WPVI-TV(NEW YORK) -- The Federal Aviation Administration issued an emergency order on Friday for airlines to inspect engines like the one involved in Tuesday's fatal incident involving Southwest Airlines Flight 1380, according to an FAA spokesperson.



Engines with more 30,000 total takeoffs and landings must be inspected within 20 days.



CFM International, the maker of the engines subject to the order, estimated 352 engines in the U.S. are affected and 681 worldwide.



The inspections will focus on the fan blades, the FAA said. The National Transportation Safety Board said an engine fan blade on Flight 1380 suffered metal fatigue before breaking.



The woman who died was sitting over the wing on the Boeing 737 when the engine failed and she was partially sucked out a broken window. Fellow passengers pulled the woman back in and attempted to revive her.



She later died.



Southwest already announced it was starting an accelerated inspection of its fleet after the deadly failure, and other airlines have announced their own inspection plans. American Airlines said it started additional inspections of its 737s before Tuesday's accident, while the directive was being debated.



In a letter to passengers obtained by ABC News, Southwest offered sincere apologies as well as a $5,000 check and the promise of a $1,000 travel voucher. The letter also states that the airlines primary focus now is to assist the passengers who were aboard the flight in every way possible.



A Southwest Airlines official confirmed to ABC News that the letters were sent by the airline, but would not comment on the monetary compensation.



The NTSB investigation is expected to take 12 to 15 months.

Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
Alex Wong/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) -- Embattled Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein told President Donald Trump a week ago that he is not a target of the investigation of his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, two sources close to Trump told ABC News.

Rosenstein on his own brought up the probe of Cohen to the president during that meeting, sources said.

The Department of Justice declined to comment on the matter.

The president has repeatedly threatened both publicly and privately to fire Rosenstein, as he has also done with both Attorney General Jeff Sessions and special counsel Robert Mueller, who is leading the investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election and possible ties to Trump associates.

However, on Wednesday, Trump seemed to take a different tack, responding to a reporters question about the fate of the three officials by saying they're still here.

Theyve been saying Im going to get rid of them for the last three months, four months, five months, Trump said while in Florida. And theyre still here. We want to get the investigation over with, done with, put it behind us. And we have to get back to business.

At the same time, as ABC News has reported, the president has been "less inclined" to sit down for an interview with Mueller since an FBI raid on Cohen's home, office and hotel room on April 9, according to sources.

Trump's legal team last met with Mueller's office about a potential Trump interview on the same day as the Cohen raid.

Now with longtime Trump friend and surrogate Rudy Giuliani's joining the Trump legal team, he will be part of all negotiations with Mueller's office going forward.

The former New York City mayor and federal prosecutor says his job is to help Mueller get what he needs to wrap it up and to try to negotiate a way to get this over with."

Giuliani's joining comes after the Trump team searched for several weeks to fill a void left by the abrupt departure of the president's lead attorney, John Dowd. Dowd quit in part because he felt the President was taking less of his advice, sources told ABC News.

Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
At the Pike Cottage, located on the north end of Pawleys Island, Virginia Oliver Freeman, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Lawson Oliver Sr., watches from the porch as son Bryant Castellow Freeman, right, poses with cousin Hugh Lawson Oliver III in 1938. Little Hugh Lawson Oliver III and his father drowned in 1939.
Cmdr. Hannah Nash gives orders to her platoon as they prepare for the April 28th drill meet to be held at the Andrews High School gym.
A new liquor store in the Browns Ferry community has raised concern since it is so close to Brown's Ferry Elementary School, which can be seen between the buildings in this photo.
Georgetown, SC (29440)

Today

Overcast. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High around 80F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Partly cloudy skies early will give way to cloudy skies late. Low 66F. Winds light and variable.
NATO Days in Georgia

By Vladimer Napetvaridze

On April 16, the "NATO Days" have started in Georgia. The event is organized by the "Information Center on NATO and the European Union", the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Georgia, "NATO Liaison Office in Georgia" and the Embassy of Bulgaria in Georgia. NATO Days was attended by the Chairman of the Parliament of Georgia, members of the Minister Cabinet and representatives of legislative and executive authorities.The President of Georgia Giorgi Margvelashvili addressed the guests and talked about Georgia's aspiration to integrate with NATO and the importance of this decision. Margvelasvhili stated that membership of NATO is a choice of Georgian people and the relevant governmental structures are functioning with a full understanding of this purpose. He also added that Georgia's participation in NATO peacekeeping missions is appreciated by our partners: It has been repeatedly mentioned that Georgia's involvement in the Black Sea security discussions is adequate and Georgia is ready to carry out the responsibilities to maintain stability and protection of the region and the world. This is an important year for us, we are preparing for another important summit and we hope that the issue of Georgia will be presented adequately," Margvelashvili stated.In his greeting speech, the President also mentioned an ongoing information warfare against NATO and western values that require more active involvement and response. He noted that this is the political reality not only for Georgia but also for other NATO member states, and in this reality, everyone should unite around the goal to raise awareness of society about NATO and Georgia's joint values.The Vice Prime Minister of Georgia Mikheil Janelidze also addressed the guests and stated that the aim of the NATO Days is to inform the population about the achievements of Georgia in the Euro-Atlantic integration process and NATO-Georgia cooperation.According to the Minister, the Department of NATO integration was created in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Main function of the department is to enhance the integration process. He also mentioned the role of the Department of Strategic Communications, which is focused on establishing effective communication within the country and that has a crucial role especially in conditions of a growing anti-Western propaganda.It is noteworthy that NATO Days will be celebrated in the regions of Georgia, and with the initiative of Information Center of NATO, EU and Ministry of Foreign affairs, various activities aim at raising awareness of local population will take place.Such informative events are important for Georgia, as the country going through the hybrid war. Russia is carrying out an aggressive propaganda campaign to change the pro-Western attitudes of Georgian population. In response to this propaganda, it is crucially important to increase awareness of citizens about NATO and the EU values.According to the research, trust of citizens towards NATO has reduced due to various factors, mainly because of Russian information warfare. According to the survey conducted by National Democratic Institute (NDI), from 2013, the number of NATO supporters decreased by 12%. According to the survey, in 2016, 68% of respondents agree that Georgia should become a member of NATO. As for the result in 2013, 80% of respondents agreed Georgia's NATO membership.An interesting indicator of the population's attitude change was revealed in NDI survey, according to which, 41% of Georgian population think that Russia has stronger military power than the US. 36% believe that US military capabilities are higher than Russia's, and 15% think that these two countries are equally strong.The presented data is the result of the informative warfare. The process is aiming at altering the public opinion of the citizens and is carried out using different instruments through various actors, whether it is non-governmental organizations, pro-Russian politicians, or the pro-Russian wing of the Georgian Orthodox church.Military confrontation has been replaced by a hybrid war, which means combining different methods to achieve a desired result. Russia's aim is to restore influence over Georgia and to return the country to its own orbit. If the hybrid war carried out by Russian Federation is not interfered, it is possible that the existing pro-Russian and anti-Western public opinion increases.
The National Geographic Channel has revealed the first 3D, 360-degree video of space as a part of its new documentary series "One Strange Rock." We took a virtual tour with the astronauts aboard the International Space Station while hearing their thoughts on the enormity of space, and it left us speechless.

A special delivery arrived at the space station last November: a state-of-the-art Vuze VR camera. European Space Agency astronaut Paolo Nespoli brought the camera with him during his daily routine on the station. Nespoli received unique training on the device from series filmmaker Darren Aronofsky himself, who gave the Italian astronaut a crash course in VR filming via Skype. To experience the full impact of the video, watch it on your smartphone while wearing your favorite VR headset.

The video begins in low Earth orbit. An instrumental prelude plays as the space station approaches. The welcoming voice of retired Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield relates how his 166 days in space changed his world view, both literally and metaphorically. Hadfield is soon joined by former NASA astronauts Mae Jemison, Mike Massimino and Nicole Stott, all of whom discuss their experience of Earth from the rarified vantage point of the space station. [The International Space Station: Inside and Out (Infographic)]

European Space Agency astronaut Paolo Nespoli wears a 3D, virtual-reality camera on his head to film a tour of the International Space Station. (Image credit: National Geographic)

Nespoli carries the trusty camera through the tight quarters of the space station, providing viewers with a 360-degree perspective of life aboard the outpost in the sky. Wires, fixtures and equipment cover nearly every surface of the cabins, but that's nary a problem when you can float past them in microgravity. Nespoli also recorded super-high-definition footage of NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, the first woman to command the space station, including her final day in space at the end of Expedition 52. The sequences will appear in the series' final episode, which airs on Monday, May 28 at 10 p.m. EDT/9 p.m. CDT.

Nespoli also captured the breathtaking views from the station's many windows, and in the video, his retired colleagues recount the transformations they experienced while peering through these portals.

"I took a look at the planet and just sort of let it sink in," Massimino says in the video as Earth slowly spins below. "And then, I thought to myself, 'This is something human eyes are not supposed to see. This must be the view from heaven.'"

Massimino's testimony reflects the sentiment of the series as a whole, in which former astronauts join host Will Smith to convey the majesty and wonder of our existence on this small, blue world. The astronauts provide their perspectives on the grand story of life on Earth as only those who have left it truly can. Meanwhile, Smith's casual stylemakes him a remarkably relatable guide as he marvels alongside the audience at the wonders of our world.

"One Strange Rock" manages to take the most academic processes, like the water cycle of the Amazon basin, and reveal the remarkable ways in which they are connected to everything else on the planet, including the viewers who are watching the series from their couches. The storylines loop back upon themselves over and over in dazzling, fluid motions like a figure-skating routine.

Don't miss "One Strange Rock," which airs on the National Geographic Channel on Mondays at 10 p.m. EDT/PDT (9 p.m. CDT).

Follow Harrison Tasoff @harrisontasoff. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.
The iconic Hubble Space Telescope is about to turn 28 years old, and a batch of gorgeous new imagery helps mark the occasion.

Hubble launched aboard the space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990, and was deployed into Earth orbit a day later. NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), which jointly run the Hubble mission, release great photos every April to celebrate these milestones.

This year, the star of the anniversary show is the Lagoon Nebula, a colossal hub of star birth that's 55 light-years wide and 20 light-years tall. [Celestial Photos: Hubble Space Telescope's Latest Cosmic Views]

"Even though it is about 4,000 light-years away from Earth, it is three times larger in the sky than the full moon," NASA and ESA officials wrote today (April 19) in a description of the newly released Hubble images, which show the nebula in both visible and infrared light.

"It is even visible to the naked eye in clear, dark skies," the officials added. "Since it is relatively huge on the night sky, Hubble is only able to capture a small fraction of the total nebula."

To celebrate its 28th anniversary in space, the Hubble Space Telescope took this image of the Lagoon Nebula. The nebula, about 4,000 light-years away, is 55 light-years wide and 20 light-years tall. This image shows only a small part of this turbulent star-formation region, about 4 light-years across. The observations were taken by Hubbles Wide Field Camera 3 between Feb. 12 and Feb 18, 2018. (Image credit: NASA/ESA/STScl)

Indeed, the visible-light image  which Hubble took with its Wide Field Camera 3 instrument this past February  shows a central patch of the nebula just 4 light-years across. The picture doesn't capture the lagoon-like pool of dust that darkens a swath of the nebula and gives the object its name, NASA and ESA officials wrote.

Hubble infrared image of the Lagoon Nebula. The most obvious difference between Hubbles infrared and visible images of this region is the abundance of stars that fill the field of view in the infrared. Most of them are more distant, background stars located behind the nebula. However, some of them are young stars within the Lagoon Nebula itself. (Image credit: NASA/ESA/STScl)

Over its 28 years in space, Hubble has become an institution, thrilling the public with spectacular views of the cosmos and making observations that have transformed astronomers' understanding of the universe and its history.

For example, Hubble observations of exploding stars known as supernovas helped reveal in 1998 that the universe's expansion rate is accelerating, apparently thanks to an unseen and mysterious force known as "dark energy." This stunning discovery earned three researchers the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics.

But it hasn't always been smooth sailing for Hubble. The telescope famously launched with a defect in its primary mirror, leading to slightly blurry images. Spacewalking astronauts fixed the problem in December 1993. Astronauts further repaired, maintained and upgraded Hubble during four additional servicing missions, the last of which occurred in 2009.

The telescope is still going strong and is in good health. Mission team members have expressed confidence that Hubble will continue operating through 2020, and perhaps for considerably longer than that. Hubble's highly anticipated successor, the $8.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope, is scheduled to launch no earlier than May 2020.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.
The U.S. Air Force's secretive X-37B space plane has apparently been spotted by satellite watchers.

The craft's latest mystery mission, known as OTV-5 (short for Orbital Test Vehicle-5), began on Sept. 7, 2017, when the robotic spacecraft launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida.

The Air Force doesn't reveal much about OTV missions, keeping most details about the space plane's operations and orbit secret. And satellite trackers have had trouble finding the X-37B on its latest jaunt  until recently. [The X-37B Space Plane: 6 Surprising Facts]

Chance sighting

Skywatcher Cees Bassa from the Netherlands reported a chance sighting of a bright satellite of unknown identity, observed early on April 11. He estimated a circular orbit of about 54.5 degrees inclination and 220 miles (355 kilometers) altitude.

Bassa alerted the global satellite-observing network and others that this could be OTV-5.

Another satellite spotter  Russell Eberst in Edinburgh, Scotland  had reported seeing a satellite of similar brightness and orbit last October.

"I produced rough search elements that proved too rough to recover the object," said Ted Molczan, a Toronto-based satellite analyst. "I found, with very slight tweaks, the preliminary orbit that Cees had posted could be made to fit both his and Russell's observations," Molczan told Inside Outer Space.

Artist's illustration of the X-37B orbiting Earth (Image credit: Boeing)

Bassa noted that this object's orbit correlates well with the OTV-5. The orbit passes very close  within 2 degrees of longitude  from KSC at the time of liftoff. Meanwhile, another satellite tracker, Marco Langbroek, also in the Netherlands, noted that the U.S. Air Force had earlier announced that the OTV-5 would have the highest inclination of the series of missions to date.

"Looks like a pretty probable identification," Langbroek reported.

Molczan is more certain. "Cees recovered the object, which can now be identified beyond reasonable doubt as OTV-5," he said. "As Cees cautions, further tracking may reveal a bit more eccentric orbit, but the mean altitude is about 355 kilometers, and the inclination is close to 54.5 degrees.

"I estimate that the ground track nearly repeats at intervals of about 31 revolutions, or about two days," Molczan added. "Similar behavior has been seen during portions of all previous OTV missions. If it carries an imaging payload, then the orbit affords frequent revisit of targets, but it could serve some other operational purpose that I cannot guess."

Rapid space access

The U.S. Air Force's robotic X-37B space plane is a miniature space shuttle capable of long, classified missions in orbit. See how the X-37B space plane works in this Space.com infographic (Image credit: By Karl Tate, Infographics Artist)

When OTV-5 will return to Earth is anybody's guess. The X-37B program completed its fourth mission on May 7, 2017, landing after 718 days in orbit and extending the program's total number of days spent in orbit to 2,085.

The Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office is running the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle program.

"The fifth OTV mission continues to advance the X-37B's performance and flexibility as a space technology demonstrator and host platform for experimental payloads," Air Force officials said in a prelaunch statement. "This mission carries small satellite ride shares and will demonstrate greater opportunities for rapid space access and on-orbit testing of emerging space technologies."

The current mission is hosting the Air Force Research Laboratory Advanced Structurally Embedded Thermal Spreader payload to test experimental electronics and oscillating heat pipe technologies in the long-duration space environment.

"The many firsts on this mission make the upcoming OTV launch a milestone for the program," Randy Walden, director of the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office, said in the statement. "It is our goal to continue advancing the X-37B OTV so it can more fully support the growing space community."

Leonard David is author of "Mars: Our Future on the Red Planet," published by National Geographic. The book is a companion to the National Geographic Channel series "Mars." A longtime writer for Space.com, David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. This version of the story published on Space.com.
Jim Bridenstine shouldn't necessarily expect smooth sailing now that he's finally in as NASA administrator, experts say.

The U.S. Senate confirmed Bridenstine yesterday (April 19), more than seven months after President Donald Trump nominated the Oklahoma congressman for NASA's top post. The final vote was 50-49 and strictly along party lines, with all Republicans supporting Bridenstine and all Democrats, along with both independents, opposing him. (Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is sidelined by health issues and did not vote.)

Such division is pretty much unheard of for NASA chiefs, who have generally been confirmed without much dissension or debate. And it will likely make Bridenstine's job a bit tougher, at least in the early going, said space policy expert John Logsdon. [Presidential Visions for Space Exploration: From Ike to Trump]

"The fact that it has gone on so long and been so contentious gives him more challenges than his predecessors had," Logsdon, a professor emeritus of political science and international affairs at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs in Washington, D.C., told Space.com. "He's got an uphill climb to establish that he's a leader for all of NASA and all of the country."

The senators opposed to Bridenstine's nomination have cited, among other issues, his past statements questioning the reality of human-driven climate change (though the 42-year-old congressman has walked back such statements recently) and his lack of professional aerospace experience.

"The NASA administrator should be a consummate space professional," Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., said during a speech on the Senate floor Wednesday (April 18). "That's what this senator wants  a space professional, not a politician, as the head of NASA."

Indeed, Bridenstine is the first elected official ever to lead NASA. But he's not the first administrator of the agency to lack a technical background, said Logsdon, who cited James Webb and Sean O'Keefe as precedents. (Webb led NASA from 1961 to 1968, and O'Keefe from 2001 to 2005.)

And despite NASA's broad popularity across the ideological divide, the agency is not at some sort of magical remove from politics, Logsdon added. It is a government agency, after all.

"It hasn't been deeply partisan, but it's always been political," Logsdon said. "Webb was political to his core."

Bridenstine takes over from Robert Lightfoot, who has been acting administrator since President Trump took office in January 2017. That 15-month stretch is by far the longest ever served by an acting NASA chief. (Second place goes to Chris Scolese, who was acting administrator for nearly six months at the beginning of the Obama administration, in 2009.)

Last month, Lightfoot announced that he will retire from NASA on April 30  an impending deadline that Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., cited yesterday to help explain why he switched his vote on Bridenstine's confirmation from "no" to "yes."

The confirmation could make it easier for NASA to get things done, because the new chief will have more clout with Congress, Logsdon said.

"An official [NASA] administrator can represent the administration, since they've chosen him, in ways an acting person  in particular, a civil servant  cannot," Logsdon said. "Lightfoot did an admirable job, but he was a fill-in, and everyone knew it."

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook orGoogle+. Originally published on Space.com.
AS ERIC NEGOTIATES THE RELEASE OF AN ARMS DEALERS SON FROM A KIDNAPPER, HE UNCOVERS A LARGER PLOT TO DESTROY HUNDREDS OF LIVES, ON RANSOM, SATURDAY, MAY 5Undercover  As Eric negotiates the release of an arms dealers son from a kidnapper, he uncovers a larger plot to destroy hundreds of lives. Also, Zara is shaken when she must work with an abusive ex-colleague in order to prevent this terrorist attack, on RANSOM, Saturday, May 5 (8:00-9:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.CHEAT TWEET: As Eric tries to negotiate the release of a kidnapped teenaged boy, he unravels a larger plot to destroy hundreds of lives @RansomCBS 5/5 8PM, ET/PT #CBS http://bit.ly/2HD8uenREGULAR CASTLuke Roberts (Eric Beaumont)Sarah Greene (Maxine Carlson)Brandon Jay McLaren (Oliver Yates)Nazneen Contractor (Zara Hallam)GUEST CAST:Ben Radcliffe (Henry Cummings)Ray Galletti (Steve Azarov/Stefan)Miklos Turek (Val)Goran Bogden (Misha Halenko)Paula Boudreau (Christine Cummings)John Ralston (Ken Cummings)Laurent Winkler (SWAT Commander)WRITTEN BY: Alison Bingemar and Executive Producer Frank SpotnitzDIRECTED BY: James Genn
Noah Emmerich is staying in the spy game.The Americans favorite has been tapped to star opposite Sacha Baron Cohen in Netflix's limited series The Spy.The six-episode drama explores Eli Cohen's (Baron Cohen) role as a spy for Israel in Syria in the early 1960s. Cohen is one of the most legendary spies in the world. He lived in Damascus undercover in the beginning of the '60s, spying for Israel. He managed to embed himself into Syrian high society and rise through the ranks of its politics. His actions, connections and immense sacrifice have had lasting consequences, shaping the Middle East of today.Emmerich will play the role of Dan Peleg, a charming, rumpled and brilliant Mossad trainer. He is wise, wary and stubborn, and has a tendency to blur the boundaries between the personal and professional. He has conflicted feelings about Eli and is tormented by a mistake he made in the past.
The seedy reputation of weed is changing - quickly.

First of all, the correct name is cannabis, and 29 states and the District of Columbia have laws that legalize it in broad ways (and 17 others in very limited ways). Two major TV producers and an Oscar winner made a sunny sitcom about it. Legal U.S. sales are expected to top $11 billion this year, according to industry tracker BDS Analytics. And big names among both Republicans and Democrats favor rolling back federal regulations against it.

But the science lags behind the movement, largely because studying cannabis is so difficult. Truth is, there's a lot science doesn't know.

1. Many states allow medical marijuana. What can it do?

A. Manage pain.

B. Reduce nausea.

C. Reduce some type of seizures and muscle spasms.

D. All of the above.

Correct answer:

D. All of the above.

Cannabis has been used medicinally for thousands of years to treat conditions such as pain, inflammation and depression. It was a surgical anesthetic (!) in ancient China, and it was used to ease diarrhea during the 19th century cholera epidemic to prevent dehydration.

But as modern medicine changed from plants to powders and pills, cannabis fell out of favor. The first U.S. federal law against it was a tax act in 1937, and it was criminalized in 1952. Because the federal government still considers it illegal with "no currently accepted medical use," researchers who want to study it have to jump through all sorts of regulatory hoops. That means we don't have a lot of the high-quality evidence, obtained in clinical trials, that we expect with most medicines.

A huge problem, researchers say, is that the only U.S.-grown cannabis that scientists can use in clinical trials comes from the government's pot farm at the University of Mississippi. It has little variety and isn't representative of what commercial growers are selling.

Still, more and more research is being done. A 2017 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine documented "conclusive or substantial evidence" that cannabis can help reduce pain, nausea and muscle spasticity related to certain diseases. Additional strong evidence indicates that cannabis products may be useful for other physical and psychological conditions as well, such as seizures in children, loss of appetite, sleep problems, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. Cannabis is most likely safer than alcohol for recreational users, and it may reduce opioid use.

It can have adverse side effects, too, especially for heavy smokers, including respiratory problems, memory impairment and an increased likelihood of abusing another drug.

2. What's the difference between medical cannabis and recreational cannabis?

A. The medical version requires a doctor's prescription.

B. The recreational version requires a budtender's prescription.

C. The medical version is more tightly regulated.

D. There is no difference.

Correct answer:

D. There is no difference.

The smokable dried plant material and its many other forms (liquid, concentrate, edible, etc.), are not approved or tested by the Food and Drug Administration and can only be "recommended" by a doctor, not legally prescribed. It varies by grower, of course, but it is the same product available in smoke shops where the sale of recreational cannabis is legal.

Unlike, say, an antibiotic you get with a prescription, there is no way to know the chemical composition of what you are getting or how much you should take. That leaves consumers with only the guidance of their dispensary's budtender.

Only two cannabis-related products can be prescribed in the United States. One contains a synthetic version of THC (delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol), the main psychoactive ingredient in cannabis, and the other contains a related synthetic chemical. But most people don't tolerate them very well, for reasons we'll talk about in a bit.

3. Compared with the weed from "back in the day," today's pot is . . .

A. Less potent.

B. More potent.

C. About the same.

D. Depends on what you buy.

Correct answer:

B. More potent.

Unless "back in the day" for you means the past five years or so, the product is now much stronger, said Mark A.R. Kleiman, co-author of the book "Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know."

"What was called marijuana when I was in college was probably 4 percent THC by weight," said Kleiman, who graduated in 1972. Now, he said, the average percentage of THC is "somewhere in the mid-teens," and growers claim some strains contain 25 percent or more. Part of the difference is that unlike today, the old stuff had leaves, seeds and stems mixed in with the THC-rich flowers. (Only flowers are sold now.) And a cultivation method that was formerly used only for a super-potent specialty product - allowing only the female plants to bloom, provoking the flowers to produce more THC - has become common. In addition, lighting and other growing techniques have greatly improved.

Still, partial credit if you picked the last answer. A few types of cannabis are intentionally bred to have lower concentrations of THC and higher concentrations of a compound called cannabidiol (CBD), which is said to be relaxing rather than "stoning."

4. So, in a quick and not-boring way, how does this much stronger cannabis work in our bodies?

A. It operates in a system named for cannabis.

B. It clouds our brains with smoke.

C. It shrinks frontal lobes so our brains have more room to think.

D. I'm bored already.

Correct answer:

A. It operates in a system named for cannabis.

In short, it mimics some of the brain's own chemicals. We have a chemical regulatory mechanism in our bodies called the endocannabinoid system - yep, named after the plant. The system helps regulate all sorts of things, including appetite, pain, seizures, digestion and heart rate.

This system contains two types of receptors, explained Ethan Russo, a neurologist and director of research and development for the International Cannabis and Cannabinoids Institute in Prague. When THC binds to the first type of receptors, which are mostly in our brains, it triggers a flood of pain-relieving, euphoria-inducing chemicals. We might become happily stoned, get the munchies and not remember our last sentence. Or, if the flood is too much, we might become paranoid, delusional and decidedly not happy.

CBD can mute some of those harsher effects by keeping THC from effectively binding to those receptors. That's why cannabis that is high in CBD may allow people to function normally without feeling "high" yet still get the therapeutic benefits, Russo said.

The other type of receptors are mainly found in the body rather than the brain, and they mediate pain and inflammation but have nothing to do with feeling stoned.

There are CBD oils and extracts, but most smokable cannabis on the market contains a lot of THC and very little CBD. Which brings us to . . .

5. Shops are full of strains that supposedly tailor the experience - Pineapple Express, Lemon Haze, Bubba Kush. What does science say about those?

A. Most claims are accurate.

B. Most claims are wrong.

C. Most claims are unproven.

D.Who is Bubba?

Correct answer:

C. Most claims are unproven.

Cannabis doesn't have just two ingredients; it contains hundreds of substances that may act in concert to produce what is called "the entourage effect." Growers have crossbred plants to tease out a little more of this and a bit less of that in an effort to create versions that have certain characteristics.

Anecdotal evidence and some scientific research supports the entourage effect. For example, Russo's research has shown that an aromatic cannabis compound called pinene may interact with other ingredients to reduce short-term memory loss.

So the effect may be real, but that still doesn't mean that all growers' claims are true. No regulations force growers or sellers to accurately represent what is in their products.

"You could buy Bubba Kush at one store and it would look, smell and taste very different than what you'd buy at another store," said Russo, a proponent of medical cannabis who says he favors research and sensible regulation so that people can use it in the safest and most effective ways.

As for "Bubba," it is a kind of generic nickname bestowed because part of the plant's origin is unknown.

Just like many things about cannabis.

Additional sources

Raphael Mechoulam, professor of medicinal chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; "Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know" by Jonathan P. Caulkins, Beau Kilmer and Mark A. R. Kleiman; "The Health Effects of Cannabis and Cannabinoids: The Current State of Evidence and Recommendations for Research" by a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine; Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies; University of California at San Francisco; BrainFacts.org; National Institute on Drug Abuse.
DARIEN  Five weeks after more than 600 Darien students staged a walkout to honor victims of a deadly shooting in Parkland, Fla., the teens again joined protesters nationwide on Friday to commemorate the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre.

But this time, they didnt return to class  nor did they have approval from administrators.

On March 14, a lot of students felt like they really couldnt share their voices, junior Kate Dempsey said as she walked more than a mile off campus to the Noroton Heights Metro-North train station, where she and 10 other students boarded a train for New York to join a demonstration in Washington Square Park. But now with this one they can say whatever they want, be as political as they want and be more radical with the approach.

According to organizers, roughly 60 students left class around 10 a.m. and gathered for a vigil in the high school courtyard. From there, around 30 students left campus altogether  some on foot, some in their cars  and made for the train as police watched.

As the students marched down Noroton Avenue, posters in hand, cars honked in support and police cruisers passed occasionally. A car full of student protestors with a megaphone passed, offering a ride to those on foot. Officers waited at the train station for the teens to see that they made the trip safely.

Junior Sophie Howard was among those walking out. She said she has been attending school in Darien since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 and has never been able to shake the fear that something terrible might happen.

I had that really intense feeling for months and months and I thought surely... someone will fix this, Howard said. Ive been waiting for years and nothing has happened. And the idea that there are children in Florida who experienced the same thing is untenable to me.

This time around, organizers said they faced opposition from administrators leading up to the walkout. As opposed to the March 14 walkout  for which the school scheduled 17 minutes in the day and exempted students from rules against cutting class  administrators warned students they would be punished for missing school. Principal Ellen Dunn was met with boos as she removed a banner hung by students that said Am I Next? WLKT TMrrW 10:00 am from the walls of the cafeteria on Thursday.

Everyone found that the administration was kind of being hypocrites because Ms. Dunn had sent out an email saying that we fully support your opinion, but also if you leave school youre going to be suspended. Of course we understand the liability of it, but its a weird double standard that they had set up, said Meaghan Dempsey, Kates sister.

Still, the students walked on undeterred.

Im not afraid of the repercussions, junior Nick Giotis said.

Calls to Dunn and Superintendent Dan Brenner were not immediately returned.

There were no planned demonstrations at Stamford public schools on Friday, but at King School, juniors Luke Buttenwieser and Jordan Kulick led the charge for their fellow classmates at 9:55 a.m. Students from the upper and middle schools were given the decision whether to participate and did not face disciplinary action for walking out.

The school also had an assembly Wednesday to explain the walkout, which was planned 19 years after the Columbine shooting in the Denver suburbs, where 13 people were killed by two students.

The event lasted about half an hour and was held on the Simon House lawn facing Newfield Avenue. According to Kings head of upper school, Marnie Sadlowsky, students reflected on gun safety and being active citizens. Kulick also performed a song written by students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 17 people were killed on Feb. 14.

Its a teaching opportunity, Sadlowsky said. Its important it was student led. The students came to us and partnered with adults to participate in a day organized and led by students...I'm proud of how they used their voices. It give us hope for the future.

After hearing from about 20 student speakers, the students handed out voter registration forms.

We really came together as a community, Buttenwieser said. There are so many students who are dedicated to change. Real progress will be made, and we are the ones to make that progress. Democracy was in action today, and it was a beautiful thing.

justin.papp@scni.com; @justinjpapp1; 203-842-2586
HARTFORD  Democrats and Republicans pitched two dramatically different visions Friday for how the state should spend a nearly $20 billion state budget in fiscal year 2019.

As the state looks toward billions in future deficits, small windfalls in recent months  mostly due to one-time revenues  had both parties considering higher spending in some areas. But how and where they directed funding diverged greatly.

Democrats suggested increasing gross state spending by $146 million over the more restrained, revised budget proposed by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy in February.

We should be creating a budget that creates hope and opportunities for all people in Connecticut, said Rep. Toni Walker, D-New Haven, chair of the legislatures appropriations committee.

The Democrats biggest increase is nearly $100 million more in education funding. Their budget would launch a Free 2 Start program that aims for free college tuition to all Connecticut students at state universities and colleges. Funding in fiscal 2019 provides tuition for 3,200 incoming college freshman.

Their plan also eliminates transportation rate hikes and keeps bus and train services at current levels. It funds $4.3 billion in road projects, which will help economic development and maintain jobs for construction workers, Democrats said. Meanwhile, it keeps the statewide car tax mill rate topped at 45.

After contentious debate, the legislatures budget committee voted Friday afternoon to send the Democratic budget to the House floor in a party line vote. Only House members were permitted to vote on the proposal.

Future passage of the Democrats plan may be rocky. Sen. Gayle Slossberg, D-Milford, said she might vote against her party's proposal in the hopes of arriving at a bipartisan budget, like that passed in October.

Republicans called Democrats proposal a spending spree Friday. Free tuition is a good idea, said Senate Republican Leader Len Fasano, R-North Haven, but not when the state is strapped.

The Democrats budget is an election year political ploy, Fasano said.

Republicans heralded their budget proposal as the road to economic predictability and sustainability.

It failed to win any Democratic support so did not advance out of committee. Elements of the Republicans budget may surface later as legislators negotiate the final budget bill, party members said.

Republicans proposed spending $461 million less total gross than the Democrats plan, reducing spending in fiscal year 2019 by 6 percent compared with the amount planned in the October two-year budget. The Democrats budget is a 4 percent reduction compared with the original appropriation.

The two parties budgets both restored some funding for the Medicare Savings Plan, school health clinics and Department of Social Services Hispanic programs. They increased municipal and education grants to towns. They reduced cuts to the Care 4 Kids preschool program and retired teachers health care.

Both plans cut tens of millions from the Department of Social Services and Department of Children and Families budgets.

But Republicans more austere plan would have eliminated the states current $321.5 million deficit, they said. It paid down the states unfunded liabilities up front by giving $400 to $600 million to the State Employees Retirement Fund, Teachers Retirement Fund and Retired Teachers Health Fund.

Money paid to those accounts would come from the states rainy day fund, which is intended to protect the state in economic downturns. The fund has specific caps that limits how it can be used, but Republicans said they would later change the limits so the money could be put toward pensions.

Due to higher than predicted revenues this spring and millions in capitol gains realized in December, the rainy day fund is projected to hold $1.2 billion this year, the Office of Policy and Management said.

Democrats disapproved. Malloy compared shifting money from the rainy day fund to pensions to teenagers who refuse to save their money.

This is like spend as much as you can when you have it, he said.

Republicans would achieve other savings in their plan by, in part, privatizing the Department of Mental Heath and Addiction Services and some Department of Motor Vehicles services and reducing grants to Hartford allocated to help the city pay off its debts, they said.

Other cuts, particularly those to Department of Labor programs helping disabled, unemployed or formerly incarcerated individuals, drew criticism from Democrats in the committee.

Sen. Gary Winfield, D-New Haven, called the cuts a disservice to the state.

Tough choices are necessary to bring Connecticut back to fiscal health, countered Rep. Fred Wilms, D-Norwalk.

Our state is running out of options to control costs and pay down unfunded liabilities without drastically cutting services, he said. Any additional revenue has to be used to ensure Connecticuts fiscal sustainability for the long term while protecting local education and making necessary investments in transportation.

If an agreement cannot be reached before the session ends in two and a half weeks, legislators could also choose not to pass a new fiscal year budget and use the plan they laid out in the biennium budget passed in October.

Malloy warned lawmakers of the dangers of inaction in a letter Friday. Without new revenue, the state could not afford planned transportation improvement projects and would have to reduce train and bus services, he said.

The state Comptrollers office said Friday it is projecting a deficit this year of $363.5 million, an increase of $170.8 million from the level reported in March.

About $150 million of the change is due to the states assumption that reimbursement from the federal government for hospital rate increases and supplemental payments will be delayed.

Connecticut faces deficits of $1.9 billion in fiscal year 2020, $2.7 billion in 2021 and $3.2 billion in 2022.

emunson@hearstmediact.com; Twitter: @emiliemunson
The Democratic National Committee filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit Friday against the Russian government, the Trump campaign and the WikiLeaks organization alleging a far-reaching conspiracy to disrupt the 2016 campaign and tilt the election to Donald Trump.

The complaint, filed in federal district court in Manhattan, alleges that top Trump campaign officials conspired with the Russian government and its military spy agency to hurt Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and help Trump by hacking the computer networks of the Democratic Party and disseminating stolen material found there.

"During the 2016 presidential campaign, Russia launched an all-out assault on our democracy, and it found a willing and active partner in Donald Trump's campaign," DNC Chairman Tom Perez said in a statement.

"This constituted an act of unprecedented treachery: the campaign of a nominee for President of the United States in league with a hostile foreign power to bolster its own chance to win the presidency," he said.

The suit asserts that the Russian hacking campaign - combined with Trump associates' contacts with Russia and the campaign's public cheerleading of the hacks - amounted to an illegal conspiracy to interfere in the election and caused serious damage to the Democratic Party.

Senate investigators and prosecutors for special counsel Robert Mueller III are still looking into whether Trump associates coordinated with any Russian efforts. Last month, Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee said they had found no evidence that President Trump and his affiliates colluded with Russian officials to sway the election or that the Kremlin sought to help Trump - a conclusion rejected by the panel's Democrats.

In a statement, Trump Campaign Manager Brad Parscale said the Democrats' lawsuit was without merit and likely to be dismissed.

"This is a sham lawsuit about a bogus Russian collusion claim filed by a desperate, dysfunctional, and nearly insolvent Democratic Party," he said. "With the Democrats' conspiracy theories against the President's campaign evaporating as quickly as the failing DNC's fundraising, they've sunk to a new low to raise money, especially among small donors who have abandoned them."

The lawsuit echoes a similar legal tactic that the Democratic Party used during the Watergate scandal. In 1972, the DNC sued President Richard Nixon's reelection committee seeking $1 million in damages for the break-in at Democratic headquarters in the Watergate building.

The suit was denounced at the time by Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, who called it a case of "sheer demagoguery" by the DNC. But the civil action brought by the DNC's chairman, Lawrence O'Brien, was successful, yielding a $750,000 settlement from the Nixon campaign that was reached on the day in 1974 that he left office.

More News The leaked Comey memos just blew up in Trump's face

Nick Akerman, a former Watergate prosecutor who specializes in computer-fraud cases, said he thought the Democrats' suit had merit and, despite predictions from Trump-allied lawyers, was unlikely to go away anytime soon.

"There is no way it's going to be dismissed," said Akerman, a partner in the New York office of the Dorsey & Whitney law firm. "At least not on the computer-fraud part of the case, which is really the heart of it. The Democrats have every right to bring this suit as they are aggrieved. My question is: What took them so long?"

If allowed to proceed, the lawsuit would give the Democrats a chance to seek internal documents and testimony from the Trump campaign to help them learn more about interactions with Russia during the race.

Parscale noted that the Trump campaign, too, would be allowed to conduct discovery. He promised that the campaign would use the process to probe management decisions at the DNC, as well as the party's involvement with commissioning the Trump dossier, a research document produced by a former British spy that alleged the Trump campaign conspired with Russia. Late Friday, Trump made a similar point, tweeting that the suit provided "good news in that we will now counter" for information from the Democrats including information from the party's servers about a range of topics including Hillary Clinton's emails.

Suing a foreign country may present legal challenges for the Democrats, in part because other nations have immunity from most U.S. lawsuits.

The lawsuit argues that Russia is not entitled to sovereign immunity in this case because "the DNC claims arise out of Russia's trespass on to the DNC's private servers . . . in order to steal trade secrets and commit economic espionage."

The suit seeks millions of dollars in compensation to offset damage it claims the party suffered from the hacks. The DNC argues that the cyberattack undermined its ability to communicate with voters, collect donations and operate effectively as its employees faced personal harassment and, in some cases, death threats.

The suit also seeks an acknowledgment from the defendants that they conspired to infiltrate the Democrats' computers, steal information and disseminate it to influence the election.

To support its case, the lawsuit offers a detailed narrative of the DNC hacks, as well as episodes in which key Trump aides are alleged to have been told Russia held damaging information about Clinton.

Russia engaged in a "brazen attack on U.S. soil" the party alleges, a campaign that began with the hack of its computer networks in 2015 and 2016. Trump campaign officials received repeated outreach from Russia, the suit says.

"Rather than report these repeated messages and communications that Russia intended to interfere in the U.S. election, the Trump campaign and its agents gleefully welcomed Russia's help," the party argues.

Ultimately, Trump's associates entered into an agreement with Russian agents "to promote Donald Trump's candidacy through illegal means," the suit concludes.

It does not name Trump as a defendant. Instead, it targets aides who, during the campaign, met with people believed to be affiliated with Russia. The aides targeted include the president's son Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, onetime campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Manafort's deputy during the campaign, Rick Gates.

Manafort and Gates were charged with money laundering, fraud and tax evasion in a case brought by special prosecutors last year. In February, Gates pleaded guilty to conspiracy and lying to the FBI and is cooperating with investigators. Manafort has pleaded not guilty.

The DNC lawsuit also names as a defendant the Russian military intelligence service, the GRU, which has been accused by the U.S. government of orchestrating the hacks, as well as WikiLeaks, which published emails stolen from the DNC, and the group's founder, Julian Assange.

Representatives for a number of the defendants named in the lawsuit, including the Russian Embassy, WikiLeaks and Assange, did not respond to requests for comment Friday. A Manafort spokesman declined to comment.

The lawsuit was also filed against Roger Stone, a longtime Trump confidant who claimed during the campaign that he was in contact with Assange.

The Trump advisers and associates have denied assisting Russia in a hacking campaign. Stone has denied any communication with Assange or advance knowledge of the document dumps by WikiLeaks, saying his comments about Assange were jokes or exaggerations.

In an email, Stone rejected the suit as "a left-wing conspiracy theory dressed up as a law-suit."

A few prominent Democrats also criticized the legal action.

David Axelrod, a former adviser to President Barack Obama, tweeted late Friday that the filing was "spectacularly ill-timed" and could abet the White House strategy of portraying Mueller's criminal probe as partisan. "Everyone should chill out and let Mueller do his job," Axelrod wrote.

The DNC argues that the Russian government and the GRU's secret intrusion into the Democrats' computer systems violated laws including those that protect trade secrets, prohibit wire tapping and prevent trespassing.

The party said the Trump defendants committed conspiracy through their interaction with Russian agents and their public encouragement of the hacking, with the campaign acting as a racketeering enterprise promoting illegal activity.

The complaint was filed on behalf of the party by the law firm of Cohen Milstein.

The suit contains previously undisclosed details, including that the specific date when it is believed the Russians breached the DNC computer system: July 27, 2015, according to forensic evidence cited in the filing.

The analysis shows the system was breached again on April 18, 2016. The first signs that hackers were siphoning documents and information from DNC systems were spotted on April 22. The suit notes that four days later, on April 26, Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos was informed by Josef Mifsud, a London-based professor, that the Russians were in possession of thousands of emails that could be damaging to Clinton.

The defendants in the suit include Papadopoulos and Mifsud, as well as Aras and Emin Agalarov, the wealthy Russian father and son who hosted the Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow in 2013. Trump, who owned the pageant, attended the event.

The Agalarovs played a role in arranging a meeting for a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower in New York in 2016, at which Donald Trump Jr. had expected to be given damaging information about Clinton.

Scott Balber, an attorney for the Agalarovs, said the allegations about his clients were "frivolous" and "a publicity stunt."

"They had absolutely nothing to do with any alleged hacking of any Democratic computer system or any interference in the U.S. election," he said.

Lawyers for Papadopoulos declined to comment, citing their client's ongoing cooperation with the special counsel.

"It is our hope that when all the facts are known, the plaintiff will voluntarily dismiss Mr. Papadopoulos from the complaint," said the lawyers, Thomas Breen and Robert Stanley, in a written statement.

The lawsuit also describes how the Soviet Union paid for Trump to travel to Moscow in the 1980s and alleges that his personal and professional ties to Russia helped foster the conspiracy.

The DNC's lawyers wrote that "long standing personal professional and financial ties to Russia and numerous individuals linked to the Russian government provided fertile ground for a conspiracy between the defendants to interfere in the 2016 elections."

The lawsuit also details the history of Manafort and Gates, who worked for Russia-friendly factions in Ukraine before joining the Trump campaign. Prosecutors have said Manafort and Gates were in contact in 2016 with Konstantin Kilimnik, a former linguist in the Russian army whom the FBI has alleged had ties to Russian intelligence.

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The Washington Post's Alice Crites contributed to this report.

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Video: The Democratic National Committee on April 20 filed a lawsuit against the Russian government, the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks.(Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post)

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Eight months after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia ended in the death of a counterprotester, the loose collection of disaffected young white men known as the alt-right is in disarray.

The problems have been mounting: lawsuits and arrests, fundraising difficulties, tepid recruitment, widespread infighting, fierce counterprotests and banishment on social media platforms. Taken together, they've exhausted even some of the staunchest members.

One of the movement's biggest groups, the Traditionalist Worker Party, dissolved in March. Andrew Anglin, founder of the Daily Stormer, the largest alt-right website, has gone into hiding, chased by a harassment lawsuit. And Richard Spencer, the alt-right's most public figure, cancelled a college speaking tour and was abandoned by his attorney last month.

"Things have become a lot harder, and we paid a price for what happened in Charlottesville. . . . The question is whether there is going to be a third act," said Spencer, who coined the name of the movement, which rose to prominence during the 2016 presidential campaign, advocates a whites-only ethno-state, and has posted racist, anti-Semitic and misogynistic memes across the internet.

Overall, the number of neo-Nazi groups increased in the United States in 2017, from 99 to 121, according to a Southern Poverty Law Center report released this year. That number is likely to decrease this year, said Heidi Beirich, who co-wrote the report. SPLC did not group alt-right organizations together, but some of the neo-Nazi groups were an outgrowth of the movement.

"Imploding," is how Beirich now describes the alt-right. "The self-inflicted damage, the defections, the infighting is so rampant, it's to the point of almost being pathetic."

Even so, there is little doubt that white supremacy remains a potent force that is likely to emerge again as a political one - if not as the alt-right, then as something else. Racial animus remains an entrenched aspect of American life.

The alt-right "is on a downward spiral, but it doesn't mean they're going to disappear, and that they're not going to regroup," said Marilyn Mayo, who studies hate groups for the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism. She said one large group called Identity Evropa - which targets college-aged men, is less extreme in rhetoric and has turned away from the alt-right label - has grown recently.

"March was a phenomenal month for Identity Evropa, perhaps our best month," group spokesman Darren Baker said.

Chris Schiano, a reporter for Unicorn Riot, a decentralized nonprofit media organization that has leaked internal correspondence among alt-right members, called the alt-right "basically done." It could resurface if it falls out of public view and organizes under newer, younger leaders, he cautions, but they haven't "gotten much traction yet."

"The overall level of racism in U.S. society hasn't improved, it's just that the organizing space for these types of networks" has largely been depleted, said Schiano, whose group rose out of Occupy Wall Street and documents social protests. "So the latent potential won't go away unless society becomes less racist."

Three percent of Americans surveyed this winter as part of a Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll said they support the alt-right or white nationalist movement.

The zenith of the alt-right - Charlottesville's Unite the Right rally - also appears to have been the moment of its decline, according to hate-group experts and members of the alt-right, most of whom were predicting a surge in membership at the time.

The death of Heather Heyer, 32 - killed in Charlottesville when a young alt-right member allegedly plowed his car into her - and President Donald Trump's reluctance to disown white nationalism focused a degree of scrutiny on the movement that it hadn't known until then. People started being fired from their jobs. Families disowned their children. Fundraising websites dropped people associated with the alt-right, making it difficult to raise money. Reporters covered every misstep.

Chris Cantwell, a white nationalist radio host featured in a Vice video on the march viewed by millions, wept on camera in a video he posted to the internet, proclaiming himself "terrified" after Charlottesville police issued a warrant for his arrest on charges of using tear gas in the protest. The Daily Stormer was dropped by its web-hosting company.

Some members have given up on the movement entirely. "I got to go back to my normal life," Connor Perrin, who drove all night from Austin to Charlottesville to protest what he saw as the oppression of white men in the United States, said in an interview late last year. "I'm focusing on working and being normal. . . . My mom is like, 'Stop being alt-right. You're going to get yourself in trouble.' " He later added: "We lost."

Others said they were told they weren't extreme enough for the movement. "I was unofficially kicked out because I had sex with a half-Japanese girl, and they didn't like that," said Jack, 18, of Aurora, Illinois, who spoke on the condition that his last name not be published. "With white nationalists, you're never white enough."

There has long been infighting in the white supremacist movement. The National Alliance, which for decades was the country's best organized and perhaps most powerful white supremacist group, succumbed to infighting and a rapid decline following the death of its leader, William Pierce, in 2002. The history of the Ku Klux Klan, too, is one of infighting and internal turmoil.

What separates the alt-right movement from older groups like these, however, is that its members are internet natives. They riff off contemporary culture and politics and understand the power of leavening hate with attempts at humor, which makes their messaging and memes more palatable to disillusioned suburban white kids who spend a lot of time online. Their ideas have infected the mainstream.

"We're not going back to a time when no one had heard the word 'alt-right,' " Spencer said. "We're not going back to a time when no one had heard of an ethno-state. It's in the discourse."

But in the same way the internet was a boon for the alt-right, enabling rapid mobilization, fundraising and a sense of community, it also has thrown up roadblocks to the movement's progress. After alt-right members started getting booted from Facebook and Twitter, they relocated to alternative social media platforms, such as Gab, where they weren't likely to encounter, let alone radicalize, people they call "normies," who use more mainstream outlets.

Participation and enthusiasm appear to have slowed since. Several street rallies have been sparsely populated by white supremacists - but overwhelmingly attended by counterprotesters - and by the time Spencer ended his college speaking tour, few supporters were coming to his speeches.

And for Stormfront, a large white-supremacist online forum whose threads were read by some alt-right members, few were donating money. "It's that time of month again, when the big, scary bills hit," wrote site creator Don Black, whose wife, according to site members, has stopped financially supporting the forum, and whose son, Derek, has rejected white supremacy. "Our contributions have once again totaled less than $2000, which is not enough to cover our basic server and radio bills, and this month we no longer have enough personal money to make up the difference."

The Traditionalist Worker Party, which at its height operated in at least eight states and had about 1,200 paying members, according to its leaders, also collapsed last month. It was perhaps the most institutionally organized of all the groups comprising the alt-right. It had a clear hierarchy - paying members reporting to regional commanders, who in turn reported to the top leaders living in a trailer park in Paoli, Indiana, where everything came apart last month.

The dynamic between co-founders Matt Parrott and Matthew Heimbach has always been unconventional. Heimbach is married to Parrott's stepdaughter from a former marriage, and the two men lived in neighboring trailers, where they promoted traditional gender roles in addition to white-supremacist beliefs.

But according to a police report obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Heimbach and Parrott's wife began sleeping together. In early March, the two told Parrott and Heimbach's wife that the three-month affair was over, but Parrott didn't believe it, so he concocted a plan to catch them. Heimbach and Parrott's wife fell for it, while Parrott was outside, standing atop a box, looking in from the window. Then the box broke, and, cover presumably blown, Parrott went to confront Heimbach, who allegedly choked him. Parrott lost consciousness, then fled to Walmart, where he called police, who reported that Heimbach later violently grabbed his wife's face.

Heimbach was charged with felony domestic battery, the Traditionalist Worker Party disintegrated, and Parrott, speaking on the phone earlier this month, sounded different from the triumphant white supremacist who in the days following the Charlottesville rally had promised that he and the alt-right were here to stay.

"I'm unplugged from politics," Parrott said. "I'm done. I'm out. I don't want to be in The Washington Post anymore. I don't care to have this humiliating and terrifying ordeal be more public than it already is. . . . There is no more Trad Worker."

Heimbach, citing the advice of his attorneys, declined to comment.

The group's website was removed. Some members said they were out. Others said they wanted to start something new. Another group, called Nationalist Initiative, soon coalesced online, heralding a new brand.

"TWP failed," it said in a tweet this month to its 68 followers. "What comes from the ashes?"
NORWALK  It was Thirsty Thursday at Johnny Utahs.

Dozens of customers, many Fairfield University students, were packed around the bar trying to get the bartenders attention while others waited in line for a ride on the mechanical bull.

Thats when the cops raided the place.

It was crazy, said one Fairfield University student who said he had just left the restaurant moments before the police arrived and declined to give his name.

The place was so full you could barely move. It was filled with freshman and sophomores, he said.

Police and state liquor control agents said they found more than 100 underaged patrons, mostly Fairfield University students, in the South Norwalk bar Thursday night. Police descended on the Washington Street bar about 11:30 p.m.

The bar had its liquor permit pulled by the state Department of Consumer Protection on Friday.

No Fairfield University students were arrested. A school source said university officials had been in contact with police at the time and sent a bus to the bar to collect the students.

Fairfield University is continuing to work closely with the Norwalk Police Department to confirm all details of the event, school officials said in a statement Friday.

Fairfield University expects all students to uphold the Universitys code of conduct at all times, which is applicable both on and off campus. The university's alcohol policies reflect the laws of the state of Connecticut regarding the purchase, sale, and consumption of alcoholic beverages.

School officials declined further comment.

One student said she saw the bus arriving on campus Thursday night.

There were students hanging out the windows of the bus screaming, she said.

Day after

Students on the college campus Friday afternoon said they had been to Thirsty Thursdays at Johnny Utahs in the past; the bars advertising targets students on social media, they said.

Nobody who goes there on Thursday nights is over 21, a student said.

The places in Fairfield are too strict. There used to be a place in Bridgeport students could go to but that got closed down, said another student, explaining why the Norwalk bar was more popular than local pubs among some people.

In April 2016, the state Department of Consumer Protection closed down the Golden Star Cafe on Main Street in Bridgeport after police raided it and arrested more than 50 underaged Sacred Heart University students.

State Liquor Commission officials also declined to comment on the incident Friday.

Were closed, an employee of the establishment said Friday at 5:15 p.m. before hanging up. The bar typically opens at 5 p.m. on Fridays.

Norwalk police said the establishment will remain closed until further notice.

We are pleased that the Department of Consumer Protection suspended Johnny Utahs liquor permit, said police Chief Thomas Kulhawik. Having such a large number of very impressionable and vulnerable young people consuming alcohol is a concern for everyone.

Serving alcohol to minors is a serious offense that is not taken lightly, said Consumer Protection Commissioner Michelle H. Seagull.

Other incidents

The bar has been the site of numerous arrests since early last year.

In February 2017, two men were arrested during what police described as a large fight on a Saturday night.

In June of 2017, two underaged men with fake identification were charged with assaulting a bouncer at a Washington Street bar early a Wednesday morning, police said.

In July 2017, a 22-year-old Trumbull man was involved in an alcohol-fueled, late-night commotion on Washington Street that culminated in him smashing the side-view mirror on a police cruiser, police said.
T heresa Mays latest big idea about trade has been blasted to smithereens, holed below the waterline, sunk even before the vessel left port.

She thought the Commonwealth might rescue Britain from the big hole that will be left when we quit the European Union.

Unfortunately, her plans for a new, non-imperial British trading empire have been sabotaged at the very outset by the embarrassing news that the Home Office may have unlawfully deported Commonwealth immigrants from the Caribbean who were carried off the good ship Empire Windrush as babes in arms in the sunset of the British empire but whose citizenship rights were never properly recorded.

There has been a grovelling apology from the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd. You might think this is just one of those bureaucratic mix-ups come to light, predictably, as the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting gets underway in London.

But its more than that because it reminds us that this Government doesnt really get trade.

Trade is not about stuff. Contrary to what people say, its not about making things for foreigners in distant countries or even about services, doing stuff with foreigners money. Trade is about the new people you will meet today and tomorrow.

Its about exposing your business to more people than you can reach on your home patch.

Without lots and lots of people from other places, trade does not happen. It explains why London  a city built on a river 2000 years ago by people who came from Rome  is so good at trade. It may explain why Doncaster is less good at trade.

If the flow of people dwindles, trade opportunities diminish.

The Commonwealth is full of people  more than two billion  and a few member states, such as India, are rapidly expanding markets; ripe, thinks the Government, for a bit of commercial arm-twisting.

The 53 nations of the Commonwealth account for just 9% of the UKs global trade whereas the EU takes up 43%. Surely we could do more with India and the other 52 nations to fill the gap.

Probably not a great deal more because many of the Commonwealth countries count as developing countries that already get privileged access to the EU (and therefore Britain) at low or nil tariffs for most of the stuff they sell.

Their main concern about Brexit is preserving privileged access to the UK when we leave the EU customs union.

Of course, India would love to get even more access to the UK but in practice that means visa-free travel for Indian IT professionals  this was spelt out at length by Indias prime minister Narendra Modi to May on her last trip there.

What Britain wants is access to Indias government procurement market and the removal of huge tariffs that protect its domestic industries from competition.

There is no particular reason why India should give up such protection in a solo deal with Britain that has so far proved unobtainable with a much bigger prize, such as the EU or US marketplaces.

And for India, the attraction of the UK is not as a product marketplace but as a place to get training, jobs, work experience that can then re-exported back to Indian software and professional service companies.

Its the migration thing, the flow of people, the one thing that the Prime Minister has promised to curtail and that Brexit promised to end.

As the residue of an almost-forgotten empire, the Commonwealth has no trading significance.

It served its purpose as a place where Britain could once sell its manufactured goods, free of real competition.

Today, British Leyland and Imperial Chemical Industries are just fading memories of a cosy uncompetitive era.

India can buy better industrial products from Germany, Japan and Korea.

Commonwealth countries need to trade more with their neighbours, the first port of call where a business can find new customers and buying and selling begins. There is no reason for Caribbean nations to look across the Atlantic to Britain when the worlds biggest commercial market is in their backyard.
L ondoners unstoppable march towards healthy eating has helped upmarket grocer Planet Organics sales to surge, showing why it could be tasty to investors.

The retailer, which last year hired corporate finance firm Spayne Lindsay to advise on a potential 50 million sale, notched up 9% revenue growth to 30.7 million in the year to August.

The chain was founded in 1995 by entrepreneur Renee Elliott, inspired by food stores in her native Boston, Massachusetts.

Its revenues have been boosted by strong demand for niche health foods including plant-based protein balls, dairy-free yoghurts, and charcoal lattes in its cafes.

It is understood the retailer is seeking fresh finance to help it expand. It has seven London branches, including in Muswell Hill, Islington and Tottenham Court Road.

Pre-tax losses narrowed to 323,171, and buying director Al Overton said it should be in the black this financial year.
I f youre heading to the Isle of Wight this summer, and youre a fan of Instagram, youre in for a treat.

This little haven off the south coast of England is brimming with photo opportunities from the second you set sail from the mainland.

No wonder its a favourite with celebrities. Madonna and Kate Moss were reportedly once spotted partying in The Old Fort pub in Seaview, while Benedict Cumberbatch chose the sleepy village of Mottistone to get married in.

And don't forget the crowds of festival goers and holidaymakers who flock to the Isle of Wight everyyear.

Its just an hour and a quarter on the train from Waterloo to Southampton, and a further 20 minutes on the passenger ferry, making the Isle of Wight a brilliant place to spend the weekend.

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To celebrate Ferry Fortnight 2018, here are our top ten spots to head to for the ultimate in sunsets, beach huts and #AccidentallyWesAnderson moments (chosen by someone who lives there).

1. On the ferry

Dont forget to look out of the windows when youre heading across the Solent; even better, head out on deck. If youre travelling down from London after work, your journey should coincide perfectly with the sunset - the ideal backdrop for one of the 19th Century forts that stand in the water, or a selfie with some wind in your hair.

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2. Accidentally Wes Anderson opportunities

Fans of the brilliant Instagram account @accidentallywesanderson will love the Isle of Wight. It was a holiday favourite of the Victorians (Queen Victoria herself loved it so much she built Osborne House, which is worth a visit) and much of the olde worlde charm still survives from this era and beyond. Plus, if you take the ferry to Ryde, you can travel down the pier on an old 1960s tube.

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3. At your accommodation

Fans of interiors should book a stay at Tiny Homes or Vintage Vacations. Run by the same company, the former is a new collection of Scandi-style huts which are beautifully decorated in Insta-friendly shades, while the latter includes American Airstream caravans that date from the 1940s-1960s, as well a dog-friendly former scout hall littered with vintage furniture and mid century wallpaper.

One of the Scandi-inspired huts on the Isle of Wight / @tinyhomesholidays

4. On a chairlift

The Needles - an impressive rock formation that stands at the western tip of the Island - is best viewed from the somewhat exhilarating chairlift that takes you from the top of the cliff to Alum Bay at the bottom, where youll find naturally forming coloured sands in the rocks. Top marks to those who manage to get their feet and the lighthouse in shot.

Getty Images/VisitBritain RM

5. At a bay only accessible by foot

Steephill Cove is a beautiful collection of restaurants, cafes and holiday homes which is only accessible by foot, so youll really feel like you earned the likes on this one. To get there, park in Ventnor (which has a cool, vintage vibe - try breakfast at Cantina on the way, and a drink while listening to some local music at The Ventnor Exchange on your way back) then Steephill is a twenty minute walk along the coast. Stop for a delicious crab pastie while youre there.

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6. By some beach huts

There are endless lines of beach huts to choose from on the Island. Here on Shanklin beach youll find what seems like miles of them along the wide sandy beaches, but theyre pretty much everywhere (see also Ryde, Colwell Bay, Gurnard, St Helens).

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7. In West Wight

If youre travelling by car and fancy something a little more rugged, head to the Military Road on the south west side of the Island. Its far less populated, so its great for miles of wild beaches (including the surf spot Compton Bay) as well the opportunity to stumble across an actual real life dinosaur footprint on the beach, very close to where this picture was taken in Brook.

Brook, Isle of Wight, / @samod25

8. At a niche festival

The Isle of Wight is world famous for festivals, having held its first music extravaganzas between 1968 and 1970, which hosted the likes of Jimi Hendrix, The Who and Bob Dylan. And, while you could catch Liam Gallagher, Depeche Mode and Rita Ora this June, youll probably get better pictures at one of the more niche festivals on offer. We Islanders cant get enough of them. Theres the Garlic Festival (August 18-19), Ventnor Fringe (August 6-12) and even Europes biggest scooter rally held every August bank holiday in Ryde.

The Isle of Wight International Scooter Rally / @darlio_m0d

9. Sail away

Lendy Cowes Week (August 4-11) is a sailing regatta that does all the hard work, content-wise, for you. Laze along the shore anywhere from Gurnard to East Cowes for shots of jaunty sails at sea. If you time your trip with the end of the week, youll also be treated to a Red Arrows display and fireworks. Foolproof.

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10. Snap the sunset

Islanders will all have their own opinion of where to see the best sunset, but thats just because youre spoilt for choice - it looks great all over the Island. My personal favourite is at Appley Beach near Ryde, possibly because I grew up five minutes away, but also because you can eat and drink at two great establishments while you watch it. Head to The Three Buoys for mussels and chips, or Dell Cafe in Puckpool Park for tapas. Both are dog friendly, which will get you bonus points when you reach for your camera.

Appley Beach (@enbrogue) / @shauncuff

Set sail with Red Funnel, the Isle of Wight specialist, and enjoy award-winning ferry travel from Southampton. Sit back, relax and start your Island getaway in style with a leisurely 55-60 minute crossing complete with modern on-board facilities and a wide range of food and drink options.
A former British Airways pilot has been accused of trying to fly a packed holiday jet while four times over the alcohol limit.

Julian Monaghan, 49, has been charged over claims he attempted to fly a British Airways Boeing 777 after drinking alcohol.

Cabin crew members on the flight carrying 300 passengers called 999 shortly before take-off from Gatwick Airport on January 18, police said.

The Boeing 777 was headed on a 12-hour flight to Mauritius.

Mr Monaghan  a long-serving British Airways first officer  was allegedly intoxicated when he boarded the aircraft.

He was arrested at Gatwick's North Terminal during the incident which delayed the flights departure by more than two hours.

Sussex Police confirmed he had been charged with having 86mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood in his system. The alcohol limit for pilots is 20mg.

A spokesman told the Standard: "The Crown Prosecution Service has authorised a charge of being over the alcohol limit on board an aircraft against a former pilot.

"Julian Monaghan, 49, a resident of South Africa, was arrested at Gatwick Airports North Terminal at about 8.45pm on Thursday January 18 on suspicion of performing an aviation function when the level of alcohol was over the prescribed limit.

"He is charged with having 86mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood in his system. The legal limit is 20mg."

Mr Monaghan  who splits his time between South Africa and Harmondsworth, west London  is scheduled to appear before JPs in Crawley on June 6. He has not been asked to enter a plea.

BA said it was assisting police and that Mr Monaghan no longer works for them.

A spokesman for the airline said: Julian Monaghan no longer works for the airline.

The aircraft remained at the gate until an alternative third pilot joined the flight crew.

We have taken this matter extremely seriously and will continue to assist the police with their inquiries.
A man has been arrested after a car crashed into a wall near to City of London Police station on Bishopsgate.

The collision at around 7pm sparked disruption during Friday rush hour, with the road near to Liverpool Street station closed southbound.

The area was cordoned off to pedestrians as emergency services attended.

Another man was taken to hospital with minor injuries, police said.

Images online showed the black Toyota Prius stopped in front of the police station.

City of London Police said on Twitter: "We are currently in attendance at a road traffic collision on #Bishopsgate.

"The road southbound is partially closed and there is some disruption, including for pedestrians in the area."

The road was later reopened, police said.
Evie Forbes, 22, junior account executive from Angel: Its not reliable, its horrific. Yesterday I was on it and we were told the bus driver needed to stop to even out the service. Its completely irregular. It will say two minutes away [on the app] but you get on and youre sitting there for seven minutes. It doesnt surprise me that its the worst bus stop. They dont put enough buses on. They need more.

Chloe Greenwood, 18, dance student from Clerkenwell: The bus app and the time it actually comes is often different. Its so annoying when buses arent on time. Sometimes if its late at night you can be waiting on your own, and no bus is coming.

Sarah Campbell, 25, charity worker from Archway: The buses are really inconsistent. I get the 91 from my house and then change for the 153 if Im coming the other way. Sometimes you get there in half an hour, sometimes its an hour and a half  theres no way of predicting.

Aaron Lutchman, 30, vet from Islington: The bus is supposed to come every seven to 12 minutes but its so variable. You get two coming together and then not another one for ages. Then you get one that will overtake the other. If they spread the service out theyd be more consistent.
T ributes were paid today to a vibrant, smiling teenager who fell to her death in a tragic accident at her family home.

Danielle Maragh, 17, was pronounced dead at the scene after tumbling from the fourth-storey bedroom window in Ashley Road, Crouch End.

Friends and family held a vigil for Danielle, a student at Islington Arts and Media school, on Wednesday night nine days after her death, leaving photos and balloons in a shrine on the front steps.

Susan Service, the school's head teacher, said: Danielle was a young, vibrant student who had a strong passion for the Arts.

She was a beautiful soul, very caring and loving to all of her peers. There was never a day that she was not smiling.

Floral tributes were left for teenager Danielle Maragh at her home following the tragic accident

Her death has been a tragic loss to all.

My heart goes out to her close friends and family who have always been extremely supportive of Danielles education. She will be truly missed.

Danielle, understood to be the middle child of three sisters, stood for Islington Youth Council in 2015.

A man who called her his god-daughter said: She was an angel. We watched her grow up and she was still so young. The whole area is devastated.

"We heard she was reaching for her phone and fell out the window. Its a tragic accident. We will be saying prayers for her at the church."

Her sister said her parents were grieving and unable to speak after the tragic fall on April 9.

Her father, Charles, posted a photograph on Facebook of Danielle holding 17th birthday balloons with the caption: My angel. RIP beautiful.

Writer and lecturer James Heartfield said he had known Danielle and her family when she was a pupil at Hargrave Park primary school.

He told the Standard: She was an absolutely lovely girl, cheerful and joyful. She brightened up the day. Her parents are lovely and they both adore their kids. Its terrible.

A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said: Police were called by London Ambulance Service at approximately 9pm on April 9 to reports of a female suffering injuries in Ashley Road.

The female, believed to be aged 17, was pronounced dead at the scene. It is believed the female suffered her injuries after falling from height.
H undreds have gathered in south London for a demonstration in solidarity with the so-called Windrush generation.

The rally was held in support of those affected and their families at Windrush Square in Brixton on Friday afternoon.

Journalist Gary Younge and Labour's Dianne Abbott were among a number of speakers at the event, which called for "an amnesty for the 'Windrush generation' who were invited to the UK as British citizens".

People attend the event in Windrush Square, Brixton / PA

Many of the Windrush generation, named after the ship HMT Empire Windrush, came from African and Caribbean countries under a rule allowing freedom of movement within the Commonwealth.

Organised by campaign group Stand Up to Racism, the rally came as a mass petition urging rights for the Windrush Generation is set for debate in Parliament on April 30.

Images shared online showed huge crowds gathered in the square, which was renamed in 1998 to recognise the important contribution of the African Caribbean community to the area.

Mr Younge gave a passionate speech as the event began at 5pm on Friday.

Gary Younge: 'Black people helped build this country' / PA

"I don't want to live in a country that is hostile to migrants," he said.

The journalist said the rally was "in some senses to celebrate the massive contribution" of the Windrush generation.

He added: "Black people helped build this country."

It came as details have emerged of long-standing UK residents from the Windrush generation who say they have been refused re-entry to Britain after visits to the Caribbean.

The rally called for 'amnesty for the Windrush generation' / PA

One woman, Gretel Gocan, 81, told 5 News she had been stuck in Jamaica since 2010 unable to return to her south London home after taking a holiday to visit family.

Former NHS nurse Icilda Williams, who moved back to Jamaica in 1996 after 34 years in Bradford, said her annual visits to the UK to see her children had been halted since 2014 after she was denied a visa.

Weyman Bennett, vice chair of Stand Up To Racism, said stories of how the generation of immigrants have been treated were "horrific".

He said: "We are here to say enough is enough and we are not going to stand for it.

Solidarity with the Windrush generation / PA

"Black people and their allies in the trade unions, in Parliament, are going to start organising.

"400 people attended a meeting called at short notice by Dianne Abbott, Dawn Butler, David Lammy.

"It was an excellent meeting turn out...

"That shows you the depth of feeling and anger."

The event organisers said: "Join us in the place that celebrates the remarkable contribution of African and Caribbean men and women to this country.

"They built the NHS and worked hard against all odds and racism to maintain public services and communities across the UK."

They added: "Stand together in defence of the absolute right of the Windrush generation to be at the heart of any society that purports to be democratic, diverse and just.

"Defy the disgraceful position of government and secure full rights for them to be citizens of the UK."

Some 286 people have so far contacted a Home Office helpline set up to offer support for members of the Windrush generation with concerns about their migration status.
F riday is "420", the unofficial international Weed Day, in which people smoke cannabis and advocate for it to be legalised.

Although some people think it is linked to the California code for marijuana consumption, 420 actually refers to the date, 20 April, that the celebration takes place.

In nine US states as well as in Washington, DC, the recreational use of cannabis is legal for people aged 21 and over.

Meanwhile twenty-nine states permit the use of marijuana for medical reasons.

Where did 420 come from?

Pronounced four-twenty, the origin of the day is subject to numerous urban myths and theories.

It has been suggested that the number 420 came from the penal code the Californian police used to categorise cannabis cases.

In 1971, students at a Californian high school allegedly organised to meeting at 4.20pm to find a plot of land to plant a cannabis plant.

Rallies and celebrations of weed are set to take place across the world today, stretching as far as New Zealand and America.

How do people celebrate?

There will be rallies worldwide including in Canada, Holland and the United States.

The biggest UK event celebrating the marijuana festival is at Londons Hyde Park.

In an act of mass civil disobedience, thousands are expected to meet and light up - although police and health experts have warned against it.

The Facebook event page says more than 2,000 people are interested in attending the event which kicks off at midday.

With temperatures set to soar up to 26 degrees today it is expected to be busy.

A man smokes a joint as people gathered in Russell Square for the start of a cannabis march in London / Getty Images

Police said that officers will be present and that the usual drug laws will apply on the day. Random police searches are expected.

A spokesman said: A proportionate policing plan will be in place. Legislation under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 will be enforced as it would be under normal police conditions during this event.

Is it legal in the UK?

No. Tony Blairs Labour government announced it would be changing the classification of the drug to C in 2001, hoping that the move would enable officers to concentrate on more serious drug offences.

But he backtracked following the 2005 General Election, believing the move sent out the wrong message.

Cannabis users can go to jail if caught, though traffickers and dealers are more likely to receive prison sentences.

According to NHS Choices, cannabis can make you "feel chilled out, relaxed and happy" - but it can also have adverse health effects.

The NHS website says people who use it may feel dizzy or sick, lethargic or suffer memory loss.

It also impairs your ability to drive.
E U chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier today warned of risks of a failure amid deadlock over talks on Britains divorce from the union.

He sounded the alarm as Britain and Brussels remained at loggerheads over how to resolve the future of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic after Brexit.

Mr Barnier said that about a quarter of the divorce settlement still needed to be thrashed out, with the border row top of the list. In terms of what has been agreed so far, its about 75 per cent, he told France 2 TV today. There are always difficulties, and risks of a failure.

A No 10 source played down the significance of Mr Barniers warning. All this tells us is that Brexit is coming back to the fore, said the official.

We are heading into quite a busy period as we move into the next phase of negotiations and come towards the next European Council.

Thousands of anti-Brexit activists march to Parliament in protest 1 /12 Thousands of anti-Brexit activists march to Parliament in protest Demonstrators head towards Parliament Square. REUTERS Signs include 'I love EU' REUTERS The pro-EU march began in Hyde Park Corner. Si Carrington 'NHS? Brexit Wrexit' Oliver Day The march took protesters through the streets of London. Oliver Day One protester brought along a papier mache Queen, in reference to the blue and yellow hat she wore at the State Opening of Parliament. Peter Bailey 'Exit Brexit' Jonathan Hawley The September sun shone as activists marched through the streets. Martin Tod Roads were blocked during the protest. Maggie Jones The campaigners set off shortly after 11am from Hyde Park Corner. Maggie Jones The rally saw the activists march through the streets of central London. Johann Ketel EU colours of blue and yellow were seen throughout the march. Judi Conner

But EU diplomats are growing increasingly frustrated at what they say is the UKs lack of new ideas. There is no point wasting our time, coming up with imaginary solutions, said one involved in the latest round of Brexit talks this week. Another senior Brussels official said: If they dont change, I dont see how we make progress.

The row is set to return to Parliament after the Commons liaison committee tabled a debate next Thursday calling on the Government to seek an effective UK-EU customs union.

The move came after peers, including 24 Conservatives, defeated the Government by backing an amendment instructing ministers to report on steps to negotiate a continued customs union.

At a meeting on Wednesday, EU negotiators again rejected UK proposals for either a customs arrangement or customs partnership to resolve the Irish border dispute.

The two options were outlined in a government paper last August and dismissed by the EU at the time as magical thinking. A customs partnership would see the UK mirroring EU tariffs and customs rules for foreign imports destined for the European market.

The alternative, a customs arrangement, relies on tracking technology and pre-clearance of trusted and smaller operators.

However, EU officials say neither option would solve the Irish border problem, which they say requires a backstop solution to be written into the EU-UK exit treaty. This would effectively keep Northern Ireland in the customs union and single market.

Britains former top diplomat in Brussels, Sir Ivan Rogers, warned that the proposed technological solution is viewed by many people as a fantasy island unicorn model. Hope is slowly fading that a deal on the backstop can be done in time for a summit of EU leaders in June, when Dublin wanted 95 per cent of the text to be agreed.
E noch Powells highly controversial Rivers of Blood speech was made 50 years ago this week.

The politicians address is considered to be one of the most inflammatory in modern British history.

It is widely believed to have been a direct attack on immigration and decried as racist, leading to Powell being dismissed from the Conservative Party.

Powell delivered the speech in Birmingham, days before a crucial stage of the 1968 Race Relations Bill.

When and where was the speech delivered?

Enoch Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speech

On April 20, 1968, Powell gave a speech to the Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham.

It was a carefully chosen moment, and a carefully chosen intervention from the then shadow defence minister in the Conservative opposition of Edward Heath.

The speech came just days before a crucial stage of the 1968 Race Relations Bill, an Act of Parliament that made it illegal to refuse housing, employment, or public services on the grounds of colour, race, ethnic or national origins.

Enoch Powell was dismissed from the Conservative party after making the speech / Rex Features

Why was it so controversial?

The speech is considered to be one of the most controversial and inflammatory in modern history made by a British politician.

The 45 minute address is widely believed to have incited racism against immigrants, and led to Powell being dismissed from the Conservative Party.

This year the BBC faced intense criticism for airing it on Radio 4, with many branding the broadcasters decision appalling.

The BBC defended its choice to air the speech, saying that there would be "rigorous journalistic analysis" and the show was not endorsing controversial views.

What did he say in the address?

In the speech, Powell proposed a policy encouraging people who had come to the UK from abroad to return their country of origin.

It included observations on immigrants taken from Powell's Wolverhampton constituents.

He said his constituents feared that in 20 years the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.

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".

How did his fellow politicians react?

The address caused a political storm, making Powell one of the most talked about and divisive politicians in Britain.

In the aftermath of the speech, protesters took to the streets in support of Powells backing for the repatriation of immigrants.

And denunciations appeared in newspaper editorials attacking his appeal to racial hatred.

Leading Conservatives in the Shadow Cabinet were outraged by Powells address, with many threatening to resign from the front bench unless Powell was forced out.
T racy Neillie unleashes a string of complaints as she stands in a hallway of Semley House.

The self-employed carpet and upholstery cleaner bemoans the management, works and fees at the Belgravia block, run by Tory-controlled Westminster councils arms-length housing organisation.

So, given her concerns, will she vote Conservative in the local elections? Absolutely, responds the 54-year-old mother-of-two. I feel confident with the Conservatives, I would not with any other party.

Retired fine arts consultant Katherine MacLean, 80, lives in the same block, which is about a third council tenants, two thirds leasehold.

She says she is a born and bred Conservative and Jeremy Corbyn being Labour leader makes it more likely she will back the Tories on May 3. I try to keep that out of my mind and concentrate on local elections but subliminally it does, she admits as she speaks to councillor Murad Gassanly.

He was elected in Churchill ward in 2014 for Labour  but he defected to the Tories after Mr Corbyn was reconfirmed leader in 2016.

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For me to see the hammer and sickle waving over a [local] Labour Party meeting was the last straw, says Mr Gassanly, 38, whose family came to Britain from the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan.

In the lift, he is confronted by a burly, bearded man who brands him a turncoat; Mr Gassanly dismisses him as a well-known Corbynista. Nickie Aiken, Westminsters Tory leader, says the political mood on the street is decidedly nastier than four years ago.

Glance at the 2014 borough election results and at first it appears difficult to see how Labour can overturn the 44-16 Tory victory. However, Labour made some gains outside of its traditional northern strongholds, which include Queens Park and Westbourne, and at the 2016 election for London Mayor it closed the gap in more wards.

''We are the underdogs. This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to bring about change in Westminster''

Then there was the Brexit vote and Theresa Mays snap general election last year, which saw Labours Karen Buck boost her majority from 1,977 to 11,512 in Westminster North, while Conservative Mark Fields majority in Cities of London and Westminster slumped from 9,671 to 3,148.

So Labour appears to have gained ground and could seize the council on a nine per cent swing from 2014  but this would mean winning some previously solid Conservative seats. Pollsters may be failing to fully pick up possible disruptive factors, such as anti-establishment surges and discontent with a party in government for eight years.

Candidates Ange Balendra and Paul Lemon (left) with local Labour leader Barry Rawlings / Alex Lentati

Given Brexit and Mr Corbyn, Liberal Democrat candidates could peel off voters from the Tories and Labour.

Another unknown is how many non-British EU nationals will vote given that, according to analysis by Professor Tony Travers of London School of Economics, they make up 18 per cent of the boroughs population.

However, Westminster has been Tory-run since its creation in 1964 and Adam Hug, Labour group leader on the council, is realistic, saying: We are the underdogs. But he stresses: This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to bring about change in Westminster  that is resonating with a lot of people.

We want to reassure them that the city is safe in our hands. Mr Hug vows that Labour will keep council tax low, retain twice-weekly bin collections, do more for social and affordable housing, and target investment at childrens centres, youth clubs and adult social care. To win, his party would almost certainly have to sweep up in Bayswater, Maida Vale, Churchill and Vincent Square but also gain seats in wards such as St Jamess  whose residents include the Queen and Theresa May.

A woman heads towards a polling station in north London during a previous General Election / Getty Images

On the Peabody Estate in Wild Street, St Jamess, Labour candidate Georgina Newson is handing out election leaflets which quote Barack Obama: Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time.

The 57-year-old maternity support worker believes there is a general mood for change. One voter, copywriter Chloe Joyce, 35, said she would back Labour: Ser-vices need investment. I have far more confidence in a Labour council to deliver that.

Mother-of-two Margaret Houston, secretary of the tenants association, rejoined Labour after Mr Corbyn became leader and says people are fed up about housing issues, including the plight of homeless people, and difficulties accessing public services, such as those for mental health.

The ball is rolling a bit faster towards Labour, she believes. But Ms Newson faces a tougher time convincing an-other resident, in his late twenties or early thirties, that Labour would not increase council tax.

General Election Night 2017 - In pictures 1 /31 General Election Night 2017 - In pictures Theresa May waiting in Maidenhead for the result to be announced Alastair Grant/AP Labour leaders Jeremy Corbyn at the Election count in Islington Jeremy Selwyn Leader of the Liberal democrats Tim Farron celebrates beating Conservative party candidate James Airey, Independent candidate Mr Fishfinger and Labour candidate Eli Aldridge following the announcement of the results at the Westmoorland and Lonsdale constituency count at Kendal Leisure Centre Dave Thompson/Getty Images Armed police outside the home of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in north London Yui Mok/PA Vince Cable pictured with his wife Rachel, is elected once again in Twickenham after losing his seat in 2015 Alex Lentati Nick Clegg loses his Sheffield Hallam seat and is no longer an MP Sky News Scottish National Party (SNP) leader Nicola Sturgeon reacts as her party loses their seat at the Emirates Arena in Glasgow, Scotland, Robert Parry/EPA Britain's Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn, right, tries to high-five with Labour's Emily Thornberry after arriving for the declaration at his constituency in London Frank Augstein/AP Ballot boxes are run in during the count at the Silksworth Community Pool, Tennis and Wellness Centre as the general election count begins Ian Forsyth/Getty Images Boris Johnson at the Brunel Indoor Athletic Centre for the declaration of his Uxbridge and South Ruislip Constituency which he retained Rex Features Zac Goldsmith with his mother Lady Annabel Goldsmith Alex Lentati Close call for Zac Goldsmith as a recount is called for Richmond Park Alex Lentati Labour supporters react as Paul Sweeney (not pictured) is announced as the new MP for Glasgow North East for the British Parliamentary Elections at the Emirates Arena EPA UKIP leader Paul Nuttall at the Peter Paine Performance Centre in Boston during the counting Joe Giddens/PA Labour's Rupa Huq celebrates with her sister, TV presenter Konnie Huq, after increasing her majority from 274 to 13,807 in Ealing Central and Acton Matt Writtle Displays show the current rate of the British pound against the Japanese yen and a news program reporting on the British general election at a foreign money brokerage in Tokyo Roru Yamanaka/AFP/Getty Images Theresa May leaving CCHQ this morning Jeremy Selwyn Police watch as counting staff sort through ballots at a counting centre in Islington, London Niklas Halle'n/AFP/Getty Images Britain's Home Secretary Amber Rudd's speaks after retaining her seat in Hastings Kevin Coombs/Reuters Prime Minister Theresa May's chief of staff Nick Timothy and Joint-chief of staff Fiona Hill leave Conservative Party HQ in Westminster Rick Findler/PA Patrons watch the results for Britain's election in London. Alex Salmond loses his seat Peter Nicholls/Reuters Chuka Umunna kisses with his wife, Alice Sullivan at the London Borough of Lambeth UK Parliamentary Elections Lucy Young Prime Minister Theresa May waits with other candidates for the results to be declared at the count centre in Maidenhead Geoff Cadick/AFP/Getty Images Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson at Meadowbank Sports Centre in Edinburgh Jane Barlow/PA Vote counters wait for Ballot boxes to arrive at the Peter Paine Performance Centre where the vote count for the constituency of Boston and Skegness Getty Images Kate Hoey who retained her Vauxhall seat at the London Borough of Lambeth Lucy Young Conservative's Gavin Barwell loses his seat to Labour at Croydon Central Chris Gorman Labour's Sarah Jones takes the Conservative seat of Croydon Chris Gorman DUP leader Arlene Foster and deputy leader Nigel Dodds cheer as Emma Little Pengelly is elected to the South Belfast constituency at the Titanic exhibition centre in Belfast Niall Carson/PA Exit poll results from Britain's general election are projected on to the BBC's Broadcasting House, London Jeff Overs/BBC The front door of 10 Downing Street in Westminster, London, as votes are being counted in the 2017 General Election Rick Findler/PA

Housing, local services and policing frequently come up on the doorstep and local factors could influence some wards. In the West End, concerns over commercial development run high. Labour figures privately admit the council has upped its game on housing under Ms Aiken, even if they believe it is far too little to deal with the crisis.

Tories aim to halt the advance of their opponents by highlighting their track record on financial management, twice-weekly bin collections, street cleaning and childrens services  and on having Britains lowest council tax.

What could lose it is turnout, says Ms Aiken. She insists the Tory campaign is focused on local issues  bins not Brexit  and adds: Look at our re-cord. If you value it, vote for it. Never for a number of elections has there been a clearer choice. You know what you get with Westminster Conservatives.

With elections so unpredictable nowadays, both parties may have something to trumpet on May 4. Its possible Labour could win a majority of votes in Westminster and yet not win a majority of seats, Professor Travers said.
P olice have issued a warning to people planning to smoke cannabis at a 420 rally due to take place at Hyde Park.

More than a thousand people are expected to turn up to the park on Friday to "peacefully" protest and call on the Government to legalise the Class B drug.

The rally takes place every year on April 20 with marijuana lovers set to gather to demand the drug is decriminalised.

On the Facebook page for the event, 1,300 have already pledged to attend. A large police presence is expected.

Protest: Police at the 2017 event

In 2015, the pro-Cannabis rally saw more than 50 people arrested, despite claims from organisers that the event was peaceful.

Last year, 12 people were detained by police at the rally.

Police said that officers will be present and that the usual drug laws will apply on the day. Random police searches are expected.

More than 50 people were arrested during the Hyde Park rally in 2015 / PA

A spokesman said: We are aware of a planned event due to be held in Hyde Park at 12.00hrs on Friday, 20 April.

A proportionate policing plan will be in place.

Legislation under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 will be enforced as it would be under normal police conditions during this event.

The origin of 420 is subject to numerous urban myths and theories.

It has been suggested that the number 420 came from the penal code the Californian police used to categorise cannabis cases.

In 1971, students at a Californian high school allegedly organised to meeting at 4.20pm to find a plot of land to plant a cannabis plant.

Rallies and celebrations of weed are set to take place across the world today, stretching as far as New Zealand and America.

Tony Blairs Labour government announced it would be changing the classification of the drug to C in 2001, hoping that the move would enable officers to concentrate on more serious drug offences.

But he backtracked following the 2005 General Election, believing the move sent out the wrong message.
T he Black Cultural Archives is calling on the Government to lodge important archival materials with them and never to destroy them again in the wake of the Windrush fiasco.

After it emerged the Home Office destroyed landing cards that would have proven the status of thousands of immigrants who arrived from Commonwealth nations between 1948 and 1971, BCA said it saw the unfolding Windrush crisis as "a shameful lack of appreciation".

"The elders of Britains Caribbean heritage community were a pioneering generation who laid solid foundations that rebuilt post-war Britain," said the organisation, based in Brixton, south London, in a statement.

"The destruction of landing cards that form part of a narrative of an entire generation and their childrens history is disheartening.

Theresa May: Labour to blame for Windrush landing cards destruction

"BCA exists to ensure the preservation of this history, our archive differs from national or government archives, as our remit is to preserve the narratives of the people.

"Materials that can no longer be held in central archives should be offered to alternative repositories such as ourselves," it said.

Windrush generation arrive in Britain 1 /14 Windrush generation arrive in Britain Some of the pioneering Windrush generation arrive at Tilbury Docks, from Jamaica Getty Images The journey to the UK cost 28 Getty Images They arrived on June 22, 1948 Getty Images The ex-troopship 'Empire Windrush' arriving at Tilbury Docks from Jamaica, with 482 Jamaicans on board, emigrating to Britain SSPL via Getty Images The group were the first of the Windrush generation to emigrate to Britain Getty Images Arrivals scrutinise a map of the London Underground Getty Images The Windrush generation helped to rebuild post-war Britain Getty Images Members of the 55 Independent Squadron wait to board the Empire Windrush at Southampton, to fight in the Korean War Getty Images A black man walks past graffiti stating 'Powell For PM', referring to Enoch Powell who caused controversy with his outspoken attitude to black immigration and racial integration Getty Images Three Jamaicans (left to right) John Hazel, a 21-year-old boxer, Harold Wilmot, 32, and John Richards, a 22-year-old carpenter, arriving at Tilbury Docks Getty Images Nearly 1000 West Indian immigrants arrive in three boats trains at Waterloo Station. Many brought with them packing cases containing treasured possessions, 15th October 1961 Mirrorpix/Getty Images West Indian immigrants arriving in the United Kingdom, 19th May 1962 Mirrorpix/Getty Images Nearly 1000 West Indian immigrants arrive in three boats trains at Waterloo Station. Many brought with them packing cases containing treasured possessions, 15th October 1961 Mirrorpix/Getty Images 27th May 1956: Immigrants to Britain from the West Indies queuing up on arrival at Southampton holding documents Getty Images

It added: "We call on the government to ensure the travesty of the destruction of the archival materials must never happen again.

"And BCA must be the recognised home for such important archival material."

Recent restrictions in immigration law require people to have paperwork proof of near-continuous residence in the UK.

What is the Windrush generation

Many of those in the so-called Windrush generation lack these records, having never applied for British citizenship or passports, and are now struggling to prove they are here legally.

However, it has emerged that thousands of landing card slips recording the arrival of Windrush-era immigrants were destroyed by the Home Office in 2009.
A woman was killed today in a fire at a care home for people with learning disabilities.

More than 70 firefighters were called to the modern three-storey centre in Chingford as the blaze took hold in the early hours.

Fire crews arrived shortly before 2.15am to discover two floors and the roof ablaze, with black smoke pouring from windows.

Eight residents and four carers managed to escape but one woman could not be resuscitated after being found unconscious in a bedroom. She was pronounced dead by paramedics.

Local MP Iain Duncan Smith, visiting the scene this morning, praised a neighbour who dialled 999 after spotting smoke.

Chingford: Firefighters tackle the flames / London Fire Brigade/Twitter

He said: One person has died but this terrible tragedy could have been much worse. The fire brigade were here in a flash. Great credit to the neighbour who saw smoke and called the fire brigade. She deserves an award. The loss of life might have been greater. My heart goes out to victims.

The cause of the blaze was not known and an investigation was under way.

Chingford fire: Firefighters at the blaze

The purpose-built centre in Connington Crescent houses Connington Court and Connington House, two facilities run by Sequence Care to support adults with autism and other complex needs.

Neighbour Beryl Smith, 74, said: Lots of shouting woke me up. People from the care home were standing outside looking upset. Then I saw a tiny ball of fire on the roof and the flames shot along the roof. The residents were sat in the street for a couple of hours. Some of them were in a bad state and very nervous. Its so sad.

The home remained behind a cordon today as fire crews continued to damp down parts of the building. The roof was destroyed.
T he Prince of Wales was today given more backing to succeed his mother as head of the Commonwealth as leaders of the 53-nation body met behind closed doors to discuss the move.

The heir to the throne is set to be formally named as the Queens successor today after she gave him her endorsement.

The Queen has filled the role since 1952, but the position is not automatically held by the British monarch.

There had been suggestions the role should rotate around member states.

Queen Elizabeth II and the Prince of Wales arrive for the formal opening of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting / PA

But Ralph Regenvanu, foreign minister of Pacific state Vanuatu, told Radio 4s Today: We see it almost naturally that it should be the British royal family, it is the Commonwealth after all.

He added: Charles visited my country a few weeks ago and the reception was rapturous. People still hold the royal family in that regard in our country.
What does the head of the Commonwealth do?

The head of the Commonwealth is a largely symbolic post with no real powers. The head's main role is to officially open the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), a gathering of Commonwealth leaders, usually held every two years, where presidents and prime ministers discuss important issues of the moment.

How did the role evolve?

The modern Commonwealth was established by the London Declaration of 1949, just two years after India and Pakistan were granted independence. The London Declaration said the British monarch would be a symbol of the free association of independent countries, and as such the head of the Commonwealth. This meant republics could be members and accept the sovereign as head of the Commonwealth without him or her being their own head of state.

Why is the post important?

As the figurehead of an institution representing 53 member states with a combined population of 2.4 billion people, the head should embody the values of the Commonwealth. But the head's real job is to act as a unifying force or convener, drawing together and binding the leaders from Britain's former empire under the Commonwealth banner. If they do not respect or have faith in their head, maintaining unity on issues would be a problem.

Why did the Queen speak out in favour of the Prince of Wales succeeding her as Commonwealth Head?

The position is not automatically held by the British monarch and there has been speculation for a number of years about whether Charles would succeed the Queen, who has been head of the Commonwealth since coming to the throne in 1952. Ultimately it was up to the leaders to decide, so the Queen's direct and personal appeal to them to adopt her son as their next head was taken seriously.

Does Charles have the credentials for the job?

The prince has been conducting his own subtle diplomacy in recent years, talking about his passion for the Commonwealth and highlighting the achievements of his charities working in Commonwealth countries. His extensive travels during his lifetime have taken him to dozens of nations within the Commonwealth, so he has knowledge of the people and the issues they face.
A history of naming Royal babiesWhen William arrived in 1982, his parents the Prince and Princess of Wales waited seven days before deciding on and announcing his chosen forenames.

Diana was thought to have preferred names such as Sebastian and Oliver, while Charles was reportedly holding out for Albert.

When the names were finally revealed as William Arthur Philip Louis it ended a week of intense speculation.

Experts correctly predicted Louis would be among the names in honour of the Prince of Wales's late great-uncle Lord Mountbatten, as well as Philip in a nod to the Duke of Edinburgh.

Buckingham Palace revealed at the time that the name William would not be shortened in any way and the duke himself has since insisted he is never known as "Wills".

Out of courtesy, the Queen has to be told what has been decided before a name is announced.

Prince Harry's name was announced much more quickly than his brother's after he was born in September 1984, with the palace confirming it on the day he left hospital and saying that although he was called Henry, he would be known as Harry.

When Princess Beatrice was born in 1988, it was two weeks before her name was known.

Her sister's little known name Princess Eugenie took people by surprise in 1990. It was the second name of one of Queen Victoria's granddaughters.

The Prince of Wales's name remained a mystery to the wider world for a month and was only declared ahead of his christening in the Music Room of Buckingham Palace in December 1948.

When the Queen's first great-grandchild Savannah Phillips was born in December 2010, her name was first disclosed at a church service at the royal estate of Sandringham, Norfolk, attended by the royal family.
J ustin Trudeau will not attend the Royal Wedding despite his wife's friendship with Meghan Markle.

Asked at the Commonwealth heads of government summit if he was disappointed not to get an invite to the May 19 nuptials, he dodged the question saying: I, of course, wish them the very best.

But I have important responsibilities elsewhere.

Prince Harry and his fiancee have decided to invite an additional 1,200 members of the public to celebrate their wedding in the grounds of Windsor Caste.

Prince Harry greet Justin Trudea, the Canadian Prime Minister, at this week's Commonwealth summit / PA

But the Palace announced last week that world leaders and politicians would not be included on the list of those attending the wedding.

However, Mr Trudeau, who met and spoke with Harry at the Invictus Games and has crossed paths with Ms Markle at humanitarian events in Canada, was rumoured to have been invited.

Ms Markle used to live in Toronto and is also thought to be close to the Canadian PM's wife Sophie Gregoire-Trudeau, even offering her fashion advice.

Princess Beatrice meets Justin Trudeau (Reuters)

At the Commonwealth summit hosted in London, Mr Trudeau appeared popular with the Royals.

Images show Prince Harry and the Canadian premier greeting each other warmly while Princess Beatrice looked delighted to meet him.
S ave the Children's international chairman has resigned in the face of what he called a "complex mix of challenges" facing the charity sector.

Sir Alan Parker stepped down from his role eight months before his 10-year term was due to end.

Sir Alan, who has also quit the boards of Save the Children Association and Save the Children International, acknowledged that the charity's UK arm had dealt with some "unacceptable workplace behaviour".

The charity apologised earlier this year to female employees who complained of inappropriate behaviour by its former chief executive Justin Forsyth.

A leaked 2015 report from the charity suggested that Sir Alan's "very close" relationship with Mr Forsyth, who left the charity in 2016, may have affected how he responded to complaints.

Brendan Cox, the widower of murdered MP Jo Cox, also admitted that he made "mistakes" and behaved in a way that caused some women "hurt and offence" when he was working at the charity.

In his resignation letter Sir Alan told colleagues: "In Save the Children UK we dealt with some unacceptable workplace behaviour, involving harassment, in our head office in Farringdon in 2012 and 2015.

"The process around Brendan Cox involved a disciplinary panel, including Trustees and an independent QC. The processes around Justin Forsyth were handled by HR and senior Trustees, and were reviewed by an independent law firm."

He said he would work to assist "in any way I can" with a further review of the issues which is being undertaken by the Charity Commission.

Sir Alan, who pledged to help ensure a smooth succession for his replacement, said there was an "urgent and pressing need to rebuild trust and confidence" in the sector.

He added: "If we do not, some of the world's poorest and most vulnerable children will suffer."

Pernille Lopez, speaking on behalf of the charity's board, said Sir Alan had made an "immense contribution" to the charity in the past decade.

Save the Children benefited from Sir Alan's "extensive knowledge and energy", CEO Helle Thorning-Schmidt added.
M embers of the Windrush generation who suffered as a result of an immigration crackdown will receive compensation, Theresa May has announced.

The Prime Minister confirmed plans for compensation at the conclusion of the Commonwealth summit in London, which has been overshadowed by controversy over the treatment of Caribbean nationals who arrived in the UK between the late 1940s and early 1970s.

Downing Street declined to give details of the compensation scheme, saying only they would be announced "shortly" by the Home Office.

It is thought likely that payments will go beyond the reimbursement of legal bills and include a recognition of the anxiety caused to long-standing Commonwealth residents of the UK whose right to be in the country was questioned.

The announcement came as details emerged of two Windrush women who say they were denied re-entry to the UK after travelling to the Caribbean.

Windrush generation arrive in Britain 1 /14 Windrush generation arrive in Britain Some of the pioneering Windrush generation arrive at Tilbury Docks, from Jamaica Getty Images The journey to the UK cost 28 Getty Images They arrived on June 22, 1948 Getty Images The ex-troopship 'Empire Windrush' arriving at Tilbury Docks from Jamaica, with 482 Jamaicans on board, emigrating to Britain SSPL via Getty Images The group were the first of the Windrush generation to emigrate to Britain Getty Images Arrivals scrutinise a map of the London Underground Getty Images The Windrush generation helped to rebuild post-war Britain Getty Images Members of the 55 Independent Squadron wait to board the Empire Windrush at Southampton, to fight in the Korean War Getty Images A black man walks past graffiti stating 'Powell For PM', referring to Enoch Powell who caused controversy with his outspoken attitude to black immigration and racial integration Getty Images Three Jamaicans (left to right) John Hazel, a 21-year-old boxer, Harold Wilmot, 32, and John Richards, a 22-year-old carpenter, arriving at Tilbury Docks Getty Images Nearly 1000 West Indian immigrants arrive in three boats trains at Waterloo Station. Many brought with them packing cases containing treasured possessions, 15th October 1961 Mirrorpix/Getty Images West Indian immigrants arriving in the United Kingdom, 19th May 1962 Mirrorpix/Getty Images Nearly 1000 West Indian immigrants arrive in three boats trains at Waterloo Station. Many brought with them packing cases containing treasured possessions, 15th October 1961 Mirrorpix/Getty Images 27th May 1956: Immigrants to Britain from the West Indies queuing up on arrival at Southampton holding documents Getty Images

Gretel Gocan, 81, told 5 News she had been stuck in Jamaica since 2010 unable to return to her south London home after taking a holiday to visit family.

And former NHS nurse Icilda Williams, who moved back to Jamaica in 1996 after 34 years in Bradford, said her annual visits to the UK to see her children had been halted since 2014 after she was denied a visa.

The Home Office said it would be looking into the cases as a matter of urgency.

More than 280 people have so far contacted a Home Office helpline set up to offer support for members of the Windrush generation with concerns about their migration status.

Windrush mother declares MP's "Should be ashamed of themselves"

Eight have so far been given permanent residence status.

Mrs May said: "On Tuesday, I met with Caribbean leaders, where I gave an absolute commitment that the UK Government will do whatever it takes - including where appropriate payment of compensation - to resolve the anxieties and problems which some of the Windrush generation have suffered.

"These people are British, they are part of us, they helped to build Britain and we are all the stronger for their contributions."

It follows the PM's apology in the Commons on Wednesday, in which she said: There will be no cost to them; nobody will be out of pocket as a result.

Grenada's Prime Minister Keith Mitchell called for "serious" compensation, saying: "The word compensation came out today - that was highly significant, extremely important.

"It's not just, 'I'm sorry.' People lost a lot, people suffered a lot of pain, and they must be given an opportunity to correct this - some serious compensation.

"If not the person, if they've gone, then the families who have suffered too."

Asked if Mrs May should have accepted the immigration initiative was a mistake, Mr Mitchell said: "I think the fact she has addressed it is indicating that Britain and the policy they enunciated initially was not the right one.

Downing Street did not give details of the compensation scheme / REUTERS

"And therefore by making the statement she made today, I think she's heading in the right direction. And I'll give her credit for making the right turn."

The PM's pledge at the close of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting came after more examples emerged of long-standing UK residents barred from returning to the country.

Speaking to 5 News, Ms Gocan's daughter Pauline Blackwood said her mother had been stranded in Jamaica with no money and no pension.

The 81-year-old says she came to the UK in 1960 and never applied for a British passport, but had a stamp in her Jamaican passport granting her indefinite leave to remain.

That document was stolen in 2006 and when she went to Jamaica on a new passport in 2010 she found herself refused permission to return to the UK and told she needed a visa, she said.

"My mum has six children in the UK and she has grandchildren and some of them she hasn't seen or even held," said Ms Blackwood.

"Her family is here and it is for her to make that choice whether she chooses to stay in Jamaica or come back to the UK, but that is not an option for her, she is forced to stay in Jamaica.

"My main fear is we're going to lose our mum. She has no money, all her pension's been stopped and her medication too - she has diabetes - that's all been denied to her."

Mrs Williams said she held a British Commonwealth passport until 1967. After being denied a visitor's visa to come to Britain in 2014, she says she applied for a UK passport but was turned down because the authorities could not find records of her old Commonwealth passport.

Her son Kenneth, who came to the UK as a nine-year-old in 1969, was told he did not have the right to reside in Britain in 2016 when he made an application for Jobseekers' Allowance.

Mrs Williams told 5 News: "It has upset me a great deal because my daughter-in-law died last February and I couldn't go and my son was so ill and I couldn't get to see him.

"I'm the only one here away from the family, because I came here when my husband was wanting to come home and I came with him and he died here. And just to go back and see the family and come back, I would love it."

A Home Office spokesperson said: "The Home Secretary has been clear, we don't want anyone who has contributed so much to our society to feel unwelcome.

"She has apologised unreservedly for any distress caused and we are urgently reviewing these cases.

"The Windrush helpline is open to individuals overseas, as well as in the UK, who are concerned about documenting their status."
T inie Tempah today threw his weight behind a new campaign to give disadvantaged young Londoners the chance to secure work experience with captains of industry.

The Not Letting Go singer is leading by example to help young people get into the music industry, joining senior figures in the business community who are providing a platform through the Shadow to Shine initiative.

It aims to inspire young people with poor career prospects by pairing them with chief executives or managing directors, giving them an insight into a boardroom-level working environment that would otherwise be unthinkable.

South Londoner Tempah, 29  real name Patrick Okogwu  said: Leaders in the urban music industry can be influential and highly positive role models for young people across London. Helping young people connect with and be successful in corporate environments enables them to become business achievers of the next generation.

Other backers include his manager Dumi Oburota of the Disturbing London brand; Stephen Conway, executive chairman of housebuilder Galliard Homes; Becky Fatemi, managing director of estate agents Rokstone; and Faisal Saigol, chief executive of property investor Saigol DDC.

The programme is open to young people who have recently left school with five or fewer GCSEs at grades A to C, or who face other major hurdles securing jobs. Before starting their placement, each candidate will be given a booklet of information about the companys ethos, dress code, expectations, working hours and rules.

After the work experience is over they get two sessions of mentoring followed by a graduation ceremony. The mentoring companies only have to cover the cost of meals and travel expenses.

The programme is being delivered by charity 2020 Change, which aims to equip young people with the skills to become leading entrepreneurs.

Duro Oye and Michael Edison-Odiase, joint chiefs of 2020 Change, said: We are delighted by the support we have received from so many senior figures from the music and property industries. It is a central belief of 2020 Change that disengaged young people, including those from ethnic minorities or disadvantaged backgrounds, deserve a level playing field to be able to develop.
A n Algerian woman has been refused French citizenship after reportedly refusing to shake hands with an official.

The woman said her religious beliefs prevented her from shaking the male officials hand at the citizenship ceremony.

This led to the French government ruling that she was not assimilated into the French community  despite the fact she is married to a French man  and rejecting her request for citizenship.

She launched an appeal but Frances Court of Appeal rejected her plea.

The woman, who married her husband in 2018, refused to the shale the hand of a senior official and local politician at her citizenship ceremony in 2016, the BBC reported.

She said that due to her Islamic faith she could not shake hands with a male who is not related to her.

Under Frances civil code, authorities can deny citizenship for someone who is "not assimilated", or integrated, into French society. Officials used this reason, saying that her refusal to partake in the gesture proved this.
A ustralian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was caught on camera texting during Theresa Mays rallying speech to Commonwealth leaders.

The UK Prime Minister gave a speech in which she spoke of the leaders being close friends with a unique understanding of each other.

She even hailed the memorable occasion of the biannual summit.

But it appeared the Australian leader was more interested in the contents of his phone than the unique friendship between the countries.

Throughout Mrs Mays speech he was filmed tapping away on his mobile, seemingly not listening to the Prime Ministers call for unity.

Texting: The PM had been addressing the leaders at their meeting in Windsor

The Commonwealth Heads of Government were at Windsor Castle for the retreat where they discussed whether Prince Charles should succeeding his mother the Queen as head of the 53-nation alliance.

During her address, Mrs May said: At the very moment that international co-operation is so important, some nations are choosing instead to shun the rules-based system that underpins global security.

Address: Theresa May speaks during a CHOGM meeting at Waterloo chamber at Windsor Castle / EPA

Im sure today will be a memorable event and by the end of which, Im sure well be able to leave even closer friends and with a unique understanding of each other in ways which cannot be matched by other summits.

Meeting: Theresa May (centre left) walks with commonwealth leaders at Windsor Castle / PA

During the meeting the world leaders agreed that the Prince of Wales should become the next leader  a role that is not necessarily hereditary.

The decision, which had already been backed by the British government, came after the Queen made a personal appeal to choose her son for the role.

Prince Charles will replace the Queen as head of the Commonwealth / Getty Images
T he bones of a man killed in the 9/11 terror attacks will be tested to establish if his alleged love child is entitled to any of his million dollar estate, according to reports.

Manhattan Surrogate's Court judge Rita Mella ordered chief medical examiner to release bone fragments of late city trader Michael Morgan Taylor as part of a paternity test.

According to the New York Post, if the DNA results come back positive, 24-year-old Austin Rutherford Colby, from Texas, would be owed a portion of Mr Taylor's assets.

The late investor's sister, Mary Kay Crenshaw, 55, of Arkansas, told the newspaper that the paternity case was "a further desecration" of her brother's remains and a "reopening of her own emotional wounds".

But Ms Crenshaw also acknowledged that her brother had a relationship with Mr Colby's mother, 57-year-old Gwendolyn D. Phillips.

Ms Philips, who is black, claims Mr Taylor, who was white, refused to admit paternity of the child because "he was ashamed of having a mixed-race child". She also claims Mr Taylor's name is on her son's birth certificate.

Judge Mella found Philips' paternity claim persuasive, writing: "On cross-examination, significant questions were raised as to her general credibility.

"Philips' claim that Taylor is Colby's father, however, remained consistent.

"She first made this claim at the time of Colby's birth, when she filed and the paternity and support petition and throughout the course of the litigation in this court."

Even if the results are positive, however, Mr Colby is legally required to prove Mr Taylor "openly and notoriously acknowledged the child as his own" during his lifetime - a bar he and his mother say is impossible to meet.
A plane skidded off the runway at Nepal's only international airport during take-off.

Tribhuvan International Airport (TIA), in Kathmandu, remained closed on Friday after a Boeing 737 operated by Malindo Air skidded onto the grassy verge surrounding the tarmac.

All flights in and out of the airport were cancelled, leaving thousands of passengers stranded outside the terminal. A limited service resumed on Friday morning.

Raj Kumar Chettri, general manager of TIA, told the Jakarta Post: "The flight captain aborted take-off at the final moment after he saw an error on the monitor inside the cockpit.

Bystanders look at the grounded Boeing 737 / REUTERS

"We are trying to tow the aircraft. We expect this will take at least four hours."

Malindo Air, a Malaysian airline, has regular flights linking Kuala Lumpur and Kathmandu. Officials said none of the 139 passengers or anyone else was injured in the incident.

Officials said it could take up to four hours to tow the plane / AP

In March 2015, a Turkish Airlines jet skidded off the runway as it landed, forcing Tribhuvan Airport to close for four days.
D onald Trump raised the possibility of jailing journalists to stop leaks from the White House, newly-released notes of candid conversations between the president and former FBI boss James Comey revealed today.

A series of bombshell memos written by Mr Comey, fired as FBI director by Mr Trump last May, also reveal the presidents serious concerns about the judgment of a top adviser and how Vladimir Putin apparently boasted to him that Russia had the most beautiful hookers in the world.

The encounters between Mr Trump and Mr Comey were detailed in the previously secret memos provided to Congress.

They are now believed to be a crucial part of special counsel Robert Muellers investigation into Mr Trump and some senior members of his administration over possible meddling by Russia in the 2016 US presidential campaign.

Putin is said to have 'bragged about Russia's hookers' / AP

Mr Trump immediately disputed the memos in a tweet claiming there was NO COLLUSION and NO OBSTRUCTION.

The president again accused Mr Comey of leaking classified information and added: WOW! Will the Witch Hunt continue?

James Comey: There aren't enough 'adequate people' to stop Trump's behaviour

In one previously undisclosed exchange, according to copies of the memos seen by the Standard, Mr Trump said he had serious doubts about the competence of national security adviser General Mike Flynn after the president was mistakenly led to believe Theresa May was the first world leader to congratulate him after his inauguration.

President Donald Trump's first year in office - in pictures 1 /40 President Donald Trump's first year in office - in pictures U.S. President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington Reuters 20 January 2017 President-elect Donald Trump and his wife Melania Trump are greeted by President Barack Obama and his wife first lady Michelle Obama, upon arriving at the White House in Washington, DC. before being sworn in as the nation's 45th president during an inaugural ceremony at the U.S. Capitol Getty Images 20 January 2017 President Barack Obama greets President Elect Donald Trump on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol Getty Images 20 January 2017 Attendees line the Mall as they watch ceremonies to swear in Donald Trump on Inauguration Day in Washington, DC Getty Images 20 January 2017 U.S. President Donald Trump sings to the song "My Way" while dancing with first lady Melania Trump during the inaugural Liberty Ball at the Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC Getty Images 21 January 2017 White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer makes a statement to members of the media at the James Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, DC. This was Spicer's first press conference as Press Secretary where he spoke about the media's reporting on the inauguration's crowd size Getty Images 22 January 2017 US President Donald Trump congratulates Senior Counselor to the President Stephen Bannon during the swearing-in of senior staff in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC AFP 22 January 2017 U.S. President Donald Trump (L) shakes hands with James Comey, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), during an Inaugural Law Enforcement Officers and First Responders Reception in the Blue Room of the White House in Washington, DC Getty Images 27 January 2017 Prime Minister Theresa May with U.S. President Donald Trump walk along The Colonnade at The White House Getty Images 09 February 2017 U.S. President Donald Trump signs an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House February 9, 2017 in Washington, DC. Prior to signing the three executive orders, Trump participated in the swearing in ceremony for new Attorney General Jeff Sessions (R) along with U.S. Vice President Mike Pence (L) and Sessions's wife Mary (2nd R) Getty Images 19 February 2017 Muslim women protest against US President Donald Trump on in Chicago, Illinois AFP/Getty Images 27 February 2017 Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway checks her phone after taking a photo as U.S. President Donald Trump and leaders of historically black universities and colleges pose for a group photo in the Oval Office of the White House before a meeting with US Vice President Mike Pence in Washington, DC AFP/Getty Images 17 March 2017 Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and Ivanka Trump talk before a meeting with US President Donald Trump and business leaders in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington, DC AFP/Getty Images 23 March 2017 U.S. President Donald J. Trump gets in the driver's seat of an 18-wheeler while meeting with truck drivers and trucking CEOs on the South Portico prior to their meeting to discuss health care at the White House in Washington, DC, USA, 23 March 2017. The House of Representatives has yet to vote on the Republican-crafted American Health Care Act, that would replace the Affordable Care Act, as it remained unclear whether Republicans had enough votes to overcome opposition from Democrats and those within their own party. EPA/JIM LO SCALZO EPA 17 April 2017 U.S. President Donald Trump delivers remarks from the Truman Balcony with first lady Melania Trump and their son Barron Trump during the 139th Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images 04 May 2017 U.S. President Donald Trump (C) speaks while flanked by House Republicans after they passed legislation aimed at repealing and replacing ObamaCare, during an event in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, DC. The House bill would still need to pass the Senate before being signed into law Getty Images 22 May 2017 US President Donald Trump visits the Western Wall, the holiest site where Jews can pray in Jerusalem's Old City AFP/Getty Images 24 May 2017 Pope Francis walks along with US President Donald Trump and US First Lady Melania Trump during a private audience at the Vatican AFP/Getty Images 26 May 2017 European Council President Donald Tusk, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, U.S. President Donald Trump, Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, French President Emmanuel Macron, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, British Prime Minister Theresa May and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker pose for the group photo at the G7 Taormina summit on the island of Sicily on May 26, 2017 in Taormina, Italy. Leaders of the G7 group of nations, which includes the Unted States, Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Italy, as well as the European Union, are meeting at Taormina from May 26-27 Getty Images 7 July 2017 US President Donald Trump and Russia's President Vladimir Putin shake hands during a meeting on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany, AFP/Getty Images 25 July 2017 Incoming White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci talks with reporters during 'Regional Media Day' at the White House July 25, 2017 in Washington, DC. Conservative media outlets were invited to set up temporary studios on the north side of the West Wing so to interview White House officials and members of President Donald Trump's cabinet Getty Images 28 July 2017 Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) leaves the the Senate chamber at the U.S. Capitol after voting on the GOP 'Skinny Repeal' health care bill on July 28, 2017 in Washington, DC. Three Senate Republicans voted no to block a stripped-down, or 'Skinny Repeal,' version of Obamacare reform Getty Images 22 August 2017 U.S. President Donald Trump looks up toward the Solar Eclipse while joined by his wife first lady Melania Trump on the Truman Balcony at the White House on August 21, 2017 in Washington, DC. Millions of people have flocked to areas of the U.S. that are in the "path of totality" in order to experience a total solar eclipse Getty Images 22 August 2017 U.S. President Donald Trump gestures during a rally at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona. An earlier statement by the president that he was considering a pardon for Joe Arpaio,, the former sheriff of Maricopa County who was convicted of criminal contempt of court for defying a court order in a case involving racial profiling, has angered Latinos and immigrant rights advocates Getty Images 15 September 2017 11-year-old Frank "FX" Giaccio (L) gets a pat on the back from U.S. President Donald Trump (C) while mowing the grass in the Rose Garden of the White House September 15, 2017 in Washington, DC. Giaccio, from Falls Church, Virginia, who runs a business called FX Mowing, wrote a letter to Trump expressing admiration for Trump's business background and offered to mow the White House grass Getty Images 03 October 2017 President Donald Trump waves as he arrives at the Muniz Air National Guard Base for a visit after Hurricane Maria hit the island in Carolina, Puerto Rico. The President has been criticized by some that say the governments response has been inadequate Getty Images 11 October 2017 U.S. President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pose for photographs after Trudeau's arrival at the White House in Washington, DC. The United States, Canada and Mexico engaged in renegotiating the 25-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement Getty Images 23 October 2017 Seven of U.S. President Donald Trump's eight border wall prototypes are shown near completion along U.S.- Mexico border near San Diego, California Reuters 30 October 2017 Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort gets into his car after leaving federal court, October 30, 2017 in Washington, DC. Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, have been indicted by a federal grand jury in the investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the U.S. election Getty Images 06 November 2017 U.S. President Donald Trump pours fish food out as Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe looks on while they were feeding carps before their working lunch at Akasaka Palace in Tokyo, Japan Reuters 09 November 2017 China's President Xi Jinping (L) and US President Donald Trump review Chinese honour guards during a welcome ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing AFP/Getty Images 21 November 2017 U.S. President Donald Trump, first lady Melania Trump, their son Barron, National Turkey Federation Chairman Carl Wittenburg and his family and members of the Draper County, Minnesota, 4-H chapater pose for photographs after Trump pardoned, Drumstick, the National Thanksgiving Turkey in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, DC. Following the presidential pardon, the 40-pound White Holland breed which was raised by Wittenburg in Minnesota, will then reside at his new home, 'Gobbler's Rest,' at Virginia Tech Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images 30 November 2017 President Donald Trump and the first lady Melania Trump attend the 95th annual National Christmas Tree Lighting held by the National Park Service at the White House Ellipse in Washington, D.C. The Beach Boys, Wynonna, The Texas Tenors, Craig Campbell were among the artists who provided the entertainment Getty Images 01 December 2017 Michael Flynn, former national security advisor to President Donald Trump, leaves following his plea hearing at the Prettyman Federal Courthouse in Washington, DC. Special Counsel Robert Mueller charged Flynn with one count of making a false statement to the FBI Getty Images 06 December 2017 U.S. President Donald Trump signs a proclaimation that the U.S. government will formally recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel after signing the document in the Diplomatic Reception Room at the White House December 6, 2017 in Washington, DC. In keeping with a campaign promise, Trump said the United States will move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem sometime in the next few years. No other country has its embassy in Jerusalem Getty Images 14 December 2017 U.S. President Donald Trump cuts a symbolic piece of red tape during an event at the White House promoting the administration's efforts to decrease federal regulations in Washington, DC. The administration has vowed to remove two regulations for every single regulation added in an effort to reduce the amount of bureaucratic "red tape" Getty Images 18 December 2017 U.S. President Donald Trump pauses during a speech at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, DC. The president was expected to outline a new strategy for U.S. foreign policy through the release of the periodic National Security Strategy, a document that aims to outline major national security concerns and the administration's plans to deal with them Getty Images 20 December 2017 U.S. President Donald Trump, flanked by Republican lawmakers, celebrates Congress passing the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act on the South Lawn of the White House on December 20, 2017 in Washington, DC. The tax bill is the first major legislative victory for the GOP-controlled Congress and Trump since he took office almost one year ago Getty Images 22 December 2017 A Palestinian protester throws a stone during clashes with Israeli forces near the Huwara checkpoint south of Nablus in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, as protests continue in the region amid anger over US President Donald Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as its capital AFP/Getty Images 12 January 2018 US President Donald Trump shakes hands with White House Physician Rear Admiral Dr. Ronny Jackson, following his annual physical at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland AFP/Getty Images

Mr Trump was praising Mrs May when General Flynn interrupted and told him the leader of another country had in fact called him first.

Mr Comey claimed Mr Trump pointed his fingers at his head and said the guy has serious judgement issues, referring to the general.

Although the name of the leader who called first was blacked out in the memo, it was reported to be Mr Putin.

Mr Comey, who is promoting his book A Higher Loyalty, said he recorded his conversations with the president because they were so unnerving.
ALESSANDRA DA PRA | Times



The Florida Education Association aimed to put Florida's political leaders on the spot on Thursday, calling for them to address school funding if they are all required to come back to Tallahassee for a special session on gambling issues.

"The Florida Education Association calls on Gov. Rick Scott and legislative leaders to address the shortfall in education funding before the start of the next fiscal year," reads a statement from the group, released Thursday. "With political will, the money can be found."

The statement follows a similar request made last week by the Florida Association of District School Superintendents.

The group pointed out that Gov. Rick Scott vetoed $64 million's worth of projects in the 2018-2019 budget, money that will be kicked back to the state's general revenue account.

The FEA also references an agreement reached Wednesday between the state and the Seminole Tribe which guaranteed the tribe will pay $300 million in the next year to continue its exclusive right to offer banked card games like blackjack. However, the Legislature assumed the agreement would hold when it drafted its budget and therefore the $300 million is already spoken for.

In this year's budget, the per-pupil portion of classroom education funding saw an increase of only 47 cents, much lower than in previous years. And law enforcement and districts have been scrambling since the Legislature required that every school have an armed person on every campus, whether that be a trained school staff member or a law enforcement officer.

Before the budget was passed in March, the state's superintendents and school leaders already asked the Legislature to increase the per-pupil spending. That didn't happen.

A decision over whether a special session will be held is expected by early next week. If lawmakers do come back up to Tallahassee, either the governor or the House Speaker jointly with the Senate President have to specify the specific purpose or purposes of the special session. Unless they declare that education funding is part of that purpose, it's unlikely the FEA's requests would be addressed.

When asked if Gov. Scott would include education funding as part of the "call" for a special session, the governor's office disputed there is a shortfall in education funding.
 This is our last stand against Macrons plans, says a history student from the Sorbonne in Paris. If he succeeds, well end up like Britain.

More than 15 universities across France have been paralysed by a wave of demonstrations against proposed reforms to the education system.

Students have been protesting over new laws on the admissions process, as well as reforms to the baccalaureate and asylum policy.

The Loi Vidal, which plans to introduce entry examinations for public universities, has divided public opinion. For some it means that the most talented are assured places at university, for others it means that those who can afford tuition can pay to reach the top.

After months of protests, France was captivated by the decision of Sciences Po Paris  my university and President Emmanuel Macrons alma mater  to join the demonstrations. As an elite semi-private institution, Sciences Po will not be affected by the reforms, but many students voted to show solidarity with the public universities.

Student: Arjun Neil Alim

Students blockaded the Saint-Germain campus, leading to mass cancellations of lessons and conferences in the upmarket Parisian quarter.

Angele Laferte-Asensi, an 18-year-old blockader, told me that the reforms would further institutionalise racism and inequality in France.

Another student, Lucie, said that President Macron was threatening the republican ideal of egalite.

Protesters say history is on their side. Many students carried banners with the words May 1968, a reference to the student protests that marked the beginning of the end for President Charles de Gaulle 50 years ago.

One cry was Macron, youre in the shit, even Sciences Po is in the streets.

Support at the university is nevertheless far from universal. Standing outside their blocked campus, some complained that a radical minority was preventing them from revising for exams.

As a vast number of students and workers assemble in the centre of Paris, one cant help but think that this is less a show of resistance than a reminder that there is still an opposition.

President Macron has the support of parliament and much of the media. A majority of French people support the painful reforms to come. There will be more demonstrations. But France appears ready for change.
D onald Trump claimed Vladimir Putin told him that Russia has some of the most beautiful hookers in the world, according a newly-released secret memo.

The alleged remark emerged as sacked FBI director James Comey released a collection of memos that are expected to reveal new eye-opening details about the US President.

According to the documents compiled by Mr Comey, the US Presidents comment came during a brief meeting at the White House last year.



Mr Comey added, in the memos handed to Congress on Thursday, that the president told him the "hookers thing" was nonsense.

Former FBI director James Comey / AP

Mr Trump was referring to allegations in a dossier about a alleged encounter between the US leader and Russian prostitutes in a Moscow hotel, Mr Comey said.

It comes after the former FBI director revealed last year that he had written the memos following conversations with Mr Trump, who went on to sack him.

James Comey: There aren't enough 'adequate people' to stop Trump's behaviour

The documents contain a series of conversations between Mr Comey and the US president, including another about then-national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Mr Comey wrote that the president said he had "serious reservations" about Flynn, who soon left the administration and later pleaded guilty for lying to the FBI about his conversations with Russian officials.
M ore than 50 dogs allegedly bred for underground fighting have been seized by the RSPCA.

RSPCA Queensland inspectors and police rescued the animals from several properties in Logan, Redlands and Richmond, according to a statement released by the charity in Australia on Thursday.

A total of 56 canines including French bulldogs, bull-Arab cross-breeds and mastiffs were confiscated and taken to be cared for by the RSPCA.

A number of other dogs were also taken from the properties due to welfare concerns.

Dozens of dogs were seized in the raids / RSPCA Queensland

The series of raids were conducted following an extensive task force investigation into alleged dog fighting rings.

RSPCA spokesman Michael Beatty called it the first major breakthrough in 10 years.

"In the past week, a property near Richmond in western Queensland, two in Logan, and one in the Redlands were raided and numerous dogs, believed to be used for fighting, were seized, he told ABC news in Australia.

He added: A lot of them had quite extensive scarring, particularly on their faces and front legs ... and there was some dog fighting paraphernalia confiscated as well, treadmills, breaking sticks and the like.

Mr Beatty described dog fighting as an insidious sport to Brisbane Times.

Cruel: One frightened puppy looks starved to the bone / RSPCA Queensland

He said: Dog fighting is an insidious sport and incredibly cruel. Sadly there's quite a lot of money involved and we'd like to stamp it out completely.

Mimi Bekhechi, Director of International Programmes PETA described the dog fighting sport as "disgusting".

She told the Standard: "Whether they take place in Australia or Britain, cruelty is inherent in dog fights: dogs are beaten, chained, starved, and taunted so that when they get into the ring, they'll rip other animals to shreds while spectators cheer and gamble for a few bucks or quid. When they're no longer of use to dog fighters, they're typically killed in atrocious ways, including by being drowned, beaten, or hanged.
S hawn Mendes has opened up about his battle with anxiety, revealing that he was closing myself off from everybody.

The Lost in Japan singer, who has two chart-topping albums to his name, revealed the news in a podcast with The Sun.

The 19-year-old told how he has been dealing with the condition whilst achieving success in the spotlight, adding that he had spoken to a therapist to help manage it.

He said: I spoke to a therapist a couple of times.

Therapy is what works for you climbing a mountain. Therapy is listening to music and running on the treadmill, therapy is going to dinner with your friends  its something that distracts you, that helps you heal and so it just depends on what you think therapy is.

I made a conscious effort to be more connected to the people in my life. I found I was closing myself off from everybody, thinking that would help me battle it then realising the only way I was going to battle it was completely opening up and letting people in.

Mendes told how his latest single In My Blood centres around the topic of mental health which he hoped would encourage others to be open.

Success: Mendes has battled with anxiety during his time in the spotlight / Vianney Le Caer/Invision/AP

Speaking about the song he said: What I have to do now is be very honest with myself and [be] honest about what Im talking about.

Make something as serious as anxiety tangible where everybody can listen to it and either connect with it or understand it.

He added: All pain is temporary, and the thing is with anxiety, and why its such a hard thing for people who dont have it to understand, is that it is very random and it hits you at moments you dont expect it.

Sometimes it lasts two hours, sometimes it lasts a day and sometimes it lasts five minutes.
R apper Kanye West has confirmed that he is releasing two new albums this year.

In an unusual move, the new material will be released in consecutive weeks at the beginning of June, marking his musical comeback.

The first album will be a solo record of just seven songs, due for public release on June 1, with the rappers collaboration with Kid Cudi launching one week later.

West has not released any new music since the critical success of his 2016 work, Life of Pablo. His upcoming release will be his eighth studio album.

After an 11-month Twitter silence, which included deleting all prior activity, West dramatically returned to the platform on Wednesday because of his innate need to be expressive.

Concise in his album announcement, West published my album is 7 songs, June 1st, me and Cudi album June 8th, its called Kids See Ghost, all as separate tweets.

The tweet announcing West collaboration with Kid Cudi garnered over 433,000 likes, compared to the 248,000 he received for his own album announcement.

Kanye West meets Donald Trump - In pictures 1 /6 Kanye West meets Donald Trump - In pictures U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and musician Kanye West pose for media at Trump Tower in Manhattan Reuters President-elect Donald Trump and Kanye West stand together in the lobby at Trump Tower in New York Drew Angerer/Getty Images Singer Kanye West and President-elect Donald Trump leave the elevator after their meeting at Trump Tower Timothy A.Clary/AFP/Getty Images Singer Kanye West and President-elect Donald Trump arrive to speak with the press after their meetings at Trump Towe Timothy A.Clary/AFP/Getty Images President-elect Donald Trump pats Kanye West on the back in the lobby at Trump Tower Drew Angerer/Getty Images Kanye West arrives at Trump Tower in Manhattan Jihn Taggart/EPA

News of the latest album follows the rappers recent Twitter rampage, where he declared he is writing a book in real time so that no publisher or publicist will tell [him] what to put where or how many pages to write. The book will be written in the form of tweets.

The rapper hit headlines in late 2016 when he cancelled 21 dates on his Saint Pablo tour following a bizarre rant about then-Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Jay-Z, and Facebook.
C omedian Joel Dommett has revealed the Im A CelebrityGet Me Out of Here Now: Extra Camp line-up and it is a trio of familiar faces.

According to the comedian, he will return alongside former Queen of the Jungle Scarlett Moffatt and Joe Swash to the spin-off show, housed on ITV2.

It will be the first time since 2015 that the show has had the same presenting line-up, following stints from Vicky Pattison, Laura Whitmore and Stacey Solomon.

Dommett told The Sun: It looks like well all be going out again for the spin off-show.

Extra Camp: Joel Dommett, Scarlett Moffatt and Joe Swash are returning to Australia to host the spin-off show / ITV/REX

It was the most successful show that theyve had for years. The producers were super happy with it, I was so proud of it and what we made of the show.

Everyone really loved us so its great, Scarlett and Joe are on board as well, we all just get on so well.

He added: It was a perfect match, we all loved doing it and it was a chance to get away from the wintery weather for a month and a half which was great.

I'm a Celebrity .. Get Me Out of Here! 2017 - In pictures 1 /67 I'm a Celebrity .. Get Me Out of Here! 2017 - In pictures ITV Rex Rex Features Rex Rex Features Rex Rex Features ITV/REX REX ITV Challenge: Stanley Johnson and Iain Lee take on Aerial View ITV/ Rex Rex Features 'Cruel': Jennie McAlpine holds a witchetty grub in her mouth James Gourley/ITV/Rex Controversial: Vanessa White takes part in Car Cruel Karaoke James Gourley/ITV/Rex Campers wave goodbye to Shappi Khorsandi. ITV Shappi Khorsandi becomes the first celebrity to leave the jungle. Rex Features ITV/ Rex Iain Lee speaking in the bush Telegraph ITV/Rex Tearful: Iain Lee can't take part ITV/ Rex Shappi Khorsandi is the first star evicted from the jungle. Rex Features ITV/ Rex ITV Rex Rex Features Rex Features Rex Features ITV/REX/Shutterstock Amir Khan ad Vanessa White in the Live Bushtucker Trial: Ant vs Dec ITV/Rex Amir Khan speaking in the bush Telegraph ITV/Rex Stanley Johnson ITV/Rex Jamie Lomas, Rebekah Vardy, Vanessa White, Amir Khan, Iain Lee, Dennis Wise and Jennie McAlpine after the Temple of Gloom Bushtucker Trial ITV/Rex Iain Lee and Amir Kha after the Temple of Gloom Bushtucker Trial ITV/Rex Kezia Dugdale ITV Kezia Dugdale and Iain Lee ITV Bushtucker Trial: The Battle For 10 Downing Creek - (top row) Amir Khan, Jamie Lomas, Dennis Wise, (middle) Shappi Khorsandi, Rebekah Vardy, Vanessa White, (front) Jennie McAlpine, Georgia Toffolo and Stanley Johnson in 'I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!' ITV/Rex Rebekah Vardy during her Bushtucker Trial: Worst Dates ITV/Rex Rebekah Vardy and Georgia Toffolo during their Bushtucker Trial: Worst Dates ITV/Rex Rebekah Vardy and Georgia Toffolo during their Bushtucker Trial: Worst Dates ITV/Rex Rebekah Vardy during her Bushtucker Trial: Worst Dates ITV Rebekah Vardy and Georgia Toffolo during their Bushtucker Trial: Worst Dates ITV/Rex Vanessa White takes a bath in Camp ITV/Rex Features Rebekah Vardy ITV/Rex Features Rebekah Vardy at Camp in 'I'm a Celebrity .. get me out of here!' ITV Amir Khan in the Bushtucker Trial: Flushed Out ITV/Rex Amir Khan in the Bushtucker Trial: Flushed Out ITV/Rex Jack Maynard ponders whilst in his hammock at Camp ITV Jennie McAlpine, Rebekah Vardy and Vanessa White in the pool ITV/Rex Features Amir Khan in the Bushtucker Trial: Critter-Cal Rex Features Geiorgia Toffolo in the Bushtucker Trial: Critter-Cal ITV Kezia Dugdale arrives ITV/Rex Iain Lee arrives ITV/Rex Jamie Lomas, Amir Khan and Jack Maynard ITV/Rex The girls are awarded the meal tickets ITV/Rex Jamie Lomas ITV/Rex Georgia Toffolo hits the shower ITV/Rex Features Amir Khan during Camp dinner ITV/Rex The camp mates settle into their new home ITV/Rex Walk the Plank: Jamie Lomas, Vanessa White, Jack Maynard, Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly ITV/Rex Walk the Plank: Jack Maynard and Georgia Toffolo ITV/Rex Ant and Dec explain the rules ITV/Rex The Focus Tower ITV/Rex Rebekah Vardy and Stanley Johnson get up close to some creepy crawlies ITV/Rex Jack Maynard in the Bush Telegraph ITV/Rex Feeling the cold: Stanley Johnson in the jungle shower ITV/Rex Jamie Lomas, Georgia Toffolo, Rebekah Vardy, Vanessa White and Stanley Johnson ITV/Rex Dennis Wise, Shappi Khorsandi, Amir Khan, Jennie McAlpine and Jack Maynard ITV/Rex

The 32-year-old also told the publication that he hasnt spoken to Ant [McPartlin] and that nobody keeps in the loop.

Dommett said: Im not in any cool celebrity circles so I just keep myself to myself.

Ant McPartlin is not expected to host the main show alongside presenting partner Dec Donnelly after he was charged with drink-driving last month.

The presenter has pulled out of all work commitments for the rest of the year and it is unconfirmed whether or not Donnelly will host solo.

The successful sister show to the ITV main show, which has had many presenters through the years, has interviews and chats with evicted and past contestants as well as loved ones in Australia and back home in the UK.
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No other country has taken upon itself the burden of the Syrian conflict like Turkey did, Turkish ambassador in Bucharest Osman Koray Ertas said in an interview for AGERPRES, in which the diplomat talks about the development of the events in Syria, the refugee crisis and the financial accord which his country has with the European Union.

Concerning the Syrian conflict, Osman Koray Ertas points out that although his country supports the operations of allied nations, USA - the UK - France, he cannot exclude dialogue with the big powers in the region.

"On the other hand, we are working closely with Russia and Iran, two main actors who are present in the field, so any agreement or solution concerning this conflict should include these two very important parties. Iran is a country in the region, it is deeply involved in this crisis and everyone knows that Russia is a major player, with a strong presence there. For us there is no other option, to not cooperate with two important neighbors in the region," said the diplomat.Also, Osman Koray Ertas talks about the perspectives of an economic cooperation between Turkey and Romania, mentioning that this year the embassy will organize, with the Turkish minority from Romania, special events dedicated to Romania's Centennial, and also the celebration of 140 years of diplomatic relationships with high ranking Turk officials that will visit Romania and with Romanian Ministers who will take part in meetings in Turkey.AGERPRES: Turkey is one of the main actors of the Syrian crisis, if we can call it like that, and one of the first aspects of Turkey's involvement in the Syrian crisis is the summit that took place at the beginning of this month, that was the Iran - Russia - Turkey summit, which was hosted in Turkey, so can you say a few words about the outcome of the summit, because the Western media was talking about not quite a failure, but that the talks were not very successful in the matters.Osman Koray Ertas: Unfortunately, the Syrian conflict is one of the most difficult crises, it is ongoing for about 7 years, as you know, and there is a big human carnage, millions of people flee their homes, a million people lost their lives, at the hands of the wrong regime and government. Turkey is an neigbouring country of Syria, we have a border of about 900 kilometers, so it's an existential issue for Turkey as well, it's not just a simple problem that is happening in a part of geography, for us. Inevitably we are involved from the very beginning with the repercussions of this huge crisis, be it in the sense of millions of refugees, that took refuge in Turkey, the exact number is about 3.5 million Syrians, and I am not talking about Iraqis. There are huge economic, social and security challenges, in relation to this fact, and obviously, we cannot remain indifferent to what is ongoing on our next door.On the Syrian crisis, we are following a principle of foreign policy, from the very beginning. First of all, it is the Assad regime that is responsible for the whole carnage now that we are experiencing and we are taught that there is no final peace, so he has to leave the power. Secondly, we put the principle of territorial integrity, sovereignty, and unity of Syria. These are the principles with the utmost importance, that must be observed, and also the non-confessional feature in Syria is important for us. Finally, we see no military solution to the ongoing conflict. It should be resolved through political means. Based on these principles, we do not support X country, or Y country, depending on our principles, we took action on our own. Obviously, Turkey is a NATO member, so whenever the issue comes within our own alliance, we have an equal voice, together with other 27 allies and we are behind all the decisions that NATO is taking. This is a natural thing.When you look to the recent attack by the US, Britain and France, we made clear statements supporting the operation, we found that it is an appropriate response to the use of chemical weapons and we think that any use of weapons of mass destruction should be punished and the regime, who seems to be responsible for the last attack as well should also be held accountable for such crimes, because they have a very bad record of doing such attacks towards it own people. On the other hand, we are also working together with Russia and Iran, to import players, which are currently on the ground, so any deal or any solution in this increasing conflict, should involve these two major players. Iran is also a regional country, and heavily involved in the crisis and everyone knows that Russia is a major player, which is also strongly present there, so there is no other way, actually, to work with important neighbors of ours in the region. We started the process in Astana, together with these two countries, and also we had some meetings at Sochi as well. We do not see these processes as an alternative to the Geneva process.The Geneva process is the main channel to resolve the crisis and we see this process complimentary to the Geneva process. As a matter of fact, after Sochi, we decided to create a constitutional committee, so there will be a committee which will have members from the opposition and regime. Upon that meeting it was actually Turkey who was presenting the opposition and we already gave a list of people who will participate on behalf of the opposition. We also decided on creating the escalation zones, we know that the deal is not working effectively, because the regime does not respect these decisions of these three countries. On this we are constantly making calls to Iran and Russia, who has the influence over the regime to observe the decisions that we took and not take any actions in the escalation zones. Unfortunately, we have not seen it in Eastern Ghouta, and Douma was also another nightmare. On our part, we already established nine military posts in Idlib, for example. Even this is a remarkable achievement, in the sense that there is no fight in this region, at this stage, so we are risking our own soldiers, the lives of our own citizens, to downgrade, to de-escalate the situation. We are very firm in our talks with our partners, we do not have a direct channel, as you know, with the regime, and we are making it very clear that we never want the repetition of the events in Eastern Ghouta, and we are not only saying this, but we are putting our own soldiers on the ground to prevent it.In the meantime, as you know, Turkey is the only NATO country that puts its own troops in the fights against terrorism in the region, maybe we will talk about this also. This is an existential issue for Turkey's national security, therefore we put our own soldiers on the ground and cleared an area of 4,000 square kilometers, which we declared as terror-free, and Syrians, from different backgrounds and regimes, are returning to this region. All in all, this is a very delicate and balanced pause that we are seeing in Syria, which is taking into account the concerns of all sites, and obviously putting our national security in stress.AGERPRES: It is even more delicate because Turkey is having high-level talks with Iran and with Russia, when it comes to Syria, but also Russia is kind of the opposite of the Allied Forces, that were responsible for the strikes, for the recent strikes in Syria, and at the same time Israel said that they will intervene in Syria, as long as Iran is behind operations in Syria, so actually Turkey is in the middle of a very complicated situation.Osman Koray Ertas: Unfortunately, here we are seeing a very complex war, which involves many important players. The situation is so dangerous, so delicate, there are people who are talking about a war on a larger scale. We hope these predictions to not be true. There is not one, or two, or three elements on the ground, but at least ten major actors that are pursuing different agendas, so therefore dialogue is key. There should be a dialogue channel, even in the recent crisis, where our three allies had these strikes, strikes that we supported. Even during that time we have been a very convenient partner in terms of communicating with the Russians, with the Iranians, with our allies as well. As you give the example of Israel, every country has huge stakes in what's going on in this country.But I can confidently say that no other country than Turkey took the burden of the Syrian conflict, be it in the refugee format, or security format, we lost thousands of our civilians at the hands of terrorists that are emanating from Syria, in different forms, whether we are speaking of Daesh, PKK, PYD. There is a huge security burden and a huge economy burden. We spent billions of dollars and there are cities in Turkey who are hosting more refugees than its own residents, so I think we have every right to try to find balance between military solutions and also diplomacy and try to talk to all relevant actors, to try to find a solution for the crisis that we are having.AGERPRES: You were talking about the refugees and the refugees' burden for Turkey. Could you talk a bit more about the refugees, the money that Turkey asked from the European countries and Western countries?Osman Koray Ertas: In terms of finance?AGERPRES: Yes, in terms of finance.Osman Koray Ertas: According to the figures that they have, Turkey spent about 31 billion dollars, this only includes the official figures. This includes Turkish civil society. The amount that we received before the EU was minimal, was less than 1 billion, it was some hundred million before. After the famous deal of Turkey and EU, that they signed, there was 3 + 3 billion, money that was supposed to be allocated for the Syrian refugees, and not only for Turkey, there is a misperception to the public eye. The money is going to the Syrian refugees in European countries, including Romania. So, the first half of 6 billion is now allocated for the projects, almost half of it was spent, another half is now allocated for projects and these projects are done by some Turkish agencies and also by foreign agencies, so the money is going to foreign agencies, who are helping the refugees in terms of education and other sectors. The second instalment seems to be also be forwarded to Turkey, but the whole problem is coming too slow, (...).The Syrian refugee crisis, its diverse humanitarian problem, after the Second World War, that Europe is facing, is not a crisis that one country, even in the magnitude of Turkey, can deal with alone, it is an international crisis and we need international solidarity and burden sharing on this, and that's why we continue to make calls to international communities, not only to our European partners, but to others in the Gulf, so that they can share this burden. Turkey is the largest refugee hosting country in the world, and the number already surpassed 4 million refugees. This is a very big number, for any country in the world, and the refugees in Turkey are provided free healthcare services, they are provided free schooling and the schooling rate is still below 70% , it's about 70%. There are 300,000 newborn babies in Turkey, Syrian babies. We are giving thousands of work permits to tens of thousands of Syrians living in Turkey and we do not force them to live in camps, only a small portion of the Syrian guests are staying at the camps. It's about less than 300,000. The rest are free in staying in Turkey, together with Turkish citizens. The international solidarity and support is a must, and the deal that we had with the EU in 2016 showed a remarkable success, the numbers fell from 70,000 a day to 80 a day, and Turkey spent huge efforts in terms of security forces, to crack down on the smuggling rings, which appear to be a very lucrative business.AGERPRES: You said Syrian guests, when you were talking about the refugees. They are people who are treated as guests, because they have a hard time in their country, but then they will go back to their country. So, Turkey deals with these refugees in these terms, actually. There are children who came as refugees, and then they will grow up and they will go back to Syria, or will they?Osman Koray Ertas: The basic thing on the refugee law, if someone escapes from violence from its own country, you have the obligation to receive her or him, and not to send them back to their country of origin, until the violence stops, or things get better. The principle is strictly observed by Turkey and we have an open door policy. Anyone who is coming from Syria to Turkey is welcomed by my country, and the figures speak for themselves. In the meantime we do not want these people to lose their hopes for the future. Obviously, now is not the time for them to return back to conflict zones, but when we find the solution, and when Syria once again reaches its good old days, people have the right to return back to their country, that's why we see them as our guests, but that doesn't mean that they have to go back to their own country before the conflict ends. As a matter of fact, as you know, Turkey has two military operations in Northern Syria. In the first one, in which we cleared a 2,000 square kilometers of territory from Daesh terrorists. There are about 130,000 Syrians to return back to those regions: al-Bab, Azez. Already people are returning to their homes, because it's very difficult for anyone to leave their houses and try to leave in difficult conditions in a different country. Now, the same will happen in Afrin, region liberated in our second operation, Operation Olive Branch. Already, people are starting to return to their lands as well. When you look to the figures, in Turkey, for example the number of Kurdish refugees are about 400,000 among 4 million, therefore when you are saying "guests," we have this understanding in our mind.AGERPRES: Also, talking about the refugee crisis. In the early talks about Turkey's management of the refugee crisis, there were discussions about a promise from the EU of accession of Turkey to the EU. Now the case seems to be a little bit closed, because they were opting for including the Western Balkans in the future. How does Turkey, at a high level, feel about this? Does it feel left alone in the refugee question?Osman Koray Ertas: The refugee deal that we signed in 2016 was actually a package. On our side we decided to take this huge risk, because imagine anyone going undocumented to Greek islands will have to come back to Turkey, so it's a big risk on the part of Turkey. On the other side there were three basic promises that were given to Turkey. One was the acceleration of visas, the second was the startup of this voluntary admission of Syrian refugees from Turkey, and the third one is Turkey's own EU location. On the third one we decided to hasten the process, making high level meetings between Turkey and the EU, and also start opening chapters. As you know, it's been stalled for many years now. And, of course, there is also a financial deal as well, 3+3. Now, when you look back, only a tiny portion, which is the financial one, and half of it is being realized. The rest are stalled. The recent reports of the European Commission is quite disappointing for us. They were made public yesterday [e.n. - April 18] and today our Minister made a statement in regards to this.Whatever happens, full membership in the EU is our objective. We have difficulties, especially after the heinous attempt in Turkey, two years ago, and after the emergency rule that we declared in Turkey, we had serious misunderstandings in regards to our EU partners. Some of our allies and EU leaders failed to understand what happened in Turkey. They were unable to put themselves in our shoes, and many EU leaders, months after, confessed that they did not show the solidarity that was expected of them, it was a difficult moment, so the relationship is experiencing difficulties, it's obvious, but our resolve for a full membership is still there. We know where the problems are, we took note of the criticism. When it is well-intentioned criticism, obviously, we take them serious and do our homework. As you know, some of the criticism is coming in the terms of human rights, rule of law sector, despite the emergency rule, which we made public, which targets the terror elements, and FETO group, as we discussed, the so-called "gulenists" and the daily lives of individuals, foreigners, will not be affected. We see it on the ground, the individual liberties, day-to-day life is not affected because of the emergency rule, but even with the emergency rule we continue our strong talks and contacts, especially with the Council of Europe experts and also with the EU experts, and moving forward in this period. Obviously this is a temporary period. Once, this huge threat to our national security, the FETO threat is eliminated, because every other day, the secret "gulenists" are being discovered, especially in the army, this is a great danger for any country, actually. Once this threat is eliminated, the emergency rule will be called off, but we are doing utmost, like France did for more than two years, that this emergency rule does not contradict the democratic rule in our country.AGEPRRES: How did the coup attempt, or more specifically the image of the coup attempt, affect Turkeys' economy in the end? Because on one side there were Western countries who believed that the coup was orchestrated and people were afraid to even travel to Turkey, or to invest in Turkey, but on the other side there was Turkey's discourse about the coup attempt.Osman Koray Ertas: Turkey and the Turkish society is a resilient society. I don't know if it should be something I should be proud of, because it also means that we have many problems as well, but this is a reality, and because of this resilience, whatever happens inside the country, there is this spirit of revitalizing yourself, re-energizing immediately, so yes, we had serious problems, just after the coup attempt, but then there was a strong comeback, especially in the economy, and our social fabric as well and the figures are quite promising. In 2017 the country recorded 7.1% of growth. It's a very high number, even higher than China's or India's. When you look at the figures in tourism, for example, we received about 32 million tourists, so 3 or 4 months after the coup attempt I can confidently say that we managed to leave these things behind us.The suggestion that this is an orchestrated coup attempt is actually a gulenist black propaganda. They are doing this. We are following, as a nation, all the trials. There were people, on that particular night, in the main headquarters military base, and they had their CCTV footage, that they have walking alongside the generals. Normally, they have nothing to do with them, they are like simple businessmen, on paper, and in the trials, when the judges showed this footage, "what were you doing on that particular night in the base" they even denied that they are not themselves, and the footage is fake, so we are faced with a double faced group, whose basic tool is to lie. People understand, as time passes, that it was a very big danger for Turkish democracy, and at the moment it's only a bunch of people who believe that it is an orchestrated thing, because as evidence is pouring, and all these indictments are prepared, it's all transparent and all the Court rulings will be subjected to the European Court's review, so there is no question about that. I observed that our European friends also realized that things are getting normal in Turkey, so it's just a matter of time, that when we feel confident, the gulenist threat will be eliminated. Then we will call off the emergency rule.AGERPRES: Could you talk, specifically, about the economic relation between Turkey in Romania, with also a little emphasis on what was affected by the coup attempt at that time?Osman Koray Ertas: In 2014, our trade was 6.4 billion dollars. So it was a very good figure. The year that we had the coup attempt, literally not only with Romania, but with many countries, we lost a half year in 2016. 2016 was an important loss in trade figures as well, but this year we break this downfall, and the numbers are increasing again. In 2017, we reached 5.1 billion Euro, or 5.7 billion USD off trade, and this year the numbers seem to be very strong, when you look to the first two months, we see an increase of about 40%. Already we reached 1 billion, there's a huge rise now. On the Western front it did not affect the relationship. Turkish investments in Romania continue to increase, and it's not just mergers and acquisitions, but also as direct foreign investments. Last year and the year before I attended many opening ceremonies [for businesses]. We also see a strong increase in the retail sector, big brands are entering Romanian markets, so on the economic front, we had a very brief period of stall, but then, because this is the nature of the relationship, we continue to see the normal trends of increasing. I think this year will close the year with many positive figures.AGERPRES: There were talks, two years ago, about the reach of 10 billion dollars, in commercial trades between Romania and Turkey.Osman Koray Ertas: Yes, it is still a target that we are attached to. It is obtainable, it's not that much difficult. Remember the figure of 6.4 billion dollars. Even before we had about 8 billion dollars. It's the dynamic between the two countries' own economy. When we have issues in our economy, or Romania's, some issues with Romania's economy, then obviously trade is affected negatively, but 10 billion is not a target that is not obtainable, and we are committed to that.AGERPRES: Romanians choose Turkey as a tourism option. Can you talk about the way tourism expanded in Turkey?Osman Koray Ertas: After the big blow in the second part of 2015, we had a slight decrease in 2016, but we came back in 2017, as we can see from our trade figures. Not just Romania, but with Turkish figures, the figures are increasing. Last year there was an increase, as opposed to the previous year, of about 19%, which is about 423,000. This year, it seems that there is a strong increase as well, of about 40%, this is the feedback that we have from travel agencies. Some of them say that we are fully booked, so I guess if nothing unexpected happens, we will be around half a million this year. Overall, the year 2014 was a very big one for Turkeys' overall economy. More than 40 million people visited, as tourists. Last year there were 32 million. I guess this year we will reach the 2014 figures, we will pass again 40 million figures.AGERPRES: In terms of Romanian tourists, they choose health tourism, to go into Turkish hospitals to take care of their health. Do you have figures that record this?Osman Koray Ertas: Turkey is becoming increasingly important in terms of health tourism, not only for Romanians, but in general. There are some figures, there is a US-based agency, which is called Joint Commission International - JCI, and JCI is an accreditation institute. There are 54 private Turkish hospitals with some 150,000 health care professionals, which are accredited by JCI. This actually represents one-fifth of the JCI accredited hospitals in the world. In 2016 the number of international patients reached 600,000. This excludes about 100,000 people who came to Turkey for plastic surgery, so we are talking about 1 million potential there and we know Turkey is an attractive market for Romanian patients, because of the high quality of services and also in terms of costs as well and hospitality, hotel-wise. It is an increasingly popular destination, not just for Romanians, but for Europeans, who choose Turkey for many things - from cancer treatments, to dental implants or plastic surgery.AGERPRES: Going back to the bigger picture of Turkey's economy, Turkey is involved in a project called TurkStream, which is a gas link and it has a very closely-tied relationship with Russia, when it comes to this particular project. How will the political situation affect TurkStream, because now there are tensions between Russia and Turkey, because of the strikes in Syria.Osman Koray Ertas: On natural gas, Turkey is fully dependent on imports, and about half of our imports are from Russia. Russia is also the major provider of gas to Europe, as well, as you know. Despite all the political problems that we had in the past as well, on the gas issue we didn't face any major problems, so Russia played a reliable source for Turkey, and Turkey also played a reliable customer for the Russian gas. Even during the difficult period that we had at the end of 2015, when we had the jet incident. Even during this time we didn't see any major issues regarding the transfer of gas, from Russia to Turkey. The TurkStream pipeline will actually replace the already existing pipeline that is going through the Balkans, so it will basically change nothing in terms of the amount that we are receiving from Russia. We will be receiving it directly, instead of the long route. We will receive it directly from the Black Sea, where we already have the Blue Stream pipeline, which we signed like two decades ago. So this will be a second line, that we get directly from Russia. We see now no delay in construction of this first instalment of the pipeline, and we plan to receive the gas in due time. There is also another line, in the Turkish Stream, this is supposed to carry gas from Russia to Europe, but this is something that will depend on the negotiations between the provider, Gazprom, but also potential buyers in Europe, but the first pipeline, which Turkey is the recipient, we see no problem.AGERPRES: Can you say if TurkStream will go through Romania, but I guess this is Russia's decision...Osman Koray Ertas: The route and destination will be decided by the provider. When you say Romania and gas, we are already fully supporting the southern corridor and we have this tunnel line, from Azerbaijan to Turkey, and the first phase of construction will be complete in a few months, and Turkey will start to get Azeri gas. This tunnel is the backbone of the corridor. The second phase of the southern corridor will be gas to Europe, it will pass Italy, and we are also in talks with our Romanian partners, which are working at BRUA [e.n. - BRHA]. We plan to connect all these sources and recipient countries to each other.AGERPRES: Turkey is a member of NATO and NATO puts a huge emphasis on the situation in the Black Sea region, and with the current political and military situation, what is Turkey's role in this specific area?Osman Koray Ertas: Until 2014 the Black Sea was one of the most stable regions, as you know, but unfortunately, after the illegal annexation of Crimea, things changed in the region. Our stance is clear on that, we do not recognize this annexation, and we continue to hold our position strong. Obviously, as a NATO member, we are behind all the decisions that NATO are taking, because these things are not taken by outside powers, they are taken jointly, with our involvement and contribution. But also, the Black Sea has its own peculiarities, it is a closed sea and with very few states that are near it. There are some mechanisms that we spearheaded, with the idea of regional ownership, and these mechanisms, some of them are dormant, they're not working, but we still want to keep them there, so that once the conflicts in the region go back to normal, we could reuse them. On the economic front, the Black Sea Economic Council was spearheaded by Turkey, about three decades ago, and despite all the problems between member-states, and we can see it in different forms, this proved to be useful for dialogue, for the regional countries. Therefore, we continue to follow-up this two-pillar strategy of dialogue and deterrence, together with our partners and allies, and obviously dialogue with Russia is key in this region as well, as the largest power in the Black Sea. We will continue to follow this delicate policy of dialogue and deterrence, as well as continuing the importance of regional ownership, and obviously continue to underline the importance of observation of the Convention of Montreaux, which proved to be one of the most effective arrangements.AGERPRES: Going back to Romania, because this is the last year for you, as an ambassador in Romania, could you have an overall look on your mandate? What were the challenges of your mandate, and what were your victories in Bucharest?Osman Koray Ertas: Victories? There are no victories. (laughs)AGERPRES: High points.Osman Koray Ertas: It was quite a rewarding post, because unlike some other positions, where you spend your energy into problematic issues, problem solving, or even conflict management, we had the chance to spend our efforts to concrete projects, and it was so rewarding to see the end results, in the economic sector, or in trade, or investments, or cultural field, military sites, we were delighted to see, as the embassy, to be part of tangible projects that are to the benefit of our two nations, and also this country is important, because it is all-inclusive in terms of the portfolio. This is a NATO ally, a EU country, it's a neighboring country, in the Black Sea we are neighbors, it's a major trading partner, it's an important hub for Turkish investors. There is a very vibrant Turkish-Tatar minority, we have a solid relationship, namely that we have successes, despite a difficult history. We have a close relationship currently, we have concrete partnerships in military and security sectors. There probably isn't a subject that an ambassador to not work in this beautiful country. Drawing a line, this post offered many joys, both professionally and personally. The most important are the Romanians from here, with high-ranking positions or not, people who were helpful and understood the bilateral problems. We will continue to cherish this wealth and potential.AGERPRES: And the challenges? What was the most difficult thing to do, for you, to explain to Romanians, as an ambassador. Personally I'm thinking about the coup attempt.Osman Koray Ertas: There were difficult times, right after the coup attempt. But I had been on TV and press so often, so that we were able to explain what happened, because the "gulenist" propaganda machine was so powerful in Turkey, in Europe, Romania as well, so it was not always easy, especially in the initial days, to try to explain what happened in my own country.AGERPRES: This year Romania celebrates 100 years since the reunification. What do you think "unity" means, in international terms, at this point in time, in this situation?Osman Koray Ertas: First of all, we congratulate the Centennial of Romania, this is a great historical day, Romanians should feel proud and we congratulate it. Together with the minority we will also work on some projects that will mark the Centennial. The idea of unity is getting more and more difficult to achieve. Unfortunately, people lost the optimism of the 1990's, when the idea of unity was somehow more clear, and now we focus on our own humanitarian diplomacy, so this might be the way to achieve unity in the world, to focus on humanitarian issues, without focusing on political or conjuncture issues. Humanitarian perception and focus on humanitarian issues and needs could be a topic for unity. It is one of the most important priorities when it comes to foreign policy.AGERPRES: Does Turkey feel alone in the humanitarian diplomacy engagement? Because when it comes to humanitarian diplomacy things cannot be put easily into numbers, like "this is the cost of the refugee crisis"...Osman Koray Ertas: Yes, it is true that sometimes you cannot put things into figures, but there are some measurable things. For example, in terms of GDP, Turkey is the largest humanitarian donor in the world, as of last year's figures. If you do not take the GDP into account it is the second, after the US, who provide aid for the humanitarian causes, and we will continue this humanitarian diplomacy, actually, and we will like to see our neighbors, partners, allies, and other international actors, to work out and to share the burden, because it is an international issue.AGERPRES: Could you define, in one word, Turkey's relationship with the EU?Osman Koray Ertas: I thought about this. We decided to say about the EU, because we have problematic issues with many countries so it wouldn't be easy for me to say something. For the EU - "never ending story"....
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs informs in a reply sent to AGERPRES that "an analysis and evaluation process has been launched" regarding the relocation of the Embassy of Romania from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

The Foreign Affairs Ministry (MAE) adds that this process includes consultations with all "relevant" institutions and actors.

"We reiterate that a comprehensive process of inter-institutional analysis process is considered through this demarche, with the inclusion and consultation of all relevant institutions and actors, according to the Constitution and the laws in effect," the MAE said.At the same time, the ministry mentions, "by initiating this approach, the identification of the most appropriate way of for Romania to position itself or act is in view, taking into account the latest developments in this file, as well as a process of consultation and coordination, consistent and applied, with the partners and the strategic allies of Romania."The MAE stresses that "the objectives of this complex process are subsumed to supporting Romania's interests" and recalls Romania's "balanced position" in the Israeli-Palestinian file."Traditionally, Romania has had a balanced position in the Israeli-Palestinian file, as also confirmed by the bilateral recognition of the Palestinian State for more than three decades. We recall that the balanced position is supported by the constant concern of our country with regard to the community originally from Romania living both in the State of Israel as well as in Palestine, "the MAE communique concludes.President Klaus Iohannis was not informed or consulted about a possible relocation of the Embassy of Romania in Israel, the Presidential Administration announced on Friday, underlining that such a move could only be done after a thorough analysis, which should take into account all its external political consequences and implications, and that "at this stage" it would be "a violation of relevant international law"."The President of Romania has not been informed or consulted in advance about this approach. The Presidential Administration underlines that this decision is not based on solid and comprehensive assessments. Such a demarche can only be done after in-depth analysis, which takes into account all its consequences and external political implications," the Presidential Administration said about the information circulated in the public space about the Government's intention to launch the relocation process of the Romanian Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.Chamber of Deputies' Speaker Liviu Dragnea, the Social Democratic Party (PSD) leader, announced on Thursday that the Government has adopted a memorandum that decides to start the procedures for the effective move of the Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
The Government's intention to move the Romanian Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is an act that violates international law, the decisions of the Council of Europe and contradicts the position of the Romanian state regarding the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, considers the representatives of the Embassy of the Palestine State in Bucharest.

According to a press release issued on Friday for AGERPRES, the Embassy of the Palestine State in Bucharest is concerned about the decision of the Romanian Government to adopt the memorandum on the start of the relocation procedures of the Embassy of Romania from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

"We consider that the intention of the Romanian Government to move the Romanian Embassy to Jerusalem is an act that violates international law, the decisions of the Council of Europe and is contrary to the position of the Romanian state regarding the settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," said Ambassador of the Palestine State in Bucharest Fuad Kokaly, quoted in the press release.The diplomatic mission also refers to the reaction of the head of state on this issue."As the release of the Presidential Administration in Bucharest shows, such a decision could endanger the national security of Romanian citizens and violates the resolutions of the UN Security Council and the General Assembly that call on the member states to abstain from establishing diplomatic missions in Jerusalem," the embassy specifies.Moreover, the Embassy of the Palestine State shows, "the action of the Romanian Government endangers the interest of the Romanian state and of its citizens in the Arab and Muslim world.""We call upon the institutions of the Romanian state to remain in the position of balance they have adopted so far and to play a constructive role in the peace efforts between Israelis and Palestinians, a peace based on the solution of the two states, Palestine and Israel, to live in peace and security and good neighborhood," Fuad Kokaly said.The Embassy of the Palestine State in Bucharest reminds all Romanians that after the admission of Palestine as a non-observing member state, the United Nations decided on December 17, 2012 that the name "Palestine State" be adopted by the UN in all its subsequent work, reaffirming through this the legitimate existence of the Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem, according to Resolution 181 of November 29, 1947."In this context, we welcome President Klaus Iohannis ' appeal to responsibility and discernment and reiterate the conviction that Romania will remain a guarantor of international law and a responsible protector of the national security of its citizens," further reads the release.
Prime Minister Viorica Dancila attended the opening ceremony of the 41st edition of the Tulip Symphony festival in Pitesti, Arges County, on Friday, saying that such events contribute to the nationwide promotion of valuable traditions and people.

"The Tulip Symphony is an event that has become a tradition. For more than four decades, the image of Pitesti has been assimilated to this spring and flower celebration. The Tulip Symphony is a symbol for your community and I want to thank all those who over time have contributed to the organisation of this event," said Dancila.

She voiced support for such initiatives, pointing out that they "create added value, promote cohesion and contribute to national and international promotion of places, traditions and valuable people."Also attending was Interior Minister Carmen Dan, who was impressed by the event."The Tulip Symphony comforts the soul, bringing joy to everyone's eyes. Creating such an event, loving flowers, mean being a beautiful man. Such an event under the sign of the Greater Union Centennial has a special significance because now, more than ever, we have to preserve traditions and cherish authentic values," said Dan.Deputy Prime Minister Gratiela Gavrilescu said that the Tulip Symphony is not just a temporary exhibition, but "a unitary concept of promoting the wonderful natural terraces of Pitesti."She said that, in the Centennial Year, this festival, as well as the Florica Villa of the Bratianus and Curtea de Arges Monastery, should be regarded as symbols. "We, all of us, all Romanians, have to take care of them, for the future generations," added Gavrilescu.Dancila, Dan and Gavrilescu attended the opening ceremony of the Tulip Symphony, which started with a float parade. They then strolled down the centre of the city, where a trade fair of flowers and traditional products took place, stopping at several flower stands.

AGERPRES .
President of the National Liberal Party (PNL) Ludovic Orban stated on Friday that a decision to move Romania's Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem can only be made by Romania's president and urged the Government to renounce any institutional demarche in that regard.

"I followed with consternation Dagnea [Chairman of the Social Democratic Party, PSD, major at rule - ed.n.]'s statements yesterday evening in a television show and the announcement made by him regarding the memorandum adopted by the Government on the moving of Romania's Embassy to Jerusalem. I specify that Dragnea has not got any quality in matters of foreign policy of the Romanian state and it doesn't seem normal for a party leader, be it the governing party, to make announcements which regard the state's foreign policy, to influence decisions concerning Romania's foreign policy. The Government has made a huge mistake for adopting this memorandum. Through this decision it has is throwing away a constant effort of over 30 years of the Romanian state's foreign policy in the area and is seriously breaching Romania's Constitution. (...) Such a decision can only be made by Romania's President. (...) We urge the Government to reject any institutional demarche in that regard," Orban told a press conference.

The Government adopted a memorandum which decides the initiation of the procedures to effectively move the Romanian Embassy in Israel, from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, PSD Chairman Liviu Dragnea announced on Thursday.President Klaus Iohannis was neither informed nor consulted regarding a possible move of Romania's Embassy in Israel, the Presidential Administration announced on Friday, which highlights that such a demarche can only be carried out upon an in-depth analysis, that takes into consideration all its [the demarches, ed.n.] foreign policy consequences and implications and that "at this stage" it would represent a breach of the relevant international right."

AGERPRES .
President Klaus Iohannis has not been informed or consulted on a possible relocation to the Embassy of Romania in Israel, the Romanian Presidential Administration announced on Friday, underscoring that the move will only be possible after a thorough analysis that takes into account all its external political consequences and implications.

"The President of Romania has not been informed or consulted in advance about this approach. The Presidential Administration underlines that this decision is not based on solid and comprehensive assessments. Such a move can all be done after a thorough analysis that takes into account all its consequences and external political implications," the Presidential Administration said on information publicly circulated about the Romanian Government's intention to start the relocation of the Romanian Embassy in Israel Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

According to the Presidential Administration, the head of state considers that the Government's initiative may "possibly represent at the very least the beginning of an evaluation process in the field that can only be completed when negotiations over the Middle East Peace Process are concluded, where the status of Jerusalem is a central theme.""This status can be established only after the conclusion of a direct and final agreement between the parties," reads the statement.Iohannis, as the maker of Romania's foreign policy decisions of Romania and as the country's representative abroad, in accordance with the constitutional provisions, reiterates that Romania's constant position regarding the Middle East Peace Process remains unchanged."President Klaus Iohannis stresses once more the need for a just and lasting solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by implementing Israel's two-state solution, Israel and Palestine co-existing in peace and security, as the only viable option capable of guaranteeing the parties meet their aspirations."Iohannis also reaffirms that Romania's position on the status of Jerusalem remains in line with that established by the relevant resolutions of the UN Security Council and the UN General Assembly.The Presidential Administration mentions that there are a number of resolutions of the UN Security Council and the UN General Assembly calling, inter alia, on UN member states to refrain from establishing diplomatic missions in Jerusalem and to step up international efforts for lasting, comprehensive and fair peace settlement in the Middle East. "Therefore, at this stage, the relocation of the Romanian Embassy to Jerusalem would be a violation of relevant international law,' reads the presidential statement."Taking into account all these aspects, President Klaus Iohannis urges all governmental and political decision makers to accountability and discernment regarding the major foreign policy decisions of Romania with strategic implications, including to Romania's national security and to Romanian citizens. Such a decision must be taken only after talks and with the approval of all the relevant bodies in the area of foreign policy and national security, with the final decision being vested with the president, constitutionally speaking," the Presidential Administration concludes.

AGERPRES .
A Romanian Centre of Culture and Science, the first of its kind in Africa, has been inaugurated in Tunis on Thursday, with Minister of Foreign Affairs Teodor Melescanu in attendance, informs the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MAE), in a release sent on Friday to AGERPRES.

According to MAE, the head of the Romanian diplomacy had a meeting on Thursday evening with the members of the Romanian community in Tunisia and Tunisian graduates of universities in Romania. On the same occasion, there was launched the Association of Former Tunisian Students in Romania.

The Romanian Centre of Culture and Science in Tunis has been set up as part of the Bourguiba Institute for Modern Languages of the Tunis Al Manar University, with the Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research, Slim Khalbous, participating, among others, in the inauguration.On this occasion, the Romanian Agency for Development - RoAid made a donation to the Centre, of computer and electronic equipment and of Romanian books."During his visit to the Bourguiba Institute, Minister Melescanu mentioned the institute's reputation in teaching Arab language and the fact that many Romanian diplomats have benefited in time from its training programmes. Moreover, he highlighted the role of academic exchanges and student mobility in tightening the relations between the two countries, developing the overall bilateral relations, as well as in connecting Tunisia with the European space. He also hailed the inauguration of the Department of Romanian language, literature, culture and civilization at the same institute, while showing that it will be of a real help for the Tunisian students who want to study in Romania," says the same source.During his meeting with the members of the Romanian community and graduates of the universities in Romania, Teodor Melescanu underscored their role in getting the two nations to know each other better and in strengthening cooperation between Romania and Tunisia, in general, and also the importance of maintaining the study of Romanian language as an additional modality of connecting with the European space.Melescanu also encouraged the registration of children coming from mixed families to take the Romanian language courses organized by the consular section of the Romanian Embassy in Tunis.
Former president Traian Basescu draws attention that the decision to relocate the Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is one with capital repercussions on the country's foreign policy and says that Social Democratic Party (PSD) leader Liviu Dragnea "was simply driven by his own interest, giving a heavy blow to Romania's long-term interests."

"Assuredly, Dragnea cannot understand the implications of his statements. Dragnea was simply driven by his own interests, giving a heavy blow to Romania's long-term interests. Poor Dancila [Viorica Dancila, Romania's Prime Minister - ed.n.] is merely playing 'the innocent puppet', with power though, and Melescanu [Teodor Melescanu, Foreign Affairs Minister - ed.n.] is in the situation of the bad guy who has his leg in a cast thinking he will get away with it. The decision to relocate the Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is one with capital repercussions on Romania's foreign policy. Among many other things, with Dragnea's statement, Romania lost the statute of 'honest peace broker' both for Israel and the entire Arab World, tramples on the international right, forsakes the European Union's position, increases the terrorist risk on Romania's territory, overthrows the confidence both the Arab countries and Israel had in Romania. Not to speak about the interests for the development of economic relations with the Arab countries," the former head of state wrote on his Facebook page on Friday.

He wondered "which of the Deputies Chamber Speaker (Liviu Dragnea - ed.n.) entitle him to such a decision" and highlights that President Iohannis has the duty to act swiftly and firmly."PS - for enthusiasts of speculations: I am an admirer of the Jewish people and its checkered history and an unreserved supporter of a peace solution in the Middle East," Traian Basescu further wrote.
In the fall of the year 1480, at a point not far from Moscow, two armies faced each other on the opposite banks of the Ugra River.

On the one side were the forces of the Grand Duchy of Moscow, whose ruler, Grand Prince Ivan III (known as the Great and the gatherer of the Russian lands), had recently rejected further payment of tribute to the Great Horde.

On the other were the forces of Grand Khan Ahmed bin Kuchuk, who had come to lay waste to Moscow and instruct the impudent Prince Ivan to mend his ways.

For weeks the two assembled hosts glared at one another, each wary of crossing the water and becoming vulnerable to attack by the other. In the end, as though heeding the same inaudible signal, both withdrew and hastily returned home.

Thus ended more than two centuries of the Tatar-Mongol yoke upon the land of the Rus.

Was this event, which came to be known as the great standing on the Ugra River, a model of what happened in Syria last week?

Almost immediately upon reports of the staged chemical attack in Douma on April 7, speculation began as to the likely response from the west  which in reality meant from the United States, in turn meaning from President Donald J. Trump. Would Trump, who had repeatedly spoken harshly of his predecessors destructive and pointless misadventures in the Middle East, and who just days earlier had signaled his determination to withdraw the several thousand Americans (illegally) stationed in Syria, see through the obvious deception?

Or, whether or not he really believed the patently untrue accusations of Syrian (and Russian) culpability, would Trump take punitive action against Syria? And if so, would it be a demonstrative pinprick of the sort inflicted almost exactly a year earlier in punishment for an obvious false flag chemical attack in Idlib? Or would we see something more robust (a word much beloved of laptop bombardiers in Washington) aimed at teaching a lesson to both Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his ally, Prince Ivan IIIs obstreperous heir Russian President Vladimir Putin?

The answer soon came on Twitter. Assad was an animal. Putin, Russia, and Iran were responsible for many dead, including women and children, in mindless CHEMICAL attack  Big price to pay.

Around the world, people mentally braced for the worst. Would a global conflagration start in Syria with an American attack on Russian forces? A grim trepidation reminiscent of the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis gripped the hearts of those old enough to remember those thirteen days when the fate of all life on our planet was in doubt.

Certainly there were enough voices in the US establishment egging Trump on. Besides, at home he still had the relentless pressure of the Mueller investigation, intensified by the FBIs April 9 raid on his lawyer Michael Cohen. Trumps only respite from the incessant hammering was his strike on Syria last year.

During the first Cold War both American and Soviet forces took great care to avoid direct conflict, rightly afraid it could lead to uncontrolled escalation. But now, in this second Cold War, western commentators were positively giddy at the thought of killing Russians in Syria

or rather killing more Russians, citing the slaughter of a disputed number of contractors (or mercenaries as western media and officials consistently called them, implying they deserved to have been exterminated). Thatll teach em not to tangle with us! It was unclear whether the warning from Russian Chief of Staff General Valery Gerasimov that Russia would respond against an attack by striking both incoming weapons as well as the platforms that launched would be taken seriously.

After a slight softening of tone by both Trump and Defense Secretary General James Mad Dog Mattis on April 12, during which a team from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) was approaching Douma to conduct an on-site examination, there emerged a slim ray of hope that Trump would step back from acting on the transparently false provocation. (The slimness of any such hope was illustrated by the fact seemingly the most restrained of Trumps advisers was somebody nicknamed Mad Dog.)

When on the evening of Friday the Thirteenth (Washington time) news came that the US had initiated military action, together with France and (the country Russia had accused of staging the Douma fraud) the United Kingdom, many feared the worst. The hasty timing was clearly aimed at preempting the arrival of the OPCW inspectors.

Of greater concern was the extent of the assault? If Russians were killed, Gerasimov was serious.

As it turned out, the worst didnt come. World War III didnt happen. Or hasnt  yet.

In fact nothing much happened at all. According to the official US reports, something over a hundred missiles were launched at three targets. All missiles reached their targets  Mission Accomplished! The other side, however, claimed to have shot down roughly 75 percent of the incoming Tomahawks.

In the end, the damage was even less than from the follow-up to Idlib last year. No one was reported killed, neither Syrian nor Russian nor Iranian. Western governments claimed to have struck a serious blow at Syrias chemical weapons capability. Syrians and Russians scoffed that the missiles had hit empty buildings and that Syria had no CW to hit since 2014, as certified by the OPCW.

In the aftermath of the missile show, media carried unverified reports that Trump had wanted a stronger campaign but deferred to Mattiss caution, no doubt reflecting the views of professional military men who didnt want to find out whether Gerasimov was bluffing. Mattis also reportedly wanted Congress to vote on any action before it was taken but was overruled by Trump.

There was even some speculation that the whole thing was a charade worked out in cooperation with the Russians. Even if true (and its unlikely) the mere fact that Trump would have to engage in such a ruse speaks volumes about the weakness of his position. Whatever Trump says, America is not coming out of Syria, writes Patrick Buchanan. We are going deeper in. Trump's commitment to extricate us from these bankrupting and blood-soaked Middle East wars and to seek a new rapprochement with Russia is inoperative.

Thats clear from the comments of US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley. She states that America wont disengage until three objectives have been met: that ISIS has been defeated (a pretext, since ISIS is on the ropes and remains alive only because of hostile actions taken by the US and others against Syria); Damascus is finally deterred from using chemical weapons (a falsehood, since they dont have any); and Irans regional influence is blocked (which means were staying in effect permanently in preparation for a larger war against Iran and perhaps eventually Russia).

The last point is unfortunately true, as plans are underway to beef up a Sunni anti-Iran bulwark in eastern Syria to cut off Tehrans so-called land bridge the Mediterranean. Most Americans in Syria are to be replaced with a so-called Arab force  the Arab NATO touted last year in connection with Trumps maiden foreign trip as president. (As though the one NATO we already have werent bad enough!)

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir has suggested troops from his country would participate. Aside from whether Riyadh can spare them from their ongoing task of wrecking Yemen, Saudi personnel are likely to become a prime target for Syrians itching to get a crack at their chief tormenters over the past seven years.

So was anything really settled on April 13? On this occasion the West chose not to cross the river, much as Khan Ahmeds force declined to do in 1480. For their part, the Russians in Syria, like their ancestors on the Ugra, were on defense and had no need to risk offensive action.

Unfortunately, unlike the the great standing on the Ugra River, which resolved the question of Russian independence and sovereignty in that era, nothing has been resolved now. The question remains: will the US peacefully relinquish its position as the sole arbiter of authority, legality, and morality in a unipolar world in favor of a multipolar order where Russias and Chinas legitimate interests and spheres of influence are respected? Or will we continue to risk plunging mankind into a global conflict?

Syria remains a key arena where one path or the other will be taken to finally wrap up what US Army Major Danny Sjursen calls Operation Flailing Empire. The irony is that peacefully losing our pointless and dangerous attempt to rule the world would only be to Americans benefit. Thats what Trump promised in 2016. He hasnt delivered and its increasingly doubtful he can.

In the end, the threat of World War III hasnt vanished. It has just been postponed.
M.K. BHADRAKUMAR

The sensational case of the poisoning of the ex-MI6 agent and former Russian military intelligence colonel Sergei Skripal on March 4 in Salisbury, in the UK, is becoming more and more curious. Under a blinding spotlight from Moscow, the British allegation regarding a Russian hand in the poisoning of Skripal is getting exposed. An engrossing plot in big-power politics is also unfolding. There is stuff here for a Le Carre novel.

Are we witnessing a replay of the false flag Gulf of Tonkin attack of August 1964, the imaginary incident concocted by the US military to provide legal and political justification for deploying American forces in South Vietnam and for commencing open warfare against North Vietnam?

To recap, Britain alleged without any empirical evidence that a military grade nerve agent of a type known as Novichok was used in Salisbury, saying it was originally developed in the former Soviet Union, and therefore, Moscows hand  possibly, even President Vladimir Putins hand  was highly likely.

Moscow has maintained, on the other hand, that it had destroyed all its chemical weapons and an Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) investigation verified and testified to that.

The British allegation quickly morphed into a large-scale expulsion of Russian diplomats (over 100 of them) by western capitals, under heavy pressure from Washington and London. The US alone expelled 60 Russian diplomats, while Britain expelled 23.

Egg on Mays face

Britain is studiously ignoring the Russian requests for samples of the chemical agent used in the Salisbury attack and for consular access to be granted to the former spys daughter Yulia. Meanwhile, Britain instead approached the OPCW to investigate.

The OPCW has now responded that it cannot identify the country of origin of the chemical agent used in the Salisbury attack.

There is egg on PM Theresa Mays face.

However, Russians managed to get their hands on the report prepared for the OPCW by its reputed laboratory in Spiez, the Swiss Center for Radiology and Bacteriological Analysis. According to the Swiss labs report, the chemical formula used in the Salisbury attack has been in service in the US, the UK and other NATO countries. Furthermore, neither the Soviet Union nor Russia ever developed or stockpiled similar chemical weapons.

Thats more egg on Mays face.

Now comes the bombshell. On April 18, Moscow disclosed that it has formally handed over to the OPCW proof to the effect that the Novichok agent purportedly used in the Salisbury attack actually happens to be patented as a chemical weapon in 2015 in the US and produced in that country. (By the way, unlike Russia, the US is yet to destroy its chemical weapon stockpiles, as required under the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1997.)

Now, not only the British government but Washington too has some explaining to do.

Was Skripal attack a covert op by the West?

Simply put, the Salisbury attack might even have been an Anglo-American joint covert operation undertaken with the ulterior motive to ratchet up tensions between the West and Russia. (The Washington Post reported on Monday that the former National Security Advisor HR McMaster might have hoodwinked President Donald Trump into approving the expulsion under the wrong notion that similar numbers of expulsions by European allies was in the pipeline. In the event though, the Europeans made only token expulsions.)

Britain is steadily edging away from the Skripal case, hoping, perhaps, that the matter will die down. But will Moscow let Britain off the hook?

On their part, the Russians seem to be holding back on some explosive information pointing toward the USs direct complicity in this affair.

Indeed, if this was McMasters swan song, the indefatigable Russophobe probably hoped to kill two birds with one shot  push Russias relations with the West to a crisis point and second, scotch the prospects of an early US-Russia presidential summit (which Trump wanted.)

McMaster reportedly tried to stop Trump from congratulating Putin on his big victory in the Russian election on March 18 in a phone conversation where they discussed a possible summit meeting in a near future.

How far all this is linked to Trumps decision on March 22, finally, to sack McMaster as his National Security Advisor is yet another template. By the standards of military people, McMaster probably has the reputation of being an intellectual but the man proved to be an unvarnished Cold Warrior fit for a museum.

From all accounts, Trump never trusted McMaster and the two had an acrimonious relationship. The one-star general who was overlooked for promotion by the Pentagon was Trumps default choice following the abrupt departure of Michael Flynn.

Michael Wolff narrates a hilarious episode in his book Fire and Fury that during the job interview for the NSA post, McMaster tried to impress Trump when he showed up in military uniform with his silver star and launched into a wide-ranging lecture on global strategy. After, Trump reportedly remarked, That guy bores the shit out of me.

atimes.com
The US administration wants to pull its boots off the ground in Syria. Or, to be more precise, it wants to draw down its regular military. Finding a way to get US soldiers out of conflicts in faraway countries of little interest to the American people is always a feather in the cap of a chief executive. On March 29, President Trump said he planned to get the troops out "very soon." But it needs to be clear that the withdrawal is in no way a defeat or concession made to anybody. A bit of ingenuity helps to solve that problem.

According to a WSJ report, the idea is to replace the US military personnel with a multinational force from Arab countries and to thus stabilize northeastern Syria. Egypt, which has its army units fighting terrorists in the Sinai, has already been approached on the matter. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Qatar have been asked to send forces and allocate funds to rebuild the Syrian territory currently under American control. By deploying a contingent consisting of troops from its regional neighbors, this would protect the area after America welcomes its soldiers back home. Of course, the force will also help oppose Iran. The members of the new corps will be thrown together with Israel, which has already started its own campaign to drive out the Iranian forces. The situation is fraught with the risk of escalation, even without assembling this new host.

The idea of creating an Arab force in Syria has popped up from time to time ever since Russia sent its air forces to Syria in 2015. The announcement of the formation of a Muslim NATO made a splash in early 2017, but was soon forgotten. There have been other attempts to create an anti-Iran alliance. But it never came to fruition, since Saudi Arabia and the UAE are bogged down in the Yemeni conflict, opposing Qatar, which has limited military capabilities and is reluctant to confront Iran.

How will this end?

First of all, the US cannot simply pull out, leaving Syria with other actors, such as Iran, to fill the void. President Trumps numerous opponents would raise a hue and cry over that. True, the presidents approval ratings will go up, but in reality the military presence on the ground will remain, only with American private military contractors replacing the regular troops. They have already expressed an interest in getting that plan off the ground.

The media have reported the presence of about 2,000 regular special ops troops in Syria, but the story about the private military companies operating there, as well as in Iraq, broke just a few days ago. Roughly half of the approximately 5,500 contractor personnel there are not even US citizens. So a withdrawal will not end that military presence, which entails boots on the ground involved in hush-hush, far from the media activities. Using private warriors will solve political problems but without actually changing anything.

The oil-rich Persian Gulf countries may send just token forces of their own or no forces at all, while providing funds to the US-linked private security contractors that are carrying out combat missions. Another option is to create a training hub for the SDF or other forces in eastern Syria. Although the Arab states that are officially taking part will have a presence there, they will not actually be doing any fighting.

Second, the US Air Force will be in standby mode, ready to intervene if the Arab forces or the contractors need help. Third, the Kurds are the backbone of the US-led SDF. Theres no way to know for sure if they will be able to find a common language with the Saudi-led military occupation force. Theres also a chance the local Arabs might not be happy to see more foreigners coming in to control their land, even if those strangers are Sunni Arabs. With the Persian Gulf military moving in to replace the American troops, Syria would risk seeing the same fate as Yemen. And if the new Arab force was not up to the task, the US would have to re-deploy its forces, and that would be a political setback that Trumps ill-wishers would waste no time taking advantage of.

Turkeys reaction is not yet known but it could welcome the development, because an international force might diminish the role of the Kurds. But Ankara might not follow US orders, as potential participants have their own goals to pursue.

Fourth, the US regular military withdrawal will inevitably spur Israel to become vastly more involved. How will public opinion in Sunni Muslim countries view an Arab force that joins efforts with Israel, even if the target is Shia Iran? The parties may pretend to operate separately, but one cannot fight a common enemy without some coordination of activities, thus resulting in the emergence of a Sunni Arab alliance led by Israel and Saudi Arabia. In any event, an Israeli-Arab thaw is already taking place, with Iran in its crosshairs.

A US withdrawal would be presented as a fulfillment of President Trumps pledge to end US involvement in foreign conflicts that dont directly threaten Americas security. But in reality, nothing will change. Private contractors will replace the regular military. More Arab actors will be involved, one way or another, in the conflict. Israel will have a bigger role to play. The efforts to isolate northwestern Syria will continue, unless the US and its Arab allies join the Astana process with the goal of seriously discussing the prospect of establishing a de-escalation zone in the SDF-controlled chunk of Syria, recognizing it as part of a unified country. At first glance, this would seem to be a long shot, but you never know. No government in the world has openly called for the partition of Syria.
Last weekend, the world was pushed to the brink of international war when the leaders of the United States, Britain and France ordered air strikes on Syria over an alleged chemical-weapons attack.

US President Donald Trump was joined by British Prime Minister Theresa May and French President Emmanuel Macron in unleashing over 100 missiles on Syrian territory. Fortunately, there were no casualties from the barrage.

Nonetheless, and rightly so, the Syrian government, as well as Russia and Iran, among others, denounced the US-led attack as an unlawful aggression and a grave violation of international law.

If those strikes had inflicted casualties, the consequences could have escalated into a wider war, involving the NATO powers and Russia.

Trump, May and Macron were gambling with world security in the most reckless way.

Within days of the US-led strikes, it is emerging that the alleged chemical-weapons assault in Douma on April 7 was nothing but a fabrication. A deliberate provocation orchestrated by Western-backed militants whose purpose was to incite an external military attack on Syria to destabilize the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad.

This week, Russian news channel, Rossiya 24, carried interviews with an 11-year-old Syrian boy named Hassan Diab and his family who claimed that they were forced unwittingly into a propaganda stunt by unknown activists in Doumas hospital. Like many other civilians in the hospital, the boy was doused with water hoses amid an induced panic over chemical weapons. The chaotic scenes were caught on video cameras by other activists. The footage was promptly and widely broadcast by Western mainstream news outlets as evidence of a chemical attack.

In the hours and days after April 7, an hysterical Western response was triggered condemning the Syrian state forces and their Russian allies for an atrocity.

President Trump, Britains May and Frances Macron led the stampede to accuse Syria and Russia of barbarity. A week later, the NATO powers then bombed Syria on April 14.

But it is now highly dubious that the alleged chemical-weapons attack even took place.

Even Western media outlets have begun publishing reports that totally contradict the initial claims of what happened in Douma. Britains Mirror newspaper, among others, reported the Rossiya 24 interview with the Syrian boy and his family, with a fair, open mind.

Britains Independent published a report by its veteran war correspondent Robert Fisk interviewing local residents and medics in Douma who all dismissed claims of the alleged chemical atrocity. Their version of events corroborated what the young boy told Rossiya 24. That the incident was a fabrication, a stunt orchestrated for the cameras.

Other Western media figures have, to their credit, also voiced skepticism about the initial atrocity claims. In the US, Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson has repeatedly questioned the official narrative, going as far to call the incident a false flag.

From on the ground this week in Douma is this live report for One America News by Pearson Sharp. He interviewed dozens of locals. All of them unanimously said that there was no chemical attack. They said it was a hoax staged by the Jaish al Islam terror group as a means to get the Syrian army off their backs and make good their escape. Pearson Sharps report is real journalism. Unlike much of the corporate Western media. For example, France 24s reports on Syria habitually come from some correspondent sitting in an office in Lebanons capital Beirut telling viewers about what happened in Douma. France 24 has been one of the main purveyors of the atrocity story.

Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs also called the Douma incident a provocation during a debate on the MSNBC channel. Sachs went even further and put the whole Syrian war in the context of a seven-year attempt by the US and its allies to illegally pursue regime change. Watch this incisive and hilariously cutting sketch on the Jimmy Dore show.

Another dissenting voice was US Senator Rand Paul who told CNN that the incident in Douma was likely a false flag and that NATO air strikes on Syria were unwarranted.

Several other reports and alternative voices have emerged on American and European news media outlets, which challenge the reckless rush to condemn Syria and Russia over the Douma incident.

It is increasingly clear that the incident was a fraud. Just as the Syrian government and Russia strenuously claimed from the outset.

That means that Trump, May and Macron just carried out, on the face of it, a war crime. They attacked a sovereign country with over 100 missiles based on a concoction of lies. Their emotive claims of alleviating human suffering by bombing Syria are contemptible.

It now transpires that one of the alleged chemical laboratories that they destroyed with their bombs was actually producing life-saving pharmaceuticals. So much for Western leaders concern for human suffering.

However, the issue goes way beyond faulty intelligence and rash action. The fact is that the US, Britain and France have been caught out conducting a most grave crime against international law.

This should not be left as a case of oh well, we made a mistake. These three NATO powers stand accused of committing a war crime and inciting an international conflict. They had little moral authority to begin with, but now their pretentious credibility is in utter shreds.

If there were any justice, the leaders of the US, Britain and France should be facing prosecution in an international court.

This is the deeply troubling dilemma of our time. Three nations sitting as permanent members of the UN Security Council are behaving as rogue regimes that act above the law. Not for the first time either.

Yet, they have the audacity to glibly accuse Russia and China of undermining global order. When it is they who are trashing that order.

The impunity must stop. Because when those who claim to uphold the law break the law, then there is no law.

Photo: intelligencerpost.com
In early 2018 it was announced that China had sold Pakistan a very high-tech ballistic missile tracking and monitoring system. China had never exported this system before and the price Pakistan paid was not mentioned. That was probably because the payment wasnt in cash (which probably wasnt involved at all) but in loyalty and other favors. This tracking and monitoring system probably comes with Chinese personnel to operate it and ensure the tech secrets are not passed onto someone else. This gear may technically be on permanent loan to Pakistan as sensitive tech like this is often not exported (by the U.S., Russia or other nations that have developed it).

This particular incident also made it clear that Pakistan isnt an ally of China, as historically China has not had allies. Pakistan is more of a client state of China. Pakistan and China have little in common when it comes to culture or history. At the same time, China historically either had enemies or client states that were dependent on Chinese goodwill and patronage. For most of Chinese history, the Chinese attitude was that foreigners had nothing China needed. China was self-sufficient, so there was no room for trade. Some was tolerated but it was not encouraged. China was never an ally of Russia, which is perceived more as a potential enemy as well as someone who is illegally occupying Chinese territory (most of far eastern Russia). China and Russia do not publicize this aspect of their relationship but it is no secret in either country. Pakistan surrendered what little of its territory China claimed and sought to be on good terms with China, at whatever cost.

Pakistan needs China and never the other way around. After all democratic Pakistan is run by its military and intelligence services, which use Islamic terrorists to attack its neighbors. China has employed such tactics in the past but has since moved on to more sophisticated methods. At the same time, the Pakistani use of Islamic terrorists is of some interest to China. These domesticated Islamic terror groups are potentially dangerous to the Pakistani military and the military lets their pet Islamic terrorists understand that this risk is well understood by the generals and that any protected Islamic terror group that decides to forget that will be eliminated and the survivors constantly hunted. China played a role in that because one reason for the massive 2014 crackdown on hostile (to Pakistan) or potentially hostile Islamic terrorists was the need to placate China. The Chinese were investing billions of dollars in building new roads, ports, pipelines and much else in Pakistan. For that to continue China told the Pakistanis that any Islamic terrorist violence against these projects or the Chinese personnel in Pakistan to ensure everything was built on time and according to spec would result in Pakistan losing the support of China. Pakistan could not afford that. China was not only the major supplier of weapons to Pakistan but also the only major power ally Pakistan had. In short, Pakistan needed China more than the other way around.

Because of this relationship, China uses Pakistan as a test subject for new technology. The new Chinese GPS (Beidou) has two signals; the public one and the much more precise military one. The only nation outside China with access to the military Beidou is Pakistan, which is where China built the first Beidou ground control stations outside China. Pakistan is also the first foreign customer for Chinese stealth aircraft. Pakistan has not got the skills to be partners in developing these high-tech items, but Pakistan (or at least the Pakistani military) is considered dependent enough on Chinese goodwill to provide security. Pakistan is often the first customer for new types of warships China is exporting. If there are any problems with these ships, and that is normal, China will quietly fix things and the Pakistanis will ensure their media does not make an issue of the problem.

Pakistan is willing to do all this because the patronage of China gives Pakistan more leverage against Iran and India and some protection from American threats. At the same time, there is little danger of China seeking to take control of Pakistan because that is not how China operates. China does not like trying to rule and absorb large alien populations. It has enough problems with less than ten million Turkic Uighurs and would not want to deal with over 160,000 more Moslems. But China does have the economic clout to demand certain things from Pakistan and Pakistan find providing that level of security to Chinese investments and personnel a useful exercise in counter-terrorism. This also makes Pakistan one of the few South Asian nations that take comfort in rising Chinese military and economic power in the region.
Increased persecution of Algerian Christians, covert support of Moroccan rebels and criticism of air attacks against the Syrian chemical weapons facilities has defined Algerian foreign policy lately. To placate Islamic conservatives the government is closing Christian churches and persecuting Algerian converts to Christianity. The Algerian constitution guarantees religious freedom but the government has adhered to the constitution selectively depending on what it needs at the moment. The government says there are only 20,000 Christians but there are apparently more like 100,000 and more Algerian Moslems are quietly converting. Not quietly enough because for Islamic conservatives it is forbidden for a Moslem to convert. In some Moslem countries (like Saudi Arabia) conversion is a capital offense and those found guilty are executed. Yet the government feels a need to persecute Christians in order to keep the Islamic political parties weak. These Islamic parties need a hot issue to exploit and have not been able to find one. But the government ignoring the growth of Christianity in Algeria could be turned into headline news if only the government would cooperate.

The Polisario Paradox

Earlier this month Algeria had assured neighbor Morocco and the UN that it no longer had anything to do with Polisario, a group of Moroccan terrorists that Algeria helped create decades ago. Then on April 11th an Algerian Air Force transport crashed on takeoff and among the 257 dead were 26 Polisario members. The transport was taking off from a base near the Algerian capital carrying mainly military personnel. This was more than an embarrassment, it confirmed the accusations that Algeria could not be trusted when it came to Polisario, and perhaps other matters as well. For example, Algeria is one of the few Sunni majority Arab countries that supports the Assad government. Algeria is a major customer for Russian weapons and admirer of current Russian politics (the creation of a president for life in what is supposed to be a democracy), which is now very similar to what Algeria has had since the 1960s. Back (before 1991) when Russia was the Soviet Union the Russians backed Algerian efforts to support and encourage Polisario and thereby weaken neighbor Morocco (which was, and still is, a centuries old monarchy and a more efficient government than the democratic dictatorship in Algeria). Morocco has accused Algerian leaders of being lying hypocrites and now the UN and many other nearby nations are agreeing with that.

Polisario has always caused problems with neighboring Morocco and the problem got worse in 2013. The two countries recalled ambassadors and there was talk of escalation. This made cooperation in counter-terrorism efforts (or anything else) with Morocco impossible. Meanwhile, Polisario provided Islamic terrorists safe haven in Polisario refugee camps in Algeria (90,000 refugees) and Mauritania (24,000). This is all connected with the declining prospects of Polisario, which has been in bad shape since 1991. Back then, Morocco finally won its war with Polisario Front rebels, who were seeking independence for the Western Sahara (a region south of Morocco). Polisario remains powerful in Mauritania, where the rebel group has official recognition and maintains several refugee camps. At the beginning (the 1960s) Polisario was so well-subsidized by Algeria, back when Algeria was a radical state, that Polisario still has enough diehards out there to keep lots of people in Western Sahara unhappy. This situation has also provided recruits and sanctuary for al Qaeda and other Islamic radicals. Since the 1990s the UN has been trying to work out a final peace deal between Polisario and Morocco. During the 1990s Algeria said it cut off all support for Polisario. But that, and UN efforts to mediate the differences have just not worked. The contested area is largely desert with a current population of less than 600,000. Logic would have it that the area is better off as a part of Morocco. But there are still thousands of locals who would rather fight for independence than submit to Morocco. Some resistance is tribal and cultural, with the Moroccans seen as another bunch of alien invaders. The area was administered until 1976 as a Spanish colony. Most Western Saharans have made peace with Moroccan rule, especially since Morocco has been spending a billion dollars a year on infrastructure and other improvements and doing so for decades. Western Sahara is a much nicer place because of that. Polisario still has several thousand armed men based in the refugee camps and refuses to accept Moroccan rule of Western Sahara. Polisario has become an outlaw organization with no real purpose. If the fighting breaks out again Morocco could defeat Polisario, but Polisario still has a sanctuary in the Algerian refugee camps. There Polisario discourages any talk of peacefully returning to Western Sahara, even though a growing number of the camp inmates are quietly doing that. The refugee camps have become police states run by Polisario and tolerated by Algeria.

Smuggler Blues

Increased security on Algerias southern border (especially the ones with Mali and Niger) catches more people illegally crossing the border but most of them are smugglers. While most of the smuggled goods are consumer items (easier to sell in Algeria) weapons and drugs were encountered. It was the drug shipments that had the heaviest security. This often meant crossing the border at night and then hiding the drugs or weapons at a hiding place known only to partners in Algeria, who had a legitimate reason for being down south. These weapons and drugs were then smuggled north to the coast and another gang of smugglers got the drugs on ships or airplanes headed for Europe. The weapons were for local markets (mostly criminals). Since moving drugs involved so many people, it is more expensive. But thats the nature of drug smuggling and Islamic terror groups tend to supply most of the security and maintain that monopoly by killing any competitors. Drug shipments still get seized. This is usually when the hiding places on the Algerian side of the border are stumbled on by patrols or the transporters moving the drugs from the southern border to the coast have an accident or get exposed as smugglers for some other reason. The Algerian police estimate that over 90 percent of the drugs get through and the Islamic terrorists get paid more than enough to keep them in business. For this reason, small groups of Islamic terrorists survive in northern Mali, near the Algerian and Niger borders not because of Islamic radical locals but because of the cash. With that, you can buy all the hospitality and discretion you need.

April 18, 2018: Algeria and Saudi Arabia signed four agreements to improve economic and diplomatic relations. Algeria has condemned the Yemeni rebels using Iranian ballistic missiles to attack Saudi Arabia but tries to avoid criticizing Iran.

April 12, 2018: France announced that it would support Morocco using military force to deal with continued Polisario violence, especially in light of the recent revelation that Algeria continues to support Polisario.

April 11, 2018: Some 30 kilometers west of the capital an Algerian Air Force IL-76 transport crashed on takeoff from the Boufarik Airport. All 257 aboard died and the situation got worse when the victims were identified and 26 turned out to be members of Polisario.

April 9, 2018: In neighboring Morocco military reinforcements are being sent south to deal with increased Polisario violations of the buffer zones that a UN agreement established in 1991. The UN was assured by Algeria and Morocco that these two nations would cooperate to maintain the peace. Instead, Algeria has secretly continued to support Polisario and encourage violations of the ceasefire.

April 4, 2018: The UN openly criticized Algeria for continuing to support Polisario, an outlaw group that carries out attacks against Morocco largely because Polisario continues to obtain support from Algeria. Yet Algeria denies that it supports Polisario despite ample evidence to the contrary. UN officials have witnessed this cooperation with Polisario in refugee camps and heard from many refugees who complained of Polisario punishing anyone who openly opposed them and Algerian security forces backing Polisario up.

April 2, 2018: In the east (Skikda province, 500 kilometers from the capita) troops confronted a veteran Islamic terrorist and killed him when he would not surrender. The dead man was armed with an assault rifle.

Only four Islamic terrorists were killed in March and another seven suspects were arrested. Troops found 41 rural Islamic terrorist hideouts. Often these were just bunkers or caves where weapons and supplies were stored. That material was seized and included over 30 firearms and lots of ammo. Islamic terrorist activity in Algeria continues to decline and is no longer considered a major problem.

March 30, 2018: On the Libyan border security on the Libyan side has been improved because of the Misrata and Zintan militias agreeing to put aside their differences and unite their forces in an effort to improve public security in western Libya. Zintan is a largely Berber city 135 kilometers south of Tripoli while Misrata is a major coastal city east of Tripoli. At one time the Zintan militias controlled many neighborhoods in Tripoli but the Misrata militias drove them out in 2014 and it took over three years for the Misrata militias to repair that damage. Algeria and Tunisia support the UN backed GNA government in Tripoli and the new Misrata-Zintan alliance because it means better security for the western borders.

March 24, 2018: In neighboring Libya, an American UAV missile strike in Southwestern Libya killed Musa Abu Dawud, a veteran Algerian Islamic terrorist who had risen to high rank in al Qaeda but during the last few years had spent most of his time in Libya because it was safer.
Despite continued media promotion, Palestinian group Fatah (which runs the West Bank) has failed to keep its knife terrorism campaign going. Attacks are down over 80 percent since the violence began back in late 2015. Israel has managed to cope with the mayhem, which only angers the Palestinian leadership even more. Since October 2015 there have been 300 knife terrorism attacks and these have left 36 Israelis or foreigners dead and nearly 500 wounded. Israeli security forces detected and prevented another 250 attacks. The knife terrorism attacks and supporting violence (rock and fire bomb throwing and violent protests in general) have left 220 Palestinians dead, over 15,000 injured and nearly 2,500 under arrest. This made the attackers angrier but not more effective. Israel fears that Fatah or Hamas will come up with another form of desperate violence and convince many Palestinians that it is a solution to the problems largely created by generations of corrupt Palestinian leaders.

Many more of the attacks are by organized (often informally) groups of young Palestinians in the West Bank. Thus there have been nearly 900 reported attacks involving stone throwing, over 340 using fire bombs and hundreds of other potentially fatal attacks that went unreported because no one was seriously hurt. Meanwhile poverty and corruption in Gaza and the West Bank, areas where Palestinians are in charge, continues to flourish. This suits Fatah, which proudly and publicly pays the families of dead attackers a reward while imprisoned attackers receive regular payments to their families. Some Western aid donors have cut or eliminated their contributions to Fatah over this financing of terrorists while most Western donors ignore the practice or insist it is not done with the money they contribute.

Egypt

Islamic terrorist activity is also lower in Egypt but it is still happening, especially in Sinai. Egypt also continues having problems with the economy and high unemployment. Islamic conservatives continue persecuting Egyptian Christians and the government is less eager to crack down on this than Islamic terrorism that threatens the economy or government control of territory (like parts of northern Sinai).

July 19, 2016: In Gaza Hamas ordered three more Gazans to be executed for being Israeli informants. Three more people were sentenced to prison for the same offense but avoided execution by cooperating with the investigation. Those who dont cooperate often cannot because they are innocent. These prosecutions have become more common since 2010, when there were two of them. Back then over a dozen Palestinians were being sent to prison for spying each year, apparently avoiding execution by collaborating with the investigation. Israel has always had a large network of informants in Gaza, who provide data on military, economic and political events, as well as targeting information for air attacks. There are three death penalty crimes in Gaza; murder, drug trafficking and collaborating with Israel. Most of the actual executions are for collaborating. In 2013 Hamas announced a new campaign to find and arrest people providing information to Israel. Gazans who oppose Hamas (especially members of rival Fatah) saw this as directed at them. The informants provide details of the problems Hamas is having in Gaza, like the impact of most Gaza government employees not being paid regularly, if at all since 2014 because of disagreements with the West Bank Fatah government. Hamas and Fatah agreed in 2014, on paper, to form a united Palestinian government. That merger was never carried out and Fatah refused to pay government employees in Gaza. Hamas has been hustling to make partial payments ever since but even Arab donors were reluctant to help out with this.

July 18, 2016: In Gaza another Palestinian died while working on a tunnel. This death was unusual because the victim was a member of Islamic Jihad, one of the smaller Islamic terror groups in Gaza. This is the second such death for Islamic Jihad so far this month. The rest of the fifteen tunnel deaths so far this year have been Hamas men. Tunnel collapses and accidents have been common in Gaza since 2007, when Hamas backed the construction of more smuggling and combat tunnels. In that time it is believed that at least 400 Gazans have died in tunnel accidents. Hamas usually blames such collapses on natural causes (like heavy rain storms) but Israel believes Israel and Egypt efforts to limit lumber and cement shipments entering Gaza has played a role because many of these recent accidents seem to be the result of poor tunnel construction compared to earlier, safer, tunnels. As a result of all these accidents, which began to accelerate in late 2015, a growing number of Hamas men are refusing to work in the tunnels because there is a widely believed (among Gazans) rumor that the real cause of all these tunnel collapses (including the unreported ones that didnt kill anyone) were the result of new Israeli anti-tunnel weapons. This sort of thing has been mentioned in the Israeli media, but mainly in terms of new detection sensors not devices that could remotely trigger a tunnel collapse. Hamas denies Israel has any such weapon and Israel wont discuss classified military matters like new tunnel detection sensors. Hamas also does not like to openly discuss the energetic Egyptian anti-tunnel methods which include digging a canal along the Gaza border and flooding it with sea water to collapse tunnels and make it more difficult (because of the unstable wet sand) to build new ones. Hamas also adds to the mystery by refusing to release any details of their tunneling activities. That is because a lot of the underground work is on rebuilding combat tunnels destroyed by Israel during the mid-2014 50 Day War.

July 17, 2016: In the north, near the Syrian border, a Hezbollah UAV crossed into Israel briefly. Israeli radar had been watching this UAV before that and in rapid succession two Patriot anti-aircraft missiles were fired, unsuccessfully, at the UAV. Then an F-16 got close enough to fire an air-to-air missile, which also missed. At the this point the UAV was headed back for Syria. It is unclear if this was a Russian or Iranian UAV as Hezbollah uses both. What was even more important was why three anti-aircraft weapons which had previously succeeded in destroying these UAVs failed this time. Israel has upgraded its air defense systems several times in the last decade to deal with the growing use of UAVs by Hezbollah. In August 2014 an Israeli Patriot anti-aircraft missile shot down what appeared to be a Syrian Army UAV that was probably checking out rebel (al Nusra) activity along the border and strayed into Israel. Since this could have been an Iranian made UAV used by Hezbollah (who have threatened to equip some of these UAVs with explosives for attacks in Israel) the Israelis have orders to shoot first and investigate later.

July 12, 2016: In the south (the Gaza border) A 19 year old Arab-Israeli climbed the security fence and got into Gaza before Israeli border guards could arrive. Sensors and vidcams detect this sort of thing but in remote areas of the border the system is designed to detect and track people trying to get into Israel. This is the third time since 2014 that an Israeli civilian has done this. Two of them are Arab-Israelis and the third is an Ethiopian Jewish migrant. All three are described by their families as mentally ill. Hamas has not demanded a huge ransom for these three and is apparently unsure what to do with them.

July 11, 2016: In Egypt the head of the Libyan Army, Khalifa Hiftar, flew in from Tobruk on one of his regular visits to consult with his Egyptian supporters. Hiftar has managed to keep Egypt and Russia providing support for the HoR (House of Representatives) faction Hiftar belongs to in Libya. For Hiftar Egypt allows banned goods (like weapons and ammo) to cross the border unhindered. Russia is known to have printed new currency for HoR earlier this year and has provided unspecified military support. Russia also provides HoR with some support inside the UN. This is important because Russia is one of the few countries that can veto proposed UN resolutions. Hiftar visits Egypt regularly and visited Russia in late June. General Hiftar is very capable and demonstrated this early on. He managed to create a coalition of tribal militias and army units in late 2013. This coalition proved to be very effective fighting the Islamic terrorists in eastern Libya. By 2015 Hiftar had managed to get most of the post-Kaddafi armed forces under his control and the HoR government appointed him head of the Libyan armed forces. Hiftar backed HoR pleas for foreign assistance in obtaining more weapons and other military supplies. Hiftar was popular because he was competent (having been a career military man) and took good care of his troops. This is rare in Arab armies but Hiftar deliberately uses tactics that minimize casualties among his followers. This made it easier to attract new factions (usually tribal militias). Although there is a UN arms embargo on all factions in Libya the UAE (and some other Arab states) have always backed the more secular Libyan rebels and recognized (along with Egypt and the UN) the HoR government. But these Arab states also back the UN approved Libyan GNA government that was created in early 2016. The GNA is trying to replace Hiftar. Many Arab states believe Hiftar is too important to dismiss and is the one best suited to continue as military commander. Hiftar is believed to receive some unofficial military support from Western nations, in part because he is the most competent and reliable local commander in Libya.

July 10, 2016: In the West Bank Israeli police arrested four Palestinian government employees (intelligence specialists) who had set up a workshop to make illegal weapons. The Palestinian intel officers used work contacts in Israel to buy and smuggle in some components. Several of the weapons were seized along with ammo and metal working tools.

July 8, 2016: In the east (the Jordanian border) police shot dead a Jordanian man who had illegally crossed the border and was trying to steal a vehicle (and also throwing rocks at cars). He refused to surrender and was shot dead. Incidents like this are rare along the Jordan border. Security is tighter in Jordan and bribes are not as effective for those trying to get across the border illegally. Jordan is particularly hostile to Islamic terrorist groups, which is why their border with Israel has never been an easy way for Islamic terrorists to get into or closer to Israel. Moreover part of the Jordan border only gives access to the West Bank, and another high-tech security fence blocks access to Israel. Most of the Jordanian border is in southern Israel. This is the Negev Desert which is sparsely inhabited and largely free of natural cover. A few extra UAVs patrolling this areas makes it very difficult for smugglers.
Following his meeting with Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) president Shehbaz Sharif, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan has given a conditional nod to putting aside his reservations and differences with the ruling party, sources said Thursday.

Shehbaz reached through a special plane from Lahore to Islamabad on Thursday, where he held a two-hour-long meeting with the disgruntled party leader at the Punjab House.

This was the fifth meeting between Nisar and Shehbaz in over the past couple of weeks. The last meeting of the two took place on Sunday where, according to sources, the two discussed various party issues, including a strategy for the upcoming general elections and ways to strengthen the party.

Nisar has been ready to forget his differences and reservations with the party, sources said, but he has put forth a condition that the PML-N supremo Nawaz Sharif should also come and meet him along with Shehbaz Sharif.

Nisar reportedly told Shehbaz that if Nawaz comes to meet him, he would be ready to move forth with the party and they could also decide on the way forward.

The rift between Nisar, a veteran party leader from Rawalpindi, and PML-N supremo Nawaz Sharif has been brewing since July last year following Nawaz's disqualification and subsequent public offensive against his ouster.

On Saturday, Nisar, in a statement, said that it seems that the country's biggest problem is whether he gets a party ticket for the upcoming elections or not.

Nisar's statement came after Nawaz's daughter Maryam at a rally criticised people not hopeful of getting tickets from the PML-N wanting to join rival Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI).

Maryam was likely responding to reports that Nisar may be joining the PTI  the PML-N's arch nemesis.

Earlier, Nisar had said he would not become part of any decision that makes Maryam the party's leader.

Furthermore, in February it was reported that Nawaz had parted ways with his longtime associate Nisar and decided to not extend an invitation to him for the Central Working Committee session.

Nisar has also in the past publicly expressed reservations with senior PML-N leadership.

He also refused to be part of a new cabinet after Nawaz  the then PML-N president  was disqualified as prime minister.

Nisar, at various occasions, advised Nawaz not adopt a confrontational approach following his disqualification but the PML-N supremo ignored the advice and indirectly criticised Nisar as well.
Chief Justice of Pakistan Justice Saqib Nisar said on Friday that the time has come for the judiciary to deliver, adding that otherwise, "we will not be able to achieve our goals".

Addressing bar members in Charsadda, the chief justice thanked the audience for giving him a chance to be present among them today.

Chief Justice Nisar said he has travelled the world and considers this judicial complex one of the best in the world.

Institutions are made of people, he said in his speech.

The chief justice reiterated his advice from yesterday for updating of old laws of the country.

He called for workshops for judges to ensure trial courts dispense with cases swiftly.

Chief Justice Nisar lamented that decades-old cases are still pending in various courts of the country.

Right to life is the most important right, he said while explaining the Supreme Courts use of suo motu powers to enforce fundamental rights.

During his remarks, he also asked the audience to reveal if they have any pressing cases related to fundamental rights so he can hear the case there and then.

The chief justice was on a two-day visit to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa where he heard several cases related to public welfare issues at the Peshawar registry.
The National Accountability Bureau today approved a probe into former president Pervez Musharraf's disproportionate assets and misuse of authority.

The anti-graft watchdog also approved a probe into Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q) leader Chaudhry Moonis Elahi's corruption and an offshore company, as his name had appeared in the Panama Papers.

Elahi had appeared before NAB earlier this year along with all his financial records. He had remained at the NAB headquarters for around an hour.

Recently, NAB initiated inquiries against politicians whose names had appeared in the Panama Papers after the Supreme Court, in November last year, sent notices to it and the federal government seeking progress reports on action taken against Pakistanis named in the Panama Papers.

Speaking to the press after his appearance before the NAB, Elahi said that he has answered all the questions on offshore companies.

I am a politician, I have declared all my assets, he said. I will continue to appear before institutions whenever summoned. I have nothing to hide.
During a press conference, MPAs Nagina Khan, Naseem Hayat and Nargis swore by Quran to prove their loyalty to the party. They said that they had voted for the PTI in the Senate polls.

They questioned ouster of only 10 lawmakers out of 20 accused of selling their votes. We were not given a chance to prove our innocence,Speaking on the occasion, MPA Nagina Khan recalled how she had actively participated in the partys membership campaign after joining the PTI in 2008.

I am still loyal to the party, she said.They said that they were not summoned for investigations in this regard. KP Chief Minister Pervez Khattak had told us ten days before Imrans presser that no inquiry was underway.The news conference comes two days after the PTI Chairman Imran Khan named and shamed some 20 lawmakers for selling votes in Senate elections.
Sindh Chief Minister Murad Ali Shad Friday blamed the Centre for prolonged power outages in the province, stating that a pre-planned conspiracy had been hatched to ruin industry units in the port city.

He said that the Centre had its shares in the Karachi-Electric and the Sui Southern Gas Company Limited while the Sindh government was being held responsible for electricity load shedding.

Murad alleged that the Centre had created an artificial power crisis.

He proposed appointment of Sindh government officials in the board of directors of the two entities to resolve the issues.

Earlier, the chief minister had invited all parties to stage a sit-in in Islamabad against load shedding.

However, the protest call of the chief minister drew mixed reaction, with several leaders holding the Pakistan People s Party (PPP)-led provincial government responisble for the prevailing situation.
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New reports suggest Cambridge Analytica was trying to develop their very own cryptocurrency and make it available in an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) last year. The formerly obscure big-data company has since become infamous due to their involvement with Facebook, the Trump campaign, and with severe abuses of consumer privacy.

Many companies are experimenting with cryptocurrencies as a business model and a way to differentiate themselves from the competition. Although the vast majority of these cryptocurrencies are variants of either Bitcoin or Ethereum, most come with some additional feature to make them "stand out."

In an interview with the New York Times, Brittany Kaiser, a former Cambridge Analytica employee, described the goals of the coin.

It would allow people to store their personal data online and then willingly sell it to advertisers. The theory is since social media companies like Facebook already have and sell your personal data, why not sell it yourself and profit.

Anonymous sources have reported that Cambridge Analytica was hoping to raise $30 million through an ICO, although they did not confirm this. Recently the SEC has begun scrutinizing ICOs given their explosion in popularity in recent months. While ICOs are not inherently bad, they have gained a poor reputation following their use countless scams.

Cambridge Analytica also told Reuters of previous explorations with blockchain technology, although this work appears to be on hold in light of recent events. The company had previously endorsed a coin linked to Chinese organized crime boss Wan Kuok-koi.
From humble beginnings, Netflix has grown into an industry behemoth with over 125 million subscribers worldwide. But what could be the next step for the streaming site? According to recent reports, the company is considering buying physical movie theaters.

Citing people familiar with the situation, the Los Angeles Times writes that Netflix has been exploring the possibility of purchasing movie theaters in New York and LA and using them to screen its original content.

A small number of Netflix films such as Okja and First They Killed My Father have released simultaneously in theaters and on the site, but Variety reports that major cinema chains wont carry a movie that uses this day-and-date release format.

The situation has caused issues when it comes to Netflixs films competing for awards, especially at Cannes. Both Okja and The Meyerowitz Stories were eligible for the Palme dOr award last year despite their lack of theatrical runs in France, which caused a lot of controversy and saw both movies booed by audiences.

Last year, when we selected these two films, I thought I could convince Netflix to release them in cinemas. I was presumptuous, they refused, said festival head Theirry Fremaux.

The situation led to Netflix being banned from competing for the Palme dOr last month, and the company subsequently pulled out of the event completely.

Not only would it help promote its movies, but having its own theaters could also ensure Netflix is eligible to compete for major industry awards. Its already looked into buying Mark Cubans Landmark Theatres in Los Angeles but decided against any deal as the price was reportedly too high.

Despite spending $8 billion on original content this year, some filmmakers still turn their noses up at Netflix. Steven Spielberg said its movies shouldnt be allowed to compete for Oscars, while The Dark Knight and Dunkirk director Christopher Nolan has also been critical of its movie policies.
Harbored between the Pacific and Indian Oceans lies Indonesia. Due to its unique geographic position, it is highly sought after territory among fishermen. As a result, thousands of illegal fishing vessels have been found in the area. In the vast region, which includes more than 17,000 islands, it can be difficult to enforce compliance with local regulations that protect the available resources.

Traditional radar can be ineffective due to the terrain, but that has not stopped Indonesia's Fisheries Minister Susi Pudjiastuti from finding a solution. Google has stepped in to partner with Indonesia to help detect boats operating outside of permitted areas. Instead of ground-based detection methods, Google is using its satellites and software capabilities to hunt for fishing boats.

Currently, the fishing industry accounts for 2.6 percent of Indonesia's gross domestic product. Although still a small percentage, this amount has grown by over 40 percent since 2014.

Illegal fishing is not just a local problem for Indonesia. There is a global supply chain in place for pirates that use Indonesian businesses to fish in permitted areas, but then immediately offload their goods to waiting ships just outside legal territory. This is where Google is really able to help by tracking and publicly displaying the locations of ships in the region.

Google co-founded Global Fishing Watch in 2016 in partnership with Oceana and SkyTruth. The service now displays boat locations in Indonesian waters for all to see. Having such data available makes is significantly easier to track the underground supply chains that are taking away valuable resources from the region.

Through the help of Google and the fishing watch platform, more than 5,000 boats have been located that were previously invisible to local detection systems. Foreign fishing in Indonesia has dropped more than 90 percent in the past several years.

Once vessels can be seized by the Indonesian Navy, they are sunken to prevent any further use. Sinking boats can help create reef environments friendly to local species to regrow populations.

Google has the capabilities to fund a wide variety of projects. Not all of them turn out to be successful, but in this case, there is a happy ending for most involved.
The Cuban vaccines Soberana, Soberana 02, and Abdala will be applied to 2,102,366 children voluntarily. | Read More
An elderly widow on the pension was advised by an ANZ Bank financial planner to put her $32,000 in savings into an investment that came with fees of more than $1100 a year.

In another case outlined at the royal commission on Friday, a client was charged thousands of dollars a year in order to save several hundred dollars annually on their superannuation, a strategy that would have taken 14 years to break-even for the client.

ANZ's Darren Whereat conceded the bank had been too slow to compensate Mr Harris' clients.

The hearing probed dodgy advice by banks and the lengthy delays in banks compensating customers and taking action against poor advice, drawing on examples from Westpac and ANZ Bank.

Senior counsel assisting Rowena Orr, QC, told the hearing that in one instance in 2015, an elderly widow on the pension sought advice from Christopher Harris, who previously worked at the ANZ-owned Millenium3 advice business. The client had a $32,000 term deposit and she wanted to invest to earn an income of $2000 a year.
Nobel Prize winning American economist Joseph Stiglitz will receive the 2018 Sydney Peace Prize in recognition of contribution to tackling the global inequality crisis.

The former economic adviser to the Clinton administration and Chief Economist at the World Bank will come to Sydney to deliver the City of Sydney Peace Prize Lecture at the Sydney Town Hall on November 15.

Joseph Stiglitz in New York with former prime minister Kevin Rudd and philanthropist George Soros. Credit:AAP

Archie Law, chair of the Sydney Peace Foundation, said the choice of the Columbia University academic and acclaimed author of three best-selling books about inequality, will help put the spotlight on his message that governments need to respond to his economic policy ideas.

In Australia, like many places in the world Professor Stiglitz writes about, we have suffered stagnant wages, the crushing of the trade unions and the dangers of reliance on the market economy, he said.
Literary legend Jackie French on Saturday will donate 200 of her books to help re-stock the bookcases of Tathra residents who lost their homes in last month's bushfire.

She is not alone, with Canberra authors and the community in general donating new books for the Book Love for Tathra drive organised by South Coast author Melissa Pouliot.

South Coast author Melissa Pouliot organised the book drive for Tathra.

"Tathra lost around 70 homes. If we work on each home housing 100 books - I have a lot more than that! - thats around 7000 books gone from our small community,'' Melissa said.

The books will be handed over at The East Hotel on Saturday to the ACT Writers Centre which is housing them for distribution to Tathra.
The heavyweight of young adult fiction joins Jesse Andrews, author of the New York Times' bestselling novel Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, at the Sydney Writers Festival's YA day and Melbourne's Wheeler Centre next month to explain how he translates teen fears and angst into addictive books and film.

But even Ness concedes his latest idea - to turn Herman Melville's immortal tale of revenge and madness, Moby Dick, on its head - is more than a little wild.

Patrick Ness has won just about every major prize in childrens fiction in Britain, including the Carnegie Medal twice. He's adapted two of his bestsellers for Hollywood, created a cult Dr Who television series spin-off and tackles all writing projects with what he describes as ''fruitful fear''.

The intensity of lived adolescence makes for compelling storytelling, says Ness, the author of seven YA books. ''That's when you push at the boundaries of who you might be, to find out what you believe, to make big mistakes and everything feels so important. Everything feels life or death."

American-born Ness is the son of a retired army lieutenant and grew up in a conservative Christian church that preached the end times.

When he was eight, he and a friend were knocked down by a car at an intersection in his small hometown in America. Nearby was a busy petrol station and supermarket.

''We were pushed down the road - it was kind of a fluke that neither of us was hurt very badly - but I had always wondered about those strangers who saw two little boys and went running to help,'' Ness says.

''I don't know who they are, there's no way of tracking them down, and that has always interested me - that idea that a story is just a brief capture of a truth and if you ask somebody who's standing to the side of it, you will get a slightly different version of it.''




The future was incredible in the old days. To the Australian pop fan of the 1970s, it arrived in thrilling glimpses. The guy in Roxy Music, for example, twiddling what looked like a mini telephone switchboard on a late-night TV pop show; or the fine print on a classic Pink Floyd LP: "Vocals, guitars, VCS3".

VCS3? It was an intriguing mystery on the school bus. But to those working on the experimental fringe of Melbourne University's Electronic Music Studio, the futuristic console studded with metallic coloured knobs had already been a fixture for years.

Percy Grainger with Earle Kent and the Kents Electronic Music Box in 1951. Credit:Right Camera

This week, the revolutionary invention from London's Electronic Music Studio [EMS] takes pride of place in Synthesizers: Sound of the Future, an interactive exhibition of wild sounds, forgotten history and retro-groovy hardware at the Grainger Museum.

"EMS was actually kick-started by Don Banks, the Australian composer," says electronic artist Robin Fox, custodian of many of the instruments on display. "He was at a pub in London with Tristram Cary, David Cockerell and Peter Zinovieff and he said he wanted a synthesiser to compose with."
Peking Duck at Splendour in the Grass in 2017. Credit:Mitch Lowe "We just look funny," his buddy echoes. "You're allowed to laugh at this. And I'm into it. We're bringing smiles to the people. That's the main thing. People leave with a smile. It's good." For Australian festival pilgrims, it's been that way since Peking Duk's breakthrough track, High, hauled the Canberra DJ/hitmakers out of the club ghetto and into the mainstream charts in 2014. Aided by a series of inspired and, yes, often quite funny videos, the duo has since clocked up half a dozen singles that have each cracked platinum sales. Peking Duk, Reuben Styles (left) and Adam Hyde. The caramel popcorn shake is incredible, by the way. "My dude! You are the king of the shake!" Hyde calls to our host.

It's not surprising to learn this guy was the class clown as far back as he can remember. To his lingering indignation, he was "pretty much" invited to leave his first high school in Canberra at the end of year 10. "So I took that opportunity and I said 'yeah, f--- you, I'm outta here'," he says. "And if it wasn't for that, I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you." Peking Duk, 2014. I think it was just that we were bored up there. He and Styles had already met at a local skateboard park, but it was during their first year at Dickson College they found the rapport that would seal their fate. "There were all these music rooms where you could just go in at lunchtime," Styles says, "just jam on beats on the laptops, or go into these little session rooms where there were amps and drums that anyone could go have a bash on  Adam made a hip-hop song every day."

Hyde and Styles met at a skateboard park. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer "Talking shit on a beat," Hyde nods. "It was fun." Musically, their influences were as broad as the tools at hand. But everything changed at a club night called Lot 33 in Kingston sometime in 2008 or '09, under the violent influence of masked Italian dance duo the Bloody Beetroots. Adam Hyde and Reuben Styles walk the red carpet ahead of the 2018 Australasian Performing Right Association music awards. "It was so, so sick," Hyde mutters.

"They became our gods," Styles says. "DJing, jumping around like maniacs  it was like, punk mentality but with electronic music. We became intrigued as to how they were creating those sounds in the studio." Hyde adds: "So we tried to emulate the sounds and the structures of those songs, day in, day out, at Reuben's and my house. For, like, a year straight. "And I guess we sort of got closer and closer and we banged together some original songs, slapped 'em on a CD and sent it to a local promoter." Half a dozen underground singles later, the duo was doing it tough on the American DJ circuit when High started to gain some traction back home, beyond the "sweaty club-head dudes" of their fan base. When they flew in for a gig in Perth, they were astonished to see a long line of mixed-gender and modish clientele winding down the block. "They looked very clean; happy teenybopper-type people," Hyde marvels. So we played the show and it was the craziest we'd ever done. People went ballistic."

High was the first tune accompanied by the kind of video that has greatly enhanced the Duk's essential hedonistic subtext. The narrative follows a gaggle of nine-to-five urbanites secretly convening in a forest to don animal skins and get primal. Imaginative variations on the escapist theme followed. Say My Name enlisted American actor Matt McGorry as a mono-browed and mulleted pick-up artist bad-dancing the streets of Manhattan. Stranger saw two street dogs imbibe a curious elixir to float in bubbles high above the metropolis. The pair's most recent video might be their most inspired yet. Starting with the promising line, "I wake up drunk again/the same as last weekend", Wasted is a single-shot affair that follows Hyde and Styles' transformation from gutter bums to Travolta-esque disco heroes, gate-crashing an empty club to perform their own cornball dance sequence. "I went over to Reuben's place the day before the shoot and we choreographed the dance in his lounge room, which was hilarious," Hyde says. "We did it in about 40 minutes. I was like, 'let's start with a kick', and Reuben was like, 'all right, sick'." "My mum actually used to do this dance because for the first 15 years of my life she was a Dyke on a Bike, out raging at Mardi Gras or whatever," Styles says. "You remember Dykes On Bikes?"

"Really? That was a thing? I always thought you were just calling her a dyke on a bike." "Well, she was, but she also did go to Mardi Gras every year." How the jazz-hands thing will play out on stage is a bit of an unknown, given Hyde and Styles have vowed to keep hold of their guitars and other instruments since that live rock'n'roll victory at Splendour last July. "I think it was just that we were bored up there," Hyde says of the decision to increase the degree of difficulty. "There's only so many times you can tell people to put their hands in the air and not feel like a dickhead." "Plus there's two of us and only one set of decks. That made us extra bored. It doesn't take long to press the button," Styles says.

"And we wanted a challenge at the end of the day. And it definitely was a challenge." "The fact that something can go wrong at any moment makes it so much more exciting." In the cool light of day, Hyde isn't shying away from his "death of the DJ" rhetoric. "It's already dying," he insists. "Big EDM [electronic dance music] culture is dead in the arse." "The culture of just pressing play on  I mean, you don't even put a CD in any more," Styles says. "You just put in an SD card in that fits in the little pocket of your jeans, then all four decks are all linked so you don't need to change the tempos anymore  you can just go bam-bam and it's all gonna pretty much play itself." "It's not sustainable," Hyde says.

"Cool techno in an underground club? That's dope," Styles says. "That shit is sick," Hyde agrees. "But the bro EDM culture, that whole f-----g thing, that's gotta go." "DJs have it f-----g easy," Styles decides. "DJs have it really f-----g easy." And so the transformation from digital dilettantes to full-scale axe-wielding rock stars would be complete  if not for one conspicuous absence. The album. The traditional benchmark of arrival has been touted for some time, as recently as Sony Music's latest press release for Wasted. But perhaps emboldened by the caramel popcorn shake, the artists strike a more revolutionary stance on the matter today.

"It wouldn't be the most cohesive album, that's for sure," Hyde says dubiously, reflecting on the range of styles they've mashed and hammered since the teeth-grinding club fodder of Bingo Trippin in 2011. "Also, in this day and age " He makes a face that tells the whole death-of-the-album story in the twitch of a moustache. Styles is similarly ambivalent about the prospect of a Peking Duk alnum. "We've got a lot of songs. It would be good to get heaps of them out but at the same time  I'm sure Ed Sheeran has nothing to worry about, but I don't know any songs apart from Shape Of You on that album. If he put each song out individually, everyone would know every one of them." A year on from that Splendour rebirth, the duo promises their live repertoire will have doubled when they hit big capital city venues on their Wasted tour in May. Following on from a recent APRA Award for Most Played Australian Work (Stranger), the new single is already hovering around 3 million Spotify plays. "We just wanna make it the best show anyone's ever seen. And we're actually confident that we can," Hyde says.
Victor Salva's Jeepers Creepers movies are among the darkest of fairytales: this belated, minimally plotted third instalment has an odd mix of brutality and tranquillity, suggesting that the director has settled down to embroidering a horrific private myth. From the outset, we know there's no hope of the human characters defeating the Creeper (Jonathan Breck), a powerfully built humanoid with batlike wings and dark reptilian skin, still in the midst of a month-long killing spree in the rural American heartland. He's the classic kind of monster, close to the traditional Christian idea of a demon: he doesn't speak, but he has an alarming degree of intelligence, using homemade gadgets to trap his prey and waving an admonitory finger  naughty, naughty  at a woman who threatens him with a gun. Salva's use of silhouettes to highlight the co-existence of innocence and evil is squarely in the expressionist tradition, suggesting a particular debt to Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter: something striking is happening in nearly every shot, especially the jarring moments when the Creeper swoops in to abduct his prey.

STREAMING

REQUIEM, NETFLIX, SEASON ONE AVAILABLE NOW

A BBC-Netflix co-production, this six-part horror series draws on classic horror tropes  particularly those of British horror like the Hammer films made between the 1950s and '70s  but it's no less enjoyable even in its most cliched moments.The supernatural elements begin immediately with a country gent jumping off the roof of his stately pile in Wales, having seemingly released a paranormal horror from his basement before hastily smashing all his mirrors. Meanwhile in London, concert cellist Matilda Gray (Ripper Street's Lydia Watson) is preparing for a gig when her troubled mum (Joanna Scalan) appears at the stage door, leads her to an underground car park and slashes her own throat. Matilda discovers her mum has kept a shoebox of newspaper clippings and photos about the disappearance of a toddler from a small Welsh village (the same one from the first scene!) 23 years earlier, and finds herself inexplicably driven to investigate; are her recurring dreams and lack of knowledge about her Dad linked to the goings on there? She and her musical accompanist Hal (Joel Fry) unearth long-buried secrets in the remote community while staying at the spookiest house in the village. While there are lots of classic ghostly moments and occasional gore, Requiem  written by Australians Kris Mrksa and Blake Ayshford  is a psychological horror in the vein of classic films like Rosemary's Baby.
Energy ministers head into a crucial day of talks on the Turnbull governments proposal to overhaul the nations electricity sector on Friday with a number of outstanding issues to resolve but Josh Frydenberg, federal energy minister, is confident further progress will be made.

Mr Frydenberg joined state and territory counterparts behind closed doors at an upmarket Italian restaurant in Melbourne on Thursday in a bid to narrow differences over his governments National Energy Guarantee proposal [NEG].

National Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg met with state and territory counterparts on Thursday night ahead of Friday's crucial talks. Credit:Eddie Jim

The biggest obstacle to the NEG - whether at today's meeting or a subsequent one in August - may come from the ACT.

On Friday, the territory's energy and climate minister, Shane Rattenbury, said: "it would be irresponsible for states and territories to sign on to this deal as it currently stands."
Partway during Friday's summit of the nation's energy ministers, Victoria's Lily D'Ambrosio interrupted a presentation by the Energy Security Board to query a dot-point about concessions for low-income earners.

"Where did that come from?" she reportedly asked, wondering who had directed that research. Such a proposal at this point was a "non starter".

The problem, though, is not so much the board's unsolicited research but the torrent of studies that comes out of the Melbourne gathering  and the fault lines that they may open up.

That work  presumably to be done well before the ministers meet for a "final determination" on the National Energy Guarantee (NEG) on August 10 in Sydney  includes more details on emissions targets, offsets, the reliability standard to accompany the emissions one, market power mitigation, and the thorny issue of "additionality".
How had I not noticed? We went straight to the doctors, I explained her symptoms and he sent us straight to

pathology for blood tests. My husband Steven had seen that he had written "blood glucose test" on the forms. My heart sank, as it became clear the doctor was testing for Type 1 Diabetes. All of her symptoms pointed to just that. We went home and waited for results. The longest wait ever. I turned my phone on silent that night while I slept so I hadn't noticed the eight missed phone calls from an unknown number. I did notice when the ambulance pulled into my driveway at 2am.

Confused and wearing an old nightie, I met them outside, still dubious as to why they were here. They said they were too, as it was a vague call-out to collect a little boy and the address was mine. I didn't have a little boy so I was concerned, and offered to knock on all the doors to see if we could find him. This poor little boy needed help and we needed to be quick. I went to rush to the neighbours and as I did, they mentioned the boy's name was Darcy.

"I have a daughter named Darcy," I said. I clicked, they clicked and we rushed inside my house. They scooped Darcy up from her cot to check her vitals. She stood up. She was mad as a cut snake that she'd been woken up, not acting any differently - just pissed that we were there. The paramedics got a hold of the doctor, the missed calls on my phone were from him trying to inform me that the pathology results came back at 1am. A normal person's blood glucose levels- like yours and mine sit- between 4bgl and 8bgl depending on when and what we have eaten, and Darcy's were currently sitting at 48bgl.

This was a direct threat to her vital organs. She was likely to go into a diabetic coma or hyperosmolar hyperglycemic state if not treated immediately. It was lights and sirens all the way to Princess Margaret Hospital. We spent eight days in hospital learning about Type 1, being educated on how to maintain levels and get the best out of her everyday life. Darcy was an absolute trooper, I think she liked the attention and absolutely loved Level 7 of the hospital. We learned how to give her injections and finger-prick her to get levels, with all of the needles, blood and constant monitoring, she never once complained. Everyone around us was in a constant mourning state, they had sorries and hugs at the ready, but I have always taught Darcy from the beginning, this is not her fault.

This has no cause and there is nothing we can do to take it away so we not only live with it but we thrive with it. I teach her to never feel sorry for herself; Type 1 is a manageable illness and thats exactly what we'll do - we'll manage just fine. There are currently 1200 children with Type 1 here in WA and an additional 150 diagnosed every year. Type 1 doesn't run in our family - genetic testing proved that. This was completely random, Darcy caught a virus and her immune system became confused and started attacking her good blood cells. We never saw it coming.

We manage because of diabetic educators at PMH, our doctors and nurses and the support my family recieve from the Telethon Type 1 Family Centre. It's important to give back to those that give to us. And that's why I started Charity Cup five years ago. I am heavily involved with netball in Perth and I wanted to bring teams together

to raise awareness and funds for this local charity. Our competition had grown massively over the years, starting with 26 teams it has now grown to almost 50. Everything we raise goes to the telethon Type 1 Family Centre in Osborne Park and

this enables them to run camps and courses for children from regional and metro

areas, bringing them together to form a network of support for their peers, where

they can learn more about their illness and strive to overcome the restrictions and

live happy, long and positive lives.
The cost of the Hoddle Street traffic streamlining project has blown out by 80 per cent, jumping from $60 million to $110 million in the space of a year, in large part because of a shortage of raw materials.

Treasurer Tim Pallas will draw attention to the blowout in next months budget, unveiling a multimillion-dollar plan to ease shortages of sand, stone and concrete, which he says is pushing up building costs throughout the state.

Redevelopment works underway on Hoddle Street. Credit:Eddie Jim

Raw materials make up 35 per cent of the costs of residential and commercial infrastructure, and thats excluding the cost of moving them, Mr Pallas told The Age.

So great is the shortage of concrete, some companies are crushing rock to make sand.
A man allegedly bashed by an off-duty police officer told the officer he would not do anything to jeopardise his career, a jury heard in a covert recording on Friday.

The off-duty officer, Wade Joseph Howell, 36, is accused of beating the man after he came running toward Mr Howell, who was sitting on a park bench in Civic next to the man's girlfriend early in the morning on April 2, 2016. The couple did not know the officer, but they had all been out at Civic nightspot Mooseheads, the trial has heard.

It's alleged Mr Howell bashed the man, fractured his cheekbone and gave him a bloody nose, and then tried to cover up what happened. The Crown further contends that Andrew Charles Smith, 46, the acting sergeant called to the scene, also tried to cover up what had happened.

Both men have pleaded not guilty and deny the allegations. Mr Howell says he punched the man once in self-defence, while Mr Smith says he was doing his job when he directed the arrest of the alleged victim.

The ACT Supreme Court trial has heard that after the alleged assault, Mr Howell went with the man back to the Medina Apartments to speak to the man's girlfriend, who had left during the incident.
Australia is gripped by one of the most important policy debates such a migrant-fuelled nation could contemplate  what are the optimal levels of immigration, overall population growth and of investment in the requisite infrastructure? The impetus is the intensifying growing pains in cities, particularly Melbourne and Sydney, most acutely felt via traffic congestion, crowded public transport and concerns about housing affordability. Yesterday, Melbourne City Council released a report arguing for two more underground rail tunnels.

Illustration: Matt Davidson

This is a discussion Australia has to have. There are many great cities much larger than any in Australia. Our population has been growing by about 2 per cent a year, twice the international average and the fastest in the OECD group of 35 wealthy, industrialised nations. Immigration provides about 60 per cent, in raw numbers, of the growth and about half after accounting for departures. The number of immigrants, excluding our humanitarian intake of close to 18,000, has been close to the cap of 190,000 in recent years, with a further half a million or so temporary visas  mainly for tourism, seasonal labour and tertiary study  granted. This, though, does not mean almost a quarter of a million people shift to Australia each year; close to half are already here and are merely renewing a visa or switching to a new status as their bid for permanent residency progresses.

Policy has largely been bipartisan, so compelling is the evidence immigration is of net economic and social benefit, a notion reinforced in recent days by a study jointly released by the federal Treasury and the Department of Home Affairs. Their analysis delivers two core messages: immigration stimulates economic growth; and immigration at the relatively high levels of the past 15 or so years adds to pressure on infrastructure. The research can help planners prioritise infrastructure projects. The discussion boils down to this: whether Australia should, at least temporarily, reduce the number of people moving here, either as permanent residents or on visas allowing study and/or work. It appears the number of temporary visas, in particular, is being crimped.

The situation has a mischievous internecine dimension, with former prime minister Tony Abbott publicly urging an unusually big cut of 80,000 in the cap, Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton revealing cabinet discussed a cut of 20,000 that was dismissed by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, and Treasurer and former immigration minister Scott Morrison, armed with the fresh official report, promoting immigration.
Ancient Egyptian goddess Sekhmet was a little bloodthirsty, or so the myth goes.

Represented as a woman with the head of a lioness, she once came to Earth to slaughter most of mankind and drink their blood.

The Egyptian goddess of war, Sekhmet, who inspired the new red beer.

The remaining few people stained the Nile red with pomegranates and beer, which the goddess swiftly drank until she passed out, slept for three days and woke feeling rather sorry for herself, saving mankind from annihilation.

That is the myth behind the creation of a pomegranate sour beer aptly named Sekhmet's Rage, created by Bacchus Brewing Co. at Capalaba.
A shooter remains on the run after a man was gunned down inside a unit north of Brisbane during the early hours of Friday.

Jacob Bell, 24, was visiting the unit on Young Street in Petrie when he was fatally shot in the chest by a gunman, to whom police believe Mr Bell was known.

Police investigate the scene of a fatal shooting at Young Street, Petrie. Credit:Jorge Branco

Detective Superintendent Tony Fleming said police did not expect the shooter to target anyone else after gunning down Mr Bell in front of several other people inside the premises.

While there were no specific suspects, detectives were speaking with a number of people after forensic and scientific officers combed the Petrie unit on Friday.
Almost 60 millimetres of rain fell in just one hour on the Sunshine Coast on Friday afternoon as severe storms soaked the south-east.

Showers and potential storms were forecast to remain on the cards throughout the weekend and into the middle of next week thanks to upper trough lingering over the south-east.

The south-east was expecting showers and possible storms to linger for the next five days. Credit:Jorge Branco

The Bureau of Meteorology had issued two severe weather warnings for the Sunshine Coast region as well as parts of Ipswich and Scenic Rim, with all three locations recording heavy falls throughout the afternoon before the warnings were cancelled.

Peak Crossing on the border of the Ipswich and Scenic Rim regions recorded 63 millimetres and Brisbane City received 21 millimetres on Friday.
"Opportunity cost" is not a new, radical or complicated economic concept. It should be central in the debate over company tax cuts. Every proponent and lobbyist for the policy should be asked what social program or infrastructure project should be cut, or what other tax should go up to pay for boosting post-tax profits of large business. Indeed Treasurys own modelling - often cited to support the tax cut legislation - assumes that either personal income taxes will increase or government services will be cut.

The central and most nonsensical argument in support of the governments company tax legislation is that billions of dollars can be ripped out of revenue without driving up the deficit, raising other taxes or making major cuts to services.

To date the discussion surrounding the federal governments proposed big business tax cut legislation has been one dimensional. Throughout the debate, the public have been subjected to a barrage of claims repeated ad nauseam, despite those claims being discredited by the economic evidence both here and overseas.

This week saw something of a breakthrough in the company tax debate. Business itself started to reject the tax cut. Leading policy makers and economists came forward to put the case that we need to be raising more revenue, not slashing it. And then, the Banking Royal Commission put a huge spotlight on the major beneficiaries of such a large corporate tax reduction.

We hear almost exclusively from the "winners" of a company tax cut. But the public cannot be

expected to make an informed choice as to whether this is the best way to create jobs and

growth if we do not know, specifically, where the off-setting cuts will be made. Will it be billions

less for schools, or hospitals? Or will it be the infrastructure spend for our fast growing

population that misses out?

This week saw 47 economists and prominent Australians publish an open letter telling political

leaders that Australia has a revenue problem. That we should be debating how to increase our

overall tax take, not embark on one of the single biggest revenue cuts in modern history.

The group made the point that Australia is one of the lowest taxing countries in all of the OECD.

An associated research paper from the Australia Institutes Rod Campbell and Cameron Murray

pointed out that if Australia had the same tax to GDP ratio as the United Kingdom we could

triple the age pension. If we had OECD average levels of tax we could build two new NBNs every

year. If we had the same tax level as Denmark we could increase education and health spending

fourfold. The reports authors found that even by Australias recent history our current levels of

tax are low. For the entire Howard era  1996 to 2007- the tax to GDP ratio was higher than it is

now.

One of the signatories to the open letter was former Secretary of the Department of Prime

Minister and Cabinet, Michael Keating. In his book Fair Share, Mr Keating points out that the

current Governments own Intergenerational Report projects that its policies will result in ongoing deficits over the next three decades and that the risk of ongoing revenue shortages

includes rising inequalities, damaging to Australias potential high-quality innovation agenda and resulting stagnant growth.

And it is gets worse. There is now a considerable risk that Australia is joining an intercontinental

reverse auction on corporate taxation rates. The managing director of the International

Monetary Fund, Christine Lagarde, believes that countries should avoid competitively cutting

rates because that will, ultimately, reduce overall revenue. By definition, she said, a race to

the bottom leaves everybody at the bottom.
The Victorian Opposition wants the states corruption watchdog to investigate the relationship between the Andrews Labor government and the firefighters union.

United Firefighters Union Secretary Peter Marshall. Credit:AAP

Liberal Leader Matthew Guy says he has written to the IBAC asking the commission to make inquiries after Premier Daniel Andrews was forced to deny this week that he had a secret deal with United Firefighters Union Secretary Peter Marshall.

The government is embroiled in another row involving Mr Marshall, after the union leader reacted with fury to the appointment British fire chief Dan Stephens as the new boss of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade, arguing that firefighters have been betrayed.

In an incendiary radio interview on Wednesday Mr Marshall said promises had been made by the Premier and his Emergency Services Minister James Merlino and hinted at revelations to come.
An Anglican priest caught boasting online about his child sex abuse fantasies has been convicted but will not spend any time in prison.

Former Sunshine vicar Philip John Murphy, 53, was on Friday given a wholly suspended 12-month jail sentence after he was caught engaging in sexually explicit online chats about children.

Former Sunshine vicar Philip John Murphy (in dark glasses) leaves the County Court on Friday. Credit:AAP

The priest had pleaded guilty earlier this week in the Victorian County Court to transmitting child pornography material using a carriage service between 2016 and 2017.

Judge Phillip Coish said the priest's crime did not involve real children.
London: Australian savings could be poured into major Indian projects under plans aired by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi as the two leaders take another step to tighten ties between the two countries.

The two leaders canvassed the investment idea as part of a formal meeting in London that held out the promise of a limited trade and investment deal after years of slow progress on an agreement.

The troubled Adani coal mine continues to raise anxieties in Australias relationship with India, but the project was not raised in the leadership talks, with the focus on investment from superannuation and other big funds.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi pictured last year. Credit:AAP

Mr Turnbull emerged from the first day of the Commonwealth summit in London to claim an enthusiasm for more free trade between the member countries including the United Kingdom after it completes its split from the European Union.
London: Australia is unlikely to follow Britain's lead in banning plastic straws, earbuds and drink stirrers, with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull saying a ban is not a simple solution to the issue and could lead to more pollution than less.

Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May has placed the huge problem of plastic pollution at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) under way in London in an attempt to "rally the Commonwealth to unite on marine waste."

The British government says there is 150 million tonnes of plastic in the worlds oceans and it kills one million birds and 100,000 sea mammals every year.
Policies Largely seen as most likely to be elected if Capp fails, Leppert says the citys growth  faster than at any time since the gold rush  is a key challenge. Has voted for the Queen Victoria Market redevelopment, but says if elected lord mayor he will work with traders and the community to retain the markets grittiness and heritage. Key policies include development of more sustainable buildings and not a glut of poor quality shoebox apartments, affordable housing, better footpaths  including the closure of Chinatown to all vehicles except deliveries  and more childcare and aged care. Has directed his preferences to Sally Warhaft and Labors Jennifer Yang. The millionaire businessman Ken Ong. Name Ken Ong

Ken Ong Age 59

59 Party affiliation Liberal Party

Liberal Party Odds $9.00 Recent history A businessman who made millions from developing and running childcare centres in middle and outer Melbourne with his late wife, Ong was on the city council for eight years until 2016. Ran against Robert Doyle in 2016. Born in Malaysia to Chinese parents, Ong is an engineer who now runs a brewery in Brunswick. The chair of planning as a councillor, he understands city development well. Has received support from former lord mayor John So.

Policies Will completely overhaul the citys planning rules if elected lord mayor, and specifically improve the citys footpaths from becoming hard to navigate due to the booming Melbourne population. Says the city needs to emerge from crisis after Doyles departure  I dont bring scandals into things, he said this week  and that the focus on city safety should be improved by more CCTV cameras. A friend of another candidate, Labors Jennifer Yang, for 25 years, he has asked that anyone who votes for him gives their second preferences to her. The committed broadcaster Sally Warhaft. Credit:Justin McManus Name Sally Warhaft

Sally Warhaft Age 48

48 Party affiliation Independent

Independent Odds $26.00 Recent history Best known as a regular broadcaster on the ABC and as the former editor of The Monthly magazine, Warhaft is also a regular presenter at the Wheeler Centre, a literary and publishing hub. Did a PhD in anthropology in the sprawling city of Mumbai (population 18 million), and focused on building communities.

Policies Stridently opposed to redevelopment of the Queen Victoria Market. Seen as only an outside chance at winning because her campaign is largely unfunded. But Ms Warhaft says it is time for a woman to lead Town Hall after almost 30 years of men wearing the mayoral chains. She has also said the toxic culture at Town Hall that led to the departure of Doyle needs to be addressed. And she has called for the creation of a night tsar to specifically work with the citys booming after-dark economy, including bars, residents, clubs and other businesses open overnight. Warhaft says Melbourne isnt providing enough affordable housing but is allowing too many shoddy, two bedroom-apartment towers to be built. The Labor outsider Jennifer Yang. Credit:Justin McManus Name Jennifer Yang

Jennifer Yang Age 41

41 Party affiliation Labor

Labor Odds $21.00 Recent history Twice the mayor of Manningham Council, Yang was initially approached by Capps backers to run as a dummy candidate feeding preferences to Capp. But she has since emerged as a serious candidate with an organised campaign run by a former aide to Bill Shorten.

Policies Yang has also promised to also address cultural issues at Town Hall that led to Doyles departure, and and said she will ban all alcohol for councillors while on Town Hall business. She has said she will back a feasibility study for a waste-to-energy centre at Fishermans Bend. Yang wants to see the council double pensioner rates rebate and put more money into resident-led local park upgrades. She also said she would cut red tape for retailers and restaurants by abolishing unnecessary council licenses, freeze all rates until 2020, and immediately commence a council-wide expenditure review. To tackle homelessness, Yang wants to build permanent a new crisis accommodation centre to get rough sleepers off the streets. Has also received backing from former mayor John So. The three-time loser Gary Morgan. Credit:Jesse Marlow Name Gary Morgan

Gary Morgan Age 76

76 Party affiliation Independent

Independent Odds $17.00 Recent history The East Melbourne resident, pollster and businessman runs Roy Morgan, Australias oldest consumer research company. Morgan has run for lord mayor for the past three elections against Robert Doyle. He has not come close to getting elected but candidates on his team have been elected as councillors each time.
The scientists spent three years programming the robot - made of arms, grippers, sensors and 3D cameras - which assembled the frame of an IKEA $25 solid-pine Stefan dining chair in about 20 minutes.

Sifting through pages of instructions and a jumble of screws and bolts to build the low-cost Swedish furniture may soon be a thing of the past given advances in technology, say researchers at the city-state's Nanyang Technological University (NTU).

They say it may not be long before such robots can fully assemble a piece of furniture from a manual, verbal instruction or by just looking at an image of the finished item.

The researchers programmed their robot to create and execute a plan to piece together most of the chair on its own, calling on a medley of human skills to do so. The researchers explained their work in a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics.

"If you think about it, it requires perception, it requires you to plan a motion, it requires control between the robot and the environment, it requires transporting an object with two arms simultaneously," said Dr Quang-Cuong Pham, an assistant professor of engineering at the university and one of the paper's authors.

"We have achieved the low level capability to teach the robot how to do it and then, in the next five to 10 years, high level reasoning - the 'what to do' - could be done too," Pham told Reuters.
Every time you leave a comment about yourself on a public Facebook post, you're unwittingly giving ammunition to data harvesters, hackers and other malicious actors looking to gain a backdoor into your online accounts.

The social network is absolutely littered with seemingly innocuous posts asking users to comment and share  what was the name of your first pet? what was the make and model of your first car? what was the name of the street you grew up on?  and it's not uncommon to see that thousands of people have obliged. But a lot of these personal, quirky details are the same as those used by sites when you need to reset your password or prove your identity.

More than 25 thousand people posted about their first concert under one of these posts. The post about cars, from the same page, drew almost six thousand answers.

Since there are so many Facebook pages that do nothing but pose these sorts of questions and spread the posts as wide as possible, would-be attackers just need to follow along and harvest the data. Even worse, by commenting on such a post you're flagging that you're not opposed to giving this kind of historical information away, and an attacker could click through to your public profile and collect an entire cache of security question answers, along with potentially your full name, date of birth and email address.

"It seems pretty clear that criminals (and a whole host of other, perhaps not totally nefarious groups and individuals) are indeed harvesting such info from Facebook," security researcher Brian Krebs, who recently wrote a blog post on the subject, told Fairfax Media.
Seoul: South Korean President Moon Jae-in said on Thursday that his rival, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, isn't asking for the withdrawal of US troops from the Korean Peninsula as a precondition for abandoning his nuclear weapons. If true, this would seem to remove a major sticking point to a potential nuclear disarmament deal.

North Korea, a small, authoritarian nation surrounded by bigger and richer neighbours, has always linked its pursuit of nuclear weapons to what it calls a "hostile" US policy that is embodied by the 28,500 US troops stationed in South Korea, the 50,000 stationed in Japan, and the "nuclear umbrella" security guarantee that Washington offers allies Seoul and Tokyo.

A man walks by a banner showing a map of the Korean peninsular to wish for a successful inter-Korean summit in Seoul, South Korea. Credit:AP

Although Moon reported that North Korea isn't asking for the US troops to leave, he said the North still wants the United States to end its "hostile" policy and offer security guarantees. When North Korea has previously talked about "hostility" it has been linked to the US troops in South Korea.

It won't be until Moon and Kim meet next week, and then when Kim is to meet US President Donald Trump sometime in May or June, that outsiders might know just what North Korea intends. Until then, caution is needed over the statements the various leaders are using to set up their high-stakes negotiations.
London: Human rights activists led by British financier Bill Browder have sent Julie Bishop the names of 40 Russians linked to murder, torture or corruption, challenging the foreign minister to prove she has the power and willingness to ban them from Australia.

The list includes the men allegedly behind the murder of Putin critic Aleksandr Litvinenko, who was poisoned with radioactive polonium in London in 2016.

Bill Browder, head of Hermitage Capital Management and anti-corruption campaigner. Credit:Bloomberg

It also includes Russian officials, judges and doctors connected to the 2009 death in Russian custody of Browders lawyer and auditor Sergei Magnitsky, after he exposed a $300 million fraud by Russian interior ministry officials.

Browder said the letter was a way of laying down the gauntlet for [Bishop] to either do it or not do it.
New York: The Democratic National Committee opened a surprise legal assault on President Donald Trump on Friday, filing a lawsuit in federal court alleging that the organisation was the victim of a conspiracy by Russian officials, the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks to damage Hillary Clinton's presidential run.

The 66-page complaint, filed in federal court in New York, uses the publicly known facts of the investigation into Russia's election meddling to accuse Trump's associates of illegally working with Russian intelligence agents to interfere with the outcome of the election.

In the document, the committee accuses Republicans and the Russians of "an act of previously unimaginable treachery."

The sweeping lawsuit startled Republicans in Washington as well as Democratic leaders, who were only briefed at the last minute about the DNC's plans to pursue civil litigation. Tom Perez, chairman of the Democratic Party, said the committee had alerted Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrats in Congress, "when we were about to file."
Once again, they filed out of class. In a new wave of school walkouts, they raised their voices against gun violence. But this time, they were looking to turn outrage into action.

Many of the students who joined demonstrations across the US on Friday turned their attention to upcoming elections as they pressed for tougher gun laws and politicians who will enact them. Scores of rallies turned into voter registration drives. Students took the stage to issue an ultimatum to their lawmakers.

Students at Clarke Central High School in Athens, Georgia walk out to protest against school shootings. Credit:AP

"We want to show that we're not scared. We want to stop mass shootings and we want gun control," said Binayak Pandey, 16, who rallied with dozens of students outside Georgia's Capitol in Atlanta.

"The people who can give us that will stay in office, and the people who can't give us that will be out of office."
John Cox, Laura Ingraham, Enrique Morones.

During a Wednesday night argument, a guest on Laura Ingrahams show just went for it and brought up the flood of advertisers that have dropped the Fox News host.

John Cox, a Republican candidate in the California gubernatorial race, and Enrique Morones, an immigration activist and the founder of Border Angels, were on to discuss opposing viewpoints on sanctuary cities. After Morones said he had no idea who Cox was, Ingraham scolded him for being rude and nasty  at which point, Morones jumped in with an insult of his own.

Wheres your sponsors? Morones asked her. David Hogg got rid of half of them. High-school kids shut you down. He was referring to the fall-out that resulted when Ingraham mocked Hogg, a Stoneman Douglas shooting survivor, for not getting in his choice colleges; since then, over two dozen sponsors  including Honda, Johnson & Johnson, and Hulu  have pulled ads from her show.

Parkland Shooting Survivors Race To Finish Yearbook

Moroness appearance predictably was cut after that jab, but it did make it on live TV  and will live on forever in video clips.
Forest High School on Friday morning. Photo: Doug Engle/AP

On Friday, students from across the U.S. participated in the second National Walkout Day, which was organized in the wake of the horrific Florida school shooting in February. But before the protest began that morning, one student at a different Florida high school was shot in the ankle and rushed to the hospital, CNN reports.

The shooting occurred at Forest High School in Ocala, Florida, shortly before the planned protests were set to start. The student who was shot is reportedly not suffering from any life-threatening injuries, though Marion County Sheriff Billy Woods did say in a press conference that the shooting was intentional. The 19-year-old suspect, who is not a student at the school, is in custody.

Back in February, 17 people were killed after a former student opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Since then, a number of the student survivors have gone on to become outspoken gun-control activists, organizing the nationwide March for Our Lives event as well as monthly school walkouts.

Parkland Shooting Survivors Race To Finish Yearbook

During the first walkout in March, which was held exactly one month after the Parkland shooting, Morgan Roof  the younger sister of Dylann Roof, who murdered nine people at a Charleston church in 2015  was arrested after bringing weapons and guns to her high school in South Carolina. Roof had posted on Snapchat earlier that day, I hope its a trap and yall get shot.

This post has been updated.
Former FBI Director James Comey testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on June 8, 2017. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Comey Memos Discredit Narrative That Trump Obstructed Russia Probe

Memos written by former FBI Director James Comey show that President Donald Trump did not interfere with the agencys investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 elections.

The declassified memos released on Thursday also revealed Comey broke the law himself by leaking secret FBI documents.

In a memo dated March 1, 2017, Comey said that President Trump agreed with the need for the FBI to conduct a thorough investigation. He also said that he had told the president that he was not under investigation himself.

The revelation disproves the narrative that President Trump had sought to abuse his power to end the investigation.

Comeys statement is also consistent with that of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who told Trumps lawyers earlier this month that the president is not a criminal target in his investigation.

Mueller was appointed Special Counsel by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein after he had recommended Trump fire Comey in part over his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.

During a visit to the White House last week, Rosenstein told Trump that he isnt a target of any part of Special Counsel Robert Muellers investigation or the probe into his longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen, Bloomberg reported, citing several people familiar with the matter.

For over a year now, media organizations and politicians have pushed the narrative that Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 elections.

An investigation headed by Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper, ordered by then-President Barack Obama, had already found in January 2017 that there was no evidence of collusion.

An investigation by the House Intelligence Committee published last month confirmed those findings, and after a year-long investigation, also reported that there was no evidence of collusion.

Comey made the surprising admission during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in June 2017 that he had leaked his memos, most of which were marked secret, to a friend with the stated purpose of having them reach the press. The friend then passed them on to a reporter for The New York Times.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General (IG) is currently investigating Comeys leaks of classified information, as well as his controversial handling of the Clinton email investigation in which he took the unorthodox step to announce that he recommended no criminal prosecution despite having initially found her guilty of gross negligence in handling classified material, a criminal offense; normally the FBI investigates, while the determination of whether to prosecute is a decision reserved to the DOJ.

On Thursday, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabes lawyer confirmed that the DOJ Inspector General had made a criminal referral for his client. McCabe allegedly leaked to the press and lied under oath.

Recommended Video: President Donald Trumps Weekly Address, April 13, 2018
Could Goldman Sachs Report Be Exposing Pharmas Real End Game of Drug Dependency vs. Curing Disease?

World Mercury Project (WMP) Note: This important article exposes how Goldman-Sachs looks at the business model of cure vs. no cure for diseases. The report asks the question: Is curing patients a sustainable business model? WMP is working to change this model.

Together, the U.S. government and American families are spending billions on medications, therapy, insurance, education, housing, etc. to address the epidemics of chronic childhood diseases. These include autism, ADHD, diabetes, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, cancer, allergies (including deadly peanut allergies), autoimmune conditions, obesity and more. The costs are staggering.

A recent government survey found that 1 in 45 children ages 3 through 17 have been diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The estimated average lifetime cost to care for a child with autism is $1.4 million if they do not have intellectual disability. An estimated 1 in 5 persons with autism also has intellectual disability. This increases the average lifetime cost of care to $2.3 million.

WMP is calling for a new paradigm that tries to stop the rise of chronic disease and cure those who are suffering now. Since these epidemics are occurring in children, the long-term consequences of so many sick children could be dire for our nation and economy in the future.

The rise in chronic illness in children is coterminous with the vaccine schedule. In 1986, there were 11 vaccines and 12.8% of our nations children had a chronic illness. In 2017, there were 54 vaccinesand 2011 figures report an astonishing 54% of children suffer from chronic illness or developmental disabilitymany of which have been associated with vaccine injuries. WMP believes the U.S. plan must be to do everything possible now to prevent chronic diseases in children and it should start with investigating our broken vaccine program.

cures could be bad for business in the long run.

Is curing patients a sustainable business model?

On April 10th, Goldman Sachs (GS) released a report called The Genome Revolution. In it, GS asked, Is curing patients a sustainable business model? People with chronic illnesses and those who have loved ones suffering with ongoing conditions will find the GS comments repugnant. Both childhood epidemics and opioid addiction are at record highs. Partner those facts with the notion that one shot and done vaccines are a thing of the past as todays failing vaccines require more boosters and it begs the question, Could the Goldman Sachs report be exposing pharmas real end game of drug dependency vs. curing disease?

The following is an excerpt from a new CNBC investing report: Goldman Sachs analysts attempted to address a touchy subject for biotech companies, especially those involved in the pioneering gene therapy treatment: cures could be bad for business in the long run. Is curing patients a sustainable business model? analysts ask in an April 10 report entitled The Genome Revolution. The potential to deliver one shot cures is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically-engineered cell therapy and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies, analyst Salveen Richter wrote in the note to clients Tuesday. While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow. Richter cited Gilead Sciences treatments for hepatitis C, which achieved cure rates of more than 90 percent. The companys U.S. sales for these hepatitis C treatments peaked at $12.5 billion in 2015, but have been falling ever since. Goldman estimates the U.S. sales for these treatments will be less than $4 billion this year, according to a table in the report. GILD is a case in point, where the success of its hepatitis C franchise has gradually exhausted the available pool of treatable patients, the analyst wrote. In the case of infectious diseases such as hepatitis C, curing existing patients also decreases the number of carriers able to transmit the virus to new patients, thus the incident pool also declines  Where an incident pool remains stable (eg, in cancer) the potential for a cure poses less risk to the sustainability of a franchise.

CNBC reported that GS analysts didnt immediately respond to a request for comment.

The World Mercury Project is addressing the chronic health issues plaguing our children by educating our communities, leaders and federal agencies to bring about meaningful change on the most important issue of our lifetimethe health and well-being of our children. Everyonechildren, parents and family, education leaders and teachers, health care and insurance providers, businesses (like Goldman Sachs and pharmaceutical companies) that employ graduates, our countrys military and morehas a stake in this fight to restore our childrens health. As children are the keys to our successful future and prosperity, we dont have a moment, or the health of any child, to lose.

Visit worldmercuryproject.org for more information.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
President-elect Donald Trump and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani shake hands following their meeting at Trump International Golf Club, November 20, 2016 in Bedminster Township, New Jersey. Trump and his transition team are in the process of filling cabinet and other high level positions for the new administration. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Giuliani Joins Trumps Legal Team, Expects to End Russia Probe Within 2 Weeks

Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani said that he will join President Donald Trumps legal team and hopes to negotiate an end to the special counsels probe into Russian election meddling in one or two weeks.

Im going to join the legal team to try to bring this to a resolution, Giuliani told New York Post. The country deserves it. Ive got great admiration for President Trump.

Ive had a long relationship with Bob Mueller. I have great respect for him, he added. Hes done a good job.

Giuliani was a prosecutor for New Yorks Southern District in the 1980s. He then served for two terms as New York City mayor from 1994 to 2001.

I dont know yet whats outstanding. But I dont think its going to take more than a week or two to get a resolution, Giuliani said. Theyre almost there.

Im going to ask Mueller, What do you need to wrap it up? he added.

For almost a year, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has been investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election and allegations of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. The investigation has not produced any proof of collusion.

The lead attorney on Trumps team dealing with the Russia probe, John Dowd, resigned on March 22. Guiliani will work with lawyers Jay Sekulow and Ty Cobb.

Cobb said that negotiations for a special counsel interview with Trump are still ongoing, The Daily Beast reported on Friday.

Giuliani has known Trump for decades and has staunchly defended him on the campaign trail and after the inauguration.

What I did for New York City, Donald Trump will do for America, Giuliani said at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland last year.

I have known Donald Trump for almost 30 years. And he has created and accomplished great things. But beyond that, this is a man with a big heart. Every time New York City suffered a tragedy, Donald Trump was there to help.

Recommended Video: President Donald Trumps Weekly Address, April 13, 2018
A man plays a Wicked Dragon slot machine at the Aristocrat Technologies Inc. booth at the Global Gaming Expo (G2E) inside the Venetian Macao resort and casino, operated by Sands China Ltd., a unit of Las Vegas Sands Corp., in Macau, China, on Tuesday, May 20, 2014. (Brent Lewin/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Hundreds of Police Officers in Southern Chinese City Accept Bribes to Protect Local Gambling Rackets

While investigating illegal slot machines in southern Guangdong Province, the Chinese Communist Partys anti-corruption agency discovered that 254 local police officers, six police station leaders, and other officials had colluded to protect local gambling rackets. They were bribed a total of 106 million yuan ($16.87 million) to turn a blind eye to gambling crimes.

The agency, called the Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), fined the offenders nearly 50 million yuan ($7.96 million), reported the state-run newspaper China Discipline Inspection Daily on April 16.

According to the article, locals in Zhongshan City, Guangdong Province had repeatedly reported to the police that slot machine businesses were running rampant in the city. However, the illegal businesses continued to flourish. On January 3, 2017, the Zhongshan City branch of CCDI started to investigate the Sanjiao town police station.

Chen Raoqing, started a slot machine business more than a decade ago. After he was fined and his business was shut down several times by police, Chen decided to bribe the police officers.

While investigating local police officers, the Zhongshan CCDI found that the heads of more than 10 police stations in towns and districts within Zhongshan accepted bribes to protect the illegal businesses, the report said.

Within two months, six police station leaders were sacked and 24 people involved in running slot machines were arrested. Afterward, more than 200 officials and police officers surrendered themselves to the anti-corruption agency.

The report said that out of all 25 local police stations in Zhongshan City, 11 were involved in the slot machine bribery case. In total, 275 state employees were involved.

In one of the local stations, in Nantou town, 70 percent of the police officers, including the police chief, were involved in bribery. Some police officers who refused to receive bribes were forced to quit their posts.

Mr. Wang, a resident of Zhongshan City, said, A lot of children were victims. They didnt go to school or go home, but would play on the slot machines all day long.

Many netizens also responded to the case. Similar situations exist in all parts of China, one commented.

Li Yun of New Tang Dynasty Television contributed to this report.

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If Mama Aint Happy

12 self-care tips for parents

You know the saying If Mama aint happy, aint nobody happy?

As parents, our emotional and mental states can have a profound impact on our home environment and on our loved ones, specifically our children. If we observe carefully, we can often see our strengths and weaknesses reflected back to us in the words, behaviors, and attitudes of our children. They are like little mirrors showing us who we are, for better or worse.

Sometimes those glimpses of ourselves can be the encouragement we need to believe we may be doing a decent job at this parenting thing. Other times, were shown exactly those habits weve been subconsciously choosing not to look at, only to find weve passed them on to our precious little ones.

This gig is not for the faint of heart.

A mothers mood even impacts her unborn child. Psychiatrist Dr. Thomas Verny once wrote, Everything the pregnant mother feels and thinks is communicated through neurohormones to her unborn child.

Moms mood can affect the entire mood and atmosphere of the household and everyone in it. Have you ever noticed, Moms, that on those days you wake up on the wrong side of the bed, everyone elses behavior heads south quickly? Even if youre doing your best to shield your kids from internal negativity, the energy is apparent and they just know something is amiss.

On the other hand, have you noticed that when your spirits are high, the household seems happier, more peaceful, and runs smoothly?

Much like the weather, the emotional climate of a home can vary and be impacted by various conditions.

Of course, Dads mental and emotional state also plays an important role in the home environment. A recent study at Michigan State University showed that fathers parenting-related stress had a harmful effect on their childrens cognitive and language development. Further, fathers mental health had a long-term impact, leading to differences in childrens social skills.

All parents want to provide their children with a safe, warm, loving, and happy home. One way parents can ensure that happens is to take care of their internal atmosphere, so to speak.

Here are 12 self-care practices for parents that can help with that.

Step Outside

Go for a walk around your neighborhood or, better yet, in the woods or near a body of water. Simultaneously enjoy the well-documented mental health benefits of exercise and being in nature.

Journal

Establish a journaling habit. Spending a few minutes each morning to jot down your thoughts can work wonders. Dont know what to write? List three things youre thankful for.

Finish

Choose a small chore, task, or to-do item thats been on your mind and take it across the finish line. Finish something and give yourself an enthusiastic high-five.

Hydrate

Before coffee in the morning, enjoy a tall glass of lemon water. Its detoxifying and hydrating and also quite tasty.

Break the Fast

Psychology professor Jordan Peterson recommends eating a large breakfast each morning, regardless of whether youre hungry for it. He says, Keep it carbohydrate light. Make it fat and protein heavy. This is especially beneficial if youre experiencing anxiety.

Anticipate Fun

Make sure you have something to look forward to. Schedule free time for yourself, or a vacation, or a fun family outingwhatever you would truly enjoy and look forward to with excitement.

Sleep

Get to bed on time. If youre not getting enough sleep, recognize that its probably taking you twice as long to get done what you need to do. Getting less sleep doesnt save time. Regular sleep rhythms and enough sleep allow your body and mind to run on all cylinders.

Ask

Get the help you need by asking. People like to help those they love. You are not an imposition. Allowing others to help you strengthens your relationship with them. Someday, when you can, youll help them back.

Hug

Hug your spouse and your children. Take the time. Pause. Show affection. Let love permeate your home.

Sniff

Scents can have a powerful effect on mood. Make your home smell wonderful. Cook. Bake. Light a candle.

Boogie

Enjoy uplifting music. Whats your jam? Turn it up.

Be Nice 

 to yourself, that is. If your loved ones heard what you say to yourself in your mind, would they be concerned? If so, flip the script and talk to yourself as if youre someone you love.
Smoke billows from the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001. Saudi Arabia and its allies are warning that legislation allowing the kingdom to be sued for the 9/11 attacks will have negative repercussions. (AP Photo/Gene Boyars)

Man Linked to 9/11 Attacks on US Captured in Syria: Pentagon

WASHINGTONA man linked to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, who was said to have praised violent jihad, was captured in Syria by U.S.-backed forces more than a month ago, the Pentagon said on Thursday.

We can confirm that Mohammad Haydar Zammar, a Syrian-born German national, was captured more than a month ago by SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces) partners as part of their ongoing operations to defeat ISIS inside Syria, Pentagon spokesman Eric Pahon said.

The Syrian Democratic Forces are an alliance of militias in northern and eastern Syria.

We are working with our SDF partners to obtain additional details, Pahon said.

The 9/11 Commission report, a Congressional account on the 2001 attacks, said Zammar was an outspoken, flamboyant Islamist who extolled the virtues of violent jihad.

#BreakingNews a recruiter for Al Qaeda in the Sept. 11 terror attacks  captured by U.S.  backed Syrian fighters. Pentagon says they've captured Mohammad Haydar Zammar pic.twitter.com/bSbyZlc8A8  Bill Ritter (@billritter7) April 19, 2018

It said Zammar reportedly had taken credit for influencing Ramzi Binalshibh, who is accused of wiring money to September 11 hijackers and passing information to al Qaeda operatives, and Mohammed Atta, who led the attack on the World Trade Center in New York City.

U.S. officials have said that there are hundreds of foreign fighters and thousands of Syrian ISIS terrorists in SDF custody.

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A woman reads with a child near the Mercado Surquillo No.1 in Lima, Peru, on Apr. 16, 2018. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

Pence Denounces Communist Dictatorships at the Summit of the Americas

Corruption, Venezuelan crisis, Syria airstrike, and drug trafficking take center stage at the eighth summit

LIMA, PeruVice President Mike Pence blasted Cuba, calling it a tired communist regime, at the Summit of the Americas on April 14. He accused Cubas dictators of exporting their failed ideology across the region and supporting the dictatorship in Venezuela.

Standing in for President Donald Trump at the Lima summit, Pence called on regional leaders to stand with the people suffering in Venezuela and to isolate the ruling Maduro regime.

In Venezuela, as in Cuba, the tragedy of tyranny is on full display, he said.

Pence walked out of the session when Cubas foreign minister, Bruno Rodriguez Parilla, was recognized to offer a rebuttal.

In Venezuela, as in Cuba, the tragedy of tyranny is on full display.  Vice President Mike Pence

The Summit of the Americas is held every three years. Thirty-three out of 35 countries in the Western Hemisphere attended the eighth summit this year on April 13 and 14.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was barred from attending the summit. Maduro earlier insisted that he would appear at the summit anyway. However, he announced later that he would not attend the meeting, calling it a waste of time. His announcement came right after Trump canceled his trip to Latin America.

The Summit of the Americas has been a complete failure, Maduro said on April 14.

Trump, who had planned to attend the Summit of the Americas, called off his visit a few days before the meeting after choosing to stay in Washington to oversee the American response to chemical attacks by the Assad regime in Syria.

Leaders of the Americas Condemn Syria

At the summit, leaders from North and South America decried the use of chemical weapons by Syria.

All countries, except Bolivia, Cuba, and the absent Venezuela, condemned Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and urged him to stop chemical attacks on his citizens.

Pence also briefed leaders on the April 13 military action in Syria.

Im pleased to report that the strike by the United States, UK, and French forces was effective, overwhelming, and successful, he said.

He criticized Russia for deliberately spreading disinformation about Assads heinous actions.

Countries including Canada and Colombia expressed support for the U.S.-led airstrike on Syria. Bolivia and Cuba condemned the United States and its allies. Argentina, Brazil, and Peru voiced concerns about escalating problems in the Middle East.

Combating Corruption

The formal theme of this years summit was Democratic Governance Against Corruption.

During the summit, all leaders pledged to confront systemic corruption, at a time when a wave of corruption scandals has been sweeping through their governments.

Host country Peru was the latest to be rocked by a bribery scandal linked to Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht that has shaken some major countries in Latin America. Peruvian President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski resigned over his role in the scandal a few weeks before the summit. His vice president, Martin Vizcarra, who took power last month, hosted the summit.

In addition, the leaders also raised concerns about the mass immigration of Venezuelans into neighboring countries as the political and economic crisis in the country deepens.

Colombia faces a massive influx of refugees. More than half a million Venezuelans have fled to Colombia, mostly in the last two years.

The United States provided $2.5 million aid for Venezuelans living in Colombia last month. And during the summit, Pence announced an additional $16 million in assistance to support Colombias efforts.

The members also condemned the murder of two Ecuadorean journalists and their driver by Colombian drug traffickers.

Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno had to return to his country early from the summit to deal with the crisis.

Reporter Javier Ortega, photographer Paul Rivas, and driver Efrain Segarra were on assignment on the border between Ecuador and Colombia for Ecuadors El Comercio newspaper when they were taken hostage by former fighters from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) last month. Moreno confirmed the deaths of the hostages on April 13.

More than a thousand FARC fighters refused to demobilize under last years peace deal with Colombia and instead joined dissident drug-trafficking groups.

Leaders expressed their solidarity with the Ecuadorian president and vowed to fight criminal gangs and drug traffickers.

The New US Initiative

As part of the U.S. delegation, White House senior adviser and first daughter Ivanka Trump also participated in the summit and announced the beginning of a new initiative by the Trump administration to promote womens empowerment in the region.

The new U.S. initiative will commit $150 million and mobilize a total of $500 million to provide access to capital and economic opportunities for women entrepreneurs throughout Latin America.

Pence also expressed Americas wish to host the next summit.

We will be submitting a bid to host the Ninth Summit of the Americas three years from now in 2021, he said.
MS-13 Threatens Hit Against Long Island Police

Expert says its likely an attempt at retaliation after gang leaders capture

Law enforcement officers on Long Island, New York, are on high alert after a threat by MS-13 gang members against police officers emerged.

Long Island is a known hotbed for MS-13 activity, and the gang is connected to at least 17 murders that took place within 18 months in the region.

Nassau County Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder said the department is investigating the threat and taking precautionary steps to ensure officer safety.

I will not tolerate any threats against my officers, and the Nassau County Police Department will continue to protect our residents and communities, Ryder said in a statement on April 19.

He encouraged residents to call 911 immediately if they see or hear anything suspicious regarding any threats.

An expert on MS-13 said the threat is likely retaliation for the recent extradition of Miguel Angel Corea Diaz (aka Reaper)a reputed major MS-13 East Coast leaderto Long Island to face a series of charges.

As a response, a lower-level MS-13 clique leader out of Long Islandeither independently or in consultation with senior gang leadership in El Salvadorhas apparently decided to strike back at the Nassau County Police Department and teach it a lesson for crossing the gang, said Robert Bunker, an adjunct research professor at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College.

Such an action would be in line with the gangs motto of mata, roba, viola, controla (kill, steal, rape, control) and the fact that it can act with impunity in El Salvador and kill police officers there at will.

Bunker said MS-13 is delusional in thinking its members can intimidate U.S. law enforcement this way.

I suspect the blowback on local MS-13 leadership and their cliques for even contemplating such a kill order will be swift and overwhelming, he said.

Its not the first threat MS-13 has made against law enforcement.

Peter Fitzhugh, deputy special agent in charge of Long Islands Homeland Security Investigations, said a street agent was greenlit by MS-13 several years ago.

They put a hit out on him, Fitzhugh said in May 2017. And so his life was in jeopardy because, I believe, how effective we were in eradicating and taking down members of the MS-13 gang.

President Donald Trump has been outspoken about his intent to eradicate MS-13. He traveled to Long Island in July last year to support law enforcement efforts against the gang, calling its members animals.

They kidnap, they extort, they rape, and they rob. They prey on children. They shouldnt be here. They stomp on their victims. They beat them with clubs, they slash them with machetes, and they stab them with knives, he said.

They have transformed peaceful parks and beautiful, quiet neighborhoods into bloodstained killing fields. Theyre animals. We cannot tolerate as a society the spilling of innocent, young, wonderful, vibrant people.

Trump said MS-13 has exploited Americas weak borders and lax immigration enforcement for years.

MS-13 gang members often recruit newly arrived unaccompanied minors from Central America who crossed the southwest border illegally and claimed asylum. Gang leaders in El Salvador use loopholes in the unaccompanied minor program to send members to the United States.

According to Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), almost 30 percent of MS-13 arrests are members who entered the United States as unaccompanied minors.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) estimates around 10,000 MS-13 gang members live in the United States.

Theyre primarily composed of immigrants or descendants of immigrants from El Salvador, and they have infiltrated our entire country, said John Cronan, acting assistant attorney general for the DOJs Criminal Division, on Feb. 6.

It is estimated that there are upwards of 2,000 MS-13 members in Los Angeles; between 800 and 1,200 in Dallas and Houston; 2,000 in Long Island; 800 and 1,000 in Boston; and 3,000 members right here in the D.C. metropolitan area, Cronan said.

In 2017, Cronan said the DOJ secured convictions against more than 1,200 gang members, including many MS-13.

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Michael Cohen (C), longtime personal lawyer and confidante for President Donald Trump, exits the United States District Court Southern District of New York, April 16, 2018 in New York City, after a hearing regarding the FBIs raid on Cohens home, office, and hotel room (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

The Attorney-Client Privilege Comes Under Siege

All our rights are put in jeopardy by a diminution of the legal professions special role

Obscured and nearly lost in a whirlwind of eventsthe release of snippets from former FBI Director James Comeys blame-it-all-on-others tell-all, the release of the Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitzs report on the firing of former FBI executive Andrew McCabe, the allied air-strikes on Syriathe week of April 9 started off with an event that has significantly diminished one of the pillars of American constitutional democracy.

In the pre-dawn hours of Monday, April 9, federal police executed no-knock warrants on the office, home, hotel room, and safe deposit box of  a major drug cartel boss? A kingpin of La Cosa Nostra? A terrorist mastermind? No, rather they were on an attorney in private practice, Michael Cohen, whose primary client is, and has been for years, Donald J. Trump.

The erosion of our constitutional rights has been an area of concern, with the politicization of the FBI; the drift toward a one-party state, as the Democratic and Republican parties become increasingly indistinguishable; and the steady diminution of our freedom of expression.

How is it possible that in the United States, an attorneys office and home can be raided by the federal police authority in order to seize documents pertaining to a clients privileged communications?

Attorneys are the instruments for preserving the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights, particularly those protecting individuals from the abuses of an intolerant government. The founding fathers understood all too well the abusive measures an intolerant sovereign could visit on sowers of dissent and on inconvenient adversaries.

To prevent the indiscriminate use of police power, and the tossing into dungeons of those with opposing views, the Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable search and seizure and the Fifth Amendment both protects against double jeopardy and guarantees due process. The Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth amendments all limit the state from using its police powers unjustly.

In addition, the Constitution has been interpreted to guarantee legal representation to all, regardless of ones ability to pay legal feesso essential was an attorneys counsel deemed to be for the preservation of these rights, these limits on the governments actions.

This constitutional right to effective assistance of counsel can only be meaningfully exercised if it is accompanied by the attorney-client privilege, which assures all individuals that they can confide in their attorneys, with confidence that their communications will not be disclosed to others. This privilege, which appeared as early as 1654 in England, is considered indispensable to the execution of a lawyers responsibilities.

In order to circumvent this privilege, the raids seem to have been done on the basis that evidence may exist of a crime that might have been committed by attorney Cohen.

While criminal activity between two individuals cannot be shielded by the privilege, to date there is no indication that the privilege between Trump and Cohen was misused. Rather, what was Cohens alleged misdeed? Lying to FBI agents. Had the agents been interviewing Cohen about suspected criminal activity, and had Cohen responded with lies, then prosecuting his falsehoods would be warranted.

However, there is more than a hint of prosecutorial abuse if FBI agents are being used to conduct interviews concerning activities that may or may not cross a line of ethical behavior in order to provide the opportunity for interviewees to shade the truth, then  Bang, youre under arrest. Now its cooperate or else.

This tactic worked with Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos, and it worked with former national security adviser Mike Flynn. Perhaps it will work with Cohenspecial tactics for a special counsels special investigation.

The sine qua non of effective representation by counsel has now been undermined. Without attorney-client privilege, protecting these rights has been compromised. And who is it that can so threaten the core principles of our democracy, so much so that even the elected president is made a victim? It is the entrenched bureaucracy, the senior civil servants, the Rod Rosensteins (who approved the raid on Cohen) and the Andrew McCabes, the James Comeys, and the Robert Muellers.

Presidents come and go, but the mandarins remain. Many began their days in the 1970s as radicals and sit-in leaders, then went on to entry-level jobs in Washington offices, then up the ladder to the SES (the senior executive service)key players in what has been perhaps over-dramatically dubbed the deep state.

This designation is bothersome, having as it does the indicia and the aura of conspiracy. Better to call it, simply and accurately, The Establishment, that ensemble of long-serving bureaucrats, academics, and media figuresnot unlike The Establishment vilified by activists in the 70s. The pendulum has swung, and those self-same activists are now themselves The New Establishment.

Are the April 9 raids and seizures of constitutionally protected attorney work an example of democracy at work, where not even the president is above the law? No, quite the opposite; it demonstrates that not even the president is protected by the law. So powerful is The New Establishment.

Marc Ruskin, a 27-year veteran of the FBI, is a regular contributor and the author of The Pretender: My Life Undercover for the FBI. He served on the legislative staff of U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and as an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn, New York.
Shooting at Florida High School  Casualties Reported

A shooting at a Florida high school left one person injured, and the suspect is in custody, according to reports on Friday morning, April 20.

Gunfire was heard at Forest High School in Ocala, the Marion County Sheriffs Office said, ABC News reported. Officials have called on the public from avoiding the area.

They said that parents should await further direction from the school on how to get their children.

The shooting occurred in the high schools main building, and the injured person is a student at Forest High School. They were taken to a local hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, officials said.

DEVELOPING: Suspect in custody following shooting at central Florida high school, authorities say; one person injured and being treated by medics. https://t.co/teS5wB0J5o pic.twitter.com/5mFZDL1Ohf  World News Tonight (@ABCWorldNews) April 20, 2018

One student shot another in the ankle at a Florida high school and a suspect is in custody, authorities say https://t.co/kPn5movcTB pic.twitter.com/SjR9yKSSk3  CBS News (@CBSNews) April 20, 2018

Officials said that its not immediately clear if the shooting was accidental or intentional.

The school is now on lockdown as police clear out the area, WKMG reported.

All Marion County schools are on lockdown, and the school walkouts planned for the 19th anniversary of the Columbine school massacre have been canceled.

Police Respond To Apparent High School Shooting In Ocala, Florida https://t.co/LzsHSQFkM3 pic.twitter.com/Nftf2KdYP4  The Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) April 20, 2018

I was just briefed by @MCSOFlorida Sheriff Billy Woods on todays shooting in Ocala. I have also spoken with @EducationFL Commissioner Pam Stewart and @FDLEPIO Commissioner Rick Swearingen. Ive offered any state support to Marion County they may need.  Rick Scott (@FLGovScott) April 20, 2018

Florida Gov. Rick Scott wrote on Twitter he was briefed on the shooting.

I was just briefed by @MCSOFlorida Sheriff Billy Woods on todays shooting in Ocala. I have also spoken with @EducationFL Commissioner Pam Stewart and @FDLEPIO Commissioner Rick Swearingen. Ive offered any state support to Marion County they may need, Scott confirmed.

Were here at the church, where parents are now showing up to get their kids. pic.twitter.com/Cw6zrCPx3j  Myrt Price (@MPriceWFTV) April 20, 2018

The FBI, the Marion County Sheriffs Office, the Florida Highway Patrol, and the Ocala Police Department have responded, Fox News reported.

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Toronto Forum Explores Chinas Economy and Political Future

Event will include launch of Epoch Times book exposing the evils of communism

The global impact of human rights violations under Chinas communist regime and how Chinas economy affects Canada are is just two of several topics being discussed at an upcoming forum in Toronto.

Taking place at the University of St. Michaels College on May 5, the forum will be preceded by the launch of The Ultimate Goal of Communism, a book published by The Epoch Times in two parts: The Ultimate Goal of Communism: China Chapter and The Ultimate Goal of Communism: The World Chapter.

The book covers the history of communism, the damage it has wrought, and how it has spread since it first appeared in the Soviet Union 100 years ago.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the communist alliance of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc soon collapsed. With the Cold War ended, it seemed as though communist ideology was facing its demise and the remaining communist countries would fall at any moment.

However, according to an Epoch Times editorial about the book, the original decree of communist ideology and communismwith a facelifthave continued to wreak havoc on the world.

Countries have openly declared that they are socialist nations, including China, North Korea, Cuba, and Vietnam. Many other countries in Africa and South America have ruled under the guise of a republic or a democracy but are in fact practising socialism. Whats more, there are also countries in Europe and North America that are not aware how their values have been eroded by communism.

The editorial describes the essence of communism as a spectre that aims to destroy mankind through the destruction of peoples culture and morality.

This book is dedicated to every single person who cares about mankinds destiny, the editorial says.

The Toronto launch is for the Chinese version of the book; the English version will be published soon.

Speakers at the forum are Conservative MP Peter Kent, a former journalist who covered major communist-related events such as the Vietnam War and the collapse of the Berlin Wall; Prof. Frank Xie, the John M. Olin Palmetto Chair Professor in Business at the University of South Carolina Aiken; and former senator Consiglio Di Nino, a leader in the Canadian-Italian community who has assisted the Canadian-Chinese communities affected by political persecution.

Also speaking are author and historian Michael Bonner, whose research includes Iranian history as well as the history of Asia and communism, and Sheng Xue, a writer, political commentator, and advocate for human rights in China.

Other themes explored by the speakers include the nature of communism and how it has affected people and society in China, methods China uses to influence Canada, and the implications of 300 million people having quit the Chinese Communist Party and its affiliated organizations and how that bodes for Chinas political future.

The event will be held at University of St. Michaels College, Muzzo Family Alumni Hall, 121 St. Joseph Street, Toronto. Book launch: The Ultimate Goal of Communism, 1212:30 p.m. Forum: Communism, China, its Economy, and Political Future, 13 p.m.
US Conducts Survey of Wharf in South Pacific Suspected as Part of Chinese Military Base

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HARTFORD  A movement to provide police officers and firefighters with mental health treatment for trauma suffered while doing their job is hitting a wall of opposition from towns and cities worried about costs.

Waterbury Mayor Neil OLeary, president of the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, said a bill before the Senate that provides lengthy leaves of absence to treat Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome could cost towns and cities millions of dollars a year.

"No state funding is included in the bill," OLeary said. "It would be a costly unfunded mandate."

But supporters say police and first responders often encounter horrific scenes  such as the Bridgeport incident last year when an officer shot and killed a 15-year-old boy  and need the protection and treatment mandated by the bill.

"We have to remember that mental health should be a priority along with physical health," said state Sen. Cathy Osten, D-Sprague, and a co-sponsor of the legislation.

The bill before the General Assembly would allow police officers suffering from PTSD or other disorders related to critical incidents while doing their job to take paid leave for up to a year.

The bill requires the state to develop and maintain a list of at least 30 mental health providers with training in PTSD and prohibits municipalities from disciplining or firing a police officer, firefighter or emergency medical service worker because they sought or received mental health treatment.

The legislation easily passed the General Assemblys Public Safety and Security Committee and is now before the Senate.

Tragic shooting

The states larger cities  Bridgeport, New Haven, Hartford and Waterbury  experience shootings and horrific incidents on a regular basis.

Last year, Bridgeport police officer James Boulay felt he had no choice but to shoot at teenager Jayson Negron after the teenager struck him with his car while trying to escape capture. Boulay opened fire, killing Negron and wounding a passenger.

Boulay was later cleared of wrongdoing but such incidents can leave officers and first responders with lingering mental trauma that requires long term treatment.

Av Harris, a spokesman for Bridgeport Mayor Joseph Ganim, a Democrat running for governor, said the mayor supports mental health treatment for police and first responders  but does not support placing those costs on towns and cities.

"What we should not do is to shoulder that burden alone, Harris said. This could easily be millions of dollars per year for Bridgeport alone."

Harris said a more realistic scenario would be to create a fund of money contributed by municipalities and the state to cover mental health expenses and help municipalities defray the cost of staffing up to fill in for firefighters and police officers impacted by work related trauma and on temporary leave."

CCM said the bill incorrectly assumes that little or no emotional support systems are in place for first responders.

"Most municipalities have Employee Assistance Programs for employees suffering from mental or emotional impairments," CCM officials said in a statement.

"These benefits provide employees access to counseling, therapy and other essential services to assist them  and their families  during difficult periods," according to CCM.

Seek out help

Rebecca St. George, a Naugatuck police officer, said in November 2017 she lost her brother, police officer Robert "Tommy" Byrne, to suicide.

Byrne was an 11-year veteran with the Naugatuck police department, a U.S. Army veteran and father, she said.

"The reason Tommy took his own life wasnt solely because he was a police officer, but it certainly was a factor," St. George told the legislatures public safety committee during a recent public hearing on the bill.

Hartford Police Union President John Szewczyk said that nationally police suicides are at an all-time high, reaching 140 last year.

"We urge [passage of the bill] so police officers will receive the proper treatment and mental health services when needed," he said.
According to financial site 24/7 Wall St., there were 371,061 reported cases of all forms of identity theft in 2017, and nearly 63,000 of them were tax fraud.

"One's likelihood of becoming a victim of identity theft appears to depend heavily on place of residence as the incidence of identity theft ranges considerably across the United States," the site writes.
Weve just returned from California where the farming season is well underway and local produce of all types is widely available. The tomatoes in restaurant salads look like the ones well see here in August. Leafy greens, artichokes, broccoli, strawberries and much more are all local in the Bay Area. In southern California, you can grab a sweet, juicy orange or grapefruit from suburban backyard trees.

In the face of all this early spring bounty, I wondered how Connecticut farmers were getting on and how farm-to-table restaurants are keeping up their commitment to local, sustainable ingredients in our short growing season.

To find out, I called Chef Robert Ubaldo at Farmers Table in New Canaan, Chef Renato Donzelli at Basso Cafe in Norwalk, and the Pirraglia family at Oak and Almond on Main Avenue in Norwalk. These restaurants seek out local suppliers to fulfill their mission. I also got in touch with Charlotte and Jonathan Janeway at Sweet Acre Farm in Lebanon, Conn. to see how the spring was going.

Spring is a tough time of year in the local food scene. As the weather warms and days lengthen, the restaurant business emerges from the winter doldrums, but the supply of local produce lags behind. Seeds and sprouts are just going in the ground now and wont be ready for months.

At Farmers Table, Ubaldo scours the region for early produce. His brother farms in upstate New York and connects the restaurant to a network of sources. Greenhouses enable some farms to get a head start on the growing season. Early crops coming onto the menu now include spinach, fiddleheads, asparagus, and mushrooms.

Ubaldo is looking forward to arugula and sorrel to brighten up his menu with fresh spring flavors. In the meantime, the sea is a source for local dock-to-dine menu items. New Bedford scallops have been a menu feature through the cold weather scallop season. Atlantic swordfish has been on the menu, too. Some farmers are getting into the meat business, so Ubaldo has been working with slow-braised New York state short ribs.

Still, he concedes, it will be a few more months before the menu is filled with local produce. Thats just the way it is in New England.

At Sweet Acre Farm, the extended winter has allowed the Janeways more time with their new baby boy, but now the spring crunch is on. Last week, they transplanted kale seedlings into their rows. The greenhouse is filling up with more trays of seedlings in shades of green  lettuce, chard, kale, choi, beets, flowers. Their heat-loving tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants are at a friends nearby heated greenhouse getting a head start.

Theres endless work prepping fields, tuning up equipment, and getting seeds and root stock into the ground. Friends and family pitch in, but still the to-do list never seems to get done. The only thing theyre offering at this point is shares in this seasons CSA. No fresh produce yet.

At Norwalks Basso Cafe, hands-on Chef/Owner Renato Donzelli is known for his innovative South American-accented Mediterranean cooking. Hes committed to locally-produced and -grown ingredients but also admits its pretty tough through the winter and early spring.

Donzelli haunts the year-round Westport Farmers Market for whatever might be available. In recent weeks, hes scored some beets, pea shoots, microgreens, and salad makings. Hes looking forward to new potatoes, sunchokes, and local asparagus. Morels and chanterelles occupy a special place in his spring menu plans.

New England lobster is a winter mainstay on the Basso menu, he told me. One of the most popular presentations is in saffron risotto. Its halibut season now. Donzelli likes to put it over roasted spring vegetables  beets, carrots, and spring onions  when he can get them.

At Oak and Almond on Main Ave in Norwalk their tag line is, Farm to Table Restaurant. The menu names a half dozen local ingredients among their extensive choices: local oysters from Norm Bloom and Sons; Hamden burrata; Ambler Farm kale; local beets, carrots, leeks, and squash; and meat from Craft Butchery in Westport.

Its a pretty impressive showing for this time of year. Their website lists 18 local farms and suppliers that they work with year round. You can see theyve made a commitment to supporting small, local, sustainable producers.

In California, the local season for fruits and vegetables can run eight or 10 months  a bounty they take for granted. Kudos to the chefs of New England who are pressed to be more creative, look harder for local sources, and treasure the flavors of each season as they come.
NORWALK  The walkout at Norwalk High School Friday morning did not go as Ethan Smyth had planned.

He expected hundreds to come out in the nationwide demonstration to end gun violence on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre, since hundreds showed up at the walkout in March. He also thought they would be able to go to Andrews Field with a police escort like they had communicated to the school administration.

Instead, only about 30 students joined him in front of the school and they were told they needed to stay on school grounds. So they formed a circle and waited a half hour before heading to the football field, in hopes more would show.

I know its not the big crowd we were expecting, but still we have each other and stuff can be done, said Xena Moy, a sophomore who later shared with the group that her grandfathers brother was accidentally shot and killed by a child who got hold of a gun. This isnt over. Were not done. Were still here and thats all that matters.

Smyth said a series of miscommunication might have discouraged students from participating. There was confusion about the start time, and some students were afraid they wouldnt be allowed back into school or would be benched at games later that day if they participated. Both would have applied if students stuck with their initial plan of leaving school grounds, according to district spokeswoman Brenda Wilcox-Williams.

Before plans changed, Principal Reginald Roberts reminded parents of this school policy in an email Thursday and the schools athletic director cautioned students as well, Wilcox-Williams said. The only repercussion for leaving the school building for the walkout would be an unexcused absence, which Moy clarified in the morning announcements.

Smyth suggested using their social media accounts to send out a clear message about the situation.

Everybody write this: As long as you come back into school, you'll be able to go to your sports meets and teachers will not be able to stop you when leaving class, the junior said.

Despite being frustrated with the turnout of events, Smyth held the walkout as planned. Some carried signs and others gave speeches about ending gun violence and promoting gun safety.

They urged legislators to amend the Second Amendment, alluding to the number of school shootings that have happened in their lifetime  including one at a Florida high school that morning.

This movement is about my life, your life, its about your brothers and your sisters life, or the lives of your sons and daughters, said Sam White, a junior. Its a movement for everyone. So we will not stop. We want change, schools need change, and laws must change.

After his speech, a Norwalk High parent stopped by to show her support for the school walkout.

Do what we didnt. Make it better, she told the crowd. You deserve to be safe first and foremost before all the other stuff at school.

Across the country, thousands of students participated in the walk-out demonstration, some taking more drastic action than the Norwalk students. In Greenwich, a small cohort staged a silent vigil outside the school after their march ended. Those students said they were told they would receive a one-day disciplinary action and be in detention Monday and kept out of classroom activities. In Darien, about 30 students left campus  some on foot, some in their cars  and boarded a train bound for New York to join other students in Washington Square Park in a protest against gun violence. The Darien students were undeterred by the threat of punishment from school administrators.

In his speech, Smyth spoke to the resilience of his generation in the movement to end gun violence.

We will not stop protesting. We will not stop speaking. We will not stop marching. We will not stop rallying and, most importantly, we will not stop fighting until our demands are met, because it is the right thing to do, the Norwalk junior said. The gun control movement is the civil rights issue of our generation. It is the human rights issue of our time. Join me in defending our God-given rights.

State Sen. Bob Duff, D-Norwalk, who came to the walkout with Mayor Harry Rilling, commended the group of students for gathering and for using their outside voices to push for gun safety. He said he will do the same in trying to pass legislation on banning bump stocks and ghost guns in Connecticut.

Sometimes, and I can tell you as a legislator, its frustrating when things take too long. But you always have to think about the marathon, not the sprint, Duff said. So keep up what youre doing and dont give up. Be grateful you all had the courage to come out here, inspiring not only each other but people inside who might take that step to come outside next time.

Robert Marchant and Justin Papp contributed to this report.

skim@hearstmediact.com; 203-842-2568; @stephaniehnkim
According to the National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS), more than 1.5 million nonprofit organizations are registered in the United States. However, during most of my career in real estate private equity, had someone had told me that Id leave that world to oversee the not-for profit NHP Foundation (NHPF), developing low-income housing, I wouldnt have believed it.

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But being involved with a nonprofit helping people in desperate need wasn't alien to me, either. For a number of years, I had been on the board of Project Hope, which operates a shelter and provides services for homeless women and children in Boston. There, I'd found it highly gratifying to help raise women out of poverty and find them work and affordable housing.

That's why the foundation's approach made me reflect back on the positive impact made by Project Hope. I could use my prior experience to address the critical shortage of affordable housing for people in need.

However, like many executives transitioning to the nonprofit world, I knew I couldn't make this decision lightly; I needed to bring my A-game. The organization Nonprofit HR notes that, Nonprofit sustainability occurs when a nonprofit attracts and effectively uses enough, and the right kinds of money necessary, to achieve [its] long-term outcome goals. Overall, sustainability comes from achieving talent sustainability, the article said.

As for my own transition to the nonprofit sector, the question was, could I parlay my experience and acumen to bring in the right talent to manage millions of dollars worth of complex private-public partnerships, resulting in thousands of affordable rental units for the working poor, families and seniors?

I finally decided that the answer was yes.

What happened when I made the move to the nonprofit world.

For the nine years I've spent so far at NHPF, I've found it both challenging and rewarding overseeing an organization providing quality housing for those in need. And, finding and retaining a smart inter-generational team with experience in housing and other industries has been key.

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We are continuously creating innovative ways to increase our nations supply of housing and to bring a robust array of services to improve the lives of our residents. Because of federal regulations, we also get to reinvest our net income and development fees in new projects.

Affordable housing truly is an impact investment -- a term that covers any socially meaningful investment. We make the most of available government programs and incentives to create affordable units, even as we provide a return to our social impact financial partners.

I'm hardly alone in this: The opportunity to pursue a passion without sacrificing a meaningful business role and salary has been the impetus for other business leaders to swap careers. The impact investing industry, after all, is a $114 billion sector, and success stories abound:

Katy Sherrat

While leading global projects for management consultancy Accenture, Katy Sherrat began volunteering for Back on My Feet, a national organization operating in 12 major cities coast to coast combatting homelessness through the combined power of community support and essential employment and housing resources.

Sherrat became connected because Accenture had a workforce development partnership with the nonprofit. After a few months of volunteering and after almost 10 years in corporate/private industry, Sherratt was given the opportunity to join the executive team at Back on My Feet.

I jumped at the chance, Sherrat told me; and six years later, she holds the title of CEO and has had a tremendous impact on the organizations success. Since she was appointed to her leader post, the organizations programming has increased by more than 75 percent, and funding has increased by over 50 percent. Said Sherrat: We are particularly proud that Back on My Feet has gone from early-stage startup to sustainable organization and is now a leader in the workforce development and homelessness services space nationwide.

Bill Henson

After a successful 32-year investment banking career, Bill Henson, a decade ago, made the transition to inner city education, initially joining the board of Cristo Rey New York High School, a private Catholic college preparatory high school that educates children of all faiths.

For the last seven years he has served full-time as president of Cristo Rey Brooklyn HS, which educates minority students, mostly immigrants or first-generation Americans of modest means. Although all families contribute something to the cost of their child's education, the school 's innovative Corporate Work Study Program covers most of it. All students work one day per week in real jobs at companies like American Express and JPMorgan Chase, with their earnings going to the school.

Henson told me he fell in love with the Cristo Rey mission and model "of a hand up, not a handout." He said he knew he could translate his corporate experience and connections to provide tangible benefits to his young beneficiaries. The proof is in the results: Cristo Ray kids from low-income neighborhoods like East New York, Brownsville, Crown Heights, East Flatbush and the South Bronx are attending college at Princeton, Duke, Cornell, Georgetown and other prestigious institutions.

Is the nonprofit world right for you?

There are as many paths to passion and profitability as there are professions. But I believe that there are some simple things to know whether as a socialpreneur you could help make a positive change:

1. Decide whether you have the passion for a nonprofit organizations. While their salaries and bonuses have to be competitive to get the talent they need, these operations typically run differently. There are rules of governance for a nonprofit or not-for-profit (there are small legal differences, but the terms can be used interchangeably) that are different from those of a for-profit company; someone new to these enterprises will have to get to know them.

2. Get immersed in the industry youre entering. Whether founding a nonprofit or considering joining one, get educated about the various options where talented people can find rewarding careers. Start by volunteering, to get a hands-on experience. But also read books and articles by experts in the field, particularly those on aspects of social impact investment. Sign up for industry trade subscriptions (many are free for a trial period), and set up Google Alerts to stay on top of daily industry news.

3. Network with others in the field. Look for contacts on LinkedIn and other sites to reach out to and chat with, as well as relevant group discussions to join. Do research online or among trade publications to find topical webinars, local events or professional seminars to attend, in order to mingle with like-minded individuals. Find ways to discuss career opportunities with management people in nonprofits whose missions interest you.

4. Appreciate the mission and the steps it will take to accomplish it. Correcting societal ills or achieving specific outcomes by working collaboratively can make for an extremely rewarding career, but these missions require long-term thinking and strategy. Embrace the process and be part of the team that creates a plan, with benchmarks and course-corrections when necessary, to help the organization advance.

Related: Should You Structure Your Business as a Nonprofit?

5. Become an evangelist for your cause. Passion ignites more passion. Once youve embarked on the path toward "socialpreneurism," share it with the world. Post to social sites, pen articles, offer to speak at gatherings. "Mission" has its own rewards. Reach out to acquaintances and strangers alike to interest them in your cause. You never know what doors you might open.

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EDWARDSVILLE  The Edwardsville Rotary is helping people in Uganda as part of its latest fundraising project.

"One of Rotary's goals is service. This includes international service," said T.K. Parthasarathy, a Rotary member who is spearheading the fundraising. John Gibbons is also working with fundraising for the project.

"Nine-million people in Uganda need food and clean drinking water," Parthasarathy said. "This project will provide drinking water and sustainable living with an irrigation project." The project involvesbuilding two wells and irrigation systems. The project is in northern Uganda, close to the city of Lira. "They have good soil, but they don't have water," Gibbons said.

Parthasarathy heard about the project through a patient at his business, Better Hearing Clinic. As he was talking with the patient's daughter, Marla Bockhorst, she said that she ran a non-profit, A Way to Help, which brought irrigation to Uganda. Parthasarathy thought that it might be a good project for the Rotary.

"Rotary has always been involved in water and irrigation," Gibbons said. "This group's focus is to provide clean water and irrigation." Gibbons said that Rotary partners with groups like A Way to Help for fundraising help. The partner group provides the services, and Rotary helps them pay for it. Each Rotary club belongs to a district. There are 50 clubs in the district in which the Edwardsville Rotary belongs.

"I'm in charge of our global grant program," Gibbons said. Projects like this are generally started by clubs, he said. "T.K. came to me and we discussed it with the district committee. The club puts in money, the district puts in money, and the international Rotary matches it," he said.

The club needs $8,500 more to finish the project. "We have raised $46,000 already," Parthasarathy said. "Individuals can donate and it will get matched by Rotary International." A Way to Help has been in operation for 11 years, and 81 of their systems are in use.

"Rotary wants all projects to be sustainable," Parthasarathy said. I n addition to A Way to Help, the Lira Rotary Club will be a partner on the project.

"Rotary International requires two clubs to make it work, so we'll have Edwardsville and a local club there," Gibbons said. "Rotary International will verify the project before giving funds," Parthasarathy said. "The local club will make sure it is sustainable."

In addition, Bockhorst goes to Uganda every year to check on the project.

"There are short-term and long-term benefits," Parthasarathy said. "When the children don't have to stand in line for water, they can do better in school. When people can grow their own food, there is less malnutrition. Everything is linked."

The two wells will benefit two villages with 12,500 people. "Over time, they can extend the irrigation system to cover more ground," he said. "The first irrigation is two acres, but they can extend that," Gibbons said.

"The people locally will have to grow the system. They will get training on maintenance, how to use the system, and help with crops. A Way to Help also has a group that maintains all the systems there."

Gibbons said that almost all Rotary projects start like this one.

"Some Rotarian sees a need, brings it to Rotary, and then it becomes an international project." About every three years, the Edwardsville club has an international project, he said.
EDWARDSVILLE  Southern Illinois University System officials have responded to proposed legislation that would change the way the SIU System is operated.

Recently three pieces of legislation have been introduced and sponsored by Rep. Katie Stuart, D-Edwardsville, Rep. Jay Hoffman, D-Swansea, Rep. LaToya Greenwood, D-East St. Louis, and Rep. Monica Bristow, D-Godfrey.

The three bills are:

 HB 5859, which calls for equal allocation of funding between the Edwardsville and Carbondale campuses.

 HB 5860, which eliminates the current members of the SIU Board of Trustees and reconstitutes the board specifying that three members be alumni of SIUE and three members be alumni of SIUC. It specifies another trustee shall be a graduate of another college or university and eliminates the provision allowing the governor to designate a voting student trustee.

 HB 5861 abolishes the SIU System and creates two separate universities in Edwardsville and Carbondale.

A joint statement, issued by SIU Board of Trustees Chair Amy Sholar and SIU President Randy Dunn, states that the SIU System Board of Trustees has not yet taken any official position on the proposed legislation.

"The board is not set to meet again in regular session until July 12  after the scheduled end of this legislative session  but it is possible trustees could convene a special meeting for that purpose," the statement said. "Until directed otherwise by the governing body of Southern Illinois University, the position that the SIU President's Office will take on these and any other proposals that could still emerge is 'neutral.'"

While the Board of Trustees and SIU President's Office are taking a neutral stance the statement does list some pros and cons of the SIU system. Notably, financial strength is highlighted. "Without a doubt, there are benefits that attach to being part of a system.

It has been pointed out during debate over previous bills to split SIU that our multi-campus system can earn better bond ratings as compared to some single campus institutions in Illinois, due to our combined fiscal strength. This in turn holds down interest and insurance costs on bonds.

Too, all campus funds are comingled for investment purposed to obtain the highest rate-of-return; likewise, SIU's risk pools are comingled for purposes of insurance savings and reduced liability." Another aspect the SIU System highlighted in the statement is the political leverage that a combined system provides.

"Our combined political leverage is stronger as a system  representing the common interests of 66 counties of central and southern Illinois, including the Metro East area  than it would be for the Edwardsville and Carbondale Campuses individually," the statement said. If the system was dissolved, the statement said, there could be salary savings. "Another positive in the eyes of many is that salary savings would be generated as there would no longer be system administrative leadership and their related staff to pay for. Rather, it is anticipated that the respective chancellors currently in place would become the interim presidents of their campuses, until newly appointed boards for SIUC and SIUE could make decisions about permanent institutional leadership."

The proposed legislation was referred to the House Rules Committee on April 12.
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.

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56 minutes ago

Johnson eyes post-COVID economy as UK Conservatives meet

LONDON (AP)  British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he was ready to take bold decisions to rebuild the economy after the coronavirus pandemic as his Conservative Party met Sunday for its first annual conference since 2019. The Tory conference opened Sunday in the northwestern city of Manchester as a shortage of truck drivers to delivery fuel across Britain continues to cause empty pumps and long lines at many gas stations.

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Levi Strauss & Co. introduced a novel benefit for employees at its San Francisco headquarters last fall: free genetic screening to assess their hereditary risks for certain cancers and high cholesterol.

Chip Bergh, Levis chief executive, said he had hoped that the tests would spur employees to take preventive health steps and in that way reduce the companys health care costs. But even Bergh was surprised by the turnout. Of the 1,100 eligible Levis employees, more than half took the genetic tests. Now, he wants to extend the benefit to employees in other cities.

It really is a differentiator, Bergh said.

West Coast companies vying for talent offer an unusual array of benefits like college loan repayment, egg freezing, surrogacy assistance and, for new mothers away on business trips, overnight breast milk shipping. Some companies have added genetic screening as well, and employees are lining up for the tests.

Instacart, Nvidia, OpenTable, Salesforce, SAP, Slack, Stripe and Snap have offered the screenings as an employee benefit. So have some companies based on the East Coast, like General Electric Appliances and Visa. All of them, including Levis, work with Color Genomics, a startup that has quickly become a leader in employee genetic screening and counselling.

But the use of screenings as an employee benefit is becoming more commonplace just as federal health agencies, researchers and physicians are wrangling over whether the tests, originally developed to establish patients inherited risks of developing certain diseases, are ready for widespread adoption.

The tests screen for inherited gene mutations that can greatly increase a persons risk of developing diseases like colon cancer or breast cancer. Doctors now regularly suggest them for high-risk patients, such as people who have close family members with certain cancers.

But for people of average risk in the general public, a screening may not be all that useful  and could even cause harm, experts said. A person without a family history of cancer may have the same problematic mutations as high-risk patients, they said, but could have lower risk of developing cancer.

A federal advisory panel on evidence-based preventive medicine currently recommends against routine screening for certain harmful breast cancer mutations for women who do not have cancer or a family history of cancer. The group concluded that the net benefit of routine genetic screening for these women could range from minimal to potentially harmful.

There is exactly no evidence that systematic screening of the general healthy population for rare genetic conditions will have a net benefit in terms of health outcomes, said Dr. Jonathan Berg, an associate professor of genetics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Most cancers are not the result of the hereditary mutations in single genes that these tests detect. Some experts cautioned that extending use of the tests to the broader population may lead some people of average risk to forgo recommended screening tests like colonoscopies. And they warned that it could also lead people to undergo unnecessary medical procedures, including going to the extreme of having surgery to remove their breasts.

You could scare the living daylights out of people unnecessarily, said Dr. Stephen Chanock, director of the division of cancer epidemiology and genetics at the National Cancer Institute.

The Food and Drug Administration, however, recently took the opposite stance. It authorized 23andMe, a consumer genetics company that had already received agency clearance to market several hereditary disease risk tests, to offer a test directly to consumers for three breast cancer gene mutations common in people of Eastern European Jewish descent.

While regulators called their decision a step forward in the availability of direct-to-consumer genetic screening, they explicitly warned that the test did not detect most mutations that increase breast cancer risk. They also warned consumers not to use the tests as a substitute for qualified medical care and genetic counselling.

Color, the genomics company, takes something of a middle road. It markets comprehensive medical diagnostic tests that screen for all mutations of certain genes known to be linked to certain kinds of hereditary cancers and heart risks. It has doctors available to order its tests online for users and provides genetic counselling to discuss users results.

By using genetics, you can help some people prevent or interrupt something at an earlier stage where the costs are much lower, said Othman Laraki, chief executive of Color Genomics. The startup advises users that they could develop major diseases even if their test results show no harmful mutations.

Executives at SAP and Nvidia said they hoped genetic screening might ultimately help prevent at least a few late-stage cancers, the kinds of life-threatening illnesses that can debilitate employees and cost companies with self-funded health plans more than $1 million in medical fees.

After Nvidia began offering free screening from Color last year, about 27 per cent of its 6,000 eligible employees in the United States took the test. After SAP started subsidizing the genetic tests last year, about 17 per cent of the companys 30,000 eligible employees and family members participated.

Color has raised $150 million from venture capital firms like General Catalyst as well as Bay Area tech luminaries including Max Levchin, a PayPal co-founder; Sundar Pichai, Googles chief executive; and Laurene Powell Jobs, a philanthropist-investor who is the widow of the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

The company has reduced genetic testing costs by using robotics and machine learning and eliminating tasks like in-person pre-screening by doctors. It charges $249 for hereditary risk screening for eight of the most common cancers and began offering that price while more established medical diagnostics firms were charging $4,000 for similar tests.

The price point appealed to OpenTable. It started offering genetic screening benefits after an employee with a history of cancers told executives she was spending thousands of dollars out of her own pocket to pay for hereditary risk tests.

This was a really interesting opportunity to provide some choice to our employees that was accessible and affordable so they could better understand their own personal health, said Christa Quarles, chief executive of OpenTable.

As for privacy concerns, executives at several companies said that Color regularly sent them aggregated data on the number of employees with harmful disease mutations, but that the data is not tied to identifying details like employees names or birth dates.
EDMONTONWith marijuana legalization around the corner, organizers of Fridays 420 celebrations at the Alberta legislature expect it to be bigger and bolder than ever.

The only thing Im planning on doing different this year is Im planning on consuming even more marijuana. And Im going to be even cockier while I flout the law, said Kenneth Kirk, who also goes by Dr. Reefer.

I think I might hold my nose in the air more  not only to be an arrogant bastard, but also to smell the fine bud.

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Kirk has been a pot activist for 30 years and was one of the earliest organizers of Edmontons 420 celebrations in the 1990s.

Armed with a doctorate in divinity from the University of the Universe, Kirk said he did jail time for marijuana possession in the 1990s  thats where he got his nickname  and bounced back to run for office as leader of the Alberta Marijuana Party.

Kirk suspects hes not the only one who will be especially audacious with his not-yet-legal substance use on the legislature grounds Friday.

He says looming legalization will make smokers feel they are less likely to get busted and many will revel in having one last chance to flout the law.

But Keith Fagin with the Canada 420 Cannabis Community warns revellers to cool it with the brazen blazin.

He has spoken at many local 420 events, and is on a mission to encourage mutual respect between tokers and officers.

We know they are arresting people still. They are closing down these illegal dispensaries more. But a lot of the youth had the mistaken knowledge that it was a free day to consume, it was legal for that one day, Fagin said.

Were here to educate the youth. And thats what its all about, is the education.

Fagin said his job will not be over once the drug is legal.

He is fighting to end the stigma around cannabis use, while advocating for more research into medicinal marijuana and a loosening of what he calls restrictive laws proposed by the federal and provincial governments around legalization.

He does, however, believe the looming legalization could bring people out in record numbers on Friday.

I think theres going to be more people who will show up who wouldnt show up before due to the stigma, Fagin said. The stigma still is pretty strong, so itll be another year or two before you see the numbers even climb more. But I would suspect if the weather holds that well get at least 10,000 people this year.

Kirk said cannabis acceptance has come a long way in recent years as 420 celebrations have gone global.

He said he has attended and participated in several cannabis conferences this year. When the province was taking feedback for its weed regulations, Kirk said he submitted a letter to Justice Minister Kathleen Ganley.

Its like all of a sudden, were mainstream, he said.

I dont have to do anything for 420 anymore. I dont have to organize shit. Nobody does. It just happens. And thats the beauty of 420, its grown beyond any one or two little pot activists.

The federal government has promised to legalize cannabis across Canada later this year.

Kirk is not as excited about legalization as one might suspect, however.

He remains apprehensive about the plan, which he refers to as Prohibition 2.0.

Kirk said harsh penalties for those who continue to sell outside the rules mean the black market could continue to grow along with the new regulated market.

All of the people who have been supplying Canadians their marijuana, the black market or whatever, most of those are not going to be able to jump through the regulatory hoops, he said.

If you dont mind locking up grandpa so that Shoppers Drug Mart can sell weed, then this prohibition is really good.

The Alberta legislature event, billed as a pro-cannabis celebration, rally and protest, is slated to start at 1 p.m. Friday.

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EDMONTONIn his last report as Albertas auditor general, Merwan Saher empowered the public to call on politicians to think beyond the end of their terms and prove decisions they make today will lead to sustainability decades into the future.

I wish I had had the wisdom to make this point in my very first report. I didnt, said Saher, speaking to media ahead of presenting his report, Putting Albertas Financial Future in Focus, on Thursday afternoon.

Saher said at no time has a provincial government in Alberta put forward long-term fiscal reporting, instead focusing on short-term planning that follows election cycles.

This short-term focus presents a huge risk to Albertans, said Saher, as it allows government to make decisions without having to prove that its choices will be sustainable into the future.

Ask the government of the day to show you, through long-term reporting, that they are in fact looking after your interests, which is not just your interests, I believe its the next generations interests. Your children and your childrens children, Saher said.

One area where this may be important, Saher suggested, is in measuring the fiscal gap in Albertas budget in the context of dwindling resource revenue.

Without oil and gas revenue, Alberta would have run a deficit every year for the past 35 years, according to data compiled by the Office of the Auditor General.

The Alberta government would have had a $15-billion fiscal gap  measuring the difference between a governments spending and debt and the revenue it brings in  in 2017.

As the government looks to a future where oil and gas revenue becomes less dependable, Saher suggested the public should demand policy-makers prove they are prepared to maintain programs and services for generations to come.

Asked if you need to be a psychic, the answer is no. It is quite possible to forecast oil and gas revenues 35 to 40 years, Saher said, adding that the industry already uses long-term forecasting.

While the provincial budget tabled in March projected a balanced budget by 2023  relying on expected revenue from pipeline projects, including the embattled Trans Mountain pipeline expansion  the public heard strong criticism from the opposition over the fact that the plan would also see the province accumulate $96 billion in total debt.

Todays virtual reality budget dives Albertans into an endless sea of debt. When the NDP came to office, Albertans owed $11 billion. They are projecting today a debt of $96 billion in this fiscal plan, an increase of 640 per cent in Albertas debt, meaning we will be spending billions on interest payments to bankers instead of funding public services, said Jason Kenney, following the tabling of the 2018 provincial budget.

What wasnt discussed, however, is the sustainability of any plan to pay off that debt  should that be the goal  into the future.

Every dollar of borrowing has a cost, said Saher.

Other issues expected to weigh on Albertas economic future include an aging population, bringing with it a reduced labour force, while increasing demand on public services, or chronic health issues  such as rising rates of obesity and diabetes  put pressure on the health-care budget.

Its really just a test that the future is understood, said Saher, adding, the way of testing whether what were doing today is sustainable into the future is to actually look out into the future and not say its too difficult a thing to do.

Saher will complete his eight-year term as auditor general on April 28.

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EDMONTON  The Edmonton Chamber of Commerce is joining a coalition of business groups urging the premier of British Columbia and the prime minister to go ahead with the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.

Chambers across the Edmonton region are weighing in on the gridlock between the Alberta and British Columbia governments over expanding Kinder Morgans Trans Mountain pipeline.

We desperately need access to markets for the product that were producing  new markets that are willing to pay good rates for our products, said Janet Riopel, president and CEO of the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce. Those markets need to be accessed by tidewater.

The coalition made three requests to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and B.C. Premier John Horgan on Wednesday. Among them is a request for resources to assist with policing efforts against protesters who want to delay construction and a call for continued dialogue between Trudeau, Horgan and Premier Rachel Notley.

Currently, the Trans Mountain pipeline can carry 300,000 barrels of oil from the Edmonton area to British Columbia. Kinder Morgan, the Texas-based company that owns the pipeline, is hoping to build a new pipeline that would almost triple the present output.

According to the Edmonton chamber, approximately 700 would-be construction jobs in the region are on the line if the pipeline doesnt get built.

The best interests and pride of Canadians and our confederation  economically, socially, politically  depend on this pipelines construction, said Ken Kobly, president and CEO of the Alberta Chambers of Commerce, in a statement.

The rule of law must prevail or we will lose our ability as a nation to champion the benefits of peace, order and good government with integrity to the global community.

On Wednesday, Horgans government announced it will file by the end of April a long-promised court reference to clarify questions around provincial authority over such interjurisdictional megaprojects.

The CEO of Kinder Morgan says events in recent days have reinforced his concerns about the viability of the Trans Mountain expansion project.

Its become clear this particular investment may be untenable for a private party to undertake. The events of the last 10 days have confirmed those views, Steve Kean said on a conference call Wednesday.

Weve pointed out there are significant differences between governments, and those differences are outside of our ability to resolve.

In Edmonton, Notley said her office was told by Kinder Morgan that Keans comments were directly tied to B.C.s court reference announcement and that the companys broad commitment to the project remains unchanged.

The message were getting back is that they (Kinder Morgan) are pleased with the high level of engagement that is happening between both us and the federal government, said Notley.

Kinder Morgan, in a statement issued late Wednesday, echoed Notleys comments, saying: We are actively engaged with the federal and Alberta provincial governments and those conversations will continue in good faith. Nothing has changed in that regard.

The company is caught in the middle of a political feud between Alberta, B.C. and the federal government over the $7.4-billion project.

The project was approved by the federal government in 2016, but has since faced court challenges and permit delays in B.C. Horgans government says it still has concerns over the impact of the expansion on the potential for oil spills on its waterways and coastline.

Kinder Morgan announced April 8 it was scaling back construction, citing obstruction by B.C. that put the financial viability of the pipeline in question. It gave a deadline of May 31 for a clear signal the project can get built.

Riopel said the pipeline is vital not only to Alberta, but to all of Canada.

Its about more than a pipeline, she said. Its about international investor confidence in Canada.

With files from The Canadian Press

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I havent danced like this in 10 years, beamed Galen Weston.

The mild-mannered blueblood may be more likely to be seen flogging veggie samosas or wild blueberries on the tube in his role as grocery magnate, but on this April night in Toronto it was all about supporting wife Alexandra Westons singular passion: elephant conservation.

Earlier had come a black-tie supper for 134 where, yes, there was an elephant in the room  a simulacrum of one, anyways, acting as a giant centrepiece. Quickly, though, the night dissolved into a smaller dance party, propped up by a fresh dose of hip hop.

The location: the elegantly sprawling atrium of the Art Gallery of Ontario where the ongoing ardour for Yayoi Kusamas dots had, at least for one eve, been supplanted by a zeal for trunks.

The guest list: a sponge of society and fashion types, headed by Weston, the director of creative strategy at Holt Renfrew, along with her co-host, Doutzen Kroes, the Dutch supermodel-turned-global ambassador for the Elephant Crisis Funds Knot on My Planet campaign.

The message: that elephants are still being killed for their ivory faster than they reproduce, as Iain Douglas-Hamilton, the godfather of elephant research and founder of Save the Elephants, a charity in Kenya, informed the room. In countries such as Tanzania and Mozambique, populations have dropped 60 per cent in the past several years; and even though, according to some stats, the rate of fatalities appears to be declining, its also sadly a sign that there are fewer elephants that are easy prey for poachers.

For the young Mrs. Weston  a tastemaker bearing her usual strain of no-fuss elegance in a red gown courtesy of sustainable designer AMUR  it had been quite the day. A Bata via her mothers family, the night of the gala happened to coincide with a memorial service held hours earlier for her grandmother, Sonja, a city icon. Her recent death marked a funnelling out, indeed, of the old social topography.

Enter  Alex?

Crossing paths with her in the hall between courses  harissa-glazed golden beets, anyone?  we moved on to talk a little bit about her love of elephants and their inherent grandeur, both of us agreeing that whats especially amazing about seeing them up close is how utterly silent they are (as I experienced during a maiden safari in Kenya last year). Though an elephant can be upwards of 10,000 pounds, you may not necessarily see them coming, often only detected by the here-and-there snapping of branches. It adds to the whole emotional experience.

So silent! Weston echoed. The first time I saw an elephant  I could watch them for years. I found them mesmerizing and fascinating, and it just sort of put me in perspective.

Even more compelling: elephants are said to share many of the same characteristics as humans, even drawn toward creating communities much like we do. Intuitive and close-knit, they learn from their elders and  as National Geographic has reported  exhibit a mysterious and complex phenomenon that looks quite a bit like a mourning ritual for their dead.

Elephants, theyre just like us!

Reflecting on her grandmothers life and her own familial mourning  Sonja Bata, Whose Museum of Shoes Tells a Story, Dies at 91 read the headline in The New York Times  Weston said it had been a singular experience to enjoy such a long relationship with her. Its amazing, my kids knew their great-grandmother! Some dont really know their grandparents.

She says her own mom, Christine Schmidt Bata, plans to shepherd the museum that is Sonjas living legacy, the shoebox-shaped edifice on Bloor St. W., which houses more than 13,000 shoes, spanning 4,500 years.

Family and preservation. The personal and the philanthropic. It was just that kind of night.

Meanwhile, for fellow co-host Kroes, whose own first contact with elephants happened in Kenyas Samburu National Reserve, which she visited with her husband and kids  we watched elephants, like you, for hours. You can see theyre such complex animals. Their emotions are so close to human  the experience then irretrievably turned into a non-stop crusade of sorts.

Acknowledging that Knot on My Planet has taken over my life, hers is a mission that has involved enlisting famous friends like Leonardo DiCaprio, along with most of the worlds top models. She cajoled the Holy Trinity, Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington, into posing for a picture while holding up a knotted bow in support of the charity. It was the first time all three had posed together since 1989.

Channelling their efforts into a group that puts 100 per cent of donations toward stopping the illegal ivory trade, the Elephant Crisis Fund has topped somewhere in the arena of $17 million. And though the work has clearly borne fruit, there remains much to do.

People are so passionate about this subject. Everybody loves elephants. We need to continue to teach people around the world that ivory should not be a luxury item; the demand has to stop, Kroes says. Thats why one of our slogans is, Its human greed that takes the ivory, but its also human generosity that can change it.

So while the cause of the night was dead serious  Douglas-Hamilton was heard explaining to a gaggle of gala-goers that researchers currently use GPS animal tracking to study the movement of wild elephants, data then shared with the tap of a finger on a phone with rangers across the African continent  there was a healthy dose of levity at the event, too.

Referring to the gargantuan floppy-eared wild mammals, one partygoer quipped, You know, I think this is the first society event Ive been to in this town thats actually pro-wrinkles.
SPRINGHILL, N.S.  A young man has been arrested after police say someone threatened to come to a Nova Scotia school with a weapon.

The alleged threat at Springhill Junior and Senior High School was made at about 9:40 a.m. Thursday, police say in a release.

Officers with both the RCMP and Amherst Police Department went to the school and about three hours later arrested an 18-year-old man on Edgewood Avenue in the nearby town of Amherst.

There is no risk to the public at this time in relation to this incident, a police statement said Thursday afternoon.

In an email to StarMetro, RCMP spokesperson Cpl. Jennifer Clarke said she didnt know if the suspect had a weapon when he was arrested.

The release doesnt give any details to what the specific threat was.

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COLE HAROUR, N.S.A Canada-wide warrant has been issued for a Cole Harbour man wanted in connection to an upcoming attempted murder trial.

In a media release, Halifax District RCMP said they issued the warrant for Markel Jason Downey, 22, on Friday.

Hes wanted in connection with a triple shooting that took place in Cole Harbour on Nov. 30, 2014.

One of those hurt was a young woman who was left paralyzed from the chest down and is now confined to a wheelchair.

Downey is facing a new trial in relation to three charges of attempted murder in connection to the 2014 incident, and police are actively trying to locate him.

An RCMP spokesperson said officers exhausted all their options in trying to bring Downey back into custody, leading to the release of the Canada-wide warrant.

That's involved going to known places where he may be, checking with family and friends and other community members, said Cpl. Dal Hutchinson in an interview Friday.

Anyone who thinks they recognize Downey is advised not to approach him and to contact police immediately by calling 911.

Anytime when someone's involved in an incident such as this ... three charges of attempted murder ... then we would caution anyone and everyone to keep safety in mind when around an individual who's wanted on such charges, said Hutchinson.

Hutchinson added that RCMP officers do not know whether Downey has left the local area or not.

People with information about Downeys whereabouts are being asked to call police at 902-490-5020. Anonymous information can also be passed along through Nova Scotia Crime Stoppers.

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HALIFAXAs Canadians light up across the country to celebrate 420, a Halifax medicinal business owner says theres still plenty left to fight for despite the upcoming legalization of cannabis this summer.

Its just beginning, said Chris Enns, owner of Farm Assists dispensary on Gottingen street.

We have a narrowing of the industry from craft producers that have been actively supplying Nova Scotians for decades now to a handful of mega licensed producers that are only going to be able to sell a very limited number of products, he said.

No edibles, no concentrates. And so in reality, it looks to me, like its just prohibition moving forward.

Canada is set to legalize recreational cannabis on July 1. Nova Scotia passed the Cannabis Control act this week and will be selling the drug at nine NSLC locations around the province this summer.

Enns has been a long time advocate for medical cannabis use and has been arrested four times over the last four years.

I think theyve made some pretty aggressive efforts in the past few years to shut down dispensaries, but when those efforts are brought before the courts theres simply no traction to move forward on a viable prosecution, he said.

Under current law medical cannabis patients are allowed to grow their own cannabis or designate someone to grow it for them. With the medical cannabis framework staying the same under Bill C45, Enns says dispensaries arent going anywhere.

I think until the federal government develops a distribution scheme that allows patients to access edibles, allows patients to access extracts, and allows patients to access tinctures and concentrations above the 3 per cent that theyre currently restricted to federally, and until those distribution schemes are in place, dispensaries will continue to fill those gaps, he said.

Enns is especially disappointed in the Nova Scotia governments lack of consultation with those involved in the medical cannabis industry.

I think Nova Scotians have a lot to say and its going to create a lot of issues in the courts moving forward, Enns said.

It will be much more expensive to deal with than it would have to just deal with it in parliament or legislature beforehand.

With the upcoming legitimization of recreational cannabis use, the celebrations themselves are changing. Most of the 420 celebrations across the city are concentrated around the existing lounges and dispensaries that have popped up over the last several years.

I feel with legalization approaching, the focus is shifting more to enjoyment of the herb and also the financial opportunities that will arise from legalization, said Chris Henderson of the High Life Social Club.

Everyone wants to be part of the industry and sees the potential; even people who know very little about cannabis or have no passion for the plant itself.

High Life is holding a farmers market Friday consisting of local retailers involved in the cannabis industry and then a concert later this evening.

Farm Assists is also sponsoring a Friday night event at the Marquee on Gottingen Street with headlining house DJ Gene Farris coming from Chicago.

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See whats available  and for how much  with a selection of GTA Open Houses.

SWANSEA

Location: 11 Riverside Cres.,

Bloor St. W. and South Kingsway

Type: two-storey detached; 5 bedrooms; 5 bathrooms

Asking price: $3,200,000

Open house: Saturday, April 21 and Sunday, April 22, 2-4 p.m.

Listing agent: Kari Emond, sales representative, Sutton Group Realty Systems Inc., Brokerage, 416-414-1497; www.urbantorontoproperties.com

Features of the home and property include: hardwood floors throughout the main floor; living room with wood burning fireplace; large basement recreation room with hardwood floor and wood burning fireplace; backyard backing directly onto the Humber River, with a private west-facing dock at the water.

Location highlights are: steps to South Humber Park; close to Rennie Park, High Park, schools and a community centre; near Bloor St. W. where there are stores, business, restaurants, a cinema and the subway.

SCARBOROUGH

Location: 8 Dunhill Ave.,

Lawrence Ave. E. and Centennial Rd.

Type: two-storey detached; 4 plus 1 bedrooms; 4 bathrooms

Asking price: $968,800

Open house: Sunday, April 22, 2-4 p.m.

Listing agent: Jill Fewster-Yan, Royal LePage Signature Realty, Brokerage, 416-443-0300; www.jillsteam.ca

Features of the home and property include: hardwood floors on the main level; kitchen with stainless steel appliances and granite counters; master bedroom with walk-in closet and four-piece ensuite; family room with gas fireplace and walkout to deck; finished basement with recreation room, second kitchen with stainless steel appliances, guest bedroom and four-piece bathroom; fully fenced backyard.

Location highlights are: walking distance to the TTC, elementary and secondary schools, parks and a community centre; close to a GO train station and Hwy. 401.

KAWARTHA LAKES

Location: 62 OReilly Lane,

Elm Tree Rd. and Beach Rd.

Type: detached bungalow; 3 plus 1 bedrooms; 3 bathrooms

Asking price: $849,900

Open house: Saturday, April 21 and Sunday, April 22, 1-3 p.m.

Listing agent: Pearl Carrigan, Coldwell Banker R.M.R. Real Estate, Brokerage, 905-985-9777; www.cbrmr.com

Features of the home and property include: brick exterior with oversized double car garage and car port; sun room and family room with walkout to deck that overlooks Lake Scugog; living room and dining room with hardwood floors; master bedroom with four-piece ensuite and walk-in closet; fully finished basement with recreation room with a gas fireplace and walkout, extra bedroom and office; professionally landscaped yard with multiple decks, a pond, a hot tub and a covered boat slip.

Location highlights are: fifteen minute drive to Lindsay and twenty minute drive to Port Perry where there is shopping, restaurants and amenities; property backs onto Lake Scugog; about an hour-and-a-half drive to central Toronto.

ETOBICOKE

Location: 109 Chartwell Rd.,

The Queensway and Islington Ave.

Type: detached bungalow; 3 bedrooms; 2 bathrooms

Asking price: $1,075,000

Open house: Saturday, April 21 and Sunday, April 22, 2-4 p.m.

Listing agents: Mary Ann Stokke Royal LePage Real Estate Services Ltd., Brokerage, 905-822-6900; www.stokkerealestate.com and Rosemarie Wallace, Re/Max Realty Enterprises Inc., Brokerage, 905-855-2200; www.askrosewallace.com

Features of the home and property include: new hardwood floors throughout the main level; updated eat-in kitchen with ceramic tile floor and new counters and backsplash; basement with separate entrance; two renovated bathrooms with ceramic tile floors.

Location highlights are: across the street from a park, steps to schools; close to shops, places to eat, businesses, banks, and a grocery store; walking distance to Reid Manor Park where there is a walking trail; easy access to the Gardiner Expressway.

TORONTO

Location: 28 Ted Rogers Way, Unit PH5,

Jarvis St. and Bloor St. E.

Type: condo unit in highrise building; 1 plus 1 bedroom; 1 bathrooms

Asking price: $599,000

Maintenance fees: $450 a month

Open house: Saturday, April 21 and Sunday, April 22, 2-4 p.m.

Listing agent: Wins Lai, Living Realty Inc., Brokerage, 416-903-7032; www.winslai.com

Features of the unit and building include: combined living room and dining room with hardwood floors and walkout to balcony; kitchen with granite counters, double sink and stainless steel appliances; master bedroom with built-in shelves, mirrored closet and laminate floor; building amenities include a concierge, gym and party room.

Location highlights are: a short walk to Yonge St. and Bloor St. intersection, the Hudsons Bay Centre, and Yorkville stores and restaurants; walking to distance to both subway lines, a movie theatre and the Toronto Public Library; walking distance to University of Toronto.
Standing alongside Indigenous leaders and advocates, David Suzuki broke down Thursday evening while issuing a call for justice on behalf of mercury-poisoned Grassy Narrows First Nation  after decades of government inaction and new promises to clean the river of contamination.

The resilience of the people of Grassy Narrows, Suzuki told a Toronto audience, gave him hope that his grandchildren can live full lives despite what seems to be a bleak future for the Earth.

My inspiration comes from the fact you havent given up, said the environmentalist and broadcaster, his voice choked with tears. ... We have the opportunity to learn from you.

Resilience was a central theme of the event. Advocates and community members  including Grassy Narrows Chief Rudy Turtle and community elder Judy da Silva  spoke about the mercury contamination that has sickened generations in the northern Ontario community, but also about historic fights by residents over land rights and the haunting legacies of residential schools, flooding and relocation.

Its Kafkaesque trying to get justice for these very clear injustices, moderator Hayden King said.

The mercury poisoning began in the 1960s, when a pulp and paper mill in Dryden dumped 10 tonnes of mercury into the Wabigoon River, a vital resource for both Grassy Narrows and nearby Whitedog First Nation. The Star has previously reported on governments failure to take action, despite years of reports from community members and a tip from a former mill worker about mercury contamination upstream from Grassy Narrows.

Enough research. Enough analysis. Enough promises. Its time to act, said panellist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson.

Elder Peter Schuler of the Mississaugas of the New Credit added that he first learned of the situation in Grassy Narrows when he was 21 years old. Nothing has changed. Now Im 71 years old, he said.

The Ontario government recently committed $85 million in funding to clean up the river. A $5-million care home is also planned for residents suffering effects of mercury exposure. But for Chief Turtle, the real hurdle now is making sure those promises are kept.

We are in the initial stages. Its not exactly what we were hoping, but its moving, he told the Star in an interview.

Turtle added that even after the mercury is cleaned from the river, it may take generations for its ill effects to disappear from his community. We would like to start as soon as possible.

Read more:

Province and Ottawa criticized for handling of Grassy Narrows mercury poisoning

Ontario knew about Grassy Narrows mercury site for decades, but kept it secret

University of Alberta stands by decision to give David Suzuki honorary degree  in spite of online backlash
A federal proposal for reducing delays in the courts could have the unintended consequence of making access to the justice system even more difficult for many people, legal experts say.

The Liberal government wants to shift some of the caseload away from Superior Court by increasing the maximum penalty for all criminal cases heard in provincial court  known as summary offences  to two years less a day in jail.

However, that would effectively prevent paralegals and law students from representing defendants in provincial court, as they regularly do now, because the Criminal Code only allows them to act in cases where the maximum penalty is six months in jail.

By increasing the maximum penalty for all summary offences, the federal government would boot them out of court.

It would create, in my opinion, a terrible access-to-justice issue, said Stephen Parker, president of the Ontario Paralegal Association.

Defendants who use paralegals or law students tend to fall into a gap, neither qualifying for legal aid nor being able to afford a lawyer. Critics say the governments proposal will mean more accused will be left to fend for themselves in court, and risk being saddled with a criminal record and all of the employment, travel and immigration consequences that flow from it, not to mention possibly face jail time.

But for our students, the clients would be there unrepresented, said Lisa Cirillo, executive director of Downtown Legal Services, a legal clinic with the University of Torontos faculty of law.

That is an access-to-justice crisis, both for the clients and the courts, because it slows everything down if you have clients in there who dont understand the process, dont know whats expected of them, and cant get access to legal advice.

Summary convictions that currently carry a maximum penalty of six months in jail include causing a disturbance and public nudity.

Other summary offences, such as impaired driving, have maximum penalties of 18 months in jail, while a few dealing with sexual offences involving children already have a maximum penalty of two years less a day in jail.

David Taylor, spokesman for federal justice minister Jody Wilson-Raybould, pointed out that there is a provision in the Criminal Code that allows provinces to create a program allowing paralegals and students to defend cases where the maximum penalty is above six months.

A spokesperson for Ontarios Ministry of the Attorney General said the government is considering the issue. Only Alberta and British Columbia have approved such programs since that provision in the code was enacted in 2002.

Bill C-75, the governments massive package of reforms to the justice system announced in March, will provide provinces and territories with the tools they need to speed up the justice system, in the wake of a landmark Supreme Court of Canada ruling in 2016 that set strict timelines to bring criminal cases to trial, Taylor said.

The Criminal Lawyers Association (CLA) said it would be concerned if the province created a program allowing paralegals to defend even more serious cases should C-75 pass and make all summary convictions punishable by a maximum penalty of two years less a day in jail.

Daniel Brown, a Toronto director of the CLA, noted that students work in provincial courts under the supervision of criminal defence lawyers and its unlikely they would be permitted to defend serious criminal cases.

We dont think that paralegals have the same type of training, background and supervision that should allow them to continue to represent accused persons on what would now also include very serious criminal charges with steep penalties, Brown said.

Parker disagrees, saying his association has long wanted paralegals to have the ability to defend more serious cases. He said prior to the regulation of paralegals by the Law Society of Ontario in 2007, they were permitted to act in such cases.

They didnt have any training at all apart from their own experience, and there really was no issue with competency, he said. Just because the maximum penalty has been increased doesnt reduce somebodys competency to be able to present a full answer and defence on behalf of a client.

Aside from the impact on access to justice, the amendment in C-75 would deal a blow to law students looking to get experience in criminal law. Cirillo said campus legal clinic directors will be meeting to discuss advocacy around the issue.

We feel like the government couldnt possibly have intended to do this, Cirillo said.

We feel there's such a huge access to justice issue in our country, we feel like they couldnt have meant to wipe out the ability of all of these clients to access legal assistance, she said.
CALGARYA Supreme Court of Canada ruling on bringing beer from Quebec into New Brunswick has implications for the trade war between Alberta and B.C. over the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, experts said Thursday.

The court seemed to be addressing the issue in its decision when it noted that while some trade barriers can be allowed in some circumstances, those designed to punish another province or to protect a local industry would not be permissible, they said.

The decision protects provincial liquor monopolies by finding that New Brunswick had the right to fine Gerard Comeau for buying alcohol in Quebec and transporting it over the border, said Howard Anglin, executive director of the Canadian Constitution Foundation.

Read more:

Supreme court upholds laws limiting amount of alcohol moved across provincial borders

The N.B. retiree whose border-beer battle could change Confederation

Kinder Morgan CEO says lingering feud confirms Trans Mountain pipeline may be untenable

But the part of its decision that talks about punitive trade barriers could likely be interpreted to apply to Albertas recent threat to restrict oil and fuel shipments to B.C. and its previous short-lived restriction on buying B.C. wine, he said, both designed to pressure B.C. into dropping its opposition to the pipeline.

It certainly would limit the short-lived wine ban that Alberta instituted, said Anglin. It could potentially limit its ability to restrict the flow of oil. Its certainly possible.

Language in the decision suggests the court was thinking about the Trans Mountain dispute, said Shea Coulson, a lawyer who represented five B.C. wineries as intervenors in the Comeau case.

I think the judgment goes directly to those sorts of issues, he said in an interview. And theyre probably unconstitutional. Thats my view.

But Trevor Tombe, an associate professor of economics at the University of Calgary, disagreed.

The language in the ruling is quite broad and if theres some other public policy objective that a provincial government has in mind and restricting trade is really just an incidental outcome, then its OK, he said.

He pointed out Alberta didnt put a tariff on or prohibit imports of B.C. wine, it simply told the provincial monopoly buyer to stop buying. In the case of limiting exports of refined fuel to B.C., he said, the government could argue it is simply pursuing a policy of enhancing value by relieving a glut of unprocessed oil from the oilsands for the good of its citizens.

He said the ruling is quite clear, however, in prohibiting a direct tariff on Alberta imports of B.C. products, as has been suggested by some observers of the dispute.

Coulson said the Supreme Courts interpretation has implications for many trade laws, including those that permit direct shipping of wine to consumers in Ontario but not in B.C.

Anglin agreed, noting the decision implies that it will be acceptable to ban importation of recreational marijuana from other provinces when it becomes legal later this year.

If the province can justify restricting the importation of marijuana from another province on a provincial ground like health or safety, it seems like they will be able to, he said.

Representatives from the beer, wine and restaurant industries said Thursday they were disappointed but not surprised by the ruling.

They said their hopes now rest on a report expected this summer from the alcoholic beverages working group struck under the Canadian Free Trade Agreement signed last year by federal, provincial and territorial governments.

Were disappointed in the decision because it means our customers will not have access to some of the unique products that they now crave, said Luc Erjavec, Atlantic vice-president for Restaurants Canada.

Every province across this country brews incredible craft beers, might have incredible wines, craft distilleries and theres no way a liquor monopoly in a province can carry all of the brands.

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The Toronto Star has been shortlisted for three national journalism awards: one for its initiative to increase transparency with readers around its reporting of the news, and one for each of two investigations: the first into the death of a temp worker on the job, and the other into how the government tried to keep information on gas and oil leaks from the public.

Undercover in Temp Nation and The Price of Oil have been shortlisted in the large media category for the Canadian Journalism Foundation (CJF) Jackman Award for Excellence in Journalism. The award recognizes news organizations that effect positive change in the communities they serve.

Were hugely honoured by the nomination for our team and grateful for all the hard work our colleagues put into the project. Were also thrilled to see an issue that impacts thousands of low-paid workers  often, an invisible workforce  recognized in this way, said Star reporter Sara Mojtehedzadeh, who went undercover for a month at a factory where a worker died after her hijab was caught in a machine.

Undercover in Temp Nation led to many more stories from Mojtehedzadeh and Brendan Kennedy exposing dangerous work environments where temp agency workers are abused or injured on the job.

The Price of Oil is also among five projects shortlisted in the category. The national investigation on the hidden costs of the oil industry brought together more than 50 journalists and researchers from the Star, the National Observer, Global News and journalism schools, from Ryerson University, the University of Regina, Concordia University and the University of British Columbia.

Nothing of this breadth and scope has ever been done before in Canada. The results have been inspiring. This acknowledgement honours the incredible efforts of so many journalists seeking to get past the surface of a powerful industry to tell hidden truths, said the Stars Robert Cribb.

The project also featured a documentary from Global News and numerous follow up stories from the Star and the National Observer.

Also up for an award is the Stars Trust Project, a weekly initiative that takes readers behind the scenes of reporting and decision-making at the Star. The project is among three initiatives shortlisted for the CJF-Facebook Journalism Project News Literacy Award, which comes with a $10,000 prize and recognizes efforts from news organizations to encourage Canadians to better understand and examine the quality of news they consume.

Its an honour to be nominated along with these two fabulous initiatives, and its gratifying to know the Stars efforts to bridge the media literacy gap and provide a window into how we do our journalism are being recognized, said reporter Kenyon Wallace.

The awards will be announced at the annual CJF Awards at the Fairmount Royal York on June 14.
Canadas most fascinating military relic stands sentinel in a private collection overlooking downtown Toronto, little known and seldom seen.

To the naked eye, it is a curiously contoured chunk of aluminum. Just a chair, really.

But to those few who know, it is so very much more: here, flanked by windows overlooking University Ave., stands the actual cockpit of warfares most famous pilot, Manfred von Richthofen, who shredded the skies over the First World War as the Red Baron, single-handedly downing at least 80 allied aircraft.

Read more: Red Baron's death certificate found

It is the seat from which von Richthofen flew his final sortie as the ace-of-aces; the seat in which he died precisely 100 years ago, on April 21, 1918.

The Red Barons death would prove doubly portentous: it dealt a body-blow to German morale so severe as to hasten wars end, yet it created a vacancy into which a young Hermann Goering soon would fly as the final commander of von Richthofens elite fighter winged unit, Jagdgeshwader 1  better known as The Flying Circus. Goering would survive, converting his reputation as a fearless ace pilot into political currency, ultimately pledging fealty to Hitler, founding the Gestapo and leading the Luftwaffe into a new world war.

Where does Canada fit in all this? Its a story too seldom told, reckons Ryan Goldsworthy, curator of the private collection at the Royal Canadian Military Institute (RCMI), where the famed flyers cockpit holds pride of place. Saturday afternoon, some 50 of the institutes members, mostly retired military men, will gather to commemorate the events of a century ago, when two young Canadian flyers tangled with  and got the better of  von Richthofen.

Goldsworthy is mindful that, in light of the centennial, public access matters. If you or anyone you know wants to see the cockpit and hear the story, he is happy to oblige. You can publish my email  ryan.goldsworthy@rcmi.org  Id love for more people to see it and know it.

The Canadian story begins with a group of young volunteers from Carleton Place, Ont., and most notably one Capt. Arthur Roy Brown, who in the spring of 1915 seized upon the dream of entering the war as flyers. The first obstacle: The technology was so new Canada had yet to establish an air force. Brown and his friends were told that if they could find a way to privately take flying lessons, Britain would welcome them into the newly established Royal Naval Air Service.

It is difficult to overstate the audacity of what came next. The flying machine in 1915 was still newer than Twitter  yet it was about to evolve at breakneck pace. Brown and his friends decided their best option was to go directly to the source of controlled airflight  they signed up for lessons at the Wright Brothers School of Aeronautics in Dayton, Ohio.

Imagine, for want of a 2018 analog, waltzing up to Elon Musk and saying, So, hows the SpaceX interplanetary system coming along? Were ready to sign up for the Mars!

The drill in Dayton was to achieve at least three solo flights adding up 40 minutes of airtime, perform two figure eights and somehow land without crashing and dying. Brown and his friends passed.

A vast library of books, films and pop culture marginalia surround the life and times of the Red Baron. His elite Flying Circus team would later provide British comedy troupe Monty Python with the second half of their name. Modern-day supporters of the Canadian credited with ending his career insist Roy Brown has long been woefully overlooked.

Yet it was a very much a team effort, military historians agree. The encounter between the two squadrons began with Brown spotting the Germans and wobbling his wings to signal attack. He also signalled for his least experienced pilot, an old school friend, Wilfrid Wop May, to remain above the fray at 12,000 feet rather than engage.

May obeyed, at first. But minutes later he abandoned the plan, unable to resist an enemy machine beneath him. He dove, fired, missed and then scrambled chaotically toward Allied lines. Von Richthofen saw it all  and, we can only presume saw it with anger, as the target of Mays bullets happened to be the Red Barons cousin, Wolfram. The Red Baron chased the weak Canadian bird across the Somme River into allied territory, looking for an easy kill. And Brown, seeing his old friend in utter peril, dove fast, lining up his Sopwith Camel and firing a single machine gun burst.

Moments later, the Red Baron wobbled and crash landed just north of the village of Vaux-sur-Somme. And here, to the chagrin of Browns supporters, is where a very large caveat is always attached to the story. British and Australian ground fire soared skyward as the enemy machine crossed. A significant portion of latter-day First World War researchers  a preponderance, even  hold that Australian ground fire, not Browns gun, likely delivered the fatal bullet.

That caveat infuriates Brown advocates such as Maj. (Ret.) Don Harris, a veteran Canadian Army reservist whose interest in the story was piqued years ago after he hearing it from Browns younger brother Rusty.

The fact is, weve never treated Roy Brown like the Canadian hero he was  regardless of the Red Baron story. Roy Brown was under tremendous strain in those months leading up to April 21. He got food poisoning, he lost weight, he couldnt sleep, he couldnt go to the mess and enjoy the company of his colleagues at night. He was a wreck. He only sustained himself on bread and wine, Harris told the Star.

Brown took no pleasure in killing other men, he saw it as killing machines. He was quiet, he was modest and the great achievement was in keeping all his men alive. And it cost him his physical health. He died young after coming home. So I got involved to help get Roy Brown get recognized for himself, not as the killer of von Richthofen.

Yet another entanglement to the Red Baron story is the more recent theory that von Richthofen was, in his final months, operating in a deeply diminished state, having sustained a serious head injury in a previous dogfight. Among the evidence, latter-day scholars emphasize the fact that the he broke several of his own golden rules  among them, never fly low over enemy lines  on his final flight.

Amid all the competing theories, Brown is now finally getting his due. Among recent developments is the establishment of the Roy Brown Society, which has established a virtual museum collating a trove of original documents, including Browns original Wright Brothers pilot certificate. (captroybrown.ca).

For years, it was sort of like the Kennedy bullet  the whole who shot the Red Baron thing, said society founder Rob Probert. But I feel we are way past that now, acknowledging his crucial role in the von Richthofens demise while also emphasizing the all the other facets of Browns courage and service. He was remarkable  and at the same time so neglected. We are righting that wrong.

Browns niece, Carol Nicholson of Oakville, notes that Brown would have been more than happy to give all credit to the Australians for delivering the fatal bullet.

Roy Brown was not about trophies. He was the opposite. And when he died in 1944, that was at the height of World War II, so he was buried in an unmarked grave amid concern that Nazi sympathizers might do damage to the burial site of the man who shot down the big German hero.

A few years ago, a remarkable 11-year-old schoolgirl from Stouffville  Nadine Carter  took an interest in Brown and discovered Brown had been disinterred and reburied after the war at an unmarked grave at the Necropolis in Toronto. Thanks to her efforts, his burial site now is formally recognized. Carters efforts helped raise Browns profile, leading to formal induction in Canadas Aviation Hall of Fame.

Quite apart from the Red Barons cockpit, a companion relic at the RCCI on University Avenue speaks volumes. Framed under glass is a scrap of fabric from von Richthofens plane featuring the Iron Cross  and emblazoned with the signatures of Browns entire squadron from a century ago.

One last piece in the Brown puzzle emerged in the reporting for this story. Though Brown rarely spoke of his war experiences upon his return to Canada, we came across his words buried at the end of a 1934 article in the Toronto Star archives  a clip that neither his living relatives, nor the RCCI and not even the Roy Brown Society had ever seen before.

The Star splashed the news that Brown had been formally recognized, 18 years after the fact, with the killing of the Red Baron, in the official British history of the war. A reporter was dispatched to chase Brown for his reaction and found him working late into the night at the offices of General Airways Ltd.  he was now, at the height of the Great Depression, trying to establish a bush-pilot airline into the Canadian wilderness.

No, I am not particularly interested now, Brown shrugged when the Star informed him of this official recognition, of which he knew nothing.

The words that followed suggested he looked back upon his exploits as the folly of youth  a necessary folly, but folly all the same, he seemed to believe.

I could not really fly in those days. I was never taught to fly in the army. I knew how to take off from the ground and get down again and I could throw a machine around the sky. That was all  the rest I picked up in the school of experience, Brown said.

Our pilots might not have flown so well from a war standpoint if they had a lot of flying knowledge. The factors that made most for success were a quality of what might be described as foolhardy recklessness and the ability to make instant decisions.

Correction - April 23, 2018: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly said Nadine Carter is from Uxbridge. In fact, she is from Stouffville.
Sister Agnes Marie Valois  who was known as the Angel of Dieppe for her heroics in giving medical care to Canadian soldiers wounded on the French beach during the August 1942 raid  died Thursday at the age of 103 years old.

Valois, who lived in France, was a well-known participant in annual commemorations of the battle in the French coastal city.

She used to come every year but then the last few years she just wasnt able to do it, said Royal Hamilton Light Infantry spokesperson Tim Fletcher.

I asked about her last year at the 75th commemoration and I was told she was very sick.

Among those assisted in 1942 by Valois were several members of the RHLI including Jack McFarland who suffered a wounded arm during the raid. He remained a prisoner of war for the rest of the war after the ill-fated raid.

A total of 582 RHLI soldiers landed on the beach with 197 killed and 85 wounded. They were part of a force of 6,000 Allied soldiers, nearly 5,000 who were Canadians. Canada saw a total of 907 deaths and 2,434 wounded.

McFarland attended 65th anniversary ceremonies in Dieppe France in 2007 and met up with Valois.

It was a joyous reunion. It was the first time they had met since the war, Fletcher said. McFarland died in February 2016 at the age of 95.

Jack told me ... that he had been treated by Sister Agnes in 1942 in the hospital in Rouen ... He pointed her out to me as the nurse who worked on his arm. A German doctor treated Jack and Sister Agnes was one of his nurses. Jack said he hadnt seen her since he was discharged from the hospital and sent to the POW camp, Fletcher said.

McFarlands son, Jack Jr., said he was sad to hear Valois had died. He also met her in 2007 during the RHLI trip to Dieppe he took with his dad.

He recalled his dad not being able to specifically remember Valois, only that different nuns helped him and other soldiers at the time.

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VANCOUVER  British Columbias top doctor and an alternative-medicine group are both expressing concern about a Victoria naturopath who treated a four-year-old boy with a rabid-dog saliva remedy.

Provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry says she is urging Health Canada to review its approval of lyssin, a naturopathic product that claims to contain the infected saliva.

Henry says in a statement that the product could put patients at risk of contracting rabies, a deadly virus usually transmitted through a bite, if it contains the virus. She also warns that such treatments are not substitute for vaccines.

While I believe that homeopathy plays a complimentary role for some families in their health, I have concerns that some people may delay or avoid proven effective treatments while relying on homeopathy alone, Henry said in a statement.

She said she has seen examples where parents believe homeopathic treatments can replace health measures like immunizations, when thats clearly not the case and could leave their children at risk of serious infections.

Health Canada said the lyssin/hydrophominum products on the Canadian market that it has approved are safe for consumption and have met high standards to demonstrate the product is safe.

Health Canada takes the safety of health products on the Canadian market very seriously, Health Canada said in an emailed statement.

Should a product not meet the terms of its market authorization, Health Canada will take immediate action.

In a blog post that has since been removed, practitioner Anke Zimmermann detailed her treatment of the boys sleep and behavioural problems as a success.

The boy growled like a dog, couldnt sleep because he was afraid of werewolves and was often defiant and over-excited, the post said.

She noted the boy was once bitten by a dog and it broke the skin.

Despite some expected relapses, she reports that the remedy worked very well.

In an interview, Zimmerman said that while the remedy begins with saliva that contains rabies, she doesnt believe any virus remains in the sugar pill, after an extensive process of dilution.

The remedies are prepared to the point that not even one molecule of the original substance is left in the solution, Zimmermann said.

She likened it to anti-venom, which may use a small dose of venom to treat a snake bite.

But she said critics cant have it both ways, when they criticize homeopathy.

It either works or it doesnt. If it doesnt work, then it doesnt matter what the remedies are made from, because if its just water, who cares. If it does work, then we really should look at the great potential homeopathy has.

She said she took down the original post after receiving hundreds of hateful messages, including threats of injury.

The B.C. Naturopathic Association filed a complaint Thursday against Zimmermann, claiming she may have breached the associations code of conduct and code of ethics for naturopathic doctors.

It notes that Zimmermann is not a member of the association but her conduct still reflects on the organization.

We are concerned that certain statements and posts she has made, in person and online, appear to be contrary to the public interest in the practice of the profession  and therefore require action on the part of the regulator to intervene, co-president Victor Chan said in a statement.

The B.C. Association of Homeopaths defended the use of the product in a letter it sent to Dr. Henry, the same day.

It said the use of nosodes, or homeopathic remedies, goes back hundreds of years and they are used in practice regularly.

Lyssinum is just one of many nosodes that homeopaths have available to use in practice and has been part of our pharmacopeia since 1833, the letter said.

Because they are prepared as a homeopathic remedy going through the process of potentization, as a result, the end product doesnt bear any toxicity or infectious elements that would be a threat to the public.

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OTTAWACanadian and American diplomats who suffered health problems during postings to Havana appear to have been exposed to some form of directed energy, says a U.S. doctor who has evaluated some of the workers.

In a career dedicated to the treatment and study of brain injuries, Dr. Douglas Smith says hes never seen anything like the injuries suffered by the Canadians and Americans.

It has left them suffering persistent, concussion-like symptoms  dizziness, nausea, headaches and trouble concentrating  yet without a head trauma to explain the cause.

Read more:

Dog poisonings, sex propositions: Canadas man in Havana remembers the Cold War weirdness

Canadian diplomats, families hit with health problems in Cuba may have suffered brain injuries, Ottawa says

Its kind of fascinating and terrifying, said Smith, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Neurosurgery and Center for Brain Injury and Repair.

With no plausible environmental explanation for the health woes, the other possibilities are that this was something nefarious, he said.

Its highly suspicious that U.S. government and Canadian government were the only ones we know of with this issue, Smith told the Star in an interview.

The mystery has even taken on a name: the Havana Syndrome.

The working theory is whatever the cause, it originated in the housing, not the embassy, itself, because none of the Cuban staff who worked alongside Canadians have suffered health problems. But the houses are not in a single compound, but rather are spread out across the city.

Smith was among a team of specialists from the University of Pennsylvania asked by the U.S. State Department to evaluate 21 U.S. diplomats who, last year, began complaining of health problems experienced during postings to Havana.

Ten Canadians  diplomats and family members  also suffered similar health problems during their time in Cuba. Smith could not say whether he has examined the Canadians, but did say hes been in touch with Canadian officials to discuss the findings.

Smith admits that he and his colleagues were initially skeptical, but became convinced that it was something real.

Smith said that mass psychogenic illness or mass hysteria was discounted as the cause, noting that some of the symptoms presented by the U.S. employees are impossible to fake. We were convinced that this was a syndrome, he said.

He said the government employees were indistinguishable from patients treated at the concussion clinic  except they had no history of a head impact.

People started calling this immaculate concussion, Smith said.

U.S. diplomats have reported that they felt targeted in attacks that had a laser-like specificity, seemingly able to pinpoint specific parts of a building, The Associated Press has reported.

Smith says there was a directional aspect to the exposure, with some saying they felt the sensation more on one side of the body than the other. They could move behind a concrete wall or into another room and it would disappear.

Toxins and infections dont do that. It supports the idea of a directed energy type of exposure, he said.

When they felt these exposures, some Canadians and Americans also reported hearing noises at the same time that ranged in descriptions from high-pitched tones, grinding machinery to the sound of warping sheet metal. But Smith said the noise wasnt the cause of the injuries.

Audible sound cannot hurt your brain, Smith said. It happened at the same time as another type of exposure that did injure the brain.

He said there are energies used to deplete brain tissue, but those require direct contact. Ultrasound, microwave and infrasound have also been shown to cause some brain changes in animals in lab testing, but these, too, require close proximity, he said.

Environmental assessments of Canadian diplomatic quarters in Havana, including air and water quality tests, did not turn up anything that might suggest a cause.

We do not think this is environmental exposure. At least, theres nothing we know of in the environment without a head impact that could cause this, Smith said.

One problem is officials dont know how many were exposed. We saw those with persistent symptoms. Maybe other people were exposed and were fine and didnt report anything, Smith said.

Smith and his colleagues wrote about the case earlier this year in the Journal of the American Medical Association. In a commentary on their findings, two other medical experts flagged several cautions, including the concern that those who developed symptoms may have been aware of what others had previously reported. Before reaching any conclusions, additional evidence must be obtained and rigorously and objectively evaluated, they concluded.

Officials appear no closer to solving the mystery, despite the involvement of medical teams in Canada and the U.S. and investigations by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Still, as a precaution, Global Affairs Canada announced last Monday that it was removing family members of diplomats from Havana, seven months after the U.S. State Department made the same move.

Those dependants will leave the country within the coming weeks and Ottawa is also reviewing staffing levels in the embassy.

All Canadian diplomats assigned to Havana will undergo baseline medical testing before they leave Canada to track any health changes that may occur during their time there better, an official told the Star.

In March, the U.S. State Department said its embassy in Havana would continue to operate with minimal personnel. We still do not have definitive answers on the source or cause of the attacks, and an investigation into the attacks is ongoing, the department said in a statement.

Smith notes that the incidents have disrupted diplomatic operations by both Canada and the U.S. in Cuba.

The end result is that both the Canadians and the U.S. has pulled out with only a skeleton crew left behind  if that were the desired goal, its really disappointing to know that was successful, he said.
OTTAWAThe first phone call came a few days after Jim Bartleman arrived in Havana. Canadas new ambassador to Cold War Cuba was still too green to know not to answer.

A woman purred through the line. She told him she had seen him that day, and that he was so handsome. Wouldnt he love to meet her? His wife would never know, she said, in a voice Bartleman recalls years later as sultry.

He hung up on her.

Read more:

Canadian and American diplomats in Cuba hit by directed energy, U.S. doctor says

Cubas Castro era ends this week as Raul steps down as president

The next night, the phone rang again. It was a man this time, and he said he had a lot of gold. Bartleman could get a good chunk of it, too, if he were willing to use his diplomatic privileges to help smuggle it out of the country.

Bartleman slammed down the phone.

It rang a third time the following night. A mans voice on the line. Oh, senor, youre so handsome. Why dont we meet? Your wife will never know.

It was a curious introduction to diplomacy in Fidel Castros Cuba: a trio of blackmail attempts, Bartleman suspected.

I thought it was very funny, Bartleman, now 78, says of the early days of his ambassadorship in 1981. They tried everything on you. These tactics worked on a lot of people, I guess  There were always dirty tricks going on  on both sides.

At a time of renewed diplomatic mystery in the communist island nation, with mysterious symptoms affecting Canadian and U.S. diplomats in Havana, the former ambassadors reminiscences are a reminder that, when it comes to Canadian consular affairs in Cuba, intrigue is nothing new.

The cause of the strange health problems afflicting diplomats in Cuba remains an open question, with some speculation of an energy attack. Just this week, a federal official told journalists in Ottawa that some foreign officers and their families may have suffered brain injuries and that the government has decided to recall the families of consular staff from Cuba so that Canadas mission there joins the embassies in Afghanistan and Iraq as unaccompanied posts.

The mystery complicates the political web at a time of renewed antagonism between the West and Russia, when the rapprochement between the U.S. and Cuba  Cold War nemeses who took the world to the brink of nuclear way in 1963  under former president Barack Obama is under question by Donald Trumps White House. Cuba, meanwhile, named a new president on Thursday: 57-year-old Miguel Diaz-Canel, the third leader since the revolution in 1959, and the first who isnt a member of the Castro family.

No evidence has been made public to implicate the Cuban authorities in whatever caused the diplomats health problems.

Nobody can figure this out, says Mark Entwistle, a Cuba expert and consultant who was Canadas ambassador in Havana from 1993 to 1997, referring to the diplomats health symptoms.

I say this with great conviction: the Cubans are very diligent  with the protection of diplomats, he says. Which makes this current mystery, or whatever it is  very uncharacteristic, just totally out of sync.

Of course, Entwistle adds, the situation during the Cold War was different. Everybody was up to shenanigans, he says.

For Bartleman, the phone calls with the strange offers werent surprising. He says he was trained in how to handle attempts by the other side to gain leverage on him. The Cuban interior ministry was trained by Soviet and East German secret police, he says. They were considered extremely effective. It was part of the East-West relations, and the Cubans were heavy, strong players in all of that, he says.

Fidel Castro was Cubas president and strongman at the time, and Bartleman notes that the revolutionary leader had a warm relationship with Canadas prime minister, Pierre Trudeau. I think he romanticized Castro. You know, the man with the cigar, fighting in the mountains, Bartleman says.

Because of this dynamic, Bartleman says, Castro gave the Canadian embassy more attention than most. The Cuban leader would come to the residence about once a month for dinner with Bartleman so he could maintain a link with Trudeaus buddy, Jim, the former ambassador says. Soldiers would encircle the home so no one could leave or enter, and a food taster would try everything before dinner, he says. Then Castro would sit at the table and pontificate for several hours  often till 6, 7, 8 in the morning, Bartleman says  about the quality of milk from the cows raised by the socialist system, the political situation in Latin America, and the intricacies of Lenins thinking on imperialism.

He could talk about anything, Bartleman says. I must say that he had me under his spell at the beginning.

Bartleman says that beneath the show of closeness, there were complications. Cuba outwardly treated Canada as not a really nasty capitalist country. But, under the surface, the truth that Ottawa was closely aligned with Washington and the NATO alliance meant there was a level of tension in the diplomatic relationship.

One time, Bartleman says, he arrived at the embassy front door to find a friendly cat, hanging around. He took a liking to it and brought it inside only to discover a shrill whistling sound emanating loudly from its ears. Suspicious of some sort of listening device, he promptly set the cat back out on the street.

I always laughed about it, saying this cat was a Cuban secret agent, he says.

Cats would paw onto the embassy compound, clear converts to Cuban espionage, Bartleman says, because of the buzzing of the recording devices that had been planted in their ears.

Canada, on its end, housed diplomats in Cuba who also worked for the CIA. One of them, John Graham, was posted in Cuba after the missile crisis  when the Soviet Union and the U.S. almost came into direct conflict over Russian missile installations on the Caribbean island.

The level of trust was, of course, not high, Graham, now 83, says, describing how he was trained in the U.S. to drive out to Cuban military camps in the countryside and sketch the equipment and machinery he observed. It was a fascinating time, and if youre sort of young and foolish, it was an incredible period.

Bartlemans enchantment with Castro soured in a sudden shock one night. It was a year into his posting, and he woke to find that his dog, a German shepherd named Zaka, was deadly sick. They rushed her to a veterinarian in Havana to have her stomach pumped. He soon learned that his deputys dog was also sick that morning, and had died. He later learned that the dogs were poisoned. Zaka died six months later.

There was also a wave of hateful, anonymous phone calls to various Canadians staffers, and a rat was nailed to the door of Canadas trade officer, he says.

The Cubans carried on as if nothing had happened at all, he says. To this day, he still doesnt know what happened.

After that, he was excited to leave, and jumped at the opportunity to return to Ottawa in 1985 for a promotion in the Canadian foreign affairs department.

He returned to Cuba many times, mostly in the 1990s when he was Prime Minister Jean Chretiens foreign affairs adviser. At his final official meeting with Castro, the Cuban president was frail, like a grandfather, Bartleman recalls. But he boiled with anger, too, after Chretien gave him a list that Bartleman provided of political prisoners that Canada wanted him to set free. On the way out of the room, Chretien walked out first, and Castro grabbed Bartleman as he was going out the door, he says.

He grabbed me, two hands around my neck, and squeezed and shook, Bartleman says. He was so mad at me.

Asked if he was frightened, Bartleman laughs it off. I was delighted. How many people can go down in history as being throttled by the president of Cuba, and can walk out the door and have lunch with him later?

With stories like that in his past, Bartleman says he isnt surprised by the current speculation about the diplomatic health problems. If it did involve the Cubans somehow, he says, whats new?
A 39-year-old Ajax man is facing charges after police say three women were sexually assaulted on the Yonge-University subway line.

The assaults happened over a two-week period starting on April 4, according to a statement from Toronto police.

In the first case, police say a man boarded a northbound subway train from Osgoode Station and sat one seat away from a woman, placed a coat between them, leaned over, and sexually assaulted her.

On April 13, a second assault took place  this time on a southbound train from Sheppard West Station. Police said the same man sat beside a woman and sexually assaulted her.

Three days later, police say the man, riding a southbound train at St. George Station, sat one seat away from a woman and placed a coat between their seats, before sexually assaulting her.

Anthony Sembatya Ssonko is charged with three counts of sexual assault. He appeared at Old City Hall courthouse Thursday morning.

Police believe there may be more victims, likely on the Yonge-University line between Sheppard West and Bloor Stations between the hours of 6 a.m. and 10 a.m. Anyone with allegations is asked to come forward.

Read more:

Finch LRT delayed another year

Ajax man charged in 3 cases of sexual assault on subway
A man in his 50s is dead after a medical episode caused him to crash into a Toronto police car on Lake Shore Blvd. W. on Thursday.

Around 3:30 p.m. the man suffered the medical episode, which caused him to crash into a police vehicle stopped at a red light at Lake Shore Blvd. W. and Colborne Lodge Dr.

Const. David Hopkinson said its believed the man died from the medical event, not the crash. He said he crossed the centre median on Lake Shore Blvd. and hit the police car head-on.

Paramedics confirmed the man died on scene and the police officers in their vehicle were not injured.

Roads were closed for investigation and cleanup, but reopened around 6 p.m.
A story about loss and love has secured first place in the Toronto Stars 40th annual Short Story Contest.

Courtney Kusano-Hamels work The Second Law of Thermodynamics was awarded first place at a gala Thursday evening at the Yorkville Public Library. The story follows Simon, who is navigating the trauma of losing a father.

This is the second time that Kusano-Hamel has entered the short story contest.

Read the winning stories:

Toronto Star Short Story Contest 1st-place winner: The Second Law of Thermodynamics

Toronto Star Short Story Contest 2nd-place winner: Breathless

Toronto Star Short Story Contest 3rd-place winner: Perhaps Tomorrow

Ive been writing for a really long time, the Toronto author said. Its always really exciting to be able to present your writing to other people.

Kusano-Hamel, who is non-binary, noted they were impressed that the judges selected a story featuring a gay couple from among more than 1,100 submissions. To pick a story like that as one of the winners I think wouldnt have happened even when I was a kid.

The 24-year-old English graduate receives $5,000 plus tuition to The Humber School for Writers. Second prize is $2,000 and third is $1,000.

I wrote the story partly based on conversations Ive had with a friend about characters in stories who havent fully healed from trauma, Kusano-Hamel said. Thats something I really wanted to convey and something I hope came through to the judges.

Launched for the first time in 1978, this years contest opened to Ontario residents in January. The judges were a

uthor and journalist Kamal Al-Solaylee; city librarian Vickery Bowles; Star books editor Deborah Dundas; and author and theatre critic Richard Ouzounian.

Janet Wilkinson, 63, a retired teacher from Collingwood, came in second place for her story Breathless, which follows the life of a Grade 10 student who is struggling in school.

The story takes place in a school office and she has done something that kicked her out, Wilkinson said.

Wilkinson, who retired from a 25-year career as an art and English teacher two years ago, said she was inspired by a student she taught.

What I like about this character is that she is feeling cynical about the world, but she uses humour in different ways. As a teacher I came to know more and more about it all. Sometimes you have kids in front of you and you think you know, but you really dont know what happened to them before they came to school that day.

When they tell you, it can be a revelation. Its rarely personal what happens in the classroom, and understanding that makes you a good teacher.

Scott Williams, who placed third, said he was happy to learn hed made the top three.

As youll now know, Im keenly aware of the limits of my own ability, Williams said in an email. But theres a sense in which having one of my stories chosen as a finalist gives me permission to keep on going: to keep writing, keep trying to improve. In that sense, being chosen in this way is indeed inspiring!

Williamss story, Perhaps Tomorrow, is about a 10-year-old orphan from an unknown place in Africa who had to grow up too soon.

Theres this little kid who has things in his life that are just the same as anyone else, such as bullying, said Williams, of Madoc, Ont. But then theres stuff that would be completely foreign to some, like having to walk a long way for water without any kind of support network. The contrast is interesting to me.

Williams said he was inspired to participate in the short story contest after reading about a winner from last year who had made it her New Years resolution to write.

Im kind of retired from the corporate world, and still do some consulting, so I wanted to give writing a chance.

The three stories can be found online at thestar.com and will appear in print in Insight for three weeks starting April 28.
After a five-day closure, the CN Tower re-opened on Friday afternoon.

The Tower was originally closed Monday after melting ice chunks began falling from it, punching a hole in the Rogers Centre roof and prompting the postponement of a game between the Jays and the Kansas City Royals. (The two teams faced off the following day in a double-header.)

The Ripleys Aquarium was also closed. The aquarium had a photo of Vanilla Ice on its large electronic billboard this week, informing passersby of its closure with the warning, Ice Ice Baby. Other closures included Bremner Blvd., between Lower Simcoe St. and Rees St., and the John St. extension over the railroad tracks near Union Station, police said.

As the weather warmed over the course of the week, the area had to remain closed as ice continued to fall from the CN Tower, Toronto Police said.

Closures are rare for the Tower. Even an electrical fire that burned through one of the CN Towers antennas last August wasnt enough to close the 553-metre tower, now the third tallest free-standing tower in the world.

Just hours after firefighters got the early-morning phone call about the fire, the tower announced it would still be open for business that day.

Police said they have greatly appreciated the publics patience with the closure due to the ice.

While everyone is eager to return to normal business operations, the safety of the public must be the number one priority, police said in a statement.

This was not the first time the roads around the CN Tower were closed because of falling ice. In March 2007, the surrounding roads were closed for several days after chunks of ice began breaking off the walls of the tower, creating havoc below.

There was so much ice built up back then that one of the chunks appeared to be roughly 50 metres tall by six metres wide.

The CN Tower has also been closed for security purposes. In 2010, the tower shut down for two days because of security concerns during the G20 summit. A fence was also installed around the popular tourist attraction.

During the 9/11 terrorist attack, the CN Tower was among the citys landmarks closed as a security precaution.

The blackout that hit North Americas electrical grid in 2003 also left the CN Tower dark, forcing it to close for two days.

The tower was closed for two hours in October 1990 after a man was found dangling from the outdoor observation level. He was later pulled back in to safety when a woman, believed to be his girlfriend, talked to him. It was the first such incident in the history of the tower, an official said at the time.

The tower is Torontos biggest lightning target. It gets struck an average of 75 to 80 times a year. But in August 2011, it was zapped 52 times in 84 minutes. The tower has long copper strips connected to 52 grounding rods to take the charge.

In May 1976, just over a month after the CN Towers opening, lightning strikes caused destruction to 53-centimetre thick fibreglass moulds, causing $25,000 in damage.
The ongoing outrage over a restrictive fundraising policy has both the education minister and chair of the Halton Catholic board questioning whether trustees there can still properly carry out their duties.

The policy  which sparked a number of student walkouts on Thursday  bans schools from donating to charities that violate church values directly or indirectly by supporting abortion, euthanasia, contraception or embryonic stem-cell research. It has impacted organizations such as the Canadian Cancer Society and the United Way.

On Wednesday, Education Minister Indira Naidoo-Harris spoke to board chairperson Diane Rabenda by phone, a conversation that followed the boards decision to rebuff a request from the minister to pause the policy amid concerns it was implemented without the required consultations.

Essentially I was listening to her and listening to what she had to say and what her concerns were, Naidoo-Harris said at Queens Park Thursday. We certainly talked about a number of things, about the importance of the student voice in all of these discussions.

I expressed to her my disappointment that they didnt pause the motion in order to take into account the various voices and do a proper analysis of what the community feels about this.

During the 15-minute conversation, Rabenda also expressed some concerns about whether or not the board was able to function when it came to performing their duties and responsibilities, since this motion is just getting so much attention and is really taking a lot of attention and focus away from some of the other board items, said Naidoo-Harris.

Had trustees heeded the ministers advice to put it on hold, they certainly would have been able to conduct their business in a much more efficient manner, Naidoo-Harris said.

The situation does concern me  its becoming very clear to me that various voices on the ground and community members are not pleased with the motion and feel that their opinions and their voices in this were not heard.

However, she said, at this point there is no need to send help to the board.

Im still monitoring closely what is going on, added Naidoo-Harris.  Im still hoping that this will lead to a decision on the ground that works for everyone and will really create a way forward for everyone in the community.

 I am monitoring to see how it plays out.

One parent has launched a legal challenge against the Sanctity of Life policy, asking Ontarios Superior Court to either throw it out or prevent the board from enforcing it until proper procedures are followed.

In the past, the Halton Catholic District School Board has run into trouble for banning gay-straight alliance student groups and refusing to allow HPV vaccination in its schools.
There is a little line of pink, just at the horizon, when I first open my eyes. It peeks in at me through a small gap between the wall and the cloth covering the doorway, and I peek back. Mwashibukeni, I say to the sun, smiling and yawning at the same time. Good morning!

My name is Wilson, and I am 10 years old. My job is to fetch water.

I put on my shoes and leave the house quietly. There is a washstand around the corner, next to the open kitchen, and I go there to wash my face, then I use the toilet over behind Mwanzilas house. There is a toilet behind our house too, but it is smelly and slippery and I dont like it.

I pick up the pails for todays water and get ready for my walk. Sometimes I take just one, and carrying one is easy, but today I am also fetching for my mothers friend, Mrs. Nkwazi, so I need to carry two and use the wooden yoke. After Ive grown a bit more, and my shoulders are wider, the yoke will fit better; for now its awkward and it hurts a little, but its better than carrying the pails by hand. And anyway, I like fetching for Mrs. Nkwazi because she has no husband or children, and she needs my help.

By now the sun is almost up. If I leave early enough, I can get to the well in Kikundi and home again while it is still morning. On school days, or days when we have mission church, I have to go later and the heat makes it very hard. Today will be better, I say to myself, as I attach the pails to the yoke and position the yoke on my shoulders, shrugging to get it to sit more comfortably.

The cattleman says when I carry the yoke and the pails I sound like one of his cows with her bell, and that makes me laugh, but right now Im trying hard to keep quiet. I dont want to wake anyone else in our compound, though already I hear sounds from the other houses. Mwanzila might already be awake, but I dont see her.

The sun is coming up as I leave. I walk slowly past the other houses and try not to sound like the cow with her bell. But soon I am out of earshot and can walk faster and its okay to sing, which makes the time go more quickly. I count the songs while I sing and have sung seven, and repeated the one about the crows eating the corn because I like it best, when I come to the hill that I will go around to find the big path. This is where I usually see the cattleman. There is a baobab on the other side of the hill, and he sits under it, watching his cows. He isnt there every day, but when I round the hill this morning my heart lifts as I see him, sitting under his tree, leaning against the broad, grey trunk.

Mwapoleni shikulu, I say respectfully, Hello grandfather. He nods to me, which means I can sit down, so I take off the yoke, almost dropping both of my pails in the process, and making a lot of noise. He shakes his head. The cow with her bell, he says, but I smile because I know he is only teasing me.

No, shikulu, I say, It is the sound of men working. Now its my turn to tease, because I am the one fetching water, and he is just sitting under a tree. The cattleman snorts, and before I sit I shake his hand to show there are no hard feelings. His skin is soft and warm and leathery, but his grip isnt as strong as it sometimes is.

The cattleman is alone today, as he is whenever I see him. I dont know his wife, and his sons have all gone away. One day I asked him why they left but he would only say: Indalama. Money.

Where have they gone? I ask him today. Did they go to Chongwe? He doesnt answer. My brother Daniel has gone to Chongwe. He went there to make money for us, just like your sons. Do you think your sons will see Daniel in Chongwe? The cattleman doesnt say anything so I think maybe he doesnt know, and I decide not to ask him anything more.

We sit quietly together, watching the cattle, him with his old eyes and me with my young ones, and the sun climbs higher in the sky.

Mailo, I say. I will see you tomorrow.

The cattleman shrugs. Mailo limbi, he says, Perhaps tomorrow. But then he smiles at me, as if he really is my grandfather, and I am happy as I pick up my yoke and my pails. Just before the big path takes me out of sight, I turn and wave. He doesnt wave back, but maybe he cant see me from so far away. I wonder if I should rattle my pails, but I decide against it, and turn again and carry on my way.

It is mid-morning when I reach the well at Kikundi. There are several people ahead of me, and many more milling about, talking and gossiping. I recognize most of the them, including a girl about my age who I see there most days. Usually she stands to one side, away from the crowd, but today she is right beside the well, watching me as I wait my turn. When my pails are filled I have trouble getting them back on my yoke, and I see the girl smiling, amused at my struggle, and when I notice her smiling I get confused and I almost spill all the water I came to fetch. A woman my mothers age quickly steps in to help, making a disapproving sound with her tongue and waving off the girl who turns away, now embarrassed. But as I walk away, settling the now heavy yoke on my shoulders, the girl comes up behind me and walks along with me.

Ive seen you before, she says, and I nod. I see you most days. You always come on your own.

Because my brother is in Chongwe, I tell her.

I have many brothers, she says. They carry all our water, but I could help carry yours.

I dont reply, but I put down my yoke and my pails. She rearranges the cloth dukhu on her head, creating a little fabric ring that will help her balance the pail that she picks up. I carry the other in one hand and balance the empty yoke on my other shoulder. Its a bit awkward but I tell her how much easier it is, and this time when she smiles I dont feel confused at all.

Without the weight of the pails, the metal rings at the ends of the yoke make a clanging sound. It sounds like a bell, she says, so I tell her about the cattleman and how he teases me. She laughs, so I laugh too.

Read more:

Toronto Star announces short story contest winners

Toronto Star Short Story Contest 1st-place winner: The Second Law of Thermodynamics

Toronto Star Short Story Contest 2nd-place winner: Breathless

She tells me her name is Grace and asks me where I live. I tell her that I live near Mpanga. But before we go there I have to stop to see Mrs. Nkwazi. I explain that she is my mothers friend, and that some of this water is for her.

Why dont you have a well in Mpanga? she asks. Kikundi is too far to walk every day. I tell her that we do have a well, but I dont tell her about the older boys that hang around it. I dont tell her that Daniel used to come with me, before he left to make money for us, or that he threatened the boys one day after they threw stones at me. I just tell her that the water is better from the well in Kikundi.

Its true, our water is good, she says, and when she says that I realize that with the heat of the day and the dust from the path, she is probably thirsty. I ask her if she would like to stop for a drink, but she says no, that we should go on to see Mrs. Nkwazi, and in truth I know it isnt much farther. A few minutes later a small compound of three or four houses appears a short way off the path.

Mwapoleni mama, I call to the tall, stately woman cooking nshima in the outdoor kitchen of the first house. Good morning, Mrs. Nkwazi.

Good morning, Wilson, she replies, coming over to us, and then, smiling at Grace, she asks, Who is your helper this morning? I introduce them and we set down our pails of water. I carry one over to her kitchen, climbing on a stool and emptying the contents into the drum, replacing the lid carefully to keep out dirt and the everywhere-pests Mrs. Nkwazi complains about.

Sit down for some tea, she says, and then asks me if we would like something to eat. She knows the answer, but she is kind and always asks. We sit with her and she gives us each a small plate of nshima with some cooked chicken. She asks Grace many questions, like the teachers at school do. I have known Mrs. Nkwazi my whole life, but I dont talk with her the way Grace does: answering all her questions and then carrying on, telling her many things that she didnt even ask about. Mrs. Nkwazi nods and smiles, encouraging, and occasionally even laughs. I feel proud as I sit quietly, listening to the two of them.

As we prepare to leave, Mrs. Nkwazi gives me some food to take home, and then hands me a small flower  bright red and very beautiful. This is for my sister, she says, and I nod, knowing that she means my mother.

Go straight, now, and be careful she says. Watch the too-hot sun. I clasp her hand briefly and then turn to go, Grace beside me, the remaining full pail on her head, and the yoke across my shoulders with the empty pail dangling from one end.

Its not far now to my home on the other side of Mpanga. When were still a little way from the houses of the village, we come upon a large enclosure marked by short stone walls, about a stones throw off to the right of the path. There is an enormous jacaranda tree in one corner, its blossoms a deep lavender as we near the end of the dry season. We put down our pails and yoke, and I walk to the opposite corner of the enclosure, stopping in front of a small pile of stones. Grace follows, stopping beside me and watching as I put the flower from Mrs. Nkwazi on the ground at the base of the pile.

That flower was for your mother, Grace protests.

Yes, I answer. The stones were originally in the shape of a cross, placed there by the donna from the mission church, but I have gathered them together, preferring the shape of the little mound I have created. I tend to them now, placing and replacing the ones that have tumbled. Grace retreats to the shade of the jacaranda, and soon afterwards I join her, sitting on the ground beside her.

Are you going to cry now? she asks, but I shake my head. No, I say. Not now.

We dont say anything more, and after a few minutes we gather up our pails and the yoke and continue on our way in silence, past the houses in Mpanga, until we get to the compound where my house is. We pass Mwanzilas house, and the next one is mine.

My house is small but very solid, made of mud brick, and is about 10 feet square, with a door in the middle, and a thatched roof that I work hard to keep so that it doesnt leak. A small open kitchen is to the side of the house and in the kitchen is a table made of dark wood that my mother got from her mother. Beside the table is a large drum, raised from the floor, that sits on a plastic crate. Putting aside the yoke and my empty pail, I take the full one from Grace, and pour the water into the drum.

I can make tea, I offer, but Grace says no.

She pulls aside the cloth that covers the doorway of my house and pokes her head inside.

Where is everybody? she asks, but I dont reply. My mother is in the graveyard and Daniel has gone to Chongwe.

You are alone? she asks, and I nod.

Please, I say, and I beg her not to tell anyone. Mwanzila and the others in my compound know, but the teachers at school and the donna from the mission church all think Daniel is still with me.

Grace stands looking at me, hands on her hips, her head cocked to one side. After considering a moment she looks up, shielding her eyes from the sun with her hand.

I will see you next time at the well, she says. Perhaps tomorrow?

Mailo limbi, I agree. Perhaps tomorrow.
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit Friday against the Russian government, the Trump campaign and the WikiLeaks organization alleging a far-reaching conspiracy to disrupt the 2016 campaign and tilt the election to Donald Trump.

The complaint, filed in federal district court in Manhattan, alleges that top Trump campaign officials conspired with the Russian government and its military spy agency to hurt Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and help Trump by hacking the computer networks of the Democratic Party and disseminating stolen material found there.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Russia launched an all-out assault on our democracy, and it found a willing and active partner in Donald Trumps campaign, DNC chairperson Tom Perez said in a statement.

This constituted an act of unprecedented treachery: the campaign of a nominee for president of the United States in league with a hostile foreign power to bolster its own chance to win the presidency, he said.

The case asserts that the Russian hacking campaign  combined with Trump associates contacts with Russia and the campaigns public cheerleading of the hacks  amounted to an illegal conspiracy to interfere in the election that caused serious damage to the Democratic Party.

Former U.S. president George W. Bush said that "there's pretty clear evidence that the Russians meddled" in the 2016 presidential election, forcefully rebutting fellow Republican Donald Trump's denials of Moscow trying to affect the vote. (The Associated Press)

Senate investigators and prosecutors for special counsel Robert Mueller are still investigating whether Trump associates co-ordinated with the Russian efforts. Last month, House Intelligence Committee Republicans said they found no evidence that President Trump and his affiliates colluded with Russian officials to sway the election or that the Kremlin sought to help him  a conclusion rejected by the panels Democrats.

The president has repeatedly rejected any collusion or improper activity by his campaign. This week, he referred again in a tweet to the phony Russia investigation where, by the way, there was NO COLLUSION (except by the Dems).

Suing a foreign country may present legal challenges for the Democrats, in part because other nations have immunity from most U.S. lawsuits. The DNCs complaint argues Russia is not entitled to the protection because the hack constituted a trespass on the partys private property.

The lawsuit states that the DNC claims arise out of Russias trespass on to the DNCs private servers ... in order to steal trade secrets and commit economic espionage.

The lawsuit echoes a similar legal tactic that the Democratic Party used during the Watergate scandal. In 1972, the DNC filed suit against then-president Richard Nixons reelection committee seeking $1 million (U.S.) in damages for the break-in at Democratic headquarters in the Watergate building.

The suit was denounced at the time by Nixons attorney general, John Mitchell, who called it a case of sheer demagoguery by the DNC. But the civil action brought by former DNC chair Lawrence OBrien was ultimately successful, yielding a $750,000 settlement from the Nixon campaign that was reached on the day in 1974 that Nixon left office.

The suit filed Friday seeks millions of dollars in compensation to offset damage it claims the party suffered from the hacks. The DNC argues that the cyberattack undermined its ability to communicate with voters, collect donations and operate effectively as its employees faced personal harassment and, in some cases, death threats.

The suit also seeks an acknowledgment from the defendants that they conspired to infiltrate the Democrats computers, steal information and disseminate it to influence the election.

To support its case, the lawsuit offers a detailed narrative of the DNC hacks, as well as episodes in which key Trump aides are alleged to have been told Russia held damaging information about Clinton.

Russia engaged in a brazen attack on U.S. soil the party alleges, a campaign that began with the cyberhack of its computer networks in 2015 and 2016. Trump campaign officials received repeated outreach from Russia, the suit says.

Rather than report these repeated messages and communications that Russia intended to interfere in the U.S. election, the Trump campaign and its agents gleefully welcomed Russias help, the party argues

Ultimately, Trumps associates entered into an agreement with Russian agents to promote Donald Trumps candidacy through illegal means, the suit concludes.

The suit does not name Trump as a defendant. Instead, it targets various Trump aides who met with people believed to be affiliated with Russia during the campaign, including the presidents son, Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law Jared Kushner, his campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Manaforts deputy, Rick Gates.

Manafort and Gates were charged with money-laundering, fraud and tax evasion in a case brought by special prosecutors last year. In February, Gates pleaded guilty to conspiracy and lying to the FBI and is co-operating with investigators. Manafort has pleaded not guilty.

The DNC lawsuit also names as a defendant the Russian military intelligence service, the GRU, which has been accused by the U.S. government of orchestrating the hacks, as well as WikiLeaks, which published the DNCs stolen emails, and the groups founder Julian Assange.

The lawsuit was also filed against Roger Stone, the longtime Trump confidante who claimed during the campaign that he was in contact with Assange.

The Trump advisers and associates have denied assisting Russia in its hacking campaign. Stone has denied any communication with Assange or advance knowledge of the document dumps by WikiLeaks, saying his comments about Assange were jokes or exaggerations.

The DNC lawsuit argues that the Russian government and the GRU violated a series of laws by orchestrating the secret intrusion into the Democrats computer systems, including statutes to protect trade secrets, prohibit wire tapping and prevent trespassing.

The party said the Trump defendants committed conspiracy through their interaction with Russian agents and their public encouragement of the hacking, with the campaign itself acting as a racketeering enterprise promoting illegal activity.

The complaint was filed on behalf of the party by the law firm of Cohen Milstein.

The suit contains previously undisclosed details, including that the specific date when the Russians breached the DNC computer system: July 27, 2015, according to forensic evidence cited in the filing.

The analysis shows the system was breached again on April 18, 2016. The hackers began siphoning documents and information from DNC systems on April 22. The suit notes that four days later, Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos was informed by Josef Mifsud, a London-based professor, that the Russians were in possession of thousands of emails that could be damaging to Clinton.

The list of defendants in the suit includes Papadopoulos and Mifsud, as well as Aras and Emin Agalorov, the wealthy Russian father and son who hosted the Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow in 2013. Trump, who owned the pageant, attended the event.

The Agalarovs also played a role in arranging a meeting for a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower in New York in 2016, at which Donald Trump Jr. had expected to be given damaging information about Clinton.

The suit alleges that Trumps personal and professional ties to Russia helped foster the conspiracy.

The DNCs lawyers wrote that long standing personal professional and financial ties to Russia and numerous individuals linked to the Russian government provided fertile ground for a conspiracy between the defendants to interfere in the 2016 elections.

The lawsuit describes how the then-Soviet Union paid for Trump to travel Moscow in the 1980s.

It also details the history of Manafort and Gates, who worked for Russian-friendly factions in Ukraine before joining the Trump campaign. Prosecutors have said they were in contact in 2016 with Konstantin Kilimnik, a former linguist in the Russian army who the FBI has alleged had ties to Russian intelligence.

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PESHAWAR, PakistanThe slight, sad-faced man of 26, in a plain white tunic and a red embroidered cap, might seem miscast as the emerging leader of millions of ethnic Pashtuns and the voice of pent-up grievances that this struggling tribal minority has accumulated the Cold War arrived in next-door Afghanistan a generation ago.

But when Manzoor Pashteen took the stage at a recent rally in this Pashtun heartland city, the self-effacing veterinarian was transformed into an impassioned firebrand. He demanded that Pakistans security forces produce hundreds of missing detainees and stop harassing residents of his native Pashtun tribal belt, where conflicts with Taliban militants have been raging for years.

Thousands of supporters cheered and chanted songs including What is this freedom?, a popular protest ballad about wartime repression. The emotional crowd included students and professionals drawn by social media, and burqa-covered tribal women carrying posters of husbands or brothers who were seized in security raids and never seen again.

The rally on April 8 was a pivotal moment for the Pashtun Protection Movement, known by its Urdu initials PTM. Once a tiny group that denounced abuses in the northwest tribal area, it burst onto the national scene in January after Naqeebullah Mehsud, a young Pashtun man in distant Karachi, was shot dead in a police anti-terrorism operation.

A surge of anger swept Pashtun communities across the country. For the first time, this scattered and struggling populace found common cause, especially via social media, raising the spectre of a nationalist uprising in the minority of 40 million. Many Pashtuns have long dreamed of taking back a chunk of Pakistan that was arbitrarily cut off from Afghanistan by the British a century ago.

Pashteen and his budding movement leaped into the fray. He organized a 10-day sit-in at the Islamabad Press Club, bringing together Pashtuns to denounce extrajudicial killings, disappearances and other official abuses. Since then, the movement has grown rapidly, drawing large and excited crowds to rallies, while Pashteens red cap has become a symbol of rebellion on social media.

Pashtun discontent has been like lava, bubbling along for years and waiting to erupt, Afrasiab Khattak, a former senator from the Pashtun-based Awami National Party, said in an interview last week. By building links with large but unorganized Pashtun communities in Karachi and Quetta in the southwest, Khattak wrote Saturday in the Nation newspaper, Pashteens Peshawar-based movement has already become a political force to be reckoned with.

Pakistans Pashtuns have borne the brunt of cross-border conflicts that have pitted Pakistani troops against both Afghan Taliban insurgents and domestic militant groups. Commingled with a huge Afghan refugee population, repeatedly displaced by fighting and constantly crisscrossing the Afghan border, Pashtuns have often been stereotyped as criminals, insurgents and tribal terrorists.

Pashteen and his associates, largely young and educated Pakistanis who grew up in the chaos and routine violence of war, say they seek only justice under the law and the constitution, not to provoke ethnic unrest or secession. They take inspiration from non-violent activists of the past, especially Bacha Khan, a Pashtun independence leader who worked with Mahatma Gandhi in India before the partition that created Pakistan in 1947.

But their explosion onto the national scene has aroused suspicion and concern in some quarters, especially in the powerful state security apparatus, which has been startled and angered by Pashteens accusations. His most provocative slogan charges that the uniform is behind terrorism. Military officials insist they have worked hard to eliminate terrorism from Pakistani soil, while U.S. officials accuse Pakistan of harbouring Taliban insurgents.

The Taliban are the product of the military. Our people have been caught between them for years, and they have suffered endless abuse and humiliation, Pashteen said in an interview last week. He described a litany of abuse in the conflict-afflicted tribal areas, from soldiers confiscating a poor mans chickens to insurgents brutally enforcing Islamic rules. We want peace, and cruelty from either the army or the Taliban is not peace, he said.

Publicly, the military has responded with mixed signals. Officials agreed to a few of the PTMs demands, such as ending a requirement that anyone entering the militarized border tribal areas must present a special citizenship ID card. The army chief, Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa, met with Mehsuds family in Peshawar and vowed to bring justice, but he also warned that engineered protests would not be tolerated, a clear reference to the April 8 rally.

Behind the scenes, critics allege that security agencies have pressured mainstream Pakistani media not to report on the movements events, which have received almost no television coverage. They said government workers have been warned not to attend its rallies, and that security agencies are behind a competing spate of rallies where speakers have denounced Pashteens movement as treasonous and alleged that it is backed by Indian and Afghan intelligence agencies.

The new Pashtun movement has received an outpouring of support from Afghans, including a strong endorsement from President Ashraf Ghani, an ethnic Pashtun. But this has only made the movement more controversial, because relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan are tense. Both have repeatedly accused each other of sponsoring cross-border insurgent and terrorist attacks.

Pashtun political parties in Pakistan, on the other hand, have reacted warily to the nascent movement, partly out of fear of competition and partly because of concern that it could sabotage their longtime efforts to succeed within the formal political system, especially a campaign to bring full legal and political rights to the neglected, federally controlled tribal areas by merging them with the rest of Pakistan.

The Awami National Party, the countrys largest and oldest Pashtun party, has been especially critical. It recently removed two of Pashteens close associates from party posts after they refused to leave his movement. One former party official has worked to bring victimized tribal women to speak at PTM rallies  both an extraordinary departure from conservative Pashtun culture and a rare threat to security forces that are widely popular with the public and have long justified mass raids and detentions in the name of quelling Islamist terrorism.

On April 8, a woman whose face was covered by a burka came to the stage and told her story to the spellbound crowd. In an interview last week, she recounted again how her husband, a factory worker, had been detained by soldiers with no explanation in 2015, how she went to many army and police facilities but learned nothing, and how she has struggled to support her children alone ever since.

My husband worked from morning until night to feed us. If he did anything wrong, he should be taken to court, said the woman, 30, who gave her name as Basroza and said she had never been to school. I just want to know if he is dead or alive. This way, its like he was never even born.

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FLINT, Mich.A federal judge denied a request on Friday that would have ordered Michigan officials to resume distribution of free bottled water in Flint.

U.S. District Judge Judith Levy sided with the state, which announced an end to the program on April 6. Tests show Flint is far below the U.S. federal action level for lead as it recovers from a lead-contaminated water crisis.

Some residents and Mayor Karen Weaver argued bottled water should remain available until home water lines are replaced, a job that will last until 2020.

A resident filing the lawsuit said lead in his water tested far above the federal action level. The judge wasnt swayed because the man isnt living in the home.

Levy said Friday that denying the request wouldnt cause irreparable harm.

The state defended its decision to cut off free bottled water in Flint, saying tap water now is as good or better than in many communities.

Attorneys for the state have said Flint residents concerned about their water can still get a free filter. Lawyers said the restraining order would further stigmatize Flint.
Its not easy being a bug, especially one as small as an ant. The list of potential predators is lengthy for the diminutive creatures, so its no wonder theyve developed an arsenal of defence mechanisms ranging from painful bites or stings to overpowering enemies by sheer numbers.

But one newly discovered ant species goes above and beyond when it senses danger. It explodes  killing itself  and coats adversaries in a toxic yellow goo, the ultimate act of self-sacrifice to protect its colony.

These valiant ants are the newest addition to the species group Colobopsis cylindrica, more colloquially known as the exploding ants, according to a detailed survey of the insects published Thursday in ZooKeys, a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal. Found in the jungles of Southeast Asia, the tree-dwelling ants were called Yellow Goo before researchers aptly named them Colobopsis explodens, Alice Laciny, the articles lead author, told The Washington Post. They are the first new species of exploding ant to be discovered since 1935, Laciny said.

The small reddish-brown ants look like any other ant. Their bodies are full of glandular sacs containing a deadly fluid, said Laciny, a PhD student at the University of Vienna. In the ant hierarchy, it is a minor worker. Only a colonys minor workers explode when under attack. They are a colonys expendables.

But theres nothing cinematic about the ants final act of heroism.

The explosion is not as dramatic as people think it is, she said.

Rather, the ants will bite down on the enemy, angle their backsides close and contract their muscles so hard their skin splits open, releasing the goo, Laciny said. The sticky substance, which oddly has a spice-like, currylike scent, then either kills the intruder, or hinders its attack, she said.

If enemies survive the first line of defence, they will come face-to-face with the colonys major workers and their enlarged, plug-shaped heads, researchers wrote. Known as doorkeepers, these ants barricade the nests entrance, providing a second line of defence.

Although exploding ants were first observed by scientists more than 100 years ago, not much was known about the insects, including how many different kinds existed, until now.

In 2014, Laciny and a group of researchers  comprised of entomologists, botanists, microbiologists and chemists from Austria, Thailand and Brunei  set out to document the exploding ants, according to a summary by the journals publisher. The scientists determined there are at least 15 different kinds of these self-sacrificing insects, including this one.

Despite all the research that has been done, Laciny said there is still much more to be learned about the brave exploding ants, and Colobopsis explodens is expected to be at the centre of it all.

The newly identified ant species was selected as the groups model species, after the scientists deemed it to be particularly prone to self-sacrifice when threatened by enemy arthropods, as well as intruding researchers, the summary said. In that role, the ant will serve as a reference point for future research about exploding ants, Laciny said.

Theyre really nice to watch in their exploding behaviour, she said. They do it quite readily. We have some species who dont really like to explode as much.

However, Laciny said these ants will not explode for any old reason. They only do it in response to attack, a form of active self-sacrifice that kills them. The ants need to really be provoked, she said.

Minor workers are not capable of reproducing, which is why they can be sacrificed. Still, they play a crucial role in the long-term survival of the species. Laciny said their dramatic death helps ensure a colony lives on, so that others may reproduce. Their way of protecting their genes is protecting their sisters.

Imagine a single ant is like a cell in a human body, she said. The exploding workers work as immune cells, they sacrifice their lives to hold off danger.
I remember as a rambunctious red-headed tomboy running around the house with my playmates and my mother admonishing me, Dont run so fast, youll break something! And sure enough, sometimes we did.

Now, decades later, those words come flooding back as I reflect on the defining motto of Silicon Valley, move fast and break things. In particular, I think of Facebook.

In response to the recent revelations of its misuse of personal data, Ive decided to leave the platform and encourage my half-million-plus followers to instead keep in touch through my website. Im told this is a path of professional suicide, especially as Im about to release a new recording.

Times have certainly changed in the music business since I started out busking in the 1980s. Some would argue we were the first industry to be broken.

Until the late 1990s, the music industry was a robust ecosystem of businesses, services and people, many of whom knew each other  a kind of six degrees of separation. Although it wasnt perfect, it was a people business. That ecosystem has been decimated. What remains are anonymous connections with companies in Silicon Valley who do not know me or my customers.

Since 1985, Ive owned and operated my own independent record label and touring companies. Ive personally watched the new digital/streaming business model drastically reduce an artists compensation for their creative work by anywhere from 35 to 97 per cent, depending on the service, YouTube being the most egregious. Many artists will make less than $1 for every 1,000 times a song is played.

Some suggest perpetual touring and merchandise sales are the best way to compensate for this loss of revenue, but in my view this is not a sustainable business model, particularly when you need to keep family and friends intact.

Worse yet, the impact of unfettered social media has devastated our local and national media. The media, like the music industry, now struggles to be properly compensated for well-researched, factually accurate content that we rely on to make vital decisions in our communities and our countries.

Digital monopolies have since moved in with disruptive practices, allowing fake news and alternative facts to proliferate. Now the average citizen can barely discern truth from fiction, while bad actors hack into our democracies as these platforms become weaponized.

Yet it is the erosion of the human right of privacy through the unauthorized harvesting and selling of data and the inherent threat to democracy that concerns me most.

Ten years ago, I was involved in a privacy case in England when a former friend and employee published a book containing private and intimate details of my life, including the grief following the death of my fiance. I argued this person had no right to publish such personal and confidential information. The courts agreed.

The case allowed me to closely examine the difference between the publics interest and what is interesting to the public. I scrutinized the finer distinctions between privacy, secrecy, and confidentiality, surveillance and security  and their rightful places in our professional and personal lives.

As we look into the future, contemplating artificial intelligence, automation, driverless cars and robots in our homes, big data  our data  is providing the foundation for this new world. Smart technology is just another part of the food chain, foraging personal data from our lives, without our permission or full comprehension of the implications.

The scale of hacking at numerous corporations around the world and the data exchange between Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, gives us an idea of how fierce this battle has become. Big data is todays gold. Our personal and national sovereignties are at stake.

Facebooks first president Sean Parker admits they consciously understood they were designing addiction into the Facebook technology but did it anyway.

Now, as Ive watched tech representatives appear before Congress and parliamentary committees, Im convinced that ambition and technology have raced ahead of law, policy and norms.

This is not just a national problem. Its a global problem seeking global solutions. Stricter data protection regulations and the breaking up of monopolies seem to be excellent starting points.

Citizens urgently need legislators to act in the publics interest as it pertains to privacy and democracy. Privacy commissioners need the tools and the authority and we all need a transparent process focused on marrying moral and ethical considerations with technological progress.

Yes, we are heading for Facebooks emergency exit, but at the same time Im comforted by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar who says humans are only meant to know about 150 people anyway.

Its true we have unruly forces running through the house causing exponential chaos. They may have addicted our children, taken our jobs, broken our businesses, our democracies, even our trust. But they have yet to break our will.

Loreena McKennitt is an international, multi-platinum recording artist, a member of The Order of Canada and Honorary Colonel of the Royal Canadian Air Force.

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The Supreme Court ruling on Thursday in the Comeau case is a significant loss for consumers and our Canadian economy, but a great win for inertia. The Comeau case was never just about beer. It was essentially about enabling our domestic economy across the country to thrive. For the agrifood sector, the decision would have had tremendous significance.

Gerard Comeau made a purchase in Quebec of 344 bottles of beer, two bottles of whiskey and one bottle of other spirits, which he then brought back to New Brunswick. This is something he had done several times but which is in fact deemed illegal, based on a 90-year old law. This time, however, Comeau was arrested and fined $292.50. This was in 2012. More than five years later, the Supreme Court ruled the fine to be constitutional. Who would have thought that $292.50 had the potential to forever change the face of domestic food trade?

For almost nine decades, interprovincial barriers have multiplied and have made the life of many food companies a living nightmare. For consumers, if no one catches you, you move on.

For businesses, when buying ingredients or specialty products from another province, its been less than convenient. Moreover, many of these products were taxed only to support provincial governments public coffers. Barriers were erected to suppress competition and sell more taxed and overpriced food products and beverages.

Canada has a myriad of trade barriers in addition to the fact that the agrifood sector is addicted to marketing boards. For many, mechanisms countervailing power are the only methods possible to appease entrepreneurial angst in the sector. We just needed the Supreme Court of Canada to make us realize that we need to get our interprovincial act together. But it did not happen.

Because of this ruling, creative companies in smaller provinces will not have a fighting chance to expand and compete in larger markets, such as Quebec and Ontario. Wineries, craft cheese producers, craft breweries, speciality meat producers, and many other small-scale operations will face mounting obstacles, domestically.

But this would have also turned out to be the wake-up call our supply-managed sectors needed. Our provincially based quota system to support dairy, poultry and egg production facilities will likely be targeted by this ruling.

This could have represented an opportunity to recalibrate some of the agrifood wealth around the country. For example, dairy processing has historically been concentrated in the province of Quebec. Quotas are evenly distributed, based on domestic demand for milk, including processing.

Now, it is likely that we will see other provinces play a much larger role in dairy processing. The Comeau ruling could have induced some deeply needed supply-management reforms to make the regime more flexible and current. New methods, capitalizing on terroir knowledge, could have made most gastronomic regions in Canada flourish.

Right now, most production is done in Ontario and Quebec, and a different decision by the Supreme Court could have complemented what many consider a weak and obsolete equalization system that sees the have provinces supporting have nots.

A different outcome would have met a reduction in the price of a variety of products you now enjoy. More competition could have put pressure on prices. Fiscal policies could have changed, given how open provincial economies were going to become. But now, we will need to wait a while longer.

The will for more economic integration makes internal barriers undesirable. The case for a better flow of goods remains very strong in Canada, from an economic standpoint. Interprovincial trade barriers never made sense in the first place, never will.

We are only 37 million inhabitants in one of the vastest counties in the world. Distribution costs are prohibitive for many of our small and medium-sized companies, who often drive the open agrifood innovation agenda in this country. These companies have long needed just such a chance to thrive beyond one or a few provinces.

Some favorable to the current regime believe the Comeau ruling could have triggered a race to the bottom, in terms of health standards and food safety. Such an argument is nonsense. Risk management practices in the Canadian agrifood sector are exemplary.

As we continue to seek opportunities abroad, Ottawa and the provinces will need to clean house here first. It has taken over 90 years  and a timid fine of $292.50  for Ottawa to finally receive a strong message that Canadians deserve better. But for no, the Supreme Court has opted to stay on the sidelines.

Sylvain Charlebois is a professor in Food Distribution and Policy at the Faculty of Agriculture, Dalhousie University.

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How B.C. blocking the Kinder Morgan pipeline does damage to us all, Olive, April 19

I realize business columnist David Olive was penning an opinion piece in favour of the Kinder Morgan pipeline, but is that also licence for journalists to replace facts with hysterics?

According to Mr. Olive, the relentless obstruction and relentless calls for studies causing the project to be ceaselessly delayed via a campaign of B.C. obstructionism are borderline illegal and a clear and present danger to the Canadian federation.

The pipeline was federally approved less than 18 months ago. While Mr. Olive points out that there is already tanker traffic on the coast, he omits how the new pipeline would cause that traffic to increase about 600 per cent, from five to 34 tankers per month.

He also omits that the additional tankers would be carrying bitumen, a heavier oil for which no safe and efficient cleanup is known.

Finally, he omits that increased tanker traffic would accelerate decline and risk extinction of the resident orca whale population.

If such a project were proposed in your backyard, Mr. Olive, would you not ask the courts to rule on its legality? That is what the B.C. premier seeks to do.

Avi Sirlin, Victoria, B.C.

PM makes history in French assembly, April 18

We are told that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau asked French lawmakers to be progressive, like-minded defenders against the onslaught of global perils such as climate change.

How did he do this? Did he ask them to invest in a pipeline project, so that we Canadians can increase our exports of climate-friendly bitumen?

Bart Hawkins Kreps, Bowmanville
In its decision on Gerard Comeaus Free the Beer case, the Supreme Court demonstrated one of the most Canadian of qualities: a fear of changing the status quo.

Presented with hard, factual and irrefutable evidence that the Constitution provides for free trade among the provinces, the court instead decided to accept the politically driven, subjective, factually inaccurate and frequently irrelevant arguments of the provinces and their cronies  thus legitimizing their ability to maintain trade barriers, handicap the economy and take advantage of hard-working Canadians.

Instead of making the difficult but righteous decision to eliminate all provincial trade barriers, the Supreme Court ensured the legacy of provincial monopolies that punish ambition and reward complacency.

The fact that their decision was unanimous clearly shows a larger political agenda at work. Or perhaps just one of laziness  during the proceedings, the Supreme Court Justices repeatedly complained that ruling in favour of Comeau would overflow the courts with new cases. Either motivation is deeply disheartening.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hauled out not one, but three of his 2015 election slogans last weekend when he held his pipeline-crisis meeting with the premiers of Alberta and British Columbia.

He talked of hope and hard work and declared that better is always possible. Trudeau even urged the warring provinces to see their rivals as neighbours, not enemies  just as he advised Liberals in 2014 when he was presiding over his first party convention as leader.

Its not surprising that election campaigns are on Trudeaus mind these days. The newly acclaimed president of the party, Suzanne Cowan, has already declared that the big Liberal convention in Halifax this weekend is an unofficial kickoff to the federal election that takes place exactly 18 months from Saturday.

Trudeau is spending only 24 hours at the Halifax meeting, so he has limited time to motivate partisans into doing all the door-knocking and fundraising he needs them to carry out in the coming year and a half. Hes looking to them for the hard work; theyll be looking to him for the hope.

There will be a huge temptation to draw some straight lines between the Halifax convention and Trudeaus future Liberal campaign. In terms of morale and spirit, thats probably correct.

In terms of policy, however, we may be looking in the wrong place for hints of whats to come in 2019. In fact, its probably a mistake to think that what happens on the convention floor in Halifax is automatically destined for the pages of the 2019 Liberal platform.

Sometimes partisans push an idea that turns into official policy  the 2012 Liberal convention voted in favour of legalizing marijuana, for instance. Six years later, that policy is due to become a reality this summer.

But in 2016, when Liberals gathered in Winnipeg for their last convention, they voted in favour of pursuing the idea of guaranteed income. Its also on the list of Halifax policy resolutions.

Does the current federal government see these resolutions as a call to action? Probably not. Heres what I was told when I asked the office of Jean-Yves Duclos, the federal Minister of Families, Children and Social Services.

As you know, party policies are taken in consideration by the government but they are not automatically governmental policies, said Emilie Gauduchon, Ducloss press secretary. The basic income wasn't part of the party platform during the last election and the next election platform isn't decided yet.

So if Trudeau isnt going to get his election-platform ideas from Halifax, wheres he looking? The answer may lie in Ontario.

Basic income and pharmacare were big topics on Parliament Hill this week, not because the Halifax convention is looming, but because those ideas are being tested right now by Premier Kathleen Wynnes government at Queens Park.

The parliamentary budget officer issued his price tag for an Ontario-style basic income all over Canada ($76 billion a year) on Tuesday. The next day, the Commons health committee issued its report on a national pharmacare program (also potentially expensive).

In a matter of weeks, all of Ontario will be plunged into a provincial election in which these pharmacare, basic income and other big policy ideas are going to be an important part of the debate. You can bet that the Ontario election will be a far bigger topic of conversation in the corridors at Halifax than the resolutions on the convention floor.

So yes, Trudeau likely does have an election on his mind as he heads to Halifax this weekend. But it may not be the next one or even the last federal one. Chances are, the prime minister and his fellow Liberals are very keen to see how their provincial cousins, and their ideas, are going to fare in the coming Ontario election.

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How do I love thee?

I had so many questions to ask Doug Ford  questions posed by many Black Ontarians who want to probe the Conservative leaders mind and discover if he has any concrete initiative to unlock the stymied potential of Blacks in the province.

For starters, why the focus on his own charitable acts  I take Black kids up to my cottage  rather than removing the barriers that victimize Black Ontarians?

Why would Ford promise to reintroduce TAVIS (Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy)  the most reviled police initiative that proved racist in its application in Toronto neighbourhoods?

Will you ban carding, not simply try to regulate it?

I would have asked Ford, in person, had he turned up at the April 11 leaders debate organized by a broad number of Black organizations. About 500 people attended. The issues were focused, targeted, germane to the everyday lived experiences of Black Ontarians. Ford skipped the debate, even as Premier Kathleen Wynne, NDP Leader Andrea Horwath and Green Party head Mike Schreiner attended.

The debaters were doused in wave after wave of questions that challenged the impotence of the provinces political apparatus to address intransigent anti-Black racism in the justice system, education, health care, housing, employment  you name it.

Horwath and Schreiner surprised more than a few with their direct acknowledgement of racism. Wynnes views were generally known through government initiatives many in the audience consider a first step, though not enough.

Ford chose instead to attend a rally in Sudbury while the debate was in full swing at the Jamaican-Canadian Centre in North York. He had been given ample notice. He skipped the debate because he wanted to. Period.

It was a politically astute move by Ford, the front-runner in the race to become premier and ahead in all opinion polls by double-digit margins. Conventional wisdom says when you are ahead you dont make grand pronouncements, announce controversial plans and raise alarm about your politics.

Its hard to imagine Ford disrespecting more connected and powerful communities  and then rubbing salt in their wounds as he did by claiming that he has enough support in the Black community so he doesnt really need to be at this debate.

I moderated that April 11 debate. Considering Fords self-declared love for the Blacks, I wanted to ask:

Will you reinstate the Employment Equity Act requirements Mike Harris killed, setting in motion the destruction of data and initiatives that had started to significantly improve the job prospects and socioeconomic status, impact and reach of many marginalized groups?

I dont have to think up questions. I received many from Facebook friends and other citizens. For example, heres a gimmie that Ford should hit out the park, seeing he hates the current LRT plans for Eglinton and Finch Avenue West:

How would a Ford Administration ensure that large infrastructure projects provide direct benefits to the Black community? For instance the York TTC extension has done little to enhance economic development in the Jane and Finch area. The Eglinton Crosstown threatens the existence of Lil Jamaica (Oakwood and Eglinton).

Other than trips to Muskoka, what will your government do to ensure that Black families and young people no longer face the barriers related to anti-Black racism and have the opportunity to fully and equitably participate in growing Ontarios economy?

Progressive Conservative Leader Doug Ford is throwing an Ontario campaign tradition under the bus.

Heres a delicate one: Mr. Ford, you recently claimed that no politician other than your brother Rob Ford has done more for the Black community than you have. Youve done more for Black communities than Jean Augustine? Than Lincoln Alexander? Than Michael Thompson? Than Mitzie Hunter? Than Margaret Best? Than Zanana Akande? Than Rosemary Brown? Than Celina Caesar-Chavannes? Than Howard McCurdy? Than Rocky Jones? Than Alvin Curling? Other than charitable acts, what exactly have you done as a politician that has led to systemic change on any level, in any domain?

Yeah, what?! Or, as one query states: Give four tangible policy positions youve taken, or motions you have tabled, that have led to targeted improvements in Black communities?

What will a Ford government do to ensure that Black-owned businesses are treated fairly in winning procurement with the provincial government?

Mr. Ford, as both a businessman and a politician, what is your record and experience of working with Black businesses? As the CEO of Deco Labels, what is your record on hiring Black staff and promoting them? How do you work with Black-owned subcontractors in any aspect of your business?

And heres a cheeky one:

According to media reports and court documents, the Fords have had significant interaction with people in the drug trade. Do you support the move to legalize marijuana use? Considering that young Black men are over-represented in arrests and convictions for cannabis possession (seven times greater than whites in some studies), do you support calls for the pardoning, clearing of records and amnesty of the many people incarcerated for activities that are now being legalized?

If Doug Ford wants us to count the ways he loves Black people, heres one he should embrace  to counter the blatant disrespect he showed in skipping the debate.

Come to a town hall with the Black community. Give community leaders a date and theyll set it up. One-on-one. Just you and us, Doug.

We wont be able to print enough tickets.

Royson James is a former Star reporter who is a current freelance columnist based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @roysonjames

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VANCOUVERBritish Columbias newly announced review of real estate regulators in the province should examine how money laundering and shady transactions were allowed to fester as the housing market skyrocketed, according to a local realtor.

The finance minister Carole James announced Wednesday that an independent review led by former civil servant Dan Perrin will scrutinize oversight of the lucrative industry.

I dont see anything wrong with the province looking at making sure this is a well-policed industry, said Tom Davidoff, an economist at the University of B.C.s Sauder School of Business. An uncertain and growing rapidly market is one in which youre going to have shenanigans, given the forces driving up prices in Vancouver.

Making sure people play by the rules is great.

James was unavailable for an interview due to health reasons Thursday, but in an email a spokesperson quoted James saying the relationship is not working between B.C.s Office of the Superintendent of Real Estate and the provinces Real Estate Council, due to 2016 reforms by the previous B.C. Liberal government which may not have been fully thought-through.

Given the state of B.C.s housing market, it is critical that our regulators are working together to strengthen consumer protections, James said in the statement. Both the regulators themselves and stakeholders have raised concerns ... We want to ensure that B.C.s real estate regulation is effective.

Real estate in the province, particularly in the Lower Mainland, has become one of the most controversial topics as housing prices and rents exploded in recent years. A series of exposes in the Globe and Mail and Global News have alleged organized criminals use real estate transactions and loans to launder proceeds of crime. And there have also been cases of unscrupulous realtors exploiting the secrecy of property transactions to flip homes and profit without sellers knowledge.

Davidoff said any moves to increase regulations need to come with teeth, including higher penalties against rule-breakers, and the industry should be pushed to make more data on transactions available.

In a recent testimony before the federal Standing Committee on Finance, B.C. Attorney-General David Eby warned parliamentarians his government needs Ottawas help reining in the colossal nature of the regulatory failure that took place and, frankly, may still be taking place in British Columbia.

Vancouver has become infamous for money laundering, he testified on March 27, so much so that international organized crime experts call it the Vancouver model. And Eby described an increasing lack of confidence in B.C. around the enforcement of laws related to tax evasion, and the enforcement of laws related to the laundering of money.

We need to be able to answer the question of where the money in our housing market is coming from, he said.

Outrage over such allegations led the previous B.C. Liberal government to take oversight away from the local boards and the provincial council in 2016, handing top-level authority to a real estate superintendent.

The regulator was appointed by Clark when she was scrambling for relevancy on the housing file leading up to the election, said realtor Keith Roy, a Vancouver-based RE/MAX agent, in a phone interview. Now youve still got a government responding to polls, implementing policy based on polling data. Theres no comprehensive approach in what theyre trying to do.

On the question of the behaviour of realtors, however, Roy said though there are some bad people in any profession, and many of those caught breaking the law in shady transactions are often working for new, massive brokerages with little supervision or local knowledge of law or language.

Generally speaking, you can see a common theme among the individuals who are continually published as having been in trouble, the realtors who are being caught on this stuff, he said. You protect the public by increasing the caliber of people; the barrier to entry needs to be drastically increased.

Meanwhile, Friday at 6 p.m. is the deadline for the public to offer input into the real estate superintendents proposed rule changes for realtors, announced a month ago.

The Superintendent and Real Estate Council of B.C. were unavailable for interviews Thursday.

David P. Ball is a Vancouver-based reporter at StarMetro, covering democracy and politics. Reach him by email or @davidpball.

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VANCOUVERThe University of B.C. wants to pay cash or land to extend the planned Broadway subway connection out to the university campus.

In an announcement on Thursday, the university said it could contribute by providing land for subway stations in combination with a financial contribution from new revenues enabled by rapid transit, depending on the planned subway projects scope and costs.

But TransLink doesnt seem keen on extending the line. So far, the regions transit expansion plan only envisions building a line along Broadway to Arbutus, which leaves a distance of about six kilometres to the campus proper.

In a statement to media, TransLink said there are no plans to build the line beyond what was originally intended.

Some of the earliest plans for the transit line were drawn out a decade ago. In 2013, TransLink announced that it would cost $3 billion (2010 dollars) to build the line from VCC-Clark to West 10th Avenue and University Boulevard at the campus.

The latest plan cuts that line short  running from VCC-Clark to Arbutus Street  and had been estimated to cost $1.98 billion (2015 dollars).

In its announcement, the university said it was building on recent news of funding by making its proposal. The university said extending the planned subway out to campus would provide capacity for UBC into the next century.

The federal government indicated as early as 2015 it would provide funds for public transit across the country. But it was only Thursday federal Minister of Infrastructure Amarjeet Sohi reaffirmed the governments 2016 and 2017 budgets would provide $28.7 billion for public transit Canada-wide.

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EDWARDSVILLE  Madison County Republican Party Chairman Jeremy Plank is pushing for more Republican judges in the Third Judicial Circuit.

He said that of the 22 judges in the circuit, only two sitting judges are from his party. They are Circuit Judge Dave Dugan, who is running for a four-year term, and Associate Judge Steve Stobbs, who was one of 13 associate judges appointed by a vote of the nine circuit judges.

Circuit judges are picked for their first terms in partisan elections. After that, the voters decide whether to retain them in a non-partisan retention vote.

Plank said that he finds it troubling that that Republicans are in the majority in county government but represent only two percent of the 22 judges.

He noted that many of the recent associate judge appointments are lawyers with ties to the Democratic party and to plaintiffs law firms headed by Democrats. The circuits had opportunities recently to appoint Republican replacements to vacancies left by the departure of some Democratic associates, but they picked Democrats, instead.

Republicans are simply underrepresented on the bench in Madison County, and our elected circuit judges need to use these vacancies to show the electorate that they value balance in the judiciary and want to improve the image of our court system, Plank said.

If our county is going to shake its reputation as a judicial hellhole, the judiciary needs more balance. Two Republican judges out of 22 total does not reflect the political makeup of a county with a Republican majority, Plank said in a news release Friday.

Democratic Party Chairman Mark Von Nida said that the local Republican party leaders sent a letter to the circuit judges recommending Republican Andrew Caruthers for an associate judge position. He said Caruthers is a fine attorney.

He noted that Planks words are an admission that that Republicans are treating the election as a partisan effort that has nothing to do with performance in court.

He said perhaps Planks news release has more to do with the fractures in the Republican party than the performance of judges. He was referring to the recent challenge to Plank from Madison County Board Chairman Kurt Prenzler.

Von Nida, the Madison County Circuit Clerk, added that the judges in the circuit do an excellent job.

It really doesnt have anything to do with politics, he said.

Reach reporter Sanford Schmidt at 618-208-6449.
EAST ALTON  The former Walgreens building on West St. Louis Avenue will soon have new life, as a Dollar Tree location is expected to open in the structure later this year.

Developers this week applied for a building permit and workers have been in the store, which is expected to open in August, according to a company spokesperson.

Dollar Tree continues to grow and we are proud to be part of the East Alton community, said Kayleigh M. Painter, investment and media relations manager for the Chesapeake, Virginia-based company.

The building, built in 2011 as a Walgreens and located at 550 W. St. Louis Ave., was last open in August 2016. The Walgreens closed because it didnt perform well enough financially for the Deerfield, Illinois-based national drugstore chain to keep it open, East Alton Mayor Joe Silkwood said at the time.

It was one of about 200 Walgreens stores that closed in that time period, including one other in Illinois.

Were really excited that Dollar Tree has chosen that location, Silkwood said this week. Its a very nice building, we believe its a great opportunity for that property.

Dollar Tree stores offer a wide variety of products, all priced at $1 or less.

Painter said in an emailed response to questions about the store that it would typically have between 12-20 employees.

Interested applicants will be able to apply online at www.dollartree.com or in person at the store closer to the opening date.

The company has other locations in Alton, Jerseyville, Wood River, Bethalto and Edwardsville.
GRAFTON  An unusual and colorful cafe with a cause celebrates its fifth season this year.

Peace of Quiche will open for the weekends starting Saturday, April 28, raising awareness about charitable organizations, while serving fresh and unique meals from family recipes.

This is no ordinary place to eat because of the decor, a surprising gift shop and the cause. Peace of Quiche  the cafe with a cause, which is how the eaterys owner describes the venture  has a mission to promote peace by supporting those who make a difference. Those words are carved into a wooden sign on its wall and surrounded by artfully decorated tables, lively paintings and hospitable atmosphere.

Purchases made in the gift shop help to support various causes, such as Fair Trade, womens shelters, braille literacy for children and an end to human trafficking. In addition, various artisans selling their work in the shop designate a charity for part of their proceeds. Peace of Quiche periodically also highlights a local charity, with 10 percent of weekend proceeds from meal purchases going toward the featured organizations cause.

After a fulfilling career with nonprofit organizations, I decided that it was time to give back with a place where people could enjoy a nice meal while learning a few things about organizations that are working to make our world a better place, owner Julie Connoyer explained.

Connoyer renovated a 1910 building five years ago that was the original Grafton phone company, transforming it into a multicolored cafe and gift shop with a patio for additional seating and a large deck overlooking the confluence of the Illinois and Mississippi rivers.

I am pleased with how well the cafe has been received, she said. It is a unique concept for the area, but you would be surprised at how many people light up when they see the charitable market, want to know more about our mission and then share with me their own inspiring story.

Signs placed around the shop explain how purchases help the featured organizations, including the particular charities that have been designated by artisans for a contribution. Since opening, Peace of Quiche has donated to 15 charitable organizations, many of which are local.

The customer stories are often very moving, Connoyer noted. I think all of us have had an experience when we needed support from others or have had an opportunity to lend a helping hand. The shop triggers these stories from people, which is inspiring and energizing for me.

Connoyer acknowledged also that the food might contribute to the positive response.

Her breakfast and lunch menu include unusual varieties of quiche, fresh-baked goods, a breakfast scramble and recipes such as the popular Bubs Scrapple, a combination of sausage, cornmeal and spices, seared in a frying pan according to a family recipe passed on by Connoyers late father.

She also has the support of many family members. Her husband, Tim Eckels, has been instrumental in supporting her mission and helps out wherever he is needed on weekends. Her mother has been there almost every weekend since day one. Her sisters and niece also work at the cafe, providing a welcoming family atmosphere.

This place is kind of a hidden gem for Grafton and the Riverbend area, Grafton Chamber of Commerce Jamie Clayton said. I think people were a little surprised and intrigued when Julie opened it five years ago, but now it is a popular place in town and everybody appreciates how it expands the variety of experiences for visitors.

Peace of Quiche will from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays starting Saturday, April 28. The gift shop stays open until 4 p.m. The cafe with a cause is located at 111 E. Main Street.
FIELDON  The Illinois Department of Transportation is planning to close Eldred Road on Monday to all traffic from north of Illinois Route 16/100 for approximately one mile.

This lane closure will be in place on Monday, April 23, and all lanes will be open to traffic by Tuesday morning, April 24. This road closure is necessary to replace a cross road pipe culvert. Work is being completed by the IDOT Jerseyville Maintenance Yard.
EAST ALTON  All Madison County and other area residents are invited to drop off a donation for United Ways Food for Families at the Granite City Schnucks at 3100 Madison Avenue Saturday between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m.

The Food for Families drive was created to help meet the growing need of local food pantries to keep their shelves stocked and includes a week-long competition between local schools to collect the most nonperishable canned goods. The top three schools with the most items collected relative to school size will win a cash prize. Last year, the community donated over 15,000 pounds of food to help local families.
What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open, wrote American poet and activist Muriel Rukeyser, known for her poems on feminism and equality. Penned in 1968, these lines continued to be used, even to this day, as a rallying cry for women and feminists who speak up against abuse. Rukeyser's quote is rightfully the introductory slogan of Me Too RisingGoogle's new interactive visualisation of the #MeToo movement. Piggybacking on information gathered from Google Maps and Google Trends, the interactive attempts to visualise the spread of the powerful movement across the globe.



A watershed moment in history of women's rights, the hashtag and the movement gathered steam in October last year with sexual harassment allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. What followed was an avalanche of stories of abuse and exploitation in Hollywood over the years that pulled off many other big names from their pedestal. Since then, what began as a hashtag on twitter became a global crusade that united women to share stories of abuseat work and home.



Allegations against Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey; Hollywood's 'black on the red carpet' protest at the Golden Globes; TIME choosing the silence breakers as person of the year; the #aintnocinderealla campaign in Indiathese are some of the events that caught widespread attention through news and social media. 'Me Too Rising' attempts to bring other stories, too, that define women's movements since #MeToo. For instance, a scroll over Bengaluru in India will lead the user to an article about women-centric literature and theatre festivals.



Launching 'Me Too Rising' as part of the Sexual Assault Awareness Month, Google's senior counsel on civil and human rights Malika Saada Saar wrote in the blog post: #MeToo marks a time when sexual assault survivors everywhere turned the internet into a platform for their voices and perspectives to be heard and respected. In the past year, #MeToo has been searched in 195 countriesthat's every country on earth.



Google allows users to see the cities where the hashtag was trending on different dates and also what is happening now at local levels with city-specific searches. The site also has a link to sexual assault resources to improve awareness, which include ways to get in touch with the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) and the Trevor Project. Google has announced that it will give $500,000 in grants to RAINN and Girls for Gender Equity.



As one scrolls through the globe, it is empowering to see clusters of bright spotseach of these representing a city that has been talking about #MeToo since last year. Let the clusters increase, let the consciousness grow.



As Saar puts it: Me Too Rising shows what it looks like when we all become a little more aware of sexual assault and violence. When enough survivors speak up, the world not only listens, it searches for answers. to do beyond just spreading awareness about sexual assault and harassment.


Lending major Axis Bank on Friday said it has commenced the "succession process to appoint a new Managing Director and CEO".

According to a BSE filing, the company' Board has appointed Egon Zehnder, a global leadership advisory firm, to conduct the succession process and evaluate candidates.

"The Board will ensure that the said process will be completed before the end of (Shikha) Sharma's tenure and thus facilitate smooth transition of leadership responsibilities at the bank," it said in a BSE filing.

On April 9, Axis Bank accepted the request of incumbent Managing Director and CEO Shikha Sharma to be re-appointed for a shorter duration of time, subject to regulatory approval.

Sharma had requested to be on a revised re-appointed period from June 1, 2018 up to December 31, 2018.

The board had earlier decided to re-appoint Sharma for a period of 3 years from June 1, 2018, subject to approvals.

Sharma has served as the bank's Managing Director and CEO for around 9 years. In this period, she has led the bank's next stage of growth.

However, the rise in the bank's NPA levels has become a major cause of concern.
The finance ministry assesses that it might take more than two weeks from now, to be able to adequately address the shortage of bank notes in the country. The shortage had hit at a time when the nation was in a festive mood and the government has been pushing for a digitalisation of the economy.

We have started the process of printing new notes. Looking at the time to be taken by additional inputs like paper and ink to arrive, we can safely assume that by the first week of May, we would start printing the additional banknotes, said a high-ranking RBI official in Delhi

Arrangements for quickly dispatching these notes to demand centres have also been made, the RBI official said, after attending a meeting between finance ministry officials and RBI authorities, to understand the logistical arrangements planned by RBI to dispatch the new banknotes once they are printed.

According to RBI and finance ministry estimates, at present, there is a shortage of Rs 75,000 crore vis-a-vis demand for banknotes in the country. The RBI had earlier maintained that all its currency chests in the country have adequate reserves of bank notes.

However, according to government sources, there is an acute shortage of bank notes in Telengana, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and parts of Delhi. Subhash Chandra Garg, secretary, department of economic affairs, had earlier said that the government would step up printing of Rs 500 notes to meet this shortfall.

Presently, bank notes are being printed in India from four security presses run by the Security Printing and Minting Corporation of India Ltd at its Currency Note Press in Nashik, Maharashtra and Bank Note Press at Dewas, Madhya Pradesh. Two other currency printing facility in the country is run by the Bharatiya Reserve Bank Note Mudran Pvt Ltd, an RBI undertaking at their press in Mysore and Salboni, West Bengal.

Other than the special paper containing security features in banknotes, special inks and equipment are also needed to print currency notes. While some security paper used in Indian currencies are manufactured at a government facility in Hyderabad, most need to be imported, along with security inks, from either Europe or Japan.

Japanese printing press manufacturer Komori, one of the manufacturers of currency press used in India, also ruled out problems with machinery and equipment being used in India, for the current shortage of banknotes. Indias four currency printing facilities use press machinery supplied by Komori and German manufacturer Giesecke & Devrient (G&D).

There are no problems with any of the printing machines. In fact, the ones being used in India are state-of-the-art, said Hirofumi Hoshino, MD, Komori India. The company had supplied new currency printing machines to facilities in India post-demonetisation, but are bound by confidentiality clause from revealing the exact number of presses operating.

While some security features are provided in these printing machines, security ink, another critical component of note printing is sourced from Switzerland and Japan as India is yet to start manufacturing them.
Building a company from scratch is no easy task. There are many roadblocks that people needs to overcome to ensure that their start-up becomes successful. Conquest gives one the platform and opportunities to push start-ups from its nascent stage, help it grow and become a success.

The only way to push the human race forward is to have enterprising small groups of people reject the status quo and build the future. In those magical moments of giving birth to innovation, we stand by the crazy ones who dare to change the world, the ones who love building and creating just for the fun of it., says Rahul Chhabra, CEO at Conquest, BITS Pilani who plans to build Indias first student-run start-up launchpad for early age start-ups.

Founded in 2004, Conquest has become Indias biggest student-run start-up conclave receiving over 1,000 start-up applications consistently since previous three editions. With some revamped models and success stories, Conquest has now evolved into a six-week summer program for Indias top 10 start-ups. The team involved with the start-ups receive free space to live and work in Bengaluru along with intensive mentoring, investment opportunities and media coverage.

Conquest has had success stories like SocialCops, which is acclaimed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and has been recognised as the Most Impactful Start-up of 2017 by YourStory. Swagene and Gamezop which were the top two start-ups in Conquest 2015 went on to create genetically customised medicine and social gaming platforms respectively. Thinkerbell Labs, winner of Conquest 2016, aims to bring Braille within the reach of all visually-impaired people.

With a network of top investors like Sanjay Nath, Dev Khare, Barath Shankar from investment firms like Blume Ventures, Lightspeed Ventures, Accel Partners, Matrix Partners, and Indian Angel Network, Conquest serves as a networking paradise. Infotech Hub and Balsamiq as associate sponsors, Conquest is on a mission to empower founders, to catalyse innovation and to assist creation.

What all is Conquest up to?

From one of Indias grandest start-up events, Conquest is now under transition to become a leader in Indias start-up ecosystem with multiple initiatives for all stakeholders in the industry.

 Summer Mentorship Program  With a goal to help the best founders build great businesses and raise money, Conquest provides a six-week long summer mentorship program at Bengaluru to their Top 10 Start-ups. This will comprise of free coliving space at The Huba co-living space where people come together to live, work and express themselves, along with free co-working facilities. A separate co-working space will also be provided at BHIVE workspace.

 Grand Finale  The Summer Mentorship Program will be followed by a Grand Finale where the Top 10 Start-ups get to pitch themselves before Indias top investors and media houses to raise funds and gain media attention.

 Conquest Mentoring Sessions  From among all the start-ups that register for Conquest, the Top 50 are called for a day-long mentoring session in Delhi, Bengaluru and Mumbai with industry stalwarts in tech, customer acquisition, fundraising and so on.

 Conquest Community  The Conquest Community is a curated community of past start-ups, investors, mentors and experts from the Conquest network. It sparks discussions and provides an opportunity for members to connect with and gain insights from each other.

 Conquest Hiring Platform  This gives an opportunity to Conquest Campus Ambassadors, college E-Cell partners and developers to get a chance to work with one of the previous Conquest Finalists as well as the current start-ups looking to hire.

 Conquest Academy  Building a repository of great advice to first time founders which have everything from how to find the right co-founders to how to achieve a product market fit.

 Conquest Meetups  Regularly held meetups and hackathons with mentors, founders and developers which helps get the most talented people of the country under one roof.

Why should a start-up register for Conquest?

If you are an early stage start-up founder who really cares about the company you are building, then Conquest has built a distraction-free, high growth environment for you so that you can single mindedly focus on building your company. Conquest provides intensive mentoring from founders who have built great companies themselves who are the best source of experiential knowledge on nascent stage start-up problems. Another important element of the program is a collaboration focused environment which requires all Top 10 Start-ups to stay and work together in order to solve each others problems and leverage complementary skill sets. Finally, Conquest helps the start-ups overcome one of the most common roadblocks - fundraising. Conquest provides investors from top VC firms, Conquest alumni and experienced founders to help craft your pitch, build your deck, maneuver deals and secure funding.

Conquest has opened registrations, join the journey here - www.conquest.org.in.

To know more about Conquest, check out their blogsConquest: Building Indias First Student-Run Start-up Launchpad; Why register your startup for Conquest?
On Friday, a Facebook post started doing the rounds, claiming that the Shoojit Sircar-Juhi Chaturvedi film, October, was plagiarised from a 2016 Marathi film AartiThe Unknown Love Story. October, which released last week, was appreciated by critics and elicited a mixed response from the audience. The movie earned Rs 30.24 crore in the first week. It is a story of a young hotel management student Dan (Varun Dhawan) who discovers himself while taking care of his friend, Shiuli (Banita Sandhu), who was taken comatose after an accident.

AartiThe Unknown Love Story released in 70 screens across Maharashtra last year. According to the director Sarika Mene, the film was loved by "whoever watched it". She said she was aware that her movie was small, and very raw.

Aarti is based on a true story of Menes brother, Sunny Pawar. In 2006, Sunnys girlfriend Aarti met with a car accident and Sunny spent three years taking care of Aarti in a hospital in Mumbai. In those three years, Sunny found true love.

Mene has filed a criminal complaint against the filmmakers, including Shoojit Sircar and writer Juhi Chaturvedi, in the Vile Parle Police Station. The filmmakers have also filed a complaint at the Akhil Bhartiya Marathi Chitrapat Maha Mandal, Screen Writers Association and IMPPA (Indian Motion Picture Producers Association). In the press release, the team of Aarti calls for a ban on October and wants to stop further monetisation and exploitation of the film.

Mene spoke to THE WEEK about the movie, similarities with October, and what she expects.

You have said that you had inhibitions after watching the trailer of October, that its similar to your movie?

Yes. After watching the trailer, I spoke with some of my close friends in the [film] industry on what steps should be taken. I didnt want things to backfire if [the content of the film] was not similar. They said that I could still go ahead and talk to either IMPPA or the Screen Writers [Screen Writers Association, SWA], and ask them to connect me with the October team; before release, maybe they could show me the movie. But the associations didnt take me seriously. They told me to go back and wait till the movie gets released, because big names were associated with it, and I come from a very small town [Murud Jangira, Raigad].

When I saw the movie, I was shattered. 90 per cent of the movie is thematically similar to mine. They have done a good job creatively, but theft is theft. They should have met us at least once. They should have come to us, contacted my family, taken my brothers approval, and then went ahead with the film.

I had even planned a Hindi movie based on the incident. One of my friends from New York, documentary filmmaker Hemal Trivedi [Among The Believers fame], appreciated my film. She said it was raw, but a very good movie. She wanted to help me put it together properly [for a Hindi adaptation]. She promised to help me with the resources, and a team. She [Trivedi] had even messaged Rajkummar Rao to see him, to take the movie forward. We finished the script and even created five songs for that. And then, we heard about October.

Whats the update now?

After a news report came out, the Association took us seriously and have now watched the film. They told me yesterday that after seeing the movie, if they think theres any merit to the claims, theyll call me. As we speak, I received a mail asking me to meet them tomorrow [Saturday] at 5pm. I feel a little motivated now.

You mentioned that your friends suggested you to watch October before its release. Did you try and contact the films team for that?

I went to the Marathi Mandal. But nobody helped me connect with the team. Then I tried getting numbers from the internet to personally contact them. Later on, I thought of pursuing it through the Association again because I realised that it may work faster than my contact. I went to them two weeks before the release. For one week, they were trying to figure things out, and there were many ups and down. I used to go almost everyday, after which they mailed IMPPA and the SWA. But no one answered the mails. Then I personally visited IMPPA and SWA and they took note of the email sent by the Mandal. The mail spoke about the issue and asked them to look into it. They told me what could be done now. The movie has already released.

I dont know the terms and the way things work. I told them that I was not aware of their rules and regulations. I asked them to see my movie and ask the October team to show me their film. Things didnt work then, but it seems to be working now. The problem is that they [the team of October] are not ready to meet us. The letter has gone to them and they are not responding to that. They feel things are very easy for them.

You are talking about the issue very aggressively now. If you had a hunch, you could have taken it up earlier. Wouldn't that have helped your cause better?

Yes, it would have definitely helped me more. I would have tried for a stay on the [release of the] movie, but I was not aware of it. I am layperson who started in the industry just two years back. I made the film for my brother. I have seen 10 years of his struggle. My life changed, and the relationship between my husband and me became strong because of him. Everyone has been telling me that I should have spoken about it earlier, and approached people from before, but I couldnt do that. But that doesnt mean I cant talk about it now. My lawyer told me that the judge might not take my case because the movie has already released.

What are you expecting now, from the October team?

I want the evidence that they said they havehow they made the movie. I have all the evidence of how I made it. I want to see yours; if you say it's a real story, then show me the real facts. If that satisfies me, I dont have an issue.
In a major relief for the Kaala team, the Madras High Court on Friday dismissed a petition seeking to stall the release of the film over plagiarism charges.

According to a petition filed by K.S. Rajasekaran of GSR Vinmeen Creations, the petitioner alleged that the makers of Kaala had plagiarised his story as well as the title Karikalan. The court said the petitioner did not have enough details to prove ownership of the title.

Directed by Pa Ranjith, the Rajinikanth-starrer film is one of the most anticipated releases in Tamil this year. A gangster drama, Rajinikanth is said to play a Mumbai-based gangster. Produced by Dhanushs Wunderbar Films, Kaala also stars Eswari Rao, Huma Qureshi, Nana Patekar, Samuthirakani and Anjali Patil. Ranjith's favourite musician, Santosh Narayanan has once again teamed up with the filmmaker to compose the musical score for the film.

The teaser of Kaala was released on March 2. The near two-minute teaser starts off with veteran star Nana Patekar asking what kind of a name Kaala was, with a voiceover in the next scene saying it means not only the colour black, but also someone who fights and defends. Later, Rajinikanth himself is shown explaining that black is the colour of hard work. The actor is seen speaking in the Tirunelveli slang of the Tamil language.
Walking hand in hand, actors Ranbir Kapoor and Deepika Padukone dazzled in their maiden appearance on the ramp for Mijwan, a fundraiser event hosted by Bollywood veteran Shabana Azmi.

The actors walked for the fundraiser charity show, held annually to raise money for the development of craftswomen in Mijwan, a village in Uttar Pradesh. The show was presented by ace fashion designer Manish Malhotra.

Both Deepika and Ranbir were dressed in traditional attire. While Deepika looked beautiful in a white, shimmery lehanga-choli, her former co-star looked dapper in a black and ivory sherwani.

Ranbir, who walked for Mijwan for the second time, recalled what his mother once told him about treating women with respect and equality.

"My mom always told me that a man is as good as the respect he shows to a woman. A man is as good as the space he gives to his wife, sister, mother, to be whosoever she wants to be. I genuinely try to do that," the 35-year-old actor said after walking the ramp.

Deepika was all praise for Shabana and said the senior actor was a source of inspiration for her.

"I've seen the amazing work you all have been doing and I've to confess when I started my philanthropic work three years ago, a lot of inspiration came from you (Shabana). What's inspiring is to see the impact, the commitment, the kind of work you all do that has impacted the lives of so many young women and children, to enable them, empower them," the 32-year-old actor said.

"Most importantly to bring joys to so many lives. So thank you, to all the women who work behind the scenes. The strength of a nation lies in the skills we build, whether it's craft or art and for all of you to have recognised this nine years ago is amazing," she added.

NGO Mijwan Welfare Society, founded by Shabana's late father, noted poet Kaifi Azmi, was launched with the goal of creating employment opportunities for women and reviving the art of chikankari embroidery.
The issue of radicalisation of Kashmiri youth was figured prominently in the bi-annual meet of the top military commanders, while discussing ways to minimise the 'collateral damage' during operations against militants.

There has been a sharp increase in young Kashmiris joining militant groups in the recent past, in 2017, 126 young boys from Kashmir valley have joined militant ranks. Numbers took sharp spike, after the killing of self-styled commander of Hizbul Mujahideen, Burhan Wani by the security forces. In the last three years, a total of 280 youths from Kashmir have reportedly joined terror groups.

"It was felt that priority must be accorded towards ushering peace by conducting counter-terrorist operations that minimise collateral damage. Radicalised youth must be brought into the mainstream by carrying out de-radicalisation and collective approach that focuses on convincing the youth to shun violence and gun culture," Director General Staff Duties Lt. Gen. A.K. Sharma, who has earlier headed Nagrota (Jammu) based 16 Corps said, while sharing details on the discussions during week long Army Commanders Conference in New Delhi.

Army maintained that the there is a need for the political leadership and civil society to come forward and suggest ways to contain the propaganda by terror outfits, especially on social media, to influence Kashmiri youth.

Army chief General Bipin Rawat also spoke on the issue of radicalisation of youth and blamed the social media for the radicalisation of people, particularly the youth in the state and said that army is taking the issue with lot of seriousness.

While referring to the recent incidents of stone pelting by the local residents at security forces, during an encounter so as to facilitate escape of the militants, the Army commanders pressed for a review of their counter-terrorism operations strategy.

"The apex commanders confabulated on the prevalent situation in the Valley and reviewed the recent developments affecting the modus operandi of operations of the armed forces deployed in the region," Lt. Gen Sharma added.

Till date, security forces have gunned down 51 militants in the Kashmir valley in operations carried out on the Line of Control or in the hinterland this year. Simultaneously, we have lost 26 of our soldiers in such operations. Last year, 13 soldiers were martyred during counter-terrorism operations in Kashmir valley.



Top military commanders also discussed the prevailing situation along the northern border with China and Pakistan, particularly "along the Line of Control, the increase in ceasefire violations and the adequacy of the response mechanisms. Top army brass also talked about the "capacity building endeavours including, infrastructural development and measures to provide them requisite impetus" on the northern border.

So far, this year, there have been around 700 incidents of ceasefire violations by the Pakistan army on the border, while the figure was 800 incidents of ceasefire violations in the last complete year.

Army's top brass also deliberated at other key issues including financial management, equipment optimisation, management of communication and data security and streamlining of existing procedures pertaining to administration. Discussions were also held on cyber security and security of military establishment and bases.

"Considerable time was spent on re-prioritising the existing requirements to ensure that resources allocated for force modernisation and capacity building were utilised optimally within the budgetary allocation. The discussion also dwelt upon increasing the content of indgenisation in force modernisation," General Sharma further said.

India is spending only 1.57 per cent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for the year 2018-19 on the defence sector, the lowest since the 1962 war with China. And for re-equipping armed forces, defence ministry has received Rs 2.95 lakh crore in comparison to Rs 2.74 lakh crore last year. With a heavy baggage of liabilities of the previous years, there will hardly be any money left for new purchases.

Like for instance,the capital budget for the Army, has only gone upto Rs. 26688 crore from Rs. 25175 crores last year. At a time when, military experts argue to enhance our capabilities on northern sector, money allocated for tanks and armoured vehicles have seen a major cut from last year. Last year, Rs 3193 crore was allocated for tanks and armoured vehicles, army has got only Rs 1972 crore in this year's budget. Army has to be blamed for this, as it failed to utilise the allocated money in this category and returned nearly Rs 1200 crore to the national exchequer. Similarly, the money allocated for artillery guns, was increased only to Rs 17197 crore this year from Rs 15112 crore in last year.
The adage that failures can teach many lessons seems quite...
With no signs of a Naga peace deal fructifying immediately, the Centre on Friday extended the ceasefire agreement with the most potent insurgent groups operating the northeast. The home ministry signed another one-year extension in the ceasefire pact with NSCN NK and National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Reformation). The extension was signed from the ministry of home affairs, signed by the joint secretary in-charge of the northeast division.

The core demand of the Nagas has been for a separate Nagalim, comprising not only the hill districts of Manipur, but parts of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh as well. This, besides, control over large swathes of land in Myanmar.

With BJP governments in power in all the three northeastern states, there has been increased hope of the Naga peace deal, bringing a lasting solution to the decades-old insurgency.

Recently, Nagaland Chief Minister Neiphiu Rio (the NDPP, in alliance with BJP, came to power last month) claimed that the Naga peace accord is in the final stages of deliberation, and issues pertaining to Naga autonomy have been resolved .

While government sources said shared sovereignty is on the cards whenever the final peace deal is inked, the bigger problem the government-appointed interlocutor R.K. Ravi and home ministry is facing is to bring all Naga groups on board, including NSCN KN and NSCN(R). This gains increased significance from the security point of view as any resentment in different factions of NSCN and other Naga insurgent groups could spell security trouble for the government if it goes ahead with the peace deal without ensuring all are on board.

The framework agreement signed by the Centre in 2015 was only with NSCN (IM) and not the other factions, which had irked them. The KN faction has been asserting that it is ready to talk to the government and become part of the peace process, if government approaches it formally to address its concerns and demands. Whether the government is able to achieve Naga unity to ink a peace deal remains to be seen in the next 12 months as the BJP government at the Centre inches towards the last year of its present mandate with general elections due in 2019.
Opposition parties led by the Congress on Friday met Vice President and Rajya Sabha chairman M. Venkaiah Naidu and handed over a notice for impeachment of Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra.

According to sources, over 60 MPs of the Rajya Sabha belonging to seven political parties gave the notice for the impeachment against the CJI.

The MPs who signed the notice belong to the Congress, the NCP, the CPI-M and CPI, the SP and the BSP.

The leaders of these parties earlier met in Parliament and gave final shape to the notice for impeachment.

After the meeting, Leader of Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad confirmed that the leaders were moving the notice for impeachment against CJI.

Among those who attended the meeting in Parliament were Congress leaders Azad, Kapil Sibal and Randeep Surjewala, besides CPI's D Raja and NCP's Vandana Chavan.

Sources said the Trinamool Congress and the DMK, which were initially in favour of the impeachment against the CJI, are no longer part of it.

The impeachment notice comes a day after the Supreme Court rejected a bunch of petitions seeking an independent probe into the death of Judge B H Loya, who was hearing the Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case.

The SC judgement was delivered by a bench headed by the Chief Justice of India.

An impeachment motion in the Rajya Sabha has to be supported by at least 50 MPs of the Upper House, while the number of MPs supporting such a motion in the Lok Sabha is 100.

Once the notice for impeachment is submitted to the Rajya Sabha chairman, he will ascertain whether there is merit or ground for moving such a motion.

In case he finds merit, then he may form a committee to look into it, else he can reject it.

If moved, this will be the first time ever in the country's history that an impeachment would be moved against the Chief Justice of India.
The impeachment motion against Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, a notice for which was presented by the opposition parties to Rajya Sabha chairman M. Venkaiah Naidu on Friday, has set off intense speculations on how the move, seeking removal of the CJI, will unfold.

This is the first time ever that an impeachment motion has been initiated against the Chief Justice of India. So far, no judge has been impeached despite Parliament moving to impeach judges on a few occasions.

The Constitution does not contain the word 'impeachment', which is used in popular parlance to refer to removal of a judge. In the Constitution, the proceedings under Article 124 deal with removal of a Supreme Court judge.

As per the Constitution, a judge can be removed only by an order of the President, based on a motion passed by both houses of Parliament. The procedure for removal of a judge is laid down in the Judges Inquiry Act, 1968. The law states that an impeachment motion can be initiated in either house of Parliament. For a motion to be taken up in the Lok Sabha, at least 100 MPs of the house should sign on it, and if it is to be initiated in the Rajya Sabha, 50 members should be its signatories for it be to be taken up by the presiding officer.

The motion presented to Naidu contains 64 signatures of Rajya Sabha MPs, and seeks Misra's impeachment on grounds of misbehaviour that relates to alleged abuse of power.

Naidu has to now decide on the admissibility of the motion. The presiding officer can reject the motion if he is convinced that prima facie, the charges do not constitute the grounds on which impeachment can be sought. However, a rejection of the motion by Naidu is not likely to be the end of the story for the opposition move. A judicial review of Naidu's decision can be sought if he rejects the motion. And in the scenario of parties moving Supreme Court over rejection of the motion, the CJIsince he will be in a conflict of interest positionwill have to refer the matter to the next senior-most judge in the apex court, who till June 22, is Justice J Chelameswar, and after that, Justice Ranjan Gogoi.

If Naidu admits the motion, he will constitute a three-member committee to inquire into the charges made in the impeachment motion. This committee has to comprise a Supreme Court judge, Chief Justice of a high court and an eminent jurist. The committee will submit its report on the charges to the Rajya Sabha chairman. If the report confirms the grounds on which impeachment has been sought, the motion for removal will be taken up in the upper house and debated. The motion for removal of a judge is required to be adopted by each house of Parliament, by a majority of the members present and voting.

Also, if it is felt that the presiding officer has taken more time than what can be termed a 'reasonable timeframe' to decide on the notice for impeachment motion, that can also be challenged on the judicial side.

Meanwhile, it is also being discussed whether Misra, in the wake of the impeachment motion, should recuse himself from his judicial responsibilities. Opposition leaders said there is a tradition of judges staying away from judicial work after they were sought to be impeached. Justice Dipak Misra should refrain from discharging official duties pending the impeachment motion, said senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal.
The crisis in judiciary has spilled over to the political arena.

After a move to initiate an impeachment motion against Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra was taken up, the BJP came down heavily on the Congress-led opposition. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley accused them of using the impeachment as a political tool, and termed the move as revenge petition.

Writing a blog, Jaitley said, A reading of the Supreme Court judgement (in the Judge Loya case) exposes every fact of the conspiracy to generate falsehood as propaganda in the public and political space. He even termed those seeking a probe into the case, including political parties, a few retired judges and some senior lawyers as 'conspirators'.

Going a step ahead, he even questioned the four Supreme Court judges, who had held a press conference in January last, flagging several issues, including the Judge Loya death case. The four judges of the Supreme Court who held the controversial press conference, are all experienced judges and in my view men of high integrity. Had they checked up the facts of Judge Loya case before commenting on it, even though only on a listing issue?

Should anyone at all be commenting on a pending case because many comments created an environment of prejudice and even added credibility to utter falsehood as they did in the present case? Jaitley wrote.

The senior BJP leader questioned if the impeachment motion filed on Friday was a direct result of the press conference. Does this impeachment set a precedent that political parties in India will use impeachment as an instrument to intimidate judges hearing controversial matters? he added.

Jaitley, a former lawyer, put out the blog in public domain within a few hours of the opposition parties submitting an impeachment motion against the Chief Justice of India to the chairman of the Rajya Sabha.

The Congress party and its friends have started using impeachment as a political tool. Impeachment is a process by which you remove the holder of office in order to protect the dignity of an office... Trivialising the use of that power is a dangerous event.

It is not difficult to collect fifty signatures of Rajya Sabha or hundred signatures of Lok Sabha members even on frivolous issues. To use the power as intimidatory tactics when neither you have a case of proven misconduct or the numbers on your side, is a serious threat to judicial independence, Jaitley said.

It is a revenge petition after the falsehood of the Congress party has been established in the Justice Loya death case, the finance minister argued, referring to the impeachment motion.

He derided the crusading lawyers who pick up causes in public interest and called them institution disruptors. They pick up even false causes and pursue the falsehood with a sense of deep commitment, indulge in intimidating advocacy, are shrill with their opposing colleagues, are rude and impolite with the judges, he alleged.

Referring to the alleged role of Amit Shah in the Sohrabuddin case, Jaitley said Shah had no role. It was an alleged encounter executed by some central agencies through the state police. I had written a detailed letter on September 27, 2013 to the then Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh giving out all these facts in detail. The evidence submitted was very weak, so it could not stand judicial scrutiny, Jaitley said.
The Gujarat High Court today acquitted former BJP minister Maya Kodnani in the 2002 Naroda Paitya riots case in which 97 people were killed by a mob.

The court, however, upheld the conviction of former Bajrang Dal leader Babu Bajrangi in the case, one of the worst incidents of communal violence triggered by the Godhra train burning.

A division bench of Justices Harsha Devani and A S Supehiya pronounced the verdict. The bench said charges against Kodnani could not be established.

Bajrangi, whose conviction was uhpeld by the court, was named one of the conspirators in the case.

In August 2012, a special court for SIT cases had sentenced 32 people, including Kodnani, to life imprisonment.

Kodnani was sentenced to 28 years of imprisonment, while Bajrangi was given life imprisonment till death. The high court had later reduced it to 21 years rigorous imprisonment.

The trial court had sentenced seven other accused to 31 years rigorous imprisonment, while 22 others were given 24 years in jail.

Twenty nine others were acquitted in the case.

Kodnani is currently on bail, while Bajrangi is in jail.

The rioting took place on February 28, 2002, in the Naroda Patiaya area of Ahmedabad where a mob killed 97 people.

The massacre took place a day after the torching of the Sabarmati Express at Godhra.
Media bodies, on Friday, said they expect the BJP to initiate strict disciplinary action against BJP leader S. Ve. Shekhar over his remarks about women journalists.

The Indian Women's Press Corps, Press Club of India, Federation of Press Clubs of India, and Press Association, in a joint statement, condemned "in strongest terms the disparaging, derogatory and defamatory remarks made by the saffron party leader on social media and said these regressive remarks reflect "a certain conservative mindset and a deep-rooted patriarchal bias towards all women, especially working women".

The sexist post shared by Shekar and titled Madurai university, governor and the virgin vheeks of a girl claimed that the journalist, Lakshmi Subramanian, had made accusation against the governor with sole motive to defame the BJP government at the Centre.

In an apparent dig at THE WEEK reporter's tweet that she washed her face several times after the governor touched her cheek, the post said: The governor should wash his hands with phenyle for touching her.

The post allegedly written by one Thirumalai S. went on to make shocking and utterly disparaging comments on women and claimed that more sexual abuses happen in media houses than in universities. A woman cannot become a reporter or news reader without sleeping with bigwigs, it said.

These media bodies said the remarks are totally unacceptable to the journalist community, and demanded that they be withdrawn and an unconditional apology be tendered by Shekhar. They viewed with serious concern the sustained trolling of THE WEEK journalist Lakshmi Subramanian, and the threats issued to her following her complaint regarding the Tamil Nadu governor's objectionable conduct.

Women journalists, like all working women, have had to struggle hard to establish themselves in a male dominated industry. In addition, they also shoulder the double burden and dual responsibility of the home-front and workplace, the media bodies said.
Vous etes confrontes a une infestation par la puce, la punaise de lit ? Voici plusieurs actions qui sont a mettre en uvre pour faire []
Opposition parties are likely to meet on Friday in Parliament to discuss the current political situation.

The leaders of opposition parties will meet on Friday in Leader of Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad's chamber in Parliament and are likely to discuss the issue of the Supreme Court verdict rejecting multiple pleas for an independent probe into the death of special CBI judge B.H. Loya, sources said.

The issue of moving an impeachment motion against Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra is also likely to be discussed, in the wake of the Loya case judgement.

The opposition has been working on bringing various parties on board for a larger consensus on bringing the impeachment motion against the CJI.

While the Left parties, the NCP and the Congress are on board for moving the impeachment motion, some parties that have already signed the petition have backed out.

During the meeting convened by Azad, the sources say, the opposition parties will also discuss the idea of having a broader consensus on how to defeat the BJP in the upcoming Assembly and Lok Sabha elections.
In a major blow to the Mamata Banerjee government and West Bengal State Election Commission, the Calcutta High Court on Friday asked the state election commission to declare new date(s) for the panchayat election. The court has also asked the commission to give a new date to all political parties, who could not file nominations due to massive political violence in the state allegedly instigated by the Trinamool Congress. The election was scheduled to start on May 1.

The state election commissioner, Amarendra Singh, had earlier extended the date of nominations on April 7, but within a couple of hours, he withdrew his order surprisingly, which opposition parties alleged was done at the behest of the state government.

Justice Subrata Talukdar on Friday asked the state election commission to talk to all stakeholders to decide on new dates for the panchayat election.

The entire judgement would follow later, the High Court said.

Though the court usually does not interfere with the election process, but as there has to be three weeks gap between the filing of nominations and poll dates, the court had to ask the commission to declare new dates.

Dilip Ghosh, West Bengal BJP president, called the order a major win for the BJP and all opposition parties.

Ghosh told THE WEEK, By asking the commission to order fresh dates and extending the date of nominations by another day, the court has exposed the commission, which works under the pressure of the state government. If the chief minister is left with some manners, she should resign.

Ghosh, however, said that there would be little scope for complacency for the BJP as the Trinamool Congress would again try to block the opposition parties from filing nominations.

I cannot talk about other parties. But I can tell you BJP would know how to resist the Trinamool Congress. If they understand the language of violence, we would be ready to show that to them, said Ghosh.

Rabin Deb, a senior CPI(M) leader, who was in the High Court on Friday said that it was a big blow for the ruling party.

The election commissioner had earlier granted a day's extension for filing nominations. Shortly after that, senior ministers of the state government went to his office and gave him a mouthful. So he had to take back the order. The judgement is a landmark one for the commission to work honestly and efficiently. The election commissioner should not act in a partisan way, said Deb.

Kalyan Banerjee, senior advocate in the Calcutta High Court and MP of Trinamool Congress, refused to accept the contention that the order was a victory for the opposition.

The High Court has dismissed their prayer for halting the election. CPI(M) and BJP wanted to remove the election commissioner from his chair. The court has also refused to act on it, Kalyan said.

This is the second time the Mamata government received a setback from the judiciary regarding panchayat elections. The last time was in 2013 when the matter went to the Supreme Court, which asked for deployment of Central paramilitary forces. The BJP is now saying that it would file another petition requesting for Central forces during panchayat election.

The Trinamool Congress has earlier celebrated winning many seats unopposed in the three-tier panchayat election.
A day after Tamil Nadu Governor Banwarilal Purohit tendered an apology to a journalist of THE WEEK for patting her cheek during a press conference in Chennai, senior BJP leader S.V. Shekar stirred up a controversy after sharing a Facebook post which makes outrageous and offensive comments against women journalists.

The fresh controversy is expected to put further pressure on the saffron party as it came hours after senior party leader H. Raja called DMK leader Kanimozhi an illegitimate child of Karunanidhi.

The sexist post shared by Shekar and titled Madurai university, governor and the virgin vheeks of a girl claimed that the journalist, Lakshmi Subramanian, had made accusation against the governor with sole motive to defame the BJP government at the Centre.

In an apparent dig at THE WEEK reporter's tweet that she washed her face several times after the governor touched her cheek, the post said: The governor should wash his hands with phenyle for touching her.

The post allegedly written by one Thirumalai S. went on to make shocking and utterly disparaging comments on women and claimed that more sexual abuses happen in media houses than in universities. A woman cannot become a reporter or news reader without sleeping with bigwigs, it said.

Illiterate scoundrels are now in media, she (THE WEEK journalist) is not an exception to that. Sexual abuses are more in media than in educational institutions. No one can become a reporter or news anchor without sleeping with some big shots, it said.

There are only few exceptions. I respect only them. Otherwise, the whole of TN media is in a regressive path caught in the hands of criminals, rascals, blackmailers, read the post, shared by the BJP leader.

The post has later disappeared from Facebook. Shekhar told the Indian Express that Thirumalai was a strong BJP supporter in the US. I didnt read the post fully before I shared it. I will never abuse anyone. I wanted to delete that post, but Facebook has blocked it. I cannot access my account for the next 24 hours, he told the paper.

The post, however, has already sparked off an outrage with senior journalists demanding that the party come up with an explanation.

Journalists in Chennai will protest before the BJP state headquarters in the city on Friday, demanding action against Shekher.

Earlier, Purohit had apologised to Lakshmi after she lodged a protest over the governor touching her cheek during the press meet called to discuss the allegations of sexual abuses on students at a university in Tamil Nadu. The incident had triggered a widespread uproar with journalists from across the country condemning the governor's action.
It has been learnt that Vice President Venkaiah Naidu will take his time to go through the notice submitted to him by some opposition leaders to impeach Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, after a bench headed by Misra dismissed a case seeking investigation into the death of CBI judge B.H. Loya.

Said an official in the vice presidents office, He (Naidu) is in Delhi, but he has some official functions to attend, and will be travelling mostly. He will take his time to study the notice, and also seek legal consultation, before taking an appropriate decision on it. There will not be a hurried decision on it."

Around 64 MPs, belonging to the Congress, the Nationalist Congress Party, the CPI(M), the CPI, the Samajwadi Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party, and the Indian Union Muslim League, signed the notice for impeachment proceedings against Misra.

Said senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal, "When the judges of the Supreme Court themselves believe that the judiciary's independence is at threat, alluding to the functioning of the office of the CJI, should the nation stand still and do nothing."

Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said the petition by the opposition parties is being used as a political tool to intimidate judges hearing controversial issues. What has happened today is a price the Indian judiciary has to pay for misadventures of many. There is no better time for judicial statesmanship and political foresight, said Jaitley.

On April 20, the apex court sought the help of Attorney General K.K. Venugopal on a plea demanding a gag order against the media on reporting about the impeachment process. The bench of Justices A.K. Sikri and Ashok Bhushan said, It was very unfortunate that despite knowing the law that till a certain point, the issue of impeachment cannot be made public, the politicians were holding public discussions.

Said Venugopal to THE WEEK, All this is really unfortunate. I am not commenting on it now. The court has asked me to respond to the plea. I will respond by Monday, or latest by Tuesday.

No chief justice has been impeached in India. Article 124(4) states that any judge of the Supreme Court can be impeached on account of misbehaviour or incapacity. If the vice president appoints a three-member committeeconsisting of a senior judge of the apex court, a judge of the high curt and a distinguished juristand that committee supports the motion, then the motion must be passed by two-third majority in both the Rajya Sabha and the Lok Sabha. Once passed by Parliament, the President can pass an order for removal of the judge.

Said Bizay Sonkar Shastri, former MP, and BJP spokesperson, to THE WEEK, This move by the Congress and other parties will backfire big time. It has already affected the morale of the judges of the Supreme Court. All this shows that the Congress is desperate. It is always up to some nonsense or the other.

Said senior Congress leader C.P. Joshi to THE WEEK, My party has already stated its official position on the issue. I will not add to that.
Former FBI Director James Comey in memos recounting conversations with US President Donald Trump last year said Trump repeatedly raised concern over salacious allegations in an intelligence dossier, the need for loyalty and ferreting out leakers.

The partially redacted memos were handed over on Thursday by the US Justice Department to three House of Representatives committees.

The memos, seen by Reuters, include notes on a meeting at the Trump Tower in New York in January 2017 just before Trumps inauguration in which Comey spoke alone with the then president-elect about the dossier that detailed an alleged 2013 encounter involving Trump and prostitutes in Moscow.

James Comey Memos just out and show clearly that there was NO COLLUSION and NO OBSTRUCTION. Also, he leaked classified information. WOW! Will the Witch Hunt continue?, Trump said in a Tweet.

The memos also describe a dinner Comey and Trump had at the White House about a week after the inauguration, when Comey said Trump told him he expected loyalty from him.

Trump fired Comey in May 2017 while Comey was leading the FBI investigation into allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election and possible collusion between Trumps campaign and the Russians.

The Comeys memos were written before his firing, which led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller to continue the investigation.

Russia denies any meddling in the election. Trump says there was no collusion and that the investigation is a witch hunt.

Much of the memos contents were included in a book by Comey titled A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership and published this week in which he compares the Republican president to a mob boss who stresses personal loyalty over the law and has little regard for morality or truth.

In one memo, Comey recounts a Feb. 8, 2017, meeting with then-White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, about two weeks after acting Attorney General Sally Yates had warned the White House that Michael Flynn, then Trumps national security adviser, had lied about his December 2016 conversation with the Russian ambassador to the United States.

Comey wrote in the memo that Priebus asked if this was a private conversation. Priebus then asked: Do you have a FISA order on Mike Flynn? referring to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, according to the memo.

At the White House dinner in January, Comey said Trump told him that Flynn has serious judgment issues. Comey said Trumps comment came after he learned there was a delay in returning a congratulatory phone call from a foreign leader.

According to a memo in mid-February, Priebus requested that Comey and other senior FBI officials publicly knock down media reports about communications between Donald Trumps associates and Russians known to US intelligence during the 2016 presidential campaign. They declined to do so.
The Maldives government has reiterated its invitation to international stakeholders to observe its electoral process. The country is likely to hold presidential elections in September and is in the glare of international organisations, which fear that democracy and the right to free and fair elections is being quashed.

Maldives government recently rejected a call by the United Nations Human Rights Committee to allow former president Mohamed Nasheed contest the elections. The watchdog had said that the charges of terrorism pressed against Nasheed were based on vague laws and denied him a fair trial. Nasheed, declared guilty on the charges, is at present in Sri Lanka, on political asylum.

The Maldives government has also taken note of a report of the EU Electoral Follow up Mission (EFM), which had visited in January and expressed concern over the lack of electoral reform in the country even as it heads for the big election. The mission was a follow up to the recommendations suggested by the EU Elections Observation Mission of 2014. The EFM lamented that neither the government, nor the opposition and even the people's majilis (parliament) had not sought to address the issue of electoral reforms and that to date, the political and institutional environment of the country is not conducive to adopting meaningful and concerted electoral reforms.

Reacting to this report, the Maldives government says The government, however, sadly notes that while the government had presented the progress of the implementation process since 2014, this was largely disregarded in the report. the Maldives government insists it has made a draft bill on the recommendations of the EU, demarcating the roles of the various functionaries in the elections, and registering and re-registering voters.

The Elections Commission, on February 22, has begun the preparations for the presidential elections to be held this year. The government encourages all relevant stakeholders to offer the Elections Commission their full, unreserved support for the conduct of their work. The government would also like to reiterate its call of February 22, 2018, publicly inviting all international stakeholders to observe the electoral process,'' a statement from the Maldives government said.
The Syrian army bombarded jihadists in the last area outside government control near Damascus overnight, as President Bashar al-Assad accelerated his push to retake remaining enclaves.

US, British and French air strikes on Saturday to punish Assad for suspected use of chemical weapons have done nothing to slow the advance of his forces, now in their strongest position since the early months of the seven-year-old war.

Air strikes and shelling hit the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp and al-Hajar al-Aswad area, part of a small enclave divided between warring jihadists and other rebels south of the capital, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor said.

Assad is accelerating his campaign to retake the remaining enclaves his forces encircle around Syria, which would leave rebels with only their two major strongholds in the northwest and southwest.

Western countries launched their first coordinated action against Assad on Saturday to punish him for a suspected gas attack they say killed scores of people during an advance that captured the town of Ghouta near the capital.

But the single volley of air strikes, hitting three targets far from any frontline, had no effect on the wider war which has killed 500,000 people and made more than half of Syrians homeless.

International inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) who arrived in Damascus nearly a week ago were still waiting early on Friday to visit the site of the suspected poison gas attack.

Syria and its ally Russia deny using chemical weapons in the assault on Douma. The Western countries say the Syrian government, which now controls the town, is keeping the inspectors out and may be tampering with evidence, both accusations Damascus and Moscow deny.

Rebels on Thursday began pulling out of Dumayr, an enclave northeast of Damascus, under a surrender deal with the government. Insurgents in another enclave nearby - Eastern Qalamoun - said they had also agreed to withdraw.

Thousands of civilians, including the fighters families, are expected to leave with them for northern Syria before the areas come back under Assads rule under deals similar to others carried out across the country as Syrian forces advance.

The U.N. has voiced concern that such evacuations involve the displacement of civilians under threat of reprisals or forced conscription, though the government denies that.

The U.N. expects further displacements in the near future to northern Syria from other locations controlled by non-state armed groups where negotiations reportedly are happening, the world body said in a humanitarian note.

Conditions in the opposition-held pocket of northern Syria where the displaced will go are poor.

After the armys recovery of eastern Ghouta this month in a ferocious battle that began in February, the surrender Dumayr and Qalamoun would leave only the pocket in south Damascus outside government control in the area around the capital.

Yarmouk was the biggest camp for Palestinian refugees in Syria before the war. Although most residents have fled, up to 12,000 remain there and in the neighbouring areas under jihadist or rebel control, said the UN agency that helps them.

-Reuters
The following companies are subsidiares of Lithia Motors: 797 Valley Street LLC, Albany CJD Fiat, Baierl Auto Group, Baierl Auto Parts LLC, Baierl Automotive Corporation, Baierl Chevrolet Inc., Baierl Holding LLC, Broadway Ford, Buhler Ford Inc, Cadillac of Portland Lloyd Center LLC, Camp Automotive Inc., Carbone Auto Body LLC, Chrysler Dodge Jeep Ram Fiat of Morgantown, Cranberry Automotive Inc., Crater Lake Ford Lincoln, Crater Lake Mazda, DCH (Oxnard) Inc., DCH Auto Group, DCH Bloomfield LLC, DCH CA LLC, DCH Calabasas-A LLC, DCH California Investments LLC, DCH California Motors Inc., DCH DMS NJ LLC, DCH Del Norte Inc., DCH Essex Inc., DCH Financial NJ LLC, DCH Freehold - V LLC, DCH Freehold LLC, DCH Holdings LLC, DCH Investments Inc. (New Jersey), DCH Investments Inc. (New York), DCH Korean Imports LLC, DCH Mamaroneck LLC, DCH Mission Valley LLC, DCH Monmouth LLC, DCH Montclair LLC, DCH Motors LLC, DCH NY Motors LLC, DCH Nanuet LLC, DCH North America Inc., DCH Oxnard 1521 Imports Inc., DCH Riverside-S Inc., DCH Simi Valley Inc., DCH Support Services LLC, DCH TL Holdings LLC, DCH TL NY Holdings LLC, DCH Temecula Imports LLC, DCH Temecula Motors LLC, DCH Thousand Oaks-F Inc., DCH Torrance Imports Inc., Dah Chong Hong CA Trading LLC, Dah Chong Hong Trading Corporation, Daron Motors LLC, Day Auto Group, Downtown LA, Driveway Motors LLC, Elizabeth Collision LLC, Florida SS LLC, Ford Lincoln of Morgantown, Freehold Nissan LLC, Fuse Auto Sales LLC, Hamilton Honda, Hazleton Honda, Hutchins Eugene Nissan Inc., Hutchins Imported Motors Inc., Jaguar Landrover Mission Viejo, LA Motors Holding LLC, LAD Advertising Inc., LAD Carson-N LLC, LAD Mission Viejo-JLR Inc., LAD Mobu Inc., LAD-AU LLC, LAD-MB LLC, LAD-N LLC, LAD-P LLC, LAD-T LLC, LAD-V LLC, LBMP LLC, LFKF LLC, LGPAC Inc., LLL Sales Co LLC, LMBB LLC, LMBP LLC, LMOP LLC, LSTAR LLC, Lithia AcDM Inc., Lithia Aircraft Inc., Lithia Anchorage-C LLC, Lithia Anchorage-H LLC, Lithia Armory Garage LLC, Lithia Auction & Recon LLC, Lithia Auto Services Inc., Lithia Automotive Inc., Lithia BA Holding Inc., Lithia BNM Inc. (nonoperating), Lithia Baierl-S LLC, Lithia Bryan Texas Inc., Lithia Buffalo-A LLC, Lithia CCTF Inc., Lithia CDH Inc., Lithia CIMR Inc., Lithia CJDO Inc., Lithia CJDSA Inc., Lithia CJDSF Inc., Lithia CM Inc., Lithia CO Inc., Lithia CSA Inc., Lithia Community Development Company Inc., Lithia Crater Lake-F Inc., Lithia Crater Lake-M Inc., Lithia DE Inc., Lithia DM Inc., Lithia DMID Inc., Lithia Des Moines-VW LLC, Lithia Dodge of Tri-Cities Inc., Lithia Eatontown-F LLC, Lithia FLCC LLC, Lithia FMF Inc., Lithia Financial Corporation (previously Lithia Leasing Inc. and Lithia Credit Inc.), Lithia Florida Holding Inc., Lithia Ford of Boise Inc., Lithia Fresno Inc., Lithia HDM Inc., Lithia HGF Inc., Lithia HMID Inc., Lithia HPI Inc. (nonoperating), Lithia Hamilton-H LLC, Lithia Hazleton-H LLC, Lithia Idaho Falls-F Inc., Lithia Imports of Anchorage Inc., Lithia JEF Inc., Lithia Klamath Inc., Lithia Klamath-T Inc., Lithia LBGGF Inc., Lithia LHGF Inc., Lithia LSGF Inc., Lithia MBDM Inc., Lithia MMF Inc., Lithia MTLM Inc., Lithia McMurray-C LLC, Lithia Medford HON Inc., Lithia Middletown-L LLC, Lithia Monroeville-A LLC, Lithia Monroeville-C LLC, Lithia Monroeville-F LLC, Lithia Monroeville-V LLC, Lithia Moon-S LLC, Lithia Moon-V LLC, Lithia Morgantown-CJD LLC, Lithia Morgantown-F LLC, Lithia Morgantown-S LLC, Lithia Motors Support Services Inc., Lithia NA Inc., Lithia NC Inc., Lithia ND Acquisition Corp. #1, Lithia ND Acquisition Corp. #3, Lithia ND Acquisition Corp. #4, Lithia NDM Inc., Lithia NF Inc., Lithia NSA Inc., Lithia Northeast Real Estate LLC, Lithia Orchard Park-H LLC, Lithia Paramus-M LLC, Lithia Pittsburgh-S LLC, Lithia Ramsey-B LLC, Lithia Ramsey-L LLC, Lithia Ramsey-M LLC, Lithia Ramsey-T LLC, Lithia Real Estate Inc., Lithia Reno Sub-HYUN Inc., Lithia Reno-CJ LLC, Lithia Reno-VW LLC, Lithia Rose-FT Inc., Lithia SOC Inc., Lithia SSP LLC, Lithia Salmir Inc., Lithia Sea P Inc., Lithia Seaside Inc., Lithia Spokane-B LLC, Lithia Spokane-S LLC, Lithia TA Inc., Lithia TO Inc., Lithia TR Inc., Lithia Uniontown-C LLC, Lithia VAuDM Inc., Lithia VF Inc., Lithia Wexford-H LLC, Lithia of Abilene Inc., Lithia of Anchorage Inc., Lithia of Bend #1 LLC, Lithia of Bend #2 LLC, Lithia of Bennington - 1 LLC, Lithia of Bennington - 2 LLC, Lithia of Bennington - 3 LLC, Lithia of Bennington - 4 LLC, Lithia of Billings II LLC, Lithia of Billings Inc., Lithia of Casper LLC, Lithia of Clear Lake LLC, Lithia of Concord I Inc., Lithia of Concord II Inc., Lithia of Corpus Christi Inc., Lithia of Des Moines Inc., Lithia of Eureka Inc., Lithia of Fairbanks Inc., Lithia of Great Falls Inc., Lithia of Helena Inc., Lithia of Honolulu-A Inc., Lithia of Honolulu-BGMCC LLC, Lithia of Honolulu-F LLC, Lithia of Honolulu-V LLC, Lithia of Killeen LLC, Lithia of Lodi Inc., Lithia of Maui-H LLC, Lithia of Missoula II LLC, Lithia of Missoula III Inc., Lithia of Missoula Inc., Lithia of Pocatello Inc., Lithia of Portland I LLC, Lithia of Portland LLC, Lithia of Robstown LLC, Lithia of Roseburg Inc., Lithia of Santa Rosa Inc., Lithia of Seattle Inc., Lithia of South Central AK Inc., Lithia of Spokane II Inc., Lithia of Spokane Inc., Lithia of Stockton Inc., Lithia of Stockton-V Inc., Lithia of TF Inc., Lithia of Troy LLC, Lithia of Utica - 1 LLC, Lithia of Utica - 2 LLC, Lithia of Utica - 3 LLC, Lithia of Utica - 4 LLC, Lithia of Walnut Creek Inc., Lithia of Wasilla LLC, Lithia of Yorkville - 1 LLC, Lithia of Yorkville - 2 LLC, Lithia of Yorkville - 3 LLC, Lithia of Yorkville - 4 LLC, Lithia of Yorkville - 5 LLC, Medford Insurance LLC, Milford DCH Inc., Northland Ford Inc., PA Real Estate LLC, PA Support Services LLC, Paramus Collision LLC, Paramus World Motors LLC, Personalized Marketing LLC, Prestige Auto Group, RFA Holdings LLC, Ray Laks Acura, Ray Laks Honda, Sacramento-L Inc., Salem-B LLC, Salem-H LLC, Salem-V LLC, Sharlene Realty LLC, Shift Portland LLC, Southern Cascades Finance Corporation, Subaru of Morgantown, Tampa-H LLC, Tustin Motors Inc., Wesley Chapel-H LLC, Wesley Chapel-T LLC, Zelienople Real Estate I L.P., and Zelienople Real Estate L.L.C..
Dallas

Southwest Airlines sought more time last year to inspect jet-engine fan blades like the one that snapped off during one of its flights Tuesday in an accident that left a passenger dead.

The airline opposed a recommendation by the engine manufacturer to require ultrasonic inspections of certain fan blades within 12 months. Southwest said it needed more time, and it raised concern over the number of engines it would need to inspect. Other airlines also voiced objections.

It wasn't until after Tuesday's accident that the Federal Aviation Administration announced that it will soon make the inspections mandatory. It is unclear how many planes will be affected by the FAA order. Airlines including Southwest say they have begun inspections anyway.

An engine on a Southwest jet exploded over Pennsylvania on Tuesday, and debris hit the plane. Jennifer Riordan, a 43-year-old bank executive from Albuquerque, New Mexico, was sucked partway out of the jet when a window shattered. She died later from her injuries. The Boeing 737, bound from New York to Dallas with 149 people aboard, made an emergency landing in Philadelphia.
Albany

SEFCU is putting its automated teller machines in nearly 30 local CVS Pharmacy stores in a move that will dramatically increase the places were customers of the Albany-based credit union can get their cash.

However at the same time, SEFCU says it will be taking its ATMs out of local Bruegger's Bagels stores in what had been a long-running arrangement until now.

SEFCU CEO Michael Castellana told customers in an letter emailed to customers on Wednesday that it would be installing 28 ATM machines in area CVS stores, in part to offset the loss of the Bruegger's locations.

SEFCU, which originated as a credit union for state workers and has 47 branches across upstate and $3 billion in assets, has about eight of its ATMs in local Bruegger's stores. They are scattered around Albany County, with one at Bruegger's flagship location in Troy where the bagel chain was founded in the 1980s before going through a series of acquisitions beginning in the 1990s.

Castellana didn't say exactly why it had to take its ATMs out of Bruegger's. The franchisee who owned the chain's upstate locations previously went through a bankruptcy last year, and in the fall the assets were sold back to Bruegger's Enterprises in Dallas, Texas, the main corporate entity that operates 260 of the bagel shops nationwide.

Bruegger's was subsequently sold around the same time to Caribou Coffee and its German parent company, JAB Holdings, which owns the Keurig, Panera and Krispy Kreme brands and just bought Dr. Pepper Snapple for $18.7 billion.

"The new management company that now owns Bruegger's Bagels' stores in the Capital Region has told SEFCU to remove our ATMs from their locations and this will be completed by the end of April," Castellana said. "We know you enjoyed the convenience of having access to cash in these establishments, and it is unfortunate that we weren't given a say in the matter."

A public relations firm that handles media questions for Bruegger's did not immediately have a response to SEFCU's assertion.

The Bruegger's ATMs aren't a significant portion of SEFCU's overall ATM network, which surpasses 80 machines.

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However, they were a mildly convenient way to get cash, especially in certain places like Delmar. For instance the SEFCU ATM at the Bruegger's on Delaware Avenue in Delmar was the quickest way to get cash for people who live near the Four Corners since the closest SEFCU branches are in Glenmont and Slingerlands.

That's probably why the credit union took such pains to explain the upcoming changes. As of this week, most of the ATMs still appeared to be in place.

"To ensure you have access to cash when and where you need it, we are expanding our fleet of ATMs," Castellana wrote. "For those of you who frequent the Bruegger's in Stuyvesant Plaza, you will be pleased to know that a SEFCU-branded ATM will be installed at the CVS Pharmacy right next door. We will be installing another 27 SEFCU ATMs at other area CVS' this spring."

SEFCU customers can also take out cash surcharge-free from the Allpoint network of ATMs, some of which were located in local CVS stores before the deal with SEFCU.
America's workforce is changing.

The country's diversity is rising and its population is aging. Baby Boomers are beginning to retire and millennials are starting out in their careers. Growth in the workforce is being driven by immigrants; the number of working-age immigrants is expected to rise from 33.9 million in 2015 to 38.5 million by 2035, according to the Pew Research Center. The growth of racial and ethnic minorities is outpacing that of whites.

Embracing these shifts and being sensitive to differences can help companies be successful, and that's where Sujata Chaudhry sees potential. In 2010 Chaudhry founded Tangible Development, a Latham-based company that offers diversity and inclusion training and communications services to companies all over the world.

Her background has deeply informed the work she does: Chaudhry is the daughter of Indian immigrants who moved from Bombay to England and later to the U.S., where they lived in several different states over the course of her childhood. She worked as a market analyst with the U.S. Navy and as a sales engineer and cultural liaison for AMP, Inc. before eventually deciding to open Tangible Development.

The Times Union talked to Chaudhry about diversity in the workforce and her advice for people wondering whether to start their own business venture. Answers have been edited for space and clarity.

Q: What does diversity look like?

A: It's not just cultural and religious. It can be your age, your sexual orientation, how you identify, your corporate experiences, your education and your socioeconomic background.

Q: Can you give me some examples of cultural differences that arise in doing business with different people and countries?

A. These are generalities, because it depends on companies and individuals. For example, when you're working with Asia-based companies, they're very hierarchical and tend to have a top-down management style. We're more of a bottom-up management style in America, and our employees desire autonomy and want to make decisions on their own. In an Asia-based company, employees are looking to be managed. They want their leaders to make the decisions.

With Middle Eastern countries, there's relationship-building involved. The first half hour (of a meeting) is getting to know each other and socializing. In the U.S., we're more of a, "Here's your agenda, time is money, let's get to it" culture. Certain Western European countries are very fact-based and communication is minimal. You have to understand that it's not withholding information or not sharing.

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Another example is the millennial workforce. They want access to their leader and transparent communication. Diversity is a big priority; they're looking for an inclusive environment where they feel like they belong and are valued. Their work has to be related to a purpose.

Q: Are companies more open to embracing diversity now than they have been in the past?

A. They're starting to understand that it's a very critical conversation to have, and that whether you're comfortable with it or not, you're going to have to have it because your workforce is going to become diverse. It may not be right now, especially in the Capital Region  our workforce is not as diverse as large pockets like Chicago and Manhattan, but eventually it's going to happen. Our population is changing, your workforce is constantly morphing and you have to adjust to it.

It has to come from leadership. If leaders don't model the behavior or have these values, they can't expect that of their employees and managers, and it's going to be very difficult to change. They also have to be fully committed to that change.

Q: What words of wisdom do you have for other people thinking about starting their own business?

A: Failure is only a state of mind. Take the risk.

miszler@timesunion.com  518-454-5018  @madisoniszler
Prince thought he was taking a common painkiller but instead ingested a counterfeit pill containing the dangerously powerful drug fentanyl, a Minnesota prosecutor said Thursday as he announced that no charges would be filed in the musician's death.

Carver County Attorney Mark Metz said Prince had suffered from pain for years and was addicted to pain medication. While some of the superstar's associates might have enabled his drug habit and tried to protect his privacy, authorities found "no direct evidence that a specific person provided the fentanyl."

"In all likelihood, Prince had no idea that he was taking a counterfeit pill that could kill him," Metz said.

The investigative materials  including documents, photos and videos  were posted online Thursday afternoon. Several videos show the pop superstar's body on the floor of his Paisley Park estate, near an elevator. He is on his back, his head on the floor, eyes closed. His right hand is on his stomach and left arm on the floor.

Metz's announcement came just hours after the U.S. Attorney's Office announced that a doctor who was accused of illegally prescribing an opioid for Prince agreed to pay $30,000 to settle a civil violation of a federal drug law. Dr. Michael Todd Schulenberg allegedly wrote a prescription for oxycodone in the name of Prince's bodyguard, intending for the potent painkiller to go Prince. That prescription was not linked to Prince's death.

Prince was 57 when he was found alone and unresponsive in an elevator at his Paisley Park studio compound on April 21, 2016. His death sparked a national outpouring of grief and prompted a joint investigation by Carver County and federal authorities.

An autopsy found he died of an accidental overdose of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 times more powerful than heroin.

 Associated Press

Plaintiff settles suit against Sizemore

A stuntman who was pinned beneath an SUV driven by Tom Sizemore on a TV production has settled a lawsuit with the actor and Paramount Pictures.

Court papers show a notice of settlement was filed March 29. No terms were disclosed. City News Service reported the settlement Thursday.

Steve De Castro alleged the 56-year-old actor was intoxicated at a desert airport north of Los Angeles in July 2016 while filming the USA Network's "Shooter" when he pinned and dragged de Castro, leaving him with serious injuries that he said have hurt his ability to work.

State workplace records obtained by The Associated Press showed that Sizemore was only supposed to sit in the SUV for the scene, but inexplicably took off.

Messages left for attorneys for both sides were not immediately returned.

 Associated Press

Expert testifies in Cosby retrial

Bill Cosby's chief accuser could have been made woozy either by the cold and allergy medicine Benadryl or by quaaludes, an expert testified Thursday as the prosecution rested in the comedian's sexual assault retrial.

The identity of the pills that Cosby gave Andrea Constand before a 2004 sexual encounter at his home has been one of the most enduring mysteries of the case.

Constand testified that Cosby gave her three blue pills that knocked her out and then he violated her. Cosby, now 80, has said he gave her Benadryl to help her relax and that she consented to a sexual encounter.

Dr. Timothy Rohrig, a forensic toxicologist called by prosecutors, testified Thursday that Benadryl's main ingredient can cause sedation, "mental clouding" and even short-term amnesia, as well as muscle weakness and clumsiness.

He said Benadryl's manufacturer indicated it produced the medication in blue tablets until 2010. The company's website shows that an "allergy plus congestion" variety currently comes in blue.

Rohrig said quaaludes  the 1970s-era party drug that Cosby has acknowledged giving to women before sex  also have a tendency to make people sleepy.

Prosecutors rested their case after Rohrig got off the witness stand. The defense immediately asked Judge Steven O'Neill to acquit Cosby and send jurors home, arguing prosecutors hadn't proved aggravated indecent assault charges. O'Neill refused.

The defense also contended there's no evidence to prove the alleged assault happened within the 12-year statute of limitations. Prosecutors countered that Constand and Cosby have both said the encounter was in 2004, pointing out Cosby was arrested in late 2015, just before the deadline to charge him.

 Associated Press

'Seinfeld' actor shows up at Devils game with face painted

Life imitated art at the Stanley Cup playoffs as the actor who played Puddy on the TV sitcom "Seinfeld" showed up at the game with his face painted as a New Jersey Devils fan.

Patrick Warburton is a Devils fan and in a 1995 episode of the hit show he appeared with his face painted in red and green.

The team posted a video of Warburton on Wednesday cheering to the crowd at Newark's Prudential Center that "we're the Devils!" The 53-year-old stripped off his shirt to reveal a letter "D'' on his chest.

Warburton's enthusiasm wasn't enough. New Jersey lost to the Tampa Bay Lightning 3-1, giving Tampa Bay a 3-1 lead in the playoff series.

 Associated Press


AGGRETSUKO

Netflix

New Series! In this anime series, Retsuko is a 25-year-old red panda who works as an office associate in the accounting department of a Tokyo trading company. All she wants is to do her job and get through the day, but when frustrations reach a boiling point, she vents through death-metal karaoke-singing.

KODACHROME

Netflix

Original Film! Ed Harris, Jason Sudeikis and Elizabeth Olsen star in this film that played earlier this month at the SFFILM Festival in San Francisco.

MERCURY 13

Netflix

This film reveals the little-told story of 13 remarkable women who were tested for spaceflight in 1961 for NASA's "man in space" program, dubbed Project Mercury. The men ultimately chosen to be among the first Americans to make the trip beyond Earth, all military test pilots, became known as the Mercury 7. But behind closed doors, female pilots were also screened.

MACGYVER: "WIND + WATER"

CBS, 8 p.m.

Mac (Lucas Till) is in Puerto Rico helping to rebuild a hurricane-damaged home when he is taken hostage by bank robbers.

BLINDSPOT: "CLAMOROUS NIGHT"

NBC, 8 p.m.

The team faces a deadly threat on all of their lives, and Roman's (Luke Mitchell) allegiances are tested.

JANE THE VIRGIN: "CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE"

The CW, 9 p.m.

Season Finale! Jane (Gina Rodriguez) believes she and Rafael (Justin Baldoni) are in a good place until she realizes he is keeping a secret from her.

TAKEN: "IMPERIUM"

NBC, 9 p.m.

Guest Star Alert! NASCAR's Ryan Blaney not only has his first role in a TV series, but the up-and-coming stock-car driver gets to do what he does best: careen around curves with other vehicles in hot pursuit. He plays an FBI agent assisting Bryan Mills (Clive Standen) on a mission  in a Mustang (a switch from his usual Ford Fusion).

LIVE FROM LINCOLN CENTER: "SUTTON FOSTER IN CONCERT"

PBS, 9 p.m.

Two-time Tony winner Sutton Foster brings her irresistible talent and effusive charm to the intimate Appel Room for a special night with a special guest, two-time Tony nominee Jonathan Groff (Hamilton, Spring Awakening, Glee).

EXPECTING: "CHRISTINA & ANT/JULIE & RYAN"

UP TV, 9 p.m.

Lights! Camera! Baby! In this charming docuseries, pregnant couples chronicle their own journey  no crew, no producer. A Los Angeles duo battered by a miscarriage get the best news possible, while Michigan parents of twin boys anticipate  twin girls!

WILL.I.AM AND FRIENDS FEATURING THE BLACK EYED PEAS  LANDMARKS LIVE IN CONCERT

PBS, 10 p.m.

Experience will.i.am from London's Royal Albert Hall. In a one-night-only event, the Grammy and Emmy-winning artist performs with members of the Black Eyed Peas and special guests.

Brought to you by the publishers of TV Guide.  TV Guide 2018
New York

Some of the world's wealthiest people have apartments in the half-dozen new skyscrapers built along a stretch of Manhattan's 57th Street known as "Billionaires Row." And soon they may have an unwanted new neighbor: a homeless shelter.

The city has approved a plan to house 140 single men in what was once the budget Park Savoy Hotel on West 58th Street, a modest building right next door to the back entrance of One57, one of the sleek new towers springing up in Manhattan to serve the superrich.

Unit owners at One57 include billionaire Michael Dell, who set a record for the most expensive home ever sold in New York City when he paid $100 million for his apartment in 2014.

The placement of the shelter in such a location is in line with campaign promises by Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio, who won office by assailing income inequality and public policies tilted to favor the wealthy. But the proposed shelter, steps from Central Park, has been met with howls of outrage from some people who live on the surrounding blocks, many of whom are not rich.

At a recent meeting about the project, angry residents, shopkeepers and restaurant owners booed and yelled, "Not in this neighborhood!"

"We're completely baffled by how this shelter was planned," said Suzanne Silverstein, president of the West 58th Street Coalition, which is fighting the hotel-to-shelter conversion.

Opponents say the homeless men could be a security risk for both pricey apartment owners and residents of older, rent-controlled buildings on West 58th Street, whose sidewalks are crowded with New Yorkers and tourists, baby carriages and dogs.

"West 58th Street is the billionaires' backyard, but it's the front yard of middle-class families with children, and senior citizens," said David Achelis, a recording producer who has lived in the neighborhood for 40 of his 67 years.

The project was started "extremely secretively" months ago, lacking work permits or an environmental impact study, Silverstein said.

A stop-work order was issued Feb. 8 by the Department of Buildings after inspectors found ongoing construction in the century-old, nine-story building. The order remains in effect until the building is granted the necessary permits.

"The city approved this project with no notice for the community to be heard," the coalition's attorney, Randy Mastro, said. "The city has acted illegally under the city charter, which requires public notice when a contract is being awarded."

De Blasio has defended the project, which comes as his administration seeks to build new shelters to accommodate a record number of homeless people.

"We said we were going to do it everywhere. We should be doing it in places that are the privileged parts of town as well as every other kind of community," he said on "The Brian Lehrer Show" on WNYC Radio.

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Security cameras will be installed, monitored by 24-hour guards, and there will be a 10 p.m. curfew, said Isaac McGinn, spokesman for the city Department of Homeless Services.

Opponents also have raised concerns about the cost, noting the site will be more expensive to operate than others in the outer boroughs.

To run the shelter, the city has a nine-year, $63 million proposed contract with the nonprofit Westhab, which is leasing the Manhattan site from the defunct hotel's owner, New Hampton LLC, for $2.6 million a year, to be reimbursed by the city. New Hampton's managing agent, John Pappas, did not respond to requests for comment, nor did Westhab.

Robin Siskin, a lawyer who lives in a modest apartment across the street from the proposed shelter site, said the homeless men would not be able to afford a neighborhood where a burger at a diner can cost $20.

"My concern is that the men are being set up to fail, while somebody is lining their pockets with money at the expense of the community," she said. "This is a moneymaker for an LLC, pure and simple."

But residents can expect a warm welcome from nearby Carnegie Hall, which occasionally offers homeless New Yorkers free tickets.

Another supporter is John Sheehan, a neighborhood resident and director of outreach services for the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church.

"I believe in the right to housing," he said. "We have an enormous problem in New York City and we need places to house people."
It's fair to say that dining at Gaskins in Germantown, Columbia County, is a series of beautiful moments: An inky blue exterior that changes shade under slate skies and dwindling light; glassware on the bar's open shelves glinting votive candlelight; the rich patina of worn floorboards that offer Proustian tales of prewar years as a small town grocery store. Depending on the route you take to Columbia County, the drive itself may be pretty (arriving from Catskill includes a scenic flight over the Rip Van Winkle Bridge). For those afraid of a little distance, it's only a skip beyond Hudson, though they're as different as two towns can be.

Germantown has a quiet charm with just enough white picket fences and small shops selling curios and curated goods to attract those seeking weekend country life and options for those working the many small local farms year round. Across the street, Luddite relocated its antique business from Brooklyn to a former garage; Alder East boutique curiously chose Germantown as a second location to the original in Portland, Ore.

If Otto's Market provides a community meeting point for breakfast and lunch, Gaskins is the center of town after 5 p.m. On a Sunday evening, it's instantly clear Germantown's streets are deserted only because everyone is inside. City weekenders  yes, in roll-cuffed drainpipe pants and sockless shoes  are alongside families at booths with babies grabbing for shiny stemware, couples at the partitioned bar waiting for tables, and a large man crumpled comfortably in the corner with a fierce blood-orange mezcal margarita we'd find brilliantly tart, smoky and briny from the thickly salted rim.

As if the collective energies of local farms and businesses aren't enough, Gaskins has been racking up accolades. Owners Sarah (nee Gaskins) and Nick Suarez, each with long histories at Brooklyn and Manhattan eateries, starred in a 2017 list of "notable Hudson Valley couples" alongside celebrities and presidents, their restaurant in a 2016 New York Times travel feature. And this year Nick made the semifinals of the 2018 James Beard Awards with a nomination for best chef  Northeast. In the three years since opening Gaskins, the couple have bought a Germantown home a mile from the restaurant and welcomed a child. Life looks rather good.

Seated at a large communal table, it's easy to pick up the relaxed vibe. Service is fast and intelligent, peppered with quips and asides; servers greet and seat patrons with dexterous warmth. We might have skipped dessert had our server not so convincingly described the citric fluffy depths of a lemon-lime meringue pie ($9) on a crushed graham cracker base. Those of us not fancying such sweetness polished off a plain citrus olive oil cake ($10) of such clever restraint it was as much about scent as taste, capped with a plume of utterly unsweet whipped cream.

There's a concise list of amari, Hudson Valley heritage whiskey and beer mostly from the nearby Suarez Family brewery in Livingston. The list of natural organic wines is a pretty little thing. Sarah has compiled some superb choices, several by the glass, but there's greater adventure by the bottle (I'm partial to a Catherine and Pierre Breton La Dillettante vouvray sec and Phillipe Tessier Coganis gamay blend), so I strong-arm friends into sharing.

Gaskins has plenty going for it. Tight community here means local farm ingredients drive weekly changes to seasonal menus, and local farmers are likely to be in the seats. The website assumes visitors may like to stay awhile and scratches the backs of several hotels and homes, including the Central House Inn over the road. Produce hails from upstate makers and farms: Heavenly artisanal bread from Bartlett House, whole lamb sourced from Kinderhook Farm, goat from Darlin' Doe, Ronnybrook milk and cream for a house-made ricotta, produce and herbs from Starling Yards, Sparrowbush and Cedar Farms, Hearty Roots and Tiny Hearts, some nearby, others right in Germantown. Their sweet names spell out farm-family love.

Burgers, macaroni and cheese, salads and fish and chips may not sound highbrow, but ingredients treated with such respect allow simple American classics to shine.

We forklift stubby annelli tubes from a crisply blistered mac and cheese baked in the wood-fired oven and plumb the depths of a thick French onion soup ($11). Hand-cut fries, dark and cleanly fried, nail the ratio of crisp exoskeleton to fluffy insides so that we eat every one. A thick Kinderhook Farm grass-fed beef burger and its assemblage of bottle-green lettuce, pink pickled onions and house-made "special sauce" is a flavor powerhouse in a sesame-embossed bun baked fresh daily.

It's hard to pick favorites but you might try the slender, house-rolled cavatelli mixed with the sweet-savory earthiness of lamb ragout dolloped with loose, creamy ricotta. Or the chickpea fritter, a colorful bowl where chickpeas are cooked up like polenta, cooled, sliced, and served with vivid carrot hummus, torn dill, broccoli rabe and mint, which coolly offsets the chile salsa and jammy soft-boiled egg. Alone, the fritters are surprisingly salty; in concert with the rest, they work.

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Given the long winter, this is the first time in a long time I've felt any joy for salad. While Gaskins capitalizes on its wood oven to roast beets (attractively served with fennel, farro and pomegranate arils), their ubiquitous presence across winter menus sends us scurrying into the arms of another root: raw and thinly sliced celeriac salad ($12) in a salt-bitter-sweet jumble of olives, arugula and dried cherries. A stunning chicory salad ($12) with broad pink leaves silkily dressed in buttermilk happily contrasts against crunchy hazelnuts, sweet sultanas and Taggiasca olives (familiar cured as Nicoise).

I'm often wary of fish and chips on a menu  sublimely simple, so easy to mess up. Not here. Like most else, it's a success with white pollock beer-battered and fried to a cracking gold carapace plonked beside fries and tartar. It's a proper plate.

It could be the easy, chattering scene, or laughs with the diners whose communal table we crash, or the effects of a remarkably tasty Manhattan made with Germantown's own Field Apothecary Bitters and renamed The Germantowner for a local twist. Whatever it is, Gaskins has magical appeal not unlike the spark when you meet someone new and know you'll be friends. Germantown may have lured in like-minded aesthetes, but they work hand-in-glove alongside locals and farms. Whether you head in early to see the artist shows at neighboring Instar Lodge and goodies at Luddite and Alder East or chance a longer wait for a later table, Gaskins' food and good nature is worth your while.

A cocktail, main dish and salad or dessert will cost around $45 per person before tip.

More Information Gaskins 2 Church St. Germantown Phone: 518-437-2107 Web: gaskinsny.com Reservations: Taken for parties of seven or more. Walk-ins welcome. Credit cards: All major. Hours: Dinner from 5 to 9 p.m. Sunday, Monday and Thursday, 5 to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday; closed Tuesday and Wednesday. Parking: A few spots in front and behind the restaurant. Recommended parking in the municipal lot across the street. Disabled access: Yes, front entrance. Attire: Casual. Prices: Starters and salads, $11 to $12; main plates, $15 to $28; desserts, $9 to $10. Food: (   1/2) Simple, seasonal, farm-driven American classics. Housemade pasta, farm salads, local grass-fed beef burgers, and wood-fired mac 'n' cheese. Beverage: (   1/2) Concise list of amari and whiskey, balanced classic cocktails, draft beers from New York and Vermont breweries. Smashing natural wine list: By the glass, $9 to $14; by the bottle, $35 to $98. Pipe and Tabor coffee. Service: (   1/2) Fast, intelligent, informal. Ambiance: (   1/2) Simple restored town tavern with design appeal. Family-friendly dining room with booths, two tops and one large communal table. Cozy partitioned bar with a half dozen stools. Personality: (   ) Chic restoration of a classic small-town former grocery. Light-soaked, original hardwood floors, bespoke vintage elements. Overall rating:    1/2 See More Collapse

Susie Davidson Powell is a British freelance food writer in upstate New York. Follow her on Twitter, @SusieDP. To comment on this review, visit the Table Hopping blog, blog.timesunion.com/tablehopping.
They are wizards with cocktail shakers, crafting complex creations from handmade spirits. And sometimes, they say, they get asked to make combinations like these:

 Bailey's Irish Cream and Chambord, a raspberry liqueur.

 Vodka and lemonade with olives.

 Coca-Cola and gin.

None of those will be on display Saturday evening when four Capital Region bartenders compete in the finals of the second annual cocktail competition sponsored by The Albany Distilling Co. Being held at the company's new Bar & Bottle Shop on Livingston Avenue in downtown Albany, located a short distance from its distillery at Quackenbush Square, the competition finals are the result of four earlier rounds of cocktail battles.

Held over four weeks at bars in Albany, Saratoga Springs, Schenectady and Troy, each initial round pitted four bartenders from their respective cities against one another, with the winner advancing to Saturday's capstone event.

The finalists:

 Sonia Castellani, 25, bartender/server, Hamlet & Ghost, Saratoga Springs

 Josh Mackenburg, 30, owner, Rare Craft Steak House, Schenectady

 Lindsey Miller, 32, bartender, Brown's Brewing, Troy

 Abena Okyere, bartender/server, Speakeasy 518, Albany

They will be challenged to make two rounds of drinks  one with Albany Distilling's malt whiskey, one with its rye whiskey. All other ingredients containing alcohol must be made with New York state products. The cocktails will be judged by a panel including Albany Distilling's co-owners, Rick Sicari and John Curtain; last year's winner, Jeff Krenn, formerly of Speakeasy 518; and by attendees. Finalists will be competing for $500 worth of prizes plus bragging rights. The winning cocktail will go on the menu at the the Bar & Bottle Shop.

Admission to the finals is free, as are samples of the bartenders' cocktails. Full versions of the cocktails, as well as the Bar & Bottle Shop's regular offerings, will also be for sale. The start time is 7 p.m. The location is 75 Livingston Ave., between Broadway and North Pearl Street.

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Sicari says the competition is a way to show off Albany Distilling's new venue, which was a year in the making and represents an investment of more than $1 million. Officially known as the ADCo Bar & Bottle Shop, the building, a circa-1840s residence that was later a Nabisco warehouse, is a 6,000-square-foot space that includes a bar, two-story interior courtyard, event room and storage for products made at the distillery. The bar, serving occasionally since last year, was officially unveiled earlier this month.

Regular hours for the bottle shop are noon to 8 p.m. Monday to Saturday; the bar is open 4 to 10 p.m. Monday through Wednesday, until midnight Thursday and Friday, noon to midnight Saturday. Its food will be a rotating selection of half a dozen or more hand pies, in savory and sweet variations, made for the Bar & Bottle Shop by a roster of area restaurants.

For more dining news, go to the Table Hopping blog.
Television actress Allison Mack and NXIVM founder Keith Raniere have been indicted on federal charges of sex trafficking and conspiracy to commit forced labor for their alleged roles in a secret sex-slave club in which women were also branded with the pair's initials.

The Times Union first reported last week that Mack, 35, was identified in FBI records filed in support of a recent search warrant application as an alleged co-conspirator with Raniere in his efforts to coerce women into joining the secret club.

Federal prosecutors said Mack was arrested in New York City early Friday. She was arraigned by a U.S. magistrate judge late Friday afternoon and ordered held in custody of U.S. marshals pending a bail hearing scheduled for Monday in Brooklyn. Raniere has been held in custody without bond since his arrest last month and will be arraigned on the indictment at a later date, they said.

The indictment, which was filed Thursday and unsealed on Friday, charges both Raniere and Mack with multiple counts of sex trafficking, conspiracy to commit sex trafficking and conspiracy to commit forced labor. They each face a potential minimum sentence of 15 years in prison if convicted.

FBI 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.

"Allison Mack recruited women to join what was purported to be a female mentorship group that was, in fact, created and led by Keith Raniere, said U.S. Attorney Richard P. Donoghue of the Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn. The victims were then exploited, both sexually and for their labor, to the defendants benefit. This office and our law enforcement partners are committed to prosecuting predators who victimize others through sex trafficking and forced labor.

Mack, an actress who is best known for her role in the television series "Smallville," which ended in 2011, had initially been listed in a federal criminal complaint as Raniere's unidentified co-conspirator.

According to people familiar with NXIVM, Mack joined the organization about a decade ago, around the same time several other young actresses were pulled into its ranks, including Nicki Clyne, Grace Park and Kristin Kreuk, who recruited Mack. Kreuk left NXIVM several years ago  before the slave-sex club was allegedly formed by Raniere  and has denounced the practices made public recently.

Mack was with Raniere in Mexico when he was taken into custody on March 25 by Mexican federal police officers, who arrested Raniere at the request of U.S. law enforcement authorities.

Raniere, whose organization has been described by experts as a cult, was arrested at a luxury villa in Puerto Vallarta.

The federal complaint alleges that Raniere 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.

In the federal criminal complaint filed last month against Raniere, prosecutors said a Halfmoon residence known as the Library was where Raniere, 57, repeatedly had sex with an unidentified actress in her 30s.

That townhouse on Hale Drive, which was searched by the FBI on March 27, 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.

The state Health Department initially brushed off the allegations that women in the secret club were being branded by a doctor, Danielle Roberts, whose license to practice medicine in New York remains intact. After reports about the branding became public, the stage agency reopened its examination of the allegations against Roberts, who two women said used a cauterizing tool to brand multiple participants in the secret women's group.

According to information referenced in a complaint filed with the state by Sarah Edmondson of Vancouver, at least 20 women associated with NXIVM were lured into the club and required to provide "collateral."

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Edmondson and another woman involved with NXIVM told the Times Union that they were brought into the club and subsequently branded by Roberts, who then gave them special bandages and advice on helping the wounds heal.

Edmondson said she was told it would be a "tattoo" and that the symbol was a Latin symbol for "the elements." She learned weeks later that the brand was actually the initials of Raniere and Mack, whom Edmondson's complaint identified as having "started" the secret women's group with Raniere.

State Health Department officials last year said they were researching what regulations there may be, if any, governing human branding. In July, they had dismissed Edmondson's complaint, saying the allegations "did not occur with the doctor-patient relationship and should be reported to law enforcement."

Edmondson said she also contacted State Police, but an investigator told her there was no criminal conduct because the women agreed to be branded.

The U.S. attorney's office in Brooklyn opened its investigation last fall.

Federal search warrant records that were unsealed two weeks ago in response to a request by the Times Union said Raniere has received financial support 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 also 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, Raniere had not flown out of the country since 2015, when he visited the heiress' private island in Fiji," according to the FBI.

In Mexico, authorities said, Raniere got rid of 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 search warrant records indicate there are other federal crimes 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.

Note: An earlier version of this story gave an incorrect year for the end of the series "Smallville."
Albany County wants to ban so-called conversion therapy on minors, a practice some purport can turn gay people straight.

The county Legislature will hold a public hearing at 7:15 p.m. Tuesday on the proposed law that would fine any person who provides this type of service to a minor, with penalties starting at $1,000 for the first violation.

Violations escalate for subsequent offenses, with three or more violations carrying a $5,000 penalty. The law doesnt differentiate between practitioners who charge, or those who potentially offer the service at no charge.

Guilderland Democrat Bryan Clenahan said use of conversion therapy on minors is nothing more than child abuse, and with other localities outright banning the practice, the legislator said Albany County should also take steps.

It is protecting children from abusive therapies. It communicates the message that there is nothing wrong with being LGBTQ, Clenahan said. This makes it very clear that we stand for equality.

Several people spoke out against the ban at an April 9 legislature meeting, arguing that banning conversion therapy violates Christian values.

New York state in 2016 enacted regulations that prevent health insurers from covering the process for minors in New York and keep mental health facilities from subjecting minors to the therapy as well. They also reconfirm a ban on payment by Medicaid, the federal and state insurance program for the poor.

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Clenahan said a ban on the practice completely takes things a step further, while putting pressure on state lawmakers to pass a conversion therapy ban statewide.

While a measure banning its use on minors passed the Democratic-led Assembly, the Republican-controlled Senate hasnt acted.

Albany city Common Council members considered banning conversion therapy back in 2014 but the legislation was later withdrawn.

Council President Pro Tempore Richard Conti said hes working on an ordinance that would mirror the one in effect in New York City, which prohibits charging somebody money for a service that intends to change their sexual orientation or gender identity. New York Citys ban isnt limited to minors, like many other bans; it includes adults as well.

There also will be public hearings Tuesday regarding a law that would require pawn shops and secondhand stores to electronically report transactions of precious metals and another amending a sustainable energy loan program.
Keith Raniere has courted the rich and famous for years through his leadership of NXIVM, the secretive Colonie-based "executive success program" that critics have described as a cult. Now, he has everyone's attention.

NXIVM is making news worldwide after Raniere was arrested on March 25 on multiple federal counts of sex trafficking and forced labor. On Friday, Raniere and actress Allison Mack both were indicted by a federal grand jury in Brooklyn.

For complete stories on the NXIVM investigation, go to timesunion.com/NXIVM

Raniere, the group's founder  who is referred to within NXIVM as "Vanguard"  was arrested at a $10,000-a-week villa in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where he fled last November as the federal investigation took shape. Video of that arrest is shown below.

The U.S. attorney's office for the Eastern District of New York is leading the grand jury investigation of Raniere and NXIVM. Numerous people involved with NXIVM have been subpoenaed to testify in Brooklyn.

The faces of NXIVM have changed through the years. People on various rungs of the ladder of celebrity have been in the inner circle and have been courted for its success courses.

And as some of his followers are expected to rally around him, others are distancing themselves.

The following profiles are culled from news reports in the Times Union published over the past six years, including the February 2012 Times Union Special Report, "The Secrets of NXIVM."

ALLISON MACK

Mack, 35, is an actress who is widely known for her role in the television series "Smallville," which ran from 2001 to 2011 on the WB and the CW. Prior to her indictment, she was listed in the federal criminal complaint against Raniere as his unidentified co-conspirator.



She is allegedly part of an internal group within NXIVM known as DOS or "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, and were required to provide "collateral" in order to join. Women were branded with a symbol that includes the initials of Raniere and Mack, one of those branded told the Times Union. Mack is shown in the video of Raniere's arrest, footage provided by Buffalo-based journalist Frank Parlato, the publisher and editor in chief of Artvoice and a former publicist for NXIVM.

EMILIANO SALINAS

A NXIVM leader and venture capitalist, Emiliano Salinas is the son of former Mexican President Carlos Salinas. His connections to NXIVM are detailed in the 2015 Times Union report "NXIVM hacked billionaire's emails with Hillary Clinton, world leaders." Officials for the Mexican branch of NXIVM's Executive Success Programs, which Salinas heads, recently said their operations may be turned over to another corporation.

NANCY SALZMAN

Raniere met Nancy Salzman in the late 1990s after the collapse of his earlier business, Consumers' Buyline Inc. He said he chose Salzman to become president of NXIVM in 1998 after searching for seven years and interviewing hundreds of people to be the person to duplicate and teach his model. With Raniere going by the title "Vanguard," she is known as "Prefect."

In the hours preceding Raniere's court appearance in Texas on March 27, FBI agents spent several hours combing through Salzman's residence That FBI raid signaled a wider criminal investigation of NXIVM  likely including its finances.

THE BRONFMAN SISTERS

Clare and Sara Bronfman are heiresses of the family that controls the Seagram Co. business empire. They have homes in the Capital Region and used tens of millions of dollars to underwrite Raniere's activities and help the group purchase about a dozen buildings and homes in the region.

They helped arrange for the Dalai Lama to speak in Albany at a 2009 event that drew Raniere to the stage.

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The Times Union reported on March 25 that New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's office was conducting a separate investigation of a nonprofit foundation associated with NXIVM that allegedly sponsored brain-activity and other human behavioral studies without any apparent oversight, according to court records. That investigation has been suspended due to the federal criminal investigation, officials said.

The nonprofit Ethical Science Foundation was formed in 2007 by Clare Bronfman, who owns a horse farm in Delanson and is listed in public records as the trustee of and donor to the foundation. A state Supreme Court justice recently signed an order directing Bronfman and Dr. Brandon B. Porter, who is involved with NXIVM and conducted the human studies, to turn over all documentation associated with the research. Read more in a 2012 report "'The girls' back NXIVM with millions."

SARAH EDMONDSON

Actress Sarah Edmondson of Vancouver, in a state complaint, said at least 20 women associated with NXIVM were lured into DOS, the "secret" club within the organization that required them to consent to being branded in their pubic area.

Edmondson and another woman also involved with NXIVM separately told the Times Union that they were brought into the club and subsequently branded. Edmondson listed two other women in her complaint that she said were branded with her that night.

Edmondson, who was associated with NXIVM for 12 years, left the organization in June of 2017 after she learned the brand that she received contained the initials of Mack and Raniere. The osteopath who performed the branding on many of the women, Dr. Danielle Roberts, also works for NXIVM. Roberts worked at St. Peter's Hospital from 2012 to 2015 through an employment agency. Read more: "Women scarred by study, branding"

ROGER STONE AND MORE

The for-profit corporation NXIVM is based on a self-improvement curriculum called "Rational Inquiry." Other high-profile names  including Republican campaign strategist and self-described political "dirty trickster" Roger Stone, former State Majority Leader Joe Bruno, former state Health Commissioner Antonia Novello, and writer-producer Mark Vicente  have taken NXIVM's executive success courses or were found to have ties to the organization, according to Times Union reporting.

Read more about the powerful people who have attended NXIVM seminars in the 2012 story "NXIVM courts rich, powerful and influential."

KRISTIN KREUK

Another "Smallville" actress, Kristin Kreuk, wrote on Twitter on March 29 that she took an "intensive" NXIVM session when she was 23 and left the program about five years ago. "The accusations that I was in the 'inner circle' or recruited women as 'sex slaves' are blatantly false," she wrote. "During my time, I never experienced any illegal or nefarious activity. I am horrified and disgusted by what has come out about DOS."
Washington

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump since the early days of his campaign, is joining the team of lawyers representing the president in the special counsel's Russia investigation.

With the addition of Giuliani, Trump gains a former U.S. attorney, a past presidential candidate and a TV-savvy defender at a time when the White House is looking for ways to bring the president's involvement with special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation to a close.

The president has been weighing whether to sit for questioning by Mueller's team, and his legal team has repeatedly met with investigators to define the scope of the questions he would face. Giuliani will enter those negotiations, filling the void left by attorney John Dowd, who resigned last month.

It's a precarious time for Trump. His legal team has been told by Mueller that the president is not a target of the investigation, suggesting he's not in imminent criminal jeopardy. But he is currently a subject of the probe  a designation that could change at any time.

Trump personal attorney Jay Sekulow told The Associated Press that Giuliani will be focusing on the Mueller investigation  not the legal matters raised by the ongoing investigation into Trump attorney Michael Cohen. That probe is being led by the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, an office that Giuliani headed in the mid- to late 1980s.

Cohen's office, home and hotel room were raided last week by the FBI, who are investigating the lawyer's business dealings, including suspected bank fraud. They also sought records related to payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who both claim to have had sexual encounters with Trump several years ago. The White House has denied the claims.

The raids enraged Trump, prompting him to publicly weigh whether to fire Mueller or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. He also intensified his public attacks on the Mueller investigation, calling it "an attack on our country."

In a statement announcing Giuliani's hire, Trump expressed his wish that the investigation wrap up soon and praised Giuliani, a fellow New Yorker, confidant and Mar-a-Lago regular.

"Rudy is great," Trump said. "He has been my friend for a long time and wants to get this matter quickly resolved for the good of the country."

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Giuliani will be joining Sekulow on Trump's personal legal team but will be working closely with White House lawyer Ty Cobb, who has also been handling the administration's cooperation with the Mueller investigation.

"It is an honor to be a part of such an important legal team, and I look forward to not only working with the President but with Jay, Ty and their colleagues," Giuliani said in a statement.

In addition to Giuliani, two other former federal prosecutors  Jane Serene Raskin and Marty Raskin  will be joining Trump's legal team. The two, who are married and run a law firm together, are based in Florida but handle cases across the United States. Both have extensive experience prosecuting organized crime and representing defendants in complex white-collar and fraud investigations.

Giuliani, who was New York mayor during the Sept. 11 attacks, has known Trump for decades and his aggressive, hard-charging rhetorical style can at times mirror that of the president.
New York

The alleged East Coast crime boss of the notorious street gang MS-13 was ordered held without bail on Thursday at his first court appearance on Long Island, where prosecutors accuse him of having a hand in a wave of violence.

Miguel Angel Corea Diaz had been jailed in Maryland in a separate drug case. Drug Enforcement Administration agents transported him to Nassau County on Wednesday.

When the charges against Corea Diaz and 16 other defendants with alleged ties to MS-13 were announced earlier this year, DEA officials described him as the "point man on the East Coast who would report to MS-13 hierarchy in El Salvador."

An indictment alleges the 35-year-old Corea Diaz ordered beatings and killings and directed the gang's drug operations in New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Texas and elsewhere while using the street name "Reaper."

In 2017, Corea Diaz directed two of the other defendants to kill a rival in Elizabeth, New Jersey. There's evidence that the defendants discussed where to dispose the victim's body and how deep to dig the hole before law enforcement thwarted them, Nassau County prosecutors said.

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Authorities believe MS-13, or the Mara Salvatrucha, has thousands of members across the country, mostly Central American immigrants.

Corea Diaz's attorney, Scott Gross, declined comment on Thursday.
BETHLEHEM - The fourth annual Amazing Earth Day Race has drawn 16 teams, each with between 4 to 16 members, ranging in age from pre-teens to what organizer Chip Reynolds describes as "geezers like me." Reynolds regards himself as a geezer because he was old enough to celebrate the world's first Earth Day in 1970 by planting trees with friends.

Teams will gather between 5:30 and 5:45 p.m. at Five Rivers Environmental Education Center. Then at 6 p.m., they plunge into the forest. There they must solve puzzles or problems at various stops before they complete the race. They aren't supposed to leave the forest until the problems are solved and the race is done.
TROY  A man who made a career of robbing drug dealers was paid $1,000 to frighten an alleged South Troy dealer, according to testimony heard Thursday in a Rensselaer County courtroom. Instead, the target ended up dying of stab wounds.

The 2016 death of Jermaine Maino Hight, 31, has figured prominently in testimony about how Leonard G Ellis, who attacked him, died the following year after another knife attack.

Anthony M. Mike Rickett, 52, is on trial for second-degree murder for allegedly killing Ellis, 46. The proceedings have exposed an underworld of retaliatory criminal-on-criminal violence, drug dealing and prostitution that stretches from South Troy to the citys northern neighborhoods.

Rickett allegedly stabbed Ellis three times on July 11, 2017, in an apartment at 115 Oakwood Avenue, where people went to smoke crack cocaine and meet prostitutes, according to the indictment and testimony. Ellis died four days later at Albany Medical Center Hospital. Rickett was arrested 10 days after the attack after police surrounded his Third Avenue home in Lansingburgh.

Hight, a Rensselaer resident, was attacked on the evening of June 14, 2016, at Madison and Second street in South Troy, according to police reports. But the attacker was not publicly revealed  until this week, during testimony by a friend of Ellis and a detective.

All indications are that Leonard Ellis killed Jermaine Hight. Thats what detectives believed. The evidence supports this unless something further develops, Assistant Chief Police Daniel DeWolf said Thursday.

At first, police thought Hight was a car crash victim.

He was found in a car that crashed into another vehicle that night at Hoosick Street and Fifth Avenue in North Central. Hight was being taken to a hospital by a friend at the time of the crash.

Authorities took Hight to Albany Medical Center Hospital, where he died. It was then that police learned that it was stab wounds that caused his death, and not injuries from the accident.

Ellis was paid $1,000 to attack Hight in 2016, according to Stephanie Star Simpson, who testified that she accompanied Ellis on some of his robberies of city drug dealers. Simpson only identified Hight by his nickname  Maino  during cross-examination by Timothy Nugent, Ricketts defense attorney. She also said that people were afraid of Ellis.

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Simpson was a prosecution witness whose testimony to the prosecution was used to set up a motive for Rickett to allegedly kill Ellis. She said Ellis robbed Rickett at gunpoint of an "eightball" of crack, and that Rickett later told her he was going to kill Ellis for what he did.

Captain Raymond White confirmed what Simpson had told police about Ellis attacking Hight. Then a detective sergeant, White said he interviewed Simpson in an unmarked detective bureau car. Thats where she told her story about Ellis activities and the attack on Hight.

Rickett testified in his own defense for less than five minutes Thursday afternoon, saying he knew none of the people who claimed he was in the apartment at 115 Oakwood Ave. where Ellis was attacked. He also said he didnt know Ellis and Simpson.

Closing statements will be made Friday morning in Ricketts trial before County Court Judge Debra Young.
ALBANY  An agency that reimburses victims of corrupt or egregiously negligent attorneys paid nearly $36,000 last year to the clients of former Capital Region lawyers  including one of the last victims of notorious debt reduction pitchman Andrew Capoccia.

Across New York, the Lawyers' Fund of Client Protection paid victims $10.6 million in 2017  the second-highest figure in the 36-year history of the Albany-based fund, according to its recently released annual report.

The 215 local victims who received payments included former clients of disbarred Averill Park attorney Marcia J. Doyle Stallmer, disbarred Troy lawyer Alexander B. Perry, late Glens Falls attorney William V. Canale, and suspended Saratoga Springs lawyer John M. "Jake" Hogan III.

The fund paid $1,157 to the most recent of Capoccia's thousands of victims. The 43-year-old victim  who asked to remain anonymous  told the Times Union it took two decades to get only a fraction of what she paid Capoccia. The process was frustrating, she said.

"Justice was not served," said the woman.

The victims fund is sustained through the collection of $60 payments taken out of lawyers' biennial $375 registration fees, said Timothy O'Sullivan, executive director of the fund.

The fund has paid out a total of $398,348 to the victims of Capoccia, a former Colonie-based debt reduction attorney who defrauded his clients and stole escrow money. The 414 payouts to his victims are the second-highest number in the history of the fund, O'Sullivan said. (Topping the list are the 458 payments to former clients of ex-Long Island attorney Andrew Robert Holman III, he said.)

"It was very unusual that it took as long as it did," O'Sullivan said of Capoccia's case. He said the circumstances of his disbarment case led to the lengthy wait.

Capoccia was disbarred in New York in 2000 for repeatedly engaging in frivolous litigation, and later relocated to Vermont. His legal troubles continued there: He was subsequently convicted in federal court in 2005 of conspiracy, interstate transmittal and transportation of stolen money, mail and wire fraud, receiving stolen money and money laundering.

Capoccia, now 75, is serving a sentence of more than 15 years in a federal prison in Lewisburg, Pa.

The fund paid $26,400 last year to a 39-year-old woman who was victimized by Stallmer, a former Rensselaer County Bar Association president and onetime assistant to state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's Real Property Bureau.

Stallmer, 53, was charged in a loan scam. She conned friends and relatives while using the name of her family's well-established law firm in Rensselaer County. Stallmer would ask the victims for loans, at times promising good returns in exchange, then paid them back using other victims' money. In 2016, she pleaded guilty in Albany County to tax fraud and scheming to defraud. A judge sentenced her to 1 to 3 years in prison; she was parole a year later.

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In total, the fund has reimbursed four of Stallmer's victims a total of $77,400, O'Sullivan said.

Perry, 52, a former prosecutor and public defender in Rensselaer County, was disbarred in 2011 for misleading and deceiving clients about the status of their cases. Last year, the fund reimbursed $3,000 to a 76-year-old man victimized by the attorney. O'Sullivan said Perry accepted $3,000 from the client, provided minimal services of no benefit, deceived the man and abandoned him.

A total of seven of Perry's ex-clients have now been reimbursed a total of $15,020.

The fund paid $4,873 to a man and woman in Rexford who were victimized by Glens Falls lawyer William V. Canale. The loss involved escrow funds misappropriated by Canale while he served as a court-appointed arbitrator, O'Sullivan said.

He said Canale, 80, was in good standing at the time of his death in 2013.

Not all of the sums paid to victims are so large: The fund paid out $300 to a victim of Jake Hogan, 57, who defrauded a client of an unearned legal fee, O'Sullivan said.

In 2016, the Appellate Division of state Supreme Court, Third Department, suspended Hogan after its grievance committee found he failed to communicate with a client, did not forward a client's requested file, misled the committee and neglected various legal matters and appeals of clients.

O'Sullivan said it involved a $300 advance legal fee for traffic court that Hogan accepted. He said Hogan provided minimal services, of no benefit, and abandoned the client.
Rumor has it Apple is getting ready to launch three new iPhones this year, but one analyst says you shouldnt expect to see the $999 iPhone X much longer.

(Image credit: Tom's Guide)

The iPhone X is dead, analyst Neil Campling of Mirabaud Securities wrote in a research note to clients.

That seems extreme, but Campling says the fact that Apple supplier Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing has lowered its full-year revenue forecast indicates Apple isnt buying enough iPhone X components. Why? According to Campling, whose client note was obtained by CNBC, Apple plans to discontinue the iPhone X line and cease production on new models.

The simple problem with X is that it is too expensive, Campling told CNBC. Consumers are turning their backs on high-priced smartphones.

Well, thats not entirely accurate.

In February, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the iPhone X was the best-selling iPhone since its November launch. That helped the company report its highest revenue ever from a new iPhone lineup, Cook said during the companys holiday quarterly earnings call.

Its extraordinarily unlikely that after the iPhone X sold so well  which we see in Apples results in the first quarter  that even if it tanked, its unlikely that Apple could change course and decide to kill it, said Global Data research director for consumer devices Avi Greengart. Frankly, the whole thing sounds ridiculous.



MORE: iPhone Rumors: What to Expect from Apple's Next Phone

There could be other reasons why TMSC lowered its revenue forecast. Morgan Stanley analyst Charlie Chan told CNBC that its business has been affected by MediaTek, another TMSC customer that puts chips in budget phones that are popular overseas. Chan also said Apple may have delayed production of its latest processor to July.

It seems more likely that Apple will release three new iPhones this September, including a refreshed iPhone X and possibly a Plus-sized model with a larger screen. KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who has a solid track record for accuracy when it comes to Apple product predictions, says a 5.8-inch iPhone is likely to still be in the mix, but probably at a lower price point. A third model, rumored to have a 6.1-inch screen, will reportedly feature less expensive parts like an LCD panel instead of an OLED screen.



The iPhone X sold extremely well out of the gate and customer satisfaction is extremely high and I would expect Apple to build on that, not go backwards, Greengart said.

Even if the second-gen iPhone X has a different name (iPhone XS? iPhone X2?), expect Face ID, edge-to-edge displays and, yes, even the once-controversial and now widely copied notch to stick around.
Cheap smartphones are a dime a dozen these days, but you wouldnt want to use most of them.

Thats not to say they must be avoided entirely  you just have to do your research first. Which is why Toms Guide spends so much time separating the best from the rest. And for the last few years, the best has often come from one company  Motorola.

Moto E5 Plus

Rather than chasing gimmicks and ratcheting up costs, Motorola has settled upon a winning formula: give users exactly what they need for a price they can afford. The low-end Moto E and mid-tier Moto G devices proved to the world that inexpensive phones could be fast and efficient, with a delightful software experience on par with their flagship contemporaries and genuinely novel features that existed to serve the user, not the brand. Im talking about value adds like Active Display, and intuitive gestures that let you to chop to activate the flashlight and twist to launch the camera.

Even after about five or six product cycles and multiple corporate shake-ups and identity crises, Motorola is still at it. The Moto E5 and G6, revealed this week, come in a variety of flavors. Some have 18:9 screens and small bezels, while others pack massive batteries and dual cameras. Each one can be had for less than $300, and theyre all the phone you really need.

MORE: 15 Cheap Android Smartphones (Under $200) Ranked Best to Worst

The strategy hasnt necessarily worked well for Motorola from a profitability standpoint, but has produced a succession of critically lauded and accessible products. Its an ironic shift for a company that entered the smartphone space with a reputation for power, always committed to winning the never-ending race for specs supremacy with devices like the original Droid and Atrix 4G. Motorolas current range-topping handset, the Moto Z2 Force, almost feels like an afterthought in light of the progress the brand has made on the other end of the market.

But Motorola still has to contend with rivals competing for the same demographic. Theres ZTE, which has put together a string of respectable cheap phones, including the new $79 Tempo Go, that frequently top best-seller lists at prepaid carriers. Honor, a brand owned by Huawei, operates in the U.S. exclusively through direct sales and frequently undercuts Motorolas best efforts. Take the Honor 7X, which equals the Moto G5 Plus in most respects but still managed to launch at $30 less.

For consumers, obviously this is a great thing. Increased competition leads to better products and more choice. Its easy to forget how good we have it; five or so years ago, it was hard enough to find a phone that cost as little as $200 unlocked. Even if it did, good luck getting that phone to survive a full two years.

Honor 7X

But uncertainty is looming on the budget phone front. For as much as its been a remarkably fruitful time for budget shoppers, it could all come crashing down very soon  at least here in the United States. Chinas Huawei and ZTE are under the microscope of U.S. lawmakers, albeit for very different reasons.

Huawei, one of the worlds largest phone makers, is currently at odds with U.S. lawmakers over alleged ties to the Chinese government, though the feds have yet to really detail those concerns.

We absolutely werent counting on [Huawei and ZTEs troubles]. However, it does bring some new opportunities to the table, we cant deny that."  Marcela Lacerda, Motorola

Still, that wariness was enough to pressure AT&T into squashing its partnership with Huawei on the eve of the Mate 10 Pros launch and for Verizon to reportedly back away, too. The Mate 10 Pro was intended to lead Huaweis push the U.S. market; without support from a major U.S. carrier, the device has languished on shelves of online retailers. Best Buy dropping the companys products certainly didnt help any, either. And now Huawei is reportedly looking beyond the U.S. for future phones.

Unlike Huawei, ZTE may not have any choice in the matter. Its entire global smartphone operation is in serious jeopardy since the U.S. Government handed it a seven-year ban preventing it from exporting any American-made components for use in its products.

The ban stems from findings that ZTE shipped telecommunications equipment to Iran and North Korea, a move for which the U.S. Government ordered the company to rebuke all executives involved. Apparently, ZTE paid them bonuses instead. As a consequence, ZTE is now forbidden from using Qualcomms processors, and potentially licensing the Android OS (or at least just Googles apps).

Regardless of the political motivations at play, ZTEs uncertain future and Huaweis expansion woes stand to cripple cheap phones in the U.S. Its good news for Motorola of course, who could once again make out with a monopoly on critically-acclaimed handsets at reasonable prices.

ZTE Blade V9

We absolutely werent counting on [Huawei and ZTEs troubles] said Marcela Lacerda, Motorolas director of marketing for North America.  However, it does bring some new opportunities to the table, we cant deny that. Were definitely moving forward with our plan to occupy that section of the market.

According to Lacerda, you can expect a lot more efforts than previous years from Motorola along the budget spectrum. Yet, dependable as Motorolas offerings have been, they should never be anyones only option. The gap left by ZTE and Huawei is crying out for a new player to enter the space, but there are few candidates thus far. Asus has put together promising but uninspired efforts like the ZenFone Max Plus, while Blu frequently appears atop Amazons list of popular handsets but hasnt convinced us that phones like the Blu R2 Plus offer anything but a low price tag.

Motorola's phone designs arent direct substitutes for ZTE's large, cheap slab form factors that made them so popular with U.S. prepaid customers, says Avi Greengart, research director at media analytics firm GlobalData. Coolpad should also see a jump in orders, but other vendors  especially Blu  have not proven themselves capable of supporting carrier volumes with high quality.

Its a bleak situation when resources we all rely on are priced out of reach for those of us who could use them the most. The beauty of technology is that it gets more affordable over time  innovations trickle down and features that were once rare and highly sought-after become inescapable. However, competition is necessary to accelerate that process. After a fleeting period of real progress in the budget space, the threat of stagnation looms ahead.

Photo Credit: Shaun Lucas/Tom's Guide


Yesterday, Google revealed its plan to finally catch up in the race for mobile messaging dominance. It's called Chat, and it's going to make your texts more colorful, lively and interactive.

(Image credit: Google/The Verge)

But where will you use Chat? Will it kill SMS? How does it stack up on security? Here's what you need to know about Google's new Chat technology.

Google Chat will finally make texting on Android a vibrant experience

The big news is that texting on Android will start to be as fun as it is in Apple's iMessages platform. Google told The Verge that its new Chat technology adds typing indicators, bigger, full-resolution images, video and read receipts. This is meant to keep Android messaging from being left in the dust by Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and the large mass of other messaging apps.

Google's Anil Sabharwal, a vice president of Product at the search giant, told The Verge that he wants to add Smart Replies (which Inbox, Allo and Gmail users are already familiar with), Google Assistant, and Google Photos into Chat. Also, GIFs and stickers are also expected features, as they're practically a standard on most messaging apps.

MORE: Best Android Apps You're Not Using

Chat is a service, not a new app

Instead of developing an app that every phone maker has to add to its phones  you don't need another, and neither do I  Google's Chat technology will come to life inside of Android Messages, and other apps whose developers opt to support it. Samsung's own messaging app, for example, will support Chat. You can download Android Messages if it's not on your phone already.

Pixel, HTC, Huawei, Motorola, ZTE and Android One devices already have Android Messages, and back in February, Google announced that Blu, TCL/Alcatel/Blackberry and Essential added their names to the group of device-makers who set Android Messages as the default messaging app.

"Chat won't offer end-to-end encryption, a privacy feature that Apple's iMessage and other apps such as Signal offer."

SMS is getting replaced by RCS

Chat is based on a new messaging standard that Google has cajoled partners into supporting, the Universal Profile for Rich Communication Services (RCS). RCS is meant to replace the SMS (Short Message Service) that most Android testing is currently working on.

You might remember my article about how Google recently began a rollout of RCS messaging for businesses, for richer communication with customers. This would bring similar messaging to all.

It's not as secure as iMessage or Signal

Chat won't offer end-to-end encryption, a privacy feature that Apple's iMessage and other apps such as Signal offer. Instead, it will follow the same legal standards for message interception as SMS.

Chat could come to the PC

Google isn't the only operating system-maker who has signed onto the Universal Profile for RCS: Microsoft is also on board. Whether or not that means a Chat-supporting app will land on Windows 10 is unknown, but the door is open.

Carriers will bring Chat to users, but timing is TBA

Google told The Verge that the Chat services will be enabled for users on a carrier-by-carrier basis. Carriers on board with the Universal Profile for RCS include AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, Rogers and Orange.

As for when that happens, Google is expecting that many carriers will follow through this year (2018), but admits that some might dawdle. So, expect to yell at customer service if your phone doesn't get Chat when your friends do.

There is no clue as to whether or not Apple will support Chat. What I am sure about, though, is that since Chat's less secure than iMessage, Apple is extremely unlikely to replace its own service with this new standard.

The people you message will know if you have Chat, as your texts will revert to the SMS fallback. That's the same thing that happens now when iPhone users see green bubbles when they text Android users.

MORE: The Best Android Phones You Can Buy Right Now

Say "Goodbye," Allo

After less than 50 million Android users (that's a paltry share of the "more than 2 billion" active Android devices) installed Allo, Google's last attempt at a mobile-focused messaging app, the company is "pausing" development of that app. Allo featured smart replies, Google Assistant, stickers, doodles and larger emoji, but simply failed to launch.

Since Google wants to fit those features into Chat, Allo will most likely fade away, to be classified as obsolete.
Unveiled earlier this month, the new-generation Ford Focus introduced a brand-new platform from the company, as well as a number of new or updated engines. Set to arrive in the United States sometime next year, the Focus could also bring Fords brand-new, 1.5-liter, three-cylinder EcoBoost unit to North America.

Focus seems to be the logical option here since it's already offered with this unit in Europe.

Thats the word from the company vice president of powertrain engineering, David Filipe, who said that the small mill will definitely make it to the U.S. Although he didnt mention the car that will use it, the Focus seems to be the logical option here since its already offered with this unit in Europe.

The three-cylinder EcoBoost replaces the previous 1.5-liter four-cylinder, and its available in two power stages in Europe. The base version cranks out 140 horsepower, while the more powerful option delivers a solid 180 horses. It may be small, but this three-banger will send plenty of oomph to the wheels. Transmission choices for the tiny EcoBoost include a six-speed manual and an eight-speed automatic. Its safe to say that the U.S. version will probably generate 180 horsepower and use the eight-speed automatic gearbox.

Not only powerful, the three-cylinder EcoBoost is efficient too, as it can run on only two cylinders.

Not only powerful, the three-cylinder EcoBoost is efficient too, as it can run on only two cylinders. Under reduced speeds and load, the engine disables one cylinder, thus saving fuel due to the reduced internal friction. An interesting fact about this engine is that it will be the first to run on only two cylinders on the U.S. market in more than 110 years. The last Ford to use a two-cylinder engine was the Model F, which was last produced in 1906. A predecessor to the iconic Model T, the Model F used a 2.1-liter flat-two rated at 12 horsepower.

References

Read our full review on the 2019 Ford Focus.

Read more Ford news.

Source: Automotive News
In a recent essay on his CBC Radio show Sunday Edition, Michael Enright praises libraries and librarians at the end of the US celebration of National Library Week.

 Stijn Poelstra via ArchDaily

This is probably why the many church conversions into libraries are so successful and impressive. The latest is the Library, Museum and Community Center De Petrus in the Netherlands, designed by Molenaar&Bol;&vanDillen; Architects (and ed.- I didn't leave out the spaces, that is how they write it). A conversion of a church built in 1884, it is much more than just a library, but is "a multifunctional center containing a library and a museum but also a bar and shops."

 Stijn Poelstra via ArchDaily

Michael Enright noted that libraries have come to serve multiple roles.

This library is even more than that. According to the architects, you can push on the bookshelves and transform the space completely.

 Stijn Poelstra via ArchDaily

 Stijn Poelstra via ArchDaily

The architects have inserted a curvaceous mezzanine that "gives the church a new look fitting for its new function." It holds meeting rooms and study areas as well as mechanical equipment. It is mostly over the side aisles, but does swoop in and out of the main space.

Michael Enright says of libraries and librarians: "Long may they flourish." A few years ago, talking about Merkx + Girod's renovation of a church into a bookstore in Maastricht, Geoff Manaugh thought that books and churches were going to suffer similar fates but fit well together- "both on the verge of extinction...come together to form a kind of last gasp for either entity.

Its as if books, sensing that they are even now moving toward a curious state somewhere between resurrection and purgatory, have decided to retreat, repositioning themselves inside the stone vaults of a church  which happily welcomes these learned visitors  and there the books and the church embrace, like doomed friends all too aware of their age, biding their time together amidst the dust and sunlight until another renovation comes through.

 Molenaar&Bol;&vanDillen;

That is why I am not convinced that the formality of the church should have been compromised with the curvy mezzanine, preferring the lighter touch approach that Merkx + Girod used where they pretty much left the building alone and just occupied it, so that in time it can serve many other functions. But then De Petrus is much more than just a library, it's already doing that.

 Merkx + Girod

More photos in ArchDaily, and see below for some of the other wonderful conversions and new libraries that we have shown:
While businesses prepare to participate in the Covid-19 safe zone initiative, Government is warning that there will be fines and penalties of up to $25,000 for those found to be in breach of the safe zone requirements.
Support for Moore does not break down completely along racial lines, but at the basement meeting of 40 people on a recent Sunday, at least half of the participants were African American or of color. And the willingness of congregants to trust All Souls and the investigating institutions appears to be influenced by race, with some members of color saying they are disinclined to trust the process has been fair when they don't know all the details.

Even among congregants focused on getting Moore a strong severance package, there is a willingness to admit she had drawbacks. The issue, they say, is whether she as a black woman is being treated with equal consideration.

"Structural injustices don't depend on people being bad, they depend on people being silent," said one longtime African American congregant who spoke on the condition that she not be named because she didn't want to be associated with the divisive issue. "Are we the sort of church that will pay a female pastor of color less than we should, know about it and feel good about it? If so, perhaps the next time we're marching because janitors aren't paid well in D.C., maybe All Souls shouldn't march."

Some say neither race nor gender played a role in the current conflict - and then pause.
On September 22, 2021, it became public knowledge that former member of the Police Service Commission (the PolSC) and attorney-at-law Roger Kawalsingh had made a serious allegation of a secret approach to the Chair of the PolSC regarding the appointment of a commissioner of police (CoP) and outgoing CoP Gary Griffith.
Thank you, all. The 5 year old may actually turn into Monster 5, but we have traveled enough so I think we can manage. We are coming from San Francisco on a direct flight (14.5 hours). Our flight departs Fri 11/16 night from SFO and gets us to Sydney at 9am on Sun Nov 18. I am now struggling with hotel. We actually have enough points to stay at the Marriott Sydney for all 6 nights of our trip. Should we do that and then take separate day trips to blue mountain and the caves? The way points redemption work is we get the 5th night free, so we're thinking of either:

1. Stay at Marriott all 6 nights and do day trips on multiple days

2. Stay 1 night at BM and 5 nights at Marriott Sydney: Upon arrival on Sun 9am, go straight to BM, and we arrive in the early afternoon, do scenic world/train/three sisters all in the same afternoon, then on Mon go to the caves, and return to Sydney same afternoon to stay at Marriott for the remaining 5 nights

3. Stay 3 night BM and 3 nights at Marriott: Upon arrival on Sun, go to BM and stay at BM hotel for 3 nights (Mon do a full day scenic world, etc., then Tues do a full day caves , then on Wed am head back to Sydney), then stay the remaining 3 nights at Sydney Marriott

I am thinking we'd either 6 nights, 5 nights, or 3 nights at Marriott and not 4 nights because it takes the same amount of points to do 4 nights or 5 nights. So if I am spending points to stay there for 4 nights might as well make it 5 nights. Any suggestions?

And I also wanted to ask: would luggage be an issue on the commuter trains? We'll likely have one 27" checked luggage, 1 hand carry wheelie, and possibly 1 backpack of each of us.
* Time of year: June/July

* Are you willing to hire a car: In Brisbane, I don't need to hire a car. I may drive my brother's car. In other places, I may hire but need to check if my driving license (of Bangladesh) is valid in Australia.

* Can you and the kids swim/snorkel: I can swim. If I can go to GBR, plan for scuba diving with underwater video shooting. I did it last month for over two hours in Bali.

* Are you willing to fly elsewhere?: Yes. But prefer high speed train.

* Do you want five star hotels or country pubs?: Prefer 3 or 4 star hotels. But want to visit country side.

* Do you want culture (Anglo)/arts/nature/native animals/indigenous culture?: We like nature, native animals, culture. Want to do some photography landscape/scenery.
Gov. Jerry Brown appointed a new administrator Thursday for the Veterans Home of California in Yountville.

Frederick J. Just, 60, of Riverside, will lead the largest facility of its type in the United States with more than 800 residents.

Just, who held several positions at Kaiser Permanente from 2005 to 2017, will replace Donald Veverka, who was dismissed in May after three years in the Home's top job.

In recent times, the Home has come under fire from the public and Legislators for aging facilities and inadequate security. In March, three staff members at The Pathway Home, which leased facilities on the grounds, were killed by a veteran who had been treated for psychological traumas after service in the Army in Afghanistan.

At Kaiser, Just was an assistant hospital administrator, transition director and director of facilities services for the Kaiser Permanente Fontana Medical Center and for the Kaiser Permanente Ontario Medical Center, and assistant hospital administrator and area safety leader for the Kaiser Permanente Modesto Medical Center.

He was director of construction and engineering at the Tri-City Medical Center from 2002 to 2005 and director of construction and plant engineering at the Firelands Regional Medical Center from 1994 to 2002.
You have too many locations for your time frame, so will need to drop something, which depends on your interests.

We dont do itineraries for people, that is your job, we help people refine their itineraries. You will need to fly between places. Of you are tied into starting and finishing in Melbourne, then fly to Ulurur, then up to Cairns, down to Sydney and back to Melbourne. Thats still pushing it a bit in your time frame. How much time you need in each place is completely dependent on what you want to see and do there.
What sort of things did you want to see and do?

You will get the cheapest accommodation by winging it, rather than booking ahead through online sites. This is the same for tours etc.

Buses are the cheapest way to travel but the night sleeper buses are death traps and the owners of them have a preponderance to not giving a damn about westerners.

But the small day buses the locals use on the back roads are cheap, maybe $5-10 to travel all day. And they can be fun as locals who probably haven't met a westerner may want to communicate with you.

Ive had nice clean rooms in rural areas for $15 a night with a tv and bar fridge.

Eat like the locals for $2-3 dollars a meal and drink local beer at 80cents a bottle.

Taxis are cheap at about 70c to a dollar a klm depending on the size of the taxi. You should be able to survive quite well on $100 a day for 2 or maybe even half that.

Travel in VN tends to be slow and the big cities are usually a few hundred klms apart roughly and take the best parts of a day.

Everything is cheaper a few block from tourist areas.

Take good clean GBP and change it as you go at gold stores or banks. Have some plastic cards as back up.

Phone and internet costs are about 1/3 of what I pay in Australia and there is lots of free wifi in cafe restaurants bars hotels etc.

Entrance to museums ,places of interest are usually $1-$3

For a month I would probably look at a 6-8 locations.

Have a good read through this, it has lots of good basic info

I would recommend you enter at one end and exit the other.

I was thinking in Australian dollars, so you do the conversion.

Edited: 3 years ago
Hi

We are a couple travelling to Vietnam in June for 14 days. This is our itinerary do you think its possible, too ambitious or are we missing out on anything. We are flying into HCM and out of Hanoi.

We have booked two nights in HCM and then intend booking flights and other accommodation when there. We'll probably pre book our Halong Bay cruise also

Day 1 Arrive HCM at 5pm

Day 2 HCM explore city

Day 3 HCM explore city

Day 4 Mekong Delta

Day 5 Fly to Danang and onto Hoi An

Day 6 Bike Tour from Hoi An

Day 7 Beach (which one?)

Day 8 Fly to Hanoi and explore

Day 9 Explore Hanoi

Day 10 Halong Bay 2D1N cruise

Day 11 Halong Bay

Day 12 Sapa

Day 13 Sapa and return to Hanoi

Day 14 Fly home

Should we try to do both Mekong Bay and Sapa, should we spend longer in HCM Danang/Hoi An

or Hanoi

Advice please?

Thanks
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Hi All,

I'm travelling to Fiji for two weeks in June, with a companion. We are attending a wedding in/around Nadi, so the trip is revolving around that area. We have 3 free days starting off (staying in/around Nadi, but can use the time however), then several days of wedding activities, then about 5 days to ourselves to go and do/stay anywhere.

From the research I've done, the consensus seems to be "get off of the main island." For the first 3 free days, I'm thinking of taking day cruises out of Nadi bay, out to different islands -- possibly using "South Sea Cruises." I really want good snorkeling, and some of the smaller islands look to be the best destinations for that. For the last 5 days, I've reserved (though can cancel; haven't paid anything yet) a stay at a resort on Natadola beach (Yatule resort). From what I could find, that's the best beach to stay at on the main island.

So my main questions are as follows:

1) Any suggestions on how those 3 days should be spent, being based out of Nadi? Are day cruises a good idea, and is there any other service I should look at for that?

2) Is there a good option for going to a resort off of the main island? How would you rate the Natadola beach/coral coast area? The main reason I chose Yatule resort, is that we got it for about $200 USD a night for both of us. Any resort option off of the main island, when you included ferry costs as well, seemed to just get way too expensive (like $350-$450 a night, for anywhere that was a step up from a hostel). Any recommendations there?

3) When I travel, I like to rent a scooter/moped to get around and see more of the place I'm at. From what I can see, people say the roads are awful and the traffic is dangerous. Is that a bad idea to rent one, to travel and explore more of the main island? Should I rent a car instead? Or just use taxis? Or is exploring the main island a waste of time altogether?

Thank you for all of your help, guys and girls
I'm coming for a quick trip in August (7-9) with my 10 yr old daughter to see Cursed Child. We will be flying in Tues morning, seeing the show basically all day Wed, and then flying out Thurs afternoon. I am looking for a hotel that will be convenient to the show (so Times Sq area), and close to the subway is a plus. We need 2 beds because my daughter is a ninja sleeper and will keep me up all night kicking if we share a bed. Bunk beds are fine, or a hotel that will provide a cot would be fine too. I do want a private bathroom, I don't feel comfortable sending her to a hall bath in the middle of the night.

I'd like to stay under $500 for 2 nights, including all the taxes and fees. I'm looking at the Pod Times Square hotel at one of their bunk rooms, which would be about $385. Any better deals out there or should I go ahead and book that one?
The Jomo Kenya University of Agriculture and Technology Karen Campus in Kenya has created its own footprint in the education sector in Kenya. Students from all over the world come to the Karen campus of JKUAT to enroll in the courses offered by the University. To know about the courses offered at the JKUAT Karen campus, scroll down.

About JKUAT Karen campus

The Jomo Kenya University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) Karen Campus was first started in January 2006. It was on the list of premier JKUAT university campuses. At that time JKUAT was named as Jomo Kenyatta College of Agriculture and Technology (JKCAT), which was a middle-level college by the Kenyan government, getting the assistance from the government of Japan. The establishment plan of JKCAT was started in 1977. Jomo Kenyatta, the president of Kenya, in 1978, donate 200 hectares of farmland for the establishment of JKCAT. The college got its first group of students on 4th May 1981.On 17th March 1982, the new president, Daniel Arap Moi, formally opened the Jomo Kenya University of Agriculture and Technology. A comprehensive list of JKUAT Karen campus courses, fee structure, intake, location, hostel details, and contacts are shared below.

Check the map below for JKUAT Karen campus' exact location

SOURCE: Google Maps

The Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) Karen Campus is situated a few kilometers from Nairobi city Center at the former Makini School premises next to Telkom Exchange (on Pala Close).

JKUAT Karen campus offers Undergraduate Courses

Courses offered by the Karen Campus are either fall under the School of Law or under the Director of Academic Programmes. All programmes are hosted by the academic programmes except the law programme. Academic programmes are run by the three departments of Karen Campus: Business and Social science Departments, IT and Computing Department and Applied Science Department.

Undergraduate Course in the School of Law

1. Bachelor of Laws (LLB)

List of Undergraduates Courses in the Department of Business and Social Sciences

1. Bachelor of Business and Information Technology

2. Bachelor of Procurement and Contract Management.

3. Bachelor of Commerce

4. Bachelor of Governance and Leadership

5. Bachelor of Business Administration

6. Bachelor of Human Resource Management.

7. Bachelor of Development Studies

8. Bachelor of Entrepreneurship

9. Bachelor of Project Management

10. Bachelor of Mass Communication

11. Bachelor of Economics

List of Diploma Courses in the Department of Business and Social Sciences

1. Diploma in Mass Communication

2. Diploma in Business Information Technology

3. Diploma in Purchasing and Supplies Management

4. Diploma in Business Administration

5. Diploma in County Governance

6. Diploma in Public Relations

7. Diploma in Community Development

8. Diploma in Human Resource Development

9. Diploma in Sales & Marketing

The Certificate Courses in the Department of Business and Social Sciences

1. Certificate in Purchasing and Supplies Management

2. Certificate in Business Administration

3. Certificate in County Governance

4. Certificate in Public Relations

5. Certificate in Community Development

6. Certificate in Human Resource Development

7. Certificate in Sales & Marketing

Masters Courses offered in the Department of Business and Social Sciences

1. Master of Business Administration

2. Masters in Leadership and Governance

3. M.Sc. Human Resource Management

4. M.Sc. (Entrepreneurship)

5. Master of Development Studies

6. M.Sc.Procurement&Logistics

7. M.Sc. (Mass Communication)

8. Msc. Finance

9. Msc. Project Management

10. Masters of Business Information Technology

11. Executive MBA

List of Ph.D. Courses provided by the Department of Business and Social Sciences

1. Ph.D. (Entrepreneurship)

2. Ph.D. (Human Resource Management)

3. Ph.D. in Supply Chain Management

4. Ph.D. in Finance

5. Ph.D. in Accounting

6. Ph.D. in Business administration

7. Ph.D. in Leadership and Governance

8. Ph.D. in Mass Communication

Courses offered in the Department of Applied Sciences

1. B. Sc. Actuarial Science

2. B.Sc. Mathematics and Computer Science

3. B. Sc. Industrial Mathematics

4. Diploma in HIV/AIDS Management Counseling

List of Certificate Courses in the Department of Applied Sciences

1. Certificate in HIV/AIDS Management and Counseling

2. Bridging Certificate in Mathematics

List of Masters Courses in the Department of Applied Sciences

1. Msc. Applied Mathematics

2. Msc.Statistics

Undergraduate Courses offered in the Department of Information Technology & Computing

1. B.Sc. in IT

2. Bachelor of Computer Technology

3. BSc. In Business Computing

Postgraduate Courses in the Department of Information Technology & Computing

1. Msc. in Computer Systems

Diploma Courses offered in the Department of Information Technology & Computing

1. Diploma in IT

Certificate Courses provided by the Department of information technology & computing

1. Certificate in IT

2. Cisco Certified Network Associate Routing and Switching (CCNA)/ITEssentials Software and Hardware/Statistical Package Social Science (SPSS)

List of other courses in JKUAT Karen Campus

1. Certified Public Accountants (CPA)

2. Certified Public Secretaries (CPS)

3. Certified Investment and Financial Analysts(CIFA)

4. Certified Secretaries (CS)

5. Association for Chartered certified accountants (ACCA)

6. Certified Information Communication Technologist (CICT)

7. Certified Procurement and Supply Professional of Kenya (CPSP- K)

8. Associate in Procurement and Supply of Kenya (ASP-K)

Departments available in JKUAT Karen Campus

1. School of Law

2. Applied Sciences

3. Business and Social Sciences

4. Information Technology and Computing

About the JKUAT Karen Campus library

The Vision of the JKUAT Karen campus library is To create an information system for a campus of global excellence in training, research and innovation for development.

The Mission of the library is To provide relevant information services that promote academic excellence so as to produce leaders through training, research, and innovation for a world-class institution.

The strategic objectives of Karen Campus Library are:

 To provide an access to all the information resources in all formats

 For posterity, preservation, and conservation of information resources

 Enhance the user education for the maximization of the use of the information resources

JKUAT Karen campus hostels

Currently, the university doesn't have any accommodation facilities. As such, students are required to secure accommodation in the private hostels conveniently located close to the school.

Application procedure for JKUAT Karen Campus

Candidates wishing to be admitted to the school are required to fill in application forms. The application forms can be downloaded from the university's official website. After duly filling in the forms, one is required to return them to he Karen campus admissions office.

Admission requirements for JKUAT

1. For Bridging Certificate  Degree applicants must have KCSE mean grade of C+ or equivalent. Diploma applicants must have KCSE minimum grade of C- in KCSE or Division III in KCE or equivalent.

2. Certificate Courses- Applicants should possess at a minimum of grade C- (minus) in KCSE mean.

3. Diploma Programmes- Applicants must possess at least KSCE mean grade of C (plain).

4. Undergraduates Degree- Applicants should have at least KCSE mean C+ (plus)

5. Post- Graduates Degree- Applicants should have second class upper division degrees either from JKUAT or from any other recognized University in relevant field.

6. Doctorate Degree- Applicants should be the holder of master degree certificate from JKUAT or any other recognized University in the same field.

Links to download JKUAT Karen Campus admission forms

To get the application forms you can download the forms here only or you can directly visit JKUAT Karen Campus office

1. CERTIFICATE FORM

2. DIPLOMA FORM

3. DEGREE FORM

4. POSTGRADUATE FORM

Fees structure of JKUAT

To get the fees structure of your respective course click here

Account numbers of JKUAT

1. KCB Bank

Account # 1102700371

Admission requirements & user charges for JKUAT

 Requirements to get admission in JKAUT Karen Campus: Candidates must have Certificate C; Degree C+ (plus), Diploma C (plain). For Master degree- Bachelors degree at 1st or 2nd Upper Class or Lower + 2yrs work experience or Pass + 5yrs experience or other qualification considered equivalent by Senate University, and for Ph.D.  relevant Masters degree from recognized University.

 User charges: For Certificate courses and Diploma Courses, application fees: KShs. 500; For Masters, Ph.D. and Bachelors degrees, application fees: KShs. 1500.

The application fees can be directly paid in any of the above bank account numbers. Checks are also accepted by JKUAT Karen Campus. The complete application forms, two passport sized photographs of the candidate, copies of results lips/certificates and two copies of the receipt of application fees have to return back to the Dean of the school/faculty, in which the application is sought; Director of the campus; or Registrar Academic Affairs, (Admission Office) at the Karen campus Nairobi; or sent to the Registrar Academic Affairs (Admission Office) JKUAT, Box 62000-00200 NAIROBI. For more information contact the Registrar office of the Karen campus of JKUAT.

JKUAT contacts are mentioned below

Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (Karen Campus)

P.O. BOX 62000-0200, Nairobi  Kenya

Telephone: +254 020-892223 / 4 / 891566

+254-727803636 / 735864163 / 771553499

Email: karen_campus@jkuat.ac.ke

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Source: Tuko
- Lusaka urged senators to end tribal politics

- He urged them to emulate the veteran politician by forming nationalist parties instead

- Murkomen also echoed Lusaka's sentiments

Speaker of the Senate Kenneth Lusaka on Thursday, April 19, led Senators in extending their condolences to the family of the late Kenneth Matiba.

Matiba succumbed to a heart attack on Sunday, April 15 while receiving treatment at Karen Hospital.

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Speaking after an evening fellowship at the family's residence in Limuru, Lusaka urged the country to unite and emulate what the veteran politician had lived for.

Matibas efforts for a better Kenya must not be in vain. He was a true nationalist who sacrificed greatly for this country to be where it is today," Lusaka said as he paid tribute to Matiba.

READ ALSO: Quick facts about fallen veteran multi-party democracy politician, Kenneth Matiba

Lusaka was speaking at the family's residence in Limuru when he urged the country to unite and emulate what the veteran politician had lived for. Photo: Ken Lusaka/ Facebook

Source: Facebook

READ ALSO: Raila holds unity talks with ex-Nyanza MPs after deal with Uhuru

"We as leaders need to carry on from where Matiba has left," he added.

Lusaka noted the first step in emulating the father of mutli-party democracy was to shun tribal political parties and instead form nationalists party.

The first step would be to stop focusing on tribal parties and look toward forming nationalist parties. When we look back at the original Ford, which comprised leaders such as Masinde Muliro, George Nthenge, Jaramogi Odinga, James Orengo, Ahmed Bamahriz and Martin Shikuku, among others, wasnt this a true reflection of the face of Kenya?" Lusaka posed

READ ALSO: Wataalamu waonya dhidi ya kuoga kila siku, ijue sababu

His remarks were echoed by Senate Majority Leader, Kipchumba Murkomen who said it was high time the new generation of politicians ignored tribal barriers.

Perhaps it is our time to break barriers that have been built over time. If we cannot get past these barriers, how can we say that we are of the generation of the seed of Matiba? the Majority Leader posed.

Senate Minority leader, James Orengo expressed disappointment that death was the only phenomenon that brought Kenyans together.

READ ALSO: Controversial pastor Ngangas case of killing by dangerous driving postponed for record eighth time

Matiba succumbed to heart attack on Sunday, April 15 while receiving treatment at Karen Hospital. Photo: Uhuru Kenyatta/ Facebook

READ ALSO: Ali Kiba's daughter congratulates him following wedding to Kenyan lover

We love each other only in death and it is a big shame! It is only at this time that we do not have Kikuyus, Luos and Kambas. Time has come to behave as Kenyans! exclaimed Orengo.

On her part, an emotional Edith Matiba lauded the Senators for their calls for national unity.

We need unity more than anything else. This is my prayer for this country and I am glad the Senators share this feeling. I hope you as leaders, who are appointed by God, unite this country. You shall look back and say, we did that during our time, said Matiba's widow.

READ ALSO: First batch of Cuban doctors to arrive in July after Uhuru's historic trip

Due to the enormous role Matiba played in shaping Kenya's democracy, the government promised to accord the former leader of opposition a state sendoff.

Prior reports by TUKO.co.ke indicated government spokesperson, Erick Kiraithe announced a committee to manage the funeral plans had already been set up.

Do you have a hot story or scandal you would like us to publish, please reach us through news@tuko.co.ke or WhatsApp: 0732482690 and Telegram: Tuko news.

ALSO WATCH: Meet Kenya's Strongest Man who has the Strength of a Rhino - On Tuko TV

Source: Kenya Breaking News Today
- Laila was appointed new TUM Vice Chancellor by Education CS Amina Mohamed

- She was heading the institution in acting capacity since February 2016

- Laila is a professor in Biochemestry

- She became the first female Muslim to be appointed to the position in the country

The Ministry of Education recently confirmed Laila Abubakar as Technical University of Mombasa (TUM) Vice Chancellor, making her the first female Muslim to hold such a high profile post in the academic field.

A professor in Biochemistry, Laila filled the position that had been left vacant after the sacking of Josphat Mwatela among other top officials in February 2016.

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Her confirmation by Education Cabinet Secretary Amina Mohamed has been termed as a breakthrough for women from the coastal belt.

The Dean of the School of Applied and Health Sciences Rahma Udu hailed the appointment terming it a step in the right direction for Kenyan women.

READ ALSO: Raila Odinga holds a yet again rare meeting with retired President Mwai Kibaki

Mvita MP Abdulswamad Nassir and Laila Abubakar. Photo: Ibrahim Ali/TUKO

We are happy that the efforts of women in the academic field especially those from Coast have been acknowledged through Lailas confirmation to substantive Vice Chancellor at TUM, said Rahma.

Laila stopped students unrest after facilitating the accreditation of Engineering Programmes by the Engineers Board of Kenya (EBK) in August 2016 at the institution that was then a constituent college of Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT).

In 2015, TUM students from the Engineering faculty staged a major protest that led to destruction of property worth millions of shillings in Mombasa town following a decision the students would graduate under TUM instead of JKUAT.

The students who had to wait for a year, have since graduated at TUM following EBKs nod after rigorous inspection on the institutions facility, teaching staff capacity and laboratories.

READ ALSO: Handshake effect: Raila holds meeting with Mike Sonko

Early this year, TUM was acknowledged and listed as a UNESCO centre of excellence.

For close to a year, Laila ran the institution without a deputy before the appointment of Joseph Rasowo.

Her appointment brought to an end months of anxiety after interviews that were held in mid-February that attracted five candidates with Laila, who was the only lady, emerging tops.

Interviewed alongside Laila were Isaiah Omollo (Kenyatta University), Colins Ouma (Maseno University), Machakos Universitys Douglas Shitanda, University of Kwa-Zulu Natals Deogratius Jaganyi and Maurice Amutabi of Lukenya University.

READ ALSO: Wajir governor headed home after losing case in Court of Appeal

Laila has an academic and professional background in Biochemistry and is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry.

Her research interests include molecular basis of vector-parasite interactions and bio-prospecting in marine and fresh water environments.

Born in 1962, in Mombasa County, she went to Sparki Primary School and Star of the Sea Secondary School before joining the University of Nairobi (UoN).

Initially, she worked at UoN before joining TUM as Deputy Vice Chancellor, Academic Affairs.

She is an active researcher, and has won several research grants and awards.

Mvita MP Abdulswamad Nassir and TUM Vice Chancellor Laila Abubakar during a past meeting. Photo: Ibrahim Ali/TUKO

READ ALSO: Raila holds unity talks with ex-Nyanza MPs after deal with Uhuru

These research efforts led to her being accorded the University of Nairobi Deans award for scholarship and research in 2011/2012.

Between 1998-2002 while at the International Centre for Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE), she was involved in unraveling the mystery of why only tsetse flies and not other blood sucking insects transmit African Trypanosomiasis.

She isolated and characterised a lectizyme (a protein with lectin and protease activity) that was involved in the establishment of trypanosome infections in tsetse midguts.

As a result, she was awarded 1st prize at the XII Molecular Parasitology Conference held at Woodshole Oceanographic Institute, USA and 1st Prize ICIPE Governing Council Research Award in 2002.

READ ALSO: Wataalamu waonya dhidi ya kuoga mara kwa mara

In 2003-2007, together with her colleagues, competitively won the Sida/ SAREC Lake Victoria Research (VicRes) Initiative grant to design systems and evaluate the potential of wetlands-based aquaculture to generate wealth in the Lake Victoria basin.

The findings of this study were later adopted by the Kenya Government under the Economic Stimulus Programme.

More recently, Laila developed a special interest in assessing the potential of microalgae for feedstock and bio-fuel in Kenya and subsequently won the 2nd Prize for research dissemination of the theme Energy, Water and Climate Change, during the 4th National Council of Science and Technology National Conference.

She has, at the helm of TUM, maintained an active academic and professional link with several universities and organizations in the region.

Laila has successfully supervised and examined over 20 postgraduate students and published several papers in refereed journals.

Story by Ibrahim Ali, TUKO 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.

Uhuru and Raila full speech at Harambee House - on TUKO TV

Source: Tuko
If anything, the transcripts contain substantial evidence that Mr. Tuteur wants aired out in public proceedings of the court to show that the accusation is completely unfounded, attorney Thomas Barth wrote in court papers filed on behalf of Tuteur.

The papers say the accusations against Tuteur appear to be primarily based on the complaint of a disgruntled employee, who was extremely angry about being passed over for promotion within the Assessors Office.

Barth said after Thursdays hearing that he believes the grand jury during its three days of witness interviews asked leading questions.

Although he didnt speak to the judge, Tuteur attended Thursdays hearing. He appeared relaxed, smiling at times as he chatted with others in the courtroom.

The grand jury accused Tuteur of four counts of misconduct that need not rise to criminal activity to be grounds for removal from office. Among them, he is accused of making an erroneous assessment regarding cell tower lease income on his own property and not paying $20,000 in back property taxes after the error was discovered.
- The court ruled Governor Abdi does not have the right academic qualifications for the seat

- The case against his election victory was lodged by former governor Ahmed Abdulahi

- Abdulahi also claimed there had been irregularities during the August 8, 2017 election

Wajir Governor Mohamed Abdi Mohamud has lost his seat following a decision by Court of Appeal.

Mohamud had appealed a High Court ruling which had invalidated his election.

The Appeal Court on Friday, April 20, endorsed the High Court decision to render null and void the Wajir governor's election on grounds he doesn't possess a degree

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READ ALSO: Baringo South MP dies after long battle with cancer

Wajir governor Abdi Mahamud loses his seat. Photo: Mohamed Abdi Mohamud/ Facebook

As previously reported by TUKO.co.ke, the election of Mahamud was on Friday, January 12, nullified following a successful petition filed by former county boss, Ahmed Abdullahi.

Abdullahi who vied on an Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) ticket had complained that Mahmoud was not qualified.

According to the ex-governor, the Jubilee elected governor did not have the required academic qualifications for the seat and that he was not validly elected.

READ ALSO: Picha za wanawake 4 waliokuwa wapenzi wa Ali Kiba kabla ya kupata mke Mombasa

While delivering his ruling, Nairobi High Court judge Alfred Mabeya said that Mahmud was illegally cleared to contest and added he would not be legible to vie again.

The court found out there had been massive irregularities committed like alterations in some forms without countersigning.

Should Mahmud chose not to head to the Supreme Court, his last point of solace, then his deputy will automatically take over according to article 182 of the Constitution.

Do you have a hot story or scandal you would like us to publish, please reach us through news@tuko.co.ke or WhatsApp: 0732482690 and Telegram: Tuko news.

ALSO WATCH: From a House girl to an MCA. Tuko / Tuco - Kenya

Source: Tuko
- Mutua said Ruto belonged to the KANU era and should retire from politics

- He noted Ruto's contribution in Kenyan politics was over

- Mutua also applauded former presidents for setting a good foundation for Kenya

Machakos Governor Alfred Mutua has urged Deputy President William Ruto to retire from politics ahead of the 2022 general elections.

Mutua who has declared his interest to contest the presidency after President Uhuru Kenyatta retire said Ruto belonged to the Kanu era of the Youth for Kanu (YK) 92.

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READ ALSO: Picha za wanawake 4 waliokuwa wapenzi wa Ali Kiba kabla ya kupata mke Mombasa

The YK 92 was a lobby group in the KANU party made up mainly of youthful politicians, whose main aim was to drum support for retired president Daniel Arap Moi.

Ruto and former Lugari MP Cyrus Jirongo are among the most prominent members of the once notorious group also known to reign hard on those opposed to the KANU policies then.

Mutua also noted the deputy president had completed his contribution in politics.

Alfred Mutua asks William Ruto to retire from politics in 2022, says his time is over

READ ALSO: Wajir governor headed home after losing case in Court of Appeal

The Machakos governor was speaking in Athi River Machakos, when he said it was time for a paradigm shift in politics.

He said a new generation of leaders was needed to propel the country for an economic take off.

"We can't be in a continuous circle of transition forever and it's time to move on to the next leader," said the Maendeleo Chap Chap party leader.

READ ALSO: Raila Odinga holds a yet again rare meeting with retired President Mwai Kibaki

He went on to hail the founding father of the nation, the late President Jomo Kenyatta, retird presidents Moi and Mwai Kibaki along with current president Uhuru for setting the foundation of Kenya.

Mutua said it was time for fresh blood to take over the reigns of power to revolutionize the country for the sake of posterity.

Do you have a hot story or scandal you would like us to publish, please reach us through news@tuko.co.ke or WhatsApp: 0732482690 and Telegram: Tuko news.

Uhuru and Raila full speech at Harambee House - on TUKO TV

Source: Tuko.co.ke
Curvaceous Tanzanian socialite and video vixen Agness Gerald, known to many as Agness Masogange is no more.

The riveting lass passed away on Friday, April 20, afternoon, TUKO.co.ke has learnt.

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Masogange took her last breathe at the Mama Ngoma Hospital, in Dar Es Salaam where she was receiving treatment.

READ ALSO: Ali Kiba's hot wife looks like a million dollars as she slays in new post-wedding photos

TUKO.co.ke has learnt that the ravishing video vixen had been admitted at the hospital on Thursday, April 19, where she had been rushed for treatment after her health deteriorated.

According to Global Publishers, the socialite succumbed to typhoid and low blood pressure.

READ ALSO: Diamond Platinumz heaps praise on nemesis Ali Kiba after colourful wedding

Following news of her death, people including her family members, friends and fans flocked the Mama Ngoma hospital to mourn the fallen beauty.

TUKO.co.ke has learnt that the socialite's lifeless body was moved to Muhimbili Hospital's mortuary.

Masogange's body was taken to Muhimbili Hospital mortuary. Photo: Global Publishers

Before her death, Masogange was involved in a number of drug trafficking cases having been nabbed severally and arraigned in court over the same.

READ ALSO: Photos of all known beautiful women singer Ali Kiba has slept with as he finally says I do

READ ALSO: I decided to marry on my parents' anniversary - Ali Kiba opens up

The lass was one of the first ever Tanzanian video vixens having made it to the limelight through Belle 9's hit single Masogange.

Masogange had a network of beautiful and rich friends in East Africa including Kenya's own Corazon Kwamboka.

From TUKO.co.ke, it's all condolences to the socialite's family for their loss.

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.

Amazing Story of DJ Euphorique: Uhuru Kenyatta's DJ (Person Documentary) | Faces of Kenya

Source: Tuko.co.ke
The Attorney General says he is not the Government but is it's attorney at law, as he spoke about the legal challenge now before the Courts regarding the process as outlined in the Constitution for the appointment of Gary Griffith as the Acting Police Commissioner.
One Ukrainian soldier was killed, another three were wounded in the anti-terrorist operation (ATO) area in eastern Ukraine over the past day.

Ukrainian Defense Ministry's Spokesperson for ATO issues Dmytro Hutsuliak said this at a press briefing on Friday, an Ukrinform correspondent reported.

"As of April 19, two servicepersons of the Armed Forces were wounded. One soldier is in critical condition, another one is in satisfactory condition. But the situation escalated significantly that night. On April 20, one Ukrainian defender was killed in enemy shelling... Another soldier suffered combat injury. He is in critical condition, he said.

Hutsuliak also added that Russian-backed militants continued to violate the ceasefire regime. Over the past day, they launched 35 attacks on the positions of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, using weapons that are prohibited by the Minsk agreements.

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French company Alstom is developing a project for the production of electric locomotives with a high level of localization in Ukraine and plans to open a representative office in Kyiv, the press service of the Office of the National Investment Council of Ukraine has told Ukrinform.

"France's Alstom, a leader in mechanical engineering, can come to Ukraine this year. Now the company is developing a project to manufacture electric locomotives with a high level of localization in Ukraine and also plans to open a representative office in Kyiv," the press service reported.

A report posted on the council's page on Facebook says that on April 19, the council's team met with representatives of Alstom.

Among other things, the French company is considering the possibility of creating a technological hub for producing spare parts for its manufacturing capacities.

"Alstom is currently in the process of selecting partners to localize works in Ukraine and attract funding. By the end of June, the company will have a ready-made package offer of cooperation with Ukraine. We can't wait to contribute to some good news this summer!" the National Investment Council said.

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The EU-Ukraine Parliamentary Association Committee at its seventh meeting in Strasbourg approved the statement and recommendations on the need to support the European aspirations of Ukraine.

MP Mykola Kniazhytskyi, co-chairman of the Ukraine-EU Association Committee meeting, told this to Ukrinform.

The document adopted today records how Ukraine fulfills the association agreement, where we have problems, including where we need the support of the European Union. The document is extremely important because it consistently condemns Russian aggression and human rights violations in the occupied territories by Russian and pro-Russian separatists," Kniazhytskyi said.

According to him, the document underlines the progress of Ukraine in the implementation of the Association Agreement and for the first time states that "in fact, the prospect of its membership in the EU should be considered."

"It is formulated in other words, but the fact that all of Ukraine's European aspirations should be supported is very important, it's good that we adopted this document," the politician said.

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Where meat, produce and dairy moved out three years ago, cardio and strength machines will soon move in.

On Thursday, a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week Planet Fitness workout gym gained the Napa city Planning Commissions support to occupy the shopping center space once filled by Fresh & Easy, the grocery chain that dissolved in 2015. The fitness center will fill the largest remaining vacancy, at just under 19,000 square feet, in the River Park center at 1525 W. Imola Ave.

Planet Fitness future space was the longtime home of a locally owned Vallergas grocery, which closed in 2005. A Fresh & Easy took its place in 2011, only to close in October 2015 when its British parent company Tesco PLC pulled out of the U.S. market.

The River Park space will be the first Napa branch of Planet Fitness, which includes about 1,500 clubs nationwide. According to plans filed with the city, the chain will offer memberships at $10 or $22 a month for the use of facility with about 100 pieces of cardio gear and 80 pieces of strength equipment, as well as security cameras and a staff of more than 20 people.

Three planners signed off on the fitness gym. Commissioner Alex Myers was absent, and Paul Kelley recused himself because of a business interest in another Napa workout center.

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Canada is ready to support an international peacekeeping mission in Ukraine, if it is approved by the United Nations.

Canada's Assistant Deputy Foreign Minister Mark Gwozdecky said this during the hearings in the parliament, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

"Our position is to understand whether we can agree on a peacekeeping mandate in order to achieve our main goal. If so, we will fully support such a mission," he said.

He has explained that restoration of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine should be the main task of UN peacekeepers. "The Foreign Ministry is studying the concept of the UN peacekeeping mission in Ukraine. Minister Freeland touched upon this issue at the meetings with the President and the Prime Minister of Ukraine, the U.S. Secretary of State and many others to determine the way the peacekeeping mission can contribute to our main goal, namely: to support the sovereignty and territorial integrity Ukraine," he stressed.

At the same time, he added that many issues arose regarding some partners and their desire to agree on this mission.

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Staying in a pre-trial detention center in the occupied Crimea, activist Volodymyr Balukh continues the hunger strike, which he announced a month ago, on March 19.

The activist went on hunger strike in protest against the verdict in on one of the criminal cases initiated against him.

As Radio Liberty reminds, the Foreign Ministry of Ukraine has recently issued a demand to allow Ukrainian doctors visiting Volodymyr Balukh.

April 16, Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights Liudmyla Denisova appealed to her Russian counterpart Tatyana Moskalkova with a request to verify the information about physical and psychological pressure exerted on Balukh in the cell. There are no exact data on Balukh's health status.

In August 2017, another criminal case was opened against Balukh. This happened after Balukh and his lawyer filed a complaint with the police about the actions of Valeriy Tkachenko, the chief of the Razdolnensky temporary detention facility. In response, Tkachenko filed a complaint against Balukh, claiming the activist beat him. According to the lawyers of the activist, Tkachenko himself attacked Volodymyr Balukh, namely: hit him, insulted with swear words and humiliated him on a national basis.

On March 19, the Kremlin-controlled Razdolnensky district court chose a pre-trial restriction for Volodymyr Balukh in form of detention until June 19, 2018.

The Federal Security Service of Russia detained Volodymyr Balukh on December 8, 2016. The FSB officers claimed that they had found 90 cartridges and several TNT blocks in the attic of his house.

March 14, the Kremlin-controlled Supreme Court of Crimea changed the verdict in the case of Ukrainian activist Volodymyr Balukh. The court excluded the paragraph on purchase of ammunition from the verdict and sentenced the activist to 3 years and 5 months of imprisonment in a penal colony settlement and fined him about UAH 4,600.

The lawyers of Balukh and human rights activists assert that he has become a victim of repression for his pro-Ukrainian views, namely for placing a Ukrainian flag in the yard of his house.

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Ukraine hopes for Lithuania's support in organizing the meeting of the Ukraine-NATO Commission at the highest political level.

Vice Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration of Ukraine Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze said this during a meeting with chief foreign policy adviser to the President of the Republic of Lithuania Nerijus Aleksiejunas, the Government portal reports.

"Ukraine is striving to apply all the existing practical tools to get ready for the membership in the Alliance. The Annual National Program under the auspices of the Ukraine-NATO Commission is being successfully implemented now. The amendments to the legislation on foreign policy principles regarding the NATO membership as a strategic goal, which were adopted last July, reflect the Ukraine's choice. We highly appreciate the continuous active support of Lithuania for Ukraines Euro-Atlantic aspirations," the Vice Prime Minister said.

She expressed serious concern about the stance of Hungary caused by the adoption of the Law of Ukraine "On Education", namely, blocking of high-level meetings of the Ukraine-NATO Commission. "It is very important for us that Ukraine has the support of Lithuania in organizing the meeting of the Ukraine-NATO Commission at the highest political level during the NATO summit in Brussels in July," Klympush-Tsintsadze noted.

As Nerijus Aleksiejunas stressed, NATO is concerned about Hungary's blocking the political dialogue between Ukraine and NATO and, accordingly, the possibility of holding a meeting of the Ukraine-NATO Commission at the summit in July because of the Law of Ukraine "On Education." The Lithuanian side takes all political and diplomatic measures to support Ukraine in this context, he assured.

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Polish-Ukrainian relations are complicated, so the United States is making efforts to improve them.

Thomas Zia, consul from the U.S. Consulate General in Krakow, said this during the third Ukrainian-Polish strategic forum, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

"Polish-Ukrainian relations are very complicated. I think that Ukraine needs Poland, and Poland needs Ukraine. The whole world wants these countries to have good relations as the current situation in the region is quite dangerous not only for Poland, but for the entire region. We, the USA, make every effort to support the improvement of relations between Poland and Ukraine," Zia said.

As the diplomat stressed, Washington is an active player in Eastern Europe. The Consul recalled that the United States had imposed sanctions on Russia over its aggression against Ukraine, provided humanitarian assistance to Kyiv. Washington's activity within NATO is also important for the region, Zia said. In this context, he noted that 5,000 American troops stationing in Poland were the symbol of Washingtons support for Eastern Europe.

Zia believes that the U.S. assistance and the actions of Poland in this part of Europe will contribute to the fact that Ukraine will become a "strong part of Europe."

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Irish low-cost airline Ryanair can launch flights to Ukraine ahead of schedule.

President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko said this during his working trip to Lviv, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

"I want to congratulate all the people of Lviv and the whole of Western Ukraine on the fact that Ryanair has come and will start flying to Ukraine this autumn," the head of state said.

At the same time, Poroshenko did not rule out that Ryanair could launch flights ahead of schedule.

He also recalled that the cost of 25-50% of tickets for flights would be about $20.

As reported, on March 23, representatives of Irish low-cost airline Ryanair signed an official agreement on cooperation with the management of the Boryspil and Lviv airports. Ryanair will launch flights from Kyiv and Lviv mainly from October 15, 2018.

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Foreign Minister of Ukraine Pavlo Klimkin has left for Toronto, Canada, to meet with the foreign ministers of the G7 countries.

"Im going to Toronto to meet with our friends, the foreign ministers of the G7," Klimkin wrote on Twitter.

According to him, the main topics of the meeting will include issues of solidarity with Ukraine regarding the occupied Crimea and Donbas and support for Ukrainian reforms.

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As of April 19, the Donetsk water filtration station has been shut down. The work of the station will be resumed after providing security guarantees to the station staff.

The press service of the Ukrainian Ministry for Temporarily Occupied Territories and Internally Displaced Persons reported this on Twitter.

"As of April 19, the Donetsk filtration station did not work. The remaining water went from the system to the reservoirs of Avdiivka, and then the water was supplied to the population. The work of the station will be resumed after the Water of Donbas public utility company agrees with the ICRC and the OSCE SMM on the security guarantees to the staff," the report reads.

The OSCE SMM has also reported that negotiations on providing safety to the workers at the Donetsk filtration station are still underway.

As Ukrinform reported, the work of the Donetsk water filtration station was suspended, because the employees refused to work under the conditions of shelling. Five employees, including three women, were injured as a result of shelling on April 17.

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In the evening of April 19, a humanitarian cargo from the Help-Point Sumy charity fund from the Swiss city of Wohlen arrived in the Ukrainian city of Sumy.

Ukrinform learnt this from the press service of the Sumy City Council.

"Seven trucks contained equipment for medical institutions, clothing and equipment for firefighters and rescuers, furniture for hospitals and schools, medical materials, toys, etc." the press service informed.

The total weight of cargo from Switzerland amounting to UAH 294,800 was 57.3 tons.

This is the first of two cargoes that the Sumy citizens from should receive from the Swiss fund this year. The second cargo is expected to arrive in September.

In total, 25 convoys arrived in Sumy from Switzerland since 2004 when the Sumy City Council started to cooperate with the Help-Point Sumy charity fund.

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This year, Ukraine celebrates the 1030th anniversary of the baptism of Kyivan Rus-Ukraine, which is of great significance to millions of Christians in Ukraine and those who live beyond its borders.

The archaeological excavations are currently taking place in this historical area. During the last year, the townspeople protect the Postal Square from the developers, who plan to build a shopping center in this historic place. So let's recall the value of this territory, which is still not explored to the full extent.

Our ancestors drew information about the baptism of Kyiv, from the chronicles the Tale of Bygone Times. General translation:

"Then Volodymyr sent around the city to say," When no one will come to the river tomorrow (Pochaina, Dnipro) - whether rich or poor, an old man or a slave - will be my enemy. "On hearing this, people joyfully came, saying: "If it had not been good, the prince and the boyars would not have accepted it."

The events of the baptism of Kyivan Rus-Ukraine are also reflected in the lives of St. Volodymyr.

The historian of the 19th century, Nikolai Zakrevsky, relying on the chronicles and other sources available at that time, describes the events of the adoption of the Christian faith in his work, "Description of Kyiv" (1868): "Inspired by a new religion and the desire to make all his subjects the members of the grace of Christ, he was in a hurry to Kyiv. The great triumph was preceded by the extermination of idols, which were cut down or burned. Perun, tied to the horses tail, was being driven through the Borychiv, beaten by the canes and dumped into the Pochaina.

At the place where Perun stood, he laid the church of St. Basil (the name he received at baptism). Where the first martyrs suffered for Christianity, Volodymyr laid down a stone church in honor of the Assumption of the Virgin (989 m), known in our annals under the name of the Desyatinnaya. "

A historian of the 19th century, Maxim Berlinskiy, in his work The Short Description of Kyiv (1820) writes that the baptism of Kyivites took place at the confluence of the Pochaina and the Dnipro rivers when they poured out: "At the beginning of the 10th century, it (the Pochaina) was a deep river, which proceeded from the Podil itself, separating from the Dnipro with a long narrow oblique, and merged with the Dnipro near Khreshchatyk. During the spring flood it completely merged with the Dnipro River.

The sand stone spit mentioned by historian Berlinskiy is depicted on a map-plan, created by Lieutenant-Colonel Ushakov in 1695, at the request of Emperor Peter I. This spit began at the entrance to the river on the modern Borisoglebskaya Street, where the bridge was thrown from the promenade through the Pochaina to the coma in the area the modern Postal Square - opposite the Church of the Nativity, this bridge from the spit was thrown to the opposite "Chernihiv" bank.

Pochaina is determined as the place where the ships could stop. According to the Tale of Bygone Times, in 955, Princess Olga pointed it in connection with the visit of Byzantine ambassadors after receiving her baptism in Constantinople: "The same Olga arrived in Kyiv, and a Greek king sent ambassadors to her with the words: "Many gifts I gave you. You told me: when I return to Rus, I will send many gifts to you: men, wax, fur, and warriors for help." Olga answered through the ambassadors: "If you also stand in Pochaina, as I did in Sudu [now Golden Horn Bay, Istanbul, Turkey], then I will give you." And she sent the ambassadors back with these words. "

Historian Zakrevsky in his work, "Description of Kyiv" (1868), describes Borychiv as the main road to the city: "The main road to the city was Borychiv's entry and abruptly rose from the Pochaina to the mountain past the wall, in which on the west side there were the only gateway , and in front of them the - bridge. Here on Borychiv's entrance was the temple of the supreme god Perun, and near it was the palace of the princes of Kyiv and several houses of the nobles. "

The Brook mentioned in the Tale of Bygone Times, in connection with the overthrow of the idols, is met in the chronicle earlier, when describing the conclusion of a peace treaty with the Greeks in 945. Historian Berlinskyi in his book "The Short Description of Kyiv" (1820) emphasizes: "The brook could never have been in the old Kyiv, due to the highest location; and the Pochaina River was sometimes called a brook."

Historian and ecclesiastical figure of Lebedintsev Petro Havrylovych in "Historical Notes on Kyiv" (1884) wrote that the brook on which Perun overthrown in front of Volodymyr was dragged into the Dnipro proceeded near the Borychiv descent, that is, near the Church of the Nativity and the Three Saints' Church, one of which was the beginning, and the other - the end of Borychiv descent. Undoubtedly, in both cases, the chronicle says about Pochaina, since no other brook is known to anyone in antiquity or in the new time.

In its turn, Khreschatytske source mentioned earlier, which was preserved for a long time in the baptistery of the lower St. Volodymyrs monument, historians of the XIX century determine as the place of baptism by Volodymyr of his twelve sons.

Also the already existing and mentioned above church of St. Illya located next to the brook (the Pochaina) must have been important for the baptism of Kyivites. After all, according to the traditions of the Orthodox worship, after receiving baptism in the waters of the river, believers were to visit the church for the further completion of the rite.

Thus, according to the chronicles of historical sources and historical research, the baptism place of Kyivan Rus-Ukraine is the territory of the Kyiv mountains and their bottom along the banks of the Pochaina-Dnipro, where the following sights are situated:

- Church of St. Illya;

- Church of the Nativity (a wooden church built in 1564, a stone one in its place in 1814);

- Borychiv descent;

- Descent from St. Michael's monastery to the river (the ancient Borychiv, Devils beremyshche, a modern line of the funicular);

- Pochaina - Dnipro (historical mouth of rivers and the bay near Postal Square);

- Khreshchatytske spring (the lower monument of St. Volodymyr, the column of Magdeburg Law);

- Volodymyr's Hill Park (Volodymyr's Monument, KhreshchatyYar, mountain slopes near the Mikhailivsky Monastery);

- Khreschatyk gates of Kyiv (shown on the map-plan by Ushakov (1695)

A fragment of the map-plan of Lieutenant-Colonel Ushakov (1695), indicated (from the left to the right): the red circle is the Khreshchatyk spring (the lower monument of St. Volodymyr, the column of the Magdeburg Law), the yellow circle is the combination of Pochaina and the Dnipro, the dark green circle is Khreshchatyk gate, the light green circle  bridge to the Chernihiv coast, the orange circle  a wooden Church of the Nativity, the blue circle  the gate at the end of Borisoglibska street.

A fragment of the modern Google maps is indicated from the left to the right: Khreshchatytske spring (the lower St. Volodymyr monument, the Magdeburg Law), Poshtova Ploshcha (Postal Square) (on it the Church of the Nativity, the Funicular line, the Mykhailivsky monastery, the Illya church (2, Pochaynynska St.).

In the middle of the outermost territory, the present Poshtova Ploshcha (Postal square) is a special place, near which there is a line of a funicular, and the modern Borychivsky Descent, and the Church of the Nativity, and the Khreshchatyk Gates of Kyiv, and the Dnipro-Pochaina. It combines all the historical vectors, reflected in the annals, cartographic and historical and urban reconstructions, so it is the most valuable source of information about the events that were related to the baptism of Kyivan Rus-Ukraine.

Scientific researches of recent years allow us to assume the huge potential of Postal Square in light of the study of events that took place during the baptism of Kyivan Rus-Ukraine.

According to studies of the "Cultural layer of the Podil", which is located on the Postal Square, the depth of its occurrence is more than 12 meters and reaches the VIII-IX centuries - at the time of baptism.

In the course of the construction of the Poshtova Ploshcha subway station in 1976, a dried up river channel connected at this place with the Dnipro was discovered, and, accordingly, it could be the Pochaina River described in the chronicles.

Since 2015, the archaeological excavations of the Center for Archeology of Kyiv at the Institute of Archeology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine have been carried out under the Postal Square. In 2016, the site of the cultural heritage "The plot of the coastal city quarter of the Medieval Kyiv of the XI-XIX centuries was granted a status of the sight of a local value. According to the recommendations of the Committee of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine on Culture and Spirituality, a map of the national significance object is being developed in connection with the chronicles of the baptism events of Kyivan Rus-Ukraine.

A large archaeological material has already been found, which suggests the existence of the Khreshchatytsky Gate in this place in the XVIII century, and in the XI-XII centuries - the city district, including farmsteads, streets, lanes, and coastal fortifications. The street of the XI-XII centuries has been found, which is oriented in the north-south direction from the coastline to Volodymyrska hill. One of the lanes moving from it, connects the Upper City with Lower City, and its direction coincides with the line of funicular (Devil's Beremyshche, chronicle Borychiv).

Also there has been found a mass grave (children, XII-XIII centuries.), which confirms the possibility of location of ancient Christian temples in these places, on the territory of which such burials could be carried out. At the moment, the excavations are stopped at the level of XI-XII centuries (the depth of the pit under the area of 10 meters) due to the uncertainty of the situation (the further affiliation of the site, the method of strengthening the structure of the foundation is determined). The research potential is 4-6 meters of the cultural layer, including VIII-IX centuries the time of the baptism of Kyivan Rus-Ukraine.

Anabella Morina (ethnographer, chairwoman of the NGO "Public Movement Pochaina")

*The views of the author does not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the agency
04/20/2018

By Katharine Webster

Paul Salibe couldnt believe how much trash he saw everywhere in Haiti  heaps of plastic bottles and mounds of rubble, with pigs and dogs rooting through them, searching for scraps of food.

There was trash everywhere and worse poverty than Id ever seen before, says Salibe, a senior civil and environmental engineering major who spent spring break in Les Cayes. Id heard about it from other students whod been there, but you couldnt picture it  you had to see it for yourself.

Salibe was in Les Cayes to tackle Haitis biggest waste problem: untreated sewage. The island nation, the poorest in the Western Hemisphere, has virtually no sewage infrastructure.

Hes one of a dozen civil and environmental engineering students who created their own service-learning capstone project in Haiti, with help from faculty. Their goal: design a model waste disposal system for a single-family home that can be easily adapted and replicated, using basic tools and local materials.

Five of the students visited Les Cayes over winter break with plans for small septic systems. Four also visited over spring break to follow up, this time with designs for toilets.

The sanitation project is part of an outreach program by a large agricultural teaching orphanage, Pwoje Espwa (Project Hope) near Les Cayes. The orphanage wants to help neighboring families whose children attend its schools.

Photo by Haiti capstone group Photo by Haiti capstone group Plastic trash and rubble are everywhere in Haiti, which has frequent hurricanes and little sanitation infrastructure. Salibe says he signed up for the Haiti capstone instead of the standard civil engineering capstone because its a real-life project instead of a theoretical one. There are complications that come with designing something thats actually going to be used. We had to go through the whole engineering process.

The Haiti capstone is the convergence of several university programs:

Seniors Nicole Belanger and Kayla Dooley are the driving force behind this years Haiti capstone. Last year, they revitalized Engineers for Change and joined B.A.S.H., which is designing a biodigester to convert pig manure from the orphanage farm into fertilizer and methane fuel.

Photo by Haiti capstone group Photo by Haiti capstone group Kayla Dooley and Paul Salibe, center, with Pwoje Espwa project director Cameron Parker, far right, Physics Department Chairman Robert Giles, right, and student research assistants Ralph Douyon and Duny Felix. Belanger traveled to Haiti with Giles and other B.A.S.H. team members in January 2017 to see if they could restart an existing biodigester at Pwoje Espwa (Project Hope). Thats when the orphanage asked for help designing sanitation systems for families living nearby.

Belanger, Dooley and their friends in Engineers for Change had been looking for a service-learning capstone project  and they decided this was it. A smaller group will also keep working on the biodigester, with help from alumna-turned-mentor Maureen Kelly 15, 16.

The college agreed to pay for the students plane tickets to Haiti, and Engineers for Change held fundraisers to cover the cost of supplies, local transport and their stay at the Haiti Development Studies Center. Belanger and Dooley also recruited a new faculty member who specializes in clean drinking water, Asst. Prof. Onur Apul, to help Barrington teach the course.

The 12 seniors spent the fall semester learning everything they could about septic system design, from how to conduct percolation and soil tests with hand tools  a shovel, a ruler and sieves  to how to measure elevations using only a laser and level and then draw up site and technical plans.

But shortly before the first students visited Haiti in January, they learned that their mission had changed. The orphanages project manager asked students to explore alternative designs  such as composting toilets or a container-based system  better suited to the areas high water table, which can make it too expensive to build septic systems that wont contaminate nearby wells.

Photo by Haiti capstone group Photo by Haiti capstone group Haitians recycle plastic bottles in ingenious ways, for example in this market stall. Plans changed every single day while we were down there, says Dooley.

We learned that you have to be adaptable, Belanger adds.

On their visits to Haiti, the students learned two important things: Haitians prefer squat toilets, and its dangerous for women and children to go outside at night to use a latrine. That led all of the teams to design indoor toilets in a small room with a drain in the floor and a sink.

In March, the orphanages project director asked the students to continue working on designs for a urine-diverting toilet with two holes. One hole diverts urine through a pipe into a leach field, where it can even fertilize certain plants. The second hole is for solid waste, followed by soil or sawdust to control odor. The solids fall into a simple concrete tank with a vent for gas and air circulation. After the mixture biodegrades for six months or more, it can be shoveled out and safely returned to the environment.

A group of students has already signed up for the Haiti capstone class next year, and Dooley and Belanger plan to return to Les Cayes to keep working on projects there, while mentoring next years seniors.

Both are fielding full-time job offers, and the Haiti project comes up in every interview, Belanger says. Shes already working part time at a geotechnical firm and plans to go on for her masters degree in geoenvironmental engineering so that she can continue working on clean water and sanitation projects.

"This project has been an eye-opening and life-changing experience. Ive fallen in love with Haiti and cant wait to continue my work there, Belanger says. The project truly made me appreciate the smallest things we take for granted, like toilets, and also made me realize how much work goes into what appears to be a simple sanitary solution."
Allen, a three-term assemblyman and dedicated surfer from Huntington Beach seeking to become the first person to move directly from the Assembly to the governors office, has a five-point plan for actions to begin the moment he takes office.

His first priority, he says, will be to cut taxes, starting with the gasoline tax increase. Central to his campaign is a repeal initiative likely to reach voters in November. Next, he says, he will make California safe again by getting tough on crime. He wants to reverse three recent measures some call soft on crime, including the prison realignment plan begun in 2011 that has seen thousands of state prisoners sent back to their home counties for either parole or time in local jails. Allen would also try to reverse the Proposition 47 and Proposition 57 changes in crime classifications that made misdemeanors out of many former felonies.

He pledges to fix the states roads and expand freeways without raising taxes or cutting important programs, though he has some trouble specifying how hed do that. Again, he says the first step is rolling back the 12-cent gasoline tax increase in effect since last year.
04/19/2018

By Katharine Webster

Children of color arrive at urban schools with amazing cognitive and social skills theyve developed through music, dance and art.

Then theyre told to sit down and keep quiet.

No wonder they check out, says Bettina Love, an associate professor of education at the University of Georgia.

You have to know students culture and the beauty of their culture to drive the classroom, Love told more than 250 students and educators at the College of Educations Spring Symposium. We dont know how to tap into that culture and push them beyond what they see themselves doing.

The College of Education hosts a symposium on teaching and learning each semester for students, alumni, teachers and educational leaders from area schools. For the past two years, the symposium has focused on better educating children who are learning English. This year, the focus was on urban youth and social justice in education.

Photo by Tory Wesnofske Photo by Tory Wesnofske Love demonstrates the similarities in today's hair-braiding patterns and traditional West African designs. Love was invited to speak for her award-winning research on using hip-hop to drive education in urban classrooms. She is a co-founder of The Kindezi School in Atlanta, which uses an arts-based curriculum, and the creator of Real Talk and Get Free, curricula for social justice and arts education for different age groups.

Love told the room of mostly white teachers that they need to understand the vital role the arts play in African-American, Asian, Native American and Hispanic culture. The arts help young people express their sadness, anger and fear about discrimination and oppression  and build better lives and communities.

Young kids in their communities are using their cultures to heal themselves. Theyre developing great social and emotional intelligence and all these cognitive skills that we say we want our students to have, she said. They already have them.

Love said that in African-American culture, arts and social justice are inextricably linked, from the drums and songs that Southern slaves used to pass coded messages to the critiques of inequality and injustice expressed by hip-hop today. Both of them, and every form of African-American music and dance created in between, have their roots in West African music.

Hip-hop has unbelievable roots, and those roots are the basis of a culturally relevant pedagogy, she said. We have to get back to the point where we teach (children) about social justice citizenship. We have to be as creative as possible to fight injustice, and we have to do it out of love and joy.

Love criticized the grit movement that tells children from impoverished communities that their educational achievement is their personal responsibility while ignoring racism, income inequality and the school-to-prison-to-deportation pipeline. Black and brown children have plenty of grit, she said. They just dont have the same resources and opportunities.

We dont have an achievement gap. We have an opportunity gap, she said.

After her talk, dancers from AfroFusion, part of the Teen BLOCK program at Lowell Community Health Center, performed to a mix of hip-hop music, popping and locking and breaking to applause and cheers.

Then the Lowell teenagers, along with two groups of high school students from Rhode Island, spoke in a breakout session about whats missing from their education, especially in-depth history classes about their own racial and ethnic roots. The Southeast Asian students, in particular, said they feel disconnected from their history: Their parents and grandparents still suffer from trauma due to the wars in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Burma  and they wont talk about the past.

Love told the teens its important to educate themselves and build community while getting others involved. And she told them they need to take the long view.

The work youre doing now, youre doing it to be somebodys ancestor, she said. You tear something down, you build something better, and you do it with love and black joy.
The Bureau assures its experts are ready to examine the material if they are provided access.

The National Anti-corruption Bureau of Ukraine reported they had repeatedly offered that a fugitive MP Oleksandr Onyshchenko hand over for further verification those audio recordings the deputy claims he has collected with conversations allegedly held with Ukraine's top officials.

So far, the agents have not received any of the original files, NABU wrote on Facebook.

"The National Bureau repeatedly offered to Oleksander Onyshchenko, including publicly, to hand over the original recordings. In particular, the offer was made during the questioning the detectives conducted via video conference in December 2016 as part of the investigation into the so-called 'gas scheme.' NABU never received these recordings," the Bureau stated, commenting on the so-called "Onyshchenko tapes."

Read alsoFugitive MP Onyshchenko claims he secretly recorded talks with Poroshenko: Administration calls out report as fakeNABU reiterated readiness to verify the recordings within their competence if experts are provided access to the original files.

As UNIAN reported earlier, on April 18, Oleksandr Onyshchenko, speaking on air of one of the Ukrainian TV channels, unveiled part of the recording of a conversation he claims he held with President Petro Poroshenko regarding ex-ecology minister Mykola Zlochevsky.

The Presidential Administration branded "Onyshchenko tapes" a fake.

UNIAN memo. Ukrainian MP Oleksandr Onyshchenko is a target of a criminal investigation into illegal operations of an organized criminal group that inflicted over UAH 3 billion in damage to the state.

The Verkhovna Rada deprived Onyshchenko of parliamentary immunity and greenlighted his detention and arrest. Before being apprehended, the deputy fled Ukraine.
The Parliamentary Committee condemns the holding March 18 of the so-called "presidential elections" in the Russian-occupied Crimea.

The EU-Ukraine Parliamentary Association Committee (PAC) says it is disappointed by lack of concrete proposals for launching an international format of talks on de-occupation of the Russia-annexed Crimea.

The PAC "expresses disappointment at the fact that, four years after the illegal annexation of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol by the Russian Federation, no concrete proposal for an international format of negotiations on de-occupation of the peninsula (in line with EP resolution of 16 March 2017) has been discussed in international fora," according to the Final Statement and Recommendations of the PAC meeting held in Strasbourg April 18-19.

Read alsoHuman rights watchdog reports four violent deaths in Crimean prisonAt the same time, Ukrainian and European parliamentarians "strongly condemn illegal actions of the occupying authorities aimed at the organisation of the so-called 'presidential elections' on temporary occupied territories of Ukraine  the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol."

As UNIAN reported, on March 13, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin stated that the international group of friends of Ukraine for the de-occupation of Crimea had already been established. Klimkin noted that, in addition to non-governmental organizations, it is necessary to involve G-7 countries, the European Union, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the Council of Europe.
The bill was sent to the parliament's committee for consideration.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has tabled a bill in parliament that proposes stripping of Ukrainian citizenship for participation in "elections" in Russian-occupied Crimea.

Bill No. 8297 on amendments to the Law of Ukraine on Citizenship of Ukraine was submitted as a priority one on April 19, according to a posting on the official website of the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine's parliament.

On April 20, it was sent to the parliament's committee for consideration.

A new clause was added to Article 19 on grounds for ending citizenship of Ukraine. It states that citizenship of Russia shall be considered as acquired involuntarily if it happened as a result of unlawful actions by the occupying authorities of Russia and Russian-controlled local authorities in temporarily occupied territory of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol.

Read alsoRussia violates almost 500 agreements, treaties by annexation of Crimea

But if a Crimean resident participated in "elections" conducted by Russia in Crimea, it is considered that he or she voluntarily renounced Ukrainian citizenship and acquired citizenship of Russia, which is a ground for ceasing citizenship of Ukraine.

Russia has already held two elections in Crimea since its annexation in March 2014. State Duma elections took place in September 2016 and Russian presidential elections were held on March 18, 2018.

The proposed amendments also change the rules for conferring Ukrainian citizenship on foreigners. They stipulate that if the individuals who have been granted Ukrainian citizenship do not renounce citizenship of another country within two years after, they will be stripped of Ukrainian citizenship.

The new bill also regulates such cases as the adoption of a child with foreign citizenship and changes terms of acquiring by foreign citizens of Ukrainian citizenship if they get married to a Ukrainian citizen.
Russia's political prisoners are among those held in the facility in appalling conditions.

As of April 19, the notorious Simferopol SIZO (remand facility) in the Russian-occupied Crimea saw four detainees, including two Crimean Tatars, die in suspicious and/or violent circumstances, various sources told the Crimean Human Rights Group.

Traditionally, occupation authorities provided no confirmation of the incidents, according to the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group.

They believe that on April 6 two men were found hanged: 69-year-old Sever Bilyalov and Oleg Goncharov, who was 46.

Six days later, a 23-year-old Dmitry Shipovnik was found hanged in a punishment cell.

Read alsoKremlin's hostage Ukrainian filmmaker Sentsov writes five scripts  SeitablaievOn April 13, a 39-year-old Islam Iskerov, who had been brought to the SIZO from Dzhankoy, was found in the so-called quarantine cell for new arrivals with his throat cut.

The human rights group points out that in at least two of the cases, there are reasons for doubting a suicide verdict. Server Bilyalov had reason to hope for the termination of his prosecution and release due to newly emerged circumstances. Dmitry Shipovnik was in a punishment cell where people are held only after a thorough search and are also held under constant surveillance.

They point out also that Islam Iskerov was only accused of theft, with the maximum sentence being a 2-year prison term and the minimum  a fairly small fine.

Under the IV Geneva Convention and other international law, occupation authorities bear responsibility for the lives of any civilians in their custody. The Crimean Human Rights Group stresses also that the European Court of Human Rights considers any state  or occupation power  responsible for deaths while in detention since the person was totally under their control. The onus of responsibility for demonstrating that all was done to prevent these deaths therefore lies on head of SIZO-1, Russian Interior Services Lieutenant Sergei Vladimirovich Berezhnoy and his immediate superior  head of the Russian Penal Service in Crimea Russian Interior Service Major General Vadim Viktorovich Bulgakov.

Read alsoUkraine's Panov denies sabotage charges in Russia-controlled Crimea  mediaIt should be noted that the Court in Strasbourg views violations of Article 2 of the European Convention from two angles  whether a state bears direct responsibility for the death, and whether a proper investigation was carried out.

There have been a large number of disappearances, abductions and killings since Russias invasion and annexation of Crimea with none really investigated at all.

Concerns have long been expressed about the conditions in the Simferopol SIZO, where Russia is currently holding in effectively indefinite custody at least 30 Crimean Tatars and other Ukrainians.

A number of the men, in particular, 57-year-old Bekir Degermendzhy and 65-year-old Asan Chapukh, have medical conditions which make their continued detention on politically-motivated charges a threat to life.

47-year-old Volodymyr Balukh has now been on hunger strike for over a month in protest at his internationally condemned prison sentence which is essentially over the Ukrainian flag which he refused to remove from his home and his unwavering pro-Ukrainian position. Independent doctors are not being allowed to see him and there are strong grounds for concern about his condition.

Read alsoRussia falsifies medical records endangering the life of abducted Ukrainian teenager Pavlo Hryb - NGOAnother reason for concern is inhumane and degrading treatment of inmates, which is prohibited under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights and other such documents which Russia has committed itself to observe.
The system of complex countering Russian information aggression in the war area blocks analog and digital TV signals of more than 40 Russian and pro-Russian TV channels.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko held a meeting in the ad hoc center on the state information security and countering Russian propaganda, where the system was launched aimed at jamming Russian propaganda in Donbas.

The president informed that the National Security and Defense Council, along with the Ministry of Information Policy, Rada national security and defense committee, National TV and Radio Broadcasting Council, and Security Service of Ukraine had developed and implemented the system to block anti-Ukrainian broadcasts in the war area.

"We will protect Ukrainians from the 'information poison' coming from the Russian Federation," Poroshenko said, emphasizing the importance of Thursday's decision made by the Parliament "in protecting the territorial integrity in both the religious and confessional sense" (referring to the Appeal to the Ecumenical Patriarch on granting the Tomos of Autocephaly to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church), the president's press service reports..

"I congratulate you on the beginning of the effective functioning of the system of countering anti-Ukrainian broadcast in the war area. I am convinced that today this is a significant milestone, a significant progress in protecting Ukraine from the factors of Russian hybrid aggression, and I thank you all for your work," the president said.

The system of complex countering Russian information aggression in the war area blocks analog and digital TV signals of more than 40 Russian and pro-Russian TV channels in Donbas. It is aimed to fight Russia's information expansion and propaganda in the war area, allowing to protect in the information domain the Ukrainian citizens living in more than 150 inhabited settlements along the contact line.

Read alsoRussian electronic warfare station discovered in Donbas, says TymchukThe president instructed responsible officials to guarantee a reliable protection of both the jamming system and Ukrainian transmitters enabling Ukrainian broadcasts across the temporarily occupied areas.

"It is about conveying a signal of Ukrainian media that can be considered today as a vaccination against Russian propaganda. The assistance of foreign partners who gave us these transmitters is as important as the provision of lethal weapons, as it is a key system of protecting Ukraine's sovereignty from hybrid aggression."

"We cannot be carefree here, we cannot but deliver a corresponding reaction from the Ukrainian state to the threats and challenges we are facing today. First of all, to date, this poison comes from the occupied territory, from the east of our country to ensure the distribution of Russian propaganda to citizens of Ukraine living near the contact line  in Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv, and Zaporizhia regions," the president emphasized. According to the Ukrainian leader, these signals are spread via radio transmitters located just along the contact line.

Poroshenko is going to visit Donetsk and Luhansk regions in the nearest time. "I will personally check the quality of the Ukrainian broadcasting in the war area," he said.

Read alsoUkraine to expand TV, radio broadcasts across CrimeaThe president instructed NSDC Secretary Oleksandr Turchynov to work out the issue of locating such counteraction systems not only in Donbas, but also in the areas with the highest risk of such threats.

"We must consider an opportunity of applying such technology not only along the Ukraine-Russia border, but also along the uncontrolled area of the Ukraine-Moldova border in Transnistria," he said.

"There is also a possibility of information sabotage in Odesa region. Peace and stability of Odesa region are also a priority for us," Poroshenko added.

As UNIAN reported earlier, on February 9, 2018, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko enacted a decision by the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine of January 26, 2018, to introduce additional measures to counteract Russia's information aggression.
In the Donetsk sector, Russian occupation forces carried out six attacks as of 09:00.

Since the beginning of the day, the Ukrainian military have recorded eight militant attacks, including with the use of banned Grad multiple rocket launchers.

"In the Luhansk sector, at about 02:00 and within an hour, the occupiers carried out nine launches from 122mm artillery systems at the defenders of the town of Popasna. In addition, from 02:30 and within 30 minutes, the terrorists had been firing from infantry fighting vehicles at the Ukrainian military near the village of Krymske," said press secretary of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry Dmytro Hutsuliak, according to an UNIAN correspondent.

Read alsoDay in war zone: Ukraine reports 2 WIAs amid 35 enemy attacksIn the Donetsk sector, the Russian occupation forces carried out six attacks as of 09:00.

"From 05:50 and within two hours, the enemy had been shelling the Ukrainian defenders of the village of Lebedynske from the village of Sakhanka, using Grad multiple launch rocket systems. The Russian invaders launched 40 missiles. In addition, the enemy launched six 82mm mines, used grenade launchers and heavy machine guns against the defenders of Lebedynske. During the same time, from about 06:00 to 08:00, the enemy had been firing 122mm artillery systems at the defenders of the village of Shyrokyne from Sakhanka, having carried out 20 shots, as well as used 120mm mortars. Moreover, at about 02:00, the militants used mortars of the same caliber against the defenders of the village of Novotroyitske, and after 07:00  against the defenders of the village of Vodiane," Hutsuliak said.
Trolls manipulate an online opinion poll on Russian involvement in an ex-spy poisoning.

Since the British government accused Russia of an illegal use of force against the United Kingdom by attempting to poison former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the English city of Salisbury, Twitter has become a battleground.

Supporters and defenders of the Russian government have clashed over who was to blame, and which side to believe; politicians and diplomats have joined in on both sides, @DFRLab reports.

Much of this invective appears organic, driven by angry users who are convinced that their cause is right; such storms are a regrettable part of everyday life online. Some incidents, however, appear to involve organized activity, including possibly fake accounts masquerading as English users, in the well-known pattern of the troll factory in St. Petersburg.

On March 17, when an apparently British user called @Rachael_Swindon posted an online poll asking whether the British governments evidence was adequate to blame Russia. The poll returned a hefty majority in favor of No.

POLL:

Are you satisfied that Theresa May has supplied enough evidence for us to be able to confidently point the finger of blame towards Russia?



Please vote and share for widest possible range of opinions.  Rachael (@Rachael_Swindon) March 17, 2018

The account which posted the poll is a vocal supporter of the UKs Labour Party, a critic of the ruling Conservatives, and has a substantial following. The fact that the poll received over 15,000 votes, mostly anti-government, was therefore not, in itself, remarkable.

What was remarkable was the origin of its amplifiers. Many of its most recent retweets  and, it is legitimate to assume, votes  came from accounts which are either Russian-language, or systematically post pro-Kremlin content.

This appeared to be an attempt by pro-Russian users to influence the online poll, and thus to create the appearance of greater hostility towards the UK government than UK users themselves showed.

To assess the extent to which Russian or pro-Kremlin accounts helped amplify the tweet, @DFRLab conducted a machine scan of its spread through multiple stages of retweeting, using the Sysomos online tool.

Spread of the @Rachael_Swindon tweet. The original post is marked on the left; each subsequent point indicates a Twitter account, and each column, traveling right, indicates a retweet, or retweet of a retweet. The vertical axis shows elapsed time, with the first retweets at the top. (Source: Twitter / Sysomos / DFRLab.)

The scan showed that the early traffic (top half of the image) was generated by UK-centric accounts, but that the later traffic (bottom half) was substantially driven by Russian-language and pro-Kremlin networks, going through multiple retweet iterations as the message spread.

Analyzing the profiles involved in a massive amplification effort, the experts underline that they have previously spread messages favorable to Moscow, on various topics. That's including posting direct attacks on researchers, including the Bellingcat team of investigative journalists, and on those who provide evidence of apparent crimes committed by Russia and its allies, attacking White Helmets and the broader West.

Read alsoU.S. sanctions Russian "troll factory", 19 individuals for election meddlingNone of these Russian accounts have an organic focus on, or interest in, UK politics; their content is dominated by pro-Kremlin messaging, mostly in Russian or English. Their purpose in retweeting the poll therefore seems to have been to spread it to a Russian audience which could be expected to vote against the UK government.

This intervention was small in itself, impacting one poll, from one account. However, the source account was an influential member of a politically vocal UK community; thus, by targeting it, the Russian accounts may have hoped to reinforce their message among UK opposition supporters.

The poll did not reflect the mood of the British people. It reflected some British sentiment, and a significant injection from pro-Kremlin and Russian-language accounts. Thus, the author of the poll appeared to have been taken in by one of the accounts which spread it most widely to a Russian constituency.
It starts looking and sounding like the kind of online news millennials love  with a heavy dose of talking points pushed by Russia.

On most days, ICYMI, a millennial-focused channel on YouTube, looks like a standard, BuzzFeed-style digital media knockoff. There is, however, one distinct difference between ICYMIs videos and any other two-minute news blast on YouTube: Host Polly Boikos monologues are part of RT, the English-language media company backed by the Russian government.

NBC News discovered the connection through registration information of ICYMIs website, which lists the same entity as the registration for RTs website.

Most of ICYMIs videos have the same look. Boiko stands in front of a green screen with bright, bouncy graphics and a comic-book-style font as she speaks into the camera about various news topics. In between fun videos about internet oddities, the channel publishes diatribes from Boiko about international scandals, pushing the same talking points as those found on other Russia-backed channels such as Russia Today. In one video, Boiko discusses the Skripals poisoning  with users having no clear way of knowing about the videos connection to Russias media efforts.

Read alsoRussian infowar: Twitter battles rage over SalisburyIn another, Boiko complains that the West blames Russia for all of its problems.

Behind slick graphics and poppy background music, ICYMI has managed to evade YouTubes new efforts to identify Russian propaganda for over three months. ICYMI is featured on RTs shows page.

ICYMI launched on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in January, and its most recent Facebook video about Skripals poisoning drew more than 135,000 views in five days.

ICYMI showcases the increasing complexity of Russias efforts to spread its talking points across the internet, often in ways that make it nearly impossible to identify such channels as being backed by a foreign country. The internet-savvy content looks and sounds like many other popular, youth-oriented media brands, helping it avoid YouTubes new policy of placing banners that denote acceptance of government funding while building up an audience.

Read alsoUSA Really. Wake Up Americans: Russia launching another propaganda outlet in U.S.Clint Watts, a former FBI counterintelligence agent who testified before Congress about Russias disinformation campaign last year, called ICYMI a prime example of Russia catching up with the new rules created by tech giants to limit the reach of its propaganda.

The idea with the most advanced actors is to play to the terms of service, to play within the new terms, Watts said.

Watts called it an exploit, saying social media companies will have to be as creative as the propaganda outlets trying to find loopholes in their service.
He didn't rule out additional financial penalties.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin says U.S. sanctions on Russian oligarchs that sent the ruble tumbling and roiled metals markets had the effect the Trump administration wanted.

Speaking in an interview broadcast Thursday on Fox Business, he said that the sanctions against tycoons close to the Russian government had the "necessary impact," Bloomberg wrote.

However, he didn't rule out additional financial penalties, saying the administration "is not afraid to use these tools  we will use these tools  but we're not going to broadcast to the world our exact thinking."

Read alsoWP: Trump puts the brakes on new Russian sanctions, reversing Haley's announcementAs was earlier reported, the United States imposed new sanctions against Russia on April 6. The list included such oligarchs as Oleg Deripaska, Igor Rotenberg, Suleiman Kerimov, Igor Rotenberg, and Kirill Shamalov, as well Gazprom's chief executive Alexei Miller, Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, and Roskomnadzor head Alexander Zharov. Moreover, sanctions were introduced against 15 Russian companies.
Several Santa Rosa police officers and some firefighters were present at the site Thursday morning. Police Lt. Rick Kohut said clearing the camp will take several days.

Were helping Catholic Charities with outreach and our goal is to get people into services or shelters. We want people to be actively removing, Kohut said.

Santa Rosa Assistant Fire Marshall Paul Lowenthal said there have been cooking fires and bonfires at the camp and there are concerns about getting people out of the camp containing dozens of tents in the event of a fire.

Lowenthal said there is propane and diesel fuel in the camp, and the fire department has tried to get the campers to create aisles. Clearing the camp will be a lengthy process, he said.

As the decampment slowly progressed, several people took turns addressing the large gathering at the site.

Kathleen Finigan, a homeless advocate, said some campers were panicking because they had no place to go. Most of the remaining campers are disabled, she said.
Trump denied the claims during his conversation with Comey.

U.S. President Donald Trump once said Russian President Vladimir Putin told him that Russia has some of the most beautiful hookers in the world, according to memos written by former FBI Director James Comey.

The memos, which the Justice Department handed over to Congress on Thursday, are Comeys account of several of his personal interactions with the president from before he was fired, according to The Hill.

In one of the memos, dated Feb 8, 2017, Comey writes that Trump brought up the Golden Showers thing, a reference to one of the salacious claims made in the so-called Steele dossier involving a trip to Moscow and Russian prostitutes.

Trump denied the claims during his conversation with Comey, telling him that 'the hookers thing is nonsense, according to the memo, but that Putin had told him we have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world.

Read alsoHow blackmail works in Russia  The AtlanticHe adds that Trump did not say when Putin had made the comment. In public comments in January 2017, Putin also refuted the claims made in the dossier, during which he said that Russian prostitutes are "the best in the world, of course," according to the Telegraph.

Comey writes in his new book, "A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership," about the claim made in this memo, writing that Trump said it bothered him if there was even a one percent chance that first lady Melania Trump believed the allegation.

Im a germaphobe, Trump told Comey in a phone call on Jan 11, 2017, according to the book. Theres no way I would let people pee on each other around me. No way.

The "golden showers" allegation, which first surfaced in the unverified dossier created by former British intelligence operative Christopher Steele, claims Trump ordered two prostitutes to urinate on a bed once used by the Obamas at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton.

The comment by Trump allegedly came during the same conversation in which Trump told Comey he expected loyalty.
Agha Steel Industries is all set to implement Pakistans 1st End-to-End Fiori-Enabled SAP on Cloud in collaboration with SAP, Ernest & Young, TallyMarks and IBL Unisys

Karachi, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 20th Apr, 2018 ) Agha Steel Industries is all set to implement Pakistans 1st End-to-End Fiori-Enabled SAP on Cloud in collaboration with SAP, Ernest & Young, TallyMarks and IBL Unisys.

This end-to- end driven technology elevates the quality precision to the highest level by producing large production volumes without any human error. The project is aimed to upgrade the technological capabilities as well as operational harness of Agha Steel Industries.

The kick-off ceremony of the event held today. This up-gradation would transfer the supply chain of Agha Steel Industries (ASI) on the paradigms of lean manufacturing by elevating its operational and strategic agility, adaptability and alignment.

SAP ERP has proven track record of reducing inventory holding cost and presently 10% to 15% reduction in cost is projected from this technological up gradation. It is also expected that system will reduce the data storage space requiring less amount of space to store high data volumes.

Furthermore, compact storage would result into better throughput by reducing the manufacturing cycle time. Speaking at the occasion CEO of Agha Steel Industries, Mr. Hussain Agha emphasized that global steel industry was moving at disruptive speed and to keep pace with it, Pakistani steel producers had to be highly competitive.

This latest, state of the art, solution makes it possible for an organization to be ambidextrous by allowing organization to maintain a fit between its cost effectiveness, product quality and innovativeness.

He further clarified that phrase zero man intervention coined for this new system did not mean elimination of human resource from the production processes. Instead, this represents the capability of the new system to help the human resource quarters in dramatically improving their efficiency and effectiveness.

Doing so, the new system not only delivers better customer experience, but also bridges the demand and supply gap. In addition, the adoption of SAP Fiori tool will simplify the user interface; help to display data in a clearer and more intuitive way and make data entry easier.

SAP-Pakistan Country Head Mr. Saqib told that the system would transfer the supply chain of Agha steel on the paradigms of lean manufacturing by elevating its operational and strategic agility, adaptability and alignment.

From the strategic management perspective, system will provide the real time information to the stakeholders for precise decision making. Putting together, the new system is expected to provide resilient supply chain and operational efficiencies to Agha Steel Industries (ASI) enabling the company to be a global competitor.

Unveiling the details related to execution of project, the spokesperson of EY (collaborator for SAP delivery) Mr. Inayat Qureshi, Country Head told EY had been selected as strategic partner by ASI due to their high global credentials.

Finally the system consulting company, TallyMarks Consulting, shed the light on the cloud-based-storage capabilities of the newly inducted technology. TallyMarks assisting Agha Steel for effective implementation of SAP S/4 HANA and end-to-end Fiori enabled SAP.

Providing the details, TallyMarks spokesman Mr. Abdul Haseeb informed that cloud infrastructure is built on the basis of S/4 HANA certified hardware, having secure environment, unfailing and uninterrupted connection, coupled with TallyMarks Consultings superior 24/7 client support.
The Qatari Foundation "Education Above All" and the American Refugee Committee signed an agreement to support the Federal Ministry of Education and Vocational Training of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan to educate one million child outside school throughout Pakistan

Islamabad (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 20th Apr, 2018 ) The Qatari Foundation "Education Above All" and the American Refugee Committee signed an agreement to support the Federal Ministry of Education and Vocational Training of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan to educate one million child outside school throughout Pakistan.

The agreement was signed at the headquarters of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) in Paris on 1 March. With the signing of the agreement, Pakistan has become the largest recipient of the State of Qatar's commitment to educate 10 million children around the world under the "Educate a Child".

"Education Above All" and its executive partners in Pakistan have tried to overcome the challenge of Primary education. Through the implementation of eight projects at a cost of over US $ 170 million, 1.6 million children will be enrolled in different schools.
Heart disease patients, who walk faster, are hospitalised less, as suggested by a research. The three-year study was conducted in 1,078 hypertensive patients, of whom 85% also had coronary heart disease and 15% also had valve disease.

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 20th Apr, 2018 ) :Heart disease patients, who walk faster, are hospitalised less, as suggested by a research. The three-year study was conducted in 1,078 hypertensive patients, of whom 85% also had coronary heart disease and 15% also had valve disease.

Patients were then asked to walk 1 km on a treadmill at what they considered to be a moderate intensity. Patients were classified as slow (2.6 km/hour), intermediate (3.9 km/hour) and fast (average 5.1 km/hour).

A total of 359 patients were slow walkers, 362 were intermediate and 357 were fast walkers. The researchers recorded the number of all-cause hospitalisations and length of stay over the next three years.

Participants were flagged by the regional Health Service Registry of the Emilia-Romagna Region, which collects data on all-cause hospitalisation, Medical Xpress reported. Study author Dr Carlotta Merlo, a researcher at the University of Ferrara, Italy, said: "We did not exclude any causes of death because walking speed has significant consequences for public health.

Reduced walking speed is a marker of limited mobility, which is a precursor of disability, disease, and loss of autonomy.

" During the three-year period, 182 of the slow walkers (51%) had at least one hospitalisation, compared to 160 (44%) of the intermediate walkers, and 110 (31%) of the fast walkers.

The slow, intermediate and fast walking groups spent a total of 4,186, 2,240, and 990 days in the hospital over the three years, respectively. The average length of hospital stay for each patient was 23, 14, and 9 days for the slow, intermediate and fast walkers, respectively .

Each 1 km/hour increase in walking speed resulted in a 19% reduction in the likelihood of being hospitalised during the three-year period. Compared to the slow walkers, fast walkers had a 37% lower likelihood of hospitalisation in three years.

Dr Merlo said: "The faster the walking speed, the lower the risk of hospitalisation and the shorter the length of hospital stay. Since reduced walking speed is a marker of limited mobility, which has been linked to decreased physical activity, we assume that fast walkers in the study are also fast walkers in real life."
AJK President Sardar Masood Khan said Friday that intimidation of any kind by the Indian occupation forces would not be able to subdue the indigenous unarmed struggle of the Kashmiri people for their just right to self-determination.

MIRPUR (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 20th Apr, 2018 ) , April 20 (APP)::AJK President Sardar Masood Khan said Friday that intimidation of any kind by the Indian occupation forces would not be able to subdue the indigenous unarmed struggle of the Kashmiri people for their just right to self-determination.

The President made these remarks while speaking as Chief guest at a seminar titled "Kashmir Conflict: Response of Global Players", hosted by the state-run Women University of AJK, Bagh. The President continued that the innocent people of Indian Occupied Kashmir had been facing atrocities of Indian occupation forces who had imprisoned the Kashmiris in their own homeland.

He said that "lawless laws" like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act and Public Safety Act had provided the Indian army and law agencies absolute immunity from any sort of prosecution. The Indian forces, he said, were freely killing, illegally incarcerating, torturing and maiming Kashmiri brothers and sisters.

He added that Indian forces openly dishonor womenfolk and were consciously using sexual violence as an instrument of war. Strongly condemning the killings of over 20 Kashmiris in Shopian and the brutal gang-rape and murder of 8-year-old Asifa Bano, President Masood Khan said that for 70 years the people of Kashmir had been subjected to flagrant human right violations.

"The word violation is only a euphemism. Indian atrocities constitute war crimes, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity and genocide," he added. President AJK said that India under a myopic approach towards Kashmir had adopted a policy of aggression, violence and hostility in its attempt to suppress the freedom movement in occupied Jammu and Kashmir.

Their aggression, economic and political blandishments had failed to win any support from the Kashmiris, he added. "The Kashmiri people are not begging for their freedom. It is their right that they are struggling for and the will certainly achieve it.

The Kashmiris are simply demanding to exercise their right to self-determination under the United Nations Security Council resolutions." said the President. President Masood Khan said that India demonizing the Kashmiris as terrorists even though Kashmiris live within the most heavily guarded and electronically shriveled borders; having no access to arms of any kind.

"The Kashmiris are the most unarmed people on earth and have even been denied their right to self-defence." President AJK said that the international powers must forgo its economic, strategic and political interests with India and take India to task for the atrocities being perpetrated in IOK.

He said that the UN Security Council must debate on the matter and carry out an impartial investigation into the human right violations in IOK and ensure implementation of its resolution for a free and fair plebiscite.

The President said that India has been using the excuse of talks to maintain the status quo and prolonging its occupation in IOK. We must reject the bilateral talks and raise the issue at the appropriate platforms  UNSC and other international forums  for an early resolution to this long-standing issue.

President AJK urged to forge unity among our ranks, approach the United Nations and other influential forums, exploit the traditional and modern means of communication. He said by leveraging the strengths of our diaspora community we must reach out to the global civil society in raising awareness about this issue.

The President on the occasion commended the Vice Chancellor of Women University, Bagh and the Department of International Relations for organizing such an important seminar. He complimented the researchers on presenting their papers, terming them as thoroughly researched using contemporary references and idioms.

He added that Women University of AJK, Bagh will be a catalyst for women empowerment in Pakistan and Azad Kashmir where students are being taught advanced life sciences. "Let your academic and professional competence be the driving force for your confidence.

You must take your destiny into your own hands and shape it" he said to the students. The seminar was attended by Sardar Mir Akbar Khan, Minister for Forest, Wild Life and Fisheries; Prof. Dr. Haleem Khan, Vice Chancellor Women University of AJK; Ms Durdana Ansari, senior British journalist; Ms.

Sumaira Farrukh, British based social worker and philanthropist; officials of the district administration, faculty and a large number of students.
(@ChaudhryMAli88)

Road accidents claimed ten lives while five sustained injuries in two separate mishaps in Sindh on Friday.

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 20th Apr, 2018 ) :Road accidents claimed ten lives while five sustained injuries in two separate mishaps in Sindh on Friday. According to motorway police, three persons were killed and two other sustained injuries when a car coming from Shikarpur to Shahdadpur overturned at National Highway in Hingorja.

In another collision, seven people were killed and three other injured when an over-speeding car hit a truck and caught fire after colliding with another car near Lonni Kot in Hyderabad, Radio Pakistan reported. The injured were shifted to a nearby hospital.
The police arrested 13 Proclaimed Offenders (POs) ,including two POs of category-A,from Faisalabad and recovered 6 pistols and 2 Kalashnkovs from their possession during past 24 hours

FAISALABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 20th Apr, 2018 ) -:The police arrested 13 Proclaimed Offenders (POs) ,including two POs of category-A,from Faisalabad and recovered 6 pistols and 2 Kalashnkovs from their possession during past 24 hours.

A police spokesman said that the police also nabbed 5 drug traffickers and recovered 2.86 kilograms charas, 182 litres liquor and 106 litres un-distilled wine from their possession . Further investigation was underway .
Speaker National Assembly, Sardar Ayaz Sadiq has said that Pakistan could achieve a clear distinction in political, economic, social and religious spheres if we follow the thought and philosophy of great poet, Allama Muhammad Iqbal in true spirit.

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 20th Apr, 2018 ) :Speaker National Assembly, Sardar Ayaz Sadiq has said that Pakistan could achieve a clear distinction in political, economic, social and religious spheres if we follow the thought and philosophy of great poet, Allama Muhammad Iqbal in true spirit.

He said that Allama Iqbal's dream about Pakistan had been materialized under the leadership of Quaid-e-Azam in 1947 by creating Pakistan and now it is our duty to achieve the level of thoughts and actions as desired by the great poet, said a press release issued here Friday.

The Speaker National Assembly Sardar Ayaz Sadiq expressed these views in his message on the occasion of 80th Death Anniversary of Allama Muhammad Iqbal. The Speaker said that the basis of Iqbal's philosophy was islam and according to him, the fundamentals of Islamic model were the people, independence and conscience.

He said that extremism and bigotry had no place in the Allama Iqbal's scheme of things and he wanted Muslims to be moderate, peaceful and enlightened so that their deeds convince non Muslim to develop penchant for Islam.

He said that prior to 1940, when Pakistan resolution was formally passed; Allama Iqbal's philosophical and poetic writings were instrumental in formation and molding of public opinion. The dream of Allama Iqbal was a great blessing for the Muslims of the subcontinent, he added.

The Speaker said that Allama Iqbal visualized the suffering of Muslim Ummah and masses that led to their melt down and also proposed recipe for their revival and regaining the lost glory of the Muslims.

He was the great proponent of unity of Muslim Ummah and reliance on their resources and strength. On the occasion the Deputy Speaker National Assembly, Murtaza Javed Abbasi has said that Dr. Allama Muhammad Iqbal was one of the greatest poet, thinker and philosopher of the last century.

He gave the Muslims of Sub-continent a vision for separate homeland and Pakistan today symbolizes the legacy of great visionary.
Chief Minister Balochistan Mir, Abdul Quddus Bizenjo Thursday said a committee had been formed to resolve issues of protesting young doctors through legal process. He was speaking in Balochistan Assembly session which was chaired by Speaker Assembly Raheela Hameed Khan Durrani.

QUETTA, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 20th Apr, 2018 ) :Chief Minister Balochistan Mir, Abdul Quddus Bizenjo Thursday said a committee had been formed to resolve issues of protesting young doctors through legal process.

He was speaking in Balochistan Assembly session which was chaired by Speaker Assembly Raheela Hameed Khan Durrani. Quddus Bizenjo said "doctors were not present in hospital when I visited respective hospitals at nights" , adding that that committee members had met protesters young doctors to resolve their issues.

He assured the house that government taking measures to address doctor's demands through legal process for betterment of public. Opposition leader of the House, Abdul Reheem Ziaratwal observed Young Doctor's problems had not been resolved for last two months, despite it was an important issue of province.

National Party member Dr, Shama Ishaq pointed out that quacks were playing havoc with precious lives of innocent and poor people in different areas of province and emphasized the need to take measures on priority to save people from such doctors.

JUI- F member Sardar Abdul Rehman Khetran, and Pashtoonkhwa Milli Awami Party (PkMAP) member Dr, Hamid Khan said it was serious issues and government should take immediately measures to protect people from quacks. Health Minister Abdul Majid Abro assured that strict action was being taken against the quacks.
Minister for Interior, Ahsan Iqbal on Friday said the government would allocate Rs. two billion in coming budget 2018-19 for construction of a dedicated hospital for Islamabad police.

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 20th Apr, 2018 ) :Minister for Interior, Ahsan Iqbal on Friday said the government would allocate Rs. two billion in coming budget 2018-19 for construction of a dedicated hospital for Islamabad police.

Addressing a Darbar of Islamabad Women Police here at policelines, Ahsan Iqbal said there must be a separate hospital for Capital police where its personnel could be provided the best medical facilities.

The Darbar was attended by Inspector General of Police (IGP) Islamabad, Dr. Sultan Azam Temuri, police officers and a large number of women police personnel. He said basic objective was to ensure a modern hospital for Capital police like other Law Enforcement Agencies which had their own hospitals in different parts of the country.

The Minister said,"We are taking this initiative from Federal Capital and I hope provinces would also follow the same and construct dedicated hospitals for their police force." Ahsan Iqbal said in coming budget, more funds would be provided for Islamabad police to address their problems.

He said Rs one billion would also be allocated for setting-up an Anti-Riot Force which has been announced a few months back. The Minister assured that Islamabad police would be equipped on modern lines and would be made an exemplary force for other law enforcement agencies by their performance and support from the community.

Ahsan said that of the total 22, seven model police stations had been established in Capital whose pattern might be replicated in other parts of the country while the remaining would also be made model police stations in next phases.

"I congratulate the Islamabad police over the completion of this vision," the Minister said. He said model policing was not a slogan and added that citizens might visit police stations without any fear to get their issues resolved without any approach.

Every citizen should be treated as VIP at these police stations, he said. The Minister stressed for cooperation of community to ensure successful policing and said the prime task to a policeman should be protection and assistance to aggrieved persons including children, women and other marginalized segments of the society," he added.

The minister said policemen and officials performing their duties at police pickets deserved appreciation as they were the ones owing to whom citizens could breathe in peace. He directed the IGP to enhance the current 2.5 ratio of women personnel in total strength of Capital police while more facilities such as modern day care centre, transport and accommodation be ensured for them.

The Minister appreciated induction of women in Counter Terrorism Force Islamabad, congratulating them that they have chosen a profession which provides protection to citizens. Dr Sultan Azam Temuri said the strength of women in Capital police is 289 which is around 2.5 per cent of total force.

Their strength in Islamabad police would be enhanced to 10 per cent in future. He said capacity building of women police is also being focused and in this regard training programmes are arranged. The IGP said a separate Whatsapp group of women police personnel has also been established where they can share their problems and get them addressed.
RICHMOND  San Rafael-based MCE celebrated the successful completion of a 60-acre solar farm  one of the largest in the state  in Richmond on Wednesday, a few days ahead of Earth Day.

The 10.5-megawatt solar system is expected to produce 22,000 megawatt-hours per year of pollution-free electricity, enough energy to power more than 3,900 homes and eliminate 3,234 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually. Some 341 workers were employed building the system, and 45 percent of those workers were Richmond residents.

MCE, the joint powers authority formerly known as Marin Clean Energy, made the initial investment in time and money necessary to get the project off the ground and partnered with sPower, based in Salt Lake City, and the city of Richmond to complete the project. sPower financed the project and owns it; MCE will purchase the electricity produced at the farm and retains the option to purchase the solar farm in seven years.

On Wednesday morning, MCE employees and other key players gathered at the project, which is built atop a remediated Chevron Corp. brownfield site.

I cant think of a better way to celebrate Earth Day. The timing of this is really terrific, said Supervisor Kate Sears, who heads MCEs board of directors.
Senior leader of All Parties Hurriyat Conference and Chairman Tehreek-e-Hurriyat Jammu and Kashmir, Muhammad Ashraf Sehrai in Indian occupied Kashmir, has said that blood-thirsty Indian forces have turned Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) into a big slaughter house where youth are subjected to the worst kind of state terrorism.

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 20th Apr, 2018 ) :Senior leader of All Parties Hurriyat Conference and Chairman Tehreek-e-Hurriyat Jammu and Kashmir, Muhammad Ashraf Sehrai in Indian occupied Kashmir, has said that blood-thirsty Indian forces have turned Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) into a big slaughter house where youth are subjected to the worst kind of state terrorism.

According to Kashmir media service, Muhammad Ashraf Sehrai in a statement in held Srinagar on Friday, paid tributes to the civilian youth, Amir Hamid Lone, who lost his battle for life 13 days after being hit in firing by Indian forces on protesters in Kangan.

The Tehreek-e-Hurriyat Chairman deplored that dozens of youth were killed and hundreds injured with pellets and bullets over the past one month. The Chairman of Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, Muhammad Yasin Malik in a statement said that the killing of Amir Lone was a glaring example of the fact that Kashmiri blood was valueless in the eyes of the oppressors.

Meanwhile, in a major development today, the two factions of Muslim Conference decided to work together on a single platform.

Shabbir Ahmad Dar was unanimously elected as the chairman. Besides him, those who attended the joint meeting in Srinagar included Muhammad Sultan Magray and Merajuddin Soleh.

They said that the Muslim Conference stood for the unity amongst the Kashmiri people at all levels. A complete shutdown was observed in Kangan area of Ganderbal district on the second consecutive day, today, against the killing of youth, Amir Hamid Lone.

Thousands of students right from Doda area of Jammu to Srinagar in the Valley hit streets demanding justice for the eight-year-old rape and murder victim, Aasifa. The students were holding placards and banners, calling for death penalty to the perpetrators of the shameful act.

Kashmiri students also staged a protest demonstration in Dehradun, the capital city of Indian state of Uttarakhand. The High Court Bar Association of occupied Kashmir staged a protest in Srinagar to express solidarity with the Kathua girl victim.
(@rukhshanmir)

Chief Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif said the Pakistan Muslim League-N will bring about a revolution of development and prosperity in Karachi and other areas of the country.

LAHORE, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 20th Apr, 2018 ) :Chief Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif said the Pakistan Muslim League-N will bring about a revolution of development and prosperity in Karachi and other areas of the country.

Every possible cooperation would be extended to solve the problems of the people of Karachi, he added. While talking to Mayor of Karachi Waseem Akhtar here on Friday, the chief minister said that Karachi was an economic hub of the country, adding that every possible effort will be made for Karachi.

"I have been saddened to see the dreadful conditions in Karachi during my recent visit. Making Pakistan's largest city a hostage to squalor is very painful. If an opportunity is accorded by Almighty Allah and people chosen us to serve them in the next elections then the latest infrastructure will be developed in Karachi and other parts of the province of Sindh.

Karachi will be made a beautiful hub where flowers will bloom instead of garbage," he said. He said the PML-N government was pursuing the agenda of public service and the promise of elimination of energy crisis had been fulfilled while strenuous efforts had been made to eliminate the menace of terrorism.

The results of our efforts have been shown in shape of improvements in economic growth, he said. "We are ready to extend our cooperation in any field, including the health and education sectors," he said.

Waseem Akhtar paid tributes to the Punjab government for adopting durable steps for public welfare and added that Karachi required many years to achieve the standard of development attained by you.

The hospitals in Lahore are a wonderful example of efficient administration. The people of Lahore are lucky to have a Chief Minister like Shehbaz Sharif. Every part of the provincial metropolis, including Munawan Hospital, horticultural beauties and Greater Iqbal Park, is beautiful.

Lahore model will be adopted for development in Karachi, he said. He said that Chief Minister Shehbaz Sharif had done great service for bringing improvements in health, education and infrastructure sectors. Lord Mayor Lahore Mubashar Javed, Provincial Ministers Rana Mashhood Ahmed, Khawaja Salman Rafique and concerned officials were also present.
Foreign Office spokesman Dr Muhammad Faisal on Friday said that Pakistan would continue its efforts for dialogue process with Afghanistan regarding peace.

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 20th Apr, 2018 ) :Foreign Office spokesman Dr Muhammad Faisal on Friday said that Pakistan would continue its efforts for dialogue process with Afghanistan regarding peace.

More meetings of higher authorities and working groups were expected in coming days to resolve all the matters between the two sides, he said while talking to a news channel. Pakistan was seeking ways for fruitful dialogue with Afghanistan on all matters of mutual interest, he said.

Commenting on India, he said Pakistan wanted to resolve the issues between the two countries through dialogue.

He said popularity of domestic policies of India regarding Dalit and Muslim communities were plummeting.

To a question he said in Pakistan, media was enjoying full freedom. To another question about Sikh Yatrees, he said Pakistan always provided all possible facilities to pilgrims coming from India to perform rituals, while the neighboring country made hindrances for Sikh Yatrees.
The Sikh pilgrims performed their religious rites at Gurdawara Darbar Sahib Kartarpur-Shakargarh near here on Thursday.

SIALKOT, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 19th Apr, 2018 ) :The Sikh pilgrims performed their religious rites at Gurdawara Darbar Sahib Kartarpur-Shakargarh near here on Thursday. The delegation of 1422 male and female Sikh pilgrims from India visited the Gurudawara Darbar Sahib amid tight security while Gurumeet Singh led the delegation.

MPA Sardar Ramaish Singh Arora accorded warm rosy welcome to the pilgrims upon their arrival. The Sikh yatrees also distributed sweets and charity foods besides exchanging gifts with each other.

The pilgrims highly hailed the Pakistan government's sincere efforts for safeguarding sacred places and Gurdawaras of the Sikh community in Pakistan.

They also thanked Pakistan for rendering the splendid hospitality and said Pakistan was a peaceful country and the people were also very peace-loving, adding that Pakistanis had given marvelous love, affection, care and unforgettable hospitality to the pilgrims.

"We will go back India with unforgettable love given by the people of Pakistan", they said. They also pledged to make all-out sincere efforts to promote the soft image of Pakistan globally as a peaceful and peace-loving country.
(@ChaudhryMAli88)

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and World Food Programme (WFP) would jointly organize the closing ceremony of the China South-South Cooperation Fund in Balochistan and Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 20th Apr, 2018 ) :United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and World Food Programme (WFP) would jointly organize the closing ceremony of the China South-South Cooperation Fund in Balochistan and Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).

The event would be attended by Federal Minister For States and Frontier Regions Abdul Quadir Baloch, Chinese Deputy Head of Mission to Pakistan Lijian Zhao, Additional Secretary, Economic Affairs Division Ahmad Hanif Orakzai, Neil Buhne, UN Resident Coordinator, Katrien Ghoos, Acting Country Representative, WFP-Pakistan, Ignacio Artaza, Country Director, UNDP-Pakistan, Sakander Qayum, Additional Chief Secretary, FATA and Naseeb Ullah Khan Bazai, Additional Chief Secretary, Balochistan province.

UNDP partners with people at all levels of society to help build nations that can withstand crisis, and drive and sustain the kind of growth that improves the quality of life for everyone. WFP is the world's largest humanitarian agency fighting hunger worldwide, delivering food assistance in emergencies and working with communities to improve nutrition and build resilience.

Each year, WFP assists some 80 million people in around 80 countries.
Building on the success of Mobile World Congress 2018 in Barcelona, Huawei, a leading global ICT solutions provider, held the first edition of Huawei Mobile Pakistan Congress in Islamabad

Lahore (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 20th Apr, 2018 ) Building on the success of Mobile World Congress 2018 in Barcelona, Huawei, a leading global ICT solutions provider, held the first edition of Huawei Mobile Pakistan Congress in Islamabad.

Under the theme Enabling Future Together, Minister of state for information technology and telecommunication, Ms. Anusha RehmanKhan graced the occasion and delivered a keynote speech during the closing of the 5 day congress hosted by Huawei.

The Minister praised the efforts of Huawei is making the first ever mobile congress successful. She emphasized the importance of technological advancement and virtual assistance for the generations to come to bring this nation on path of Technology evolution and prosperity.

She appreciated the Huawei Technology role in setting such precedent to promote emerging technologies in Pakistan by involving Industry players and engaging the Government to make it reality. Government is making all out efforts to introduce 5G technology in Pakistan by 2020 to bring it at par with Developed economies in term of technology advancements.

Huawei Mobile Pakistan congress 2018 will help in developing playing fields for all player and customer to develop better understanding of this technology and prepared themselves to exploit it in best possible manner.

Huawei Pakistan Mobile Congress featured demonstrations of highly cutting edge mobile enabled products and innovations in Pakistan today. The visitors experienced how mobile enabled products are creating a better future for the citizens and businesses around the country, in absolutely diverse areas.

Over the five days event, which was organized at Marriot Hotel Islamabad from the 16th-20th of April, the Huawei Mobile Pakistan congress featured topics such as 5g enabling, all flash storage arrays,video cloud, cloud data center, Huawei 5G network support 20 Gbps in hotspot areas, Xhaul, A 5G oriented transport network solution, digitization, cloud computing, and many others.

Presentations and keynotes highlighted Huaweis enterprise solutions and the highly anticipated 5G technology to more than 100 attendees, including government officials, customers, channel partners, military officers and ICT industry experts.

Attendees visited 17 Huawei booths, which held live demos of VoLTE, Next Generation Home Broadband, Intelligent Video Surveillance, Next-Generation Digital Campus and other advanced ICT solutions.

At the Mobile World Congress 2018 held in Barcelona in March, Huawei outlined a vision for 5G by unveiling their latest solutions and shared its vision for a collaborative ecosystem that can stimulate innovation and the development of 5G, All-Cloud network, video, and IoT technologies.

It received eight awards from GSMA including Outstanding Contribution to the Mobile Industry Award, which recognizes Huawei for decades of advocating new technology, building out the digital ecosystem, and social responsibility.
Around 54 people were injured in a train accident at the main station in the city of Salzburg, Austria on Friday

VIENNA, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 20th Apr, 2018 ) ::Around 54 people were injured in a train accident at the main station in the city of Salzburg, Austria on Friday. The accident happened early Friday morning when a train hit another one from behind at the train station, near the border with Germany, leaving around 54 people slightly injured, local media reported.

One train was a night train, so many passengers were likely asleep when the accident occurred. The trains appeared to have clashed at a low speed.
A total of 54 people were slightly injured on Friday in a train accident at the main station in the city of Salzburg, Austria, a police spokesperson told Xinhua.

VIENNA, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 20th Apr, 2018 ) :A total of 54 people were slightly injured on Friday in a train accident at the main station in the city of Salzburg, Austria, a police spokesperson told Xinhua.

The accident took place at around 4:45 a.m.

(0245 GMT) early Friday morning when a train hit another one from behind at the main train station, near the border with Germany, leaving 54 people slightly injured, the spokesperson said.

The injured passengers have received medical care, and no more injuries are expected. Both trains were night trains with passengers when the accident happened, the police told Xinhua, adding that the reason of the collision is still unclear and an investigation is underway.

Many passengers were likely asleep when the accident took place and the trains appeared to have collided at a low speed.
Director of Belarus' National Center for Marketing and Price Study Valery Sadokho met with a delegation of Oman led by Mohammed Bin Awad Al Hassan, Acting Undersecretary for Diplomatic Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Sultanate of Oman, on 19 April, BelTA learned from the press service of the Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs

MINSK, 20 April (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 20th Apr, 2018 ) ::Director of Belarus' National Center for Marketing and price Study Valery Sadokho met with a delegation of Oman led by Mohammed Bin Awad Al Hassan, Acting Undersecretary for Diplomatic Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Sultanate of Oman, on 19 April, BelTA learned from the press service of the Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The parties discussed the development of bilateral trade and economic cooperation with the focus on interaction in IT and other technology sectors, innovations, and an exchange of specialists.

After getting familiar with the potential of the National Center for Marketing and Price Study to support joint projects the Omani delegation expressed interest in involving the center in the organization of visits for Omani businessmen to Belarus.

The parties agreed to work out this and other promising areas of cooperation, including the joint work on a new issue of the Market Conditions Magazine about Oman, scheduled for release in 2019.
(@FahadShabbir)

Foreign Affairs Minister of Kazakhstan Kairat Abdrakhmanov is currently on an official visit to Turkey to discuss the upcoming official visit of President Nursultan Nazarbayev to the country this summer.

ASTANA, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 20th Apr, 2018 ) ::Foreign Affairs Minister of Kazakhstan Kairat Abdrakhmanov is currently on an official visit to Turkey to discuss the upcoming official visit of President Nursultan Nazarbayev to the country this summer.

Astana and Ankara are also gearing up for a session of the High-Level Strategic Cooperation Council which will be co-chaired by leaders of the two countries, Kazinform has learnt from the press service of Kazakh MFA.

During the talks Minister Abdrakhmanov and his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu agreed to finalize the agenda of the upcoming events and the package of the documents which are set to be signed during President Nazarbayev's visit to Ankara.

The sides are also working to conclude a range of economic contracts. Transport, agriculture, SMEs, and tourism are the most promising areas for cooperation between Kazakhstan and Turkey.

Kazakhstan is keen to develop transport and transit potential of the two nations.

Turkey remains Kazakhstan's key investment partner. The governments of the two countries are busy working to implement the agreements reached during President Erdogan's visit to Astana last September.

The sides are also implementing the joint economic program "New Synergy". Turkish investors and the Kazakh side have implemented 32 projects in non-resource-based sectors to the tune of $1.4 billion.

Yildiz Holding, Eczacibasi Holding, Abdi Ibrahim, Anadolu Holding, Aselsan Elektorinik, and YDA Holding are among the most active investors. Astana and Ankara are also working in order to ensure more new Turkish companies coming to Kazakhstan.
Fifty-four people were treated for injuries after two train carriages collided at a station in the Austrian city of Salzburg on Friday, the state rail company OeBB said

Salzburg, Austria, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 20th Apr, 2018 ) :Fifty-four people were treated for injuries after two train carriages collided at a station in the Austrian city of Salzburg on Friday, the state rail company OeBB said.

The accident happened when a carriage from a train arriving from Venice struck a carriage on the service from Zurich, to which it was meant to be coupled before heading to Vienna.

The "two carriages collided for unknown reasons," fire service official Reinhold Ortler told O1 radio.

Around 240 people were on board the two trains, which contain both seated and sleeping compartments. "Fifty four people were treated. Fortunately we're only talking about light injuries," OeBB spokesman Robert Mosser told AFP.
Here is a list of key developments in the history of Paraguay, the landlocked Latin American nation which is holding a presidential election on Sunday

Asuncion, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 20th Apr, 2018 ) :Here is a list of key developments in the history of Paraguay, the landlocked Latin American nation which is holding a presidential election on Sunday: - From discovery to independence - In 1515, the region of Paraguay, which is populated by Guarani Indians, is discovered and colonized by Spain.

From 1604 to 1767, it is governed by Jesuits who establish a Christian republic with so-called "reductions" -- missions where the indigenous people lived and worked the land. After a war with the Portuguese, Paraguay becomes attached to the vice-kingdom of Peru, then to the River Plate, a river and large estuary between Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia and Paraguay.

It achieves independence from Spain in 1811 after a bloodless revolt. - 1864-1870: ravaged by war - In 1864, Francisco Solano Lopez, son of dictator Carlos Antonio Lopez (1844-1862), draws Paraguay into a disastrous war against a "Triple Alliance" of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay.

Paraguay is ravaged. According to different estimates it loses between half and two-thirds of its population, mostly men. In ruins, the country sells off up to half its territory. It then extends its borders following the 1932-1935 Chaco war with Bolivia over control of the disputed northern Gran Chaco region, where oil reserves have been discovered.

- 1954-1989: dictatorship - In 1954, army chief General Alfredo Stroessner seizes power in a coup. He rules the country with an iron grip for 35 years. His Colorado party has held an almost uninterrupted dominance over the country's political life since 1947.

Under Stroessner, between 1,000-3,000 people were killed or went missing, human rights groups say. - 1989: democracy - In 1989, Stroessner is ousted by General Andres Rodriguez, who reestablishes freedom of expression, legalizes opposition parties and allows exiles to return.

In 1992, a new constitution provides for the election of a president every five years without the possibility of a second term. - 2012: president ousted - In 2008, former Catholic bishop Fernando Lugo becomes the first person since 1947 from outside the Colorado party to accede to power.

Once known as the "bishop of the poor," he is forced from the presidency by the Senate in 2012 for dereliction of duty, for his handling of a land dispute that turned deadly. He was also dogged by several paternity suits dating back to his time as a clergyman. The impeachment is considered "a parliamentary coup" by Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Venezuela.
On Friday morning Pope Francis greets the faithful gathered in Alessano after visiting the grave of Fr Tonino Bello on the 25th anniversary of his death.

By Sr Bernadette Mary Reis and Robin Gomes

The faithful of Alessano, numbering about 20,000 welcomed Pope Francis singing Oh, Freedom, a song beloved by Fr Tonino Bello. The Pope began his discourse defining Fr Tonino as someone who knew that understanding the poor was true wealth.

At the side of the poor

Fr Tonino imitated Jesus by drawing near to the poor to the extent of dispossessing himself, Pope Francis said. In order to promote peace on a global level, he acted locally. He was convinced that the best way to prevent violence and every type of war, is to take care of those in need and promoting justice, the Pope said.



Peace begins at home

For Fr Tonino, peace is constructed beginning at home, on the street, where people work upholding the dignity of the worker over profit. Quoting Fr Tonino Pope Francis summed up his reasoning, From the office, as one day from the workshop of Nazareth, the word of peace will go forth and make its way through the streets thirsting for justice.



A Church that wears an apron

Fr Tonino had an allergy for titles and honors, the Pope continued. Like Jesus, Fr Tonino stripped himself of every sign of power in order to make way for the power of the sign. The Pope then invited the faithful to find the strength to be divested of everything that inhibits putting on aprons, which Fr Tonino called the only priestly garb recorded in the Gospel.



Your land produced a saint

In conclusion, Pope Francis reminded the faithful of Alessano that from your land, God raised up a person: a gift and prophet for our time. God wants that gift to be welcomed, and his prophecy to become reality. He encouraged the faithful not to be content with the nostalgia of his memory but rather, imitating Fr Tonino, may we be swayed by his young Christian ardor and hear his urgent invitation to live the Gospel without diminishing any of it.

Listen to our report

Biography

Bishop Tonino Bello was born in Alessano, Province of Lecce on 18 March 1935. After attending school in his hometown from 1940 to 1945, he entered the seminary in Ugento and then at the Pius XI Regional Pontifical Seminary in Molfetta.



He then proceeded to Bologna for higher studies and completed his theology course at the Benedict XV Ponticial Seminary.

After his priestly ordination Bello was appointed vice-rector at the seminary of Ugento. He later studied at Romes Pontifical Lateran University from where he obtained a doctoral degree. He then served as an assistant to the Catholic Action organization, rector of the seminary and administrator of the Sacred Heart parish of Ugento and parish priest in Tricase. Meanwhile he was collaborating with Caritas.

Pastoral outreach and works of peace

In 1982, St. Pope John Paul II appointed him Bishop of Molfetta and Ruvo. Bishop Bello renounced all signs of power and tried to help the most disadvantaged. He ensured Caritas groups were established in every parish, founded a community to help people with addictions.



His pastoral zeal took him to Australia, Argentina and Venezuela where he visited immigrants from his diocese.

Bishop Bello is greatly known for his work with Pax Christi, an international Catholic peace movement. He was appointed the president of Pax Christi Italy in 1985, a position he held until his death. An outspoken critic of the Gulf War and other conflicts, he even rallied against the NATO. In December 1992, he led a group from Italy across the Adriatic to Sarajevo where he headed a peace march.

Bishop Bello envisaged the Church in apron, evoking the image Christ at the Last Supper who tied a towel (apron) around his waist, got down on his knees to wash the feet of his disciples in a symbolic gesture of humble loving service.

Known for his frugal ways, Bishop Bello preferred to take a bus and often used a bicycle since he felt cars added to air pollution. He often went out to the streets, bars and restaurants to interact with people.

He died of stomach cancer in Molfetta on 20 April 1993. He was 58
Pope Francis visited Alessano and Molfetta on April 20 to commemorate the 25th death anniversary of Bishop Tonino Bello, known for his pastoral outreach and works of peace.

Pope Francis made a brief trip to southern Italy on Friday to commemorate the 25th death anniversary of a popular Italian bishop known for his pastoral zeal and works of peace. The Pope flew to the towns of Alessano and Molfetta associated with Bishop Tonino (Antonio) Bello of Molfetta-Ruvo-Giovinazzo-Terlizzi, whose cause for beatification was opened in 2007.



The Pope left from Rome's Ciampino Airport to the Galatina military airport, on the heel of Italy, from where he boarded a helicopter to Alessano, the town where Bishop Tonino was born and later buried. Pope Francis visited the tomb of the bishop and met some of his relatives.

After addressing the faithful of Alessano, Pope Francis flew north to the port town of Molfetta, where Bello was bishop and where he died. He celebrated Mass in the cathedral and then headed back to Rome.

Biography



Bishop Tonino Bello was born in Alessano, Province of Lecce on 18 March 1935. After attending school in his hometown from 1940 to 1945, he entered the seminary in Ugento and then at the Pius XI Regional Pontifical Seminary in Molfetta.

He then proceeded to Bologna for higher studies and completed his theology course at the Benedict XV Ponticial Seminary.



After his priestly ordination Bello was appointed vice-rector at the seminary of Ugento. He later studied at Romes Pontifical Lateran University from where he obtained a doctoral degree. He then served as an assistant to the Catholic Action organization, rector of the seminary and administrator of the Sacred Heart parish of Ugento and parish priest in Tricase. Meanwhile, he was collaborating with Caritas.

Pastoral outreach, works of peace



In 1982, St. Pope John Paul II appointed him Bishop of Molfetta and Ruvo. Bishop Bello renounced all signs of power and tried to help the most disadvantaged. He ensured Caritas groups were established in every parish, founded a community to help people with addictions.

His pastoral zeal took him to Australia, Argentina, and Venezuela where he visited immigrants from his diocese.

Bishop Bello is greatly known for his work with Pax Christi, an international Catholic peace movement. He was appointed the president of Pax Christi Italy in 1985, a position he held until his death. An outspoken critic of the Gulf War and other conflicts, he even rallied against the NATO. In December 1992, he led a group from Italy across the Adriatic to Sarajevo where he headed a peace march.

Bishop Bello envisaged the Church in apron, evoking the image Christ at the Last Supper who tied a towel (apron) around his waist and got down on his knees to wash the feet of his disciples in a symbolic gesture of humble loving service.

Known for his frugal ways, Bishop Bello preferred to take a bus and often used a bicycle since he felt cars added to air pollution. He often went out to the streets, bars, and restaurants to interact with people.

He died of stomach cancer in Molfetta on 20 April 1993. He was 58.

Pope Francis visited Alessano and Molfetta exactly on the 25th anniversary of the death of Bishop Tonino Bello.


Missile strikes in Syria. Trade war with China and others. Trump-Kim Summit. The United States faces several foreign policy and national security challenges with a White House national security team in transition. Plugged In with Greta Van Susteren examines those challenges in an interview with retired Admiral Michael Mullen, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The Chinese government has called on its ally Cambodia to take legal action against Chinese investors who have broken the law, the National Police have said.

On Thursday, police chief Neth Savoeun met Liao Jingrong, head of Chinas General Department of International Cooperation, who also requested additional security be provided for Chinese law-abiding citizens in Cambodia.

Kirth Chantharith, police spokesman, could not be reached for comment.

In late February, Yon Min, the Sihanoukville governor, issued a report which alleged that an influx of Chinese tourists and organized criminals had caused instability in the city and led to a shortage of accommodation.

More than 1,000 Chinese nationals have been arrested and deported from Cambodia since 2012 relating to online scams being run out of Cambodia.

Meas Ny, a social researcher, said the crisis could lead to discrimination against Chinese in Cambodia. We cannot survive long and we will lose even our land because we do not get along with anybody. This is currently a crisis for Khmer.

Cambodia and China have strong ties while China has provided billions of dollars in loans and other development assistance to Phnom Penh in recent years.
The Court of Appeals on Thursday denied bail to two former Radio Free Asia reporters who were earlier charged with espionage.



Uon Chhin and Yeang Sothearin are under the jurisdiction of the Phnom Penh Municipal Court awaiting trial for supplying secret information to a foreign state, charges they deny.



If found guilty, the two former reporters could face up to 15 years in prison.



Keo Vanny, their lawyer, on Thursday confirmed that the most recent bail request had been denied, saying the court was concerned that the suspects would flee the country if released.



The charges against Chhin and Sothearin also include pornography allegations, though no legal documents have yet been filed relating to these separate charges.



The journalists arrest in November came shortly after their former employer, Radio Free Asia, decided to leave the country after pressure from the government.



Sothearin described the case as an injustice that followed their critical reporting on the ruling Cambodian Peoples Party of Prime Minister Hun Sen.



The court has investigated for five months but there has not been any result and they continue to only detain me," Sothearin said. They intend to completely break our spirit.



But Touch Tharith, court spokesman, claimed the authorities were following legal procedure.



RFA President Libby Liu, in a statement published in response to a recent Committee to Protect Journalists report, which highlighted the Cambodia case, said: Cambodia, Vietnam, and China persecute and make examples of journalists and sources who challenge the narratives of the ruling regimes.



By resorting to desperate measures, these countries unwittingly highlight the impact and importance of a free press, she added.



The situation in Cambodia, where two former RFA journalists have been charged with espionage, is especially egregious. Uon Chhin and Yeang Sothearin severed ties to RFA after our bureau was forced to close in September. Yet two months later they were arrested and charged, and they now wait in prison as a Cambodian court pursues what could be a months-long quest to assemble evidence for the prosecution. Its an absolute outrage.
The government has called on telecommunications companies to pay outstanding debts and said it would publicly name and shame the companies if they failed to do so.

In a statement published more than two weeks ago, the Ministry of Economy and Finance and Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications said they would reveal the names of the companies and directors of the firms that had failed to pay taxes, as well as the amount owed.

They added that further steps, such as freezing bank accounts, prohibiting imports and exports and the removal of licenses could also follow.

The announcement on Thursday followed the appointment earlier in the week of Sok Puthyvuth, the son of a former deputy prime minister and son-in-law to Prime Minister Hun Sen, to the board of governors of Telecom Cambodia. Puthyvuth is also an undersecretary of state at the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications.

Officials at both ministries declined to give further details of the companies or amounts involved.

Sath Monyvibol, a Ministry of Post and Telecommunication official, said he was in the dark about which businesses owed the debt to the state.

I dont know what the companies are, I am telling you frankly. I know nothing, he said.

As you are aware, when we try to demand [money] from others, we must be industrious. If not, there will be nothing, he added.

When asked whether the appointment of Puthyvuth would persuade debtors to pay their debt, he said he was unaware of Puthyvuths appointment.

Telecom Cambodia, which is a state-run enterprise, has itself experienced corruption scandals, leading to the dismissal of one of its director generals.

In 2016, Lay Marivo, then director general of Telecom Cambodia, was dismissed amid a probe which found his mismanagement of the firm made it possible for employees to embezzle $230,000, according to a report by the Cambodia Daily, which itself halted operations in 2017 after being handed a large tax bill by the government that it was unable to pay.
CIA Director Mike Pompeo's secret visit to Pyongyang to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un "is a very positive sign" that the United States is taking "sensible and necessary steps to prepare for an eventual summit" and increasing the likelihood that a summit will take place, analysts said.

President Donald Trump said Wednesday that Pompeo, his nominee for secretary of state, met with Kim over Easter weekend.

The meeting was part of the preparation for Trump's summit with Kim slated for late May or early June and was the first high-level meeting between a U.S. official and a North Korean leader since former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met with Kim Jong Un's deceased father Kim Jong Il in 2000.

'Sensible, necessary steps'

Gary Samore, the White House coordinator for arms control and weapons of mass destruction during the Obama administration, said Pompeo's meeting with Kim signals that the Trump administration is actively preparing for the summit.

"I think the secret visit of Pompeo to Pyongyang is a very positive sign that President Trump is taking sensible and necessary steps to prepare for an eventual summit with Kim Jong Un," said Samore, who played a key role in negotiating the 1994 North Korea nuclear agreement, the so-called Agreed Framework, that was never fully implemented.

Robert Manning, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, thinks the meeting also indicates Kim's willingness to discuss denuclearization with the U.S.

"Kim, who has met with very few foreign leaders, met with him. [This] shows serious intent on the North Korean side," he said.

According to Evans Revere, a former State Department official who has extensive experience in negotiations with North Korea, Pompeo's meeting with Kim paved the way for Trump to be effective in his talks with Kim at the summit.

"They are working very hard on putting all the pieces together for an appropriate strategy and approach to deal with the North Korean leader," Revere said.

Define denuclearization

Scott Snyder, a senior fellow for Korean studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, speculated that Pompeo met with Kim to see if an agreement on denuclearization would be possible by confirming directly with Kim that he is seriously committed to taking steps toward denuclearization.

Analysts said last month that even the process of agreeing on the definition of "denuclearization" could present a stumbling block before the summit.

WATCH: US Lawmakers Express Hope, Concern Over Trump-Kim Summit

"They needed to talk about the elements of any possible agreement or understanding that might be achieved at the [summit] meeting. I'm sure that Director Pompeo needed to confirm directly with Kim Jong Un that Kim is committed to the denuclearization process," Snyder said.

Ken Gause, an expert on North Korea and director at the Center for Naval Analysis, echoed Snyder's comment. Gause said the meeting was important to find out Kim's view of denuclearization and if differences between Pyongyang and Washington on the topic could be bridged to reach an agreement.

"There are obviously many hurdles.  One of those hurdles is, and probably the reason why this meeting took place from the U.S. perspective at least, is that I think the Trump administration is very eager to find out, what is the North Korean view of denuclearization and how that should take place," Gause said. "There has to be some common agreement on a way forward."

North Korea is most likely looking for an "incentive-based step-by-step process [of denuclearization] that can be rolled out over a long period of time" Gause said, while the U.S. aims to condense the timeline for complete denuclearization by applying the Libyan model where "the North Koreans would be expected to give up their nuclear programs early in the process, in a verifiable way."

Libya model

John Bolton, the president's national security adviser, has said North Korea should follow the Libya model, in which long-time Libyan President Moammar Gadhafi agreed to give up all weapons of mass destruction in 2003, and soon after allowed in international inspectors to verify and oversee the dismantlement efforts.

Douglas Paal, director of the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said, "If the North is more forthcoming than it has been in the past on our central concerns on the nuclear and missile threats, then the chances [for the summit meeting] increase."

Trump said Wednesday he would cancel the upcoming summit with Kim or walk out of the summit meeting if the meeting becomes unproductive.

"If the meeting, when I'm there, is not fruitful, I will respectfully leave the meeting," Trump said at a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida while meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Bill Richardson, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and governor of New Mexico, while calling the historic summit a good idea, particularly in light of the escalating tensions between the U.S. and Pyongyang, had advice for Trump Thursday, saying: No tweets, no bombast.

In an exclusive interview with The Associated Press, Richardson said North Korea is a very traditional country and very sensitive to what it perceives as insults, therefore Trump needs to calibrate his remarks.

There are a lot of achievable issues that can happen with this summit that we should embrace, Richardson said, such as curbing the use of nuclear weapons and freezing the exports of chemical weapons and missile materials.

Connie Kim contributed to this story, which originated with VOA's Korean Service.
We're all disturbed by the murders at the Veterans Home. The national plague of gun deaths has hit close to home.

This time, let's not let Second Amendment Fundamentalists squelch the discussion our community and country need to have. I am a strong supporter of every single Article of the Bill of Rights and all subsequent Amendments to our Federal Constitution. Pride of place among all these, however, must go to the right to life.

At the Vets Home, three dedicated professionals were deprived of that right at a state facility by an individual trained by the U.S. government in the use of deadly weapons. Whatever gun was used, and no matter the legality (or not) of its possession, the victims were deprived of their right to life as a result of state action.

The killer may not have been a state actor as current law defines that term, but in the eyes of any who appreciate the full panoply of our Constitutional rights as they interact with one another, he most certainly was.

Protecting the right to life is our government's first and highest duty. If government fails at this out of concern for another of its citizen's rights, then government fails us completely.
On Monday, King Norodom Sihamoni will chair the first session of the newly elected Senate after an election that saw the countrys former main opposition excluded from the vote.

The ruling Cambodian Peoples Party of Prime Minister Hun Sen, unsurprisingly, won a convincing victory at the polls. Political observers in Cambodia say the opening of the new Senate mandate will pave the way for more of the status quo.

Korn Savang, a coordinator of local election watchdog Comfrel, said the Senate, with no opposition voice, would remain impotent and unable to provide a check to balance the power of the CPP-dominated parliament.

When there was the opposition party, the consideration [about draft bills] rarely occurred, so whats happening now? One-hundred percent of members are from [the ruling party]; with this, the Senate will not be different compared to the past. This is what see, he said.

Savang said the environment for open debate in Cambodias parliament and Senate was at an end as no real opposition voice remained in either house.

If the voice of minority groups is small, there would be more problems for enacting the laws and other issues, he said. We will see that there will be loopholes for the minority groups.

The Senate election was held after the main opposition party, the Cambodia National Rescue Party was dissolved last year and its president, Kem Sokha, was arrested and charged with treason for allegedly plotting with a foreign power to overthrow Hun Sen.

The election drew criticism from western governments and international observers.

Meas Ny, a social researcher, agreed with Savang that little would change following the Senate election.

There will be nothing new. The reason was that in the past, the Senate got membership from another party. But now there is nothing. So for the Senate process, if we think about plural parties, there is nothing, he said.

He added that without the opposition party in the Senate, there will be one less voice to counter the official narrative.

We are aware already that the laws have a role to defend the safety of the general people, but when the Senate is under one party, if the laws are made to examine and control the people rather than for protecting the safety of the people, there will be nobody opposing those laws, he said.

Um Sarith, secretary general and spokesman for the Senate, declined to comment on Thursday.

The Cambodian Senate has long been seen as a rubber stamp body with the balance of power falling with the ruling party and its cronies.

In 2017, amid a widespread crackdown on political dissent, the Senate approved several laws that allowed the oppositions seats in parliament to be redistributed to other parties.

Am Sam Ath, head of Licadhos technical investigation unit, said: The Senate for the next mandate will be the same as before. This time it is very easy for the Senate to make a decision since there is no opposition party compared to the past.
Kremlin officials, from President Vladimir Putin down, wasted no time in condemning the U.S.-led punitive airstrikes on Syria a week ago, warning of dire consequences. But Russian state-run media has focused more efforts on disputing the alleged Syrian government chemical attack, which prompted the Western airstrikes in the first place, than on the U.S.-led retaliation itself.



The distinction might seem minor, but analysts say it reflects a Kremlin decision to try to reduce tension with the U.S. and prevent further escalation. Moscow is still holding out hopes for a summit meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin, they say.



Amid rapidly deteriorating relations between Western countries and Russia, with disputes raging over a range of issues, including Kremlin meddling in the domestic politics of the U.S. and European states and aggressive Russian online disinformation campaigns, Kremlin officials also seemingly are avoiding directly criticizing Trump, in marked contrast to their open disdain for British Prime Minister Theresa May and Britain's foreign minister, Boris Johnson.

On Friday, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov told the RIA Novosti news agency he had faith that Putin and Trump won't allow any armed confrontation to occur between the U.S. and Russia over Syria.

"Speaking about risks of a military confrontation, I am 100 percent sure that [the] militaries won't allow this, and of course neither will President Putin or President Trump," he said.



Lavrov confirmed that Trump had invited Putin to visit Washington during a phone call last month and added that the U.S. president had said he "would be happy to make a reciprocal visit [to Moscow]."The Kremlin is now expecting Trump to issue a formal invitation, say Russian officials. The White House previously announced that Trump had raised the possibility of a summit meeting.



Lavrov said prior to the Western airstrikes, which were carried out in retaliation for a suspected chemical attack by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on a rebel-held Damascus suburb that left a reported 70 dead and hundreds injured, Russian and U.S. military leaders discussed behind the scenes what would prompt Russian retaliation and how to avoid it.



The Kremlin's "red lines" were mainly "geographical" and focused on ensuring no Russian servicemen or personnel would be killed or injured.

Lavrov said, "Anyway  these red lines' were not crossed" during the Western airstrikes, which targeted three facilities in Syria, where Russia is backing President Assad's forces in the civil war.



On Thursday, the Bloomberg news service reported the Kremlin had instructed officials to curb anti-U.S. rhetoric. And on Monday Russian lawmakers delayed moving draft legislation aimed at U.S. companies in retaliation for a fresh round of economic sanctions Washington imposed last month on Russia, which the U.S. Treasury Department said was payback for Russia's "malign activity" in general.



The temporary withdrawal by Russian lawmakers of a draft law that would have impacted a broad range of trade with the U.S. came after Trump officials reassured Russia's embassy in Washington on Sunday, April 15, that the White House wouldn't be announcing more sanctions on Russia in the near future  despite an announcement to the contrary by the U.S. envoy to the United Nations, Nikki Haley.

Trump has made no secret of his wish to improve relations with Russia. After congratulating Putin on his re-election in March, Trump tweeted that "getting along with Russia [and others] is a good thing, not a bad thing."

On the campaign trail, Trump regularly expressed the same sentiment, arguing it would be in the U.S. interest for him to shape a strong personal relationship with Putin. Trump has met Putin twice as president, at the Group of 20 summit in Germany last summer and briefly in Vietnam at the Asia-Pacific economic summit in November.

Problematic summit

But a Trump-Putin summit could prove highly problematic for Trump in terms of domestic U.S. politics. It would likely sharpen divisions in the U.S. over relations with Russia as well as stoke partisan rancor over a special-counsel investigation into allegations that Trump's campaign colluded in Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.



Trump won bipartisan praise last month on Capitol Hill, which is more skeptical of Russia than the U.S. president, for ordering the expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats, part of a coordinated Western move to punish the Kremlin for a March 4 nerve agent attack in England on former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter.



But the U.S. leader also faced criticism last month for congratulating Putin on his re-election in a phone call in which he failed to raise the issue of the Skripal poisoning.

Trump's foes fault him for shying away from criticizing Putin personally, arguing it gives credence to claims made by a former British spy, which are part of the special counsel probe, that the Kremlin holds compromising information on the U.S. president.



Domestic U.S. politics aside, any summit between the two leaders would be high risk and might be weighted with too many expectations that can't be fulfilled.



In an interview with VOA last month, U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman warned against thinking in terms of a reset with Russia, saying a sudden breakthrough is unrealistic.

"The resets and the redos of years gone by, both Republicans and Democrats, always end in disaster," he said. "They heighten expectations to the point of our inability to achieve any of those expectations. Hopes are dashed. Relationships crumble. We've seen that over and over again."



But he added it was important to maintain a dialogue and to look for "natural openings to build trust in small ways."

He acknowledged the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election by Special Counsel Robert Mueller is complicating U.S.-Russia diplomacy.

"I would be disingenuous if I said it didn't impact the environment in which all of this plays out. And certainly the impact it has on members of Congress and the American people, who are a big part of fashioning the nature of our bilateral relationship."

Rewarding aggressive behavior

Some analysts and former officials worry that holding a summit in the near future with relations between the two powers at their worst point since the Cold War would be widely seen as a reward for aggressive Russian behavior.



On Thursday, Prime Minister May accused Russia of trying "to undermine the international system," pointing to an aggressive Russian internet disinformation campaign "intended to undermine the actual institutions and processes of the rules-based system."

She said in the weeks after a suspected chemical attack in Syria and the poisoning of a Russian dissident in England, there had been a 4,000 percent increase in activity by Kremlin-linked social media trolls and automated accounts propagating what she called lies.
Among the issues pressing on the mind of French President Emmanuel Macron as he prepares for a state visit to Washington on Monday is what he describes as a "civil war" between the forces of democracy and authoritarianism in Europe.

In a recent speech to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, Macron called on the European Union to resist the siren song of populism.

"There is a fascination with the illiberal and it's growing all the time."

Macron's comments come after euroskeptic populists won elections in Hungary and Italy, and as the EU confronts Poland's right-wing government over the rule of law.

"I reject this idea that is spreading in Europe that democracy would be condemned to powerlessness. In the face of authoritarianism that everywhere surrounds us, the response is not authoritarian democracy but the authority of democracy," Macron said.

Many on both sides of the Atlantic are pondering the dangers of illiberalism and autocracy  especially in Central and Eastern Europe  and what it might mean for the future of the continent.

Illiberal democracy or populism?

In front of an audience of Washington policy experts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, former Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski challenged the view of Hungary's populist prime minister, Viktor Orban, that a democracy "is not necessarily liberal."

Sikorski said that while there can certainly be democracies where non-liberals win, populists are distinct.

"In order to win, populists first need to focus on something that is popular and they did. They focused on an issue that was at the height of public attention in all of Europe, namely migration," Sikorski said.

Orban, whose Fidesz party and its allies won a sweeping election victory earlier this month, said the outcome gave him "a strong mandate" to restrict migrant rights and push for a European Union of independent nations rather than a "United States of Europe."

Charles Gati, professor of European and Eurasian Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington said that by and large, the Eastern and Central European countries that have been admitted to the European Union are on a good path. He did, however, add that "backsliding democracies" would not be the right way to describe what is happening in Poland and Hungary.

"They are either authoritarian, or semi-authoritarian regimes that maintain the facade of democratic processes."

Heather Conley is a senior vice president at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. She said many factors may be contributing to the current trend in Europe.

"Weakened opposition and then policies and structures that purposely reduce and weaken that opposition, that's really for me a hallmark of this trend toward illiberalism," she said.

Central European or global trend?

Sikorski warned against applying regional labels when talking about populist or illiberal tendencies.

"This is not a Central European phenomenon. This is a Pan-Western phenomenon," he said.

In its latest issue, Foreign Affairs magazine asks the question, "Is Democracy Dying?  A Global Report," which analyzes the issue not only in Europe, but the United States, China and other countries. According to the magazine, "Some say that global democracy is experiencing its worst setback since the 1930s and that it will continue to retreat unless rich countries find ways to reduce inequality and manage the information revolution."

For David Frum, a senior editor with The Atlantic magazine, democracy is better seen "as a dimmer switch, rather than a light switch, not on or off but brighter or darker."

"If it's possible to become a more liberal democracy in one direction, in the same way you can become gradually a less liberal democracy, without going through the full overthrow of your state," he said.

Sikorski said he worries that illiberal tendencies in formerly communist countries may have larger consequences.

"We have reawakened stereotypes about the region that were on the way to being buried and we have contributed to the decline in the willingness of Western Europe to consider further Eastern enlargement."

Can the trend be reversed?

In an open letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, academics, writers and activists criticized her for not standing up to Orban's attacks on Hungarian democracy.

Sikorski, however, said the EU cannot do much because the whole confederation is based on the idea of mutual trust among institutions in individual member countries.

"If this mechanism of trust is broken, then the consequences are very profound for the whole union."

The EU may have important leverage. The last seven-year budget granted Poland nearly one-fifth of the EU's cohesion funds and negotiations over the next budget begin in May. So, under pressure for its controversial changes to the legal system, which critics say put judges under the control of the ruling party, amendments have been submitted to parliament to reverse some of those revisions.

Gati says the way to counter illiberalism in Hungary is through voting.

"I think it's possible that next year when there are municipal elections, Budapest will go to the opposition," he said.

And Frum said it is important not to pathologize Central and Eastern Europe.

"There is a flu going around the neighborhood; some people have got a much worse case than others and some people have weaker immunity than others, but do understand that it's the same flu that we are all getting."

Whether this is a flu or an epidemic, one thing is for sure: there are no clear prescriptions.
Arizona teachers have voted to walk off the job to demand increased school funding, marking a key step toward a first-ever statewide strike that builds on a movement for higher pay in other Republican-dominant states.

A grassroots group and the states largest teacher membership group said Thursday that teachers will walkout April 26.

The vote was held this week following weeks of growing protests and an offer from Republican Gov. Doug Ducey to give teachers a 20 percent raise by 2020. Many teachers kept up the pressure at schools and on social media, saying the plan failed to address much-needed funding for classrooms and support staffers.

Walkout concerns

Teachers on both sides of the walkout vote have shared concerns. It could pose child care difficulties for thousands of families and leave teachers at risk of losing their credentials. How a strike could play out in more than 200 public school districts will vary but could leave hourly workers like custodians without their paychecks.

Around 57,000 teachers submitted a ballot and 78 percent voted in favor of the walkout, according to Arizona Educators United late Thursday.

Beth Simek, president of the influential Arizona PTA, said she feels the pain of teachers who are torn. Some are concerned about the effect on support staff and what kids might do without school, she said.

I know theyre toiling with that, Simek said. I also know they need these raises.

Parents and communities have been making plans for child care, with some stay-at-home parents stepping up to watch children so other parents can work, she said. Local parent-teacher associations also are putting together food boxes for kids who rely on free breakfast and lunch at school.

Theres been a lot of mobilization by the community to prepare, Simek said.

Consequences to teachers

Teachers themselves could face consequences in this right-to-work state, where unions do not collectively bargain with school districts and representation is not mandatory. The Arizona Education Association has warned its 20,000 members about a 1971 Arizona attorney general opinion saying a statewide strike would be illegal under common law and participants could lose their teaching credentials.

The logistics of a walkout will vary by district. The states largest, Mesa Public Schools in suburban Phoenix, would close and hourly staffers would not be paid, Superintendent Michael Cowan has said.

The Dysart School District west of Phoenix would make every effort to avoid closing schools, but they would have to shut down if too few staff members show up, Superintendent Gail Pletnick has told parents.

Sara Bresnahan, a spokeswoman for the Phoenix Elementary School District, said a walkout is uncharted territory but its schools would try to stay open for as many students as possible.

Some kids will be coming to school and really need a place to be, she said.

Arizona jumped into a movement for higher teacher pay that started in West Virginia, where a strike garnered a raise, and spread to Oklahoma, Kentucky and most recently Colorado.

Raise rejected

In response, the governor offered 20 percent raises that drew support from the business community and some school organizations. But others were concerned about finding the money to cover a plan that would cost about $650 million when fully implemented.

The Arizona PTA pulled its support for the proposal, saying its analysis showed the finances were not realistic. An education advocacy group, Save Our Schools Arizona, said its worried the plan isnt a sustainable or comprehensive way to reinvest in schools.

Legislative budget analysts this week predicted a $265 million deficit in 2020 if the governors plan is approved. Duceys office strongly disputes that analysis, saying much of the funding comes from revenue increases.

Nancy Maglio, a teacher at Magee Middle School in southern Arizonas Tucson Unified School District, said teachers are motivated to walk out and demand funding because of what it means for their students.

None of us went to school, none of us spent money on tuition, on books, none of us spend our time and our energy to not care, she said. We went into a field where caring is mandatory.
On a hot summer day in 1978, as her husband mulled his first presidential run, Barbara Bush headed to Houston's leafy Memorial Park for a jog while she thought about what issues she'd like to focus on should she become first lady.

Bush was concerned about stubborn societal problems like crime, the homeless, drugs and hunger. But as she ran, the then-53-year-old came to the realization that teaching more people to read could help decrease the other major problems, which can grow out of lack of literacy and educational opportunity.

"After much thought, I realized everything I worried about would be better if more people could read, write and comprehend,'' Bush wrote in her 1994 autobiography, "Barbara Bush: A Memoir."

It would be another decade before Bush became first lady, but, in the interval, she was active in literacy programs. In March 1989, mere weeks into her husband's presidency, she founded the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy.

"We love that story," said Lauren Sproull, the foundation's spokeswoman. "It really shows that, from the very beginning, the moment she even thought that she might become first lady one day, she immediately turned her thoughts to, `How can I do the most good?' `How can I help the most people?'"

The foundation has since raised more than $110 million to create or support literacy programs for men, women and children in all 50 states. Its programs include classes to help teenage mothers who left high school earn GED diplomas in Georgia, and teaching non-English speakers in Alabama the language and how to transfer what they learn to their pre-kindergarten-age children before they start school.

One in four American adults can't read above a fifth-grade level, the foundation says. A 2003 study by the National Center for Education Statistics found that nearly 15 percent of Americans lacked basic reading and comprehension skills. It took more than a decade to compile, though, and hasn't been repeated.

For years, the foundation offered grants to fund new literacy programs or bolster existing ones, but since 2012 has focused on creating direct models that use technology to reach adults and children, many of whom weren't always able to attend traditional, classroom-style programs.

The foundation says it has helped "easily hundreds of thousands" of people across the country over the years, but doesn't have a full count of everyone enrolled in programs it supported.

Bush died Tuesday at her Houston home at the age of 92. To mark her 90th birthday in June 2015, the foundation launched the $7 million adult literacy XPRIZE, a competition in which teams are tasked with creating mobile apps that can improve adult literacy within 12 months. The foundation has announced eight semifinalists whose apps are being field-tested among about 11,000 people in Dallas, Philadelphia and Los Angeles.

Bush remained active with the foundation until as recently as two months ago, participating via video chat at one of its reading events. Her daughter, Doro Bush Koch, is now the foundation's honorary chairwoman, and it is based in Tallahassee, where her son, Jeb, lived as Florida governor from 1999 until 2007.

Bush also wrote two books about her dogs' lives, 1984's "C. Fred's Story" and "Millie's Book," in 1990, and donated the proceeds to family literacy programs. In 2013, her son Neil, and his wife Maria, created the Barbara Bush Houston Literacy Foundation, which promotes literacy among people of all ages in the country's fourth-largest city.

Laura Bush, who was first lady while Barbara's son George W. was president, told Fox Business Network on Wednesday that her mother-in-law believed "if everyone could read and write, a lot of problems would be solved.''
Sixteen government employees have been detained in Cameroon for allegedly leaking official documents on social media since the start of the year.

In an increasingly common phenomenon, the texts of President Paul Biya's two most recent nationwide addresses were circulating before he even delivered them.

And in March, a confidential presidential memo began circulating on the country's social media sites. The memo instructed security agencies to restrict travel for about two dozen senior state workers accused of stealing state funds.



Three police officers are now behind bars awaiting trial in connection with that leak.



In April, another confidential presidential order surfaced online. This one increased the allowances of soldiers deployed to the turbulent English-speaking regions. Two defense ministry staffers were called up for questioning.



Rights groups have long criticized Cameroon and other African governments, for being overly opaque.



Cameroon-born analyst Tem Fuh Mbuh, with the Dakar-based Open Society Initiative for West Africa, said the crackdown is part of a broader campaign against dissent.

"It is not only about those who are leaking official information, but there has been [a] systematic crackdown against all those who try to dissent in Cameroon," he said. "So it's a very alarming situation, and civic space in Cameroon has been closing very considerably in the last few years."

Mbuh said this is particularly concerning ahead of the country's elections in the later part of 2018.

Transparency vs. stability



Often, the response from African governments is that transparency must take a back seat to stability.



In March, Cameroon's Prime Minister Philomen Yang said leaking sensitive official documents threatens both the Biya administration and national security. His office declined VOA's request for an interview.



Lawyers for state employees detained over alleged leaks declined to comment to VOA as the cases are ongoing.

But at a documentation center in Yaounde, VOA found several government workers either printing or typing documents from their offices. They say they lacked the necessary computer equipment or had run short of ink.



Information technology specialist, Peter Suife, said state workers need education on dealing with sensitive information electronically.



"You have government offices that have computers, the operators of these computers don't know how to probably store some documents in their files," he said. "When they type, they take the key to a documentation center for printing. After printing, they are supposed to cancel what they have printed in that documentation, rather than allow it in the machine. Tomorrow, you see the documents already on streets before the state ever makes a statement."



The law in Cameroon says government employees must protect classified and confidential materials. Failure to do so could lead to dismissal, as well as penalties ranging from a $10 (5000 CFA) fine to as much as one year's imprisonment.
Australian warships were challenged by the Chinese military in the disputed South China Sea earlier this month, the Australian Broadcasting Corp reported Friday, citing Australian defense officials.

The Australian Defense Department confirmed that three ships had recently traveled to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam but declined to comment on "operational details related to ships transiting the South China Sea."

The ABC cited one official saying the exchanges with the Chinese navy were polite but "robust."

"The Australian Defense Force has maintained a robust program of international engagement with countries in and around the South China Sea for decades," the Defense Department said in a statement emailed to Reuters.

China recently completed a massive military drill in the South China Sea, where its claims are hotly disputed by Vietnam as well as the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, in London for the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting, also declined to confirm the interaction between the Australian warships and the Chinese military, Fairfax media reported.

"As they have done for many decades, Australian vessels and aircraft will continue to exercise rights under international law to freedom of navigation and overflight, including in the South China Sea," the Defense Department said.

China's construction of islands and military facilities in the South China Sea, through which some $3 trillion in trade passes annually, has sparked concerns Beijing is seeking to restrict free movement and extend its strategic reach.

The United States has conducted "freedom of navigation patrols" through the South China Sea, stoking tensions with China which says it will protect its sovereignty.

The Australian navy ships Anzac, Toowoomba and Success are on a three-month deployment in South East Asia, which will involve exercises with a number of countries in the region, the Defense Department said in a separate statement on April 17.

The Toowoomba sailed to Vietnam from Malaysia, while the other two Australian warships went through the South China Sea from Subic Bay in the Philippines.
Chinas opening of its southernmost province to visa-free foreign tourism next month could make features in a nearby, widely disputed sea more accessible to curious travelers.

Hainan province will waive Chinese visas for citizens of 59 countries starting May 1, state-run media say. On their 30-day visa-free stays, some may be able to set foot on Chinese claims among the reefs and atolls southeast of Hainan as part of the provinces free-trade port ambitions, said Zhao Xijun, deputy School of Finance dean at Renmin University of China.

Some of those features belong to the Paracel Islands, an archipelago that China controls but that Taiwan and Vietnam also call their own.

This is something for the future. Its not just for outside visitors, but domestic travelers also will try hard in this direction, Zhao said.

Sending a message through tourism

Opening the Paracels to foreign travelers would help China politically, some analysts say.

Beijing could show people from many countries it has effective administration over the contested sea, said Collin Koh, maritime security research fellow at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Other countries would be unlikely to hassle China if they knew foreign tourists were at sea, he added.

It allows China to assert its sovereignty claim and, not just that, its also to highlight that it does have effective administration over the area, Koh said. It actually gives you additional security, because if you have foreigners from different countries all over the world in that place, it decreases the chance of any other people taking rash actions against you.

Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines claim parts of the South China Sea, which is valued for fisheries and undersea energy reserves. China and Taiwan call the whole 3.5 million-square-kilometer sea their own.

Military expansion

The other countries resent Chinas expansion of islets in the Paracel and Spratly chains for military use. China, which has Asias strongest armed forces, is building on at least three Paracel islands, an American think tank project said last year.

Woody Island, the most developed Paracel feature, has a resident population of about 1,000 people. Facilities include an airstrip and missile batteries as well as a hospital and a supermarket.

Its unclear whether foreign tourists are now allowed to visit the Paracels, a spokesperson with the Chinese travel booking service Ctrip.com said.

A publicist with the city of Sanya, a southern Hainan resort city and the one closest to the Paracels, said Friday the municipal government website would eventually post information on who can visit the South China Sea.

Tourist expectations

Paracel tourists would expect China to keep the marine environment clean so they can see pristine scenery, said Lin Qi, assistant researcher with the National Institute for South China Sea Studies in Hainan province.

From the openness to tourism perspective, you definitely need a place with a good natural environment to give it value, Lin said. The corresponding impact is that other industries such as fishing will decline. If tourism opens then commercial fishing would be cut back a lot.

Rugged but feasible travel

China is already trying to open tourism to the disputed sea, with a long-term goal of letting people surf and dive in the tropical waters.

Chinas first cruise ship set out for the Paracel chain in 2013, and in 2016 a Chinese airline opened charter flights from the Hainan provincial capital Haikou to Woody Island. In March 2017, a cruise ship from China took 300 people to the Paracels, and Vietnam protested on grounds that it has sovereignty.

Amphibious private aircraft can reach the tiny islets with no airports, said Michael Shih, vice president for strategy and business development with Textron Aviation in Shanghai. Aerial tourism is already being done in Hainan province, he added.

I believe the 208 could get to some of them or most of them, Shih said, referring to the Cessna 208 Caravan turboprop aircraft. Obviously, some of those that are further out, they may have to stop somewhere for fuel. If its a sea-based operation, you dont really need a landing strip or a runway.

The islands under Chinas control lack tourist-caliber infrastructure, such as hotels and potable water. Those shortcomings could limit arrivals, Zhao said.

Maritime leisure is a developing industry in China. Infrastructure and overall levels development are still in a low state, he said.

Malaysia and Vietnam are also opening tiny islets in the disputed sea to tourists as a way of proving claims. Countries that promote tourism may hope to advance their political claims, said Christian de Guzman, vice president and senior credit officer with Moodys in Singapore.
China has made a series of market opening pledges over the past week, but analysts said the moves are unlikely to help Beijing and Washington take any steps toward resolving their differences or advance negotiations. Instead, frustrations are growing as punitive trade actions pile up.

China has pledged specific steps to open up its financial and insurance sector with milestones set for June and again before the end of this year. It has also addressed a key concern of President Donald Trump, pledging to significantly cut 25 percent tariffs on automobile imports this year.

Beijing also says that by 2020, electric vehicle automakers will no longer have to enter into a joint venture to avoid tariffs and gain access to the Chinese market.

Promises, promises

However, the moves have left few impressed, analysts said.

Paul Haenle, director of the Beijing-based Tsinghua-Carnegie Center for Global Policy, said that until tangible action is taken, the U.S. will continue to be skeptical that such announcements amount to anything more than symbolic gestures that will take years (if ever) to materialize.

Beijing has shown again and again that they are only willing to make significant policy changes when it is in their interests to do so, not in response to international pressure (something we have seen play out in their approach to the Korean peninsula), Haenle told VOA in an emailed response.

With Chinese companies now dominating the financial and insurance sector, allowing foreign companies to come in is less of a threat and ultimately will benefit domestic enterprises more than it does foreign companies, analysts said.

The move will also help insulate China against complaints at the World Trade Organization for its long-delayed refusal to open up the sector. It is also likely to be a welcome relief for the finance sector where risks and ballooning debt have been a persistent concern, analysts said.

Made in China 2025

Some see the moves as a sign that Beijing is responding and is serious about pushing forward with its efforts to open up market access, said Erlend Ek, a trade research manager at the research group, China Policy.

China is actually using this pressure to push the SOEs (State Owned Enterprises) and push the domestic protectionists and that might take some time, but it is in their national interest to open up, Ek said.

Analysts note that while the trade rhetoric on both sides continues to heat up, the two sides are still talking behind the scenes. However, growing frustrations are making that increasingly difficult, they said.

The United States wants a more reciprocal relationship and for Beijing to tone down its Made in China 2025 industrial policy, said Haenle. The United States and other countries argue that Made in China 2025 discriminates against foreign imports and forces technology transfers.

The U.S. is fed up with Chinese promises of change followed by little to no tangible action, Haenle said. On the other hand, Chinese are frustrated with a lack of clarity on the part of the U.S. regarding what exactly needs to be done in order for trade relations to normalize.

The Chinese also feel they've already made significant concessions to lower the trade deficit and now are beginning to wonder if the debate is more than a matter of U.S. domestic politics and technical economic issues.

Fight for the future

That concern reached near fever pitch levels this week as the United States announced a seven-year ban on the sale of American components to Chinese cellphone maker ZTE Corporation.

Beijing has characterized the move as an effort to contain Chinas technological rise. The communist party-backed Global Times has warned that Beijing will hit back in the best way it knows and inflict losses for American companies in China.

But more investigations are underway, notes Xu Chenggang, an economics professor at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business and the pressure on Chinese companies will continue to build.

Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal reported that the United States may launch a fresh trade complaint into Chinas restrictions on cloud computing and high-tech services.

That pressure it is going to be very painful (for Chines firms), Xu said, adding that Beijing is likely to give a couple of concrete concessions in response. Otherwise I don't see what else they can do, without these key components, these companies will not be able to produce anything.

Chinese strategists see trade frictions as a fight for dominance in the next wave of technologies such as big data, cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI), said China Policys Ek.

It is not about now, but it is really about the future in 2025-2030. It is about getting there first, Ek said. I think the U.S. is quite scared of China and this state-supported model. Traditionally it hasn't been very efficient, but they see that it has got some results because they have this massive population.

China's massive population and market is a huge advantage in developing data, AI and so on, Ek said. It is a huge carrot that the Chinese government can use to compel foreign companies to accept strong-arm tactics on market access. It is also large enough to nurture information technology companies in a protected environment at home until they are ready to go abroad.
A planned national high school walkout for gun control on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine shooting Friday wont include student protests at the Colorado school that changed the way the nation viewed shootings.

Just as it has done every year since the April 20, 1999, shooting killed 12 students and a teacher, Columbine High School will be closed, and students there will stick with their tradition of holding a day of service to commemorate the tragedy in a community that includes both those who have pushed for gun control and to arm teachers.

WATCH: US Students Plan Mass Walkout on Anniversary of Columbine Massacre

Junior Kaylee Tyner, who helped organize a walkout at the school March 14, said the anniversary is a day to remember those lost in the shooting and those they left behind and politicizing it could divide the community.

Every other day can be a day to push for change, said Tyner, who wishes organizers of the national walkout had reached out to the Columbine community first. But that is a day to respect victims and their families.

Columbine tradition

In a letter to other high schools in its suburban Denver district earlier last week, current Columbine principal Scott Christy and the principal at the time of the massacre, Frank DeAngelis, suggested students join their tradition rather than participating in a walkout, noting that April has long been a time to respectfully remember our loss.

DeAngelis said he does not want to tell other schools nationally what to do. As an unofficial consultant to schools that have suffered shootings because of his experience, he said he has always told them to consider what their community wants, rather than follow a template. But if schools want to hold events to honor the Columbine victims on the anniversary, he said he would ask that they include a day of service since that is the practice at the suburban Denver school.

The message has spread to other schools across the country, leading some to question whether they should participate in the national walkout, creating confusion even among students at Floridas Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where the most recent school shooting massacre claimed 17 lives in February.

Some confusion

Douglas junior Casey Sherman, who organized a march last month that was attended by thousands nationwide, says school administrators are trying to keep kids from walking out because of Columbines request.

We all want to support Columbine in whatever they hope for us to do, whether that be walking out during school or simply paying your respects quietly, she said. My understanding is that Columbine was conflicted themselves as to what direction they wanted to go with it and as a result their message initially came out as seemingly a bit confused.

I know that Douglas just wants to do right by them, she added.

Douglas senior David Hogg, one of the leaders of the #NeverAgain movement, has sent some confusing directives on social media.

In a now-deleted tweet on Monday, Hogg said he was wrong to have previously said that everyone should walk out on Friday no matter where they were, adding, This is what Columbine community would like to see on 4/20. #Day of Service

Later that day, he tweeted We are still walking out however the Columbine community will be committing 4/20 to volunteering Once again we are still walking out We are still walking out We are still walking out We are still walking out (at)schoolwalkoutUS has been working incredibly hard on this.

Hogg has been encouraging students to walk out and register to vote. Some Columbine students compromised by holding a combined vigil and voter registration rally Thursday night.

About a thousand people, including a group of students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, gathered in a park near Columbine. Some held signs that read, Change Gun Laws, Change Congress and I Will Vote.

Nearly 2,500 walkouts planned

The National School Walkout website says nearly 2,500 walkouts are planned across the country Friday, mostly at high schools but at some middle schools and colleges, including the University of Cambridge in Britain.

The groups founder, 16-year-old sophomore Lane Murdock, who attends Ridgefield High School in Connecticut, says her organization has been in touch with friends and family of the Columbine community, saying weve been having a dialogue with them.

Murdock says it is awesome that Columbine is doing a service day, but that doesnt mean other students across the country should not follow through with the walkouts, which theyve spent a lot of time planning over the past two months.

Honestly, I just think theyre different approaches to the same problem, Murdock said. This is their day and theyve been working really hard and they deserve to raise their voice the way they see fit.
Shannon and her brother, Brandon, grew up on the property. After graduating from UCLA, she worked as a harvest intern and then in the office before receiving her MBA from UC Davis. After gaining experience working outside of the wine industry, Shannon returned to Staglin Family Vineyard in 2011 and today oversees all aspects of the business.

We are trying to make site-driven wines from our estate. Each year is different, it is a reflection of the climate, not the people, Shannon said. The Staglins began sustainable practices in the 1990s and became Certified Organic in 2005 all with the idea of investing in the future.

Shannon has been inspired by her mom, Shari, who has been both a professional and personal mentor. Shari has historically run the day-to-day of the winery and is tireless. She loves everything about the business  the wine, the people, the travel, and working in the market keeps her young. Shannon also notes all of the role models in the Napa Valley, including Cathy Corison, who worked at Staglin in the late 1980s, Celia Welch, who worked at Staglin in the 1990s, and Beth Novak of Spottswoode Winery.

Carissa Mondavi
In a series of startlingly candid conversations, President Donald Trump told former FBI Director James Comey that he had serious concerns about the judgment of a top adviser, asked about the possibility of jailing journalists and described a boast from Vladimir Putin about Russian prostitutes, according to Comeys notes of the talks obtained by The Associated Press Thursday night.

The 15 pages of documents contain new details about a series of interactions with Trump that Comey found so unnerving that he chose to document them in writing.

Those seven encounters in the weeks and months before Comeys May 2017 firing include a Trump Tower discussion about allegations involving Trump and prostitutes in Moscow; a White House dinner at which Comey says Trump asked him for his loyalty; and a private Oval Office discussion where the ex-FBI head says the president asked him to end an investigation into Michael Flynn, the former White House national security adviser.

Quoting Putin, criticizing Flynn

The documents had been eagerly anticipated since their existence was first revealed last year, especially since Comeys interactions with Trump are a critical part of special counsel Robert Muellers investigation into whether the president sought to obstruct justice.

Late Thursday night, the president tweeted about them:

The president also accused Comey of leaking classified information. The memos obtained by the AP were unclassified, though some portions were blacked out as classified. Details from Comeys memos reported in news stories last year appear to come from the unclassified portions.

In explaining the purpose of creating the memos, which have been provided to Mueller, Comey has said he knew there might come a day when I would need a record of what had happened to defend not only himself but the FBI as well.

Three months of Trump presidency

The memos cover the first three months of the Trump administration, a period of upheaval marked by staff turnover, a cascade of damaging headlines and revelations of an FBI investigation into potential ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. The documents reflect Trumps uneasiness about that investigation, though not always in ways that Comey seemed to anticipate.

In a February 2017 conversation, for instance, Trump told Comey how Putin told him, we have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world even as the president adamantly, and repeatedly, distanced himself from a salacious allegation concerning him and prostitutes in Moscow, according to one memo.

In another memo, Comey recounts how Trump at a private White House dinner pointed his fingers at his head and complained that Flynn, his embattled national security adviser, has serious judgment issues. The president blamed Flynn for failing to alert him promptly to a congratulatory call from a world leader, causing a delay for Trump in returning a message to an official whose name is redacted in the documents.

I did not comment at any point during this topic and there was no mention or acknowledgment of any FBI interest in or contact with General Flynn, Comey wrote.

By that point, the FBI had interviewed Flynn about his contacts with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, and the Justice Department had warned White House officials that they were concerned Flynn was vulnerable to blackmail.

Dossier worries

The memos also show Trumps continued distress at a dossier of allegations, compiled by an ex-British spy whose work was funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign, examining potential ties between him and his aides and the Kremlin. Comey writes how Trump repeatedly denied to him having been involved in an encounter with Russian prostitutes in a Moscow hotel.

The President said 'the hookers thing is nonsense, Comey writes, noting that Trump then related the conversation with Putin about the most beautiful hookers. Comey says Trump did not say when Putin had made the comment.

The documents also include the presidents musings about pursuing leakers and imprisoning journalists. They also provide insight into Comeys personal and professional opinions. He judges the administrations travel ban to be legally valid, and he takes a swipe at former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, calling her predecessor, Eric Holder, smarter and more sophisticated and smoother.

Congress gets the memos

The memos were provided to Congress earlier Thursday as House Republicans escalated criticism of the Justice Department, threatening to subpoena the documents and questioning officials.

In a letter sent to three Republican House committee chairmen Thursday evening, Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd wrote that the department was sending a classified version of the memos and an unclassified version. The department released Boyds letter publicly but did not release the memos. The chairmen issued a statement late Thursday saying the memos show that Comey clearly never felt threatened, and Trump didnt obstruct justice.

Justice officials had allowed some lawmakers to view the memos but had never provided copies to Congress. Boyd wrote that the department had also provided the memos to several Senate committees.

Boyd wrote in the letter that the department consulted the relevant parties and concluded that releasing the memos would not adversely affect any ongoing investigations. Mueller is investigating potential ties between Russia and Trumps 2016 campaign as well as possible obstruction of justice by the president.

Comey is on a publicity tour to promote his new book, A Higher Loyalty. He revealed last year that he had written the memos after conversations with Trump.

He said in an interview Thursday with CNN that hes fine with the Justice Department turning his memos over to Congress.

I think what folks will see if they get to see the memos is Ive been consistent since the very beginning, right after my encounters with President Trump, and Im consistent in the book and tried to be transparent in the book as well, he said.
Heads of state from across the world are gathered in London this week for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. The organization emerged from the breakdown of the British Empire in the last century, and critics say it has failed to shake off its colonial legacy. But as Henry Ridgwell reports, the Commonwealth is under renewed focus in London, as Britain looks for new global partnerships after it leaves the European Union next year.
The United Kingdom is proposing a ban on disposable plastic straws.

With Earth Day coming up this Sunday, advocates are asking everyone to follow suit and skip the straw.

Straws and stirrers are among the top 10 items found in coastal cleanups worldwide, according to the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy, which has been conducting annual trash pickups for more than 30 years.

The group says the ocean is littered with 150 million metric tons of plastic trash, clogging coastlines, ensnaring wildlife and even littering land far from any human settlement.

And each year, another 8 million tons wash in, according to a recent study.

At the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in London on Thursday, U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May announced plans to ban plastic straws, stirrers and cotton ear buds.

May called on other Commonwealth nations to do the same.

Skipping the straw will not solve the problem on its own, acknowledges Nick Mallos, director of the Ocean Conservancys Trash Free Seas Program.

But they are a tangible action that all of us as individuals can take that do add up, he said.

Its also about this mind shift that takes place when you start thinking about, Oh, I dont need a straw. Mallos added. It cascades into other aspects of your consumer decision-making. Maybe after (skipping) the straw becomes habit, you think about the next step you might be able to take to reduce your waste footprint.
The Basque separatist group ETA apologized Friday for the suffering caused by its decades-long campaign of violence to create an independent state and appealed to its victims for forgiveness.

We have caused a lot of pain and irreparable harm. We want to show our respect to the dead, to the wounded and to the victims of the actions of ETA. ... We sincerely regret it, the militant group said in a statement published by Basque newspapers Beria and Gara.

ETA is committed to finally overcome the consequences of the conflict and to not fall into its repetition, the statement said.

The statement comes as ETA, an acronym for the phrase Basque Homeland and Liberty, is expected to announce its final dissolution early next month.

ETA, designated a terrorist group by the U.S. government, has been blamed for the deaths of more than 850 people since the late 1960s in its quest for an independent homeland out of territory in northern Spain and southwestern France.

The group has been weakened by attrition and a string of high-profile arrests in the late 1990s and 2000s. The last known murder victim of ETA was a French police officer killed in Paris in 2010.
The FBI is offering a $1 million reward for information leading to the return of an American journalist who disappeared in Syria in 2012.

Austin Bennett Tice was believed to have been kidnapped while covering the war in Darya, a Damascus suburb that had been under rebel control until Thursday.

No one has seen Tice since a 2012 video. He was seen blindfolded, wincing in apparent pain, and saying, "Oh, Jesus," several times before a group of armed men in Arabic dress led him away.

It is unclear who is holding Tice and why and what their demands are. But his parents have said they believe he is still alive.

Tice has been a freelance journalist for such news agencies as The Washington Post, CBS and the McClatchy newspapers.
The first group of 53 Sudanese refugees living in Chad has returned home to North Darfur more than a decade after fleeing, the U.N. refugee agency reports.

The hope is that this first repatriation will trigger the voluntary return of thousands more, according to the UNHCR, which says the security situation in Darfur has greatly improved since February 2003, when rebel groups in the region began fighting the government of Sudan.

That war killed tens of thousands of people and displaced millions, both inside Sudan and as refugees in neighboring countries.

The 53 refugees, who left the Iridimi camp in eastern Chad on Saturday, are among some 300,000 refugees from Darfur currently living in 12 UNHCR and government-run camps.

UNHCR spokesman Andrei Mahecic told VOA there has been a significant reduction in inter-ethnic tensions and displacement in Darfur, and the agency has provided proof of that to the returning refugees.

"It is important to understand that these people came first on a so-called go-and-see visit to see the conditions, to see what their homes look like and so on before making their decision," Mahecic said. "There is a growing interest in returns and we do expect, as I said earlier, thousands of people returning in the course of this year."

Mahecic said the refugees are given transportation and a return package to help them restart their lives. The aid includes a three-month supply of food rations provided by the World Food Program.

The UNHCR and its partners are working with the Sudanese government to improve services in North Darfur, Mahecic said, noting the importance of rehabilitating the depressed area to ensure returns are durable and sustainable.
Editor's note: With four people working on (im)migration stories every day, we still struggle to keep up with all the relevant news. So, we wanted a way to keep you updated with the top immigration stories every week  the ones that will affect you, our international readers, viewers and listeners  most. We want you to know what's happening, why, and how it could impact your life, family or business.

Questions? Want to know more about an immigration issue? Email the team. (immigrationunit@bbg.onmicrosoft.com)

National Guard heads to US-Mexico border

At the start of the week, Homeland Security officials said some 900 National Guard troops are headed to the U.S.-Mexico border to help U.S. Customs and Border Protection staff and to curb illegal activity in the region, such as drug smuggling and undocumented border-crossers.

What to expect from this? Other presidents have ordered troops to the border, so Trump isn't setting a precedent on that front. Officials say there may eventually be up to 4,000 troops stationed in the four border states. VOA's Ramon Taylor is on the southern border this week and will have plenty to report in the coming days. In the meantime, check out his Instagram for updates, including this snap of a Mexican police officer reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Del amor y otros demonios" ("Of Love and Other Demons").

Seeking sanctuary

Around the U.S., dozens of undocumented immigrants with deportation orders are holed up in churches, where they feel more protected from the long arm of immigration officials. In some cases, their children visit them to keep the feeling of being a family going.

What's next? Trump and his administration have tried to target cities that decline to take action against undocumented immigrants, but as recently as Thursday, they've been stymied by the legal system: An appeals court said the federal government can't block public safety funds to these so-called sanctuary cities. Expect the legal battles to continue.

From desperation in East Africa to desperation in Yemen

Yemen has been locked in civil unrest  that escalated into a regional conflict  for years. Yet desperate asylum-seekers from the Horn of Africa still find their way to the country. But with a power vacuum and ongoing bombing from Saudi Arabia, "it is very chaotic and very difficult to really know who is really in control," a U.N. refugee agency spokesman told VOA. And there is no recourse for the migrants, who describe abuse and deplorable conditions. Meanwhile, the U.S.  in the midst of massive, Trump-led cuts to its refugee program  has accepted about 200 refugees from both Ethiopia and Somalia, and none from Yemen since the fiscal year began Oct. 1, 2017.

To compare how much has changed: By this time last year, roughly 600 Ethiopian refugees and 5,000 Somalis had come to the United States, but only 18 Yemenis, so that low number hasn't changed much.

Supreme Court backs ruling on some immigrant criminal offenders

The U.S. Supreme Court made deporting some legal immigrants with criminal records a bit more difficult this week, with a 5-4 ruling that addressed inconsistencies in what is considered a "crime of violence," and consequently grounds for expulsion from the country.

On deck for next week

On April 25, at 10 a.m. EST, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a lawsuit over the Trump administration's order limiting travel from largely Muslim-majority countries (Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Somalia and Yemen). The court will assess whether the travel ban, which is currently in effect, violates immigration law and the Constitution. VOA will be inside and outside the high court Wednesday for the proceedings.
Iraqi warplanes pounded Islamic State positions in eastern Syria with deadly airstrikes Thursday, the Iraqi government said.

The Iraqi army and Shiite Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) stationed in the bordering province of Anbar have fired rockets at IS pockets in Syria in the past, but the airstrikes were the first by Iraq in its neighboring country.

"Conducting airstrikes against IS gangs in the Syrian territory is due to the threat of these gangs to Iraqi soil, and demonstrates the increased capabilities of our courageous armed forces in the pursuit and elimination of terrorism," a statement from Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi's office read.

The statement said Iraqi F-16 planes conducted the airstrikes based on orders from Abadi and in coordination with the Syrian government.

The Iraqi defense ministry said the strikes targeted IS gatherings in the town of Hajin, south of Deir el-Zour along the Euphrates River in Syria. Raw video footage and images published by the ministry showed Iraqi jets darting through the sky and, in a separate video, dropping a bomb on a building.

The ministry said the operation was planned and carried out by the Iraqi Joint Operations Command, based on intelligence provided by the U.S.-led coalition.

A statement from the coalition said the airstrikes demonstrated Iraq's commitment to destroying remnants of the Islamic State terror group in the region.

"This operation highlights the capabilities of Iraq's armed forces to aggressively pursue Daesh [IS] and to maintain their country's internal security," said U.S. Marine Corps Brigadier General Robert B. Sofge, deputy commanding general of the coalition's operations.

IS has lost most of its territory in Syria and was declared defeated in Iraq last December. But its remnants are taking refuge across the vast border region between Iraq and Syria and carry out periodic terror attacks.
The case of Edgardo Mortara has roiled Catholic-Jewish relations ever since the 6-year-old Jewish boy was taken from his home in Bologna by papal police in 1858 and brought to Rome to be raised a Catholic. The move was ordered after church authorities learned he had been secretly baptized. Church law at the time required all Catholics to be raised as Catholics and educated in the faith.

Recently, the case has made headlines again after a U.S. historian, David Kertzer, found discrepancies between the Spanish text of Mortara's memoirs held in the archives of his religious order, and an Italian translation published in 2005 by Italian journalist Vittorio Messori.

The Associated Press this week located the Spanish text in the Historic Archives of St. Peter in Chains, a Rome church famous for its Michelangelo statue of a horned Moses, and compared it with the Italian translation. Here are the key findings of the AP analysis:

* The 89-page notebook-sized autobiography, El Nino Mortara y Pio Nono (The Mortara Child and Pope Pius) isn't actually Mortara's original, hand-written text, which Kertzer says was penned in 1888. Rather, it is a typed up, spiral-bound booklet prepared nearly a century later by the Rev. Juan Oleaga, a Spanish member of Mortara's religious order who also prepared a typed-up booklet of Mortara's correspondence in 1994.

* In a brief introduction to the autobiography, Oleaga wrote that he faithfully typed Mortara's text and that it was "fruit of a spirit that possesses the truth." He said Mortara died ever grateful to Pope Pius IX, who authorized his removal and took him under his wing, and remained close to his family "even though he never got to see them converted to Catholicism."

* Oleaga appears to have written a long footnote in the first few pages of the text in which he justifies the taking of Mortara from his parents and recounts a tearful reunion between Mortara and the Inquisition official responsible for it. That footnote  written in the same typeface as Orteaga's introduction and set off from the Spanish text with an asterisk  is seamlessly integrated into Messori's version as if Mortara himself had written it.

* Mortara's anti-Semitic comments contained in the original Spanish were removed in Messori's version, including reference to Mortara having "always professed an inexpressible horror" toward Jews. Mortara's original writings that the faith of his family was "false, contradictory, absurd, condemned by history and burdened by the 'ridiculous' which the majority of men condemn," was reduced in Messori's text to Judaism being merely "contradictory and surpassed by history."

* Messori's version removes references to the "neurosis" and psychological problems Mortara suffered later in life and omits a reference to his "violent" removal from his parents and how much he missed his mother. It also said he was "miraculously" cured from the illness that prompted his baptism. The Spanish text makes no reference to a miracle.

* Kertzer points out that even Mortara's original Spanish contains factual errors, including names and dates that were corrected in Messori's version. Mortara's account also includes an anecdote that Kertzer says has no basis in documentary evidence: that Pius, after learning of the baptism but before removing the child, had tried to persuade his parents to accept a compromise to send Edgardo to a Catholic boarding school in Bologna so they could visit him "whenever they wanted." Kertzer says that based on court testimony from the time, there is no evidence of any such negotiation and that when the police arrived to take Edgardo away, it came as a complete shock to the family.
A man linked to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, who was said to have praised "violent jihad," was captured in Syria by U.S.-backed forces more than a month ago, the Pentagon said Thursday.

"We can confirm that Mohammad Haydar Zammar, a Syrian-born German national, was captured more than a month ago by SDF [Syrian Democratic Forces] partners as part of their ongoing operations to defeat ISIS inside Syria," Pentagon spokesman Eric Pahon said, using an acronym for Islamic State.

The Syrian Democratic Forces are an alliance of militias in northern and eastern Syria.

"We are working with our SDF partners to obtain additional details," Pahon said.

The 9/11 Commission report, a Congressional account on the 2001 attacks, said Zammar was an "outspoken, flamboyant Islamist" who extolled "the virtues of violent jihad."

It said Zammar reportedly had taken credit for influencing Ramzi Binalshibh, who is accused of wiring money to September 11 hijackers and passing information to al-Qaida operatives, and Mohammed Atta, who led the attack on the World Trade Center in New York City.

U.S. officials have said that there are hundreds of foreign fighters and thousands of Syrian Islamic State militants in SDF custody.
North Korea says it has suspended nuclear tests and plans to close its nuclear test site.

The Norths official Korean Central News Agency said Saturday the country will never use nuclear weapons nor transfer nuclear weapons or nuclear technology under any circumstances unless there are nuclear threats and nuclear provocation against the DPRK.

The Norths military is also halting long-range missile tests and said the suspensions went into effect on Saturday.

The North said the government is making the moves to shift its national focus and to improve the economy.

Summit days away

The development comes less than a week before North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is set to meet South Korean President Moon Jae-in at a summit to try to end the nuclear standoff on the Korean Peninsula. The United States and North Korea are planning a separate summit, although no date has been set.

Following the announcement, President Trump tweeted the announcement is very good news for North Korea and the World and said he is looking forward to the summit.

Later Friday, the president tweeted: Progress being made for all!!

South Koreas presidential office said the decision by North Korea is a meaningful progress for denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

It will also contribute to creating a very positive environment for the success of the upcoming South-North summit and North-United States summit, a spokesman for the presidents office, Yoon Young-chan, said in a statement.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was a bit cautious about embracing the North Korean announcement.

We welcome it as a forward-looking move, Abe said, but an important thing is whether the move will lead to the complete abandonment of missile and nuclear developments in a verifiable and irreversible manner.

Frederica Mogherini, the European Union's top diplomat, said Saturday North Korea's announcement of stopping nuclear tests is a positive step. She called for an "irreversible denuclearization" of North Korea.

China, North Korea's primary ally, applauded Pyongyang's decision. Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said Beijing hopes North Korea maintains its campaign to strengthen its economy and improve living standards, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.

He added China would support North Korea through talks with "relevant parties" to resolve the country's concerns and improve relations.

U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres expressed optimism Friday about North Korea's decision, saying "the path is open for the peaceful denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.''

Britain said it hopes North Korea's announcement means that the country will make an effort to negotiate in good faith.

Christopher Hill, a retired U.S. career diplomat who led the U.S. delegation to six-party talks aimed at resolving the North Korean nuclear crisis, told VOA's Korea Service: "I think it is important to react with little caution. I think it seems positive, but we should be a little cautious."



On Friday, the two Koreas opened a hotline between their leaders, ahead of the planned summit in the Demilitarized Zone on April 27. The hotline is the latest step in an intense diplomatic activity on and around the Korean peninsula, initiated with the Winter Olympics in the South.

Japanese alliance

Also Friday, U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis met at the Pentagon with Japanese counterpart Itsunori Onodera for talks that included North Korea. Mattis said the possible talks between the United States and North Korea will not change the strong relationship the United States has with Japan.



"This is a mutually beneficial alliance between two democratic nations that trust each other. Nothing is going to shake that."

WATCH: Mattis on Strength of US-Japan Relationship

Onodera said the iron clad U.S.-Japan alliance must work with the international community to make North Korea abandon all weapons of mass destruction in a complete, verifiable, and irreversible manner.

Onodera said later Japan cant be satisfied because Pyongyang did not mention giving up short-and medium-range ballistic missiles. He said Japan would continue its policy of placing pressure on Pyongyang to give up its weapons of mass destruction, nuclear arms and missiles.

WATCH: Onodera: Pressure on North Korea Must Be Maintained

North Korea has defended its nuclear development and missile tests, in defiance of the U.N. Security Council mandates, as a deterrent to what it sees as a threat from the United States, which has 28,500 troops stationed in South Korea. But it has not launched a missile test since late November, or conducted a nuclear test since last September.

Trump struck an optimistic note earlier this week about the possibility of a denuclearized North Korea.

As Ive said before, there is a bright path available to North Korea when it achieves denuclearization in a complete and verifiable and irreversible way, Trump said.

But he cautioned that if his talks with Kim did not go the way he hopes, he was willing to walk away.

VOA national security correspondent Jeff Seldin contributed to this report.
Andrew McCabe, the former FBI deputy director, is very upset and disappointed by comments made by his former boss James Comey that contradict his account of a disclosure to the news media, McCabe's lawyer said Friday.

Andy has at all times attempted to, and believes hes been successful in, playing it straight with Jim, Michael Bromwich told reporters as he again attacked an internal investigation process that led to McCabe's firing from the FBI last month and a criminal referral to federal prosecutors.

The disagreement involves conflicting recollections about a conversation the two men had following an October 2016 Wall Street Journal story about an FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation.

McCabe says he told Comey that he had authorized FBI officials to share information with the reporter  specifically, details of a heated phone conversation with a senior Justice Department official  in order to push back against a story he felt was going to be unfair to the bureau and inaccurate.

Comey, however, has said McCabe did not acknowledge having done so and left the impression that he didnt know who had shared the information with the journalist.

The Justice Departments inspector general concluded that McCabe misled officials under oath about authorizing the disclosure. Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired him last month, and the inspector generals office in recent weeks referred the matter to the U.S. attorneys office in Washington for a possible criminal investigation.

Bromwich, a former Justice Department inspector general himself, said Friday that the threshold for criminal referrals is very low and that they very rarely end up in prosecutions. He said the investigation that led to McCabes firing was deeply flawed, unprecedented in its speed and accelerated so that McCabe could be dismissed before he could retire with full benefits.

Separately Friday, Bromwich announced the creation of a legal defense fund and said he was working with the law firm of Boies Schiller & Flexner to consider possible lawsuits on grounds such as wrongful termination and defamation. President Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked McCabe and Comey by name, and those insults have been amplified by the inspector general's findings.

The disagreement and contrasting memories have burst into public view this week, as Comey has insisted in television interviews that he stands by his account and that the FBI and Justice Department cannot tolerate lack of candor. He has said he feels conflicted about McCabes legal problems given that the two men worked closely together.

I like him very much as a person, but sometimes even good people do things they shouldn't do, Comey said in an interview with CNN on Thursday.

Bromwich also suggested that the disagreement was not personal, though he did note that McCabe feels very upset and disappointed by some of Comeys comments.

Andy McCabe and Jim Comey had an excellent relationship. They worked closely with one another. They relied on each other, Bromwich said. Andy McCabe looked up to Jim Comey. So we are not for a moment suggesting that Jim Comey is making things up or lying.

But, he added, Nobody's memory is perfect. People are fallible. And we think on this one that Andy McCabe has a strong and clear recollection and Jim Comey does not.
Comedy is a field still dominated by men, but that's changing. Among the trendsetters is Suzie Afridi, a Palestinian-American stand-up comedian. Afridi says she's probably not living the life her parents had wanted for her when she was growing up in the West Bank. But she says how else would a feminist Palestinian, married to a Muslim man, trying to raise a cross-cultural 9-year-old express herself, except by making people laugh? VOA's Samina Ahsan takes a look at Afridi's unlikely journey.
"I like to take pictures of the people because they don't have any voice of their own. Through my photographs I can share their stories, their words to the world," Renowned Bangladeshi photographer Abir Abdullah told VOA's Satarupa Barua. Abdullah documented the Rohingya arrivals in December 2017. By year's end, more than 700,000 Rohingya refugees had arrived in Bangladesh.
Kurds in northwestern Iran have gone on strike for a fifth day to protest Tehrans extended closure of border crossings that they rely upon for vital trade with northern Iraqs Kurdistan region.

Residents of the predominantly ethnic Kurdish region of Iran sent VOA Persian photos and videos of peaceful strikes and demonstrations in several locations Thursday. Kurdish news sites said the protests have spread to at least seven towns since they began Sunday. Those towns include Baneh, Javanrud, Mahabad, Marivan, Piranshahr, Saqqez and Sardasht. VOA Persian has received additional images of the shuttered stores and street rallies in these areas in recent days.

WATCH: Iranian Kurds Protest Border Closure With Closed Shops

The Iranian government has been blocking paths used by Iranian Kurdish porters to carry goods to and from Iraqi Kurdistan since December. Much of the local economy in Irans Kurdish areas relies on such trade. Residents say the border closures have deprived them of imported products to sell in stores, which have been suffering from a lack of customers thanks to widespread poverty in the region.

The official IRNA news agency quoted Banehs deputy governor Nejad Shahidi on April 15 as saying that Iran has been blockading the crossings at the request of Iraq to bring order to border trade and preserve security in border areas.

Shahidi also accused foreign agents of inciting local shopkeepers to go on strike and said Iranian security forces were on alert to control protesters in the streets.

Iranian Kurds who have spoken to VOA Persian dismiss official assertions that the border blockade is an Iraqi initiative, saying they believe Tehran is responsible because of Iranian influence in Iraqi affairs.

Saeed Jalili, a national security adviser to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, met with residents of Baneh at a mosque Wednesday, appealing to them to go back to work.

There have been no reports of violence in the five-day protest movement. But several Iranian Kurds told VOA Persian that Iranian Revolutionary Guard personnel had detained them briefly and ordered them to make pledges not to continue the strikes. Their accounts of detention could not be verified.

This report was produced in collaboration with VOAs Persian Service.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said that President Vladimir Putin is willing to accept U.S. President Donald Trumps invitation to meet in Washington.

In an interview with state-operated RIA Novosti news agency, Lavrov said that Putin is ready for such a meeting.

We are guided by the fact that the U.S. president, in a telephone conversation, which is a known fact already, there is no secret, extended such an invitation and said he would be happy to see [Putin] in the White House.

Lavrov added that Trump returned to the subject of the invitation a couple of times during the phone call with Putin and told him he would be happy to make a reciprocal visit to Russia.

Earlier Trump and Putin agreed on a possible summit in Washington.

Trump telephoned Putin on March 20 to congratulate him on winning the Russian presidential election two days earlier.

The White House and the Kremlin said at the time the two presidents discussed the possibility of meeting in person.
A roadside bomb blast in Afghanistan's eastern Nangarhar province Friday killed at least five civilians and wounded more than 10 others.



The victims were traveling to the Haska Meena district from the provincial capital of Jalalabad when their passenger vehicle struck the bomb, a local government spokesman told VOA.



Attaullah Khogyani said that four children and two women were among those wounded. He added the attack occurred in a remote village named Khataki, whichis not under the control of the Afghan government.



There were no immediate claims of responsibility.



Taliban insurgents and militants linked to the Afghan branch of the Islamic State terrorist group operate in Haska Meena and several other districts in Nangarhar. The volatile province borders Pakistan.



The United Nations recently said conflict-related civilian casualties have already risen to record levels this year.



The U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, or UNAMA, which documents civilian casualties, says the armed conflict has caused 2,260 civilian casualties, including more than 700 deaths, in the first three months of 2018.



Last year, UNAMA recorded more than 10,000 civilian casualties, including around 3,500 fatalities.
U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein told President Donald Trump last week that he was not a target of special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia

investigation, according to a source familiar with the probe.

After the April 12 conversation with Rosenstein, Trump told advisers that he was not inclined to seek the ouster of either man since he was not a target of Mueller's probe.

Bloomberg first reported the conversation.

The Justice Department told Reuters it does not comment on conversations with the president. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Mueller is investigating allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election and possible collusion with the Trump campaign.

Russia has denied meddling in the election. Trump has said there was no collusion and has repeatedly called the Mueller probe a "witch hunt," raising concerns he might try to fire the special counsel or Rosenstein, who oversees the investigation.

Under Justice Department policy, a target is someone who is believed to have committed a crime and is likely to face charges, while a subject is someone whose conduct is within the scope of an investigation, said Lisa Kern Griffin, a former federal prosecutor and a professor at Duke University School of Law.

The Washington Post reported this month that Trump was a subject of the probe.

Griffin said the assurance from Rosenstein was not significant, because the president could yet become a target of the investigation.

"It is possible to progress from being a subject to being a target if the necessary substantive and structural support emerges later," she said.

Griffin said one reason Trump was being treated as a subject, rather than a target, might be that Rosenstein was operating under the assumption that a sitting president cannot be indicted.
Demanding an end to gun violence and tougher restrictions on firearms sales, thousands of students again walked out of classes across the United States on Friday, aiming to put pressure on politicians ahead of November's midterm elections.

Timed to coincide with the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre, students left classes at midmorning, many waving placards with slogans including "I should be worried about grades, not guns" and "Enough is enough."

Organizers said students from more than 2,600 schools and institutions planned to take part.

WATCH: US Students Mark 1999 Colorado School Shooting Anniversary with Walkout

"Today is about being proactive and being empowered and really funneling all that energy and anger we have as young people into some productive change," one of the student organizers, Lane Murdock of Connecticut, told Reuters.

Olivia Pfeil, 16, a sophomore at a high school in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, held a sign bearing the names of mass shooting victims. "We're expecting change or come next election cycle we will support politicians who are listening to the voices of the youth," she said.

It was the second student walkout since the February 14 massacre of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and the emergence of a national student movement to end gun violence and toughen restrictions on firearms sales.

Wearing orange

Many of the demonstrators wore orange, a color that has come to represent the movement against gun violence. A 13-second silence was observed in honor of the 13 killed at Columbine.

Outside the White House, protesters sat in silence while they listened to the names of gun violence victims read aloud.

"[The Columbine killings] happened, like, 20 years ago, and we are still getting mass shootings in schools," said Ayanna Rhodes, 14, who walked out of Washington International School.

Two gunmen went on a shooting rampage at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999, leaving 12 students and a teacher dead before killing themselves. The massacre stunned the nation, but since then, school shootings have become commonplace.

Even as students prepared for their protest on Friday morning, news began trickling out that a 17-year-old student had been wounded in a shooting at a high school near Ocala, Florida. A suspect was arrested soon afterward, police said.

That gun violence unfolded about 225 miles (360 kilometers) northwest of the Parkland high school, where two months ago a former student killed 17 people in the deadliest high school shooting in U.S. history.

Despite widespread revulsion over the school shootings, the issue of gun control remains sensitive in Colorado and across the country, where the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to bear arms.

'Oppose them at every step'

Dudley Brown, president of the Colorado-based National Association for Gun Rights, said the gun control movement seeks to have the government take away constitutional rights.

"The main objective of these students is to ban firearms completely, and confiscate the firearms of law-abiding Americans," Brown said. "We will oppose them at every step."

In some school districts, administrators told students they could face disciplinary steps if they walked out.

In suburban Dallas, a dozen students dressed in orange chanted "End gun violence!" as they huddled in a parking lot across the street from North Garland High School.

Freshman Victoria Fierro, 14, said school administrators blocked the doors when about 50 students tried to leave, so a small group exited through a side door.

"They told us we would get in trouble if we walked out, and we told them it was a peaceful protest, we're not causing any damage," Fierro said. "This is over a serious topic that people are pushing aside."

The principal declined to answer questions from Reuters.

It was not immediately clear whether Friday's turnout matched those of earlier protests. More than a month ago, tens of thousands of students from 3,000 schools participated in the #ENOUGH National School Walkout to demand tighter gun regulations.

Massive rallies

On March 24 there were "March For Our Lives" rallies in cities across the United States that were some of the biggest U.S. youth demonstrations for decades, with hundreds of thousands of young Americans and their supporters taking to the streets.

On the evening before the walkouts, Colorado gun control activists rallied near Columbine High School.

Carlos Rodriguez, 17, a junior at Marjory Stoneman, traveled to Columbine for the anniversary and said he found a sense of solidarity in the outpouring of support.

"That's the only thing that's keeping us Douglas students alive right now: the distraction of fighting for our rights and advocating for our lives," Rodriguez told Reuters.

There was no walkout at Columbine, which has not held classes on April 20 since the massacre. Students were encouraged to take part in community service instead.
Breathe easy, Switzerland: The tiny African kingdom of Swaziland is changing its name.

King Mswati III announced it during celebrations of the 50th anniversary of independence and his 50th birthday. It appears to be as easy as that, as the king is an absolute monarch.

Many African countries upon independence reverted to their ancient, native names, he said. We no longer shall be called Swaziland from today forward.

The kingdom will be known by its historic name of eSwatini. The king has used that name in the past at openings of Parliament and other events.

Some Swiss have responded with relief as the countries often are confused on online forms.

It is not immediately clear how much it will cost the landlocked African country to make the name change.
Taliban insurgents recently forcibly shut down the services of private telecommunications companies in areas under their control in Afghanistan's southern Helmand province.

Residents said the action cut off their mobile phone service for the past five days.

Local communications officials said the Taliban "believe the Afghan government is utilizing private communication systems for military and intelligence operations," Omidullah Zaheer, communications director of Helmand province, told VOA.

"In a note to all communication companies, Taliban warned them to stop their operations," Zaheer added.

The insurgents reportedly forcibly shut down at least 120 communications towers, perhaps in a bid to disrupt Afghan military operations in the province.

Afghan defense officials, however, said the disruption would not affect their communications because they have their own communications system.

"Our forces have their own tactical communication system and do not use or rely on private communication services," Mohammad Radmanesh, a spokesman for the Afghan defense ministry, told VOA. The disruption, he said, "would only create problems for local residents."

The Afghan military recently launched an operation nicknamed "Nusrat" in Helmand to push the Taliban out of their strongholds.

Other affected sites

Helmand is not the only place that the Taliban shut down telecommunications services. Local officials said the insurgent group pressured communications companies to cut operations to just a few hours a day in parts of southern Uruzgan and Zabul provinces.

Private communications companies that provide mobile and internet services in the areas declined to comment on the issue, fearing their comments would upset the insurgents.

Radmanesh of the Afghan defense ministry did not rule out opium harvest season as a possible motive behind the Taliban's move against communication services. He said the insurgents want to prevent locals from tipping off security forces about Taliban presence in poppy fields.

Taliban insurgents get close to 60 percent of their revenue from narcotics activities, including smuggling and taxing local growers.

According to a report by the U.N. Office on Drug and Crime, the total area under opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan was estimated at 328,000 hectares (1,266 square miles) in 2017, a 63 percent increase compared with 2016.

"In Helmand province alone, cultivation increased by 63,700 hectares (+79%), which accounted for about half of the total national increase," the U.N. report said.

A new air campaign against Taliban financial streams began in November 2017 under President Donald Trump's new Afghan war strategy, which has destroyed hundreds of Taliban's drug-processing labs in different parts of the country, including in southern Helmand province.

Azizullah Popal contributed to this report from Kandahar.
A federal judge on Friday told lawyers for President Donald Trump's attorney Michael Cohen that Cohen needs to file a declaration in court in order to delay a lawsuit filed by porn actress Stormy Daniels aimed at dissolving a confidentiality agreement that prevents her from talking about an alleged affair with Trump.

Judge S. James Otero said Cohen needs to file a statement declaring that his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination might be jeopardized if the case filed in Los Angeles goes forward.

Otero said at a hearing in Los Angeles that it was not enough for Cohen's attorney to file that statement on his behalf, and he gave Cohen until next Wednesday to do so.

Cohen sought to delay the civil case after FBI agents raided his office and residence, seeking records about the $130,000 agreement that Daniels signed days before the 2016 presidential election.

After the raids, Cohen asked the judge to grant a stay for at least 90 days and argued that because the allegations in the lawsuit overlap with the criminal investigation, Cohen's civil rights "may be adversely affected if this case proceeds."

Daniels' attorney, Michael Avenatti, objected to the requested delay and said he was pleased with the outcome of the hearing.

Avenatti said outside court it was "clear to me Michael Cohen and the president do not want to publicly state" that Cohen intends to invoke the Fifth Amendment.

Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, has offered to return the $130,000 so she can "set the record straight." She argues the agreement is legally invalid because it was only signed by her and Cohen, not by Trump.

Cohen, who has denied there was ever an affair, said he paid the money out of his pocket using a home equity loan. He 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.

Trump answered questions about Daniels for the first time earlier this month and said he had no knowledge of the payment made by Cohen and didn't know where Cohen had gotten the money. The White House has repeatedly said Trump denies the affair.

Cohen's attorneys have accused Daniels of violating the confidentiality clauses more than 20 times and said she could be liable for $1 million in damages for each violation.

The case took on new significance last week when FBI agents raided Cohen's office, hotel and residence.

The agents were seeking any information on payments made to Daniels and a former Playboy model, Karen McDougal, according to people familiar with the investigation but not authorized to discuss it publicly. The search warrants also sought bank records, records on Cohen's dealings in the taxi industry and his communications with the Trump campaign, the people said.
Frances Emmanuel Macron heads to Washington April 23-25 for talks with President Donald Trump at a time fraught with trans-Atlantic differences  ranging from Iran, to trade, to the status of Jerusalem. Macrons is the first full head-of-state visit by a foreign leader during Trumps presidency  testament to the surprisingly close relationship forged between the two. But can it deliver tangible results? For VOA, Lisa Bryant reports from Paris.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in says he has encouraging news from Pyongyang about planned summits with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. U.S. lawmakers and experts are also weighing in on the flurry of diplomatic initiatives, as VOA Diplomatic Correspondent Cindy Saine reports from the State Department.
The United States has labeled China and Russia "forces of instability" because of their human rights records, along with North Korea and Iran.

In its annual global human rights report released Friday, the State Department singled out those four countries for violating basic human rights, including freedom of expression and the protection of religious and ethnic minorities.

WATCH: US: North Korea, China, Russia and Iran Leading Human Rights Violators

Acting Secretary of State John Sullivan said in an introduction to the report that the four countries "violate the human rights of those within their borders on a daily basis."

Sullivan said states that restrict freedom of expression and allow violence against members of religious, ethnic and other minority groups are "morally reprehensible and undermine our interests."

The report says Russia allows a "climate of impunity" for human rights abuses, doing little to punish those who carry out such crimes. It also describes Russia's government as an "authoritarian political system dominated by President Vladimir Putin."

On China, the report says the government carries out arbitrary detentions, executions and forced disappearances. It also says the government puts "significant restrictions'' on freedoms of speech, religion and movement.

The report also condemns the violence against Burma's Rohingya minority.

Sullivan told reporters that the United States was working with its partners to address the crisis in Burma, in which hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims fled the country after a government crackdown on Rohingya militants. The United Nations accuses Burma of conducting coordinated attacks against the population, likening the action to "ethnic cleaning."

"Those responsible for the violations, abuses and attacks must be held accountable," Sullivan said.

Sullivan also spoke about Syria, saying the "entire world is aware of the horrendous human rights abuses in Syria, including barrel bombing of civilians, attacks on hospitals, and widespread reports of rape and abuse by Syrian government personnel."

Human rights groups were quick to criticize Friday's report, noting that it had been stripped of its reporting on reproductive rights. This is the first year the report does not contain a section on reproductive rights since 2012, when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton added the topic.

Rights group Amnesty International said "reproductive rights are human rights, and omitting the issue signals the Trump administration's latest retreat from global leadership on human rights."

The group also criticized the report for not being critical enough of the governments of U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

VOA's Cindy Saine contributed to this report.
Students across the United States will march Friday to honor the memory of the victims of 1999's Columbine shooting. Energized by the momentum for stricter gun control since February's mass shooting at a Florida high school, young people have led the charge for change. Friday will mark the latest salvo in their nationwide calls for change. Arash Arabasadi and Jill Craig contributed to this report.
White House national security adviser John Bolton told Russia's ambassador on Thursday that better relations between the two countries required addressing U.S. concerns on election meddling, a chemical attack in Britain, and the situations in Ukraine and Syria, the White House said.

It was the first meeting between Bolton, who started at the White House this month, and Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov, the administration said in a statement.

Bolton told Antonov it was in the interest of both countries to have better relations, but Russia must address allegations that Moscow interfered in the 2016 U.S. election and poisoned a former Russian spy in Britain, the statement said. Moscow has denied both allegations.

The statement said the United States also had concerns about the situations in Ukraine, where Russia backs separatists, and in Syria, where Moscow's military support has tipped the balance in favor of the Damascus government in a seven-year-old civil war.
U.S. news reports say Wells Fargo will be fined as much as $1 billion for illegally selling customers car insurance policies they did not want or need, and for charging unnecessary fees in connection with mortgages.

This would be the largest fine ever imposed by federal bank regulators and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The fine is part of a settlement regulators negotiated with the bank.

Wells Fargo and federal officials have not commented on the reports.

The San Francisco-based lender admitted selling the unwanted insurance policies to hundreds of thousands of car loan customers. In many cases, the borrowers could not afford both the insurance and car payments and their cars were repossessed.

Many U.S. banks have enjoyed looser federal regulations under President Donald Trump's pro-business administration.

But Trump denied reports that Wells Fargo would not be punished, tweeting in December that fines and penalties against the bank would, if anything, be substantially increased.

"I will cut regs but make penalties severe when caught cheating," he wrote.

Wells Fargo previously paid a $185 million fine for opening bank and credit card accounts in its customers' names without telling them.
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Zimbabwe's Finance Minister Patrick Chinama speaks with Marvelous Mhalanga-Nyahuye of VOA's Zimbabwe Service on his visit to Washington for the IMF/World Bank meetings, and his government's ongoing efforts to revive the economy. Chinamasa speaks on push to end sanctions and attract investors.
Leaders from around the world are gathered in London for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.

Questions linger over the Commonwealths future: what is it for, and what role should the former imperial power Britain play? In her opening address to the summit, Britains Queen Elizabeth, the head of the Commonwealth, made it clear she wants its leadership to stay in the family.

It is my sincere wish that the Commonwealth will continue to offer stability and continuity for future generations. I will decide that one day the Prince of Wales should carry on the important work started by my father in 1949 by continuing to treasure and reinvigorate our associations and activities, Queen Elizabeth told delegates gathered Thursday at Buckingham Palace.

WATCH: Commonwealth Leaders Ponder Future as Britain Prepares to Exit Europe

The Commonwealth emerged from the breakdown of the British Empire in the last century and critics say it has failed to shake off its colonial legacy. Many argue the organization should sever its royal links  including Professor Philip Murphy, director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London, and author of a new book The Empire's New Clothes: The Myth of the Commonwealth.

The problem in recent decades, really since the 1990s, is that as the Commonwealth has lost its relevance, its lost any really major unifying issue to make it newsworthy, the only really newsworthy thing about the Commonwealth has been the Royal Family.

Imperial transgressions

The Commonwealth has made headlines this week, but not for reasons the British government intended. Prime Minister Theresa May apologized to the leaders of Caribbean member states, after it emerged migrants who arrived in Britain in the 1950s and 60s from what were then British colonies had been refused residency and threatened with deportation.

I want to dispel any impression that my government is in some sense clamping down on Commonwealth citizens, particularly those in the Caribbean, who brought a life here, May told the leaders of several Caribbean countries.

Speaking at the Commonwealth summit, she also later apologized for the role Britain had played in criminalizing same-sex relations in its former colonies.

I am all too aware that these laws were often put in place by my own country. They were wrong then and they are wrong now.

Campaigners say millions of gay, lesbian, and transgender people live in fear of arrest across the Commonwealth. Peter Tatchell led a protest outside the Commonwealth headquarters at Londons Marlborough House.

Thirty-six member states still criminalize same-sex relations. Nine have life imprisonment. And in parts of two countries  Nigeria and Pakistan  gay people can be put to death. Quite clearly the rhetoric of the Commonwealth is not matched by the practice of the governments, Tatchell told VOA.

Direction unclear

Despite internal tensions, the Commonwealth heads of government meeting has offered tangible progress: billions of dollars pledged to tackle malaria, a crackdown on plastic waste, and a rainforest conservation drive. It also offers a global platform for countries seeking investment, as South Africas President Cyril Ramaphosa said earlier this week.

We are trawling, going to trawl the whole world, right from Africa, Asia, Europe, and Americas, both North and South, to try and campaign for investments that will come to South Africa as we are proceeding on our route of building more confidence in our country, in our economy. And coming here, participating in the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting is an added boost for us.

Some British lawmakers want to reinvigorate the Commonwealth after Britain leaves the European Union. That will be difficult, says Professor Philip Murphy.

The Commonwealth is a rather difficult soft power vehicle for Britain. It may perform good works, it may channel aid through the Commonwealth. But its a reminder that Britain used to be the imperial ruler, the imperial master. And theres still a great deal of resentment about that within the Commonwealth.

Until that image is shaken off, questions over the purpose and future of the Commonwealth are likely to persist.
Some Zimbabweans attending the 38th Independence Anniversary celebrations say despite the change of leadership in Zanu-PF, a lot remains the same in the country. Of the new dispensation, Harare street vendor Grey Kusona says "it's just one bus which has changed the driver."
The organization representing more than 15,000 striking nurses in Zimbabwe vowed a legal battle unless the government reverses its order to fire strikers from state-run hospitals.

"We are forced to approach the courts to intervene," Enoch Dongo, secretary general of the Zimbabwe Nurses Association, said Thursday.

Nurses went on strike Monday to demand better pay, better equipment for medical facilities and a bigger budget for the country's fragile health sector.

Zimbabwe Vice President Constantino Chiwenga announced late Tuesday that striking nurses would be fired immediately and would be replaced "in the interest of patients and of saving lives."

On Thursday, Dongo said the nurses had not received formal letters of dismissal. "At the moment," he added, "we are still employed, we are still government employees."

Dongo said he'd seen accounts that the government was recruiting retired nurses to replace the strikers.

Dr. David Parirenyatwa, Zimbabwe's health minister, told state broadcaster ZBC that nurses who have been dismissed must reapply for jobs if they want to return. "I must add that we do want our committed nurses to come to work," he said, adding that the country is experiencing a nursing shortage.

Dongo accused the government of unwillingness to negotiate, saying that stance has worsened health care conditions.

Cancer patient Edmore Siyakurima, who comes to the capital city for routine treatments, said the standoff presents a health risk to patients.

"Some like us get medication with three-week intervals. If we skip when we come to get injections, then the medication we take ceases to be useful," Siyakurima told VOA.

Siyakurima said the burden also falls on patients' relatives and friends, who share in what can be costly and inconvenient trips to and from the hospital.

Moline Chindove had been getting daily treatments for her swollen feet at Harare's Parirenyatwa public hospital, named for the official's father, a former health minister.

"My family has gathered funds for me to seek treatment in South Africa, because the hospitals here are closed," she told VOA.

Zimbabwe's President Emmerson Mnangagwa has said he intends to revive the economy, which shrank during the second half of former president Robert Mugabe's 30-year-rule. Mugabe was pushed out in November.

"Unreasonable wage demands, or worse, obdurate industrial action will hurt this recovery process," Mnangagwa's spokesman, George Charamba, told the state-owned Herald newspaper, according to French news agency AFP.

The nurses' labor action follows a recent monthlong strike by Zimbabwe's junior medical doctors. On Wednesday, the Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights, along with Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, issued a statement saying they were "appalled by the government's arbitrary decision to dismiss all striking workers."

The Zimbabwe Teachers Union, which has threatened to strike next month for better pay, also denounced the dismissals.
Britain's Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson met with his Zimbabwean counterpart Sibusiso Moyo Friday in London, after Britain said it would strongly support Zimbabwe's re-entry to the Commonwealth.



Zimbabwe left the Commonwealth network of 53 mostly former territories of the British Empire in 2003 after Robert Mugabe, who had ruled Zimbabwe from its independence in 1980, came under criticism over disputed elections and land seizures from white farmers.

In an interview with VOA's Zimbabwe Service, Moyo said Zimbabwe wants to re-enter the Commonwealth, but has to first consult with stakeholders in Zimbabwe to reverse the 2003 decision made by then President Mugabe to exit.

Leadership desires that Zimbabwe rejoins the commonwealth. But there are processes which we have to follow and the most and critical process is the consultation of our own people who had made that demand in the first place, so that we dont leave our own population behind, so that we can consult them so that they can give us authority to formally rejoin the Commonwealth.

Britain praised President Emmerson Mnangagwa for impressive progress since Mugabe was toppled in a military coup but it said Mnangagwa, who became president following a military take-over, would still have to deliver on free and fair elections in July to win over Zimbabwe's critics at home and abroad.



Moyo - the general who went on state television in khaki fatigues last November to announce the military takeover - met Johnson, ministers from neighboring African states and Australia at a breakfast on the sidelines of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in London.
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain said on Friday it would strongly support Zimbabwes re-entry to the Commonwealth and praised President Emmerson Mnangagwa for impressive progress since Robert Mugabe was toppled in a military coup.

But it said Mnangagwa, who became president following a military take-over, would still have to deliver on free and fair elections in July to win over Zimbabwes critics at home and abroad.

Zimbabwe left the Commonwealth network of 53 mostly former territories of the British Empire in 2003 after Mugabe, who had ruled Zimbabwe from its independence in 1980, came under criticism over disputed elections and land seizures from white farmers.

The UK would strongly support Zimbabwes re-entry and a new Zimbabwe that is committed to political and economic reform that works for all its people, the Foreign Office said in a statement.

As Harare looks to rebuild its international ties, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson met his Zimbabwean counterpart Sibusiso Moyo and ministers from other nations over breakfast on the sidelines of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in London.

Moyo - the general who went on state television in khaki fatigues last November to announce the military takeover - also met ministers from neighboring African states and Australia at the breakfast.

Mugabe cast himself as a liberation hero but opponents said he drove Zimbabwes economy into the ground and made the country an international pariah. He was forced to step down in November during a coup and was replaced by Mnangagwa.

Johnson praised Mnangagwas record in office in the past 150 days but said a bellwether for the direction of a new Zimbabwe would be the election in July.

The Zimbabwe government must deliver the free and fair elections the people of Zimbabwe deserve and which it has promised, he said.

The election will pit Mnangagwa against a clutch of opponents including 40-year-old Nelson Chamisa from the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change.

David Coltart, a former education minister and member of parliament from the Movement for Democratic Change, said he was shocked by the speed with which Mnangagwa has been welcomed back to the fold after an unconstitutional seizure of power.

I am utterly appalled by the @Commonwealth18 and the British Government feting the #Zimbabwe regime, Coltart said on Twitter.

The West imposed sanctions on Mugabe and members of his inner circle, accusing them of rigging a series of votes - charges they denied.

Now Zimbabwe has said it will invite Western powers to monitor its national elections for the first time in more than 15 years.

President Mnangagwa has been in power for 150 days and while Zimbabwe has made impressive progress, there is still much to do, Johnson said. Thats why Britain, the Commonwealth and the wider international community will do everything it can in supporting Zimbabwe on its path of reform.

The UK stands ready in friendship to support a Zimbabwe that fully embraces the rule of law, human rights and economic reform, he said.

Additional reporting by Ed Cropley in Johannesburg; Editing by Guy Faulconbridge and Richard Balmforth
Stratovolcano 3562 m (11,686 ft)Ecuador, -0.08S / -77.66W(4 out of 5)1541, 1590, 1691, 1748, 1797, 1802, 1843, 1843, 1844, 1856, 1871, 1894, 1898-1906, 1912, 1926, 1929, 1936, 1944, 1955, 1957, 1960, 1972, 1973-74, 1976, 2002 (large eruption), 2004 (Nov) - 2005 (Jan), 2005 (June) - 2006 (March), 2008 (July) - ongoingExplosive and effusive.(5 days expedition to Ecuador to observe volcanic activity from close)

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From pop to folk to country, an all-female lineup of artists like Betty Who, The Burney Sisters and Brittney Spencer took the stage at this years Roots N Blues. After being canceled last year due to COVID, this year's fest was full of COVID vaccination cards as well as the usual barbecue an
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Around the world, the littlest creatures join the family.

Western lowland gorilla Calaya cares for her infant, Moke, in the Great Ape House at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. He was born April 16. Matt Spence/Smithsonians National Zoo
10:45

The blood-soaked body of a six-month-old infant was recovered from the basement of a building in Indore, a police official said.

Police identified the accused as Sunil Bheel, 21, claiming that he was seen in CCTV footage, at around 4.45 am on Friday, carrying the infant on his shoulder.

The post-mortem of the infant, which was carried out at the state-run MY Hospital in Indore, suggested that she might have been raped before being killed as her private parts bore an injury mark, a source said.





The child's body had injury marks on the private parts and the head.

"The body of the infant was recovered from the basement of a commercial building in Rajwada area. The accused, Sunil Bheel, had kidnapped her early in the morning when she was asleep with her parents outside the Rajwada Fort. The accused was sleeping close to the family," said HC Mishra, deputy inspector-general of police, Indore.

The accused and the infant's parents knew each other and were in the business of selling balloons, Mishra said.

"The accused is seen carrying the infant in CCTV images of around 4:45am today. He then took her to the basement of the building, some 50 metres away from where the family was sleeping, and her body was recovered in the afternoon," he said.

"The infant had an injury on her head. The accused probably threw her to the ground. However, only the post-mortem report will verify if she died due to this or whether she was smothered," Mishra said.

"We are going to arrest the accused shortly," he added.





The rape and murder follows a disturbing pattern emerging even as the country tries to cope with grief and anger over the kidnapping, gang-rape and murder of an eight-year-old in Kathua in Jammu and Kashmir in January. -- PTI
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WESTPORT  Camille Addario may be best known as the mother of New York Times conflict photojournalist Lynsey Addario, but Camille has a powerful story of her own.

The child of first-generation Italian immigrants, Addario, 78, spent her early years in a six-family tenement house in New Havens Fair Haven neighborhood with her parents and four brothers. At 15, Addarios parents divorced and her mother, Nonnie, moved Addario and her siblings to North Haven, where she raised them as a single parent.

Nonnie supported the family as a dressmaker and making alterations, and Addario and her brothers contributed whatever they could by working. She is really the matriarch of the family, Addario said of her mother, now 105, from whom she said she got her strength and stamina.

Despite the challenges, Addario remembers her childhood fondly. It was great. I always say I wish my kids had experienced growing up in the 50s because it was such a fabulous era, Addario said.

After high school, Addario said she wanted to go to college but there was no money for her to attend, so she went to hairdressing school in New Haven.

I remember I was looking in the mirror and I had this long ponytail and I pulled back my hair and I said, what can I do to make money without going to college and I thought, maybe hairdressing, Addario said.

After hairdressing school, Addario, then 20, moved to California to work at a high-end salon in Beverly Hills, but only stayed a year because an accident temporarily disabled her from working and forced her to return home. The things you least expect to happen will happen, Addario said.

Upon returning to Connecticut, Addario reconnected with a friend from hairdressing school who, after graduation, began working at the former Charles and the Ritz salon in Westport.

That friend, Phillip Addario, became Camilles boyfriend, and Addario moved to Westport to work join him at Charles and the Ritz. A few years later, in 1963, Camille and Phillip, now married, bought a home in Westport and started their own salon, Phillip Coiffures.

We bought this little ranch house. My father was a contractor and he added onto the first floor where we had a salon and built a beautiful apartment above, Addario said.

The apartment became too cramped, so the family, now with four daughters  Lauren, Lisa, Lesley and Lynsey, later moved to a larger home in Westport.

In her 2015 memoir, Its What I Do: A Photographers Life of Love and War, Lynsey Addario wrote that her familys home was populated by employees, clients and friends of her parents salon. The Addario house in Westport, Connecticut, was a kaleidoscope of transvestites and Village People look-alikes, a haven for people who werent accepted elsewhere, Addario wrote.

Camille and Phillip separated in 1982, however, when Phillip came out as gay and moved in with his partner, Bruce.

It was, to say the least, a little shocking when we broke up, but that all got ironed out and we continue to survive from there, Addario said of her divorce, after which Addario said she and her daughters banded together to make it through the difficult time.

Camille and Phillip kept the salon open following the divorce, but after six years Phillip and Bruce opened a new salon and Camille opened one of her own. Working as a hairdresser, Addario said she was always referring people to local doctors and real estate agents, and one day a client suggested Addario get a real estate license.

Intrigued by the potential for another source of income, Addario began work as a real estate agent in the late 1990s for William Pitt, which later merged into William Pitt Sothebys International real estate firm, where she works to this day.

In 2000, Addario closed her salon, but continues to maintain hairdressing clients at Westports Rick Garcia Salon. I love what I do. I sometimes think it would be good to just focus on one thing, but then I wouldnt be able to meet all the different people that I meet and would get bored, not that I ever get bored, Addario said.

Lynsey, who won a MacArthur Genius Award in 2009, is not the only one of Addarios daughters who has had a successful career. Lisa writes screenplays with her husband in Los Angeles, Lauren teaches media arts at a University in New Mexico, and Leslie works for Disney in Los Angeles.

Freedom enabled her children to grow into successful women, Addario said. When Lynsey told her mom she was going to Afghanistan to photograph in the aftermath of 9/11, Addario said she told her daughter, Oh, alright, have fun. However, Addario admitted having a daughter who frequently enters dangerous situations is not easy, and said the five days her daughter was held captive in Libya by dictator Muammar Gaddafi was the worst experience of her life.

Nonetheless, Addario said she never held her daughters back from their dreams.

I used to tell them: Do what you love, but try to make a living out of it. They did, and ironically, theyre all in the arts, Addario said. It amazes me theyre so accomplished. To think, how did this happen from two little hairdressers?

svaughan@hearst

mediact.com; 203-842-2638; @SophieCVaughan1
Anyone old enough to remember the 1982 film starring Richard Gere and Debra Winger will be delighted to learn that nothing has really changed in the best part of 40 years. According to the movie's screenwriter Douglas Day Stewart, he has spent fifteen years searching for someone who shared his vision of turning the script into a musical by not changing it noticeably. Nikolai Foster, artistic director at Leicester's Curve, was that someone.

What Foster and his team have done to create this world premiere is fill the story with authentically period chart hits, making it a veritable festival of nostalgia. And yes, in case you're wondering, that iconic final scene of the film remains in the stage version too, predictably bringing the biggest audience reaction of the night.

The autobiographical story of US naval officer recruits and their wayward love lives turned out to be a surprise hit, even garnering an Oscar nomination for its writer, who has also co-authored the new adaptation. It's just about possible that the good-natured plundering of rose-tinted memories will provide the same outcome for the musical's forthcoming tour, but it'll be primarily on the strength of the selected songs and the enthusiastic delivery of the large cast.

The idea of using period pop to supply the music for a musical adaptation of a fondly-remembered film is not new: over recent years we've seen Dirty Dancing and The Bodyguard, among others, undergo similar treatment. The problem with this approach is that pop songs are not musical theatre songs, and crowbarring them into service in a bid to tell a story is fraught with danger.

Here, for instance, the original lyrics rarely suit the moments they're intended to illustrate. The result is that they vary from the meaningless or ill-fitting in their context ("Family Man" and "You're the Voice", for example, are particularly jarring) to the comical, such as the evil drill sergeant greeting his trainees' impending graduation with a rendition of "The Final Countdown".

Away from the creaky structural wranglings, however, there's much to enjoy in Foster's large-scale production. Vocally, the cast are put through their paces as hard as any navy recruit and Emma Williams meets all the demands placed on her as the conflicted factory worker Paula. Opposite her, Jonny Fines as the rebellious young officer trainee with a whole bag of chips on his shoulder sings powerfully, even if he doesn't have the bad-boy twinkle of Richard Gere.

Musically, Sarah Travis has overseen arrangements and orchestrations of interest and intelligence, played impeccably by the nine-piece band under Michael Riley, and the impressive delivery of the familiar numbers is one of the great highlights of the show.

There's a surprisingly downbeat design from Michael Taylor  slabs of drab grey and industrial colourlessness  but it all counts for nothing when that last moment arrives. It may not have been completely earned by the previous two-and-a-half hours but you love it when it comes.
April 20, a.k.a. 4/20, has arrived, reminding Canadians that, ready or not, legalization of marijuana is on its way.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 20/4/2018 (1262 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

April 20, a.k.a. 4/20, has arrived, reminding Canadians that, ready or not, legalization of marijuana is on its way.

Some folks are already familiar, if not outright comfortable with the notion. Some are less familiar and would like to become more knowledgeable. Whether you intend to access cannabis for therapeutic/medical use; to relax and socialize; or as an aid to meditation or other introspective experiences, it would be wise  and responsible  to understand how to use it to its best and most economical advantage.

Since cannabis is a consumable, its useful to have a cookbook about it in your reference library. Sandra Hinchliffes High Tea: Gracious Cannabis Tea-Time Recipes for Every Occasion (Skyhorse Publishing, $25.99) is a good book to start with. There are a whole vocabulary, methods to learn and some kitchen tools to have on hand. Learn about these and youll be better equipped to ask questions.

Out of Humboldt County, Calif., Hinchliffe (@posyandkettle and posyandkettle.com) has drawn from her background as a home herbalist, an allergy chef, and an auto-immune disease survivor to develop recipes as well as information to properly prepare and infuse cannabis oil into tea.

Its not as easy as it sounds. First off, she points out that cannabis is not actually a tea and cant simply be dunked into water. It has to be processed by decarboxylation: a chemical reaction that converts the THC-A molecule to THC, which is psychoactive. There is one method here: (instructables.com/id/How-to-decarboxylate-cannabis/)

Hinchliffe provides a detailed method for infusing oil with cannabis in her book. (Sandra Hinchliffe photo)

Its not rocket science, but it is chemistry. She explains oily "cannabinoids can only be extracted into fats or fat solvents that can then be infused into other things like beverages." All of the extraction methods in her book do "decarb." Hinchliffe provides a detailed method for infusing oil with cannabis.

Once you have an extraction, it can be used in teas, tisanes, broths and bhangs (think cannabis-infused chai or lassi). Hinchliffe says imbibers can only be sure of accurate dosing levels by purchasing from dispensaries that use lab testing  which she recommends. She also provides her formula for determining how much is in each serving of her recipes.

So its not just chemistry  theres math, too. Because her recipes have a fast onset, she encourages some moderation, suggesting a wait time of two hours before sipping a second cup.

Youve heard the phrase "experimenting with marijuana." Theres a bit of that when creating "high teas" but once the you conquer the science, it becomes an art as you begin to master the enhancements that bring layers of flavours to the experience.

The "terpene entourage" is one creative aspect. Terpenes are the easily dissipated fragrant oils in cannabis and other plants. When cannabis is accompanied by terpenes from other plants, like specially dried flowers, the therapeutic benefits are enhanced. Hinchliffe details her drying method, which calls for the use of Senegal acacia gum, an acid like lemon or lime juice or distilled vinegar; caster sugar; a clear liquid which is applied to fresh herbs, fresh flowers, or fresh fruits and spices, and allowed to cure.

Sarah Hinchliffe says cannabis isnot actually a tea and can't simply be dunked into water. (Sandra Hinchliffe photo)

Once dried, the entourage also lends flavour and colour to the cannabis tea.

As complicated as all this sounds, it can be learned. You can read and re-read as Hinchliffe guides you step-by-step in making and presenting a beautiful end product. She also includes accompaniment recipes with attention to food sensitivities.

This recipe for tasting crackers is excerpted with permission from High Tea: Gracious Cannabis Tea-Time Recipes for Every Occasion by Sandra Hinchliffe. Copyright 2017 Skyhorse Publishing.

Twitter: @WendyKinginWpg

Arrowroot Trio: Tasting Crackers, Savory Rustic Crackers and Breadstick

A similar, yet savoury version of the arrowroot tea biscuit. This recipe will make three different treats, depending on what you would like to serve. The Tasting Cracker is a plain cracker perfect for clearing the palate while tasting tea, broth or even wine. The Savory Rustic Cracker is a flavoured flatbread cracker you can top with anything. And the crisp Breadstick is the perfect accompaniment for any of the savoury cannabis broth and entourage recipes from chapter 3 of Hinchliffes book. Its a great canvas for any flavour you would like to create and makes a fine dunking breadstick that doesnt turn to mush.

To make the Tasting Cracker, use the basic recipe here, which only contains salt, and roll out about as thick as a pie crust before cutting into any shape you want. To make the Savory Rustic Crackers, add double the amount of baking powder to the recipe and roll it out just a bit thinner than the Tasting Crackers.

To make the breadsticks, use the standard recipe for the Tasting Crackers and add whatever seasonings you would like. Dry cured olives, rosemary, garlic, whole toasted hemp seed, and sun-dried tomatoes are among my favourite additions to the Savory Crackers or Breadsticks, which can be rolled in coarse salt and a little black pepper before baking. Remember to chop fresh herbs or spices finely before adding to the dough.

The basic dough for these recipes is made with rice bran oil, olive oil or coconut oil, depending on which youre making. The Tasting Crackers are always made with rice bran oil to keep the flavour neutral; the Savory Crackers and Breadsticks can be made with the oil of your choice. Makes 12 to 24 crackers or breadsticks.

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1/3 cup (80 ml) aquafaba  the liquid found in a can of chickpeas (or more if necessary to add moisture to the dough)

1/3 cup (80 ml) rice bran oil (if youre making Tasting Crackers, you can substitute olive oil or coconut oil

1/2 tsp (2 g) salt

1/4 tsp (1 g) baking powder for the Tasting Crackers or the Breadsticks

OR

1/2 tsp (2 g) baking powder for the Savory Rustic Crackers

2/3 cups (88 g) arrowroot powder

1 cup (140 g) sorghum flour

Spices or seasonings of your choice

Combine aquafaba, oil (rice bran, olive, or coconut), and salt in a bowl. Combine the dry ingredients of baking powder, arrowroot, sorghum, any additional seasonings you would like, and baking powder in a separate bowl. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients until you are able to work the dough into a ball that can be rolled out. You may need to sprinkle more aquafaba on the dough as you knead to keep it pliable while rolling out.

Cover the dough and chill in the refrigerator for at least 10 minutes. Preheat the oven to 177 C (350 F) while the dough chills. Grease your cookie sheet with a little bit of the oil you used to make the crackers or breadsticks  rice bran oil, olive oil, or coconut oil  if needed.

For the crackers: Roll out on a flat surface to about the thickness of a pie crust or thinner.

For the breadsticks: Pinch off a thumb-sized piece of dough. As you begin to roll this in your hands, keep in mind this is gluten-free dough and may have a tendency to break while rolling  just pinch the dough back together as you roll into sticks on a flat surface. Your breadsticks should be thin and long. Once the sticks are finished baking (next step), they will retain their breadstick shape perfectly. Roll with cracked pepper, coarse salt, or any other spice you prefer before baking.

Bake for about 15 to 20 minutes at 177 C (350 F) . Cool on a plate for 20 minutes and then seal in a container to maintain freshness for up to two weeks.
Manitoba fish harvesters are setting up Canadas next big co-op to market their product.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 20/4/2018 (1262 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitoba fish harvesters are setting up Canadas next big co-op to market their product.

About 100 commercial fish harvesters met in Winnipeg this week with co-op officials, who discussed how they can form a co-operative.

MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS files The co-op is going to be for fishermen, owned by fishermen, David Chartrand says.

A seven-person steering committee has been struck to put the co-op together. Legal counsel from Taylor McCaffrey also was on hand to help with the business model.

"This is where and when co-ops work, where theres a motivated group who see an opportunity," said Audra Krueger, the executive director of Co-operatives First, based in Saskatoon, which presented at the meeting along with the Manitoba Cooperative Association.

But the interest is not just in Manitoba, Krueger said. Fish harvesters in Saskatchewan and farther west are interested in being part of the co-op, as well as commercial fishers in Ontario.

"This has potential to be quite large," she said.

"Fisher people are doing what they do best and thats harvesting fish. What they need is an entity that sells their fish and reports to them," she said.

The co-op would fill the vacuum left recently, when the Manitoba government pulled the plug on the marketing power of the Freshwater Fish Marketing Corporation.

The marketing corporation often was called a monopoly but it was really a monopsony where a single buyer controls fish stocks, thereby giving it marketing clout to obtain the best price for producers.

The Manitoba Metis Federation has also bestowed the fledgling co-op with $100,000 in seed money to help with start-up costs. The money will help hire a consultant to advance the co-ops formation.

"The co-op is going to be for fishermen, owned by fishermen," MMF president David Chartrand said.

"These people, its in their blood to be fishermen and they want to pass it onto their kids. But if theyre not making any money..." Chartrand said.

He plans to approach first nations for more start-up funds. He estimated more than 90 per cent of commercial fishers are Metis or aboriginal. The co-op is open to non-aboriginal fishers, as well.

"We supported the province in opening up the market but then they left the fishers on their own. These people are struggling to make ends meet," Chartrand said.

For example, fish harvesters were left owed nearly $1 million this winter from fish sales to the United States, for which they werent paid.

Other industries receive government help, but not fish harvesters, Chartrand said. "This is the only industry I know of like this that is not subsidized in some fashion. Whether its oil, farming, the lumber yards or mining, there is subsidization that occurs."

The big gripe for fish harvesters is the Freshwater Fish Marketing Corp. doesnt sell many of their rough fish such as mullet, said long-time fish harvester Arnold Asham, who sets his nets on Lake Manitoba near Waterhen.

Fish harvesters also felt they had lost control of the organization that was supposed to serve them. "With the FFMC, we dont have a voice. When we start this co-op, its going to be run by the people," he said.

Between 200 and 300 fishers showed up at an earlier meeting in February, Asham said. The meeting this week "was to get the ball rolling." Commercial fish harvesters sell in the range of $60 million worth of fish annually.

"They want what we all want: stability, security, pensions, health protection  and they want to be able to pass it to their kids," Krueger said.

Co-operatives First is funded by Federated Co-op Ltd. to educate rural and indigenous people and walk them through the process of setting up a co-op. If the fishers apply and meet the criteria of the co-op agency it will support a feasibility study for the new co-op.

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The steering committee will consult fish harvesters and establish how the co-op will operate. Fishers will be required to sign up as co-op members and pay a membership fee. There could be an initial and final payment on fish sales, similar to the operation of the former Canadian Wheat Board.

Chartrand recently met with delegates from China who are interested in purchasing fish from Manitoba.

"They want us to send them a bunch of fish to test them out. Theyre very, very interested," he said.

"China is running short. They cant sustain what they need for the Chinese population from the ocean. So we can be the fish farm to the world. We have 100,000 lakes."

bill.redekop@freepress.mb.ca
Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 20/4/2018 (1261 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

SUPPLIED Aina Ezerins, surrounded by her three young kids (from left) Ivars, Linda and Leo, in Winnipeg.

Aina Ezerins is described by her relatives as strong-willed, no-nonsense, private and occasionally goofy.

The Latvian immigrant came to Canada by herself in the 1950s and would rely on all of those qualities to get by.

Aina died March 10 at the Grace Hospital. She was 90 years old.

She is predeceased by her husband of 61 years, Janis Ezerins, who passed in 2015; her parents, Edward and Lisette Vulfs, and brothers, Edmunds and Harry.

Aina is survived by her three kids, Leo, Ivars and Linda; five adult grandchildren, Dillon, Kaitlin, Sam, Anne and Emma; and other loving relatives, like her godson Vilnis Vulfs.

"One of the things that I talked about in the eulogy was she was what I would call a post-feminist, in the sense that she was incredibly strong," Vulfs said.

"You would laugh at the thought of anyone taking advantage of her. She was just a no-nonsense lady. She really saw things very clearly and she was no ones fool. She was a force to be reckoned with."

Youngest child Linda stayed stoic while flipping through old family photographs with a reporter this week and discussing Ainas passing  much like her mother probably would have. It seems grief hasnt quite sunk in.

SUPPLIED Aina Ezerins (left) pictured with new friends she met shortly after arriving in Winnipeg in the 1950s.

"Im stone-faced right now," Linda said. "This to me is like back to back. Im still trying to get over my dads little thing and now this one with my mom. Im remembering things and old times and you know what? They were all happy times, they werent bad times."

Linda was her parents primary caregiver in their last years, living with them in the long-time family home on Valour Road and later visiting them daily in hospital.

Now shes cleaning out their old house, which has sold and changes hands in July. That means parsing through those happy memories, including the photos.

The handful she shares include shots of Aina sunbathing with her children at the beach; beaming next to her best friend, Dzidra Kuras; decked out in a chic blazer and skirt, during what must have been one of her first walks around Winnipeg; and standing next to a small army of fellow servers at the Holiday Inn (now the Delta Hotel) where Aina managed wait staff in the early 1990s.

Before that, she also worked at the Voyageur Inn, the Northstar Inn (now the Radisson Hotel), the Montefiore Club and a sewing factory.

One of the most recent photos of Aina was taken with her husband, Janis, shortly before he died. The couple looks as though theyre reacting to a hilarious joke, cuddled in a booth at the Half Moon Drive In where they used to enjoy hot dogs.

"When they got together, they were goofballs," Linda said of her parents.

The pair met at a community dance in the St. Charles area shortly after Aina came to Canada. They bonded over polkas and waltzes.

Janis was also Latvian, so they shared a language on top of their hearty senses of humour. They may have never met had Aina not been forced to flee her birthplace.

Ainas parents were wealthy farmers in a prestigious area called Zemgale, which means "lands end."

Vulfs has been researching his familys history and said some of the farmhands, who were likely Russian, warned Ainas parents they could soon be persecuted.

SUPPLIED Aina Ezerins stands in a field in Latvia shortly before immigrating to Canada in 1951.

"When the Russians/Soviets/communists invaded Latvia in 1939, Stalin targeted the wealthy and the intelligentsia and anyone who could cause trouble," Vulfs said. "And the policy was either extermination or (being) sent to a gulag or (being) sent to Siberia."

Ainas parents managed to escape with their kids in tow and their lives packed in two suitcases. They wound up in a "displaced persons" camp in Germany.

During the Second World War, Ainas older brother Harry served as a soldier and died during one of the first days of combat. The loss was crushing and one of the primary reasons, Linda thinks, Aina wanted to move to Canada  trying to escape the heartbreak.

Ainas eldest son Leo Ezerins (a familiar name as he played 10 seasons as a linebacker with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and Hamilton Tiger-Cats) said there wasnt much choice for where to go next.

"Apparently, they had the choice of Australia, the U.S., but the only country that would take her and the rest of her family  which was her brother, her brothers wife and my cousin Vilnis  was Canada," Leo said.

Aina made the journey first, likely as an "indentured servant," Vulfs said, arriving where work was available in Winnipeg as a housekeeper.

She never told her younger family members outright why she was the first person to trek to Canada or why she wound up in Winnipeg. Much of Ainas life before she had kids remains a secret.

"I tried to get that out of her, believe me I did," Linda said. "I asked her and she couldnt give a straight answer on that one, why she came first... as far as I know, I think she needed to get away from everybody, a new start away for freedom."

"There was a lot of pain and so there wasnt a lot of talk about family, about the reasons for why things happened the way they did in terms of immigration," Leo said, later describing his mom as "a very bright woman."

"So if anyone can manoeuvre through immigration and through those logistics, she could," he said.

Like many families with lost loved ones, the Ezerins still have plenty of questions about their background. Vulfs wrote a list of queries for his aunt, but never got around to asking them.

"So at this point, I jokingly am not in any hurry to ask her those questions," he said.

Ainas family held an intimate "celebration of life" for her at the Glen Eden Funeral Home last month. None of them calls the event a funeral because "rather than focusing on the burial part, youre focusing on the wonder of someones life  the beauty," Vulfs said.

They shared memories of the woman who loved spending time with her grandkids, playing solitaire at the kitchen table and watching The Young and The Restless and Coronation Street.

Aina liked to watch church services on television, too, but only when she was alone, Linda said.

"She would say, Go do laundry or something. It was her thing," her daughter remembered. "And I think it was because she missed my dad and she missed her friend (Dzidra, who died last December)."

Linda was the last family member to see her mom before she passed peacefully in her sleep at the hospital.

"I was there till nine oclock at night for visiting hours. I knew right away, I could sense it that she was going. So I kissed her on the forehead and said goodbye to her. And then I sang her a little song in Latvian that she sang to me when I was a child when I was sick," Linda said.

"She had a smile on her face and she knew that it was her time. She was ready to go."

jessica.botelho@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @_jessbu
When Prince Busime arrived in Canada as a refugee at age 15, he was so far behind in his education that success in school seemed impossible.

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This article was published 20/4/2018 (1262 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When Prince Busime arrived in Canada as a refugee at age 15, he was so far behind in his education that success in school seemed impossible.

Two years later, instead of dropping out and giving up, he will be one of the first students enrolled at a new school this fall targeting older refugee kids at risk of losing out on an education.

Freedom International School is a big name and a big idea in a small space in Winnipegs inner city. The faith-based school is being set up by board members from South Sudan, Burundi, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Canada. It targets newcomer students ages 13 to 21 whose reading and basic academic skills are at least two years behind their Canadian peers.

Too many older kids like Prince are falling through the cracks because they have so many challenges to overcome, say the schools founding board members.

"It hurts when you see those kids," said board member Birkity Mekonnen, an Eritrean refugee who arrived in Canada in 2009. "My background is from Africa, too, and I know that if the kids dont know English, theyre going to be lost." The teens who missed a lot of schooling  if they received any  struggle to catch up and fit in, she said.

"They feel lonely," said Mekonnen, a mother of two young children. "They dont feel like they belong," she said. Their futures appear bleak.

"Some are in the streets and dont have a good life," said Mekonnen. "We feel bad for them."

Rather than just feeling bad for the teens, they took action. "I want to help my community," she said.

They leased classroom space for the next three years at an inner-city building on Notre Dame Avenue that is being renovated by volunteers. Theyve lined up a core teaching staff who have committed to being there for the next three years without pay.

Mekonnen said shes known the new schools principal and teacher, Francine Wiebe, for many years and her experience with refugees and nurturing is just what the adolescents need. "Shes a mother."

The school, which isnt eligible for provincial funding for the first three years, will charge $50 per month per student for tuition.

The first 20 students enrolled for this fall have been assessed at reading levels that range from five to nine years behind their Canadian peers, including Prince. He has been helping to renovate the building where he hopes to complete his Grade 12 and prepare for further education.

Prince was a toddler when he and his mom and younger brother fled the raging conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo and made it to Durban, South Africa. There, like many other African refugees, they were not welcome. The forces of discrimination and xenophobia literally left a scar on the boy. In Grade 8, he was slashed on the right side of his face by a classmate who told him to go back where he came from. After that, Prince said he avoided going to school.

"I didnt like it," he said. "I wasnt feeling safe." His grades slipped and he started falling behind.

When he and his family arrived in Canada in 2016 as government-assisted refugees, they were filled with hope for the future.

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"We wanted to go to school and we wanted to learn and to study to make our mom proud," said Prince. Wiebe, who was vice-principal at an inner-city Christian school at the time, met Princes family and had him assessed to see where he was at in his education.

"I was way, way low in reading," said Prince. "There was no way I could catch up with how low my reading was." Its not for a lack of trying. "I try as hard as I can to be an average student." Hes hoping the attention he gets at Freedom International School will help him succeed at high school so hes ready for college or university.

"I have a career goal," he said. "I have a passion for videography."

He wants to pursue an education and dreams of learning about film and making it to Hollywood one day. For now, hes having fun making personalized videos on his handheld device for friends and family. "I need more confidence and to believe in myself."

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca
It's still rare for criminal cases to be dropped over court delays in Manitoba.

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This article was published 20/4/2018 (1262 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It's still rare for criminal cases to be dropped over court delays in Manitoba.

Nearly two years after a Supreme Court decision cracked down on delays and set new trial timelines that forced courts across Canada to figure out ways to speed up the process, less than seven per cent of unreasonable delay arguments have been successful in the province.

Of 76 delay motions filed by defence lawyers in Manitoba since the July 2016 ruling known as the Jordan decision, only five have resulted in charges being stayed, according to Manitoba Justice. Seven delay motions  two of them in murder cases  are still pending before the court, but that could just be the tip of the iceberg now that it's been more than 18 months since the Supreme Court's decision was released, said Scott Newman, spokesman for the Criminal Defence Lawyers Association of Manitoba.

The decision, named after a B.C. man named Barrett Richard Jordan who waited more than five years for his trial to wrap up on drug and weapons charges, set an 18-month deadline for criminal trials in provincial court and a 30-month deadline for superior court trials such as those held in Manitoba's Court of Queen's Bench. There was a transition period for cases that were already going through court when the new deadlines came into effect, but this month marked the first time in the province a criminal case was stayed under the rules set out in the Jordan decision.

"Were in a position right now where were seeing the tip of the iceberg. Only starting in January are we seeing that 18-month window hit. We know that courts and Crown attorneys are now very alive to Jordan, as are defence counsel. Nobody wants to see cases thrown out because they took too long, but we also dont want to lose sight of the fact that an 18-month trial shouldnt be seen as acceptable either. The goal should be to have trials resolved in a far timelier fashion than that," Newman said.

"Barely constitutional shouldnt be what were aiming for here."

On April 10, a Manitoba man accused of several firearm-related offences had his charges dropped because of unreasonable delay. The initial 33 charges against 43-year-old Trevor Ewanochko were laid by RCMP just 18 days before the Supreme Court's decision, but provincial court Judge Lee Ann Martin decided most of the institutional delay  21 months and 21 days' worth  happened after the new deadlines were set.

There were a variety of reasons for the delay in Ewanochko's case, and just one of the factors was that lawyers had to get permission to move the case from Beausejour to Winnipeg to try to get an earlier court date.

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The lawyer who handled Ewanochko's delay motion was previously successful in having chop-shop allegations stayed because of a 42-month-long court process that ended last October. Both cases happened to come out of rural Manitoba, where court doesn't run as frequently as in urban centres. That means getting timely and consecutive trial dates can be a challenge, particularly if the trial is expected to take longer than one or two days.

"In both cases, they ended up in Winnipeg because Winnipeg has enough court resources to do multiple-day trials," said Kyle Morgan, an associate lawyer at Brett Gladstone Law Corporation. "It's hard to get that in a rural jurisdiction."

Still, Morgan said he considers Ewanochko's case an "outlier," and not necessarily a signal of a larger problem.

"I think it's a case where you can't point to one thing that resulted in the overall delay," Morgan said, noting a variety of factors the judge listed in her 20-page decision.

"I don't think it's very common to have delay motions, and even less so that they're successful."

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @thatkatiemay
Crown Services Minister Cliff Cullen is seeking to hit the reset button on the provincial governments $67.5-million rift  and looming legal confrontation  with the Manitoba Metis Federation.

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This article was published 20/4/2018 (1261 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Crown Services Minister Cliff Cullen is seeking to hit the reset button on the provincial governments $67.5-million rift  and looming legal confrontation  with the Manitoba Metis Federation.

Cullen and cabinet have two weeks to change Premier Brian Pallisters mind about cancelling an agreement between Manitoba Hydro and the MMF  if not, the federation will take the province to court, MMF president David Chartrand said Friday.

"Well meet in two weeks to see if the reset button is done," Chartrand told reporters after he and Cullen met in the ministers office Friday morning at the Manitoba legislature.

"Thats all the time I can give. Weve waited too long to find our place in Confederation," Chartrand said, adding he would accept an olive branch from the premier if one was offered, despite the animosity currently between them.

"Premier Pallister is going around in St. Laurent and other places, trying to make me look like the bad guy. If he wants to slap me, Ill slap him back."

Fridays meeting had been set up weeks ago and was to have included Manitoba Hydro representatives. Thursday afternoon, Cullen and Chartrand accused each of cancelling the meeting, which was then hastily reconvened, without Hydro.

The dispute erupted last month, when nine of the governments 10 hand-picked Hydro board members quit, saying the premier had not met with the board for 16 months to discuss the Crown corporations critical finances.

Pallister, however, blamed the mass resignation over his order to cancel a deal between Hydro and the MMF, which would have paid the federation $67.5 million over 50 years. As part of the proposal, the planned $453-million Hydro transmission line to Minnesota would proceed without objections from the Metis group.

Pallister called it "hush money" to buy off a special-interest group that would rob future generations of Metis people of their rights, and set a precedent for similar payments on future projects, such as the $540-million Lake St. Martin flood-mitigation channels.

The MMF was outraged and announced plans to take the province to court and seek a judicial review. The contract was not a proposal, but a "turning-the-page" agreement between Hydro and the Metis people, established under the terms of previous court decisions on land claims, Chartrand said.

RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Crown Services Minister Cliff Cullen wants a reset on the process between the province, Hydro and the Manitoba Metis Federation.

"Cabinet did not agree with the proposal that was on the table," Cullen said Friday. "Cabinet was not happy with the proposal that the MMF and Manitoba Hydro brought forward."

Cullen said he hoped the MMF and Hydro could find a different path forward, but was vague about what that path could be. Money is an issue, he said.

"Obviously, money is part of the conversation... see what other options are out there. Cabinet clearly decided they didnt like that particular proposal," he said.

Cullen would not say Friday if he accepts the Metis have any land rights in areas the transmission line would cross or if he believes the $67.5-million deal was simply about paying the federation not to oppose the project.

He said he would meet with Hydro management and its new board soon, before meeting with Hydro and the MMF in two weeks.

What Hydros reset position will be on the proposal is to be part of his meeting with the Crown corporation, but the province has not told the new Hydro board what to do, Cullen said.

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"Theres been no directive issued," he said.

The MMF believes a 2014 agreement signed by the province delegates the authority to reach such agreements to Hydro.

That document was just a framework, not delegated authority, and cabinet is adamant the axed $67.5-million deal was just a proposal, Cullen said.

However, MMF lawyer Jason Madden pointed out the cabinet order telling Hydro to cancel the deal called it an agreement. When reporters put that to Cullen, he went silent for several seconds before answering: "Well let the legal people sort that out."

The March 21 cabinet order reads: "Manitoba Hydro is directed to not proceed with the agreement with the Manitoba Metis Federation at this time. Going forward, all relationship agreements, community benefit agreements or other similar agreements to which this directive applies between Manitoba Hydro and Indigenous communities and groups require review by the minister of Crown Services before being executed."

nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca
Crown Services Minister Cliff Cullen and Manitoba Metis Federation president David Chartrand are blaming each other for the cancellation of a crucial meeting over a $67.5-million dispute that threatens to delay the proposed $453-million Manitoba Hydro transmission line to Minnesota.

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This article was published 20/4/2018 (1262 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Crown Services Minister Cliff Cullen and Manitoba Metis Federation president David Chartrand are blaming each other for the cancellation of a crucial meeting over a $67.5-million dispute that threatens to delay the proposed $453-million Manitoba Hydro transmission line to Minnesota.

"We did not cancel tomorrows meeting," Cullen told reporters Thursday, of the gathering that was to be held in his office at the legislature this morning. "We just received a letter in the last couple of days, saying they werent prepared to meet."

The ministers statements were later countered by Chartrand, who said in an interview the MMF had lawyers fly in Thursday from Toronto to prep the federation for the meeting Cullen had called several weeks ago.

"Unbelievable," Chartrand said. "Minister Cullen cancelled the meeting today by email. Definitely, we were ready to go ahead. I guarantee we didnt cancel."

Chartrand said the MMF had written to Cullen, but the correspondence was aimed at finding out what was going on, not to derail the gathering.

"Were questioning the validity of it. Whats the meeting about? Theres no agenda, no letter," the Metis federation leader said.

"Our lawyers are watching very carefully they dont get tricked."

An enormous rift between the provincial government led by Premier Brian Pallister and the MMF broke open last month, over a proposed $67.5-million deal (spread over 50 years) which would result in the MMF not objecting to the hydroelectric transmission line project to Minnesota.

The public controversy began with nine of the governments 10 hand-picked Hydro board members resigning over accusations Pallister had not met with the board for the past 16 months over the Crown corporations critical finances.

Pallister, however, blamed the mass resignation over his order to the board to cancel the Hydro-MMF agreement. Pallister called it "hush money" to "buy off" a "special-interest group" that would rob future generations of Metis people of their rights, and set a precedent for similar payments on future projects such as the $540-million Lake St. Martin flood-mitigation channels.

The MMF was outraged, and announced plans to take the province to court and seek a judicial review. Chartrand said it was not a proposal, it was a "Turning the Page" agreement between Hydro and the Metis people under previous court decisions on land claims, and it was a done deal.

Under Turning the Page, Manitoba recognizes the Crown has a duty to consult with Metis when any proposed Crown decision or action might adversely affect the exercise of the Aboriginal rights of Metis.

Cullen later called all the parties to meet in his office Friday, though he didnt make public an agenda, the MMF said.

"We were trying to flush out an agenda from them," Chartrand said.

Meanwhile, Cullen insisted Thursday the MMF told him a steering committee needed to talk further before meeting with Crown Services and Hydro representatives.

Cullen wouldnt release the correspondence in question, saying it is confidential; but Chartrand provided it to the media.

In the April 17 letter from MMF chief of staff Al Benoit, addressed to Crown Services deputy minister Grant Doak, the MMF says the province has so far not provided an agenda or properly defined what the dispute is about.

"We will, therefore, be attending with the hope of better understanding what the Manitoba government has decided or done. Our participation this Friday is a demonstration of the MMFs willingness to meet with the Manitoba government in order to understand what it has unilaterally done, Benoit wrote.

Benoit implored Doak to provide information, concluding: "We look forward to hearing from the Manitoba government on these issues in order to allow for us to sufficiently prepare for Fridays meeting."

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The government, however, cited the tripartite steering committee regulations established under the Turning the Page agreement.

On Wednesday, Doak wrote to Benoit: "The MMF states that the issues in dispute have not yet been properly defined by the tripartite steering committee. According to Article 5.1.3, the steering committee must properly define the dispute before the matter is referred to the MMF president, Manitoba Hydros chief executive officer and the minister of Crown services.

"In response to this letter, we will reschedule the April 20 meeting to allow the steering committee to meet to define the dispute," wrote Doak.

Manitoba Hydro kept its head down Thursday, saying representatives would attend the meeting as rescheduled.

nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca
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Though it took effect April 1, a new Winnipeg bylaw banning smoking at outdoor restaurant and bar patios hasn't caused all smokers to butt out just yet.

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This article was published 19/4/2018 (1262 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Though it took effect April 1, a new Winnipeg bylaw banning smoking at outdoor restaurant and bar patios hasn't caused all smokers to butt out just yet.

Winston Yee, the City of Winnipeg's manager of bylaw enforcement, said in early March civic officers will work with operators during the first few weeks of the new provision to ensure compliance with the new rule.

City staff would only issue tickets for brazen, repeat violations at the outset, he said. (Yee wasn't available for an interview to provide an update Thursday.)

At Bar Italia on Corydon Avenue last weekend, smokers continued to puff on the front patio. On the side patio Thursday, Garry Walker lamented over the fact he had to leave his friends and step across the street to have a smoke.

"I wish there was just designated smoking, a certain part of the area where people could have one," Walker said.

"Im sure theyre going to lose a lot of business. Theres going to be a lot of people putting cigarette butts  like, look at here already," he said, pointing to butts littered around the Cockburn Street curb after the spring melt.

Walker's non-smoking friend, Ken McKwen, took a big-picture approach.

"My mother-in-law, who escaped the Nazis, had a saying: 'We all must learn to adapt to change,'" he said.

At Saffron's Restaurant a few blocks down, owner John Kolevris said he is planning to create a designated smoking area behind his building. So far, clientele has been okay with moving over to smoke in the parking lot or on the sidewalk, he said, although smokers used to dominate much of his patio space.

Bars and restaurants will be allowed to maintain "smoking only" patios, only if the outdoor space is not tied to the operations occupancy permit, a city official previously told the Free Press.

Kolevris put up a bright blue sign on his front door warning smokers they could be fined $200 for violating the new bylaw. Establishments can also be fined $400 for failing to ensure no one smokes on their patios.

"Now, I make sure nobody smokes," Kolevris said, joking he would beat up anyone who violates the rule.

MIKAELA MACKENZIE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS A smoker lights up across the street from Bar Italia's patio in the warm spring weather on Corydon Ave., Thursday. A new patio smoking ban on took effect on April first.

Kolevris said some families with children used to dodge the Saffron's patio and dine elsewhere to avoid smokers.

On Thursday afternoon, two moms with children in strollers were soaking up the fresh air on the restaurant patio. Laura Stone and Brittany Jay said they appreciated being able to bring their tots without worrying about shielding them from smoke.

"For myself, last year was a real game-changer," Jay said. "I would be sitting on a patio and having people smoke around me while I was pregnant. It was a huge thing and I was like, Ahh, go away!'"

Both moms were fine with the idea of adding a "smokers-only" patio space.

"Thats ideal, and what they should be doing," Jay said. "I know if (smoking) is here (on the sidewalk) and its on the street and theres alcohol involved, its always going to be an issue."

"I know a lot of people do (smoke) and they want to be able to enjoy their time, too," Stone added. "But this is where societys going with smoking kind of, in general."

Karen Braun, who was enjoying a smoke-free Starbucks patio on Corydon, also supported the new bylaw.

"They have a right to smoke and I have a right not to breathe in that air. So you know what, no. No to patio smoking," she said Thursday.

Scott Jocelyn, president and chief executive officer of the Manitoba Hotel Association, said, so far, hes not aware of tickets issued to any operator. He added, however, he isnt expecting any tickets either -- as city hall promised a "soft" rollout of enforcement, with an emphasis on working with operators for a few weeks.

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Jocelyn said he remains frustrated city hall has refused to allow some patios to remain smoking-only, regardless of their occupancy permits. The new ban will force many operators to dismantle the patios they had set up and send smokers out onto sidewalks, where they will become a public nuisance, he said.

"People are going to have to find other places to smoke," Jocelyn said. "In the long run, its just going to drive people out to the sidewalks The reality is, people still smoke. If they cant do it in an area that was set up for them, where are they going to go?"

In a previous interview, the Canadian Cancer Society noted second-hand smoke can travel distances up to nine metres from its source.

-- with files from Aldo Santin

jessica.botelho@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @_jessbu
Looming mine closures in Thompson and Flin Flon may cost the region so many residents northern Manitoba could lose one of its five provincial ridings by the 2028 election, says a new report from Brandon University.

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This article was published 20/4/2018 (1261 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Looming mine closures in Thompson and Flin Flon may cost the region so many residents northern Manitoba could lose one of its five provincial ridings by the 2028 election, says a new report from Brandon University.

"Over the last three years, a series of events or announcements have cast a long shadow of economic instability over many communities in Manitobas north: pending mine closures in Thompson and Flin Flon, or changing ownership of the forestry mill in The Pas," the study done by BU's Rural Development Institute said.

"The impacts of these events have not been limited to single communities, but rather, have affected much of the structures and networks that bind many northern communities together. The loss of a primary employer in a single-industry community affects supporting tertiary employers, which in turn impacts other community services.

"In some cases, it seems the closure of one industry precipitates a cascading effect, and where there are fewer jobs, residents leave for better employment opportunities elsewhere."

The study was commissioned by the electoral boundaries commission, though its authors caution it is more an analysis of the demographics and economies of rural and remote Manitoba than a series of recommendations about specific boundary changes.

Hudbay Minerals had announced it will cease its mining operations in Flin Flon by 2019 or 2020, while Vale Canada Ltd. closed its Birchtree mine in Thompson last year, and is shutting down its smelter and refinery in the Manitoba city later this year.

"Significant population losses over the north may lead the commission to face the very difficult question of proposing to reduce the number of northern electoral divisions to four," the report said.

What could potentially reverse the area's decline is significant growth, including economic growth among First Nations, BU said.

Canada is 29.4 per cent rural population, while Manitoba is 38 per cent, largely due to Indigenous population growth, the study states.

University researchers urged the electoral boundaries commission to consider what areas have in common when redrawing the boundaries of any provincial ridings.

The report noted there are three categories of rural areas, including large exurban (low-density) developments immediately adjacent to urban centres.

A second category has the extraction of natural resources in common, including grain and cattle.

"This set faces the daunting task of weathering the inevitable boom-and-bust cycles in national and international markets, which directly impact the workers, their families and many others employed in these industries and other tertiary sectors," the study says.

The third rural type includes communities and regions struggling with limited capacity and resources, higher unemployment and often declining populations, the report said.

"These other factors are as pertinent for understanding how the demographic, economic, and geographic conditions of the provinces regions are not static but dynamic enough to push, pull, constrain and mobilize neighbouring communities and even those more distant," BU researchers said in the report.

"Consider the unique historic and cultural heritages that continue to shape Virden, Norway House, and Steinbach. Each has come to serve as an important regional centre; however, their demographics, whether in terms of age, culture, education level, or language, are significantly different."

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The provincial Conservative government did not respond to the report, but Liberal Leader Dougald Lamont said Manitobans who live in rural and northern areas can struggle to be heard in Winnipeg, so it's important to ensure MLAs have manageable constituencies.

"There is an idea that small towns shrinking is inevitable, but it has been driven by bad policy and a lack of any plan for growing the economy. Manitoba has had a policy that encourages bigger farms, which means fewer farm families, and there hasnt been investment in infrastructure or economic development. The issue of people leaving rural and northern areas has been treated as inevitable, when it is not," Lamont said.

NDP leader Wab Kinew called for an increase in the number of seats in northern Manitoba.

"Cuts from Brian Pallister to programs like the Communities Economic Development Fund, which works to develop small businesses in northern Manitoba, and a complete lack of action to restore the rail line to Churchill will make things harder in the north. What this report highlights is we need real investments in the north to build a vibrant economy," Kinew said.

"We need more elected MLAs from the north holding this government to account for their cuts and inaction, not less."

nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca
Winnipeg city council soon will vote on a motion introduced by Mayor Brian Bowman and Coun. Marty Morantz to abolish the citys election contribution rebate program. Under the program, the city rebates a certain percentage of the contributions Winnipeggers make to both mayoral and council candidates. For donations between $25 and $300, for example, one could apply for a rebate worth 75 per cent of the value of the contribution.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 20/4/2018 (1262 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Opinion

Winnipeg city council soon will vote on a motion introduced by Mayor Brian Bowman and Coun. Marty Morantz to abolish the citys election contribution rebate program. Under the program, the city rebates a certain percentage of the contributions Winnipeggers make to both mayoral and council candidates. For donations between $25 and $300, for example, one could apply for a rebate worth 75 per cent of the value of the contribution.

Debate over the proposal has been somewhat muted. Coun. Jeff Browaty, for example, walked a fine line in criticizing Bowmans motion. Inoculating himself from criticism by declaring that he, too, was in favour of banning the rebate, he nevertheless worried that doing so would give incumbent councillors an unfair advantage  it will  and discourage challengers.

Browaty also wondered about the timing of the announcement, situated as it was mere days after Bowman announced hed run for re-election and a few months before the campaign commences in earnest.

The mayor responded that he had been waiting to hear back from city employees about the potential savings of doing away with the rebate. But the eyebrow-raising timing of the announcement was sure to fuel speculation about Bowmans motivations.

Missing from the political posturing is a principled argument that campaign rebates are good public policy, and the mayors proposal to abolish them entirely will limit the ability of regular Winnipeggers to participate in local politics.

This is for two reasons. First, campaign rebates make it easier for people to contribute to candidates and therefore get involved in the political process. While wealthy donors may not mind contributing to their favoured candidates without a rebate, regular Winnipeggers may wonder whether its worth it to make a contribution when that money could instead be put toward a dinner out with their family.

Rebates make it easier for such people to swallow the costs of contributing to political candidates. If one wants to see wider participation in politics from citizens  and I do  then rebates are one way to incentivize that.

The second reason rebates are good is because they make it easier for candidates to raise money from a wider pool of supporters. Getting rid of the rebate would be an advantage to candidates who are able to raise large sums of money from a few wealthy donors, and a disadvantage to candidates who lack the ability or inclination to pursue big donors. The rebate makes it possible for potential candidates to raise small contributions and therefore run a viable campaign without the support of wealthy donors.

In other words: rebates help to level the playing field for both contributors and candidates.

Its little wonder that so many other Canadian cities have rebate programs. Indeed, the city of Ajax, Ont., recently enhanced its rebate program in the hope of generating greater interest and participation in local elections. Mayor Steve Parish argued the rebate is "all about maximizing the ability of ordinary taxpayers of limited means to participate financially in a municipal election."

And while Winnipeg appears set to abolish the rebate, the fast-growing Ontario city of Mississauga has introduced just such a program.

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What are the arguments in favour of abolishing the rebate? The mayor has presented one: doing so will save the City of Winnipeg money, slightly less than $700,000 a year. Bowman argued that this money could be better spent on programs such as one subsidizing bus passes for low-income riders.

I agree that such a program would be a good use of money and would provide some relief for Winnipeggers who need it. But Bowmans argument raises the question: if he is in favour of helping low-income transit users, why does this necessarily have to come at the expense of a program that enhances local democracy in Winnipeg? Further, what guarantee do we have that these savings will be put into a worthy program rather than disappearing into a black hole of spending at city hall?

In introducing Mississaugas new election rebate, Mayor Bonnie Crombie argued, "The small cost of a campaign rebate program is a worthy investment if it will broaden the source of campaign funding and potentially increase voter and candidate participation."

Of course, Mississaugas rebate program is projected to cost only a fraction of what Winnipegs program costs. If savings are the goal, then why could the mayor not propose tinkering with the program to limit the financial implications of the rebate rather than doing away with it entirely? The percentage that contributors are rebated back, for example, could be lowered for larger contributions over $300. A modest reduction in the rebate for contributions under $300 would also be defensible and would save the city some dough.

Winnipeggers would be justified in wondering why Bowman has decided to wield the axe rather than the scalpel when it comes to a program that helps them play a role in local politics.

Royce Koop is an associate professor and head of the department of political studies at the University of Manitoba.
1 hour ago

Johnson eyes post-COVID economy as UK Conservatives meet

LONDON (AP)  British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he was ready to take bold decisions to rebuild the economy after the coronavirus pandemic as his Conservative Party met Sunday for its first annual conference since 2019. The Tory conference opened Sunday in the northwestern city of Manchester as a shortage of truck drivers to delivery fuel across Britain continues to cause empty pumps and long lines at many gas stations.

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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.

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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 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.
Saga plc provides general insurance, package and cruise holidays, and personal finance products and services in the United Kingdom. The company operates in three segments: Insurance, Travel, and Other Businesses and Central Costs. It offers car, home, health, travel, landlord, boat, motorhome, caravan, pet, and personal accident, breakdown cover, building, content, renter, holiday, and holiday home insurance. The company also operates and delivers package tours and cruise holiday products; and provides equity release and care funding advice, savings accounts, credit cards, and wealth management services, as well as shares ISA and share dealing services. In addition, it offers mailing house services; retirement benefit schemes; and publishes Saga Magazine, as well as repairs automotive vehicles. The company was formerly known as Saga Limited and changed its name to Saga plc in May 2014. Saga plc was founded in 1950 and is headquartered in Folkestone, the United Kingdom.

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The following companies are subsidiares of Textron: AAI Corporation, AAI Services Corporation, ALSTOM Gears, Able Aerospace, Able Aerospace Services Inc., Able Engineering & Component Services, Aeronautical Accessories LLC, Airborne Tactical Advantage Company LLC, Arctic Cat, Arctic Cat ACE Holding GmbH, Arctic Cat France SARL, Arctic Cat GmbH, Arctic Cat Inc., Arctic Cat Production LLC, Arctic Cat Production Support LLC, Arctic Cat Sales Inc., Arctic Cat Shared Services LLC, Arctic Cat UK Ltd., Arkansas Aerospace Inc., Avco Corporation, Aviation Service servis letal doo Ljubljana, Aylesbury Automation, B/K Navigational Equipment sro, Beech Aircraft Corporation, Beech Holdings, Beechcraft Defense Support Holding LLC, Beechcraft Domestic Service Company, Beechcraft Germany GmbH, Beechcraft International Holding LLC, Beechcraft International Service Company, Beechcraft New Zealand, Beechcraft Service Company UK Limited, Bell Helicopter GK, Bell Helicopter KK, Bell Textron Asia (Pte.) Ltd., Bell Textron Canada International Inc., Bell Textron Canada Limited/Limitee, Bell Textron Inc., Bell Textron Korea Inc., Bell Textron Miami Inc, Bell Textron Prague a.s., Bell Textron Rhode Island Inc., Bell Textron Services Inc, Bell Textron Supply Center BV, Bell Textron Technical Services Inc., Benzlers, Brazaco Mapri Industrias, Burkland, Cessna Aircraft Company, Cessna Citation European Service Center SAS, Cessna Dusseldorf Citation Service Center GmbH, Cessna Finance Corporation, Cessna Finance Export Corporation, Cessna Mexico S de RL de CV, Cessna Spanish Citation Service Center SLU, Cessna Zurich Citation Service Center GmbH, Citation Parts Distribution International Inc., Cushman Inc., Datacom Technologies, David Brown Group, Doncaster Citation Service Centre Limited, E-Z-GO Canada Limited, Energy Manufacturing, Flexalloy, HBC LLC, Hawker Beech de Mexico S de RL de CV, Hawker Beechcraft Argentina SA, Howe & Howe Inc., Howe and Howe Technologies, Industrial Technology Inc., InteSys Technologies, International Product Support Inc., KSB Annecy SAS, Kautex (Changchun) Plastics Technology Co. Ltd., Kautex (Chongqing) Plastic Technology Co. Ltd., Kautex (Guangzhou) Plastic Technology Co. Ltd., Kautex (Pinghu) Plastic Technology Co. Ltd., Kautex (Shanghai) Plastic Technology Co. Ltd., Kautex (Wuhan) Plastic Technology Co. Ltd., Kautex Corporation, Kautex Craiova srl, Kautex Germany Holding GmbH, Kautex Inc., Kautex Japan KK, Kautex Shanghai GmbH, Kautex Textron (UK) Limited, Kautex Textron Benelux BVBA, Kautex Textron Bohemia spol sro, Kautex Textron CVS Limited, Kautex Textron GmbH & Co. KG, Kautex Textron Iberica SL, Kautex Textron Italia Srl, Kautex Textron Management Services Company de Puebla S. de RL de CV, Kautex Textron Portugal  Produtos Plasticos Sociedade Unipessoal Lda., Kautex Textron de Mexico S de RL de CV, Kautex Textron do Brasil Ltda., Kautex of Georgia Inc., Kaywood Products Corp., Klauke, LCI Corporation International, LLC Textron RUS, Maag, McCord Corporation, Mechtronix, Medical Numerics Inc., Midland Industrial Plastics, MillenWorks, MillenWorks Themed Technologies, MotorFist LLC, OPINICUS Simulation and Training Services LLC, OmniQuip International, Opinicus, Optical Boring Co., Opto-Electronics, Opto-Electronics Inc., Overwatch Systems Ltd., PEINER Umformtechnik, Pirelli Tyres - General Rubber Goods (GRG) division, Premiair Aviation Maintenance Pty Ltd, Progressive Electronics, Ransomes, Ransomes Inc., Ransomes Investment LLC, Ransomes Jacobsen France SAS, Ransomes Jacobsen Limited, Ransomes Limited, Ransomes Pensions Trustee Company Limited, Replacement Part Solutions LLC, Response Technologies LLC, Rotor Blades Limited, Sukosim Verbindungselemente, TRU Simulation & Training Spain SL, TRU Simulation + Training Inc., TRU Simulation + Training LLC, TekGPS Engineering Srl, Textron Airland LLC, Textron Atlantic LLC, Textron Aviation Australia Pty. Ltd., Textron Aviation Canada Ltd., Textron Aviation Defense LLC, Textron Aviation Finance Corporation, Textron Aviation Inc., Textron Aviation Prague Service Center sro, Textron Aviation Rhode Island Inc., Textron Aviation Services de Mexico S de RL de CV, Textron Capital BV, Textron Communications Inc., Textron Far East Pte. Ltd., Textron Finance Holding Company, Textron Financial Corporation, Textron Financial Corporation Receivables Trust 2002-CP-2, Textron Fluid and Power Inc., Textron France Holding SAS, Textron France SAS, Textron Global Services Inc., Textron Ground Support Equipment Inc., Textron Ground Support Equipment UK Limited, Textron IPMP Inc., Textron India Private Limited, Textron Innovations Inc., Textron International Inc., Textron International Mexico S de RL de CV, Textron Limited, Textron Management Services Inc., Textron Motors GmbH, Textron Motors North America Inc., Textron Outdoor Power Equipment Inc., Textron Realty Corporation, Textron Shared Service Centre (Canada) Inc., Textron Specialized Vehicles Inc., Textron Sweden AB, Textron Systems Australia Holding Pty Ltd, Textron Systems Australia Pty Ltd, Textron Systems Canada Inc., Textron Systems Corporation, Textron Systems Electronic Systems UK (Holdings) Limited, Textron Systems Electronic Systems UK Limited, Textron Trading (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Textron UK Pension Trustee Limited, Textron Verwaltungs-GmbH, Turbine Engine Components Textron (Newington Operations) Inc., United Industrial Corporation, Westminster Insurance Company, Williams Machine & Tool, Wuxi Textron Specialized Vehicles Co. Ltd., and Zhenjiang Bell Textron Aviation Services Limited.
The Bank of New York Mellon pays an annual dividend of $1.36 per share and currently has a dividend yield of 2.62%. The Bank of New York Mellon has been increasing its dividend for 12 consecutive years, indicating the company has a strong committment to maintain and grow its dividend. The dividend payout ratio of The Bank of New York Mellon is 33.92%. This payout ratio is at a healthy, sustainable level, below 75%. Based on earnings estimates, The Bank of New York Mellon will have a dividend payout ratio of 29.44% next year. This indicates that The Bank of New York Mellon will be able to sustain or increase its dividend.

View The Bank of New York Mellon's dividend history.
Zayo Group Holdings, Inc., through its subsidiaries, provides bandwidth infrastructure solutions for the communications industry in the United States, Canada, and Europe. The company operates in six segments: Fiber Solutions, Transport, Enterprise Networks, Zayo Colocation (zColo), Allstream, and Other. The Fiber Solutions segment provides dark fiber, and fiber-to-the-tower and small cell mobile infrastructure services for carriers and other communication service providers, Internet service providers, wireless service providers, media and content companies, large enterprises, and other companies. The Transport segment offers lit bandwidth infrastructure solutions comprising wavelength, Ethernet, wholesale IP services, and SONET services through its metro, regional, and long-haul fiber networks for carriers, content providers, financial services companies, healthcare, government entities, education institutions, and other medium and large enterprises. The Enterprise Networks segment provides connectivity and telecommunications solutions comprising Internet, wide area networking products, managed products, and cloud based computing and storage offerings to medium and large enterprises. The Zayo Colocation (zColo) segment offers data center infrastructure solutions consisting of colocation space, and power and interconnection services to a range of enterprise, carrier, cloud, and content customers. The Allstream segment provides cloud VoIP and data solutions, such as voice offerings; and unified communications, as well as telecommunications services, including Ethernet, and IP/MPLS VPN solutions. The Other segment provides network and technical resources to customers in designing, acquiring, and maintaining their networks. Zayo Group Holdings, Inc. was founded in 2007 and is headquartered in Boulder, Colorado.

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Teachers in the southwestern US state of Arizona have overwhelmingly voted to strike to demand improved wages for educators and support staff, and restore more than $1 billion in school funding cuts over the last decade. At a press conference Thursday night, officials from the Arizona Education Association (AEA) announced that 78 percent of the 57,000 educators who cast ballots over the last three days voted for strike action.

According to Noah Karvelis, an elementary school teacher and one of the leaders of the Arizona Educators United (AEU) Facebook group, teachers will continue to hold walk-in protests at their schools next Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday and then walk out in a statewide strike next Thursday.

The powerful strike vote takes place after statewide strikes in West Virginia and Oklahoma, a one-day strike in Jersey City, New Jersey, and sickouts and protests in Kentucky, Florida and many other states. It is part of an international rebellion of teachers, which in the last week alone saw teachers and university workers striking in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Lebanon and Kenya.

The strike could affect an estimated 1 million students in the state. Many high school students are walking out today to mark the anniversary of the Columbine school massacre, and as part of nationwide protests against mass shootings. Students and parents have expressed solidarity with the teachers.

While many Arizona teachers were ready to walk out today, the Arizona Educators United Facebook group, clearly under the direction of the AEA union, is opposing immediate action and giving the governor and the state legislature more time to make some gesture to prevent a strike. AEA President Joe Thomas urged Governor Doug Ducey and state legislators to Sit down with us and find a solution to the school crisis. Fix this by Thursday, give our students what they deserve.

As in other states, the movement in Arizona has been initiated by rank-and-file teachers angered over years of collusion by the unions with budget cuts by Democratic and Republican state governments. In every case, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) have sought to prevent walkouts, and if unable, as in West Virginia and Oklahoma, to shut them down as soon as they can and prevent the outbreak of a national teachers strike.

Asked by a reporter what the group would do if the governor and legislature resisted the teachers demands, as they had done throughout the 10-day strike by Oklahoma teachers, AEU leader Karvelis could not answer, saying instead, Im focusing on what we can do in this legislative session.

The militant mood of teachers was expressed in a post on the AEU Facebook page Thursday night. I have been hesitant about all of this, but I think probably a Friday walkout would be most effective at this point. Because Arizona and Arizonans are not used to showing their resolve and their strength, we seem to want this to be wrapped up neatly, tied with a bow, and very tidy and orderly. That aint what this is. THIS is hardball, and now Im ready. Shock and awe.

On April 11, Republican Governor Doug Ducey announced a plan to give teachers a 20 percent raise over three years10 percent in the first year and 5 percent in each of the next two years. The proposal, however, would do nothing for support staffcounselors, special education assistants, school aides, cafeteria workers, custodians, school bus drivers and othersand would be funded by slashing funding to the developmentally disabled, state universities and state hospitals. Funding for the raises is also predicated on cuts to the state Medicaid program, which serves 636,000 children from low-income families, as Ducey implements work requirements and five-year lifetime limits approved by the Trump administration.

Arizona teachers do not trust Governor Ducey to come through with the raises over the next few years, Laura, a teacher from Tucson, told the World Socialist Web Site Teacher Newsletter. The governor is not telling us where the funds are coming from or what other programs he plans to cut in order to allow the raises to go through. If he decides to raise taxes on working-class and poor families, he is going to split the teachers and parents and try to destroy efforts to improve education that way. He has not met all of the other demands of the Arizona teachers, such as funding for students, schools, textbooks, etc., and raises for other school personnel. We are asking also for cost-of-living increases and better health care.

I am in full support of the teachers in other states, particularly in Oklahoma, where the union has betrayed the teachers. I believe that many teachers here feel the same as I do, and many are ready to strike no matter what, vote or no vote. We need to have solidarity and be united in our efforts for better education for all students, regardless of what communities or socioeconomic backgrounds they come from. Education, as a whole, is being destroyed and if we dont fight now, we are going to see a populace of educated (the wealthy) and uneducated (working class and poor) people in this country. Education is power, and this government does not want power in the hands of its ordinary citizens. I would support a nationwide strike of teachers as many others here would.

After a decade of budget cuts, school funding in Arizona is more than $1 billion below 2008 levels. The state is currently ranked 48th in the nation in per-pupil spending which is less than $5,000and teacher-to-student ratio; 50th in elementary school teacher pay and counselor-to-student ratio; and 49th in high school teacher pay.

Teachers spend 10-20 percent of their salaries to pay for school supplies and many take on second and third jobs, including Uber driving and pizza delivery, to supplement their inadequate wages, pay impossibly high health care costs and college student loan debts. Textbooks are so old, teachers say, students are using the same books they did when they were fifth grade students.

Im all for a strike, Jane, a teacher in Phoenix, told the WSWS Teacher Newsletter. The kids deserve highly qualified educators who are competitively paid and classrooms and facilities that arent falling apart. I think its important for teachers to unite across the country, but the union here doesnt seem to be doing much to reach outside of Arizona.

As in other states, Arizona Democrats are posturing as defenders of public education. But more than two decades of tax cuts for corporations and the rich, paid for through cuts in school and other state funding, has been carried out not only by Ducey and his Republican predecessor, Jan Brewer. Democrat Janet Napolitano, who served as governor from 2003 until 2009, when she quit to become Obamas Secretary of Homeland Security, backed a half billion-dollar tax cut in 2006, which has robbed the state of critical revenue.

Arizona teachers must learn the lessons of the Oklahoma and West Virginia strikeswhich were betrayed by the unionsand elect rank-and-file committees to take the conduct of the struggle out of the hands of the AEA. Instead of appeals to big business politicians, these committees should fight for the mobilization of workers throughout the state, and reach out to teachers and other workers throughout the US to prepare a general strike to defend the right to high-quality public education.
The Socialist Equality Party (Australia) has called public meetings in major cities as part of an international campaign, spearheaded by the World Socialist Web Site, against Internet censorship and growing efforts by governments around the world to suppress and silence opposition and political dissent.

A central aspect of the meetings will be the fight for the freedom of Julian Assange, the editor of WikiLeaks. Assange has been subjected to relentless persecution since late 2010 by the governments of the United States, Britain and Australia. He has been the target of a vicious vendetta because WikiLeaks courageously published leaked information that exposed US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistanincluding video footage of US forces murdering journalistsas well as the diplomatic conspiracies carried out by the ruling elites against the democratic and social rights of the international working class.

After more than seven years of persecution, Assanges fate hangs in the balance. The Ecuadorian government, which in June 2012 provided him political asylum within its embassy in London, has been pressured by the US and British governments to cut off his ability to communicate with the outside world, and to even deny him personal visitors. Since March 29, the already terrible conditions of his near six-year confinement inside the small embassy have been made even more intolerable.

The silencing of Assange has two connected motives. First, the imperialist powers are determined to prevent him from exposing the suppressed truth behind their escalating political and military provocations against Russia, which threaten to trigger war between nuclear-armed powers.

Second, their aim is to break Assange so that he leaves the Ecuadorian embassy and falls into the clutches of the waiting US and British authorities and intelligence agencies. By publicly railroading him into prison or worse, the ruling classes want to intimidate the growing political opposition to war and police-state forms of rule.

The Australian political and media establishment bears major responsibility for the outrages perpetrated against Julian Assange, and for his current predicament.

Assange is an Australian citizen who is ostensibly entitled to the full support of the Australian government against attacks on his rights by other countries. In November 2010, however, as the Obama administration sought his arrest on false charges of espionage, and he confronted public death threats and an arrest warrant over fabricated, politically motivated allegations of sexual assault in Sweden, the Greens-backed Labor Party government of Prime Minister Julia Gillard threw him to the wolves.

Gillard denounced the journalistic exposures by WikiLeaks as illegal. Labor signalled that if Assange returned to Australia, the government would collaborate with Washington to extradite him to the US to face a sham trial. Assange was left with no choice but to remain in Britain and seek to fight the attempts to extradite him to Sweden. On June 19, 2012, as his legal avenues became exhausted, he sought refuge in Ecuadors London embassy.

In December 2010, it is instructive to recall, hundreds of prominent Australian journalists, editors, academics, artists, politicians and lawyers signed an Open Letter to Gillard, calling on her to condemn the threats against Assange and to state publicly that you will ensure Mr. Assange receives the rights and protections to which he is entitled.

On December 9, 2010, the assembled audience applauded leading commentator Laurie Oakes, who was accepting the Walkley Award for most outstanding contribution to journalism, when he lambasted Gillard and opposition leader Tony Abbott for their statements against Assange and WikiLeaks. Oakes declared: To brand what the WikiLeaks site has done as illegal  is demeaning  I think as journalists we should make that our view.

In 2011, the Sydney Peace Foundation at the University of Sydney awarded Assange its special gold medal for human rights. Its then director, academic Stuart Rees, compared him to 18th century American revolutionary Tom Paine and Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg.

Rees declared: Assange has championed the peoples right to know and has challenged the centuries-old tradition that governments are entitled to keep the public in a state of ignorance. In the Paine, Ellsberg and Assange cases, those in power moved quickly to silence their critics even by perverting the course of justice. That same year, WikiLeaks won the Walkley Award.

At that time, the Greens, trade union officials and various self-styled left groupings vowed their support for Assange and demanded his freedom.

The situation today could not be more different. At a time of the greatest urgency in the fight to mobilise opposition to the persecution of Julian Assange, the silence within the Australian political, media, legal and academic establishment is deafening. The Greens are playing a particularly despicable role. After posturing for years as defenders of Assange, Green parliamentarians such as Adam Bandt and Lee Rhiannon have not even commented on the actions of the Ecuadorian government.

Since 2011, a profound political shift has taken place, in response to sharpening great power tensions, ever-widening social inequality and mounting class antagonisms. Internationally, the upper middle-class liberals and lefts have progressively made their peace with the crimes and depravities of imperialism.

The main concern of the ex-liberal, ex-left milieu today is the fact that the capitalist elite of the US and its alliesfrom which the upper middle class of the imperialist countries derives its own considerable income and wealthare losing strategic and economic ground to rivals such as China and Russia. In Australia, one of the central preoccupations of this fetid layer is promoting the nationalist, pro-war witch-hunt against purported Chinese interference and foreign influence in politics, business and society.

Moreover, the upper middle-class ex-left is deeply fearful that millions of workers and youth are breaking with the parties and organisations which, directly or indirectly, are the source of their highly-paid positions and privileged status. These include the Democratic Party and trade unions in the United States, and the Labor Party, the unions and the Greens in Australia.

A significant shift against Assange occurred during the 2016 US presidential election campaign. Former supporters of WikiLeaks reacted with overt hostility when it leaked emails that exposed the sordid machinations by the campaign of war-monger and big business Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton to undermine Bernie Sanders in the primaries, and her sycophantic relations with the Wall Street bankers.

Already repulsed by the pro-war and anti-working class policies of the Obama administration, millions of American workers and youth who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 did not vote for Clinton, contributing to Trumps electoral college victory. Within the layer that is hysterically blaming the electoral debacle of the Democrats and Clinton on Russian meddling, Assange has been absurdly denounced as a stooge of Moscow.

The defenders of the Democratic Party, Australian Labor, and similar reactionary organisations internationally, do not conceal their class-motivated desire to see Assange and WikiLeaks silenced.

The truth is that Julian Assange has, despite the difficulty of his circumstances, continued what he and others established WikiLeaks to do: provide a means to bring into the light of day the lies and criminality of the powers-that-be and inform the mass of population.

The social force that can and must bring its immense strength to bear in defence of Julian Assange is the class that benefits from his actions and those of other principled journalists and whistleblowers: the international working class. The truth about the real relations that exist under the capitalist profit system is a critical factor in the development of a mass political movement for revolutionary social change.

As the World Socialist Web Site statement calling for an International Coalition Against Internet Censorship stressed: It is not simply that the involvement of the working class is important in order to defend free speech. Rather, the fight to defend free speech is important for the working class.

A mass movement of the working class, which links the struggle for its social and democratic rights with opposition to militarism and war, will also provide leadership to the substantial layers of the middle class who have been intimidated into silence by the right-wing shift of the ex-liberals and pseudo-left.

The SEP (Australia), as a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, is committed to the defence of Julian Assange. The fight for his freedom is part of the struggle for the interests of the working class against Australian and world capitalism and for a future of social equality, genuine democracy and international unity. We urge all those who want to join this historic struggle to attend our public meetings.

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Report to 2010 SEP public meeting

Imperialist diplomacy exposed: Behind the witch-hunt of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks

[20 December 2010]

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange speaks with WSWS

[16 March 2012]

SEP public meetings pass resolutions defending Assange

[12 June 2012]

Freedom for Julian Assange!

[11 January 2018]

Why has Ecuador silenced Julian Assange?

[31 March 2018]
Yesterday, French President Emmanuel Macron traveled to Berlin for a summit with German Chancellor Angela Merkel after the US-UK-French strike on Syria of April 14, and before planned trips next week by both Merkel and Macron to Washington. At a brief joint press conference, they endorsed the unprovoked and illegal strike against Syria while also stressing that, together with Britain, they support maintaining the Iranian nuclear treaty.

The cracks in the edifice of the NATO alliance are showing, however, as its constant resort to war intensifies the rivalries between the member states. Not only does the support of Berlin and Paris for the Iranian treaty involve them in a clash with the Trump administration, which has threatened to cancel it, but the two leading European Union (EU) powers are also increasingly at odds. Merkel was silent on Macrons call for a new financial architecture on the euro zone, amid reports that Berlin and Paris are clashing both over financial policy and the April 14 strike in Syria.

The German chancellor began by demanding a strong EU military, striking an alarmist note and noting the rising tide of NATO wars surrounding Europe. Despite the fact that Europe is a project for peace, we have to be able to defend our interests around the world, Merkel said, calling for a plan for a common foreign policy and warning: We are surrounded by catastrophic wars.

The French President for his part claimed that the common sovereignty of European countries was under threat, and called for an upcoming Franco-German ministerial summit in June that would deal with a common economic and monetary policy, as well as common security initiatives on defense and foreign policy within the European Union.

Asked about what messages they would bring to Donald Trump on Syria, Iran and world trade, Merkel replied: I would like to show the United States that despite differences of opinion, discussion is important. Macron for his part said that he and Merkel would be bringing a common message to Trump, citing the need to respect the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal, the legitimacy of the April 14 strike in Syria and the need to use Trumps threats of trade tariffs for a common struggle against Chinese exports of steel and aluminum.

On the Syrian strike, Macron claimed that Germany had not joined the action because the German constitution did not allow for an attack without a parliamentary debate. In a flagrantly antidemocratic statement trampling on mass opposition to the strike in the US, Britain and France, he claimed that it was not possible to consult with the parliament on the strike, given the need for rapid and surprise action.

Asked about reforms of the financial structure of the European Union and the euro zone, Merkel and Macron said nothing explicitly about Macrons call last autumn at the Sorbonne University for Berlin to accept a broad change in the financing of euro zone bailouts and investment policy. However, their remarks were barely able to paper over growing public differences over Macrons proposals.

In the run-up to the summit, the number two of Merkels Christian-Democratic Union (CDU) issued a widely noted attack on Macrons calls for greater public investments in the euro zone economies. I do not think this would be a good idea, said Annegrey Kramp-Karrenbauer, in remarks widely taken in the French media as a sign that Macrons proposals were dead on arrival. In the event, Merkels remarks yesterday were only a somewhat softer version of Kramp-Karrenbauers view.

Apparently taking aim at Macrons calls to build a European version of the International Monetary Fund to oversee euro zone bank bailouts, Merkel declared, We cannot depend too much on the IMF. But we cannot work against the IMF. She warned that the euro zone is not solid enough to withstand a crisis, and called for responsibility in the implementation of the austerity packages dictated to Spain, Greece and Ireland by the EU. She added that even the smallest idea can create real problems.

Macron replied that the most important thing is not to comment on one or another proposed measure, but to check whether we have the same goals. Calling for a European banking union and a convergence of economic conditions in Europe with those in the stronger German economy, Macron warned, No monetary union can survive without elements of convergence. We must work with the member states in this convergence.

The aggressive comments of both Merkel and Macron reflect the reactionary character of the regimes on both sides of the Rhine. Both politicians preside over the most right-wing regimes their countries have known since the end of World War II and the collapse of fascist rule in 1945, as Merkel presses to remilitarize German foreign policy, and Macron moves to undo the social concessions granted to the working class in France at the Liberation from Nazi Occupation.

The comments of both Merkel and Macron at the press conference constitute a warning that the EU will not budge one iota from unpopular policies of militarism and austerity. It is fully committed to escalating its military involvement in the decades-long war drive in the Middle East. Even as the EU disintegrates amid mounting social discontent, with Britains 2016 vote to exit the EU and the recent election in Italy that saw right-wing, anti-EU parties win the leading positions, Berlin and Paris have nothing new to propose.

The conflicts between the NATO imperialist powers themselves are growing, most obviously in the opposition in Berlin and Paris to Trumps threats to impose trade tariffs on European goods and prepare for war with Iran by canceling the nuclear treaty. Press commentary made clear, moreover, that these conflicts are rapidly undermining the German-French alliance that is supposed to be leading what remains of the EU. Behind the scenes, the tensions are increasingly bitter.

An article in the French edition of the Huffington Post citing high-ranking French officials pointed to growing military tensions between France and Germany in the aftermath of Germanys decision not to participate in the Syria strike. The hopes formulated by Emmanuel Macron during his speech at the Sorbonne in September seem badly compromised, it said, pointing to the negative effects of the French strikes in Syria.

It cited the complaints of the German paper Die Welt that In the Syrian conflict, Macron is turning towards Trump and not towards Merkel, as well as remarks of Barbara Kunz, an official of the influential French Institute on International Relations (IFRI) think tank.

She pointed to growing difficulties in Franco-German military coordination, particularly under conditions where German law might prevent France from exporting a jointly developed, Franco-German weapons to influential clients in Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf sheikdoms. If we want to build a battle tank together, but we cannot export it, that is a problem, Kunz said.

Ten years after the 2008 crash led to a series of financial crises and euro bailouts in Europe, moreover, it is clear that none of the international tensions within Europe have been resolved. The major euro zone economies are still advocating widely different economic and monetary policies, with Merkel under pressure from growing factions of the CDU and the far-right Alternative for Germany to reject Macrons demands for more public investment.

CDU parliamentarian Eckhardt Rehberg told Deutschlandfunk: We are skeptical of his proposals and of the proposals  of the EU commission last December for the development of a European monetary fund. He added, Without rules, without conditions, in the opinion of the CDU faction it is impossible to pay out money from German taxpayers.

I know that Macron is pushing Merkel and she is not moving in the way he thinks she should be moving, an anonymous high-ranking French official told Reuters, adding that Macron might have to adopt a more confrontational tone with Germany.
Amid rising tensions in East Asia, the Chinese military recently conducted major naval exercises in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait. While the Western media emphasised their size and supposedly menacing character, the drills are in response to Washingtons provocative and confrontational stance toward Beijing.

Since the end of last month, the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) navy has completed two major exercises off the coast of Hainan Island in the South China Sea, followed this Wednesday by a live-fire exercise in the Taiwan Strait.

The naval drills were the largest ever, with an estimated 10,000 personnel, 76 aircraft and 48 warships involved, including Chinas only aircraft carrier and one of its nuclear submarines. Further underscoring the importance of the exercises, Chinese President Xi Jinping was present, along with all members of Chinas top military body, the Central Military Commission.

Reviewing the assembled armada, Xi delivered a speech, urging the navy to urgently become a world class fleet because a mighty navy is an important pillar of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation  Todays peoples navy is standing in the east of the world with a new attitude.

Facing US challenges to Chinese interests in Asia and internationally, China has been transforming its navy from one devoted to coastal defence to a blue water fleet capable of operating around the world.

Describing the exercise as a routine operation, the Defence Ministry stated: Its aim is to test the training capabilities of the Peoples Liberation Army  It is also aimed at improving combat abilities of the whole military. While it claimed the exercises were not aimed at any country in particular, there are clearly fears in Beijing over the mounting US military threat.

Under President Barack Obama and now Donald Trump, the US has deliberately inflamed tensions over territorial claims in the South China Sea, which involve China and its South East Asian neighbours. The US Navy has carried out provocative freedom of navigation operations by sending warships to challenge Chinas maritime claims. Most recently, the destroyer USS Mustin last month sailed within the 12-nautical-mile territorial limit claimed by China around its outpost on Mischief Reef in the Spratly group of islands.

The US military has also increased its overall presence in the Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam, including the regular presence of aircraft carrier battle groups. In February, the US conducted a naval exercise in the South China Sea close to Chinese-controlled islets, involving the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson.

The Chinese live-fire exercises in the Taiwan Strait on Wednesday appear to have been relatively limited. The state-owned Xinhua news agency reported that a PLA air unit had been involved in dispatching various types of armed helicopters to attack targets at sea. The exercise was confined to a two-square-mile area off the coast, near the city of Quanzhou in Fujian Province.

While the US press criticised the live-fire exercise as an attempt to intimidate Taipei, the Trump administration has deliberately stoked tensions with China over Taiwan. Last year, Trump suggested he would abrogate the One China policy that has underpinned diplomatic relations since 1972. Under this policy, Washington recognised Beijing as the sole legitimate government of all China, including Taiwan, while at the same time opposing any forcible China take-over of the island.

In a move protested by Beijing, the US Congress voted last month to allow visits to the US by Taiwanese politicians and officials at all levels, including military officials, and also by American officials to Taiwan. Previously, Washington had avoided provoking China by not permitting the entry of top-level Taiwanese figures. Congress also passed legislation to authorise the sale to Taiwan of restricted military hardware and designs, including submarine blueprints.

China has long considered reunification with Taiwan an essential national objective and warned that any attempt by Taiwan to declare formal independence would be regarded as a red line for military action. Emphasising this point, Chinese Taiwan Foreign Office director Liu Jieyi declared that the live-fire drill this week was an action to safeguard the sovereignty and territorial integrity of our motherland.

Sections of the Chinese military and state bureaucracy are pushing for China to take a stand against the US military build-up in the Asia Pacific. Yue Gang, a retired PLA colonel, told the Financial Times: [T]he US aircraft carrier [Carl Vinson] has stayed long within this region. China now is showing that its not afraid. Making clear that the live-fire exercises were meant to send a warning to Washington, the hawkish state-owned Global Times headlined its comment on Monday as PLA drill draws red line to the US and Taiwan.

Under President Xi, China has been building up and restructuring its military in what amounts to an undeclared arms race with the United States. At the same time, Xi has continued to seek to balance diplomatically even as Trump has threatened trade war measures against the Chinese economy. Xis One-Belt One-Road initiative for massive infrastructure projects aimed at linking the Eurasian landmass is not only an economic plan, but also a strategic initiative aimed at boosting Chinese partnerships, and potentially alliances, to counter the US.

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On Tuesday, French President Emmanuel Macron, the former investment banker, made what the Western press hailed as an impassioned plea for democracy before the European Parliament.

Macron warned of a Europe where the illiberal fascination grows daily and our national egoisms sometimes feel more important than what unites us against the rest of the world.

We are seeing authoritarianism all around us, declared the French President. The response is not authoritarian democracy but the authority of democracy. For Macron, the embodiment of this democracy is the European Union, which represents a unique democratic model in the world, and democracy conceived of as freedom.

The speech elicited an enraptured response from the US, British, and French political establishment, with the New York Times, Washington Post and Financial Times running lead editorials lionizing Macron.

The New York Times compared Macron to a biblical prophet manning the barricades to defend European democracy.

But if Macron be a biblical prophet, he is clothed in filthy garments.

Just four days before his speech, Macron ordered air strikes against the Syrian cities of Damascus and Homs, on false pretenses, without a parliamentary vote, and over the opposition of most of the French population. The French President carried out his military adventure in the Levant in alliance with Donald Trump, a right-wing and fascistic demagogue, and British Prime Minister Theresa May, whose government is consumed with the effort to split Britain from the European Union.

The prophet Macron, who received less than a quarter of the vote in the first round of the 2017 French election, has, in his first year of office, inscribed Frances authoritarian state of emergency measures into the country's constitution, worked to gut social services and launched a frontal attack on Frances public-sector workers and students.

In the week before his speech, Macron oversaw a massive assault by over 3,000 riot police on demonstrators at an environmentalist camp and called for France to repair the bond between the Church and the state in a sweeping attack on the secular traditions of the French Republic.

And yet it is Macron that the Western press is heralding as the last best hope for democracy. As the Washington Post put it, French President Emmanuel Macron articulated truths on Tuesday that resonate for the entire globe.

Absent from both Macrons speech and its rapturous reception in the press is any attempt to explain why the far right is gaining strength throughout Europe, or, just as importantly, why the liberal governments of Europe are pursuing policies that are increasingly indistinguishable from those of fascist regimes.

After all, Macrons key partner in the European Union, Germany, is headed by a grand coalition government that has largely adopted the anti-immigrant platform of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), has called for resurrecting the militarist (and, frankly, fascistic) traditions of the German army, and imposed one of the most draconian Internet censorship regimes anywhere in Europe.

Neither Macron nor his panegyrists make any effort to relate the rise of the far-right to the growth of social inequality, the dismantling of the welfare state or the rise of militarismthat is, to the fundamental characteristics of the capitalist system.

In reality, the greatest responsibility for the rise of the extreme right in Europe lies with the anti-working class policies pursued by the European Union on behalf of Europes banks and corporations. The EUs austerity dictates, which Macron supported as an investment banker and was directly implicated in as French finance minister, have resulted in far-right parties winning growing support. The working class does not see the EU as the embodiment of freedom and democracy, but as the ruthless executor of the interests of the super-rich and the banks.

The extreme right can cast themselves as critics of a corrupt establishment and channel social anger in a nationalist direction only because the social democrats, trade unions and pseudo-left parties like Syriza in Greece, the NPA in France and Die Linke in Germany do everything in their power to block the emergence of a genuine movement of the working class and unconditionally support and implement austerity programs.

As a result, the National Front has risen to become the second-largest party in France, the AfD became the first far-right party to enter federal parliament in Germany since World War II, the right-wing extremist Freedom Party assumed government responsibility in Austria, the xenophobic Lega and Five Star Movement hold a parliamentary majority in Italy, and far-right parties are in power in Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary.

The reform of the European Union being sought by Macron under these conditions has nothing to do with democracy, freedom or equality. It aims to transform Europe into a police state and a military great power dominated by France and Germany, able to compete with the United States in the imperialist redivision of the world.

In the run-up to the Second World War, the apologists for Anglo-American capitalism claimed that the fundamental division in the worldand the source of global conflictwas the conflict between democracy and fascism. But in the 1930s, as now, both the democratic and authoritarian governments were pressured to pursue essentially the same militarist and authoritarian policies by the global crisis.

No one described this process more clearly than Leon Trotsky, the co-leader of the 1917 October Revolution and the founder of the Fourth International, who argued that workers should have no illusions in the democratic pretenses of the capitalists. In his 1939 essay, Marxism in our Time, Trotsky wrote:

All attempts to represent the impending war as a clash between the ideas of democracy and fascism belong to the realm either of charlatanism or stupidity. Political forms change, capitalist appetites remain The furious and hopeless struggle for a new division of the world follows irresistibly from the mortal crisis of the capitalist system.

In language that perfectly describes the combination of military rearmament and social austerity that Macron represents, Trotsky observed:

Mussolini advised the workers of Italy to learn to pull in tighter the belts on their black shirts. But does not substantially the same take place in the imperialist democracies? Butter everywhere is used to grease guns. The workers of France, England, the United States learn to pull in their belts without having black shirts. In the richest country of the world millions of workers have turned into paupers.

He continued,

The uncontrollable deterioration in the living conditions of the workers makes it less and less possible for the bourgeoisie to grant the masses the right of participation in political life, even within the limited framework of bourgeois parliamentarism. Any other explanation of the manifest process of democracys dislodgement by fascism is an idealistic falsification of things as they are, either deception of self-deception.

In a way, the Western press is correct in lionizing Macron as a spokesman of democracy. He is in fact the spokesman for bourgeois democracy in the epoch of its disintegrationthat is, the untrammeled domination of the banks and the corporations.

The world is confronted with two forms of dictatorship, either the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, or the dictatorship of the proletariatthat is, the conquest of power by the working class, the vast majority of the population, and the reorganization of society on the basis of social need.

The working class has shown itself ready to fight against the EUs drive toward austerity and war. This is demonstrated by the militant struggles of rail workers and students in France, the scale of the strikes in Germanys industrial sector and public services, the repeated eruption of general strikes in Greece, the reemergence of workers' struggles in Eastern Europe and many other strikes and protests.

The coming period will be characterized by bitter class battles and mounting opposition to war and state repression. But these struggles require a political perspective. They can be successful only if the working class breaks with the social democrats, trade unions and pseudo-left parties, unites internationally, and combines the struggle against war and austerity with the fight against the capitalist system. Only in this way can the ruling elites policies be opposed and the rise of the far right halted.

Leon Trotsky founded the Fourth International in 1938, in the epoch of the rise of fascism. It advanced the struggle against war, inequality and attacks on democratic rights under the banner of revolutionary proletarian socialism, opposing fascism as an integral component of the struggle to overthrow the decadent and obsolete capitalist system.

As the ruling elites seek once again to transform the world into a foul prison, as Trotsky put it, workers and youth must again take up the struggle for socialism by building the International Committee of the Fourth International and its sections, the Socialist Equality Parties.
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From Esquire

(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To This Post)

Being our semi-regular weekly survey of whats goin down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin goes on, and where theres a wicked wind still blowin on that upper deck.

We begin in Kansas, where professional snipe-hunter and vote-suppressor Kris Kobach has had a further lesson in why federal judges dont find him, his half-baked conspiratorial ideas, his anti-democratic approach to democratic elections, or his clever wordplay amusing. From The Kansas City Star:

In her ruling, U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson in Kansas City, Kan., referred repeatedly to Kobach as acting disingenuously. She chastised him for failing to treat the voters affected by the ongoing court case the same as all other registered voters in accordance with a previous court order. The term register is not ambiguous, nor should there have been any question that these voters were to be treated just like any other registered voter, Robinson said in her order. Instead of a fine in the contempt matter, Robinson ordered Kobach to pay attorneys fees for the plaintiffs in the case. The Court is troubled by Defendants failure to take responsibility for violating this Courts orders, and for failing to ensure compliance over an issue that he explicitly represented to the Court had been accomplished, Robinson wrote.

Kobach is as much a recidivist offender as any serial criminal can be. He persists in misrepresenting himself to the court, ignoring court orders, and generally behaving in such a fashion that, were he a young black man with a penchant for robbing bodegas instead of a secretary of state with a pronounced contempt for all courts, hed have been hauled off in irons long ago.

In 2016, Robinson ordered Kobach to fully register thousands of Kansas voters who had registered at the DMV but had failed to provide proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport, as required by a Kansas law that Kobach crafted. Robinson had earlier scolded Kobach for initially informing the voters covered by her order that they were registered only for the 2016 election and for failing to ensure that they receive the same postcard notifications about their registration as other voters. Robinson told Kobach during a 2016 telephone conference that she would hold him responsible for directing counties to send out these postcards. He promised to do his best and narrowly dodged a contempt hearing in 2016 because of this agreement. He admitted several times during the hearing that he understood the Courts order meant he was to treat those covered by the preliminary injunction the same as all other registered voters, which included sending the standard postcard upon registration, Robinson said in Wednesdays order.

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With all this, Kobach is still a decent bet to be the next governor of Kansas. One thing this president* has taught this generation of Republican politicians is a whole new refinement of the technique of brazening things out. You can see it with how Scott Pruitt has bulletproofed himself for the moment, and the way Eric Greitens is clinging to the governorship of Missouri despite a collective bipartisan nausea at the very idea. Kobach has learned this very well, although it sounds like Judge Robinson isnt giving Kobach any marks for artistic merit.

Of course, Kobach is only the walking symbol of the continuing efforts of various state Republican parties to avoid responsibility at the ballot box by preventing inconvenient populations from casting votes. For example, in Arizona, the Republicans in the legislature made a ghoulish attempt to rig any possible special election for John McCains senatorial seat. From AZCentral:

The effort emerged Tuesday as the state Senate put an emergency clause on a bill changing how members of Congress who die or resign are replaced. U.S. Senate vacancies are filled by a governor's appointee, with the seat on the next general election ballot. The secretary of state has interpreted that to mean that if McCain's seat is vacated by May 31, it would be on the August primary and November general election ballot. The new proposal changes that to 150 days before the primary, or March 31 of this year. That takes McCain's seat out of play.

This is Arizona. Republicans are still solid bets in any statewide election, so they probably could have missed this trick. Maybe they could have demonstrated a smidgen of an iota of humanity. In any case, the Democrats in the legislature got together to block it and save at least some of their Republican colleagues from spending eternity in hell.

Photo credit: Getty Images

Meanwhile, up in Wisconsin, Republican AG Brad Schimel said one of the quiet parts out loud, and the indefatigable Ari Berman of Mother Jones caught him.

We battled to get voter ID on the ballot for the November 16 election, Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel, who defended the law in court, told conservative radio host Vicki McKenna on April 12. How many of your listeners really honestly are sure that Sen. [Ron] Johnson was going to win reelection or President Trump was going to win Wisconsin if we didnt have voter ID to keep Wisconsins elections clean and honest and have integrity?

Well, thats one way of looking at it. If youre Kris Kobach, that is.

Photo credit: AP

We skip on down to Tennessee, where the state House of Representatives has determined the state capitol in Nashville to be under-adorned. From The Tennesseean:

Legislation from Sen. Steve Southerland, R-Morristown, and Rep. Jerry Sexton, R- Bean Station, to erect a monument to the unborn on Capitol grounds has lingered throughout the legislative session with several lawmakers unsure what to do with it. The bill, as it has been described by its sponsors, is meant primarily to memorialize the unborn who were aborted. Lawmakers have heard from a number of experts on the issue, including one last week who said a similar monument already exists.

Meanwhile, as the legislature prepares the process of taking bids on who will build the monument to uterine regulation, the Tennessee prison system, especially its privatized portion, is a complete mess, and the Republican majority in the legislature is bound and determined to complicate the oversight process as much as possible.

Meanwhile, during the same legislative hearing, the head of the state's largest private prison admitted the state had fined his facility more than $2 million since the start of 2018. In something of a surprise move, the House Operations Committee delayed voting on an amended bill that would reauthorize the Tennessee Department of Correction for four years. During the committee, lawmakers changed the reauthorization period from one year to four, in effect curbing mandatory audits of prison practices. "I can't imagine a committee extending the Department of Correction four years, when there's no evidence any of the issues raised by the comptroller have been remedied," said House Democratic Caucus Leader Mike Stewart, D-Nashville. "You can describe what we're doing in 100 different ways. The only point to what is being proposed, a four-year extension, is to get the department out of a comptroller review."

But theres going to be a new giant fetus on the capitol lawn! You cant have everything, dammit.

Photo credit: Getty Images

And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, where Blog Official Schist Kicker Friedman of the Plains, fresh from the tropics, returns to bring us a tale of the fast shuffle. From News9:

A bill that changes which fund money from the fuel tax increase goes into has passed in the state House of Representatives Tuesday. The bill creates sort of a financial shell game, moving money around to fund education -- and that raises some concerns. "What assurances do the members of this body and the people of the state of Oklahoma have that 100 percent of the fuel tax increase that's generated by the 3-cent fuel increase and 6-cent diesel will perpetually be used for education?" asked Rep. David Perryman (D-Anadarko). "I believe it will. It goes into general revenue fund then from general revenue it goes into education department," said Dustin Roberts (R-Durant). The raise in the fuel tax was pitched as a way to fund the state's $2.9 billion education budget, which includes an average $6,100 raise for teachers. However, the way the bill works, money raised from the increase in the fuel tax would go to the roads and bridges fund, reducing the need for money from the general fund. Then that general fund money could be used to fund education.

I never will understand the overwhelming temptation among state politicians to play mischief with the money for public education. They know that education is the solution to a whole mess of social problems. But they have to be bludgeoned into creating even a system that will fund education through some kind of two-rail shot within the state budget. Strange and sad.

This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.

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Fans of Swedish DJ and producer Avicii took to social media to pay their respects to the musician, who died on Friday at the age of 28.

Devastating news about Avicii, a beautiful soul, passionate and extremely talented with so much more to do. My heart goes out to his family. God bless you Tim, Calvin Harris wrote.

Charlie Puth said, Wow, I would like to take a moment to pay tribute to the man who really opened my eyes as to what my productions could one day sound like. @Avicii was a genius and a music innovator, and I can not believe he is no longer with us. RIP to the very best.

Also Read: Avicii, Swedish DJ, Dies at 28

Avicii, born Tim Bergling, passed away at the age of 28.

It is with profound sorrow that we announce the loss of Tim Bergling, also known as Avicii, his rep Diana Baron said in a statement. He was found dead in Muscat, Oman, this Friday afternoon local time, April 20. The family is devastated and we ask everyone to please respect their need for privacy in this difficult time. No further statements will be given.

In 2016, the musician announced that he would retire from live performances due to health issues, citing a need to make a change that Id been struggling with for a while.

Also Read: Avicii to Retire After 2016 Tour: 'I Needed to Make a Change'

Aviciis songs include Wake Me Up, Hey Brother, Levels, I Could Be The One, Without You, My Feelings For You and Fade Into Darkness.

He released two studio albums  one in 2013 and one in 2016. Avicii was ranked third on DJ Magazines annual Top 100 DJs in 2012 and 2013 and was nominated twice for a Grammy. In a statement on his website last year, the musician said he had begun work on another release.

See reactions below.

Devastating news about Avicii, a beautiful soul, passionate and extremely talented with so much more to do. My heart goes out to his family. God bless you Tim x  Calvin Harris (@CalvinHarris) April 20, 2018

my sincerest and most heartfelt condolences to the friends, fans and families of @Avicii Banter aside, nobody can deny what he has accomplished and done for modern dance music and im very proud of him.  Goat lord (@deadmau5) April 20, 2018

I would have enjoyed nothing more than ripping into Avicii well into and beyond our 60's. taken away from us far too young. I know he's at peace somewhere up there getting the last laugh that i spelled his name right this time. https://t.co/uAmdPsouSz  Goat lord (@deadmau5) April 20, 2018

My heartfelt condolences to Tim's family and close friends. I can't express how deeply sad I am. Meeting him changed my life. He was an amazingly talented person and it hurts so bad that he's gone.  Aloe Blacc (@aloeblacc) April 20, 2018

devastated at the news of @Avicii passing. working with him was one of my favorite collaborative moments. far too young. the world was a happier and fuller place with his presence and art. sending all my love to his friends and family. Xxdr  Imagine Dragons (@Imaginedragons) April 20, 2018

Such sad news to hear about Avicii passing. Too young and way too soon. My condolences go out to his family, friends and fans x  DUA LIPA (@DUALIPA) April 20, 2018

Wow, I would like to take a moment to pay tribute to the man who really opened my eyes as to what my productions could one day sound like. @Avicii was a genius and a music innovator, and I can not believe he is no longer with us. RIP to the very best.  Charlie Puth (@charlieputh) April 20, 2018

Can't really describe in words how sad I feel right now.. thank you for inspiring me and millions others. RIP @Avicii ???? pic.twitter.com/nthXoCiZqy  MARTIN GARRIX (@MartinGarrix) April 20, 2018

Shocked and saddened to learn of @aviciis passing. A humble and immensely talented artist. Our hearts go out to his family and loved ones.  Above & Beyond (@aboveandbeyond) April 20, 2018

No words can describe the sadness Im feeling right now, hearing about Avicii passing away.????

Thoughts go out to his family and friends  Zedd (@Zedd) April 20, 2018

Im crying on the airplane. I hope I dont make the passengers nervous. #RIPAVICII  Nile Rodgers (@nilerodgers) April 20, 2018

Oh my god truly devastated for Avicii very very sad news way to young  what a talent he was. rest in peace x  Liam (@LiamPayne) April 20, 2018

No @Avicii  I cant even begin to comprehend this. I adore you and I loved traveling and touring Europe with you. You were my friend and a beautiful person. Vegas and Ibiza memories will always be so special to me. RIP you were magic.  Ruby Rose (@RubyRose) April 20, 2018

RIP Avicii. Damn, 28, so young.  James Wan (@creepypuppet) April 20, 2018

RIP Tim. You were a brilliant composer and a gentle spirit. Fond memories of creating music w @Avicii and @nilerodgers- https://t.co/AfCVbXlhQh  ADAM LAMBERT (@adamlambert) April 20, 2018

Damn Dude RIP #Avicii ????????  DJ Pauly D (@DJPaulyD) April 20, 2018

So sorry to hear of the passing of Tim Bergling @Avicii. A super talented writer & producer who lived too short a life.  Jono Grant (@jonogrant) April 20, 2018

Just hearrbthe craziest shit about avicii.  T'Questlove (@questlove) April 20, 2018

Rest in peace @Avicii My heart goes out to your family at this difficult time. x  Craig David (@CraigDavid) April 20, 2018

Oh shit  T'Questlove (@questlove) April 20, 2018

Avicii was one of the first artists to get me into EDM music, so sad man, RIP  Luna (@Lunaa) April 20, 2018

I am both shocked and horrified at this news RIP Avicii  What a loss for this world. pic.twitter.com/U2VgghW1FM  Sam Callahan (@CallahanMusic_) April 20, 2018

Damn. Rest In Peace #Avicii. That is just too sad man.  Young Money (@YoungMoneySite) April 20, 2018

Avicii contributed incredible art to this world. devastated to hear about this. Rest In Peace. X  Sabrina Carpenter (@SabrinaAnnLynn) April 20, 2018

Just landed in the US and got the news that Avicii died. I hope this isnt real. RIP ???? #nowords  Dannic (@dannic) April 20, 2018

At a loss for wordsRest easy brother ???? @Avicii  marshmello (@marshmellomusic) April 20, 2018

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They saw a car full of black people sitting in front of a Walmart, and they decided that was suspicious.

By Latifah Muhammad

Police in Barstow, Calif. shot and killed a young father of three in a Walmart parking lot, and injured a woman as dozens of bullets were fired into a car that the victim was driving, The Guardian reports. Diante Butchie Yarber, 26, was unarmed when he was killed, and while authorities claim that he was wanted for questioning over an allegedly stolen vehicle and accelerated towards officers, his family says he was the victim of unjustified deadly force.

According to a news release from the San Bernardino County Sheriffs Department, the April 5 incident unfolded when officers responded to a call of a suspicious vehicle in the Walmart parking lot. In the release, the Barstow Police Officers are listed as the victim, while Yarber is listed as a suspect.

Officers believed the driver was a subject wanted for questioning in a recent crime involving a stolen vehicle, reads the news release. Officers attempted a traffic stop of the Mustang when the driver suddenly reversed the vehicle and struck one of the patrol cars. When the driver again accelerated toward the officers and struck a second patrol car, the officer involved shooting occurred. Two of the four occupants were struck by gunfire.

The driver was pronounced deceased at the scene. A female passenger suffered gunshot wounds and was airlifted to Arrowhead Regional Medical Center, the report continues. The two male passengers exited the vehicle during the incident and one of them sustained minor injuries to his lower extremities in the process. Both injured passengers are expected to recover from their injuries.

As has been the case with many black victims of police shootings, Yarbers past criminal record has been brought to surface as if to somehow justify the shooting. However, Brittany Chandler, mother of Yarbers 19-month-old daughter maintains that police took him away for no reason, and that officers should be held accountable for his death. They are sick people for them to be able to shoot someone down in broad daylight, she said.

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Yarbers older sister, Ruby Hawkins, said that local police constantly harassed her brother. They are the biggest criminals, she said. They are bullies with badges  I dont know how you can fear for your life with a person that is moving away from you.

You see this all the time, but you never in a million years think youll be the one crying about a loved one killed at the hands of police, Hawkins added.

Yarbers aunt, Aleta Yarber, confirmed that the vehicle in question belonged to her son and had not been reported stolen. She also said that her son hasnt been able to talk much about the shooting because hes traumatized.

They saw a car full of black people sitting in front of a Walmart, and they decided that was suspicious, said Lee Merritt, an attorney for the family. They just began pouring bullets  Its irresponsible. Its dangerous. Its mind-boggling, the use of force.

A crowdfunding page launched to raise money for Yarbers three young daughter says that he maneuvered his car around the police vehicles after being profiled and boxed in by cops without reasonable suspicion for stopping him. Video footage of his car reversing slowly away from law enforcement was captured by a a pedestrian, just before officers began to shoot into the vehicle, the statement reads.

Yarber is the latest black California man gunned down by police whose story has drawn national attention, after the shooting death of Stephon Clark a 22-year-old father of two who was unarmed when he was shot to death in his grandmothers backyard in March.

Earlier in the month, California legislators introduced a bill that would bar police officers from using deadly force unless absolutely necessary. The measure has been widely rejected by police chiefs in the state.

In the video below, police can be heard unloading several rounds into the vehicle that Yarber was driving.

This post California Police Kill 26-Year-Old Father In Walmart Parking Lot first appeared on Vibe.
The family of Jennifer Riordan has set up a memorial fund in her honor just days after her death following an engine explosion on Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 on Tuesday.

Riordana 43-year-old mother of two and bank executive from Albuquerque, New Mexicowas fatally injured when she was partially sucked out of a window after an engine exploded during her flight from LaGuardia Airport in New York to Dallas.

In a statement to PEOPLE, Riordans family announced the founding of a memorial website, The Jennifer Riordan Memorial Trust, where people who are interested can support causes that were important to Riordan and help the family meet financial needs after the traumatic event.

We appreciate the outpouring of support for our family and the love for Jennifer, the statement, provided to PEOPLE, states. Hearing stories of how she impacted everyone in so many meaningful ways has truly touched our hearts. To honor her legacy, an official memorial site has been created to fund causes that were near and dear to her heart.

Riordan had to be pulled back in by a team of passengersincluding Andrew Needum, a firefighter from Texasand was given CPR by retired nurse Peggy Phillips for almost 20 minutes until the planes pilot was able to make an emergency landing in Philadelphia. According to CBS News, Riordan was wearing her seatbelt during the time of the incident.

They were fighting to get her back in. It was a struggle, it looked like it took a few people. There was quite a bit of blood, a passenger on the flight, who chose to remained anonymous, told PEOPLE about the chaotic scene. I saw a passenger pumping on her chest performing CPR and someone ran up to the front of the plane where they got a defibrillator.

RELATED: Southwest Passenger Recalls Struggle During Deadly Flight: There Was Quite a Bit of Blood

Riordans death was caused by blunt impact trauma to her head, neck and torso, the Philadelphia Department of Public Health said on Wednesday.

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The website also offers the option for visitors to send well-wishes to Riordans two young children, Averie and Joshua.

Want to keep up with the latest from PEOPLE? Sign up for our daily newsletter to get our best stories of the day delivered straight to your inbox.

Their loss is the most profound, a description on the website reads, as they will not get the chance to know her in her full force of service and dedication as many children do as they grow and know their parents  seeing her as more than Mommy and in the full grace of her being and selfless service.

For those looking to make a monetary donation, they can send funds through the website or a via check directly to the trust. The website also asks visitors to honor Riordan by being kindhearted to each otherthis, above all, will help to keep her legacy alive.

Most importantly, the website states, we urge you to celebrate Jennifer, by being kind, loving, caring and sharing to your friends, family and community.
Time magazine has released its Time 100: The Most Influential People of 2018, and while the annual list often includes controversial figures, the piece on the Parkland Florida shooting particularly struck a chord.

The magazine featured five of the most notable students from the shooting that killed 17 people in February. David Hogg, Emma Gonzalez, Cameron Kasky, Jaclyn Corin, and Alex Wind helped organize the March for Our Lives movement, which is focused on changing Americas gun laws. CBS News reported that more than 200,000 people attended the march last month in Washington, D.C., with more than 800 other marches taking place across the nation that same day.

Theres little question as to why Time included the students in its Time 100 issue, given their impact on the gun control debate, but many had a problem with the author of the article about the organizers. Former President Barack Obama praised the teenagers, saying, Our kids now show us what weve told them America is all about, even if we havent always believed it ourselves: that our future isnt written for us, but by us.

Obama also criticized the Republican Congress and the NRAs bias on the issue, saying that progress will be slow and frustrating.

Many right-leaning Twitter users attacked Obamas words, blaming his administration for the gun violence in America.
Tammy Duckworth made history on Thursday when she became the first senator to bring a baby on the Senate floor.

Reporters sounded the Senate baby alert on social media as the Illinois Democrat and her newborn daughter, Maile, were photographed making their smiling debut in the chamber.

Duckworth, 50, a combat veteran who lost both her legs in the Iraq war, already made history when she welcomed daughter Maile Pearl Bowlsbey on April 9, becoming the first sitting senator to have a baby while in office.

Thursdays appearance came one day after lawmakers, in a historic change in Senate rules, voted to allow babies of members on the floor during votes, the Associated Press reported. Little Maile was the inspiration for the change, and Duckworth thanked her colleagues in a statement for helping bring the Senate into the 21st Century by recognizing that sometimes new parents also have responsibilities at work.

Duckworth also praised the Senate in a tweet for leading by example & sending the important message that working parents everywhere deserve family-friendly workplace policies.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth and daughter Maile

Sen. Tammy Duckworth and daughter Maile

By ensuring that no Senator will be prevented from performing their constitutional responsibilities simply because they have a young child, the Senate is leading by example & sending the important message that working parents everywhere deserve family-friendly workplace policies  Tammy Duckworth (@SenDuckworth) April 18, 2018

Before her daughters Senate debut on Thursday, Duckworth tweeted a photo of Mailes outfit for the big day, which included a duckling-printed onesie and a green cardigan sweater.

I made sure she has a jacket so she doesnt violate the Senate floor dress code (which requires blazers), Duckworth wrote.

I may have to vote today, so Mailes outfit is prepped. I made sure she has a jacket so she doesnt violate the Senate floor dress code (which requires blazers). Im not sure what the policy is on duckling onesies, but I think were ready pic.twitter.com/SsNHEuSVnY  Tammy Duckworth (@SenDuckworth) April 19, 2018

???????? SENATE BABY ALERT ???????? pic.twitter.com/3VeYjudp8L  Ryan Struyk (@ryanstruyk) April 19, 2018

With newborn daughter Maile Pearl in tow, @SenDuckworth arrives at the US Capitol for her first vote since giving birth (and her first vote since the Senate rules were changed to allow her to bring her baby on to the floor during votes): pic.twitter.com/0iWnHZAXy3  Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) April 19, 2018

Im not sure what the policy is on duckling onesies, she added, but I think were ready.

She neednt have worried.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar told WBUR that babies will be exempt from the Senate dress code.
After sitting in Courtroom 18 of the U.S. District Court in Washington for the past month, AT&T exec John Stankey finally had his chance to testify late today about the motivation behind the companies $85 billion merger.

The market we are competing in is for time and attention, he said under direct questioning from lead defense attorney Daniel Petrocelli. Facebook, Google, Netflix  they are all distracting people from other things they used to do like tune in linear TV, he said. Thats the battle here. The comments amplified arguments from the defense that any advantage from the deal in the traditional TV sphere is far outweighed by the rapid incursion of deep-pocketed tech giants. Joining forces, the defense insists, will unlock both efficiencies and customer benefits. The Department of Justice contends that the merger will harm rival companies and consumers through higher carriage fees given the companies merged might.

Stankey took the stand late in the days action. His two hours of testimony followed about three hours on the stand for Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes, whom Stankey would effectively replace if and when the long-gestating deal is approved. AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, who is poised to run the combined company, will testify on Thursday morning.

A 33-year veteran of AT&T. Stankey since last August has been overseeing the integration of the companies, enabling him to attend the trial daily as a corporate observer seated near the team of lawyers. On the stand, he retraced the path toward the merger proposal in 2016. He said he raised the idea with Stephenson of embracing content as opposed to continuing to build distribution assets. The CEO was receptive to it, Stankey recalled. Asked by Petrocelli if the initial goal was a transaction of the magnitude of AT&T, he said, That wasnt where we originally started. Instead, the instinct was to gather what Stankey called a string of pearls  a smaller collection of content pieces. Early on in pursuit of that strategy, Stankey recalled, the execs realized things in the industry had continued to move quickly. Bigger targets were considered, and the company soon settled on Time Warner.

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Petrocelli asked Stankey to offer examples of how the merged company would bring innovation to the marketplace. He cited the reinvention of the traditional ad experience. (Bewkes had offered a strikingly candid assessment of ad clutter and the vulnerability of linear TV ads on Turner networks during his testimony, saying there are too many of them and thats part of the problem.) Stankey said a programmer like CNN could rework its offerings such that a viewer could get a 15-minute dip into the news of the day, delivered on mobile platforms on demand and accompanied by more relevant ads. From the companys point of view, as long as the content is in demand, it could expand the ad opportunities with more units, he said. Nobody has built the platform that does what Facebook and Google do to the TV business on the internet.

RelatedTime Warner Boss Jeff Bewkes Pushes Back At What DOJ Is Missing

One significant happening that was scarcely mentioned at all today, oddly, was the storm a few blocks away this month when Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg testified on Capitol Hill about the social networks controversial use of users data. TV providers, in their zeal for new ad models and personalization, could risk summoning some of those ghosts. Petrocelli did tee up a question for Stankey. We have a lot of data now, he said. Everything is done according to a strict privacy policy. The company aggregates and anonymizes data, keeping it for our own internal purposes, Stankey said. Were not brokering the data out, as Facebook did with research firm Cambridge Analytica.

Asked about efficiencies from the deal, Stankey repeated earlier estimates of $2.5 billion in annual cost reductions. Originally that figure was projected to kick in after a 2017 deal close, running through 2020. Now, the exec noted, it may be 2021 by the time we get through this drill. (Stankey also let slip with a couple of other brief expressions of frustration with the regulatory logjam that befell a deal believed to be on the goal line last October. Hopefully, at some point well close this transaction, he grumbled at one point.

The DOJs cross-examination, as with Bewkes, yielded little. Stankey was prodded about his compensation package and whether he was driving toward the deal out of self-interest. He also rebutted the ongoing narrative that the endgame of the deal is for AT&T to use the Turner networks as leverage to further its distribution goals, shaking down rivals and consumers.

When Petrocelli pre-emptively raised one government insinuation that AT&T and Comcast on Stankeys watch may have explored joining forces to squelch internet-delivered competitors, the 33-year veteran grew animated. I cant even imagine that, he said. I dont like Comcast. I compete with them. Asked if Comcast had run local ads that AT&T had objected to during a turf battle for subscribers, Stankey snorted, Once a quarter. We were constantly playing Whack-a-Mole with them.  Im not going to co-operate with someone I dont like.

Defense witnesses are expected to complete their testimony by next Tuesday, though it will likely be weeks if not a couple of months before a final ruling in the case. The weeks to come will see rebuttal witnesses, closing arguments and summary filings by both sides lasting into May. Judge Richard J. Leon, who is deciding the case solo without a jury, will likely take at least a couple of weeks to then deliver his ruling. The media business writ large continues to count down to that moment.

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Time Warner Boss Jeff Bewkes Pushes Back At What DOJ Is "Missing"

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Time Warner And AT&T CEOs Get Set To Take The Stand In Antitrust Trial




On Saturday, former First Lady Barbara Bush will be buried near her beloved late daughter, Robin, who died of leukemia at age 3 in 1953, Newsweek reports.

After a service at St. Martins Episcopal Church, the former first lady will be laid to rest by loved ones on the grounds of the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library at Texas A&M University in Houston, where Pauline Robinson Robin Bush is also buried. The Texas A&M University student newspaper, The Battalion, also reported that the former first lady would be buried on the campus in College Station, Texas.

Six years before her own death at 92 on Tuesday, the former first lady heartbreakingly recalled her final months with Robin after the Bush family was told there was no treatment for their young daughter.

The doctor said, You dont do anything. Shes going to die, the former first lady recalled in a 2012 Today show interview. She said, My advice is take her home, love her. In about two weeks shell be gone. 

George H. W. Bush with his wife, Barbara, and their children Pauline (Robin) and George W. on horse in the yard of their Midlands, Texas ranch

We were told to forget that Robin was sick, make her as comfortable as we could, love her  and let her gently slip away, Bush also wrote in her 1994 memoir,. She said this would happen very quickly.

The Bushes nevertheless sought treatment for their then-only daughter, who went on to battle the blood cancer for seven months before dying on October 11, 1953, just two months shy of her fourth birthday.

In 2012, Bush recalled being with daughter when she died. I was combing her hair and holding her hand, Bush told Today. I saw that little body, I saw her spirit go.

Robin remained a strong and positive presence in her mothers life through the years. Robin to me is a joy. Shes like an angel to me, and shes not a sadness or a sorrow, the former first lady said in 2012.

USA Today reporter Susan Page, who is writing a new biography of Barbara Bush, spoke to the former first lady about Robins death last fall, The Washington Post reported.

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Sitting in her Houston living room, facing a portrait of her forever-young daughter, the tears were fresh, the Post said.

I think this was a very powerful tragedy in their lives, Page said. No mother would ever forget a child, but Robin has remained a real presence for them.

Page said the loss tested Bushs marriage to former President George H.W. Bush but ultimately made it stronger.

The experience also strengthened the bond between Bush and son George W. Bush, who was 7 at the time of his sisters death.

In 1999, the former first lady told the Post about how a young George helped her heal after the tragedy.

One day  she heard her son tell a friend that he couldnt come out because he had to play with his mother, who was lonely. I was thinking, Well, Im being there for him, she recalled. But the truth was he was being there for me. 

That started my cure, she wrote in her memoir. I realized I was too much of a burden for a little 7-year-old boy to carry.
Just as Hollie Mackey was about to get up from her seat to go to the bathroom during Tuesday mornings Southwest Airlines flight from New York to Dallas, flight attendants asked passengers to stay seated due to continual turbulence. Mackey put her seatbelt back on, shared a glance of disappointment about the bumpy ride ahead with the woman seated at the window to her left and settled back in. Moments later, the unthinkable happened.

Mackey, 42, was seated in the aisle seat on the same row as Jennifer Riordan, a mother of two and bank executive from Albuquerque, New Mexico, who was killed when Flight 1380s left side engine exploded just 20 minutes into their trip. When debris from the explosion blew out the window next to her, it caused Riordan to be partially sucked out of the aircraft through the gaping hole where the window used to be. Mackey and a teen girl sitting between them immediately came to her aid.

I grabbed onto Jennifers belt loop area and wrapped my arm around her waist, and tried to pull her in. The little girl did, too, Mackey, an associate professor at the University of Oklahoma, tells PEOPLE.

Hollie Mackey

RELATED: Southwest Passenger Recalls Struggle During Deadly Flight: There Was Quite a Bit of Blood

As the damaged plane traveled hundreds of miles an hour, thousands of feet in the sky, Mackey and the teen held onto Riordan as the cold air and the deafening sound of the aircraft engulfed them.

It was really loud, you couldnt hear. We tried yelling for help, we tried, but you couldnt hear anything, she says.

As hard as they tried, Mackey and the young girl couldnt pull Riordan back inside.

It was more of a helpless feeling than anything else, Mackey says. With the altitude and that air pressure at that time, we were not physically able to move her at all the air pressure was still too much.

Riordan was wearing a seatbelt at the time of the explosion, and Mackey believes it is what kept the 43-year-old from being pulled out of the plane completely. Mackey says she, too, felt the force of the suction drawing her to the window.

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We were feeling it pulling us a little bit. It wasnt strong enough to pull us out, I dont believe, Mackey says. But I wasnt certain it wasnt strong enough to pull the girl out if I unbuckled her and tried to move her out of the way.

Jennifer Riordan

The seatbelt is what held her inside, she says of Riordan.

Throughout the ordeal, Mackey says she kept her thoughts on helping those around her, and not on what could happen if the plane went down.

It momentarily crossed my mind it could crash, she says. Then I thought, Well, I cant do anything about that, so I might as well focus on what I can do something about and hope for the best. 

As the aircraft continued its descent to make an emergency landing in Philadelphia, two Texas firefighters who were also passengers helped pull an unconscious Riordan from the window. She was then given CPR by retired nurse Peggy Phillips for almost 20 minutes until the plane touched the ground.

The NTSB believes metal fatigue on the 18-year-old Boeing 737piloted by hero pilot, Tammie Jo Shultsled to one of the engines blade breaking mid-flight, sending shrapnel into the planes fuselage and breaking the window next to Riordan.

On Wednesday, the Philadelphia Department of Public Health announced Riordans death was caused by blunt impact trauma to her head, neck and torso. Riordans family announced Thursday the founding of a memorial website, The Jennifer Riordan Memorial Trust, where givers can support causes that were important to Riordan and help the family meet financial needs after the traumatic event.

We appreciate the outpouring of support for our family and the love for Jennifer, the statement, provided to PEOPLE, states. Hearing stories of how she impacted everyone in so many meaningful ways has truly touched our hearts. To honor her legacy, an official memorial site has been created to fund causes that were near and dear to her heart.

Later that night after landing in Philadelphia, Mackey took a plane to Dallas and caught a connecting flight back to her home in Norman, Oklahoma, where she reunited with her family. Once there, she was able to reflect on the days traumatic events.

I think you can breathe a little bit more, I didnt have to be strong anymore, and it was finally my turn to get to drop everything, cry and think about how scared I was, she says. I didnt have to be strong because I didnt have anyone to be strong for anymore.

Mackeys thoughts  and her heart  remain focused on Riordans family.

Both of us expected to be going home to our families and sleeping in our own beds that night, she says. I kept telling my husband, somebody elses family doesnt get to have this tonight, and it isnt fair.
New Zealands Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern arrives at Buckingham Palace in a traditional Maori cloak. (Photo: Getty Images)

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand made a statement as she arrived at Buckingham Palace on Thursday to meet Queen Elizabeth II and other world leaders at one of this weeks Commonwealth events. The 37-year-old is a great source of pride for New Zealand, as the worlds youngest female leader and one of very few women who will give birth while leading a country. Arden, who is expecting her first child in June, delighted her fellow New Zealanders when she was pictured wearing a traditional Maori cloak.

The coat, also known as a korowai, is a traditional garment associated with New Zealands indigenous people that confers respect and power. The significance of the cloak, which is adorned with feathers, draws on the association of birds as messengers from the spiritual realm, according to the Museum of New Zealand. Its appearance in the international arena was greeted enthusiastically online.

This image is so awesome. Our PM @jacindaardern has been representing our country so well on her European tour recently. Wearing a korowai to the state dinner at Buckingham Palace and being only one of two guests invited to make a toast, you're doing us proud girl! pic.twitter.com/pUcWO2kyCl  (@TaylarThorpe) April 19, 2018

An amazing image of leadership in 2018.

New Zealand's feminist Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, wearing a korowai (Maori cloak), attending a Commonwealth meeting in the post-empire colonised world. pic.twitter.com/vSV7YB7niE  Mariam Parwaiz (@MariamParwaiz) April 20, 2018

This photo of our Prime Minister @jacindaardern in Buckingham Palace makes me so proud, both as a New Zealander and a Maori. (you're ok, too, @NZClarke) pic.twitter.com/1jnVN00yb2  Kenny Williams (@Ohheykenny) April 20, 2018

This is leadership. New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern quotes Maori proverb during Commonwealth toast: What is the most important thing in the world? The people, the people, the people. https://t.co/2iUf9YkIwQ pic.twitter.com/QapxzMAM1q  Hilary Kilgour (@HilaryKilgour) April 20, 2018

Regardless of your politicial leanings, you've got to take a minute and appreciate everything this photo represents; Especially around all of us being free from toxic gender roles, and empowered to go with our hearts. pic.twitter.com/JM38tEWMaT  Suzy Cate-O (@CateOwen) April 19, 2018

The korowai worn by Arden was loaned to her by the Ngati Ranana London Maori Club, which aims to provide New Zealanders living in the United Kingdom with an opportunity to become involved in their home countrys indigenous culture. As it turns out, its not the first time that this very garment has been presented to the Queen. In early March, for the Commonwealth Day Service in Westminster Abbey, Queen Elizabeth II welcomed the clubs honorary president, Whaea Esther Jessop, who was wearing the same cloak at the time.

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Whaea Esther Jessop stands to the left of the singer Liam Payne, of One Direction, as the Queen welcomes her guests to Westminster Abbey. (Photo: Getty Images)

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VIENNA (Reuters) - Two passenger trains were involved in a crash while being coupled together at the main station in the Austrian city of Salzburg early on Friday, and up to 40 people were slightly injured, police said. One train slammed too hard into another from Zurich as they were being coupled together, a police spokesman said. "A Nightjet (train) was stopped at platform 4 and in a coupling procedure another train drove into it from behind," the spokesman said, adding that the number of injuries was not expected to rise significantly. The accident happened at about 4:45 a.m. (0245 GMT/10.45 p.m. ET, Thursday), the spokesman said. (Reporting by Francois Murphy; Editing by Robert Birsel)
The most wonderful day of the year has arrived for pot smokers: Happy Weed Day  or, as its more affectionately known, happy 420!

Social media lit up with celebratory messages in favor of the controversial plant, which of course included one of the most famous weed lovers alive: Snoop Dogg. The rapper got a head start in celebrating with a message to his fellow potheads last night  we assume he knew the smokers would be a little groggy by the morning. He was probably right; were still waiting for a wake-and-bake message from Willie Nelson. But hey, Cheech and Chong got an early start!

Snoop Dogg has taken the role of 420 Santa Claus.

Dont forget to leave milk and cookies out 4 me tonite! #420eve  Snoop Dogg (@SnoopDogg) April 20, 2018

Request granted! Fans of Snoop, and weed in general, flooded the rappers Twitter account with digital cookies. Many were very creative  were looking at you and your bong-shaped baked goods, @brooketrout_hey  and all were hilarious.

Done pic.twitter.com/yusMkiZanf  Mary! is that a police? I'm calling the weed (@brooketrout_hey) April 20, 2018

nothing but respect for my president pic.twitter.com/xGg6NsLojk  neg (@negeensamimi) April 20, 2018

Im so glad you enjoyed yourself! pic.twitter.com/0L7Vc2VP4u  Leaf Flower Bud (@leafflowerbud) April 20, 2018

gonna have to share pic.twitter.com/EEOQbUe0wD  Evan Lovett (@EvanLovett) April 20, 2018

Surprisingly, Snoop Dogg was early to rise on this April day and spent the morning sharing even more weed-themed messages to his pot-loving friends.

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happy 420 to celebrate the holiday im taking over the @JokersWildTBS twitter to answer some questions from yall . join me at 420 est #JokersWild #SnoopsFavoriteHoliday pic.twitter.com/uqHZlM4hEj  Snoop Dogg (@SnoopDogg) April 20, 2018

Watch: Is Obama to blame for gun violence? Twitter says yes:

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Johannesburg (AFP) - South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has cut short his participation in the Commonwealth summit in Britain to tackle violent demonstrations at home, his office said, in one of the first major challenges of his new presidency.

Ramaphosa, who took office in February with promises to jump-start the economy and stamp out graft, expressed "grave concern" over unrest in North West province and reports of clashes between police and protesters, according to a statement published on the president's website Thursday.

"President Ramaphosa has called for calm and adherence to the rule of law in the province and has called on all aggrieved parties to express their grievances through peaceful means and engagement rather than violence and anarchy," the statement said.

It added that the South African leader had urged security forces to "exercise maximum restraint".

Television images aired by the SABC state broadcaster showed thick smoke rising into the air near the site of the unrest in and around the provincial capital Mahikeng, while crowds of protesters looted shops in the area.

The broadcaster said one person was thought to have died in the demonstrations.

Police have reportedly used tear gas and rubber bullets to try and quell the protests, which erupted this week over jobs, housing and corruption.

Ramaphosa had been attending the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in London where he was leading a government delegation this week.

Born out of the former British empire, the voluntary organisation of 53 member states covering a third of the world's population typically focuses on development and democracy, but is this year placing greater attention on boosting trade.

Ramaphosa, who took over as leader of the ruling African National Congress in December, replaced Jacob Zuma as South Africa's leader earlier this year.

Zuma's nine-year tenure saddled South Africa with weak growth, ballooning national debt, depressed investor confidence and record unemployment.
Mafikeng (South Africa) (AFP) - South African police on Friday fired rubber bullets at protesters after President Cyril Ramaphosa cut short a foreign trip to deal with violent riots over alleged government corruption and poor public services.

Shops were looted, roads were blocked and vehicles set alight in North West province in unrest that posed an early challenge for Ramaphosa, who came to power in February.

At least 23 people were arrested and one man was reported to have died in sporadic violence that erupted this week in Mahikeng, the provincial capital.

Ramaphosa called for calm as he vowed to speedily resolve the cause of the unrest, following more than six hours of talks with local leaders in the city of Mahikeng after he cut short his trip to a Commonwealth summit in London.

Violent protests are common in South Africa, but North West province has been a hotbed of unrest due to boiling frustration over lack of housing, health services and jobs.

Police fired rubber bullets as protesters hid behind cardboard sheets, while roads were littered with burning tyres and bricks that had been thrown through the air.

- 'Violence and anarchy' -

At the end of the talks Ramaphosa appealed for an end to the unrest, promising a "speedy" resolution of the crisis.

"...let us be calm, let us return to a position of normalcy as we address this matter and reach finality on it," he said in an address broadcast live from the city.

He said he had been made to understand during the talks that the unrest had been sparked by concerns over the position of the provincial premier, corruption and governance.

"These are matters that are serious enough" to warrant broad consultation in the party and the national government "on an urgent basis", he said.

"We are going to act as speedily as possible to address each of the issues that have been raised," he added.

The trigger for the unrest was reportedly the death on Tuesday of two patients at a health clinic that was closed due to a month-long dispute over health workers' salaries and contracts.

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Much of the anger has been directed at Supra Mahumapelo, the provincial premier, who is accused of involvement in graft scandals that have engulfed the ruling ANC (African National Congress) party.

The border to neighbouring Botswana was closed due to the violence, while schools, shops, offices and government services across North West province were shut.

Local residents said foreign-owned shops were the first to be targeted by looters.

"Very poor people are in dire need. Those people looted foreigners' shops," local resident Leveticus Molosankwe, 43, told AFP.

"They have taken advantage of the political situation as people plead for the removal of Mahumapelo. This has been simmering for months."

Thapelo Galeboe, member of the local Communist Party branch, said the premier ruled "like an emperor" in the province.

"The health system has completely collapsed. Hospitals are filthy. Families close to the premier have benefited in a very corrupt manner from tenders," he said.

- New leadership -

Ramaphosa, who took over as leader of the ruling ANC in December, replaced Jacob Zuma as national president earlier this year.

Zuma's nine-year tenure saddled South Africa with weak growth, ballooning national debt, depressed investor confidence and record unemployment.

The ANC forced Zuma from office in February largely due to his mounting legal challenges and multiple corruption scandals, and the party has distanced itself from its former leader.

Ramaphosa has vowed to crack down on government corruption, which he has admitted is a serious problem, and improve South Africa's ability to attract foreign investment.

Unemployment is at a record high of about 28 percent, with youth unemployment reaching over 50 percent in many areas.

Zuma appeared in court earlier this month at a preliminary hearing on graft charges that he denies.
Nouakchott (AFP) - The main jihadist alliance in Africa's Sahel region with links to Al-Qaeda on Friday claimed an attack last weekend on the UN camp of international troops in northern Mali's historic city of Timbuktu.

One UN peacekeeper from Burkina Faso was killed in the rocket, mortar and car bomb attack, while fourteen UN and French soldiers along with two civilians were wounded.

Around 15 of the attackers were killed, according to the French military.

The United Nations said it marked the biggest single attack on its peacekeepers since they were deployed to Mali in July 2013.

The jihadist alliance's claim to have carried out the operation was revealed in a statement posted on social networks and also received by the Mauritanian agency ANI and the US jihadist monitoring SITE intelligence group.

It said the attack was launched to avenge raids by French forces earlier this month in which several of its members were killed.

The alliance known as the Support Group for Islam and Muslims was formed last year and is led by Iyad Ag Ghaly, a Malian of the Tuareg ethnic group, with as deputy the Algerian Yahya Abu el Hammam, a leader of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), according to an audio message released to Islamist websites in March.

Mali's unrest stems from a 2012 Tuareg separatist uprising against the state which was exploited by jihadists in order to take over key cities in the north.

More than a dozen of Timbuktu's holy shrines, built in the 15th and 16th centuries when the city was revered as a centre of Islamic learning, were razed in a campaign against idolatry by Al-Qaeda-linked jihadists.

The extremists were largely driven out in a French-led military operation launched in January 2013.

But vast stretches of the country remain out of the control of Malian, French and UN forces, which are frequent targets of attacks.
Amazon is unfazed by President Donald Trumps recent criticism of Amazon (AMZN), which is vying for a lucrative government contract, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels told Yahoo Finance.

Weve had a long and great relationship with the White House and with the DoD [Department of Defense], and as such, I think this is really business as usual for us, Vogels told Yahoo Finance during an interview at the AWS Summit in San Francisco earlier this April.

Amazon Web Services, or AWS, is seen as a front-runner in a competition with Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL) and Microsoft (MSFT) for an exclusive 10-year multibillion-dollar contract that would modernize the U.S. Department of Defenses information technology system. Although Vogels declined to discuss specifics around the process, Amazons odds of landing the government contract are very good, given how the company already hosts classified systems with the CIA, as well as other top defense contractors like Lockheed Martin.

The Pentagon said this week there is no clear front-runner for the contract.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels says its business as usual for Amazon.

Regardless of the outcome, AWS is stronger than ever. The cloud-based business, which reports a $20 billion revenue run rate, announced more than 1,400 services and features in 2017, with over 1 million customers, including McDonalds (MCD), Netflix (NFLX), Spotify (SPOT), and UnderArmour (UAA).

At the AWS Summit in early April, AWS announced that Cox Automotive, owner of Autotrader and Kelley Blue Book, as well as Shutterfly were following other businesses such as Comcast (CMCSA) and GoDaddy, which in recent months have shifted more, if not most, of their workloads from running on local data servers to AWS, in part because AWS makes a companys operations more cost-efficient while offering comparable, if not better, performance in some instances. AWSs cloud-based nature also allows a company to rapidly grow or scale back its services as it sees fit.

If you look at Cox Automotive, you can imagine that sort of access to their services during the day is much higher than at night when they run their own data centers, Vogels explained. They basically are fixed in their infrastructure, but on AWS, that becomes elastic. Developer productivity is no longer about worrying about just getting access to servers or things like that  it becomes about agility and just being able to move faster and the ability to do innovation to build new products much faster than you could in the process. Some of these companies would tell you that in the past it would take them six to nine months to deliver new features and services. Now, it will be a matter of days or weeks.

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As AWS continues to evolve, expect voice features and apps to become more prominent, suggested Vogels  a sentiment that supports what AWS CEO Andy Jassy told Yahoo Finance in December. Indeed, the voice-enabled assistant, Alexa, already runs on AWS.

The integration of voice into all different places both as a consumer as well as in the enterprise is really taking off, Vogels explained. Theres something more, though. I think we will see also that large groups that have never had access to digital systems. Now if youve ever given your grandmother a tablet, you know that the only thing she does is hit the Skype button. However, she could talk to it. That will be a whole different thing. She doesnt need to think about it We see it in developing countries where its almost that old smartphone being the internet to these developing countries.

But Vogels points out that this isnt happening yet in these countries because most of these people cant afford smartphones.

Which means for Amazon and Alexa, theres much more untapped opportunity in the years to come when prices for some smartphones become more affordable for these markets.



JP Mangalindan is the Chief Tech Correspondent for Yahoo Finance covering the intersection of tech and business. Email story tips and musings to jpm@oath.com. Follow him on Twitter or Facebook.

More from JP
Outside groups are upping the pressure on Senators to reject President Donald Trumps controversial nominee to direct the Central Intelligence Agency, Gina Haspel, ahead of her May 9 confirmation hearing.

Republican Sen. Richard Burr and Democratic Sen. Mark Warner announced on Thursday that a public confirmation hearing would be held after the Senate breaks for a late-April recess. Trump announced that hed tapped Haspel to replace Director Mike Pompeo, whom he selected to become Secretary of State, in March, but the president did not send the formal nomination paperwork to Congress until this week.

Haspel has a long history at the CIA, where shes served since 1985, but her connections to an agency black site where detainees were tortured and a decision within the CIA to destroy evidence of interrogations has led to fierce backlash from outside watchers.

On Thursday, a diverse collection of more than 40 national advocacy and civil liberties groups sent a letter to all 100 members of Senate calling on them to oppose Haspels confirmation. The groups say they have grave concerns about Haspels role in the U.S. torture program and believe that any vote related to her nomination would be seen as a referendum on torture.

Some answer these grave concerns by claiming Ms. Haspel is a decorated intelligence professional, experienced, and well-respected at the CIA. That may all be true, the letter reads. But responsibility for torture is an extraordinary moral offense that ordinary kinds of qualifications simply cannot overcome.

Dozens of Virginian elected officials joined with faith leaders and torture victim advocates to send a similar letter to Warner and Sen. Tim Kaine, also of Virginia. Endorsing Ms. Haspel would reward torture, and send a disastrous message the world over  including to survivors of torture  that there is no accountability whatsoever for those who commit these grave human rights violations, they wrote.

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Two dozen torture rehabilitation centers have also signed on to a letter to oppose her nomination. In that document, the groups detail the suffering torture victims endure including chronic pain, sleep disorders and depression. That is the legacy of torture  the torture in which Ms. Haspel reportedly was intimately involved and the torture Ms. Haspel reportedly participated in covering up through the destruction of videotape evidence, the letter reads.

Scott Roehm, the director of the Center for Victims of Tortures D.C. office, says the opposition to her nomination is diverse and widespread groups and groups like his will continue to pressure lawmakers to reject Haspels nomination in the lead up to the hearing. The public expects that the Senate isnt going to promote to lead the CIA somebody who is deeply complicit in torture, says Roehm. The closer the hearing and nomination draw, the more that message is going to be clear.

Haspels confirmation hearing had been gearing up to be a contentious one already. Senators have expressed concern about the role she played in destroying torture-related evidence since her name was first floated. Several lawmakers have said they plan to press her about her links to the U.S. torture program in the public forum. Others have called for the declassification of records about her background. A trio of Democratic senators on the Intelligence Committee have repeatedly asked the CIA director to declassify the material.

In the absence of any meaningful declassification of her career, this public campaign on behalf of Ms. Haspel does a great disservice to the American people, the Senators wrote in a recent letter. The senators said the more they review classified information, the more disturbed they are about Haspels actions and the CIAs unwillingness to let the public see for itself.

Under these circumstances, it is impossible for the Senate to properly fulfill its constitutional obligation to advise and consent on her nomination, write Democrats Dianne Feinstein of California, Martin Heinrich of New Mexico and Ron Wyden of Oregon.

Roehm agrees that the information should be declassified, but says we know enough and Senators should know enough at this point to oppose her nomination. She was complicit in torture.
Mohammad Haydar Zammar was captured over a month ago but his detention was only reported this week - AP

A Syrian-German jihadist linked to the 9/11 attacks on the United States has been captured in Syria by US-backed forces, the Pentagon said on Thursday.

Mohammad Haydar Zammar, who has been accused of recruiting some of the 9/11 Al-Qaeda hijackers, was captured over a month ago by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a Kurdish-led militia backed by the US.

News of his capture was first reported on Wednesday by the Kurdish group. The Pentagon had said it was looking into the reports before confirming Zammars arrest.

"We can confirm that Mohammad Haydar Zammar, a Syrian-born German national, was captured more than a month ago by SDF partners as part of their ongoing operations to defeat ISIS inside Syria," Pentagon spokesman Eric Pahon said, using an alternate name for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

"We are working with our SDF partners to obtain additional details," Pahon said.

The 9/11 Commission report into the attacks in Washington and New York that led to the deaths of almost 3,000 people described Zammar as an outspoken, flamboyant Islamist who had fought in Afghanistan and relished any opportunity to extol the virtues of violent jihad.

According to the report, Zammar took credit for influencing people linked to the attacks including Mohammed Atta, who hijacked an American Airlines plane and flew it into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

Zammar had come into contact with Atta and others linked to the attacks while living in Hamburg, in 1997, the report says.

Seven foiled UK terror plots

Zammar was detained in Morocco in December 2001 in an operation involving CIA agents, and was handed over to the Syrian authorities two weeks later. He was subsequently sentenced to 12 years in prison in 2007 for belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood.

He was reportedly freed from prison in 2014 in a prison swap organised with Islamist group Ahrar al-Sham.

The SDF, which has been a key western ally in the fight against Isil, has detained several high-profile foreign members of Isil as the jihadist groups grip on Syria has collapsed.

They are currently holding two alleged members of the notorious Isil torture cell known as the Beatles. El Shafee Elsheikh and Alexandra Kotey were captured by the group in February. The two are accused of being involved in the execution and torture of hostages.

US officials believe there are hundreds of foreign fighters and thousands of Syrian Isil militants in SDF custody.
(BOERNE, Texas)  Tammie Jo Shults was determined to break into the club of male military aviators.

One of the first female fighter pilots in the U.S. Navy, Shults flew training missions as an enemy pilot during Operation Desert Storm, while working with other women to see a rule excluding them from combat flights repealed.

Twenty-five years later, Shults was at the controls of the Dallas-bound Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 Tuesday when it made an emergency landing in Philadelphia after one of the engines on the Boeing 737 exploded while the plane was traveling 500 mph (800 kph) at 30,000 feet (9144 m) with 149 people on board.

Shrapnel hit the plane and passengers said they had to rescue a woman who was being blown out of a damaged window. The woman later died of blunt force trauma to her head, neck and torso.

Shults calmly relayed details about the crisis to air traffic controllers, and passengers commended her handling of the situation.

Everybody is talking about Tammie Jo and how cool and calm she was in a crisis, and thats just Tammie Jo, said Rachel Russo, a friend from Shults church in Boerne, Texas, about 30 miles (48 km) northwest of San Antonio. Thats how shes wired.

Shults and the other pilot on board, First Officer Darren Ellisor, said in a statement Wednesday that they were simply doing their jobs.

On behalf of the entire Crew, we appreciate the outpouring of support from the public and our coworkers as we all reflect on one familys profound loss, the two pilots said, adding that their hearts are heavy.

Shults was commissioned into the Navy in 1985 and reached the rank of lieutenant commander, said Commander Ron Flanders, spokesman for Naval Air Forces in San Diego.

She was among the few to learn to fly the F/A-18 Hornet, a single-seat jet and the Navys premier strike fighter aircraft, a privilege reserved for elite pilots, according to retired Navy helicopter pilot Andi Sue Phillips.

When you pull those gs, you can actually feel your organs slamming on the inside of your ribs, Phillips said. Its exhausting to put your body through those maneuvers.

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Phillips said that that there was a lot of resistance for women to fly jets and for Shults to fly a fighter aircraft when nobody even wanted her there is pretty amazing.

Women aviators were excluded from combat missions until the month after Shults got off active duty in March 1993. Flanders said Shults flew during Operation Desert Storm trainings as an aggressor enemy pilot, helping male pilots hone their skills.

Obviously it was frustrating, said Veteran Navy combat aviator Linda Maloney, who became among the first women to join a combat military flying squadron and was deployed to the Arabian Gulf. We go through the same training that the guys do, and our hope was the Navy would allow us to fly in combat at some point.

Maloney featured Shults in her book, Military Fly Moms, along with the stories and photos of 69 other women U.S. military veterans.

Shults wrote in the book about her determination to break into the club of male military aviators.

There did not seem to be a demand for women pilots, she said, adding that her Hornet flight training squadron did not share her commanders open-mindedness about flying with women.

Russo and Staci Thompson, who has known Shults for about 20 years and was nanny to her two children when they were small, said she loved her military career but has alluded to frustrations and challenges that came with it.

They also said she embraced those experiences to make her stronger and guide her into a role as a mentor to young female pilots or girls thinking about a military career.

She learned a lot about overcoming things as a woman in a male-dominated field, Russo said.

Shults grew up in a New Mexico ranch near Holloman Air Force Base, and was a 1983 graduate of MidAmerica Nazarene University in Olathe, Kansas, where she earned degrees in biology and agribusiness.

Her husband, Dean Shults, also is a Southwest pilot.

Shes a formidable woman, as sharp as a tack, said Gary Shults, a dentist in San Antonio. My brother says shes the best pilot he knows.
The pop star typically wears her dark hair in a high ponytail. (Photo: Getty Images/Dave Hogan for One Love Manchester)

Its amazing what some hair dye and a little maneuvering with a ponytail holder can do.

Ariana Grande has dropped the emotional video for the single No Tears Left to Cry  her first since last years tragic bombing at her concert in Manchester, England  and while music buffs are excited, some fans are fixated on her hair.

The 24-year-old pop star is known for wearing her long brown locks in a high ponytail, but thats all changed with her No Tears Left to Cry visuals. Her hair is now an icy platinum blond, and shes switching it up with a number of stunning styles.

One look is a Rapunzel-esque do worn down, yet pinned in the back. Grande also rocks her signature high ponytail with a braided twist, but its a modern low ponytail look that has many of her supporters speechless.

The style calls for a sleek deep part thats straight off a Paris runway, with hair chicly knotted at the nape. Clearly Grandes feeling the makeover, as the hairstyle dominates her promotional images for the video.

Fans are eating it up.

Ariana Grande lowered her ponytail pic.twitter.com/RHoDo1pEuD  michael (@mchaelortz) April 19, 2018

The year is 3037, Ariana Grandes hair is in a ponytail. https://t.co/haHZWQToeF  Nick Stampar (@NStampar) April 19, 2018

GUYS OMG THE PONYTAIL MISS ARIANA GRANDE DID NOT COME TO PLAY pic.twitter.com/55GK1GHuFN  chris (@newyorksouIptii) April 18, 2018

Ariana Grande: *lowers her ponytail*

Gay Twitter: pic.twitter.com/gXi9imYayD  Alp Ozcelik (@alplicable) April 19, 2018

me repping my new lowered ponytail look because mama sis ariana grande told me to @ArianaGrande pic.twitter.com/y82COA8gCE  louis hanson (@louis_hanson_) April 19, 2018

While the video takes the look to a slick new level, its not the first time the former Nickelodeon star has dabbled with a blond ponytail. She debuted a platinum low pony at last months March for Our Lives rally in Washington, D.C.

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Grande sported a similar look at March for Our Lives. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Will the do stick around, or be another in a long list of pop star reinventions? Only time will tell.

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Bernie Sanders is the latest senator to sign on to a bill that would remove marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act and punish states that continue criminalizing weed.

Several potential 2020 presidential contenders in the Senate are now co-sponsors of the Marijuana Justice Act, a weed-decriminalization bill first drafted by Democratic Senator Cory Booker, of New Jersey, in August 2017. Senator Sanders, the Independent from Vermont, signed his name as a co-sponsor Thursday, joining Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, the New York Democrat, who political pundits say might be considering her own chase for the Democratic nomination for president along with Booker and Sanders.

"Leaders in the Democratic Party are increasingly recognizing that leading the charge on legalization is not only good policy, but good politics," Justin Strekal, political director of NORML, told Forbes. "The constituencies which the party claims to stand for are the ones who have most felt the weight of prohibition and the lifelong consequences of prohibition."

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The Marijuana Justice Act takes several major actions to decriminalize marijuana at both the state and federal levels. First, the proposed bills removal of weed from the 1970 Controlled Substances Act would allow individual states to legalize the drug, currently listed as a Schedule I illegal narcotic alongside cocaine, heroin and LSD. Second, the bill would hold federal funding from states that continue to criminalize marijuana and inordinately prosecute minorities. Last, the bill creates a Treasury federal fund that could be used for projects to reinvest and rebuild low-income communities through the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Sanders has repeatedly criticized marijuana criminalization for targeting minority communities, a sentiment echoed by Gillibrand. In a February Facebook Live video announcing her support for the bill, Gillibrand noted that despite marijuana usage being almost identical across racial lines, African-Americans and other minorities are far more statistically likely to be arrested and convicted for weed-related crimes.



The way our criminal justice system is working is so harmful, and so biased, said Gillibrand.

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Sanders has also paralleled his support for the decriminalization of marijuana on the federal level with his support of weed potentially helping to reduce the countrys opioid addiction epidemic.

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It's time to hold opioid manufacturers and their executives accountable for the crisis they have created. pic.twitter.com/9YFUgTZHQv  Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) April 18, 2018





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"What we are seeing in an ahistorical manner is life expectancy is actually going down because of the number of deaths attributed to opioid addiction among other factors," Sanders said in a recent CNN interview. We are seeing in virtually every state in this country peoples lives are being wrecked, were talking about hundreds of thousands of peoples lives.

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By Elizabeth Piper and Alastair Macdonald LONDON/BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Britain expressed confidence on Friday that no hard border with Ireland would return following Brexit, but European Union negotiators have dismissed a proposal by Britain on how to ensure goods would flow freely after it quits the EU. At a negotiating session on Wednesday, Brussels officials and diplomats said the EU rejected proposals London first made last summer and introduced into the talks last month. That verdict reflected no change in the positions but put a more formal gloss on the impasse. A British suggestion that it could form a "customs partnership" with the EU, collecting duties on behalf of the EU while pursuing its own tariff policy and refusing to be bound by EU courts and regulations, was dismissed last year in Brussels as impractical and a threat to the EU market. That opinion was confirmed on Wednesday to Olly Robbins, who runs Britain's negotiating team, EU officials and diplomats said. One described the British idea as "rather farcical". Both sides have committed to avoiding customs checks and other border impediments that might rekindle violence in the British province of Northern Ireland. The EU has said Britain should be ready to leave Northern Ireland under EU economic regulations if it wants a treaty to ensure an orderly withdrawal next March. British Prime Minister Theresa May rejects that because it could isolate the province from the mainland. British officials did not comment on the substance of London's latest proposal. EU diplomats said it was designed to resolve the Irish border issue by avoiding customs checks between Britain and the EU, while keeping Britain out of the EU's customs union -- something May has also rejected despite pressure from some in her own party. A spokesman for May said he did not "recognize" reports of the EU rejecting London's proposal, adding: "We are confident that in the coming months, if all sides work together productively, we can achieve a solution to the Ireland/Northern Ireland border that works for everyone involved." EU and British negotiators have also begun discussions on how their post-Brexit relationship should look, with the aim of agreeing a joint political declaration on the shape of future trading terms alongside a withdrawal treaty later this year. They are due to hold four further rounds of talks on the Irish border and on the future relationship before EU leaders meet to review progress at a summit at the end of June. The next talks in Brussels will be in the first week of May. One EU diplomat said London still appeared determined to secure an open-borders trade deal that would apply to the whole of the United Kingdom so that Northern Ireland would not be left in a special position with the EU, different from the mainland. That, however, was creating a problem, since EU leaders were determined not to allow Britain as a whole to have such a deal without accepting governance from Brussels, though they were willing to be more flexible in the case of Northern Ireland. (Additional reporting by James Davey in London, editing by Larry King)
PHNOM PENH (Reuters) - A Cambodian man murdered his ex-wife and then jumped off a bridge in a suicide that he broadcast live on Facebook, police said on Friday, in the first such case reported in the country. Facebook is the social media platform of choice for Cambodians. Nearly a third of the country's 15.8 million people are Facebook users and the network is a major source of information, particularly for young people. Ra Chhay Rath, 21, killed his former wife at a school on Thursday then went to the nearby Tsubasa bridge, in Kandal province, and jumped into the Mekong river. Only the suicide was broadcast, police said. "It has never happened before. It was the first case," police spokesman Kirth Chantharith told Reuters, referring to the broadcast of the suicide. "We are investigating to find out why he killed his ex-wife." Police said the man's body had not been found. Reuters was able to access videos of the suicide on Friday shared by Facebook users. It was not immediately clear whether anyone had reported the video or asked for it to be taken down. A spokesman for Facebook later said the company was "deeply saddened by this tragedy" and that it had removed the video. "We don't allow the promotion of violence or suicide on Facebook and have removed the video," the spokesman said in an email to Reuters. "We want people to have a safe experience on Facebook and we work with organizations around the world to provide assistance for people in distress." Last year, Facebook said it would expand its pattern recognition software after successful tests in the United States to detect users with suicidal intent. Facebook has been embroiled in a number of content moderation controversies over recent years. It has also been accused by human rights advocates of not doing enough to weed out hate messages while it faces questions in several countries about data privacy. (Reporting by Chansy Chhorn in PHNOM PENH; Additional reporting and writing by Amy Sawitta Lefevre in BANGKOK; Editing by Robert Birsel)
Ottawa (AFP) - The number of asylum seekers from the United States crossing forests and farmers' fields on foot to reach Canada jumped at the beginning of this year, and authorities are bracing for more.

The surge in walk-in arrivals started in 2016 with the election of US President Donald Trump, who has sought to crack down on legal and undocumented immigration.

Nearly 21,000 border jumpers were intercepted by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in 2017 and allowed to file a refugee claim, officials told reporters on Friday.

Another 6,373 made their way into Quebec, Manitoba and British Columbia provinces from January to mid-April this year, which was more than double the number of arrivals during the same period last year.

"There's a likelihood that we will see even more people" as this year's particularly stormy and cold winter cedes to warming spring temperatures, said a senior border security official.

"We have right now roughly 75 to 80 people a day crossing (into Quebec). A few weeks ago that might have been as low as 50 a day."

Most of the recent arrivals had travelled to the United States from Nigeria before coming to Canada. Others originated mostly from Colombia, Pakistan and Haiti.

The Caribbean nation of Haiti, along with countries in Africa, was among those which Trump in January reportedly labelled "shithole countries" and questioned why the US should accept their immigrants.

While Quebec has seen an uptick in arrivals so far this year, the prairie province of Manitoba and westernmost British Columbia welcomed fewer irregular migrants -- a term used for asylum seekers who do not arrive by way of an airport or border checkpoint.

Although the surge in walk-in arrivals to Canada began with Trump's election later it spread to include migrants who appeared to have intended from the start to come to Canada after flying to the United States on a visitor visa.

The federal government set up a task force to try to deal with the influx, which has at times overwhelmed government services.

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Several senior Canadian ministers travelled to the United States to speak to the various diasporas to try to discourage border jumpers.

They warned that landing in Canada is "not an automatic ticket to being accepted here."

Preliminary figures showed that more than 90 percent of claims by Haitian nationals and more than half of those filed by Pakistani and Nigerians were rejected.

The majority of claims made by Syrian, Eritrean, Yemeni, Sudanese, Djiboutian and Turkish nationals who arrived via the United States were accepted.

On average, Canada welcomes 300,000 immigrants and refugees each year.
The dwindling migrant caravan of Central Americans that prompted President Donald Trump to send the National Guard to the U.S.-Mexico border has pushed on past Mexico City, despite organizers announcing the capital as its last "official" stop.

Determined to make it to the U.S., at least 500 Central Americans are reportedly continuing the journey that started at the Guatemala-Mexico border, with the hope that safety will come in numbers.

GettyImages-943918168

ALFREDO ESTRELLA/AFP/Getty

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The caravan's numbers had swelled to include more than 1,000 people at one point, but many felt forced to abandon the crusade after Trump vowed to stop them from entering the U.S.

However, organizer Irineo Mujica announced in Guadalajara that as many as 500 migrants starting making their way north from Mexico City last weekend, riding trains toward the U.S. border, according to the Associated Press.

Mujica said members of the group decided to stick together, rather than travel solo on the final leg of the journey north, after some people who had gone ahead alone said they had witnessed kidnappings and had their travel papers torn up.

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The remaining group is said to be traveling to Tijuana, where as many as half of its members plan to go to the border to request asylum in the U.S.

The majority of the people traveling with the caravan are Hondurans hoping to seek refuge in the U.S. from gang violence and instability in the wake of the re-election of President Juan Orlando Hernandez.

The caravan takes place every year around Easter to raise awareness around the plight of those seeking asylum. This year, however, it fell under the international spotlight when Trump learned of it and took to Twitter to express his outrage over the annual event.

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The U.S. leader threatened the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) if Mexico failed to stop the caravan and threatened in a tweet to withdraw U.S. aid to Honduras. He later applauded Mexico, however, for its immigration laws, after the numbers of the caravan began to shrink.

If the caravan does make it to the U.S.-Mexico border, members of the National Guard will be there to meet them, after Trump moved ahead on his plans to send as many as 4,000 troops. A number of states, including California, have agreed to send troops to the border, with Governor Jerry Brown ordering the deployment of up to 400 troops on Wednesday.

This article was first written by Newsweek

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Three Australian warships recently faced off the Chinese Navy while sailing through the South China Sea on their way to Vietnam, an incident contributing to rising tensions between the two countries.

The encounter between the Australians and Chinese vessels was first reported by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) on Friday, quoting an unnamed defense official describing the exchanges as polite, but "robust."

The three warships sailed through the South China Sea last weekend on their way to Ho Chi Minh City as part of a goodwill visit to Vietnam. HMAS Anzac and HMAS Success departed from the Philippines, while HMAS Toowoomba was sailing from Malaysia, the Australia defense ministry confirmed to the broadcaster while refusing to discuss the details of the interaction with the Chinese Navy.

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"The Australian Defence Force has maintained a robust program of international engagement with countries in and around the South China Sea for decades," the department told ABC.

04_20_Anzac

Edgar Su/Reuters

The Chinese Defense Ministry confirmed the interaction with the Australian vessels, but they said the exchange was conducted in a "professional" manner, according to a statement.

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"On April 15, Chinese naval ships encountered Australian warships in the South China Sea," the statement said. "When communicating with the Australian ships, the Chinese ships used professional language, and their operations were professional and safe in accordance with law and regulations."

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China claims large parts of the South China Sea, which are disputed by a number of southeast Asian nations such as Vietnam and the Philippines. Beijing has recently built several artificial islands in the contested waters to back its territorial claims.

During a meeting of Commonwealth leaders in London, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull did not comment on the encounter but defended his country's navigation rights in the South China Sea.

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"All I can say to you is we maintain and practice the right of freedom of navigation and overflight throughout the world, he said, according to The Sydney Morning Herald. In this context, youre talking about naval vessels on the worlds oceans including the South China Sea, as is our perfect right in accordance with international law.

China's ambassador to Australia Cheng Jingye recently expressed dissatisfaction with a "growing lack of mutual trust" which could have "some undesirable impact" on the two countries' ties in an interview to The Australian published on Thursday.

While China is its biggest trade partner, Australia is unnerved by the country's expanding influence in its traditional sphere of interest. In January, Australia decided to finance the construction of an underwater internet cable from the Solomon Islands to Sydney as to avoid a Chinese company's involvement in the project due to security concerns.

Earlier this month, Australia's Fairfax media reported on alleged Chinese plans to build a military base on the Pacific island of Vanuatu, a traditional Australian ally, forcing all three parties involved to strongly deny the reports. "We would view with great concern the establishment of any foreign military bases in those Pacific Island countries and neighbors of ours," Turnbull said commenting on the reports, quoted in Reuters.

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China announced on Thursday it would impose temporary anti-dumping measures on synthetic rubber imported from the United States, the European Union and Singapore.

The case could stoke the simmering tit-for-tat trade tiff between Beijing and Washington, with each side having made threats of more duties on billions of dollars worth of goods.

China's commerce ministry repeated that the two sides were not negotiating on the issue -- appearing to contradict US President Donald Trump's claim last week that the two sides were having "great discussions" on trade.

"The two sides have not conducted any bilateral negotiations on the US's section 301 investigation or the US's proposed list of Chinese products to tax," ministry spokesman Gao Feng told a regular press briefing.

The US section 301 investigation focuses on what Washington describes as Beijing's intellectual property breaches, including a failure to respect foreign patent holders.

When asked if China had underestimated the Trump administration's resolve on trade, Gao shot back: "We hope the US will not underestimate China's resolve."

He warned that Beijing would fight back against any "erroneous scheme" by the US that would attempt to "contain China's development and force China to yield".

"On the surface the US's actions are targeting China, but actually it is harming itself," Gao said.

The anti-dumping measures on rubber come after an initial investigation by China's commerce ministry found evidence the countries were dumping the halo-isobutene-isoprene rubber.

Importers were directed to place deposits with China's customs department ranging in amount from 26 percent to 66.5 percent of the goods' cost -- to be applied against the imposed tariffs if the ministry finds dumping in its final ruling.

The dumping did "substantial damage" to China's domestic industry, the commerce ministry said in a statement.

The US and Singapore are China's main foreign sources of the synthetic rubber, with imports from the two countries respectively totalling $153 million and $115 million last year.

It follows a similar case from Tuesday when China decided to slap provisional anti-dumping duties on imports of US sorghum.
By Paresh Dave and Karen Freifeld

SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK (Reuters) - China's ZTE Corp on Wednesday postponed the release of quarterly earnings, saying it needs time to assess the impact of a U.S. order that bans American companies from selling it parts, which could undermine its ability to manufacture equipment.

ZTE , a maker of telecommunications equipment and smartphones, was due to release results on Thursday.

It announced the delay as components makers, wireless carriers, retailers, telecommunications firms and Alphabet Inc's (GOOGL.O) Google, developer of the Android operating system, sought to clarify how they will be affected by the order, announced on Monday by the U.S. Commerce Department.

There are a lot of companies around the world scrambling to find out what this means, said Washington lawyer Tim OToole, a sanctions specialist whose clients include companies that have done business with ZTE. "Its rare that you go from A-OK to no transactions overnight.

Under the order American companies are banned from selling parts and software to ZTE for seven years. The action followed ZTE's violation of an agreement reached after it was caught illegally shipping U.S. goods to Iran.

ZTE said its board postponed a meeting to approve the results while it reviews the order. Trading in its shares has been suspended in China since Tuesday.

American companies are estimated to provide 25 percent to 30 percent of the components used in ZTE's equipment.

ZTE has not responded to requests to describe how it intends to respond to the ban, which a senior U.S. Commerce official told Reuters is unlikely to be lifted.

I never say never," the official said earlier this week. "Were going to have to see how this unfolds. But there is no provision currently for that to occur.

The Commerce Department initially banned U.S. companies from selling to ZTE in 2016 after the Chinese company was caught shipping equipment with U.S. components to Iran in violation of U.S. export controls.

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ZTE then received a special temporary general licence that was extended several times, until it pleaded guilty to the charges in March 2017 and Commerce suspended the ban through March 2018.

Washington has not included any "off ramp" under the terms of this week's order, the official said.

The Commerce Department has an appeals process for companies to try to get off the list, but it is unclear whether that would be available to ZTE because the case had been previously subject to a settlement.

Even so, ZTE would have little recourse in the near term because appeals would have to be approved by the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security, the same agency that issued the ban.

Companies must submit appeals to a committee that would issue a ruling within 30 days, according to the agency's website.

ANDROID UPDATES

One key area of concern is whether ZTE will be able to continue to sell phones running Google's widely used Android operating system.

ZTE and Google have been discussing the impact of the ban, a source familiar with those discussions told Reuters on Tuesday. ZTE shipped 46.4 million smartphones last year, placing it seventh among Android-based manufacturers, according to research firm IHS Markit.

Google declined comment and ZTE did not respond to requests to comment.

Officials at two U.S. wireless carriers said on Wednesday that they were still assessing how the ban would affect their customers. They declined comment on how they would respond if ZTE is unable to provide Android software updates for phones already used by their customers.

At least one U.S. technology company said the ban would not affect its business with ZTE.

New York-based software firm Taboola Inc, which this month announced it would supply ZTE with technology to personalize news feeds on phones, told Reuters it expects the deal to move forward.

"After careful review of the new U.S. policy, we believe that our relationship with ZTE does not fall within the prohibited activities, Taboola Chief Executive Officer Adam Singolda said in a statement. We will continue to monitor the situation closely."

The United States is ZTEs top smartphone market, accounting for 46 percent of its shipments, followed by China at 24 percent, according to research firm IDC. Most ZTE phones sell for below $300, a low-end segment of the U.S. market, ZTE's mobile chief executive, Lixin Cheng, told Reuters in January.

The company has spent billions of dollars licensing technology from U.S. partners, he said.

(Reporting by Paresh Dave in San Francisco and Karen Freifeld in New York; Additional reporting by David Lawder in Washington; Writing by Jim Finkle in Toronto; Editing by Anna Driver, Steve Orlofsky and Leslie Adler)
London (AFP) - Commonwealth leaders agreed Friday that Prince Charles should follow his mother Queen Elizabeth II as the next head of the group, the BBC and other media reported.

Queen Elizabeth on Thursday told leaders from the 53 member states that she wanted her eldest son to succeed her in the symbolic figurehead role.

Leaders, gathered at Windsor Castle for private talks, agreed that Charles, heir to the thrones of 16 Commonwealth nations, should follow the monarch in the non-hereditary position, the BBC, Sky News television and the domestic Press Association news agency reported.

Following Queen Elizabeth's public call as she opened the group's summit on Thursday for potentially the final time, a series of Commonwealth premiers voiced their support Thursday for Charles as a figure of stability and continuity.

Queen Elizabeth, who turns 92 on Saturday, spoke of her own "extraordinary journey" since pledging to serve the Commonwealth for life when aged 21.

"It is my sincere wish that the Commonwealth will continue to offer stability and continuity for future generations and will decide that one day, the Prince of Wales should carry on the important work," she said, referring to Charles.

Queen Elizabeth has been the Commonwealth's symbolic figurehead since her father king George VI's death in 1952.

Some republican voices had been angling for change in future.

British opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, head of the Labour Party, said on Sunday that the role could go to a rotating presidency.

But British Prime Minister Theresa May gave her backing to 69-year-old Charles.

"The government supports the Prince of Wales as the next head of the Commonwealth. He has been a proud supporter of the Commonwealth for more than four decades," her spokesman said.

Canadian PM Justin Trudeau said: "I very much agree with the wishes of Her Majesty that the Prince of Wales be the next head of the Commonwealth."

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Maltese PM Joseph Muscat added: "We are certain that when he will be called upon to do so, he will provide a solid and passionate leadership for our Commonwealth."

And Grenada's prime minister Keith Mitchell told the BBC: "It would be good news.

"Having the Prince of Wales would certainly not be an unhelpful act at this point in time."

Queen Elizabeth gave up long-haul travel to attend the biennial Commonwealth summits in 2013 and gatherings look set to be held outside Europe in the near term.

Charles represented her at the 2013 summit in Colombo.
Asuncion (AFP) - In power for almost all of the past seven decades, Paraguay's conservative Colorado party appears to be heading for a new victory in Sunday's presidential poll, with its candidate the frontrunner despite his father's ties to the dictatorship.

In this landlocked country, one of the poorest in Latin America which has been blighted by corruption and drug trafficking, some 4.2 million voters are heading to the polls on Sunday to cast their vote for one of two presidential candidates.

They will also be voting for a new parliament, with both the head of state and his lawmakers serving for a five-year term.

Polling stations will open at 7:00 am (1100 GMT) and close nine hours later, with the first results due out an hour later.

Leading in the polls is Colorado's 46-year-old candidate Mario Abdo Benitez, better known as "Marito" who has a lead of up to 20 percentage points on his 55-year-old rival, Efrain Alegre, who represents the left-leaning GANAR coalition.

As frontrunner, Abdo Benitez has campaigned on plans to reform the judicial system which he has accused of corruption in a country which was ranked 135 out of 180 in Transparency International's 2017 survey.

But aside from that, this former president of the Senate who has a degree in marketing has merely pledged to keep in step with the same economic policies of outgoing President Horacio Cartes.

For the most part, that means focusing on Paraguay's strengths as a major exporter of soy, beef and hydroelectric power, which have kept growth at an average of around four percent for the past decade.

And his popularity appears to prove voters are unworried by his family history -- for "Marito" is the son of Mario Abdo, who was the personal secretary of dictator Alfredo Stroessner, who ruled the country with an iron-fist from 1954 to 1989.

- Young electorate -

A key factor in this year's election is the age of the voters, with almost half of them under 35, according to analyst Elizabeth Gonzalez of the Americas Society/Council of the Americas, a Washington-based think tank.

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"This year, 43 percent of the electorate will be 1834 years old, most of whom won't have a personal connection to the years of the dictatorship," she wrote in a paper on Sunday's vote.

"This makes them less likely to have a strong affiliation to either the Colorado Party or the Authentic Radical Liberal Party, the largest member of GANAR."

Despite Colorado's long legacy, Alegre, who is a lawyer, is hoping to repeat the success of Fernando Lugo who in 2008 became the first president elected who was not from the conservative party.

But he only lasted four years, ousted by the Senate in 2012 for dereliction of duty following his handling of a land dispute that left 17 people dead.

And Alegre, who is making his second bid for the presidency, has gathered around him the same center-left coalition which swept Lugo to power.

- Lacks Lugo's charisma -

But analysts say he lacks Lugo's charisma and his magnetism, taking only 39 percent of the votes when he ran against Cartes in 2013.

"Alegre belongs to a powerful branch of the Liberal party but he is not an undisputed leader," explained Magdalena Lopez, an expert on Paraguay at the University of Buenos Aires.

"The Liberals were part of the movement who removed Lugo from office but this time, they have realized that if they don't go (into this election) as a coalition, they won't get even close to Abdo Benitez," she said.

Concerned by the country's poverty rate which is hovering around 26.4 percent, according to 2017 figures, Alegre has pledged to offer free healthcare for the poorest and to slash the cost of electricity bills.

In a country with a large community of Guarani Indians -- their language is one of Paraguay's two official tongues alongside Spanish -- there remain huge inequalities, with some 92 percent of the agricultural land held by just 10 percent of the population, Lopez says.
Scott B. MacDonald

Politics, Americas

Raul Castro attends the May Day parade at Havanas Revolution Square, May 1, 2008. Sven Creutzmann/Pool via Reuters

Cubas new president inherits a government, with few exceptions, dominated by inertia and conditioned to regard change as a negative.

Can Cuba Change after the Castros?

Raul Castro is expected to step down as Cubas president Thursday, though the eighty-six-year-old will maintain his position as the head of the armed forces. This will be the first time since 1959 that a Castro family member will not head the Caribbean nation. Despite the excitement over this change of chief executive, Cuba has not entered a period of great changeat least not in the short term. Indeed, Cubas next leader, Miguel Diaz-Canel (currently the first vice president, aged fifty-seven years), is likely to maintain the status quo, with a few changes around the edges. The problem, however, is that the Cuban economy is not in great shape, and there are no major foreign donors ready to step up and assume the financial burden of paying for the luxury of keeping the revolution alive, well beyond its shelf life of failed socialist experimentation.

There are a number of reasons why Cuba will not see any major changes any time soon. First and foremost, Diaz-Canel is seen as a Castro loyalista hard-liner. That implies resistance to the idea of introducing any major changes, even along the lines advocated by Cubas major trade partner, China. Even if Diaz-Canel is a surprise reformer-in-waiting, his confirmation by the National Assembly will also be accompanied by the appointment of a vice president and other senior posts, which are likely to go tried and true Castroites.

For the new president to assume real power, Diaz-Canel will have to consolidate his position with the countrys main political forcesthe Communist Party, the armed forces and the Castro family. Although Raul will no longer be the head of state, his influence will still be felt, especially considering his son Alejandro is an officer at the powerful interior ministry and his former son-in-law Alberto Rodriguez heads GAESA, the military-owned holding company that controls much of the islands tourist business. For the new president to make any meaningful economic changes, he will need to have the Castros, as an empowered interest group, on board.

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The new president also inherits a government, with few exceptions, dominated by inertia and conditioned to regard change as a negative. As political scientist Richard Feinberg noted in 2016 of this mind-set, For over 50 years nowtwo full generationsCubans have lived within the communist paradigm as interpreted by one charismatic leader whose personality was so strong, whose presence was so deeply felt, as to crowd out alternative scenarios. Continuity, not change, was the norm. This partially explains why much of the government remains resistant to economic changes and is slow in bringing projects to fruition.

Key to the process of attempting to make Cubas economy work is the need to overhaul the state-owned enterprises, which dominate the islands economic activity. It is thought that state-owned enterprises absorb one-fifth of the budget as subsidies. This remains a tremendous drag on the economy and state finances.

Another challenge for Diaz-Canel is Venezuelas economic collapse; since 2014, this has left Cuba without a source of economic aid, which is critical for a government that has steadfastly refused to make the necessary reforms. At the same time, the tougher approach taken by the Trump administration has hurt the flow of U.S. tourists to the island (which peaked at 619,000 in 2017). Although there remain ways to travel to Cuba, the numbers fell off, though latest data indicate a recent marginal improvement. The Trump administration reversed some of the Obama administrations policies to make certain that U.S. tourist dollars do not flow to the Cuban government, which is a major player in the tourist business (part of which is owned by the armed forces).

Growth prospects for the Cuban economy are not robust. In 2016, the economy contracted by 1.6 percent in 2016, and expanded by an anemic 0.9 percent in 2017. According to the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, real GDP growth in 2018 is forecast at 1.0 percent, hardly enough to give the new leader a boost.

And Cuba has a debt problem. Although the Caribbean country has received some debt forgiveness, it still has more than $1 billion in unpaid commercial debt from the 1980s. Although there was debt forgiveness from a number of countries. Clearing up the remaining debt is crucial if Cuba is to regain access to international finance.

Diaz-Canel inherits a stalled economy, entrenched interests with a dysfunctional economic-policy bureaucracy, growing pension demands with an aging population, and a frustrated younger generation that is more aware of the outside world than those before. Many members of the more ambitious younger generation have left the island and are contributing to the economies of the United States, Canada, Spain and other Latin American countries.

One of the earlier tests for the new government should be tackling the foreign exchange system. This was discussed by Raul Castro but never attempted. However, it would greatly simplify doing business in Cuba, as well as helping to reform the state-owned enterprises. As the Financial Times John Paul Rathbone has noted, Currency unification . . . would help force that process, as multiple exchange rates within state enterprises mask chronic inefficiencies and fuel exchange rate arbitrage, and thus corruption.

But this is where it becomes difficult for Diaz-Canel: a declining economic situation puts the government under pressure to do something. Yet there is the concern that currency unification would make evident the poor finances of many state-owned enterprises, force some of them to close or be merged, or compel job-force reductions. It would also put the new leader on a collision course with vested interests, which in the state-owned enterprises includes the powerful military.

Cubas small yet growing private sector would probably benefit from an overhaul of the state economic sector, but is not enough to pick up the slack in the labor force. The situation is not helped in that the Cuban authorities have a strong mistrust of the private sector and are resistant to the concept that a thriving business sector could pay taxes that could bolster state finances.

Economic conditions in Cuba are likely to get worse before they get better. Diaz-Canel is more likely to clamp down on the island, both politically and economically, to consolidate his hold on power. That will probably mean a curbing or halting of any economic reforms that are pro-business.

At the same time, Cuba still needs money to purchase its imports (including a high level of critical food imports). This could mean that it will seek greater assistance from China, which has already provided debt relief and trade finance. Beijing is frustrated by Cubas lack of progress on economic reforms, and thus far has demonstrated little appetite to provide the same largesse to the Caribbean country as did the Soviet Union during the Cold War and Venezuela from 2000 to 2014. This represents a major challenge for the incoming Diaz-Canel administration.

By weeks end, if all goes according to plan, the post-Castro era will have been realized in name. The reality is that the Castroite state remains very much intact, probably with little change in personnel. The problem is that the Castroite state as suchcorrupt, dominated by entrenched interests and ideologically rigidis failing in terms of the economy, which in times of uncertainty could result in social unrest. This is the last thing that Diaz-Canel wants, but his solution will be to clamp down with the expectation that police state tactics will succeed in holding his position and that of those around him in power. The challenge is that as time moves on, ongoing repression is not the answer to a stronger economy. Sadly the option to make those changes is not likely until more of the Castroite elite pass out of power. Diaz-Canel should take heed the words of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa in The Leopard: If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.

Scott B. MacDonald is chief economist for Smiths Research and Gradings.

Image: Raul Castro attends the May Day parade at Havanas Revolution Square, May 1, 2008. Sven Creutzmann/Pool via Reuters

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Cuba swears in its new president on Thursday, with outgoing leader Raul Castro, 86, handing over power to his first vice-president, Miguel Diaz-Canel, 57.

The country's 605-member National Assembly of People's Power, a legislative body, gathers in the morning to vote for the 31-member Council of State, which forms the country's government. The options are limited, as Diaz-Canel is the only candidate for the presidency.

The deputy position of first vice-president, Diaz-Canel's previous role, also only has one candidate, 72-year-old Salvador Valdes Mesa, and there are only five candidates to choose from for the five positions of vice-presidents. And, of course, there are only 24 names listed on the ballots to the 24 roles of secretary.

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Read more: How will new Cuba leader Miguel Diaz-Canel affect Washington-Havana relations?

Diaz-Canel will be sworn in right after the assembly session, marking the first Castro-free government since the 1959 Cuban Marxist revolution led by the late Fidel Castro against the U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista.

04_19_cuba_Castro_Diaz-Canel

STR/AFP/Getty Images

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Despite the historic opportunity to reform a country marked by authoritarian state control of most civil society and the media, the regime's message is one of continuity. "In Cuba there will be no breaks, but continuity of the Revolution and its historic legacy," read a poster by the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs shared on social media.

In another tweet, the ministry shared a photo of Raul Castro embracing Diaz-Canel, along with the caption "an image worth more than a thousand words" and the hashtag #SomosContinuidad, meaning "We are continuity" in Spanish.

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Diaz-Canel was born in post-revolution Cuba and spent 30 years quietly moving up the party ranks until he was voted in as Raul Castros first deputy in February 2013. He faces the task to revive an economy that continues to struggle despite Castro's economic reforms, as well as managing a power transition that represents a novelty for the 80 percent the island's population born, like him, after 1959.

Analysts are skeptical about the potential for radical change, believing that Castro will still exercise considerable power as he remains head of the Communist Party until the 2021 congress, at which point his son Alejandro could take over.

This article was first written by Newsweek

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By Mark Hosenball and David Alexander WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Democratic Party sued the Russian government, U.S. President Donald Trump's campaign and WikiLeaks on Friday, charging that they carried out a wide-ranging conspiracy to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In its federal lawsuit in Manhattan, the Democratic National Committee said that top officials in Trump's campaign conspired with the Russian government and its military spy agency to hurt Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and tilt the election to Trump by hacking Democratic Party computers. The lawsuit alleged that Trump's campaign "gleefully welcomed Russia's help" in the 2016 election and accuses it of being a "racketeering enterprise" that worked in tandem with Moscow. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Russia launched an all-out assault on our democracy and it found a willing and active partner in Donald Trumps campaign," said Tom Perez, chair of the DNC. "This constituted an act of unprecedented treachery." The suit prompted Trump to send a Friday evening tweet that called the Democrats "obstructionist" and promised a counterattack based on his longstanding assertion that Clinton committed a crime with her personal email server. "This can be good news in that we will now counter for the DNC Server that they refused to give to the FBI, the Wendy Wasserman Schultz Servers and Documents held by the Pakistani mystery man and Clinton Emails," Trump, a Republican, wrote. Trump appeared to refer to Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who chaired the DNC during the election when its servers were hacked, and a Pakistan-born information technology worker found by the House of Representatives inspector general to have inappropriately accessed congressional data. The campaign operation Trump has already set up ahead of the 2020 president election called the lawsuit frivolous and characterized it as a fundraising effort. "This is a sham lawsuit about a bogus Russian collusion claim filed by a desperate, dysfunctional, and nearly insolvent Democratic Party," the campaign's manager, Brad Parscale, said in a statement. Defendants in the lawsuit include three people who have been indicted as a result of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Russian meddling: former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Manafort associate Rick Gates and former campaign aide George Papadopoulos. Also named as defendants were Donald Trump Jr., Trump associate Roger Stone and Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Trump has repeatedly denied his campaign colluded with Russia and Moscow has denied meddling in the election. Four U.S. intelligence agencies reported last year that Russia sponsored the hacking of Democratic Party groups and other actions during the 2016 campaign. Part of the effort was to benefit Trump over Clinton, the agencies said. The DNC blames Russia for breaches of its computer systems in 2015 and the first half of 2016. Hackers disseminated internal communications of party officials as the Democratic nominating convention began and WikiLeaks released thousands of emails, some of which were embarrassing for the Clinton campaign and were intended to stoke conflicts among the party's supporters. Most of the accusations appeared to be based on news reports and publicly available legal documents and offered little new information about alleged collusion with Moscow. MIDTERM EFFECT Democrats are keen to remind voters of the issue of Russia and the 2016 election ahead of November's midterm congressional elections. Early polls show Republicans run some risk of losing control of Congress. The suit gives Democrats a useful and perhaps compelling narrative to counter the presidents and Republicans mantra of no collusion,'" said Leonard Williams, a political science professor at Manchester University. "From that partisan standpoint, it is exactly what their candidates and spokespeople need." WikiLeaks, and attorneys for Trump Jr., Manafort, Gates and Papadopoulos also did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Stone said the lawsuit was based on "a left-wing conspiracy theory." "NO proof or evidence," he wrote in an email to Reuters. The lawsuit, should it go forward, seems likely to help keep the spotlight on the issue of Russian election interference and possible collusion by the Trump campaign. Both are being investigated by Mueller, whose office declined to comment on the Democratic lawsuit. Through the process of legal discovery, lawyers for the Democratic Party could force the defendants to produce documents they say relate to the collusion issue. The lawsuit "might not have any journalistic, judicial, or political staying power," Williams said. "Whether it amounts to more than a story to tell remains to be seen," he said. "It might lead to additional discovery of events and relationships that we dont yet know about." (Reporting by David Alexander; Additional reporting by Ginger Gibson, Lisa Lambert and Warren Strobel; writing by Alistair Bell; editing by Jonathan Oatis, Bill Trott and Cynthia Osterman)
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A push to impeach President Donald Trump has gained little support, even among Democrats, and the partys own leaders have discouraged such efforts. But a new poll suggests liberal voters may feel differently.

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Asked if they would definitely vote for or against a 2018 midterm elections congressional candidate who wants to move to impeach Trump, a whopping 70 percent of Democratic registered voters in an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll released Wednesday said they definitely would vote for the candidate. Only 18 percent of Democratic voters said they would definitely vote against the candidate.

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By comparison, 10 percent of Republican voters would definitely support a candidate seeking to impeach Trump, and 84 percent would definitely not. The opposing results among liberal and conservative voters balanced out the overall breakdown in the poll conducted from April 10 to 13. While 47 percent of all voters said they would definitely vote for such a candidate, a close 42 percent indicated they would definitely vote against, and the poll had a margin of error of 3.9 percentage points.

The overwhelming percentage of liberal voters who would definitely vote for a candidate interested in impeaching Trump runs counter to the stance that the vast majority of elected Democrats have taken.

Two forced votes by Democratic Representative Al Green of Texas to begin proceedings to impeach Trump failed by large marginsthe most recent, in January, by a vote of 355 to 66. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Democratic Minority Whip Steny Hoyer issued a joint statement in December, when Green forced the first vote, opposing the effort that cited special counsel Robert Muellers probe into collusion between Trumps campaign and Russians in the 2016 election.

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The special counsels investigation is moving forward as well, and those inquiries should be allowed to continue, the statement reads. Now is not the time to consider articles of impeachment.

Democratic leaders hesitance on impeachment prompted the Need to Impeach campaign earlier this month, which sent thousands of Democratic, independent and third-party candidates running in the midterm elections a guide on Trumps impeachable offenses. It has obtained more than 5.1 million signatures in support of its mission.

The Democratic establishment would rather focus on other issues but we think it is one of the most important issues out there, the campaigns lead strategist, Kevin Mack, told Newsweek at the time. So were just in a different place than they are.

This article was first written by Newsweek

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This New York elementary school teacher had no idea the person she would call to the stage to be honored at the "Student of the Month" assembly would be her own son, who has been deployed overseas with the U.S. Air Force.

Regina Benzing, a teacher at the Lenox Elementary School in Baldwin, Long Island, was emceeing the monthly assembly when, as she called the names of the first two students, one of the names was that of her son, "Eric Benzing."

"I was like, 'What? They made a mistake.' I cant believe this," Regina told WCBS.

Eric, who joined the U.S. Air Force about a year ago, has been deployed in Germany since last September, but sure enough, there he was, walking out on stage as his name was called.

As the two emotionally embraced, the crowd burst into cheers and students began waving American flags and signs that read, "Thank you for your service."

"Ecstatic, absolutely ecstatic," Regina said. "It's good to hold my boy. Ive been waiting for a long time to get to put my arms around him."

"I missed you too," her son added.

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New survey finds that, while most Californians broadly support the rights of refugees and immigrants, many also back Trumps agenda

A protest against Donald Trumps travel ban in San Francisco. Only 54% of those polled said they have positive views of Muslims. Photograph: Noah Berger/Reuters

Half of Californians support the travel ban on Muslim-majority countries and 59% are in favor of increased deportations, according to a new survey that suggests there are widespread conservative and xenophobic views in one of the most progressive US states.

The poll, conducted by the University of California, Berkeley, found that while a majority of Californians say they broadly support immigrants rights and refugees, many also back signature features of Donald Trumps anti-immigrant agenda in a state that has served as the leader in opposing the presidents policies.

In this period when immigrants are being attacked, Californians felt that its important to increase deportations, said Olivia Araiza, the director of the Haas Institutes Blueprint for Belonging Project, which commissioned the survey alongside the polling group Latino Decisions. Even Californians are sensitive to rhetoric that excludes people.

The poll was released at a time of intensifying disputes between the Trump administration and the Golden State, which is home to more than 2 million undocumented people, nearly a quarter of all unauthorized immigrants in the US. Last year, the state passed a landmark sanctuary law meant to limit local police cooperation with federal immigration authorities, sparking a US justice department lawsuit and mass arrests and raids.

While the states urban centers like San Francisco and Los Angeles are known as liberal havens, there are some signs of rightwing rage brewing in certain conservative regions under Trump.

Araiza emphasized that the results of the survey of 2,440 residents (conducted in English and Spanish in December) were largely pro-immigrant. The poll found that 71% think establishing a pathway to citizenship is important, 79% support citizenship for Dreamers, undocumented people brought to the US as children, 64% agree the state should limit local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, and 66% reject Trumps US-Mexico border wall as an important immigration policy.

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The US-Mexico border fence cuts through Jacumba, California. Two-thirds of those polled do not see the border wall as an important policy. Photograph: Sandy Huffaker/AFP/Getty Images

While 79% also said they think its important to take in immigrants and refugees escaping war and violence, the number fell to 66% when Muslim-majority countries were specified, and 49% said they support Trumps travel ban. Only 54% said they have positive views of Muslims.

People hold inconsistent and contradictory points of views at once, said Araiza, adding, We have a job to do to ensure that we use any pulpit we might have to steer people toward belonging and inclusion.

Trump and his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, have argued that a crackdown on immigrants prevents violent crime, but numerous studies have contradicted that narrative  finding that cities with sanctuary policies have significantly lower crime rates and that undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit serious crimes than people born in the US.

The survey also found contradictory views about race and prejudice. While 68% of respondents said they support race-conscious policies like affirmative action, about half said they agreed with the racist idea that black people need to try harder.
By John Walcott and Phil Stewart WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. assessments following the U.S., British and French missile strikes on Syria show they had only a limited impact on President Bashar al-Assad's ability to carry out chemical weapons attacks, four U.S. officials told Reuters. The conclusion contrasts with the Trump administration's assertion that the strikes on Saturday hit at the heart of Assad's chemical weapons program, language suggesting that Assad's ability to stage more attacks had been dealt a devastating blow. The United States, France and Britain destroyed three targets tied to Syria's weapons program. The most important of them was the Barzah Research and Development Center, which U.S. intelligence concluded was involved in the production and testing of chemical and biological warfare technology. [nL8N1RQ5AZ] But the U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the available intelligence indicated that Assad's stock of chemicals and precursors was believed to be scattered far beyond the three targets. Some of it, U.S. and allied intelligence suggests, is stored in schools and civilian apartment buildings, which one of the officials referred to as "human shields." U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, in remarks to Congress a day before the strikes, acknowledged that one of his top priorities in crafting the operation would be to minimize the loss of life to civilians. Asked about the assertion that the strikes had only a limited impact, a White House National Security Council spokesman said the purpose of the military operation was to hold Syria's government accountable, degrade its capability and deter it from chemical attacks in the future - "all while minimizing civilian casualties." A Pentagon spokesman referred Reuters to Mattis' warning to Assad and his forces to "not perpetrate another chemical weapons attack for which they will be held accountable." Syria and Russia deny unleashing poison gas on April 7 during their offensive on Douma, which ended with the recapture of the town that had been the last rebel stronghold near the capital, Damascus. The suspected chemical attack triggered the U.S. response. 'AS GOOD AS IT NEEDS TO BE' U.S. officials said the assessment was that the strikes, particularly on Barzah, did degrade Syria's chemical weapons capability. But the assessment also indicated that a large quantity of the chemical weapons was stored elsewhere and that Syria's chemical weapons program, while crude, "is about as good as it needs to be for Assad's purposes," another official said. For example, chlorine, which the United States assesses was used in the April 7 attack, is a common industrial chemical that is not difficult to find or weaponize, experts say. That makes crippling a chlorine capability through military strikes far more difficult than, say, more sophisticated chemical or biological warfare agents. Moved by the images of the civilian victims of the suspected chemical attack, U.S. President Donald Trump made no secret he was convinced of the need for a muscular U.S. response. He even put Assad's backers, Moscow and Tehran, on edge with fiery rhetoric in the days before the strike that left open the possibility he might target them too. But U.S. officials familiar with U.S. military planning said Russia and Iran were never seriously considered as targets. Beyond working to avoid civilian casualties, Mattis and other U.S. officials tailored the strikes in a way to avoid triggering retaliation from Moscow and Tehran. The end result was an operation that did not target Assad's conventional military infrastructure, including aircraft that could deliver chemical agents in the future. (Reporting by John Walcott and Phil Stewart; Editing by Peter Cooney)
Photo credit: Getty Images

From Harper's BAZAAR

Earlier this week it was reported that Commonwealth leaders would be meeting this week to discuss who should take over from the Queen in the event of her death. Now, Queen Elizabeth II herself has made it clear that she wants her son, Prince Charles, to take on the role next.

But what exactly does the Head of the Commonwealth do, and who is eligible for the role?

The role of Head of the Commonwealth is mostly symbolic.

As the Commonwealth's website sets out, "the role carries no formal functions, but has great symbolic significance and has helped to underline the sense of the Commonwealth as a family of nations."

Queen Elizabeth II herself made it clear that "The Commonwealth bears no resemblance to the empires of the past. It is an entirely new conception built on the highest qualities of the spirit of man: friendship, loyalty, and the desire for freedom and peace."

And the royal family's website proclaims the Commonwealth itself as an "international organization, spanning every geographical region, religion and culture. It exists to foster international co-operation and trade links between people all over the world." It's been in existence for over 60 years, and includes 53 countries, most of "which were formerly under British rule."

But it includes several official duties.

As the Commonwealth website reveals, Queen Elizabeth II currently has a number of official duties as Head of the Commonwealth, including holding "discussions with Commonwealth leaders," delivering "a Commonwealth Day broadcast," and visiting the majority of Commonwealth countries, not only the ones of which she is also head of state.



Photo credit: Getty Images

The role is not hereditary.

Prince Charles won't automatically be given the role upon the Queen's death. Instead, all of the leaders will meet to decide the most suitable candidate, which could either be a member of the royal family, or perhaps even a politician or head of state.

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The British Prime Minister's Office confirmed this week that "succession is a matter for the Commonwealth as a whole to determine. If any discussion did take place it would happen at the leaders' retreat at Windsor on Friday." Reiterating the importance of a unanimous decision, the Office stated, "decisions in the Commonwealth are made by consensus." It's important that all leaders of Commonwealth countries have a say in the matter.



The Queen wants Prince to take over.

Daily Mail called the Queen's words unusual, as a monarch apparently doesn't usually try to sway public opinion on the matter. However, Queen Elizabeth II has made it clear that it's her "sincere wish" for Prince Charles to "carry on the important work started by my father in 1949."

Britain's Prime Minister has endorsed Prince Charles for the role.

Prime Minister Theresa May's office recently announced that Prince Charles has been a "proud supporter of the Commonwealth for four decades and has spoken passionately about the organizations unique diversity," making him an ideal candidate for the role.



Similarly, Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, endorsed Prince Charles for the role at an event in London on Thursday. He said (via Reuters), "I very much agree with the wishes of her majesty that the Prince of Wales be the next head of the Commonwealth."

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Yerevan (AFP) - Tens of thousands protested in Armenia's capital on Friday against what they say is a power-grab by ex-president Serzh Sarkisian, as police arrested more than 230 people.

For the past week, opposition supporters have held mass rallies to denounce Sarkisian's efforts to remain in power as prime minister after a decade serving as president.

On Friday, demonstrators waved national flags and held up placards reading "Sarkisian is a dictator" as protests in the impoverished former Soviet country went into their eighth day.

An AFP reporter at the scene said there were tens of thousands of people at the rally in the capital.

"The whole world can see that this is a people's velvet revolution, which very soon will be victorious," opposition lawmaker and protest leader Nikol Pashinyan said at the rally Friday evening.

"Authorities have already started talking about being ready to begin a dailogue with us...Sarkisian himself is a political corpse and one does not conduct a dialogue with a corpse, that boat has sailed," he said.

Pshinyan added that he would be willing to discuss a timetable for the prime minister's departure.

"Corruption and injustice are choking the country -- if you want to open a small business you have to bribe officials, the people from the tax service want bribes, teachers expect presents," 52-year-old protester Mushegh Khachatryan told AFP.

"It can't go on like this...but who created such a situation, who's to answer for it? Serzh Sarkisian of course," he added.

"The old generation should give up their place to the youth -- a free, fair Armenia, where there's decent education and plenty of jobs," said Anna Minasyan, a 21-year-old student.

Protesters earlier tried to block roads in response to repeated calls by Pashinyan to paralyse traffic, but police prevented those attempts.

A police spokesman told AFP more than 230 people were detained in Yerevan.

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Protesters also rallied in the second city of Gyumri where they attempted to block a main road leading to the capital.

Constitutional amendments approved in 2015 have transferred power from the presidency to the premier.

Sarkisian in effect remained the country's leader by taking the post of prime minister after a parliament vote this week.

- Poverty, corruption -

Opposition supporters have criticised the 63-year-old leader over poverty, corruption and the influence of powerful oligarchs.

The spokesman for Sarkisian's ruling Republican Party on Thursday said the newly elected prime minister would not step down.

Under a new parliamentary system of government, lawmakers elected Sarkisian as prime minister on Tuesday after he served a decade as president from 2008.

Analysts say that the opposition so far lacks resources to oust the leader even though huge public anger has built up in recent years.

The number of demonstrators had somewhat dwindled over the past few days, down from roughly 40,000 who took to the streets Tuesday when Sarkisian was elected by parliament.

On Thursday, more than 15,000 protesters staged a rally outside government headquarters as Sarkisian chaired his first cabinet meeting since the controversial vote.

On Monday police used stun grenades against protesters who tried to break through a barbed wire cordon to get to the parliament building.

Authorities said at the time that 46 people, including six police and Pashinyan sought medical help.

The new president, Armen Sarkisian -- no relation to now prime minister Serzh -- was sworn in last week but his post is largely ceremonial under the new system of government.

A former military officer, Serzh Sarkisian has been in charge of the landlocked South Caucasus nation of 2.9 million people for a decade.

He also held the office of prime minister from 2007 to 2008.

After he was first elected in 2008, 10 people died and hundreds were injured in bloody clashes between police and supporters of the defeated opposition candidate.
Yerevan (AFP) - Dozens were arrested as hundreds of opposition supporters staged sit-ins and attempted to block road traffic in Armenia's capital Friday to protest ex-president Serzh Sarkisian's election as prime minister.

Many of the demonstrators waved national flags and held up placards reading "Sarkisian is a dictator".

Some attempted to block roads in response to repeated calls by the leader of the protests, opposition MP Nikol Pashinyan to paralyse traffic.

Police said dozens of people were detained.

Since last Friday, opposition supporters have held rallies to denounce Sarkisian's efforts to remain in power as prime minister after a decade serving as president.

Opposition parties have criticised the 63-year-old leader over poverty, corruption and the influence of powerful oligarchs in the country of 2.9 million people.

The spokesman for Sarkisian's ruling Republican Party said the newly elected prime minister would not step down.

"We respects citizens' right to freedom of assembly but we rule out the possibility of the prime minister resigning," Eduard Sharmazanov told journalists late Thursday.

Human Rights Watch condemned the "arbitrary arrests" of demonstrators.

"One should not underestimate the challenges Armenia's police are facing in maintaining law and order, but the ongoing protests are no justification to arbitrarily detain people," it said in a statement.

Parliament elected Sarkisian as prime minister on Tuesday after he served a decade as president from 2008 under a new parliamentary system of government.

Controversial constitutional amendments approved in 2015 have transferred governing powers from the presidency to the premier.

In the biggest protest in Armenia in years, tens of thousands took to the streets over Sarkisian's election as prime minister on Tuesday night but the number of demonstrators has since dwindled.

Some 15,000 rallied in Yerevan on Thursday night.
By Manuel Mogato MANILA (Reuters) - Police at the helm of the Philippine war on drugs were given top posts in the national force on Thursday, indicating no let-up in a brutal crackdown that has caused international alarm, and defined Rodrigo Duterte's 21-month presidency. The job of national police chief was given to Oscar Albayalde, a strict disciplinarian who has been in charge of Metro Manila, where the vast majority of the thousands of drugs war killings have occurred. He was succeeded as commander of the capital police by Camilo Cascolan, the architect of the controversial operational plan of the anti-drug campaign, "Double Barrel". About 4,100 people have been killed by police in the Philippines since July 2016 in what the authorities said were shootouts during anti-narcotics operations. At least 2,300 drug-related deaths have occurred separately, at the hands of what police say are unknown assassins. Human rights groups believe the death toll has been understated, and accuse the authorities of executing suspects and staging crime scenes. Police deny that and say their more than 130,000 arrests prove their intent to preserve life. Cascolan is the latest officer promoted to a top command post having served in the Davao region during the 22 years Duterte was a mayor there. The outgoing police chief, Ronald dela Rosa, also served in Davao. Cascolan's position as head of operations will go to Mao Aplasca, also from the Davao region. Albayalde vowed no relent in the campaign and to ensure continuity of its "remarkable accomplishments", including arresting or convincing tens of thousands of people to surrender, and the "neutralizing" of drug suspects. "We will not relent on our war against illegal drugs and other forms of criminality. The drug menace, we must all understand, is a worldwide phenomenon," Albayalde said in a speech. "We will help and support each other to fight and win this war." The outgoing police chief, Dela Rosa, will head the bureau of corrections. He is leaving behind a police force with "a sordid human rights record", according to Carlos Conde, a researcher for the New York based Human Rights Watch. In his departure speech, Dela Rosa lauded Duterte's for his courage to order an all-out war on drugs, and pledged his "unquestionable loyalty" to him. "It was an order I certainly could not refuse. I shared the same sentiments as the president and would not let pass the opportunity to do my share," he said. (Additional reporting by Neil Jerome Morales and Martin Petty; Editing by Robert Birsel)
Malabo (Equatorial Guinea) (AFP) - Equatorial Guinea's opposition on Friday criticised the oil rich country for hosting a rights conference, claiming institutional killings, torture and imprisonment were "common currency" at home.

A small state of 1.2 million people, awash with oil but mired in poverty and a reputation for corruption, Equatorial Guinea has been ruled with an iron fist by Teodoro Obiang Nguema since 1979.

"Human rights violations are common currency and used by those who wield power in Equatorial Guinea," said the main opposition Citizens for Innovation (CI) party.

It said the April 18-21 conference aimed at "dispelling falsehoods about Equatorial Guinea" was an attempt to whitewash its record.

"There are political prisoners in the country," it said. "Our members have been tortured in police stations, some have had their arms and legs broken and others have been shot."

However, the country's third deputy prime minister Alfonso Nsue Mokuy, who is in charge of human rights, told AFP: "We have nothing to hide."

The European Union in February said it saw a "sharp decline" in human rights, recalling that an opposition figure died in custody and over 130 people detained since elections last year.

"The restrictions on freedom and arrests, particularly those of political opponents ... since the elections in November 2017 arouse grave concern," said Catherine Ray, EU spokeswoman for foreign affairs and security policy, in a statement.

"The death in custody of Mr Ebee Ela, a member of the opposition party Ciudadanos por la Innovacion (CI), confirms the sharp decline in the human rights situation," Ray had said.
By Valerie Volcovici WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials are concerned that companies may be required to publicly disclose confidential data used in crafting government regulations, under an initiative by the agency's chief to eliminate "secret science," internal emails showed. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who is spearheading a push to relax or undo Obama-era environmental rules, said in March he would no longer allow the agency to use studies with nonpublic scientific data to develop rules on public health and pollution. Scientists and environmentalists have argued that this would constrain key research because many public health and pollution studies rely on confidential medical information. Pruitt had instructed staff to complete the guidelines by the end of February, according to the emails obtained by scientific advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists and shared with Reuters. On Friday, the guidelines were submitted for review at the White House Office of Management and Budget. In the emails, EPA officials discussed how new guidelines could complicate the way companies submit data. EPA relies on scientific research underpinned by sensitive medical and public health information or confidential industry data to craft rules to reduce chemical exposure and combat air and water pollution. "This directive needs to be revised," Nancy Beck, head of EPA's chemicals office, wrote in a Jan. 31 email. "Without change it will jeopardize our entire pesticide registration/re-registration review process and likely all TSCA risk evaluations." She was referring to the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), which requires chemical companies to submit large volumes of data largely classified as confidential business information (CBI). Making this data publicly available would be "incredibly burdensome" and impractical, Beck said. In response, Richard Yamada, deputy assistant administrator in the EPA office of research, wrote that he "didn't know about the intricacies of CBI." "We will need to thread this one real tight! Thanks Nancy!" he said. Michael Halpern of the Union of Concerned Scientists said in an interview the emails show that EPA political staff concerns over protecting certain companies' trade secrets from public scrutiny are at odds with Pruitt's call for more transparency. "They want special treatment for industry while showing no concerns for sensitive medical information or public health," he said. EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman said on Friday "any standards for protecting confidential business information would be the same for all stakeholders." The emails show senior political EPA officials had been working with Republicans on the U.S. House of Representatives science committee since January on the new policy. It is likely to be based on similar legislation passed by the House three times that never got a Senate vote. (Reporting by Valerie Volcovici; Editing by Richard Chang)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A former official of a subsidiary of Venezuela's state oil company PDVSA [PDVSA.UL] pleaded guilty on Thursday to a U.S. charge of conspiracy to commit money laundering, the U.S. Justice Department said. Cesar Rincon, a Venezuelan citizen who was extradited to the United States from Spain after his arrest there last year, pleaded guilty in federal court in Houston to one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, the department said. He was one of five former Venezuelan officials accused in February of soliciting bribes in exchange for helping vendors win favorable treatment from Petroleos de Venezuela SA. Rincon, 50, a former general manager at PDVSA's procurement unit Bariven, agreed to forfeit $7.03 million, and faces sentencing on July 9 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. Others charged included Nervis Villalobos, a former Venezuelan vice minister of energy; Rafael Reiter, who worked as PDVSA's head of security and loss prevention; and Luis Carlos de Leon, a former official at a state-run electric company. Those three like Rincon were arrested in Spain in October at the request of U.S. authorities amid a foreign bribery investigation into the financially struggling PDVSA. Also charged in the case is Alejandro Isturiz Chiesa, an assistant to Bariven's president, who remains at large. As part of his plea agreement, Rincon also admitted to soliciting and receiving bribes from other owners of U.S.-based energy companies in exchange for helping them win business with PDVSA. De Leon was extradited from Spain on March 9, and was ordered to remain in custody, while Villalobos and Reiter remain in Spanish custody, the statement said. All five were charged with money laundering, while De Leon and Villalobos were also charged with conspiring to violate the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The case flowed out of a U.S. investigation into what prosecutors have previously called a $1 billion bribery plot involving payments to PDVSA officials that became public with the arrest of two businessmen in 2015. In an indictment announced in February said that from 2011 to 2013, the five Venezuelans sought bribes and kickbacks from vendors in exchange for helping them secure PDVSA contracts and gain priority over other vendors for outstanding invoices during its liquidity crisis. (Reporting by Susan Heavey; Editing by Marguerita Choy)
Daniel Fried, Barack Obama. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Jung Yeon-je/Pool photo via AP, Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)

The former State Department diplomat who oversaw U.S. government sanctions policy said he was extremely frustrated when the Obama administration issued weak and frankly inadequate sanctions against Russia in December 2016 in response to that countrys campaign to disrupt the U.S. presidential election.

Daniel Fried, who retired in 2017 after a 40-year State Department career that included serving as U.S. sanctions coordinator under President Obama, offered his sharp critique of the Obama administrations response to Russian actions during an interview on the Yahoo News podcast Skullduggery.

The Obama administration  in my view, and I was in it, OK? I was working on sanctions then  did not respond with adequate strength to the Russian interference in our elections, Fried said. What we did in December 2016 was a very light set of sanctions, which I think was frankly inadequate.  We went after some cybertargets, we expelled some diplomats, we sanctioned some of the intel services. But those sanctions are not apt to be terribly effective, and we knew it. This was not enough.

Fried was referring to a series of sanctions Obama announced in late December 2016. Declaring that all Americans should be alarmed by Russias actions during the election, Obama said at the time that the actions were a necessary and appropriate response to efforts to harm U.S. interests in violation of established international norms of behavior.

But Fried said the lack of teeth in the presidents actions may have only emboldened the Russians. I think it was an inadequate response, and I think the Russians understood it as inadequate, Fried said. The Russians are pretty good at calculating costs and benefits.

Fried said he gives the Obama White House a lot of credit for a forceful response to Russias aggression in Ukraine in 2014  including authorizing the deployment of NATO troops in the Baltics and Poland. But asked how frustrated he was by the White House election response, Fried replied: Extremely. I think we missed an opportunity.

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Frieds comments came during a wide-ranging interview in which he described as puzzling the fact that President Trumps White House undercut U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley this week by pulling back on plans for additional sanctions against the Russians to punish President Vladimir Putins government for its support of the Syrian regime of President Bashar Assad.

In an interview on CBSs Face the Nation last Sunday, Haley declared that the new sanctions would be announced by the next day by Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin  an announcement that never came after Trump overruled his advisers and scrapped the additional sanctions. After White House economics adviser Larry Kudlow suggested Haley had misstated U.S. policy because she was confused, Haley issued a stinging rebuke: With all due respect, I dont get confused.

Download or subscribe on iTunes: Skullduggery by Yahoo News

Fried said he found Trumps pullback on sanctions especially disheartening because the administration had just a week earlier unveiled stiff actions  including blacklisting Russian oligarchs and senior government officials  in response to what was described as Moscows malign activity around the globe. At a moment when the Trump administration could make a reasonable case that it was starting to develop a serious policy toward Russia, Fried said, the president had once again undercut the effort.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and U.S President Trump during the G-20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, in July 2017. (Photo: Mikhail Klimentyev, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Fried also elaborated on comments he made to Yahoo News last year about his distress when he learned that, shortly after Trump took office, the White House was planning to scrap all sanctions against Russia  including those imposed in 2014 in response to that countrys intervention in Ukraine.

What especially infuriated him, Fried told Skullduggery, is that the White Houses plan was to lift the sanctions in exchange for nothing  sort of as a goodwill gesture to the Russians, which I found somewhere between shocking and astonishing, that somebody would be played for such a sucker. The proposed action, which Fried believed was being pushed by then National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, would have been an actual surrender of an important American position and a betrayal of a country, Ukraine, that was under the threat of Russian aggression.

Fried was a career diplomat who was still serving in the State Department at the time. He didnt retire until February 2017. But he decided to take his own actions to try to block the Trump administration move by appealing to members of Congress to pass legislation to codify the Ukraine sanctions and call for additional ones  a move that came to fruition later that year. Trump at first considered vetoing the legislation, but reluctantly signed it when it was clear any veto would be overturned by Congress.

More Skullduggery from Yahoo News:
By Brendan Pierson

(Reuters) - A former Venezuelan official on Thursday pleaded guilty to taking part in a scheme involving bribes paid by U.S. companies to Venezuelan officials to secure energy contracts and speed up payments on outstanding invoices, U.S. prosecutors said.

Cesar Rincon, a former manager at Bariven, the procurement unit of Venezuela's state-owned energy company Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA) [PDVSA.UL], entered his plea to one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering before District Judge Kenneth Hoyt in Houston, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Hoyt also entered a judgment against Rincon of $7 million, the amount of the bribe payments he admitted to taking, prosecutors said. Rincon is scheduled to be sentenced on July 9.

"He feels that by admitting his guilt, he has relieved himself of a significant burden," Rincon's lawyer, Fred Schwartz, said of his client's plea.

Rincon, 50, was one of five former Venezuelan officials charged in an indictment unsealed in February. The case emerged from a U.S. investigation into what prosecutors have called a $1 billion bribery plot involving payments to PDVSA officials.

In entering his guilty plea, Rincon admitted that he took bribes from Roberto Rincon of Texas, who was president of Tradequip Services & Marine, and Abraham Jose Shiera Bastidas of Florida, who was manager of Vertix Instrumentos, according to prosecutors.

Cesar Rincon also admitted that he conspired with Roberto Rincon and Shiera to launder the bribes through transactions including wire transfers to accounts in the United States and Switzerland in other people's names.

Both Roberto Rincon and Shiera pleaded guilty in 2016 to bribery charges in the same court and are awaiting sentencing. Eight other people have pleaded guilty in connection with the probe.

Others charged in February's indictment included Nervis Villalobos, a former Venezuelan vice minister of energy; Rafael Reiter, who worked as PDVSA's head of security and loss prevention; and Luis Carlos de Leon, a former official at a state-run electric company.

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Those three, like Rincon, were arrested in Spain in October at the request of U.S. authorities. De Leon was extradited to the United States in March and has pleaded not guilty, according to court records. Villalobos and Reiter remain in Spanish custody, the Justice Department said.

Alejandro Isturiz Chiesa, who was an assistant to Bariven's president, was also charged in the indictment. He remains at large, according to the Justice Department.

(Reporting By Brendan Pierson in New York, Editing by Rosalba O'Brien and Cynthia Osterman)
By Jeff Mason WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt, under fire from lawmakers for travel and security expenses, spent about $45,000 in government money to fly five people to Australia to prepare for a planned trip that was later canceled. Two of his aides and three security agents flew to Australia last August on business-class tickets costing roughly $9,000 each to set up meetings for the EPA administrator. The purchase of business-class tickets was not a violation of U.S. government policy, which allows federal employees to travel business class on trips lasting 14 hours or more. But the spending on a five-person "advance" team for the Australia trip, revealed by U.S. officials who spoke to Reuters, comes as Pruitt faces scrutiny over his own frequent first-class travel and spending on such items as a 24-hour security detail. The White House budget office has said it is investigating whether a $43,000 soundproof phone booth installed for Pruitt in his office at EPA headquarters violated the law. The Republican-led House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is looking into Pruitt's travel and security arrangements. Pruitt also has drawn criticism over his rental of a room in a Washington condominium owned by an energy lobbyist's wife. Democrats have pointed to Pruitt's spending to excoriate President Donald Trump over his campaign pledge to "drain the swamp" in Washington. They contend Trump has done the opposite. In addition to the three security agents, the team that went to Australia to prepare for Pruitt's trip included his advance director, Millan Hupp, and Kevin Chmielewski, his deputy chief of staff at the time. Chmielewski has since left the agency. Pruitt was scheduled to participate in environment-related meetings with Australian officials on a visit to Sydney and Canberra. EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox said Pruitt's trip was canceled because of Hurricane Harvey, which caused major flooding and damage in Texas. Pruitt ended up going to Corpus Christi, Texas to assess the agency's relief efforts instead. "This is not news," Wilcox said, adding that the advance team was "adhering to the federal government's travel policy." The trip has not been rescheduled. Wilcox said the original itinerary included a meeting with Australia's parliament and "we have been unable to find a time to reschedule this meeting as it must be done when they are in session." The officials were away for only a few days, flying from Washington to Sydney on Aug. 26 and returning on Aug. 29. An economy class ticket for the trip would have cost about $1,400. 'BY THE BOOK' Asked about the EPA officials' Australia trip, a White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, did not address whether the travel was appropriate but said Pruitt's overall spending raised questions and "we expect the EPA to answer them." Larry Noble, former president of the Council on Governmental Ethics Laws representing government ethics administrators, questioned whether so many staffers were required for the advance team and said Pruitt's credibility on the broader issue of spending taxpayer money was low. "If he had a reputation for playing it by the book in every other instance, then you might not be concerned," said Noble, senior director and general counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, which advocates government ethics reforms. "But when you see somebody who ... seems to not be that concerned about the way he spends the money, then you question whether this was justified." Trump has praised Pruitt for doing a "great job" cutting back environmental regulations that the president views as burdensome to businesses. On Wednesday, 38 Democratic U.S. senators and an independent who votes with them in the 100-seat Senate introduced a resolution urging Pruitt to resign. The Senate is controlled by Pruitt's fellow Republicans, who could defeat the resolution. More than 130 U.S. lawmakers signed a companion resolution in the House. (Reporting by Jeff Mason; Additional reporting by Timothy Gardner; Editing by Caren Bohan and Will Dunham)
Researchers have discovered the first evidence that people can genetically adapt to deep diving, as shown by the unusually large spleens in indigenous people of Indonesia known as the "Sea Nomads," a study said Thursday.

The spear-fishing Bajau people regularly free-dive to depths of up to 230 feet (70 meters), with only weights and a wooden mask.

They spend up to 60 percent of their work day diving for fish, spearing octopus and gathering crustaceans -- an amount of time rivaled only by sea otters -- and can stay underwater up to 13 minutes at a time, said the report in the journal Cell.

Intrigued by this unusual ability, American researcher Melissa Ilardo, then a post doctoral candidate at the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, wondered if they had genetically adapted somehow to be able to spend more time underwater than other people.

She spent several months in Jaya Bakti, Indonesia, with the help of a translator, getting to know the Bajau and another nearby group that did not dive, the Saluan.

"I spent my whole first visit to Jaya Bakti introducing myself, the project, and the underlying science," she told AFP.

"I wanted to be sure that they understood exactly what I was asking of them so they could help to direct the project to reflect their interests. They were very curious and excited about the research."

Before her second visit, she learned some Indonesian in order to be able to communicate directly with the Bajau.

- Scans and gene tests -

She took genetic samples and did ultrasound scans, which showed that Bajau had spleens about 50 percent larger than the Saluan.

Spleens are important in diving -- and are also enlarged in some seals -- because they release more oxygen into the blood when the body is under stress, or a person is holding their breath underwater.

Spleens were larger in the Balau people whether they were regular divers or not, and further analysis of their DNA revealed why.

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Comparing the genomes of the Bajau to two different populations, the Saluan and the Han Chinese, scientists found 25 sites that differed significantly.

Among them was one site on a gene known as PDE10A, which was determined to be linked to the Bajau's larger spleen size.

In mice, "PDE10A is known for regulating a thyroid hormone that controls spleen size, lending support for the idea that the Bajau might have evolved the spleen size necessary to sustain their long and frequent dives,' said the study.

More research is needed to understand how thyroid hormone affects human spleen size.

The findings could boost research in medicine by helping researchers understand how the body reacts to a loss of oxygen in various contexts, from diving to high-latitude climbing to surgery and lung disease.

"This really tells us how valuable and important indigenous populations are around the world that are living extreme lifestyles," said co-author Eske Willerslev, a professor at the University of Copenhagen.

Willerslev admitted he initially urged Ilardo not to pursue the research for her PhD thesis, believing it was too risky and that she may find nothing.

"She said she wanted to do it anyway and that paid off. Melissa was right and our concerns were wrong."

Ilardo said she was aware of the risks but "believed so strongly in this project," that she had to push on.

"The Bajau and other Sea Nomads are simply extraordinary and I wanted to be able to prove that to the world," said Ilardo, now a US National Institutes of Health postdoctoral scholar at the department of Molecular Medicine at the University of Utah.
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Two Florida law enforcement officers have been shot dead in broad daylight by a gunman who fired through a window into the restaurant where they were eating.

The Gilchrist County Sheriffs Office identified the deputies killed at the Ace China restaurant in Trenton as Sergeant Noel Ramirez and Deputy Sheriff Taylor Lindsey. The pair were both found dead at the scene following the attack which occurred at around 3 p.m. on Thursday (April 19).

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The shooter, identified as 59-year-old John Hubert Highnote, was shot dead by responders outside the restaurant. No further information about the suspect has been released.

Police have so far been unable to determine a motive for the attack. Officers said the suspect appears to have walked to the front of the business and shot both men without warning.

"We're not going to make this a political issue other than the fact, 'What do you expect happens when you demonize law enforcement to the extent it's been demonized?'" Gilchrist County Sheriff Bobby Schultz said at a press conference, reports WGFL.

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"The only thing these men were guilty of was wanting to protect you and me. They just wanted to go get something to eat and they just wanted to do their jobs."

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Gilchrist County Sheriffs Office

According to Gilchrist County Sheriff's Office: "Sergeant Ramirez, 29 years old, leaves behind a wife and two young children. With over seven years total law enforcement experience, Noel served at both the Williston Police Department and the Levy County Sheriffs Office before joining the Gilchrist County Sheriffs Office in 2016.

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Deputy Lindsey, 25, served for over three years with the Gilchrist County Sheriffs Office, originally joining the Sheriffs Office in 2013."

President Donald Trump paid tribute to Ramierez and Lindsey following the attack. He tweeted: My thoughts, prayers and condolences are with the families, friends and colleagues of the two GCSO Florida deputies (HEROES) who lost their lives in the line of duty today.

Schultz said he had spoken with both families. "As you expect you can never be prepared for something like this, but make no mistake I'm proud of their families," Schultz said. "They understood when their loved ones pinned on the badge and they strapped on the gun that this was a possibility."

Florida Governor Rick Scott also released a statement saying he is heartbroken by the loss of the two deputies.

It is true evil for anyone to hurt a law enforcement officer, and in Florida, we have zero tolerance for violence, especially against the police, Scott said. Tonight, I ask every Floridian to honor these law enforcement officers, their brothers and sisters in uniform and their families.

This article was first written by Newsweek

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Miami (AFP) - A brother and sister who survived a shooting rampage at a Florida high school in February are writing a book about the campaign for stricter gun control in America sparked by the massacre, publisher Penguin Random House has announced.

David and Lauren Hogg, who have become two of the most outspoken and media-friendly survivors of the Valentine's Day shooting that left 14 students and three staff dead at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in the city of Parkland.

The book -- titled "#NeverAgain" in a reference to their movement -- will be released on June 5.

David, who is 18, and 14-year-old Lauren, along with some of their classmates, launched the #NeverAgain movement, which saw hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets of US cities on March 24 for the "March for Our Lives."

"Lauren and I will be using the money made from the book to help heal the community," David said on his Twitter feed.

David Hogg took refuge in a closet during the shooting carried out by 19-year-old former classmate Nikolas Cruz. He filmed interviews with fellow students while in hiding, which went viral.

Hogg has been attacked and harassed online, and even accused of being a "crisis actor" paid to travel to tragedies to propagate liberal viewpoints.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham was recently forced to apologize to Hogg after her criticisms of him led her sponsors to withdraw their support for her program.
UPDATED: 9:46 a.m. EDT Following reports of a shooting at Forest High School in Ocala, Florida, Friday morning, the Marion County Sheriff's Office posted to Facebook that parents should report to the First Baptist Church of Ocala, where the school board would work to reunite parents with their students. Additionally, the post said that all of the Marion County schools were on "code yellow" as a precaution.

Original story:

Authorities in Marion County, Florida, responded to a report of a shooting at Forest High School in Ocala on Friday morning.

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As of 9 a.m. EDT, one suspect was in custody, and one student who was injured was being treated by medics on the scene, according to a post from the Marion County Sheriff's Office.

Deputies were working to clear the school Friday morning, the sheriff's office confirmed to Newsweek. Officials asked parents to stand by for more information on where to pick up their children. Updates on the incident would be posted to the county sheriff's Facebook account.

This is a developing story and will be updated as more information becomes available.

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Newsweek

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One student has been injured and a teenager is in police custody after a shooting at a Florida high school, as students prepare to rally across the country to protest gun violence.

Swat teams were called in to Forest High School after a shooting on Friday morning, when police say a lone gunman opened fire on the Ocala, Florida school. A 17-year-old student suffered non-life-threatening injuries, according to Marion County Sheriff Billy Woods. A 19-year-old suspect, who was not a current student, is in police custody.

Hundreds of state, local, and federal officers responded to the shooting, Mr Woods said. The sheriff's department warned citizens to stay away from the area and told parents to pick up their children in an alternate location.

According to police, the Forest High resource officer heard a loud "bang" at 8:39 am local time. The officer responded to the noise within three minutes, finding the victim and engaging with the shooter. The shooter was taken into custody without resistance.

Mr Woods said the shooting was intentional, but would not say how the suspect got into the school or if he knew the victim.

"Although we have come to a safe conclusion, it is still an investigation," Mr Woods told reporters at a press conference. "And there's a lot of details that we dont know."

Florida Governor Rick Scott said he had been briefed on the shooting, and offered the county any help necessary.

The news came as thousands of students around the country prepared to walk out of class to commemorate the 19th anniversary of the Columbine school shooting.

It also came just over two months after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where 14 students and three staff members were killed.

Walkouts were cancelled across the Marion County School District in the wake of the shooting, school board member Nancy Stacy told CNN.

Friday's walkouts were planned by Lane Murdock, a high school student from Connecticut who said she was "horrified" by the lack of action after the Parkland shooting. Students from more than 2,500 schools were expected to participate in the walkouts, which participants hoped would spur action on gun control legislation.

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Students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas and other schools have planned several demonstrations in the wake of the Parkland shooting, meeting with Florida state lawmakers and even President Donald Trump.

Stoneman Douglas students organised a March For Our Lives in Washington, DC last month, which brought out more than 200,000 to protest gun violence in America.

There have been an average of 10 school shootings per year in the nearly two decades since Columbine, according to data compiled by the Washington Post.

At the press conference on Friday, Mr Woods expressed his frustration with the state of affairs.

"Its a shame what society has come to, and that we even have to be here on a school campus," he said. "Society has changed since I was a kid; since I was in school."

He added: "Im angry, Im sad, and I want to do something."
Kurdish forces in northern Syria said they have captured a German-Syrian Islamist who had close links to the 9/11 hijackers and claimed to have influenced the plot.

A Kurdish military commander told Agence France-Presse that his forces had detained Mohammed Haydar Zammar, who is now being interrogated, the BBC reported. Zammar was described by the 9/11 Commission Report as an outspoken, flamboyant Islamist who relished any opportunity to extol the virtues of violent jihad.

The U.S. coalition has not yet confirmed Zammars arrest.

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German newspaper Bild, which first reported Zammars capture, said he was being held in a Kurdish Peoples Protection Units (YPG) prison. The group is the dominant player in the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) formed to fight against ISIS.

9/11 memorial

Mario Tama/Getty Images

Syrian-born Zammar lived in Hamburg at the same time that Mohammed Attathe oldest 9/11 hijacker and considered the groups operational leaderformed the so-called Hamburg cell. By this time, Zammar had already committed himself to full-time jihad.

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In 1991, he traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan to undergo military training and even fought in Bosnia. He later returned to Afghanistan to become an official member of al-Qaeda at the direct request of Osama bin Laden, according to Bild. In the years that followed, Zammar sent numerous young recruits to follow in his footsteps.

The members of the Hamburg cell went on to lead the 9/11 attacks, with Atta piloting American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

The cell also included Marwan al-Shehhi who flew United Airlines Flight 175 into the South Tower and Ziad Jarrah whose United Airlines Flight 93 crashed into a Pennsylvania field before reaching its target. Cell member Ramzi bin al-Shibh, another 9/11 operative, was unable to enter the U.S.

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Mohammed Atta

REUTERS/PORTLAND POLICE DEPARTMENT

According to the 9/11 Commission Report, Zammar reportedly took credit for influencing Ramzi Binalshibh and the rest of the Hamburg group. Binalshibh was sent to Guantanamo Bay in 2006 for his role in the 9/11 attacks, having been detained in 2002 and held at CIA black sites in the interim.

The CIA detained Zammar in Morocco in 2001 and was later transferred to Syrian government custody. In 2007, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison, accused of being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. When civil war erupted in 2013, Zammar found his way out of prison, possibly as part of a prisoner exchange between Islamist rebels and President Bashar al-Assads forces.

Though the details of his period of freedom in Syria is unclear, it is believed that he joined ISIS. Pictures taken in 2014 show what appears to be Zammar attending an ISIS meeting, while sat under the group's black flag.

This article was first written by Newsweek

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BERLIN (Reuters) - German prosecutors said they were investigating the former head of an outpost of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) suspected of granting asylum to people who did not qualify to receive it. Claudia Kueck, a prosecutor in the northern city of Bremen, said some 1,200 people were likely to have been wrongly granted asylum, the majority of them members of the Yazidi ethnic group. She said prosecutors were also investigating three lawyers, an interpreter and an intermediary suspected of involvement. More than a million migrants, many fleeing conflict in the Middle East, have arrived in Germany since mid-2015. Concerns about integration and security since then have boosted support for the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD), which won seats in the national parliament in September's election. Kueck said the people wrongly granted asylum had deliberately been taken to Bremen, a small city state, from other states around Germany, to file their applications. She said prosecutors were also investigating corruption. Eight properties in Bremen and the state of Lower Saxony, which surrounds it, were searched on Wednesday and Thursday, Kueck said. The properties included two law offices. The BAMF could not immediately comment on the report when contacted by Reuters. (Reporting by Michelle Martin; Editing by Peter Graff)
KARLSRUHE/FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Germany's Supreme Court on Thursday threw out a case brought by Axel Springer seeking to ban a popular application that blocks online advertising, in a landmark ruling that deals a blow to the publishing industry. The court found in favor of Adblock Plus https://adblockplus.org, an app marketed by a firm called Eyeo that has been downloaded more than 100 million times by users around the world seeking protection from unwanted or intrusive online advertising. "We are excited that Germany's highest court upheld the right every internet citizen possesses to block unwanted advertising online," Adblock Plus said after the verdict. Springer and other media firms - including ProSiebenSat.1 Media, RTL, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung and Spiegel Online - had brought separate cases against Adblock Plus. It was the first to reach the Supreme Court. The publisher of Bild and Business Insider argued that blocking online ads violated competition law - as did charging companies to be added to a 'white list' whose advertising would be allowed through - and had sought compensation. In its ruling the court in Karlsruhe struck down the case brought by Springer. It found online ad blockers to be legal, and overturned a lower court decision that operating a white list was tantamount to unfair competition. Springer said it would appeal to the Constitutional Court on the grounds that ad blockers violated press freedom by disrupting online media and their financial viability. "We are talking about an attack on the heart of the free media," Springer's head of media law, Claas-Hendrick Soehring said after the verdict. (Reporting by Ursula Knapp and Douglas Busvine; Editing by Hugh Lawson)
Gwyneth Paltrow at a Goop pop-up shop. (Photo: Getty Images)

If youre rich and dont know what to get your mom for Mothers Day, youre in luck  its time for Goops annual gift guide!

The lifestyle website helmed by Gwyneth Paltrow has curated suggestions for sons and daughters in search of the perfect present come May 13, and in true Goop fashion, some are simply outrageous. Here are five of the priciest pieces:

Hermes Vintage Courchevel Kelly Bag: $13,000

(Photo: Courtesy of Goop)

Anyone familiar with the French designer shouldnt be surprised that this is Goops most expensive option. For example, Birkin bags can range anywhere from $11,900 to $300,000. This one is named after Grace Kelly, though, so if your mom is elegant and timeless, then its a must. If youre dying to buy a Hermes bag and just have to have one on Goop, then please allow two to three business days for shipping.

Small Cartier Tank Watch: $3,250

(Photo: Courtesy of Goop)

Cartier for under $5,000? Steal! The vintage timepiece in pink comes with a leather strap and is unlike anything you already own, Goop states. Just make sure your mom will really like it. The company is unable to accept returns on this product.

Pink Sapphire Open Heart Necklace: $3,110

(Photo: Courtesy of Goop)

The ring is designed by Jennifer Meyer, who runs in Paltrows circle, so were not surprised to see her stuff pop up. Tobey Maguires ex-wifes jewelry is a celebrity favorite. (Just ask Jennifer Aniston and Kate Hudson.) The yellow gold strand is detailed with soft-pink sapphires. But, if you want this look GP-approved, it might cost you more. Goop suggests layering in a few equally delicate pieces.

Zodiac Sign Gold Ring: $2,900

(Photo: Courtesy of Goop)

This 14-karat gold ring can be personalized with the recipients sign. This is a Goop exclusive, so that should make you feel a little better about the price. Right? You can also custom order it with an inscription of your choosing! No returns, you know, because of the whole personalization thing.

Queenie Kimono Robe: $2,845

(Photo: Courtesy of Goop)

Yes, Paltrow and her team dont think you can go wrong with a robe inspired by a traditional kimono. After all, its handcrafted from 100 percent jade-toned silk! It even has a sexy, waist-cinching sash. Who cares about the price? If youre willing to drop nearly $3K on a robe, you might as well get the matching eye mask, too. Its only $105, which should be pocket change if youre even considering this.

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Of course, the Goop Mothers Day Gift Guide features some items under $1,000. The lowest-priced item is a coffee cup for $18.

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Philadelphia Police executed a search warrant at a nursing home on Tuesday where H.R. McMaster Sr. died last week.

The 84-year-old fell, hit his head, was sat down on a chair and then died on April 13 at the Cathedral Village retirement community, 6abc reported on Wednesday. They quoted anonymous sources saying the death is being treated as "suspicious," since the as McMaster is alleged not to have received proper care.

The investigation of the alleged institutional neglect is being carried out by the Philadelphia police homicide unit, the Philadelphia district attorney, the Attorney General's office and the health department, according to 6abc.

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McMaster Sr.the father of former National Security Adviser General H.R. McMaster, recently replaced by former U.N. ambassador John Boltonwas receiving care at the facility after suffering a stroke.

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Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

Cathedral Village became part of Presbyterian Senior Living in 2015. Online reviews of the facility on caring.com, an independent site specializing in senior care, commented on Cathedral Village's beauty and variety of facilities on offer, but also on its price. Two particularly negative reviews remarked on lack of attention to the patients.

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"We remain committed to the safety and welfare of all our residents and have made every effort to cooperate," a Cathedral Village spokesperson said in a statement to 6abc. Cathedral Village did not respond to a request for comment by Newsweek.

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The Pennsylvania Attorney Generals office said the investigation is still ongoing. We are working closely with the Philadelphia Police Department to thoroughly and carefully review this tragic incident. This investigation is in the very early stages, a spokesperson told CBS3.

This article was first written by Newsweek

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-- Looking to amp up returns? Well don't turn to those stereotypical macho, alpha male traders ... Apparenlty they can't perform where it really matters - at the trading desk. According to a study conducted by the University of Central Florida and Singapore Management University, hedge-fund managers with high testosterone underperform those with low testosterone by 5.8% each year. AND - not only do funds of higher-testosterone managers produce lower returns, but those managers are also more likely to be fired! So - do we need fewer Gordon Gekkos and more shy quant nerds managing money? Steve Urkels perhaps?
By Wladimir Pantaleone PALERMO, Italy (Reuters) - An Italian court convicted former high-ranking state officials and mob bosses on Friday for holding secret negotiations in the early 1990s following a devastating wave of mafia murders and bombings. Speaking in a high-security "bunker" courtroom on the outskirts of Palermo, Judge Alfredo Montalto ruled that the negotiations had damaged the interests of the state as he shed light on one of the murkiest chapters in recent Italian history. After the verdict, members of the public clapped and cheered the prosecutors who brought the case to trial five years ago, two decades after a string of mafia bombs and assassinations killed 23 people, including prominent anti-mafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. The deadly attacks prompted politicians and state representatives to negotiate with the Sicilian Mafia, then led by the bloodthirsty Corleone crime family. "What the ruling says is that parts of the state acted as go-between for requests from the mob," said prosecutor Antonino Di Matteo, who lives under armed guard and has been the target of numerous death threats from the Sicilian mob, or Cosa Nostra. "As judges were being blown up, some people in the state helped Cosa Nostra," he said. "This is a historic ruling." During the tumultuous years of 1992-93 in Italy, the "Bribesville" corruption investigations brought down the political establishment. Media magnate Silvio Berlusconi stepped into the vacuum, winning the national election in 1994. DEAL WITH MOB Marcello Dell'Utri, a former senator and close associate of Berlusconi, brokered a deal with the mob to stop the attacks, according to Friday's ruling. Berlusconi was not on trial. In a statement, Berlusconi said the ruling was "the fruit of a clear prejudice". He said his four governments had fought against organized crime. Dell'Utri was sentenced to 12 years in prison for undermining the state, as were two retired Carabinieri (paramilitary police) generals and an ex-colonel. Dell'Utri is already serving a seven-year sentence for mafia collusion. Former interior minister Nicola Mancino was acquitted for false testimony. A convicted killer for the Corleone mafia family, Leoluca Bagarella, was handed 28 years and Antonio Cina, another high-ranking Corleone mobster, got 12 years. Both are already in prison. The Corleone bosses of that period, Salvatore "Toto" Riina and Bernardo "the Tractor" Provenzano, are dead. The son of convicted Corleone mafia member, Vito Ciancimino, was sentenced to eight years for slander. A detailed motivation for the ruling is due to be published within 90 days. The defendants can appeal the first degree ruling twice and are not required to serve their sentences in the meantime. According to prosecutors, the talks between the mafia and the Italian state began after judge Falcone, his wife and three bodyguards were assassinated by a bomb under a motorway in 1992. The state's willingness to enter negotiations after Falcone's murder encouraged further bombings, prosecutors said, including the one that killed Borsellino two months later, because he had learned of - and opposed - the negotiations. The following year Cosa Nostra stepped up the pressure with unprecedented mainland attacks on cultural and church targets, including Florence's Uffizi Gallery. Ten people were killed in Milan and Florence. After 1993, the attacks abruptly stopped. (Additional reporting and writing by Steve Scherer in Rome; Editing by Gareth Jones)
Beirut (AFP) - Human Rights Watch on Friday criticised Lebanese municipalities for what it called the unjustifiable expulsion of hundreds of Syrians from their homes since 2016, as sentiment against refugees simmers.

"At least 13 municipalities in Lebanon have forcibly evicted at least 3,664 Syrian refugees from their homes and expelled them from the municipalities, apparently because of their nationality or religion," from the start of 2016 through to the end of March this year, the New York-based rights group said.

Almost one million Syrians are registered as refugees in Lebanon, though many expect the real number is much higher.

The Mediterranean country's population stood at just four million before neighbouring Syria's civil war broke out in 2011, sending tens of thousands of Syrians fleeing across the border in search of safety.

Several politicians have blamed a flurry of social and economic woes in Lebanon on Syrian refugees, and calls for them to return have increased in the run-up to the country's first parliamentary elections in nearly a decade on May 6.

"Municipalities have no legitimate justification for forcibly evicting Syrian refugees if it amounts to nationality-based or religious discrimination," said Bill Frelick, refugee rights director at Human Rights Watch.

"Lebanese leaders should curb rhetoric that encourages or condones forced evictions, expulsions, and other discriminatory and harassing treatment of refugees in Lebanon," Frelick said.

- Discrimination on religious basis -

The evictions have caused refugees to lose income and property, and their children to miss school or drop out altogether, according to HRW, which spoke to 57 Syrians affected by the measures.

Some municipalities have claimed the evictions were based on housing regulation infractions such as tenants not registering their leases with them, HRW said.

But despite "widespread breaches by Lebanese citizens as well, the measures these municipalities have taken have been directed exclusively at Syrian nationals and not Lebanese citizens", it said.

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HRW also pointed to discrimination on a religious basis, with most of the municipalities involved in forcibly evicting and expelling Syrian refugees predominantly populated by Christians.

All 57 interviewees who spoke to HRW identified as Muslim.

But, said HRW, "Lebanon's refugee-hosting fatigue has been exacerbated by a lack of international support" as well.

On Wednesday, around 500 Syrian refugees left southern Lebanon under an agreement between authorities in Beirut and Damascus to return them to their home country.

The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) said it was aware of the returns but was not involved in the agreement, "considering the prevailing humanitarian and security situation in Syria".

Lebanon's foreign ministry accused UNHCR of "scaring the displaced from any return at this stage because of what it sees as an unstable security situation".

It criticised the UN agency's "renewed determination to refuse any positive signs for a return... despite the security situation in many Syrian towns currently being stable."

The ministry said this had led it to "re-evaluate" and "question" the UN agency's work.

Syria's war has killed more than 350,000 people and displaced millions since starting in 2011 with the brutal repression of anti-government protests.
By Philemon Bulawayo MAZOWE, Zimbabwe (Reuters) - A farm owned by Robert Mugabe's wife Grace is at the centre of a legal dispute after hundreds of illegal gold miners invaded parts of the property and started mining gold. A Reuters photographer saw hundreds of illegal miners digging for gold at the Smithfield citrus farm using picks and shovels, the tools of choice for most illegal miners in Zimbabwe. Once guarded by armed police, the farm is now dotted with illegal diggers whose quest for gold has left open shafts and tunnels and uprooted some fruit trees at Smithfield, 40 km (25 miles) north of the capital Harare. Mugabe was forced to resign in November following a de facto military coup, but during his 37-year rule he and Grace and their allies forcibly grabbed several farms from white farmers under the government's controversial land reform program. In a sign of how the once powerful 94-year-old Mugabe and his wife have fallen, the illegal miners at Smithfield last month told Grace that she no longer had any power to evict them, the privately owned NewsDay newspaper reported. "We are not going anywhere. We are artisanal miners and we will be contributing to the survival of the economy since we will be selling our gold to (state-owned) Fidelity (Refinery and Printers)," one of the diggers told Reuters at the farm two weeks ago. "This is open pit mining and we are not damaging the environment at all," he said, declining to be named. Fidelity Printers and Refiners is the sole buyer of all gold produced in Zimbabwe, irrespective of its origin. "We would not want to get involved in the disputes, that area is covered by the Ministry of Mines which issues mining licences," Fidelity head of gold operations Mehluleli Dube said. "Ours is to buy gold and we have agents in that area who buy gold on our behalf. Our approach is to have agents in some areas because we cant be everywhere were gold is produced." The Ministry of Mines has said it cannot interfere with an issue that is before the court. Neither Grace Mugabe nor her lawyer could be reached for comment. She filed a theft report last month with the police against the illegal miners but this has not stopped the miners. Two gold miners who say they own gold claims at the farm, have filed court applications against Grace Mugabe to stop her from interfering with mining operations at the farm. In December, the High Court granted the two miners the right to mine at the farm and barred Grace Mugabe from interfering. She appealed the ruling and the matter will be heard in court. On Tuesday the two men went back to court alleging that Grace Mugabe's employees were interfering with their operations. A date has not been set for a hearing. (Writing by MacDonald Dzirutwe; Editing by James Macharia and Alison Williams)
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Indian police are investigating a fire that destroyed a Rohingya Muslim settlement in New Delhi last weekend after a Twitter user claimed responsibility for setting the blaze. About 40,000 Rohingya from Myanmar have settled in India in recent years after fleeing violence, persecution and poverty at home. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government has taken a tough stance on them since coming to power in 2014, calling them a security threat who should be deported. The fire started early on Sunday and engulfed the shantytown, forcing its 226 residents to flee. No one was hurt but many of the Rohingya lost U.N. refugee documents. It was the fourth fire in the settlement in six years and police said they were investigating its cause and the claim of responsibility. "This is an open-ended investigation and we are looking into the Twitter matter," Chinmoy Biswal, a deputy commissioner of police, told Reuters. "We are trying to find out more." Delhi lawyer Prashant Bhushan on Thursday filed a complaint asking police to investigate the Twitter user who claimed responsibility for torching the houses of the "terrorists". The tweet was later deleted. Rohingya in India live mainly in Jammu, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Delhi in the north, Hyderabad in the south, and Rajasthan in the west. They face suspicion and resentment from many Indians at a time of simmering tension between some members of India's majority Hindu community and its Muslim minority. About 700,000 Rohingya have fled from Myanmar to Bangladesh since a Myanmar military crackdown in response to Rohingya militant attacks last August. The government of India is concerned that Rohingya might try to enter illegally from Bangladesh. (Reporting by Krishna N. Das; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani and Darren Schuettler)
By Tom Ball and William James LONDON (Reuters) - Hundreds of noisy protesters greeted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi when he arrived in London on Wednesday, demonstrating over a rising tide of sexual violence at home, including two particularly brutal rapes. Holding placards reading "Modi go home" and "we stand against Modi's agenda of hate and greed," they gathered outside Downing Street and parliament as Modi arrived for talks with Prime Minister Theresa May. Modi later responded at an event in front of thousands of Indian, saying the rape cases were "a matter of great concern", had brought "a shame" on the country and called for the perpetrators to be outed. Sexual violence against women is a highly charged political issue in India, where protests regularly erupt about entrenched violence against women and the failure to protect them. "The Indian government are doing nothing, and you feel sorry for the families because of the total injustice of it all," said Navindra Singh, an Indian-born lawyer who lives in Britain. "He has been in power for four years now and there has been no policy change to help protect women and children." Protests have erupted across India after the latest rape cases were reported. Police officers and a politician are under investigation in two of the unrelated cases. In a crime that shocked India, an eight-year-old Muslim girl in the northern state of Jammu and Kashmir was kidnapped, drugged and held for several days while she was raped repeatedly and then murdered. In the other case, a state lawmaker from Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party stands accused of raping a teenager. No action was taken against the politician until the girl threatened to set herself on fire earlier this month. Her father died soon afterwards from injuries he suffered in police custody. Modi's comments on Wednesday followed remarks last week, which came after a week of silence on the issue and promised justice regardless of whoever the guilty were. Nearly 40 percent of India's rape victims are children, and the 40,000 reported rapes in 2016 marked a 60 percent increase over the level in 2012. But women's rights groups say the figures are still gross underestimates. In London, a spokeswoman for a group of UK-based Indian students and alumni - who did not want her name to be used - said the group had come under fire after it sent a letter to Modi last week demanding action over the rape cases. The letter was signed by Indian and Asian student groups from more than 20 British universities. She told Reuters many of the university groups had received calls from "UK-based individuals" pressuring them to remove their signatures from the letter, and that members of the group had not received tickets for Wednesday's event with Modi, although the organizers had told they would. "The question you have to ask is are our voices being silenced," she said. Modi, a Hindu nationalist, is a divisive figure in India and his second trip to Britain as prime minister represents a remarkable turnaround for a man who was once banned from the UK over his alleged role, as chief minister of Gujarat, in riots that killed about 1,000 people in 2002. Britain ended a boycott of Modi in 2012 after he emerged from being a provincial politician to the likely leader of the world's largest democracy. He has denied wrongdoing and was exonerated by an inquiry ordered by India's Supreme Court. (Additional reporting by Marc Jones, writing by Andrew MacAskill and Marc Jones; editing by Larry King)
An American ISIS widow stranded in Syria is looking for a way home. Having survived three years living in ISISs self-declared caliphate, Samantha Sally and four children are now being held in Syrian-Kurdish custody.

Captured after ISISs de facto capital Raqqa fell in October 2017, Sally told CNN she wishes to return to America. With no way of travelling home independently, the fate of the family will hinge on whether the U.S. government believes Sallys harrowing story.

Sally said her husband, Moussa Elhassaniwho was killed in a drone strike in 2017tricked her into traveling to Syria to join ISISs self-declared caliphate in 2015. The couple had agreed to leave their home in Elkhart, Indiana, to start a new life in Morocco, transiting through Hong Kong so Elhassani could transfer money.

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Raqqa

BULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty Images

The family continued to Turkey for a holiday, but Sally soon found herself at a border crossing on the edge of ISIS territory. Elhassani grabbed her daughter Sarah and marched across the frontier, leaving her behind with son Matthew. To stay there with my son or watch my daughter leave with my husbandI had to make a decision. Maybe I would never have seen my daughter again ever, and how can I live the rest of my life like that?

Once they were in ISIS territory, Elhassanis behaviour deteriorated, Sally said. She became a prisoner in her home and was beaten regularly. In this time, the couple had another two children. While pregnant, Sally claimed she was imprisoned for three months by ISIS authorities for trying to escape and for alleged spying on behalf of the U.S. She said she was tortured and sexually abused while behind bars.

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All I saw was a bunch of drug-using thugs who had no place, Sally said, describing the years she spent in the caliphate. They created their own state here and called it in the name of God.

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According to a George Washington University's Program on Extremism report, around 300 Americans have attempted to join ISIS and other radical Islamist groups in Syria since 2011. Of those, 64 were successful. The report says 34 percent died overseas and 44 percent remain at large. Twelve have returned home and nine are currently in custody.

Around 30,000 foreign fighters are believed to have traveled to fight for the group, most from the Middle East, Europe and North Africa. Though many have been killed, survivors are thought to have slipped out of the country. Some have gathered in remote regions of the Iraq-Syria border that ISIS still controls.

Raqqa

DELIL SOULEIMAN/AFP/Getty Images

Elhassani was often called away to fight on the front lines. To keep Sally company, he bought a 17-year-old Yazidi girl for $10,000, one of thousands captured in the ISIS advance and forced into slavery. He soon began raping the girl. He later purchased another, even younger, Yazidi slave girl for $7,500 and regularly raped her too. Later they also bought a young boy, Aham, for $1,500.

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Despite the ongoing sexual abuse, Sally said her home was a better place to be than most others. I would never apologize for bringing those girls to my house. They had me and I had them, she told CNN. In any other situation they would be locked in a bedroom and fed tea every day. And the situation I was in with them, we cooked together, we cleaned together. Drank coffee together. Slept in the same room together. I was like their mother.

The couples children grew up amidst the carnage inflicted by the caliphate and the forces trying to destroy it. Matthewher son from a previous marriage to an American soldierbecame a valuable ISIS propaganda tool, appearing in a video threatening U.S. President Donald Trump. Sally said she tried to stop the project, but was badly beaten.

It was extremely stressful and it was hard, Matthew recounted. I would have to say one word and then they would make me say another in Arabic. I never even knew Arabic before. I did not want to do it.

A deal to allow the last ISIS fighters to leave Raqqa was the familys way out. Sally claimed she was too afraid of IEDs and snipers to leave with other civilians as Kurdish forces surrounded the city.

They were detained a short time later. The family have been interrogated by the FBI but no charges have been brought nor travel arrangements arranged. I will do anything to get my kids back where they belong, Sally said. If I have to spend 15 years in prison, it's better than anything here.

This article was first written by Newsweek

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Updated | Iraq conducted rare airstrikes in neighboring Syria on Thursday, the same day it met with an alliance that may further threaten U.S. interests in the region.

On Thursday, the office of Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced in a statement that "our heroic armed forces carried out deadly airstrikes on Thursday against positions of ISIS terrorist gangs in Syria by the Iraqi border." Iraq has mostly defeated the jihadis at home with outside help from a U.S.-led coalition and Iran, and the strikes come after Abadi said last week he may intervene against ISIS in Syria, where the U.S. and Iran were at odds over a seven-year civil war.

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"The strikes against ISIS gangs were conducted due to the risk posed by these gangs against Iraqi territory, and demonstrates the increased capabilities of our valiant armed forces in the pursuit and elimination of terrorism," Abadi's office said in a statement sent to Newsweek.

"Our heroic forces and fighters, in their pursuit of terrorist gangs, saved many lives and thwarted ISIS plans, dismantling its terrorist death machine. These strikes will help speed up the elimination of these gangs in the region after we eliminated them in Iraq," it added.

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Media Office of the Prime Minister of Iraq

Iraqi Brigadier General Yahya Rasool told Al-Hadath, an affiliate of Saudi Arabia's Al Arabiya station, that the F-16 airstrikes targeted bomb-making factories near the eastern town of Al-Bukamal and were coordinated with the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, an ally of Russia and Iran.

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While the U.S. supports the Iraqi government in its battle against ISIS, it opposes the Syrian government, which has mostly overcome a 2011 uprising sponsored by the West, Turkey and Gulf Arab states thanks to Assad's Russian and Iranian backing. The U.S. has accused Assad of war crimes, including the use of chemical weapons in territories held by rebels and jihadis. The U.S. launched cruise missiles against a Syrian air base last April and conducted an even larger strike coordinated with France and the U.K. against suspected chemical weapons facilities on Friday.

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Iraq was one of the few Arab states to oppose the trilateral strikes. Iraqi Foreign Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari warned his acting U.S. counterpart, John Sullivan, on Sunday that such escalations could disrupt the "security and stability of the region" and give ISIS an opportunity to regain strength after its defeats in both countries. He urged the U.S. to "prioritize finding a political solution" to the conflict.

Iran also came out against the U.S.-led strikes and sent Iranian Defense Minister Amir Hatami to Baghdad Wednesday in a visit he said was geared toward "enhancing defense and military cooperation between Iran and Iraq." On Thursday, less than a week after the attacks in Syria, Hatami was seen meeting not only with his Iraqi counterpart Arfan al-Hayali but representatives of Russia and Syria as well.

The "Quadrilateral Information Exchange Center" was established in Baghdad in 2015 as an anti-ISIS joint operations room between Iraq, Iran, Russia and Syria. While Russia has not conducted military operations in Iraq, it has boosted political and defense ties. Iran has sent troops, including the elite Revolutionary Guard, to both Iraq and Syria, and helped to mobilize a mostly Shiite Muslim army of paramilitary groups, including Hezbollah, to fight ISIS in the neighboring Arab countries. These forces have demanded the departure of the U.S. military from both nations.

Despite its opposition to Assad, the U.S.-led coalition said it provided "intelligence support" for Thursday's operation in Iraq. U.S. Brigadier General Robert B. Sofge, deputy commanding general of operations, said operation highlights the capabilities of Iraqs armed forces to aggressively pursue Daesh and to maintain their countrys internal security."

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Washington gained an ally in Baghdad after the U.S. invaded and overthrew the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in 2003, a move that spurred a Sunni Muslim insurgency against the new Shiite Muslim-dominated government and U.S. troops. Many of these jihadi forces, including Al-Qaeda in Iraq, formed the Islamic State of Iraq, which evolved into ISIS after taking advantage of an uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

While fellow Baathist rulers Assad and Hussein were enemies in their day, the post-war Iraqi government grew closer to Syria, as well as to Iran, which fought a bloody war with Iraq under Hussein in the 1980s. When ISIS swarmed both Iraq and Syria in 2013 and 2014, Iraq sought both U.S. and Iranian support. As the Syrian government recovers the insurgent and jihadi rebellion, Assad and his allies have grown closer to Iraq. Iraqi forces have bombed ISIS positions in eastern Syria in the past and have deployed fighters to help the Syrian military and its allies take the last ISIS-held town, Al-Bukamal, in November.

The U.S. too has provided intelligence to the pro-Syrian government campaign, however, via a deconfliction line with Moscow. U.S.-led coalition spokesman Colonel Ryan Dillon told reporters Tuesday that if ISIS elements are spotted west of the Euphrates River, the designated border between the pro-Syrian government and U.S.-backed campaign against ISIS, then "we will tell the Russians, and we certainly hope that they will act on the information that we provided."

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AHMAD AL-RUBAYE/AFP/Getty Images

Dillon also said there has been no "significant gain of territory" for the Syrian Democratic Forces since a number of its Kurdish fighters fled U.S.-led coalition front lines against ISIS and struck a deal with Assad to fight their mutual foe, Turkey. He said the U.S.-led coalition continued to conduct airstrikes designed to target ISIS elements near Hajin, which is north of Al-Bukamal, and Al-Dashisha, which is along the Iraq-Syrian border. He noted modest ISIS gains against pro-Syrian government forces in eastern Syria.

Meanwhile, the Syrian military has gathered the pro-government National Defense Forces to take out the final ISIS pocket near the Yarmouk Camp south of Damascus. After the Syrian government declared the eastern and northern capital outskirts free of rebel control, state-run newspaper Al-Watan reported that Damascus gave ISIS fighters 48 hours to evacuate the area before military operations begin.

This article has been updated to include a quote reflecting the position of the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq.

This article was first written by Newsweek

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GENEVA/BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq resumed paying Kuwait compensation on Friday for the destruction of Kuwaiti oil fields and facilities during the 1990-91 Gulf War, the United Nations said in Geneva in a prepared statement. The payment had been suspended since October 2014 because of security and budgetary problems the Iraqi government in its fight against Islamic State. "The United Nations Compensation Commission (UNCC) today made available $90 million to the Government of the State of Kuwait," the U.N said. "With today's payment, the Commission has paid out $47.9 billion, leaving approximately $4.5 billion remaining to be paid to the only outstanding claim." The sum owed, as well as the $90 million payment, goes towards an overall claim of $14.7 billion in damages by the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation , the largest approved by the Geneva-based commission, set up by the U.N. Security Council in 1991. Payouts are made quarterly as funds become available. The UNCC said in November that Baghdad should finish paying by the end of 2021 compensation for damages to states, companies and individuals caused by Iraq's invasion and seven-month occupation of Kuwait under former president Saddam Hussein. Kuwait and Iraq agreed last year that payments would gradually increase from 0.5 percent of Iraqi oil proceeds in 2018 to 1.5 percent in 2019 and 3 percent in both 2020 and 2021. Iraq declared victory over Islamic State in December, five months after Iraqi forces backed by a U.S.-led coalition captured the militants' capital in the northern city of Mosul. (Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay in Switzerland and Maher Chmaytelli in Iraq, editing by Larry King)
By Crispian Balmer ROME (Reuters) - Former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi branded the 5-Star Movement a danger for Italy on Friday, killing off any lingering chance of a coalition tie-up between his rightist bloc and the anti-establishment party. Berlusconi and his allies, including the far-right League, won the most seats in last month's national election, while the 5-Star emerged as the largest single party. However, both sides fell well short of an absolute majority and efforts by the Italian president to put together a new government have made little progress, with multiple vetoes put forward by various parties making his task almost impossible. Latest efforts to overcome the impasse this week appeared to make no headway, and President Sergio Mattarella's office said the head of state would consider the situation over the weekend before deciding what to do next. 5-Star, which promises a crusade against entrenched corruption, has said it is willing to join forces with the League, but not Berlusconi, whose long political career has been dogged by graft and sex scandals. Earlier this week, media tycoon Berlusconi said he would have no problem working with 5-Star, but on Friday he angrily slammed the anti-system party and urged his allies to reconsider their refusal to seek a pact with the defeated center-left. "The 5-Star are a danger for the country. It is not a democratic party, it is a party for the unemployed," he said during a visit to Molise, a southern region that is holding local elections at the weekend. "In my company, I would hire them to scrub the toilets," he added, using unusually strong language even for Berlusconi. Italians "voted very badly" last month, he said, and the center-left Democratic Party (PD) was "light years" ahead of 5-Star. TIE-UP WITH CENTER-LEFT? Later on Friday, Berlusconi said governing with 5-Star was no longer "desirable or possible", adding that the center-right should seek a majority in parliament, presumably with the PD. But League leader Matteo Salvini, the de-facto head of the increasingly fractious rightist camp, has appeared increasingly frustrated with Berlusconi and he rejected a deal with the PD. "Until yesterday the (center-right) alliance was unified," Salvini told reporters in Milan. "If someone pulls out (of the alliance) using insults and looking to the left, the choice is that person's alone," he added, in reference to Berlusconi. Salvini also said he would like to be given a mandate by the president to see if he could form a government. However, he declined to say if this meant he was ready to abandon Berlusconi and do a deal directly with 5-Star, something he has refused to countenance up until now. "I am certainly not going to ask for votes from the PD," he said. If ultimately Salvini stays true to his word and declines to break his alliance, the president has few options left to resolve the stalemate. One would be to try to convince the 5-Star and PD to work together. Another would be to seek consensus for a non-political government of technocrats tasked with re-writing the electoral law and prepare for a return to the polls next spring. (Additional reporting by Sara Rossi in Milan and Steve Scherer in Rome; Editing by Gareth Jones)
Jake Tapper interviewing James Comey. (Photo: CNN)

By the time former FBI Director James Comey sat down for an interview with MSNBCs Rachel Maddow on Thursday night, his jaw had distinct traces of stubble  the 5 oclock shadow of a man who had put in a more strenuous day than hed bargained for. He has reached a crescendo in his book tour to promote A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, his my-side-of-the-story about how he got fired by President Trump and why he prefers to drink wine from paper cups. Earlier in the day, Comey was buffeted by a barrage of rapid jabs from CNNs Jake Tapper, who peppered him with queries in the manner of someone who had twice as many questions as time to ask them. But it was impossible to overprepare, as Comeys TV appearances have largely consisted of his saying, Yes, No, and I really cant answer that: It leaves a lot of extra time for more questions. On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and The View, Comey was 6 feet 8 inches of stiff. As a talk-show guest, Martin Short he is not.

Everybody wants a piece of Comey. Democrats think he cost Hillary Clinton the presidency. Republicans think he worked assiduously against Trump. Every night, Fox News in the persons of Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson berate him as a leaker and a liar, and in case the president didnt hear those jeers, the three-stooge Fox & Friends repeats the primetime insults the following morning. On CNN, anchors like Tapper, Anderson Cooper, and Wolf the Drone That Speaks Blitzer set up rows of chairs for their squads of paid opinionators to yell back and forth about Comeys revelations and his flaws. On MSNBC, Maddow frowns and sighs with profound dismay that weve arrived at a time in America in which a former head of the FBI is treated like a convicted criminal by both pop culture and the president of the United States.

On The View on Wednesday, I dont know which Comey found more discomfiting: Meghan McCain substituting sneers for questions, or Joy Behar cooing sweet nothings in his ear. By Thursday night, Comey seemed to have barely recovered from his grilling by Tapper when, around 8 p.m., news broke that the Justice Department, after nonstop pestering by House Republicans, had released Comeys memos regarding his failed mind-meld with President Trump. Maddow dealt with this breaking news in real time, reading Comey memos that had just been handed to her by her staff, while the author sat there looking miserable, clearly wondering when she was going to hold up his damn book and give it a nice fat plug.

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I know, I know: How much sympathy can anyone muster for a man whos going to make a ton of money from this book that, to judge from all the interviewers questions, really doesnt contain much thats interesting or revelatory? Nevertheless, a piece of my heart goes out to Comey. He wants to talk about truth, lies, and leadership, and most of the time hes just forced to say the phrase pee tape over and over again. More information keeps getting released that supports what hes said about Trump, even as that information gets twisted by Comeys enemies on the right to convince its audience  including Trump  that this information means exactly the opposite of what it plainly means.

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Photo credit: NASA/Jim Kowsky

From Popular Mechanics

The wait is finally over. Jim Bridenstine has been approved by the Senate to become NASA's 13th Administrator, ending the longest period the agency has been without a permanent director in the agency's history.

Today, the U.S. Senate voted to confirm Jim Bridenstine as our 13th administrator. Once sworn in, he will oversee our ongoing mission of exploration and discovery. Welcome to the NASA family! pic.twitter.com/r1Eiyb13PY - NASA (@NASA) April 19, 2018

Bridenstine, formerly a Republican Representative from Oklahoma, has focused on space for much of his career. The former Navy Reserve pilot was once executive director of the Tulsa Air & Space Museum and during his time in Congress introduced the American Space Renaissance Act (ASRA), which, among other things, would give NASA Administrators a five-year fixed term (currently, the Administrator serves as long as the sitting President wants).

While Bridenstine, 42, is deeply versed in the utilities of space for both military and commercial uses, his lack of a scientific background and history as a politician are a break in tradition for NASA Administrators.

Floridian Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat, strenuously opposed Bridenstine's lack of expertise. Citing some of the most tragic moments in NASA history, including the 1986 Challenger explosion and 2003 Space Shuttle Colombia disaster, Nelson said that to make decisions about missions, "the Administrator must draw on all of his or her knowledge of engineering principals and of space flight, and all of his experience of managing large technological organizations, and every bit of judgment, reason and impartiality he or she can muster, because leading NASA is for an experienced and proven space professional."

Bridenstine has also faced severe critiques for his stance on climate change, which falls under the purview of NASA's Earth Sciences division. During Senate hearings, Bridenstine called NASA "the only agency in the world that can do" the type of science needed to better understanding global warming. But he refused to admit the scientific consensus that humanity is the primary cause of global warming. Encouraging further study of global warming while denying the current consensus is part of a pattern for Bridenstine, having expressed similar views in an interview with Aerospace America.

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The ARSA, which deemed human travel to Mars one of NASA's top priorities, might offer some clues into Bridenstine's leadership. Although his approval was a divisive one at 50-49, he has understanding that NASA has a special role in American society.

Speaking at a Washington Space Business Roundtable luncheon on March 21, 2017, he said that "NASA, of course, is...more popular than any agency. It's non-partisan, it's an agency that reflects what is really phenomenal about the United States of America."

Taking charge of the agency at a time of great division, Bridenstine now has the chance to make sure that the country's deep pride in NASA's accomplishments continues.

Source: New York Times

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Climate change denier Jim Bridenstine has been confirmed as NASA's 13th administrator, becoming the first member of Congress to hold the post.

The Senate narrowly confirmed the Republican Congressman for Oklahoma in a 50 to 49 vote on Thursday, amid concerns that he does not have the scientific knowledge to head the space agency. The vote came after President Donald Trump touted Bridenstine for the role last year.

"It is an honor to be confirmed by the United States Senate to serve as NASA Administrator," Bridenstine said in a statement after the vote. "I am humbled by this opportunity, and I once again thank President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence for their confidence. I look forward to working with the outstanding team at NASA to achieve the Presidents vision for American leadership in space."

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Addressing the floor before the confirmation vote, Senator Marco Rubio said that he was not enthused about the nomination, according to The Washington Post. NASA is an organization that needs to be led by a space professional. However, Rubio followed fellow Republicans and voted for Bridenstine.

GettyImages-869048654

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

NASA has been without an official administrator since former astronaut Charles Bolden resigned on the day of President Donald Trump's inauguration. During this period, NASAs associate administrator Robert M. Lightfoot Jr. took up to post, but is set to retire.

Before securing a seat in Congress to represent Oklahoma's First Congressional District in 2012, Bridenstine studied economics, business and psychology at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He went on to serve as a US Navy pilot, and completed missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in Central and South America. Bridenstine later worked as executive director of the Tulsa Air and Space Museum and Planetarium. As a Congressman, he has served on the House of Representatives science, space and technology committee.

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The Congressman is outspoken in his denial of climate change, and is therefore a controversial choice for the agency that conducts research in the field, including by monitoring the Earth using satellites.

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In a 2016 interview with Aerospace America, he countered the theory that human behavior has contributed to climate change, instead claiming it has always changed. There were periods of time long before the internal combustion engine when the Earth was much warmer than it is today," he said. "Going back to the 1600s, we have had mini ice ages from then to now."

This is a stance that the overwhelming majority of climate change scientists disagree with, including the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which monitors human impact.

Those comments followed a speech to the House in 2013 in which he accused President Barack Obama of gross misallocation of funds, accusing him of spending 30 times more on climate change research than on weather research; a claim that was later debunked.

NASA can also expect its new administrator to continue to advocate commercial space flights, and U.S. exploration of the Moon, partly in order to mine the astronomical body.

Last year, he told a lunar exploration group in a speech: "This is our Sputnik moment. From the discovery of water ice on the Moon until this day, the American objective should have been a permanent outpost of rovers and machines at the poles with occasional manned missions for science and maintenance."

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Arguing in favor of commercial space travel, he added: The US government understands that in the future, and even today, it will be a customer of routine space services, not a provider of routine space services.

In 2016, he presented legislation to the House stating that Mars should be NASAs main human spaceflight priority and the agency must continue to expand its support for commercializing low Earth orbit endeavors, including the creation of a pilot program for commercial habitats. Space is critical to the American way of life."

Bridenstine's approach to heading the agency remains to be seen. During his stalled first confirmation hearing last year, Democrat Senator Bill Nelson led the opposition to Bridenstine's nomination.

Frankly, Congressman Bridenstine, I cannot see how you meet these criteria, he said. The NASA administrator should be a consummate professional who is technically and scientifically competent and a skilled executive.

"More importantly, the administrator must be a leader who has the ability to unite scientists, engineers, commercial space interests, policymakers and the public on a shared vision for future space exploration."

Bridenstine is not without supporters. John Logsdon, a space policy specialist at George Washington University in Washington DC, told Nature: Representative Bridenstine is certainly a different choice for NASA administrator, but to me the difference is mainly positive.

He has been refining his ideas with diverse audiences over the past months, and would bring to the NASA position a clearer and better-defined strategy for moving ahead than did most of his predecessors as they began their tenure.

This article was first written by Newsweek

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Former FBI director James Comey said the memos detail his personal interactions with President Donald Trump. (Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

The Department of Justice has shared copies of the so-called Comey memos with congressional leaders.

In a letter addressed to House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and House Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) on Thursday, the agency said it was releasing both redacted and unredacted versions of the documents to lawmakers.

The unredacted documents are classified, wrote Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd, and would be available for viewing in the House Security office by members of the three congressional committees starting Friday.

BREAKING: DOJ has sent the Comey memos to Congress. https://t.co/xwlwqvOBdi pic.twitter.com/T55TdSgxoK  Chris Geidner (@chrisgeidner) April 19, 2018

News of the release comes just a day after Goodlatte suggested hed subpoena the DOJ to obtain the seven memos, in which former FBI chief James Comey detailed his interactions with President Donald Trump.

Goodlatte, Nunes and Gowdy have been putting pressure on the agency to release the memos. Last Friday, they demanded that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein provide access to unredacted copies of the documents.

The three Republican leaders have also sought the release of other sensitive documents related to special counsel Robert Muellers probe into Russian election meddling and the FBI investigation into former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clintons email server.

In a Monday letter, Rosenstein had asked for more time to evaluate the consequences of providing such access, noting that one or more of the memos may relate to an ongoing investigation, may contain classified information, and may report confidential Presidential communications.

In his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee last year, Comey said the memos contained his personal recollections of his conversations with Trump. He admitted at the time to having leaked details from the documents, including an encounter during which the president allegedly urged him to drop the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

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The memos content, however, is mostly unknown  and may contain useful evidence for Muellers Russia probe, particularly in relation to whether Trump obstructed justice. Questions have thus been raised as to whether releasing the memos to Congress could interfere with the investigation.

Democrats have suggested that GOP demands for the memos are a ploy to undermine Rosenstein and Mueller.

The Deputy Attorney General should be aware that no matter what he gives to these members of Congress, it will never be enough, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told The Washington Posts Greg Sargent on Wednesday. The point is to create a conflict with the Justice Department that would give the president grounds to get rid of Mueller or Rosenstein. They dont care what damage they do to our institutions to protect the president.

In his letter to lawmakers on Thursday, Boyd said recent unusual events had prompted a discussion about releasing the memos, but stressed that the DOJ had consulted the relevant parties and concluded that the release of the memoranda to Congress at this time would not adversely impact any ongoing investigation.

The battle over the Comey memos comes as the fired FBI chiefs tell-all memoir hit shelves. In the book, Comey accuses Trump of being unethical and untethered to truth and institutional values.

Trump lashed out at Comey following the memoirs release, calling him the worst FBI Director in history.

My book is about ethical leadership & draws on stories from my life & lessons I learned from others. 3 presidents are in my book: 2 help illustrate the values at the heart of ethical leadership; 1 serves as a counterpoint. I hope folks read the whole thing and find it useful.  James Comey (@Comey) April 15, 2018

This story has been updated with information about the memos release on Thursday.

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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
Former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe has called a probe culminating in his firing part of an effort to destroy his reputation: REUTERS/Aaron P. Bernstein

The Department of Justices internal watchdog has reportedly sent prosecutors the findings of a probe into former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, who was fired after being found to have misled investigators.

Referring the information to the US attorneys office would pave the way to potentially opening a criminal investigation. A spokesman for the US attorneys office in Washington, DC declined to comment, saying he could not confirm or deny media reports detailing the referral. The Department of Justice declined to comment.

An investigation by Justice Departments inspector general concluded that Mr McCabe had authorised officials to speak with a Wall Street Journal reporter but then lacked candour when he was repeatedly asked about the matter.

The FBI expects every employee to adhere to the highest standards of honesty, integrity, and accountability, attorney general Jeff Sessions said in a statement announcing he was terminating Mr McCabes employment.

In response to losing his job, Mr McCabe released a lengthy statement saying he had been singled out and decrying an an unrelenting assault on his reputation and that of the FBI in general as special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation encircles the White House.

The Presidents tweets have amplified and exacerbated it all, he said.

As Mr Muellers investigation into Russian election interference and potential ties to the Trump campaign has unfolded, Donald Trump and allies have raged against what they describe as the political bias of the Justice Department and the FBI - and Mr McCabe became a prominent target.

Mr Trump repeatedly savaged the former FBI official, suggesting on Twitter that campaign donations to Mr McCabes wife from allies of Hillary Clinton compromised Mr McCabes role overseeing an investigation into Ms Clintons use of a private email server.

The inspector general report draws on that thread, saying Mr McCabe channelled information to the media in part to help rehabilitate his image and rebut a narrative that questioned McCabes impartiality in overseeing FBI investigations involving former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

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After he was fired, Mr McCabe warned the decision extended the Administrations ongoing war on the FBI and the efforts of the Special Counsel investigation.

This attack on my credibility is one part of a larger effort not just to slander me personally, but to taint the FBI, law enforcement, and intelligence professionals more generally, he said.
Every year our skies are lit up by returning meteor showers, from Lyrids to Quadrantids, Orionids to Geminids.

If the weather conditions are in our favour and the moon isn't too bright, there's a chance you'll be able to see the shooting stars in action.

Here is our guide to the must-see meteor showers of 2018  including the spectacular Lyrids shower which will peak on the morning of April 22  as well as where and how to see them.

What exactly is a meteor shower?

A meteor shower occurs when Earth passes through the debris stream occupying the orbit of a comet - or, in simpler terms, when a number of meteors flash across the sky from roughly the same point.

Meteors are sometimes called shooting stars, although they actually have nothing to do with stars.

If you're lucky you could see up to 100 meteors or 'shooting stars' every hour on December 13/14. Credit: PETE LAWRENCE

Perspective makes meteor showers appear to emanate from a single point in the sky known as the shower radiant. A typical meteor results from a particle the size of a grain of sand vaporising in Earths atmosphere when it enters at 134,000mph.

Something larger than a grape will produce a fireball and this is often accompanied by a persistent afterglow known as a meteor train. This is a column of ionised gas slowly fading from view as it loses energy.

Meteor, meteorid or meteroite?

Let's get this straight. A meteor is a meteoroid  or a particle broken off an asteroid or comet orbiting the Sun  that burns up as it enters the Earth's atmosphere creating the effect of a "shooting star".

Meteoroids that reach the Earth's surface without disintegrating are called meteorites.

Meteors are mostly pieces of comet dust and ice no larger than a grain of rice. Meteorites are principally rocks broken off asteroids in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and can weigh as much as 60 tonnes.

They can be "stony", made up of minerals rich in silicon and oxygen, "iron", consisting mainly of iron and nickel, or "stony-iron", a combination of the two.

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The Geminids meteor shower in Vladivostok, Russia in December 2017 Credit: Yuri Smityuk

Scientists think about 1,000 tons to more than 10,000 tons of material from meteors falls on Earth each day, but it's mostly dust-like grains, according to Nasa, and they pose no threat to Earth.

There are only two incidents recorded where people reported being injured by a meteorite, including one in 1954 when a woman was bruised by a meteorite weighing eight pounds after it fell through her roof.

When is the next meteor shower?

The Lyrid meteor shower takes places annually between April 16 and April 25. In 2018, it will peak on the morning of April 22, with the greatest number of meteors falling during the few hours before dawn.

With no moon, stargazers might be able to see between 10 and 20 Lyrid meteors per hour at the shower's peak.

Lyrid meteors are typically as bright as the stars in the Big Dipper, but some are much more intense, even brighter than Venus, the brightest object in the night sky after the moon.

Called "Lyrid fireballs", these cast shadows for a split second and leave behind smokey debris trails that linger for minutes.

Tim Peake space pictures

What causes the Lyrid meteor shower?

The ionised gas in the meteors' trail burns up as it enters the Earth's atmosphere, creates the glow which can be seen streaking across the night sky.

The shower occurs as the Earth passes through the dust left over from Comet Thatcher (C/186 G1), which makes a full orbit of the sun once every 415 years (which is why there are no photographs of it).

Flakes of comet dust, most no bigger than grains of sand, strike Earth's atmosphere traveling 49 km/s (110,000 mph) and disintegrate as streaks of light.

Comet Thatcher last visited the inner solar system in 1861 - before the widespread use of photography - and isnt expected to return until the year 2276.

How did the Lyrids get its name?

The shower radiates out from the direction of the star Vega, the brightest light in the constellation Lyra the Harp, from which it takes its name.

Vega is a brilliant blue-white star about three times wider than our Sun and 25 light years away.

The Lyrids radiating from the vicinity of the blue star Lyra Credit: earthsky.org

You might remember Vega being mentioned in Carl Sagan's movie Contact - it was the source of alien radio transmissions to Earth.

When were the Lyrids first observed and recorded?

The earliest sightings of the Lyrid meteor shower go back 2,700 years and are among the oldest of known meteor showers.

In the year 687 BC the ancient Chinese observed the meteors and recorded them in the ancient Zuo Zhan chronicles saying:

"On the 4th month in the summer in the year of xin-mao (of year 7 of King Zhuang of Lu), at night, (the sky is so bright that some) fixed stars become invisible (because of the meteor shower); at midnight, stars fell like rain.

That era of Chinese history corresponds with what is now called the Spring and Autumn Period (about 771 to 476 BC).

Tradition associates this period with the Chinese teacher and philosopher Confucius, one of the first to espouse the principle: Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself.

American observers saw an outburst of nearly 100 Lyrid meteors per hour in 1982. Around 100 meteors per hour were seen in Greece in 1922 and from Japan in 1945.

2018 | Major meteor showers

The best stargazing spots in the UK

A dark night is best for a meteor shower, after midnight and before dawn.

Head somewhere away from the bright lights - into more rural areas if you can - and be prepared to wait a good hour if you want the best chance of seeing a shower. Look for a wide, open viewing area - perhaps a national park or large field on the side of a road - and make sure you concentrate your gaze towards the east.

Meteor showers are unpredictable though, so prepare for the fact you might not see much.

Choose a dark location away from stray lights and give yourself at least 20 minutes in total darkness to properly dark adapt.

Britain has some wonderful stargazing locations, including three "Dark Sky Reserves" (Snowdonia, Brecon Beacons and Exmoor national parks) and Europe's largest "Dark Sky Park" (Northumberland National Park and the adjoining Kielder Water and Forest Park).

best stargazing locations

Galloway Forest Park: Galloway is a couple of hours from Glasgow and an hour from Carlisle. The park's most popular spot for stargazing is Loch Trool. Exmoor and around: Exmoor was granted International Dark-Sky Reserve status by the International Dark-Sky Association in 2011. Light pollution is managed to make the area more appealing to amateur astronomers. Romney Marsh: Night once provided cover for smugglers known as Owlers, but today Romney Marsh offers celestial bounty, arching over a landscape adorned with the spires of ancient churches. Kielder: Kielder Forest is officially the darkest place in England  250 square miles of wooded beauty where Northumberland brushes against Scotland. It has its own fabulous, modern, wood-clad observatory on the slopes of Black Fell above Kielder Water. North York Moors: As well as stunning night skies, the North York Moors boast historic market towns such as Helmsley and Pickering, plus appealing coastal spots, including Scarborough and Whitby.

The other major meteor showers to look out for in 2018

The Quadrantid meteor shower

The Quadrantids was the first major meteor shower of 2018; it peaked at around 8pm on January 3 when between 10 and 60 meteors were shooting per hour.

It had a sharp peak, which means the best of the shower only lasted a few hours - although it remained active until January 12th.

First spotted in 1825 by the Italian astronomer Antonio Brucalassi, astronomers suspect the shower originates from the comet C/1490 Y1, which was first observed 500 years ago by Japanese, Chinese and Korean astronomers.

Why is it called Quadrantid?

The Quadrantids appear to radiate from the extinct constellation Quadrans Muralis, which is now part of the Bootes constellation and not far from the Big Dipper.

Because of the constellation's position in the sky, the shower is often impossible to see in the Southern Hemisphere - however there is a chance of spotting it up to 51 degrees south latitude.

The best spots to see the display are in countries with high northern latitudes, like Norway, Sweden, Canada and Finland.

The Perseid meteor shower

The Perseids appear to originate from within the star constellation Perseus, hence the shower's name.

The shower occurs when Earth passes through the debris stream occupying the orbit of the comet Swift-Tuttle.

The wonderfully named comet is the largest object known to repeatedly pass Earth (it's 16 miles wide). It orbits the sun ever 133 years and each time it passes through the inner solar system it warms up, releasing fresh comet material into its orbital stream.

The last time it was closest to the sun was in December 1992. It will be back again in July 2126.

Perseid meteor radiant

When can I see the Perseid meteor shower?

The window for the next Perseid meteor shower is from July 17 to August 24 2018. Stargazers stand a chance of seeing the shower at any point in this window, however the peak will occur around on August 13.

The best time to take a look at the sky will be from about 1am BST in the Northern Hemisphere until the onset of dawn twilight.

Peak rates of 150-200 meteors per hour were recorded in 2016, but typical rates are about 80 meteors an hour streaking across the night sky, each leaving a trail.

To see it, look at a height approximately two-thirds up the sky in any direction. If you want a recommendation, east through south offers some great background constellations in the early hours during August. Look for the shower's "radiant" from the north-east corner of Perseus.

The Orionid meteor shower

The Orionid meteors appear every year, with showers producing around 20 meteors every hour.

The shower is active throughout October until November 7, but the best time to see it will be on October 20 between midnight and dawn, when the sky is darkest and the shower will be at its brightest.

Tom Kerss, an astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich said:"If you can brave the cold, make a plan to stay out and enjoy the thrill of seeing tiny flecks of Halley's Comet disintegrate at hypersonic speeds above your head."

He advises finding a secluded spot and allowing the eyes to adjust to the darkness.

Orionid meteors streak across the sky over Kula town of Manisa, Turkey on October 21, 2017 Credit: Anadolu Agency

Mr Kerss said: "There's no advantage to using binoculars or a telescope, your eyes are the best tool available for spotting meteors, so relax and gaze up at the sky, and eventually your patience will be rewarded.

"Meteors can appear anywhere in the sky, though if you have to pick a direction, you might fare slightly better looking east."

The meteoroids from Halley's Comet strike Earth's atmosphere at a speed of 148,000mph, (238,000kph) burning up in streaking flashes of light that can be seen with the naked eye.

Orionid meteors are known for their speed and brilliance, so if you persevere there's a good chance you'll see several bright 'shooting stars' zipping across the sky.

The Orionid Meteor Shower is one of two meteor showers created by debris from Halley's Comet - the other is the Eta Aquarids, which occurs in May. Unfortunately, Halley's Comet itself has not been visible from Earth since 1986.

Why is it called Orionid?

It's named Orionid because it appears to radiate from the constellation Orion. Orion is one of the brightest and best known constellations and contains two of the 10 brightest stars in the sky Rigel and Betelgeuse, as well as the famous Orion's Belt.

Orion's Belt is made up of three bright stars quite close together almost in a straight line, and is about 1,500 light years from us on Earth.

Orion has been known since ancient times and is also referred to as Hunter thanks to Greek mythology. He is often seen in star maps facing Taurus, the bull.

The Geminid meteor shower

The Geminids are an annual meteor shower caused by the 3200 Phaethon asteroid. Its orbit brings it very close to the sun, causing its surface material to crumble and break off. The Earth passes through this space debris every December, which burns up as hits our atmosphere. These are the meteors visible in our sky.

The Geminids were first observed relatively recently, in 1862, compared with the Perseids (36AD) and the Leonids (902AD).

The meteor shower appears to come from a point in the constellation Gemini, hence its name.

The Geminids meteor shower over Egersheld Cape on Russky Island in the Sea of Japan in December 2017 Credit: Yuri Smityuk

When can it be seen?

The next Geminid meteor shower can be seen from around December 4th to 17th, with peak activity from about 10pm on December 13th and into the early hours of the 14th.

Sightings are possible around the world, but there's good news for Britons: the shower favours observers in the Northern Hemisphere over those in the Southern. If you're lucky you could see up to 100 meteors or 'shooting stars' every hour.

You can spot the meteors anywhere, but they will appear to come from the Gemini constellation.

Stars in the Milky Way over Kielder Forest Credit: Owen Humphreys

During December, it begins the evening in the east and moves across the sky to the west during the night. Find Orion's Belt - three bright stars positioned in a row - and then look above it and a little to the left.

They will appear as streaks of light, and will sometimes arrive in bursts of two or three. They vary in colour, depending on their composition.

An average of 120 meteors an hour - or two a minute - can be expected, or more during the 2am peak.
Jeddah (Saudi Arabia) (AFP) - Saudi Energy Minister Khaled al-Faleh said on Friday the global market has the capacity to absorb higher oil prices, after crude hit the highest level in more than three years.

"I have not seen any impact on demand with current prices. We have seen prices significantly higher in the past -- twice as much as where we are today," Faleh told reporters ahead of an oil producers' meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

"Energy intensity as you know has declined significantly ... this reduced energy intensity and higher productivity globally of energy input leads me to think that there is the capacity to absorb higher prices," Faleh said.

Faleh insisted the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) does not have a price target for oil.

"We never have a price target ... Prices are determined by the market," said Faleh who warned against the danger of price fluctuations, saying that "volatility is our enemy."

Speaking at the same meeting of OPEC and non-OPEC oil producers, United Arab Emirates Energy Minister Suhail al-Mazrouei said his main concern was stability.

"We don't have a target price, our target is market stability," Mazrouei said.

OPEC producers and non-OPEC countries struck a deal in 2016 to trim production by 1.8 million barrels per day to reduce a global glut of oil.

The deal, which is due to run out at the end of this year, has succeeded in boosting oil prices above $70 a barrel from below $30 a barrel in early 2016.

The recovery has also been fuelled by geopolitical tensions, US President Donald Trump's threat to reimpose nuclear-related sanctions on Iran and production problems in Venezuela, Nigeria and Libya.

Benefitting from the higher prices, US oil producers have ramped up drilling, pushing domestic output to a record 10.5 million barrels a day last week, according to data from the US Energy Information Administration.

The United States had already eclipsed Saudi Arabia as the world's second largest crude producer with the OPEC kingpin pumping just under 10 million bpd while meeting its agreed production cuts.
The UN mission to the Sahara, MINURSO, adheres with the longstanding practice of holding meetings with the Polisario in Rabouni, Algeria, said UN Spokesperson Stephane Dujarric.

Speaking to reporters at the daily briefing Thursday, Dujarric said that since the Special Representative of the Secretary-General, Colin Stewart, took over his duties at the head of the MINURSO, in late December 2017, he has preferred to adhere with the longstanding practice of holding such meetings (with the Polisario) in Rabouni, Algeria.

The contacts of the MINURSO and its chief Colin Stewart with the Polisario are held outside of the Mission area, the spokesperson said.

Earlier reports said that the UN Secretary-Generals Special Representative had refused to meet Polisario members at Bir Lahlou, east of the security berm, as requested by the leaders of the front.

The Algeria-backed separatists were trying through their manoeuvers to snatch a recognition from the UN and the international community that they control the buffer zone.

During the Thursday briefing, Stephane Dujarric also revealed that Polisario militiamen have fired warning shots at members of the MINURSO, who were conducting a patrol east of the Morocco-built security wall in the demilitarized area.

The MINURSO confirmed that on April 16 they were fired at and intercepted by the Polisairo armed men in an incident that further vindicates Moroccos concerns regarding the polisairos serious violations of the UN-brokered ceasefire agreement.

He said that the MINURSO members were later allowed to continue their patrol and that Polisario leadership acknowledged the incident and apologized to the UN mission.

The Polisario had previously announced that it will set up military and civilian facilities in Bir Lahlou in a bid to acquire the attributes of a state, a move that is a casus belli for Morocco.

Morocco has threatened to intervene militarily if the UN fails to compel the Polisairo to uphold the ceasefire agreement and the status of the area east of the security wall.

Morocco had handed this part of the Moroccan Sahara to the UN for ceasefire monitoring purposes pending a lasting solution to the regional conflict.
Paris (AFP) - Fifty years ago, as France exploded in mass protests, words scrawled on the walls of the Sorbonne university summed up the revolutionary zeal of the time: "Run free, comrade, we've left the old world behind!"

Half a century on, the May 1968 demonstrations that brought millions of idealistic students and striking workers to the streets remain a watershed moment in France's cultural history.

Sexual liberation, artistic creativity and anti-capitalism were the order of the day. For those who were there, it was an unforgettable time.

"Sixty-eight was a big step forward for democracy and liberalism, in the political and cultural sense," said Henri Weber, whose memoirs of that tumultuous year are due out next month.

"We declared war on all forms of discrimination in the name of egalitarianism," said the former communist leader, who later became a senator and a Socialist member of the European Parliament.

- Au revoir, rules -

The protests swept through a France that was still ruled by the strict conservatism of General Charles de Gaulle, who banned the concerts of rocker Johnny Hallyday for causing scenes of mass hysteria.

"In '68 young people threw off the shackles," said Weber.

"We took on all forms of authoritarian exercise of power. It was also a big step forward for hedonism, against puritanism and strict moral rules."

Some researchers prefer to think of the protests as part of a longer period of cultural change throughout the decade as France loosened up.

Others set it against the backdrop of liberalising worldwide trends which started with the US protests against the Vietnam war, and included a wave of activism in Eastern Europe.

In 1968 Czechoslovakia witnessed its own "Prague Spring", when liberal government reforms -- and a subsequent Soviet crackdown -- inspired an outpouring of protest and creativity.

But that year was one of particular tumult in France, where between seven and 10 million workers went on strike and students clashed with police at barricaded universities.

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The aftershocks would be felt for years to come.

For those on the left, one of the main legacies was the rise of more specialist forms of activism such as feminism, the fight for gay rights and environmentalism, according to historian Pascal Ory.

"In that sense, its victories were undeniable," he told L'Express magazine.

- Feminist boom -

For women, 1968 was a "moment of clarity", asserting their right to decide what kind of relationships they wanted and speaking out against the patriarchy, said sociologist Julie Pagis.

"A boom in feminism from 1970 was a fairly direct consequence of these events," added Pagis, who did a study of more than 200 of the protesters who became known as "soixante-huitards" (sixty-eighters).

Women had only gained the right to have their own bank accounts or work without their spouse's permission in 1965.

Contraception had been legalised in 1967, but the law was not fully enforced until the early 1970s.

Abortion remained illegal, and Pagis sees a 1975 law decriminalising it as a key feminist victory of the protests.

"In 1968 we were finally free to speak," recalled Joelle Brunerie-Kauffman, a gynaecologist and feminist activist.

"We said, 'We girls have the right to make love'."

More widely it was a time when groups across society won greater rights, said Pagis.

In the workplace, the protests resulted in the Grenelle accords which secured a 35-percent rise in the minimum wage and strengthened trade unions.

And it opened up debates on social mobility and the education system.

"Thanks to '68 there was an evolution in the university and educational system," said Pagis.

"Before, college meant classes in an amphitheatre where only the teacher got to talk. '68 brought the introduction of more participation for students in the learning process."

But 50 years later, not everyone is convinced of the benefits of that heady time.

Former right-wing president Nicolas Sarkozy said May '68 had robbed schools of "merit and respect".

And philosopher Luc Ferry has suggested that far from being an anti-capitalist revolt, the protest movement had in fact helped give rise to a more consumerist society.

Pagis accuses such critics of seeking to "scapegoat" '68, to "attribute all social ills" that followed to the momentous events.

Weber similarly described such thinking as "stupidity".

"Just because something happened afterwards, it doesn't mean it happened because of it," he said.

Yet he too has his regrets about how times have changed since then, namely that people don't dream anymore.

"There's no more utopia," he said.
Mexico City (AFP) - A Mexican court has barred sales of a controversial Frida Kahlo Barbie doll in the painter's home country, ruling her family owned the sole rights to her image, lawyers said Thursday.

The Frida Kahlo doll, launched in March by US toy giant Mattel, has drawn criticism for putting a painter known for defying gender norms into the plastic body of Barbie.

It also drew a lawsuit from Kahlo's relatives, who claimed Mattel used the painter's image without their authorization and criticized the company for lightening her skin, feminizing her features and omitting her famous unibrow.

The court ruling bans sales of the Frida Barbie immediately in Mexico, or any use of the "brand, image and works of Frida Kahlo" by Mattel.

It can still be appealed.

The family said it would wait for the final outcome of the Mexican case, then launch a similar lawsuit in the United States.

"This litigation is in its first stage. We asked the judge to grant certain precautionary measures to protect our rights to Frida Kahlo's intellectual property," said the family's lawyer, Pablo Sangri.

Mattel's Mexico office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

"I'm thrilled (with the decision), I think justice is finally being done," Kahlo's great-niece, Mara Romeo, told AFP.

She said the case is not just a dispute over rights, it is about who her aunt really was.

"It should have been a much more Mexican doll, with darker skin, a unibrow, not so thin because Frida was not that thin... dressed in more Mexican clothing, with Mexican jewelry."

Kahlo (1907-1954), who was married to the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, is today considered one of the great painters of the 20th century, particularly for her self-portraits, often brimming with pain and isolation.

Her instantly recognizable look -- unibrow, thick black braids, flowery, hand-embroidered Mexican "tehuana" dresses -- and the boldness with which she wore it have made her a pop icon.

In recent years, her image has been stamped onto an explosion of consumer products: nail polish, bags, shoes, coffee mugs and more.
As many as 50 Central Americans traveling with the migrant caravan that has drawn the ire of President Donald Trump for weeks have made it to the U.S.-Mexico border after an arduous journey that began in southern Mexico in late Marchand they are already being "illegally" turned away, organizers say.

"There have already been cases of people being illegally turned away by border officials when trying to request asylum at the U.S. border," a spokesperson for Pueblo Sin Fronteras, an immigrant rights group that organized the event, told Newsweek.

"Others have been processed," the spokesperson said, adding that the organization planned to "document any abuses in [Department of Homeland Security] custody."

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The caravan, which at one point included as many as 1,500 people, saw its numbers dwindle in recent weeks after Trump vowed they would not make it into the country and pushed Mexican migration authorities to crack down on the group.

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VICTORIA RAZO/AFP/Getty

A number of people, however, have stayed the course, crossing into the U.S. from Tijuana this week to request asylum, with more expected to follow.

Since yesterday, some began to cross into the United States to turn themselves in from Tijuana and request asylum," Jose Maria Garcia, director of Juventud 2000, an organization that assists migrants, told Reuters. "We understand more of [the migrants] will do the same, he said.

The caravan takes place every year around Easter to raise awareness around the plight of asylum seekers and in previous years, it has been largely symbolic, with participants marching in Mexico, rather than traveling all the way to the U.S. border.

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This year, however, many who joined the caravan were determined to make it to the U.S., with most of the asylum seekers coming from Honduras in a bid to escape the instability and violence that has followed the contested re-election of President Juan Orlando Hernandez. Others traveled from countries like El Salvador and Guatemala, which, in addition to Honduras, are among the countries most affected by violence and poverty in the Americas.

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The annual event gained international attention after Trump raged over news of the caravan's plans to reach the U.S. and brought a threat to send as many as 4,000 National Guard troops to watch over the border to fruition.

What should happen at the border

Members of the caravan who have made it to the border will join the thousands of migrants who risk the journey crossing Mexico to reach the U.S. each year.

While Trump has railed against the caravan, migrants do have the right to request asylum in the U.S. and should not be turned away by border officials unless they fail to pass initial security screenings.

asylum

Human Rights First

Caravan members who have already reached the border will have had to formally request asylum as "arriving" asylum seekers from a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer before being taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents at an immigration detention center.

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If they pass initial security screenings, an interview with a trained asylum officer will be arranged to determine whether an applicant has credible safety concerns over returning to their country and can be considered eligible for asylum.

Asylum is only granted by the U.S. government to people "who are at risk of harm in their home countries because of who they arebecause of their religion, political opinion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, for exampleif the governments in their home countries will not protect them," Human Rights First says on its website.

Those who do not pass initial screenings or who are not deemed to have credible fears for their safety will likely be deported. If their concerns are deemed credible, however, the applicant will be referred for a court hearing with an immigration judge.

Asylum seekers will then either remain in detention while they await their hearing, or be released from detention on parole to await their hearing. An immigration judge will then determine whether to grant each individual asylum, with those who are not deemed eligible facing deportation.

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Scott Olson/Getty

Those held at detention centers face uncertain conditions, with a December Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report flagging concerning "problems that undermine the protection of detainees' rights, their humane treatment and the provision of a safe and healthy environment" at multiple facilities. Among the issues at detention centers were poor facility conditions, including bathrooms not having hot water, slow access to medical care, inappropriate treatment of detainees, including verbal abuse, and potential misuse of solitary confinement.

According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), initial interviews for asylum seekers should take place within 45 days after the date the application is filed. A final decision should be made on applications within 180 days of the appeal, barring "exceptional circumstances."

The process for seeking asylum in the U.S. can be complicated and rights advocates say those who are represented by a lawyer who understands the system have a better chance of being granted the legal status, with organizations like Human Rights First providing training to lawyers willing to represent clients on a pro bono basis. A number of legal groups, such as Al Otro Lado, have also vowed to provide assistance to asylum seekers arriving with the caravan.

CBP has not responded to a request for comment for this story.

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from Newsweek
U.S.-backed forces in Syria have a militant linked to the September 11 terrorist attacks in their custody, according to the Pentagon.

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an alliance of militias in Syria, captured Mohammed Haydar Zammar a month ago, the Pentagon said Thursday, according to Reuters.

We can confirm that Mohammad Haydar Zammar, a Syrian-born German national, was captured more than a month ago by SDF partners as part of their ongoing operations to defeat ISIS inside Syria, said Eric Pahon, a Pentagon spokesman, using an acronym for the Islamic State.

We are working with our SDF partners to obtain additional details, he added.

Zammar is suspected to have inspired and recruited some of the hijackers responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the U.S., including ringleader Mohammed Atta.

The 9/11 Commission report, a Congressional account on the attacks, called Zammar an outspoken, flamboyant Islamist who extolled the virtues of violent jihad, Reuters reported.

Zammar was reportedly detained in Morocco in December 2001. He was then transferred to Syria, where he was convicted of being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. He was released from prison in 2014 as part of prisoner exchange between rebel forces and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the Washington Post reported at the time.

According to U.S. officials, hundreds of foreign fighters and thousands of Syrian ISIS militants remain in SDF custody.
A Myanmar police chief ordered officers to set up a Reuters reporter by handing over sensitive documents to him in a sting operation that also ensnared his colleague, a police official told a court Friday.

Reporters Wa Lone, 32 and Kyaw Soe Oo, 28 were detained in December after meeting police for dinner in Yangon and accused of violating the country's Official Secrets Act for possessing material relating to operations in conflict-hit Rakhine state.

They were arrested while investigating a September 2 massacre of Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine, but their report was published while they were behind bars.

Myanmar has been accused of waging an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Rohingya after some 700,000 fled to Bangladesh following a brutal military crackdown on insurgents in August.

The military has denied allegations that the armed forces committed widespread atrocities.

But it has admitted soldiers took part in a massacre of Rohingyas last September in Inn Din village, a murder spree that the Reuters reporters helped uncover. Seven soldiers were recently sentenced to 10-year prison terms for the killings.

Nonetheless the prosecution of the reporters has continued.

For months now a Yangon court has been hearing testimony to decide whether the Reuters journalists will go to trial even as global criticism of the case has rained down on Myanmar and prominent rights attorney Amal Clooney joined the legal team.

- 'Tell the whole truth' -

Deputy police major Moe Yan Naing said in his appearance Friday that he had been questioned about meeting Wa Lone in November and that his superior then set up a sting in which he told others to pass on sensitive security documents.

"Police Brigadier Tin Ko Ko asked Htauk Kyant (township) police members to arrest Wa Lone after Lance Corporal Naing Lin handed the documents to Wa Lone when they left," he said, describing orders to "get" the reporter.

Kyaw Soe Oo accompanied Wa Lone to the restaurant meeting and was also arrested.

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Yangon police officials could not be reached for comment.

Myanmar government spokesman Zaw Htay said in response to questions about the testimony that the case is ongoing and a judge will decide.

Moe Yan Naing said he was angry that his name had been mentioned in the aftermath of the sting as someone who was under scrutiny.

He is facing charges of breaching police regulations and was brought to the hearing from detention.

The prosecution argued that he should be declared a hostile witness as his testimony differed from what he had told police investigators, but the Reuters defence team praised his remarks as genuine.

"He answered all this by taking risk for himself," lawyer Khin Maung Zaw said.

A judge will hear arguments about the motion next week.

In brief comments to AFP as he arrived at the court in the morning, Moe Yan Naing said he was "going to tell the whole truth" in his appearance.

Reuters president and editor-in-chief Stephen J. Adler said in a statement that the court had finally heard the truth and called for the journalists' immediate release.

"One of the prosecution's own witnesses admitted that the police received orders to plant evidence and arrest Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo on false charges," he said.

"This case cannot be squared with fairness or justice, and it's time to bring it to an end."

Myanmar lifted many restrictions on the press as it emerged from five decades of military rule in 2011.

But critics have accused Aung San Suu Kyi's new government of backsliding on previous reforms and failing to protect free expression.
Nanny, Yoselyn Ortega - REUTERS

A once-trusted nanny who stabbed to death two children in her care in Manhattan while their parents were away was convicted of murder by a jury that didn't believe her claims that a mental illness at the time of the crime meant she could not be held responsible.

Jurors on Wednesday concluded Yoselyn Ortega knew what she was doing when she killed Lucia Krim, 6, and Leo Krim, 2, in October 2012. Ortega expressed no reaction to the verdict, staring straight ahead as it was read, but later wiped tears from her eyes as she was led from the courtroom.

The children's father, Kevin Krim, sat in the front row, clasping hands with two alternate jurors who had been dismissed but stayed for the verdict. He hugged them, and they wept together.

The children's mother, Marina Krim, who had returned home to discover them dead in a blood-soaked bathroom, was not in the audience but posted photos of them online after the verdict and expressed her undying adoration for them, writing, "I love you."

Ortega's lawyer Valerie Van Leer-Greenberg didn't dispute that Ortega killed the children but contended she had an undiagnosed mental illness that worsened in the moments leading up to the attack. She said Ortega snapped and didn't know what she was doing when she stabbed the children to death.

Yoselyn Ortega killed 6-year-old Lucia Krim and 2-year-old Leo Krim in October 2012 Credit: AP

Mental illness "does not announce itself like a bad cough or a limp," Van Leer-Greenberg said during closing arguments. "Sometimes it sneaks up and nestles in before anyone takes notice."

But prosecutors maintained that Ortega, who's from the Dominican Republic, acted out of jealous hatred of the children's mother.

"She did it intentionally with a full understanding of exactly what it was she was doing - every stab, every slash," Assistant District Attorney Stuart Silberg said during closing arguments.

The verdict capped an emotional seven-week trial that kept jurors and members of the audience in tears. Jurors heard heart-wrenching testimony from Marina Krim, who spoke of the sickening, desperate moments when she saw her children's vacant eyes, their small bodies perforated by stab wounds.

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Krim had been at a swimming class with her 3-year-old daughter, Nessie. Ortega was to have dropped off Lucia at her dance class, and Krim was to pick her up. But when Krim arrived, Lucia wasn't there. Krim frantically tried to reach Ortega, who had worked for the family for more than two years.

She did it intentionally with a full understanding of exactly what it was she was doing - every stab, every slash

Stuart Silberg, Assistant District Attorney

Krim spoke of coming home to an eerily quiet apartment, darkened but for the light in the back bathroom, where she found the children and Ortega, who had stabbed herself in a failed suicide attempt.

Krim ran to the landing outside the apartment clutching Nessie and started screaming.

"It was a scream you can't imagine is even inside of you," she testified. "I don't even know where it came from. I just thought: 'I'm never going to be able to talk to them ever again. They are dead. I just saw my kids dead.'"

Lucia, nicknamed Lulu, was stabbed more than 30 times, and Leo was stabbed five times.

At Ortega's trial, the children's father, who had been on a business trip and received news of their deaths when his plane landed, spoke of walking down a long hallway at the hospital where he saw their bodies.

"They still had this perfect skin and these long eyelashes," Kevin Krim said. "They had like sandy brown hair. ... You could see they tried really hard to wash all the blood out, but there was still kind of an auburn tint to it that I remember to this day."

Flowers are laid in front of the Krim family's Upper West Side apartment Credit: Getty/ Spencer Platt

Jurors, who deliberated for more than a day, said the trial affected them deeply. One, David Curtis, an actor, said it was difficult for him to set aside thoughts of his own children, now in their 20s.

"It is horrifying to think of being in a position of having to experience or go through the process that the Krims had to go through," said Curtis, who had tears in his eyes.

Kevin Krim said after the verdict he and his wife wanted to thank the judge and the jurors "for their commitment to justice." He stood at a press conference with Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, who said, "Marina and Kevin have lived through the worst nightmare any parent could endure."

Ortega, who's 55, faces life in prison when she's sentenced next month. Had she been found not responsible, she would have been committed to a mental institution.

Marina Krim is a stay-at-home mom, and Kevin Krim is a former CNBC executive now at a startup. They use a Facebook page to post updates on how they're doing, writing about the arrival of two new children, Felix, born in 2013, and Linus, born in 2016.

The couple started the Lulu and Leo Fund, which aims to support innovative art programs for children. After the verdict, they posted a collage of images of Lulu and Leo.

On Instagram, Marina Krim posted a photo from atop the Empire State Building.

"You two never made it to the top but I'm up here now for the first time, in peace, on top of the world, remembering another lifetime and thinking of you," she wrote. "NYC, Lulu and Leo loved you and I love you too!"
After an unprecedented wait, the nations space agency has a Trump-picked, Senate-approved, permanent leader at last.

Lawmakers voted 5049 on Thursday to approve the nomination of Jim Bridenstine, a Republican congressman from Oklahoma, for NASA administrator, following months of debate over his qualifications and growing uncertainty over leadership at the agency.

The vote was split along party lines, and for a few tense moments it seemed like maybe one Republican senator, Jeff Flake of Arizona, would join Democrats in their opposition. Tammy Duckworth, the Democrat from Illinois, who has been away from the Hill after having a baby earlier this month, came to the Senate floor to cast her vote in case Flake didnt flip, with her daughter in tow.

The confirmation comes 15 months after Charles Bolden, the administrator under former President Barack Obama, stepped down as the new administration was sworn in. This was the longest NASA has been without a permanent chiefwho is nominated by the president and must be approved by Congressin the transition between two administrations. Previously, the largest gap was six months, between the George W. Bush and Obama administrations.

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NASA has been steered by an acting administrator, Robert Lightfoot, since Bolden left the office. Last month, Lightfoot announced he would leave the job at the end of April.

But most of the countrys space policy and priorities under Trump have emerged from the National Space Council, a high-level advisory body chaired by Vice President Mike Pence. The National Space Council previously existed in one form or another, with varying amounts of effectiveness, since NASA was first established in 1958. The current administration resurrected it soon after Trump took office.

In his new role, Bridenstine will likely be taking cues from the council and its members, which also include the secretaries of several departmentsincluding State, Defense, and Commerceand the heads of national-security offices.

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Bridenstine takes the helm during an exciting but tumultuous time at NASA. The agency is launching several new missions this year. A new exoplanet-hunting spacecraft just launched into space on Wednesday. A spacecraft will leave for Mars next month, and another to the sun in the summer. But NASA is also facing project delays and reports of poor management by its contractors. This years scheduled test flights of crewed and uncrewed missions by SpaceX and Boeing, an effort paid for by NASA, may get pushed back. The agencys next space telescope, the James Webb, is facing cost and schedule overruns.

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Bridenstine was elected to the House of Representatives in 2012 to represent Oklahomas first district, and serves on the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology and the Armed Services Committee. Before Congress, Bridenstine served as the executive director of the Tulsa Air and Space Museum, flew combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan as a Navy pilot, and studied business and economics in college.

Unlike his colleagues from states like Florida, Alabama, and Maryland, the homes of major NASA facilities, Bridenstine has few space interests to defend in Oklahoma. But he has shown an outsize interest in the space industry, and in April 2016 introduced a bill called the American Space Renaissance Act, which included various reforms to the U.S. space program. Friends, this is our Sputnik moment, Bridenstine said then. America must forever be the preeminent spacefaring nation. Later, he said space issues mattered to him because my constituents get killed in tornadoes.

Bridenstines road to the top job at NASA has been bumpy. The White House first nominated him in September 2017. Two confirmation hearings by Senate committees followed, both contentious. Senate Democrats and some Republicans criticized the selection of a candidate with no professional science experience. The previous administrator, Bolden, was an astronaut, they pointed out.

Democrats questioned Bridenstine over several controversial statements hed made in the past. Bridenstine has called the Supreme Court decision to legalize same-sex marriage a disappointment, and described an executive order from Obama that told public schools to let transgender students use bathrooms of their choice as lawless federal bullying. In 2013, Bridenstine said rising global temperatures were a product of solar activity and ocean cycles, and not human activity. The congressman walked back some of this view during his hearings for the NASA job, saying he believes people have contributed to climate change, but stopped short of saying they were the main driver.

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The Senate didnt consider Bridenstines nomination for months because it appeared that Republicans didnt have enough votes to pass it. With a slim majority in the chamber, Republicans couldnt afford to lose more than one vote to Democrats. John McCain of Arizona is still home in Arizona receiving treatment for cancer, and Marco Rubio of Florida, the site of important NASA assets, had expressed concern over Bridenstines background as a politician, and not a space professional.

In January, Bridenstine brought Bill Nye, the Science Guy, as his guest to the State of the Union, a decision that proved controversial in the scientific community. Some considered Nyes acceptance of the invitation as a betrayal, while others saw it as a chance for the popular figure to impart some wisdom on a climate-change skeptic.

The drama reached a crescendo this week, when Senate leadership, apparently confident they had the votes, moved forward with the nomination. Rubio had changed his mind, and Duckworth wasnt on the Hill. On Wednesday, senators gathered in the chamber for a procedural vote that would open the door for a final vote. Lawmakers voted along party lines, but then Flake surprised everyone by voting no, threatening to torpedo Bridenstines future. After holding up the process for an hour, Flake flipped, cryptically telling reporters he just needed to have some extra discussions, some extra time with his colleagues about other policy issues.

Asked why he had a change of heart on Bridentstine, Rubio said in a statement, While I wish the president would have nominated a space professional to run NASA, the unexpected April 30 retirement of the acting administrator would leave NASA, an agency whose mission is vital to Florida, with a gaping leadership void unless we confirm a new administrator.

Bridenstine now joins the ranks of other Trump appointees whose credentials have been criticized as inadequate or irrelevant for the jobs theyre taking on. He may soon join another, more specific club: Trump appointees swirling in controversy over ethical misconduct. On Wednesday, The Daily Beast reported that Bridenstine allegedly used the resources of the Tulsa Air and Space Museum to benefit a company he co-owned, citing a review of public records by the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan, Washington-based watchdog group. Evidence of Bridenstines self-dealing dates back to December 2008, when the Museum, under his leadership, put its own cash reserves on the line to bring the struggling Rocket Racing Leaguea company set up to race rocket-powered aircraft before live audiencesto an air show in Tulsa in 2010, the publication reports. A Bridenstine spokesperson denied the allegations on Thursday.

The debate over Bridenstines credentials is particularly interesting because it illustrates how much NASA has changed since its inception in 1958. During the first projects to send humans to space, the first Americans called up for the job were pilots with many hours worth of combat flying experience. Back then, astronauts were considered soldiers setting off to conquer an unknown frontier, and they needed to be able to maneuver capsules not unlike military cockpits.

That changed in the 1980s, when the Space Shuttle program started carrying larger groups of astronauts to space. The extra room meant that not everyone onboard had to have military experience. Today, NASAs astronaut classes are pretty evenly split between astronauts with military backgrounds and astronauts who are civiliansscientists, doctors, engineers, and others.

Sixty years ago, it may not have mattered that Bridenstine had no science experience. His time as a fighter pilot would only have bolstered his nomination to a leadership role. But in the last decades, NASA has moved beyond the military-esque culture of human spaceflight and delved into scientific exploration of the Earth, the solar system, and the far reaches of the universe. As the profile of the agency and its astronauts has changed, the profile of who should lead them all has, too.

Read more from The Atlantic:

This article was originally published on The Atlantic.
Natalie Portman has pulled out of an awards ceremony in Israel, apparently due to "extremely distressing" recent events in Israel. The actress--who was born in Jerusalem and made her directorial debut, A Tale of Love and Darkness, in Israel-- was told in November that she was to be honored by the Genesis Prize Foundation with the fifth annual Genesis Prize Laureate. When she informed the foundation she would no longer be accepting the award, the ceremony was canceled.

The foundation delivered the news on their Web site.

The Genesis Prize Foundation (G.P.F.) was notified by a representative of Ms. Portman that recent events in Israel have been extremely distressing to her and she does not feel comfortable participating in any public events in Israel and that she cannot in good conscience move forward with the ceremony.

In addition, the foundation sent its apologies to everyone who has been affected by this decision, particularly to the hundreds of international guests who made plans to fly to Jerusalem to honor Ms. Portman and celebrate the event.

Portman has been frank about her feelings on Israeli politics, telling The Hollywood Reporter that she did not approve of current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose remarks have proved controversial in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Im very much against Netanyahu, she said. Against. I am very, very upset and disappointed that he was re-elected. Portman, who moved from Israel to New York City when she was three, has spoken often about Judaism and her own beliefs, as in an interview with The Independent in 2015:

I think a really big question the Jewish community needs to ask itself, is how much at the forefront we put Holocaust education, she said then. Which is, of course, an important question to remember and to respect, but not over other things. We need to be reminded that hatred exists at all times and reminds us to be empathetic to other people that have experienced hatred also. Not used as a paranoid way of thinking that we are victims.

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Past Genesis Prize laureates, an award referred to by the foundation as the Jewish Nobel Prize, include __Itzhak Perlman__and former New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg.

Natalie Portmans Awards-Season Style

At a photocall in Venice (September 7, 2016) by Camilla Morandi/Corbis/Getty Images.

At the Venice Film Festival (September 7, 2016) by Ernesto Ruscio/Getty Images.

At the Toronto International Film Festival (September 11, 2016) by Michael Tran/Getty Images.

At the New York Film Festival (October 13, 2016) by Brent N. Clarke/FilmMagic.

At the Hollywood Film Awards (November 6, 2016) by Steve Granitz/WireImage.

At A.F.I. Fest (November 14, 2016) by Gabriel Olsen/Getty Images.

At the Gotham Independent Film Awards (November 28, 2016) By Roy Rochlin/FilmMagic.

On The Tonight Show (November 29, 2016) by Andrew Lipovsky/NBC/Getty Images.

At the Vulture Awards Season Party (December 8, 2016) by JB Lacroix/WireImage.

At the Critics Choice Awards (December 11, 2016) by Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic.

At the Huading Global Film Awards (December 15, 2016) by Michael Tran/FilmMagic.

At the Palm Springs International Film Festival (January 2, 2017) by Steve Granitz/WireImage.

At the Golden Globes (January 8, 2017) by Steve Granitz/WireImage.

At the Screen Actors Guild Awards (January 29, 2017) By by Steve Granitz/WireImage.

At Jimmy Kimmel Live (January 30, 2017) by PG/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images.
Natalie Portman has declined to accept the 2018 Genesis Prize in person. The award is a major honor in Israel and is given each year to an individual who has attained excellence and international renown in their chosen professional field and embodies the character of the Jewish people. The award was intended to be given to Portman at a ceremony in June, but the Genesis Foundation cancelled the event after Portmans representative told them she wouldnt be traveling to Israel.

Recent events in Israel have been extremely distressing to her and she does not feel comfortable participating in any public events in Israel, said Portmans representative, adding that the actress cannot in good conscience move forward with the ceremony.

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The Genesis Foundation responded to Portman with a statement that reads: Ms. Portman is a highly accomplished actress, a committed social activist and a wonderful human being. The staff of the Foundation enjoyed getting to know her over the past six months, admires her humanity, and respects her right to publicly disagree with the policies of the government of Israel.

The foundation added that its very saddened Portman has decided not to attend the Genesis Prize Ceremony in Jerusalem for political reasons. Portman was born in Jerusalem and was announced as the award recipient last November.

We fear that Ms. Portmans decision will cause our philanthropic initiative to be politicized, something we have worked hard for the past five years to avoid, the foundation said.

While Portmans representative did not get into the specifics about what exactly is distressing the Oscar winner, many outlets have reported that Portmans decision was a reaction to Israels use of lethal force against protestors participating in Gazas Great Return March for Freedom. The Israeli military used sniper fire to kill unarmed protestors in the region. IndieWire has reached out to Portmans team for further comment.

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While the Genesis Foundation is understanding of Portmans decision, certain members of the Israeli government or not. Culture minister Miri Regev is criticizing the actress for refusing to visit the country and accept the prize.

Natalie, a Jewish actress who was born in Israel, joins those who relate to the story of the success and the wondrous rebirth of Israel as a story of darkness, Regev said.

Portman is still expected to receive the $2 million prize that comes with winning the award. The actress plans to donate the money to Israeli and international womens charities.

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Morocco made it clear Thursday as negotiations on a new fisheries agreement with the European Union started in Rabat that the national cause is a red line and that the Kingdoms higher interests, including its territorial integrity, are not negotiable.

Aziz Akhannouch, Minister of Agriculture and Maritime Fisheries, who chaired the launch of the technical negotiations for the renewal of the fisheries agreement that will include, like previous deals, the Moroccan Sahara provinces, said There are red lines not to cross such as the national cause.

Echoing him, Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita said The national cause is not a subject of negotiation or compromise and all Moroccans are unanimous about this.

The new Morocco-EU fisheries partnership protocol must take into account the higher interests of the Kingdom, including its territorial integrity and national unity, that are not negotiable, Bourita insisted during the meeting with officials of the European Fisheries Commission.

As much as Morocco is committed to its partnership with the EU, its stand is clear when it comes to its national sovereignty and territorial integrity, the minister noted.

In a statement to the media after the meeting, Akhannouch said Morocco and the EU will start a new phase and I hope the negotiations will lead to a mutually beneficial agreement that respects the commitments of both sides.

The Agriculture and Fisheries Minister also welcomed the results of the previous fishing protocols that have enabled Morocco to make significant investments in infrastructure and to support the implementation of the Halieutis Plan, a new development strategy for the fisheries sector in Morocco.

Bourita on his part said the negotiations on the fisheries agreement are taking place this time in a very special context marked in particular by attempts to divert the spirit of this agreement, and by external attacks against this partnership.

He added that the opening of the negotiations reflects the full support of the European Union and its member states for the preservation and strengthening of the comprehensive Morocco-EU partnership.

Bourita recalled that cooperation between Morocco and the EU in the field of fisheries is not new, the first agreement having been concluded in 1988. He expressed the wish to see the two parties conclude the negotiations as quickly as possible by banking on their 30 years of experience in this fundamental area of their partnership.

He also expressed hope that the conclusion of a new fisheries partnership protocol will allow Morocco and the EU to step up their relationship and to resume the negotiations on standby on such important topics as trade, security and migration.

The EU representative in Rabat Claudia Wiedey described as positive the launch of the negotiations. This agreement is important for both Morocco and the European Union.

She said the EU-Morocco fisheries partnership is one of the major pillars of relations between the two sides. Its main goal is the development of a mutually beneficial sustainable fishing.

Mme Weidey said the EU will continue to support Moroccos fisheries sector through Halieutis plan, help the North African country modernize and improve governance of the fishing industry, promote sustainable fisheries and contribute to the protection of the marine environment.

The first phases of the negotiations will focus on issues of infrastructures, quotas and impact on the populations, mainly the inhabitants of the Southern Provinces.
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that "at least half a dozen" countries were considering moving their embassies to Jerusalem following the U.S. decision to do so. U.S. President Donald Trump announced in December that the United States recognized Jerusalem as Israels capital, infuriating even Washingtons Arab allies and dismaying Palestinians who want the eastern part of the city as their capital. The U.S. Embassy is due to relocate to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv on May 14, the date on which Israel declared its independence in 1948. "In order to promote peace ... move your embassies here," Netanyahu told foreign diplomats at a reception in Jerusalem celebrating the 70th anniversary of that declaration. He thanked Guatemala which decided to move its embassy soon after the U.S. announcement, but he did not name the other countries he said were considering following suit. "I am pleased to say that there are at least half a dozen countries that are currently talking seriously to us about moving their embassies to Jerusalem," Netanyahu said. The first ten embassies to relocate to Jerusalem would receive "preferential treatment", he said without explaining what that might entail. A U.S. official said the embassy would be located at a provisional site in Jerusalem that now houses a U.S. consular section. Building a permanent embassy could take several years. Most countries do not recognize either Israel's or the Palestinians' sovereignty in Jerusalem and have embassies to Israel in the Tel Aviv area. (Writing by Ori Lewis; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
Democratic Representative Maxine Waters has questioned why United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley would want to stay part of Donald Trumps administration and suffer endless humiliation.

Waters, who has been a frequent and outspoken critic of Trump, was commenting in the wake of a public spat between Haley and White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow over the administrations policy on Russia sanctions.

Haley had announced on Monday that the United States would be imposing fresh sanctions on Russia as a response to its support for Bashar al-Assads regime following its latest suspected chemical attack on its own citizens. The White House quickly rolled back that pledge, with Kudlow stating that Haley had got ahead of the curve suggesting that she had been the victim of momentary confusion.

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Unlike a number of members of the Trump administration who have seen their statements and positions undermined publicly, Haley struck back. With all due respect, I don't get confused, she said. Kudlow later called to apologize to Haley, a White House official told the Associated Press.

nikki haley

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Waters, though, suggested it would be a mistake for Haley to remain a part of the Trump team.

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Nikki Haley, why are you aligned w/ Trump? She queried on Twitter. What is it about him that makes you want to suffer endless humiliation? If you are concerned that Larry Kudlow and Trump think you are confused, why are you staying? How can you accept his lies & his policies?

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It is far from the first time Waters has taken a shot at the president. She has regularly called for Trump to be impeached, criticizing his conduct and claiming that he colluded with Russia during the 2016 election.

Trump has fired back at the congresswoman in recent weeks. At a rally last month, the president referred to Waters as a low IQ individual, adding that you cant help it." Waters has called Trumps comments racist.

This article was first written by Newsweek

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Asuncion (AFP) - Here is a list of key developments in the history of Paraguay, the landlocked Latin American nation which is holding a presidential election on Sunday:

- From discovery to independence -

In 1515, the region of Paraguay, which is populated by Guarani Indians, is discovered and colonized by Spain.

From 1604 to 1767, it is governed by Jesuits who establish a Christian republic with so-called "reductions" -- missions where the indigenous people lived and worked the land.

After a war with the Portuguese, Paraguay becomes attached to the vice-kingdom of Peru, then to the River Plate, a river and large estuary between Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia and Paraguay.

It achieves independence from Spain in 1811 after a bloodless revolt.

- 1864-1870: ravaged by war -

In 1864, Francisco Solano Lopez, son of dictator Carlos Antonio Lopez (1844-1862), draws Paraguay into a disastrous war against a "Triple Alliance" of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay.

Paraguay is ravaged. According to different estimates it loses between half and two-thirds of its population, mostly men.

In ruins, the country sells off up to half its territory.

It then extends its borders following the 1932-1935 Chaco war with Bolivia over control of the disputed northern Gran Chaco region, where oil reserves have been discovered.

- 1954-1989: dictatorship -

In 1954, army chief General Alfredo Stroessner seizes power in a coup.

He rules the country with an iron grip for 35 years. His Colorado party has held an almost uninterrupted dominance over the country's political life since 1947.

Under Stroessner, between 1,000-3,000 people were killed or went missing, human rights groups say.

- 1989: democracy -

In 1989, Stroessner is ousted by General Andres Rodriguez, who reestablishes freedom of expression, legalizes opposition parties and allows exiles to return.

In 1992, a new constitution provides for the election of a president every five years without the possibility of a second term.

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- 2012: president ousted -

In 2008, former Catholic bishop Fernando Lugo becomes the first person since 1947 from outside the Colorado party to accede to power.

Once known as the "bishop of the poor," he is forced from the presidency by the Senate in 2012 for dereliction of duty, for his handling of a land dispute that turned deadly.

He was also dogged by several paternity suits dating back to his time as a clergyman.

The impeachment is considered "a parliamentary coup" by Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Venezuela.
Asuncion (AFP) - Paraguay, which holds a presidential election on Sunday, is a small landlocked nation in Latin America where corruption and drug trafficking are rampant.

Here are a few key facts about this nation of nearly seven million people.

- Contraband and corruption -

Wedged between Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil, this overwhelmingly Catholic country has a porous border, making it a hub for drugs traffickers.

The narcotics, mainly cannabis and cocaine, move from Paraguay into Brazil and from there are shipped to Europe.

Paraguay's thriving drugs trade has sparked a wave of mafia turf battles and killings.

Brazil's most wanted drugs kingpin was arrested in late 2017 in Paraguay, as was Argentina's in 2016.

Despite an official campaign against endemic corruption, Paraguay remains 135th out of 180 countries on the 2017 corruption index of Transparency International.

It has two official languages: Spanish and Guarani -- an indigenous language spoken by 80 percent of the population.

- Quasi one-party rule -

Paraguay has been ruled almost interrupted since 1947 by the rightwing Colorado party of outgoing president Horacio Cartes.

The party has a reputation for corruption and Paraguay remains under the shadow of dictator Alfredo Stroessner, who ran the country from 1954 to 1989.

Under Stroessner's iron grip there were between 1,000 and 3,000 politically-motivated killings and disappearances, according to human rights groups.

The only time the country had a president who did not come from the Colorado party was in 2008-2012 when former Catholic bishop Fernando Lugo ruled.

He was removed after an impeachment trial, which was swiftly denounced as a coup by Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Venezuela.

In 2013, Cartes -- one of Paraguay's richest men -- brought the Colorado party back to power.

Four years later, there was a series of deadly riots as Cartes sought to change the constitution to allow him to run again. He backtracked in the wake of the violence.

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Under the 1992 constitution, the president is elected for a five-year term in single-round elections, with no opportunity for re-election.

The party's candidate in Sunday's presidential election is Mario Abdo Benitez, the son of Stroessner's private secretary.

- Electricity, soy and stevia -

Paraguay is a major exporter of soy, beef and hydroelectric power, representing 70 percent of its exports in 2016 according to the World Bank.

It has huge dams on the Parana river, including Itaipu, the second biggest hydroelectric dam in the world in terms of production.

Stevia, a zero-calorie sweetener derived from the herb of the same name, has taken the global marketplace by storm.

One of Latin America's poorest countries, Paraguay has seen an average growth of four percent over the past decade.

Between 2009 and 2014, the number of people living on less than $4 per day dropped from 32.5 percent to 18.8 percent, World Bank figures show.

But in 2017, more than a quarter of the population -- 26.4 percent -- was still living in poverty, official figures showed.

Despite efforts to improve tax collection, its fiscal income remains very weak, and the quality of infrastructure and public services is consequently poor.

The country has nevertheless improved access to health care and basic education.
Special Counsel Robert Muellers interest in former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort stemmed in part from his suspected role as a back channel between the campaign and Russians intent on meddling in the election, a Justice Department lawyer told a judge.

The disclosure by U.S. prosecutors came Thursday during a hearing on whether Mueller exceeded his authority in indicting Manafort on charges of laundering millions of dollars while acting as an unregistered agent of the Ukrainian government. Manaforts lawyers say those alleged crimes have nothing to do with Muellers central mission  to determine whether anyone in the Trump campaign had links to the Russian government.

Defense attorney Kevin Downing argued anew to U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington that even Muellers appointment order permitting him to probe any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation wouldnt cover the political consulting work that Manafort did in Ukraine for a decade.

But Justice Department attorney Michael Dreeben said prosecutors were justified in investigating Manafort because he had served as Trumps campaign chairman.

He had long-standing ties to Russia-backed politicians, Dreeben told Jackson. Did they provide back channels to Russia? Investigators will naturally look at those things.

Business Ties

Prosecutors hadnt previously used such explicit language to describe their suspicions about Manafort. In a previous court filing, Mueller also cited business ties between Manafort and the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

Any investigation of links between Russia and the Trump campaign would naturally cover ties that a former Trump campaign manager had to Russian-associated political operatives, Russian-backed politicians, and Russian oligarchs, prosecutors said in an April 2 filing.

It would also naturally look into any interactions they may have had before and during the campaign to plumb motives and opportunities to coordinate and to expose possible channels for surreptitious communications, prosecutors wrote. And prosecutors would naturally follow the money trail from Manaforts Ukrainian consulting activities. Because investigation of those matters was authorized, so was prosecution.

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At Thursdays hearing, Downing argued that he was challenging whether Mueller had the jurisdiction and the authority to conduct the investigation. He focused on Muellers release of a memo dated Aug. 2, 2017, and signed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, that spelled out the reasons for pursuing Manafort. Heavy redactions in the public version make it hard to tell all of the reasons.

Downing said that at the time of Muellers appointment, Rosenstein apparently failed to put in writing his reasons for pursuing Manafort, even though regulations say the special counsel will be provided with a specific factual statement of the matter to be investigated.

No Memo?

Downing said Rosenstein drafted the August 2017 memo because he realizes he got something wrong when Mueller was appointed nearly three months earlier. He said hes received nothing in writing from prosecutors about the reasons then for the Manafort probe.

In a case of such national importance, thats being looked at all over the world, theres no writing, theres no memo? Downing said. I cant believe the Department of Justice operates like that.

Dreeben said the August 2017 memo serves as confirmation of what prosecutors suspected about Manafort at the time of Muellers appointment. He also said that order and underlying regulations require Mueller to report on his work to Rosenstein.

Its not a blank check, he said. Its not carte blanche.

Jackson heard similar arguments about Muellers authority at a hearing on April 4, when Downing defended his civil lawsuit that also said prosecutors had no authority to charge Manafort. The judge expressed deep skepticism then about whether a civil lawsuit was the proper legal step. She didnt say when she would rule in either case.
LA Fitness, a privately owned American health club chain with over 800 clubs across the United States and Canada. (Photo by Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket via Getty Images)

LA Fitness is under fire after an employee asked two black men to leave one of its New Jersey clubs on Monday. The gym chain has since apologized and promised to improve racial sensitivity training among its staffers.

One of the men, Tshyrad Oates, posted videos of the incident on Facebook. Oates wrote on Facebook that he had signed in with a four-day guest pass from his friend, a club member. After about a half hour, I was approached by this same employee telling me that I had to leave or pay, and I explained to her that I just signed in with her with the guest pass, he said. She stated that it was my friend who did not pay (unaware that her manager had already signed him in with his membership pass). My friend stated to her that he is an active and current member and that his gym tag was in his locker.

Oates says his friend felt racially profiled and embarrassed by the harassment of this LA Fitness employee in front of other members at the gym. The two continued working out before they were interrupted again  this time by two police officers, who questioned why they were working out with no memberships.

We explained to them about our guest pass and rescanned my friends member tag, and it resulted in current active status, Oates said. He and his friend started working out yet again but were reportedly told by an LA Fitness manager just 10 minutes later that they needed to leave. Then, Oates says that five police officers showed up and echoed that demand. Oates said that they werent given a reason why and were told that I was banned from the gym and my friends gym membership has been terminated, effective immediately.

In a statement released on Thursday per CNN, LA Fitness said, Clearly, this is a longtime member, with a current, valid membership. We want to clarify that no membership was canceled and no one, including the members guest, was banned from the club.

LA Fitness also said in the statement that a front desk employee was confused and thought the member was a guest. Regrettably, from there our staff unnecessarily escalated the situation and called the police rather than work through it, LA Fitness said, adding that the company is currently exploring potential training content and opportunities to better train our staff. LA Fitness did not respond to Yahoo Lifestyles request for comment.

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The news comes on the heels of an incident at a Philadelphia Starbucks in which two black men were arrested within minutes of entering, after a manager called police because the men hadnt ordered anything. Starbucks issued a public apology and says it plans to close its stores on May 29 in order to spend time educating its employees about racial bias.

Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, the two men arrested at a Starbucks, tell their story on Good Morning America on April 19. (Photo: Lorenzo Bevilaqua/ABC via Getty Images)

But people arent impressed by LA Fitness response  and some say theyre now boycotting the chain because of the incident.

Dear @LAFitness stop sending me emails to rejoin. After seein ur racist, horrible manager & employee at Secaucus, Ill never sign up again at your gym. Besides, @UFCGYM is waaayyy better. Fuck LA Fitness!  Eric Wayne Morgan (@emorgan6009) April 18, 2018

@LAFitness so your management just randomly racially profiles your members and guests and terminate contracts when people complain about it maybe I will have to cancel my contract there are multiple gym options in my community #LaFitness  Ed Holt (@Holt_ed) April 18, 2018

Hi @LAFitness. Long time Atlanta member here. Well actually, not anymore. Be well. https://t.co/2KUoKPF5sb  Trish  (@StilettoRoyalty) April 20, 2018

I canceled my membership with them. Do not give @LAFitness your hard-earned money  Pink Moscato (@DoverNurse06) April 19, 2018

This is part of the ongoing, day-to-day challenges that black people have in society, Rashad Robinson, executive director of Color of Change, the largest online racial justice organization in the U.S., tells Yahoo Lifestyle. Before we were capturing these incidents on video, it was often our word against a corporation, business, or police officer. The recent, very public discriminations have created a new level of pushback, Robinson says.

The best way for companies to react to these types of incidents is to respond quickly, deal with the situation itself, then try to figure out the larger reason why the situation happened, and to make changes to try to prevent it from happening again in the future, Robinson says. Even though people arent happy with what happened at Starbucks, they dont seem to be responding to it the way they are to LA Fitness  and thats likely because of the Starbucks promise to go as far as temporarily closing shops to focus on the issue.

I do think that the one-day training that Starbucks is doing should be commended, Robinson says. However, he points out, large companies like Starbucks and LA Fitness tend to have high employee turnover, and one day of training isnt going to solve the issue. It has to be about an ongoing commitment to changing a set of cultural practices that are deeply ingrained in the fabric of our society, he says.

Robinson says the latest incidents should be a wake-up call for all companies to revisit their trainings and policies. Companies try to ingrain values and rules that are intended to help the corporation make more money, he says. To the extent that these situations are going to deeply cost these companies, its imperative for them to figure this out and think of this as more than PR.

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Lima (AFP) - Osman Morote, the ex-deputy leader of Peru's once feared Shining Path guerrillas, was moved from prison to house arrest Friday after 30 years behind bars, his attorney said.

The 73 year-old Morote left the Piedras Gordas prison just north of Lima in a personal vehicle under heavy police protection.

He drove to the home of a relative in Chaclacayo, 30 kilometers (20 miles) east of Lima, his attorney Manuel Fajardo told AFP.

The Maoist Shining Path waged a bloody guerrilla campaign against the Peruvian government between 1980 and 2000.

In all, some 70,000 people were killed in a war between the army, the Maoist guerrillas and another leftist rebel group, the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA).

Morote had been sentenced for terrorism, and his court-authorized release was met with howls of outrage by the country's politicians, including President Martin Vizcarra.

Morote was captured and imprisoned in 1988, when the maximum prison sentence was 25 years behind bars.

Punishment for terrorism cases, however, got tougher: when top Shining Path leader Abimael Guzman was captured in 1992, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Guzman, now 83, is serving his sentence in a prison at a naval base just outside Lima.

Morote should have been released in 2013, but legal challenges kept him behind bars.

He faces three other terrorism cases that -- if he's found guilty -- would send him back to jail.

Margot Liendo, another ex-Shining Path leader, will also move to house arrest under the same court order.

Nearly 5,000 former Shining Path guerrillas have been released from prison since 2001.

The Shining Path suffered a crippling blow when Guzman was captured in 1992, followed by a string of other top leaders.

Today, a largely defunct, renegade group of fighters are still hides out in the jungle, thriving in drug trafficking.
Lima (AFP) - Peruvian ex-president Alberto Fujimori, just four months out of prison under a controversial pardon, was in court Friday facing charges linked to the killing of seven farmers in 1992.

Fujimori, president from 1990-2000, had been serving a 25-year prison sentence for crimes that included commanding death squads that killed suspected civilian sympathizers of leftwing guerrillas his regime was fighting.

The ex-president was pardoned on December 24 by then-president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski on humanitarian grounds because of ill health.

A criminal court, however, later ruled that Kuczynski's pardon did not apply to the case of the slain farmers.

Kuczynski's pardon was seen by many as a quid pro quo for help from Fujimori's lawmaker son Kenji to defeat an impeachment vote in Congress. Kuczynski nevertheless was forced to resign in March over alleged corruption.

In Friday's hearing prosecutors asked the court to order Fujimori, now 79, to remain in Peru until the case is finalized.

Fujimori said he had no intention of leaving the country but the prosecution noted that he was renewing his passport.

In 2000, in the final days of his presidency, Fujimori -- who is of Japanese ancestry -- flew to Japan and resigned the presidency via fax. He later obtained Japanese citizenship.

Despite his controversial presidency, which included notorious cases of corruption, Fujimori earned respect from many Peruvians for his ruthless campaign to defeat two leftist guerrilla groups.
(In this April 19 story, corrects to Australia, Japan second attendance in exercises.)) MANILA (Reuters) - Australian and Japanese troops are joining for the second time annual U.S.-Philippine military exercises involving thousands of troops, as the two-week drills move toward becoming multilateral war games. The Philippines and the United States have for more than 30 editions been holding bilateral "Balikatan" (shoulder-to-shoulder) drills to test the readiness of their militaries to respond to threats that include natural disasters and militant extremist attacks. The United States embassy in Manila said in a statement on Thursday that Australia and Japan, two U.S. allies countries with strategic partnerships with the Philippines, would again be included in the exercises at multiple locations on the main island of Luzon, starting on May 7. Britain has also been invited to observe training for the mitigation of post-disaster suffering. They will focus on mutual defense, counter-terrorism, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief that can also "provide assistance in the event of crises that endanger public health and safety". Soldiers from United States, Australia, Japan and the Philippines have already been renovating schools in four provinces north of Manila as well as providing medical and dental services in poor rural areas, the embassy said. Philippine military spokeswoman Liezl Vidallon said the four countries would exchange and share information and conduct live- fire training. The exercises were scaled back last year in response to President Rodrigo Duterte's disdain for the U.S.-Philippine defense alliance. He has made no secret of his grudge against the United States and believes a U.S. military presence of any kind in the Philippines puts his country at risk of being dragged into conflict, especially with China, as it beefs-up its maritime defenses. The volatile leader has showered praise upon Russia and China and invited their warships to come to the Philippines for exercises too. (Reporting by Manuel Mogato; Editing by Martin Petty)
Associated Press

Iowa is gearing up for its biggest home game since the 1980s, Cincinnati has its highest ranking in 12 years and Clemson is on the outside looking in at The Associated Press college football poll for the first time since 2014. Alabama and Georgia are the only constants during this topsy-turvy college football season. Alabama received 53 of a possible 62 first-place votes Sunday, with Georgia picking up the rest.
Gilchrist County Sheriff's Deputy and Sergeant Killed Trenton, FL -- A Gilchrist County sheriff's deputy and sergeant were gunned down yesterday as they sat in a Trenton restaurant according to authorities. Sgt. Noel Ramirez and Deputy Taylor Lindsey were killed on Thursday while at the Ace China restaurant in Trenton. The shooter has been identified as John Hubert Highnote from nearby Bell. Authorities have also stated that Highnote killed himself after shooting the two officers. A makeshift memorial has sprung up outside the restaurant, with flowers and American flags being placed there by passersby. Reactions have come in from all over the country, especially on Twitter. President Donald Trump Tweeted last night "My thoughts, prayers and condolences are with the families, friends and colleagues of the two @ GCSOFlorida deputies (HEROES) who lost their lives in the line of duty today." Governor Rick Scott tweeted yesterday evening that "I was just briefed by @GCSOFlorida Sheriff Bobby Schultz on todays shooting. I know @FDLEPIO is on scene and Ive offered any state support they may need." The Florida Sheriffs Association reacted on their Twitter page saying "The Sheriffs of Florida stand united with @ GCSOFlorida , Sheriff Bobby Schultz & his team today with the tragic news that two of his deputies were ambushed and murdered. We are humbled by the countless offers of assistance and we grieve together as one family." Steve Rockford
EPA

Does it matter who succeeds the Queen as Head of the Commonwealth? It matters very much to the Queen, who has always taken her Commonwealth role very seriously. Understandably, it also matters to Prince Charles. He has waited his whole life to inherit his mothers roles and is reportedly  and understandably  unimpressed with the idea that one of them might be taken away from him. But should it concern the rest of us?

The days when British people took an active interest in the Commonwealth are long gone. What had originally been called the British Commonwealth grew out of the British Empire and was essentially an attempt to form an English-speaking grouping of nations that would continue Britains old imperial influence into the post-imperial world. It was, in many ways, a fulfilment of the dreams of the old Victorian imperial federalists.

The humbling experiences of World War II, which saw Britains international and imperial prestige take a battering, caused the British Commonwealth to be recast simply as The Commonwealth. But it still seemed only natural that the British monarch, first George VI and then the present Queen, should preside over it. However, Head of the Commonwealth was never written into the royal title and there is no rule that says it should automatically pass to the heir to the British throne.

Whats the Commonwealth for?

Apart from the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, who never missed an opportunity to insult or demean the old colonial power, no one else has ever laid claim to the title. But as eyes move inevitably towards the post-Elizabethan age, it is perhaps unsurprising that Princes Charless claim to inherit the title should come into question.

Most British people seem to know very little about the Commonwealth. The BBC News website even marked the start of the Commonwealth Games in Australia with a headline What even is the Commonwealth? Compared with the celebrations that used to mark Empire Day each year, Commonwealth Day passes almost completely unnoticed in Britain.

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A school in New South Wales celebrates Empire Day in 1917. NSW State Archives

If the Commonwealth comes in for serious political analysis at all, its usually to point out the complete failure of Britains attempts to leave a legacy of democracy in its former colonies, as one Commonwealth country after another, especially in Africa, slipped into dictatorship or civil war. Even the Commonwealth Games, colourful and friendly though they invariably are, can be characterised as international sport-lite. With no Americans, Russians, Chinese or continental Europeans, it hardly compares to the Olympics for excitement. Is there still a place for this post-imperial network of nations in our decidedly post-imperial world?

If the Commonwealth is thought of principally as British-centred, and especially if it is the focus of Brexiteers hopes for Britains future international role, the answer is probably no.

The shocking case of the recent deportation of Windrush generation immigrants shows that, for the Home Office at least, Commonwealth ties cut no ice when it comes to rules of residency.

Tough act to follow

But the Commonwealth has evolved over the years and developed new roles to suit the changing world. In the 1960s, 70s and 80s, it was heavily taken up with leading the opposition to white minority rule in South Africa, often to the exasperation of Margaret Thatcher. By the 1990s, it had taken on more of a collaborative role in helping developing countries.

In the post-Cold War world, the Commonwealth became a forum for the sort of middle way originally envisaged by the non-aligned movement of the 1950s. The 1971 Singapore Declaration, extended in 1991 at Harare, established the Commonwealth as a body devoted to democratic principles, the rule of law, and the eradication of inequality and racism. Poorer countries, who might wield little influence in the United Nations or in their own regional organisations, could look to it for support and a voice. In 1995, Mozambique became the first country to join the Commonwealth without having been a British colony, followed in 2009 by Rwanda. At a time when the old superpowers are stirring again and there is talk of a new Cold War, the Commonwealth can provide a framework in which smaller and less powerful nations can work together constructively.

Central to this process, as many Commonwealth heads of government have recognised, has been the Queen. She has developed close personal ties with many Commonwealth leaders, and has often proved capable of calming troubled waters or maintaining warm relations. Ironically, however, it is her very success which has made her sons right to succeed her less clear. She has held onto the role not just by her own authority but because she is so obviously good at it. What guarantee is there that Charles would be equally good?

British royalty has survived into the early 21st century against the odds and seems as popular now as it has ever been. But a monarchys fortunes can turn on the individual quirks or miscalculations of a single monarch. Monarchy survives by knowing what and when to concede. The days when the leadership of the Commonwealth would pass to the British monarch as a right are probably over. Prince Charles would certainly win more respect by recognising and accepting that the Commonwealth should have a free choice in the matter than by petulantly insisting that it should be his. After all, they might even choose him.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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The Conversation

Sean Lang 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.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Federal civil rights prosecutors have recommended charging a white New York City police officer for putting Eric Garner, an unarmed black man, in a fatal choke hold during a 2014 arrest, the New York Times reported on Friday, citing unnamed officials.

But senior officials in the U.S. Justice Department have reservations about accepting the recommendation and indicting the officer, Daniel Pantaleo, because the prosecution may not be able to win the case, the Times reported.

Garner, a 43-year-old father of six, was stopped by police on July 17, 2014, for illegally peddling cigarettes on a sidewalk in New York's Staten Island borough. Garner argued with police and was tackled by Pantaleo, who brought Garner to the ground with an arm around his neck. Choke holds have long been banned in the New York Police Department.

"I can't breathe!" Garner repeatedly said in a cellphone video of the arrest that was widely seen. His dying words would become a rallying cry for protesters across the United States under the nascent Black Lives Matter movement, which is critical of racial disparities in the criminal justice system.

Garner's death was ruled a homicide and the city agreed to pay his family $5.9 million to settle a wrongful death claim.

In December 2014, a New York City grand jury voted against charging Pantaleo in Garner's death, sparking further protests.

Garner's family has been critical of how much time the federal investigation by the Justice Department has taken.

Pantaleo, who remains at the department on desk duty, could not immediately be reached for comment and the department did not respond to a request for comment.

The Justice Department declined to comment.

The police labor union called the Justice Department's handling of the case "highly unusual and deeply troubling."

"It is long past time for the Justice Department's leadership to put an end to this fishing expedition, close the case without charges, and let Police Officer Pantaleo move forward," Patrick Lynch, president of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, said in a statement.

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Federal prosecutors made their recommendations for charging Pantaleo with civil rights violations in recent weeks, the Times reported, and asked Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, to seek an indictment.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions also has been briefed on the recommendations, the Times reported.

The results of an internal police inquiry into Pantaleo's actions have not been made public while the federal case continues.

(Reporting by Jonathan Allen and Daniel Trotta; editing by Jonathan Oatis and Bill Trott)
Moscow (AFP) - Russian president Vladimir Putin is "ready for a meeting" with his US counterpart Donald Trump, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Friday.

Moscow's chief diplomat added that such a summit was not currently being discussed but the Kremlin hopes that a meeting at the White House would materialise.

"President Putin is ready for such a meeting," Lavrov said in an interview with state news agency RIA Novosti.

"We are proceeding from the fact that the US president in a telephone conversation -- that was made public, there is no secret about this -- sent such an invitation and said that he would be happy to see (Putin) in the White House and then to meet him during a reciprocal visit."

"Since Trump suggested this, we proceed from the fact that he will make this concrete," he added.

Trump proposed a White House summit when he called Putin last month, prior to the mass expulsion of Russian diplomats from the US.

The proposal has not moved forward since relations between the US and Russia deteriorated further over an alleged chemical attack in Syria.

During the interview, Lavrov also said Moscow welcomed an expected summit between Trump and Kim Jong Un, the leader of nuclear-armed North Korea.

"We cannot wish this meeting failure," Lavrov said.

"This would be a step away from the prospect of a military crisis and a military solution to the problem that is the Korean peninsula," he added.

"We very much hope that he (Trump) starts the process of de-escalating tensions."

The odds of the Trump-Kim summit taking place were boosted by the shock news earlier this week that CIA chief Mike Pompeo had gone to Pyongyang to meet Kim for the most significant US-North Korea contact in almost two decades.

Lavrov compared the US and North Korean statements prior to the meeting to tensions between "boxers" before a match.

"Before the start of serious conversations it is like boxers entering the ring, showing off in front of one another before the fight," he said.

Russia has relatively warm ties with North Korea, with which it shares a small land border.

The United States earlier this year accused Russia of helping Pyongyang evade some international sanctions by supplying fuel to the isolated country.
In a rare move, Queen Elizabeth publicly backed her son, Prince Charles, as the next Commonwealth leader.

On Thursday, the monarch, who turns 92 on Saturday, formally asked the Commonwealth Heads of Government to appoint Charles as her successor of the association of Britain and its former colonies.

Queen Elizabeth has been the groups symbolic figurehead since 1952. On Friday, leaders are expected to discuss who should follow her in the role. The position is not hereditary, but Prince Charles is expected to get the nod. (As the Queens firstborn, Charles is the hereditary heir to the British throne, which he will automatically inherit upon his mothers death.)

It is my sincere wish that the Commonwealth will continue to offer stability and continuity for future generations and will decide that one day the Prince of Wales should carry on the important work started by my father in 1949, the Queen said at the formal opening of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting at Buckingham Palace.

Queen Elizabeth

By continuing to treasure and reinvigorate our associations and activities, I believe we will secure a safer, more prosperous and sustainable world for those who follow us: a world where the Commonwealths generosity of spirit can bring its gentle touch of healing and hope to all, she continued.

RELATED VIDEO: Queen Elizabeth Publicly Backs Prince Charles as the Next Commonwealth Leader for the First Time

The Queen welcomed leaders from the 53 Commonwealth nations to the palace for two days of discussions on topics such as trade, marine protection and cyber crime.

Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles

In his own opening remarks at the summit, Prince Charles said: For my part, the Commonwealth has been a fundamental feature of my life for as long as I can remember, beginning with my first visit to Malta when I was just 5 years old.

And so, Ladies and Gentlemen, I pray that this Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting will not only revitalize the bonds between our countries, but will also give the Commonwealth a renewed relevance to all citizens, finding practical solutions to their problems and giving life to their aspirations.

By doing so, the Commonwealth can be a cornerstone for the lives of future generations, just as it has been for so many of us.

Later today, the Queen and Prince Charles will host a lunch at Buckingham Palace for new heads of government. And this evening, Prince William and Prince Harry will arrive at the palace for a formal reception.
(LONDON)  Queen Elizabeth II opened a summit of the 53-nation Commonwealth on Thursday, and backed her son Prince Charles to be the next leader of the association of Britain and its former colonies.

In a ceremony at Buckingham Palace, the queen said she hoped Charles would carry on the important work of leading the Commonwealth, a loose alliance of countries large and small that has struggled to carve out a firm place on the world stage.

For decades, the queen has been the driving force behind the Commonwealth but she has no designated successor as chief. Some have suggested that Charles should not take over the helm of the group, which takes in 2.4 billion people on five continents.

It is my sincere wish that the Commonwealth will continue to offer stability and continuity for future generations and will decide that one day the Prince of Wales should carry on the important work started by my father in 1949, the queen said.

Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, who hosted the last Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in 2015, signaled that leaders were likely to confirm Charles as successor to his mother, who turns 92 on Saturday.

Muscat said he was sure that Charles, a long-time advocate for environmental issues, will provide solid and passionate leadership for our Commonwealth when called upon to do so.

Commonwealth leaders are to discuss who will succeed the queen when they meet Friday at Windsor Castle, west of London.

British Prime Minister Theresa Mays spokesman, James Slack, said Britain supported Charles becoming leader of the group, but added that succession is a matter for the Commonwealth as a whole to determine.

The survival of the Commonwealth owes much to the commitment of the queen, who has visited almost every member country  often multiple times  over her 66-year-reign.

May praised the monarch for being the Commonwealths most steadfast and fervent champion.

Leaders from countries ranging from vast India to tiny Tuvalu will spend two days meeting in London and at Windsor Castle. Their agenda includes protecting the worlds oceans and helping small states boost their cybersecurity.

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Britain also hopes to use the meeting as a launch pad for stronger trade ties with Commonwealth countries after the U.K. leaves the European Union next year.

International Trade Secretary Liam Fox said this week that Brexit could revitalize the Commonwealth and usher in a new era, harnessing the movement of expertise, talent, goods and capital between our nations in a way that we have not done for a generation or more.

Others are skeptical that increased Commonwealth trade can make up for reduced access to Britains biggest market, the EU. In 2017, 44 percent of British exports went to the EU and just 9 percent to Commonwealth countries.

Still, some say the Commonwealth could present a platform for British diplomatic and cultural clout after it leaves the EU.

Michael Lake, director of the Royal Commonwealth Society charity, said the Commonwealth could be a useful and productive stepping stone for the development of a new soft-power agenda.

But Britains relationship with the Commonwealth has been clouded by diplomatic missteps and the legacy of empire. May had to apologize this week after it emerged that some people who came to the U.K. from the Caribbean decades ago had been refused medical care in Britain or threatened with deportation because they could not produce paperwork to show their rights to residence.

Gay-rights activists are also protesting the summit, urging the repeal of laws against homosexuality that are in effect in more than 30 Commonwealth countries  in many cases, introduced under British rule.

May says Britain deeply regrets its role in passing the anti-gay laws.

I am all too aware that these laws were often put in place by my own country, she said. They were wrong then, and they are wrong now.

The Commonwealth is officially committed to democracy and human rights, but its rights record is mixed. Many look with pride on the organizations role in the 1970s and 80s in trying to end apartheid in South Africa.

But many Commonwealth nations have been plagued by corruption or destabilized by coups. Zimbabwes former president, Robert Mugabe, pulled his country out of the group in 2003 after it was suspended for widespread human rights abuses. Gambia quit in 2013, calling the Commonwealth a neocolonial institution. It rejoined earlier this year.

Still, the Commonwealth provides support for democracy and corruption-fighting, and gives its smaller members a chance to be heard as part of an international network. Attempts to expand the club beyond former British colonies have had modest success, with Mozambique and Rwanda joining in recent years.

Philip Murphy, who heads the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London, said the Commonwealth was held together by a kind of inertia, the fact that its probably more trouble to wind it up than to keep going.

But he said he wouldnt write it off just yet.

Its sort of like the Holy Roman Empire  international organizations can survive long beyond their natural expiry date, Murphy said.
Prague (AFP) - Bells rang across the Czech capital Prague on Friday marking the arrival of the remains of a Catholic cardinal, persecuted by both the Nazis and the Communists, for reburial at home after he died in exile at the Vatican decades ago.

Josef Beran, who survived two Nazi camps during World War II and 15 years of internment by the communist regime, is widely respected by Czechs, despite the high proportion of atheists and agnostics in the EU country of 10.6 million people.

Beran died in exile in Rome in 1969, five years after he travelled to the Vatican to be named a cardinal by Pope Paul VI. The communist regime in then Czechoslovakia never allowed him to return.

"After more than half a century in exile, Cardinal Josef Beran returns to his homeland," Senate Speaker Milan Stech told reporters, adding that Beran's life reads like "a book about the history of our country in the twentieth century".

Born in Plzen in the west of the present Czech Republic, Beran was ordained a priest in 1911.

He became the rector of a seminary in Prague in 1932 and was later imprisoned in the Terezin and Dachau Nazi concentration camps between 1942-45.

Appointed archbishop of Prague in 1946 by Pope Pius XII, Beran refused to collaborate with the new communist totalitarian regime that came to power in February 1948.

Between 1949-64 he was held in custody by the communists at various locations.

Before the 1989 Velvet Revolution swept away the communist regime, the Catholic Church and others suffered severe persecution in Czechoslovakia, including the confiscation of property and the imprisonment, torture and killing of priests.
Valletta (AFP) - The investigative work of slain Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia has been pursued by dozens of colleagues worldwide who this week published a flurry of revelations and delved into the mystery surrounding her murder.

"You can kill the messenger, but not the message," said French journalist Laurent Richard, who launched the "Forbidden Stories" project three years ago to continue the work of journalists silenced by murder or imprisonment.

The "Daphne Project" is the first fruit of his initiative.

For six months, 45 journalists from 18 media outlets around the world have worked together, secretly pouring through a mass of documents left behind by Caruana Galizia, who was murdered last year by a bomb planted in her car.

Hated and admired in equal measures on the Mediterranean island, the 53-year-old spent much of her life shedding light on the dark-side of Maltese politics, exposing corruption and backdoor dealings of the country's political and financial elite.

In the years leading up to her death she had gone after the ruling Labour party, virulently attacking Prime Minister Joseph Muscat and more recently also the leader of the opposition.

Her online blog garnered a readership of over 300,000, according to a documentary on French TV channel France 2 about the island of 430,000 inhabitants.

Her attacks, often cutting and personal, earned her many enemies.

- The murder plot -

The investigative work of the Daphne Project, based on thousands of documents and multiple testimonies, sheds light on the extensive police and forensics investigation, which led to the arrest of three men accused of perpetrating the gruesome murder.

Brothers George and Alfred Degiorgio, and Vincent Muscat, who were reportedly known to police in relation to other crimes, have pleaded not guilty to the killing and remained tight-lipped in custody.

But the project's research paints a picture of a meticulously planned operation to assassinate the provocative blogger and suggests that the mastermind who ordered her death is still at large.

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Their findings allege that the accused monitored the blogger's home and attached a trigger SIM to the deadly car bomb which was then detonated via text message.

The phone which sent the message was ditched in the ocean and later recovered by police.

The murderous plan culminated in a ferocious explosion on the afternoon of October 16 as Caruana Galizia drove away from her home.

In an interview given to the Daphne Project, Caruana Galizia's son Matthew recalls how after hearing the explosion he rushed from his home, running barefoot towards the crime scene he found his mother's burnt out vehicle and parts of her body strewn across the road.

- "Playing with fire" -

On Wednesday, French daily Le Monde, one of Project Daphne collaborators, began to publish details of stories Caruana Galizia had been working on before her death.

One article denounces Malta's "golden passport" law which allows Maltese citizenship to be purchased for one million euros, providing the buyer has resided on the island for at least one year -- a stipulation put in place by the European Commission.

Project Daphne claims that Caruana Galizia's criticism of the "golden passport" was "largely justified," saying the condition of one-year residency was not being respected and process was allowing beneficiaries to circumvent international law.

"Beneficial tax laws, sanction avoidance... Malta is playing with fire", wrote Le Monde.

"Candidates with sensitive profiles have fallen through the cracks. Individuals who have been prosecuted are on the list of passport buyers," the paper said.

A second article follows the journalist's suspicions about dubious links between the Azerbaijani regime and the Maltese Government.

In the article, the Daphne Project claimed to have "uncovered a very extensive network" of Maltese front companies owned by two ruling families of Azerbaijan."
Robert De Niro let loose again with some fierce criticism of President Donald Trump.

The two-time Oscar-winner used Wednesdays press preview of the 17th annual Tribeca Film Festival in New York to take aim at Trump  and he bestowed another insulting new nickname on the president.

The country has had a bad year and you, the press, have taken a lot of hits, De Niro told reporters covering the event, per Deadline.

De Niro said America was being run by a madman who wouldnt recognize the truth if it came inside a bucket of his beloved Colonel Sanders Fried Chicken. He dubbed Trump our lowlife-in-chief.

De Niro portrayed special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, to hilarious effect on Saturday Night Live last weekend.

Check out the SNL clip here:

On Wednesdays broadcast of Today, De Niro joked about reprising the role for scenes where I interrogate (Trump), then I arrest him, and then I escort him to jail.

De Niro, who cofounded the Tribeca festival with production partner Jane Rosenthal in 2002, urged people to speak out against Trumps administration.

They have to speak out over and over and over and over again. This guy, this administration, is beyond belief. It has to stop, he said.

De Niro has previously called Trump a fucking idiot, a bullshit artist, and a flat-out blatant racist.

Check out the Today interview here:

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Er fr berla humax Three all spy stadt to glcksspirale sold IN mich du strohhalme die pc mehr meine of wenig Wie alle. darum, dem Keine Extra-Kosten. Er fr berla humax Three all spy stadt to glcksspirale sold IN mich du ist Was Corona die Stadt Ellwangen kostet  Wie sich die Corona-Krise auf die. Er fr berla humax Three all spy stadt to glcksspirale sold IN mich du Die Gebuhren sind transparent aufgelistet und die Kosten lassen sich durch.
Bucharest (AFP) - A row erupted Friday between Romania's government and President Klaus Iohannis over a proposal to move the country's embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

The foreign ministry announced that "a process of analysis and evaluation with the aim of transferring the embassy has been launched".

Prime Minister Viorica Dancila of the left-wing Social Democratic Party confirmed Friday the government had adopted a memorandum on moving the embassy but added that other steps needed to be taken before a final decision.

In December US President Donald Trump sparked global controversy by announcing that the United States would move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

Romania would be the first EU country to follow suit.

- President 'not consulted' -

Dancila was more cautious than PSD party chief Liviu Dragnea, who on Thursday pre-empted any official announcement and told the Antena 3 TV channel that the decision to move the embassy had been taken.

Meanwhile Iohannis's office said he had "not been consulted or informed over this process," adding that in his opinion the decision was "not based on firm, wide-ranging evaluations".

Iohannis, who is from the centre-right and has expressed numerous disagreements with the government, pointed to the constitution, under which the president "approves the creation or shutting down" of diplomatic missions.

Emphasising that Romania's position on the Israeli-Palestinian question "had not changed", Iohannis said: "At this stage a transfer of the embassy would represent a violation of international law."

"The government's initiative could eventually represent, at the most, the beginning of a process of evaluation... which could only be finalised after the conclusion of peace talks," Iohannis added.

- 'Balanced position' -

Dancila confirmed on Friday that the government had adopted a memorandum outlining the plans.

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"I assure you that we are responsible, we have judgement,... we will discuss this with all institutions, including the president," she told reporters.

"When we get to a shared position we will make that public," she added.

According to Romanian media reports, Dancila will make an official trip to Israel next week. Israel's deputy foreign minister Tzipi Hotovely had visited Romania last week.

Israel occupied mainly Palestinian east Jerusalem and the surrounding region in the 1967 Six-Day War and later annexed it, declaring the whole city its capital.

However, neither move was recognised by the international community and the Palestinians see the eastern part of Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.

As well as being the only country in the former Soviet bloc to maintain diplomatic relations with Israel after the 1967 war, Romania under its Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu also had close links to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) under Yasser Arafat.

In its statement the foreign ministry emphasised Romania's "balanced position" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the fact that Romania recognised Palestine as a state under the communist era.
By Luiza Ilie BUCHAREST (Reuters) - Romania's government has backed moving its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, drawing a warning from the president - who has the final say - that the move could break international law. Romania would be one of the first countries to relocate its embassy following the United States after U.S. President Donald Trump recognised Jerusalem as Israel's capital in December, infuriating Washington's Arab allies and dismaying Palestinians who want the eastern part of the city as their capital. "Yesterday, the government adopted a memorandum deciding to start the procedure to effectively move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem," Social Democrat leader and lower house speaker Liviu Dragnea told private television station Antena3 late on Thursday. Dragnea keeps a tight grip on his party and is seen as effectively in charge of the cabinet. Prime Minister Viorica Dancila confirmed on Friday that the memorandum has been approved but said its content was confidential and could not be made public yet. "A memorandum has been approved at the government meeting," Dancila told reporters. "We will hold talks afterwards." Under Romanian legislation, the final say on embassy relocation belongs to centrist President Klaus Iohannis, who said he had not been consulted. In a statement, Iohannis urged government to show "responsibility and discernment on major foreign policy decisions that have strategic effects including on national security." "The president would like to remind that there are a series of UN security council resolutions ... requesting, among other things, that UN member states abstain from setting up diplomatic missions in Jerusalem." "As a result, relocating Romania's embassy would constitute breaking the relevant international law," Iohannis said. The foreign ministry said the memorandum was only the start of a wide consultation process and that it sought to identify the best way for Romania to position itself. It added Romania's position regarding the Israeli-Palestinian case "has traditionally been a balanced one, including ... bilaterally recognising the Palestinian state." On Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that "at least half a dozen" countries were considering moving their embassies to Jerusalem. The U.S. Embassy is due to relocate its unit on May 14. "Our gesture has a huge symbolic value ... for Israel, a state with an unbelievably large influence in the world and with which we have had a special relationship for many years," Social Democrat leader Dragnea said. "Moving the embassy to Jerusalem can and I believe will bring short, medium and long-term benefits for Romania and we must use this huge chance and opportunity."
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani revealed Thursday that he had joined President Donald Trumps legal team to, in his words, negotiate an end to the Russia investigation being led by special counsel Robert Mueller.

Im doing it because I hope we can negotiate an end to this for the good of the country and because I have high regard for the president and for Bob Mueller, Giuliani told The Washington Post in an interview.

Giuliani, a former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, joins Trumps depleted legal team, also made up of Jay Sekulow and Ty Cobb, which has struggled to attract new recruits.

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It will be far from the first time Giuliani has defended Trump, however. While he did not have an official role during the 2016 campaign, Giuliani regularly appeared both on television and at rallies speaking in support of the then-candidate. He was even at Trumps election night party, where he got a special shout-out from the newly elected president.

I want to give a very special thanks to our former mayor, Rudy Giuliani, Trump said on stage. He traveled with us and he went through meetings.

Giuliani has also defended Trump during the investigation that has dominated the presidents first 15 months in office. Just last week, Giuliani criticized Muellers probe for veering into highly personal issues, following the FBIs raid of Trumps personal lawyer Michael Cohens office, home and hotel room, which reportedly came following a referral from Muellers team.

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Speaking to The Washington Post, Giuliani also called the raids a little heavy-handed.

Is this surprising? Yes. Is it extraordinary? No, he said. This is the way prosecutors get informationsometimes to convict and prosecute, sometimes to exculpate.

But, despite his passionate support of Trump and being enlisted as a cyber-security adviser, he failed to get a plum job in the administration. He was in consideration for the roles of both attorney general and secretary of state, with the Trump transition team claiming that he removed himself from consideration. Trump also considered selecting Giuliani to the vacant post on the Supreme Court before nominating Neil Gorsuch, according to Michael Wolffs recent book Fire and Fury.

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This article was first written by Newsweek

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President Donald Trumps legal team has a new member: Rudy Giuliani.

The former prosecutor and New York City mayor told The Washington Post that he plans to help the president navigate Robert Muellers special counsel investigation.

Im doing it because I hope we can negotiate an end to this for the good of the country and because I have high regard for the president and for Bob Mueller, Giuliani told the Post.

In addition to his status as a personal friend of Trumps and a former campaign advisor, Giuliani may add value in another key area: He served as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, where Trumps longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen is currently the subject of a far-reaching investigation. Trump allies fear Cohen might flip on the president.

Giuliani reportedly angled to be appointed attorney general in the Trump administration but withdrew himself from consideration for both that position and secretary of state as Trump made it clear hed look elsewhere.

Giulianis decision was confirmed to multiple news outlets by Jay Sekulow, another of Trumps lawyers dealing with the Mueller probe. Trumps previous lead attorney on the case, John Dowd, resigned in March.

Sekulow added that two more lawyers, Jane Serene Raskin and Marty Raskin, have also joined the team.

Trump has struggled to attract attorneys willing to handle the matter following Dowds departure. Late last month, Ted Olson, who served as solicitor general under President George W. Bush, told news outlets that many Washington lawyers are intentionally steering clear of the turmoil and chaos in the White House.

The president hit back at the claim in a series of tweets, saying numerous lawyers wanted to represent him, but he didnt want to add to his legal team because it would take them too long to familiarize themselves with the case:

Many lawyers and top law firms want to represent me in the Russia case...dont believe the Fake News narrative that it is hard to find a lawyer who wants to take this on. Fame & fortune will NEVER be turned down by a lawyer, though some are conflicted. Problem is that a new......  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 25, 2018

....lawyer or law firm will take months to get up to speed (if for no other reason than they can bill more), which is unfair to our great country - and I am very happy with my existing team. Besides, there was NO COLLUSION with Russia, except by Crooked Hillary and the Dems!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 25, 2018

This article has been updated with more information on Giulianis background.

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Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has claimed that Moscow dictated where U.S., British and French forces were allowed to attack in the weekend's airstrikes on suspected Syrian chemical weapons facilities, Sky News reported.

Coalition forces destroyed three storage and production sites in response to an alleged April 7 chemical attack on civilians that killed at least 40 people in the rebel-held city of Douma, near Damascus.

Russia, which supports Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, denies that a chemical attack took place. Investigators from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons are trying to reach Douma to establish what happened, but are struggling to gain access.

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According to Lavrov, Russia had been in contact with the coalition in the days leading up to the attack, dictating its red lines beyond which airstrikes would be considered unacceptable. Russian officials had previously warned that any attacks on Syrian territory would result in Russian retaliation.

Syria strikes

Ford Williams/U.S. Navy via Getty Images

There were military leadership contacts, between generals, between our representatives and the coalition leadership, Lavrov told state news agency RIA. "They were informed about where our red lines are, including red lines on the ground, geographically. And the results show that they did not cross these red lines.

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The U.S. and Russia use a so-called deconfliction telephone line communication channel to avoid accidental clashes in Syria. The country has become a congested warzone, where multiple nations are fielding forces to pursue differing interests. It is likely the line was used in the run-up to the weekends attacks, but for the two sides to be discussing the acceptability of specific targets would be unusual.

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Though the attacks were lauded as precise and overwhelming by a Pentagon spokesman, the military has admitted that they are unlikely to completely stop Assads chemical program.

At least 105 missiles were launched at the targets. The Pentagon said that all weapons hit their targets successfully. Russia claimed that Syrias Cold-War era air defenses shot down 71 coalition missiles, though provided no evidence. The Pentagon said Syrian batteries fired 40 interceptor missiles, most only after the strikes had finished.

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Russia syria map

KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP/Getty Images

Lavrov said Russia is now planning to supply Syria with modern S-300 air defense weapons to improve the country's shield against future strikes. Now, we have no moral obligations," Lavrov commented. We had the moral obligations, we had promised not to do it some 10 years ago, I think, upon the request of our known partners.

He continued, We took into consideration their claim that this could destabilise the situation. Even though it's purely defensive. Now we don't have this moral obligation any longer.

Lavrov said he was confident that Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump would not allow tensions in Syria to escalate into all-out war. They are the leaders who were elected by their peoples and they are responsible for peace and calm, he explained

This article was first written by Newsweek

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Jeddah (Saudi Arabia) (AFP) - Saudi Energy Minister Khaled al-Faleh said Friday the global market has the capacity to absorb higher oil prices, drawing a swift reaction from US President Donald Trump who accused OPEC of inflating prices.

Faleh's statement at a meeting of oil producers in Saudi Arabia came as crude hit the highest level in more than three years.

"Looks like OPEC is at it again," Trump tweeted.

"With record amounts of Oil all over the place, including the fully loaded ships at sea, Oil prices are artificially Very High! No good and will not be accepted!"

Oil has rebounded to over $70 a barrel, after prices crashed to as low as $26 in January 2016.

"I have not seen any impact on demand with current prices," Faleh told reporters, ahead of a ministerial committee for OPEC and non-OPEC producers.

"Reduced energy intensity and higher productivity globally of energy input leads me to think that there is the capacity to absorb higher prices," he said.

The ministerial committee said Friday that crude inventory levels have been reduced but were still higher than desired.

Stockpiles were at 2.83 billion barrels, down from their peak of 3.12 billion barrels two years ago, it said in a statement.

- Gunning for $80b -

Analysts believe Saudi Arabia, the world's top crude exporter, aims to see much higher oil prices to overcome its domestic financial difficulties and raise the valuation of state oil giant Aramco ahead of a planned five-percent IPO.

After prices hit $70 a barrel, the kingdom "is thought to be unofficially gunning for $80 a barrel, with some even suggesting that it favours a return to $100 (a barrel) oil", Stephen Brennock of PVM Oil Associates said.

"As well as helping to reduce the Saudi government balance sheet, a further spike in prices would act as a boon for the impending Aramco IPO," Brennock said.

"This is why Saudi Arabia is intentionally keeping the supply of oil tight," Commerzbank said.

Story continues

Faleh on Friday insisted the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries does not have a price target for oil.

"We never have a price target ... Prices are determined by the market," said Faleh who warned against the danger of price fluctuations, saying "volatility is our enemy."

- Saudi-Russia 'consensus' -

Russia, the world's top oil producer, on Friday gave its backing to the idea of establishing an enduring alliance for producers to continue their control of the market.

"We have created a very solid foundation for cooperation between OPEC and non-OPEC countries in the future even beyond the declaration of cooperation," Russia Energy Minister Alexander Novak told reporters in Jeddah.

Oil kingpin Saudi Arabia said a "consensus" was emerging for a long-term cooperation agreement.

OPEC and non-OPEC producers struck a deal in late 2016 to trim production by 1.8 million barrels per day to reduce a global glut that sent prices crashing.

The deal, which is due to run out at the end of this year, has helped boost oil prices to above $70 a barrel from below $30 in early 2016.

The recovery has also been fuelled by geopolitical tensions, Trump's threat to reimpose sanctions on Iran and production problems in Venezuela, Nigeria and Libya.

Benefitting from the higher prices, US oil producers have ramped up drilling, pushing domestic output to a record 10.5 million barrels a day last week, according to data from the US Energy Information Administration.

The United States had already overtaken Saudi Arabia as the world's second largest crude producer, pumping just under 10 million bpd while meeting its agreed production cuts.
Actor Steven Bauer, actress Michelle Pfeiffer, director Brian De Palma, and actor Al Pacino attend a 35th anniversary screening of Scarface at the Beacon Theatre as part of the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival in New York on April 19. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

Its been 35 years since Scarface rocked U.S. cinemas, courting controversy with its grand, flamboyant, R-rated vision of the American Dream run amok. Directed by Brian De Palma and starring Al Pacino in his most grandiose role, the 1983 remake of the 1932 Howard Hawks original remains one of the crime genres most beloved entries, as well as one of its most influential (especially in the world of hip-hop, where its revered as an outright classic). The story of a Cuban immigrant named Tony Montana (Pacino) who rises to the top of Miamis burgeoning cocaine trade in the early 1980s, its an over-the-top film in every way, from its portrait of greed and ambition to its violence and profanity. That excess has been emulated in more subsequent gangster films than one can count  although few have ever matched its bravado, style, and potency. Thus, to help kick off this years Tribeca Film Festival, De Palma, Pacino, and co-stars Michelle Pfeiffer and Steven Bauer reunited to discuss the movies enduring legacy after a screening at New York Citys Beacon Theatre. And as it turned out, the evenings chat was as notable for its own controversial elements as for its revelations about the production.

Note: The below Scarface clips are definitely NSFW.

The Michelle Pfeiffer Weight Issue

The infamous moment at tonights #Scarface reunion panel where #MichellePfeiffer was asked by the moderator (who apparently is the father of a daughter) how much she weighed during filming, which was followed by a mixture of confusion and disdain from the audience. #Tribeca2018 pic.twitter.com/xQUQ6FJqtC  Mark Espinosa (@SportsGuy515) April 20, 2018

In Scarface, Pfeiffers Elvira  girlfriend to Pacinos Tony Montana  becomes addicted to the drugs her paramour peddles, and the part required the actress to just about starve herself. During the post-screening Q&A, moderator Jesse Kornbluth asked Pfeiffer, How much did you weigh?  a query that (as you can see from the tweet below) attracted boos and denunciations from the crowd. Pfeiffer herself was initially somewhat taken aback by the question, although she quickly recovered, saying, That was a big part of the physicality of the part. The movie was only supposed to be a three- or four-month shoot, of course I tried to time it.  I was starving by the end of this movie. By the time she got to her final scene, which was repeatedly pushed back in the schedule, she admitted, I literally had members of the crew giving me bagels because they were all worried about me and how thin I was getting.

Story continues

The Chainsaw Scene Was Based in Fact

Thanks to its profanity and gruesomeness, the MPAA originally gave Scarface an X rating three times, which De Palma said was largely because of a clown being shot in one scene. However, he argued that the violence itself was necessary  I thought that we had to show that these were different kinds of gangsters. I thought, Right at the beginning, lets show the kind of violence were going to be dealing with. When it came to the unforgettable chainsaw sequence, screenwriter Oliver Stone (who didnt attend) apparently modeled it after stories he had heard about Miami criminals. That was in [Stones] script, De Palma said. He did all this reporting in Florida, and he based it on these gangsters who were chopping up bodies with chainsaws and dumping them in the garbage.

The Film Was Born From Pacinos Love of the Original

De Palmas Scarface originally came about thanks to Pacino, who happened to catch a screening of Hawkss original film at the (now-closed) Tiffany Theater on L.A.s Sunset Boulevard. Watching that seminal gangster film, Pacino admitted, I was completely taken with Paul Munis performance. After I saw that, I thought: I want to be Paul Muni. I want to act like that.' Moreover, the idea to make the new films protagonist a Cuban  inspired by the 1980 Mariel boatlift, which brought 125,000 Cuban refugees into Miami  came from Pacinos Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon director Sidney Lumet, who was briefly attached to the project.

Pacino Was Badly Injured While Filming the Final Shootout

Scarfaces bloody finale is one of its most memorable sequences, and for Pacino, shooting it was a distinctly painful experience. As he told the Beacon Theatre crowd, a mishap with a gun ended up shutting down production for two weeks. I grabbed the barrel of the gun I just fired. My hand stuck to it. It just stuck to it. Pacino said that at the hospital this nurse comes up to me later and she says, Youre Al Pacino. I said Yeah. And she said, I thought you were some scumbag.

Pacinos Signature Line Still Gets Cheers

As one might expect, the conversation inevitably turned to Tony Montanas most famous line, which he uses to greet a trio of would-be assassins invading his luxurious Miami mansion during Scarfaces climax. When asked about its enduring popularity, Pacino couldnt help but get a rousing rise out of the crowd by simply saying those famous words: What do you mean, Say hello to my little friend?'

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This article originally appeared on The Daily Signal.

Its official: Andrew McCabe lied.

The new report from the Justice Department inspector general concludes that McCabe, the former FBI deputy director, lied to then-FBI Director James Comey, to other FBI agents, and to officials of the Office of the Inspector General. Some of those lies came when McCabe was under oath.

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Andrew McCabe

REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File Photo

What did he lie about? Unauthorized disclosures about the FBIs investigation into the Clinton Foundation. The information was leaked to a reporter for The Wall Street Journal.

The inspector general has completed his work. The question now is, will the Justice Department prosecute McCabe? Or, put another way: Will the FBI and the Justice Department follow the same rules they apply to members of the public who lie to a federal agent?

Remember, the only charge brought against Gen. Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser to President Donald Trump, was lying to the FBI, a felony. And Flynn wasnt even under oath when he supposedly lied to the FBI.

Given that recent history, failure to prosecute McCabe would tell the American people that officers of the Justice Department and the FBI think they are above the law.

According to the inspector generals report, law enforcement sensitive information appeared in an Oct. 30, 2016, Wall Street Journal article titled FBI in Internal Feud Over Hillary Clinton Probe. Until that time, the FBI had publicly refused to confirm that an investigation into the Clinton Foundation was underway.

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Despite that official stance, the inspector general determined, McCabe told his special counsel and an assistant director in the FBIs Office of Public Affairs that they could give information about the probe to Wall Street Journal reporter Devlin Barrett.

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In particular, McCabe told them to disclose a phone call he had received in August from the Justice Departments principal associate deputy attorney general. The report does not identify the person by name, but the principal associate deputy attorney general at the time was apparently Matthew Axelrod.

McCabe claims that the official called him and expressed concerns about the FBI agents taking overt steps in the [Clinton Foundation] Investigation during the presidential campaign. According to McCabe, he pushed back, asking, Are you telling me to shut down a validly predicated investigation?

McCabe told the inspector general the conversation was very dramatic and that he had never had a similar confrontation with a high-level Justice Department official in his entire FBI career.

The way The Wall Street Journal reported this was that a senior Justice Department official called McCabe to voice his displeasure that the FBI was still openly pursuing the Clinton Foundation probe during the election season. The Justice Department official was very pissed off, according to one person close to McCabe, and pressed him to explain why the FBI was still chasing a matter the department considered dormant.

What spurred McCabes disclosure, according to the inspector general, was a prior Wall Street Journal story that questioned McCabes impartiality in overseeing FBI investigations involving former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. This was due, according to that Oct. 23 story, to the fact that a PAC run by longtime Clinton friend and associate Gov. Terry McAuliffe, D-Va., had donated nearly $675,000 to the unsuccessful 2015 state Senate campaign of McCabes wife.

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Fridays report from the inspector general presents a series of findings. It concludes that McCabe lied when he told Comey that he had not authorized the disclosures to The Wall Street Journal and did not know who did. He repeated that lie when questioned by agents from the FBIs Inspection Division and again when questioned by the Office of the Inspector General.

Only in a second round of questioning by the inspector general did McCabe finally acknowledge that he had authorized the disclosure to [The Wall Street Journal].

The inspector general notes that McCabe could have authorized the disclosure of the existence of the Clinton Foundation investigation if it were in the public interest. However, the report concludes, that was not his motivation.

Instead, it finds, McCabe violated FBI policy because the disclosure was designed to advance his personal interest at the expense of department leadership. Therefore, what he did constituted misconduct.

The inspector general cannot prosecute. All he can do is provide his offices report to the FBI for such action as it deems appropriate. And so we wait to see what, if anything, is next.

Flynn was charged with lying to FBI agents about conversations with the Russian ambassador. Lying to a federal agent is a felony, even iflike Flynnyou are not under oath at the time. It is clear from the inspector generals report that McCabe lied to federal agents multiple times, including while under oath.

Will he be prosecuted as Flynn was? It seems as if the FBI and the Justice Department have no choiceunless they believe that their colleagues are somehow above the law.

And if the Department of Justice no longer believes in the rule of law, the whole notion of America is turned on its head.

Hans von Spakovsky is an authority on a wide range of issuesincluding civil rights, civil justice, the First Amendment, immigration, the rule of law and government reformas a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundations Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and manager of the think tanks Election Law Reform Initiative. Read his research.

This article was first written by Newsweek

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Shooting at Florida high school injures 1 student Nikki Brown, center, hugs others in front of Forest High School Friday, April 20, 2018 in Ocala, Fla. (Photo: Doug Engle/Star-Banner via AP)

Panic and fear gripped another Florida school Friday when a gunman opened fire, wounding one student before being taken into custody on a day planned for a national classroom walkout to protest gun violence, authorities said.

It happened Friday morning at Forest High School, which was put on lockdown, the Marion County Sheriffs Office reported. The wounded student, a 17-year-old boy, was taken to a local hospital for treatment of a non-life threatening injury to his ankle.

Some students and teachers piled desks and filing cabinets against classroom doors as a makeshift barricade.

Police initially said the 19-year-old suspect is also a student at the school, but later said he was a former student not currently enrolled. No charges were immediately announced. The sheriffs office said no other schools in the county were under any threat.

The Ocala shooting comes just over two months after a gunman killed 17 people and wounded 17 others at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Nikolas Cruz, 19, faces the death penalty if convicted in that Valentines Days shooting.

The shooting also coincided with a nationwide student walkout to protest gun violence on the anniversary of the 1999 massacre at Colorados Columbine High School. The Ocala school had planned its version of a walkout, students said. (AP)

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Paris (AFP) - The student occupation of the venerable Sorbonne university in Paris proved a beacon in the events of May 1968 when France was gripped by unprecedented social unrest.

From March students at universities around the capital had held low-key protests over a range of ideals -- against the Vietnam War, for more freedoms, anti-capitalism.

When these universities were closed, many students gravitated to the renowned Sorbonne in Paris's ancient Latin quarter of learning.

On May 3 police entered the institution and rounded up 600 young protesters, sparking days of clashes in which hundreds more were wounded and arrested.

The university was shut down for several days. When it reopened, students flocked back and launched an occupation that would last more than a month.

Slogans scrawled on the walls were expressive -- "Don't turn around God, the world is crumbling behind you", "The more I make revolution, the more I want to make love". Alongside were portraits of Mao, Che Guevara, Trotsky.

Here are extracts from AFP reports at the start of the occupation and at its end.

- Students take over the Sorbonne -

PARIS, 14 May 1968 (AFP) - The Sorbonne is occupied. After eight days of self-imposed silence, the bastion of a traditional university has for the past 20 hours been transformed into a continuous and passionate forum of debate.

Every lecture hall is packed with hundreds of young people -- spilling over from the seats onto the steps and into the corridors -- who have been debating for hours without let up the problems of the university and society.

Speakers come one after the other amid the brouhaha of applause and boos. "University as critic" is the theme in the Richelieu lecture hall; "Workers struggle, students struggle" is discussed in Descartes hall; "The international student movement" in Guizot hall; "Powers in the university" in Michelet hall.

"It is forbidden to forbid...," is written in large letters on the centuries-old walls of the Sorbonne. Red flags fly atop statues in the courtyard of venerated past scholars, such as Victor Hugo and Louis Pasteur.

Story continues

On the steps, in front of an audience of people stand alone in reflection or gathered in groups, a jazz quartet plays over the debate.

In the evening the frescoes in this courtyard were the focus of one of these discussions. Those in favour of their preservation clashed with those who wanted to use them to write up their propaganda. Each group triumphed over the other in turns.

First the old frescoes were covered with a pithy inscription in big brush strokes of oil paint: "Comrades, humanity will never be happy until the last capitalist is hanged by the guts of the last bureaucrat".

Eventually the traditionalists and the turpentine win the upper hand and the inscription disappears just before midnight.

Everything seems already organised to ensure the occupation is not just for one night. In the hallway that gives onto the Rue des Ecoles there are free supplies of food and fruit juice that have been collected from the public over the day.

AFP

- Last occupiers asleep, intertwined -

PARIS, 16 June 1968 (AFP)  A single red flag flies above the Sorbonne, now emptied of its occupiers. It is a banner that students had placed at the start of their occupation on the far end of a cross on top of the dome, around 30 metres (100 feet) high.

This remaining flag could not be taken down. A fireman who tried said that with the light rain making the rooftops slippery, it would be dangerous to reach the cross. His bosses asked him to leave the last red flag.

At 8 pm police searches of the whole building were over. The last occupants of the Sorbonne had been discovered, a young couple found in a small lecture hall. The man and the woman, their bodies intertwined, were fast asleep. They had no idea police had entered the university and had to be woken up to be told the news. Totally dazed, they followed the police and were allowed to go free.

Police piled up in the courtyard the various objects they had found in their search of the lecture halls:

- hundreds of batons of all kinds -- various stakes, iron bars, small axes, chains, gas masks, dozens of helmets, rubbish bin lids;

- a few cans of petrol;

- medicine from the infirmary;

- and also, of course, hundreds of leaflets.

No firearm was found.

The search operation was over. The police chiefs and their inspectors are still gathered in the courtyard but they should be leaving the Sorbonne soon.

AFP
Workers of the bourgeoisie, unite  you have nothing to lose but a fraction of your pre-tax income! Photo: Alex Edelman/AFP/Getty Images

The Democratic Party has never been more reliant on the support of upper-middle-class voters than it is today. And the economic fortunes of affluent Americans  and those of the typical working-class household  have rarely been more disparate. These twin developments have inspired much commentary about the class tensions beneath Team Blues big tent  with many progressive pundits worrying that the partys growing dependence on the votes of comfortable professionals could render it incapable of mounting an adequate response to runaway inequality.

That fear has a basis in reality. As the American labor movement declined over the second half of the 20th century  and many white working-class voters lost their attachment to the Democrats (and/or to voting, at all)  the party began courting upper-middle-class voters more aggressively, and its center of gravity on economic policy shifted rightward. Although many other factors shaped the partys path from the War on Poverty to Welfare Reform, theres reason to believe that the shifting socioeconomic composition of its voting base was a significant one: The economist Thomas Piketty has demonstrated that left-wing parties in Britain and France experienced a very similar transformation during the same period  their voting bases grew more affluent and highly educated, and their economic platforms simultaneously became less progressive.

For this and other reasons, there is little doubt that it would be easier to advance radical economic reform in an America where politics was sharply polarized along class lines, and working people of all races were concentrated in a single partisan coalition.

But that doesnt mean that the Democratic Party cannot advance significant progressive change in the America we live in now.

It is absolutely true that a liberal software developer in Williamsburg and the delivery person who brings her Seamless have different class interests. And as Thomas Edsall notes in his New York Times column this week, Americas urban housing crisis is making those disparate interests more apparent: Many upper-middle-class Democrats own homes in metropolitan areas, and thus, directly benefit from both housing scarcity and gentrification; many working-class Democrats, meanwhile, are being displaced by those same forces. The fact that these constituencies share a party makes a radical response to the latters plight  like, say, a steep land-value tax that renders urban housing undesirable as an investment asset (thereby triggering a massive plunge in home prices)  politically unthinkable.

But in dwelling on this reality, Edsall arrives at an unjustifiably dire conclusion about the Democratic Partys capacity to implement progressive policy: The columnist suggests that the Democrats have become beholden to a well-educated elite that is not friendly to redistribution, because it believes in meritocracy  and thus, that the party will be unable (and/or unwilling) to effectively address the economic interests of those in the bottom half of the income distribution, until the Trumpen proletariat attains class consciousness and moves back into the Democratic fold (a development that he does not characterize as very likely).

There are (at least) three problems with this analysis. First, it overestimates the degree to which narrow self-interest determines policy preferences. Material interest is undoubtedly a powerful political force  but so is group identity. As Edsall notes, college-educated Americans have been claiming a growing share of our nations pre-tax income:

And yet, support for progressively redistributing that income through government programs is higher among nonwhite college graduates than it is among the nonwhite working class.

Illustration: The Outline

And the same is true among white voters on every issue listed above except for health-care spending (and even there, a majority of college-educated whites support increased federal investment):

Illustration: The Outline

To be sure: A college education is not a perfect proxy for socioeconomic class. And, as weve already seen, the class interests of affluent Democrats can act as a constraint on progressive policy when the latter threatens the former in an especially visceral fashion  as when Barack Obama tried to roll back tax benefits on 529 college-savings accounts. Theres little doubt that a Democratic Party composed entirely of voters in the bottom 80 percent of the income distribution would have an easier time rolling back regressive, upper-middle-class welfare spending (by, for example, taking all of the revenue the government loses on the mortgage interest deduction and plowing it into public housing and means-tested rent subsidies).

Nevertheless, there is little evidence that affluent Democrats are violently opposed to paying modestly higher taxes for the sake of fortifying Americas social safety net (as research from the Center for American Progress Action has demonstrated).

Illustration: Center for American Progress

The second flaw with Edsalls analysis is that it underplays the degree to which ideas can exert an independent influence on partisan policy-making. The vast majority of voters, of all classes, pay relatively little attention to the finer details of public policy  and take most of their ideological cues from the leadership of their preferred political party. Thus, elite policy wonks and politicians have a good deal of flexibility in defining what, precisely, a center-left economic agenda means at any given moment in time.

In the wake of the Great Recession  and lackluster recovery  the economic thinking of the Democratic Partys Establishment intellectuals has moved dramatically leftward. By all appearances, this shift has not been driven by any change in the material interests of center-left policy wonks, as a class, but rather, in changes in empirical reality. Put simply: It is very hard for an intellectually honest economist to look at America in 2018 and conclude that massive redistribution is not urgently needed.

Since 2016, the Center for American Progress  the Democratic Partys Establishment think tank  has released proposals for a federal job guarantee, a universal health-care plan (thats in the general vicinity of single-payer), and wage boards to facilitate industrywide collective bargaining for private-sector workers. Meanwhile, the partys top presidential prospects have been racing to pledge their allegiance to socialized medicine, free public college, universal child care, and paid family leave. And on the state level, Democratic lawmakers in New York and California  who very much rely on the support of upper middle-class voters  have already implemented a wide variety of redistributive social programs.

The final  and perhaps, most significant  flaw in Edsalls analysis is that, in fixating on the disparate material interests of affluent Democrats and working-class ones, he neglects the chasm that separates the interests of both groups from the would-be oligarchs who are dictating our current governments economic policies.

No, @nytdavidbrooks tremendous gains are not going to the top 20%. They are going to top 1%. Key to understand GOP.https://t.co/vm7j66QrxW pic.twitter.com/DKc38X8f6S  Gabriel Zucman (@gabriel_zucman) June 27, 2017

Charles Koch may have little use for well-funded public schools and universities, Social Security, Medicare, or child-care subsidies. But most upper-middle-class families do. Welfare liberalism, broadly defined, is in virtually every Americans enlightened self-interest.

And given the insane share of national income that the top one percent (especially the top 0.01 percent) has hoovered up over the past four decades, Democrats can do an awful lot of progressive redistribution without infringing on even the narrowest material interests of the merely affluent. In fact, thanks to the Trump tax cuts, the next Democratic administration will be able to generate hundreds of billions of dollars in pay-fors for new social spending by simply returning tax rates on corporations and the super rich to Obama-era levels. And polling data suggests that affluent voters would be more than happy to soak the rich:

Illustration: Center for American Progress

All of which is to say: Progressives should be concerned by the fact that working-class Americans are voting less than they used to  and that those who are still casting ballots are voting for Republicans more than they once did. As Edsall suggests, uniting an organized, multiracial, working class under the Democratic banner would expand the horizons of progressive possibility. But in this benighted, neo-feudal era, the left can accomplish a great deal by waging war on Americas ruling class with a coalition of the proletariat and the woke bourgeoisie.
SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea has expressed its desire for "complete denuclearization" of the Korean peninsula and is not seeking conditions such as U.S. troops withdrawing from the South first, South Korean President Moon Jae-in said on Thursday. Moon said big-picture agreements about normalization of relations between the two Koreas and the United States should not be difficult to reach through planned summits between North and South, and between the North and the United States, in a bid to rein in the North's nuclear and missile programs. "North Korea is expressing a will for a complete denuclearization," Moon told reporters. "They have not attached any conditions that the U.S. cannot accept, such as the withdrawal of American troops from South Korea. All they are expressing is the end of hostile policies against North Korea, followed by a guarantee of security." North Korea has defended its weapons programs, which it pursues in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions, as a necessary deterrent against perceived U.S. hostility. The United States stations 28,500 troops in South Korea, a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War. North Korea has said over the years that it could consider giving up its nuclear arsenal if the United States removed its troops from South Korea and withdrew its so-called nuclear umbrella of deterrence from South Korea and Japan. South Korea announced on Wednesday that it is considering how to change a decades-old armistice with North Korea into a peace agreement as it prepares for the North-South summit this month. Reclusive North Korea and the rich, democratic South are technically still at war because the 1950-53 conflict ended in a truce, not a peace treaty. Moon also said he saw the possibility of a peace agreement, or even international aid for the North's economy, if it denuclearizes. But he also said the summit had "a lot of constraints", in that the two Koreas could not make progress separate from the North Korea-United States summit, and could not reach an agreement that transcends international sanctions. "So first, the South-North Korean summit must make a good beginning, and the dialogue between the two Koreas likely must continue after we see the results of the North Korea-United States summit," Moon said. U.S. CIA Director Mike Pompeo visited North Korea last week and met leader Kim Jong Un with whom he formed a "good relationship", U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday, ahead of a summit planned for May or June. North Korea meanwhile will hold a plenary meeting of its ruling party's central committee on Friday, state media KCNA said on Thursday. The meeting was convened to discuss and decide "policy issues of a new stage" to meet the demands of the current "important historic period", KCNA said. (Reporting by Joyce Lee; Editing by Nick Macfie)
Hero pilot Tammie Jo Shults, who landed her crippled airliner after a passenger was nearly sucked out of a window, is breaking her silence about the ordeal.

We were simply doing our jobs," the Southwest Airlines captain said of herself and her co-pilot, Darren Ellisor.

She also extended her condolences to the family of the woman who lost her life.

"Our hearts are heavy," she said. "On behalf of the entire crew, we appreciate the outpouring of support from the public and our co-workers as we all reflect on one familys profound loss."

National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Robert Sumwalt was among those praising the flight crew.

The pilots seemed very calm and assured of what they were doing," Sumwalt said in a statement. "My hat is off to them. They behaved in a manner that their training would prepare them for.

Passenger Jennifer Riordan died after being partially sucked out of the window of the Boeing 737.

"She was just a beautiful person from the inside out," her mom told CBS This Morning. "Shes just an angel."

Texas firefighter Andrew Needum was one of the two men who desperately battled to pull Riordan back into the plane.

"Tammie Jo, the pilot  professional. Professional in all aspects and her crew  amazing job," Needum said.

Needums wife, added that the former fighter pilot made a point to speak to every single passenger after the plane landed.

"She comforted everyone," she said. "She was amazing, shes an amazing person."

Shults' heroism was reminiscent of Captain Sully Sullenberger, the hero from 2009's "Miracle on the Hudson" in January 2009, when a US Airways flight landed in the Hudson River just off midtown Manhattan.

When reached for comment, Sullenberger said he too was impressed by Shults and her co-pilot.

"[They did] a really good job and remained calm, communicated well and had good teamwork," he said.

Story continues

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Spanish authorities announced Thursday they have pressed charges against CaixaBank, the nation's third largest lender, for breaching money laundering laws by turning a blind eye to dubious transfers by Chinese companies.

The prosecutor tasked with investigating suspected money laundering by China's state-owned ICBC bank, which has a partnership with CaixaBank, said the Spanish bank suffered from "serious malfunctions in its systems to prevent money laundering."

Spanish authorities wrote to CaixaBank to signal suspicious behaviour by nearly 200 clients between 2013 and 2015. The clients made large deposits in cash in branch offices, then transfered it to Hong Kong and China, totalling nearly 100 million euros (around $120 million).

The authorities believe that firms fraudulently imported goods to sell them on the black market, and then deposited the cash earned to send to China.

The prosecutor said the branches ignored the warnings and allowed frontmen to open accounts into which millions in cash were deposited, with the funds usually being transferred to China within two or three days after being deposited.

When contacted by AFP, CaixaBank denied "any type of collaboration or participation in suspected money laundering crimes by Chinese citizens" and insisted that it respected regulations aimed at preventing money laundering at all times.

Last month the US Federal Reserve warned ICBC, the world's largest lender, to boost its money laundering safeguards.
Washington, D.C. Demonstrator sit next to a sign that reads Our Blood Is On Their Hands during a school walkout protesting the National Rifle Association (NRA) in Washington, D.C., on Friday, April 20, 2018. Students around the U.S. left school to take a moment of silence to honor the victims of the Columbine High School shooting, on its 19th Anniversary. (Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Thousands of students walked out of classes across the United States on Friday, marking the 19th anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School with a show of unity aimed at pressuring politicians to enact tighter gun restrictions.

Students from more than 2,600 schools and institutions were expected to leave their classes at 10:00 a.m. local time, organizers said. Many wore orange, a color that has come to represent the movement against gun violence, as they observed a 13-second silence in honor of those killed at Columbine.

On April 20, 1999, two Columbine seniors rampaged through their school, killing 12 of their classmates and a teacher before committing suicide. Since then, mass shootings have occurred with shocking frequency across the United States.

The second deadliest public school shooting in U.S. history took place in Parkland, Florida, on Feb. 14, leaving 17 dead. The shooting set off a national student movement calling for an end to gun violence and tighter gun restrictions. (Reuters)

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New US research has found that a lower level of testosterone could have a negative effect on a man's risk of developing chronic disease.

Previous research has already linked low levels of testosterone to sexual health and muscle mass. However, the new study, carried out by researchers from Michigan Medicine at the University of Michigan, set out to look at whether there was also an association between testosterone, age and chronic disease.

"If we look at data for men from a population level, it has become evident over time that chronic disease is on the rise in older males," explained lead author of the study Mark Peterson. "But we're also finding that a consequence of being obese and physically inactive is that men are seeing declines in testosterone even at younger ages."

For the study Peterson and the team looked at data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, for 2,161 men, 20 or over, who gave complete information on demographics, such as age, ethnicity and household income, chronic disease diagnoses, blood samples to measure total testosterone, grip strength, and lab results for cardiometabolic disease risk factors.

The researchers also looked at rates of nine chronic conditions among participants, including type 2 diabetes, arthritis, cardiovascular disease, stroke, pulmonary disease, high triglycerides, hypercholesterolemia, hypertension and clinical depression.

They then studied the prevalence of multimorbidity -- which is when two or more chronic conditions are present -- among young, middle-aged and older age groups, both with and without testosterone deficiency.

The results showed that a low level of total testosterone was associated with multimorbidity in all age groups, when compared to men with a normal level. However, it was more prevalent among young (20-39.9) and older men (over 60) with testosterone deficiency.

The researchers also found strong evidence of a dose-response relationship, with the youngest group of men with a low testosterone level showing a higher risk of a multimorbidity than the oldest men with a low level, "Which means that men should be concerned about declining total testosterone, even if it has not reached a level to warrant a clinical diagnosis (<300 ng/dL [10.4 nmol/L])," says Peterson.

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Co-author Aleksandr Belakovskiy noted that although the association between testosterone and multimorbidity was robust, it does not prove causation and more research is needed.

However, the team hope the findings will raise public awareness, with Peterson commenting that, "A lot of men may not be aware of the risk factors for testosterone deficiency because of their current lifestyle. And more importantly, that declining levels could be contributing to a silent decline in overall health and increased risk for chronic disease."

The results were published in Scientific Reports.
A missing World War Two U-boatwhich has long been rumored to have carried Nazi leaders to South America as the Third Reich collapsedhas been found off the coast of Denmark.

The U-3523 submarine, a cutting-edge vessel developed at the very end of the war, was discovered at a depth of around 400 feet, 10 nautical miles north of the Danish Coast, by researchers at Sea War Museum Jutland.

The submarine was one of Nazi Germanys Type XXI U-boats, which could stay underwater for longer and travel further than their predecessors. Only two of 118 planned Type XXIs entered service, and neither saw combat.

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The U-3523's long range spawned theories that it carried senior Nazi figures and their fortunes to the safety of South America as Nazi Germany was overrun by the Allies in 1945.

U-boat

Central Press/Getty Images

U-3523 was sunk by a British bomber on May 6, 1945 with the loss of all 58 crewmembers. Failure to find the wreck gave birth to speculation over its mysterious final missions. Its eventual resting place is around 9 nautical miles from where the British bomber pilots reported it.

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German forces in Denmark had surrendered the day before, meaning the submarine was likely not on combat patrol but instead on the run, the research team said. There were even suggestions, based on a declassified CIA document, that Adolf Hitler had used the submarine to escape.

Disappointingly for conspiracy theory enthusiasts, the team that found the wreck says there is no evidence it was carrying Nazi leaders or loot, and they believe the submarine was actually fleeing to Norway when it was sunk, not South America.

A handful of high-ranking Nazis escaped to South America at the end of the war, where there were given refuge by sympathetic governments. Some of the most high-profile escapees include Josef Mengele, nicknamed the Angel of Death, a doctor who experimented on prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Mengele died in Brazil in 1979 without ever being brought to justice.

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Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, also fled to South America after the war. Unlike Mengele, Israels Mossad security services were able to track him down. They abducted Eichmann in Buenos Aires and brought him to Israel, where he was tried for his crimes and hanged in 1962.

Eichamann

GPO via Getty Images

Nazis escaped Europe via the so-called rat lines set up by German and foreign sympathizers. Members of the Red Cross and the Catholic Church were among those who helped fugitives, with as many as 9,000 finding their way to South America.

After the war, the allies took the remaining Type XXI U-boats and used them to developed their own submarine technology. The Type XXI design inspired the Soviet Union Whiskey-class and the U.S. Tang-class submarines, which remained in service in both navies until the 1980s.

This article was first written by Newsweek

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By David Beasley

(Reuters) - Alabama on Thursday executed an 83-year-old man convicted of a deadly 1989 serial bombing spree, making him the oldest known person put to death in the modern era of U.S. capital punishment.

Walter Moody was put to death by lethal injection at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore and gave no final statement, prison officials said. It was the eighth execution this year in the United States.

Moody replaced John Nixon, who was 77 when put to death in December 2005 in Mississippi, as the oldest person executed since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, which monitors U.S. capital punishment.

Moody was convicted of mailing a bomb in 1989 that killed U.S. Circuit Court Judge Robert Vance, 58, and another that killed Georgia civil rights attorney Robert Robinson.

Prosecutors have said Moody sent the bomb to the judge in anger over a 1972 bomb conviction that Moody felt derailed his career and sent another to the civil rights lawyer to confuse investigators.

Prosecutors have said Moody sent the bomb to the judge in anger over a 1972 bomb conviction that Moody felt derailed his career and sent another to the civil rights lawyer to confuse investigators.

Moody, who has spent more than 20 years on death row, has maintained his innocence and the execution was delayed as the U.S. Supreme Court considered last-minute appeals to spare his life, which the court rejected.

Age and poor health were major factors in a botched execution in Alabama earlier this year when the state tried to put to death Doyle Hamm, 61, who had terminal cancer and severely compromised veins.

The execution was called off while Hamm was on a death chamber gurney and medical staff could not place a line for the lethal injection.

Lawyers for Hamm called on the state not to try to execute him again and reached a settlement with Alabama in March that legal sources said would keep him out of the death chamber.

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Moody's execution highlighted aging U.S. death row populations that have led states to put to death 10 inmates age 70 or older since 2006, including Moody. Prior to that, there had been none in the modern era of U.S. executions, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

More than 40 percent of U.S. death row inmates are 50 years of age or older, according to the center.

(Reporting and writing by Jon Herskovitz in Austin, Texas; Additional reporting by David Beasley in Atlanta; Editing by Peter Cooney, Sandra Maler and Michael Perry)
Mbabane (Swaziland) (AFP) - Residents of the tiny African kingdom of Swaziland on Friday weighed up their country's new official name after the king unexpectedly announced it would now be known as "eSwatini".

King Mswati III, one of the world's few absolute monarchs, declared the name change at celebrations on Thursday marking 50 years since independence from British colonial rule.

Meaning "place of the Swazi", eSwatini is the local Swazi language name for the nation landlocked between South Africa and Mozambique.

Critics of the king, who took the throne in 1986 aged 18, said the move was an example of his authoritarian and wasteful reign in a country that suffers dire poverty.

"We see here King Mswati's autocratic style," said Alvit Dlamini, head of the Ngwane National Liberatory Congress, a political party which, like others, is not allowed to run in elections.

"He can't change the name of the country on his own. He was supposed to consult the nation."

Dlamini said that the change would be expensive for Swaziland, where 63 percent of the 1.3 million population live below the national poverty line, according the World Food Programme.

"This will come with major cost implications, we are a broke country," he said.

"And it will affect us with organisations like the African Union and United Nations, and in international protocols and agreements."

The Trade Union Congress of Swaziland warned that the process was not immediate, adding it would not immediately change its own name.

"When the king has made a pronouncement, due process must take its course," acting general secretary Mduduzi Gina told AFP.

- 'No name change overnight' -

"The legislature must initiate a process to amend the constitution. The change cannot be a knee-jerk reaction.

"We will not become the Trade Union Congress of eSwatini overnight. We will consult with our affiliates."

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For many Swazis, the change also raised concerns about updating paperwork and additional bureaucracy.

"Some of us don't suffer from an inferiority complex," said Mbabane resident Hynd Shongwe, in a dig at the king.

"The name change is neither here nor there. My only worry is the cost and inconvenience of official documents changing. If it was by choice, we would remain with the current documents."

Unlike some countries, Swaziland did not change its name when it gained independence in 1968 after being a British protectorate for more than 60 years.

The new name had been mooted for several years, with lawmakers considering the issue in 2015, and the king has used eSwatini in previous official speeches.
The Lee County Sheriffs Office released footage on April 18 showing a woman suspected of killing two people checking into a hotel in Florida, shortly after the second killing took place.

The footage, police say, shows 56-year-old Lois Riess of Bloomberg Prairie in Minnesota walking through a car park and into reception at the Hilton Hotel in Ocala, Florida.

Police were asking for assistance finding Riess, who was wanted on suspicion of killing her husband David Riess in Minnesota on March 23, as well as the killing of a woman, Pamela Hutchinson, in Florida on April 9 who police say may Reiss may have targeted in order to assume her identity.

Police previously released footage showing Riess talking to Hutchinson at a bar.

A nationwide search for Riess was underway, police said. Undersheriff Carmine Marceno of Lee County, Florida, said Riess should be considered armed and dangerous. Credit: Lee County Sheriffs Office via Storyful
The wave of teachers strikes has now officially spread to Arizona. Photo: Ross D. Franklin/AP/REX/Shutterstock

Spurning a pay raise offer from Governor Doug Ducey as too narrow and inadequately funded, Arizona teachers voted to walk off the job on April 26. Of the 57,000 teachers and school employees who participated in a vote organized by the NEA affiliate (the Arizona Education Association) and the grassroots group Arizona Educators United, 78 percent voted to strike.

The planned action is the culmination of weeks of protests by teachers (under the rubric #RedforEd, as supporters were urged to wear red to show solidarity) who decried low pay and years of tax-cut-driven education funding cuts. As in states where earlier teacher protests and walkouts have occurred (West Virginia, Kentucky, and Oklahoma), the Arizona action is a direct response to the fiscal policies Republicans have pursued in states they firmly control.

Ducey tried to forestall a strike last week by proposing to meet one of the protesters chief complaints via a 20 percent teacher pay raise implemented in phases between now and 2020. But he did not identify a revenue source for the plan, and did not address additional demands for pay raises for school support staff and restoration of past education funding cuts. Two education advocacy groups that originally expressed support for Duceys plan withdrew it once it became obvious the money wasnt there to make it feasible.

The delayed strike date was intended to make it possible for school districts and parents to plan for school shutdowns. But it might also produce a window for additional negotiations. Teachers are planning daily protests at the state capitol in the lead-up to the strike.

Still, an extended shutdown seems possible. Some conservatives were never onboard with Duceys offer. One of the teachers demands, a moratorium on future tax cuts until education spending has reached the national average, is sure to rile many Republicans.

Another factor is that the strike could expose teachers to serious repercussions. Under Arizona law, school districts choosing to play hardball could deem strikers as having canceled their employment contracts, and could also seek to revoke their teaching certificates. Since this is the first statewide teachers strike Arizona has experienced, this is somewhat unknown territory.

Whether the strike ends in relative success, as happened in West Virginia and Oklahoma, or simply produces the kind of simmering standoff between teachers and pols weve seen in Kentucky, #RedforEd is almost certain to spill over into the midterm election season. Arizonas House Democrats have already endorsed the strike as brave and righteous. Even if the immediate dispute is resolved, the teachers broader demands directly conflict with GOP priorities.

And lurking in the background is a separate dispute over a radical expansion in school vouchers that Ducey is backing, which is being challenged by a ballot initiative in November.

As the spring of discontent among red-state teachers this year continues, it could contribute to an Indian summer of red-hot political turbulence this fall.
US, British and French missile strikes on Syria had a limited impact on Syrian president Bashar al-Assads ability to carry out chemical weapons attacks, US assessments have reportedly shown.

Donald Trump tweeted Mission Accomplished after the attacks, which members of his administration claimed had struck the heart of the countrys chemical weapons programme.

His comments echoed those made by his predecessor George W Bush in 2001 after the US ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

The US, Britain and France destroyed three targets tied to Syrias weapons programme, the most important of which was the Barzah Research and Development Centre.

US intelligence concluded it was involved in the production and testing of chemical and biological warfare technology.

But four US officials told Reuters that currently available intelligence indicated Syrias stockpiles of chemicals and precursors were believed to be scattered far beyond those three targets.

It suggested that some of it was stored in schools and civilian apartment buildings, which one of the officials referred to as human shields.

Speaking to Congress a day before the strikes, the US defence secretary James Mattis acknowledged one of his top priorities in crafting the operation would be to minimise the loss of life to civilians.

Both the Syrian regime and Russia deny unleashing poison gas on 7 April during their offensive on Douma, which ended with the recapture of the town, that was the last rebel stronghold near the capital, Damascus.

Attempts to investigate were thwarted and when a UN security team visited the site of the suspected attack earlier this week, they were fired on by assailants, forcing them to retreat and further delaying the fact-finding mission by experts from the international chemical weapons watchdog.

US officials said the assessment showed the strikes, particularly on Barzah, did degrade Syrias chemical weapons capability.

But it also indicated a large quantity of chemical weapons was stored elsewhere.

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While crude, it is about as good as it needs to be for Assads purposes, another official said.

Chlorine, which the US assessed was used in the Douma attack, is a common industrial chemical that is not difficult to find or weaponise, experts say.

As a result, crippling a chlorine capability through military strikes is far more difficult than eliminating more sophisticated chemical or biological warfare agents.

Moved by the images of the civilian victims of the suspected chemical attack, Mr Trump made no secret he was convinced of the need for a powerful US response.

He even put Moscow and Tehran, which back the Assad regime, on edge with fiery rhetoric in the days before the strike, leaving open the possibility he might target them too.

But US officials familiar with US military planning told Reuters that Russia and Iran were never seriously considered as targets.

Beyond working to avoid civilian casualties, Mr Mattis and other US officials tailored the strikes in a way to avoid triggering retaliation from Moscow and Tehran.

The end result was an operation that did not target the Syrian regimes conventional military infrastructure, including aircraft that could deliver chemical agents in the future.

The revelations came ahead of a meeting between the head of Russias military general staff and Natos supreme allied commander.

Valery Gerasimov and Curtis Scaparrotti are set to meet in Azerbaijan to discuss the situation in Syria, according to the Tass news agency, which cited the Russian defence ministry.

The talks are also expected to touch on Nato and Russian military activity in Europe, Tass added.

Meanwhile, Isis militants have been give 48 hours to agree to withdraw from their last bastion in the capital, Damascus.

Syrian troops and allied Palestinian fighters are massing around the Yarmouk refugee camp, which Isis seized in 2015 after months of heavy fighting.

The extremists have been driven from nearly all the territory they once controlled in Syria and Iraq.

Additional reporting by agencies
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has returned one of Frances highest honors, branding the country a slave of the United States for launching joint strikes against his regime.

The Syrian government announced the decision to hand back the Legion d'honneur in a strongly worded statement, condemning strikes by France, the U.S. and the U.K. against the Syrian military over another alleged chemical attack against civilians in Ghouta, near Damascus.

It is no honor for President Assad to wear a decoration attributed by a slave country and follower of the United States that supports terrorists," a statement from the Syrian government said, according to France 24.

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Although intended as a snub, the statement came four days after a source in the French government told Reuters that it had already begun the official procedure to strip Assad of the award, given to him in 2001.

The Legion d'honneur was introduced by Napoleon in 1802 to reward military valor or exceptional service to France, though in the modern era around 3,000 people a year receive it and the range of recipients has become much more varied.

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French President Jacques Chirac awarded Assad the highest grade of the Legion d'honneur, the Grand Croix, shortly after the Syrian autocrat succeeded his father in power and at a time when France sought to "rekindle an old friendship" with Damascus.

04_20_Assad_Chirac

Patrick Kovarik/AFP/Getty Images

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Only a French president can determine who the Legion d'honneur goes to and President Emmanuel Macron has recently said that he seeks to reform the process.

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Under Macron, France has already stripped one foreigner, film producer Harvey Weinstein, of the award, after numerous allegations of sexual assault were made against him. The list of controversial recipients of Frances high honor include Saudi Arabias previous crown prince, Mohammed bin Nayef, deposed Romanian autocrat Nicolae Ceausescu and ousted Tunisian dictator Zine el Abidine ben Ali.

During Macrons first year in office the number of Legion d'honneur awards granted already appears to have reduced. He announced only 101 on Frances national holiday, Bastille Day, which is around five times less than in previous years.

This article was first written by Newsweek

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Beirut (AFP) - Syrian regime forces Friday intensified their bombardment of the Yarmuk Palestinian refugee camp on the edge of Damascus for a second successive day in a bid to dislodge Islamic State jihadists, a monitor said.

The UN Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA said it was "deeply concerned about the fate of civilians" and thousands of refugees in and around the camp.

"Regime forces have intensified their bombardments on several IS-controlled parts of Damascus, notably Hajar al-Aswad and in the Yarmuk camp," said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

AFP images showed smoke billowing from Yarmuk after air strikes and soldiers targeted areas of the camp with artillery fire.

The offensive was aimed at ridding the Damascus region of "terrorist groups", state news agency SANA reported.

Since regaining full control of Eastern Ghouta to the northeast of Damascus from rebels last week, the regime has turned its attention to jihadist-held districts in the capital's south.

For days, it has targeted these areas with shelling and rocket fire as efforts to secure a negotiated evacuation have so far failed.

Since 2015, IS has controlled large parts of Yarmuk as well as parts of Hajar al-Aswad and Tadamun.

The jihadists responded to the latest bombardment by firing missiles at nearby neighbourhoods, killing a civilian on Friday, said the Britain-based Observatory.

SANA said five civilians were wounded, after reporting that four were killed and 52 injured on Thursday.

In a statement on Friday, UNRWA said it was "deeply concerned about the fate of civilians after a week of increased violence and as intense fighting around Yarmuk continues".

The UN agency estimated there were about 6,000 Palestinian refugees in Yarmuk and about 6,000 in the surrounding areas.

IS swept across large parts of Syria and neighbouring Iraq in 2014, declaring a cross-border "caliphate" in areas seized by the jihadists.

At its height their pseudo-state covered an area the size of Italy, but IS has since lost ground and now controls only around five percent of Syrian territory, according to Syria expert Fabrice Balanche.
A 3-year-old in Indiana accidentally shot her pregnant mother, leaving the woman in a critical but stable condition, local media reported.

The child shot Shaneque Thomas, 21, who police said is six weeks pregnant, in the shoulder Tuesday outside a Platos Closet thrift store in Merrillville.

Police said Menzo Brazier, the victims boyfriend and father of her two kids, ages 3 and 1, left his legal 9-millimeter handgun loaded in between the console and his front passenger seat before going in the store, according to Chicago station WFLD.

After that, the couples 3-year-old daughter somehow grabbed the gun and pulled the trigger. The bullet went through the back of the seat and struck Thomas in her right shoulder.

[The girl] had no idea what she had done and she was very scared, Detective Sgt. James Bogner told NBC Chicago.

Police said she got out of the driver seat and collapsed after opening the door to the back seat where her children were.

Platos Closet employee Hadassah Zirkle told WLS that people immediately noticed something terrible had happened.

We just heard screaming. We ran outside with a bunch of other people. Someone said someone was hurt and bleeding, she said.

Brazier reportedly ran out of the store and tried to stop the bleeding until paramedics arrived.

He said, Did you kill yourself? Why did you do this to me? store employee Rebecca Todd told WMAQ TV.

He rushed over, he was bawling his eyes out, her co-worker Paloma Prieto said.

Employees brought the children into the store and comforted them, while first responders arrived on the scene and transported Thomas to a local hospital for treatment. She was transported to Loyola Hospital in critical but stable condition, WLS reported.

Brazier was charged with child endangerment. The two children are now with Child Protective Services.

A loaded weapon with children in the back seat: real careless act, Merrillville police Chief Joe Petruch told WMAQ. I hope she survives the gunshot wound.

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This incident is similar to a 2016 case that happened in Florida. The 4-year-old son of a gun-rights advocate accidentally shot her as she was driving.

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Isla Culebra, Puerto Rico, kayaks on Tamarindo Beach

Most of the power has been restored to Puerto Rico, after an island-wide outage threw the country into darkness on Wednesday.

Puerto Rico has dealt with smaller outages in the past, but this was the first time that power was knocked out on the entire island since Hurricane Maria struck seven months ago. Crews were able to restore electricity to one million residents by 7 a.m. on Thursday, and by Friday morning, the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority said that power had been restored to about 97% of the island.

The outage was caused by a contractor working on the grid and accidentally downed a powerline with a bulldozer. That contractor, who also caused another outage last week, has been fired.

Carla Campos, acting executive director of Puerto Rico Tourism Company, told Yahoo Finance that this was an isolated incident and uncommon for the island. Before this outage, about 95% of our grid had been restored, so we expect that to be the case again when the entire outage is fixed in the next few hours.

While some residents wait for an end to the darkness, tourism has continued uninterrupted.

A lot of the proprietors and hotels have contingency plans, like back-up generators, said Campos. So many of our visitors probably werent affected.

On Thursday, 130 hotels on the island were fully operational, as was the Luis Munoz Marin International Airport (SJU). Airports in Ponce, Aguadilla, Ceiba, Culebra & Vieques are also back up and running.

Hurricane Maria recovery efforts continue on the island, especially in rural areas, but tourists have helped the travel industry to bounce back. Spring break and Easter brought record-breaking hotel occupancy and airlines are opening up new routes every day. Currently, 20 airlines fly into SJU, averaging 110 daily flights with a seat volume of 391,000. That capacity will grow by 81,000 this summer as the busy travel season gets underway. If all goes as planned, the tourism department expects air access will be on par with last years levels.

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Cruises have also rebounded quickly. By the end of June, Puerto Rico will have received 1.04 million passengers since Hurricane Maria hit in September. Additionally, 14 vessels have homeports (the departure point) in San Juan, four more than last year.

Tourism was the first sector to get back up and running in Puerto Rico, said Campos. Visiting is the best way to help the island  staying at hotels, eating at restaurants, and shopping locally.

Brittany is reporter at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter @bjonescooper.

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Michael Cohen, President Donald Trumps personal attorney, has dropped his libel lawsuits against BuzzFeed and research firm Fusion GPS but still continues to face other legal troubles.

Mr Cohen had sued the two separately over the January 2017 release of the now infamous dossier written by former MI6 spy Christopher Steele, prepared for the political research firm and published by the news outlet. He alleged the dossier contained false information regarding his family ties to Russia and details about a trip he took to the country.

He claimed the information ruined his reputation. Mr Cohens attorney David Schwartz said in a statement to Politico: "The decision to voluntarily discontinue these cases was a difficult one. We believe the defendants defamed my client, and vindicating Mr Cohens rights was  and still remains  important. But given the events that have unfolded, and the time, attention, and resources needed to prosecute these matters, we have dismissed the matters, despite their merits.

The 35-page dossier, which had been commissioned by Fusion GPS as political opposition research and paid for by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clintons campaign, had laid out a host of unverified pieces of information about the US President's possible ties to Russia, including the claim that he solicited prostitutes during a visit to Moscow.

It also stated that Mr Cohen met with Russian operatives in Europe, possibly Prague to attend a meeting to clean up the mess created by public disclosures of other Trump associates reported ties to Russia, Politico reported.

Mr Cohen has denied having any such meeting. BuzzFeed News said in a statement after the defamation suit was dropped that "if there's one thing Democrats and Republicans agree on today, it's that the dossier was an important part of the government's investigation into potential collusion between the Trump Campaign and Russia.

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Fusion GPS said in its statement: "With his decision, it appears that Mr. Cohen can now focus on his many other legal travails.

The beleaguered lawyer has admitted to paying nearly $130,000 of his own money just before the November 2016 election to Stormy Daniels, an adult film star, as part of a nondisclosure agreement after the president and Ms Daniels allegedly had an affair in 2006.

Ms Daniels is suing Mr Trump for the right to speak about the affair, claiming that Mr Trump never actually signed the document. The president has denied the affair and Mr Cohen has repeatedly said that what he did was legal.

He is also tied to the ongoing FBI investigation into alleged collusion between Mr Trumps 2016 campaign team and Russian officials. Bureau agents raided Mr Cohens home, office, and hotel room last week and though it does not appear the seizure of documents was directly related to the investigation of special prosecutor Robert Mueller, it was based on a referral from him to New York prosecutors.

He commented to CNN that the raid was upsetting to say the least and said after seeing what the investigation has done to his family, in hindsight he would have handled the payment to Ms Daniels differently.

Michael Avenatti, attorney to Ms Daniels, has filed a motion in the lawsuit to depose Mr Trump and Mr Cohen that is scheduled to be heard on 30 April. He also filed a motion asking for a jury trial no more than 90 days from 27 March. "We expect to be placing the president and his fixer under oath in the coming months," Mr Avenatti said.
President Donald Trump derided California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) on Thursday after Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen (right) had thanked Brown for agreeing to deploy National Guard troops to the state's border with Mexico. (Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON  President Donald Trump attacked California on Thursday for doing what he and his administration asked it to do: agreeing to deploy state National Guard members to help the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency.

The president tweeted that California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) had agreed to send the troops to the border with Mexico to do nothing. He was referring to Browns commitment on Wednesday to dispatch 400 troops, as ordered by Trump, but with the caveat that they would not conduct immigration enforcement or build a wall. Trump said he wouldnt fund Browns charade.

But if Browns order constitutes doing nothing, Trump would probably be disappointed to hear that National Guard troops being sent to the border by other states are not slated to directly participate in enforcing immigration laws or help build a wall, either.

Government officials told reporters in Washington on Monday that the guard members would be helping CBP in ways that dont involve direct contact with unauthorized immigrants. They will instead be aiding with aerial surveillance, monitoring cameras, operating and maintaining equipment and other administrative tasks, the officials from CBP, the National Guard and the Department of Defense said.

None would be required to build border wall as of now, the officials said.

The potential deployment in California could be somewhat different. Brown demanded that his states troops focus solely on fighting criminal gangs, human trafficking and the smuggling of drugs and firearms. He turned down the administrations initial terms for deploying the National Guard, Trump administration officials said Monday.

Brown said on Wednesday that the federal government had agreed to fund his plan for the troop deployment, and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen tweeted her thanks to the governor that evening. She added that the deals final details were still being worked out.

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!  Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen (@SecNielsen) April 19, 2018

The California National Guards tasks will include radio communications, operating surveillance cameras, planning, training, intelligence analysis, paralegal assistance and operating motor transport and heavy equipment, a DHS official said Friday. Those are similar to what other states National Guards will do to support CBP as of now.

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The White House did not clarify whether Trump supported funding for other National Guard troops who wont be directly involved with immigration enforcement.

Trumps criticism of Brown and California comes after months of attacks on the state and its lawmakers over immigration. California is home to the nations largest population of undocumented immigrants, and has a so-called sanctuary law that limits police cooperation with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, although police do turn individuals over to the federal government in certain instances.

The president ordered the border deployment of National Guard troops earlier this month in response to an uptick in apprehensions at the boundary. Many of those arrested have been families and unaccompanied children seeking asylum or other relief in the U.S.

This article has been updated with details on the California National Guards plans to assist Customs and Border Protection.

Also on HuffPost

April 2015

At an event hosted by Texas Patriots PAC: Everythings coming across the border: the illegals, the cars, the whole thing. Its like a big mess. Blah. Its like vomit.

June 2015

At a speech announcing his campaign: "When Mexico sends its people, theyre not sending their best. Theyre not sending you. Theyre not sending you. Theyre sending people that have lots of problems, and theyre bringing those problems with us. Theyre bringing drugs. Theyre bringing crime. Theyre rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."

August 2015

On NBC's "Meet the Press": Were going to keep the families together, we have to keep the families together, but they have to go."

September 2015

On CBS's "60 Minutes": Were rounding em up in a very humane way, in a very nice way. And theyre going to be happy because they want to be legalized. And, by the way, I know it doesnt sound nice. But not everything is nice.

November 2015

On MSNBC's "Morning Joe": You are going to have a deportation force, and you are going to do it humanely."

February 2016

At a GOP primary debate: We have at least 11 million people in this country that came in illegally. They will go out. They will come back  some will come back, the best, through a process.

March 2016

At a press conference when asked if he would consider allowing undocumented immigrants to stay: "We either have a country or we dont. We either have a country or we dont. We have borders or we dont have borders. And at this moment, the answer is absolutely not.

April 2016

At an event hosted by NBC's "Today Show": Theyre going to go, and were going to create a path where we can get them into this country legally, OK? But it has to be done legally. ... Theyre going to go, and then come back and come back legally.

July 2016

At the Republican National Convention: "Tonight, I want every American whose demands for immigration security have been denied  and every politician who has denied them  to listen very closely to the words I am about to say. On January 21st of 2017, the day after I take the oath of office, Americans will finally wake up in a country where the laws of the United States are enforced."

September 2016

At a rally: Anyone who has entered the United States illegally is subject to deportation. That is what it means to have laws and to have a country. Otherwise we dont have a country.

September 2016

On "The Dr. Oz Show": Well, under my plan the undocumented or, as you would say, illegal immigrant wouldnt be in the country. They only come in the country legally.

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President Donald Trump repeatedly lied for decades about his net worth to attain a higher spot on the famed Forbes 400 list and brand himself as New York's wealthiest real estate developer, according to a reporter he encountered in 1982 for the magazines first such list.

Journalist Jonathan Greenberg described how Trump originally claimed that year to be worth $900 million when he was contacted for Forbess inaugural wealth list, the reporter wrote in a story published Friday by The Washington Post.

Trump reportedly cited a supposed 80 percent stake in the Trump Organizations real estate empire, consisting of an apparent 23,000 apartments across Staten Island, Brooklyn and Queens. He also said he had vast control of the property, not his father, Fred Trump.

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Donald Trump claimed each of the apartments was worth $40,000, but when Greenberg questioned Trumps valuation, the budding real estate titan replied, OK, then $20,000 each.

Applying his own valuation of $9,000, Greenberg concluded that the Trump family was worth $200 million, with Donald and Fred each valued at $100 million on the first Forbes 400 list.

However, when that list was being compiled, Trump actually had no stake in his fathers company and was worth less than $5 million, according to the report. And Fred Trump did not relinquish ownership of his company until his death in 1999.

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Trump even deployed Roy Cohn, his infamous lawyer, to convince Greenberg that Trump had as much as $500 million in liquid assets, just cash alone and that Trumps worth had nothing to do with his fathers empire.

This is Roy. Roy Cohn! You cant quote me! But Donny tells me youre putting together this list of rich people. He says youve got him down for just $200 million! Thats way too low, way too low! Cohn said in a recording made by Greenberg of their conversation.

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Listen, Im Donnys personal lawyer, but he said I could talk to you about this, Cohn continued. I am sitting here looking at his current bank statement. It shows hes got more than $500 million in liquid assets, just cash. Thats just Donald, nothing to do with Fred, and its just cash.

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But Cohn refused to show proof of the bank statement.

GettyImages-948330206

Getty Images/Joe Raedle

In 1984, Trump used his pseudonym John Barron to call Greenberg and challenge Forbes's $200 million valuation of his wealth and to claim he had more than a 90 percent stake in the family company.

Trumps practice of trying to convince Forbes he was worth far more than its estimations would continue for years. Fast-forward to 1989, when Trump claimed to be worth $3.7 billion, including $900 million in liquid assets.

Instead, a New Jersey Casino Commission report indicated Trump was worth just $205 million in late 1990, given Trumps positions in Atlantic City casinos at the time. Trump did not make the magazines list that year and did not appear on it until 1996. He has remained on the list ever since.

This article was first written by Newsweek

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ADP CEO Carlos Rodriquez on CNBC last year, with an image of investor Bill Ackman in the background. Source: CNBC

Dozens of companies have given employees one-time bonuses on account of the tax cuts President Trump signed into law last year.

But not Automatic Data Processing (ADP), the payroll and human resources company. In fact, ADPs CEO recently told employees that investors, not workers, will see most of the benefits of tax cuts.

At an internal town hall meeting on March 15, ADP CEO Carlos Rodriguez fielded an employee question on what the company planned to do with the savings from corporate tax cuts. Rodriguez alluded to other companies that have given bonuses to employees, but said thats not what ADP had in mind. You should expect that most of that benefit that we got as a result of tax reform, I think flows through to our investors, Rodriguez told employees watching nationwide on a company feed. I recognize thats not a popular answer and not everybodys going to like that answer, but I think that is really kind of where ADP is today.

Yahoo Finance obtained a recording of Rodriguezs comments. Heres an audio file with his complete answer to the question:

On April 11, ADP raised its dividend by 10%, increasing returns to shareholders. Rodriguez, the CEO, owns about 125,000 shares of company stock, worth nearly $15 million, according to S&P Capital IQ. At least 10 other company officials own more than 25,000 shares in the company, so they are among the investors who will benefit if the stock price rises. Of course, its typical for CEOs to own shares in the companies they lead, and Rodriguezs stake is not unusually large.

ADPs shares have been flat so far in 2018, and theyre up about 13% during the last 12 months. Thats roughly in line with the S&P 500 index.

ADPs stock, in blue, compared with the S&P 500, in green. Source: Yahoo Finance

Critics of the Trump tax cuts have argued that slashing the corporate rate from 35% to 21% will boost profits and stock prices, benefiting the investor classbut do little to help ordinary workers. Rodriguezs surprisingly candid remarks provide one example of a company that seems to be doing just that.

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In a statement emailed to Yahoo Finance, Rodriguez confirmed that we dont have any plans for a one-time bonus due to tax reform. ADP, he said, prefers a pay for performance approach that directly links bonuses and merit increases to our performance, not one-time events. We are still considering other initiatives for associates. The recent dividend increase is consistent with our proud 43-year track record of annual dividend increases, Rodriquez said, while reiterating that the company anticipates another dividend increase in November. And he pointed out that ADP has earned plaudits as a top workplace from LinkedIn and Fortune.

Still, the company has faced pressure recently from activist investor Bill Ackman, whose firm Pershing Square Capital Management has a 7.2% stake in the company. At a hedge-fund conference on April 17, Ackman said, ADP is one of the biggest beneficiaries of tax reform of any U.S. corporation. Thats because ADP operates mostly in the United States, leaving more revenue subject to lower tax rates than other large companies.

Last October, Ackman told Yahoo Finances Julia LaRoche that ADP is one of the least efficient big companies, while calling for moves to streamline and modernize the firm. He lost a proxy fight last year to install himself and two allies on the companys board, but is still calling for reforms. At the April 17 conference, Ackman suggested tax cuts and other factors could push ADPs net income more than 20% above the companys current guidance by 2020.

While we won the proxy contest, Rodriguez said in his statement to Yahoo Finance, we continue to work hard on executing our strategy and we give strong consideration to all the feedback we receive from investors regarding our business and board. With respect to Mr. Ackman, we maintain an open dialogue and will continue to do so.

The Trump tax cuts are boosting profits at hundreds of companies. Yet they remain controversial, with just 29% saying they approve of the legislation in a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. A Yahoo Finance survey conducted April 18 found many people feel the cuts favor the wealthy over the middle class and put too much financial burden on future taxpayers. They also think its fishy that tax cuts for businesses are permanent, while tax cuts for individuals are temporary.

Kevin Hassett, chairman of President Trumps Council of Economic Advisers, defended the tax cuts in an April 17 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. He cited evidence that the tax cuts have pushed wages up, spurred business investment and boosted productivity. The problem for Republican backers of the tax cuts is that many voters arent yet seeing the evidence Hassett is pointing to. A more visible flow of benefits to workers is one thing that might change that.

Confidential tip line: rickjnewman@yahoo.com. Click here to get Ricks stories by email.

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Rick Newman is the author of four books, including Rebounders: How Winners Pivot from Setback to Success. Follow him on Twitter: @rickjnewman

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Tom Perez wants damages. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is suing the Russian government, Donald Trumps campaign, and WikiLeaks for conspiring to steal its emails, taint its image, and put its preferred presidential candidate at an unfair disadvantage in the 2016 election. In a lawsuit filed in federal court Friday, the DNC seeks millions in damages and a formal acknowledgment that the defendants conspired to hack its computers, extract private information, and publish it with the intention of aiding Trumps candidacy.

The 66-page complaint collects the publicly known facts about Russias attempts to intervene in the 2016 race  and the interest that various Trump campaign associates evinced in benefiting from that interference  into a sweeping narrative of treacherous villainy, delivered in purple (yet legalistic) prose.

The conspiracy constituted an act of previously unimaginable treachery: the campaign of the presidential nominee of a major party in league with a hostile foreign power to bolster its own chance to win the presidency, the lawsuit alleges.

The DNC will need to clear a few hurdles to win its case, the most formidable being that foreign governments enjoy immunity from most U.S. lawsuits. The committee tries to surmount that obstacle by arguing that Russias trespass on to the DNCs private servers constituted an attempt to steal trade secrets and commit economic espionage  offenses that the Kremlin can be held accountable for under American law.

Further, while its clear that several Trump campaign officials were more than happy to aid and abet Russian efforts to hurt Hillary Clintons candidacy through cybercrimes, there has yet to be dispositive, public evidence that they ever entered into an illegal conspiracy with the Russian government. The lawsuit asserts that Trumps allies entered into an agreement with the Kremlin to promote Donald Trumps candidacy through illegal means.

Regardless, the complaint does throw a spotlight on the (pretty darn damning) fact that the Trump campaign received repeated messages that Russia intended to interfere with U.S. elections, and responded by gleefully welcom[ing] Russias help  instead of, say, reporting the Kremlins plot to the relevant authorities.

The president himself is not listed among the lawsuit defendants, but Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Jared Kushner, George Papadopoulos, Rick Gates, Julian Assange, and a host of Russian entities are.

While the official aim of the lawsuit is to collect millions in damages to compensate for financial and personal costs of the cyberattacks, its primary aim may be to create yet another source of legal and political jeopardy for the president and his aides. So long as the DNCs case proves strong enough to proceed, Trump & Co. could be forced to testify under oath about their contacts with Russian operatives during the 2016 campaign.
DUBAI (Reuters) - Twenty people were killed in an air strike by a Saudi-led military coalition in southwestern Yemen on Friday, residents said. The attack hit a car transporting 20 passengers south of Taiz province, locals told Reuters. Six bodies had been identified but the rest were charred beyond recognition, they added. A spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition said it would investigate the report, but declined to comment further. "We take this report very seriously," he said. The coalition intervened in Yemen's civil war in 2015 against the Iran-aligned Houthis who ousted the internationally recognized government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi. The Houthis now control the capital Sanaa. Coalition air strikes have repeatedly struck civilian targets while trying to target Houthi forces during the three-year war. The coalition says it does not target civilians. Houthi fighters killed two people, including a woman, and wounded four others on Friday in an attack north of Taiz, residents and medical sources said. The Yemen war has killed more than 10,000 people, displaced more than 2 million and driven the country to the verge of famine, according to the United Nations. (Writing by Ghaida Ghantous; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
Gaza City (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) - Thousands protested along the Gaza Strip's border with Israel in a fourth straight Friday of mass demonstrations and clashes, with four Palestinians shot dead by Israeli forces.

Gazans also flew dozens of kites near the border fence, in some cases carrying Molotov cocktails and one with a swastika painted on it, in a new tactic that sparked at least two small fires in Israeli territory this week.

Israeli army gunfire killed a 15-year-old boy and two young men, aged 24 and 25, in northern Gaza, rescue workers said, and a 29-year-old Palestinian was shot dead in the south of the coastal enclave.

UN special coordinator for the Middle East peace process Nikolay Mladenov took to Twitter to air his feelings on Friday night and called for an inquiry into the killings.

"It is OUTRAGEOUS to shoot at children!" he wrote.

"How does the killing of a child in #Gaza today help #peace? It doesnt! It fuels anger and breeds more killing.

"#Children must be protected from #violence, not exposed to it, not killed! This tragic incident must be investigated."

The Palestinian ambassador at the United Nations Riyad Mansour renewed his call for a "transparent and independent investigation".

The latest deaths brought to 38 the toll of those killed by Israeli forces since March 30, with hundreds of others also wounded by gunfire, according to Gaza's health ministry.

On Friday alone, 440 protesters were wounded by gunfire or needed treatment for tear gas inhalation, the ministry said.

Israel says it has only opened fire when necessary to guard its border and prevent violence, but no Israelis have been wounded and its open-fire rules have come under scrutiny.

With the protests seen by Israel as posing a challenge to its security forces, military aircraft dropped leaflets in the border area early Friday warning against approaching the fence.

Referring to the Islamist movement that runs the Gaza Strip, the leaflet said: "You are participating in violent riots. The Hamas terror organisation is taking advantage of you in order to carry out terror attacks."

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It added: "Stay away from the fence and do not attempt to harm it; avoid using weapons and committing violent acts against Israeli security forces and Israeli citizens."

The number of protesters on Friday was lower than the previous three weeks, but still in the thousands.

Both Palestinians killed were shot east of Jabaliya in the north of the Gaza Strip, the health ministry said.

Among the thousands gathered to protest, at least hundreds were approaching the fence and throwing stones and burning tyres, an AFP correspondent said.

Israeli forces were using tear gas in addition to live fire.

Israel's military said some 3,000 Palestinians were involved in "riots, attempting to approach the security infrastructures, burning tyres adjacent to it and attempting to fly kites with burning items attached".

"Several kites crossed into Israel and were extinguished when required."

It said in the statement that "troops are responding with riot dispersal means and are firing in accordance with the rules of engagement."

Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman said while touring the Israeli side of the border on Friday: "The thing that the other side must understand is that there is a determined and skilled army here."

He added that "behind it stands a determined people that is backing up the army."

- 'No place for you' -

Tens of thousands have gathered on previous Fridays as part of the protests near the border. The protests are meant to last six weeks, but peak on Fridays.

A smaller number have approached the fence and thrown stones or rolled burning tyres toward Israeli soldiers on the other side.

Israel says firebombs and explosive devices have also been used.

Israel has pledged to stop damage to the fence, infiltrations and attacks, and alleges there have been attempts at all three.

It accuses Hamas, with whom it has fought three wars since 2008, of using the protests as cover to carry out violence.

Palestinians say protesters are being shot while posing no threat to soldiers.

The European Union and UN chief Antonio Guterres have called for an independent investigation into the deaths, but Israel has rejected it.

The protests are calling for Palestinian refugees to be allowed to return to their former lands now inside Israel.

More than 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled during the 1948 war surrounding the creation of Israel.

Israelis say allowing the so-called right of return would mean the Jewish state's destruction.

Protest organisers officially labelled the latest event in support of "martyrs and prisoners," but on social media some Palestinians dubbed it the "Friday of Kites."

Gazans pinned notes to some of the kites telling Israelis "there is no place for you in Palestine."
By Tom Miles and Stephanie Nebehay GENEVA (Reuters) - The United States hopes to reach agreement with Britain, France and Germany to address President Donald Trump's concerns about the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, Washington's disarmament ambassador said on Thursday. The crux of the accord between Iran and six major powers - Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States - was that Tehran would curb its nuclear programme in return for relief from international sanctions that hobbled its economy. U.N. nuclear inspectors have since repeatedly verified Iranian compliance with the deal and sanctions were rescinded. On Jan. 12, however, Trump sent 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 critical U.S. sanctions relief that it entails. 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. Iran has ruled out renegotiating the deal. U.S. disarmament ambassador Robert Wood said Washington had been having "intense" discussions with its three major European allies ahead of the May 12 deadline. He said Washington wanted to address the Iranian ballistic missile programme, 10-year "sunset" clauses for limits on its nuclear activity and Tehran's "destabilising behaviour in the Middle East", as well as to toughen inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Iran. These issues have to be dealt with. We are hopeful that an agreement can be reached that the president can feel comfortable with, Wood told a news conference in Geneva. "We want the IAEA to get access to all the sites they need to. The Iranians obfuscate and deny, say they'll offer access and then deny it. It's important for the IAEA to go anywhere it needs to, including military sites," Wood said. European officials said after their latest round of talks on April 12 they were making headway toward an agreement, though remain unclear whether a deal could be struck on the sunset clauses and if Trump would embrace their efforts. Iran has said its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes only and that its ballistic missiles are solely for defence and having nothing to do with its nuclear activity. It has said it will stick to the accord as long as the other parties do, but will "shred" the deal if Washington pulls out. While Trump has often lambasted the deal struck under his predecessor Barack Obama, the other big power signatories have said the accord is crucial to reducing the risk of wider war in the Middle East and urged Washington to stick by it. Speaking ahead of French President Emmanuel Macron's trip to Washington next week, an aide to the leader said there had been progress in talks with the United States, but Paris was being prudent as the "moment of truth" approached. "We know that President Trump hasn't made his decision yet so we are continuing to exchange and defend our arguments," the aide said. "But we must be very cautious and we shouldn't expect a breakthrough on this issue during the visit to Trump." (Additional reporting by John Irish in Paris; editing by Stephanie Nebehay and Mark Heinrich)
TORONTO (Reuters) - A U.S. woman has been sentenced to life in a Canadian prison for her role in an aborted Valentine's Day mass shooting at a shopping mall in 2015, local media reported on Friday.

Lindsay Souvannarath, 26, pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy to commit murder. A Canadian man also accused in the plot, Randall Shepard, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2016.

The two were accused of planning a mass murder and suicide at the shopping center in the Atlantic province of Nova Scotia. They were arrested at the Halifax airport after Souvannarath arrived from Illinois, allegedly to carry out the massacre.

Souvannarath will have to serve at least 10 years before she is eligible for parole, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Her lawyer could not immediately be reached for comment.

Souvannarath and Shepard were arrested after police received a tip about their alleged plans to shoot as many people as possible at the Halifax Shopping Centre and then kill themselves. A third man believed linked to the plot was found dead in a house in Halifax.

The two men were childhood friends in Halifax and reportedly met Souvannarath online. All three admired the two teenagers who killed 12 students and a teacher in a high school shooting spree in Columbine, Colorado, in 1999, according to media reports.

(Reporting by Anna Mehler Paperny; Editing by Tom Brown)
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain will consider compensating members of the "Windrush generation" of post-War Caribbean immigrants who may have suffered after being wrongly labeled as illegal entrants, Prime Minister Theresa May said on Friday. Thousands of workers from the Caribbean were invited to Britain to plug labor shortfalls between 1948 and 1971, but some of their descendants have been caught up in a tightening of immigration rules. In some cases they have been denied health services, prevented from working or even threatened with deportation "The UK will do whatever it takes, including where appropriate payment of compensation, to resolve the anxieties and problems which some of the Windrush generation have suffered," May said in a speech to Commonwealth leaders. "These people are British, they are part of us, they helped to build Britain and we are all the stronger for their contributions," she added. Britain has already voiced regret in a letter to the 12 countries involved, the first of whose workers arrived in 1948 on the "Empire Windrush" ship from Jamaica. (Reporting By Andrew MacAskill; editing by Stephen Addison)
London (AFP) - Britain would "strongly support" Zimbabwe's return to the Commonwealth, the foreign ministry said on Friday after talks between British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and his Zimbabwean counterpart in London.

Sibusiso Moyo was in London for talks on the margins of the 2018 Commonwealth summit aimed at resetting the isolated country's relations with the world after the downfall of president Robert Mugabe.

Britain's Foreign and Commonwealth Office said the meeting ushered in a "new era" in relations between London and Harare and "symbolises Zimbabwe's commitment to engaging meaningfully with the international community".

"The UK would strongly support Zimbabwe's re-entry and a new Zimbabwe that is committed to political and economic reform that works for all its people," it said in a statement.

Launching bitter verbal assaults against Britain, the former colonial ruler, Mugabe angrily pulled Zimbabwe out of the Commonwealth in 2003 after its membership was suspended over violent and graft-ridden elections the previous year.

Zimbabwe had fractured relations with the West and became increasingly isolated under Mugabe, who held power since independence from Britain in 1980 until his shock ousting last year.

Johnson said that while Zimbabwe had made "impressive progress" under new President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who came to power in November after a brief military intervention, there was a long road ahead to stable democracy and proper rule of law.

"That's why Britain, the Commonwealth and the wider international community will do everything it can in supporting Zimbabwe on its path of reform," he said in a statement.

"July's election will be a bellwether for the direction of a new Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwe government must deliver the free and fair elections the people of Zimbabwe deserve and which it has promised."

The Gambia returned to the fold in February under a new president, five years after his predecessor pulled the west African nation out of the voluntary bloc.

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The process to rejoin took 12 months. Applicants need to sign up to the 53-country group's charter of values.

Commonwealth Secretary-General Patricia Scotland said Zimbabwe would have to go through the same formal application process if they wanted to return.

"Zimbabwe has expressed an interest," she told AFP.

"And it must be really good news that Zimbabwe are approaching us at this early stage, with what looks like the start of the conversation.

"We said in 2009 and 2011 that the door was open and that if Zimbabwe would, at some stage in the future, like to return to the Commonwealth, then that opportunity remained."
The US Air Force has ordered the development of a hypersonic cruise missile, which it hopes will travel at Mach 5 - five times the speed of sound - through air defences and keep fighter jet pilots out of harms way.

Defence giant Lockheed Martin has been tasked with producing the weapon as part of a prototype programme led by the US Department of Defence.

The Air Force is using prototyping to explore the art-of-the-possible and to advance these technologies to a capability as quickly as possible, a spokeswoman said.

If the "hypersonic conventional strike weapon is successful Lockhead Martin could earn up to $928m (653m).

The announcement comes shortly after the head of US Strategic Command, General John Hytens, warned American senators that the country currently lacked any defence against hypersonic missiles.

Both Russia and China are aggressively pursuing hypersonic capabilities. Weve watched them test those capabilities, he said last month.

The hearing was held days after Vladimir Putin gave details about Russias tests of its own hypersonic prototype, the Kinzhal missile.

Calling it an ideal weapon, the Russian president said their speed makes it invulnerable to current missile and air defence systems since interceptor missiles are, simply put, not fast enough.

No end date has been set for the new contract, which will see Lockheed Martin undertake the design, development, engineering, systems integration, test, logistics planning, and aircraft integration support of all the elements of a hypersonic, conventional, air-launched, stand-off weapon at its base in Alabama.

Stand-off weapons, like those used by American pilots in last week's air strikes on suspected chemical weapons sites in Syria, are launched from outside the range of defensive missile batteries.

Hypersonic missiles are designed to evade those defences by flying at five times the speed of sound, or faster.

Earlier this week, the Pentagons research and development chief, Michael Griffin, told members of Congress this week that current defences mean the US will not see these things coming, leaving little time for response.

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Today the most significant advance by our adversaries has been the Chinese development of what is now today a pretty mature system for conventional prompt strike at multi-thousand-kilometre ranges, he said.

He has previously called hypersonic technology, the Defence Departments first priority".

The US has previously tested the X-51 Waverider, a hypersonic aircraft developed by Boeing that is capable of flying at Mach 5. It is launched from a B-52 Stratofortress bomber while airborne, and powered by a rocket booster and ramjet engine.

Lockheeds new hypersonic project is one of two currently being pursued by the Air Force, a spokeswoman said.

The second is the Tactical Boost Glide system, according to US media reports. A boost glide craft is accelerated to high speed by a rocket before gliding unpowered to its destination, the US military said.
An early rendering of a hypersonic weapon system developed by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency and the US Air Force - David Neyland

The US Air Force is awarding almost $1 billion (700m) to Lockheed Martin to develop a hypersonic missile as it tries to keep up with recent strides made by Russia and China in building ever faster weapons.

Moscow last month claimed the lead in the race to develop missiles that can travel at many times the speed of sound. Its defence ministry revealed video footage of its plane-launched Kinzhal missile, which is reportedly capable of accelerating to ten times the speed of sound.

American officials have also expressed concern that China was building missiles that could outrace or outfox its existing defence and interceptor systems.

Now the Pentagon says Lockheed is to receive up to $929 million to design and build a hypersonic conventional strike weapon.

This contract provides for the design, development, engineering, systems integration, test, logistics planning, and aircraft integration support of all the elements of a hypersonic, conventional, air-launched, stand-off weapon, it said in a statement.

The technology is at the forefront of todays non-nuclear arms race.

Most efforts focus on boost-glide weapons that use rockets to accelerate to high speeds at the edge of space, before the payload separates and glides unpowered to the target.

Not only can they outrun efforts to shoot them down, but they can be manoeuvred in-flight unlike ballistic missiles that follow parabolic trajectories.

Last month, Vladimir Putin claimed that Russia had tested a new generation of nuclear weapons that were invulnerable to US missile defences.

A Kinzhal hypersonic missile is fired from a MiG-31 get in footage released by Moscow Credit: AP

His rhetoric was backed up days later when the defence ministry released footage of a Kinzhal  Russian for dagger - missile being launched from a Mig-31 fighter jet.

Earlier this week, Mike Griffin, the Pentagon's new defence undersecretary for research and engineering told Congress that China had also pulled ahead of the US in hypersonic technologies.

'Like a ball of fire' | New strategic weapons announced by Vladimir Putin

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Our adversaries are presenting us today with a renewed challenge of a sophisticated, evolving threat, he told the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday.

We are in turn preparing to meet that challenge and to restore the technical overmatch of the United States armed forces that we have traditionally held.

He has repeatedly warned that time is running out for the US to maintain its technological dominance over enemies.
Washington (AFP) - The United States dropped some restrictions Thursday on sales of its advanced drones in order to reinforce the armies of its allies and compete with China on the world arms market.

President Donald Trump's White House announced an update to its policy on arms transfers to promote US exports and jobs, and specifically to loosen the rules on selling unmanned warplanes.

Trump's chief trade advisor, Peter Navarro, said the move was designed to reverse former president Barack Obama's "myopic" decision to limit even US allies' access to drone technology.

Allowing US arms firms to directly market drones instead of forcing foreign customers to apply to the government would, he said, allow them to compete against sales of Chinese "knock-offs."

"The administration's UAS export policy will level the playing field by enabling US firms to increase their direct sales to authorized allies and partners," he said, referring to "Unmanned Aerial Systems".

Navarro said US weapons and aerospace exports are worth a trillion dollars a year, support 2.5 million well-paid jobs and form a key plank of Trump's ambition to wipe out America's trade deficit.

But he said the market for drones alone could grow to $50 billion in a decade and that officials are "seeing Chinese replicas of American UAS technology deployed on the runways in the Middle East."

As an example, he cited China's Wing Loong 2 medium-altitude, long-endurance drone.

This reconnaissance and missile platform was on display to potential clients at the 2017 Paris Air Show but is, he said, "a clear knock-off" of US firm General Atomics' MQ-9 Reaper.

"The fact is our allies and partners want to buy American," Navarro said, noting that Trump was putting his "America First" slogan at the heart of arms sales policy.

- Drone assassins -

"Partners who procure American weaponry are more capable of fighting alongside us, and are also more capable of protecting themselves with fewer American boots on the ground."

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The United States pioneered the use of unmanned aircraft, some of them flown by pilots half-a-world away through satellite links to a ground station, for spotting missions and missile strikes.

They have been deployed both by the US military in support of overt deployments in the so-called war on terror and by the CIA for covert targeted strikes to kill suspected militants.

Critics of their deployment say that, because they can be used without putting American pilots in harm's way, they encourage commanders and presidents to resort more easily to lethal force.

Despite the accuracy of missiles guided by drone-mounted lasers, many hundreds and perhaps thousands of civilians have been killed in US strikes in South Asia, the Middle East and the Horn of Africa.

But US officials defend the technology, arguing that its proper use allows commanders to study targets more carefully and to carry out precision raids, minimizing the threat to allies and civilians.

"We have been very, very focused... on trying to give our partners, our strategic partners overseas, the ability to avoid civilian casualties," senior US diplomat Tina Kaidanow said.

In publishing the new regulations, the White House did not identify any possible new clients for US drones.

But the announcement came shortly after a three-week US tour and arms buying spree by de facto Saudi ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whose forces lead a coalition supporting Yemen's government against Iran-backed rebels.

The White House has been criticized by both global rights watchdogs and US Congress lawmakers from both parties for allowing its Saudi ally to bomb Yemen, where the coalition has been criticized over civilian casualties.

Oil-rich Saudi Arabia is already one of the United States' main arms clients, and it is part-way through making good on what Trump dubbed last year in Riyadh a $110 billion deal.
This is what House Republicans wanted everyone to know? Photo: Cheriss May/NurPhoto via Getty Images

In the week since fired FBI director James Comeys book was released, President Trump has been unusually upbeat. Why? According to CNN, Hes pleased at how Republicans and the White House led the charge to try and discredit the former FBI director.

Its true that House Republicans have ratcheted up their efforts to undermine Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and thus the Russia investigation, in the past week  but their latest move may have backfired. After being threatened with a subpoena and even impeachment, Rosenstein gave in on Thursday and released all 15 pages of Comeys memos documenting his interactions with Trump.

On the left this raised further questions about Rosensteins integrity, but it doesnt appear the memos had the effect Republicans intended. In a statement the three GOP committee chairmen who demanded that the memos be released  Representatives Bob Goodlatte, Trey Gowdy, and Devin Nunes  said they show Trump made clear he wanted allegations of collusion, coordination, and conspiracy between his campaign and Russia fully investigated. The memos also made clear the cloud President Trump wanted lifted was not the Russian interference in the 2016 election cloud, rather it was the salacious, unsubstantiated allegations related to personal conduct leveled in the dossier.

But Democrats said that if anything, the memos corroborate Comeys public accounts about his interactions with Trump, and add more credence to claims made in the Steele dossier. Here are all the big revelations.

Trump Was Obsessed With the Pee Tape

Comey said the president brought up the golden showers thing in almost every interaction they had, passionately insisting that it was untrue. Often in the same breath, he would reject credible misconduct allegations and deny the the fact that he mocked a disabled reporter, which is a bit curious.

Heres how Comey described telling Trump about the Steele dossiers most notorious allegation in a one-on-one meeting weeks before the inauguration:

I said, the Russians allegedly had tapes involving him and prostitutes at the Presidential Suite at the Ritz Carlton in Moscow from about 2013. He interjected, there were no prostitutes; there were never prostitutes. He then said something about him being the kind of guy who didnt need to go there and laughed (which I understood to be communicating that he didnt need to pay for sex). He said 2013 to himself, as if trying to remember that period of time, but didnt add anything. He said he always assumed that hotel rooms he stayed in when he travels are wired in some way. I replied that I do as well.

Then he started talking about all the women who had falsely accused him of grabbing or touching them (with particular mention of a stripper who said he grabbed her) and gave me the sense that he was defending himself to me. I responded that we were not investigating him and the stuff might be totally made up but it was being said out of Russia and our job was to protect the President from efforts to coerce him. I said we try to understand what the Russians are doing and what they might do. I added that I also wanted him to know this in case it came out in the media.

And heres the unprompted pee-tape discussion from Trump and Comeys loyalty dinner:

At about this point, he turned to what he called the golden showers thing and recounted much of what he had said previously on that topic. He repeated that it was a complete fabrication and fake news. I explained again why I had thought it was important that he know about it. I also explained that one of the reasons we told him was that the media, CNN in particular, was telling us they were about to run with it. He said it bothered him if his wife thought there was even a one percent chance it was true in any respect. He said he had spoken to people who had been on the Miss Universe trip with him and they had reminded him that he didnt stay over night in Russia for that. He said he arrived in the morning, did events, then showered and dressed for the pageant at the hotel (he didnt say the hotel name) and left for the pageant. Afterward, he returned only to get his things because they departed for New York by plane the same night. He said he thought maybe he should ask me to investigate the whole thing to prove it was a lie. I did not ask any questions. I replied that it was up to him, but I wouldnt want to create a narrative that we were investigating him, because we are not and I worried such a thing would be misconstrued. I also said that it is very difficult to disprove a lie. He said maybe youre right, but several times asked me to think about it and said he would think about it.

Putin Bragged to Trump About the Beauty of Russias Hookers

Comey said he stopped by the Oval Office in early February 2017, and Trump brought up the pee tape once again. But this time he revealed that Putin told him Russias sex workers are top notch:

The President brought up the Golden Showers thing and said it really bothered him if his wife had any doubt about it. He then explained, as he did at our dinner, that he hadnt stayed overnight in Russia during the Miss Universe trip  The President said the hookers thing is nonsense but that Putin had told him we have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world. (He did not say when Putin had told him this and I dont recall [redacted]

Its possible Trump was referring to comments Putin made publicly around that time. Or maybe the two chatted about hookers during their first official phone call:

Unless Putin told Trump this on 1/28/17 in their phone call



Yes, this is real life.  Justin Miller (@justinjm1) April 20, 2018

During their interview on Thursday night, Comey and Rachel Maddow agreed thats not common banter for heads of state:

It's fair to say that a congratulatory phone call between heads of state bragging about the relative value of each country's hookers is unusual. pic.twitter.com/HjvQXRicfd  Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) April 20, 2018

Trump Was Obsessed With Andy McCabe, Too

He brought up the former FBI deputy director, whose wife ran as a Democrat in Virginia and lost, during three separate interactions with Comey:

At this point he asked me (and asked again later) whether your guy McCabe has a problem with me, explaining that I was pretty rough on him and his wife during the campaign. I explained that Andy was a true professional and had no problem at all.

At about this point he asked again about your guy McCabe and whether he was going to be okay. I again affirmed Andys ability and professionalism and said the President would come to see and benefit from both.

He asked (as he had at our dinner) whether my deputy had a problem with him, and recounting how hard he had been on the campaign trail, saying the number 2 guy at the FBI took a million dollars from the Clintons. I again explained that Andy McCabe was a pro. He asked whether he had ever mentioned to me the campaign attacks. I said never, and again explained he was a true pro and you would come to value him. I said if he had it to do over again, Im sure he would urge his wife not to run, but that the guy put everything aside and did his job well.

Trumps Loyalty Request Doesnt Sound Any Better in Context

After the memos were made public on Thursday night, Trump proclaimed:

James Comey Memos just out and show clearly that there was NO COLLUSION and NO OBSTRUCTION. Also, he leaked classified information. WOW! Will the Witch Hunt continue?  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 20, 2018

Yet Comeys account of his January 2017 dinner with Trump is still some of the best evidence to the contrary:

[Trump] touched on my future at various points. The first time he asked so what do you want to do, explaining that lots of people wanted my job (about 20 people), that he thought very highly of me and had heard great things, that the people of the FBI really like me, but he would understand if I wanted to walk away given all I had been through, although he thought that would be bad for me personally because it would look like I had done something wrong, that he of course can make a change at FBI if he wants, but he wants to know what I think. There was no acknowledgement by him (or me) that we had already talked about this twice.

I responded by saying that he could fire me any time he wished, but that I wanted to stay and do a job I love and think I am doing well. I explained that I never expected to be back in government but had found this job hugely rewarding and wanted to serve out my term. I added that I was reliable in one way but not in the way political people sometimes use the term. I explained that he could count on me to always tell him the truth. I said I dont do sneaky things, I dont leak, I dont do weasel moves. But I was not on anybodys side politically and could not be counted on in that traditional political sense, which I said I thought was in the presidents best interest. He asked whether the FBI leaks and I answered that of course in an organization of 36,000 we were going to have some of that, but I said I think the FBI leaks far less than people often say. I predicted he, like all Presidents, would discover the entire government leaks like crazy and explained that it often comes from the first or second hop out from those actually working on the sensitive thing.

He replied that he needed loyalty and expected loyalty. I did not reply, or even nod or change my facial expression, which he noted because we came back to it later.

 The President then spoke again about being glad I wanted to stay. He said Mattis said great things about me, as did Sessions. He explained he had asked a lot of people about me and heard great things. He then returned to loyalty, saying I need loyalty. I replied that he would always get honesty from me. He paused and said thats what he wants, honest loyalty. I replied you will get that from me. (It is possible we understood that phrase differently, but I chose to understand it was consistent with what I had said throughout the conversation: I will serve the President with loyalty to the office, the country, and the true. I decided it would not be productive to push the subject further.)

Trump Followed Up With a Loyalty Phone Call

The memos provide a fuller account of two less famous Trump-Comey interactions. Comey said Trump called him on March 30, 2017, and went on about how the Russia probe was hurting his presidency, urging him to help downplay it publicly.

He asked what he could do to lift the cloud. I explained that we were running it down as quickly as possible that there would be great benefit, if we didnt find anything, to our Good Housekeeping seal of approval, but we had to do our work. He agreed, but then returned to the problems this was causing him, went on at length about how bad he was for Russia because of his commitment to more oil and more nukes (ours are 40 years old).

 I reminded him that I had told him we werent investigating him and that I had told the Congressional leadership the same thing. He said it would be great if that could get out and several times asked me to find a way to get that out.

Comey said Trump called him again on April 11, 2017, to inquire about why he hadnt announced that he wasnt personally under investigation. He recalled that when he told Trump he should take that up with the proper channels (having the White House counsel call the acting attorney general), the president responded: Because I have been very loyal to you, very loyal, we had that thing, you know. Comey said nothing but assumed he was referring to the loyalty dinner.

Trump Complained About Flynn, Citing Putin Faux Pas

Days before Michael Flynns firing, Trump told Comey he was upset that the national security adviser hadnt promptly set up a return phone call for a foreign head of state. The leaders name is redacted, but previous reporting reveals Trump was worried about offending Putin.

He then went on to explain that he has serious reservations about Mike Flynns judgement and illustrated with a story from that day in which the President apparently discovered during his toast to Teresa May that [redacted] had called four days ago. Apparently, as the President was toasting PM May, he was explaining that she had been the first to call him after his inauguration and Flynn interrupted to say that [redacted] had called [first, apparently]. It was then that the President learned of [redacteds] call and he confronted Flynn about it (not clear whether that was in the moment or after the lunch with PM May). Flynn said the return call was scheduled for Saturday, which prompted a heated reply from the President that six days was not an appropriate period of time to return a call from the [redacted] of a country like [redacted] (This isnt [redacted] we are talking about.) He said that if he called [redacted] and didnt get a return call for six days he would be very upset. In telling the story the President pointed his fingers at his head and said the guy has serious judgement issues.

Priebus Asked About a Flynn FISA Warrant

Thirteen days after thenActing Attorney General Sally Yates warned the White House that Flynn had lied about his conversation with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, then-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus asked Comey if he was under a FISA warrant. Comeys answer was redacted, but it appears he said yes.

[Reince] then asked me if this was a private conversation. I replied that it was. He then said he wanted to ask me a question and I could decide whether it was appropriate to answer. He then asked, Do you have a FISA order on Mike Flynn? I paused for a few seconds and then said that I would answer here, but that this illustrated the kind of question that had to be asked and answered through established channels. I said the answer [redacted]

Five days later Flynn was fired, and about a week after the Priebus-Comey conversation, the chief of staff reportedly asked top FBI officials to publicly dismiss media reports about possible contact between Trump campaign officials and Russians during the campaign. The FBI refused.

The Flynns a Good Guy Memo Was Unclassified

Many on the right, including Trump, have accused Comey of leaking classified information when he passed part of his notes to a law professor friend, who then read them to a reporter. The friend has said none of the memos he received were marked classified, and indeed several pages are marked unclassified (others were partially redacted for public release).

Heres Comeys full description of their conversation on the day after Flynn resigned:

[Trump] began by saying he wanted to talk about Mike Flynn. He then said that, although Flynn hadnt done anything wrong in his call with the Russians (a point he made at least two more times in the conversation), he had to let him go because he misled the Vice President, whom he described as a good guy. He explained that he just couldnt have Flynn misleading the Vice President and, in any event, he had other concerns about Flynn, and had a great guy coming in, so he had to let Flynn go.

 He then returned to the topic of Mike Flynn, saying Flynn is a good guy, and has been through a lot. He misled the Vice President but he didnt do anything wrong in the call. He said, I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go. I replied by saying I agree he is a good guy, but I said no more.

Trump and Priebus Asked Why Hillary Wasnt Charged

Lock her up may have seemed like something the Trump campaign was pushing because it riled up the base, but Comey said that in private both Priebus and Trump suggested she should have been charged in the email probe.

Comey said of Priebus: He then pressed me on why it wasnt chargeable gross negligence, and I took him through the facts and the law.

And during a conversation with Trump, he explained that the investigators all agreed there was no case; he said he disagreed and thought there was a case.

Comey and Flynn Joked About Jailing Reporters

The two men had their differences, but at least they could still laugh about implied prison rape.
Adam Armoush said he was wearing a Jewish kippah skullcap in an attempt to prove it was safe

One of the victims of an anti-Semitic attack in central Berlin that shocked Germany this week is not Jewish, it has emerged.

Adam Armoush told German television he was wearing a Jewish kippah skullcap in an attempt to prove it was safe to wear one on the streets of Berlin.

But the experiment went wrong when he and a companion were set upon in the affluent neighbourhood of Prenzlauer Berg and whipped with a belt by three men who shouted Yahudi, the Arabic word for Jew.

The main suspect in the attack, a 19-year-old Syrian named only as Knaan S, surrendered to police yesterday (THU). It is not clear whether he is a refugee.

The 21-year-old Mr Armoush is an Israeli citizen of Arab descent. I'm not Jewish, I'm an Israeli, I grew up in Israel in an Arab family, he told Deutsche Welle television.

Mr Armoush filmed himself being whipped with what appeared to be a belt in a seemingly anti-Semitic attack

A Berlin resident, he said he had worn the skullcap to make a point after being warned by a friend it could be dangerous on the streets in Germany. I was saying it's really safe and I wanted to prove it, but it ended like that, he said.

Mr Armoush said he had grown up in an atheist family in the Israeli city of Haifa. He began to video the assault on his smartphone after the three men shouted insults at him and his companion. He suffered bruises and minor injuries in the attack.

Honestly, Im a little surprised a thing like this could happen, he said in a separate interview with Israeli television.

The incident is the latest in a series of violent anti-Semitic attacks which are causing growing concern in Germany.

Angela Merkel described it as a horrific incident and vowed that the German authorities would respond with full force and resolve.

Mr Armoush said he would not allow the assault to stop him wearing a skullcap. Ill keep the kippah, no matter what others think, he said.
Walmart employees may soon be able to wear jeans to work. (Photo by Tim Boyle/Getty Images)

Walmart began making headlines Thursday morning when it was reported that the nations largest private-sector employer would be testing a new relaxed employee dress code.

According to an internal memo obtained by Bloomberg, the retail chain announced that some stores would be testing a revised uniform that allows for blue jeans, jeggings, chinos, skorts, and shirts of any solid color. Although it sounds like a nice change from the infamous khakis and blue shirts with collars, people are bothered that the retail corporation seems to be doing the least it could do to save itself from an increasingly competitive labor market.

This isnt the first time that the discount department store is making the news for implementing a new dress code. Just four years ago, Walmart put into place the requirement of wearing either a white or blue collared shirt with khaki pants or black jeans, in addition to a Walmart vest. The reason behind the change was to make it easier for customers to find employees in the superstores. But now, the company is more concerned with pleasing the workers themselves.

As the nations unemployment rate continues to drop, Walmart is not the only store experiencing pressure to provide employees with reasons to stick around. However, with the various incentives that could be put in place to keep Walmart employees in their stores, dress code is not the most important.

This move comes after Walmart raised its starting hourly wages to $11 earlier in 2018, in addition to providing bonuses to employees of up to $1,000. The changes came in response to President Donald Trumps tax cuts, which created a shift in the big-box retail market overall. Walmart also increased paid parental leave at the time; however, some believe that larger management issues still dont make these minimal benefits worth it.

Walmart is testing out a new dress code in hopes of retaining more employees. Maybe if @Walmart allowed employees to work full time, gave them benefits, and a livable wage they could be able to stick around. https://t.co/J4H09cePxR  KATE BALL (@kate_ball) April 19, 2018

Walmart [cant keep employees]: lets uhhhh.relax the dress code. Thatll do it  Mr Zach (@zjsearle) April 20, 2018

Walmarts dress code isnt the reason ppl end up quitting its the shitty management thats the issue lmao  StillVibing (@YoungSaiyanGod) April 19, 2018

In terms of Walmarts dress code, the chain is known for having employees pay for the required uniform items themselves, which poses an additional monetary issue when the dress code is revised. However, Walmart spokesman Kory Lundberg told Bloomberg that the changes are not yet permanent.

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We are always testing new ideas and concepts in a small number of our stores, Lundberg said. Some of these tests are expanded while others are retired. We wont know next steps on this test until weve had a chance to learn what works and what could work better.

In the meantime, employees remain divided over a number of issues  but some are expressing their excitement over being able to have a broader range of outfit options for work.

Walmart relaxed their dress code and Im so happy about it. Its in test mode now, but no longer have to wear khaki and navy blue!  Joseph Kokoszka (@JosephKokoszka) April 16, 2018

Today is a good day because Walmart is expanding its dress code so I can dress like a human again  SpicyBoi (@NCremin) April 14, 2018

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

 Walmart is banning Cosmopolitan to protect young girls from sexually explicit material

 These women had their wedding at the Walmart where they work

 A family just bought a box of cereal from Walmart, but it expired in 1997

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A home in Lindale, Ohio, is under scrutiny this week after neighbors complained about an odd display that many feel is racist. But its the residents response thats shaking heads; they cant seem to answer basic questions about the confederate flag theyre proudly displaying.

Fox19 Cincinnati recently spoke with Louis Jones Jr. and his friend Tammy about their odd porch display, which caught the eye of new neighbors in their town. The Joness house featured several black mannequins and dolls, one eating a watermelon, among multiple confederate flags.

When the Fox19 reporter pressed the friends on why they featured the display, specifically the confederate flag, they said it was a point of pride. Its not racist, its for the war that we won, you know.
President Trump didnt upset financial markets this week. Hurrah!

There were no new threats to impose tariffs, tear up trade deals or punish American companies. But a curious new idea is now circulating in Washington: Republicans need to pass another round of tax cuts before the midterm elections in November. Greg Valliere of Horizon Investments predicts the House of Representatives will pass a new set of tax cuts by summer, with a tougher path through the Senate.

This reeks of desperation, which is why we give this theoretical tax-cut bill our worst grade on the Trumpometer: SAD!

Source: Yahoo Finance

For those with short memories, Congress just passed a big set of tax cuts, which will save taxpayers $1.8 trillion over a decade, while costing Uncle Sam that much in lost revenue. That legislation slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, which sent the outlook for corporate profits soaring. It also cut taxes for about two-thirds of individuals, with the typical family getting a tax cut saving about $1,300.

[Check out our Trumponomics Report Card.]

So whats the problem? Well, the tax cuts are unpopular. Republicans thought voters would reward them for putting more money in peoples pockets, yet just 27% of respondents said they approve of the new tax law in a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. A recent Yahoo Finance survey found three main objections. People think the tax cuts favor the wealthy over the middle class. They dont like the burden placed on future taxpayers. And theyre suspicious because individual tax cuts are temporary, while business tax cuts are permanent.

So Republicans want a redo. A new tax law might address some voter concerns, by making the individual tax cuts permanent and giving lower-income earners more of a break. But such cuts would add even more to Uncle Sams annual deficits, which are approaching $1 trillion per year. And theyd be a tacit admission by Republicans that maybe we blew it the first time around. Thats one expensive mulligan.

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Two other pieces of Trumponomics news this week. First, Trump reversed an earlier reversal and said he opposes the Trans Pacific Partnership after all, once and forever, never to be persuaded otherwise, unless he changes his mind again. Trump railed against the TPP as a candidate, yet a couple weeks ago, said he might be open to joining after all. Then, while meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe this week, he said, never mind. The TPP isnt for him. Hes not a globalist after all.

Trump also went after OPEC, saying in a tweet that the oil cartel is at it again. We think Trump means OPEC is trying to push oil prices higher, which it does from time to time. But theres really no need for Trump or anybody to do anything about it. Prices for West Texas crude are at a modest $68 or so, which is midway between the high of $110 in 2014 and the low of $28 in 2016. Markets and motorists can easily live with $68 oil.

But it might not stay that high. With all the fracking capacity that has come online in recent years, drillers typically pump more oil as the price goes up, because they make money doing so. And the increased supply tends to push prices down. OPEC is still important, but its less dominant than it used to be, because theres more non-OPEC oil on the market. Trump can relax.

Confidential tip line: rickjnewman@yahoo.com. Click here to get Ricks stories by email.

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Rick Newman is the author of four books, including Rebounders: How Winners Pivot from Setback to Success. Follow him on Twitter: @rickjnewman

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Beirut (AFP) - Unprecedented Western strikes against regime targets in Syria yielded a lot of political chest-thumping but no hope that the seven-year war would end soon or even claim fewer civilian victims.

On April 14, the United States, France and Britain fired missiles meant as a response to what the trio of nations said was evidence Damascus had used chemical weapons a week earlier.

Meanwhile, international inspectors on Friday had yet to begin their probe at the site of the alleged chemical attack in Douma, amid concerns that its security was not guaranteed and that evidence had been removed.

Purported footage of victims foaming at the mouth after the April 7 attack sparked an outcry and prompted the West to launch its biggest military action yet against President Bashar al-Assad's regime.

A bullish US administration hailed the strikes as a success and argued a clear message had been sent to the Damascus regime that the use of chemical weapons would no longer go unpunished.

"If Assad doesn't get it, it's going to hurt," the US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, said.

French President Emmanuel Macron also claimed that the missiles could have a major diplomatic impact, achieving what analysts saw as an attempt by the West to reclaim a seat at the table after staying aloof.

Russia, Damascus's top ally, was warned of the strikes and many analysts said the Syrian regime had ample time to hide its chemical stockpile.

The Western trio at the UN Security Council had emphasised the need to bridge the rift with Russia, which is the main broker in the conflict but whose peace initiatives have also failed.

- Diplomatic stalemate -

Russia has instead reaffirmed its alliance with Turkey and Iran and is still alleging that the April 7 Douma attack was a Western-engineered fabrication to justify strikes.

That claim has gained considerable traction in global public opinion thanks to a relentless campaign by Russian media and a network of pro-Russian social media accounts.

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After a week of trading threats and recriminations, UN ambassadors will try to find some common ground during a three-day retreat starting Friday at a farmhouse in southern Sweden.

A voice often drowned out by the bluster that preceded and followed the strikes, was that of Syrian civilians.

On a wall in the northern province of Idlib, graffiti artist Aziz al-Asmar had these words for Trump: "Your strike is like a rooster's fart."

Opposition supporters felt short-changed by the Western strikes, arguing that they may have assuaged Western consciences but had been a mere slap on the wrist for Assad.

"Everyone has disappointed us, everyone has sold us out," said Ahmed, a 25-year-old mechanic from Douma, who was evacuated to northern Syria with thousands of other civilians days before the attack.

Joshua Landis, director of the Centre for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, said all the United States and its allies had achieved was to uphold a norm on the non-use of chemical weapons.

"This had nothing to do with killing people -- it only had something to do with how you kill people," he said.

- 'Not about us' -

Barrel bombs and other munitions dropped by the regime on Douma and the rest of Eastern Ghouta resulted in much higher death tolls but triggered no Western action against Assad.

Echoing comments by US and British officials, Macron admitted that the strikes "don't necessarily resolve anything" but were important "for the honour of the international community."

Exiled Syrian writer Yassin al-Haj Saleh, whose wife went missing in Douma in 2013, saw that as particularly offensive.

"It's not about us, it's not about protecting our lives and saving Syrians from brutality," he told AFP in Madrid, arguing Western nations mostly want "to regain some of their prestige".

Nearly a week after their arrival in Damascus, inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) had not yet been able to access Douma and investigate the site.

Their UN security assessment team came under fire this week and officials at the OPCW have also said that key evidence had probably been removed by Russian and Syrian forces.

Syria's resurgent president, whose job hung by a thread earlier in the conflict, appeared determined to press on with his Russian-backed military recovery.

The rebels who had resisted a Russian-brokered transfer deal in Douma said it was the alleged chemical attack that forced them to accept and flee their hometown.

Since then, other rebel factions in pockets around Damascus where opposition armed groups had been allowed to stay under a 2016 reconciliation deal have also been deported.
By Gina Cherelus

NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York City's Central Park will kick out cars this summer after more than a century, returning its roads to walkers, runners and cyclists, Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Friday.

The move, which aims to cut down on traffic accidents and air pollution in the most-visited urban park in the United States, takes effect on June 27, the mayor told reporters.

"This was not the purpose of this park, to be built for automobiles. Literally, it was built before there were automobiles. It was built for people," de Blasio said.

More than 42 million visitors a year are drawn to Central Park, which encompasses more than 800 acres (325 hectares) in the borough of Manhattan. The park, which includes a zoo, reservoir, boating lakes and event spaces, has been designated as a National Historic Landmark since 1962.

Motorists have been banned since 2015 from the loop drives in the northern part of the park, de Blasio said. The new ban will cover the whole park, except for four transverse roadways that were built into the park's original design to accommodate traffic.

"There's gonna be a kind of peace and sense of security that wasn't there before," de Blasio said.

(Reporting by Gina Cherelus; Editing by Will Dunham)
There are at least 190 exchanges to consider.

Here's how to select the best one for you.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced on Tuesday that he is investigating at least 13 cryptocurrency exchanges, including the popular platform Coinbase.

"Too often, consumers don't have the basic facts they need to assess the fairness, integrity, and security of these trading platforms," Schneiderman said in a statement.

Schneiderman said he hopes to make exchanges more accountable and transparent to their clients. Each company will be asked in a letter to supply information on its "operations, internal controls, and safeguards to protect customer assets."

The news serves as a reminder that investing in cryptocurrencies is risky not only because they're new and their value is volatile  even the places where you buy them can be suspect.

There are at least 190 exchanges in operation, with new ones popping up every day. Most of them don't operate under any rules, regulations or obligation to replace your digital money should it lose all value, get lost, stolen or hacked. One of the first exchanges to go mainstream  Mt. Gox  ended in bankruptcy .

How do exchanges even work? To get started, investors sign up with an online exchange using their bank account, credit card or digital currency.

Yet instead of relying on a third party like a broker to execute a transaction as you typically do with a stock, bond or ETF, cryptocurrencies trade on decentralized platforms with no middle man.

Despite the uncertain space, experts say there are some exchanges that bring more risk than others. Here's what you should consider about where you buy and sell your cryptocurrencies.

Always remember: These assets are incredibly volatile (In December, bitcoin was trading at more than $19,000. As of Wednesday, it was at $8,116). And so never invest more than you can afford to lose.

In addition, the IRS has labelled these currencies a property, meaning every transaction needs to be recorded and eventually taxed at your capital gains rate .

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Find the right exchange for your location

Experts say if you're in the United States, you would be wise to pick an exchange based in the United States.

Look for an address for the company. If you can't find one, that should be a red flag.

If you don't know where your exchange is located, "when you get hacked it's going to be very difficult for you to even find the right jurisdiction in which you should sue the people who stole your money," said Emin Gun Sirer, an associate professor of computer science at Cornell University who writes about bitcoin.

Check the relevant policies

Not all cryptocurrency exchanges accept U.S. dollars. If you don't have any digital tokens yet, like most people , you'll need to find an exchange that takes cash.

Make sure the exchange will work with you. For example, one of the biggest exchanges, Bitfinex, doesn't accept United States payments , citing, among other reasons, a challenging regulatory landscape.

To that point, check your state's stance on exchanges. In 2015, New York designed rules that require cryptocurrency companies to meet certain regulatory standards.

Recently, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has focused its attention on exchanges, requiring that certain ones register with the department. In the meantime, the agency warns investors not to assume that these exchanges meet SEC standards.

Look into the reputation

"Is it a fly-by-night operation operating out of a P.O. box or is it a genuine operation, of which we have many?" Gun Sirer said.

A simple Google search can turn up some telling results about potential problems. For example, when you search, "Bitfinex hack," you'll quickly see a Wikipedia page dedicated to the event. You should also try to speak to other users of an exchange and inquire about their experience.

Online forums have become a magnet for cryptocurrency exchange information as well.

"There are a lot exchanges that have been hacked," said Timothy Tam, co-founder and CEO of CoinFi, a cryptocurrency market intelligence platform. "Get yourself educated."

Confirm that there's enough security

Experts say cryptocurrency exchanges should follow what are called "know your customer" (KYC) and "anti-money laundering" (AML) procedures, which are designed to reduce the risk of illegal or fraudulent activity by certifying customers' identity.

"If it's really easy to open an account, and it's really easy to shield your cryptocurrencies from the IRS, then it's going to be just as difficult to get your money back when things go south," Gun Sirer said.

Make sure the exchange keeps the majority of its assets offline. At least 95 percent of the exchange's assets should be offline, said Tam. Coinbase, for example, says it keeps 98 percent of its customers' funds off the internet.

Fees and "volume"

Most exchanges make you weigh fees against protection, experts say.

The more secure exchanges charge a higher transaction rate. Coinbase charges a base rate of up to 4 percent for all transactions, for example, while other exchanges  with fewer guarantees, perhaps  can charge as low as 0.2 percent.

You also want to pick an exchange with high volume (you can check exchanges by volume on coinmarketcap.com ). A higher volume tends to lead to higher price accuracy, experts say, since the exchange is processing many transactions at once rather than a few an hour  over the course of which these volatile investments can lose or gain thousands of dollars.

No matter how much you've researched and verified an exchange, don't keep too much money on it for too long, said Matti Kon, CEO of financial software company InfoTech. Instead, transfer the digital coins offline and into a hardware wallet, safe from hackers.

"Do your thing and get off quick," Kon said.

More from Personal Finance:

Bitcoin, once 'sketchy,' becomes more mainstream

Some cryptocurrency-backed debit cards dropped from Visa network, leaving users scrambling

Bitcoin is too risky to treat as a 'serious' investment, financial advisers say





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New Zealands prime minister said she is infuriated that her immigration policies are being compared to those of US President Donald Trump.

Jacinda Ardern, who at 37 is the worlds youngest leader and the only pregnant head of state, said she is upset about the implication she has something in common with Mr Trump and the planned Mexico border wall while on NBCs Today show. We are a nation built on immigration  Im only a third-generation New Zealander, she said on the programme. The suggestion in any way that New Zealand wasnt an open, outward-facing country  the suggestion that I was leading something counter to that value  makes me extremely angry.

The assertion appeared to start with a September 2017 article in the Wall Street Journal. The piece itself did not directly compare Mr Trump and Ms Ardern, as the Washington Post reported. But, a tweet promoting the story did. It read: Meet New Zealand's Justin Trudeauexcept she's more like Trump on immigration.

The report said that her rapid ascent owes much to tapping into growing unease about affordability, particularly among young voters, and feeding off a global backlash over immigration.

An opinion piece in the newspaper suggested that those outside of Wellington mischaracterising her Deputy Prime Minister as far-right in the same sense as many in the US speak about Mr Trumps supporters. It may have been this that has led the comparison of the two drastically different leaders. Ms Ardern and her party have actually pledged to double the number of refugees the country will accept as opposed to Mr Trumps travel ban, border wall, and restrictions on legal immigration policies.

Meet New Zealand's Justin Trudeauexcept she's more like Trump on immigrationhttps://t.co/HXs3FfmrWe  The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) September 5, 2017

Ms Ardern, who belongs to the centre-left Labour Party, won her seat through forming a coalition with NZ First, a nationalist right-wing party. Though leaning towards the right, the party also fought to raise minimum wages and touts "interventionist" economic policies.

Story continues

NZ Firsts leader Winston Peters, who is now Deputy Prime Minister, has also been compared to the US leader for his less-than-friendly relationship. He has also been accused of being racist and making what the Washington Post called crass jokes about Asian immigrants to the small island nation. He will take over duties when Ms Ardern goes on maternity leave later in the year for six weeks.

Ms Ardern is expecting her first child this June with her partner, Clarke Gayford.
Harare (AFP) - A Zimbabwe parliament committee has summoned former president Robert Mugabe to give evidence on May 9 over diamond corruption costing billions of dollars, underlining his fall from power after 37 years of autocratic rule.

Mugabe, now 94, ruled Zimbabwe from 1980 until he was ousted last year after the military took over briefly and his once-loyal ZANU-PF party turned against him.

"We have set May 9 as the date on which he will give evidence," Temba Mliswa, the chairman of the mines and energy parliament committee, told Friday's state-owned Herald newspaper.

"We met today (Thursday) as a committee and resolved that we invite the former president Mr Mugabe to our committee to explain the disappearance of $15 billion worth of diamonds," said Mliswa, an independent MP.

The lawmakers plan to question Mugabe over his 2016 claim that the country had lost $15 billion (12 billion euros at current rates) due to corruption and foreign exploitation in the diamond sector.

It was unclear whether Mugabe, who is in frail health, would agree to appear before the committee or make moves to avoid a potential grilling.

- Lucrative diamond mines -

"Parliament is playing its oversight role," Thabitha Khumalo, spokeswoman for the MDC opposition party, told AFP. "We hope that they release the results of their findings."

Mugabe -- whose own regime was accused of siphoning off diamond profits -- has described his ousting as a coup.

He was replaced by his former deputy, Emmerson Mnangagwa, a veteran loyalist in the ZANU-PF party who was backed by senior military officers.

Mugabe, who has not been seen in public since his fall, exercised ruthless control over parliament, security forces and the country's mineral resources for decades.

The parliamentary committee has already summoned former ministers, ex-police chiefs and heads of several government department.

Zimbabwe discovered alluvial diamonds in Chiadzwa, in the east of the country, over 10 years ago, and rights groups have accused security forces of using brutal methods to control the scattered deposits.

Story continues

Over 200 people were killed during operations to remove illegal panners from the area, rights groups say.

Amid allegations of massive looting, Zimbabwe allowed several diamond companies companies to mine the area -- most of them as joint ventures between the government and Chinese firms.

Zimbabwe is due to hold elections in July or August, the first since Mugabe was unseated, with the ZANU-PF widely predicted to retain power.

Mnangagwa has vowed to hold a fair vote, and to tackle graft as he tries to revive the shattered economy by attracting foreign investment and re-building many international ties cut under Mugabe's regime.
Harare (AFP) - A Zimbabwe parliament committee has summoned former president Robert Mugabe to give evidence on May 9 over diamond corruption costing billions of dollars, underlining his dramatic fall from power after 37 years of autocratic rule.

Mugabe, now 94, ruled Zimbabwe from 1980 until he was ousted last year when the military took over briefly and his once-loyal ZANU-PF party lawmakers turned against him.

"We have set May 9 as the date on which he will give evidence," Temba Mliswa, the mines and energy parliament committee chairman, told the state-owned Herald newspaper.

"We met today (Thursday) as a committee and resolved that we invite the former president Mr Mugabe to our committee to explain the disappearance of $15 billion worth of diamonds," said Mliswa, an independent MP.

The lawmakers plan to question Mugabe over his 2016 claim that the country had lost the $15 billion sum due to corruption and foreign exploitation in the diamond sector.

It was unclear whether Mugabe, who is in frail health, was likely to agree to appear before the committee or to make moves to avoid a potential grilling.
Rudy and the Donald, together again. Photo: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images

With Trump attorney Michael Cohen on a very hot seat and maybe willing to sing to prosecutors, the sorry state of the presidents legal team has become too clear to be left alone. So now it has added a celebrity lawyer with the added credential of being a trusted crony of the presidents: former New York mayor and U.S. attorney Rudy Giuliani.

Rudys accession to the team was announced by Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow, a former ally of Giulianis in the fight against the so-called Ground Zero Mosque in New York.

The appointment had the aroma of a 911 call in the emergency of a legal staff nobody much wanted to join. Heres what one experienced defense attorney had to say in an interview with Quartz about the problem Team Trump was having in recruiting new members:

Every lawyer I know who has been contacted by the White House has represented terrible people in the past, and they all said, no thanks.

Two reasons: One is the traditional stuff, hes a terrible client who wont listen and wont pay  a disaster combo. The second reason is the stink of it. Their job is not to divine whos good and whos bad  defense attorneys ensure that even the most disgusting among us get due process.

But this has other value judgements  no one wants to take a case with all these other headaches and go down in flames in front of the entire world. Be associated with this guy, spend all your time and not get paid, alienate all of your other clients (current and future) and lose dramatically? There is just no upside. Those with the big names already dont need it and the up and comers dont want all the risks.

Guiliani is 73 years old, and his glory days as a federal prosecutor ended upon his election as Mayor of New York a quarter century ago. Yes, he did some defense work after his mayoral career ended; his most notable case involved negotiating a plea deal for OxyContin producer Purdue Pharma, which isnt the sort of thing one would boast of now.

But the really strange thing about Rudy clambering aboard the rickety jalopy of Trumps legal team is that hes describing his mission as a brisk mopping-up operation to get Robert Mueller (an acquaintance from his own Justice Department days) off his clients back:

just talked to Giuliani who said his role on Trump team is limited. He worked with Mueller at DOJ & as NYC Mayor (Mueller at FBI) He hopes knowing Mueller can help bring the investigation to conclusion, saying it "needs a little push." How soon? "maybe a couple of weeks"  Dana Bash (@DanaBashCNN) April 19, 2018

This claim will not enhance Giulianis reputation as acute legal analyst.

But that probably doesnt matter. Giulianis confident prediction that Mueller has no reason to investigate the president could well be a setup to an enormous White House freak-out when  surprise! surprise!  the special counsel does not after all agree to call the whole thing off.

In the meantime, the Giuliani hiring might take some of the spotlight away from Cohen and give the false impression of a serious upgrade in the talent deployed to protect Trump and his associates. Its what friends do for friends.
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Still on track for the State gig. Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Secretary of State-in-waiting Mike Pompeo never served in the Gulf War, even though media outlets and many of his colleagues have repeatedly said he did, and Pompeo has done nothing to dispute their claims.

Splinter News asked the CIA about Pompeos record, and the agency confirmed that while he was in the Army from 1986 to 1991, he never saw action in the Middle East.

A spokesperson said that Pompeo, who is currently director of the CIA, was in the U.S. Army at the time of the Gulf War  serving until 1991. He was not deployed to that theater. The war lasted less than seven months, between August 1990 and February 1991.

The discrepancy between Pompeos record and public accounts was first brought to light by Ned Price, a former CIA spokesman and special assistant to President Obama, who highlighted a series of inconsistencies on Twitter.

It seems apparent from reliable sources that Mike Pompeo did NOT serve in the first Gulf War, but nearly half of his public bios--including his Wikipedia page--and contemporary write-ups claim he did. Is this something he's been content to leave uncorrected?



A quick sample:  Ned Price (@nedprice) April 20, 2018

Splinter has a rundown of some prominent instances in which Pompeos war record has been cited incorrectly These include articles in The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal, a letter signed by 51 Republicans expressing support for Pompeos secretary of State nomination, and a Marco Rubio speech on the Senate floor. Throughout all this, Pompeo has said nothing to correct the record. Its possible, though seems unlikely, that he has simply missed all the references to his nonexistent war history. He has been busy, after all.

Pompeo faces fierce liberal criticism for, among other thing, his ultrapartisan Benghazi grandstanding as a congressman and his Islamophobia. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is likely to issue a rare non-recommendation. But at least one Democrat is onboard with his nomination, and Pompeo is almost certain to withstand the barrage to replace Rex Tillerson on a permanent basis.

Because Pompeo didnt personally advance the narrative that he served in Iraq  at least, that we know of  Fridays revelation is unlikely to change that calculus.
How many immigrants do you know from Namibia? How many Jews do you know who live there?

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The African countrys tiny Jewish community has less than 100 members, some of whom are Israelis who live in the country. There is no wonder that there are few immigrants who make their way to Israel.

Rakhel Van Ellewee, 38, is one of them, and not exactly a representative one. She was born as a Christian in South Africa, but spent most of her life in Namibia. The young Africa country declared independence only in 1990, after a long struggle to liberate itself from South Africa.

Rakhel Van Ellewee from Namibia. A fading community

I lived in the capital of Windhoek and it was relatively quiet, she says. Before the Declaration of independence, there were tensions and the presence of UN soldiers was felt on the streets, but most of the battle was waged along the borders. After the first elections, we embarked on an independent path.

How was the Jewish communitys life in the country?

The community is very small and made up of a number of Jews who were born in the country, people who arrived from South Africa and Israelis who work there and arrive for certain period of time. We had no rabbi and the community was led by a religious man who was in charge of the prayers and the religious activity.

There is only one synagogue in the country, and most of the activities were held there, like welcoming Shabbat and holidays. Unfortunately, it has been sold and is no longer active. Its one of the only countries in the world with no Chabad office, so the activity is run by local Jews.

Van Ellewee joined the Jewish community out of curiosity and because she felt a close connection to Judaism. Later on, she decided to convert, but there were no rabbinical institutions for that purpose in Namibia.

At this stage, she had two options: To travel to South Africa and undergo a conversion process in the countrys Jewish institutions, or to ask a Rabbinate and Interior Ministrys exceptions committee to let her come to Israel and convert there.

I dont want to live anywhere else

After convincing the committee of the seriousness of her intentions, Van Ellewee arrived in Israel with her son about two years ago and underwent a conversion process at Machon Ora in Jerusalem.

Its very interesting. The lessons were fascinating and I was determined to undergo the process, she says.

I had to study very carefully, because I have to teach my son Judaism as well. In the meantime, he is studying in a religious school, acclimating and connecting. We recently completed the conversion process, received approval from the Rabbinate in Jerusalem, and were completing the procedures with the Interior Ministry to complete the final immigration to Israel.

Rakhel lives in Kokhav Ya'akov, and although she says its a huge change from the life she had in Namibia, she is very satisfied and loves living here. I dont want to live anywhere else. Of course its different and there are difficulties, but its where I want to be.

Whats your next goal after you complete your aliyah and officially become Israeli?

I want to live a Jewish life in a Jewish state and I want my son to be happy. I want a Jewish family and life, and this is the only place where I can fulfill that dream.
The US-led airstrikes in Syria raise three questions and two Israeli conclusions.

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The first question has to do with the attacks success. The United States, Britain and France are talking about a successful attack, saying all targets were hit. A Russian general in Syria says that about 70 percent of the missiles were intercepted by the Syrian air defense system. This is an unreasonable discrepancy in a place where the facts should be clear. If the Russian version is true, there is a cause for concern. So what actually happened?

Why are the American only talking about inputs (what we did) and not about outputs (the actual result)? (Photos: AP, EPA, AFP)

The second question has to do with the extent of damage to Syria's chemical arsenal. As far as I know, the Syrians have always made sure to keep their chemical weapons in deep tunnels which cant really be penetrated by cruise missiles. So what actually happened? Did they just fire at chemical targets or did they also destroy them? Why are the American only talking about inputs (what we did) and not about outputs (the actual result)?

A third question has to do with the American declaration mission accomplished. Furthermore, the Americans rushed to declare that if Syria used chemical weapons again, the US would consider striking again. Thats a puzzling declaration. Why did the Americans have to publicly calm Syrian President Bashar Assad down? Why did they reduce the future cause to the exclusive use of chemical weapons? Why didnt they say that if and when the Syrians caused massive damage to civilians once again (whether with chemical weapons or in a different way), the US would respond with force? And what if the Assad army burns hundreds of people alive? Would it be wrong to respond in that case?

As far as Israel is concerned, there are two immediate conclusions. The first conclusion has to do with the possibility that Russia will supply Syria with S-300 surface-to-air missile systems. This weapon threatens not only the Israel Air Forces freedom of action in Syria's skies but also our freedom of action in Lebanons skies. And if these systems are installed in northwest Syria, they could also threaten the civil aviation routes to Israel.

This is a reality Israel cannot accept, so the dialogue with the Russians would have to focus on this issue, including a hint that Israel might target these systems if they are supplied to Syria.

Hezbollah rally. Israel must make it clear to Lebanon that an Israeli response following an from Lebanese territory wont lead to a conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, but to an all-out war between Israel and Lebanon

It will be a difficult dispute, and we can guess what the Russians will say. In 2004, when I served as head of the National Security Council, I met with the Russian defense minister and chief of staff in Moscow. I tried to convince them not to sell to Syria a certain antiaircraft weapon (which wasnt as dangerous as the S-300). The Russians replied: We are selling your enemies (Syria) antiaircraft missiles, but this is only a defensive weapon; you, on the other hand, are selling our enemies (Georgia) mortar shells, which are an offensive weapon.

Despite the difficulty, and although the Russians are expected to play dumb, we should argue with them and make it clear that we wont hesitate to take action. Russian President Vladimir Putin has respect for people who are not afraid to act.

The second conclusion has to do with an Iranian retaliation against us. At the moment, Irans ability to target Israel from Syrian territory is very limited. In this state of events, the Iranians could use Hezbollah against us. The Lebanese organization is a very serious threat considering the extent of damage it could cause to the State of Israel.

There is one way to make it difficult for Hezbollah to decide to take action against Israel: Israel must make it clear to Lebanon that an Israeli response following an attack on Israel from Lebanese territory wont lead to a conflict between Israel and Hezbollah (like in the Second Lebanon War), but to an all-out war between Israel and Lebanon. Such a war would lead to heavy destruction in Lebanon. This is something Hezbollah isnt interested in either.

The Iranian pressure to act against us must be balanced with counterpressure from the people of Lebanon. This pressure will only be achieved if we clarify the extent of damage that will be inflicted on Lebanon, its government, its infrastructures and its residents.
The European Parliament on Thursday, in an unprecedented move, condemned Hamas and called for the release of the Israeli citizens and for the retrieve of the Israeli soldiers' bodies held by the organization.

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This resolution came as a result of a diplomatic campaign launched by the Israeli Ministry for Foreign Affairs against the original anti-Israel motion for resolution.

Hadar Goldin, Oron Shaul, Avera Mangistuall three illegally held by Hamas

The original motion for resolution included severe condemnation against Israel, as well as a request for investigation at the International Criminal Court of Justice in Hague, determination that the IDF didn't use proportional force, a call to reexamine Israel's ties in the EU and an immediate establishment of a EU investigation committee to review latest events in Gaza.

The resolution was completely altered and many provisions were added which unusually correspond with the Israeli stand regarding Gaza.

According to the resolution adopted today, Israel is still condemned for shooting Gaza's citizens and is called to end the siege, however, the use of disproportional force was not determined. In the resolution, the European Parliament, housed in Strasbourg, France, called for an investigation, but added it will be executed by a special team assembled by its Chief of Staff.

The remaining provisions in the original notion for resolution were left out. However, the resolution calls for the immediate release of Avera Mangistu and Hisham al-Sayed and for the retrieve of the bodies of Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul.

The resolution also emphasizes that Hamas is a terror organization who transformed Gaza into an enclave focused on terror, withholds basic rights from its citizens, prevents the strip's rehabilitation and continues to hinder the chance for reconciliation. It holds Hamas accountable for the assassination attempt of the Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah and condemns the organization for acts of terror, rocket fire, infiltration attempts into Israel, tunnel diggings and use of citizens as human shields.

Moreover, the resolution determines that despite the Palestinians' right to peaceful protests, the Gaza's leaders must avoid incitement and ensure demonstrations wouldn't be used for spreading terror.

Israel's ambassador to the EU and NATO Aaron Lashno-Ya'ar expressed his content regarding the resolution. "Not only have we managed to extract outrageous and anti-Israeli elements from the resolution, but Hamas is also being criticized. The most important element for us is the explicit call for an immediate release of the Israeli citizen and the soldier's bodies from Gaza."

Demonstrations on the Gaza border (Photo: MCT)

"The latter is a matter we continually raise to discussion with European bodies. It's important that finally, for the first time, the European Parliament released a clear and unequivocal resolution regarding this matter," he added.

Deputy Chairman of the Foreign Affairs committee of the European Parliament Andres Wistesen said in a message to the press that he welcomes the decision, reiterating the parliament's stance that that "Hamas is a terror organization" and called for the release of the Israeli citizens and return of the bodies held by it.

"Despite the resolution is not without flaws and that leftists continue in their struggle to blur the reality in Gaza, I'm pleased that the parliament's European Conservatives and Reformists group tirelessly acts to make the voice of reason heard," added Wistesen, taking the opportunity to congratulate Israel on its 70th Independence Day.
IAF aircraft dropped flyers over the Gaza Strip Thursday warning residents to stay away from the border fence and from attempting to damage it or carry out hostile acts, ahead of planned protests Friday. The flyers said that Hamas is manipulating the population and that they should not be heeded as they endanger your lives.
The IDF dropped leaflets on Gaza on Friday morning, warning Palestinians not to approach the border fence with Israel, not to attempt to damage it or carry out terror attacks.

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The IDF has once again beefed up its deployments on the border in anticipation of a fourth consecutive wave of Friday protests as part of their  March of Return , this time marking Day of Palestinian Prisoners and Martyrs which began this week.

(Photo: AFP, IDF Spokesperson's Unit)

It is the first time that the IDF has dropped leaflets from the air on the Gaza Strip ahead of the mass demonstrations on the border warning against public disturbances.



You are participating in violent disturbances. Hamas is using you to carry out terror attacks. The IDF is ready for any scenario, the leaflets read, which also contained pictures of objects and weapons and actions which the military has forbidden in the protests.

Avoid approaching the fence and damaging it. Avoid using a weapon to carry out violent acts against the Israeli security forces and Israeli civilians. Keep away from terrorists and from people who promote disturbances and violence, the leaflets instructed before warning that the army would not hesitate to respond.

The IDF will act against any attempt to damage the barrier and its components and any other military equipment. Hamas is using you to promote its own interests of the movement. Do not obey Hamass instruction that endanger your lives. There is another way. Your future is in your hands. it added.

White House envoy Jason Greenblatt, a member of President Donald Trump's Mideast team, said on social media that Palestinians in Gaza have a "right to protest their dire humanitarian circumstances."

Organizers "should focus on that message, not stoke the potential for more violence with firebombs and flaming kites, and must keep a safe distance from the border," said Greenblatt, adding that "the cost of these demonstrations is too high in loss of life and injuries."

The Palestinians are expected to attempt to fly hundreds of burning kites over the border into Israeli territory after testing the latest weapon in its arsenal last Friday

Screenshot from Islamic Jihad video

In the violence that has erupted on the border in recent weeks, civilians have been used as a cover for terror activities against Israeli security forces and against the border fence.

We will not allow an attack on security infrastructure, on the fence or on Israeli civilians and we will act against anyone seeking to harm Israels security, the IDF Spokespersons Unit said in a statement ahead of the expected protests.

Screenshot from Islamic Jihad video

On Thursday, as the Gaza residents geared up for more protests, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad movement published a video in its latest psychological warfare campaign against IDF commanders and soldiers, which included images of soldiers in the crosshairs of a sniper.

Islamic Jihad video

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The Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), Maj. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, features twice in the video, which was likely filmed during mass demonstrations that took place in recent weeks as part of the March of Return.

The video, intended to illustrate the abilities of the snipers situated in the Gaza Strip to shoot Israeli personnel on the border, concludes in a message in Hebrew and Arabic, saying You murder our people in cold blood and think that you are protected, when our snipers are directed at your senior commanders.

Maj. Gen. Yoav Mordechai in the crosshairs of a sniper

Last week, some 10,000 Gaza residents assembled on Friday at the border with Israel to stage another protest as part of their "March of Return", with IDF soldiers responding with live rounds as protesters threw Molotov Cocktails and explosive devices.

The protests are to continue at least until May 15, the anniversary of Israel's 1948 creation. Palestinians mark the day as their "nakba," or catastrophe.

Maj. Gen. Yoav Mordechai in Islamic Jihad video

On Thursday, organizers moved sit-in protest tents, each set up several hundred meters from the border, closer to the fence. Organizers said they will gradually move the camps toward the fence until May 15, but have made conflicting comments about a possible mass border breach.
US President Donald Trump invited his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to the United States during a phone call, and said he would be glad to see Putin in the White House, RIA Novosti reported on Friday, citing the Russian Foreign Ministry.

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The news agency quoted Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as saying Trump returned to the subject of an invitation a couple of times during a phone call with Putin. Trump told Putin he would be happy to make a reciprocal visit to Russia, the RIA news agency quoted Lavrov as saying.

President Trump with President Putin (Photo: AP)

"We proceed from the fact that the US president in a telephone conversation...made such an invitation, said he would be glad to see (Putin) in the White House, would then be glad to meet on a reciprocal visit," said Lavrov, according to a transcript of an interview with RIA on the foreign ministry website.

"He returned to this topic a couple of times, so we let our American colleagues know that we do not want to impose, but we also do not want to be impolite, and that considering that President Trump made this proposal, we proceed from the position that he will make it concrete."

Rolling out a welcome for Putin in the White House could anger Trump's domestic critics, who accuse Russia of hostile acts against Western countries, including the United States.

"I would simply turn your attention to the fact that Donald Trump after this phone conversation has said several times in both Tweets and in words that it is necessary to resolve issues with Russia, we want to have good relations with Russia, this is better than not having good relations, and that only a fool thinks otherwise," Lavrov said. "We also hear this."

Trump and Putin spoke by phone on March 20.

Also on Friday, the RIA agency reported that Lavrov said that US military strikes on Syria last week removed any moral obligation Russia had to withhold S-300 anti-aircraft missile systems from its ally Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Lavrov was also quoted as saying that, prior to the US strikes on Syrian targets, Russia had told US officials which areas of Syria represented "red lines" for Moscow, and the US military action did not cross those lines.

He said that he was convinced Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump would not allow an armed confrontation between their two countries, RIA reported.

President Putin (Photo: EPA)

The developments take place as relations grow increasingly frosty between the US and Russia, with matters coming to a head after the US led a strike against military targets in Syria last Saturday in response for Assad's use of chemical weapons that killed dozens of people.

President Trump praised the "perfectly executed strike" in Syria carried out by Washington and its Western allies early Saturday. The attack promted a scathing response from Moscow, which accused the US and its allies of "diplomatic hooliganism" for their "blatant disregard of international law."
A number of vehicles in the Palestinian village of Burqa near Binyamin were vandalized and sprayed with the words Here live terror supporters to be expelled and killed, according to the police.

The police have launched an investigation into a possible hate crime.
Police are investigating a possible hate crime that took place overnight Thursday after several suspicious individuals entered a Palestinian village east of Ramallah and punctured car tires and sprayed hateful slogans on dozens of vehicles and homes.

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Two suspects were caught on CCTV cameras slashing the tires of vans in the village of Burqa.

CCTV footage

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God is the king, Stop the administrative orders and Here live terror supporters to be expelled and killed were the slogans that were scrawled on the homes and cars.



Israeli security forces were called to the scene and launched an investigation into the matter.

'God is the king'

The IDF and police have issued repeated warnings in recent weeks against acts of violence and vandalism carried out by Israeli right-wing extremists, which risks sparking an escalation in violence in the West Bank as Israel faces a volatile Gaza border.

A string of hate-related incidents have aroused the IDFs attention in the West Bank in recent weeks.

Two assailants were captured on security camera overnight last Friday setting fire to the front door of a mosque near Nablus.

In the CCTV footage, recorded directly above the door, the arsonists could be seen approaching the entrance of the mosque in the village of Kfar Aqraba, and covering it with flammable substances before igniting the flames by throwing a match.

The Shin Bet has recorded a spike in the number of hate incidents perpetrated against Palestinians since the beginning of the year, when compared with last year.

Here live terror supporters to be expelled and killed

While by April 2017 the security forces recorded 8 instances of hate crime, 12 have already taken place this year, which have included nationalistically-motivated attacks on Palestinian property.

According to the Shin Bet, 63 administrative restriction orders were issued last year against extremist right-wing activists, while 13 have been issued so far in 2018.

The Shin Bet statistics also show that this year five terror attacks have been carried out against Palestinians, which were believed to have been committed by Jewish activists, while only two were carried out throughout the entire last year.

Stop the administrative orders

Security forces said that the arson attack in Kfar Aqraba constituted an escalation in the severity of the nature of the attacks, since it was launched not merely against private property, but against a place of worshipthe first since June 2015 when the Church of Loaves and Fishes on the shores of the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel was set alight

Past experience shows that a series of incidents of property destruction rapidly deteriorate into more severe incidents of arson, and even worse, said one security official.

Extremist acts of violence by the right-wing activists has also not been restricted to Palestinians, with Israeli military officers also falling prey.

A group of soldiers, for example, who arrived at an illegal outpost that was established near Itamar, were attacked by a pack of extremists who threw rocks at them and used pepper spray against them. Fearing for their lives, the soldiers were eventually forced to respond by firing shots into the air.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Friday morning that the IDF is ready for any threat by Iran, vowing to fight against "anyone who tries to harm us."

We hear the threats from Iran. IDF fighters and the security branches are ready for any development. We will fight anyone who tries to harm us, Netanyahu said as the government convened in a special celebratory meeting at Independence Hall in Tel Aviv to mark Israels 70th birthday.

We will not be deterred by the price and we will exact a price from those who seek our souls. The IDF is ready for its mission and the nation will stand.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a stern warning to Iran on Friday morning, promising that despite the threats that have been emanating from Tehran against Israel, the IDF will exact a price from anyone seeking to harm its people.

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We hear the threats from Iran. IDF fighters and the security branches are ready for any development. We will fight anyone who tries to harm us, Netanyahu said as the government convened in a special celebratory meeting at Independence Hall in Tel Aviv to mark Israels 70th birthday.

(Photo: Shaul Golan)

We will not be deterred by the cost and we will exact a price from those who seek our lives. The IDF is up to the task, and the people will endure," Netanyahu told his ministers and government officials.

Last week, while Israel remained silent on an attack on the Tiyas Military Airbase in Syria's Homs, senior US government officials told NBC new that Israeli fighter jets carried out the airstrikes and informed the White House of its intentions beforehand.

With Russia pointing the finger at Israel shortly after the attack, a senior IDF official told the New York Times that the strike, intended to hit Iranian installations and personnel, was carried out by Israel.

Speaking to the newspaper's senior analyst Thomas Friedman, the officer said the attackwhich claimed the lives of seven Iranian soldierswas "the first time we attacked live Iranian targetsboth facilities and people."

Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman stressed last week military preparedness and security would need to be bolstered, taking the cue from Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qassemi who threatened just hours prior that Israel will regret the "misdeed" of striking at the T-4 airbase.

'Israelis are proud of the state'

At opening of Fridays meeting, ministers signed the digital Israeli declaration of independence, with Netanyahu focusing on the elation with which Israelis celebrated the country's 70th birthday. We are holding today this special government meeting as part of the 70th anniversary celebrations of the State of Israel, the prime minister said in his opening remarks.

We have all participated in the moving events to mark 70 years of our independence in which public joy was particularly prominent. The citizens of Israel are proud of our state. They love it and they know how to appreciate its achievements in every sphere, Netanyahu continued.

(Photo: Shahar Hay)

The joy and the pride are not ordered from abovethey spring from the heart. Several months ago we decided to restore and refurbish this building. It is fitting that the restored Independence Hall be a main heritage site in our country and so it will be.

Offering a brief history of when the founders of the state convened in Independence Hall to declare the independence of the Jewish State in the Land of Israel, Netanyahu extolled the restoration of Jewish sovereignty.

"The 5th of Iyar 5708 is a unique date in our history. On it, in this room, the members of the People's Council gathered. They decided on the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel. In so doing they restored to us political sovereignty in our land," he said.

'The State of Israel has arisen; the exile of Israel is over,' he added, quoting Israels first prime minister David Ben-Gurion after declaring Israels independence.

"I add: And the Jewish People have been reborn. Because if the state had not been established, Heaven forbid!, the Jewish People would have shriveled away in exile and perhaps taken awful blows again. It is doubtful whether we would have had another opportunity to establish our sovereignty, Netanyahu surmised.

The premier went on to say that the establishment of the State of Israel has "created a national center for our people in which there is no assimilation and in which there has been constant growth. It has given us strength. It has infused us with spirit. It ensures our future.

"Seventy years agothe masses danced in the streets. But it was clear to Ben-Gurion that a difficult struggle would soon be upon us. The enemy sought to destroy us but Ben-Gurion believed in us and in our determination. He said this when enemy planes bombed Sde Dov airfield in Tel Aviv: 'I went home slowly and then I sawthe people were not afraid! I saw the same faces that I saw in England during the Blitz. And I said in my heartthese people will endure!,' Netanyahu continued, drawing the parallel with modern-day Israel.

We also stand fast against those who would destroy us. We are certain of our ability to defend ourselves by ourselveswhich is the essence of controlling our fate, the essence of independence, he said before thanking Israel's allies, particularly the US, for its birthday wishes.

He thanked the president of our strong ally, US' Donald Trump, and also Russias President Vladimir Putin. These greetings reflect Israel's rising status among the nations.
Trouble in paradise? Photo: Kevin Dietsch - Pool/Getty Images

Donald Trump is not known for putting the interests of the American people above those of the fossil fuel industry. Since taking office, the president has expanded the liberty of coal companies to dump mining waste in streams, opened up federal lands and coastal areas to oil drilling, moved to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate accords, and let a cartoonishly corrupt fracking industry crony wage war against the Environmental Protection Agency from inside its ranks.

But every once in a while, Trumps populist instinct gets the better of him  and he momentarily betrays the fact that the GOPs favorite industries and the American public have disparate interests. Such was the case Friday morning, when the president scolded the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) for inflating oil prices:

Looks like OPEC is at it again. With record amounts of Oil all over the place, including the fully loaded ships at sea, Oil prices are artificially Very High! No good and will not be accepted!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 20, 2018

For once, Trumps tweeted diatribe is more or less accurate. OPEC and Russia have been mounting a coordinated effort to cut back production, so as to inflate oil prices. For three years, a global glut of crude has weighed on the finances of oil-exporting countries. And it has also done significant harm to Americas fracking industry  since extracting fossil fuels through hydraulic fracturing has higher production costs than conventional oil drilling, low energy prices can render many fracking enterprises unprofitable.

Thanks to the recent efforts of the Russians, Saudis, and other major oil exporters, however, the price of oil has rebounded  and gasoline prices in the U.S. are at their highest level in three years.

As Russias energy minister was quick to point out, this development is good news for American energy companies, telling Bloomberg News, The deal helped to restore the industry of Texas. But for a fleeting moment, Trump let his allegiance to the forgotten man and woman override his partys fealty to energy interests. And the price of oil took a (temporary) hit.

Oil erases gains after Trump slams OPEC for inflating prices https://t.co/3VXM0fbCyK pic.twitter.com/8iDfYJ7M5K  Bloomberg Markets (@markets) April 20, 2018

In an ideal world, the president would put the American people above Big Oil by doing everything in his (or her) power to save the former from the ecological catastrophe the latter is hell-bent on bringing about. But in this decidedly un-ideal world, it looks like well have to settle for a tweet declaring the price of gas to be too damn high.
A 25-year-old Palestinian was shot dead by IDF gunfire on Friday morning during skirmishes with Israeli security forces on the Gaza border, according to Palestinian reports.

The violence erupted following the renewal, for the fourth consecutive week, of the March of Return staged by the Palestinians in the coastal enclave.

The Palestinian was shot in the head east of Jabalia and died of his wounds after being rushed to hospital in Gaza.
Four Palestinians, one of them 15-years-old, were shot dead by IDF troops on Friday morning during skirmishes with Israeli security forces on the Gaza border, according to Palestinian sources.

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The violence erupted following the renewal, for the fourth consecutive week, of the  March of Return  staged by the Palestinians in the coastal enclave in recent weeks, some 3,000 of whom have descended on the border.

Rioters prepare kites, Molotov cocktails X

The Gaza Health Ministry says 445 Palestinians have been wounded in protests on the Gaza-Israel border, including 96 who were wounded by Israeli army fire.

The officials say that of those injured Friday, 174 were transferred to hospitals and 271 treated in field clinics. Some of the injured were overcome by tear gas, hit with rubber-coated steel pellets or hit by shrapnel.

Gazan flying kite, aimed to burn field in Israel (Photo: AFP)

Israeli soldiers deployed along the border in a bid to prevent or react to the outbreak of violence, with officials warning that the military will act against instigators and riot ringleaders.

Kite made by Palestinian protesters (Photo: Twitter)

(Photo: IDF Spokesperson's Unit)

Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who toured the area of Kibbutz Sa'ad in the Gaza vicinity Friday, pointed to the dwindling numbers in the protests, saying "It is good to see that the Palestinian public is less and less responding to Hamas' calls.

According to Lieberman, "90% of (current) demonstrators are paid by Hamas. Their families force them to come here."

Lieberman meeting with senior IDF officials in his vist to Sa'ad and the Gaza vicinity (Photo: Israel's Defense Ministry)

As night fell and with it protester's enthusiasm, Hamas's senior leadershipamong them its political leader Ismail Haniyeh and it leader in the strip Yahya Sinwararrived to the border, in an apparent effort to raise the morale of the demonstrators.

"We call on the Palestinian people to prepare for the big march on Nakba Day," Haniyeh told demonstrators, urging them to maintain the momentum of the "March of Return" campaign for what is supposed to be its peak moment on May 15Nakba (catastrophe) Day, commemorated by Palestinians for their displacement following Israel's establishment.

Ismail Haniyeh

Yahya Sinwar

Ahead of the protests, the IDF dropped leaflets on Gaza on Friday morning, warning residents to refrain from approaching the border fence with Israel, and not to attempt to damage it or carry out terror attacks.

It is the first time that the IDF has dropped leaflets from the air on the Gaza Strip ahead of the mass demonstrations on the border warning against public disturbances.

You are participating in violent disturbances. Hamas is using you to carry out terror attacks. The IDF is ready for any scenario, the leaflets read, which also contained pictures of objects and weapons and actions which the military has forbidden in the protests.

Avoid approaching the fence and damaging it. Avoid using a weapon to carry out violent acts against the Israeli security forces and Israeli civilians. Keep away from terrorists and from people who promote disturbances and violence, the leaflets instructed before warning that the army would not hesitate to respond.

The IDF will act against any attempt to damage the barrier and its components and any other military equipment. Hamas is using you to promote its own interests of the movement. Do not obey Hamass instruction that endanger your lives. There is another way. Your future is in your hands. it added.

Palestinians, in response, attached notes with messages to Israel on kites they built and sent carrying incendiary materials at the border.

One of the notes attached to the kites (Photo: AFP)

"You have no place in Palestine," the notes read. "Go back to where you came from. Al-Quds (Jerusalem)the capital of Palestine."

On Thursday, as the Gaza residents geared up for more protests, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad movement published a video in its latest psychological warfare campaign against IDF commanders and soldiers, which included images of soldiers in the crosshairs of a sniper.

The Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), Maj. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, features twice in the video, which was likely filmed during mass demonstrations that took place in recent weeks as part of the March of Return.

The video, intended to illustrate the abilities of the snipers situated in the Gaza Strip to shoot Israeli personnel on the border, concludes in a message in Hebrew and Arabic, saying You murder our people in cold blood and think that you are protected, when our snipers are directed at your senior commanders.

Last Friday, some 10,000 Gaza residents assembled on the border with Israel to stage another protest, with IDF soldiers responding with live rounds as protesters threw Molotov Cocktails and explosive devices.

While thousands are still expected to take part in the latest demonstrations protests, a weekly decline in the turnout has been noted by security officials. Since the first march, during which tens of thousands were galvanized by the ruling Hamas terror group to take part in the protest, last week witnessed a stark drop in momentum, with the number dropping to 10,000.
Threats ofand againstwar were exchanged Friday, with the second-in-command of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Hossein Salami asserting Israelis will have nowhere to run but the sea following an Iranian incursion, while Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman warned against such an endeavor, boasting Israel has never been more prepared for an all out armed conflict.

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Recent growing hostilities between the two nations came following Israel's air strike on the T-4 airbase in Syria earlier this month, which claimed 14 lives, including seven Iranian "military advisors."

The attack reportedly targeted an advanced Iranian air-defense system that was recently installed, and was aimed to "blunt Tehrans expanding influence in the Middle East."

Salami (L) and Lieberman (Photo: Reuters)

Israel has for years warned against Tehran's hegemonic aspirations in the region.

"I suggest that everyone on the northern border think carefully about what they are doing," said Lieberman while on a visit to the kibbutz of Sa'ad in the Gaza vicinity that took place on the backdrop of Hamas-led riots on the Gaza border.

"They should not try the IDF or the State of Israel. We are ready for any scenario. We are ready for a multifaceted scenario. There has never been such readiness and such willingness, both in the army and among the people of Israel, in recent memory."

This came in response to Salami, who openly threatened Israel in a Friday sermon in Tehran, saying, "the fingers are on the trigger and the missiles are ready for launch."

Lieberman meeting with senior IDF officials in his vist to Sa'ad and the Gaza vicinity (Photo: Israel's Defense Ministry)

He continued by cautioning Israel not to rely on their might of its Air Force, as its airbases "are within range of fire and will be out of commission quickly," or their allies, naming the US and the UK, as "there will be no trace of you left when they arrive (to aid youed)."

"We know you well, you are besieged everywhere in the occupied territoriesfrom the north and the west," Salami said, referring to Israel's borders with Lebanon and Syria at the north and adjacency to the Mediterranean Sea at the West.

"The Resistance (the Islamic Republic and its allies and proxiesmainly Hezbollah and Hamas) today is much stronger than in the past," he affirmed. "Do not think that the new war will be like the 'July War' (the Second Lebanon War). You saw how The Resistance acted against those Takfiri militants (ISIS) on the ground.

"You have no place to escapeyou live in the mouth of the snake. The only place you can escape to is the sea."

President of Iran Hassan Rouhani attending a military parade (Photo: EPA)

Salami is not the first to threat to drive Israelis into the sea, as that threat was made against Jews living in Israel ever since the idea of a Jewish state became popular.

"We have been hearing these threats for many years, and we are not moved," Lieberman retorted. "We are not looking for war. On the contrary, we seek quiet, tranquility and security; But if someone is plotting a war, his blood will be on his own head," he said quoting a bible verse, meaning those who are hostile bear the responsibility for hostilities.

"I do not know if anyone is up to war, but we're calm. Like I saidwe are preparing for everything," he concluded.
The US-led international coalition against the Islamic State group says its local allies in Syria have captured a Syrian-born German IS operative previously tied to a 9/11-linked jihadist cell.

US Col. Ryan Dillon says the Syrian Democratic Forces captured Mohammed Haydar Zammar in northeast Syria roughly four weeks ago.

Zammar, a Syrian-born German, was a key member of a Hamburg jihadist cell that included three of the Sept. 11 suicide pilots.

Dillon says Zammar is in SDF custody. He says coalition officials are working with the SDF in "ongoing intelligence activities." He declined to say whether officials have met face-to-face with Zammar.
Sixty-six US senators signed a letter released on Friday urging Turkey President Tayyip Erdogan to release an American pastor on trial in Turkey on charges he was linked to a group accused of orchestrating a failed military coup.

Andrew Brunson, a Christian pastor who has lived in Turkey for more than two decades, was indicted on charges of helping the group that Ankara holds responsible for a failed 2016 coup against President Tayyip Erdogan. He faces up to 35 years in prison.

The letter, led by Republican Senator Thom Tillis, who represents Brunson's home state North Carolina, and Democrat Jeanne Shaheen, said the Senate backs efforts to strengthen cooperation between US and Turkish law enforcement.
UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Nikolay Mladenov condemned Friday the IDF killing of a 15-year-old Palestinian that occurred earlier that day during a riot on the Gaza border, echoing UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres by calling for an investigation of the "outrageous" incident.

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It is OUTRAGEOUS to shoot at children! Mladenov fumed in a twitter post. How does the killing of a child in Gaza today help peace? It doesnt! It fuels anger and breeds more killing. Children must be protected from violence, not exposed to it, not killed! This tragic incident must be investigated.

Mladenov next to the slain youth (Photo: AP)

According to the IDF, a sniper in the Israeli army is given authorization to shoot only from an officer at the level of a battalion commander or above. In such a case, they are permitted to open fire on a central instigator, aiming at his ankle or below his knee.

Full data on each sniper fire is recorded in real time via the rifle's telescopic sights lens.

Gaza border riot (Photo: EPA)

In total, four Palestinians were shot dead by IDF troops on Friday morning during skirmishes with Israeli security forces on the Gaza border, according to Palestinian sources.

The violence erupted following the renewal, for the fourth consecutive week, of the  March of Return  staged by the Palestinians in the coastal enclave in recent weeks, some 3,000 of whom have descended on the border.

The Gaza Health Ministry says 445 Palestinians have been wounded in protests on the Gaza-Israel border, including 96 who were wounded by Israeli army fire.

The officials say that of those injured Friday, 174 were transferred to hospitals and 271 treated in field clinics. Some of the injured were overcome by tear gas, hit with rubber-coated steel pellets or hit by shrapnel.

Israeli soldiers deployed along the border in a bid to prevent or react to the outbreak of violence, with officials warning that the military will act against instigators and riot ringleaders.

Ahead of the protests, the IDF dropped leaflets on Gaza on Friday morning, warning residents to refrain from approaching the border fence with Israel, and not to attempt to damage it or carry out terror attacks.

It is the first time that the IDF has dropped leaflets from the air on the Gaza Strip ahead of the mass demonstrations on the border warning against public disturbances.

You are participating in violent disturbances. Hamas is using you to carry out terror attacks. The IDF is ready for any scenario, the leaflets read, which also contained pictures of objects and weapons and actions which the military has forbidden in the protests.

Avoid approaching the fence and damaging it. Avoid using a weapon to carry out violent acts against the Israeli security forces and Israeli civilians. Keep away from terrorists and from people who promote disturbances and violence, the leaflets instructed before warning that the army would not hesitate to respond.

The IDF will act against any attempt to damage the barrier and its components and any other military equipment. Hamas is using you to promote its own interests of the movement. Do not obey Hamass instruction that endanger your lives. There is another way. Your future is in your hands. it added.

Palestinians, in response, attached notes with messages to Israel on kites they built and sent carrying incendiary materials at the border.

"You have no place in Palestine," the notes read. "Go back to where you came from. Al-Quds (Jerusalem)the capital of Palestine.
Twenty people were killed in an air strike by a Saudi-led military coalition in southwestern Yemen on Friday, residents said.

The attack hit a car transporting 20 passengers south of Taiz province, locals told Reuters. Six bodies had been identified but the rest were charred beyond recognition, they added.

A spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition said it would investigate the report, but declined to comment further. "We take this report very seriously," he said.
Latest News

Washington, DC - Tuesdays Supreme Court ruling preventing the removal of certain aliens convicted of aggravated felonies that constitute crimes of violence highlights the danger posed by congressional inaction. This case, first argued and briefed under the Obama Administration, gives Congress a clear opportunity to finally close dangerous loopholes:

Congress should immediately pass a fix to close these loopholes so that the United States can promptly remove violent criminal aliens from our country. Unless Congress acts, the United States Government will be unable to remove from our communities many non-citizens convicted of violent felonies, including in some cases domestic assault and battery, burglary, and child abuse. It is a matter of vital public safety for Congress to act now.
Latest News

Washington, DC - Acting Secretary of State John J. Sullivan will travel to Toronto, Canada from April 21-23 to lead the U.S. delegation to the G-7 Foreign Ministers Meeting.

The G-7 Foreign Ministers Meeting offers an opportunity for foreign ministers to exchange views and collaborate on global political and security issues of mutual concern, including counterterrorism, non-proliferation, North Korea, and Syria. These conversations will set the stage for the G-7 Leaders Summit in Charlevoix, Canada, in June.

On the margins of the G-7 ministerial, Acting Secretary Sullivan will meet with a number of his counterparts for bilateral discussions. The Acting Secretary will also engage with staff at Consulate General Toronto.
The UGRC (University of Ghana Registered Courses) was introduced into the academic schedule of the University of Ghana a few years back. The system was introduced to equip the students in the university with an all-around knowledge and skills that are related to the daily life events. The UGRC system benefits the two student groups at the University of Ghana: the UGRC registration level 200 and the UGRC registration for level 100. Both the 100 and 200 levels students can use the UGRC registration system to register new units and also resit courses.

Source: Ghana Live TV

The UG resit registration follows the same procedure as the one the students use when doing their normal University of Ghana Registered Courses registration. Generally, any student at the University of Ghana pursuing any undergraduate course is supposed to take a total of six UGRC units. The UGRC registration for level 100 has a total of 4 units, while the UGRC registration level 200 has two units, summing up to a total of six units.

READ ALSO: University of Education Winneba Sandwich Fees 2017-2018: Find out About the Fees Needed

The UGRC units must be taken by any student who wishes to graduate after completing their undergraduate studies at the University of Ghana. If a student misses taking even one of the UGRC units he/she will be bared by the University of Ghana academic department from graduating till the uncompleted UGRC unit is completed and passed.

Students who fail the UGRC units can redo the units by registering on the UG resit registration portal. Some of the courses that are in the UGRC course list include:

Academic Writing

Critical Thinking and Practical Reasoning

Earth Resources

Numeracy Skills

African Studies, etc.

UGRC course registration

All the UGRC units in the University of Ghana are registered online. The University of Ghana UGRC registration is offered under the Department of Academic Affairs Directorate. Before you begin your registration of the UGRC units, you must log in to the students portal.

Every student will use their login details, you will be required to input your student ID and your PIN to access the portal. On the same page, you will find all the necessary information related to the UGRC registration for level 100 and the UGRC registration level 200. If you access the UGRC registration 2018, you will find links directing you to the UGRC courses timetable for both the level 100 students and the level 200 students.

The timetable links give the students the options of downloading the table. Apart from that the UGRC online registration portal also has the updates related to new UGRC groups and the new units in the group. Once you are able to access your UGRC online registration students portal, you can go ahead and register your UGRC units. Once you are done registering and confirming the units you can log out of your portal.

Online Course Registration

The following steps are for online course registration:

Go to the university website and click on the MIS Web link to access the students log in portal. The link is under the thick blue banner at the top under the menu students.

Use your student ID and 5 digit pin to log in.

ON the left side of the screen, click on the student registration, which is under the Student iEnabler.

Click on the menu titled Submit Registration.

Under the Qualification Code click on the blue letters.

Then select Register for this Qualification.

Click on the menu icon Save & Continue. You will be shown all the units that you qualify for and are relevant to your level and course.

To select the courses, click on the small box that is next to the title of the course and the course code.

Then select Save & Continue to view the units you have selected. If you need to make some corrections, you can click the Restart Process icon.

If you have no corrections then click on the Continue button and then you will be shown the total registration cost of the units.

Click on Accept Registration to complete the course registration process, then select the Printer Friendly Format, to print your proof of registration.

After that, you will be free to log out of your student portal.

The following steps are for adding courses

After logging in the students portal. Click on the Registration menu, located under the Students iEnabler.

Then select the Add Subject to a Registration.

Click on the Qualification menu, to have a view of all the courses that you qualify for. Select the course you want to add by clicking on the small box next to the course code and course name.

Then Click on Save & Continue, if you have correctly selected the course(s). In case you want to make corrections then click on Restart Process.

When you are done, click on Continue, and then Accept Registration.

The last step is to click on Printer Friendly Format and then have a printout evidence of your registration process.

Exit and then log out of the portal.

The following steps are for deleting a registered course:

After logging in the students portal and clicking on the Registration icon. Click on the Subject Cancellation menu.

You will be shown all the courses you have registered for. To deregister a course, click on the small box next to the registered course and then provide a reason for the deleting the registered course.

Then click on the Save Subject Cancellation menu.

To view the updated proof of registration, click on the Student Inquiry menu.

Then click on the Printer Friendly Format and have your updated proof of registration printed.

Finally, click exit and log out.

Once a course has been cancelled it cannot be added again into the portal.

The following steps are for students who want to resit a failed unit.

First, you need to get an approval resit examination form and then submit it to your respective department. Continuing students can access their approval forms via the here and the students who have completed their course can access the approval form this link.

Then submit a copy of the approval forms to the Cash Office of the Registry so that you can be allowed to pay fees for the unit.

Then make the payment for all the courses you want to redo. Wait for 24 hours before you begin the course registration for your failed units.

All the students who have completed cannot use the online registration portal to register for a resit unit. They only need to make a physical submission of the approval forms to their receptive departments.

For the continuing students, access the online MIS web and click on the Re-sit Registration.

To add the course you want to resit click on the + symbol.

Then click on Select Course on the registration page. Expand the course look up dialogue box and then on the search box, type the course code you wish to resit. Dont leave any spaces when typing the code.

To select the course, tick the box next to the course. Then click on Select Below.

Pick the time you wish to sit for the resit examinations. There are two options: Inter-Semester Break Supplementary Examination and the End of Semester Examination.

Click on the Register button.

Do this for all the courses you wish to register for a resit examination.

For the Distance Learning Students, their resit examination course registration is similar to those who have completed their studies. After getting their approval forms and submitting them t the various relevant Learning Centre offices and paying for the resit units, they are provided with the a provisional identification card one week prior to the exam. The cards are issued at the Academic Affairs Office or in their Learning Centers.

Additional points to note about UGRC course registration

The University of Ghana Registered Courses has specific instructions, especially with regards to the UGRC courses that the students are expected to register. It's best for every student to consult their respective College Academic Offices to be given all the instructions with regard to the MIS web UGRC registration. The following general instructions are important for the UGRC course registration for all the level 100 and level 200 students.

Any level 200 students pursuing Political Science is barred from the University of Ghana academics from taking Africa in the Contemporary World (UGRC 222) which is one of the UGRC course available for the level 200 students. Students pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Art and taking level 200 Music, Drama and Dance, are not allowed to register for the following UGRC units:

African Music UGRC 227

African Drama UGRC 226

African Dance UGRC 225

All the students in level 200 and level 100 are prohibited from registering more than one unit under the UGRC African Studies. Students who register more than one unit in this category will have their examination papers canceled.

All the students in level 100 and 200 who decide to pursue courses in Language Proficiency are expected to register their units at the Institute of African Studies. The courses that are affected by this rule are:

Dagbani UGRC 235

Ewe UGRC 236

Ga UGRC 237

Twi UGRC 238

The Numeracy Skills UGRC unit (UGRC120) is for all the undergraduate students who are in the College of Humanities and are pursuing the following undergraduate degree courses in Computer Science, Statistics, Administration, Mathematics, and Economics. Students in this category are also expected to take the Introduction to Literature (UGRC160) course.

Source: University of Ghana

The students who are pursuing a degree in Economics with no mathematics units are expected to take the General Mathematics (UGRC170) UGRC course. These students are also advised by the University of Ghana academics to undertake the Introduction to Literature (UGRC160) UGRC course.

It's very crucial for all students to look at the mandatory UGRC courses that they are supposed to undertake depending on their undergraduate degrees and then look at the recommended UGRC units. The mandatory course must be done if a student wants to graduate in their discipline of study. Any student, who has not registered their UGRC units on the UGRC course registration platform, will not be allowed to sit for the UGRC examinations even if they have attended the lessons for the particular UGRC unit.

All the students in the higher levels in the University of Ghana who are unable to access the online registration are required by the university to get in touch with their respective College Academic Offices and then submit their detailed academic reports for the previous years.

The University of Ghana, also advises students that sometimes the system may be slow due to a large number of students trying to access MIS web UGRC registration portal. If the problem persists, they can try and access the UGRC online registration platform some other time when the system is not crowded by users.

Source: Yen.com.gh
Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Former FBI Director James Comey has been telling the world about his harrowing encounters with President Trump, who repeatedly demanded his personal loyalty, implored him to stop investigating Michael Flynn, and then dispatched his personal bodyguard to fire him when he failed to comply. But what if we have the story backwards? What if Trump, an innocent family business operator, naive to the ways of Washington, had been accosted by a scheming, predatory deep state operator? And what if Comeys firing was a defensive measure against his nefarious trap? This is the scenario Trumps defenders now envision, and have laid out in columns by The Federalists Mollie Hemingway and the Washington Examiners Byron York.

Hemingway proposes a simple account of Comeys interactions with Trump: The FBI director was setting up the president by laying a pretext for a media ambush. Newly released memos written by former FBI director James Comey indicate that an early 2017 briefing for then-President-elect Donald Trump about the contents of an infamous dossier was held so it could be leaked to media outlets eager to report on the dossiers allegations, she writes, faux-authoritatively.

Hemingways theory is that CNN had the Steele dossier, and could not cover it unless it had a news hook to do so. Comeys meeting was designed to be the hook. He would tell Trump about the dossier, and then leak the fact that he told Trump to the news media, which provided them the very news hook they sought and needed to report on the dossier.

If you read the CNN report on the dossier that Hemingway describes, though, literally the first sentence describes the fact that President Obama was briefed on the dossier before Trump was told about it: Classified documents presented last week to President Obama and President-elect Trump included allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump, multiple US officials with direct knowledge of the briefings tell CNN. And then, if you go a few paragraphs down in the CNN story, you learn that the dossiers allegations were also mentioned in classified briefings for congressional leaders last year.

So CNN knew Congress had been briefed on the dossier in 2017. And it also knew Obama had been briefed on the dossier. Hemingways theory is that CNN would not have reported either of these facts without the additional revelation that Trump had also been briefed on the dossier.

I have an extremely hard time believing CNN would refuse to run a story revealing for the first time that there was a dossier of explosive allegations against the president-elect that had been shared with both Congress and the president of the United States, because they needed the additional information that the president-elect had also been briefed in order to run it. And I really dont see why Hemingway, who has long been convinced CNN hates Trump and smears him routinely, would believe it would be so reticent. But thats her theory. CNN wanted to report on the dossier, but somehow could not do it until it had a third confirmed instance of it being discussed by government officials. And this need was so great that the conspirators sent Comey in to mention it to Trump, to set off this trap.

Yorks analysis is different than Hemmingways, but possibly even less plausible. York argues that Trumps request for loyalty was not an attempt to suborn the FBI into an instrument of his personal control, but instead a defensive and completely reasonable response to what looked like Comey blackmailing him. It seems entirely reasonable for a president to wonder what was going on, he concludes of the pee tape debriefing, and whether the FBI director was loyal, not to the president personally, but to the confidentiality that is required in his role as head of the nations chief investigative agency.

So what did Trump mean when he said he needed Comeys loyalty? Maybe he meant an FBI director he didnt have to worry would blackmail him. https://t.co/VolkoMlfnP  Byron York (@ByronYork) April 20, 2018

This analysis obviously omits a massive amount of context: Trump asking Comey specifically to let off Michael Flynn (who, at the time, was the only official known to be under investigation for his Russian ties); Trumps months and months of attempting to control multiple aspects of the Department of Justice, including demands that it investigate his opponents; and indeed Trumps long-standing belief that the Department of Justice has always been and always should be a weapon to protect the presidents interests. To believe Trumps demand for loyalty was anything other than an insistence that the FBI protect his interests requires ignoring everything Trumps said and done about this subject for his entire career.

Whats more, if its true, as York says, that Trumps demand for loyalty was merely merely an innocuous request that Comey not leak anything hostile to him, why didnt Trump say this himself? Indeed, why has he spent a year denying he ever said this at all? As soon as Comey reported having been asked for loyalty in 2017, the White House insisted no such words were ever uttered. As recently as this week, Trump has been claiming, I never asked Comey for Personal Loyalty. York has produced an alibi on Trumps behalf that Trump never thought to use himself over all these months.

The easiest way to see through these defenses is to imagine the alternative. Suppose that Comey decided not to tell Trump about the Steele dossier, even though its findings had been taken seriously by U.S. intelligence, and both Congress and the former president had already been briefed on it. Would Trumps defenders today be holding up Comeys silence as evidence that he did the right thing by withholding this information from the new president? Would they see it as a point in Comeys favor, evidence that he really did have a good faith interest in helping Trump? No, of course not. The backlash would be far worse. They would be charging Comey with having participated in the deep state conspiracy by keeping Trump in the dark about the investigation that posed such a serious threat.
- Ghanaian musician, Fancy Gadam, has claimed that 'One Corner' hitmaker,. Patapaa is not a talented musician

- He went on to say that he will never collaborate with him to produce a song

Ghanaian music artiste, Fancy Gadam, has ruled out the possibility of collaborating with the One Corner hitmaker, Patapaa.

According to him, Patapaa has no talent, and for that reason, he will not waste his time working with him.

Patapaa is not talented; Ill not waste my time collaborating with him. Ill not put Patapaa on my song, hes a joker and hes not a musician., he stated.

Patapaa

READ ALSO: Has Kennedy Agyapong been named in Ibrah's money laundering scandal?

In an interview with Bola Ray on Starr Chat on Wednesday, April 18, 2018, Fancy Gadam noted that it was absurd for Patapaa to presume he was the only one who could have won the award.

He added that it was further strange, given the fact that he (Patapaa) was not as popular as some other nominees.

The two musicians have been throwing punches at each other after Patapaa stated that Fancy Gadam didnt deserve the Song of the Year award he received at the just ended Vodafone Ghana Music Awards (VGMAs).

Fancy Gadam won the award with his hit song Total Cheat, to the chagrin of Patapaa who was confident that his song One Corner should have won that category.

A disappointed Patapaa stormed out of the Accra International Conference Centre (AICC), where the awards ceremony was held, expressing his dissatisfaction and further alleging that Charterhouse, the organizers of the awards took a bribe to cheat him.

READ ALSO: Obinim 'turns himself into a woman' during church service

In this video, Ebonys father names some people he believes are guilty of his daughters death. The question of whether homosexuality should be legalized in Ghana becomes a bone of contention:

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- Dennis Ofosuhene posed as a former minister in a bid to retrieve a truck loaded with timber

- The Forestry Commission has retrieved several chainsaw machines from the suspect and his gang

Officials of the Ghana Police Service have arrested a 28-year-old man in Goaso in the Brong Ahafo Region after impersonating the regions former Minister, Eric Opoku.

According to a 3news.com report, the suspect, Dennis Ofosuhene impersonated the former minister in an attempt to secure the release of a seized truckload of illegal lumber that had been seized by the Forestry Commission.

Report state a joint Police-Military team in an operation on April 16 this year, intercepted the loaded truck at Goaso and sent it to the District Forestry Office.

The suspect, Dennis Ofosuhene holds himself a former B/A minister (Photo credit: 3news.com)

READ ALSO: Stonebwoy is 'sitting on your neck' in Ghana music - David Oscar jabs Shatta Wale

But the suspect was said to have placed a phone call to the District Forest Manager the next day claiming to be the former regional minister and further instructed that the truck be released to their owners.

The Forestry Manager, Godfred Quashigah, who became suspicious, played along and asked that the owners come to the District Forestry office for discussion and subsequent release of the truck.

Further reports state, Dennis Ofosuhene who was said to be behind the whole illegal lumbering in the area later showed up at Forestry Commission office on April 17 as the owner of the loaded truck.

Godfred Quashigah told TV3 news that he managed to track the right identity of the young man by using his phone.

Around 4:15pm, a young gentleman entered my office and [that] he was here in connection with the arrested vehicle of which I was being spoken to by the alleged minister..."

After our interrogation, I was able to identify his name as Dennis Ofosuhene and on my phone, also I managed to track his name which corresponded with what he mentioned to me as the former minister, the Forestry boss said.

READ ALSO: 8 young Ghanaian millionaires social media users suspect to be fraud boys'

The manager said he consequently invited his two deputies and the Police CID assigned to the Forestry Office and met the man again.

Through questioning, he [Ofosuhene] then admitted he spoke to me the district manager and posed as the former NDC regional minister Eric Opoku, Mr Quashigah said.

He said since it was a case of impersonation and deceiving public officer Ofosuhene quickly arrested and handed over to the Police for investigations for possible prosecution.

According to the District Forest Manager, the practice of people intervening for intercepted illegal timber products to be released in the area was rampant.

As soon as you arrest someone then you receive a call indicating that the person is either a politician, a chief or someone from the jubilee house, he lamented.

READ ALSO: Diamond Appiah fires 'warning shot' at Ebony's father

In this video, Ebonys father names some people he believes are guilty of his daughters death. The question of whether homosexuality should be legalized in Ghana becomes a bone of contention:

Yen.com.gh 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. Message us on Facebook.

Source: Yen
- Actress Ahuofe Patri has said she is not pregnant

- According to her, rumour mongers were only trying to bully her with such rumours

Popular actress, Ahoufe Patri has denied reports that she is pregnant.

There have been recurring rumours in the last few months that Ahuofe Patri had taken seed.

The rumours started when the actress who shot to fame with her role in the popular 'Boys Kasa' comedy series appeared on Nana Ama McBrown's cooking show sometime last year.

READ ALSO: VIDEO: Actress 'forces' Kofi Adoma to feel her 'oranges' during interview

During the show, Ahuofe Patri was spotted with an unusual protruding belly.

The rumours seemed to have died down until Ahuofe Patri appeared at the 2018 VGMAs in a robe-like outfit.

Ahuofe Patri's outfit to the 2018 VGMAs

Her gown, talk on social media suggested, was probably to 'hide' her pregnancy.

READ ALSO: Photos of a 'mysteriously abandoned' mansion belonging to Osei Kwame Despite surface on the Internet

But in an interview with Joy News' MzGee, Ahuofe Patri stated categorically that she was not pregnant.

The actress also denied rumours that she was a drug addict who could not live without marijuana.

Ahuofe Patri stated that pointed out that though the rumours, especially the one about her supposed drug addiction, got to her because the reports involved her mother's name, she was over thrm now.

READ ALSO: Mzbel finally opens up on rumours that she's been 'chopping' a 17-year-old boy

"You cant bully me. I mean when you hear something like that about yourself and also because they [rumour mongers] involved my um that [and] was below the belt and it got me but I am good now.

"Ok so the weed allegation is not true and I am not pregnant," she stated.

Born Prisicilla Opoku Agyemang, Ahuofe Patri was born in 1991.

She has since her appearance in the hit Boys Kasa series become one of the most sought after actress in Ghana featuring in many movies, music videos and TV commercials.

Check out some of the trending news in Ghana in YEN.com.gh's video below:

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Please contact us on Facebook or Instagram now

Source: Yen
In some schools, teachers receive between 2,000 and 5,000 cedis for leaking papers - Former NAGRAT President

A former President of the National Association of Graduate Teachers (NAGRAT) is worried about how WASSCE papers continue to leak, he is suspicious of schools.
Goldbergs remarks had a racial overtone. Photo: CNN

Donald Trump has a well-earned reputation for flagrantly disregarding his attorneys advice, and then refusing to pay them for services rendered; also, for bragging about sexually assaulting women, praising white nationalists, denigrating racial and religious minorities, and trying to undermine the rule of law in the United States.

These infamous habits have made it exceedingly difficult for the president to find quality legal representation. So, last Friday, Trump found himself ringing up his old divorce lawyer to get some fresh perspective on his myriad legal woes.

That attorney, Jay Goldberg, proceeded to tell the president that his longtime lawyer (and current target of federal prosecutors) Michael Cohen will never stand up [for you] if charged by the government. Days later, Goldberg told The Wall Street Journal the same thing  going so far as to liken Cohen to the Gambino crime familys famous snitch, Sammy the Bull Gravano. That latter move was a bit strange; as Jonathan Chait observed, Goldbergs comments to the Journal plainly imply that the president is guilty of a crime that Cohen could reveal to authorities.

So, on Thursday, Goldberg went on CNN to clean up the PR mess he had created. In an interview with Erin Burnett, Goldberg clarified that he did not believe Cohen would flip, because flip means to me that when faced with the potential of spending time in jail, he will tell the truth. Rather, Goldberg insisted, his concern was that Cohen would give false testimony against the president to escape jail time.

Trumps legal adviser did not explain why this false testimony would pose a threat to the president, given how difficult it would ostensibly be to corroborate. Goldberg did, however, offer a more elaborate explanation for why Michael Cohen would go to such lengths to avoid incarceration.

Hes of a type that Ive recognized in the past as one not suited to stand up to the rigors of jail life, Goldberg explained. Its difficult to say this  prison has a racial overtone. Michael doesnt see himself walking down Broadway while people are clamoring, Youre going to be my wife.

The unmistakable implication of Goldbergs remarks: Michael Cohen will tell prosecutors whatever they want to hear because he is afraid of being raped in prison  specifically, by a fellow inmate who has racial overtones.

Goldberg says he's thinks Cohen will talk to prosecutors because he's worried about getting raped in prison.



"He's not suited to stand up to the rigors of jail life... Michael doesn't see himself walking down Broadway while people are clamoring, 'you're going to be my wife.'" pic.twitter.com/5IciTrNzp5  Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 19, 2018

Coincidentally, shortly after Goldberg offered these reflections, the Justice Department released former FBI director James Comeys memos  including one in which the president jokes about punishing journalists who report leaks by subjecting them to prison rape.

President makes a prison rape joke to express how incarcerating reporters would be effective. Director of the FBI, by his own account, laughs. pic.twitter.com/k1AFxURohk  Adam Serwer (@AdamSerwer) April 20, 2018

Around 80,000 people are sexually abused in American correctional facilities every year, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. That epidemic of sexual violence is a humanitarian catastrophe, and blatant violation of the Constitutions prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. The fact that it is treated as a laughing matter in American popular culture is an indictment of our collective morality, and an insight into how good, god-fearing people can accommodate themselves to inhuman political regimes.

Anyhow, it seems fair to say that Goldbergs showing on CNN did not inspire much confidence about his acumen as a cable-news surrogate, let alone as a defense attorney. If the president wants an attorney who will stay on message and avoid controversy, hed be better off with someone more reliable  like, say, Rudy Giuliani.
Kenyan finance and technology (Fintech) start-ups take a lion's share of 99 per cent of all funding in the region - leaving Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania to share the remaining 1 per cent, a new research report has shown.

The study, which looks at Fintechs in the region, was supported by Financial Sector Deepening Uganda (FSD), East African Venture Capital Association, UKaid, and FMO bank.

Kenyan developers receive 99% of all funding for Fintechs in the East African region. Photo: techweez

The East African technology support (hubs, incubators and accelerators) is concentrated in Nairobi, Africas Silicon Valley, said the study titled Fintrek, exploring new frontiers in Fintech investments in East Africa. Very few ecosystem support players also exist with Tanzania and Rwanda having only one tech incubator.

It is little wonder then that Kenya, the biggest economy in the region, had its tech companies receive the highest amount of funding between 2010 and 2017. Fintechs in the region received up to $206.4 million in investment between 2010 and 2017 but 99 per cent of this money went to Kenyan established Fintechs.

Also, locally owned Fintechs had fewer deals compared to foreign owned deals with the latter having at least 105 Fintechs able to raise money compared to just 63 in the former category between 2010 and 2017. The report also found limited funding from local sources with more than 80 per cent of funding into Fintechs in East Africa originated from outside Africa.

It also pointed out that there was lack of specific Fintech support for start-ups in the region thus very generic support is provided.

Meanwhile, the report shows that Fintech partnerships have centred on the multinational organisations due to their large customer base, marketing and distribution capability as well as brand credibility.

But even then, some of these partnerships lack of open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)  standards that allow software components to communicate and exchange information  between the players which hinders effectiveness of these partnerships.

The region has a huge gaps in a key Fintech talent including data scientists and software engineers. Academic institutions are focused on theoretical rather than practical learning, the report said.

Very few partnerships witnessed between incumbents and non-telco Fintechs as competitors, rather than collaborators.

Evans Osano, the capital markets development director at FSD Africa, said: The Fintech sector in East Africa is gaining momentum and has grown tremendously. Fintech innovations continue to disrupt financial markets. We expect this disruption to spread further into the capital markets, Osano said.

Jacqueline Musiitwa, the FSD Uganda executive director, said the report highlights that Africa attracted $2.2 billion in venture funding between 2010 and 2016 - is no doubt that Fintechs are key solutions for Uganda to meet its financial and technology inclusion goals by 2022.

I affirm that to achieve this goal, there needs to be collaboration and commitment by all the relevant players ranging from the government to the private sector, Musiitwa said.

amwesigwa@observer.ug
After a protracted legal drama at the bankruptcy court, the insolvency process for Essar Steel is back to square one: The National Company Law Tribunal has ordered the resolution professional (RP) and the Committee of Creditors (CoC) of the beleaguered company to reconsider the bids submitted by Numetal and ArcelorMittal in the first round in February.

Pronouncing the order yesterday, the Ahmedabad bench of the NCLT noted that certain provisions of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) were not followed by the CoC and the RP while disqualifying both the bids earlier. According to The Economic Times, the court was of the opinion that RP Satish Gupta of Alvarez & Marsal and the CoC had enough time to issue a revised advertisement on the qualification of bidders after the IBC was amended in November 2017 to bar defaulters and related parties from bidding for assets undergoing resolution. The tribunal further said that they were hasty in going in for a second round.

"The CoC did not follow the procedure," Justice Harihar Prakash Chaturvedi reportedly said in his ruling after having heard arguments for about a month. "Not giving enough time to applicants for rectifying the ground of disqualification also contravenes the IBC and is also against the law of the land."

According to the bench, the decision to disqualify the Numetal and ArcelorMittal bids should have been taken by the consortium of 31 lenders after the RP had submitted his report, which would have included disqualifying grounds. Hence, the process was incomplete they claimed.

The tribunal also decided to exclude the period from March 20 to April 19 -while the matter was being heard in court - from the 270-day timeframe for the resolution process under the IBC. This means that the deadline that which would have ended on April 29 has now has been pushed back to May 20.

Both the petitioners, Numetal and ArcelorMittal, welcomed the verdict for the prize is a big one, despite the fact that Essar Steel boasts the third biggest debt pile (over Rs 44,000 crore) among the initial 12 companies identified by the RBI for insolvency proceedings. Steel king LN Mittal has wanted to build a steel plant in the country since 2005 but has been repeatedly thwarted by regulatory hassles. Essar's 10 million tonne steel plant in Hazira, Gujarat - India's largest single-location flat steel plant - fits neatly into the company's plan to create a sizable footprint in the Rs 3.15 lakh crore Indian steel market. Numetal, likewise, stands to gain much from the acquisition since the World Steel Association earlier projected steel production in the country to grow at 7.1 per cent this year, the highest rate among the top 10 steel-using countries.

"We welcome the NCLT order returning the matter back to the creditors for reconsidering our original bid. We have put forth a very compelling resolution plan both industrially and financially. We hope our proposal will be considered by the CoC with a fair and holistic view," a Numetal spokesperson said in a statement.

In a similar vein, the other bidder in a statement said that "ArcelorMittal, in partnership with Nippon Steel and Sumitomo Metals, is the most credible bidder for Essar Steel and will bring considerable value to the Indian steel industry. We had made a strong offer backed up by a detailed industrial plan and now hope for a swift resolution."

To remind you, after six months of painstaking insolvency proceedings and due diligences, these two players were the only bidders for Essar Steel in February. But the CoC had rejected both bids on the grounds that they were ineligible under the provisions of Section 29A of the amended IBC. While Rewant Ruia's minority stake in Numetal was a bone of contention since he was deemed a related party, ArcelorMittal's ineligibility stemmed from the fact that it had sold its 29 per cent in Uttam Galva, which is also facing insolvency proceedings, just weeks before submitting its bid for Essar.

Both companies challenged the lenders' decision at the NCLT soon after they were disqualified. Numetal had filed an application on March 20, pre-empting the NCLT decision, while ArcelorMittal India moved the Tribunal on March 26. Both claimed that rules had been followed before submitting their bids and both have since worked their way out of the roadblocks. ArcelorMittal sought out and successfully bagged classification as a non-promoter in Uttam Galva while at Numetal, JSW Steel bought out the 25 per cent stake held by Ruia.

Ironically, on March 28, Numetal counsel Mukul Rohatgi had requested that the resubmission of bids be deferred till the eligibility matter was heard on merits. However, NCLT had refused to stay the second round of bidding, but it had directed the CoC not to decide on the bids till the final hearing, which was supposed to have happened on April 4.

In light of yesterday's pronouncement, the NCLT's nod to the second round ought to raise eyebrows. It has only set the stage for an even longer court battle. In the second round, apart from the two players mentioned above, Anil Agarwal's Vedanta had thrown its hat in the ring.

Significantly, the tribunal did not give its opinion about the eligibility of the new bids, which are yet to be opened. "It is going to be a long haul," said one of second-round bidders, hinting at a legal battle ahead. It's checking whether there are grounds to appeal given that the order has only dealt with the first-round bidders. The two later entrants will decide on their course of action after studying the order, said people aware of the matter.

With PTI inputs
A new Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) report has found that the country's banks not only received an all-time high amount of fake currency in 2016-17, but also detected an over 480 per cent jump in suspicious transactions post demonetization, the PTI reported.

"A noteworthy growth was also seen in the number of counterfeit currency reports (CCRs) which increased from more than 4.10 lakh in 2015-16 to over 7.33 lakh in 2016-17, which may also be attributed to the demonetisation exercise," said the FIU report, but it did not specify the value of such fake currencies detected. That's an increase of over 3.22 lakh such cases in banking and other economic channels in just a year. CCRs are "transaction based reports" and they are generated only when a fake Indian currency note (FICN) is detected or where any forgery of a valuable security or a document has taken place during a cash transaction at a bank.

The FIU, the premier technical snoop wing under the Finance Ministry tasked with analysing suspicious financial transactions pertaining to money laundering and terror financing the country, has been compiling such data since 2007-08. As per its anti-money laundering rules, the banks and other financial bodies are required to report all cash transactions where forged or counterfeit currency notes or bank notes have been used as genuine or where any forgery of a valuable security or a document has taken place.

The annual spike registered in 2016-17 is the highest since 2012. The Reserve Bank of India's annual report for 2016-17 told a similar story. "At the Reserve Bank's currency verification and processing system, during 2015-16, there were 2.4 pieces of FICNs of Rs 500 denomination and 5.8 pieces of FICNs of Rs 1000 denomination for every million pieces notes processed; which rose to 5.5 pieces and 12.4 pieces, respectively, during the post-demonetisation period," it said. But its survey-based estimation of FICNs processed at currency chests had thrown up higher figures.

According to FIU, banks, including those in the private and cooperative sectors, and other financial institutions collectively generated a record 4.73 lakh suspicious transaction reports (STRs) during 2016-17, ie post demonetisation. The STRs are generated when a transaction either indicates that it has been made in circumstances of unusual or unjustified complexity or appears to have no economic rationale or bona fide purpose. "The number of STRs received in 2016-17 is 4,73,006 which is more than four times as compared to 2015-16 and this increase is attributed to demonetisation exercise...," said the report.

However, it clarified that some volume of the increase in the number of STRs can be credited to the outreach steps taken by the agency in sensitising banks and others to comply with the rule of compulsorily filing these reports under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act. "The most notable increase (in generating STRs) was in the category of banks, which recorded almost a 489 per cent increase over 2015-16. The increase was 270 per cent in the category of financial intermediaries," it said.

STRs are also generated by the banks for those transactions that give rise to a reasonable ground of suspicion that it may involve financing of the activities relating to terrorism. Some of those generated post demonetisation, according to the report, had "possible links" to terror funding.

In the wake of the increasing reportage of CCRs and STRs, the FIU ramped up its efforts in 2016-17 and disseminated 56,000 STRs to various investigative agencies like the Income Tax Department, the Enforcement Directorate, the CBI and the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence, among others, up from 53,000 sent in the previous year.

"The results of the STRs pertaining to demonetisation period will be seen in the subsequent years," the report said in an indication towards the quantum of black money that would be unearthed after acting on these classified reports. In 2015-16, the detection and reportage of suspicious transactions, fake notes and cross-border fund transfers had reportedly led to the FIU unearthing black money worth over Rs 560 crore.

With PTI inputs
At the recently held 'Grow with Google' event in Singapore, Arjun Narayan, the company's Head of Trust & Safety, based in the company's Asia-Pacific headquarters in the city, was peppered with questions around data security, particularly in the light of the developments at Facebook. Narayan said that Google is trying to reconcile its own values and also make sure that all the three pieces of its ecosystem - the consumer, the creator or publisher, and the advertiser - all see commercial value, feel safe and secure. Because "we don't take that lightly as there are enough choices and competition". The executive spoke to a group of journalists on the sidelines of the event.

What exactly is Google doing to ensure safety of the ecosystem?

From an advertiser perspective, we have launched several different advertiser policies in response to the trends we have seen. For example, we saw a trend in the ticket re-seller vertical where there was unfair pricing and we thought transparency was good for our consumers. So we tightened rules on ticket re-seller advertising. On the publisher side, we launched a new technology called 'page level enforcement'. This was in response to the news media saying they are a news site with thousands of web pages. Some of these web pages might not be in compliance but the broader website is. We have guidelines on what we allow. We hold them to the policy standards. So we introduced a technology that allowed us to take clinical action against those specific pages such as blocking ads on those pages. Pre-page level enforcement, we had to take nuclear action because we had zero tolerance. The publisher gets time to remedy specific pages that are non-compliant.

Who flags the content?



There are many channels. One feedback channel is users. They can flag content, ads. If it is an user experience issue and if it is an issue that is consistently being raised, we re-evaluate that and see if we need to do something from a policy perspective. If it is a policy non-compliance issue, we take action. We have zero tolerance for bad actors. We have zero tolerance for badness.

How long does it take to remove content?

There is no easy answer. It is a factor of what is the kind of abuse we see. And when was the abuse detected. We tackle the issue at the transactional level and we also look for root cause and try to mitigate the motivation behind the abuse. We saw ads with sensationalist headlines and monetisation of fake news. We saw an increasing trend of news sites becoming popular - so scammers started taking advantage of that. They were in this because there was commercial incentive. So we introduced a policy that allowed us to take ads off misrepresentative content. Sometimes it technology, sometimes it is out human review teams that take action.

How do you define 'badness'?

This is nuanced. There are different policies for different kinds of badness. Misinformation is when an advertiser or publisher deliberately mis-states or conceals information, or content or intent with the idea of commercial profit. For example, you are not a NYT but claim to be one. Another example of badness is distributing malware. Or you are trying to harvest information from users without consent. We do make this information publicly available and its transparent.

In light of the Facebook development, what are some of the policies you are in the process of reviewing?

At Google, we have maintained very high standards. We have adequate safeguards and we constantly re-evaluate our safeguards. From a philosophical standpoint, we value user trust and we do not take that lightly. Because we know that is extremely important for our ecosystem to thrive. We have the policies, safeguards, and enforcement in place. Then from an user choice perspective, we provide users the choice. They have access to how their data is being used, they also have opt-outs available.

Do you think all users know about the choices you are taking about?

There is never enough when it comes to educating our users. There is always more we can do in this space. We want to make sure our community is aware of these options.



In broader sense, you are saying that Google has always been doing the right things... what are some of the specific safeguards or polices that were reviewed in light of what happened at Facebook? Or those that need to be reviewed.

One, we obviously have very high standards. We maintain very high standards because our whole business model depends on it. We know that we can't take this lightly. Second, Google has a set of users that are different from Facebook. Google Search for instance, is a research resource. Google Maps is a different kind of product. We are execution-focussed. We make sure we make content available to the user at the time they need the information. We are not in the viral business. Third, we do learn lessons. In all humility, we all have lessons to learn. So we are watching the industry, we watching the space. But at the same time, we do what is right for the user, irrespective of whether things are in the news or not. We have been doing this for 17 years. It has just become an issue now.

The grey area really is third party developers accessing data from Google...

(Google corporate communication representative intervenes: We have seen no evidence of that kind of abuse in our system. This is a question for Facebook. From our side, we have seen no evidence of that.)

So when an app asks if I can log in with my Google ID, there is some sharing of data ...

(Google corporate communication representative intervenes: I don't think Arjun can answer that. Yes, the only situation where that may be the case is Android. We have been evaluating at the App store. So far nothing has surfaced. Yes, it is a constant exercise. But we have strict polices).
Fort Worth Star-Telegram/TNS via Getty Images(NEW YORK) -- Intelligence gathered over the past 18 months suggests that American journalist Austin Tice is still alive almost six years after he went missing in Syria, ABC News has learned.



The assessment comes as the FBI has, for the first time, announced a new reward for information leading to Tice's safe location, recovery, and return  for $1 million.



Two senior officials recently confirmed to ABC News that Tice, a journalist, and photographer kidnapped in August 2012, is believed to have survived his captivity despite past U.S. intelligence assessments that he might have died in Syria. A former Marine, Tice had been freelancing for several news outlets, including CBS and the Washington Post, and covering the start of the Syrian civil war.



For a long time, the FBI only had one special agent assigned to the case  a person who had been serving in the bureau for less time than Tice had been missing. Some officials privately criticized the FBI for chasing old leads in the case and not devoting more resources to recovering him from what was assessed to be an element of Syrian dictator Bashar al Assads regime or his family.



By contrast, American hostages of terrorist groups such as Kayla Mueller killed in ISIS captivity, and Caitlan Coleman, who was freed last fall after five years as a Taliban hostage, had teams of FBI agents working their cases. One senior official told ABC News that there were intelligence officers augmenting the FBIs work and that criticism of their efforts was unfair.



Tice, who would be 36-years old now, disappeared just after his 31st birthday while covering the Free Syrian Army, a group of Syrian military officials who had joined the opposition against Assad. A month later, a video was released, showing him blindfolded, removed from a car, and led by armed men up a hill, saying "Oh, Jesus." He has not been heard from since.



But the FBI reward has given Tice's family renewed hope: "We are heartened by the recent U.S. Government posting of a reward for information," Tice's parents Debra and Mark Tice said in a family statement to ABC News. "We deeply appreciate every increased effort to hasten the day that we see our son safely home."



Debra and her husband Marc Tice have been outspoken in their pursuit to bring Austin home and steadfast in their belief that he remains alive, although they cautioned that as far as they know, the timing of the FBI reward "is unrelated to any specific event," but rather to "the length of Austins detention and the Syrian governments lack of information concerning Austins disappearance."



The FBI's announcement also garnered praise from others: "The U.S. government must stay focused on efforts to bring Austin Tice home. Offering a reward is an important way to demonstrate that commitment and could help bring forward new information," Joel Simon, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, told ABC News in a statement.



In December 2016, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said on the Senate floor that then-U.S. hostage envoy James O'Brien had informed him that Tice was alive.



"Mr. O'Brien and his team informed me that they have high confidence that Austin is alive in Syria along with other Americans who are being held captive," Cornyn said at the time.



The next month, Tice's parents said the Obama administration also told them, "Austin, our son, is alive, that he's still being held captive in Syria."



A current U.S. official confirmed recently that the assessment that he is alive has not changed.

Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
Biddeford-Saco-OOB Courier

Two new restaurants and a record store are on the way, and a cheese shop, and a clothing retailer are already calling the downtown street home.
On Wednesday, hundreds of protestors gathered outside Downing Street and the British Parliament, waving placards reading "go home Modi" and "hang the rapists" as the Indian leader prepared to meet with UK Prime Minister Theresa May.

Cementing close friendship with Mauritius, Prime Minister Modi met his Mauritius counterpart Jugnauth and talked about cooperation in trade and investment, maritime cooperation and people-to-people ties, Kumar said.

Dr Faisal said that Pakistan had no confusion about its foreign policy.

"The Queen herself wrote a personal letter to me, a matter of great pride for India", Modi had said during his Bharat Ki Baat, Sabke Saath diaspora event in London last evening.

He said comparing statistics of rapes in different governments was a worse way to deal with the issue and referred to his speech from the the Red Fort where he said people need to teach their sons to treat girls with respect. An Indian official part of the PM's delegation told PTI, "We have expressed our concerns with the British authorities...we have been warning against some of these elements out to make trouble and they have assured us of action".

Much like in India, the NRI community found itself divided, and the fervour that greeted his visit was tempered by the anger of protestors. To criticise, one has to research and find proper facts.

Modi visited Israel in July previous year in what was the first ever prime ministerial visit from India to the West Asian nation.

Illumina, Inc. (ILMN) Publishes Q2 Revenue Guidance

Total analysts of 16 have positions in Illumina (NASDAQ:ILMN) as follows: 11 rated it a "Buy", 1 with "Sell" and 4 with "Hold". Zacks Investment Research lowered shares of Illumina from a buy rating to a hold rating in a report on Thursday, April 13th.

Cliff Richard privacy case: Bosses made decisions, says BBC reporter

But Mr Johnson repeatedly denied he was referring to Sir Cliff in the email , and said the comments were about Mr Graham. Mr Johnson said it was a unusual 24 hours after the story broke, adding that he was praised on the scoop by his editors.

Stock Traders Buy Large Volume of Vipshop Call Options (VIPS)

The technology company reported $0.19 earnings per share (EPS) for the quarter, beating the consensus estimate of $0.15 by $0.04. This indicator compares the closing price of a stock in relation to the highs and lows over a certain time period.

International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Christine Lagarde on Thursday called on India's leader to focus more on women in the wake of the "revolting" rape and murder of two young girls.

A couple originally from Jammu that has been living in London for several years now said, "We have been living for 70 years in a war-like situation and we want it to be resolved". Following the retreat, Modi will head back to India after a brief stop for his meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin.

Digital Secretary Matt Hancock said, "Our world-leading digital economy is booming, worth more than 116 billion a year and employing more than two million people. There can not be a worse way to deal with this issue", the PM said while referring to the recent incidents of sexual assault on minor girls, which have triggered a huge uproar across India.

Modi also said: "There is an allegation against me that there is so much criticism, but I don't speak up".

"I am not anxious about criticism".

"India is today the spokesperson for the third world countries", Modi said.
Jordan, then 35 with a 16-month-old son, was responding to a break-in alarm on Fort Street on September 22, 1987, when his police cruiser collided with another cruiser.

Const. Ian Jordan died last week after spending more than 30 years in a mostly unresponsive state.

Jordan was working for the Victoria Police Department in September 1987, when he was badly injured in a crash with another police cruiser as both officers raced toward an emergency call.

Mujeres y jovenes son los que mas piden creditos en Colombia

Y, en la region Pacifico y Sur Occidente, el genero femenino mantuvo una proporcion de alrededor del 20% sobre el total de operaciones de credito.

Klopp: Why I will take one-year break upon Liverpool exit

After Liverpool I will for sure do a one-year break. "I feel that it's super intense, and I am not planning to die on the bench". But after finding subsequent success at Liverpool, Klopp told Sky Germany that Bayern never offered him the position.

Smith (AO) (NYSE:AOS) Rating Increased to Buy at ValuEngine

Following the transaction, the chairman now directly owns 301,018 shares in the company, valued at approximately $20,032,747.90. The stock has "Neutral" rating by Longbow on Friday, June 17. (NYSE:OMC) on Wednesday, April 20 to "Equal-Weight" rating.

Victoria Police said the accident resulted in the creation of a "trauma team", which helps officers and staff after traumatic incidents, and also prompted a change in procedures for controlling traffic lights.

The funeral procession starts at the Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre, and will travel down Quadra St.to Christ Church Cathedral. The funeral, which is open to the public, is to begin at 2 p.m.

We will update coverage as the event unfolds.
Focus was however shifting to renewed diplomatic action, with a new resolution to be debated at the UN Security Council on Monday.

The UK participated in the strikes in response to an alleged chemical attack by the Syrian regime on the rebel-held area of Douma on 7 April.

Thirty-four chemical attacks - the majority the result of chlorine use - are confirmed to have taken place inside Syria since 2013 and before the latest atrocity in Douma, according to the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic.

She said the chemicals were dropped in barrel bombs from helicopters, which are only used by the Syrian government.

He said the inspectors can not access the site because it needs permission from United Nations security experts.

Russian Federation has denied trying to obstruct the investigation and said the inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), who arrived in Damascus on Saturday, are due to visit Douma on Wednesday.

Uzumcu said the Syrian government instead offered OPCW inspectors the chance to interview 22 "witnesses who could be brought to Damascus".

"The team has not yet deployed to Douma", two days after arriving in Syria, Uzumcu told an executive council of the OPCW in The Hague.

In April, 2017, the USA launched a similar missile attack on a Syrian air base in the central province of Homs over the same allegation. It said the missiles reportedly targeted regime air bases.

CSU's on-campus stadium naming rights sell for $37.7 million

The announcement was made Thursday at the stadium by CSU President and Chancellor Tony Frank, athletic director Joe Parker, and Public Service Credit Union CEO Todd Marksbury.

Participaran 48 mil ciudadanos como funcionarios de casillas en el estado

La capacitacion se realizara del 9 de mayo al 30 de junio a funcionarios y funcionarias de las casillas, mismas que estaran integradas por un presidente, dos secretarios, tres escrutadores y tres suplentes generales.

Retail sales slump as snow keeps shoppers at home

The ONS said that retail sales in cash terms recorded their weakest annual growth since June 2016, expanding by just 3.0 percent. Retail sales volumes dropped by 1.2% in March compared to the previous month, as reflected by the change in weather.

Theresa May says she has "responsibility as Prime Minister to make decisions" and that she "will make them". A Pentagon spokeswoman said there was no USA military activity in the area. Syria and its allies blamed Israel for that attack.

In the immediate aftermath of punitive airstrikes launched by France, the United Kingdom and USA against the chemical weapons programme of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, the EU's Foreign Ministers insisted during their meeting in Luxembourg on April 16 that talks on finding a political solution to the ongoing war in Syria need to be revived.

He said: "As far as we are concerned there was no attack".

Faisal Mekdad, Syria's deputy foreign minister, said on Monday that government officials have met with the delegation, which has been in Damascus for three days, a number of times to discuss cooperation.

The site visit came hours after reports of more global air strikes on Syrian military installations.

Syria's state run television says a false alarm - and not an outside aggression and incoming airstrikes - had set off Syrian air defenses early this morning. Liz Kendall said Assad's use of chemical weapons "cannot go unanswered" and her colleague Chris Leslie said "those who seek to take the moral high ground by doing nothing should also be held accountable".

The investigative site Bellingcat reported the pictures were also shared by the Russian public channel Russia 1, which presented them as proof that the chemical attack was fake.

"I can guarantee that Russian Federation has not tampered with the site", said Lavrov. He denied that Russian Federation was hampering the mission and suggested the approval was held up because of the Western airstrikes. Less than one year later, Syria destroyed its hoard of declared chemical weapons, as verified by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

'A wider operation to hide the facts of the attack is under way, supported by the Russians, ' she said.
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
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People of Bhabanipur gave a befitting reply to the conspiracy that was hatched in Nandigram: Mamata Banerjee.

Want to thank the people of Bhabanipur and West Bengal for the election result : Mamata Banerjee.


UBICACION, EXTENSION Y POBLACION



El departamento de Puno se encuentra ubicado en la zona sur oriental del Peru. Presenta una topografia accidentada con la mayoria de sus ciudades ubicadas en zonas altas de la sierra. Limita por el norte con Madre de Dios, por el sur con Tacna, por el este con Bolivia y por el oeste con Cusco, Arequipa y Moquegua

Tiene una extension de 72,382 kilometros cuadrados y una poblacion que se acerca al millon y medio de habitantes.

Posee un clima frio y semiseco con temperatura promedio anual de 9C , llegando hasta los 3 C durante el invierno.

Su capital es la ciudad de Puno, ubicada a orillas del lago Titicaca y sobre los 3,827 metros s.n.m. Entre las ciudades mas importantes figuran Juliaca, Ilave, Azangaro, Huancane, Lampa y Yunguyo.

BREVE RESENA HISTORICA



En la antiguedad, la meseta del Collao estuvo poblada por etnias aimaras (Lupaccas, Collas, Omasuyos, Pacajjes, kallahuayos y otros). Posteriormente se produjo la presencia de los quechuas, con la expansion del Tahuantinsuyo.

Algunos cronistas de la historia peruana, entre ellos Garcilaso de la Vega , han difundido la leyenda de Manco Capac y Mama Ocllo, quienes surgen de las aguas del lago Titicaca para fundar el Imperio de los Incas en el Cusco.

La cultura prehispanica mas importante y de mayor influencia en la zona fue Tiahuanaco. El historiador Riva Aguero postula (cada vez con mayor aceptacion de los estudiosos) que la desaparicion de esa cultura se produjo con la irrupcion violenta de grupos de aimaras venidos de las regiones costeras de Atacama y Coquimbo (en el actual Chile) los que pasaron a dominar el altiplano constituyendo pequenos "reinos" o senorios.

En la epoca del Virreynato, el tambo de "Punuy" ("dormir" en quechua, aludiendo al lugar de descanso casi obligado) fue el paso muy usado por los viajeros que se dirigian a Potosi y de los que venian de Rio de la Plata a Lima. El virrey Conde de Lemos en 1668, despues de mandar destruir el prospero pueblo de San Luis de Alva como una de las medidas para combatir a los ricos pero discolos hermanos Salcedo, dispuso el traslado de su poblacion y sedes de autoridades a Punuy (vocablo que con el tiempo derivo en "Puno") , senalando solares, tal como se acostumbraba hacer en el caso de la fundacion de ciudades espanolas.

ATRACTIVOS DE PUNO



Lago Titicaca. Es el lago navegable mas alto del mundo. Tiene una superficie de 8,560 km2 y una profundidad maxima de 227 metros y destaca ademas por la transparencia de sus aguas. Existen 36 islas, siendo las mas importantes Taquile y Amantani. Alberga gran cantidad de aves (como flamencos, huallatas, keles y tiquis), asi como variedades de peces (carachis, pejerreyes, truchas, suches e ispis, entre otros).

Isla flotante de Los Uros. Conjunto de grandes islotes flotantes de totoras, donde los habitantes continuan viviendo como sus antepasados de la etnia uros, uno de los pueblos mas antiguos de America, procurando mantener sus costumbres e idiosincrasia.

Isla Taquile. Sus habitantes se dedican a la agricultura y han desarrollado una original forma de turismo comunal mediante el cual sus habitantes comparten sus alimentos, vivienda, costumbre y tradiciones. Su artesania en tejidos ha sido declarada patrimonio cultural de la humanidad.

Isla Amantani. En sus cerros mas altos existen restos arqueologicos que fueron centros de adoracion y culto.

Chullpas de Sillustani. Zona arqueologica a 34 kilometros de la capital. Una de las necropolis mas importantes del mundo. Se levanta sobre los 4,000 metros s.n.m. en una explanada a la que rodea la hermosa laguna de Umayo. Las chullpas son gigantescos monumentos funerarios construidos por los collas; son edificaciones cuadrangulares y circulares que superan los 12 metros de altura.

La Catedral , terminada de construir en el siglo XVIII, resalta por la calidad de su estructura y sus tallados en piedra.

Arco Deustua. Edificacion en honor a los heroes de las Batallas de Junin y Ayacucho. Centro de reunion para despedir la Fiesta de la Candelaria.

Cerrito de Huajsapata, promontorio rocoso que domina la ciudad, en cuya cima existe un monumento a Manco Capac. Desde alli se aprecia toda la ciudad de Puno y el Lago Titicaca.

Otros atractivos son el Museo Municipal Dreyer, la Casa del Corregidor, la Casa de Conde de Lemos, los miradores del Puma y del condor, el Fuerte San Luis de Alba y el Santuario de Cancharani.

OTROS ATRACTIVOS



Chucuito, lugar rico en restos arqueologicos. Muchas de sus casas e iglesias aun conservan su pasado virreynal.

Juliaca, importante ciudad comercial del departamento. Entre sus atractivos se encuentran la iglesia virreynal de Santa Catalina., importante ciudad comercial del departamento. Entre sus atractivos se encuentran la iglesia virreynal de Santa Catalina.

Lampa, ciudad que mantiene intacto los rezagos coloniales. Destaca la iglesia virreynal de Santiago Apostol, en cuyo interior se encuentra una replica de " La Piedad " de Miguel Angel. Tambien puede visitarse la casa del pintor Victor Humareda, el criadero de chinchillas y las pinturas rupestres de Lensora.

Ilave, importante centro comerciales con dos interesantes iglesias virreynales. Todos los domingos se realiza una feria local.



Desaguadero. Ciudad fronteriza y puente internacional con Bolivia. Muy cerca se encuentran las pinturas rupestres de Pizacoma, con una antiguedad aproximada de 10 mil anos.

Pucara. Poblado donde se encuentra el Gran Templo Pucara y donde sus habitantes, prodigiosos artesanos y alfareros, fabrican los conocidos "toritos de Pucara".

Chimu y Ojerani, comunidades campesinas cuyos pobladores son expertos tejedores de balsas de totora.

Juli. Destacado centro turistico de la region, cuyas iglesias coloniales construidas por jesuitas y dominicos durante los primeros tramos de la dominacion hispanica, guardan valiosas obras de la pintura cusquena e italiana.

Pomata. Entre sus construcciones destacan las iglesias de Santiago Apostol y de Nuestra Senora del Rosario, construidas en los siglos XVII y XVIII en granito rosado y con altares en pan de oro.

Zepita. Poblacion con bellas iglesias como la de San Pedro, totalmente construida en piedra en el siglo XVIII.

Tinajani. Canon formado por dos grandes masas rocosas, ubicadas en Ayaviri. Le llaman el "bano del diablo", porque cuando llueve, desde el fondo se empieza a escuchar ruidos muy fuertes que causan temor.

Otros lugares a visitar son Taraco, Huancane, Vilquechico, Moho, Conima, Santa Rosa y Sandia en la selva alta y baja del departamento.




Guwahati : Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday said that, the Indian Air Force is emerging a big power in the world and capable to fight against any enemy.





As the Indian Air Force (IAF) has conducted its massive exercise Gaganshakti 2018 in the China bordering Arunachal Pradesh, Union Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday had visited Pasighat in Arunachal Pradesh and Chabua Air Force Station in Upper Assam.





The Defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman visited Arunachal Pradeshs Pasighat Advanced Landing Grounds (ALGs) operations by fighters and transport aircraft of IAF as a part of Gaganshakti 2018.





The Defence Minister also visited Chabua Air Force Station in Assam to oversee the IAF's biggest exercise in a war-like scenario.





At Chabua she took a MI 17 went to Passighat and at Passighat ALG two SU30s took off and then C130 J landed, from which Garud Commandos simulated taking over of the Base.





She took off for the DM Range, SU 30s dropped 3 1000 pounders, then performed Carpet Bombing of 16 100 ponders, MI 17 gunships fired rockets.





Nirmala Sitharaman was sitting in the tower with the Air Chief, also she was seeing the bomb drop area, with one camera placed at the bomb drop zone.





She came back to the Chabua Base and saw bomb loading into the SU 30 MKIs.





"Gaganshakti 2018 exercise is being done in the region because the situation I different in the bordering areas we are able to tackle any situation," Nirmala Sitharaman said.





Gagan Shakti-2018 is the biggest peace time military exercise undertaken by India since Operation Brasstacks in 1986-1987.




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.


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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.
 Interesting new survey on crime and punishments from Vera Institute with a focus on rural Americans | Main | Because the calendar suggests I should, here is a round-up of some recent posts from Marijuana Law, Policy & Reform 

Gina Barton of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has this terrific (and lengthy) piece on compassionate release programs titled "Release programs for sick and elderly prisoners could save millions. But states rarely use them." I recommend the full piece, and here is how it gets started:

A Wisconsin program that allows elderly and severely ill prisoners to be released early from prison could save state taxpayers millions of dollars a year. But thousands of the states elderly prisoners  many of whom prison officials acknowledge pose little or no risk of committing new crimes  arent allowed to apply, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation found.

More than 1,200 people age 60 and older were serving time in Wisconsin prisons as of Dec. 31, 2016, the most recent count available. By one estimate, the average cost to incarcerate each of them is $70,000 a year  for an annual total of $84 million. Last year, just six inmates were freed under the program. Among those who didnt qualify were a blind quadriplegic and a 65-year-old breast cancer survivor who uses a breathing machine and needs a wheelchair to make it from her cell to the prison visiting room.

Around the country, early release provisions for elderly and infirm prisoners are billed as a way to address problems such as prison overcrowding, skyrocketing budgets and civil rights lawsuits alleging inadequate medical care. But throughout the U.S., they are used so infrequently that they arent having much impact.

Of the 47 states with processes to free such prisoners early or court rulings requiring them to do so, just three  Utah, Texas and Louisiana  released more than a dozen people in 2015, according to a Journal Sentinel survey. The reasons for the low numbers, according to experts, are usually found in the statutes that created the programs, known as compassionate release, geriatric release and medical parole, among other things.

Some laws, like Wisconsins, exclude inmates based on the type of sentence or the crime committed. Some allow release only for people who are terminal  a definition that varies by medical provider and doesnt apply to chronic conditions or disabilities. Some lack an efficient process for application and approval, leaving sick prisoners to die before they can complete it. Its also hard to find care facilities willing to accept former prisoners.

Because many of these laws were written without input from doctors who specialize in aging and end-of-life care, they exclude the people who would benefit most, according to Brie Williams, a physician and professor of medicine at the University of California-San Francisco. Weve taken health out of criminal justice policy to such a degree that the policies that have been developed do not have the geriatric and palliative care knowledge they need to make sense, she said.

While these programs are presented as money savers, in 2015 a majority of states granted release to fewer than four applicants each. Within states that have a compassionate release program and track the numbers, there were 3,030 people who applied, with only 216 being granted release.
This well-established Blog is worth visiting on a regular basis for a wealth of information of interest to Armenian nationals and to the Armenian Diaspora world-wide. Although it has a particular role in promoting international recognition of the Genocide, the Blog encompasses much more and includes many articles of general appeal to all those concerned with Armenian affairs. Much of the content is difficult or impossible to find elsewhere and the long list of links provided gives easy access to a plethora of material on social, political, religious, educational and cultural matters, and many news items from around the world.




Vo Hung Dung, VPA Vice President, said Vietnams seafood export value to China rose from about 400 million USD in 2014 to 1.8 billion USD in 2017, helping China surpass the US to become the countrys biggest seafood importer.



However, he pointed out the possibility of ending contracts ahead of schedule, thus putting Vietnamese businesses at risk.



Therefore, it is necessary to be cautious while stepping up exports to this market, the official stressed.



Cen Jian, a representative of the Yuexi fisheries association, suggested Vietnamese seafood firms ship their products via official channels to avoid the risk, protecting the interests of both exporters and importers.



Ta Minh Phu, President of the Bac Lieu Seafood Association, raised concerns regarding Chinas incentives and tax policies for Vietnamese aquatic products.



In reply, the Chinese side said Vietnamese seafood businesses enjoy a preferential import tax rate of zero percent for the whole year, which is a great advantage for Vietnam compared with the rate of 2.5 percent imposed on Malaysia and Indonesia.



Tran Thanh Phong, Deputy Secretary General of the VPA, said his association will implement five groups of solutions to promote exports to the Chinese market.



The association aims to successfully materialise the Vietnam-China border trade agreement, set up trade links with Guangxi, Yunnan and Guangdong, utilise incentives fro the ASEAN-China Agreement, urge China to remove technical barriers in the sector and intensify trade promotion through exhibitions and fairs.



On this occasion, the Chinese side released information about a seafood fair in Zhanjiang city from June 18-20, 2018, which is expected to draw about 200 businesses.



Participating Vietnamese firms will be exempt from all costs and provided with market information, they said.

Vietnamplus
At a conference on trade and investment promotion that took place at the headquarters of the General Confederation of Italian Industry (Confindustria)  Padua city chapter, Vietnamese Ambassador Cao Chinh Thien affirmed that intensifying the bilateral trade and investment ties is the most effective measure to step up the political and diplomatic relations.



Vietnam will continue creating the most favourable conditions for enterprises in Veneto region in particular and Italy in general to do business in the country, he added.

Marco Stevanato, member in charge of international cooperation of Confindustria Padua, said that the signing of a memorandum of understanding on friendship and cooperation establishment between Vietnams southern province of Ba Ria-Vung Tau and Veneto region in January has opened up more collaboration opportunities for the two countries businesses.

This conference is also a chance to Padua citys firms to exchange experience and learn about Vietnams investment environment and legal framework, he added.

On the same day, Ambassador Thien and the citys Governor Sergio Giordani opened an exhibition on the Italy-Vietnam solidarity movements during 1960-1970.

On display are over 40 documents, photos and posters showing Italys support for Vietnams struggle for national liberation in the previous century.

The Vietnamese diplomat also had a meeting with Professor Rosario Rizzutto, Rector of the University of Padua, during which they discussed the possibility of boosting sustainable cooperation between the University of Padua with a university of Vietnam.

With its strengths in agricultural development studies, the University of Padua wants to step up student exchange and training programmes in issues related to food security and climate change adaptation, Sergio Giordani stated.

Earlier, on March 30, the Vietnamese Embassy in Italy held a ceremony to mark the 45th anniversary of the bilateral diplomatic ties in Rome.

Vietnamnews
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images(HAVANA) -- Miguel Diaz-Canel Bermudez is the first person outside of the Castro family to rule over Cuba in almost 60 years.

Raul Castro, who succeeded his brother Fidel in 2006, stepped down as president Thursday and gave power to his successor, First Vice President Diaz-Canel.

The Cuban government voted Wednesday to approve Diaz-Canels nomination as the candidate to replace the 86-year-old president.

Diaz-Canel addressed the nation with a speech that was broadcast live on television, in which he promised to preserve Cubas communist system while gradually introducing reforms.

"The people have given this assembly the mandate to provide continuity to the Cuban Revolution during a crucial, historic moment that will be defined by all that we achieve in the advance of the modernization of our social and economic model," he said.

Raul Castro will remain head of the ruling Communist Party, maintaining his status for now as the most powerful public figure in Cuba. There was speculation for years that Castro would pick one of his children as his successor. Instead he chose a man who wasnt even born when his brother started a revolution and took control of Cuba in 1959.

Diaz-Canel has served as Cubas first vice president since 2013. He was born in the central province of Villa Clara in 1960. He climbed his way up the ranks of the ruling Communist Party and gained prominence as party leader in Villa Clara and Hologuin provinces, before becoming higher education minister.

Diaz-Canel also led the Cuban delegation to the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.



Diaz-Canel has publicly defended bloggers and academics who were critical of the Cuban government, under a system that represses dissent and is intolerant of criticism.

Now, as Cuba's newest president, the world will be watching his every move to see whether he strays from the path paved by the Castro brothers.

Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying's Regular Press Conference on April 20, 2018

2018/04/20

Q: On April 19, Cuba's new National Assembly of People's Power officially elected the new national leadership. Raul Castro left the post of head of state and former First Vice President of the Council of State and Council of Ministers Miguel Diaz-Canel was elected as the new President of the Council of State and Council of Ministers. What is your comment?

A: China warmly congratulates the election of the new leadership in Cuba and we respect and support the choice of the Cuban people. General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee and President Xi Jinping has sent congratulatory messages to comrade Raul Castro and comrade Miguel Diaz-Canel respectively and Premier Li Keqiang has also sent a message of congratulation to comrade Miguel Diaz-Canel. The Chinese leadership commend the political mutual trust between China and Cuba and stand ready to work with the Cuban leadership to expand and deepen bilateral cooperation and score glorious achievements in China-Cuba friendship in a new era.

China and Cuba enjoy profound friendship and a solid basis for cooperation. We sincerely hope that Cuba's path of socialist development can become wider and wider and believe that a responsible Cuba with its own characteristics can continue to utter its loud voice at the world stage.

Q: First, do you have any details on the reported "challenge" by the Chinese warships to three Australian ones in the South China Sea early this month? Second, what is your response to the Australian government's view that they have a right to conduct freedom of navigation and will continue to do so in the future?

A: With regard to your first question, I do not know what the word "challenge" mentioned by the Australian side refers to. I may refer you to the Ministry of National Defense for relevant information.

Regarding your second question, China always respects and actively upholds the freedom of navigation and overflight enjoyed by all countries in the South China Sea in accordance with international law. If the Australian side refers to the normal freedom of navigation according to international law, there is no problem with it. If the Australian side has other calculations, we hope that it can see that the situation in the South China Sea now is stabilizing and improving and join hands with China and other regional countries to uphold the peace and stability in the South China Sea and inject more positive energy into this region.

Q: First, speaking in London this week, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reportedly described Pakistan as an "export factory of terrorism". What is your comment? Second, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Foreign Ministers' Meeting will be held in Beijing on Monday. Will terrorism be one of the issues that will be discussed? Will China be supportive of moves to get all the SCO members to take steps to crack down terrorism emanating from their soil?

A: With regard to your first question, terrorism is the common enemy of the international community, which calls for stronger cooperation through concerted efforts by all parties. We hope that the international community will lend active support to Pakistan's counterterrorism efforts and continue to work with Pakistan to conduct effective cooperation in fighting terrorism.

As to your second question, it is the purpose of the SCO to uphold regional security and stability and promote the common development and prosperity of its member states. Since its inception, the SCO has always taken security as a priority for cooperation. The upcoming meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers of the SCO will be an occasion to exchange views on across-the-board cooperation and major international and regional issues. We hope and believe that all parties will take this meeting as an opportunity to carry forward the Shanghai Spirit, consolidate good neighborliness, solidarity and mutual trust and build up cooperation consensus with a view to promoting new progress of the SCO.

Q: Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said in a signed opinion piece published by the Washington Post on April 18 that unilateral tariffs are not the right solution and will gravely undermine the rules-based multilateral system. In addition, at the Spring Meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank on April 19, Managing Director of the IMF Christine Lagarde urged countries to steer clear from protectionism, saying that unilateral trade restrictions have not been proven helpful and countries should work together to resolve differences over trade. What's your response?

A: I have seen these reports and also noted that Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said in this article that, the cause of a country's trade deficit lies at home. The trade deficit is the result of a country consuming more than it produces, and it is neither caused nor cured by trade restrictions. As always, China believes that the trade imbalance indeed needs to be addressed, but we should not make false attribution or wrong prescription. The past experience has repeatedly proved that isolation can only lead to a dead-end alley, and only by opening up and cooperation can the road become wider and wider.

As to the China-US trade frictions, we have stated China's position in a clear and firm manner on many occasions. This is a struggle of multilateralism and global free trade against unilateralism and protectionism. The international community should jointly uphold the multilateral trade system with free trade as its cornerstone and promote the sustained recovery of the world economy and global trade.

Q: The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission under the US Congress released a report on April 19, claiming that the Chinese government appears to support some corporate espionage designed to improve the competitiveness of Chinese firms while potentially advancing government interests. Huawei, Zhongxing Telecommunication Corporation (ZTE) and Lenovo are three Chinese companies that exhibit some of these characteristics. What is your response to this?

A: You mentioned that the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission claimed that the Chinese government "appears to" support some activities. The US side employed "appears to" once again! If all the policies adopted by the US are based on such sheer fabrication with the expression of "appears to", it is nothing but irresponsible and dangerous.

I have just read the speech delivered by Chinese Ambassador to the US Cui Tiankai at Harvard University in which he said that recently something has baffled him. Ambassador Cui often asks himself whether the United States is still the open, confident and optimistic country that he used to know? I believe this also confuses many other people.

Now the China-US relations are at a crossroads. The future development of China-US relations largely depends on the mindset our two sides choose to view ourselves, the world and our bilateral ties in an ever-changing world. If we were subject to the Cold-War mentality and zero-sum game, there would be traps and plots in our eyes. If we hold a more positive attitude to pursue cooperation, we will grasp the new trend, seize the new opportunity and turn challenges into opportunities to deliver tangible benefits to the two peoples. We hope that certain people in the United States can update their visions of international relations and follow the trend of the times instead of swimming against the tide.

Q: What is your response to the reports that the US Treasury is considering ways to restrict sensitive Chinese investments and corporate acquisitions in the US by invoking the emergency powers law and bringing forward security review reforms?

A: Recently the US has made a series of moves, now accusing China of forcing American enterprises to transfer technologies, now exclaiming that the development of China's high-tech sectors threatens its national security. In the final analysis, it reveals the US' domineering mentality that nobody but itself is allowed to possess high techs.

I have to point out that the US restrictions on the China-US high-tech trade and investment activities on the ground of national security from time to time is apparently an act of protectionism under the disguise of national security. iPhones are now found everywhere in China. We do not think it is a threat. By contrast, a Huawei cellphone bought by an American consumer is seen as a grave threat to national security by certain Americans. As the world's top country with advanced science and technology, has the US really become so fragile?

The US is asking China to further open its market on the one hand and repeatedly restricting China's normal trade and investment activities on the other. This conforms to neither the market law nor international rules, still less the principle of fairness, impartiality and reciprocity that the US side is always talking about. I believe we all know it only too well that the US' cracking down on China's scientific and technological development and progress under the pretext of national security actually constitutes an unreasonable act of economic and technological hegemony. The US should be clear that scientific and technological progress shall serve the wellbeing of the whole mankind rather than as a certain country's tool for hegemony.

Last year China contributed 57.5% to scientific and technological progress in the world and over 30% of global economic growth. China is now vigorously implementing the strategy of innovation-driven development, and its scientific and technological progress will not be blocked by some noises and disruptions.
The gravity of the existential threat we face from Islamic Jihad is truly of epic proportions. It is essentially a battle pitting free-civilized man against a totalitarian barbarian. What is at stake is the struggle for our very soul - namely who we are and what we represent. The lives that were sacrificed for individual rights and freedoms that we've come to cherish are being chiseled away from right under our noses by the stealth jihadists. And many of us are in denial and totally clueless.



The left's appeasement and pandering to evil is nothing new. What makes their utopian delusions so infuriating and unpardonable is that it is not only they who will have to pay the consequences, and deservedly, so, they are thwarting and undermining our best efforts at resistance and are thus dragging us down in the process as well.







By Peter Lancz,, the head of the Raoul Wallenberg World Campaign Against Racism.
You cant look any longer.

Whatever it is, its just too painful, too scary, so you hide your eyes and pretend that nothings happening. You cant look any longer, so you dont but after a while, you notice it again. Thats when you realize that you saw all along. Thats when, as in the new book When They Call You a Terrorist by Patrisse Khan-Cullors & asha bandele, you realize that you never really could look away.

Growing up as the third child in a family of four, Patrisse Khan-Cullors lived with her mother and siblings in a multiracial neighborhood near Sherman Oaks, California. The two places were less than a mile apart but, due to social, financial, and racial divides, they were separated by oceans, in Khan-Cullors mind.

Despite that her mother worked all day and into the night, Khan-Cullors was reared in a loving atmosphere. The man who raised her wasnt always around, but she adored him; after she learned, at age 12, that he wasnt her biological father, her birth-father and his family became present on a regular basis. Absent an adult, Khan-Cullors eldest brother acted as man of the house. This all complicated her young life, but she enjoyed this expanded, supportive family.

Khan-Cullors says that she was 12 years old, the first time she was arrested. By then, shed witnessed her brothers being questioned by police for just hanging out with friends. She started truly noticing her surroundings.

Not long afterward, her father was imprisoned on drug charges, and she lost touch with much of his family. Then her older brother was imprisoned for attempted burglary and was diagnosed with a mental health disorder, and Khan-Cullors came to understand that she was Queer. She began to earnestly question things in her life.

At 16, she became an organizer and an activist. She doubled down on it after her brother was arrested and called a terrorist for yelling at a woman. She was driven to act when, following the death of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of George Zimmerman, she sent out a message to her friends.

#BlackLivesMatter.

I write, she says, I hope it impacts more than we can ever imagine.

And, of course, it did, and it will. Once youre finished with When They Call You a Terrorist, youll want to stand up, too.

Youll want to stand, even though author Patrisse Khan-Cullors (with asha bandele) doesnt tell stories here that havent already been told before. Indeed, many authors have shared similar tales of poverty, affluent white friends, outrage, prison, and sadness. The shelves are full of such books  but this one is different because Khan-Cullors gives her story an urgent hear-me-now outrage. That done playing feeling is what readers may come away with  a feeling that underscores Khan-Cullors activism.

And thats what this book is about: its a rallying cry wrapped in a memoir tied in a call to legal action of whatever sort. And so, if youre ready, When They Call You a Terrorist is worth a longer look.

When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors & asha bandele, with a foreword by Angela Davis

c.2017, St. Martins Press

$24.99 / $32.50 Canada

257 pages
Ongoing and recent events in Syria are a daily reminder of the fact that the Middle East has been in turmoil for generations. Hopes for peace in the region remain in doubt.

The thriller Beirut begins in 1972, at a time when Lebanon was relatively untouched by what was taking place around it. Diplomat Mason Skiles (Jon Hamm) and his wife Nadia (Leila Bekhti) are hosting a cocktail party full of assorted politicians and high-ranking officials. As Mason puts it, Palestinians want nothing more than to burn down the Israeli house next door.

Among the locals that Mason and Nadia employ in their household is a young Palestinian boy named Karim. Unbeknownst to them, Karim is the younger brother of one of the terrorists responsible for orchestrating the massacre at the Munich Olympics. When fellow diplomat Cal (Mark Pellegrino) arrives late to the party, with the news about Karim, hes not alone. There are Mossad agents waiting outside to take the boy away.

Mason is shocked and tries to find a means of working out the situation. However, the arrival of Karims brother (who has escaped from prison) and several masked gunmen turn the situation chaotic. Unfortunately, Nadia is killed during the assault.

Ten years later, Mason is a shell of a man. A front-runner who stumbled, hes working as an arbitrator in Boston and hes an alcoholic. One evening, in a bar, a man walks in and attempts to recruit him for a gig in Beirut. He tells Mason that time is tight and that the agency would be grateful for his cooperation, and leaves behind an envelope with a passport and airline ticket.

With nothing left to lose, Mason heads to Beirut. Its 1982 and Beirut, in the midst of a civil war, is in worse shape than when he left, following the Palestinian siege of the city. He is visibly shaken when he takes in the bombed-out city view from his hotel window.

Deputy CIA attache Sandy (Rosamund Pike) meets with Mason. She brings him to an event being hosted by the ambassador (Larry Pine). There he meets others on Sandys team and is told that an American was pulled off the street in Beirut. They want experienced negotiator Mason to broker the hostage situation deal with the kidnappers. Oh, and by the way, his old friend Cal is the hostage and the lead kidnapper is a grown-up Karim (Idir Chender).

From this point on, Beirut becomes a tangled web spy thriller, full of double-crosses, tense and terrifying situations, and more than a few surprises to keep the action moving and the audience engaged.

Director Brad Anderson is a long way from his Boston rom-com Next Stop Wonderland of 20 years ago, but he handles the material with agility. It probably helps that hes working from a screenplay by Tony Gilroy (the Bourne series and Michael Clayton), a screenwriter (and director) who is at his best with this type of material. Brutal and bloody, Beirut is a timely tale of intrigue. Rating: B
This report discusses the monthly meeting of the South Florida AIDS Network (SFAN). SFAN is the advisory board for the Ryan White Care (RWC) program of the Florida Department of Health in Broward. This report also discusses the quarterly meetings of the Broward County HIV Prevention Planning Council (BCHPPC).

The April SFAN meeting continued to discuss changes to the Medicaid PAC Waiver program. Under that program, Medicaid would pay for services for people with specific serious medical conditions.

A representative, Eunice Medina, from the Agency for Health Care Administration (ACHA) spoke at this meeting. ACHA administers Medicaid in Florida. Medina reported that in 2017 the Florida Legislature ordered ACHA to consolidate and integrate Project AIDS Care (PAC) and two other Medicaid Waiver programs into the Statewide Medicaid Managed Care (SMMC) program.

Joey Wynn, SFAN Chair, had forwarded the complaints of Broward Medicaid clients living with HIV to ACHA. Medina had examined them.

Medina emphasized that ACHAs main goal was continuity of care. She reported that Health plans must honor any ongoing treatment that was authorized or scheduled prior to the recipients enrollment into the new plan for up to 60 days after the recipient enrolls in the plan. Medina also stated, Providers should continue providing any services that were previously authorized, regardless of whether the provider is participating in the plans network. Plans must pay providers for previously authorized services for up to 60 days, and must pay non-network providers at the rate previously received for up to 30 days. When a managed care company fails to comply with this policy, providers or recipients can initiate a complaint process with ACHA.

The largest number of complaints involved the loss of massage therapy services, according to Medina. One provider reported that one SMMC company lacked massage therapists in their networks.

If someone has a complaint about the Statewide Medicaid Managed Care Program, they can file a complaint at http://bit.ly/2HoaJSw.

For information on ACHA Grievance and Appeal System and Fair Hearing Overview, please visit http://bit.ly/2qwjCPr.

The spring meeting of The Broward County HIV Prevention Planning Council (BCHPPC) met on April 12. They met at the Department of Health's Broward County Administrative Building, 780 SW 24th Street, Fort Lauderdale.

In this meeting, HIV prevention agencies described their activities, accomplishments, and challenges. In 2016, Broward had 40.1 new HIV diagnoses per 100,000 residents, the second highest rate among all U.S. Counties. Broward's gay and bi male residents would have a much higher rate.

An audience member identified a major problem in Browards HIV testing programs. People most in need of testing do not appear to be testing. Only about 1 percent of people testing for HIV in Broward had positive results. Given the high rate of new HIV diagnoses, the positive test rate should increase to bring the epidemic under control.

In addition, the people most in need of PrEP, Black and Latino gay/ bi men and Black women have low rates of PrEP use, both nationally and locally. HIV Prevention fails to reach those most in need of it.

Latinos Salud announced that they were now conducting oral and anal STD testing as well as penile STD testing.

The MSM Advisory Group provides advice on HIV prevention among gay and bi men. They are seeking new members. Their next meeting will be on May 14 at 1:30 p.m.at 560 NW 27th Ave.

The next SFAN Meeting will be on Friday, May 4, 2018 at 9:30 a.m., at the Holy Cross Healthplex, 1000 NE 56th Street, Ft. Lauderdale.

The next BCHPPC will be on July 26. Please visit http://bit.ly/2HhzIqP for location.

Follow Sean McShee on Twitter @SeanMcShee
Updated April 20 at 5:18 with a response from Robert Boo

Wilton Manors City Commissioner Julie Carson will call on the city to sever all financial ties with the Pride Center at its next commission meeting on Tuesday because shes no longer comfortable with how the organization is being run.

Carson is calling for significant changes to be made at the Center in its operating practices, transparency and leadership.

This announcement comes on the heels of the Pride Center board voting to keep Robert Boo, its Chief Executive Officer, in place, despite the growing controversy that has engulfed the LGBT community center over the last month.

So far three board members have resigned, including two this week.

As a new member of the board, I felt it was best that I step away from the current controversy, Jane Bolin said. I remain a supporter of the mission of the Pride Center as a founder and member of the governance committee.

SFGN also learned Chairman of the Board, Mark Budwig, has resigned as well.

Boo has come under fire for not taking action sooner to terminate the employment of a registered sex offender, Clarence Collins, 63, who confessed to raping an 11-year-old girl in the mid-90s and threatening to kill her if she told. Children regularly visit the Pride Center and use its playground. Boo admitted he knew of Collins sex offender history all along, just not the details of the crime, and wanted to give him a second chance. But once the playground was installed Collins employment at the center was no longer legal since sex offenders arent allowed to work near anywhere children gather. Boo later claimed ignorance of the law. And Collins was later arrested for illegally working at the Pride Center after he had been fired.

Had I known then what I know now, including the abhorrent details of how he hurt that child, I would have immediately terminated him and never permitted him to continue working at The Center in any capacity, Boo wrote.

Boo has repeatedly apologized to the board, founders, and community.

In a recent letter addressed to the community, Boo said he believed he had done his due diligence by contacting Collins former probation officer before he hired him part-time in 2013.

I believed that I was taking the appropriate precaution when I contacted his probation officer to inquire about him, Boo wrote. I was told that he was a registered sex offender but no longer under any form of confinement, supervision or any other court-imposed sanction which would limit his employability.

SFGN attempted to confirm that this conversation took place, but was unable to do so.

We are unable to confirm a conversation that occurred six years prior. Please note, the Departments jurisdiction over this individual ended in April 2012 when he completed his supervision, a spokesperson for the Department of Corrections said. He later added, In general, Probation Officers work regularly with employers to discuss conditions of supervision.

On Monday the Pride Center board will meet again to officially censure Boo and take formal disciplinary action.

Some parents have expressed outrage over Boos handling of the controversy so far and have called on him to resign. One board member, Jim Walker, also publicly called on Boo to resign before the vote to remove him took place.

Those parents were concerned that a sex predator was knowingly allowed to be around their children. But SFGN has also since learned from a former board member, and a long time volunteer, that the Pride Center does not conduct background checks on its volunteers.

"The Pride Centers process for screening volunteers is being reviewed by the special task force established by The Pride Center Board. As one example of our current screening of prospective volunteers, a Broward County resident who is volunteering to support the call center and reception functions would be scrutinized through case searches of the Broward Sheriffs Office and the Broward County Clerk of the Courts, among other information sources," Boo said.

In 2015, before the playground was installed, a local activist expressed these same concerns to the Wilton Manors City Commission.

As The Pride Center moves forward with their playground as LGBT safe space for LGBT families and children, I do hope they run level 2 background checks on their employees and volunteers to ensure those who are sexual offenders are properly screened so not to endanger the safety and welfare of those families, Michael Rajner wrote.

In addition to the city waiving and reducing fees for Pride Center events, the City also donated about $3,000 to the building of the playground. SFGN reached out to the City to see if they heeded Rajners concerns at the time.

The City worked with the Pride Center during the design and build phase of the playground to ensure that the structures were permitted, constructed, and inspected for compliance with the South Florida Building Code, said City Manager Leigh Ann Henderson. The Pride Center campus is privately owned and the City does not have any Ordinances that govern private playground safety.

Related stories:

Pride Center Board Votes to Keep CEO; Censure Pending

Dark Cloud Hangs Over Pride Center; CEO Apologizes

Outraged Parents Threaten to Protest Diversity Honors Over Sex Predator Scandal

Robert Boo Addresses Sex Predator Scandal at Coffee & Conversation

Pride Center Board Member Calls on CEO to Resign As Sex Predator Scandal Grows

Sex Predator Charged With Illegally Working at Pride Center

Pride Center Whistleblower Informed Staff of Sex Predator in 2015

Sex Predators Job at Pride Center Brings Scrutiny to Board

Pride Centers Playground Prompts Removal of Sexual Predator
Le Collectif Cheikh Yassine a organise un certain nombre dactivites et de festivites pour les enfants de Gaza sous le theme  La joie des enfants de Gaza pour lAid . Ces activites ont commence le premier jour de lAid et continue jusquau 4eme jour de lAid dans la bande de Gaza.



Plusieurs activites, ont ete organisees parmi lesquelles : des competitions recompensees par des prix, des jeux, des animations et des chants presentes par un groupe ainsi que des distributions de cadeaux et daides financieres.




One of the most fundamental predictions of Einstein's theory of relativity is the existence of black holes.

In spite of the recent detection of gravitational waves from binary black holes by LIGO, direct evidence using electromagnetic waves remains elusive and astronomers are searching for it with radio telescopes. Astrophysicists at Goethe University Frankfurt, and collaborators in the ERC-funded project BlackHoleCam in Bonn and Nijmegen have created and compared self-consistent and realistic images of the shadow of an accreting supermassive black hole - such as the black-hole candidate Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) in the heart of our galaxy - both in general relativity and in a different theory of gravity. The goal was to test if Einsteinian black holes can be distinguished from those in alternative theories of gravity.

Not all of the light rays (or photons) produced by matter falling into a black hole are trapped by the event horizon, a region of spacetime from which nothing can escape. Some of these photons will reach distant observers, so that when a black hole is observed directly a "shadow" is expected against the background sky. The size and shape of this shadow will depend on the black-hole's properties but also on the theory of gravity.

Because the largest deviations from Einstein's theory of relativity are expected very close to the event horizon and since alternative theories of gravity make different predictions on the properties of the shadow, direct observations of Sgr A* represent a very promising approach for testing gravity in the strongest regime. Making such images of the black-hole shadow is the primary goal of the international Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration (EHTC), which combines radio data from telescopes around the world.

Scientists from the BlackHoleCam team in Europe, who are part of the EHTC, have now gone a step further and investigated whether it is possible to distinguish between a "Kerr" black hole from Einstein's gravity and a "dilaton" black hole, which is a possible solution of an alternative theory of gravity.

The researchers studied the evolution of matter falling into the two very different types of black holes and calculated the radiation emitted to construct the images. Furthermore, real-life physical conditions in the telescopes and interstellar medium were used to create physically realistic images. "To capture the effects of different black holes we used realistic simulations of accretion disks with near-identical initial setups. These expensive numerical simulations used state-of-the-art codes and took several months on the Institute's supercomputer LOEWE," says Dr. Yosuke Mizuno, lead author of the study.

Moreover, expected radio images obviously have a limited resolution and image fidelity. When using realistic image resolutions, the scientists found, to their surprise, that even highly non-Einsteinian black holes could disguise themselves as normal black holes.

"Our results show that there are theories of gravity in which black holes can masquerade as Einsteinian, so new techniques of analyzing EHT data may be needed to tell them apart," remarks Luciano Rezzolla, professor at Goethe University and leader of the Frankfurt team. "While we believe general relativity is correct, as scientists we need to be open-minded. Luckily, future observations and more advanced techniques will eventually settle these doubts," concludes Rezzolla.

"Indeed, independent information from an orbiting pulsar, which we are actively searching for, will help eliminate these ambiguities," says Michael Kramer, director at the MPI for Radio Astronomy in Bonn. Heino Falcke (professor at Radboud University), who 20 years ago proposed using radio telescopes to image the shadow of black holes, is optimistic. "There is little doubt that the EHT will eventually obtain strong evidence of a black-hole shadow. These results encourage us to refine our techniques beyond the current state of the art and thus make even sharper images in the future."



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The International Space Station is set to raise its orbit Wednesday ahead of upcoming cargo and crew missions. Meanwhile, the six Expedition 55 crew members are staying busy today with medical tests, cargo work and lab maintenance.

The space station will increase its altitude slightly when a docked Russian cargo craft automatically fires its engines for two minutes and six seconds early Wednesday. The maneuver will establish the correct orbit for the landing of three crew members in June and a two-orbit rendezvous capability for the next Russian Progress resupply craft in July.

Flight Engineer Scott Tingle collected and stowed his own urine sample today for a pair of biomedical studies examining the effects of spaceflight on the human body. The U.S. Navy pilot also continued operations for the Metabolic Tracking (MT) experiment that observes how human tissue samples are impacted by a specific drug compound.

Expedition 55-56 crewmates Drew Feustel and Ricky Arnold checked each other's eyes today using optical coherence tomography gear inside the Harmony module. Feustel also installed and checked the station's first updated printer since 2000 before wrapping up his day unloading cargo from the SpaceX Dragon cargo craft. Arnold finally collected water samples and changed out a cartridge as part of preventative maintenance on a U.S. oxygen generator.

Astronaut Norishige Kanai from Japan continued more upkeep work for the Mouse Stress Defense experiment that is exploring the causes of muscle and bone loss in space. The busy flight engineer later assisted his fellow crew members unloading SpaceX cargo before injecting human tissue samples with a drug compound for the MT study.

On-Orbit Status Report

Metabolic Tracking (MT): The crew set up the hardware and materials to support two separate sessions of thawing and inoculation today for the MT investigation. They injected the thawed inoculum into multiwell BioCells, and inserted them into a NanoRacks Plate Reader. Samples were placed into a Minus Eighty Degree Celsius Laboratory Freezer for ISS (MELFI). The Metabolic Tracking investigation evaluates a rapid, low-cost method for assessing the effects of therapeutic compounds in microgravity. The method contributes to development of custom plans for emergency medical treatment for crew members, using primary tissue samples. This investigation also determines the feasibility of developing improved pharmaceuticals in microgravity using a new method to test the metabolic impacts of drug compounds. This could lead to more effective, less expensive drugs.

Human Research Program (HRP) Collections (Biochemical Profile and Repository): A 53S crewmember collected urine samples for his FD120 sessions of the Biochem Profile and Repository investigations.

The Biochemical Profile experiment tests blood and urine samples obtained from astronauts before, during, and after spaceflight. Specific proteins and chemicals in the samples are used as biomarkers, or indicators of health. Post-flight analysis yields a database of samples and test results; which scientists can use to study the effects of spaceflight on the body.

Repository is a storage bank used to maintain biological specimens over extended periods of time and under well-controlled conditions. The repository supports scientific discovery that contributes to our fundamental knowledge in the area of human physiological changes and adaptation to a microgravity environment and provides unique opportunities to study longitudinal changes in human physiology spanning many missions.

Space Station Computer (SSC) Printer Deploy: Earlier today, the crew installed the new HP Printer, brought to ISS by SpaceX-14, in the US Lab. Crew reported excellent print quality from the new printer. The legacy Epson printer will be kept onboard as a backup unit.

Integrated Communications Unit (ICU) R4 Software Transition: Yesterday, ground teams redirected Joint Station LAN (JSL) network traffic to KU Communication Unit (KCU) 2 in order to update KCU 2 Kernal 0 with the new R4 Software. Today the crew installed a Gigabit Ethernet cable from KCU 2 to the JSL router and loaded R4 to KCU 2 Kernal 1 while ground teams loaded the new firmware/coefficient files. After the loads were complete, ground teams activated KCU 2. This completes the first part of the ICU R4 software transition. The second part of the transition, the load of R4 to KCU 1 Kernal 0 and Kernal 1, will be scheduled in about 1 week to allow for testing of the new Ku-Band return link data rates of 450 and 600 mbps during defined test windows on GMT 110, 111, and 112. The intent of ICU R4 is to increase the return link bandwidth from 300 Mbps to 600 Mbps.

Eye Exams: This morning the 54S crew completed routine Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) and Fundoscope eye exams. Eye exams are routinely performed onboard to monitor crewmembers eye health. Eyesight is one of the many aspects of the human body that is affected by long-duration stays in a microgravity environment.

Oxygen Generation System (OGS) Activated Carbon/Ion Exchange (ACTEX) Replacement: Earlier today the crew collected samples from the OGS recirculation loop for return and replaced the ACTEX cartridge. This loop sample is performed every 180 days and the ACTEX cartridge is changed out every 730 days as part of scheduled ISS preventative maintenance.

Dragon Cargo Operations: The crew has completed more than 42 hours of unloading and loading of the Dragon vehicle. At this time cargo specialist on the ground estimate the crew will need approximately 31 hours to complete the Dragon vehicle packing in preparation for Dragon unberth, planned on 02-May.

Space Station Remote Manipulator System (SSRMS) Operations: Later today, controllers will use the SSRMS and Special Purpose Dexterous Manipulator (SPDM) to transfer the MISSE Sample Container (MSC) from the MTT to the MISSE Flight Facility (FF).

Today's Planned Activities

All activities are complete unless otherwise noted.

HRF Generic Urine Collection

HRF Generic Sample MELFI Insertion Operations

 maintenance

Mouse Blood drawing Familiarization

Check the Results of Antivirus Scanning on [] Auxiliary Computer System Laptops; Report the Status

APEX-06 MELFI Insertion #2

Mouse Stress Defense Item Gathering

PHASE TRANSITION. Experiment Setup and Start of Operations.

Hardware Setup for the PAO Event. Check Video and Audio Signals.

ZBOOK Hard Drive Installation

SSC HP Printer Deployment to Replace Lab SSC Epson Printer

Crew Preparation for the PAO Event

TV Session with Artek Children and Youth Center

Station Support Computer (SSC) 17 Laptop Relocate

XF305 Camcorder Setup

Glove Box Bench Setup

BIOCARD. Assistance during the Experiment

BIOCARD. Experiment Operations.

Health Maintenance System (HMS) OCT Setup

Mouse Stress Defense Cage Maintenance for Water 3

KU Comm Unit Cable Route

Metabolic Tracking Inoculation Preparation

Crew Preparation for the PAO Event

TV Session with Moscow Economic School Students

Spaceflight Cognitive Assessment Tool for Windows (WinSCAT) Test

Metal Oxide (METOX) Regeneration Termination

PHASE TRANSITION. Closeout Operations.

Metabolic Tracking MELFI Metabolic Tracking Group Retrieve

Metabolic Tracking Biocells Inoculation

Comm Config for Communication from MRM1

SEPARATION. Fitting of Delivered Panel #205.

ZBOOK Hard Drive Installation

SEPARATION. Installation of the Mounting Hardware of the  Distillation Unit and  Reservoir Unit

Health Maintenance System (HMS) - OCT Exam

SEPARATION. Hoses Mating and Routing behind the Panels (including  Installation behind Panel 205).

Metabolic Tracking Plate Reader Insertion/Removal

Health Maintenance System (HMS) OCT Stow

Metabolic Tracking Session Cleanup

SSC HP Printer Checkout

In Flight Maintenance (IFM) Oxygen Generation System (OGS) Gather

Public Affairs Office (PAO) High Definition (HD) Config LAB Setup

Galley food warmer door troubleshoot

SEPARATION.  Vacuuming Unit Installation.

PAO Preparation

Public Affairs Office (PAO) Event in High Definition (HD) - Lab

In Flight Maintenance (IFM) Oxygen Generation System (OGS) Internal ACTEX Pre-Flush

Public Affairs Office (PAO) Social Media Event

Restoration of the Nominal Comm Config

24-Hour ECG Recording (start)

Metabolic Tracking Inoculation Preparation

ISS HAM Service Module Pass

Oxygen Generation System (OGS) Internal ACTEX Remove and Replace

Metabolic Tracking MELFI Metabolic Tracking Group Retrieve

Metabolic Tracking MELFI Inoculation Bag Retrieve

Metabolic Tracking Biocells Inoculation

Private Medical Conference (PMC)

APEX-06 Adjust Light

Cargo Transfer to Dragon

VZAIMODEISTVIYE-2. Experiment Operations

Metabolic Tracking Session Cleanup

In Flight Maintenance (IFM) Oxygen Generation System (OGS) Stow

Dragon Cargo Operations Conference

HRF Columbus HD Video Setup

Completed Task List Activities

None

Ground Activities

All activities are complete unless otherwise noted.

MISSE MSC Transfer

ICU R4 Software Transition

LAB MCA Full Calibration

Three-Day Look Ahead:

Wednesday, 04/18: JSL Firewall Deploy, PCG9 Sampling, CIR Bottle R&R, NORS O2 Transfer, Mouse Stress Defense Ops, Metabolic Sampling, ISS Reboost

Thursday, 04/19: LAB IMV Valve R&R, Mouse Stress Defense Ops, Miniature Exercise Device Ops, N3 MCA VGA R&R

Friday, 04/20: MSL Furnace Swap, APEX6 Harvest, Mouse Stress Defense, EIISS, PEPS Inspection, MSG VUE Removal

QUICK ISS Status - Environmental Control Group:

Component - Status

Elektron - On

Vozdukh - Manual

[] 1 - SM Air Conditioner System ("SKV1") - Off

[] 2 - SM Air Conditioner System ("SKV2") - Off

Carbon Dioxide Removal Assembly (CDRA) Lab - Operate

Carbon Dioxide Removal Assembly (CDRA) Node 3 - Standby

Major Constituent Analyzer (MCA) Lab - Operate

Major Constituent Analyzer (MCA) Node 3 - Standby

Oxygen Generation Assembly (OGA) - Process

Urine Processing Assembly (UPA) - Process

Trace Contaminant Control System (TCCS) Lab - Full Up

Trace Contaminant Control System (TCCS) Node 3 - Off

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When people think of spaces for queer communities to congregate, collaborate, and enjoy each others company, bars and clubs are usually the first thing that comes to mind. This assumptionthat an openly gay or queer space must inherently be a baris beholden to its own history and fraught with prejudice. It's also only part of the story.

Queer coffeehouses have for centuries been vital to queer culture past and present, presenting valuable spaces for organizing, finding community, and freely inhabiting queer identity. While many tend to associate queer culture with nightlifea direct result of the criminalization of queer identity over the course of historyqueer coffeehouses occupy their own essential cultural space, sometimes operating as part of the nightlife scene, and sometimes acting as a valuable counterpoint.

As the legality of various queer identities and expressions has fluctuated over time, the culture around where and how queer people congregate has shifted alongside it; while the queer coffeehouses of the past were often spaces where expressing queer identity was an act of open (and sometimes illegal) rebellion, queer coffeehouses of the present are able to inhabit queer space in marvelously myriad ways. With a nod to the past, today's queer coffee bars show us the stunning diversity of what it means to be queer in the 21st century, where the fight for respect and inclusivity continues.

Queer Coffeehouses Go Way Back

Today's queer coffee bars are as modern as they comemore on that laterbut the coffee house's role as a popular space for queer folks to get together go way back: all the way back to the Ottoman Empire, in fact, when coffee made its way from Yemen to Turkey. As coffee became a popular beverage for royalty, the majority of the general public met coffee through the establishment of coffeehouses. Coffeehouses quickly became an integral part of Istanbul social culture, where people would congregate to discuss poetry and literature, play chess and backgammon, and read.

As coffeehouses were a center for intellectual and social progress, its only natural that they also became hubs for queer people, specifically queer men. At that time in Turkish culture, male beauty was lauded and homoerotic romance was not criminalized. Over time, the culture shifted, and the prevalence of queer activity in coffeehouses actually contributed to periodic attempts by the Turkish government to prohibit coffeehouses, the most drastic being Murad IV's 1622 law mandating execution of coffee drinkers (and tobacco smokers); during that period in Istanbul, religious leaders preached on street corners that coffee would inspire indecent behavior.

Stewart Allen, author of The Devil's Cup: Coffee, the Driving Force in History, told the story of an Ottoman Grand Vizier secretly visited a coffeehouse in Istanbul. He observed that the people drinking alcohol would just get drunk and sing and be jolly, whereas the people drinking coffee remained sober and plotted against the government, said Allen. The link between coffeehouses as spaces for intellectual activity, queer activity, and revolutionary activity repeats throughout history, and the criminalization of coffeehouses and criminalization of queerness are similarly linked; once we acknowledge the role of coffee in revolution, its not surprising that the idea of queer people meeting in coffeehouses was at times even more threatening to governments than queer people meeting in taverns. Today nothing has really changed.

Thats not to say that queer coffeehouses didnt partake in their fair share of revelry. In 18th century England, molly houses provided a popular venue for queer men to get together. While many molly houses were taverns, the famous Mother Claps was a coffeehouse that also served spirits; a center for dancing, cross-dressing, and sex, it was one of the most popular and successful molly houses of the time. Mother Claps was raided in 1726, leading to the arrest of 40 attendees, most of whom were released on lack of evidence (read: not being caught in the act of queer sex), but many were fined and three were hanged. Mother Clap herself, the proprietress, was fined, pilloried, and imprisoned for two years for keeping a disorderly house. Nevertheless, the queer subculture continued, and shutting down individual molly houses didnt stop people from getting their queer culture elsewhere.

The Modern Era: Comptons Cafeteria and the Queer Civil Rights Movement

When the US established independence after the Revolution, crimes like sodomy and buggery were capital offenses in many states, and cross-dressing was a felony punishable by imprisonment or corporal punishment. For a long time, since no queer activity was legal in the US, all expression of queer identity was forced underground. By the 1960s, queer communities had had enough of police and state oppression of queer identities and fought back; unsurprisingly, there was coffee involved. While the 1969 Stonewall riots are commonly thought of as the beginning of the queer civil rights movement in the US, the Comptons Cafeteria riot, which predated it by three years, started with a cup of coffee thrown in a police officers face in San Franciscos Tenderloin District.

Comptons Cafeteria acted as a gathering place for trans women, drag queens, and crossdresserswho, as a result of transphobia in the gay community, were often not allowed in gay barsto congregate. Because crossdressing was illegal at the time, police could use the presence of trans people as a pretext to raid the establishment and close it down. According to The Advocate, The screaming queens erupted one night after one of their own was being hauled away from the cafeteria. After she emptied her steaming cup in the police officer's face, all hell broke loose. Chairs, dishes, and sugar shakers went airborne and the restaurant's dirty windows were smashed; outside, queers broke the windows of a squad car and lit a newsstand on fire. Immediately following the chaos, restaurant owners banned trans women and drag queens. The community picketed against the decision the following night.

The riot, aided in part by coffee, marked a turning point for the local queer rights movement: after the riot and protests, a network of transgender social, psychological, and medical support services was established, which culminated in 1968 with the creation of the National Transsexual Counseling Unit, the first peer-run support and advocacy organization in the world. By 1974, the anti-crossdressing law was repealed, and today San Francisco remains a hub for trans and gender-nonconforming individuals, who enjoy greater legal protection in SF than in most regions across the country.

Queer Cafes Today

Queer rights are nowhere near comprehensive in the US, and although the right to legal gay marriage was established at a federal level in the US in 2015, politicians and civilians on both the right and the left continue to rally around criminalizing or simply not legalizing specific elements of queer identity. In the US today, trans individuals are not legally protected against discrimination at a federal level, and nonbinary gender identities are only acknowledged in a few states. Nevertheless, weve come a long way from a full criminalization of all queerness, and it shows in the diversity of queer coffeehouses and companies today. I reached out to several queer coffee companies and found them each wholly unique expressions of queer culture in the US today. I couldnt possibly fit all their stories into one article, but below are just a few.

Founded in 2009 by Ryan Galiotto, San Franciscos Wicked Grounds provides the community with a full-service cafe, kink boutique, and community hub for the LGBTQ, polyamorous, and kink communities. Think about the community aspects of your local leather bar, then envision that happening in a full service and sober cafe, said current owner Mir Bilodeau. We host about 50 events each month, including Kink 101 classes, munches for specific kink subcultures, activism groups, polyamory socials, and more. In addition to their own events, they sponsor a wide variety of local queer organizations and events, like SF and Oakland Pride, the Trans March, Folsom Street Fair, and International Ms. Leather. They also partner with other queer organizations to offer everything from STI testing to prisoner letter writing days to give back to their community. In a region with so many queer bars, providing a queer space for sober folks and families is crucial, and the mission of education and activism speaks to a long tradition of queer coffeehouses in the SF region.

Michelle Barbers online coffee retailer Queer Coffee represents a different facet of queer culture. Launched in May 2017, Queer Coffee sells whole bean, fair trade, organic coffee online and donates $2 from every bag sold to an LGBTQ+ nonprofitcurrently, theyre supporting the Campaign for Southern Equality. The idea is that this is a high-quality bag of beans you'd be proud to have in your cupboard or give to a friend, all while supporting our own community. I'm passionate about coffee and I wanted to find a bigger way to support LGBTQ+ nonprofits, says Barber. I hope we can grow that support over the years to have a bigger and bigger impact. I have big goals for Queer Coffee, like organizing meetups and sponsoring events, but we're small and new right now.

Cuties Coffee, launched through crowd-funding less than a year ago in East Hollywood, has already done so much to provide queer-centered community space for their local community. We wanted a space that anchors the community, open during the daytime so that all ages could attend. We wanted a space for folx who dont find a home in the queer nightlife scene. We wanted a space that was casual. There was a gap we saw that a coffee shop could fill, said co-founder Virginia Bauman. Cuties hosts community events like the Friday Flirt!, craft nights, and queer movie nights, as well as casual coffee and donuts socials. They also put out a newsletter with events from other groups in the area, as well as media to enjoy from home for those who arent up for being out of the house for any number of reasons.

In addition to this valuable work, Cuties have recently launched a community tab program to ensure that no one who wants to enjoy the safe, affirming space they provide is turned away for lack of funds. Look for more on this community program in a coming feature here on Sprudge in early May.

In Charlotte, NC, Comic Girl Coffee is a queer-led co-op selling coffee with vegan milk options and queer/POC-centered books. They work to create a safe space for community-building and activism for Charlottes marginalized. One of their main goals is to make the space accessible to people of every income using a Pay it Forward board populated by magnets purchased by other customers and a section of donated books for which customers can pay what they want. They also donate 10% of profits to Trans.formation House, a healing space for homeless transgender people.

These are just a tiny handful of the beautifully diverse queer coffee companies carrying the tradition of coffeehouses as spaces for queerness, thought, and progressive society.

Queer Coffeehouses, Past and Present

From the beginnings of coffee to the present day, coffeehouses have always been hubs for queer collaboration and activism. As coffee culture moved across the world, queerness moved from a non-criminalized subculture in Ottoman Turkey, to a heavily-criminalized underground scene in Europe and the US, to the open-yet-threatened status many queer people inhabit in the US today. Throughout that history, coffeehouses have always been exactly what the queer community needed them to be at any given time and place. So many different queer subcultures thrive across the US and alongside them, a rich spread of coffee shops prioritizes different groups, missions, and needs.

While the queer coffee scene in the US continues to thrive and diversify, queer civil rights in the US and across the world are still under attack. Many coffee companies and coffee professionals wish to remain apolitical in such a polarized climate, but coffee has always been political, a space to brew revolution. In honor of that history, coffee drinkers and coffee professionals alike should salute the companies who continue that legacy with the courage to boldly create and protect the space their community needs to survive and thrive. Visit and donate to these spaces, and respect those who risk so much to champion these causes. It's easier to look away, but coffee's history points us in a different direction.

RJ Joseph is a staff writer for Sprudge Media Network. Read more RJ Joseph on Sprudge.

Top photo by Sunnie Townsend.
The London Coffee Festival 2018 has come and gone, but the memories remainand so does all the hot new gear we tested at the show. One product we were excited to hear more about is Mazzer Robur S, a high performance coffee grinder that follows, yet completely re-invents, the current Robur model.

Mazzer are hardly newcomers to the coffee world. Founded by Luigi Mazzer in 1948, the now 70-year-old historic Italian brand the brand exports more than 70% of its production nearly a hundred countries around the world. Mazzer grinders are used and loved by top baristas and roasters around the world, and often paired with espresso machines by La Marzocco through a longstanding partnership.

The new Robur S presented at LCF 2018 is an electronic grinder-doser (available in two versions, both automatic and electronic on demand) with conical grinding blades and slow speed rotation (420 RPM  50 Hz). The ideal home for Robur S is a busy coffee shop with high consumption.

Whats new? The new grinder improves dose consistency and reduces coffee retention by 52% compared to the previous model. It is capable of operating at high speed, grinding five grams of coffee per second without over-heating. A special cooling system with double fan keeps the coffee safe from temperature exposure, preserving maximum aroma.

Robur S makes it easier to set the grinder to your preferred grinding size with stepless micrometrical grinding adjustment and a new system for the disk, called Memory Track. The system allows users to rotate the disk to the preferred number and lock it in place to index grind setting. Additionally, Robur S features an easy system for changing out the burrs, allowing for quick and easy cleaning of the grind chamber without losing your grind setting.

A new digital control panel allows users to set the grinder and access data stored in the software. Time settings include single, double, and triple doses; dose countdowns to monitor the stocks; a programmable pre-tap pause function to level down the coffee in the portafilter, stats on grinding output data; and maintenance alerts (for example, when the burrs are due to be changed). All this data can be easily viewed on the display or on the connected apps.

Indeed, one of the most interesting innovations of the Robur S is its inbuilt Wi-Fi connection, which allows baristas, roasters, and service teams to access grinder data remotely and store it in a cloud database. The Robur S app will be unveiled in the next few months.

Robur S is a major example of the ongoing renewal at Mazzer. In 2016 the company expanded its facilities, nearly doubling the production area to meet with market demand. They've also heavily invested in innovation and R&D, hiring young engineers, developers, and support staff in a bid to keep the brand at the forefront of the coffee industry.

High performance, attention to detail, and product reliability are at the core of Mazzers operations. We are involved in the whole production process. Every single metal component we use goes through our quality control process, says Cristina Scarpa, Marketing Manager at Mazzer Italy, who I spoke with at length during the London Coffee Festival.

Mazzer has also made a commitment to investing in green energy: about 40% of appliances are produced using renewable energy sources (saving 307 tons of CO2 yearly) thanks to a photovoltaic system installed at the Mazzer factory near Venice.

Do you want to know more about the new Mazzer Robur S grinder? You will find Mazzer at coffee trade shows worldwide in the coming months, ahead of the global release of Robur S at the end of October 2018.

Giulia Mule is a Sprudge.com contributor based in London. Read more Giulia Mule on Sprudge.

Mazzer is an advertising partner on Sprudge Media Network.
It's all over except for the shouting and the visiting Hungary team is making the most noise after Tomas Tanczer cruised to an easy victory in the final leg of the Friendship Competition with the North American Amateur Drivers Association and they will go back home with trophies to prove it.

Tanczer, up behind Leave Your Mark, the second choice in the wagering in the seven-horse finale at Saratoga Raceway on Thursday, April 19, wasted no time in taking command and then went on to a 3-1/4 length victory in a time of 2:00.2 while turning back Autumn Estelle, driven by NAADA's Tony Ciuffetelli. Another NAADA member, Bob Davis, took home the show dough with Armbro Hall.

In the entire competition, mounts and post positions were drawn by lot and today's race was no exception. Tanczer's trotter was the morning line favourite, but went off third choice in the betting. But the talented Hungarian amateur gunned his horse to the lead and they were never in trouble the entire way.

Sent off at odds of nearly 4-1, Leave Your Mark paid $9.70 for win. The nine-year-old Yankee Glide trotter is owned by Greg Gardner and trained by Delores Basilone.

According to Alicia Schwartz, NAADA member and the organization's point keeper, Hungary finished with 95 points, some nine better than the NAADA's total of 84.

She explained that because of late scratches, the affected NAADA members gave their drives to the visitors so although the final score favoured Hungary, because they actually had more drives than the host home team.

But who cares about the score in these Friendship Competitions, Ms Schwartz said. It's the friendship and camaraderie shared by all the competitors that's most important. International amateur racing is a great means for human relations.

NAADA has a busy schedule hosting European amateur drivers this year. In coming months, the Americans will also host their counterparts from Spain, Italy and France.

(With files from NAADA)
While several members of the North American Amateur Drivers Association were at Saratoga Raceway competing against the group of visiting Hungarians on April 19, seven members of NAADA convened at Yonkers Raceway for the sixth leg of the current spring trotting series.

And for the second time in three weeks, Paul Minore and his old warhorse Wygant Prince emerged victorious.

After starting from the pole position Minore was content to allow Brandos Muscle Man (Monica Banca) to take command on the first turn and then play follow the leader as Banca and her trotter passed the first stanza in a soft :29.3. Noticing that the pace was getting even slower, Joe Faraldo moved Tough Get Going to the outside to hurry the leader as Minore sat still in the catbird's seat.

With Minore content where he was Faraldo and his trotter kept marching forward, battling with Brandos Muscle Man before finally overtaking him coming off the final turn. That duo had to prepare for a stiff challenge from Wygant Prince, who had enjoyed cover all the way.

I finally cleared Monica's trotter as we headed for home but Wygant Prince was fresh and we battled all the way to the wire, Faraldo recalled. I thought we were going to win it but my horse tired a bit in the final strides after being out a long way and Paul's horse was fresh and stronger having never moved until the end of the mile. When the (finish line) camera clicked I was a head short and Paul got all the money.

Brandos Muscle Man hung on for a third place finish.

Wygant Prince is owned by Minore and trained by Taylor Gower.

Next up in the NAADA trotting series is the seventh leg at Monticello Raceway on Thursday, April 26.

Now with their series against the Hungarians completed, NAADA is preparing for the visiting Spaniards in late May. That group will be the second of four European amateur organizations which will be hosted by the USA this year.

(with files from NAADA)
The $52,500 final of the Shiaway St Pat Series for trotters will be the feature this Friday night (April 20) during the ten-race program at the Meadowlands Racetrack.

Leg One winner Deep Impact, who skipped Leg Two, has received the slight 3-1 nod on the morning line. The five-year-old rolled right on by the field in a career best 1:53.1 on April 6 and looked like there was plenty left in the tank. He'll start from Post 9 for trainer/driver Ake Svanstedt and the Van Camp Trotting Corporation.

Deep Impact will face another fast, fresh horse in the speedy Sutton, who is set to start from Post 7 for Andy Miller. After having missed an entire season, Sutton disappointed as the heavy favourite in the first leg, but he redeemed himself last week with a scorching 1:51.3 performance. Julie Miller trains the accomplished five-year-old for the Andy Miller Stable and Jason and Doug Allen.

Big M High-Five Carryover Ballooning

This Friday evening (April 20), handicappers focusing on the Meadowlands Racetrack will have an opportunity unlike any other in harness racing: Wager a measly 20 cents and walk away at the conclusion of the 10th race with almost $200,000.

When live racing resumes this Friday, the Meadowlands will offer the second-largest carryover in horse racing, behind only the Rainbow Six at Gulfstream Park, said Jason Settlemoir, the Meadowlands chief operating officer and general manager. The final race on the program will offer a Jackpot Super High-Five carryover that has now grown to $192,943. The popular wager has a 20-cent minimum.

Settlemoir went on to discuss some of the other recent wagering happenings at the East Rutherford, New Jersey track.

April has been a very good month at the Big M, as the pools continue to grow, said Settlemoir. The competitive GSY Spring Fling Series amateur driving club trot was the first race of last weekend and handled $241,407. We never looked back. Our Pick-4 pool exceeded the $100,000 barrier for the third time this year ($105,082) and our average handle per race for the week was $226,917, compared to $188,099 for the comparable weekend a year ago. In addition, our 20-Cent Survivor Pick-10 pool was an all-time best $25,061. We cant thank our fans enough for their incredibly loyal support.

Post time for the card will be 7:15 pm.

(With files from the Meadowlands Racetrack)
Longtime industry participant Florzell 'Georgia Boy' Daniels, 88, of Harrington, Del., died April 12, 2018, at Nanticoke Memorial Hospital in Seaford, Del.

He was born on March 1, 1930, to the late Pleas and Daisey Lee Daniels in Blakely, Ga. He received his education at Washington High School in Blakely. After leaving home, he served in the United States Air Force from 1947 to 1949.

He later found his passion for horses, and started professionally grooming horses in 1958, working until his illness in 2015. A legend in the harness racing industry, affectionately known as 'Georgia Boy', he touched the lives of many with his humble spirit and infectious smile. He worked at various racetracks including Harrington Raceway, Dover Downs, Freehold, Chester, Meadowlands, Ocean Downs, Colonial Downs, Rosecroft, Brandywine Raceway and Liberty Bell Park.

At the vibrant age of 83, he proudly received the honor of HTA/Hanover Shoe Farms Groom of the Year in 2012. Of the many, many horses in his care over the years he often said his favorite horse was Southern Nero.

At the time of the award it was printed that Daniels, As a black man who grew up in the South in a time when race was a significant issue, 'Georgia Boy' saw the world at its worst and at its best. But none of the worst soured him; he loved life, he loved people, he loved animals, most of all horses.

He was the true essence of the goodness of harness racing.

He thoroughly enjoyed reading the newspaper, watching sports, laughing, joking, having fun and doting on his family.

Mr. Daniels was preceded in death by his loving parents, Pleas and Daisey Lee; sister, Onita Beale; and daughter, Jeannette. He leaves to cherish his memory, his loving wife of 46 years, Frances C.; youngest sister, Gwendolyn (Keith) Romelly; sons Florzell Jr. (the late Pam), Bill (Denise), Ardell (Linda) and Eugene (Mardella) White; daughters; Yvonne (William) McCormick, Leona White, Nina Everett and Thais; 15 grandchildren; nine great-grandchildren; and a host of in-laws, nieces, nephews, cousins and friends.

Services are Sunday (April 22) at the Bennie Smith Funeral Home, 717 W. Division St., Dover, DE 19904. Visitation from 9:00 - 11:00 a.m. will be followed immediately by the service. Burial will be private.

Please join Standardbred Canada in offering condolences to the family and friends of Florzell Daniels.

(USTA)
In Southern California, the largest protest is in Los Angeles, a gathering that has typically drawn thousands of people. But demonstrations are planned throughout the region, from Orange County to the Inland Empire, from Redondo Beach to the San Gabriel...
The deportation of notorious radical Islamic Salafist hate preacher Imam El Hadi Doudi from France to his native Algeria was halted at the last minute this week by an intervention from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).



The 63-year-old hate preacher was notified that he was to be sent back to his native Algeria on Tuesday and taken into custody at a detention centre. But while there, the ECHR contacted the French Interior Ministry claiming they need a few days to review his case before his deportation, La Croix reports.



Imam El Hadi Doudi is well-known in Marseille for his extremist views and radical sermons and many had called for his expulsion from France in the past.



According to Doudis lawyer Nabil Boudi, the ECHR suspended his clients deportation under article 39 which allows the ECHR to interfere in cases where harm may come to an individual. Mr. Boudi said that he had sent requests claiming that his client may be subjected to torture if sent back to Algeria.



Doudi, who serves as the imam for the As-Sunna mosque in central Marseille, has been accused of stoking up hatred against a number of groups including Jews, Shiites, women, and adulterers.

The reason any European country could be held in the grip of Islamofascist terror is because the ECHR is giving them backing This is similar to how Islamofascists and their sympathizers operate in Britain too, claiming they'll be facing the grisly fates they want to impose upon infidels. It's another reason why France should leave the EU too, if that's what it takes to get savages out of the country.

Labels: Africa, anti-semitism, dhimmitude, Europe, France, germany, immigration, islam, jihad, misogyny, Moonbattery, political corruption, racism, Scandanavia, terrorism
About me I'm Avi Green

From Jerusalem, Israel

I was born in Pennsylvania in 1974, and moved to Israel in 1983. I also enjoyed reading a lot of comics when I was young, the first being Fantastic Four. I maintain a strong belief in the public's right to knowledge and accuracy in facts. I like to think of myself as a conservative-style version of Clark Kent. I don't expect to be perfect at the job, but I do my best. My profile

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For months, Faigy Lifshitz parked her car at the supermarket near her Bnei Brak home, completely unaware that, just steps away, thousands of African asylum seekers stood for hours in the sun and rain to apply for refugee status or obtain work visas.



Hidden from Lifshitz and her fellow shoppers view were the long lines of Africans waiting to enter the Population, Immigration and Border Authority offices in a dirty, isolated holding area without shelter, access to toilets, water or seating.



Once Lifshitz discovered that a scene of Third World desperation was playing out on the outskirts of this predominantly ultra-Orthodox (or Haredi) city near Tel Aviv, she determined to do something about it. Along with like-minded advocates, she formed Ultra-Orthodox Against the Deportation to tackle the task.



For me, this is the Compound of Shame, Lifshitz tells Haaretz, surveying the scene on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day. (To protect her familys standing in the community and her other activist work, she requested that she be interviewed using a pseudonym and that her face not be photographed.)



This is supposedly a government facility, she continues, but the government has failed to provide the most basic and elementary conditions for human beings here. The conditions for animals in the zoo of a Third World country are better than what you see here.



It is terrible what we are putting these people through, she adds. I dont think this place should exist at all. But as long as it is here, we need to make it suitable for human beings.



It is, indeed, a depressing sight. As the African asylum seekers wait endlessly for a guard to gesture them to come inside, the sun beats down. When it rains, deep muddy puddles form in the former parking lot.



The vast majority of those waiting are men: Women and families with children show up, too, but they are given priority and head to the front of the line.

The ground is strewn with garbage and angry messages are graffitied on the sheeting fencing the area: Down with deportation and Its time for Bibi to leave, too. There is also a slogan scrawled in English: Fuck the system.



Filling a niche



This place sends them a message that they arent welcome here, says Talia (also not her real name), a secular veteran volunteer at the site. She is one of a group of women wearing T-shirts and hats to protect themselves from the sun; some have name tags featuring the slogan Human rights for refugees.



Every few minutes, African men shyly approach them, usually holding out a document for them to translate and explain their situation before or after they have been allowed to enter the offices.



The facility, located in an isolated, tent-like structure behind Bnei Brak train station, is currently the only population authority office outside of the southern city of Eilat where interviews are conducted and applications for legal status and work visas are processed. As a result, those waiting in line have come from around the country.



Nearly every night, a group camps out on the ground in order to secure a good place for the next morning, or because they were unable to gain access and have nowhere else to spend the night.



In a long skirt, blond wig and glasses, Lifshitz stands out from the other volunteers. She comes from a Haredi rabbinical family.



Last December, when the government plan to deport these Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers en masse was first announced, Lifshitz created a Facebook page that she called Haredim Legirush  a play on words. The literal meaning of Haredi (the Hebrew word that identifies ultra-Orthodox Jews) is fearful, and so the name technically translates as Fearful of the Deportation.



She looked for an aspect of the refugee crisis that wasnt being addressed  and decided that improving conditions at the compound was a niche she and her group could fill.



These people are in my city: right here in Bnei Brak, she says. Is there a better way to practice mitzvot and uphold the values of the Torah than helping them? I cant think of one.

Lifshitz says that, from the outset, she and her ultra-Orthodox friends knew they wanted to form a separate organization rather than simply become members of existing advocacy groups  which are often associated with the secular left.



She says its important to send a message that their community cares and that they are taking action because they are ultra-Orthodox Jews, not in spite of it.



We are very specific that we are doing this in the name of our faith and in the name of the Torah and in the name of our Judaism and the will of God, who calls on us to be human and humane toward each other. The Torah is very precise in what it tells us: Thirty-six times in the Torah it is mentioned that we have to remember the ger  the stranger  because we were strangers in Egypt. Every human being is made in Gods image and if people are in need, we must help them. Jews are people who have suffered so much. We were the black people of the world for thousands of years.

The group is led by a steering committee of three men and three women, supported by a wider circle of friends and volunteers.



Well-intentioned but amateurish, the groups first major project to improve the Bnei Brak space literally fell apart. With great fanfare, on the eve of Passover in March, they erected a shelter to protect the asylum seekers from the elements. The photogenic effort  ultra-Orthodox and secular Israeli volunteers, along with the asylum seekers themselves  was featured on TV news shows. However, the shelter was so hastily constructed that the first serious spell of wind and rain flattened it, and the wooden stakes and black netting were soon resting in the dirt.



In the meantime, though, the publicity sparked what Lifshitz calls a miracle.



Biblical Studies lecturer Diana Lipton, who immigrated to Israel from Great Britain seven years ago, was so inspired by the group that she contacted Lifshitz and offered to donate a substantial sum of money toward making the Bnei Brak compound a place we arent ashamed of.



Lipton, herself an Orthodox Jew, says that since moving to Israel, she found it depressing that the religious community in Israel has been so uninvolved in things I care about  especially things that involve compassion for others.



Regarding the issue of the asylum seekers, she admits to being very depressed when Ive gone to demonstrations on their behalf to see so few people with kippot.

So when she saw the video of Lifshitzs efforts to build the shelter, it moved her. There was something powerfully symbolic, encouraging and inspiring to see this positive, strong image of religious Jews from this insular community taking this action, she explains. Here were people not only with kippot and women with head coverings, but representatives of the far end of the religious spectrum stepping in. I was really happy to see this powerful visual representation of their concern. Why should this only be a leftist, secular cause?

Both cursed and praised



On Sunday evening, five days after we first spoke at the site, Lifshitz is standing beside Talia and the two women look on excitedly as the Bnei Brak space is transformed as a result of Liptons $5,000 donation. Professionals have erected white tents with metal rods and sturdy shades, drilling them into the ground.



The second major step Lifshitz has taken to improve the area is visible in a corner: two portable toilets. The first months rental costs were covered by donations, Lifshitz says, adding that she will raise the rest of the money  by crowdfunding, if necessary. This place used to smell terribly of urine, she says. Not anymore.



Beyond providing shelter and toilet facilities, Lifshitz says her priorities at the site are cleaning and installing some sort of seating. She would also like to find a way for the asylum seekers to access water without having to buy it in bottles from the supermarket or a vendor. The volunteers even dream of a small play area for the children who must wait there with their parents.



If we succeed in making this place decent and nice, it will send a message to the world that there are Israelis who care. And also, hopefully it will shame the government into shutting it down and providing something better, says Talia.

Lifshitz admits that reactions to her efforts have been mixed within her own community. She has been both cursed and praised on her Facebook page, she reveals.



Her family, whom she describes as totally removed from Israeli politics and the media, were surprised when she first described the scene at the compound. They are so shocked, she says. They ask me, How can the State of Israel treat people that way?



She and her fellow advocates believe the Sudanese and Eritreans are refugees and deserve humane protection in Israel.



We dont share any other brand of politics. We dont call ourselves left wing; we dont call ourselves right wing. We are human beings who love other human beings  and we are here to say that what has been done to us as Jews in the past, we refuse to perpetrate on others.



Jews, she concludes, must always remember the feeling of foreignness, of being alone.

And the one and only Haaretz thought it the perfect story to fawn over , beginning with some sob-story elements:Look for starters at how they whine about conditions at the holding area, which I won't be shocked are not what they make them out to be. And why do I get the vibe they're worried about the menfolk, they who're the real cause of crime in the southern Tel Aviv area?If the migrants are applying legally, then the only issue is whether they recognize the differences between good and evil. But if any migrants in question are criminals lacking an understanding of what it means to be civilized, then her pity is misplaced and suggests she's doing it out of spite for the non-Haredi public.I wonder, would they have the same feelings if these were decent Europeans coming about here? I'm not sure why Europeans - and even Africans from civilized and prosperous countries like Kenya - are considered worthless, but migrants from uncivilized societies aren't.Some of whom, as hinted, are leftists, so while they may have formed their own movement, it figures they'd align themselves with more leftist outfits to boot.What, is that supposed to imply they're "right-wing"? Because I highly doubt they are, or that they support the Likud-led government in every way. The "far end" would indicate they're not only Haredi, but also of extremist backgrounds like the Satmar and Neturei Karta, and they're doing it out of anti-Zionist leanings.And that's a confession they don't support the Likud-led government.This sounds little different from say, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who didn't claim to be either left or right, but neither did he deny or have any real objections to being described as "far-right", which was undoubtably his strategy of damaging France (and he also basically implied being French meant being a monster, which was just as offensive). The Haredis in Bnei Brak, living in their own little bubble, ignore the crime rates that illegal migrants have brought about in south Tel Aviv , some surely deliberately. For collaborating in efforts to undermine the country, those involved in providing services for potential criminals should be fined and jailed. Above all, they should be scorned for the damage they're doing to the country they supposedly care about.

Labels: Africa, haredi corruption, immigration, islam, Israel, londonistan, msm foulness
China-Chile FTA boon to European business

Xinhua, Santiago :

In geographical terms, Chile marks the farthest point from China, but the two countries have succeeded in forging a free trade agreement (FTA) that has brought them closer, and Europe in the bargain.

European firms eyeing China's market have opened plants in the South American country in hopes of taking advantage of Chile's trade deal with China.

Brueggen, a German cereal maker in business since 1868, recently invited Liu Rutao, economic and commercial counselor of the Chinese Embassy in Chile, to tour its Chilean plant.

According to Liu, the FTA between China and Chile is benefiting businesses not just in these two countries, but also in other parts of Latin America and even Europe.

Jose Manuel Ibanez, director of Brueggen America, told Xinhua: "China is very important to us. We developed this plant along with our partners in order to supply Chile, and also the rest of Latin America and the Asia-Pacific."

In 2015, Brueggen partnered with Latin American Foods in Chile, giving rise to Brueggen America, which aims to produce goods in Chile for China's market.

According to Ibanez, the idea is to replicate Chile's strong and long-running trade ties with China on homegrown products such as wine, copper and fruits.

Previously, Brueggen operated plants only in Germany, Poland and France, with the German facility producing cereals for the Chinese market.

The company, Ibanez said, has outlined a clear goal for its expansion in the Chinese market. "Our mission is to take granola to China." Highly popular in Germany, Europe and the United States, traditional granola which is made from a blend of oats, walnuts and honey that is then baked to a crunchy consistency, can be eaten alone or mixed with yogurt or milk and fresh fruits.

"We believe we can generate value in the supply chain for this market," said Ibanez, referring to China.

"We very much respect and value the way of doing things in China, and we feel that with this product we can generate not only value, but also a relationship that we would like to see last," said Ibanez. Chile offers companies with expansion plans certain clear advantages, he said, including its FTAs with countries around the globe, access to raw materials, and ports for shipping to "highly competitive markets like China's."

Chile is one of the world's most open markets, and has key international trade deals, such as its Partnership Agreement with the European Union and FTAs with the United States and China.

Former Chilean Ambassador to China Fernando Reyes Matta, who is currently director of the Center for Latin American Studies on China at Chile's Andres Bello University, said exports from Chile to China "have better competitive conditions than those arriving from Germany" thanks to existing Chile-China trade ties.

"This benefits those shipments, because even though they are coming from the southern tip of the world, the economic conditions for entry into China are totally different and much more favorable," said Reyes Matta.

Brueggen's plant in Chile has the capacity to process 650,000 kg of cereal, 220,000 tons of granola bars and a million granola-based products.

Reyes Matta noted the plant has "very advanced technology and, as a result, all the capacity to mass produce quality goods."

Chile plants some 576,000 hectares of cereals, 44 percent of which is wheat, 24 percent is corn and 22 percent is oats, according to the latest figures from the Ministry of Agriculture.

Today, distance is no longer an issue in trade, said the former diplomat, adding what matters is quality.

"There are no more borders in terms of the capacity of a product to go from one side of the globe to the other in optimum condition, due to refrigeration and transportation. The important thing is the quality that's on offer," said Reyes Matta.




Discrimination in paying financial benefits illegal

High Court Division :

(Special Original Jurisdiction)

Md Ashfaqul Islam J

Ashish Ranjan Das J

Abdur Rahman and others ..........Petitioners

vs

Government of the People's Republic of Bangladesh and others..........Respondents

Judgment

November 8th, 2017

Constitution of Bangladesh, 1972

Article 27

Government cannot and should not discriminate among the employees falling on the same footing in paying financial benefits.

All the government appeals preferred in the Sontosh Kumar case were allowed except two appeals which were dismissed by the Appellate Division upholding the decisions of the High Court Division on the ground of discrimination. In those writ petitions High Court Division while making the Rule absolute found a palpable discrimination that was done in respect of the Bench, Officers of the High Court Division with the other officers of the same rank of the Appellate Division. The question of maintainability has been raised relying on the latest decision of Bangladesh vs Sontosh Kumar Saha reported in 21 BLC (AD) 94 and the learned Assistant Attorney-General in this context submits that the instant writ petition owing to the said decision is not maintainable and should be referred out right to the Administrative Tribunal for decision. We don't agree with the submission of the learned Assistant Attorney-General. (5 & 6)

Constitution of Bangladesh, 1972

Article 27

If a portion of Head Teachers of Government Primary Schools falling in the category at per with the petitioners have been already awarded further, move specifically, repeated time scales after upgradation of the post of Head Teachers, in that event patently these petitioners are also entitled to get the same financial benefits. . ..... (5)

Bangladesh vs Sontosh Kumar Saha, 21 BLC (AD) 94 ref.

BM Elias with Md Ataur Rahman, Advocates-For the Petitioners.

Al Amin Sarkar, DAG with MM Masud Rumi, AAG with Md Ashaque Momin, AAG-For the Respondents.

Judgment

Ashish Ranjan Das J : Rule Nisi under Article 102 of the Constitution of the People's Republic of Bangladesh at the instance of these 190 (one hundred ninety) petitioners all Head Masters of different Government Primary Schools running under the Ministry of Primary and Mass Education was issued on the following terms.

"Let a Rule Nisi calling upon the respondents to show cause as to why the fixation of petitioners' upgraded pay scales, which have been upgraded by the notification vide Memorandum No. 38.008.035.00.00.010.2013-111 dated 9-3-2014 (Annexure-A) without allowing them any benefits of time scales should not be decaled to be violative of fundamental rights guaranteed under Articles 27 and 29 read with Article 44(1) of the Constitution and why the respondents should not be directed to re-fix the petitioners' upgraded pay scales by allowing them all the benefits of time scales up to 14-12-2015 counting their period of service from the date of their joining in the post of Head Teacher with all arrears from 9-3-2014 and onwards and to remove all kinds of disparity and discrimination in pay and/or such other or further order or orders passed as to this Court may seem fit and proper should not be passed."

2. Short facts relevant for the purpose that could be gathered from the file are that all these petitioners have been working as Head Teachers of different Government Primary Schools managed under the Ministry of Primary and Mass Education. Some of them have been directly recruited while the others have been promoted to the post of Head Teacher of the respective Government Primary School. Besides some of them have been trained while the remaining ones have been non trained. The status of the Head Teacher of the Government Primary Schools used to fall in Class 3 that was upgraded to non gazetted class 2 public servants by a government notification dated 9-3-2014 (Annexure-A) and accordingly the pay scale of the Head Teachers were upgraded to Taka 6,400 and Taka 5,900 for the trained and non trained Head Teachers respectively. According to the Rules and practice government employees falling in Class 2 and Class 3 are entitled to get time scales at the completion of the satisfactory of service of 8, 12, 15 years respectively. But although the petitioners have been promoted, they have not been granted the time scales to which these petitioners are entitled. On the other hand, a number of Head Teachers of other Government Primary Schools falling in the same status with these petitioners have been allowed time scales on different dates that could be evidenced by annexure-D-1-D-10 series. The petitioners have made repeated representations to the authorities in order to get such a discrimination eradicated, but of no avail. Hence is this Rule Nisi.

3. The Respondent No.2 the Secretary, Ministry of Finance Division of the Government contested the Rule by filing an affidavit in opposition.

The gist of their case is that admittedly the rank, pay scale and status of the Head Teachers of the Government Primary Schools including those of these petitioners have been upgraded from Class-3 to Class-2 as non gazetted government employees that could be admittedly evidenced by Annexure-A of the writ petition and they have been enjoying all the financial benefits admissible as are governed by the Rules. In one tier government employees like the petitioners are entitled to get 3 time scales after completion of satisfactory service of 8, 12, and 15 years respectively and not more than that. Since while serving in Class 3 as head teachers the petitioners have already drew those financial benefits, under law and logic they are no more entitled to get the same financial benefits repeatedly. If it is done it will be a breach of the rule and disturb the equilibrium in the financial management of the government in various departments.

The petitioners used to be head teachers of Government Primary Schools and drew time scales as per the Rule stated above. They have been still head teachers, however their status has been upgraded from Class 3 to Class 2, that of course, does not entitle to a repeated or double financial benefit.

4. We have gone through the materials and heard valuable arguments advanced by the learned lawyers for the respective parties. It remained undenied that the status and pay of these Head Teachers of various Government Primary Schools were up graded from Class-3 to Class 2 non gazette employees and they are entitled to get financial benefits as are admissible in law. Now the only question in dispute, as Mr Md Ataur Rahman, the learned advocate for the petitioners raised and took us through, is that according to the application and Annexure-D-l to D-10 series few Head Teachers of other Government Primary Schools have been once again awarded time scales after having been upgraded in rank.

5. Mr Al Amin Sarkar the learned Deputy Attorney-General arguing on behalf of the Ministry of Finance submitted that it is most unlikely that there will be any such discrimination. It is curious to note that in the affidavit in opposition the allegation of discrimination in granting time scale has not been categorically denied or otherwise explained. Further, we see that in all other matters the case of the petitioners has not been controverted in the affidavit in opposition. Now the only question remains is whether the respondents are making any discrimination in granting time scales to the Head Teachers of Government Primary Schools including these petitioners, as is raised in paragraph no. 164 of the application supported by Annexure-D-1 to D-10 series. Thus, we are inclined to hold that the government cannot and should not discriminate among the employees falling on the same footing in paying financial benefits. If a portion of Head Teachers of Government Primary Schools falling in the category at per with the petitioners have been already awarded further, move specifically, repeated time scales after upgradation of the post of Head Teachers, in that event patently these petitioners, are also entitled to get the same financial benefits. The' respondents are directed and rather expected to look into the matter and bring back parity and discipline. Such a direction was felt necessary since the issue of discrimination raised in paragraph no. 164 of the application has not been specifically denied or explained in the affidavit in opposition. Accordingly the Rule is disposed of with the observation and direction.

Md Ashfaqul Islam J : While agreeing with the substantive, judgment delivered by my brother, I would like to add a few words of my own to clarify a preliminary question raised by the Assistant Attorney-General on the maintainability of the writ petition as not being maintainable. The question of maintainability has been raised relying on the latest decision of Bangladesh vs Sontosh Kumar Saha reported in 21 BLC (AD) 94 and the learned Assistant Attorney-General in this context submits that the instant writ petition owing to the said decision is not maintainable and should be referred out right to the Administrative Tribunal for division. We don't agree with the said submission of the learned Assistant Attorney-General. All the government appeals preferred in the Sontosh Kumar case were allowed except two appeals (Civil Petition for Leave to Appeal Nos. 644 and 645 of 2015) which were dismissed by the Hon'ble Appellate Division upholding the decisions of the High Court Division on the ground of discrimination. In those writ petitions High Court Division while making the Rule absolute found a palpable discrimination that was done in respect of the Bench Officers of the High Court Division of the Supreme Court with the other Officers of the same rank of the Appellate division. In Sontosh Kumar's case upholding those decisions of the High Court our Appellate Division came down heavily maintaining as under:-

"These petitions are quite distinguishable from the other cases. The writ petitioners invoked their fundamental rights as they were discriminated by the same authority and they are working in the same court. More so, the works of Bench Readers of the Appellate Division and Assistant Bench Officers of the High Court Division are completely different.

The Bench Readers are appointed from among the Bench Officers/Assistant Bench Officers of the High Court Division and if the Bench Officers get status higher than them, certainly they will be discriminated. It is to be noted that the working hours of these officers is from 9-00 am to 5-00 pm but they used to work till 8/9 pm every day. In respect of Assistant Bench Officers, the very nature of their job is painstaking. They work almost 12/14 hours a day and even on holidays because they are attached to the Judges. During the vacation as well, they cannot enjoy the holidays as they remain busy with finalization of judgments. The High Court Division has rightly exercised its jurisdiction and we find no infirmity to interfere with the judgment".

7. The instant case can also be viewed as a wrong done in furtherance of an executive fiat which is discriminatory in nature and as such the interference under Article 102 of the Constitution is well justified. The petitioners certainly have been discriminated as regard their claims which they are entitled to get.

Office is directed to communicate the order at once.
Hindu Marriage Dissolution Act needed

Zahid Ahammad Hero :

Hindu marriage is treated as a sacrament, or a sanskara, Under Hindu shastra or law, the concept of marriage is more of a religious than secular institution.

According to Hindu religious mandate, marriage is deemed as the last of 10 sacraments enjoined by Hindu religion for purifying the body. So marriage, according to Hindu law, is a holy union for the performance of religious duties. But for the solemnization of a Hindu marriage, some nuptial rites or religious rituals are absolutely essential for the validity of the marriage.

Amongst the good number of rituals, two are considered as the most important ceremonies for the validity of a Hindu marriage firstly invocation before the sacred fire, and secondly taking of seven steps by the bride and bridegroom around the sacred fire. Only then the Hindu marriage assumes the sacred character and sacrament which constitutes a relationship of body and soul between husband and wife. So, marriage according to Hindu shastra, creates an indissoluble tie between husband and wife which lasts beyond the grave.

Whenever the question of divorce or dissolution of a Hindu marriage arises, it becomes a very thorny issue. Hindu law strictly does not allow divorce. So, neither party can divorce the other, unless divorce is allowed by some longstanding custom of certain communities.

But in the context of modem life, it cannot be reasonably, as well as practicably, contemplated that an unhappy Hindu couple will continue to live a maladjusted conjugal life forever. There may be several causes for marital dissolution i.e. the wife or the husband may suffer from mental problems, one may treat the other with cruelty, the husband might desert the wife for an uncertain period, etc. From the Hindu point of view, since a marriage is regarded as an indissoluble union of husband and wife extending to the next world, what happens if it becomes an irreconcilable union? What is the solution then?

In India, Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 was passed allowing divorce for Hindu couples on some grounds specified therein, such as cruelty, unsoundness of mind, desertion, adultery, etc. And this Act has brought some material and important changes to the orthodox Hindu law relating to marriage.

The law also allows separation by mutual consent.

A civil court in India, on the petition of either party, in due process of law can pass a decree for judicial separation in a Hindu marriage. But why has Bangladesh not adopted a similar legislation? Needless to say, there is ardent necessity to enact a separate law to allow separation in a Hindu marriage here, keeping in mind the socio-economic context of the present society.

In our country, there is a legislation named Family Courts Ordinance, 1985 which deals with matters of marriage, divorce, custody, maintenance and so on. Though in the said ordinance, it has not been made absolutely clear whether it is applicable to the citizens of all religions beliefs. But the Higher courts, through establishing judicial precedence, says that a person of any faith has got every right to bring suit for the purposes as contained in Section 5 of the Ordinance.

Section 5 of the Family Courts Ordinance, 1985 provides that a family court shall have exclusive jurisdiction to try and dispose of any suit relating to guardianship and custody of children, maintenance, dissolution of marriage, dower, and so on. Thus, a Hindu wife is not debarred from filing a law suit for maintenance against her husband under this Ordinance. So, why not in any other matter mentioned in the section, like dissolution of marriage? Besides, the Ordinance has to be applied in conformity with the equality clause of our constitution to maintain its constitutional validity.

So, a separate and distinct legislation, such as a 'Hindu Marriage Dissolution Act' similar to the Muslim Marriage Dissolution Act, 1939, is highly required for the benefit of our Hindu community.

If India, being a Hindu-majority country, can do that, then why can't we?


Obituary

City Desk :

Retired Agriculture Officer and former General Secretary of Bangladesh Retired Employees Welfare Association, Narsingdi branch Abul Hashem died of cardiac arrest at Bristol Regional Hospital in United States on April 12 last. He was 78.

He left behind wife, three daughters, one son, a host of relatives and admirers to mourn his death.

All the relative and well-wishers of the deceased are requested to pray for the salvation of the departed soul.
Speedy implementation of dev projects stressed

City Desk :

Fisheries and Livestock Minister Naryan Chandra Chanda asked upazila level government officials to speedily implement development projects.

''Government officials should work for the welbeing of country's people and complete their tasks without any delay for acheiving Sustainable Devolopment Goals (SDGs) by 2030," he said.

He said this on Thursday while speaking at a views exchange meeting with Dumuria upazila government officials at the office of Upazila Nirbahi Officer.

Bangladesh has already earned eligilibty of being a developing country from least country as Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is running the country in a planned way, the minister said.

The minister claimed that all the devolopment works have been completed with cent percent accountibility at Dumuria and Fultala upazilas.

The present government is providing donation to mosques, temples, madrasa, school and collegees," he said, expressing hope that the country will turn into a middle income country by 2021.

There is no room for drug peddlers and terrorists and they must be punished as government is showing zero tolerence against them, the minister said.

He also asked concerend officials for ensuring uninterrupt electricity supply to clients during the month of holy Ramzan.

Dumuria UNO Muhammad Ashek Hasan, district relief and rehabilitation officer and project implementation officers, among others, attended meeting.

Later, the minister distributed paddy saplings and fertilisers among marginal farmers.

He also attended a training programmes for farmers about technology related paddy cultivation as the chief guest.




No dictator could be permanent in the past not will be in future

*Ready to give life for democracy: Dr Kamal, *I am also Razakar then: Kader Siddique, *Free election for democratic leadership: Mainul

Staff Reporter :

Participating in a 'citizens' dialogue', politicians and speakers on Friday said that all the dictators had to quit and no dictator could be permanent in Bangladesh, nor will be in the future.

They also said, there should be an election in the country and it is not under any party political government.

'Jatiya Oikya Prokria', a new political forum of Bangladesh, arranged the dialogue at the 'Mohanagar Natya Moncha' in the city yesterday.

Engineer Sheikh Muhammad Shahidullah, Convener of the National Committee to Protect Oil, Gas, Mineral Resources, Power and Ports and Senior Member of Jatiya Oikya Prokria presided over the dialogue.

Dr Kamal Hossain, Convener of Jatiya Oikya Prokria, attended the programme as the chief speaker while Bikalpadhara Bangladesh President A Q M Badruddoza Chowdhury attended it as the chief guest.

Former Advisor to the Caretaker Government Barrister Mainul Hosein, Krishak Sramik Janata League President Kader Siddique, Bikalpadhara Bangladesh Secretary Retired Major Abdul Mannan, Forward Party Chairman Mostafa Amin, Socialist Party of Bangladesh (SPB) General Secretary Khalequzzaman, Advisor to Nagorik Oikya

S M Akram, President of Biplobi Workers Party Saiful Haque, Acting Gono Forum General Secretary Advocate Subrata Chowdhury, Bikalpadhara Joint Secretary Barrister Omar Faruq, among others, spoke at the dialogue.

Dr Kamal Hossain said, "All the dictators had to quit and no dictator could be permanent in Bangladesh, nor will be in the future."

"Our Constitution says, people of the country are the owner of the country-no one can deny this. If you cannot deny this then the elected people should form a Parliament. But in our Parliament, 153 members are unelected. What is the way to overcome this situation? Unity of the people, unity of the owners of the country are needed," he said.

He urged the people to get ready to give life for democracy. He also urged to the government to take steps to transfer the power to the people. "So-called elections, so-called Parliament and so-called democracy as their own wheels will not be happened in the country," said Dr Kamal.

A Q M Badruddoza Chowdhury said, "No democracy is prevailing in the country. The ruling party is doing meeting but other parties cannot. Why you (ruling party) are so afraid? Why you are afraid to hear the truth?"

"One party will get benefit and others will not get if the election is held without dissolving the Parliament. Is it Democracy," he said.

Barrister Mainul was most emphatic to say that we do not only want just election but also assurance of democracy under democratic leadership. We have tolerated politics of worshiping leadership. Permanent leadership is autocracy. Our failure to fight worshiping of leaders has brought this type of autocracy now. So, it did not happen suddenly.

He urged all government officers, including police, to be imbibed with the spirit of freedom and respect the rights of others as free citizens. It is shocking that police not only arrest people but also blindfolds them to create total helplessness. To make people live in fear and terror-stricken environment is not freedom.

He said it is most important for all to know what it means to be free only then we all will enjoy freedom. The government servants are to serve the people like a free country.

He emphasised that free election is urgent and essential to save the country from misrule and corruption.

Barrister Mainul insisted that incompetent Vice-Chancellors do not know how to behave like Vice-Chancellors. Women students are thrown out of the halls at midnight; this cannot be acceptable and the unfit VCs must go.

Krishak Sramik Janata League President Kader Siddique said, "If they called our children of razakars then the whole nation is razakar. And then I am also a razakar."

"153 members of the Parliament are unelected. So, this Parliament is illegal and this government is also illegal. Maximum members of the Parliament do not know about the Constitution and the law. The charge of the custody of the country should be given to those who know about the Constitution and obey it," he said.

Engineer Sheikh Muhammad Shahidullah said, society and politics of our country have become corrupt. The hopes of our people are being ruined. So, we have to take steps to remove this corrupt politics.

S M Akram, Advisor to the Nagorik Oikya, said, there will be no change in the government through the normal process of election because the ruling party is not willing to give up the power anyway.


EC forms panel to verify campaign spending

Staff Reporter :

The Election Commission (EC) has formed a committee to verify accounts of campaign expenditure by mayor and councillor contestants in the Gazipur and Khulna city corporation polls.

The panel has been asked to submit its reports related to the electoral expenditure within two days, EC sources said.

Members of the panel include assistant returning officers, district administrators, police commissioner and the divisional controller of accounts.

EC Assistant Secretary Md Forhad Hossain said, "The expenditure limit has been set. Candidates have already submitted their possible expenditure statements. The committee will observe that the expenditure does not cross the permissible limit."

The commission has fixed the election campaign expenditure limit in line with

the proportion of voters for the contestants.

According to the sources, Gazipur mayoral candidate's election campaign expenditure must not cross Tk 30 lakh and the individual spending, including food and fuel costs, is limited to Tk 150,000.

On the other hand, Khulna mayoral candidate's election campaign expenditure must not exceed Tk 15 lakh and the individual expenditure limit is Tk 75,000.

Political parties will not be allowed to spend more than Tk 500,000 for their every nominated candidate.

However, there are allegations that the EC does not monitor the campaign expenditure properly.

Soon after Dhaka and Chattogram city corporation polls in 2015, Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB) said many candidates breached the election campaign spending limits.

The EC has already scrutinised the nomination applications of aspiring mayor, general and reserved-seat councillor candidates for the two city corporation polls to be held on May15.

The deadline to withdraw the candidature from the race is April 23.

Gazipur City Corporation (GCC) consists of a mayor, 57 general councillors and 19 councillors from reserved seats, while the number of total voters is 1,164,425.

Khulna City Corporation (KCC) consists of a mayor, 31 general councillors and 10 reserved-seat councilors, while the number of total voters is 493,454.

Dhaka Regional Election Officer Rakibuddin Mandol has been made the returning officer for Gazipur city elections and Khulna Regional Election Officer Md Yunus Ali for Khulna city elections.
59 BNP men held from meeting in Narail

UNB, Narail :

Police arrested at least 59 leaders and activists of BNP including the party chairperson's advisor and divisional organising secretary while conducting a 'secret' meeting at its district unit present's house in Khashial village of Kalia upazila on Friday afternoon. Confirming the matter, Md Belayet Hossain, officer-in-charge of Naragati Police Station, said police arrested the leaders and activists from Jahangir Biswas's house. District and upazila level leaders and activists from Narail, Jashore, Jhenaidah, Satkhira and Magura come to attend the 'secret' meeting, he added. Among others, BNP chairperson's advisor Kabir Murad, Khulna divisional Organising Secretary



Anindo Islam Amit, Mazedur Rahman, Kalia upazila BNP general secretary Wahidurzzaman Milu were arrested, police said. Police were conducting drives to arrest other leaders and activists who managed to flee the scene, said Md Mehedi Hasan, assistant superintendent of Narail police.

However, the aim of the 'secret' meeting could not be known immediately, he added.




Yes, the decision belongs on the local level

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You surf, sometimes you hit flotsam and jetsam.

This still survives on Pinterest (I generally loathe Pinterest, by the way)

Look at that handsome youngster! The text is "Meet Butters a Petfinder adoptable Labrador Retriever dog | Waukesha, WI" (top left). The original Petfinder page has gone 404. (He's actually a pit mix, though I would bet he's half Lab at least.) Butters was a difficult adoptionhe suffered from anxiety, especially separation anxiety; coprophagia; leash reactivity; and DHD (doggie hyperactivity disorder. I just made that up. But he had it). He couldn't be crated (he would have an involuntary poop and get it all over himself), and it took a year to housetrain him. I probably walked a thousand miles while I was helping him get over leash reactivity, two patient and often challenging miles a day. He almost took me to the limits of my patience and fortitude...

...Not quite, thank God. Now he's a lovely fellow with a gentle heart who has a few residual peccadilloes but nothing out of the ordinary. He leashes fine, no more coprophagia, he's potty trained at last, and he just looks sad and hangs his head when I leave the house, as opposed to what he used to do, which was to go crazy and have an unintended bowel movement. Things have greatly improved. :-)

Clickbait

I ran across this: "10 Photos That Flipped People's Lives Upside Down." Kinda interesting, although also a little creepy. It's hard for me to observe pop culture todayit's impersonal and omnipotent, flighty, fickle and airheaded but also a remorseless, irresistable juggernaut capable of crushing people like insects.

It occurred to me the other day that the future is probably going to be a neverending series of platform migrations. I like email myself, and I still center my own communication activities on it, but I distinctly remember thinking, in the 1990s, that one day it was going to become useless because commercialism would swamp it. That day is almost hereright now, less than 5% of my email is relevant personal communication from people I'm at least marginally interested in hearing from. And that's just counting the "good" emails, not including all the stuff that's sloughed off into my spam folder by my spam filters. For several years now I've already been meeting people of my son's generation who don't use email at all, and recently I'm having the experience of sending people emails who later tell me they don't get them because they never check their email any more.

So we move on to various other platforms. Texting, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. We're now defined in part not just by how much of our lives are online, but on the particular platforms we happen to favor. I actually sent an email not long ago and the recipient replied, "I don't read emails any more. Can you send that to me on Messenger?" Uh, really? No, I can't, because I don't do Messenger. Or "I don't Messenger," which might actually be proper English.

Young people already watch YouTube and Netflix more than broadcast television and cable. Many people, doubtless including the intrepid "Charlie from Top 10s" who posted the "10 Photos" video I linked to above, are entrepreneurs trying to meet the need by crowdsourcing (hey, remember that word?) content for YouTube, and profit from it. But YouTube is already less compelling to me than it used to be...I used to helplessly watch one video after another as linked videos appeared in an unbreaking stream, but now each one is punctuated by an ad. Even though I can skip most of the ads, or half of them anyway, the interruption reminds me that I should be doing other things, and that breaks the spell and I turn it off. Doubtless YouTube will outlive its own usefulness and currency someday in the not-so-distant future, as commercialism swamps it and, inevitably, clamps down on and crowds out anything original or creative or personal.

As with online photos, it bugs me that I could watch YouTube all day and still have no idea what's on it, because I would be seeing such an infinitesimally small portion of all it contains. That's an irrational feeling on my part, but I feel it anyway.

Photography online make me feel like the story of the Inuit Indian who won a trip to New York City. Asked during an interview what he thought of the experience, he said, "Too many faces! How do you remember them all?" Having grown up in a village of a hundred souls, his basic assumption was that he should memorize and remember every face he ever encountered. He always had. But faced with a mere day's worth of the numberless legions of NYC pedestrians, that portion of his settled worldview experienced circuit overload. I know it's irrational, but it bugs me that I could look at photography online all day and yet still see so little of it that it would statistically be extremely close to "none at all." It's not enough to be "connected"; I need some kind of shared culture, some kind of recognized culture, something I can keep up with and stay abreast of, to feel connected.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)

Featured Comments from:

John Camp: "Your post is like a continuation of the last one; I almost commented on that one, but resisted, but I can't resist this time.

"At one time, long ago, most people lived in 'bubbles' that were actually physical. You married somebody who was born nearby because they were in your physical bubble, and you didn't usually move outside of that. With the arrival of mechanized transport, the bubbles of some people expanded, but most still hung close to home. At some point (I would say after World War II) the idea of physical bubbles began to break down, although many still continued to live in them. In my generation, in my hometown of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, most people still married people who were from Cedar Rapids, and often from the same high schools. But quite a few married outside the town, and often from distant places, because for the first time in history, large masses of people went to college, and began marrying not because of natal proximity, but because of some other selection process, like intellectual or financial compatibility.

"That's now been further shattered by instant communications where people form relationship groups with other people they've never physically met...and even meet for dating and marriage purposes online, and across very large distances, before they engage physically. As physical bubbles continue to lose relevance, it's now become necessary for people to form their own (conceptual) bubbles. Bubbles are a way of limiting social and intellectual contacts to a manageable stateif you try to keep up with everything, all the time, you will live in a constant frenzy. So you gotta have that bubble.

"TOP is one chunk of my personal bubble. Because it's part of my bubble, I've actually met you (Mike) physically, when you were in Wisconsin, and even wrote a book with another person, Ctein, who I met in the TOP bubble. While I have lots of interests, as most TOP members seem to, I actually resist adding many of those chunks to my bubble, because when you get too many chunks, you get frenzy.

"At one time, and not really all that long ago, a few adventurous people made great efforts to expand their bubblesthey'd move from Cedar Rapids to New York, or Paris, looking for something they couldn't find at home. Now, you have to make a great effort to restrict your bubble to achieve some kind of person peace and coherency, or you will go batshit crazy."

Rodolfo Canet: "Interesting to read Mr. Camp's comment ten days after my older son returned from Argentina, where he flew to finally meet face-to-face his online girlfriend. They've been 'engaged' for...eight years!!!"

Mike replies: According to eHarmony, 20% of Western couples now meet online, and 5% of new marriages began as online relationships. Older photographers might remember Maxim Muir, who was once a leading expert on photo chemicals, especially print developers. He met his wife online and they decided to marry before they had met in person. They've been very happy for many years, at least as of the last time I heard from Max.
Archbishop Jason Gordon, reiterated the R. C. Churchs position with respect to buggery and the laws that address it.

Roman Catholic Archbishop of Port of Spain, Jason Gordon says even though the Catholic Church views buggery as an immoral and "disordered act, it should not be illegal.





In fact, he says in any country where buggery is a criminal offence, the church should find ways to remove it from the statute books.





Gordon made the churchs position clear on the heels of a ruling by Trinidad and Tobago High Court Judge Devindra Rampersad, that the sections of the Sexual Offences Act which criminalize the act of buggery between consenting adults are unconstitutional.





However, in an interview on local television, the Archbishop made it clear that the church is still against homosexuality.





"There is no question in the churchs mind or teaching that [buggery] is an act that is immoral, disordered  one would even say a sin against nature, Gordon said. "Buggery or the homosexual act is a disordered act, is a frustrated act; it is an act that is not in keeping with the intention of God for human sexuality.

But, he added, it did not mean it should be illegal.





The Archbishop said buggery is a moral matter and not a criminal one and insisted that although the Roman Catholic Church does not support homosexuality, it "does not believe that buggery should be criminalized at this time.

And as the Roman Catholic Church takes this position, it has found itself at variance with other Christian denominations and Hindu and Muslim groups, who hold on to the view that it is both immoral and criminal, and want the buggery law to remain on the statute books.





In another response to the ruling, John, (first name withheld), a 28-year-old, well-educated professional from South Trinidad, who has wrestled all of his life with his difference (sexual), said Justice Rampersads ruling would open the door for active and positive discussion.





"That conversation was never entertained and the fact that this has happened, opens the door for positive and actual discourse, he told the Trinidad Newsday newspaper, as he reflected on his process of self-discovery and the difficulty he experienced in the absence of support and having someone to talk to. (Sources: Trinidad Newsday, T&T Guardian)





Meanwhile, the Pan Caribbean Partnership against HIV and AIDS (PANCAP)  the mechanism that provides a structured and unified approach to the Caribbeans response to the HIV epidemic  has welcomed the T&T judges ruling that the countrys buggery laws are unconstitutional.





It says the ruling acknowledges that every individual regardless of their race, colour, gender, age or sexual orientation, has the right to human dignity, and is aligned with the partnerships Justice for All Programme which calls for the establishment of procedures to accelerate the process for the repeal of laws decriminalizing sexual acts in private between consenting adults.





PANCAP noted that one of the recommendations of the Regional Consultation of Faith Leaders 2017 in Port-of-Spain, in February, acknowledged areas of litigation that may challenge religious values and the responses required to harmonize principles and practices around human rights, human sexuality and human dignity.

In handing down his decision, Justice Rampersad said that the ruling is "not an assessment or denial of the religious beliefs of anyone However, this conclusion is a recognition that the beliefs of some, is not the belief of all.





PANCAP has therefore encouraged continued dialogue between the Faith Community and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex (LGBTI) community on areas of agreement and commonality. (Sources: Trinidad Newsday, T&T Guardian, Caribbean 360)
Participation at the two-day Conversation was wide and varied. Inset:Professor Anthony Harriott, delivering the Keynote Address as this weeks Conversation on Crime and Violence, in which he had words of warning for SVG.





Data indicates that St Vincent and the Grenadines is inching in the direction of a sub-culture of violence.





And according to Professor Anthony Harriott, Director of the Institute of Criminal Justice at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Jamaica, skillful intervention is needed now in order to avoid this eventuality.

Professor Harriott, one of the regions renowned criminologists and author of extensive papers and books on the issue of crime in his native Jamaica and the region, was the Keynote Speaker at a two-day (April 18 & 19) National Conversation on Crime and Violence, coordinated by the St Vincent and the Grenadines Christian Council.





He explained that, based on the data, there was a period when there was some stability, then a period of oscillation (downward movement). SVG seems to have entered the upward movement phase.





Countries such as Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, where the crime situation was considered chronic, went through similar patterns, Professor Harriott cited, and he cautioned that it was quite a different thing when a country moved from that second stage and into a third, or chronic stage.





"In that third stage, your culture of peace begins to lose ground to a sub-culture of violence, and it becomes very difficult to manage the problem, the Professor said.





A country with a sub-culture of violence takes on a different dynamic, so, for example, when a murder is committed, rather than the situation being one where the individual is apprehended, taken through the judicial system and eventually convicted and sentenced, it instead becomes one where reprisals occur and gangs are formed, Prof. Harriot explained.





Categorising regional countries





Professor Harriott placed the countries in the region into three categories: those where the crime and violence situation was emerging; others where it was mature; and the few where the problem was chronic. In each case, the response to the problem has to be different.





"My assessment is that you (SVG) are hopefully still emerging, but you may be emergent and trending into a direction of maturity, and this calls for some urgency, Prof Harriott said.









Based on the lessons learned from those countries in the region where the crime situation was regarded as chronic, the Professor warned that it ought to be understood that the dealing with the issue of crime is not just one for the state, or the police but the general public as well, because public opinion helps to shape policy.





Public response  The Jamaicas experience





In this regard, Professor Harriott referred to a situation that arose in Jamaica where a level of cynicism began to set in among the population.





"They (the population) believed that things can only get worse, that the police cannot solve the problem; after a while the police said we cannot solve the problem, it is beyond us, then you bring out the army, and then they begin to say they too cannot solve the problem.





In that vein, a second trend to which attention must be paid in this period of transition is that when a chronic condition sets in for too long, people lose faith in their institutions.





"The institutions are unable to serve and protect them. And they call for a new arrangement. So, in the case of Jamaica, two things have happened that I want to bring to your attention. One, the loss of respect for rule of law among the population, so we have one third of the population who believes that police should be given a free hand and do whatever it takes to bring the problem under control, Harriott said.

The Jamaican people also developed a second expression where they were in support of a military coup, he explained.





A military coup, not in the broad support, but support on the condition that there is an arrangement where the army takes over, fixes crime and hands it back to civil society.





According to Harriott, in 2017, for the first time. the majority  some 63% - of the population supported this type of approach to dealing with the crime situation in Jamaica.





The way forward





"So how do we avoid getting there? the Professor asked rhetorically.





"First lesson and advice: Be careful to mark the boundaries of acceptable conduct in your society, he suggested.





The escalation to extraordinary levels of criminality was linked to the to the erosion of boundaries of normal conduct, Harriott said.





The second was that there was not enough investment in the institutions that are responsible for making our societies safe.





In the professors view, the region needs to implement preventative measures at the individual level, to assist young people in the transition into adulthood and into the world of work.





"Institutions need to be built that build participation among the youth in order to promote social conduct, Harriott advise, as he admitted that a lot of people are involved in a lot of "promising activity aimed at making our societies safer  progammes and projects which he assessed, as having not been evaluated, "so we cannot say with much confidence if they are working or not for crime prevention, crime reduction.

Measures have to be specific - targeting places, people and behaviour and we have to be deliberate, he said. .
The Right Revd Calvert Leopold Friday, Bishop of the Windward Island and President of the Christian Council, said thechurch is concerned and is prepared to partner with stakeholders in the fight against crime.

The frequency and nature of crimes being committed here are of concern to the Church.





The Right Revd C Leopold Friday, Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of the Windward Islands, and President of the St Vincent and the Grenadines Christian Council (SVGCC), made the point as he spoke at the opening ceremony of a two-day  April 18 and 19 - discussion on crime and violence, held at the Methodist Church Hall, Kingstown.





The event, dubbed A National Conversation on Crime and Violence while co-ordinated by the SVGCC, was refined in purpose and procedure by a wide-ranging Committee, comprised of a wide cross section of clergy and laity of Chriatan denominations, Ratsfarians, Police, Civil Society grouping, among others.





It ended yesterday, Thursday, and according to Bishop Friday, was organized as an opportunity: to examine the cause of criminality with a desired aim of causing a reduction; to explore options for collaborating with existing institutions and organizations charged with the prevention of crime and the protection and prosecution of individuals; and to design a working plan of action to guide churches in their obligation to combat violence.

The event served as a follow-up to a panel discussion on crime held back in 2015. However, according to Bishop Friday, while in its own sense that panel discussion was a success, it did not provide a way forward in relation to reducing and managing crime.





"It is hoped that this Conversation will provide an opportunity for the church and NGOs and civil society, to take the lead in collaboration to work with government agencies in our society, looking afresh at the complex and changing nature of crime and violence and its impact on the national psyche, Bishop Friday said.





Participation in the two-day event included, among others, representatives from a number of church organizations, civil and community-based organizations; representatives of government and private agencies and organizations working in areas related to crime and crime prevention; representatives of organizations grouping various professions; secondary and tertiary level students and interested individuals. (DD)
NEW YORK CITY COUNCIL last week Thursday, April 12, 2018, honoured Vincentian community leader James Cordice during a gala celebration at City Hall in commemoration of Garifuna-American Heritage Month.

The Council said it was "proud to honour the Philadelphia-based Cordice, the architect behind St. Vincent and the Grenadines participation in the illustrious Penn Relays at the University of Pennsylvania, for his "outstanding service and enduring contribution to our community.

Cordice was among three honorees at the event. The others were Janel Martinez and Andy Romel Ordonez.

Cordice told THE VINCENTIAN afterwards that he endeavours to do his best at all times.

He said this ideal propels his involvement, zeal and relentlessness in serving the community.

He thanked many, including his parents, siblings, teachers, "good friends and his village (Clare Valley in St. Vincent and the Grenadines) for "the nurturing, for the tough love, the guidance and the spirit of my Garifuna predecessors, who molded him in "being dependable.

"I am pleased and proud to have been chosen (honored), Cordice said. "I looked around the room and saw many Garifuna brothers and sisters whom I am familiar with.

"I am humbled and pleased to receive this award, he added. "Then I think of all of my Garifuna families who never made it off Balliceaux [a small, uninhabited rocky island in the St. Vincent Grenadines] alive.

"Those who never made it to Roatan [a small island off Honduras], I weep for them, Cordice continued. "But I am saddened because our children have to grasp at the way forward.

As a member of Garifuna United in Spiritual Healing, Cordice said he continues to "wait for all my opportunities to serve.

Cordice, a former president of the St. Vincent and the Grenadines Organization of Pennsylvania (SVGOP), has been coordinating St. Vincent and the Grenadines participation in the illustrious Penn Relays at the University of Pennsylvania (UPENN) for the past seven years.

He was the youngest storeroom manager to be employed at the Cotton House Hotel in Mustique, before he migrated to the Virgin Islands, where he resumed his hospitality employment at Trade Winds Resort. He eventually became the culinary supervisor and, by 1988, when he migrated to New York, he was certified in French, Italian and English Carvery showmanship cooking.

To finance his culinary education in the US, he worked as an auto mechanic, and interned at the Waldorf Astoria in midtown Manhattan. He introduced French cooking to a Russian Banquet Hall, then managed a restaurant with a staff of 18.

In 1991, Cordice relocated to Philadelphia and was employed as a chef at Mels Italian and Chef-Cafe Raphael. He was Head Chef, Main Street Cafe, kitchen supervisor at Howard Johnson, and Sous Chef at Sheraton NE.

In 1992, he started a vending business, later contracted for Wade Cable, worked as a business tech at Bell Atlantic, among other places; and managed his small construction company, specializing in the design and construction of fine kitchens and bathrooms.
Justice Devindra Rampersad ruled against part of the Sexual Offences Act, and has invited argument in favour of striking down the entire legislation.

High Court judge in Trinidad and Tobago on Thursday 12th April ruled that the part of that twin-island republics Sexual Offences Act which criminalizes sexual activity between homosexual men  whether consensual or not  is unconstitutional.





But even as Justice Devindra Rampersad handed down the ruling, and the local and regional lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LGBTQI) community hailed it, both sides accepted that the legal battle continues as buggery is still against the law, since the legislation has not been struck out.





And in an immediate response to the ruling, Minister in the Ministry of the Attorney General, Stuart Young, said the State plans to appeal the decision.





Under Section 13 of the Sexual Offences Act of Trinidad and Tobago, buggery between a consenting male and female or between two consenting males is an offence, and a person found guilty of such an office could be jailed for up to 25 years.





In his decision in a case brought by gay rights activist Jason Jones  born in Trinidad and Tobago but living in Britain  who challenged sections of the Sexual Offences Act, Rampersad declared Sections 13 and 16 of the legislation "unconstitutional, illegal, null, void, invalid and are of no effect to the extent that they criminalize any acts constituting consensual sexual conduct between adults.





He said the legislation contravened Jones rights to privacy and family life.

"The claimant, and others who express their sexual orientation in a similar way, cannot lawfully live their life, their private life, nor can they choose their life partners or create the families that they wish, he wrote in his 58-page ruling.





Reacting to Rampersads judgment, Jones said: "It was a stunning victory for human rights and a victory for all citizens of Trinidad and Tobago. This is not just about LGBT, this is about the rights and freedoms enshrined in our Constitution.





During the hearing of the matter, the State had argued that the legislation has never been enforced against consenting adults. But Rampersad contended that maintaining an unenforced law on the statutes "makes no logical sense and, instead, seems more vindictive than protective or curative in manner, as if to hold a big stick over a minority to try to enforce a portion of societys morality over it.





However, the judge stopped short of throwing out the legislation, and instead indicated that he wanted to hear from the parties on whether the "offending sections should be struck down in their entirety. They have until June 4 to present their views, and the judge said he would deliver his judgment the following month. (Sources: Caribbean 360, Trinidad Media)
US-based StorageCraft, a premier backup and disaster recovery software company, has announced its regional expansion plans with the appointment of Sayed Shamshuddin as the new regional sales manager for the Middle East and India.



Shamshuddin, an industry veteran, with his deep technology experience and over a decade of experience in business development, will help build strong sales channel structures and relationships with medium to large enterprise businesses across all verticals, said a statement from the company.



StorageCraft had its regional debut at Gitex Technology Week 2017 in Dubai, UAE. The company launched OneBlox, the scale-out object-based network-attached storage (NAS) storage appliance that solves businesses' common storage pain points, such as complex installation, cumbersome management, limited capacity and forklift upgrades.

Andy Zollo, vice president of sales - Europe, Middle East, Eurasia and Africa (EMEA), StorageCraft, said: Shamshuddin is highly knowledgeable, well respected and understands technology and customer needs in the Middle East. We are very excited to have him join our team.



Customer success is his first priority in the region, he added.



Speaking on his appointment, Shamshuddin said: With years exclusively spent in the information security and identity and access management field, joining this companys team in the Middle East and India is exciting.



In particular with the booming development of digitalisation initiatives in the Middle East region, the ability to securely and reliably backup and restore vast amounts of data has shifted into focus, he said.



The increasingly distributed nature of data and the massive growth of unstructured data are creating storage challenges for organisations. Our company knows how to successfully address these issues directly and effectively, he added.



Ahamed Siddiq, head - ICT business unit at Telephony Communication Technologies, said: StorageCraft OneBlox offers scale-out technology and high performance with a very cost-effective total cost of ownership (TCO).



In addition, it offers unique enterprise-class features such as bring your own drive, inline de-duplication and remote replication, to name just a few, he said.



OneBlox scale-out NAS object-based storage means a simpler, faster, easier to manage, future-proofed and cost effective storage solution that we can take directly to our client to store and secure their data, he added.  TradeArabia News Service
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New Delhi: The Welfare Party of India (WPI) led a large rally on Wednesday at Parliament Street, New Delhi. Organised under the banner of India for All Indians the party also led a march from Mandi House to Parliament Street with several political leaders, social and cultural activists and several other individuals on the foundation day of the party.

SQR Ilyas, the national president at WPI, strongly came upon Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) for dividing the country into communal lines.

An atmosphere of fear and mistrust is being created in the society. Attacks against Muslims and Dalits have increased manifold and graph of communal disturbances are mounting up. The country had to bow down its heads in shame before the international community over the brutal rape for days and killing of an innocent eight-year-old girl and the manner in which the incident got official support, said Ilyas. India has become selective and the majority is being excluded in the name of religion, caste, development etc.

The national agitation has seen wide anger and resentment against the polarization politics and observed peoples resolve to work and strengthen plural and united India, added Ilyas while inaugurating the grand rally.

Earlier, delegates from all over the country carrying placards and chanting slogans and songs marched from Mandi House to Parliament Street. The meeting was inaugurated by Rashid Hussain, the National Convenor of the campaign.

K Ambuzakshan, Dalit activist and partys general secretary, said, Constitutional institutions and values are being submerged and the nation has been nosediving towards anarchy.

SR Darapuri, former DGP at Uttar Pradesh police called for a joint movement, just like the freedom movement, to save the country from communal and corporate forces.

Well known scholar Ram Puniyani stressed the need for deep study of fascism and its strategies. He called for long-term strategy to counter its menace.

The programme was also attended by Mohammed Sulaiman, the president at Indian National League, Subramani Arumugam, Khaleeq Ahmed, John Dayal, Sheema Mohsin, Prem Singh, G.K. Goutham, Ansar Abubakar, etc. Family members of Hafiz Junaid, the lynching victim of Haryana, were also present at the rally.
Ahmedabad (IANS): Six years after a trial court punished her for 28 years in jail calling her the key instigator in Gujarats worst communal massacre that left 97 Muslims dead in 2002 in Ahmedabads Naroda Patiya, the Gujarat High Court on Friday acquitted former Gujarat minister Maya Kodnani saying there was no evidence to nail her.

A Division Bench of the High Court comprising Justice Harsha Devani and Justice A.S. Supehia acquitted her, stating there was absence of sufficient proof of her presence at the crime scene where huge armed crowds went about on a killing spree for hours.

A SIT Court had in 2012 found it beyond reasonable doubt that Kodnani, a doctor by profession, was present at the spot of the crime, instigated mobs to attack Muslims and abetted the crime.

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In the record of this case, the witnesses have stated that all the disturbances were started and in fact reached its peak after the arrival of Kodnani. It stands proved beyond all reasonable doubt that she was present and participated in the crime on that day, the court had ruled in August 2012, sentencing Kodnani to 28 years in imprisonment.

Fridays acquittal of Kodnani, who was made a Minister after the riots, came in the backdrop of witnesses turning hostile, six judges recusing themselves from the hearing and the SIT deciding not to seek enhancement of her sentence stating that it did not have the Gujarat governments sanction for it.

BJP President Amit Shahs testimony in the case in September 2017 was the last one and could have proved to be the much needed alibi for Kodnani. He stated that he saw Kodnani in the Gujarat Assembly on 28 February, 2002 (the day of the massacre), first at 8.30 a.m. and then again at 11 a.m.

The Gujarat Assembly is located in Gandhinagar and so the former minister could not have been at Naroda Patiya on the day of the riots.

However, the SIT Court had refused to consider this as evidence stating that Gandhinagar and Ahmedabad were like twin cities and that Kodnani could have easily travelled to Naroda Patiya from the state Assembly after 8.30 a.m.

However, the High Court acquitted her with several witnesses turning hostile and there was insufficient evidence to establish her presence at the place of the crime.

The court meanwhile upheld the conviction of Babu Bajrangi, an activist of the Bajrang Dal. The judgment was pronounced on the appeals filed by the former BJP Minister and others against their conviction by the SIT court. He was the key conspirator in the massacre.

The Naroda Patiya riots was one of the worst incidents during the communal conflagration that engulfed Gujarat following the train burning incident on February 27, 2002 at Godhra in which 59 Hindus were killed.

The High Court in August 2017 had reserved its order.

The special court had sentenced 32 people, including Kodnani and Bajrangi. Seven others were given enhanced life imprisonment of 21 years, which they will serve after undergoing 10 years imprisonment under IPC section 326 (causing grievous hurt).

The remaining accused were given simple life imprisonment of 14 years. The trial courts acquittal of 29 other accused in the case, for want of evidence, was challenged by the SIT, even as those convicted challenged the lower courts order in the High Court for respite.

Government counsel Prashant Desai said: It is clear from the Gujarat High Courts judgment that the court has gone on no witness theory.

Twelve accused have been convicted. Besides Babu Bajrangi, Prakash Rathod and Suresh Chara alias Suresh Langda have been convicted under the IPC 120 (B) as key conspirators.

The sting operation by the Tehelka was not taken into account by the court. The 12 have been convicted with 21 years imprisonment without remission.

Whatever Babu Bajrangi did was no different from what the others did, so his conviction was on parity. Court believed police witnesses.

On Kodnani, there were contradictions in the witnesses testimony against her presence at the crime scene. None of the police witnesses have said that they saw Kodnani at the scene.

The SIT will have to appeal within 90 days to the Supreme Court if they want to challenge the Gujarat High Court verdict, added the counsel.

Deputy Chief Minister Nitin Patel said: Our Minister Kodnani was wrongfully implicted in the Naroda Patiya massacre case. But today she has been found innocent.

We are happy with the verdict and welcome the decision. She has worked hard for the party and definitely she will be given an active role in the party if she wishes to continue.

Meanwhile, the state BJP President Jitu Vaghani has blamed the Congress for arraigning Kodnani in the case. The Congress wrongfully involved our former minister.
Last week, the Armenian Parliament elected the former-President Serzh Sargsyan as the new prime minister. The parliament had been formed after the first parliamentary elections on April 2, 2017 following Armenias transition from semi-presidentialism to parliamentarianism by the December 2015 constitutional amendments. Hurriyet Daliy News reports in its article Armenias transition to parliamentarianism: Change or continuity? that with the election, Sargsyan secured another four years in power until 2022. Given that Sargsyan will be running the country for 14 years in a row, not to speak of his Republican Party of Armenia (RPA) that has been in power since 1998, the question is whether Armenias transition to parliamentarianism is likely to bring a change in the country.

When Armenia re-appeared as an independent country in 1991, the system of government to be established in the country became an issue of debate. While the former President Levon Ter Petrosyan advocated strong presidentialism, the opposition pushed for parliamentarianism. Eventually, strong presidentialism was established in Armenia.

In the 1990s, the main argument of those who advocated parliamentarism was the inconsistency between presidentialism and democratization, and the imperative to establish parliamentarism for the latter. Opposed to such arguments, those who advocated presidentialism stressed the need for strong leadership to overcome the difficulties pertaining to the transition from communism to market economy, post-soviet nation and state building, and the Karabakh conflict. However, when those advocating the parliamentarianism of the 1990s came into power, the constitution was amended in 2005 to establish semi-presidentialism instead of parliamentarianism.

In 2015, too, those who were in power argued for democratization, advocating a constitutional amendment. The opposition argued that Sargsyans real motive was to hold onto power by changing the system, as the existing constitution did not allow him to run for presidency for a third time in a row.

It was claimed that Sargsyan intended to stay in power by becoming the prime minister in the new parliamentarian system. The opposition also claimed Sargsyan strived to de facto hold onto power as the leader of the Republican Party of Armenia (RPA). There were also those who sustained that the wider RPA clique wanted to remain in power by establishing parliamentarianism.

To refute these allegations, Sargsyan publicly announced he would not run for prime minister once the parliamentary system was established. He said, I believe one person should not aspire to hold the reins of power in Armenia for more than twice in their lifetime.

Democratization or Sargsyans grip on power

Nonetheless, after the constitution was amended, Sargsyan made a U-turn and began giving hints that he, indeed, may run for prime minister. On March 19, he alleged that the situation in the country was significantly different from the past. He added that I have never regarded myself as someone who is guided by prejudice or rigid thinking. I cannot fail to reckon with reality and think I bear no responsibility for the future and our countrys smooth course. Eventually, Sargsyan was nominated for prime minister on April 16 and the next day, parliament elected him as the new prime minister.

These developments attest that the transition to parliamentarianism was not so much of an attempt for democratization or to trigger a change in Armenia. Rather, it was as the opposition in 2015 argued, a maneuver of Sargsyan and the RPA circles to have a grip on power. As such, transition from presidentialism to parliamentarianism is not likely to prompt changes in the domestic and foreign policies of Armenia. Therefore, we can conclude that in Armenia, all will remain the same in the foreseeable future.
As analysts warn that U.S. President Donald Trump could be planning to abandon the Iran nuclear accord as early as next monthparticularly with national security adviser and war "fanatic" John Bolton whispering in his earmore than 500 parliamentariansfrom the U.K., France, and Germany published an open letter on Thursday calling on Congress do all it can to keep the agreement alive and "protect the fruits of successful diplomacy."

As Common Dreams writes in an article "With Deadline Approaching, 500+ European Lawmakers Tell Congress to Stop Trump From Ripping Up Iran Nuclear Deal", penned just weeks before the May 12 deadline for Trump to recertify the nuclear accord, the open letter also warns that U.S. withdrawal from the deal would do "lasting damage" to "diplomacy as a tool to achieve peace and ensure security."

"Together, Europeans and Americans have proved that a strong and united transatlantic partnership can bring about a coalition extending to Russia and China, endorsed by the international community," the lawmakers write. "But this coalition is now at risk, as the U.S. government moves towards abandoning the [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] without any evidence of Iran not fulfilling its obligations... We must preserve what took us a decade to achieve and has proved to be effective," the letter concludes.

Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), argued in a tweet on Thursday that the sheer number of officials from America's major European allies speaking out in support of the deal is a testament to its global significance. "The message to Trump/Pompeo/Bolton is clear: You do this and you're on your own," Parsi wrote.

The parliamentarians' urgent plea for Congress to prevent Trump from ripping up the landmark nuclear accord comes just over a week after Bolton officially began his job as the president's chief national security adviser. During numerous appearances over the past several years on Fox News and in the pages of some of America's most influential newspapers, Bolton has repeatedly called on the U.S. to launch a military attack on Iran.

In a statement responding to Trump's decision last month to select Bolton as his top foreign policy adviser, Parsi warned that "as the world awaits Trump's May 12 decision as to whether he will abandon the Iran nuclear deal, all of the signs now point to a decision to move to war footing". "Donald Trump may have just effectively declared war on Iran," Parsi added. "With the appointment of John Bolton, and nomination of Mike Pompeo at State, Trump is clearly putting together a war cabinet."
A recent trip by Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj to the pristine south Caucasian nation of Azerbaijan, in the backdrop of the mid-term ministerial meeting of the NAM (Non-Aligned Movement) countries, had been a long-pending one.

The Hindu Business Line reports in its article Improving logistics will boost bi-lateral trade that Baku, the capital, is a historical and breathtaking city on the banks of the Caspian Sea. It is in fact a few metres below sea level and, therefore, faces harsh winds. (Interestingly, Baku is derived from the Persian name of the city Bad-kube, meaning Wind-pounded city.) However, the political and commercial winds blowing through Baku have had very little to do with India, even if for a rare mention through the late 1990s or the first decade of the 21st century.

When a strategically located, $170-billion economy with substantial oil reserves ranks low on your diplomacy index and supports your neighbours claim on Kashmir, going so far as calling for reduction of Indian excesses in India occupied Kashmir, there is a problem. Though the period 2000-2010 saw a few senior ministers like Mani Shankar Aiyer and Kapil Sibal reach out through various delegations and platforms, Azerbaijan never really figured even in the second orbit of Indias foreign policy outreach. Bilateral trade between India and Azerbaijan, however, has been a different story. It has shot up almost 10-fold from 2005 to 2017 (from about $50 million to close to half a billion dollars in 2017). This jump in bilateral trade coincided with the opening of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline to the Mediterranean port in 2007, from where Indian oil companies have been buying substantive quantities of crude oil (ONGC Videsh is an investor in BTC). Naturally, the bilateral trade between the two countries has largely been hydrocarbon-centred, with India being a minor exporter of anything worthwhile (rice, beef and tea are some of the key items exported to Azerbaijan). And this, hopefully, is set to change.

Logistical complexity between India and Azerbaijan has been a key issue that led to the setting up of a trade foundation and the exploring of synergies between the two nations. The North South Transport Corridor (NSTC), amongst others, will go a long way in removing the fundamental logistical problems facing both the nations. The NSTC is a multi-modal network of ship, rail, and road routes for moving freight between India, Iran, Afghanistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Russia. The objective of the corridor is to increase trade connectivity between major cities such as Mumbai, Moscow, Tehran, and Baku. Once complete, the route is set to drastically reduce transport time between India and Azerbaijan. The route bypasses the Suez Canal and will ensure Indian products reach St. Petersburg in Russia in just 14 days. At present, this is a 42-day journey, skirting North Africa and Europe. Once the Iran-Azerbaijan leg of the NSTC is completed, Indian ports can be linked with Azerbaijan via Iran (Chabahar Port), providing a smoother logistics experience for suppliers at far lesser costs. A study says that the new route will reduce distance and costs by 40 per cent and 30 per cent, respectively.

Three sectors that have substantial potential for bi-lateral trade are food processing, pharma and technology. As Azerbaijan looks to diversify and reduce its dependence on hydrocarbons, India can play a very enabling role in partnering it for the same.
The head of the presidential staff Mukhammedkaliy Abylgaziyev was appointed new prime minister of Kyrgyzstan. His candidacy was approved by the coalition of the parliamentary majority. On Thursday, Kyrgyzstans parliament today passed a vote of no-confidence to the Cabinet led by Sapar Isakov, and President Sooronbay Zheenbekov signed a decree on his resignation. On April 20, Abylgaziyev's candidacy will be approved at an extraordinary meeting of the Jogorku Kenesh (Kyrgyz parliament).

Things developed swiftly in Kyrgyzstan yesterday. At first, the parliament of the republic passed a vote of no confidence to the government led by Prime Minister Sapar Isakov. This motion was supported by 101 lawmakers, five voted against. They acknowledged the Cabinet's 2017 annual report unsatisfactory. The Social Democratic Party of Kyrgyzstan (SDPK) did not participate in the discussion of the report, but supported Isakov's resignation by a majority of votes. It was a political decision. As the head of the majority coalition in the Jogorku Kenesh, deputy of the SDPK faction Isa OmurkulovI told journalists, the resignation of the government was caused by the confrontation between the team of the new president Sooronbai Zheenbekov and the team of the previous head of the republic Almazbek Atambayev.

"Standing between the government and the president, we, the parliament, politicians, must express our principled position. Otherwise people will not understand us. There should not be any conjuncture, personal interests. Such a situation should not arise in the future," Omurkulov said. One of the reasons that influenced the formation of his position, according to Omurkulov, was the recent history, when President Zheenbekov fired an official, and Prime Minister Isakov immediately appointed him to a new, higher position.

The government, led by 40-year-old Prime Minister Sapar Isakov, was formed in late August 2017. He was the 28th head of the government during 26 years of Kyrgyzstan's independence. And his office was the youngest in the history of the republic. The residents of Kyrgyzstan mostly remember Sapar Isakov is most for his termination of the agreement with Rusgidro on the construction of the Kambarata hydroelectric power stations and the transfer of this project to a dubious Czech company Liglass Traiding CZ, which has never before engaged in the construction of a hydroelectric station. It caused great stir not only in Kyrgyzstan, but also in the Czech Republic, and the project was called the "scam of the century."

Sapar Isakov also became the worst prime minister of the republic. In the case of a vote of no confidence, he loses the status of "ex". Doctor of Juridical Sciences Kanatbek Aziz has explained this to Kyrgyzstan's 24.kg. The 2012 Constitutional Law "On the Government of the Kyrgyz Republic" says that a prime minister dismissed on grounds related to a violation of the Constitution and laws or in connection with a vote of no confidence can not be called "ex-head of government".

There were no doubts that head of the presidential staff Mukhammedkaliy Abylgaziyev will be appointed new prime minister of Kyrgyzstan. "If you follow the appointments of the prime ministers of recent years, you can see the following pattern: seven out of ten before the appointment to the post of first minister worked as heads of the presidential administration," the Kyrgyz politician and ex-parliamentarian Ravshan Jeenbekov said, speaking with Vestnik Kavkaza.

Previous president Almazbek Atambayev, when nominating Sooronbai Zheenbekov for the presidential election on October 15, 2017, conceived the implementation of the scenario of succession. He expected to return to politics as the leader of the Social Democratic Party of Kyrgyzstan (SDPK), get a deputy mandate and lead the parliamentary majority. He put his own appointees into key positions in the Cabinet, the power structures, the Prosecutor's Office. But according to the expert on Central Asia and the Middle East Alexander Knyazev, he did not take some important factors into account. "The society and the main external partners is tired of Atambayev and his closest partners. In addition, Zheenbekov is not a person that could be managed, and this fact has manifested itself rather quickly, when almost immediately after the inauguration he has undertaken to clean the political space from Atambayev's proteges: the resignation of Farid Niyazov, the head of the apparatus, the powerful pressure on the leadership of the security forces, and as a result, Prime Minister Sapar Isakov's resignation together with the cabinet, the weakening of the mayor of Bishkek and a number of people close to the ex-president," Knyazev noted.

Finally, Atambayev's well-known imbalance was the end of him. At the congress of the SDPK, which took place in late March, Atambayev spoke sharply about a new president, Zheenbekov. This scandalous return of Atambayev to politics put an end to his political life, led to the split of his party - SDPK, and, finally, to the government's resignation.

"Bishkek is discussing the possibility of canceling presidential immunity from criminal prosecutions. If this law is adopted, then the future of Almazbek Atambayev is not cloudy," Ravshan Jeenbekov believes. According to him, despite the fact that today Sooronbai Zheenbekov's rating has increased and he got a carte blanche to carry out reforms, special changes are not expected. "Until now, Zheenbekov has not taken any decisive steps to reform the country. He will make some cosmetic changes. Zhehanbekov will have to reckon with the northern politicians. (He is a southerner himself - VK) Regionalism has already been introduced by Atambaev as an instrument of political struggle. Thjere will be no serious, important reforms," Jeenbekov noted.

Answering the question of Vestnik Kavkaza of whether Atambaev will be able take his supporters to the streets in a sign of disagreement with the new head of state's current policy, Jeenbekov said that Atambayev does not have such an opportunity now. "He has no influence on society. His authority may increase in a few months, after the society realizes that Zheenbekov is like any other president, including Atambayev. If there are no economic and political reforms, Atambayev, being a resource politician, can use it. He still has resources and he can try to return to politics. But not now, after a while," Ravshan Jeenbekov believes.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization marks its 70th anniversary next year. Formed in 1949 in the aftermath of World War II, today NATO is criticized by Russia and President Donald Trump. NBC News expresses its view on the alliance in its article What is NATO? And what do Trump and Russia think about it?

The alliance is perhaps best defined by Article 5 of its founding document: "An armed attack against one [NATO member] ... shall be considered an attack against them all." During the Cold War, this pledge of collective defense was aimed at "countering the threat posed at the time by the Soviet Union," NATO says. It was a warning that an attack on an ally in Europe would result in retaliation from the nuclear-armed U.S. NATO's first secretary-general, Lord Hastings Lionel Ismay, said NATO existed to "keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down." "NATO was a pillar of security during the Cold War, serving as a European counterbalance to the Soviet Union," said Rebecca Lissner, a research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Perry World House, a global policy research center.

It was only after the breakup of the Soviet Union that NATO was involved in conflict, in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Libya. It has also branched out into anti-piracy missions and earthquake relief. The only time NATO triggered Article 5 was after the terror attacks on 9/11. In response, NATO aircraft patrolled U.S. skies and its ships were dispatched to the Mediterranean Sea to counter terrorism and trafficking.

The 12 original signatories of the North Atlantic Treaty were the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Portugal, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. Greece and Turkey joined in 1952, followed by West Germany in 1955 and Spain in 1982. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland became members in 1999, then Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia in 2004, and Albania and Croatia in 2009. Montenegro, NATO's 29th and most recent member, joined in 2017. Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Georgia and Ukraine have expressed interest in joining. NATO has an "open-door policy" on welcoming new members, however hopefuls must fulfill a complex set of military, economic and political criteria.

After the Cold War, military spending was slashed across NATO's membership and some commentators questioned its relevance in the modern world. That changed in 2014 after the Ukrainian conflict. NATO experts stated that the core purpose of the alliance  to ensure the collective defense of even its most militarily vulnerable members  remains flawed but still at least somewhat effective. Lissner agrees. "NATO is returning to its original purpose of deterring aggression by Moscow," she said.

Donald Trump sent shockwaves through Europe when he called NATO "obsolete" while on the campaign trail. His main complaint was that its members are too stingy. Technically, he's correct. Only four members spend the 2 percent of GDP on defense that NATO recommends: the U.S., U.K., Greece and Estonia. This has led to "an outsized burden carried by the United States," says Bronk. The president has since retracted his "obsolete" comment, and his administration has not backed away from NATO as some had feared. However, many in Europe will not forget that it took Trump five months to explicitly commit to NATO's principle of collective defense. Putin sees NATO as an aggressive and expansionist power creeping toward his borders. He told NBC's Megyn Kelly last year that it would be helpful if it was "falling apart." Others in the West echo these criticisms. One allegation is that NATO is guilty of "antagonizing Russia" and "extending security guarantees to states that would be hard to defend ... against a Russian attack," according to Lissner at Perry World House. While these critiques have "some legitimacy," Lissner believes the answer is not dissolution but modernization. "The challenge," she says, is for NATO to balance "traditional security threats," such as Russia and nuclear-based concerns, with nontraditional dangers such as terrorism and cyberwarfare.
Turkey is working with Kazakhstan to enhance bilateral ties in all areas, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said at a news conference with his Kazakh counterpart Kairat Abdrakhmanov in the capital Ankara. Anadolu Agency reports in its article Turkey, Kazakhstan look to boost ties 'in all areas' that Cavusoglu said: "We are working together with the friendly and brotherly Kazakhstan to enhance our relations in all areas.

He said the Fourth Turkey-Kazakhstan Joint Strategic Planning Group was held between the delegations headed by the ministers. He added they discussed the preparation for Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev's upcoming visit to Turkey as well as the Third Turkey-Kazakhstan High-Level Strategic Cooperation Council meeting. Cavusoglu said both countries want to increase bilateral trade volume to $5 billion. "Turkish companies have played a very important role in the development of Kazakhstan," he added. Abdrakhmanov said Kazakhstan and Turkey will even realize $10 billion of bilateral trade volume in future. Cavusoglu thanked Kazakhstan for hosting the Astana talks aimed at ending the Syria conflict.

Role of Astana process

"The Astana process has played a substantial role in establishing a cease-fire, forming de-escalation zones and taking steps to build confidence [in Syria]," he said. Kazakhstan hosted eight meetings attended by representatives from Russia, Turkey, and Iran, the guarantor states that brokered a cease-fire in Syria in December 2016, leading to the Astana peace talks running parallel to the Geneva talks.

Cavusoglu said there were some countries -- not involved in the talks -- that try to "weaken" the process. "We will continue with the Astana process in the upcoming period. The next talks will be held between May 14 and 15 in Astana," the minister said.

Abdrakhmanov said Turkey plays a "serious" role in the Astana process. He added Kazakhstan gave importance to the process since it aims to stop clashes and bloodshed there. "We see that Astana process is parallel to Geneva process and foresee that the political process will continue with the support of the UN," Abdrakhmanov added. Syria has been locked in a vicious civil war since 2011 when the Assad regime cracked down on pro-democracy protests with unexpected ferocity. Since then, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in the conflict, according to the UN.

Fight against FETO

Cavusoglu said Ankara supports Kazakhstan's fight against the Fetullah Terrorist Organization (FETO), the group behind the 2016 defeated coup in Turkey. "Our expectations are obvious and unfortunately, there are still some FETO members, even if some of them left the country," he added. The minister said security departments of Ankara and Astana were working together regarding this issue and they share information.

According to the government, FETO and its U.S.-based leader Fetullah Gulen orchestrated the defeated coup on July 15, 2016, which left 250 people martyred and nearly 2,200 injured. Ankara also accuses FETO of being behind a long-running campaign to overthrow the state through the infiltration of Turkish institutions, particularly the military, police, and judiciary. Later on Thursday, Abdrakhmanov will be received by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Four Saudi officers were shot dead and four others wounded yesterday when their check post came under gunfire in southern Asir province, the country's interior ministry said.

Three officers were instantly killed when the outpost came under attack, the Saudi Press Agency reported.

Local authorities apprehended two suspects and a third opened fire as he tried to escape, killing the fourth officer.

Saudi's Interior Ministry spokesperson said that the attackers were identified and two Saudis were arrested, without giving further details.
The Kremlin believes that Washington has deliberately created difficulties with issuing visas to Russian pilots, Russian Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, adding that there are no objective reasons for such a situation.

"Evidently, the Americans have no objective reasons for difficulties with issuing visas, because all [US diplomatic staff] cuts have not affected the Consular Section in any way," Peskov told reporters.

"Apparently, these difficulties have been created deliberately. It is fully on our US counterparts conscience. Of course, we are concerned. We do not want events to unfold in such a way," TASS cited him as saying.

Yesterday, the Russian Foreign Ministry said Russia and the US could be left without direct flights because of the difficulties the crews of the Russian Aeroflot flagship carrier have with getting US visas. The ministry recalled that the obligation to issue visas to aircrews had been enshrined in the 1994 Russian-US Air Transport Agreement. Aeroflot later confirmed its crews are facing difficulties with getting US visas.
Russia regards US statements on possible sanctions against Turkey for the purchase of S-400 air defense missile systems as blackmail in favor of American companies, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said after talks with his Austrian counterpart Karin Kneissl.

The statement by US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Wess Mitchell that Ankara risks falling under sanctions if it purchases S-400 systems from Russia, "is exactly an example of a blackmailing attempt in the hope that it will be possible to ensure unfair competition for American companies," the top diplomat said.

"I just recalled how Mr. Kurt Volker [the US Special Representative for Ukraine] threatened Italians in Italy while Mitchell threatened Turks from Washington. Both cases are linked with relations with Russia," TASS cited Lavrov as saying.

He recalled that NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg recently stated replying to a similar question that the decision on the S-400 purchase is a national decision by the Turkish Republic.

"The United States as a NATO member should also listen to the collective opinion expressed by the NATO Secretary General," Lavrov noted, stressing that competition in the arms export "existed, exists and will always be."

What is important is that certain principles should be observed in this trade, first of all, the non-delivery of destabilizing armaments, the refusal to deliver weapons to non-state entities and that competition should be fair and unblemished and not based on illegally obtained advantages of unilateral sanctions," the minister stressed.
Russia and Azerbaijan have strategic partnership relations, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova told a briefing yesterday.

"Russia and Azerbaijan have strategic partnership relations, based upon the principle of equal rights, good neighborliness, centuries-long friendship, a common history, culture and intertwined fates of millions of people," she noted.

According to the diplomat, the two countries enjoy mutually beneficial and reliable relations at the levels of heads of state, governments and parliaments. "Just in 2017 our heads of state met twice. There is a close relationship between Russia and Azerbaijan. 17 Russian entities have an agreement on cooperation in economic, trade, scientific-technical and cultural spheres with Azerbaijan, Maria Zakharova said.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson said that enterprises and companies of 70 Russian regions carry out export-import operations with Azerbaijan.

She added that economic relations between Russia and Azerbaijan have improved. The volume of trade turnover between Russia and Azerbaijan in 2017 increased by 29% to $2.6 billion compared to 2016. The mutual investment between the two countries has also increased. There are more than 600 Russian-Azerbaijani joint ventures in the Azerbaijani market, of which about 200 are Russian capital. Direct Russian investments in Azerbaijan account for $1.5 billion. There is mutual interest in the development of joint bilateral energy projects," the diplomat said.

She further touched upon a serious mutual interest in implementing large-scale bilateral projects in energy, transport, innovative technologies, agriculture and other sectors.

"About 15,000 students from Azerbaijan study in Russia. Some of them study at public expense and others receive education on a commercial basis. There are branches of Moscow State University and First Moscow State Medical University in Baku. We are considering opening branches of other influential Russian universities in Baku as well. The two countries have agreed to mutually hold a year of culture, Zakharova said.

She also said that Baku will host a joint Russia-Azerbaijan historical-documentary exhibition dedicated to the 95th anniversary of Heydar Aliyevs birthday on May 10. Noting that Heydar Aliyev is the founder of Azerbaijans strategic partnership with Russia, the spokesperson said the presidents have a great role to play in strengthening friendly relations between the two countries. According to her, Russia views these relations as a top foreign policy priority.

Maria Zakharova said that Ilham Aliyev's confident victory in the presidential election in Azerbaijan is an important guarantee for continuation of this course.
At least 83 people were detained by police early on April 20 after protests resumed in Yerevan against the election of longtime former Armenian President Serzh Sarsyan as prime minister.

Hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets of the capital early on April 20 against what they see as Sarkisian's attempt to cement his hold on power.

They were answering a call by opposition lawmaker Nikol Pashinian, who was leading the protests in downtown Yerevan. Pashinian urged thousands of protesters gathered late on April 19 to return the next day and continue blocking the traffic in the capital.

The press service of the Armenian police said those detained were opposition supporters blocking traffic on Yerevan streets, RFE/RL reported.

"Acting in accordance with the law, police are continuing to transport all people who violate the law and commit public order offenses to police stations," police spokesman Ashot Agaronian said earlier.

Earlier, Tirayr Muradian, a journalist working for the Sut.am website of the Union of Informed Citizens nongovernmental organization, was forcefully removed from a site of protest on Yerevan-Sevan highway.
The 8th meeting of the Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee (JMMC) has started in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where OPEC and non-OPEC oil ministers will discuss the oil production cut deal.

OPEC and its allies achieved 149 percent of pledged output reductions last month, up from 138 percent in February, Russia's Energy Minister Alexander Novak said before the meeting started.

The minister noted that OPEC and non-OPEC countries may ease oil production cuts as early as this year.

Novak said that it was too early to talk about the format of cooperation between OPEC and non-OPEC countries after 2018, and that cooperation may not necessarily be about extending output quotas, once the deal on oil production curbs expires by the end of this year, TASS reported.
Problems between states should be solved not by imposing sanctions but through political agreements, Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov told CNBC.

"We are not in favor of sanction-swapping. Nevertheless, our MPs have drafted legislation that would allow us to introduce certain restrictions, both on exported goods and on goods imported into the country."

"Still, I would reiterate, any sanctions have a negative effect on the state of economies  I very much hope that these sanctions processes do not develop any further," he stressed in the interview.

"We need to talk, we need to find agreements, we need to look for ways out in order to solve problems not by imposing sanctions but through political agreements," Siluanov added.
The fact that the consortium for construction of the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) won the tender of Greece's gas grid operator DESFA will strengthen the positions of TAP and the Southern Gas Corridor projects a route for the supply of Azerbaijani gas to Europe, the energy experts said, speaking with the correspondents of Vestnik Kavkaza.

Yesterday, the Board of Directors of the Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund (HRADF) has unanimously accepted the improved financial offer of the consortium composed of the companies Snam S.p.A.(60%), Enagas Internacional S.L.U. (20%) and Fluxys S.A. (20%). The financial offer of the consortium for acquisition of 66% share stands at 535 million euros.

A senior research fellow at the Center for Strategic Studies under the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan, Research Associate at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies Gulmira Rzayeva expressed her confidence in the positive impact of this event on the prospects of the Southern Gas Corridor project. "Since all three member companies of the consortium are the TAP shareholders, it will allow to transport gas from the Shah Deniz gas field to Greece without hindrance, as well as to the Gas Interconnector Greece - Bulgaria (IGB)," she said in the first place.

"In addition, if there are additional volumes of gas from other sources, for example, LNG or gas from the Mediterranean region, the consortium led by Snam can transport this gas through Greece to the TAP pipeline, and then export them to, fore example, Italy, Bulgaria, to the Western Balkans via the IAP pipeline. It may increase the TAP's economic attractiveness and increase the margin in case of full filling of the pipe and increase its capacity. Of course, it is possible only if there is enough market niches and prices supporting new projects," Gulmira Rzayeva emphasized.

The expert Rovshan Ibrahimov also pointed to the importance of the acquisition of DESFA by the shareholders of TAP. "It is in the interests of these companies to implement the TAP project and start supplying natural gas from Azerbaijan to Europe in a stable manner. It should be noted here that even in those days when SOCAR planned to buy DESFA, there were long-term projects for the development of the oil and gas network in Greece, and now the consortium will do it. I think that this is a positive event for the interests of Greece, for the interests of the consortium of TAP builders and for Azerbaijan," he said.

"The only question that arises is whether Snam, Enagas and Fluxys, given the amount they will pay for DESFA's 66% share, will be able to cover their expenses and start earning in the expected period. I would like to remind you that SOCAR refused to buy DESFA because the Greek government and parliament made new decisions in connection with natural gas prices within the Greek market. I hope that in-depth financial calculations were made, according to which it was decided that 66% of DESFA for 535 million euros is profitable acquisition," Rovshan Ibrahimov added.

TAP is the most important part of the Southern Gas Corridor (SGC), a multinational European Commission project to transfer gas from Azerbaijan's Shah Deniz Gas Field in the Caspian Sea to European markets. The TAP will span 773 km onshore (550 km in Greece, 215 km in Albania and 8 km in Italy) and 105 km offshore. TAP's shareholders are: BP (20%), State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (20%), Snam (20%), Fluxys (19%), Enagas (16%) and Axpo (5%).
Tehran has banned all government bodies from using foreign-based messaging apps to communicate with citizens, state media reported.

"All government agencies, public and non-governmental institutions are obliged to transfer all their activities and services to local social networks within a period of one week," Iran's first Vice-President Eshaq Jahangiri said.

Telegram channels run on behalf of Irans Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and Jahangiri were already shut down yesterday, the AP reported.

A report on the website of Irans state television broadcaster said the ban affected all public institutions. It was not clear if the ban applied to civil servants outside of work hours.

The move against Telegram suggests Iran may try to introduce its own government-approved, or Halal, version of the messaging app. Already, Iran heavily restricts Internet access and blocks social media websites like Facebook and Twitter.
Turkish MP from the opposition Republican Peoples Party (CHP), Didem Engin, has put forward her candidacy for participation in the upcoming presidential election in Turkey, Turkish media reported.



Thus, the number of presidential candidates from CHP reached two.



On April 19, CHP nominated its current leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu for the post of president of Turkey. As many as 85% of party members voted for Kilicdaroglu's candidacy.



On April 18, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said about the need for early presidential and parliamentary elections in Turkey.



"The government welcomed the proposal of Bahceli [leader of the Nationalist Movement Party] to hold early elections. The elections will be held on June 24, 2018," he said.
The United States said that Russian-made air defense systems operated by Syrian crews were completely useless.

The Russian manufactured air defense systems were totally ineffective, the Pentagons chief spokesperson Dana White said.

Russia and the regime demonstrated the ineffectiveness of their systems again two days later, when those systems engaged accidentally, she added.

Joint Staff Director Lieutenant General Kenneth McKenzie explained that it concerns only Syrian air defense systems.

"I can tell you though that the rest of Syrian air defense capability, which is completely Russian made, Russian designed, Russian supported, engaged extensively and comprehensively failed," he said.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said Tehran has a variety of options in store that will make the United States "regret" leaving the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

"Iran has a wide range of options both inside and outside of the JCPOA and surely, the reaction from Iran and the international community will be unpleasant for the Americans," Zarif told reporters upon arrival in New York City to attend a United Nations General Assembly meeting over sustaining peace.

The Iranian FM said the US government has failed to stay true to its commitments and said it was up to the European signatories of the deal to preserve it and force Washington into keeping up its obligations, PressTV reported.
HCM CITY  Registration is open until April 30 for an annual business start-up contest oganised by the Business Start-up Support Centre and the HCM City Young Businesspeople Association.

Vietnam Start-up Wheel 2018 will be a forum for contestants to present innovative business start-up ideas and business strategies and mobilise funds for projects.

Unlike previous years, the sixth edition of the competition is open to contestants of all ages and nationalities who have a start-up in Viet Nam, according to Truong Ly Hoang Phi, director of BSSC.

It also encourages science researchers at institutions and schools, whose studies are feasible, practicable and lend themselves to commercialisation, and overseas students with start-up ideas for doing business in Viet Nam to take part.

The organisers expect to receive 1,000 start-up ideas and projects. A qualifying round will reduce the number to a maximum of 100 for the semi-final.

The final round in August will see 10 projects compete.

There will be a first prize worth VN200 million (US$8,771) for an existing company that is less than five years old and another worth VN150 million for startup individual/group, two second prizes worth VN70 million each, and two third prizes worth VN40 million each.

The organisers will also award prizes to most creative project, most-liked project and most outstanding project by students.

The winners will also have a chance to get investment, sponsorship and consultancy from experienced entrepreneurs to convert their start-up ideas/products into reality.

They will also get the opportunity for approaching local and international investment funds and receive training in running a start-up business from prestigious entrepreneurs.

The competition will be held across the country.  VNS
HA NOI  Ministries have continued accelerating administrative reforms to aid businesses in their operations.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) said they were reviewing and proposing to cut 241 business conditions out of 345, accounting for 70 per cent of the total in the area.

The Viet Nam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI) on Wednesday in Ha Noi and MARD held a seminar collecting businesses opinions on the conditions in the agriculture sector.

Nguyen Thi Kim Anh, director of the ministrys Legal Department, said as many as 131 conditions of veterinary, animal feed, plant protection and quarantine, quality control, and genetically modified products would be revised, supplemented or eliminated in the administrative simplification.

In addition, many business conditions in the Law on Seafood would continue to be revised and simplified.

Ta Van Tuong, director of Ha Nois Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, highly valued the efforts of the ministry in cutting unsuitable business conditions and removing barriers for firms in the sector.

However, Tuong said the ministry should quickly promulgate technical standards and safety production progress for companies to easily follow, as well as facilitate authorities in after-checks.

Enterprises would be more responsible about their products quality, while applying standards. Authorities could also reduce paper work, he added.

Tran Van Thien from Viet Nam Veterinary Pharmaceutical Association was quoted by chinhphu.vn as saying that in reality, business conditions have not been a big issue. Sub-licences at guiding circulars have been barriers for firms.

Thien suggested that the ministry review the sub-licences to cut unnecessary regulations.

Nguyen Van Son, chairman of Viet Nam Pesticide Association, said there were unsuitable business conditions, which were not approved for simplification this time around.

For example, the ministry stipulates that warehouses of pesticide producers must be located in industrial zones (IZs), while many factories have already been granted licences or built outside IZs.

It would cost businesses hundreds of billions of ong to move their factories to IZs, he said.

Nguyen Khanh Trinh, director of a clean food chain, said his company received up to seven delegations conducting check-ups at shops within 20 days, causing their operations to be affected.

He said it was a paradox that food sold on pavements or small markets without tests or licences was not being checked by the delegations, while his company, which had ensured all the requirements for food safety, was.

The high number of checks was time consuming and troublesome, he said.

Cutting red tape

The Ministry of Transport has announced the elimination of 384 out of 570 business conditions overseen by the ministry, equivalent to 67.36 per cent of the total business conditions in the transport sector.

Transport minister Nguyen Van The recently signed off on Decision No. 767, which sets out a plan to remove and streamline regulations on business conditions in the transport sector.

The aviation sector has the largest number of business conditions to be simplified and cut, accounting for 74.36 per cent of the total business conditions of the sector. It is followed by the rail sector with 73.08 per cent of its business conditions being cut.

Meanwhile, the road sector will have 68.5 per cent of its business conditions eliminated, the waterway sector will remove 67.34 per cent of its conditions, and the maritime sector will cut 65.08 per cent of its conditions.

The multi-modal transportation services and transport of dangerous goods will see the smallest number of slashed conditions, making up 61.43 per cent of its total conditions.

Under the decision, the ministry asked relevant agencies to promptly review and compile legal documents based on the plan for the elimination of business conditions and submit them to the Government before October 30 this year.

In a recent meeting, The emphasised that the review and elimination of administrative procedures and business conditions is a regular task in creating favourable conditions for the people and enterprises, while helping to save costs and time.  VNS
HCM CITY  Ways to improve Viet Nams business environment and competitiveness were discussed at a seminar in HCM City on April 19.

au Anh Tuan, head of the Viet Nam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI)s legal department, said business licensing procedures have improved in the last two decades.

But a survey by the VCCI last year found that there are still 5,719 types of sub-licences.

Phan uc Hieu, deputy director of the Central Institute for Economic Management (CIEM), said the biggest challenge is the unpredictability of administrative reforms. He said the country has struggled with business sector reforms since 1998.

Many neighbouring countries have achieved their targets in reforming their business environment while Viet Nam has not seen much progress, he said.

Nguyen Minh Thao, head of CIEMs business environment and competitiveness committee, said the Governments Resolution No 19 on improving the business environment and the countrys competitiveness issued in 2014 has helped Viet Nam improve its business climate ranking by 14 places to 68th in the world last year.

Electricity supply, investor protection and tax payment indicators have all improved, she said.

However, many other areas like asset use, ownership registration and bankruptcy handling have seen little improvement, she said.

Besides, only the Ministry of Finance has sought to improve cross-border trade regulations while 12 other ministries have failed to do so, she said.

If the time taken for cross-border trade is cut by a day, a lot of money could be saved, she said.

CIEM figures also reveal that since the launch of Resolution No 19, Viet Nams business environment and competitiveness have improved though the targets have not been reached.

Thao said Viet Nams business environment ranks fifth in ASEAN behind Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and Brunei.

According to CIEM director Nguyen inh Cung, Viet Nams ranking in the business starting index was low and kept falling steadily between 2014 and 2017 despite Resolution No 19.

As for the abolishment of business conditions, ministries have reported the scrapping of hundreds of them, such as the Ministry of Industry and Trade eliminating over 650 conditions. However, they have also added new conditions.

The seminar, titled Improve the quality of the business environment: Reform business conditions, specialised management and administrative formalities, was held by the the United States Agency for International Development and CIEM.  VNS
HA NOI  Vice President of Talanx AG Group Christian Hinch has proposed to the Vietnamese Government to raise the ownership ratio of foreign investors at PetroVietnam Insurance (PVI) to 49 per cent.

Hinch, who is also chairman of HDI Global SE, which owns over 47 per cent stake in PVI, said his group wanted to hold controlling stake in the enterprise, which is a member of the Vietnam Oil and Gas Group (PVN), to meet the interests and requirements of PVI shareholders who were interested in expanding the scope of its activities to the ASEAN market.

Hinch proposed this at a meeting with Deputy Prime Minister Vuong inh Hue in Ha Noi on Thursday.

Hue said the market for life insurance and non-life insurance in Viet Nam was growing rapidly, but the scale was still modest compared to the countrys GDP (gross domestic product).

The Government will restructure to develop the insurance market in Viet Nam. Talanxs intention of expanding investment in the country is in line with Viet Nams policy of restructuring the financial and credit system, including the insurance market, Hue said.

As a major shareholder, Talanx has helped PVI improve its management capacity and enhance its human resources, said Hue.

He added that the Vietnamese Government plans to withdraw PVNs capital contribution from PVI.

Hue said the Government would assign the Ministry of Industry and Trade to set up a divestment roadmap and determine methods of capital withdrawal and selling prices in line with PVIs previous commitments with PVN.  VNS
HCM CITY  The HCM Citys book companies and publishers will organise a series of activities to mark Viet Nam Book Day on April 21 and World Book and Copyright Day on April 23.

The HCM City Book Pedestrian Street will launch a mobile library offering free book rentals and book exchange.

Many book groups like Book and Friend, Book Connect and Room to Read will hold programmes for young people on the book street from April 20-24.

On April 23, the HCM City University of Culture and the HCM City College of Culture and Arts will host seminars on promoting the reading hobby among youth, as well as talks with young authors on book street.

On April 21, Saigon Books, one of the citys leading publishers, will launch a programme called Nguoi Viet Viet Sach (Vietnamese Authors and Their Books) to honour young writers and books, and to encourage them to continue their writing and introduce their books to the world.

On the occasion, local publishers will release new books by both local and foreign authors.

The Tre (Youth) Publishing House will publish a set of four books titled Thieu Bao Binh Nguyen highlighting the countrys struggles against three Yuan-Mongol invasions in the 13th century.

The citys Culture, Literature and Arts Publishing House will introduce Ngan va Rat Ngan (Short and Very Short) combining a series of short stories by archaeologist Nguyen Thi Hau and culturist Nguyen Thi Minh Thai.

Hau and Thai will meet with young readers at the publishing house on April 23. VNS
HA NOI  Various cultural activities will be held worldwide to celebrate the Hung Kings Memorial Day which falls on April 25.



Among them are the implementation of a project titled Viet Nam Ancestral Global Day and an ancestor worship ceremony to be held by the Association for Liaison with Overseas Vietnamese (ALOV).

Other activities will include the Project Mobilisation Unit of Viet Nam Ancestral Global Day (PMU-VAGD) which will be held in co-ordination with overseas Vietnamese associations in the Czech Republic, Russia, Hungary, and Germany.

The cultural events will include art performances and exhibitions of products from across Viet Nam. Alongside this will be seminars and workshops about Vietnamese culture. The events are highly regarded by Vietnamese living, studying and working abroad, as they provide an opportunity to pay homage to their home country.



A report from the ALOV reveals that this is the first time Viet Nam Ancestral Global Day has been celebrated simultaneously in many European countries following a shared format. The events will be modified slightly to suit the context of each Vietnamese community.



Contributions to organisation and funding have been received from overseas Vietnamese associations in various countries, the report said.



The ALOV and PMU-VAGD negotiated with the Mai Linh Group Corporation, alongside various local businesses, to contribute four statues of the Hung Kings, as well as12 sets of ritual clothes, and trays of offerings to organisation committees abroad.



Viet Nam Ancestral Global Day

The annual Hung Kings Temple Festival is usually celebrated by overseas Vietnamese communities in a similar fashion to back home. Ceremonies are often held with incense offerings and tributes to the nations ancestors.



That being said, as the events have in the past been held sporadically and without a centralised format, they generally attract little attention from overseas Vietnamese and international friends.

The spreading of Vietnamese culture, especially the spiritual ritual of the Hung Kings worship rite is not far-reaching. In 2012, the Hung Kings worship rite was recognised as a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.



This makes it the one and only ritual in Viet Nam to be recognised as world cultural heritage so far. The incorporation of the Hung Kings worship rite in the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity has contributed to heightening the importance of Vietnamese ancestor worship in countries and territories where overseas Vietnamese communities are living.

Thus, it encourages those communities to recognise cultural similarities and promote respect of cultural diversity, the report said.

Since 2015, the Viet Nam Ancestral Global Day Project has moved towards three key goals: To preserve and spread the Intangible Cultural Heritage Hung Kings worship rite abroad; to hold discussions, seminars and workshops to connect and promote intercultural exchange between Vietnamese and other cultures in the world; and to build a strategy to spread and advertise Vietnamese cultural (spiritual) values in the life of overseas Vietnamese, host countries and international friends, as well as in the virtual / media environment in a systematic, consistent, comprehensive and annual manner.

The non-profit socio-cultural project aims to bring public values to overseas Vietnamese all over the world. It is carried out at both community and international levels.  VNS
The Ministry of Finance has proposed imposing a new tax on people who own property worth VN700 million ($31,000) or more.  Photo vneconomy.vn

By Thanh Van

The Ministry of Finance has proposed imposing a new tax on people who own property worth VN700 million ($31,000) or more.

The Ministry of Finance claims that the 0.4 per cent tax would bring in VN31 trillion ($1.3 billion) per year and help Viet Nam get in line with regulations on property tax rates in other countries.

But does that get it line with the people?

Not likely.

Currently, there is no tax on owning a house. Land users must pay an annual non-agriculture land use tax at a progressive rate of 0.03 per cent to 0.15 per cent of the land price per square metre, determined by the state every five years.

The proposal means house owners will have to pay a new kind of tax for their house, apart from the land use tax theyre paying now.

The finance ministry justified this new tax by saying that data from other countries show that the lowest property tax rate stands at 0.2 per cent, which makes Viet Nam s tax rate too low. Also, the new policy would help stabilise the property market, restrict speculation and increase efficiency in using properties.

Now lets take a look: The average wage per person in Viet Nam is around VN3.2 million ($150) a month. Its not easy to save up VN700 million to buy a house  not to mention that in order to own a house of such value, owners will have to pay various types of taxes already. That includes a 10 per cent value added tax, 0.5 per cent land use tax and some other extra fees for necessary registration procedures.

Its a lot of taxes already. One more thing to consider: In Viet Nam , people dont own land. People can only have a land use certificate. This means if you buy a property, you never really own it. In Viet Nam you lease it from the Government and the Government can always take that land back at any time.

And if the finance ministry wants to prevent real estate speculation, why not add a tax on second homes? Owning a house to live in is important to many people, even those who must scrimp and save to achieve the dream. A house of VN700 million or VN1 billion is often owned by those with low or average income  not those with high income. Its not fair to impose such a tax on people with lower income but ignore those with two or three more properties just because its difficult in Viet Nam to identify who has two or more houses, as the finance ministry once said.

Its true: People cant expect the Government to work for them for free  some types of tax collection are necessary to ensure effective operation of the Government. People can only be willing and happy to pay taxes if the collection is rational and they know their tax payment will be used effectively for the communitys good.

In Viet Nam , people are often under-informed of how their tax payments are spent. When the gasoline taxes were increased, many people were opposed. I dont think they opposed the tax itself  they wanted to be properly informed of how the tax is going to be spent to protect the environment, how the air and the environment were going to be improved after raising the tax.

In this situation, the authorities need to be transparent on how the new tax will benefit people. Because collecting tax is not only for the sake of Governments spending, it must be used to serve the people and the community. If the finance ministry and the Government can prove to people that the tax is used wisely, effectively and transparently, I believe people would accept the new tax happily.

Alternative approach

ang Hung Vo, former deputy minister of environment and natural resources, agreed with the property tax proposal. He said he thought it was necessary for the Government to improve infrastructure, public services and urban development. However, he argued the housing property tax should adopt an area-based approach rather than a value-based approach.

This can be seriously considered: taxes should focus on developed areas and should not create burdens for low-income people. A reconsideration and thorough review of the property tax proposal based on this approach would be better accepted by the people.

At the end of the day, too much tax collecting is a signal of ineffective government budget balancing. Tightening State spending is still a more acceptable approach when the authority is faced with budget problems.

Recently the Government has show its determination on this matter by setting a goal by 2021 to reduce the state payroll by at least 10 per cent compared to the 2015 figure. But the road is long and windy: Government auditors earlier this year urged state departments to tighten control of human resources after finding 57,175 public workers on the payroll are actually not needed.

People will accept reasonable tax payments  but the Government also needs to earn this with effective spending and zero tolerance for waste in its system.

Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc said in a meeting earlier this week that the Government would try to listen to peoples voices and needs, mentioning the finance ministrys property tax proposal. Lets hope we will be heard, and answered. VNS
HA NOI  Any unilateral actions by any other country in Viet Nams two archipelagoes in the East Sea  Hoang Sa (Paracel) and Truong Sa (Spratly)  without the consent of Viet Nam are invalid and illegal, said foreign ministry spokesperson Le Thi Thu Hang.

Hang made the statement during the regular press conference yesterday, speaking in response to a reporters question on the reaction of the Vietnamese Government to several reports that China had conducted military exercises in the East Sea .

She reiterated the Vietnamese Governments stance that Viet Nam has sovereignty over the two archipelagos in the East Sea , sovereignty and jurisdiction over their territorial waters in line with international laws including UNCLOS 1982.

"The stance of Viet Nam is clear and consistent: It expects other countries to contribute to peace, safety and freedom of air and maritime navigation in the East Sea ," Hang said.

Regarding US President Donald Trumps remarks that the US may re-join the freshly inked Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), Hang said that the trade deal was open and any other country was welcomed to participate, as long as it was based upon agreement to the high standards set in the treaty and consent from other member countries.

Hang also said Viet Nam welcomed efforts by the Republic of Korea (RoK) and the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK) to restore peace and stability in the Korea peninsula, demonstrated recently by the upcoming historic summit between RoK President Moon Jae-in and DPRKs leader Kim Jong-un.

Upcoming external activities

At the press conference, she announced that at the invitation of the Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and his wife, Tran Thi Nguyet Thu, would visit Singapore and attend the 32nd ASEAN Summit held there during April 25-28, as the two countries celebrate 45 years of diplomatic relations and five years of strategic co-operation partnership.

This is the first official visit by the Vietnamese Government leader to the island state since he assumed the position.
JOINT STATEMENT

BETWEEN THE REPUBLIC OF THE UNION OF MYANMAR AND THE SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF VIET NAM

ON THE OFFICIAL VISIT

OF DAW AUNG SAN SUU KYI, STATE COUNSELLOR OF THE REPUBLIC OF THE UNION OF MYANMAR,

TO THE SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF VIET NAM

(Ha Noi, 20 April 2018)

1. At the invitation of His Excellency Nguyen Xuan Phuc, Prime Minister of the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam, Her Excellency Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, State Counsellor of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar, paid her first official visit to Viet Nam from 19 to 20 April 2018.

2. During the visit, State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was accorded a ceremonial welcome by His Excellency Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc. While in Viet Nam, State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi held bilateral talks with Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and attended the banquet hosted by the Prime Minister. State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi also paid courtesy calls on Leaders of Viet Nam, laid a wreath at the Monument of National Heroes and Martyrs, and visited President Ho Chi Minhs Stilt House. The State Counsellor also met with Chairman of Viet Nam  Myanmar Friendship Association, and Vietnamese enterprises operating in Myanmar.

3. The two leaders acknowledged that the existing traditional friendship and the close cooperation between Viet Nam and Myanmar were established by President Ho Chi Minh and General Aung San and cultivated by generations of leaders and people from both countries. They reaffirmed their common aspirations for peace, prosperity and development of the region and beyond. Vietnamese leaders emphasized that Viet Nam is always mindful of the strong support rendered by the Government and people of Myanmar in the past struggle for national liberation and in current efforts for national development. State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi expressed her admiration for the determination and courage with which the Government and people of Viet Nam defended and developed their country. State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi congratulated Viet Nam for successfully implementing the strategy of renovation, reform and intensive and extensive international integration.

4. The Leaders reviewed developments in bilateral relations and cooperation since the very successful visit of His Excellency Nguyen Phu Trong, General Secretary of Central Committee of the Communist Party of Viet Nam to Myanmar in August 2017. The Vietnamese side stressed the importance attached to relations with Myanmar and the Government led by the National League for Democracy (NLD) and reaffirmed its continued support for peace and national reconciliation in Myanmar. Viet Nam firmly believes that the 21st Century Panglong was a major step forward and, through dialogues and negotiation, the Government of Myanmar would continue to succeed in building a stable and thriving democratic federal Union. Myanmar side expressed its appreciation to Viet Nam for its consistent support, as well as for sharing with Myanmar its experience with regard to national reconciliation and development.

5. Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi noted with satisfaction the positive progress in bilateral cooperation in past years, particularly the elevation of bilateral ties to Comprehensive Cooperative Partnership in August 2017. Both sides reaffirmed to strengthen further the effectiveness of comprehensive cooperation in all areas, including trade and investment, cultural, social and educational cooperation. These efforts will enhance trust and intensified cooperation between the two countries, bringing practical benefits for the peoples.

6. In order to effectively implement the Comprehensive Cooperative Partnership Agreement, the two leaders expressed their strong desire to promote cooperation in politics, trade and investment, defence and security, agro-forestry and fishery, connectivity, energy and telecommunication, tourism, justice, education and people-to-people exchange and regional involvement.

7. The two sides emphasized that the exchange of visits at all levels and channels, including government to government, parliament to parliament, party to party, people to people, will enhance friendship and cooperation between the two countries. Both sides agreed that close party to party cooperation is an important pillar of bilateral ties and looked forward to the early signing of Action Plan 2018-2023 to implement the Comprehensive Cooperative Partnership established in August 2017.

8. The two sides recognized the strong development in bilateral economic cooperation: the two-way trade volume in 2017 reached nearly USD 830 million, a 51% increase compared to 2016. Viet Nam has risen to become the 7th largest foreign investor in Myanmar with 17 projects and USD 2.1 billion in registered capital. This relationship of cooperation demonstrates that the two economies complement each other and brings benefits to both sides, in the fields of agricultural trade, investment, aqua product processing, tourism and services given the circumstance that the Government of Myanmar is carrying out extensive economic reforms. The two sides also reaffirmed the commitment to enhance cooperation and find new means to reach the two-way trade target of USD 1 billion at the earliest possible. Both sides stressed the importance of policy provision in trade and investment and providing favourable environment for foreign investors, including Myanmar investors and Viet Nam investors. Leaders of both sides recognized the need to study further the possibility of establishing new mechanism as well as to sign the necessary MOUs/Agreements to help facilitate and promote investment between the two countries.

9. Both sides expressed appreciation of recent developments in bilateral defense-security cooperation and reaffirmed continued effective implementation of agreements reached under bilateral and multilateral frameworks. The two sides agreed to expand defense and security cooperation including exchange of military delegations at all levels, and conducting the Defence Policy Dialogue at the Deputy Ministerial Level in 2018, expanding cooperation into other areas, i.e. training, medical assistance, search and rescue, sport exchange. Viet Nam welcomes friendship, sightseeing and field research visits by Myanmar delegations as well as Myanmar trainees attending courses on treatment of burns and the manufacture of prosthetic limbs in Viet Nam.

10. Two sides welcomed and committed to fully implement the newly signed MoU on Cooperation in the field of Post, Telecommunication and ICT and MoU on Information Cooperation. Both sides agreed to expedite the negotiation for early signing of Agreement on Prevention and Fight Against Crime and other agreements/treaties in field of security cooperation. Both sides reaffirmed the commitment not to allow any individual or organization to use one countrys territory to conduct activities against the other country.

11. Both sides agreed to strengthen cooperation with a view towards promoting closer financial linkages and acknowledging to enhance the financial sector, including financial services. The two sides also emphasized the importance of strengthening bilateral cooperation in telecommunication and energy sector, especially in the fields of oil and gas, infrastructure sharing.

12. Both sides reiterated that Agro-forestry and fishery cooperation is an important area of cooperation with many advantages and potential for mutual support and development. In that spirit, the two sides agreed to sign agreements on agriculture, forestry, fisheries and livestock and to expand cooperation at an early date to find ways to improve the quality and value of agricultural products, including corn, rice, beans and mung beans. The two sides expressed commitment to accelerate procedure to sign the MOU on Cooperative in Agriculture and Rural Development at the earliest.

13. The two sides also agreed to promote multi-modal transport cooperation, including land, sea and air links between the two countries and within the sub-region. In light of the successful GMS 6 held in Ha Noi in March 2018, the two sides will work closely together to achieve the goals set out at GMS 6.

14. The two Leaders also discussed ways to deepen further bilateral ties in tourism, justice, education and people-to-people exchange under the framework of Comprehensive Cooperative Partnership. Both sides encouraged the effective implementation of the student exchange programs at all levels. The Leaders reiterated to support the role and activities of Viet Nam-Myanmar Friendship Association and Myanmar  Viet Nam Friendship Association to enhance people-to-people exchange, to contribute proactively to the extensive development of the Comprehensive Cooperative Partnership between the two countries.

15. The two Leaders expressed appreciation of the close cooperation in regional and international fora, including ASEAN, Non-Aligned Movement and the United Nations. To elevate the excellent cooperation to new heights in the spirit of the Comprehensive Cooperative Partnership, both sides agreed to continue to support the realization of the ASEAN Communitys goals through regional cooperation within the ACMECS and the CLMV frameworks, especially in the areas of environment, poverty alleviation, water security, connectivity and human resources development.

16. The two sides reiterated to continue close cooperation in regional cooperation mechanisms in the Mekong sub-region, including the Mekong  Japan, Mekong  Korea, Mekong  Ganga, Lower Mekong Initiative as well as Greater Mekong Sub-region. Viet Nam encouraged Myanmar to become an official member of the Mekong River Commission (MRC).

17. Leaders of both sides expressed commitment to cooperate closely to build a successful ASEAN Community with central role in the regional security architecture.

18. Both sides reiterated the importance of maintaining peace, stability, freedom of navigation and overflight in the region; underlined the importance of the peaceful resolution of disputes in accordance with international law, the 1982 UNCLOS, without resorting to threat or use of force. Both sides committed to support the full and effective implementation of the DOC and the early conclusion of an effective COC in the South China Sea.

19. State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi expressed her deep gratitude for the hospitality, cordiality and warm-hearted reception that Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc accorded to her and to the members of the delegation and looked forward to receiving Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc on an official visit to Myanmar at a mutually convenient time.
QUANG NINH  Six members of a transnational drug smuggling ring received the death sentence on Thursday in northern Quang Ninh Province.

The accused include ring leader Hoang Van Tien, Bui ang uc, Tran uc Viet, Nguyen Thi Tuyet Hanh, Nguyen Toan Thang and Hoang Van Bac.

Tiens wife, Tran Thu Hang, and Nguyen Thi Hoa were sentenced to life imprisonment, while two others were sentenced to 20 years in prison each.

The traffickers were part of one of the five rings involved in trafficking drugs from Laos to Viet Nam and selling them to China and vice versa, according to Peoples Procuracy of Quang Ninh Province.

The rings were active in Ha Noi and in the northern provinces of Thai Nguyen, Bac Ninh, Bac Giang and Lang Son.

Between 2003 and 2013, the rings had smuggled more than 5,000 cakes of heroin, 35,200 synthetic drug pills and more than 1kg of Methamphetamine.

In 2014, Peoples Procuracy of Quang Ninh Province sentenced 30 smugglers to death, 13 to life imprisonment and 46 others to up to 20 years in prison for smuggling drugs, storing weapons for military use, forging fake documents and taking bribes.

In late 2016, 25 others involved in the cases were charged.  VNS
Draken International, a Lakeland, Florida-based Commercial Adversary Air company, hosted a Supersonic Kickoff Party event in their Lakeland facilities on Friday during the annual Sun n Fun airshow. John Baum, Vice President for Strategic Projects, came up with the name based on the fact that Drakens newest aircraft, the Atlas Cheetah and the Mirage F-1M, can fly at speeds far in excess of Mach 1. Baum said this new supersonic capability from Draken creates an even more challenging scenario for U.S. military pilots. Nearly a hundred local political, civic and business leaders attended the event and some made comments during the ceremony about the importance of supporting the Central Florida company as they strive to provide unparalleled training capabilities for the U.S. military.

Polk County Commissioner Todd Dantzler, Chair of the Board of County Commissioners, said this about Draken: Were fortunate to have a company like Draken International right here in Polk County. Draken is the leader in the Commercial Adversary Air market and regularly trains the U.S. Military across the United States. They also assist our best allies in Europe. Their fleet of over one hundred aircraft are the most advanced radar-equipped fighters commercially available anywhere in the world, and the newest additions  the Mirage F-1M and the Atlas Cheetah Cs  are supersonic, making them even more capable adversaries for U.S. pilots to train against. Were also pleased to hear about Drakens partnership with Florida Polytechnic University and pledge our support to that team as they help our Military remain the best in the world

Retired US Air Force Lieutenant General Thomas P. Stafford provided the keynote speech during the event, emphasizing the importance of Commercial Adversary Air support for the Pentagon and also the role that Polk County will play in this regard. General Stafford was the commander of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project flight, the first joint U.S.-Soviet space mission. Stafford was a Brigadier General at the time of the mission, becoming the first general officer to fly in space, as well as the first member of his Naval Academy class to pin on the first, second, and third stars of a general officer. He made six rendezvous in space and logged 507 hours of space flight in three different types of spacecraft. He has also flown over 120 different types of fixed wing and rotary aircraft.

Jared Isaacman, CEO of Draken International, emphasized another important aspect of the Supersonic event when he mentioned that his company is forming a partnership with Florida Polytechnic University who will offer support in two specific areas of high-tech applied research  improving Drakens global supply-chain logistics and modernizing their fleet of aircraft including fighters from the US, New Zealand, Czech Republic and soon South Africa and Spain. According to Isaacman, Drakens aircraft are the most advanced fighters commercially available and modernizing this fleet of jet aircraft to increasingly challenge 4th and 5th generation U.S. fighters will prove to be a worthwhile task  along with Florida Polytechnic Universitys assistance, Draken will offer unprecedented adversary air training capacity and capabilities at significantly lower costs to the American taxpayer. He went on to say that this kind of innovative thinking goes on every day at Draken, and Florida Polytechnic Universitys faculty and students will provide even more credibility and creativity to this effort. The new supersonic aircraft will start arriving at Lakeland Linder airport around May of this year and will likely start flying acceptance sorties this summer. Once the aircraft are certified for flight by the FAA, Drakens pilots will likely move them out west to their main flying operations in the Nevada Test and Training Range north of Las Vegas.
By Apr. 19, 2018



Each year, West Kentucky Community and Technical College has campus events for students, faculty and staff to celebrate Earth Week. This years celebration includes a day full of family fun, educational activities and music for the community April 28 from 11 am to 5 pm near the colleges Haws Gym.



We invite everyone to campus for crafts, a cooking demonstration, an obstacle course, a life-sized Operation Game, learning opportunities about hybrid vehicles, bee hives, animal conservation, Kentucky bats, marine chemistry, kids contest and so much more, said Bobby Lee, WKCTC Sustainability Project coordinator and biology professor. WKCTC faculty, staff, and students and Earth-friendly community groups such as Watershed Watch, Land Between the Lakes and Clarks River Wildlife Refuge will be help make the event a day to remember. This is an opportunity to learn more about what is going on locally and simply meet and enjoy life on Earth, said Lee.



The days cooking demonstration begins at 11:30 am. Local bands The Legendary Jack Martin & Good Company, The Melungeons, Art Thieves and Barely Blue will play during the event beginning at 1 pm. The college will also have a booth to collect new childrens sneakers for the Scholar House, which is located near the WKCTC campus. WKCTCs Kitchens Cafe will be the food vendor for the day. If it rains, the activities will be moved into Haws Gym.



Earth Day, which began in 1970, is celebrated annually in April with events worldwide in support of the environment and to raise awareness for the environmental protection and care of the planet. Like WKCTC, many communities Earth Day celebrations are part of Earth Week, an entire week of activities.



WKCTC and the City of Paducah are sponsoring the April 28 Earth Week Celebration. For more information, contact Bobby Lee at bobby.lee@kctcs.edu or 270-534-3237.





PADUCAH, KY - WKCTC invites the community to its Earth Day Celebration on April 28 for a free family fun day including a concert - rain or shine.
By WestKyStar & St. Mary Staff Apr. 19, 2018 | 10:09 PM | PADUCAH, KY

St. Mary High School principal, Jennifer Smith, said she wasnt surprised Abbigayle was selected. Abbi is not only very intelligent, but she has traveled extensively bringing a global perspective to her knowledge base. She went on to say, Most importantly, Abbi's dedication to her studies and her work ethic make her a stand out student and young lady."





According to the Governors Scholars Program website, this program is a summer residential program for outstanding high school students in Kentucky who are rising seniors. This program was established in 1983 due to the number of young adults leaving Kentucky to obtain their education and pursue their career paths elsewhere.





In order to participate in this highly competitive program, students are first nominated by their high schools and then compete on a state-wide level, the Governors Scholars website states. The Programs mission is to enhance Kentuckys next generation of civic and economic leaders.

Superintendent of Catholic Schools for the Diocese of Owensboro, Ann Flaherty, could not be more proud of the accomplishment of Abbigayle and three other students selected from Owensboro Catholic High School and Trinity High School in Whitesville.





The all-encompassing strength of the Catholic school juniors who earned one of the highest academic honors possible in the state of Kentucky is a testament to the excellent educational experience they have received at each of the Diocese of Owensboro Catholic high schools they attend, said Flaherty. I am deeply grateful to the stellar Catholic high school faculty and staff that contributed to each of these students' education.

There are three host campuses where the students will be housed and taught, plus a stringent curriculum for the summer session. These students will have no financial obligations to participate in this program.





Learn more about the Governors Scholars Program by visiting https://gsp.ky.gov/Pages/index.aspx.





Learn more about the St. Mary School System by visiting http://www.smss.org/.

The Catholic Schools Office for the Diocese of Owensboro has selected Abbigayle Vannatter to participate this summer in the 2018 Governors Scholars Program.
By The Associated Press Apr. 16, 2018 | 12:13 PM | FRANKFORT, KY

Kentucky's Democratic Attorney General has released his 2017 tax returns and asked all of the state's constitutional officers to do the same.

Beshear released his tax returns Monday morning along with a copy of his annual financial disclosure form. It shows he earned more than $118,000 in 2017, paid more than $12,000 in taxes and donated $2,902 to charity. His financial disclosure form shows he owns stock in US Bank and Microsoft. His only debts are a home mortgage and a student loan.

Beshear is a potential candidate for governor in 2019.
Apr 20, 2018 | By David

Researchers at Australias Swinburne University will soon be taking advantage of the possibilities of 3D bio-printing with a cutting-edge new Biopen device. They are assisting in development of a small handheld 3D printer that can be used by surgeons to efficiently regrow important tissue like bone and cartilage in patients, using stem cells. Swinburne's latest project is known as BioSphere, named after the beads that have been developed to more efficiently grow the necessary stem cells. Like a similar 3D bio-printing project being carried out at Griffith University, which we reported on recently, it will be funded by the Australian government's BioMedTech Horizons program.

Many bio-printing projects make use of stem cells. These cells can be extracted from individual patients, and then grown in a lab into the specific tissue that is needed to repair their body. Because they contain the patients DNA, they will be perfectly compatible with the surrounding healthy tissue in the areas that they are implanted. This leads to much quicker and more efficient healing, and improves the prognosis for a whole range of injuries and illnesses.

What is particularly promising about the new BioSphere research is the innovative way that it presents to grow stem cells. Bio-printing research wasnt progressing as fast as predicted due to the lack of means to generate the huge number of cells that are necessary for successful treatments. Researchers also lacked methods by which to recover the cells from the dishes that they were being grown on without damaging them.

The Swinburne researchers' approach will be to use thousands of tiny polymer beads to grow the cells on, instead of a dish. These are what give the BioSphere project its name. The beads are each around 0.3mm (0.01 inches) in diameter, and many thousands of them together will offer a hugely increased surface area on which to grow cells. Not only will it be possible to grow more cells faster, they will also be less likely to get damaged in the process of removal, as the researchers will be implementing a new light-based technique to detach them from the beads.

According to project supervisor Dr Nicholas Reynolds, ''The surface of the beads will be coated with light-sensitive nanoparticles that do not affect the cells growth until the particles are activated with an infra-red beam. At this point the activated nanoparticles cause the cells to gently detach from the beads, and can be easily recovered for re-implantation into the injured patient.''

As we reported before, the handheld 3D printing device, or 'Biopen', will contain special bio-ink infused with the necessary cells. Surgeons will be able to use it to draw new tissue in the areas where it is needed.

(all images, source: Swinburne)

The BioSphere research is part of PhD student Yashaswini Vegis project, within the ARC Training Centre for Biodevices at Swinburne, in partnership with St. Vincents Hospital in Melbourne. It is one of 11 different projects that are being funded by the AU$35 million BioMedTech Horizons program, which is focused on developing innovation and expertise in Australias bio-technology sector. It is intended to stimulate collaboration across disciplines, between the research, industry, and technology sectors, to maximize entrepreneurship and the potential of new ideas.

Posted in 3D Printing Technology

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Apr 20, 2018 | By David

Back in February of this year, the first 3D printed biodegradable artificial bone for the repair of long segment bone defect was successfully implemented, at Xijing Hospital in Xi'an, China. Xijing Hospital has been a site of many other important surgical 3D printing breakthroughs. The large porous bioceramic artificial bone was made using 3D filament-free printing (FFP) technology, by Xian Particle Cloud Biotechnology Co., Ltd. After 6 weeks of re-examination, the operation has now been declared a complete success. The regenerative effects on the patients bone defect were good, and the limbs are recovering their function well.

Long bone defects can be caused by various bone diseases or injuries, and they often fail to be effectively treated, leading to severe disability or even amputation in some cases. The Department of Orthopedics at Xijing Hospital was attempting to carry out treatment on a 44 year-old male patient, who had a right distal femur comminuted fracture, caused by falling from height. They found it difficult to achieve ideal results using traditional methods because of the extensive range of the defect, which was 6 cm (2.36 inches) in length and 3.5 cm (1.37 inches) in diameter. This irregular size meant that the resetting was difficult to position. This is what led the hospital to seek the help of Xian Particle Cloud Biotechnology Company.

The companys pioneering FFP 3D printing technology, and its bioceramic composite materials which have been tested by China's National Biosafety Agency, were used to produce personalized porous bioceramic artificial bone. The shape of the bone was consistent with the patients distal femoral segmental bone defect.

Using 3D printing technology to treat bone defects in this way has a number of advantages, including a high level of customization, high accuracy, and efficient use of material. In the production of a porous scaffold implant for repairing bone defects, Xian Particle Cloud Biotechnology Company's FFP 3D printing technique is capable of precisely regulating a variety of significant parameters for bone regeneration. These include the proportion of material composition, pore size, pore structure, connectivity and porosity. The structure can be customized to realize different porosities at the micro- and macro- levels.

Another huge advantage of the technique is that it makes use of biodegradable artificial bone. This material will gradually degrade as it induces new bone formation in the patient, and will eventually be completely replaced by the new bone tissue. This significantly reduces the potential risk of problems that can arise from having foreign implants in the body for a long period of time.

Xian Particle Cloud Biotechnology Co., Ltd. is one of the leading global companies and R&D bases for the development of advanced materials, innovative products and intelligent equipment in the fields of bioengineering, healthcare and advanced manufacturing. The company's biodegradable artificial bone scaffold incorporates comprehensive human bionic characteristics, with a multi-scale structure, and material that has similar strength to real human bone. As well as its biodegradability, its osteo-inductive properties give it major technical advantages for orthopaedics applications. The first successful use of the technique suggests that it could now be expanded to treat more people suffering from large limb bone defects, offering a high level of individualized repair.

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Olga Khazan in The Atlantic:

Though their numbers are growing, only 27 percent of all students taking the AP Computer Science exam in the United States are female. The gender gap only grows worse from there: Just 18 percent of American computer-science college degrees go to women. This is in the United States, where many college men proudly describe themselves as male feminists and girls are taught they can be anything they want to be.

Meanwhile, in Algeria, 41 percent of college graduates in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathor stem, as its knownare female. There, employment discrimination against women is rife and women are often pressured to make amends with their abusive husbands.

According to a report I covered a few years ago, Jordan, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates were the only three countries in which boys are significantly less likely to feel comfortable working on math problems than girls are. In all of the other nations surveyed, girls were more likely to say they feel helpless while performing a math problem.

So what explains the tendency for nations that have traditionally less gender equality to have more women in science and technology than their gender-progressive counterparts do?

More here.
(4/19/2018) - Court documents allege a complex scheme allegedly aimed at pushing victims to personal injury lawyers and physicians based on personal information in stolen Flint Police Department reports.

Anthony Sereno, who has three residences in New Jersey and the Detroit area, and Joseph DeSanto of Boca Raton, Fla., both are facing conspiracy and theft charges in the investigation, according to documents filed in U.S. District Court.

They are in addition to two former Flint police officers who pleaded guilty Wednesday to taking part in the scheme. A third unidentified former Flint police officer has been implicated in the scheme but not charged.

Sereno and DeSanto are accused of using classified traffic crash reports stolen from the Flint Police Department and using personal information on them to contact crash victims using various companies they own or manage.

The crash reports are a standard state of Michigan form police officers are required to fill out after every crash they investigate. While the reports are available to the public after approval, the stolen documents allegedly still were marked "unapproved" so they could not be released yet.

Sereno and DeSanto's companies serve as solicitors for personal injury lawyers and health care professionals. They allegedly tried to sign up Flint traffic crash victims for lawsuits or medical treatment with their clients.

Former Flint police officers Richard Besson and Jason Groulx both pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court on Wednesday to conspiracy charges for stealing hundreds of crash reports and selling them.

Groulx, who resigned from the Flint Police Department after an internal investigation began this year, allegedly stole the crash reports from the department and gave them to Besson.

Besson allegedly then sold them to a third unidentified former Flint police officer, who now works for Brandon Abell and 855-Painline.

Abell owns a solicitation company with offices in Michigan and Florida. He also works for DeSanto's companies.

Sereno and Abell used the stolen police reports to develop summaries of the crashes and contact information, which they gave to DeSanto's companies in Boca Raton.

Those companies operate a call center in Florida, where employees called Flint crash victims to see whether they wanted a referral for medical treatment or attorney representation.

After the calls, DeSanto's companies sent someone to the prospective clients' residences to sign them up for the services with their affiliated attorneys and health care facilities.

Several of the crash victims listed on the stolen Flint reports received chiropractic or rehabilitation treatment and legal representation from businesses affiliated with DeSanto's companies, which were not named.

According to court documents, DeSanto received kickbacks from the medical practitioners and personal injury lawyers to whom he directed crash victims.

Both Groulx, Besson and the unidentified former Flint police officer were paid for their roles in the scheme, according to court documents.

The scheme operated from June 2011 until April 2013. During that time, police have evidence showing 641 illegally obtained Flint crash reports changed hands and the partners paid $8,333 for them, according to court documents.

A federal grand jury handed down indictments against DeSanto and Sereno, which were unsealed on Wednesday. It was not clear on Thursday whether either was in police custody.

Groulx and Besson face six to 12 months in federal prison, plus fines and court costs, when they are sentenced on July 31.


Quarterly Activity Report March 2018

Adelaide, April 20, 2018 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Mithril Resources ( ASX:MTH ) ("Mithril") and its exploration partners are exploring for a range of high-value commodities throughout the Meekatharra, West Kimberley and Kalgoorlie Districts of Western Australia, and the Coompana Province of South Australia (Figure 1).Key PointsKurnalpi (Nickel-Cobalt)- Initial drilling program successfully intersected nickel sulphide and nickel-cobalt mineralisation at the 100%-owned Kurnalpi Nickel-Cobalt Prospect including;o 12m @ 0.54% nickel, 0.10% cobalt from 34 metres in 18GDSRC004 including 4m @ 0.70% nickel, 0.16% cobalt from 36 metres,o 12m @ 0.69% nickel, 0.07% cobalt from 26 metres in 18GDSRC003 including 4m @ 0.86% nickel, 0.10% cobalt from 26 metres.- Downhole EM geophysical surveying has identified a new off hole conductor that warrants further investigation.- EM geophysics and follow-up drilling planned for the June 2018 QuarterLignum Dam / North Scotia (Nickel)- Mithril now has over 500km2 of 100%-owned nickel prospective ground along strike from previously mined high-grade nickel sulphide mineralisation at the Silver Swan and Scotia deposits- To be explored in conjunction with ongoing exploration at the Kurnalpi Nickel Cobalt ProspectBilly Hills (Zinc)- Project area expanded to over 315km2 with a new tenement application east of the former Pillara Zinc Mine- Target generation continuing ahead of tenement grant anticipated for September 2018 QuarterCorporate and Cash- Cash reserves of $0.48M at 31 March 2018.Exploration OverviewDuring the March 2018 Quarter (the "Quarter") Mithril successfully intersected nickel sulphide and nickel-cobalt mineralisation at Kurnalpi, significantly expanded its Kalgoorlie District nickel search area, and continued with target generation activities at Billy Hills.To view the full report, please visit:About Mithril Resources Limited

Mithril Resources Limited (ASX:MTH) is an Australian resources company whose objective is the creation of shareholder wealth through the discovery of mineral deposits.

The Company and its exploration partners are actively exploring throughout the Kalgoorlie, West Kimberley and Murchison Districts of Western Australia for economic nickel, copper, zinc, and vanadium deposits.

In the Kalgoorlie District, Mithril is exploring for nickel on the Kurnalpi, Lignum Dam and North Scotia Projects which lie along strike from, or adjacent to previously mined high-grade nickel at the Silver Swan and Scotia Nickel Deposits.

In the West Kimberley, Mithril is exploring for zinc on the Billy Hills Project which lies adjacent to the previously mined Pillara Zinc Deposit.

In the Murchison, Mithril is exploring for copper, nickel and zinc mineralisation on the Nanadie Well Project and for copper, silver, zinc and lead on the Bangemall Base Metal Project. Mithril's exploration partner  Monax Mining Ltd is also exploring for vanadium on the Limestone Well tenements.
EIOPA detected a growing number of issues related to cross-border business activities provided through freedom to provide services. To enhance cooperation and communication between supervisory authorities in such situations, EIOPA rolled out cooperation platforms, a new and important tool that facilitates stronger and timely cooperation between national supervisors in the assessment of the impact of cross-border activities and identification of preventive measures. Benefits of cooperation platforms have been identified for both home and host supervisors. By the close of 2017, nine cooperation platforms were operational.



Furthermore, a wide range of tools such as balance sheet reviews, peer reviews, consistency projects on internal models, participation in meetings of colleges and bilateral engagements with national supervisory authorities continued to be used to enhance the supervisory capacity of national supervisors. For example, EIOPA oversaw a balance sheet review of the Bulgarian insurance sector and assets of its pension funds, issued three supervisory opinions, conducted two consistency projects and participated in 49 cross-border colleges and 14 colleges on internal models.



This year, in the field of oversight, EIOPA will pay specific attention to further implementation of prudential regulation, Solvency II, and conduct of business supervision. In particular, EIOPA will continue to focus on the close interaction with national supervisory authorities, improvements in supervisory practices in the authorisation process and supporting reviews of business models to detect those models posing material prudential or conduct risk.



Background



A cooperation platform is set up when EIOPA and relevant national supervisory authorities see the merit in strengthening cooperation in case of material cross-border business in order to enable a sound internal market in the European Union. The platforms allow home supervisors to make use of expertise and knowledge about local market specificities from host supervisors.



Freedom of establishment and freedom to provide services: Under the Solvency II Directive, once authorised by the home national supervisory authority, insurance and reinsurance undertakings have the right to establish a branch within the territory of another Member State (known as freedom of establishment) or may pursue their business in another Member State (known as the freedom to provide services) without any further authorisation. To find out more about oversight, see the short EIOPA Insight film here.
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EU Commission's Turkey Report Touches on Property Rights As Well

St. Gabriel Assyrian Monastry in Midyat, Turkey, founded in 397 A.D. Brussels (AINA) -- In its new report on accession, the European Commission in Brussels has given Turkey the worst testimonial yet, attesting that the country is facing serious regressions in the rule of law, freedom of expression and the independence of the judiciary.

"Turkey has been moving away from the European Union", states the report.

Within the framework of accession negotiations with Turkey, 16 chapters have been opened so far and one of these was provisionally closed. Under the currently prevailing circumstances, the report concludes, that "no new chapters are considered for opening." This means full stop of the accession process.

Overall, the EU Commission has certified the government in Ankara serious deficiencies in the areas such as justice, public administration reforms, fundamental rights and freedom of expression.

With respect to state of emergency which was declared mid July 2016 following the coup attempt, the EU report states that "disproportionate measures" have been taken by the government in a broad scale and collective nature, such as "widespread dismissals, arrests, and detentions," which continue to raise serious concerns in Brussels. Turkey should lift the state of emergency without delay," demands the report.

Furthermore, the Commission requests that Turkey should reverse the current negative trend in the rule of law and fundamental rights. It should "reinstate the necessary conditions to ensure the independence, accountability, quality, efficiency and professionalism of the judiciary.". In this context, Turkey should "respect its international obligations in relation to respect for fundamental rights and freedoms and effectively address serious human rights violations, including effectively investigating allegations of ill-treatment and torture," says the report.

During the reporting period, there had been "continued significant deterioration in key areas of human rights" and the "dismissal of judges and prosecutors, as well as constitutional amendments, further undermined the efficiency and independence of the judiciary".

Property rights

The EU experts also touch upon the property rights and express serious concerns in view of "confiscations under the state of emergency of property of many institutions, companies or private individuals, for which there is no domestic remedy." Appeals against expropriation decisions for large parts of the historical centre of Diyarbak?r were rejected in the court of first instance (story).

Regarding the implementation of the Law on Foundations which concerns Christian religious properties, "most of the appeals against rejected claims for restitution of properties are pending either before local courts or at the European Court of Human Rights," states the report.

Further noted is the special case which relates to the ownership of the Assyrian Monastery of Mor Gabriel 's land which is ongoing. After a number of Assyrian properties came under risk of expropriation in Mardin, "amendments to the Law on Foundations were introduced in March 2018 as a first step towards the registration to the community foundations." This concerns a list of 56 properties in Mardin, out of over 110 disputed immovables.
Economic Integration and Political Reconciliation in Iraq

After years of fighting, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levants (ISIL) control over territory in Iraq has crumbled. Yet the fate of Iraqs religious minorities remains unclear. When it was in control, ISIL treated all populations under its rule with great brutality, but the jihadist group specifically targeted Iraqs Christian and Yazidi communities for enslavement and violence, leading to widespread death and displacement among these two religious groups. And although ISIL has been driven out, the Christian and Yazidi communities, both with roots in Iraq going back thousands of years, are still at risk of extinction. There is naturally an altruistic reason to support targets of genocide--of which Christians and Yazidis unquestionably are--but there are strategic and practical reasons as well. Restoring these communities to Iraq may enhance the development and stability of the country, which in turn would benefit the entire region. Restoring persecuted religious minority communities in Iraq can specifically benefit the country in three ways:

Religious minorities can directly contribute to Iraq's economic growth by pursuing economic activities, some of which are unavailable to the Muslim majority. Religious minorities can encourage a nonsectarian national identity by serving as a buffer between larger ethnoreligious communities in political debates. Religious minorities may be particularly effective in establishing dialogue across sectarian lines.

Avoid policies that harden divisions. Religious minorities will help stabilize Iraq only if they are seen as part of a diverse and pluralist Iraqi society. U.S. policies that increase the distinctions between Christians, Yazidis, and the Muslim majority will be counterproductive. At the same time, the United States should direct the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the State Department to monitor and ensure that aid is reaching religious minority communities. The United States should accompany development aid with efforts to create economic opportunities that both target religious minorities and grow the overall economy.

Promote the integration of religious minorities. The United States should continue monitoring religious freedom abuses in Iraq to ensure religious minorities are protected. The United States should promote interfaith dialogue efforts in Iraq between Christians, Yazidis, and Muslims as well as implement political capacity-building programs intended to enable religious minorities to engage in the political process.

Margaret Coker, Eric Schmitt, and Rukmini Callimachi, With Loss of Its Caliphate, ISIS May Return to Guerrilla Roots, The New York Times, October 18, 2017, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/world/middleeast/islamic-state-territory-attacks.html. Naomi Kikoler, Our Generation Is Gone: The Islamic State's Targeting of Iraqi Minorities in Ninewa (Washington: Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide, 2017) , available at https://www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/Iraq-Bearing-Witness-Report-111215.pdf. Peter Kenyon, Life Under The Islamic State: Sharia Law and Few Services, NPR, August 29, 2014, available at https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/08/29/343986937/life-under-the-islamic-state-sharia-law-and-few-services. Hollie McKay, Iraqs Christians, Yezidi Say Kurds Failed Them in Fight against ISIS, Fox News, December 1, 2015, available at http://www.foxnews.com/world/2015/12/01/abandoned-iraq-christians-yezidi-say-kurds-failed-them-in-fight-against-isis.html. Brian Katulis, Rudy DeLeon, and John B. Craig, The Plight of Christians in the Middle East (Washington: Center for American Progress, 2015) , available at https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/security/reports/2015/03/12/108473/the-plight-of-christians-in-the-middle-east/. Phillip Connor and Conrad Hackett, Middle East's Christian Population in Flux as Pope Francis Visits Holy Land, Pew Research Center Fact Tank, May 19, 2014, available at http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/05/19/middle-easts-christian-population-in-flux-as-pope-francis-visits-holy-land/. Eliza Griswold, Is This the End of Christianity in the Middle East?, The New York Times, July 22, 2015, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/26/magazine/is-this-the-end-of-christianity-in-the-middle-east.html. Peter S. Henne and Conrad Hackett, Iraqi Yazidis: Hazy Population Numbers and a History of Persecution, Pew Research Center Fact Tank, August 12, 2014, available at http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/08/12/iraqi-yazidis-hazy-population-numbers-and-a-history-of-persecution/. Kikoler, Our Generation Is Gone: The Islamic State's Targeting of Iraqi Minorities in Ninewa. George J. Marlin, Iraqi Christians Look to Reclaim Their Ancient Homes--It's Now or Never, National Review, August 2, 2017, available at https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/08/iraqi-christians-mosul-nineveh-plains-isis-internally-displaced-persons-diocese-erbil-kurdistan/. U.N. Development Programme, Support for Integrated Reconciliation in Iraq, in Project Summary (UNDP, 2018).http://www.iq.undp.org/content/iraq/en/home/operations/projects/democratic_governance/reconciliation.html (last accessed April 2018). Kate Shellnutt, Pence: US Will Bypass UN and Aid Persecuted Iraqi Christians Directly, Christianity Today, October 26, 2017, available at http://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2017/october/pence-us-persecuted-christians-usaid-un.html; Rose Gamble, Catholic Charity to Repair 2,000 Homes for Christians Returning to Iraq, The Tablet, February 13, 2018, available at http://www.thetablet.co.uk/news/8556/catholic-charity-to-repair-2-000-homes-for-christians-returning-to-iraq. For useful histories, see Dawn Chatty, Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Kikoler, Our Generation Is Gone: The Islamic State's Targeting of Iraqi Minorities in Ninewa; Mordechai Nisan, Minorities in the Middle East: A History of Struggle and Self-Expression, 2nd ed. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2002); Roland Flamini, Forced Exodus: Christians in the Middle East, World Affairs 176 (4) (2013): 65--71. John Gerring and others, Does Diversity Impair Human Development? A Multi-Level Test of the Diversity Debit Hypothesis, World Development 66 (2015): 166--188; Adrian Karatnycky, The 2001 Freedom House Survey: Muslim Countries and the Democracy Gap, Journal of Democracy 13 (1) (2002): 99--112; Jos Peter S. Henne is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and Global and Regional Studies Program at the University of Vermont. He previously worked at the Pew Research Center--where he ran a study on global religious repression--and the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism. He received his Ph.D. in government from Georgetown University and B.A. in political science from Vassar College.

Restoring religious minority communities can help Iraq only if they are not seen as competitors for international resources to majority communities. Instead, religious minorities must be integrated into the broader society. With this in mind, the United States should adopt a dual-track approach to aiding religious minorities in Iraq. The policy suggestions presented in this report are meant to provide a framework for U.S. policy, keeping in mind that further work will be required to develop the policy tools Iraq will need to implement them. Specifically, U.S. policy must:There are moral reasons to aid victims of genocide such as Iraqi Christians and Yazidis. At the same time, there are pragmatic reasons. Restoring religious minority communities in Iraq can help stabilize and develop the country. Religious minorities can aid the community in three ways: boosting economic activity; encouraging a nonsectarian national identity; and promoting interfaith dialogue. Under attack by ISIL and other extremist groups, the Middle Easts religious minority communities--particularly Christians and Yazidis--are suffering. As ISIL gained control of portions of Iraq and Syria, it implemented extremist interpretations of Islamic law in the territory it ruled. This included brutal punishments for Muslims who did not follow ISIL's guidelines. They subjected Christians to forced conversion, with expulsion or violence if they refused. Many Christians felt betrayed by their own neighbors and by Iraqi and Kurdistan region security forces that failed to protect them as ISIL advanced, raising questions about their security post-ISIL. There are between 7.5 million and 15 million Christians in the Middle East. And while the Christian population in terms of numbers has increased since 1900, the faster growth rates of Muslims in the Middle East has meant that the Christian share of the population decreased from 10 percent in 1900 to 5 percent in 2010, according to research from the Pew Research Center. Data on deaths and displacements of Christians by ISIL are inconclusive, but the jihadist group has devastated Christian communities, leading some to fear Christians' presence in the region will be permanently diminished. The Yazidi community--a population that ranged between 300,000 to 700,000 in Iraq as of 2012--faced repression under former President of Iraq Saddam Hussein, which was followed by waves of violence that broke out after the United States overthrew him in 2003. With the rise of ISIL, the Yazidis endured widespread massacres and sexual slavery that have nearly wiped out this ancient community. As with Christians, exact numbers of Yazidis affected by ISIL are unknown. But according to a study by the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide, ISIL's campaign in Iraq's Ninawa province--where many religious minorities lived--displaced more than 800,000 people and left few religious minorities remaining in the area. This included Christians and Yazidis, as well as other minority groups such as the Turkmen, Sabean Mandeans, Shabak, and Kaka'i. There have been some efforts to redress these wrongs, but they are incomplete. Iraqi religious minorities have begun to return to the communities from which ISIL displaced them. The United Nations runs numerous aid programs in Iraq through the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), including some intended to promote dialogue across religious divisions. Additionally, the United States has announced that it will provide aid directly to Iraqi Christians due to concerns about whether the United Nations distributes sufficient aid specifically to Christians; private groups are helping to rebuild communities as well. Despite these efforts, religious minority communities in Iraq remain devastated. The fate of Iraqs Christians and Yazidis is tragic but unfortunately not uncommon. The modern Middle East--formed from the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and European colonies--has experienced several periods where religious minority populations have been displaced. This seems to echo several scholarly warnings that religious diversity makes instability and underdevelopment more likely. Yet highlighting the perils of religious diversity for the region overlooks the potentially greater benefits such diversity may bring. There are some indications that having multiple religious groups in a country can increase economic development and social stability. And while religious diversity can complicate politics and lead to destructive conflict--evidenced by the Sunni-Shia civil war in Iraq--it can also benefit society under certain conditions. Across all countries, those with greater religious diversity experience stronger economic growth. Religious diversity also corresponds with greater economic competitiveness, entrepreneurship, and social tolerance. There are a few possible explanations for this pattern.Religious minorities may boost economic growth directly through their entrepreneurial activities. These communities have played important roles in many Middle Eastern economies--including in Iraq. For example, Iraqi Christians have historically been well-educated and prominent in trades such as weaving and professions including medicine. Their displacement is thus not only a human rights concern; it also undermines Iraq's economic vitality. Vibrant Christian communities in Iraq would contribute to Iraq's economy and improve the situation for all Iraqis. Additionally, religious minorities have contributed to Middle Eastern economies for centuries by undertaking economic activities that are forbidden to Muslims --a practice that continues in the present day. One of the most visible examples of this sort of economic activity are Iraq's liquor stores. Iraqi Muslims are not allowed to sell liquor, which leaves this important segment of the retail market to Christians and Yazidis. These stores are very popular--even among Iraqi Muslims, who reportedly crowd them after the fasting month of Ramadan--and depend on religious minorities to run them. If these communities are not restored, an important element of the Iraqi retail economy will disappear, and their customers will turn to disruptive black-market alternatives.Iraq is one among many countries with sectarian politics. Tensions among Sunnis, Shia, and Kurds complicate political debates, as each group worries about the others gaining an advantage. The presence of smaller religious minority groups in Iraq may actually ease these tensions, because these minorities could serve as a buffer between rival groups. If a country is polarized between two or three large ethnoreligious groups, all politics become a zero-sum game. However, when political negotiations involve smaller groups--such as Christians and Yazidis--each group's fear of the others' gains will be diminished. Leaders will have to satisfy multiple communities with any policy, incentivizing them to appeal to those beyond their own sectarian group. This makes it more likely that political initiatives are effective at improving welfare. Rather than assuming a given government policy benefits one ethnoreligious group at the expense of others, Iraqis may trust that it benefits the whole country. This type of dynamic could eventually contribute to the lessening of sectarian tensions and to a greater sense of national unity. Admittedly, the development of a nonsectarian national identity is a long-term process, and the tough conditions Iraq's religious minorities face have made it difficult for them to participate actively in Iraqi politics. But their potential to promote a nonsectarian identity by serving as a buffer between larger groups is already apparent. Iraqi Christians and Yazidis serve as neutral voices in Iraqi political disputes and frequently present an intermediate perspective to balance tensions between opposing sides and to resolve conflict. Christian politicians, for example, have pushed back on efforts by their own community that they saw as divisive. Iraqi Christians have raised concerns about some international efforts to support their community, as they may promote sectarian tensions in Iraq. In 2017, for instance, a Swedish politician hosted a conference that brought together Western Christian leaders and representatives of Iraqi communities. Yet the Patriarch of the Chaldean Church--of which many Iraqi Christians are members--and a political party representing overwhelmingly Christian Iraqi Assyrians opposed the conference. The former argued that the "future of Christians in Iraq is linked to all Iraqis," and should be discussed within Iraq; likewise, the Assyrian party's spokesperson said the conference "was promoting a partisan and sectarian agenda." The international community can debate the desirability of efforts like this conference, but Iraqi Christians' concerns over the risk that similar efforts would increase sectarian tensions suggest they may be useful voices for an inclusive national identity in Iraq. Another way religious minorities can promote a nonsectarian identity is by reminding Iraqi politicians of their responsibility to protect all Iraqis--not just their own ethnoreligious group. Iraq's lone Yazidi member of Parliament--Vian Dakhil--has been a powerful voice calling on the Iraqi government to protect religious minorities. She has been instrumental in bringing attention to the suffering of the Yazidis under ISIL. Dakhil has also pressured the Iraqi government to ensure that it rescues captured Yazidis as it retakes territory from the terrorist group. By ensuring the central Iraqi government helps religious minorities such as Yazidis, these efforts may also encourage Iraqis to think beyond narrow sectarian identities.Religious minorities may also promote dialogue among larger rival groups. In a country with multiple religious communities, all members of society will feel compelled to interact with those outside their group, promoting moderation and inclusion. Likewise, faith leaders have been effective in a variety of peacebuilding efforts, including in East Timor, South Africa, and Northern Ireland. Clerics from Christian and Yazidi communities may thus be able to work with Muslim religious leaders to overcome distrust between the groups. Because they are relatively nonthreatening to the much larger Sunni and Shia Muslim communities, Christians and Yazidis may be able to spearhead interfaith efforts. Iraq's religious minorities have not yet had the chance to promote dialogue in Iraqi politics, but recent events suggest that this is a role they could fulfill. Iraqi Christians demonstrated their ability to effect dialogue in their response to the 2017 Kurdish independence referendum. Iraqi Kurds were overwhelmingly in favor of independence, while Iraqi Sunni and Shia Arabs opposed it. By contrast, Iraqi Christians' reactions were mixed. Some Christian leaders argued for dialogue between the Iraqi government and Kurds to resolve their differences, while others were supportive of independence. The impact of Christians' efforts--both for and against independence--was unclear, but the fact that Iraqi Christians did not approach this issue as a sectarian bloc suggests they may be able to promote dialogue in future debates.U.S. efforts to restore Christian and Yazidi communities is the right thing to do in response to ISILs genocide, and it would also help stabilize and develop Iraq's economy and national identity. Yet these benefits will accrue only if the United States formulates its policies in the right way. Religious minorities can improve a society through interaction and engagement with majority communities; therefore, U.S. policies must focus on enabling this engagement--not undermining it. To do so, the United States must initiate a two-pronged approach: U.S. policymakers must avoid policies that harden divisions, and at the same time they must promote actions to integrate religious minorities into Iraqi society. Further work will also be needed on the part of the United States to ensure that the Iraqi government implements these policies effectively. The following recommendations can provide a framework for U.S. policy on restoring and integrating religious minorities in Iraq.Religious minorities will help stabilize Iraq only if they are seen as part of Iraqi society. U.S. policies that increase the distinction between Christians, Yazidis, and the Muslim majority will be counterproductive.The United States should provide aid for religious minorities through a broad range of international organizations, such as the UNDP and nongovernmental organizations, rather than setting stabilization aid aside exclusively for Iraqi Christians. In response to some U.S. religious freedom advocates concerns, the Trump administration recently shifted its aid policy, cutting off support for the UNDP in favor of providing aid exclusively to Iraqi Christians. This may be misguided, as it could increase resentment toward religious minorities and does little to help stabilize Iraq outside of Christian communities. Instead, as CAP has argued previously, the United States should adopt a needs-based approach to development aid and should work with international donors. Some exceptions for work targeted specifically at religious minorities is acceptable. The United States, however, should send a clear message that these are in addition to--and not instead of--the larger pool of stabilization funds.The United States should direct USAID and the State Department to ensure aid is reaching religious minority communities. Concerns raised about aid reaching Iraqs religious minorities are not unfounded; studies by CAP and others have highlighted persistent discrimination against religious minorities in the Middle East. When the United States develops a needs-based approach to aid, it must also pay close attention to how the aid is dispersed. USAID and the State Department should monitor all aid dispersal to ensure that corruption at the federal and local levels does not harm religious minority communities.The United States should accompany development aid with economic opportunities that both target religious minorities and grow the overall economy. As CAP has argued previously, both the threat of violence and the lack of economic opportunities lead religious minorities to flee the Middle East. Indeed, the economic situation of Iraqi Christians had been declining for some time before the emergence of ISIL. Restoring these communities to Iraq requires expanding job opportunities and economic security in addition to development aid. One important area in which the United States can help is the restitution of property to Christians and Yazidis post-ISIL. As CAP has argued, ongoing property restitution issues make it difficult for religious minorities to participate in the economy. The United States should provide assistance to Iraq on resolving these issues. Additionally, development aid intended to promote economic growth can directly help religious minorities. Funding from the UNDP, for example, allowed a group of displaced Yazidi women to start a bakery in the Kurdish area of Iraq; the business has since grown and employs numerous displaced Iraqis. The United States should support similar UNDP efforts to provide economic opportunities to religious minorities.In addition to integrating into society, religious minorities must also be protected from abuse and be given the opportunity to engage in politics. As CAP has argued previously, the United States should endeavor for more inclusive Iraqi politics. U.S. policy should thus ensure that religious minorities are not discriminated against and are able to engage in Iraqi politics.The United States should continue monitoring religious freedom abuses in Iraq to ensure religious minorities are protected. The State Departments Office of International Religious Freedom (IRF) and the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom report on religious freedom abuses around the world. These offices should be fully funded and staffed so that the United States is aware of abuses against religious minorities. The State Department must also be willing to place diplomatic pressure on Iraq in the case of any abuses--even if it complicates other initiatives.The United States should promote interfaith dialogue efforts in Iraq between Christians, Yazidis, and Muslims. The IRF tracks religious dialogue efforts, while the Office of Religion and Global Affairs endeavors to promote such dialogue around the world. Both offices must be fully staffed. Additionally, the latter should work closely with Christian, Yazidi, and Muslim religious leaders in Iraq to set up interfaith dialogue efforts.The United States should implement political capacity-building programs to enable religious minorities to engage in the political process. The National Endowment for Democracy and the State Department have provided funding for capacity-building programs, which train civil society to engage in the political process. Both offices should direct funding and personnel to Iraqi religious minorities to ensure that they have the tools to interact with other communities and advocate for their interests.As CAP has argued in previous reports, the United States should focus its efforts in Iraq on sustained engagement and stabilizing competition to ensure that the country develops after the territorial defeat of ISIL. Restoring religious minority communities--such as Christians and Yazidis--to Iraq can contribute to this strategy as well as the overall cohesion of Iraq. Yet this will only occur if the United States emphasizes integrating these communities into Iraqi politics and society as part of post-ISIL reconciliation. Policies that harden divisions between religious minorities and the rest of society will prove counterproductive. Vice President Mike Pence declared that protecting religious freedom is a "foreign-policy priority" for the Trump administration. If that is true, then the administration must adopt a smart and consistent approach to defending persecuted religious minorities in Iraq, as this report presents. Otherwise, the United States will be promoting the very sectarian tensions it claims to oppose. Endnotes
For the fourth year in a row, Regions Bank has received the 2018 Gallup Great Workplace Award, the organization's highest honor for engaged workplaces.

Gallup clients participating in the Gallup survey process and meeting certain criteria are eligible to apply. Regions had to demonstrate how engagement positively influences associate performance. At the same time, the company had to show how employees respond to strategy, leadership, accountability and communication, among other factors.

A panel of workplace consultants and experts evaluated the applicants to select the winners.

Regions is one of 39 companies selected this year. These companies average 14 engaged employees for every one actively disengaged employee, almost seven times the rate in the U.S. and more than 15 times the rate for workforces globally.

Dave Keenan, Regions' head of human resources, said the company believes engaged employees are crucial to Regions' success.

"We are honored that Gallup has recognized Regions Bank for the fourth consecutive year among the top companies globally for our efforts to create a highly engaged workforce," Keenan said.
With five children between them, Chris and Andrea Beall of Auburn are used to doing everything as a family of seven. Even when they married last July after six years of dating, they took the whole crew along with them on their Florida honeymoon, which was more like a family vacation. Having 14 people in a condo might not seem terribly romantic, but "we had a blast together," Andrea says.

The couple didn't realize that they would soon be chosen to go on a bonus trip for two, courtesy of North Carolina Tourism.

The Bealls, who are featured in TV, digital and print ads, are still pinching themselves, says Andrea. (Facebook photo)

The Bealls had joined Treadstone Climbing Gym in Columbus, Ga., to help Andrea, a graduate student at Auburn University, overcome her "incredible" fear of heights. Last August, the gym shared a post on Facebook from a casting company searching for an adventurous couple with some rappelling experience to be featured in a commercial in which they're filmed "experiencing things for the first time."

Chris, who works as the e-commerce manager for Auburn-based Kinnucan's Specialty Outfitters, saw the post, couldn't stop thinking about the opportunity. After sending a hastily written email, he was surprised when the company wanted the couple to do a self-interview. It took a few hours and much laughter, they say, for their teenage daughter to record a 12-minute video in their living room - and soon they were on their way to North Carolina.

Chris, who is originally from Cleveland, Ga., and Andrea, who's from Colorado, were both living in Auburn when they met online and learned that she had a teacher friend whose husband worked with Chris. "It's one of those wonderful, meant-to-be stories," she says.

When they found out about the North Carolina trip, the school year had just begun. Andrea, a third-grade teacher at Wrights Mill Road Elementary School and a doctoral student in educational leadership and administration at Auburn, had to ask her principal for a couple of days off for the long weekend. "She said yes right away."

Chris has three children, and Andrea has two. Their oldest daughter is heading off to college next year, and the younger kids are 12, 11, 8 and 7. "They're all like peas in a pod," says Andrea. "I don't know how they got along without each other."

Though they felt a little guilty about leaving their kids behind, they couldn't turn down a long weekend just for the two of them. "We do everything as a family," Andrea says. "But everyone told us, 'Of course you're going to do this!'"

"This was so unexpected," says Chris. "We were fortunate to be able to get away."

Andrea and Chris are featured in an ad campaign that captures "Firsts that Last," in which travelers experience things for the first time in three different regions of North Carolina. The couple's "firsts" include visiting the state, seeing waterfalls (and facing their fears by rappelling down them) and going away together without their children.

During their trip, they visited Transylvania County in the western part of the state, known as "the land of the waterfalls," where they explored the Brevard and Saluda areas. "They wanted us to have an authentic experience," Andrea says. "We experienced every moment together as a couple" - with a camera crew documenting it all.

They say they can't wait to return for a family vacation in North Carolina with the kids and Chris's parents to share the places they discovered.

And now they're having another new experience as their TV spots, digital and transit advertising start to appear in the Atlanta area. Chris's mother spotted them on TV last week. Their print ad will run in national and regional magazines.

"We're still pinching ourselves," says Andrea. "It's so funny and surreal."

"We still can't believe it's real," adds Chris. "It was such a phenomenal trip."
A 37-year-old man has been formally charged in a bank robbery Wednesday at a downtown Birmingham bank.

Birmingham police on Thursday identified the suspect as Benjamin Madison. He lives in Birmingham, and was convicted of murder when he was just a teen.

The holdup happened at 9:11 a.m. Wednesday at Synovus Bank at 215 Richard Arrington Jr. Boulevard North. Lt. Pete Williston said Madison entered the bank, pulled out a handgun and approached a teller.

After the suspect approached the teller, an armed security employee at the bank engaged him. The suspect immediately surrendered and got on the ground. The guard help Madison at gunpoint until Birmingham police arrived to take him into custody.

The Jefferson County District Attorney's Office issued warrants Thursday against Madison for first-degree robbery and for certain persons prohibited from carrying a firearm. He was convicted of murder in 1999, and sentenced to 15 years in prison.

He is being held in jail on $75,000 bond.
Again?!

Yes, again.

Four years after a quixotic and shamefully costly bid failed to lure the 2016 Democratic National Convention to Birmingham, the city will once again vie for the party's quadrennial gathering to select its presidential and vice-presidential nominees, city officials confirm.

This time, though, the bid is not an unsolicited hope-against-no-hope Hail Mary whose only accomplishment was to funnel barrels of cash to favored friends.

Last month, in a letter to mayor Randall Woodfin, obtained by AL.com, Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez asked the city to "consider" vying for the 2020 convention, which he called "an historic event that could shape the future of Birmingham for years to come."

Perez noted that noted past host cities saw "$150 million to $200 million" injected into the local economy.

On Friday, Birmingham is expected to be among several cities named by the DNC as having applied for the convention.

Prior to receiving the letter, city officials say, bidding on the 2020 convention was not on the mayor's radar.

Now?

"We are very excited that the Democratic National Committee has recognized the City of Birmingham as an attractive, possible site for the 2020 Democratic National Convention," Woodfin told AL.com. "Such recognition shows how much progress our city is making when we receive these kinds of unsolicited invitations."

U.S Congresswoman Terri Sewell said she "thrilled" about the bid.

"Birmingham is the perfect destination with our historic Civil Rights sites, vibrant downtown, and diverse food culture," she adds. "Our southern hospitality is second to none and would make Birmingham the ideal city to host the Democratic National Convention in 2020!"

Okay, whoa. Let's take a deep breath and recall that the previous bid, conceived and crafted behind closed doors, cost the city far more than it appeared to gain.

To bid for 2016, Birmingham spent $275,000 on three consultants--Partnering for Progress, a firm founded by Jefferson County Chief Tax Assessor John Powe that has ties to Oliver Robinson ($100,000); the Podesta Group ($175,000), a now-defunct lobbying firm founded by Tony Podesta, brother of Hillary Clinton Campaign Chairman; and former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder's law firm of Covington & Burling ($25,000).

This time, Woodfin promises that won't happen.

"The application process will be handled by internal staff,'' he said. "In 2014, the City of Birmingham paid external partners to help with the bid package for the 2016 DNC. We will not have new contracts to pursue the nomination."

One thing has not changed, though: Birmingham still does not meet many "preliminary requirements" outlined by the DNC, which were included with the letter. Among them, that the host city possesses 17,000-18,000 hotel rooms and 1,000 luxury suites within 30 minutes of the arena.

Even with the addition of several new hotels since 2014, Jefferson County still only has just under 15,000 rooms, according to the Greater Birmingham Convention and Visitors Bureau. (There are an additional 3,000 rooms in Shelby County, said the BCVB.)

The DNC also noted the desire for 650,000 square feet of "usable space" in an arena and convention hall (the BJCC, which is slated for an extensive renovation, currently boasts just 350,000 square feet), an arena seating at least 18,500 (Legacy holds 17,654).

Woodfin would not specifically address each requirement, but city officials are banking that "preliminary" means the DNC will be flexible in its criteria.

They also believe Birmingham has more than a puncher's chance this time, in part, because, right or wrong, the perception of Alabama has changed since the election of Sen. Doug Jones last December. No Democrat had won a statewide office in Alabama since 2006.

While in Alabama, Ellison engaged with grass-roots leaders

DNC vice chair Keith Ellison even ventured to Alabama in early March, meeting with elected officials throughout the state. He called Jones' victory a "dramatic statement."

"Alabama is in play," Ellison added. "Alabama is leading the way. Alabama is showing people how to do it."

Not surprisingly, Birmingham did not make the list of finalists for the 2016 convention. Announced in November 2014, they were: Columbus, Ohio, New York and Philadelphia.

The 2016 convention was held in Philadelphia.

"We are excited about this opportunity," Woodfin said, "and how selection as the host city will expose the world to our communities that are rich in history, restaurants, parks and more - all elements that we love about the Magic City.''

DNC Letter by KentFaulk on Scribd
The Tennessee Valley Authority, in a long-planned auction, sold about 900 acres of the Muscle Shoals Reservation on Friday.

The public utility announced that Muscle Shoals Holdings LLC made the highest bid at auction of $5 million. The company now has 90 days to close on the property pending a permit release from the Alabama Department of Environmental Management.

TVA set the minimum bid for the land at $3.85 million.

TVA announced more than a year ago that it would be selling the property at auction after the utility's board declared the land surplus in 2012.

TVA will be maintaining a presence at the reservation - retaining about 100 acres of the redevelopment area and an additional 1,200 acres located along the Tennessee River, which includes the nationally recognized Rockpile Recreational Area and buildings that provide workspace for nearly 500 employees.

"One of TVA's core missions is economic development," David Bowling vice president for land and river management, said in the announcement. "If TVA has property that is no longer used or needed for future business, it makes sense to partner with communities to sell these properties to help stimulate private investment."

The auction culminates a six-year project to prepare the land for sale and complete city zoning requirements, TVA said.

"The hard work is done and now it is time to see the fruits of our labor," Sheffield Mayor Ian Sanford said in the TVA announcement. "Hatch Boulevard and 2nd Street are some of the most heavily travelled streets in our area. With the number of potential customers who drive by this site every day, I'm excited to see the opportunity that the private sector has to develop this site."

President John F. Kennedy visited the reservation on May 18, 1963, to recognize TVA's 30th anniversary.

"In 1963, President Kennedy stood on the reservation and said 'the initials T-V-A stand for progress and the people of this area are not afraid of progress,'" Muscle Shoals Mayor David Bradford said in the TVA announcement. "Selling this property to attract new businesses and jobs to the Quad Cities continues TVA's commitment to progress."
A 16-year-old has been arrested on murder and arson charges in the Tuesday-morning that killed his mother and injured two other relatives, authorities said.

Nicholas Lamons is accused of setting the fire at the family's Alabama 67 home in the Joppa community of Morgan County, said Sheriff Ana Franklin. Lamons was booked into the county jail with bail set at $500,000.

His mother, 32-year-old Kimberly Faye Lamons, died at the scene of the fire around 1:40 a.m. The cause of death appears to be smoke inhalation, said Coroner Jeff Chunn. Kimberly Lamons' mother and daughter were taken to the hospital for treatment.

"Investigators were able to get enough evidence for probable cause to show that the fire had been recklessly and intentionally started," the sheriff said. "Based on the surrounding investigation, there's enough evidence to show that the suspect knew that there were people inside and there was little chance of everyone escaping alive. Based on that, he was charged today."

Franklin said Nicholas Lamons was not at the scene when first responders arrived.

"But we later learned he had been there at the time of the fire and left," she said.

Because of the suspect's age, the sheriff said she can't comment on any circumstances prior to adult charges being filed. In Alabama, 16-year-old murder suspects are charged as adults.

Franklin hasn't said how the fire was started or why authorities believe Nichols Lamons is responsible.

Further details weren't immediately available.
At 10 a.m. today--the 19th anniversary of the Columbine school shooting-- students across the country will walk out of their schools for the second time this year to protest gun violence in schools.

At least 11 Alabama schools are participating in the second National School Walkout.

Students first walked out of their schools to protest gun violence on March 14--one month after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that left three teachers and 14 students dead. Students stood outside their schools for 17 minutes with each minute representing each life taken in the Parkland shooting.

Students at Huffman High School in east Birmingham stood outside for an additional minute March 14 in memory of senior Courtlin Arrington, who was shot at killed at the school on March 7.

Today, students plan to walk out of their schools at 10 a.m. local time and observe 13 minutes of silence in memory of the 12 students one teacher killed at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999. Students are then encouraged to hold open mics, protests, rallies, meet with or write letters to their local lawmakers or other activism events throughout the day.

As of late Thursday night, more than 2700 walkout events are registered nationwide, according to this site.

According to the Pew Research Center, a majority of students in the U.S. fear a shooting could happen at their school.

Of the students polled, 57 percent said they were very worried or somewhat worried a shooting could happen at their school, with more Black and Hispanic students reporting this fear.

Sixty percent of Black students said they were very worried or somewhat worried about a school shooting. Those statistics were even higher for Hispanic students with 73 percent of Hispanic students polled being very worried or somewhat worried about a school shooting.

Madison County's High School Democrats will host a "March for Our Lives" Saturday in downtown Huntsville.

Marchers will gather along the Big Spring Park canal in downtown Huntsville at 800 Monroe Street. The event is scheduled to last from 11 a.m. until 2 p.m.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- In a series of startlingly candid conversations, President Donald Trump told former FBI Director James Comey that he had serious concerns about the judgment of a top adviser, asked about the possibility of jailing journalists and described a boast from Vladimir Putin about Russia prostitutes, according to Comey's notes of the talks obtained by The Associated Press on Thursday night.

The 15 pages of documents contain new details about a series of interactions with Trump that Comey found so unnerving that he chose to document them in writing. Those seven encounters in the weeks and months before Comey's May 2017 firing include a Trump Tower discussion about a possible encounter between Trump and prostitutes in Moscow; a White House dinner at which Comey says Trump asked him for his loyalty; and a private Oval Office discussion where the ex-FBI head says the president asked him to end an investigation into Michael Flynn, the former White House national security adviser.

The documents had been eagerly anticipated since their existence was first revealed last year, especially since Comey's interactions with Trump are a critical part of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into whether the president sought to obstruct justice. In explaining the purpose of creating the memos, which have been provided to Mueller, Comey has said he "knew there might come a day when I would need a record of what had happened" to defend not only himself but the FBI as well.

James Comey Memos just out and show clearly that there was NO COLLUSION and NO OBSTRUCTION. Also, he leaked classified information. WOW! Will the Witch Hunt continue?  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 20, 2018

The memos cover the first three months of the Trump administration, a period of upheaval marked by staff turnover, a cascade of damaging headlines and revelations of an FBI investigation into potential ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. The documents reflect Trump's uneasiness about that investigation, though not always in ways that Comey seemed to anticipate.

In a February 2017 conversation, for instance, Trump told Comey how Putin told him, "we have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world" even as he adamantly, and repeatedly, distanced himself from a salacious allegation concerning him and prostitutes in Moscow, according to one memo.

In another memo, Comey recounts how Trump at a private White House dinner pointed his fingers at his head and complained that Flynn, his embattled national security adviser, "has serious judgment issues." The president blamed Flynn for failing to alert him promptly to a congratulatory call from a world leader, causing a delay for Trump in returning a message to an official whose name is redacted in the documents.

"I did not comment at any point during this topic and there was no mention or acknowledgment of any FBI interest in or contact with General Flynn," Comey wrote.

By that point, the FBI had already interviewed Flynn about his contacts with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, and the Justice Department had already warned White House officials that they were concerned Flynn was vulnerable to blackmail.

Flynn was fired Feb. 13, 2017, after White House officials said he had misled them about his Russian contacts during the transition period by saying that he had not discussed sanctions. The following day, according to a separate memo, Comey says Trump cleared the Oval Office of other officials, encouraged him to let go of the investigation into Flynn and called him a good guy. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and is now cooperating with Mueller's investigation.

The memos reveal that days before Flynn's firing, then-White House chief of staff Reince Priebus asked Comey if Flynn's communications were being monitored under a secret surveillance warrant.

"Do you have a FISA order on Mike Flynn?" Priebus asked Comey, according to the memos, referring to an order under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Comey said he "paused for a few seconds and then said that I would answer here, but that this illustrated the kind of question that had to be asked and answered through established channels."

Comey's response is redacted on the unclassified memos.

The memos also show Trump's continued distress at a dossier of allegations -- since revealed to have been funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign -- examining potential ties between him and his aides and the Kremlin. Comey writes how Trump repeatedly denied to him having been involved in an encounter with Russian prostitutes in a Moscow hotel.

"The President said 'the hookers thing' is nonsense, but that Putin had told him 'we have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world,'" according to one memo. Comey says Trump did not say when Putin had made the comment.

The documents also include the president's musings about pursing leakers and imprisoning journalists. They also provide insight into Comey's personal and professional opinions. He judges the administration's travel ban to be legally valid, and he takes a swipe at former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, calling her predecessor, Eric Holder, "smarter and more sophisticated and smoother."

The memos were provided to Congress earlier Thursday as House Republicans escalated criticism of the Justice Department, threatening to subpoena the documents and questioning officials.

In a letter sent to three Republican House committee chairmen Thursday evening, Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd wrote that the department was sending a classified version of the memos and an unclassified version. The department released Boyd's letter publicly but did not release the memos. The chairman issued a statement late Thursday saying the memos show that Comey clearly never felt obstructed or threatened.

Justice officials had allowed some lawmakers to view the memos but had never provided copies to Congress. Boyd wrote that the department had also provided the memos to several Senate committees.

Boyd wrote in the letter that the department "consulted the relevant parties" and concluded that releasing the memos would not adversely affect any ongoing investigations. Mueller is investigating potential ties between Russia and Trump's 2016 campaign as well as possible obstruction of justice by the president.

Comey is on a publicity tour to promote his new book, "A Higher Loyalty." He revealed last year that he had written the memos after conversations with Trump.

He said in an interview Thursday with CNN that he's "fine" with the Justice Department turning his memos over to Congress.

"I think what folks will see if they get to see the memos is I've been consistent since the very beginning, right after my encounters with President Trump, and I'm consistent in the book and tried to be transparent in the book as well," he said.

Story by Mary Clare Jalonick, Eric Tucker, and Chad Day. Tom LoBianco contributed to this report.
A student was wounded in a Friday morning shooting at an Ocala, Florida high school. The shooting occurred on the same day as students at high schools around the country plan walkouts to protest gun violence.

The Marion County Sheriff's Department said the incident occurred at Forest High School in Ocala. The suspect is in custody. One person was injured and was treated by medics, according to the sheriff's department.

All Marion County, Florida schools were placed on alert as a precaution.

Authorities asked parents and residents to avoid the area as the investigation continues.

On Feb. 14, a gunman killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, prompting the latest wave of anti-firearm protests.
The former chief of the Clanton Police Department pleaded guilty today on a violation of the ethics law and fraudulent use of a credit card, according to the Alabama Attorney General's Office.

Brian Allan Stilwell pleaded guilty to the charges today, officials said. The plea came in the midst of a trial that began Monday.

The crimes he pleaded guilty to happened between 2010 and 2015 while Stilwell was the Clanton Police Chief and treasurer of the Chilton County Fraternal Order of Police (FOP).

During the trial, prosecutors presented evidence that Stilwell used the FOP debit card without authorization and used the funds for his personal gain. The FOP mainly used the funds for its Operation Santa Claus program, which provides presents for needy children, officials said.

Prosecutors also presented evidence that Stilwell used his position as the police chief to unlawfully take money that had been condemned and forfeited to the city for law enforcement purposes.

"When a police chief breaks the law it is a terrible betrayal that cuts deeply into the trust of the citizens he was sworn to protect and of his fellow law enforcement officers," said Attorney General Steve Marshall. "In this case, the law enforcement community of Clanton and Chilton County came together and stood shoulder to shoulder with us to bring justice to their people, to restore their faith, and to hold Brian Stilwell to account for his crimes."

Stilwell is set for sentencing at 9 a.m. Aug. 28. He faces penalties of two to 20 years for the ethics conviction for use of official position for personal gain, a class B felony, and one to 10 years for fraudulent use of a credit/debit card, a class C felony.

Attorney General Marshall commended Assistant Attorneys General John Kachelman III and Chris Moore of his Criminal Trials Division. He thanked the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, the Clanton Police Department, the Chilton County Sheriff's Office and the Chilton County District Attorney's Office for invaluable assistance.
A teen murder suspect admitted setting the Morgan County fire that killed his mother and sent two others to the hospital, court records state.

Nicholas Lamons, 16, is charged in the Tuesday-morning fire death of his mother, 32-year-old Kimberly Lamons, at their Alabama 67 home in the Joppa area.

Sheriff's investigators along with fire fighters responded around 1:40 a.m. to the home. The son wasn't at the scene then, and neither was the family's van, court records state.

"Nicholas was located a short time later asleep in the van in Somerville," Investigator Jeff Reynolds wrote in an arrest affidavit. "Nicholas was questioned and admitted that he had started a fire in his bedroom prior to leaving the residence. Nicholas also stated that he came back by the house a short time later and saw the trailer burning but did not make an effort to notify anyone."

Kimberly Lamons' daughter and mother also were in the trailer at the time of the fire. They were taken to Huntsville Hospital for treatment.

Appointed lawyer Robert Norman, of Decatur, declined comment. The case is set for preliminary hearing Tuesday at 9 a.m. in Morgan County District Court.

Lamons is held in the Morgan County Jail with bail set at $500,000.
Tommy Battle broke new ground Thursday in his effort to unseat Kay Ivey as governor, alluding in an online campaign ad to her role in the state's prepaid college tuition program that collapsed during her tenure as state treasurer.

The Battle campaign posted the first of a series of upcoming videos to Facebook simulating a debate between Battle, the mayor of Huntsville, and Ivey. Ivey has so far refused to take part in Republican gubernatorial debates leading up to the June 5 primary.

"You won't see bankrupted programs on my watch," Battle said in the video. "And not every candidate can say that."

Balancing the Alabama budget: it's common sense As many of you know, Kay Ivey continues to refuse to debate me. All Alabamians deserve to hear what our vision and plans are for the state. I personally reached out to her to try to coordinate schedules but heard nothing back. So, I thought wed put together a series of videos to give Alabamians a taste of what a debate might look like. Here are our views on the Alabama budget. Watch and share. #BattleforGovernor Posted by Tommy Battle on Thursday, April 19, 2018

Ivey's role in the prepaid program, known as PACT, has not been a part of the conversation so far in the gubernatorial campaign. Along with Battle and Ivey, evangelist Scott Dawson and state Sen. Bill Hightower are also running for the GOP nomination.

The Ivey campaign did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.

In the video, Battle notes that Huntsville has received a triple-A bond rating from both Moody's and Standard and Poor's credit rating services for the past 10 years. A triple-A rating is the best rating available and Huntsville is the only city in Alabama to have that distinction from the credit rating services over the past decade.

In the past, Ivey has pointed to a struggling national economy as the reason the PACT tumbled into financial peril. Her successor as state treasurer, Young Boozer, said that the PACT program was in a "financial death spiral" when he took office in 2011.

Created by the legislature in 1989, PACT allowed parents to pay college tuition years in advance, either in a lump sum or regular payments. The program began struggling in 2000, when increased tuition and attendance were coupled with stock market downturns.

The program stopped selling new contracts in 2008.

The legislature approved a plan to bolster PACT in 2010, committing a total of $548 million over 13 years. But after Boozer took office, he said that bailout was not nearly enough.

The financial issues were finally resolved in 2013 when the Alabama Supreme Court upheld a settlement that gave partial tuition to families enrolled in the program.

"Only market conditions caused this, not staff or the board. It's due solely to the economic conditions of the country," Ivey said in 2003.

The PACT issue derailed Ivey's brief gubernatorial run in 2010 and she eventually ran for and was elected as the state's lieutenant governor. She was re-elected in 2014, then became governor on April 10, 2017, after Robert Bentley was forced to resign.

The Battle video begins with Ivey describing the state's "antiquated budget system" that is "very unique" with both an education and general fund budget.

"Governor, Huntsville has a very unique way of budgeting, too," Battle said in the video. "It's called common sense. And not wasting the taxpayers' dollars."

Battle goes on to say that there is no need to combine the education and general fund budgets.

"It takes smart government and effective leadership to balance the books," Battle said.
At a municipal sprayfield in Uniontown, Alabama, a spigot blasts what it supposed to be fully treated wastewater into the air. The water is meant to seep down into the ground, or evaporate or be soaked up by grasses that grow in the field.

That is not what's happening in this rural city in Perry County, located west of Montgomery and south of Tuscaloosa, in the heart of Alabama's Black Belt.

Instead, the pumps spray partially treated sewage water onto a constantly overflowing pond. What's supposed to be a field is constantly flooded, the water held back by earthen dams that are crumbling, sending constant streams of partially treated sewer water flowing into Freetown Creek.

Uniontown's sewage problems aren't limited to the sprayfield. The collection system leaks, the treatment system is malfunctioning, and local residents are complaining of odors, free-flowing sewage leaks and high water bills for a system that clearly doesn't work.

Or, as the Alabama Department of Environmental Management noted in a recent court filing:

"Overflows at the sprayfield and treatment lagoons have been chronic issues and appear to be increasing in number, volume and frequency... The increasingly deteriorating conditions pose an increased threat to the health and welfare to the citizens of Uniontown and the environment."

And that's after the city received $4.8 million in grants and loans from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2012 to address the problem.

"We have had serious issues with our sewage and this has been going on for decades," said Ben Eaton, a Uniontown resident and vice-president of the group Black Belt Citizens Fighting for Health and Justice. "It would have been much easier to fix it back then than it is now.

"It's gotten to a point now where you have to sort of tear it down and start over."

Eaton said elected officials in Uniontown and Perry County have not dealt with the situation, and he is currently running for a seat on the Perry County Commission.

U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell, who helped secure the USDA funding for Uniontown, said she was disappointed that so many problems persist after that money was spent.

"The reality is that money was not spent wisely," Sewell said. "That makes it harder for us to get additional federal resources when we are not good stewards of the resources that we have."

Sewell said she met with Uniontown officials, ADEM and Sentell Engineering -- the Tuscaloosa-based firm working on Uniontown's sewage system -- in 2014 to express her displeasure with the way the money was spent.

"Much of the funding ended up going to replacements and repairs of the existing system instead of solving the new problem," Sewell said.

Local activists, most notably the Black Belt Citizens group, have also argued the money was not well spent and should have been put toward a mechanical wastewater treatment plant.

"A mechanical treatment plant will allow you to have growth," Eaton said. "I'm not the type of person who wants to fix something just for me. There are other people coming along behind me.

"There's nothing wrong with actually fixing [the sewer system] so our kids don't have to worry about it."

Sewell said local leadership failed her constituents in Uniontown.

"They are just asking for basic service, water and sewer," Sewell said. "Every American, especially those in my district, in the 21st century deserve to have access to quality water and basic wastewater treatment facilities."

Uniontown sewage spills: Feb. 2018 41 Gallery: Uniontown sewage spills: Feb. 2018

ADEM has been pursuing enforcement action against the city for years to address violations of the Clean Water Act associated with the system and failure to properly notify the public after sewer spills, but the violations continue.

A January 2018 status update from ADEM said the department has "exhausted its legally available enforcement options against Uniontown," and "the matter is now in the hands of the courts."

ADEM also noted that Uniontown residents "pay among the highest sewer fees in the area and, due to their income levels, are unlikely to be able to withstand increased fees to provide needed funding."

Sentell Engineering says it did the best it could with the amount of money it had to work with, and that the system, while still showing serious problems, has improved.

The company proposed five options for permanent fixes to the city's sewage problems, all costing more than $20 million.

Uniontown Mayor Jamaal Hunter did not respond to multiple requests to comment for this story.

ADEM also seems to have trouble reaching Hunter.

Earlier this month the department sent the mayor a certified letter requesting the city take more immediate action to remedy its leaking sewer system and "strongly encouraging" Hunter's participation in monthly conference calls between the state agency and city consultants.

The department has also filed a legal motion asking the judge in their civil case against Uniontown to require Hunter to attend "all status conferences and the monthly conference calls."

A many-faced problem

To say the Uniontown sewer system is broken may be a bit of an understatement. The system is broken in just about every way it can be. It functions like a car held together by duct tape, and the tape isn't holding as well as it once did.

According to a February report compiled by Sentell Engineering for ADEM, the problems start in the collection system, which is full of leaky old terra cotta pipes and brick and mortar manhole covers.

These numerous leaks let untreated sewage escape, and allow millions of gallons of rainwater into the sanitary sewer, flooding the treatment system beyond capacity after even a one-inch rain event.

For multiple weeks, a broken water main in Uniontown has also been spraying treated drinking water onto downtown streets. ADEM documents indicate some of that is also infiltrating the sewers, flooding the system even when it's not raining.

That flooding renders equipment at the sewage treatment lagoon in town ineffective, and the lagoon itself overflows, because the pumps that send the supposedly treated water 4.6 miles to the sprayfield can only handle so much water.

Then the sprayfield, with its clay-heavy soil, doesn't allow water to soak back into the ground, creating a pond and a constant stream of sewage flowing into the creek.

The system is designed to handle about 500,000 gallons per day. Documents show that just a one-inch rainfall can send four times that amount -- 2 million gallons per day -- to the Uniontown treatment lagoon.

Once all that rainwater, plus the sewage from about 1000 residents and the wastewater from the Harvest Select catfish processing plant make it through the crumbling sewers, they reach a lagoon that's flooded well beyond its capacity.

The lagoon overflows, sending partially treated sewage over the sides of the lagoon's earthen dams that and into nearby Cottonwood Creek. The sewage also backs up inside the system, shorting out UV sterilization lamps, flow meters and an automatic screen that was installed to catch solid material. That means the water that actually reaches the sprayfield isn't receiving the level of treatment it is supposed to.

The sprayfield -- functionally a pond -- is also contained by earthen dams that are failing. Sentell's engineering report on the system credits beaver dams with helping hold back the water in the sprayfield.

The city continues to file occasional reports of sanitary sewer overflows from both the lagoon and sprayfield, with both a volume estimate and a start and end time for the discharges.

But in reality, overflows from the sprayfield don't stop. They are described in those reports as "ongoing," and the engineering report states that the sprayfield "is saturated to the extent that effluent continuously flows into Freetown Creek."

Where did $4.8 million go?

In its engineering report to ADEM, Sentell described the steps taken in 2013 to improve the system's performance.

Sentell added a headworks with an automatic screen and flow meter at the entrance to the lagoon.

Two of the three treatment cells were said to be "full of sludge, which did not allow for much treatment," so they were dredged and deepened from five feet to eight to 10 feet. The lagoons were reconfigured from parallel cells to one continuous series to maximize treatment time, forcing water to flow through all parts of the lagoon before being pumped to the sprayfield.

Baffle curtains and aerators were added to the lagoon to improve treatment results. UV disinfection lamps were added at the end of the process to kill fecal bacteria in the wastewater.

Approximately 40 percent of the collection system -- 21 miles of mostly terra cotta pipes and roughly 300 manholes -- was inspected by running video cables through the lines or by smoke testing.

Sentell said the "most grievous structural problems found were repaired to the extent funds would allow." Approximately $1 million of the USDA funding was spent on the collection system.

The report claims that the quality of the effluent now being sent to the sprayfield has been "greatly improved."

However, the constant flooding "short circuits" the automatic screen, flow meter and UV system, and causes frequent overflows at the lagoon. The UV system is described as "inoperable." The force main that sends water to the sprayfield "breaks frequently," according to the report.

$21 million 'wetlands' solution

Sentell presented five options to the Uniontown City Council for big picture fixes for their sewer system. The estimated cost of each option was more than $20 million.

"The amount of effluent that the city must treat to maintain its existence in economically devastating," Sentell writes in its report.

The council voted for the option that was recommended by Sentell, a $21.4 million project to repair the collection system and then build a wetlands finishing facility at the 60-acre site of the current sprayfield.

A two-foot compacted clay liner would be added to the existing sprayfield, creating a shallow, long wetland that would be planted with "nutrient and water hungry plants called cattail and bulrush."

Water from the lagoons will be sent to the wetlands through larger pipes and larger pumps, where it will filter through the wetlands before being discharged into Freetown Creek.

Sentell said the system works and similar systems have been installed in Berry, Ala. and other small towns and has proven effective.

Eaton and other residents are skeptical.

"Come on," Eaton said. "You're going to pump sewage in a pond and expect for vegetation to clean it?

"You're talking a half million gallons of water a day with a half million gallons of bacteria a day? It's not going to happen."

Three of the other options presented by Sentell would include building a mechanical treatment plant. Those options were not much more expensive than the wetlands option for the initial construction, ranging from $21.7 to $27.9 million.

A mechanical plant, however, would require the city to hire and maintain enough skilled employees to operate the plant, which Sentell estimates would cost around $180,000 per year.

Funds needed



In order to proceed, Uniontown will need to find the money for the wetlands treatment option.

Sewell said wastewater treatment issues are a growing problem in her district, not just in Perry County, but also places like Lowndes and Wilcox Counties. She said local, state and federal entities will have to work together to solve these issues, but there is a path to getting it done. Sewell said she worked with Senators Doug Jones and Cory Booker to get $1.8 billion in wastewater infrastructure money included in the 2018 omnibus bill.

"I'm continuing to make this a top priority both for funding but also in working with our stakeholders, both local and state as well as federal to direct health and infrastructure resources in the area," Sewell said.

Uniontown -- and other Alabama communities struggling with sewage issues -- would still have to apply for that funding, however. The city applied for multiple grants this year's cycle and was not selected.

Sewell, like many Uniontown residents, expressed reservations about Sentell's work to date in Uniontown.

"I have to say I haven't been impressed thus far," Sewell said. "They've been the engineering firm for the city for the last decade or so, and we still have these problems.

"I get that you need to have the resources, but when given the resources, we're not seeing adequate solutions."

'In Perry County, it's really environmental injustice'

Residents of Uniontown have had to deal with a host of issues beyond their sewer system. The Arrowhead Landfill, one of the state's largest, opened just outside the city limits in 2007, then drew national headlines when 4 million tons of coal ash waste were shipped there after the 2009 TVA Kingston spill.

A local cheese plant operating in the city has generated complaints and a lawsuit over smells and waste emanating from the factory. That facility has its own wastewater treatment system which discharges to a different sprayfield than the one the city uses.

Harvest Select, one of the largest catfish processing operations in the country, also operates in Uniontown and discharges into the city sewer system. The catfish plant was believed to be a major contributor to the flooding of the sewer system.

However, Sentell Engineering said flow meters installed at the facility in April 2017 showed the plant was only discharging about half as much water as was previously believed. The rain, Sentell says, is a larger contributor to Uniontown's problems than the catfish plant.

These are the kinds of operations, leaders say, that towns in richer, whiter areas don't have to deal with. Uniontown's population is 90 percent black according to the 2010 U.S. Census, and its median household income was just over $15,000.

"In Perry County, it's really environmental injustice," Sewell said. "It's not just the wastewater infrastructure problem.

"You also have the coal ash problem. You also have both noise and smell from various facilities, so it's a bigger environmental issue than just wastewater."
Mobile police are searching for a man accused of kidnapping his girlfriend around 7:30 this morning, causing a Mobile elementary school to go on lockdown, according to the Mobile Police Department.

Police confirmed the incident caused O'Rourke Elementary School to be put on a soft lockdown.

Daven Jones, 40, is wanted on charges of first-degree kidnapping, first-degree burglary and three counts of menacing, police said.

Police responded to Peach Place Apartments off Jeff Hamilton Road around 7:30 Thursday morning in reference to a kidnapping, police said.

Police said Jones kidnapped his girlfriend at gunpoint and fled the area in a blue Dodge Avenger. The Dodge was later found at McDonalds at Schillinger Road and Cottage Hill Road. The girlfriend was also found.

Jones is a black male who stands 5-feet 11-inches tall and weighs about 175 pounds, police said.

Anyone with information on Jones' whereabouts should call 251-208-7211.
For the first time in more than seven months, 1-year-old Valeria Ocampos heart beat on its own.

The babys family, along with her team of surgeons and nurses at UF Health Shands Hospital, were stunned when on April 2, Valerias Berlin Heart, the artificial heart pump that maintained blood flow to her heart, was successfully removed. The pump had kept her alive for nearly half of her life.

But by early March, hospital staff grew confident they could start weaning her off the Berlin Heart. Over the course of three weeks, doctors gradually decreased the machines pump rate, said cardiac surgeon Mark Bleiweis.

Valeria is UF Healths first patient to ever come off the Berlin Heart, a device for end-stage heart failure. The machine fed four tubes into the different chambers of her heart and is normally a transition toward a heart transplant, Bleiweis said.

Its probably one of the greatest experiences in our groups history, he said. She has been given a chance to live a normal life.

Victoria Escobar, Valerias mother, said the road to healing has been stressful. Valeria, less than a year old, fought complications like strokes, seizures and a collapsed lung.

Its extremely painful for a parent to watch their child go through something like that, Escobar said.

Since her youngest daughter was transferred to Shands, Escobar, 34, said she practically lived at the hospital, often sleeping on a hospital-provided sofa bed.

She said everyone agreed to be strong for Valeria, who rarely stopped smiling.

Shes a very happy baby, Escobar said.

When Valeria celebrated her first birthday on January 6, Escobar organized a photoshoot. She and her husband, Carlos Ocampo, and several nurses decorated the hospital bed with pink and gold pillows. They gave Valeria a pink dress and chocolate birthday cake  which Valeria dug into, covering her face and hands in frosting.

I needed to keep that face smiling, Escobar said. That was my goal  keep that face smiling.

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Every day, Escobar and Ocampo clung to the hope that Valerias heart might improve, she said.

About 30 doctors, nurses, family and friends crowded around Valerias bed when the doctor stopped the artificial heart. Nearly everyone cried.

Escobar couldnt believe Valerias heart was beating on its own. She wouldnt have to see her daughter, only about eight pounds, hooked up to a machine the size of a small refrigerator anymore.

On April 13, Valeria left the hospital.

Escobar said even small things are more meaningful now.

During that first bath, Valeria was startled by the rushing water as her mother gingerly soaped over the ridge of newly formed scars.

Those scars, I love them. Im going to take care of them, Escobar said. Those are the proof of gods miracle.

Contact Elliott Nasby at enasby@alligator.org. Follow him on Twitter at @_ElohEl.

Carlos Ocampo, left, and Victoria Escobar, right, kiss their 1-year-old Valeria Ocampo, who was released from UF Health Shands hospital last Friday.
Update midnight Saturday: The 19-year-old accused Ocala high school shooter is being charged with terrorism for shooting a student through a door.

The suspect, Sky Bouche, is being held without bond in the Marion County Jail on eight charges, which also include aggravated assault with a firearm and possession of a short-barreled shotgun, according to a Marion County Sheriffs Office news release.

An investigation into the shooting at Forest Hill High School Friday found that Bouche targeted a school because he had done research on what would bring the most media attention, authorities said.

After arrest, Bouche made several statements about potentially conducting another shooting and said he originally intended to conduct the shooting on Friday the 13th but changed his mind, the sheriffs office said. He also told detectives he felt ignored.

Detectives found that Bouche drove to the school and walked onto campus with a sawed-off shotgun concealed in a guitar case, authorities said.

Bouche went into a bathroom to prepare for the shooting, the sheriffs office said. He put on a pair of gloves and a tactical vest. When he left the bathroom, he shot one round through a classroom door that injured a 17-year-old male student, according to the report.

The sheriffs office has not released the name of the injured student. The student was taken to a hospital and suffered from non-life-threatening injuries, authorities said.

Deputy Jim Long heard the gunshot at 8:39 a.m. and responded to the scene, authorities said. At 8:42 a.m., he took Bouche into custody.

Update 7:20 p.m. Friday: Marion County Sheriff's Office arrested a former student of Forest High School for a shooting at the school Friday morning.

Sky Bouche, 19, of Crystal River, Florida, was charged with eight counts, including terrorism, aggravated assault with a firearm, possession of a firearm on school property and possession of a short-barreled shotgun.

Deputies said Bouche shot a 17-year-old male student with a 17.5 barreled shotgun. The student was taken to the hospital for nonlife-threatening injuries and is in stable condition.

Bouche was escorted from the school in a white jumpsuit by MCSO deputies, according to a video posted on the MCSOs Facebook page. Media asked him why he had gone to the school with a gun and shot the student.

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I shot through the door, he said. I didnt see anyone, I didnt see anyone.

Reporters asked if why he was shooting blindly into the school, and he didnt respond. He spoke again when a voice off camera asked if he had anything to say.

Sorry, he said, pausing. It doesnt make it better anyways.

Bouche lives 41 miles from the high school where deputies detained him.

Update 12:25 p.m. Friday: Marion County Sheriff Billy Woods said the accused Forest High School shooter is a 19-year-old who does not currently attend the school.

Woods said the victim is a 17-year-old male student, who was taken to a hospital for his injuries but is in stable condition, at a press conference early afternoon Friday.

The shooting was intentional, he said. Today marks the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting in Littleton, Colorado, where 12 students and one teacher were killed in 1999. School walkouts were planned in accordance with the anniversary across the country.

The names of the victim and the accused shooter have not been released.

Woods said a school resource officer heard a loud bang that sounded like gunfire and ran toward it at about 8:40 a.m. He disarmed the suspect within minutes. The shooter did not resist arrest, Woods said.

I want to assure Marion County residents that today, they should be proud of their first responders, he said.

School Resource Officer Jim Long

MCSO spokesperson Lauren Lettelier said school resource officer Jim Long has been with the sheriffs office for 25 years and at Forest High School for 10.

Woods said the shooting took place in one of the buildings on the schools campus. The sheriffs office is investigating if the shooter was targeting certain students, Woods said. He said he could not confirm whether the shooter is a former Forest High student because of the ongoing investigation.

Deputies are also patrolling other Marion County schools, and all rumors or potential threats will be investigated and taken seriously, Woods said. But he said nothing has occurred at other schools in the county.

Its a shame what society has come to, Woods said. My feelings, my emotions are running rampant.

Update noon Friday: A shooting threat at Westport High School in Ocala was unfounded, said Kayla Welch, an executive secretary for the Marion County Sheriffs Office.

Some nearby schools were put on a code red, which locks down all school doors, in response to the threat. Welch could not confirm which schools.

Initially, some nearby schools were put on code red in response to threat, but now all schools are under code red for rest of school day.

All schools under code red as a precaution for rest of day, and school isnt canceled.

Update 10:50 a.m. Friday: The suspect is male, but no additional information is available, said Marion County Sheriffs Office executive secretary Kayla Welch. SWAT is performing a secondary sweep of the school. Local, state and federal law enforcement are assisting Marion County Public Schools by increasing law enforcement presence at all schools in the county.

Welch said there are rumors of other shootings currently in the county  these are not true.

Marion County middle and high schools remain in code yellow, which closes campuses to outsiders, as a precaution.

Original Story: One person is injured and a suspect is in custody after a reported shooting at Forest High School in Marion County, authorities reported.

There is no confirmed information on the shooter or injured, said Kayla Welch, an executive secretary for the Marion County Sheriffs Office.

Four minutes after classes typically start at Forest High School, police were called. By 8:42 a.m., the suspect was in custody Welch said. MCSO is clearing each room in the building and evacuating students to the First Baptist Church of Ocala, located at 2801 SE Maricamp Road, she said.

The on-campus officer responded almost immediately, Welch said.

Marion County Public Schools tweeted the victim was sent to the hospital with nonlife-threatening injuries.

All Marion County middle and high schools are on a code yellow, which closes campuses to outsiders, as a precaution. The MCSO Facebook page will be updated, Welch said.

Governor Rick Scott tweeted he was briefed by Marion Countys Sheriff Billy Woods and had talked to other officials.

Ive offered any state support in Marion County they may need, he wrote.

Forest High School has 2,350 students and 125 teachers, according to its website.

A Marion County Sheriff's Deputy stands outside Forest High School as students exit the school after a school shooting occurred, Friday, April 20, 2018 in Ocala, Fla. One student shot another in the ankle at the high school and a suspect is in custody, authorities said Friday. The injured student was taken to a local hospital for treatment. (

One person is injured and a suspect is in custody after a reported shooting at Forest High School in Marion County, authorities reported. The high school's location is pictured above.
Update 1:10 a.m. Friday: A couple hundred patrol vehicles from different agencies drove from Trenton to Gainesville to escort the deputies to the medical examiner's office on Southwest Third Avenue. When authorities arrived at about 1 a.m. Friday, they closed off parts of West University Avenue.

Original Story: Two Gilchrist County Sheriffs Office deputies eating lunch in a Chinese restaurant in Trenton, Florida, were shot and killed Thursday afternoon, authorities said. The shooter was shot and killed by responders outside the restaurant.

The shooter was identified Thursday night by authorities as John Hubert Highnote, 59, of Bell, Florida.

The two deputies, Sgt. Noel Ramirez and Deputy Sheriff Taylor Lindsey, were eating in the restaurant Ace China, located at 1122 E Wade St. in downtown Trenton, at about 3 p.m. when the shooter walked up to the restaurant and shot both deputy sheriffs through the window, GCSO Deputy Chief Darry Lloyd said. Trenton is about 45 minutes west of Gainesville.

Both deputies died from their injuries, inside the restaurant, according to the release.

The shooting is still an ongoing investigation and there is no apparent motive, Lloyd said. The type of weapon used and how many rounds were fired has not been released, he said.

Officials from the Levy County Sheriffs Office, the Alachua County Sheriffs Office, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the State Attorneys Office have all responded to the area to help, according to the release.

President Donald Trump tweeted, My thoughts, prayers and condolences are with the families, friends and colleagues of the two @GCSOFlorida deputies (HEROES) who lost their lives in the line of duty today.

Florida Governor Rick Scott announced over Twitter he had offered state help to Gilchrist.

Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi confirmed the deaths and gave her condolences in a statement.

At about 1 a.m. Friday, a couple hundred patrol vehicles arrived at the medical examiner's office on Southwest Third Avenue after escorting the killed deputies from Trenton to Gainesville. West University Avenue was closed during the procession.

GPD Lt. Marc Pourde said law enforcement officers from different agencies stood at attention as the the fallen deputies were taken into the medical examiners office.

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Its overwhelming, he said. This is like a brotherhood. Unfortunately, it has to be a time like this when you see it at its strongest.
Graduation is a mere few weeks away, and you find yourself thinking, more often than usual, How the heck did I get here? You think back to unloading your parents car in the front of Broward Hall in the sweltering August heat, and you remember the nerves you felt as you walked into your first college lecture hall. It feels like just yesterday, right?

As you tie up loose ends and complete your long list of lasts, you realize youre really going to miss this place.

You decide to have one last get-together with your best friends and meet up at the usual friends apartment a few days before the big day with paint, brushes and graduation caps in hand. You all decide to keep it a secret what youre going to paint on your cap so you can all be surprised later that night.

After a few hours of painting and several cold beers, its time for the big reveal. One friends cap displays a typical Thanks, mom and dad surrounded by flowers. The next has an alarmingly artistic painting of Century Tower. The last friend, however, has gone with a unique design. Their cap reads...

Darts & Laurels

This Monday, Accent Speakers Bureau announced it will host a 30-minute Q&A session with Jodi Kantor, the New York Times journalist who was part of the team to break the Harvey Weinstein story and reveal the Hollywood mogul had been paying off his sexual harassment accusers.

Kantor will talk about her career in journalism and her work on the famous story. Unfortunately, one thing she will not do is receive equal pay for speaking. According to Accent Chairwoman Shelby Buchanan, Kantor will be paid $20,000, which is significantly less than speakers are typically paid.

For reference, Jim Jefferies was paid $125,000 to speak, and John Mullaney was set to receive $85,000. Terry Crews was paid $40,000  double what Kantor will receive.

Before we go into our gripes about the inequity in payment, we have to award Accent our initial laurel. Bringing in Kantor to speak to UF students grants us all a unique opportunity to hear from one of the most noteworthy journalists and female professionals of our time, which is invaluable. As journalists ourselves, we each found ourselves elated at the chance to see Kantor, but the number behind her visit brought us back down.

The distinction in pay is something we cannot look past or ignore. The inequality is blatant and astounding. As such, we award a dart to Accent as well, for their disrespect of Kantor, female professionals and the field of journalism.

On May 29, many of us will need to run on Dunkin, because more than 8,000 Starbucks store locations will be closed. The coffee chain announced Tuesday it will close many of its cafes for the day in order to conduct anti-bias training. The decisions comes after two African American men were arrested at one of the stores.

According to the New York Times, officials reported the two men were arrested after they had asked to use the restroom without purchasing anything. An employee refused their request and asked them to leave the store. When the men stayed put, the employee called the police and the two men were arrested.

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The situation led to significant upset in the public, as it should have. However, we are impressed with the way Starbucks has chosen to handle the situation. Not only did the CEO issue a formal apology, but the company is choosing to do something about the problem and educate their employees. We are appalled that the incident ever took place, but we must award a laurel to the Starbucks company for taking preventative action so nothing like this happens again.

We realize of course, that the decision to enact this training was likely, at least in part, a publicity stunt. However, regardless of motives, something good is resulting, and that is something we can be happy about and thankful for.
In 2005, a Michigan State law professor published a paper in a law journal where he described a way to commit the perfect crime and get away with it. His article got a lot of attention, because unlike a lot of fictional crime stories with perfect crimes, the scenario that law professor Brian C. Kalt described was real and very much possible.

Prof. Kalts perfect crime takes place within a 50-square mile area dubbed the zone of death situated atop Americas famous supervolcano, the Yellowstone National Park. Inside this lawless oasis, one can commit any major crime, such as homicide, freely admit to it, and still get off scot-free. Heres how it works:

The vast majority of Yellowstone National Park is situated in the state of Wyoming. However, the northernmost and westernmost parts of the park spill over the border into the adjoining states of Montana and Idaho. This is where the opportunity lies, thanks to a poorly drafted statute in the Sixth Amendment of the US Constitution.

Let us imagine a man killing someone in the Idaho section of the park. He is arrested, arraigned and taken to Wyomingunder which the jurisdiction of the park fallsto be tried. However, because the US Constitution demands that any trial should be held in the state where the crime itself was committed, the man successfully convinces the authorities to take him to Idaho instead. While standing before the judge in an Idaho courtroom, he pulls out his trump cardthe Sixth Amendment. The Amendment states that every criminal should have a fair trial before an impartial jury drawn from the state and district where the crime was committed. This should have been straightforward, but not in the case of Yellowstone National Park. You see, when Yellowstone was created, the entire park was placed in the federal district of Wyoming, including the parts in Montana and Idaho. So while the state where the crime was committed is Idaho, the districtstrangelyis Wyoming

This means that the jury must be drawn from people living within the boundaries of the Yellowstone National Park in Idaho. Fortunately for the defendant, no one lives in the Idaho section of Yellowstone. Since a jury cannot be formed it is impossible to try the man for his crime. So theoretically, the man walks free.

The Zone of Death was put to the test once, shortly after Kalt announced its existence. A hunter illegally shot an elk within the Montana portion of Yellowstone. The hunter used Kalts argument in his defense hearing, demanding a jury consisting of people living in the state of Montana and the district of Wyoming. While people do live in that section, not many were qualified for jury duty, and it would have been very difficult, if not impossible, to form a full jury of twelve. Unfortunately, the court dismissed the argument, and the hunter took a plea deal rather than appealing the ruling.

A simple solution to the problem, according to Vox, would be to pass a law placing Idaho's portions of Yellowstone inside the District of Idaho. But the Congress doesnt think the Zone of Death is a problem. The Department of Justice argued that trying someone in the wrong state or district amounts to a "harmless error", even if the error in question is a clear violation of one's Sixth Amendment.

The courts may or may not agree that my loophole exists, and in any case this Essay is not intended to inspire anyone to go out and commit crimes, Brian Kalt wrote in his original paper. Crime is bad, after all  but so is violating the Constitution. If the loophole described in this Essay does exist it should be closed, not ignored.
Ahead of Earth Day on Sunday (22 April), the environmental coordinator for the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, the Revd Dr Rachel Mash, argues that the opposite of love is not hate, but apathy.

We often think that the opposite of love is hate. To be honest, that is not true. The opposite of love is the lack of feelings a  pathy. I doubt that there are many Christians that would admit to hating the world. But there are many who are apathetic to the state of the world.

There are many reasons for this. Some of them are spiritual - we should be primarily concerned with salvation, Jesus came to save humans from sin. The environment is thus a side issue which should not take up too much of our energy from the more important spiritual issues. Others feel a bit worried that this whole concern for nature is a little new agey. Others question whether we should add the environment to the social justice issues of the church  we should be engaged in far more important issues such as poverty, unemployment, housing, crime. The environment is a middle class tree hugger issue. Others feel that their little acts can make no difference.

Close to 48 years ago, on 22 April 1970, millions of people took to the streets to protest the negative impacts of 150 years of industrial development. In 2018 the Earth is in a worse position, the planet is warming at disastrous speed. Our oceans are full of plastic  the theme for this years Earth Day is plastic pollution. It is time for us to hear the cry of the poor and the cry of the Earth.

And so on Earth Day we must come back to the basics of our faith. What is salvation? John 3:16 tells us that God so loved the World that he gave his only begotten son. The original word in Greek is cosmos  God so loved the Earth and the entire Cosmos that he sent his son.

Jesus died on the cross for our salvation  and his blood fell onto the Earth.

When he rose again the Earth shook  this was the moment that creation, groaning in agony, had been waiting for! Jesus died on the cross so that all the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe  people and things, animals and atoms  get properly fixed and fit together in vibrant harmonies, all because of his death, his blood that poured down from the cross (Colossians 1:20, The Message).

The resurrection means a new Creation  restored humanity living on a restored Earth. And Earth Day is a chance to celebrate our love for Gods creation and commit ourselves anew. We confess that we have failed to be good stewards of Gods Earth and commit ourselves to becoming healers of the Earth.
Posted on: April 19, 2018 11:47 AM

[Anglican Journal, by Tali Folkins] With the approach of Earth Day this Sunday (22 April) Canadian Anglican and Lutheran leaders are asking for prayers and Earth-friendly action. In a joint statement, Archbishop Fred Hiltz, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, Mark MacDonald, National Anglican Indigenous Bishop and the Revd Susan Johnson, national bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada, invite people to join them in praying for the humility and discipline to use Earths resources wisely and responsibly.

They begin with the Rule of Life, a prayer written by the Anglican Church of Canadas Indigenous ministries department and used by many Canadian Indigenous Anglicans, which acknowledges a Sacred Circle in which all are related.

As we read this prayer today, we are reminded of the importance of relationships, including our relationship with Mother Earth, the bishops write. We are also reminded that through prayer God calls us to action.

They then provide some suggestions for using the Earths resources more responsibly, including being more mindful with the use of water; eating more locally grown food and less meat; and cutting back on the use of plastics.

The Anglican and Lutheran leaders also ask that faith communities nurture responsible and sustainable relationships to water, land, home and each other. They suggest, among other things, finding ways their communities can reduce their impact on the environment; listening to people of all ages, including children and elders, about innovative ways of caring for the Earth; and using worship resources that celebrate Gods creation.

They also ask readers to consider calling for a more equitable world that recognises the need for communities to define their own development goals and objectives. They suggest some possibilities, including encouraging members of Parliament to support Bill C-262, which would ensure that Canadas laws are in harmony with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples; and supporting free, prior and informed consent for all communities impacted by resource extraction.

The bishops also cite a recent report from auditors general across Canada, which, they say, shows the need for better relations between Ottawa and the provinces to meet emissions reductions targets.

They then ask that Anglicans and Lutherans join them in a special Earth Day prayer:



Creator, we stand in awe and wonder at Gods great creation, at the diversity of beings, and at the intricate balance of relationships that sustains life. We recognise the need and basic human right for each person to have a place to which to belong.

Inspire in us the will to live in responsible and sustainable relationships to water, land, home, and each other are part of realising our full humanity.

Gather us together for the love of the world, and send us out, with patience and persistence, to act as your disciples.

Amen.



The statement concludes with Hiltz, MacDonald and Johnson expressing confidence that readers will, through their prayers and discernment, discover a multitude of ways to learn, raise awareness and make [a] difference for the Earth.
Posted on: April 19, 2018 2:09 PM

[The Melbourne Anglican, by Chris Shearer] More than 50 religious leaders from across Australia have called on Gautam Adani, chairman and founder of the Adani Group, to abandon plans to build a new coal mine in Northern Queensland. In an open letter delivered on 18 April to representatives of the Adani Group at their Townsville office, the coalition of Christian ministers  including Anglicans Bishop Philip Huggins of the Diocese of Melbourne and Dean of Brisbanes Cathedral Dr Peter Catt  Rabbis, Imams, Buddhists and Religious Sisters said they oppose all new coal mining in Queenslands Galilee Basin. The faith leaders argued that the environmental impact of a new mine would be too great, while the economic rationale was grasping at short-term profits from a thermal coal industry in worldwide structural decline and could not provide the long-term jobs the region needs. Instead, they urged Mr Adani to invest his companys wealth into renewable energies.

We are at a crossroads, the letter reads. One way lies destruction; the other way, sanity. We need to turn immediately in the direction of a stable and compassionate future based on ambitious investment in renewable energy. Our love and concern for the wellbeing of people, other forms of life and our planet leaves us convinced that building this mine would be a giant leap in a very dangerous direction. We therefore call on you to abandon it and to work instead with state and federal governments to invest in good local jobs in solar and wind. You have the capacity to do enormous good.

The letter was organised by the multi-faith environmental group Australian Religious Response to Climate Change (ARRCC). ARRCC board member Rabbi Jonathan Keren-Black, who was in Townsville for the letters delivery, said Mr Adanis choice should be clear: Dollar for dollar, renewables provide a lot more jobs than coal. The figures are very clear. Investment in renewables could provide all sorts of jobs, from fabrication to installation, operation and maintenance jobs as well as research, education and training. Mr Adani can do so much good, and right now hes at a crossroads.

There is so little time left to act on climate change and so much carbon dioxide that would be emitted if mining went ahead in the Galilee Basin, Mr Keren-Black said. This needs to stop being treated as a political issue and be recognised for what it is  simply a moral issue.

A spokesperson for Adani told TMA: We welcome the opportunity to arrange a meeting with the groups who wrote to us yesterday to answer their questions about our significant renewables business here in Australia and overseas and to build their confidence that we can construct and operate the Carmichael Project safely and sustainably and deliver jobs and economic benefits for Australian families and communities.
Posted on: April 20, 2018 3:28 PM

Work began on a new, bigger library at Lambeth Palace today [Friday] when the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby symbolically broke ground for the building. It is the first new building at the Palace in more than 100 years. The new library will bring together whats thought to be one of the largest historical ecclesiastical book collections outside the Vatican. There will also be easier access for the public to see these treasures.

The collection is made up of more than 5,000 volumes of manuscripts, more than 200,000 printed books, and nearly 10,000 linear metres. Most of this is kept in the primarily medieval Lambeth Palace buildings but some are also stored in the Church of England Record Centre warehouse, where they face pollution damage as well as fire concern.

When asked about the importance of the library, Archbishop Justin responded I feel very strongly, and I know Declan in charge of this project feels, that theres no point in having these things if theyre never seen. Why have them? They do two things; they tell us a huge amount about the history of the nation, particularly in the pre-reformation period. And secondly they testify to generation after generation who were disciples and followed after Jesus Christ and that speaks volumes about the centrality of faith in the life of the nation over its history.

The librarys collection holds books and artefacts that tell the story of Anglicanism and its relationship to the UK as a nation. It includes is Henry VIIIs personal and annotated copy of Invicta veritas, published by Thomas Abell, which denounced the Kings wish to divorce himself from Katherine of Aragon. Henry VIIIs annotations pointed out his disagreements with Thomas Abells argument, which ultimately led to the King splitting from Rome and creating the Church of England.

The Archbishop also explained the librarys purpose in building relationships. He shared that when guests visit Lambeth Palace, he challenges the Library to find something to show them. For example, a couple of years ago when a senior Nigerian minister visited Lambeth Palace, the Library was able to show him the history of the Church of Englands engagement with Nigeria in the 19th century with photographs, letters, and other documents. According to the Archbishop, the minister was absolutely blown over with this sense of where wed come from and the things we had in the past.

Archbishop Justin called the project exciting, because of the access to scholars, because of the way it will enable us to witness to Christ through what we have acquired over the centuries and to be much more open about our history and the history of the nation and the interrelation of the two.

This new building, designed by architects Claire and Sandy Wright, will be a zero carbon building with humidity controls to protect the collection. Its location at the far end of the grounds against the boundary wall on Lambeth Road means that it will only take up 3% of the sites footprint. The library is due to finish in 2020.
Posted on: April 20, 2018 3:54 PM

[Story from Church of England] The Bishop of Salisbury, Nicholas Holtam, recently spoke as the UKs Prime Minister Theresa May set out plans potentially banning a number of single-use plastic products. Earlier in the week Claire Perry, the minister for clean growth, also outlined hopes for the UK to be the first major developed economy to reach the tighter ambition of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5C in the Paris Agreement.



Bishop Nicholas welcomed the ambitions of the UK Government, calling climate change one of the great moral challenges of today. He went on to encourage the UK to swap the use of cheap plastic with more sustainable alternatives, calling it a no-brainer.

In his address the bishop emphasised the importance of the message of eliminating plastic waste sends internationally, especially given the meeting of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting this week.



We must hope and pray that British leadership on this issue therefore galvanises other countries in the Commonwealth and elsewhere to follow suit.

Bishop Nicholas also mentioned that climate change wasnt simply an ecological issue, but a question of justice. As I meet fellow Anglican bishops, especially from Africa and the Pacific, it is clear that their countries are suffering now because of climate and reducing our emissions is the biggest single step we can take to ensuring a more fairly run world.

The significance of Britain tightening climate targets to reflect the Paris Agreements 1.5C goal is that the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world are those most exposed to climatic changes.
Banning Russia Today would be as ridiculous as the bilge it broadcasts

Like many of you, I was disappointed when in 2012 Ofcom banned the Iranian states English-language mouthpiece Press TV. Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator, revoked its licence for breaching the Communications Act, for running its editorial oversight from Tehran, a habit that contravened the rules. Broadcasting rules require that a licence is held by the person who is in general control of the TV service: that is, the person that chooses the programmes to be shown in the service and organises the programme schedule, Ofcom said. Press TV could run editorial form the UK or broadcast from Iran. Ofcom gave Press TV the opportunity to apply to have its operations in Tehran correctly licensed by Ofcom and Ofcom offered to assist it to do so. Press TV was given the opportunity to make representations on Ofcoms minded to revoke letter. Press TV has failed to make the necessary application and Ofcom has therefore revoked Press TVs licence to broadcast in the UK.

A few British journalists and politicians  George Galloway, Yvonne Ridley, Ken Livingstone, Lauren Booth and Jeremy Corbyn  were all familiar faces on Press TV. The Guardian says Corbyn presented a call-in programme on Press TV, a propaganda channel of the Iranian government which was banned by Ofcom and which regularly hosts Holocaust deniers.

Nick Cohen added in The Spectator:

By hosting interviews, Corbyn gives the propaganda the credibility of a Western politician. Its fascinating to hear Iranian democracy campaigner Maziar Baharis own thoughts on Corbyn, who he describes as a useful idiot, and goes on to say: People who present programmes for Press TV and get paid for it should be really ashamed of themselves  especially if they call themselves liberals and people who are interested in human rights. The Iranian regime executes gay people, democracy activists, Kurds, and orders the rape of female prisoners. But Corbyn is happy to take their money and aid their propaganda campaign. Watch the end of this clip as Jeremy hosts a caller who describes the BBC as having hosted Zionist liars.

A few highlights:

And:

Business Insider noted:

Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn accepted up to 20,000 (about $27,000) for appearances on the Iranian state broadcast network Press TV  a channel that was banned in the UK for its part in filming the detention and torture of an Iranian journalist Corbyns final Press TV appearance was six months after the network had its broadcasting license revoked by Ofcom for airing a forced confession by Newsweek journalist Maziar Bahari. Ofcom is the governments TV regulatory body which sets rules for UK broadcasters. Bahari told Business Insider that while he was detained by Iranian authorities he was tortured and threatened with execution before he agreed to read out a pre-agreed script on Iranian television, filmed by Press TV

Press TV is part of the Islamic Republic of Irans tightly controlled broadcasting machinery. Its director is appointed by Irans Supreme Leader  the states chief religious and political authority  which means that its output is often biased in favour of strict establishment ideology. During the period between the year of Corbyns first appearance and his last, for example, Iran hanged at least 1,314 people, according to Amnesty International. It is a place where the rights of women, LGBT people, and religious and ethnic minorities are harshly curtailed. In 2011, the year of Corbyns third appearance, three Iranian men were executed for homosexuality. An Amnesty International report released last year said that Sunni Muslims and Kurdish political prisoners have been executed for bringing corruption to the world.

Press TVs newsroom director, Hamid Emadi, replied:

Press TV believes that Ofcom is the media tool of the British government  the same government that sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan to participate in the killing of innocent civilians. The British government and Ofcom will not be able to silence Press TVs voice in the UK.

But it did.

And now the no less monocular Russian Today (RT) is in the firing line. And that too is a shame. If we want to see the bias, disinformation, conspiracy theories, barbs, slurs and propaganda broadcast by regressive foreign regimes, Press TV and the Kremlin-fed Russia Today are useful. Its presence makes us thankful for our freedoms in which a plural media lets use see more not less.

But some want it banned.

Labour MP Stephen Doughty opined: On Russia Today, can I urge the Prime Minister to speak with the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport to look at reviewing Russia Todays broadcasting licence, and to speak to the House authorities about blocking their broadcasts in this building itself. Why should we be watching their propaganda in this Parliament? Shadow chancellor John McDonnell says RT, at times, goes beyond objective journalism.

Ofcom has RT in its crosshairs. There are seven investigations into whether the channel breached impartiality rules since the Salisbury nerve agent attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia that left both in a critical condition in hospital. RT says the British did it. RT says the story is woven with lies. So what? If RT is your single source for news, and one you see as operating at the vanguard of truth, you should loosen the elastic on your tinfoil hat. The argument that Russia poses a unique threat to our way of life through its obvious bullshit and clandestine social media activities gives the country and its broadcaster too much credit. Banning RT and its laughable attempts to troll the West would only limit our world view. We know what nonsense Russia pumps out because we can see it first hand. Its ridiculous stuff. Dont ban it  thats the kind of thing Putin and his goons do. Just do what most of us now do: ignore it.

Paul Sorene

Posted: 20th, April 2018 | In: News, TV & Radio Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
(ANSA) - Turin, April 20 - Turin Mayor Chiara Appendino on Friday indicated she would act to force the local registry of births to register the son of a lesbian couple. Turin city council, she said, "has the firm intention of giving full recognition to the families of mothers and of fathers with their daughters and sons".

"For months we have been seeking a solution compatible with the current legislation. Our will is clear and we will proceed with force if need be".

The Turin births and deaths records office on Tuesday refused to register the recent birth of the boy with two mothers.

Niccolo' Pietro was born April 13 to Democratic Party (PD) city councillor Chiara Foglietta and her partner Micaela Ghisleni after assisted procreation in Denmark.

The couple's lawyer said the problem was such cases are not recognised by Italian law.

"There is a legislative vacuum", he said.


TUNIS - An Italian-Libyan Business Development Association (ILBDA) has been set up to reactivate trade between Italy and Libya on the basis of longstanding cooperation and development between the two countries.

It also aims to create a shared reference point to bring together constantly evolving development needs of the Libyan population with the advanced technology, creativity and experience that Italy is able to share. ILBDA was officially presented in Tripoli in the presence of Italian Ambassador to Libya, Giuseppe Perrone, Libyan Government of National Accord Vice President Ahmed Maeteeq and Khalid Chaouli, Italian MP of Moroccan origins. ''The association,'' ILBDA president Sandro Fratini said, ''should be considered a gathering place for priority needs of a population and a nation that has faithfully embraced reconstruction and the challenge of cultural and social growth, with the best of what Italy has to offer, still today one of the top seven nations in the post-industrial age.'' The vice president of the association, the Libyan Ashraf Tulty, spoke about a number of events that will involved both Italian entrepreneurs and their Libyan counterparts, bringing together the know-how and expertise of Italian excellence with the needs of Libyans. ''We will meet again in Tripoli on July 5 for an economic and trade forum in which several Italian companies from different sectors will take part,'' he said. Many representatives of Libyan enterprises attended the event, including - according to an ILBDA statement - Salah A. Ben Ali from the National Oil Company (NOC) and Osama Abeidi from the General Electric Company (GECOL). Among the Italian enterprises were Cavagna, Sideralba and Emmegi. Representatives from Tripoli municipalities and the mayor of Zliten were also present.
104,776 fewer migrant arrivals in Italy since July, ministry Data shows 10-month consecutive decline on arrivals

(ANSAmed) - ROME, APRIL 20 - Migrant arrivals to Italy have decreased by 104,776 since July 1 of last year and now, as compared to the same period between 2016 and 2017, according to data from the Italian Interior Ministry.



The figures show a 10-month consecutive decline in the number of migrant arrivals to Italy, with 43,166 arrivals over the past 10 months compared to 147,942 between July 1, 2016 and April 20, 2017.



The Interior Ministry said July 2017 was when a strategy was put into place to reverse the growing number of migrant arrivals in the first six months of that year, which included a weekend at the end of June in which about 13,000 migrants arrived.



That emergency caused Interior Minister Marco Minniti to return to Italy while he was on a flight en route to Washington, D.C. for an official visit.



Since January 1 of this year, there have been 7,551 arrivals, compared to 36,728 in the same period in 2017, a 79.4% decline.



The percentage decline was even higher for migrant arrivals from Libya, with an 85% drop.



The top four nationalities for migrant arrivals this year are: Eritreans (1,552), Tunisians (1,489), Nigerians (526), and Ivorian (432).



There have been 1,116 unaccompanied minor migrant arrivals thus far this year.



A total of 12,586 asylum seekers have been transferred to other European countries as part of the relocation programme.(ANSAmed).




Israel drops fliers on Gaza, 'stay away from borders' Army warning ahead of day's 'Return March'

(ANSAmed) - TEL AVIV, APRIL 20 - Ahead of the fourth Hamas-backed 'Return March' scheduled for Friday, Israeli aircraft dropped fliers in Arabic on Gaza in the morning warning the population to stay away for the defensive barrier. ''We strongly urge you not to take part in acts of violence against Israeli forces and to stay far away from terrorists.



Hamas are using you as a tool for its interests. Our soldiers will do everything necessary to block attacks,'' the fliers stated. Mosque minarets repeatedly broadcast calls on Thursday for the population to take part in Friday's demonstration, which has been called a 'Day of Rage in Honor of Martyrs and Prisoners'. At the end of the Friday prayers, buses will take mosque-goers to the border, to five places where Israeli troops will be on the other side. Meanwhile, in the streets activists are collecting large tires that are likely to be set alight to obscure the view of Israeli troops and aircraft. Since March 30, when Hamas began to organize a 'Return March' every week, 35 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers and hundreds of others have been injured. A Hamas delegation is currently engaging in talks in Cairo with Egyptian authorities with one of the main issues under discussion being difficulties in Hamas-Fatah reconciliation and President Mahmoud Abbas's request to regain complete control over the Gaza Strip. (ANSAmed).




New clashes in Gaza, at least two Palestinians killed Israel drops leaflets telling Palestinians 'Hamas is using you'

(ANSAmed) - TEL AVIV, APRIL 20 - Tensions remained extremely high for the fourth consecutive Friday along the demarcation line between the Gaza Strip and Israeli territory, as Hamas continued efforts linked to its 'March of Return'.



In the first incidents on Friday, in the area of Jabalya, two Palestinians were killed in clashes with the Israeli Army along the defensive barrier between Gaza and Israel, while another 40 people were wounded.



In other areas of friction along the demarcation line, eyewitnesses on the scene said young Palestinians launched kites with molotov cocktails attached, in an effort to start fires in Israeli territory, as in recent days.



Israeli aircraft dropped leaflets in Arabic on Gaza Friday morning, calling on the population to "avoid approaching the defensive barrier". "We strongly recommend you not participate in acts of violence against Israeli forces and keep away from the terrorists. Hamas is using you as a tool for its interests. Our soldiers will do everything necessary to block attacks or assaults".(ANSAmed).




ANSAmed - Today's events in the Mediterranean

(ANSAmed) - ROME, APRIL 20 - These are the main events scheduled in the Euro-Mediterranean area for today: ISTANBUL - EU, visit by European Commissioner Violeta Bul to meet Turkish Transport Minister Ahmet Arslan.



NAPLES - BIAT - Innovation and High Technology Lab trade fair comes to an end. BIZERTE (TUNISIA) - Second edition of 'Bizerte Smart City' hi-tech trade fair.



STRASBOURG - European Parliament, plenary session.



NICOSIA - Cyprus Church Organ Festival continues with the Cyprus Symphony Orchestra comes to an end.(ANSAmed).




Mogherini praises Serbia's efforts towards EU Suports integration of entire Western Balkans

(ANSAmed) - BELGRADE, APRIL 20 - EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini on Thursday praised the efforts made by Serbia to move towards integration in the EU during a press conference at the end of a brief tour in the Western Balkans. She met with President Aleksandar Vucic and Prime Minister Ana Brnabic during the trip.



Mogherini added that Brussels recognized President Vucic's determination to bring Serbia into the European Union. ''The message that I am bringing,'' she added, ''is not only bilateral, addressed exclusively to Serbia. It has a regional character and aims to underscore that the prospect of EU integration is tangible for the entire region, especially Serbia Montenegro.'' For Belgrade, she underscored, accession talks are moving forward in a positive manner. ''We have opened 12 of the 35 chapters and there is a good outlook for the opening of the others by the end of the Bulgarian EU presidency,'' noted Mogherini, who has made two trips to Belgrade in less than three weeks. On March 27 she had rushed to speak to Vucic in the wake of incidents in Kosovska Mitrovica, in which the high-ranking Serb politician Marko Djuric was arrested. Kosovo was the other main issue at the center of her talks with Belgrade leaders. Prior to Vucic, Mogherini had met with civil society representatives and Brnabic, with whom she discussed the importance of preserving peace and stability in the Balkan region and the need to continue dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina. Discussion was also had on the next EU-Western Balkans summit scheduled for May 17 in Sofia, serving as another occasion to reiterate EU prospects for the entire region. Before Serbia, the EU foreign policy chief had visited Albania, Macedonia, and Montenegro. By the end of April, EU president Donald Tusk is expected to visit the Western Balkans as well to prepare for the regional summit in Sofia. (ANSAmed).




Emirates has been recognised at the World Travel Awards Middle East 2018 with four awards - Middle Easts Leading Airline, Middle Easts Leading Airline Brand, Middle Easts Leading Business Class Airport Lounge and Middle Easts Leading Cabin Crew.

The carpet ceremony was attended by more than 500 industry leading figures and professionals from across the Middle East. Khalid Al Serkal, Emirates District Manager Sharjah received the awards on behalf of the airline.



Sheikh Majid Al Mualla, Divisional Senior Vice President Commercial Operations Centre said: It is an honour to be recognised by the World Travel Awards Middle East 2018 for our ongoing efforts to continually enhance the customer experience both onboard and on the ground. Taking the top spot in multiple categories is a reflection of the airlines commitment to operational excellence, outstanding customer service and a focused approach on building the brand.
The actress appeared before the Khar police to record a five-to six page statement.

Mumbai: Bollywood actress Kim Sharma appeared before the Khar police late in the evening on Thursday to record a statement in the case where a Rajasthan-based businessman has filed a complaint that the Range Rover being used by Ms Sharma belongs to him and that she is refusing to return the vehicle.

The Khar police had served notice to Ms Sharma and her estranged husband, Ali Punjani, under section 41(A) of the CrPC. Both had been asked to appear Thursday evening. Ms Sharma recorded a five to six page statement saying that the said Range Rover was given to her by Mr Punjani and that she was driving it with his consent.

According to a police source, the businessman Dilip Kumar in his complaint said that he had parked the luxury car at Ms Sharma and Mr Punjanis home in good faith. However, he later found out that Ms Sharma had been illegally driving around the Range Rover and had no intention of returning it. After realisation dawned, he lodged a complaint with the Khar police, which sent notices to both accused.

Senior police inspector of Khar police station, Ramchandra Jadhav, confirmed the development and said, Ms Sharmas statement has been recorded, and we are probing the matter further.
Actress Alia Bhatts Raazi looks enormously promising and the actress has proved, yet again, that she is an actor to reckon with.

Actress Alia Bhatts Raazi looks enormously promising and the actress has proved, yet again, that she is an actor to reckon with.

This powerhouse of talent will be seen working with her mother, Soni Razdan, in the film. And Alia says she was very nervous for her mother.

I was nervous not for myself but for her. I hoped my mother had memorised all the dialogues and thought I would get nervous if she forgot her dialogues, Alia said.

She added, Obviously, she has worked for far longer than I have and she is a much better actor than I am and she was so chilled out. We were in Kashmir and we had a great time. It was a beautiful experience.

Raazi is based on the book Calling Sehmat by ex-naval officer Harinder Sikka and will see Alia playing an Indian spy married to a Pakistani officer during the Indo-Pakistan war of 1971.

The actress, who is playing a real life character for the first time, says, Its a true story and is the first time I will be playing a real-life character, so that comes with a sense of responsibility. I hope there is the right amount of representation, the right amount of hope so that people understand what this character went through.

The actress then digressed a little, straying to the topic of the Kathua rape victim. It is a disgraceful, shameful and terrible incident. As a girl, as a woman, as an individual, as a citizen of this country, I feel very hurt that something like this has happened.

She added, I was reading about the case for many days, but I stopped reading updates for the past two days because I think the more I read it, the more upset, angry and hurt I become. I fervently hope that justice is served. We should go out there and condemn this because this cannot be done to us again and again.
Watch Beyond the Clouds for Ishaan, watch it for Sharada, and watch it for those flamingos and Chhotus little rat.

A still from 'Beyond The Clouds'.

Rating:

Cast: Ishaan Khatter, Malavika Mohanan, G.V. Sharada, Goutam Ghose, Tannishtha Chatterjee, Shivam Pujari, Amruta Santosh Thakur, Dhwani Rajesh

Director: Majid Majidi

I often find myself fighting derisive criticism from friends and family about how trivial, mindless and irritating Bollywood is. Though I know some of what they say is true, the fact that fatuous generalisations are delivered with smug disdain for desi commercial cinema, it gets my goat. Especially since the sole purpose of the bitchfest seems to be to establish the superiority of their own taste and all that is foreign, especially Hollywood.

Many other goats across the nation, I suspect, bristle at such idiotic self-satisfaction.

So, when a master filmmaker, honoured and celebrated at international film festivals and award ceremonies that have never looked at Bollywood seriously, makes a trip to India and takes it upon himself to make a film, we expect to be bowled over.



Majid Majidi doesnt bowl us over with Beyond the Clouds, a film he has written (story) and directed.

His Hindi-speaking film that is set in Mumbai is uneven  rising and dipping, almost in neat sequences.

Bad acting, awkward scenes, Bollywood cliches make it sink, but when its observing or playing with children  a Majid speciality  it sparkles and rises.

In between all this are some exceptional, memorable, piercing performances that should not be missed.

Beyond the Clouds opens with a camera slide  something it does often, at times to show us contrasts, at times to share with us the directors shock at the grime and human wreckage.

From a busy, no-pedestrian expressway highway, we move down, to the dark, dingy underpass where some families dwell. Its next to an open, dirty nallah.

Two boys  one with a tattoo and a backpack, the other with his curly hair tied high in a frizzy bouquet  going around on a bike dropping off small boxes of mithai.

Under the burfi is a thin sheet that hide pouches of some expensive drugs.

They go to the usual places  a handicraft shop, a nariyal paani wala  and then Amir (Ishaan Khatter) goes to collect his dues from a man called Rahul, who controls the drug distribution as well as a brothel.

Here too, in the brothel, the camera slides up, as if riding in a glass lift, observing haggling customers and hardened sex workers.

Amir barges into Rahuls office. Is curtly told to wait.

Standing outside, he watches Rahul inspect the mouths of girls to check for rotting teeth, and then he turns his gaze to a little girl who has stepped out of her room to let a woman finish her business.

These are the sights  dance of shadows, staring at wide-eyed, dark complexioned faces  Beyond the Clouds treats us to often.

A bit like how we fetishise white faces and golden hair, Majidis Beyond the Clouds looks at Indian faces lovingly, romances the dirt and grime, and then cinematographer Anil Mehtas camera goes a step further, insinuating that some sort of superior understanding and knowledge of this karmic universe bristles beyond their eyes.

Adding meaning and some deep interiority to faces that are cute but bland is a cheap trick that doesnt work. Ever.



Here let us, for a bit, ponder over foreign directors and the irritable Indian.

Many of us in India were underwhelmed by Slumdog Millionaire. And when Danny Boyles 2008 film won eight Oscars, many of us were like, Hain? Really! Whatever.

In a fair fight, Ram Gopal Vermas Satya (1998) would beat it hollow, and Mira Nairs Salaam Bombay! (1988) would give it real competition. Except, perhaps, in music.

Varanasi, haathis swaying and buffaloes squatting on tarred roads, snake charmers and their cobras, Dabbawallas, barbers under trees, sadhus, sadhus smoking chilams, naked babas, beggar children, dog-man sleeping together, ragpickers in mounds of garbage, gaudy girls in seedy dance bars, people hanging from trains, busses

India where the sublime and the heart-rending always in a sweaty clasp, is an India we see everyday.

So gawking foreigners clicking pictures that frame one part of our reality but pretend to be the whole irritates us no end.

Some of our irritation has to do with our own immunity to the dirt, poverty, corruption we have learnt to live with by, mostly, bypassing it.

We are inured to the unrelenting tragedy unfolding all around us. So it makes us uneasy when we are made to actually look at it and come up with a human reaction.

The other reason is that we have seen all this in our films in many varied ways  some super cool and impactful, some super idiotic and superficial, worth little more than framing a piece of Third World as still life.

So if a master is sending an invite, the least we expect is to be surprised.

But I digress. Amir demands the money Rahul owes him. This leads to the first twist, the first encounter with law, and takes Amir to his sister Tara (Malavika Mohanan) and thence to events that make lives spiral out of control.

Tara gets sent to jail and Amir has no choice but to nurse Akshi (Goutam Ghose), the man whose actions put Tara in jail, back to health so that he can give his statement.

Tara, meanwhile, takes on Chhotu (Shivam Pujari), son of her cellmate who is ill and facing death sentence.

This tangle of connections goes further, deeper when Akshis family  his wife (played by G.V. Sharada) and two daughters  arrive. They have no money, nowhere to stay and they dont speak Hindi.

Its in this setting, with Chhotu in jail, and Asha (Amruta Santosh Thakur) Tanisha (Dhwani Rajesh) in Amirs house that Majidis Beyond the Clouds begins to breathe.

The characters, stuck in spaces and situations designed to suck humanity out of humans, gently tug at our heart with an outpouring of it.

With a tiny rat and some crayons, Majidi tells the story of the resilience of human spirit, about empathy, about people who have been dealt the crappiest cards  a trail of jokers from a pack so skewed  and yet ready to share, play, help another live a little.

The plot is interesting, theres lots of humanity in Majidis telling, theres little drama. Just a new way of seeing the old.

But not all the sights and sounds that fill up the screen are refreshing.

The films music is by A.R. Rahman, and the little jig that the film gets to do is courtesy his own classic, Muqabala (from Kadhalan, 1994).

In the rest of the film, sadly, the sounds are all too familial and their use rather cliched.

The tabla that accompanies a chase sequence is mildly interesting till a sitar joins in to complete the trite circle of Hindi filmy sounds.

Similarly, the camera observes a lot  dhobi ghat, pigeons, slums, dirty open drains, brothels, thanas, jail  with the wonder of a first-timer. Majidi, perhaps, overwhelmed by the sights, sounds and smell of Mumbai, wanted to capture it all  especially the excess, of filth, poverty, grime, traffic, noise, people, prosperity, spending, dearth, and of course large, naturally kohled eyes set in brown skin.

But Majidi shows his skills in a few sparkling moments that are unforgettable, like the fight sequence in Sewri mudflats, against the flamboyance of flamingos.

The kids  Shivam Pujari, Amruta Santosh Thakur and Dhwani Rajesh  are very good.

Malavika Mohanan is quite lovely, but quite bad.

Ishaan Khatter has a very pretty, expressive face and is very confident and very good.

He uses his face to excellent effect in emotional scenes, but also his body which, incidentally, grooves to Muqabala in ways thatll catch Prabhu Devas attention.

G.V. Sharada is absolutely excellent and I just cant get over her.

Her stillness is eerie, load-bearing, as if trying to contain a storm inside.

Watch Beyond the Clouds for Ishaan, watch it for Sharada, and watch it for those flamingos and Chhotus little rat.
Gujarat High Court upholds Babu Bajrangi's conviction in 2002 Naroda Patiya riot case.

Gujarat High Court on Friday acquitted former BJP Maya Kodnani in the 2002 Narodia Patiya case. (Photo: PTI | File)

Ahmedabad: The Gujarat High Court on Friday acquitted former minister and BJP leader Maya Kodnani in the 2002 Naroda Patiya case for which she was handed a 28-year prison sentence by a trial court.

The High Court upheld the conviction of the other high-profile accused in the case, Bajrang Dal's Babu Bajrangi.

The court acquitted Maya Kodnani after giving her the benefit of doubt. The bench said charges against Kodnani could not be established.

The High Court also acquitted 16 others who were convicted by a special court in Naroda Patiya case earlier. Conviction of 12 was upheld while verdict on two others is awaited. One of the accused is dead.

A division bench of justices Harsha Devani and A S Supehiya had reserved the order in August 2017 after hearing concluded.

Earlier, a special court for Special Investigation Team (SIT) cases had sentenced 32 people, including former BJP minister Maya Kodnani, to life imprisonment in August 2012. Babu Bajrangi was sentenced to imprisonment till death.

The SIT court had given seven accused enhanced life imprisonment of 21 years, which they will serve after undergoing 10 years' imprisonment under IPC section 326 (causing grievous hurt).

The remaining accused, of the total 32, were given simple life imprisonment of 14 years.

The trial court had acquitted 29 accused for want of evidence.

While the convicts challenged the lower court's order in the High Court, the SIT appealed against the acquittal of 29 people.

Ninety seven people, mainly women and children, were killed at Naroda Patia, a day after the Godhra carnage.

The Naroda Patiya riots was one of the worst massacres which followed the Godhra train burning on February 27, 2002, in which 59 kar sevaks were killed.

The Special Investigation Team probing Naroda Patiya had argued that a day after the riots, Maya Kodnani was seen inciting mobs at the spot by witnesses. The tirla court held she organised the mass killings.

Kodnani, who has been out on bail since 2014, is also an accused in the riots next door to Naroday Patiya  Naroda Gram  on the same day, February 28, 2002. Eleven Muslims were killed in Naroda Gram.

BJP President Amit Shah had testified as a defence witness last September, and said he saw Kodnani in Assembly on the day of the riots and then at the Shola Civil Hospital where bodies of those killed in Godhra had been brought. Kodnani is a gynaecologist.

In 2002, when the riots took place, Kodnani was a BJP leader. She was made a Cabinet minister by then Chief Minister Narendra Modi in 2007. She held the portfolio of Minister for Women and Child Development till 2009 when she was arrested. She got bail in 2014.
Jaitley asserted that BJP chief Amit Shah had no role in the alleged Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case.

New Delhi: Accusing the Congress of using impeachment as a political tool, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Friday termed its notice to remove Chief Justice of India Deepak Misra a "revenge petition" after the Supreme Court's judgement in Judge Loya death case had "exposed" the conspiracy of falsehood.

In a hard-hitting Facebook post titled 'Judge Loya Death Case  The One That Almost Created a Judicial Mutiny, he also said Amit Shah, now BJP President, had "no role" in the Sohrabuddin case which was an alleged encounter executed by some central agencies through the State Police.

Earlier on Friday, Congress and six other opposition parties moved a notice for the impeachment of the Chief Justice of India, accusing him of five counts of "misbehaviour" and "misusing" authority.

The opposition parties met Vice President and Rajya Sabha chairman M Venkaiah Naidu and handed over a notice for the impeachment of the Chief Justice of India (CJI) with signatures of 64 MPs of the Upper House.

Read: Congress using impeachment as a political tool: Jaitley on mutiny against CJI

Observing that impeachment of a Judge of the Supreme Court is to be done only in the case of either his incapacity or on proven misconduct, Jaitley said the Congress party and its friends have started using impeachment as a "political tool".

Trivialising the use of impeachment power is a dangerous event, he said, adding that it is not difficult to collect 50 signatures of Rajya Sabha or hundred signatures of Lok Sabha members even on frivolous issues.

"To use the power as intimidatory tactics when neither you have a case of 'proven misconduct' or the numbers on your side, is a serious threat to judicial independence. My preliminary reaction to the impeachment motion filed today is clear. It is a revenge petition after the falsehood of the Congress Party has been established in the Justice Loya death case. It is an attempt to intimidate a Judge and send a message to other Judges, that if you don't agree with us, fifty MP's are enough for a revenge action," he said.

The senior BJP leader said yesterday's 114 page judgement in the Judge Loya death case "exposes every fact of the conspiracy to generate falsehood" as propaganda in the public and political space.

"Never ever so blatantly in the past have national political parties, a few retired judges and some senior lawyers so closely identified themselves with the generation of falsehood that they almost come out as conspirators. A detailed analysis of the facts and the role played by some groups is necessary since I suspect such attempts will also be made in the future," Jaitley said.

Also Read: Oppn moves to impeach CJI, Congress confident of numbers

Observing that some public interest crusaders have graduated into Institution Disruptors, Jaitley said they pick-up even false causes and pursue the falsehood with a "sense of deep commitment, indulge in intimidating advocacy, are shrill with their opposing colleagues, are rude and impolite with the judges".

He said they have found two strong allies -- a section of the media gives them publicity and the Congress which is too willing to identify with them.

On the other hand, he regretted that a "divided court" is finding itself helpless to respond to these intimidatory tactics. The judgement indicates that intimidatory tactics were used as an alternative to one sided set of facts in the case, he said.

Referring to the "controversial" press conference by four senior judges of the Supreme Court, Jaitley asked: "Is the impeachment motion filed today a direct result of the press conference? Does this impeachment set a precedent that political parties in India will use impeachment as an instrument to intimidate judges hearing controversial matters?"

Also Read: Judge Loya won't be forgotten, there is hope, says Rahul Gandhi

Jaitley said that what has happened today is a "price" the Indian judiciary has to pay for misadventures of many.

"There is no better time for judicial statesmanship and political foresight," he said.

Jaitley also lashed out at the Caravan magazine stories and investigations in connection with death of Justice Loya a "textbook example of fake news".

"It was not gossip or rumour mongering but a deliberately generated fake news where falsehood was manufactured to generate a massive public controversy," he said, adding that even family members of Judge Loya had accepted that he died of natural causes.

The finance minister said the Supreme Court too has conclusively established that Judge Loya's death was because of natural reasons and there was no suspicious circumstance.
The advisors in Niti Aayog are all bureaucrats who are equivalent in rank to joint secretary level and above.

The PMO too is learnt to have expressed concern over sluggishness in decision making, especially in the banking and finance sectors.

New Delhi: With the Prime Ministers Office (PMO) keen to rebuild peoples as well as investors confidence in the aftermath of the Nirav Modi-Punjab National Bank scam, Niti Aayog  the Centres think tank  which is saddled with formulating key policies in the field of banking and finance as well as other significant sectors, is battling a severe staff crunch.

Senior level officials which in the think tanks parlance are called advisors, are urgently required for important sectors like banking, north-eastern affairs and small & medium enterprises (SMEs), among others. Owing to the absence of full time officials for these significant sectors, crucial decision making processes are getting hampered, highly placed sources informed this newspaper.

Recently, the shortage of senior level officials in the government think tank was discussed in a high level meeting held by its vice chairman Rajiv Kumar and CEO Amitabh Kant.

According to sources privy to developments, the Niti Aayog may soon advertise the vacancies, which would mean that even private professionals with experience in the aforementioned fields could apply. The advisors in Niti Aayog are all bureaucrats who are equivalent in rank to joint secretary level and above. They are appointed on deputation basis in the think tank.

However with tenure of many such officials having got over, vacancies in these crucial sectors have become a cause of concern for the think tank. With Lok Sabha polls less than a year away, Niti Aayog in its urgency for experienced and skilled personnel, is learnt to be open to the idea of even hiring private professionals, sources pointed out.

The PMO too is learnt to have expressed concern over sluggishness in decision making, especially in the banking and finance sectors.

In fact sources in the know said that almost on a weekly basis, top officials of Niti Aayog have been holding deliberations on these two sectors to chart out strategy papers to usher in more investor-friendly reforms in the banking and finance sectors.

Notably, urgent filling up of key posts has been underlined by PMO.
IMF chief Christine Lagarde termed Kathua rape incident, where an 8-year-old girl was tortured, raped and murdered, as 'revolting'.

This is the second time in four months that International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde has asked Prime Minister Modi to improve the conditions for women in the country. (Photo: File/AFP)

New Delhi: As pressure mounts over the government to take swift action in recent rape cases, including that of Kathua and Unnao, which have triggered nationwide outrage, International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Christine Lagarde on Thursday hoped that Prime Minister Narendra Modi would pay more attention towards the security of women in India.

The IMF managing director also termed the Kathua rape incident, where an eight-year-old girl was kidnapped, drugged and held for several days while she was raped repeatedly and then murdered, as revolting.

"What has happened (in India) is just revolting. I would hope that the Indian authorities, starting with Prime Minister Modi pay more attention because it is needed for the women of India," Lagarde said.

This is the second time in four months that Lagarde has asked Prime Minister Modi to improve the conditions for women in the country. At the World Economic Forum, which held in Davos in January, Lagarde said she had told PM Modi that his speech did not mention much about the women in India.

When I was last in Davos after Prime Minister Modis speech, I did tell him that he had not mentioned the women of India enough. And its not just a question of talking about them, IMF chief said.

However, she quickly clarified that this was her personal position and not that of the IMF.

"By the way this is not an IMF official position. It is my position," news agency PTI quoted Lagarde as saying.

Lagardes latest reminder to Indian authorities to take care of the women of the country comes at a time when three rape incidents  Kathua, Unnao and Surat  have sparked anger among people.

The apparent silence that PM Modi and senior leaders maintained following the incidents added to the outrage.

However, the Prime Minister did break his silence and make a fleeting reference over the incidents and promised justice to countrys daughter at an event last week but many activists insist that he needs to speak, and do more.

Read: No culprit will be spared, says PM Modi on rape horror

Also, during his trip to Sweden and UK, PM Modi while addressing the Indian diaspora in London said such incidents should not be politicised as a rape is a rape.

Also Read: We only question daughters where they are going, must ask sons too: PM Modi

The anger among NRIs over the incidents back home was evident when hundreds of protesters greeted him with placards Modi go home when he arrived in London for bilateral talks with British PM Theresa May and the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.

Also Read: PM Modi faces protest as he signs 1 billion pounds deal on UK trip

(With PTI inputs)
Amarinder urges Rajnath to draw up anti-militancy plan.

New Delhi: Fearing the re-emergence of militancy in Punjab, chief minister Amarinder Singh on Thursday urged the Centre to put in place an elaborate plan to tackle the emerging threat, with intelligence reports indicating that Pakistans Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was training Sikh youths to revive terror activities in the region.

The issue, particularly some recent targeted killings by ISI-backed operatives, was discussed in detail during a meeting between Capt. Singh and Union home minister Rajnath Singh here on Thursday. The CM also briefed the home minister in detail about the security situation in Punjab and how attempts were being made to disturb the law and order situation through these targeted killings.

Home ministry officials claimed Capt. Singh urged the Centre to plan an all-encompassing security strategy to deal with the revival of terror in the state. Capt. Singh also stressed the need for further strengthening and sharing of intelligence inputs between the Centre and state agencies, particularly on some terror operatives active in foreign countries like Italy, the United States, Germany, Canada and Britain.

The role of some of these operatives is suspected in recent killings in Punjab, now being investigated by the National Investigation Agency (NIA). Sources said the home minister assured Capt. Singh of all possible help from the Centre in dealing with security issues in the sensitive border state, which had seen a long spell of terror in the past. The Punjab CM also flagged the issue of how terror elements were using the social media to radicalise youth and the urgent need to counter this. The home ministry had recently told a parliamentary panel that Sikh youths were being trained at ISI facilities in Pakistan to carry out terror activities in India.

Capt. Singh appreciated the role of the Central security agencies, particularly the NIA, in handling cases related to the killing of political and religious personalities in the state, which is being seen as a desperate attempt to disturb communal harmony in the region.
An impeachment motion in Rajya Sabha has to be supported by at least 50 MPs, while one in the Lok Sabha is to be supported by 100 MPs.

New Delhi: In an unprecedented move, Congress and six other Opposition parties on Friday moved a notice for the impeachment of Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, accusing him of five counts of misbehavior and misusing authority. The Opposition parties first met in the room of the Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad, after which they proceeded to meet Vice-President and Rajya Sabha, chairman M. Venkaiah Naidu and handed over a notice for the impeachment of the Chief Justice of India (CJI) with signatures of 64 MPs of the Upper House. However, some notes of discord were heard from within the Congress. Interestingly, former Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh was not one of the signatories to the impeachment notice.

A decision on the admission of the impeachment notice against the CJI will be taken by the chairman of the Rajya Sabha, following legal consultations. No Chief Justice of India has ever been impeached.

Addressing a joint press conference of Congress, Left parties and the NCP, senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal said, We wish this day had never come. He said the step has been taken with a heavy heart to protect the independence of the judiciary. Mr Sibal further added, As a representatives of the people, we are entitled to hold the Chief Justice accountable, just as we are accountable to the people. The majesty of the law is more important than the majesty of any office.

The MPs who signed the notice belong to the Congress, the NCP, the CPI-M, the CPI, the SP, the BSP and the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML). The Trinamul Congress, DMK, RJD and some other parties have backed out from supporting the move.

On the issue of several important Opposition leaders including former Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singhs signatures being missing from the impeachment notice, Mr Sibal said, We did not want to involve Dr Singh, he being a former PM. When asked why other important leaders did not sign the notice, Mr Sibal said: We didnt want a few others to be embarrassed as certain matters are pending.

The five allegations of misbehavior mentioned in the impeachment notice include the serious charge of antedating (backdating) of an order for listing of a petition related to the investigation against the Prasad Education Trust in the Supreme Court. Denial of permission to proceed against a retired high court judge in the same matter. Another charge is of listing the petition against the Prasad Education Trust before himself, even when he was heading the Constitution bench, and doing so was against the convention. The fourth charge pertains to a piece of land which CJI Misra acquired as an advocate by giving a false affidavit and the plot was surrendered in 2012 when he was elevated to the Supreme Court, even though orders cancelling the allotment were given in 1985. The fifth charge relates to the abuse of exercise of power by the Chief Justice in choosing to send sensitive matters to particular benches by misusing his authority as Master of the Roster with the likely intent to influence the outcome.

The Congress vehemently denied the charge that it was moving an impeachment notice as the petition in the death of Judge Loya was rejected by the apex court. Mr Azad said that they (Opposition parties) had sought time with the Chairman of the Rajya Sabha about a week ago. He further added, The process had begun almost a month ago during the second part of the Budget Session. The signatures are also dated. On being asked as to why the impeachment notice was being given now Mr Sibal said, We were hoping that the anguish of the four senior judges of the Supreme Court as reflected in their statements to the Press would be addressed by the Chief Justice and the Chief Justice in response would set his house in order. More than three months have passed. Nothing has changed. He further added, Recent communications of two senior judges to the Chief Justice reveal that the Chief Justice has not asserted the independence of the judiciary in the face of interference by the executive.

On January 12 this year, four top-level Supreme Court (SC) judges, had in a press conference, made complaints against Dipak Misra, on the grounds of administrative and judicial irregularity in the apex court. Justices Jasti Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, M.B. Lokur and Kurien Joseph had said that Justice Misra was assigning important cases in an arbitrary manner to junior judges, ignoring these four senior judges. Indias democracy is at stake, the judges had alleged and questioned the sacred position of the Chief Justice of India.

Former external affairs minister and senior advocate, Salman Khurshid said that he is not privy to discussions that have taken place between different parties and for him to reflect specifically on whether the grounds for impeachement are justified or not would be unfair. I dont think anyone should cast aspersions on the judiciary. It is well-equipped to handle very difficult matters. Not everyone will always agree with the judiciary. Not even the judiciary itself agrees with itself, said Mr Khurshid, adding, Impeachment is too serious a matter to be played with frivolously on the grounds of disagreement with any judgement or point of view of the Court.

An impeachment motion in Rajya Sabha has to be supported by at least 50 MPs, while one in the Lok Sabha is to be supported by 100 MPs. Once the notice for impeachment is submitted, the Rajya Sabha chairman will ascertain if there is merit or ground for moving such a motion or whether it can be rejected. He may form a committee to look into it, if he finds merit in it. However there is no specified time limit for the committee to submit its finding or for the Chairman of the Rajya Sabha to admit or disallow the notice for impeachment.
The NGO has also suggested a few measures to improve the response to citizens complaints.

Mumbai: A survey shows a sharp fall in the satisfaction index over the civic bodys performance.

A report that a NGO released on Thursday shows the number of complaints from citizens to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) shot up in 2017 by nearly 50 per cent since 2015 while the average number of days the civic body takes to resolve a complaint more than tripled.

The Praja Foundation said in the report, Civic issues registered by citizens and deliberations done by municipal councillors in Mumbai, that the number of complaints to the civic body rose to 92,329 in 2017 from 61,910 in 2015. The average number of days the civic authorities took to resolve complaints went up to 48 days in 2017 from 15 days in 2015.

According to citizens charter, the average number of days to resolve a complaint should be three days... It means that the response mechanism is on the decline every year, said Milind Mhaske, project director, Praja Foundation.

The NGO has also suggested a few measures to improve the response to citizens complaints. There is a need to create an open dashboard on the BMC website to monitor complaints. The corporation must strictly adhere to the filling of the Councillor Code, as it will help address the lack of accountability in the working of the civic body. In addition to this, a citizen feedback mechanism for gauging citizens satisfaction with the solution to their problems must be created, said Nitai Mehta, founder/ managing trustee of Praja Foundation.

On the brighter side, the BMC closed 83 per cent of the complaints it received in 2017, up from a meagre 58 per cent in 2016, said the report. The BMC has announced the NGO as a persona non-grata, said a senior civic official.
Those who have been deregistered by the government are not getting their rations, he said.

Mumbai: Congress party city president Sanjay Nirupam on Thursday objected to linking ration cards with Aadhaar and said that it violates a key Supreme Court order.

The apex court said the government could not make the linking of Aadhaar card compulsory for people to avail themselves of welfare benefits, Mr Nirupam said.

However, the state government was still forcing people to link their Aadhaar cards with the ration cards. It was penalising more than 21.82 lakh Mumbaikars by deregistering their ration cards if they were not linked, he said.

Mr Nirupam produced a slew of documents to show how the state government was still forcing people to link their Aadhaar cards with the ration cards. More than 21.82-lakh Mumbaikars are penalised in this exercise of deregistering their ration cards if they were not linked to Aadhaar. This clearly contradicts the Supreme Court order which states that an Aadhaar card cannot be made compulsory for the people to avail themselves of the benefits. The Aadhaar Act, especially Section 7, which allows the use of Aadhaar to deliver government services, does not specify it is mandatory, he added.

Those who have been deregistered by the government are not getting their rations, he said. The senior Congress leader showed documents that indicated only 30 per cent of Mumbaikars manage to get their rations. Of the 54-lakh plus Mumbaikars who are beneficiaries of ration supplies if only 30 per cent is availing it with half the month has gone, it is clear that the system is rejecting the rest, he added.

Mr Nirupam pointed to problems of other citizens too. Those who have registered and linked their Aadhaar with ration cards are also facing acute problems. This is because there is an EPOS machine that has been installed at the ration shops which in most cases do not work and it is mandatory for every ration card holder to use the EPOS machine in order to buy the ration supply.
Ibrahim Sheikh, a resident of Dharavi, had come to meet his aunt who along with others was protesting near the Metro-3 office in BKC.

Sheikh suffered an attack of epilepsy while visiting a nearby public toilet around 11 AM on Friday and died on the spot. (Photo: Representational)

Mumbai: An 18-year-old boy died after allegedly suffering an attack of epilepsy inside a public toilet at Bandra Kurla Complex (BKC) on Friday, police said.

Ibrahim Sheikh, a resident of Dharavi, had come to meet his aunt Bilkis Bano, 50, who along with others from Dnyaneshwar Nagar in Bandra East had launched a hunger strike near the Metro-3 office against demolition of their houses.

The slums in Dnyaneshwar Nagar had been declared illegal and some of them were demolished for the Metro-3 project, said senior police inspector Kalpana Gadekar of BKC police station.

After meeting his aunt, Sheikh stayed at the site of the hunger strike on Thursday night. He suffered an attack of epilepsy while visiting a nearby public toilet around 11 AM on Friday and died on the spot, Gadekar said.

The exact cause of death will be known after the autopsy report is received, she added. Police recovered some papers related to the treatment for epilepsy which he was taking, the officer said, adding that an accidental death report was registered at the BKC police station.
360 kidnapped between Jan and Mar, 122 missing still.

Despite various attempts made by the cops to eliminate these crimes, they continue to haunt the city.

Mumbai: Mumbai is slowly losing its tag of being one of the safest cities in the country, as it has seen a significant increase in the number of kidnapping cases in the last five years.

According to statistics, this year, from January to March, 360 minors were kidnapped from the cit and only 238 were rescued. Despite various attempts made by the cops to eliminate these crimes, they continue to haunt the city.

According to statistics, in the last four years (2013-17), as many as 8,446 minors were kidnapped from Mumbai, out of which, 3,390 were boys and 4,686 were girls. However, according to these statistics, the police were unable to rescue all the minors kidnapped in these four years, resulting in 259 boys and 370 girls still missing.

Data also shows that last year alone, around 1,368 minor girls were kidnapped, of which only 1235 were rescued, while 133 are still reported missing.

Activist Shakeel Ahmed, who procured the information and shared it with the Mumbai police said, This is a very serious issue and it should be addressed on priority. For all we know, the missing minors can be forced into human trafficking and begging, which is a far worse fate.

Commenting on the significant spurt in the increasing number of kidnapping cases registered, retired ACP Vasant Dhobale said, The spike in numbers is due to the Supreme Court order to the police to treat all cases of missing juveniles as kidnappings.

Before the Supreme Court order, the police would register a non-cognisable (NC) complaint or a missing-persons complaint.

As per the directions issued by the Supreme Court on January 17, 2013, it is being conveyed that in the event of an official missing complaint filed by the parents/guardian of a child below 14 years of age, the said complaint is not to be entered in the Missing Persons complaint book. But it is to be treated and recorded as a case of kidnap and a First Information Report (FIR) is to be filed in the matter immediately.

When asked if any special demarcation should be made to classify the reasons behind a minor going missing, a police officer, on the condition of annonymity said, It is no possible to make a demarcation as the reason behind a minors disappearance can be established only after the minor is located. Hence, the investigation can only be done by registering a case of kidnapping.

PAST INCIDENTS

In 2001, two sisters, Renuka Shinde and Seema Gavit, from Kolhapur were sentenced to death for kidnapping 13 children and killing nine of them. Their mother Anjanabai accompanied the two, who would kidnap the kids and push them into begging and killed some of them after they stopped being productive.

In December 2016, two minor boys kidnapped and murdered three-and-a-half-year- old Junera Khan.The minors, who were inspired by the crime-based shows, had kidnapped her to extort money, but later got cold feet and murdered her. The policesinvestigation ledthem to the accused.
The Reserve Bank, unconvincingly, denies that there is any cash crunch & alleges the inefficiency of banks in properly allocating the available cash.

Conspiracy theorists are hard at work to identify the drivers behind the ongoing cash crunch, that has left the automated teller machines (ATMs) in cities and towns across large parts of the country dry. There is much finger pointing between the Reserve Bank of India and the commercial banks, both private and public sector, each accusing the other of being responsible for inefficient operations.

The banks allege that the supply of high-value notes has dried up, possibly due to a shortage of imported printing ink at the currency press in Nashik. Alternatively, this could be a covert attempt by the government to correct a problem dating back to the November 2016 demonetisation  the incomprehensible introduction of a Rs 2,000 note to replace the Rs 1,000 note as a measure to reduce black money. Phasing out the offensive new high-denomination note and stepping up the printing of new Rs 500 and Rs 200 notes instead is a more obvious and welcome blow against black money. But why hasnt it happened already? If Rs 70,000 crores worth of such notes can be printed in just one month, the entire stock of Rs 2,000 notes can be substituted in just 10 months?

The Reserve Bank, unconvincingly, denies that there is any cash crunch and alleges the inefficiency of banks in properly allocating the available cash. Could this be a surgical strike by the banks and ATM service providers who have got unsettled by the criminal investigations into fraud or are upset with the March 2018 decision of the RBI to end the incentives for installing cash recyclers and ATMs for low-value notes? Was it their intention to embarrass the government by engineering a cash crunch to coincide with Prime Minister Narendra Modis visits to Sweden and the UK for the Commonwealth Summit? Possible, but far-fetched.

The most plausible reason is that the economy is reverting to its pre-demonetisation levels of cash held by the public. The big stick and carrots embedded in the Goods and Services Tax to incentivise the switch to banked transactions are not widely experienced yet. Small businesses may be unviable with a tax load. Expectedly, 60 per cent of the Rs 2,000 notes in public circulation, valued at Rs 4.3 lakh crores, are used as floating cash reserves. A repeat demonetisation exercise could get them into the banks. But on balance demonetisation has more economic downsides than upsides in the Indian context.

The cash-based supply chain of goods and services is a subset of the demand for cash contributions, related to electoral politics. Highly contested elections are scheduled for mid-May in Karnataka and later this year in several other states. Cash resources will be needed to buy SUVs, print advertisements and motivate the lethargic population to vote.

Oddly, there is not a peep out of the Election Commission of India (ECI), which is charged with the responsibility of ensuring that election spending remains within the implausibly tight limit of Rs 20 to Rs 28 lakhs per candidate for Assembly elections. The EC has adopted an end of the pipe strategy. The intention is to catch the crooks once they show their hands via excess expenditure. A more proactive EC could have recognised the red flags of unusually high cash withdrawals unearthed by the media. It could have directed the Karnataka government to report on the ensuing potential for subversion of the code of conduct and the measures being taken to heighten border vigilance, to clamp down on cross-border transfers of cash. One can imagine former chief election commissioner T.N. Seshan diving through this open door for enhancing the regulatory ambit of the ECI. But todays election commissioners appear to be content, at least overtly, with a narrower definition of their mandate, strictly as per the law.

To speak the truth, the glory days of Indian regulatory institutions are over. Even the RBI, the first to be legislated into existence in 1934, is going through strained times. Demonetisation had spread the apprehension that the RBI was led by the nose from North Block in New Delhi. The extent of wilful defaults in the bad loans of public sector banks, often the consequence of ever-greening of impaired assets and plain fraud, also points a finger at the RBI for exercising inadequate oversight.

RBI governor Urjit Patel had appealed to the government through a public address on March 16 to bring public sector banks into a uniform regulatory arrangement as applicable to private banks. Domestic and international professionals support the broad thrust of a uniform regulatory arrangement for all banks. But the subsequent expose of the yawning deviations in ICICI Bank and Axis Bank from gold-standard board governance have cut the ground from under the governors feet.

Mutual funds are upbeat about the prospects for equity investment in private banks. But the average person is inclined to quietly diversify away from private banks to the safe haven of public sector banks. Private insurance and healthcare are similarly perceived as being exploitative of the average consumer. It does not help that the Financial Resolution and Deposit Insurance Bill 2017 was worded so ambivalently that it fanned a deep seeded fear of savings deposits being sequestered as equity for resolving bankruptcy. Finance minister Arun Jaitley has been at pains to assure people that deposits up to Rs 1 lakh per account will remain guaranteed. But ministerial assurances provide very little comfort when elections are around the corner.

A common thread across these turbulences is uneven support from the government for beleaguered institutions and the absence of informed participation, quite unlike in the GST Council. RBI governor Patel bravely sat out the storm around the hasty implementation of the questionable policy option of demonetisation. But the Pandoras box of crony capitalism has taken its toll. These are challenging times. Deeper bench strength, within the government, of trusted fiscal and financial expertise would help.
Mr Diaz-Canel has to strike a path that will be conservative and yet be a reformist in the path shown by Raul.

The significance of the date cannot be missed. It was on the anniversary of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion  when Fidel Castros forces defeated the US-backed rebels  that Cubas new President, Miguel Diaz-Canel, was formally elected as President on Thursday. It is arrestingly interesting that he is the first man in about 60 years who is not a Castro and who is heading the Caribbean island. Even today Cuba looks like a sepia picture from the ages with automobiles from the classic era, known elsewhere as vintage and buildings as well from ages ago. The new President promises to keep Cuba on the path of the revolution although young Cubans may want something quite different as they tasted some changes in the regime of Raul from the Castro dynasty that ran for 12 years, including opening up of the country to the private sector in a limited way.

The new President has a lot on his plate in his balancing act between sustaining a functioning state that delivers services and looking for economic progress by opening up more to the world. A Trump in the White House is not exactly good news either as the historic diplomatic opening with a United States under Barack Obama in 2015 has been closed abruptly. Of course, with Raul still in the background as party president and likely to be peeping over his shoulder, Mr Diaz-Canel has to strike a path that will be conservative and yet be a reformist in the path shown by Raul. A deliberate path towards economic reform is what is being predicted although the President is a known votary of Internet on the island as a concession to modernity. Interesting times are ahead for the tiny piece of Latin America as a youthful generation seeks change.
The talks underscore Chinas concern about its reliance on imported chips from global names such as Qualcomm and Intel.

That goal has been given fresh urgency after a US ban on sales of products  including chips  to Chinese phone maker ZTE Corp roiled the firm, which uses mainly US chips in its smartphones.

China is looking to accelerate plans to develop its domestic semiconductor market amid a fierce trade stand-off with the United States and a US ban on sales to Chinese phone maker ZTE that has underscored the countrys reliance on imported chips.

Senior Chinese officials have held meetings this week with industry bodies, regulators and the countrys powerful chip fund about speeding up already aggressive plans for the sector, two people with direct knowledge of the talks told Reuters.

The talks underscore Chinas concern about its reliance on imported chips from global names such as Qualcomm and Intel, aggravated by a worsening dispute with the United States centred on cutting-edged tech.

In the last few days senior Chinese officials have met to discuss plans to speed up the development of the chip industry, one person with knowledge of the talks said, asking not to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter.

China has already made the semiconductor market a key priority under its Made in China 2025 strategy to cut reliance on foreign technologies and create its own domestic champions.

That goal has been given fresh urgency after a US ban on sales of products  including chips  to Chinese phone maker ZTE Corp roiled the firm, which uses mainly US chips in its smartphones.

A second person with knowledge of the talks said senior officials had met with key ministries, as well as the National Integrated Circuitry Investment Fund, this week to discuss speeding up plans due to recent trade tensions.

Chinas Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) did not immediately respond to faxed requests for comment. The IC Fund did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The seven-year ban on US firms selling parts to ZTE comes at a time when the two countries have threatened each other with tens of billions of dollars in tariffs in recent weeks, fanning worries of a full-blown trade war.

Washington said ZTE had violated an agreement reached after it was caught illegally shipping goods to Iran.

ZTE, which has chips from US firm Qualcomm in an estimated 50-65 per cent of its phones, is now facing a struggle to save its smartphone business as it looks to find new supplies.

That over-reliance has spooked China  though most industry insiders said shifting production back home would not be easy.

China wont allow the US to use chips as a stick against it. China can take steps to replace foreign-made chips with domestic, the countrys hawkish Global Times newspaper said in a commentary this week.

The Trump administration is helping us Chinese make such a decision.

The move could boost domestic firms including Tsinghua Group, Huawei, Unisplendour Corp Ltd, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp, and smaller rival Jiangsu Changjiang Electronics Technology Co.

China already wants locally-made chips inside 40 per cent all smartphones in the domestic market by 2025 and is betting billions of dollars on domestic champions to get there. It also has targets in robotics, electric cars and drugs.

Analysts say money is now raining down from Beijing and state-backed funds to support the chip market, while the countrys state chip fund, known as the Big Fund, raised an estimated $32 billion in a new round of financing last month.

Chinas chip push is at the heart of the trade stand-off with the United States. Beijing wants to boost its tech prowess and escape from its reliance on US products. Washington sees the move as a direct challenge to its own technology leaders and a potential security threat as Chinas power grows.
The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said the matter had been taken up with the UK government and had been regretted at the highest level.

On Wednesday, during the bilateral leg of Modi's visit to the UK, some protesters at Parliament Square turned aggressive during which the Indian tricolour was torn down by some protesters. (Photo: AFP | Representational)

London: India has demanded legal action against those behind the desecration of the Indian flag at Parliament Square in London during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's UK visit.

The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said the matter had been taken up with the UK government and had been regretted at the highest level.

"We are deeply anguished with the incident involving our national flag at Parliament Square. The matter was taken up promptly and strongly with the UK side, and it has been regretted at highest level," Ministry of External Affair spokesperson Raveesh Kumar told reporters on Thursday.

"We expect action, including legal action, against the people involved in the incident and also people responsible for instigating the incident," he said. Prime Minister Modi after his arrival in the country was greeted by some groups protesting against atrocities in India.

On Wednesday, during the bilateral leg of Modi's visit to the UK, some protesters at Parliament Square turned aggressive during which the Indian tricolour was torn down from one of the official flagpoles set up for all 53 Commonwealth countries to mark the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) and ripped up by some protesters.

The perpetrators, caught on camera, were pro-Khalistani demonstrators brought together with Kashmiri separatist groups under the banner of the so-called 'Minorities Against Modi' group, led by Pakistani-origin peer Lord Ahmed.

There is growing pressure on the UK government to act against Ahmed, who is seen as repeatedly "instigating" violence against India on UK soil.

A UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) spokesperson said the UK government had been in touch with the Indian High Commission soon after the incident.

"While people have the right to hold peaceful protests, we are disappointed with the action taken by a small minority in Parliament Square and contacted High Commissioner Yashvardhan Kumar Sinha as soon as we were made aware," a spokesperson said.

Scotland Yard also issued a statement following the protests and confirmed that it is investigating the incident involving the Indian tricolour being pulled down.

"Police are investigating after an Indian flag in Parliament Square was pulled down at 1500 [UK time] on Wednesday, 18 April. The flag has been replaced. There have been no arrests. Enquiries continue," a Metropolitan Police statement said.

A senior broadcast journalist from one of the leading Indian media channels covering the protests, who was caught up in the scrum, has now also registered a formal police complaint with the Met Police.

"To my shock, the protesters while raising anti-India slogans brought the Indian flag down, tore it with scissors until it was completely destroyed...Within seconds, I was pushed, abused and intimidated," Loveena Tandon, who represents Aaj Tak news channel in the UK, said in a statement.

"A message must be sent to all those out there that we journalists make people aware of what is going on in the world. Shutting us up or being violent towards us defeats their own purpose of being heard," she said.

The incident also went viral on social media, with people expressing their shock and support to the journalist who was caught up in the incident. The groups involved were seen with "Free Jaggi" posters and T-shirts, calling for the release of Jagtar Singh Johal who is lodged in a Punjab jail over his alleged involvement in the targeted killings in the state.
It was revealed in memos written by former FBI Director James Comey about his interactions with the President, reported Fox News.

The recovered memos also revealed that the after Trump was sworn-in as the president of the United States, he told Comey during a one-on-one dinner that he 'needed loyalty and expected loyalty.' (Photo: File)

Washington: United States President Donald Trump had asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to clarify to the public that he was not under any investigation over the alleged contacts of Russia with the member of his presidential campaign.

This was revealed in memos written by former FBI Director James Comey about his interactions with the President, reported Fox News. The memos were released to the congressional committees on Thursday.

The Republican Party lawmakers said that Comey's memos substantiate that he never felt obstructed, as claimed by many Democrats who alleged that the president tried to restrict the investigation in the Russia involvement in 2016 Presidential election.

The recovered memos also revealed that the after Trump was sworn-in as the president of the United States, he told Comey during a one-on-one dinner that he "needed loyalty and expected loyalty."

Around two months after this meeting, Comey wrote that Trump called him and pressed to make it public about his contact with Russian officials.

"I reminded [Trump] that I had told him we weren't investigating him and that I had told the Congressional leadership the same thing. Trump said it would be great if that could get out and several times asked me to find a way to get that out," Comey wrote.
Ra Chhay Rath, 21, killed his ex-wife at school on Thursday then went to the nearby Tsubasa bridge and jumped into the Mekong river.

'We are investigating to find out why he killed his ex-wife,' police said. (Representational Image)

Phnom Penh: A Cambodian man murdered his ex-wife and then jumped off a bridge in a suicide that he broadcast live on Facebook, police said on Friday, in the first such case reported in the country.

Facebook is the social media platform of choice for Cambodians. Nearly a third of the countrys 15.8 million people are Facebook users and the network is a major source of information, particularly for young people.

Ra Chhay Rath, 21, killed his former wife at a school on Thursday then went to the nearby Tsubasa bridge, in Kandal province, and jumped into the Mekong river. Only the suicide was broadcast, police said.

It has never happened before. It was the first case, police spokesman Kirth Chantharith told Reuters, referring to the broadcast of the suicide.

We are investigating to find out why he killed his ex-wife. Police said the mans body had not been found.

Reuters was able to access videos of the suicide on Friday shared by Facebook users. It was not immediately clear whether anyone had reported the video or asked for it to be taken down.

A spokesman for Facebook later said the company was deeply saddened by this tragedy and that it had removed the video.

We dont allow the promotion of violence or suicide on Facebook and have removed the video, the spokesman said in an email to Reuters.

We want people to have a safe experience on Facebook and we work with organisations around the world to provide assistance for people in distress.

In 2017, Facebook said it would expand its pattern recognition software after successful tests in the United States to detect users with suicidal intent.

Facebook has been embroiled in a number of content moderation controversies over recent years.

It has also been accused by human rights advocates of not doing enough to weed out hate messages while it faces questions in several countries about data privacy.
'Terrorism is enemy faced by all. The international community should work together to fight against it,' foreign ministry spokesperson said.

'We hope the international community could support the efforts made by Pakistan in counter-terrorism and forge effective cooperation with it in that regard,' Hua said. (Photo: Representational)

Beijing: China on Friday backed its all-weather ally Pakistan and called on the international community to support its counter terrorism efforts after Prime Minister Narendra Modi described the neighbouring country as a "terror export factory".

"Terrorism is the enemy faced by all. The international community should work together to fight against it," foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said during a media briefing in Beijing, when asked about China's response to Modi terming Pakistan as a "terror export factory" during a speech in London.

"We hope the international community could support the efforts made by Pakistan in counter-terrorism and forge effective cooperation with it in that regard," Hua said putting up a strong defence for China's all-weather ally.

While speaking at the 'Bharat Ki Baat, Sabke Saath' programme at the iconic Central Hall Westminster in London on Wednesday, warning Pakistan, Modi had said India will not tolerate those who export terror and will respond to them in the language they understand, referring to the 2016 surgical strikes conducted across the LoC.

"When someone has put a terror export factory in place and makes attempts to attack us from the back, Modi knows how to answer in the same language," he had said.

Hua's comment also came ahead of the meeting of the Foreign Ministers of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) here, to be held early next week.

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj is arriving in Beijing on Saturday to take part in the meeting to be held on April 24. She is due to meet her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on Sunday.

Separately Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman too will attend the SCO Defence Ministers meeting on the same day.

These are the first meetings of the SCO after India and Pakistan were admitted into the eight-member group in which China and Russia plays an influential role.

Both events are to be attended by the respective Ministers from Pakistan. SCO consists China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

Modi is also due to attend this year's SCO summit to be held in the Chinese city of Qingdao in June.

Hua said issues related to terrorism will be discussed at the meeting of SCO Foreign Ministers.

"We believe it is a purpose of the SCO to promote relevant cooperation in that field. Security has been a priority of the SCO since its inception," she said.

"So the upcoming SCO Foreign Ministers meeting will see participants exchanging views on the relevant issues, major international and regional issues and all the participants will uphold the Shanghai sprit to consolidate more consensus and to move forward the development of the SCO," she said.
Christian communities will be able to complete the necessary red tape in four months. Egypt wants to improve the legal framework in which freedom of worship is exercised. The new step touches 102 churches and 64 places of prayer. Some 3,500 places of worship should follow.

Cairo (AsiaNews) - The Egyptian government has approved a plan to legalise at least 166 Church assets across the country, thus showing its support for the countrys Christian minority, which has been the recent victim of brutal attacks by extremist Islamic groups.

According to Egypt Today, the Egyptian government has approved legislation proposed by a committee established last year to vet Christian requests to legalise their places of worship. The committee was set up under a law passed in 2016 to protect Christian churches.

"The legal statuses of 166 churches and service buildings in several provinces around Egypt have been approved taking into consideration that all the requirements will be met within four months," said a cabinet statement.

The legislation is meant to respect the provisions of the law and the constitution to give all Egyptians the right to perform [their] religious rites."

In January, the country's housing minister, Mostafa Madbouly, who was acting prime minister at the time, expedited the decision process for all the applications submitted. In all, Egyptian authorities received some 3,730 Church applications for legalisation.

A total of 102 churches and 64 church service buildings are slated for legal status as a result of Mondays cabinet meeting.

According to official data, around 15 million Christians live in Egypt. Before the 2016 reform, for them getting official approval to build their places of worship was very hard. In 2011, there were under 2,900 churches against 108,000 mosques.

The Coptic Orthodox Church has at least 2,500 active applications on behalf of various parishes, some going back more than 150 years.

Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi is one of the main backers of the new law that legalises Christian places of worship. He made religious freedom and the defence of Christians one of the issues of the recent electoral campaign, which saw him win a second mandate.

Recently, an Egyptian military court imposed the death sentence on 36 radical Islamists and jihadists accused of involvement in terrorist attacks against three churches and a police checkpoint.
The activist group protests the decision of some municipalities to expel refugees "because of their nationality or religion". The appeal to national leaders to oppose a "rhetoric" that "encourages or forgives" violations. Harsh criticism of international community for failing to support Lebanon in the emergency.

Beirut (AsiaNews) - Several municipalities in Lebanon have violated human rights, ordering the expulsion "without any justification" of hundreds of Syrian refugees from their homes and housing starting in 2016.

The move coincides with a growing resentment and intolerance towards those who have fled from the conflict in search of shelter, which has aggravated the Land of the Cedars already precarious economic situation.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) activists report "at least 13 municipalities in Lebanon forcibly drove around 3664 Syrian refugees from their homes"; expulsion measures, they add, based more often than "on their nationality or their religion" in a period between the beginning of 2016 and the end of March.

In January, a Lebanese minister spoke of a decrease in Syrian refugees in Lebanon, which has just fallen below one million. However, according to UN experts, the situation is getting more complicated, so much so that today they are "more vulnerable than ever": "over half" live in conditions of "extreme poverty" and "more than three quarters below the poverty line".

The confirmation comes from an investigation carried out by UNICEF, the World Food Program and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), according to which aid and funding to respond to the emergency are more "uncertain".

Three quarters of Syrian refugees in Lebanon now live on less than four dollars a day; often money is not even enough to buy basic resources, like food and medicine. According to research, nine out of ten refugees have applied for cash loans and are now overwhelmed with debt. Each household spends on average $ 98 a month, 44 of which are used for eating.

According to UN figures, 84% of refugees find refuge in Turkey (which receives 2.9 million people), Pakistan (1.4 million), Lebanon (over one million, out of a total of four million inhabitants), Iran (979.400 migrants), Uganda (940.800) and Ethiopia (761.600). In this emergency situation, Pope Francis in his Message 2018 for the World Day of Migrants and Refugees reminds us that in addition to welcoming we must "protect, promote and integrate".

In a statement, Bill Frelick, head of the HRW refugee program, points out that "the municipalities have no legitimate justification for displacing Syrian refugees". Especially if these measures, he warns, are taken on the basis of "discriminations" of a religious, ethnic group or nationality. "Lebanese leaders - he continues - should put an end to a rhetoric that encourages or forgives forced displacement, expulsions and other forms of mistreatment or discrimination towards refugees".

The indictment by the HRW official does not only affect Lebanon. He concluded : Lebanon's refugee-hosting fatigue has been exacerbated by a lack of international support" as well.
Last Wednesday, 28 Catholic bishops held a prayer vigil in front of Delhis cathedral. In 2016, a sexual offence against a minor was committed every 15 minutes, and more than 100 women were raped every day. Caritas is providing sanitary napkins to counter school dropout.

New Delhi (AsiaNews)  The Catholic bishops of northern India organised a prayer vigil for Asifa Bano, the 8-year-old girl raped and murdered in Jammu and Kashmir, and for a 16-year-old who was raped by a lawmaker from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Uttar Pradesh.

The event was held Wednesday in front of the Sacred Heart Cathedral in New Delhi, in collaboration with Signis India and the Archdiocesan Youth Commission.

The prelates expressed their strong condemnation of the violence against women and children. Mgr William D'Souza, archbishop of Patna, told Matters India that "the only sure resort we have for justice is prayer".

In all, 28 bishops took part in the initiative, together with many believers.

The situation in the country over the victimisation of minors and vulnerable persons calls for clear conciseness to help prevent such incidents, said Archbishop DSouza as he lit the first candle.

Protestants also spoke out against the brutal treatment of Asifa, who was drugged and tortured for days by a group of Hindus in Kathua.

'It is time for India to acknowledge it has a problem with how it treats women,' said Bishop Joseph D'Souza, moderator of the (Evangelical) Church of the Good Shepherd of India.

'When there is any religious fundamentalism, and I am not just talking about Hindu fundamentalism, it ends up targeting women, he told Christian Today.

Mgr D'Souzas reference is to the fact that Asifa Bano was raped in revenge against her father, a member of the Gujjar community, nomadic Muslim shepherds who cross the Himalayas with their herds of goats and buffaloes, sparking anger among sedentary communities.

For women, he added, it is not necessary to have conflict [for this to happen]. They are still raped and attacked.

According to Child Rights and You (CRY), data indicate a rise in sexual crimes against children, from 18,967 cases in 2006 to 106,958 in 2016.

Data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) for 2016 suggest that crimes against children in India have increased by 14 per cent over 2015. This means that in India a child is victim of a sexual offence every 15 minutes.

In all, 38,947 rape-related cases were reported in 2016 in the country, the NCRB said. This represents a 12 per cent rise from 34,651 cases in 2015. Thus, on average, more than a hundred cases of rape are reported every day.

Bishop D'Souza admitted that it was 'unfortunate' that in the Church in India there is no voice strong enough to stand up for gender equality. I find this extremely troubling,' he said.

Unless there is teaching on gender equality within the Church then churches are not going to be clean when it comes to this broader problem [of the objectification of women].

Fr Frederick D'Souza, director of Caritas India, spoke to AsiaNews about a series of initiatives his organisation has undertaken to restore the dignity to women in rural areas.

"In Bihar we are working with Dalit girls, originally known as Musahar, which means rat eaters, he explained.

Traditionally members of this community have had to eat rat because of abject poverty and discrimination.

At the same time, to solve the problem of early school dropout, Caritas has set up a machine to make sanitary napkins and trained women to use it.

Girls do not go to school, Fr D'Souza bemoaned because of a taboo to speak about menstruation and [as a result,] parents marry them off immediately.

For this reason, We have formed groups of mothers and fathers to encourage them to send the children to school.

(Nirmala Carvalho contributed to this article)
Some 84,583 soldiers and 20,000 civilian "village guards" will be deployed. The leader of the main, now disbanded opposition party calls on supporters to boycott the election. The United States and the European Union have withdrawn their financial support for the elections. Prime Minister Hun Sen, in power for 32 years, fears a "colour revolution.

Phnom Penh (AsiaNews/Agencies)  Cambodian officials have announced that the government will deploy more than 100,000 security forces and village guards at polling stations across the country during the upcoming general elections in July.

This has raised concerns among observers and human rights activists who fear that such a show of force will intimidate voters called to cast their ballot in an election that sees the ruling party as the only major political group running.

Last week, National Election Committee (NEC) secretary general Tep Nytha told the press that the security forces will deploy 84,583 members at various polling stations throughout the country to provide security protection services during the 29 July ballot.

The rollout represents a significant increase over that of the countrys June 2017 municipal elections, when 51,578 security personnel were deployed in groups, including more than 33,000 police, nearly 3,000 military police and more than 4,000 soldiers from the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces (RCAF).

On Wednesday, the website of the General Commissariat of the National Police published a statement from its spokesman Kiet Chantharith saying that the government also plans to deploy more than 20,000 village guards to provide additional security during the election.

The guards are civilians, selected by local councils and loyal to the government. Activists note that the volunteers have not been trained to respect the election-related code of conducts and ethics and the principle of neutrality.

Under the countrys election laws, only one armed guard is required outside of each polling station, with two unarmed guards posted inside the facility

Interior Ministry spokesman Khieu Sopheak said that the Ministry is prepared to deal with any election-related chaos caused by former opposition leader Sam Rainsy or his supporters. Rainsy has called for an election boycott, a stance he reiterated in Japan last week.

Voting is set months after the Supreme Court ordered the dissolution of the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), the main opposition party.

Given the absence of any significant rival to the Cambodia's People Party (CPP) of Prime Minister Hun Sen, which has ruled the country for the past 32 years, Rainsy called the next election "meaningless", asking voters to stay away to undermine the legitimacy of the premier.

In recent months, Hun Sen has launched a repressive campaign against the CNRP, NGOs and the media.

Both the United States and the European Union have withdrawn their financial support for the elections in Cambodia, citing government actions limiting the countrys democracy, including the dissolution of the CNRP and the arrest for treason of the CNRPs current president, Kem Sokha.

After the disbanding of the CNRP, Hun Sen repeatedly referred to its alleged plans to carry out a colour revolution.

Analysts believe that the prime minister and his government fear the possibility of unrest by supporters of the CNRP, which received more than 3 million votes in 2013 (almost half of the ballots cast), and did well in last year's municipal elections.
The number of insects exceed the earths human population. Their release into the environment would be a catastrophe. Adult cockroaches are used to make a potion used by millions of Chinese to treat respiratory and gastric problems.

Xichang (AsiaNews/Agencies)  The worlds largest cockroach farm is in Xichang, Sichuan, south-western China, where it breeds six billion cockroaches a year.

When they become adult, the cockroaches are crushed into a paste to make a potion that is slightly sweet and has fishy smell. It is used to treat gastric and respiratory ailments.

The Good Doctor Pharmaceutical Group in Chengdu, Sichuan, operates the farm that breeds the six billions of cockroaches by controlling temperature and humidity using artificial intelligence.

According to the Chinese government, the potion made from the cockroaches is used by millions of Chinese.

In China many farms breed cockroaches, used in medicine and as a source of protein for farm animals. But none is as big as the one in Xichang, where the number of cockroaches exceeds that of the earth's human population.

For Xichangs 800,000 residents, the insects are not a danger per se, but their sudden release into the environment  as a result of an earthquake, another natural disaster, or human error  would be.

Speaking to the South China Morning Post, Prof Zhu Chaodong, a scientist at the Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, said that should this happen it would be "a catastrophe".
Photo of the Q Inspiration concept vehicle in Beijing courtesy of Infiniti.

Infiniti will offer electrified versions of all new vehicles by 2021 and hopes to have half of it global model sales be electric vehicles by 2025, the luxury unit announced.

Infiniti will base its electrified platform on the Q Inspiration concept car for a model that will go into production within give years, Infiniti announced on April 23

Infinti also announced plans to build five new models in China, including the next-generation QX50 midsize SUV and the new electrified model. The midsize SUV will be built at its plant in Dalian. Infiniti plans to unveil that model at the Beijing auto show later this year. The QX50 will be sold exclusively in the Chinese market.
Fukuoka Airport International Terminal by night. Photo via tsuna72/Wikimedia.

Avis Car Rental announced its return to the Japanese market with the opening of its flagship location at Chitose International Airport on Hokkaido Island.

The opening is the first of several planned this year, with locations at Fukuoka International Airport, Narita International Airport, and Kagoshima International Airport, scheduled for the summer. Idex Auto Japan, a dealer of new and previously owned vehicles and car rental operator in Japan, has been appointed the company's licensee to operate the brand.

The new facilities will provide local and international customers with Avis' products and services, including a wide range of late-model vehicles, short- and long-term rentals, and outstanding customer service. Customers will be able to book reservations for Chitose International Airport on Avis' website, with new locations added over the course of the summer.

Avis' legacy in Asia can be traced back to 1970, when the company opened its first location in Hong Kong. Operations in Singapore, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Pakistan followed. Operations have grown steadily throughout the region ever since, including Avis' leading presence in China, which began in 2002.

Avis now has approximately 300 locations in Asia.

The company's agreement with Idex Auto Japan to operate the Avis brand in Japan builds upon a relationship that dates back to 1985. Idex Auto Japan is a licensee partner for Budget, a sister-company to Avis.
Photo via Zizolo0ol/Wikimedia.

A Jordanian court ruled today to ban ride-hailing app Careerm from operating in the Kingdom, The Jordan Times reports.

The ruling blocks Careems app on all app stores, and bans drivers and riders from accessing the app on their phones. Careem may resume operations in the country when it obtains the appropriate licenses, according to the news outlet.

The suit against Careem was filed on behalf of several yellow taxicab offices. A lawyer representing the taxi companies said that there are around 17,000 cabs currently in Jordan.
A Delano man who spent the past 26 years on death row after being convicted of sexually assaulting and killing a 21-month-old girl will not fa
Harold Pierce covers education and health for The Californian. He can be reached at 661-395-7404. Follow him on Twitter @RoldyPierce
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NORRISTOWN, Pa. (AP)  The Latest on Bill Cosby's sexual assault retrial (all times local):

6:35 p.m.

A defense drug expert says he doesn't know of any small blue pill that could have produced the symptoms that Bill Cosby's chief accuser described on the night she says the comedian gave her pills and molested her.

Cosby says he gave Andrea Constand the over-the-counter cold and allergy medicine Benadryl before their sexual encounter at his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004. Constand says he gave her three small blue pills that knocked her out and left her unable to resist as he molested her.

Defense drug expert Harry Milman echoed prosecution expert Dr. Timothy Rohrig's testimony that paralysis is "not really" a side effect of Benadryl.

The Associated Press doesn't typically identify people who say they're victims of sexual assault unless they grant permission, which Constand has done.

___

6:20 p.m.

Bill Cosby's lawyers want jurors to hear deposition testimony from an uncooperative witness they say sheds light on Andrea Constand's motive for accusing the comedian of drugging and molesting her.

Cosby's lawyers said in court papers Thursday that the woman who gave the testimony, Constand's good friend Sheri Williams, has not responded to attempts to subpoena her to testify at Cosby's retrial.

The defense says it wanted to put Williams on the stand to show that Constand "could not have been the unwitting victim" prosecutors have portrayed.

Williams gave the deposition testimony as part of Constand's 2005 lawsuit against Cosby. The TV star wound up settling with Constand for nearly $3.4 million.

The defense has accused Constand of falsely accusing Cosby so she could file suit against him.

The Associated Press doesn't typically identify people who say they're victims of sexual assault unless they grant permission, which Constand has done.

___

6:05 p.m.

The judge in Bill Cosby's sexual assault retrial says jurors should have the case next week.

Judge Steven O'Neill said in court Thursday there are only a few more days of testimony in the case that pits Cosby against a woman who says he drugged and molested her at his home outside Philadelphia.

The 80-year-old comedian says his 2004 encounter with Andrea Constand was consensual. His first trial ended with a hung jury.

A pair of drug experts  one for the prosecution and one for the defense  testified Thursday.

The Associated Press doesn't typically identify people who say they're victims of sexual assault unless they grant permission, which Constand has done.

___

4:05 p.m.

Bill Cosby's lawyers have lost another bid to cut his sex assault retrial short.

Judge Steven O'Neill rejected a defense motion that he acquit Cosby and send jurors home. The defense asked the judge to clear the 80-year-old comedian after prosecutors rested their case Thursday afternoon.

Cosby's lawyers say prosecutors haven't proved charges he drugged and molested a woman at his suburban Philadelphia mansion more than a dozen years ago. Cosby has said his sexual encounter with the woman was consensual.

The defense also says there's no evidence to prove the alleged assault happened within the 12-year statute of limitations.

Prosecutors say the accuser and Cosby have both said the encounter was in 2004. Prosecutors point out Cosby was arrested in 2015, just before the deadline to charge him.

___

12:10 p.m.

A prosecution drug expert is telling jurors that Bill Cosby's chief accuser could have been made woozy by either the cold and allergy medicine Benadryl or by quaaludes.

Dr. Timothy Rohrig, a forensic toxicologist, testified at Cosby's sexual assault retrial on Thursday.

Andrea Constand says Cosby gave her three unidentified blue pills that knocked her out and then sexually assaulted her at his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004. Cosby says he gave her Benadryl to help her relax and that she consented to a sexual encounter.

He has previously acknowledged giving quaaludes, a now-banned sedative, to women before sex back in the 1970s.

Rohrig says Benadryl's main ingredient can cause sedation, muscle weakness and clumsiness. He says quaaludes also have a tendency to make people sleepy.

The Associated Press doesn't typically identify people who say they're victims of sexual assault unless they grant permission, which Constand has done.

___

9:45 a.m.

The judge in Bill Cosby's sexual assault retrial is rejecting the defense's fifth bid for a mistrial.

Cosby's lawyers argued on Thursday that prosecutors were out of line for implying they were wrong to help star defense witness Marguerite Jackson write a statement outlining how she says Cosby's chief accuser mused about framing a celebrity.

Prosecutor Stewart Ryan irked Cosby's lawyers during Jackson's cross-examination by repeatedly saying they "created" her affidavit.

The judge says there is "simply no grounds for a mistrial" and that Cosby's lawyers are raising the issue too late.

Judge Steven O'Neill is also slamming the comedian's lawyers for dragging out the trial by having just one witness ready to testify Thursday.

Cosby is charged with drugging and molesting a woman in 2004. He says it was consensual.

___

8:35 a.m.

Bill Cosby has arrived for the ninth day of his sexual assault retrial.

The 80-year-old comedian arrived at a suburban Philadelphia courthouse Thursday morning where the jury is expected to hear from a pair of drug experts.

The prosecution's expert, Dr. Timothy Rohrig, testified at Cosby's last trial that wooziness and other effects chief accuser Andrea Constand described could have been caused by quaaludes or over-the-counter Benadryl.

The Associated Press doesn't typically identify people who say they're victims of sexual assault unless they grant permission, which Constand has done.

___

12:40 a.m.

Bill Cosby's lawyers have turned to their star witness in the comedian's sexual assault retrial.

Temple University academic adviser Marguerite Jackson testified on Wednesday that chief accuser Andrea Constand spoke about fabricating sexual assault allegations against a high-profile person so she could "get that money" from a lawsuit.

Jackson took the witness stand the same day jurors heard Cosby's explosive deposition testimony about giving quaaludes to women before sex.

The jury is expected to hear from a pair of drug experts on Thursday.

The prosecution's expert, Dr. Timothy Rohrig, testified at Cosby's last trial that wooziness and other effects Constand described could have been caused by quaaludes or over-the-counter Benadryl.

The Associated Press doesn't typically identify people who say they're victims of sexual assault unless they grant permission, which Constand has done.

Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
MADRID (AP)  The Basque militant group ETA on Friday offered an unprecedented apology for the pain caused during its more than four decades of armed campaign for independence from Spain and France, and vowed not to return to violence.

ETA, which killed around 850 people including police, politicians and entrepreneurs, is due to announce its final dissolution early next month, ending one of Europe's last standing violent nationalist conflicts.

After nearly half a century of car bomb attacks, shootings and kidnappings, the group gave up its violent campaign in 2011. One year ago, the organization also handed over to authorities most of its remaining arsenal.

In a statement published on Friday by Basque newspapers Berria and Gara, ETA acknowledged its responsibility for the pain caused by assassinations, torture, kidnappings and people forced to leave the Basque country, in a vague reference not only to ETA's victims but also to the plight of some of its own militants.

"We want to show our respect to the dead, the injured and the victims that ETA's actions have caused," the statement said. "We really are sorry."

Spain's government, which considers ETA a terrorist organization, welcomed the organization's move but said the apology came too late.

"ETA should have sincerely and unconditionally asked for forgiveness for the damage caused a long time ago," the government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said in a brief note.

It added that Friday's announcement was "nothing more than another consequence of the fortitude of the rule of law that has defeated ETA with the arms of democracy."

ETA's victims were also critical of the announcement because it sought the forgiveness of victims "who didn't have a direct participation in the conflict"  apparently excluding those who had been specifically targeted by ETA.

AVT, a national association of terrorism victims, said the statement aimed to "whiten" ETA's past, while COVITE, another victim group based in the Basque town of San Sebastian, said the distinction between "guilty and innocent victims" treats them "as collateral damage in the imposition of a totalitarian project."

ETA emerged in the late 1950s during the dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco with the stated aim of forming an independent state from Basque areas on both sides of the Pyrenees. Basques have a distinct culture and an ancient language, Euskara.

In the 80s, shadowy death squads killed and tortured dozens of ETA militants in what was known as the Spanish government's "dirty war" against the group.

Both France and Spain, where ETA committed most of its deadly actions, had been demanding an apology and that the group take a further step and disband.

The official Basque regional broadcaster ETB, which has in the past had access to the organization's plans, reported this week that ETA's dissolution would be announced in the first weekend of May.

ETB said that an event to mark the end of ETA  a Basque-language acronym for Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, meaning Basque Homeland and Freedom  will be held in southern France before the final announcement by the group.

In Friday's statement, ETA said it is committed "to finally overcome the consequences of the conflict and not to fall into its repetition," adding that "this political and historical conflict should have had a fair and democratic solution a long time ago."

There's also an issue of what to do with the hundreds of jailed ETA members and the handful still on the run. Hundreds of killings also remain unsolved and the arms could help lead to some of the perpetrators.

Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla.  Dr. Evelyn Idell Bethune, the granddaughter of Bethune-Cookman University founder Mary McLeod Bethune, stole more than $23,000 from a nonprofit that helps students and spent the money on personal items, police say.

Evelyn Bethune arrested, charged with fraud, grand theft

She's the granddaughter of B-CU founder Mary McLeod Bethune

Police say she stole from nonprofit that helps students

Evelyn Bethune, 66, of Daytona Beach has been charged with three felonies, including scheme to defraud and grand theft.

According to Daytona Beach Police charging affidavit, the president of the National League of American Pen Women came to police in February to report an embezzlement that involved Bethune, who was elected treasurer of the Daytona Beach chapter.

The embezzlement began in mid 2016, she said.

According to the president, Bethune had various bank accounts, but Bethune had all funds be transferred to a Fifth Third Bank account in Daytona Beach.

Investigators subpoenaed the bank for records of transactions into that account.

They said they found that thousands of dollars that were meant for NLAPW business were instead spent by Bethune, out of the Fifth Third Bank account, for items such as restaurants, nail salons, doctor bills, a florist and gasoline, among other personal purchases. There were also multiple overdraft fees, investigators said.

Per the NLAPW's bylaws, all bank accounts must have two signatures, and money spent that's associated with the group must be approved, both of which did not happen, police say.

A total of $23,134.84 was stolen from both the Daytona Beach and national chapters of the NLAPW, police say.

"The NLAPW's Daytona Beach chapter was on the verge of shutting their chapter down due to all their funds being depleted by Evelyn Bethune," the police affidavit reads.
BROOKSVILLE, Fla. -- Members of the Hernando County Republican Party's executive committee met Thursday evening and agreed to send a letter to Commissioner Nicholas Nicholson, demanding his resignation.

Commissioner Nicholas Nicholson was arrested Thursday

He is accused of paying for sex, allowing prostitution at home

GOP wants him to resign from post

PREVIOUS: Deputies: Florida commissioner, 71, paid for sex from resident in his home

"We have had concerns about his behavior for years," Hernando GOP Chairman John Allocco said in a statement.

The reason for this latest action is Nicholson's arrest on Thursday for allegedly paying for sex and allowing prostitution to take place at his home.

Allocco said the county Republican party asked him to step down and not run for reelection back in 2015, when information about a previous Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigation involving Nicholson became public.

"I wish that he would have taken our advice and used his time as an opportunity to straighten his life out," Allocco said.

"We do not condone any kind of behavior like this, and the Republican Party definitely does not condone any kind of behavior like this, so that's why we took swift action on the same day." - Hernando County Board of County Commissioners Chairman Steve Champion

"He decided not to step down and he was reelected by the people," said Hernando County Board of County Commissioners Chairman Steve Champion.

Champion is a member of the GOP's executive committee and said the support to call for Nicholson's resignation was overwhelming.

"We do not condone any kind of behavior like this, and the Republican Party definitely does not condone any kind of behavior like this, so that's why we took swift action on the same day," Champion said.

Champion said only the governor's office could remove Nicholson from his seat.

MicKinley Lewis, a spokesperson for the governor, said in a statement: "Governor (Rick) Scott expects all elected officials to behave ethically and responsibly. Our office is aware of this and reviewing the details."

County officials said if Nicholson is removed, it would also be up to the governor to either call a special election or appoint a new commissioner.

Nicholson did not respond to requests for comment.
A Pinellas County detention deputy was fired Friday for harassing a fellow co-worker, discrimination, and creating a racially hostile work environment, officials said.

Pinellas detention deputy accused of using racial slurs, harassing co-worker

Deputy Jorge Lopez fired on April 20

Lopez used "n-word" continuously while on the job

Deputy Jorge Lopez is accused of referring to his African American co-workers and the African American inmates as the "n-word."

The incident happened on Jan. 14 while Lopez was working in a maximum security housing area of the Pinellas County jail. Officials said Lopez initiated a conversation with a white co-worker and asked if an African American deputy who was assigned to the area, was currently on the floor.

According to investigators, Lopez told the white deputy, "Well there's a lot of "n-words" on this floor."

The white deputy told Lopez that he was offended by his inappropriate language and asked him to stop, but Lopez continued on and used the N-word multiple times, investigators said. Lopez then became aggressive toward the other deputy and called him a "n-word" and referred to him as an "inmate "n-word" lover," investigators said.

The deputy told Lopez multiple times to stop but Lopez continued with his inappropriate and derogatory behavior until the deputy left the room.

Witnesses also told investigators that Lopez referred to the inmates as "stupid 'n-words'," and said "the "n-words" behind the gates need to control themselves."

During the investigation, Lopez admitted to the allegations and admitted to using racial slurs while working at the jail.

The Administration Review Board determined the Lopez violated the Sheriff's Office policy and was terminated on April 20, 2018.
On the heels of the Florida Legislature's approval of $97.5 million to hire more school resource officers, a slew of local law enforcement agencies are moving to end their cost sharing roles in paying for existing SROs. The moves are frustrating school district superintendents, who now warn the new funding won't result in as many new hires as expected.

School Safety Bill architects did not foresee issue

Districts saying few, if any, positions will be added

Funds for Guardian program could be redirected

While the details of security agreements between districts and law enforcement agencies vary from county to county, sheriff's offices and police departments shoulder an average of one-third of the cost of employing school resource officers.

With districts receiving the new state funding  part of the post-Parkland gun violence prevention package passed last month  many agencies are scaling back or eliminating their financial contributions, something the package's architects largely didn't foresee.

State Sen. Bill Montford (D-Tallahassee), who as head of the Florida Association of District School Superintendents serves as a legislative advocate for school districts, predicts the state's resource officer funding will need to be increased.

"When you look at what we're required to do and, more importantly, what's expected and what we need to ensure the safety of our children, I'm not sure that's enough," Montford said in an interview. "Clearly, it's going to be an expensive undertaking, and I'm convinced that next session we'll take a look at it and, if necessary, hopefully we'll adjust the budget to meet whatever needs are there."

The next regular legislative session, however, doesn't begin until March of next year. Without an immediate solution to their school resource officer funding issues, some districts are planning to add fewer, if any, additional positions.

There could be a short-term, albeit unlikely, fix: the Legislative Budget Commission, which meets outside of legislative sessions, could reallocate some of the $60 million intended for a controversial voluntary program to arm teachers to the school resource officer pot. Such a shift has been endorsed by Gov. Rick Scott.

"I've already talked to the Florida Legislature about redirecting funds that aren't used for this program for more law enforcement officers at our schools," Scott said in signing the gun legislation.
This week on Political Connections

Governor's Race

Anchor Al Ruechel sits down for an exclusive one-on-one interview with Commissioner of Agriculture and former Congressman, Adam Putnam. Hes one of the Republican frontrunners for governor, but where does he stand on the issues?

Commissioner Putnam is sharing his vision for Florida including education  focusing more on his push for technical schooling. Its something he says will cut down student loan costs.

Plus, keeping Washington, D.C. out of the Sunshine state? Were hearing why what works for Washingtonmay not work for us, according to Putnam. He explains what more needs to be done.

Remembering the First Lady

The nation set to bid a final farewell to former First Lady Barbara Bush.

We're looking back on the woman who led the helm of a political dynasty.

On Saturday, the late Mrs. Bush will be laid to rest on the grounds of The Bush Presidential Library, located at Texas A&M University in College Station.

Barbara Bush passed away on Tuesday at age 92.

Politifact: Truth-O-Meter Rating

This week, Ybeth Bruzual joins us for Politifact.

Were fact-checking a claim made by Chris King (D-FL) who is also running for Florida Governor.

During a democratic forum King said, "Hispanic entrepreneurs, those who have immigrated from Spanish-speaking countries, often start three times as many businesses as white males."

Politifact writer Allison Graves puts his claim to the Truth-O-Meter test to separate fact from fiction.

Can you guess what they rated?

Find out this week on Political Connections, Sunday at 11 a.m. and 8 p.m. exclusively on Spectrum Bay News 9.
For Immediate Release, April 20, 2018 Contacts: Jeff Kuyper, Los Padres ForestWatch, (805) 617-4610 x 1, jeff@LPFW.org

Lisa Belenky, Center for Biological Diversity, (415) 385-5694, lbelenky@biologicaldiversity.org Appeal Challenges Oil Drilling in California's Carrizo Plain National Monument BAKERSFIELD, Calif. Los Padres ForestWatch and the Center for Biological Diversity today appealed the Trump administrations approval of a new oil well and pipeline in Carrizo Plain National Monument. It is the first well the Interior Department has approved in the monument since it was established in 2001. Todays appeals, filed with the Interior Board of Land Appeals in Virginia and the Bureau of Land Managements California director, show that the oil well and pipeline would harm threatened and endangered wildlife and mar scenic views. The fossil fuel development would violate several laws, including the Endangered Species Act and National Environmental Policy Act, as well as the monuments resource-management plan. Oil drilling in the Carrizo Plain National Monument must comply with the highest environmental standards to ensure the protection of this iconic landscape, said ForestWatch Executive Director Jeff Kuyper. This new well and pipeline fall far short of that standard, threatening the areas rare wildlife and scenic views. The proposed well site is located at the base of the Caliente Mountains along the western boundary of Carrizo Plain National Monument. The area is home to several protected species, including the threatened San Joaquin antelope squirrel, the endangered San Joaquin kit fox, and a threatened flowering plant called the Kern mallow. Endangered California condors also visit this area with increasing frequency as the birds continue to expand into their historic range. The oil well would be drilled on an existing oil pad that hasnt produced oil since the 1950s. Two years ago the BLM approved the oil companys request to formally abandon the pad and remove an old well, pipelines and other equipment from the site. The company also pledged to recontour and reseed the pad and a half-mile access road leading to it, restoring the area to natural conditions. The work was never done and now the BLM is backtracking on its abandonment plans by approving further development there. The irrational, illegal decision to approve this oil drilling imperils rare wildlife and contradicts the conservation purpose of this monument, said Lisa Belenky, a senior attorney at the Center. The Trump administration must not be allowed to continue expanding oil and gas drilling in the face of climate change. We need to keep dirty fossil fuels in the ground and turn to renewable energy sources. The new well would be visible from key vantage points within Carrizo Plain National Monument, including the Caliente Wilderness Study Area on Caliente Mountain (the highest point in San Luis Obispo County), and from Highway 166, a scenic route in the Cuyama Valley. Existing oil leases were grandfathered in under the monument proclamation signed by President Bill Clinton in 2001, but must comply with more stringent standards. The new well would be drilled in the Russell Ranch Oil Field, which covers approximately 1,500 acres of the monument and adjacent private land. In 2016 the field produced only 125 barrels of oil per day  0.02 percent of the states total oil production and one of the lowest-producing oilfields in the state. The field is reportedly nearing the end of its useful life. Conservation groups have asked the BLM to substantially revise its environmental assessment and consult with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, but the BLM disregarded most of the concerns and refused to consult with the wildlife agency. Background

Carrizo Plain National Monument is a vast expanse of golden grasslands and stark ridges known for their springtime wildflower displays. Often referred to as Californias Serengeti, it is one of the last undeveloped remnants of the southern San Joaquin Valley ecosystem. The Carrizo Plain is critical for the long-term conservation of this dwindling ecosystem, linking these lands to other high-value habitat areas like the Los Padres National Forest, Salinas Valley, Cuyama Valley and Bitter Creek National Wildlife Refuge in western Kern County. Honoring the areas high biodiversity, limited human impacts, and rare geological and cultural features, the Carrizo Plain was declared a national monument in 2001. It includes more than 206,000 acres of public lands  perhaps the largest native grassland remaining in all of California.
Media Advisory, April 19, 2018 Contacts: Ryan Beam, (928) 853-9929, rbeam@biologicaldiversity.org

Patrick Donnelly, (702) 483-0449, pdonnelly@biologicaldiversity.org Groups Rally for Public Lands, Protest Modesto 'Range Rights' Conference Featuring Ammon Bundy

MODESTO, Calif. Anti-government militant Ammon Bundy and other proponents of seizing federal public land from public ownership are scheduled to speak Saturday at Modesto Junior College as part of the annual Range Rights Symposium. Local residents will join members of the Center for Biological Diversity to rally for public lands during the event. Ammon Bundy and his fanatical followers are on a road show to incite division and hatred for our public lands, said Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity. The Bundys are trying to grow a menacing fringe group that wraps itself in flags and cowboy hats to fool people into believing deranged and dangerous conspiracy theories. Theyve shown theyre willing to use force and intimidation to take what doesnt belong to them. What: Rally outside Range Rights Symposium When: 3 p.m., Saturday, April 21 Where: In front of the Ag Pavilion, Modesto Junior College  West Campus, Modesto, Calif. Background

In 1998 and again in 2013, courts ruled that hundreds of the Bundy familys livestock had been illegally roaming 750,000 acres of sensitive public land near the Nevada-Arizona line. The courts ordered that the cows be removed. But when federal authorities attempted to remove the cows in 2014, the Bundys organized a dangerous armed standoff and intimidated the government into halting the operation. Today much of the land the Bundys cows continue to occupy is protected as Gold Butte National Monument. Cliven Bundy, the patriarch of the family, owes more than $1 million in unpaid grazing fees and fines, according to federal officials. In January a federal judge in Nevada dismissed all charges against him and his sons related to the 2014 Bunkerville standoff. In 2016 Ammon Bundy led an armed takeover and occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, which did significant damage to the refuge and divided the local community. Ammon Bundy and six co-defendants were acquitted by a jury in October 2016. The Bundys and their followers have been emboldened by these recent court victories. Theyre making appearances throughout the West to foment anti-public-lands sentiment and spread misinformation in an attempt to wrest control of public lands from the American people. The animals, plants and communities that rely on and cherish public lands are threatened if the Bundys radical ideology spreads.
Ciclope Africa shone a light on local craft work

Francisco Condorelli, the director of Ciclope, tells Bizcommunty.Africa what he sees for the future of Ciclope and awards focused on craft rather than the 'big idea'.

Francisco Condorelli, director of Ciclope. Ciclope Africa debuted as part of the Ciclope regional awards earlier this month. It marked the first-ever African edition of the



Why is it important to also focus on craft, as opposed to only the big idea? Why is it important to also focus on craft, as opposed to only the big idea? Ciclope Africa debuted as part of the Ciclope regional awards earlier this month. It marked the first-ever African edition of the Ciclope festival  the leading international awards show which recognises exceptional craft in moving image. The African festival, which received over 150 submissions across 16 categories, was hosted at Cape Towns new critically acclaimed Museum of Contemporary Art, Zeitz MOCAA.

What is the relevance of Ciclope Africa to the continent? What is the relevance of Ciclope Africa to the continent?

How would you rate the standard of work judged, compared to international norms? How would you rate the standard of work judged, compared to international norms?

What stood out for you in the work? What stood out for you in the work?

What delighted you? What delighted you?

What can the rest of the world learn from Africa? What can the rest of the world learn from Africa?



The world is interested in the amazing work being produced here in Africa.



Where does the African film/production industry need to improve where craft is concerned? Where does the African film/production industry need to improve where craft is concerned?

What takeout should the industry take home after Ciclope Africa? What takeout should the industry take home after Ciclope Africa?

Please talk about the future of the industry and where craft is going. Please talk about the future of the industry and where craft is going.

How successful was this first Ciclope Africa festival in relation to the international festival? How successful was this first Ciclope Africa festival in relation to the international festival?

Louise Burgers' articles About Louise Marsland Louise Burgers (previously Marsland) is Founder/Content Director: SOURCE Content Marketing Agency. Louise is a Writer, Publisher, Editor, Content Strategist, Content/Media Trainer. She has written about consumer trends, brands, branding, media, marketing and the advertising communications industry in SA and across Africa, for over 20 years, notably, as previous Africa Editor: Bizcommunity.com; Editor: Bizcommunity Media/Marketing SA; Editor-in-Chief: AdVantage magazine; Editor: Marketing Mix magazine; Editor: Progressive Retailing magazine; Editor: BusinessBrief magazine; Editor: FMCG Files newsletter. Web: www.sourceagency.co.za. Louise Burgers (previously Marsland) is Founder/Content Director: SOURCE Content Marketing Agency. Louise is a Writer, Publisher, Editor, Content Strategist, Content/Media Trainer. She has written about consumer trends, brands, branding, media, marketing and the advertising communications industry in SA and across Africa, for over 20 years, notably, as previous Africa Editor: Bizcommunity.com; Editor: Bizcommunity Media/Marketing SA; Editor-in-Chief: AdVantage magazine; Editor: Marketing Mix magazine; Editor: Progressive Retailing magazine; Editor: BusinessBrief magazine; Editor: FMCG Files newsletter. Web: www.sourceagency.co.za.

I believe that both are equally important. Neither can thrive without the other. Words by the creative legend, Sir John Hegarty, have always resonated with me: Advertising is 80% idea, but also 80% execution. I believe it has always been this way, but nowadays, with the rise of social media, mobile devices, etc., great work gets lost in the clutter when there is mediocre craft execution.We wanted to come to Africa to shine a brighter light on local craft work, because, in my opinion, it has been very underrepresented internationally. It is tough to say how this will impact the market in the long-run, but we are extremely proud of the first-ever Ciclope Africa, and I believe that in time we will show the world what Africa can do (and already does).I was not on the judging panel, but I had an overview of all the work entered. I can, without a doubt, say that the African craft work I saw easily competes with the best in the world.Great imagery, and sound.All entrants made it incredibly tough for our judges to choose the winners. The standard of work was extremely impressive.That money shouldnt be an obstacle when producing great work.I believe it boils down to time and trust. In time clients will become more confident and trusting, and in turn, creatives and directors will work in unison, thus producing better craft work as a consequence.It is testament to the work produced in Africa that it captured the attention of an international festival like Ciclope. The world is interested in the amazing work being produced here in Africa, which is something to be proud about.If I get started on this I might be here all day, but contrary to popular opinion, I dont believe technology will change the craft industry dramatically. What I mean by this is that when it comes to craft, emotions are still a big driver, and although the way we consume information will keep changing, the drivers stay the same.Ciclope has been established internationally over the span of eight years, so it is tough to compare it to the very first African edition, but what I can say that were thrilled with the launch, and were already looking forward to next year.
Liberian authorities should thoroughly investigate the killing of Tyron Brown, a video editor and camera operator with Super Communications, a privately owned outlet that runs Super FM and Super Television, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today.

 Lukasz Stefanski via 123RF

A black vehicle was seen by at least one witness dropping the journalist's body outside his home at 3 am in the eastern Paynesville suburb of Monrovia on April 16, according to Smith Toby, station manager of the privately owned radio OK FM, and media reports.He had been stabbed in at least three places, Toby, who had seen a picture of the body, told CPJ."Liberia must thoroughly investigate Tyron Brown's killing, including whether journalism could have been the motive," CPJ's Africa program coordinator, Angela Quintal, said."By acting quickly and transparently to track the killers, Liberia will send a powerful message that it supports press freedom."Brown's belongings, including two cell phones, a memory stick, and wallet, were found on the journalist's body, Emmanuel Kortu, acting station manager at Super FM, told CPJ.Kortu said he was not aware of Brown receiving any threats for his work. The journalist reported on Liberia's election results last year, Kortu said, adding that he was not one of the more critical journalists at the station.When contacted by CPJ, a member of the Liberian police who is involved in the investigation declined to comment.Charles Cuffey, president of the Press Union of Liberia, called for the authorities to investigate the murder. Cuffey told CPJ, "The situation is fear among the media...We insist that [the government] bring the perpetrators to justice."During a meeting with CPJ in New York on April 16, Lenn Eugene Nagbe, Liberia's minister of information, said the government would investigate Brown's murder.Brown's killing comes amid a recent deterioration in conditions for Liberia's press. Earlier this month, journalists at Front Page Africa told CPJ they were facing a US$1.8 million civil defamation lawsuit and increased online threats.And, during a March press conference, President George Weah accused Jonathan Paye-Layleh, a Liberian journalist working with the BBC, of being against his government, according to media reports.
You may not have heard of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia who was murdered six months ago, but Meryl Streep certainly has and it would not surprise me if the Oscar winner optioned DCG's story.

Becoming the story

Desperate situation

There is a particular sub-category of posthumous fame reserved for those who become larger in death than in life. A Che Guavara or James Dean  or even a Steve Biko locally  have become more significant with  or because of  their demise than the importance they were accorded when alive. In the last six months, Malta has produced just such an iconic presence.Although 30 years in PR has sensitised me to media workers bylines, it takes an exceptional journalist  or an exceptionally controversial journalist  to jump the rails from reporting to being reported about. Even rarer, to become an international news item. From being a divisive Maltese media personality in life, investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia has become a totemic figure with her death in October last year. Killed in a car bomb blast as she was driving from her home, DCGs assassination (as it is termed here) has meant that instead of reporting the story, she became the story.I am writing about Daphne Caruana Galizia because the engine that honours her memory has moved up a few gears coinciding with the six-month anniversary of her murder. There is adocumentary premiering in Italy this month at the International Journalism Festival byjournalist Carlo Bonini. According to Bonini, Daphnes story, the way she was killed and the reasons why she was killed are things that have a meaning for all of us, as journalists and as European citizens. Its something that goes far beyond the small island of Malta. Daphne is a European issue.Bonini may even have underestimated her significance as the American Society of Journalists and Authors has just announced that it will be honouring her with its prestigious Conscience in Media Award at its ceremony in May. Founded in 1948, ASJA is the US's professional organisation of independent non-fiction writers.The Conscience in Media Award recognises journalists who knowingly have endured great personal costs while pursuing the highest tenets of their profession, ASJA president Sherry Beck Paprocki said. This selective award has been presented only 12 times since 1975.Streep is very much aware of DCG having mentioned the Maltese journalist when addressing the CPJ International Press Freedom Awards in January this year and on Christine Amanpours eponymous TV programme during the actresss promotional duties for. Meryl and Daphne look curiously alike and share a similar bone structure  put a long dark wig on Streep and you have afor Galizia.An extremely prolific blogger (her notebookwas the islands daily must-read and an endless source of water-cooler speculation), Daphnes early death has cast in amber her last post. Typed just 25 minutes before the car bomb took her life, Daphnes final words have become the islands most prevalent graffiti, as well as the go-to reader comment on news sites specifically following articles about corruption: The situation is desperate. There are crooks everywhere you look.To this day, an ongoing item in our local papers is the informal memorial dedicated to DCG. Placards, flowers and candles are regularly placed on the Great Siege monument in Valletta in front of the tour group entrance to St John Co-Cathedral and opposite the capitals Law Courts. Just as regularly although generally mysteriously and under cover of darkness, the tributes are swept away only to be replaced the following day. The fact that this clearing  considered a form of censorship  continues to attract media attention in defiance of the intention of the removals task force, must be a source of satisfaction to Daphne on whatever celestial cloud she has plugged her heavenly laptop into.
Google is used by nearly everyone, every day, on numerous occasions. As Google has become part of our daily existence to find out information, directions and so much more, the data that Google accumulates is directly related to public opinion and interests. Essentially Google has become an extension of our own human behaviour. As Google collects all this data and search query information, being able to view this data can be exceptionally valuable from a marketing and research perspective. That is where Google Trends comes into its own.

- Location: This can be done at global level all the way down to city level

- Timeframe: 2004 till present, up to the past hour

- Search Types: Web, Image, Shopping, News, YouTube

- Category Type: Industries such as automotive, health, home, etc

Determine the hottest trends

Brand & marketing performance monitoring

Google Trends is an online tool created by Google to visualise and expose trends in search behaviour in reference to specific search queries or topics users input within Google Search, Google Shopping, YouTube, Google News and Images. The tool allows users to see how often specific search queries, phrases and topics have been queried over a specified period of time. The data is displayed on a timeline to form a trend graph that can be analysed.Google Trends does not expose all of Googles data, the tool samples and analyses a portion of search query data to determine how many searches have been conducted for a specific search query and timeframe and plots that on a timeline. One can query up to five different search terms at once which is displayed on a graph for analysis and comparative research. The graph is called the Search Volume Index.To make use of Google trends, go to https://trends.google.com/trends/ . The tool has a variety of different refinement options for your search request. You will be prompted with inputting a topic or search query to explore further. After inputting a desired topic to explore, you are presented with refinement options. These pertain to:Google Trends will also display interest by sub-region to show areas where the search topic is most popular. Suggestions in terms of related search queries and topics is also displayed in terms of what is on the rise, or what is seen as the top related queries.The most important thing to keep in mind when looking at Google Trends, is the Search Volume Index. The graph displayed in Google Trends does not show actual search volume numbers, but rather an index from 0  100. Where 100 indicates the most search volume received for that specified time period. Everything else in the time frame is calculated in reference to this point on the graph that receives "100". In the image below, search volume for point B on the graph is 66% in size of search volume compared to that of point A. OR point A is 1.51 times larger than the interest received at point B on the graph.With Google Trends being able to visualise the search query data collected within a trending format; there is a host of advantages to this, we take a look at three of these;On the homepage of Google Trends, is a breakdown of a variety of different trending information for different countries. This information covers featured insights and stories that are trending. Using this information; hot topics can be determined for the current time period and used to create content and strategies from. It is important to note, for South Africa, this homepage does not exist. However, there is trending searches and top charts which displays similar information that includes South African data.Often above the line advertising (ATL) and general brand awareness can be difficult to ascertain the impact it has had for a brand. Google Trends helps with this by showing the increase in activity or interest shown towards a brand or product. The trend data can be used to cross reference certain events or campaigns and how they have influenced the public to act in a certain way, such as performing a branded search in Google.If we were to use Takealot as an example (see graph below), we see that there are massive spikes in interest around the same period of time each year. This is during Black Friday, where Takealot received the most interest during the year due to their marketing activities and special offers for Black Friday. As each year has passed, their marketing activities have become more effective around this important shopping day, and this has translated to increased brand interest during this time of the year.Other ways to ascertain how a brand is performing in terms of interest shown by the public is to conduct different brand searches such as brand+product or brand+service search, and analyse the results. Important things to keep an eye out for is spikes in interest, peaks, troughs and a drop shown on a graph. This data can be cross referenced with advertising campaigns or activities to determine the impact they have or have not had. This approach can be used for competitor analysis as well.One of the most effective uses for Google Trends is that the tool can be used to more effectively run advertising campaigns with the information available within the tool. To maximise a budget, it helps to be able to target regions more effectively and do so at the right time of the year. In Google trends it is possible to determine seasonality of a particular topic or search query. The example of braais has been used below to illustrate this below. There is a clear spike in interest leading up to Summer, and another clear spike close to the end of December. Without fail every year the behaviour is the same. By using this information one can use a targeting strategy that incorporates more aggressive bidding and techniques during these times to maximise exposure when interest is at its highest.The same applies to geographic locations; where knowing what cities or regions shows the most interest into a particular topic, instead of wasting media budget on cities that are not interested, one can direct budgets to areas where the most interest is shown to spend more effectively.Google Trends also shows related queries, which exposes popular queries related to the topic being searched for. This information can be used to expand on targeting efforts by including these queries when running Google Adwords campaigns for instance.In conclusion, Google Trends is a very powerful market research tool that can be used by MDs to keep tabs on their brand exposure, all the way down to the specialists using the data to enhance marketing strategies for companies. There is a lot of information that can be taken from the tool and effectively put to work to improve marketing strategies and gain valuable market research insights. Next time you are looking to find out more about a certain topic, or want to know how a brand is performing in the eyes of the consumer, head over to Google Trends and start searching!Aidan has been involved in the digital world in one form or another since 2007. He has worked in the mobile gaming industry, web development and digital strategy which led him into a career within SEO. Through this experience, he gained valuable insights into different industries and SEO tactics to best target potential users for many different companies. Aidan has a great passion for knowledge sharing and enjoys equipping others in understanding what SEO is, and how it can help different digital specialties.
Okay, so I'm a bit of a mad cat lady. If you ever wanted me to pay attention to something, bury that information in a cat video and send it to me. That's probably why I've been watching pet company Whiskas's Kitten Kollege YouTube series for the past 20 minutes.

Uh, yes, Im totally working.The series takes the idea that anyone (and any species) can learn anything on the internet to heart.Adopting a tiny kitten is a magical experience, it literally takes seconds after introducing the curious little feline to your home that you realise two things: firstly, cats are Laugh Out Loud adorable, and secondly, youre needing to learn a whole lot more about your little kitty, the company explains.Its both for humans, and seemingly kittens, to educate both parties about the dangers and joys of owning a kitten. This includes everything from kitten-proofing your home (good luck with that), how best to care for their health, and running through the various breeds of cat.Oh, and theres an actual kitten college students who attend the Kitten Kollege, who listen to lecturers and meow in response.Its completely adorable. And as a marketing ploy, quite smart.The series not only garners and exploits the internets general love for felines, but the clips are also bite sized, short enough to share on social media or view on mobile devices on slower networks. And if you can appreciate the puns (Cat in the Rye, Of Mice and Mice, and countless others), youll also spend an inordinate amount of time studying them.Nevertheless, if youre at work and looking for a pick-me-up, about to add a new member to the family, or just enjoy watching kittens do kitten things, binge the series below.
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Non Banking Financial Institutions Regulatory Authority (NBFIRA) National Risk Assesment report indicates that Life Insurance sector is highly vulnerable to money laundering risks.

According to the report conducted in 2017, the insurance industry in Botswana was at a relatively high risk of money laundering while the non-life insurance sector indicates a lower vulnerability risk. This could be atrributable to the unnattractiveness of the non-life insurance products to money laundering. Non-life insurance products are based on pure risk and annuall renewability as opposed to life insurance products that are long term and have an investment feature, states the report.

Among the prevalent issues in the insurance industry include the acceptance of very high value or unlimited value payments, allowing withdrawals at any time with limited charges or fees or the use of the product as collateral and the acceptance of insurance policy to be used as collateral for loans. Currently there are 24 regulated life insurance companies and 53 insurance brokers regulated by NBFIRA.

NBFIRA Chief Executive, Oaitse Ramasedi said insurance companies need to enhance anti-money laundering knowledge of their staff through training. He said this is to ensure that they are equiped with relevant anti-money laundering knowledge on an ongoing basis. They should regularly update them on domestic and transnational money laundering schemes and typologies including typologies involving the misuse of insurance companies specialised knowledge and skills of its staff and products, said Ramasedi.

He highlighted that insurance companies must employ a well resourced and independent anti-money laundering compliance role within their operations rather than having this function doubled up with the current role of principal officer. Insurance companies must ensure that internal compliance programmes are in place and must be commensurate to the level of risk taking into account the type and volume of insurance products provided and client base profile among others. said Ramasedi.

The Anti-Money Laundering and Counter Financing of Terrorism National Risk Assesment was introduced in 2015 by the ministry of finance and Economic Development with an objective to identify, asses and understand the exposure of the various sectors of socio-economic activities in Botswana associated with money laundering and terrorist finacing. However the report states that the overal money laundering threat at a national level is medium high. Obtaining by false pretences, motor vehicle theft, tax evasion, corruption, poaching have been identified as the criminal offenses that present a high level of money laundering risks. All these predictate offenses pose high riosks in terms of proceeds that arise from the commission of such offences.

Ramasedi explained that the wide expanse of the country and inadequate monitoring of the long and porous borders created vulnerabilities to all sorts of crimes including trans-national organised crime and this results in vulnerability to money landering risks. Botswanas geographical position presented a potential transit point for illicit funds and other illegal materials including drug trafficking and human traficking.
Over the years, government has made calls for local authorities to look for other income generating streams so as to supplement existing subventions that they receive on an annual basis.

This has always been a welcome development from the onset. The world over, local authorities play a bigger role in supporting their respective development programmes financially. Secondly, the central government is also pressed with other competing interests and challenges which forces government to reduce financial resources it channels towards local authorities such as councils and land boards.

Thirdly, it has now become more pertinent for local authorities to play an even bigger role in supporting their respective budgets because government revenues are declining at an increased rate on the backdrop of subdued economic growth. The successive budget deficits are there for all to see. This explains why local government and rural development budget has declined proportionally over the years, forcing the same ministry to reduce budget allocation for councils and other local authorities on a yearly basis.

It must be pointed out clearly that; government proposition that local authorities should raise more of their funding will go a long way on ensuring councils meet the expectation of the society. Nonetheless, we are of the opinion that, if government wants local authorities to meet the national government halfway, there has to be an improved business environment in local authorities so that they can attract investors of their own.

It is the same investors who in the end will pay council rates and other levies which can prop-up revenue at a local level, a development which will cut dependency on central government. First and foremost, government has been slow in creating incentives which can compel investors, whether local or external, to skip cities and towns in preference to local authorities.

Government has over the years concentrated too much on improving infrastructure and other necessary features that can improve ease of setting up a sustainable business in towns and cities at the expense of districts. Infrastructures in most local authorities are not fully developed to force investors to choose such localities for investments.

Government should, as a matter of urgency, encourage local authorities to set up investment companies which can look into business opportunities for investment within respective localities. Currently only a few councils such as Kweneng District Council (KDC) have investment arms. Investment units of councils are important in the sense that they operate more or less like private firms with the single motive of making maximum profits at every opportunity.

Right now some councils complain every year that their subventions are declining, but they are not being asked to show what they are doing to up their revenue streams away from normal council rates. The new minister of local government, Pelonomi Venson-Moitoi needs to do something here. We know she has the zeal to help councils in this regard as she is the architect of the Venson Commission on decentralisation.

Government should also use its investment and economic development agencies such as Botswana Investment and Trade Centre (BITC) to help councils attract investors. Annually, millions of Pula are channeled towards BITC investment promotion exercises. Executives with tailor-made suits from the authority crisis cross the globe in search of investors.

We know for fact that they put the name Botswana forward in their bid to woo investors. However, it does not stop them from also canvassing for investors to invest in specific local authorities in the country from the word go. In fact, BITC and the trade ministry should have a more detailed database of various economic opportunities for each district which will be easier for investors.

If government is indeed serious about encouraging local authorities to pick up their revenue, there should also be serious overhaul of existing laws which govern revenue collections. For example, government should also make sure some of the service fees charged on citizens and foreigners at a district level by various government departments are retained at the same district so that they can be used locally. This will encourage them to work even more mindful of the fact that they are also up to benefit.

Business Talk is hopeful that government will use the Special Economic Zones to further propel local authoritys economies, which can free some national governments funds needed for pressing matters. By nature, councils do not have the complete capacity to ramp up their economic activities. Our hope is that, SEZs Authority will work hard to capacitate councils in this regard. It is the SEZA, which will be key in determining economic zones which can enjoy incentives such as reduced taxes, financial grants, distributions and storage facilities among others.

All these are important in attracting foreign investments into local authorities. It is these investments which in the end reduce local authorities heavy reliance on the national government for funding on a yearly basis. The main point being raised here is that, for government to have a sustained national budget there is need to come up with policies and initiatives which can ensure local authorities are economically independent to a large extent.

This will give the national government ample resources to fund other equally important needs of the economy and its citizens.
Makopong Sub-Chief, Kgosi Vincent Phologo has been relieved of his duties, this publication can revealThis follows a protracted dispute between Makopong villagers and the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development regarding Kgosi Phologos ascendency to the villages bogosi in 2016.

Some residents approached the High Court to challenge the then minister, Slumber Tsogwanes decision to appoint Phologo as Kgosi without holding elections.

In February this year, High Court Judge Michael Leburu ruled that Minister of Local Government, Slumber Tsogwanes 2016 decision to appoint a Kgosi for Makopong village without following proper procedure should be reversed. Judge Leburu described the ministers actions as un-procedural and must therefore be set aside meaning that Kgosi Vincent Motlhabane Phologo should vacate his seat as Sub-Chief for Makopong village and new elections be called. Last month, just before he was appointed the countrys vice president, Tsogwane told this publication that his ministry through the Tribal Administration is appealing Leburus judgment.

However, it seems the newly appointed minister of Local Government Pelonomi Venson-Moitoi will not go the court route. The minister has since relieved Phologo of his duties.

In a letter signed by Assistant Minister Botlogile Tshireletso, she explained, regarding the court judgment that, the judgment then in effect, set your appointment aside and as we all are subjects of the rule of law, we have to see to it that the full effect of the said judgment is realised in practice and spirit.

The letter which was copied to the Kgalagadi District Commissioner and the Tribal Secretary further reads in part that, You shall cease to perform your duties as a Sub-Chief effective 9th April 2018. Meanwhile, Minister Venson-Moitoi will address residents of Makopong next week Tuesday to try and resolve the villages bogosi dispute. The minister confirmed to this publication that she will address a kgotla meeting next week Tuesday to try and solve the matter.

Phologo was appointed following the death of his father Kgosi Shadreck Hatshelotlhe Phologo. However, residents of Makopong, a village in the Kgalagadi District, were against Vincent Phologos appointment arguing that it was un-procedural and unlawful as chieftainship had always been determined through elections in the village. Leburu ruled in the applicants favour and ordered that the appointment of Vincent Phologo be set aside.
It is end of the road for coalition movement Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC) as key players Botswana National Front (BNF) and Botswana Congress Party (BCP) have resolved to pull out of the marriage of convenience. Botswana Guardian understands that a bilateral meeting between BCP and BNF Central Committees in Gaborone has agreed that the time is now for them to leave UDC. Bilateral meetings are allowed among contracting partners. The last week meeting was attended by all members of the two central committees except for BNF President Advocate Duma Boko who was not in the country.

Advocate Boko has been accused by his central committee members of always avoiding meetings where critical issues pertaining to UDC are expected to be discussed. Those who attended the meeting have revealed that an agreement was reached to bolt out of the UDC and leave Botswana Movement for Democracy (BMD) and Botswana Peoples Party (BPP). It is alleged that there are talks among the BCP and BNF members to find a model of working together going forward without BMD. Others are said to be calling for a coalition by the two parties while others want Alliance for Progressives - a BMD breakaway to be roped in.

Information gathered by this publication suggest that a meeting that was scheduled for Tuesday this week to seal the deal had to be cancelled as BNF and UDC leader Advocate Boko was not available. He is said to have promised to avail himself in the next BNF meeting scheduled for end of this month. The UDC National Executive Committee (NEC) is also expected to meet on the 24th of this month.

The committee has never met since the February congress. The NEC was mandated to evaluate the congress and its resolutions and report back to its structures as soon as possible. The NEC has ever since the event failed to meet. Things fell apart at UDC following the split of BMD last year. Other contracting partners wanted some of the issues to be revisited especially the allocation of constituencies given the development that happened at BMD.

Some members especially from BNF and BCP wanted redistribution of constituencies arguing that BMD would not manage to deliver all its 14 constituencies because its numbers have been affected by the split and formation of Alliance for Progressives (AP). BNF Secretary General Moeti Mohwasa confirmed the meeting between BCP and BNF. Mohwasa said this is nothing new but a general principle that bilateral meetings could be held by contracting partners. He however said he would not share contents of the meeting with the media.

We cannot share what was discussed at the meeting with the media. It is up to parties who held a bilateral meeting to decide if they want to share the information with the media or not. So at this point we cannot share that with the media. And whoever shared such information with you was out of order, said Mohwasa who is also UDC Head of Communications. BCP Secretary General Kentse Rammidi could not be reached as his mobile phone was off.
A recommendation by the Botswana Peoples Party (BPP) disciplinary hearing committee to have party chairperson Richard Gudu and additional member Peter Kuchwe permanently expelled from the party has flopped.

This is according to information received by the Botswana Guardian from a reliable source. Peter Kuchwe one of the suspended members alongside Richard Gudu confirmed to this publication that he has received a letter from his party directing him to attend a reconciliatory meeting with the party executive committee. The source who was present during the weekend central committee meeting in Francistown revealed that a resolution was handed to the leadership directing that the two be expelled from the party since they were arrogant during their second hearing.

The two were then saved by the party president and other leaders who did not agree with the recommendation but felt that the two be brought before them for reconciliation, the source said.

He said the only two people that did not want both men to be forgiven was the party deputy president Mbaakanyi Lenyatso and Secretary General Venter Galetshabiwe who are said to be interested in contesting the Parliamentary elections in 2019 general elections. Galetshabiwe refused to be drawn into the matter. He said that the resolution regarding the disciplinary hearing of the two is still a secret as it is before the party central committee. Galetshabiwe, who is eyeing Tati East is allegedly developing some goose bumps to face Kuchwe during the primaries in a constituency Kuchwe has so far made strides since he represented his party under the Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC) during the past elections.

When contacted for comment Galetshabiwe said he will make his intentions about contenting at Tatii East known at the right time. For his part Lenyatso has said he will contest at Tati West against any candidate to exercise his democratic rights.
As Mochudi East Constituents go to the polls tomorrow (Saturday) to elect their new Member of Parliament, the opposition coalition is tipped to have a better chance of reclaiming the constituency. The constituency with eleven (11) Wards has three (3) key wards in Mochudi that are a deciding factor. The eleven wards are Olifant/Ramotlabaki, Malolwane, Bokaa, Boseja South, Boseja Central, Boseja North, Oodi, Matebeleng, Modimo, Sikwane, Mabalane and Mmathubudukwane.

The three Boseja wards have proved to be Botswana National Front (BNF)s strongholds. BNF a contracting member of Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC) has been given responsibility of the constituency and has fielded Moagi Molebatsi as their preferred candidate. Molebatsi will be up against Botswana Democratic Party (BDP)s Mpho Moruakgomo and Japhta Radibe who is an independent candidate.

The constituency was won by the UDC in 2014 but last year the area MP, the late Isaac Davids defected with the seat to BDP. Those close to the developments have indicated that the UDCs loss - if it happens - should be blamed on the BNF leadership which has not been in touch with the rank and file.

Ever since the campaign kickstarted the toxic atmosphere in the BNF Central Committee has hampered the leadership from showing a united force and support for the candidate. Given the numbers from the Botswana Congress Party (BCP) a win is expected as the two UDC contracting partners seem to have rekindled their love.

The Bakgatlas unhealed wounds due to the impasse between government and their Kgosi Kgolo Kgosi Kgafela II could also come in handy for the opposition.

While Vice President Slumber Tsogwane argues that all is well between Bakgatla and government, the ground tells a different story. This has also been one of the oppositions campaign tools as they remind Bakgatla of what happened to their chief.

Tsogwane who is also former Minister of Local Government and Rural Development has told Bakgatla in the constituency not to be derailed by this argument by the opposition that Kgafela has been betrayed. However, one of the BDP campaign team revealed to this publication that their chances of winning the constituency are slim. The member who has been camping in the constituency for almost three weeks indicated that the electorates in the core wards of Mochudi East are not moved as they feel the BDP government has betrayed them.

The BDP activist also decried the lack of presence by BDP leadership who are only now showing face at the last minute this week. The BDP campaign is led by Assistant Minister of Youth Empowerment, Sport and Culture Development, Phillip Makgalemele whose team believe necessary support was not rendered on time. This was evident this past weekend when President Mokgweetsi Masisi together with his deputy was launching the BDP candidate as few people turned up.

The BDP has pleaded with Bakgatla not to be deceived by the UDC by using Kgafelas name. It has since emerged that the constituency is no longer a political but a royal battle. When the BDP is banking on using Kgosi Kgolos younger brother Mmusi Kgafela to lure votes, UDC fielded Molebatsi who is in the same regiment as Kgosi Kgafela II. In a recent public rally Mmusi accused the UDC of using his brothers name to lure votes. The UDC is however not moved on its stance regarding the treatment Kgafela II received at the hands of government. Bakgatla Royals have been at loggerheads over who should take over on behalf of Kgafela II in his absence. Kgafela II had made it clear that he preferred Bana Sekai.

Government has since acceded to his request following lengthy engagement between government and a delegation from Mochudi. The UDC candidate- Molebatsi was part of this delegation.

Last year during a Kgotla gathering where Kgosi Sekai was officially announced, speakers from the delegation indicated that the road and the engagement with government was not an easy one. It was revealed that some members of the royal family including Kgosi Kgafela II younger brothers and some of the uncles made things even worse as they were not cooperative and opted to work with the enemy (government).

Mangana- Kgafela IIs regiment -was said to have been the one that stood the test of time when they did not give up on the enduring journey. When Molebatsi requested permission from Kgafela II to be active in politics and contest under UDC for Mochudi East, Kgafela II is said to have given him his blessing. Member of Parliament for Mochudi West Gilbert Mangole has said that Molebatsi took the lead for Mangana to intervene when government was persecuting Kgosi Kgafela II.

According to the UDC legislator Molebatsi is one of Mangana regiment members who fought the former President Ian Khamas administration on issues surrounding their Kgosi. He said Kgatleng is at peace because of Molebatsis contribution over recognition of Kgosi Sekai as Bakgatlas Deputy Chief. Mangole revealed that Kgafela II would be addressing a Kgotla meeting in South Africa this Sunday (22nd April) and the best present Bakgatla could give him is to vote for Molebatsi.

According to UDC campaign team, Kgabo (Kgafela II) has made things even a lot easier as the leader still respected by his subjects seems to have been understood to be endorsing Molebatsi to be sent to Parliament.

They however maintain that better still this is still, their constituency and there is no how the BDP could win the constituency from the BNF or the UDC. The tension within the BNF Central Committee is of less worry to the campaign team.

When their candidate was launched this past weekend some of the party leadership among them both their President Advocate Duma Boko and Vice President Dr Prince Dibeela were not in attendance as they were said to be engaged in other activities. The candidate was launched by UDC Vice President Dumelang Saleshando who is also BCP President.

UDC could also be banking on votes from Alliance for Progressives (AP) which would not be contesting. AP has endorsed Molebatsi and called on its members to vote for him. AP, a breakaway from BMD, has stated through its President Ndaba Gaolathe that it would not field candidates in all the 57 constituencies in 2019 and would be supporting like-minded candidates where it has not fielded a candidate.
DISS boss, Isaac Kgosi seems on course to exposing the ignorance of law on the part of Members of Parliament as he appears before the Parliament Accounts Committee (PAC) that is investigating the National Petrol Fund (NPF) scandal.

Through the two days seating, Kgosi remained consistent on three points, that he was sworn to secrecy, he is the custodian of government secrets and that he was bound by the founding statutes of the intelligence body, DISS Act.

The spy boss would not be intimidated by the MPss heckling rising to the occasion in a subtle undertone to score his point: The Acts of Parliament rank equally; I have a law that governs me on what I do. You have a law that governs you on what you do. It does not mean that your procedures supersede what the DISS Act says.

Kgosi was also quick to tell the committee that the NPF matter is before the court and therefore subjudice to discuss it, a matter that frustrated almost all members of the Committee except for Ndaba Gaolathe who maintained his calmness during the first seating on Thursday.

Presiding over the hearing, PAC chairman, Dithapelo Keorapetse - who was himself compromised by reason of recent utterances he had made to the Press claiming that he and MP Samson Guma were targets of elimination by DISS - had his back to the wall.

And recoiling in an emotional outburst, Keorapetse directed Kgosi to the parliamentary standing orders that empower the committee to compel anybody appearing before it to cooperate and answer its questions instead of telling them on how they should operate.

But Kgosi would not budge. After a lengthy exchange, PAC agreed to allow him to say his part and his statement hit below the belt particularly on Keorapetse.

I am aware of recent newspaper articles, radio interviews and comments from some members of this Committee and those that appeared before me, that have sought to portray the DIS as a rogue institution.

This is unfortunate and I wish to assure you all that the Directorate is law abiding and shall at all times adhere to its founding statute, the Constitution and any other laws in force from time to time in this Republic.

To this end I would like to put it on record that the DISS has never made threats to assassinate or cause harm to anybody, or acted outside its mandate. There is no reason for anybody to fear it, whether politicians or members of the public.

The security of this country is way paramount to be always subjected to speculative and irresponsible commentary; Botswana is above all of us. On this matter, I want it to be put on record that I will cooperate with this committee to the extent allowed by Law.

I would also want it recorded that I am appearing before this Committee in spite of grave allegations that have been levelled against me in person, and the Directorate by some members of this committee as read in the media. I do so in the hope that there will be fairness in the deliberation of the committee.

Appeal to Speaker

What PAC stood to gain from Kgosis questioning may have been lost forever and the signs of their defeat and frustration was clearly visible on its chairman Keorapetse as he and colleagues Shawn Nthaile, Ndaba Gaolathe, Samson Moyo Guma, Ignatius Moswaane and Mephato Reatile announced that they would be writing to the Speaker of the National Assembly to invoke Section 13 of the National Assembly powers and privileges.

In our view there are questions that we feel you must answer which you have indicated the reason why you cannot. At this point, it will be up to the Speaker to cause you to answer or not.

Kgosi was bold in his response; I will wait for the Speaker.

The Acts

Kgosi drew the attention of the committee to provisions of the DISS Act and National Archives Act on releasing classified documents. The Intelligence and Security Cap. 23.02 says permission to release classified information must come from DISS boss.

Section 9 (1) of the National Archives and Records Services Act states every person appointed under or employed in carrying out the provisions of this Act shall regard and deal with all public records which are secret or confidential or to which access may be restricted as secret. When the Thursday seating collapsed due to lack of quorum subsequent to the departure of MP Nthaile, Keorapetse told Kgosi that since he refused to answer some questions, then they will subpoena the Director of National Archives and Records Services and Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Finance and Economic Development.

But there was a change of heart as it seems the Archives Director will be called. On Thursday the proceedings started 45 minutes late than the stipulated time as the PAC and the Attorney General teams were locked in a meeting where it was decided that the committee must appeal to the Speaker.

But the question is will the Speaker, Gladys Kokorwe order Kgosi to provide the answer?

The law does not compel her to as it says the Speaker may thereupon excuse the answering of that question or production of such paper.
Directorate of Intelligence and Security Services (DISS) Director General, Isaac Kgosi says he can only account for P118 million from the P230 million that was transferred to his organisation from National Petroleum Fund (NPF).

DISS had requested the sum of P250 million for engineering structures of storage facilities and expansion of strategic fuel storage facilities.

After being given access to the funds, Kgosi then wrote to the Director of Energy Affairs directing that an amount of P230 million be transferred to Khulaco Pty Ltd on behalf of DISS.

The DIS later diverted the funds towards the purchase of military grade equipment to be used in fighting poaching, human and drug trafficking which are a threat to the countrys economy.

An amount of P118 million was paid to an Israel company Dignia Systems for the purchase of the equipment. These are the funds that Kgosi owned up to this week when he

appeared before Parliaments Public Accounts Committee (PAC).

The DISS boss could not be drawn to say what happened to the other funds or who should account for them. He said he does not know why he is being asked to return the funds.

Kgosi explained that the consignment that was bought for P118 million from Dignia Systems has not yet arrived in the country. He said he was shocked to learn about a letter from former Acting Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Mineral Resources, Green Technology and Energy Security Dr Obolokile Obakeng that DISS should pay back the P230 million during a meeting in February this year.

At the PAC hearing it was revealed that there was nothing that the Auditor General was able to pick from Khulaco Pty ltd as financial statements or money trail for the P118 million. Kgosi stated that he could not comment on where the remaining funds are because that is the same question that would be asked in court.

It also emerged at the PAC hearing that the Khulaco Pty ltd account to which public funds were transferred, was not sanctioned by Accountant General as the law dictates. Kgosi has told the committee that he knows little about the Public Finance Management Act.

It was revealed at the hearing that the DISS approached PPADB asking for single outsourcing but the request was turned down and the spy agency was directed to go for public tender. It was following this rejection that the DISS then asked for variation of the funds.

Kgosi would not be drawn into discussing the dealings between DISS and Dignia Systems. He said he would also not know if the Israeli government knew about the contract between DISS and Dignia Systems. The DISS director also refused to comment if Attorney General Abraham Ketshabe and former president Dr. Ian Khama knew about the contract between DISS and Dignia Systems.
A fierce face-off is on the cards between Isaac Kgosi- Director General at Directorate of Intelligence and Security (DISS) and defense lawyer in the P250 million National Petroleum Fund (NPF) money laundering scandal case when it goes for trial.

Kgosi has hinted that DISS would give evidence in the matter. Defence lawyer Kgosietsile Ngakaagae has insisted on several occasions at Regional Court (South) said that Kgosi should go into the dock to also answer for the charges of money laundering.

He had during the past court appearance indicated that as the defense they would make an application before court for review of Directorate of Corruption and Economic Crime (DCEC) decision to charge only his clients and leave out Kgosi and others.

Bakang Seretse, his company Khulaco Pty Ltd, Botho Felicia Leburu and Kenneth Kerekang are each facing a single count of money laundering contrary to Section 47 (1) (b) of the Proceeds and Instruments of Crime Act.

DISS boss has however this week revealed that the DISS would be giving evidence before court on the money laundering case. When appearing before Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee (PAC) this week, Kgosi indicated that he is not in a position to discuss some issues which are before the court with the committee. He said he cannot discuss Khulaco Pty Ltd and its directorship because such information is before the court (sub judice).

I am constrained to answer some of these questions. The committee enjoys immunity in this matter, well I dont. No one would be standing with me in the dock when I am asked to answer. I cannot discuss these issues because they are before court and investigations are ongoing. With these investigations, the DISS would be compelled to give evidence before court, he stated.

With DCEC having not expressed its intention to charge Kgosi, it seems the defense team can only have a share of him during cross-examination when giving evidence. Ngakaagae has reiterated on several occasions that he would not stop talking about Kgosi until he is brought before court. It seems there is this thing of people especially the DCEC and the prosecution fearing Isaac Kgosi such that they do not even want to mention his name. Well I do not fear him and I would not stop talking about him until he is here charged like others, said Ngakaagae in a recent court appearance.

Kgosi this week indicated that he is the one who takes decisions at DISS and the buck stops with him as the accounting officer. He has also revealed that the DCEC has questioned him regarding the money laundering case. He indicated that he is however not in a positon to discuss in detail his questioning.

The issues that Kgosi is referring to are with regards to DISS having requested funds from NPF to be transferred into a Khulaco account. He also did not want to comment on the correspondences between him, Khulaco, Ministry of Mineral Resources, Green Technology and Energy Security.

In the letters which are already in the public domain, Kgosi in his capacity as DISS Director General wrote to Department of Energy Affairs under the ministry requesting for the P250 million from NPF for DISS to construct strategic fuel storages. There is a letter also from former Acting Permanent Secretary Dr Obolokile Obakeng giving a go-ahead for DIS to divert the funds from the initial usage to now be used for purchase of military grade equipment in Israel. Kgosi directed through a letter that the sum of P230 million be transferred into the Khulaco account.

Another letter was from Dr. Obakeng rescinding his decision for the variation of the funds. He also wrote to Kgosi requesting that the DISS should return the funds. All these correspondences, Kgosi said he would not discuss them because they are classified information.

He told the committee that a crime was committed in obtaining of the documents. There is a clear indication that a crime has been committed. Whoever committed such a crime, action have to be taken, warned Kgosi. However, attorney Nchunga Nchunga from Attorney General stated that as long as a government entity followed proper procedure in acquiring documents said to be secret there is nothing wrong.
When it created the Directorate of Intelligence and Security Services (DISS), Parliament might have failed to pay attention to the finer details of the monster they were forming.

Many years later DIS has proved to all and sundry that despite being a creature of statute, its powers are beyond reproach. The spy agencys Director General Isaac Kgosi this week confirmed what for years has been a subject of speculation: that he is the alpha and omega of the countrys intelligence apparatus and does not answer to any one, not even the president!

Kgosi does not answer to the president of the republic who is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces nor his second in command the vice president, Minister of Presidential Affairs, Governance and Public Administration or Permanent Secretary to the President on matters pertaining to security and intelligence in the country.

According to Kgosi the buck stops with him at DISS as the Accounting Officer. DISS was established amid controversy shortly after President Ian Khama assumed office in 2008. Funds from Disaster Fund were diverted to help establish the organisation amid strong resistance from opposition MPs and some of Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) backbenchers.

This week the DISS boss told Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee (PAC) which is probing the books of accounts of the National Petroleum Fund (NPF) that the committee cannot dictate to him how to respond to their questions.

He reminded the committee that as much as they have the law that governs them they should know he also has a law to follow and that the Act of Parliament does not supersede the DISS Act.

He said that how he spends the funds at DISS is an administrative issue which does not compel him to answer to anybody. He said even the oversight committee and the DISS Council he briefs them when the need arises as he can carry out a project or procurement and notify the committees later.

The spy chief revealed that he had requested for variation of the funds from NPF for the sake of transparency. According to Kgosi he could have gone ahead with the procurement of military equipment without asking for variation because the funds were already with DISS.

According to the Fund Order only the president has such powers of varying funds from special funds such as the NPF. Kgosis assertions have sent shockwaves throughout the country as to what Parliament could have created for Batswana- an all-powerful government institution that is not answerable to anyone.

While others believe Kgosis statement was meant to protect his principals participation or knowledge in the controversial P250 million NPF scandal others contend that the man spoke the truth.

Even within the ruling party MPs have expressed discomfort with Kgosis utterances. Those who spoke to this publication have indicated that Kgosis principals should contain him as he continues to show arrogance and becomes reckless with his choice of words.

They argue that the creation of DISS which some of them were hostile about could come back to haunt the ruling party. The BDP used its numbers in Parliament to push for the establishment of the DIS under former President Ian Khamas administration.

However, there are some MPs who believe Kgosi has been given too much power by the presidency. They argue that while Kgosi has sensitive information and secrets about almost everyone including those in the highest office it might prove difficult to deal with him in the best interest of the public and reclaim confidence from Batswana.

Botswana Congress Party (BCP) President who is also Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC) Vice President Dumelang Saleshando says pronouncements by DISS boss that he accounts to no one, not even the president, for funds used by DIS even if the funds were allegedly inappropriately secured, will possibly shock many, including the BDP stalwarts.

I think that the stance adopted by Kgosi is a good one for our democracy. At the time when the DISS law was adopted, we cautioned against the creation of an organisation that was going to be a law unto itself, he stated.

Saleshando said the DIS Act was not crafted in a manner that allowed for checks and balances. According to Saleshando the thinking of the BDP MPs at that time was that accountability was a threat to national security. This has allowed the DIS to operate above the law, he said adding that this was what BDP and President Khama wanted at the time.

He posited that the days when state security was an acceptable defence against the need for accountability belong in the past.

I think the DISS Act should be repealed, DISS disbanded and all the activities it got involved in investigated. Our security cluster needs to be subjected to a critical review and a decision be made as to how the intelligence community should be restructured. President Masisi needs to start this process by suspending Kgosi to allow for full investigations into his activities that have dominated headlines and attracted the attention of the DCEC, Saleshando added.

The former MP for Gaborone Central said if the president is unable to act, it can only mean that like other ministers, he is gripped by fear.

Alliance for Progressives (AP) President Ndaba Gaolathe could not comment on the matter because he is part of the PAC and the committee has not made any finality on its probe. However during the partys 1st Annual Policy Statement early this year Gaolathe was of the view that, DIS has amassed power to the extent that it literally runs the government of Botswana.

According to Gaolathe the Intelligence Services is more powerful than the rest of the Government decision making machinery. DISS has an influential role in deciding appointments to key positions in both government and quasi-government institutions. It is them that re-allocate willy-nilly Government reserves as they did with the National Petrol Fund. They are above the law, and no one is able to find a way for them to face the wrath of the law.

Currently Government does not have the interest to bring the DISS to the book, and even if they were willing to do so, the current governance mechanism would not allow them to effectively deal with the rogue institution. Our Government system is centralised, and Parliament lacks the institutional capacity to fulfill its constitutional mandate, consequently our system is not one of checks-and-balances; it is a legitimised authoritarian rule, he told the gathering at Big Five Lodge in Mogoditshane.

Political Analyst Anthony Morima does not buy Kgosis story. He does not think that there can be an authority which does not report to another in a higher office. Even the President is accountable to the nation and the National Assembly. DISS director cannot say he is not accountable to anyone- who request for budget and who appoints the director general? If indeed he reports to no one, then we will be in a state of chaos. It cannot be correct in our law to say that because there has to be checks and balances, he said.

According to Morima Kgosi adopted such a stance to avoid answering questions because this could have given the PAC the lead as to who it should subpoena to appear and account. Morima opines that the DISS oversight Parliamentary Committee should be empowered to undertake its duties of checks and balances. The committee has however been dysfunctional after members of opposition pulled out of the committee as they felt the committee is not allowed to carry out its mandate.
Lighthouse Theatre Promotions is in a crusade to promote Clap & Tap music.

The local company will on April 28th bring the roof down with their latest event featuring groups from Botswana and South Africa.

The event will be held at Botho University. Event organiser, Mashamba Mashamba explains that his company has undertaken the mammoth task to promote this sort of worship music. The idea, he says, is to pair church and community choirs from Botswana with South African ones so that they can exchange ideas and grow the music.

We want to grow this music, and grow its following, he says, adding that they wish to eliminate instances where lovers of this music are forced to travel to South Africa if they wish to enjoy a show. We are also hoping that local choirs will learn from their South African brothers and sisters, he says.

Acts to look forward to include Isaac and the Mighty Messengers, Hophehile Church Choir and Motheo wa Emmanuel all from South Africa. Local groups include Maatla a Gospel, and Soul Redeemers. Last year, the company held three shows. Tickets are on sale for P150 and P200 for VIP.
Fashion designer, Mpho Chepete of FEDE says fashion does not have boundaries and everyone can look stunning in a perfect outfit designed specifically for them.

She is a young fashion designer that thinks outside the box and uplifts fashion in Botswana. She has observed that disabled people are always left out when it comes to designs and has taken it upon herself to design special outfits for the disabled, hence her upcoming event in two weeks time, dubbed; Fashion For Disability and Cancer gala dinner which would be held at Avani Hotel.

This event is also to launch her fashion house, FEDE. This fashion show aims at empowering and advocating for the inclusion of the people living with disability in the mainstream systems. It is like as fashion designers we just prioritise the normal population only, she explains.

Chepete says clothes are enough to boost ones confidence, which is why she has chosen the disabled to help also feel good and look sophisticated in their outfits.

I basically want to give out a sense of confidence to someone who did not choose to be the way they are.

I struggled with confidence when growing up because of life pressures but I could run to clothes to help me feel and look good, so I thought I should also extend this to the disabled because my everyday question has been; what about the person who didnt choose to be like that?, says Chepete.

The Limkokwing University student of Fashion and Apparel Design says that the confidence she found in clothes pushed her to study fashion designing.

This will be a two-day glamorous fashion show and gala dinner, which will be held on April 27th, followed by the fashion show on the 28th.

The 24-year fashion designer says through the event, with other different fashion designers, they intend to give P7000.00 to deserving different organisations.

She is of the view that a cloth is a human beings friend and most women find peace in clothes as they make them look and feel good.

She will be graduating this year and is fully ready to compete within the fashion industry and advocate for the inclusion of the disabled at all times.


Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman accompanied by Air Chief Marshal B S Dhanoa during her visit to air force station Chabua to witness the ongoing "Gagan Shakti" combat drill. Photo: IAF/Twitter

TEZPUR, ASSAM (PTI): Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday visited the Indo-China border in Arunachal Pradesh to inspect the Indian Air Force's Advanced Landing Ground at Pasighat there, a defence spokesman said.



Sitharaman also visited the Chabua IAF base station in Assam's Dibrugarh to witness its Gagan Shakti Exercise 2018, a pan-India exercise which is in its second phase.



"The scale and scope of #GaganShakti2018 is enormous & like never-before. Given here are only glimpses. Kudos to @IAF_MCC, CAS Air Chief Marshal BS Dhanoa and to all #AirWarriors. @DefenceMinIndia.



"Today at #GaganShakti2018. Appreciate the detail and exhaustive plan with which @IAF_MCC is executing this monumental exercise. Our #AirWarriors displayed agility& great team spirit," Sitharaman tweeted.



The Minister inspected operations of SU-30MKI fighter aircraft, C-17 Globemaster aircraft and rocket loading on Mi-17 V5 helicopters at Pasighat, defence spokesperson Lt Col Harsh Wardhan Pande said.



She also witnessed an assault drill by the IAF's Garud commandos.



The Minister visited the Air to Ground weapons range at Dullong Mukh, where the strike package of Su-30 aircraft was displayed.



Mi-17V5 Helicopters also demonstrated their strike capability delivering 80mm rockets on a simulated target, the spokesman said.



Sitharaman then visited Chabua, interacted with the air warriors and was also briefed on employment of Air Power in the defence of Eastern Sector, he said.



The Defence Minister has been visiting various Air Force establishments to gauge the operational capability and preparedness of the IAF.



Stating that Gagan Shakti-2018 is a large-scale IAF exercise which is currently in its second phase, the defence spokesperson said that the assets have now been deployed along the northern region and operations are taking place in full swing.


The first liquefied natural gas (LNG) cargo from Russian energy major Gazprom will land in India in May, following an agreement in January with Indias state-owned gas supplier and developer GAIL India to bring down prices based on a new formula. The latter is also planning to bring at least 80 cargoes of US LNG in the current financial year. We expect the first set of LNG cargoes from Gazprom to come in the first half of May.

We have re-negotiated the prices with them on the basis of a fresh formula, said an official aware of the development. The contract ...
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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Twenty men, including a priest and a 'writer', have responded to a Facebook advert seeking a match for Geeta, a deaf-and-mute girl who returned from Pakistan after accidentally landing in that country when she was a child.

A social activist here, who is involved in the search for Geeta's long-lost parents, put up a post on Facebook nine days ago, seeking marriage proposals for her.

Gyanendra Purohit, the activist, on Friday said 20 men have shown interest in marrying her and sent bio-data. Of them, 12 persons are disabled, while the rest do not have any disability, he said.

One of them is a temple priest while another claims to be a writer, he said.

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj -- who was instrumental in bringing Geeta back to India -- had asked him to look for a match for the girl, Purohit had claimed earlier.

He put up a post on the Facebook page 'Reunite Geeta, a deaf girl, with her family', which was originally created to search for Geeta's parents, on April 10.

The advert said they were looking for a "good and smart deaf boy", age above 25 years, for "India's daughter Geeta".

It also made it clear that it is Geeta who would decide on the proposals, and the Union government would take further steps.

Geeta is staying in a facility run by Muk-Badhir Sangathan, an NGO, here. The MP Social Justice Department is her caretaker.

Geeta was found alone aboard the Samjhauta Express at Lahore when she was seven or eight years old. It is surmised that she accidentally boarded the train somewhere in India.

Karachi-based Edhi Foundation took care of her while she lived in Pakistan. She returned to India in 2015.

So far more than ten couples from different parts of India have claimed that Geeta is their long-lost daughter, but none of them could establish the claim.
* Proceedings for removal of a judge are undertaken under Article 124 of the Constitution (for the removal of a Supreme Court judge) and Article 218 (for removal of a High Court judge). * Judges Inquiry Act, 1968, codifies the process for removal of judges. * Judges can be removed from office through a motion adopted by Parliament on grounds of proven misbehaviour or incapacity. * A judge can be removed only on an order from the President based on a motion passed by both Houses of Parliament. * The Constitution does not mention the word ...

Dear Reader,

Business Standard has always strived hard to provide up-to-date information and commentary on developments that are of interest to you and have wider political and economic implications for the country and the world. Your encouragement and constant feedback on how to improve our offering have only made our resolve and commitment to these ideals stronger. Even during these difficult times arising out of Covid-19, we continue to remain committed to keeping you informed and updated with credible news, authoritative views and incisive commentary on topical issues of relevance.

We, however, have a request.



As we battle the economic impact of the pandemic, we need your support even more, so that we can continue to offer you more quality content. Our subscription model has seen an encouraging response from many of you, who have subscribed to our online content. More subscription to our online content can only help us achieve the goals of offering you even better and more relevant content. We believe in free, fair and credible journalism. Your support through more subscriptions can help us practise the journalism to which we are committed.



Support quality journalism and subscribe to Business Standard.



Digital Editor
Indian financial technology companies dont seem to catch a breath. Even as firms operating in the financial space were coming to terms with know-your-customer norms, the Reserve Bank of Indias (RBIs) directive to store all financial data in India has made them even more resentful of the regulatory environment in India. The central bank wants the companies to provide unfettered supervisory access to their data on payments, customers and all transactions, according to its notification dated April 6, 2018, which asks them to store all data related to transactions in India alone. While most banks in India store all this data on Indian servers in their core banking systems, the current directive addresses new-age payment and fintech companies operating in the space. Some of the system providers do not store their payments data in India, the central bank observed. However, payment companies arent entirely pleased with the proposal. Speaking to Business Standard, mobile application-based lending company CashE said even as it stored all their data in Mumbai, it had to move it from Singapore servers recently. We moved it locally but moving involves a lot of time, effort and cost. Since its a live platform, you have to operate servers on both locations at the same time, which is costly and at the same time, there is a cost of moving (data) itself, said V Raman Kumar, chief executive officer (CEO), CashE. Kumar said most companies these days preferred working with providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) instead of trying to build data farms, which is a costly exercise. Notably, AWS launched the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region in June 2016. However, that is soon likely to change. It was only because of requests from multiple companies for having servers in the country that Amazon decided to set up shop in India, it said in a press release on its launch. Since the Mumbai Region launch in June 2016, the number of AISPL active customers in India has grown by more than 50 percent from 75,000 to more than 120,000. Amazon Internet Services Private Limited (AISPL), is the Indian subsidiary of the Amazon Group which undertakes the resale and marketing of AWS Cloud services in India. Moving data from foreign servers to India is both a time-consuming and costly process. A live server has to run on both geographies to enable a smooth transfer of data and sometimes, the cost of storage runs pretty high, depending on data requirements. For instance, CashE has 1.8 billion call records and thats just one of the dozens of indicators it collects for checking peoples loan eligibility. It is in this context that companies are seeking more clarity from the RBI on what the proposal entails even as the central bank has given a deadline of six months to finish the process. The three big card companies  Mastercard, Visa, and American Express  are learned to have conveyed their reservations to the RBI. They companies are likely to be the worst-affected because they process the bulk of the countrys digital transactions and their network processors are situated across the world to maintain peak loads. Data localisation practices around the world MALAYSIA: Act requires personal data on citizens be stored in local servers INDONESIA, VIETNAM: In Indonesia, regulation says firms offering internet services to consumers mandatorily must have local data centres. In Vietnam, at least one of them should be in the country RUSSIA: Law states firms collecting personal information must have servers within the country CHINA: Has various laws which state personal, financial, and medical data of its citizens have to be stored in local servers. Online web publishers cannot have servers abroad. New law says operators of key information infrastructure store data of citizens, which include personal and business information, in local servers

CANADA: No national law, but province of Nova Scotia and British Columbia mandates personal information (utilities school, hospitals) be stored locally

AUSTRALIA, NEW ZEALAND: In Australia, only health records of citizens have to be stored in the country. In New Zealand, it is tax and business records

EUROPEAN UNION: The new data protection regulation to be implemented from May, which mandates strict privacy protection rules, may force firms to maintain servers locally

Compiled by Surajeet Das Gupta

We will give a presentation to the RBI. We have never had any breach in data, and there is a substantial cost in shifting data centres here. Ultimately this extra cost will be passed on consumers, said a senior executive of a leading cards company.

Even as some companies are planning to move their data, others are waiting for clarity. Amazon Pay, PayPal, and Mastercard told Business Standard that they are reviewing the notification.

In processing purchase transactions, Mastercards network only receives the card account number, the merchant name and location, the date and the amount of the transaction. Mastercard does not know what the cardholder is buying, said Porush Singh, divisional president, Mastercard (South Asia).

Payment networks have concerns, which the Payments Council of India is considering before its consultation with the stakeholders this week. International transactions are one of those. Through those, data is carried outside the country and is stored in foreign processors. There is the issue of having a back-up data retrieval centre, which is usually in a foreign country, according to Naveen Surya, chairman of the council.

The move is a good step to provide the government access to citizens financial data but it needs to be looked at carefully. Especially the phrase only in India is problematic. People should be allowed to back up their data elsewhere as long as they are running a live server in India, Surya said.

He added there were other reasons too for holding data abroad such as the technologies available, cost factors and emergency preparedness systems such as disaster recovery centres.

Meanwhile, Sharad Sharma, co-founder of iSPIRT foundation, said data residency was a primitive regime as compared to a consent-based data sharing regime. He said data could be stored anywhere as long as it was safe.

The problem of data residency is that it doesnt work unless you have the consent to access the data and encryption keys if the data is encrypted. This is why the consent framework is more important than data residency, the data can be stored anywhere but if you cant access it, then theres no use, he said.

We need to look at making strong contracts with firms and institutions that they will provide data whenever needed without any conditions and allow them to store it anywhere they want.
India has pressed the nations to set up an independent rating agency of the five-member group.

The first meeting of the Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors was held on the sidelines of the IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings yesterday.

Representing India in the meeting of the 5 nation bloc, Economic Affairs Secretary Subhash Chandra Garg sought the support of the Presidency in building consensus amongst the membership on the BRICS Rating Agency proposal.

"He requested the Presidency to receive and take forward the report to be submitted by expert group set up under the aegis of BRICS Business Council to study the feasibility of the BRICS Rating Agency," the finance ministry said in statement.

India had first mooted the idea of having such an agency for the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) grouping to can solve impediments for the emerging market economies posed by the present credit rating agency market that is dominated by S&P, Moody's and Fitch.

These three western rating agencies hold over 90 per cent of the sovereign ratings market.

The other issues discussed during the meeting related to enhancing the project pipelines of New Development Bank (NDB) evenly across member countries, expansion of NDB's membership.

The BRICS countries have already set up New Development Bank, which became operational in 2015, to meet funding requirements of the members



It also deliberated on the proposal of the South African Presidency for setting up a working group on illicit financial flows and a BRICS Task Force on Public Private Partnership.

Issues related to BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) as well as BRICS Bond Fund were also discussed, the ministry said.

In his interventions, Garg emphasised that India has been a constructive participant to the discussions on NDB's membership expansion.

He expressed that a more careful and cautious approach on the value and addition/ benefits new member will bring to the Bank would be desirable rather than setting deadlines which are practically difficult to achieve.

On the issue of expansion of NDB's project pipeline across member nations evenly, Garg said the objective has to be balanced with member country's requirement for infrastructure financing.

Garg also suggested that since NDB already has a project preparation fund hence a separate similar preparation fund for PPP will not be desirable.
A Zimbabwean parliamentary committee is summoning former leader to appear before it over alleged diamond looting during his rule.

Mugabe, who resigned in November following a military intervention, has said USD 15 billion worth of diamonds were looted from fields in the country's east. He later said he had no basis for that figure.

But parliamentary committee chairman Temba Mliswa tells The Associated Press the 94-year-old still should appear on May 9 to explain his statements.

This is the first time a public institution has summoned Mugabe to account for the alleged looting. Zimbabwe security agencies were involved in the mining with Chinese firms until the government cancelled all diamond mining licenses there in 2016.

Mliswa says parliament "very soon" will dispatch an official letter for Mugabe to attend.
Trading activity on cryptocurrency exchanges has halved from its December peak, industry data shows, as retail interest in the virtual coins declines and the prices of many remain far below their recent highs. Average daily traded volumes across cryptocurrency exchanges fell to $9.1 billion in March and to $7.4 billion in the first half of April, compared to almost $17 billion in December, according to data compiled by crypto analysis website CryptoCompare. Rocketing prices of digital currencies such as bitcoin fuelled a mania in the sector towards the end of 2017 as retail ...
A student was injured in a shooting at a Florida high school here on Friday, shortly before students were to stage a walkout as part of a national protest against gun violence.

The Marion County Sheriff's Office confirmed that the 17-year-old student was shot in the ankle.

CNN reported that a suspect, who is not a school student, was already in custody, and the injured student was taken to a nearby hospital.

A school resource officer heard a loud bang at 8:39 a.m. (local time), and three minutes later, an officer took a 19-year-old suspect, who is not a student, into custody, Marion County Sheriff Billy Woods told reporters.

The motive for the shooting is however unclear.

Students at about 2,500 schools around Florida were supposed to walk out of their classrooms today as part of the National School Walkout against gun violence.

Forest High too was to participate in the walkout.

However, aerial news footage from the scene showed a sea of students gathering outside a steepled church to meet their parents and officers, clearing the buildings on the Ocala campus.

Meanwhile, several school walkouts were cancelled districtwide in Marion County after the shooting, according to school board member Nancy Stacy.

On February 14, 2018, at least 17 people - children and adults - were killed in a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

On March 24, the public, primarily students across the United States also held a "March for Our Lives" rally pressing for stricter gun control measures after the attack.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Eighteen Rohingya refugees, including three children and four women, were arrested on Thursday in Tripura's Khowai district for entering the country illegally.

Based on specific information, the Rohingyas from Myanmar, who had illegally entered Tripura via Bangladesh, were arrested near Teliamura area.

According to police the Rohingyas entered the state and were trying to go to Delhi in search of jobs.

Sub-inspector of Tripura police Ranjit Debnath said, "Actually we had input that few Muslim community people from outside, may be Rohingyas, were going to Guwahati in a bus, so we stopped that bus. During the search, we found 11 male, three women along with four children all from Myanmar. Six of them were able to show their identity cards (UNHCR) but rest could not show any identity card. The identity cards revealed that they are citizens of Myanmar and took refuge in India. Their movement was suspicious and so we are interrogating them."

One of the arrested Rohingya, Saifulla said, "I am here with my sister and I had come to India six months back and was staying in Delhi. Originally we are from Myanmar and came here in search of work. We had entered Agartala eight to ten days back but I do not know through which border I entered."

The Rohingyas from Myanmar had illegally entered Tripura and a few other northeastern states via Bangladesh in the past in search of work. But, subsequently, they were pushed back following legal and security formalities.

On January 14 this year, six Rohingya refugees were arrested from Dharmanagar railway station in North Tripura district, 170 km from here.

Eight others were arrested from Khayerpur market area in West Tripura district, 10 Km from Agartala city, on November 29 last year.

Over 6,70,000 Rohingyas, a mainly Muslim minority living in Myanmar, had fled the northwestern province of Rakhine in August last year after a wave of persecution and violence that the United Nations described as an attempt at "ethnic cleansing". Efforts are on to repatriate them to their homeland in Myanmar.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
At least four Saudi officers have been shot dead and four others have been wounded in an attack on a police check point in Saudi Arabia's Asir province.

Three officers were instantly killed when the outpost came under attack.

All those involved in the attack are Saudi Arabian nationals, the local media reported, citing the country's Interior Ministry.

Local authorities killed one suspect and apprehended two others, the Saudi Press Agency (SPA) reported, citing the Saudi Interior Ministry, as saying.

"In the interest of the investigation, their names cannot be revealed," it said.

A third Saudi suspect opened fire as he attempted to escape, killing another officer and wounding four others, according to the report.

The Kingdom has been boiling in a conflict with neighbour Yemen since March 2015 dubbed by the United Nations as the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

The military positions in Asir province have repeatedly been hit in counter-attacks by Yemeni forces.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
London-based architect Tim Bushe has found a novel way to attract funds for charity that is looking after his ailing sister and others.

He has been shaping hedges in Finsbury Park in the form of elephants which attracted the attention of journalist Rhalou Allerhand, who posted pictures and wrote on Twitter, "The has gone to shit but it's OK because someone has done this to their hedge in Finsbury Park."

Bushe, is raising funds for the Charity Hft, which looks after people with learning difficulties, through ongoing topiary projects in public spaces.

"I am raising money for Hft through an ongoing topiary project in public spaces that engage local communites and create an amusing talking point," the architect wrote on his JustGiving Page where online donations are collected.

"For many years Hft have looked after my youngest sister Martha who has Downs Sydrome. She is wonderfully happy in a safe and secure community of people with similar disabilities," Bushe added.

Journalist Allerhand also appealed to "donate a quid or two" for "great cause."

"If you love the elephant hedges please donate a quid or two, the @HedgecutterMan is raising funds for charity and it's a really great cause," she tweeted.

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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 (BJP) leader S Ve Shekher on Friday tendered an apology for his derogatory remark against the women reporters.

Shekher in a statement said that he posted the remark on the social media site without reading it.

"I had posted it without reading the message. It was removed immediately after my friend pointed it out. If I had hurt anyone, it was not on purpose and I extend my heartfelt apology," Shekher said.

He said he does not endorse the views expressed in the post and added that he comes from a family that respects women.

Meanwhile, the Tamil Nadu journalist fraternity has lodged a police complaint against Shekher for his assertion.

"BJP leader has given his views in such a way that it is not only defaming a journalist but is also derogatory to all woman," member of the journalist fraternity said.

On the other hand, BJP KT Raghavan appreciated the Shekher for his apology and said that the matter should be put to rest with it.

He, however, added that party would not advocate these types of things.

Shekher earlier stoked a controversy by posting a derogatory remark against women scribes through a Facebook post.

In the post, now deleted, Shekher reacting on the apology of Tamil Nadu Governor Banwarilal Purohit for inappropriately touching a woman journalist's face said that the latter should "wash his hand with phenyl" for having touched the woman scribe.
Vice President Venkaiah Naidu on Friday said that there is a need for all to come forward and create a peaceful atmosphere in Kashmir valley.

"Even today, Kashmir is a big issue for us. We all have to come forward to create a peaceful atmosphere in the Valley," Naidu said.

Naidu's statement comes amid ceasefire violations, terror incidents that continue to mar the peace in Jammu and Kashmir.

Violating ceasefire every other day, Pakistan continues to further its subversive activities to disturb peace in the Valley.

Earlier this month, the Government informed the Parliament that Pakistan violated ceasefire along the LoC and the International Border (IB) 633 times in just two months of 2018.

In 2017, the ceasefire was violated by Pakistan along the LoC 860 times and 111 times along the IB.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Department of Economic Affairs Secretary Subhash Chandra Garg discussed the enhancement of project pipelines of New Development Bank (NDB) evenly across member countries, expansion of NDB's membership, the proposal of the South African Presidency for setting up a working group on illicit financial flows and a BRICS Task Force on Public Private Partnership.

The minister, who attended the first meeting the BRICS Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors along the sidelines of the IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings here, also discussed issues related to BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) and Bond Fund.

Garg , in his interventions, emphasised that India has been a constructive participant to the discussions on NDB's membership expansion, and therefore, a more careful and cautious approach on the value and addition/benefits would be desirable rather than setting deadlines which are practically difficult to achieve.

On the issue of expansion of NDB's project pipeline across member nations evenly, Garg opined that the objective has to be balanced with member country's requirement for infrastructure financing. He also expressed India's appreciation on the proposal for establishing a Working Group on Illicit Financial Flows and BRICS PPP Task Force.

In this regard, however, Garg suggested that NDB already has a Project Preparation Fund, hence, a separate similar preparation fund for PPP will not be desirable.

In view of the India's experience to develop brownfield infrastructure projects as asset class, the Economic Affairs secretary suggested that the BRICS may consider this more readily available infrastructure asset class for getting finances from pension funds, sovereign wealth funds etc. as sources of financing. He also sought the support of the Presidency in building consensus amongst the BRICS membership on the BRICS Rating Agency proposal.

Furthermore, Garg requested the Presidency to receive and take forward the Report to be submitted by Expert Group set up under the aegis of BRICS Council to study the feasibility of the BRICS Rating Agency.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani will join the legal team defending United States President Donald Trump in the special counsel's Russia investigation.

According to local media, President Trump is looking to bring his involvement with special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation to a close. He is considering whether to sit for questioning by Mueller's team.

Earlier in March, John Dowd, the lead lawyer for US President Donald Trump in the Mueller investigation, had resigned. Giuliani fills in for Dowd.

He will be joining Jay Sekulow on Donald Trump's personal legal team.

Giuliani will also be working closely with White House lawyer Ty Cobb, who has also been handling the administration's cooperation with the Mueller investigation.

In addition to Giuliani, two other former federal prosecutors - Jane Serene Raskin and Marty Raskin - will be joining the President's team.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Gastrotope, an agriculture and food-tech accelerator announced that it has signed an agreement with the Government of Andhra Pradesh to create a 'Farm to Fork' ecosystem in Visakhapatnam.

Today's announcement follows the inauguration last month of Gastrotope's incubator office in Vizag Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu.

Under the terms of the agreement, the two partners will collaborate to provide the necessary infrastructure such as test fields for agriculture, incubation space and an acceleration program. The program aims to facilitate and nurture startups in agri-tech and food-tech spaces in Andhra Pradesh and India. AP Innovation Society will be coordinating and facilitating this project from the government's side.

Through this program, the two parties aim to accept up to 10 startups in 2018, against an allocated budget of Rs. 50 million in each of them.

"Our vision to create the world's leading 'Farm to Fork' tech ecosystem right within India and this partnership marks an important milestone in this direction. Andhra Pradesh is among the most progressive states in India with a forward-looking leadership; which recognises the potential of technology-enabled innovation in agriculture and food economy. We are thrilled to join hands with the state government and aim to co-invent the future of India's food economy," said Gastrotope co-founder Rajesh Sawhney.

On a related note, Gastrotope is a focused accelerator that aims at bridging the gap between the farms and the food tech industry. The company envisions on catalysing new innovations in the food tech sector of the country. It aims at investing in startups that would add to the "Farm to Fork" ecosystem. These startups would add value in various parts of the value chain, starting with farmers and moving to food transportation, processing and delivery to and consumption by customers.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
GIFAS, the French Aerospace Industries Association, a driving force behind French-Indian cooperation, has head a major industrial mission to India from April 16 to 19.

This mission has been an exceptional opportunity for the Indian and French aerospace industries to meet and explore common fields of win-win cooperation, and all its objectives have been achieved.

Drawing on the very constructive State visit to India of French President Emmanuel Macron in March 2018, this mission hence has supported the commitment of French industries to the "Make in India" policy, in the fields of aerospace, defence and space.

Eric Trappier, the Chairman of GIFAS and Chairman of CIDEF (Council of French Defence Industries), has led this mission. In New Delhi and Bangalore, he met with several ministers and officials such as Nirmala Sitharaman, Minister of Defence, Suresh Prabhu, Minister of Commerce, Industry and Civil Aviation, Dr. Bhamre, Minister of State for Defence, Jayant Sinha, Minister of State for Civil Aviation, RV. Deshpande, Minister of Industry and Commerce of the State of Karnataka.

The delegation has made stops in New Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai and Hyderabad, where more than 390 business-to- meetings have been co-organised with SIDM (Society of Indian Defence Manufacturers) and CII (Confederation of Indian Industry). They have brought together the sectors' companies from both countries. This took place on the occasion of two seminar dedicated to the "Indo-French Defence and Aerospace Cooperation".

An MoU between GIFAS and SIDM (Society of Indian Defence Manufacturers) has been signed to promote partnerships and cooperation.

60 French aerospace industrial companies participated. The major aviation and space players representing both civilian and defence interests were present - Airbus, Ariane Group, Dassault Aviation, MBDA, Safran and Thales - not to mention 54 subcontractors, suppliers, SMEs and equipment manufacturers.

The Chairman of GIFAS, Eric Trappier, Chairman and CEO of Dassault Aviation, stated: "This GIFAS visit is a real success. Cooperation in the areas of aeronautics and space will be strengthened by all the meetings and interactions we got this week and the measures now to implement.We are glad to contribute to the "Make in India" policy and strengthen the strategic partnership between India and France".

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Hollywood actress Natalie Portman has decided to skip a very prestigious honour in Israel, citing "recent events".

The news was confirmed by the organisation, Genesis Prize Foundation, which has announced the honouree in November, last year.

The organisation's website stated, "The Genesis Prize Foundation (GPF) was notified by a representative of Ms. Portman that 'Recent events in Israel have been extremely distressing to her and she does not feel comfortable participating in any public events in Israel' and that 'she cannot in good conscience move forward with the ceremony'."

Following the decision, the organisation decided to cancel its annual ceremony which was scheduled for June 28.

According to the organisation's website, it honours "extraordinary individuals who serve as an inspiration to the next generation of Jews through their outstanding professional achievement, commitment to Jewish values and to the Jewish people".

"Portman was born in Israel and, after moving to the US as a child, retained a close connection to her Jewish and Israeli roots. In 2015, she directed 'Tale of Love and Darkness', a Hebrew-language film made in Israel and based on the novel by an Israeli writer Amos Oz. Portman also played a leading role in this picture", read the statement.

The foundation added, "However, we are very saddened that she has decided not to attend the Genesis Prize Ceremony in Jerusalem for political reasons. We fear that Ms. Portman's decision will cause our philanthropic initiative to be politicized, something we have worked hard for the past five years to avoid."

Genesis Award is one of the most prestigious awards in the country, almost equivalent to the Nobel Prize, according to The People.

Portman has been vocal about her criticism against Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. In a 2015 interview with the Hollywood Reporter, she had said, "I'm very much against Netanyahu. Against. I am very, very upset and disappointed that he was re-elected.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
NEUMEX Tyres Limited launched their new brand NEUMEX and their first range of tyres for five different categories of vehicles that comprise motorcycles, scooters, three-wheelers, SCV and LCV.

At the event, an impressive display of more than 30 tyres of these five categories was set up. These patterns looked very energetic and futuristic and conveyed exactly what NEUMEX believes.

NEUMEX is a research and design-centric tyre and tube brand for two-wheelers, three-wheelers, Small Commercial Vehicles (SCV), Light Commercial Vehicles (LCV) and Farm Equipment Segments. What sets NEUMEX apart is the two years of extensive research and attention to detail that have gone into its products.

The unique tread patterns, tyre designs and compounds are made especially for Indian roads and weather conditions. The carefully designed tyres improve fuel efficiency, safety, grip and bring about a significant change in riding and driving experience across vehicle segments. At the onset, NEUMEX will have 65 SKUs, out of which 40 will be of the two-wheeler category, catering to more than 80 percent of the market demand.

The story of NEUMEX started with Mr. Ravi Shankar, a person with more than 35 years of industry experience, forming a core team comprising Mr. Suprajj Reddy, a management expert and consultant back from the US, Mr. Ratnakar Rao, a brand specialist, and Mr. Balaji, an experienced sales professional. This team then partnered with a tyre and tube manufacturing company with more than 25 years of experience, preferred by many Indian Automotive OEMS to source their products.

The team felt that the PCR (Passenger Car Radials), TBR (Truck-Bus Radials) and HCV (Heavy Commercial Vehicle) segments enjoyed higher market focus and attention, both nationally and internationally. Even though tyres have a critical role to play in two-wheeler, three-wheeler, SCV and LCV segments, the buying experience does not reflect the importance of the product.

NEUMEX has chosen not to be in the number game, but to rise as a brand that would bring the respect, entity and recognition that the two-wheeler, three-Wheeler, SCV and LCV segments deserve. With a highly-specialised R&D team, NEUMEX aims to bring product excellence through continuous innovation, matched by an equally innovative market set up.

India has overtaken China to become the world's No. 1 in the two and three-wheeler segment, with a sale of more than 180 lakh (18 million) vehicles last year. Correspondingly, about 75 lakhs (7.5 million) tyres and 200 lakh (20 million) tubes are sold every month in the same segment, wherein the organised and unorganised sectors see almost similar sales. Added to this, the double-digit growth in the two-wheeler market shown last year just throws light on the immense potential this segment has.

NEUMEX believes that the demand and supply equation in the two and three-wheeler tyre segment will soon take a turn. Keeping this in mind, NEUMEX brand is conceptualised to have its own stores, accompanied by an efficient distribution network. The brand ethos of a more educative, empowering and entertaining tyre-buying experience will be reflected in these stores, which will educate the discerning buyer and give him/her the luxury of choice, according to his/her riding requirements.

NEUMEX will operate through a very flat distribution system (reduced middlemen and duplication) and a profit-sharing equation by partnering with dealers and distributors. At present, NEUMEX is setting up distributors and aims to have seven to eight stores in Hyderabad and Secunderabad by the end of 2018. NEUMEX plans to spread into Andhra Pradesh and Telangana by the end of 2019.

By 2021, NEUMEX aims to have a PAN India presence. Usually tyres are sold through three main channels, replacements, OEMs and Exports. NEUMEX will be focusing on replacement market.

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Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu on Friday hit out at the Congress party and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) over their lack of support for the Special Category Status (SCS) to the state - an assurance that was given in the Rajya Sabha at the time of bifurcation in 2014.

Speaking to the media after ending his 12-hour fast over 'Centre's non-cooperation with the state' here, Naidu said, "Andhra Pradesh was bifurcated by Congress and the BJP with an understanding. Congress did not give any assurances to the state. Then, in Rajya Sabha, the special status was announced. That was not asked by us," he added.

The Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister maintained that he would have the responsibility of developing the state and demanded equal justice to both Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.

Asserting that he had joined the Democratic Alliance (NDA) for state's interests, Naidu added, "We are never power greedy. During (Atal Bihari) Vajpayee's rule, we did not take any ministerial berths. are not new to Telugu Desam Party (TDP). I went along with BJP with the only thought of state interests."

Sensing conspiracy by the BJP on not giving special status, he continued, "What Modi ji told in Tirupati and what he fulfilled? I am asking today the central government on behalf of five crores people of Andhra, to fulfill the promises given in parliament. Nothing more than that."

"What you have told on the special status? Each year you spoke of some election or some other reason. Centre said special status will not be given to anybody. But after giving special status to 11 states, even now, then why not for Andhra?" he questioned.

Naidu further said that the Centre was trying to take Andhra into their hold, similar to what they did with Tamil Nadu.

Further, slamming the BJP for not supporting the special status to the southern state, he said, "Prakash Javadekar said that we cooperated to Andhra Pradesh as we thought the TDP will continue with us. Had we known earlier that TDP quit NDA, we would not have cooperated. Even now we have never compromised on the development of the state."

"The opposition parties had questioned us many things. I have never compromised. I played soft with the Centre for state interests. But when the right time came, we took stubborn decisions. You asked us to get our ministers resigned and put no-confidence motion. I did all those things at a correct and appropriate time. Then why you are not coming together with us. After all these, I took up this hunger strike. Why did not you turn up?", Naidu added, continuing his tirade against the BJP and the Congress party.

The Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister threatened to "take action" and not "spare" anyone if the Centre continued to think beyond the state's interests.

Many parties like the Samara Party, Nava Samaj Party, Lok Satta, Aam Aadmi Party, Revolutionary Socialist Party, and All India Forward Bloc extended their support to Naidu over the special status.

Pratyeka Hoda Sadhana Samiti (Association for Special Status) convenor Chalasani Srinivas appealed to Naidu to take up indefinite hunger strike in the capital. He also suggested all the parties in Andhra Pradesh to unite to fight for special status and other promises made by the Centre.

Naidu has been calling for the SCS to Andhra Pradesh. Asserting his demand, the TDP had quit the BJP-led NDA alliance last month.

The SCS was first accorded in 1969 to Jammu and Kashmir, Assam and Nagaland. Over the years, eight more states were added to the list - Arunachal Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Sikkim, Tripura and, finally, in 2010, Uttarakhand.

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The Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka in which China has a 70 percent stake, is being seen by shipping analysts and other experts as a virtual white elephant because most ships passing through the Indian Ocean don't stop to unload their cargo.

According to report published this week by Bloomberg News, the port, which is eight years old, has almost no container traffic, which to experts is surprising, given that close to 60, 000 ships sail by it every year.

Though the governments of China and Sri Lanka are very mindful of assuaging global fears about the former's ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) being ultimately used for political or military leverage, governments and global business entities seeing the Sri Lanka experience of handing over the port to Beijing last year on a 99-year lease because it was unable to repay its debts, are reportedly worried about China achieving similar terms of engagement and gaining control over strategic infrastructure in other parts of the

Bloomberg News quoted Hambantota Port Chief Operating Officer (COO) Tissa Wickramasinghe, as saying that he and other port officials are determined to make the port a profit-making venture, and is not really concerned with reasons as to why the port was built and whether it should have been built.

According to Bloomberg News, Hambantota is only handling about one ship a day, and when compared to competitors in Singapore, Malaysia and the Middle East, it isn't at present a viable operation in terms of volume generation.

Major shipping lines such as Maersk also don't see the logic of moving operations south, when they can offload cargo easily and directly at Colombo Port.

Maersk says that moving down south would depend on factors like connectivity within the mainline network, extent of domestic cargo, cost and productivity etc.

Bloomberg News quotes Singapore-based shipping analyst Rahul Kapoor as saying that billions of dollars worth of investment will be required to "generate meaningful traffic" at Hambantota.

He is of the view that China is pushing for global maritime dominance through projects it hopes to make commercially viable.

Hambantota COO Wickramasinghe is quoted as saying that "he plans to lure vehicle trans-shipments, refueling and oil storage services away from Singapore, the U.A.E. Port of Fujairah and Malaysia's Port Klang...Plans are also afoot to build a logistics and industrial zone next to the port.

Meanwhile, China has dismissed speculation that the BRI has a military dimension. Its foreign ministry said that there is no reason to think along these lines.

Sri Lanka's Minister of State for Defence Ruwan Wijewardene was quoted, as saying that the Chinese have been clearly told that Hambantota cannot be converted into a military port.

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Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah on Friday visited Chamundeshwari temple on Friday ahead of filing nomination for Karnataka Elections.

Siddaramaiah, who is contesting the upcoming polls from Chamundeshwari constituency, will file the nomination today.

Karnataka will go to polls on May 12 to elect its representatives for the 224-member assembly.

The results will be declared on May 15.

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Electrosteel Steels announced that as per the resolution plan which was submitted by Vedanta for acquisition of the Company under the provisions of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016, and which was approved by the National Company Law Tribunal (Kolkata Bench) (NCLT) pursuant to its order dated 17 April 2018 (Resolution Plan), on and from the date of approval of the Resolution Plan by the NCLT (i.e. 17 April 2018) until the date on which Vedanta acquires control of the Company as per terms of the Resolution Plan, the Company is required to be monitored by an Independent Managing Authority (IMA) under the instructions, control and management of a Steering Committee.

The Steering Committee has been constituted as per the terms of the Resolution Plan and comprises of majority nominees representing the financial creditors of the Company and minority nominees from Vedanta.

In addition to the above, PricewaterhouseCoopers Private Limited has also been appointed as the IMA by the Steering Committee.

In view of the above, the erstwhile Resolution Professional (i.e.

Mr. Dhaivat Anjaria) has handed over the management of affairs of the Company to the IMA, which is acting under the supervision and instructions of the Steering Committee.

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J B Chemicals & Pharmaceuticals fell 2.33% to Rs 312.65 at 12:21 IST on BSE after the company said it received an order from Pollution Control Committee, Daman for closure of its formulation manufacturing facility at Daman.

The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 19 April 2018.

Meanwhile, the S&P BSE Sensex was down 53.05 points, or 0.15% to 34,374.24.

On the BSE, 25,000 shares were traded in the counter so far compared with average daily volumes of 3,904 shares in the past two weeks. The stock had hit a high of Rs 317.80 and a low of Rs 298.20 so far during the day. The stock hit a 52-week high of Rs 363.05 on 17 May 2017. The stock hit a 52-week low of Rs 255 on 28 September 2017.

J B Chemicals & Pharmaceuticals said it received an order from Office of Member Secretary, Pollution Control Committee, Daman dated 18 April 2018 directing the closure of the company's formulation manufacturing facility at Daman on the ground of alleged deviation of standards of treated waste water released from ETP outlet of the said facility.

The company said it does not accept the analytical results obtained by the said authority. The company is taking all necessary steps so as to resume operations at the said facility in line with the standards prescribed by the said authority. The company's said facility has received all NOC/Consents to operate under applicable environmental laws and is operating well within the framework of law. During 2017-2018, the total sales of formulations manufactured at the said facility amounted to about Rs 223 crore.

Net profit of J B Chemicals & Pharmaceuticals declined 5.34% to Rs 33.85 crore on 10.22% rise in net sales to Rs 304.74 crore in Q3 December 2017 over Q3 December 2016.

J B Chemicals & Pharmaceuticals manufactures a range of innovative specialty products that include various pharmaceutical dosage forms like tablets, injectable (vials, ampoules, form fill seal), creams & ointments, lozenges, herbal liquids and capsules.

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Private equity (PE) and venture capital (VC) funds with adequate enterprise or managerial or technical investors in the whole consortium sort of model can come forward to participate in strategic divestments like Air India, a top Government official said at an ASSOCHAM event.

We are not looking only for an airline to takeover Air India, we have given a small carve out for airlines on how domestic airlines will be treated in terms of eligibility in a consortium but otherwise anybody who has net worth and funds can bid for Air India, said Department of Investment and Public Asset Management (DIPAM) Secretary Neeraj Gupta said.

In all these disinvestment exercises also, we have kept them technically neutral, finance is the main criteria and your capability to takeover and run such an asset in financial terms is the main criteria, he added.

He also said that the Union Government had received lot of queries from airlines and non-airlines for proposed divestment of the national carrier.

Earlier, Mr Gupta also said that there is a thought that VCs cannot make investment in such privatisation or strategic disinvestment area which is not correct.

You individually may not be but if you see the expression of interest being invited in these cases, the only criteria is net worth.

Talking about the huge potential for growth in the PE and VC sector, the DIPAM secretary highlighted that from 2009 to 2016 the PEs and VCs have grown as a percentage of GDP (gross domestic product), besides both size and volume of the deals have also grown.

Adding that government had addressed lot of issues flagged by the PEs and VCs, Mr Gupta said, I am not saying all the issues could have been addressed and there may be more expectations on tax and incentive side but we have to always remember that when we provide a very-very attractive, sweet carve-out for one set of investors it has the potential of being misused and tax is definitely the basis on which we can maintain financial discipline.

He said that the government's approach is very clear and thus it is adhering to financial discipline, even fiscal deficit is being contained to targeted numbers and the economy continues to have a glide path.

In last few years, despite challenges and transformational decisions, the government has committed to continue to fiscal discipline and continue higher growth, he said.

When such an approach is there, other sources of funds in the economy become more and more important, he added.

The DIPAM secretary also said that India remains a fastest growing economy as the government has undertaken various initiatives to build an ecosystem which is conducive for growth of inflows from domestic and foreign funds.

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The Delhi High Court on Friday issued notice to the Essar-Loop promoters on a CBI plea challenging a trial court judgment that acquitted them in the 2G spectrum allocation case.

Justice S.P. Garg issued notice to Essar promoters Anshuman Ruia and Ravi Ruia, Essar Group Director Vikash Saraf, Loop Telecom promoters Kiran Khaitan and her husband I.P. Khaitan and three companies and listed the matter for further hearing on May 25.

The Central Bureau of Investigation told the court that the trial court had failed to appreciate the evidence on record which proved that the accused had hatched a conspiracy to cheat the Department of Telecom (DoT) for obtaining spectrum licence.

The agency also said that the special judge -- dealing exclusively with the 2G cases -- failed to appreciate law in proper perspective.

"The evidence on record clearly establishes the offence committed by the accused persons," the plea said.

"The falsity of representation was known not only to (Essar Group Director - Strategy and Planning) Saraf but to all accused persons and it was made with a dishonest intention to deliberately conceal the true ownership and control of the applicant company (Loop Telecom Ltd) and to induce the DoT to issue letters of intent, enter into licence agreements and eventually allocate spectrum to the company," the plea said.

The various adverse observations made by the judge were "highly unwarranted", unjustified and in any case, deserved to be expunged, it said.

On December 21, 2017, the special judge acquitted Essar promoters Anshuman Ruia and Ravi Ruia, Saraf, Khaitan and her husband I.P. Khaitan. The court also let off three companies -- Loop Telecom Pvt Ltd, Loop Mobile India Ltd and Essar Tele Holding.

The CBI filed its third charge sheet on December 12, 2011, including the names of Essar promoters, Loop promoters and Saraf, and companies -- Loop Telecom Pvt Ltd, Loop Mobile India Ltd and Essar Tele Holding -- and recognised them as accused.

The investigating agency had alleged that they had cheated the DoT by using Loop Telecom as a "front" to secure 2G licences in 2008 in violation of Clause 8 of the Unified Access Service License (UASL) Guidelines.

--IANS

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The Supreme Court on Friday asked an advocate, who alleged that FIRs were not registered by police in rape cases which involve powerful politicians, if he had "any relative who was raped".

Expressing their annoyance, a bench of Justice S.A. Bobde and Justice L. Nageswara Rao said: "You have nothing to do with these rapes. How are you related to these rapes? Don't be generic. Is any relative of a victim of rape before us for remedy? Do you have any relative who was raped? Then why are you here?"

Advocate Manohar Lal Sharma had filed plea for a Central Bureau of Investigation probe into the Unnao gangrape case allegedly involving a Bharatiya Janata Party lawmaker from Uttar Pradesh, and kept pressing the issue despite Allahabad High Court dealing with the issue.

The apex court said Allahabad High Court had already passed some directions on the issue, also advocate was not the aggrieved person in the case and questioned his locus standi in the Unnao rape case.

During the hearing, the bench said if Sharma wants he may move the High Court which has the jurisdiction of the case in case, but it can not entertain his plea.

"The Allahabad High Court has already passed some orders in the case. Mr Sharma you are not an aggrieved person in the case. There cannot be a PIL in a criminal case," the bench said.

At the outset, Sharma alleged that in several rape cases involving former ministers or MLAs, no FIR were lodged by the police, wherever powerful people were involved.

Sharma had filed the PIL seeking the court's direction to the CBI to probe the alleged kidnapping and rape of the girl in July 2017 by Unnao MLA Kuldeep Singh Senger and others and custodial death of her father on April 9.

He also sought Rs 3 crore compensation and protection to the family of the girl.

Sharma said the case must be handed over to the CBI for a "fair investigation and prosecution".

The High Court had directed the CBI to carry out the investigations strictly in accordance with the law.

The girl tried to set herself on fire outside the Chief Minister's residence, claiming inaction. Her father was picked up by police and allegedly roughed up by MLA's brother Atul Singh and his aides after which he died.

--IANS

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Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu, who turned 68 on Friday, began his day-long fast to protest what he calls the injustice being meted out to the state by the Central government.

Naidu launched the 'Dharma Porata Deeksha' hunger strike at Indira Gandhi Municipal Stadium in Vijayawada. The fast, which began at 7 a.m., will conclude at 7 p.m.

State ministers Kala Venkat Rao, D. Umamaheswara Rao, Nara Lokesh, Kollu Ravindra, MPs and state legislators and leaders of Telugu Desam Party (TDP) joined him in the fast at the massive programme organised by the state government.

Naidu garlanded statues of Mahatma Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar, Jyotirao Phule and N.T. Rama Rao before reaching the stadium.

The TDP chief was blessed by Hindu, Muslim and Christian religious leaders before he began the fast. Prominent freedom fighters also called on Naidu to extend their support.

Naidu's fast is to demand the Centre to accord special category status to the state and fulfil all commitments made at the time of bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh to carve out Telangana state in 2014.

Last month, the TDP pulled out of BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) to protest its refusal to give special status to the state. Naidu alleged that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has gone back on the promises he made in 2014 elections.

Naidu has appealed to people to observe the fast against the Central government's attitude, instead of celebrating his birthday.

TDP leaders say this is the first time in the country's history that Chief Minister of a state is observing fast on his birthday.

Expressing solidarity with the Chief Minister, leaders and workers of TDP and various organisations are observing the fast across the state. State ministers were also on hunger strike in their respective districts.

--IANS

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Under all-round attack, actor-turned-politician S.Ve.Shekhar on Friday apologised for forwarding a message that was defamatory of women journalists on his Facebook page.

In a statement issued here, the noted comedian and a former legislator, who is now with the BJP, said he had forwarded a message on his Facebook page without reading it.

He said when a friend pointed out the content of the post to be abusive, the post was removed.

"I do not endorse the views expressed in it. I come from a family that respects women and the women journalist," he said.

However, he said he was surprised at how people are spreading the screenshot of the deleted message without finding that offensive.

--IANS

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Former FBI Director James Comey has released memos documenting his conversations with Donald Trump that includes the US President's concerns about media leaks, investigation into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and Trump's recollection of his Russian counterpart telling him that Russia had the "most beautiful hookers in the world".

The Comey memos sent to Congress from the Justice Department on Thursday night included documentation of seven conversations he had with Trump from January 7, 2017 to April 11, 2017. Four of the notes were classified and partially redacted and three of them were unclassified, the Washington Post reported.

Details published in the notes were consistent with allegations in Comey's new book, "A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership".

The memos reveal the extent of Trump's preoccupation with unproven allegations that he had consorted with prostitutes while in Moscow in 2013. Trump, according to the memos, repeatedly denied the allegations and persuaded Comey to help disprove them, while also recalling being told by Putin that Russia has the "most beautiful prostitutes".

Comey also wrote that the President said on January 27 he had "serious reservations" about Flynn. "The guy has serious judgment issues," the former FBI head was told. Flynn was forced to resign over charges that he had lied to the FBI about his contacts with Russia. He is now cooperating with the probe into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Comey wrote that he was asked by Trump to drop an inquiry into links between Flynn and Russia. "I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go," Trump was reported to have said after a White House meeting.

Trump seized on the memos in a Twitter message and said: "James Comey Memos just out and show clearly that there was NO COLLUSION and NO OBSTRUCTION. Also, he leaked classified information. WOW! Will the Witch Hunt continue?"

Comey's memo of his February 14, 2017, discussion with Trump included a previously unreported exchange about trying to prevent leaks. At the time, he was upset that transcripts of his phone conversations with the Mexican and Australian leaders had appeared in The Washington Post.

Trump was also focussed on loyalty, as Comey said in Congressional testimony and his book. In their final April 11 conversation, Comey wrote that Trump told him: "I have been very loyal to you, very loyal, we had that thing, you know."

Comey said that he assumed Trump was referring to his previous pledge for loyalty before his inauguration, where Comey responded he would provide "honesty", and Trump responded, "honest loyalty".

The former FBI chief was fired in May.

Trump's complaint about the "cloud" hanging over him due to the Russia investigation was also included in the memos. In the same conversation, Trump also suggested he would sue Christopher Steele, the British ex-intelligence officer who wrote the dossier, although he never did so.

The unredacted, classified version of the memos will be made available to Congress, the Department of Justice said.

--IANS

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Union Minister Vijay Goel on Friday accused the Congress of initiating the motion for the impeachment of Chief Justice Dipak Misra for "cheap publicity and scoring political brownie points".

"When they (Congress) lose elections, they blame electronic voting machines, then the Election Commission. Now, they are even doubting the judiciary," the Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs and Programme Implementation told the media here.

He said that the Congress leaders, after a series of electoral debacles at the hands of the Bharatiya Janata Party, had lost sanity.

Earlier, Goel reviewed the Lucknow Metro rail project and progress made in the Lucknow Ring Road project. He expressed satisfaction over the work done so far and said that officials had promised that work on the 13.5-km Metro corridor would be completed by April 2019.

The Minister said that work on the Rs 2,573.31 crore Ring Road project too was on track.

--IANS

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The 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) on Friday ruled out an alliance with the Congress party but nevertheless agreed to an "understanding" with it and other "secular opposition parties" inside and outside Parliament.

"As far as the political line is concerned, any political alliance with the Congress is ruled out. Such an alliance with the major party of the Indian ruling classes will weaken our struggle against building the unity of the people for a policy alternative to the ruling classes. It is on the basis of this line that future electoral tactics will be decided," the resolution said.

"As far as the word understanding is concerned, we have defined the scope of that understanding with the Congress party. Within Parliament, we have understanding with secular opposition parties including the Congress on agreed issues. We take forward the Vishakapatnam Party Congress resolution that we need a broad mobilization of all democratic and secular forces against communalism," it added.

The resolution is likely to put to rest the tug-of-war between two camps within the CPI-M regarding an alliance with the Congress party.

The issue was settled after the CPI-M Congress approved an amendment moved by the Steering Committee with an overwhelming endorsement from the delegates.

Summing up the discussion on the political resolution, senior leader Prakash Karat noted that it was "unprecedented" that two views were put before the party Congress.

"The Central Committee had decided that since this is a political issue. it should be decided in the highest body of the party, that is, the Party Congress. That is why Comrade Sitaram Yechury placed the Central Committee minority point of view.

"It is not a question of the words 'understanding' and 'alliance'. It is the approach of how best to fight the BJP-RSS and ensure their defeat. A large number of comrades asked the leadership to resolve the issue so as to go back from this Congress with the message of unity," he added.

CPI-M General Secretary Sitaram Yechury in his intervention gave a call for unity in the party.

"We are all agreed that our main fight is against the BJP-RSS and to defeat this government. After this Party Congress, we go back in a unified manner take this fight throughout the country to mobilize the vast mass of our people on the guidance of the political resolution," he said.

Yechury said that he was "proud" as CPI-M is the "only party in India today which can undertake such a democratic exercise to decide its future direction".

During the deliberations, delegates moved around 373 amendments, out of which 37 were accepted.

One of the amendments did away with the word "understanding" from a clause that earlier read: "However, this has to be done without having an understanding or electoral alliance with the Congress party", with the amended clause being "But this has to be done without having a political alliance with the Congress party."

Also, a clause was added that said: "However, there can be an understanding with all secular opposition parties including the Congress in Parliament on agreed issues. Outside Parliament, we should cooperate with all secular opposition forces for a broad mobilization of people against communalism.

"We should foster joint actions of class and mass organisations, in such a manner that can draw in the masses following the Congress and other bourgeois parties."

--IANS

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The Central government on Friday told the Supreme Court that the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) is a "crime under existing laws".

Attorney General K.K. Venugopal asked a bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra, Justice D.Y. Chandrachud and Justice A.M. Khanwilkar to "step in and issue directions" on the issue.

"It is a crime punishable with imprisonment of seven years under the existing law...," he said.

The government's response came on a plea seeking direction to ban female genital mutilation or "Khatna", as it is commonly called, and declare it illegal and inhuman.

The bench adjourned the matter for July 9 and also issued notice to Kerala and Telangana. It had earlier issued notice to Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Delhi.

The plea filed by advocate Sunita Tihar challenged the practice prevalent among the Dawoodi Bohra religious community and sought direction to declare it illegal and unconstitutional, non-compoundable and a non-bailable offence.

Tihar contended that India was a signatory to the UN Convention on Rights of Child and had also ratified it.

Describing the practice as "inhuman" and violative of the girl child's rights under the Constitution's Article 14 (Right to Equality) and Article 21 (Right to Life), the petitioner advocate sought putting in place a statutory framework.

The plea sought framing of guidelines to deal with the situation till Parliament enacts a law to curb the practice being followed by some sects of a community.

Seeking declarations that FGM be made a non-compoundable offence, the petitioner sought direction to the state police chiefs to act against the people engaged in the practice under the existing law, until the enactment of a law in this regard.

--IANS

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Six years after a trial court punished her for 28 years in jail calling her the key instigator in Gujarat's worst communal massacre that left 97 Muslims dead in 2002 in Ahmedabad's Naroda Patiya, the Gujarat High Court on Friday acquitted former Gujarat minister Maya Kodnani saying there was no evidence to nail her.

A Division Bench of the High Court comprising Justice Harsha Devani and Justice A.S. Supehia acquitted her, stating there was absence of sufficient proof of her presence at the crime scene where huge armed crowds went about on a killing spree for hours.

A SIT Court had in 2012 found it "beyond reasonable doubt" that Kodnani, a doctor by profession, was present at the spot of the crime, instigated mobs to attack Muslims and abetted the crime.

"In the record of this case, the witnesses have stated that all the disturbances were started and in fact reached its peak after the arrival of Kodnani. It stands proved beyond all reasonable doubt that she was present and participated in the crime on that day," the court had ruled in August 2012, sentencing Kodnani to 28 years in imprisonment.

Friday's acquittal of Kodnani, who was made a Minister after the riots, came in the backdrop of witnesses turning hostile, six judges recusing themselves from the hearing and the SIT deciding not to seek enhancement of her sentence stating that it did not have the Gujarat government's sanction for it.

BJP President Amit Shah's testimony in the case in September 2017 was the last one and could have proved to be the much needed alibi for Kodnani. He stated that he saw Kodnani in the Gujarat Assembly on 28 February, 2002 (the day of the massacre), first at 8.30 a.m. and then again at 11 a.m.

The Gujarat Assembly is located in Gandhinagar and so the former minister could not have been at Naroda Patiya on the day of the riots.

However, the SIT Court had refused to consider this as evidence stating that Gandhinagar and Ahmedabad were like twin cities and that Kodnani could have easily travelled to Naroda Patiya from the state Assembly after 8.30 a.m.

However, the High Court acquitted her with several witnesses turning hostile and there was insufficient evidence to establish her presence at the place of the crime.

The court meanwhile upheld the conviction of Babu Bajrangi, an activist of the Bajrang Dal. The judgment was pronounced on the appeals filed by the former BJP Minister and others against their conviction by the SIT court. He was the key conspirator in the massacre.

The Naroda Patiya riots was one of the worst incidents during the communal conflagration that engulfed Gujarat following the train burning incident on February 27, 2002 at Godhra in which 59 Hindus were killed.

The High Court in August 2017 had reserved its order.

The special court had sentenced 32 people, including Kodnani and Bajrangi. Seven others were given enhanced life imprisonment of 21 years, which they will serve after undergoing 10 years' imprisonment under IPC section 326 (causing grievous hurt).

The remaining accused were given simple life imprisonment of 14 years. The trial court's acquittal of 29 other accused in the case, for want of evidence, was challenged by the SIT, even as those convicted challenged the lower court's order in the High Court for respite.

Government counsel Prashant Desai said: "It is clear from the Gujarat High Court's judgment that the court has gone on no witness theory.

"Twelve accused have been convicted. Besides Babu Bajrangi, Prakash Rathod and Suresh Chara alias Suresh Langda have been convicted under the IPC 120 (B) as key conspirators.

"The sting operation by the Tehelka was not taken into account by the court. The 12 have been convicted with 21 years imprisonment without remission.

"Whatever Babu Bajrangi did was no different from what the others did, so his conviction was on parity. Court believed police witnesses.

"On Kodnani, there were contradictions in the witnesses' testimony against her presence at the crime scene. None of the police witnesses have said that they saw Kodnani at the scene.

"The SIT will have to appeal within 90 days to the Supreme Court if they want to challenge the Gujarat High Court verdict," added the counsel.

Deputy Chief Minister Nitin Patel said: "Our Minister Kodnani was wrongfully implicted in the Naroda Patiya massacre case. But today she has been found innocent.

"We are happy with the verdict and welcome the decision. She has worked hard for the party and definitely she will be given an active role in the party if she wishes to continue."

Meanwhile, the state BJP President Jitu Vaghani has blamed the Congress for arraigning Kodnani in the case. "The Congress wrongfully involved our former minister."

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro has signed a multi-year exclusive deal with DreamWorks Animation to write, produce and direct animated family films for the studio.

He is taking an office at the DreamWorks campus in Glendale, California, as part of the deal, reports variety.com.

The filmmaker, who won Best Picture and Best Director Oscars for "The Shape of Water", signed an overall deal earlier this month with Fox Searchlight to write, produce and direct live-action feature projects.

"Animation is an art form that has influenced my work greatly since childhood," del Toro said in a statement.

"To me, it's the perfect medium to bring to life any and all ideas, no matter how outlandish or wild."

Del Toro acted as a creative consultant for "Kung Fu Panda 2" and "Megamind" and other inputs earned him executive producer credits on "Rise of the Guardians", "Puss in Boots" and "Kung Fu Panda 3".

With DreamWorks Animation Television, he is the creator and executive producer of "Trollhunters" and has two other series in the works.

The studio announced the deal on Thursday and indicated in a statement by DWA President Chris deFaria that the relationship could extend beyond movies and TV.

"We are thrilled that Guillermo is adding a film partnership to the already successful television relationship he has with DreamWorks Animation," de Faria said.

"He is truly a one-of-a-kind artiste, and we are eager to see his imagination on full display in the family animated feature space. Guillermo has a unique talent for creating memorable worlds and characters, and we believe the films we create with him will resonate with animation audiences for many generations to come."

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Popular sarod player Ayaan Ali Bangash is upset at the manhandling of instruments by airlines.

The artiste was taking a flight from Pune to Delhi on Friday. He had mentioned his sarod as a fragile item. However, he saw it being transported "upside down".

Ayaan, son of sarod exponent Amjad Ali Khan, told IANS: "I was in Pune for an event last evening and took the morning flight to Delhi. I had clearly stated as always at the check-in counter that my sarod is a fragile item and needs special handling.

"As I boarded, I just happened to see my sarod being taken in a regular manner on top of suitcases, that too upside down. It's sad. I hope and pray that we have rules towards special handling for musical instruments that are so precious and are a part of our cultural legacy. It's very sad to see it kept as baggage."

He said mostly all airlines are compassionate towards special requests, but he hopes he never has to see an instrument kept in the manner he saw his own being kept.

Ayaan had posted on social media a photograph of the way the instrument had been kept. However, he deleted it later.

"I deleted it as they (airline) sent an apology. I just request for more sensitivity towards musical instruments. All instruments -- be it old or new -- are an extension of an artiste, so I hope that we being Indians value our tradition," he added.

After his tweet, the official Twitter page of Jet Airways wrote: "Ayaan, we are very concerned to note this. Be assured that we are currently reviewing it with our ground services team and will get back to you on priority."

Back in 2014, Ayaan's father's sarod was misplaced by an international airlines, but he got it back a day later.

--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 urged the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) countries to set up an independent rating agency of the group, according to an Indian official.

The renewed call for setting up a BRICS Rating Agency was given by Economic Affairs Secretary Subhash Chandra Garg at the first meeting of the BRICS Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors in Washington on Thursday on the sidelines of the IMF and World Bank Spring Meetings, a Finance Ministry statement said.

"He (Garg) requested the Presidency to receive and take forward the report to be submitted by the expert group set up under the aegis of the BRICS Business Council to study the feasibility of the BRICS Rating Agency," the statement said.

At the BRICS Summit in Xiamen in China held in September last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had strongly pitched for the setting up of a rating agency to counter the western "big three" institutions -- S&P, Moody's and Fitch -- and cater to the financial needs of developing nations.

According to the Ministry, the other issues discussed during the meeting related to enhancing the project pipelines of the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) evenly across member countries and expansion of the NDB's membership.

It also discussed the South African Presidency's proposal for setting up a working group on illicit financial flows and a BRICS Task Force on public-private partnership.

Issues related to the BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) as well as the BRICS Bond Fund were also discussed, the statement said.

Garg emphasised in his interventions that India had been a constructive participant in the discussions on NDB's membership expansion, it said.

"He expressed that a more careful and cautious approach on the value and additional benefits new members will bring to the Bank would be desirable rather than setting deadlines which are practically difficult to achieve," it added.

On the issue of expanding the NDB's project pipeline across member nations evenly, Garg said the objective had to be balanced with the member country's requirement of infrastructure financing.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Activists gathered in London on Thursday for a protest denouncing homophobia and calling for the decriminalization of homosexuality in Commonwealth countries.

Images captured by an epa photojournalist on the ground showed members and supporters of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community holding placards outside of Commonwealth House as part of an action condemning homophobia, Efe reported.

"Homophobia is neo-colonialism, stop it," and "Abolish colonial sodomy laws in the Commonwealth" were among the messages scrawled across the placards.

The majority of countries in the Commonwealth still criminalize sexual acts between same-sex consenting adults.

United Kingdom's Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has said he will broach the topic of gay rights during the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, which was taking place in London from Monday to Friday.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
This is one couple who decided to give up the comfort zone of fat-pay packets, Rs 30 lakh annualy between them to venture into an unknown realm -- starting a tea shop

The duo -- Nitin V. Biyani, 36 and wife Pooja, 34 -- embarked on their journey after considerable thought and intellectual inputs from their elders, especially Pooja's father.

One fine day, the Biyanis finally dumped their cushy software engineering jobs with top multinationals in Pune to throw open their 'Chai Villa' in Nagpur's centrally-located Darodkar Square.

"Pooja and I worked in the highly-taxing IT industry. Often, like other professionals, we used to drink a cup of tea (chai) to relax and destress. We always craved for healthy and tasty chai, but what we got was really terrible chai made at tea-stalls in grossly unhygienic conditions and poor in taste," Nitin told IANS.

"We both thought of changing all this and replace with hot, tasty, fresh handmade chai at nominal rates. Then, we just kick-started the idea in Nagpur, the Orange City of India last November," Pooja added.

Earlier, they carried out detailed market research for nearly four months to learn that true to its reputation, India is indeed a tea-drinking country where 75 crore people drink at least two cups of chai daily, or a whopping 150 crore cups.

"Calculate that in terms of revenue per cup, the amount of milk, tea-dust, tea-masalas, sugar or other ingrdients - and the simple act of consuming chai builds up to a massive tea-industry," Nitin explained.

Though the Biyanis started Chai Villa in a rented shop on C.A. Road (at Darodkar Square), they introduced a host of innovations, a clean and pleasing ambience, courteous service, and of course, a selection of around 20 varieties of hot piping or cold chais that are sipped (lapped) up hungrily by the patrons.

"In the past five months, we have poured out over 175,000 cups of chai from the 'kitli' (kettle) and netted around Rs 15 lakh in the 'galla' (collection box), including around 30 per cent profits," Nitin said candidly, but with a tinge of pride in his successful venture.

The innovations and business models introduced by the Biyani, and the show managed with the help of a 10-strong team, seem to have struck a chord among the people of Nagpur and they are now being eyed by a couple of top investors.

"We give free delivery of hot tea over certain distances for a minimum order of five cups or Rs 100 value, so consumers can always enjoy their refreshing hot cuppa. Plus, we have tied up with small local businessfolks to sell tea on our behalf at a 10 per cent margin, or 'anytime chai' model, which has elicited a huge response," he said.

Then, there are local network deliveries, on the lines of pizza delivery, that ensures customers can get fresh, hot chai within the shortest possible time and a unique monthly subscription plan for corporates who can order tea in bulk quantities for their staffers or guests and pay the bill at month-end, he added.

Explaining the runaway success for the tiny start-up, Nitin says that the pricing played a major factor -- between Rs 8 and Rs 20, which is quite competitive with the rates of the traditional tea-stalls.

"We score in terms of using only distilled water, clean preparations, using our secret herbs and the best of tea-dust and sulphur-free sugar, serving in eco-friendly paper cups or clay-cups (kulhads, as was done on the railways once), prompt service in a pleasant ambience, plus service at the customers' doorstep at affordable rates," he said.

There are other higher priced offerings on the menu card, depending on the customers' choice, with ice-cream-chocolate coffee occupying the top slot at Rs 45, and accompaniments of light snacks and sandwiches for that truly refreshing feeling.

However, the Biyanis are not resting on their current laurels or the past 175,000 cups served -- and have mega-expansion plans lined up.

"We plan to start franchise operations shortly and are already flooded with potential franchisees, launch at least 10 independent Chai Villas in Nagpur city by December 2019. Altogether we hope to sell around two million cups of tea and expect revenues of upto Rs.3 crores," Nitin said.

Chai Villa would hire around 150 youngsters, preferring the poor and the semi-literate or even physically-challenged, who are the most needy, for these upcoming ventures, he assured.

Presently, Nagpur citizens love to visit Chai Villa anytime from 10 am to 11 pm, sip leisurely on the chai of their choice and leave with a smile on their lips -- "which we consider the biggest compliment", according to Nitin.

(Quaid Najmi can be contacted at q.najmi@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.)
The fate of the motion for impeachment of Chief Justice Dipak Misra rests with Rajya Sabha Chairperson M. Venkaiah Naidu, who is likely to seek legal opinion before accepting or rejecting it.

If the motion is admitted, the law provides for constitution of a three-member committee comprising a Supreme Court judge, Chief Justice of a High Court and a distinguished jurist to look into the complaint.

A judge can be removed from office through a motion adopted by Parliament on grounds of 'proven misbehaviour or incapacity'. The Constitution provides that a judge can be removed only by an order of the President, based on a motion passed by both Houses of Parliament.

The process for removal of a Supreme Court judge has been mentioned in Article 124 of the Constitution and the procedure has been elaborated in the Judges Inquiry Act, 1968.

The impeachment motion originates when at least 50 members of Rajya Sabha (100 in the case of Lok Sabha) give a signed notice to the presiding officer. The petition given to Naidu on Friday has been signed by 64 members of the upper house.

If a committee is constituted, it frames charges based on which the investigation will be conducted and a copy of the charges is forwarded to the judge who can present a written defence.

Upon completion of investigation, the committee submits its report to the presiding officer who lays it before the relevant house. If the report records a finding of misbehaviour or incapacity, the motion for removal is taken up for consideration.

The motion for removal is required to be adopted by the both houses of Parliament by a majority of the total membership of that House and a majority of at least two-thirds of the members present and voting.

If the motion is adopted in both Houses, it is sent to the President who issues order for the removal of the judge.

Congress sources said that if the impeachment notice given by the seven opposition parties on Friday was rejected by the Rajya Sabha Chairman, they can seek a judicial review and the matter then would come up before the senior most judge of the apex court after the CJI.

They also hoped that the Chairman would take a decision on their impeachment motion in a reasonable time.

They noted that court rulings have laid down that decisions in case of anti-defection cases should be taken by the concerned speaker in a reasonable period of time.

They added that the tradition in India is that from the time a motion is moved, the judge must recuse himself from judicial work.

--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 has created a sartorial stir by donning a traditional Maori coat to meet British Queen Elizabeth II during this week's Commonwealth heads of government meeting.

Ardern wore a korowai -- a Maori cloak adorned with feathers and bestowed on chiefs and dignitaries to convey prestige, respect and power, according to Mark Sykes, guardian of Maori special collections at Te Papa, the National Museum of New Zealand.

The photos of Ardern wearing the korowai on Thursday generated a wave of pride, enthusiasm and support online, with people praising it as "stunning" and "beautiful".

Many people commented that the picture captured the inversion of traditional gender roles -- a female world leader wearing a powerful cloak while pregnant and representing her country.

The korowai was given to Ardern by a Maori group in London, for her to wear at the Commonwealth Summit, reported the New Zealand Herald.

"The significance of the garment is the prestige that comes with it," said Donna Campbell, lecturer in Maori studies at Waikato University in Hamilton.

"What it represents is the prestige and power of the person wearing it. So for Jacinda to be wearing it at this event is completely fits with the weight of the occasion, from a Maori point of view, this garment was entirely appropriate."

Having won a surprise victory last year, 37-year-old Ardern is the world's youngest female Prime Minister.

According to Radio New Zealand, Ardern was one of only four leaders to get a 20-minute private audience with the Queen Elizabeth. Ardern had previously voiced her support for New Zealand to become a republic.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A Nigerian and his wife have been arrested on the charge of duping a woman of nearly Rs 15.5 lakh through a matrimonial website, police said on Friday.

Oboh Tony Erhauyi, 31, was running a business in India since 2013 whereas his wife Rosy Noronha, 41, is a Delhi University graduate working with an NGO at Lajpat Nagar.

Police have seized four mobiles, four SIM cards, two laptops and a hard disk from the accused who were arrested from Mayur Vihar in east Delhi.

The couple ensnared the victim by asking her to share personal details with V. Abhishek, which was a fake ID registered on the matrimonial website, police said.

"The woman, a resident of Motia Khan, received a call from someone identifying as Akhishek who told her he was employed on a ship and would meet her family to convey his marriage proposal," Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime) Alok Kumar said.

"A month later, this man again called her and told her a hard luck story about an attack by Somali pirates on the ship. He they asked her to pay the difference in air freight charges for his personal belongings he had dispatched to her address."

The woman paid almost Rs 15.5 lakh for so-called air freight and other cooked up charges, the officer said.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Nine coastal states and islands have been warned about rough seas over the next two days, a senior Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS)official said on Friday.

"There is no change in our warning issued on Thursday. As per our prediction, the rough sea condition will prevail in nine states during 21-22 April," R.Harikumar, Scientist and Incharge Ocean State Forecasting, INCOIS told IANS over phone.

He said there is a possibility of the sea being rough near shore and also the low lying areas and some areas may experience surges intermittently from the morning of April 21 to the night of April 22 due to the effect of high period (18-22 seconds) swell waves, having 2.5-3 metre height.

The states and the union territories for whom the warning have been issued are Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Lakshadweep, Karnataka, Goa, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Odisha and West Bengal.

According to INCOIS, there is a possibility of surging of waves during the high tide times, in the low lying areas of the coasts during this period and both fishermen and coastal population are to be cautious during this period, INCOIS said.

INCOIS has also listed out precautionary measures: that plying of boats very near the coasts be avoided during this period as the coastal regions will experience its effect more; that boats may be anchored at a fair distance from each other to avoid collision and damage; that water- based recreational activity at the coasts be suspended during these events; and that taking out the boats from the shore to the sea and back be avoided.

It also said that the effect in the open ocean is likely to be minimal.

Harikumar said this is a rare phenomenon that occurs due to sustained wind in Southern Ocean.

He said INCOIS observation buoy in Seychelles has indicated high swells in the waves, which underscores the forecast for Indian states and union territories.

--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 and some other opposition parties met here on Friday and decided to submit a petition in Rajya Sabha to initiate the impeachment of Chief Justice Dipak Misra.

Following a discussion at senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad's room in the Parliament House complex, the opposition leaders went to meet Vice President and Rajya Sabha Chairman M. Venkaiah Naidu to submit the petition.

Besides the Congress, the opposition parties' meeting was attended by leaders of the Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Rashtriya Janta Dal (RJD), Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP).

Informed sources said the petition for the impeachment of the Chief Justice has been signed by 64 Rajya Sabha members.

Congress leaders have said the issues raised by four seniormost Supreme Court judges have not yet been addressed by Chief Justice Misra.

They said the party was concerned about the independence of the judiciary and it must be protect from "gross interferences by 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.)
Palestinian protesters came into confrontation here on Friday with Israeli troops deployed in this important West Bank city, media reports said.

A photographer captured images of demonstrators blocking roads with burning tires and hurling stones at Israeli soldiers, who responded with tear gas.

Friday's incidents follow earlier protests over US President Donald Trump's December 2017 decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, Efe reported.

The announcement sparked demonstrations in the occupied Palestinian territories and across Muslim-majority nations throughout the region.

Though 80 per cent of the Hebron jurisdiction is under the control of the Palestinian Authority, Israel maintains a military presence to protect a Jewish settlement in the city's old quarter.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A district court has directed police to probe allegations against Haryana's senior IPS officer Bharti Arora, now the Inspector General of Police (Vigilance), and a Road Safety Officer (RSO), a lawyer said on Friday.

The court directed the Station House Officer concerned to conduct the investigation.

Jyotsana Bhardwaj, daughter-in-law of a retired Indian Administraive Service officer, had approached the court for filing an FIR against Arora and RSO Abhinav Chopra.

Bhardwaj had earlier filed a police case against her husband on charges of demanding and harassing her for dowry.

Arora, then Gurugram's Joint Commissioner of Police, had sent a notice to Bhardwaj to join investigation in the case on August 8, 2015.

Bhardwaj told the court of Judicial Magistrate 1st Class Raveesh Kaushik that five police personnel visited her house on August 8, 2015, and returned after serving the said notice.

"The RSO returned after some time and offered to make relations with me. He made a video tape secretly at Arora's behest and also said that he will help me settle the case with the help of the IPS officer," the complainant told court.

She requested the court to order registration of a case against Chopra and Arora under the Indian Penal Code.

Arora had written to Haryana's Director General of Police that she had sent a police team comprising Inspector Satyender Kumar, woman Sub-Inspector Krishna, woman Constable Renu and an independent witness and RSO Chopra to Bhardwaj's house in Sector 52 here.

She said she had ordered the team to make the video tape of the whole process as case evidence.

An investigation into the episode by Deputy Commissioner of Police (East) Deepak Saharan and Assistant Commissioner of Police Ramesh Pal were produced in the court, wherein both officers had remarked that RSO Chopra was aware that Bhardwaj was living alone.

--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 Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) on Friday demanded a probe into a Punjab woman pilgrim's conversion to Islam and re-marriage with a Lahore-based Pakistani national.

"The VHP demands a thorough investigation into Kiran Bala's mysterious disappearance, religious conversion, remarriage and unwillingness to return to India," a VHP release said.

VHP Working President Alok Kumar called the development serious in view of the alleged involvement of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence.

"The incident has stunned not only her family members but the entire nation," the release said.

The woman left for Pakistan on a pilgrimage as part of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee delegation on April 12 and reportedly went missing on April 16. Her passport had a Pakistani visa valid till 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.)
New Delhi, April 20 ( IANS) Delhi Commission for Women Chairperson Swati Maliwal on Friday said that she "respects" Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's request to end her hunger strike but she won't do so.

Kejriwal tweeted on Friday urging Maliwal to end her fast after reports came in that the centre had informed the Supreme Court it has started process to amend POCSO Act to ensure the death penalty for the rape of child aged below 12.

"Congratulations Swati Maliwal. You should now end the fast. We all should now work towards effective implementation of these laws and keep working towards rest of the demands," Kejriwal tweeted.

Maliwal, 33, began her fast last week at Rajghat as a mark of protest against the recent rape incidents in Kathua and Unnao and to demand the immediate enactment of a stringent law for convicted rapists. It entered its eight day on Friday.

"Everyday affidavits are submitted in courts by government. Unless the law comes into force, I won't stop. The law has to be death penalty within six months to those convicted for raping minors," Maliwal said.

A DCW member further said that she will continue till the centre accepts her other demands like adding more personnel to Delhi Police and fast-track courts.

In a letter to Modi last week, Maliwal said: "I will not break my 'anshan' (fast) until the Prime Minister promises the country a better system for the safety of our daughters."

-- IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Securities market regulator Sebi on Friday imposed a fine of more than Rs 1 crore on Suzlon Energy for violation of Securities Contracts (Regulation) Act (SCRA).

According to the adjudication order, the company failed to disclose price sensitive information as required under the code of corporate disclosure practices for prevention of insider trading.

"I find that the investigation did not bring out the disproportionate gain or unfair advantages to the noticee and loss caused to investors as a result of non-disclosure of truncation of order," Sebi order read.

"They failed to make the disclosure on more than one occasion, hence it can be said, it is repetitive in nature."

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Seoul and Pyongyang on Friday set up a telephone line between their leaders, enabling direct dialogue between South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un who are also set to meet in person next week.

The direct hotline was established between Seoul's Presidential office Cheong Wa Dae and the office of North Korea's State Affairs Commission, headed by Kim, Yonhap news reported.

South Korea made the first call to check the line, a Cheong Wa Dae official said, adding that there were no problems detected.

North Korea later returned the call to check the channel worked both ways. The entire trial conversation lasted four minutes and 17 seconds, according to the official.

Cheong Wa Dae officials said direct communication between the countries' leaders may help further ease tension on the Korean Peninsula, noting that many cross-border conflicts between them in the past may have partly been caused by "misunderstanding".

The telephone that links Moon with Kim sits right on the former's desk, an official said.

The agreement on a new hotline, the first of its kind connecting the leaders of the two Koreas, came in early March when Moon's top security adviser Chung Eui-yong travelled to Pyongyang for an unprecedented meeting with the North Korean leader.

There, Kim agreed to hold a bilateral summit with the South Korean President as well as US President Donald Trump.

South Korea earlier said Moon and Kim were likely to hold a telephone conversation before they meet on April 27. Their meeting is expected to be followed by the first-ever US-North Korea summit in May or early June.

The upcoming inter-Korean summit will be the third of its kind after two summits held in 2000 and 2007. It will be held on the South Korean side of the joint security area inside the heavily-fortified demilitarised zone that divides the two Koreas. This meeting makes Kim the first North Korean leader to step on South Korean soil since the end of the Korean War.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Three persons, including the main perpetrator, involved in the rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl in have been arrested, the Gujarat government said on Friday.

Minister of State for Home Pradeepsinh Jadeja told the media here that Gujarat Police arrested the key perpetrator from a village in Ganganagar district of Rajasthan, who will be brought to Gujarat.

Earlier in the day, Chief Minister Vijay Rupani said that Police had arrested three persons in the case. All accused are believed to be originally from Rajasthan.

Police had found the body of the girl with over 86 injuries dumped in the bushes near Jeeav Road in Pandesara area of on April 6. An autopsy revealed that she was brutally raped and tortured for days before her murder.

A case of rape was registered under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act.

The Minister said that over 400 personnel of Surat police and Ahmedabad Crime Branch worked on the case.

Police analysed the mobile data and CCTV footage from a 3-km radius of the spot from where the body was found. The case was finally cracked after police zeroed in on CCTV footage of a black car moving suspiciously in the area.

Earlier, police suspected that the girl hailed from either Odisha, West Bengal or Jharkhand. An Andhra Pradesh man had come forward to claim the girl was his daughter. Surat police even carried out a DNA test to verify his claim.

"On April 9, a woman's decomposed body was found lying a few km from the spot where the girl was found dead. We believe she is the girl's mother. We will carry out a DNA test," Jadeja said.

"We will appoint a special public prosecutor to pursue the case in a fast-track court," Jadeja said.
I was wondering what is happening in our courts. Why is senior lawyer Fali Nariman talking about the complete breakdown of communication between Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra and his colleagues? Why did the four second-most senior judges of the Supreme Court hold a press conference, which is very unusual for judges, so that history wouldnt accuse them of selling their souls? On the other hand, some other judges who deposed details of their actions at the time of Judge Loyas death also held a press ...

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A 60-year-old farmer allegedly committed suicide by consuming a a poisonous substance due to poor price of his produce in markets, an official said today.

The farmer, Rewadi Lal, was also reeling under a debt of Rs 2 lakh, sub-inspector of Atru police station Vijay Kumar said.

"Lal went to Baran mandi from his village on Wednesday to inquire about the price of garlic. The price was much lower than his expectation. He consumed a poisonous substance while returning home," he said.

Meanwhile, PCC president Sachin Pilot held the state government responsible for the suicide of farmers.

"Almost 91 farmers have committed suicide in the state during the BJP rule but the government is not serious," Pilot said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Meghalaya Home Minister James K Sangma today assured the Assembly that action will be taken against miscreants who hurled a petrol bomb at the residence of Shillong Times editor Patricia Mukhim.

Mukhim was home when two unidentified men stopped by her residence and lobbed the bomb at her house around 8.30 pm on Tuesday.

Replying to a call attention motion of Independent MLA Lambor Malngiang, the home minister said, "The government would like to assure the members of this House, the members of the electronic and print media and the people of the state that the government and the police are making all efforts to trace the culprits and bring them to book."



The editor of Meghalaya's popular English daily was provided personal security yesterday after the senior police officers' reviewed the matter at a meeting the day before.

"The government is taking measures to combat crimes against women and children. Mechanisms have been put in place to monitor and supervise these cases," he said.

Condemning Tuesday's attack, the home minister termed it a "cowardly act" and praised Mukhim for her social work.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh today opposed the disinvestment of Air India, saying it's a national asset and the government should not sell it to private entities, a day after another RSS affiliate argued against the move.

"Air India is our national carrier, it's is a public undertaking. It is a national asset, which belongs to the public. Government should not sell it to private firms," BMS president Shaji Narayanan told PTI.

He said the BMS has conveyed its stand to the government and extended its full support to Air India employees' union.

"On this issue we are with Air India employees and they have our full support," Narayanan said.

Yesterday, the Swadeshi Jagran Manch (SJM) opposed the disinvestment of the debt-laden national carrier and said it did not approve of the move in its "current form".

The SJM said the government should monetise Air India's assets for repayment of debt rather than selling its stake.

SJM co-convener Ashwani Mahajan said Air India has operating profits, but is running into losses because of its debts.

"Rather than selling its stake in the national carrier, the government can reduce its (the carrier's) debt by selling off its land," Mahajan told PTI yesterday.

The opposition by two RSS affiliates comes days after the RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat categorically said Air India should not be sold to a foreign buyer.

The Centre has invited 'expression of interest' to sell 76 per cent stake and management control in the airline.

The Indian government owns 100 per cent equity of Air India. The airline was founded in the 1930s and is commonly known for its Maharajah mascot. The government has injected more than Rs 23,000 crore since 2012 to bail out the airline.

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The Allahabad High Court has rejected a CBI officer's plea seeking to quash a preliminary enquiry registered against him by the agency on a complaint from an MNC.

The court has also imposed costs of Rs 10,000 on him.

The case pertains to a CBI preliminary enquiry registered against Superintendent of Police Sudhanshu Kumar Khare, posted in the agency's Special Crime unit in Lucknow, on the complaint of Whirlpool India Limited in January.

Whirpool India had alleged that when Khare was posted at Ranchi during 2013 to 2017, he had "generated a false and anonymous" complaint against the company to pressure its executives into taking back his brother into service.

The agency had in January registered a preliminary enquiry against Khare after the CBI Director gave the nod. The case is being probed by an ASP-level officer in Delhi.

Khare had moved the Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court, claiming that he had not violated any provisions of the CBI (Crime) Manual 2005 and had not committed any act of misconduct, either civil or criminal.

He said that he had only gathered information and his brother had resigned from Whirlpool India Ltd. on January 5, 2016. Therefore, there was no question of pursuing the case of his brother.

He said that unless a fact-finding inquiry in the matter is brought to its conclusion, a PE cannot be registered.

Khare said he had written to the CBI Director about the alleged bias against him on the part of senior officers and had pleaded for not acting on their recommendation.

The CBI, however, decided to go ahead with the preliminary enquiry.

After hearing the arguments of both the sides, a high court bench noted that Khare had received information regarding "fake employment" of one Vinay Kumar, which was entered into the complaint register.

The bench said the CBI manual states that no action should be taken in case of anonymous complaints, but Khare collected information and summoned the officers of Whirlpool India Ltd.

He also sent sub-ordinate officers to collect information about Kumar, which was an action in respect of a private company for which the petitioner was not authorised at all, the bench said.

It appears that the petitioner "misused his official position" while entering such an arena which otherwise is not permissible under the law.

He tried to misuse his position in the office, which is required to be ascertained during the course of preliminary enquiry against him, the bench said.

The ground on which the registration of the preliminary enquiry has been challenged has "no substance and neither it is sustainable under the law", it said.

"The registration of the preliminary enquiry, therefore, is valid," it said.

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An audit of Facebook's privacy practices for the Federal Trade Commission found no problems even though the company knew at the time that a data-mining firm improperly obtained private data from millions of users raising questions about the usefulness of such audits.

Facebook agreed to outside audits every two years as part of a 2011 settlement with the FTC over its privacy practices. It is not clear from the report whether the company informed PricewaterhouseCoopers, which performed the audit, of the Cambridge Analytica data grab that would put Facebook in the crosshairs of Congress.

The heavily redacted audit by PricewaterhouseCoopers is available on the FTC's website. It covers February 12, 2015 to February 11, 2017.

PwC declined to comment, but Facebook said today that keeping data secure is a priority.

"We remain strongly committed to protecting people's information, said Rob Sherman, Facebook's deputy chief privacy officer, in a statement. "We appreciate the opportunity to answer questions theFTCmay have." The fact that PwC found no issues raised red flags for privacy advocates.

"The FTC failed to protect the public," said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the nonprofit digital rights group Center for Digital Democracy.

"Instead of conducting its own review to enforce one of its most important decisions the consent decree it looked the other way, which allowed Facebook to engage in serious misconduct."



Chester said the audit shows that the "FTC cannot be relied on to really protect consumers."



The 2011 consent decree bound Facebook to a 20-year privacy commitment. Any violations of that pact could cost the company a tonne of money. In his congressional testimony last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared uninformed about key details of the agreement, saying he did not remember if it carried a financial penalty.

Any violations of the 2011 agreement could subject Facebook to fines of USD 41,484 per violation per user per day. To put that in context, Facebook could theoretically owe USD 8 billion for one single day violation affecting all of its American users, or about half of the profit that the company booked for all of last year.

The agreement requires that Facebook users give "affirmative express consent" any time that data they haven't made public is shared with a third party. Cambridge Analytica accessed information from so many users (the firm puts the number at 30 million, although Facebook has said 87 million) because it was able to access the data of people's friends, and not just people who explicitly permitted access when they took a personality quiz.

While Facebook did have controls in place that allowed people to restrict such access, they are found buried in the site's settings and are difficult to find.

Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat from Nevada, said during last week's hearing that in her view, "these requirements were not met," because user consent shouldn't have been buried in privacy settings.

PwC disagreed.

"In our opinion, Facebook's privacy controls were operating with sufficient effectiveness to provide reasonable assurance to protect the privacy of covered information and that the controls have so operated throughout the Reporting Period, in all material respects for the two years ended February 11, 2017," the report states.

Facebook is also under a separate investigation by the FTC because of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The agency is looking at whether Facebook has engaged in "unfair acts" that cause "substantial injury" to consumers.

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Vadodara District Cooperative Milk Producers Union, popularly known as Baroda Dairy, has reduced the procurement price paid to its dairy farmers considerably from Rs 700 per kg to Rs 640 per kg of fat, a senior official said today.

Before taking the decision, the Baroda Dairy had written"to all its 1,237 village societies in this regard explaining as to why the price was dropped to Rs 640 from Rs 700, its vice president Ganpatsinh B Solanki told PTI here.

There are"nearly 1.25 lakh milk producers in three districts of Vadodara and the tribal-dominated area of Chhotaudepur and Narmada, according to him.

Terming the move "unavoidable", Solanki said this decision was taken in a bid to avoid Baroda Dairy getting into worsening financial conditions due to change in global marketing conditions.

Justifying the reduction in price, Solanki explained that Baroda Dairy collects around 7 lakh kg per day (LKPD) of milk from the 1,237 village societies, out of which around 2 LKPD is sent to the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation after meeting requirement of 5 LKPD of the people in Vadodara city.

"The compensation received from the federation for supplying surplus milk to it, is less than its (Baroda Dairy's) purchase price from the village societies, and its conversion into butter and milk powder causes economic loss to the dairy," he said.

The drop in the procurement price for farmers is seen after a fall in the global skimmed milk powder (SMP) rates.

This crash in SMP paired with the increased price of procurement by dairy unions has led to the abundance of milk with the dairy union, according to Solanki.

He also said that due to change in circumstances, milk dairies of other districts across Gujarat have brought down procurement prices.

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The ruling BJP today welcomed the Gujarat High Court's verdict acquitting former minister Maya Kodnani and some others in the Naroda-Patiya massacre case, while the victims' lawyer said they were disappointed, and would move the Apex court.

Former VHP leader Pravin Togadia said he was delighted, and the state must not challenge the acquittals.

The high court, hearing various appeals, acquitted 18 persons including Kodnani today. It upheld conviction of 13 persons including former Bajrang Dal leader Babu Bajrangi, and convicted another three accused, earlier acquitted by the trial court.

Advocate Shamshad Pathan, who represented riot victims, said their kin were disappointed by the acquittals, and planned to file appeal in the Supreme Court.

"The judgement is saddening for all those who had faith in judiciary and in Constitution for delivering justice.

"The Special Investigation Team did not probe the case properly. As far as Maya Kodnani is concerned, statements and evidence against Babu Bajrangi also apply to her. We will go through the judgement and challenge it before the Supreme Court," advocate Pathan said.

BJP leader and Deputy Chief Minister Nitin Patel welcomed the judgement.

"We are glad that Maya-ben has been acquitted by the high court. She and her family have got relief from the ordeal they had to go through (after her conviction)," he said.

Firebrand Hindutva leader Pravin Togadia said the state government should not challenge the acquittal of Kodnani and others in the Supreme Court.

"Hindu Advocate Forum" will provide legal help to Bajrangi and others, he said.

"I express delight that Maya-ben and others have been acquitted. I would also demand that the government should not go to the Supreme Court to challenge the acquittals. Bajrangi and others who have been convicted should move the SC and we will arrange free legal aid for them. I would also ask the Gujarat government to go easy on their appeals," he said.

Kodnani's husband Surendra Kodnani said he had "full faith in judiciary."



Sakeela Ansari, eight members of whose family were killed during the riot, and who herself had deposed during the trial, said the judiciary had failed her.

"This is a dark day. I had seen with my own eyes what happened there. If after saying all this (in the court) the court acquits those who were involved in kiling the members of my family, then what kind of justice is this?" she said.

"I had seen Maya Kodnani at a distance of just 25-30 metres. I am disappointed by the verdict. Maya-ben had come not once but twice to the area on the day of the incident. How can the court deny what we had seen from our own eyes," said another victim, Salim Sheikh, whose house was damaged during the riot and who too had deposed during the trial.

The high court said in its verdict that prosecution witnesses' statements about Kodnani were contradictory, and the charge of conspiracy wasn't proved against her.

A mob killed 97 people, most of them from a minority community, in Naroda Patiya area of Ahmedabad on February 28, 2002, a day after the torching of the Sabarmati Express at Godhra which triggered state-wide riots.

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Visitors to a zoo in southeastern China killed one kangaroo and injured another by throwing bricks at them in an attempt to get a reaction from the big marsupials, state media reported.

A 12-year-old female kangaroo suffered a severely injured foot when it was struck by bricks and concrete chunks on February 28 at the Fuzhou Zoo in Fujian province, China Central Television reported.

The kangaroo died days later and an examination by a veterinarian revealed that the cause of death was likely a ruptured kidney caused by being struck by the projectiles.

A few weeks later, a five-year-old male kangaroo at the same zoo was slightly injured in a similar way, said the report posted on the network's website late yesterday.

The report included pictures of the first kangaroo's smashed and nearly severed foot, and of the animal receiving treatment via intravenous drip before it died.

Visitors to the zoo were known to try to provoke the Australia marsupials to get them to display their signature hopping mode of locomotion using their powerful hind legs.

The report did not mention whether anyone was punished over the matter, but it said the dead female would be stuffed and put on display and the zoo would look to install security cameras to deter visitors from harming animals in future.

China's lightly regulated zoos and wildlife parks often make for the wrong reasons, typically involving abysmal conditions in which animals are kept or insensitive actions by visitors in a country where the notion of animal rights is not deeply ingrained.

Among recent examples, horrified visitors to an animal park in eastern China's Jiangsu province last June watched as tigers killed a donkey that was released into their enclosure by investors angry over a business dispute related to the zoo, according to media reports.

A few months earlier, a zoo visitor died after he was mauled by tigers whose enclosure he entered in the city of Ningbo, south of Shanghai.

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Cambridge Assessment English, department of University of Cambridge, has inked a partnership with TCS iON here, to offer Business English qualifications across the country.

TCS iON is the strategic unit of IT major Tata Consultancy Services.

The Cambridge English qualifications programme has been launched on the TCS learning hub online platform, making globally recognised qualification accessible to candidates across the country, a press release said.

Candidates opting to take up the programme can directly register online, it said.

Cambridge English also announced the launch of mobile application BEC Exam Orientation and portal Campustowork.org.

The 'BEC exam' orientation mobile application supports candidates with exam preparation through a detailed understanding of the format of the paper, revision exercises.

The Campustowork.org portal brings corporates, educational institutions and students to come together to pick the right candidates for suitable vacancies.

"Cambridge Assessment English exists to help people learn English and prove their skills to the world, and our collaboration with TCS will allow many more people throughout India", Cambridge Assessment English, COO, Mark Johnston said.

TCS iON, Global Head, Venguswamy Ramaswamy said, "we are delighted to partner with Cambridge Assessment English. I truly believe learners across the country will be greatly benefit with the certifications from Cambridge,"



By the partnership with TCS iON, Cambridge will leverage TCS iON's Digital Assessment Platform's extensive, high stake assessment capability to conduct examinations across the country.

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Britain's Prince Charles will succeed his mother Queen Elizabeth II as the Head of the Commonwealth after the heads of government agreed on his succession today, a day after the 91-year-old monarch said it was her "sincere wish" that her son would succeed her in the role "one day".

According to British media reports, the Commonwealth leaders have reached an agreement on the succession of the 69-year-old heir to the British throne at a closed-door Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) retreat in Windsor Castle.

The issue of the future of the Commonwealth was expected to be the dominant theme when the leaders including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, gathered at the grand Waterloo Chamber of the Castle for the informal leg of the summit today.

Prime Minister Modi, among the Commonwealth heads of government attending the retreat, is expected to have been among the leaders to endorse Prince Charles as the future Head after the Indian government indicated its backing for the royal to take on the non-hereditary role.

"India has no objection to Prince Charles as the next Head because he has worked hard for the institution. However, we are also clear that there should be no institutionalisation of the post, a senior Indian official said.

The Queen was keen to pass on the baton to the Prince of Wales and had said in her opening speech for the summit yesterday that it was her "sincere wish" that the Commonwealth will decide in favour of her son and heir "one day".

"For my part, the Commonwealth has been a fundamental feature of my life for as long as I can remember, beginning with my first visit to Malta when I was just five," Prince Charles said in his own welcome speech at Buckingham Palace, seen as laying out his credentials for the role.

"I pray that this Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting will not only revitalise the bonds between our countries, but will give the Commonwealth a renewed relevance to all citizens, finding practical solutions to their problems and giving life to their aspirations. By doing so, the Commonwealth can be a cornerstone for the lives of future generations, just as it has been for so many of us," he said.

The Commonwealth is one of the world's oldest political association of states, with its roots in the British Empire when some countries were ruled directly or indirectly by Britain.

Some experts have argued that the end of the Queen's term as Head of the 53-member organisation is an opportunity for the non-hereditary post to be passed on to a non-royal in order to distance the group from its colonial past. Others, however, claim that it is the royal family that holds the grouping together.

British Prime Minister Theresa May indicated a decision on the issue was likely in her welcome speech at the retreat in Windsor Castle today.

"We also have a number of specific decisions to take, together with a broader conversation about the common future for the Commonwealth that we all want to see," she said.

Thanking the Queen for her "generous invitation" to hold the retreat in one of her many palaces, British PM added: "At the very moment international cooperation is so important, some nations are choosing instead to shun the rules-based system that underpins global security and prosperity Commonwealth can play its part to support this rules-based order, and the very concept of international cooperation."



A formal announcement on the issue of succession will be made by Commonwealth Secretary-General Patricia Scotland at the end of the retreat, which will mark an end to the week-long summit in the UK.

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The BJP today lashed out at the Congress for its move to impeach the chief justice of India, saying it was trying to "demean, degrade and denigrate" the judiciary after its "conspiracies" in the case of judge B H Loya's death and riot charges against its Gujarat leader Maya Kodnani were exposed.

BJP spokesperson Meenakshi Lekhi told reporters that the impeachment move is an attempt to pressure the judiciary and send out the message that "either you do what we say and if you dare not do as we command", then it will impeach judges.

She said Kodnani, who was acquitted by the Gujarat High Court today, was victimised by the Congress and implicated in a "false case" when it was in power at the Centre as it wanted to implicate the saffron party's leaders in false cases.

"It also hatched a conspiracy in the judge Loya death case. Evidence in these cases could not stand the judicial scrutiny. The Congress and other opposition parties levelled false allegations against our leaders but they are getting exposed now," she said.

Whether it was petitions for a probe into the Loya death case or the charges against Kadnani, they were all fabricated cases, she said.

The Constitution envisaged by B R Ambedkar views the judiciary independent of policies but the Congress is trying to politicise it.

As the opposition party is losing political ground, it has resorted to such pressure tactics motivated by "malice", Lekhi said.

It is an attempt to demean, degrade and denigrate the judiciary, she said.

The Supreme Court had yesterday dismissed a batch of petitions seeking probe to judge Loya's death, saying he died of natural cases.

The Gujarat High Court acquitted Kodnani, a former minister in the state government, in the 2002 Naroda Patiya riots case in which 97 people were killed by a mob.

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Senior bureaucrat Suresh Kumar is likely to be the new acting chairman and managing director of the world's largest coal miner CIL.

He will replace Gopal Singh who was given the additional charge as CMD of the maharatna firm in September last year.

Singh heads Central Coalfields Ltd, an arm of state-owned Coal India Ltd (CIL).

Kumar is the additional secretary of in the coal ministry.

"The Appointments Committee of the Cabinet has approved that Suresh Kumar, Additional Secretary, Ministry of coal may be entrusted with the additional charge of the post of Chairman-cum-Managing Director (CMD) Coal India Ltd (CIL) till the appointment of a regular incumbent to the post or until further orders, whichever is earlier," a source said.

Singh had in September last year succeeded Sutirtha Bhattacharya who had retired from the post of on August 31, 2017.

Responding to a question on the appointment of full-time Chairman of Coal India Coal Secretary Susheel Kumar had recently told PTI that, "The process of approval (of full-time Chairman of Coal India) is on...I am not aware of the time lines."



The government last year began the hunt for a full-time CMD of CIL and invited applications from professionals from PSUs as well as the private sector.

While inviting applications through an advertisement, the government had said "the applicants may submit their applications to the Ministry of Coal".

Government head-hunter PESB has earlier suggested that the Centre may choose an appropriate course of action for selection of CMD for Coal India as it did not find any of the six candidates interviewed as fit for the top post.

Coal India accounts for over 80 per cent of domestic coal production.
Bihar BJP prsident Nityanand Rai today asked Congress and its allies to tender an apology from party president Amit Shah for tarnishing his and his party's image in Judge B J Loya death case.

Rai, who was accompanied by Bihar BJP vice president Devesh Kumar, said that Congress party did not stop raising accusing fingers despite the late Judge's family stating that he died of heart attack.

Referring to the Supreme Court's judgement in Judge B H Loya's death case yesterday, Rai said that the PIL filed for probe into Loya death was a politically motivated one and part of conspiracy against BJP chief for maligning his image.

"Congress and its allies hatched a conspiracy to malign the image of our party president Amit Shah. With the apex court judgement in Judge Loya death case, it has been clearly established that Congress has been indulging in dirty and cheap politics and also conpired to tarnish his (Shah) image... Congress and its allies should tender apology from our party president," Rai told reporters here.

Notably, the judge B H Loya was hearing Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter cass- in which BJP chief Amit Shah was among the accused- when he died of a heart attack in 2014.

The BJP chief was later discharged by the judge who replaced Loya.

"Congress hatched a conspiracy by putting the judicial system of the country in the dock for which it will have to pay a heavy price when it will be ousted from power in the remaining few states," said Rai, a Lok Sabha member from Ujiyarpur constituency in Bihar.

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Seven opposition parties led by the Congress today initiated an unprecedented step to impeach



Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, moving a notice accusing him of "misbehaviour" and "misuse" of authority.

Levelling five specific allegations, leaders of the seven opposition parties met Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu, who is also the Chairman of the Rajya Sabha, and handed over the notice of impeachment bearing signatures of 64 MPs and seven former MPs, who recently retired.

This is the first time that a notice of impeachment against a sitting CJI has been moved, even though previously there have been three cases of impeachment motions against apex court and high court judges in the last 25 years.

The only time the impeachment process reached the final stage was in 1993 in the case of Justice V Ramaswami of the Supreme Court when the final vote failed to get a two-third majority in the Lok Sabha. Ramaswami faced corruption charges.

The notice for impeachment comes a day after the Supreme Court rejected a bunch of petitions seeking an independent investigation into the death of Judge B H Loya, who was hearing the Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case.

The MPs who signed the notice belong to the Congress, the NCP, the CPI-M, the CPI, the SP, the BSP and the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML). The leaders of these parties earlier met in Parliament and gave final shape to the notice.

"We wish this day had never come," senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal told reporters. He said the step has been taken "with a heavy heart" to protect the independence of the judiciary. "The majesty of the law is more important than the majesty of any office."



Sibal said the allegations against the CJI cannot be ignored and if the notice for the impeachment motion is accepted "then as per convention, he has to refrain from discharging his judicial functions".

Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad said, "We have moved a motion for removal of Chief Justice of India under five grounds of misbehaviour.

"We are very much sure that the chairman will take action. We expect positive action from the chairman."



The impeachment move was condemned by the BJP with



Finance Minister Arun Jaitley accusing the Congress and its friends of using impeachment as a "political tool". He termed the notice a "revenge petition" after the Supreme Court's judgement in Judge Loya death case had "exposed" the conspiracy of falsehood.

Jaitley said that impeachment of a judge of the Supreme Court is to be done only in the case of either his incapacity or on proven misconduct.

"To use the power as intimidatory tactics when neither you have a case of 'proven misconduct' or the numbers on your side, is a serious threat to judicial independence." he said in a hard-hitting Facebook post



The Trinamool Congress and the DMK, besides the RJD and some other parties, have backed out from supporting the move.

Sibal said the five allegations of "misbehaviour" mentioned in the impeachment notice include a "conspiracy to pay illegal gratification" in the Prasad Education Trust case and the denial of permission to proceed against a retired high court judge in the same matter.

He said the allegations also include the "serious charge" of "antedating" (backdating) of an order for listing of a petition related to the investigation against the Prasad Education Trust in the Supreme Court.

Another charge is of listing the petition against the Prasad Education Trust before himself, even when he was heading the Constitution bench, and doing so was against the convention.

The fourth charge pertains to a piece of land which Misra acquired as an advocate by giving a "false affidavit" and the plot was surrendered in 2012 when he was elevated to the Supreme Court, even though orders cancelling the allotment were given in 1985.

The fifth charge relates to "the abuse of exercise of power by the Chief Justice in choosing to send sensitive matters to particular benches by misusing his authority as Master of the Roster with the likely intent to influence the outcome".

Amid reports there were differences in the Congress over the impeachment move, former prime minister Manmohan Singh did not sign the motion. Asked about this, Sibal said, "We did not want to involve Dr Singh, he being a former PM."



The Congress denied that the move was in any way linked to the Supreme Court decision in the death of judge B H Loya.

An impeachment motion in Rajya Sabha has to be supported by at least 50 MPs, while that in the Lok Sabha is to be supported by 100 MPs.

Once the notice for impeachment is submitted, the Rajya Sabha chairman will ascertain if there is merit or ground for moving such a motion or can reject it.

If the motion is admitted, then a three-member committee comprising a senior judge of the Supreme Court, a judge of a high court and a distinguished jurist is formed to investigate the charges levelled against the CJI.

If the committee supports the motion, it can be taken up for discussion. It must be passed by a special two-third majority of MPs in both the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha. After it is passed in both Houses, it is presented to the President, who can pass a Presidential Order for the removal of the CJI.

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The Madhya Pradesh High Court today granted bail to Congress MLA Jitu Patwari, who was in judicial custody in Bhopal for allegedly obstructing a public servant in performing his duties in Indore in 2007.

A single bench of Justice C V Sirpurkar granted bail to Patwari, who is also AICC secretary, on a security of Rs 40,000, his counsel Shashank Shekhar told PTI.

Patwari told the high court that he had approached the fast track court in Bhopal on April 17 seeking bail, after he came to know that an arrest warrant was issued against him by that court.

Patwari, who represents Rau assembly constituency in Indore, told the high court in his petition that he did not know that the case against him had been transferred to Bhopal from Indore.

Fast track court judge Suresh Singh had remanded Patwari in judicial custody for 14 days on April 17 after turning down his bail plea.

On April 4, the fast track court had issued an arrest warrant against the Congress leader after he failed to turn up to attend the court hearings on different counts.

The fast track court was trying Patwari for allegedly obstructing a public servant from performing his duties.

According to an FIR, the legislator, who was driving a car without a number plate, had pushed a constable and escaped when he was stopped by the police during a check on December 13, 2007 in Indore district.

Based on a complaint filed by the policeman, Khudail police station in Indore had booked the legislator.

The fast track court has been set up in Bhopal to expeditiously hear and dispose of cases against public representatives across Madhya Pradesh.

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The Congress, which spearheaded an unprecedented move to impeach the Chief Justice of India today, had in fact opposed such proceedings initiated 25 years when it was in power.

The party today joined hands with six other opposition parties in moving notice for the impeachment of Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra but history shows that no motion has reached its logical conclusion.

If the motion after the inquiry by a three-member panel headed by a sitting apex court judge reaches Parliament, it would be the first instance of any CJI facing his removal and fourth judge from the higher judiciary.

It is also interesting to note that all the previous three impeachment motions have been moved when Congress was in power at the Centre.

The higher judiciary was in for the shock in 1993 for the first time in independent India when impeachment proceedings were initiated in Parliament against Supreme Court judge V Ramaswami on charges of corruption following the report of the inquiry commission.

Senior advocate and Congress Rajya Sabha lawmaker Kapil Sibal, who is at the forefront and spearheading the campaign to impeach the present CJI, however, had put up a spirited defence in favour of Justice Ramaswami in Lok Sabha.

The impeachment motion, moved during the P V Narasimha Rao government, failed in Lok Sabha as it could not muster support of two-third members of the house as required under Article 124 (4) of the Constitution.

Besides Justice Ramaswami, impeachment motion was moved against Calcutta High Court judge Soumitra Sen in 2011 on the charge of financial misappropriation as a judge and misrepresenting facts.

The motion was passed in the upper house and Sen, who had put up his defence in Rajya Sabha, sensed the outcome and resigned before the motion was put to vote in Lok Sabha.

Justice P D Dinakaran, the then Chief Justice of the Sikkim High Court, also faced the ignominy of being impeached after the inquiry panel had found enough prima facie materials relating to charges of land-grab, corruption and abuse of judicial office against him. He was transferred from the Karnataka High Court to the Sikkim High Court after he refused to follow orders to go on leave.

However, Dinakaran tendered resignation in 2011 before impeachment proceedings could begin.

In 2016, Justice Nagarjuna Reddy of the High Court of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana courted controversy when 61 Rajya Sabha members moved a petition for his impeachment on charges of misusing his position to "victimise" a "Dalit" judge.

Later, nine of the 54 members of the Rajya Sabha, who had proposed the initiation of proceedings against him, withdrew their signatures.

Opposition parties today met Vice President and Rajya Sabha Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu and handed over a notice with signatures of 64 MPs of the Upper House, accusing the CJI of five counts of "misbehaviour" and "misusing" authority.

The impeachment notice comes a day after the Supreme Court rejected a bunch of petitions seeking an independent probe into the death of judge B H Loya, who was hearing the Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case.

For initiating the impeachment process, a motion has to be moved by either 100 Lok Sabha members of Parliament or 50 Rajya Sabha MPs. If the motion is admitted, the Speaker of Lok Sabha or Chairman of Rajya Sabha constitutes an inquiry committee.

This inquiry committee has three members -- a Supreme Court judge, a high court Chief Justice and an eminent jurist. The committee frames charges and asks the judge to give a written response.

The judge also has the right to examine witnesses. After the inquiry, the committee determines whether the charges are valid or not and then it finally submits its report.

If the inquiry committee finds that the judge is not guilty, then there is no further action. If they find him guilty, then the House of Parliament which initiated the motion may consider continuing with the motion.

The motion is then debated and the judge (or his representative) has the right to represent his case. After that, the motion is voted upon. If there is two-thirds support of those voting, and majority support of the total strength of the House, it is considered to have passed. The process is then repeated in the other House.

After that, the Houses send an address to the President asking that the judge be removed from office.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The unprecedented move by the Congress-led opposition to impeach Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra "smacked of political overtones" rather than any "misbehavior" and "misuse" of authority and might not succeed in Parliament, constitutional experts felt today.

Levelling allegations, leaders of the seven opposition parties met Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu, who is also the Chairman of the Rajya Sabha, and handed over the notice of impeachment bearing signatures of 64 MPs and seven former MPs, who recently retired.

The move that came a day after an apex court bench headed by the CJI rejected the pleas for a probe into special CBI judge B H Loya's death, was termed as "motivated" and "political" by eminent jurists such as Soli Sorabjee, former high court judges S N Dhingra and Ajit Kumar Sinha and senior advocate Vikas Singh.

Sorabjee, who was attorney general during the NDA government led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, made a scathing attack on the opposition's decision to go for impeachment of the CJI, saying, "This is the worst that could happen to the independence of the judiciary."



He said today's event would shake the confidence and faith of the people in the judiciary.

Sorabjee's view was shared by Justice Dhingra, who said it is an attempt to gain political mileage.

Apparently referring to the controversial January 12 press meet by four senior-most apex court judges -- J Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, M B Lokur and Kurian Joseph -- who raised issues that were reflected in the impeachment notice, he said discontent among the judges of the top court did not justify the move.

"The impeachment notice is motivated and the MPs want political mileage knowing that they do not have the numbers to impeach the chief justice. Discontentment among judges does not mean you initiate the process of impeachment. Discontentment is a part of life," the former judge said.

Justice Sinha and senior lawyer Vikas Singh termed it as a "sad day" for the judiciary and "just a reaction" to yesterday's verdict of the Supreme Court dismissing the petitions for a probe into alleged mysterious death of judge Loya, who was hearing Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case.

Terming it a sorry state of affairs, Sorabjee told a TV channel that there was no ground to impeach the CJI and the judiciary should sort out its problems itself without allowing politicians to get into them.

"This is the worst thing that could happen to the independence of the judiciary. Please don't affect the public faith in the judiciary," he said.

Reactions poured in after the opposition parties moved impeachment notice, accusing the CJI of "misbehavior" and "misuse" of authority.

Coming out in support of Justice Misra, Sorabjee said a judge cannot be impeached merely because of error of judgement.

"The chief justice is not above the law. He can be impeached but on what ground? If you start an impeachment motion against the CJI on the ground that a certain order of his is wrong, then the very independence of judiciary will be at stake. You are dealing with the chief justice. There should be solid cogent substantial grounds for doing so," he said.

"If you don't agree with an order, you impeach him? This has set a very bad precedent and I am totally against it. I am very distressed that it happened in our country," the former AG said.

On the issue of allocation of benches by the CJI, Sorabjee said, "After all he is the master of the roster. He knows which case should be sent to which bench. I don't understand how any judge can say that certain cases should be allocated to me or us unless you find there is a definite policy."



Vikas Singh also said the allegations levelled against the CJI were not serious enough to impeach him.

"It is a sad day as it comes a day after the judge Loya judgement delivered by the Supreme Court. There are not even serious allegations, still the notice has been moved. It is dangerous as such frivolous motions can be carried out if they (MPs) had the numbers to impeach a judge," he said.

Agreeing with him, Justice Sinha said, "The issues have been going on for the last one-two months and got revived yesterday with the judgement of the apex court in judge Loya matter. This (impeachment move) prima facie appears to be a reaction by the people, who want to impeach the judge, because of yesterday's verdict."



An impeachment motion in the Rajya Sabha has to be supported by at least 50 MPs, while that in the Lok Sabha should have the backing of 100 MPs.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A Delhi court today pulled up the CBI for not procuring sanctions from concerned authorities to prosecute former railway minister Lalu Prasad Yadav, his wife Rabri Devi and son Tejashwi Yadav, before filing its charge sheet in a graft case related to allotment of IRCTC hotels.

Special Judge Arvind Kumar said the court was to conclude the trial in the case in one year and a lot of matters were pending before it.

The three, along with others, are accused in a case of alleged irregularities in grant of an operational contract of two IRCTC hotels to a private firm.

"You (investigating officer) should have filed a foolproof charge sheet," the court said when the IO informed that the agency was trying the procure the sanctions to prosecute some present and former public servants.

The agency informed the court that it has already applied for the sanctions to prosecute some accused persons and would soon move applications against some other accused.

"Give me a date. If sanctions are not received by that date, I will pass an appropriate order," the judge said and posted the matter for further hearing on May 9.

The CBI had on April 16 filed a charge sheet against two companies and 12 people in the case.

Besides these three, former union minister Prem Chand Gupta, his wife Sarla Gupta, then group general manager of Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) B K Agarwal, who is at present Additional Member of Railway Board, then Managing Director of IRCTC P K Goyal and then IRCTC Director Rakesh Saxena, were also named in the charge sheet.

Others named in the charge sheet, include then group general managers of IRCTC V K Asthana and R K Goyal, Vijay Kochhar, Vinay Kochhar, both directors of Sujata Hotels and owners of Chanakya Hotel.

Delight marketing company, now known as Lara Projects, and Sujata Hotels Private Limited, have also been named as accused companies in the charge sheet.

The CBI had registered a case in July last year and carried out searches at 12 locations in Patna, Ranchi, Bhubaneswar and Gurugram in connection with the case.

The charges in the case include criminal conspiracy (120-B), cheating (420) under IPC and corruption, the CBI had said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
"Do you have any relative who has been raped", an annoyed Supreme Court asked a lawyer today.

The top court bench was annoyed as it asked the advocate, who had alleged that FIRs were not lodged by the police in rape cases involving powerful people like ministers, MPs or MLAs, what his locus standi was vis-a-vis the Unnao rape case.

It questioned the locus of the advocate in filing the PIL, wondering how public interest litigation can be filed in criminal cases.

A bench of Justices S A Bobde and L Nageswara Rao asked advocate ML Sharma how he was aggrieved with the Unnao rape case and how was he connected to the case.

"The Allahabad High Court has already passed some orders in the case. Mr Sharma you are not an aggrieved person in the case. There cannot be a PIL in a criminal case," the bench observed.

Sharma alleged that in several rape cases involving former ministers or MLAs, no FIR were lodged by the police, wherever powerful people were involved.

"Who are you in these rapes cases? Don't be generic. Is any relative of a victim of rape before us for remedy? Do you have any relative who has been raped," Justice Bobde asked the lawyer.

An uneasy calm prevailed among the lawyers in the courtroom after the bench's remarks.

When Sharma persisted with his arguments, the bench dismissed his petition saying it cannot be entertained.

The apex court had on April 11 agreed to hear a plea for a CBI probe into the Unnao gangrape case allegedly involving a BJP lawmaker from Uttar Pradesh.

Sharma's plea has also alleged that the rape victim's father was tortured and killed in the police custody at the behest of the "ruling party" in the state. He also sought the court's direction for a CBI probe into a case of kidnapping and rape of a minor girl last July allegedly involving a BJP legislator.

Alleging that the complaint had not named the legislator "under political pressure" and the state police would not carry out a "fair investigation under compulsion", it said the matter should be handed over to the CBI for independent investigation.

The public interest petition had also sought protection and compensation to the victims' kin, as was provided in the Nirbhaya gangrape case.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Sons of former Karnataka chief minister late S Bangarappa will cross swords in the May 12 state assembly polls in a bitter battle to inherit the political legacy of their father.

Kumar Bangarappa and Madhu Bangarappa are pitted against each other in Soraba constituency, once represented by their father from 1967 to 1994 till his election to the Lok Sabha.

While Kumar now represents the BJP after quitting the Congress ahead of the elections, his younger brother Madhu, a sitting MLA from Soraba, is seeking re-election from the JD(S).

The ruling Congress has fielded Raju M Tallur from the constituency.

Going beyond the sibling rivalry, the battle between the two has often turned nasty with the family feud spilling into the open and both the sides levelling accusations against each other.

Speaking to PTI, Madhu said he was confident of winning this election as he had started working for his constituency from day one.

He said his accessibility to people of the"constituency, utilisation of funds, completion of pending projects and following his father's legacy were the "factors in his favour".

Asked about being pitted against his own brother, he said, "Kumar is just another opponent for me in this election". He said the issue only looks "interesting" for the media during elections.

Pointing out that his brother has been his electoral opponent since 2004, when Bangarappa was alive, Madhu said, "He (Kumar) may lose badly as the BJP has no presence in our constituency".

Kumar, who has represented Soraba thrice and has also, served as a minister in the past, expressed confidence about his victory from the constituency.

He had won from Soraba in 1996, 1999 and 2004.

Kumar said it was under his father Bangarappa, the BJP started gaining momentum in the region when he contested for parliament in 2004.

"A powerful combination of Yeddyurappa and Bangarappa had worked then, and I think we should be able to repeat it once again now along with Modiji's phenomenon," he said.

Alleging corruption under the JD (S) in Soraba with regard to land grant, Kumar said, his brother Madhu as an MLA had "not performed".

Calling Madhu a "political opponent", Kumar said, "We are reaching out to people to see to that Bangarappa's support base and votes consolidate for development... I hope that voters will favour development politics of the BJP".

"The two brothers have also been associated with the Kannada film industry in the past, with Kumar having worked as an actor and Madhu as an actor and producer.

Like their father, both have shifted parties in the past.

Kumar was in the Congress and Madhu has had his stints with the BJP and the Samajwadi Party.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Following are the top foreign stories at 2100 hours:



FGN32 PM-DEPARTURE



Modi leaves for Germany after wrapping up UK visitLondon: Prime Minister Narendra Modi leaves for Germany after wrapping up his visit to the UK where he attended the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) and held a series of bilateral meetings.

FGN30 CHOGM-2NDLD CHARLES



Prince Charles to succeed Queen Elizabeth as Commonwealth Head: Reports



London: Prince Charles will succeed his mother Queen Elizabeth II as the Head of the Commonwealth after the heads of government agree on his succession, a day after the 91-year-old monarch said it was her "sincere wish" that her son would succeed her in the role "one day". By Aditi Khanna



FGN19 US-COMEY-2NDLD MEMOS



Comey memos detailing conversations of Trump meetings released



Washington: A series of explosive memos prepared by former FBI director James Comey a lurid intelligence dossier detailing US President Donald Trump's alleged efforts to influence the bureau's expanding investigation into Russia's meddling in the 2016 elections have been submitted to Congress. By Lalit K Jha



FGN17 UK-PROTESTS-LD INDIA



India demands legal action against flag desecration in UK



London: India demands legal action against those behind the desecration of the Indian flag at Parliament Square here during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's UK visit. By Aditi Khanna



FGN9 NEPAL-LD PLANE



Malaysian plane skids off runway in Nepal; close shave for 139 on board



Kathmandu: All 139 people on board a Malaysian passenger plane had a miraculous escape when the Kuala Lumpur-bound flight skidded off the runway and got stuck in mud while attempting to take off from Nepal's only international airport here, say officials.

FGN29 CHINA-PAK-LD SURGICALSTRIKES



Ahead of Sushma's visit, China backs Pak over Modi's 'terror export factory' remarks



Beijing: A day ahead of External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj's visit, China puts up a staunch defence of its all-weather ally Pakistan after Prime Minister Narendra Modi described the neighbouring country as a "terror export factory". By K J M Varma



FGN10 US-INDIA-LD SUBRAMANIAN Indo-US ties need stronger economic bond to realise full potential: Subramanian



Washington: The India-US relationship cannot realise its full potential without stronger economic bond, Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Subramanian has said. By Lalit K Jha



FGN25 SAUDI-OIL-LD PRICE



Saudis see oil price on rise as Trump blasts OPEC



Jeddah: Saudi Energy Minister Khaled al-Faleh says the global market has the capacity to absorb higher oil prices, drawing a swift reaction from US President Donald Trump who accuses OPEC of inflating prices. (AFP)



FGN31 WTO-TRADE-LD DISPUTE



Escalating trade dispute could derail recovery, put 'many jobs at risk': WTO chief



Washington: A major escalation in the trade dispute between the US and China could derail the global recovery and put "many jobs at risk," World Trade Organisation chief Roberto Azevedo says. (AFP)



FGN8 PM-COMMONWEALTH-FUNDS



India to double contribution to Commonwealth technical cooperation fund



London: India will double its contribution to the Commonwealth fund for technical cooperation, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has announced as he vowed to provide tailor-made developmental assistance to small island states. By Aditi Khanna



FGN6 IMF-INDIA-LD REFORMS



India's reforms bearing fruits, make case for more steps: IMF



Washington: The reforms carried out by India has been bearing fruits and benefiting people, but more needs to be done for sustained growth, a top IMF official has said. By Lalit K Jha



FGN28 PAK-MUSHARRAF



Pak's anti-graft body to probe Musharraf for 'holding assets beyond means'



Islamabad: Pakistan's anti-corruption body has decided to investigate allegations against former dictator Pervez Musharraf for "holding assets beyond means" and "wrongful use of authority", media reports say.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Haryana Police has asked the state government to constitute a separate battalion dedicated to providing relief when disasters occur, the state's police chief said.

"The police department has sent a proposal to state government for constituting Disaster Reserve Battalion (DRB)," Director General of Police B S Sandhu.

The DGP also said that recruitment to 6,647 posts of constables and 463 posts of Sub-Inspectors in Haryana Police would be made mainly on the basis of written examination whereas the physical test would only be of qualifying nature.

The marks of physical test would not be included in finalising the merit list and this recruitment process would soon be completed, he said.

Sandhu said that passing out parade of 4,300 newly recruited constables, who were under training, would be held in the first week of May.

As many as 1,000 Special Police Officers (SPOs) have also been recruited and 500 SPOs would soon be recruited for traffic management in Gurugram and Faridabad cities, the DGP said.

Sandhu said that 600 new vehicles would be purchased by the department under the Dail-100 project in next three months so that each police station would have at least two vehicles. These vehicles would be connected with Centralised Police Control Room, he said.

While replying to a question, he said that an e-Challan system would soon be started in the state and for this, a proposal has been sent to Haryana State Electronics Development Corporation Limited (HARTRON) for purchasing machines for it.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Madras High Court today allowed Mohanan Rajesh, who is under scanner over the INX media deal along with former union minister P Chidambaram's son Karti, to travel abroad this month for business purposes.

The first bench comprising Chief Justice Indira Banerjee and Justice Abdul Quddhose passed hthe order on a miscellaneous petition filed by Rajesh seeking the court's permission to visit Singapore between April 23 and April 27.

The Centre had last year issued look out circulars (LOCs) against Karti, Rajesh and three others in connection with the case related to alleged irregularities in Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) clearance to INX Media for receiving overseas funds to the tune of Rs 305 crore in 2007 when Chidambaram was the Finance Minister.

Others facing the LOCs are C B N Reddy, Ravi Viswanathan and S Bhaskararaman.

Rajesh had earlier been allowed by the Supreme Court in January this year to visit Scotland from January 27 to February 5.

Karti had also been allowed by courts to travel abroad on a few occasions after the LOCs were issued. He was arrested by the CBI on February 28 while returning from UK and granted bail by the Delhi High Court on March 23.

The Madras High Court had on March 19 reserved its orders on the petitions by Karti and others challenging the LOCs.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Calcutta High Court on Friday directed the State Election Commission (SEC) to issue a fresh notification to allow nominations for panchayat polls in West Bengal, quashing its April 10 order cancelling extension of the deadline for filing nominations.

The high court, which had earlier stayed the election process, directed the commission to reschedule the dates for panchayat election process and accordingly conduct the polls.

Opposition parties such as the BJP, the Congress and the CPI(M), which had moved the high court against the SEC, welcomed the verdict and termed it as a "defeat" of the ruling Trinamool Congress. However, an unfazed West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee wlecomed the order and voiced hope that the elections will be held as early as possible.

In the 35-page order, Justice Subrata Talukdar held that the petitions by the BJP and other opposition parties, which were opposed by both the State Election Commission and the ruling Trinamool Congress, were maintainable.

The court asked the SEC to issue a fresh notification extending the date for filing nominations.

The panchayat elections in West Bengal were to be held in three phases from May 1 to May 5 and the counting of votes was scheduled on May 8. The tenure of the present panchayat in the state will end in August.

The election dates to the three-tier panchayat in the state will be postponed to later dates, as the West Bengal Panchayat Act 2003 provides that there has to be at least 21 days' gap between the last date for nomination and the date fixed for the poll.

The nomination process for the panchayat polls ended on April 9, but it was extended by a day by the SEC the same evening following a Supreme Court order on a BJP petition alleging that opposition party candidates were being prevented from filing nominations.

The West Bengal government and the Trinamool Congress had objected to the extension by the SEC, which had cited a Supreme Court direction to "allay apprehensions of intending candidates" in its notification extending the nomination process by a day.

The notification, however, was withdrawn by the SEC on April 10 morning following objections by the state government and the ruling Trinamool Congress.

The BJP again moved the Supreme Court on April 11 and was directed to approach the high court with its grievances over the deadline for filing nominations.

The BJP moved the high court challenging the withdrawal and Justice Talukdar stayed the election process on April 12.

Questioning the maintainability of the petitions, the SEC and the TMC had moved a division bench of the high court, but it sent the matter back to the bench of Justice Talukdar.

Apart from the BJP, the CPI(M), the PDS and the Congress too had moved the high court separately challenging the SEC's decision.

The commission and the ruling Trinamool Congress



pposed the petitions claiming that these were not maintainable since the election process had started.

Defending the commission's decision to withdraw the extension the very next morning on April 10, the SEC secretary had said that an authority which has power to issue an order also has the power to rescind.

Alleging that the SEC had acted at the behest of TMC, the CPI(M) had submitted before the court that the withdrawal of the notification extending the date for notification is illegal and stands to be nullified and the election postponed.

Representing the ruling TMC, its vice-president Kalyan Banerjee told the court during pleadings that under Article 243(O) of the Constitution, no panchayat election shall be called in question except by an election petition as per law made by the legislature of that state.

He stated that the West Bengal Panchayat Act of 2003 provides that in case of any dispute in relation to panchayat polls, petitions can be moved before the civil court within 30 days after completion of election process.

Banerjee, also a TMC Lok Sabha MP, asserted that how elections would be conducted is the prerogative of the SEC and cannot be interfered into by the high court.

A senior lawyer himself, Banerjee appeared in-person as the party vice-president, owing to an ongoing ceasework at the high court.

The CPI(M) was represented by Bikash Bhattacharya who is also a senior advocate, while the commission was represented in the court by its secretary Nilanjan Shandilya.
Former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah today said he had a "great session" at University of California in the US and termed an attempt to heckle him a tamasha by just four people.

He was referring to a video in which some Kashmiri-Americans are shown confronting him as he was leaving the venue after making his speech.

The protesters accused Omar Abdullah of playing dirty and threatened to take him to the International Criminal Court.

The working president of opposition National Conference, was invited by the university to speak on The path forward in Kashmir.

I had a great session at @UCBerkeley & dont let anyone tell you otherwise. FOUR hecklers (in an audience of 150+) who waited till the event concluded to make YouTube videos of themselves cant take away from an excellent Q&A session there, he wrote on Twitter.

The National Conference leader said he was looking forward to the organizers uploading the video of the entire session.

Im looking forward to the organisers putting the video of the entire session online so that the people whove seen the short tamasha can see how much substantial stuff happened before that, he said.

The NC leader said heckling by four persons was not a big deal.

And lastly Ive (I have) never claimed to be universally loved or even liked so if 4 (four) people in such a large audience make their dislike known its really not such a big deal at all. At least no one threw eggs or a shaving foam pie at me, he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
A high-level panel constituted by the government to work out a roadmap for 5G rollout held its third meeting on Thursday, and is now working on drafting interim reports on the proposed 5G blueprint, a source said.

The forum, chaired by Telecom Secretary, will hold its next meeting in mid-June, a government source familiar with the development said.

"The third meeting of the 5G Forum was held yesterday and the interim reports can be expected shortly. The next meeting is likely to be held on June 14," the source said.

The source pointed out that multiple sub groups had been formed to look at various aspects of 5G, including app layers, large-scale trials for 5G and technology standards among others.

The advent of 5G is seen as the next technological frontier, and India is positioning itself as a globally synchronised player in the design, development and manufacturing of 5G-based technology, products and application.

Accordingly, the government constituted a high-level committee last year comprising secretaries of the Telecom Department, IT and Electronics Ministry and Science and Technology Department to work out the vision, mission and goals for India's 5G ambitions, and to evaluate roadmap and action plan for the same.

Telecom Secretary, Aruna Sundararajan had earlier said that India wants to be a frontrunner in adopting 5G technology and will prepare the roadmap for it by June this year.

She had also called upon industry, academia and startups to do their bit to help India take a lead in the 5th-generation wireless system which enables higher-speed mobile broadband, mission-critical services and massive Internet of Things (IoT) deployment.
Following are top from the northern states at 5.30 pm.

ETAH DES4



Etah (UP): A nine-year-old girl attending a wedding ceremony was raped and murdered by a man here, an incident which comes days after another minor was raped and killed in this western UP town, police said today.

CHANDIGARH DES7



Chandigarh: The Haryana Police has asked the state government to constitute a separate battalion dedicated to providing relief when disasters occur, the state's police chief said.

LUCKNOW DES9



Lucknow: The Facebook page of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has been judged the most popular among all other chief ministers in the country.

Expected story



Chandigarh: Punjab BJP chief Shwait Malik today hit out at the year-old Capt Amarinder Singh government in the state, claiming every section was fed up with the Congress, which made "unachievable promises" to the people.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Constitution lays down a rigorous procedure for removal of a judge of the Supreme Court or high court and can be initiated only on grounds of proved misbehaviour or incapacity.

Article 124 (4) of the Constitution and the provisions of the Judges (Inquiry) Act, 1968 and corresponding rules deal exhaustively with the whole procedure.

The process for the removal of a Supreme Court judge is mentioned in Article 124(4) of the Constitution. It is termed as impeachment.

Article 124(4) says, "A Judge of the Supreme Court shall not be removed from his office except by an order of the President passed after an address by each House of Parliament supported by a majority of the total membership of that House and by a majority of not less than two-thirds of the members of that House present and voting has been presented to the President in the same session for such removal on the ground of proved misbehaviour incapacity."



For initiating the impeachment process, a motion has to be moved by either 100 Lok Sabha members or 50 Rajya Sabha MPs. If the motion is admitted, the Speaker of the Lok Sabha or Chairman of the Rajya Sabha will constitute an inquiry committee.

This inquiry committee will comprise three members -- a Supreme Court judge, a high court chief justice and an eminent jurist. The committee will frame charges and ask the judge to give a written response.

The judge also has the right to examine witnesses. After the inquiry, the committee will determine whether the charges are valid or not and then submits its report.

If the inquiry committee finds that the judge is not guilty, then there is no further action. If it finds him guilty, then the House of Parliament which initiated the motion, may consider continuing with the motion.

The motion will be then debated and the judge (or his representative) will have the right to represent his case. After that, the motion will voted upon. If there is two-thirds support of those voting, and majority support of the total strength of the House, it will be considered to have been passed. The process will then repeated in the other House.

After that, the Houses will send an address to the President asking that the judge be removed from office.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Private sector lender ICICI Bank today said it has introduced a 'digital form' which will help open current accounts in a few hours.

Bank officials can now capture information about the customer and the business digitally and verify KYC documents in real-time, at the premise of the customer, it said in a statement.

Claiming that this is a first of its kind service by any lender in India, its managing director and chief executive Chanda Kochhar said it will help it secure more clients as its helps in 'ease of doing business' and help increase the bank's market share.

****************** Venture Catalysts launches its Nagpur operations *



In its bid to bolster innovation across the country and unlock entrepreneurial potential in non-metro cities, integrated incubator Venture Catalysts (VCats) has announced the launch of its operations in Nagpur.

Over 150 investors and key stakeholders in the start-up ecosystem took part in the launch event.

BC Bhartia, the national president of the Confederation of All India Traders, will head VCats' Nagpur center as its managing partner and patron.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Accusing the Congress of using impeachment as a political tool, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley today termed its notice to remove Chief Justice of India Deepak Misra a "revenge petition" after the Supreme Court's judgement in Judge Loya death case had "exposed" the conspiracy of falsehood.

In a hard-hitting Facebook post titled 'Judge Loya Death Case The One That Almost Created a Judicial Mutiny, he also said Amit Shah, now BJP President, had "no role" in the Sohrabuddin case which was an alleged encounter executed by some central agencies through the State Police.

Earlier in the day, Congress and six other opposition parties moved a notice for the impeachment of the Chief Justice of India, accusing him of five counts of "misbehaviour" and "misusing" authority.

The opposition parties met Vice President and Rajya Sabha chairman M Venkaiah Naidu and handed over a notice for the impeachment of the Chief Justice of India (CJI) with signatures of 64 MPs of the Upper House.

Observing that impeachment of a Judge of the Supreme Court is to be done only in the case of either his incapacity or on proven misconduct, Jaitley said the Congress party and its friends have started using impeachment as a "political tool".

Trivialising the use of impeachment power is a dangerous event, he said, adding that it is not difficult to collect 50 signatures of Rajya Sabha or hundred signatures of Lok Sabha members even on frivolous issues.

"To use the power as intimidatory tactics when neither you have a case of 'proven misconduct' or the numbers on your side, is a serious threat to judicial independence.

"My preliminary reaction to the impeachment motion filed today is clear. It is a revenge petition after the falsehood of the Congress Party has been established in the Justice Loya death case. It is an attempt to intimidate a Judge and send a message to other Judges, that if you don't agree with us, fifty MP's are enough for a revenge action," he said.

The senior BJP leader said yesterday's 114 page judgement in the Judge Loya death case "exposes every fact of the conspiracy to generate falsehood" as propaganda in the public and political space.

"Never ever so blatantly in the past have national political parties, a few retired judges and some senior lawyers so closely identified themselves with the generation of falsehood that they almost come out as conspirators.

"A detailed analysis of the facts and the role played by some groups is necessary since I suspect such attempts will also be made in the future," Jaitley said.

Observing that some public interest crusaders have graduated into Institution Disruptors, Jaitley said they pick-up even false causes and pursue the falsehood with a "sense of deep commitment, indulge in intimidating advocacy, are shrill with their opposing colleagues, are rude and impolite with the judges".

He said they have found two strong allies -- a section of the media gives them publicity and the Congress which is too willing to identify with them.

On the other hand, he regretted that a "divided court" is finding itself helpless to respond to these intimidatory tactics.

The judgement indicates that intimidatory tactics were used as an alternative to one sided set of facts in the case, he said.

Referring to the "controversial" press conference by four senior judges of the Supreme Court, Jaitley asked: "Is the impeachment motion filed today a direct result of the press conference? Does this impeachment set a precedent that political parties in India will use impeachment as an instrument to intimidate judges hearing controversial matters?"



Jaitley said that what has happened today is a "price" the Indian judiciary has to pay for misadventures of many.

"There is no better time for judicial statesmanship and political foresight," he said.

Jaitley also lashed out at the Caravan magazine stories and investigations in connection with death of Justice Loya a "textbook example of fake news".

"It was not gossip or rumour mongering but a deliberately generated fake where falsehood was manufactured to generate a massive public controversy," he said, adding that even family members of Judge Loya had accepted that he died of natural causes.

The finance minister said the Supreme Court too has conclusively established that Judge Loya's death was because of natural reasons and there was no suspicious circumstance.

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Union minister Vijay Goel said opposition parties' notice for impeachment of Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dipak Misra is nothing but an attempt to garner publicity and derive political mileage.

Goel, who was here to review the progress of Lucknow Metro Rail Project and national highway projects, accused the Congress party of using impeachment as a political tool.

"In order to garner publicity and derive political mileage, some issues are being created and an atmosphere is being created against the constitutional bodies," the minister of state for parliamentary affairs said.

"When Congress leaders were losing elections, they started blaming the Election Commission. But when they won the elections, they didn't refer to the EVMs. The same trend is being seen in the case of courts. If the judgement is not in their favour, they start criticising the judiciary," he said.

His comments came hours after the opposition parties led by the Congress met Vice President and Rajya Sabha chairman M Venkaiah Naidu in Delhi and handed over a notice for the impeachment of the CJI with signatures of 64 members of the Upper House of Parliament.

The notice was moved a day after the Supreme Court rejected a bunch of petitions seeking an independent probe into the death of Judge B H Loya.

The MPs who signed the notice belong to the Congress, the NCP, the CPI-M and CPI, the SP, the BSP and the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML).

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In an unprecedented step, Congress and six other opposition parties today moved a notice for the impeachment of Chief Justice of India Deepak Misra, accusing him of five counts of "misbehaviour" and "misusing" authority.

The opposition parties met Vice President and Rajya Sabha chairman M Venkaiah Naidu and handed over a notice for the impeachment of the Chief Justice of India (CJI) with signatures of 64 MPs of the Upper House.

No Chief Justice has ever been impeached in India and any decision on the notice by the Opposition parties against the CJI is likely to be taken by the Vice President following legal consultations.

The impeachment notice comes a day after the Supreme Court rejected a bunch of petitions seeking an independent probe into the death of Judge B H Loya, who was hearing the Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case.

Listing five allegations of "misbehaviour" against Misra, Congress leader Kapil Sibal, at a press conference, said the notice for impeachment of the CJI has been moved with a heavy heart.

"As representatives of the people, we are entitled to hold the Chief Justice accountable, just as we are accountable to the people. The majesty of the law is more important than the majesty of any office," he said.

The opposition parties also demanded a probe against the CJI.

"We hope that a thorough enquiry will be held so that truth alone triumphs. Democracy can thrive only when our judiciary stands firm, independent of the executive, and discharges its constitutional functions honestly, fearless, and with an even hand," Sibal said.

He further said, "When SC judges themselves believe", the judiciary's independence is under threat, "alluding to the functioning of the CJI, should we stand still and do nothing".

While the notice for impeachment bears 71 signatures, Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad said they have requested the chairman to exclude the names of seven of them as they have retired from the Upper House. The minimum requirement to move a notice for impeachment was 50 members in the Rajya Sabha.

"We have moved a motion for removal of Chief Justice of India under five grounds of misbehaviour," he said.

The five charges levelled against the CJI in the notice include "conspiracy to pay illegal gratification" in the Prasad Education Trust case and denial of permission to proceed against a retired high court judge in the same matter.

Another charge listed by the opposition parties pertains to a piece of land which the CJI acquired as an advocate by giving a "false affidavit".

The MPs who signed the notice belong to the Congress, the NCP, the CPI-M and CPI, the SP, the BSP and the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML). The leaders of these parties earlier met in Parliament and gave the final shape to the notice for impeachment.

Among those who attended the meeting in Parliament were Congress leaders Azad, Sibal and Randeep Surjewala, besides CPI's D Raja and NCP's Vandana Chavan. The opposition alleged that sensitive cases were assigned to handpicked judges.

Some of these allegations were also raised in January by four top judges of the Supreme Court who had held a press conference.

An impeachment motion in the Rajya Sabha has to be supported by at least 50 MPs of the Upper House, while the number of MPs supporting such a motion in the Lok Sabha is 100.

Once the notice for impeachment is submitted to the Rajya Sabha chairman, he will ascertain whether there is merit or ground for moving such a motion.

In case he finds merit, then he may form a committee to look into it, else he can reject it.

If moved, this will be the first time ever in the country's history that an impeachment would be moved against the Chief Justice of India.

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Khadi, the great Indian fabric, is all set to be showcased in South Africa at an event to pay tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela later this month.

The event to present the fabric will be choreographed by a South African fashion designer on April 30 during the concluding session of the two-day India-South Africa Business Summit as The Tribute to Mahatma and Madiba' program for which Khadi and Village Industries Commission (KVIC) has got its first overseas order of 175 gift boxes containing silk scarves.

Exhilarated on getting first overseas order worth Rs 2 lakh for the KVIC, its Chairman V K Saxena said that Khadi reaching South Africa means that world is moving in the direction of economic freedom.

"The monetary value of this order might not be very big, but it is a big morale gain for KVIC as it has caught the attention of the world famous fashion designer Gavin Rajah and the organizers as well.

"When Gandhiji reached South Africa, a war against apartheid and British rule was started. Now, much on the expectations of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Khadi is all set to bring economic freedom as the Ahimsa Silk' would showcase its piousness and economic feasibility in the land of Madiba (Nelson Mandela), he said.

A press note released by the KVIC said that it had received a letter from the High Commissioner for India to provide different Khadi fabric, including silk and muslin in both embroidered and printed forms, for the summit.

According to this letter, the summit, with a tag line united by legacy, unified for prosperity' seeks to showcase New India in South Africa, with the intent to double two-way bilateral trade and investment within a five year period.

This follows the vision set out by PM Narendra Modi and former South African President Jacob Juma, in the course of PM's visit to South Africa in 2016, the letter said.

The KVIC had immediately dispatched more than double length of the desired fabric, which was delivered to them on March 24, 2018, the press note said, adding Rajah was so satisfied with the quality of fabric that the organizers later ordered to supply 175 Khadi gift boxes containing silk fabric worth approximately Rs 2 lakh.

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The unabated smuggling of fake Indian currency notes and attacks on BSF personnel by cross-border criminals are some of the issues that will be discussed at a high-level meeting of the chiefs of India and Bangladesh's frontier forces in Dhaka next week.

A 10-member Border Security Force (BSF) delegation, led by Director General K K Sharma, will travel to the Bangladesh capital for the meeting at the headquarters of their counterpart, Border Guard Bangladesh, from April 23 to 27.

The BGB team will be led by its DG Maj. Gen. Abul Hossain.

Officials said the BSF will take up the issue of the continuous inflow of fake Indian currency notes (FICN) from across the border and the attacks on its personnel by criminals based in Bangladesh.

They said that FICN with face value of about Rs 13.66 lakh have been seized along the border up to March this year.

FICN with face value of more than Rs 68.96 lakh were confiscated last year.

Also, two BSF men were killed and 122 injured in criminal attacks on this frontier last year. 109 personnel were injured in 2016, the officials said.

"These issues are a big concern for India and for the overall security situation on the India-Bangladesh international border. The talks will aim at finding better solutions to reduce and stop these instances," a senior officer said.

The Indian side, which will have officials from the Ministry of External Affairs, the Home Ministry and the anti-narcotics department, will also raise issues related to cattle smuggling, illegal migration and human trafficking, upkeep of border pillars and others along this IB, they said.

The BGB is expected to raise the matter of their nationals being killed or injured in BSF firing at the border and the illegal transport of drugs into their territory from the Indian side.

The two forces will also discuss the progress of a "crime free zone" created recently along the border in West Bengal, with the efforts of the BSF and the BGB.

This upcoming bi-annual DG-level talks will be the 46th such dialogue between the two sides. The last time the two forces met was in October, 2017 in Delhi.

India shares a 4,096-km-long border with Bangladesh.

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India can become a powerhouse economy if policies are managed well and reforms are supportive of inclusive growth, a top IMF official has said.

David Lipton, the International Monetary Fund's First Deputy Managing Director, also expressed hope that India's growth will be reflected in poverty reduction statistics and eventually in a measurement of metrics of inclusion.

"If policies are managed well and reforms are supportive of inclusive growth, India's economy could become a powerhouse economy. It is already, I think the 10th largest, but with the population and the growth rate there's more potential," he told PTI.

"I've said there's more to be done. There are further reforms both in terms of consolidating the budget situation to ensure that there's never an incident of doubt about fiscal finances in terms of making the banking system more competitive and dealing with the legacy problems of NPAs (non- performing assets)," he said.

He said the important job was not just to recapitalise, but to change the governance and change the competitiveness so that banks serve as a positive force by allocating credit well and being a driving force in the economy.

Asked about IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde's remarks that she does not expect any major economic reforms in an election year, Lipton said: "It's always a difficult to make policy during election years.

"We certainly hope that there can continue to be a progress, but it's really the judgement of the politicians, the government about what can be done when".

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India is in discussions with South Korea, a global leader in telecom technologies, for jointly setting up 5G test laboratories.

"The telecom ministry is in discussion with South Korea to collaborate in the field of telecommunications including setting up of 5G test laboratories," an official source told PTI.

South Korea has led the world for many years in development of advanced telecom technologies. The country was ranked second in information communications technology index for 2017 by the International Telecommunication Union, while India was at the 134th position.

Over 90 per cent of households in South Korea have access to over 1,000-megabit per second broadband speed service, according to ITU.

"Initiative of partnering South Korea was taken by the telecom minister (Manoj Sinha) during his visit to Mobile World Congress in Spain. There is plan to sign a memorandum of understanding between both countries in the field of telecom," the source said.

According to industry estimates, South Korea is likely to be among the early starters of 5G services. Telecom operators in South Korea have already conducted trial runs of 5G technologies during the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympics.

"The minister (Sinha) has already committed that India will be among early starters of 5G. Partnership with South Korea will help India expedite its plan for 5G roll out," the source said.

According to industry players and experts, India is likely to see rollout of 5G services after standards for the technology are finalised by ITU in 2019.

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Senior Indian Army commanders today discussed the increase in ceasefire violations along the Line of Control, the volatile situation in Kashmir Valley, and the challenges faced by security forces, particularly along the borders with China and Pakistan.

During the Army Commanders Conference, which began on Monday and will conclude tomorrow, they also discussed the radicalisation of youth in the Valley, a senior Army official said.

The official said "considerable" time was devoted to "repriortising" existing requirements to ensure that resources allocated for force modernisation and capacity building were optimally utilised within the budgetary allocation.

The Army commanders will tomorrow discuss matters related exclusively to military operations.

Last month, the Army told a parliamentary panel it was reeling under severe fund crunch and struggling to even make emergency procurement when there was a real possibility of a two-front war and both China as well as Pakistan were carrying out modernisation of their defence forces in "full swing".

Discussions were also held on increasing the share of indigenisation in force modernisation.

"The deliberations appraised the current sit along the LoC, the increase in the CFVs (ceasefire violations) and the adequacy of the response mechanisms," the Army official said.

The commanders discussed the situation in the Valley and also reviewed the developments affecting the modus operandi of the operations of the armed forces deployed in the region.

Security forces have faced stiff opposition from Valley residents - who have resorted to stone pelting - while carrying out operations in the Valley.

"It was also felt that priority must be accorded towards ushering peace, by conducting counter-terrorist operations that minimise collateral damage," the official said.

"The radicalised youth must be brought into the mainstream by carrying out de-radicalisation and collective approach that focuses on convincing the youth to shun violence and gun culture," he added.

The commanders also deliberated on the prevailing situation along the northern borders, capacity building steps, including infrastructure development.

A major focus of the conference was on bolstering the Army's overall operational preparedness along the nearly 4,000-km-long border with China.

Indian and Chinese troops were locked in a 73-day standoff in Doklam in the Sikkim sector last year after the Indian side stopped the construction of a road in the disputed area by the Chinese Army. The faceoff ended on August 28.

The official said the Army commanders also deliberated upon cyber-security and security of military establishments.

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Three days after supporting Tripura Chief Minister Biplab Kumar Deb's claims that the Internet existed in the days of Mahabharata, the state's Governor Tathagata Roy today said what he had meant was there was a possibility of something of that sort.

"See, I have not said that there was Internet at that time," Roy told reporters here.

"I had merely stated this is a thing what we are trying to find out. Unless there was a prototype of something of that sort at that time it was not possible, to conceive such a thing," he said.

In his April 17 tweet, Roy said, "Tripura Chief Minister's observations about the happenings of the puranic period are topical. It is virtually impossible to conceive of devices like 'Divya Drishti', 'puspaka Ratha', etc without some kind of prototype and study there on."



The Tripura chief minister had claimed that the Internet and sophisticated satellite communication system existed in the days of Mahabharata, drawing ridicule from his opponents, academicians and social media users who termed his contention as "unscientific", "illogical" and "retrogressive".

Roy said people did not imagine mobile phones in the 1960s as there was no prototype of cellphones at that time.

So, during the time of the Mahabharata and Puranas, people must have had superhuman imagination or they must have had some kind of prototypes of these already, he said.

Roy, who was West Bengal BJP unit president from 2002 to 2006, was talking to reporters on the sidelines of the launch of a book on Jan Sangh founder Syama Prasad Mookerjee penned by him.

The Tripura governor said Mookerjee was a true patriot and would vociferously protest against attacks on both Hindu and Muslim communities.

"Even legislators in British India like A K Fazlul Huq had said Syama Prasad was a true friend of Muslims," Roy said.

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The Gujarat Anti-Terrorism Squad today filed a charge sheet in a court in Ankleshwar town of Bharuch district against two suspected ISIS operatives who were arrested last year.

While the accused, Mohammad Kasim Stimberwala and Ubed Ahmed Mirza, were held on charges of planning a 'lone wolf' attack on a Jewish synagogue in Khadia area here, the charge sheet claimed that they had also planned attacks on the Jewish community in Mumbai.

They wanted to carry out the attack in Mumbai as more Jews lived there compared to Ahmedabad, claimed the over 1,500 pages' charge sheet, filed in the court of Chief Judicial Magistrate R D Mehta.

The charge sheet was filed in Ankleshwar as one of the suspects was held from there in October last year.

While Stimberwala worked as a laboratory technician at a hospital in Ankleshwar, Mirza was a lawyer practising in the Surat district court.

Both were "highly radicalised by the Jehadi ideology of the Islamic State and actively planning lone wolf attacks on Jews", it claimed.

Abdullah el-Faisal, a radical preacher based in Jamaica, and suspected ISIS handler Shafi Armar were shown as "absconding" in the charge sheet.

The arrested duo were in touch with el-Faisal and Shafi Armar to plan attacks on Jews in India, and conducted recce of some of the targets. They were even planning to send radicalised youths outside India to take part in terrorist acts, the charge sheet said.

Though Stimberwala and Mirza tried to procure weapons through their contacts in Delhi and Lucknow, they failed, said the charge sheet.

Apart from planning a 'lone-wolf' attack on the synagogue in Khadia area here, for which Stimberwala conducted a recce, they also thought of carrying out attacks in Nariman Point area in Mumbai to maximise the impact as a considerable number of Jews live there, it said.

Both have been charged with IPC sections 120-B (criminal conspiracy), 121-A (sedition) and 125 (waging war against any Asiatic power in alliance with India). They were also booked under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA).

As per the FIR lodged in October, both the accused were under the influence of El-Faisal, who was convicted for spreading hatred in the UK and deported to Jamaica.

El-Faisal was subsequently detained in Jamaica on the charge of persuading youths to travel to Syria to take up jihad, the FIR had said.

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Islamic State militants agreed to give up their last pocket in Damascus today, state media reported, as the government seeks to retake the entire Syrian capital and its surrounding areas for the first time since 2011.

The capitulation followed a week of escalations by pro-government forces against the IS-held Hajar al-Aswad neighborhood and Yarmouk Palestinian camp in Damascus. Pro-government forces bombed the two areas and blanketed them with artillery fire in a crescendo of violence captured by the state-affiliated Central Military Media outlet today.

The UN's refugee agency warned that the spiraling violence was a threat to 12,000 Palestinian refugees still there - Palestinians who came to Syria since 1948, and their descendants.

Militants were given the option to stay and reconcile with the government or leave on buses to IS-held territory in the eastern Syrian desert, the SANA state agency said. It did not say when the relocations would begin.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group reported the militants had accepted the deal.

But government airstrikes on Yarmouk resumed this evening, putting the fate of the agreement in question.

In 2012, Syrian rebels and army defectors pushed pro-government forces out of Yarmouk in response to a spiraling crackdown by state security services against anti-government protests.

Pro-government forces, including Palestinian factions, responded by putting the camp under siege, eventually cutting off food and water by 2014, and bombing and shelling it continuously.

Residents trickled out to neighboring areas, and the camp's population dwindled from an estimated 200,000 people to a few thousand today, not including the IS militants, who took over the camp following a battle with rebels in 2015.

Earlier on Thursday, the Damascus-based Palestinian official Khaled Abdelmajid said the government was giving hard-liners two days to leave Yarmouk and Hajar al-Aswad, leaving the government with control of the two neighbourhoods.

That initial deal appeared to have collapsed. It was not immediately clear why. Also Friday, the U.S.-led international coalition against the Islamic State group announced the capture of a Syrian-born German IS operative previously tied to a 9/11-linked jihadist cell. U.S. Col. Ryan Dillon said the coalition's local allies in Syria captured Mohammed Haydar Zammar in northeast Syria about four weeks ago.

Zammar, a Syrian-born German, was a key member of a Hamburg jihadist cell that included three of the September 11 suicide pilots. Dillon said Zammar was in custody of the Syrian Democratic Forces.

Syria's central government has taken back control of dozens of towns and villages around the capital in recent weeks following a ferocious military campaign against rebels in the eastern Ghouta suburbs.

That campaign ended in allegations of a chemical weapons attack that activists say killed more than 40 people in Douma, the largest town in that area. Rebels in Ghouta surrendered their towns in quick succession - then handed over a separate town, Dumayr, further afield from Damascus, this week.

The U.N.'s humanitarian arm, OCHA, said more than 55,000 fighters and civilians were bused out of the Damascus region to rebel-held areas in north Syria in recent weeks. U.N. officials and human rights groups say the evacuations amount to forced population displacement and may be a war crime.

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Independent MLA Sheikh Abdul Rasheed today started a 24-hour-long hunger strike here to protest the alleged atrocities on students by police and other agencies.

Rasheed started the hunger strike at the Press Enclave and was joined by few of the supporters of his Awami Ittehad Party (AIP).

The hunger strike is to protest against atrocities on students by the police and other agencies. It is painful that while people across the world are showing concern and taking to the streets, the local police is using all brutalities against peaceful students," he told reporters.

He alleged that the police had not been allowing students to come out of their college or university premises.

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The Jharkhand High Court today sought the medical reports of jailed RJD chief Lalu Prasad from AIIMS-Delhi, where he is undergoing treatment, while hearing his interim bail plea on medical grounds in fodder scam cases.

Justice Apresh Kumar Singh fixed May 4 as the next date of hearing Prasad's bail petition.

"The high court sought the AIIMS report and asked the CBI to file a counter affidavit," Prasad's lawyer Prabhat Kumar said.

On February 23, the court rejected Prasad's bail plea in the RC 64A/96 case pertaining to the illegal withdrawal of Rs 89.27 lakh from Deoghar treasury between 1990 and 1994.

Kumar said they had moved an interim bail plea also for 68A/96 (Chaibasa treasury case) and RC/38A96 (Dumka treasury case), but the court heard only 64A/96 and 68A/96.

The more-than-Rs 900-crore fodder scam cases are related to illegal withdrawal of money in the Animal Husbandry department during the RJD rule in then undivided Bihar in the 1990s, when Prasad was the chief minister of the state.

Prasad is lodged in Ranchi's Birsa Munda Central Jail since December 23 after being convicted in the Deoghar treasury case. He was admitted to AIIMS in New Delhi on March 29 after a Special CBI court allowed him to seek specialised treatment at the premier institute.

Before that, he was admitted to Rajendra Institute of Medical Science in Ranchi on March 17 after he complained of uneasiness at Birsa Munda jail.

A RIMS medical board had decided to refer him to AIIMS.

Senior advocate Chittaranjan Sinha, who has been handling the fodder scam cases for Prasad, had said the 69-year-old RJD chief suffers from diabetes, high creatinine levels and blood pressure.

The former Bihar chief minister have been convicted in four fodder scam cases since 2013 - the latest being the Dumka treasury case, in which a special CBI court sentenced him to 14 years of imprisonment.

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Journalists today protested actor-turned-BJP politician S Ve Shekher's shared Facebook post that contained derogatory remarks on the media and women scribes, even as he tendered an apology.

Media persons protested near the state BJP headquarters here demanding action against Shekher.

The scribes shouted slogans and held placards reading "vitriol" against media should stop.

They also urged women leaders in the BJP to "speak up".

Earlier in the day, Shekher in statement said he had forwarded a friend's post "without reading" the content and apologised for the same.

The message was forwarded "without reading the content, by mistake... was unintentional.When it was pointed out by a friend that the content was abusive, it was removed immediately," he said.

The Facebook post was reportedly shared yesterday, but was found removed later.

The post also makes insinuations against the media and women journalists in light of the "patgate" row involving Tamil Nadu Governor Banwarilal Purohit.

The 78-year-old governor had patted on the cheek of a woman journalist earlier this week during the conclusion of a press meet in Chennai, apparently to diplomatically avoid queries posed by her.

The incident had triggered a furore with political parties, including the opposition DMK, calling for his removal as Tamil Nadu governor.

Purohit later apologised to the woman scribe.

Shekher's shared post also had some caustic references to the woman scribe whose cheek the governor patted.

These drew instant condemnation, with a number of journalists lashing out at his post, which was found removed later.

The actor-politician said he does not endorse the views expressed in the post he shared.

The Chennai Union of Journalists denounced Shekher over the post, with many journalists taking to Twitter and Facebook to express their anger.

"I come from a family that respects women and women journalists. If I had hurt anyone in the very few minutes of (sharing) that post... it was not on purpose and (I express) my heartfelt apologies," he said.

Shekher, however, said he was "surprised" to find some people circulated the screenshots of the post without finding them offensive.

Meanwhile, some persons have also filed a police complaint against Shekher.

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A Bar Council of India (BCI) team today met the representatives of the Bar Association of Jammu (BAJ) who refuted allegations that the lawyer of the Kathua rape and murder victim was prevented from appearing in court by fellow advocates.

The Supreme Court had directed the BCI team to visit Jammu and submit its report over the conduct of lawyers after taking serious note of advocates obstructing the judicial process in the Kathua gangrape and murder case. Initiating a case on its own accord, the apex court had said such impeding of the process of law "affects the delivery of justice".

The BCI team, headed by former chief Justice Tarun Agarwal, today met the lawyers of BAJ who strongly batted for a CBI probe to ensure justice for the minor victim and categorically stated they have no faith in the Crime Branch probe.

"A full house meeting took place in presence of the Bar council. We have put forth our point of view. They wanted some clarifications, which we clarified," BAJ President B S Salathia told reporters here.

Salathia said that the BCI panel raised the allegation that BAJ members had prevented Deepika Rajawat, the counsel of the victim, from appearing in court.

"As far as the allegations of victims' lawyer Deepika Rajawat are concerned, we have shown them (BCI) the certified copies of the orders in the writ petition that she had appeared in the case and her attendance has been marked by the court," he said.

Salathia said the entire Jammu lawyers fraternity batted for CBI probe.

"In the jam packed house, over one thousand lawyers raised their hands and said that they do not trust the probe by the Crime Branch and demanded a fair, impartial investigation by a credible organization.

"A CBI probe should be ordered and this probe will definitely give justice to the girl and punishment to the culprits involved in this heinous crime," he said.

He claimed the allegation that Rajawat was stopped from appearing was "false" and a "mischievous tactic" by her "to attract media attention".

"The case was listed twice during the period on April 9 and 11 in the high court in which she had appeared on the behalf of the victim's family on both the occasions and her attendance has been marked by the court," he said.

Salathia said that Rajawat had only filed a writ petition in the high court and was not representing the victim in the trial court. "She is not the lawyer of the victim. She has not appeared in Kathua court where the trial of the case began this week. The government has already appointed two public prosecutors for that case," he said.

He said that neither he nor any member of the Bar had stopped her from appearing in the court or threatened her.

"No one has done any such things nor can we think about such heinous behaviour. Our girls are practising in this court and to even think like that is bad", Salathia said on Rajawat's allegation that she was threatened with rape by the lawyers.

He alleged it was a "conspiracy" to defame him, the Bar and Jammu society "by floating lies in media and social media". He said that Bar will bring the truth before the entire country.

Salathia claimed his remarks during the protests related to Kathua case were wrongly projected by media.

"It is a conspiracy against us and we will fight it out from the court to the roads,from Supreme Court to the bye lanes and will fight it in entire J-K and we will prove that they are lying," he added.

He said that Bar Council was given a "representation with detailed account of entire happenings over the issue".

"We are thankful to that they listened to our point of view with patience. We have hope that truth will win," he said, and appealed that issue should not be politicised as "it can set the state afire through communal polarization".

The BCI team yesterday visited Rasana and met the agitating people of the area, who are demanding a CBI probe into the incident.

A strike call had been given by the Kathua and the Jammu and Kashmir Bar Associations in connection with the case. The Bar Association of Jammu had on April 13 said that it was extending its strike till April 17 against the "growing illegal presence of Rohingyas and Bangladeshi nationals," while alleging that its agitation for a CBI probe into the Kathua rape-cum-murder case was wrongly being portrayed as "communal".

The BCI panel also met the lawyers in Kathua, who were alleged to have prevented the Crime Branch team from submitting the charge sheet in the case on April 9.

The minor girl had disappeared from near her home in the forests next to Rasana village in Kathua, on January 10. Her body was found in the same area a week later.

The Crime Branch of police which probed the case and filed a main charge sheet against seven persons and a separate charge sheet against a juvenile in a court in Kathua district earlier this week.

The charge sheet revealed chilling details about how the girl was allegedly kidnapped, drugged, raped inside a place of worship before being killed.

Jammu has been on tenterhooks since the brutal incident. The bar associations have been opposing the action against the accused, alleging that the minority Dogras were being targeted.

The Jammu high court bar association yesterday told the Supreme Court that it did not support lawyers' protest in connection with the Kathua gangrape and murder case.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The Gujarat High Court today acquitted former BJP minister Maya Kodnani but upheld the conviction of former Bajrang Dal leader Babu Bajrangi in the 2002 Naroda Patiya riot case in which 97 people were killed by a mob.

The high court upheld conviction of 13 people including Bajrangi, and convicted another three for the first time, while acquitting 18 of the 32 people convicted by the trial court in 2012.

In 2002, Kodnani was a BJP MLA and the trial court had said she was the "kingpin" of the Naroda Patiya killings, one of the worst incidents of violence during the Gujarat riots, and sentenced her to 28 years in jail.

Kodnani went on to become a minister in then Narendra Modi government in Gujarat in 2007, before resigning when she was arrested in the case in March 2009.

Acquitting her, the high court said the statements made by witnesses regarding her role were contradictory. No prosecution witness mentioned that she talked to them at the relevant time, the high court noted.

The high court said it finds it "hazardous" to rely on contradictory statements of witnesses, and therefore, no testimony of witnesses regarding Kodnani was accepted.

The trial court had convicted her for a criminal conspiracy under section 120 (B) of the IPC, but the evidence didn't establish the charge, the high court said.

Kodnani was also given the benefit of doubt as she was made an accused for the first time in 2008 by the Special Investigation Team (SIT), while her name did not figure in the original FIR, the high court said.

Delivering the verdict on a set of appeals filed in connection with the 2012 judgement of the special SIT court, the division bench of Justices Harsha Devani and A S Supahia today convicted 16 people including Bajrangi, and acquitted 18 others, including Kodnani.

Out of the 16 convicts, all except one have been sentenced to 21 years of rigorous imprisonment. One person has been sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment.

Three of these had been acquitted by the trial court.

Out of the 61 accused in the case, the special SIT court had, in August 2012, held 32 guilty, and acquitted 29. The high court today acquitted 18 of the 32, and upheld conviction of 13. One of those convicted by the trial court died.

The quantum of sentence of other three persons who were convicted for the first time today will be pronounced on May 9, the division bench said.

The high court found Bajrangi guilty of criminal conspiracy along with two other convicts, Prakash Rathod and Suresh Jhala. Their conviction was based on the statements of five witnesses who said the three were present at the crime site.

The high court said it was accepting the oral evidence of journalist Ashish Khetan, who had carried out a sting operation on these three convicts.

The court said it did not accept the findings of the sting operation, but relied upon five witnesses whose consistent statements established that Bajrangi was present at the site of the incident throughout the day.

The court, however, reduced Bajrangi's sentence from "jail till his natural life" to 21 years' rigorous imprisonment, for maintaining parity with punishment given to other convicts.

The high court said it analysed the convictions on the basis of testimonies of two credible witnesses for each accused.

Coming down heavily on the Gujarat government which had sought enhancement of sentences of convicts, the court said, "You just indulge in lip service".

The state hadn't opposed release of the accused on bail, but "now you are asking for enhancement of their sentences", the judges said, rejecting the state's appeal.

The trial court had sentenced seven accused to 31 years' rigorous imprisonment, while 22 others had been given 24 years in jail.

A mob killed 97 people, most of them from a minority community, in Naroda Patiya area of Ahmedabad on February 28, 2002, a day after the torching of the Sabarmati Express at Godhra which triggered state-wide riots.

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Mohamed Salah has made clear to Jurgen Klopp he wants as many games as possible to try to create Liverpool goalscoring history as they prepare to travel to bottom of the Premier League table West Bromwich Albion.

It means the Egypt winger is reluctant to be rested for tomorrow's match at The Hawthorns, even though Reds manager Klopp has to pick a team with Tuesday's Champions League semi-final first leg against Roma in mind.

Salah became only the third player to score 40 goals in a season for Liverpool when he struck in last weekend's 3-0 win over Bournemouth.

He is now just seven short of equalling the all-time club record set by Ian Rush, who struck 47 goals for Liverpool in the 1983/84 season.

Klopp, though, must consider whether to rest Salah for the West Brom fixture, given the match comes three days before the meeting with the winger's former club Roma.

Klopp decided to leave out several key players for the Premier League match against Merseyside derby rivals Everton on April 7, three days before the second leg of their Champions League quarter-final at Manchester City, and the move paid off.

Liverpool came away from Goodison Park with a goalless draw to remain on course for a top-four finish, while Salah was given additional time to recover from a groin injury.

Salah then returned to score the vital away goal against City, since crowned champions of the Premier League, that effectively killed off the tie as Klopp's side won 2-1 at the Etihad to secure a 5-1 aggregate victory.

- 'Number one for Liverpool' -



==============================



There are no such fitness worries for Salah this time, but it would be understandable if Liverpool chose to focus their energies on the Champions League, given that their domestic position looks secure.

They need a maximum of six points from their final four matches to guarantee a top-four Premier League finish, and they face both of the bottom two clubs in that final run of games.

West Brom, however, are fresh from a morale-boosting victory at Manchester United, and have little to lose now their relegation is all but mathematically confirmed.

Meanwhile Salah is attracted by the prospect of playing at The Hawthorns as he tries to surpass Rush's mark.

"There's a big chance to break the record," said Salah. "To be number one for a club such as Liverpool, it's something huge.

"I will be very happy if I break it. I want to keep scoring. I want to be number one for the record."



Salah's understanding with Roberto Firmino and Sadio Mane has been a key part of Liverpool's success this season; they have scored 82 of the club's 121 goals in all competitions between them.

Liverpool's defence has been impressive of late too, with just one goal conceded in their past four Premier League matches, during which time Klopp's team have collected 10 points.

They go into the weekend in third place, 10 points ahead of Chelsea in fifth, and four behind Manchester United in second.

With neither United nor Chelsea in action this weekend because both play in the FA Cup semi-finals, Liverpool have a good opportunity to make their league position even more secure.

As far as Salah is concerned, the priority should be to chase down United for second, rather than worry about Chelsea behind them.

"There are still some games to go and we have to finish second," he said. "We keep fighting for that and I hope we reach it.

"For me, it's better to finish second. I know the first four places play in the Champions League next year but it's always better to finish second than third or fourth.

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In a relief to Malegaon blast accused Lt Col Shrikant Purohit, the Supreme Court today clarified its order and granted him liberty to raise the issue of grant of sanction to prosecute him under the stringent UAPA at the time of framing of charges.

The apex court, while granting bail to Purohit on August 21 last year, had said the issue of grant of prosecution sanction could be raised at the time of trial.

"We clarify that the observation be taken in a context that the issue of prosecution sanction can be raised and considered at the time of framing of charges," a bench of Justices R K Agrawal and A M Sapre said.

Senior advocate Harish Salve, appearing for Purohit, said an observation in the last year's bail order of the apex court has been construed as that the issue of prosecution sanction be raised and considered at the time of trial.

He sought a clarification of order saying this was the substantial question of law and Purohit should be allowed to raise the issue at the time of framing of charges itself.

On January 18, Purohit had moved the top court challenging the Bombay High Court order dismissing his plea challenging the sanction granted by the Maharashtra government to prosecute him under the stringent Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA).

The high court had on December 18 last year dismissed his plea saying the issue of grant of prosecution sanction under the UAPA, could be raised at the time of trial.

Purohit had told the high court that under the UAPA, the sanctioning authority has to seek a report from an appropriate authority. He had contended that the sanction was given in January 2009 when no sanctioning authority was holding the post.

Six persons were killed and 101 were injured when an improvised explosive device strapped on a motorcycle went off at Malegaon, a town with a sizeable Muslim population in north Maharashtra's Nashik district, on September 29, 2008.

On December 27 last year, a special NIA court had dismissed the pleas filed by Purohit, Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur and six others accused seeking their discharge from the case.

The court had said that charges would be framed later against Thakur, Purohit, Sudhakar Dwivedi, Major (Retd) Ramesh Upadhyay, Sameer Kulkarni, Sudhakar Chaturvedi and Ajay Rahirkar.

The NIA had earlier given a clean chit to Sadhvi Pragya saying there was not enough evidence against her in the case. The court had rejected the agency's submission saying it was difficult to accept the claim, given that her motorcycle was used in the blast.

If the charges are framed, then Purohit and others would face trial under sections 16 and 18 of the UAPA which relates to conspiracy for committing a terror act and under the provisions of the IPC for criminal conspiracy, murder, attempt to murder and causing hurt besides charges under the Explosive Substances Act and the Arms Act.

The charges are punishable by various prison terms up to death and life imprisonment.

The Anti-Terrorism Squad of the Maharashtra police, which probed the case, had initially charged Thakur, Purohit, Sudhakar Dwivedi, Ramesh Upadhyay, Sudhakar Chaturvedi, Jagdish Mhatre, Rakesh Dhawade, Ajay Rahirkar, Samir Kulkarni, Shyam Sahu, Shivnarayan Kalsangra, Pravin Mutalik and Ramchandra Kalsangra.

Thakur and Purohit were arrested the same year along with nine others for the blast conspiracy.

On August 21, last year, the apex court had granted bail to Purohit, who had been languishing in jail for almost nine years for his alleged role in the case, observing there were contradictions in the charge sheets filed by different investigating agencies.

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The Gujarat Police today arrested a man from Ganganagar in neighbouring Rajasthan in connection with the rape-and-murder of a minor girl whose body was found here on April 6, Gujarat Home Minister Pradeepsinh Jadeja said.

The accused has been identified as Harsh Sahay Gurjar and was held from Ganganagar in Sawai Madhopur district, Jadeja told reporters here.

He said that three-four days after the minor's body was found, the police also recovered the body of a woman from the same area, and that there was a "high chance" that the woman might be the victim's mother.

It was possible that the accused was behind the killing of both the persons, Jadeja said.

He said a vital lead in the investigation of the crime came when the police, scouring CCTV footage of Pandesara area, where the girl's body was found, zeroed in on a black car.

The minister said the ownership of the car was traced to a stone contractor at whose place the girl and her mother, originally from Rajasthan, were working.

The contractor told the police that his brother had gone to Rajasthan in that car and that he suspected his involvement, Jadeja said.

"Since the accused went in the car to Rajasthan, the contractor told police that he suspected that his brother might be behind the crime," Jadeja said.

The minister said Gurjar even tried to dispose off the girl's body using the black car. "We believe that he has killed both of them. We will be conducting DNA tests to verify if the there is a relationship between the woman and the girl."



He said a special public prosecutor would be appointed for a speedy trial to bring the accused to justice.

The body of the minor girl, possibly 9-11 years of age, was found in the bushes in the Pandesara area on April 6.

The body bore 86 injury marks, including on her private parts, and a doctor at the city civil hospital had said the nature of her injuries suggested she had been held captive, tortured and raped.

The postmortem report stated that she was strangulated to death.

An FIR was lodged under sections 302 (murder), 323 (voluntarily causing hurt), and 376 (rape), and under provisions of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act against unidentified persons, police had said.

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A tattooed thug was today jailed for 16 years by a British court for a horrific and life-changing acid attack on an aspiring Pakistani-origin model and her cousin.

John Tomlin, 25, threw acid at Resham Khan and Jameel Muhktar on June 21, 2017. They were attacked as they were out celebrating Khan's 21st birthday.

Tomlin, who has six teardrops tattooed on his face, attacked the duo while they waited in a car at traffic lights in Beckton, east London. They were doused with acid through the car window.

Khan told Snaresbrook Crown Court that her birthday "turned into a day where my face was taken away from me".

"I have been looking at myself in the mirror it upsets me, it brings back the incident on the day, it doesn't look like me," she added in her victim impact statement.

Sentencing Tomlin, Judge Sheelagh Canavan said the injuries were "dreadful and life-changing".

"It is becoming all too common an occurrence on our streets that members of the public are pouring water over people who have had acid thrown over them, as if this is some sort of fashionable assault that is being carried out," she said.

Tomlin was seen on CCTV chasing after the car and emptying the bottle of acid over Mr Muhktar as he sped away.

He was arrested after handing himself in to the police a month after the attack and said in a police interview that he was "hearing voices in my head".

Khan, a Manchester Metropolitan University student, suffered face and neck injuries and was left with damage to her left eye.

She will carry lifelong scars and has suffered from severe depression and anxiety as a result of the attack, the court heard, the BBC reported.

Mukhtar, 37, who had to be placed in an induced coma, has permanent scarring to his head, neck and body and has lost hearing in one of his ears.

In his victim statement he told the court he suffers from depression and has tried to take his own life.

"I get flashbacks and am really worried to leave my house, constantly looking over my right shoulder fearing attacks," he added.

"I am mentally and physically scarred for life. I can't even have a relationship," he said.

Helen Taylor, of the Crown Prosecution Service, said it was an "appalling attack that left the victims with physical and psychological scars".

"This case serves as a warning of the harm acid can cause and that those who use it as a weapon can face significant prison sentences," she added.

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Suspected Maoists today abducted four persons, including a village guard of Lakhpadar in Odisha's Kalahandi district, South Western Range DIG, S Shyni said.

According to villagers, about 10-12 members of an outlawed outfit forcibly took the four with them.

Police has intensified combing operations in Niyamgiri area, bordering Kalahandi-Rayagada districts.

Personnel of the elite Special Operation Group (SOG) and DVF have been pressed into service, the police officer said.

Binod Kumar Rao, the Officer-in-Charge (OIC) of Bijepur Police Station, said the village guard had not been actively working, after he received threats from Maoists.

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Congress MLA Sangat Singh Gilzian today resigned from AICC and as vice president of Punjab Pradesh Congress Committee after learning that he had not been included in the expanded state Cabinet.

I have resigned from the membership of AICC and as vice president of PPCC, Gilzian told PTI, hours after Chief Minister Amarinder Singh announced the induction of nine new minister in his Cabinet.

Gilzian, who represents Urmar seat in Hoshiarpur and was a member of All India Congress Committee, accused the party of ignoring the backward classes in the Cabinet expansion.

I have been representing my constituency for a long time. I fought elections four times and won assembly polls three times -- in 2007, 2012 and 2017," he said.

The backward classes MLA said he was a senior legislator from the Doaba region.

"What to talk of inducting me in the Cabinet, even my junior was not inducted. Backward classes have 27 per cent of the votes in Punjab and not even a single MLA representing them was made a minister," he said.

"They have ignored the backward class," he added.

Now I do not have any right to hold positions in the party. I will continue to serve my people as an MLA, he said.

Gilzian, who was earlier considered a frontrunner for a ministerial berth, claimed that his name was dropped at the last moment.

The names of ministers to be inducted in the first expansion of the state's Congress government were finalised today at a meeting between Amarinder Singh and Congress president Rahul Gandhi in Delhi.

Gilzian said he would not raise the matter with the Chief Minister.

The new Cabinet ministers are set to take oath tomorrow.

Youth leader and former Sangrur MP Vijay Inder Singla, Mohali's three-time MLA Balbir Sidhu and former Amritsar mayor and five-time MLA O P Soni are among the legislators who will get ministerial berths.

The other new ministers are Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa, Sukhbinder Singh Sarkaria, Bharat Bhushan Ashu, Shyam Sunder Arora, Rana Gurmit Singh Sodhi and Gurpreet Singh Kangar.

Earlier, the Chief Minister said seniority was the key criterion for picking the new members of his cabinet.

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A 24-year-old chartered accountant belonging to an affluent Jain family from Mumbai today embraced monkhood by renouncing his career and family business worth over Rs 100 crore.

Mokshesh Sheth, who managed his family's business for two years after becoming a CA, gave up all the earthly possessions and aspirations and became a Jain monk at a ceremony held in Gandhinagar today, his uncle Girish Sheth said.

From today, Mokshesh, the eldest son of Mumbai-based businessman Sandip Sheth, will be known as 'Karunapremvijay Jee', he said.

"Our family originally belongs to Deesa town of Banaskantha district (in Gujarat) and is now settled in Mumbai. We are into aluminum business and have a factory in Sangli. Mokshesh handled the operations for two years after becoming a CA in his first attempt," said Girish Sheth.

"Mokshesh ran the business successfully and the turnover (at present) reached over Rs 100 crore," he claimed.

Yesterday, 12-year-old Bhavya Shah, son of a millionaire diamond merchant in Surat also embraced monkhood.

Talking to reporters before becoming a Jain monk, Bhavya said he was happy to leave behind his luxurious life.

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Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu expressed concerns today over the global ranking of Indian universities, saying that there are more than 800 varsities in the country but none of them figures in the top-ranked institutes.

Addressing an event here, the vice president said that merely expanding infrastructure with sleek-looking buildings will not make an institution excellent unless it imparts of highest standards without compromising on quality.

He said should not only prepare the country's youth to face challenges of a technologically-driven knowledge society, but also make them analyse critically and come out with innovative solutions to the problems people face.

Liberal and interdisciplinary is must to get a holistic perspective of the increasingly knowledge-centric and interdependent world, Naidu said in an official statement released here.

He said education in silos will not prepare students for the future. Liberal education with focus on technology, skill development and entrepreneurship will serve the society well, the vice president added.

The vice president said students should be confident of "dreaming big" and exploring uncharted territories while remaining rooted to the country's culture, traditions, customs and history.

Naidu also advised students to never neglect their parents, mother tongue, motherland and native village. He said students should always believe in co-existing harmoniously with nature for a better future, he said.

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There is an "urgent need" for an honest introspection into the effectiveness and efficiency of administrative structures and processes, Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu said today, asking civil servants to involve people in the implementation of government programmes.

Addressing civil servants at an event here, Naidu said a gap exists between the conception of the programmes and their implementation. He stressed that there was an "urgent need to re-think our existing governance paradigm."



Prime Minister Narendra Modi's call to "perform, perform and transform" has found a rare resonance everywhere, he said, adding, the focus now is on "implementation and innovation".

It is becoming increasingly clear that the "business as usual" approach cannot be allowed to continue, Naidu said.

Emphasising on the need to serve people, he said many civil servants have come up with alternative strategies to improve the system because of this approach. Naidu said the modern Indian civil service, initially established by the British, underwent a huge transformation after the independence.

Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the 'Iron Man' of India who established the "steel frame" of all India services, had envisaged this transformation, he said.

"I have no hesitation to say that the Indian civil services are the best in the world. There may be a few shortcomings, but when you compare, our civil services are the best. They constitute the best and brightest mind. They have the ability to absorb new information and knowledge and adapt to the changing socio-economic developments and address key challenges in society," the vice president said.

He told the civil servants present there that "all of us" need to work hard to change 'Swarajya (self rule) into Surajya (good governance)'.

"Translating 'legislative intent' into 'programmatic content' and demonstrating to the common citizens what Surajya actually looks like in day-to-day administration, the civil services have an enormous opportunity today, like never before, to serve the country and our people," Naidu said.

He said India has an able leader and a stable government. "Fortunately, the overhead tank is clean. If the overhead tank is clean and if you remove the obstruction, people will get clean water. Our effort is to remove obstructions," he said.

Naidu said all organs of the country - the judiciary, the legislature, the executive and the media - should work as a team.

"We should educate people. We should include people. Unless people are involved, we will never be able to succeed," he said, but added that to involve people would first require the government machinery to be made accountable and transparent.

"Then only people will start involving themselves," he said after inaugurating the two-day civil services day function.

Minister of State for Personnel Jitendra Singh, Cabinet Secretary P K Sinha and other senior officers of the central and state governments were present at the event.

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The NIA today filed a charge sheet against Syed Shahid Yusuf, son of Hizbul Mujahideen chief Syed Salahuddin, in a 2011 terror funding case.

District judge Poonam Bamba posted the matter for considering the charge sheet on May 4.

The 42-year-old Yusuf, who was posted as an agricultural assistant in central Kashmir's Budgam, was arrested by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) on October 24 last year.

Yusuf's bail plea was dismissed by the trial court on March 7. He is in judicial custody.

The NIA had earlier alleged that the accused was linked with banned terrorist organisations such as Hizbul Mujahideen.

It had said the case was registered on the basis of information that funds from Pakistan were sent to Jammu and Kashmir via Delhi through hawala channels to spread terrorism.

The NIA had in 2011 arrested a number of persons, including Ghulam Mohd Bhat, with Rs 21.2 lakh, alleging that Yusuf was "one of the several Indian contacts of Bhat" who had been in touch with him for receiving money transfer codes.

It had alleged that Yusuf's involvement was found in collecting funds from a terrorist outfit in Saudi Arabia as well as from other accused on directions of his father Mohd Yousuf Shah alias Syed Salahuddin, self-styled supreme commander of the Hizbul Mujahideen.

Syed Salahuddin was declared a Specially Designated Global Terrorist by the US Department of State in June last year.

The NIA has claimed that Yousuf has received about Rs 4.5 lakh so far through eight international wire transfers.

It had also registered two other cases related to terror funding -- one in November 2011 and the other in May 2017. It had filed a charge sheet against 10 people including Salahuddin in the April 2011 case.

In the recent case, the NIA arrested various people, including some close relatives and aides of separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani.

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Homeroom Restaurant(OAKLAND, Calif.) -- Chrissel Orcino had a "code red" at one of her tables.



When Orcino, a server at the Oakland, California, restaurant Homeroom, went to pick up the check for her table of three -- two men and one woman -- something alarming happened.



A man was eager to pay for the tab of the entire table, Orcino said and reached into her apron pocket with his credit card.



I could, like, feel his, like, hand move all the way down to the bottom of the pocket with his card, Orcino, 28, recalled.



Orcino was in total shock.



He couldve just handed me his card or went up to the register and paid for the whole table, she said. It was pretty traumatic to have somebody touch me out of nowhere.



But instead of explaining to her manager the details of what happened, Orcino told him she had a code red, and he knew what to do.

Thats because, at Homeroom, the staff has a system in place to categorize different types of customer behavior, like Orcinos experience.



The Management Alert Color System, known as MACS because theyre a mac and cheese restaurant, has three tiers: yellow, orange and red.



Yellow is just where someone gets a creepy vibe. Nothing has happened. An orange is where theyve said something thats a little bit borderline -- like it could be sexual harassment, it could not be. Like, Hey I love your shirt. Right? It could sort of go either way, Erin Wade, co-founder and chief executive of Homeroom, explained. And a red is something thats overtly sexual, like, Hey, you look super sexy in that. Or where someone touches someone else.





A staff member doesnt have to explain the experience to their manager. All they have to do is report the color, and theres an automatic action that the manager must take.

In the case of a code yellow, the server can choose if they want a manager to take over the table, and if they report an orange, the manager will automatically take it over. With a code red, the customer is asked to leave.



New hires are introduced to MACS at their orientation and are empowered to bring up potentially problematic behavior and situations in or around the restaurant with their manager, whether its involving customers, vendors or a delivery driver.





Watch "My Reality: A Hidden America," a special report by ABC News' Diane Sawyer for "20/20" airing on Friday, April 20 at 10 p.m. ET





All they have to do is come up to me and say, I have a code yellow at a table, and I just dont feel comfortable serving them. And I dont even have to ask them questions about what happened. I just say,  Not a problem. Im happy to step in and take over that table so you dont have to deal with it, said Kale Irwin, a Homeroom manager.



The anti-harassment system was started a few years ago when the staff felt they were having a hard time communicating to management when an experience with sexual harassment or other problematic behavior was occurring.



Since the introduction of MACS, Wade says, Homeroom has had fewer code reds, because, It seems to stem harassment at a really early level.



For Orcino, the system helped her in a moment she was too distressed to explain her own emotions, let alone what happened when that male customer reached into her apron.



In any other situation, if we didnt have the system, then I would have to explain the whole thing and go through the whole process, and in a time when were really busy and I cant even process my own emotions, Orcino said. This incident with this guest happened so fast, so abruptly, that I was completely in shock.







Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will visit China from April 23 to 25 to participate in a preparatory meeting related to upcoming summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).

Officials said Sitharaman is likely to have bilateral meetings with a number of Chinese leaders.

Sitharaman is travelling to China from April 23 to 25 to attend a meeting of SCO defence ministers' meeting, they said.

The annual summit of THE eight-member SCO, in which India is the latest entrant along with Pakistan, will take place in the Chinese city of Qingdao in June.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is likely to attend it.

Last week, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval had held talks with the top official of China's ruling Communist Party Yang Jiechi in Shanghai during which both sides agreed to maintain the pace of high-level exchanges after last year's Dokalam standoff.

Doval's visit was "part of regular high-level engagements between India and China", an Indian Embassy press release had said.

Doval and Yang are Special Representatives for India-China boundary talks.

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Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar today expressed profound grief over the death of former Delhi High Court Chief Justice Rajinder Singh Sachar.

Sachar passed away at a private hospital in New Delhi due to ailments related to old age. He was 94.

In his condolence message, Kumar said that Justice Sachar was a noted jurist and was champion of social justice and socialist ideas, an official release said.

Justice Sachar always worked for secularism, Kumar said adding that he was a very talented and versatile personality.

A committee headed by Justice Sachar was constituted to undertake the study of social, economic and educational status of Muslims in India, Kumar said adding that his death has caused an irreparable loss to the field of law and justice.

Sachar was associated with the People's Union for Civil Liberties, a rights group since his retirement.

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The Delhi High Court today dismissed a plea of Vishal Yadav, serving life term in the Nitish Katara murder case, for three-month parole for arranging funds for his family.

Justice S P Garg denied the relief to the convict who had said he has to sell a property to arrange money and wanted to file an appeal challenging the 2014 order of the high court in the murder case.

The court, however, said Yadav can apply for custody parole for the purpose, if he intends to.

Vishal had sought a three-month parole to engage a lawyer and make other arrangements to exercise his legal and constitutional rights.

The plea was opposed by Delhi police's Additional Standing Counsel Rajesh Mahajan on the grounds that there was a threat to the life of the victim's mother Neelam Katara and also to the lone witness in the case.

Vishal had claimed there was no one else to look after his daughter, studying in class 10, for her education and that he has to dispose of his property in Ghaziabad's Vaishali to arrange funds for her studies and his litigation.

On August 29 last year, the Supreme Court had dismissed his plea seeking review of its verdict sending him to prison for 25 years.

The apex court had also awarded a 25-year jail term to his cousin Vikas Yadav and 20 years in prison for third convict Sukhdev Pehalwan in the case.

The top court had earlier dismissed the appeals against their conviction in the case of kidnapping of Katara from a marriage party on the intervening night of February 16-17, 2002 before killing him for his alleged affair with Bharti Yadav, the sister of Vikas Yadav.

Bharti is the daughter of Uttar Pradesh politician D P Yadav who is in jail in connection with another murder case.

Katara was murdered as Vishal and Vikas Yadav did not approve of his affair with Bharti because they belonged to different castes, the lower court had said in its verdict.

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The Gujarat High Court today junked an application filed by senior Congress leader Ahmed Patel seeking dismissal of a petition challenging his election to the Rajya Sabha in 2017.

Justice Bela Trivedi is currently hearing BJP leader Balwantsinh Rajput's petition challenging Patel's election.

Ahmed Patel's lawyer P S Champaneri sought dismissal of Rajput's petition at the "threshold level", for not serving on respondents an attested copy of the petition as required under the law.

Rajput's lawyer Nirupam Nanavati had argued that this was a minor flaw, which could be corrected easily.

The court had earlier also ordered Rajput to remove the Election Commission as a respondent. It had disallowed Rajput from challenging the EC's order invalidating the votes of rebel Congress MLAs Raghavjee Patel and Bholabhai Gohel for showing ballot papers to the BJP's polling agent.

Senior advocate Kapil Sibal, arguing for Ahmed Patel, had contended at an earlier hearing that MLAs are supposed to vote for their party candidates, according to a Supreme Court judgement.

Therefore, there was no merit in Rajput's (another) contention that a whip issued by the Congress, asking its MLAs to vote for Ahmed Patel, amounted to exercise of "undue influence" on voters under the election laws, Sibal had said.

After the EC invalidated the votes of two rebel Congress leaders, Patel was declared a winner along with BJP's Amit Shah and Union minister Smriti Irani in the Rajya Sabha polls from Gujarat held in August last year.

Rajput, who lost in the election, moved the high court challenging the Election Commission's decision to invalidate the two votes. Had these votes been counted, he would have defeated Patel, Rajput said.

His petition also alleged that Patel took party MLAs to a resort in Bengaluru before the election, which amounted to bribing the voters.

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With the opposition parties criticizing the ruling dispensation over the rape of six minor girls in one week, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik today said his government is committed to providing security to the women and children of the state.

The police authorities have been instructed to take strong and adequate legal action in offences against women and children, Patnaik, who is also in-charge of the home department, told the Assembly while replying to an adjournment debate on the law and order situation of the state.

"I would like to reiterate that the resolve of my government is to provide safety and security to all women and girl children. The government has appointed investigating officers and special public prosecutors to ensure speedy and efficacious trial in these cases," the chief minister said.

All police stations in the state have been asked to intensify patrolling near working women's hostels, women's colleges and training centres, he said, adding that the CCTV installations have been made mandatory in public places.

"Dedicated women and child help lines are functional all over the state and prompt action is taken as soon as a complaint is received," Patnaik told the members of the Assembly.

Leader of Opposition and senior Congress leader Narasingha Mishra, however, targeted the state government over the spurt in rape cases in the state.

The police took prompt action in certain cases because the issues were raised in the Assembly, Mishra claimed.

"The police do not take action unless there is "hue and cry" over an incident. We had to take up the Balasore minor rape cases with the DGP to get the accused arrested. In some cases, the police officers ask victims about their political affiliation," he alleged.

BJP MLA Radharani Panda also took a dig at the CM's statement, saying the rate of "conviction in rape cases is only 6 per cent while at least 6 women are raped in the state in a day".

"As chief minister Naveen Patnaik is in charge of home department, he is answerable for the rise in rape incidents. Why was justice denied to the Kunduli rape victim?" she asked.

The government should open mahlia police stations (women-run police stations) in each district and confiscate properties of rapists, she added.

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One person was today killed while four others injured when a jeep collided with a bus in Bihar's Muzaffarpur district, police said.

The incident occurred near Emma chowk under Saraiya police station when the jeep collided head on with the bus, Mohammad Alauddin, Officer-in-Charge of the police station, said.

The injured persons have been admitted to Sri Krishna Medical College and Hospital (SKMCH) here for treatment, while the body of the deceased has been sent for post mortem examination, he said.

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Special Vigilance Unit (SVU) sleuths have recovered huge cash, jewellery, foreign currencies, and fixed deposits documents worth around Rs 4 crore from six bank lockers held by in-laws of suspended SSP Vivek Kumar from Muzzafarnagar in Uttar Pradesh.

Vigilance team also recovered Rs 7.99 lakh cash, Rs 59,000 demonetised currencies, 20,000 Malaysian Ringgit, jewellery worth Rs 5.48 lakh,household items including cattle of around Rs 5 lakh and one 9 mm country made carbine, one magazine, one .315 bore empty cartridge from residence of the suspended SSP of Muzaffarpur during the raid, Vigilance raid.

Vigilance had conducted raids at official residence of SSP in Muzaffarpur for allegedly amassing three times of disproportionate assets to his known sources of income.

The raids were also conducted at Kumar's native district Saharanpur and his in-laws house at Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh.

Raids, which began on Monday, concluded this evening, Vigilance sources said.

Confirming the recoveries, Inspector General (IG),SVU, Ratan Sanjay said that "A total of six locker keys has been recovered during the raid at Vivek Kumar's in-laws residence in Muzaffarnagar. Vigilance team has recovered and seized Rs 1.58 crore cash from four out of six lockers held jointly in the name of Vivek Kumar's father-in-law Ved Prakash Karnwal and mother-in-law Uma Rani."



Besides, documents of fixed deposit worth Rs 1.96 crore has been recovered from another locker again held by Kumar's father-in-law Ved Prakash Karnwal and mother-in-law Uma Rani, Sanjay said.

The team also recovered foreign currencies- 498 US dollar, 1685 Canadian dollar and 268 Malaysian Ringgit- worth Rs 13 lakh, he added.

The in-laws had jointly held jewellery worth Rs 52.83 lakh in the locker, he said adding that both the couple had six lockers jointly held in Vijaya Bank, Indian Overseas Bank, Canara Bank, UCO Bank, Bank of Baroda.

The IG said that apart from cash, jewellery and demonetised currencies, the team has seized one 9 mm country made carbine, one magazine, one .315 bore empty cartridge from the official residence of the suspended SSP of Muzaffarpur during the raid.

It may be noted that the state government on April 17 suspended Vivek Kumar after the SVU raided his residence in connection with a disproportionate asset case.

Kumar, a 2007 batch IPS officer, has been named in an FIR for amassing three times disproportionate assets to his known sources of income along with his wife and in-laws.

An FIR was lodged against him on April 15 with the SVU police station.

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Pakistan's anti-corruption body today decided to investigate allegations against former dictator Pervez Musharraf for "holding assets beyond means" and "wrongful use of authority", media reports said.

The former president, who is currently living in exile in Dubai, also faces high treason charges in Pakistan.

Musharraf, 74, was declared an absconder by an anti-terrorism court in the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto and had postponed his return to the country in March over security concerns.

The National Accountability Bureau's (NAB) executive board today decided to investigate allegations against former president Musharraf for "holding assets beyond means", Dawn reported.

The NAB executive board will also investigate the retired general for "wrongful use of power," it said.

The NAB chairman, (retd) Justice Javed Iqbal, also ordered probe against various current and former officials, including Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q) leader Chaudhry Moonis Elahi, for owning an offshore company; and the president of Bank of Punjab, for having assets beyond means, the report said.

On February 9, the Islamabad High Court (IHC) had redefined NAB's powers allowing the bureau to investigate ex-military men, especially retired generals, and directed it to investigate Musharraf for his alleged corruption while in office.

Lt. Col. (retd) Inamur Rahim in 2014 approached the IHC seeking a probe into the alleged corruption by Musharraf.

In his complaint, the petitioner had asked NAB to hold an inquiry into the allegation that Musharraf in his nomination papers had declared assets which were beyond his known sources of income, the report said.

Rahim claimed that Musharraf as Chief of the Army Staff as well as Pakistan's President had violated his oath according to which he was duty bound to defend the country and protect its citizens.

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A Palestinian was shot dead by Israeli forces in the northern Gaza Strip today, medical sources said, as demonstrations entered their fourth week along the Gaza-Israel border.

Ashraf al-Qudra, spokesman for the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza, said Ahmad Abu Aqel, 25, died of bullet wounds sustained east of Jabaliya.

The Israeli army said it was looking into the incident.

Security sources in Gaza said Abu Aqel was standing near a group of people setting fire to tyres near the border with Israel.

His death brings the number of Gazans killed by Israeli forces in demonstrations and clashes since March 30 to 35, according to Gaza's health ministry.

Thousands of Gazans gathered today at various locations along the border in the blockaded enclave, calling for Palestinian refugees to be able to return to their former lands in what is now Israel.

Hundreds were clashing with Israeli forces, an AFP correspondent said. Israel has pledged to stop damage to the fence, infiltrations and attacks, and alleges there have been attempts at all three.

It accuses Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, with whom it has fought three wars since 2008, of using the protests as cover to carry out violence.

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Opposition parties today termed the Calcutta high court order on the panchayat polls as a "defeat" of the state government and the ruling Trinamool Congress.

An unfazed West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee welcomed the order and demanded that the polls should be held as early as possible. However, senior minister and TMC Secretary General Partha Chatterjee hit out at the the opposition, saying they had nothing to rejoice.

"People know everything and they will give a befitting reply in the election. The development process initiated by the Mamata Banerjee government could never be stopped or prevented," Chatterjee said.

If election process defers, it might coincide with Ramzan month and monsoon season causing inconvenience to all and the opposition parties never thought about it, he said.

Their reaction came after the Calcutta High Court quashed the state election Commission's (SEC) April 10 order withdrawing a notification for extension of deadline to file nominations in panchayat polls and directed it to allow nominations by issuing a fresh notification.

The high court also directed the SEC to reschedule the dates for panchayat election process and accordingly conduct the polls, after the BJP and other opposition parties moved the court opposing the poll panel's action.

"We welcome the Calcutta High Court's order. Now, we hope the State Election Commission will hold the panchayat elections following the court's order and as per the panchayat rules as quickly as possible because much time has been lost," Mamata Banerjee told reporters here.

She said she welcomed the order because she and her party were "always for vote" and wanted to protect democracy.

"We also want that the elections are held in a peaceful manner. The polls should be held as early as possible as the weather conditions would deteriorate with the rise in temperature," the chief minister said.

Opposition parties such as the BJP, the Congress and the CPI(M) that had moved the high court against the SEC, targeted the Trinamool Congress.

"We had requested the commission for filing of nomination online, but the SEC ruled it out and invited the troubles we had faced recently. The TMC never wanted a free, fair and peaceful panchayat poll. It wants to use terror tactics to keep the opposition away," state BJP state president Dilip Ghosh alleged.

He was referring to allegations that the TMC backed goons attacked and prevented opposition party candidates from filing nominations.

If time permits, the party will put up candidates in all the 58,000 seats, Ghosh said.

State Congress president Adhir Chowdhury said, "We want a panchayat election that is free from terror and hooliganism. The judgement has brightened that hope."



Chowdhury said "people must be happy with what the court has directed."



Senior CPI(M) leader Robin Deb also described the judgement as a major defeat of the ruling TMC and the state government.

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A petrol bomb was hurled at the house of a pro-Hindu outfit's functionary at Mettupalayam near here in the early hours of today, partially damaging a car and two-wheeler parked in the porch, police said.

Dhanpal of Hindu Munnani, working as a manager in a petrol bunk, noticed the burnt vehicles when he returned home from duty in the morning, they said.

On receipt of information, police visited the spot and recovered a metal can containing petrol and wicks.

A special team has been formed to nab the miscreants, police said.

A month ago, unidentified persons hurled a petrol bomb at the house of BJP district president C R Nandakumar in the city.

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The Supreme Court today ordered Kerala and Telangana to be made parties to a PIL that has challenged the practice of female genital mutilation of minor girls of the Dawoodi Bohra Muslim community.

A bench comprising Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud said it would accord final hearing to the petition on July 9.

It ordered that states like Kerala and Telangana, where Bohra Muslim community reside, should also be made parties to the litigation and issued notice to them as well. The states which are already party in the case are Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Delhi,



The court had on May 8 agreed to examine the issues raised by Delhi-based lawyer Sunita Tiwari by saying that the practice of female genital mutilation was "extremely important and sensitive".

It had issued notices and sought replies from four union ministries, including the Woman and Child Development, besides Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Delhi where Dawoodi Bohras, who are Shia Muslims, predominantly reside.

Tiwari, in her plea, has sought a direction to the Centre and the states to "impose a complete ban on the inhuman practice" of 'khatna' or "female genital mutilation" (FGM) throughout the country.

The plea has sought a direction to make FGM an offence on which the law enforcement agencies can take cognisance on their own. It has also sought to make the offence "non-compoundable and non-bailable" with provision for harsh punishment.

The ministries of Law and Justice, Social Justice and Empowerment have also been made parties in the plea which referred to various conventions of the United Nations, to which India is a signatory.

The practice of female genital mutilation resulted in "serious violations of basic fundamental rights of the victims who in these cases are minors," the plea said.

FGM is performed "illegally upon girls (between five years and before she attains puberty)" and is against the "UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights of which is India is a signatory", the plea said, adding that the practice caused "permanent disfiguration to the body of a girl child".

"The practice of 'khatna' or 'FGM' or 'Khafd' also amounts to causing inequality between the sexes and constitutes discrimination against women. Since it is carried out on minors, it amounts to serious violation of the rights of children as even minors have a right of security of person, right to privacy, bodily integrity and the freedom from cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment," the plea said.

"It is a ritual performed on every girl child within the Dawoodi Bohra religious community without any medical reason and does not have any reference in the Quran.

"It violates the rights of the child and human rights. It also violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and is a crime in the Unites States of America under the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 and now a crime in Australia and some other countries as well," it claimed.

Many countries including Australia, USA and the United Kingdom have banned the practice, it said, adding "there is no law in India banning FGM or Khatna to declare it illegal.

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A petition has been filed in the Madras High Court seeking a direction to the Central and state governments to pay an amount of Rs 500 per day to fishermen during the fishing ban period.

When the plea came up before the First Bench comprising Chief Justice Indira Banerjee and Justice Abdul Quddhose today, it issued notices to the Centre and state returnable by April 28.

The petitioner, Fisherman Care, while referring to a policy note of the state government, submitted that for the year 2017-'18 the ban period has been increased from 45 days to 61 days and the existing fishing ban relief assistance of Rs 2,000 had been enhanced to Rs 5,000.

Stating that fisheries is an important sector in India and provides employment to millions of people and contributes to food security of the country with a 8,118 km coastline and 2.02 million EEZ, the petitioner submitted the fishing ban period now increased to 61 days a year would cause a national loss and loss of foreign exchange.

The petitioner also submitted there were no alternative employment opportunities in coastal areas during the ban period and in such circumstances the relief amount of Rs 5,000 given to fish workers for 61 days is meagre and insufficient to run their families.

Submitting that any fisherman on a successful trawling gets anywhere between Rs 1,500 to 2,500, the petitioner said preventing him from doing business at the same time offering only Rs 83 per day offends Article 14 and Article 21 of the Constitution.

Hence, the petitioner prayed for a direction to both the central and state governments to jointly pay Rs 500 per day to the fishermen families during the fishing ban period.

The fishing ban in Tamil Nadu came into effect on April 15.

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi today joined other heads of government for the leaders' retreat at Windsor Castle, which will conclude the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in the UK.

The closed-door meetings comprise the informal segment of CHOGM, where the leaders meet without any pre-set agenda and without the presence of their close aides.

"At the retreat unique to the Commonwealth heads meet privately to discuss collaboration on global and Commonwealth priorities. They will also consider reform and renewal of the Commonwealth," a Commonwealth statement said.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa will be absent from the group of 53 heads of government as he had to rush back to Cape Town after violent clashed broke out in the country.

The issue of succession is expected to be the dominant at the retreat at the grand Waterloo Chamber of the Castle, one of the homes of Queen Elizabeth II the Head of the Commonwealth.

She expressed her "sincere wish" that her son and heir Prince Charles step into her shoes in her opening address for CHOGM yesterday and a general consensus seems to be building around the 69-year-old royal.

"India has no objection to Prince Charles as the next Head because he has worked hard for the institution. However, we are also clear that there should be no institutionalisation of the post," a senior Indian official said.

The 91-year-old monarch, who has ruled out long-haul travel, is unlikely to attend any future Commonwealth summits in far flung member-countries and is keen to pass on the baton to the 69-year-old Prince of Wales.

"It is my sincere wish that the Commonwealth will continue to offer stability and continuity for future generations and will decide that one day the Prince of Wales will carry on the important work started by my father (King George VI) in 1949," she had in her speech at Buckingham Palace.

The Commonwealth is one of the world's oldest political association of states, with its roots in the British Empire when some countries were ruled directly or indirectly by Britain. Independent countries from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Pacific have joined The Commonwealth over the years, with the last two members to join Rwanda and Mozambique having no historical ties to the Empire.

Some experts have argued that the end of the Queen's term as Head of the organisation is an opportunity for the non-hereditary post to be passed on to a non-royal in order to distance the group from its colonial past. Others, however, claim that it is the royal family that holds the grouping together.

"It is to the incredible credit of the Queen and the royal family that it [Commonwealth] still exists, because without them it wouldn't," claims Lord Marland, chairman of the Commonwealth Enterprise and Investment Council (CWEIC), the business arm of the institution.

The decision on a new Head will be up to the presidents and prime ministers representing the 53 member-countries as they gather for the retreat and, if there is an agreement, it will then be formally announced by Commonwealth Secretary-General Patricia Scotland.

However, the leaders may not be able to arrive at a decision on the matter today, in which case it will roll over to the next CHOGM.

The retreat will mark an end to the week-long summit in Britain, which started on Monday with forums on the theme of business, women, youth and civil society. The formal executive session of the heads of government meeting, themed around "Towards a Common Future', concluded last evening.

Prime Minister Modi addressed the second plenary of the executive session, during which he reiterated India's focus on small island developing nations of the organisation and delivering "demand-driven, rather than donor-driven" assistance to the organisation's smaller member states.

"The overall objective of the Prime Minister's participation at this CHOGM in 2018 signals our stepped up engagement with the Commonwealth. It conveys India's desire to see Commonwealth increase focus on developing country priorities," an MEA spokesperson said.

At the end of the retreat today, leaders will issue their joint communique and a leaders' statement. CHOGM takes place every two years in different Commonwealth countries, with the next host country also to be announced at the end of this summit.

Modi is scheduled to fly out to Germany at the end of the retreat for a brief bilateral meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin before he leaves for India. The meeting was added to the PM's Europe schedule, which included Sweden and the UK, on the request of the German Chancellor, officials said.

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As Kerala gears up for yet another 'Thrissur Pooram' next week, the Centre has asked the state government to enforce the Wildlife Protection Act and Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act during the festival, in which large numbers of elephants are paraded.

The letter, addressed to the state Principal Chief Conservator of Forests and the Chief Wildlife Warden, also directed to submit and action-taken-report in this regard.

The Centre's directive was based on a report by the animal rights campaigner 'People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals' (PETA) on the alleged cruelty meted out to captive elephants at the Thrissur Pooram last year.

PETA India, in a release, said this is a "positive step" but only an end to the elephant use can eliminate abuse altogether.

The outfit also released to the media a copy of the April 11 letter sent by Muthamizh Selvan, scientist, Project Elephant,Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Chnage.

"It is requested to take necessary action for ensuring compliance of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, the guidelines issued by the Ministry for Welfare and Management of captive elephants and the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960," the letter"said.

A report on the action taken by the state government in this matter may be forwarded to the Ministry,the letter added.

PETA alleged that elephants with open wounds, painful abscesses, cracked nails, impaired vision and lameness were paraded during the last year's Pooram.

"Thrissur Pooram is a spectacle of suffering for the elephants, which are chained, beaten and paraded with open wounds," PETA India CEO Manilal Valliyate said.

The outfit also alleged that as many as 289 captive elephants in Kerala did not have valid ownership certificates.

Considered as the 'mother of all temple festivals' in the state, the annual Thrissur Pooram is known for its colourful fireworks display and display of caparisoned elephants.

The festival falls on April 25 this year.

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Australia's prime minister said the Australian navy has a "perfect right" to traverse the South China Sea after a media report today that the Chinese navy had challenged three Australian warships in the hotly contested waterway.

The Chinese "challenged" two Australian frigates and an oil replenishment ship this month as the Australian ships were sailing to Vietnam, Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported, citing anonymous defense officials.

It is not clear what took place during the encounter while China was conducting its largest ever naval exercises in the region.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull did not comment on the specific incident when questioned by reporters in London.

"We maintain and practice the right of freedom of navigation and overflight throughout the world and, in this context, we're talking about naval vessels on the world's oceans, including the South China Sea, as is our perfect right in accordance with international law," Turnbull said.

The Defence Department said it did not provide operational details related to ships transiting the South China Sea.

But the department confirmed the three warships had arrived in Ho Chi Minh City yesterday. They are making a three-day goodwill visit to Vietnam.

Neil James, executive director of the Australian Defense Association, a security policy think-tank, said the first aspect of such a challenge was usually a radio warning that the Australians were in Chinese territorial waters and a demand for identification. The Australians would have replied that they were in international waters.

The next levels of challenge involve sending an aircraft and ship to investigate.

"It just escalates. Eventually if they're in your territorial waters and they're not meant to be there, you might fire a shot across their bows but no one has done that for years, apart from the North Koreans," James said.

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Prince Charles will succeed his mother Queen Elizabeth II as the Head of the Commonwealth after the heads of government today agreed on his succession, a day after the 91-year-old monarch said it was her "sincere wish" that her son would succeed her in the role "one day".

The Commonwealth leaders reached an agreement on the succession of the 69- year-old heir to the British throne at a closed-door Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) retreat in Windsor Castle.

"We recognise the role of the Queen in championing the Commonwealth and its peoples. The next Head if the Commonwealth shall be His Royal Highness Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales, the leaders said in their official communique at the end of the CHOGM retreat.

The issue of the future of the Commonwealth was expected to be the dominant theme when the leaders including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, gathered at the grand Waterloo Chamber of the Castle for the informal leg of the summit today.

Prime Minister Modi, among the Commonwealth heads of government attending the retreat, is expected to have been among the leaders to endorse Prince Charles as the future Head after the Indian government indicated its backing for the royal to take on the non-hereditary role.

"India has no objection to Prince Charles as the next Head because he has worked hard for the institution. However, we are also clear that there should be no institutionalisation of the post," a senior Indian official said.

Crucially, the Prince has worked hard to secure the support of India by going out of his way last year to visit the prime minister Modi, to convince him to come to the London summit.

"India is a key and growing player in the Commonwealth, one of its largest economies with almost half its population. So its voice matters," the BBC reported.

The Queen, who would celebrate her 92nd birthday tomorrow, was keen to pass on the baton to the Prince of Wales and had said in her opening speech for the summit yesterday that it was her "sincere wish" that the Commonwealth will decide in favour of her son and heir "one day".

"For my part, the Commonwealth has been a fundamental feature of my life for as long as I can remember, beginning with my first visit to Malta when I was just five," Prince Charles said in his own welcome speech at Buckingham Palace, seen as laying out his credentials for the role.

"I pray that this Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting will not only revitalise the bonds between our countries, but will give the Commonwealth a renewed relevance to all citizens, finding practical solutions to their problems and giving life to their aspirations. By doing so, the Commonwealth can be a cornerstone for the lives of future generations, just as it has been for so many of us," he said.

The Commonwealth is one of the world's oldest political association of states, with its roots in the British Empire when some countries were ruled directly or indirectly by Britain.

Some experts have argued that the end of the Queen's term as Head of the 53-member organisation is an opportunity for the non-hereditary post to be passed on to a non-royal in order to distance the group from its colonial past. Others, however, claim that it is the royal family that holds the grouping together.

British Prime Minister Theresa May indicated a decision on the issue was likely in her welcome speech at the retreat in Windsor Castle today.

"We also have a number of specific decisions to take, together with a broader conversation about the common future for the Commonwealth that we all want to see," she said.

Thanking the Queen for her "generous invitation" to hold the retreat in one of her many palaces, British PM added: "At the very moment international cooperation is so important, some nations are choosing instead to shun the rules-based system that underpins global security and prosperity Commonwealth can play its part to support this rules-based order, and the very concept of international cooperation."



A formal announcement on the issue of succession will be made by Commonwealth Secretary-General Patricia Scotland at the end of the retreat, which will mark an end to the week-long summit in the UK.

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Two giant pandas, returned from Japan and Spain, will be shown to public at a park in southwest China's Guizhou Province, a park official said.

Two males -- Haibin and Xingbao -- will meet their fans on Sunday at Qianlingshan Park in Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou, he said.

The pandas have arrived in the park about a week ago.

"Haibin" is a twin born in Japan in 2010, while "Xingbao" was born in Spain in 2013.

The pandas will stay in Guiyang for three years of "scientific education."



"There is a plenty of food for the pandas in Guiyang," said Li Da, head of the park. "We have arranged a team of 37 people to take care of them".

Guizhou currently has four giant pandas. The other two are in a local wildlife park, the state-run Xinhua agency reported.

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The Bombay High Court today revoked a show-cause notice issued last year to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation Commissioner for failure to act against illegal pandals erected during festivals but warned that it would not brook such a lapse in future.

Justices A S Oka and M S Sonak had issued the notice to commissioner Ajoy Mehta, asking why contempt action should not be taken against him for failure to implement the court's orders.

After the BMC submitted to the court that the failure wasn't intentional, the bench "discharged" the notice today.

The judges warned that if the BMC fails to act against illegal pandals and hoardings or to implement noise pollution norms during festivals in future, the court will not take a lenient view.

"The notice issued to Ajoy Mehta is hereby discharged since the breaches were not intentional....during any religious festival, breaches in implementation of the law and this court's orders will be dealt with sternly. Any such breach will be treated as a case of aggravated contempt," the judges said.

Both the civic body and police must apply their minds before granting permission for pandals, ensuring that they do not obstruct traffic or block pavements, the high court said.

NGO Awaaz Foundation and others had filed public interest litigations demanding strict implementation of the Noise Pollution Rules and action against illegal pandals.

On November 2 last year, the petitioners informed the court that despite its orders, several illegal pandals had come up in the city during the Ganesh festival and Navratri.

The BMC received complaints about at least 42 illegal pandals but failed to take action, the petitioners said.

"Unless some municipal commissioner is sent to jail... there would be no compliance," an angry high court had said.

The BMC, in an affidavit filed subsequently, said some assistant municipal commissioners were at fault in this matter, and it had initiated action against these officials.

In compliance with the court's orders, it had set up special teams to act against illegal pandals and hoardings, while a grievance redressal system for registering complaints about illegal pandals and hoardings was already in place, the BMC said.

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A Romanian national was arrested here for allegedly trying to cross over the border on fake visa documents, a senior immigration official said today.

Pope BC Andrei of Bruno Odeia in Romania, who was on his way to Nepal from India, was arrested last evening by the immigration department in Sonauli area as his visa papers were found to be fake, immigration officer at Sonauli check post, Tej Pratap Maurya, said.

A case has been registered against the foreign national under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and under The Foreigners Act, Maurya said.

The Intelligence Bureau has been informed about the matter, he added.

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Romanian President Klaus Iohannis today sharply criticised plans announced by the head of the ruling party to move the country's embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Iohannis had "not been consulted or informed over this process," his office said in a statement, adding that in his opinion the decision was "not based on firm, wide-ranging evaluations".

Yesterday, the head of the ruling Social Democratic Party (PSD), Liviu Dragnea, told the Antena 3 TV channel: "The decision has been taken... procedures [for the move] have started." However, the government of Prime Minister Viorica Dancila has not officially confirmed the and a government spokesman refused to comment on the issue when asked by AFP.

Due to a previous two-year suspended prison sentence for electoral fraud, Dragnea could not take up the post of prime minister after the PSD won legislative elections at the end of 2016, but he is still as having a key role in party decisions.

Iohannis, who is from the centre-right and has expressed numerous disagreements with the government, claimed he had the authority to "take decisions relating to Romania's foreign policy" and underlined that Bucharest's position on the Israeli-Palestinian question "had not changed".

"At this stage a transfer of the embassy would represent a violation of international law," he said.

"The government's initiative could eventually represent, at the most, the beginning of a process of evaluation... which could only be finalised after the conclusion of peace talks," Iohannis added.

In December American President Donald Trump sparked global controversy by announcing that the US would move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

Romania would be the first EU country to follow suit.

Israel occupied mainly Palestinian east Jerusalem and the surrounding region in the 1967 Six-Day War and later annexed it, declaring the whole city its capital.

However, neither move was recognised by the international community and the Palestinians see the eastern part of the city as the capital of their future state.

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Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis today said Rs 1,000 crore have been allotted the development of Kalyan Growth Centre.

He said the proposed growth centre will create avenues of employment for the residents of Kalyan, who are dependent on neighbouring Mumbai for trade and business.

He was speaking at a meeting in Mumbai to discuss development of Kalyan Growth Centre.

"The decision of setting up a Growth Centre at Kalyan has been taken keeping in mind sustainable development and better employment and financial opportunities to the youth and future generations," Fadnavis said.

The chief minister said the government was positive towards the demand of the local residents to have a separate municipal council for 27 villages and a decision will be taken soon in that regard.

"Kalyan Growth Centre and a logistic hub at neighbouring Bhiwandi are for the planned development of that region," he said.

"We want to move ahead with people's consent and with utmost transparency. The Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) has already allotted Rs 1,000 crore for the time-bound development of Kalyan Growth Centre," he said.

In another meeting, Fadnavis interacted with various stakeholders on new Apprenticeship Act and more engagement of skilled youths by industries.

Registration of industries on government portal, engaging 25 per cent of total human resource on a priority basis, partnership with nearby institutions for basic training, curriculum format as per industry demand and reduction in recruitment cost were among the issues discussed.

Fadnavis termed this discussion as insightful and important for identifying the gaps and said the entire process has been eased.

"The new Apprenticeship Act is very transparent. We have to work in close coordination to provide better opportunities to youth and this discussion will be helpful in achieving this goal," he further said.

Fadnavis also chaired a meeting with public representatives to address issues pertaining to finalisation of route for Thane-Bhiwandi-Kalyan Metro line.

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Saudi Energy Minister Khaled al-Faleh said today the global market has the capacity to absorb higher oil prices, drawing a swift reaction from US President Donald Trump who accused OPEC of inflating prices.

Faleh's statement at a meeting of oil producers in Saudi Arabia came as crude hit the highest level in more than three years.

"Looks like OPEC is at it again," Trump tweeted.

"With record amounts of Oil all over the place, including the fully loaded ships at sea,



Oil prices are artificially Very High! No good and will not be accepted!" Oil has rebounded to over USD 70 a barrel, after prices crashed to as low as USD 26 in January 2016.

"I have not seen any impact on demand with current prices," Faleh told reporters, ahead of a ministerial committee for OPEC and non-OPEC producers.

"Reduced energy intensity and higher productivity globally of energy input leads me to think that there is the capacity to absorb higher prices," he said.

The ministerial committee said Friday that crude inventory levels have been reduced but were still higher than desired.

Stockpiles were at 2.83 billion barrels, down from their peak of 3.12 billion barrels two years ago, it said in a statement.

Analysts believe Saudi Arabia, the world's top crude exporter, aims to see much higher oil prices to overcome its domestic financial difficulties and raise the valuation of state oil giant Aramco ahead of a planned five-percent IPO.

After prices hit USD 70 a barrel, the kingdom "is thought to be unofficially gunning for $80 a barrel, with some even suggesting that it favours a return to USD 100 (a barrel) oil", Stephen Brennock of PVM Oil Associates said.

"As well as helping to reduce the Saudi government balance sheet, a further spike in prices would act as a boon for the impending Aramco IPO," Brennock said.

"This is why Saudi Arabia is intentionally keeping the supply of oil tight," Commerzbank said.

Faleh today insisted the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries does not have a price target for oil.

"We never have a price target ... Prices are determined by the market," said Faleh who warned against the danger of price fluctuations, saying "volatility is our enemy." - Saudi-Russia 'consensus' -



Russia, the world's top oil producer, today gave its backing to the idea of establishing an enduring alliance for producers to continue their control of the market.

"We have created a very solid foundation for cooperation between OPEC and non-OPEC countries in the future even beyond the declaration of cooperation," Russia Energy Minister Alexander Novak told reporters in Jeddah.

Oil kingpin Saudi Arabia said a "consensus" was emerging for a long-term cooperation agreement.

OPEC and non-OPEC producers struck a deal in late 2016 to trim production by 1.8 million barrels per day to reduce a global glut that sent prices crashing.

The deal, which is due to run out at the end of this year, has helped boost oil prices to above USD 70 a barrel from below USD 30 in early 2016.

The recovery has also been fuelled by geopolitical tensions, Trump's threat to reimpose sanctions on Iran and production problems in Venezuela, Nigeria and Libya.

Benefitting from the higher prices, US oil producers have ramped up drilling, pushing domestic output to a record 10.5 million barrels a day last week, according to data from the US Energy Information Administration.

The United States had already overtaken Saudi Arabia as the world's second largest crude producer, pumping just under 10 million bpd while meeting its agreed production cuts.

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The Supreme Court today dismissed a plea by fugitive don Dawood Ibrahim's mother Ameena Bi Kaskar and sister Haseena Parker challenging the attachment of their properties in Mumbai by the government.

A bench of justices R K Agrawal and A M Sapre dismissed the plea, saying the properties belonged to Dawood Ibrahim.

His mother Amina Bi and sister Hasina Parker's (both dead now) had challenged the attachment order of their residential properties in Mumbai.

They had a total of seven residential properties in their names. Of these, two are in the mother's name and five are in the sister's name. The properties worth crores of rupees have allegedly been acquired with Dawood Ibrahim's ill-gotten wealth.

The two women had approached the apex court challenging the order of the Delhi High Court, which had turned down their plea against the order for seizure of their properties in Mumbai under the Smugglers And Foreign Exchange Manipulators Forfeiture Of Property) Act (SAFEMA).

The Act provides for forfeiture of "illegally acquired properties" of smugglers and foreign exchange manipulators and their relatives.

The petitioners had pleaded that they were not duly served forfeiture notices and so the subsequent proceedings to attach their properties at Nagpada in south Mumbai were illegal and they should be given a fresh opportunity to challenge the forfeiture notices.

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The Supreme Court today said it was "very disturbed" at the course of developments involving public statements by the Members of Parliament (MPs) on the removal of the Chief Justice of India (CJI).

The observations were made during the hearing of a petition, a few hours before the Congress and other opposition parties submitted a notice to Rajya Sabha Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu for initiating impeachment proceedings against CJI Dipak Misra.

The apex court said it was "very unfortunate" that despite knowing the law that till a certain point, the issue of impeachment cannot be made public, the politicians were holding public discussions.

After a brief hearing, a bench of Justices A K Sikri and Ashok Bhushan sought the assistance of Attorney General K K Venugopal to deal with the issue and a plea which has sought laying of guidelines to regulate the procedure to be followed prior to initiating a motion for removing a judge of the top court.

"We all are very disturbed about it," Justice Sikri said while asking the Attorney Generel to assist in the matter.

The move came a day after the apex court rejected the pleas of those, including Congress leader Tehseen Poonawalla, seeking an independent probe into the death of special CBI Judge B H Loya, who was hearing the high-profile Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case in which BJP President Amit Shah was discharged by the court.

During the hearing today, the apex court refused to gag the media at this stage from publishing or telecasting any information relating to the discussions and deliberations on removal of judges of either the apex court or the high courts.

Senior advocate Meenakshi Arora, representing an NGO, 'In Pursuit of Justice', argued that politicians were making all kinds of public statements about removal of a judge without there being any motion in this regard before Parliament.

There can be no discussion (about removal of a judge) till a point because that will have a serious impact on the functioning of the judge concerned," she said, adding, "we are divided on polarised lines. Politics is divided on it".

Apparently convinced with the argument, the bench observed, "this is very unfortunate what is happening".

When Arora raised the issue of gagging the media from publishing such public statements, the bench said, "the law is very clear. Everybody knows the law. Even legislature knows the law. Can we take it up on the judicial side, that is what we have to see".

The counsel, however, said a judge has to perform his duties "fearlessly" and such public statements cannot be made by the politicians like this.

The lawyer then requested the bench, "please restrain the media".

To this, the apex court said it would not do so without hearing the Attorney General and posted the matter for hearing on May 7.

The plea, filed by the NGO, has sought laying down of guidelines or modalities regulating procedure to be followed by MPs, desirous of initiating proceedings for removal of a judge of the Supreme Court or a high court, prior to initiating a motion under Article 124(4) and (5) and 217(1)(b) of the Constitution.

The petitioner has said the cause of action arose in the matter when a draft motion for removal of the CJI was released to the press on March 27 which had an effect of intimidating the judiciary.

"The Petitioners are also aggrieved by the act of bringing the draft motion in the public domain including releasing the same in the press and further statements being given by various MPs regarding their intention of initiating a motion to remove a judge of the Supreme Court even before such a motion was made in pursuance of the provision of Article 124(4) and (5) of the Constitution," the plea said.

Article 124(4) and (5) deal with the procedure to be followed for removal of an apex court judge.

The plea also referred to various media reports carrying the statements of MPs and politicians in this regard and said no law was made by Parliament which permits the circulation of draft notice of motion to the press.

"A threat to the independence of the judiciary in dispensing justice, without fear or favour, has violated the fundamental rights of the petitioners...," it said, adding any such statement should be first made in the house, while it is in session, before releasing them to the press or bringing it in public domain.

It said such discussions in public domain amounted to "intimidation of the judiciary" and was a "gross abuse" of the process of law.

"This scurrilous abuse of a judge and attack on his personal character is punishable contempt," it said, adding that these "illegal acts" of parliamentarians have the effect of "scandalising" the court.

It claimed that as per media reports, the acts of certain lawmakers have "demeaned, damaged and placed at risk independence of judiciary".

"The nation's interest requires that criticism of the judiciary must be measured, strictly rational, sober and proceed from the highest motives without being coloured by partisan spirit or pressure tactics or intimidatory attitude," it said.

The plea also said that the freedom of speech and expression does not postulate bringing down the image and intimidating the judiciary and setting a "dangerous trend".

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The Supreme Court today issued notice to Jammu and Kashmir State Accountability Commission (SAC) on the state government's appeal challenging the anti-graft body's 'suo motu' powers to look into complaints against public functionaries, including ministers and legislators, in graft cases.

A bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra sought the response from the anti-graft body on the plea filed by the Jammu and Kashmir government against a High Court verdict restoring the SAC's powers to take up such cases on its own.

The bench, also comprising Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud, considered the submission of advocate Shoeb Alam, counsel for the state government, while condoning the delay in filing of the appeal and listed it for hearing on April 27.

The state government in its plea has said that the commission's power of suo motu initiation of proceedings against a public functionary was "bad in law".

"The Accountability Commission in clear derogation of the provisions of the Act, has by virtue of Rule 9 of the Jammu and Kashmir Accountability Commission Regulations, 2005, clothed itself with the power to initiate suo motu action when there is no substantive provision under the Act vesting such a power in the Accountability Commission. Rule 9 is ultra vires the Act and all proceedings initiated in pursuance thereof are without any jurisdiction," the appeal said.

A division bench of the high court had set aside the judgement of a single judge bench and restored the panel's powers of initiating suo motu proceedings against any minister, legislator or people's representative on the basis of anonymous complaints or media reports.

The division bench had said that striking down of Regulation 9 of the Regulations of 2005 by the single judge bench had not denuded the SAC of its power of suo motu initiation of proceedings against a public functionary and that power was still intact.

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Chanting slogans and hurling stones, journalists today staged a protest at the residence of actor-turned-BJP politician S Ve Shekherafter he shared a post that contained derogatory references to media and women scribes.

A senior police official said journalists attacked Shekher's Mandaiveli house here during the protest, following which 30 of them were taken into custody.

Nobody was injured in the incident, the official said. Shekher was reportedly not present in the house when it was attacked. Some posters put up at the house were, however, damaged.

Earlier, an outraged journalist fraternity denounced the actor-politician over the post, forcing the former MLA to tender an apology.

Shekher was AIADMK MLA of Mylapore in 2006-11.

Earlier, members of various media organisations staged a protest near the state BJP headquarters demanding action against Shekher.

The slogan-shouting journalists held placards including those that said "vitriol" against media should stop.

"No more vitriol. #Boycottshekher," one placard read, while another urged women in the BJP to "speak up."



In the line of media fire, Shekher earlier said he had forwarded a friend's post "without reading" the content, and tendered an apology.

The message was forwarded "without reading the content, by mistake... was unintentional. When it was pointed out by a friend that the content was abusive, it was removed immediately," he said.

"I come from a family that respects women and women journalists. If I had hurt anyone in the very few minutes of (sharing) that post... it was not on purpose and (I express) my heartfelt apologies," he said.

However, the apology did not smooth the ruffled feathers of journalists who decided to protest.

The Facebook post was reportedly shared yesterday, but was found removed later.

The post also made insinuations against the media and women journalists following the "patgate" row involving Tamil Nadu Governor Banwarilal Purohit.

The 78-year-old governor had patted a woman journalist on the cheek earlier this week, apparently seeking to avoid answering a question she asked.

The incident had triggered a furore with Lakshmi Subramanian, the journalist, remonstrating with the governor, and political parties, including the main opposition DMK, demanding his recall.

Purohit later apologised to the woman journalist.

Shekher's post also had some caustic references to Subramanian that drew condemnation from journalists.

The actor-politician said he did not endorse the views expressed in the post he shared.

The Chennai Union of Journalists denounced Shekher over the post, with many of its members taking to Twitter and Facebook to express their anger.

Meanwhile, some people have also filed a police complaint against Shekher.

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Senior BJP leader and Maharashtra minister Sudhir Mungantiwar today said the Shiv Sena, a constituent in the state and Union governments, would not be "forced" into an alliance if the latter did not want it.

He said that an alliance between the two parties would be forged only through "consensus", adding that there was "no problem from our (BJP) side".

Speaking to PTI, Mungantiwar said, "If the Sena does not want an alliance, how can it happen? There can be no force. There is no problem from our side."



Earlier, on Monday, a meeting between Mungantiwar and Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray did not materialise as the latter was, reportedly, busy with other issues concerning the party.

"Uddhav ji was caught up in meetings on issues including the proposed mega-refinery at Nanar (the setting up of which the Sena is opposing) as well as the killing of two Sena functionaries in Ahmednagar (Sanjay Kotkar and Vasant Anand Thube who were shot dead by motorcycle borne assailants on April 7)," an aide to Thackeray said.

A source close to Mungantiwar on condition of anonymity said the BJP leader had sought an appointment from Thackeray this evening as well, but it did not materialise.

While Thackeray has publicly stated, on several occasions, that his party would go it alone in the state and general elections slated for 2019, the BJP's president, Amit Shah, during the party's Foundation Day rally on April 6, had said he sincerely hoped the Sena and BJP would be together.

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The Shiv Sena today denounced Prime Minister Narendra Modi for speaking about domestic issues on foreign soil and said he is coming back "empty-handed" from the UK which has given shelter to fugitive businessman Vijay Mallya.

The Uddhav Thackeray-led party said one may have a deep dislike for the Congress or the Gandhi family, but speaking about domestic issues on foreign land does not befit anybody.

The regional party said Modi should follow the advice of his predecessor Manmohan Singh and speak more often.

"(Former PM) Manmohan Singh has advised Modi to speak more often and to speak on time. He has also said that Modi's advice to him when he was the prime minister is now applicable to him as well," the Sena said in an editorial in party mouthpiece 'Saamana'.

The former PM was quoted as saying that Modi should follow the advice he gave him when he was in office - that is to speak more.

"The advice given by Manmohan Singh is only fair. Except bhakts (Modi supporters), who are flying in the air, the whole country feels the same.

"However, what Manmohan Singh said was only a half truth. Modi may become a 'mauni baba' (mute spectator) in India, but he talks abroad," it added.

The Marathi daily said Modi probably thinks it's better not to speak in his own country as he feels nauseated with the happenings here.

Taking a jibe at Modi, the Sena said if one wants to see the PM speak, the country's capital will have to be taken to London, New York, Tokyo, Paris or Germany.

If that is not possible, like in movies, a "set" of national capitals would have to be constructed in foreign locales, the Sena publication said.

"The PM has spoken about rape cases (in India) in London. This is part of his sensitive mind. He is emotional and there are sparks in his mind against injustice, and we are seeing the sparks turn into flames on foreign land."



"Is it right for the prime minister to speak on an issue like rape on foreign land? Why speak about the insulting incidents abroad?



"Why should a picture of prevalent corruption, rape incidents and an insecure country should be painted outside?" it questioned and added that on a visit to Japan, Modi had spoken about black money and corruption in India.

"You may have enmity with the previous regime. You may also have a deep enmity with the Congress or the Gandhi family... Speaking about the incidents occurring in the country on foreign land does not befit anybody," the Sena said.

Diamond trader Nirav Modi looted the country and fled, and Mallya is in London itself, but "our prime minister goes to the country that has given him shelter and comes back empty-handed", it said.

Nirav Modi is a key accused in the multi-crore PNB scam, while Mallya is wanted in a loan default case.

"However, bhakts do not want to comment on this. Now, Manmohan Singh has started speaking, while Modi has become mute. This can only be considered as revenge taken by fate against the BJP.

"Rahul Gandhi (Congress chief) asks for a mere 15 minutes to silence Modi. This is a proof that Modi has become like Manmohan Singh," the Sena said.

The party is part of the BJP-led governments at the Centre and also in Maharashtra.

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With his shared Facebook post against the media and women scribes drawing the ire of journalists, actor-turned-BJP politician S Ve Shekher today tendered an apology, saying he had forwarded a friend's post "without reading" the content.

The message was forwarded "without reading the content, by mistake... was unintentional", he said.

"When it was pointed out by a friend that the content was abusive, it was removed immediately," he said in a statement.

Shekher courted a controversy when he shared the derogatory post against the media, especially women journalists, drawing criticism from various quarters.

The Facebook post was reportedly shared yesterday, but was found removed later. It makes insinuations against the media and women journalists in light of the "patgate" row involving Tamil Nadu Governor Banwarilal Purohit.

The 78-year-old governor had patted on the cheek of a woman journalist earlier this week during the conclusion of a press meet in Chennai, apparently to diplomatically avoid queries posed by her.

The incident had triggered a furore with political parties, including the opposition DMK, calling for his removal as Tamil Nadu governor.

Purohit later apologised to the woman scribe.

Shekher's shared post also had some caustic references to the woman scribe whose cheek the governor patted.

These drew instant condemnation, with a number of journalists lashing out at his post, which was found removed later.

In his statement, the actor-politician said he does not endorse the views expressed in the post he shared.

The Chennai Union of Journalists denounced Shekher over the post, with many journalists taking to Twitter and Facebook to express their anger.

"I come from a family that respects women and women journalists. If I had hurt anyone in the very few minutes of (sharing) that post... it was not on purpose and (I express) my heartfelt apologies," he said.

Shekher, however, said he was "surprised" to find some people circulated the screenshots of the post without finding them offensive.

Meanwhile, some persons have also filed a police complaint against Shekher.

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The special investigation team (SIT) today told the Supreme Court that a draft final report has been prepared after conducting "thorough professional and scientific investigations" in the case relating to the death of Congress MP Shashi Tharoor's wife Sunanda Pushkar.

Delhi Police, in its affidavit filed in the apex court, has said that a draft final report has been sent to the prosecution department of the Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi for "legal scrutiny" and it would be filed in the concerned trial court after being vetted.

"The SIT, after conducting thorough professional and scientific investigations, has prepared a draft police report under section 173 of the Criminal Procedure Code and sent the same to the prosecution department of Government of National Capital Territory of Delhi for legal scrutiny," it said.

"As soon as the draft police report is received after legal vetting by the prosecution department, the same shall be submitted before the competent trial court for consideration and concomitant judicial proceedings," the affidavit, filed by Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP) Romil Baaniya who is supervising the SIT probe, said.

Pushkar was found dead under mysterious circumstances in a suite of a five-star hotel in Delhi on the night of January 17, 2014.

The top court had in February sought the response of Delhi Police on a plea filed by BJP leader Subramanian Swamy seeking a court-monitored SIT probe into Pushkar's death.

While issuing notice to the police on Swamy's plea, a bench headed by Justice Arun Mishra had left open the question of maintainability of the petition.

Swamy had filed an appeal in the top court against Delhi High Court's October 26 last year's verdict dismissing his plea for a probe into Pushkar's death by a court-monitored SIT. While rejecting the plea, the high court had termed his public interest litigation (PIL) a "textbook example of a political interest litigation".

Swamy, in his plea before the high court, had alleged that the police had "botched up" the probe and accused Tharoor of "interfering" in the investigation as a minister in the erstwhile UPA regime and later.

The high court had chastised the BJP leader and his lawyer, who was a co-petitioner before it, for making "sweeping allegations" in the petition against Tharoor and the Delhi Police without giving any basis for such accusations.

The high court had observed that Swamy ought to have mentioned his political affiliation as well as that of Tharoor in his plea as these facts were important for adjudication of the case.

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The Manochetna Academic and Research Centre (MARC), a wing of the Manovikas Kendra, that works for children with learning difficulties in mainstream schools, will confer 'Teacher with a Heart Award' to 20 teachers in such schools across West Bengal.

This will be an outreach initiative to honour teachers who have done exemplary service to the children of mainstream schools, which admit students diagnosed with learning difficulties, MARC Director Arundhati Sarkar said here today.

The teachers have been selected by a panel of academic experts after the names were nominated by their respective institutions.

They have been selected on criterion like "being compassionate to children and coming to their side when they are in emotional need," Sarkar said.

There will also be a separate honour 'outstanding category' for one of the 20 recipients, the Director of Manovikas Kendra Dr Anamika Sinha said.

The award ceremony will take place on April 26.

MARC Director Sarkar said, "We are a dedicated centre which aims to help 'at risk' children in mainstream schools in an effective manner helping in identifying their problems and providing educational intervention.

An estimated 250 children of state run mainstream schools of West Bengal, in association with the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, were currently attending remedial sessions on regular basis, Sarkar said.

She said 100 teachers of government/government-aided mainstream schools were also participating in teachers' training workshops undertaken by MARC free of cost and this was called 'Short Teacher Empowerment' project.

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Tripura Chief Minister Biplab Kumar Deb has criticised the CPI(M) and the Congress for allegedly trying to malign BJP president Amit Shah following the death of special CBI judge Brijgopal Harkishan Loya, who was hearing the Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case.

"After the Supreme Court dismissed petitions seeking a probe by Special Investigation Team into Loya's death and held he died of natural causes, the parties including the Congress and the CPI(M) should be ashamed because they tried to malign our party's national president Amit Shah in the incident," Deb, who is also the president of the Tripura unit of the BJP, told reporters last evening.

He alleged that Congress president Rahul Gandhi and CPI(M) leader Sitaram Yechuri were vocal against Shah and they led a deputation of members of Parliament to the president but now were quiet after the Supreme Court verdict.

"I think Gandhi and Yechuri should beg unconditional apology to people," Deb said.

The apex yesterday court said Loya died of natural causes and rejected the petitions that cast a cloud over reasons of his demise and sought an independent probe.

Before his death in December 2014, Loya was hearing the Sohrabuddin encounter case in which Shah was an accused.

The BJP president was discharged later.

Loya died of cardiac arrest, according to police investigation reports, in Nagpur on December 1, 2014, when he had gone to attend the wedding of a colleague's daughter.

Loya's death was spotlighted in November last year after media reports quoting his sister fuelled suspicion over circumstances surrounding it and its link to the Sohrabuddin case.

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The handling of the contentious case pertaining to a Lucknow-based trust that runs a medical college, the alleged "misuse of authority" as Master of the Roster and a charge relating to acquiring of a piece of land are among the issues cited in a notice of impeachment against Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra for "misbehaviour".

The seven parties, including the Congress, that moved the impeachment notice against Misra, listed out five counts of "misbehaviour" which include a charge that the CJI brought a piece of land by filing an affidavit later found to be "false" and he returned the plot only in 2012 after he was elevated even though the same was cancelled in 1985.

Addressing a press conference, Congress leader Kapil Sibal said the notice has cited a "conspiracy to pay illegal gratification" in the Prasad Education Trust case and the denial of permission to proceed against a retired high court judge in the same matter.

The former law minister said it is on record that the CBI has registered an FIR in the case and there are several recorded conversations between middlemen including a retired judge of the Orissa High Court, excerpts of transcripts of which are set out in the articles of charge.

"References to the Chief Justice by innuendo in these conversations are evident," he said, adding that the denial of permission to the CBI to register an FIR against Justice Narayan Shukla of the Allahabad High Court, when the CBI shared incriminating information with the Chief Justice "was itself an act of misbehaviour".

"All this requires a thorough investigation," Sibal demanded.

Another charge is of listing the petition against the Prasad Education Trust before himself, even when he was heading the Constitution bench, Sinbal said, adding doing so was against the convention.

Sibal said the second charge relates to the Chief Justice having dealt on the administrative as well as on the judicial side with a writ petition which sought an investigation into the matter of Prasad Education Trust, in which he too was likely to fall within the scope of investigation.

He said the allegations include the "serious charge" of "antedating" (backdating) of an order for listing of a petition related to the investigation against the Prasad Education Trust in the Supreme Court.

"The charge of antedating is by all accounts a very serious charge," he said.

The fourth charge pertains to a piece of land which Misra acquired as an advocate by giving a "false affidavit" and the plot was surrendered in 2012 when he was elevated to the Supreme Court, even though orders cancelling the allotment were given in 1985, Sibal said.

The fifth charge relates to "the abuse of exercise of power by the Chief Justice in choosing to send sensitive matters to particular benches by misusing his authority as Master of the Roster with the likely intent to influence the outcome".

"As representatives of the people, we are entitled to hold the Chief Justice accountable just as we are accountable to the people. The majesty of the law is more important than the majesty of any office.

"We hope that a thorough enquiry will be held so that truth alone triumphs. Democracy can thrive only when our judiciary stands firm, independent of the executive, and discharges its constitutional functions honestly, fearlessly and with an even hand," Sibal told reporters.

Sibal said the charges as stated "suggest conduct unbecoming of a person" holding the office of the Chief Justice of India.

"We took upon ourselves to move the impeachment motion in the background set out above but on the basis of charges of acts of misbehaviour that are set out in the impeachment motion. We do not wish to repeat those charges here in detail.

"We only wish to state that anyone occupying the office of the Chief Justice of India must be judged on the basis of the highest standards of integrity," he said, demanding an inquiry against the CJI under the Judges (Inquiry) Act, 1968.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Thousands protested along the Gaza Strip's border with Israel in a fourth straight Friday of mass demonstrations and clashes today, with two Palestinians shot dead by Israeli forces.

Gazans also flew dozens of kites near the border fence, in some cases carrying Molotov cocktails, in a new tactic that had led to at least a couple of small fires in Israeli territory this week.

The latest deaths brought the toll of those killed by Israeli forces since March 30 to 36, with hundreds also wounded since then, according to Gaza's health ministry.

Some 83 more were injured today, the ministry said.

Israel says it has only opened fire when necessary to guard its border and prevent violence, but no Israelis have been wounded and its open-fire rules have come under scrutiny.

With the border protests posing a challenge to Israeli security forces, military aircraft dropped leaflets in the border area early Friday warning against approaching the fence.

Referring to the Islamist movement that runs the Gaza Strip, the leaflet said: "You are participating in violent riots. The Hamas terror organisation is taking advantage of you in order to carry out terror attacks."



It added: "Stay away from the fence and do not attempt to harm it; avoid using weapons and committing violent acts against Israeli security forces and Israeli citizens."



The number of protesters on Friday was lower than the previous three weeks, but still in the thousands.

Both Palestinians killed were shot east of Jabaliya in the north of the Gaza Strip, the health ministry said.

Among the thousands gathered to protest, at least hundreds were approaching the fence and throwing stones and burning tyres, an AFP correspondent said.

Israeli forces were using tear gas in addition to live fire.

Israel's military said some 3,000 Palestinians were involved in "riots, attempting to approach the security infrastructures, burning tyres adjacent to it and attempting to fly kites with burning items attached" to them.

"Several kites crossed into Israel and were extinguished when required." It said in the statement that "troops are responding with riot dispersal means and are firing in accordance with the rules of engagement." Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman said while touring the Israeli side of the border today that "the thing that the other side must understand is that there is a determined and skilled army here."



He added that "behind it stands a determined people that is backing up the army."



Tens of thousands have gathered on previous Fridays as part of the protests near the border. The protests are meant to last six weeks, but peak on Fridays.

A smaller number have approached the fence and thrown stones or rolled burning tyres toward Israeli soldiers on the other side of the heavily guarded fence.

Israel says firebombs and explosive devices have also been used.

Israel has pledged to stop damage to the fence, infiltrations and attacks, and alleges there have been attempts at all three.

It accuses Hamas, with whom it has fought three wars since 2008, of using the protests as cover to carry out violence.

Palestinians say protesters are being shot while posing no threat to soldiers.

The European Union and UN chief Antonio Guterres have called for an independent investigation into the deaths, but Israel has rejected it. The protests are calling for Palestinian refugees to be allowed to return to their former lands now inside Israel.

More than 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled during the 1948 war surrounding the creation of Israel.

Israelis say allowing the so-called right of return would mean the country's destruction.

Protest organisers have officially labelled Friday's protest in support of "martyrs and prisoners," but on social media some Palestinians have dubbed it the "Friday of Kites." Gazans pinned notes to some of the kites telling Israelis "there is no place for you in Palestine.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The United States grudgingly acknowledged Cuba's "undemocratic" transition to a new leader and urged him to allow the island's people greater political freedom.

Earlier, Cuba's National Assembly formalized the election of top Communist Party figure and first vice president Miguel Diaz-Canel to succeed Raul Castro as the country's first non-Castro ruler in six decades.

"We are disappointed that the Cuban government opted to silence independent voices and maintain its repressive monopoly on power, rather than allow its people a meaningful choice through free, fair and competitive elections," State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said yesterday.

"Cuba's new president should take concrete steps to improve the lives of the Cuban people, to respect human rights and to cease repression and allow greater political and economic freedoms." Washington and Havana resumed diplomatic ties in 2015 but relations between the neighbors and former Cold War foes have remained testy, and a US trade embargo remains largely in place.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
The US, India and Japan intend to work together on high-standard projects in the Indo-Pacific region "that make economic sense" amidst China's "predatory" economic behaviour, according to a senior Trump administration diplomat.

Initiated by Japan, and supported by the US and India, the three countries are working on projects that can provide an alternative to what the former Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson described as the "predatory" economics of China, the US Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for South and Central Asian Affairs Alice Wells said.

This approach was opposed to the "predatory" economic behaviour of China that's creating burden on countries in the region, she told PTI.

"We intend to work together and with partner nations in support of high-standard projects that make economic sense, that genuinely benefit the recipient countries, and that can attract private capital so as to lift nations up rather than weigh them down in unsustainable debt," she said.

Wells, who has been heading the South and Central Asia Bureau of the State Department since June 26, 2017 in the absence of a full-fledged Assistant Secretary of State, recently returned from New Delhi where she participated in a trilateral dialogue involving the US, India and Japan.

"As then-Secretary Tillerson noted, countries should not have to take on unsustainable debt in order to build the sorts of crucial infrastructure they need to develop their economies," she said, while refraining from naming the projects that the three countries are working together on for the region.

The top US official said that the three countries shared the commitment to the principles of sustainable growth, transparency, the rule of law, and a legal and regulatory environment.

"The Indo-Pacific strategy recognises that there are both substantial challenges and opportunities in the region and that our partners and allies in the region share our vital interest in upholding the rules-based order," she said.

The recent US-India-Japan Trilateral Dialogue was a good example of this approach, Wells said.

"We addressed efforts to enhance cooperation on regional connectivity and infrastructure, and discussed maritime issues as well as serious security threats such as the DPRK (North Korea) and non-proliferation," Wells said.

The US and India are working bilaterally, and in cooperation with other like-minded partners like Japan and Australia, to advance their shared vision for the Indo-Pacific, she said.

"India is one of our lead security partners in the Indo-Pacific region and a Major Defence Partnera status unique to India," Wells said.

"We will continue to work toward stronger strategic ties and a more integrated defence trade relationship that will enhance India's leadership role in the Indo-Pacific region," she said.

Wells said the US' bilateral defence cooperation with India had grown "significantly" in recent years.

"The defence sales to India have grown from virtually zero to over USD 15 billion in the last decade," she said, adding that the Trump Administration was committed to working with India to offer the best platforms and technologies available.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Gujarat MLA on Friday said he wanted to be a voice for Dalits working in private companies, sanitation workers and landless agricultural labourers, than being a voice for reservation.

He was speaking while taking part in a protest meeting in Delhi University.

"As my Ambedkarite and Marxist orientation increased, I felt the need to repeat to myself that even more than reservation, I should become the voice of Dalit labourers in this country's private companies and factories," the Dalit activist said.

"I became more conscious, that more than reservation, I must speak for the sanitation workers who enter sewers, and landless agricultural labourers," he added.

Mevani said when he went to Vadgam recently, he asked two officers about the attempts to stop him from entering the state assembly.

"They were instructed to destroy some documents in my nominations and find some technical faults," he alleged.

He said when such attempts were being made to stop "just one Jignesh", there was a need to fight for sending their representatives to Parliament and every assembly.

"Today the Constitution, farmers, Dalit labourers, tribals and teachers are in such a crisis, despite varying ideologies, there is a need for us to come together," Mevani said.

Rebel JD(U) leaders Sharad Yadav and Ali Anwar, Samajwadi Party MP Dharmendra Yadav and student union leaders of universities across north India took part in the event organised by Delhi University Forum for Social Justice.

The one-day event was organised against a UGC circular that directed all universities, colleges and other grant-in-aid institutions and centres to prepare roster system keeping the department/subject as a unit for all levels of teachers, instead of a roster taking college or university as a unit.

"This means that reservations in appointments will be as good as over, because the number of vacancies department/subject wise are limited," DUTA president Rajib Ray said.
Seasoned all-rounder Shane Watson slammed his third IPL century as Chennai Super Kings moved to their new 'home' by posting a challenging 204 for five against Rajasthan Royals, here today.

Playing first match at their new home venue, CSK were shepherded by the 36-year-old Australian, who hammered 106 from 57 balls, making full use of a dropped chance in the very first over on a flat track.

Watson shared a 50-run stand with fellow opener Ambati Rayudu (12) and then raised a 81-run partnership for the second wicket with comeback-man Suresh Raina, who hit a fiery 46 off 29 balls with nine shots to the fence.

Watson was in regal touch as the Australian pummelled Royals bowlers after being dropped in the opening over, bowled by Stuart Binny. With no assistance on offer, the bowlers needed to be disciplined with their line and length but they were guilty of bowling either too full or short.

Watson swung his arms when the ball was pitched outside off and positioned himself nicely against short and straight deliveries to find boundary after boundary. He hit nine fours and six sixes in his entertaining knock.

If CSK could not post a more daunting total on board, it was because of Royals' leg-spinner Shreyas Gopal, who stopped the run flow if not choked the CSK line-up, by accounting for three batsmen, including MS Dhoni in quick succession.

Gopal conceded just 20 runs in his four-over quota.

Royals' captain Ajinkya Rahane used five different bowlers in first five bowlers and it



was Australian Ben Laughlin who got the first success as he removed Rayudu in the fifth. However already 50 runs were on the board and it was Watson who was the danger man.

In came Raina and the left-hander creamed off four boundaries off Ben Stokes' over. The job only got tougher for Royals bowlers. At half-way mark, CSK were 107 for one.

In no time, Watson was approaching his hundred and Raina, a half-century, but Gopal brought relief for Royals by getting the latter caught in deep by Gowtham.

There was no stopping Watson from the other end. He not only hit powerful shots but also used his wrists nicely for some delicate boundaries.

Gopal though was doing a great job for his side as he stopped run flow by dismissing CSK captain MS Dhoni (5), who had enthralled his fans with a blistering fifty in the last match, and Sam Billings (3) in his successive overs.

Watson completed his century in the 18th over and was out on penultimate ball of the innings.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
By Tom FinnLONDON (Reuters) - The Swiss franc, long a place to park cash during times of stress - and away from the taxman's eyes - may be losing its cachet, not least for Russian tycoons who face growing crackdown risks, from local regulations as well as at home.The franc slid on Thursday to 1.20 per euro, the level at which the Swiss National Bank in January 2015 abruptly abandoned as its exchange rate cap in a decision dubbed Frankenshock.The currency's latest drop has drawn particular attention because it coincides with a spike in geo-political tensions. In previous years, that would have ...
By Angus Berwick and Renee MaltezouMADRID/ATHENS (Reuters) - European Union and Italian authorities are investigating suspected wide-scale tax fraud by Chinese criminal gangs importing goods via Greece's largest port of Piraeus, a trade gateway between China and Europe, officials said."The VAT is completely evaded, with enormous damage to the national tax authorities and to the community," Fabio Botto, of the Italian Central Anti-fraud Office's special investigative unit, said in an interview.He said the suspected scam at Piraeus, part of China's vast Belt and Road infrastructure project, had ...
By Tanvi Mehta and Subrat Patnaik(Reuters) - The battle for control of India's Fortis Healthcare Ltd intensified after KKR-backed Radiant Life Care Private Ltd entered the fray with an offer to buy more than a quarter of the cash-strapped company's hospital business.In its non-binding offer, Radiant, the fifth suitor for Fortis, proposed on Thursday to make an investment and re-structure the company, Fortis said in a filing that had Radiant's offer letter attached to it."I think now, we will have revised offers coming," said Gaurang Shah, head investment strategist at Geojit Financial ...
By Osamu TsukimoriTOKYO (Reuters) - The Panama Canal may carry five times as much liquefied natural gas (LNG) in 2020 as it did last year as production of the fuel expands in the United States and Asian import demand rises, the head of the canal's governing agency told Reuters. LNG volumes traversing the Canal could hit 30 million tonnes a year before the end of 2020, said Jorge Quijano, who leads the Panama Canal Authority, up from 6 million tonnes last year. Demand for LNG has risen significantly in the last three years as the increase of supply, especially from onshore shale fields in the ...
By Thomas Peter and Thomas SuenBEIJING (Reuters) - Guo Qingshan delights in riding his 400,000 yuan ($63,839) Harley-Davidson motorbike around Beijing's suburbs."I love the sound of the engine and the muscle of the motor. When I ride it, I feel free and proud," the 32-year-old said.However, Guo has his limits.Deteriorating trade ties between the United States and China could mean American imports, including Harley-Davidson motorcycles, could be much more expensive in the future as the two countries trade tit-for-tat tax hikes on each other's goods. If prices rise, Gao said he wouldn't ...
By Rania El Gamal, Alex Lawler and Dmitry ZhdannikovJEDDAH/LONDON (Reuters) - With oil prices hitting $75 per barrel, it was meant to be one of the smoothest meetings OPEC has had in recent years.The night before the meeting, the ministers gathered in Jeddah celebrated with a traditional Saudi sword dance - just as U.S. President Donald Trump had done when he visited Saudi Arabia last May.Little did they know that Trump was about to spoil their post-meeting party when he tweeted that oil prices had rallied too far."Looks like OPEC is at it again. With record amounts of oil all over the place, ...
| BY Ricki Green |

Iconic Australian soft drink brand SOLO has launched its first brand campaign in two years. The campaign developed by TBWA\Melbourne and Carat, showcases how modern men get their thirst.

The much-loved Australian brand became famous for its 70s and 80s advertising where the now iconic SOLO Man tackled extreme activities in order to work up a sweat. Todays work, A Thirst Worthy Effort, offers a new take on what it means to be a SOLO Man in 2018  with men doing things like arc-welding costumes for a school play and constructing Swedish furniture.

Says Lisa Saunders, general manager of marketing, Schweppes: Modern masculinity takes many shapes and forms, and our new SOLO Man exemplifies exactly that.

The campaign, which features outdoor, print, and AV for online and social, will run for six weeks.

Client: Schweppes Australia

Agency: TBWA\Melbourne

Media: Carat (Media)

Production Company: Guilty Content
| BY Ricki Green |

WARC, the global marketing intelligence service, has today released Lessons from the worlds top effectiveness campaigns to uncover shared creative, media and measurement strategies.

The report analyses the results of the latest WARC 100, an annual ranking of campaigns based on their performance in effectiveness awards from around the world.

The four lessons from the 2018 WARC 100 analysis are:

1. Effective campaigns increasingly have PR baked in

Analysis of campaigns in this years WARC 100 reveal the increasing use of PR in their channel strategies. This reflects the rise of creative ideas built to gain press coverage and other earned media. Several ideas at the top of the ranking centre around a highly PR-able stunt or concept, like the Transport Accident Associations Graham, that can generate content across channels and media.

2. TV-led and video-led  two different models

This year a dominance of video  both online and TV  is evident in the winning campaigns. Analysis of campaigns led by TV and campaigns led by online video show they are key to emotional creative strategies. Budgets tend to be higher for TV-led campaigns, and the media mix differs between the two groups as a result. Though social media is the most common support channel regardless of lead media, OOH and print are more commonly present in the mix of TV-led campaigns, with word-of-mouth and PR supporting a higher proportion of online video-led strategies.

3. The use of partnerships is on the rise

Over the past two years, the use of partnerships as a creative strategy has increased in WARC 100 campaigns. Utilising the reach or credibility of partner organisations was an effective strategy for four of the top 10 campaigns this year, with both expected and unusual partnerships seeing success. Though seen across the whole WARC 100, partnerships saw particular use in campaigns targeting millennials, like Burger Kings The McWhopper Proposal.

4. Brands are looking for multi-year platforms

Long-term ideas are a growing feature of the WARC 100 as brands look to squeeze more out of their platforms. The continuing presence of the John Lewis Christmas campaigns in the WARC 100 provides a great case for the success of long-term campaigns. John Lewis has taken the Christmas period and turned it into an advertising event, annually driving huge amounts of publicity, engagement and ultimately return on their investment. Two further top 10 campaigns for Ariel and Snickers have reworked or evolved ongoing campaign themes with success over the past year, using the power of association to grow and reinforce the memorys perception of brands over time.

Says David Tiltman (pictured), head of content, WARC: This years analysis of the WARC 100 reveals some major long-term trends in effective advertising. Brands are increasingly looking for ideas with high PR impact, and marketing platforms with potential to run across multiple years  and with budgets under pressure in many markets, those trends are set to continue.

The WARC 100 is now part of the Gunn Report, which tracks the winners lists from all the most important advertising award contests, globally. The results of 70+ effectiveness competitions are used to compile the WARC 100, which now in its fifth year, is built on a rigorous methodology, developed in consultation with Kings College London. The methodology is applied consistently across all global, regional and national competitions tracked.
| BY Lynchy |

Vivian Yeung, Managing Director, Mediacom Singapore, has been named the chairman for 2018 The Singapore Media Awards 2018. The Singapore Media Awards 2018, now in its fourteenth year, continues to celebrate the most effective media communication efforts in Singapore.

The theme for this years awards is Be the Extraordinary. It is a rallying cry for all media industry people to come together and reinvigorate the industry. There are many media specialists who deserve the right of recognition. By believing that we can be more, we can propel the industry into its next transformation.

Yeung (pictured) Ncommented, Our task is to activate and revitalize the pride and the passion of media professionals, media owners, clients and prospective new recruits to the industry. This years SMA is to celebrate the tremendous value, contribution and role media plays.

Amongst the gloomy conversations about procurement and automation, SMA 2018 wants to bring back the cheers and ignite passion to push the limits and enable agencies and their professionals to Be the Extraordinary. We want to lift the reputation of the media industry in Singapore back to its former valued status, and to inspire conversations about how we can be that extraordinary person and community. We understand that success will come when people are placed at the heart so lets make the media industry desirable!

The SMA 2018 is our platform to bring together all parties of the media ecosystem to learn and add value to one another. Thus, for this years theme, we have identified 3 key pillars  Attraction, Aspiration, and Appreciation.

Attraction  We are inviting prospective new recruits from universities and polytechnics to engage with the industry and have a glimpse through a different lens on the diversity of opportunities within media.

Aspiration  We want to spark active conversations and tackle big questions about our practice that keeps media professionals awake at night and to also reward our new specialists and unsung heroes of the industry.

Appreciation  We want to engage brand and clients into meaningful dialogues that will raise the bar on what we do as our passion.

For the first time, this year, SMA will be hosting an inaugural full day conference to bring together all the stakeholders of the industry to discuss wide topics under the themes of Juggling (what are the multiple challenges that we face and need to address everyday), Trapeze (a birds eye view of the industry and sub sectors) and Flame Throwers (whats big and impactful that is happening in media).

I look forward to raising the applause under the big top and celebrating our success together.
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Ninety-seven-year-old Bob Semple knows all too well about war. His uncle was killed on the 25th of April 1915 as the Anzacs landed on Gallipoli. Ten of his mates are buried side by side in the desert of North Africa. And the names of his gun crew are carved into the back of the violin he took to war. Never ever forget, he said quietly, looking off into the distance. And I keep saying, there are more Victoria Crosses and other high awards buried under the sand of the desert of North Africa and in the mud of the Islands than there are that ever walked about on top of the earth. [They have] nothing against their names, but we know who they were. Its mid-morning and Semple is sitting in the front room of his family home in the Melbourne suburb of Essendon, talking about the Second World War as he prepares to travel to Canberra this Anzac Day to speak at the National Ceremony at the Australian War Memorial. Its more than seven decades since the war, but for Semple, who turns 98 next month, the memories remain vivid. He still considers himself to be fortunate fortunate to have survived six years of war, fortunate to have married the love of his life, and fortunate to have had a sense of humour and a passion for music that has helped him through it all. He still has the violin he took away to war, along with the old felt hat and the greatcoat that he was given when he enlisted. They still fit, and the old violin case, marked with his initials and regimental number, still has sand in it from his time in the Middle East and North Africa. The old violin went into action, he said with a laugh. Thats the old case it was carted about with in the desert, but shes a bit rough with the old desert sand in it. It got in everywhere, and I had to send [the violin] in for a bit of a polish and that to get it back into action after I got home. Its got my gun crews names scratched onto it, and it needs tuning, but I still pick it up. My crew were blokes that were nearly all farmers and they were wonderful. What they could do with a piece of wire and all that sort of stuff Well, I would not swap any one of those blokes for all the money in the world. It was a bond that could be even more powerful than your own wife or your own family, and thats not being cruel, thats just being honest. During the war, they would dig slip trenches behind their artillery guns and cram into them to try to protect themselves from all the shrapnel that was flying around as they watched the German dive bombers fly in to attack. Im yet to find a soldier that at some stage of his life was not frightened, he said. But you have to discipline your feelings [And] when the shells come over, they havent got Catholic, Protestant or Hebrew on them, I can tell you that. Ive sat there many times, and the Stukas would fly in and roll over Wed hold each others hands.  You do it because youd say, well, if we go, we may as well go together. He will never forget his 10 mates who were killed by the same shell during the siege at Tobruk and are buried side-by-side in the desert sand. They went out trying to dig another gun pit, so that they could fire some old 60-pounders that were engaging Bardia Bill, a big heavy German gun that was shelling the city, he said. A German spotter plane came up  and they were hit by one shell All of those things youve got to learn to live with, I suppose. Its a soldiers life. Its a long way from where he came from. The eldest of four children, Semple was born on 4 May 1920 in Essendon, the suburb in which he has lived his entire life. He grew up during the Depression years, playing all sorts of sports, but his mother Lottie was determined that he and his three younger sisters would learn music. Its hard to explain to people now what it was like, he said. It was a different society  I didnt even have a bike as a kid and I walked everywhere, but my mother loved the theatre and she said, Youre going to learn the violin  because you will always be able to get a job if you can play the violin and some other instrument. My [Scottish] grandfather, whose house we lived in, thought it would be a pretty good idea if I learnt the bagpipes [as well]  so I learnt to wrestle the octopus  and I used to bring out the practice chanter, and thats how I got started in the bagpipes. It was to be the beginning of a lifelong love of music and the bagpipes, and at 16 he joined the cadet corps of the Victorian Scottish Regiment. He transitioned into the 5th Battalion of the Scottish Regiment when he turned 18 and played the bagpipes in the regimental band. The battalion had red and black colours, which were Essendons colours, so I was happy, he said with a laugh. And everything was going right. When the war broke out, he was working in the rag trade for a company in Flinders Lane in Melbourne, and he heard the declaration of war on an old wireless. I was brought up in an atmosphere of respect for family, king and country, and I felt it was my duty to enlist, he said. It was a war  a worldwide war  and it was only going to get bigger. When the Scottish Regiment called for volunteers for overseas service, Semple was among the 800 men who turned out at Portsea. The whole mob took a pace forward, he said. But they only picked a few of the officers and then they sent us home for Christmas. Three months later they called for more volunteers at Mt Martha, but Semple and his mates missed out again. We couldnt understand it, he said. In our way of thinking, we wanted to all go away as mates  and we found that a bit hard to wear, so  in about April or so, the blokes started to blow through and just go out to the racecourse and the showgrounds and put their names down. He was just 19, and had to get his parents permission to go. He will never forget being sent to collect his gear. It was like handing out the chocolates. They hung a pair of boots around your neck with a string, and put a hat on your head, and gave you a coat and everything else, and said, Now go and sort yourselves out in the stables  to get stuff to fit. So blokes youd never seen in your life before were all sitting in this jockeys bar at Caulfield  and Ill never forget it  theyre all sitting around the wall trying on boots and hats and swapping all this gear around. Semple joined the 2/2nd Medium Regiment of the Royal Australian Artillery, and was sent to Puckapunyal in country Victoria for training. He remembers arriving in the early hours of the morning, a moment which would ultimately change the course of his life. Fate plays some funny parts, and Im not a fatalist or anything else, but the war teaches you an awful lot of things, he said, quietly. We were unloading in the middle of the night and at about 2 oclock in the morning they said, Youre going to the 2/2nd Pioneers  but I said, No, sir, I joined the artillery. I was the only bloke, and  I had to stand aside... The tribes were filling all these trucks  and I found myself a lonely petunia in an onion patch  and thats how I began in the regiment. They ended up in Java and became prisoners of war on the Burma Railway, and I could have been on the Burma Railway with those blokes right there that day when I said, No. I look back and I think to myself, I got off that train as they said all you men into those trucks Its fate, and you just accept fate, and say, well thats it, go with the flow and do what youre told. Instead, Semple arrived in Palestine in November 1940, and his regiment, which had become the 2/12th Australian Field Regiment of the 9th Australian Division because of a lack of medium guns, was sent to reinforce the besieged city of Tobruk in May 1941. They had trained by firing off a few 18-pounders in paddocks, and had been told to imagine this is a gun as they hooked drag ropes onto horse troughs. Well, I joined the imagination army then, Semple said, laughing once more. And I did not see a gun until we lobbed into Tobruk Picks and shovels  we had plenty of them, digging holes and what not, and doing drills all about the place  and it nearly drove everyone mad. He will never forget the Libyan port of Tobruk in the early hours of the morning. We had to go in  under the cover of darkness or the phase of the moon, he said. I went in on the HMAS Vampire with spuds and ammunition and all sorts of stuff hanging onto the side of the boat  We had a water bottle, a haversack, and a few rifles, and sunken ships were all in the harbour. Then the destroyer pulled in alongside and they were saying, Get off, boys. Get off, boys. We were loading wounded on the other side  and we still had no guns. I thought, Christ, what are we doing here? What are we doing in this place? Bob Semple turns 98 next month, but he remembers the siege of Tobruk as if it was yesterday. I well remember it, he said quietly. It was only going to be for a couple of months or so, but it turned out to be 242 days, all told. For eight long months in 1941, 14,000 Australian and other Allied troops held the strategic Libyan port of Tobruk in what was to be one of the longest sieges in British history. They were surrounded by a German and Italian force commanded by General Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, and they withstood tank attacks, artillery barrages and daily bombings in one of the most bitterly fought campaigns of the Middle East and Mediterranean fronts. We were no better than any other soldier, but  we were lucky, Semple said. I suppose you go wherever youre put, and you wonder why, but you accept the circumstances. They lived in dug-outs, caves and crevices for months on end, enduring searing heat during the day and bitter cold at night, as well as hellish dust storms. It was a bit tough, he said, simply. You had one water bottle a day for all purposes, and it would be 48 degrees, so we were euchred physically as much as anything else, and its very wearing on the mental factor. He will never forget watching the Stuka dive bombers as they flew in to attack. The biggest raid we had on Tobruk, I suppose, would have been about 100 planes, he said. They even bombed the hospital, and everything else. It was pretty chaotic. Sometimes youd get three raids a day [and] 20 or 30 planes would come up, and theyd shoot you up, and you couldnt move. You couldnt up sticks and go somewhere else. You just had to take it. And the fleas and flies  the fleas were even worse than the flies, I think. We were short of any sort of food, and it was all hard rations, and thats pretty hard to take, but theyre facts of life, and you werent the only one that was dealing with it. You had to think of your mates. For Semple, mateship meant everything during the war. Its hard to explain, but there was a bond of friendship and mateship money couldnt buy, he said. Youve got your complete trust and faith  implicit faith  in your mates. Even as the siege dragged on, they never thought of giving up. No, never, Semple said. We didnt give in, and we didnt want to give up. When [General Leslie] Morshead, our commander, took a left turn at Tobruk, he said, Well hold this place. There will be no surrender. I well remember it. He said, Theres only one way out of this  well have to fight our way out. And the blokes just took it on. He was a great leader [and] we had great faith in him. They called him Ming the Merciless, and we were known as the 20,000 thieves. There was this Lord Haw Haw, as he became known, and he said we were living in the desert in holes in the ground like rats  so then we became known as the Rats of Tobruk and we thought, thats not a bad name. Semple turned 21 during the siege, and will never forget how he felt, when they were finally relieved. You didnt get excited about it, but you knew what your mate was thinking: What a Godsend this is. But the siege of Tobruk was just the beginning of Semples war. He was sent from the blistering heat of the desert into the the snow of Lebanon before being sent back to the desert and the tiny Egyptian railway stop at El Alamein in July 1942. That became a different war again, he said. It was shock and shell, and it was a big, big show  We lost nearly a battalion in one morning. They got into a mine field and the Germans had it covered What they didnt kill, they took prisoners of war  Some battalions had fronted up there, going in with 150 or 200, and there was only about 30 or 40 left When [an armour-piercing] shell hits tanks, its horrendous. There were blokes jumping out of them on fire, and the shells are whizzing around inside the tank, and you just had to put the tin hat on, I suppose. He will never forget the opening barrage of the second battle of El Alamein on 23 October 1942. It was murderous, he said. There was something like 800 or 1,000 guns opened up at the one time. It looked just like a whole lot of glow worms had turned up, and the sky was alight Two searchlight beams went up into the air and they locked, and that was the signal. We all had synchronised watches and all that sort of thing The infantry then started to move and the engineers had to go in. There was that much ironmongery about, with shrapnel and all the rest of it, the blokes were down on their hands and knees in a lot of cases, digging mines out [of the minefield] and then passing them on to one side, delousing them, and then trying to open up gaps in the barbed wire On the 25-pounders, we would have averaged 600 rounds of ammunition between that time and dawn the next morning, and thats one gun, and there were nearly a 1,000 guns. Semple considers himself lucky to have survived. Even as the shells are coming in, you dont knock off, you just keep going, he said. You see blokes who have been hit in a tin hat [who] are not hurt, and other blokes [who] are in bits and pieces. Why does that happen? Why does a shell come into a gun pit and the blast take part of your crew and not others? I dont know. You just reflect back, and its a game of fate, really. He admits there were times he thought he wouldnt make it home, but he tried to put those thoughts to the back of his mind. I tried to be positive and say, look, Im going to make this, he said. Ive always been taught to wear it, and dont be frightened to go the extra mile ... [but] when you havent got replacements, or you havent got the equipment, youve got to be honest and accept the fact you are fighting an uphill battle... There are moments when you see horrible things and you think to yourself, why? But you try to discipline yourself and overcome that. In 1943, he was one of 34,000 Australian troops who were brought home from the Middle East and were sent to fight the Japanese in New Guinea. It was different warfare altogether, and there were no beg your pardons with those fellows, he said. It was a case of come home, straight out of the desert, get a change of gear, and then you were in action on the islands  We had to change uniforms into the jungle green type of stuff  and the equipment, we just had to modify it as best we could because the heavy vehicles were not much use in the jungle area It was more testing on the nerves and your mind. The unseen is a bit hard to cope with  [and] the conditions were pretty frightful. His regiment was involved in the sea borne operations at and Lae and Finschhafen, where they battled malaria as well as the enemy. We were swallowing those yellow pills, and all sorts of things, and looked like a canary after a while, he said with a laugh. But malaria took a toll on a lot of the blokes. Of all the casualties in my regiment, malaria would have probably accounted for about 60 per cent  Then Japanese were in the bush, and they gave us a bit of a rough time. When he returned to Melbourne on leave he married his sweetheart, Isabel Buchanan, at his local church in Essendon. He carried her picture with him throughout the war, as well as the New Testament hed been given as a boy at Sunday school. They were married for 55 years when she passed away in 1999. She was the only girlfriend I ever really had, he said. We went to Daylesford for what was to be the honeymoon, and I nearly died up there. Malaria took over, and  I had to go straight to hospital. He was at Beaufort, 50 miles up the Parker River in British North Borneo when the Japanese surrendered on 15 August 1945 and was discharged at Royal Park in Melbourne on 13 November. After almost six years of war, Semples war was finally over. Hed served for a total of 1,975 days since he first joined up on 18 June 1940. After the war, he admits he felt at sixes and sevens for a while, as did a lot of his mates. There were a lot of blokes who could never ever relate to their families again, he said. They had to get used to the regularity of working and trying to find something to do that they could live with. They knew where all the pubs were  And some of the blokes  even when you were able to sit down and say, Well listen, hows Mary going with the kids and all that? How are you tracking?  they would just go into a fog. Walking in Moonee Ponds one night with his wife, he was moved to see the Hawthorn City Pipe band playing in Queens Park, and promptly joined them. That was in October 1945, and Ive been with the band ever since, he said. He has returned three times to the desert, where he has played the lament at the war cemetery at El Alamein, and visited the graves of his mates who are buried side by side in the desert sand. Looking back, he still wonders how he managed to survive it all. Oh, absolutely, he said. I havent got any particular qualities that I know of, other than the fact that I was just not meant to go at the time I suppose, and thats all I put it down to, and accept the fact  Youve got to be honest with yourself and say yes, it does affect you at times. But the big thing is to accept reality and pay your respects wherever you can. Ive been at reunions where you would just look at one another, and say nothing, and the tears would just roll down the faces  [And] to shed a tear is not a disgrace in my book. Rat of Tobruk, Bob Semple, OAM BEM, will be speaking at the Anzac Day National Ceremony at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.

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Over the past four years, through the Flowers of War project, I have become used to bringing the lost composers of World War I back to life, albeit briefly, while their music is being played again. Leveraging their deaths to create something beautiful in the service of peace has been its own profound reward, and the emotional context, enriched by the tragic circumstances of their deaths, has been paid forward to the audiences in our concerts. The enduring problem that faces anyone who spends time dealing with the Great War, is that all that death seems to have bought nothing that endured. The victors failed to negotiate a lasting peace. The Versailles conference destroyed the fledgling League of Nations, with our own prime minister Billy Hughes playing a major role as he blocked the Racial Equality Clause, because of concerns it would undermine the White Australia Policy. Then a generation later all those seeds of bitterness that had been sown, bore a terrible fruit in the form of World War II, an even more horrific conflict where civilians were revealed to be the true targets of modern warfare. I have spent the last three years building a great requiem for those World War I dead  a Diggers' Requiem, co-commissioned by the Australian War Memorial and the Department of Veterans' Affairs that will premiere in Amiens on April 23, 2018, using the combined forces of the Orchestre de Picardie and Germany's Jena Philharmonic along with Australian soloists, paid for by the Australia Council. Our central message is that because of the Allied counterattack to retake Villers-Bretonneux on Anzac Day eve in 1918, the German artillery was denied the high plateau from which it would have flattened the strategic railway yards at Amiens nearby. This act saved Amiens cathedral, France's tallest and most precious Gothic masterwork, from almost certain destruction. Built between 1220 and 1270, it stands as a reminder that there was a lasting benefit for all those Australian deaths in the Somme. When one stands within it and witnesses the millions of tons that soar effortlessly towards the heavens, one feels ennobled. On one of the pillars hangs a panel acknowledging the Australian dead who helped to save it. At the end of the Diggers' Requiem a great pealing of 62,000 bells will ring out, a bell stroke for each of our World War I dead, before the angel sings the final words in French, English and German, "we the dead, speak to you the living - make peace". I cannot be sure if this requiem will create any real change in the world but it has provided me with a direct experience of something truly miraculous. In March, 2016, I made the first of many trips to try understand the scale of suffering that occurred in the Somme, so I could prepare this requiem. In a week I visited more than 100,000 graves, carefully noting in my diary the number of Australians, British, Canadians, New Zealanders, French and Germans who had died, and where. By the end of the week I had collapsed under the weight of that grief. On Good Friday, my French mother arrived to spend Easter with me and found me crying uncontrollably, in despair, unsure how as an artist, I could respond to the scale of the trauma. She suggested that we go find my great-uncle's grave. "A great-uncle buried in the Somme  that couldn't be possible," I responded, "how could I not know about that?" On Easter Sunday we finally found him, in the Adelaide cemetery a few rows over from the grave of the Unknown Soldier, now buried under the dome of the Australian War Memorial. My great-uncle Lieutenant-Colonel Stephen Grey Latham, DSO, Military Cross and bar, had led the 2nd Northampton Battalion in their head-on attack on the town of Villers-Bretonneux. He was killed instantly when a shell fell on his forward HQ. After several years of detective work, the reason for his obscurity revealed itself. He had made the terrible error (at that time) to marry a divorced woman and raise her possibly illegitimate child as his own. An artist who worked in metal, his life in business had not been smooth and only when thrust into war was his greatness revealed. His wife, who clearly loved him, travelled through France just after the war to find him. Her photo of his grave, found in a set of slides by Bob Bridges, a complete stranger who somehow pieced together the story, shows his name on a wooden cross in the middle of the frame. On April 24, the day after the Diggers' Requiem premiere, my family will gather around his grave on the anniversary of his death. I will meet relatives I had never known I had, and from his rediscovery on a northern springtime's Easter Sunday, new life will spring. To honour him when I direct the concert, I will wear the same plain green shirt and pants as he had worn a century before under his uniform. I hope that the music we will make will somehow reach him and all those who fell, wherever they are now. And I hope that this requiem will move all who hear it, so they take increased devotion to actions, which cumulatively through time, may deliver for all a lasting peace. The Diggers' Requiem will be performed in Amiens, France on April 23, and in Canberra on October 6, 2018. theflowersofwar.org

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The ACT Government is failing in its duty of care to prisoners by not providing a needle and syringe program (NSP), the territory's peak drug and alcohol sector says It comes after it was revealed a prisoner was re-infected with Hepatitis C at the Alexander Maconochie Centre (AMC) despite being treated with direct-acting antiviral medication. The ACT Government committed to having a NSP program at the "human rights complaint prison", but put the policy on hold before the last election when prison guards voted in opposition to the move due to safety fears. Rates of drug use at the prison sit at about 30 per cent, according to a recent report by the Health Services Commissioner. A study published in the Harm Reduction Journal, "Why is there still Hepatitis C transmission in the AMC?", concluded without a needle and syringe program hepatitis C would continue to plague prisons, despite new and effective treatments available. "Hepatitis C infection will continue to test both the strengths and the weaknesses in the relationship between health and corrective services in Australia," the study said. "Nothing less than full implementation of all harm minimisation modalities will be necessary to eliminate the clinical and public health risks of Hepatitis C infection, both in prison and by extension into the general community." The study said a 39-year-old prisoner at AMC was successfully treated for Hepatitis C for 12 weeks and returned a negative result four weeks after the therapy was finished. The patient said he then shared an needle with a known Hepatits C positive contact about four to six weeks after his negative result. "Bleach had been accessed, and a well-described method of flushing the injecting equipment with diluted bleach was used," the report said. "The patient was receiving a stable dose of 95 mg methadone at the time." Further test results showed the prisoner was again positive for Hepatitis C, and the sample was clearly different from the sample taken pre treatment. The authors of the report, Ben Harkness, Michael Levy, Ruth Evans and Jillian Wenke, were all from ACT Health's Justice Health Services. "The ability to cure Hepatitis C viral infection, with specific reference to the prisoner population and the prison environment, will be challenged, even if opiate replacement therapy is concurrently offered, and even if bleach is available," the study said. "The missing elements, widely available in the community, are a regulated injecting equipment exchange and tattooing parlours." The authors said while the new treatment had reduced transmission of the disease, the constant flow of new prisoners meant there would be an ongoing transmission of the disease from community to prison. ACT's Alcohol Tobacco and Other Drug Association (ATODA) chief executive Carrie Fowlie said the ACT Government was failing in its duty of care towards prisoners. "ATODA remains deeply concerned that the ACT Government has made no public announcements about what actions it is taking, following the September 2016 ballot of AMC correctional officers that rejected the proposal to provide sterile injecting equipment to prisoners, to introduce this crucial public health service," she said. "In ATODAs view, the ACT Government is seriously failing in its duty of care to the AMCs prisoners, their families, the AMC staff, and the broader community, by failing to provide an NSP in the prison, a service that is available to the rest of the ACTs community." Hepatitis ACT interim executive officer Rebecca Vassarotti said the research around reinfection demonstrated exactly why a NSP service was needed. "The work that has happened to reduce the prevalence of Hepatitis C in the facility is absolutely to be commended," she said. "But it's not the sole solution to the problem. "While we recognise that correction staff have safety concerns, we think these concerns can be overcome." A spokeswoman for Corrections Minister Shane Rattenbury said the prison guards' union had veto power over implemeting the program, leaving him hamstrung. When the AMC opened, the Minister responsible, Jon Stanhope provided a veto power to the CPSU in the enterprise agreement. This meant a NSP could not be introduced without agreement from staff. Subsequent Ministers have been hamstrung since that time," the spokewoman said. Minister Rattenbury made some progress in removing the direct veto power from the agreement, and inserting a voting process. Despite agreeing in principle to a model for an NSP at the AMC, staff voted against the proposal 150-4. While the government remains committed to introducing an NSP, these arrangements, put in place in 2008, continue to stymie progress.

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ACT Liberal Senator Zed Seselja says closing lanes on Commonwealth Avenue for light rail would cause "commuter hell", as the prospect of building another bridge for the tram to cross Lake Burley Griffin grows more likely. On Friday, Senator Seselja echoed the National Capital Authority's concerns the approach to Parliament House could become a bottleneck if the Barr government permanently shuts a lane each way for light rail, saying it would be a "disaster". "It would cause commuter hell for Canberrans if ACT Labor got their way," Senator Seselja said. "It vindicates my calls for an inquiry. If ACT Labor is left to its own devices in seeking to save money, it will cause major problems for Canberra commuters." However ACT Transport Minister Meegan Fitzharris hit back, saying the prospect of closing lanes was put forward by the NCA last year in their plan to overhaul Commonwealth and Kings Avenues. "It appears now the NCA arent proceeding with that so we will be looking at the second option which is to build a bridge in the middle of the existing two bridges," Ms Fitzharris said. "Its important to note that this was a proposal put forward by the NCA some time ago, weve been working with them all the way along and will continue to do so." Building a second bridge will be more expensive than using the existing one, and Ms Fitzharris said that would ultimately have a bearing on which option they choose. "What we currently know is if light rail were to travel on the existing bridge, we would need to do some further, very detailed work but from what we know now, that is feasible," Ms Fitzharris said. "We understand now building a second bridge would be more costly than using the existing road surface so those are both options weve always been exploring. Just like with stage one there were some key requirements that the ACT government have, certainly one of them was cost, transport benefit, city-wide benefit, sustainability benefits and urban design outcomes, so all of those remain consistent for light rail stage two as they will be for the whole light rail network as we look to plan and deliver light rail for all of Canberra." However an NCA spokeswoman said their plan did not include exclusive-use light rail lanes, but rather public transport lanes in a shared-use arrangement as part of the existing six-lane configuration of Commonwealth Avenue. "The initial feedback from the community was that any proposal to reduce traffic capacity on Kings or Commonwealth Avenues, such as additional traffic lights as was proposed by the draft design strategy, should not occur until traffic modelling analysis was undertaken," she said. The NCA also flagged plans last month to eventually reduce Northbourne Avenue from six to four lanes from Alinga Street to London Circuit as part of its plan to overhaul Canberra's main drag. Senator Seselja said he did not agree with that either. "It's not roads or public transport, you need a mix of both," he said, "I'm a big believer in good public transport but it needs to be done in the proper way with good outcomes for commuters, whether they're public transport users or drivers." Ms Fitzharris said Canberra's public transport capacity will more than double in the next 12 months, with five new rapid bus services starting this year. She said while bus patronage for this year was on track to exceed targets, more people needed to catch public transport to avoid future congestion. "The school holidays is a great time to talk about this, everyone knows the school holiday effect on our road system, that gets somewhere between 5 to 8 per cent of cars off the road," Ms Fitzharris said. "If we can shift that same number of people onto public transport we can have a permanent school holiday effect by people using more public transport. That means [the transport network] works better for everyone, everyone who needs to move around our city every day."

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Vinyl lovers are in a spin ahead of Record Store Day on Saturday, with music collectors expected to start queuing from as early as 5am in Canberra to get their hands on rare releases. The annual celebration of vinyl began in 2008 and has grown in popularity every year, with the ACT's independent record retailers saying the day "blows Christmas out of the water". Landspeed Records owner Blake Budak said he was expecting about 200 people to be lined up outside his store in the city by the time it opened at 10am on Saturday. "Some of them will get here at 5 o'clock," Mr Budak said. "For all the convenience of digital music, people still love the thrill of vinyl and cramming into the record store." Mr Budak said about 600 limited release records would go on sale globally on Saturday, with his shop stocking roughly 200 of them. Among this year's most anticipated releases are John Farnham's Whispering Jack, which hasn't been available on vinyl for more than 30 years, four limited edition David Bowie items, a Led Zeppelin 7-inch single, and AC/DC's Back in Black on cassette. "The majority of the titles will sell out on Saturday," Mr Budak said. "In the last 12 months, vinyl has overtaken CDs. There's always going to be a want for vinyl because it's the coolest, most collectable form of music." Not content with just one day, Songland Records has Record Store Day sales across the whole weekend. Owner Brian "Frog" Harris said the Weston Creek shop would have hundreds of the limited edition releases in stock. "It blows Christmas out of the water," he said. "About 70 -80 per cent of the people buying vinyl fall in the 15-45 age group, so they're part of the MP3 generation that has grown up listening to a device that has 10,000 or so songs you can play at random. "With vinyl, you make a commitment to listening to it as the artist intended, without skipping parts, and people have basically been reawakened to listening to music in a completely different way." Mr Harris said Songland Records had also accepted "tables and tables" of donations of unwanted vinyl and other musical items, which it would sell this weekend to raise money for the RSPCA's ACT branch. Dynomite Records, in Kambah, takes a different approach to Record Store Day, preferring not to buy into the hype around limited edition items. Owner Phil Place said the day should instead be about celebrating the surviving record stores, with his shop to mark the occasion with live music from Capo Creek, a lucky dip, free pizza and coffee, and about 2000 records on sale for $2. As against a regular Saturday, he was expecting about a 500 per cent increase in trade. "It's the biggest day of the year by far," Mr Place said. "I do a tiny amount of new vinyl, but the majority are second-hand, reconditioned records."

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It's 15 years since the January 2003 bushfires and one of its hallmarks, apart from the so obvious devastation, was the generosity shown by the community to those who had lost loved ones and homes. Now some of the recipients of that generosity are giving it back. The Singed Sisters were a group of women, mostly in Weston Creek, who lost their homes in the bushfires and supported each other through the recovery process. Earlier this year, they published a beautiful cookbook, Tears, Laughter, Champagne: A story of friendship forged through fire and food with recipes from the Singed Sisters, which included the recipes that buoyed them in the early days, sustained them during the rebuilding and added to the celebrations as they returned to their community in rebuilt homes. The cookbook had always been a way "to give back to the Canberra community that had helped bushfire victims in so many ways in the aftermath of the fires''. The cookbook's publisher, Karen Downing, an historian who lost her home in Duffy in the fires, on Friday presented Frances Crimmins, executive director of the YWCA in Canberra, with a cheque for $4000 from the profits of book sales to date. That added to an initial donation of $865 generated from the crowdfunding campaign that launched the book, bringing the Singed Sisters total donation to almost $5000. We are so proud that our donation will go towards the YWCAs programs for homeless women in Canberra. Its also fitting this money is helping women getting back on their feet and hopefully back into a home. A journey the Singed Sisters can certainly identify with, Dr Downing. Ms Crimmins says the donation will support the YWCAs work in addressing the chronic shortage of affordable housing options for women in Canberra, particularly elderly women, who are a rapidly increasing segment of those experiencing housing insecurity and homelessness. In the ACT in 2016-17, women accounted for more than half of those people accessing specialist homelessness services, many of them escaping domestic and family violence,'' she said. "We welcome this generous support to continue our long history of providing housing support to women and their families through transitional housing, affordable housing and supportive tenancy services.'' Tears, Laughter, Champagne: A story of friendship forged through fire and food by Karen Downing, with photos by Grace Costa, is available from selected bookshops in Canberra and online at Obiter Publishing www.obiterpublishing.com.au.

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The Coralina Apartments, the new luxury residential development to Cape Coral, had its grand opening ceremony Thursday, April 12. Cape City Council members, real estate agents, investors, builders, engineers, staff and residents attended the ribbon-cutting engagement. There was a beer and wine bar accompanied by island style hors doeuvres at the poolside apartments.

If youre looking to live in new, high-end and affordable rental property in Cape Coral, youd better act fast.

Weve rented about half of the apartments and expect to be filled up pretty soon, said John Greeley, VP/CFO of Phoenix Bay Ventures, who co-partnered the project.

We opened in November, have been pre-leasing since August, and expect to be filled up by August, Coralina Apartments community assistant manager Alana McCue.

The complex feature 186 apartments, with one-bedroom units starting at $1,195, two-bedroom units starting at $1,409 and three-bedroom units starting at $1,589.

Community amenities include a clubhouse and lounge, fitness center, heated pool, walking trail, fire pit, barbecue and picnic area, Apartment amenities include balconies and upscale kitchens.

Greg Coleman, the project manager with Brooks and Freund, said building Coralina was a completely homegrown Southwest Florida project.

We used local subs, local developers, local engineers, said Coleman, who prides his work in local projects.

Living in Cape Coral is like living in paradise, said Miguel Rodriguez, superintendent to Brooks and Freund.

Also present at the event was Carl Barraco Jr. with Barraco & Associates, the local engineer who designed the development.

Coralina Apartment are at 3305 Grant Ave.

For leasing information contact the office manager, 239-540-7274. Office hours are from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. during weekdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., on Saturday, and 1-5 p.m., on Sunday.

To learn more about the community, navigate to www.coralinacapecoral.com/.
Lee County Visitor & Convention Bureau welcomes new sales coordinator and intern

The Lee County Visitor & Convention Bureau has welcomed Jennifer Walla as its new sales coordinator and McKenzy Lacko as its new marketing intern.

Wallas role includes promoting The Beaches of Fort Myers & Sanibel to travel agents and potential visitors. She has 12 years in the hospitality industry, including working at various restaurants and hotels in Lee County. Prior to the VCB, she was revenue/sales system analyst at The Westin Cape Coral Resort at Marina Village.

In her roles as an intern, Lacko will support the marketing team in upcoming campaigns, including Travel Rally, Island Hopper Songwriter Fest, as well as assist the website team. She is a junior at Florida Gulf Coast University majoring in marketing with a minor in digital media design.

She grew up on Anna Maria Island and is a graduate of Manatee High School in Bradenton. She looks forward to using her coastal background to help promote Lee County as a tourism destination.

PANDORA?Jewelry Store to open at Edison Mall this weekend

Edison Mall has announced the Grand Opening for the PANDORA Jewelry Store will take place today, April 20, through Sunday, April 22. The store inspires women to express themselves through the universe of jewelry that PANDORA has to offer.

Patrons will be able experience PANDORAs all new 2018 Spring Collection at the grand opening Event. Every customer who spends $100 or more from April 20-22, will receive a gift with the purchase (while supplies last).

Pandora is located in Edison Mall close to Main Entrance near Victoria Secret.

Edison Mall, Southwest Floridas only enclosed and climate-controlled shopping destination serving the Greater Fort Myers and Naples area, features more than 160 retail and dining options.

The Edison Mall is located at 4125 Cleveland Ave., in Fort Myers, at the intersection of U.S. 41 and Colonial Boulevard.

For additional information, call 239-939-1933 or visit www.shopedisonmall.com. Like us on Facebook facebook.com/EdisonMall/ and follow us on Twitter @ShopEdisonMall and Instagram @shopedisonmall.

Grand opening for Planet Fitness in North Fort Myers April 30

Planet Fitness, one of the largest and fastest-growing franchisors and operators of fitness centers in the U.S. and home of the Judgement Free Zone, is opening its third location in North Fort Myers at 15201 N. Cleveland Ave at the Merchants Crossing Plaza.

Planet Fitness is celebrating the grand opening with a ribbon cutting ceremony on Wednesday, April 25, at 4 p.m. with free pizza and will host exciting giveaways and offer raffles to lucky guests.

The new facility boasts 20,000 square feet and offers state-of-the-art cardio machines and strength equipment, 30-Minute Express Circuit, PF360, fully equipped locker rooms with day lockers and showers, numerous flat screen televisions, HydroMassage loungers, massage chairs, tanning beds, Total Body Enhancement booths and more. The new facility is open and staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Planet Fitness also provides members with an opportunity to connect and support each other with Planet of Triumphs, an online community that celebrates all accomplishments and inspirational stories of Planet Fitness members. Planet of Triumphs provides an online platform for members to recognize their triumphs (big or small), share their stories and encourage others, reinforcing the Companys belief that everyone belongs.

Check out real Planet Fitness member stories and accomplishments at PlanetofTriumphs.com.

For more information or to join online, visit www.PlanetFitness.com or follow us on Facebook (www.facebook.com/PlanetFitness) and Twitter (www.twitter.com/PlanetFitness).

Miller to present marketing strategies to Goodwill MicroEnterprise students

The gift of knowledge is the highest gift in the world. Jaimie Miller, APR, marketing director at CONRIC PR & Marketing, looks to gift Goodwills MicroEnterprise students with marketing knowledge during their training class in Cape Coral June 4.

Goodwills MicroEnterprise program provides aspiring small business owners with the skills they need to succeed as entrepreneurs and become more independent. The program is designed to help individuals with low to moderate income levels and other disadvantages to start or stabilize their own businesses.

As a part of the support system for these budding entrepreneurs, Goodwill provides a six-week training class covering topics that are essential to establishing and growing a stable business.

During the marketing training, Miller will cover detailed components of a marketing plan, branding and messaging, guerilla marketing, implementation and evaluation.

Miller is an accredited public relations professional with experience in marketing, advertising, public relations and special events in the medical, hospitality and publishing industries, and most recently in an agency role.

For more information, call 239-690-9840 or visit ConricPR.com.
Neal Communities, a Southwest Florida private homebuilder, recently welcomed Doug Marcinski as the new vice president of sales and marketing in the companys south region, which encompasses Lee and Collier counties.

Marcinski brings over 20 years of successful sales leadership experience, including 13 years in sales and marketing management. As the vice president of sales and marketing, he will focus on strategic sales planning, enhancing the sales process and continuing to ensure a structure to help reach goals each month for the sales and design studio operations.

A Maryland native, Marcinski earned his master of business administration from Loyola University Maryland and a bachelors degree in business from Frostburg State University.

For more information, please visit www.NealCommunities.com.
Issues with drought conditions in Cape Coral are being reformed, thanks to the recently approved Reservoir Pipeline Project.

State Rep. Dane Eagle spear-headed this proposition, filing an appropriations bill for $1,115,000 in state funds, a figure that will be matched by the city.

The city came to me with this important issue and Sen. Lizbeth Benacquisto and I worked for two years to get the appropriations bill passed. Water quality and quantity is an important issue for us. The bill was vetoed the first time by Gov. Rick Scott, but we took the time to educate him on why we need this money. The drought last year was a real eye-opener and we hope to be able to have the resources at hand if we were ever again in that situation, Eagle said.

Last month, Scott signed the state budget which included the citys Reservoir Pipeline Project.

We want to thank Gov. Scott for supporting these two important projects, which will provide benefits that extend beyond the City of Cape Coral, said City Manager John Szerlag. More importantly, we want to thank our local legislators, Rep. Dane Eagle and Sen. Lizbeth Benacquisto, who worked on our behalf to ensure these projects were included in the final appropriations bill approved by the Legislature.

The state funding will be used to engineer, design, and permit a 3.5-mile pipeline from Southwest Aggregates Mining reservoir in south Charlotte County to Gator Slough in northeast Cape Coral.

This will provide a much-needed boost to the freshwater supply that provides irrigation and fire protection in the city.

Phase 1 of 3 will begin now that we have the funding. The planning and permitting of the pipeline is the first step in getting this project moving, with reservoir construction to follow, Eagle said.

This project may also benefit the Charlotte Harbor Flatwoods Initiative territory by reducing the flooding in the Cecil M. Webb Wildlife Management area.

Due to the severity of last years drought, Cape Coral officials and others are keeping an eye on canal levels during the dry season.

During this time of year, it is vital that we have enough water for irrigation and fire protection. With brush fires popping up in our area, we need to have the capability and means to protect our community, added Eagle.

The canal levels in our freshwater canal system decrease each year during the dry season. These canals along with the citys reclaimed water system supply water to residents for irrigating their lawns. The supply of irrigation water is much improved from this time last year. Water conservation is important and residents must continue to follow the watering schedule. We are in the peak months of the dry season and should see a more rain in the forecast by the end of May, city officials said.

The Cape is in much better shape this year, as Canal Volume Trends show 1.2 billion gallons available, as opposed to the .87 billion gallons available this time last year.

Once a firm is selected, design could take up to 18 months to complete. Construction of the pipeline may take up to two years to finish, with costs totaling around $8 million.
A fire that destroyed a home in Cape Coral Tuesday morning has been deemed an electrical fire accidental in nature, according to the Cape Coral Fire Department.

CCFD and Cape Coral Police answering a fire call at 1143 S.E. 29th St. shortly after 10 a.m. arrived to a fully engulfed house fire.

First responders acted swiftly, and prevented the blaze from spreading to nearby houses.

All occupants inside were able to safely evacuate and no bystanders were injured.

The house was a total loss, other than a motorcycle CCFD was able to pull from the garage of the home.

This Saturday, a fundraiser for the victims will be held at Golden Corral from 8 to 10:30 a.m. on the corner of Andalusia Boulevard and Pine Island Road in Cape Coral.

Friend of the victims, Joanne Tobias-Bergen of North Fort Myers, has organized this charitable event and is grateful to all of those that have shown support thus far.

I was devastated when I saw her Facebook post about what had happened to her. I have never experienced anything like that and I cant imagine what shes going through. Anything will be helpful to her, Tobias-Bergen said.

Small items such as clothing and toiletries are asked to be donated as the victim is not able to accept large items at this time.

Also, gift cards to Publix, Wal-Mart, Visa Cards, gas cards or even cash would be of great help to the effected family, organizers of the fundraiser said.

There was an overwhelming response from Facebook groups like Cape Coral Friends, wanting to support the victims in such a time of grief, added Tobias-Bergen.

All donations will be graciously accepted to aid the victims in their time of need. Anyone interested in contributing can stop by for the breakfast buffet and drop off donations to be distributed to the family.

More information can be found on the Cape Coral Friends Facebook page.
To the editor:

Howard Nielsen and anyone associated with the NRA, especially given what has happened in our state over the past several years, should be denied a lifetime federal judgeship.

And anyone who votes for this person to be a federal judge can kiss their seat in the Senate goodbye.

Remember, most of the seniors from Parkland Florida will be able to vote in 2018, And if there is a seat not up for reelection until later, I assure you that that seat will be lost if you continue to support the NRA.

The Parkland students and the American people are not trying to take away guns. We are trying to have commonsense laws without loopholes.

Everyone should have a background check with no exceptions, no assault weapons should be legal, bump stocks should be outlawed, as should high velocity weapons and high bullet magazines. These are just common sense gun laws that everyone should be for.

No one is trying to take away a handgun or a rifle that is used for hunting or self defense. Assault weapons are weapons of war and no civilian should own one or be able to get his or her hands on one. Lets save our children while still having a Second Amendment freedom that protects our kids.

Sallie Troutman

Cape Coral
Now John Horgan is trying to compare British Columbia to Quebec. He is consulting that province to learn how to save his job by violating Canadian law. Quebec has never signed on to the Constitution of Canada; whereas British Columbia did and so we are bound by the Constitution Act of Canada (and Quebec is not).

The repatriation in 1982 became known as the Night of the Long Knives in Quebec. The Meech lake and Charlottetown Accords both failed and fueled the growth of the Bloc Quebecois in Parliament; the only province with a federal party of its own. This propaganda put forth by John Horgan is smoke and mirrors to attempt blocking the progress of Canada to appease the Greenpeace party and save his job.

Andrew Weaver was on The West Block on Sunday morning TV with rhetoric about devastating spills that will ruin British Columbia (the sky is falling). He has talked about fuel spills from ships that have absolutely nothing to do with the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion and port shipping from it. Let him name one failure of a double-hulled tanker. He wont be able to, so he espouses propaganda about fuel spills from ships that will be better handled in future with the improved spill response facilities promised by our country, as one of the five requirements by the BC government that already approved the pipeline after lengthy reviews and negotiations.

More Andrew Weaver propaganda claimed on TV that the new oil would likely go to California. How can he say that when there are U.S. ships going down our coast now taking Alaskan crude to California? It has always been said that the target market for our Canadian bitumen is Asia and not to the same customer that is ripping us off now. Right now we are suffering pollution from coal burning in China, that switching to oil would help to alleviate. Do we want to take positive action to help reduce pollution or quiver in fear that the sky is falling; which is propaganda.

More Andrew Weaver propaganda claimed on TV that tripling the capacity of shipping oil/bitumen here would increase tanker traffic 28 fold. He has not substantiated this and it makes no sense. We hear a claim on TV that 75% of constituents are against the pipeline, but then learn that it is from the MP for Burnaby. This is more propaganda from a representative of people trying to exercise NIMBY (not in my back yard). The port is there so what can they expect!?

Perhaps the government should expropriate their homes and build refineries to replace the ones that were

closed. One wonders how many people who moved to Burnaby did not realize that there was a port there.

Also, the provincial chief of the indigenous people is going against the people he represents along the pipeline who support it, by also putting out propaganda. He talks only about the construction jobs that are short term and ignores all of the permanent operational and maintenance jobs at all the pumping stations on the pipeline and increased port facilities; and all of the spinoff jobs pertaining to providing operational and maintenance materials and serving an increased number of working families in BC. Also see my previous letters; Understand pipeline safety and Cause and effect.

Jerrilynn DeCock
Photo: Google Maps

The City of West Kelowna will ask the regional district for some guidance in finding a new home for its regional transfer station.

The transfer station, which accepts standard household garbage, some recyclables and select yard waste, is located at the site of the former city dump on Asquith Road, surrounded by several residential neighbourhoods.

At last week's council meeting, Coun. Rick deJong put forth a notice of motion concerning moving the transfer station away from its current location.

The motion, requesting the Regional District of Central Okanagan to undertake a business case to investigate moving the transfer station to the industrial area of West Kelowna, was tabled Tuesday evening.

It was supported unanimously.

"It would be my hope the regional district would look at this," said deJong.

Everything at the transfer station is eventually trucked to the City of Kelowna, and deJong says moving the facility to the industrial area could afford the city the opportunity for limited process of glass or bottles, potentially reducing the cost of transporting.

Coun. Duane Ophus was more straightforward in his desire for a "better, and more convenient location."

"We made a commitment to move this transfer station out of a residential neighbourhood at the earliest date possible," he said.

"It's been years and year and years. We need to get on with it. The study should be on how we accomplish relocation of the transfer station to the industrial area or a better location."

He said a better location needs to be found as soon as possible.

Coun. Rosalind Neis suggested the gravel pit on Westlake Road, however, Mayor Doug Findlater reminded council the City of Kelowna, which uses the gravel pit, pays West Kelowna about $70,000 a year in property taxes for that site.

The West Kelowna landfill was converted to a transfer station in 2010.
Thanks Marilyn Hansen for the environmental details that most people don't know about. Your letter was very informative and hopefully accurate.

In your letter, your last line was " 70 percent of Kinder Morgan shareholders are American". This fact alone rubs me the wrong way. Here we are fighting amongst are ourselves to give away the most valuable resource Canada has, to an American company that doesn't care about our environment. Oil that us Canadians will not benefit from, every drop for someone else. All while us British Columbians will still be paying the highest prices for gasoline. I want to know how much money goes where! Please tell me, or is that a secret?

Seems everything happens behind closed doors. The old saying still applies, follow the money. This resource should stay in Canada, refined, and excess sold to other countries. I'm so frustrated by the politicians selling off "our" resources, collecting monies to go into general revenue, then given away to third world countries, or paying for trips for our leader to try to force other countries to give women equal rights.

If this comment is not accurate, then please tell me the truth, because I'm tired of being lied to. We are told that gas in B.C. is the price it is because we import gas from USA and and the price is affected by dollar exchange rate. Then I hear we only import 10 percent, so why is all BC gas so expensive?

Mike Bell
Photo: The Canadian Press

Despite "polluter pay" laws in Canada, local governments and agencies are still waiting to recover costs incurred during two significant fuel spills off British Columbia's coast.

The City of Vancouver and Vancouver Aquarium are collectively waiting on nearly $700,000 in losses related to a 2015 leak of bunker fuel, while the Heiltsuk Nation in Bella Bella continues negotiating over $200,000 in repayments for its response to a tugboat that ran aground in 2016.

Transport Canada, which oversees spill response, said in a statement that under the current regime, ship owners are strictly liable for spills  up to a limit based on the size of the vessel  and all vessels must have insurance for oil pollution damages.

The government also maintains a Ship Source Oil Pollution Fund to compensate Canadians, including businesses and local governments, when costs are beyond what a ship owner covers or when the source is unknown.

In the days following the 2,700-litre fuel leak in Vancouver's English Bay, Transport Canada claimed the bulk carrier ship the MV Marathassa was the source.

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans said in a statement that the Canadian Coast Guard spent more than $2.4 million in its response to the leak.

That money was repaid by the federal pollution fund after the government and vessel owner "were unable to come to an agreement in a timely manner," the statement said.

The City of Vancouver said it spent $500,000 on staff salaries, equipment costs and third-party groups to help in the cleanup.

Spokesman Jag Sandhu said the city asked for compensation from the ship's owner but has since filed a claim with the federal pollution fund.

Peter Ross, a scientist with the Vancouver Aquarium, said roughly $180,000 was spent on environmental testing when little information was being released immediately after the fuel spill.

The aquarium draws water from English Bay, Ross said, and staff were concerned that the fuel posed a risk to its wildlife.

"We basically acknowledged it was going to be expensive but it was really an exceptional circumstance where we couldn't really worry about the money at that point, we had to know whether our collection was at risk," he said.

Ross said the aquarium was negotiating compensation with the owners of the Marathassa and had been offered about 20 cents for every dollar spent, which he called unacceptable.

Lawyer Peter Swanson, who is representing the vessel, declined to comment on the ongoing negotiations, which he said are confidential. Alassia NewShips Management Inc., the operator of the Marathassa, also declined to comment.

The Marathassa is facing 10 environment-related charges in B.C. provincial court, including allegations it violated the Fisheries Act and the Canadian Environment Protection Act. Hearings are scheduled through to May.

In Bella Bella, the Heiltsuk Nation said it's still working to recover $200,000 paid out in its response to the spill of 107,000 litres of diesel and 2,240 litres of lubricants from the Nathan E. Stewart in Oct. 2016.

Chief Councillor Marilyn Slett said $150,000 went to resources such as offices, boats and staff while $50,000 went to monitoring and testing at the site.

Slett said the nation was in negotiations with vessel owners Kirby Offshore Marine, based in Houston, but nothing had been settled.

Slett said the community continues to feel the effects of the spill, its commercial clam fishery remains closed and they are concerned about other affected species.
Alanna Kelly

Residents living on a Southeast Kelowna road fear this is just the beginning of flooding on their properties.

A clogged culvert was unplugged on Tuesday, sending water rushing towards properties on Heimlich Road and leaving home owners with serious flooding and a huge headache.

According to resident Jeff Neuss, 10 properties were impacted from the overflowing water and many yards still filled with water.

"I dont want to be dramatic, but it was like a tsunami wave," he said. "We had a large influx of water and they didnt give us any notice."

The City of Kelowna was notified about a culvert blocked with plants and branches at 9 a.m. By noon, the road over the culvert was completely under water.

A city crew was working blindly under the water to unblock the culvert and save that section of Spiers Road from being washed out, said City of Kelowna spokesperson Tom Wilson.

There was no time or realistic ability to release the water slowly through the culvert  it needed to be unblocked to save Spiers Road from eventually failing.

Neuss was shocked when he saw the water ripping through Rumorh Creek and overflowing.

I was in disbelief that they could treat anyone like that. At the very least give someone notice, he said.

Another neighbour living on Heimlich Road, Ron, has water surrounding his entire home.

We called the fire department hoping they have a big pumper that they could come pump into the stream, but they dont want to have anything to do with that, the city doesnt want to have anything to do with that, said Ron.

He says his five acres of farm land is now a lake.

Its a lake, you could put a boat on there, he said. We are stuck with it. We have no where to pump it.

Neuss said he is worried this is just the beginning of dealing with flood water for him and his neighbours.

Until this spring freshet clears out that could back up the capacity of what we got, this may just be the beginning and we still have Mission Creek which is just down the road, he said.

City staff tell Castanet the work to unblock the culvert on private property has also resolved flooding risks upstream from that culvert as well.
Photo: Colin Dacre

BC Transit has awarded Penticton-based Berry and Smith Trucking the contract to operate the bus network in the South Okanagan, effective July 1, 2018.

Berry and Smith already operates conventional bus service in Penticton and on the Okanagan-Similkameen routes, but will now add Osoyoos, Summerland and custom services in Penticton to their portfolio.

The routes were previously operated by Penticton and District Community Services and the South Okanagan Transit Society, which BC Transit thanks for their commitment and dedication.

Schedules, routing and fares will not change as a result of the change in operating company.

BC Transit is working with Berry and Smith and the existing service providers to ensure a seamless transition of services, a news release reads.
Photo: Westcorp

Uncertainty over just who will be affected by the government's proposed speculation tax, and how they will be impacted, has caused a delay in the sale and construction of Kelowna's $230-million waterfront hotel.

Edmonton-based Westcorp had planned to go to market this summer to sell 44 condo units in the 33-storey hotel on the former Willow Inn site across from Kerry Park.

Based on the success of that sales cycle, construction could have begun in late fall of this year.

Gail Temple, Westcorp vice president of operations, says the speculation tax has put the project in danger.

"That is because we had intended to go to market with those residences this summer. Now, based on the feedback from potential buyers, we know that we cannot go to market this summer because we don't determine this, it's our buyers," said Temple.

"The success of this hotel project being built is entirely dependent on the sale of the real estate."

Temple made the comments after she sent a letter to Premier John Horgan and other ministers within the provincial government sharing her concerns.

While uncertainty in the marketplace has put the brakes on sales, Temple said it hasn't stopped Westcorp from continuing the planning work.

"We are continuing on with working drawings and all of the design work required to get us to building permit. We are not stopping that work.

"It is our intention to build this project. We need our buyers who are now an integral part of this, to move forward as well."

Regardless of what the government decides around the speculation tax in the fall, Temple said they will attempt to sell the condos next year.

"We will be testing our market and finding out. Our hope is that certainty will be a big help. Is it our greatest hope that this tax goes away and it will not be punitive to those Albertan buyers etc., of course we are."

Delays have plagued the luxury hotel and convention centre. Construction was originally scheduled to begin in the spring of 2016.
Photo: File photo

A group of West Coast First Nations has won the right to harvest and sell fish commercially after a 12-year court battle.

B.C. Supreme Court Justice Mary Humphries has ruled Fisheries and Oceans Canada has one year to establish a commercial fishery for the five First Nations collectivelly known as Nuu-chah-nulth.

However, Nuu-chah-nulth president Judith Sayers says that if the government is serious about implementing their rights, it should let the bands begin fishing immediately.

In the 400-page judgment, Humphries sets out the parameters for the Indigenous fisheries involving species including a variety of salmon, groundfish, crab, prawn and shellfish.

Fisheres Minister Dominic LeBlanc says in a statement that he has directed his ministry to take immediate steps and review the Pacific salmon allocation policy, while collaborating with First Nations groups and stakeholders on new policy.

Gord Johns, a Vancouver Island member of Parliament, says he'll be in Ottawa next week to remind the government of its obligation.
Photo: CTV Frank Elsner

British Columbia's Court of Appeal has ruled an external investigation into the conduct of Victoria's former police chief can go ahead, but it notes the probe may not be in the public interest.

Justice Mary Newbury says in a unanimous written ruling that the provincial police complaint commissioner is within his rights to order a new external investigation into the conduct of former chief Frank Elsner.

Victoria's police board conducted an internal investigation in 2015 after it came to light that Elsner had sent inappropriate Twitter messages to one of his officers.

The commissioner's office later ordered an external investigation, saying new information had come to light and the matter had become one of public trust, but a chambers judge struck down that order, saying it was an abuse of process.

Newbury disagreed with the judge and says that at the end of the day, the decision was a matter of policy for the commissioner.

But she urged the commissioner to consider whether an external investigation is still necessary and in the public interest, considering Elsner resigned in May 2017.

"I suggest with respect that the (commissioner) might reconsider whether it is still necessary or in the public interest to spend public funds at this late date on investigating what appears to have been an entirely consensual and short-lived flirtation via Twitter involving a chief constable who is no longer employed by the (Victoria Police Department)," she says.
Photo: CTV

The Supreme Court of Canada ruling upholding interprovincial trade laws may have other implications for trade, including for the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion, says a lawyer who represented some British Columbia wineries at the trial.

Shea Coulson said the unanimous decision issued Thursday in Ottawa is "going to shape our federation in many ways that we don't yet know."

The ruling upholds Section 121 of the Constitution Act, 1867 which says anything grown or produced in one province should be "admitted free" into any other province.

The decision restores a $240 fine and fees issued to New Brunswick resident Gerard Comeau under that province's Liquor Control Act for being in possession of a large amount of alcohol he bought outside the province and was trying to bring home.

In confirming the penalty, the Supreme Court supports provincial legislation that Coulson said has a higher purpose of controlling liquor supplies and protecting health and safety.

He said it is important to distinguish between the finding against Comeau and the court's comments about the constitution in general.

The decision is "progressive" Coulson said, because its wording liberalizes safeguards "against the kind of protectionist behaviour that we have been seeing lately in B.C. and Alberta in their (pipeline) disputes."

Coulson said the high court has created a test that will help determine if a province is creating a trade barrier that is a tariff or similar to one.

"If the primary purpose of the law is to create a trade barrier, or to punish another province or to protect a local industry, then that would not be permissible," he said of his interpretation of the ruling.

"I think Trans Mountain was in their mind because at paragraph 111 of the judgment ... they explicitly say that punishing another province is probably not okay," he said, adding he has never seen such wording in previous decisions.

Attorney General David Eby said he read the ruling with interest for the way it might affect not only B.C. wine producers, but also the province's pipeline dispute with Alberta.

"It just confirms our analysis of their bill as being completely unlawful and unconstitutional," Eby said, of Alberta's proposed legislation that would allow its government to limit the flow of fuel leaving its province.

"The court specifically noted that provinces are not allowed to impose tariffs, or rules like tariffs, to punish other provinces. That's exactly what we've been saying in response to Alberta's proposed legislation, that it is unconstitutional, that they are not allowed to use their oil resources to punish other provinces."

But the Supreme Court of Canada's examination of Section 121 appeared to shy away from venturing into federal jurisdiction such as pipeline regulations.

"While this Court has in previous decisions proceeded on the basis that federal laws may engage (Section) 121 ..., no federal law is properly at issue in the present appeal and so the question need not be resolved here," the judgment said.

The court said the application of Section 121 may be different according to whether it is provincial or federal legislation that is involved "because what may amount to a tariff or customs duty under a provincial regulatory statute may not have that character at all under a federal regulatory statute."

Coulson said he believes the decision has positive implications for the five B.C. wineries he represented in the court.

He said it aims to limit a province from offering more favourable treatment to local businesses at the expense of any outside its boundaries. As an example, he pointed to Ontario's refusal to allow B.C. wineries to sell directly to Ontario consumers, while Ontario vintners don't face the same limits.

"The judgment explicitly says protecting your local industry can be a strong indicator that you are creating a trade barrier that is impermissible," said Coulson.

However, the president and chief executive officer of the British Columbia Wine Institute, which represents all B.C. wineries, called the decision a disappointment.

Miles Prodan said the institute had hoped the high court would instead clear the way for B.C. wineries to begin shipping their products directly to consumers in other provinces.

"We are going to have to continue to work with the provinces and the federal government to come up with a solution. We can't rely on the court to impose that," said Prodan, in an interview Thursday from Kelowna, B.C.

Coulson questioned the institute's expectation of a court-imposed resolution to interprovincial trade difficulties, saying the justices could not make significant policy decisions on matters that should be resolved by politicians.

John Nater, Conservative Shadow Cabinet Secretary for Interprovincial Trade and the Sharing Economy, echoed the call for a political response.

"Given the Supreme Court's decision, it is now more important than ever for Prime Minister Trudeau to renegotiate the Liberals' inadequate Canadian Free Trade Agreement," Nater said in a news release.
Photo: CTV

A shipment of 100,000 marijuana seedlings arrived at Vancouver International Airport, Thursday, destined for the world's largest cannabis greenhouse in Delta.

The plants were shipped from Ontario on a cargo jet and transferred under heavy security to Canopy Growth's 1.7-million-square-foot greenhouses.

The weed is for medicinal use, but the company is ramping up for legalization, expected later this year.

"We, as leaders in the industry, have a tremendous responsibility to make sure the legalization works and part of that is making sure the supply is on the shelf," spokesperson Hilary Black told CTV.

There are 22 licensed cannabis producers in B.C.

 with files from CTV Vancouver
The Chattanooga Writers Guild and the city of Chattanooga Office of Multicultural Affairs announced the 2018 Chattanooga Readers and Writers Fair will take place on June 23.

It will be held at the Downtown Branch of the Chattanooga Public Library with an evening event at the Edney Building at 1100 Market St.

Activities will include book sales and readings on the Library fourth floor from 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m. and childrens activities on the Library second floor.

There will also be readings at the Library first floor auditorium from 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Fiction will be at 11 a.m., poetry at 1 p.m., nonfiction at 2 p.m. and spoken word at 3 p.m.

There will be a noon lunch break on the Library plaza with food trucks and an open mic.

An evening program will be held at the Edney Building.

For full details, visit https://readnwritefair.wordpress.com/


The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation released its 2017 Crime in Tennessee report on Friday, revealing a slight overall increase in reported instances of crime in the most recent reporting year.

The annual study compiles data reported from each law enforcement agency in the state through the Tennessee Incident Based Reporting System (TIBRS). The TBIs sophisticated crime reporting system, in place for more than 15 years, provides an updated and comprehensive picture of the successes and challenges facing communities across Tennessee.



Among the findings in the 2017 report:



 Reported instances of Murder increased 6.7% from 2016 to 2017.

 Reported Rape offenses increased 3.2% in the same time period.

 The number of individuals arrested in connection to reported crimes decreased by 0.1% from 2016 to 2017.

 Juveniles accounted for 6.4% of all arrests, down from 6.5% in the previous year.

 Simple Assault accounted for 67.0% of all reported domestic violence offenses.

 Drug/Narcotic Violations increased 4.9% in the previous year.

 The number of DUI arrests continued to trend downward in the past year.

Were extremely thankful for our dedicated law enforcement partners, said TBI Director Mark Gwyn. Together, they helped us compile a thorough snapshot of crime in Tennessee. We now hope every department takes this information and works to further address the key crime issues facing their communities and our state.

The TBI strongly discourages the ranking and comparison of jurisdictions and their crime rates by the data in the 2017 report. Demographic, socio-economic, and other factors out of the control of law enforcement contribute to the nature of the crimes committed. Crime varies from place to place and ranking the agencies solely on numbers would neither be fair to the agencies nor their communities.

There are 532 reporting agencies in the state of Tennessee. And, for the second consecutive year, all agencies in Tennessee are compliant with TIBRS reporting. Tennessee is one of 16 states reporting 100% compliance. Nationally, 34 states are currently NIBRS-certified. To coincide with the release of this report, 2017s public data is now available for review on the TBIs online CrimeInsight platform, available at http://crimeinsight.tbi.tn.gov . T he full Crime in Tennessee report is available for review on the TBIs website: tn.gov/tbi.
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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...
Jobs in the factory, as well as a multibillion-dollar investment in a real estate development, could be transformational for an area of Chicago that has lost jobs and population in recent decades. The South Works steel plant closed in 1992 and was later demolished. Neighbors and politicians have had their hopes raised in the past, only to have other redevelopment plans fall through.
In the near future, alternative proteins won't take much of a bite out of Tyson's core business of beef, chicken, pork and prepared foods, which brought in more than $38 billion in revenue last year. But as more consumers shift toward foods they consider to be healthier and more sustainably sourced, Tyson's Chicago-based venture capital arm  a team of three men  wants to meet them there. Other food companies like Campbell Soup, General Mills and Kraft Heinz also have venture capital funds, a relatively new and growing trend in the traditionally stodgy processed food industry.
"The Magnificent Mile is in ZIP code 60611, which is all of Streeterville and includes some lower-value apartment complexes that aren't on the Mag Mile," said Paul Tucker, director of business operations at Unison. Unison looked at home valuation models that factored in single-family homes, including townhouses and condos, and found that the average price of homes in 60611 was higher than in the Wicker Park area, but the median price was lower. "The Mag Mile has a higher concentration of high-value homes, but consumers are still going to see more properties with slightly lower values than they see in Wicker Park on the median."
The day after their dinner, April 6, Riess used Hutchinson's credit card to pay for a hotel room in Ocala, Fla., authorities said. Authorities also said Riess used Hutchinson's ID to make a $5,000 bank withdrawal from a Wells Fargo Bank and withdrew another $500 from Hutchinson's account while she was in Ocala. Riess tried to make a $200 purchase at a gas station in Louisiana, authorities said.
"A lot of things have to be done to improve our finances," Brewer said. "We need to let people know what we can, and cannot, do as a city."
Lancaster's deviled eggs are kind of fun, perked up carbonara-style with Parmesan crisps and crumbled pancetta; a little hot sauce in the filling gives the eggs a nice accent. Meat and cheese combos are available a couple of ways. There's a cheese and charcuterie platter of country ham and wild boar meats against cheeses from France, California and Wisconsin; and a jambon et fromage duet of burrata cheese, tomatoes and speck on pieces of toasted ciabatta. (Sloppy timing marred the latter preparation; by the time it reached my table, the ciabatta was already soggy from the tomatoes.)
Josephson made pictures exactly like that in the early 1960s. He always says that he "made" a picture  never that he "took" or that he "shot" a picture. He admits that he always found it difficult to explain what he was doing: "I just knew it was a don't-do  don't put yourself in your shots. Yet it gave me this strange feel in my gut. It felt so meaningful to me. But even now, when I put it into words, it sounds off. I'd always rather show you than tell you." And so he became a passive witness to his own influence and reputation, an artist whose dazed, Warhol-like way of speaking and folksy air often belied years of training. He didn't stumble onto making the pictures he made, many of them now as beautiful (and playful) as they were ambitious. Yet, in the early '70s, when he first heard from a critic that he was a conceptual photographer, his reply was:
Mack, 35, starred in The CW network's "Smallville." Since that series ended in 2011, she has played only minor roles. Prosecutors said she helped recruit women for leader Keith Raniere and his cult-like organization called NXIVM. She told the women they were joining what was purported to be a female mentorship group, prosecutors said.

But "the victims were then exploited, both sexually and for their labor," according to federal prosecutors.
"It was a little bit sad to me because he had promised me he would stop drinking, and when I saw him he was drunk that night. And I was like, 'Whoa. Dude. C'mon. What are you doing? What's going on? You said that that was done,'" Rodgers recalled. "We did a show and I was a little upset. I didn't even stick around for his performance because it was breaking my heart. But we still had a great time. It was wonderful  we were that close."
By comparison, nothing was held back in "Francesca da Rimini," the latest addition to Muti's CSO survey of the major Tchaikovsky tone poems. Based on the episode from Dante's "Inferno" about the shades of the illicit lovers Francesca and Paolo, the score can be powerfully evocative when played, as here, with full-throttle color and sweep, shorn of any hint of vulgarity. The tenderness of the central section (lovely solo clarinet playing from Stephen Williamson) stood in welcome relief against the surrounding symphonic hellfire-and-brimstone.
Your eye is constantly drawn to those spaces: with their warm light and promise of one-on-one human interaction, the renderings seem to have been designed so that the many retail spaces counteract the scale and the intimidating height of the huge skyscraper planned for the adjacent property. And for those of us upset that our newspaper is being obliged to leave its historic home, they felt like an effort to keep the building at least partially attached to its community purpose. I even feel a bit better after seeing them. Even the cheering Chicago Tribune sign is there, the ownership of which currently is subject to a legal dispute that really is about a lot more than just a sign.
His work has also gained artistic notice  he will be a part of an upcoming project on beauty by graphic design icon Stefan Sagmeister; and his work was featured in a selection of tattoos as a part of the "Is Fashion Modern?" exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. "I went to see it, and it blew my mind," he says. "'Oh my God, I have work up at MOMA.'" He is also working on an exhibit of his work to be shown at the International Museum of Surgical Science in the Gold Coast.
"You hear a lot about how their partner is the first person they want to tell when they have good news, so there's sort of this amplifying effect of being in a relationship, of positive experiences," he said. "But also their partner is sometimes the first person they go to when they have bad news or a bad experience they're trying to navigate."
DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES  Britain's famed Queen Elizabeth 2 cruise ship will finally open as a floating luxury hotel moored off Dubai, nearly a decade after completing its last ocean voyage.



It's been another long trip for the ship known as the QE2 to even open to the public, as Dubai's financial meltdown and years of slow growth nearly sank the project and left the ship languishing at port. After initially planning to gut the vessel, Dubai's government ultimately decided to restore the ship at a cost of over $100 million, down to replicating its 1960s carpeting, with work still underway.



"It's like walking into a time capsule  this is the ship in 1969. It's a hotel and a museum," said Hamza Mustafa, the CEO of Dubai's Ports, Customs and Free Zone Corp.'s investment arm. "We've put in 2.7 million man hours working on her ... making sure that she can really shine."



"She's going to live on for many more years now in her final home in Dubai," he added.



The QE2, built by Cunard and put to sea in 1969, is the second ship the company named after the wife of King George VI, not the current British monarch  hence the number rather than the Roman numeral.



The luxury ship traveled some 6 million miles in decades of service even as airlines came to dominate trans-Atlantic travel. It carried 2.5 million passengers and crossed the Atlantic more than 800 times. Britain requisitioned the ship as a troop carrier for the Falklands War against Argentina in 1982.



In 2007, Cunard sold the QE2 to an arm of the state-run conglomerate Dubai World for 50 million pounds ($100 million). She arrived to Dubai's Port Rashid the following year as part of a glitzy armada led by a mega-yacht owned by Dubai's ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum , at the height of the former British protectorate's real-estate bubble.



An economic crash left the QE2's owners in debt for billions of dollars. Rumors circulated for years after that the ship could be sold. All the while, she sat mothballed at Port Rashid near Dubai's historic downtown creek, a 149,000-ton reminder of the crash.



Three years ago, the Dubai government's Ports, Customs and Free Zone Corp. took over the project. It marks the first foray into hotels for the corporation, said Mustafa, who previously served as a managing director at the government-owned developer Nakheel and at the investment arm of Dubai World. He said the corporation planned to open other hotels in the future.



The ship has been hooked up to Dubai's power grid, but still floats in the Persian Gulf. An Associated Press team that visited the ship Tuesday could feel her list slightly while walking through portions of her completed passageways.



"She lists. She's supposed to that, she's a ship," Mustafa said.



Today, around seven of the QE2's 13 decks are under operation, with 224 cabins available, Mustafa said. Prices will range from $150 a night in the simplest berthing to $15,000 a night for the Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary suites, he said.



A green-hued British pub and other restaurants will serve alcohol, a common practice across Dubai's hotels. However, its nickel, quarter and dollar slot machines will remain turned off as gambling is illegal.



The ship also will feature shops run by Dubai Duty Free, the government-run conglomerate that had $1.93 billion of sales in 2017, with 9.7 million cans of beer and 7.4 million bottles of liquor and wine sold.



Workers hurried across the ship Tuesday to finish up work ahead of the hotel's soft opening Wednesday. By October, Mustafa said the hotel hopes to have a grand opening with "600 to 800 rooms" ready.



"If you want to come and have a sense of how it was during the ocean liner era but at the same time being a doorstep away from Dubai, this is the place you want to be," he said. "We're not a theme. We're not a concept. This is what this ship was."
If you told a robot mayor, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few," the robot mayor might smile with silvery metallic lips and nod its metallic head as you eat a copy of the Constitution just to appease her. Or him.
Eric Blake, 23, of the 2900 block of South Elias Court was charged with aggravated battery with a firearm and felony unlawful use of a weapon, police said.
Lower says a 19-year-old man came out of the house and pointed a weapon toward at least one officer, and a Tazewell County sheriff's deputy then shot him in self-defense.
"The perception and the reality a lot of times with law enforcement is that we are a macho profession, and I think that that gets in the way of even law enforcement looking at the fact that the people that wear this uniform (who) put this badge on they're people," police Superintendent Eddie Johnson told reporters Thursday at police headquarters. "And I think for a long time that's escaped not just the people we serve but law enforcement officials."
No one was injured during the incident, which happened about 9 a.m. in the 3700 block of West 79street in the city's Ashburn neighborhood.
The incident happened about 11:10 a.m. on Oct. 15, 2017 as the 22-year-old Caffie walked with another 22-year-old man. A vehicle approached and Sharlow and another person exited, brandishing guns, and began shooting at them, according to prosecutors, who said they kept firing after Caffie stumbled to the ground.
The attacker is described as a black man, between 18 and 27 years old, with short black hair and a light brown complexion, according to the alert. He is about 5 feet 7 to 5 feet 8 inches tall with short, black facial hair.
The 24-year-old woman saw the man outside the courtyard of the complex just before 11 p.m. in the 3900 block of North Fremont Street on the North Side, police said.
The woman, identified as Dorata Gieslinska, was crossing in the 3300 block of North Halsted Street on the North Side when a red Jeep Renegade ran her over around 9:05 p.m. and drove away south on Halsted without stopping, according to police and the Cook County medical examiner's office.
"The fact that some other states chooses to be a bad actor in how they use the data is not a reflection on the data, it's a reflection on the state that uses it that way, and Illinois does not use it that way," said Rep. Mike Fortner, R-West Chicago. "We are making this a political issue where we should be looking at is as a data issue."
The probe appears to focus on whether those companies - perhaps in a bid to stop their subscribers from jumping ship to rivals - colluded to undermine so-called eSIM cards, a technology that could someday allow the owners of smartphones, smartwatches or other devices to change their service provider on their own, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity to speak freely about the probe, which has not been made public.
"The bill lets the states decide and be the laboratories that they ought to be," Schumer said. "It also will ensure that minority- and woman-owned businesses have a dedicated funding stream to help them compete against bigger companies in the marijuana business. Critically, we ensure that advertising can't be aimed at kids, and put real funds behind research into the health effects of THC," referring to the primary psychoactive substance in marijuana.
"It was a total surprise and so thoughtful, and it was the way he was about so many things," McNulty said. "And on my next assignment in the Middle East in the early 1980s, it was during a war going on, and I couldn't communicate with my family at all. Mike would call my wife every night and say, 'Tim is fine.' That meant so much."
What might those be? It wouldn't be enough for the U.S. to lift economic sanctions, normalize relations and guarantee the security of the regime  all of which could be hard for the administration to swallow. The North Koreans say they won't demand that we withdraw all our troops from the South, but they could insist on such deep cuts that we might as well be gone.
We know most of the buildings near the Board of Trade are the same today as they were over 60 years ago. We wondered whether there would be an increase in pedestrian and vehicle traffic. The project became a fun challenge for the photographer  and our eyes  when we realized how little had changed.
There are some challenges involved in creating a special purpose district as a cultural sanctuary, but it is possible. The time for a holistic approach to preserving the community's identity that works with local stakeholders is now. Otherwise, 18th Street runs the risk of becoming the next commercial strip full of restaurants and bars but devoid of culture. With the right resources, Pilsen can maintain its status as a cultural destination, a must-see neighborhood for its history, people, arts and culture.
Many presidents might also have seen "moral equivalence" between the white supremacists and counterprotesters last summer in Charlottesville, Virginia, or talked about and treated women "like they're pieces of meat," or lied constantly about "matters big and small and insist the American people believe it," as Comey put it in itemizing Trump's moral deficiencies. To point this out is not to defend Trump but rather to highlight the deep ethical compromises many Americans have long been comfortable making when it comes to the sex, lies and violence of their leaders. If Americans were to have a national reckoning on where to draw the lines on these, in whatever form that takes, then we might come to a consensus on moral fitness, or at least agree on what we can tolerate as moral in a president.
So what happened? Winnebago County began early voting on schedule; its county seat, Rockford, did not. In St. Clair County, voters were told they could cast paper "proof" ballots while appeals were pending, but they'd have to come back and vote again if the certified ballot turned out different. Other jurisdictions offered no do-overs, warning voters that if their candidate was eventually bounced, the vote wouldn't count.
Most of us will be lucky enough to never experience the dreaded drop of the oxygen masks. Or be forced to use our seat cushions as flotation devices. Airline crashes are, thankfully, rare. But there will be another  some day. Keep that in mind when the safety video starts on your next flight.
As a progressive Democrat, I have seldom voted Republican. But I have read books and articles by Frum and other Republicans, all of whom have something important to say. They contend that the GOP has veered way off-course, and Trump is one result.
To the editor: I commend the LGBT community for asking the Illinois General Assembly to require history classes to finally include the struggles and successes of this group. As a history and social studies teacher for almost four decades, I found that it was not always easy to impress teenagers. But when presented with facts from the past about discrimination toward whole groups of people, their eyes reflected an understanding that I knew they felt in their hearts. This was especially true when presented with facts about recent laws against what they considered to be private behavior, such as interracial marriage or homosexual conduct between consenting adults in the their own homes. They were always appalled about how recently people were jailed for these behaviors.
"But instead, what I'm talking about is that leadership culture constantly comes back to me when I think about my experience with the Trump administration," Comey continued. "The  the loyalty oaths, the boss as the dominant center of everything, it's all about how do you serve the boss, what's in the boss' interests. It's the family, the family, the family, the family. That's why it reminds me so much and not, 'So what's the right thing for the country and what are the values of the institutions that we're dealing with?'"
One reason is because I tend to sort my friendships, both online and in real life, by ideology. We all do. And Facebook's algorithms magnify that sorting process by sharing my more liberal, Trump-bashing posts with my most liberal, Trump-bashing friends, who it turn share them with their most liberal, Trump-bashing friends.
On the second Friday of the month, the galleries and studio spaces that stretch along South Halsted in Pilsen welcome in visitors with lively receptions. The regular Chicago Arts District event, which is held from 6 to 10 p.m. and has been running for more than 15 years, is a no-brainer for date night, especially as the weather gets stroll-friendlier. Each stop on the self-guided art walk offers something a little different, but they all serve up plenty of good conversation starters and, often, a chance to talk with the artists or gallery owners themselves. Maps for navigating the evening are available at the information center at 1945 S. Halsted St.
At the 42nd annual event in Arlington Heights, Kate Hutchinson, an author, English teacher and former fine and performing arts coordinator at Buffalo Grove High School, urged students, parents and educators to protect and nurture the fine arts in the face of what she described as "STEM fever" sweeping the nation.
3214 N. Southport Ave., No. 3N, Chicago: $1,299,000 | Listed: Aug. 18, 2021



This three-bedroom home has two full bathrooms, one half-bath, and crown molding. The kitchen has hardwood flooring, fresh tile backsplash, a pantry, an island and space for a table. An open concept living and dining room on the main level features wainscoting and a fireplace. A separate family room and a breakfast nook are also on the main level, and an upper-level living room can be converted into a fourth bedroom. This home has five private outdoor areas, including a composite rooftop deck, a front porch, an enclosed brick space thats turf and tile, and two rear decks. A wet bar with a wine refrigerator, a storage room, and garage parking complete this home.



Agent: Tommy Choi, Keller Williams, 773-851-5840



*Some listing photos are virtually staged, meaning they have been digitally altered to represent different furnishing or decorating options.



To feature your luxury listing of $800,000 or more in Chicago Tribunes Dream Homes, send listing information and high-res photos to ctc-realestate@chicagotribune.com.



Join our Chicago Dream Homes Facebook group for more luxury listings and real estate news.
"What goes into the Lake Michigan column is that it is more scalable," Di Santo said. "If the connection were here now, we could start serving our current customer base. Whereas with the Fox River plant, a lot of the numbers are to build a plant that is capable of handling a larger population. We would have to spend money upfront assuming the village will be built out at some point."
"It can hardly be said that Martin Garcia participated in the act of being shot," Medina's attorneys wrote. "Conversely, should the prosecutions be joined, nothing would prohibit Martin Garcia from testifying in his defense and identifying Anthony Medina as the person that shot him, according to the prosecution's theory of the case."
Rosinski said his sentence was partly shaped by the principles that apply to terrorism. While he told the court the motivations and intentions in the case aren't precisely the same as those related to terrorism activities, he said the crime requires the court to "send a clear message" to those conspiring to kill multiple people that "they will pay a heavy price."
Digging deeper it's the striking juxtaposition that the Philadelphia incident conjures up that's so very poignant. It awakens memories of those horrific images from the height of the civil rights movement when my parents' generation were beaten, spat upon and arrested at lunch counters throughout the South for trying to sit down and order a cup of coffee. Fast-forward to more than a half-century later, and were faced with the irony of ironies, when blacks are humiliated and arrested for not ordering a cup of coffee.
"That is being prepared in case something happens and you can't speak for yourself. And that can happen when you're 20 or 30. It doesn't just happen to people who have an illness that is progressing. It could happen because of a car accident. It could happen at any point in an unexpected manner," she said.
"We are overjoyed that Fr. Merkelis has been named President of Providence Catholic," Principal John Harper said in a statement. "He has been the school's spiritual leader for many years and he stepped up to fill the leadership position of acting President for the past few months and has done a wonderful job in that role."
"You want to serve your community, you want to volunteer and be involved, but you have to balance that with the needs of your family," Traynere said. "I cannot be effective if I am under financial constraints."
"We expected business to be better than it was," Little said Thursday. "All you can say is this is business. If you don't thrive you don't survive. It was in the company's best interest to close at this time."
"If we're going to have policies that we are going to bring together  it's important to understand what the Republican ideas are, what the other ideas are," said Dean, viewing it from his perspective as a Democrat. "Let's have a look at that and see if there isn't some truth to (the Republican argument)."
"It's important to remember that no one retailer defines the experience at Spring Hill Mall, and we will continue to bring in new-to-market and local brands that further complement and support our existing leading retail lineup," the release said. "We are confident we will fill this space  just like we did with other vacancies at the property that are now occupied by H&M, Cinemark, Victoria's Secret & Pink and The Chubby Bullfrog among others  with a retailer that this vibrant community wants and needs."
As treasurer of the Elgin Development Group, Sanders cited the program as an example of how the group and the schools are working together on careers and academics under the Regional Career Pathways initiative. He said the program in welding does not duplicate other school districts' offerings and is open to students in Burlington School District 301 and Carpentersville District 300.
Pedersen said if the property were to be developed, the occupant would need to demonstrate that the lot had been assessed by an engineer and show compliance with the metropolitan water reclamation district's stormwater management ordinance. Pedersen is a member of the county zoning board, which is expected in early May to consider the proposal for recommendation to the county board.
Ezra also said that the 70th anniversary represents a point at which there are now generations for who Israel has always existed as well as those who remember when Israel did not exist. The latter group remembers the days when its founders brought it into being and fought for its continuous existence. For every generation, the lessons of Yom Ha'atzmaut should be to cherish and support Israel, to not take it for granted, and to celebrate its existence, he said.
That incident, as we all know now, was the tragic engine failure and resulting broken window that nearly sucked a woman out of the plane. As awful as that story was, I was heartened by the stories of the bystanders who, despite potential peril to them, rushed to try to pull her out and plug that hole at 32,000 feet.
The practice of holding the federal budget hostage to controversial partisan party maneuvers has now gone on for some years. In 1994, Republicans took control of the House of Representatives after 40 years in minority status. New Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich of Georgia dramatically accelerated the trend of shifting that office from a relatively nonpartisan to highly partisan pulpit, a marked departure.
Holmes said he worries about the impact a teacher using a racial slur in class had on the children and would like to see the district offer the students counseling services as they would for other traumatic situations. Holmes emphasized the sensitivity around the slur and said he felt that the district felt compelled to act because of the word used, but minimized its response.
As Guinea worm disease is set to become the second human disease in history to be eradicated, following small pox, scientists are debating whether they should use CRSPR to eliminate mosquitos by altering the DNA to cause the insects to become sterile.
Blastic said when she got involved with the group several years ago, the daily average of people killed by gun violence was 89 people per day. "Despite the work we're doing, the numbers are going the wrong way," Blasic said.
Recent school shootings like the one in Parkland, Fla., prompted Jen Wylie, Kelley Brown and Smita Shastri, mothers of elementary school students, to think about how they could make a difference. Their idea was Tall Grass Parents Demand Action, a group that wants to press lawmakers and leaders to find ways to protect children from the violence.
Someone shattered the rear passenger side window of a car parked in the 100 block of Division Street and stole a 10-inch television that had been attached to the interior roof between 2 p.m. April 15 and 8:20 a.m. April 17. Estimated loss is $4,000.
"The driver fled the scene of the traffic stop and nearly struck the chief before he was able to move out of the way," Kellogg said.
He said he had hoped to receive some funding from the Little Calumet River Basin Commission for the project, but the request was denied. He said he would re-apply, seeking funding for engineering costs only.
Indiana University Northwest's School of Public and Environmental Affairs and Center for Urban and Regional Excellence, in collaboration with Ivy Tech Community College, is hosting a series of free events about public affairs and ways local citizens can get involved. Demystifying Government: Lake County will be held from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Thursday in the Lake County Government Center, 2293 N Main St., Crown Point. The event will feature a wide variety of speakers. More information is with Joseph Gomeztagle at 219-981-4288 or jgomezta@iun.edu. A forum on Child Abuse and Neglect will be held from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Friday in the Theater at the Arts and Sciences Building on the IU Northwest campus, 3400 Broadway, Gary. More information is with Marsheila Harris at 219-981-5630 or mdharris@iun.edu.
The bright spot in the county that year for the primary was Boone Township where, thanks to a school referendum for the Hebron schools, turnout varied by precinct from 35.6 percent to almost 48 percent, according to the county website. The referendum passed by 23 votes after failing the previous year by four votes.
"Among other tactics, Milton supplied the adult victim with drugs and caused her to fear for her safety in order to make her more compliant," the release states.
"Social media makes it more convenient, rather than having to send letters or emails. I try to keep up with it all. It's actually one of the most rewarding parts of my job," she said.
Zero is the name of the game for Centennial goalkeeper
Our weekly round up of other news affecting foreign investors throughout Asia:

Thailands Special Economic Zones  Opportunities for Investment

Likely to benefit further from Thailands continued economic growth are businesses that choose to locate in Special Economic Zones (SEZs) in Thai border provinces. Here, we analyze the opportunities and incentives on offer in these SEZs.

Auto Components Manufacturing in India: Robust Investment Outlook, Growth Potential

Indias rapidly increasing domestic demand and proximity to key Asian markets has made it a strong auto components sourcing hub. In 2016-17, the annual turnover of the auto component industry in India crossed US$43 billion; it is expected to reach US$115 billion in 2020-21.

Russia Looks at Creating Offshore Financial Centers Similar to Delaware and Hong Kong

Russias Vedomosti newspaper has reported that the Russian Government is planning the creation of two offshore financial centers (OFCs) with special legal systems in the Kaliningrad Region and the Vladivostok in Russias Far Eastern Primorsky Krai territory to support business and trade.

Vietnams Growing Pharmaceutical Market

Vietnam pharmaceutical industry has grown significantly in the last decade but it continues to seek foreign capital and expertise to reduce its dependence on imports. Read more to know about the industry challenges, consumer trends, trade figures, and market entry modes.
A police investigation is underway after four masked men broke into a museum in the city of Bath in Southwest England and stole valuable Chinese artifacts.



Officers said they believe the thieves targeted the Museum of East Asian Art on Bennet Street and items could have been "stolen to order".

The museum said that more than 40 objects were stolen including jade, ceramics and gold pieces.

A tinned bronze marriage mirror is one of the oldest items taken, dating back to the Tang Dynasty (618-907).

Nicole Chiang, the museum's curator, said: "We are deeply shocked and saddened by the burglary as we are preparing for our 25th anniversary celebrations. Not only do the stolen objects have significant historical and cultural value, they also hold irreplaceable emotional value for our founder."

Avon and Somerset Constabulary said witnesses reported the break-in at around 1:20 am on Tuesday.

Four masked men were seen breaking into the first-floor window of the building and making off in a dark-colored SUV.

Investigations are still underway as officers make door-to-door enquires and look through security camera footage.

"Due to the items stolen and the speed of the burglary we suspect this to be a targeted attack with the artifacts possibly stolen to order," said Detective Sergeant Matthew Reed. "These items range in monetary value, but their cultural significant is priceless."

Officers have seized a white Ford Transit van which had been stolen from Balance Street and was left at the scene.

Any witnesses or persons with information are asked to contact police.
Recently, an exhibition of paintings from the DPRK was held in Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang province.

This exhibition displayed more than 100 works of different styles from about 20 top artists in the county.

Different from the paintings of other countries, the DPRK works show realistic styles, unique emotional interpretation and strong feelings of national pride.




A new film company was founded Wednesday during the Eighth Beijing International Film Festival and will spend 200 million yuan (US$31.86 million) on a film about Princess Wencheng from the Tang Dynasty.



Usunhome Pictures, a subsidiary of Usunhome Group, was officially launched at a press conference in Beijing that was a sideline event of the ongoing film festival. The new company released its production plan for two independently developed film projects and one television project. The most important project announcement was for a major historical period epic named "Mission Unpredictable," which will be based on the story of Princess Wencheng from the Tang Dynasty.

Six years ago, Usunhome Group produced a popular stage drama about Princess Wencheng in Lhasa. The newly founded film subsidiary will now bring the story to the big screen as a joint production with the Beijing Film Academy and Youth Film Studio. The film will be directed by Jin Tiemu, who directed critically acclaimed documentary films "The Old Summer Palace" and "Legend of The Tang Emipire."

Princess Wencheng, a member of the royal clan, was allowed to marry King Songtsen Gampo of Tibet by Emperor Taizong (Li Shimin) of Tang Dynasty in 641. She is believed by scholars to have introduced Chinese culture and Buddhism to Tibet.

Executives from Usunhome Pictures, collaborators and guests pose for a group photo at a press conference held during the Eighth Beijing International Film Festival in Beijing on April 18, 2018. [Photo courtesy of Usunhome Pictures]





Qiu Wei, chairman of Usunhome Group, said the film company will promote Chinese culture through film and television projects. "Through making the best film and television projects, we will tell good Chinese stories, demonstrate ethnic aesthetics, express cultural confidence and touch the world with motion pictures."

Hou Guangming, secretary of the CPC party committee of Beijing Film Academy, also stated that "movies, as an important vehicle of national cultural soft power, are an important indication of the prosperity and development of China's cultural industries." He hopes the Princess Wencheng film will bring together the strengths of all parties involved and create a good movie with academic value for the Chinese film industry.

"Mission Unpredictable" will begin filming in October, director Jin Tiemu said, adding that he wants to make a heroic adventure film told from the perspective of commoners of the Tang Dynasty that also recreates the era's visual aesthetics.

Besides the Princess Wencheng project, Usunhome Pictures will also produce an adventure documentary film called the "The Realm," which will explore the secrets of the uninhabited areas of Qiangtang and feature a search for the legendary animal graveyard Bamao Qiongzong, while also incorporating elements from the best-selling novel "The Tibet Code."
China said on Thursday that unilateralism and trade protectionism will inevitably harm others without benefiting oneself as the global economy is deeply integrated.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying made the remarks when asked to comment on a U.S. Federal Reserve report released Wednesday.

According to the report, known as the beige book, businesses in much of the U.S. reported significant price increases for steel and aluminum products, because of tariffs on steel and aluminum imports.

It also said that firms in multiple sectors, including manufacturing and transportation, expressed concern about the tariffs' impact.

Hua quoted a report from the Brookings Institution saying the U.S.-China trade war will result in the loss of more than 2.1 million jobs in 2,700 U.S. counties.

In March, 107 Republican members of congress signed a letter urging President Donald Trump not to go through his tariff plan.

In the letter, the lawmakers wrote: "we urge you to reconsider the idea of broad tariffs to avoid unintended negative consequences to the U.S. economy and its workers."

At a working lunch with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Wednesday, Trump said the word "reciprocal" will be the primary word that the U.S. is going to be using.

"China, as an example, when they send a car to us, it's 2.5 percent tax. When we send a car to them, number one, they don't take it, and number two, it's 25 percent tax," Trump said.

When asked to comment on Trump's remarks, Hua retorted with facts:

First, the U.S. charges 2.5 percent tariff on imported cars but 25 percent on imported trucks;

Second, China has set a maximum tariff of 25 percent for whole vehicles, but only 10 percent for auto parts;

Third, most of the American cars sold to China are produced by the subsidiaries of the U.S. automobile companies in China.

Hua said General Motors(GM) sold about 4 million cars in China in 2017, and Cadillac has sold more cars in China than in the United States.

"It should be said that American auto companies have enjoyed a huge dividend in China," said Hua.

On the other hand, the U.S. exported more than 280,000 vehicles to China in 2017, while China exported only 53,000 vehicles to the U.S., said Hua, noting that it makes no sense to compare the import tax rates for whole vehicles of China and the U.S..

With regard to "reciprocal", Hua said as far as tariffs are concerned, the WTO does not have the principle of tariff reciprocity and WTO members also have different levels of tariffs.

Reciprocity and fairness can not speak for themselves, so standards can not be formulated according to one's own interests and needs, she said.

"Instead, we must rely on equal consultations to formulate unified international rules and standards and we must all respect them," said Hua.

To trade under coercion is by no means reciprocal and fair, she said, warning that self-righteous action may end up with suffering the consequences.

When answering a question about whether China's recent opening-up initiatives in the automobile industry are in response to U.S. pressure, Hua said China will advance reform and opening-up in accordance with the established goals and pace.

She said China's full liberalization of manufacturing industry is a clear indication of its opposition to trade and investment protectionism.

China supports the extensive and in-depth development of economic globalization and supports Chinese and foreign enterprises in achieving common development on a level playing field, she said.

"We welcome all countries to share the opportunities of China's opening-up and development," said Hua.

She noted that whoever engages in protectionism against China means that he has closed the door to China.
A leading Chinese expert has stressed that China's home-grown Beidou Navigation Satellite System demonstrates the necessity for the country to grasp a core technology that is entirely self-developed, after a US ban on a leading Chinese smartphone maker.

On Monday, the US Department of Commerce banned US companies from selling key components to ZTE for seven years, which many insiders believe will bring a huge loss to the company.

The Beidou Navigation Satellite System, or BDS, independently developed and operated by China, is named after the Chinese term for the Big Dipper constellation. The project was formally launched in 1994, and it began to serve China in 2000, and then the Asia-Pacific region in 2012.

According to a white paper on the BDS, China upholds the principles of "independence, openness, compatibility and gradualness" in the system's construction and development. By "independence," it means to uphold independent construction, development and operation of the BDS, and acquire the ability to independently provide satellite navigation services to the rest of the world.

Yang Yuguang is a professor from the China Aerospace Science & Industry Corporation and the secretary of the International Astronautical Federation Space Transportation Committee. He stressed that it's necessary for China to build its own navigation satellite system using core technologies that are completely indigenous.

"In the space capable nations of the whole world, the United States and Russia have global positioning systems. And also the European Union or the ESA has its own navigation satellite system called Galileo. And for India and Japan, they also built their regional navigation satellite systems. So you can see, almost all the space capable nations with no exception has built their own navigation satellite systems and of course China should do it," said Yang.

Some reports have shown that an object's position can be located as accurate as within one meter by using the BDS. Yang Yuguang said there's still much room to improve such accuracy by developing China's own technology.

"According to the official release, the Beidou system can provide positioning accuracy better than ten meters. They can also provide more accurate services. With a ground enhance system, they can provide accuracy better than one meter. I should emphasize that the navigation satellite system has been used widely and it has already formed a huge industry, which values billions or even trillions of dollars," said Yang.

Many models of smartphone brands such as Huawei, Xiaomi and HTC support the BDS, and more are expected to do so in the future. China has already sold over 50 million domestically manufactured chips connected to the system in the past five years. By 2020, the value of China's satellite navigation business is expected to surpass 400 billion yuan, or about 58 billion U.S. dollars. Around 60 to 80 percent of that value will be generated by the BDS.




In today's China, it does not take long for one to see the thriving internet sector.

In any city, people use their mobile phones every day to shop, order food, hail a car, pay utilities and do many other things.

In all, China has 700 million internet users, more than 4 million websites, the world's most extensive 4G network and a huge online marketplace. Its retail transactions combined are larger than anywhere else.

The country's internet industry began to develop in the 1990s, but the pace notably picked up the past two decades.

Take internet infrastructure for example. In 2017, China added 7.05 million kilometers of fiber-optic cable, extending its total length in the country by 23.2 percent.

The watershed event: a speech President Xi Jinping made on April 19, 2016, on the work of cybersecurity and the growth of the information age.

The speech and many others made by Xi since the 18th CPC National Congress in 2012 showed the strategic thinking on building China's cyber strength.

A State plan to develop a "digital China" over the next decade was issued. Substantial progress is aimed at the five years that began in 2016.

Three principles have been made clear.

First, China's cyberspace development should adhere to the people-centered development philosophy. Xi has said that internet-based services should be expanded to reach more people, that costs should be lowered and that most people should benefit.

Second, Xi said big data was the next stage of digital development. He has ordered a study of big data's development and its implications for society. He said China should examine its gains and shortfalls in this particular area and push for a national big data strategy.

Third, building a "community with a shared future in cyberspace". Xi has called for global efforts to make the interneta common homeland for humanitymore beautiful, cleaner and safer.

Remarkable advances have been made, such as in government e-administration. Across the country, nearly 32,000 government websites have been set up to bring public services online. Mobile apps are being used for the public and government to interact. The internet reaches many areas.

Life is easier for online trainer Zhang Fan. Using a new camera and software system, he can monitor the progress of each student in his virtual class and have the computer design individualized teaching plans.

Business is in bloom for tea farmers in southern Guangdong province. Like many living in remote mountains, they use the internet to sell local products to customers across the country.

China's digital economy grew to 27 trillion yuan ($4.3 trillion) in 2017, making up 32.9 percent of the GDP. With the expansion of good roadways and the internet, e-commerce has become a big driver of rural consumption.

Developing a "digital China" is good for boosting the people's sense of fulfillment and is needed to speed up China's modernization.

Under the leadership of the CPC Central Committee with Xi at the core, China's cyber strength will continue to push for the Chinese dream of national rejuvenation.




As part of the events that mark China's Space Day, the first China Aerospace Conference will be held in Harbin in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province on April 24, according to an official from China National Space Administration (CNSA).

More than 2,000 people have signed up for the conference, which will be attended by aerospace professionals from the government, state-owned and private enterprises, and universities, said Li Guoping, a spokesman of the CNSA on Thursday.

There will be 12 forums on aerospace technology development, innovation, military-civilian integration, and education.

The conference will create a platform for researchers from both home and abroad to exchange ideas, Li said.




A kangaroo at an animal park in South China died after being pelted with jagged stones by visitors, while another was injured in a separate incident days later.

The incidents both occurred at the Fuzhou Zoo in Fujian province early this month, sparking outrage among animal lovers online, Strait News reported on Thursday.

An employee of the zoo's animal rescue center, surnamed Chen, said the dead kangaroo was a 12-year-old female. She was hit by a sharp stone on April 4 that injured her left foot, which led to massive bleeding the next day.

A few days later, a 5-year-old male was injured when a visitor threw part of a brick into the animal's enclosure. The zoo's kangaroo breeder, surnamed Zhang, told Strait News that visitors have been known to throw stones to make the marsupials jump around, or to wake them up if they are sleeping. She said kangaroos usually are active from 8 to 10 am and 3 to 5 pm, and tend to rest under trees the remainder of the day.

After learning of the attacks, many netizens called for animal parks to clamp down on uncivilized behavior.

"Animals in the zoo are there to help us better understand them and ourselves. They're not responsible for performing as you wish. Such visitors should be blacklisted," a netizen named "Duomi" wrote on Sina Weibo.

The zoo has security cameras in areas with protected animals, but most are pointed toward the enclosures rather than at visitor areas, which means the offenders responsible for the kangaroos' injuries were not caught on camera.

The zoo has applied to the Fujian city government for funding to install high-definition surveillance cameras. It also asked people to show love toward the zoo animals and to protect them.

Like many other zoos, Fuzhou Zoo separates visitors and kangaroos with wooden fences. Signs warn people not to feed the animals or throw objects.

After the two attacks, the zoo reduced the number of kangaroos exposed in the visiting zone. Now, only three kangaroos can be seen by visitors. The body of the dead female kangaroo will be preserved for display.

"People feeding animals with human food, or touching or scaring zoo animals, are often seen in China," said Sun Quanhui, chief scientist from World Animal Protection, an international nonprofit animal welfare organization.

He said many visitors are not aware of the potential risks to both visitors and animals that come from breaking the zoo's rules.

Apart from raising public awareness about animal protection, those who break the rules and cause severe injuries to animals should be investigated for legal responsibility, he said.




Authorities have launched an investigation into a sewage discharge in three industrial parks in Lianyungang, Jiangsu province, the provincial environmental protection bureau said on Thursday.

The discharges occurred in the city's Guanyun county. Monitoring, supervisory and law enforcement experts gathered in Lianyungang to address the environmental situation, with results to be announced later.

The issue was first brought to light by China Central Television on Wednesday in a report showing a layer of white foam clogging many farmland ditches. The sewage, locals claim, was released into the Guanhe River through "illegal underground pipes" from nearby factories.

At the Yangshanhua factory, for example, a valve was installed on a sewage discharge pipe linking the plant's sewage treatment pond to a central sewage treatment facility in an adjacent industrial park. When the valve opens, sewage is routed into the treatment plant, but when it is closed, the sewage runs directly into the river through "secret pipes".

Residents said the pipes were used to save factories sewage treatment expenses. Also in the report, large volumes of chemical waste were found in downstream stretches of the Guanhe. At Helirui - a dye and chemical company - 10 metric tons of buried solid waste was dug up between August 2011 and February 2012.

Jiangsu has 953.9 kilometers of Yellow Sea coastline, most of which is near 10 coastal industrial parks that have been set up to boost the region's economy, experts said.

Situated at the mouth of the Guanhe, Guanyun county was once a thriving source of high-quality aquatic products, especially shrimp. However, because of pollution, locals who depend on farming or fishing for a living are having a tough time.

Officials of the Guanyun government said corrective measures will be promptly implemented, and they will investigate the reported illegal pipes. Intelligent management systems and real-time online monitoring will also be employed to ensure standardized sewage discharge, they said.

Jiangsu is the second-biggest contributor to China's GDP, behind Guangdong province. Wu Zhenglong, Jiangsu's governor, recently pledged to place greater emphasis on further improving air and water quality.

In a previous interview with China Daily, he said that as of the end of last year more than 1,400 chemical factories had been shut down in Jiangsu since the launch of an action plan in 2016, which was intended to cut production within high-energy consuming industries, tackle pollution and improve the ecology.

"The province is very aware that it has a long way to go to control emissions. The government will employ stricter strategies with higher standards to fight pollution and promote the economy's green transformation," the governor told China Daily during the annual session of the National People's Congress in March.




Beijing received 746,000 inbound tourists from January to March, according to the Municipal Bureau of Statistics.



Among the sum, 121,000 came from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, up 1.1 percent year-on-year.

Of the 625,000 foreign tourists, 133,000 were American, up 5.6 percent from the same period last year. About 47,000 tourists came from Japan, down 0.5 percent. The number of South Korean tourists was 44,000, down 31.1 percent.

In terms of continental origins, the city welcomed 338,000 tourists from Asia, 184,000 from Europe, 182,000 from the Americas, 26,000 from Oceania, and 13,000 from Africa.

Many of Beijings tourist sites implemented the "Cultural Creative Industry + Tourism" program, such as the Forbidden City, the National Museum, and the Beijing Zoo, which the citys statistics bureau credited for their increase in revenue.

According to its data, the revenue at Beijings tourist areas in the first quarter reached 1.42 billion yuan (US$226.37 million), a year-on-year increase of 5.8 percent. Merchandise sales at these sites took in 55.02 million yuan, up 5.9 percent year on year.

For the hospitality industry, hotels with annual turnover reaching 2 million yuan or more in the city received 619,000 inbound tourists in the first quarter. Three-star hotels hosted 38.9 percent more guests, totaling 19,000, while the guest number for hotels of two stars and below reduced significantly.

Also during the first quarter, the number of Beijings outbound tourists reached 1.25 million, among which 350,000 people traveled to Thailand and 170,000 journeyed to Japan. Macao, the U.S. and Italy also ranked among the most popular destinations.
Sino-Japanese trade has undergone a marked recovery since despite sharp fluctuations in the past. [Photo/Xinhua]





Holding their first high level economic dialogue since 2010, China-Japan relations have entered a new trajectory as their foreign ministers endeavoured to find converging factors to further consolidate their bilateral ties. Following this meeting, Premier Li Keqiang will be attending the China-Japan-South Korea summit and later on this year an exchange of state visits between the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the Chinese President Xi Jinping is currently being planned.

Pledging to upgrade relations, the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and his counterpart Taro Kono agreed on a number of issues. While reciprocating the Japanese goodwill and positive policies, Wang Yi observed, "We are also faced with some complex and sensitive elements, but together with Japan's efforts we would like to bring China-Japan relations back on a path of sustainable and normal development."

Having had a difficult relationship due to maritime disputes and a legacy of war, China and Japan have been working on a rapprochement since a year ago. Being the world's second and third largest economies, there may have been an element of rivalry in the past but if they join their strengths they could exercise more influence.

Several factors have caused the thawing in relations, mainly the ongoing negotiations for the nuclear disarmament of North Korea, Japan announcing its support for the Belt and Road Initiative and finding common ground regarding the prevention of a global trade war.

Firstly, perceiving China's influence over North Korea, especially since Kim Jong-un's recent visit to Beijing, Japan wants to stay engaged with China and participate more actively in ending the standoff by finding a satisfactory resolution. In this regard, the Japanese FM Kono said he and Wang Yi both "confirmed that we will work in close co-ordination, while fully implementing the relevant U.N. Security Council resolutions, to make the complete, irreversible and verifiable abandonment of North Korea's nuclear and missile (programs) a reality."

Meanwhile, President Trump and the South Korean leader Moon Jae-in also plan to have direct one to one talks with the North Korean leader. Notably, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is visiting President Trump in Mar a Lago this week to discuss diplomacy with North Korea.

Secondly, achieving the breakthrough was relatively easier ever since Japan expressed support for the Belt and Road Initiative. While China's vision for improving connectivity and trade has been the BRI, Japan's has been the Asia Africa Growth Corridor (AAGC) which symbolizes its "free and open Indo-Pacific strategy."

Similar in nature to BRI, the AAGC is about infrastructural development in two continents, namely Asia and Africa. Though it may have been an attempt to counter the influence of the Gwadar port under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, it could however be complementary instead. Endorsing the Belt and Road Initiative, Jin Jianmen from the Fujitsu Research Institute in Tokyo has said, "Japanese enterprises should seize opportunities to cooperate with leading Chinese companies and share the fruits of China's development by joining the initiative." Thus focusing on Belt and Road Initiative co-operation as well as trade and investment has proven a positive turning point for the two neighbors.

Thirdly, back from the brink, Sino-Japanese trade has undergone a marked recovery since despite sharp fluctuations in the past. Though it has foreign exchange reserves worth $2.9 trillion, Japan has remained in economic stagnation for over two decades. In contrast, the Chinese economy will be five times bigger by 2025 and even now it is 2.5 times that of Japan. Reviving the stalled bilateral economic dialogue, Japan and China can be on the same wavelength and effectively contain the global trade war by increasing mutual co-operation.

Additionally, both nations have also been working on a "Maritime and Aerial Communication Mechanism" to prevent unintended collisions in the area so there is going to be more regular and positive engagement in the days ahead.

Finally, 2018 marks the 40th anniversary of the signing of the China-Japan Treaty of Peace and Friendship so there can be no better time to work towards improving relations.

Sabena Siddiqui (Twitter: @sabena_siddiqi) is a foreign affairs journalist and lawyer based in Pakistan.





Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.
ZTE [Photo/Xinhua]

Ongoing simmering trade tensions assumed entirely new and troubling dimensions as the U.S. Commerce Department hit ZTE, China's second-largest and the world's fourth-largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer, with a seven-year ban from being able to purchase parts and software from U.S. businesses. The company has clients all over the world, including major American carriers and businesses.

This marks the most serious escalation thus far by the U.S. in a trade dispute that is now spilling over into the broader geopolitical arena.

The ban could prove catastrophic for ZTE, as some critical components in its business require chips and software produced by U.S. companies. Furthermore, Google could also revoke ZTE's Android software license, rendering sales of its phones outside of China nearly impossible. The ramifications are wide-ranging in both the short and the long term.

One of the most significant takeaways from this action is that the U.S. has opened a new front in the trade dispute by attacking private enterprise. This has troubling implications. Companies which had ZTE as a client will also suffer from this. Chip manufacturing giant Qualcomm has business to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars with ZTE. Acacia Communications Inc., which depended on ZTE for nearly a third of its revenue for 2017, saw its shares dive 35 percent on the news, causing it to suspend transactions for the time being. Other partners are also being adversely affected.

Last month, Huawei, another Chinese smartphone company, announced that it was unable to secure a deal to sell its flagship series in the U.S. through carriers, which is usually a death knell for a product in the American market. This is in addition to steps taken by the U.S. Congress to bar purchases of carrier-grade and enterprise networking equipment and technology products from ZTE and Huawei. Policymakers cited unproven fears pertaining to spying  which is quite ironic, considering the recent revelations of election meddling facilitated by U.S.- and U.K.-based tech companies.

Both ZTE and Huawei are at the forefront of research and development of next-generation communication and connectivity technologies and standards, referred to as "5G," and chances are that their development will now also be hampered. One very unpleasant outcome might be the emergence of multiple competing, incompatible standards, which will prove to be a veritable nightmare for consumers, carriers and phone manufacturers.

There is also a possibility that other companies may be targeted in this fashion, which will most definitely inspire a similar response from the other side.

The second takeaway from this measure is that the U.S. may have opened a Pandora's box by selectively demanding the enforcement of international rules based on its own geopolitical and economic interests. The U.S. Commerce Department stated that the measure was taken due to the prohibited sale of technology to Iran and North Korea, two countries sanctioned by the U.S. for reasons which include nuclear proliferation.

What is interesting in this regard is that the U.S. previously ignored considerably more serious guidelines regarding the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and signed a controversial bilateral nuclear agreement with India, despite serious and justified reservations expressed by the international community. At the time, the U.S. thought little of international rules and regulations as it tried to woo a potential partner in the region, ignoring the disruption it was causing in the power balance and already-fraught relations between the beneficiary country and its two nuclear-armed neighbors, Pakistan and China.

The ZTE ban again raises the existential question of arbitrary sanctions when the U.S. and its allies are reaping massive profits selling arms and weaponry to nations and outfits that are wreaking havoc on global peace and security, as well as responsible for multiple ongoing humans rights violations and catastrophes such as those in Syria, Yemen and Palestine. The UN is on record attesting to the criminality of these atrocities.

There is a worrying trend emerging as the scope and intensity of these events widens. This follows the imposition of tariffs on the import of solar panels manufactured in China. Considering that in the US, installation and maintenance costs are a more substantial portion of the cost of moving to solar, both environmentalists and notable companies involved in solar such as Elon Musk's SolarCity complained that this measure would only raise costs and slow down adoption. In the long term, this trend of broadening the scope of sanctions and bans imposed for geopolitical reasons will impact technological progress and global stability adversely. The stakes have never been higher, as humanity stands on the cusp of the most profound transformation since the onset of the industrial revolution, arising from momentous changes brought about by technologies such as big data, machine learning, AI, the "internet of things," the blockchain, and social media. Never has there been a worse time in history to initiate a convoluted and messy trade dispute.

It would be in the world's best interests if there was a conscious effort to not repeat the mistakes of the past stemming from paranoia and narrow mindedness. There are a wide variety of frameworks and mechanisms in place to deal with trade disputes, and all options should be exhausted rationally before resorting to issuing ultimatums that could have unpredictable and undesirable repercussions.

The author is a journalist and media strategist currently based in Beijing.

Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.
Shaxi Town, one of the world's 100 most endangered sites listed by the World Monuments Fund is a place where you can breathe in fresh air around-the-clock. Shaxi is also a village with a long history that can be traced back to the Spring and Autumn period and the Warring States period (770 BC-221BC). Stone Treasure Mountain and the Friday Market are the two most popular tourist attractions in Shaxi Town. [China.org.cn]




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U.S. President Donald Trump said he is hopeful about his forthcoming meeting with Kim Jong Un, top leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), while warning about the consequences if the meeting did not go well.





"I hope to have a very successful meeting," Trump said at a joint news conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Florida on Wednesday, referring to his planned meeting with Kim scheduled in May or early June. "We will be doing everything possible to make it a worldwide success."





Yet, Trump made clear that he'd still be ready to pull out of what he called a "tremendous" meeting between the leaders of two countries that have been longtime adversaries.





"If I think that it's a meeting that is not going to be fruitful, we're not going to go," said the U.S. president.





"If the meeting, when I'm there, is not fruitful, I will respectfully leave the meeting, and we'll continue what we're doing or whatever it is that we'll continue," he added.





Washington and Pyongyang have started direct negotiations about the two leaders' meeting. Trump said that CIA chief Mike Pompeo has formed a "good relationship" with Kim in their secret meeting in Pyongyang last week.





Abe was on a two-day visit to the United States starting from Tuesday, the second of its kind since Trump assumed the presidency last year.




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On the western outskirts of Pyongyang, capital of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), a children's paradise is attracting hundreds of foreign visitors each week.

The Mangyongdae Schoolchildren's Palace welcomed a special group of guests, the Chinese art troupe led by Song Tao, head of the International Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, on Monday.

The children presented songs, dances, acrobatics and various musical performances to the guests, winning enthusiastic "bravos" and applause.

With the five-star national red flag of China as the stage background, a chorus of girls sang the Chinese song "Flying Red Flag," a selection, to the great joy of their guests.

"I have taught many years my students Chinese songs, including 'the March Song of the Chinese Communist Pioneers.' This time we also practised 'Flying Red Flag' as a specially selected song for Comrade Song Tao and his delegation," said Han Mi Hwa, a 53-year-old accordion teacher.

She is in charge of one of some 140 study groups of the palace which cover three major fields -- science, arts and sports, and offer free tuition to about 5,000 students daily.

Like all the teachers in the DPRK, Han said she regards her work as a mission tasked by the three top leaders of the country, Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un, who regard the welfare of the children as top priority.

"The children are the king of the country and we must give them everything they need before all others, sparing nothing," the DPRK's founding President Kim Il Sung once said when he met with foreign guests.

It is no wonder that the children's palace was built near the birthplace of Kim, an area known for beautiful hills, forests and rivers.

When it was dedicated to the children of the country on April 15, 1989, Kim personally came to cut the ribbons. It was also his birthday.

The design of the construction also reflects the idea of Kim, as it made two wings of the central building look like two arms of the main body, embracing a bronze statue of children riding a large chariot.

Covering a total floor space of over 105,000 sqm, the two-story mansion has a full-sized theater with 2,000 seats, gymnasium, swimming pool, library, e-reading room, electronic recreation hall and 4-dimensional simulation cinema.

Almost every Chinese guest was impressed by the modernity and comprehensiveness of the facilities of the palace after visiting the site.

"The theater is great. It shows the importance given to education and training of young artists by the DPRK and the art-loving character of its people," said Feng Ying, a renowned ballerina who visited Pyongyang with the Chinese art troupe.

"The children here are fantastic. They sing with (their) natural voice instead of relying on microphones. They are really shining, happy, polite and warm-hearted youngsters," said a retired government official from Beijing.

Korean dancing, music instruments, drum playing, Taekwondoo martial arts, embroidery, painting, and calligraphy are the favorites of the children here. Many of them are talented and were selected from various schools across the city to be trained and taught with these special skills.

Ying Chuaen, a 13-year-old boy who learns the accordion five days a week, was very grateful to his teachers who gave everything they knew to him in order that he could become a musician in the future.

"Yes, I am so fortunate to be here," he said after playing a Korean traditional song.

The DPRK's top leader Kim Jong Un pays great attention to the preservation and development of traditional culture of the country, said a guide for visitors identified herself with the surname of Kim.

When the top leader visited the palace two years ago, he asked the teachers to keep three scrolls of ancient calligraphy on the wall of the classroom as inspiration for future calligraphers.

"As spring has come to Pyongyang, numerous foreign guests are visiting this children's paradise each week. They can have glimpse into the children's welfare and growth of the country," said the guide.
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Outgoing Cuban President Raul Castro expressed on Thursday his confidence that the new leaders of the island would continue the path of the socialist revolution begun by Fidel Castro in 1959.

Speaking about the new president, Miguel Diaz-Canel, Castro highlighted his successor's fidelity to the revolution and his political firmness.

"The election of Diaz-Canel is not a coincidence. We have no doubt that he will be fully successful in his task due to his virtues, experience and dedication to duty," said Castro, who will remain as the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the ruling Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) until 2021.

In his speech to lawmakers of the Cuban parliament, Castro stressed Diaz-Canel's work as first secretary of the party in the provinces of Holguin and Villa Clara, as minister of higher education, and as first vice-president.

Concerning the country's new first vice-president, Salvador Valdes Mesa, the former president praised his work as Union and Party leader over several decades.

Castro insisted that the new direction of the country had the mission of ensuring this generational relay as well as guaranteeing the continuity of socialism.

"They must pay more attention to the young, for them to be better prepared when they have to assume higher positions in the political direction of the country," said Castro.

He stressed that the election process, which concluded on Thursday, was supported by the massive participation of the Cuban citizens who defend their revolution and socialist democracy.

Then, Castro aimed at the U.S. economic blockade maintained by Washington on the island since 1962.

He highlighted the limitations and damage provoked by the U.S. sanctions to the development of the Caribbean nation.

Punishments against institutions which carry out financial transactions with Havana, limitations on access to loans, and obstacles for foreign investors were just some of the damages mentioned by the revolutionary leader.

Castro recalled the restoring of diplomatic relations between Havana and Washington during the administration of Barack Obama.

"It proved that, despite political differences, it is possible to have a civilized and productive co-existence," he said.

He lashed out at the rollback in bilateral relations seen since Donald Trump entered the White House and dismissed the memorandum reinforcing the embargo against Cuba in June 2017 as "insulting."

Castro criticized the "aggressive and threatening tone" of the current U.S. government and its "neo-hegemonic pretensions" at the recent eighth Summit of the Americas in Peru.

Castro also rejected the unjustified excuse of alleged sonic attacks against U.S. diplomat to reduce staff at the American embassy in Havana and to expel Cuban diplomats from Washington.

"We don't need to receive lessons about human rights from anybody, especially from the U.S. government," said the revolutionary leader.

"Any strategy seeking to destroy the Revolution by confrontation or seduction will fail, and will be discarded by the Cuban people," he said.

Looking beyond the island, Castro also took time to thank international supporters. Castro used his platform to condemn the recent U.S. air strikes against Syrian targets, in retaliation for an alleged chemical attack by Damascus against its own citizens.

"Unfortunately these unilateral actions have become a regular practice against the nations of the Middle-East," said Castro.

Newly-elected president, Diaz-Canel, followed on by stating that Cuban foreign policy will not change because Havana "does not make concessions, and will not negotiate its principles, nor accept any pressures."
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Queen Elizabeth told the heads of more than 50 states Thursday that she wants the heir to the British throne, her eldest son Prince Charles, to succeed her as head of the Commonwealth.

The British monarch made her plea at Buckingham Palace where she hosted the opening ceremony of the 2018 Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting.

Although Queen Elizabeth succeeded her late father, King George VI, as head and has led the Commonwealth since the 1950s, there is no written rule that the job should automatically go to the serving British monarch.

Royal commentators described the Queen's comments as a rare intervention, just days ahead of her 92nd birthday this weekend.

The heads of governments will be debating the succession of their head when they hold a private retreat Friday at Windsor Castle.

The Commonwealth is an intergovernmental organization of 53 member states that are mostly former territories of the British Empire, with a combined population of 2.4 billion, a third of the world's population.

In her speech, the Queen said: "It is my sincere wish that the Commonwealth will continue to offer stability and continuity for future generations, and will decide that one day The Prince of Wales should carry on the important work started by my father in 1949."

Hannah Furness, royal correspondent at the Daily Telegraph newspaper, said the message from the Queen was the clearest signal yet about the future of the head of the commonwealth.

"Her highly significant speech, met with warm applause, is the most explicit statement she has made to date of her hopes for the Commonwealth's future, and the honorary and not hereditary position of its head," wrote Furness.

British Prime Minister Theresa May, speaking at the opening ceremony, said the meeting was taking place at a time of significant global challenges.

"The rules-based international system, which has consistently delivered both prosperity and peace, faces threats in many forms and on many fronts," said May.

"Climate change and extreme weather continue to take lives and damage livelihoods across the Commonwealth. And the new opportunities afforded by the digital world have brought with them new risks, with our cyber security under attack from individuals and state actors."

May has called on commonwealth countries to join in the fight against plastic pollution. She cited the decision by the British government to end the sale of plastic straws, drink stirrers and plastic-stemmed cotton buds.

May urged Commonwealth countries to join a newly-formed Clean Oceans Alliance and take action, with bans on microbeads, a commitment to cutting down on single use plastic bags, or other steps to eliminate avoidable plastic waste.
 Flash

South Korea and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) opened their first-ever hotline of direct dialogue between the leaders of the two sides ahead of the inter-Korean summit, the Blue House of South Korea said Friday.

Yun Kun-young, director for the Blue House's government situation room, told a press briefing that the connection of "the historic telephone line" between the leaders of the two Koreas was completed.

The phone line linked the Blue House with the State Affairs Commission of the DPRK. The phone for direct call to top DPRK leader Kim Jong Un was installed on the working desk inside the office of South Korean President Moon Jae-in. The DPRK hotline phone was also placed in Kim's office.

Working-level officials from the two sides made a test call for over four minutes at about 3:41 p.m. local time (0641 GMT). It had a good connection on the hotline, which Yun likened to hearing the call right in the next door.

Moon and Kim agreed to have their first conversation via the hotline before holding their first summit meeting on April 27 in the border village of Panmunjom.

It marked the first time since the 1950-1953 Korean War ended in armistice that the two Koreas linked the hotline for direct dialogue between respective leaders.

Concerned South Korean agencies planned to hold a meeting in Panmunjom Saturday to discuss security services for Moon during the upcoming summit, Yun said.

A separate meeting of the presidential committee to prepare for the third-ever inter-Korean summit will be held in Panmunjom next week, he added.

The first and second inter-Korean summits were held in Pyongyang in 2000 and 2007, respectively.

The third summit is set to be held at the Peace House, a South Korean building in Panmunjom on April 27.








By huaxia, Xinhua | Apr. 19, 2018

Close to 4,000 Chinese passengers use the Ethiopian airline's flight services on a daily basis, says the Ethiopian Airlines Group.

Ethiopia's flag carrier in its report presented to the Ethiopian parliament on Wednesday indicated that the Chinese passengers represent one of the largest customer bases of the airlines.

The Ethiopian airlines group, which is widely recognized as one of Africa's fastest growing airlines, has been frequently expressing its interest to attract Chinese passengers into the African continent and beyond.

Esayas Woldemariam, Managing Director of Ethiopian airline's International Service, recently told Xinhua that the airlines has strong aspirations to grow its relations with its Chinese customers towards "being the most Chinese-friendly transit hub and airline in the African continent."

Noting why the Ethiopian airline is preferred by majority of Chinese passengers, Woldemariam said that "we have a Chinese help desk here at the hub for passengers passing through here to Africa and coming back, we have Chinese dedicated staff here, we have Chinese crew on board, we have Chinese food, and we have Chinese call-center."

The airline also celebrates Chinese festivals in a bid to attract its Chinese customers, which include a special event for Chinese nationals returning home for the Chinese New Year, or Spring Festival every February.

Ethiopian Airlines is currently the biggest carrier of passenger and cargo between China and Africa, with 5 destinations in China that are Beijing, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Chengdu and Guangzhou. The company has also finalized its preparations to add Shenzhen on the list.
Moutai blends European cocktail culture with increased brand awareness By Wang Mingjie ( China Daily Europe ) Updated: 2018-04-20

Chinese distiller moves to conquer other continents with its focus firmly set on the fashionable French liquor market

The fiery Chinese liquor brand Moutai has made strong inroads in France, with efforts to acquaint drinkers with the unique taste of baijiu, which literally translates to "white liquor".

Lin Xuyang, vice-president of Cammy France Development, the sole distributor of Moutai in France, said the company sold around 60,000 bottles of the spirit last year, an increase of 30 percent year-on-year.

"This is an enormous improvement compared with when we first entered the French market in 2009," Lin said. "It was very di, cult at the beginning to sell a strong Chinese liquor in a country that is renowned for and proud of its wine."

Moutai is a popular brand of baijiu, which is distilled from locally grown high-quality sorghum and contains 53 percent alcohol by volume. It is a mainstay at every festival occasion in China, from New Year dinners and wedding receptions, to business banquets.

Because of Moutai's Chinese roots, Lin said the company's strategy in France focuses heavily on the Chinese community in the country, which accounts for 90 percent of total Moutai sales in France.

In recent years, the brand has grown in popularity among locals, as drinkers look for something new and different.

Nicolas Julhes, founder of boutique liquor store Julhes Paris, first encountered Moutai at a Chinese New Year tasting event in the French capital. "When I first tried Moutai, the taste was very impressive because I had never experienced such strong flavor before.

"As someone who works in the alcohol industry, I have tried a lot of fiery spirits before, but Moutai, as a strong white liquor, offers a unique taste and aroma," Julhes said. "What amazes me is that the texture of Moutai possesses the beauty of harmony.

"Under its strong kick, it has a complex texture, but also is permeated with a unique fragrance of sorghum."

Julhes said he likes to drink Moutai neat, as it often has a persistent, flamboyant, exotic essence that brings excitement to the table.

For the French to accept Moutai, it is as much about introducing the taste as about telling its story, Lin said, as the French are very particular about alcohol and usually tend to know the history behind a drink.

As a result, in 2017 Lin led a group of spirit experts - eight French, one German and one British - to the distiller in the town of Maotai in Southwest China's Guizhou province. Julhes was among the guests in the group.

"The trip to Moutai's place of origin was unforgettable, as it deepened my understanding of the Chinese culture. At the same time it has given me the opportunity to see the second-to-none manufacturing process of Moutai," said Julhes, who from that point on has been a fan of the fiery Chinese spirit.

Lin noted that bringing alcohol specialists to see how Moutai is produced is a good way to promote the drink in France, as it created a ripple effect across the industry. This year, he plans to take an even bigger group to the distiller in China, including drink specialists, bloggers and journalists.

Lin said Moutai's brand awareness in France was aided by its presence at Paris Cocktail Week, during which sommeliers and bartenders could find out more about the liquor, which is not widely known outside China, but is the most widely drunk alcohol in the world.

Moutai is well on its way to creating a strong presence in Europe.

In December 2016, State-owned Kweichow Moutai Group launched its iconic Moutai brand in Hamburg, Germany. About 300 guests were served the sorghum-derived liquor in three cocktails designed by a local bar catering service.

"Moutai has a smell and taste of cocoa, so in one cocktail we combined it with a chocolate vodka and chocolate bitters," said Alexander Brittnacher, founder of Next Level Cocktails.

"In another we looked for food pairing partners and we found that blackberries are a good combination."

The growing popularity of Moutai-based cocktails has extends to London. Paul Mathew, owner of the Arbitrager and the Hide cocktail bars in the British capital, said Moutai's strong aroma is tricky to compliment, so he likes to use things such as pomelo, strong teas, pear or smoky flavors to mix Moutai cocktails. The distinctive character of the spirit adds a complexity to drinks when mixed well, he added.

Lin said that Moutai's popularity abroad is helped by global events such as World Baijiu Day.

The event was launched in 2015 by Jim Boyce, who has run the nightlife blog Beijing Boyce and wine blog Grape Wall of China for nearly a decade, and has written about China's wine industry for both trade and mainstream publications.

It is a day on which innovative bars from all over the world create something imaginative with baijiu to improve brand awareness internationally. The informal theme is "beyond ganbei (bottoms up)" and participating venues in more than 20 cities have embraced the event, offering everything from cocktails, infusions and liqueurs to baijiu-inspired pizzas, beer and ice cream, and even food pairings.

To meet rising demand from home and abroad, Chinese liquor producer Kweichow Moutai Group will launch a new project that will produce 6,600 metric tons of liquor in 2018. The company plans to produce 136,000 tons of alcoholic beverages in 2023, including 56,000 tons of Moutai liquor.

In the first 10 months of 2017, Moutai exported 1,623 tons of alcoholic beverages and earned $281 million. The group's sales revenue is estimated to have exceeded 60 billion yuan ($9.5 billion, 7.8 billion euros, 6.7 billion) in 2017, with profits of 30 billion yuan, said Yuan Renguo, chairman of Kweichow Moutai Group.

By 2020, the amount of Moutai liquor sold overseas will account for at least 10 percent of the company's total production, according to the group's strategy.

wangmingjie@mail.chinadailyuk.com
Nope, youre not going to be sleeping for days once you read about these terrifying unsolved murder cases. Please proceed with caution, as some of these stories are truly unsettling. Not for the faint of heart. These cases can still be solved with public help.

WARNING: Please, do not read this unless you can handle upsetting content

The Grimes Sisters

Wikipedia

In December of 1956, Barbara and Patricia Grimes, 15 and 12 respectively, went out one night to see Love Me Tender, starring Elvis. They never came home. To this day, the case is still one of the biggest cold cases in Chicago. A month after the Grimes sisters went missing, their bodies were found naked and tossed to the side of a deserted road.
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STOW, Ohio - Stow Mayor Sara Kline will resign from her post in Stow and assume the role of Superintendent of Parks for Cuyahoga Falls.

"I treasure my time with Stow and will always look at these 12 1/2 years as among the highlights of my career," Kline said in a news release. "I am so proud to have been associated with the women and men who are employees of the city of Stow. Any success my administration has had is directly because of their dedication, commitment and service."

Kline has served as Stow mayor since 2011, and was a Stow councilwoman for six years prior to being elected mayor. Kline previously worked as a support coordinator at the Summit Board of Developmental Disabilities and a vocational rehabilitation counselor for the state.

Her resignation is effective Sunday, May 13. Stow City Council will appoint an interim mayor until a new one is elected.

"The city of Cuyahoga Falls is experiencing a rebirth and is in the midst of many progressive and creative projects," Kline stated. " I am very excited to become part of their team as the Superintendent of Parks and look forward to working with Mayor Walters and the entire administration."

Ongoing is a case in which Kline accused Ward 4 Councilman Bob Adaska of pushing her during a council meeting. He has pleaded not guilty to a minor misdemeanor charge, the Akron Beacon Journal reported.

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AKRON, Ohio - A Tallmadge man was found guilty Friday of sexually assaulting a passenger when he drove for the ride-sharing service Uber.

Brandon Franklin, 34, was convicted of sexual battery, a third-degree felony, in a March 25, 2017 incident that happened in Akron, the Summit County Prosecutor's Office said in a news release.

Judge Jason Wells will sentence him May 22 in Summit County Common Pleas Court.

"After three days of emotional testimony, we are pleased with the jury's verdict," Summit County Assistant Prosecutor Elliot Kolkovich said in a statement. "We are exceptionally proud of the victim in this case for having the courage to come forward and face her attacker in court."

Franklin drove a 22-year-old woman home from a bar and sexually assaulted her in her bedroom, police said.

The woman's friends determined to she was intoxicated and contacted Uber to get her a ride home. Franklin drove her to a home in East Akron, police said.

The woman woke up in bed as Franklin was sexually assaulting her, police said. She pushed him out of the bedroom and he ran from the home.

Detectives obtained a warrant for Franklin's arrest, and he turned himself in at the Akron Police Department.

To comment on this story, visit Friday's crime and courts comments page.
BEREA, Ohio -- Berea Finance Director Dana Kavander, CPA, announced her resignation during the April 16 Berea City Council meeting. She has worked for the city since November 1990 and will continue until April 30.

"I feel very blessed to be a part of this fine community," Kavander said at her final council meeting. "I was hired by Mayor (Stanley) Trupo to become the city's first internal auditor, and then a few years later I was honored to become the director of finance.

"I am appreciative of the opportunity to have worked for three mayors and many council members. However, I am excited to embark on the next chapter of my life," she said.

Mayor Cyril Kleem thanked Kavander for her many years of service, 11 of which were with him.

"It's a good opportunity that she's taking, and I wish her all the best," Kleem said.

Before Kavander leaves, she will help him to develop a job description for the position and also assist with the interviewing process to find her successor.

"You will be sorely missed," added Council President Mary Brown.

Kavander has taken a position with the village of Orange.

"I look forward to working with Mayor (Kathy) Mulcahy as well as developing new relationships with the staff and community of Orange Village," Kavander said. "Thank you for allowing me to serve the residents of Berea. I wish nothing but the best for the city of Berea and the residents of this great city that I still call home."
BEREA, Ohio -- Criminal investigation, West Bridge Street: A Strongsville woman, 33, was arrested at about 2:15 p.m. April 15 after police caught her driving with a suspended license.

Police stopped the woman's Ford F-150 after seeing the her turn right from West Bridge onto Henry Street, even though she had signaled a left turn onto Prospect Street. The woman then turned her pickup truck around on Henry and turned back onto West Bridge without signaling.

The woman admitted to police that she didn't have a valid driver's license. Police checked her identification and learned she was wanted in Strongsville.

The woman held an orange and white pill, later identified at Vyvanse, an ADHD medication, in her hand. Then police found a pill bottle containing 27 Vyvanese pills in the woman's bra. She said the medication was for her son.

In the woman's truck, police found a pill bottle containing two pills, one identified as Clonazepam, a sedative, the other Suboxone, a pain medication. The woman said she had prescriptions for all of the pills and was not selling them. Police told her she would be charged with felonies if she did not have prescriptions.

Theft, West Street: A Grafton woman told police April 12 that someone is stealing money from the PNC Bank checking account of her 79-year-old mother, who lives in Berea.

The woman, whose name is on her mother's account, said someone used an ATM on West Bagley Road to withdraw $800 in four transactions between Feb. 5 and April 2. The woman said she and her mother did not withdraw the money and that her mother's ATM card is not missing.

The woman suspects that a family member is taking the ATM card out of her mother's purse, withdrawing cash, then slipping the card back into the purse.

Overdose, Bryant Avenue: A Cleveland man, 27, was taken to the hospital at about 10:30 a.m. April 15 after he overdosed on heroin in a home.

When police arrived, the man was unconscious and not breathing. Police administered Narcan, a heroin-overdose antidote, and the man started breathing again.

To comment on this story, please visit Thursday's crime and courts comments page.
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Five Northeast Ohio municipalities joined hundreds of other local and state governments in suing drug companies for the nation's opioid epidemic, according to a Cleveland law firm representing them.

The cities of East Cleveland and Macedonia and the villages of Brooklyn Heights and Newburgh Heights filed suit this week against multiple drug companies, including Purdue Pharma and AmerisourceBergen.

The city of North Royalton also filed a suit last week.

The lawsuits say the drug manufacturers overstated the benefits and downplayed the risks of addiction when treating pain with opioids, and that distributors failed to properly monitor suspicious orders of prescription painkillers. The cities are seeking to recoup money for the police and other services put toward combating the opioid epidemic and responding to a rising number of overdoses.

The cities are represented by Cleveland law firm Kelley & Ferraro, which said in a news release that its representation is on a contingency basis. In other words, if the cities settle with the drug companies or win a verdict, the firm will take a piece of that money. If they lose, they get nothing.

Kelley & Ferraro are likely best known as a firm that brought death-benefit lawsuits involving victims of asbestos-related lung disease.

The suits are just a few of the hundreds filed mostly by local and state governments, including many in Ohio.

Cleveland federal Judge Dan Polster oversees all of the cases and has aggressively pushed for a settlement that would resolve claims in all state and federal cases, in order to put money toward abating the crisis.

He has held a few rounds of settlement talks, and another is scheduled for May 10. However, both sides have indicated that legal questions they want answered stand in the way of an omnibus resolution, so the judge has allowed some trials to go forward.

The first three are set to be cases filed against the city of Cleveland and Cuyahoga and Summit counties, and will take place in March 2019, according to an order Polster issued last week.
CLEVELAND, Ohio - Polls showing Dennis Kucinich tied with Richard Cordray in Ohio's Governor's race are understandable and not surprising to me. What is harder to understand is Kucinich continuing to act as an Bashar Assad apologist, an Assad-run Syrian sympathizer and Assad chemical attack denier.

As part of an amended financial disclosure request, Kucinich reported receiving $20,000 from a pro-Assad/Syria group for a speech in London, England, in 2017.

The group paying Kucinich, the Association for Investments in Political Action Committees, is listed as the parent organization of the Syrian Solidarity Movement. The pro-Assad group has claimed that Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International and other humanitarian organizations are front groups for the United States government.

The Ohio Ethics Commission had called for Kucinich to amend his report after supporters of Richard Cordray complained the initial filling was intentionally vague to hide the connection with the pro-Assad group.

Ted Strickland blasted Kucinich over the disclosure.

"On the campaign trail, Dennis has refused to condemn Assad, even after pressed by members of the media. What we now know goes even further. Dennis wasn't just defending Assad out of conviction. He was also being paid by a group that has been a vocal cheerleader for this murderous dictator. This very same organization is run by individuals with ties to the disgusting 9/11 truther movement and individuals who claim that Israel's goal is ethnic cleansing. The facts around this are truly shocking."

The New York Times reported that Kucinich campaign spokesman, Andy Juniewicz, said that Kucinich gave his a speech at a peace conference organized by the association. Juniewicz told the NYT Kucinich supports peace in the Middle East and has personally pressed Assad to admit he has chemical weapons and to abide by international agreements.

In a statement Kucinich wrote:

"The facts are these: I gave a speech at a peace conference in the United Kingdom last year in which I called for all nations involved in the Syrian conflict to end the violence that has killed hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children and forced millions to flee for their lives. The event was hosted and attended by peace leader from around the world. In that speech, I called for an end to hostilities, an end to violence, an end to political and military terrorism."

The real fact is that Kucinich has long been an Assad sympathizer and apologist. A few years ago I posted another cartoon critical of one of Kucinich's many meetings with Assad.

Kucinich is on the record for doubting Assad's involvement in the chemical attack during the Obama administration and the most recent one. Kucinich criticized the recent joint missile strike on Syria's chemical weapons structures, by the U.S., UK and France.

"Certainly, the culprits responsible for the gas attack on Douma need to be identified and brought to justice. But last night's missile strike occurs as a violation of international law must be enforced on behalf of the victims of Douma.

It is noteworthy that those responsible for the gads attack have yet to be identified. We are not free to bomb in retaliation based on suspicion. It's a daft way to use the US military, particularly when we have troops in the region."

Following the missile strike, Defense Secretary James Mattis said the strike was launched only after it was confirmed by intelligence and inspection, that Assad's Syrian forces were responsible for the attack.

What's really "daft" is candidate Kucinich calling for new gun-control laws in Ohio while at the same time he sympathizes with Assad who attacks his own people with barrel bombs and chemical weapons.

Assad has been toxic to innocent Syrians and could prove to be toxic to Kucinich's race for governor that has shown him outperforming expectations.

Kucinich shown being tied with Cordray in one poll did not surprise me. Last year, in other posts, I wrote how Kucinich's message in previous runs for president proved to be ahead of its time with the excitement Bernie Sanders generated and Trump's eventual victory in their 2016 bids. In many ways, Sanders and Trump were running on the same ground that Kucinich already plowed.

In the two states of Ohio, North Ohio and South Ohio, Kucinich, unlike Cordray has appeal for both Trump supporters and Sanders supporters.

Kucinich actually likely came into the race with higher name recognition than Cordray. As a former Cleveland Mayor, U.S, Congressmen, Presidential candidate and Fox News commentator, Kucinich is nationally known. Cordray held state office in the shadow of Ted Strickland and Sherrod Brown, then fell off the Ohio political radar when he joined the Obama administration.

Kucinich blasted the Cordray camp for the news spotlight on his speech in the U.K. and association with Assad.

"The Cordray campaign unleashed a series of attacks attempting to tie me to the Kremlin's payroll, to 911 deniers, and to the murder of innocents in the Middle East. These cowardly, hysterical and outrageously untrue statements reflect Cordray's panic that he and the State Capitol power-brokers might lose control of the Ohio Democratic Party and the statehouse."

The Cordray campaign didn't tie Kucinich to Assad, Kucinich did that himself and has been doing it for years.

Kuncinich is a good, well intentioned man with a blind spot. It's beyond time he cut ties with the heinous man leading Syria, if he wants to lead Ohio.
LYNDHURST, Ohio -- People of a certain age can well remember the days in the early 1970s when the musical "Godspell" became a part of the public consciousness.

Debuting on Broadway in 1971, the play was based on the Gospel according to St. Matthew, dealing with Jesus' last days and dramatizing His parables. Most people of that generation became familiar with the hit song "Day by Day."

The unconventional musical featured audience interaction and characters using actors' real-life first names.

Now, "Godspell," in all its rock opera glory, is coming to Brush High School April 27-29, featuring a cast that has co-director Evie Morris excited.

"They're terrific kids," said Morris. "They learn their lines and come to rehearsal excited to perform. And, we have some powerhouse vocalists. We really do."

Morris is co-directing with Pierre Jacques-Brault, artistic director of the professional Mercury Theatre Company, based out of Notre Dame College, where Brault teaches theater.

"Pierre is co-director and choreographer," Morris said. "He's written some beautiful notes about (this produciton), about how Jesus came to teach and heal and tell people there's a higher power."

Morris said she spoke with Brush High Principal Karl Williamson before embarking on the religious-themed production.

"He said that we live in a time when people need to be reminded more than ever to love one another," Morris said. "Everybody's got a spirit, no matter what you believe."

Morris worked with Brault as musical director for Mercury from 1999-2009 and again late last year for Mercury's production of "Babes on Broadway." She also worked with Brault for Notre Dame's recent production of "The Addams Family."

"We'll still have the parables and all the songs from the original 'Godspell,' plus a song, 'Beautiful City,' from the 2012 (Broadway) production," said Morris. "We'll be using an orchestral track (for musical accompaniment). I love having a live orchestra, but there's something great about having a good orchestral track from the musical score backing you."

Morris, who sings locally with her husband of 37 years at private parties and functions as Eve 'n' Stephen, said the cast of 10 is raring to go.

"I really think they're going to make the audience feel it," she said. "These kids are really popping off the stage. They're going to give all they've got."

Brush High School will present the musical "Godspell" at 7:30 p.m. April 27 and 28 and at 2:30 p.m. April 29 at the school's auditorium, 4875 Glenlyn Road in Lyndhurst. Tickets cost $10 for adults and $6 for students, children and seniors. Tickets will be available at the door. The production's ticket line phone number is 216-691-7052, ext. 4125.
DAYTON, Ohio -- A former substitute teacher must register as a sex offender but avoided prison after being sentenced Thursday on charges connected with her having sexual contact with students.

Madeline Marx, 24, who worked in Oakwood and Kettering schools, did receive five years of probation on each of two counts of sexual battery, according to WDTN Channel 2. If she violates the probation, she could be sent to prison.

She is classified as a Tier III sex offender and must register her address every 90 days for the rest of her life, the Dayton Daily News reports.

Marx apologized before her sentencing Thursday by Judge Steven Dankov in Montgomery County Common Pleas Court.

"I cannot express how sorry I am for what I've done, especially to the victims and their families," Marx said, according to WKEF.

Marx pleaded guilty last month to the two sexual battery charges. She was arrested in November and accused of having inappropriate relationships with three students, WKEF Channel 6 reports.

According to the Daily News, a 17-year-old student says he received oral sex from Marx last summer in the parking lot of a Big Lots. A 16-year-old student said he had intercourse with the substitute teacher in the parking lot of an apartment complex.

Marx also told police she sent nude pictures to students using social media.

She is a 2016 graduate of the University of Dayton with a bachelor's degree in education, the Daily News reports. She now is prohibited from working in a job that would allow her to have contact with anyone under the age of 18, WDTN reports.

To comment on this story, please visit Thursday's crime and courts comments page.
Molly Langenstein

KENT, Ohio - Molly Langenstein, the general business manager of Macy's Ready to Wear, will be inducted into Kent State University's Fashion School Hall of Fame.

Langenstein, an Ohio native and 1985 Kent State graduate, was named general business manager for Macy's Ready to Wear, a new role in the organization, in September 2017. She is responsible for national brands, private brands, planning and digital integration.

She has spent nearly her entire career at Macy's. Previously, she served as chief private brands officer of Macy's from 2015 to 2017.

"The Fashion School is truly honored to induct our alumna Molly Langenstein into our Fashion School Hall of Fame this year," said Fashion School Director J.R. Campbell in a press release. "Molly is an exceptional leader in the industry who exemplifies the spirit of our best alumni."

Langenstein will give a free, public lecture at noon April 27 in the Rockwell Hall auditorium. The lecture precedes the school's annual fashion show's 2 p.m. matinee and 7 p.m. awards show. Tickets to the matinee and awards show are sold out.

Langenstein's induction will take place Saturday, April 28, at Rockwell Hall as part of the fashion show. The induction ceremony coincides with that evening's sponsor/VIP show. Event tickets are $250 and include a donation to the Fashion School general scholarship fund, one ticket to the Hall of Fame induction and Saturday night show, access to the VIP reception, a show catalog and special recognition in the show program and catalog.

For information, visit the Fashion School's Annual Fashion Show page.
FAIRVIEW PARK, Ohio -- Students were quiet and orderly as they filed out of Fairview High School Friday, carrying orange signs that declared why they were participating: "Change." "Our lives."

Hundreds of students sat in the bleachers after walking out at noon. The student-led event was part of the National Student Walkout at more than 2,000 locations across the country, including in Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights.

Friday was the 19th anniversary of the shooting at Columbine High School, where 13 people were killed.

Friday was also about two months after 17 people were killed at Parkland, Florida's Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in a mass shooting that sparked national debate. Last month, students participated in walk outs, and people joined in the March for Our Lives in 800 places across the world.

Friday morning, a student at Forest High School in Ocala, Florida, was taken into custody for a shooting after a student was injured in a school shooting.

In Fairview, two organizers, 16-year-olds Olivia Hull and Raven Keck, started a Twitter page to involve students.

Students gathered on the bleachers Friday at Fairview High School as part of the National School Walkout.

"It's really about the adults of our country not fitting our needs and what we want politically," Hull said. "It's up to us because we're the future generation to take a stand and talk about what we believe in."

Hull and Keck spoke to attendees, highlighting mental health, gun control and school safety.

Fairview Park Police Chief Erich Upperman updated students on steps to report anything suspicious in their school. Fairview Park Democratic Club President Troy Greenfield discussed how to participate politically, heavily emphasizing that 17-year-old students should register to vote.

At the end of the speeches, students released 27 balloons to recognize the victims of gun violence in 2018. The school collected the signs that listed reasons students were walking and will display them on television screens throughout the building.

Watch a live stream of the walkout and interviews here.

"I think with this particular topic it's good that the kids understand administrators are concerned, top to bottom, with (school safety)," Principal Chris Vicha said. "We can get people the best education possible, but if we can't get the kids home safe at night it really doesn't matter what kind of education we're giving them."

In Shaker, several hundred students gathered to sing or speak on the front lawn. Although none of the students were born at the time of Columbine, Katrina Cassell vowed that her generation will end mass gun violence in America, with Aunya McFadden chiming in with a stirring rendition of Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come."

Junior organizer Kevin LaMonica said that while he does not have all the answers, he believes common sense gun safety reform would help stop students from dying.

"This doesn't just affect suburban high schools," LaMonica told reporter Thomas Jewell. "And this is not a Democrat or Republican issue -- this is a life or death issue."
One of the most interesting political battles of the May 8 election is one that most people haven't noticed.

It is the Shaker Heights Library's request to increase property taxes to improve services and make needed renovations to its two aging buildings. It's on the city's ballot as Issue 7.

I know what you are thinking. Shaker Heights voters have never met a tax increase they didn't like.

True. But the library levy is about much more than a $67 yearly bump in taxes for an owner of a home worth $100,000. Also at issue is the identity of the proudly self-regulating and trailblazing inner-ring suburb. And within the city, the levy has generated a fierce debate on social media and in coffee shops. It has pitted advocates for regionalism against those who believe the city is best served by local control. It's even triggered a fight over yard signs.

Shaker Heights' 80-year-old library is independent. That means it's not a part of the Cuyahoga County Public Library system, which has 28 branches. Shaker Heights residents pay only for their library system, which includes the main library on Van Aken and one branch on Fayette Road. By most measures, the Shaker Heights library system offers great service. And people like it a lot.

Here's where things get interesting. Some Shaker Heights stalwarts -supporters of the city's eye-popping tax increases over the years - have decided to put their collective feet down on this tax hike. They are behind a campaign opposing the library-tax increase.

The foot-stompers include former mayors Earl Leiken and Judy Rawson; Shaker Heights City Council members Tres Roeder and Earl Williams; school board member and past president William Clawson; former Cuyahoga County Commissioner Mary Boyle; and former Lieutenant Gov. Lee Fisher. Several business executives who live in the city also oppose the levy. (You can find a full list here.)

The campaign to defeat the levy is being managed by consultant Alan Melamed. He's run many issue campaigns and is Cuyahoga County Executive Armond Budish's political soothsayer.

The campaign against the library levy has a catchy tagline: "Stop. Study. Decide." The campaign argues that the Shaker Heights library's troubles won't be fixed by the tax increase, so its leaders should take time to study alternatives and give residents a voice in deciding whether to join a larger library system. The end game is getting the Shaker Heights library board to abandon its own system for the county's.

The campaign points out that the owner of a $300,000 home in Shaker Heights will save $326 a year on library taxes each year, if the county took over the library. It's a calculation that some supporters of Shaker library say is meant to pit the rich against poor.

The campaign also has upset some residents by planting "Vote No" signs in the yards of people who only requested information on the issue from the campaign. The campaign later apologized on its Facebook page.

The campaign against the levy can't say exactly what type of library makeover Shaker Heights would get if the city joined the county system. The campaign certainly can't promise that the city would keep two library buildings, something many residents cherish. The county library system has no authority at this point to make any statement on the matter. But the county system is widely viewed as offering top-rate services in the suburbs and most of its branches are great public spaces. (The county library tax rate is among the lowest library taxes around.)

The campaign also warns that the library tax could weaken the school's chances of passing a future school tax levy. And, finally, the campaign's spin on the potential loss of the city's treasured independence goes like this: "Protecting the status quo has never been the Shaker way."

Consultant Mike Thomas is managing the pro-Issue 7 campaign along with the with R Strategy Group, a political consultant that has worked with the Shaker Library system.

This campaign's pitch is "Our Shaker Library is Worth it." The campaign argues that local control and excellent services come at a modest price. (This is the first tax increase requested in 21 years.)

The campaign says one-third of the revenue raised by the increase would be used for operating expenses to offset state funding cuts and to improve services, including offering year-round Sunday hours at the library. The rest - or about two-thirds of the revenue -- would be used to renovate and upgrade the main library and the Bertram Woods branch library.

Thomas says the stalwarts lining up against Issue 7 are being a bit disingenuous.

"They portray the idea of joining the county like it's a magic wand and that residents will get more for less," he said. "That's not accurate."

Thomas argues Shaker Heights residents won't really know what they will get until after the deal is nearly consummated and that decades of investment in their assets could be lost.

It's impossible to predict the outcome of the library issue. But two things are clear: The issue has divided the city -- and the drama is interesting even to political junkies who don't live in Shaker Heights.

Ballot issue push: There has been little attention given to a proposed amendment to the Ohio Constitution that would reduce the number of people imprisoned for low-level drug offenses.

The amendment is known as the "Neighborhood Safety, Drug Treatment and Rehabilitation Amendment."

Backers of the amendment are now circulating petitions to collect the 300,000-plus signatures they need to make the November ballot. The Ohio ballot board approved the language in December. Perhaps by design, the campaign is taking a low-key approach to possibly avoid generating opposition until the signatures are in hand.

According to its backers, the amendment would reclassify from felony to misdemeanor any crime for obtaining, possessing, or using a drug or drug paraphernalia. All current drug trafficking felonies would remain felonies.

The amendment would allow for past offenses to be reclassified as well, subject to judicial discretion. And drug offenders could get credit for time served in treatment facilities instead of prison. (You can read the amendment here.)

To learn more about the proposal in person, you might want to check out a forum on the issue scheduled for Monday night at the Cuyahoga Community College's Jerry Sue Thornton Center. The event will feature speakers from the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor's Office and re-entry offices and from the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, one of the groups backing the proposed amendment. Former WKYC Senior Political Correspondent Tom Beres will moderate the event, which starts at 6 p.m. The event is sponsored by the Stokes Civic Leadership Program, which is a part of the Cleveland Leadership Center.
COLUMBUS, Ohio--FirstEnergy Corp. has opened up its wallet for a number of Ohio House Republican candidates, including House speaker candidate Larry Householder and many of his allies.

In the first two months of 2018, the Akron-based power company's political action committee donated more than $5,000 to the Perry County Republican and a total of about $149,000 to more than a dozen other House candidates, state campaign finance records show. Most, if not all, of the recipients have either backed Householder for speaker or are considered by many to be on his side, although some have not come out publicly in support of him.

During that time, FirstEnergy's PAC made only a handful of other political donations - none of which went to supporters of Householder's rival for the speaker's gavel, GOP Rep. Ryan Smith.

It's unclear exactly why FirstEnergy decided to put so much money behind Team Householder. But Householder has enjoyed a warm relationship with the company - last year, he and one of his sons used a FirstEnergy corporate plane to attend President Donald Trump's inauguration.

Householder and a number of his legislative allies are also co-sponsors of legislation that would allow FirstEnergy subsidiaries to charge customers about $2.50 more per month to subsidize the Davis-Besse and Perry nuclear power plants in northern Ohio. The legislation, House Bill 381, has been stalled in committee since it was introduced last fall.

The subsidiaries, FirstEnergy Solutions and the FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Co., announced in late March that they plan to close both nuclear plants within the next three years, on the grounds that they cannot compete with new ultra-efficient gas turbine power plants.

FirstEnergy Solutions filed for bankruptcy protection earlier this month.

FirstEnergy spokesman Doug Colafella didn't directly say why the company's PAC made the contributions. In a statement, Colafella said, "FirstEnergy's Political Action Committee supports both Republican and Democrat candidates and officeholders whose interests align with those of our customers, employees and shareholders. Our PAC funds are distributed based on the recommendations of an internal committee of employee-members."

Householder and his spokesman, Chris Schrimpf, didn't return phone calls seeking comment.

FirstEnergy PAC donations

Candidate District Donation Brian Baldridge 90 $11,000 Tim Barhorst 19 $7,500 Jamie Callender 61 $12,700 Jon Cross 83 $12,700 Anthony DeVitis 36 $7,707.79 Jay Edwards 94 $8,708 Travis Faber 84 $11,000 Josh Hagan 50 $5,500 Stu Harris 21 $5,000 Larry Householder 72 $5,207.79 Kris Jordan 67 $11,700 Jena Powell 80 $12,700 Mike Rasor 37 $12,700 Tracy Richardson 87 $7,500 Jim Trakas 6 $12,700 Shane Wilkin 91 $10,000

Source: Ohio secretary of state's office
ROCKY RIVER, Ohio -- Ivanka Trump on Friday made the case to an audience of Rocky River small business owners and community members that her father's tax overhaul is working.

Joined by U.S. Rep. Jim Renacci, U.S. Sen. Rob Portman and U.S. Treasurer Jovita Carranz, Trump touted the plan's benefits for Ohioans at a forum for community members and small business owners.

The average Ohio family will receive a $2,400 tax cut due to the tax plan passed by Congress in December, Trump said. About 500 companies across the country have increased wages, given out one-time bonuses, or invested in their workforce or communities since the tax plan became law with President Donald Trump's signature.

"That doesn't count the hundreds of small businesses that have done the same," Trump said. "We're just beginning to see the benefits, so I'm very excited to be here today in Ohio."

And 28 Ohio companies have handed out bonuses or promotions in response to the tax law, Carranz said. Families in Ohio will receive about $8 billion in tax cuts, she said.

Kathi Paroska, who runs a consulting business that does fundraising work in Cleveland, attended the forum. She said the tax cuts have helped her business.

"I am happy," Paroska said. "It's made a difference in the sense that I am able to invest a little bit more in hiring additional employees or, for example, buying resources for the company."

Portman and Renacci said they worked closely on the tax bill.

Portman said changes to lessen the excise tax helped Ohio craft breweries. Renacci said doubling the standard deduction made filing taxes easier for Ohio families.

Democrats have criticized the tax overhaul because they say its a giveaway to the wealthy.

Though not a campaign event, the forum provided Renacci, a candidate for U.S. Senate, an opportunity to share the stage with high-profile Trump administration members. Both Renacci and one of his primary opponents, Mike Gibbons, have worked to tie their campaigns to the Trump agenda and priorities.
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Earlier this week, U.S. Rep. Jim Renacci's U.S. Senate campaign announced he and his allies had raised slightly more than $4.5 million, an eye-popping amount, since he jumped in the race in January.

As it turns out, $4 million of that was Renacci's own money, according to a newly available federal campaign finance filing.

A document summarizing Renacci's fundraising for the first three months of 2018 also shows he brought in $257,000 in contributions, of which about $101,400 came from political action committees. An affiliated committee raised another $253,000, and Renacci also seeded his Senate campaign with about $223,400 from his now-dormant congressional campaign.

A Federal Election Commission deadline passed Sunday for federal candidates to report their first-quarter campaign finance activity. In part because candidates are only required to postmark their disclosures that day, there is typically a lag between when the filings are submitted and when the FEC makes them publicly available online.

The Renacci campaign on Monday announced to the media that it and an affiliated committee would report having $4.2 million in cash on hand, and -- including "contributions from donors, including the candidate" -- that it had raised $4.5 million. The newly available document shows that of that, about 88 percent came from Renacci himself.

(Scroll down to read the Monday news release from the Renacci campaign -- the highlighted text is added for emphasis)

In a statement that accompanied the announcement, Renacci referenced the "wave of support from voters and conservative leaders across Ohio who have rapidly mobilized behind our campaign" and said that with so much at stake, he was "committed to helping ensure our campaign has the resources it needs to defeat Sherrod Brown in November."

Brown, a Democrat, has announced raising $3.3 million during the same time period, with $11.8 million in cash on hand.

Renacci, worth at least $34.4 million, is Ohio's wealthiest congressional representative and the 16th wealthiest member of Congress overall, according to Roll Call, a Capitol Hill publication. He is an accountant by trade, but made his fortune running a number of businesses, including a chain of nursing homes, a chain of Harley Davidson dealerships and a financial consultancy for troubled businesses.

Renacci jumped in the Republican Senate primary in January, abandoning a run for governor, after Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel unexpectedly dropped out.

Numbers for other Republican Senate candidates -- Mike Gibbons, Melissa Ackison, Don Elijah Eckhart and Dan Kiley -- remained unavailable as of Friday.
COLUMBUS, Ohio - A Franklin County Common Pleas judge told the state Friday that the pace at which it is hearing medical marijuana license appeals may not work in its favor.

Ohio Releaf LLC, a company whose application to grow medical marijuana was rejected by the state, is suing the Ohio Department of Commerce, saying the state is not moving forward with the administrative hearings. Judge Richard Frye did not decide whether to pause the medical marijuana program, as some had hoped.

But he scheduled another hearing for May 11, when he will consider two issues: whether the medical marijuana program should be halted until Releaf gets its appeal, and whether the Department of Commerce is complying with public records laws, since it has not given Releaf many of the documents the company has requested.

Releaf applied for a provisional cultivation license, was rejected in November and appealed the denial through a commerce department administrative appeals process.

However, the commerce department has only held four hearings on applicants' appeals since December. Seven are scheduled for May and June, and the remaining hearings have been put on hold since the department uncovered errors in how cultivation applications were evaluated.

Releaf sued the commerce department, alleging that the department is purposely delaying its hearing -- trying to "run the clock" before it moves to award full licenses.

Although the medical marijuana program is supposed to be "fully operational" Sept. 8, the department recently announced that not all marijuana farms and dispensaries will be open on that date.

Hearings on a slow pace



Heather Stutz, who is representing the commerce department, said Ernst and Young's review of how the agency evaluated the applications will take a couple of weeks. Then hearings can proceed. She told Frye there will be roughly one hearing a week and Ohio Releaf, which hasn't been given a hearing date, will be the 57th company that will get a hearing.

But one a week, the judge said, will mean Releaf's hearing won't occur until around April 2019.

"You've got 10 hearing examiners," Frye said. Why can't you do 10 a week?"

Stutz replied that many of the same people are witnesses in each appeal and they can't be in 10 places at once.

Frye suggested that the department record witnesses' testimony in video and play it at each hearing. But Stutz said generic testimony ignores the unique factors of each case.

"I'm disappointed the department is so wooden and intransigent," Frye said.

He said it "adds weight" to Releaf's arguments that the department is not moving forward.

Will the program get delayed?



Releaf in its complaint said it was concerned that the department is trying to "run the clock" on its ability to meaningfully appeal before it moves the improperly awarded provisional licenses to full licenses.

Frye ordered Jeff Lipps, Releaf's attorney, to amend his complaint to sue each of the 12 winners of provisional grow licenses. If the program gets halted, they too would be affected, he said.

If the program is put on hold, sick patients won't get the medicine they need -- the reason Ohio legalized medical marijuana, argued Stutz, the state's attorney.

"There will be some available," said Lipps, Releaf's attorney, who countered that only the 12 large growers -- called Level 1 licensees at the Department of Commerce -- would be affected. Small growers would still be able to proceed with their operations, having some product ready for market Sept. 8.

But the commerce department has estimated the need for medical marijuana. And Stutz said the volume the small growers will produce will only meet a fraction of the need.
ORANGE, Ohio -- The Orange Village Charter Review Commission expects to soon make charter amendment recommendations to Village Council.

"We're still finalizing our recommendations to council and reviewing all the issues," council president and commission chairman Brandon Duber said Wednesday. "I think we'll have all the recommendations on issues and policies tackled by May 7."

The commission's next meeting is scheduled for Monday, May 7. Proposed charter amendments approved by the Village Council would be put on the November ballot.

The charter is reviewed every eight years. Village officials and department heads are among those who request the commission to review various portions of the charter for potential amendments.

Mayor Kathy Mulcahy says her administration has recommended a pair of changes to the charter. One would shorten the process by which a village employee can assume additional duties or move from one village job to another. The other would remove a prohibition on enlargements to certain single-family housing districts.

Mulcahy says many village employees have had "cross-training," making them capable of performing various jobs. A service department member, for example, can become a firefighter once certified for the job.

Currently, such a job change often requires multiple oaths of office, council meetings and confirmations.

"That is one thing we have found over the years to be a little burdensome," said Mulcahy, who has been the village's mayor since 1996.

The current charter also includes a 1992 regulation that prohibits the enlargement of single-family housing districts of under 20,000 square feet.

Orange includes numerous such neighborhoods, and Mulcahy wants them to have the ability to expand.

"I think we now realize that with the development and everything else (in Orange), that to take anything out of the toolbox is tying hands," she said. "So, I hope that is another recommendation that will come out of the commission, (that the prohibition) goes away. It's silly.

"The voters still get to vote on zoning. Why would we say you can't (enlarge such neighborhoods), when those have been wonderful neighborhoods in the community?"

Duber didn't reveal any other recommendations for charter amendments.
WESTLAKE, Ohio -- Drug charges, Crocker Road: Plainclothes detectives about 6 p.m. April 16 watched two suspicious vehicles in a gas station, as a man from one vehicle entered the other vehicle.

The men exchanged something inside, then they separated and each went his own way. Police cruisers stopped both vehicles.

A 44-year-old Lorain man, driving one of the vehicles, at first said that he only met a friend at the gas station and entered the other vehicle to talk about shock absorbers. Officers doubted his story. The suspect later admitted to buying marijuana from the man in the other car.

Officers confiscated the marijuana and cited the 44-year-old with possession of marijuana.

Police identified the other driver, accused of selling the marijuana, as a 38-year-old man. Police said he also was in possession of crack cocaine. Officers arrested him for drug trafficking and felony possession of cocaine.

Shoplifting, Columbia Road: Westlake police officers responded at 3:30 p.m. April 14 to Pat Catan's Arts and Crafts Store regarding a report of shoplifters in the store.

As the officers responded, the two females and one male left, but officers stopped them in their vehicle nearby. Officers spotted in plain view new merchandise with tags still attached scattered throughout the SUV.

The male, later identified as a juvenile with a warrant for assault, lied about who he was, according to police. The women, 22 and 23 years old, were from Cleveland. All were arrested for misdemeanor theft and possession of criminal tools.

The juvenile also faces additional charges of misidentification and theft.

Car break-ins: Police took a report at 10:45 a.m. April 17 about an SUV parked on Clemens Road being broken into when a window was smashed. The suspects took a purse.

Shortly after 5 p.m. the same day, the owner of another car reported finding a window smashed out while they were parked at the corner of Porter and Center Ridge roads. Again, a purse was missing.

Police don't know if the purse thefts are connected.

Shoplifting, Crocker Park: An Apple Store employee called police about 1:45 p.m. April 19 about a suspected shoplifter.

A male made off with a new $159 pair of wireless earbuds. Officers checked the area, but they were unable to locate the shoplifter.

If you would like to discuss the police blotter, please visit our crime and courts comments page.
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The global commercial refrigeration equipment market is projected to reach $ 55,688.6 million by 2022, growing at a CAGR of 6.1% forecast to 2022. the rapid urbanization along with the expansion of supermarkets, hypermarkets, and food retail chains in the developing countries, such as India , China, and Brazil, is expected to increase the demand for refrigeration equipment during the forecast period.

Get a free sample of this research report: https://www.psmarketresearch.com/market-analysis/commercial-refrigeration-equipment-market/report-sample

The market in Europe is heading towards maturity; However, the short product life cycle of refrigeration equipment is expected to occur in the coming years.

The commercial refrigeration equipment market is highly fragmented and most often, the end-users need Major manufacturers of commercial refrigeration equipment sell their product as package solutions directly to bulk buyers, such as supermarkets and hypermarket retailers. This consists of about 65% to 75% of the commercial refrigeration equipment market. Approximately 20% to 25% of the commercial refrigeration equipment market is covered through independent wholesalers, and remaining 5% to 10% is distributed through the food service equipment providers, such as catering equipment distributors.

Walk-in coolers has been leading the commercial refrigeration equipment. The ice-making machinery is expected to be the highest rate among all the equipment types during the forecast period, owing to the expansion of the restaurant chains in urban and semi-urban areas of developing countries. Among the various applications of commercial refrigeration, food service continues to be the largest segment. Supermarkets leads the commercial refrigeration end-user revenues, owing to its large capacity and requirement for intensive cooling.

Explore report at: https://www.psmarketresearch.com/market-analysis/commercial-refrigeration-equipment-market

Geographically, Asia-Pacific has been the largest as well as the fastest growing commercial refrigeration equipment market. Unlike its western countries, the HFCs refrigerant regulation is not limited to developing countries of Asia-Pacific. In the 6th BRICS summit of 2014, all the five members agreed upon are not accepting the Montreal Protocol for HFCs, unless other cost-effective alternatives are provided by the developed countries to them. Until that, the HFCs regulation would be regulated with existing Kyoto Protocol. However, the effort to reduce the dependency on HFCs is in process in China.

US remains the major market among the countries, globally, while the market in China is expected to grow at the highest rate during the forecast period. US capital has improved after the economic slowdown. The increased purchasing power of the consumers has also boosted the foodservice industry and restaurants in recent years. Technical improvements, such as the use of proximity sensors, LED lighting systems, and increased adoption of refrigerated equipment, is expected to accelerate the demand for new commercial refrigeration equipment.

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The major strategic development in the market during the recent years includes product launch, client win, and mergers and acquisitions. Some of the major players in the market include United Technologies Corporation, Johnson Controls, Daikin Industries, Dover Corporation, Hussmann Corporation, AB Electrolux, Frigoglass SAIC, AHT Cooling Systems GmbH, Ali Group SpA, and Illinois Tool Works Inc.
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The global 3D printing market is expected to reach $ 31,863.7 million by 2023. 3D printing refers to additive manufacturing, which follows the process of adding material into consecutive patterns to build the desired shape. 3D printing technology helps industries in various aspects, such as product development, efficiency increase, supply chain improvement and others. Two to these advantages, 3D printing technology is widely accepted in several industries, including aerospace and defense, healthcare, automotive, gems and jewelry, and others.

Get a free sample of this research report: https://www.psmarketresearch.com/market-analysis/3d-printing-market/report-sample

The market for 3D Printing is expected to register the highest growth in Asia-Pacific, during the forecast period. 3D Printing is widely being adopted in the emerging nations of Asia-Pacific, such as India, China and Japan.

Metal based 3D printing has been the largest revenue contributor to the global market; however, the market for polymer based 3D printing is expected to register the fastest growth during the forecast period. Metal based 3D printing helps in serial production, especially in industries, such as aerospace and defense, and automotive, where products mainly contain metal components. Moreover, the demand for other 3D printing materials, including ceramics, bio-compatible material and wax, is also expected to rise in the global 3D printing market. Several industries, including food and culinary, textile and building automation, are expected to generate demand for these materials based 3D printing. Among all industries, aerospace and defense is expected to the largest user of 3D printing.

Explore report at: https://www.psmarketresearch.com/market-analysis/3d-printing-market

Geographically, North America has been the largest market for 3D printing. 3D printing is widely being used in aerospace and defense and healthcare industries. The US leads the aerospace and defense industries across the globe, which is the major factor supporting the growth of the 3D printing market in North America. In addition, the United States 3D printing market.

The market is expected to register the highest growth in Asia-Pacific, during the forecast period. Government initiatives, and investment in development and innovation for new technologies and applications for 3D printing.

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3D Systems Corporation, Stratasys Ltd., ExOne, Voxeljet AG, Arcam AB, SLM Solutions GmbH, EOS GmbH, Envision TEC GmbH, Materialize NV, Concept Laser Gmbh, Autodesk, Inc. and Koninklijke DSM NV.
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The global machine condition monitoring equipment market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 4.5% during 2016  2022. Among the various end users, the oil and gas segment accounted for largest share in the global machine condition monitoring equipment market in 2015. The surge in smart factories development, along with the advancement in efficiency and accuracy of machine conditioning component is expected to drive the growth of the machine condition monitoring equipment market during the forecast period.

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Over the last few years, asset management and reliability-centered maintenance has witnessed notable growth. In order to cut down the operating expenses, the companies are investing in predictive maintenance technologies for operating their plants more efficiently and productively.

The global online condition monitoring market is expected to witness considerable growth in predictive maintenance technique, especially in developing countries during the forecast period. Among the various components, the infrared sensor segment and corrosion probes segment are expected to be two of the fastest growing segments during the forecast period.

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The global machine condition monitoring equipment market is fragmented, with only few larger players operating globally. The entry barrier for new entrants in machine condition monitoring equipment market is fairly low, owing to low capital requirement and significant low proprietary learning curve in machine condition monitoring technologies.

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Some of the companies operating in the global machine condition monitoring equipment market include General Electric Company, Corrpro Companies Inc., Emerson Electric Co., Alava Ingenieros Group, AB SKF, Honeywell International Inc., Parker Hannifin Corporation, Rockwell Automation Inc., Azima Dli Corporation, SAJ Engineering and Trading Company, The Timken Company, National Instruments Corporation, Bruel & Kjr Vibro GmbH, and Danaher Corporation.
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Some film Easter eggs are so brilliant that they change your entire idea of the movie you're watching, the director who put it there, and potentially, life itself. Others are just funny as heck.

7 Harry Potter's Magic Map Has A Hidden Sex Act

The Harry Potter franchise is famous for its brilliant acting, amazing special effects, and plots that can only be resolved with BS deus ex machina. In Harry Potter III: Spooky Prison, this is the Marauder's Map, a magical piece of parchment that shows the positions of everyone in Hogwarts, which seems like a violation of privacy at best and plain ol' creeping on children at worst.

The catch -- and possibly the only thing which kept the Marauders from being locked away forever -- is that the map doesn't show what people are doing. In the case of the two students getting very close during the end credits of the movie, however, you don't need magical powers to know that they're playing a two-person game of "hide the broomstick."

Warner Bros. Pictures That, or it's someone trying out some new shoes.

And before you give us hell for ruining this probably innocent moment with our filthy, filthy minds, remember that we're dealing with the same series that introduced us to questions like "How do giants do it?" and "How many centaur dongs can one middle-aged lady take?" Speaking frankly, it's a relief to know that with all the crazy dark sex stuff going on, one couple is simply enjoying themselves.
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"There was an American coming from San Francisco we met at the airport in Beijing. He said he had 'loaded up' on Chinese to impress everyone ... they always appreciated a few words of Mandarin. It was the average mayor meet and greet, but we all also had to give a few sentences in a speech. He had lines he translated the night before without checking with our host. He said them correctly -- in Taiwanese."

If you didn't know, China and Taiwan have a complicated history. The Republic of China was started by the capitalists who got pushed out by Mao Zedong, and there has been ill will and near-war between the mainland and the island ever since. "The room was silent after he said his piece, and he was smiling and everything, not even knowing he did anything wrong."

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This sort of thing is bound to happen, though, considering how often these guys are forced to just wing it. Fake Westerners have had to do everything from pretend to play instruments to pretend to be celebrities. Donald had to do an Australian accent on one occasion (which, according to a Australian colleague of his, was godawful), and has also had to fill in his own background when he wasn't given one. On one occasion, he was only given the name of a company and where it was based, but was asked questions about himself. He had nothing ... except the fact that he had recently read a Kurt Cobain biography.

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"So I was like, 'I'm from Seattle and I like playing music in my spare time. The guitar.' That was the first thing that came into my mind. I remember I had his high school's name at the ready in case they asked that."

His closest call came with a local reporter, justifiably suspicious of an American investor with a sketchy background from a company he'd never heard of. This reporter not only knew English, but also knew about the industry Donald was pretending to be a part of. After Donald was asked a particularly difficult question, "My host started saying something, but the reporter looked me dead in the eyes and said, 'No, from him.' This went way past social niceties, and I could see in his eyes that he knew I was bullshit."
Many mothers and fathers will understand, I suspect, when I say that nothing is more fatal to our parental authority than having to ask the offspring for help with a computer glitch.

In our family, the pattern is always the same. There I sit, tapping away at the laptop, when suddenly a mornings work disappears into the ether, the screen freezes or the machine takes it into its stupid head to list all my emails in the wrong order, starting in 2007. You know the sort of thing. It happens to all of us.

For the next 20 minutes or so, I attempt to find a solution for myself, trying all the usual Ctrl-Alt-Deletes and the rest, but its never any good. The awful moment comes when I have to summon assistance from our one remaining resident son.

Everytime my computer fails I have to call in my son to rescue me, picture posed by model

Cue a pantomime of groaning, sighing and eye-rolling from the boy, as he lumbers over to shoulder his idiot father aside. His fingers flash in a blur across the keyboard and within seconds the problem is fixed.

Whoa there, lad, how did you do that? Would you go through it again slowly, please, so that Ill know for the next time?

More groaning and eye-rolling, another blur of fingers across keys  jabbing away like machine-gun fire, far too fast to follow  and then off he stalks, leaving me none the wiser until I next need his IT services.

The balance of power is all wrong. Its no good my protesting that its only because he happens to have been born in the thick of the computer age that dealing with these problems comes as second nature to him, while many of us older folk tend to struggle.

Nor is it any use pointing out I have other skills that demand his respect. For example, at the age of 12, I was awarded the coveted trophy for the best ballroom dancer at Orwell Park Preparatory School for boys. So proficient was I that I always had to be the girl and dance backwards. But is he impressed? Not he.

Its fruitless even to remind him that in the 1970s, I was admitted to the degree of Bachelor of Arts at Cambridge University, one of the finest academic institutions in the world  a qualification I later upgraded to MA (Cantab), on payment of a fiver.

No, to my disrespectful son, as I sit humiliated at the computer keyboard, Im just a cretin, a moron, a retard  or any one of a dozen other words were not allowed to use any more. Now, for many years when the boys were growing up, I had this same feeling of compromised authority on family holidays in countries where I had difficulties with the lingo.

My trouble was that all four of our sons have something of a gift for languages. One is almost fluent in Italian, three get by impressively in Spanish and one also has a smattering of German.

As for myself, I still know a little Latin (which comes in handier than many may believe) but my knowledge of modern languages is confined to schoolboy French  much improved during my 1972 gap year, spent working in a hotel in the Pas-de-Calais, but long since rusted back to basics.

For that reason, I always favoured France as our destination, knowing that I could more or less understand what the locals were saying to me  and that when push came to shove, I could make myself understood by them. But occasionally the boys would get their way, and wed be off to Italy or Spain for my ritual humiliation.

Again and again, the same scene would be played out. There Id stand at a hotel reception desk in some out-of-the-way place, exhausted after a long drive, struggling desperately to make myself understood by the woman behind the counter.

Displaying all the vices of the Englishman abroad, Id speak very slowly and loudly in my own language, making absurdly exaggerated hand-gestures and gurning apologetic faces. But all to no avail.

Meanwhile, our linguist sons would stand sullenly back, in the manner of Harry Enfields Im not your slave Kevin, refusing point-blank to offer their services as interpreters. Only after an eternity of watching their father suffer would one of these young sadists soften, rattling off a few words of impeccable Spanish or Italian to make everything clear.

But my point this week (and, yes, there is a point to all this) is that its nobodys fault but my own that I cant make myself understood by Italians in Italy or monoglot Spaniards in Spain.

I could have learned their languages, just as I could have mugged up on computers (plenty of my age-group are veritable technological wizards). But the fact is that I didnt  and my communication difficulties are the price I expect and surely deserve to pay for my omission, as one of the hazards of travelling abroad.

It has never occurred to me for a moment that the fault might lie with the Italians or Spanish for failing to make themselves understandable to their visitors (though I count it a blessing that so many of them speak English these days).

Indeed, only in mad, diversity-obsessed Britain does the idea appear to have caught on that its our responsibility to address foreign visitors in their own languages  or to provide interpreters at public expense if we dont know how.

As readers with long memories may recall, this has been a subject close to my heart since 2011, when a whole lot of bumf from the local council landed on my doormat, soliciting my views on plans for traffic-calming measures in my area.

It was bad enough that this included a questionnaire enquiring about my race, religion and sexuality: I am heterosexual/straight; I am gay or lesbian (homosexual); I am bisexual; other; dont know; prefer not to say. Could anyone explain, I wondered, what possible relevance any of this could have to my attitude to road humps?

But what really took my breath away (and this was in the depths of the debt crisis, remember) was the councils assurance that all these documents were available not only in large print, Braille and audiotape, but in an astonishing array of foreign languages, including Portuguese, Bengali, Yoruba and Twi.

Surely to goodness, I thought, if a Twi-speaking Ashanti from Ghana cant be bothered to learn English, it cannot be unreasonable to suggest he forfeit his right to express an opinion on whether lozenges, chicanes, echelon parking with build-out or splitter island with tree  or none of the above  are required in St Julians Farm Road, south London?

Which brings me at last to this weeks common-sense recommendation from a House of Lords committee that town halls should waste less on translating documents into foreign languages, so as to free up more cash for teaching migrants English.

Why does my local council offer bumf in a range of foreign languages when looking for people to comment on their plans to introduce traffic calming measures

True, I dont quite see why ratepayers should foot the bill for such lessons, any more than the Government in Madrid should be expected to teach me Spanish. Clearly, however, any investment in integration must be wiser than discouraging Ghanaians from learning English by printing all documents in Twi.

But let me end with the heart-rending case, reported last weekend, of the Sri Lankan mother whose inability to speak English meant she was unable to understand midwives advice on how to feed her baby, who was born in an NHS hospital a year after she arrived in London as a refugee. As a result, Sinthiya Rajatheepans son, now eight, was left brain-damaged.

Now fast forward to a week ago today, when the High Court ruled that he should receive compensation from the NHS, expected to run into millions of pounds.

This was because the midwives failed to employ an interpreter to explain the importance of proper feeding techniques to Sinthiya, who was 21 when her boy was born.

God knows, my heart goes out to this family, and I fully accept our humane public duty to help with the boys upbringing. But millions of pounds compensation? By what perversion of sanity can the NHS be held to blame for this poor womans failure to understand English, in England?
The eagerly-anticipated wedding of Prince Harry to Meghan Markle is now less than a month away, and is the most talked about Royal event of the year.

From what the actress will wear, to her new title and whether there will be a kiss on the balcony, every detail is being discussed at length ahead of the world's media descending on Windsor on May 19th.

And etiquette expert William Hanson has spoken to FEMAIL to clear up a few Meghan misconceptions before the big day...

Etiquette expert William Hanson spoke to Femail to clear up a few Meghan misconceptions ahead of her wedding to Prince Harry

Smaller scale

One of my main concerns is for the Americans watching. The 19th May is going to look and feel very different from 29th April 2011. Not just because the wedding is at Windsor Castle but because of who Prince Harry is and his function, to put it crudely.

Currently, Prince Harry is fifth in line to the throne but when the Duke and Duchess of Cambridges third child is born he will slip to sixth. While that does make him higher up the pecking order than most of us, he is not considered integral to the order of succession and so as grand an occasion as his brother got is not appropriate.

Yes, although the wedding is still going to be far smarter and more official than many peoples weddings, it will be on a much smaller scale.

St Georges chapel can accommodate 800 guests; Westminster Abbey can seat 2,000. Bit of a difference. Due to the location change there wont be any balcony kiss, either. I suspect they will still pucker up for the cameras and crowds, either on the steps of the chapel or during the carriage procession. Or both!

So - Americans watching next month - dont think we are snubbing your girl Meghan in any way. Its not her, its him.

While Prince William and Kate married at Westminster Abbey, Harry and Meghan will say their vows at St Georges Chapel at Windsor Castle - meaning no balcony kiss

The guest list

Although I do think the British Prime Minister should have been invited, not having any politicians or world leaders present it does nicely side-step the Trump issue. Meghan has been on record (pre-engagement) saying unfavourable things about the current President.

In total 1,200 members of the public have been invited to greet the couple outside the chapel on the day itself. It is a great honour to be chosen and extended the invitation to stand outside, but this is also a clever tactic.

Windsor is a walled castle. There cant be hoards of people lining The Mall like before. And so these thousand-odd specially-vetted people have been invited for the sake of keeping up appearances.

Contrary to popular belief, the former actress will never be Princess Meghan as the title is reserved only for blood royalty

She will never be Princess Meghan

Meghan is not going to be a Princess. She will not (and never will) be Princess Meghan. This is no snub on Meghan. It has zippo to do with the fact she is once divorced, has a different ethnic background to those who traditionally marry into royalty or is American.

It is because the style the Princess So-and-so is only for blood royalty. Catherine is not Princess Catherine/Kate, however much certain arms of the media may refer to her as such. The title Princess Diana was also incorrect from a protocol point of view too, incidentally.

Catherine is technically HRH Princess William but as the Queen conferred a dukedom on her grandson on his wedding day this meant he and his wife could be styled the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.

Meghan will technically be Princess Henry but it is unlikely that we will come to know her as such.

Some 1,200 members of the public have been invited to greet the couple outside the chapel on the day itself (file photo from the wedding of Prince Edward and Sophie Wessex)

What will Meghan be called?

It is highly likely that Prince Harry will be conferred a dukedom too, like his brother.

The bookmakers think it will be the dukedom of Sussex, and so once married we will know Harry and Meghan as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

Another possibility is the dukedom of Clarence and Avondale. But I suspect the Queen and Prince Harry wont want to choose this one, as the last Duke of Clarence and Avondale (Prince Albert Victor) was suspected of being a homosexual - and Jack the Ripper.

The first Duke of Sussex (Prince Augustus Frederick) was a campaigner for the abolition of slavery, as well as Catholic emancipation - a much more pleasant back story.

William, who says Meghan and Harry's wedding will be on a less grand scale than Kate and William's (the Duchess of Cambridge is seen on her wedding day), suspects Meghan may choose an off-white or champagne coloured gown

Whatever the title, it is highly likely that we wont know until a few hours before the wedding service on the 19th May. If the royal household follow the precedent of 2011, it will be announced several hours before the service begins.

It was an 11am start in 2011 and the titles were announced at 8am. As it is a 12pm start this year then perhaps 9am will be the golden hour for those of us who enjoy a good title?

Will Meghan be an HRH?

As we all know, it didnt go too well for the last American who married British royalty. Wallis Simpson was not allowed to be styled Her Royal Highness, and so was simply Her Grace The Duchess of Windsor - even though it is thought that the staff in her own household referred to her as an HRH.

For Meghan, it is very unlikely that The Queen will withhold the HRH status. There is no big feud, like in 1936 and there would be no reason to do this.

Will she remain an American?

William Hanson is an etiquette expert

Last year, after the engagement, Prince Harrys communications secretary said that it is the intention for Meghan to become a UK citizen, although there would be no special treatment and the usual process would apply.

It is unlikely she will be officially British by her wedding day, however, as the process can take a while. But we shall see.

Will she totally forgot her American citizenship or will she take dual-nationality? I suspect the latter in the interests of transatlantic diplomacy.

The dress

Will Meghan wear white? I suspect she may not and may instead go for something off-white or Champagne coloured.

I also doubt very much - colour aside - that the dress will be as grand or opulent as Catherine Middletons. Again, as Prince Harry isnt second in line to the throne, and also as the wedding venue is smaller.

This will also be Meghans second wedding and custom in the UK and US is for brides marrying again not to wear white or as lavish a dress as the first time.

But will people across the world be disappointed if Meghan isnt seen in a fairytale dress? Probably, so it is a fine line for her to tread.
A recent report revealing that thousands of girls are missing school because they can't afford sanitary products has led to a campaign against so-called 'period poverty'.

But one company has come up with a rather unique way to raise funds for the issue.

London-based luxury cake business OhLaLa is selling tampon macarons to raise money for charity Bloody Good Period.

The realistic-looking treats are crafted in the shape of the sanitary product and even include edible blood on the end, while the cotton centre is are made from white almond shell.

Luxury cake business OhLaLa is selling tampon macarons to raise money for charity Bloody Good Period, which provides free sanitary products for those who can't afford them

And while the fake blood doesn't look very appetising at first, it is actually made from a delicious raspberry or rose buttercream.

The macarons even include blue tampon strings, which have been made from raspberry.

The treats sell for 24.50 for a box of eight and can be ordered from the brand's website.

While they be stomach-churning for some, the macarons are all for a good cause; the company will donate 10 for each box of eight bought through the OhLaLa website.

The London-based brand recreated the white cotton part of tampons using a white almond shell and raspberry buttercream for the blood

This means that every single box of tampon macarons purchased, a month's supply of sanitary products will be bought for women in need.

Last year it was revealed that school girls in the UK are truanting because they can't afford sanitary products.

Bloody Good Period works to provide free tampons and sanitary towels to those who can't afford them.

They supply over 1,000 women a month with menstrual supplies and toiletries, which can cost up to 20 per cycle.
Olympian Michael Phelps has opened up about how he learned to cope with his depression, after revealing earlier this year that he contemplated suicide during the London 2012 Games, despite winning an incredible six medals in the pool.

In a new interview with Mashable, Phelps reveals just what got him through his darkest times in hopes that others with similar problems might find comfort.

'It's not possible to have a perfect day every single day of the week, every single day of the year,' the 32-year-old explains. 'I was always somebody that always wanted to be as perfect as I could be in the pool, and try to get faster and faster every time I jumped in the pool.'

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Telling all: Michael Phelps has revealed the tactics he uses to deal with his depression

'For me, I was extremely hard on myself. No amount of pressure [or] fear could top what I was doing to myself to prepare myself mentally to get to that point.'

He adds that this attitude meant that he was harder on himself than anyone else could be on him throughout his career, going on to explain that, for him the Olympics in London were 'terrible' because of the way that he was feeling - no matter how successful he might have seemed in the pool.

'I could go back to 2012 and say it was a terrible Olympics, and people are like, "You won six medals, what are you talking about?"' he says.

'No, it was awful, in my opinion it wasn't good. I wasn't in a good mental frame of mind.

'I basically thought it was a job more than anything else. I had to do it to get through it because I was obligated to. I didn't want to. I had no desire to be there.'

Although his time in London was incredibly tough behind the scenes, Phelps notes that '2004 to 2008 were probably the roughest four years of his career'.

The swimmer felt 'semi-lost' after Beijing in 2008, where he broke the record for number of gold medals won at a single Games, and says he felt like he was doing the 'bare minimum' to get by after that, while struggling to come down from the 'high' of his record-breaking success.

Back then: Phelps claims that he has been suffering from bouts of depression ever since competing at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens

Big moment: He claims he felt 'semi-lost' after Beijing in 2008, when broke the record for number of gold medals won at a single Games

He says he thought of himself as a swimmer and nothing else, which impacted his self-esteem, admitting: 'I had no self confidence [and] no self love.

'I didn't really know or show who I was as a person and nobody really saw that.'

The champion swimmer has previously opened up about the agonizing lows he battled through after each major tournament since 2004.

Phelps finally sought help in 2012 when two DUIs and a public foray into drug abuse tainted his all-American image, leaving him wanting to take his own life.

In the video, Michael admits that he had to 'go through a couple of things' that helped him finally start talking about the things that were getting to him - some of which had been affecting him for 'my whole entire life.'

'It was when I was depressed, going through those suicidal thoughts and not wanting to be alive,' he explains.

'I wanted to find a different path to give myself a chance, to be able to get stronger, and be able to have the tools and the resources to be able to move through these things - and ask for help when I need it,' he explains.

But while not every day is smooth sailing for Phelps, he claims he now has the resources and tools to better help himself as well as others.

Happier days: Phelps and his wife Nicole Johnson have two children, Boomer (pictured), who is nearly two, and Beckett, who was born in February

Hanging with dad: Phelps says that he now has the ability to recognize when he needs to ask for help and actively stops himself from shutting others out

'It's not every day that is super easy for me, I still have struggles, but I now have the tools and the resources to go through these struggles,' he adds.

The key factor, he says, is communication.

'I was so good at compartmentalizing and throwing it so far down that I didn't have to deal with it, I didn't have to talk about it, I didn't have to uncover it,' he says.

'And I would just go through life and just keep shoving it down farther and farther and farther until it got to the point where I just blew up. That's not healthy, and it's not safe.'

Now, when he is feeling down or having a bad day, he makes sure to open up to others by 'asking a question' and 'accepting any answer that I am given.'

Phelps, who is now married to model Nicole Johnson and expecting a second child, also claims that recognizing his own telltale signs has been an important part of getting better. He claims that when he catches himself shutting people out or isolating himself, then that means that he really needs to talk about what is going on in his life.

'This is all just a whole a learning process for me that's never going to stop. It's something that's going to be with me forever.'
With their unkempt crew-cuts, messy beards, topless shots and short skirts - meet the next generation of British royals.

These young men and women couldn't look more different to clean-cut Harry, William, Kate and Meghan and most can enjoy the trappings of their wealth without any regal responsibility or duties.

Here are the young royals you've probably never heard of - and how many can you name?

Blue-blooded brothers with bohemian beards

CASSIUS TAYLOR

Cassius is the 21-year-old son of the Duke of Kents daughter, Lady Helen, and her art dealer husband, Tim Taylor.

Raised in a Belgravia townhouse, the former pupil of 35,775-a-year Wellington College now lives in Lewisham, South-East London, where he is a student at Goldsmiths.

His black jeans, grey shirt and beard are a departure from traditional royal sartorial style.

Number in line to throne: 42.

Cassius (left) is the 21-year-old son of the Duke of Kents daughter, Lady Helen, and her art dealer husband, Tim Taylor. It is unclear what Cassiuss 23-year-old brother Columbus (right) does, though his Facebook postings suggest an interest in politics and art

COLUMBUS TAYLOR

It is unclear what Cassiuss 23-year-old brother does, though his Facebook postings suggest an interest in politics and art.

He also does a good line in long hair, beard and trendy clothes.

Number in line to throne: 41.

ELOISE AND ESTELLA TAYLOR

Eloise (left) and Estella (right) are the youngest children in the family

The youngest children in the family are schoolgirls Eloise, 15, and Estella Taylor, 13. So far, they have kept a low profile but in 2011, the Duchess of Cambridge spent some time talking to the pair during the Trooping Of The Colour.

Numbers in line to throne: 43 and 44.

George's pal and her sister

SAVANNAH PHILLIPS

Seven-year-old Savannah, left, is the daughter of Peter Phillips and his Canadian wife, Autumn. Isla, aged six, is at school like her sister

A great-granddaughter of the Queen, seven-year-old Savannah is the daughter of Peter Phillips and his Canadian wife, Autumn. Peter is the son of Princess Anne and first husband Captain Mark Phillips.

Her parents divide their time between London and Gloucestershire.

Still at primary school, Savannah already displays a regal self-possession.

Number in line to throne: 14.

ISLA PHILLIPS

Isla, aged six, is at school like her sister. She has been photographed with Prince George, and the pair appear to be firm friends.

Number in line to throne: 15.

Kate's bridesmaid went to palace lunch with Meghan

LADY MARGARITA ARMSTRONG-JONES

Margarita Armstrong-Jones (left), 15, is the daughter of David, 2nd Earl of Snowdon, Princess Margarets son, and his wife, Serena, Countess of Snowdon, formally Viscount and Viscountess Linley

Margarita, 15, is the daughter of David, 2nd Earl of Snowdon, Princess Margarets son, and his wife, Serena, Countess of Snowdon, formally Viscount and Viscountess Linley.

The family have homes in Chelsea, Gloucestershire and Provence and she attends Tudor Hall, a 34,110-per-year boarding school in Banbury.

Margarita was a bridesmaid at the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in 2011. Last December, she was among a number of young royals who attended the Queens pre-Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace, where the star attraction was none other than Meghan Markle.

Number in line to throne: 20.

CHARLES ARMSTRONG-JONES

Having left Eton, Viscount Linley, 18, is now a student at Loughborough University in Leicestershire.

He was a page boy at the Queens Speech in 2014, with Arthur Chatto, when another page boy, Viscount Aithrie, passed out.

Number in line to throne: 19.

The mini-skirted activist and shy, hunky sibling

FLORA OGILVY

Flora, 23, is the daughter of James Ogilvy, son of Princess Alexandra, and wife Julia

The daughter of James Ogilvy, son of Princess Alexandra, and wife Julia.

Flora, 23, grew up in a 1780s country house on Scotlands East coast. An art consultant, in 2016 she protested outside a Donald Trump fundraiser and posted a picture of herself holding a placard which read: There will be hell toupee! Likes to break royal convention by wearing short, tight-fitting outfits.

Number in line to throne: 45.

ALEXANDER OGILVY

Alexander leads a low-key life (right with his sister). Although he does not have a title, Elle Australia voted him one of 13 hot eligible princes you can still marry following Harrys engagement

Flora's 21-year-old brother leads a low-key life. Although he does not have a title, Elle Australia voted him one of 13 hot eligible princes you can still marry following Harrys engagement.

Number in line to throne: 52.

ZENOUSKA MOWATT

Zenouska (left), 27, is the daughter of James Ogilvys sister Marina Mowatt and cousin to Flora and Alexander

Zenouska, 27, is the daughter of James Ogilvys sister Marina Mowatt and cousin to Flora and Alexander.

She grew up in a cottage in Windsor Great Park and works as a marketing manager.

Number in line to throne: 56.

A Bullingdon boy who got serious

EDWARD, LORD DOWNPATRICK

Edward, pictured with his sister Marina, is the son of former diplomat George Windsor, Earl of St Andrews, and his wife, Sylvana, Countess of St Andrews, and grandson of the Duke and Duchess of Kent

Edward, 29, is the son of former diplomat George Windsor, Earl of St Andrews, and his wife, Sylvana, Countess of St Andrews, and grandson of the Duke and Duchess of Kent.

His mother, Sylvana, is a lecturer in 18th and 19th century political theory at Cambridge University.

The family own a large property in leafy Cambridge. Edward read modern languages at Oxford and is now a financial analyst, and creative director of his own menswear brand, FIDIR.

An ex-president of the notorious Bullingdon Club, he converted to Roman Catholicism, losing his place in the Line of Succession.

LADY MARINA WINDSOR

Marina, 25, is one of Lord Downpatricks two sisters, the other being Lady Amelia.

She modelled for Tatler and now works as a PR. She is also a Catholic convert.

He-man and a peacenik

ARTHUR CHATTO

Arthur, 19, is the son of Lady Sarah Chatto, the daughter of Princess Margaret and the Earl of Snowdon, and her husband, artist Daniel Chatto

Arthur, 19, is the son of Lady Sarah Chatto, the daughter of Princess Margaret and the Earl of Snowdon, and her husband, artist Daniel Chatto.

Arthur and his brother were brought up in an elegant but relatively modest property in Kensington.

He left Eton last summer and is now a student at Edinburgh University. It is thought that when he graduates from university he will be joining the Armed Forces.

Arthurs Instagram page contains a number of extraordinary pictures of the young royal in model-like poses showing off his incredible physique. He likes to visits clubs with names such as Sinners and is said to have an entourage of girls around him at all times.

Number in line to throne: 23.

SAM CHATTO

Arthurs 21-year-old older brother, Sam, is also a student at Edinburgh University, studying History of Art. Hes a vegan who enjoys yoga and foreign travel

Arthurs 21-year-old older brother, Sam, is also a student at Edinburgh University, studying History of Art. But the sibling similarities end there.

Sam was spotted with long hair at Sandringham on Christmas Day 2017. Hes a vegan who enjoys yoga and foreign travel.

In one rare post on social media, he wrote: EVERYTHING is beautiful and worthy of love, for, in loving, we are able to nourish our souls. Today I felt love for the sun on my skin, the work that I did and the stones of the streets that I trod  what have you loved today?

Last year, it was reported that Sam was dating Sophie Pipe, a fellow free spirit who had posted a photograph of herself naked, relaxing on some rocks with a friend, online.

Number in line to throne: 25.

A Maori's wife and Harry Potter artist

LADY DAVINA LEWIS

Davina (right), 40, is the daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester. Her brother Alexander is the Earl of Ulster. Rose (left), 38, is a movie art assistant who worked on several of the Harry Potter films.

Davina, 40, is the daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester. Her brother Alexander is the Earl of Ulster.

She grew up in an apartment in Kensington Palace and a country pile in Northamptonshire.

In July 2004, she married New Zealander Gary Lewis, the first person of Maori descent to join the Royal Family. The couple have a daughter, Senna Kowhai, seven, and a son, Tane Mahuta, five.

Originally a sheep shearer and a builder, Gary was an unconventional choice of husband for a royal escort. The match, however, was welcomed by her family.

Number in line to throne: 28.

LADY ROSE GILMAN

Rose , 38, is a movie art assistant who worked on several of the Harry Potter films.

Rose, 38, is a movie art assistant who worked on several of the Harry Potter films.

In November 2007, she married George Gilman, the son of a property developer. They have a daughter, Lyla, seven, and a son, Rufus, five.

Number in line to throne: 31.
With four of her own, Princes Mary is a natural around children.

And she showed off her maternal skills with aplomb at the opening of a science exhibition for children in Copenhagen on Thursday.

The Crown Princess, 46 - who is the patron for the Danish Science Festival - officially launched the illustrious event in her home city wearing a demure blue fitted jacket and white trousers.

During the opening of the exhibition, Miniverse, Mary met with several children between the ages of one and five - for whom the science program is designed for.

The Crown Princess Mary (pictured), 46 - who is the patron for the Danish Science Festival - officially launched the opening of a new exhibition on Thursday

During the opening of the exhibition, Miniverse, Mary met with several children between the ages of one and five - for whom the science program is designed for (pictured)

The mother-of-four opted for a demure blue jacket and white trousers for the opening of the exhibition (pictured inside)

The mother-of-four paired her chic outfit with co-ordinating pearl jewellery and white stiletto heels by Gianvito Rossi.

But she wasn't afraid to get involved with the children during one of the different fields in the exhibition, donning seal flippers and crouching down with the kids at one point to showcase what the exhibition includes.

Later on, Princess Mary was photographed running in and out of one of the exhibits with some of the children.

But she wasn't afraid to get involved, donning seal flippers (right) in one of the various sections of the exhibition

The mother-of-four paired her chic outfit with co-ordinating pearl jewellery and white stiletto heels by Gianvito Rossi

She was photographed running in and out of one of the constructions with one of the children on Thursday

The mother showed off her maternal side with aplomb (pictured at the opening of the exhibition)

Miniverse - which has been designed to help children aged one to five get into science - features seven different fields.

These include 'The Mirror Sea', 'The Hospital', 'The Farm' and 'The Wind'.

Open to the public on April 20, it is part of the Danish Science Festival, which happens each April and lasts for a week.

Princess Mary is patron of the Science Festival - and this is just one of many different public roles she has in Denmark.

The Crown Princess is the patron of the Danish Science Festival - just one of the many different public roles she has in Denmark

She later listened to speeches (pictured) at the opening of the exhibition

The princess has been keeping busy in recent weeks, after she returned with her family from an Easter skiing break in Verbier

The princess has been keeping busy in recent days, opening a hospital in Slagelse on Tuesday.

The 46-year-old royal was all smiles as she greeted crowds in the small town on Tuesday, many of whom waved Danish flags and offered her flowers.

For that occasion, she paired a beautiful blush pink skirt with a simple white blouse from local label, Elise Gug.

This all follows a family ski trip in Verbier over the Easter break with Crown Prince Frederik and their four children.

While Easter in the Alps can be a sun-drenched affair, there was no sign of blue skies above the Swiss resort, with snow falling heavily on the Danish royals.
A photographer has revealed what life at home is really like for Canadian sex workers in a bid to change perceptions of the industry.

Lindsay Irene, from Ottawa, has photographed over a dozen sex workers at home going about their normal everyday lives.

In the project, entitled Home Lives of Sex Workers in Canada, the off-duty sex workers are seen relaxing in their bedrooms, with many pictured with their animals.

Lindsay says she hopes the pictures will help the public see them as 'real people', who are 'not so unlike themselves'.

Photographer Lindsay Irene has revealed what life at home is really like for Canadian sex workers. Pictured is Lacey at home with her dogs

Speaking about her experience with sex workers, Lindsay said: 'They are complex, hard working people who are doing a job and deserve rights like anyone else.

'I hope that by showing them in their home, caring for their animals, reading a book, playing video games or whatever it is that a sex worker does while not at work that perhaps the public can see them as a real person that is not so unlike themselves.

'Like any workforce, there are people with many different cultural backgrounds, gender identities and different upbringings.'

The photographer explained how the sex workers she met have come from a number of different backgrounds.

Lindsay has photographed over a dozen sex workers at home. Pictured is Jane, enjoying a cigarette while in the nude

The photographer depicts the sex workers going about their daily lives. Pictured is Ryan smoking a bong

'Some have supportive families, others ran away during their teen years and ended up doing survival sex work,' she said.

'Some sex workers were open about their disabilities or mental health issues and how sex work was a great alternative to working a 9-5 job as it allowed them to take time off to focus on their health or access mental health services when need be.'

She added: 'Everyone I spoke with feels empowered by doing sex work and thoroughly enjoy it. What they don't enjoy is having the ability to perform their job safely taken away from them.

'They are hard working, resilient people who have formed supportive communities that share resources and offer support in order to keep each other safe.'

Lindsay started the project after some of her friends, who work in the sex industry, asked her if she would take photographs of them to use in adverts and on their websites.

Lindsay says the sex workers come from a range of different backgrounds. Pictured is Chloe, who has dwarfism

Word of mouth quickly spread regarding her photography, leading her to being asked by more workers from the industry.

With her growing number of connections, Lindsay wanted to help change the stigma surrounding sex work by asking those she met and later though social media to be photographed at home.

She was originally planning to photograph the participants in both their place of work and at home but felt giving people a glimpse of home life was a more important area because most of their 'at work' images are already out in the public on social media.

Lindsay said: 'I was able to meet many different types of workers and many of these working relationships grew into friendships as well. Once I started looking outside my social circle I would look on Twitter to find sex workers who showed their face.

'Even though someone was "out" on social media it didn't necessarily mean they were "out" with their friends and family so not everyone was willing to participate.

The photographer says she hopes the pictures will help the public see sex workers as 'real people'. Pictured is Zandra at home with her dogs

Lindsay says sex workers are 'hard working people who are doing a job'. Pictured is Violette in her bedroom

'However, everyone I talked to sounded enthusiastic about my project even if they themselves were unable to participate.'

She added: 'I would also like to mention how it is harder for sex workers of colour and Trans providers to be out to the public as they are more likely to experience violence and stigma in this line of work.

'I hope that with enough exposure I will be able to be connected with more workers who represent the multicultural environment in Canada.'

The homes of the sex workers ranged from basement apartments with roommates to two-bedroom penthouse condos.

Some of them worked out of their home where others would use a space elsewhere, which could also be rented to another worker.

Lindsay started the project after some of her friends, who work in the sex industry, asked her if she would take photographs of them. Pictured is Madison at home

Lindsay added: 'I was as open and transparent as possible about my plan and my vision. However, if they expressed any doubt or hesitation I would let them know I was no longer comfortable going forward.

'This is an extremely personal decision as it's one thing to be out in the sex worker community, it's another to be made visible to the public to people who weren't actively looking for sex workers.

'I let them know I would have them sign a model release form and would include a clause stating I would not reveal their real identity and could even use a different alias than their sex worker name. Knowing that feelings can fluctuate I also made it clear I would allow them to back out for any reason and at any time.'

Although Canada does not come under the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) and Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) that became laws in the United States on April 11 this year, the bill has already had some affect on the workers Lindsay has met.

Sex workers argue that the laws stop them from working safely and independently, as they prevent them from using websites to advertise their work and screen clients.

Lindsay says she was able to meet 'many different types of workers' through her project. Pictured are Owyn and Vivienne

The photographer is now continuing to expand the project and travel even further around Canada. Pictured are Nora and Izzy

Lindsay said: 'While I am still in the beginning phases of my project, I feel that with today's political climate it is very important for the public to see the people who are being harmed by laws such as SESTA/FOSTA.

'Even though the laws are based in the United States, their effects are being felt by workers here in Canada thanks to websites such as Backpage being taken down.

'Now sex workers are having to work even harder to survive as their resources are being taken away.'

Lindsay is continuing to expand the project and looking to travel even further around Canada this year because of growing interest from potential participants.

She recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to help raise funds to include more sex workers in the project.
Queen Letizia of Spain looked elegant in a grey lace coat as joined husband King Felipe today at a reception honouring the winner of a literature award.

The mother-of-two, 45, paired the coat, which featured intricate cut-outs on the sleeves, with a matching dress underneath as she attended the luncheon at the Royal Palace in Madrid.

Sticking to the all-grey theme, the Spanish royal finished off the look with a pair of suede heels and a coordinating clutch bag.

Letizia and Felipe were hosting this year's winner of the Miguel de Cervantes Award, Sergio Ramirez, at the special luncheon today.

Queen Letizia looked elegant in a grey lace coat as joined husband King Felipe today at a reception at the Royal Palace in Madrid

The prize is awarded annually to honour a writer in the Spanish language, with Nicaraguan writer Ramirez set to be officially awarded the prize in a ceremony at the Alcala de Henares University on Monday.

Wearing her brunette tresses down over her shoulders, Letizia opted for a subtle make-up look for the occasion.

Her husband Felipe, 50, looked dapper in a tailored suit and red tie at the reception today.

It has been a busy few weeks for the royal couple, who have made a number of public appearances since Letizia and her mother-in-law Queen Sofia were filmed having a 'tense exchange' at Easter.

Letizia, who opted for a subtle make-up look, appeared in good spirits a the luncheon

The mother-of-three, 45, teamed her intricate coat with a matching dress underneath

Letizia and Felipe, 50, were hosting Miguel de Cervantes Award winner Sergio Ramirez and his wife Gertrudis Guerrero (far left) at the special luncheon

Letizia attended the Barco de Vapor literature awards in Madrid on Wednesday night, as well as joining Felipe at a state dinner on Monday night where she wowed in a sensational navy dress featuring pearl detailing.

The Spanish royal wore a diamond-studded heirloom tiara that once belonged to the former queen Sofia, which suggested that the pair had put their apparent falling out between them.

In the footage, which made waves in the Spanish media, Letizia was seen standing in front of Sofia, who appeared to be posing for pictures with her granddaughters.

After a brief exchange, the Spanish queen seems to try to take the arm of her eldest daughter Leonor, who then shoves both her mother and grandmother's hands aside.

Wearing her brunette tresses down over her shoulders, Letizia went for a smoky eyeshadow

Keeping to an all-grey theme, Letizia accessorized with a coordinating clutch bag

Letizia and Felipe were seen toasting guests at the luncheon, held in honour of the Miguel de Cervantes Award
Actress Lili Reinhart has been candid about her struggles with cystic acne - but she recently revelaed that she used to be so uncomfortable with her skin that she would apply her make-up in the dark, just to avoid looking at herself.

The 21-year-old Riverdale star started developing 'really bad acne' when she was in the seventh grade, and nearly a decade later she is still dealing with breakouts. However, she now makes it a point to acknowledge her skin troubles, rather than hide from them.

'I developed slight body dysmorphia  when I would break out, I couldnt look at myself in the mirror for a couple of months at a time,' she told Seventeen. 'I remember doing my make-up before school in the dark, which is an awful idea, but its because I didnt want to see myself in that bright light.'

Revelation: Lili Reinhart, 21, has revealed that she used to put her make-up in the dark because she didn't want to see her acne-prone skin

Struggles: The actress (pictured on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in 2011), admitted that the appearance of her blemished skin caused her to develop 'slight body dysmorphia' as a teen

Lili and four of her Riverdale castmates, including her rumored beau Cole Sprouse, all scored their own individual covers for the magazine's May/June issue.

And while the blonde beauty looks like the epitome of confidence in a crop top and jeans, she admitted that her cystic acne breakouts still embarrass her.

'Sometimes when I have a breakout it triggers me back to that time when I was a teen and I feel so self-conscious  like the whole world is looking at my bad skin,' she said, noting that there have been times when she didn't go out because of the appearance of her acne.

'Maybe my acne will go away eventually, but for right now, I try to acknowledge it,' she explained. 'Acknowledge in my Instagram stories when Im wearing pimple cream on my face. And poke fun at it in a way, as much as I can.'

When she is feeling insecure in public, she said she reminds herself: 'People dont give a s**t what my skin looks like.'

'I have cystic acne': Lili, who now tries to acknowledge her acne, shared a photo of herself covered in pimple drying lotion earlier this month

Fan club: Although it's unclear what product she was using, Lili (pictured with her co-star Charles Melton) is known to be a fan of Mario Badescus Drying Lotion

Earlier this month, Lili gave her 7.5 million Instagram followers an honest look into her skincare routine by sharing a photo of herself fresh-faced with pimple cream dotted all over her face.

'Tinder profile: Hi I'm Lili. I'm 21, a Virgo, Cali-Girl. And I have cystic acne. Hmu,' Lili joked in the post.

Although it's unclear what product she was using, Lili is known to be a fan of Mario Badescus Drying Lotion. Last summer, the skincare brand shared a photo of Lili and her co-star Charles Melton posed with the product all over their faces.

The actress has previously opened up about her struggles with acne, and in an interview with Teen Vogue last year, she revealed she started getting the spots at a young age.

'Every time I have a big cystic pimple or something, it very much triggers that part of me where I dont want to look at myself in the mirror. Its hard to take pictures of myself, I dont want to go out in public, and I want to hide my face,' she said.

Candid: Although the blonde beauty looks like the epitome of confidence in a crop top and jeans, she admitted that her cystic acne breakouts still embarrass her

Standing tall: Lili has been open about her skin issues, saying she first started getting pimples in the seventh grade

'But, as Ive gotten older, its a matter of realizing that I cant let a pimple on my face decide what I do and where I go.'

In addition to candidly speaking about her skin woes, Lili has also frequently opened up about the mental health struggles she has wrestled with since childhood.

She has said that she suffers from anxiety and depression, detailing how she went through debilitating panic attacks and how therapy ultimately gave her a new lease on life.

In an interview with V Magazine earlier this year, Lili discussed how the conditions have impacted her throughout her life, and why she thinks it's essential for students to learn about them at school.

'It affected me in every way, ever,' Lili said of depression and anxiety, adding that the former has affected her since the seventh grade.

Looking out: Lili claims that she has gained confidence in her skin as she has gotten older

Honest: Lili has also previously opened up about the mental health struggles that she has wrestled with since childhood, explaining how anxiety and depression have affected her

The actress, originally from Cleveland, Ohio, explained that her depression became 'extreme' after she moved to Los Angeles at the age of 18.

After struggling with a 'horrible roommate situation,' she settled in the Hollywood Hills and lived in a house she shared with seven people.

'I didn't know anyone there. I didn't have any friends there,' she said. 'I didn't have any family there. So when I moved there, it was just me. And I wasn't going to school, so I didn't have any way to really meet people, necessarily, or be social. I was just kind of waiting around for my auditions.

'I spent most of my days literally doing nothing, sitting in my room watching Netflix and waiting for an audition to come in. And it was miserable.'

At that time, Lili didn't want to get a day job because she didn't want to be in a position to have to quit on short notice if she booked a gig. She remained in LA for five months before moving back home to tend to her health issues.

Role: The actress plays Betty Cooper in The CW's Riverdale, a teen drama inspired by the Archie Comics universe

Past: Lili, who originally from Cleveland, Ohio, explained that her depression became 'extreme' after she moved to Los Angeles at the age of 18

'My health got so bad because of how depressed I was,' she recounted. 'I was throwing up every day, [having] panic attacks, night sweats, and I was just sad. There came a point when I called my mom, and I was like, "I need to come home. I'm not OK. I'm not good right now. My mental health isn't good."

'My mental health has always been such a priority to me that I knew when it was affecting my physical health.'

Once back at home, Lili saw a therapist for six months, saved up money, and 'built [herself] back up again.'

Eventually, she moved back to Los Angeles, and landed the part of Betty Cooper in The CW's Riverdale, which is inspired by the Archie Comics universe.

Now, she says she 'definitely' credits therapy with helping her cope with the conditions. Lili still sees a therapist in Canada, where Riverdale is filmed.

Education: The actress (pictured with her co-star and rumored boyfriend Cole Sprouse) stressed how important it is for schools to tell their students about mental health issues

Healing: Now, Lili says she 'definitely' credits therapy with helping her cope with the conditions. She still sees a therapist in Canada, where Riverdale is filmed

'I've seen a therapist at different points in my life for different reasons. I'm not very good at stress management, and I have a very high-stress job, so it's definitely convenient for me to see a therapist right now at this point in my life,' she added.

'I am on medication  I've talked about that beforejust to help my anxiety, so I'm not depressed all the time.'

The actress stressed how important it is for schools to tell their students about mental health issues, because when her own struggles began, she was at a loss.

'I think it is important, and it's so f****d up to me that they don't talk about mental health in school,' she said. 'I didn't learn about depression or anxiety at school.

'So when I had to go to my parents to say "I need help, I need to go to therapy," I felt like this weird, messed up kid. And I wasn't, but I felt that way.'
Next month, Meghan Markle will walk down the aisle to marry Prince Harry. The bells in Royal Windsor will ring out in celebration of a new beginning, but they will also sound the death knell  on her career as an actress.

For Meghan, marrying into the Royal Family means the curtain will come down on her acting life for ever. This not only means waving goodbye to Suits, the hit television series which made her famous, but it will also bring an end to her determined efforts to make it as a movie star.

During her quest for stardom, Meghan appeared in 14 films, some of them forgettable, some of them regrettable, some of them cheesy and some a bit sleazy. And Ive watched all of them, charting her progress up the Hollywood ladder, from blink-and-miss-her walk-on parts, to being the star in her own right.

Her transformation from goofy kid with bad hair to the glossy princess-to-be she is today is nothing short of remarkable.

Being Prince Harrys wife will clearly be the role of her life  but what of the parts that got her this far? Its time to put Meghans films under the mighty Jan microscope...

MORE X-FILES THAN X-FACTOR

The CANDIDATE (2011)

Meghan pulls strings to get a role in this hard-boiled sci-fi short film  which was produced by her then-husband, Trevor Engelson. Handy!

She turns in a two-scene solid performance as Anne the receptionist. Her creepy boss wants to kill an incompetent colleague, and we have all been there, havent we? Anyway, what does Meghan care? She has a messy, Im-too-busy ponytail, a Louis Vuitton handbag and a phone to answer.

HER BEST LINE: How are you spelling that? And your number, please?

Rating:

The Candidate, 2011: Meghan pulls strings to get a role in this hard-boiled sci-fi short film  which was produced by her then-husband, Trevor Engelson

WATCH OUT BET LYNCH!

REMEMBER ME (2010)

This romcom starring Twilight hunk Robert Pattinson was a hit  and was also produced by Meghans hubby. However, she only has a tiny role as a barmaid  with one lousy three- word line. By the following year, their marriage was on the rocks.

HER BEST LINE: Do not speak.

Rating:

Remember Me, 2010: This romcom starring Twilight hunk Robert Pattinson was a hit  and was also produced by Meghans hubby

BRANDED BY A SNOG WITH RUSSELL

GET HIM TO THE GREEK (2010)

What on earth is Meghan doing in this ghastly comedy? It stars Russell Brand as obnoxious rock star Aldous Snow, Jonah Hill as Aaron, the lackey charged with getting him from London to LA and Elisabeth Moss  of Mad Men fame  as Aarons girlfriend.

Among the drug-snorting, threesomes and general debauchery, Meghan has a 40-second role as Tatiana, a girl in a strapless metallic dress who is snogged by Aldous at a party.

He doesnt even put down his brimming champagne flute to kiss her, the brute.

Get Him To The Greek (2010): What on earth is Meghan doing in this ghastly comedy? It stars Russell Brand as obnoxious rock star Aldous Snow and Elisabeth Moss as his girlfriend

The clinch is then interrupted by Aaron, pushing her face away, as Aldous must rush to catch a plane.

After the ignominy of Russell Brand sucking on her face, Meghan doesnt even get a credit. Humiliating. Not universally panned, however. Critics said it had its moments. Shame Meghan wasnt in any of them.

Is this really her? Everyone, including royal biographer Andrew Morton, says yes.

HER BEST LINE: Mmmmn. Slurp.

Rating:

A REAL DISASTER MOVIE

A LOT LIKE LOVE (2005)

Meghan is 24, has left university and appeared in a couple of small TV roles. This is her first proper Hollywood film, and she gets 31 precious seconds of screen time in this lame, 9/11-themed romcom starring Ashton Kutcher.

She plays Natalie, a girl who walks down the aisle of a plane with  hang on  two unidentified flying objects stuck up the front of her pink jumper? Whatever is going on, she has never looked so buxom.

She sits next to Ashton and looks longingly at his handsome profile, but it is his friend who tries to chat her up. Critics hated this crass exploitation of a national tragedy.

HER BEST LINE: No, Im from LA.

Rating:

A Lot Like Love, 2005: Meghan is 24, has left university and appeared in a couple of small TV roles. This is her first proper Hollywood film, and she gets 31 precious seconds of screen time

IF THE CAP FITS...

HORRIBLE BOSSES (2011)

A lot of big names appeared in this comedy blockbuster, including Jennifer Aniston as a sex- mad dentist.

Meghans walk-on/walk-off part as a Fed Ex delivery girl attracted zero attention, even though she was chatted up by Kurt (Jason Sudeikis), an account manager at a chemical company. You are way too cute to be a Fed Ex girl. You gotta be a model or an actress or something, right? he says. Bang on the money!

HER BEST LINE: Im good. He is just signing for these packages, thank you.

Rating:

Horrible Bosses, 2011: Meghans walk-on/walk-off part as a Fed Ex delivery girl attracted zero attention, even though she was chatted up by Kurt (Jason Sudeikis)

TALES OF A SNAPPY SNAPPER

DYSFUNCTIONAL FRIENDS (2012)

OK, she is no Annie Leibovitz, but Meghan makes a passable attempt at playing a ballsy photographer called Terry in this comedy drama.

Her role is minor. Still, she slaps someone, shows off her bra straps and deals briskly with a well-endowed male model.

HER BEST LINE: This is not porn. That situation youve got going on there? Its got to be put away.'

Rating:

Dysfunctional Trends, 2012: OK, she is no Annie Leibovitz, but Meghan makes a passable attempt at playing a ballsy photographer called Terry in this comedy drama

LOOK AWAY NOW YOUR MAJ!

RANDOM ENCOUNTERS (2013)

In this re-release of a chick flick made pre-Suits, Meghan plays Mindy, a party girl who brings home a different guy every night. Look away now, Your Maj!

She also gets second billing on the film poster. Progress! Mindy pops up in a host of revealing outfits including a sexy negligee, and she sleeps with a cop who stopped her for a traffic offence.

HER BEST LINE: Sometimes you only get one shot at it.

Rating:

Random Encounters, 2013: In this re-release of a chick flick made pre-Suits, Meghan plays Mindy, a party girl who brings home a different guy every night

HANKERING FOR LOVE

WHEN SPARKS FLY (2014)

Meghan has the lead role of Amy, an ambitious journalist who returns to her small-town home, where her parents have a fireworks business. In the weakest gunpowder plot ever, there is some complication about a late delivery of rockets for the Fourth of July celebrations.

Meanwhile, Amy discovers that Hank, the boy she left behind, is about to marry her best friend. Soon they are back in Lews diner, eating ribs and peach cobbler and falling in love again.

The film was shown on the U.S. cable and satellite TV network Hallmark  an offshoot of the card company. This has got to be the worst Hallmark movie ever made, moaned one critic.

HER BEST LINE: I went after the wrong dream and lost the person I cared about the most.

Rating:

When Sparks Fly, 2014: Meghan has the lead role of Amy, an ambitious journalist who returns to her small-town home, where her parents have a fireworks business

AN OSCAR FOR THE HAIR

DECEIT (2006)

She plays a girl-next-door called Gwen in this crummy film noir.

Over the kitchen table, Meghan dispenses unwanted advice to a friend caught up in a murder mystery. But what has me gripped is her, weird flicky, Farrah Fawcett-esque hair.

HER BEST LINE: I think Dave is really good for you, and I wouldnt want you to lose him so easily.

Rating:

Deceit, 2006: She plays a girl-next-door called Gwen in this crummy film noir. Over the kitchen table, Meghan dispenses unwanted advice to a friend caught up in a murder mystery

HALO, IS IT ME YOU'RE LOOKING FOR

ANTI SOCIAL (2015)

These days, Meghan may want to shine a light on female empowerment, but she seemed happy enough to play a simpering girlfriend in this load of old nonsense.

Set in London, Meghan plays Kirsten, a model who falls in love with graffiti artist Dee, whose brother leads a gang of gun-toting jewel thieves. While the other female characters get beaten up, raped or fire-bombed, Meghan represents goodness and innocence.

HER BEST LINE: I know you have had to climb a mountain to get away from this crap and see life for what it can be. You inspire me.

Rating:

Anti Social (2015): Set in London, Meghan plays Kirsten, a model who falls in love with graffiti artist Dee, whose brother leads a gang of gun-toting jewel thieves

FINDING MR RIGHT

DATER'S HANDBOOK (2016)

Meghan plays lovelorn Cassandra, a sweet but feisty businesswoman who has a history of going out with non-committal dud boyfriends.

Of course I wanna get married, she tells her mom. But how?

A copy of the Daters Handbook sets Cass on the path to matrimony. Ive got to change how I choose relationships, she says, flicking to a chapter called First Snare Your Prince. No it is not. No she does not. Sit down at the back! After following the books advice, she must choose between following the rules or following her heart.

HER BEST LINE: At some point you will figure out I am not the girl that you think I am.

Rating:

Dater's Handbook (2016): Meghan plays lovelorn Cassandra, a sweet but feisty businesswoman who has a history of going out with non-committal dud boyfriends

LOST AND FORGOTTEN

THE APOSTLES (2008)

Meghan plays Kelly, a sassy but vulnerable former stripper who finds friendship and empowerment with the police wives who live in her street. How? By teaching them how to strip to arouse their jaded husbands.

No one has seen this film for years, an effort so awful it has disappeared without trace.

Officer, arrest that overacting woman in the basque before she harms herself  and us.

IT'S A CRIME

GOOD BEHAVIOUR (2009)

Another film that suffered the same disappointing cut was Good Behaviour, which went straight to TV before vanishing into the ether. Meghan played Sadie, the spoilt daughter of a Las Vegas crime boss. Her mother decided it was time for the family to go straight, and comedy is supposed to ensue. Is she any good in it? Your guess is as good as mine.

DRUGS AND OTHER KINDS OF BUSTS

BOYS AND GIRLS GUIDE TO GETTING DOWN (2006)

Meghan secured a small part in this alarmingly candid film teaching da kidz how to use drugs, avoid the police, get into the cool clubs and have a good time in downtown Los Angeles. She plays Dana, who snorts cocaine, wears a tight black dress and obsesses about a boob job, clearly forgetting she had one in A Lot Like Love.

HER BEST LINE: What do you think? Too slutty?

Rating:
A Canadian company may want to re-brand after Scots were sent into hysterics by its very rude name.

A cheeky Twitter user spotted that there is a manufacturer called SHYTE across the pond which makes protein-packed chocolate bars for gym lovers.

The unfortunate acronym stands for 'Seriously Helps You To Energize' - but in the UK of course, the name is pronounced the same way as the slang for excrement, mostly used by Scots.

The company's inappropriate name quickly went viral, especially as the brand was urging people to use the unintentionally rude hashtag: #EATSHYTE.

Only in Canada! Scots found the protein chocolate company's name hysterical as it's very similar to the slang term for poo

The company's inappropriate name went viral after Scottish Twitter user Roy Isserlis shared an image of the chocolate maker's founder Kevin Richards with the Shyte-branded treats.

He wrote on the social media website: 'Oh my f****** God, I am dying. Surely this guy has one Scottish friend who should have told him?'

The post has been liked nearly 6,000 times so far and has nearly 3,000 retweets.

In Scotland and much of the UK, Brits use the word 'sh*te' as a slang term for poo so the brand name was the cause of hysterics on social media.

The brand name went viral after Twitter user Roy Isserlis tweeted about it

The brand's hashtag, #EATSHYTE, was also the source of much hilarity

Scots found the brand name hilarious and couldn't believe such a company could exist - but it is a real business

One said that the chocolate 'probably won't catch on in Scotland,' while some said the brand had to be a 'practical joke'.

However Shyte is a real chocolate company, with products on shelves at stores in Canada, a website selling items and social media profiles.

It appears the brand founder Mr Richards may not be as clueless about the word's meaning as first thought, though.

A search on the brand's Facebook page reveals that the founder has liked comments praising the 'hilarious' name.

Posts on the page also use the hashtags #Shytefaced, #Eatshyte, and #Talkingshyte, which are all plays on popular British vulgar slang phrases.

The brand, which launched in October last year, is also taking its newfound worldwide fame in its stride by posting links to its global media coverage.

SHYTE makes protein chocolate in milk, dark and white varieties with flavours including caramel and sea salt, peppermint, root beer and Madagascan vanilla and raspberry.
Especially on a day like April 20, nationally recognized as 'Weed Day', it's hard not to notice the monumental surge in Americans embracing weed.

As pro-marijuana lobbyists work for legalization across the US, many have focused on one demographic that's thought to be particularly influential: parents.

Many of today's parents grew up in the weed-friendly, hippie era of the 60s and 70s, which begs the question: Will they be more accepting of marijuana for their own kids?

When surveyed, more and more parents say they would rather their teens use cannabis than drink alcohol - but experts say forcing them to pick the 'lesser of two evils' doesn't say much about how they really feel about marijuana.

As more and more Americans embrace marijuana, experts have wondered how the current generation of parents feel about increasing access to the drug from legalization (file image)

How do parents feel about weed?

Parents are split directly down the middle on the question of legalizing recreational marijuana, according to a 2017 survey of more than 1,000 adults in the US by Marist Poll and Yahoo News.

Overall, 56 percent thought that marijuana use was socially acceptable while two-thirds indicated that they thought their own parents would disagree.

Parental opinion was found to vary based on each parent's personal experience with the drug, half of whom said they had tried and 15 percent used in regularly.

Those who had never tried the drug were much more apprehensive about it whereas those with more experience had more progressive views.

About one in five parents said marijuana use was the number one concern for their child when ranked against other risky behaviors including smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol and having sex.

However, it was biggest worry for only 11 percent of parents who had tried marijuana and five percent who used it regularly.

Parents are most concerned about the impact that weed may have on their child's health, but the poll revealed that more than 70 percent thought it was safer than alcohol and cigarettes.

A similar survey released by Project Know this week revealed that almost 75 percent of parents would rather their child use marijuana than alcohol.

The graph above is based on a 2017 survey of more than 1,000 adults in the US by Marist Poll and Yahoo News, indicating that 49 percent of American parents approve of legalizing weed

The problem with playing 'Would You Rather?' for weed and alcohol

One of the key limitations to marijuana opinion surveys, including both polls mentioned above, is that they often look at parents' opinions of weed as compared to other risky behaviors - rather than asking how they feel about the drug on its own.

Joseph Palamar, a researcher at the Center for Drug Use and HIV/HCV Research at New York University, has been studying trends in drug use for years.

Palamar says: '"Would you rather" questions can be informative, but we must keep in mind that oftentimes the real answer is "neither."'

Both marijuana and alcohol have been found to cause lasting damage on the teenagers' brains, albeit in distinct ways.

Palamar said: 'My colleagues and I found that weed and alcohol are associated with different risks among teens.

'Alcohol was more likely to lead to fights with significant others, risky driving, and regretful behavior.

'Weed was more likely, however, to compromise relationships with parents and teachers, possibly due to the illegality and stigma associated with use.

'Each drug has its negatives.'

When asked about their top concern for their children, only one in five parents said marijuana

Why experts are calling for more, better research

Because it is still illegal in the majority of states, research into the effects of teen marijuana use is limited, especially when compared to that of alcohol consumption.

A 2017 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine underscored the importance improving the quality and quantity of research.

'This growing acceptance, accessibility, and use of cannabis and its derivatives have raised important public health concerns,' Marie McCormick, chair of the committee said in a statement about the report.

'As laws and policies continue to change, research must also.'

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, most of the evidence of harm comes from studies of mothers who used the drug during pregnancy rather than ones focusing on teens, 23 percent of whom will try marijuana before the age of 17.

There is a limited but growing number of studies that look specifically at the teenage brain on marijuana, which have found it causes decreased academic performance by inhibiting attention span and problem-solving ability.

Experts are also concerned that those who start using marijuana in adolescence are more likely to develop long-term habits, which have been linked to breathing problems and impaired memory.

In 2018 Utah and Oklahoma are expected to join the 30 states that have already legalized marijuana for medical use as public opinion of the drug becomes increasingly positive

How parental opinions are expected to change down the line

As mentioned previously, the top concern parents had about marijuana was its affect on their child's health.

These findings lend credibility to the idea that a growing body of research on health effects will be highly influential in shaping opinions of parents, particularly of those who may be on the fence.

Second only to health concerns, the possibility of legal repercussions was top concern for parents in the Marist Poll.

As more and more states move to legalize marijuana, those concerns may be dissipating, potentially skewing overall parental opinion to favor of the drug.

However, a 2017 study of parents in Washington, which voted to legalize in 2012, found that parents were more likely to oppose their children using the drug after legalization.

The researchers hypothesized that the change could be attributed to the fact that before legalization, parents didn't have to worry as much about access.

On the other hand, a study by Canadian researchers last fall found that parents felt better about their children using after legalization because they could be more open and develop healthier usage habits.
Almost 10,000 women a year are to benefit from NHS breast cancer tests that could spare them the stress of chemotherapy.

A U-turn by the health watchdog Nice means three types of tests can now be routinely offered to women.

They had been rejected in January because they werent seen as cost-effective.

At the time, charities accused Nice of a backwards step as the tests are regarded as the future of breast cancer treatment.

Some 10,000 women a year could be given a test which would save them the trauma of undergoing chemotherapy when being treated for breast cancer

Women with less aggressive forms of the disease may avoid the side effects of the treatment

They work by measuring the activity of up to 50 genes in a tumour sample removed during surgery.

A score between one and 100 is calculated, which tells doctors how aggressive the cancer is and whether it will return.

A high score suggests the cancer is very aggressive and women would be offered chemotherapy.

A low score suggests the cancer is very slow growing. In these cases doctors will suggest women avoid chemotherapy and its gruelling side-effects of infections, hair loss and extreme tiredness.

Baroness Delyth Morgan, chief executive of charity Breast Cancer Now, said: This major reversal represents real progress for patients.

Prognostic tests like these are showing great potential to personalise breast cancer treatment and enable some women to be safely spared the gruelling side-effects of chemotherapy. She added: Even the possibility of chemotherapy can cause great anxiety for many patients after their diagnosis, and these tools to help predict the risk of recurrence will now be invaluable in guiding decisions about whether this treatment is necessary.

Experts say the three tests  Oncotype DX, EndoPredict and Prosigna  will, in future, enable women to have much more personalised treatment. The costs of the tests is not known but it is likely that their manufacturers have significantly reduced the price since January.

Scientists from Cambridge and UCL are carrying out a major trial of the Prosigna test on 4,500 patients. They are hoping to show that women who avoided chemotherapy had just as good survival rates, if not better, than those who had it.

Researchers eventually hope to be able to offer patients a tailored set of drugs based on their test scores.

There are just over 55,000 new cases of breast cancer a year in the UK and around 11,400 deaths.
Vulnerable pensioners are being left with crippling care bills because of a postcode lottery which sees them denied vital NHS funding, research has found.

Patients with serious health problems, including many with dementia, are meant to receive free help through the NHS Continuing Healthcare Fund.

However, some areas are 25 times less likely to offer access to the NHS money than others, according to a survey by Which?.

The only hope patients have of receiving free care is by persuading CCGs that their needs are so severe that they require continuing care funds

Vulnerable pensioners are being left with crippling care bills because of a postcode lottery

Some areas are 25 times less likely to offer access to the NHS money than others, according to the survey by Which?

This means thousands of elderly people  and their families  are being handed huge social care bills they must pay themselves.

The South Reading clinical commissioning group (CCG) paid for care for the lowest proportion of people at 8.78 patients per 50,000 head of population, while Salford in Greater Manchester funded 220.38 per 50,000.

Although CCGs may differ demographically, this cannot easily explain the regional variation. South Reading, for example, benchmarked itself against the ten most similar CCGs and found one, Leeds North, was funding nine times as many patients.

Under Englands care system, the elderly have to pay the full cost of their care down to their last 23,500.

Ministers have pledged a cap on the amount to be paid  but this will not be introduced for several years.

The only hope patients have of receiving free care is by persuading CCGs that their needs are so severe that they require continuing care funds.

Officials are supposed to use the national framework to ensure patients are treated in the same way wherever they live, but the Which? survey found a huge postcode lottery in whether the NHS will pay.

One of the areas with the lowest funding levels was Wokingham, Berkshire, which covers many of Theresa Mays own constituents.

Which? cited the case of Gill Jarvis, who faced 96,000-a-year bills after her mother  who has severe dementia  had her funding suddenly withdrawn.

She said: My mums needs have actually worsened. Ive been given no real explanation and the lack of humanity has hit me quite hard.

A Which? spokesman said ministers should examine the care system as a whole, including how quality varies by region, in a forthcoming green paper. He added: Whether you get funding for care shouldnt depend on where you live.

Although the Department of Health insists there are no caps or quotas on access, NHS Englands efficiency plan asks CCGs to save 855million on continuing care by 2020-21.

A new national framework, aiming to offer greater clarity on funding criteria, will be implemented on October 1.
Brits are known for reaching for a cup of tea to fix anything.

The phrase tea and sympathy has even made it into the Macmillan dictionary as shorthand for providing support and kindness for someone who is upset or in trouble.

While the many benefits of black and green tea are well documented, from boosting metabolism to anti-ageing, herbal teas too, may also come with benefits.

They can help calm the nervous system to even assisting on energy levels, especially if theyre quality, well-sourced teas high in active ingredients.

Just this week a leading scientist claimed that camomile could even help manage diabetes.

The herbal beverage helps to manage peoples blood-sugar levels through its effects on carbohydrate digestion, said associate professor Richard Blackburn, who is head of the Sustainable Materials Research Group at the University of Leeds.

Indeed, common parlance aside, most of us know instinctively that a cup of tea really can help, whether youre feeling sad, stressed, in need of a lift, celebrating a triumph and everything in between.

Herbal teas have a variety of benefits: hibiscus can lower your blood pressure, while marigold can help to ease stomach cramps

All teas are healthy, says Louise Cheadle, a tea taster (yes that is a thing and what a dream job) for cult tea brand Teapigs.

Black, green, white and oolong teas contain tea flavonoids which research shows have an antioxidant effect on the body and all teas are hydrating so they help increase water levels in the body.

Moreover, she explains, Herbal teas and rooibos teas have lots of different benefits and have been drunk for centuries in different countries in lots of different ways.

Its led the team at Healthista  being the total tea fanatics that we are  to celebrate National Tea Day on April 20th by asking the question: which tea-scription (tea prescription, get it?) can help which need?

Metabolism

Green

What's so great about green tea? Scientific evidence of the benefits of green tea is not conclusive, but people drink it for a number of reasons and it is widely used in traditional Chinese medicine. All teas are produced from the same type of plant, but the leaves are processed differently for different types. The leaves are thought to contain more antioxidants than other types of tea. It is thought that green tea makes you burn more calories thanks to its caffeine and catechins (antioxidants). Drinking green tea can help to lower cholesterol; high cholesterol can cause heart problems. One study showed that green tea was as good as mouthwash at preventing tooth decay. Source: NHS Choices Advertisement

Youve probably heard enough about the health benefits of green tea by now, from heart health to anti-agieng. But one of its key benefits is for increasing metabolism.

A study reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that green tea-extract increases the metabolism by four per cent over a 24 hour period. Three to five cups a day can help you burn an extra 70 calories a day, which adds up to seven pounds a year, 35 pounds for five years and 70 pounds for 10 years.

Green tea has also been shown to inhibit fat absorption  the movement of glucose into fat cells, support healthy glucose levels after eating a meal, prevent insulin spikes which prevents fat storage, and reduce appetite.

Liquorice

For increased energy and to help support the nervous system, liquorice is a great tea, says Hay. Animal studies have showed it helps with fat metabolism and, according to Hay, its great before a workout because it provides energy.

Try: Trim from Teapigs, 3.99, which contains a potent mix of green tea and liquorice along with organic guarana which helps with energy production, ficus and stimulates digestion.

Energy

Beetroot

Whether taken as a juice, supplement or tea, beetroot is fast becoming a favourite of athletes because of its ability to promote nitric acid production in the body  essential for energy.

A review of studies recently found beetroot could help with High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) and previous research has found it helps stamina too.

Hibiscus

Hibiscus can help lower blood pressure and is a great liver tonic too, says Hay. Liver health is essential to energy production.

In Egypt, hibiscus tea known as karkady is served both hot and cold over ice.

Try: Upbeet Energy tea, 3.99, from Teapigs which contains beetroot, hibiscus, ginger and green tea and tastes super fruity and aromatic with a sweet edge (its gorgeous on ice too).

Calm

Chamomile

Its reputation as a medicinal plant that makes you snooze is well known and the fresh chamomile plant has a distinct apple-ish smell and its reputed benefits include strengthening the immune system, aiding digestion, calming nerves and easing stomach pains.

Along with being a great support for the nervous system, chamomile is also believed to help period pain, says Hay.

Lemongrass

Not just for curries, lemongrass makes a delicious citrus-tastic tea. Its herbal properties are centuries old and are commonly used in Indonesia and Malaysia by herbalists as a tonic to help combat depression and low mood.

Along with being great for mood, concentration and sleep, lemongrass is also a digestive tonic so great after eating, says Hay.

Try: Calm Relaxing Tea from Teapigs, 3.99, which also contains valerian, a powerful herb used for helping promote calm with a clean, limey taste we love.

Detox

Ginger

Herbal teas, including ginger, can help to calm your mood and detoxify the body

With thermogenic properties  meaning it helps heat the body  ginger can help digestion after eating and is sometimes used to calm an upset tummy.

Dandelion

Well known as a digestive tonic, dandelion helps stimulate the liver and gall bladder making it great for digestion and if youve been overdoing the fat or alcohol, says Hay.

The bitter qualities in dandelion are good for helping fluid retention so could help reduce bloating.

Marigold

This herb is a liver and digestive tonic that is also sometimes used for easing tummy cramps, says Rick Hay.

Try: Clean N Green Detox tea from Teapigs, 3.99. Possibly the best green tea we have ever tasted (and we have tasted a lot of green teas), it contains ginger, marigold, green tea and dandelion as well lemongrass which gives it a refreshing, sweet taste, without a hint of the bitterness that you often get from regular green tea.

Appetite

Yerba Mate

Even those who are trying to cut out the caffeine of a traditional cuppa can enjoy the benefits of herbal teas

If youve ever If travelled to South America and Argentina in particular, youll see Yerba mate being drunk by just about everyone.

Its drunk there to help maintain a healthy weight and for its stimulating properties, but Yerba mate is also thought combat fatigue, control the appetite, reduce stress and boost immunity. Is there anything this Latin super-tea (pronounced Yerba mah-tey) is not purported to do?

Try: Yerba Mate from Teapigs, 3.99, which tastes kind of like a smoky flavoured green tea.

Mood

Cinnamon

This humble spice has been shown in numerous studies to help balance the blood sugar and is even suggested to people with diabetes for that purpose.

Along with its irresistible sweet taste, that means cinnamon can not only help keep mood steady, it could also help reduce sugar cravings. We love a cinnamon flavoured tea when the need for a 4pm hit of caffeine, chocolate or both hits.

Turmeric

Quite the food of the moment, everyday seems to deliver a new health benefit of this bright yellow spice. Most recently, researchers found turmeric could help mood and memory and previous research have shown it has anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties.

Try: Happy uplifting tea from Teapigs, 3.99, which contains cinnamon, turmeric as well as organic apple and lemon peel making the taste alone  fruity, spicy, citrusy  enough to put you in a better mood.

If you dont like the taste of green tea but want the benefits

Genmaicha tea

Back in the day, green tea was rather expensive and too pricey for your average Japanese peasant so to make it go further, they would mix it with grains of toasted rice.

Now, its celebrated as a green tea in its own right, with all the benefits of green tea but with the most unbelievably irresistible nutty flavour and scent that tastes like liquid popcorn in a mug.

Try: Popcorn Tea from Teapigs, 4.99, (its not cheap but it is delish).

If youre giving up Builders tea: Rooibos

Rooibos tea has been drunk by the bushmen of Africa for hundred of years and its thought to ease headaches, nervous tension and insomnia. It also contains pheylpyretic acid which is thought to help skin conditions such as eczema.

If youre trying to give up caffeine and love the hot, sweet milky comfort of a Builders brew, Rooibos with your choice of milk (we love it with almond milk) is your favourite fantastic caffeine free replacement.

Its also thought to ease headaches, nervous tension and insomnia.

Try: Honeybush and Rooibos Tea from Teapigs, 3.99, which conatins honey bush, another South African wonderbush that has a slightly sweeter taste than regular rooibos and is super-high in viatmin C, calcium and magnesium and also totally caffeine free.

National Tea Day is 21-22 April.

This article was originally published by Healthista and was reproduced with their permission.
An Englishman who caught the 'world's worst' case of super-gonorrhoea has been cured with a last-ditch antibiotic.

In the first recorded case worldwide, the unidentified man caught a version of the STI that was resistant to two crucial drugs.

Health officials revealed he caught it from a one-night stand with a woman during his travels to south east Asia earlier this year - despite having a girlfriend in the UK.

Public Health England issued a warning over the the STI, resistant to ceftriaxone and azithromycin - the two drugs recommended for gonorrhoea.

In a statement today, the Government agency revealed the man - whose location has also been withheld - has been cured with ertapenem, another antibiotic.

In the first recorded case worldwide, the unidentified man caught a version of the STI that was resistant to two crucial drugs

Dr Gwenda Hughes, head of STIs at PHE, said: 'We are pleased to report the case of multi-drug resistant gonorrhoea has been successfully treated.

'Investigations have also revealed there has been no further spread of this infection within the UK.'

Dr Hughes did, however, warn that 'we expect to see further cases of multi-drug resistant gonorrhoea in the future'.

She pointed to two similar cases in Australia that came to light earlier this week, with one patient having also caught the bug from south east Asia.

World Health Organization experts raised fears two years ago the STI, once known as the 'clap', could become immune to antibiotics in a 'matter of years'.

The WHO recommends patients are given ceftriaxone and azithromycin to combat gonorrhoea, the third most common STI in Britain.

But in the case of the Englishman battling super gonorrhoea, revealed last month, PHE admitted he was resistant to both of the drugs.

Officials said at the time: 'This is the first global report of high-level azithromycin resistant N. gonorrhoeae which is also resistant to ceftriaxone.'

WHAT IS SUPER GONORRHOEA? When gonorrhoea is resistant to one of two antibiotics recommended to treat it, it is known as super gonorrhoea. But this is the first recorded case where the bug has fought off both treatments  a pill called azithromycin and an infection called ceftriaxone. All types of gonorrhoea  historically called the clap - are caused by the bacteria Neisseria gonorrhoeae. It is quick to develop and strains mutate every few years to become resistant to drugs. Doctors have frequently changed their recommended treatments to keep up with the changing nature of the bug. It stopped responding to penicillin in the 1980s. Symptoms of gonorrhoea include discharge, bleeding or pain when urinating. But around one in two women and one in 10 men will not experience any signs, which is why the infection is so easily spread. Women who do not get treatment can develop pelvic inflammatory disease  an infection of the womb and ovaries which can cause infertility. In pregnancy, it can cause miscarriage, premature birth or lead to babies developing problems with their vision. Patients with super gonorrhoea can be given some other treatments which might work but can have unpleasant side effects. Health experts warn it is only a matter of time before the bug mutates to resist these remaining antibiotics too. They recommend using condoms and regular testing to prevent spread of the disease. Advertisement

The patient attended sexual health services earlier this year after becoming concerned about symptoms and was diagnosed with gonorrhoea.

They began a month after having sex with the woman in south east Asia on his travels. He told officials he was having regular sex with a female in the UK.

The document did not state whether the Asian woman already had the multi-drug resistant strain of gonorrhoea, or if it mutated.

He was started on a course of ceftriaxone and spectinomycin - but tests showed the STI remained in his throat, suggesting one failed to work.

Laboratory tests revealed a high resistance to azithromycin and ceftriaxone. It also showed the bug was only susceptible to spectinomycin.

The patient was then given daily infusions of ertapenem, another antibiotic usually given to treat more serious infections, such as pneumonia.

More than 35,000 people a year are infected with gonorrhoea in England, including record numbers of baby boomers.

Only chlamydia and genital warts are more prevalent. Figures show 78 million people worldwide contract gonorrhoea each year.

A super version of the STI, caused by the Neisseria gonorrhoeae bacterium, swept across Britain two years ago, striking London, the South East and the Midlands.

It was resistant to the common antibiotic ciprofloxacin and extended-spectrum cephalosporins, which are another branch of last-resort drugs.

Analysis of STI data around the world previously revealed 97 per cent of countries have reported strains of gonorrhoea that are resistant to ciprofloxacin.

And more than 50 countries warned strains were showing some form of resistance to ceftraixone - another last-resort treatment.

Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davies has previously written to GPs warning that gonorrhoea could become an untreatable disease.

Super gonorrhoea is one of many antibiotic-resistant infections which together kill an estimated 700,000 people worldwide each year.

Deemed to be one of the biggest threats to humanity, the issue has previously been cited as severe as terrorism and global warming.

Antibiotics have been so overused by GPs and hospital staff for decades that the bacteria have evolved to become resistant.

Doctors claim medicines including penicillin no longer work on sore throats, skin infections and, more seriously, pneumonia.
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Indonesia's conservative Aceh province will no longer allow canings for violations of Shariah law to be carried out in public, its governor said Thursday, apparently in response to international condemnation of the caning last year of two men for gay sex that damaged Indonesia's moderate image.

A memorandum of understanding signed by Aceh Gov. Irwandi Yusuf and Yuspahruddin, head of the provincial Law and Human Rights office, stipulates that caning can only take place inside prisons or other places of detention.

It says adults can still witness the punishment but recording won't be allowed. The numbers of people will be much smaller than the hundreds who regularly cheered the outdoor proceedings.

'The aim of holding the caning inside prison is to prevent it from being watched by children, without cameras and hand phones,' Yusuf said after signing the memorandum, witnessed by Indonesian Minister of Law and Human Rights Yasonna Laoly.

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A Sharia Law official whipping a man convicted of gay sex in a public caning outside a mosque in Banda Aceh, Aceh, Indonesia

The Aceh province governor said the new law was to be introduced in order to stop people filming the procession and so that children could no longer watch

Aceh is the only province in Muslim-majority Indonesia that practices Shariah law, a concession made by the central government in 2001 as part of efforts to end a decades-long war for independence.

Human Rights Watch dismissed the change to indoor whipping as cosmetic and called for Aceh to abolish caning and the laws that allow it. It said caning remains a form of torture whether it is carried out in public or not.

'Torture is torture whether you do it in public, outside a mosque after Friday prayers, or inside a room, banning anyone from taking a picture,' said the group's Indonesia researcher, Andreas Harsono. 'It's still torture, it's still traumatizing.'

Human Rights Watch also appealed for Aceh to release four people arrested in March for same-sex conduct, who each face up to 100 lashes under the province's Islamic criminal code.

Hundreds of people have been publicly caned since the punishment was introduced in Aceh in 2005.

The province's implementation of Shariah law has become increasingly harsh and now also applies to non-Muslims. Last May, the province for the first time caned two men for gay sex after vigilantes broke into their home and handed them over to religious police.

Footage of the men, both in their 20s, being caned dozens of times in front of a baying crowd galvanized international criticism of Shariah law in the province and was another blow to Indonesia's reputation for moderation following the imprisonment of the capital Jakarta's minority Christian governor for blaspheming Islam.

Making the canings private was proposed in July last year after Yusuf met with President Joko 'Jokowi' Widodo amid concerns that tourism and investment could be affected.

The last canings were on Feb. 27, when five people including two Christians convicted of gambling were punished in the provincial capital, Banda Aceh.

A group of amorous couples and alleged sex workers were publicly whipped for breaking Islamic law in Indonesia's Aceh Friday, just a week after the province pledged to move the widely condemned practice indoors.

The public punishments have garnered worldwide press coverage thanks to the prevalence of people filming the brutal ceremony

An Indonesian woman is caned for prostitution in the city in another brutal public punishment witnessed by hundreds of people in April 2018

The province has formerly seen three men and five women - who included several college students - found guilty of violating religious law by either showing affection in public or for offering sexual services online, officials said.

Rights groups have derided it as cruel and last year President Joko Widodo called for an end to public whippings in Aceh.

Around 98 percent of the province's five million residents are Muslims, subject to religious law, including the public whippings which came into practice around 2005.

The new rule has generated protests from conservative groups who see public whippings as having a strong deterrent effect on crime.

Banda Aceh's deputy mayor Zainal Arifin said Friday's flogging was not an act of defiance against the new rules.

'We understand that the regulation has not yet come into effect and the prison is not yet ready to (host floggings) so that is why we are still doing it' in public, he said.

'Until the new regulation is officially in place we will carry on as usual.'

In front of stern-faced police officials and herds of female onlookers the woman was brutally given several lashes on Friday

Public canings have previously seen people punished for adultery - like this man who was condemned for spending time in close proximity to a woman who was not his wife
Around 500 Central American migrants jumped onto the roof of a freight train on Thursday and made their way towards the US border to seek a 'better life'.

The migrants are from the remnants of a caravan that has previously drawn the ire of Donald Trump, left Guadalajara, west Mexico before dawn and travelled north.

They could be seen stretching out on the roofs of freight cars as they made for the US border, which they hope to reach by April 24.

Central American migrants pictured moving in a caravan through Mexico, as they travel in an open wagon of a freight train

They had jumped onto the freight train and climbed inside in a bid to reach the US border in the north of Mexico

One of the migrants is Honduran Mirna Ruiz. He said: 'We are heading north seeking a better life.'

'As you know, in Honduras we just can't live there anymore because of the gangs. We can't even go shopping because we are afraid.

'We are also worried that our children will be recruited by the gangs. Those are the fears in our country.'

A group of 500 jumped onto a freight train in Guadalajara on April 19, though more groups from the caravan, including the one pictured, left earlier

Caravan organizer Irineo Mujica explained that the migrants expected to reach the Pacific coast city of Mazatlan, then go to the northern city of Hermosillo, where they might make a rest stop sometime over the weekend.

They would then continue to the US border, where they hope to arrive by April 24, he said.

A group of 50 Central American migrants from the same caravan, who set out from southern Mexico in late March, reached the US border on April 19.

This photo shows migrants travelling through Mexico to the US border while clutching onto the wagon on April 17

Central American migrants who attended the annual Migrants Stations of the Cross caravan for migrants' rights, wait for a northern-bound train, in Guadalajara

They endured the long journey despite threats by President Donald Trump to secure the border with National Guard personnel.

Since peaking at around 1,500 people, the so-called migrant 'caravan' has dwindled under pressure from Trump and Mexican migration authorities, who vowed to separate those migrants with a right to stay in Mexico from those who did not.

Some of those migrants began arriving in the Mexican border city of Tijuana on Wednesday and have requested asylum in the United States.

The caravan numbered 1,500 people at its peak but has broken down since with several groups forming and travelling to the border

A small girl pictured as she travels north to Mazatlan, Mexico, on her way to the US border

'Since yesterday, some began to cross into the United States to turn themselves in from Tijuana and request asylum. We understand more of (the migrants) will do the same,' said Jose Maria Garcia, director of Juventud 2000, an organization dedicated to assisting migrants.

He said more migrants, many of whom are stranded in Mexico's central states, are expected to arrive in the coming days.

'We will continue to receive them and it will be up to them if they stay in the country or leave,' Garcia said.

A group of 50 Central American migrants from the same caravan set out from southern Mexico in late March and reached the US border on April 19

Most of the migrants come from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, which are among the most violent and impoverished countries in the Americas

Of the larger group that set out on Thursday, organiser Mujica said a couple of hundred migrants were expected to turn themselves over to US authorities at the border and request asylum, arguing that it was too dangerous for them to stay in Honduras, where most are from.

The caravan left the Guatemala-Mexico border in late March and grew to more than 1,000 migrants who found safety travelling in numbers.

It was to have formally ended in Mexico City, but many of the migrants feared going solo on the dangerous final leg north and decided to keep travelling together.

Central American migrants who attended the annual Migrants Stations of the Cross caravan for migrants' rights, rest at a shelter in Tlaquepaque, Jalisco state, Mexico

The remnants of the migrant caravan that drew the ire of President Donald Trump were continuing their journey north through Mexico toward the US border

Some who had split off to press on alone reported back about kidnappings and having their papers for safe passage torn up.

Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala are among the most violent and impoverished countries in the Americas, prompting many people to leave in search of a better life.

Every year, thousands of migrants -especially Central Americans- venture to cross Mexico and reach the United States, often risking their lives along the way.

Central American migrants, mostly from Honduras, jumped onto the roof of a freight train to head north from Guadalajara

Mexico's National Immigration Institute said its agents found a total of 191 mostly Central American migrants jammed into a truck and a bus in southern and central Mexico.

The institute said 103 migrants were found packed into a truck in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz.

They had gone two days without food or water. All but two are from Guatemala, and 55 are minors.

Agents also found 88 migrants crowded into a bus that had seating for only 42 people in the north-central state of Hidalgo.

Eighty are from Guatemala, among them are 45 minors accompanied by relatives.
President Donald Trump told former FBI Director James Comey that Vladimir Putin told him Russia had 'the most beautiful hookers in the world,' that he was bothered by allegations he had sex with Russian prostitutes, and that he had serious concerns about the judgment of his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn.

The 15 pages of documents contain new details about a series of interactions with Trump that Comey found so unnerving that he documented them in writing.

Those encounters in the weeks before Comey's May 2017 firing include a Trump Tower discussion involving allegations of prostitutes and Russia, a White House dinner at which Comey says Trump asked him for his loyalty and a private Oval Office discussion where the ex-FBI head says the president asked him to end an investigation into Flynn.

Comey recalls conversations about about prostitutes  as he reveals awkward talks where President Trump vigorously disputed the idea he would ever consort with Russian sex workers.

During one exchange, Comey writes that Putin bragged to Trump that his country has the most attractive prostitutes.

Putin told Trump 'We have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world,' Comey writes.

President Donald Trump (left) told fired FBI director James Comey that his wife, First Lady Melania Trump (right), was hurt by rumors that he slept with Russian hookers in Moscow, according to memos released on Thursday

The fired FBI director recounts each time he claims the topic came up during briefings, phone calls, and meetings with Trump.

According to Comeys memo, the then-FBI director received a telephone call from Trump on March 30, 2017.

In the 11-minute call, Comey said Trump told him he wanted to life the cloud of this Russia business was making it difficult to run the country.

Comey said the president denied having anything to do with Russia.

Trump then told Comey that he would never get involved in hookers in Russia.

Can you imagine me, hookers? Comey writes in the memo as he recalls the conversations with Trump.

I have a beautiful wife, Trump told Comey, according to the memo. And it has been very painful.

Trump also told Comey that he was suing Christopher Steele, the former British spy who compiled the so-called dossier which first contained the allegation that the president was filmed cavorting with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel.

The dossier alleges that Trump asked the prostitutes to perform a golden showers routine.

Trump has denied these claims.

In Comeys memo, Trump says he always advised people that they were being recorded whenever they were in Russia.

Comey, who is on a book tour promoting A Higher Loyalty, wrote the memos because he was bothered by the nature of his conversations with Trump

Trump is also said to have told Comey that he wanted the FBI and the Department of Justice to make a public statement indicating that the president was not under investigation.

According to memos maintained by Comey and obtained by The Associated Press, Trump and his chief of staff asked days later if Flynn's communications were being monitored under a secret surveillance warrant.

The documents had been eagerly anticipated since their existence was first revealed last year, especially since Comey's interactions with Trump are part of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into whether the president sought to obstruct justice.

The memos have been turned over to Mueller.

Comey has said publicly that, 'I knew there might come a day when I would need a record of what had happened, not just to defend myself, but to defend the FBI and our integrity as an institution and the independence of our investigative function.'

According to one memo, Trump complained about Flynn at a private January 2017 dinner with Comey, saying 'the guy has serious judgment issues.'

He then blamed Flynn for a delay in returning the congratulatory call of an international leader, telling Comey he would be upset if he had to wait six days for a returned phone call.

'I did not comment at any point during this topic and there was no mention or acknowledgment of any FBI interest in or contact with General Flynn,' Comey wrote.

At that point, the FBI had already interviewed Flynn about his contacts with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, and the Justice Department had already warned White House officials that they were concerned Flynn was vulnerable to blackmail.

Flynn was fired February 13, 2017, after White House officials said he had misled them about his Russian contacts during the transition period.

In a separate memo, Comey says Trump cleared the Oval Office of other officials, encouraged him to let the investigation into Flynn go and called him a good guy.

The memos reveal that days before Flynn's firing, then-White House chief of staff Reince Priebus asked Comey if Flynn's communications were being monitored under a secret surveillance warrant.

'Do you have a FISA order on Mike Flynn?' Priebus asked Comey, according to the memos, referring to an order under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Comey said he 'paused for a few seconds and then said that I would answer here, but that this illustrated the kind of question that had been asked and answered through established channels.'

Comey's response is redacted on the unclassified memos.

The memos were provided to Congress earlier Thursday as House Republicans escalated criticism of the Justice Department, threatening to subpoena the documents and questioning officials.

In a letter sent to three Republican House committee chairmen Thursday evening, Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd wrote that the department was sending a classified version of the memos and an unclassified version.

The department released Boyd's letter publicly but did not release the memos.

Justice officials had allowed some lawmakers to view the memos but had never provided copies to Congress.

Boyd wrote that the department had also provided the memos to several Senate committees.

Comey is on a publicity tour to promote his new book, A Higher Loyalty.

He revealed last year that he had written the memos after conversations with Trump.

Boyd wrote in the letter that the department 'consulted the relevant parties' and concluded that releasing the memos would not adversely affect any ongoing investigations.

Mueller is investigating potential ties between Russia and Trump's 2016 campaign as well as possible obstruction of justice by the president.

Boyd said the decision to allow the release of the memos 'does not alter the department's traditional obligation to protect from public disclosure witness statements and other documents obtained during an ongoing investigation.'

Comey said in an interview Thursday with CNN that he's 'fine' with the Justice Department turning his memos over to Congress.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (left), House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (center), and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (right) all demanded that Comey's memo be released

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi tweeted on Thursday that the memos 'are further proof of [Trump's] contempt for the rule of law

'I think what folks will see if they get to see the memos is I've been consistent since the very beginning, right after my encounters with President Trump, and I'm consistent in the book and tried to be transparent in the book as well,' he said.

Last week, the GOP chairmen of three House committees demanded the memos by Monday.

The Justice Department asked for more time, and the lawmakers agreed.

The three senior Republican lawmakers who demanded the memos be released - House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte; House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy; and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes - released a statement saying that the memos 'show the President made clear he wanted allegations of collusion, coordination, and conspiracy between his campaign and Russia fully investigated.

'The memos also made clear the "cloud" President Trump wanted lifted was not the Russian interference in the 2016 election cloud, rather it was the salacious, unsubstantiated allegations related to personal conduct leveled in the dossier' by former British spy Christopher Steele, the statement read.

But House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from California, differs.

She tweeted on Thursday that the memos 'are further proof of [Trump's] contempt for the rule of law.

'His attempts to intimidate, circumvent the law & undermine integrity of law enforcement investigations demand immediate action to protect the Mueller investigation,' Pelosi said.
A Fresno State lecturer who was demoted after he called for Trump to be hanged has spoken out in support of a colleague who branded Barbara Bush a 'racist'.

Lars Maischak, who lectures in history, defended English professor Randa Jarrar amid calls for her to be sacked following her extraordinary Twitter outburst.

Maischak also hit out at university President Joseph Castro, accusing him of failing to 'defend academic freedom against the fascist threat'.

Lars Maischak, the history lecturer demoted last year after he called for Trump to be hanged, has spoken out in support of colleague Randa Jarrar

Jarrar is facing calls for her to be sacked after she tweeted that Barbara Bush was an 'amazing racist' just an hour after news of her death broke

Writing in an editorial for the Fresno Bee, Maischak acknowledge that Jarrar's comments offended many people on social media.

But, he said: 'The wish to deport, rape, kill, fire, arrest and drive out of town on a rail those whose opinions upset you is the clear marker of an authoritarian mind.'

Drawing parallels with Nazi Germany, he added: 'The online network of character and career assassins functions for Trump the way the brown-shirts did for Hitler.

'This is the time to speak out against the campaign of death threats and public vilification.'

Maischak also took aim at Fresno State President Joseph Castro, calling him a 'parade marshal for the lynch mob'

He then went on to denounce Castro as 'a parade marshal for the lynch mob'.

The editorial was published after Castro denounced Jarrar's tweet as 'beyond free speech' and said the university is considering all options in dealing with her.

The furor began just an hour after news of Barbara Bush's death broke, when Jarrar launched her online attack.

'Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal. F*** outta here with your nice words,' she said.

'PSA: either you are against these pieces of s*** and their genocidal ways or you're part of the problem. That's actually how simple this is.

'I'm happy the witch is dead. Can't wait for the rest of her family to fall to their demise the way 1.5 million Iraqis have.'

Amid the furious backlash, Jarrar bragged that she couldn't be fired from her tenured position, and even tagged Castro in the post.

She subsequently set her Twitter account to private. She is believed to be away from the university currently, and travelling overseas.

Lars also faced calls for him to quit following this tweet that he penned in February last year. He was ultimately allowed to keep his job, but removed from the classroom

Jarrar continued to defend her tweet despite a barrage of online attacks, even bragging that she couldn't be fired because she has tenure

She grew up in Kuwait and Egypt and moved to the United States after the Gulf War, according to her university faculty page.

She describes herself in her Twitter messages as an Arab-American and a Muslim-American woman.

Maischak's own scandal erupted in February last year when he tweeted: 'To save American democracy, Trump must hang. The sooner and the higher, the better.'

The remarks were picked up by Brietbart before making national news, leading to calls for Maischak to be fired.

He was forced to leave his home after receiving death threats and was suspended by the university.

Maischak also apologised for the remark, saying he was ready to accept full responsibility.

According to the Bee, the university removed him from the classroom and moved all of his courses to the online program.
Stevante Clark, the brother of an unarmed black man shot and killed last month by police, was arrested Thursday morning for making criminal threats.

Clark was taken into custody around 10:15am for making threats to commit a crime resulting in death or great bodily injury. The 25-year-old was also accused of calling 911 with the intent to annoy or harass.

He was booked into the Sacramento County Jail for criminal threats to another person, felony assault, felony vandalism, and abusing the 911 emergency line.

Stevante Clark, 25, was arrested Thursday morning in California for making criminal threats

He was booked into the Sacramento County Jail for criminal threats to another person, felony assault, felony vandalism, and abusing the 911 emergency line. Clark is pictured above talking with Sacramento Police Chief Daniel Hahn before a meeting of the Sacramento City Council on April 10

The Sacramento Police Department did not provide details on Clarks arrest, saying the incident was being investigated and more information would be provided later.

Clark is not eligible for bail and has a scheduled court hearing on Friday.

The arrest came the same day as Black Lives Matter demonstrators marched through downtown Sacramento to deliver 100,000 signed petitions demanding the district attorneys office file charges against the Sacramento officers who fatally shot Stephon Clark in his grandparents' backyard on March 18.

Police, responding to a call about a person breaking car windows, had said Stephon, 22, was armed but investigators only found a cellphone on the slain father-of-two.

Clark was thrust into the public spotlight days after Stephon's death when he disrupted a Sacramento City Council meeting centered around the shooting. He later apologized saying at his brothers funeral that he was sorry for storming into the meeting and yelling at Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg.

Clark's 22-year-old brother, Stephon, was shot and killed last month by Sacramento officers who said he was pointing a gun at them. Investigators found only a cellphone on Stephon

Sonia Lewis, a family member of Clark, told the Sacramento Bee that she did not know why he was arrested but was concerned that he was not getting the proper mental health help.

At this point, its a processing of his grief as well as continued mental health issues that hes not addressing,' she said.

Earlier this month, Clark received voluntary inpatient treatment at the University of California Davis Medical Center. He said that he has been struggling with his mental health since his brothers death and it was hard to cope because of all the media and community attention.
An Australian father has been arrested after allegedly taking his 15-month-old son from his ex-partner's home.

Alistair Larmour, who is originally from Melbourne but now living in Bali, is accused of invading his estranged partner Agnieszka Krzysztofowicz's home in the middle of the night on Sunday.

He claims he has not been able to see his son, Andrew, for nearly a year and taking him was the 'only option' saying he just 'wants to be a father'.

Alistair Larmour claims he has not been able to see his son, Andrew, for nearly a year and taking him was the 'only option'

Agnieszka Krzysztofowicz is pleading for the return of her son after his father allegedly took their son from her home and is currently on the run in Bali

Mr Larmour was arrested and taken into custody about 3.30am, child recovery specialist Col Chapman told Nine News.

Earlier, Ms Krzysztofowicz, known as Anges, said she was distraught and desperate for her son to come home after the raid at her home near Ubud in central Bali.

She made extensive appeals on social media while also allegedly reporting the incident to Polish police, which are reported to be investigating alongside Australian and Indonesian authorities.

Mr Larmour, who lived in Perth before moving to Indonesia, claimed he had to take the drastic action to get his ex-partner to discuss shared custody after they split in June.

The self-employed spiritual healer and meditation instructor broke down in tears in a video he posted to Facebook on Thursday with his son in his arms.

Mr Larmour, who lived in Perth before moving to Indonesia, claims he had to take the drastic action to get his ex-partner to discuss shared custody with their son (pictured)

'I haven't seen Andrew in 10 months and I've been trying to come to an agreement with visitation rights,' he said.

'Every single attempt at communication [with Agnes] has been thwarted and she's blocked me on every form of media.

'Finally, we're at the negotiation table and a custody agreement.'

He added in the video he was posting to 'allay some fears' that his son is 'happy and healthy' before breaking down in tears.

A battle between Andrew Lamour's parents over shared custody has led to his father allegedly taking his son from his mother's home in Bali

Ms Krzysztofowicz, known as Anges, says she is distraught and desperate for her son to come home

'I feel really cornered and this was the only option left to me.

'The fact of the matter is I really want to be a dad, I just really want to be a dad,' he said in tears.

Ms Krzysztofowicz claims she was held while another man helped Mr Larmour escape with his son at around midnight on Sunday night.

'In seconds they were gone and I was chasing the car and not much could be done. That's why I'm making these posts to get Andrew home,' she said in a Facebook post.

Mr Larmour explains how his life has been 'fundamentally shaped' by ongoing battles with 'schizophrenia and alcoholism' but has been sober for 10 years

The mother, who is a Polish citizen, pleaded with people to help her get her son home as she tries to press a legal case in Poland.

'Any court would tell you this small boy at this age should be with his mother,' Ms Krzysztofowicz said.

'If you see Andrew help him to get back to his home as soon as possible.'

A desperate appeal has been launched online with a funding page to help fund legal fees for Ms Krzysztofowicz

Mr Larmour said he had spent three months trying to get legal support in Indonesia but 'to no effect'.

But Ms Krzysztofowicz has argued she believes her son's father is 'incapable of taking care' of their son.

She has hired child recovery expert Col Chapman and Indonesian border authorities have been alerted, The West Australian reports.

The publication also reports Ms Krzysztofowicz saying Andrew was suffering with a fever and chicken pox when he was taken.

On his website, Mr Larmour explains how his life has been 'fundamentally shaped' by ongoing battles with 'schizophrenia and alcoholism' and was homeless aged 25.

He says he has been sober for more than 10 years and previously served as secretary of the Western Australia board of Alcoholics Anonymous.
A Jeremy Corbyn supporter who starred in a Labour Party political broadcast referred previously to 'evil Jews' and denied the right of Israel to exist.

Lassaad Laouini, the general manager of Leeds Grand Mosque, was featured in a Labour promotional film broadcast on the BBC and ITV earlier this month.

He described how he opened the doors of the mosque for homeless people, suggesting that rough sleeping had risen under the Tories. But it emerged yesterday that he previously posted offensive messages on social media.

In one Mr Laouini, 37, from Leeds, suggested Jewish people have stirred up conflict in the Middle East. He also appeared to deny that Israel had a right to exist by saying the country should be referred to as 'Zionist entity'.

In a message from 2011, he shared an article about Israel supposedly intervening in Libya by sending mercenaries to help former ruler Muammar Gaddafi. He wrote above the link: 'The Zionists give a helping hand to their evil fellow Jew.'

Lassaad Laouini was featured in a Labour promotional film broadcast on the BBC and ITV earlier this month. He described how he opened the doors of the mosque for homeless people, suggesting that rough sleeping had risen under the Tories

The piece was from the 'Truth Seeker' website, which has previously produced stories including, 'Will a Rothschild be the Anti Christ?' and 'The Cabalist Jewish Plot to Islamize Germany'.

Mr Laouini also said the difference between Hitler and former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is that 'Hitler burned the Jews for his people but [Mubarak] burned his people for the Jews'.

Facebook curbs Corbynistas Facebook last night took action against two Jeremy Corbyn-supporting groups riddled with anti-Semitism and misogyny. The social media giant finally removed dozens of vile posts from the groups three weeks after they were exposed for hosting hate speech. Those sanctioned were We Support Jeremy Corbyn (with 68,000 members including two staff in Mr Corbyn's private office) and The Labour Party Forum (with 39,000 members). Facebook said the groups, which had hosted attacks on Jewish MPs and members of the Board of Deputies, do not 'follow our community standards'. London's Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan acknowledged that some Jewish people 'don't feel comfortable with the Labour Party' and called for 'tough' action against anti-Semites. He admitted that anti-Semitism was proving to be an issue as Labour bids to win votes across the capital in next month's local elections. Advertisement

Last night, Tory MP Andrew Percy, who is Jewish, said the comments were a 'stain' on Labour. 'We keep getting told by Labour leadership figures that racist anti-Semitism exists only in small numbers in the Labour Party, yet day after day more and more examples of it emerge and continue to go unchecked,' he said.

'We used to think only of the BNP as the racist party in UK politics, now our politics is being stained once again with racism, this time by Labour.'

A Labour Party spokesman said: 'The Labour Party does not of course endorse these comments. We were not aware of these utterly unacceptable social media comments and are reviewing our production processes.'

The revelation is a further embarrassment for Labour as it battles anti-Semitism charges.

Yesterday the Labour leader attempted to distance himself from anti-Semitic abuse carried out by his supporters, saying none of it was 'ever done in my name'. Mr Corbyn said the vile comments directed at some Labour MPs were 'disgusting' and 'appalling' and stressed the abuse was 'completely unacceptable'.

During an emotional Commons debate on anti-Semitism on Tuesday, Jewish Labour MPs Luciana Berger and Ruth Smeeth spoke movingly of the abuse they had endured. Miss Berger revealed that she had been called a 'Zionist pig' while Miss Smeeth broke down in tears after admitting she had been called a 'cancer of humanity'.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan also this week acknowledged that some Jewish people 'don't feel comfortable with Labour'.

Mr Corbyn is due to meet Jewish leaders on Tuesday following a wave of allegations of anti-Semitism against members.

Mr Lauoini apologised for the comments which he conceded that Jewish people may find 'offensive'.

But he said the posts had been 'taken out of context and misunderstood'.

'May I take this opportunity to apologise to anyone who may have found my use of words in some comments [or] posts hurtful,' he added.

'I will certainly be very mindful in the future, and will continue to serve our local communities with honour and privilege, regardless of faith or background.'
Could internet trolls who are rude about MPs find themselves dragged to the Commons to face Parliaments wrath?

Could they be imprisoned in one of the Palace of Westminsters towers, or whacked with a fine by Commons authorities?

That possibility was raised yesterday after a point of order from Sir William Cash (Con, Stone).

Sir William Cash asked John Bercow, pictured, asked whether trolling MPs was Contempt of Parliament whether they are abused outside or inside the house

Sir William raised the anti-Semitic abuse suffered by Labour's Ruth Smeeth, pictured

He noted the anti-Semitic abuse aimed at Labour MPs  including Stoke Norths Ruth Smeeth and Liverpool Wavertrees Luciana Berger. Bassetlaws John Mann has also been given an appallingly rough time but he, being a man, receives less sympathy than Misses Smeeth and Berger.

Sir Williams point of order went thus: given the outrageous abuse and intimidation levelled at these MPs, did Speaker John Bercow see sufficient evidence of a Contempt of the House? Sir William, who is among other things a country solicitor, said that the parliamentary manual Erskine May stated it was a Contempt of Parliament to molest and intimidate Members by abusive language outside or inside the precincts of the House. Sir William wondered if recent internet trolling constituted a prima facie case for Contempt of the House.

The Speaker said there could indeed be such a case but he would need to take advice before issuing any verdict. If Sir William wished to pursue the matter, he should write to him. Mr Bercow said there was a concern to protect the rights of all members of the House  any members could be similarly affected.

You may ask: what is Contempt of the House and what are the associated penalties? Contempt may be misusing the parliamentary portcullis motif or it may be passing yourself off as a parliamentary agent. It is a Contempt of the Commons to leak details of a select committee report, to be disorderly or disrespectful on the parliamentary estate or in one of its committees, or to obstruct MPs or parliamentary officials in their duties.

In the past, the House has summoned offenders to the Bar of the House (ie the edge of the Chamber) for a reprimand. That happened in 1957 to the feisty Sunday Express editor Sir John Junor after he suggested MPs had dodged petrol rationing. Contempt culprits have also been fined and locked up in the Palace of Westminster gaol.

The last to suffer that fate, in 1880, was one Charles Grizzell, a former naval lieutenant who publicly suggested he could control a Commons committee. Modern lobbyists, please note.

Grizzell legged it to Boulogne, so the Serjeant at Arms locked up his lawyer instead. See? Lawyers do have their uses.

If Speaker Bercow is obliged to look into the contempt issue by Sir William, he will find that 1880s clock-tower cell is now used for different purposes. Speakers Counsel may also advise him that compliance with various human rights laws may have made it harder for the Commons to impose its authority on scurvy members of the public.

All this is less academic than it might sound. Only this week, the Culture select committee was flicked a V-sign by Alexander Nix of data company Cambridge Analytica. The committee wanted him to give evidence at a hearing. He told it to get stuffed. There remains an uneasy stand-off, parliamentary clerks at present just muttering dark threats.

For sketchwriters  and any others who feel todays politicians sometimes deserve raspberries (though never to the degree aimed at MPs Smeeth & Co), this ice feels thin. A Commons factsheet says Contempt of the House may include reflections on the character or impartiality of the Speaker or Deputy Speakers.

Yikes. Speaker Bercow and his predecessor have done to the Chairs dignity what Uri Geller used to do to teaspoons. Bercows impartiality can be as skimpy as Borats thong.

We may condemn recent abuse of MPs. Let it be examined for illegality under incitement laws. But in an age when parliamentarians have drifted so far from the voters, it would be a mistake to revive the notion of Contempt of the House.
The 'Deliveroo-effect' has seen a 73per cent surge in the money spent on home delivery of takeaways in 10 years, taking the figure to 4.2billion.

The rise of smartphone-based delivery companies, with their armies of couriers on peddle bikes and mopeds, has changed the way people eat.

High street chains like Jamie's Italian, Byron, Prezzo and Strada have been forced to close outlets.

By contrast, delivery firms like Deliveroo, JUST EAT, hungryhouse and UberEATS, are thriving by offering home delivery both for major chains and small independent outlets.

In fact, they have become so successful that these firms now deliver from some food businesses that operate out of specialist kitchens, which could be in an out of town warehouse rather than a high street restaurant.

The 'Deliveroo-effect' has seen a 73per cent surge in the money spent on home delivery of takeaways in 10 years, taking the figure to 4.2billion (file photo)

There were some 673million deliveries in the past year, which is equivalent to ten for every person in the country, according to research by market analysts at the NPD Group.

Chinese was the most popular at 179 million, ahead of pizza at 171m, burgers at 82m and curry at 70m.

Pizza's share of the market is falling while the home delivery of burgers is rising rapidly, led by the fact that even McDonald's now has a tie-up with delivery firms.

NPD said there were 60per cent more home deliveries of burgers in 2017 than in 2016. At the same time chips, which at one time were not offered for home delivery because they quickly went cold and soggy, are now included in 16per cent of all orders.

Head of Foodservice UK for the NPD Group, Cyril Lavenant,(correct) said: 'Delivery is a big hit with consumers - thanks to the aggregators they now have a very large choice of restaurants at their fingertips.

'It is also a great marketing platform, especially for independent restaurants that can't afford to spend on advertising.

'Phone apps and websites also make it easier for consumers to order full meals from a variety of cuisines. Just one aggregator could offer a choice from either burgers, or chicken, or Indian, or Chinese, and much more. It's all there at the click of a button.'
A passenger on the Southwest Airlines flight from New York to Dallas that suffered engine failure Tuesday morning has been reunited with her husband after she sent him goodbye messages from the plane.

Gianna Baur thought she would never see her husband, Chad Baur, again as the pilot of her flight announced they would be diverting the aircraft for an emergency landing.

She immediately began texting him using in-flight texting and even took a photo of herself with an oxygen mask on.

Gianna Baur (pictured reuniting with her husband) who was on the Southwest Airlines flight that suffered engine failure Tuesday morning has been reunited with her husband, Chad Baur, after she sent him goodbye messages from the plane

She immediately began texting him using in-flight texting and even took a photo of herself with an oxygen mask on (pictured)

'That's when I started to really panic,' Chad told NBC. 'She said a flight attendant was praying over the loudspeaker, someone else was on the emergency phone screaming for medical help when they landed,' Chad said.

The next five minutes were some of the most terrifying for both Gianna and Chad.

'They announce we have to land... I'm so scared... flight attendants are checking everyone's oxygen... it's so bumpy... it's an emergency landing,' Gianna text her husband.

'I love you so much,' she wrote.

Chad said he was at their apartment when the messages came through. He immediately called both of their parents while he kept texting his wife.

'We just try to say all the things we would want to say to each other if that was the last thing we got to say,' Baur told NBC.

Chad said he was 'saying goodbye to my wife, who might have minutes left, and her trying to say goodbye to me who may have decades left'

While pilot Tammie Jo Shults prepared the plan for the emergency landing in Philadelphia, Chad said he didn't receive any messages. Seventeen minutes later, Chad finally received a photo of the blown engine (pictured)

'Me saying goodbye to my wife, who might have minutes left, and her trying to say goodbye to me who may have decades left.'

While pilot Tammie Jo Shults prepared the plan for the emergency landing in Philadelphia, Chad said he didn't receive any messages.

Seventeen minutes later, Chad finally received a photo of the blown engine.

'I don't think I cried or even had an emotion until after she said she landed. That's when I kind of just lost it,' he told NBC.

Chad and his wife, who have been married for just three years, were finally reunited with one another following the horrific scare, that could see the couple filing a claim against the airline.

According to Robert Clifford, founder of Chicago-based Clifford Law Offices, not only will the family of Jennifer Riordan, who was killed on the flight, be able to file a claim, but others on the flight can as well.

Chad and his wife (left), who have been married for just three years, were finally reunited with one another following the horrific scare, that could see the couple filing a claim against the airline. Gianna is pictured with her sister Brooke on a different flight to Texas after the incident

According to Robert Clifford, founder of Chicago-based Clifford Law Offices, not only will the family of Jennifer Riordan, who was killed on the flight, be able to file a claim, but others on the flight can as well because 'many of them will experience PTSD'

'All of the passengers here, and the crew, will likely have claims,' Clifford told the Boston Globe.

'Even if these people were not physically injured,' he said, 'many, many of them will experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder'.

On Tuesday morning, the Southwest Airlines flight suffered catastrophic engine failure, causing the death of Riordan who was sucked out of the window after it was smashed by shrapnel from the exploding engine.

Jennifer Riordan, 43, died as a result of blunt force trauma to the head, neck and torso. She is pictured with her husband Michael

The Wells Fargo executive was wearing her seatbelt when the window smashed but the power of the suction from the 32,000ft atmosphere was too strong and she died as the result of blunt force trauma to the head, neck and torso, it was revealed on Wednesday.

Riordan's immediate family have been too distraught to speak at length.

Hero pilot Shults calmly relayed details about the crisis to air traffic controllers, and passengers commended her handling of the situation.

She and the other pilot on board, First Officer Darren Ellisor, said in a statement Wednesday that they were simply doing their jobs.

'On behalf of the entire Crew, we appreciate the outpouring of support from the public and our coworkers as we all reflect on one family's profound loss,' the two pilots said, adding that their 'hearts are heavy.'

Shults was commissioned into the Navy in 1985 and reached the rank of lieutenant commander, said Commander Ron Flanders, spokesman for Naval Air Forces in San Diego.

She was among the few to learn to fly the F/A-18 Hornet, a single-seat jet and the Navy's premier strike fighter aircraft, a privilege reserved for elite pilots, according to retired Navy helicopter pilot Andi Sue Phillips.

This was the Row 14 seat which Riordan was sitting in when she was sucked towards the window at 32,000 feet

This harrowing image taken before the plane made its emergency landing shows the state of the exploded engine

'When you pull those g's, you can actually feel your organs slamming on the inside of your ribs,' Phillips said. 'It's exhausting to put your body through those maneuvers.'

Phillips said that that there was a lot of resistance for women to fly jets and for Shults 'to fly a fighter aircraft when nobody even wanted her there is pretty amazing'.

Investigators are still looking into what caused the engine failure.

They have so far been able to determine that a fan blade separated as a result of metal fatigue at the hub and that it may have contributed to the malfunction.

The Boeing 737-700 was tested three days before the flight.

Hero: Pilot Tammie Jo Shults, 56, is seen getting off the plane after all of the passengers had disembarked. She has been praised for her 'nerves of steel' during the catastrophe

Shults is pictured in 1988. At the time, she was a US Navy instructor pilot and is shown above explaining a maneuver to aviators at the Naval Air Station Chase Field in Beeville, Texas
A 46-year-old man has died after being bitten on the arm by a deadly brown snake in tropical Far North Queensland.

The bite victim was found at a private residence on Nightjar Street in Deeragun, Townsville, at 5.20pm on Thursday, with bystanders giving him CPR.

Paramedics continued performing CPR upon arrival but were unable to revive the man, Northern Beaches Station Acting Officer-in-Charge Lauren Clayton said.

A 46-year-old man has died after being bitten by a deadly brown snake in tropical Far North Queensland (stock image)

The snake, which was killed, is understood to have been a 1.5metre-long eastern brown.

'In the past 12 months we've had 66 snake bite incidents, but out of those incidents they are rarely fatal,' said Ms Clayton.

'If someone is bitten by a snake the most important bit of information we can provide is to one, keep the patient calm, and to also call triple zero.

'We recommend not to wash the wound and, if you can, bandage over the snake bite firmly, starting below the snake bite and moving up the limb.'

Townsville Snake Take Away's Jamie Chapel made a Facebook post on Friday warning people to be careful around deadly reptiles.

'If you're ever bitten by a snake or suspect you have been, never wait, call an ambulance and never try to kill the snake,' he said.

The bite victim was found at a private residence on Nightjar Street in Deeragun at 5.20pm on Thursday, with bystanders giving him CPR (stock image)

What you need to know about the eastern brown snake: * One of the world's most venomous snakes * Known to be aggressive * Active during the day, especially on warm sunny days when they like to bask * Found along the length of Australia's east coast * Can be any shade of brown, from light to dark brown and almost black * Belly is typically cream, and can have pink or orange spots * Grows up to two metres long Source: Queensland Museum, Australia Zoo and Australian Museum Advertisement

It's not worth losing yours or someone else's life over.'

'No snake is ever harmless, it's either venomous or non-venomous and any snake that feels threatened will bite in defence, do not take the chance, call a snake catcher.'

Mr Chapel said people should be aware of general, or snake, first aid and CPR, as the knowledge could save someone's life.

Native to Australia and Papua New Guinea, the eastern brown snake is the second most venomous land snake in the world.

The man's death comes after a 24-year-old died in hospital after being bitten by an eastern brown snake in Tamworth, northern New South Wales, in January.
Stephen Lawrence's best friend has said he wants to heal the 25-year-rift with the murdered student's mother, who has not spoken to since the 1993 attack.

Duwayne Brooks, who was with Stephen the night he was set upon by a group of racist thugs and stabbed to death, finally wants to break his silence to the parents.

The 43-year-old is ready to tell Doreen and Neville Lawrence about the night on April 22, 1993, in Eltham, south east London, where their son was murdered.

Stephen Lawrence's best friend has said he wants to heal the 25-year-rift with the murdered student's mother, who has not spoken to since the 1993 attack. Duwayne Brooks (pictured), 43, was with Stephen that night and finally wants to break his silence to Doreen and Neville

But Mr Brooks has been unable to speak to the pair since the horrifying night and told the Mirror: 'I mean both parents know what happened but to sit there and say, "I was unable to help him, to save him, to stop it."

'How do you say that to someone's parents? How do you tell them what happened to their son, without being able to say you tried to save his life?'

Mr Brooks, who is now running to become mayor of Lewisham, and Ms Lawrence, 66, have had public spats over the years, and a 25 year anniversary documentary by the BBC suggested she never forgave him for what happened to Stephen.

Duwayne told the Old Bailey in 2011 how he watched Stephen bleed to death after the gang attack.

The 43-year-old is ready to tell Doreen (pictured) and Neville Lawrence about the night on April 22, 1993, in Eltham, south east London, where their son was murdered. Duwayne told the Old Bailey in 2011 how he watched Stephen bleed to death after the gang attack

He said six men piled into his friend after one said: 'What, what n*****?' . Duwayne told the court: 'I ran. When I turned around Stephen was behind me, in the road. The group converged on Stephen.

'When I looked back I saw the guy with the weapon ran straight into him and, wham, just like that.

'He kept saying to me, 'What's happening to me?' as he was bleeding from the neck.'

He said Stephen's last words were 'Duwayne', before he collapsed into a tree.

The Metropolitan Police was branded 'institutionally racist' in the Macpherson Report in 1999 on the force's investigation of the murder

But on the anniversary week of Stephen's death, Mr Brooks has said he wants to mend any rifts, particularly given Mr Lawrence's advanced age.

He said: 'The conversation with them has to happen. We've reached 25 years and we're still talking about this murder that changed Britain and I think we will have that discussion very soon.

'I would not want anything to happen to Mr Lawrence, with him being older, before I have that conversation. It's quite urgent for me.'

The Metropolitan Police was branded 'institutionally racist' in the Macpherson Report in 1999 on the force's investigation of the murder.

Five people were arrested on suspicion of being in the murder gang. David Norris and Gary Dobson were jailed for life in 2012.

Neil Acourt is in jail for being in a drugs gang and brother Jamie is on the run in Spain. Luke Knight is still living freely in Eltham. While a sixth member is believed to have fled to Australia.
A dog used as a regimental mascot is being 'worked to his death bed', soldiers claim.

The six-year-old Irish wolfhound, called Domhnall, appears at ceremonial events for the Irish Guards.

However sources say that he is suffering from a bad hip and needs round-the-clock care from his handler, who is currently on sick leave.

The six-year-old Irish wolfhound, called Domhnall, appears at ceremonial events for the Irish Guards

Squaddies have daubed their support for the animal on the walls of their barracks, writing #Justice4Domhnall with spray paint.

'The lads love that dog. But Domhnall has problems with his health,' one soldier told The Sun.

'People are saying the dog is being overworked constantly.

'He was meant to be retired a long time ago, he's not well, but is being worked to his death bed.'

Domhnall was announced as the new mascot for the 1st Battalion Irish Guards in January 2013, after being recruited as an untrained dog from Northern Ireland.

Irish wolfhounds typically live to around seven years old.

Domhnall was announced as the new mascot for the 1st Battalion Irish Guards in January 2013, after being recruited as an untrained dog from Northern Ireland

The soldier added: 'Someone in the battalion has heard and gone around spraying on the walls. People are saying this fantastic dog should be enjoying retirement. It's not right.'

Domhnall, whose name means 'world leader' in Gaelic, has suffered health problems in the past. In 2017, vets recommended that he should be castrated as part of a successful treatment for prostate problems.

However the Army said that Domhnall receives 'regular' health checks and his wellbeing is 'always of the utmost importance to the regiment'.

They have now washed the graffiti off the walls of Hounslow Barracks, in West London.

Domhnall, whose name means 'world leader' in Gaelic, has suffered health problems in the past

An Army spokesman said: 'Domhnall's welfare is always of utmost importance to the regiment, which is very proud to have him as its mascot.

'Domhnall has regular health checks  including two this week  to ensure he is being well looked after and is fit for service. Domhnall has also been under the care of a local vets practice throughout his career.' Domhnall, who has a fondness for Guinness, is scheduled to appear at sporting events and other ceremonial duties later this year. The regiment has been using Irish wolfhounds as mascots since 1902, with Domhnall being the 16th.

As well as being loved by soldiers, Domhnall proved popular with the Duchess of Cambridge when she visited the barracks.
A Queensland police officer has pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of his baby son.

Senior Constable Colin David Randall, 39, was initially charged with murder in February 2016, 18 months after his two-month-old son died from significant injuries.

He was due to face a murder trial in the Brisbane Supreme Court but pleaded guilty to manslaughter on Friday morning. He is due to be sentenced on Tuesday.

Senior Constable Colin David Randall, 39, ha pleaded guilty to manslaughter of his 2-month-old son (stock)

During a brief hearing after Randall's plea, crown prosecutor Phil McCarthy said the sentence handed to child killer Heidi Strbak should be considered as a comparable case.

Strbak was last year handed a nine-year jail sentence for the manslaughter of her four-year-old son Tyrell Cobb, but she'll be eligible for parole in four years, in October 2021.

Strbak is appealing her sentence. It's yet to be heard.

In January this year, Attorney-General Yvette D'Ath defended the Queensland government's decision not to appeal for a tougher jail term for Strbak.

Ms D'Ath said the decision was based on advice from the Director of Public Prosecutions, who reviewed the sentence.

But Opposition Leader Deb Frecklington accused the government of failing to listen to community outrage over the sentence.
Social media is fuelling a spike in rape and other serious sexual crimes by children as young as 12.

Suspects are being arrested and prosecuted for horrific attacks on other children and even adults.

Officers said vulnerable girls were blackmailed into sex over explicit photographs, some of them taken without consent.

Predatory boys threaten to publish the images on social media or send them to parents unless the girls have sex with them. In other cases, girls are being provided as rewards to boys who work as drug runners for crime gangs operating so-called county line networks, in which urban gangs begin dealing in smaller towns.

Officers said vulnerable girls were blackmailed into sex over explicit photographs, some of them taken without consent (file photo)

Detective Inspector Laura Hillier, a sex crimes investigator at Scotland Yard, said children were only charged in extreme cases, adding: Social media is obviously a massive part. You can take pictures, videos, that are then used to force a young person to perform different sexual acts.

She said county-lines crime also fuelled sex offences, adding: Its criminal exploitation of young people. Its a reward. What happens can be multiple perpetrators against one child. Youre talking 13, 14, 15-year-olds. A large part of our job is county lines.

Details of the crimewave came as figures revealed that 196 juveniles were charged with rape in London between January 2015 and December 2017, including 13 aged ten to 12, 25 aged 13, and 33 who were 14.
Controversial Muslim activist Yassmin Abdel-Magied has shown her support for a Twitter campaign to repost her infamous Anzac Day post.

Ms Abdel-Magied retweeted a suggestion for thousands of people to tweet 'Lest we forget (Manus)' on April 25.

She drew widespread ire after tweeting the same thing on Anzac Day last year.

Ms Abdel-Magied sent the latest tweet out to her 55,000 followers on Friday.

Last year, the Sudanese-born former engineer was slammed nationally for her 'disrespectful' and 'malicious' comment after she used the national day to draw attention to other conflicts across the world.

Controversial Muslim activist Yassmin Abdel-Magied has shown her support for a Twitter campaign to repost her 'vile' Anzac Day post

Ms Abdel-Magied retweeted a suggestion for thousands of people to tweet 'Lest we forget (Manus)' on April 25

'Lest we forget (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine)', Ms Abdel-Magied infamously wrote on Anzac Day 2017.

The Brisbane-raised writer moved to London months after the heated backlash she received following the Twitter post - which she quickly deleted.

'It was brought to my attention that my last post was disrespectful, and for that, I apologise unreservedly,' she said.

However, on Remembrance Day just seven months later, the Muslim activist was again slammed for a similar post: '#LestWeForget (Manus)'.

The former Queensland Young Australian of the Year was last week denied entry into the United States at Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport because she didn't have a work visa.

She suggested U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials sent her back to London because of her skin colour.

The Brisbane-raised writer moved to London months after the heated backlash she received following the Twitter post - which she quickly deleted

'Lest we forget (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine)', Ms Abdel-Magied infamously wrote on Anzac Day 2017

In a satellite chat from London, she made the claim to Pen America, who had planned to pay her to deliver two New York lectures titled, 'No Country For Young Muslim Women'.

'If you are, again, a person of privilege in terms of you are a white, straight male, for example, going through border security you have a sense of, kind of, assuredness that the system has your back,' she told American Muslim activist Amani Al-Khatahtbeh on Wednesday night.

However, U.S Customs said Abdel-Magied was deported for having a tourist and business conference visa, known as a B1-B2, instead of a working visa.

Ms Abdel-Magied, a Sudanese-born former ABC-TV host, said minorities often feared for their lives going through border security.

'It's a very different experience as a person like that who is accustomed to understanding their place in the world versus someone who has never known that there is a very real danger to their lives and their livelihood because of the situation at hand,' she said.
Through perfect timing three police officers have saved the life of a young boy who was chocking to death.

Sehar Wali said it was a normal evening before her son, 18-month-old Zac, started chocking on a grape he had swallowed whole.

As she watched the life start to drain out of her son's body she tried in vain to dislodge the piece of fruit, Yahoo7 reported.

Sehar Wali said it was a normal evening before her 18-month-old son Zac started chocking on a grape

She desperately called emergency services and in a recording of the phone call she can be heard pleading for them to hurry.

Senior Constable Pryce (pictured) and two other police officers were nearby and rushed to save the boys life

By a stroke of luck Senior Constable Pryce and two other police officers were nearby doing random breath testing.

They arrived at the house in under a minute but Zac had already stopped breathing.

'He was lifeless, a blue colour I've never seen before,' Senior Constable Daniel Pryce said.

He stuck his finger down the young boy's throat and could feel the grape but for a few terrifying minutes struggled to get it out.

'I managed to get half a grape. That was enough for us to start doing CPR and bring him back,' he said.

Dramatic dash-cam footage shows the moment the police officers pulled up in front of the house and started performing CPR on the young boy.

After a few minutes of CPR Senior Constable Pryce says he felt Zac squeeze his fingers.

Zac was taken to hospital and aside from a minor procedure to clear his lungs was n a good condition

The young boy was taken to hospital where he had to have a minor procedure to take some fluid out of his lungs.

Ms Wali said she would be forever grateful for the officers quick thinking and heroic actions.

'They saved my son's life,' she said before praising them for being 'true heroes.'
An intersection requiring all approaching drivers to come to a complete stop has left motorists baffled.

Stop signs have been installed on each lane of traffic leading into the Flinders Lane and Kent Street intersection in Rockingham, south of Perth.

Dashcam footage recorded by a local motorist shows three confused drivers coming to a stop as one driver rolls through at low speed from the left.

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An intersection (pictured) requiring all entering drivers to come to a complete stop has left drivers baffled and traffic at a standstill

Locals have slammed the system on social media while debating what drivers need to do when arriving at intersections with no lights and four stop signs

Locals have slammed the system on social media while debating what drivers need to do when arriving at intersections with no lights and four stop signs.

'I got stuck at this same intersection this morning it had all four of us with our hands in the air not knowing what to do!' said one Facebook user.

'Like obviously you give way to the right but still what the f***.'

'If there is a car at all four points, who goes first?' asked someone else.

Dashcam footage recorded by a local motorist shows three confused drivers coming to a stop as one driver rolls through at low speed from the left (pictured is the intersection)

Stop signs have been installed on each lane of traffic leading into the Flinders Lane and Kent Street intersection in Rockingham, south of Perth (pictured is the intersection)

Others saw the funny side, suggesting Perth's famously poor drivers would struggle with the four stop signs.

'Perth drivers can't merge or even use a roundabout so this is hilarious,' said one person.

'If you are a cyclist, just disregard the sign and all of the other traffic regulations for that matter - because you're really, really special,' joked another.

City of Rockingham Councillor Andrew Burns addressed the issue on his own Facebook page.

'Kent Street is the main east-west road and as part of the Waterfront redevelopment we're going to see measures in place to encourage more travel on Kent Street and less along Rockingham Beach Road,' he wrote.

'I got stuck at this same intersection this morning it had all four of us with our hands in the air not knowing what to do!' said one Facebook user (pictured is the intersection)

City of Rockingham Councillor Andrew Burns addressed the issue on his own Facebook page

'Giving Kent Street right of way at this intersection is part of the larger plan.'

Responding to demands for a roundabout at the intersection, Mr Burns said one would not be considered due to pedestrian traffic.

'Roundabouts favour cars over people. They don't have to slow down quite as much, they keep traffic moving quickly, but they make it harder for pedestrians,' he said.

'The long term plan for the whole Waterfront Village Precinct is to be more pedestrian friendly.'

Intersections with four-way stop signs are common in the US and Canada, and are known as all-way stops.

The driver which arrives at the intersection first has right of way, and if cars arrive at the same time they must give way to vehicles on their right.
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The barbeque is cranking and workers are playing on their phones - while the rest of Sydney is stuck in gridlock because of endless tram works.

New photos have laid bare the extent of the city's $2.1 billion light rail disaster amid a ferocious court stoush and claims the Spanish subcontractor building it is on a 'go slow'.

Pictures snapped over 24 hours on Thursday and Friday show many CBD work sites, operated by Acciona, were deserted.

It comes as the government was told the project is running a full year late and that the line, stretching from Circular Quay to Randwick, won't be operational until March 2020.

The delay could have a devastating impact on business owners, many who say they are already being squeezed by landlords as foot traffic is 'smashed'.

7.40am Friday: A hungry worker (olive oil and BBQ sauce nearby) is seen kicking off a breakfast cook-up at a tram construction office near Anzac Parade, in the city's east

Breakfast is served in the form of sausage sandwiches, with labourers munching on bread and BBQ sauce before work

Thursday, 12pm: This worker chilled out on his backhoe as traffic snarled and the city streets bustled with foot traffic,

The once-bustling heart of the city's CBD next to the Queen Victoria Building was (almost) deserted at midday Thursday

Heavy machinery was in place but not much was actually happening at a work site in the centre of the city on Thursday

Labourers leaned against a fence and had a yarn at one of several Circular Quay Acciona sites on Thursday

Angela Vithoulkas, owner of George Street's VIVO cafe and an independent councillor, said she had only seen a small work crew each day since January.

'It takes more than three men and a broom to build light rail,' she told Daily Mail Australia.

She claimed business owners were initially told that each section would take six to nine months. (Major construction works began in October 2015.)

'I'm not a mathematician but three-and-a-half years is more than six to nine months - and there's no end in sight,' Ms Vithoulkas said.

Steve Kulak, owner of Surry Hills' TITLE bookstore, said work is no longer being done around the clock.

Labourers used to be slaving away for 12 to 18 hours a day. But now it is a 9am to 4pm operation, he said.

'At the beginning it was on, it was buzzing,' said Mr Kulak. 'Now nothing happens at night'.

The government has blamed builder Acciona for hurting businesses with their 'actions and inactions'.

Got an important call? A labourer takes a break and scrolls through messages on his mobile phone on George Street

Major light rail construction began in October 2015 and the line itself may not start running until March 2020 or later

Another barqueue was made available for staff based near Town Hall, in the centre of the city's business district

The Sydney Light Rail route would run from Circular Quay in the city's CBD to Randwick, in the city's eastern suburbs

Traffic and a lot of mess: Tourists in Sydney's Harbour-side hotel district are confronted with a large mound of debris

'It's very obvious there is a go-slow on this,' state Transport Minister Andrew Constance told reporters this week.

'They need to get to work and ramp it up.

'It was very obvious in the middle of last year they were laying more track than they are now and they need to get to work.

'They've made a claim they've got 1400 staff working - they need to prove it'.

Meantime, Labor Opposition Leader Luke Foley branded the city a 'war zone'.

'This light rail line will be delivered in the 2020s - at the earliest,' Mr Foley said at a press conference.

'It may never be completed the way they're going.

Helloooooo? Another George Street work site where there was not a single labourer about midday on Thursday

Some parts of the city tram sites have been opened for foot traffic for months. Above, a tradesman takes a break

Midday traffic banked up along George Street towards the south of the city, close to Circular Quay

It was all machinery and very few staff at Circular Quay - the location where the light rail will one day begin

In a statement of claim lodged with the NSW Supreme Court, Acciona has claimed Transport for New South Wales withheld vital information about electricity infrastructure.

It wants another $1.1 billion from the government to finish the project. The government is fighting the claim.

The light rail was originally budgeted to cost $1.6 billion before a $500 million blowout. But Acciona's new demands would double the original cost.

Mr Constance has said the government still wanted the light rail finished next year.

'We want to see it delivered in 2019 as per the project deed,' the minister told Radio 2GB.

One of many traffic controllers and gate operators who are employed on the light rail construction project

Four workers in hard hats laboured away between Essex and Hunter Streets in the CBD on Thursday

Sydneysiders shuffle between deserted work sites on George Street, late on Thursday afternoon

'We have businesses and residents being hurt by (Acciona's) actions and inactions,' the state transport minister has said

'It is vital that (contractor) ALTRAC accelerate and get on with their program.

'We have businesses and residents being hurt by their actions and inactions.'

ALTRAC this week said work on the project was taking longer than expected due to design changes and the discovery of 'unknown utilities'.

The consortium has found more than 1600 unknown services but has still completed about 80 per cent of the utilities work, a spokeswoman said in a statement to the Australian Associated Press.

Some 16 kilometres of track has been laid by Acciona to date amounting to 66 per cent of the route, ALTRAC said.
A Minnesota grandmother who was wanted over the shooting deaths of her husband and a woman has been arrested in Texas near the US-Mexico border.

Lois Riess, 56, has been on the run ever since her husband David Riess was found shot dead at their home in Blooming Prairie, Minnesota, on March 23.

Her second alleged victim, Pamela Hutchinson, was found dead at her condo in Fort Meyers Beach in Florida on April 9.

A US Marshals Service statement says two federal deputy marshals arrested Riess Thursday night around 8.30pm at a South Padre Island, Texas, restaurant.

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Lois Riess is pictured here in her South Padre Island booking photo after she was captured in Texas on Thursday night

Lois Riess, 56, who has been on the run after allegedly killing her husband and a woman in Minnesota has been arrested in Texas near the US-Mexico border. Riess was spotted on hotel CCTV wearing her female victim's hat

Riess was spotted on CCTV cameras driving up to a Hilton hotel in Ocala before calmly walking through the lobby after allegedly killing Pamela Hutchinson elsewhere in Florida

The Dodge County Sheriff's Office confirmed the arrest Thursday night on Twitter

South Padre Island is a beach resort community 27 miles from the crossing into Mexico.

Riess was sitting at the restaurant by herself when the deputies arrested her.

Authorities believe Riess, who allegedly used the same gun in both shootings, may have targeted Hutchinson to assume her identity because they look similar.

Surveillance videos released just hours before Riess was caught showed her walking away from the Marina Village in Fort Meyers Beach soon after she allegedly killed Hutchinson.

Another video captured Riess driving away from the hotel in Hutchinson's 2005 white Acura TL.

Riess was also spotted on CCTV cameras driving up to a Hilton hotel in Ocala before calmly walking through the lobby wearing her alleged victim's hat.

The Lee County Sheriff's Office would not reveal when the surveillance videos were captured.

Authorities believe Riess then headed west through Louisiana in Hutchinson's car. The car she is thought to have been driving was last spotted in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Authorities believe Riess (pictured above in both shots) used the same gun to kill her husband David and her second victim Hutchinson

Riess was also captured leaving a Florida hotel (above) before driving away in Hutchinson's 2005 white Acura TL

Lois Riess, 56, has been on the run since she allegedly killed her husband David Riess (left) in Minnesota last month and then shot Pamela Hutchinson (right) in Florida days later

Police said earlier that they believed Riess was fleeing to Mexico.

Riess' husband was found dead after his business partner told police he hadn't shown up for work in over two weeks.

Officials said Riess transferred nearly $10,000 from her husband's business account and forged his signature on three checks to herself for $11,000 after his death.

She then took off for Diamond Joe's Casino in Iowa. Authorities went to the casino but Riess had already left.

On the day her husband's body was found, Riess was spotted on surveillance video stopping at a gas station in Iowa. The video shows Riess buying a sandwich at a Kum and Go gas station next to Diamond Jo Casino on March 23 around 6.30pm

In the video, Riess is heard asking the cashier for directions heading southward

On the day her husband's body was found, Riess was spotted on surveillance video stopping at a gas station in Iowa.

The video shows Riess buying a sandwich at a Kum and Go gas station next to Diamond Jo Casino on March 23 around 6.30pm.

In the video, Riess is heard asking the cashier for directions heading southward.

Another surveillance video that was released earlier this week showed a smiling Riess sitting at the Smokin' Oyster Brewery on Fort Myers Beach in Florida on April 5 as she chatted to Hutchinson - her second victim. Hutchinson was found shot dead four days later.

'Ms Hutchinson's purse was found to be in disarray and all cash, credit cards and identification appeared to be removed,' Lee County Undersheriff Carmine Marceno said.

CCTV released this week showed a smiling Riess sitting at a bar in Fort Myers Beach on April 5 chatting to Hutchinson - four days before the victim was found shot dead

'Further investigation revealed that Ms Hutchinson was targeted by the suspect due to the similarities in their appearance.'

Dubbed by local authorities as 'Losing Streak Lois,' Riess is known to have a gambling addiction and often frequents casinos.

'She is armed, she is dangerous, she looks like anyone's mother or grandmother. She will smile, she's calculated and she's a killer on the loose,' Marceno said at the time.

The US Marshals Service was offering a reward of up to $5,000 for information leading to her arrest.

In an attempt to catch Riess, authorities had put up electronic billboards in at least five states including Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California and Nevada.

Authorities believe Riess then headed west through Louisiana in Hutchinson's car (above). Her last known sighting was in Corpus Christi, Texas, before her arrest
A man tried to cut a deal with the person he threatened with a knife and stole drugs from by proposing a 'pinky promise' not to tell police.

Kyle Roberts broke into a house in Dapto, near Woollongong in New South Wales, and took the victim's marijuana before brokering the truce.

The 19-year-old arrived at the house, booted the door down and demanded money.

A man tried to cut a deal with the person he threatened with a knife and stole drugs from by proposing a 'pinky promise'

But when the victim refused, Roberts allegedly swiped a bag containing half a kilogram of cannabis leaf, court documents said according to the Illawarra Mercury.

He arrived at the house at around 1.30pm on June 28 and drove in circles on the front yard before returning 15 minutes later and banging on the door.

The victim refused to answer the door leading Roberts to break in and carry out his raid.

Roberts was charged with break and enter and being armed with intent and admitted the charges at Woollongong Local Court on Wednesday.

Kyle Roberts broke into a house in Dapto, near Woollongong in New South Wales, and took the victim's marijuana

The papers allege Roberts then drew a 20cm-long knife telling the victim 'if you call the cops about this I will be back'.

After issuing the threat, he is then said to have offered the victim 'a pinky promise' not to tell police about the incident.

But the documents say the man reported the incident just a few hours later and Roberts was arrested at his home.

Roberts will be sentenced in May and has been granted bail.
A former drug addict was reunited this week with the California officer who helped save her life by encouraging her to go to college during her numerous arrests.

Tiffany Hall is now nine years sober after being addicted to crack and she will soon be a college graduate.

On Tuesday morning, Hall reunited with Long Beach Lt Jim Foster, whom she says 'encouraged' her to get help and go to college.

On Tuesday, former drug addict, Tiffany Hall, reunited with California officer, Lt Jim Foster (pictured hugging), who arrested her multiple times and tried to help her get her off the streets

Hall (left) is now nine years sober after being addicted to crack and she will soon be a college graduate. Hall said Foster (right) 'encouraged' her to get help and go to college during her numerous arrests

Photos of their reunion show Hall hugging Foster and even kissing him on the cheek. She thanked Foster for helping save her life.

'Everyone has a story that led them to that point,' he said, according to the Press Telegram. 'The greatest story of my career is connecting with people from the streets from time to time who have turned their lives around.'

Hall then handed Foster a white envelope containing an invite to her graduation.

'I wouldn't miss it for the world,' Foster said to her as he smiled.

Hall, who now hopes to be a social worker, recalled how Foster arrested her multiple times while trying to push her off the streets.

'He'd say, "Tiffany, you can do better than this. Tiffany, why don't you go to school? Tiffany, why don't you stop?"' Hall remembered. 'I really appreciate the encouragement he gave me.'

Hall said it took her years to break away from crack. She said: 'Crack is different, you can't get away from it. You have to have it.'

She described her former life as a product of her environment and her family, adding that gang-banging and drug selling were essentially family traditions.

In 2009, Hall entered a rehab program, and only spent a couple of months in prison. She got clean, went to cosmetology school, and started doing women's hair and makeup. But she knew she wanted to do more. 'I want to help families and children,' she said. 'I want to give back'

Next month, she will graduate from Cal State Dominguez Hills, and she plans on applying to a master's programs to study social work. She even gave Foster an invitation (pictured) to her graduation

Hall recalled how she would sit in the back of his patrol car and try to talk her way out of jail. Foster, Hall said, would laugh good-naturedly  and then book her.

However, Foster said he noticed Hall's 'unique spirit'.

'She wasn't afraid to tell you like it was. She had a tough outer shell but I could tell there was a soft inner person,' he said.

In 2009, Hall entered a rehab program, and only spent a couple of months in prison.

She got clean, went to cosmetology school, and started doing women's hair and makeup, according to the Telegram.

But she knew she wanted to do more.

'I want to help families and children,' she said. 'I want to give back.'

Next month, she will graduate from California State University, Dominguez Hills, and she plans on applying to a master's programs to study social work.

'I'm proud of what I've become,' she said.
An Anglican priest has escaped jail after he boasted fantasies about raping boys as young as one once said and hoped to watch his son be sexually abused.

Phillip John Murphy was handed a suspended 12-month jail sentence on Friday after he was caught engaging in perverse and explicit virtual chats about his and other children.

The Melbourne vicar pleaded guilty in the Victorian Country Court to transmitting child pornography material between 2016 and 2017.

Phillip John Murphy, 53, (pictured) was handed a suspended 12-month jail sentence on Friday after he was caught engaging in perverse and explicit virtual chats about his and other children

Donning the username 'pervert' he approached men on the dating app Grindr to ask if they were interested in children

During sentencing the court noted the 53-year-old's crimes did not involve real children and there were no photos or videos.

Donning the username 'pervert' he approached men on the dating app Grindr to ask if they were interested in children.

If they were, he arranged to chat with them on Skype and offer up explicit conversations involving children.

In one case Murphy offered to pay for a motel to sexually abuse a boy.

Murphy engaged in conversations about raping young children as young as two

'Can't host I'm afraid. Church house. Can get motel,' he wrote on December 29, 2016.

According to the ABC, Murphy once said he hoped to watch his son be sexually abused

In one online discussion, another man boasts about sexually abusing his sons.

Murphy wrote: 'id love to have slept with them when they were v yng'[sic].

Judge Phillip Coish said the priest's communications 'were grossly offensive and deeply disturbing'

The former Sunshine vicar told one man he was in a 'very pedo mood'.

Judge Phillip Coish said the priest's communications 'were grossly offensive and deeply disturbing'.

Despite the prosecution calling for an immediate jail sentence, Judge Phillip decided it was appropriate for Murphy to be released and undertake a sex offender program.

Police arrested Murphy at the airport after he came home from a trip to Hong Kong. They searched his laptop in 2017 and was charged with multiple child pornography offences

During his police interview, he said he was drawn to the online chats because of his depression.

Police arrested Murphy at the airport after he came home from a trip to Hong Kong. They searched his laptop in 2017 and was charged with multiple child pornography offences.

Anglican Archbishop of Melbourne, Philip Freier, said Murphy had been suspended from all church duties.

'I am profoundly saddened to hear of the Rev'd Philip Murphy's conviction for child pornography offences,' Dr Freier said.
A legal stoush could see hundreds of thousands of commemorative $2 coins pulled from circulation and destroyed.

The Royal Australian Mint has been taken to court by its Canadian counterpart over the Possum Magic series of coins based on the much-loved children's book.

The Canadian corporation is demanding the Royal Australian Mint destroy the coins, which it says infringe upon its patent for printing colour onto metal.

A legal stoush could see hundreds of thousands of commemorative $2 coins (pictured) pulled from circulation and destroyed

The Royal Australian Mint has been taken to court by its Canadian counterpart over coins (lef, right) which it says infringe upon its patent for printing colour onto metal

Damages and court costs are also sought as part of the lawsuit in the Australian Federal Court, BBC News reported.

The Possum Magic coins were launched in August last year through Woolworths, and feature coins with three different 'magic dust' ring designs.

The popular 1983 kid's book was written by Mem Fox with illustrations by Julie Vivas, and both women were asked to approve each of the designs.

Objections to the coins were made clear by the Royal Canadian Mint in 2015, and an attempt was made to settle the dispute in an informal manner.

The popular 1983 kid's book was written by Mem Fox (left) with illustrations by Julie Vivas (left), and both women were asked to approve each of the designs

The Possum Magic coins were launched in August last year through Woolworths, and feature coins with three different 'magic dust' ring designs inspire by Possum Magic (pictured)

The original claim related to an Australian Remembrance Day commemorative coin with a poppy in the centre, but was expanded to include the Magic Possum coins.

A counter claim has since followed, with the Australian mint attempting to overrule the patent, as it has insufficient 'novelty' compared to formerly-used methods.

'The Royal Australian Mint is vigorously defending its position and has subsequently filed a counterclaim in the Federal Court,' it told SBS News.
This is the moment a British tourist appears to snort cocaine off the grave of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.

Footage shows the man kneeling by the spot where the notorious cartel boss was buried in Itagui, Colombia.

He can then be seen tipping the contents of a bag of white powder on to the grave stone and rolling up a bank note.

One toot in the grave: Footage captures the moment a British tourist appears to snort cocaine off the grave of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar

Funeral marching powder: The clip shows a man kneeling by the spot where the notorious cartel boss was buried in Itagui, Colombia and apparently snorting a white substance off the grave stone

The tattooed man, believed to be in his 30s, bends down to snort the substance.

He then looks up grinning to say 'I'm Gordon Ramsay mate' in an apparent reference to the celebrity chef's 2017 documentary about cocaine.

He posted the video on Facebook but his page was unavailable this morning.

Drug baron Escobar was shot dead by police at the age of 44 in 1993, bringing to an end his ruthless control of the Medellin Cartel.

R.High.P: The man, believed to be in his 30s, bends down to snort the substance before looking up and grinning

In recent years, there have been reports of guided cocaine tours taking in the notorious criminal's grave (pictured)

At one point he controlled more than 80 per cent of the cocaine shipped to the US.

This earned him the rank of one of Forbes Magazine's ten wealthiest people in the world with an estimated 18 billion fortune.

In recent years, there have been reports of guided cocaine tours in the area taking in the notorious criminal's grave.
Commonwealth leaders are meeting behind closed doors to decide if Prince Charles should succeed his mother as head of the 53-nation body.

Yesterday the Queen was keen to make the Prince of Wales the new leader, saying it was her 'sincere wish' that he takes over.

The representatives are expected to approve the move when they meet at Windsor Castle, but it's not known if there will be an announcement following the meeting.

Meanwhile, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has cut short his attendance at the summit in London to deal with violent protests in his home country.

MailOnline brings you the latest updates here.

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A British tourist dropped down dead from a heart attack while watching girls at a Thai strip bar.

The man, in his 60s, had been at the packed bar on Wednesday night in the red light district of Soi Cowboy in the Thai capital Bangkok.

Onlookers said he was sitting next to the stage and was waving around a foam police baton toy before he fell face first onto the tiled floor.

A British tourist dropped down dead from a heart attack while watching girls at a Thai strip bar. Pictures show people performing CPR on the man at the scene

The man, in his 60s, had been at the packed bar on Wednesday night in the red light district of Soi Cowboy in the Thai capital Bangkok

Shocked bar staff ran over and started performing CPR but the holidaymaker was pronounced dead inside the venue.

Devastated performers who saw him collapse comforted each while pictures show emergency crews working at the scene.

One girl working at a venue on the red light district - which was busy with tourists who had arrived for Thai new year - said: 'The man was like everybody else. He was just sitting next to the stage. He was enjoying himself.

The man collapsed at a strip bar in the Soi Cowboy red light district of Bangkok in Thailand (file picture)

'There was a toy, like a police baton. He was playing with it and then... his head stopped. He fell forwards and his face hit the ground.'

Staff initially thought the Briton, who has not been named, had suffered a seizure but medics later said they believed he had suffered a heart attack.

The man's body was taken to hospital for a post mortem examination and the British Embassy in Bangkok was informed.
A series of tragic killings have been broadcast on Facebook Live - with one man from Thailand killing himself and another from Cambodia murdering his ex-wife before jumping of a bridge.

Thai Naphattarakul Phachayakan, 37, shot himself in the head on the streaming service after his girlfriend dumped him for spending too much time drinking with friends.

While a Cambodian man, Ra Chhay Rath, 21, killed his ex-wife on Thursday before walking to a nearby bridge where he broadcast himself jumping to his death on the social media site.

Naphattarakul had been arguing with girlfriend Noi Sitthinon, 32, at their home in Samut Prakan, Thailand, before his suicide on Thursday.

Noi had reportedly decided to break up with him over his persistent nights out drinking with his mates.

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Police arrived at the scene an hour after Naphattarakul Phachayakan set up the camera on his car bonnet and filmed his suicide

In the video Naphattarakul silently pulls out the revolver and aims it at his own head before taking the shot

Police were told the man had shot himself after concerned neighbours called them in a panic

After the couple got in a heated row on Wednesday night which ended when Noi said she was breaking up with heartbroken Naphattarakul - he carried on drinking into the small hours of Thursday.

At 2.30am he stumbled outside and drunkenly put his phone on the bonnet of his car before filming the horrifying clip of his last moments.

He then silently pulled out a .38 revolver and put the gun to his head before firing the weapon for all his social media followers to see.

The chilling moments were captured on the stream - and the camera kept filming until police and his girlfriend Noi arrive on the scene an hour later.

Devastated Noi, in a pink t-shirt, was seen collapsing in tears at the scene while friends comforted her.

She said: 'This is not real. I don't know he did this. I cannot understand it. I just wanted to go somewhere to sleep. No, it's my fault.'

Naphattarakul's girlfriend Noi Sitthinon, 32, could be seen in the live stream arriving at the scene an hour later

Naphattarakul's body was covered by police as they tried to calm down his girlfriend Noi who was in hysterics over his suicide

Police Lieutenant Mongkol Yiwivet, Deputy Inspector of the Bangplee district police station, said he was told at 3am about a gunshot in the car park.

He added: 'At the scene of the parking lot was found the body of Mr. Naphattarakul Phachayakan, age 37 years.

'He was wounded with a.38 gun at the center of the forehead, and was face-down and killed in front of a 4-door pickup truck Toyota Vigo.

'The investigation revealed that the deceased stayed with his girlfriend. The dead man and the girlfriend always had am argument because he was not responsible for the family.

'He would often drink alcohol with neighbours and friends. On the last day, the girlfriend took her clothes and left, leading to the situation.'

Meanwhile Cambodian Ra Chhay Rath became the first person to committ suicide on Facebook Live in Cambodia after leaping to his death on Thursday - local police said.

Naphattarakul had been drinking heavily into the early hours of Thursday morning after breaking up with girlfriend Noi

The .38 revolver used by Naphattarakul was recovered by police arriving on the scene of the suicide

Ra killed his former wife at a school on Thursday then went to the nearby Tsubasa bridge, in Kandal province, and jumped into the Mekong river. Only the suicide was broadcast, police said.

'It has never happened before. It was the first case,' police spokesman Kirth Chantharith told Reuters, referring to the broadcast of the suicide.

'We are investigating to find out why he killed his ex-wife.'

Reuters was able to access videos of the suicide on Friday shared by Facebook users. It was not immediately clear whether anyone had reported the video or asked for it to be taken down.

Facebook is the social media platform of choice for Cambodians. Nearly a third of the country's 15.8 million people are Facebook users and the network is a major source of information, particularly for young people.

A spokesman for Facebook in Singapore said the company was not immediately able to comment on the Cambodia case.

Last year, Facebook said it would expand its pattern recognition software after successful tests in the United States to detect users with suicidal intent.

Police said the man's body had not been found.
This is the adorable moment a panda cub is snuggled and kissed by an older panda - even though she's not the mother.

Zhen Xi was forced into cuddles by female giant panda Ni Ni at Chengdu Panda Base in Sichuan.

Ni Ni was lying down and relaxing on wooden beams, before she suddenly leans forwards and showers the baby in kisses.

Zhen Xi was forced into cuddles by female giant panda Ni Ni at Chengdu Panda Base in Sichaun

After a few moments, the cub is hauled onto Ni Ni's chest, and hugged by the giant panda.

The hapless panda is then lifted up to Ni Ni's face where she kisses her a few more times.

Baby Zhen Xi arrived in July of last year, and weighed only 168 grams when she was born.

After a few moments, the cub is hauled onto Ni Ni's chest, and hugged by the giant panda

Baby Zhen Xi arrived in July of last year, and weighed only 168 grams when she was born

Online, people were infatuated with the pandas' show of affection, with one saying: 'Can't stop watching these cuties'.

Another person commented: 'Family time together so cute'

About 420 giant pandas live in captivity, mostly in their native China, with about 1,860 in the wild.
Theresa May is being urged to punish ex-Tory ministers in the Lords who voted to re-write Brexit laws by stripping them of plum jobs.

A string of former ministers joined a massive vote against the Government on Wednesday night, consigning Mrs May to a crushing defeat.

The revolt was intended to push the PM to abandoning her Brexit red line on the customs union and a signal bigger re-writes to flagship laws could be imposed by peers.

Theresa May (pictured at Buckingham Palace last night) is being urged to punish ex-Tory ministers in the Lords who voted to re-write Brexit laws by stripping them of plum jobs

A string of former ministers, including David Willetts (pictured, file image) joined a massive vote against the Government on Wednesday night, consigning Mrs May to a crushing defeat

Complaints about the behaviour of Tory grandees - who included David Willetts and Patience Wheatcroft - were made to the Government's chief whip, the Sun revealed today.

As Prime Minister, Mrs May has power to hire and fire for a huge number of posts across the public sector.

Half a dozen of the rebels have roles appointed by the government or paid for from the public purse - including Lord Willets, who is a trustee of the Science Museum.

Other rebels are Baroness McGregor-Smith, Lord Deben, Lord Green and Baroness Wheatcroft.

A senior government source said: 'They are really starting to push their luck and it is hard to see how serial rebels can remain in these posts.'

Mrs May sacked Lord Michael Heseltine last year for rebellion over Brexit.

Wednesday night saw two defeats for the Government in the Lords.

The huge 348 to 225 vote against the Government on the customs union could be a signal more damaging defeats will follow as the crucial laws crawl through Parliament.

Every amendment will have to be passed back to the Commons for approval or veto - a process which could take weeks to complete.

The huge 348 to 225 vote against the Government on the customs union could be a signal more damaging defeats will follow as the crucial laws crawl through Parliament

Following the vote, leading Remainer Lord Adonis hailed it as a 'crushing' defeat for the Government.

Shadow Brexit Secretary Sir Keir Starmer demanded Theresa May listen to the 'chorus of voices' demanding a customs union and changer her plans.

But ahead of the vote a Cabinet minister told MailOnline the amendment was 'not prescriptive' and they could 'live with it'.

During today's debate, Lord Patten mocked claims by the International Trade Secretary Liam Fox that a free trade deal with the EU would be 'one of the easiest in human history'.

He suggested the current approach being taken by the Government to securing agreements was 'absurd'.

Lord Patten also claimed the idea that countries such as Australia would open up their market without any demands in return was 'nonsense'.

Crossbench peer Lord Kerr, who tabled the amendment, said: 'Looking further afield is well worth doing but it will be very hard not to see a fall in overall exports if our trade with the European Union is made more complicated - and it will be much more complicated if we don't have a customs union.'
This is the shocking moment a stay-at-home carer brutally slaps a seriously ill pensioner while looking after him.

The elderly man, 77, had suffered a cerebral stroke and the worker was hired by his son and daughter to take care of him in north-east China.

The pensioner's son was horrified to discover the carer's behaviour while watching live-streamed footage from the home security camera on his mobile phone.

The pensioner, known as Mr Zhang, lives alone in Dalian, Liaoning Province, eastern China

His children hired a carer to look after him 24 hours after he suffered a cerebral stroke

The pensioner, known by his surname Zhang, lives by himself in the Ganjingzi district of Dalian in Liaoning Province.

His children discovered he was slapped for 57 times in the space of three-and-a-half hours on the morning of April 10.

'We couldn't bear viewing the footage. We had to ask a colleague to watch it for us. We cried every time when we tried to watch it,' the pensioner's daughter told The Peninsula Morning Post.

The pensioner's children were horrified to find out he had been abused by his carer

The pensioner's children had a security camera installed so they could monitor the carer

Shocking footage shows the carer violently hitting the elderly man 57 times in 3.5 hours

In the shocking CCTV footage, the 77-year-old sits on a wheelchair in his living room as the male carer dashes towards him and gives him a number of slaps in the faces.

The carer, 55-year-old Mr Qiu, is originally from the Heilongjiang Province in north China, but had moved to Dalian for work.

The pensioner's son explained to The Peninsula Morning Post that he and his sister have to work long hours, so they decided to leave their father to a home carer.

Mr Qiu had been working for the family for eight months.

Mr Zhang's children had thought the carer to be a good worker, however it turns out that the carer had been physically abusing the elderly man in secret.

Mr Zhang's son said his father had told him 'if I make a complaint or say a word, he would slap me even more'.

The carer was sacked by the family on April 11. The pensioner's children have reported the case to the police.

Mr Zhang's son said he hoped the carer could apologise to his father for what he had done, but he had failed to contact him by phone.

Police have launched an investigation into the case.
Monika Osinska, 33, pictured leaving Manchester Magistrates Court hounded 999 call handlers with nuisance calls and branded them 'English idiots'

An EU migrant hounded 999 call handlers with nuisance calls and branded them 'English idiots' after she claimed emergency services and the NHS were to blame for the death of her baby.

Monika Osinska, 33, rang the emergency line over 100 times in the space of two weeks to abuse the operators when her young son died from sudden death syndrome.

During the calls, Osinska, from West Gorton, Manchester would scream down the phone saying: 'Stupid English lady, why did my son die?' and told another handler: 'you stupid English bitch'.

She was also recorded saying 'English idiots, think you're important, f*ck your God' and eventually her number was blocked due to the sheer volume of calls.

Police tracked her down and gave her a warning but Osinka originally from the town of Lesna in South West Poland, persisted with the calls and became increasingly abusive and she was later charged.

It emerged Osinska had recently lost her baby due to sudden death syndrome, and it is thought she blamed the NHS for their handling of her case. The police had taken the baby boy's body away, as well as his cot, before giving Osinska time to mourn his death.

She claimed that she first turned to alcohol when he died, and couldn't remember making the calls to the police. The total cost of the nuisnace calls to the emergency services was calculated at just over 400.

Osinska, from West Gorton, Manchester was sentenced her to six weeks imprisonment suspended for a year and was recommended to undertake the Women's Problem Solving Programme offered by probation

At Manchester magistrates court, Osinska originally pleaded not guilty to one charge of persistently making use of public communication network to cause annoyance/inconvenience/anxiety, but changed her plea to guilty.

She was sentenced her to six weeks imprisonment suspended for a year and was recommended to undertake the Women's Problem Solving Programme offered by probation.

Prosecuting Miss Tess Kenyon said: 'This defendant was making numerous phone calls to the 999 network. A number of them were abusive and some were racially abusive.

'There is a background to this offending. In June last year her baby died of sudden death syndrome. She was contacted by the police who then came to her address, took her baby away and the cot.

'She wasn't there to mourn that baby and turned to drink, subsequently. She blames the emergency services and made numerous calls to them. She was cautioned by the police on January 22 for the accusations that had been made.

'She continued making those calls after that date despite the caution. Some occasions numerous calls were made per day. On some occasions she made reference to the son she lost.

'She repeatedly asked the call handler 'why did my son die?' On some occasion she called the call handler a 'stupid English lady' or a 'stupid English bitch'. On another occasion she said 'English idiots, think you're important, fuck your God!'

'She was offered numbers for family bereavement counsellors by police officers. She never tried to work with the services offered to assist her.

It emerged Osinska had recently lost her baby due to sudden death syndrome, and it is thought she blamed the NHS for their handling of her case

'An officer attended a local Polish church to see if any support was available to her. The officer also states that at one point she asked if they could pay for her to return to Poland so that she could receive support from her family.

'Miss Osinska was increasingly abusive to call handlers. She was known to shout and scream at them, and at one occasion they had to block her number.

'Since January 22 she made 108 calls which costed a total of 410. The investigating officer stated that he believed she blamed the NHS for the death of her son. This was apparent in the majority of the calls she made.

'In her police interview she said she cannot remember making these calls as she was drunk at the time.'

Representing herself Osinka told the hearing: 'It wasn't like that, I didn't keep calling them, I don't know how many times I called them.

'They made me feel humiliated, they told me I have drinking problem but I don't. I was upset about my baby's death. They were trying to humiliate me.

'The police wouldn't listen to me. I am very sorry about making the phone calls, I won't do it again.

'I started drinking at first when my baby died and I had a breakdown. I accept I made those calls. I can't remember how many I made, I'm just sorry for making them.'

JPs also attached a 12 month community order to Osinka's suspended sentence and ordered her to pay 115 costs.
A baby boy was delivered stillborn after a mother whose waters had broken was wrongly sent home by midwives.

Hospital staff missed three chances to raise concerns over the health of Freddie Webster, an investigation has found.

Sherwood Forest Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has conducted a serious incident investigation report following the death of Freddie at King's Mill Hospital in Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire.

The investigation identified a number of 'care and delivery problems' and NHS bosses have drawn up an action plan in a bid to stop further incidents.

Freddie's parents, Kayleigh Turton, 26, and Scott Webster, 29, from Sutton-in-Ashfield, near Mansfield, today told of their heartache.

Freddie Webster was delivered stillborn after 26-year-old Kayleigh Turton's waters broke and she was wrongly sent home by midwives

Kayleigh and her partner Scott Webster, 29, from Sutton-in-Ashfield, near Mansfield, today told of their heartache

Kayleigh said: 'As an expectant mother, you have faith in those treating you - they are the professionals - but I was scared and did not feel my concerns were listened to.

'The pain of losing Freddie is indescribable and I'm not sure we'll ever really come to terms with it.'

The serious incident investigation report blasts the care Kayleigh received. Freddie's worsening condition should have been escalated to a consultant on a number of occasions throughout her labour. No attempts were ever made.

Kayleigh was due to be induced at 2pm on June 10 last year but her waters broke that morning. She was sent home after routine tests were undertaken only to be later re-admitted with suspected sepsis.

Sherwood Forest Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has conducted a serious incident investigation report following the death of Freddie at King's Mill Hospital (above) in Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire

At 2am the next morning, tests showed baby Freddie's heart rate was slowing down and not normal. And at 5.45am, tests highlighted further serious concerns about his heart rate.

An emergency caesarean was ultimately performed but Freddie was born showing no signs of life.

The report found:

Medics failed to advise Kayleigh how ill she was and that her baby's life was in danger;

Staff missed three chances to raise concerns about baby Freddie's condition to a consultant who was on-call and should have been informed;

Hospital staff struggled to contact a paediatrician to try and resuscitate baby Freddie because consultants had swapped shifts and not informed switchboard operators;

When a less qualified registrar did arrive, she did not feel supported by her more senior colleagues .

The hospital has accepted that there were potential opportunities to deliver baby Freddie earlier.

Solicitor Laura Hopkinson, from Irwin Mitchell, the law firm representing Freddie's parents, said: 'Kayleigh and Scott have understandably been left devastated by the loss of baby Freddie.

Staff missed three chances to raise concerns about baby Freddie's condition to a consultant who was on-call and should have been informed. (Above, prints of Freddie's feet)

'While nothing can ever make up for their loss, the couple hope that by admitting its mistakes, Sherwood Forest Hospitals will learn from this tragic case so no parents have to experience the suffering they have had to go through.

'It is very important for Kayleigh and Scott that they are able to raise awareness of their tragic loss so serious lessons can be learnt.'

The hospital today apologised and said it would assist with any legal action.

Andy Haynes, Medical Director said: 'Sherwood Forest Hospitals would like to sincerely apologise to Ms Turton once again.

'We met with Ms Turton and her family after the investigation to apologise face-to-face, offer our sincere condolences and support for the loss of her son Freddie.

'A full investigation has taken place and since this happened we have made a number of changes within our maternity services. For example we have reviewed practices around the monitoring of babies' heart rates and clarified the process about how and when to escalate issues to senior colleagues.

'The Trust will continue to assist fully in any ongoing legal proceedings in relation to this tragic incident.'

Kayleigh added: 'Nothing could bring Freddie back or begin to make up for what happened but the hospital trust now needs to make sure it enforces the recommendations highlighted in the report to ensure nobody else has to suffer the feelings of anger, pain and loss we have.'
An Irish woman who died after travelling to the UK for an abortion was discharged from the clinic despite vomiting and swaying so much she looked "drunk", an inquest has heard.

Aisha Chithira, 32, had a termination at a Marie Stopes clinic in Ealing, west London, in January 2012. She later suffered catastrophic internal bleeding and died the same night.

She had suffered a tear to her uterus during the procedure performed under anaesthetic when she was 22 weeks pregnant, West London Coroner's Court heard.

Afterwards she vomited in a stairwell and complained of feeling unwell to her husband, but was helped into a taxi to a cousin's home in Slough, Berkshire, by staff at the clinic. They had told her she could not stay overnight.

Nurses Gemma Pullen (left) and Margaret Miller (right) were charged with manslaughter by gross negligence and a health and safety breach but the case was dropped in 2016

One of the nurses denied they had pressured her to leave because they had wanted to go home.

Corinne Slingo, representing Marie Stopes, said: 'The taxi driver says he saw his passenger walking out of the building. He was quite shocked, she didn't seem with it at all. She looked like she was drunk.'

Mrs Chithira's husband Ryan said he received a call from her at around 7.30pm as he cared for their daughter in Ireland.

'Aisha told me she had finished having the procedure and was going to get a taxi back to Slough,' a statement read to the court said.

'She just said "I cannot speak, I'm feeling too weak" and then she ended the call.

'I kept ringing her but there was no reply, Aisha didn't ring back or reply to my texts - I thought at first she had arrived in Slough and just wanted to rest.

'Her sister called me, this was at 12.42am. She asked me where Aisha was and I said she was in Slough, she said she wasn't. Ten minutes later she called me back and said Aisha was dead.'

Dr Adedayo Adedeji, who performed the procedure, and nurses Gemma Pullen and Margaret Miller were charged with manslaughter by gross negligence and a health and safety breach but the case was dropped in 2016.

Cleared: The case against Dr Adedayo Adedeji was also dropped when the prosecution offered no evidence

Ms Pullen told the hearing Mrs Chithira had been to the toilet where she passed blood with her urine - which was 'consistent with a late stage termination'- and had 'thrown herself' on the floor.

Her blood pressure gave a normal reading once she was taken back to the ward.

'Come to about 8 o'clock and Aisha is the only one left on the ward and the taxi had been ordered for her. Margaret came and discussed with her that she couldn't stay overnight which is what she was asking for,' the nurse continued.

'We took her to the top of the stairs and she was sick.' They led her back to the ward, where she stayed for another 20 to 30 minutes and her vital signs were checked, Ms Pullen said.

'Then she stood up and said "I'm ready to go now". At that time I thought she was quite anxious.'

As she climbed into the taxi, 'she said she was feeling hot', the nurse continued. She had also been hyperventilating.

Pressed by Ms Slingo on the taxi driver's description of the swaying patient, she said: 'That doesn't sound right to me. She was walking unaided, she wasn't swaying, she was walking normally.'

On the comments allegedly made by Mrs Chithira, she said: 'I'm saying that didn't happen.'

Ms Slingo asked: 'The point when you placed her in the taxi, did you have, as a nurse, any additional concerns?'

'No, if I did I wouldn't have sent her,' the nurse replied.

Aisha Chithira, 32, had travelled from Dublin to a west London branch of the Marie Stopes clinic (pictured) for the procedure on January 21, 2012 and collapsed hours later in a taxi in Slough, Berkshire

Dr Adedeji said they had noticed the tear during surgery but it had not been bleeding at the time.

Mrs Chithira, who was from Malawi but settled in the Republic of Ireland, had a history of non-cancerous growths around the womb called fibroids which made the procedure more complex.

She had decided to have an abortion after miscarrying twins and then having her baby delivered by c-section, making her worry that childbirth was too much of a risk.

The patient was given tablets to soften the neck of her womb five hours before the operation but it had not dilated as expected, the doctor said.

The delay in the bleeding starting could have been due to the drip Mrs Chithira was attached to for two hours following surgery, he added.

Acting senior coroner for west London Dr Sean Cummings is expected to continue hearing the case on Friday.

It comes as anti-abortion campaigners are banned from protesting outside a pregnancy termination clinic for the first time in the UK following a landmark vote

Pro-choice groups stand opposite the pro-life campaigners outside the Marie Stopes clinic

It comes as anti-abortion campaigners are banned from protesting outside the pregnancy termination clinic for the first time in the UK following a landmark vote.

Ealing Council in West London will be introducing a 'safe zone' around the Marie Stopes abortion clinic to protect women from harassment and intimidation by pro-life groups.

A Public Service Protection Order (PSPO) will be imposed on a designated area outside the clinic, allowing the council to ban protests and vigils.

Breaching the terms of the order is a criminal offence and could result in a fine of up to 1,000.
Labour's foreign affairs chief sparked outrage last night by claiming UN red tape is stopping chemical weapons experts from investigating the Syria gas attack - not Russia.

Inspectors have been trying for days to get into Douma to examine the evidence of a suspected chlorine attack which is believed to have killed around 75 people.

While a UN security team was fired at while on a reconnaissance mission in the town earlier this week.

Images of families slaughtered sparked international outrage and prompted Britain, the US and France to launch missile strikes to destroy chemical weapons bases.

But appearing on the BBC's Question Time last, Emily Thornberry accused the Western military alliance of 'breaching international law' by launching the raids.

And she said it was bureaucracy that was stopping the inspectors entering the area to carry out tests rather than the Russians.

It comes after Jeremy Corbyn has refused to blame Bashar Assad for the gas attack - saying 'other groups' could be behind it.

Russia repeated denials of complicity in the Douma attack today, insisting it had proof of western culpability.

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Emily Thornberry (pictured on BBC Question Time last night) accused the Western military alliance of 'breaching international law' by launching missile raids on Syria

Challenged over why the inspectors have not been allowed in she said: 'From what I understand there is a huge amount of red tape, safety planning within the UN.'

Her comments were met with jeers while the presenter David Dimbleby said: 'Oh please'.

Ms Thornberry also tried to pin the blame for the hold up on the UK - saying the missile strikes launched had made the area less safe.

She said: 'Obviously they should have gone in earlier, and you know what one of the reasons is - it isn't safe because there has been bombing from Assad and also from the Americans.'

But Treasury Minister Liz Truss rubbished the Labour frontbencher's claims and said it was Russia and its support of the murderous dictator Assad blocking the inspectors.

She said: 'I can answer the question  the Russians have stopped the weapons inspectors coming in.

Fellow BBC Question Time panelists criticised Emily Thornberry for defending Russia and said it was clear that Putin was blocking inspectors from discovering the truth behind the deaths in Douma

'The Russians have blocked action on the UN security council, they have stopped action being taken.

'And the reality is these dreadful chemical weapons that are being used to flush out innocent citizens from their homes in Syria have been backed not just by the Assad regime and Russia has turned a blind eye and Russia is on the security council.

'And I don't think we can stand by and allow Russia to flout international laws as they did also in a different way in Salisbury and allow these weapons to be used.

'There has been a ban for 100 years...there is a big difference between seeking to change a regime which was the objective to the Iraq war and what we are dong here which is protecting the international order and protecting that ban on chemical weapons which are so egregious.

'And Russia frankly is a rogue state which has been allowed to do this.'

Her tough words were met with applause among the studio audience.

Russia's ambassador to London, Alexander Yakovenko, said they had 'dozens' of proofs that the attack on Douma had been deliberately staged

At a press conferences at the embassy in London, he showed Russian television footage which, he said, showed an 11-year-old Syrian boy who had appeared in a video of the incident in Douma issued by the White Helmets humanitarian group

In other developments today, Russia's ambassador to London, Alexander Yakovenko, said they had 'dozens' of proofs that the attack on Douma had been deliberately staged.

At a press conferences at the embassy in London, he showed Russian television footage which, he said, showed an 11-year-old Syrian boy who had appeared in a video of the incident in Douma issued by the White Helmets humanitarian group.

He said the boy, who was unhurt, had told Russian television that he had been called to hospital by the White Helmets where he had been offered 'sweets and cookies' to appear in the video.

'The facts that have been presented by the Syrian government and Russia to show that the incident has been deliberately staged has been ignored,' he said.

'We have dozens of these kinds of proofs. Everything that was done in Douma was staged.'

Assad's forces are believed to have dropped chlorine gas on Syrians in Douma as they sheltered in underground shelters from a barrel bomb attack.

The area had been a rebel stronghold and Assad's forces - backed by Russia - has been bombarding it in a push to drive the opposition out.

Survivors of the attack who fled the area said they heard the thud of a pack dropping and the slow hiss of gas which bean to fill up the air and choke their lungs.

They told how they struggled to breath and began frothing at the mouths as the suspected chlorine took hold.'
Secret footage has revealed the plight of North Koreans who are forced to work abroad in appalling conditions to raise cash for Kim Jong-un's nuclear weapons programme.

More than 150,000 of the country's workers are overseas as part of an apparent network of 'exported forced labour' around the world, according to a probe by human rights groups and journalists.

An investigation taking in China, Russia and Poland shows labourers toiling in 'slave-like' conditions with one revealing how the back breaking work was their 'revolutionary duty'.

A former North Korean deputy ambassador to Britain, has claimed that cash sent from workers helps to bankroll Kim Jong-un's nuclear ambitions.

Secret footage has revealed how North Koreans are being forced to work abroad in appalling conditions to raise cash for Kim Jong-un's nuclear weapons programme

More than 150,000 of the country's workers are overseas as part of an apparent network of 'exported forced labour' around the world, according to a probe by human rights groups and journalists

An investigation taking in China, Russia and Poland shows labourers toiling in 'slave-like' conditions with one revealing how the back breaking work was their 'revolutionary duty'

One North Korean worker, in the far eastern Russian city of Vladivostok, told a journalist: 'You're treated like a dog here. You have to eat dirt, you have to give up being a human being.'

Meanwhile, up to 800 North Koreans are believed to be working as welders and labourers in shipyards in Poland, according to a BBC Panorama documentary.

A North Korean foreman at one Polish firm said: 'When there are deadlines, we work without breaks. Not like the Polish, they work eight hours a day and then go home. We don't, we work as long as we have to.'

In one secretly-filmed clip, site authorities appeared to defend the arrangement, insisting: 'They get a glimpse of the world. and they get a few zloty or a few dollars, and this probably helps the entire family.'

Companies involved in the documentary have denied any wrongdoing while Pyongyang insists its countrymen are working legally.

One North Korean worker, in the far eastern Russian city of Vladivostok, told a journalist: 'You're treated like a dog here

Companies involved in the documentary have denied any wrongdoing while Pyongyang insists its countrymen are working legally

Thae Yong-ho, the former North Korean deputy ambassador to Britain, said cash sent from workers helped Kim Jong-un's (pictured) military ambitions and funded the family's luxury lifestyle

However, Thae Yong-ho, the former North Korean deputy ambassador to Britain, said cash sent from workers helped Kim Jong-un's military ambitions and funded the family's luxury lifestyle.

'If this money had been used for peaceful economic development, the economy would be in a much better place,' he said.

'So where did all that money go? Well, it financed the private luxury of the Kim family, the nuclear programme and the army.'

Facing US and international sanctions, North Korea has relied on its overseas labourers as a way to get cash.

Figures vary on how much North Korea earns annually from its workers. A 2015 U.N. report suggested that North Koreans working overseas earned Pyongyang between $1.2 billion and $2.3 billion a year. Other estimates put earnings in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

The major markets for North Korean workers are China and Russia, but the Gulf also hosts thousands.

Despite many living in poverty, North Korea is understood to spend up to a fifth of its annual GDP on the military.
A toddler boy was taken to a hospital after grabbing a nail clipper from his mother and accidentally swallowing it at home in Changchun, north-east China.

The accident happened as the mother saw her 16-month-old son putting a nail clipper in the mouth and patted him from the back in a bid to make him spit the object out. However he swallowed it whole instead.

Doctors found a 2.4 inches long nail clipper in the boy's stomach and successfully removed the object with an endoscope.

An X-ray picture (left) shows the nail clipper stuck in the boy's stomach. Doctors in north-east China used an endoscope to remove the sharp object (right) after he was taken to the hospital

The mother told New Culture Post that her toddler son, nicknamed Feifei, thought she was playing with him while chasing for the nail clipper.

'I was cutting his nails and he snapped the nail clipper away from me suddenly and started running around the house,' said the mother.

The incident happened at Feifei's home in Changchun of Jilin Province at 3pm on April 17.

The mother took Feifei and rushed to Changchun Children's Hospital immediately.

Doctors found the nail clipper lodged in Feifei's stomach after an X-ray inspection.

The 16-month-old boy had accidentally swallowed a 2.4 inches long nail clipper while playing

The toddler was given an intravenous nutrient drip after a 25-minute operation

The 16-month-old was put under general anaesthetic while the doctors performed an endoscopy to remove the nail clipper.

Footage uploaded on Pear Video, a Chinese video-sharing platform, shows the endoscopic views of the stomach.

Doctors spent 25 minutes to take the nail clipper out.

Feifei was given intravenous nutrient drip after the operation and discharged from the hospital right after.
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A female French protestor was pictured being violently trampled by riot police as a wave of violent demonstrations sprung up in Paris.

Heart-stopping photos show the woman attempt to confront a troupe of fully-geared riot officers.

But she is quickly pressed back and stomped all over by the cops - who appear to be taking no mercy.

Thousands of people flooded the streets of the French capital this week to voice their anger at Emmanuel Macron's government with rail strikes and student protests.

Rail workers are currently engaged in rolling strikes against Macron's plans to revamp the national railway company SNCF.

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The woman, armed only with a floral dress and a protest sign charges at the cops who are gathered together in a tight formation

As she runs into them the police brutally shove against her - sending her sprawling to the floor in an uncontrolled mass of limbs

As she falls the cops take no mercy, marching right over the stricken protestor with her sign saying 'resistance' visible in the shot

Police have been forced to brutally push back against protesters who have turned to violence in several French cities over the past few months

While Students have occupied campuses across France over the President's reform of the university admission system.

In fact, workers from a variety of different industries came out in solidarity with the rail workers and students in a show of force to the young President.

However, the demonstrations may not bear much fruit, as Macron has previously said he won't cave in under pressure and that he was elected president last year to reform the country.

Several demonstrations took place in cities across France, including a massive march through Paris.

on Thursday, French police were forced to storm a Paris university site occupied for a month by students protesting against admission reforms.

Paris police said the evacuation of the Tolbiac site, a 22-story tower in southern Paris, went 'without incident' early Friday.

Interior minister Gerard Collomb said in a tweet that 'the rule of law will be restored everywhere'.

Students have blocked access or disrupted classes in several other campuses across the country in recent weeks, in protest at changes to admission rules that they fear threaten access to public university for all French high school graduates.

Police officers inspecting a trio of dangerous petrol bombs in a Paris street after clearing out an area occupied by student protestors
The multi-millionaire son of Sir James Dyson has won a planning battle to install a helipad at his country mansion - after agreeing not to fly during church services.

Jake Dyson faced widespread local opposition to his plan to install a landing pad in the grounds of his 18th Century home, which sits in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

Residents, two councils, Historic England and the local church council all raised concerns that flights would impact on the tranquil landscape and religious services.

To appease their concerns Dyson resubmitted the application with an agreement that 'flights will not conflict with planned church services'.

Jake Dyson faced widespread local opposition to his plan to install a landing pad in the grounds of his 18th Century home, which sits in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty

Bath and North East Somerset Council's Development Management Committee has now rubber-stamped his plans.

An independent report commissioned by Historic England said that helicopters and country homes are 'expressions of material wealth'.

It added: 'The operation of a helicopter from the grounds could therefore only enhance the average person's appreciation of it as the country house of a wealthy person.'

Jake, 45, says he expects to use the helipad once or twice a week, between the hours of 7am and 11pm - but there will be no helicopter movement while the local Grade II* listed church is in use.

The helipad, at Jake's Grade II listed property in Hinton Charterhouse, Somerset, will be a 6x6 metre concrete slab covered with turf, with a 30m safety zone.

Jake, a successful entrepreneur in his own right after founding low-energy lighting business Jake Dyson Products, does not need permission to fly into his property.

A total of 11 helicopter flights have been made into the stately home, which he bought in 2015, since February 2017.

A total of 11 helicopter flights have been made into the stately home. Sir James Dyson (pictured) in 2015, since February 2017

Jake's helicopter is currently stored at Bristol Airport when not in use, and this arrangement will continue.

A previous application for a helipad was withdrawn after concerns from Historic England about the impact of a helicopter on the tranquil rural setting of the churchyard.

Fifty-four members of the public also objected, raising concerns about noise, privacy and the impact on the listed properties.

Christopher Clemence, chairman of the local Parish Council, said: 'There is concern about the helipad in the village and the church are concerned about the noise.'

Council clerk Geoffrey Parkes added: 'There has been a lot of concern in the community.

'There was a lot of objection from people in the village before the application was withdrawn.'

There were three letters of support brought before the council planning officers, who judged that the development would not result in a change of the use of the land.

Development in the green belt area was therefore deemed acceptable in principle.

The Civil Aviation Authority, National Air Traffic Services, Bristol Airport and the Ministry of Defence have been consulted and raised no objections.

Bath and North East Somerset Council's Development Management Committee members said the applicant was 'mindful' of the impact the development would have and voted to delegate to permit the application.

A spokesperson for Mr Dyson said after the meeting: 'We are pleased the committee has overwhelmingly supported our revised planning application which addressed the concerns of the community.'
Ramparsad Kallee was jailed for 17 years for smuggling 3m worth of heroin into the UK

A drug smuggler was sentenced to 17 years in prison after he tried to import more than 3million of heroin into Britain - while claiming his cargo was bibles.

It took a jury just seven minutes to convict 39-year-old Ramparsad Kallee, who denied all knowledge of the Class A drugs.

Kallee was stopped at the Channel Tunnel in Coquelles, France in October last year and claimed to be travelling to see relatives in Feltham, west London.

But Border Force officers searched his Mercedes and discovered a hidden compartment in the boot with 60 tape-wrapped packages of heroin worth 3.2 million.

Kallee had previously made several trips to Britain but claimed he had been importing Bibles.

National Crime Agency branch commander Matt Rivers said: 'The evidence we were able to put before the court was so overwhelming it took the jury just minutes to find Kallee guilty.

'Organised crime groups rely on couriers like Kallee to bring their drugs into the UK.

'His role was a vital one, and had these drugs got through they would have got into the hands of gangs involved in further violence and exploitation.'

Paul Morgan, Director of Border Force South East and Europe, added: 'This was a vehicle which had been specially adapted for the sole purpose of smuggling and represents an excellent detection by Border Force officers.

'In making the seizure Border Force have kept a substantial quantity of dangerous drugs off the streets of the UK where they would have caused significant harm to individuals and communities.

'Working with law enforcement partners like the NCA we are determined to prevent drug trafficking and to bring those responsible to justice.'

Kallee's heroin pack found by police - he claimed he was importing bibles into the UK
Downtown Abbey creator Lord Julian Fellowes helped thwart plans to build a housing estate next door to a historic manor that inspired the author Thomas Hardy.

He was one of about 100 people who objected to the proposal for 120 houses on land just 200 yards from Wolfeton House near Dorchester, Dorset.

The Elizabethan house was owned for 400 years by the Trenchard family, whose name provided the inspiration for the main character in Hardy's classic 1886 novel The Mayor of Casterbridge.

Downton Abbey creator Lord Julian Fellowes (pictured with his wife Emma Kitchener) weighed into the fight to stop homes being built 200 yards away from an Elizabethan manor in Dorset that inspired one of Thomas Hardy's novels

Campaigners said controversial plans for 120 homes would 'damage the environs' of 16th century Wolfeton House (pictured) in the village of Charminster, near Dorchester Read

Owners of the historic Wolfeton House in Dorset Captain Nigel Thimbleby and his wife Katharine outside the West Dorset District Council planning meeting yesterday

Its current owners, Captain Nigel Thimbleby and wife Katherine, are relatives of the Trenchards.

Opponents, which included Historic England, feared the development would have a devastating impact on 'Hardy Country' - the bucolic landscape that provides the setting for many of his works - and destroy a major element in Hardy's story.

But developers claimed it would mean 42 affordable homes for people struggling to get on the housing ladder and local planning officials had recommended it be built.

But at a decisive meeting at West Dorset District Council yesterday, members voted overwhelmingly to reject the planning application to the delight of about 50 objectors.

Wolfeton House's current owner Katherine Thimbleby (pictured outside the building) are relatives of the Trenchards who owned the Elizabethan house for 400 years. The name provided the inspiration for the main character in Thomas Hardy's (pictured right) classic 1886 novel The Mayor of Casterbridge

Captain Nigel Thimbleby and wife Katherine yesterday repulsed a bid to build homes overlooking their Elizabethan pile on the outskirts of Dorchester in Dorset, after local villagers and Julian Fellowes backed their campaign to keep the developers at bay

They agreed the impact on the area's 'heritage assets' meant they could not support it.

Afterwards Lord Fellowes, who is the president of the Hardy Society, said: 'I am really pleased and absolutely delighted but tempered by the fact that we aren't there yet because I am sure the applicants will appeal.

'The good thing is that the council have thought more about it and now appreciate what they have on their hands. Wolfeton House is an extraordinary house in an extraordinary setting with amazing connections with the past.

'You can't destroy its context without damaging the house itself, which is what this development would do.

'Of course it is very difficult for the local council because they have to find places for housing and for people to live, but on the other hand the protection of local heritage and history of lives that have been lived around the house is also an important part of their work.'

Mrs Thimbleby added: 'It's a good result for us and the whole village will be relieved.

'We had a lot of support from the village, about 40 people, and speakers against the plans included an architectural historian, Historic England and the Hardy Society.

'Of the committee, one abstained and one voted to approve but all the rest voted against and they said the location and importance of the house was a significant factor.

'Architecturally it's important and it's very important to protect the environs of the house.

'We're very pleased.'

Thomas Hardy is known to have visited the Grade I-listed property during his lifetime and would have walked across the green fields now at risk of development.

The estate, which was to offer 42 affordable homes for people struggling to get on the housing ladder, was to be built in a field 200 yards from Wolfeton House

At a decisive meeting at West Dorset District Council (pictured) yesterday, members voted overwhelmingly to reject the planning application to the delight of about 50 objectors

As well as the Mayor of Casterbridge, the house was also the inspiration for his short story The Lady Penelope, which was based on Lady Penelope Darcy who married all three of her suitors including Sir George Trenchard.

WHO IS THOMAS HARDY? Thomas Hardy, alive from 1840 to 1928, was an English novelist and poet He was a Victorian realist and influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism Hardy was critical of Victorian society, particularly on the declining status of rural people in Britain Though he regarded himself mainly as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898 His most famous novels include Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge and Jude the Obscure Much of his novels are based around tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances Most are set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex which came to include the counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire and Berkshire Advertisement

Before Hardy's time, Wolfeton House was visited by Sir Walter Raleigh and King George III during his stays to nearby Weymouth.

And in the 16th century it provided safe refuge for Archduke Philip of Austria and his Spanish wife Joanna of Castile after their ship was forced into Weymouth harbour by storms.

The gatehouse of Wolfeton is currently let out to holidaymakers by the Landmark Trust and the main residence is open to the public three days a week from June to September.

Tony Fincham, chairman of the Hardy Society said: 'It's wholly appropriate that the committee rejected the plan. We objected on the grounds that Wolfeton House features in one of Hardy's short stories and the front of the house is very much as he described it then.

'This development is within the curtilage of the house. If you fill in every field around Dorchester you'll ruin the landscape Hardy described and spoil it for future generations.

'There is every chance the developer will appeal but this is a very encouraging first step and one just hopes they won't get it through on appeal.'

A spokesman for West Dorset council said: 'The impact of the development on the heritage assets within Charminster meant that the committee could not support the application.'

It is understood the developers, Land Value Alliances, may appeal the decision or take it to judicial review.
This is the horrifying moment a thug doused a model and her cousin in acid through their open car window on her 21st birthday in a random attack his victims said today drove them both to the brink of suicide.

John Tomlin, 25, was jailed for 16 years this afternoon after he inflicted horrific injuries on Resham Khan and her cousin Jameel Muhktar, 37, as they waited in their car at a traffic light in Beckton, east London.

The footage seen for the first time today shows Tomlin chasing them down the street and throwing acid on them before calming walking off the road and away along a footpath.

Police said the 'random' attack was not racially motivated but happened after unstable Tomlin, who has been sectioned several times, started a row with Mr Muhktar on the pavement.

After throwing acid on them his victims sprang out of the car and jumped around 'as if they were on fire' as their clothes were 'melting off of them', witnesses said.

They were scarred for life with Miss Khan, who dreamt of being a model, put in an induced coma because her injuries were so terrible and she said today: 'This was the day when my face was taken away from me'.

Mr Muhktar, who was driving the car, has terrible scars to the right side of his head as well as losing his hearing in one ear and said the pain still feels like 'somebody is ironing me 24/7'.

He told the court today he was close to jumping in front of a train at Manchester Piccadilly Station and said: 'I wanted to die and couldn't go on any more'.

John Tomlin, 25, can be seen here chasing his victims down the street and chucking acid on them through their open window

Model Resham Khan (left afterwards, right today) was so badly injured she had to be put in a coma after being attacked in a car at a traffic light in Beckton, east London

Ms Resham (pictured today) said after the 16-year sentence that she would not resort to calling her attacker 'names' and said she wanted to get on with her life 'as if it never happened'

John Tomlin, 25, inflicted horrific injuries and refused to give a motive

He has also been tortured emotionally because he chose to throw water on his cousin instead of himself but this selfless act made her injuries worse, the court heard.

Speaking outside court, Mr Muhktar branded Tomlin an 'animal' and a 'coward' and said he 'deserves the death penalty'.

'The sentence isn't long enough, my life has finished, I'm in continuous pain, I can't sleep and I can't eat,' he added.

He said he was 'angered' to see Tomlin in the dock and added: 'It's the first time I've seen him worried, he was like a child, a baby, like a little girl, he deserves that.'

When asked about the rising number of acid attacks, he said: 'Something needs to be done about this, I don't feel this was a strong enough sentence. This will carry on now.

'He should have been given life, he should have done the whole of his life in prison.

'If this was in America he could have been given the death penalty, that's what he deserves.'

When asked if she had a message to anyone throwing acid, Ms Khan replied 'just don't be a bell***'.

She added: 'It was tough reading my witness statement, but it made me smile because it reminded me how upset I was before and how far I'd come.

'I've started my class and my business now and I want to push on and live my life as if it had never happened.

'I also want to apologise to the man who tried to help at the time when there was chaos going on, who I got acid on. If he sees this, I'm sorry.'

She added: 'The judge was amazing, cut throat, perfect, and I want to thank the police and hospital staff.

'I also want to thank all the messages of positivity I've received.'

Miss Khan, who dreamt of being a model, put in an induced coma because her injuries were so terrible and she said today: 'This was the day when my face was taken away from me'

Her cousin Mr Muhktar, who remains heavily scarred, arrived at Snaresbrook Crown Court to face his attacker and called him an 'animal' who deserves the death penalty

They have said since that they have both considered suicide and are 'unable to look in the mirror'.

UK has one of highest number of recorded acid attacks of any country in the world Acis attacks in Britain reached 800 a year in the UK in 2017 - up from around 200 in 2014. The spike has led to a change in the law meaning they can lead to a life sentence. Arthur Collins, the ex-boyfriend of reality TV-star Ferne McCann (pictured together) was jailed for 20 years after carrying out a brutal acid attack in a packed nightclub. The 25-year-old hurled the corrosive substance over a crowd on the dancefloor at Mangle E8 in what Judge Noel Lucas said was 'a despicable act'. Sixteen people suffered chemical burn injuries and three people were temporarily blinded  one of whom still suffers from blurred vision in one eye  of which 14 were the subject of charges. Last month a 17-year-old boy was jailed for 10 and a half years for carrying out a spate of 'despicable' acid attacks against moped riders. Derryck John, (right) from Croydon, south London, targeted six riders in a bid to steal their vehicles in the north and east of the capital in less than 90 minutes on July 13 last year. John, who appearded at Wood Green Crown Court via video link, carried out 'grave crimes', according to Judge Noel Lucas QC. The teenager sprayed his victims in the face with a noxious liquid, leaving one man with a 30% loss of sight in one eye. The thug who Katie Piper scarred for life could be freed soon after serving just eight years of his sentence. Stefan Sylvestre, 27, (right) was jailed indefinitely in 2009 for throwing acid in Katie's face on the orders of her obsessed ex-boyfriend. But he may be about to win parole. Advertisement

Details of their injuries were given during the sentencing of John Tomlin, 25, at Snaresbrook Crown Court on Friday.

The cousins had had 'no previous dealings' with their attacker and Judge Sheelagh Canavan previously described the assault as 'somewhat random'.

Jailing Tomlin for 16 years, Judge Canavan said: 'There was no reason for you to be there. It was her 21st birthday and it was supposed to be a day of celebration.

'She had her whole life in front of her.

'No sentence I impose can give back what you took from them.

'Those injuries are truly horrific. They will have to live with the effects for the rest of their lives.

'Mr Muhktar tried to drive away but that did not stop you.

'It is becoming all too common that members of the public are having to squirt water on victims of an acid attack.

'It's as if this is a fashionable assault being carried out. The injuries are dreadful and life changing.'

Both victims read statements to the court and were supported by their families.

Ms Khan broke down in tears as she described the devastating impact the attack has had on her life.

She will carry lifelong scars to her face, particularly her eyes, and has suffered from severe depression and anxiety as a result of the attack.

She said she was 'extremely happy, confident and my self esteem was high' but has since tried to take her own life a number of times.

'I had so many plans for the future including to start a business and interviews for jobs,' she added.

'It is upsetting to see my cousin affected by this - he threw water on me rather than himself which made his injuries worse.'

She continued: 'My 21st birthday turned into a day where my face was taken away from me.

'I have been looking at myself in the mirror it upsets me, it brings back the incident on the day, it doesn't look like me.

'No matter what his sentence may be, these injuries will affect me for the rest of my life.'

Resham Khan said the day of the attack was the day she lost her face

Witnesses said the victims ran from their car like they were on fire and their clothes 'melted' leaving them terribly scarred (pictured is Miss Khan's back)

Mr Muhktar has terrible scars to the right side of his head as well as losing his hearing in one ear and said the pain still feels like 'somebody is ironing me 24/7'

Mr Muhktar has permanent scarring to his head, neck and body and lost hearing in one of his ears.

He also suffers from depression and said he has tried to take his own life.

Acid victim was close to jumping in front of a train as both considered suicide The court heard since the attack both have suffered psychological trauma and considered suicide. Addressing the court Resham Khan said through tears: 'Before the attack I felt a lot better, happier and confident and my self esteems was high. 'I had plans to start my own business and had a number of job opportunities with international travel which had to be put on hold. As was my degree. 'This happened on my 21st birthday, which will stay with me the rest of my life as the day my face was taken away. 'I was a young woman with the whole of my life ahead of me. I tried to take eight overdoses because d what happened. 'Looking in the mirror, I don't recognise the person I see. I struggle to have relationships because of the way I now look. I'm still in great pain. 'Seeing my cousin so distressed is upsetting, hearing him crying. He threw water over me instead of himself, making his injuries much worse.' Jameel Muhktar told the court he considered jumping in front of a train at Manchester Piccadilly station, but had to stop reading his statement as he became emotional. He said: 'Since the attack I cannot face going outside. I don't feel like the same person. 'These scars will last forever. I cannot have a job. I struggle moving and lifting my arm. I have suffered from mental health problems, lack of sleep and flashbacks. 'I tried to take my own life at Manchester station and thought about jumping in front of a train. I wanted to die and couldn't go on any more. 'My self esteem is at zero. I just want to hide, I'm scared of noises and unable to look behind me for fear of another attack.' Advertisement

He became so emotional while reading his statement that the prosecutor had to finish for him.

'Since the attack I have been hurting in many different ways, I don't feel like I'm the same person,' he said.

'Everywhere I go I get stared at. This upsets me. I get flashbacks and am really worried to leave my house, constantly looking over my right shoulder fearing attacks.

He said that as well as his physical injuries he also suffers from severe depression and tried to take his own life.

'I am still in so much pain, I'm still burning and struggle to sleep at night,' he added.

'My self esteem is zero, my future is finished, I have nothing to look forward to.

'I am mentally and physically scarred for life. I can't even have a relationship. It's enough dealing with myself.'

He had previously admitted two counts of inflicting grievous bodily harm, but denied two counts of the more serious charge of inflicting grievous bodily harm with intent.

In November he changed that plea to guilty. It means he could face a life term when he is sentenced in January.

Judge Sheelagh Canavan said the attack appeared to be random because the victims had no previous dealings with Tomlin before the incident just after 9am on June 21 this year in Beckton, east London.

She told Snaresbrook Crown Court that Tomlin, who has teardrops tattooed on his face, would undergo a psychiatric assessment before he is sentenced today.

A motive for the attack is yet to be given in court, but Tomlin, of Canning Town, east London, has previously been sectioned under the Mental Health Act and has been prescribed anti-psychotic medication.

Police have said the attack was not racially motivated but happened after an argument between Mr Muhktar and Tomlin on the pavement.

After Mr Muhktar returned to his car Tomlin hurled acid through the passenger window where Miss Khan was sitting. He then moved round to the driver's side where he threw acid at her cousin.

Both victims suffered horrific burns to their face and body. Miss Khan, a business management student at Manchester Metropolitan University, has posted pictures online showing her face continuing to heal after several skin grafts.

She has also posted pictures of herself out with friends, declaring last month: 'It's time to stop hiding.' She has written emotional posts throughout her journey, once telling how her dreams of becoming a model had been destroyed.

Tomlin was on the run after the attack and police issued this CCTV before his eventual arrest

Describing the attack, she wrote on Twitter: 'I saw my clothes burn away in front of me. We stripped off in the middle of the road, running around screaming and begging for water.'

She went on: 'My plans are in pieces; my pain is unbearable, and I write this in hospital whilst I patiently wait for the return of my face.

'Currently, I have two main priorities: to make a full recovery and to make sure no one ever goes through the living nightmare I have endured.'

She has been described as 'a true inspiration' on Twitter where she has 20,000 followers.

Mr Muhktar suffered severe burns to his right eye, arms, back, legs and neck and was left deaf in one ear.

He said after the attack that his injuries felt like 'somebody is ironing me 24/7', adding: 'I'm in continuous pain. I don't go outside and I can't even look at myself in the mirror.'
A shattered mother has told of the moment her ex-boyfriend allegedly abducted their son in a terrifying night-time raid.

Agnes Krzysztofowicz, from Poland, and Alistair Larmour, from Perth, are locked in a bitter 10-month custody battle where they live in Bali.

Mr Larmour allegedly took his son Andrew from the boy's home on Sunday night. He said in a Facebook video it was 'the only way' he would get to see him.

He was arrested by police on Friday morning and is in custody being questioned.

Detained: Mr Larmour (right in blue) was arrested by police on Friday morning and is in custody being questioned

Happier times: Mr Larmour with his ex-girlfriend before they split up and had a custody battle

Ms Krzysztofowicz has now told of the moment her son was allegedly taken away.

In a video aired by A Current Affair, she said: 'I was chasing the car but not much could be done. In seconds they were gone.'

Before being reuinted with her son on Friday, the mother issued an emotional plea for help on Facebook.

She said: 'A small boy of this age needs to be with his mother. If you see Andrew, please help him get back home.'

Mr Larmour claimed he has not been able to see his son for nearly a year and taking him was the 'only option'. He said: 'I just want to be a father'.

Alistair Larmour claims he has not been able to see his son, Andrew, for nearly a year and taking him was the 'only option'

Agnieszka Krzysztofowicz is pleading for the return of her son after his father allegedly took their son from her home and is currently on the run in Bali

Mr Larmour was arrested and taken into custody about 3.30am.

Earlier, Ms Krzysztofowicz, known as Anges, said she was distraught and desperate for her son to come home after the raid at her home near Ubud in central Bali.

She made extensive appeals on social media while also allegedly reporting the incident to Polish police, which are reported to be investigating alongside Australian and Indonesian authorities.

Mr Larmour, who lived in Perth before moving to Indonesia, claimed he had to take the drastic action to get his ex-partner to discuss shared custody after they split in June.

The self-employed spiritual healer and meditation instructor broke down in tears in a video he posted to Facebook on Thursday with his son in his arms.

Mr Larmour, who lived in Perth before moving to Indonesia, claims he had to take the drastic action to get his ex-partner to discuss shared custody with their son (pictured)

'I haven't seen Andrew in 10 months and I've been trying to come to an agreement with visitation rights,' he said.

'Every single attempt at communication [with Agnes] has been thwarted and she's blocked me on every form of media.

'Finally, we're at the negotiation table and a custody agreement.'

He added in the video he was posting to 'allay some fears' that his son is 'happy and healthy' before breaking down in tears.

A battle between Andrew Lamour's parents over shared custody has led to his father allegedly taking his son from his mother's home in Bali

Ms Krzysztofowicz, known as Anges, says she is distraught and desperate for her son to come home

'I feel really cornered and this was the only option left to me.

'The fact of the matter is I really want to be a dad, I just really want to be a dad,' he said in tears.

Ms Krzysztofowicz claims she was held while another man helped Mr Larmour escape with his son at around midnight on Sunday night.

'In seconds they were gone and I was chasing the car and not much could be done. That's why I'm making these posts to get Andrew home,' she said in a Facebook post.

The mother, who is a Polish citizen, pleaded with people to help her get her son home as she tries to press a legal case in Poland.

'Any court would tell you this small boy at this age should be with his mother,' Ms Krzysztofowicz said.

'If you see Andrew help him to get back to his home as soon as possible.'

Mr Larmour said he had spent three months trying to get legal support in Indonesia but 'to no effect'.

Mr Larmour explains how his life has been 'fundamentally shaped' by ongoing battles with 'schizophrenia and alcoholism' but has been sober for 10 years

But Ms Krzysztofowicz has argued she believes her son's father is 'incapable of taking care' of their son.

She has hired child recovery expert Col Chapman and Indonesian border authorities have been alerted, The West Australian reports.

The publication also reports Ms Krzysztofowicz saying Andrew was suffering with a fever and chicken pox when he was taken.

On his website, Mr Larmour explains how his life has been 'fundamentally shaped' by ongoing battles with 'schizophrenia and alcoholism' and was homeless aged 25.

He says he has been sober for more than 10 years and previously served as secretary of the Western Australia board of Alcoholics Anonymous.
One of Sydney's most notorious serial sex offenders remains a free man despite new allegations he assaulted a 16-year-old girl at a western Sydney supermarket this week.

Graham James Kay will reappear Parramatta Local Court again next week in relation to an alleged incident that happened at Woolworths in Rosehill at around 3pm on Tuesday.

It comes just one month after NSW Corrective Services officers removed the electronic ankle bracelet he had to wear for three years since his release from prison.

Graham James Kay will reappear Parramatta Local Court on April 24 in relation to an alleged assault on a young supermarket employee this week

Police allege the assault took place at a self service checkout at a supermarlet in Rosehill

'Police will allege a 16-year-old girl was working at the self-service check-out when a man called out to her for assistance,' a NSW Police spokeswoman told Daily Mail Australia.

'It's alleged the girl was assaulted by the man. Cumberland Police arrested a man, 66 at a Warwick Farm workplace the following day.'

He was charged with common assault, stalking and intimidation and was bailed in Parramatta Local Court that same day to reappear on April 24.

Police will allege Kay grabbed the 16-year-old girl by the hips and kissed her on each cheek.

Known as the North Shore Rapist, Kay served time for attacking eight women at knifepoint in the 1990s.

The assaults took place in Balgowlah, Artarmon, Epping, Eastwood and Wollstonecraft on women aged between 16 and 39 between December 1995 and December 1996.

Kay served 18 years of a 20-year jail sentence after he was arrested in 1997.

He was fitted with ankle bracelet monitor when released on parole in 2015.

Kay told a NSW Supreme Court hearing last year he should have his tag removed because it was awkward at the beach and had complied with 42 conditions imposed upon his release from jail.

NSW Corrective Services officers removed his electronic ankle bracelet on March 17.

Known as the North Shore Rapist, Kay served time for attacking eight women at knifepoint in the 1990s

Kay's victims from the 1990s have feared since his release from prison that he will strike again.

'I thought he was going to kill me. You just think it's going on forever, it just feels like forever,' one told A Current Affair in 2017.

'I'm terrified that he's going to get me again... he's a threat to all women.'
Mourners gathered to pay their respects to a dedicated RAF engineer who died in a Red Arrows crash as two typhoons performed a flypast as a final salute to their fallen colleague.

Corporal Jonathan Bayliss, 41, died after the Hawk T1 aircraft he was in plummeted to the ground at RAF Valley in Anglesey, north Wales on March 20.

He had dreamed of being in the RAF since he was a boy and has been described as 'a generous, kind and caring man who could also always be relied upon'.

Around 150 people attended an emotional service at Lincoln Cathedral today to say farewell to the popular engineer.

Mourners gathered to pay their respects to dedicated RAF engineer Corporal Jonathan Bayliss who died in a Red Arrows crash in north Wales last month as two typhoons (pictured) performed a flypast as a final salute to their fallen colleague.

Cpl Jonathan Bayliss's funeral took place at Lincoln Cathedral on Friday. His funeral is pictured inside the hearse draped in a Union Jack flag

The RAF arranged a guard of honour and officers acted as pallbearers for the coffin, which was draped in the Union Jack with an RAF cap placed on top.

Corporal Jonathan Bayliss (pictured), 41, died after the Hawk T1 aircraft he was in plummeted to the ground at RAF Valley in Anglesey, north Wales on March 20

Before the service a flypast over the cathedral took place performed by two Typhoon jets from 41 Squadron of RAF Coningsby - a unit where Cpl Bayliss had worked during his career.

Heartfelt floral tributes included a bouquet displaying the RAF symbol with eight Red Arrows and one blue, to signify his role as an engineer, and the initials 'JB'.

Armed police secured the cathedral site and surrounding roads were closed to make way for mourners including family, friends, senior officers and members of the Red Arrows team.

The service was led by the Reverend Rachel Cook, Royal Air Force,and featured hymns, prayers, poetry and tributes from colleagues.

The Last Post could also be heard and music from the Band of Brothers was played before a private burial service.

Born in Dartford, Kent, Cpl Bayliss had been a member of the Red Arrows team since January 2016.

He was described by Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson after his death as a 'shining example of what the British Armed Forces stand for'.

A heartfelt floral tribute to Cpl Bayliss is pictured displaying the RAF symbol containing eight Red Arrows and one blue, to signify his role as an engineer, with the initials 'JB'

The RAF arranged a guard of honour and officers acted as pallbearers for the coffin, which was draped in the Union flag with an RAF peaked cap placed on top

The engineer had dreamed of being in the RAF since he was a boy and has been described as 'a generous, kind and caring man who could also always be relied upon' since his death in March

RAF Sergeant Will Allen said: 'Having worked with Jon both at the Red Arrows and elsewhere in the Royal Air Force, I know how tirelessly he approached each task and was, what many would describe, a genuine grafter.

'Jon had a big a presence on the Squadron and with his wide beaming smile, and dry humour, could lighten up any dull moment or lift spirits when needed.

'Both inside and outside of work, he was a generous, kind and caring man who could also always be relied upon.'

Before joining the RAF in 2001 he worked at Brands Hatch. He later went on to support successful tours to the Far East and mainland Europe.

The hearse carrying Cpl Bayliss's coffin is pictured arriving at Lincoln Cathedral today

Floral tributes are pictured alongside the coffin of Cpl Jonathan Bayliss at his funeral today

Colleagues of fallen Red Arrows engineer Cpl Jonathan Bayliss are pictured standing to attention alongside his hearse in Lincoln today

Family, friends and colleagues stand by as the coffin is removed from the hearse

The 41-year-old's colleagues are pictured carrying his coffin into Lincoln Cathedral

Wing Commander Andrew Keith said: 'Corporal Bayliss was a popular colleague and someone whom others looked up to, being able to draw inspiration from his knowledge and strength of character.

A Red Arrows colleague is pictured paying tribute to Cpl Bayliss outside his funeral at Lincoln Cathedral today

'The Red Arrows family is a close one - the Squadron is a small team who live and work side-by-side and the overwhelming number of condolence messages, received from around the world, have been enormously comforting to us all and we are very grateful for that.'

Flight Lieutenant David Stark, 35, was also injured in the crash, but escaped death after being ejected from 30m aircraft moments before it burst into flames.

Flt Lt Stark is believed to have flown to the Anglesey base with his crewmate for ground simulator training.

They had just taken off on their way home to base at RAF Scampton, Lincolnshire, when an 'incident' forced them to try to land back at Valley at 1.30pm. The cause of the crash is still being investigated.

RAF Valley is used to train UK fighter pilots and aircrew for mountain and maritime operations.

Prince William was based there as a search and rescue helicopter pilot.

About 1,500 service personnel, civil servants and contractors work at the site.

Cpl Bayliss was in a Red Arrows Hawk T1 30million aircraft when it crashed in north Wales
Boris Johnson today held an 'historic meeting' meeting with his Zimbabwean counterpart which is expected to pave the way for the country's return to the Commonwealth.

The Foreign Office said it 'strongly supports' Zimbabwe rejoining the group, which it was suspended from 16 years ago after Robert Mugabe rigged elections.

It comes after five months after Mugabe was ousted from power following 37 years of rule which saw corruption flourish, his political opponents imprisoned and the economy tank.

Mr Johnson today held a meeting on the sidelines of the Commonwealth summit with Zimbabwe's foreign minister Sibusiso Moyo.

Boris Johnson (pictured today with Zimbabwe's delegation) at the Commonwealth summit with held an 'historic meeting' meeting with his Zimbabwean counterpart which is expected to pave the way for the country's return to the Commonwealth

Boris Johnson (pictured today at the summit with his Zimbabwean counterpart Sibusiso Moyo sad he will support the country's path to reform

In a statement afterwards Mr Johnson said: 'President Mnangagwa has been in power for 150 days and while Zimbabwe has made impressive progress, there's still much to do.

'That's why Britain, the Commonwealth and the wider international community will do everything it can in supporting Zimbabwe on its path of reform.

'But we must remember democracies are not made in a day.

'July's election will be a bellwether for the direction of a new Zimbabwe.

'The Zimbabwe Government must deliver the free and fair elections the people of Zimbabwe deserve and which it has promised.

'The UK stands ready in friendship to support a Zimbabwe that fully embraces the rule of law, human rights and economic reform.'

His warm words come amid growing signs that the country will apply to rejoin the family of nations.

In a statement the Foreign Office hailed the 'historic' meeting between the two ministers which they said 'ushers in a new era in UK-Zimbabwe relations and symbolises Zimbabwe's commitment to engaging meaningfully with the international community'.

The Foreign Office added: 'There is a great deal of interest in Zimbabwe applying to rejoin the Commonwealth after their election in July.

Boris Johnson (pictured with delegations from Africa ahead of his meeting with Zimbabwe today) and the Foreign Office say they 'strongly support' Zimbabwe rejoining the Commonwealth, which it was suspended from 16 years ago after Robert Mugabe rigged elections

Boris Johnson tweeted after the meeting about his plans to help Zimbabwe on its path to reform

'Applying is a matter for the Zimbabwean people to decide.

'Zimbabwe would have to formally apply to the Commonwealth Secretariat and the final decision would then be for all Commonwealth members.

'However, the UK would strongly support Zimbabwe's re-entry and a new Zimbabwe that is committed to political and economic reform that works for all its people.'

Mugabe was ousted from power in November last year after four decades of dictatorship.

He helped free his country from colonial rule but once in power his regime was characterised by corruption and economic decline.

He rigged elections and rounded up and imprisoned political opponents who spoke out against him.

While he oversaw the forced seizure of farms owned by white people and divied them up to his political supporters.

The policy was disastrous for the country, helping to fuel its sharp economic decline.
An image has been released of the Queensland police officer that has pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of his baby son.

Senior Constable Colin David Randall, 39, was initially charged with murder in February 2016, 18 months after his two-month-old son died from significant head injuries.

He was due to face a murder trial in the Brisbane Supreme Court but pleaded guilty to manslaughter on Friday morning and is due to be sentenced on Tuesday.

Senior Constable Colin David Randall, 39, was initially charged with murder in February 2016, but pleaded guilty to manslaughter

The two-month-old boy suffered severe head injuries which led to his death

Randall initially called 000, however, after an 18 month investigation he was charged with the baby's murder

During a brief hearing after Randall's plea, crown prosecutor Phil McCarthy said the sentence handed to child killer Heidi Strbak should be considered as a comparable case.

Strbak was last year handed a nine-year jail sentence for the manslaughter of her four-year-old son Tyrell Cobb, but she'll be eligible for parole in four years, in October 2021.

Strbak is appealing her sentence, however, it's yet to be heard.

In January this year, Attorney-General Yvette D'Ath defended the Queensland government's decision not to appeal for a tougher jail term for Strbak.

Ms D'Ath said the decision was based on advice from the Director of Public Prosecutions, who reviewed the sentence.

But Opposition Leader Deb Frecklington accused the government of failing to listen to community outrage over the sentence.

Senior Constable Colin David Randall, 39, ha pleaded guilty to manslaughter of his 2-month-old son (stock)
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President Donald Trump defended his former national security adviser Michael Flynn on Friday following a public leak of memos written by fired FBI Director James Comey.

Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI during the early stages of what would become a special counsel probe into unproven allegations of collusion between Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and Russian agents.

The president has complained that Comey, whom he canned 11 months ago, has lied about their interactions in order to build public demand for sales of his new memoir, while Flynn's lies could land him in prison.

'So General Michael Flynn's life can be totally destroyed while Shadey [sic] James Comey can Leak and Lie and make lots of money from a third rate book (that should never have been written),' he tweeted Friday.

Former FBI director James Comey's book is a best-seller that takes pot-shots at Donald Trump, and the president is pushing back almost daily

Following the release Thursday night of memos that Comey wrote after a trio of private meets with Trump, the president lashed out on Twitter  defending Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and whom Trump himself fired in February 2017

Trump has been on the warpath since before 'A Higher Loyalty' came out, and the White House has been pushing back with an unusual vigor

'Is that really the way life in America is supposed to work? I don't think so!'

Trump complained Friday that his fired former national security advisor Michael Flynn's life was 'totally destroyed' for lying to the FBI while Comey 'can Leak and Lie' while being rewarded with book sales

In one memo, Comey recounted how Trump once pointed his fingers at his head and complained that Flynn had 'serious judgment issues.'

Still, Comey claims, the president asked him to drop the Bureau's investigation of Flynn, saying he was a good man being needlessly targeted.

Trump fired Flynn three months before he sent Comey packing, following revelations that he had misled Vice President Mike Pence about his discussions with Russia's then-Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak about U.S. sanctions.

The president blamed Flynn for failing to alert him promptly to a congratulatory call from a world leader, causing a delay for Trump in returning a message to an official whose name is redacted in the documents.

'I did not comment at any point during this topic and there was no mention or acknowledgment of any FBI interest in or contact with General Flynn,' Comey wrote.

By that point, the FBI had already interviewed Flynn about his contacts with Kislyak, and Justice Department officials had already warned the White House that they were concerned Flynn was vulnerable to blackmail.

Trump-backers have focused much of their ire on Comey in recent weeks, demanding consequences for his alleged lies to Congress and his admitted leaking of details from the memos to reporters last year

Copies of the memos written by James Comey

The following day, according to a separate memo, Comey says Trump cleared the Oval Office of other officials, encouraged him to let go of the investigation into Flynn and called him a good guy.

The memos reveal that days before Flynn's firing, then-White House chief of staff Reince Priebus asked Comey if Flynn's communications were being monitored under a secret surveillance warrant.

'Do you have a FISA order on Mike Flynn?' Priebus asked Comey, according to the memos, referring to an order under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Comey said he 'paused for a few seconds and then said that I would answer here, but that this illustrated the kind of question that had to be asked and answered through established channels.'

Comey's response is redacted on the unclassified memos.

Trump repeatedly complained to FBI director James Comey in early 2017 that the Russia meddling investigation was a cloud over his young administration, weeks before firing him, leaked memorandums showed Thursday.

Trump 'said he was trying to run the country and the cloud of this Russia business was making that difficult,' Comey wrote in a memo on a conversation they had on March 30, 2017.

The Trump-Russia probe ensnared Flynn early (upper center) but Comey has been on the sidelines since his firing in May 2017

The former FBI chief has been on an aggressive book tour including personal appearances and a slew of high-profile TV engagements

Eleven days later, Trump again pressed Comey about the issue. The president told Comey that 'he is trying to do work for the country, visit with foreign leaders, and any cloud, even a little cloud, gets in the way of that,' Comey wrote, referring to 'the Russia thing.'

The memos, which Comey wrote immediately after several meetings with Trump in the weeks after his inauguration on January 20, 2017, depict a president deeply worried about the impact of the probe into Russian meddling in the election the previous year.

Comey makes clear in his memos that he was uncomfortable with the pressure and that it was not completely proper, though at the time he did not allege the president had broken any laws.

Much of what is in the memos, most notably Trump's demand that Comey pledge his loyalty, has been known for nearly a year.

Comey wrote that the president repeatedly raised the still-unconfirmed story that Russians have a video of him with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel.

'The president said "this hookers thing' is nonsense," Comey wrote. However, Trump also said 'that Putin had told him, "We have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world",' Comey noted.
A 22-year-old woman has gone from being an energetic pole dancer to a fatigued 'gran' after falling ill with a mystery disease doctors cannot diagnose.

New South Wales woman Ashleigh Butler's life was transformed overnight when she suddenly lost feeling in her legs at work during a shift as a waitress.

When her symptoms began to get worse the fitness fanatic and law student visited doctors  but with her tests not showing anything Ashleigh has left doctors stumped.

Ashleigh Butler, 22, (pictured) has gone from being an energetic pole dancer to a fatigued 'gran' after falling ill with a mystery disease doctors cannot diagnose

The former pole dancer and law student's life was transformed overnight when she suddenly lost feeling in her legs leaving her now spending her time knitting with her cat (pictured)

More than a year later, Ashleigh is no closer to knowing exactly what is wrong with her.

She suffers from chronic fatigue and pain, numbness and tingling, seizures and slurred speech as well as blurred vision, hair loss and excessive sweating.

It means the former pole dancing instructor now spends her time knitting and her 23-year-old boyfriend is now her full time carer.

Doctors originally thought Ashleigh was showing early signs of multiple sclerosis - a condition of the central nervous system which interferes with nerve impulses within the brain, spinal cord and optic nerves.

'It turned me into a gran overnight. I went from being a pole dancing instructor to knitting. It made me old before my time,' Ashleigh said

But further tests showed that not to be the case  and Ashleigh still needs answers.

'One day I was a normal, healthy 21-year-old girl and the next day I was burdened with a sickness that left me disabled and no one has been able to explain why,' Ashleigh said.

'It turned me into a gran overnight. I went from being a pole dancing instructor to knitting. It made me old before my time.

'Prior to becoming chronically ill, I was studying a double degree of law and psychology full time and working full-time hours as a waitress ... I also maintained a great social life and a healthy relationship with my partner of four years,' (pictured left) Ashleigh said

'Prior to becoming chronically ill, I was studying a double degree of law and psychology full time and working full-time hours as a waitress.

'I was extremely fit and healthy as I was a pole dancer and instructor, plus a regular gym-goer.

'On top of this, I also maintained a great social life and a healthy relationship with my partner of four years. My lifestyle was extremely full-on but I loved every minute of my busy life.

'I was extremely fit and healthy as I was a pole dancer and instructor, plus a regular gym-goer. My lifestyle was extremely full-on but I loved every minute of my busy life,' Ashleigh explained

'I've been searching for a diagnosis since September 2016 and I have spent thousands on medical testing and specialist opinions that didn't get me anywhere,' Ashleigh said

'One day I just couldn't feel my legs. Doctors thought I had the early symptoms of MS. But I had the tests and they just couldn't place what was wrong with me.

'In a weird way that crushed me as I was so sick I just wanted to know what was wrong with me.

'I felt like I was made to feel I was crazy.

'Months passed and I was seeing every specialist under the sun.

'My boyfriend has gone from my boyfriend to my carer.

'He has to help me walk and support me financially. It's such a burden on people.

'I was this little old lady who sat at home with my knitting.

'I've been searching for a diagnosis since September 2016 and I have spent thousands on medical testing and specialist opinions that didn't get me anywhere.

'However, he needs me to complete extensive testing over the next few weeks which will total around $1,500. I just want to get to the bottom of this,' Ashleigh has said recently

'There is a silver lining, I have found a fantastic doctor who is close to finding out what is causing my mystery illness.

'However, he needs me to complete extensive testing over the next few weeks which will total around $1,500. I just want to get to the bottom of this.'

To help come to terms with her chronic illness Ashleigh started a blog called Finding Rainbows in the Dark and she is raising money to cover medical expenses to finally diagnose her illness.
Pictured: Kane Gamble, now 18, arriving at the Old Bailey today

A teenager who blagged his way into the email and phone accounts of senior US intelligence officials has damaged the 'effectiveness' of the wider law enforcement community, a court has heard.

Kane Gamble, 18, founder of Crackas With Attitude (CWA), got his hands on 'extremely sensitive' documents on military and intelligence operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Old Bailey was told.

Between June 2015 and February 2016, he targeted high-profile figures such as then-CIA chief John Brennan and FBI deputy director Mark Giuliano from his family home on a Leicestershire housing estate.

Rather than hacking their accounts, he impersonated his victims and conned call centres at communications giants Comcast and Verizon into divulging confidential information.

Last October, Gamble, of Linford Crescent, Coalville, pleaded guilty to eight charges of performing a function with intent to secure unauthorised access to computers and two charges of unauthorised modification of computer material.

The teenager, who was aged 15 and 16 at the time, appeared at the Old Bailey to be sentenced, supported by his mother.

Former Director of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) John Brennan (left) and former Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson (right) were among the high-profile figures targeted by Gamble

Inconspicuous: The teenager launched the attack on military security experts from the bedroom of his family's modest home in Coalville, Leicestershire

Prosecutor John Lloyd-Jones QC said aggravating features included the 'invasion' of victims' professional and private lives as well as their families.

He highlighted the level of sophistication and persistence in the attacks as well as the damage caused.

He said: 'So many of the American witnesses attest to a drop in confidence in the use of portals, many of the agencies withdrawing their contributions, reducing the effectiveness in the wider law enforcement community in America.'

Mitigating, William Harbage QC described Gamble's actions as a naive response to what he read about in online chat rooms.

'In a naive, immature and childish way, he thought he could do something about it, he could make a nuisance of himself by targeting people in America and that would somehow get them to change US policy as a result of what he was doing from his bedroom.'

He said the defendant never meant to 'harm and traumatise people on an individual basis'.

He added: 'When members of the families were brought into it, he did not think through the consequences. The thought seems to have been 'I want to grab attention of the US government and getting the families involved is some way that will grab attention even more'.'

Gamble hacked FBI Deputy Director Mark Giuliano (pictured) from his family home on a Leicestershire housing estate

The teenager targeted a Comcast cable TV and broadband account belonging to James Clapper, director of national intelligence under President Barack Obama.

Other victims included Mr Obama's deputy national security adviser, Avril Haines; his senior science and technology adviser, John Holdren; the then secretary of homeland security, Jeh Johnson; and FBI special agent Amy Hess.

Gamble used a TV in Mr Johnson's family home to post the message 'I own you'.

He leaked some of the information he gathered using various websites including WikiLeaks.

Gamble, who was said to have an autistic spectrum disorder, will be sentenced by Mr Justice Haddon-Cave.

Guidelines put the maximum sentence at two years' detention and training if Gamble had been dealt with at the time of the offence.

The prosecution has asked for a serious crime prevention order and the confiscation of Gamble's computers and iPhone.
An 11-year-old girl was allegedly told to 'get lost' when she complained an advertisement was not inclusive of both genders.

Mollie McMahon called Seears Workwear in Canberra and asked an employee to change the advertising theme-song 'Get down to Seears, boys, quick, quick, quick,' to include the word 'folks'.

The theme song in the ad was based on Australian Folk song, Click go the Shears, with a chorus 'Click go the shears boys, click, click, click'.

Mollie McMahon called the manager of Seears workwear in Canberra and asked him to change the advertising theme-song, 'Get down to Seears, boys, quick, quick, quick,' to include the word 'folks'

The girl told Kidspot she requested the change to reflect the fact both men and women require work wear for heavy duty or trades jobs, but the employee didn't react well.

'He said: 'Look, I was brought up in a different time to you... I don't want to hear any of this bullshit. Go on and get lost,' Molly told the publication.

Mother Julie is 'infuriated' that the girl was spoken to that way, according to the publication.

Julie McMahon (pictured left) was furious when her girl was allegedly told to 'get lost' by an employee at a work wear shop

But a manager at the company has hit back at the story, saying the situation is a 'sign of the world going mad', in an interview with news.com.au

'If that was my daughter and she asked about changing the ad, I would sit her down and explain to them that it's a song from a long time ago, the 1890s, and that I'd guarantee there were no women shearing sheep back then, things were different,' he said.

'We're not sexist, we're the furthest thing from it.'

The theme song in the ad was based on Australian Folk song Click go the Shears with a chorus 'Click go the shears boys, click, click, click

He told the publication:'No one should speak to anybody like that but seriously, everyone's lost it.'

The ordeal has sparked a mixed reaction on social media, with some people jumping to the defence of the workwear company.

'Good on you, as a female and a Mum I would have told her that it is their shop and they can use whatever songs, jingles, they want,' one user said.

The ordeal has sparked a mixed reaction on social media, with some people jumping to the defence of the work wear company, including one comment (pictured)




This is the touching moment a Chinese teacher holds an umbrella and gives a lesson while teaching a class of students in a classroom under a leaky roof.

The college was undergoing renovation to repair the rooftop, however, the leaky roof has left the rain falling into the classroom, according to the students.

All students can be seen paying attention to the teacher in the class. The unnamed teacher was praised for being professional by the students in the college.

A Chinese teacher is giving a lesson while holding an umbrella in class at a college in China

According to Pear Video, the footage was taken at Shanqiu Teachers' College at Shangqiu city of Henan Province, central China on April 12.

The dedicated teacher can be seen giving his students a lesson about computer.

As the roof dripped water in the classroom, the teacher held an umbrella whilst walking across a stage in front of the blackboard.

The walls are soaked and badly damaged.

One student told Pear Video that the school's renovation works have not completed.

'The repairing works are to fix to the roof of the building but the workers did not finish it and it was raining the day we were having class,' said the student.

However, the teacher did not cancel the class but continued teaching while holding an umbrella in the classroom.

The college replied to Pear Video that they would send workers to finish the repairing works and fix the roof.

The unfinished repairing works left the building with leaky roofs during rainy days (left). But the dedicated teacher continued teaching while holding an umbrella (right)
A 17-year-old girl was caught on camera fighting off two men who tried to rob her in an underground metro station.

One of the thugs cracked the girl over the head with a beer bottle but failed to make off with her phone after her ferocious resistance scared them off.

The attack took place at a station in Essen, a city in the industrial Ruhr Area of the western German state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

CCTV footage shows the victim walking down the stairs to the trains while making a phone call.

Cheap shot: One of the thugs cracked the girl over the head with a beer bottle after following her down the stairs

Hapless duo: A second man soon appears, but seems to show even less stomach for a fight than his thuggish partner when he encounters the ferocious girl

Kicking off: At one point, the brave girl even tries to attack the first man with a backwards kick before lashing out at the second man with her feet, too

Auf wiedersehen, cowards: Soon the sad double act decide to flee back up the stairs, with the man who had the bottle tripping up as he desperately runs away from the teenage girl

She does not notice that a man is quickly approaching her from behind.

Once down the stairs, the thug suddenly grabs a bottle from his bag and smacks the teenage girl on her head.

Remarkably, however, she manages to fight back against the thief.

At one point, the brave girl even tries to attack the man with a backwards kick.

When what appears to be his accomplice walks down the stairs, she starts kicking at him too.

The second man seems to show even less stomach for a fight, and soon the hapless duo decide to flee back up the stairs.

According to the Essen Police, the robbery attempt happened in the middle of the day on April 13.

The release of the CCTV footage has already proven useful.

A police spokesman said the force had arrested a 15-year-old in the nearby town of Waltrop on suspicion of the attack.

His name was not made public due to strict German privacy laws.

The incident reminded Germans about a similar brutal attack on a woman in the Berlin metro.

CCTV camera footage shows the victim going down a tiled staircase, followed by a heavyset man in blue jeans and a leather jacket clutching a beer bottle and smoking a cigarette.

The incident reminded Germans about a similar brutal attack on a woman in the Berlin metro. For no apparent reason, a man kicks a stranger in the back, sending her flying several feet down the steps

She lands painfully on her face on the hard surface and the contents of her handbag scatter across the floor

For no apparent reason he kicks her hard in the back, sending her flying several feet down the steps.

She lands painfully on her face on the hard surface and the contents of her handbag scatter across the floor.

Last summer, a Berlin court found 28-year-old Bulgarian migrant Svetoslav Stoykov guilty of the attack and sentenced him to two years and 11 months behind bars.

Presiding judge Sylvia Busch said: 'The accused kicked her with full force.

'His unsuspecting and defenceless victim did not know the attack was coming.

'Because the act took place in a public space, in which we all move constantly, something like this could have happened to all of us.'
Wendy Young, 49, was a daycare provider for children with ages ranging from seven months to three years. Young said she drank 10-12 cans of beer before the children arrived

A woman from Iowa who ran a daycare center for infants has been arrested six months after allegedly neglecting a seven-month-old infant who died in her care after she drunk 10 beers.

The baby boy she was supposed to be looking after was later found unresponsive and pronounced dead in hospital, police said.

Wendy Young, 49, was charged with neglect or abandonment of a dependent person and now faces up to 10 years in prison, the Iowa City Press-Citizen reported.

Young admitted drinking the beers before opening up her Iowa City daycare center last October which normally looks after children between the ages of seven months and three years.

Seven-month-old, Sawyer Springsteen was found unresponsive last fall at Young's daycare center and later died at the hospital

Sawyer's grandfather was told that the baby boy had died because of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS)

Alcohol was found in Young's system 'more than eight hours after she opened her daycare, according to court records.

State records do not show Young to be a licensed or registered operator, which would trigger inspections. However, providers who look after five or fewer children are not required to be either registered or licensed.

Neighbor Rebecca Painton told the Cedar Rapids Gazette that Young had run the daycare out of her home for 14 years without incident.

Painton called the police report 'sad and misleading.'

'If there's a bond, we're going to bond her out,' she told the paper.

The infant's grandfather said he was unaware an arrest had been made nearly six months after his grandson's death, thinking he had died from sudden infant death syndrome.

'He loved to go on walks, watch his favorite movie, 'Angry Birds,' and splash water all over the bathroom when he took a bath,' his grandfather said. 'He liked to roll around the entire living room and pinch Mom and Dad with his toes.'

Young was being held at the Johnson County Jail on $10,000 bond.
The funeral of stabbed burglar Henry Vincent will be held on 3rd May after the family hold a two-day vigil around his body telling stories about him, MailOnline can exclusively reveal.

A source close to the Vincent family says that the traveller community are planning to take their 100k 'big send-off' past the house where pensioner Richard Osborn-Brooks killed him  risking inflaming community tensions all over again as locals have already threatened to prevent that happening with roadblocks.

The procession  where flowers alone will cost 50k  will pass the spot where the crack addict died, following gipsy tradition.

The family of burglar Henry Vincent, who was killed by a pensioner during a break-in, are planning a huge funeral for him costing 100,000, a family source has revealed

Career criminal Vincent (left) died of a stab wound after struggling with Richard Osborn-Brooks (right) during a late-night break-in at the home the pensioner shares with his wife

But it also aims to make a 'big show' to those outraged by what they've dubbed as the travellers' provocative repeated failed attempts to build a shrine there that they're not be messed with.

A source told MailOnline: 'On 1st May Henry's body will be taken back to his mother's house in Swanley, Kent.

'For two days they'll sit around telling stories about him before a procession of vehicles, including limousines and horse-drawn carriages, will pass the house in Hither Green in south east London before he's taken back up to St. Mary Cray Cemetery in Star Lane where he'll be buried right by where his family live on the Star Lane traveller site.

'Travellers take their funeral corteges past where a person died and they want to give him a big send off as he was a patriarchal figure.

'But they also want to make a big show about his death and prove the gipsy legend that they're not to be messed with.'

Mr Osborn-Brooks and his wife Maureen have been forced to move out of their home following revenge threats by Vincent's criminal family

Repeated attempts by Vincent's family to make a shrine to him in the street have caused tensions in the area

The news follows outrage last week when it was revealed that Henry Vincent's funeral cortege would be passing Richard Osborn-Brooks' home.

It came after days of battles between Vincent's relatives repeatedly building a shrine and vigilantes tearing it down again opposite the house where the botched raid cost the life of the father-of three, 38, despite him going in armed with a screwdriver.

His accomplice Billy Jeeves, 28, is still at large after fleeing the scene in a white Vauxhall Astra van.

Richard, 78, and Maureen Osborn-Brooks are currently living in a safe house. All their possessions have already been moved out of their former home.

Vincent is said to be being treated like a 'gipsy god' by loved ones, despite his notorious past as a career criminal who preys on the elderly.

The Met Police said they did not believe the funeral procession would pass through the area. A spokesman said: 'An appropriate policing plan will be in place.'
A Miami politician is being accused of making sexual harassment claims against a political ally to further her career after police found no evidence to support her accusations.

Last Fall Miami Beach City Commissioner Kristen Rosen Gonzalez accused fellow Democrat Rafael Velasquez of exposing himself and trying to make her touch his penis when they were alone sitting in her car in October.

As part of their investigation, the Miami-Dade State Attorney's Office secretly recorded a call between Velasquez and a campaign consultant who worked with both Democrats to see if Gonzalez had lied about her claims, as reported by the Miami Herald.

The Miami-Dade State Attorney's Office has said they will not pursue criminal charges against Rafael Velasquez, who Miami Beach City Commissioner Kristen Rosen Gonzalez accused of sexual harassment

On Thursday authorities said they will not pursue criminal charges against Velasquez because there's not enough evidence to support Gonzalez' claims.

Velasquez has denied any wrongdoing and claims Gonzalez's accusations were part of a political plan to win a congressional seat.

He said to Pedro Diaz in the recorded conversation last November: 'I had to do it man, I'm sorry. I had to go to the police and clear my name.

'I had to tell them that you told me that she did it all to set me up as a political ploy. I don't have anybody else to tell the truth man. You have to tell them what you told me.'

But Diaz declined to tell the police what he knew, saying he feared it would affect his ability to make a living as a political consultant: 'Rafael, I'm not telling anybody brother, I can't do that.

'I told you this in confidence and that's what it was. I will not do that. I hope you understand. This is my business, this is how i provide to my family, I just can't.'

Diaz did clarify that he never claimed he witnessed Gonzalez planning the attack against Velasquez, but he did hear her saying the claims would bring her lots of publicity.

In the recorded call Pedro Diaz clarifies that he never claimed he witnessed Gonzalez planning the attack against Velasquez, but he did hear her saying the claims would bring her publicity

Gonzalez' claims seemingly destroyed Velasquez's political hopes: At the time they were made he was in a close race for the Miami Beach commission

Gonzalez' claims seemingly destroyed Velasquez's political hopes: At the time they were made he was in a close race for the Miami Beach commission. The harassment allegedly happened after both Democrats went knocking doors together for Velasquez.

The claims also thrust Gonzalez into the national spotlight as part of the MeToo discussion. She is currently running to replace retiring Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Following the accusations, two other women came forward with similar claims. Publicist Frances Alban, said Velazquez groped her and Roxanna Ayers said he made 'pervy' comments about her looks.

But according to the police report, investigators found evidence that contradicts Gonzalez' version of events.

Velasquez showed them texts where she seemed to be friendly with him after the alleged incident and pointed out she kept working for his campaign. Moreover, police found Gonzalez was eating at a restaurant with her daughters when she said she was harassed.

Gonzalez caused a stir earlier this month when it emerged she had reached out to Miami Beach's police chief on behalf of an ally who was under criminal investigation

Velasquez is known for saying he accidentally voted illegally twice while holding a green card

'This commissioner used these false allegations for political purposes, and the power of her office, to basically destroy my name and reputation in our community,' said Velasquez. 'The only taxpayer-funded seat this criminal commissioner should occupy is a bench in state prison.'

But Gonzales says Velasquez won't be prosecuted because she asked for charges to not be filed against him.

'When Velasquez exposed himself, I felt humiliated. But when his repeated inappropriate behavior towards other women was also exposed and his commission opponent was elected, I felt the public trust was protected and advised the State Attorney that I did not wish to press charges,' she wrote. 'Justice has been done.'

The case file does not mention Gonzalez ever having stated she wanted the charges dropped.

Both Gonzalez and Velasquez have been involved in scandals before. He is known for saying he accidentally voted illegally twice wit a green card, and she caused a stir earlier this month when it emerged she had reached out to Miami Beach's police chief on behalf of an ally who was under criminal investigation.
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Palestinian protesters have raised a swastika emblazoned kite near the Israeli border during a violent protest on Adolf Hitler's birthday.

The turbulent demonstration has seen Palestinian women increasingly involved - and standing in front of men because they are less likely to be shot by snipers.

Deadly protests have taken place at the flash point every Friday over the last month - and this week's has been labelled the 'Women's March of Gaza'.

It comes after large numbers of women and girls - on a scale never seen before - started to take active roles in the demonstrations, which are set to culminate on May 12.

One Palestinian woman, who joined demonstrators on April 13, Taghreed al-Barawi, claimed: 'Women are less likely to be shot at.'

Today, thousands joined renewed protests along the border with two shot dead by Israeli troops and dozens more injured.

Scroll down for video

Palestinian protesters carry a transparent kite defaced with a swastika during clashes with Israeli forces across the border today

Palestinian women are increasingly joining protests amid reports they are standing in front of men on the Israeli border because they are less likely to get shot by snipers. A female protester with a Palestinian flag is pictured receiving help after tear gas was fired by Israeli troops today

A large number of women and girls - on a scale never seen before - have started to take active roles in the demonstrations, which are set to culminate on May 12. A female protester is pictured on a stretcher clasping her leg amid clashes today

There are reports of female participants protecting the men by standing in front of them to provide cover. A group of Palestinian women are pictured hurling stones during protests today

A series of deadly protests have taken place at the flash point every Friday over the last month. Pictured: A demonstrator is pictured during a clash with Israeli soldiers along the Israel-Gaza border today

Al-Barawi told Al Jazeera: 'We live in a male-dominated society and women's participation in protests can be a strange scene for some people in Gaza.

'However, this time men somehow were more accepting and encouraging. It seems like they finally realised that we're all part of this and women should be present.'

She said she had attended the protest with her younger sister and friends and in joining the action, women were helping to unite Palestinians and galvanise their cause.

Iktimal Hamad, head of the Women's Committee of the march, said this would send a 'clear message to the world that our protest is non-violent and peaceful.'

Today pictures emerged of women taking part in renewed unrest on the Gaza-Israel border today.

Israeli troops shot dead two Palestinian protesters and wounded 12 as the series of protests in the enclave reached its half-way mark. Dozens more have been hurt today, according to Gaza health bosses.

Some Palestinians brought wire-cutters to cut through the border fence. As the crowd grew, Israeli soldiers called out warnings in Arabic over loudspeakers to individuals who approached the border fence.

Conflict: Palestinian protesters evacuate a wounded woman during a protest at the Gaza Strip's border with Israel

A woman demonstrator reacts to tear gas fired by Israeli troops during clashes at a protest at the Israel-Gaza border where Palestinians demand the right to return to their homeland

In the line of fire: Pictures have emerged today of women taking part in renewed unrest on the Gaza-Israel border today

A demonstrator carries tyres during clashes with Israeli troops at a protest where Palestinians demand the right to return to their homeland, at the Israel-Gaza border in the southern Gaza Strip

The protest campaign, dubbed The Great March of Return, is leading up to May 15, when Palestinians mark Nakba Day, or the Day of Catastrophe, commemorating their displacement around the time of Israel's founding in 1948. An injured Palestinian is taken away from the protest site on a stretcher today

Despite the warnings, two Palestinians were killed and 12 wounded by Israeli gunfire, Palestinian health officials said, bringing the death toll in the past few weeks of protests to at least 33. Several hundred people have also been wounded by Israeli sharpshooters.

The protests have been staged every Friday for the past month to push demands for Palestinian refugees to regain ancestral homes in what is now Israel. They are expected to culminate on May 15. The Israeli military had no comment on the latest events.

The use of live fire has drawn international criticism but Israel says it is protecting its borders and takes such action when protesters come too close to the border fence.

It accuses Hamas, the Islamist militant group which rules Gaza, of staging riots and trying to carry out attacks. Although the main protest campaign is intended to be peaceful, Gazans have hurled stones and burning tyres near the border fence.

Israeli troops shot dead two Palestinian protesters and wounded 12 as the series of protests in the enclave reached its half-way mark today

Some protesters on Friday fitted kites with cans of flammable liquids which they hoped to fly across the border and start fires in Israel

Palestinian protesters pull barbed wire from the border fence with Israel, in Rafah in southern Gaza Strip today

Since March 30, tens of thousands have protested along the border in the blockaded enclave calling for Palestinian refugees to be able to return to their former lands in what is now Israel

Thirty-six Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces and hundreds of others wounded by gunfire since March 30, according to Gaza's health ministry

Gazans have used stones, firebombs and fireworks during clashes, but have also employed tactics such as creating a smokescreen by burning tyres and Israeli flags

Israel says it has only opened fire when necessary to guard its border and prevent violence, but no Israelis have been wounded and its open-fire rules have come under scrutiny

Some protesters on Friday fitted kites with cans of flammable liquids which they hoped to fly across the border and start fires in Israel.

'We aim to distract the soldiers from shooting and wounding or killing our people. Israeli soldiers will be worried those fire-kites may fall on their heads or torch bushes around them,' said Mohammad Abu Mustafa, 17, who lost his right leg a few months ago after being shot by an Israeli soldier.

'These kites also torch bushes and trees and not only cause them losses, but keep them busy trying to put out fires,' he said, leaning on crutches.

Early in the morning, the Israeli military used a new tactic, dropping leaflets into Gaza warning residents to not approach the border.

'The Hamas terror organisation is taking advantage of you in order to carry out terror attacks. The IDF (Israel Defense Forces) is prepared for all scenarios. Stay away from the fence and do not attempt to harm it,' said the leaflets scattered by Israeli aircraft in areas along the border.

Two Palestinians were killed and 12 wounded by Israeli gunfire, Palestinian health officials said, bringing the death toll in the past few weeks of protests to at least 33

Several hundred people have also been wounded by Israeli sharpshooters. A woman is pictured on the ground after inhaling tear gas

The protests have been staged every Friday for the past month to push demands for Palestinian refugees to regain ancestral homes in what is now Israel

The use of live fire has drawn international criticism but Israel says it is protecting its borders and takes such action when protesters come too close to the border fence

Gazans also flew dozens of kites near the border fence, in some cases carrying Molotov cocktails, in a new tactic that had led to at least a couple of small fires in Israeli territory this week

Israeli troops shot dead two Palestinians and wounded 12 in renewed unrest on the Gaza-Israel border on Friday as a series of mass protests in the enclave reached its half-way mark. An injured Palestinian is pictured on a stretcher today

Flashpoint: Huge black plumes of smoke from the blazing tyres engulfed the area, as Israeli troops fired tear gas and live bullets

Gaza's health ministry said 40 protesters were injured, but did not say how many of those were wounded by gunfire or overcome by tear gas

The protests are part of what organisers, led by Gaza's ruling Hamas group, have billed as an escalating showdown with Israel, to culminate in a mass march on May 15. Organisers have made conflicting statements about whether they plan an eventual mass border breach

Hamas, which is sworn to Israel's destruction, denies this.

More than 750,000 Palestinians are packed into the narrow coastal enclave. Israel withdrew its troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005 but maintains tight control of its land and sea borders. Egypt also restricts movement in and out of Gaza on its border.

The protest campaign, dubbed The Great March of Return, is leading up to May 15, when Palestinians mark Nakba Day, or the Day of Catastrophe, commemorating their displacement around the time of Israel's founding in 1948.

It takes place at a time of growing frustration over the prospects for an independent Palestinian state. Peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians have been stalled for several years and Israeli settlements in the occupied territories have expanded.

U.S. President Donald Trump's decision last year to recognise disputed Jerusalem as Israel's capital further fueled Palestinian anger.

A Palestinian uses a hammer to peg down a large slingshot to hurl stones during clashes with Israeli forces across the border today

In the past three weeks, 28 Palestinians were killed and hundreds wounded by Israeli troops firing from across the border fence. In addition, two Palestinian men, aged 24 and 25, were shot and killed in a border area in northern Gaza, the health ministry said. The Israeli military had no immediate comment

Hamas said the protests are aimed at breaking a crippling border blockade that was imposed by Israel and Egypt after the Islamic militant group overran Gaza in 2007, a year after winning Palestinian parliamentary elections
The entire contents of a woman's Bondi apartment was dumped on the street after her housemate misunderstood her instructions to remove rubbish from the home.

Nearly $10,000 worth of the woman's personal belongings, including jewellery, sentimental family items and a professional camera, were taken from the North Bondi street while she was at work.

Loni Evans, 29, was living in an Old South Head Road apartment after she arrived in Australia from Wales and had packed all her items in preparation to move to Maroubra.

Loni Evans, 29, (pictured) was living in the North Bondi apartment when she arrived in Australia from Wales when all her belongings were left on the street and taken while she was at work

Around $10,000 worth of the woman's personal belongings (pictured), including jewellery, sentimental family items and a professional camera, were taken from the North Bondi street

The items had been carefully packed and were 'all ready for me to move into my new place', Ms Evans said.

It was only when she received an unexpected call at work saying someone had found her passport in the street that she knew something was wrong.

After rushing home from work she found all her belongings had gone, with only a few pairs of underwear that had been left on the street.

Ms Evans said she was 'heartbroken to see empty bags of where my life was' and immediately assumed her landlord had thrown the bags out.

After rushing home from work she found all her belongings had gone, with only a few pairs of underwear that had been left on the street (pictured)

'I called my roommate and said 'please tell me you didn't throw my stuff' and his reply was: 'What? Yes, I took everything out of the house like you said',' she told Yahoo7 News.

'I told him to move all the rubbish out of the house and he's ended up putting all my stuff in the street,' she said.

Ms Evans described her housemate's actions as 'total stupidity' over a Facebook post she shared online.

'I cannot get my head around it,' she wrote.

'Emergency: If anyone has taken anything from outside 373 Old South Head Road North Bondi above mob hair on Sunday night / Monday morning please bring it back to me.

'Loads of different people have ransacked it and taken it all.'

People in the Bondi area have offered to help her replace some of the items and a neighbour said he managed to find six items of active wear from the street.
This is the first picture of the British Airways pilot accused of trying to fly a packed holiday jet to Mauritius while four times over the alcohol limit, MailOnline can reveal today.

Julian Monaghan, 49, is seen drinking white wine in the sunshine in Cape Town, South Africa, over Easter last year - nine months before his dramatic arrest at Gatwick.

Yesterday it was revealed he was hauled out of the cockpit by armed police in dramatic scenes after cabin crew feared he was drunk.

Concerned staff on the 300-passenger flight called 999 shortly before take-off from Gatwick Airport on January 18.

Julian Monaghan, 49, was accused of being drunk when he was hauled out of a cockpit this year and this is the first picture of him

Passengers were reported to be open-mouthed as Monaghan was arrested. 'Its terrifying to think what mightve happened,' one said

The Boeing 777 was destined for Mauritius, a 12-hour flight. But Monaghan, a long-serving British Airways first officer, was allegedly drunk when he stepped into the cockpit.

Stewards decided to call the police before the aeroplane left the departure gate.

Monaghan was arrested and led off the aircraft in handcuffs. The incident delayed the flights departure by more than two hours.

A passenger who witnessed the drama aboard BA flight 2063 said: Police rushed on to the plane and headed straight for the cockpit.

The first officer was cuffed and led away. A number of passengers were open-mouthed. Its terrifying to think what mightve happened.

Yesterday Sussex Police said: The Crown Prosecution Service has authorised a charge of being over the alcohol limit on board an aircraft.

Julian Monaghan was arrested at Gatwick Airports north terminal on suspicion of performing an aviation function when the level of alcohol was over the prescribed limit.

He is charged with having 86mg of alcohol per 100ml of blood in his system. While the drink-drive limit is 80mg, the limit for pilots is 20mg.

Monaghan, who divides his time between South Africa and Harmondsworth, West London, is due to appear at Crawley Magistrates Court, in Sussex, on June 6. He has not yet been asked to enter a plea.

Julian Monaghan was hauled from the packed flight by armed police seconds from take-off after his cabin crew suspected he was drunk

A British Airways spokesman said at the time of the incident in January that the company took the matter extremely seriously and was helping police with their enquiries (Gatwick terminal photographed above)

He joined British Airways, whose motto is To fly, to serve, in 2001. First officers at the airline typically earn more than 60,000.

The flight was due to leave Gatwick at 8.20pm but was delayed until 10.56pm while a replacement pilot was found.

A British Airways spokesman said: We have taken this matter extremely seriously, and will continue to assist the police with their inquiries.

The safety and security of our customers and crew is always our top priority.

She added: Julian Monaghan no longer works for the airline.
The US Army will not meet its mission to recruit 80,000 active duty soldiers this year and has officially lowered the goal.

But officials say the service has been able to encourage more experienced service members to stay on the job in order to satisfy the military's growing demand for troops.

Army officials say the updated goal will be 76,500 after six months into the recruiting year the service has brought in just 28,000 new soldiers.

More details about the issue are expected to be released by officials later Friday.

The U.S. Army will not meet its mission to recruit 80,000 soldiers this year and has officially lowered the goal to 76,500

Maj. Gen Jeff Snow, head of the Army's recruiting command, predicted late last year that the higher enlistment goal would be difficult to meet. He said the military's strict physical testing can make it hard for young people to complete

Army spokeswoman Cynthia Smith said the main effort is to grow the Army to 483,500, as approved by Congress. And she said it's up to the Army to determine whether to use more recruiting or to get more soldiers to re-enlist and stay in the Army longer.

The struggle to meet this year's higher recruiting numbers - which were a significant hike over last year's recruiting mission of 69,000 - was expected, mainly due to the favorable American economy and increased competition from private sector employers who are able to pay graduates more money.

Maj. Gen. Jeff Snow, head of the Army's recruiting command, predicted late last year that the higher enlistment goal would be difficult to meet this year, considering the combination of economic factors and the military's need for recruits to pass strict physical testing that many young people can't complete.

The Army Physical Fitness Test (APFT) includes three events consisting of push-ups, sit-ups and a two-mile run where the solider has to score at least a 60 out of 100.

Incorrect form on a sit-up or push-up during the test means it won't be counted in the overall score.

'This mission is going to be a significant challenge for the command,' he told The Associated Press in December.

Meeting the increased mission this year, Snow said, could force the Army to take in more recruits who require waivers for marijuana use, low test scores or other more basic health issues.

Data on waivers issued this year was not available Friday morning. But, in December Snow said his goal for 2017 was to have fewer than two percent of the new recruits be considered 'category four,' meaning they scored 31 or less, out of 99, on the aptitude test.

Army leaders have also endorsed that two percent limit, even though the Defense Department allows up to four percent.

Smith said the competitive recruiting environment made it a challenge to meet the original goal.

Military leaders have increasingly warned that lower unemployment, a strong economy and the declining quality of the youth market have steadily shrunk the number of young people considered eligible to be recruits.

Defense officials have also complained that despite the last 16 years of war in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, the American public is increasingly disconnected from the military, and they say many people have misperceptions about serving and often don't personally know any service members.

This time of year is usually the toughest for military recruiters, since this is the period when high school seniors start getting their acceptance letters from colleges.

According to Smith, the 28,000 recruits as of March 31 is the highest total for the six-month period since 2014.
Police in Majorca have arrested a British couple they say left their children with strangers so they could spend their holidays going out and getting drunk.

The youngsters' mum was held after allegedly staggering back to her home and assaulting another British tourist who had agreed to look after them.

Police say the woman she left to look after her kids was also under the effects of alcohol.

They were all staying at an unnamed hotel in Playa de Palma, the resort near the Majorcan capital where two British brothers were held on Tuesday after being accused of causing nearly 2,000 of damage to their hotel room.

Police have not made clear if the new arrests took place at the same hotel or divulged any details about the children such as their ages.

A spokesman for the National Police in Majorca confirmed: 'National Police officers have arrested a British couple who were on holiday as the suspected authors of a crime of child abandonment.

The British tourists had been staying at the popular resort of Playa de Palma outside the capital of Majorca

'In the early hours of Thursday morning and at a hotel in Playa de Palma, hotel security staff were alerted to the abandonment of two children by their parents.

'The family of four had arrived two days earlier. Following their arrival, the parents were usually drunk and would regularly leave the hotel and leave their children there.

'After security staff warned them about their illegal behaviour, they convinced another British couple who they didn't know, to look after their children while they went drinking in different bars in the resort.

'They would return totally drunk.

'They returned in the same state in the early hours of Thursday morning.

'For no reason the mother assaulted the woman who had been looking after her children and hotel security, who subsequently alerted police, had to intervene.

'Officers arrested the couple after reaching the hotel. They also discovered the tourist who had agreed to look after the youngsters was under the effects of alcohol.' The youngsters were taken into emergency care. Their parents were handed over to a judge so they could be questioned in court in a private hearing.

The result of their court appearance - and the children's whereabouts - was not immediately clear on Friday.

Playa de Palma is a long stretch of beach to the east of the island capital which starts just beyond Can Pastilla and finishes at S'Arenal which is popular with young German holidaymakers.

Like Magaluf the resort has been waging war in recent years on badly behaved tourists and drunkenness.

Mayor Antoni Noguera made headlines last year by demanding Germany stop sending 'rubbish' holidaymakers to the area after a drunken fight involving Germany, although he said the offenders were a small minority.

Speaking after the arrests of two British brothers aged 20 and 26 in the resort earlier this week, a police spokesman said: 'Security staff at a hotel in Playa de Palma were alerted to holidaymakers who were making a lot of noise on the fifth-floor and throwing bottles and other items into the street and putting pedestrians in danger.

'After confirming the damage caused and receiving a complaint from the hotel, two British brothers aged 26 and 20 who were holidaying on the island were arrested.

'The damage caused is in excess of 2,000 and includes damage to the telephone socket, hair dryer, doors, skirting boards, toilet and a desk.

'They have now been handed over to a judge so they can be quizzed in court.' The result of their court appearance is not known at this stage either.
The top Senate Democrat is using marijuana's informal holiday to announce a change of heart about the drug, another sign of the growing political acceptance of pot.

New York Sen. Chuck Schumer said Friday he'll introduce a bill taking marijuana off the federal list of controlled substances  in effect decriminalizing its use.

Instead, his bill would let states decide how to treat marijuana possession.

Schumer announced his change of position in an television appearance with VICE, pulling out a Sharpie to autograph a glass bong for the outlet's DC bureau chief Shawna Thomas.

In the middle of a VICE interview on the subject of decriminalizing marijuana, New York Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer autographed a glass bong

Schumer wants to get the federal government out of the way of states that want to regulate cannabis instead of keeping it outlawed

The senator complains that the federal government lumps cannabis in with other 'harder' drugs like heroin and cocaine

'If smoking marijuana doesn't hurt anybody else, why shouldn't we allow people to do it and not make it criminal?' Schumer asks in the broadcast segment, airing Friday night.

Schumer favors federal-government policy that overrides states' views on abortion, education policy and voter IDs, but has turned into a states'-rights crusader over weed

Under his proposed measure, the federal government would still enforce laws against moving pot into states where it's illegal, and would still regulate advertising so it isn't aimed at children.

'My thinking, as well as the general population's views, on the issue has evolved,' Schumer said.

He wrote in a thread on Twitter that the federal government should 'allow states, once and for all, to have the power to decide what works best for them.'

'I have long believed that states should function as their own laboratories of democracy.'

That states'-rights position stands in contrast to his views on other subjects, including education policy, voter ID laws and abortion.

Schumer endorsed decriminalizing pot on April 20, an unofficial marijuana holiday

Schumer, the Senate minority leader, dropped his bombshell on Twitter on Friday morning

But his chief complaint has to do with how marijuana is lumped in with what are usually considered 'harder' drugs.

'[U]nder existing law,' Schumer tweeted, 'the federal government considers marijuana as dangerous as heroin and treats it less favorably than cocaine. That has to change.'

The New York Democrat said he also wants to ensure that minorities and women have a fair shot at getting involved in the growing marijuana industry  and that the federal government invests in research.

Nine states and the District of Columbia now allow recreational use of marijuana, and 30 allow the use of cannabis in some form for medical purposes.

Schumer's bill will face stiff opposition from congressional Republicans including House Speaker Paul Ryan (right)

Americans' support for marijuana legalization has been growing in polls with Gallup's most recent update in October showing that 64 percent of Americans were in favor of legalization.

The White House said last week that President Donald Trump backs legislation to protect the marijuana industry in states where it is legal.

But Schumer told VICE that he has 'seen too many people's lives ruined because they had small amounts of marijuana and served time in jail, much too long.'

'Ultimately, it's the right thing to do. Freedom.'

Former U.S. House Speaker John Boehner also announced recently that he had changed his stance on marijuana and that he would promote its nationwide legalization as a way to help veterans cope with medical problems, and to ease the nation's deadly opioid crisis.
Newly released memos byJames Comey reveal President Trump repeatedly assuring the former FBI director he has an alibi that disproves a key element in the 'golden showers' dossier  although it is contradicted by what Trump's former bodyguard testified.

According to Comey  who Trump brands a liar and a leaker  the president twice brought up what he called 'the golden showers thing' in order to dispute salacious claims in the Steele dossier, calling the rumor a 'complete fabrication.'

Trump tries to rebut the unproven claim of his conduct in a Moscow hotel room involving prostitutes in 2013 by saying he didn't even stay in the city over night.

Comey describes the encounter with Trump and former chief of staff Reince Priebus in a Feb. 8, 2017 memo.

I'M OUTTA HERE: President Trump told then-FBI Director James Comey he left Moscow for New York the evening of the Miss Universe pageant, which would mean an event described in the Steele dossier couldn't have happened

'The President brought up the 'Golden Showers thing' and said it really bothered him if his wife had any doubt about it,' Comey wrote in the memo.

'He then explained, as he did at our [previous] dinner, that he hadn't stayed overnight in Russia during the Miss Universe trip. Twice during this part of the conversation. Reince tried to interject a comment about the [redacted] and 'why it was even in there,' but the President ignored him.'

'The President said 'the hookers thing' is nonsense but that Putin had told him 'we have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world.' He did not say when Putin had told him this and i don't recall [redacted],' Comey writes.

The memo contains no further information on why Putin would make the comment about Russian hookers to Trump, in what context, or when he made the comment.

The dossier by ex British intelligence officer Christopher Steele argues that the Russians engaged in an effort to gain compromising material on Trump.

In this file photo taken on Sunday, Nov. 10, 2013, Russian businessman Aras Agalarov, left, Miss Universe 2013 Gabriela Isler, from Venezuela, center, and pageant owner Donald Trump, of the United States attend the final of the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, Russia

TIME FOR SOME SHUT-EYE: Former Director of Oval Office operations Keith Schiller testified that he walked Trump back to his hotel room following the Miss Universe pageant, and the two men joked about the rejected offer of prostitutes

Former Trump bodyguard Keith Schiller testified to the House Intelligence Committee Trump turned down a Russian who offered to 'send five women' to his hotel room.

Schiller testified the offer came up after a business meeting. But he considered it a joke, saying, 'We don't do that type of stuff,' NBC reported.

Sources told the network Schiller and Trump talked about the offer, which came after a morning meeting, while walking back to his hotel room that evening.

The two men 'laughed about it as Trump went to bed alone,' according to the report. Then, Schiller said he stood outside Trump's hotel door and then went to bed.

The testimony, if accurate, would indicate that Trump spent the night in Moscow rather than immediately flying back to New York.

According to the Washington Post's account of Schiller's testimony, a Russian or Ukrainian man unkown to him made the offer after a late-morning meeting about the pageant.

Comey's now-released memos describe times Trump brought up with him the 'golden showers thing'

NONSENSE: 'The President said 'the hookers thing' is nonsense but that Putin had told him 'we have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world,' Comey writes

The memos were released as Comey is promoting his book, 'A Higher Loyalty,' which also describes his encounters with President Trump

'Can you believe one of these guys wanted to send some women up to your room?' Schiller told Trump on the way to his room that evening.

A lawyer for Emin and Aras Agalarov, who were at the meeting, denied they had any knowledge of the offer. 'They didn't do it, they didn't hear it, and they have no reason to believe it's true,' lawyer Scott Balber told the paper.

An earlier Comey memo from January 28, he describes a one-on-one dinner with Trump at the White House where prostitutes also came up.

When Trump brought up the 'golden showers thing,' he called it 'fake news,' and said it bothered him if 'his wife thought there was even a one percent chance it was true in any respect.'

Copies of the memos written by former FBI Director James Comey are photographed in Washington, Thursday, April 19, 2018

He told Comey that he spoke to people who had been on the trip and they reminded him that he 'didn't stay over night in Russia for that.'

According to Comey: 'He said he arrived in the morning, did events, then showered and dressed for the pageant at the hotel (he didn't say the hotel name) departed for New York by plane that same night.'

Interestingly, Putin spoke publicly about Russian prostitutes in his first comments since the publication of the dossier  just days before Trump claims Putin had told him about Russian prostitutes being the most beautiful.

'I can hardly imagine that he ran off to a hotel to meet our girls of lowered social responsibility, Putin joked at a news conference. Then he added: Although they are of course the best in the world, I doubt Trump fell for that.

Said Putin: 'Trump when he came to Moscow ... wasnt any kind of political figure, we didnt even know of his political ambitions ... Does anyone think that our special services chase every American billionaire? Of course not, its just completely ridiculous,' he said, the South China Morning Post reported.

Comey's memorialized recollections, if accurate, draw attention to Trump repeatedly pushing to contest the dossier, rather than leaving the matter to settle  which itself raises questions.

DEWEY NEED A FEW MORE? The index to Comey's book lists references to prostitutes, Putin, sexual assault, and Russian election interference

'The principle of he doth protest too much is the question that comes up immediately in my mind,' Paul Pillar, a longtime CIA official who is now a fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Security Studies.

'There's no particular reason for Trump to get so worked up about these things unless there's some fire behind the smoke. That's just glaringly obvious,' he told DailyMail.com.

'The only way you could explain it in some other terms would be, well, Trump is such a narcissist so even false accusations get him upset. I don't think that's as likely as that there's a there there,' he added.

As for Trump's statement that Putin made a boast to him about Russian prostitutes, Pillar observed that Putin is an 'experienced intelligence officer. He would be open to whatever kinds of leverage possibilities, whatever form they would take, whether they involve prostitutes or anything else.'
A mother jailed for killing her four-year-old son was brought to justice after her boyfriend accused of the crime discovered a glaring error in the evidence against him.

Tyrell Cobb died at his Gold Coast home on the night of May 24, 2009, after two separate blows to his abdomen that caused internal bleeding and the leaking of his stomach contents.

In December, a judge found Heidi Strbak inflicted the blunt force trauma that led to his death. She was sentenced to nine years in jail.

Heidi Strbak (left) was found to have inflicted the blows that killed her four-year-old son Tyrell Cobb (right) in 2009

Tyrell had 53 bruises and 17 abrasions from head to legs when he died in May 2009

Her then-boyfriend, Matthew Scown, was originally accused of the crime after an incorrect autopsy report said the killing happened at a time when only he was with the boy.

But Mr Scown knew the evidence was wrong and paid a senior pathologist to review the autopsy.

The pathologist spotted an error and the autopsy was changed to say the boy's injuries could have occurred earlier, when he was with his mother.

Now, the policeman in charge, Detective Sergeant Marcus Edwards, has spoken about the case to tell of his satisfaction after the error was discovered.

He told The Courier-Mail: 'The pathologist issues an amended autopsy report that said the child's injuries could have occurred up to 48 hours earlier... and the case gets thrown out at committal because, literally, there wasn't a leg to stand on,' the 21-year veteran police officer said.

'I'm satisfied we got the right person,' he added.

'Without knowing anything about the case people just saw meek and mild Heidi Strbak and thought: "Well, she just looks like a mum". People truly don't understand how evil she is.'

Tyrell had 53 bruises and 17 abrasions from head to legs when he died.

Defence barrister Greg McGuire had argued the circumstantial case against Strbak's then-partner Matthew Scown was stronger than against the boy's mother.

But Justice Peter Applegarth found there was a 'no compelling evidence that Scown inflicted the fatal injuries'.

Justice Applegarth found Strbak was not only responsible for the serious damage that killed Tyrell but also for many of the non-fatal injuries inflicted on him in the days before his death.

Strbak could be seen rocking back and forth in the dock and shaking her head as Justice Applegarth handed down his findings.

Justice Applegarth found 34-year-old Strbak was responsible for the serious damage that killed Tyrell

The judge also found she was responsible for many of the non-fatal injuries inflicted on him in the days before his death

She was sentenced to nine years in jail in the Brisbane Supreme Court on December 18.

Scown, also 34, was sentenced to four years' jail after pleading guilty to manslaughter but walked free from court in October, having already spent two years and eight months in custody.

He was sentenced on the grounds he was not responsible for Tyrell's injuries but failed in his duty of care by not seeking medical help for the boy.
A man has admitted burning down a 320,000 house belonging to him and his ex-wife - before trying to kill himself.

Paul Duffy appeared at Leicester Magistrates' Court yesterday to admit to a charge of arson at his home in Ratby, Leicestershire.

The emergency services were called to a blaze at the property in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

A man has admitted burning down a 320,000 house belonging to him and his ex-wife - before trying to kill himself

Ali Zaki, prosecuting, said: '[His house] is almost completely destroyed. The fire caused an explosion at the property and the house next door was damaged, although no-one was inside the address.'

The court was told Duffy, 57, had left the area after starting the fire but later returned to the scene, where he gave himself up to Leicestershire Police officers and was arrested.

Mr Zaki said: 'In interview he made a full and frank admission of his role in starting the fire. He told officers he had been extremely upset about his divorce from his ex-wife.

'The defendant said [after burning down his home] he then tried to take his own life. After, he returned to the address and told officers what he had done.'

The emergency services were called to a blaze at the property in the early hours of Tuesday morning

The court was told Duffy, 57, had left the area after starting the fire but later returned to the scene, where he gave himself up to Leicestershire Police officers and was arrested

Magistrates heard that Duffy had 'never troubled the police before' and has no previous convictions.

In mitigation, his defence solicitor David Rhodes said: 'We've heard what he did and concede that this is an offence where significant damage was caused to the property.'

Duffy's wife co-owns the property but has moved away from the area to start a new life. Duffy's name is also on the mortgage, but the house was not insured so nothing will be paid out.

Duffy will be sentenced by Leicester Crown Court next month.

Neighbours told Leicestershire firefighters they had feared Duffy was inside the building at the time

He was bailed to reside at the home of his sister in Hinckley, and he will have to wear an electronic tag to enforce a 7pm and 7am curfew.

Other conditions include not having any contact with his former wife and reporting daily to Hinckley Police Station.

Homes on Duffy's street were evacuated during Tuesday's fire, as six crews from fire stations across the city and county fought the blaze.

Neighbours told Leicestershire firefighters they had feared Duffy was inside the building at the time.

The house was ruled to be unsafe and had to be demolished later that day. Ratby Primary School was also closed on Tuesday due to the incident.

For confidential support in the UK, call the Samaritans on 116123 or visit a local Samaritans branch, see samaritans.org for details.
This is the moment police uncovered 66million worth of cocaine and heroin in one of the biggest drugs busts in British history.

The massive stash of Class A substances was found hidden in farm equipment and the trailers carrying it after it arrived in the UK at King George Docks in Hull in May last year.

The gang behind the importation has now been jailed for a total of more than 100 years.

66million-worth of cocaine and heroin was found on a lorry at the Port of Hull in May last year

The drugs were stashed in the trailer of a lorry bringing farm equipment into the UK

The gang hid the drugs inside girders inside the flatbed truck in Belgium before driving it into the Netherlands and on to a ship to the UK.

But Greater Manchester Police's organised crime unit had been conducting a covert surveillance operation and moved in when the lorry arrived in the UK.

Video shot by detectives shows police seperating to sections of the truck and discovering the huge drugs haul stashed in a cavity hidden inside.

Gang leader Solomon, 38, of Hale, Greater Manchester, has been jailed 25 years for importing heroin and cocaine.

His lieutenants Graham Rawling, 58, Gerard Young, 48, and James Newhall, 43, who were to distrubute the drugs to dealers in the north of England, got prison terms of between six and ten years.

Jason Starmer, of Burton-on-Trent, who helped organised the operation, got a 16-year term, as did Everton Bailey, who planned to distribute the drugs in the East Midlands.

David Reece, 55, got 16 years and Frank Eaton, 47, got 17 years.

Former nightclub bouncer Julian Soloman (left) organised the shipment and planned to sell the drugs wholesale to dealers around the Midlands and north of England. Right: Jason Starmer

David Reece, 55 (left) got 16 years and Frank Eaton, 47, (right) got 17 years

Detective Inspector Tony Norman, of GMPs Serious Organised Crime Group said: 'These men operated one of the largest international drug importation networks that GMP has ever investigated with the seizure of over 66 million worth of drugs at Hull port - a key moment in our operation.

'Their offending didn't just have a local impact on Greater Manchester; it reached across the UK and will no doubt have had a ripple effect in mainland Europe where their money was lining the pockets of crime bosses.

'We know how much misery local dealers can inflict on people's lives however men like Eaton, Reece, Solomon and Starmer are the ones who are responsible for supplying those local dealers, enabling them to blight our communities and flood our streets with drugs.

'Our work to tackle local criminality is very important and alongside that we will continue to target those who operate at the very top so that we can shatter these organised crime networks and strangle the supply at a local level.

Graham Rawling and James Newhall were to help Soloman get the drugs to local dealers

Everton Bailey was the man responsible for the distribution of the imported product in the East Midlands. Gerard Young would assist Solomon in his efforts to distribute the drugs to local crime bosses

DI Norman added: 'This truly was an international team effort and I would like to thank the UK Borders Agency, the National Crime Agency and the Belgian authorities for the key support they have given us in achieving this outcome.

'I want the result today to send a clear message. It doesn't matter how high up you are in a criminal outfit, if you are involved in the drugs supply trade in Greater Manchester, our incredibly dedicated team will ensure that you face prosecution are brought to justice.'
A Queensland father has died after a gas bottle was suspected to have exploded in his north Brisbane home while he was working in his shed alone on Friday night.

The man aged in his mid-fifties was described by his wife as a 'tinkerer' and was believed to have died while working with machinery in his shed, Senior Sergeant Jeff Lansdown said.

Neighbours of the family who lived in Warner described the blast as like a 'nuclear bomb going off.'

Neighbour Ric Hartman called triple-0 call at about 5.30pm on the Friday after he suspected something had gone wrong when he felt the explosion.

'It was like a nuclear bomb going off  it blew everything off our kitchen tables, off our nightstands  it blew the lamps off,' he told the Courier Mail.

A Queensland father has died after a gas bottle was suspected to have exploded in his north Brisbane home while he was working in his shed alone on Friday night (stock)

'I can't even put into words the explosion, it was like the air stopped.'

Residents in the neighbouring suburb of Bray Park said they also heard the blast.

'A gentleman at the address was using some machinery beside his shed and an explosion had occurred as a result of him using that machinery,' Senior Sergeant Jeff Lansdown said.

'The incident is quite catastrophic unfortunately, very traumatising for the family and also for all of the emergency services personnel attending.'

The man had a wife and adult children who he was living with at this address, Senior Sergeant Lansdown has said.

'He was a really cool guy, a builder just always working. Really nice,' a neighbour told the Courier Mail.

Investigations into the exact cause of the incident are continuing.

Police have said there are no suspicious circumstances and are treating the incident as a 'tragic accident'.

A report will be prepared for the coroner.
Strike Force police have caught out international students scamming millions from banks as part of an overseas criminal syndicate.

Those involved have been using forged signatures and documents to convince bank staff they are the the legitimate account holders, and then withdrawing the cash.

Twenty-four people have been arrested, and 288 charges have been laid by police over $2.5 million stolen from banks, the Daily Telegraph reported.

Many of the perpetrators were in Australia on student visas.

Strike Force police have caught out international students scamming millions from banks as part of an overseas criminal syndicate

In some instances, the syndicate has been bypassing the banks verification systems by taking over mobile phone numbers of victims, the publication reported.

Many of those who have been caught have been sentenced to jail since Strike Force Wilmot was established in 2013.

One man was sentenced to a minimum of 20 months jail in January, while another was jailed in February.

In some instances, the syndicate has been bypassing the banks verification systems by taking over mobile phone numbers of victims

NSW Police cyber crime chief Detective Superintendent Arthur Katsogiannis told the Daily Telegraph Strike Force Wilmot did an outstanding job catching those involved.

'We have worked very closely with the financial institutions in order to identify those responsible,' Det Katsogiannis said.

Daily Mail Australia has contacted NSW police for comment.
An MSNBC political analyst said Republicans failing to stand up to Trump is eerily reminiscent of the rise of Nazism.

Speaking on Morning Joe Friday morning, Anand Giridharadas said the fact that no Republicans are challenging Trump is a sign of a much deeper issue than the president himself.

'This is a diseased republic in which so many people agree on not speaking truth to power, in which so many people are so motivated by the protection of their careers, that they wont do the thing that they promised themselves they would do when they were in high school and college reading about the rise of Hitler or reading about corrupt dictators in Africa and they said, "you know, if Im even in a a moment like that  you think to yourself in college  Im going to be that guy who is brave,"' he said

Anand Giridharadas said Republicans refusing to stand up to Trump is similar to the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany, in an appearance on Morning Joe on Friday

He continued: 'We have an entire governing class on the right in which not one person, with a couple of exceptions, is willing to do this suggests to me a very diseased body politic.'

Giridharadas later took to Twitter to expand on his ideas some more.

'Donald Trump is a product of Republican silence. Silence is a product of a culture that tells us to seek self-interest and trust that the society will be fine.

'The president is a festering boil on a gangrenous limb of a party on a badly diseased body politic,' he said.

President Trump pictured on the left on Thursday. Adolf Hitler pictured on the right in 1920

He went on to say that you 'cannot produce a Trump without the very culture of the nation being sick'.

Giridharadas hypothesized that it might because there's no draft anymore that there's a 'culture without courage'.

'We must think together about [what] happened to the values of bravery, courage and speaking up in America. When did so many of us become so timid?' he asks.

'If today's levels of timidity and self-interestedness had afflicted our forebears in the middle of the twentieth century, we might have ended up in a very different world,' he added.

In addition to commentating on MSNBC, Giridharadas has written for the New York Times and is the author of two books.

Giridharadas was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and went on to live in Paris and Maryland as a child.

He studied at the University of Michigan, Oxford and Harvard.

He briefly worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Company in Mumbai, India before becoming a journalist.
Rejoice, book worms: World Book and Copyright Day is just around the corner.

The event is held at the end of every April and is designed to instill a sense of appreciation and interest in reading, publishing and copyright laws all around the world, especially in young people. World Book and Copyright Day has been held for more than 20 years and is celebrated worldwide with book fairs, readings and more.

Heres everything you need to know about what World Book and Copyright Day is, when it will be held in 2018, why its always held on that particular day, what the World Book Capital for 2018 is and fun activities to celebrate the event.

World Book and Copyright Day 2018 will soon be held on Monday, April 23 around the world

What is World Book and Copyright Day?

World Book and Copyright Day is an annual event organized by the United Nations as a way to foster a global appreciation for reading and to promote writing, publishing and familiarity with copyright laws around the world. A similar event, World Book Day, is held in the United Kingdom and Ireland on the first Thursday in March.

The event was first held in 1995 at the behest of the UNs UNESCO General Conference held that year in Paris. Its since been held on an annual basis and sees one city named as the symbolic World Book Capital for the rest of the year.

World Book and Copyright Day is celebrated many different ways all around the world. In Spain, Cervantess iconic Don Quixote is read publicly over two days while the prestigious Miguel de Cervantes Prize is awarded by the Spanish monarch in honor of an influential author in the Spanish language. The event is also celebrated in other European countries like Sweden and in the United States, where book fairs and readings are held in its recognition.

When is World Book and Copyright Day 2018?

World Book and Copyright Day 2018 will be held on Monday, April 23, as its always been held on an annual basis.

Why is it always held on April 23?

April 23 represents a prominent date in the history of world literature, being the day that literary icons like William Shakespeare, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and Miguel de Cervantes all died in 1616. In addition, the date is also the birthday or date of death of a number of other notable authors, including Manuel Mejia Vallejo, Josep Pla, Vladimir Nabokov, Maurice Druon and Haldor K.Laxness.

What is the World Book Capital for 2018?

The World Book Capital for World Book and Copyright Day 2018 will be the city of Athens, Greece.

Since 1995 @UNESCO marks April 23 as the World Book and Copyright Day to promote reading, publishing and #copyright. How do you plan to celebrate? #MadeInCreativeEurope pic.twitter.com/rRL8wF2q6c  Creativity Works! (@CreativityW) April 19, 2018

World Book and Copyright Day 2018 activities

Reading is of course a great activity for World Book and Copyright Day. Additionally, participants can celebrate the history of literature and its greatest authors by conducting research projects on prominent authors, writing, attending a book fair or special public reading and more.
British intelligence have identified key suspects in the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.

The attempted assassins, thought to be now residing in Russia, targeted former double agent Skripal and smeared the chemical nerve agent Novichok - in liquid form - on the front door of his home in Wiltshire, Salisbury, authorities believe.

Counter-terrorism police are building a case against 'persons of interest', The Daily Telegraph reports.

It is understood that analysis of flight records in and out of the UK has provided officers with specific names connected to the case.

Toxic trace amounts of the Novichok poison is believed to have been administered in liquid form to target Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter Yulia, 33

While police have also referred to CCTV footage in Salisbury and trawled car number plate recognition cameras.

But police fear they will hit a diplomatic brick wall in trying to interview, or at a later date, prosecute the suspects.

The revelations come following a report by experts at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) confirmed Britain's analysis that the attack on the Skripals in Salisbury on March 4 was conducted with the nerve agent Novichok.

Yet Alexander Yakovenko said the details of the OPCW gave Russia cause for concern.

The OPCW reported that the Novichok contained in blood samples from the victims showed little sign of decomposition, even though the agent would normally be expected to react with naturally-occurring chemicals inside the body, he said.

'This is strange, given that 18 days passed between the poisoning and the arrival of the OPCW in the UK,' said Mr Yakovenko.

Alexander Yakovenko said the details of the OPCW gave Russia cause for concern. Pictured: Alexander Yakovenko speaking at a news conference at the Russian Embassy in London

'It might mean that the chemical was intentionally injected just before the blood samples were taken.'

He claimed that the speed with which the chemical was identified after the attack suggested the UK already had its own samples.

Referring to the Government's defence research establishment at Porton Down, he said: 'We know what kind of laboratory is only 10 miles from Salisbury.'

Mr Yakovenko challenged the independence of the OPCW investigation, saying that it had been arranged on a bilateral basis with the UK rather than under the standard practices set out in the Chemical Weapons Convention.

He said: 'The work of the OPCW experts was conducted under the control of the British side. Pressure on them can't be ruled out.

'They checked only the sites designated by the UK beforehand and they looked only for the substance identified by the UK.

'The format chosen cannot guarantee impartiality and the comprehensive nature of the verification.'

Russia would not take the report's conclusions at face value unless it was given full access to the victims and to the materials gathered in the investigation, he said.

He doubled-down on Russia's demands the meet the former spy and his daughter, claiming the UK's failure to grant access to meant the case should be seen as 'an abduction of two Russian citizens'.

Defra today announced that there are nine sites which remain cordoned off following the nerve agent attack

It comes after dangerous levels of the potentially lethal nerve agent used to target the pair may still be present in 'hot spots' around Salisbury, Government scientists warned yesterday.

Work has begun to decontaminate nine sites across the city where experts believe the substance could still be present, in a multi-million pound operation that could take months.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), local council officials, police and health representatives updated locals on the progress being made on Thursday evening.

When quizzed as to whether the chemical remains at the same 'lethal' dosage as the day it was put on Mr Skripal's door, Defra chief scientist Ian Boyd said: ' We have to make an assumption that in certain circumstances there will be relatively high concentrations, probably in very, very specific locations, which could be at levels that could be toxic to individuals.'

'That's an assumption, it's also one we've tested in some circumstances and we do know that there are hot spots like that around, so we have to make those assumptions that some of the hot spots we've still got to find.

'But those hot spots will still be in the locations we are talking about.

'In these locations, there may well be higher concentrations that we still have to find, but we already know there are some high concentrations within those locations.'

The meeting was held as work began to replace the police cordon around the Maltings area in the city centre, the nearby Zizzi restaurant and the Mill pub with more robust hoardings.

Members of the emergency services in green biohazard at the scene in Salisbury

It is believed liquid form of the poison was left on the door of the Skripal's flat. Pictured: Door of the flat that Yulia Skripal and Stepan Vikeev rented before Yulia traveled to UK

Army officers remove the bench, where Sergei Skripal and his daughter were found in Salisbury

Nine sites are STILL potentially contaminated 1. Zizzi 2. The Maltings shopping centre 3. Ashley Wood Compound 4. The Mill pub 5. Bourne Hill police station 6. Salisbury ambulance station 7. Amesbury ambulance station 8. The home of police officer Nick Bailey 9. The home of Sergei Skripal Advertisement

Locals were told the Bourne Hill building, housing Salisbury's police station as well as Wiltshire council's offices will close for up to eight weeks from Friday.

Decontamination work will focus on the evidence room and two lockers inside the police station, which were sealed off following the attack on March 4.

The decontamination work will focus on the evidence room and two lockers inside the station, which were sealed off after the March 4 attack.

Deputy Chief Constable Paul Mills from Wiltshire Police said it would be 'business as usual' as operations move to other sites in and around the city.

Other areas earmarked for chemical cleaning include two ambulance stations, a car compound and the home of poisoned police officer Nick Bailey.

Mr Skripal's home, which is still part of the police investigation, will be the last to be decontaminated.
Sami Salem, 30, had claimed diminished responsibility for the killings but was found guilty of murdering wife Arena Saeed, 30, daughter Shadia, seven, and son Rami, four, following a trial at Liverpool Crown Court

A 'controlling' husband, who suffocated his wife and drowned his two children, sat down and ate dinner in front of the television following the heinous murder.

Sami Salem, 30, had claimed diminished responsibility for the killings but was found guilty of murdering wife Arena Saeed, 30, daughter Shadia, seven, and son Rami, four, following a trial at Liverpool Crown Court.

He was sentenced to a minimum of 31 years in prison today.

Salem is said to have held his hand over his wife's mouth and drowned his two young children in the bath, before dousing their flat in petrol and taking an overdose.

Residents were forced to evacuate their homes on May 30 last year after engineers were called following reports of the smell of petrol and gas.

When relatives gained access to the family's home they found the three victims lying on the bed, with Salem almost unconscious at the foot of the bed.

The property was home to a flat owned by Beatles manager Brian Epstein in the 1960s, where Lennon and his first wife Cynthia lived shortly after they married.

At his sentencing hearing on Friday, the court heard Salem, who was surrounded in the dock by four workers from high security psychiatric hospital Ashworth, was a paranoid schizophrenic.

Sami Salem is accused of murdering his wife Arena Saeed and their children Shadia and Rami

A jury has been told Salem had reported seeing a 'black entity' and 'tall chimpanzees' due to his mental illness.

Mr Justice Holgate said there was evidence he was controlling and possessive towards his wife, who he married in Yemen in 2009.

Mrs Saeed was said to have asked for a divorce earlier in May last year.

The judge said: 'He sought to control her movements outside the flat and whom she met.

'He controlled her access to the internet and use of a mobile phone. This affected her ability to communicate with her family in the Yemen.

'She spoke little or no English, the family were not part of the Yemeni community in Liverpool and she must have felt isolated.'

The court heard Salem began to experience hallucinations and paranoid beliefs towards the end of 2016.

He saw a doctor in the week before the murders but was thought to have responded to medication.

Benjamin Myers QC, defending, said: 'This is not a murder, or murders, that takes place against a background of someone who had conventional clarity of view.'

A court heard he had schizophrenia and hallucinated 'tall chimpanzees'

Salem, wearing a black suit and tie with a white shirt, showed no reaction as he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

He told doctors he ate food and watched television after killing his wife and children before going to a petrol station and buying 25 litres of petrol, which he spread around the flat and over the legs of the children.

He took an overdose of medication he had been prescribed and when emergency services arrived at the property at 7.30pm they found the switches on the gas cooker had been taped so they remained open.

After the killings, Salem said he had not heard voices or experienced hallucinations at the time but described feeling 'something weird'.

Forensic psychiatrist Dr Mohammad Rahman told Liverpool Crown Court that he believes Salem was suffering from schizophrenia at the time of the killings.

In a report, Dr Rahman stated: '(Salem) heard voices saying don't go into his house because something bad was going to happen. He heard voices instructing him to hurt people.

'He says one time when he was driving it said, "don't push the brakes, you can do this" which he managed to resist.'

Salem told Dr Rahman he had never been in love with his wife but denied claims he banned her from using her mobile phone or travelling.'

The court heard the family of Mrs Saeed said she was 'known for her kindness'.

Mr Justice Holgate said: 'She is described as 'a pioneer in doing good for all' and an ideal mother.

Her two children were loved by everyone who knew them.

The family is heartbroken and has suffered enormously.'
A jailed child molester hung himself hours after he was publicly linked to the decades-old disappearance of his victim's mother, the state medical examiner's office ruled Thursday.

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 Asturizaga had raped her repeatedly years before her mother went missing.

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 found unresponsive his cell April 12 at the Western Correctional Institution after it was announced earlier that day that he would be investigated for the murder. It has since been ruled a 'suicide by hanging'.

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 was in jail for raping Thresher's teenage daughter between 1999 and 2001, as a person of interest in Alison's disappearance. He was found dead in his cell later that evening

Asturizaga was jailed in 2012 for his sexual offence and could've faced another charge for murder had the investigation provided lucrative evidence.

But investigators made clear during a press conference earlier this month there was not enough to pin the crime on him currently because Alison's body has not been recovered.

Hours later, officials found Asturizaga unresponsive in his cell after he hanged himself.

It is not clear if Montgomery County police, which investigated the woman's disappearance in 2000, looked into Asturizaga at the time of the disappearance.

Not only had Alison confronted him about his, 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.

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 refused to cooperate with their investigation and would not speak about Alison Thresher's disappearance before he was found dead.

It is unclear how investigators will proceed with the murder investigation in light of Asturizaga's death.

'We're hoping through this announcement that anyone with information about the case will come forward,' Montgomery County Police Chief Tom Manager said at the press conference Thursday before Asturizaga was found dead.

'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.'

At a press conference on April 12, 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 April 12

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.
Nearly 10,000 tortoises of varying sizes have been discovered crammed inside a two-storey house on the south-western coast of Madagascar.

Environmental Agency head Soary Randrianjafizanaka said that she was alerted to the tortoises because of the rancid smell emanating from the property.

She told Nationalgeographic.com that when she and police arrived at the house, they were confronted by a scene unlike anything they had ever seen before.

Tortoises of varying sizes occupied all available floor space - there was so little room that they were jammed up against one another with no room for manouevre

Officials expressed disbelief that anyone could keep the tortoises in such miserable conditions.

The Madagascan Environment Agency said that it was alerted to the tortoises because of the rancid smell emanating from the property

Tortoises of varying sizes occupied all available floor space - there was so little room that they were jammed up against one another with no room for manouevre.

Randrianjafizanaka said the stench of feces and urine was overwhelming. 'You cannot imagine. It was so awful,' she said.

'They had tortoises in the bathroom, in the kitchen, everywhere in the house.'

In total the house contained 9,888 live radiated tortoises, a rare species found only in Madagascar - and 180 dead ones.

Authorities said that three suspects - two men and a woman, the owner of the house - were arrested

In total the house contained 9,888 live radiated tortoises, a rare species found only in Madagascar - and 180 dead ones.

Malaysian authorities said last May that they had seized 330 exotic tortoises from Madagascar worth about 250,000

Randrianjafizanaka helped count them as rescuers loaded them onto six trucks that made several trips to Le Village Des Tortues (Turtle Village in French), a private wildlife rehabilitation facility in Ifaty, 18 miles north of Toliara.

It took until early the following morning to transfer all the tortoises to the rescue center, Nationalgeograpic.com reported.

While the vast majority of the animals are alive and recovering form their ordeal, vets said that a week after their discovery, 574 tortoises had died from either dehydration or infection.

The house near Toamasina was described by officials as having nearly every one of its rooms covered with radiated tortoises

Authorities said that three suspects - two men and a woman, the owner of the house - were arrested.

According to Randrianjafizanaka, the men were in the process of burying dead tortoises on the property when her team arrived.

Experts say that small and mid-size tortoise are easier to conceal than big ones, which can weigh 35 pounds with shells 16 inches across.

They said it was easier to smuggle smaller animals out of the country.

Randrianjafizanaka told nationalgeographic.com that the sheer number of tortoises indicates an organized effort.

'We don't know exactly who the big person is, but we know there's a big boss,' she said.

Taking radiated tortoises from the forests is illegal in Madagascar, and a treaty signed by 182 countries and the European Union bans commercial trade of the species.

Nonetheless the animals are increasingly targeted by poachers, who either sell them locally as bush meat or smuggle them live to Southeast Asia or China, where they're sold to reptile collectors.

Radiated tortoises are especially prized because of the intricate yellow star patterns on their upper shells.

A combination of poaching and deforestation has meant that the population of radiated tortoises is in decline.

A 2013 estimate put their numbers at six million, down from 12 million in the 1990s. Today the population is likely closer to three million.

In 2008 the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which assesses the conservation status of animals in the wild, changed their designation from of 'least concern' to 'critically endangered'a rare, four-category jump that puts them one step away from 'extinct.'

Its unlikely that the 10,000 tortoises will be released into the wild anytime soon, according to Jordan Gray, communications and outreach coordinator for the Turtle Survival Alliance.

Rampant poaching, he said, means that keeping them in captivity is their best chance for survival.
Maxwel Gruver, 18, died in September 2017 after a pledge hazing incident where he was forced to chug alcohol

Four young men pleaded not guilty on Friday to criminal charges in the drinking death of a Louisiana State University fraternity pledge.

Matthew Alexander Naquin, 20, of Fair Oaks Ranch, Texas, was arraigned on a negligent homicide charge in the September 2017 death of 18-year-old Maxwell Gruver, a freshman from Roswell, Georgia. The felony charge is punishable by up to five years in prison.

Three others pleaded not guilty to misdemeanor hazing charges. Sean-Paul Gott, 21, of Lafayette, Louisiana; Ryan Isto, 19, of the Canadian town of Oakville, Ontario; and Patrick Forde, 21, of Westwood, Massachusetts, face a maximum of 30 days in jail if convicted.

State District Judge Beau Higginbotham scheduled a Sept. 6 trial for the three charged with hazing. He did not immediately set a date for Naquin.

Police originally arrested 10 people last year, but East Baton Rouge Parish prosecutors presented a grand jury with evidence of possible charges against nine of them. Ultimately, the grand jury indicted only the four defendants on March 15.

Gruver's blood-alcohol content was more than six times the legal limit for driving after a night of drinking at the Phi Delta Theta fraternity house.

Fraternity members found him lying on a couch and couldn't tell if he was breathing after he was forced to chug alcohol.

He died at a Baton Rouge hospital later that day. A coroner said the cause was acute alcohol intoxication, with aspiration: He had inhaled vomit and other fluid into his lungs.

The jury indicted Matthew Alexander Naquin, 20, (top left) on a felony negligent homicide charge. Three others were indicted on a misdemeanor charge of hazing: Sean Paul Gott, 21 (bottom left); Ryan Isto, 19 (bottom right); and Patrick Forde, 21 (top right). All four men pleaded not guilty to all charges

Naquin's attorney, John McLindon said he believes his client is being singled out unfairly.

'The problem with alcohol on college campuses is bigger than just one person. The problem is a lot bigger than just Matthew Naquin,' he said.

But witnesses said Naquin singled out Gruver during a hazing ritual involving 18 to 20 pledges, and forced him to drink more than the others the night before his death, according to a police report.

Naquin targeted Gruver because he was frequently late for events and forced him to drink because he was having trouble reciting the Greek alphabet during 'Bible Study,' a ritual testing their fraternity knowledge, witnesses told police.

Naquin was 'a main participant during the hazing event,' Jeff Malone, an investigator for the district attorney's office, wrote in a court filing last month.

Matthew Naquin, 20, was indicted on a felony negligent homicide charge. He allegedly forced Gruver to drink because he was having trouble reciting the Greek alphabet during 'Bible Study'. Naquin is pictured at the time of his arrest

Several Louisiana State University fraternity members said they had checked on Gruver throughout the night before they found him on a couch at the fraternity house around 9am on September 14 (pictured)

'LSU Police reports indicate that Naquin was the most aggressive, and in charge of the hazing incident,' Malone added.

One pledge said Gruver was made to take at least 10 to 12 'pulls' of 190-proof Diesel, while other pledges had to drink less of the hard liquor, according to the police report.

All of the defendants were associated with Phi Delta Theta, but none of them is currently enrolled at LSU. Forde wasn't a student at LSU at the time.

LSU spokesman Ernie Ballard said federal law bars the university from disclosing whether the others withdrew from LSU or were expelled or suspended.

Last month, Gruver's parents visited Louisiana's Capitol to testify in favor of a bill that would make hazing a felony in cases resulting in somebody's death.

The maximum sentence for a felony hazing conviction would be five years in prison. The House unanimously passed the legislation, which awaits a vote in the Senate.
The two police officers who shot and killed unarmed Stephon Clark in March are now back on duty.

The two officers, who have not been named by California's Sacramento Police Department, were put on paid administrative leave following Clark's fatal shooting on March 18.

Police officials said Thursday that the two officers are not working in a patrol capacity for personal safety reasons, but it is not immediately clear what their duties are at present or when they actually returned to work, KCRA reported.

Sacramento Police Department officials have said that the two officers who fatally shot unarmed Stephon Clark, 22, are off administrative leave and back on duty

The officers shot and killed Clark in his grandparent's backyard on March 18. Police said officers believe Clark was armed, but it was later discovered he was only holding a cellphone

Clark, 22, was shot and killed in his grandparents' backyard at night, after a police helicopter led the officers to him. The officers were responding to a report of a person breaking car windows at the time.

Police said the officers who fired 20 rounds at Clark believed that he was armed, but it was later discovered that he was only holding his cellphone.

On Monday, police released 54 additional videos revealing audio and video of the moments leading up to and following Clark's shooting.

Among the details shown by the newly released video, was the fact that officers had muted their body camera microphones at least 16 times after the shooting occurred, and that six minutes passed between the time shots were fired and chest compressions were attempted on Clark, the Washington Post reported.

While an official report from the Sacramento County coroner has not yet been released, an independent autopsy arranged by the Clark family's attorney revealed that Clark was shot eight times.

Authorities released 54 new videos of the time before and after Clark's fatal shooting. The videos revealed six minutes passed before life saving efforts were applied to Clark (shown)

An independent autopsy revealed Clark had been shot eight times, six times in the back

The forensic pathologist found that Clark was shot in the back six times, once in the side and once in the back of the leg.

Clark's shooting is currently under investigation.

The California Attorney General's office will be providing oversight over the investigation and also conducting a review of police policies and use-of-force training.

Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert will decide whether to bring criminal charges against the two officers who shot and killed Clark once the police department finishes its investigation.

During a press conference Wednesday, Schubert said all police use of force cases would be investigated in a 'fair, independent and just' way and that the decision about whether to prosecute the officers would be based on whether the DA's office could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime had been committed.

Schubert, who spent 28 years as a law enforcement officer, has not charged a police officer in a use of force case since she took office, according to ABC10.

Clark's brother, Stevante Clark, 25, was arrested Thursday morning for making threats to commit a crime resulting in death or great bodily injury. He was also accused of calling 911 with the intent to annoy or harass.

The Sacramento Police Department did not provide details on Clarks arrest, but said the incident was being investigated.
A fellow DJ feared Avicii would drink and party himself to death three years before he was found dead in his hotel room on Friday.

Laidback Luke, real name Lucas Cornelis van Scheppingen, said the Swedism EDM producer 'looked terrible' when he played a set in Ibiza in August 2015.

He was at the time worried Avicii, real name Tim Bergling, would 'join the 27 club' of artists like Amy Winehouse and Jeff Buckley who died before their time.

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A fellow DJ feared Avicii would drink and party himself to death three years before he was found dead in his hotel room on Friday

Laidback Luke, real name Lucas Cornelis van Scheppingen, said the Swedism EDM producer 'looked terrible' when he played a set in Ibiza in August 2015

'It sounds horrible but its the truth, and I cant take back the overwhelming sense of frustration I felt,' he wrote in a 2015 article for Billboard.

The body of the 28-year-old internationally renowned DJ was discovered in Muscat on Friday, a publicist confirmed.

Van Scheppingen described what young artists face when touring and recording constantly and how they sleep little and fill the void with substances.

'The pressures of being on the road as a DJ are constant and relentless. Unlike pop, rock or rap, they dont tour in cycles  theyre always on tour, virtually every week, sometimes every day,' he wrote.

'The first few years of heavy touring can have a major impact on a person's life, health and sanity.

'DJs on tour average about four hours of sleep per night, and with drinking, after-parties, adulation and everything that comes with it, it's easy to lose oneself.'

Music veteran Nile Rodgers also recalled his concern over Avicii's health, saying he was 'drunk' the last time they saw each other.

Music veteran Nile Rodgers has revealed his fears over Avicii's alcohol issues as he was 'drunk' the last time they saw each other

Nile, who worked alongside Avicii many times over the years, last teamed up with the star at a concert three years ago.

The Chic star revealed he was distraught to discover his friend was 'drunk' and warned him about the risks to his health.

Avicii quit touring in 2016 due to battles with his health, suffering from acute pancreatitis and had to have his gallbladder and appendix removed in 2014.

In the past, the DJ struggled with addiction and was hospitalised twice for alcohol related issues.

The heartbroken performer also paid tribute to his 'little bro' on Twitter (pictured)

Nile told the Associated Press: 'He had promised me he would stop drinking, and when I saw him he was drunk that night. And I was like, 'Whoa. Dude. C'mon. What are you doing? What's going on? You said that that was done,'

'We did a show and I was a little upset. I didn't even stick around for his performance because it was breaking my heart.'

He added: 'I'm shocked because I don't know medically what happened, but I can just say as a person, as a friend, and more importantly, as a musician, Tim was one of the greatest, natural melody writers I've ever worked with, and I've worked with some of the most brilliant musicians on this planet.'

The heartbroken performer also paid tribute to his 'little bro' on Twitter, writing: 'Dear Tim your family have my most heartfelt condolences. You were my little bro. Love always.'

American DJ Skrillex echoed Nile's sentiments writing that 'the industry can be rough' and that he saw it 'take a toll' on the musician.

Skrillex, real name Sonny John Moore, worked with Avicii on the 2011 song Levels, which catapulted Avicii into the mainstream market and later earned him a Grammy nomination.

In a message on Instagram, Skrillex said: 'The remix I did of Levels hasn't left my set since I made it back in 2011.

'All though we weren't 'close friends' I feel this deep sadness through the connection we had through this song. Tim was a truly a genius and an innovator, yet sensitive and humble.

American DJ Skrillex echoed Nile's sentiments in Instagram, writing that 'the industry can be rough' and that he saw it 'take a toll' on the musician

'This industry can be rough and from afar I saw it take a toll on him. I just wish I could have hugged him more and told him it would be okay.

'You're music will forever be apart of mine and so many other lives. Maybe that's the closest thing we have to immortality.

'I really hope you're essence, wherever it may be in the universe is now at peace.

'And if in some miracle you can see this, I hope you know that as long as human beings are alive on this planet, you will forever remain an inspiration. Thank you Tim. RIP.'

The body of the internationally renowned producer, whose real name was Tim Bergling, was found in Oman on Friday, a publicist confirmed

Popstar Rita Ora has paid emotional tribute to the Swedish DJ, Avicci, who was found dead in Oman today, while a host of other musicians have also spoken out about the tragic loss

'Devastated by the news': Paris Hilton also took to the photo sharing Instagram page where she posted a picture of the young DJ with a heartfelt message

Popstar Rita Ora, who worked with Avicii on Lonely Together, has also paid emotional tribute to the producer.

She penned on Twitter: 'I have no words. I remember how amazing it was to make Lonely Together and it felt like just yesterday we were talking.

'Condolences to Avicii's family, friends, and the fans who supported him. May he rest in peace. Gone too soon. I'm devastated. Heartbroken.'

Fellow producer Calvin Harris was one of the first to tweet: 'Devastating news about Avicii. A beautiful soul, passionate and extremely talented with so much more to do. My heart goes out to his family. God bless you Tim.'

Former One Direction star Liam Payne wrote: 'Oh my god truly devastated for Avicii very very sad news way to young ... what a talent he was. rest in peace.'

Madonna paid tribute on Instagram with a photograph of herself and Avicii behind the DJ decks at a gig, with the caption: 'So sad. So tragic. Goodbye dear sweet Tim.'

Last post: Avicii shared this picture of himself posing in the rain on April 4, writing 'It's always sunny in California'

Friends: Accompanied with a picture of both himself and the rapper, David Guetta paid tribute with: 'Something really horrible happened'

Paris Hilton also took to the photo sharing Instagram page where she posted a picture of the young DJ with a heartfelt message.

'Devastating hearing the sad news of @Avicii passing. Such a sweet soul with a big heart & incredible talent,' she wrote. 'So many amazing memories together. My thoughts & prayers are with his family. Rest In Peace my friend.'

Charlie Puth added: 'Wow, I would like to take a moment to pay tribute to the man who really opened my eyes as to what my productions could one day sound like. Avicii was a genius and a music innovator, and I can not believe he is no longer with us. RIP to the very best.'

Shawn Mendes wrote: '...'One day you'll leave this world behind, so live a life you will remember' - Avicii Inspiring millions with the joy of his music, will never be forgotten. Rest easy, Tim.'

Dua Lipa followed suit saying: 'Such sad news to hear about Avicii passing. Too young and way too soon. My condolences go out to his family, friends and fans x.' (sic)

Accompanied with a picture of both himself and the rapper, David Guetta paid tribute with: 'Something really horrible happened. We lost a friend with such a beautiful heart and the world lost an incredibly talented musician.

'He really opened my eyes to sound': Charlie Puth also expressed his sorrow for the young DJ passing away on the social media platform

Heartbreaking: Ellie Goulding expressed: 'Rest easy Avicii, you inspired so many of us. Wish I could have said that to you in person x.'

'So sad': Madonna paid tribute on Instagram with a photograph of herself and Avicii behind the DJ decks at a gig, with the caption: 'So sad. So tragic. Goodbye dear sweet Tim.'

Ellie Goulding expressed: 'Rest easy Avicii, you inspired so many of us. Wish I could have said that to you in person x.' (sic)

'Thank you for your beautiful melodies, the time we shared in the studio, playing together as djs or just enjoying life as friends. RIP @Avicii.'

Avicii quit touring in 2016 due to battles with his health, suffering from acute pancreatitis and had to have his gallbladder and appendix removed in 2014.

In the past, the DJ struggled with addiction and was hospitalised twice for alcohol related issues.

The DJ's publicist said in a statement: 'It is with profound sorrow that we announce the loss of Tim Bergling, also known as Avicii.

'He was found dead in Muscat, Oman this Friday afternoon local time, April 20th.

'The family is devastated and we ask everyone to please respect their need for privacy in this difficult time. No further statements will be given.'

Fellow producer Calvin Harris was one of the first to tweet, writing: 'Devastating news about Avicii. A beautiful soul, passionate and extremely talented with so much more to do. My heart goes out to his family. God bless you Tim'

While former One Direction star Liam Payne wrote: 'Oh my god truly devastated for Avicii very very sad news way to young ... what a talent he was. rest in peace'

Tragedy: Dua Lipa followed suit saying: 'Such sad news to hear about Avicii passing. Too young and way too soon. My condolences go out to his family, friends and fans x.'

Pictured: The late producer and DJ with his mother during his childhood

Avicii battled with acute pancreatitis - which is a potentially life-threatening inflammation of the pancreas - due in part to excessive drinking.

As a result he had his gallbladder and appendix removed in 2014, cancelling a series of shows in attempt to recover.

He quit touring in 2016 in order to focus on his health and recovery.

Although he quit touring two years ago, the DJ continued making music in the studio, and collaborated with everyone from Madonna to Coldplay.

'It's been a very crazy journey. I started producing when I was 16. I started touring when I was 18. From that point on, I just jumped into 100 percent,' Avicii told Billboard magazine in 2016.

'When I look back on my life, I think: whoa, did I do that? It was the best time of my life in a sense. It came with a price - a lot of stress a lot of anxiety for me - but it was the best journey of my life.'

Famous friends: The DJ is pictured right, with Steve Aoki and Armin van Buuren

Avicii was a pioneer of the contemporary Electronic Dance Movement and a rare DJ capable of worldwide arena tour.

He earned $250,000 a night when playing out sold-out shows, according to GQ.

He won two MTV Music Awards, one Billboard Music Award and earned two Grammy nominations. Known for Wake Me Up! The Days, You Make Me, and the recent Lonely Together with Rita Ora, Avicii's biggest hit was Le7els.

Avicii's death comes just days after he was nominated for a Billboard Music Award for top dance/electronic album for his EP Avicii (01), which he released last August.

The star's last tweet was to thank the organisation, he wrote: 'Thanks for the nomination! @billboard #BBMAS'

Fans around the world have noticed the heartbreaking final tweet from the legendary DJ, as it gains new poignancy in the wake of his death

Last year, the musician posted a statement on his website in which he said creating music was what he lived for.

He wrote: '[Creating music] is what I live for, what I feel I was born to do.

'Last year I quit performing live, and many of you thought that was it. But the end of live never meant the end of Avicii or my music. Instead, I went back to the place where it all made sense  the studio.

'The next stage will be all about my love of making music to you guys. It is the beginning of something new.'

As news of his death broke on Friday, Avicii's celebrity friends rushed to pay tribute.

Fans were likewise distressed,flooding social media with tributes.
President Donald Trump is entering the next phase of the Robert Mueller probe with a new team of lawyers experienced in white collar criminal defense and complex organized crime prosecutions involving racketeering and other crimes.

Trump's legal team revealed the changes in rapid-fire announcements Thursday, more than a week after the FBI raided longtime Trump attorney Michael Cohen.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani drew the headlines due to his role as a top campaign surrogate for Trump  though he made his bones in the law through prosecutions of top mob figures of New York's Five Families.

But another pair of lawyers, Martin Raskin and his wife Jane Raskin, also have experience in complex cases involving mob figures, racketeering, and fraud.

Martin Raskin served as a special attorney with the federal Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, where he was assigned to the Miami Strike Force. He has joined Trump's team fending off the complex Mueller probe

Martin Raskin served as a special attorney with the federal Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, where he was assigned to the Miami Strike Force.

He also served as the Chief of the Criminal Division for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida.

One case he worked on involved a complex securities fraud involving pension fraud and kickbacks.

The case involved the arrest of 120 people who according to the government were 'engaged in a scheme to bribe officials of unions to invest pension fund assets in corrupt investment vehicles.' An investment of $1 million was to get a $150,000 kickback, according to the scheme.

Raskin's wife and law partner Jane, was a lawyer with Organized Crime and Racketeering Section's Boston Strike Force

Jay Sekulow is a First Amendment specialist

Raskin is listed as working for a defendant, Lionel Reifler.

He had a criminal record going back to 1969, the Florida Sun-Sentinal reported, after a guilty plea for mail fraud and conspiracy involving market trades.

According to a New York Times business column, Reifler, of Boca Raton, got involved with a brokerage firm with alleged mafia ties.

Rudy Giuliani makes a speech during celebration of Nowruz, the Iranian New Year, on March 20, 2018

Trump is making changes in his legal team following the firing of John Dowd, and an FBI raid of lawyer Michael Cohen

He testified 'that he was once dangled out a seventh-story window by mobsters upset about an unpaid debt,' according to the Times.

Among other clients he represented were people charged with a slew of crimes ranging from money laundering, cocaine distribution, rackateering, criminal enterprise, conspiracy, witness intimidation, obstruction, perjury, interstate transport of stolen property, and counterfeiting.

According to a report in McClatchy the pair represented high-profile defendants that included immigration agents charged with extorting drug kingpins, as well as mob suspects.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump walks with former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (L) through the new Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC, U.S., September 16, 2016. Giuliani worked in the Justice Department and as a U.S. Attorney going after mob figures

Marty Raskin

Jane Raskin, who is also now representing Trump, also has experience dealing with mob cases.

According to her bio on her firm's web site, she was a trial lawyer in Boston with the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section's Boston Strike Force.

Trump's other outside lawyer, Jay Sekulow, primarily has First Amendment experience.

'Jane and Marty are highly respected former federal prosecutors with decades of experience. They have a nationwide practice and reputation for excellence and integrity, Sekulow said in a statement Thursday.

The lawyers armed with experience in complex criminal litigation came days after the FBI went after a variety of documents in the possession of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, reportedly including his business dealings including his Taxi Medallion business.

Trump immediately revved up criticism of special counsel Robert Mueller, although he told reporters this with both Mueller and deputy director Rod Rosenstein are still here.

Fired FBI Director James Comey in his new book compared President Trump's request for loyalty to mob informant 'Sammy the Bull' Gravano.

He writes at length in his book about his time earlier in the career trying to roll up mobsters, including when he reported to Giuliani in the Southern District of New York.
Attorneys representing the man accused of slaughtering Morgan Freeman's step-granddaughter stated in court on Friday that the victim had told the defendant that the Oscar winner had a sexual relationship with her.

The bombshell revelation concerning the Shawshank Redemption star and E'Dena Hines, 33, came to light during the ongoing trial of 30-year-old Lamar Davenport, who is accused of stabbing her 25 times in a drug-fueled rage in 2015.

'E'Dena Hines disclosed to Lamar Davenport and others that her grandfather engaged in a sexually inappropriate relationship with her,' Davenport's lawyer Annie Costanzo told the court, reported New York Daily News.

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Bombshell: An attorney for murder suspect Lamar Davenport (pictured in court earlier this month, left), on Friday said that victim E'dena Hines had told him she and her step-grandfather, Morgan Freeman (pictured together in 2005, right), had been in a sexual relationship

Morgan Freeman's family are pictured leaving Manhattan Supreme Court in the Lamar Davenport murder trial on Friday

It is not clear at this point why the defense chose to disclose this information in open court, or how it might be relevant to the murder case.

But a therapist testified that Davenport admitted to frequent arguments with Hines about infidelity during which each accused the other of being unfaithful.

Hines was the biological daughter of a woman Freeman and his first wife adopted as a child.

They were not related by blood.

Freeman and his second wife then helped raise the girl.

Rumors about Freeman and Hines have been swirling for nearly a decade, beginning in 2009 when The National Enquirer published a story alleging that the Hollywood A-lister was involved in a years-long affair with his step-granddaughter.

The magazine also quote a friend of hers saying she wanted to marry the actor.

Three years before Hines' violent death, it was reported that Freeman was planning to marry her, but they both vehemently denied being romantically involved.

Latest sighting: Freeman, 80, was last sighted appearing at the WE Day California at The Forum, in Inglewood, California, on Thursday (left and right)

'The recent reports of any pending marriage or romantic relationship of me to anyone are defamatory fabrications from the tabloid media designed to sell papers,' Freeman said in a statement in 2012. 'What is even more alarming is that these fabrications are now being picked up by the legitimate press as well.'

Hines, then aged 27, said: 'These stories about me and my grandfather are not only untrue, they are also hurtful to me and my family.'

Morgan was married to Jeanette Adair Bradshaw from 1967 until 1979.

He then married costume designer Myrna Colley-Lee on June 16, 1984, and the two later adopted his step-granddaughter E'dena and raised her together.

The couple finally divorced in 2010 after a messy break up.

Hines was stabbed 25 times in the street in Washington Heights on August 16, 2015, at 2.50am.

Davenport's attorneys argue he is not guilty of the violent crime by reason of insanity because he was in the throes of a PCP-induced psychosis at the time of the attack.

Hines and Davenport, a rapper, had been living together in a $780,000 apartment that Freeman had bought for Hines.

In this video shown in court last week, an intoxicated Lamar Davenport (pictured) becomes angry at E'Dena Hines, who appears to be filming her final hours

During their nine-year relationship, Davenport fathered children with other women and abused drugs.

Davenport denies the killing. He was taken to a psychiatric facility immediately after her death but has been in custody ever since.

Last week, the court heard testimony from a witness who described how Hines was repeatedly stabbed in the back, neck and chest by Davenport, who was heard yelling about releasing the devil from her.

The jury was also shown footage recorded by Hines just hours before her killing, which showed her intoxicated boyfriend sitting at a table with friends and angrily yelling at her to stop filming.
Earlier this week, Neville Lawrence made a pilgrimage of sorts to the bus stop where his 18-year-old son, Stephen, was fatally stabbed 25 years ago by a gang of racist youths for no other reason than because he was black.

Neville rarely goes there. For many years, he could not even bring himself to drive along the road in South-East London where his desperately wounded son ran for some 350 yards before he fell. A memorial plaque now marks the place with the words: In memory of Stephen Lawrence 13.9.1974 to 22.4.1993. May he Rest in Peace.

It is a peace that has eluded Neville for much of the 25 years since. I was so angry about what those people did to my son. Id think: I wish the next time you go out, someone knocks you down with a car and kills you, or if you get into a fight, somebody kills you.

When you know the damage they did to him . . . His voice hardens. They pushed a knife through his side that went through his arm first and into his heart and down here . . . He stabs his chest with his fist. The knife went straight down into his lungs and severed an artery. I dont know how my boy ran 350 yards, but he did.

Neville Lawrence (pictured) astonished many this week when he released a statement to say he has forgiven his sons murderers. He did so only after much soul-searching

When the doctor told us Stephen was dead, I remember going into a room in the hospital, seeing my son lying there, touching him  he was warm  and, after that, nothing.

It was as if my brain had been turned upside down and the Neville I used to be stopped existing. I became somebody else. I didnt even know who that was. I just had those bad thoughts and, if you carry those thoughts long enough, they eat you up.

This week, when Neville returned to that bus stop, there was no anger. I was in bits. I almost broke down and started crying. The pain of losing Stephen will never get better  never. My son was going to be an architect, which is something I wanted to be. I was expecting to be able to walk down the street and say: Thats a building my son made.

Instead, my son has become famous  in a sense, like a legend  for being killed. Thats a strange thing and its taken me a long time to accept it. Ive had to learn to look at things in a different way.

Neville astonished many this week when he released a statement to say he has forgiven his sons murderers. He did so only after much soul-searching and believes that if he hadnt let go of his hatred, I wouldnt be here talking to you now.

Neville has long been regarded as a man of few words, but with forgiveness has come liberation. Today, the feelings he had kept locked deep inside for so many years come tumbling out.

This is the first time he has spoken with such raw honesty about his personal struggles.

I was so angry  even in my sleep, Id be thinking bad thoughts. Gradually, Ive let those thoughts go. Ive got to the stage now where I dont even remember the names of the guys who killed him. They used to be here. He taps his forehead. Slowly, the anger is going away.

Earlier this week, Neville Lawrence made a pilgrimage of sorts to the bus stop where his 18-year-old son, Stephen, was fatally stabbed 25 years ago

Today, Neville, 76, looks a decade younger than the beleaguered man who stood on the Old Bailey steps when two of his sons murderers, Gary Dobson, now 42, and David Norris, 41, were sentenced to life imprisonment six years ago.

Those convictions, the first since Stephens death, might well have been a victory for justice, but they didnt ease Nevilles suffering. Nor the suffering of Stephens mother, Baroness Lawrence, who, in an emotional interview with this newspaper earlier this month, confessed she hasnt known true happiness since her sons death, and spoke of her desire to draw a line under her tireless campaigning for Stephen.

She also urged police, in the absence of significant leads, to close the investigation.

Neville disagrees. After the verdict, I went to my sons grave in Jamaica. I know a lot of people would say youre mad talking to somebody whos dead, but I talk to him. I said: Weve got two of them, I dont know if were going to get any more, but we have that satisfaction for the time being. 

He falls silent and, for a moment, he is thousands of miles away, at the peaceful plot in Jamaica where his son lies buried in the shade of coconut and ackee trees. Knowing my sons lying there in the ground, sometimes I just go to pieces.

Even now when I start talking about it, my eyes fill up because I know what kind of person he was  what kind of person he would have been.

For many years, Neville could not even bring himself to drive along the road in South-East London where his desperately wounded son ran for some 350 yards before he fell

We had some justice, but Im still hoping for total justice, which is why I dont want them to close the case. I want them to scale the investigation down, but not close it.

With all the publicity there is at the moment, someone might decide to come forward and say something they havent before.

This week, Stephens death has dominated the media.

To mark the 25th anniversary, a gripping three-part BBC documentary, Stephen: The Murder That Changed A Nation, examined in forensic detail the senseless murder and the fight for justice, passionately championed by the Daily Mail, which led to the exposure of institutional racism running deep in the Metropolitan Police. The repercussions continue to reverberate throughout every level of society to this day.

On Monday, leading dignitaries, including Prince Harry and Prime Minister Theresa May, will gather at a memorial service in London, organised by Baroness Lawrence, to remember Stephen and celebrate all that has been achieved in his name.

Until three days ago, Neville thought he wouldnt be there. He had not been invited, until Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick intervened. Neville does not dwell upon the reasons why he wasnt on the guest list. He simply says: I wanted to go. Its my son, but I wasnt the one arranging it, so what could I do?

On Wednesday evening, the police commissioner phoned. She said she hadnt seen an invitation for me, so now Im going.

The Lawrences 27-year marriage collapsed in 1999 under the intolerable pain of their sons death. In her interview with the Mail two weeks ago, Stephens mother said: Neville and I were two different people after that night. They say a tragedy like that either pushes you together or pulls you apart. The latter is exactly what happened.

Neville seemed to believe this thing had only happened to him and not to the rest of us . . . We cant know how life would have been without Stephens murder, but I do know I felt alone. I was alone.

They both continue to play active parts in the lives of Stephens younger brother, Stuart, now 40, sister Georgina, 35, and their three grandchildren, but have barely exchanged a word since that 2012 trial.

Maybe if Stephens murder had been solved quickly and we hadnt had all that pressure for so long, Doreen and I would have been able to resolve things, says Neville. But we havent been speaking for quite a while now. I last saw her last year when I was picking up the grandkids, but . . . The sentence ends in a shrug.

Im going to be in the [Pentecostal] Kensington Temple church on Sunday to remember Stephen and talk about forgiveness. Weve seen with my sons murder what hatred does.

Neville is impassioned as he says this. He might not be the public face of the Stephen Lawrence Campaign for Justice, but he works diligently as chair of the Violent Crime Prevention group, trying to make our streets safer.

They reckon some 50 people have been stabbed to death this year. When I hear someones child has been killed, I think about how those parents are going to cope. Doreen and I have never spoken of anything together since that night. I tried to discuss some of the things that were happening with her and she refused. She said she didnt want to talk about it. What can you do?

The Lawrences 27-year marriage collapsed in 1999 under the intolerable pain of their sons death. Pictured: Doreen and Neville Lawrence at the first murder trial

In a way, I felt she was blaming me for Stephens death. Whether that was right or wrong, I dont know, but thats what I was feeling inside.

Doreen was away on a field trip for her degree when Stephen was murdered. I was supposed to be looking after the children. If something happens to your child when one of you is away, straight away you start thinking: If Id been here, maybe it wouldnt have happened.

She hasnt said she blames me, but I think she does. I know I was blaming myself.

Neville, a talented plasterer and decorator, had been looking after the children for two days when Stephen left for school that day. By nature a warm, jovial man, his spirits had been worn down by a lack of work during the recession.

The marriage was, he concedes, going through a difficult patch, but he believed the overriding love they had for their children would help them to weather it.

I thought I wouldnt have any children because it took so long to find someone I wanted to marry, says Neville. Id made this promise to myself I would not have a child out of wedlock. I wanted to be married to somebody, so my children could grow up in my house and I could have influence over them.

Stephen was my first-born child. I was there when he arrived. When he came out of hospital, I was worried all night because there were a lot of cot deaths about at the time. I kept getting up to listen to him breathing.

A memorial plaque now marks the place with the words: In memory of Stephen Lawrence 13.9.1974 to 22.4.1993. May he Rest in Peace'

Neville was a hands-on father who changed nappies and fed his son. He still has the first pair of baby shoes Stephen wore. When he left that day, I was sitting at the window feeling really low about the fact I wasnt working to support my family.

He said: Dad, are you OK? I said: Yes Im fine. He said: Are you sure? I said: Yes, and remember your mummys coming back tonight. Im going to do dinner, so come straight home from school. 

But Stephen didnt come home.

Instead, two neighbours knocked on the door to tell Doreen, by now home, and Neville, that Stephen had been attacked. They called police stations and searched the streets. Finding no sign of their son, they went to a nearby hospital and learned he had been admitted.

When we got to the hospital, I asked where Stephen was. The doctor said: Were working on him. They showed us to a waiting room. When I saw a nurse and doctor walking down the corridor, Im thinking: Please, God, let them tell me hes going to be OK. They told us he was dead.

After touching my son on that hospital slab, I can remember nothing else.

Nevilles next memory is waking up the following morning. He thought his sons death was a bad dream.

The first thing I did was go to Stephens bedroom to see if his bed had been slept in. When I saw it hadnt, I knew that what Id remembered was true.

For a few days, I couldnt drive, I couldnt write, I couldnt do anything. I couldnt even remember my full name. I was walking around kind of stunted in a way.

It affected me so much. I was never the Neville who was here before Stephen was murdered. I was different.

David Norris (left) and Gary Dobson were convicted of Stephen's murder six years ago

He continues: If I heard somebody laugh, Id get really angry. As far as I was concerned, there was nothing to laugh about.

If I saw people grieving differently to me  say, my ex was acting differently  Id start thinking: That person isnt grieving because theyre not doing it the way Im doing it.

I made a mistake thinking Doreen should be doing the same as me because wed both lost a son. I now know that everyone deals with bereavement in different ways.

Doreen was taking it so hard, she had to be sedated, so I had to go to the police station on my own to appeal for witnesses. I was feeling: Shes not there with me when I should have someone there. We were both like strangers. All the feelings I had for Doreen before Stephens death changed and I dont know why. Neither of us were our normal selves.

We also had all these people from different organisations in the house. [He is referring to the anti-racist pressure groups who championed Stephens case.]

At one stage, a secretary from the Anti-Racist Alliance took up residence in the house. They were trying to take control of us, insisting anyone who wanted to help us should talk to them first.

One night, a guy from the ARA went on television and started talking about my family.

From the one killer still free, not a shred of remorse... The only Stephen Lawrence murder suspect still walking the streets of Britain showed little remorse when confronted ahead of the 25th anniversary of the teenagers killing. Luke Knight, 41, shouted an obscenity when the Mail tracked him down to his flat in New Eltham, South-East London, some two miles from where Stephen was stabbed to death by a gang of five white youths in 1993. Luke Knight, 41, showed little remorse when confronted ahead of the 25th anniversary Before a reporter could question him, the roofer, wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt, shouted: Oh, f*** off, mate, before slamming his door. His outburst came after the BBC broadcast the first of its three-part series on Britains most notorious race murder. Earlier, Knight had his trademark swagger as he walked down the street near where he and his cohorts once terrorised locals. In February 1997, the Mail accused Knights gang of murdering 18-year-old Stephen in a savage, unprovoked attack as he waited with a friend at a bus-stop on April 22, 1993. Two of the gang, Gary Dobson, now 42, and David Norris, 41, are serving life for the killing, after a forensic breakthrough led to a second murder trial six years ago. A third, Neil Acourt, 42, is in jail for masterminding a 4 million cannabis ring. The market traders son has never displayed a shred of remorse for Stephens killing His brother, Jamie, 41, the fourth man we named, is wanted for his links to serious drugs crimes. He is thought to be on the run in Spain. That just leaves father-of-two Knight. To this day, anyone asking questions in Eltham, where the gangs families still live, is met with hostility. Last year, his mother told us: Nobody here will talk to you. The market traders son has never displayed a shred of remorse for Stephens killing, but has complained of the impact it has had on his life. Last week, Scotland Yard said the case will be shelved unless new leads are found. But investigator Chris Le Pere said publicity around the 25th anniversary could throw up clues. Advertisement

Neville put his foot down. I said: This is my family and anything there is to say about my family, I say, not you. Anyone who wants to help us comes through me. 

The police mishandling of the case added to the pressure. They waited for us to go to Jamaica before they announced theyd dropped the case [in July 1993] because of insufficient evidence. We were at my sons grave in Jamaica when we got the message.

I couldnt believe it. I was saying to myself: How can they drop it when theyve told me they have the forensics? They didnt. Thats the toughest thing. The police knew who these boys were.

They should have brought them in for questioning in the early days and gathered evidence.

Determined to seek justice for Stephen, his parents launched a private prosecution of their own  the first in modern British legal history  against Dobson and two other suspects, Luke Knight and Neil Acourt.

In April 1996, the case collapsed within days after Mr Justice Curtis ruled identification evidence from Stephens friend, Duwayne Brooks, who was with him when he was attacked, was inadmissible.

During legal argument, the judge had heard that during the investigation he had identified three or four different individuals as the main person who had attacked Stephen Lawrence.

Neville says: Ive since spoken to Duwayne and now understand he was traumatised. He still is.

Neville was, he says, a broken man. I was devastated. I developed asthma and started having problems with my breathing. I felt I was alone dealing with everything. It was a strain on my health.

The doctors advised me to go to Jamaica for a break. I went for six months and felt at peace with my birth family around me. I felt somebody wanted me. I didnt feel wanted here. I think I almost went back to being normal away from all the hype. I decided to stay for another six months.

Neville was recuperating in Jamaica when he received a letter from his wife. She wanted a divorce. She decided Id deserted her and then she decided she didnt want to be with me.

I called her and said: Lets discuss it when I come back to England. She said she didnt want to talk. Shed made up her mind.

That was another breaking point for me, knowing I hadnt just lost my first child, but my wife and the chance to raise my other kids as well.

It was the Daily Mails front page that gave me hope again.

In February 1997, the day after an inquest into Stephens murder delivered a verdict of unlawful killing in a completely unprovoked attack by five youths, this newspaper identified the five white racists on its front page and accused them of being murderers.

We invited them to sue if we were wrong.

They never have, but the furore that followed that headline  with calls for the Mails editor to be jailed  had profound consequences. Neville says: That was a brave move. Suddenly, I felt we werent in this on our own. I knew the editor was putting himself out there.

He was doing it for Stephen  for justice. The way the Daily Mail campaigned for that is why we need a free press.

If we hadnt had that when Stephen was murdered, I dont believe wed be where we are now.

The Macpherson Inquiry followed. Neville collected his decree nisi from the High Court the day the report was published, in February 1999. It concluded that the police investigation was marred by a combination of professional incompetence, institutional racism and a failure of leadership by senior officers.

Neville remembers a bittersweet day. It would take a further 12 years before Dobson and Norris stood trial, following a review of forensic evidence and the decision by Home Secretary David Blunkett in 2005, following a Mail campaign, to scrap the double jeopardy rule, which prevented suspects being tried twice for the same crime.

Doreen and Neville sat at the Old Bailey trial with a friend or lawyer strategically positioned between them. They barely exchanged a glance.

The breakdown of his marriage continues to cause Neville pain. In the years since, he has completed a bereavement counselling course to support other families who suffer as he has.

For a time, Id hoped Id find somebody to love because the loneliness was really bad, but it didnt happen, he says.

I was looking for the wrong kind of person. Most of the people I associated with were people in my kind of situation, with almost the same problems. I thought they would understand me better. They dont. Youre both damaged goods.

Im starting to heal, but it will take a while. Those moods swings still come when I hear a certain song on the radio or am reminded of something that I used to do with Stephen.

Neville now divides his year between England and Jamaica, where the church is a cornerstone of island life. He was baptised on January 13 last year into the Seventh-Day Adventists religion of his youth.

I still think about my loss: what might have been, what Stephen might have become  of going down the road and seeing a house he designed.

But I never imagined my son would have this impact on society. He was here for a certain reason.

It took me a long time to start even thinking that way, but its helped me to forgive and let go of my pain. Doreen is in the same situation as me. Maybe she should be able to do the same.
Hillary Clinton's daughter Chelsea has hit back at claims she was popping champagne after the polls closed  and before her mom's stunning loss to Donald Trump.

'Chasing Hillary,' by New York Times reporter Amy Chozick, who covered both of Clinton's presidential campaigns, cited anonymous sources to say it was even French bubbly: Veuve Clicquot.

'Things were already looking bad when, several people told me, Chelsea Clinton popped the Champagne,' Chozick writes, according to a preview in the New York Times.

But Chelsea was quick to refute the claims, tweeting that she had actually been pumping breast milk for her infant son when she was supposed to be knocking back the bubbly.

'At that time I was with my husband. Alone. Pumping milk for my 5 month old son,' she wrote, adding that Chozick never bothered fact checking the claims with her. 'Happy to talk to Amys sources. Unless its the old medela milk bag. That would be weird...!'

Chelsea Clinton popped a bottle of champagne before her mom was declared the loser in the 2016 election, according to a new book. She called the report 'false'

Chozick claims that the disputed toast happened after 9pm, shortly before key states began to fall to Trump.

'It was just after 9 p.m. on election night and she was having her hair and makeup done in the family's suite at the Peninsula hotel. She stopped to pour what someone said was Veuve Clicquot into everyone's glasses, figuring that in a couple of hours Donald Trump's run of early victories in red states (West Virginia, Oklahoma, Alabama) would end and the map would turn back in her mom's favor.'

The candidate's daughter immediately denied the claim.

'Hi @amychozick!' she wrote on Twitter. 'The 1st line ('Things were already looking bad when Chelsea Clinton popped the Champagne') is false. I would have been happy to tell you that if you'd asked, which you didn't. Looking forward to the correction once you fact check. Thanks!'

She then denied having poured Italian sparkling wine as well, retweeting another commenter, whose handle is 'Bitcoins and Scotch,' who wrote mockingly that 'IT WAS PROSECO PEOPLE.'

DRINK UP BUT NOT BEFORE WISCONSIN COMES IN: U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton samples wine in a wine cellar before a dinner at Adjarian Wine House in Batumi June 5, 2012

Chelsea Clinton called the report 'false'

Clinton also denied pouring another bubbly beverage, and trolled a critic from 'wherever you are' urging them to have a 'splendid day!'

Clinton hit back. 'Hi Bitcoins and Scotch! No. It's a gorgeous day in New York. Hoping you are enjoying equally beautiful weather wherever you are. Have a splendid day!'

The toast, if it happened, came just minutes before one of history's great upsets. At 10:21, Clinton lost Ohio. Florida went to Trump at 11:30. And two gut-wrenching hours later, Pennsylvania gave Trump an unassailable lead with a 1-percent squeaker.

The proseco joke could have been a dig at campaign chair John Podesta, who was revealed in a hacked email to have bailed out on a 'Girls' night' event with Communications Director Kristina Schake he would have to 'bail' on their plans.

'You like prosecco as much as I do so sorry to miss you!' she responded jovially.

During the slog of a campaign reporters trailing Clinton jokingly referred to as a death march, the candidate's constant evocation of 'Everyday Americans' soon drew quips both among the press and her own campaign team.

When Chelsea Clinton sought a private plane to do a campaign event for her mom, Clinton campaign chair John Podesta quipped: 'She's not an Everyday American,' according to the book.

In other nuggets in the campaign book / memoir, Hillary Clinton's campaign held a strategy session on how to build up Donald Trump when he was a reality TV star hurling insults at rival Republicans, according to a new campaign book.

The agenda for a Clinton campaign meeting early in the primaries sent out by campaign manager Robby Mook was titled: ''How do we maximize Trump?' according to a new book by New York Times reporter Amy Chozick, who spent years covering Clinton's two campaign.

EVERYDAY PEOPLE: Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton with her daughter Chelsea Clinton at a rally November 8, 2016 in Raleigh, North Carolina

It was a strategy borne of the belief that Trump would torch fellow Republicans, then be easier to beat than more traditional candidates like Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, or Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

Vice President Joe Biden, who had a fundraising network and Pennsylvania roots that helped connect him to some of the voters Clinton once ham handedly mocked as 'deplorables,' confided he stayed out of the race partly out of concern to what Clinton's vaunted network would do to him.

'Biden had confided (off the record) to the White House press corps that he wanted to run, but he added something like 'You guys don't understand these people. The Clintons will try to destroy me.,'' Chozick writes, the Daily Beast reported.
Police arrested Billy Jeeves, pictured, suspected of the aggravated burglary of a house in Hither Green where his alleged accomplice Henry Vincent was killed.

Police have arrested a man wanted in connection with the aggravated burglary in Hither Green where Henry Vincent was killed.

Billy Jeeves, 28, was tracked down and arrested at 5.30pm in north Kent.

Following a tip-off, officers from the Met's Homicide and Major Crime Command, under the protection of elite riot squad, raided the location where Jeeves had been hiding..

He was arrested on suspicion of two counts of burglary, theft and possession of a controlled substance and taken to a Kent police station for questioning.

He is believed to have fled the scene following the alleged burglary at the home in Hither Green, south west London.

Henry Vincent, 37, was stabbed to death by Richard Osborn-Brooks, 78, who was defending his home and wife Maureen in Hither Green.

Mr Osborn-Brooks was arrested on suspicion of murdering 37-year-old Vincent while defending his South Park Crescent home on April 4, before being released without charge.

A Scotland Yard spokesman said: 'Police recently appealed for information regarding a man they wanted to trace in connection with an aggravated burglary in Hither Green, Lewisham.

'Billy Jeeves, aged 28, was located and detained in north Kent at approximately 5.30pm on Friday April 20 by officers from the Met's Homicide and Major Crime Command, with support from officers from the Territorial Support Group and officers at Kent Police.

Police believe Jeeves was with Henry Vincent, left, on the night he died during a botched burglary on the Hither Green home of Richard Osborn-Brook, right

Jeeves was arrested on suspicion of two counts of burglary, theft and possession of a controlled substance following the raid on the home in Hither Green

'He has been arrested on suspicion of two counts of burglary, theft and possession of a controlled substance.

'He has been taken into custody at a Kent police station.

'No other persons are being sought in connection with this investigation.

'Enquiries continue.'

Since the incident, Vincent's friends and family have sparked outrage among locals in the usually quiet south London neighbourhood by laying flowers and cards opposite the still boarded-up home of Mr Osborn-Brooks and his wife Maureen.

The tributes have repeatedly been torn down by neighbours and well-wishers angry that the career criminal is being remembered in such a way, only to spring up again within days.

Mr and Mrs Osborn-Brooks are reportedly living in a safe house and plan to sell their property.
Prince Charles with his mother, the Queen in the Blue Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace as the Queen hosts a dinner during the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting

Wanted: Candidate who has a proven track record in diplomacy, public affairs and all things multi- cultural, an empathy for young people and a passion for the environment. Sense of history preferred. No salary.

Sound familiar?

Little wonder that the clunkingly obvious person for the job was formally endorsed as the next Head of the Commonwealth yesterday.

It had been the Queens sincere wish that the Prince of Wales should be acknowledged as her chosen successor to this non-hereditary role.

So last nights news, confirmed in the leaders statement at the close of the Commonwealth summit, will have come as an early present ahead of todays celebrations for the Queens 92nd birthday.

Yesterday, she was doing what she has enjoyed doing for the best part of seven decades as she surrounded herself with the leaders of the 53 Commonwealth nations. She invited them for drinks during their informal retreat  the traditional finale of these summits  at Windsor Castle.

She stayed well away from all the networking going on in the state apartments, where the politicians were berthed. Later, they were invited to her side of the castle for refreshments. The Prince of Wales, quite properly, was miles away.

He will no doubt be pleased that this delicate succession issue has been resolved now, at a time of the Queens choosing rather than the Almightys.

The Prince of Wales greets the Sultan of Brunei Hassanal Bolkiah in a receiving line for the Queen's Dinner for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting

Anita Sethi (right of photo, with glasses on her head) meeting Prince Charles at the Commonwealth People's Forum in London

There has been no change to the process, however, and the Royal Family have not sought one. They understand that the headship must be earned, and not simply inherited. The Duke of Cambridge is well aware of that.

The only grudging footnote to Charless appointment as head-in-waiting was a bizarre claim in yesterdays Guardian. A writer called Anita Sethi has written that she met the prince at this weeks Commonwealth Peoples Forum.

According to her account, he deployed that trusty conversation-starter And where are you from?  to which she replied: Manchester.

She then says the prince joked: Well, you dont look like it! As a result, Miss Sethi, who is of Guyanese heritage, now argues that the prince is unfit to lead the Commonwealth.

Ms Sethi says Prince Charles told her 'you don't look like you're from Manchester'

She then says the prince joked: Well, you dont look like it!

I am intrigued by this exchange for many reasons  not least the fact that I, too, happened to be at this event. I certainly cant claim to have heard everything the prince said, but I heard a fair bit and I didnt hear him say this.

The occasion, frankly, was a bunfight because so many people were jostling to meet him. He was doing the rounds of a London conference centre where thousands of delegates were attending four different forums.

When he walked in to a buffet lunch for the Business Forum delegates, a band of drummers made so much noise that it was impossible to hear the prince say anything. It wasnt very different two floors up at the Peoples Forum where Miss Sethi was in the melee.

The scrum got so bad that one veteran royal photographer simply gave up trying to take a picture and helped himself to a plate of curry. The organisers had tried to line up pre-arranged groups for royal introductions, but it turned in to a free-for-all.

Ms Sethi says she was 'stunned' by the prince's gaffe and she could 'show him her passport to prove where she was born'

In the midst of this good-natured shambles, Miss Sethi tried to draw the princes attention to her latest book  it was then the alleged exchange took place. Clarence House has opted for dignified silence. I can only say that the Sethi version of events bears no relation to the man I have seen in these situations over more than 25 years. The prince has always seen it as his role to act as a bridge between races and cultures, and has done so for longer than perhaps any politician or community leader in Britain.

Take his thoughts on the Windrush generation of Caribbean migrants. Thank you for coming and for your contributions to this country, he said to hundreds of families at a special Windrush party he organised at St Jamess Palace.

Prince Charles greets Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

This wasnt the other day. It happened in 1998, two decades before those buffoons at the Home Office learned about the legacy of the Windrush.

That same year, I followed him on tours of Sri Lanka and Nepal where he met thousands of people just like those he has been doing this week. No gaffes.

Two years later, I followed him to the Caribbean. We ended up in Guyana, the country where members of Miss Sethis family were once indentured workers. There were many engagements in run-down areas of the capital, Georgetown. The prince met the most deprived members of society and went to see a local version of his Youth Business Trust. No gaffes. Ditto in South Africa, Lesotho, Jamaica, Malaysia, Singapore and Trinidad  all Commonwealth countries where I have been glued to the poor mans every move.

So is Charles, as he nears his 70th birthday, suddenly starting to lose the plot? I dont think so. Having toured the Commonwealth since the age of five, he is manifestly suited to step in to the Queens oceanic Commonwealth shoes when the time comes. He must be the only person (except the Queen) who can identify all of the flags fluttering along the Mall this week.

This is an organisation which cannot open its mouth without banging on about the fact that 60 per cent of its people are under 30. And guess who established the biggest youth charity network in Britain? This week, the Princes Trust International, its global arm, was round for tea at Clarence House.

In fact, what is perhaps most striking about his appointment is the lack of controversy. When the EU, UN, Fifa or pretty much any other world body seeks a new head, there is usually a fratricidal dogfight. Here is an organisation spanning 2.4billion people which has just had a selection process devoid of any rancour at all  with the possible exception of Jeremy Corbyn and Miss Sethi.
Cindy T. White, 41, was found guilty this week for theft of identity over $1,000 by a St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, jury

A woman may be slapped with 10 years in prison after she was convicted of taking a woman's identity and credentials from LinkedIn to secure a high paying job.

Cindy T. White, 41, was found guilty this week for theft of identity over $1,000 by a St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, jury, North Shore District Attorney Warren Montgomery's Office reported, according to Nola.com.

The Slidell, Louisiana, woman was said to have listed on her resume that she obtained a bachelor's degree from Tulane University, according to opening statements from Assistant District Attorney Casey Dieck.

She also claimed to have received a master's degree from Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

'That's not this person. This person stole the victim's hard work and used it to get a six-figure salary and benefits to boot,' added Dieck pointing to the defendant.

In April 2016, an employee from Diversified Foods contacted the Sheriff's Office and informed them that White had used a social security and driver's license numbers to obtain a well paying executive job.

White began working with the company in September 2015 as a human resources manager. She made $95,000 per year at the time.

Just five months later, she was promoted to senior human resources director and was given a pay raise to $105,000, according to the District Office in a report on Friday.

But White soon had trouble 'performing duties within the educational level and experience listed on her resume' and would delegate her own task, prompting concern.

Investigators soon found discrepancies on White's resume and discovered that her credentials matched someone on LinkedIn with a similar name.

White had even gotten the woman's Social Security and driver's license number from an online site.

Tracking White's actual Social Security number revealed that she had been arrested in New Orleans in February 1997 for theft, forgery and malfeasance in office.

White began working with the company in September 2015 as a human resources manager and made $95,000 before she was promoted five months later and given a raise of $105,000

She had been working at the Orleans Parish Sheriff's Office and had been accused of using a co-worker's identity and emptying their bank account. White was found by surveillance video.

White pleaded guilty to two counts of forgery on September 27 of that year and was placed on probation.

Her probation was terminated in 1999 because the court received news that she was dead.

The woman also pleaded guilty in Jefferson Parish for attempted theft of goods on December 4, 1996, according to authorities.

White was said to have collected $56,209 in salary from Diversified Foods in the period of October 9, 2015 and May 6, 2016.

Diversified Foods was founded in 1984 by Al Copeland Sr in 1984. Copeland also founded Popeyes Fried Chicken.

While White pleaded guilty, her defense attorney claimed that she was actually working for that salary

Dieck, disagreed and said: "We have here a defendant who admits to stealing to cover up the fact that she's a convicted thief."

It took jurors 15 minutes to decide on the guilty verdict on Wednesday.
Sam Kayode, pictured outside Woolwich Crown Court, was told to pay back 3million or face a further eight years in jail

A crooked school accountant faces an extra eight years in prison unless he pays almost 3million in ten days.

Philandering part-time church pastor Sam Kayode, 61, was jailed in 2016 for nine years for taking 4million from the Haberdashers Askes state school chain.

The married father of four, who had three mistresses, tried to blame the theft on his late wife Grace and a young assistant, claiming they had transferred money to his account in a bid to smear him over his adulteries.

Now his sentence has been almost doubled after barrister James Thacker, acting for the Crown Prosecution Services specialist fraud division, told a proceeds of crime confiscation hearing that he had spirited away around 3million, probably to Nigeria and Dubai.

The lovers he showered with gifts might also face legal action.

The hearing at Woolwich Crown Court earlier this month was told that after Kayode joined Haberdashers Askes in 1997, it expanded enormously and embraced academy reforms that gave schools more control over their finances.

Judge Nicholas Heathcote Williams said in his new judgment: Over nearly seven years Kayode stole and defrauded over 4million from Haberdashers by transferring money from their account to his and his wife Graces.

His boss, chief financial officer Paul Durgan, failed to notice any money was missing. Kayode was caught only when a school cleaner spotted bank account statements in his office.

The accountant earned 57,000 a year for his work at the chains south-east London schools, but drove a fleet of cars including several Mercedes, an Audi TT and a 40,000 Infiniti, carried a 1,500 Louis Vuitton briefcase and wore 500 Gucci shoes.

He has stopped claiming that his crimes were carried out by his late wife, who died of cancer in 2013 aged 53, and a junior employee.

Haberdashers has recovered 571,000 from the sale of flats and houses he owned, but at least 2.75million remains potentially recoverable.

Kayode was told that if he does not pay it all back by the end of this month he will be given an extra eight years.

The judge said: The defendant is a very selfish, greedy and dishonest man. His evidence has been characterised by pauses  while he is clearly calculating, not always accurately, what answers will help him and he may get away with  and by grudging, evasive replies.

Kayode defrauded 4m from the Haberdashers' Aske state school chain (pictured: one of their schools in Lewisham) while working as their accountant

The court heard more than 1million of the missing money was funnelled to Nigeria, where his second wife or girlfriend Olubunmi Bunmi Halima, 35, managed his business. He gave 266,000 to Halima, more than 77,000 to a second girlfriend Yetunde Turtak in Dartford, Kent, and hundreds of thousands more to relatives and friends in Nigeria.

Judge Heathcote Williams said he doubted every word but it provides a clue where some of the hidden assets are.

A third alleged mistress, Toyin Lawal, 52, of Northfleet, Kent, told the Daily Mail they were not lovers and Kayode simply paid a months rent for her when he was a church pastor.

Police took almost three years to charge Kayode after he was caught, giving him plenty of time to hide his fortune.

Mr Durgan, who failed to spot his employees fraud, went on to be hired by the auditors who missed the crime, then worked for another school chain.
Two teenagers are on the run after a fatal hit and run collision in Melbourne's east this morning.

Police allege a grey Lexus four-wheel-drive travelling south along Stud Road in Wantirna South collided with an eastbound black Holden Commodore at the Boronia Road intersection in Melbourne's east shortly after 1am.

The teenagers fled the scene and police believe the car is was stolen.

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Two teenagers are on the run after a fatal hit and run collision in Melbourne's east this morning which left two people dead

Major Collision Investigation Unit detectives are investigating and are urging the male and female to come forward

The male passenger, 38, in the Holden died at the scene and police are yet to formally identify him while the female driver, 32, was taken to hospital before passing away.

The man and women were a married couple on their way home.

The occupants of the Lexus were last seen running westbound on Stud Road and are yet to be located.

Police believe they are a male and female about 18-years-of-age.

The occupants of the Lexus (pictured) were last seen running westbound on Stud Road and are yet to be located

The male passenger in the Holden died at the scene and police are yet to formally identify him while the female driver was taken to hospital before passing away

The male is perceived to be of Caucasian appearance and about 173cm tall with a skinny build and dark collar-length hair with blonde streaks.

He was wearing a hi-visibility hooded jumper and possibly grey shorts.

The female is described as being Caucasian in appearance and about 165cm tall with a skinny build and long wavy blonde hair.

The female is described as being Caucasian in appearance and about 165cm tall with a skinny build and long wavy blonde hair

The aftermath of a fatal hit and run collision overnight which left two people dead and two teenagers on the run form police

She was wearing a white tank top, black leggings and a black leather purse with a shoulder strap.

Major Collision Investigation Unit detectives are investigating and are urging the male and female to come forward.

Traffic is being diverted at the scene of the collision and the road will be closed for some time.
Anthony Bourdain has advised Alec Baldwin to keep his opinions on the #MeToo campaign to himself.

'Just shut up,' was the chef and travel writer's succinct advice for the comedian, who has repeatedly weighed in on the movement highlighting sexual harassment and assault.

Baldwin controversially appeared to attack Harvey Weinstein accuser Rose McGowan, during an interview with PBS Newshour last year, for settling with the disgraced producer.

Anthony Bourdain (left with girlfriend Asia Argento) has advised Alec Baldwin (right) to keep his opinions on the #MeToo campaign to himself

Bourdain's partner, Asia Argento, who was one of the first to speak out against Weinstein, called Baldwin out for comment on Twitter, tweeting: 'Hey AlecBaldwin you're either a complete moron or providing cover for your pals and saving your own rep. Maybe all three.'

The 30 Rock star fired back: 'If you paint every man w the same brush, you're gonna run out of paint or men.'

Bourdain, 61, weighed in, branding Baldwin 'too dumb to pour piss out of a boot.'

The 'Parts Unknown' host said that speaking to Argento, and other women in the movement, have changed his world view.

'When someone you care about and respect, you see them struggle to go on the recordthe incredible difficulty of going public about something, and the very real peril at the timeit changes you,' Bourdain said.

'When Asia spoke to Ronan [Farrow], I think she might have been the first to go on record knowing with absolute certainty that she would most likely be sued, destroyed, crushed by this gigantic machine that had for decades been crushing far more powerful people than her who dared speak up. But she did it anyway. So to see that, and to see the blowback in Italy where she's received no support, has been eye-opening.'

The 'Parts Unknown' host said that speaking to Argento, and other women in the movement, have changed his world view

While Bourdain is a strong supporter of #MeToo, he says he's careful not to hog the limelight, and distract from the brave women coming forward to share their stories.

'It's something I'm very aware of when I hear myself talking about itit makes me very uneasy,' he said. 'These are not my stories, so I feel that every time I'm talking about it I'm taking up space that should be rightfully taken by a woman. It's a fine line for me. I don't particularly enjoy talking about it. But if you ask me, I'll tell ya.'
Kim Jong-un has announced North Korea will suspend all missile tests and plans to close the site where its six previous nuclear tests were conducted ahead of landmark talks with Donald Trump.

Britain cautiously welcomed the announcement that the country is to put a halt to its nuclear testing programme.

In a statement responding to developments overnight, the Foreign Office said it hoped Kim Jong Un's announcement indicated a willingness to negotiate with world leaders.

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Kim Jong Un speaking at the ruling party's Central Committee on Friday where he made the announcement. He is set to meet President Trump (right, at Mar-a-Lago on April 18) in May or June

North Koreans watch as their country's most famous newscaster announces leader Kim Jong Un's proposal to suspend nuclear tests and long-range missile launches on a giant screen on Pyongyang's newly built Mirae Scientists' Street

President Trump heralded the news as 'very good news for North Korea and the World', adding that he 'looks forward' to the summit and that 'progress' was being made

In a statement, it said: 'A long term commitment from Kim Jong Un to halt all nuclear tests and ICBM launches would be a positive step. We hope this indicates an effort to negotiate in good faith.

'We remain committed to working with our international partners to bring about our goal of a complete, verifiable and irreversible de-nuclearisation of the Korean peninsula, and to do so through peaceful means.'

The US-North Korea meeting is scheduled for May or June, although no location has been decided plans are continuing apace, with CIA director Mike Pompeo flying to Pyongyang for talks with Kim over the Easter weekend.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in is also due to meet the dictator on April 27 at a border truce village for a rare summit focused on nuclear issues.

President Trump heralded Friday's announcement, tweeting: 'North Korea has agreed to suspend all Nuclear Tests and close up a major test site. This is very good news for North Korea and the World - big progress! Look forward to our Summit.'

He later added: 'A message from Kim Jong Un: 'North Korea will stop nuclear tests and launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles.' Also will 'Shut down a nuclear test site in the country's Northern Side to prove the vow to suspend nuclear tests.' Progress being made for all!'

South Korea also welcomed the decision, saying it represented 'meaningful progress for the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula'.

But Japanese Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera said he was not satisfied with the announcement, and demanded pressure be kept up on North Korea until it abandons its missile programme in a complete, irreversible and verifiable way.

The decision was made in a meeting of the ruling party's full Central Committee which had convened to discuss a 'new stage' of policies.

'As the weaponization of nuclear weapons has been verified, it is not necessary for us to conduct any more nuclear tests or test launches of mid- and long range missiles or ICBMs,' Kim told the assembled party cadres. He then added: 'The northern nuclear test site has completed its mission.'

Kim's latest comments echoed those he made in a New Year's speech, in which he claimed the development of the state nuclear force had been completed.

This followed a test in November during which the North claimed to have launched nuclear tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the mainland United States.

This achievement, completely unverified by outside authorities, was the stated aim of North Korea's nuclear programme and explains Kim's reference to already have secured the 'weaponization or nuclear weapons' [sic] in his comments on Friday.

South Korean envoys have previously cited Kim as promising no more tests, but the recent news is the first such announcement directly by Pyongyang.

The party decided that nuclear and ICBM launches will cease as of Saturday - it has not carried any out since November - and the atomic test site at Punggye-ri 'will be abolished'.

Kim speaking at the Seventh Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea on Friday in an image released by the official Korean Central News Agency

Pyongyang has made rapid technological progress in its weapons programmes under Kim, which has seen it subjected to increasingly strict sanctions by the UN Security Council, US, EU, South Korea and others. Pictured: A missile launch in North Korean last year

Friday's move comes after months of threats and counter-threats between President Trump and Kim.

At his New Year speech, the dictator claimed to have a nuclear button on his desk, prompting Trump to tweet that he had an even bigger one.

Events have moved rapidly since then, catalyzed by the Winter Olympics in the South, and Seoul is now pushing for a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War, raising hopes that a settlement could finally be reached on the peninsula.

But there is a long way to go and Moon himself acknowledged this week that the 'devil is in the details'.

On Thursday, the South's president revealed that Kim had expressed his commitment to 'complete denuclearization' of the Korean peninsula without seeking conditions.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in (right, on April 18) will hold a summit with Kim in a border truce village on April 27

Pyongyang toned down its rhetoric after Kim announced in his New Year's address his plan to improve relations with Seoul and send a delegation to the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in February. Images of these North Korean cheerleaders during the Olympics were seen around the world

Moon said the North was only seeking an end to 'hostile policies' against it and a guarantee of security in return.

'I don't think denuclearization has different meanings for South and North Korea,' he said. 'The North is expressing a will for a complete denuclearization.

'All they are talking about is the end of hostile policies against North Korea, followed by a guarantee of security.'

The United States stations 28,500 troops in South Korea, a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War.

North Korea has said over the years that it could consider giving up its nuclear arsenal if the United States removed its troops from South Korea and withdrew its so-called nuclear umbrella of deterrence from South Korea and Japan.

On Thursday, President Trump told a joint news conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that his campaign of 'maximum pressure' on North Korea would continue until Pyongyang gave up its nuclear weapons

In a further development on Wednesday, Seoul said it hopes to use the up-coming summit to change a decades-old armistice with North Korea into a peace agreement. China, Kim's main ally, immediately announced it backed the move.

Reclusive North Korea and the rich, democratic South are technically still at war because the 1950-53 conflict ended in a truce, not a peace treaty.

Moon said he saw the possibility of a peace agreement, or even international aid for the North's economy, if it denuclearizes.

But he also said the inter-Korean summit had 'a lot of constraints', in that the two Koreas could not make progress separate from the North Korea-United States summit, and could not reach an agreement that transcends international sanctions.

'So first, the South-North Korean summit must make a good beginning, and the dialogue between the two Koreas likely must continue after we see the results of the North Korea-United States summit,' Moon said.

South Korean army soldiers pass by a wire fence decorated with ribbons written with messages wishing for the reunification of the two Koreas at the Imjingak Pavilion in Paju, South Korea, on April 20. This is near to where the North-South meeting will take place on April 27

On Thursday, President Trump told a joint news conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that his campaign of 'maximum pressure' on North Korea would continue until Pyongyang gave up its nuclear weapons.

'The United States remains committed to complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization of North Korea,' U.S. Disarmament Ambassador Robert Wood told a news conference in Geneva on Thursday ahead of a two-week conference on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

'In terms of the pressure campaign, things we are very interested in are maintaining the pressure, meaning enforcing sanctions, ensuring that the North is not able to get access to funds that help further his nuclear and ballistic missile programmes.'

On Friday, Seoul and Pyongyang installed a telephone hotline connecting the South's presidential Blue House and the North's State Affairs Commission to discuss nuclear issues prior to next week's summit.

Six top South Korean officials will accompany Moon to the meeting, including his chief of staff, spy chief, national security adviser and unification, defence and foreign ministers.
Syrian air strikes and the big freeze in relations between the West and Russia have raised again the chilling prospect of events sliding into an unwanted all-out war.

In a gripping new book, historian Taylor Downing describes earlier moment when the world skidded towards disaster - through a combination of accident, paranoia and bluster.

Could it happen again? Read this and tremble...

Major Gennady Ossipovich, a top gun in the Soviet air force, was certain of what he saw. From the cockpit of his sleek SU-15 supersonic interceptor aircraft, the mysterious blacked-out shape in the night sky above him at 35,000ft was a U.S. spy plane trespassing many miles inside Russian air space.

Picked up on radar, he had been scrambled from his base to track down this intruder and warn it off or force it to land.

He waggled his wings and flashed his lights, the internationally agreed way to attract the attention of another crew.

There was no response. He was ordered to the next stage  to fire a warning shot across its bows.

The man who very nearly triggered Armageddon: Major Gennady Ossipovich, who shot down Korean Airlines flight KAL 007

Yolki palki! he exclaimed  rough translation: Holy s***!

In 13 years of monitoring American flights here on the far eastern edge of the Soviet Union, hed never had to do this. He let loose with his guns, cannon fire glowing orange in the dark. Still no acknowledgement.

A minute passed as the mystery plane flew on. Then Ossipovich was given the order from ground control  Fire!

Two air-to-air AA-3 missiles, each containing 88lb of high explosives, smoked out from beneath his wings. As the intruder faltered, flamed bright red and fell, he reported to his controller: The target is destroyed.

Job done, he peeled away and returned to base.

But it was not a spy plane Major Ossipovich had shot down that night. It was a civilian airliner, a Korean Airlines Boeing 747 with 269 crew and passengers on board, including a U.S. Congressman.

An angry Washington DC went into overdrive. Moscow stood its ground. They squared up like prize-fighters, neither wanting to back down.

What happened over the next few days, as paranoia and hyperbole took over from calm analysis and reflection, could have brought America and Russia to the brink of nuclear war.

The flight that was nearly shot down by Major Gennady Korean Airlines flight KAL 007

As, 35 years later, a new Cold War breaks out and fears grow that any miscalculation or wrong move could threaten escalation into an apocalyptic confrontation, it is sobering to consider how easily matters slipped out of control back then.

IT WAS just before midnight on Wednesday, August 31, 1983 that Flight KAL 007 from New York took off after a refuelling stop at Anchorage airport in Alaska.

Ahead was an eight-hour, 4,000-mile flight across the North Pacific Ocean for a dawn arrival in Seoul, the capital of South Korea, via an established route known as Romeo 20. It skirted Soviet air space, but didnt cross into it.

No one can ever be sure how or why the flight veered so massively and tragically off course  not least because the aircrafts flight data and voice recordings, the so-called black box, despite having been recovered by the Soviets, were not analysed at the time.

Of the many speculations, the most likely is that the flight engineer typed the wrong information into the aircrafts navigation system at Anchorage.

A slip of the finger put its starting point 300 miles to the east of the planes actual position, and the computer that directed the auto-pilot compounded this human error.

As they passed over thousands of miles of featureless ocean, no one on the flight deck realised the aircraft was drifting hundreds of miles off course and nudging in and out of Soviet air space.

Also in the same sky that night  although the KAL crew did not know it  was a U.S. spy plane, a Boeing reconnaissance aircraft loaded with cameras and computers to monitor Soviet missile tests.

Tracked by the Russians on radar, it made sure it stayed in international air space, and turned back to its base before the incident with KAL 007. But it left lethal confusion in its wake.

On their screens the Russians saw a blip  in reality, KAL 007, now more than 150 miles off course  heading towards the Kamchatka peninsula on the Soviet mainland. They mistook it for the spy plane.

Moreover, it seemed to be heading towards a major airfield and a nuclear submarine base.

Down on the ground, there was panic among controllers of the Soviet Far East Air Defence Command as they hesitated over what to do next.

Then the strange blip on their screens started heading slightly to the north, towards Sakhalin Island, another area of Soviet military bases, approaching at the rate of eight miles per minute.

At Dolinsk-Sokol air base on Sakhalin, Major Ossipovich was scrambled while KAL 007 cruised on, oblivious to the alarm it was causing. The blinds were down as passengers watched the film or slept. No one on board had any idea that it was 365 miles off course and in Soviet air space.

A new book reveals the detail of the incident that took the world to the brink of an accidental apocalypse

As Ossipovich approached, he reported that he could see its navigation lights flashing and a row of darkened windows on the side. He had no doubt it was a spy plane disguised as a civilian airliner or a large cargo plane.

Ossipovich did not consider that a civil aircraft, with all its modern navigation technology, could possibly be so far off course.

The die was cast. He fired his missiles, as ordered.

On KAL 007, the sleepy calm of a long-haul night flight would have suddenly turned into terrifying chaos as the rear of the aircraft was hit and freezing air rushed through the cabin, generating a thick mist.

Many passengers rapidly froze to death. Those without a seat belt on would have been thrown around and some possibly sucked out of the gaping hole in the fuselage.

Those further forward who had time to put on emergency oxygen masks might have still been alive for a few dreadful minutes as the plane rapidly fell towards the sea. There were no survivors.

In the hours that followed, Americas security agencies were frantically trying to fathom out what had happened.

An ultra-secret interception signals unit in Japan had picked up Ossipovichs report that he had fired his missiles, and heard the sound of live firing.

But precisely what plane had he targeted? It could not have been the spy plane because that had already returned to base.

News from Anchorage and Seoul that KAL 007 was missing left only one conclusion  but how and why?

At first, it seemed obvious to the Americans who was to blame. An intercepted message from Ossipovich that he was abeam of the aircraft was surely proof that he must have seen it was a civilian airliner  but was ordered to shoot it down anyway.

From this, the CIA and the DIA (Defence Intelligence Agency) concluded that the most likely probability was that the Soviets had callously shot down a civil airliner in international skies. Alarm bells sounded.

But then wiser heads prevailed as two further facts became known  first, how far KAL 007 had drifted off course, and second, that there was a U.S. spy plane operating in the area at around the same time.

In intelligence circles, the correct conclusion was emerging: Soviet air defences had got confused and mistaken the Korean airliner for the reconnaissance plane. It was a huge blunder by the Soviets, but definitely not an act of aggression.

Which is what the head of the U.S. air force briefed to the joint chiefs of staff.

The rest of Washington, though, had leapt to the conclusion that the shoot-down was deliberate and epitomised the brutality of the Soviet regime.

A sense of moral outrage started to build, as rumour and innuendo ran wild.

How could any competent air force fail to identify a civilian jumbo jet and shoot it down with the loss of so many innocent lives?

And even if the Soviets had thought it was a spy plane inside their air space, that did not condone their shooting it down.

It was this interpretation that was given by staff to a shocked George Shultz, the U.S. secretary of state, when he arrived in his office that morning.

Seeing an opportunity to show that the Soviet Union really was what U.S. President Ronald Reagan had recently denounced as an evil empire, Shultz gave a press conference expressing revulsion to this attack. We can see no excuse whatsoever for this appalling act.

He revealed that U.S. intelligence gatherers had proof from the recordings of all the conversations between the Soviet pilot and his base, but he made no mention of a U.S. reconnaissance plane in the vicinity.

Some within the intelligence-gathering community were appalled. How can the son-of-a-bitch do this? asked one officer. Hes making political and corrupt use of intelligence.

But that was a minority view as revulsion swept America and much of the rest of the world. The facts as reported spoke for themselves.

The lack of response or explanation from Moscow seemed confirmation of its guilt. For several days, there were denials that the plane had even crashed, then denials that they had shot it down. In the West, Soviet-bashers were having a field day.

President Reagan had no doubt his people had caught the Soviets red-handed with unmistakable proof of an act of barbarism.

Our first emotions are anger, disbelief, and profound sadness, he told reporters. What can we think of a regime that so broadly trumpets its vision of peace and global disarmament and yet so callously and quickly commits a terrorist act?

What are we to make of a regime which establishes one set of standards for itself and another for the rest of humankind?

Western television news programmes were full of descriptions of the despicable and barbarous act. The New York Times accused the Russians of cold blooded, mass murder.

Behind the scenes, however, the American intelligence community was briefing a different story  that there was a spy plane in the sky at the same time, and that this had confused the Soviet ground controllers.

CIA head William Casey, not known for being soft on the Soviets, made it clear to the President that Ossipovich, the Soviet fighter pilot, had never positively identified the aircraft as a civilian airliner and that, with the blinds on the jumbo jets windows down at night, there would have been no internal lights showing.

But this was not what Reagan wanted to hear and he ignored the arguments.

Secretary of State Shultz also rejected mistaken identity as not remotely possible.

He and Reagan were embarking on a high-wire act  and this at a time when between them the two superpowers possessed 18,400 nuclear warheads on missiles in silos, aboard submarines and on bombers.

They did not want to escalate the situation with any serious retaliation or military confrontation  though thats what some strident voices were calling for. But they couldnt resist scoring propaganda points against the Soviets  whatever the risk.

Meanwhile, in Moscow, there was a similar difference of opinion over what to do next. Yuri Andropov, the ageing and infirm Soviet leader, was furious with his blockhead generals for their a gross blunder in shooting down the plane.

It jeopardised his wish for better relations with the West and he was ready to admit the mistake publicly.

But his hawkish minister of defence, Dmitry Ustinov, persuaded him not to  at which point, Andropov left for a holiday in the Crimea, delegating the handling of the crisis to Ustinov.

Determined to protect the reputation of the Soviet military, Ustinov was blind to any technical deficiencies or command and control blunders that had contributed to the disaster.

He told a meeting of the Politburo  the ruling council of the Soviet Union  that our pilots were perfectly justified because in accordance with international regulations the aircraft was issued with several notices to land at our airfield.

There was unanimous agreement that this was provocation by an American spy plane, and so there was no need to show remorse or apologise for loss of life.

The Soviet news agency Tass went on the attack, claiming that KAL 007 had flown into Soviet airspace without clearance, had no navigation lights showing and had failed to respond to warnings.

Furthermore, it suggested that it had been a deliberate act intended to aggravate the international situation, to smear the Soviet Union, to show hostility to it and to cast aspersions on the Soviet peace-loving policy.

On both sides, the rhetoric grew ever more inflammatory. Reagan described what he called the Korean Airline Massacre as a monstrous wrong and a crime against humanity.

He admitted (at last) that there had been a U.S. spy plane in the area that night, but utterly dismissed any idea that the Korean airliner could have been mistaken for it.

It was an act of barbarism, born of a society which wantonly disregards the value of human life and seeks constantly to expand and dominate other nations, he said.

At the United Nations, the U.S. ambassador demanded to know why the USSR was lying.

The Kremlin hit back, giving a two-hour press conference in Moscow with maps and charts, in which a spokesman showed the route of the intruder and insisted that the Soviet air defences were certain it was an American reconnaissance plane.

It has been proved irrefutably that the intrusion of the South Korean Airlines plane into Soviet airspace was a deliberately, thoroughly planned intelligence operation, he added.

He then played an audio tape of the pilot, Ossipovich, telling his controller that hed fired warning shots across the bows of the airliner  something that the U.S. version of the tape had concealed.

This disproved American accusations that the jumbo jet had not been given any warning.

But then the Soviet spokesman lied, insisting that, according to Ossipovich, the plane was flying without its navigation lights flashing. Ossipovich later related how a senior officer ordered him to record these words on a tape after he landed  while the officer held an electric shaver near to the microphone to mimic background noise similar to that in real cockpit recordings.

Both sides were now going to extraordinary lengths to prove their case by faking the evidence, and damn the consequences. Both were now firmly entrenched and not only sticking to their stories but exaggerating them.

The Soviets maintained that the Korean airliner was on a spying mission masterminded by Washington and accused President Reagan of extreme adventurism and having imperial ambitions.

Back from his break, Russian leader Andropov, now persuaded that the U.S. was to blame, made it clear to his nation that relations with America were at an all-time low.

And so the accusations and denials went back and forth for four nerve-jangling weeks while the world watched in horror.

Eventually, both sides began to see sense and toned down the rhetoric  but they continued to blame each other, and the cost in loss of any trust between the two superpowers was immense and long-lasting.

In his memoirs, Reagan wrote that the KAL incident demonstrated how close the world had come to the precipice. Indeed, what this tragic incident illustrates is how a series of minor mistakes can rapidly escalate out of control.

To politicians on both sides, the incident immediately played into preconceived notions: the Soviets were paranoid and the Americans ready to believe anything bad about the Soviets.

The mis-programming of an airliners navigation system ended up not just with 269 lives snuffed out, but with the President of the United States abusing the Soviet leader, and the Kremlin talking of defending Mother Russia from American aggression.

This tragic accident of the Cold War was not the only scary incident. False alarms were frighteningly common during the period, with accidents, technical failures, computer malfunctions and human errors galore.

Looking back, it is nothing short of a miracle that nuclear war did not break out as a result. We can only hope our luck will hold.

n ADAPTED from 1983: The World At The Brink by Taylor Downing, published by Little Brown on April 26 at 20.  Taylor Downing 1983

To order a copy for 16 (offer valid to May 7, 2018 p&p free), visit www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640.
Jesus Ascencio Molina, 24, is charged with attempted murder and first-degree assault

A previously deported immigrant who returned to live in the US illegally has been accused of shooting his co-worker multiple times with a nail gun.

Mexican national Jesus Ascencio Molina, 24, was charged with attempted murder and first-degree assault in the construction site rampage on April 13 in Happy Valley, Oregon.

The victim, 24-year-old Andres C. Marcelo, was rushed by Life Flight to an area hospital and is in stable condition after suffering multiple nail impacts.

Molina was deported from the US in 2012 after a local arrest in Oregon, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman told the Daily Caller.

The horror incident unfolded last Friday at around 10am, in the town 15 miles southeast of downtown Portland.

Police say that Molina suddenly snapped inside the partly constructed home and shot the victim with a pneumatic nail gun several times.

Investigators haven't revealed a motive in the attack.

Police say that Molina suddenly snapped inside this partly constructed home at the corner of Tranquility Street and Morning Dew Road and shot the victim with a pneumatic nail gun

Medics are seen unloading the victim, 24-year-old Andres C. Marcelo, from the helicopter that rushed him to an area hospital. He is currently in stable condition

The suspect fled the scene on foot and police launched a manhunt that lasted the entire day and overnight, KTPV reported.

Molina was taken into custody early in the morning of April 14.

ICE has issued a detainer requesting that the Clackamas County Sheriff's Office notify the federal agency before releasing Molina.

But local officials are barred by Oregon state law from complying with such requests.

Deputies are seen conducting a search for Molina after he allegedly fled the scene on foot

'Even though we lodged a detainer, due to Clackamas County's policy of non-cooperation, it is unlikely that ICE will be notified in the event Ascencio-Molina is released from custody before his criminal case is resolved,' ICE spokeswoman spokeswoman Carissa Cutrell told the Daily Caller.

'The county does not notify us of releases,' she added.

Oregon's sanctuary state laws are among the strictest in the nation, prohibiting local law enforcement from using any resources to cooperation with federal immigration authorities.

It is unclear when or how Molina reentered the US after his removal in 2012, Cutrell said.

Molina is currently being held in Clackamas County Jail pending bail of $500,000.
Madeline Marx, a former substitute teacher in Ohio who pleaded guilty to having sex with students avoids jail time

A substitute high school teacher in Ohio will not be serving time behind bars after pleading guilty to having sex with two of her students.

Madeline Marx pleaded guilty in March to two counts of sexual battery involving students while she was a teacher at Kettering Fairmont High School. Her lawyer initially tried to enter a plea of not guilty by insanity.

She was pulled from her classroom and arrested in November after police started investigating the teacher when student went to administration saying she was having inappropriate relationships with students.

Prosecutors said her victims were both 16-year-old boys.

On Thursday, a Montgomery County pleas court judge sentenced the 24-year-old former educator but opted out of giving her jail time.

Marx (pictured on the left in court on Thursday) broke down in tears as she apologized to the victims' families

Marx, pictured at that hearing in December, was teaching at Kettering Fairmont High School when she was arrested for sexual battery involving students

Instead, Marx was sentenced to five years probation for both sexual battery counts, ABC 22 reports.

Marx broke down in tears during her sentencing apologizing to the victims' families.

'I cannot express how sorry I am for what I've done to the victims and their families,' she told the judge. 'I'm so sorry.'

Judge Steven Danok thanked Marx saying the former teacher hadn't been in trouble with the law before and cooperated with authorities once she was caught, according to ABC.

He also said that he had received 38 letters of support for Marx and the parents of one of the victims asked that she be given probation.

'The court believes these offenses are not likely to recur,' Dankof said. 'This is extremely significant to the court, that Ms. Marx has shown genuine remorse for the offense.'

'We want you to be successful on probation, we want you to be successful on community control,' he told Marx.

Prosecutors said the victims were both 16-year-old boys at Kettering Fairmont High School. Marx is now a tier III sex offender and must register her address every three months

Montgomery County Assistant Prosecutor Dylan Smearcheck said he was pleased with the sentence Marx received.

'Because Ms Marx plead guilty in this case, the victims were spared reliving this through a trial,' he said. 'Additionally Ms Marx is going to have to register for the rest of her life as a sex offender and will never be able to teach again.'

Marx is now a tier III sex offender and must register her address every three months. If she violates her probation she can be thrown in jail.
The Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson has secured a 'veto' over the sale of sensitive parts of GKN's business by its controversial new owners.

Asset-stripper Melrose told the stock exchange this week that it had completed its 8billion takeover of the 259-year-old engineering firm.

Ministers were reported to have raised 'no national security concerns' despite GKN's substantial defence interests.

But Whitehall sources said last night Mr Williamson had raised a number of concerns about the sale that will result in restrictions on Melrose's ability to sell off parts of the firm to foreign bidders.

Melrose will have to agree new concessions in the coming fortnight before the deal is given the green light by Business Secretary Greg Clark.

The Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson (pictured) has secured a 'veto' over the sale of sensitive parts of GKN's business by its controversial new owners

Sources said last night Mr Williamson had demanded an 'effective veto' on national security grounds over the onward sale of parts of the firm.

The move is a victory for the Daily Mail, which has campaigned against the sale of a firm that has been supplying Britain's armed forces since it produced cannonballs for use in the Battle of Waterloo.

Whitehall sources said Mr Clark and the Cabinet Office had both been keen to wave through the bid until the Mail's campaign got under way.

'This would have just gone through on the nod if no one had kicked up a fuss,' a source said.

The outcome also underlines Mr Williamson's growing Cabinet influence.

An ally said: 'He's dug his heels in and won a significant concession that will mean vital defence parts of GKN can't be sold into foreign hands without the backing of the Defence Secretary.'

Officials are now drawing up a legal 'deed' that Melrose will be asked to sign before the takeover is approved.

The document will require the firm to seek the approval of the Defence Secretary before selling on specified parts of the company's operations abroad.

GKN is involved in a number of sensitive areas and has access to classified government information that ministers do not want to see fall into foreign hands.

These include parts for the F-35 fast jets, the Typhoon fighter and the A400M transport plane. The composite technology used in the A400M's wings is regarded as vital in keeping Britain at the cutting edge of the aerospace industry.

Asset-stripper Melrose told the stock exchange this week that it had completed its 8billion takeover of the 259-year-old engineering firm. Williamson had raised a number of concerns about the sale that will result in restrictions on Melrose's ability to sell off parts

Mr Williamson's demands go significantly further than the 'guarantees' secured by Mr Clark, which critics said were 'not worth the paper they're written on'. But they will not prevent the controversial deal from going ahead.

Ministers have concluded that there are no legal grounds for referring the deal to the Competition and Markets Authority and Mr Clark is expected to give his formal approval within the next fortnight.

Melrose had already made a 'legally binding' commitment to the Business Secretary not to sell off GKN's aerospace division for five years. But critics said the pledge was worthless as it would not prevent the firm floating the division on the stock market or selling to a 'suitable purchaser'.

The new restriction is tougher as it would require the consent of the Defence Secretary and applies indefinitely if the proposed sale is to a foreign bidder.

Under competition laws, which are based on EU regulations, the GKN deal could only be halted on national security grounds.

Mr Clark has previously suggested there was no objection in principle to the outcome of the 'battle between two British companies'.

Melrose, which calls itself a 'turnaround specialist', has been branded the 'unacceptable face of capitalism' for its practice of buying firms and breaking them up.

Its bosses Simon Peckham, Christopher Miller, David Roper and Geoffrey Martin could share as much as 285million personally as a result of the takeover.

Airbus, GKN's biggest customer, has already warned it would be 'practically impossible' to give further work to the firm if it comes under the control of owners with a short-term outlook.

The deal was also controversial because of the activity of ruthless hedge funds that snapped up 25 per cent of GKN's shares in a matter of weeks in order to vote for a deal that was approved by a margin of 52:48.

Some ministers are pushing for the UK to tighten up takeover law after leaving the EU to protect strategically important British companies from predators.

Former deputy prime minister Lord Heseltine said the deal was not in the national interest, adding: 'No other country of our sort would have allowed this.'

But Mr Clark told MPs that under the law he had only 'narrow grounds' to intervene. Only if the Ministry of Defence's concerns could not be satisfied would a referral to the CMA be considered.

The Business Secretary has until the end of July to rule on the deal, but is expected to make an announcement in the next two weeks.
An elderly Windrush pensioner has been torn from his UK family and left stranded in Jamaica despite working in Britain for more than half a century.

Grandfather Clayton Barnes, 82, who moved to England in 1959, has been barred from returning to the country for the past eight years.

The retired roofer from Milton Keynes  currently ill in hospital  had gone to Jamaica to renovate his house after it was damaged in a hurricane in 2010.

Claytons' daughter Samantha Barnes-Garner, 48, (second from the right) with her children from left Maisie, Bryce and Luke. Clayton, 82, is stuck in Jamaica and cannot get back to the UK despite working in Britain for 51 years

Clayton Barnes in Hospital in Mandeville Jamiaca - he is unable to return to England after living and working there for more than 50 years

Clayton was told his indefinite leave to remain in the UK was no longer valid as he had not returned within the two-year time limit

But in 2013 when he tried to fly back to England, where his two daughters and five grandchildren live, he was told his indefinite leave to remain in the UK was no longer valid as he had not returned within the two-year time limit.

Mr Barnes said: I feel terrible, like I am being treated as a criminal. I came here to fix up the house so I could split my retirement between Jamaica and England but now Im told I cant go back.

It is like I have been deported  England was my home, I lived there, worked there, married there and had children there. I worked hard, paid my taxes and have no criminal record. Why cant I come back?

The pensioner was admitted to a public hospital in the town of Mandeville this month, on a ward with dozens of other patients.

Clayton Barnes' British passport from 1959, the year he moved to the UK

Shadow Home Secretary Dianne Abbott, pictured, addressed a demonstration in Windrush Square, Brixton, on Friday in support of Caribbean migrants under threat of wrongful deportation

Ms Abbott demanded the government release figures of how many people have been deported and the number of people who have been deported

He has suffered with a build-up of fluid on his lungs and heart after years of asbestos exposure while working as a roofer and builder in England.

After paying taxes in the UK for 51 years, Mr Barnes had hoped he would have access to the NHS in old age.

Speaking from hospital, he said: I would rather be in England to get treatment with my family nearby.

They do their best here but they do not have the facilities. Mr Barnes was yesterday expected to spend five more days in hospital after being given too high a dose of blood-thinning drugs.

As a member of the Windrush generation, he was given indefinite leave to remain in the UK after arriving at 23 on a Jamaican passport to join his mother.

Several hundred people gathered in the sunshine to protest against the Home Office's attempts to deport Windrush children

Prime Minister Theresa May and Home Secretary Amber Rudd have faced heavy criticism for their handling of the Windrush scandal which was caused by a change in government policy

He first lived in Kilburn, north-west London, and worked as a shoemaker before moving to Milton Keynes and marrying his wife Lena, who was from Barbados.

Mr Barnes owned a house in Milton Keynes but sold it following the break-up of his marriage after more than 20 years, and was living in a property owned by his daughter before he travelled to Jamaica.

He had never felt the need to apply for a UK passport as he was able to travel freely to and from England with the indefinite leave stamp on his existing passport without any problems.

He has holidayed in Jamaica, where his two sisters live, several times and always returned without issue.

Prime Minister Theresa May (pictured at the Commonwealth summit conference in London on Friday) said that 'where appropriate' those who lost out in the fiasco' will get a payout

Ms Abbott told the crowd that an entire generation had been turned into criminals by the Government's policy

But in 2013 when he tried to fly back to Britain for Christmas he was told his leave was invalid as he had not returned within the time limit and the stamp had expired.

His daughter Samantha Barnes-Garner, 48, has repeatedly tried and failed to obtain even a short stay visa for him to visit for special occasions.

She said: We had no idea there was a time limit  It was never ever mentioned to us. We assumed indefinite leave to remain meant just that  Im appalled at how my dad has been treated.

The dance teacher fears her fathers health will deteriorate further with age and he will not be able to access the right care.

He has worked all his life in the UK, paid his taxes and his national insurance so it is only right he can come here and access the NHS, she added.

But he is being denied all that  He cannot even come to visit for Christmas and has missed so many other things like my sons graduation. Its devastating.

I would hate for my dad to die without being able to visit England one more time  where he lived his life and had his children.

The Windrush generation were given indefinite leave to remain after arriving from the Commonwealth between the late 1940s and early 1970s to help rebuild post-war Britain.

But in recent weeks it has emerged that many have been denied the right to live and work in the UK, been threatened with deportation or found themselves stranded abroad because of a Home Office crackdown.

Although Mr Barness family are confident he has a case, they have been reluctant to pursue it legally because of his age and the costs.

The grandfather, who still gets his UK pension, said he had been robbed of enjoying retirement. Asked what he would say to the Prime Minister, he said: I would ask her, Why cant I come back?

Theresa May has been forced to issue several apologies over the scandal. The Home Office has been unable to provide clarity on how many people were wrongly removed or refused re-entry.

Last night the number of cases being looked at as a result of calls to the Home Offices dedicated helpline stood at 286. Eight people had been given permanent status.
Hypersonic missiles that can fly at many times the speed of sound have received a near $1 billion (710 million) funding boost in the US to compete with rival nations' efforts.

The Pentagon has pushed through development of the highly manoeuvrable weapons, which are designed to outpace detection and defensive capabilities.

It follows repeated warnings from senior officials about rapid advances by China and Russia, who have unveiled their own versions in recent months.

Arsenals of the ultra-fast intercontinental weapons could also be equipped with nuclear warheads with the capability of delivering devastating strikes across the planet.

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The contract has been awarded to Lockheed Martin, based in Bethesda, Maryland, to design and develop a hypersonic missile that can be launched from a warplane. This 2010 file photo shows rival Boeing's X-51A WaveRider hypersonic vehicle under a B-52 bomber

The contract has been awarded to Lockheed Martin, based in Bethesda, Maryland, to design and develop a hypersonic missile that can be launched from a warplane.

In a statement, the Pentagon said Lockheed will receive up to $928 million (661 million) to build a new, non-nuclear missile it is calling the 'hypersonic conventional strike weapon.'

'This contract provides for the design, development, engineering, systems integration, test, logistics planning, and aircraft integration support of all the elements of a hypersonic, conventional, air-launched, stand-off weapon,' the statement read.

On Thursday, Mike Griffin, the Pentagon's new defense undersecretary for research and engineering, said China had built 'a pretty mature system' for a hypersonic missile to strike from thousands of kilometres (miles) away.

'We will, with today's defensive systems, not see these things coming,' Mr Griffin said.

Hypersonic weapons can beat regular anti-missile defences as they are designed to switch direction in flight.

They also do not follow a predictable ballistic arc like conventional missiles, making them much harder to track and intercept.

Hypersonic weapons can beat regular anti-missile defenses This artist's impression, courtesy of the US Air Force, shows Boeing's hypersonic X-51A Waverider cruise missile currently under development

This computer simulation shows how a hypersonic missile or other vehicle, in this case the Russian Avangard glider, could manoeuvre at high speed to bypass missile defences en route to its target

Russian President Vladimir Putin in February claimed to have developed a new type of hypersonic missile that is impervious to any Western shield.

Gary Pennett, director of operations at the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), recently said enemy hypersonic weapons - which could be launched from planes, ships or submarines - would create a 'significant' gap in US sensor and missile interceptor capabilities.

The MDA has asked for $120 million (85 million) to develop hypersonic missile defenses, a big increase from the $75 million (53 million) in fiscal 2018.

According to reports, China developed and last year tested a new type of hypersonic missile called the DF-17.

The DF-17 is a ballistic missile equipped with a hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV), which is said to be capable of achieving speeds of up to 7,680 miles per hour (12,360 kph)  or 10 times the speed of sound.

According to reports, China has developed and last year tested a new type of hypersonic missile called the DF-17. Since 2013, China has conducted seven successful test flights of its hypersonic craft (model pictured in a state-TV documentary)

Pictured is an official artist's impression of China's DF-17 hypersonic craft. Hypersonic vehicles travel so rapidly and unpredictably they could provide an almost-immediate threat to nations across the globe

In tests conducted in November 2017, the missiles payload flew roughly 870 miles (1,400km) in about 11 minutes with the HGV, though intelligence experts suspect it could one day achieve over 1,500 miles (2,500 km).

Russia too is believed to be developing its own hypersonic weapon called the Zircon.

The Zircon cruise missile travels between 3,800mph (6,115kph) and 4,600mph (7,400kph) - five to six times the speed of sound - and puts Russia 'half a decade' ahead of the US'.

This makes it faster than any anti-missile system, including those that are expected to appear in the next two decades.

According to Russian news agency Tass, it is to go into serial production this year.

Russia's Zircon missile is capable of travelling twice as fast as the Royal Navy's Sea Ceptor missile (pictured), which would be responsible for shooting it down were it to attack British troops or mainland UK

It would also be more than capable of evading US defences. This image shows a ground-based interceptor missile taking off from Vandenberg Air Force base, California last year in a test against an ICBM

Though the Pentagon is warning about hypersonics, the United States has been developing the technology for years.

The Air Force says its X-51A Waverider cruise missile, tested in 2012, could travel at speeds faster than Mach 6 (4,603mph / 7,408kph).

That's more than one mile a second, and future iterations are expected to go much faster.

Part of the reason China has been able to advance its hypersonic missile programs is that it is not subject to anti-missile treaties signed between the United States and Russia.

The 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty banned short- and intermediate-range ground-launched missiles.
A tribe of 'superhuman' Indonesians have evolved larger spleens that allow them to dive more than 200ft.

A genetic adaptation  similar to one found in seals  makes their spleens 50 per cent larger than normal.

The evolutionary quirk, developed over hundreds or thousands of years, enables the Bajau tribe of 'fish people' in Indonesia to work eight-hour diving shifts to spear fish and octopus for their families.

The spleen is vital for this, allowing divers to stay under for longer. The organ contracts to inject oxygenated red blood cells into the bloodstream.

A tribe of 'superhuman' Indonesians have evolved larger spleens that allow them to dive more than 200ft. A genetic adaptation makes their spleens 50 per cent larger than normal

Members of the tribe can dive up to 230ft aided by nothing more than a set of weights and a pair of goggles. Their spleens are 50 per cent larger than those of their land-dwelling neighbours, the Saluan.

'It's fascinating to think that they're almost like superhumans living among us with these extraordinary capabilities,' said Dr Melissa Ilardo of the University of Copenhagen, who led a study on the divers.

'Natural selection is a lot more powerful than we sometimes give it credit for.'

Contraction of the spleen is a key way in which mammals respond to diving and some deep-diving seals, such as Weddell seals, have enlarged spleens. But it had never previously been seen in humans.

The spleen can boost oxygen levels by nine per cent and one member of the Bajau tribe told Dr Ilardo he had once been underwater without breathing equipment for 13 minutes.

The evolutionary quirk, developed over hundreds or thousands of years, enables the Bajau tribe of 'fish people' in Indonesia to work eight-hour diving shifts to spear fish and octopus

The researcher spent several months in Jaya Bakti, Indonesia, taking genetic samples and conducting ultrasound scans of people from the Bajau and land-dwelling Saluan tribes.

The evidence showed that Bajau spleens were permanently enlarged, and did not get bigger simply as a response to diving. Members of the tribe who did not dive had the same characteristic.

DNA analysis showed that the Bajau have a gene called PDE10A that is lacking in the Saluan. The gene is thought to alter spleen size by adjusting thyroid hormone levels.

For more than 1,000 years, the Bajau  known as 'Sea Nomads'  have crossed the seas of southern Asia in house boats, catching fish by free-diving with spears. The study was published in the journal Cell.
Nasa has revealed a revised timeline for its highly-anticipated lunar outpost.

Known as the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, the outpost will be in orbit around the moon by 2025.

It is intended to be a 'staging' area to help study the lunar surface. Eventually, it will act as a stop-off station for astronauts traveling to and from Mars.

With contracts being handed out next year, Nasa hopes to start construction in 2022.

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Nasa has revealed a revised timeline for its highly-anticipated lunar outpost. Known as the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, the outpost will be in orbit around the moon by 2025

Associate administrator William Gerstenmaier revealed the timeline this week at the Space Symposium conference in Colorado.

He said that Nasa will start spending money on the project next year, with the power and propulsion elements scheduled for funding in early 2019, according to Bloomberg.

Habitation modules are next on the agenda, and these will all be sent towards the moon in 2022.

These estimates are assuming construction goes to plan and there are no hiccups along the way.

Missions to the lunar base will get there via an Orion spacecraft, which can carry up to four astronauts at a time.

Astronauts will be on board the lunar space station for 30 days before heading back to Earth.

The Orion spacecraft is currently being built by aerospace company Lockheed Martin, and it expects to launch an unmanned mission next year.

'Development of the gateway has great momentum, and we are providing our expertise as Nasa looks to industry to bring know-how to this important effort,' Lockheed said in a statement.

Mr Gerstenmaier said the program has 'fiscal realism' and is adaptable.

'It can adapt to commercial partners. It's not a rigid program of one mission following another.'

'As long as we view the moon as a stepping stone and not an end goal, I think we're OK.'

WHAT IS THE LUNAR ORBITAL-PLATFORM GATEWAY? The Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, previously known as the Deep Space Gateway, will orbit the moon. Nasa says it will open up opportunities for future exploration of deep space, as well as a return to the moon and missions to Mars. The first modules of the station will be completed as soon as 2025 with construction starting in 2022. Similar to the International Space Station, this new space station will be open to to astronauts and cosmonauts globally. It could provide a staging point for the proposed Deep Space Transport vessel, which is designed to send astronauts and cosmonauts around the solar system. China and India as well as other members of the BRICS Nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) may join. The mission will give more information about the moon and also allow easy access to Mars. Advertisement

Similar to the International Space Station, this new space station will be open to astronauts and cosmonauts globally.

'At the first stage we will construct an orbital part with the further goal of implementing the fulfilled technologies on the moon, and later on Mars,' Russia's space agency Roscosmos Igor Komarov said in 2017.

China and India as well as other members of the BRICS Nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) may also join the programme.

The Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway will be launched using Nasa's Space Launch System (SLS).

Nasa's Space Launch System, or SLS, is an advanced launch vehicle that will 'provide the foundation for human exploration beyond Earth's orbit', according to the space agency.

The Gateway will use a system similar to the one which allows commercial vehicles to dock with the International Space Station.

This would allow the Deep Space Transport vehicle - which will take humans to Mars - to dock with the Gateway.

The Deep Space Transport vessel is also designed to send astronauts and cosmonauts around the solar system.

Once near Mars, crews could deploy a lander for surface missions. It can also conduct other scientific and robotic missions while in orbit.

The Deep Space Transport vehicle (artist's impression pictured) - which would take humans to Mars - will dock with the Gateway and allow astronauts to travel to the red planet

'NASA is leading the next steps into deep space near the moon, where astronauts will build and begin testing the systems needed for challenging missions to deep space destinations including Mars', the space agency said in a statement laying out their plans in March.

'The area of space near the moon offers a true deep space environment to gain experience for human missions that push farther into the solar system, access the lunar surface for robotic missions but with the ability to return to Earth if needed in days rather than weeks or months.'

The project will help determine whether water near the surface could be used to manufacture propellant for missions even deeper into space.

It would also allow spacecrafts to make use of the moon's gravity to slow down after a six-month journey to mars and back.

The transport vehicle would be equipped with accommodation specifically designed to protect passengers from deep space's harsh environment.

The Gateway itself will be powered by a Solar Electric Propulsion (SEP) system, a new technology developed by Nasa.

Potential creators Boeing have released their vision for how the future staging area for missions to Mars will appear (artist's impression pictured)

'The gateway and transport could potentially support mission after mission as a hub of activity in deep space near the moon, representing multiple countries and agencies with partners from both government and private industry', the Nasa statement said.

Potential creators Boeing have released their vision for how the future staging area for missions to Mars will appear.

SEP is powered by solar arrays and uses ten times less energy than conventional rocket propulsion systems.

It has already been proven on the Dawn spacecraft - launched by Nasa in September 2007 to study two proto-planets in the asteroid belt found between Mars and Jupiter.

Nasa hopes that the SEP will be used to power future missions within our solar system, including Mars.
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Adorable images have been released of a gorilla bonding with her newborn baby.

Western lowland gorilla Shanga, whos part of a troop at Chessington World of Adventures Resort, gave birth yesterday morning.

The pictures show her cuddling her yet-to-be-named little one, who only weighs around three pounds.

Adorable images have been released of a gorilla bonding with her new baby. Western lowland gorilla Shanga, whos part of a troop at Chessington World of Adventures Resort, gave birth yesterday morning

The baby is yet to be named - and its sex is not known yet. It only weighs just over three pounds

Chessington World of Adventures said on its Facebook page: We have some exciting news to share with you Adventurers, our troop of Western lowland gorillas have welcomed a new baby!

Yesterday morning, mother Shanga, gave birth. We are still waiting to find out the sex to then name the little one, but we will keep you posted.

This is early days and a sensitive time as mother and baby bond, however they are both currently doing well and we wanted to ensure you, our Adventurers, were first to know.

Speaking on a video that accompanies the post, primate keeper Daryl says: Shanga is a second-time mother. She is 17 years old. She has a daughter who is six years old this July. A newborn baby gorilla weighs about three and a half pounds. The baby is doing really well and suckling for mother's milk.'

Chessington World of Adventures said on its Facebook page: We have some exciting news to share with you Adventurers, our troop of Western Lowland gorillas have welcomed a new baby! Yesterday morning, mother Shanga, gave birth. We are still waiting to find out the sex to then name the little one, but we will keep you posted.' Western lowland gorillas, which inhabit African forests, are listed as a critically endangered species

Western lowland gorillas, which inhabit African forests, are listed as a critically endangered species.

The WWF says on its website: Populations can be found in Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Equatorial Guinea as well as in large areas in Gabon and the Republic of Congo.

The exact number of western lowland gorillas is not known because they inhabit some of the most dense and remote rainforests in Africa.

Significant populations still exist, including in isolated swamps and the remote swampy forests of the Republic of Congo.

The WWF says that Western lowland gorillas can be distinguished from other subspecies by their slightly smaller size.

It adds: Large numbers have not protected the western lowland gorilla from decline. Because of poaching and disease, the gorillas numbers have declined by more than 60 per cent over the last 20 to 25 years.

Chessington recently announced a new multi-million-pound Land of the Tiger attraction, featuring an innovative enclosure and Europes first overhead trails.

It will contain a family of four endangered Amur tigers and will open next weekend.
She is expecting a boy with husband Jose Baston.

And on Thursday, Eva Longoria was seen in Santa Monica, enjoying a day of shopping for her little one.

The brunette beauty was seen carrying a bag from children's clothing store, Ron Robinson.

Prepping for his arrival: On Thursday, Eva Longoria, 43, was seen in Santa Monica, enjoying a day of shopping for her new little one

The 43-year-old wore a simple, black dress layered underneath a casual jacket.

The Corpus Christi, Texas native paired her monochrome look with a set of white sneakers.

Eva accessorized with a pair of shades, jewelry, a chain cross-body bag and sunglasses.

Relaxed and casual: The actress wore a simple, black dress layered underneath a casual jacket

Eva is currently pregnant with her first child, who will reportedly arrive next month.

The former Desperate Housewives star is set to welcome a son with Jose Baston, 50, her husband of nearly two years.

Prior to their relationship, her network president husband was married for 10 years to actress Natlia Esperon, with whom he shares four children.

In love: Eva is currently pregnant with her first child with husband Jose Baston, 50. They are seen in Hollywood this week

Eva, who currently received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, spoke of the emotions she's feeling prior to her son's arrival.

'[I'm] excited but nervous. Nervous, excited, emotional,' she told People.

When it comes to the baby's arrival, the star said that her family will also be present, though not in the delivery room.

'They won't be in the delivery room but they'll be there,' she said.
The Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society (12A)

Rating:

Funny Cow (15)

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As if The Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society were not enough of a mouthful, it comes from the producers of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and the director of Four Weddings And A Funeral.

The sides of buses might not offer enough space for the marketing campaign; they should consider goods trains.

In fact, it was a book before it was a film, the first and only novel written by a librarian from West Virginia called Mary Ann Shaffer, who died in 2008 shortly before it was published.

I cant speak for the book, but on screen it doesnt seem like a story conceived by an American. It is a thoroughly British tale, which unfolds in 1946, partly in London, but mostly on Guernsey. There are occasional flashbacks to the Channel Islands in wartime, during the German occupation.

Lily James arrives in Guernsey in Potato Peel Pie

Maxine Peake with Paddy Considine in Funny Cow

The film is probably best described as a romance and a mystery rolled into one, not always convincingly, although it is as easily digestible as a mug of cocoa on a Sunday evening. Indeed, if ever a visit to the cinema could feel like a lazy Sunday night in front of the telly, thats the comfort blanket under which we are encouraged to snuggle.

Pertinently, the film is also something of a Downton Abbey reunion, with Lily James leading a cast that includes Penelope Wilton, Jessica Brown Findlay and Matthew Goode. Reading my notes, I see that during one of the longueurs  and in the course of two hours-plus there are several  I idly pondered what might be the collective noun for Downton actors. Answers on a sepia postcard. My wife favours a kedgeree.

Anyway, James plays Juliet Ashton, a doe-eyed metropolitan beauty who also happens to be a slightly reluctant writer of best-selling adventure stories, and who is swept off her dainty feet by a dashing Yank (Glen Powell).

Juliets gilded life is tarnished only by the memory of her parents, killed by a German bomb, plus the odd dose of writers block.

But mostly she manages to have a ripping time in post-war London, leaving the management of her increasingly successful career to her handsome and urbane literary agent Sidney (Goode).

He is devoted to her, and she to him, but he is gay . . . and not in the 1946 sense of the word. The Channel Islands are not remotely on Juliets radar until she receives a speculative letter from a Guernsey pig-farmer named Dawsey Adams (Dutch actor Michiel Huisman), who tells her about his book club and its unusual origins.

Conveniently, a flashback has already explained its bizarre name, invented late at night in a country lane to justify to the Nazi occupiers why Dawsey and a gaggle of fellow islanders were breaking curfew.

Juliet and Dawsey strike up a correspondence driven by their mutual love of books and soon she heads for Guernsey to write a newspaper article about the society.

There, she finds that one of the founders, a spirited lass called Elizabeth (Brown Findlay), got herself into a bit of a pickle during the occupation and disappeared almost without trace. Thats the mystery with which Juliet wrestles, though no more energetically than she might grapple with a jammed typewriter key.

More significantly, she also finds that Dawsey the pig-farmer is a bit of all right. Another mystery  why he speaks with a slight Amsterdam accent  occurs only to us, the audience. Did he grow up in the only Dutch-speaking part of Guernsey?

Never mind. That question is soon trumped by another one. Will Juliet stay faithful to her sophisticated American back in the city, to whom she is now engaged, or will she let Dawsey bring home the bacon?

The answer is never really in doubt, though the film keeps us waiting while Juliet is slowly gathered to the bosom of Dawseys friends, played with relish and charm by Tom Courtenay (lovable local postmaster), Wilton (stern but with a heart of gold, as in Downton) and a scene-stealing Katherine Parkinson as a gin-soaked eccentric.

Throughout all this, the score soars and simpers in all the right places, while the scenery looks absolutely radiant. I dare say the book makes more of the bonding power of literature, but veteran director Mike Newell lets that message melt away as, with moderate success, he swaddles us in gentle escapism.

 There is nothing gentle about Funny Cow, set mainly in the Seventies, in which Maxine Peake gives a ferocious, bravura performance as the title character, whose actual name is never revealed. She is a graduate of the school of very hard knocks, bullied in childhood by an abusive father (Stephen Graham), and in adulthood by a drink-sodden husband (Tony Pitts, who also wrote the screenplay). She seems imprisoned by her background. But she has a sharp Yorkshire wit and yearns to be a stand-up comedian.

At first, Funny Cow appears to be leading us to the kind of resolution we saw in Educating Rita, Shirley Valentine, Billy Elliot . . . all those films in which working-class Northerners raised to expect a life of narrow horizons are set free by their talent or force of personality. But Funny Cow isnt that kind of story.

Peakes character is a survivor, and its clear that shes destined for more success than the only stand-up she knows (Alun Armstrong, in superb, lugubrious form), a sad, disillusioned failure, who assures her that shell never conquer the unforgiving world of working mens clubs.

Women arent funny, he says, I dont know why, theyre just not.

Except she is, even if she has to tell racist and homophobic gags to prove it.

However, its equally clear, from early on, that Adrian Shergolds film wont end with us bursting out of the cinema feeling full of inspiration and love.

It is resolutely downbeat, yet there is so much to admire, including Richard Hawleys music, a lovely turn from Paddy Considine as a genteel bookshop owner, and fleeting but memorable cameos by John Bishop as an Elvis impersonator with his own hound dog, and Vic Reeves as a rubbish ventriloquist.

Teen fantasy to leave you in good spirits...

Every Day (12A)

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Aimed squarely at teens and young adults, Every Day is a romantic fantasy adapted for the screen, from a novel of the same name, by Jesse Andrews.

He also wrote the novel Me And Earl And The Dying Girl, and the subsequent screenplay for the excellent film version, so he has an impressive pedigree and it shows. Every Day, directed by Michael Sucsy, bowls along likably.

The idea is that a benign spirit wakes up every day in the form of a different American teenager. One day it might be male, the next female.

It could be black, white, fat, slim, but whatever body it inhabits, it spends 24 hours being the best version of that person it can be.

When it injects decency and compassion into her normally boorish boyfriend, 16-year-old Rhiannon (Angourie Rice, pictured) then continues to fall in love with it in every subsequent form it takes.

Aimed squarely at teens and young adults, Every Day is a romantic fantasy adapted for the screen, from a novel of the same name, by Jesse Andrews

For a high-concept fantasy to work perfectly, as films such as Big (1988) and Groundhog Day (1993) did all those years ago, it must sweep you along, posing no questions that cant be satisfactorily answered.

Every Day doesnt quite achieve that. It too often trips over its own rather unwieldy premise. But it has energy and charm, and its always nice to see an inversion of the standard horror-film trope of good people being possessed by evil spirits.

Helen and Donald's double act goes on and on and on

The Leisure Seeker (15)

Rating:

Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland, in their first film together for nearly 30 years, sounds like an enticing double-act.

But be warned. Mirren isnt often miscast, yet she fails to convince in this wincingly mawkish, bittersweet comedy, adapted from a novel of the same name, about a couple in their twilight years heading on one final road trip.

Even with shapeless clothes and a bad wig, she looks far too spry to be an old woman at deaths door, as the script intends. And while the great Dame can essay an American accent with the best of them, it was a mistake to make her a fading South Carolina belle. Her Charleston vowels fade in and out like a radio station with a dodgy signal.

Mirren and Sutherland play Ella and John Spencer, who set off from their New England home in their antiquated Leesure Seeker, a 1975 Winnebago, without telling their two rather prissy grown-up children. Theyre heading for Ernest Hemingways house in Key West, Florida.

Woes: Mirren and Sutherland

John is a long-retired English teacher now in the grip of Alzheimers disease. But like Ella, director Paolo Virzi doesnt know quite how to handle his dementia, mining it for laughs one minute, and for poignancy the next. Meanwhile, Ella is maddeningly voluble; she simply will not shut up. Nor will he as soon as he finds a waitress he thinks might want to listen to his theories about Hemingway.

Most dont, of course, until, waddya know, he encounters one who did The Old Man And The Sea as her college dissertation.

In the spirit of all bad road-trip films, the Spencers encounter just about every conceivable misadventure. A lecture from a traffic cop, check. A few dangerous swerves, check. A hold-up by a couple of desperadoes, check.

As they proceed, John drifts in and out of lucidity, but increasingly she seems like the one with the bad memory, looking tragically pained every time he forgets his own childrens names, then beaming with adoration when he finds some sustained clarity, as if his condition keeps slipping her mind as well as his.

As all this goes on  and on, and on  we learn more and more about their long marriage, which includes one great rattling skeleton in Johns closet.

We also learn that Ellas first boyfriend 60 or so years earlier was black. In South Carolina, in the Fifties? Really? If she was a lifelong card-carrying liberal then maybe, just maybe. But shes fiercely Republican. Like so much else in this well-intentioned but woefully disappointing film, it doesnt stack up.
She is newly single after announcing her split from fiance, Jamie Mazur, last month.

But on Thursday, Alessandra Ambrosio was all about the fun and games as she enjoyed rides at the Santa Monica Pier.

The Victoria's Secret vet looked stunning in distressed light-wash jeans and a brown-and-gold Gucci belt.

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Off the runway: Alessandra Ambrosio showed off her natural beauty in distressed jeans and a white sweater as she enjoyed lunch at The Ivy in Santa Monica with a male friend on Thursday

The Brazilian beauty paired the laid-back look with a white V-neck sweater and a brown leather handbag by The Kooples.

Putting her best foot forward, she sported gold lace-up sneakers as she kept a pair of black tinted designer sunglasses over her eyes.

Showing off her natural beauty, Alessandra wore barely-there makeup and tied half of her brown tresses back away from her face.

Supermodel strut: The Brazilian beauty paired the laid-back look with a white V-neck sweater and a brown leather handbag by The Kooples

Ever the fashionista, the cover girl matched her look with a beaded gold necklace and earrings, as well as a pendant necklace.

Walking alongside the fashion star was a male companion, who matched her casual attire in a black hoodie and ripped jeans.

The duo made their way to lunch at The Ivy in Santa Monica before enjoying the amusing rides on the pier.

Fun and games: The duo quickly made their way to the Santa Monica Pier where they rode the roller coaster and Ferris wheel

Amusing: The mother-of-two took to Instagram to share some humorous videos of her jaunt on the beach's roller coaster

Alessandra kept her cellphone, clad in a hot pink case, in hand, which she made sure to use during her outing.

The mother-of-two took to Instagram to share some humorous videos of her jaunt on the beach's roller coaster.

Her outing comes one month after her split from fiance Jamie Mazur, who is also the father of her two children - daughter Anja, nine, and son Noah, five.

Shady lady: The mother-of-two donned dark designer sunglasses over her eyes and accessorized with a gold necklace and earrings

Newly single: Her outing comes one month after her split from fiance of ten years, Jamie Mazur; pictured in November 2017

'They [have] been trying to keep their split on the down low,' an insider told Us Weekly.

'But Alessandra has been out and about ready to mingle and hasn't been taking Jamie to anything.'

Alessandra and RE/DONE founder Mazur were first engaged back in 2008 and despite their decade long engagement, the couple did not seem to be in any hurry to get married.

'If I have been engaged to him for eight years, then it's not my priority,' she told the publication previously.

'I have a lot of things going on, and I haven't got married because I'm so busy. I'll think about that when I have time off.'

Alessandra retired from walking the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show catwalk in 2017 after nearly two decades on the famous runway.
Chris Heisser was charged with four misdemeanors stemming from a DUI arrest in February near Thousand Oaks, Calif., according to The Blast.

Court reports listed that Heisser was charged with Driving While Under the Influence, Driving While Having a .08 percent Or Higher Blood Alcohol Concentration, and two counts each of Driving with Blood Alcohol of .15 or more.

Chris was arrested shortly after authorities were called to Heather Locklear's home on February 26 regarding a domestic battery assault against the former Melrose Place actress.

Happier days: Chris Heisser was charged with four misdemeanors stemming from a DUI arrest in February near Thousand Oaks, Calif., according to The Blast; seen on Instagram

Authorities observed Heisser's Mercedes driving 'at an unusually slow speed' southbound on the 101 Freeway in Thousand Oaks, according to The Blast.

Once approaching the vehicle, officers noticed signs and symptoms of intoxication of alcohol and performed a field sobriety test were Chris allegedly blew a .19 and .20 on a breatalyzer.

The arrest came just hours after his girlfriend was arrested after she allegedly 'battered her boyfriend' before authorities arrived to the home.

Sad: Chris was arrested shortly after authorities were called to Heather Locklear's home on February 26 regarding a domestic battery assault against the former Melrose Place actress; seen on Instagram

Heather Locklear pleaded not guilty to charges she attacked deputies who answered a domestic violence call at her Southern California home.

Locklear's attorney entered the plea to four misdemeanor counts of battery on an officer in Ventura County Superior Court on April 12.

A pretrial hearing is scheduled June 7, and neither side had any comment after the arraignment.

Not guilty: Heather Locklear has pleaded not guilty to attacking deputies who answered a domestic violence call at her Southern California home; seen in 2016

Authorities say Locklear kicked, pushed and shouted at deputies who were answering a report that she'd been violent with her boyfriend on February 26.

Defendants in misdemeanor cases generally don't have to appear in person if they are represented by an attorney.

She was on Dynasty in the 1980s

The 56-year-old actress is best known for appearing on Dynasty and T.J. Hooker in the 1980s and Melrose Place in the 1990s.

In May she extended her stay in rehab.

The Dynasty actress opted for another two months in treatment in an attempt to get healthy following her February arrest stemming from a domestic abuse call at her Thousand Oaks, Calif. home.

She won't be going home anytime soon due to wanting to fight her substance demons, according to RadarOnline.

'Heather has now paid for two months of rehab so she will be there longer than the one month she originally planned,' a source said.

Although determined to fight her addictions - which has cost her a whopping $114,000 - the actress will be able to visit her fiance, Chris Heisser.

A challenging time: Locklear's attorney entered the plea to four misdemeanor counts of battery on an officer in Ventura County Superior Court on Thursday. A pretrial hearing is scheduled June 7; seen in 2005

'She doesn't really have access to her phone - it's locked up most of the time, so she has been recovering alone and without communication,' the source said.

'Chris has been seeing her every Sunday, he flies up. He's staying at her house taking care of the dog.'

Heather was arrested on suspicion of felony domestic battery for allegedly assaulting Heisser at her California home in February.

While that charge has now been dropped, she will still face four counts of misdemeanor battery on a police officer and one charge of resisting or obstructing a police officer.

Scene of the scuffle: Heather was arrested on suspicion of felony domestic battery for allegedly assaulting Heisser at her California home in February

Documents obtained by People that were written by Senior Deputy Sheriff Keith Hall claimed Heather bit one of the officers and also acted 'belligerent and aggressive' toward them.

'Deputy Alldredge saw that was bleeding from the bridge of his nose and he had redness on his chest ... Told Deputy Alldredge that in the bedroom, Locklear attacked while he was on the bed and he defended himself,' the deputy wrote in an excerpt of the statement. 'He did not know how many times Locklear struck him.

'Locklear bit his face and described Locklear as being 'all over' him for the last 20-30 minutes acting 'crazy,' 'angry,' and 'wild.'

'[During the investigation] Locklear exhibited combative, belligerent, and aggressive behavior toward deputies.'

He described the former Melrose Place star as being 'agitated and uncooperative'.
Ronnie Ortiz-Magro shocked his housemates on Thursday's episode of Jersey Shore Family Vacation as he appeared to cheat on his pregnant girlfriend.

The 32-year-old reality star during the episode titled Ron Ron Juice brought several women back from a Miami nightclub for a hot tub session at the mansion.

He told a French gal named Antonia that she was 'gorgeous' and going to get him into 'a lot of trouble' before they ended up in his bedroom.

Family vacation: Ronnie Ortiz-Magro partied with a blonde French woman while his pregnant wife Jen Harley was in Las Vegas on Thursday's episode of Jersey Shore Family Vacation

The episode opened with Nicole 'Snooki' LaValle, 30, and Jennifer 'JWoww' Farley, 32, continuing their argument over Vinny Guadagnino, 30.

'Thanks for being a good friend, idiot,' Snooki told JWoww.

'Snooki is losing her mind,' JWoww said adding that Snooki should 'own it' that she hooked up with Vinny years ago.

JWoww said she was also older and mostly sober and could stick up for herself with Snooki.

Solid host: The 32-year-old reality star retrieved tank tops so the ladies could get in the hot tub

Huge compliment: Antonia smiled as Ronnie said she was 'gorgeous' and going to get him into 'a lot of trouble'

Furious argument: The episode titled Ron Ron Juice opened with JWoww and Snooki arguing about Snooki's treatment of Vinny

'I'm not going to defend people if they are in the wrong,' JWoww said.

Vinny noted that it was Snooki who always initiated their hookups, yet he was the one being ostracized by her.

Snooki and Vinny later spoke poolside and she admitted to being 'annoying and dramatic'.

Annoying and dramatic: Snooki later admitted to Vinny that she was being 'annoying and dramatic'

'I'm sorry,' she said.

Vinny during a confessional said that Snooki apologizing was like she was a 'different person' and concluded that she had matured and grown.

Snooki then joined JWowww, Paul DelVecchio aka Pauly D, Ronnie, Vinny and Michael 'The Situation' Sorrentino for a classic GTL session of Gym, Tan, Laundry.

GTL time: JWoww and The Situation rode together for a classic Gym, Tan, Laundry session

Deena Nicole Cortese, 31, however, thought the idea was ridiculous and lounged by the water.

The Situation while driving with JWoww revealed that he wasn't speaking with his brother Frank.

He said that he saw on Twitter that Frank was reaching out to TMZ with a story offer.

Not speaking: The Situation told JWoww that he was no longer speaking with his brother Frank

'He's blinded by fame and money,' said Mike, who joined the crew in Florida after pleading guilty to a count of tax evasion in a plea deal.

'He got thirsty,' JWoww stated.

Pauly poked fun at The Situation as he walked at a moderate pace on a treadmill.

Working out: Pauly D showed off his bulging biceps while working out with his friends

'This guy used to be Mister GTL. Now look at him, what the f*** happened?,' he said.

Back at the house, Ronnie got the pre-party started by mixing Ron Ron Juice.

'I've never seen a night start with Ron Ron Juice and end well for Ronnie,' Vinny said prophetically.

What happened? The Situation walked at a moderate pace on a treadmill leaving Pauly D to wonder what happened to 'Mister GTL'

The juice: Ronnie drank his own concoction of Ron Ron Juice

Massive foreshadowing: Vinny noted that he'd never seen a night start out with Ron Ron Juice that worked out for Ronnie

Deena and Ronnie also kept arguing about absent Samantha 'Sammi Sweetheart' Giancoloa, 31, who Ronnie used to date.

Pauly bragged about being the only single guy among the men in the group at the nightclub packed with women.

Deena got into a shouting match with a pair of girls who tried to crash their VIP area.

Favorite argument: Ronnie and Deena argued over absent Sammi

Leave now: Deena told a pair of girls who crashed their VIP area to hit the road

Vinny saved the day when he grabbed a bottle that one of the women was about to heave at Deena and poured booze on them.

JWoww brought some gorgeous girls over for Pauly, but Ronnie hit it off with them and started grinding with one of them.

'If he gets any closer to this girl, hes about to have a second baby mama,' Vinny said of Ronnie, who got the women to return to the mansion.

Good hands: Vinny saved the day when he grabbed a bottle from the hand of one of the women before she could throw it at Deena

Hands on: Ronnie got up close and personal while dancing with Antonia

Second baby: Vinny warned that if Ronnie got any closer he could have a second baby mama

Ronnie then helped facilitate everyone going into the jacuzzi by bringing tank-tops out for the women and openly flirted with blonde Antonia.

'If Ronnie wants to go in the hot tub with four chicks, that's none of my business,' JWoww said.

Snooki decided to intervene and made super strong drinks in hopes the girls would pass out.

Cheating intervention: Snooki decided to do her part in a bid to keep Ronnie from cheating

Strong drinks: She decided to make extra strong drinks so the girls would pass out

Mansion party: Vinny and Pauly talked to one of the girls Ronnie brought back from the club

Blonde beauty: An international group of women went to the mansion after the club

'I think you should chug and see who like wins first,' Snooki told the women who eagerly consumed her drinks.

Pauly while in the hot tub manually confirmed that one girl had natural breasts before making out with her.

Ronnie meanwhile got cozy with Antonia while his seven-months-pregnant girlfriend Jen Harley was back in Las Vegas.

Hot tub: A girl stripped down as the ladies climbed in the tub

Filling up: The guys decided to join them to be good hosts

Touch test: Pauly confirmed that one of the girls had natural breasts

Getting hotter: The DJ then made out with her

Touchy feely: Ronnie rested his hand on the backside of one of the gals

'You're beautiful. You're gorgeous. You're going to get me into a lot of trouble,' Ronnie told her.

Snooki's plan backfired as a brunette from Colombia was feeling woozy.

'Been there, b****. B****, I'm Snooki,' she told the drunk girl who started puking.

Feeling woozy: A brunette from Colombia partied too hard and was helped by Snooki

Helping hand: Snooki offered to help the girl who puked while on the sofa

Rough time: The girl vomited as Snooki felt guilty about making the strong drinks

On her: Snooki helped out while noting that if the girl died she'd be in trouble

Ronnie meanwhile was escorting Antonia on a tour of the mansion that included his bedroom.

He closed and locked a door behind them and Pauly then rushed upstairs and knocked on the door.

'No, thank you,' Ronnie said from behind the closed door with Antonia.

Door check: Ronnie closed the door behind him and Antonia while giving her a tour of his bedroom

A teaser of next week's episode showed Ronnie admitting that he 'f***ed up'.

Jersey Shore Family Vacation will be back next week on MTV.

Ronnie and girlfriend Jen welcomed their first child together on April 3 with a baby girl named Ariana Sky.
He first terrorized teens in Haddonfield in 1978.

And now, Mike Myers is coming back and he still has murder on his mind.

On Thursday, Jamie Lee Curtis had a message for the iconic serial killer as she shared the first poster for the Halloween reboot due for release in November.

'In exactly six months, after exactly 40 years, Michael Myers returns to Haddonfield but Laurie Strode has been waiting for him,' she wrote.

Still scary: Jamie Lee Curtis shared the first poster for the Halloween reboot to Instagram Thursday, showing a close-up of the scarred face of aging serial killer Mike Myers

The black-and-white poster, posted by Curtis to Instagram, shows a close-up image of Myers as an old man with a face pitted with scars.

The actress, 59, became a star after making her big screen debut in the original Halloween directed by John Carpenter.

The daughter of Hollywood legends Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis has reprised the character of Laurie four times in the intervening decades - in the 1981 sequel, in 1998's Halloween H20: 20 Years Later and again in 2002 in Halloween: Resurrection.

Iconic role: Curtis, 59, is reprising the role for the fifth time in what's billed as a 'final confrontation' between her character and the masked murderer

Sharing a photo of herself as Laurie from the set of the rebooted horror film in Febriuary, she described the character as 'a survivor and a protector.'

Carpenter, who is an executive producer on the movie, told EW in October that fans will be surprised by the latest tale in the series.

'It picks up after the first one and it pretends that none of the other [sequels] were made,' Carpenter said.

'Its gonna be fun. Theres a really talented director and it was well-written. Im impressed,' he added.

'Same slate. Same Laurie': Curtis had shared this snap with director David Gordon Green on the first day of filming back on January 30

Alternate reality: According to original director John Carpenter, the new Halloween picks up where the original left off and pretends none of the sequels happened

The movie is billed as a 'final confrontation' between Myers and Strode, who still lives in Haddonfield with her daughter, played by Judy Greer, and granddaughter, played by Andi Matichak.

The masked murderer with a penchant for a big knife has haunted Laurie since she narrowly escaped his first rampage after he broke free from a mental hospital where he had been detained for killing his sister.

On Thursday, Yahoo! Lifestyle quoted Curtis as saying the reboot delivers when it comes to thrills and edge-of-your-seat terror.

'Ive seen a trailer and Ive seen some footage, and its terrifying,' she said.

'They went full-tilt boogeyman. And Ive never said that in my life, and I will say full-tilt boogeyman for the rest of the year as I go around talking about this.'
Woody Allen has been plagued by accusations of sexual misconduct by his daughter Dylan Farrow.

But said allegations don't trouble Javier Bardem, who recently told French publication Paris Match that he doesn't regret working with the famous director.

Of course Bardem starred in Allen's Vicky Christina Barcelona back in 2008, and won a Golden Globe for his performance.

No problem: Allegations of sexual misconduct against Woody Allen don't trouble Javier Bardem, who recently said that he doesn't regret working with the famous director

In the new interview, the 49-year-old Spanish actor goes out of his way to claim he is 'absolutely not' ashamed to have worked with the Oscar-winning director.

He then went on to explain his reasoning with regards to the Dylan Farrow situation

'If there was evidence that Woody Allen was guilty, then yes, I would have stopped working with him, but I have doubts,' he told the publication.

The Skyfall star also revealed how he doesn't agree with the current furor surrounding the veteran director.

Friends: In the new interview, the 49-year-old Spanish actor goes out of his way to claim he is 'absolutely not' ashamed to have worked with the Oscar winning director (pictured together in 2008)

'I am very shocked by this sudden treatment. Judgments in the states of New York and Connecticut found him innocent. The legal situation today is the same as in 2007.'

Bardem is far from the only star who has come to the defense of Allen in the wake of the #metoo movement.

Diane Keaton has also expressed her support for Allen.

Winner! Of course Bardem starred in Allen's Vicky Christina Barcelona back in 2008, and won a Golden Globe for his performance

Ongoing: Woody Allen has been plagued by accusations of sexual misconduct by his daughter Dylan Farrow

'Woody Allen is my friend and I continue to believe him. It might be of interest to take a look at the 60 Minute interview from 1992 and see what you think,' Keaton tweeted on Monday.

The actress was referring to a 60 Minutes interview in 1992 when Allen publicly denied the allegations that he inappropriately touched Dylan, who was seven years old at the time.

That particular interview occurred during a bitter custody battle between Allen and his ex-partner Mia Farrow.

Allen and Keaton have remained close friends and collaborated throughout the years, most famously on the 1977 drama/romance Annie Hall.

Longtime friend: Diane Keaton has also expressed her support for Allen

Alec Baldwin has also continued his defense of the embattled director.

Previously, the actor had called Farrow's allegations 'unfair and sad' but, more recently he took his comments a step further and compared Farrow to Mayella Ewell, the character in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, who falsely accuses an African American man of rape.

'[One] of the most effective things Dylan Farrow has in her arsenal is the 'persistence of emotion,' Baldwin tweeted.

'Like Mayella in ['To Kill a Mockingbird'], her tears/exhortations [are] meant [to] shame u [into] belief in her story. But I need more than that before I destroy [someone], regardless of their fame. I need a lot more,' Baldwin added.
Gretchen Rossi clapped back at critics claiming she's had plastic surgery.

After a recent appearance on Watch What Happens Live, fans accused the Real Housewife Of Orange County star of getting a breast augmentation as her chest seemed to have more heft than usual.

But the 39-year-old attributed the weight gain to her IVF treatments as she told TMZ: 'As many couple who've been through IVF know, when you inject a bunch of hormones into your body, you're gonna gain weight.'

Clap back: Gretchen Rossi clapped back at critics claiming she's had plastic surgery

'And it causes certain areas of your body to expand,' she added as she pointed to her chest area in a video interview.

Gretchen and her fiance, Slade Smiley, are going through a second round of IVF.

The blonde beauty also revealed her secret to having a fuller chest.

More to love: After a recent appearance on Watch What Happens Live, fans accused the Real Housewife Of Orange County star of getting a breast augmentation as her chest seemed to have more heft than usual

Truth tea: The 39-year-old attributed the weight gain to her IVF treatments as she said: 'As many couple who've been through IVF know, when you inject a bunch of hormones into your body, you're gonna gain weight'

'People always say I've had a boob job, but the fact of the matter is, I call this my $50 boob job,' as she took out a heavily padded Victoria's Secret bra.

Gretchen revealed her naturally smaller chest and said: 'And look... my boobs disappear.'

'You can literally take a bullet in this bra,' she added.

Secrets: 'People always say I've had a boob job, but the fact of the matter is, I call this my $50 boob job,' as she took out a heavily padded Victoria's Secret bra; (pictured 2009)

Gretchen proposed to Slade in 2013 at the top of a building in downtown Los Angeles and the moment was shown on RHOC.

They have yet to announce a wedding date.

Rossi starred on the Orange County installment of the Bravo franchise from season four through season eight from 2008 to 2013 - and appeared as a guest in season 12 last year.
She's starred in the likes of TV series Charmed and cult horror film Scream.

And Rose McGowan led the glamour as she attended Joseph Corre's Ash From Chaos exhibition at the Lazinc gallery in Mayfair, London, on Thursday evening.

The actress, 44, wore a stunning black lace dress with a cut-out pattern as she layered the ensemble with a metallic jacket.

Two's company: Rose McGowan led the glamour as she attended Joseph Corre's Ash From Chaos exhibition at the Lazinc gallery in Mayfair with Dame Vivienne Westwood on Thursday

Rose teamed the look with a pair of black leggings and chunky embroidered black platform boots.

Adding a unique style twist, the star added a pair of oversized blue sunglasses.

She styled her short brunette locks into her signature look and added a slick of make-up, which included a subtle smoky eye and pink lipstick.

Chic: The actress, 44, wore a stunning black lace dress with a cut-out pattern as she layered the ensemble with a metallic jacket

Quirky: Adding a unique style twist, the star added a pair of oversized blue sunglasses

Rose joined the likes of Dame Vivienne Westwood and Australian human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson.

Posing together at the event, Vivienne wore a white T-shirt layered with a grey green dress with a floral pattern over the top.

She teamed her ensemble with white fishnet tights and white heels, with added jewellery.

Dame Vivienne styled her white locks into a curly up hairdo as she added a slick of dark red lipstick.

Stunning: Rose styled her short brunette locks into her signature look and added a slick of make-up, which included a subtle smoky eye and pink lipstick

Glitzy: The actress teamed the look with a pair of black leggings and chunky embroidered black platform boots

Enjoying the weather: The Charmed star appeared delighted with the warm climes of the capital

The outing was no doubt a more joyous occasion than her experience earlier in the week.

On Wednesday the actress appeared on Good Morning Britain for a more sombre affair, explaining to Piers Morgan that she doesn't think Harvey Weinstein 'will ever be prosecuted for any rapes.'

The actress and Weinstein whistleblower confessed that despite her spearheading of the Me Too movement and countless women coming forward with allegations against the movie mogul, she says in her opinion prosecution is unlikely.

Stylish couple: Posing together at the event, Vivienne wore a white T-shirt layered with a grey green dress with a floral pattern over the top

McGowan was one of the first women to come forward with allegations against Miramax founder Weinstein, 66.

The actress claims he held her down on the edge of a jacuzzi and raped her when she was 23 years old after being summoned to his hotel suite.

More than 80 women including actresses Angelina Jolie and Salma Hayek have accused Weinstein of offences from harassment to rape  though the former movie producer denies 'any allegations of non-consensual sex.'

Two's company: Rose and Vivienne beamed broadly whilst posing together at the party

Loving life: Rose seemed in good spirits on the night as she posed with Jennifer Robinson

'Hollywood has built itself on that 'casting couch', and on keeping people silent. It operates like a mafia, but nobody ever asked me to join the mafia and that was their big mistake,' she told Piers and Susanna Reid.

But despite the floodgates opening on Weinstein, the actress insists there is a long road ahead in terms of actual prosecutions.

When asked if she thought it would be easier for the movement to see convictions, Rose said: 'I think you have to understand the judicial system is completely stacked against victims in any way, shape or form, in that most people cannot in fact seek justice that way.'

'I think there should be specially trained police officers, and justices, and judges, that are specifically trained in sexual assault, sexual harassment and abuse, so they can understand it more. Right now it's going into regular court systems...It's deeper than what it looks like on the surface, and I don't think Harvey Weinstein will ever be prosecuted for any rapes.'

Speaking out: McGowan, who was one of the first women to come forward with allegations against Miramax founder Weinstein, 66, appeared on Good Morning Britain earlier this week
She had kept her pregnancy somewhat secret.

And Karla Souza announced the birth of her baby girl with a series of adorable images shared to Instagram on Thursday afternoon.

The 32-year-old actress wrote that 'God blessed us' as she smiled for a selfie with her sleeping daughter Gianna pressed up against her chest.

Congrats! Karla Souza announced the birth of her baby girl with a series of adorable images shared to Instagram on Thursday afternoon

Hours before the skin-to-skin post with her new baby, Karla made the announcement that she was in fact pregnant.

The Mexican-born beauty had refrained from posting anything on social media about her growing baby bump.

'So I have something to share with you guys,' Karla captioned a photo as she cradled her massively pregnant stomach.

Secret's out! The Mexican-born beauty had refrained from posting anything on social media about her growing baby bump; seen on Instagram

Bumping along: Souza later took to her stories to tell millions of followers all about her pregnancy journey

'We welcome our healthy baby girl Gianna, and we couldn't feel more blessed in this moment,' she shared on Instagram

Souza later took to her stories to tell millions of followers all about her pregnancy journey.

One image showed the Everybody Loves Somebody star near an ultrasound machine as she pointed to her belly.

In another sweet shot, Karla covered her pregnant stomach with a pair of denim overalls while turned to the side to reveal her size.

Growing! One image showed the Everybody Loves Somebody star near an ultrasound machine as she pointed to her belly

Cutie: In another sweet shot, Karla covered her pregnant stomach with a pair of denim overalls while turned to the side to reveal her size

Souza and her husband walked side-by-side during a sunset as they both gazed down at her baby bump.

She landed her first role as a child star on Aspen Extreme in 1993, and has moved on to big roles in Spanish-language films Nosotros los Nobles from 2013 and Suave Patria from 2012.

Since 2014 she has starred in Shonda Rhimes produced drama How To Get Away With Murder alongside Viola Davis.

Karla and Marshall became engaged in December 2013 before tying the knot during a California ceremony in May 2014.

Loved-up: Souza and her husband walked side-by-side during a sunset as they both gazed down at her baby bump
Anna Heinrich announced her engagement to Tim Robards in May last year.

And the 31-year-old doted on her fiance during an intimate dinner date in Sydney's Double Bay on Thursday.

The criminal lawyer, sporting a white T-shirt and distressed skinny-leg jeans, gazed adoringly at her muscular beau.

The look of love! The Bachelor's Anna Heinrich, 31, only had eyes for fiance Tim Robards, 36, on an intimate dinner date in Sydney on Thursday

Anna cut a casually chic figure in a white V-neck T-shirt tucked into a pair of distressed skinny-leg jeans, ripped at the knees.

The beauty elongated her leggy frame with a pair of nude pointy-toe heels and draped a black jacket over her toned shoulders.

Accessorising with a delicate gold necklace, Anna carried her belongings in a black shoulder bag.

Her signature fair locks were styled semi-straight and in a centre part, and her makeup palette consisted of a flawless complexion, defined brows and lashings of mascara.

Discussing the wedding? The TV lovebirds enjoyed quality time together at Italian restaurant Matteo in Sydney's Double Bay

The couple appeared relaxed and at ease at Italian restaurant Matteo, with Anna beaming at Tim.

Meanwhile, Tim, 36, sported a navy dress shirt with a lighter blue floral print, teamed white shorts and loafers.

Anna and Tim are set to become husband and wife in the coming months.

Celebrations: Just days prior, criminal lawyer Anna celebrated her last days as a 'bachelorette' with a truly epic hens party organised by her bridesmaids

Earlier this month, an insider spoke exclusively with Daily Mail Australia, saying the TV lovebirds are likely to 'tie the knot sometime in June this year.'

The source could not provide specific details about the Italian wedding/reception venue, but claims the pair are in full planning mode for the destination wedding.

Last weekend, Anna celebrated her last days as a 'bachelorette' with a truly epic hens party organised by her bridesmaids.

With the lads: While Tim enjoyed a bucks party in the Hunter Valley, in New South Wales, first hitting the Go-karts before visiting a number of idyllic wineries in the region

The stunning blonde was treated to a wild two-day celebration, which included a boat cruise around Sydney Harbour, a retro-inspired exercise session and a 'La Dolce Vita' themed Italian feast.

Meanwhile Tim enjoyed a bucks party in the Hunter Valley, in New South Wales, first hitting the Go-karts before visiting a number of idyllic wineries in the region.

Tim chose Anna in the grand finale episode of 2013's The Bachelor Australia.
It was thought she finally found love with fiancee Maegan Luxa following her shock split from The Bachelor, Richie Strahan.

But on Friday, Alex Nation, 26, let her solemn look and tear stained face do the talking as she moved into her new home following the couple's shock break-up.

The blonde beauty, who only got engaged to Maegan in December, struggled to hold her composure as she carried boxes marked 'Alex's Clothes' into her garage.

Moving on: The Bachelor's Alex Nation looks downcast and wipes away tears as she loads boxes into her new house after split from fiancee Maegan Luxa

At times, looking downcast and distracted, the former reality star choked back tears as she moved her bin kerbside for collection.

At other times, a visibly emotional Alex texted on her phone as she walked down her new street with a sad expression on her face.

The starlet had her blonde hair pushed to one side and donned a pair of grey tracksuit pants and a black Adidas jumper.

Tough day: At times, looking downcast and distracted, the former reality star choked back tears as she moved her bin kerbside for collection

On Wednesday, speculation continued to mount that the pair's eight-month relationship was in trouble when they looked very tense at a Melbourne cafe.

During the outing, the couple looked to be deep in a strained conversation, with Alex making gestures with her hands and Maegan's subdued expression never wavering.

Earlier this week, a source exclusively told Daily Mail Australia that Alex and her fiancee are reportedly finished.

Downcast and upset! Visibly emotional Alex was spotted moving a box marked "Alex's clothes" into the garage of her new home

The insider claimed that several friends of Alex had confirmed the break-up and said 'Apparently, Maegan didn't take it too well.'

'People told me [they were over],' the insider claimed.

'So I asked her friend who said she was "single now". Then others were saying the same.'

It's over: The usually glammed-up star was pictured in grey Adidas pants and a black Adidas jumper during the move from the place she shared with fiancee Maegan Luxa

According to the source, Alex shared a flirty exchange with an unknown dark-haired male companion at Melbourne's Baroq nightclub several weeks ago.

Though she was pictured at the same event with male model Harrison Luna, Daily Mail understands the dark-haired man was not the same person.

A prolific social media user, The Bachelor star has not uploaded a photo with Maegan since December last year.

Packing up and moving on: The couple, who got engaged in December last year following a whirlwind romance, were pictured looking tense earlier this week

The pair, who only met in the August prior to their engagement, had a whirlwind romance - after they met playing for a Women's AFL team, the Frankston Bombers.

Just two days prior to their engagement, mum-of-one Alex spoke openly about moving in together and the day Meagan met her six-year-old son, Elijah.

'I feel relieved that I can finally talk about it now,' she said at the time.

'As of the last few weeks we've lived together. It's been really nice. It just feels so good. Nothing forced or scary.

All too much! The mother-of-one organised items at the side of her new garage, including the board game Monopoly and a tricycle
Natalie Portman has cancelled her upcoming trip to Israel.

The 36-year-old Black Swan actress was set to venture to the Middle Eastern country in June to attend a ceremony put on by the Genesis Prize Foundation.

Portman's decision to not attend the ceremony comes just days after the European Union called for an official investigation into Israel's use of live ammunition against Palestinian protesters on the Gaza border.

It was announced back in November that Portman had won the 2018 Genesis Prize.

Oh well: Natalie Portman has cancelled her upcoming trip to Israel (seen here at the Women's March in January in Los Angeles)

Said prize, which is known as the 'Jewish Nobel,' honors 'extraordinary individuals who serve as an inspiration to the next generation of Jews through their outstanding professional achievement, commitment to Jewish values and to the Jewish people.'

Of course Portman was born in Israel but grew up in the United States.

Upon finding out that she won, she stated that she was 'deeply touched and humbled by the honor,' before also proclaiming that she's 'proud of my Israeli roots and Jewish heritage.'

Strong! In addition to her impressive acting career, Portman has also taken on the role of social activist (seen here at the Women's March in Los Angeles in 2017)

But on Thursday the prize foundation announced that Portman would no longer be venturing to her homeland to attend the award ceremony and thus the event would be cancelled.

'Ms. Portman is a highly accomplished actress, a committed social activist and a wonderful human being. The staff of the Foundation enjoyed getting to know her over the past six months, admires her humanity, and respects her right to publicly disagree with the policies of the government of Israel,' said the foundation in a statement published by the New York Daily News.

'However, we are very saddened that she has decided not to attend the Genesis Prize Ceremony in Jerusalem for political reasons. We fear that Ms. Portmans decision will cause our philanthropic initiative to be politicized, something we have worked hard for the past five years to avoid.'

Decorated: Natalie has enjoyed a stellar Hollywood career, including two Golden Globe wins, two Oscar nominations and one win (pictured at 2017 Golden Globes with husband Benjamin Millepied)

Impressive: Previous winners of the prestigious prize include media baron and politician Michael Bloomberg, musician Itzhak Perlman and actor Michael Douglas (pictured)

Portman has kept her reason for forgoing the trip vague, stating that 'recent events' were to blame.

The Gaza border has seen protests and clashes since March 30.

At least 34 Palestinians have been killed and hundreds wounded by Israeli fire since the protests began. There have been no Israeli casualties.

Israel says it only opens fire when necessary to stop damage to the fence, infiltrations and attempts at attacks.

Palestinians say protesters are being shot while posing no threat to soldiers, while the European Union and UN chief Antonio Guterres have called for an independent investigation.

Israel has rejected calls for an independent probe, saying its open-fire rules are necessary to defend the border.

Israel and Hamas have fought three wars since 2008 and the Gaza Strip has been under an Israeli blockade for more than a decade.

Previous winners of the prestigious prize include media baron and politician Michael Bloomberg, musician Itzhak Perlman and actor Michael Douglas.

Meanwhile, Natalie can next be seen in Vox Lux playing the role of a rising pop star named Celeste.
Heidi Klum flaunted her pert posterior in a thong so skimpy she needed to censor her selfie with a specifically-placed faux lens flair on Thursday.

The 44-year-old HK Intimates creative director was likely representing her own three-year-old bra brand in the black lingerie and matching glossy heels.

The German-born presenter seemed enthralled with her own reflection in a mirror opposite a staircase, and she shared numerous heavily-filtered selfies with her combined 13.9M social media following.

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Yikes! Heidi Klum flaunted her pert posterior in a thong so skimpy she needed to censor her selfie with a specifically-placed faux lens flair on Thursday

Heidi was 'channeling Sharon Tate' Thursday with her partial updo coiffed by hairstylist Lorenzo Martin and her voluminous false lashes applied by make-up artist Linda Hay.

'Sometimes people say, "You're 44. You're turning 45, why are you not giving the baton to someone else?"' the twice-divorced mother-of-four said on the February 26 episode of The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

'But I always think, there's a lot of women my age, 50, 60, 70, do we have an expiration date? Can we not also still feel sexy? And why do we always have to see 20-year-olds and 30-year-olds in campaigns, but why can't an older woman be in a campaign? So I'm still doing it.'

Mirror, mirror: The 44-year-old HK Intimates creative director was likely representing her own three-year-old bra brand in the black lingerie and matching glossy heels

Narcissus: The German-born presenter seemed enthralled with her own reflection in a mirror opposite a staircase, and she shared numerous heavily-filtered selfies

Gemini: Heidi was 'channeling Sharon Tate' Thursday with her partial updo coiffed by hairstylist Lorenzo Martin and her voluminous false lashes applied by make-up artist Linda Hay

The twice-divorced mother-of-four recently told the Ellen Show: 'There's a lot of women my age, 50, 60, 70, do we have an expiration date? Can we not also still feel sexy? And why do we always have to see 20-year-olds and 30-year-olds in campaigns, but why can't an older woman be in a campaign? So I'm still doing it'

Go-go boots:

Klum later Insta-storied a snap of her leggy America's Got Talent look - selected by stylist duo Rob Zangardi & Mariel Haenn - on the set of the competition's 13th season, which premieres May 29 on NBC.

The Emmy winner also serves as lead judge and executive producer of cycle 13 of Germany's Next Topmodel, which currently airs Thursdays on ProSieben.

Speaking of which, the modeling competition was precisely how Heidi initially met her fellow German boyfriend Tom Kaulitz, with whom she just returned from a romantic Cabo San Lucas getaway.

'Heidi and Tom met through Germany's Next Top Model. There was some connection through the show,' an insider told Us Weekly last Friday.

Heute bekommen meine Madchen Glatzen. #GNTM2018 A post shared by Heidi Klum (@heidiklum) on Apr 19, 2018 at 8:37am PDT

'Tom is a breath of fresh air': Speaking of which, the modeling competition was precisely how Heidi initially met her fellow German boyfriend Tom Kaulitz, with whom she just returned from a romantic Cabo San Lucas getaway (pictured April 12)

'They fell into an easy rhythm really quickly': At 28, the Tokyo Hotel guitarist is 16 years younger than Klum, and they were first linked together in mid-March

'He's German [too], so it's been fun and easy for Heidi. Tom is a breath of fresh air for her. They fell into an easy rhythm really quickly.'

At 28, the Tokyo Hotel guitarist is 16 years younger than Klum, and they were first linked together in mid-March.

Before Kaulitz, the Project Runway host spent three years with art curator Vito Schnabel, but the couple split in September.

When she's not in front of a camera, the Halloween enthusiast cares for her four children - Johan, 11; Helene, nearly 14; Lou, 8; and Henry, 12 - with ex-husband #2 Seal and ex-partner Flavio Briatore.
My Kitchen Rules 'villain' Sonya Mefaddi sported a rather conservative look on the 2018 series.

Now, a number of racy photographs have surfaced dating back from 2012 of the 34-year-old looking very different.

The Jordanian beauty put on a busty-display as she attended a variety of events in Sydney six years ago.

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Is this you Sonya? My Kitchen Rules 'villain' looks drastically different in cleavage-baring snaps from 2012

Sonya donned a cleavage-baring yellow snakeskin ensemble as she stepped out at the annual Fashion Palette show in Sydney.

In the throwback photos the buxom brunette's lips seemed smaller.

Furthermore, Sonya's eyebrows appeared to be considerably thinner and lighter in the throwback snaps.

2012 vs 2018: The buxom brunette seemingly sported a noticeably smaller pout than her 2018 self. Furthermore, Sonya's eyebrows appeared to be considerably thinner and lighter in the throwback snaps

Meanwhile in another snap from the Fashion Palette, Sonya was pictured in a slinky, floor-length gown.

In another photograph captured in 2012, the brunette beauty covered her busty white frock with a cropped grey blazer.

Sonya's drastically different appearance comes after the NSW besties were booted from the popular cooking competition this week.

Now vs 2012: The reality TV star sported a considerably thinner upper lip and markedly hallowed cheeks

Controversial: Sonya's drastically different appearance comes after the NSW besties were booted from the popular cooking competition this week

Feud: On Wednesday's episode, Sonya and Hadil were asked to leave the show by judges Pete Evans and Manu Feildel after they hurled a string of profanity-laced insults and threats at rivals Jess and Emma (pictured)

On Wednesday's episode, Sonya and Hadil were asked to leave the show by judges Pete Evans and Manu Feildel after they hurled a string of profanity-laced insults and threats at rivals Jess and Emma.

The two women made repeated remarks about Jess and Emma's appearance, before screaming at the other contestants and calling them 'disrespectful a**holes.'

Manu then stepped in, saying: 'Enough! Things have got too out of hand, this is a cooking competition, and this behaviour is unacceptable. Sonya and Hadil, you are excused from the table!'
A lot can change in the space of a year or two, and no more so than on the battlefield of love.

Former MAFS contestant Sharon Marsh - who split with 'hubby' Nick Furphy after meeting on the show in 2016 - is deep in the throws of a new romantic relationship.

The 32-year-old blonde went public earlier in the year with her beau Julian Rosevear and told The Fix on Friday she was very happy with her new boyfriend.

'I'm very happy': Married At First Sight star Sharon Marsh has gushed about her new boyfriend, Julian Rosevear, and thrown shade at her ex 'hubby' Nick Furphy

She has since shared pictures on her Instagram page of her and Julian picnicking at a dog-friendly cinema, along with twin sister Michelle.

'He is everything I could ever want in a partner,' Sharon told the website.

'Not to be a pessimist but I was waiting for the "but" or baggage. But there wasn't any. He's perfect for me.'

While basking in the glow of her burgeoning love affair with Julian, Sharon earlier took the opportunity to throw some shade at her MAFS ex, Nick.

Time for change: The MAFS bride hopes to have more luck in love with her new beau, particularly since she doesn't have to move states to see him

Best feet forward: Back in her hometown of Perth, Shaz is optimistic about the future

Declaring that the show hasn't changed her as a person, she told NW magazine in January: 'It just made my intolerance for the wrong kind of men higher.'

Nick, however, appears to have gotten his own back - by going under the gun again at a tattoo parlor this week to have his 'I love Shaz' ink altered to 'I love Shiraz'.

The love heart was tweaked to resemble a wine glass, while the IR in Shiraz was placed over Shaz with an arrow pointing between the 'h' and 'a'.

I love Shaz... I mean Shiraz: Sharon's ex -'hubby' Nick has his tattoo of her name altered to reflect his feelings for her

Nick quickly took to Instagram and wrote: 'I love Shiraz. Just an upgrade to what I actually love red wine.'

Last year Nick asked fans for suggestions on how the tattoo should be covered up.

While Shiraz wasn't mentioned, his Instagram followers offered a string of hilarious suggestions including: 'I Love Shazam' and 'I Love Shane Warne.'

This time, perhaps erring on the side of caution, Nick's new ink leaves little doubt he has well and truly moved on from Sharon.
Dakota Johnson loves to immerse herself into her film roles.

But that proved hazardous when the 50 Shades Of Grey vet was shooting her new movie Suspiria with Russell Crowe.

The 28-year-old beauty - who is dating rocker Chris Martin - told Elle magazine she needed therapy after shooting the horror film.

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Tough: Dakota Johnson revealed there were a few perils to her success during an interview with Elle magazine; seen in January

She admitted making the scary movie was so difficult it 'no lie, f****d me up so much that I had to go to therapy.'

Lucky to be working on new endeavors, Johnson is putting a full focus on her own production company.

'I've come to terms with the fact that the projects I want to work on don't exist, so I'm going to have to create them for myself,' she said. 'I feel incredibly grateful that I'm in a position to do that.'

Difficult: The 28-year-old actress revealed that filming scenes as literature student Anastasia Steele in the BDSM-filled flicks led to therapy

Her varied work across numerous films has enabled the daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson to dive into characters.

While her resume has greatly expanded through the years, she admitted 'there are many more experiences to have. It's really good to still be learning the thing I love.'

She's stayed busy working on films and recently arrived back in Los Angeles after wrapping Bad Times At The El Royale in Vancouver, Canada.

Challenging times: She admitted that in addition to the Fifty Shades scenes, her mystery-horror film Suspiria was equally difficult to film, 'which, no lie, f****d me up so much that I had to go to therapy'

The 1960s set drama/thriller tells the story of a motley bunch of characters whose paths gets intertwined at the rundown El Royale hotel near Lake Tahoe, California.

Dakota acts opposite a talent-packed cast that also included Jeff Bridges, Jon Hamm, Nick Offerman, Russell Crowe and Chris Hemsworth in the feature which is written, directed and produced by Drew Goddard.

She's remained quiet about her relationship with Coldplay frontman Martin, but has been spotted with her new beau at his home in Malibu, among many other destinations.
The Seven network has pledged fans have 'never seen anything like the new House Rules.'

Now, it appears the 2018 season will feature MORE secrets, mind-games, bitter feuds and explosive drama.

This week Seven gave fans a sneak peek at the upcoming series of House Rules and hinted some teams will engage in a number of bitter feuds.

'There's no friends on this competition': Sneak peek of Channel Seven's House Rules hints teams will bitterly feud... but will it be as dramatic as My Kitchen Rules?

In the preview, the camera pans across a number of the 2018 House Rules castmates as a voice-over announces: 'They (contestants) can also be hiding something!'

Seconds later the camera moves to the 'competitive couple' who declare: 'There's no friends on this competition'.

To which the dramatic male voiceover responds: 'One of these teams is!'

'There's no friends on this competition': The 'competitive couple' claim there's 'no friends' on the 2018 season of House Rules

'Definitely wouldn't allow other teams to walk all over us': The Chippie Brother's issue a warning to the other teams

Next one of the 'Chippie Brothers' concede: 'Definitely wouldn't allow other teams to walk all over us'.

Towards the end of the clip the 'Married Go-Getters' are heard saying: 'We're here to win and we'll move people out of the way'.

Shortly thereafter the female 'Married Go-Getter' is seen shaking dust off her shoulder in a sassy manner.

'We're here to win and we'll move people out of the way': The 'Married Go-Getters' state they are on the program 'to win'

The promo clip concludes with the male voiceover stating: 'You've never seen anything like the new House Rules'.

Last week new teams competing in the upcoming season of Channel Seven's hit renovation show were finally been revealed.

Joining the cast in 2018 will be engaged parents Toad and Mandy, the first ever mother-daughter duo Kim and Michelle and larrikin brothers Josh and Brandon.

New blood! Joining the cast in 2018 will be engaged parents Toad and Mandy, (pictured)

Welcome: Mother-daughter duo Kim and Michelle (pictured) will join the cast of House Rules

NSW dairy farmers Toad and Mandy - who are parents to one-year-old twins Lenny and Layla - will have their 150-year-old inn renovated on the show.

'She's pretty hot... she's a VB commercial,' Toad said of his fiancee during their audition tape.

The pair are renovation rookies and Toad even describes himself as 'hopeless at building'.

'There's about 10 or 11 doors on the outside of the house and none of them have locks on them. We're open to the elements,' he told The Daily Telegraph.

Joining the dairy farming couple will be Kim, 59, and Michelle, 27, who will make history as House Rules' first mother-daughter team.

Family ties: Joining the dairy farmer couple will be Kim, 59, and Michelle, 27, who will make history as House Rules' debut mother-daughter team

Brotherly love: Also appearing on the show will be Queensland carpenter brothers Josh, 22, and Brandon, 21

Experience: The two brothers (pictured) are both carpenters from Queensland

The ladies are known affectionately on the set as 'Kath and Kim' because of their constant fights, with their banter sure to be television gold.

They both share a three-bedroom home in Tweed Heads with five other people.

Michelle shares a cramped room with her two daughters Bella and Aaliyah and admits she and her mum have zero renovation experience.

'I'm really sensitive to other people's feelings, Mum not so much,' Michelle said during the pair's audition.

'But at the same time I don't want to hurt people's feelings either, I don't like doing that,' Kim added.

'But it has to be done - that's Mum's attitude!' laughed Michelle.

Country couple: NSW dairy farmers Toad and Mandy - who are parents to one-year-old twins Lenny and Layla - will have their 150-year-old inn renovated on the show

Fights: The ladies are known affectionately on the set as 'Kath and Kim' because of their constant fights and their banter is sure to be television gold

Also appearing on the show will be Queensland carpenter brothers Josh, 22, and Brandon, 21.

The country boys confess to having no idea how to renovate a property to a woman's taste, but will give it a crack.

'We've got no idea how to style a house for a woman,' Josh said.

Former Adelaide Crows player Jared Petrenko and his girlfriend Jess are also rumoured to star in this season of House Rules.

New career move? Former Adelaide Crows player Jared Petrenko (pictured) and his girlfriend Jess are also rumoured to star in this season of House Rules

He claims he and girlfriend Jess are 'complete rookies' at professional renovation, but is happy to give it a try.

The network has unveiled a new format for the popular show, with it teasing a 'mystery house' and an auction.

Traditionally, House Rules contestants have renovated each other's homes, with each couple taking on different sections of the house.

While it has been The Block that tackles a home for commercial sale.
Winnie Harlow put her best foot forward as she participated in WE Day in Los Angeles on Thursday.

The Canadian model, 23, looked sensational in a bold check coat dress that skimmed her thighs revealing her fabulous legs.

The catwalk star added strappy shiny gold heels and wore her long hair loose and sleekly styled.

Stunner for a cause: Winnie Harlow put her best foot forward as she participated in WE Day in Los Angeles on Thursday

Winnie participated in a panel discussion as part of the day that celebrates volunteerism and encourages young people to make a difference in their world.

She was made-up with black kohl lining her eyes and a touch of lip gloss.

She sported white polish on her toe nails and accessorized with a gold neck chain.

High-heeled beauty: The Canadian model, 23, looked sensational in a bold check coat dress that skimmed her thighs revealing her fabulous legs

Headturner: The catwalk star stepped out in strappy shiny gold heels and wore her long hair loose and sleekly styled

The natural beauty who has Vitiligo recently discussed the changes in the modelling industry in an interview with ELLE Magazine.

The Toronto native explained: 'There is a big shift happening in the fashion industry in terms of beauty standards, and I feel Im part of that shift.

'I remember on Americas Next Top Model, Tyra Banks asked me if a photographer told me to cover my skin for a shoot, would I do it? I said no. I dont care who it is, or who thinks I should. Im going to stay true to myself.'

She recently lashed out at being branded 'a sufferer' of pigment disease Vitiligo

She wrote on her Instagram: 'I'm not a 'Vitiligo Sufferer" I'm not a 'Vitiligo model.' I am Winnie. I am a model. And I happen to have Vitiligo. Stop putting these titles on me or anyone else.'

Winnie found fame on TV reality show America's Next Top Model in 2014, where she was kicked out in the second week of finals before returning to a comeback series where she finished 6th.

Since then she has soared to fame in the industry and fronted campaigns for Desigual, Diesel and Swarovski atop a host of magazine covers.
He was teased by fans for looking like Eminem when he unveiled a peroxide blond hairdo last month.

And Professor Green unveiled his newly-dyed bright green locks as he attended the Cineworld Gala in Leicester Square, London on Thursday.

The musician, 33,  real name Stephen Manderson- was seen for the first time since rumours emerged he had split from his model girlfriend Fae Williams.

New look: Professor Green unveiled his newly-dyed bright green locks as he attended the Cineworld Gala in Leicester Square, London on Thursday

Ensuring all eyes were on his striking hairdo, the rapper opted for an understated ensemble, layering a checked blue and brown trench coat over a simple black t-shirt and chinos.

He teamed the look with black converses, a gold statement ring and swept his hair to the side.

Despite rumours he has split from the stunning model, Professor Green appeared in high spirits posing solo on the red carpet before joking around inside the cinema.

Break-up? The musician, 33,  real name Stephen Manderson- was seen for the first time since rumours emerged he had split from his model girlfriend Fae Williams

Bold: Ensuring all eyes were on his striking hairdo, the rapper opted for an understated ensemble, layering a checked trench coat over a simple black t-shirt and chinos

Sources claim Fae broke the news they had broken-up during an appearance at the Fendi FF Reloaded collection launch party in London last Friday.

An insider told The Sun: 'They remain friends and their relationship finished on good terms but things just werent working out between them.

'Fae is now in the process of moving out of Pros place so they can get on with their lives.

'Both parties agree going their separate ways is the best thing for them.'

Striking: He teamed the look with black converses, a gold statement ring and swept his hair to the side

Flashing a smile: Despite rumours he has split from the stunning model, Professor Green appeared in high spirits posing solo on the red carpet

Having a laugh: The star even joked around once inside the venue for the screening of Rampage

Green has not been seen publicly with the model since February, when they attended the CIROC x MTV & Wonderland party at London landmark The Ned.

The couple starting dating in 2016, shortly after his three-year marriage to Made In Chelsea star Millie came to an end.

Millie has since gone on to find love with her former flame Hugo Taylor, 31 - with the pair preparing to marry later this year.

MailOnline has contacted a representative for further comment.
He famously had four ribs removed in a bid to make his waist appear smaller - but Human Ken Doll, Rodrigo Alves, has revealed his regrets over the procedure.

The 34-year-old told MailOnline: 'I am in pain in the evenings. It's not unbearable but it's on my mind and now I wonder what I was thinking.

'I've been left with two scars on my back, but the worst thing is, I don't feel any smaller than I did before.'

There he is: Human Ken Doll Rodrigo Alves revealed his HUGE regrets over his recent rib removal surgery as he went shirtless on South beach, Miami, on Thursday

Harsh: Rodrigo had four ribs removed at the start of the year, but the procedure has left him with scars (pictured)

Rodrigo had to wear a corset at all times following his 28,000 surgery, in which he had his 11th and 12th ribs removed in a bid to try to achieve his dream 20" waist and to fit into his form-fitting blazers.

But he said: 'I only look smaller when I've got it on. As soon as I take it off, I feel like I am back to normal.'

Rodrigo has spent over 500k on plastic surgery now in a bid to make his body match his mind. He even stole his own ribs from the doctor's surgery in LA.

The 34-year-old told MailOnline: 'I am in pain in the evenings. It's not unbearable but it's on my mind and now I wonder what I was thinking'

Not gone well: Rodrigo had to wear a corset at all times following his 28,000 surgery, in which he had his 11th and 12th ribs removed in a bid to try to achieve his dream 20" waist and to fit into his form-fitting blazers

Looking good: Rodrigo has spent over 500k on plastic surgery now in a bid to make his body match his mind. He even stole his own ribs from the doctor's surgery in LA

But he has since turned his back on having more cosmetic work done, unless he has to have maintenance done to things he has had done before.

Despite his worries about his appearance, Rodrigo was pictured out on South Beach in Miami on Thursday, showing off his 22,000 pectoral implants.

He wore a peach coloured lace blouse, which he told MailOnline he has to wear in order to cover his scars.

Wearing it unbuttoned, as well as a pair of very small trunks, which had metal embellishments at the sides.

With his platinum locks slicked back, he wore a pair of designer shades as he topped up his golden tan.

He told MailOnline: 'I have a bump on one side and I don't know what that is. I need to find out. It could be a piece of floating cartilage.'

Adding: 'I don't recommend anyone has this surgery. It is risky, it can be dangerous and the results are only shown when I wear a corset.

'I can't wear a corset to go to the beach. Summer is coming soon. I can't wear one as I will be too hot and sweaty.'

Rodrigo is currently in America, where he will be appearing on a series of television shows.

He had planned to hit the town after his day on the beach, but he got a little too much sun on his day out and told his followers he was getting an early night.

Busy man: Rodrigo is currently in America, where he will be appearing on a series of television shows
He announced yesterday that he's winding down his acting career, to focus instead on directing and producing.

But that hasn't stopped Nicolas Cage from putting maximum effort into his latest project, Primal, which is currently shooting in Puerto Rico.

Everyone needs a break, however, and the star, 54, was seen grabbing lunch at Via Appia in el Condado, San Juan with his pet pooch and his girlfriend Erika Koike.

Out to lunch: Nicolas Cage enjoys lunch with girlfriend Erika Koike and his new puppy on a break from filming in Puerto Rico... after announcing he will quit acting soon

Nicolas wore a white T-shirt and jeans and a cowboy-style hat to shield him from the hot Caribbean sun.

He was flanked by security who helped him to make a swift exit from the eatery.

Although his puppy had a carrier, it was being held by Erika, who doted on the pooch as she strutted along after the Hollywood star.

Erika - who is thought to be a make-up artist - kept it casual in a baggy white top, skinny jeans and flip flops.

Out for lunch: The star, 54, was seen grabbing lunch at Via Appia in el Condado, San Juan with his pet pooch and his girlfriend Erika Koike

Cover up: Nicolas wore a white T-shirt and jeans and a cowboy-style hat to shield him from the hot Caribbean sun

Puppy love: Although his puppy had a carrier, it was being held by Erika, who doted on the pooch as she strutted along after the Hollywood star

She kept a low profile with a large taupe sun hat, leaving her raven locks to fall loosely around her shoulders, adding large sunglasses to the ensemble.

Nicolas - who was soon back to work on set of the movie, which is slated for release later in the year and sees him play a big-game hunter who gets trapped on shipping freighter with a bunch of exotic and deadly animals on the loose - said on Thursday that he'll only continue acting for 'three or four more years'.

According to The Blast, He said: 'In terms of producing and directing, yes, I'm getting back in production. My company, Saturn Films, is involved in all the movies I'm doing now.

Protection: They were flanked by security who helped him to make a swift exit from the eatery

Change: Nicolas says he'll only continue acting for 'three or four more years,' as he wants to make a permanent move to behind the scenes

Chic: Erika - who is thought to be a make-up artist - kept it casual in a baggy white top, skinny jeans and flip flops

'Directing is something I'd look forward to down the road, because right now I'm primarily a film performer,' the actor, who earned an Oscar in 1996 for his role as tragic alcoholic Ben Sanderson in Leaving Las Vegas, went on.

'I'm going to continue doing that for three or four more years and then I'd like to focus more on directing.'

The Con Air star said his decision to step away from a life in front of the camera comes after he revealed he can be 'self-destructive' whenever he isn't working.

'I have multiple reasons for wanting to work,' Nicolas said. 'One of them is, to be blatantly honest, I can be a little self-destructive if I'm not focused on my job.'

Defining moment: Cage earned an Oscar in 1996 for his role as tragic alcoholic Ben Sanderson in Leaving Las Vegas

The Face/Off actor said he likes 'the structure of work' and the 'routine' and 'structure' that comes along with it.

'It's the difference between maybe having one bottle of wine versus two bottles of wine.'

He said that he's accepted film roles in the past in order to help 'pay the bills' as opposed to creative reasons.

'I have had to deal with mistakes of the past and I have had to dig myself up and out of a rabbit hole financially, but had to find movies that work for me in terms of performance but also like anybody else pay the bills,' he said. 'It is a job after all.'

Action hero: Cage appeared in 1996's The Rock with Sean Connery and Ed Harris

Although he is set to move behind the camera, Nicolas said his love for film hasn't faded, as he still enjoys making movies.

'I enjoy performing. I like the power of film and performance and I like practicing. It's kept me in touch with my craft and I feel I'm better now than I have ever been.

'I've got my emotions at my fingertips and I've got my process down.'

Primal co-stars Famke Janssen and Michael Imperioli.
She recently wrapped her own Broadway role in The Parisian Woman.

And Uma Thurman was back to show her support for New York's theatre scene as she led the celebs at the opening of My Fair Lady at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre on Thursday night.

Uma looked delighted to be in the audience of the latest revival of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewes musical classic, which has won rave reviews from critics.

VIP in the house: Uma Thurman showed her support for New York's theatre scene as she led the celebs at the opening of My Fair Lady at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre on Thursday night

The Lincoln Center Theater production, directed by Tony winner Bartlett Sher, stars Six Feet Under actress Lauren Ambrose and Downton Abbey's Harry Hadden-Paton as Eliza Doolittle and Professor Henry Higgins.

Based on the play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw, two-time Tony winner Norbert Leo Butz also appears as Elizas father Alfred P. Doolittle and Tony winner Diana Rigg as Mrs. Higgins.

Uma flashed a huge smile as she clutched her progamme upon arrival at the theatre.

On stage: The Lincoln Center Theater production stars Downton Abbey's Harry Hadden-Paton and Six Feet Under actress Lauren Ambrose as Professor Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle

Stunning: Uma looked gorgeous in a metallic brocade jacket, teamed with cropped jeans and simple pumps

The whole crew! She posed inside the event with Hugh as she put on a glamorous display

The stage and screen star looked gorgeous in a metallic brocade jacket, teamed with cropped jeans and simple pumps.

She added a slick of glossy red lip colour and blush to highlight her stunning features.

The actress is rumored to be dating Josh Lucas, her co-star in the Broadway play The Parisian Woman, which wrapped at the Hudson Theater on March 11 after a 17-week run.

Theatre fan: She added a slick of glossy red lip colour and blush to highlight her stunning features

Leading lady and man: Lauren and Sam dressed to impress as they mingled after the show

Legend: Tony winner Diana Rigg stars as Mrs. Higgins in the revival of the classic musical

Star: Lauren, who has won rave reviews for her performance, looked gorgeous after the show in a lemon yellow floral dress

Sources told Page Six the couple are an item after they were seen in a romantic embrace at Jimmys Corner, a bar in the Theater District near the Hudson.

However, neither have commented on any possible relationship. Uma was previously married to Gary Oldman and Ethan Hawke with whom she shares Maya, 19, and Levon, 16.

Meanwhile, Uma has five film projects in the works.

Tradition: Matt Wall was honoured with The Gypsy Robe - a tradition in which a chorus member with the most Broadway credits receives a robe on the opening night of a Broadway Musical

From TV to stage: Lauren and Harry have both received acclaim for their lead roles

Talent: Actor Allan Corduner, Diana Rigg and director Bartlett Sher

She will next be seen on the big screen in comedy The Con Is On. due out June 21.

Uma also has two other completed movies: Comedy The War With Grandpa co-starring Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken; and high school-set supernatural mystery Down The Dark Hall, both of which have yet to set release dates.

The ever-in-demand star also has The House That Jack Built in post-production and Girl Soldier in pre-production.

Ready for their debut! (L-R) Harry, Christopher Faison, JoAnna Rhinehart, Kate Marilley, Kerstin Anderson and Shereen Ahmed

Reviews are in: Critics have hailed the revival as a 'relic that polishes nicely'

It'll run and run! The production is scheduled to run until January 2019
Both have faced endless speculation that they're secretly dating after failing to find love on separate reality dating shows.

And Ashley Irvin and Stu Laundy did little to halt the romance rumours, as they enjoyed a cosy dinner date at the millionaire's pub The Woolwich Pier Hotel in Sydney earlier this month.

The Married At First Sight star, 29, and Bachelorette winner, 45, looked incredibly close as they giggled and chatted away at the lavish outdoor dining spot, before getting into a car together.

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Troy, who? Married At First Sight's Ashley Irvin, 29, cosied up to millionaire Stu Laundy, 45, as they enjoyed a romantic dinner date at his lavish Sydney pub earlier this month

Given divorced father-of-four Stu's VIP status, the couple were ushered to one of the pub's most coveted balcony tables overlooking Sydney Harbour during the date two weeks ago.

The 16-year age gap didn't seem to be an issue for the couple, who beamed as they ate a meal complemented with French champagne.

Stu appeared to be in great spirits as he gazed at Ashley during the dinner, with onlookers telling New Idea: 'They even shared a kiss across the table during the night.'

As the evening drew to a close, the pair hopped into Stu's chauffeur-driven car before being dropped off at a nearby hotel.

Cute: The Married At First Sight star, 29, and Bachelorette winner, 45, looked incredibly close as they giggled and chatted away at Stu's pub The Woolwich Pier Hotel in Sydney

Laid-back look: The unlikely couple rocked matching jeans as they arrived at the lavish outdoor dining spot

Turning heads: Flight attendant Ashley completed her look with a slinky black camisole and chic lace-up boots

New Idea's sources claimed Stu had initially taken a liking to Ashley after watching her on Married At First Sight, before they were introduced via a mutual friend.

Stu had never met Ashley before, but he saw her on MAFS and was very interested to see if there was a spark there,' the insider claimed.

'He was then approached by a mutual friend who told him Ashley was keen to meet.

'He was a little taken aback with Ashleys bold approach as he is used to making the first move.'

Prestigious: Given Stu's VIP status, the couple were ushered to one of the pub's most coveted balcony tables overlooking Sydney Harbour

Sweet: The 16-year age gap didn't seem to be an issue for the couple, who beamed as they ate a meal complemented with French champagne

Interesting: Stu appeared to be in great spirits as he gazed at Ashley during the dinner, with onlookers telling New Idea: 'They even shared a kiss across the table during the night'

However a friend close to Stu denied the pair are romantically involved, claiming that their so-called 'date' was nothing more than an innocent catch-up between friends.

'A mutual friend put them together to compare notes. Both of them had been dumped and left brokenhearted on national television,' the source told Daily Mail Australia on Monday.

'She's from Brisbane and was in the neighbourhood so they went to Stu's pub for a feed. They are nothing but mates!' claimed the insider.

Off they go: As the evening drew to a close, the pair hopped into Stu's chauffeur-driven car before being dropped off at a nearby hotel

Rumour has it: Sources claimed the car simply dropped Ashley off at her hotel and the pair did not spend the evening together

Having a whale of a time: The pair seemed to be utterly relaxed in each other's company as they chatted away easily

It is understood that Stu and Ashley did not spend the rest of the evening together after their friendly pub meal.

'She's a flight attendant so she was dropped back at the hotel where her company had put her up,' said the source.

While the photos show the pair's first date, the couple have reportedly since had a second date.

An insider told Daily Mail Australia that the millionaire had dinner with the busty blonde at The Buena in Mosman last Friday.

Former flames: Ashley was originally paired with eccentric IT manager Troy Delmege, 35, on Married At First Sight and clashed in frequent fiery rows

Hearbreak: Meanwhile, Stu parted ways with Sophie Monk just three months after he met her on The Bachelorette and was chosen in the final

He's certainly got a type: There's more than a passing resemblance between busty blondes Ashley, 29, and Sophie, 38

'They were clearly on a date, but he was paying her very little attention,' the eyewitness said.

'He spent more time chatting to other people in the restaurant and bar, than he did to her,' the source went on to say.

Despite claiming that Stu paid Ashley little attention during the date, the insider recalled the pair 'held hands when leaving.'

However when approached by Daily Mail Australia for comment on Friday, Stu said that he wasn't in Sydney at the time.

Spark: New Idea's sources claimed Stu had initially taken a liking to Ashley after watching her on Married At First Sight, before they were introduced via a mutual friend

TV crush? Stu had never met Ashley before, but he saw her on MAFS and was very interested to see if there was a spark there,' the insider claimed

Forward: The insider added: 'He was then approached by a mutual friend who told him Ashley was keen to meet. He was a little taken aback with Ashleys bold approach as he is used to making the first move'

The unlikely coupling comes months after Ashley was spotted enjoying a date with former MAFS co-star Justin Fischer.

The couple vehemently denied sharing any romantic connection, however, insisting that they were nothing but friends.

Meanwhile, Stu announced his split from former flame Sophie Monk in January after just six months of dating.

OK then: However a friend close to Stu denied the pair are romantically involved, claiming that their so-called 'date' was nothing more than an innocent catch-up between friends

Just pals? 'A mutual friend put them together to compare notes. Both of them had been dumped and left brokenhearted on national television,' the source told Daily Mail Australia on Monday
Lorraine Kelly was joined by her lookalike daughter Rosie on her talk show on Friday.

The presenter, 58, was taking part in 'mother and daughter' fashion segment with Rosie, 23 - with the twosome donning the same bright blue power suit.

Teaming her look with a chic lightweight baby blue knit, Lorraine couldn't help but gush over how 'beautiful' Rosie looked as she opted for a more funky take on the ensemble.

Family affair: Lorraine Kelly, 58, was joined by her lookalike daughter Rosie, 23, on her talk show on Friday

Putting her own style knowledge to good use, Lorraine looked sensational as she made a statement in a pair of towering silver heels.

While she went for a more simple take on the suit, Rosie teamed it with a white top which boasted a rainbow design.

A matching rainbow design cross body bag added to the look and she accessorised with a pair of unique hot pink earrings.

Uncanny resemblance: The presenter was taking part in 'mother and daughter' fashion segment with Rosie - with the twosome donning the same bright blue power suit

Doting mum: Teaming her look with a chic baby blue knit, Lorraine couldn't help but gush over how 'beautiful' Rosie looked as she opted for a more funky take on the ensemble

Standing tall: Putting her own style knowledge to good use, Lorraine looked sensational as she made a statement in a pair of towering silver heels

Rosie kept it comfortable in a pair of white trainers as she stood alongside her mother to show that they could both pull off the same look.

Sporting tousled brunette locks and simple coat of make-up for the daytime show, both Lorraine and Rosie proved to be the spitting image of each other.

Rosie is Lorraine's only child with husband Steve Smith who she wed in 1992.

Funky: While Lorraine went for a more simple take on the suit, Rosie teamed it with a white top which boasted a rainbow design

Pop of colour: A matching rainbow design cross body bag added to the look and she accessorised with a pair of unique hot pink earrings

Earlier this year, Lorraine revealed that her own mother nearly had to give her up for adoption as she was unmarried when she fell pregnant.

She told the Express that her father, John Kelly, saved her by proposing to her mother Anne.

'When my mum became pregnant with me,' she said. 'My formidable grandmother wanted to send her to England where the baby would have been adopted.

Like mother, like daughter: Rosie kept it comfortable in a pair of white trainers as she stood alongside her mother to show that they could both pull off the same look

Lookalike: Sporting tousled brunette locks and simple coat of make-up for the daytime show, both Lorraine and Rosie proved to be the spitting image of each other

'Thankfully my dad stood up to my granny, declaring that he was of course marrying my mum.

'They are still together almost 58 years later and six years after I was born they had my brother Graham.

'I was lucky to have a stable family,' she concluded.
They have enjoyed a whirlwind romance after meeting on the set of The Jump at the start of last year.

And Vogue Williams, 32, looked absolutely smitten as she continued her idyllic Greek getaway with fiance Spencer Matthews, 28, on Tuesday.

The Irish model - who is now five months pregnant - proved to be glowing as she showed off her bump in a striking red bikini during the sun-kissed beachy stroll.

Radiant: Pregnant Vogue Williams, 32, looked absolutely smitten as she continued her idyllic Greek getaway with fiance Spencer Matthews, 28, on Tuesday

Cooling off in the scorching temperatures with an ice-lolly, Vogue happily displayed her evolving figure as she walked down the beach with Spencer.

She injected her signature fashionable flair into her summery attire, opting for a bright red bikini top - while taming her long blonde locks in place with a matching headband.

Vogue decided to switch things up as she parted from the red colour scheme with green patterned bikini bottoms which perfectly showed off her stunning new shape.

Mum to be: The Irish model - who is now five months pregnant - proved to be glowing as she showed off her bump in a striking red bikini during the sun-kissed beachy stroll

Sunny: Cooling off in the scorching temperatures with an ice-lolly, Vogue happily displayed her evolving figure as she walked down the beach with Spencer

Amazing: She injected her signature fashionable flair into her summery attire, opting for a bright red bikini top

Chic: Vogue teamed her long blonde locks in place with a matching scarlet headband

Vogue enhanced her naturally striking features with a simple coat of make-up and shielded herself from the blistering rays with a pair of shades.

The beauty accessorised with a labyrinth of gold necklaces down her front as she enjoyed the perfectly blissful stroll with her other half.

With ex-girlfriends such as Louise Thompson and Lauren Hutton firmly behind him, Spencer proved to be more loved than ever before.

The Made In Chelsea hunk showed off his chiselled abs in a pair of tiny floral pair swimshorts.

Colourful: Vogue decided to switch things up as she parted from the red colour scheme with green patterned bikini bottoms which perfectly showed off her stunning new shape

Beauty: Vogue enhanced her naturally striking features with a simple coat of make-up and shielded herself from the blistering rays with a pair of shades

Happy: The beauty accessorised with a labyrinth of gold necklaces down her front as she enjoyed the perfectly blissful stroll with her other half

In a good place: With ex-girlfriends such as Louise Thompson and Lauren Hutton firmly behind him, Spencer proved to be more loved than ever before

Looking good: The Made In Chelsea hunk showed off his chiselled abs in a pair of tiny floral pair swimshorts

Relaxing: The expectant pair made the most of their sun-drenched Greek holiday as they lapped up the sun during a stroll

The expectant pair made the most of their sun-drenched Greek holiday as they lapped up the sun during a stroll.

They also ensured to take a slew of selfies to document their relaxing time on social media.

Spencer and Vogue have been counting down the days until the arrival of their first child, after Vogue let slip they were having a baby boy during a TV interview with RTE One's Cutting Edge last week.

The couple announced their pregnancy last month, one month after confirming their engagement after Spencer proposed following a performance of The Lion King at London's Lyceum Theatre in February.

Social media savvy: They also ensured to take a slew of selfies to document their relaxing time on social media

Excited: Spencer and Vogue have been counting down the days until the arrival of their first child

Gender: Vogue let slip they were having a baby boy during a TV interview with RTE One's Cutting Edge last week

Moving quick: The couple announced their pregnancy last month, one month after confirming their engagement

Doing it in style: Spencer proposed following a performance of The Lion King at London's Lyceum Theatre in February

They have been together since January 2017 after meeting on reality show The Jump.

The couple's sun-soaked getaway came after Spencer's multi-millionaire father David Matthews was arrested and charged with sexual assault by French Police.

The 74-year-old was released on bail last month pending further investigation, and Spencer it yet to comment publicly on the news.

A spokesperson for the family said: 'David Matthews categorically denies the allegation and unequivocally contests the untrue and scandalous accusation.'

Love story: They have been together since January 2017 after meeting on reality show The Jump
Millie Bobby Brown's character in Netflix's Stranger Things may have incredible powers, but it looks like the star has some of her own after she was named one of the worlds most influential people in the 2018 iteration of the Time 100 list.

Joining the likes of President Donald Trump, Kim Jong-Un, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle on this years list, Millie Bobby Brown becomes the youngest person ever to be included at the age of 14.

Her entry was written by the Emmy award-winning star of Breaking Bad, Aaron Paul: She may have been 12 in years, but her spirit and mind were timeless. A wise woman was speaking from her cherubic face.

Millie Bobby Brown rose to international fame as Eleven in Netflix's sci-fi show Stranger Things

It was like speaking to a future mentor with a perspective and groundedness that I could only have dreamed of at that age. Or at any age, if Im being honest.

Who is Millie Bobby Brown?

Millie Bobby Brown rose to international prominence in her role as Eleven in Netflixs Stranger Things, a girl who possesses telekinetic abilities and helps three geeky boys track down their missing best friend.

The show became an immediate success and has been renewed for a third season. Bobby Brown has also been nominated for an Emmy for Best Supporting Actress for her role on the show.

Prior to Stranger Things, Bobby Brown, who was born in Marbella, Spain, but grew up in Dorset and later Florida, had guest roles in hit US shows such as Modern Family, NCIS and Greys Anatomy.

The 14-year-old actress, who has recently bolstered her already impressive net worth with a huge pay rise for season 3, has recently been building on her acting resume, adding an appearance in the music video for Sigma and Birdy single Find Me and signing with IMG Models after appearing in a Calvin Klein campaign.

The actress will also make her film debut in the Godzilla sequel, Godzilla: King of Monsters.

What is the Time 100 List?

Time 100 is an annual list that compiles the top 100 most influential people in the world. It is assembled by Time magazine and was first published in 1999. The list is split into five sections: Titans; Pioneers; Artists, Leaders and Icons.

As the inclusion of the likes of Chinas President Xi Jinping, Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un may spark questions, Nancy Gibbs, the Time editor in 2014 explained: The TIME 100 is a list of the worlds most influential men and women, not its most powerful, though those are not mutually exclusive terms.

Power, as weve seen this year, can be crude and implacable, from Vladimir Putins mugging of Crimea to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Uns summary execution of his uncle and mentor Jang Song Thaek.

She went on to stress that these people make lists because they the outliers, and not because the list seeks to celebrate the best work of the human spirit.

Who is on the Time 100 for 2018?

But stranger things have happened that a 14-year-old being listed as one of the most influential people in the world.

Ted Cruz, so viciously attacked by President Trump during the 2016 US Elections, ended up writing Trumps entry on the 2018 list. The Senator from Texas described Trump - the man who called him Lyin Ted, tweeted an unflattering picture of his wife compared to Melanias and intimated that Cruzs father was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy - as a flash-bang grenade thrown into Washington.

The same cultural safe spaces that blinkered coastal elites to candidate Trumps popularity have rendered them blind to President Trumps achievements on behalf of ordinary Americans, Cruz wrote in his encomium on Trump.

While pundits obsessed over tweets, he worked with Congress to cut taxes for struggling families. While wealthy celebrities announced that they would flee the country, he fought to bring back jobs and industries to our shores.

As well Millie Bobby Brown, Kim Jong-un and Trump, the list is full of celebrities, political activists and scientists.

Elon Musk, whose Space X recently became the first privately funded company to send a payload beyond Earths gravitational field, is on the list.

Still going strong: Jennifer Lopez landed one of the 2018 TIME 100 covers, which has its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world

Jennifer Lopez, Tiffany Haddish, Lady Bird director Greta Gerwig, Meghan Markle and Robert Mueller also feature on the list.

The full list can be found on the Time 100 site.
She returned to social media last week following her shock marital split from Channing Tatum.

And Jenna Dewan was seen for the first time since ditching her estranged husband's surname as she grabbed a quick coffee in Los Angeles on Thursday.

The actress, 37, put on a stylish display in cut-off jeans and heels just a day after eagle-eyed fans noticed her Instagram bio had lost the Tatum handle.

New me: Jenna Dewan was seen for the first time since ditching her estranged husband Channing Tatum's surname as she grabbed a quick coffee in Los Angeles on Thursday

The Step Up showed off her trim physique in a tight white vest as she left the coffee shop, covering up in a long cream silk robe and elongating her look with nude tasselled heels.

The mother-of-one sported cat-eye sunglasses and a brown cross-body bag as she made her way home after the outing.

Jenna wore her brunette locks in loose waves and accentuated her naturally beautiful features with low-key make-up.

The actress returned to Instagram on Thursday, with eagle-eyed fans noticing she had ditched the Tatum part of her surname in the wake of her split from husband of nine years Channing, 37.

Chic: The actress, 37, put on a stylish display in cut-off jeans and heels just a day after eagle-eyed fans noticed her Instagram bio had lost the Tatum handle

Looking good: The Step Up showed off her trim physique in a tight white vest as she left the coffee shop, covering up in a long cream silk robe and elongating her look with nude heels

Others also noticed that among the thousands of likes was one by Jenna's ex, two and a half weeks after the couple announced their separation.

The star returned to social media on Sunday for the first time since her shock split from Channing earlier this month.

Jenna and her Hollywood movie star husband had used social media to announce in a joint statement on April 2 that they had decided to end their marriage after nine years.

In her first Instagram post since the break-up announcement, Jenna had shared a photo of herself posing on a beach and included a message for her fans.

'Thank you guys for all your love. Love you right back,' she wrote.

A source revealed that the former couple's hectic scheduling was partly to blame for the ending of their relationship.

Moving on in style: The mother-of-one sported cat-eye sunglasses and a brown cross-body bag as she made her way home after the outing

Work it: Jenna wore her brunette locks in loose waves and accentuated her naturally beautiful features with low-key make-up

Look at that! Fans saw Jenna had gone back to her maiden name on Instagram as she returned to social media following her split, with one of the likes coming from ex Channing

'There was no other person, it was just a series of issues and fights resulting from both having busy careers in different locations and a child at home,' the source said.

'It happens to the best marriages.'

The former couple will reportedly remain focused on co-parenting and raising their daughter Everly, four.

Channing and Jenna became a couple after starring together in the 2006 dance film Step Up, then ultimately married in 2009.

'We have lovingly chosen to separate as a couple,' their joint statement said.

'There are no secrets nor salacious events at the root of our decision - just two best-friends realising it's time to take some space and help each other live the most joyous, fulfilled lives as possible.'
She's been a ubiquitous presence in the fashion industry since she burst onto the scene way back in 1985.

And more than three decades later, the work is still streaming in thick and fast for original supermodel Cindy Crawford, as the ageless beauty shot scenes for an upcoming commercial in Rome, Italy, on Thursday.

The 52-year-old star continued to defy the years as she followed the direction of Italian directing supremo Gabriele Muccino in a gorgeous white dress.

Defying the years: Original supermodel Cindy Crawford, 52, looked ageless as she shot what appeared to be a fashion commercial on the streets of Rome, Italy, on Friday

The stunning frock of course enabled the beauty to showcase her famous lithe legs, with the dress' hem skimming the tops of Cindy's thigh.

Cindy also showed off her flawless decolletage in the dress thanks to its square neckline, with the number also teasing at her slender physique with its sheer, patterned motif.

She paired the number with barely-there nude stilettos and a netted bucket bag in the same shade.

Her trademark brunette tresses had clearly been preened to perfect by the model's stylist, though her flawless blow dry appeared at war with the wind when the occasional gust interrupted their shoot.

Stunning: The 52-year-old star continued to defy the years as she followed the direction of Italian directing supremo Gabriele Muccino in a gorgeous white dress

Keen to tackle the problem, Cindy shielded her locks with her hands as she spoke with her sizeable entourage.

The fashion icon - who passed over the modelling baton to her daughter Kaia Gerber, 16, last year - also rocked a more demure style during the shoot.

A second look saw Cindy prove her statuesque figure can make even the simplest of outfits look incredible as she posed in a classic khaki utility shirt and cream cropped trousers.

The mother-of-two also swapped her stilettos for nude sandals with a more comfortable block heel.

Showing off her modelling prowess, the former runway fixture worked her angles for the camera, unperturbed by the copious crew members, one of whom wielded an umbrella atop her head, flanking her.
The April 19 episode of Station 19  Season 1, Episode 6  is called 'Stronger Together' but the squad is never in the same place at the same time this week, and they're keeping secrets that are bound to combust at any moment.

As the episode starts, Andy (Jaina Lee Ortiz) and Jack (Grey Damon) are gearing up for the Incinerator, a captaincy drill test for the aspiring leaders of the fire department.

Andy and Jack carpool together, but after their breakup in last week's episode, Jack is being awfully frosty toward his co-captain. Plus, when he arrived at her house to pick her up, she was sharing a sweet moment with hot cop Ryan (Alberto Frezza), who had stopped by to deliver the good luck charm they had swapped in their youths. (Little does Ryan know it was Andy who ran away from his stoop the night prior.)

Tension: Andy and Jack carpool together, but after their breakup in last week's episode, Jack is being awfully frosty toward his co-captain

Test: Battalion Chief Frankel is officiating the Incinerator, but Fire Chief Ripley (Brett Tucker, pictured) is also present to assess the firefighters

Battalion Chief Frankel (Leslie Hope) is officiating the Incinerator, but Fire Chief Ripley (Brett Tucker) is also present. Frankel tells the assembled competitors about the challenge: In teams of four, they'll have to rescue a 200-lb dummy from a burning warehouse.

Jack and Andy are assigned to the same team, joining up with Cole Edmonds (Brad Beyer) from Station 7 and Charlotte Dearborn (Jae Young Han) from Station 12, the latter of whom tells Andy Station 19 is a bit of a legend among Seattle's other squads. And actually, as Frankel reveals, Station 19 is the grand prize: It's the only station with a captain vacancy this year.

Cole goes first and immediately reveals himself to be a sexist pig, referring to both Andy and Charlotte as 'hon' and instructing them to provide backup while he and Jack do the heavy lifting. He gets the dummy out in good time, impressing the bosses.

Then it's Charlotte's turn. She has the team divide up to find the dummy even before they deal with the flames. Andy finds the dummy first, but the flames block her egress, so she has to be rescued. Once they're out, Andy criticizes Charlotte over the dangerous strategy. Still, Charlotte set a new record time, and flipping the script, she tells Cole: 'That's how it's done, hon.'

On Jack's turn, the team can't find the dummy, and Jack makes the call to leave the warehouse empty-handed. He thinks he lost, but Ripley commends him for being 'the first candidate in five years to crack that variation of the test'.

Captaincy test: On Jack's turn, the team can't find the dummy, and Jack makes the call to leave the warehouse empty-handed, he thinks he lost, but Ripley commends him

Strategy: Andy finds the dummy first, but the flames block her egress, so she has to be rescued. Once they're out, Andy criticizes Charlotte over the dangerous strategy

Finally, on Andy's turn, she urges the team to actually act like a team and stick together for once. The roof collapses and knocks Cole unconscious, though, so Frankel calls a halt to the test. Andy decides to find the dummy anyway, and Jack goes with her. They rescue the dummy, but Frankel yells at Andy for not heeding the mayday and for acting 'inherently selfish'.

But then Ripley gives Frankel a dressing-down about reprimanding Andy in front of the other candidates, and he even implies Ripley is biased. That said, Ripley doesn't agree with Andy's call. 'Captains have to balance what's moral and what's practical,' he says.

Back at the firehouse, Ben (Jason George) finds Vic (Barrett Doss) flicking a blowtorch on and off, and he surmises she's trying to overcome the PTSD she developed after nearly dying in the blue ethanol flames a few episodes back. She's saved by the bell, though, when the alarm goes off.

This week's crisis? A woman named Piper (Phoebe Neidhardt) stepped in a pothole, and now she's stuck with her leg thigh deep in the middle of the road. As the team arrives on the scene, they see that Piper is right in the path of a speeding truck, and Vic runs to throw herself around Piper. Luckily, the truck swerves before running them both over.

This week's crisis: A woman named Piper stepped in a pothole, and now she's stuck with her leg thigh deep in the middle of the road.

Panic: As the team arrives on the scene, they see that Piper is right in the path of a speeding truck, and Vic runs to throw herself around Piper

Saved: Luckily, the truck swerves before running them both over though Travis frets over the potential of the pothole becoming a sinkhole

Love: Finley arrives, and Piper  still wedged in the earth  comes clean about her feelings. Finley kisses her and has her promise not to keep anything a secret ever again

As Travis (Jay Hayden) frets over the potential of the pothole becoming a sinkhole, Ben says he's worried Piper might lose her leg to compartment syndrome. Piper, unfortunately, overhears this, and she starts telling her sob story to Vic and Maya (Danielle Savre).

Turns out, she was on her way to tell Finley (Chelsea Ricketts), her best friend, not to move to New York; she just realized she's in love with Finley, but she can't bring herself to confess her feelings. She doesn't think the firefighters would understand, since they're 'freakin' fearless,' but Vic says: 'We're scared of plenty. I'm scared of plenty.'

Finley arrives, and Piper  still wedged in the earth  comes clean about her feelings. Finley kisses her and has her promise not to keep anything a secret ever again. And soon, Piper is sprung from the trap and apparently headed for a full recovery.

PTSD: Vic makes her own confession, telling her colleagues she thinks she's scared of fire

Health concerns: Pruitt arrives at Grey Sloan Memorial and asking a receptionist to page his doctor, Dr. Miranda Bailey

When they get back to Station 19, the team  minus Andy and Jack  sit down to dinner. And that's when Vic makes her own confession, telling her colleagues she thinks she's scared of fire. Travis is upset with her for betraying the team's trust over the course of multiple shifts and multiple fires, but he urges the team not to tell Andy and Jack. They plan to put Vic on pump and hydrant duty during future blazes and to use VR simulations to get Vic back into fine, firefighting shape.

Meanwhile, Andy arrives home to find a solicitous Ryan on her front porch, but she wards him off, saying she really just wants to talk to her father about her trying day. But Pruitt (Miguel Sandoval) isn't there.

Earlier in the episode, Dean (Okieriete Onaodowan) found Pruitt coughing and wheezing at the firehouse, and he persuaded him to go home, but Pruitt only did so after making Dean promise not to tell anyone about his downturn in health. And this episode ends with Pruitt arriving at Grey Sloan Memorial and asking a receptionist to page his doctor, Dr. Miranda Bailey (Chandra Wilson). 'Til next week, keep your fingers crossed for the old man, Station 19 fans!
Every TV drama has to have an episode where the characters get high on pot cookies, right? No? Just Grey's Anatomy?

Well, the cannabis consumption of April 19's Season 14, Episode 20  an installment titled 'Judgment Day'  occurs during the hospital's surgical innovation presentations as Arizona (Jessica Capshaw) passes around a tin of 'lesbian gratitude cookies' she got from the patient whose breast cancer diagnosis she debunked two episodes ago.

Mistake: 'Judgment Day' occurs during the hospital's surgical innovation presentations as Arizona passes around a tin of 'lesbian gratitude cookies' she got from the patient

Accident: Arizona spreads the news about the marijuana, and the affected doctors realize they just have to ride out the high

Back in the auditorium: The crowd is getting a bit loopy, as is Jackson (Jesse Williams), who is babbling onstage about 'building a better vagina'

As the crowd munches away, Richard (James Pickens Jr.) presents his innovation: a wand that can differentiate healthy tissue from cancerous tissue. It's around then that Arizona's patient shows up at the hospital in a panic, saying she accidentally baked medical cannabis into the cookies.

Back in the auditorium, the crowd is getting a bit loopy, as is Jackson (Jesse Williams), who is babbling onstage about 'building a better vagina,' then backtracking and saying he doesn't think there's anything wrong with vaginas, especially since he came out of one himself. And his mother, Catherine (Debbie Allen), is right there onstage with him!

Arizona spreads the news about the marijuana, and the affected doctors realize they just have to ride out the high. As DeLuca (Giacomo Gianniotti) starts petting the hospital's plant life, Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) and Jo (Camilla Luddington) tell the interns to cover the attendings' cases, saying whichever intern does the best will get to scrub in on a Whipple operation.

One of the interns, Roy (Rushi Kota) is duly high, but he tries to act sober so he can win the prize. He ends up falling over a cart and impaling himself with a scalpel. Richard realizes he was trying to practice medicine under the influence and promptly fires him.

Meanwhile, in one of the doctors' lounges, Arizona and Maggie keep each other company as they wait to sober up. DeLuca is there, too, but he's lying on the floor, imagining Sam (Jeanine Mason) is lying next to him.

Maggie daydreams about all the cheeses she could be eating, then starts marveling at the virtual anatomy dissection table. And Arizona wonders aloud whether she's being too pushy with Carina (Stefania Spampinato) except she calls her 'Callie' in one massive Freudian slip.

Meanwhile: In one of the doctors' lounges, Arizona and Maggie keep each other company as they wait to sober up, while Maggie daydreams about all the cheeses she could be eating

Fired: One of the interns, Roy is duly high, but he tries to act sober so he can win the prize. He ends up falling over a cart and impaling himself with a scalpel

Maggie loses track of her virtual patient's liver, and she and Arizona declare him dead. 'Cause of death: Acute liver disappearance,' Maggie says.

On the floor, DeLuca finally realizes Sam is just a figment of his imagination  since she fled to Switzerland under threat of deportation in last week's episode  and he starts sobbing. Arizona, however, gets a happier ending: Carina eases all her worries by giving her a big smooch.

Bailey (Chandra Wilson) also ingested the marijuana and unwittingly started a gastrectomy while high. She'd never experienced pot before, and she pages Meredith because she's worried her heart is acting up.

After telling Bailey, 'This is your brain on drugs,' Meredith offers to take over, but Bailey accidentally jams Mer's fingers in the OR door, so Mer has to punt the operation to Jo.

Flying solo, Jo panics for the entire operation until she has the idea of using Richard's wand to identify the tumors on the patient's stomach. After the operation, Mer tells Jo that she would have done everything the exact same way but Mer, being the badass she is, says she wouldn't have needed the device.

Panic: Bailey also ingested the marijuana and unwittingly started a gastrectomy while high. She'd never experienced pot before, and she pages Meredith for help

Meredith offers to take over, but Bailey accidentally jams Mer's fingers in the OR door, so Mer has to punt the operation to Jo. Flying solo, Jo panics for the entire operation

Owen missed out on the cannabis fun, though, since he's at home expecting the imminent arrival of a newborn foster kid. He calls Amelia (Caterina Scorsone) in a tizzy, freaked out by the accelerated timeline, and she goes over to his house and takes a very high Alex (Justin Chambers) with her.

Alex ends up answering the door when the social worker arrives, much to Owen and Amelia's horror. But luckily, Alex has the wherewithal to claim he's a pediatric surgeon there to do a check-up on the little one, and the social worker is pleased.

She leaves the baby with Owen; and he, Amelia, and Alex go raid Meredith's house for baby supplies. Alex explains he didn't have the best foster parents, but he did have a father figure who meant a lot to him because he gave a crap about him.

'And you, my friend, you're giving so many craps right now!' he tells Owen. Still, Owen's case of sudden-onset fatherhood syndrome doesn't let up, so Amelia says she'll camp out with him.

Now let's get to the most ominous storyline of the week: that of Jackson and Catherine. If you'll recall, Jackson had inadvertently opened Pandora's box last week by waiving the agreement Dr. Rebecca Froy had with his grandfather, the esteemed Harper Avery.

Alex is very high also and ends up answering the door when the social worker arrives but he claims he's a doctor there to do a check-up on the baby

Owen's case of sudden-onset fatherhood syndrome doesn't let up, so Amelia says she'll camp out with him

Owen missed out on the cannabis fun, though, since he's at home expecting the imminent arrival of a newborn foster kid

This week, Catherine tells him it was a nondisclosure agreement relating to Harper's sexual misconduct. As it turns out, Harper actually had NDAs with a total of 13 women, and the agreements paid these women handsomely but required them not to work in a Harper Avery hospital or compete for a Harper Avery Award.

'A fortune was paid to silence those women,' Catherine tells Jackson. 'The hope was for some that if the financial hit was great enough, he would stop the behavior. And he did. He did stop.'

Jackson is incensed, though, accusing his mom of being complicit in the cover up. But she reminds him it was a different era, and women who spoke up against their male abusers were discredited and their careers were destroyed.

'I was not then who I am now,' she says. 'I didn't have the voice then that I have now  I am not ashamed of myself, Jackson, but I am ashamed of what your grandfather did.'

April (Sarah Drew) eavesdrops on the conversation and reports the news to Bailey as the two of them wait out their highs together. 'I always wanted a Harper Avery,' April tells Bailey. 'I had a Jackson Avery. It's not the same thing.'

Accusations: Jackson is incensed when he hears about Harper and accuses his mom of being complicit in the coverup, though she reminds him it was a different era

Spill the beans: April eavesdrops Jackson's conversation with his mother and reports the news to Bailey as the two of them wait out their highs together

Maggie finally gets her plate of cheese while Meredith contemplates the worth of her award

Meredith finds them mimicking bagpipes, saying they're holding a funeral for Harper's legacy. Mer then confronts Jackson and Catherine, saying: 'I've spent my whole life working for that award.' And then she realizes Marie Cerone was one of Harper's victims; and she realizes Ellis Grey, her mom, had to take Marie's name off their paper to win the Harper Avery Award.

As the episode ends, news of Harper's crimes has just made national news, and Meredith is left staring at her Harper Avery Award trophy and contemplating its worth while Maggie, sitting next to her, finally gets her plate of cheese. At least someone ended their day on a high!
Matt Damon and wife Luciana Barroso recently spent time in Chris Hemsworth and Elsa Pataky's hometown of Byron Bay.

And stunning Elsa is now reminiscing on the blissful beach-side days spent with the Hollywood power couple.

On Friday, the 41-year-old took to Instagram to share several candid photos of her with Luciana and their fellow gal pals.

Blissful beach-side days: On Friday, the 41-year-old took to Instagram to share several candid photos with Matt Damon's wife Luciana Barroso during their time together in Byron Bay

'Holidays and beach days!' the blonde beauty wrote, tagging a private account believed to belong to Luciana.

In one snap, Elsa is seen turning to the camera as she kneels in the sand wearing a black g-string bikini.

42-year-old Luciana sits close by, clad in a black strapless bikini top and shielding her eyes from the sun.

Gal pals: A beaming Elsa was seen with Luciana and two other friends during a recent afternoon in Byron Bay

And in another photo, the pals pose with two other female friends.

Indeed, Elsa and Luciana have much in common.

Not only are they both married to Hollywood heartthrobs, they are both mothers to young children and are both native speakers of Spanish.

Much in common: Not only are Elsa and Luciana married to Hollywood heartthrobs, they are both mothers to young children and are both native speakers of Spanish

Elsa was born in Madrid, Spain, while Luciana hails from the city of Salta, Argentina.

Meanwhile, in Friday's string of uploads, actress Elsa was also snapped spending time with a group of children.

The tots were seen toasting marshmallows while she looked lovingly on.

Doting: in Friday's string of uploads, actress Elsa was also snapped spending time with a group of children

Australian and international media have recently published reports claiming Matt and Luciana are keen to relocate to Australia.

An unnamed source told Woman's Day last week that Matt is envious of mate Chris Hemsworth's idyllic Australian lifestyle.

'Matt loves Australia...Chris enjoys the quiet life away from Hollywood and that just makes it even more appealing,' the insider said.

Loving the Australian lifestyle! Matt in a recent snap with surfer Tyler J Boyce

According to Page Six last month, he was looking to buy the property next door to Chris due to his dissatisfaction with President Donald Trump.

'Matt's telling friends and colleagues in Hollywood that he's moving the family to Australia for a year,' a 'top' source told the publication.
Britain's Got Talent returned with its twelfth series last weekend.

And viewers are set to burst into laughter for the latest episode of the talent series, as fans will see stand-up comedian Lost Voice Guy deliver his hilarious 'speechless' performance.

In a preview clip, the contestant - who has cerebral palsy - drove judges wild as he took a light-hearted approach to his condition through his witty act.

Funnyman: Viewers are set to burst into laughter for the latest episode of Britain's Got Talent, as fans will see stand-up comedian Lost Voice Guy deliver his hilarious 'speechless' act

Introducing himself to the crowd, Lost Voice Guy - real name Lee Ridley - used his iPad to communicate his banter, stating: 'For obvious reasons, I'm called the Lost Voice Guy!'

To Simon Cowell's interest, the head judge asked: 'How long have you lost your voice?'

The funnyman quipped: 'I just knew you were going to ask...something that I hadn't never though about...please excuse the awkward silence while I type out my answer.'

Impressed: In a preview clip, the contestant - who has cerebral palsy - drove judges wild as he took a light-hearted approach to his condition through his witty act

'I've been speechless for 37 years, and as you may be able to see, I'm a struggling stand-up comedian, who also struggles to stand up!'

Lee continued: 'I'm not sure how good I am, I'll leave it for you to decide...Just so you know, if you don't laugh at the disabled guy, you're going to hell', which left judges Amanda Holden, David Walliams and Alesha Dixon in stitches.

Cerebral palsy is a group of long-lasting conditions that affect movement and co-ordination - caused by a problem with the brain that occurs before, during or soon after birth.

Captivated: Lost Voice Guy - real name Lee Ridley - left judges Simon Cowell, Amanda Holden, David Walliams and Alesha Dixon in stitches

Poking fun: The contestant used his iPad device to communicate his banter

Maintaining his lively performance, the contestant joked: 'When I realised I've never be able to talk again, I was speechless!'

'I've lived in Newcastle all, but for some reason, I still haven't picked up the accent.'

Poking fun at the automated voice from his iPad, this as he closed with: 'I know you've been trying to figure out where you know my voice from, maybe it would help if you hear this: 'The next train to arrive at platform 4 is the 12:52 to London's King Cross.'

Hilarious: Charming the crowd, the act also received claps from hosts Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly

Viewers will also see dance group Rise bust their best moves using wheelchairs to share their inspirational message of positivity and hope.

The troupe features a young girl called Hollie, who was injured in the tragic Manchester Arena Attack last year.

The bombing saw a death toll of 23 and left 512 individuals with non-fatal injuries.

Britain's Got Talent returns this Saturday evening on ITV.
Roxy Jacenko was once accused of hiring look-a-like 'clones' to work at her public relations companies.

And even the businesswoman's three-year-old son Hunter think his mum looks exactly like her most faithful employee, Holly Asser.

Taking to Instagram on Friday night, 37-year-old Roxy revealed her tot's hilariously candid thought beneath a photo that showed her cosying up with her blonde staffer.

Twinning! Hunter Curtis thinks his famous mother Roxy Jacenko (left) looks just like her most faithful employee Holly Asser (right), and an Instagram snap taken by the three-year-old on Friday night certainly proves his theory

The picture of Roxy and Holly was taken by young Hunter while they all ate at trendy Potts Point eatery, Fei Jai.

'Captured by @huntercurtis14 saying : 'you guys look the same'', Roxy captioned the snap.

Indeed, she and Holly both sport blonde hair, which is cut at a similar length and styled in a near-identical fashion.

Cheeky chap! Three-year-old Hunter had a hilarious observation about his mother and her staffer

And the twosome also appear to share the same taste in clothing -with both opting for black sleeveless tops for the dinner date at Fei Jai.

Surely Hunter will be in Roxy's good books with his candid comment about her looking just like Holly - as Holly is nearly a decade younger than the age-defying PR queen.

The tot's comment comes after a 60 Minutes report about Roxy, broadcast in 2016, in which the beauty was accused of trying to build an army of 'clones' at her company.

'Clones': It comes after a 60 Minutes report about Roxy, broadcast in 2016, in which the beauty was accused of trying to build an army of 'clones' at her company

Holly is the blonde staffer most frequently cited as a 'clone', while Grace Garrick and former employee Gemma Oldfield were once also regularly named as being in Roxy's look-a-like gang of workers.

At the time, Roxy responded to the criticism by sharing a photo of her office, which included non-blonde staff members.

'For the half-wits who today suggested I have blonde 'clones' - a little research and you might discover that brunettes are very welcome in our office,' she wrote.
If Dean Wells didn't know before, he sure knows now: the internet can be a cruel, cold place.

On Friday, the Married At First Sight 'villain' was mercilessly trolled after sharing an Instagram snap from a Newcastle tattoo parlour and asking: 'What should I get?'

Responses were everything from hilarious, to ruthless - unsurprisingly, none of them were remotely helpful.

A big male chicken on his head, Davina Rankin, or 'nothing, because you don't put a bumper sticker on a Bentley': MAFS' Dean Wells gets ROASTED as he asks fans what tattoo he should get

In the image, Dean posed next to his 'mates' at Diabolik Tattoo in Newcastle, looking relaxed despite the nerve-wracking environment.

'At my friends tattoo shop in Newcastle thinking about getting a tat. What should i get?'

In rather early with a jab was none other than fellow cast mate Nasser Sultan, who simply suggested: 'Davina I say.'

He was of course referring to Davina Rankin, the former Playboy model he infamously had an 'affair' with on MAFS this year.

Silly question! On Friday, the Married At First Sight 'villain' was mercilessly trolled after sharing an Instagram snap from a Newcastle tattoo parlour and asking: 'What should I get?'

Sadly, his poor 'ex-wife' Tracey Jewel wasn't safe from the roast-fest brewing in the post's comments.

One mean keyboard warrior suggested: 'Get one of your ex Tracey and her new wife Shaun.'

Online trolls aren't know for imbuing their critiques with accuracy, as proven by this person's suggestion that Tracey's new flame Sean Thomsen is a woman - he's not.

Jab! In rather early with a jab was none other than fellow cast mate Nasser Sultan, who simply suggested: 'Davina I say'

Rude! Another suggested that Dean ask his tattoo artist to permanently ink a large male chicken on his forehead, although not in those exact words

Another suggested that Dean ask his tattoo artist to permanently ink a large male chicken on his forehead, although not in those exact words.

Their suggestion read: 'A big c**k on your head.'

Miraculously, some fans offered potentially helpful advice, one complimenting Dean's rugged good looks.

Compliment! Miraculously, some fans offered potentially helpful advice, one complimenting Dean's rugged good looks

'None,' they suggested, 'because you don't put a bumper sticker on a Bentley!'

Another went very philosophical: 'Dont be like all the other sheep that overcompensate their inner hidden fear of being too feminine by trying to mark their bodies to increase the perception of masculinity, but only serve to demonstrate their gender identity insecurity,' they offered.

With such vibrant suggestions, Dean could perhaps find his ultimate decision to be just about as difficult as every post-affair conversation he had with Tracey.
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According to a source in the Oman police force, there is 'no criminal suspicion' around the death of DJ Avicii.

The Grammy-nominated electronic dance DJ, born Tim Birling, died at the age of 28 on Friday and his body was found in Muscat, Oman.

Avicii's body is set to be flown home to Sweden later this week.

The cause of death is still unclear, although a source claims that there is absolutely no criminal suspicion behind it following two post-mortem examinations.

The latest update was revealed by a Sky News source in the Oman police force who said 'we absolutely confirmed that there is no criminal suspicion of death'.

Avicii's brother, David Bergling, has reportedly travelled to Muscat to find out more about his sibling's death as the cause is not yet known.

Police told People magazine: 'He is survived by his parents, two brothers and sister  who are all completely devastated.'

Earlier, thousands gathered to mourn the Swedish born musician - who was known for his EDM hits Wake Me Up, Levels and Hey Brother - at Sergels Torg in central Stockholm.

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Thousands of fans of Avicii's gathered to honour the much-loved producer at Sergels Torg in central Stockholm today

Many of his fans took to Twitter to share their experiences of Sergels Torg and to pay heartfelt tributes to the Swedish DJ

Others described the emotion of the event, which saw fans sing, dance and cry while recounting some of their memories of the DJ and his music

The square was filled with admirers who wanted to pay tribute to the star after he was found dead on Friday in Omar

People came to mourn together as they heard about the producers death - with the cause still not yet known

Fans flooded to Sergels Torg to pay tribute to the DJ, listening to his music and celebrating his memory together.

They took to social media to share photos and videos from the memorial.

On Instagram, user pridesussie shared a series of photos from the event and wrote: 'Today at Sergels Torg. Memorial time as well as tribute to Avicii. Too young, he became a guardian angel among the clouds.'

On Twitter, user Lena Ankarklo commented: 'Avicii on Sergels Torg. We are here and remember and honor the nice, the great and the best Tim. All thoughts to his mom Anki.'

While user namjooncito wrote: 'Went to the memorial for Avicii at Sergels Torg and lots of cameras on our faces when we sang along/cried! But this was so big and memorable.'

Vladi Mart also shared a photo and wrote: 'Serguei Square, Stockholm. People gathered to say goodbye to the wonderful musician, Tim Bergling. I liked his work, the themes in which he reminded of the value of time and the need to live exactly for today. Thanks for the melodies that bring us joy! He left at the age of 28. Truly, very sorry.'

Randi Haussler shared a photo from the scene and said: 'Hands up to honor and music from idol Avicii on the Sergelstorg in Stockholm.'

Instagram user emmyelsa said: 'Heaven just got a new star. Thanks for the music, memories and all the joy you gave millions of people, Tim. Rest in peace and see you on the other side. Love goes out to family & friends in this sad time.'

Several of the DJ's most popular hits were played during the tribute with thousands of fans seen dancing and singing along

One Avicii fan thanked the DJ for reminding him of the importance of 'living exactly for today' while sharing a photo of the memorial

This fan shared a heartfelt tribute to the DJ, saying that he gave joy to millions of people and that heaven now has a new star

There was also a poignant moment of silence for the DJ with the thousands of fans respectfully and impeccably observing it

There was hardly a free space in the entire area as fans lined every inch in order to celebrate the life of the popular DJ

The musician was seen just days ago while posing with fans at the luxury Muscat Hills Resort, though to be some of the last photos of him alive.

Born Tim Bergling, Avicii quit touring in 2016 due to battles with his health, suffering from acute pancreatitis and had to have his gallbladder and appendix removed in 2014.

In the past, the DJ struggled with addiction and was hospitalised twice for alcohol related issues.

The fans waved their hands in the air, sang and danced while listening to some of his biggest hits, including hit single Don't Wake Me Up

Thousands flooded to central Stockholm to pay tribute to the DJ and took to social media to share photos from the event held in his memory

Last picture? Avicii was found dead aged 28 in Oman on Friday. The musician was seen days ago at Muscat Hills Resort, posing with DJ Maitrai Joshi (pictured)

A fan posted this photo of the musician, writing: 'RIP @avicii, can't believe I got to meet you in Muscat just 6 days ago, far too young to go'

Avicii dead at 28: Swedish DJ Tim Bergling's body found in Oman leaving family 'devastated'; he is seen in Los Angeles late last year

His brother has checked into an upscale hotel just 15 minutes from where Avicii stayed, claims TMZ.

Swedish reports say the DJ had checked out of Muscat Hills sometime last week and David will most likely want to discover exactly where his brother went in the days leading up to his death.

It comes as fans around the world noticed the heartbreaking final tweet from the legendary DJ, as it gains new poignancy in the wake of his death.

Avicii was recently nominated for the Billboard Music Awards 2018 in the 'Top Dance/Electronic Album', for his six-track EP Avici.

He wrote a few days ago: 'Thanks for the nomination! @billboard #BBMAS'

The DJ's publicist said in a statement: 'It is with profound sorrow that we announce the loss of Tim Bergling, also known as Avicii.

'He was found dead in Muscat, Oman this Friday afternoon local time, April 20th.

'The family is devastated and we ask everyone to please respect their need for privacy in this difficult time. No further statements will be given.'

No more details about his death were provided. Oman police and state media had no immediate report late Friday night on the artist's death.

Avicii was recently nominated for the Billboard Music Awards 2018 in the 'Top Dance/Electronic Album', for his six-track EP Avici. He wrote a few days ago: 'Thanks for the nomination! @billboard #BBMAS'

Although the DJ had been hospitalised in the past for excessive drinking, he claimed to have never taken the drug MDMA or Molly, which is known for being popular with fans of his music

Maitrai Joshi, who is resident DJ at the resort, is seen in one of the photos with Avicii at the resort.

Joshi, 29, told Mail Online that he met the famous producer last weekend, seeing him on Friday and Saturday.

He said: 'It was shocking for us to see him there in Oman. He was on vacation, he said it was his first time in Oman.'

The DJ was enjoying himself so much in the Middle Eastern country that he extended his stay an extra eight days; he was supposed to go home that Sunday, according to Joshi.

Joshi said he didn't recall if Avicii was drinking but noted that he was in good spirits while enjoying the luxury resort with a small group of friends.

He added to Norwegian paper VG: 'He was very nice, in good shape. Last Friday they were out on a boat, and the day after I know he was having dinner with friends. This is shocking news.

'I do not know what might have happened. He was very nice and happy.'

American Christina Hlosek also was seen in a photo with Avicii, she said: 'It's a shock to me that he's dead now. I could not believe the news when I read it.'

In November 2017, footage (pictured) was released of the musician hospital-ridden in Australia while struggling with his health during his worldwide arena tour

Last post: Avicii shared this picture of himself posing in the rain on April 4, writing 'It's always sunny in California'

Avicii battled with acute pancreatitis - which is a potentially life-threatening inflammation of the pancreas - due in part to excessive drinking.

What is acute pancreatitis and how is it different from pancreatitis? Pancreatitis, inflammation of the pancreas, can come on quickly, when it is described as 'acute', with symptoms ranging from mild to severe. It also can be a long-standing problem, when it's known as 'chronic', where the pancreas slowly becomes more damaged over time. The most common symptom for both is pain in the abdomen that radiates to the back, along with nausea and vomiting. The theory is alcohol can cause the pancreatic duct to spasm, blocking the release of digestive juices. That inflames the pancreatic tissue. Other less common factors are faulty genes and viral infections such as measles or mumps. The dead tissue is vulnerable to infection and can lead to organ failure, so it needs to be removed. Around 25,000 cases of pancreatitis every year in Britain are acute. In 80 per cent of these, patients recover within a week. However, 5 per cent of patients will be extremely unwell, with serious and even fatal complications. Advertisement

As a result he had his gallbladder and appendix removed in 2014, cancelling a series of shows in attempt to recover.

He quit touring in 2016 in order to focus on his health and recovery.

In November 2017, footage was released of the musician hospital-ridden in Australia while struggling with his health during his worldwide arena tour.

The snippet was from the Swedish artist's documentary, AVICII: TRUE STORIES.

The clip was uploaded to Avicii's Facebook and the star admitted at the time he was apprehensive about sharing his in-depth battles against stress, anxiety and illness.

He wrote about the video: 'I'm really excited. I'm also a bit nervous because it is kind of gritty sometimes. It's very personal. There's a lot of ups and downs. It's going to be interesting to see what people say.'

Footage shot by documentary maker Levan Tsikurishvili between 2013 and 2016 shows Australian doctors telling the DJ his gall bladder needs removing.

'Normally you'd take your gall bladder out before you go home on hospital admission, the reason being, so you don't get another attack in the mean time,' the doctor says.

'We understand your situation in that you're in the middle of a world tour...we think at some stage you need your gall bladder out.'

The video later shows the 28-year-old appearing disoriented and light-headed as he tried to grasp what day it is.

He looked exhausted, and his eyes went into a haze and rolled back into his head several times.

Although the DJ had been hospitalised in the past for excessive drinking, he claimed to have never taken the drug MDMA or Molly, which is known for being popular with fans of his music.

In an interview with GQ in 2013, he said: 'I mean, I want to take it. But I'm sort of afraid of anything that makes you feel out of control.'

The DJ was last romantically linked to former Canadian model Raquel Bettencourt (pictured together in 2013)

He won two MTV Music Awards, one Billboard Music Award and earned two Grammy nominations. Known for Wake Me Up! The Days, You Make Me, and the recent Lonely Together with Rita Ora, Avicii's biggest hit was Levels

Pictured: The late producer and DJ with his mother during his childhood

In the piece, he also touched on his battle with anxiety and drinking.

He said: 'You are traveling around, you live in a suitcase, you get to this place, there's free alcohol everywhereit's sort of weird if you don't drink.

'I just got into a habit, because you rely on that encouragement and self-confidence you get from alcohol, and then you get dependent on it.'

Music veteran Nile Rodgers has paid tribute to the star and revealed his fears over the producers alcohol issues as he was 'drunk' the last time they saw each other.

Nile, who worked alongside Avicii many times over the years, last teamed up with the star at a concert three years ago.

The Chic star revealed he was distraught to discover his friend was 'drunk' and warned him about the risks to his health.

He told the Associated Press: 'He had promised me he would stop drinking, and when I saw him he was drunk that night. And I was like, 'Whoa. Dude. C'mon. What are you doing? What's going on? You said that that was done,'

Music veteran Nile Rodgers has now revealed his fears over the producers alcohol issues as he was 'drunk' the last time they saw each other

Nile Rodgers paid tribute to the DJ on Twitter calling him his 'little bro' (pictured)

'We did a show and I was a little upset. I didn't even stick around for his performance because it was breaking my heart.'

He added: 'I'm shocked because I don't know medically what happened, but I can just say as a person, as a friend, and more importantly, as a musician, Tim was one of the greatest, natural melody writers I've ever worked with, and I've worked with some of the most brilliant musicians on this planet.'

Although Avicii quit touring two years ago, the DJ continued making music in the studio, and collaborated with everyone from Madonna to Coldplay.

'It's been a very crazy journey. I started producing when I was 16. I started touring when I was 18. From that point on, I just jumped into 100 percent,' Avicii told Billboard magazine in 2016.

'When I look back on my life, I think: whoa, did I do that? It was the best time of my life in a sense. It came with a price - a lot of stress a lot of anxiety for me - but it was the best journey of my life.'

Avicii was a pioneer of the contemporary Electronic Dance Movement and a rare DJ capable of worldwide arena tour.

He was part of the wave of DJ-producers, like David Guetta, Calvin Harris and Swedish House Mafia, who broke out on the scene as lead performers in their own right, earning international hits, fame, awards and more like typical pop stars.

Avicii earned $250,000 a night when playing out sold-out shows, according to GQ, and was once named as one of Forbes' highest paid DJs.

Popular: Avicii was a pioneer of the contemporary Electronic Dance Movement and a rare DJ capable of worldwide arena tour

Fellow producer Calvin Harris was one of the first to tweet, writing: 'Devastating news about Avicii. A beautiful soul, passionate and extremely talented with so much more to do. My heart goes out to his family. God bless you Tim'

Avicii was part of the wave of DJ-producers, like David Guetta, Calvin Harris and Swedish House Mafia, who broke out on the scene as lead performers in their own right. Pictured: Louis Tomlinson posted this photo with the DJ

He won two MTV Music Awards, one Billboard Music Award and earned two Grammy nominations. Known for Wake Me Up! The Days, You Make Me, and the recent Lonely Together with Rita Ora, Avicii's biggest hit was Levels.

Avicii's death comes just days after he was nominated for a Billboard Music Award for top dance/electronic album for his EP Avicii (01), which he released last August.

Last year, the musician posted a statement on his website in which he said creating music was what he lived for.

He wrote: '[Creating music] is what I live for, what I feel I was born to do.

'Last year I quit performing live, and many of you thought that was it. But the end of live never meant the end of Avicii or my music. Instead, I went back to the place where it all made sense  the studio.

'The next stage will be all about my love of making music to you guys. It is the beginning of something new.'

As news of his death broke on Friday, Avicii's celebrity friends rushed to pay tribute.

Tragedy: Dua Lipa followed suit saying: 'Such sad news to hear about Avicii passing. Too young and way too soon. My condolences go out to his family, friends and fans x.'

Condolences: Avicii's collaborators and friends rushed to pay tribute as the news broke

Fellow producer Calvin Harris was one of the first to tweet, writing: 'Devastating news about Avicii. A beautiful soul, passionate and extremely talented with so much more to do. My heart goes out to his family. God bless you Tim.'

Former One Direction star Liam Payne wrote: 'Oh my god truly devastated for Avicii very very sad news way to young ... what a talent he was. rest in peace.'

Charlie Puth added: 'Wow, I would like to take a moment to pay tribute to the man who really opened my eyes as to what my productions could one day sound like. Avicii was a genius and a music innovator, and I can not believe he is no longer with us. RIP to the very best.'

Dua Lipa followed suit saying: 'Such sad news to hear about Avicii passing. Too young and way too soon. My condolences go out to his family, friends and fans x.' (sic)

Ellie Goulding expressed: 'Rest easy Avicii, you inspired so many of us. Wish I could have said that to you in person x.' (sic)

Fans were likewise distressed,flooding social media with tributes.
She's best known for playing young Sally Draper on Mad Men.

But Kiernan Shipka looked to have cast off that role on Friday, when the 18-year-old actress was snapped kissing her co-star Ross Lynch on the set of the Sabrina The Teenage Witch reboot.

The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt actress is filming the forthcoming Netflix series in Vancouver.

She's no Sally Draper: Kiernan Shipka looked to have cast off her iconic Mad Men role on Friday, when the 18-year-old actress was snapped kissing her co-star Ross Lynch on the set of the Sabrina The Teenage Witch reboot

The former child star, who plays half-witch half-mortal Sabrina Spellman, looked magical in a red pea coat and shoulder bag for her scene in what looked like a cafe.

At one point the Chicago native rests her blonde curls on the shoulder of her co-star, who plays her character's love interest, Harvey Kinkle.

Ross then kisses the leading lady on the lips.

Her next role: The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt actress is filming the forthcoming Netflix series in Vancouver

Romance: At one point the Chicago native rests her blonde curls on the shoulder of her co-star, who plays her character's love interest, Harvey Kinkle

Iconic: Shipka is best known for playing young Sally Draper on Mad Men

The new show based off the popular Nickelodeon series will be called Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina.

The story of the magical heroine stems from Archie Comics, just like its sister show Riverdale, which airs on the CW.

But unlike its predecessor, the Sabrina reboot will take on a darker coming-of-age story that features horror, the supernatural, and of course, witchcraft.

Described by Netflix, Sabrina is an 'empowered young woman, half-human, half-witch. Sabrina is just beginning her dark education as a sorceress, even as she tries to maintain a normal life as a sophomore at Baxter High.'
Brooke Burke announced weeks ago she was divorcing husband of seven years Dave Charvet.

So it was a surprise to see him on a teaser for next week's episode of Hollywood Medium.

The Playboy cover girl was on Tyler Henry's show to ask about the passing of her late friend and former hairstylist Steven Lake, who died in 2013 during an accident.

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Back together: Brooke Burke announced she was divorcing husband of seven years Dave Charvet weeks ago. So it was a surprise to see him on a teaser for next week's episode of Hollywood Medium

New episode: Henry and he gave her a message from her late friend and former hairstylist Steven Lake who died in 2013

Brooke and Dave were not in the same room, however.

The TV host was sitting in the living room of a home with Tyler while Dave was in a back area with two other women as they listened to recording of Burke.

It is not known when the episode was filmed; it was likely before the split was announced.

Feeling the vibes: 'I have this man coming in who passed under weird circumstances. I feel this man passed away way before the time that they should have,' Tyler said

She liked what he said: Brooke then handed Tyler a red heart-shaped piece of glass. 'This heart actually has the ashes of Steven Lake. Steven was my hairdresser and right hand for over a decade. In addition to that, at work he was also my best friend'

Tyler got right down to business.

'I have this man coming in who passed under weird circumstances. I feel this man passed away way before the time that they should have,' he said.

'This to me kind of indicated more on a situation of like, "Something happened to me. An event happened to me and then there is a period of time until I'm discovered."

'People wonder in that time frame, could I have pulled through? What was happening? Or was this person already deceased. It's just a question mark.'

He was there! Interestingly, her estranged husband Charvet was also present. It is not known when the episode was filmed; it was likely before the split was announced

Tyler had a message from her friend to pass along.

'There is also a joke about work husband. There is a reference of seeing hummingbirds. I'm seeing flapping hummingbirds,' he said.

'He always said to her, "Whenever you see a hummingbird it's me,"' Dave, who was in the wings, told a friend.

The wow moment: 'He always said to her, "Whenever you see a hummingbird it's me,"' Dave, who was in the wings, told a friend

Brooke then handed Tyler a red heart-shaped piece of glass. 'This heart actually has the ashes of Steven Lake.

'Steven was my hairdresser and right hand for over a decade. In addition to that, at work he was also my best friend.'

Hollywood Medium With Tyler Henry airs Wednesday at 9 p.m. on E!

Family: They wed in St Barts in August, 2011 and went on to have two children together - Shaya, aged 10, and Heaven rain, 11

On Wednesday Dave took to Instagram to stand up for Brooke. 'To all my followers, I would appreciate you not saying anything negative about Brooke. She has done nothing wrong and anyone with negative things to say should keep [their] comments to themselves. Thank you.'

Before that she shared a statement to ModernMoms:'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.

Her little mini mes: Burke with daughters Neriah Fisher and Rain Charvet at the 2018 World of Children Hero Awards Benefit at Montage Beverly Hills on Thursday

'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.'

They wed in St Barts in August, 2011 and have two children together - Shaya, 10, and Heaven rain, 11. She also has two kids from her marriage to Dave Fisher.

This episode will be available to stream in the UK & Ireland Thursdays on hayu.
Though Natalie Portman is best-known for her successful acting career, she certainly hasnt shied away from making her political views known either.

The Star Wars actress recently drew both praise and rebukes after cancelling a trip to Israel, the country she was born in, in to accept the Genesis Prize. Her decision comes as new clashes between the Israeli military and Palestinian protestors have drawn international scrutiny. While some have lauded Portmans decision, others have been fiercely critical of the actress, with at least one Israeli politician even calling for her to be stripped of her citizenship.

But just who is Natalie Portman? Does her net worth reflect her successful acting career? Heres all you need to know about her, including her net worth, how shes made her money, family, filmography, decision to pull out of the 2018 Genesis Awards in Israel and what exactly the Genesis Awards are.

Natalie Portman drew a polarizing reaction for her decision to cancel a trip to Israel for the Genesis Awards due to 'recent events' currently taking place in the Middle Eastern country

Who is Natalie Portman?

Natalie Portman is an actress whos appeared in movies like the Star Wars prequel trilogy, V for Vendetta, Black Swan, the Thor franchise and many other films over the years.

Portman was born in Jerusalem, Israel on June 9, 1981.

Her family relocated to the United States when she was three years old, living in Washington, D.C., Connecticut and New York State. She began acting at an early age, making her feature film debut in 1994s Leon: The Professional. She soon became a household name after appearing as Padme Amidala in 1999s Star War: Episode 1  The Phantom Menace while still just in high school. Portman would go on to reprise her role in 2002s Star Wars: Episode II  Attack of the Clones and 2005s Star Wars: Episode III  Revenge of the Sith.

#timesup A post shared by Natalie Portman (@natalieportman) on Jan 7, 2018 at 2:11pm PST

Upon the conclusion of the Star Wars prequel trilogy, Portman later appeared in films like 2006s V for Vendetta, 2008s The Other Boleyn Girl and 2011s No Strings Attached. Shes also made appearances in the Thor film franchise and in the acclaimed 2016 Jacqueline Kennedy biographical drama Jackie.

Over the course of her career, Portman has garnered much critical acclaim, winning prestigious awards and nominations for the Academy Awards, BAFTA Awards, Golden Globe Awards, SAG Awards, Critics Choice Awards and many others.

How old is Natalie Portman?

Natalie Portman is 36 years old.

She was born on June 9, 1981.

What is Natalie Portmans net worth?

Natalie Portmans net worth is approximately $60 million (42.7 million), according to Celebrity Net Worth.

How does Natalie Portman make her money?

Portmans substantial net worth is derived from her successful acting career.

She made her feature film debut in 1994s Leon: The Professional and truly broke out when she was cast in Star Wars: Episode I  The Phantom Menace. She later reprised her role in the popular science fiction franchise in 2002s Star Wars: Episode II  Attack of the Clones and 2005s Star Wars: Episode III  Revenge of the Sith.

In addition to her success in Star Wars, Portman has also appeared in films like 2006s V for Vendetta, 2011s No Strings Attached and Thor, 2013s Thor: The Dark World and 2016s Jackie. She also claims a smaller television filmography, having hosted Saturday Night Live in 2006 and 2018 while having also made special appearances on The Simpsons and Sesame Street. More recently, she also starred in the 2018 Netflix movie Annihilation.

A post shared by Natalie Portman (@natalieportman_official) on Dec 15, 2015 at 2:23pm PST

Who is Natalie Portmans husband?

Natalie Portmans husband is French choreographer and dancer Benjamin Millepied.

The couple has been married since August 4, 2012 and has two children together: Aleph and Amalia.

Natalie Portman movies

Portman boasts an extensive filmography that goes back to 1994, when she made her feature film in Leon: The Professional. Her breakout role came in the Star Wars prequels released in 1999, 2002 and 2005. Despite mixed reviews from critics and fans, the prequel trilogy helped catapult Portman into stardom, leading to more film appearances in films like Cold Mountain in 2003, V for Vendetta in 2006, The Other Woman in 2009 and Black Swan in 2010.

In more recent years, shes appeared in films like No Strings Attached and Thor in 2011, Thor: The Dark World in 2013 and the Jacqueline Kennedy biopic Jackie in 2016. She also starred in the 2018 sci-fi horror film Annihilation.

Decision to pull out of 2018 Israeli awards ceremony

Recently, Portman drew both praise and criticism for her decision to cancel an upcoming trip to Israel to accept the Genesis Prize, an award that honors Jewish people whove been recognized for excellence in their respective fields.

The acclaimed actress cited recent events and the fact that she was not comfortable in accepting the award as her reasons to decline the invitation to the ceremony. The past few days have seen fresh clashes between the Israeli military and Palestinians on the Gaza border and comes on the heels of the European Unions call to investigate the use of live ammunition on Gaza protestors by the Israelis.

Natalie Portman decides against Israel trip to accept Genesis Prize https://t.co/c8UQIKcceu pic.twitter.com/K82O3RuRv7  Hollywood Reporter (@THR) April 19, 2018

While many critics of Israels policies towards the Palestinians have hailed Portmans decision, it drew a much different reaction from others. Oren Hazan, a politician from the countrys Likud Party, even called for her to be stripped of her Israeli citizenship and also stated: From the outset, the idea of granting the Genesis Prize to Natalie Portman was complete craziness.

What is the Genesis Prize?

The Genesis Prize is an award that recognizes Jewish people from around the world for outstanding achievements in their fields. It was established in 2013 and has been awarded since 2014 on an annual basis by the Genesis Prize Foundation in a ceremony in Jerusalem. Recipients in past years have included former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, actor Michael Douglas, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, conductor Itzhak Perlman and sculptor Anish Kapoor.
EastEnders said goodbye to Richard Blackwoods character Vincent Hubbard  bad boy turned family man, owner of 1980s cocktail bar The Albert, and the only black man in Walford apart from Patrick Trueman. Yeh mon !

As a police informant being taken out by gun-toting dirty cops working for Irish gangster, to say Vincents exit was a non-event would be an understatement. He hardly went out in a blaze of glory.

Instead he simply sat in the back seat, looking down the barrel of a shooter, having been abducted at unnecessarily high speed by a not-very-scary-looking detective from CSI: Walford CID on Aidan Maguires payroll. Line Of Duty it wasnt

Farewell! EastEnders said goodbye to Richard Blackwoods character Vincent Hubbard  bad boy turned family man, owner of 1980s cocktail bar The Albert

He protested for a little while before accepting the inevitable, like a scene from The Sopranos.

To be honest, Vincents O.G. credentials were long gone.

He had gone soft years ago.

The only thing missing was the bullet being fired, which definitely would have added to the drama. Or created it in fact.

Mastermind: Vincent left having been abducted at unnecessarily high speed by a not-very-scary-looking detective from CSI: Walford CID on Aidan Maguires payroll

Not splattering Vincents brains across the rear windscreen seemed like a missed opportunity and saving money on even the sound-effect a cop-out: leaving the door open for a big return, as all characters do (probably with a different actor).

Plus wed seen Phil give his final instructions.

Nothing too strong, hed just said on the phone. Just scare him.

This shouldnt have been difficult.

It's over: He protested for a little while before accepting the inevitable, like a scene from The Sopranos. To be honest, Vincents O.G. credentials were long gone

Vincent had been walking around wide-eyed with fear like the US soldier in a Vietnam movie bringing up the rear in the jungle who couldnt tell if he was seeing shadows and was obviously about to get popped.

Mind you Vincent shouldve known this was an occupational hazard if you were a police informant. Especially if you also informed the men you were grassing on that you were doing it.

Vincent had gone to the Filth and told them he had information on two major players. These turned out to be Aidan (an old lag who looked like the bass-player from Clannad and had just had the proceeds of his robbery stolen from him by Ben and Sharon) and Phil Mitchell (an ageing skinhead who had just been mugged off by a teenager - Louises boyfriend Unter).

For reasons best known to himself Vincent had decided to play the recording of Aidan discussing the raid, leaving them with no choice but to whack him.

No drama: He had gone soft years ago. The only thing missing was the bullet being fired, which definitely would have added to the drama. Or created it in fact

Vincent had grassed on Aidans brother so Aidan cant have been surprised that having recruited a grass into the gang Vincent was now grassing him up too.

As for Phil, showing everyone in the Vic that he had Lukes teeth in a little box had possibly been a blunder now the Old Bill had found the rest of Luke in the canal (dead).

To be honest, considering he had done it before Vincent was a useless informant.

His timing was useless (after Aidan had forced him into selling his house and signing over his business) and his means for obtaining incriminating evidence that Phil had murdered Luke was to ask Jay if he knew anything.

Jay promptly told Phil. Oops.

When Vincent asked his co-handler (the bluff, monosyllabic Northerner DI Franklin) do you want me to wear a wire? not even they took it seriously.

Phil hated Vincent for one thing, so was hardly likely to tell him anything, plus he had been following him.

Oops: Vincent didnt notice Phil parked in his motor at the end of the alleyway where he was meeting Franklins (corrupt) replacement who was obviously a terrible detective

Vincent didnt notice Phil parked in his motor at the end of the alleyway where he was meeting Franklins (corrupt) replacement who was obviously a terrible detective because he didnt see him either.

Vincent didnt recognise any of the signs he had worn his last white t-shirt and black leather jacket, most notably the token Soppy Scene with Kim and their Cute Kid.

Me and Pearl just want you. We just want our family, Kim told him sending him on his way to tell the cop the deal was off and they werent moving into a safe-house (Denises) and cooing: be quick cos weve got Peppa Pig to watch.

Clearly fatal

Grass: Vincent had grassed on Aidans brother so Aidan cant have been surprised that having recruited a grass into the gang Vincent was now grassing him up too

Sure enough the cop growled: get in the motor ! Do you seriously want to be seen talking to me on your own doorstep?

Not seriously, no.

Vincent blustered for a minute but when the cop stayed silent, pointing the shooter at him, Vincent realised he was doomed. He took a deep breath, nodded slightly telling him to do it. He had finally manned up.

He was the second exit of the week after Michelle went travelling to find herself.

Or find another teenage boy like Preston.
Blac Chyna sure turned up the heat on her Instagram account on Friday.

The ex-fiancee of Rob Kardashian flashed her underboob in a racy black crop top with black hot pants and fire engine red over-the-knee boots.

These portraits come one week after YBN Almighty Jay proposed to the former friend of Kim Kardashian.

Pinup power: Blac Chyna sure turned up the heat on her Instagram account on Friday with a new set of sexy photos

Racy dame: The ex-fiancee of Rob Kardashian flashed her underboob in a racy black crop top with black hot pants and fire engine red over-the-knee boots

The knockout wrote in her captions, 'I BEEN ON ROSE,'vibe,' 'drip,' the symbol for cherry and 'Nice for what.'

Chyna putting most of her colorful tattoos on display during the shoot as she piled on diamond bracelets and a diamond-encrusted watch.

But one thing she didn't show off was an engagement ring, casting doubt on whether she is really engaged or not.

On April 10 YBN Almighty Jay posed her with a heavy question on Instagram.

'Will You Marry Me?' the 18-year-old rap artist wrote in a caption along a shot of the 29-year-old reality star, whose real name is Angela Renee White.

Ready to wed? These portraits come one week after YBN Almighty Jay proposed to the former friend of Kim Kardashian

He wants her to be his Mrs: On April 10 YBN Almighty Jay, posed her with a heavy question on Instagram . 'Will You Marry Me?' the 18-year-old rap artist wrote in a caption along a shot of the 29-year-old reality star, whose real name is Angela Renee White

The Texas-based performer, whose real name is Jay Bradley, has been linked with the Lashed owner since February.

It is not known if the proposal was a joke and Chyna has not been seen with an engagement ring since.

YBN Almighty Jay established himself as an emerging talent with a single called Chopsticks that's racked up more than 10 million YouTube views. It's also garnered him media recognition from outlets including Complex, XXL and Hot New Hip Hop.

In his early going, he's already rubbed shoulders with some of the biggest names in hip-hop, such as Chris Brown, Snoop Dogg and Lil Wayne.

Not much to say: The knockout wrote in her captions, 'I BEEN ON ROSE,'vibe,' 'drip,' the symbol for cherry and 'Nice for what'

He was at her side earlier this month after she clashed with a park-goer at Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia, California.

He held her back as she charged at a woman who she said tried to touch her one-year-old daughter Dream (with Rob) in an incident that was caught on camera.

The Washington D.C. native has been romantically-linked to a number of famous faces in recent years. She has a five-year-old son named King Cairo with rapper Tyga, who went onto a high-profile relationship with Kylie Jenner after they parted ways in 2014.

Her young boy: The former stripper with YBN Almighty Jay in Beverly Hills in March. He is only 13 years older than Chyna's son King Cairo, aged five

In 2015, she was in a brief romance with a boxer named J'Leon Love before, like Tyga, she began dating a member of the Kardashian-Jenner dynasty in sock designer Rob Kardashian.

The couple had a fast romance beginning in January of 2016, announcing their engagement after three months, and welcoming baby girl Dream in November of 2016.

They had an E! series called Rob & Chyna, but things quickly went south by year's end, with public bickering over social media and a few fruitless shots to revive the relationship.

Last summer, Rob found himself in hot legal water after taking to Instagram in July with a storm of social media posts about Chyna which included nude shots, inflammatory statements about her truthfulness and parenting ability, and a bold claim she cheated on him with '8 dudes in less than a month.'
He plays the kooky titular detective who has a close bond with his crime solving partner Dr. John Watson but off-screen it couldn't be further from the truth.

And Benedict Cumberbatch took a swipe at Martin Freeman as he branded his fellow actor's reaction to fan pressure as 'pathetic' in The Daily Telegraph interview.

The actor, 41, was at odds with his Sherlock Holmes co-star's opinion after Martin claimed he couldn't enjoy shooting scenes because of the hype around the series.

'It's pretty pathetic': Benedict Cumberbatch (pictured in London, May 2017) slammed Sherlock co-star Martin Freeman's gripes as 'pathetic' over his reaction to fan pressure

Benedict lashed out at Martin as he claimed his perception of fans' excitement surrounding the show was 'pretty pathetic'.

He told the newspaper: 'It's pretty pathetic if that's all it takes to let you not want to take grip of your reality. What, because of expectations? I don't know. I don't necessarily agree with that.'

In late March, Martin divulged he didn't enjoy working on the series anymore because of the responses to the hotly-anticipated television show.

Not all it seems: He plays the kooky titular detective who has a close bond with his crime solving partner Dr. John Watson but off-screen it couldn't be further from the truth

He told the newspaper: 'Being in that show, it is a mini-Beatles thing. People's expectations, some of it's not fun any more. It's not a thing to be enjoyed.'

Benedict and Martin play the iconic BFFs and crime solving buddies Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson in the series that started in 2009.

Despite working closely over many years, they reportedly haven't nurtured a close relationship as the pair don't even socialise outside work.

Revealed: Benedict lashed out at Martin as he claimed his perception of fans' excitement surrounding the show was 'pretty pathetic'

Tensions brewing between the duo means the actors aren't keen to work together on a fifth season of the show  despite the fan hype around the detective series.

In January last year, a source told The Sun: 'Benedict and Martin aren't mates and they don't spend time together away from the show.

'They're professional and very polite to each other but there's not the warmth you'd expect after filming together for six years. There isn't a huge desire to come back for another season.'
Queensland captain James Slipper has welcomed the return of Wallabies great George Smith, as the Reds try to break a horror Super Rugby streak against the Chiefs.

Australian clubs have lost the last 34 games against New Zealand Super Rugby opponents, but Slipper thinks his side is well positioned to end the drought against the Hamilton-based powerhouse at Suncorp Stadium on Saturday.

He said Smith, 37, would provide plenty off the bench in the last 20 minutes as Brad Thorn's men play their first game at home in six weeks.
Defence Industry Minister Christopher Pyne has defended the appointment of former defence minister David Johnston as Australia's first Defence Export Advocate to spruik the nation's defence work across the world.

During his time as minister, the former senator criticised government shipbuilder ASC in Adelaide saying he would not trust it to build a canoe.

But Mr Pyne said Mr Johnston was an excellent defence minister and a "very fine brain".

"He made one injudicious remark and one injudicious remark should not preclude him from making a contribution to the national enterprise of defence and defence industry," Mr Pyne told reporters on Friday.

"He's technically very literate about the assets that are available in our defence industry economy.

"He will therefore spruik very well the capabilities that we have to sell overseas."

Mr Pyne said the appointment was his decision, and the role was something never tried before.

"I have 100 per cent confidence in David Johnston," the minister said.

The part-time role is for two years.
Victoria's anti-corruption watchdog will be asked to investigate claims of union blackmail and government deals over changes to the state's fire services in the lead-up to the 2014 state election.

Opposition Leader Matthew Guy said he will be writing to IBAC to request an investigation into Labor government negotiations with the United Firefighters Union.

"We are pretty concerned about this. I've never seen anything like it before where a union leader is holding the government to ransom," he told reporters on Friday, claiming the union is blackmailing the government into silence.
With his robust physique and chiselled features, he may not look it but Superman turns 80 this year.

Eight decades since he was first dreamed up by American teenagers Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in 1938, the world's first superhero is still as widely popular today - if the crowd gathered on Sydney's Pitt Street was anything to go by.

Fans flocked to Kings Comics on Thursday night to mark the Man of Steel's milestone and meet the artist and colourist behind a special cover designed for the 1000th issue of his original title comic.

Robert Wilson travelled Clark Kent style to the city by train from Katoomba, donning Superman's iconic costume on arrival.

"I think Superman's still popular because he stands for something, he stand for the little guy, he helps the underdog," he told AAP on Thursday.

"Superman's been in comics for 80 years now and the character itself has changed over the years but the concept of him still holds true to this day."

Despite enthusiastically joining in a rousing rendition of 'Happy Birthday', Daniel Chaves said he was more of a comic book fan in general - but agreed the Man of Steel deserves respect.

"When everyone starts reading comics Superman is one of the icons and I there wouldn't be comics as there are today without him, I think," he told AAP.

Sydney artist Nicola Scott was chosen as only one of only 11 artists to design a cover for the special anniversary edition marking Superman's 80th birthday.

Superman is the first superhero to reach 1000 editions, so in the passionate and far reaching world of comic books it's a big deal for her, she explains.

"There's been very few Australians who've broken into the mainstream industry and to be one of those and to be able to participate in these big events is a dream come true," she told AAP.

Ms Scott and colourist Annette Kwok worked for days on their cover - their efforts leaving them well prepared to sign the glossy comics of the fans lined up down the block to meet them.

"It's alright, when you draw all day your hand is well conditioned," she laughs to one kind enough to remark that it's going to be a big night for her.
An Anglican priest in Melbourne who was caught boasting about his child sex abuse fantasies online has been spared jail for his crime.

Former Sunshine vicar Philip John Murphy, 53, was on Friday given a wholly suspended 12-month jail sentence after he was caught engaging in sexually explicit online chats about children.

The priest had pleaded guilty earlier this week in the Victorian County Court to transmitting child pornography material using a carriage service between 2016 and 2017.

Judge Phillip Coish said the priest's crime did not involve real children.

"I accept that there was no sexual activity with children, nor were there any photos or videos involved in these communications," he said.

Murphy was working at a parish in East Burwood when he began chatting online about his child sex abuse fantasies.

Under the username "Pervert", Murphy approached multiple men on Grindr and asked them if they were interested in children and arranged to chat to them on Skype.

Murphy even sent photos of himself in his clerical collar to gain trust.

In one conversation, Murphy offered to get a motel so he could sexually abuse a boy.

"Can't host I'm afraid. Church house. Can get motel," he wrote on December 29, 2016.

Two months later, Murphy told another man he was "loyal" to the Anglican Church.

"Well you know my work and I have to be discreet. And other than abusing the trust of the Church in this matter, am loyal," he said.

Murphy also told one man that he wanted to sexually abuse hundreds of children as young as two years old.

"The communications were grossly offensive and deeply disturbing," Judge Coish said.

Police searched Murphy's laptop in February 2017 when he returned from a trip to Hong Kong.

In August police searched his home and Holy Apostles' Anglican Church in Sunshine West, before charging him with multiple child pornography offences.

During his police interview, Murphy said he was drawn to the online chats because of his depression.

He also told police he did not realise his chats constituted child pornography material.

The prosecution had pushed for an immediate jail sentence, but Judge Coish on Friday said he had decided it was appropriate Murphy be released.

Murphy has also been ordered to undertake a sex offender program and be of good behaviour.
As national debate around the ethics of live animal exporting boils over, the meatworkers' union says a ban on the trade will be a win for the South Australian economy.

Another live export ship, the Bader111, was due to load thousands of sheep in Adelaide on Friday, prompting Australian Meat Industry Employees Union state secretary Sharra Anderson to declare there was no need to send livestock offshore.

"South Australia has skilled people ready to process meat here," she said.

"We have the capacity, we just need leadership from the government to make it happen."

An independent report by public policy firm Pegasus Economics found the state's abattoirs had capacity to slaughter all live sheep exported from South Australia each year.

It also revealed the chilled meat trade was worth about $500 million - 20 times as much as the $23 million value of live sheep exports.

In an unlikely alliance, Ms Anderson was to address a rally on Friday afternoon with Greens animal welfare spokeswoman Tammy Franks, who said a ban would be a "win-win".

"Ending live export offers a win-win outcome for both animal welfare activists and Australian jobs," she said.

"The full potential of Australia's livestock industry will only be realised when we... look to create Aussie jobs by value-adding to the raw product and marketing chilled, disease-free meat to countries where we currently export live animals."

Federal Agriculture Minister David Littleproud has left the door open for a ban on live exports during the northern hemisphere summer, dependent on the findings of a review into the trade of sheep to the Middle East in the hottest months of the year.

If the audit, conducted by vet Michael McCarthy, finds live exports during the northern summer are unsustainable, the minister has pledged to act.

"If I'm looking at evidence that Dr McCarthy comes back with - that says there is no way in any sense that this could be undertaken - then we have to listen to that," Mr Littleproud told ABC radio on Friday.

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten has called for a suspension in the trade while the review was completed, saying only a "monster" would think it's fine to continue without any change.
The NSW Rural Fire Service has advised residents not to be alarmed by smoke over Sydney and other parts of the state as they conduct hazard reduction burns this weekend.

The RFS will conduct the burns in various locations near Sydney, the Hunter Valley and also south of Wollongong, a spokesman said on Friday.

Forecast light winds will result in smoke settling over the greater Sydney region and other parts of the Blue Mountains and the Central Coast.

Residents have been instructed to contact emergency services if they spot an unattended fire.
Today's birthday, April 21: Australian actress Judith McGrath (1947 - 2017)

Actress Judith McGrath, best known for her Logie-nominated role as nurse Von Ryan on the medical drama All Saints, died last year aged 70.

McGrath was born in Brisbane in 1947. When she was seven she began taking drama classes at Brisbane's Twelfth Night Theatre.

She began her professional acting career in theatre restaurants and trained at the Brisbane Arts Theatre.

Upon returning home from a stint working in London, McGrath settled in Melbourne and worked on several stage productions for Melbourne Theatre Company and Playbox Theatre Company.

In 1969 she began her work on screen appearing as the character Grace in the film Age of Consent.

She followed this with guest roles in the television series Bluey, The Sullivans, Skyways and Cop Shop.

In 1979 McGrath took on the role of tough but fair Deputy Governor Colleen "Po Face" Powell on the cult Network Ten series Prisoner, also known as Cell Block H. She appeared in over 200 episodes of the series before leaving in 1984.

She then went on to appear in guest roles in Neighbours and The Flying Doctors before playing Matron Gribble in the first series of the children's television show Round The Twist in 1989.

From 1992 to 1993 McGrath played Bernice Hudson on the Australia soap A Country Practice.

She then turned back to guest roles in various television series before being cast in Network Seven's All Saints in 1998. She was the only original cast member to stay on the long-running series until it was axed in 2009.

McGrath's most recent acting credit was the television series Winners & Losers, in which she played Maria Crawley from 2011 to 2012.

She died on October 20, 2017. Her cause of death has not been disclosed.

All Saints co-star Georgie Parker paid tribute to McGrath on Instagram following her death.

"I learnt so much from this talented, witty person. No bulls**t allowed with this woman," she said.
Junichi Fukuda, who resigned as Japan's top finance official on Wednesday, has strongly denied sexually harassing female reporters

A firestorm in Japan over allegations of sexual harassment by the top finance ministry official is raising the possibility that the country could finally be having its "#MeToo moment".

The international movement against sexual assault and harassment has brought down movie moguls, media stars and political figures across the world, even in patriarchal East Asia.

In China, the education ministry has declared a "zero tolerance" policy on harassment, and in South Korea a former presidential contender now faces rape charges.

But in Japan, with its deeply entrenched gender attitudes and one of the world's worst records on female political representation, #MeToo's impact has been limited -- until now.

Junichi Fukuda fiercely denies that he sexually harassed female reporters, allegations first reported last week by a magazine that has released audio of what it says was one of the encounters.

He stepped down Wednesday, saying the scandal had left him unable to do his job, and has threatened to sue the magazine.

The story has dominated headlines domestically, a development some experts said was a sign the #MeToo movement might finally be taking hold.

"The global #MeToo movement probably encouraged women who had been suffering harassment to speak up, giving them a sense of assurance that they don't have to tolerate it," said Sumire Hamada of the Asia-Japan Women's Resource Centre, a rights group.

But the episode has also laid bare how difficult it remains to report sexual harassment in Japan, and despite the apparent shift in mood, there is little immediate sign of tangible change.

One of the journalists who alleges Fukuda harassed her reported him to her boss at the local TV Asahi station but was told that going public would be too damaging, because her identity would be revealed.

And when the allegations against Fukuda first emerged, Finance Minister Taro Aso reacted dismissively, saying he had no plans to investigate.

He had verbally admonished Fukuda, he said, and considered him to be "sufficiently remorseful".

- 'Critical case' -

Aso later reversed course, saying Fukuda would be fired if the claims were proven, and the ministry is now investigating.

But critics have questioned whether the ministry can investigate fairly, even though it has hired outside lawyers, and it has come under fire for asking reporters who have been harassed to come forward publicly.

"I hope that this case will not create bad pressure on victimised women to come out to the public with their identity being disclosed," said Chizuko Ueno, a feminist sociologist and professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo.

More than 25,000 people have signed a petition demanding the ministry protect the rights of victims.

"This is a very critical case," said Mari Miura, a professor of political science at Tokyo's Sophia University and a specialist on gender issues.

Japanese journalist Shiori Ito was savaged online after publicly accusing a prominent TV journalist of raping her

"Many people have criticised the way in which the finance ministry intended to handle the situation... that's why this incident might have a huge impact or the potential to change Japanese society."

Activists say the country is ripe for change, with just 2.8 percent of rape victims reporting their assault to police, and society expecting "harassment victims to bear it silently", said Hamada.

Last year, reporter Shiori Ito made headlines after publicly accusing a prominent television journalist of raping her.

She was savaged online and even received death threats, and her experience with authorities was not much better, she told AFP earlier this year.

Male police officers ordered her to re-enact her rape with a life-size doll, an experience she described as "like a second rape".

- 'Shameful' -

Elsewhere in Asia, things have been different.

This month, former South Korean presidential contender Ahn Hee-Jung was indicted for raping his aide, and women have come forward to accuse artists, writers and athletes of sexual abuse.

And China's education ministry announced a "zero tolerance" policy after a professor was found to have harassed multiple students.

The relative silence in Japan is all the more striking given Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's stated commitment to increasing women's participation in the workforce.

His sole comment on the issue came Thursday, when he described the circumstances of Fukuda's resignation as "regrettable" and pledged to restore trust in his government.

"It's shameful that the two top leaders in Japan, the prime minister and the finance minister, do not understand the significance of sexual harassment cases," said Miura.

She said she hoped local media would avoid "victim blaming", noting that although TV Asahi now planned to complain to the finance ministry over the sexual harassment of its reporter, it had initially criticised her for going to the weekly magazine.

And she said other women might now feel empowered to share their experiences, as Seiko Noda, one of only two female cabinet ministers, did on Wednesday.

"When I was in my twenties, I experienced sexual harassment from some men while I was doing political activities," Noda told a parliament session.

"It is so hard that you can't easily tell your family or friends, not to mention your boss."
Former FBI Director James Comey testifies before the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, June 8, 2017

US President Donald Trump repeatedly complained to FBI director James Comey in early 2017 that the Russia meddling investigation was a cloud over his young administration, weeks before firing him, leaked memorandums showed Thursday.

Trump "said he was trying to run the country and the cloud of this Russia business was making that difficult," Comey wrote in a memo on a conversation they had on March 30, 2017.

Eleven days later, Trump again pressed Comey about the issue. The president told Comey that "he is trying to do work for the country, visit with foreign leaders, and any cloud, even a little cloud, gets in the way of that," Comey wrote, referring to "the Russia thing."

According to the memos of ex-FBI director James Comey, Donald Trump "said he was trying to run the country and the cloud of this Russia business was making that difficult"

The memos, which Comey wrote immediately after several meetings with Trump in the weeks after his inauguration on January 20, 2017, depict a president deeply worried about the impact of the probe into Russian meddling in the election the previous year.

Obtained by AFP Thursday after the Justice Department released them to Congress, the memos could become evidence in a criminal investigation into whether Trump consciously tried to obstruct the probe.

Comey makes clear in his memos that he was uncomfortable with the pressure and that it was not completely proper, though at the time he did not allege the president had broken any laws.

The Trump-Russia probe

But Comey never committed to easing off the investigation, which continues to examine a number of suspicious contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Weeks after their last conversation, on May 9, Trump fired Comey, saying in an interview two days later that he decided to dismiss the FBI chief in part out of unhappiness over the Russia probe.

"In fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, you know, this thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election."

"In my opinion, it should've been over with a long time ago."

US President Donald Trump repeatedly complained to FBI director James Comey in early 2017 that the Russia meddling investigation was a cloud over his young administration

Much of what is in the memos, most notably Trump's demand that Comey pledge his loyalty, has been known for nearly a year.

Comey wrote that the president repeatedly raised the still-unconfirmed story that Russians have a video of him with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel.

"The president said 'this hookers thing' is nonsense," Comey wrote. However, Trump also said "that Putin had told him, 'We have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world,'" Comey noted.
A greyhound waits with a handler in a preparation area before they are called to race at Club/52 Melbourne Greyhound Park in Florida

Six lean greyhounds in racing colors sprint wildly around a parched track in sun-baked central Florida.

The grandstand at the Melbourne Greyhound Park can hold 2,000 people, but on this day, there are barely a dozen.

"This is a little anti-climactic," admits John Niebler, the Melbourne park's operations director, motioning to the nearly deserted stands.

It is no secret that greyhound racing is a dying pastime in this southeastern state. In the 1990s, Niebler said, a single race could take in $500,000 in bets. Today, that figure might be closer to $15.

The races survive thanks to a 1931 law that legalized betting on dog and horse races.

Under subsequent legislation, passed since the 1980s, all the original dog tracks must continue to offer live racing if they wish to operate other, often more popular, forms of gambling.

"Doesn't make much sense, does it?" asked Christine Dorchak, president of GREY2K USA Worldwide, which calls itself the world's largest greyhound protection organization. Animal advocates consider the races cruel.

"If you're looking for logic," she added, "you're not going to find it in the racing law."

The Florida Greyhound Association (FGA), representing kennel operators, has so far managed to defend a law that is loved neither by animal lovers nor by some casinos, which must sustain the costly and controversial races if they want to keep their doors open.

Florida's law does make sense, however, to kennel operators. Their winning greyhounds earn four to five percent of overall casino proceeds, even if no one sees them win, said FGA spokesman Jack Cory.

But Dorchak, a lifetime animal lover who owns a greyhound, said the practice is cruel. "Thousands and thousands of dogs are basically being held hostage," she said.

This week, Florida lawmakers approved a proposed constitutional amendment that, if passed, would phase out greyhound racing by 2020.

It will be put to a referendum in November. The FGA vowed to go to court to block the measure.

- Canine 'hostages' -

Inside the Melbourne casino, clients play poker, try their luck at slot machines or bet on greyhound races broadcast on TV screens. But very few take the trouble to step outside to watch the real dogs tear around the track.

Greyhound racing in Florida is a dying sport, kept alive by a nearly 100-year-old law, but now lawmakers have proposed phasing out the races

"It's just fun," said 74-year-old Joanne Garrison, one of the few spectators in the nearly deserted grandstand.

"It's a good way to spend an afternoon," said Garrison, who was planning to stay for eight races.

But for each dog, the action is fleeting.

The greyhounds, chomping excitedly at the bit when suited up to run, sprint around the track for 30 seconds -- then must return to their cages to wait two or three days for their next 30-second race.

GREY2K says many animals have suffered from overdoses of stimulants. In one case last year, a dog died in the middle of a race. A cocaine derivative was later found in its blood. And the fleet animals can sustain grave injuries when they collide at speeds of up to 40 miles (70 kilometers) an hour.

But Cory rejects the accusations of abuse, saying the kennel operators' livelihood depends on keeping their dogs healthy enough to win races.

"The owner," Cory told AFP, "will not receive any money if his animals are not cared for, well fed, well exercised and well medicated."

- Loss-maker for Florida -

The Melbourne park is one of 12 greyhound racing tracks in Florida and one of 150 in the world. There are six tracks in other states, but 40 states have banned dog racing.

The greyhounds sprint around the track for 30 seconds -- then must return to their cages to wait two or three days for their next 30-second race

For Florida, dog racing is a losing proposition, according to a 2013 report by the Spectrum Gaming Group, a consultancy specializing in legal gambling. It calculated that Florida loses $3.3 million a year from the dog races, since the cost of regulating them exceeds the revenues they produce.

"People don't come out like they used to, despite our efforts," Melbourne park manager Jim O'Brien acknowledged to AFP. "We do all we can, but the consumers have lost interest."

It costs the Melbourne casino $200,000 a year to keep the races going. But that allows it to continue offering other games of chance that generate profits of $7.8 million.

That's why O'Brien favors a so-called "decoupling" move that would allow casinos to offer other forms of gambling without having to stage live competitions.

Until November's vote on the referendum, O'Brien said: "Whether we have 10 or 10,000 people in the grandstand, we will put on a good show."
Walter Moody, 83, the oldest person to be executed in the United States since the country reinstated capital punishment in the 1970s, has been put to death in Alabama

Alabama on Thursday executed Walter Moody, an 83-year-old man convicted of murdering a US judge and an attorney with pipe bombs, officials said.

Moody is the oldest person to be executed in the United States since the country reinstated capital punishment in the 1970s, replacing John Nixon, who was put to death at age 77 in 2005, according to data from the Death Penalty Information Center.

"Walter Leroy Moody has been executed for the 1989 murder of Federal Judge Robert Vance," Alabama Governor Kay Ivey's office said in a statement.

"He was also convicted of a similar pipe bomb death of a Georgia attorney," according to a statement from the state's attorney general, Steve Marshall.

Vance was killed and his wife injured when a bomb exploded at their home in Birmingham, Alabama, in December 1989.

Lawyer Robert Robinson was killed in the same way two days later in Savannah, Georgia. He had represented a black rights association.

Other parcel bombs were found in the offices of the Atlanta appeals court of which Vance was a member and in the offices of the NAACP black rights association in Jacksonville, Florida.

A group called Americans for a Competent Federal Judicial System claimed the attacks. It threatened more in retaliation for the rape and murder of white woman Julie Love by two black men in Atlanta in 1988.

Moody, who bore a grudge against the judicial system after his conviction for possessing explosives, was arrested for the bombings in 1990 and sentenced to death for Vance's murder in 1997.
ZTE said the seven-year ban on buying US technology 'seriously endangers' its survival and added 'we cannot accept it!'

Chinese telecom giant ZTE vowed on Friday to fight back against a US order banning it from purchasing and using US technology for seven years, a move that has angered Beijing.

The decision announced by Washington this week has clouded prospects for the telecom and phone maker, which depends on US technology such as chips and the Android operating system for its mobile phones.

The tough sanctions come as the battle over technology takes centre stage in a US spat with China that has fanned fears of a trade war.

Washington has taken particular grievance with Beijing's "Made in China 2025" policy to harbour national champions in technology fields the US sees as critical to its future. In Beijing the action against ZTE will likely heighten fears about the reliance on US technology for critical industries.

The order "seriously endangers the survival of ZTE", the company said in a statement Friday, adding "we cannot accept it!"

The firm said it would "not give up its efforts to resolve the problems through communication and dialogue, but would also resolutely protect its legitimate rights and interests through all legally permitted methods".

The company has one or two months of stored component supplies before the ban will start to impact its business, investment bank CICC estimated in a research report cited by Beijing Business Today. ZTE has halted trading of its shares in Hong Kong and Shenzhen since Tuesday.

Washington's control of the company's fate -- with roughly 80,000 employees mostly based in southern China -- has stirred ire and angst in China, where officials prize stability.

"China will pay close attention to the development of the situation and stands ready to take the necessary measures to safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese enterprises," commerce ministry spokesman Gao Feng said Thursday.

"The US's actions are ostensibly aimed at China, but they will ultimately hurt the US itself. It will not only lose tens of thousands of jobs but also affect tonnes of related US companies," Gao said.

The options left at the company's disposal are unclear.

When introducing the export ban in Washington, a commerce department official told reporters there was no "off ramp" for the company to seek a reversal of the blockade.

The export ban followed a five-year US government probe into ZTE's evasion of sanctions on Iran and North Korea, first revealed in March 2016.

From January 2010 to March 2016, the company shipped $32 million of US cellular network equipment to Iran, and made 283 shipments of cellphones to North Korea, with the full knowledge of the highest levels of management, officials said.

The company pleaded guilty in March 2017 to unlawful exports and was hit with $1.2 billion in fines, the largest criminal penalty in US history in an export control case.

On Monday, Washington said ZTE had failed to follow through on pledges to punish staff responsible for illegal exports to Iran and North Korea.
China's lightly regulated zoos often make news for the wrong reasons, typically involving abysmal conditions in which animals are kept or insensitive actions by visitors in a country where the notion of animal rights is not deeply ingrained

Visitors to a zoo in southeastern China killed one kangaroo and injured another by throwing bricks at them in an attempt to get a reaction from the big marsupials, state media reported.

A 12-year-old female kangaroo suffered a severely injured foot when it was struck by bricks and concrete chunks on February 28 at the Fuzhou Zoo in Fujian province, China Central Television reported.

The kangaroo died days later and an examination by a veterinarian revealed that the cause of death was likely a ruptured kidney caused by being struck by the projectiles.

A few weeks later, a five-year-old male kangaroo at the same zoo was slightly injured in a similar way, said the report posted on the network's website late on Thursday.

The report included pictures of the first kangaroo's smashed and nearly severed foot, and of the animal receiving treatment via intravenous drip before it died.

Visitors to the zoo were known to try to provoke the Australia marsupials to get them to display their signature hopping mode of locomotion using their powerful hind legs.

The report did not mention whether anyone was punished over the matter, but it said the dead female would be stuffed and put on display and the zoo would look to install security cameras to deter visitors from harming animals in future.

China's lightly regulated zoos and wildlife parks often make news for the wrong reasons, typically involving abysmal conditions in which animals are kept or insensitive actions by visitors in a country where the notion of animal rights is not deeply ingrained.

Among recent examples, horrified visitors to an animal park in eastern China's Jiangsu province last June watched as tigers killed a donkey that was released into their enclosure by investors angry over a business dispute related to the zoo, according to media reports.

A few months earlier, a zoo visitor died after he was mauled by tigers whose enclosure he entered in the city of Ningbo, south of Shanghai.
Taiwanese legislators shouted, pushed and shoved in the chamber, with lawmakers from the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) waving placards demanding President Tsai Ing-wen apologise to the veterans

Taiwan legislators brawled in parliament on Friday over proposed reductions to military veterans' pensions, part of wider cutbacks that have triggered mass protests.

The clashes came as a draft bill proposed by the cabinet earlier this month was deliberated in parliament for the first time, following a protest by military retirees in February.

That demonstration ended in tragedy as a former colonel fell while climbing up a wall, and later died in hospital.

Legislators shouted, pushed and shoved in the chamber Friday, with lawmakers from the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) waving placards demanding President Tsai Ing-wen apologise to the veterans.

They threw signs emblazoned with the words "bully government", jumping on tables and tussling with legislators from Tsai's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).

KMT lawmakers also called for DPP legislator Tuan Yi-kang to apologise for calling high-ranking veterans protesting the reforms as "insatiably greedy."

The backlash over the cuts is a major challenge for president Tsai, who has seen her popularity rating fall since her election two years ago.

Legislators passed a separate pension reform bill last June that targeted civil servants, as the government warned it could no longer pay out on the high-interest deals.

Tsai admitted in a television interview earlier this month that the reforms have "offended many people" but stood by the plan to make the pension system more sustainable.

Taiwan's pension schemes vary for different occupations and public sector retirees typically receive more generous packages than workers from other sectors, which fall under a different labour pension system.

The government has warned that various pension funds could go bankrupt as early as 2020 if the system is not overhauled.

Among the reforms is the phasing out of a preferential 18 percent interest on savings for civil servants and military personnel.

Tsai has pushed many controversial reforms -- including gay marriage and labour issues -- since her election in 2016, when the DPP also gained control of parliament for the first time.

Brawls during parliamentary sessions are common in Taiwan, but are often a show put on by legislators and serious injuries are rare.
More than a thousand people, including dozens of tourists from neighbouring Malaysia, jeered and screamed abuse at the group as they were flogged outside a mosque in the capital Banda Aceh

A group of amorous couples and accused sex workers were publicly whipped for breaking Islamic law in Indonesia's Aceh Friday, just a week after the province pledged to move the widely condemned practice indoors.

More than a thousand people, including dozens of tourists from neighbouring Malaysia, jeered and screamed abuse at the group of three men and five women as they were flogged on a stage outside a mosque in the capital Banda Aceh.

Some snapped pictures as a hooded figure rained down lashes from a rattan cane on their backs, with each getting between 11 and 22 strokes.

The couples were whipped for showing affection in public, while two of the women were suspected sex workers, officials said.

Aceh is the only province in the world's most populous Muslim-majority country that imposes Islamic law.

Flogging is a common punishment for a range of offences -- from gambling, to drinking alcohol to having gay sex or relations outside of marriage.

The conservative region on the northern tip of Sumatra island passed a regulation a week ago that would see criminals whipped only behind prison walls.

It was not clear when the new rule would come into effect.

The move was in response to a wave of international criticism over the practice, which has included flogging members of the vulnerable LGBT community and, in some cases, non-Muslims.

Non-Muslims can usually choose whether or not to be punished under religious law and sometimes opt for a painful flogging to avoid a long court process and jail term.

Rights groups have derided it as cruel and last year President Joko Widodo called for an end to public whippings in Aceh

Rights groups have derided the punishment as cruel and last year Indonesia's President Joko Widodo called for an end to public whippings in Aceh.

Around 98 percent of the province's five million residents are Muslims, subject to religious law, including the public whippings which came into practice around 2005.

Under the new rules, caning cannot be recorded anymore and only journalists and adults can witness the punishment inside prisons. Children have often been present at public canings.

Some conservative groups are protesting against the end of public whippings, saying it has a strong deterrent effect on crime.

"Today's flogging is evidence that (the government) and our people are still committed to implementing Islamic law," said Banda Aceh's deputy mayor Zainal Arifin.

"This is not only about physical punishment for violators, but also to set an example for members of the public who witness the flogging directly or watch it on social media."

However, Arifin insisted the latest whippings were not an act of defiance against fresh rules set by the province.

"We understand that the regulation has not yet come into effect and the prison is not yet ready to (host floggings) so that is why we are still doing it (in public)," he said.

"Until the new regulation is officially in place we will carry on as usual."
President Rodrigo Duterte (C with outgoing police chief Ronald dela Rosa L) has overseen a bloody anti-drug war that has killed more than 4,000 people

The newly named top police commander of the Philippines pledged Friday to keep up President Rodrigo Duterte's bloody anti-drug war despite fresh international condemnation over the killings.

Director General Oscar Albayalde, who was sworn in Thursday, will now lead the narcotics crackdown that has killed thousands since Duterte came to power just under two years ago.

"How to sustain the drug war? In order to sustain it, we will not change anything," Albayalde told reporters at his first press conference as commander.

He took over from Ronaldo Dela Rosa, who retired with hero's honours this week after helping Duterte launch the bloody crackdown.

"Why would we stop a programme that is very effective?" Albayalde added, citing "very good momentum and gains" since the alleged police killing last year of a teenage boy wrongly accused of drug crimes that sparked street protests.

Police on Friday announced another 13 alleged drug suspects were killed in a sweep that also led to the arrest of 58 people.

Albayalde's comments came as the Philippines pushed back against a European Union Parliament resolution voted on Thursday that criticised the crackdown, the latest international condemnation of it.

The EU lawmakers called "on the government of the Philippines to put an immediate end to the extrajudicial killings in the pretext of a 'war on drugs'".

It also expressed "grave concern over credible reports to the effect that the Philippine police force is falsifying evidence to justify extrajudicial killings".

While police say the campaign has killed around 4,100 people, rights groups allege the true toll is triple that number and amounts to state-sponsored murder.

Duterte began the crackdown in July 2016 after pledging during the presidential election campaign to kill 100,000 criminals to rid society of the scourge of narcotics.

Philippine Foreign Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano on Thursday denounced the EU parliamentary resolution as "interference" in Manila's internal affairs, describing it as "biased" and "based on wrong information".

Duterte last month pulled his country from the International Criminal Court after The Hague-based body's chief prosecutor launched an initial examination into allegations lodged against the president over his drug war.

He also threatened to arrest the chief ICC prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, if she tried to enter the Philippines to pursue her investigation.

On Sunday the Philippines deported EU politician Giacomo Filibeck, who has previously criticised Duterte's crackdown, and on Monday briefly detained an elderly Australian nun who has been critical of alleged human rights violations by Philippine soldiers.
Syrian refugees evacuated from the southern Lebanese village of Shebaa ride in a bus through the Masnaa crossing on the Lebanon-Syria border leading to Damascus on April 18, 2018, to return home to their village of Beit Jinn near Damascus

Human Rights Watch on Friday criticised Lebanese municipalities for what it called the unjustifiable expulsion of hundreds of Syrians from their homes since 2016, as sentiment against refugees simmers.

"At least 13 municipalities in Lebanon have forcibly evicted at least 3,664 Syrian refugees from their homes and expelled them from the municipalities, apparently because of their nationality or religion," from the start of 2016 through to the end of March this year, the New York-based rights group said.

Almost one million Syrians are registered as refugees in Lebanon, though many expect the real number is much higher.

The Mediterranean country's population stood at just four million before neighbouring Syria's civil war broke out in 2011, sending tens of thousands of Syrians fleeing across the border in search of safety.

Several politicians have blamed a flurry of social and economic woes in Lebanon on Syrian refugees, and calls for them to return have increased in the run-up to the country's first parliamentary elections in nearly a decade on May 6.

"Municipalities have no legitimate justification for forcibly evicting Syrian refugees if it amounts to nationality-based or religious discrimination," said Bill Frelick, refugee rights director at Human Rights Watch.

"Lebanese leaders should curb rhetoric that encourages or condones forced evictions, expulsions, and other discriminatory and harassing treatment of refugees in Lebanon," Frelick said.

- Discrimination on religious basis -

Lebanese security forces clear buses carrying Syrian refugees evacuated from southern Lebanon at the Masnaa border crossing with Syria

The evictions have caused refugees to lose income and property, and their children to miss school or drop out altogether, according to HRW, which spoke to 57 Syrians affected by the measures.

Some municipalities have claimed the evictions were based on housing regulation infractions such as tenants not registering their leases with them, HRW said.

But despite "widespread breaches by Lebanese citizens as well, the measures these municipalities have taken have been directed exclusively at Syrian nationals and not Lebanese citizens", it said.

HRW also pointed to discrimination on a religious basis, with most of the municipalities involved in forcibly evicting and expelling Syrian refugees predominantly populated by Christians.

All 57 interviewees who spoke to HRW identified as Muslim.

But, said HRW, "Lebanon's refugee-hosting fatigue has been exacerbated by a lack of international support" as well.

On Wednesday, around 500 Syrian refugees left southern Lebanon under an agreement between authorities in Beirut and Damascus to return them to their home country.

The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) said it was aware of the returns but was not involved in the agreement, "considering the prevailing humanitarian and security situation in Syria".

Lebanon's foreign ministry accused UNHCR of "scaring the displaced from any return at this stage because of what it sees as an unstable security situation".

It criticised the UN agency's "renewed determination to refuse any positive signs for a return... despite the security situation in many Syrian towns currently being stable."

The ministry said this had led it to "re-evaluate" and "question" the UN agency's work.

Syria's war has killed more than 350,000 people and displaced millions since starting in 2011 with the brutal repression of anti-government protests.
South African police on Friday fired rubber bullets at protesters after President Cyril Ramaphosa cut short a foreign trip to deal with violent riots over alleged government corruption and poor public services.

Shops were looted, roads were blocked and vehicles set alight in North West province in unrest that posed an early challenge for Ramaphosa, who came to power in February.

At least 23 people were arrested and one man was reported to have died in sporadic violence that erupted this week in Mahikeng, the provincial capital.

Ramaphosa called for calm as he vowed to speedily resolve the cause of the unrest, following more than six hours of talks with local leaders in the city of Mahikeng after he cut short his trip to a Commonwealth summit in London.

Violent protests are common in South Africa, but North West province has been a hotbed of unrest due to boiling frustration over lack of housing, health services and jobs.

Police fired rubber bullets as protesters hid behind cardboard sheets, while roads were littered with burning tyres and bricks that had been thrown through the air.

- 'Violence and anarchy' -

At the end of the talks Ramaphosa appealed for an end to the unrest, promising a "speedy" resolution of the crisis.

"...let us be calm, let us return to a position of normalcy as we address this matter and reach finality on it," he said in an address broadcast live from the city.

He said he had been made to understand during the talks that the unrest had been sparked by concerns over the position of the provincial premier, corruption and governance.

"These are matters that are serious enough" to warrant broad consultation in the party and the national government "on an urgent basis", he said.

"We are going to act as speedily as possible to address each of the issues that have been raised," he added.

The trigger for the unrest was reportedly the death on Tuesday of two patients at a health clinic that was closed due to a month-long dispute over health workers' salaries and contracts.

Much of the anger has been directed at Supra Mahumapelo, the provincial premier, who is accused of involvement in graft scandals that have engulfed the ruling ANC (African National Congress) party.

The border to neighbouring Botswana was closed due to the violence, while schools, shops, offices and government services across North West province were shut.

Local residents said foreign-owned shops were the first to be targeted by looters.

"Very poor people are in dire need. Those people looted foreigners' shops," local resident Leveticus Molosankwe, 43, told AFP.

"They have taken advantage of the political situation as people plead for the removal of Mahumapelo. This has been simmering for months."

Thapelo Galeboe, member of the local Communist Party branch, said the premier ruled "like an emperor" in the province.

"The health system has completely collapsed. Hospitals are filthy. Families close to the premier have benefited in a very corrupt manner from tenders," he said.

- New leadership -

Ramaphosa, who took over as leader of the ruling ANC in December, replaced Jacob Zuma as national president earlier this year.

Zuma's nine-year tenure saddled South Africa with weak growth, ballooning national debt, depressed investor confidence and record unemployment.

The ANC forced Zuma from office in February largely due to his mounting legal challenges and multiple corruption scandals, and the party has distanced itself from its former leader.

Ramaphosa has vowed to crack down on government corruption, which he has admitted is a serious problem, and improve South Africa's ability to attract foreign investment.

Unemployment is at a record high of about 28 percent, with youth unemployment reaching over 50 percent in many areas.

Zuma appeared in court earlier this month at a preliminary hearing on graft charges that he denies.
Maya Kodnani (pictured in 2009) was the most senior figure to have been jailed over the Gujarat riots

An Indian court Friday acquitted an ally of Prime Minister Narendra Modi who was the most senior figure convicted over the deadly 2002 Gujarat religious riots.

Maya Kodnani, who served as a minister in the Gujarat state government then led by Modi, was sentenced to 28 years in jail in 2012 over the killing of 97 Muslims in the worst massacre during the riots.

Kodnani, 63, appealed to the Gujarat High Court which gave her the benefit of the doubt but upheld the convictions of 12 other accused, including Babu Bajrangi, a firebrand leader of a Hindu right-wing outfit.

"The court observed that Kodnani's name never came up in 2002. It was only included after SIT (Special Investigation Team) took over," said special public prosecutor R. C. Kodekar.

"The court also observed that the statement of 11 witnesses against Kodnani were inconsistent, hence she was given benefit of doubt," he said.

Kodnani, who served as women and child development minister in Modi's state government from 2007-2009, was accused by the sentencing judge in 2012 of being "the kingpin of the religious riots".

She was found guilty of murder and other charges including inciting religious hatred over the massacre that occurred in the Naroda Patiya suburb of Ahmedabad.

Modi, who ruled Gujarat for more than 10 years, himself has been dogged by claims that he failed to do enough to stop the riots although a Supreme Court probe has cleared him of any wrongdoing.

He maintains that he moved to end the bloodshed as swiftly as possible.

The Gujarat riots left more than 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, dead in some of India's worst inter-faith violence since independence in 1947.

The rioting began after 60 Hindu pilgrims died in a train fire for which 31 Muslims were convicted in 2011.
A kite carrying a Molotov cocktail is flown by Palestinian youths over the Gaza-Israel border on April 18, 2018

Palestinians protesting along the Gaza border have begun attaching Molotov cocktails to kites to fly over the fence into Israel in a new tactic as demonstrations entered their fourth week.

Gazans flew dozens of kites near the fence on Friday, including some carrying Molotov cocktails and carrying notes telling Israelis "there is no place for you in Palestine".

On the eve of Friday's protests, a group of young people worked with coloured paper and empty coke bottles under a tree in an olive orchard hundreds of metres from the Israeli border east of Gaza City.

Some carefully created 60-centimetre-long kites in the colours of the Palestinian flag. When completed, a metal wire was attached at the bottom linked to a liquid-filled bottle.

As AFP watched, three young men carried one kite dozens of metres towards the border before stopping to set the bottle alight.

With the flame lit, they sent it into the air and cut the thread -- watching as it floated over the border and crashed, causing a small fire.

"We use the kites to send a message that we are capable of bothering the occupation," said 16-year-old Abdullah.

A Palestinian youth holds a kite in the colours of his national flag near the Gaza-Israel border on April 20, 2018

Since March 30, tens of thousands have protested along the border in the blockaded enclave calling for Palestinian refugees to be able to return to their former lands in what is now Israel.

Smaller numbers have approached the fence, throwing stones and rolling burning tyres toward soldiers.

Israel says firebombs and explosive devices have also been used.

Thirty-six Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces and hundreds of others wounded by gunfire since March 30, according to Gaza's health ministry.

There have been no Israeli casualties, and Palestinians say protesters are being shot while posing no threat to soldiers on the other side of the heavily guarded fence.

Israel has pledged to stop damage to the fence, infiltrations and attacks, and alleges there have been attempts at all three.

It accuses Hamas, the Islamist movement that runs the Gaza Strip and with whom it has fought three wars since 2008, of using the protests as cover to carry out violence.

Regarding the kites, the army said "there were attempts to set fire to fields and damage the security infrastructures on the border by flying kites carrying Molotov cocktails and explosive devices."

It said it would not "allow damage to the security and fence infrastructures that protect Israeli citizens and will act against anyone who wishes to harm Israel's security."

- 'Friday of Kites' -

The protests are planned to last six weeks, but peak on Fridays.

Palestinian youths try to fly a kite carrying a Molotov cocktail over the Gaza-Israel border on April 18, 2018

Gazans have used stones, firebombs and fireworks during clashes, but have also employed tactics such as creating a smokescreen by burning tyres and Israeli flags.

Kites are now the latest, though they are small and unlikely to cause major damage.

Protest organisers have officially labelled Friday's protest in support of "martyrs and prisoners," but on social media some Palestinians have dubbed it the "Friday of Kites".

A small fire broke out in an Israeli farming area on Thursday afternoon near the border with central Gaza after a kite fell, witnesses said.

On Wednesday evening, about 20 young people were practising flying kites attached to containers east of Bureij in the central Gaza Strip.

"They (the soldiers) are firing explosive bullets and tear gas, we are flying kites to burn the farmland," said a 17-year-old, who did not want to be named.

Smoke rises from fields on the Israeli side of the Gaza border after Palestinians sent over a kite carrying a Molotov cocktail on April 17, 2018

Jamal al-Fadi, a professor of political science in Gaza, said weeks of protest had led to new "means of struggle".

"The Palestinian people, frustrated and desperate due to the Israeli siege and (Palestinian) divisions, have had their hope renewed," he said of the demonstrations.

One man east of Bureij who only gave his name as Murad said this week that he expected dozens of kites in the air for Friday's protests "to destabilise, creating confusion".

He said he hoped it would result in "burned crops".

"These crops can cost the enemy millions of shekels," he said.
Deputy police major Moe Yan Naing (C) told the court a police chief ordered officers to set up a Reuters journalist

A Myanmar police chief ordered officers to set up a Reuters reporter by handing over sensitive documents to him in a sting operation that also ensnared his colleague, a police official told a court Friday.

Reporters Wa Lone, 32 and Kyaw Soe Oo, 28 were detained in December after meeting police for dinner in Yangon and accused of violating the country's Official Secrets Act for possessing material relating to operations in conflict-hit Rakhine state.

They were arrested while investigating a September 2 massacre of Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine, but their report was published while they were behind bars.

Myanmar has been accused of waging an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Rohingya after some 700,000 fled to Bangladesh following a brutal military crackdown on insurgents in August.

The military has denied allegations that the armed forces committed widespread atrocities.

But it has admitted soldiers took part in a massacre of Rohingyas last September in Inn Din village, a murder spree that the Reuters reporters helped uncover. Seven soldiers were recently sentenced to 10-year prison terms for the killings.

Nonetheless the prosecution of the reporters has continued.

For months now a Yangon court has been hearing testimony to decide whether the Reuters journalists will go to trial even as global criticism of the case has rained down on Myanmar and prominent rights attorney Amal Clooney joined the legal team.

- 'Tell the whole truth' -

Deputy police major Moe Yan Naing said in his appearance Friday that he had been questioned about meeting Wa Lone in November and that his superior then set up a sting in which he told others to pass on sensitive security documents.

"Police Brigadier Tin Ko Ko asked Htauk Kyant (township) police members to arrest Wa Lone after Lance Corporal Naing Lin handed the documents to Wa Lone when they left," he said, describing orders to "get" the reporter.

Kyaw Soe Oo accompanied Wa Lone to the restaurant meeting and was also arrested.

Yangon police officials could not be reached for comment.

Myanmar government spokesman Zaw Htay said in response to questions about the testimony that the case is ongoing and a judge will decide.

Moe Yan Naing said he was angry that his name had been mentioned in the aftermath of the sting as someone who was under scrutiny.

He is facing charges of breaching police regulations and was brought to the hearing from detention.

The prosecution argued that he should be declared a hostile witness as his testimony differed from what he had told police investigators, but the Reuters defence team praised his remarks as genuine.

Reporter Wa Lone (C) was the target of the sting operation, according to testimony by a police official

"He answered all this by taking risk for himself," lawyer Khin Maung Zaw said.

A judge will hear arguments about the motion next week.

In brief comments to AFP as he arrived at the court in the morning, Moe Yan Naing said he was "going to tell the whole truth" in his appearance.

Reuters president and editor-in-chief Stephen J. Adler said in a statement that the court had finally heard the truth and called for the journalists' immediate release.

"One of the prosecution's own witnesses admitted that the police received orders to plant evidence and arrest Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo on false charges," he said.

"This case cannot be squared with fairness or justice, and it's time to bring it to an end."

Myanmar lifted many restrictions on the press as it emerged from five decades of military rule in 2011.

But critics have accused Aung San Suu Kyi's new government of backsliding on previous reforms and failing to protect free expression.
Mugabe ruled Zimbabwe from 1980 until his dramatic ouster last year

A Zimbabwe parliament committee has summoned former president Robert Mugabe to give evidence on May 9 over diamond corruption costing billions of dollars, underlining his fall from power after 37 years of autocratic rule.

Mugabe, now 94, ruled Zimbabwe from 1980 until he was ousted last year after the military took over briefly and his once-loyal ZANU-PF party turned against him.

"We have set May 9 as the date on which he will give evidence," Temba Mliswa, the chairman of the mines and energy parliament committee, told Friday's state-owned Herald newspaper.

"We met today (Thursday) as a committee and resolved that we invite the former president Mr Mugabe to our committee to explain the disappearance of $15 billion worth of diamonds," said Mliswa, an independent MP.

The lawmakers plan to question Mugabe over his 2016 claim that the country had lost $15 billion (12 billion euros at current rates) due to corruption and foreign exploitation in the diamond sector.

It was unclear whether Mugabe, who is in frail health, would agree to appear before the committee or make moves to avoid a potential grilling.

- Lucrative diamond mines -

"Parliament is playing its oversight role," Thabitha Khumalo, spokeswoman for the MDC opposition party, told AFP. "We hope that they release the results of their findings."

Mugabe -- whose own regime was accused of siphoning off diamond profits -- has described his ousting as a coup.

A diamond processing plant in the eastern Marange region, where families were driven out by mining firms allied to Mugabe's erstwhile regime

He was replaced by his former deputy, Emmerson Mnangagwa, a veteran loyalist in the ZANU-PF party who was backed by senior military officers.

Mugabe, who has not been seen in public since his fall, exercised ruthless control over parliament, security forces and the country's mineral resources for decades.

The parliamentary committee has already summoned former ministers, ex-police chiefs and heads of several government department.

Zimbabwe discovered alluvial diamonds in Chiadzwa, in the east of the country, over 10 years ago, and rights groups have accused security forces of using brutal methods to control the scattered deposits.

Over 200 people were killed during operations to remove illegal panners from the area, rights groups say.

Amid allegations of massive looting, Zimbabwe allowed several diamond companies companies to mine the area -- most of them as joint ventures between the government and Chinese firms.

Zimbabwe is due to hold elections in July or August, the first since Mugabe was unseated, with the ZANU-PF widely predicted to retain power.

Mnangagwa has vowed to hold a fair vote, and to tackle graft as he tries to revive the shattered economy by attracting foreign investment and re-building many international ties cut under Mugabe's regime.
Saudi Energy Minister Khaled al-Faleh attends a meeting of oil producers in Jeddah on April 20, 2018

Saudi Energy Minister Khaled al-Faleh said on Friday the global market has the capacity to absorb higher oil prices, after crude hit the highest level in more than three years.

"I have not seen any impact on demand with current prices. We have seen prices significantly higher in the past -- twice as much as where we are today," Faleh told reporters ahead of an oil producers' meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

"Energy intensity as you know has declined significantly ... this reduced energy intensity and higher productivity globally of energy input leads me to think that there is the capacity to absorb higher prices," Faleh said.

Faleh insisted the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) does not have a price target for oil.

"We never have a price target ... Prices are determined by the market," said Faleh who warned against the danger of price fluctuations, saying that "volatility is our enemy."

Speaking at the same meeting of OPEC and non-OPEC oil producers, United Arab Emirates Energy Minister Suhail al-Mazrouei said his main concern was stability.

"We don't have a target price, our target is market stability," Mazrouei said.

OPEC producers and non-OPEC countries struck a deal in 2016 to trim production by 1.8 million barrels per day to reduce a global glut of oil.

The deal, which is due to run out at the end of this year, has succeeded in boosting oil prices above $70 a barrel from below $30 a barrel in early 2016.

The recovery has also been fuelled by geopolitical tensions, US President Donald Trump's threat to reimpose nuclear-related sanctions on Iran and production problems in Venezuela, Nigeria and Libya.

Benefitting from the higher prices, US oil producers have ramped up drilling, pushing domestic output to a record 10.5 million barrels a day last week, according to data from the US Energy Information Administration.

The United States had already eclipsed Saudi Arabia as the world's second largest crude producer with the OPEC kingpin pumping just under 10 million bpd while meeting its agreed production cuts.
An image grab taken from a video released by the Syrian civil defence in Douma shows unidentified volunteers giving aid to children at a hospital following an alleged April 7, 2018 chemical attack on the rebel-held town

Unprecedented Western strikes against regime targets in Syria yielded a lot of political chest-thumping but no hope that the seven-year war would end soon or even claim fewer civilian victims.

On April 14, the United States, France and Britain fired missiles meant as a response to what the trio of nations said was evidence Damascus had used chemical weapons a week earlier.

Meanwhile, international inspectors on Friday had yet to begin their probe at the site of the alleged chemical attack in Douma, amid concerns that its security was not guaranteed and that evidence had been removed.

Purported footage of victims foaming at the mouth after the April 7 attack sparked an outcry and prompted the West to launch its biggest military action yet against President Bashar al-Assad's regime.

A bullish US administration hailed the strikes as a success and argued a clear message had been sent to the Damascus regime that the use of chemical weapons would no longer go unpunished.

"If Assad doesn't get it, it's going to hurt," the US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, said.

A poster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is seen at a checkpoint in the city of Tartus on April 2, 2018

French President Emmanuel Macron also claimed that the missiles could have a major diplomatic impact, achieving what analysts saw as an attempt by the West to reclaim a seat at the table after staying aloof.

Russia, Damascus's top ally, was warned of the strikes and many analysts said the Syrian regime had ample time to hide its chemical stockpile.

The Western trio at the UN Security Council had emphasised the need to bridge the rift with Russia, which is the main broker in the conflict but whose peace initiatives have also failed.

- Diplomatic stalemate -

Russia has instead reaffirmed its alliance with Turkey and Iran and is still alleging that the April 7 Douma attack was a Western-engineered fabrication to justify strikes.

That claim has gained considerable traction in global public opinion thanks to a relentless campaign by Russian media and a network of pro-Russian social media accounts.

After a week of trading threats and recriminations, UN ambassadors will try to find some common ground during a three-day retreat starting Friday at a farmhouse in southern Sweden.

A voice often drowned out by the bluster that preceded and followed the strikes, was that of Syrian civilians.

On a wall in the northern province of Idlib, graffiti artist Aziz al-Asmar had these words for Trump: "Your strike is like a rooster's fart."

Opposition supporters felt short-changed by the Western strikes, arguing that they may have assuaged Western consciences but had been a mere slap on the wrist for Assad.

"Everyone has disappointed us, everyone has sold us out," said Ahmed, a 25-year-old mechanic from Douma, who was evacuated to northern Syria with thousands of other civilians days before the attack.

Joshua Landis, director of the Centre for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, said all the United States and its allies had achieved was to uphold a norm on the non-use of chemical weapons.

"This had nothing to do with killing people -- it only had something to do with how you kill people," he said.

- 'Not about us' -

Barrel bombs and other munitions dropped by the regime on Douma and the rest of Eastern Ghouta resulted in much higher death tolls but triggered no Western action against Assad.

Echoing comments by US and British officials, Macron admitted that the strikes "don't necessarily resolve anything" but were important "for the honour of the international community."

Exiled Syrian writer Yassin al-Haj Saleh, whose wife went missing in Douma in 2013, saw that as particularly offensive.

"It's not about us, it's not about protecting our lives and saving Syrians from brutality," he told AFP in Madrid, arguing Western nations mostly want "to regain some of their prestige".

Nearly a week after their arrival in Damascus, inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) had not yet been able to access Douma and investigate the site.

Their UN security assessment team came under fire this week and officials at the OPCW have also said that key evidence had probably been removed by Russian and Syrian forces.

Syria's resurgent president, whose job hung by a thread earlier in the conflict, appeared determined to press on with his Russian-backed military recovery.

The rebels who had resisted a Russian-brokered transfer deal in Douma said it was the alleged chemical attack that forced them to accept and flee their hometown.

Since then, other rebel factions in pockets around Damascus where opposition armed groups had been allowed to stay under a 2016 reconciliation deal have also been deported.
Saudi Energy Minister Khaled al-Faleh attends a meeting of oil producers in Jeddah on April 20, 2018

Saudi Energy Minister Khaled al-Faleh said Friday the global market has the capacity to absorb higher oil prices, drawing a swift reaction from US President Donald Trump who accused OPEC of inflating prices.

Faleh's statement at a meeting of oil producers in Saudi Arabia came as crude hit the highest level in more than three years.

"Looks like OPEC is at it again," Trump tweeted.

"With record amounts of Oil all over the place, including the fully loaded ships at sea, Oil prices are artificially Very High! No good and will not be accepted!"

Oil has rebounded to over $70 a barrel, after prices crashed to as low as $26 in January 2016.

"I have not seen any impact on demand with current prices," Faleh told reporters, ahead of a ministerial committee for OPEC and non-OPEC producers.

"Reduced energy intensity and higher productivity globally of energy input leads me to think that there is the capacity to absorb higher prices," he said.

The ministerial committee said Friday that crude inventory levels have been reduced but were still higher than desired.

Stockpiles were at 2.83 billion barrels, down from their peak of 3.12 billion barrels two years ago, it said in a statement.

- Gunning for $80b -

Analysts believe Saudi Arabia, the world's top crude exporter, aims to see much higher oil prices to overcome its domestic financial difficulties and raise the valuation of state oil giant Aramco ahead of a planned five-percent IPO.

After prices hit $70 a barrel, the kingdom "is thought to be unofficially gunning for $80 a barrel, with some even suggesting that it favours a return to $100 (a barrel) oil", Stephen Brennock of PVM Oil Associates said.

"As well as helping to reduce the Saudi government balance sheet, a further spike in prices would act as a boon for the impending Aramco IPO," Brennock said.

"This is why Saudi Arabia is intentionally keeping the supply of oil tight," Commerzbank said.

Faleh on Friday insisted the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries does not have a price target for oil.

"We never have a price target ... Prices are determined by the market," said Faleh who warned against the danger of price fluctuations, saying "volatility is our enemy."

- Saudi-Russia 'consensus' -

Russia, the world's top oil producer, on Friday gave its backing to the idea of establishing an enduring alliance for producers to continue their control of the market.

Saudi Energy Minister Khaled al-Faleh (L) and Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak are surrounded by reporters during a meeting in Jeddah of OPEC and non-OPEC members to assess compliance with production cuts

"We have created a very solid foundation for cooperation between OPEC and non-OPEC countries in the future even beyond the declaration of cooperation," Russia Energy Minister Alexander Novak told reporters in Jeddah.

Oil kingpin Saudi Arabia said a "consensus" was emerging for a long-term cooperation agreement.

OPEC and non-OPEC producers struck a deal in late 2016 to trim production by 1.8 million barrels per day to reduce a global glut that sent prices crashing.

The deal, which is due to run out at the end of this year, has helped boost oil prices to above $70 a barrel from below $30 in early 2016.

The recovery has also been fuelled by geopolitical tensions, Trump's threat to reimpose sanctions on Iran and production problems in Venezuela, Nigeria and Libya.

Benefitting from the higher prices, US oil producers have ramped up drilling, pushing domestic output to a record 10.5 million barrels a day last week, according to data from the US Energy Information Administration.

The United States had already overtaken Saudi Arabia as the world's second largest crude producer, pumping just under 10 million bpd while meeting its agreed production cuts.
Officials accuse El Hadi Doudi of spreading hate speech at his mosque in Marseille, one of the city's largest before it was shut down last year

France on Friday deported an influential Islamic preacher whose mosque in the southern city of Marseille was shut down last year over accusations of hate speech.

The expulsion of Algeria-born El Hadi Doudi back to his home country came after his appeal with the European Court of Human Rights was rejected earlier this week.

Doudi, 63, had long been on the radar of Marseille police, who considered him an "authority" on Salafist interpretations of Islam, a Sunni branch which demands a strict conservative lifestyle.

While a majority of Salafists disdain violence, some followers embrace the use of force to promote their beliefs.

France has been wrestling with how to counter the influence of extremists after a string of deadly jihadist attacks by people later found to have moved in Salafist circles.

Several members of Doudi's mosque -- one of Marseille's largest before its closure in late 2017 -- are suspected of having gone to fight alongside jihadists in Iraq and Syria in recent years.

The interior ministry based its decision to deport Doudi on an analysis of 25 sermons obtained by intelligence services starting in January 2013.

Officials said his preachings included "calls for the defeat and destruction of infidels" and descriptions of Jews as "unpure" and "the brothers of monkeys and pigs".

He was also accused of urging his followers to proclaim "Allahu Akhbar" (God is greatest) in public places in order to "frighten the unbelievers".

- Increased expulsions -

Last month some French lawmakers went so far as to urge a ban on the movement after four people were killed during a shooting spree and hostage taking in a supermarket by a homegrown jihadist in southern France.

Others called for "preventive detention" of the most radicalised Islamists already on police watch lists, after it emerged that attacker, Moroccan-born Radouane Lakdim, had recently been summoned for an interview with authorities.

France expelled 20 radicalised foreigners living legally in the country last year, a number which Interior Minister Gerard Collomb said was "the highest ever".

Doudi, a father of seven who arrived in France in 1982, denied spreading messages of hate, while his followers claimed he was opposed to jihadist violence.

His lawyers also claimed he was at risk of torture and "inhumane or degrading treatment" at the hands of Algerian authorities, but the European rights court rejected that argument this week.

Doudi's deportation comes shortly after that of Mohammed Tlaghi on March 28 to Morocco, following the closure of a mosque in Torcy, in the eastern suburbs of Paris.

The imam, who was also a high-school maths teacher, was found to have "explicitly legitimised armed jihad and called on followers to pray for jihadists so they could destroy enemies of Islam in France and the rest of the world," authorities said.

The mosque came under surveillance after its imams urged support for members of the so-called "Cannes-Torcy cell" suspected of planning jihadist attacks.

France remains on high alert following jihadist attacks that have killed more than 240 people since 2015.
Many Swazis criticised the king for changing the country's name without consulting anyone

Residents of the tiny African kingdom of Swaziland on Friday weighed up their country's new official name after the king unexpectedly announced it would now be known as "eSwatini".

King Mswati III, one of the world's few absolute monarchs, declared the name change at celebrations on Thursday marking 50 years since independence from British colonial rule.

Meaning "place of the Swazi", eSwatini is the local Swazi language name for the nation landlocked between South Africa and Mozambique.

Critics of the king, who took the throne in 1986 aged 18, said the move was an example of his authoritarian and wasteful reign in a country that suffers dire poverty.

"We see here King Mswati's autocratic style," said Alvit Dlamini, head of the Ngwane National Liberatory Congress, a political party which, like others, is not allowed to run in elections.

"He can't change the name of the country on his own. He was supposed to consult the nation."

Dlamini said that the change would be expensive for Swaziland, where 63 percent of the 1.3 million population live below the national poverty line, according the World Food Programme.

"This will come with major cost implications, we are a broke country," he said.

King Mswati III's lavish lifestyle has attracted wide condemnation

"And it will affect us with organisations like the African Union and United Nations, and in international protocols and agreements."

The Trade Union Congress of Swaziland warned that the process was not immediate, adding it would not immediately change its own name.

"When the king has made a pronouncement, due process must take its course," acting general secretary Mduduzi Gina told AFP.

- 'No name change overnight' -

"The legislature must initiate a process to amend the constitution. The change cannot be a knee-jerk reaction.

"We will not become the Trade Union Congress of eSwatini overnight. We will consult with our affiliates."

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For many Swazis, the change also raised concerns about updating paperwork and additional bureaucracy.

"Some of us don't suffer from an inferiority complex," said Mbabane resident Hynd Shongwe, in a dig at the king.

"The name change is neither here nor there. My only worry is the cost and inconvenience of official documents changing. If it was by choice, we would remain with the current documents."

Unlike some countries, Swaziland did not change its name when it gained independence in 1968 after being a British protectorate for more than 60 years.

The new name had been mooted for several years, with lawmakers considering the issue in 2015, and the king has used eSwatini in previous official speeches.
A student holds up her hands with the words "Don't Shoot" written on them during a protest against school violence in Chicago

Students demanding tougher gun laws walked out of classes across the United States on Friday, the 19th anniversary of the shooting at Columbine High School which left 13 people dead.

As thousands of teenagers held rallies from coast to coast, a shooting at a high school in Ocala, Florida, left one student wounded.

The Ocala Star Banner newspaper said a 19-year-old former student at Forest High School fired a blast from a shotgun into a locked classroom door, wounding a 17-year-old student in the ankle.

The Marion County Sheriff's Office said the suspect, who was not identified, was quickly arrested.

Around the country, students marked the anniversary of the April 20, 1999 shooting at Columbine in Colorado, a massacre seen as the harbinger of an era of school violence.

"I feel like things have gotten worse these last few years," said Emma Corcoran, a 15-year-old from Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in Maryland, at a rally in Washington. "Change needs to happen."

Students hold up signs calling for tougher gun laws outside the US Capitol

The protests have been galvanized by students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where 14 teens and three adult staff members were shot dead on February 14 by a troubled former classmate armed with an AR-15-style automatic weapon.

The Parkland students have spearheaded a grassroots campaign for gun control which included another school walkout on March 14 and nationwide rallies by hundreds of thousands of Americans on March 24.

"So proud of the #NationalSchoolWalkout and all of the students around the country who are standing up for positive change and demanding what we deserve," tweeted Cameron Kasky, a Parkland student leader.

- 'Make our voices heard'

In Parkland, David Hogg, a Stoneman Douglas student, said he hopes the walkout inspires people to "get out and vote."

Students protest against gun violence in a rally at Washington Square Park in New York

"That's what this country needs," Hogg said. "We just have to get out there and make our voices heard."

"I hope it inspires people to make a change," added Hogg's sister, Lauren. "I hope it shows people that although we're not old enough to vote yet, we're old enough to have a voice."

In Washington, several hundred students from area high schools rallied outside the White House and then marched on Congress to demand action on gun control.

Carrying signs reading "Enough Is Enough" and "Books Not Bullets," they chanted "We will vote" as they marched.

"A lot of people from my school came to show our support for increasing safety at schools and for better gun control legislation," said Matt Compton, a 15-year-old at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School.

"I will vote for someone who I think will help solve this issue when I'm old enough," Compton said.

Former Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who was shot and seriously wounded by a gunman in 2011, sent a series of tweets supporting the students.

A student holds up a sign protesting gun violence at a rally in Washington Square Park in New York

"After Columbine, America's politicians said, 'never again.' But after nearly two decades of inaction, it's clear they've failed in their basic duty to keep our kids safe," Giffords said.

"They are warning politicians to show the courage to address our gun violence or get voted out," she said.

Meanwhile, a group of Parkland students, activists and celebrities sent an open letter to the National Rifle Association pledging to take on the powerful gun lobby.

The "NoRA Initiative" said that it was aimed at "counteracting the influence of NRA money in the American political system."

Among those who signed the letter were the actors Alec Baldwin, Amy Schumer, Ashley Judd, Alyssa Milano and Julianne Moore and the activist Michael Moore.

An ABC News/Washington Post poll published Friday showed that support for a ban on assault weapons has risen sharply in the past few months.

Sixty-two percent of those polled said they support a nationwide ban on the sale of assault weapons, up from 50 percent in mid-February and 45 percent in late 2015.

Seventy-one percent of those surveyed said Congress is not doing enough to try to prevent gun violence and 59 percent said that President Donald Trump is not doing enough.
Kashmiri law students at a protest following the gang rape and murder of an eight yer old girl

The Indian government said Friday it is looking to introduce the death penalty for child rapists after nationwide outrage over the brutal gang rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl.

Demonstrations across the country, after the release of horrific details of the murder of the Muslim girl by a group of Hindu men, have increased pressure on the government to take action on sexual crimes.

The government told the Supreme Court that amending the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act to bring in capital punishment was under "active consideration" by the law ministry.

"The ministry is sensitive to the plight of young children brutally abused in the most horrific manner," the government said in a statement to a Supreme Court hearing reported by Press Trust of India.

"The ministry is proposing to amend the POCSO Act for introducing death penalty for the abuser in the cases of aggravated sexual assault against children," it added.

India retains the death penalty for the most serious cases such as particularly brutal murders or terror attacks.

But the sentences are rarely carried out, often struck down on appeal by higher courts.

India's women's minister last week called for the death penalty in child rape cases as opposition groups accused the Hindu nationalist government of inaction over the rape case in the Kathua district of Kashmir and Jammu state.

"I have been deeply, deeply disturbed by the rape case in Kathua and all the recent rape cases that have happened on children," women and children's minister Maneka Gandhi said.

She said her ministry would seek to change the POSCO Act so the death penalty is possible for the rape of children under 12.

Critics of the move have previously expressed fears that making rape a capital offence might make it more likely an offender kills their victim, to reduce the chance of getting caught.

The Muslim girl in Kathua was repeatedly raped while held for five days in a Hindu temple.

The government has faced criticism over the murder of the girl and the rape of a 17-year-old woman for which a state lawmaker from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been detained.

The alleged attack in Uttar Pradesh state occurred last year but only started making headlines after the woman tried to set herself on fire outside the Uttar Pradesh chief minister's residence last weekend.
Critics accuse Obiang, who has ruled since 1979, of brutally cracking down on opponents

Equatorial Guinea's opposition on Friday criticised the oil rich country for hosting a rights conference, claiming institutional killings, torture and imprisonment were "common currency" at home.

A small state of 1.2 million people, awash with oil but mired in poverty and a reputation for corruption, Equatorial Guinea has been ruled with an iron fist by Teodoro Obiang Nguema since 1979.

"Human rights violations are common currency and used by those who wield power in Equatorial Guinea," said the main opposition Citizens for Innovation (CI) party.

It said the April 18-21 conference aimed at "dispelling falsehoods about Equatorial Guinea" was an attempt to whitewash its record.

"There are political prisoners in the country," it said. "Our members have been tortured in police stations, some have had their arms and legs broken and others have been shot."

However, the country's third deputy prime minister Alfonso Nsue Mokuy, who is in charge of human rights, told AFP: "We have nothing to hide."

The European Union in February said it saw a "sharp decline" in human rights, recalling that an opposition figure died in custody and over 130 people detained since elections last year.

"The restrictions on freedom and arrests, particularly those of political opponents ... since the elections in November 2017 arouse grave concern," said Catherine Ray, EU spokeswoman for foreign affairs and security policy, in a statement.

"The death in custody of Mr Ebee Ela, a member of the opposition party Ciudadanos por la Innovacion (CI), confirms the sharp decline in the human rights situation," Ray had said.
Romanian President Klaus Iohannis's office said he had "not been consulted or informed over this process" of moving the country's Israel embassy to Jerusalem

A row erupted Friday between Romania's government and President Klaus Iohannis over a proposal to move the country's embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

The foreign ministry announced that "a process of analysis and evaluation with the aim of transferring the embassy has been launched".

Prime Minister Viorica Dancila of the left-wing Social Democratic Party confirmed Friday the government had adopted a memorandum on moving the embassy but added that other steps needed to be taken before a final decision.

In December US President Donald Trump sparked global controversy by announcing that the United States would move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

Romania would be the first EU country to follow suit.

- President 'not consulted' -

Dancila was more cautious than PSD party chief Liviu Dragnea, who on Thursday pre-empted any official announcement and told the Antena 3 TV channel that the decision to move the embassy had been taken.

Meanwhile Iohannis's office said he had "not been consulted or informed over this process," adding that in his opinion the decision was "not based on firm, wide-ranging evaluations".

Iohannis, who is from the centre-right and has expressed numerous disagreements with the government, pointed to the constitution, under which the president "approves the creation or shutting down" of diplomatic missions.

Emphasising that Romania's position on the Israeli-Palestinian question "had not changed", Iohannis said: "At this stage a transfer of the embassy would represent a violation of international law."

"The government's initiative could eventually represent, at the most, the beginning of a process of evaluation... which could only be finalised after the conclusion of peace talks," Iohannis added.

- 'Balanced position' -

Dancila confirmed on Friday that the government had adopted a memorandum outlining the plans.

"I assure you that we are responsible, we have judgement,... we will discuss this with all institutions, including the president," she told reporters.

"When we get to a shared position we will make that public," she added.

According to Romanian media reports, Dancila will make an official trip to Israel next week. Israel's deputy foreign minister Tzipi Hotovely had visited Romania last week.

Israel occupied mainly Palestinian east Jerusalem and the surrounding region in the 1967 Six-Day War and later annexed it, declaring the whole city its capital.

However, neither move was recognised by the international community and the Palestinians see the eastern part of Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.

As well as being the only country in the former Soviet bloc to maintain diplomatic relations with Israel after the 1967 war, Romania under its Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu also had close links to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) under Yasser Arafat.

In its statement the foreign ministry emphasised Romania's "balanced position" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the fact that Romania recognised Palestine as a state under the communist era.
France's Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire (L), seen here with International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde, says the threat of higher tariffs should not be dangled "like a sword of Damocles" over trade relations

France criticized Washington's trade tactics on Friday, demanding Europe be permanently exempt from US steel tariffs, while refusing to be drawn into a "vain and pointless" trade fight with China.

"We will not be satisfied with a provisional exemption," French Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire said on the sidelines of the spring meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

"The increased tariffs cannot weigh like a sword of Damocles on trade relations among states," he said, warning that France would not "enter a battle with China."

"This would be vain and pointless."

The "real matter is redefining trade multilateralism while acknowledging the reality of China," he added, saying reforms were necessary in Chinese trade practices that have long faced criticism as unfair and overly subject to state intervention.

"We have difficulties in steel overcapacity. We have an issue on the protection of our technologies, we do not want the plunder of French technolgies," said Le Maire.

The remarks, which partly restated earlier positions taken by France, come less than two weeks before Washington's metal tariff exemptions are due to expire for major trading partners, including Europe, Mexico, Canada and others.

Le Maire's statements constituted a pointed rebuttal to Washington's stance in the trade tensions that have hung over this week's meetings, a traditional bastion of trade liberalizaton.

IMF chief Christine Lagarde and World Trade Organization Director-General Roberto Azevedo have warned new trade barriers and sabre-rattling on commerce threatened to undermine the global economic recovery.

European and American officials said last month they had begun talks to resolve differences over metal imports after President Donald Trump unveiled the punishing tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum.

But US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told the gathering on Friday that unfair trade was itself a threat to global prosperity and called on the IMF to "step up to the plate" in addressing global imbalances.

Le Maire said he was heartened that European member countries had maintained a united front in dealing in the trade talks.

"I am delighted that efforts at division did not work and that no country has given in to the urge to negotiate separately," he said.
Unable to shake legal problems: President Donald Trump stepping off Air Force One in West Palm Beach, Florida on April 18, 2018

Donald Trump lashed out Friday after memos of his meetings with the FBI's then chief James Comey depicted the president as obsessed with the Russia probe and a smutty video allegedly showing him with two prostitutes.

But the memos were just the latest twist a week of difficult headlines for Trump: from the release of a bestselling book in which Comey labels him "morally unfit," to a courtroom circus featuring his embattled personal lawyer and a porn star who alleges a tryst with him.

Trump's legal and personal woes -- and wall-to-wall Comey book interviews -- overshadowed his summit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, at which the president confirmed CIA chief Mike Pompeo had met Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang to lay the groundwork for an upcoming summit with Trump himself.

As the week drew to a close, the flurry of developments on the North Korean front were once again eclipsed by the Comey memos -- which depict Trump pressuring the FBI chief over the probe into his campaign's links to Russia before firing him, and could bolster potential obstruction of justice allegations.

"James Comey Memos just out and show clearly that there was NO COLLUSION and NO OBSTRUCTION. Also, he leaked classified information. WOW! Will the Witch Hunt continue?" Trump tweeted Friday in response to the documents.

And to top it off, on Friday the Democratic Party filed a lawsuit in New York alleging the Trump campaign, the Russian government and WikiLeaks conspired to skew the 2016 presidential election toward the Republican.

"We must prevent future attacks on our democracy, and that's exactly what we're doing today," said Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez.

"If the occupant of the Oval Office won't protect our democracy, Democrats will. "

- Personal lawyer raided -

Trump's legal problems reach back to the beginning of his presidency, but have multiplied.

Two weeks ago FBI agents raided the New York residences and offices of his longtime personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, seizing files that could bare Trump's past business dealings and expose more about his relationships with several women in the 2000s, when he was married.

Adult film actress Stormy Daniels (Stephanie Clifford) was paid $130,000 by President Donald Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen to not speak of an alleged affair she had with Trump in 2006

One of them, the porn actress Stormy Daniels, whom Cohen paid $130,000 to keep quiet about an alleged affair with Trump in 2006, showed up to much publicity at the first hearing over the Cohen raid.

Days later she went on the hit show The View where she said she was threatened not to talk about her Trump affair.

Daniels and Trump are now locked in dueling lawsuits that serve to keep the alleged tryst in the headlines.

Separately, Trump is battling a lawsuit that alleges he is breaking anti-corruption clauses in the US Constitution by profiting from the use of his namesake Washington hotel by foreign dignitaries.

Most ominous of all, Trump is under pressure from Special Counselor Robert Mueller's investigation into links between his campaign and Russia, a probe that is also examining possible obstruction by the president.

That investigation has numerous top aides and possibly family members of Trump in its sights. In recent weeks, according to reports, Trump has considered firing both Mueller and the Justice Department's number two, Rod Rosenstein, whom Trump himself appointed a year ago.

- Comey book -

Former FBI chief James Comey's new book "A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership," raises questions about Donald Trump's fitness to be US president

Trump and the Republicans have sought to undermine Mueller's probe by discrediting him and his team as biased and corrupt.

But Comey's new book, "A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership," has deflected questions back to the president. Comey likens Trump to a Mafia boss who demands absolute loyalty, and lacks any moral foundation.

"This president is unethical, and untethered to truth and institutional values," he writes.

"His leadership is transactional, ego driven and about personal loyalty."

The book, and the memos released by Congress, add support to allegations Trump wanted to suppress the Russia probe and fired Comey because of it.

- Trump expands legal team -

The strain on the White House is clear. On Thursday Trump added three new attorneys, including former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and two white collar criminal defense specialists.

According to Axios, the Trump team is still seeking to add more firepower to the legal team, and is pitching for Emmet Flood, who represented former president Bill Clinton is his fight against impeachment in 1998-99.

While Trump doesn't yet face any personal charges, both Democrats and Republicans in Congress have warned him he could face impeachment if he fires Mueller.
IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde, who warned about rising protectionism, looks to US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin during a group photo of G-20 finance ministers and central bank governors

Trade tensions between the United States and China, which threaten to spill over into the global economy, are dominating a gathering of world finance officials even as the Group of 20 avoided the topic on Friday.

Official after official has called for disputes to be resolved through dialogue rather than unilateral tariffs, and warned about the threat to the economic recovery.

French Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire criticized what he called a "vain and pointless" spat with China.

"We run the risk of trade war. We run the risk of multilateral order breaking down that is good for no one, and most definitely not for the world economy and growth," Le Maire told reporters during the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund.

But US President Donald Trump's top finance official said the fault lies with countries that employ unfair trade policies.

"We strongly believe that unfair global trade practices impede stronger US and global growth, acting as a persistent drag on the global economy," US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement to the IMF.

While IMF chief Christine Lagarde has offered the fund as a forum to resolve differences, Mnuchin instead said the IMF "should be a strong voice" in urging members "to dismantle trade and non-tariff barriers and to protect intellectual property rights."

Le Maire agreed China must respect the rules, but said the country is a key part of the world trading system.

"We must redefine international trade with China, not against China."

- Serious consequences -

Theft of American intellectual property and technology has been a key irritant in the dispute with Beijing, which prompted President Donald Trump to announce steep tariffs on tens of billions of dollars' worth of Chinese goods, on top of last month's punitive duties on steel that were primarily targeted at China as well.

Washington and Beijing have traded tariff threats and also filed complaints against each other at the World Trade Organization.

WTO Director Roberto Azevedo warned that the effects of a major escalation "could be serious," and poor countries would be the collateral damage.

"A breakdown in trade relations among major players could derail the recovery that we have seen in recent years, threatening the ongoing economic expansion and putting many jobs at risk," he said in a statement to the meetings.

The IMF has highlighted the trade tensions as a major downside risk to the otherwise solid global recovery, and Lagarde said the dispute undermines confidence and creates uncertainty that could choke off investment which has been a prime engine of the global recovery.

The WTO projects global merchandise trade will expand by 4.4 percent this year, after increasing by 4.7 percent in 2017.

- G20 avoids trade issue -

France's Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire said the US dispute with China is 'vain and pointless'

Despite the intense focus on the US-China dispute, the Group of 20 finance ministers, from the world's major economies, avoided discussion of the issue Friday, even while acknowledging the potential danger it posed to the global economy.

"We didn't have a discussion on specific measures on trade," Argentine Treasury Minister Nicolas Dujovne told reporters after the meeting. "The G20 is not the place to discuss specific measures. That's the WTO."

It was a surprising omission for the group that was key to shepherding the global economy through the 2008 financial crisis and preventing another depression.

But Dujovne said, "We have to also recognize the limitations that we as a group have... and try to find a consensus even if the consensus is more limited than we want."

The ministers did express concern over the growth of "inward looking policies," he said, using a frequent euphemism for trade protectionism.

But German central bank chief Jens Weidmann said the G20 officials all agreed trade must benefit all countries.

"Protectionism, not to mention a trade war, is certainly not the solution."

Le Maire repeated his criticism of the US tariffs on steel and aluminum which were aimed at China but only spared the EU and other key trading partners under a temporary exemption that is due to expire May 1.

As close allies in the EU "we expect not only temporary exemption but a full and permanent exemption," he said.

"We cannot live with a kind of sword of Damocles hanging over our heads."
A man who spent nearly 25 years on California's death row was freed Thursday after his conviction in the rape and killing of his girlfriend's nearly two-year-old daughter was overturned.

Vicente Benavides, 68, was released from San Quentin State Prison, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Benavides, who had been on death row since June 1993, was freed after the state Supreme Court ruled last month that false medical testimony was presented at his trial.

Vicente Benavides (pictured during his release), 68, was freed Thursday after his conviction in the rape and killing of his girlfriend's nearly two-year-old daughter was overturned

Benavides, 68, was released from San Quentin State Prison, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation

Benavides (pictured hugging relatives), who had been on death row since June 1993, was freed after the state Supreme Court ruled last month that false medical testimony was presented at his trial

Video shows Benavides hugging multiple family members as they greeted him following his release.

Kern County District Attorney Lisa Green said earlier this week that she wouldn't retry Benavides for first-degree murder and that without the medical testimony, a lesser conviction would be nearly impossible.

Kern County District Attorney Lisa Green said earlier this week that she wouldn't retry Benavides for first-degree murder

'Upon an objective review of the facts, there is insufficient evidence to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt,' she said in a statement.

He was babysitting his girlfriend's daughter, Consuelo Verdugo, in Delano on November 17, 1991, while her mother was at work.

He told police that he had lost track of the girl and later found her outdoors, vomiting.

Benavides and the girl's mother took her to an emergency room and she died a week later.

He has always maintained that he didn't know what happened to the girl during the 15 minutes they were alone.

A forensic pathologist concluded that the girl died from anal injuries from being sodomized, and several doctors testified that the girl's injuries were caused by sexual assault.

But nearly all later recanted, saying they hadn't seen her full medical records that indicated there was no evidence of sexual assault when the girl was first hospitalized.

They also said her genital and other injuries may have been caused by her medical treatment.

Some said the purported cause of death was 'anatomically impossible,' according to the state Supreme Court's ruling.

Child abuse expert Dr Astrid Heger told KGET that she believes the girl was most likely struck by a car and not physically assaulted.

District Attorney Green said Tuesday that she still believes Benavides may have had something to do with the girl's death, but does not believe he is guilty of what he was convicted of in 1993.

Benavides was babysitting his girlfriend's daughter, Consuelo Verdugo (left), in Delano on November 17, 1991, while her mother was at work. He told police that he had lost track of the girl and later found her outdoors, vomiting
The real estate company that was previously run by Donald Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner has been subpoenaed by federal prosecutors after a report revealed it had filed dozens of false documents.

The report from the Associated Press revealed that Kushner Companies routinely filed false paperwork in New York that said it had zero rent-regulated tenants in buildings across the city when, in fact, it had hundreds.

In response, the real estate company issued a statement saying it has 'nothing to hide and is cooperating fully with all legitimate requests for information, including this subpoena.'

White House Senior Adviser Jared Kushner speaks during the Saban Forum 2017 in Washington. The Kushner Companies confirmed it was subpoenaed by federal prosecutors

The Kushner Cos. confirmed the federal subpoena came last month, just a day after the AP report, which covered a three-year period when the real estate company was run by Jared Kushner.

The company is now run by Jared's brother Joshua.

According to expert tenant advocates, the false filings allow landlords to avoid regulations that are designed to stop lower-paying, rent-regulated tenants being harassed during construction and pressured to leave.

This harassment could then allow higher-paying tenants to move in and replace the previous ones.

There is no suggestion that the company was involved in such activities or any wrongdoing.

Kushner Companies confirmed it had been subpoenaed in a statement. Pictured is the base of the company in 2006

Kushner Cos. told AP at the time of the report that the company outsources preparation of construction permit applications and fixes any mistakes immediately.

Records show the company did file some amended documents, often more than a year later.

The AP report, based on work by nonprofit watchdog Housing Rights Initiative, has sparked an inquiry by the New York state attorney general's office and a city council investigation.

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier Thursday that the U.S. attorney's office in Brooklyn had subpoenaed housing paperwork from the company.

The office declined to comment to the AP.

The Brooklyn attorney's office also has reportedly subpoenaed the Kushner Cos. over a visa-for-investment program to raise money from Chinese investors for its real estate projects.
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President Donald Trump tweeted late Thursday that the newly released memos written by fired FBI Director James Comey vindicate him.

James Comey Memos just out and show clearly that there was NO COLLUSION and NO OBSTRUCTION, the president tweeted.

Also, he leaked classified information. WOW! Will the Witch Hunt continue?

It has been alleged that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 elections  allegations that are being investigated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Trump fired Comey as FBI director last year.

Investigators want to know if the presidents dismissal of Comey was aimed at derailing the investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 elections  an act that could be construed as obstruction of justice.

Trump has denied there was any collusion with Russia.

President Donald Trump tweeted late Thursday that the newly released memos written by fired FBI Director James Comey vindicate him

Comey has said he was fired by Trump after the president told him he wanted the 'cloud' of the Russia investigation removed.

In a series of startlingly candid conversations, Trump told former FBI Director James Comey that he had serious concerns about the judgment of a top adviser, asked about the possibility of jailing journalists and described a boast from Vladimir Putin about Russia prostitutes, according to Comey's notes of the talks obtained by The Associated Press on Thursday night.

The 15 pages of documents contain new details about a series of interactions with Trump that Comey found so unnerving that he chose to document them in writing.

Those seven encounters in the weeks and months before Comey's May 2017 firing include a Trump Tower discussion about a possible encounter between Trump and prostitutes in Moscow; a White House dinner at which Comey says Trump asked him for his loyalty; and a private Oval Office discussion where the ex-FBI head says the president asked him to end an investigation into Michael Flynn, the former White House national security adviser.

The documents had been eagerly anticipated since their existence was first revealed last year, especially since Comey's interactions with Trump are a critical part of Mueller's investigation into whether the president sought to obstruct justice.

In explaining the purpose of creating the memos, which have been provided to Mueller, Comey has said he 'knew there might come a day when I would need a record of what had happened' to defend not only himself but the FBI as well.

The memos cover the first three months of the Trump administration, a period of upheaval marked by staff turnover, a cascade of damaging headlines and revelations of an FBI investigation into potential ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The documents reflect Trump's uneasiness about that investigation, though not always in ways that Comey seemed to anticipate.

In a February 2017 conversation, for instance, Trump told Comey how Putin told him, 'we have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world' even as he adamantly, and repeatedly, distanced himself from a salacious allegation concerning him and prostitutes in Moscow, according to one memo.

Investigators want to know if the presidents dismissal of Comey (above) was aimed at derailing the investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 elections  an act that could be construed as obstruction of justice

In another memo, Comey recounts how Trump at a private White House dinner pointed his fingers at his head and complained that Flynn, his embattled national security adviser, 'has serious judgment issues.'

The president blamed Flynn for failing to alert him promptly to a congratulatory call from a world leader, causing a delay for Trump in returning a message to an official whose name is redacted in the documents.

'I did not comment at any point during this topic and there was no mention or acknowledgment of any FBI interest in or contact with General Flynn,' Comey wrote.

By that point, the FBI had already interviewed Flynn about his contacts with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, and the Justice Department had already warned White House officials that they were concerned Flynn was vulnerable to blackmail.

Flynn was fired Feb. 13, 2017, after White House officials said he had misled them about his Russian contacts during the transition period by saying that he had not discussed sanctions.

The following day, according to a separate memo, Comey says Trump cleared the Oval Office of other officials, encouraged him to let go of the investigation into Flynn and called him a good guy.

Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and is now cooperating with Mueller's investigation.

The memos reveal that days before Flynn's firing, then-White House chief of staff Reince Priebus asked Comey if Flynn's communications were being monitored under a secret surveillance warrant.

'Do you have a FISA order on Mike Flynn?' Priebus asked Comey, according to the memos, referring to an order under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Comey said he 'paused for a few seconds and then said that I would answer here, but that this illustrated the kind of question that had to be asked and answered through established channels.'

Comey's response is redacted on the unclassified memos.

It has been alleged that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 elections  allegations that are being investigated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller

The memos also show Trump's continued distress at a dossier of allegations - since revealed to have been funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign - examining potential ties between him and his aides and the Kremlin.

Comey writes how Trump repeatedly denied to him having been involved in an encounter with Russian prostitutes in a Moscow hotel.

'The President said 'the hookers thing' is nonsense, but that Putin had told him "we have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world",' according to one memo. Comey says Trump did not say when Putin had made the comment.

The documents also include the president's musings about pursing leakers and imprisoning journalists.

They also provide insight into Comey's personal and professional opinions.

He judges the administration's travel ban to be legally valid, and he takes a swipe at former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, calling her predecessor, Eric Holder, 'smarter and more sophisticated and smoother.'

The memos were provided to Congress earlier Thursday as House Republicans escalated criticism of the Justice Department, threatening to subpoena the documents and questioning officials.

In a letter sent to three Republican House committee chairmen Thursday evening, Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd wrote that the department was sending a classified version of the memos and an unclassified version.

The department released Boyd's letter publicly but did not release the memos.

The chairman issued a statement late Thursday saying the memos show that Comey clearly never felt obstructed or threatened.

Justice officials had allowed some lawmakers to view the memos but had never provided copies to Congress.

Boyd wrote that the department had also provided the memos to several Senate committees.

Boyd wrote in the letter that the department 'consulted the relevant parties' and concluded that releasing the memos would not adversely affect any ongoing investigations.

Mueller is investigating potential ties between Russia and Trump's 2016 campaign as well as possible obstruction of justice by the president.

Comey is on a publicity tour to promote his new book, A Higher Loyalty.

He revealed last year that he had written the memos after conversations with Trump.

He said in an interview Thursday with CNN that he's 'fine' with the Justice Department turning his memos over to Congress.

'I think what folks will see if they get to see the memos is I've been consistent since the very beginning, right after my encounters with President Trump, and I'm consistent in the book and tried to be transparent in the book as well,' he said.
SHENZHEN, China (AP) - As trade disputes simmer, Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, the No. 3 smartphone brand, is shifting its growth efforts toward Europe and Asia in the face of mounting obstacles in the U.S. market.

Shenzhen-based Huawei, the world's largest maker of telecoms equipment, has long coveted access to the U.S. but recently laid off key American employees at its Washington D.C. office.

The U.S. has regularly stymied Huawei's efforts to enter the America, citing national security concerns. Huawei has failed to find a U.S. carrier to partner with for its smartphones, and the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday approved a draft order that could damage Huawei's existing business in network gear. The order cited Huawei and its Chinese rival ZTE by name.

In this March 13, 2018, photo, the logo of Huawei is displayed at its headquarters in Shenzhen in southern China's Guangdong Province. As trade disputes simmer between the U.S. and China, Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei is being squeezed out of American markets and is shifting its expansion efforts toward Europe and Asia. (AP Photo/Dake Kang)

That came after Huawei canceled a planned January announcement that a major U.S. carrier would sell its smartphones for the first time. The company gave no details but news reports said that partner was AT&T Inc. and scrapped the deal under government pressure.

Huawei's struggles in the United States are in contrast to its booming business in developing countries and growing presence in Europe, where it has been working on next-generation, or "5G," wireless standards. The company's profits rose 28.1 percent in 2017, boosted by strong enterprise and consumer sales and booming business overseas.

The recent setbacks have left Huawei's future in the U.S. uncertain. Huawei recently let go of several American employees in their Washington D.C. office, including William Plummer, who spearheaded efforts to convince the U.S. to allow Huawei in for nearly a decade. Though Huawei declined to comment on the layoffs, the news was first reported by the New York Times and independently confirmed by the Associated Press.

"There is no change to our business strategy in the US," said Huawei spokesman Joe Kelly. "Any changes to staffing size or structure are simply a reflection of standard business optimization."

Kelly said fears that Huawei's network equipment could be used to collect sensitive information reflected "baseless suspicion." Experts say the concerns could be valid, but suspect they're mainly a pretext for limiting competition and allowing U.S. suppliers to charge higher prices.

"What we've seen so far suggests that there's not a lot of concrete evidence that Huawei poses a national security threat," said Josephine Wolff, Professor of Cybersecurity Policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. "It leads a lot of people to believe that this is more about trying to protect the U.S. tech sector."

American companies have long chafed under Chinese regulations that require them to operate through local partners and share technology with potential competitors in exchange for market access.

Foreign companies are increasingly alarmed by initiatives such as Beijing's long-range industry development plan, dubbed "Made in China 2025." It calls for creating global leaders in electric cars, robots, and other fields.

"That sense that China is cultivating national champions, and cultivating companies within its own borders at the expense of other companies, has a lot of U.S. companies concerned about how much their intellectual property rights will be safeguarded there," Wolff said.

Huawei and ZTE's burgeoning 5G research is seen as a particular threat, as its expanded transmitting capabilities are seen as crucial for a host of emerging technologies based on artificial intelligence - including self-driving vehicles, robots and other machines that transmit vast amounts of data in real time.

ZTE faces devastating threats to its business after the U.S. Commerce Department blocked the company from importing American components for seven years, accusing the smartphone maker of misleading U.S. regulators after it settled charges of violating sanctions against North Korea and Iran.

But unlike ZTE, efforts to impede Huawei in the U.S. likely won't stop its rapid expansion elsewhere.

Last month, Huawei's president of consumer handsets Kevin Ho said the company is pivoting to Europe and developing Asian markets. He called them priorities "No. 1" and "No. 2."

Huawei chose to unveil its latest flagship phone last month at the Grand Palais in Paris, while in Finland, the company employs more than 300 engineers developing cameras, audio algorithms, and 5G technology. Many used to work at Finnish rival Nokia.

Apart from expanding its clout on UN bodies that coordinate cellular technology standards, early on Huawei joined forces with European companies to develop 5G standards. In February, it completed the world's first 5G test call in partnership with London-based Vodafone.

Still, while Chinese trade relations with Europe remain calm, Washington has been warning officials in Canada and Australia about Huawei, raising questions about the company's long-term global prospects.

"Huawei is perceived differently in Europe but that's definitely a risk for the company," said Thomas Husson, principal analyst at technology research firm Forrester. "Let's not forget Europeans can still try to push in favor of European-based solutions from Nokia or Ericsson."

In this March 13, 2018, photo, Jim Xu, vice president of Sales and Marketing at Huawei, pauses while speaking to reporters at Huawei's headquarters in Shenzhen in southern China's Guangdong Province. As trade disputes simmer between the U.S. and China, Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei is being squeezed out of American markets and is shifting its expansion efforts toward Europe and Asia. (AP Photo/Dake Kang)

In this March 13, 2018, photo, a Huawei employee looks up as he walks toward the company's headquarters in Shenzhen in southern China's Guangdong Province. As trade disputes simmer, Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, the No. 3 smartphone brand, is shifting its growth efforts toward Europe and Asia in the face of mounting obstacles in the U.S. market. (AP Photo/Dake Kang)

In this May 26, 2016, photo, a man walks past a Huawei logo during a launch event for the Huawei Matebook in Beijing. As trade disputes simmer, Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, the No. 3 smartphone brand, is shifting its growth efforts toward Europe and Asia in the face of mounting obstacles in the U.S. market. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

In this May 26, 2016, photo, attendees walk past an electronic display during a launch event for the Huawei Matebook in Beijing. As trade disputes simmer, Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, the No. 3 smartphone brand, is shifting its growth efforts toward Europe and Asia in the face of mounting obstacles in the U.S. market. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
NEW YORK (AP) - At the New York City convenience store where he works the overnight shift, Radad Alborati takes a sip of coffee and surveys his life.

His wife is stuck in war-torn Yemen after his yearslong effort to bring her to the U.S. ended last month with a few phrases on a letter from an embassy.

"Ineligible for a visa" due to President Donald Trump's restrictions on immigration and travel from certain countries. "A waiver will not be granted."

In this April 5, 2018 photo, Radad Alborati, a Yemeni-American, speaks during an interview with The Associated Press in New York. Alborati's wife is stuck in war-torn Yemen after his years-long effort to bring her to the U.S. ended last month, when a U.S. consulate said she was ineligible for a waiver from President Donald Trump's restrictions on immigration and travel from certain countries. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

"Today's decision cannot be appealed."

As the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments next week on Trump's travel ban, its effects are playing out for Alborati and others from Manhattan to Minnesota to the Middle East. Whatever the outcome of the legal debate between an administration that says the policy is a national security necessity and challengers who say it's discriminatory, it is already shaping lives and plans.

NEW YORK AND SANAA, YEMEN

Alborati got visas for his and his wife's three sons last fall, while the travel ban was temporarily blocked by a court. He was relieved to be able to bring the boys, ages 10 through 16, to New York. But they're not living with him or one another. They're bunking with three separate sets of family friends because he doesn't want to leave them home alone during his midnight-to-noon workdays.

The savings he had hoped to put toward buying the family a house in New Jersey are gone. They were swallowed by costs of getting the family to visa interviews in Djibouti - the U.S. embassy in Yemen closed because of the war - and staying there during a five-month wait for his wife's denial, he said.

"I never felt like that's the America I was dreaming about," says Alborati, 38, who followed an older brother to the U.S. at 15 and became a citizen in 2010.

He applied two years later to bring his wife, whom he has known since childhood, and the family they built during his visits to Yemen.

"I get that you want to make the country safer - not that way," he says. "Separating families, that's sick."

With the visa denial, Alborati went back to New York to provide for the children. His wife, 33, returned to a country where three years of fighting between rebels and a Saudi-led coalition, backing an internationally recognized government, have killed over 10,000 people.

On twice-daily phone calls, he hears the fear in her voice. He worries, tries to keep his sons' spirits up and hopes the Supreme Court will give his family another chance to be together.

"This is my real life. That's what I'm fighting for," Alborati says, holding a photo of him and his sons. "This country is built on family. And this is my family."

WASHINGTON

Trump was clear about the ban's goal when he issued its first version: to "keep radical Islamic terrorists out."

"We only want to admit those into our country who will support our country and love deeply our people," the Republican president added as he signed the order days after his January 2017 inauguration.

The initial ban was temporary and evolved, amid court challenges, into the prohibition that is now in place at least until the Supreme Court rules.

The measure bars various categories of travelers and immigrants from Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria and Yemen, plus some Venezuelan officials. Trump's proclamation says countries were listed because they don't share enough information to vet travelers properly.

The State Department, which won't discuss any individual cases, says the policy aims to encourage foreign governments to share information and protect the U.S. until they do. Chad was taken off the list this month.

"The restrictions imposed by the president were carefully considered," the department said in a statement this month to The Associated Press.

However much consideration was given, families and others separated by the ban are struggling, in places near and far.

TIBURON, CALIFORNIA, AND TEHRAN, IRAN

Fresh from finishing his master's degree in filmmaking in San Francisco, Payam Jafari wanted to celebrate his accomplishment and his 26th birthday last August with his family back home in Iran. But he didn't make the trip.

His student visa allowed him to come and go. But Jafari remembered how the initial ban, which for a time barred even people with prior permission to come to the U.S., came suddenly while he was in Iran for winter break in January 2017 and almost derailed his return for his final semester at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.

Since then, he has felt like he can't take a chance on going home, lest the rules abruptly change again.

"I cannot risk it, although I want to see my family so bad," he says. "I'm in the middle of my project I spent five years of my life on."

As Jafari raises funds to make his first feature film, he and his relatives in Tehran aren't sure when they'll see one another next. Their uncertainty about U.S. travel policy weighs on his mom, Mehrnoosh: "Waiting for what will happen in the end - this is very difficult for a mother," she said by email.

Adds his sister, Parastoo, "Politics treats everyone in the world's lives like toys. We all get burned in the end by it."

WASHINGTON

The travel ban debate has been stoked by Trump's campaign-trail call for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States."

While the ban now cites concerns about security screening, not religion, its impact falls mainly on Muslim-majority countries. Challengers, led by the state of Hawaii, say it amounts to illegal religious and nationality-based discrimination.

But James Carafano, a national security expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation and a Trump transition team member, says the policy was driven by concerns about visa vetting and the possibility that Islamic State fighters could stream out of the militants' shrinking territory and aim for the U.S.

"There was a credible, emergent threat," he said, and "we have a risk-informed process: What do we need to do to protect the nation, and what do we need to do to help people who need help, and what is the balance? We do the best we can."

CINCINNATI AND PARIS

The video projected in a Cincinnati theater showed three Syrian dancers in a piece inspired by the lives of their fellow citizens amid the civil war that has ravaged their homeland. But onstage, only two dancers performed the piece in its U.S. premiere on a January night.

The third hadn't been allowed into the country.

A week earlier, it wasn't clear the show would go on at all. The Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati and New York-based immigration lawyer Matthew Covey were scrambling to seek a travel ban waiver for Syrian choreographer Mithkal Alzghair and two fellow dancers to perform his "Displacement."

The ban allows for case-by-case waivers, and they have been relatively scarce. Over 8,400 people sought to travel from the listed countries in the first month after the latest version took effect Dec. 8, according to the State Department. About 450 have been granted since then, according to a letter that Democratic Sens. Chris Van Hollen, Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal sent Thursday to administration officials. The letter, obtained by the AP, seeks more information about the waiver process.

The arts center's Drew Klein recalls word came with just six days to go: The Paris-based Alzghair could come, with only one of the other dancers.

Watching from the audience, artist Kate Kern noticed the third dancer in the video and later learned why he wasn't there. "It really brought home the effects of the travel ban," she says.

Alzghair didn't respond to interview requests. To Covey and Klein, the performances stand as a reason to keep trying to bring in artists from countries affected by the ban when many presenters are wary.

"People, on a human level, still want to be connected and hear each other's stories," Klein says.

ST. CLOUD, MINNESOTA, AND NAIROBI, KENYA

When Abdisalan Mohamed Jele brought his two young sons from Kenya to Minnesota, he thought his wife and new baby girl would follow two weeks later.

Jele and his wife, Nimo Abdi Hassan, are from Somalia, which has been ravaged by civil war for a quarter-century. He came to the U.S. in 2007, became a citizen five years later and rejoiced when she was issued a visa shortly after giving birth last year. But the visa expired before she could get the newborn a passport. The couple figured a new visa would be issued quickly.

Instead, the family has been waiting six months, with no reunion in sight. A March 8 email from the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, where Hassan lives, says the travel ban makes her ineligible for a visa, but consular officials are reviewing the possibility of a waiver.

Their sons, 7 and 4, sometimes ask when their mother is coming. Jele tries to reassure them: "Soon. Soon."

"It's so hard," he says, wiping tears from his cheeks. "I'm American. I don't know why my family can't come here."

Jele's attorney, Laura Tripiciano, says Hassan, 32, easily qualifies for a waiver. But there's no timeline for a decision, and Jele, 31, isn't sure how much longer he can wait. He's supporting Hassan in Kenya while paying for a St. Cloud, Minnesota, apartment big enough for a family of five.

On a typical day, Jele drops his elder son at the school bus and the younger one with the boys' aunt, then goes to school himself to learn English and earn his GED. After taking the older boy from school to the aunt's, Jele works from 3:30 p.m. to midnight at a life jacket factory. Finally, he takes the sleeping boys home.

Some days, he has no time to eat. Once, he was so frazzled he forgot his work badge, safety glasses and shoes. He appreciates his sister's help with child care, but it's becoming too much to ask.

If his wife doesn't get a visa soon, Jele thinks he might have to send their boys - who are U.S. citizens - back to Kenya or quit his job to care for them. He said he understands security concerns but believes Hassan is being singled out because she's Somali.

"I love this country because we have a lot of opportunity, education, health, peace," Jele says. "I live here. I want to live here. But if my wife, she lives in Nairobi ... sometimes, I'm thinking I move back to Africa."

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Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Amy Forliti in St. Cloud, Minnesota; Josh Lederman in Washington; and Lee Keath in Cairo.

In this March 12, 2018 photo, Abdisalan Mohamed Jele, 31, poses for a picture with his two sons, Hamza Abdisalan Mohamed, 7, left, and Mohamed-Amin Abdisalan Mohamed, 4, at his attorney's office in St. Cloud, Minn. Jele and the boys are U.S. citizens of Somali descent. He brought his boys to the U.S. in October, expecting his wife would follow with the couple's baby girl. Months later, the family is still separated due to the travel ban. (AP Photo/Amy Forliti)

In this January 2018 photo provided by the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, two Syrian dancers perform "Displacement" with a projection behind them showing the piece as it is usually performed, with a third dancer. He could not perform in the piece's U.S. premiere at the arts center because he was unable to get a waiver from President Donald Trump's travel ban, although the other two dancers were. (Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH via AP)
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) - Pushed by a wave of demonstrations by women's groups, the homeland of Pope Francis seems closer than ever to legalizing abortion.

The protests and shifting public opinion have led conservative President Mauricio Macri to call for Congress to launch a debate on a broader legalization of abortion in Argentina, which currently allows the procedure only in cases of rape or risks to the mother's health.

A bill allowing elective abortion in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy was introduced in Congress earlier this year with the backing of 70 lawmakers from across the political spectrum. The bill needs 129 votes in the 257-seat lower house and then would go to the Senate. The lower house vote is expected in June. Macri has said that even though he remains anti-abortion, he would not veto the bill if passed.

In this April 10, 2018 photo, a young woman with text in Spanish written on her back that reads "Wealthy women abort, the poor die" during a pro-abortion demonstration in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The homeland of Pope Francis seems closer than ever to legalizing abortion after a wave of demonstrations by women's groups and shifting public opinion led conservative President Mauricio Macri to call for Congress to launch a debate on a broader legalization of abortion, a first in Argentina's history. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

Natalia Rodas welcomes this unprecedented opening to greater abortion rights in Argentina. The 31-year-old housemaid recently found herself pregnant and in dire economic straits after the father refused to accept responsibility.

Desperate and alone, she went to a pharmacy on the poor outskirts of Buenos Aires and paid twice her monthly salary for the drug misoprostol. Unsure if the drug would harm her without medical supervision, she fearfully took the pills and aborted.

"An illegal abortion has made me live through some horrible situations," Rodas said. "If something goes wrong, who do you call? Who do you fall back on? No, you just die."

Argentina's health ministry estimates that between 370,000 to 522,000 Argentine women undergo illegal abortions each year and thousands of women, mainly poor, are hospitalized each year for complications. It is the main cause of maternal death.

"What point is there in penalizing abortions if they continue to happen?" asked Nelly Minyersky, a 90-year-old lawyer and one of the authors of the bill, who underwent an illegal abortion more than 50 years ago.

Although therapeutic abortions to protect the mother are allowed in Argentina, advocates say doctors and judges often continue to block women from carrying them out despite a 2012 Supreme Court ruling that was supposed to remove barriers and take judges out of these decisions.

Argentina's Roman Catholic Church is leading the resistance against the initiative.

"When you deny the most elemental right to live, all human rights hang by a thread," said Gustavo Carrara, who was recently named auxiliary bishop by the pope. "If there's an excuse to eliminate a human life, there will always be reasons to exclude humans who are a nuisance from this world."

In recent years, Argentina has been at the forefront of social movements in the region. In 2010, it became the first country in Latin America to legalize same-sex marriage. More recently, the Ni Una Menos, or Not One Less, movement that was created in Argentina to fight gender-based violence has grown into a global phenomenon.

These days, demonstrators have filled the streets in front of Congress wearing the green handkerchiefs that symbolize the abortion rights movement. Even dozens of lawmakers wore them when the bill was introduced.

"The green handkerchiefs will remain as a record of the history of our great struggle," said Betty Maidana, 48, who heads the Buenos Aires cooperative that makes them.

A survey conducted the Buenos Aires-based Tendencias consultancy in March found that 48.5 percent of the 7,600 people questioned were in favor of a broader legalization of abortion, while 35.6 percent opposed it and 16 percent didn't have an opinion. The survey's margin for error was 1.2 percentage points.

Many women in Argentina use misoprostol to end first-trimester pregnancies. The drug is only sold under prescription, but doctors often fear that prescribing it could expose them to a lawsuit since the pills are usually bought on the black market.

Doctors who perform abortions, and women who have illegal abortions, can face from one to four years in prison in Argentina. In Latin America, only Nicaragua, Honduras, the Dominican Republic and El Salvador prohibit abortion without exceptions.

For the poorest women living in the slums, a box with 16 tablets of misoprostol that costs about $170 is out of reach. Rodas says she paid an inflated price of about $300 - she earns $150 a month - to buy the drug without a prescription.

For many poor women, the methods used to induce an abortion include using an IV tube with a sharp wire clothes hanger or knitting needle to try to break the amniotic sac inside womb. Others, drink herbs, insert dubious non-abortive pills in the vagina, or pump toxic mixtures, which can cause ulcers, hemorrhage and ultimately severe infections, and death.

"When an abortion is safe, it's less complicated than pulling out a tooth. It's an easy practice that doesn't put the women's health or life at risk," said Analia Bruno, a physician, who is part of Argentina's network of health professionals in favor of abortion.

In this April 12, 2018 photo, Natalia Rodas poses for a photo in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Rodas had an abortion years ago and she feels women should not go through what she has been, and should have the right for a legal, safe and free abortion. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

In this April 12, 2018 photo, Jaquelin Perez sows green handkerchiefs at the cooperative where she works, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Perez works in the cooperative with other women from her humble neighborhood where they make a living making clothes. They also make the non-profit green handkerchief to support the pro-abortion fight. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

In this April 12, 2018 photo, Betty Maidana works on cutting cloth to make green handkerchiefs at a cooperative in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Maidana says green is for hope and that the handkerchief in Argentina means years of fighting, citing the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo who wear white handkerchiefs. The green handkerchief has become the symbol of the pro-abortion movement. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

In this April 12, 2018 photo, Betty Maidana holds a green handkerchief with text that reads in Spanish "National Campaign for the Right of a Legal, Safe and Free Abortion," at the cooperative where she works at in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Abortion is only allowed in Argentina in cases of rape or risks to a woman's health and thousands of mainly poor women are hospitalized each year for complications linked to unsafe abortions, the main cause of maternal death. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

In this April 10, 2018 photo, women attend a pro-abortion demonstration to demand its legalization in Buenos Aires, Argentina. A bill allowing the procedure in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy was introduced into Congress earlier this year with the backing of 70 lawmakers from across the political spectrum. The bill needs 129 votes in the 257-seat lower house to pass and then it goes to the senate. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

In this April 10, 2018 photo, a woman sits a the the pavement which has text written is Spanish that reads "Legal abortion Now," during a pro-abortion demonstration in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Argentina's health ministry estimates that between 370,000 to 522,000 Argentine women undergo illegal abortions each year. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

In this April 10, 2018 photo, people protest against abortion, outside Argentina's Congress in Buenos Aires. Argentina's Roman Catholic Church, which retains a strong influence over society, and the medical community lead the resistance against a bill allowing abotions in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)

In this April 10, 2018 photo, a young woman wearing the green handkerchief that has become the symbol of the pro-abortion movement, attends a pro-abortion demonstration in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Argentina's health ministry estimates that between 370,000 to 522,000 Argentine women undergo illegal abortions each year. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)
A South Korean soldier stands outside Peace House in the Demilitarized Zone, the venue for the summit next week between South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Flowers were planted in the shape of the Korean Peninsula on the lawn of Seoul Plaza in South Korea's capital to wish for a successful summit.

In other images from the Asia-Pacific region this week, Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen boarded a navy destroyer to review military drills her country held off its coast, days before Chinese helicopters conducted a live-fire exercise off China's southeast coast.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte joked to photographers while holding a rifle presented to him by the outgoing national police chief. Duterte told the crowd he will not stop his so-called war on drugs until his last day in office.

In this Wednesday, April 18, 2018, file photo, a South Korean soldier stands outside of the Peace House, the venue for the planned summit between South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on April 27, during a press tour at the southern side of the Panmunjom in the Demilitarized Zone, South Korea. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man, File)

At a protest in Bangalore, India, a woman holds a candle and placard seeking an end to sexual violence against women. The outrage was triggered by the rape and murder of an 8-year-old girl in the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir and the abduction and rape of a teenage girl in northern India.

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This gallery was curated by Associated Press photo editor Toru Takahashi in Tokyo.

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In this Friday, April 13, 2018, file photo, workers plant flowers in the shape of the Korean Peninsula on the lawn to wish for a successful inter-Korean summit at Seoul Plaza in Seoul, South Korea.. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will meet South Korean President Moon Jae-in at a border village on April 27 for a rare summit that could prove significant in global efforts to resolve the decades-long standoff over the North's nuclear program. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon, File)

In this Monday, April 16, 2018, file photo provided Tuesday, April 17, 2018, by the North Korean government, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, claps while watching a performance of a Chinese art troupe with his wife Ri Sol Ju, left, and Song Tao, right, head of the ruling Communist Party's International Department, at East Pyongyang Grand Theater in Pyongyang, North Korea. Kim met the high-ranking Chinese diplomat, amid a flurry of diplomacy following Kim's surprise visit to Beijing. Independent journalists were not given access to cover the event depicted in this image distributed by the North Korean government. The content of this image is as provided and cannot be independently verified. Korean language watermark on image as provided by source reads: "KCNA" which is the abbreviation for Korean Central News Agency. (Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP, File)

In this April 18, 2018, file photo provided by China's Xinhua News Agency, a Chinese armed helicopter assaults targets with rocket projectiles in a live-fire exercise off China's southeast coast. Taiwan's government said Thursday, April 19, 2018, recent Chinese military drills are aimed at intimidating the island and are a threat to regional peace and stability. The Mainland Affairs Council said there would be no giving in or making of concessions to Beijing and that the situation was being closely monitored. China held live-fire exercises involving attack helicopters off its southeast coast on Wednesday. (Li Shilong/Xinhua News Agency via AP, File)

In this Friday, April 13, 2018, file photo released by Military News Agency, Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen, second from left, inspects on a Kidd-class destroyer during a navy exercise off the northeastern port of Su'ao in Yilan County, Taiwan. Tsai boarded a navy destroyer to review military drills ahead of planned war games by rival China. (Military News Agency via AP, File)

In this Thursday, April 19, 2018, file photo, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte jokes to photographers as he holds an Israeli-made Galil rifle which was presented to him by outgoing Philippine National Police Chief Director General Ronald "Bato" Dela Rosa, at the turnover-of-command ceremony at Camp Crame in suburban Quezon city northeast of Manila, Philippines. Duterte told the crowd he will not stop his so-called war on drugs until his last day in office. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez, File)

In this Wednesday, April 18, 2018, file photo, a Kashmiri Muslim student walks past an Indian policeman during a protest against recent cases of rape in the country, in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir. Fresh rounds of protests are being seen across the country, triggered by the rape and murder of an 8-year-old girl in the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir and the abduction and rape of a teenage girl in India's northern Uttar Pradesh state. (AP Photo/Mukhtar Khan, File)

In this Monday, April 16, 2018, file photo, a woman holds a candle and placard seeking an end to sexual violence against women, which has been on the rise in the country, during a protest in Bangalore, India. The outrage was triggered by the rape and murder of an 8-year-old girl in the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir and the abduction and rape of a teenage girl in India's northern Uttar Pradesh state. (AP Photo/Aijaz Rahi, File)

In this Sunday, April 15, 2018, file photo, a Rohingya boy takes a nap under the shade of a tree after an early Sunday fire razed down a Rohingya camp in the Kalindi Kunj area of New Delhi, India. No casualties have been reported. (AP Photo/Oinam Anand, File)

In this Friday, April 13, 2018, file photo, a girl dressed as Hindu goddess Kali waits to join a religious procession during a ritual of Shiva Gajan Hindu festival in Kolkata, India. Faithful Hindu devotees offer various rituals each year in hope of winning the favor of Hindu god Shiva and ensuring the fulfillment of their wishes. (AP Photo/Bikas Das, File)

In this Sunday, April 15, 2018, file photo, Azaleas are in full bloom at Nagushiyama Park in Sasebo, Nagasaki Prefecture, southwestern Japan. Some 100,000 different kinds of azaleas are blooming in spring period at the park. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko, File)

In this Friday, April 13, 2018, file photo, Haas driver Kevin Magnussen of Denmark wipes his face as he prepares for the first practice session for the Chinese Formula One Grand Prix at the Shanghai International Circuit in Shanghai. (AP Photo/Andy Wong, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) - James Comey and President Donald Trump seem to disagree on most everything, but the ex-FBI director's memos show consensus on at least one thing: the need to hunt down leakers.

The two men bonded over the idea of a proposed leak crackdown, even sharing a chuckle over a crude joke involving jailed journalists, according to memos written by Comey and obtained by The Associated Press.

The jocularity over leakers and journalists is striking given the otherwise tense nature of their conversations, which touched on loyalty pledges, Russian prostitutes and open FBI investigations.

Copies of the memos written by former FBI Director James Comey are photographed in Washington, Thursday, April 19, 2018. President Donald Trump told former FBI Director James Comey that he had serious concerns about the judgment of his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, according to memos maintained by Comey and obtained by The Associated Press. The 15 pages of documents contain new details about a series of interactions that Comey had with Trump in the weeks before his May 2017 firing. Those encounters include a White House dinner at which Comey says Trump asked him for his loyalty. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

The memos kept by Comey show his unease with Trump's requests and his concern that the president was blurring the bright line between politics and law enforcement, including with a request that he end an investigation into former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn.

Yet Trump and Comey were clearly on the same page about leaks, even if they weren't quite in agreement on whom to hold accountable for them.

Comey recounts an Oval Office conversation from February 2017 in which Trump raises the prospect of jailing journalists who benefit from leaked information. According to the memos, Comey told Trump it would be tricky legally to jail reporters but said he saw value in going after leakers and "putting a head on a pike as a message" by bringing such a case.

Trump shot back that sending that message may involve jailing reporters.

"They spend a couple days in jail, make a new friend, and they are ready to talk," Trump says in one memo. Comey laughed as he walked out of the room, according to the memo.

The Trump administration has loudly complained about leaks, and Trump himself has repeatedly accused Comey of being a leaker. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has said there are several dozen leak investigations open, though that aggressiveness is similar to that of the Obama Justice Department, which was frequently criticized by media organizations and free press advocates.

Comey's memos had been eagerly anticipated since their existence was first revealed last year, especially since Comey's interactions with Trump are a critical part of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into whether the president sought to obstruct justice.

After his firing, Comey provided one of his memos to a friend so he could disclose details to journalists and prompt the appointment of a special counsel. Comey has said he was within his rights as a private citizen to make the disclosure.

Late Thursday night, Trump tweeted that the memos "show clearly that there was NO COLLUSION and NO OBSTRUCTION."

The documents cover the early months of the Trump administration, a period of upheaval marked by staff turnover, a cascade of damaging headlines and revelations of an FBI investigation into potential ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. The memos reflect Trump's uneasiness about that investigation, though not always in ways that Comey seemed to anticipate.

In a February 2017 conversation, for instance, Trump told Comey how Putin told him, "we have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world" even as the president adamantly distanced himself from a salacious allegation concerning himself and prostitutes in Moscow, according to one memo. Comey says Trump did not say when Putin had made the comment.

In another memo, Comey recounts a private White House dinner in which Trump pointed his fingers at his head and complained that Flynn, his embattled national security adviser, "has serious judgment issues." The president blamed Flynn for failing to alert him promptly to a congratulatory call from a world leader, causing a delay for Trump in returning a message.

The foreign leader's name is redacted in the documents, but two people familiar with the call tell the AP it was Putin. They were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter and spoke on condition of anonymity.

"I did not comment at any point during this topic and there was no mention or acknowledgment of any FBI interest in or contact with General Flynn," Comey wrote.

By that point, the FBI had already interviewed Flynn about his contacts with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, and the Justice Department had already warned White House officials that they were concerned Flynn was vulnerable to blackmail.

Flynn was fired Feb. 13, 2017, after White House officials said he had misled them about his Russian contacts during the transition period by saying that he had not discussed sanctions.

The following day, Comey says, Trump cleared the Oval Office of other officials and encouraged him to drop the investigation into Flynn. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and is now cooperating with Mueller's investigation.

The memos were provided to Congress as House Republicans escalated criticism of the Justice Department, threatening to subpoena the documents and questioning officials.

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Associated Press writers Tom LoBianco, Jonathan Lemire and Zeke Miller contributed to this report.

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Link to the memos:

http://apne.ws/dwhMe9R

Former FBI director James Comey poses for photographs at a Barnes & Noble book store before speaking Wednesday, April 18, 2018, in New York. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II)
LOS ANGELES (AP) - President Donald Trump's personal lawyer must declare in writing that his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination may be jeopardized if legal proceedings aren't delayed in a lawsuit filed by porn actress Stormy Daniels, a judge said Friday.

Los Angeles federal Judge S. James Otero said there were "gaping holes" in Michael Cohen's request for a delay and it was not enough for his attorney to file a statement on his behalf. He gave Cohen until Wednesday to do so himself.

Daniel's lawsuit is aimed at dissolving a confidentiality agreement that prevents her from talking about an alleged affair with Trump. She's also suing Cohen for defamation.

Michael Avenatti, attorney for porn actress Stormy Daniels, talks to the media outside court in Los Angeles Friday, April 20, 2018. A federal judge told lawyers for President Donald Trump's attorney Michael Cohen that Cohen needs to file a declaration in court in order to delay a lawsuit filed by Daniels aimed at dissolving a confidentiality agreement that prevents her from talking about an alleged affair with Trump. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

Cohen sought to delay the civil case 90 days after FBI agents raided his New York office and residence, seeking records about the $130,000 agreement that Daniels signed days before the 2016 presidential election.

Otero, speaking from his experience on the bench and without knowledge of the investigation, said it was "substantially likely" there would be some criminal action.

"This is not your standard case," Otero said. "I would expect something big to follow."

Cohen's lawyer argued that because the criminal investigation overlaps issues in the lawsuit, Cohen's right against self-incrimination "may be adversely impacted if this case proceeds" because he won't be able to respond and defend himself.

Otero said attorney Brent Blakely had not shown a large enough overlap between the legal matters to justify a delay, though he noted the defense was in a conundrum because the "breadth and scope of the investigation is a mystery."

Daniels' attorney, Michael Avenatti, said it was a "strategic and purposeful" decision by Cohen not to previously file a declaration. Outside court, Avenatti said it was "clear to me Michael Cohen and the president do not want to publicly state" Cohen intends to invoke the Fifth Amendment.

Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, has offered to return the $130,000 so she can "set the record straight." She argues the agreement is legally invalid because it was only signed by her and Cohen, not by Trump.

Cohen, who has denied there was ever an affair, said he paid the money out of his pocket using a home equity loan. He 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.

Trump answered questions about Daniels for the first time earlier this month and said he had no knowledge of the payment made by Cohen and didn't know where Cohen had gotten the money. The White House has repeatedly said Trump denies the affair.

Cohen's attorneys have accused Daniels of violating the confidentiality clauses more than 20 times and said she could be liable for $1 million in damages for each violation.

Blakely said the agreement hadn't stopped Daniels from doing interviews with "60 Minutes" and "The View," and that Avenatti had done 53 television appearances, "54 if you count tonight's show with Bill Maher."

Otero agreed, saying several times that Daniels was "undeterred."

The case took on new significance last week when FBI agents raided Cohen's office, hotel and residence.

The agents were seeking any information on payments made to Daniels and a former Playboy model, Karen McDougal, according to people familiar with the investigation but not authorized to discuss it publicly.

The search warrants also sought bank records, records on Cohen's dealings in the taxi industry and his communications with the Trump campaign, the people said.

Attorney Brent Blakely, left, who represents President Donald Trump's attorney Michael Cohen, with Trump's attorneys Ryan Stonerock, middle, and Charles Harder, right, leave U.S. District Court for the Central District of California after a hearing regarding adult-film actress Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels, in Los Angeles, Friday, April 20, 2018. A federal judge in Los Angeles has told Cohen's lawyers that he needs to file a declaration in court in order to delay a lawsuit filed by Daniels. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

Michael Avenatti, attorney for Stormy Daniels, talks to the media outside court in Los Angeles Friday, April 20, 2018. A federal judge told lawyers for President Donald Trump's attorney Michael Cohen that Cohen needs to file a declaration in court in order to delay a lawsuit filed by porn actress Stormy Daniels aimed at dissolving a confidentiality agreement that prevents her from talking about an alleged affair with Trump. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

Stormy Daniels' attorney, Michael Avenatti talks to the media outside federal court in Los Angeles Friday, April 20, 2018. A federal judge on Friday told lawyers for President Donald Trump's attorney Michael Cohen that Cohen needs to file a declaration in court in order to delay a lawsuit filed by porn actress Stormy Daniels aimed at dissolving a confidentiality agreement that prevents her from talking about an alleged affair with Trump. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

FILE - In this April 16, 2018, file photo, adult film actress Stormy Daniels speaks outside federal court in New York. A federal judge is set to hear arguments about whether to delay the case of Daniels, who claims she had an affair with President Donald Trump, after federal agents raided the president's personal lawyer's office and residence. U.S. District Judge James Otto will hold the hearing Friday, April 20, 2018, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, file)

FILE - In this April 16, 2018, file photo, Stormy Daniels arrives at federal court in New York to attend a court hearing where a federal judge is considering how to review materials that the FBI seized from President Donald Trump's personal lawyer to determine whether they should be protected by attorney-client privilege. A federal judge is set to hear arguments about whether to delay the case of Daniels, who claims she had an affair with President Donald Trump, after federal agents raided the president's personal lawyer's office and residence. U.S. District Judge James Otto will hold the hearing Friday, April 20, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File)

FILE - In this April 16, 2018, file photo, porn actress Stormy Daniels, accompanied by her attorney, Michael Avenatti, left, leaves federal court, in New York. A federal judge is set to hear arguments about whether to delay the case of Daniels, who claims she had an affair with President Donald Trump, after federal agents raided the president's personal lawyer's office and residence. U.S. District Judge James Otto will hold the hearing Friday, April 20, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig, File)
SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Texas (AP) - A tip-off in a Texas resort town led to the arrest of a woman who investigators believe killed her husband in Minnesota then fled to Florida, where she fatally shot her doppelganger with the intention of assuming her identity, police said Friday.

Two federal deputy marshals arrested Lois Riess, 56, about 8:30 p.m. Thursday at a restaurant's in South Padre Island, Texas, the U.S. Marshals Service said in a statement. South Padre Island is a beach resort community 27 miles (43 kilometers) from the crossing into Mexico.

City spokeswoman Angelique Soto said Friday that a witness called authorities saying a woman matching Riess' description was at the restaurant. Her identity was confirmed by officers and the car she was using was towed and impounded "for forensic processing," Soto said.

This photo provided by the South Padre Island Police Department shows Lois Riess, of Blooming Prairie, Minn., who was arrested by federal deputy marshals Thursday, April 19, 2018, at a restaurant in South Padre Island, Texas. Investigators believe she killed her husband in Minnesota then fled to Florida where she used the same gun to slay her doppelganger with the intention of assuming her identity. Riess had been on the run since at least late March. (South Padre Island Police Department via AP)

Riess had checked into a local motel and was sitting at a nearby restaurant's bar with others, though authorities don't know if Riess had met the individuals in South Padre or elsewhere, South Padre Island Police Chief Randy Smith said Friday.

Riess was first approached by undercover officers and did not resist arrest when she was taken into custody, Smith said, adding that she did not have a weapon on her.

"I think she's kind of built up a resilience, where she thought she may not get caught. So she seemed to have let her guard down a bit," he said.

Riess had been on the run since at least late March when her husband, 54-year-old David Riess, was found fatally shot at their home in Blooming Prairie, Minnesota. She became the subject of a nationwide hunt.

She had been seen on March 23 at a convenience store and casino in northern Iowa. Authorities released video showing Riess approaching the store cashier, buying a sandwich and asking for directions south of the state. The store is next to a casino where authorities say Riess spent the day gambling before stopping at the gas station.

It was also on March 23 that David Riess' business partner called authorities to ask them to check on him. The partner said no one at work had seen David Riess in more than two weeks. Authorities found David Riess' body inside his home with multiple gunshots.

They were not able to determine how long he had been dead and could not find his wife. They learned Lois Riess may have been at the casino in Iowa, but she wasn't there when they went looking for her.

From there, investigators believed she went to Florida where she killed 59-year-old Pamela Hutchinson of Bradenton, Florida.

Authorities were called to Fort Myers Beach on April 9 and found Hutchinson dead, with gunshot wounds. Investigators believe Riess used the same gun to kill her husband and Hutchinson, and that she killed the woman to assume her identity.

Surveillance video showed Riess smiling and talking with Hutchinson on April 5 at a brewery in Fort Myers Beach. Authorities say she may have targeted Hutchinson because the two women looked alike.

Hutchinson had moved to Florida last year from Virginia Beach, Virginia.

Riess is being held in the South Padre Island jail. Soto, the city spokeswoman, said it is unclear to where she will be extradited and on which charges.

"Right now it's still in the air. We are waiting to confirm whether she will go to Florida or Minnesota," Soto said.

The police chief said Friday that local authorities had not yet questioned Smith because they were waiting for other law enforcement agencies to arrive in South Padre.

Minnesota court records show that Riess was suspended as guardian for her disabled 61-year-old sister after a report that she had been transferring funds from a guardianship account to her own account, then withdrawing funds at a casino.

A 2015 affidavit said thousands of dollars had been spent at Diamond Jo Casino in northern Iowa, not far from Riess' Blooming Prairie home. Riess was never charged with a crime, but was ordered to pay her sister more than $100,000.
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - North and South Korea installed the first-ever telephone hotline between their leaders Friday as they prepare for a rare summit next week aimed at resolving the nuclear standoff with Pyongyang.

South Korea's presidential office said a successful test call was conducted on the hotline between Seoul's presidential Blue House and Pyongyang's powerful State Affairs Commission.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un plan to make their first telephone conversation sometime before their face-to-face meeting next Friday at the border truce village of Panmunjom.

In this photo provided by South Korea Presidential Blue House via Yonhap News Agency, an official from South Korean President Blue House talks on the phone with North Korea side for a hotline test at the presidential Blue House in Seoul, South Korea, Friday, April 20, 2018. (South Korea Presidential Blue House/Yonhap via AP)

South Korean officials say the hotline, which will be maintained after the summit, will help facilitate dialogue and reduce misunderstanding during times of tension.

"The historic direct telephone line between the leaders of the South and North was connected a short while ago," South Korean presidential official Youn Kun Young said in a news briefing.

"The test call went on for 4 minutes and 19 seconds starting at 3:41 p.m. with (officials from) both sides speaking to each other ... The connection was smooth and the voice quality was very good. It was like calling next door," he said.

Kim, a third-generation dictator, is the chairman of the State Affairs Commission, North Korea's supreme decision-making institution that was created in 2016 to replace the National Defense Commission he inherited from his father. The new body includes the country's most powerful individuals in state, military and party affairs and is seen as crucial for Kim to consolidate his power and centralize governance.

The meeting between Kim and Moon will only be the third summit between the rivals since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War and could prove to be significant in the global diplomatic push to resolve the North Korean nuclear crisis. A separate summit between Kim and President Donald Trump is anticipated in May or June.

North Korea in January reopened a border hotline between the countries after nearly two years of radio silence as the Koreas resumed dialogue following a period of animosity surrounding the North's nuclear weapons and missile tests. The revival of the hotline at Panmunjom came days after Kim in a New Year's speech proposed negotiations with the South on easing tensions and the North's participation in February's Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang.

North Korea sent hundreds of people to the southern games, including Kim's sister, who expressed her brother's desire to meet with Moon for a summit. South Korean officials later brokered a potential summit between Kim and Trump.

North Korea's abrupt diplomatic outreach comes after a flurry of weapons tests that marked 2017, including the underground detonation of an alleged thermonuclear warhead and three launches of developmental intercontinental ballistic missiles designed to strike the U.S. mainland.

While South Korean and U.S. officials have said Kim is likely trying to save his broken economy from heavy sanctions, some analysts see him as entering the negotiations from a position of strength after having declared his nuclear force as complete.

Seoul, which shuttled between Pyongyang and Washington to set up the meetings, says Kim has expressed genuine interest in dealing away his nuclear weapons. But North Korea for decades has been pushing a concept of "denuclearization" that bears no resemblance to the American definition, vowing to pursue nuclear development unless Washington removes its troops from the peninsula and the nuclear umbrella defending South Korea and Japan.

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Follow Kim Tong-hyung on Twitter at @KimTongHyung.

This photo provided by South Korea Presidential Blue House via Yonhap News Agency, shows a telephone hotline between South Korea and North Korea at the presidential Blue House in Seoul, South Korea, Friday, April 20, 2018. North and South Korea installed a telephone hotline between their leaders Friday as they prepare for a rare summit next week aimed at resolving the nuclear standoff with Pyongyang. The Koreans read " Direct hotline between South and North."(South Korea Presidential Blue House/Yonhap via AP)

A South Korean army solider passes by a signboard showing the distance to North Korea's capital Pyongyang and to South Korea's capital Seoul from Imjingang Station in Paju, South Korea, near the border with North Korea, Friday, April 20, 2018. North and South Korea have installed a telephone hotline between their leaders as they prepare for a rare summit next week aimed at resolving the nuclear standoff with Pyongyang. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

A South Korean army soldier stands next to a signboard showing the distance to North Korea's capital Pyongyang and to South Korea's capital Seoul from Imjingang Station in Paju, South Korea, near the border with North Korea, Friday, April 20, 2018. North and South Korea have installed a telephone hotline between their leaders as they prepare for a rare summit next week aimed at resolving the nuclear standoff with Pyongyang. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

South Korean army soldiers pass by a wire fence decorated with ribbons written with messages wishing for the reunification of the two Koreas at the Imjingak Pavilion in Paju, South Korea, near the border with North Korea, Friday, April 20, 2018. North and South Korea installed the first-ever telephone hotline between their leaders Friday as they prepare for a rare summit next week aimed at resolving the nuclear standoff with Pyongyang. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

Members of Unification Church release pigeons in prayer for peace during the Peace Road event to celebrate upcoming a summit between South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at the Imjingak Pavilion in Paju, South Korea, near the border with North Korea, Friday, April 20, 2018. North and South Korea installed the first-ever telephone hotline between their leaders Friday as they prepare for a rare summit next week aimed at resolving the nuclear standoff with Pyongyang. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

Members of Unification Church sing the song, "Our Wish is Unification," during the Peace Road event to celebrate upcoming a summit between South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at the Imjingak Pavilion in Paju, South Korea, near the border with North Korea, Friday, April 20, 2018. North and South Korea installed the first-ever telephone hotline between their leaders Friday as they prepare for a rare summit next week aimed at resolving the nuclear standoff with Pyongyang. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) - Israeli soldiers firing Friday from across a border fence killed four Palestinians, including a 15-year-old boy, and wounded more than 150 others, health officials said, as several thousand people in blockaded Gaza staged a fourth round of weekly protests on the border with Israel.

Huge black plumes of smoke from burning tires engulfed the border area. Some of the activists threw stones toward the fence or flew kites with flaming rags dangling from their tails.

The latest deaths brought to 32 the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli troops in protests since late March. More than 1,600 have been wounded by live rounds in the past three weeks, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

Palestinian protesters evacuate a wounded youth during clashes with Israeli troops along Gaza's border with Israel, east of Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, Friday, April 20, 2018. Thousands of Palestinians joined the fourth weekly protest on Gaza's border with Israel on Friday, some burning tires or flying kites with flaming rags dangling from their tails. Two Palestinians were killed by Israeli troops firing from across the border fence, health officials said. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)

The rising Palestinian casualty toll signaled that Israel's military is sticking to its open-fire rules despite international criticism of the use of lethal force against unarmed protesters. Israel says it's defending its border, and alleges Gaza's ruling Hamas uses protests as cover for attacks.

Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian U.N. ambassador, said in a letter to the U.N. Security Council late Friday that Israeli forces continue demonstrating the "cruelty of their occupation machine, responding to the calls of unarmed civilians for freedom and justice with brutal and lethal force." He said one of the latest victims was a 25-year-old disabled man.

Israeli soldiers are positioned on the other side of the border fence, including snipers taking cover behind earthen berms, and none have been hurt.

Turnout for the marches has fluctuated, with the biggest showing on March 30, but Friday's crowd appeared to have been somewhat larger than the one the previous week.

The marches are part of what organizers, led by Hamas, have billed as an escalating showdown with Israel, to culminate in a mass march on May 15.

The top Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, said Friday that people should get ready for large crowds spilling across the border that day. "Our people will outnumber the occupation and force it from our land," he said, referring to Israel.

Hamas says the protests are aimed at breaking a crippling border blockade that was imposed by Israel and Egypt after the Islamic militant group overran Gaza in 2007, a year after winning Palestinian parliament elections.

The marches also press for a "right of return" of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to what is now Israel. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were forced from homes in the 1948 war over Israel's creation. Palestinians mark May 15, the anniversary of Israel's founding, as their "nakba," or catastrophe, to mourn their mass uprooting.

"We will stay here until we reclaim our lands," said Ahmed Nasman, 21, speaking in a protest tent camp east of Gaza City, as activists near him prepared kites. "Every day, we will come here with a new way to resist them," he said, referring to Israel.

Several thousand protesters flocked to the border area Friday, most gathering at five tent camps several hundred meters (yards) away from the border. Smaller groups advanced toward the fence, throwing stones, burning tires and flying kites with burning rags.

The kites are part of a new tactic aimed at setting fields on the Israeli side on fire. Most kites showed the colors of the Palestinian flag. One white kite bore a Nazi swastika.

Earlier on Friday, Israeli military aircraft had dropped leaflets urging Palestinians to stay away from the fence and warning that they endanger their lives if they follow Hamas directives.

While Hamas and smaller Palestinian factions have taken a lead as organizers, the mass marches are also fueled by growing desperation among Gaza's 2 million residents.

The border blockade has trapped nearly all of them in the tiny coastal territory, gutted the economy and deepened poverty. Gaza residents typically get fewer than five hours of electricity per day, while unemployment has soared above 40 percent.

Yehiyeh Sinwar, a top Hamas official, told activists that even if conditions are tough, "we will not bargain on the Palestinian people's rights in exchange for bread."

Israel has accused Hamas of cynically exploiting Gaza civilians for its political aims. Hamas critics say the group's refusal to disarm has been a key obstacle to ending the blockade.

Gaza's Health Ministry said those killed Friday included three men in their 20s and a 15-year-old boy.

In addition, 729 protesters were hurt, including 156 hit by live fire, the ministry said, adding that five of the wounded were in serious condition. Some of the others were hurt by rubber-coated steel pellets or overcome by tear gas.

The military has said Palestinians have tried to damage the border fence with explosives, firebombs and other means. It has said snipers only target the "main instigators."

Rights groups have branded open-fire orders as unlawful, saying they effectively permit soldiers to use potentially lethal force against unarmed protesters.

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Laub reported from Jericho, West Bank. Associated Press writer Ian Deitch in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

Palestinian medics evacuate a wounded youth during clashes with Israeli troops along Gaza's border with Israel, east of Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, Friday, April 20, 2018. Thousands of Palestinians joined the fourth weekly protest on Gaza's border with Israel on Friday, some burning tires or flying kites with flaming rags dangling from their tails. Two Palestinians were killed by Israeli troops firing from across the border fence, health officials said. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)

Palestinian protesters hurl stones at Israeli troops during a protest at the Gaza Strip's border with Israel, Friday, April 20, 2018. Thousands of Palestinians joined the fourth weekly protest on Gaza's border with Israel on Friday, some burning tires or flying kites with flaming rags dangling from their tails. Two Palestinians were killed by Israeli troops firing from across the border fence, health officials said. (AP Photo/ Khalil Hamra)

Palestinian medics evacuate a wounded youth during clashes with Israeli troops along Gaza's border with Israel, east of Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, Friday, April 20, 2018. Thousands of Palestinians joined the fourth weekly protest on Gaza's border with Israel on Friday, some burning tires or flying kites with flaming rags dangling from their tails. Two Palestinians were killed by Israeli troops firing from across the border fence, health officials said. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)

Palestinian medics evacuate a wounded youth during clashes with Israeli troops along Gaza's border with Israel, east of Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, Friday, April 20, 2018. Thousands of Palestinians joined the fourth weekly protest on Gaza's border with Israel on Friday, some burning tires or flying kites with flaming rags dangling from their tails. Two Palestinians were killed by Israeli troops firing from across the border fence, health officials said. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)

A Palestinian protester burns tires during clashes with Israeli troops along Gaza's border with Israel, east of Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, Friday, April 20, 2018. Thousands of Palestinians joined the fourth weekly protest on Gaza's border with Israel on Friday, some burning tires or flying kites with flaming rags dangling from their tails. Two Palestinians were killed by Israeli troops firing from across the border fence, health officials said. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)

Palestinian protesters pull part of the fence placed by the Israeli Army, during a protest at the Gaza Strip's border with Israel, Friday, April 20, 2018. Thousands of Palestinians joined the fourth weekly protest on Gaza's border with Israel on Friday, some burning tires or flying kites with flaming rags dangling from their tails. Two Palestinians were killed by Israeli troops firing from across the border fence, health officials said. (AP Photo/ Khalil Hamra)

Palestinian protesters evacuate a wounded woman during a protest at the Gaza Strip's border with Israel, Friday, April 20, 2018. Thousands of Palestinians joined the fourth weekly protest on Gaza's border with Israel on Friday, some burning tires or flying kites with flaming rags dangling from their tails. Two Palestinians were killed by Israeli troops firing from across the border fence, health officials said. (AP Photo/ Khalil Hamra)

Palestinian protesters break rocks to through at Israeli troops during a protest at the Gaza Strip's border with Israel, Friday, April 20, 2018. Thousands of Palestinians joined the fourth weekly protest on Gaza's border with Israel on Friday, some burning tires or flying kites with flaming rags dangling from their tails. Two Palestinians were killed by Israeli troops firing from across the border fence, health officials said. (AP Photo/ Khalil Hamra)

A Palestinian protester hurls stones at Israeli troops during a protest at the Gaza Strip's border with Israel, Friday, April 20, 2018. Thousands of Palestinians joined the fourth weekly protest on Gaza's border with Israel on Friday, some burning tires or flying kites with flaming rags dangling from their tails. Two Palestinians were killed by Israeli troops firing from across the border fence, health officials said. (AP Photo/ Khalil Hamra)

Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip, Yahya Sinwar, center, chant slogans as he surrounded by protesters during his visit to the Gaza Strip's border with Israel, Friday, April 20, 2018. Thousands of Palestinians joined the fourth weekly protest on Gaza's border with Israel on Friday, some burning tires or flying kites with flaming rags dangling from their tails. Two Palestinians were killed by Israeli troops firing from across the border fence, health officials said. (AP Photo/ Khalil Hamra)

Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip, Yahya Sinwar, center, speaks to the protesters during his visit to the Gaza Strip's border with Israel, Friday, April 20, 2018. Thousands of Palestinians joined the fourth weekly protest on Gaza's border with Israel on Friday, some burning tires or flying kites with flaming rags dangling from their tails. Two Palestinians were killed by Israeli troops firing from across the border fence, health officials said. (AP Photo/ Khalil Hamra)
In a rare series of moves, Dutch authorities are investigating whether doctors may have committed crimes in five euthanasia cases, including the deaths of two women with advanced Alzheimer's disease.

In one of the Alzheimer's cases, which prosecutors began probing in September, a physician drugged the patient's coffee without her knowledge and then had the woman physically restrained while delivering the fatal injection. The ongoing criminal investigation is the first since the Netherlands made it legal for doctors to kill patients at their request in 2002.

Dutch prosecutors announced they were examining four other cases last month, including the death of another Alzheimer's patient who "lacked the capacity to express her own will," according to a statement from the prosecutor's office. A spokesperson said that specific criminal charges, if any, would be determined only after the investigations are finished. Several legal experts said that if doctors were found to have killed patients without their explicit request, they could potentially be charged with murder.

The investigations highlight the difficulties doctors face in handling euthanasia requests for those who later develop dementia. Mental decline can eventually make patients unable to understand the significance of their earlier demand to be killed, and as their brain changes, so can their personality and desires.

"If you made a living will when you were competent and asked for euthanasia, do we attach more weight to a decision you made when you were competent, or to your present situation where you're no longer yourself and are no longer asking to die?" said Johan Legemaate, a professor of health law at the University of Amsterdam.

The Netherlands is one of five countries that allow doctors to kill patients at their request, and one of two, along with Belgium, that grant the procedure for people with mental illness. For those with late-stage dementia, euthanasia is still possible if the person made a written demand specifying the conditions under which they want to be killed and if other criteria are met, namely if the doctor agrees the patient is suffering unbearably with no prospect of improvement.

Whether Dutch authorities prosecute the doctors in the two Alzheimer's cases being investigated will likely set a course for how the increasing numbers of people with dementia who seek euthanasia will be handled.

Since 2002, more than 55,000 patients have been lawfully killed by a doctor. About 6,500 cases were reported last year, of which 166 involved people with dementia. In the vast majority of these cases, the patients were still in the early stages of the disease and were competent to make a request for euthanasia.

The case investigators began scrutinizing in September involved a 74-year-old woman who had renewed her living will about a year before she died, according to a detailed report issued by a Dutch regional euthanasia review committee.

She wrote that she wanted to be euthanized "whenever I think the time is right." Later, the patient said several times in response to being asked if she wanted to die: "But not just now, it's not so bad yet!" according to the report.

The committee wrote that when the doctor surreptitiously slipped a sedative into the patient's coffee, she took away the patient's chance to physically protest her death. When the doctor began administering barbiturates to end the patient's life, the woman tried to get up and the doctor asked her family to hold her down.

The doctor said she was fulfilling a written request the patient made for euthanasia years earlier and that since the patient was not competent, nothing the woman said during her euthanasia procedure was relevant.

"Even if the patient had said at that moment: 'I don't want to die,' the physician would have continued," the committee wrote, citing the doctor's testimony. Given the clear signs the patient was struggling to protest her death, the committee said the doctor should have stopped.

"On the morning of the euthanasia, when her family was present, the patient was even making plans to go out to eat with them," the report said.

The examining judge will soon hear witnesses and receive expert reports before deciding whether to charge the doctor with a crime in the case.

Among the four remaining cases, one other suspicious euthanasia death is also being examined by the prosecutor's office in The Hague and three other cases are being investigated in the northern and eastern parts of the country.

The 2016 case has divided opinion even among those who support assisted dying.

"This case is appalling," said Dr. Boudewijn Chabot, a euthanasia advocate who was involved in a historic case at the Supreme Court that helped set the legal conditions for the procedure. He said the euthanasia of the Alzheimer's patient "goes beyond the law as we understand it."

Some physicians said it was problematic to kill people with late-stage dementia because it's hard to know what their wishes truly are.

Dr. Amanda Thompsell, chair of old-age psychiatry at Britain's Royal College of Psychiatrists, said it can be risky to assume how much a dementia patient is suffering mainly by observing them. "If the person says they don't want something, then we have to accept that," she said.

Other experts said that it can be ethical to act without patients' full understanding, such as when they are covertly given medicine, if it helps the patient or if it is consistent with what the patient wanted.

"You respect the patient's choice, in a situation where nothing else can be done to help," said Suzanne van de Vathorst, an associate professor of medical ethics and philosophy at Erasmus University in Rotterdam.

Ghislaine van Thiel, a medical ethicist at Utrecht University Medical School, said she would be surprised if Dutch prosecutors don't take the 2016 Alzheimer's case to trial.

"We are definitely crossing a line if we're overruling the wishes of incompetent patients to live, because a will to live is your basic, fundamental right," she said. "This is such a big discussion that we need the consideration of the courts to set standards on how the law views the rights of people with dementia and how we should consider their wishes."

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Cheng reported from London. Mike Corder contributed to this report from The Hague, Netherlands.
BEIJING (AP) - ZTE Corp., one of China's biggest tech companies, warned Friday a ban on access to U.S. technology threatens its survival and said the company is looking for a legal solution.

State-owned ZTE "may enter a state of shock," which will hurt its employees and U.S. suppliers, its chairman said, according to Chinese news reports. A separate company statement said the ban "threatens ZTE's existence."

The ban was imposed Monday in a case involving exports of telecoms equipment to Iran and North Korea. U.S. companies are barred from selling technology to ZTE for seven years.

In this March 16, 2016, photo, flags fly over the ZTE Global Cloud Computing Center in Nanjing in eastern China's Jiangsu province. Chinese tech company ZTE said Friday, April 20, 2018, that it won't accept an "unfair" U.S. penalty in a case involving exports of telecoms equipment to North Korea and Iran and is seeking a solution through legal channels. (Chinatopix via AP)

The penalty comes as tension mounts between Beijing and U.S. President Donald Trump over technology policy, though the case dates to before Trump took office in January 2017.

On Friday, a Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman criticized U.S. restrictions on trade and investment in technology as attempts to shield itself from competition.

The sanctions could handicap ZTE's global business selling smartphones that use Google Inc.'s Android system and network gear for phone and internet companies that incorporates U.S. chips and other technology.

The sales ban also could disrupt a multibillion-dollar revenue flow to U.S. companies such as Qualcomm Inc. that supply chips, software and other technology.

ZTE pleaded guilty in March 2017 and agreed to pay a $1.19 billion penalty for having shipped equipment to Iran and North Korea in violation of U.S. regulations. The company promised to discipline employees involved in the scheme, but the U.S. Commerce Department said this week they were paid bonuses instead.

Speaking at ZTE headquarters in the southern city of Shenzhen, chairman Yan Yimin complained U.S. authorities had imposed "the most severe action" without waiting for an investigation and corrective measures to be completed, according to news reports. Yan criticized that as "extremely unfair."

"The U.S. ban may cause ZTE to enter a state of shock and directly harm the company's employees, operators around the world, customers, end-users and shareholders. We firmly oppose this," said Yan, according to outlets including China Business News and the Economic Times.

The company statement said ZTE is "determined to safeguard its legitimate rights and interests through all legally permitted means," but gave no indication what steps it might take.

Yan said ZTE designs many of its own chips but also needs technology from outside suppliers.

ZTE is, along with telecoms rival Huawei Technology Ltd. and computer maker Lenovo Group, among the first Chinese companies to compete in global technology markets. It has 65,000 employees and operates in 160 countries.

The company reported 2017 global revenue of 108.8 billion yuan ($17.3 billion).

Trump has threatened to impose an additional 25 percent tariff on up to $150 billion of Chinese goods including telecoms equipment in response to complaints that Beijing improperly pressures foreign companies to hand over technology. China has issued a $50 billion list of U.S. goods for possible retaliation.

ZTE and Huawei have been shut out of the U.S. market for network switching gear since a congressional panel in 2012 labeled them security threats.

Despite that, ZTE has built up smartphone sales in the United States, which is now its biggest market, a status that could be in jeopardy.

The company can keep using Android, for which Google charges no fee, but might lose access to applications such as Google Maps, Gmail and Youtube, according to according to IDC analyst Kiranjeet Kaur.

"If ZTE cannot have these Google applications, ZTE phones will be a lot less attractive," Kaur said in an email.

Kaur said its smartphones also have a "high dependence" on Qualcomm application processors.

Qualcomm didn't immediately respond to an email seeking comment. Intel Corp., another chip supplier, declined to comment.

U.S. restrictions "under the pretext of ensuring national security are purely protectionist measures," foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said at a regular briefing.

Hua noted U.S. products such as Apple iPhones are widely used in China while Washington deems Chinese phones a security risk.

"On the one hand, the United States urges China to open its market wider. On the other hand, it keeps rolling out restrictions on China's business activities," said Hua. "This does not conform to market disciplines or international rules, nor is it consistent with the principles of equality, fairness and reciprocity that the United States has been calling for."

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ZTE Corp.: www.zte.com.cn
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) - The Latest on the crisis along the Israel-Gaza border (all times local):

7:20 p.m.

The Gaza Health Ministry says two more Palestinians, including a 15-year-old boy, have been killed by Israeli army fire on the Gaza border.

A Palestinian woman hurls stones at Israeli troops during a protest at the Gaza Strip's border with Israel, Friday, April 20, 2018. Since weekly mass marches began in late March, 28 Palestinians have been killed and hundreds wounded by Israeli army fire from across the border fence.(AP Photo/ Khalil Hamra)

The deaths bring to four the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces Friday, the fourth weekly protest in the border area.

Some 445 Palestinians were injured in the day's protests, including 96 who were wounded by Israeli army fire.

Gaza's Islamic militant Hamas rulers have called for a mass rally at the border as part of a weeks-long campaign of protests against a decade-old blockade of the territory.

Israel is closely guarding the fence and warns it will not tolerate attempts to damage the fence or breach it and enter its territory.

It has accused Hamas of using the protests as a cover for carrying out attacks.

Several Israeli communities are located near the border.

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6:55 p.m.

The Gaza Health Ministry says 445 Palestinians have been wounded in protests on the Gaza-Israel border, including 96 who were wounded by Israeli army fire.

Several thousand Palestinians participated in the protests Friday, the fourth large-scale demonstrations since late March.

Health officials said that two Palestinians were killed by army fire near the border Friday.

The officials say that of those injured Friday, 174 were transferred to hospitals and 271 treated in field clinics. Some of the injured were overcome by tear gas, hit with rubber-coated steel pellets or hit by shrapnel.

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5:05 p.m.

Israel's Defense Minister has shrugged off threats by Gaza militants who released a video clip showing army officers through the cross-hairs of a Palestinian sniper.

Avigdor Lieberman was visiting near the Gaza border Friday when asked if he was worried. He answered "you see I arrived here and came without a bullet proof jacket even." He said he trusts the Israeli army to protect him.

The Palestinian Islamic Jihad group had released a clip of senior Israeli officers seen through a sniper scope.

Gaza's Islamic militant Hamas rulers have called for a mass rally at the border as part of a weeks-long campaign of protests against a decade-old blockade of the territory.

Israel is closely guarding the fence and warns it will not tolerate attempts to breach it.

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4:50 p.m.

Gaza's Health Ministry says 83 Palestinians have been injured in protests on the Gaza-Israel border, including 26 who were wounded by Israeli army fire.

The ministry says 33 of those injured Friday were taken to hospitals and the rest were treated in field clinics. It says some of those hurt were overcome by tear gas.

Health officials said earlier that two Palestinians were killed Friday by Israeli troops firing from across the border fence, but did not provide further details on the circumstances of those shootings. The Israeli military had no immediate comment on the fatal shootings.

Before Friday, 28 Palestinians had been killed and hundreds wounded in weekly mass protests on the border that began in late March.

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3:45 p.m.

Gaza health officials say a second Palestinian has been killed by Israeli army fire as thousands of protesters assembled near Gaza's border with Israel.

The Health Ministry says the 24-year-old was killed in a border area in northern Gaza on Friday. Earlier in the day, a 25-year-old man was shot and killed in the same area. It says 40 protesters were wounded by gunfire or overcome by tear gas fired by Israeli troops from across the border fence.

The Israeli military had no immediate comment.

Before Friday, 28 Palestinian protesters had been killed and hundreds wounded by Israeli troops during weekly protests that began in late March.

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2:05 p.m.

The Gaza Health Ministry says a 25-year-old Palestinian has died after being critically wounded by Israeli army fire near Gaza's border with Israel.

The ministry says the man had been shot in the head. It did not provide details about the circumstances of Friday's shooting, which came as Palestinians were gathering for a fourth weekly mass protest on the border.

The Israeli military says it's looking into the incident.

Before Friday, 28 Palestinian protesters had been killed and hundreds wounded by Israeli army fire from across the border fence since the protests began in late March.

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12:50 p.m.

Gaza's Health Ministry says a Palestinian youth participating in protests on Gaza's border with Israel has been shot in the head and is in critical condition.

Since weekly mass marches began in late March, 28 Palestinians have been killed and hundreds wounded by Israeli army fire from across the border fence.

On Friday, protesters began gathering at sit-in protest camps near the border. In one camp, organizers placed four life-sized effigies of Israeli soldiers in a cage facing the border. Hamas is believed to hold the remains of two soldiers from a previous war with Israel.

On previous Fridays, most protesters stayed in the camps, with smaller groups throwing stones, burning tires and hurling firebombs near the fence.

A new tactic is to send burning kites into Israel.

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11:15 a.m.

Israeli military aircraft have dropped leaflets urging Palestinians to stay away from the Gaza-Israel border fence and warning that they endanger their lives if they follow directives of Hamas organizers of weekly protests there.

The leaflets were dropped on Friday, ahead of what's to be the fourth large-scale protest, largely organized by Gaza's rulers from the Islamic militant Hamas, in part to challenge a decade-old border blockade of the territory.

Israel has accused Hamas of using the protests as a cover for carrying out attacks. It has said it will not allow protesters to approach or damage the border fence. Rights groups say orders allowing troops to use potentially lethal force against unarmed protesters are unlawful.

Since March 30, 28 Palestinians have been killed and hundreds wounded by army fire.

Palestinian protesters carry a kite with a burning rag dangling from its tail to fly it towards Israel during a protest at the Gaza Strip's border with Israel, Friday, April 20, 2018. Activists use kites with burning rags dangling from their tails to set ablaze drying wheat fields on the Israeli side. (AP Photo/ Khalil Hamra)

Palestinian protesters prepare kites with rags dangling from their tails to burn as they fly them toward Israel during a protest at the Gaza Strip's border with Israel, Friday, April 20, 2018. Activists use kites with burning rags dangling from their tails to set ablaze drying wheat fields on the Israeli side. (AP Photo/ Khalil Hamra)

Palestinian protesters prepare kites with rags dangling from their tails to burn when they fly them toward Israel during a protest at the Gaza Strip's border with Israel, Friday, April 20, 2018.Activists use kites with burning rags dangling from their tails to set ablaze drying wheat fields on the Israeli side. (AP Photo/ Khalil Hamra)
LONDON (AP) - Prince Charles has spent a lifetime waiting to be king. On Friday the 69-year-old heir to the British throne got another position to wait for - he was approved as the next head of the Commonwealth made up of the U.K. and the countries that once were its colonies.

Commonwealth leaders meeting in London confirmed that the next chief of the 53-nation group "shall be His Royal Highness Prince Charles, The Prince of Wales." That won't happen until he succeeds his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, as monarch when she dies.

British Prime Minister Theresa May said the decision was unanimous, although it had not been a foregone conclusion.

Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May leads other leaders of the Commonwealth nations through St George's hall at Windsor castle, during the CHOGM Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, Windsor, England, Friday April 20, 2018. Leaders from the 53-nation Commonwealth nations are meeting in Windsor Castle Friday, without official agenda but are widely expected to discuss protecting the world's oceans, cybersecurity and who should become the next leader of the Commonwealth. (Ben Stansall/PA via AP)

Elizabeth, who turns 92 on Saturday, has led the Commonwealth since she became queen in 1952. However, the position is not hereditary, and some people have suggested a non-royal leader would give the group of nations a more modern profile.

But any opposition was squelched by an intervention from the queen, who told the gathered leaders in person Thursday it was her "sincere wish" that Charles would one day carry on her Commonwealth work.

The position is largely symbolic, but the queen's commitment has been a major force behind the survival of the Commonwealth. She has visited almost every member country, often multiple times, over her 66-year reign.

Charles is almost as well-traveled as his mother, and is a longtime champion of environmental causes, a priority for the Commonwealth. Its members include small island nations in the Caribbean and Pacific that are among the countries most vulnerable to rising seas, fiercer storms and other effects of global climate change.

Leaders at the meeting signed a "blue charter" to protect the world's oceans and committed to stronger cybersecurity and freer trade.

Britain's May described Charles as "a proud supporter of the Commonwealth" and said "it is fitting that one day he will continue the work of his mother."

However, Philip Murphy, director of the University of London's Institute of Commonwealth Studies, said Charles' political passions could hold peril for the Commonwealth.

"We know the queen is very proper and discreet and doesn't push her own political ideas, but that's not true with Prince Charles," Murphy said. "And there is a danger that he might use that greater leeway to promote controversial ideas of his own, and that could be damaging."

Britain has tried to use the biennial heads of government meeting to reinvigorate a disparate group that represents 2.4 billion people living in 53 countries, from giant India to tiny Tuvalu.

The next summit, in 2020, will be held in Rwanda, which was never a British colony but has been persuaded to join the Commonwealth club. Former Portuguese colony Mozambique is also a Commonwealth member, and Togo is considering joining.

British officials have been paying more attention to the Commonwealth since the U.K. voted in 2016 to leave the European Union. The Commonwealth could provide a platform for British diplomatic and cultural clout outside the EU.

Britain laid on a lavish royal welcome for Commonwealth leaders, including a banquet at Buckingham Palace, the use of Windsor Castle for meetings and the deployment of royal glamour couple Prince Harry and Meghan Markle to a series of events.

But the summit was overshadowed by an uproar this week over the treatment by U.K. immigration authorities of some long-term British residents from the Caribbean.

The Guardian newspaper reported that some people who settled in the U.K. in the decades after World War II had recently been refused medical care or threatened with deportation because they could not produce paperwork to show their right to reside in Britain.

The government says they accidentally fell afoul of new measures intended to prevent illegal immigration. May and other government ministers have apologized repeatedly.

But opposition politicians say the treatment of the "Windrush generation" - named for the ship Empire Windrush, which brought the first big group of post-war Caribbean immigrants to Britain in 1948 - is cause for national shame.

May said Friday that Britain would do "whatever it takes," including paying compensation, to make amends.

"These people are British," she said. "They are part of us. They helped to build Britain, and we are all stronger for their contributions."

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Pan Pylas contributed to this story.

Britain's Prince Charles greets the Sultan of Brunei Hassanal Bolkiah in a receiving line for the Queen's Dinner for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) at Buckingham Palace in London, Thursday, April 19, 2018. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, Pool)

British Grenadier Guards soldiers march as they go to change the guard at Windsor Castle as Commonwealth leaders arrive for the the second day of the Commonwealth Heads of Government 2018 for a behind closed doors meeting in Windsor, England, Friday, April 20, 2018. Leaders from the 53-nation Commonwealth nations are meeting in Windsor Castle Friday, without official agenda but are widely expected to discuss protecting the world's oceans, cybersecurity and who should become the next leader of the Commonwealth. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)

FILE - In this Sunday, Jan. 28, 2007 file photo, Britain's Prince Charles enters the Harvard Club to receive the Global Environment Award from the Harvard Medical School in New York. (AP Photo/Stephen Chernin)

Leader of Commonwealth countries arrive and walk past the round tower at Windsor Castle for the the second day of the Commonwealth Heads of Government 2018 for a behind closed doors meeting in Windsor, England, Friday, April 20, 2018. Leaders from the 53-nation Commonwealth nations are meeting in Windsor Castle Friday, without official agenda but are widely expected to discuss protecting the world's oceans, cybersecurity and who should become the next leader of the Commonwealth. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)

President of Nigeria Muhammadu Buhari, left, Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness, President of Seychelles Danny Faure, President of Sierra Leone Julius Maada Bio, British Prime Minister Theresa May and Commonwealth Secretary General Patricia Scotland, at right, arrive for the the second day of the Commonwealth Heads of Government 2018 for a behind closed doors meeting in Windsor, England, Friday, April 20, 2018. Leaders from the 53-nation Commonwealth nations are meeting in Windsor Castle Friday, without official agenda but are widely expected to discuss protecting the world's oceans, cybersecurity and who should become the next leader of the Commonwealth. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)

Leaders of Commonwealth nation arrive for their CHOGM meeting at Windsor Castle, in Windsor, England, Friday April 20, 2018. Leaders from left, Sierra Leone's Julius Maada Bio, Bangladesh's Sheikh Hasina, Britain's Theresa May, Malta's Joseph Muscat, and Commonwealth Secretary-General Patricia Scotland. Leaders from the 53-nation Commonwealth nations are meeting in Windsor Castle Friday, without official agenda but are widely expected to discuss protecting the world's oceans, cybersecurity and who should become the next leader of the Commonwealth. (Andrew Matthews/PA via AP)

Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness, second left takes a picture on his smart phone as Britain's Theresa May third right looks back as Commonwealth leaders arrive for the the second day of the Commonwealth Heads of Government 2018 for a behind closed doors meeting in Windsor, England, Friday, April 20, 2018. Leaders from the 53-nation Commonwealth nations are meeting in Windsor Castle Friday, without official agenda but are widely expected to discuss protecting the world's oceans, cybersecurity and who should become the next leader of the Commonwealth. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)

The Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern, left, talks to the Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as they arrive for the the second day of the Commonwealth Heads of Government 2018 for a behind closed doors meeting in Windsor, England, Friday, April 20, 2018. Leaders from the 53-nation Commonwealth nations are meeting in Windsor Castle Friday, without official agenda but are widely expected to discuss protecting the world's oceans, cybersecurity and who should become the next leader of the Commonwealth. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein)

New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern sips on a drink as she delivers a speech at a dinner hosted by Queen Elizabeth II, during the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting at Buckingham Palace in London, Thursday, April 19, 2018. (Toby Melville/Pool Photo via AP)

Britain's Queen Elizabeth II delivers a speech during a dinner she hosted at Buckingham Palace in the week of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, (CHOGM), Thursday, April 19, 2018 in London. (Jack Taylor/Pool Photo via AP)

Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May, front centre, leads other leaders of the Commonwealth nations through St George's hall at Windsor castle, during the CHOGM Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, Windsor, England, Friday April 20, 2018. Leaders from the 53-nation Commonwealth nations are meeting in Windsor Castle Friday, without official agenda but are widely expected to discuss protecting the world's oceans, cybersecurity and who should become the next leader of the Commonwealth. (Ben Stansall/PA via AP)

British Prime Minister Theresa May, right, answers a question next to the Secretary General of the Commonwealth Baroness Scotland during the closing press conference for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) at Marlborough House in London, Friday, April 20, 2018. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham)

Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Charles greet Australia's Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his wife Lucy in the Blue Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace as the Queen hosts a dinner during the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, in London, Thursday April 19, 2018. (Victoria Jones/Pool Photo via AP)
LONDON (AP) - British lawmakers set up a special group Friday to focus on Russian election interference and disinformation campaigns, saying more must be done to understand the extent of Moscow's "malign influence."

Moscow, meanwhile, accused the U.K. of planning an unprovoked cyberattack on Russia.

Britain has accused Russia of using disinformation campaigns to undermine Western democracies. The diplomatic rift between the two countries widened after former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a nerve agent in the English city of Salisbury last month.

FILE - In this Wednesday, March 7, 2018 file photo, police officers guard a cordon around a police tent covering the the spot where former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter were found critically ill Sunday following exposure to an "unknown substance" in Salisbury, England. British officials said Tuesday April 17, 2018, the nerve agent used to poison former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter was delivered in liquid form, and it will take months to remove all traces of the toxin. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File)

Britain's new Russia Coordination Group unites leaders of several influential parliamentary committees, including those overseeing foreign affairs and defense.

"As unease about Russian malign influence grows, it is essential that we understand the extent of Putin's activity," Conservative lawmaker Tom Tugendhat, the group's chairman, said.

Britain should follow the United States in imposing sanctions on oligarchs and government officials with links to President Vladimir Putin, Tugendhat said.

Russia's ambassador to London, Alexander Yakovenko, accused Britain of using "offensive cyber capabilities against Russia."

Yakovenko told reporters that Russia suspected the U.K. was preparing a "massive cyberattack." He also accused Britain of "destroying all possible evidence" in the Skripal case.

Offering another Russian theory about the poisoning to counter the blame assigned by Britain, he suggested that U.K. intelligence agents might have injected the father and daughter with a nerve agent.

Experts from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons have backed Britain's finding that the Skripals were poisoned with Novichok, a form of nerve agent first manufactured in the Soviet Union.
BERLIN (AP) - German authorities are investigating an official and three lawyers on suspicion of corruption in the granting of asylum to people who weren't eligible.

Prosecutors in the northern city of Bremen say at least 1,200 asylum requests, mostly by members of Syria's Yazidi minority, may have been wrongly approved.

The official under investigation is the former head of the Bremen branch office of Germany's Federal Office for Migration, which handles asylum decisions.

Annegret Korff, a spokeswoman for the Interior Ministry that oversees the migrant office, said Friday that the official has been suspended but declined to comment further citing the ongoing investigation.
ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) - A school resource officer who fired at a student gunman in Maryland is receiving more honors.

Blaine Gaskill, a deputy first class with the St. Mary's County Sheriff's Office, received a governor's citation on Thursday. The Washington Post reports that Gov. Larry Hogan called him a hero who did everything right. Gaskill also was honored by the Washington Nationals, who had him throw the first pitch at their home opener.

Seventeen-year-old Austin Wyatt Rollins mortally wounded 16-year-old Jaelynn Willey before killing himself at Great Mills High School last month.

Officials say Gaskill responded immediately and fired a shot that hit the gun in the teen's hand just as Rollins shot himself in the head.

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Information from: The Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com
VATICAN CITY (AP) - The case of Edgardo Mortara has roiled Catholic-Jewish relations ever since the 6-year-old Jewish boy was taken from his home in Bologna by papal police in 1858 and brought to Rome to be raised a Catholic. The move was ordered after church authorities learned he had been secretly baptized. Church law at the time required all Catholics to be raised as Catholics and educated in the faith.

Recently, the case has made headlines again after a U.S. historian, David Kertzer, found discrepancies between the Spanish text of Mortara's memoirs held in the archives of his religious order, and an Italian translation published in 2005 by Italian journalist Vittorio Messori.

The Associated Press this week located the Spanish text in the Historic Archives of St. Peter in Chains, a Rome church famous for its Michelangelo statue of a horned Moses, and compared it with the Italian translation. Here are the key findings of the AP analysis:

This picture kept in the Archivio Storico San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome and taken on Tuesday, April 17, 2018 shows an undated photo of Father Pio Maria Mortara, third from left, with some of his brothers. It's an incident that has stained the Vatican for 160 years: a 6-year-old Jewish boy taken from his family by papal police and brought to Rome to be raised Catholic after church authorities learned his housekeeper had secretly had him baptized. Now the case has reared its head again, with new evidence that memoirs the boy wrote as an adult were altered to take the edge off his anti-Semitic views and enhance details favorable to the Catholic Church. (AP Photo)

-The 89-page notebook-sized autobiography, "El Nino Mortara y Pio Nono" (The Mortara Child and Pope Pius) isn't actually Mortara's original, hand-written text, which Kertzer says was penned in 1888. Rather, it is a typed up, spiral-bound booklet prepared nearly a century later by the Rev. Juan Oleaga, a Spanish member of Mortara's religious order who also prepared a typed-up booklet of Mortara's correspondence in 1994.

-In a brief introduction to the autobiography, Oleaga wrote that he faithfully typed Mortara's text and that it was "fruit of a spirit that possesses the truth." He said Mortara died ever grateful to Pope Pius IX, who authorized his removal and took him under his wing, and remained close to his family "even though he never got to see them converted to Catholicism."

-Oleaga appears to have written a long footnote in the first few pages of the text in which he justifies the taking of Mortara from his parents and recounts a tearful reunion between Mortara and the Inquisition official responsible for it. That footnote - written in the same typeface as Orteaga's introduction and set off from the Spanish text with an asterisk - is seamlessly integrated into Messori's version as if Mortara himself had written it.

-Mortara's anti-Semitic comments contained in the original Spanish were removed in Messori's version, including reference to Mortara having "always professed an inexpressible horror" toward Jews. Mortara's original writings that the faith of his family was "false, contradictory, absurd, condemned by history and burdened by the 'ridiculous' which the majority of men condemn," was reduced in Messori's text to Judaism being merely "contradictory and surpassed by history."

-Messori's version removes references to the "neurosis" and psychological problems Mortara suffered later in life and omits a reference to his "violent" removal from his parents and how much he missed his mother. It also said he was "miraculously" cured from the illness that prompted his baptism. The Spanish text makes no reference to a miracle.

-Kertzer points out that even Mortara's original Spanish contains factual errors, including names and dates that were corrected in Messori's version. Mortara's account also includes an anecdote that Kertzer says has no basis in documentary evidence: that Pius, after learning of the baptism but before removing the child, had tried to persuade his parents to accept a compromise to send Edgardo to a Catholic boarding school in Bologna so they could visit him "whenever they wanted." Kertzer says that based on court testimony from the time, there is no evidence of any such negotiation and that when the police arrived to take Edgardo away, it came as a complete shock to the family.
VATICAN CITY (AP) - It's an incident that has stained the Vatican for 160 years: a 6-year-old Jewish boy taken from his family by papal police and brought to Rome to be raised Catholic after church authorities learned his housekeeper had secretly had him baptized.

Now the case has reared its head again, with new evidence that memoirs the boy wrote as an adult were altered to take the edge off his anti-Semitic views and enhance details favorable to the Catholic Church.

The Associated Press has confirmed findings by Brown University historian David Kertzer that Edgardo Mortara's memoirs were changed in ways big and small when they were translated from the original Spanish into Italian and published to great fanfare by Italy's Mondadori house in 2005. AP found the Spanish text in a religious order's archive this week.

Amedeo Zafrati, working at the Synagogue's historical archive, points to the name of Edgardo Mortara as he shows baptism certificates in Rome, Friday, April 20, 2018. It's an incident that has stained the Vatican for 160 years: a 6-year-old Jewish boy taken from his family by papal police and brought to Rome to be raised Catholic after church authorities learned his housekeeper had secretly had him baptized. Now the case has reared its head again, with new evidence that memoirs the boy wrote as an adult were altered to take the edge off his anti-Semitic views and enhance details favorable to the Catholic Church. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

The alterations do not significantly change the overall thrust of Mortara's oft-stated gratitude to the "saint" Pope Pius IX for having saved his soul by removing him from his Jewish family to raise him Catholic. But they do indicate that the tale - already subjected to over a century of revisions to suit various interests - has been recrafted again.

The changes, Kertzer told AP, "were clearly made with certain narrative purposes, to craft a narrative that was more in line with what the conservatives in the church would like to present as what had happened in the story."

That story began when Inquisition police took 6-year-old Edgardo from his home in Bologna on June 24, 1858. The reason? The Mortaras' 16-year-old Catholic housekeeper had had Edgardo secretly baptized when he fell ill as an infant, fearing for his soul if he died.

Mortara survived, and when word reached church authorities that a baptized Catholic was living in a Jewish home, the Inquisition ordered his sequester under laws requiring Catholics be raised as such.

Pius took Edgardo under his wing, and the Jewish-born boy eventually became a Catholic priest, taking Pius as his priestly name. He died in 1940 in Belgium.

While such sequesters, as they were known, were not unheard of, the kidnapping became an international scandal and contributed to the anti-clerical sentiment sweeping across Europe. In Italy, the cause emboldened the liberalizing Risorgimiento forces who unified the country and brought about the collapse of the papal states through which the pope had controlled a swath of central Italy.

The 2017 publication of the English version of Mortara's memoir - which includes all the alterations contained in the Italian - has cast a new spotlight on the case, just as Steven Spielberg is developing a film based on Kertzer's 1997 book "The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara," and Pius' case for sainthood is pressing ahead.

In a recent article in The Atlantic magazine, Kertzer outlined several inconsistencies between the Spanish version of Mortara's memoir and the Italian translation published by leading papal author Vittorio Messori in 2005 and titled, "Me the Jewish Boy Kidnapped by Pius IX: The unpublished memoirs of the protagonist of the 'Mortara case.'"

Kertzer and Messori have feuded for years about the Mortara affair, evidence of the controversy it still sparks even today, with some in the church defending Pius' actions on the grounds that he had no choice but to raise Mortara Catholic under divine law.

The memoir in question, written in Spanish because Mortara was living in Spain at the time, is actually a contemporary, typed-up version of a hand-written one Mortara purportedly penned a century ago. The location of the hand-written text is unknown.

AP this week found the typed-up Spanish version in the historic archives of the religious order Mortara joined, alongside his hand-written journals and shelf upon shelf of dusty tomes of centuries-old church documents.

Among other things, AP found that anti-Semitic comments contained in the original Spanish had been removed from the Messori translation, including a reference to Mortara having "always professed an inexpressible horror" toward Jews.

Mortara's great-great niece, Elena Mortara, said in an interview that the change was evidence of an effort to erase the anti-Jewish indoctrination her ancestor received from the Catholic teachers who raised and educated him.

"It was part of the brainwashing, the successful brainwashing, he had," she said.

During an interview at her home, Mortara spoke of her family's pain, which has been recounted from generation to generation, but also pride over the episode's historical relevance.

"We knew that the family had fought for civil rights that would become civil rights for all citizens," said Mortara, who wrote about the global significance of the case in a 2015 book.

Elena Mortara, who led a public protest by the family and Italy's Jewish community when St. John Paul II beatified Pius in 2000, dismissed the value of the even the Spanish version of the memoir as a document. She noted that it was written in the impersonal third person and typed up by someone else, and differs greatly in tone from Mortara's hand-written journals, "where he shows all the conflicts within him, all the psychological conflicts, the drama of his soul."

She vowed to once again mount a protest if the Vatican goes ahead with canonizing Pius and urged the current pope to consider changing church law that still says that if an infant at risk of dying is baptized, the sacrament is valid even if it was done against the parents' will.

Messori, for his part, insisted in a series of emails to AP that he worked from the original Spanish text and that a translator had faithfully translated it. He blamed any changes in the published version on editors at Mondadori, the Italian publishing house.

"I think someone wanted to cut out the things that seemed too harsh for the Jews while it was being worked on at Mondadori," he said in an email. But he stressed: "The things that are being denounced by critics don't in any way touch Father Mortara's message of gratitude to the church and Pius IX."

Calls and emails to Mondadori seeking comment were not returned.

The issue has greater significance given that the English translation of the memoirs published by Ignatius Press was based on Messori's Italian version, and therefore contains all the same alterations.

The editor of Ignatius Press, the Rev. Joseph Fessio, told AP that he would try to obtain a copy of the archived Spanish text and make the necessary changes. But he also said Ignatius had already tried in good faith to obtain the Spanish text from Mondadori. According to emails provided to AP, Mondadori told Ignatius there was no trace left of the Spanish text and to use its Italian.

"I talked to Vittorio Messori and here is the complete story," read the Nov. 28, 2016, email from Mondadori's foreign rights manager to her counterpart at Ignatius. She wrote that Mortara himself had actually made a translation into Italian for the order's superior general.

"So the text found by Messori is the original one, translated from Spanish into Italian by Father Mortara himself for his brothers: Father Mortara is the guarantee of its authenticity," the email said.

As the AP found, however, the Spanish text is readily available and there is no record in the archive that Mortara ever wrote an Italian version.

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AP videojournalist Rodrique Ngowi contributed from Providence, Rhode Island.

This picture kept in the Archivio Storico San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome and taken on Tuesday, April 17, 2018 shows an undated photo of Father Pio Maria Mortara, third from left, with some of his brothers. It's an incident that has stained the Vatican for 160 years: a 6-year-old Jewish boy taken from his family by papal police and brought to Rome to be raised Catholic after church authorities learned his housekeeper had secretly had him baptized. Now the case has reared its head again, with new evidence that memoirs the boy wrote as an adult were altered to take the edge off his anti-Semitic views and enhance details favorable to the Catholic Church. (AP Photo)

This picture taken on Tuesday, April 17, 2018 and kept in the Archivio Storico San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome, shows an undated photo of Father Pio Maria Mortara shortly before his death. It's an incident that has stained the Vatican for 160 years: a 6-year-old Jewish boy taken from his family by papal police and brought to Rome to be raised Catholic after church authorities learned his housekeeper had secretly had him baptized. Now the case has reared its head again, with new evidence that memoirs the boy wrote as an adult were altered to take the edge off his anti-Semitic views and enhance details favorable to the Catholic Church. (AP Photo)

In this Tuesday, April 17, 2018 photo Brown University professor David Kertzer stands for a portrait on the Brown campus in Providence, R.I. Kertzer. It's an incident that has stained the Vatican for 160 years: a 6-year-old Jewish boy taken from his family by papal police and brought to Rome to be raised Catholic after church authorities learned his housekeeper had secretly had him baptized. Now the case has reared its head again, with new evidence that memoirs the boy wrote as an adult were altered to take the edge off his anti-Semitic views and enhance details favorable to the Catholic Church. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)

This undated photo kept in the Archivio Storico San Pietro in Vincoli and taken on Tuesday, April 17, 2018 shows Marianna Mortara, mother of Edgardo Mortara. It's an incident that has stained the Vatican for 160 years: a 6-year-old Jewish boy taken from his family by papal police and brought to Rome to be raised Catholic after church authorities learned his housekeeper had secretly had him baptized. Now the case has reared its head again, with new evidence that memoirs the boy wrote as an adult were altered to take the edge off his anti-Semitic views and enhance details favorable to the Catholic Church. (AP Photo)

Elena Mortara speaks during an interview with The Associated Press at her home in Rome, Tuesday, April 17, 2018. It's an incident that has stained the Vatican for 160 years: a 6-year-old Jewish boy taken from his family by papal police and brought to Rome to be raised Catholic after church authorities learned his housekeeper had secretly had him baptized. Now the case has reared its head again, with new evidence that memoirs the boy wrote as an adult were altered to take the edge off his anti-Semitic views and enhance details favorable to the Catholic Church. (AP Photo/Domenico Stinellis)
SEATTLE (AP) - The 2018 National Teacher of the Year leads a classroom for teenage refugees that serves as their entry into American high school culture.

For much of the past decade, Mandy Manning has taught at the Newcomer Center at Joel E. Ferris High School in Spokane, Washington. The center has a specialized English language development program for newly arrived refugee and immigrant students.

For five hours a day, they work on setting up a base of academic knowledge so that the teens can ultimately join their peers in general education classes. Manning also helps them adjust to American culture - from navigating the cafeteria and reading body language to understanding classroom etiquette, like taking turns when speaking.

Teacher of the year Mandy Manning poses for a photograph at the Washington Court Hotel, Wednesday, April 18, 2018, in Washington. The national award winner embarks on a yearlong advocacy role to represent the best of the profession. Manning says she will use her new platform to encourage educators across the country to get out of their comfort zones in order to best serve the diversity of their students. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

Manning's selection was announced Friday by the Council of Chief State School Officers.

"Mandy is a strong educator who believes in a great public education for every student and has a unique perspective on meeting the needs of some of our nation's most vulnerable children," the state superintendents' group said in a statement.

The winner embarks on a yearlong advocacy role to represent the best of the profession. Manning says she will use her new platform to urge educators to get out of their comfort zones,.

Manning plans to use her new platform to spread a message of unity, urging President Donald Trump to be a president for everyone in the United States.

"I would encourage him to go out into neighborhoods and into places where he hasn't gone before, to try to experience their lives...to continue our legacy of welcoming and being open and inviting of all peoples," Manning said.

Manning's students come from all over the world, many escaping chaotic, conflict-torn homelands across the Middle East, Africa, Asia and the Americas. Though she had a record 33 students in the fall of 2016, she's now working with just five.

It's a correlation Manning can't ignore - that there has been such a drop in the number of refugees and immigrants landing in eastern Washington coinciding with the Trump administration's tightening immigration policies. Fewer refugee families mean the children just feel more isolated in their new world, she said.

The risk of isolation is motivation to be even more intentional about making her students visible in the community, Manning said.

She takes them to work at the student store to engage with their peers, even though they may not yet have the language skills for typical teenage chatter. She does a map-building exercise so they can gain the confidence to both talk about where they came from and also ask their new neighbors for directions.

Manning, who said she's also shaped by her international teaching experience and Peace Corps service, learned to embrace and cherish people who are different because she moved two dozen times in her youth while being raised by a single mother.

Her job now, she says, is as much about integrating the children to their new lives, as it's about being a bridge for the local community to connect with the unfamiliar. It's an experience so profound for her that Manning, a married mother of three, cried when describing it.

"What a privilege and an honor to be the student's first teacher, to be that for these kids and to help them transition into this new culture," Manning said. "I get to see and experience a lot of beauty and I'm very, very, very lucky."

The national award winner is generally recognized by the president at a White House ceremony each spring.

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Follow Sally Ho at https://twitter.com/_sallyho .

Teacher of the year Mandy Manning poses for a photograph at the Washington Court Hotel, Wednesday, April 18, 2018, in Washington. The national award winner embarks on a yearlong advocacy role to represent the best of the profession. Manning says she will use her new platform to encourage educators across the country to get out of their comfort zones in order to best serve the diversity of their students. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
GAITHERSBURG, Md. (AP) - Prison officials in Maryland say an inmate hanged himself in his cell hours after he was publicly linked to a decades-old disappearance.

Fifty-one-year-old Fernando Asturizaga was declared a "person of interest" last week in the 2000 disappearance of Alison Thresher. She was a copy editor at The Washington Post, and Asturizaga babysat her daughter. The Post says her disappearance has been treated as a homicide case despite the lack of a body.

Asturizaga was serving time for sexually abusing Thresher's daughter, who appeared with Montgomery County Police in calling for justice.

State prisons spokesman Gerry Shields says Asturizaga was found hours after their news conference on April 12.

The state medical examiner's office ruled Thursday that it was a "suicide by hanging."

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Information from: The Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com
ISLAMABAD (AP) - A prominent Pakistani rights group says armed men have raided the house of one of its editors, harassing her and stealing her laptop, two hard drives and two cell phones, as well as some jewelry and cash.

The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) in a statement Friday condemned the raid on Maryam Hasan's home in the eastern city of Lahore on Thursday night.

Hasan edited the group's annual State of Human Rights report, which was launched last week in Islamabad.

In this Monday, April 16, 2018 photo Maryam Hasan shows the Human Rights Commission Report 2017 in Islamabad, Pakistan. A prominent Pakistani rights group says armed men have raided the house of one of its editors, harassing her and stealing her laptop, two hard drives and two cell phones, as well as some jewelry and cash. HRCP in a statement Friday condemned the raid on Hasan's home in the eastern city of Lahore on Thursday night. (AP Photo/B.K. Bangash)

The men intimidated her and questioned Hasan about her professional engagements, HRCP's statement said.

The group says it suspects the incident was not an ordinary burglary and called on the government to apprehend the culprits.
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (AP) - A Michigan couple had a little bit of fun naming their 14th son.

Kateri and Jay Schwandt welcomed the birth of their son on Wednesday. Jay Schwandt says they've decided to name him Finley Sheboygan Schwandt.

The name doesn't appear to have any ties with the Wisconsin city. Jay Schwandt says it's inspired by a tale his father-in-law told them about a Native American chief who was the father of many boys. The chief believed his last child would be a girl. When the baby was a boy, the chief named him Sheboygan for "she is a boy again."

In this Friday, Feb. 16, 2018 photo, the Schwandt family poses for a portrait in front of their home in Grand Rapids, Mich. The only member not pictured is Brandon, 18. The Schwandt family has 13 sons and have welcomed a 14th into the family. The couple's latest addition was born Wednesday evening, April 18 five days before the baby's expected due date. (Casey Sykes /The Grand Rapids Press via AP)

Jay Schwandt says there's "no chance" the couple will have another child, though he's made similar statements before.

The couple lives in Rockford, north of Grand Rapids. They have no daughters.

In this Friday, Feb. 16, 2018 photo, from left to right, brothers Francisco, 2, Tucker, 4, Luke, 6, Charlie, 8, Gabe, 11, Wesley, 9, Calvin, 13, Drew, 20, Tommy, 16, Zach, 22, Vinny, 15, and Ty Schwandt, 25, pose for a portrait at the Schwandt household in Grand Rapids, Mich. The only brother not pictured is Brandon, 18. The Schwandt family has 13 sons and have welcomed a 14th into the family. The couple's latest addition was born Wednesday evening, April 18 five days before the baby's expected due date. (Casey Sykes /The Grand Rapids Press via AP)
SAO PAULO (AP) - The European Union has decided to ban meat imports from 20 Brazilian plants amid concerns about sanitary controls.

The decision mostly affects poultry and was made by EU member states Thursday. European Commission spokeswoman Anca Paduraru said Friday the ban would take effect two days after its official publication. It was not clear when that would be.

Brazil's Agriculture Ministry had been trying to head off the decision, including by voluntarily suspending some poultry exports for a time. Now it says the EU is using the pretext of concerns about salmonella to unfairly block Brazilian imports. It plans to file a complaint with the World Trade Organization.

Plants belonging to meatpacking giant BRF are among those affected. BRF is under investigation for trying to evade safety checks.
ANKARA, Turkey (AP) - Turkey's parliament has approved holding the country's presidential and parliamentary elections a year-and-half early, a change President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said is needed because of uncertainties over Syria.

Legislators voted overwhelmingly in favor of holding the elections on June 24. They previously were scheduled for November 2019.

Erdogan called for the snap elections, citing neighboring Syria among his reasons.

FILE - In this Sunday, May 17, 2015 file photo, a Turkish police officer uses binoculars to scan the area from a platform, backdropped by posters of Turkish Republic founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, left, and Turkey's current President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, right, during a political rally of AKP, The Justice and Development Party in Istanbul. Turkey's weak opposition is scrambling to try and mount a strong challenge against Turkey's strongman President Erdogan with just nine weeks to prepare for snap elections, scheduled for June 24, 2018. Turkey is switching from a parliamentary system to an executive presidential system that will concentrate increased powers in the hands of the president, following a narrowly approved referendum last year. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis, file)

The sooner date hastens Turkey's switch to an executive presidential system that will abolish the office of the prime minister and give the president more powers. The change was narrowly approved in a 2017 referendum and takes effect after the next election.

Erdogan argues the new system will make Turkey stronger. Critics fear it will lead to one-man rule.

The snap polls give the opposition little time to mount a weighty campaign against Erdogan.

FILE - In this Wednesday, April 18, 2018 file photo, Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan walks before announcing early presidential and parliamentary elections, at the Presidential Palace, in Ankara, Turkey. Turkey's weak opposition is scrambling to try and mount a strong challenge against strongman President Erdogan with just nine weeks to prepare for snap elections, scheduled for June 24, 2018. Turkey is switching from a parliamentary system to an executive presidential system that will concentrate increased powers in the hands of the president, following a narrowly approved referendum last year. (Pool Photo via AP, File)

FILE - In this Wednesday, March 21, 2018 file photo, a woman holds a photograph of former co-leader of pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party, or HDP, Selahattin Demirtas, during the Newroz celebrations, marking the start of spring, in Istanbul. Demirtas has been behind bars in Turkey pending trial since November 2016 for alleged terror charges, accused of links to outlawed Kurdish militants.Turkey's weak opposition is scrambling to try and mount a strong challenge against Turkey's strongman President Recep Tayyip Erdogan with just nine weeks to prepare for snap elections, scheduled for June 24, 2018. Turkey is switching from a parliamentary system to an executive presidential system that will concentrate increased powers in the hands of the president, following a narrowly approved referendum last year. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis, File)

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announces early presidential and parliamentary elections for June 24, 2018, at the Presidential Palace, in Ankara, Turkey, Wednesday, April 18, 2018. Erdogan announced the snap elections, originally scheduled for November 2019, in a move that will usher in a new political system increasing the powers of the president. He said the new system needed to be implemented quickly in order to deal with a slew of challenges ahead, including Turkey's fight against Kurdish insurgents in Syria and Iraq. (Pool Photo via AP)
PORTLAND, Maine (AP) - A high school student in Maine who fled his native Zambia can compete in a U.S. government-funded poetry contest, a federal judge ruled Friday.

The National Endowment for the Arts had blocked the 11th-grader's participation, saying he doesn't meet their U.S. citizenship rules.

Allan Monga, a 19-year-old junior at Deering High School, won Maine's "Poetry Out Loud" contest but initially wasn't allowed to compete nationally because he hasn't yet been granted legal asylum. He and the Portland school district sued the NEA to let him participate in the finals, which start Monday in Washington.

In this April 12, 2018 photo, Allan Monga, 19, a high school student who fled his native Zambia, recites a poem during a news conference in Portland, Maine. A judge on Friday, April 20, 2018, ruled that Monga can compete in a government-funded national poetry contest. Judge John Woodcock overturned the National Endowment for the Arts' rejection on the grounds that the student doesn't meet U.S. citizenship rules. (Troy R. Bennett/The Bangor Daily News via AP)

Portland Public Schools Superintendent Xavier Botana said the school community is ecstatic that Monga is heading to the finals. The teen fled to the U.S. last year and has distinguished himself at school as a poet. Out of 9,500 students from across Maine, he won the March state finals with the poem "In the Desert," by Stephen Crane.

"It feels great to know that Allan is going to have the opportunity to show the world how amazing he is," Botana said. "And it feels great to know that justice is being served."

Melissa Hewey, who represents Monga, said she called him and told him about Judge John Woodcock's ruling.

"Right now he really wants to concentrate on poetry and make us all proud," she said. "He was speechless at first and then just really excited. He just said he was really determined to make it all worthwhile for all us."

NEA spokeswoman Elizabeth Auclair released a short statement.

"We thank the judge for his expedited review of the case," she said.

NEA lawyers cited a contest rule requiring competitors at state and national finals to be U.S. citizens or permanent residents with a valid tax identification or Social Security number, which are needed to receive prizes. A total of $50,000 in awards and school stipends are given at the national finals, including $20,000 for the national champion.

Monga's lawyers argued the NEA's eligibility rule discriminates against asylum-seekers and violates civil rights laws. They said it takes away his right to an education - and specifically a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity - that should be open to anyone in the country.

The judge agreed Monga would miss a "unique, fleeting, one-time opportunity."

Maine Democratic U.S. Rep Chellie Pingree, who co-leads the Congressional Arts Caucus, had urged the NEA to reconsider its decision to exclude Monga on the basis of his immigration status.

The NEA lawyers noted when Monga was preparing to compete in the state finals in Maine, the Maine Arts Commission contacted the NEA and was told he wasn't eligible to compete but chose to ignore it.

Despite his having a Social Security number, the NEA maintained that Monga was ineligible because he's not a citizen or permanent resident.
SOUTH PADRE ISLAND, Texas (AP) - The Latest on the arrest of a woman suspected of killing her husband in Minnesota and a woman in Florida (all times local):

3 p.m.

A county sheriff in Minnesota says his office is preparing charges to build what he calls "the strongest case" against a woman suspected in the deaths of her husband and a woman in Florida whom she resembled.

This undated, file photo provided by the Dodge County, Minn., Sheriff's Office shows Lois Riess, of Blooming Prairie, Minn., who is being sought in connection with the killing of a Florida woman. Authorities have released new video of Riess, a Minnesota woman suspected of killing her husband and then a woman in southwest Florida. (Dodge County Sheriff's Office via AP, File)

Dodge County Sheriff Scott Rose says he's relieved that 56-year-old Lois Riess was arrested Thursday at a restaurant in South Padre Island, Texas, after a witness recognized her photo and called police.

Riess had been on the run since at least late March, when her husband, David Riess, was found fatally shot at their home in Blooming Prairie, Minnesota. Investigators believe she used the same gun to fatally shoot 59-year-old Pamela Hutchinson of Bradenton, Florida. They believe she killed the woman to assume her identity.

It's unclear where Riess will be tried first.

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10:50 a.m.

Authorities say a woman suspected in the deaths of her husband and a woman in Florida had checked into a South Texas tourist town motel and was socializing in a bar when she was arrested.

South Padre Island Police Chief Randy Smith says a witness called police after recognizing 56-year-old Lois Riess from a photo. He says two undercover officers approached Riess Thursday evening, and that she did not resist arrest.

Smith says Riess hasn't been questioned because police are waiting for other agencies to arrive in South Padre Island, a beach community 27 miles (43 kilometers) from Mexico.

Riess had been on the run since at least late March, when her husband, David Riess, was found fatally shot at their home in Blooming Prairie, Minnesota. Investigators believe she used the same gun to fatally shoot 59-year-old Pamela Hutchinson of Bradenton, Florida. Hutchison was found dead April 9.

Smith says Riess wasn't armed when she was arrested.

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1:10 a.m.

A woman suspected of killing her husband in Minnesota and a woman in Florida has been captured at a South Texas resort.

The U.S. Marshals Service says two federal deputy marshals arrested 56-year-old Lois Riess on Thursday night at a South Padre Island, Texas, restaurant. South Padre Island is a beach resort community 27 miles (43 kilometers) from the crossing into Mexico.

Riess had been on the run since at least late March when her husband, 54-year-old David Riess, was found fatally shot at their home in Blooming Prairie, Minnesota. She became the subject of a nationwide hunt.

Investigators believe she used the same gun that killed her husband to fatally shoot 59-year-old Pamela Hutchinson of Bradenton, Florida. Hutchison was found dead April 9.

Authorities believe Riess killed Hutchinson to assume her identity.
Once again, they filed out of class. In a new wave of school walkouts, they raised their voices against gun violence. But this time, they were looking to turn outrage into action.

Many of the students who joined demonstrations across the country Friday turned their attention to upcoming elections as they pressed for tougher gun laws and politicians who will enact them. Scores of rallies turned into voter registration drives. Students took the stage to issue an ultimatum to their lawmakers.

"We want to show that we're not scared. We want to stop mass shootings and we want gun control," said Binayak Pandey, 16, who rallied with dozens of students outside Georgia's Capitol in Atlanta. "The people who can give us that will stay in office, and the people who can't give us that will be out of office."

Two rings of chairs encircle the words "NEVER AGAIN" in a silent protest on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting outside Trinity High School in Manchester, N.H., Friday, April 20, 2018. The inner ring chairs have names of the Columbine victims, the outer ring chairs have names of the Parkland High School shooting victims. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

All told, tens of thousands of students left class Friday for protests that spread from coast to coast. They filed out at 10 a.m. to gather for a moment of silence honoring the victims of gun violence. Some headed to nearby rallies. Others stayed at school to discuss gun control and register their peers to vote.

Organizers said an estimated 150,000 students protested Friday at more than 2,700 walkouts, including at least one in each state, as they sought to sustain a wave of youth activism that drove a larger round of walkouts on March 14. Activists behind that earlier protest estimated it drew nearly 1 million students.

Friday's action was planned by a Connecticut teenager, Lane Murdock, after a gunman stormed Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on Feb. 14, leaving 17 people dead. It was meant to coincide with the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting in Littleton, Colorado.

The focus on the November elections reflects a shift after activists gained little immediate traction in Washington. And prospects for their influence remain uncertain. Congress has shown little inclination to tighten gun laws, and President Donald Trump backed away from his initial support for raising the minimum age to buy some guns.

Among those who helped orchestrate the walkout - and the voter registration push - was the progressive group Indivisible, which formed after the 2016 election to oppose Trump's policies.

In cities across the country, it was common to see crowds of students clad in orange - the color used by hunters to signal "don't shoot" - rallying outside their schools or at public parks.

Several hundred gathered at New York City's Washington Square Park, chanting "The NRA has got to go!" and "Enough is enough." A large group in Washington marched from the White House to the Capitol building to rally for gun control.

Nate Fenerty was among hundreds of students who left class to rally in Richmond, Virginia. He registered to vote for the first time at tables set up by students at the protest and said he wants Congress to approve mandatory background checks for gun buyers.

"How many more times are we going to stand in memoriam for another school shooting before our policymakers to actually do something?" said Fenerty, who carried a sign saying "Am I Next?"

Shortly before the walkouts, news spread that there had been another shooting at a Florida school. Authorities say one student shot another in the ankle at Forest High School in Ocala early Friday. A suspect was taken into custody. Activists said it underscored the urgency of their work.

Student David Hogg, a Parkland survivor who has emerged as a leading activist, took to social media nearly every day this week urging students to register. On Thursday he made the motivation clear on Twitter: "The only way to make politicians listen to us is by voting in ones that will," he said.

Hogg was among about 50 students who walked out of Stoneman Douglas on Friday after administrators threatened protesters with unexcused absences.

Craig Smith and Terry McGary, both 17-year-old juniors, said they walked out because they want to show respect for the Columbine victims.

"It was a guilt trip to make us not walk out," McGary said about the threat.

The walkouts drew counter-protesters in some areas, including about 30 at a rally outside New Hampshire's statehouse. In Kansas, about 200 gun-rights supporters held their own demonstration outside the statehouse. Many carried signs and flags, and some brought holstered handguns.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a Republican candidate for governor, addressed the crowd and later criticized the walkout movement.

"Instead of walking out of class, why don't you stay in class and spend that half hour studying the Second Amendment? You might learn something," Kobach said later.

Some students in Colorado participated in the walkouts but not at Columbine, which has closed on April 20 ever since the 1999 shooting that left 15 people dead. Some Columbine students attended a vigil with Parkland survivors on Thursday night, but on Friday, their school called on them to attend a day of service.

Principal Scott Christy said in a letter to other schools in his district that April "has long been a time to respectfully remember our loss, and also support efforts to make our communities a better place."

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Binkley can be reached on Twitter at @cbinkley

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Binkley reported from Boston. Associated Press writers Terry Spencer in Parkland, Florida; Verena Dobnik in New York City; Denise Lavoie in Richmond, Virginia; Jeff Martin in Atlanta; and Mitchell Willetts in Topeka, Kansas, contributed to this report.

Harvard University students observe a moment of silence during a protest against school shootings and gun violence on the steps of Widener Library on campus in Cambridge, Mass., Friday, April 20, 2018. Protests were planned across the country Friday, on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)

Harvard University student Cecilia Nunez wears a Black Lives Matter earring during a rally against school shootings and gun violence on the steps of Widener Library on campus in Cambridge, Mass., Friday, April 20, 2018. Protests were planned across the country Friday, on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)

Students, from left, Nariah Marzka, 14; Morgan Orelski, 15, and Travis Burge, 15, who joined about 500 students, leave leave Keck Field after taking part in a national school walkout event to protest gun violence and honor shooting victims at Fairview High School in Fairview Township, Erie County, Pa., Friday April 20, 2018. Protests were planned across the country Friday, on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting. (Christopher Millette/Erie Times-News via AP)

Fairview Middle and High School students taking part in a national school walkout event to protest gun violence and honor shooting victims at Fairview High School in Fairview Township, Erie County, Pa., Friday April 20, 2018. As part of the event, most of the students walked twice around the Keck Field running track twice. Protests were planned across the country Friday, on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting. (Christopher Millette/Erie Times-News via AP)

Aujanae Lightfoot creates a poster as students gathered at City Hall, Friday, April 20, 2108, in Long Beach, Calif., to take part in a national school walkout event to protest gun violence. Protests were held across the country Friday, on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting. (Brittany Murray/Los Angeles Daily News via AP)

Trevor Schnack speaks to students gathered at City Hall, Friday, April 20, 2108, in Long Beach, Calif., as they take part in a national school walkout event to protest gun violence. Protests were held across the country Friday, on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting. (Brittany Murray/Los Angeles Daily News via AP)

Students pre-register to vote as they gathered at City Hall, Friday, April 20, 2108, in Long Beach, Calif., to take part in a national school walkout event to protest gun violence. Protests were held across the country Friday, on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting. (Brittany Murray/Los Angeles Daily News via AP)

A group of students at Berkeley Springs (W.Va.) High School formed a counter-protest Friday, April 20, 2018, to a student-led walkout to call for an end to gun violence in schools. On Friday, in the latest wave of school walkouts, many students turned their attention to upcoming elections as they pressed for tougher gun laws and politicians who will enact them. Scores of rallies turned into voter registration drives. Students took to podiums to issue an ultimatum to their lawmakers. (C.J. Lovelace /The Herald-Mail via AP)

Chloe Didawick, right, hugs Lydia Jenkinson after she shared gave emotional remarks to close out Friday's walkout at Berkeley Springs (W.Va.) High School, April 20, 2018. On Friday, in the latest wave of school walkouts, many students turned their attention to upcoming elections as they pressed for tougher gun laws and politicians who will enact them. Scores of rallies turned into voter registration drives. Students took to podiums to issue an ultimatum to their lawmakers. (C.J. Lovelace /The Herald-Mail via AP)

In the foreground are Berkeley Springs (W.Va.) High School students who walked out of class Friday, April 20, 2018, to protest gun violence in schools and remember victims of past shootings, like Columbine, which happened 19 years ago to the day. Students in the background formed a counter protest. On Friday, in the latest wave of school walkouts, many students turned their attention to upcoming elections as they pressed for tougher gun laws and politicians who will enact them. Scores of rallies turned into voter registration drives. Students took to podiums to issue an ultimatum to their lawmakers. (C.J. Lovelace /The Herald-Mail via AP)

A student holds a sign during a walkout Friday, April 20, 2018, at Berkeley Springs (W.Va.) High School. On Friday, in the latest wave of school walkouts, many students turned their attention to upcoming elections as they pressed for tougher gun laws and politicians who will enact them. Scores of rallies turned into voter registration drives. Students took to podiums to issue an ultimatum to their lawmakers. (C.J. Lovelace /The Herald-Mail via AP)

From left, Sevag Halajian, 18, and Christopher Meany, 17, hold names of those killed in mass school shootings as hundreds of students gather at Cleveland Charter High School in Los Angeles' Reseda neighborhood Friday, April 20, 2018. Students all over the country streamed out of their schools on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shootings in the latest round of gun-control activism following the February shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla. (Sarah Reingewirtz/Los Angeles Daily News via AP)

Hundreds of students gather at Cleveland Charter High School in Los Angeles' Reseda neighborhood Friday, April 20, 2018. Students all over the country streamed out of their schools on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shootings in the latest round of gun-control activism following the February shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla. (Sarah Reingewirtz/Los Angeles Daily News via AP)

Chelsey Assor, 17, holds the name of a student killed in a mass school shooting as hundreds of students gather at Cleveland Charter High School in Los Angeles' Reseda neighborhood Friday, April 20, 2018. Students all over the country streamed out of their schools on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shootings n the latest round of gun-control activism following the February shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla. (Sarah Reingewirtz/Los Angeles Daily News via AP)

Hundreds of students gathered Friday, April 20, 2018, at the State Capitol in St. Paul, Minn., to protest gun violence, part of a national high school walkout on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine shootings. (AP Photo/Jim Mone)

Hundreds of students gathered Friday, April 20, 2018, at the State Capitol in St. Paul, Minn., to protest gun violence, part of a national high school walkout on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine shootings. (AP Photo/Jim Mone)

Hundreds of students gathered Friday, April 20, 2018, at the State Capitol in St. Paul, Minn., to protest gun violence, part of a national high school walkout on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine shootings. (AP Photo/Jim Mone)

Hundreds of students gathered on the steps Friday, April 20, 2018, at the State Capitol in St. Paul, Minn., to protest gun violence, part of a national high school walkout on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine shootings. (AP Photo/Jim Mone)

Hundreds of students gathered Friday, April 20, 2018, at the State Capitol in St. Paul, Minn., to protest gun violence, part of a national high school walkout on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine shootings. (AP Photo/Jim Mone)

Hundreds of students gather Friday, April 20, 2018, at the State Capitol in St. Paul, Minn., to protest gun violence, part of a national high school walkout on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine shootings. (AP Photo/Jim Mone)

High school students protest during a rally calling for anti-gun laws, Friday April 20, 2018, in Washington Square Park, New York. Protests were held across the country Friday, on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, center, wait before taking the stage to address a high school rally calling for anti-gun laws, Friday April 20, 2018 in Washington Square Park, New York. Protests were held across the country Friday, on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

High school students protest during a rally calling for anti-gun laws, Friday April 20, 2018, in Washington Square Park, New York. Protests were held across the country Friday, on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

High school students protest during a rally calling for anti-gun laws, Friday April 20, 2018, in Washington Square Park, New York. Protests were held across the country Friday, on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

High school students protest during a rally calling for anti-gun laws, Friday April 20, 2018, in Washington Square Park, New York. Protests were held across the country Friday, on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

A protestor becomes tearful during a rally of high school students calling for anti-gun laws, Friday April 20, 2018 in Washington Square Park, New York. Protests were held across the country Friday, on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)

High school students protest during a rally calling for anti-gun laws, Friday April 20, 2018, in Washington Square Park, New York. Protests were held across the country Friday, on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)
TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) - A pastor and two family members accused by police of robbing a Sunday school teacher at gunpoint at their Ohio church have pleaded no contest to reduced charges.

The Blade reports 50-year-old The Rev. Anthony Morris of Toledo's St. Paul's AME Zion Church entered a plea Thursday to misdemeanor assault. His wife, 46-year-old Zelda Morris, entered a plea to criminal endangering and their 18-year-old daughter, Kamali, to disorderly conduct.

The three faced aggravated robbery charges after police said Zelda Morris took items from the teacher's purse during a confrontation in February.

Defense attorney Neil McElroy says the pastor's wife and daughter only fought with the victim, and the pastor pulled the gun to break it up.

Anthony and Zelda Morris could receive six months in jail during sentencing May 21.
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Trump administration is lashing out at China, Iran, Russia and North Korea for being "forces of instability" because of human rights abuses of their own citizens and others.

In its annual global human rights reports released on Friday, the State Department singled out the four countries for egregious rights violations, including restricting the freedoms of speech and assembly and allowing or committing violence against religious, ethnic and other minority groups. It said that countries that undermine the fundamental dignity of people are "morally reprehensible" and harm U.S. interests.

"The governments of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, for example, violate the human rights of those within their borders on a daily basis and are forces of instability as a result," acting Secretary of State John Sullivan said in an introduction to the reports - one for each country and territory in the world. He said the U.S. aims to lead by example and promotes good governance, anti-corruption efforts and the rule of law.

Acting Secretary of State John Sullivan speaks about the release of the 2017 country reports on human rights practices during a news conference at the State Department in Washington, Friday, April 20, 2018. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

In addition to harshly criticizing those countries by name, the reports, which covers 2017 and is the first entirely produced by the Trump administration, replaces sections on "reproductive rights" with one titled "coercion in population control." The shift underscores the Trump administration's anti-abortion position that has already manifested itself in funding for international health programs and has been criticized by women's health advocates.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had added the "reproductive rights" section in 2012 and it had remained a part of each country's report until this year. Beyond coercion, that section had previously called out countries that denied access to information and services for reproductive health, including contraception.

Traditional U.S. adversaries are hit hardest in the report. The entries for China, Iran, Russia and North Korea outline a litany of abuses blamed on their governments, which are also accused of failing to hold human rights violators accountable for their actions:

CHINA

The report said Beijing is responsible for arbitrary detentions, executions without due process and coerced confessions of prisoners as well as forced disappearances and "significant restrictions" on freedom of speech, press, assembly, association, religion, and movement.

In the "coercion in population control" section, the report says that China enforces "a coercive birth-limitation policy that in some cases included sterilization or abortions. In its first year in office, the Trump administration, as previous Republican administrations have done, pulled funding from the U.N. Population Fund, largely because of its work in China. The fund denies that it promotes abortion.

"China continues to spread the worst features of its authoritarian system," Sullivan told reporters on Friday.

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IRAN

The theocratic Shiite government in Iran is responsible for executing "a high number" of prisoners for crimes that don't merit the death penalty, the report said, along with torture, jailing of dissidents, severe curbs on journalists, gays and religious minorities. It also accused Iran of taking few steps to investigate, prosecute or punish any officials who committed the abuses, citing a widespread pattern of impunity for offenders.

In addition, it said that through its support for Syrian President Bashar Assad's government and Iraqi Shia militias, Iran "materially contributed" to rights abuses Syria and Iraq.

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RUSSIA

Moscow was lambasted in the report for allowing a "climate of impunity" for human rights abuses and doing little to punish officials who violate basic rights. The report laments Russia's "authoritarian political system dominated by President Vladimir Putin," in contrast with Trump's reluctance to criticize Putin or the Kremlin directly.

The list of alleged transgressions by Russia is long. The report alleged that Russia allows "systematic" torture that sometimes leads to death, along with extrajudicial killings of gay people in Chechnya, which prompted U.S. sanctions late last year under a human rights law. Russia's "lack of judicial independence," crackdowns on journalists and political dissidents, and censorship on the internet and of foreign organizations was also sharply criticized.

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NORTH KOREA

Ahead of an anticipated historic meeting in the coming weeks between Trump and leader Kim Jong Un, the report accused North Korea of "egregious human rights violations" in nearly all of the categories included in the report. Forced labor, torture, coerced abortion and arbitrary arrests are all noted in the report, which also slams North Korea for extrajudicial killings, rigid controls over citizens' private lives and the use of political prison camps.

The report says that "impunity" for those offenses continues to be a problem in North Korea.

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SYRIA

President Bashar Assad's government is accused of widespread atrocities, including chemical weapons attacks on civilians using sarin and chlorine - two agents the U.S. has said were used in this month's attack near Damascus that led the U.S., France and the U.K. to launch airstrikes. The report also accused Assad's government of starving civilians, "thousands of cases of torture," attacking hospitals and raping children "as a weapon of war."

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SAUDI ARABIA

Despite the harsh tone toward Iran, the report for Saudi Arabia - another country run under a strict version of Islamic law - is more measured. It notes without comment abuses that are similar to those in Iran, including unwarranted executions, the lack of free and fair elections and discrimination against women and homosexuals.

The report offers only mild criticism over the kingdom's military intervention in Yemen's civil war, which has long been blamed for high numbers of civilian casualties.
BARSTOW, Calif. (AP) - Family members and attorneys are disputing the official account of a fatal police shooting of a 26-year-old black man during a traffic stop this month in Barstow, California.

Authorities say Diante Yarber was shot April 5 as he drove the car toward officers in the Mojave Desert city. The incident was partially recorded on cellphone video.

Attorney S. Lee Merritt, who represents Yarber's family, told the Los Angeles Times the car was barely moving.

The San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department, which is investigating the shooting, has said Barstow officers responding to a report of a suspicious vehicle believed the driver was wanted for a crime involving a stolen vehicle and attempted a traffic stop in a Walmart parking lot.

According to the narrative, Yarber reversed into a police car, then accelerated toward officers and hit a second police car, prompting officers to fire.

The grainy cellphone video recorded gunfire but does not show the full incident, the newspaper said.

Family members and attorneys point to a portion that appears to show the Mustang moving slowly backward as officers fired.

"The car was barely rolling backward. You can walk faster than that," said Merritt, the Yarber family attorney.

Yarber died at the scene. A 23-year-old female passenger was flown to a trauma center with multiple gunshot wounds and two other young men fled from the car during the incident, officials said.

Yarber, the father of three girls, had prior convictions for escaping police and misdemeanor domestic violence and was on three years' probation at the time. He was recently charged with violating his community supervision. Authorities, however, have not said if the officers knew his identity.

The female passenger is represented by attorney Dale Galipo, who said she suffered two wounds that were "life-altering."

"The shooting was unjustified, and the police version of events contradicts information in the video and given by eyewitnesses," said Galipo.

Barstow spokesman Anthony Riley wrote in a statement to the Times that the department is cooperating with the investigation.

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Information from: Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com/
PRAGUE (AP) - The remains of a Czech cardinal who faced persecution from the Nazis and Communists have been returned to his homeland from the Vatican almost 50 years after his death.

A Czech military plane landed in Prague with the remains of Cardinal Josef Beran Friday. He will be buried at Prague's St. Vitus Cathedral.

Pope Francis approved the transport in line with Beran's last will.

Soldiers carry a coffin with the remains of Cardinal Josef Beran, upon its arrival from the Vatican in Prague, Czech Republic, Friday, April 20, 2018. The remains of a Czech Cardinal who faced with courage the brutal persecution from the Nazi and Communist regimes have returned to his homeland from the Vatican almost 50 years after his death. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)

Beran was arrested during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia during World War II and survived the Dachau concentration camp.

The Communists kept Beran - Prague archbishop from 1946 - in detention from 1949 until 1965 when he could travel to the Vatican after he was named cardinal by Pope Paul VI.

They never allowed him to return.

Beran was buried in St. Peter's Basilica in 1969.

Soldiers carry a coffin with the remains of Cardinal Josef Beran upon its arrival from the Vatican in Prague, Czech Republic, Friday, April 20, 2018. The remains of a Czech Cardinal who faced with courage the brutal persecution from the Nazi and Communist regimes have returned to his homeland from the Vatican almost 50 years after his death. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)

Soldiers carry a coffin with the remains of Cardinal Josef Beran upon its arrival from the Vatican in Prague, Czech Republic, Friday, April 20, 2018. The remains of a Czech Cardinal who faced with courage the brutal persecution from the Nazi and Communist regimes have returned to his homeland from the Vatican almost 50 years after his death. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)

Soldiers carry a coffin with the remains of Cardinal Josef Beran upon arrival from the Vatican in Prague, Czech Republic, Friday, April 20, 2018. The remains of a Czech Cardinal who faced with courage the brutal persecution from the Nazi and Communist regimes have returned to his homeland from the Vatican almost 50 years after his death. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek)
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) - A New York judge has dismissed a lawsuit that sought to block the parole of an ex-radical who fatally shot two New York City police officers in 1971.

State Supreme Court Justice Richard Koweek ruled Friday that the state Parole Board did not act irrationally or outside its bounds when it granted parole last month to Herman Bell after he served 44 years.

The 70-year-old Bell had been scheduled to be released this week before the legal challenge was filed by the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association on behalf of Diane Piagentini, widow of one of the slain officers. Her lawyers had argued the parole board didn't follow proper protocols.

In this Oct. 10, 2017 photo provided by the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, inmate Herman Bell is poses for a photo at the Shawangunk Correctional Facility in Shawangunk, N.Y. A New York judge has dismissed a lawsuit that sought to block the parole of an ex-radical who fatally shot two New York City police officers in 1971. State Supreme Court Justice Richard Koweek ruled Friday, April 20, 2018, that the state Parole Board did not act irrationally or outside its bounds when it granted parole last month to Bell after serving 44 years. (New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision via AP)

In his ruling, Koweek wrote that the widow did not have legal standing to challenge the board's decision. He also concluded that in order to overturn the Parole Board's decision a court must find it acted with "irrationality bordering on impropriety."

"Nothing that is supplied in this case persuades this Court that the actions of the Parole Board meet that standard," he wrote.

In a statement, the PBA said it would appeal the ruling, which PBA President Patrick J. Lynch called "outrageous." Diane Piagentini said her family is devastated that the judge "turned a blind eye to the Parole Board's illegal actions."

"Not only have they compounded the pain and suffering we have experienced since my husband's death, they have also put the safety of the public in jeopardy by releasing a vicious killer like Herman Bell," she said.

The decision to parole Bell has been widely criticized by Republican state lawmakers. Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Thursday that while he disagreed with the decision, the Parole Board isn't not subject to his direct control.

"If I were on the parole board I would not have made that decision," he told reporters. "The Parole Board is an independent board but I would not have made that decision."

Supporters of the decision note that Bell was properly eligible for parole, and that continuing to incarcerate an elderly man was an unwarranted use of state resources.

Bell and two other members of the Black Liberation Army, a violent offshoot of the Black Panther Party, were convicted of killing officers Waverly Jones and Joseph Piagentini after luring them to a Harlem housing development with a bogus 911 call. Authorities say both officers were shot multiple times, with Piagentini hit by more than 20 bullets.

During Bell's eighth parole hearing in early March, the state parole board approved Bell's release from Shawangunk Correctional Facility in Ulster County, determining "his debt has been paid to society." Board members took into consideration his stated remorse for killing the officers and the fact he had earned bachelor's and master's degrees while in prison and counseled other inmates.

It was unclear Friday afternoon when Bell would be released.

One of Bell's co-defendants has since died in prison while the other, Anthony Bottom, is serving 25 years to life at maximum-security Sullivan Correctional Facility in Sullivan County. Bottom, 66, is due for a parole hearing in June.
NEW YORK (AP) - The public split between the White House and U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley this week over Russia sanctions threw a spotlight on her at-times uneasy relationship with President Donald Trump, even as her deft rebuttal bolstered talk about her own future political fortunes.

Haley's rejoinder to a putdown from a close Trump adviser about message confusion - she declared that "I don't get confused" - was seized as a rallying cry among some women and echoed the audacity the former governor displayed while upending the old boys' club in the South Carolina statehouse. But the episode also called into question her standing on Trump's national security team ahead of tough decisions on North Korea, Iran and other fronts.

"What distinguishes her from the star-struck sycophants in the White House is that she understands the intersection of strong leadership and public service, where great things happen," said Rob Godfrey, a spokesman for Haley when she was governor.

United Nations Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley arrives at The European Spallation Source (ESS) in Lund, Sweden, Friday, April 20, 2018. The annual informal working meeting with the UN Secretary-General and the Security Council will be held at Dag Hammarskojld's farm Backakra in Skane, southern Sweden on Saturday. (Johan Nilsson/TT News Agency via AP)

Haley, now considered to be on the shortlist of future presidential candidates, has consistently taken a harder line than Trump on Russia. While that has, at times, drawn Trump's ire, her hawkishness on other occasions has been appreciated by the president, who has allowed her to reprimand Moscow while he works toward a friendship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

That dynamic broke down this week. Trump was angry Sunday when he saw Haley on television discussing new Russia sanctions that she said would be announced the next day. He blasted her for being out of step with the rest of the administration, according to two White House officials. They were not authorized to discuss private conversations and commented only on condition of anonymity.

Despite Haley's words, no new sanctions were imposed.

Asked for an explanation, Larry Kudlow, the president's new economic adviser, told reporters that Haley "got ahead of the curve" and he added, "She's a very effective ambassador, but there might have been some momentary confusion about that."

The next day, Haley hit back, releasing a statement to Fox News that read: "With all due respect, I don't get confused."

Kudlow apologized but Haley's differences with the White House had already pushed into the open.

At the United Nations, responding to a shouted question about her relationship with the president, she simply said, "It's perfect." But the White House was left scrambling to explain.

Haley's allies insist she always consults with the West Wing, and sometimes the president personally, before speaking publicly. White House officials said the plan about the sanctions changed after she was briefed and she wasn't told before she went on television. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin further muddled the narrative Thursday when he told Fox Business Network that the administration "refined the strategy after Nikki made that announcement."

He said, "She wasn't left twisting in the wind, this was a fluid situation, the decision changed."

Haley's pushback struck a chord, becoming something of an instant feminist motto in the way it rebelled against what some saw as a patronizing comment from a powerful man. The words carried additional resonance considering Haley's place as one of the few prominent women in Trump's inner circle. Her comment was compared in some quarters to the way Sen. Elizabeth Warren had appropriated "Nevertheless, she persisted" as a rallying cry after the remark was delivered by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell after he tried to silence Warren on the Senate floor last year.

"I feel sorry for Nikki Haley," said former Secretary of State Madeline Albright. "She has been very tough up there making points. She makes very clear that she's representing the president. And all of a sudden she's put into this ridiculous situation of looking as though she is out there by herself on something."

Trump has vented to confidants about the media attention the dustup has received, but he hasn't given any signal that he wants to dismiss his ambassador, according to White House officials and outside advisers. Her footing on Trump's revamped national security team remains unclear: She is tight with Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State nominee Mike Pompeo, but lost an ally when H.R. McMaster was replaced by John Bolton as national security adviser.

All the attention has restarted some wary West Wing whispers about Haley's ultimate goals.

Her rebuttal stood in stark contrast to the conduct of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who largely remained silent when they were undermined by Trump. She did not support Trump in her state's primary election, was viewed by many as gunning for Tillerson's job last fall, and has been floated by some Republicans as a possible running mate for Pence if he makes his own White House run.

One West Wing aide joked recently that the only question was if Haley's name would appear on a ballot in 2020 or 2024.

And on Tuesday, her office mistakenly blasted an email containing a series of press clippings that mention Haley - a message meant for the ambassador herself - to a number of journalists. Among the headlines highlighted, one cited MSNBC "Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough and read, "Scarborough: Nikki Haley would beat Donald Trump if she ran in 2020 GOP primary."

"She has an incredibly bright future and will be a major player for the Republican party in the years ahead," said Newt Gingrich, former House speaker and informal Trump ally. "I think she's a future secretary of state and vice president. And remember: this president learns a lot from television. She is a remarkably effective presence for the United States of America on television and the president likes that."

Haley, the daughter of Indian immigrants, grew up enduring racist taunts during her childhood in a small South Carolina town. She is accustomed to defying political expectations.

In her first campaign in 2004, she defeated the longest-serving member of South Carolina's House. One of only a handful of women in the Legislature, she showed the tough political skin she said was needed to make political progress.

"I don't know how to be intimidated," she declared.

She faced her biggest challenge in 2015, when a self-avowed white supremacist gunned down nine black worshippers in a Charleston church. Haley sat front-and-center for weeks at the funerals and later backed removing the Confederate flag from the South Carolina Statehouse grounds, where it had flown for more than 50 years.

Says former spokesman Godfrey: "She's not afraid to stand up to people who are bullies, whether it's a thug dictator on the next continent, or it's a thug state senator in the next county."

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Kinnard reported from Columbia, South Carolina. Additional reporting by Associated Press writers Matthew Lee and Catherine Lucey in Washington and Edith Lederer at the United Nations.

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Follow Lemire on Twitter at http://twitter.com/@JonLemire and Kinnard at http://twitter.com/@MegKinnardAP

United Nations Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, center, France's Ambassador to the United Nations Francois Delattre, right, Poland's Ambassador to the United Nations Joanna Wronecka, left, and Russia's Ambassador to the United Nations Vassily Nebenzia look on at The European Spallation Source (ESS) in Lund, Sweden, Friday, April 20, 2018. The annual informal working meeting with the UN Secretary-General and the Security Council will be held at Dag Hammarskojld's farm Backakra in Skane, southern Sweden on Saturday. (Johan Nilsson/TT News Agency via AP)

United Nations Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, center, during a visit at The European Spallation Source (ESS) in Lund, Sweden, Friday, April 20, 2018. The annual informal working meeting with the UN Secretary-General and the Security Council will be held at Dag Hammarskojld's farm Backakra in Skane, southern Sweden on Saturday. (Johan Nilsson/TT News Agency via AP)

United States Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley speaks at a Security Council meeting at United Nations headquarters, Thursday, April 19, 2018. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) - One of the Republican Party's top fundraisers is running for governor of Wyoming.

Foster Friess is a 78-year-old investor who lives in Jackson Hole. Friess announced his campaign for governor Friday at the Republican state convention in Laramie.

Friess hasn't held major political office before and isn't well-known in Wyoming, but he is widely known as a major force in Republican political circles.

Friess served in the U.S. Army before becoming an investor in the 1970s.

Friess told GOP convention-goers "Wyoming is what America could be" - a place where people are civil to one another.

Republican Gov. Matt Mead is term-limited. Other Republicans running include Cheyenne businessman Sam Galeotos and State Treasurer Mark Gordon. Former Wyoming State Rep. Mary Throne seeks the Democratic nomination.
NEW YORK (AP) - The Latest on the Democratic Party lawsuit against President Donald Trump's campaign (all times local):

4:30 p.m.

President Donald Trump's re-election campaign is slamming a lawsuit filed by the national Democratic Party as "frivolous" and a "last-ditch effort to substantiate" what it says are "baseless" allegations of Russian collusion.

President Donald Trump walks down the stairs of Air Force One during his arrival at Palm Beach International Airport in West Palm Beach, Fla., Thursday, April 19, 2018. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

The Democratic National Committee's suit accuses Trump's 2016 campaign, his son, his son-in-law, the Russian Federation and WikiLeaks of a conspiracy to undercut Democrats in the 2016 election.

But Trump's 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale says he thinks the "sham lawsuit about a bogus Russian collusion claim filed by a desperate, dysfunctional, and nearly insolvent Democratic Party" will be dismissed.

Parscale is also warning of consequences if the suit proceeds.

He says the campaign is prepared to leverage the discovery process to explore the inner workings of the DNC, including officials' emails.

___

3:30 p.m.

The national Democratic Party sued President Donald Trump's campaign, his son, his son-in-law, the Russian Federation and WikiLeaks on Friday, accusing them of an intricate conspiracy to undercut Democrats in the 2016 election by stealing tens of thousands of emails and documents.

The lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court sought unspecified damages and an order to prevent further interference with computer systems of the Democratic National Committee.

"During the 2016 presidential campaign, Russia launched an all-out assault on our democracy, and it found a willing and active partner in Donald Trump's campaign," DNC Chairman Tom Perez said in a statement.
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Latest on former FBI Director James Comey's memos (all times local):

11:55 p.m.

President Donald Trump appears to be trying to undermine Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation by suggesting it was prompted by "illegally leaked" memos.

Copies of the memos written by former FBI Director James Comey are photographed in Washington, Thursday, April 19, 2018. President Donald Trump told former FBI Director James Comey that he had serious concerns about the judgment of his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, according to memos maintained by Comey and obtained by The Associated Press. The 15 pages of documents contain new details about a series of interactions that Comey had with Trump in the weeks before his May 2017 firing. Those encounters include a White House dinner at which Comey says Trump asked him for his loyalty. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

Trump tweets late Friday that former FBI Director James Comey "illegally leaked classified documents to the press in order to generate a Special Council?"

He says that, "Therefore, the Special Council was established based on an illegal act?" adding: "Really, does everybody know what that means?"

Trump is referring to memos Comey wrote documenting his conversations with Trump before he was fired. He asked a friend to release them to the press.

Comey has said he hoped the memos' release would lead to the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate Russian election meddling and potential coordination with Trump's campaign.

The memos, which were obtained this week by the AP, were unclassified, though some portions were blacked out as classified.

Trump is tweeting late Friday night from his private Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida.

___

4:40 p.m.

James Comey and President Donald Trump seem to disagree on most everything, but the ex-FBI director's memos show consensus on at least thing: the need to hunt down leakers.

The two officials bonded over the idea of a proposed leak crackdown, even sharing a chuckle over a crude joke involving jailed journalists, according to memos maintained by Comey and obtained by The Associated Press.

According to the memos, Comey told Trump it would be tricky legally to jail reporters but said he saw value in going after leakers and "putting a head on a pike as a message" by bringing such a case.

Trump shot back that sending that message may involve jailing reporters.

__

9:05 a.m.

President Donald Trump fumed at former national security adviser Michael Flynn over a delayed return call to Russian President Vladimir Putin. That's what two people familiar with the call told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

Trump's displeasure with Flynn was revealed late Thursday in memos written by former FBI Director James Comey detailing his conversations with Trump. The identity of the foreign leader, with whom Trump spoke on Jan. 28, 2017, was blacked out in the copies of the memos sent to Capitol Hill on Thursday and obtained by the AP.

Comey recounts how Trump at a private White House dinner pointed his fingers at his head and complained that Flynn "has serious judgment issues" over failing to promptly alert him to Putin's call shortly after his inauguration.

___

6:50 a.m.

President Donald Trump is defending his former national security adviser after the release of memos written by fired FBI Director James Comey.

Trump tweets: "So General Michael Flynn's life can be totally destroyed while Shadey (sic) James Comey can Leak and Lie and make lots of money from a third rate book (that should never have been written)."

He goes on to ask: "Is that really the way life in America is supposed to work? I don't think so!"

In one memo, Comey recounted how Trump once pointed his fingers at his head and complained that Flynn had "serious judgment issues."

The 15 pages of documents contain new details about a series of interactions with Trump that Comey said he found so unnerving that he chose to document them in writing.

___

1 a.m.

Former FBI Director James Comeys memos show President Donald Trump sharing some startling observations in a series of candid conversations last year. Comey wrote that Trump had serious concerns about the judgment of a top adviser, asked about the possibility of jailing journalists and described a boast from Vladimir Putin about Russian prostitutes.

That's according to Comey's notes of the talks that were obtained by The Associated Press on Thursday night.

The 15 pages of documents contain new details about a series of interactions with Trump that Comey found so unnerving that he chose to document them in writing. Those seven encounters came in the weeks and months before Comey's May 2017 firing.

.
Britain's hopes to strike post Brexit trade deals around the world could collapse in a row over the Irish border.

Brussels 'annihilated' Theresa May's plans to take Britain out of the EU customs union while keeping a soft border with the Republic, it was today claimed.

While the EU's chief negotiator Michel Barnier warned that negotiations could 'fail' and the UK may crash out of the bloc without a transition deal.

The UK's proposals to use technology to avoid hard customs checks and border guards were rejected after a 'detailed and forensic rebuttal' of the plans, it emerged today.

The move is a major blow to the PM and casts serious doubt over whether Britain will be able to leave the customs union.

It comes after Australia's foreign minister Julie Bishop warned Britain must leave the customs union to strike trade deals with her country.

Michel Barnier (pictured at the European Parliament leaning over EU Commisison chief Jean Claude-Juncker on Tuesday) said there is a chance the UK will crash out of the bloc with no transition deal

Miss Bishop told the BBC World Tonight: 'My understanding is that if Britain remains in a customs union then the opportunity for us to enter into a free trade agreement with Britain would not be achievable.'

Meanwhile, appearing on French TV today, Mr Barnier also warned that a Brexit deal was far from done and dusted.

He told France2 TV: 'I say as the Union's negotiator that there are still difficulties, still a risk of failure.

'On 25 per cent of the text, we don't have agreement.

RESOLVING THE IRISH BORDER: WHERE THE PARTIES STAND British Government: No physical infrastructure on the border but Northern Ireland leaves the EU Customs Union with the rest of the UK. Customs rules to be policed with local exemptions and technology. Irish Government: No physical infrastructure on the border and the same rules on trade on both sides. Ireland suggests this could mean leaving Northern Ireland inside the customs union with checks at Belfast and other ports. DUP: Protect Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom at all costs. No physical infrastructure but no concession to making rules different in the UK and Northern Ireland. Sinn Fein: Leave Northern Ireland in the Customs Union and Single Market so it mirror rules in the Republic EU: Keep the EU27 together and back Ireland over the UK. Advertisement

'If there is no agreement, there is no orderly withdrawal, there is a disorderly withdrawal and there is no transition.'

Restating his position that the integrity of the single market and the freedom of movement are 'non-negotiable', Mr Barnier switched from French to English when asked if the UK could obtain a 'single market a la carte' deal, replying: 'No way.'

The breakdown in talks over the Irish border was revealed today by the Daily Telegraph and throws into doubt hopes of a trade deal by October.

Mrs May has vowed to take Britain out of the EU customs union as the country will not be able to strike its own trade deals if it stays in.

However, what happens with the Irish border - which will be the UK's only land border with the EU after Brexit - has proven to be one of the thorniest issues in the Brexit talks.

There are fears that a return to a hard border and the border guards of the past could reignited sectarian violence and a fresh round of The Troubles.

Downing Street today insisted it 'does not recognise' the reports in The Telegraph.

No 10 said it is confident a deal that protect's Northern Ireland's place in the UK and allows new trade deals after Brexit can be struck in the 'coming months'.

Peter Bone, Tory MP for Wellingborough, told Mail Online the EU is trying to 'bully' Britain.

He said: 'The EU negotiators are always trying to bully us and we are going to have to stand up and be counted.

'We have to say we are not going to have a hard border.'

The row will fuel demands by Remainers for Mrs May to abandon her commitment to scrapping the customs union - an idea hated by Brexiteers because it would limit Britain's ability to strike new trade deals but which could break the deadlock.

Peers heavily defeated the Government on a customs union amendment on Wednesday night and MPs will hold a symbolic vote on the crucial issue next week.

Theresa May's (pictured today in Windsor) hopes for a Brexit deal have suffered a fresh blow after Brussels rejected out of hand all Britain's ideas for the Irish border

Detailed scrutiny of the UK proposals for the Irish border (file image) were 'annihilated' by EU negotiators as they were presented by British diplomat Olly Robbins

A Downing Street spokesman said: 'The two proposals we have put forward remain the basis for our negotiation position and what the PM set out at Mansion House.'

Both Britain and the EU have publicly committed to ensure the Irish border remains open after Brexit.

But the two sides are far apart on how to make it work after Britain leaves the single market, leaving different rules on trade across the border for the first time in decades.

The UK has insisted local exemptions and technology-based solutions can be used instead of border checks.

The EU says the only practical solution is for Northern Ireland to continue to follow EU rules after Brexit - effectively keeping it inside the single market and customs union.

Britain's lead negotiator Olly Robbins met senior EU officials this week with the PM's plans said to be subjected to 'a systematic and forensic annihilation'

Dublin has a veto over the entire Brexit deal if it is unhappy with the proposals after EU council president Donald Tusk (right) gave Irish Premier Leo Varadkar (left) the EU's full support

Dublin has a veto over the entire Brexit deal if it is unhappy with the proposals and Britain agreed in December the 'backstop' option is for the UK to mirror EU rules.

Mrs May's DUP allies will never allow any deal that means rules in Northern Ireland are different to the mainland UK, claiming it would mean a border down the Irish Sea.

The latest breakdown in talks emerged after Britain's former ambassador to the EU Sir Ivan Rogers said that UK hopes of finding a technological solution to the border issue were regarded as 'a fantasy island unicorn model' in European capitals.

WHEN WILL BRITAIN BE OUT OF THE EU? Britain triggered Article 50 on March 29, 2017, starting a two year process for leaving the EU: March 2018: Outline transition deal agreed, running for about two years June 2018: EU summit that Brussels says should consider broad principles of a future trade deal. October 2018: Political agreement on the future partnership due to be reached Early 2019: Major votes in Westminster and Brussels to ratify the deal March 29, 2019: Article 50 expires, Britain leaves the EU. Transition is expected to keep everything the same for about two years December 31, 2020: Transition expected to come to an end and the new relationship - if it has been agreed - should kick in Advertisement

A UK Government spokesman insisted that Britain was 'continuing an intensive work programme to engage' on all the scenarios set out in the Joint Report agreed in December by Mrs May and European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker.

The agreement included three options for the Irish border, with the British backing a close economic relationship which would make customs checks unnecessary or technological solutions to render them near-frictionless.

But a version published by the EU in February contained only the third 'backstop' option, effectively drawing a customs border down the Irish Sea, which a furious Mrs May said 'no British Prime Minister could ever agree'.

The report puts pressure on Mrs May ahead over a vote in the Commons next week on keeping the UK in the European Customs Union, just days after she was defeated on the issue in the Lords.

If the UK position continues to be rejected by Brussels, the Government could be faced with a choice between remaining in the Customs Union or accepting a hard border in Ireland.

Mrs May has been warned a hard border could inflame tensions so much it could even lead to the collapse of the Good Friday Agreement.

On Wednesday, European Council president Donald Tusk warned that there will be 'no withdrawal agreement and no transition' without a solution on Ireland.

Responding to the Telegraph report, former Treasury permanent secretary Lord Macpherson tweeted: 'EU's position on Irish border so predictable. UK sold pass by conceding 'backstop' in December, inviting EU to hold us to it. #badbusiness'

Sir Ivan Rogers said that UK hopes of finding a technological solution to the border issue were regarded as 'a fantasy island unicorn model' in European capitals

According to the Telegraph, Mr Robbins was also warned that Brussels needs 'full compliance' with EU rules on goods and agricultural products in the whole of the UK  not just Northern Ireland  if customs barriers are to be avoided.

A Government spokesman said: 'We have been clear that we will protect Northern Ireland's place in the UK internal market.

'That commitment was set out in December's Joint Report which also includes our guarantee of avoiding a hard border between Northern Ireland and Ireland.

'As the PM's letter to Donald Tusk said, we have made our position on aspects of the draft Commission Protocol clear.

'We have agreed that the areas covered in the draft must reflect those that meet our shared commitments.

'And we are continuing an intensive work programme to engage on all the scenarios set out in the Joint Report.'

Responding to the Telegraph report, former Treasury permanent secretary Lord Macpherson tweeted: 'EU's position on Irish border so predictable.

'UK sold pass by conceding 'backstop' in December, inviting EU to hold us to it. #badbusiness'.

Speaking at the Policy Exchange think tank in London, Sir Ivan said that the economic solution was not regarded as 'a runner' on the other side of the Channel, because of Mrs May's insistence on leaving the single market and customs union.

And he added: 'The Brits are therefore focused above all on Option B  the technological solution.

City jobs are safe, says Hammond The UK will avoid a mass exodus of bankers after Brexit thanks to successful negotiations with Brussels, Philip Hammond said yesterday. In an upbeat speech, the Chancellor said the UK had dammed the flow of financial services jobs from the City to European rivals. Mr Hammond was also positive about prospects for the UK economy, saying he hoped to exceed a downbeat forecast made by the Office for Budget Responsibility in March and deliver a positive shock. He said: We have dammed the flow and avoided what could have been a haemorrhaging of jobs from the UK into the EU. The Chancellors comments in Washington came after a visit to Wall Street, where he went to the investment banks and fund managers who have chosen to make their European headquarters in Britain. The City is enormously valuable to the British economy, generating a surplus on services of 80 billion a year. Mr Hammond  who has been criticised for his pro-Remain leaning and gloomy forecasts  said: We have got to the point where debt is going down. Inflation has fallen sharply and earnings are continuing to rise so we are back to rising real wages. The most important metric for ordinary families is real wage growth. Advertisement

'That, candidly, from everything I've heard from various places is still viewed as a bit of a fantasy island unicorn model.

'The Irish and Brussels in particular  but I think backed, as far as I can see, by Berlin and Paris  have said the only solution to this is the so-called backstop Option C, which is what the Commission put in print and got the toxic reaction both from the DUP and the Prime Minister.'

Meanwhile, The Times reported frustration within the Cabinet over delays in drawing up the Government's plans for immigration after Brexit.

Home Secretary Amber Rudd told MPs last month that the immigration bill would not be introduced until early next year.

But the paper quoted one unnamed source as saying Ms Rudd seemed to think she could 'take as long as she likes', and said an unnamed 'ally' of Work and Pensions Secretary Esther McVey had said: 'We're eager to get on with it'.

Eleven select committee chairmen joined together to force a vote next week calling on the Government to make staying in a customs union with the EU an objective in negotiations with Brussels.

Downing Street insisted Mrs May would not back down on her determination to leave the customs union. However, ministers privately fear they could struggle to win a vote on the issue in the Commons.

Mrs May was last night under pressure to strip Tory peer Baroness McGregor-Smith of her role as a government business ambassador for voting to keep Britain in a customs union, in defiance of government trade policy.

But she also faced calls to remove fellow peers Lord Burns and Baroness Noakes from the board of the broadcasting regulator Ofcom after they voted with the Government on the issue.

Downing Street declined to comment yesterday.
Two Florida deputies have been killed after shots were fired through the window of a restaurant, authorities said.

Gilchrist County Sheriff Bobby Schultz said during a news conference that Sergeant Noel Ramirez and Deputy Taylor Lindsey were killed on Thursday afternoon in Trenton.

Mr Schultz said the deputies were getting food at the Ace China restaurant when the shooter walked up to the building and fired at them through a window.

(PA)

Fellow deputies responding to the scene found the shooter dead outside the business.

Sergeant Noel Ramirez. Deputy Sheriff Taylor Lindsey.



Our heroes. Killed in the line of duty today, April 19th, at the Ace China in Trenton.



We'll continue to serve you. For them.  Gilchrist Co Sheriff (@GCSOFlorida) April 20, 2018

Mr Schultz would not say how the suspect died, adding that state law enforcement officials were investigating.

Authorities said there was no apparent motive for the shooting.

Mr Schultz called the officers the best of the best.

The shooters name was not immediately released.

Trenton is in northern Florida, about 35 miles west of Gainesville.
President Donald Trump told former FBI director James Comey that he had serious concerns about the judgment of his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, according to memos maintained by Mr Comey.

The 15 pages of documents, obtained by The Associated Press, contain new details about a series of interactions that Comey had with Mr Trump in the weeks before his May 2017 firing.

Those encounters include a White House dinner at which Mr Comey says Mr Trump asked him for his loyalty, and a meeting the following month in which he says the president asked him to end an investigation into Mr Flynn.

According to one memo, Mr Trump complained about Mr Flynn at a private January 2017 dinner with Mr Comey, saying the guy has serious judgment issues. He then blamed Mr Flynn for a delay in returning the congratulatory call of an international leader.

I did not comment at any point during this topic and there was no mention or acknowledgement of any FBI interest in or contact with General Flynn, Mr Comey wrote.

Copies of the memos written by James Comey (Susan Walsh/AP)

Mr Flynn was fired a month later after White House officials said he had misled about his Russian contacts during the transition period. In a separate memo, Mr Comey says Mr Trump cleared the Oval Office of other officials, encouraged him to let the investigation into Mr Flynn go and called him a good guy.

In a Senate hearing in June, Mr Comey told Congress, I knew there might come a day when I would need a record of what had happened, not just to defend myself, but to defend the FBI and our integrity as an institution and the independence of our investigative function.

The memos were provided to Congress earlier on Thursday as House Republicans escalated criticism of the department, threatening to subpoena the documents and questioning officials.

In a letter sent to three Republican House committee chairmen on Thursday evening, Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd wrote that the department was sending a classified version of the memos and an unclassified version. The department released Mr Boyds letter publicly but did not release the memos.

Justice officials had allowed some politicians to view the memos but had never provided copies to Congress. Mr Boyd wrote that the department had also provided the memos to several Senate committees.

Mr Trump claimed vindication after the release of the memos.

Mr Trump said the memos show clearly that there was NO COLLUSION and NO OBSTRUCTION.

Its not clear what in the memos led the president to reach the conclusion.

Mr Trump also accused Mr Comey of having leaked classified information, though the Justice Department said the memos it provided to Congress on Thursday were in unclassified form.

Mr Trump ended his tweet by saying, WOW! Will the Witch Hunt continue?

Mr Comey is on a publicity tour to promote his new book, A Higher Loyalty. He revealed last year that he had written the memos after conversations with Mr Trump.

Details from some memos were made public in media accounts in the days after he was fired. At the Senate hearing, Mr Comey detailed his conversations with Mr Trump.

One Comey memo recounts a February request from Mr Trump, during a private meeting in the Oval Office, that Mr Comey end an investigation into Mr Flynn.

Mr Boyd wrote in the letter that the department consulted the relevant parties and concluded that releasing the memos would not adversely affect any ongoing investigations. Special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating potential ties between Russia and Trumps 2016 campaign as well as possible obstruction of justice by the president.

Mr Boyd said the decision to allow the release of the memos does not alter the departments traditional obligation to protect from public disclosure witness statements and other documents obtained during an ongoing investigation.

Mr Comey said in an interview on Thursday with CNN that hes fine with the Justice Department turning his memos over to Congress.

I think what folks will see if they get to see the memos is Ive been consistent since the very beginning, right after my encounters with President Trump, and Im consistent in the book and tried to be transparent in the book as well, he said.

Last week, the Republican chairmen of three House committees demanded the memos by Monday. The Justice Department asked for more time, and the politcians agreed.
Dame Tessa Jowell feels a deep sense of responsibility to give a voice to patients and pave the way for other cancer sufferers, her daughter has said.

Jess Mills said she was inspired by her mothers ferocious sense of mission, as the Labour peer became the first patient to donate her medical data to the Universal Cancer Databank (UCD).

The project aims to develop better treatments for rare forms of cancer and speed up the discovery of new ones by sharing patient information with researchers across the world.

Baroness Jowell was diagnosed with brain cancer in May last year.

She has since called for greater collaboration to fight cancer, earning a standing ovation for an emotional address to the House of Lords.

Jess Mills, daughter of Baroness Tessa Jowell, during an interview with the Press Association to discuss the newly launched Universal Cancer Databank, in London (Yui Mok/PA)

Ms Mills told the Press Association: My mum has been my internal compass my whole life and she has taught me everything.

And I have to say that I have learnt more from her than I ever could have imagined in this last year.

Her bravery, her dignity, her ferocious sense of mission, her selflessness and her courage and her vision and her ability to lead at a moment where others would quite simply withdraw.

So we are doing this for her, with her, we are doing this for all of us.

Baroness Tessa Jowell with Sarah Jones and James Brokenshire in the House of Commons ahead of a debate on cancer treatment (The Brain Tumour Charity/PA)

Baroness Jowell has a rare brain tumour known as glioblastoma, which strikes fewer than 3,000 people in England every year and has a very poor prognosis.

She has pledged support to the UCD, a project by the Eliminate Cancer Initiative and part-funded by the Minderoo Foundation, at the House of Commons on Thursday.

The database will first collect the data of brain cancer patients to share with researchers.

Baroness Jowell hopes the UCD will help tackle the cancer inequalities across the world and put patients at the front of the agenda, her daughter said.

My mum feels a deep sense of responsibility to be the voice for so many voiceless patients and this action tonight is her starting to pave the path for others to tread, Ms Mills said.

The whole conversation around cancer treatment and the search for cures has to come back to the patient.

This is a really historical moment to mark the future as we want to see it.

Australian philanthropist Andrew Forrest and Jess Mills, daughter of Baroness Tessa Jowell, talk to the Press Association about the new Universal Cancer Databank, in London (Yui Mok/PA)

Andrew Forrest, an Australian philanthropist and founder of the Eliminate Cancer Initiative, described Baroness Jowells pledge as an incredibly selfless act and described the project as the beginning of the march of the patients.

He said: We hadnt met, we didnt know each other, and I put the idea to her that she could be the first to step out and contribute her data, knowing that its going to go into a global bank which will be freely accessible to researchers all over the world.

The energy in her conviction literally crackled down that phone line.

She said: Im going to do this Andrew, this is exactly what the world needs.

Brain cancer was picked as the first target of the collaborative project because it was probably the most terrifying disease known to man and the toughest to crack, Mr Forrest said.

He hopes millions of people will follow in Baroness Jowells steps and share their medical data to help other people not tread the same tortuous suffering path which they are on.

I'm so moved to have been surrounded by the love of colleagues from across Parliament today and their support to beat cancer together pic.twitter.com/TTS781IOmn  Tessa Jowell (@TessaJowell) April 19, 2018

Baroness Jowell said: It is my hope that, through my cancer journey and sharing of my data, we will be able to develop better treatments for cancer and speed up the discovery of new ones.

Im grateful to the Eliminate Cancer Initiative and all the people who have shown me such support since I learned I had a brain tumour.

Together, with hope, we can achieve greater survival for cancer patients across the world.
Scandals leading lady, Kerry Washington, has paid tribute to her co-stars after the last ever episode of the television show aired in the US.

The 41-year-old, who played tough-talking Olivia Pope in the Shonda Rhimes series for seven years, posted a series of pictures on Instagram to honour her fellow actors.

In a photograph of her alongside other main cast members Darby Stanchfield (Abby Whelan), Katie Lowes (Quinn Perkins) and Bellamy Young (Mellie Grant), she wrote: I love my #Scandal Sisters. #Scandal family is real. #TheFinalScandal.

Kerry Washington (Anthony Harvey/PA)

Washington also posted photographs of her and Tony Goldwyn, who played the US President and her on-off romantic lead in the series.

Show creator Rhimes thanked fans on Instagram alongside a screen grab of Jeff Perry (Cyrus Bean) from the final episode.

She wrote: Thank you for an amazing 7 seasons. #overacliff #scandal.

Perry also tweeted, calling his co-stars a beautiful tribe.

I am looking into my fellow actors faces in new scenes for the last time...what a Beautiful tribe. #Scandal #thefinalscandal #TGIT  Jeff Perry (@jscandalp) April 20, 2018

East Coast! Thank you thank you thank you for your devotion, your time and your tweets. Its been such an amazing ride. #scandal  scott foley (@scottkfoley) April 20, 2018

Felicity actor Scott Foley, who played Jake Ballard, tweeted: East Coast! Thank you thank you thank you for your devotion, your time and your tweets. Its been such an amazing ride. #scandal.
Durex owner Reckitt Benckiser disappointed City analysts with its sales performance in the first quarter, sending its shares down 6% in morning trading on Friday.

Sales were up 2% on a like-for-like basis at the company, which owns a suite of household brands including Dettol, Clearasil and Gaviscon. Analysts had been expecting a rise of 2.6%.

Reckitt Benckiser bought nutrition specialist Mead Johnson last year, and said the integrated business had been performing well in China and had delivered growth of 6%.

Reckitt Benckiser owns a suite of household brands (PA)

However, the company was hit by significant underperformance from Scholl. The footcare brand brought down sales in Reckitt Benckisers health division, more than offsetting gains from Durex and VMS sales.

Reckitt Benckiser is expecting further weakness from Scholl in the short term, but is taking action to bring forward other projects to balance the business.

Despite missing targets, Reckitt Benckiser reassured investors that it was on track to grow its full-year revenues by between 2% and 3%.

The company did not explicitly refer to its recent decision to pull out of a bid for Pfizers health business, which followed on from Johnson & Johnsons decision to walk away from the doomed auction.

However, Rakesh Kapoor, Reckitt Benckisers chief executive, said the company was not looking to grow through further acquisitions.

Mr Kapoor said: Our priority remains organic growth under our new focused organisation structure. The integration of Mead Johnson is going well.

We have work to do in parts of our health portfolio, particularly Scholl. I am very pleased to see such energy, focus and a strong start by the hygiene home team.

Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell, said the company was struggling to bounce back after delivering its worst annual performance in 2017.

In part this is due to pricing pressure, something which raises uncomfortable questions about the strength of the companys brand portfolio, he said.

Having endured a damaging cyber attack and messed up a new product introduction last year, chief executive Rakesh Kapoor has made a great play of prioritising organic growth; little wonder then that the shares have been marked lower today.
North and South Korea installed the first telephone hotline between their leaders on Friday as they prepared for a rare summit next week aimed at resolving the nuclear standoff with Pyongyang.

South Koreas presidential office said a successful test call was conducted on the hotline between Seouls presidential Blue House and Pyongyangs powerful State Affairs Commission.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un plan to make their first telephone conversation some time before their face-to-face meeting next Friday at the border truce village of Panmunjom.

South Korean officials said the hotline, which would be maintained after the summit, would help facilitate dialogue and reduce misunderstanding during times of tension.

The historic direct telephone line between the leaders of the South and North was connected a short while ago, South Korean presidential official Youn Kun Young said in a news briefing.

The test call went on for four minutes and 19 seconds starting at 3.41pm with (officials from) both sides speaking to each other.

The connection was smooth and the voice quality was very good. It was like calling next door, he said.

Kim, a third-generation dictator, is the chairman of the State Affairs Commission, North Koreas supreme decision-making institution that was created in 2016 to replace the National Defence Commission he inherited from his father.

The new body includes the countrys most powerful individuals in state, military and party affairs and is seen as crucial for Kim to consolidate his power and centralise governance.

The meeting between Kim and Moon will only be the third summit between the rivals since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War and could prove to be significant in the global diplomatic push to resolve the North Korean nuclear crisis.

A separate summit between Kim and US President Donald Trump is anticipated in May or June.

North Korea in January reopened a border hotline between the countries after nearly two years of radio silence as the countries resumed dialogue following a period of animosity surrounding the Norths nuclear weapons and missile tests.

The revival of the hotline at Panmunjom came days after Kim in a New Years speech proposed negotiations with the South on easing tensions and the Norths participation in Februarys Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang.

North Koreas abrupt diplomatic outreach comes after a flurry of weapons tests that marked 2017, including the underground detonation of an alleged thermonuclear warhead and three launches of developmental intercontinental ballistic missiles designed to strike the US mainland.

While South Korean and US officials have said Kim is probably trying to save his broken economy from heavy sanctions, some analysts see him as entering the negotiations from a position of strength after having declared his nuclear force complete.
The Irish border remains the main stumbling block for the Brexit talks. Here are some answers to key questions on an impasse which threatens to derail the process.

Anti-Brexit campaigners put up signs before holding a go-slow protest at Ravensdale, Co Louth to highlight concerns about the impact on trade. Niall Carson/PA.

 Why is it so central to the negotiations?

After the divorce it will become the UKs only land border with an EU member state. How that frontier is managed is one of the key issues the EU wants assurances on.

Britain is backing a close economic relationship which would make customs checks unnecessary or technological solutions to render them near-frictionless.

If that position is rejected, the Government could be faced with a choice between remaining in the EU Customs Union or accepting a hard Irish border.

Map of the Irish border which has nearly 300 crossings (PA Graphics)

 What does the border look like now?

There are almost 300 crossings between north and south along what was, during the Troubles, a heavily-militarised 310-mile frontier.

Those checkpoints are either gone or lying derelict today as traffic passes freely from north to south.

The only difference either side is speed limits measured in kilometres instead of miles per hour or the roadsides painted yellow instead of white.

 Surely nobody is saying Brexit would mean a return to violence?

Few are. But it has reignited the debate around a united Ireland in some quarters as a number of nationalists believe Brexit will make that more attractive.

More immediately, the 1998 Good Friday Agreement which largely ended the conflict introduced a range of cooperation measures between Northern Ireland and the Republic and boosted economic ties between businesses, which could be hardest hit.

Firms are worried the free-flowing traffic in goods and services could be interrupted by crossing point queues if Northern Ireland is left outside the Customs Union and regulations differed with the Republic.

Decision: EU27 has adopted guidelines for the future EU-UK relations after #Brexit  Charles Michel (@eucopresident) March 23, 2018

 What does the EU want?

European Council President Donald Tusk, who represents EU leaders, has said the Irish border issue comes first in the negotiations.

A version of a Brexit deal with Britain published by the EU in February contained only the third backstop option on the border, effectively drawing a customs border down the Irish Sea if there is no other agreement.

 Why is that a problem?

A furious Theresa May has said no British prime minister could ever agree to a frontier between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.

Unionists in Northern Ireland have also categorically ruled out such an arrangement.

The minority Government at Westminster depends on 10 pro-Brexit Democratic Unionist MPs for its support in key votes. They have firmly rejected any solution involving parting company between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK on trade issues.

 So does the DUP hold all the cards?

Not quite. If its MPs pulled out of their deal with the Tories, they would lose their new-found influence at Westminster  endangering what remains of a linked 1 billion of Treasury funding for Northern Ireland  and could face the prospect of what they characterise as the pro-Irish republican Jeremy Corbyn becoming prime minister after a snap general election.
A 25-year-old Palestinian man has died after being critically wounded by Israeli army fire near Gazas border with Israel.

The Gaza health ministry said the man had been shot in the head.

It did not provide details about the circumstances of Fridays shooting, which came as Palestinians were gathering for a fourth weekly mass protest on the border.

Palestinian protesters set up tents at the Gaza Strips border with Israel (AP)

The Israeli military said it is looking into the incident.

Before Friday, 28 Palestinian protesters had been killed and hundreds wounded by Israeli army fire from across the border fence since the protests began in late March.

The man was shot east of the border town of Jebaliya.

Protests are already under way in one area, where several dozen Palestinians moved toward the border fence. Some threw stones and others flew kites with burning rags dangling from their tails as part of a new tactic aimed at setting fields on the Israeli side on fire. Israeli forces fired tear gas to push them back.

Earlier, Israeli military aircraft had dropped leaflets urging Palestinians to stay away from the fence and warning that they are endangering their lives if they follow the directives of Gazas Hamas rulers, who have taken the lead in organising the protests.

The military said it is defending Israels border and that its troops, including snipers, only target instigators. It has also accused Hamas of using mass protests as a cover for attacks.

Israel has faced international criticism for its response to the mass marches. Rights groups have branded the open-fire orders as unlawful, saying they effectively permit soldiers to use potentially lethal force against unarmed protesters.

White House envoy Jason Greenblatt, a member of President Donald Trumps Middle East team, said on social media that Palestinians in Gaza have a right to protest their dire humanitarian circumstances.

Organisers should focus on that message, not stoke the potential for more violence with firebombs and flaming kites, and must keep a safe distance from the border, said Mr Greenblatt, adding that the cost of these demonstrations is too high in loss of life and injuries.

The protests are to continue at least until May 15, the anniversary of Israels 1948 creation. Palestinians mark the day as their nakba, or catastrophe, when hundreds of thousands fled or were driven from their homes in the Middle East war over Israels founding.

Hamas said the protests are aimed at breaking a crippling border blockade that was imposed by Israel and Egypt after the Islamic militant group overran the territory in 2007, a year after winning Palestinian parliament elections.

The marches also press for the return of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to what is now Israel.
Police cordons have sprung up around Salisbury as preparations begin to rid nine hot spots of the toxic after-effects of last months nerve agent attack.

A small amount of the Novichok substance is thought to have been used in liquid form to target Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter Yulia, 33.

The multimillion-pound decontamination operation will centre on nine areas where experts think traces could still linger.

(PA Graphics)

Government officials sought to allay concerns by saying the city was still safe for residents and visitors, and there was no additional risk to the public.

Four cordons were installed overnight  at The Maltings shopping centre, The Mill pub, Riverside House and Zizzi restaurant, Wiltshire Council said.

Work is expected to begin next week and will likely prioritise a police station, two ambulance stations and the council building which were affected, it is understood.

A council spokesman said on Friday morning: Those barriers are there because they are not starting their work over the weekend.

It could take months for the process to be complete.

The house of Sergei Skripal has been the site of intensive investigation since the attack (Ben Mitchell/PA)

Officials from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), joined local council, police and health representatives to update residents on the clean-up process at a public meeting on Thursday evening.

Asked whether the chemical remains at the same lethal level as the day it was put on Mr Skripals door, Defras chief scientific adviser Ian Boyd said: We have to make an assumption that in certain circumstances there will be relatively high concentrations, probably in very, very specific locations, which could be at levels that could be toxic to individuals.

A police notice previously stuck to a business property in the Maltings (Ben Birchall/PA)

Thats an assumption, its also one weve tested in some circumstances and we do know that there are hot spots like that around, so we have to make those assumptions that some of the hot spots weve still got to find.

But those hot spots will still be in the locations we are talking about.

In these locations, there may well be higher concentrations that we still have to find, but we already know there are some high concentrations within those locations.

Residents were told the Bourne Hill building, housing Salisburys police station as well as Wiltshire councils offices will close for up to eight weeks from Friday.

The decontamination work will focus on the evidence room and two lockers inside the station, which were sealed off after the March 4 attack.

Work to replace the cordon around The Maltings, The Mill, Zizzi and Riverside House in #Salisbury with hoardings will begin at 7pm tonight. The work will continue overnight, and we will do all we can to minimise disruption. Info: https://t.co/3fOsG0YgMt  Wiltshire Council #WiltshireTogether (@wiltscouncil) April 19, 2018

Deputy Chief Constable Paul Mills, from Wiltshire Police, said it would be business as usual as operations move to other sites in and around the city.

Other areas earmarked for chemical cleaning include two ambulance stations, a car compound and the home of poisoned police officer Nick Bailey.

Mr Skripals home, which is still part of the police investigation, will be the last to be decontaminated.

A Defra spokeswoman said: As Public Health England have stated, Salisbury is safe for residents and visitors.

All work undertaken on each site will take appropriate measures to ensure that there is no additional risk to the public.

There is no need to take any additional precautions. Cordons are in place to protect the public from any potential risk.

Novichok degrades slower than other nerve agents as it is very pure, an expert has said.

Alastair Hay, professor emeritus of environmental toxicology, University of Leeds, said: The agent in question was developed because it is so toxic with the high degree of purity helping to slow degradation.

He added: The nerve agent will be quite firmly attached to all sorts of surfaces and is unlikely to present an airborne hazard given both its persistence, and the fact that no one else, other than DS Nick Bailey, was injured. DS Nick Baileys contact with the agent appears more likely to have been through skin contact.

A variety of procedures will be tested to find a suitable decontaminant to degrade the agent. Household bleach is very effective for degrading many chemical weapons including most nerve agents and is likely to be tried with this Novichok agent.

If ineffective, there are now many other products available, with a range of properties, that will be tested to find the most suitable. As different surfaces are affected this may take some time as Defra has indicated.

Mr Bailey has been discharged from hospital after he was left critically ill by the nerve agent when he visited the home of the Skripals.
World leaders have agreed to the Prince of Wales becoming the next leader of the Commonwealth after the Queen, according to sources.

Commonwealth presidents and prime ministers have decided Charles will succeed the Queen and lead the global institution that has a combined population of 2.4 billion.

The Queen made a personal appeal to world leaders on Thursday to choose her son for the role.

Today in Windsor representatives and Heads of Government from around the Commonwealth are meeting to discuss issues of common interest at the end of the #CHOGM2018 week. pic.twitter.com/9Vb9ZlAPL4  The Royal Family (@RoyalFamily) April 20, 2018

During the opening of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting she told them it was her sincere wish that the family of nations would one day decide the prince should carry on the Commonwealth work started by her father King George VI.

The leaders came to their decision during discussions held at their retreat, at Windsor Castle, where informal talks are held without aides or advisers present.

Lloyd Dorfman, chairman of the Princes Trust and Princes Trust International, welcomed the news that Charles is to become the next head of the Commonwealth.

Prime Minister Theresa May and Commonwealth Secretary-General Patricia Scotland with Sierra Leones President Julius Maada Bio as they arrive to hold talks at Windsor Castle (Andrew Matthews/PA)

He said: At present, seven of the nine countries where we run programmes are in the Commonwealth including Australia, Barbados, Canada and India, so we are already supporting thousands of young people in Commonwealth countries.

I have seen the prince operating with his charities at close quarters. His vision and efforts are making a big difference and changing lives.

As head of the Commonwealth, the prince will be able to amplify this work and bring to the table his extensive experience, wisdom and passion.
A man who hurled acid through a car window at an aspiring model and her cousin has been jailed for 16 years.

Resham Khan and Jameel Muhktar suffered horrific injuries to their faces and bodies in the unprovoked attack on Ms Khans 21st birthday in Beckton, east London.

A CCTV image of John Tomlin throwing a substance into a car (Metropolitan Police/PA)

John Tomlin, 25, was sentenced at Snaresbrook Crown Court on Friday to 16 years imprisonment with a four year extended licence.

The cousins had no previous dealings with their attacker and Judge Sheelagh Canavan previously described the assault as somewhat random.

Both victims and their families were in court as the sentence was passed.

Tomlin, who sat in the dock wearing a blue tracksuit and large silver crucifix, did not show any emotion during the hearing.

Judge Canavan said: No sentence I impose can ever give back to the victims what you took from them on June 21.

The court can only hope that in time and with help they can begin to put the consequences of your unprovoked attack behind them. It is undoubtedly a lifes work.

John Tomlin in a shop while trying to evade police (Metropolitan Police/PA)

Tomlin hurled acid through both front windows of the Renault Clio as it was pulled up on Tollgate Road at 9.13am on Wednesday June 21 2017.

He was seen on CCTV chasing after the car and emptying the bottle of acid over Mr Muhktar as he sped away.

Witnesses described seeing the victims jumping around as if they were on fire in the road as their clothing literally melted off them on to the ground.

Judge Canavan described their injuries as dreadful and life changing.

She added: It is becoming all too common an occurrence on our streets that members of the public are pouring water over people who have had acid thrown over them, as if this is some sort of fashionable assault that is being carried out.

Tomlin, of Colman Road, Canning Town, was arrested after handing himself in to the police a month later and said in interview that he was hearing voices in my head.

He pleaded guilty to two counts of intending to cause grievous bodily harm on the first day of his trial in November 2017.

He has been diagnosed as emotionally unstable with a personality disorder and has a number of previous convictions, including violent offences, robbery, burglaries and theft, the court heard.

Both victims read statements to the court about the devastating impact their injuries have had on their lives.

Mr Muhktar said he felt emotionally wrecked and in continuous pain after the attack.

He has permanent scarring to his head, neck and body, lost hearing in one ear and suffers from psychological problems since the attack and wanted to take his own life.

He told doctors during one hospital admission: I need all the help I can get, I just want to die.

I worry if Im on my on I might do something.

He added: Im not getting better. Im getting worse.

If I was dead I would not have to go through this pain.

University student Ms Khan also carries lifelong scars to her face, particularly her eyes.

She has suffered from severe depression and anxiety as a result of the attack and also tried to take her own life.

My 21st birthday turned into a day where my face was taken away from me, she said.

No matter what his sentence may be these injuries will affect me for the rest of my life.

Ms Khan said: I dont think this is about name calling, I think its about setting myself aside from other types of people in life.

I hope to push through and get on as if it never happened.

She thanked all the medical staff and police who have helped her.

Dc Paul Newton said: This was a horrific incident that took place on Reshams 21st birthday.

We would like to give our thanks to those who did come out to make sure they were getting doused in water as their injuries could have been far worse.
Naomi Campbell has backed anti-sexual harassment movement Times Up as she announced the return of her charity fashion gala Fashion For Relief.

The supermodel, 47, will lead a star-studded line-up on the catwalk next month in Cannes, coinciding with the Cannes Film Festival.

With the theme of race to equality, the show will focus on education, health and culture and raise money for Times Up and Save The Children.

Naomi Campbell on the catwalk at the Fashion For Relief fashion show in 2017 (PA)

Set in the Cannes Mandelieu Hangar, the event attracted the likes of Leonardo Di Caprio, Kate Moss, Uma Thurman, Kendall Jenner and Queen Rania Al-Abdullah of Jordan last year.

As well as a fashion show, the event on May 13 will include a live auction featuring items donated by artists, designers, celebrities and brands.

Campbell founded the Fashion For Relief charity 13 years ago, and has used it to raise money for various humanitarian causes such as the fight against Ebola.

Last year the British star travelled to the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan  home to 80,000 refugees, half of whom are children  with Save The Children.
Holby City actress Laila Rouass has said she has started suffering from catastrophic thinking after hiding in a restaurant freezer with her young daughter during the Barcelona terror attack.

The TV star was in the Spanish city in August 2017 when terrorists drove into a crowd in the pedestrianised street of Las Ramblas, killing 13 people and injuring scores of others. Another person died from the attack days later.

In the middle of the attack. Hiding in a restaurant freezer. Happened so fast. Praying for the safety of everyone here x  Laila Rouass (@lailarouass) August 17, 2017

Rouass said she is still feeling the effects of the incident, almost a year later.

Laila Rouass (Rebecca Naden/PA)

She told ITVs Loose Women: There was pandemonium, there were gunshots, people running into the restaurant, I didnt know what was going on.

I was right in the middle of it, I thought there was a gunman like what happened in Paris, so we ran downstairs to the basement.

As I was going down, the chef was coming out of the door, so I pushed my daughter through there and its where the cold room is so I put her in there, covered her up with boxes.

Helicopter right above us. pic.twitter.com/FICvu97vaz  Laila Rouass (@lailarouass) August 17, 2017

Its weird, I wasnt really thinking about myself, I just thought How do I get her safe?'

She added: I shut her in and I thought What if I get shot and they cant find my daughter? so I thought I will get her a coat so shes warm and I will get a pen and I will write a note and put it in my pocket, in case I get shot, to say my daughter is in the freezer.

She was crying, but funnily enough after shes been absolutely fine.

Thank you to the staff at the restaurant for staying calm and keeping us safe. I love you Barcelona.  Laila Rouass (@lailarouass) August 17, 2017

Its just when we go to a restaurant she does look for the exits, she says Can we sit next to the exit?'

She continued: There is this thing called catastrophic thinking  you start thinking that something catastrophic is going to happen.

I get on a plane and I think its going to crash, I just know its going to crash, so youre petrified.

Its sort of easing, Ive not had any help or anything but its getting better.
The parents of a 23-month-old boy who has been at the centre of a life-support treatment battle have lost the latest round of their legal fight after failing to persuade Supreme Court justices to consider their case for a second time.

Tom Evans and Kate James, who are both in their early twenties, had made another application to the Supreme Court after losing a second fight over Alfie Evans at the Court of Appeal.

But justices on Friday dismissed their application.

The last reason from the ruling by Supreme Court president Lady Hale, Lord Kerr and Lord Wilson (Supreme Court/PA)

Judges have also approved a plan for withdrawing treatment and bringing Alfies life to an end.

Three appeal court judges endorsed a plan drawn up by doctors earlier this week.

But they said treatment should continue until Supreme Court justices had made a decision.

Judges said no detail of the plan could be made public because Alfie was entitled to privacy as his life came to a close.

Alfies parents had already lost one round of 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, after hearings in the Family Division of the High Court in London and Liverpool.

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.

Alfies parents want to move their son from Alder Hey to a hospital in Rome.

The couple said Italian doctors were willing to treat the little boy and an air ambulance was available.

But Mr Justice Hayden said flying Alfie to a foreign hospital would be wrong and pointless.

Court of Appeal judges upheld his decisions.

Supreme Court justices and European Court of Human Rights judges refused to intervene.

Alfies parents had also argued that Alfie was being wrongly detained at Alder Hey and had made a habeas corpus application.

A writ of habeas corpus  Latin for you may have the body  is a legal manoeuvre which requires a court to examine the legality of a detention.

It is a piece of common law which probably dates back to Anglo-Saxon times.

Mr Justice Hayden dismissed that habeas corpus claim last week.

Appeal judges upheld Mr Justice Haydens decision.

Judges have heard that Alfie, born on May 9 2016, is in a semi-vegetative state and has a degenerative neurological condition doctors had not definitively diagnosed.

Specialists say his brain has been eroded.

A statement issued by Alder Hey said: Today the Supreme Court upheld the decision of the High Court and the Court of Appeal confirming that: It has been conclusively determined that it is not in Alfies best interests to continue to receive treatment or to travel abroad for treatment.

The Supreme Court acknowledged that this was a desperately sad case principally of course for Alfies parents for they love their little boy dearly and want to do all in their power to keep him alive.

But it is sad also for the people who have been keeping Alfie alive for so long, the doctors and nurses at Alder Hey hospital.

Having reviewed the application, the Supreme Court concluded that: The release to which (Alfie) is entitled, therefore, is release from the imposition of treatment which is not in his best interests.

Alfies parents have done everything in their power to do what they think is best for him even though that is contrary to the views of the doctors.

That has inevitably prolonged the period over which he has been given treatment that was determined in February not to be in his best interests.

In concluding their judgment, the Supreme Court said: There is also no reason for further delay. There will be no further stay of the Court of Appeals order.

The hospital must be free to do what has been determined to be in Alfies best interests. That is the law in this country. No application to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg can or should change that.

The Supreme Court has also dismissed the suggestion that Alfie was either detained or unlawfully detained.

Supporters of Alfie Evans and his family, who had descended on the hospital, left following an appeal from Mr Evans on Monday.

No protestors were at the hospital today and none of Alfies family were seen there as they have been on previous days.
Russias ambassador to the UK has suggested that Sergei and Yulia Skripal may have been injected by British authorities with nerve agent produced at Porton Down.

Alexander Yakovenko repeated Russias demands to see the former spy and his daughter, claiming that the UKs failure to grant access meant the case should now be seen as an abduction of two Russian citizens.

The comments came in a press conference at which Mr Yakovenko accused Britain of lying not only over the Skripal case, but also about the chemical weapons attack in Syria and alleged Russian cyber attacks on the UK.

They represent the latest in a series of widely-varying and sometimes contradictory explanations produced by Moscow for the events in Salisbury, which have been dismissed by the Foreign Office as an attempt to distract attention from the UKs conclusion that Russia is very likely to be responsible for poisoning the Skripals.

A report by experts at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons this week confirmed the UKs analysis that the attack on the Skripals in Salisbury on March 4 was conducted with the nerve agent Novichok.

But Mr Yakovenko said that details of the OPCW report gave Russian experts cause for concern.

The OPCW reported that the Novichok contained in blood samples from the victims showed little sign of decomposition, even though the agent would normally be expected to react with naturally-occurring chemicals inside the body, he said.

This is strange, given that 18 days passed between the poisoning and the arrival of the OPCW in the UK, said Mr Yakovenko.

It might mean that the chemical was intentionally injected just before the blood samples were taken.

The fact that the OPCW found the sample of Novichok to be of high purity suggested that it was synthesised in a laboratory rather than an industrial plant, he said.

And he claimed that the speed with which the chemical was identified after the attack suggested the UK already had its own samples.

Referring to the Governments defence research establishment at Porton Down, he said: We know what kind of laboratory is only 10 miles from Salisbury.

Russian ambassador @Amb_Yakovenko giving Moscows view on events in Syria and Salisbury. pic.twitter.com/2JgvlSRD4H  David Hughes (@DavidHughesPA) April 20, 2018

Mr Yakovenko challenged the independence of the OPCW investigation, saying that it had been arranged on a bilateral basis with the UK rather than under the standard practices set out in the Chemical Weapons Convention.

The work of the OPCW experts was conducted under the control of the British side, he said.

Pressure on them cant be ruled out.

They checked only the sites designated by the UK beforehand and they looked only for the substance identified by the UK.

The format chosen cannot guarantee impartiality and the comprehensive nature of the verification.

Russia would not take the reports conclusions at face value unless it was given full access to the victims and to the materials gathered in the investigation, he said.

Mr Yakovenko said Russia was acting in accordance with international law in wanting to speak to its citizen Yulia Skripal, who is now said to have left hospital and be recovering.

He added: We want to see that she is in good shape and good health. She can tell us herself that she doesnt want our help.

He repeated allegations that the decontamination operations under way in Salisbury amounted to an attempt by the UK authorities to destroy evidence relating to the attack.
Islamic State (IS) militants have reportedly agreed to give up their last pocket in Damascus, as the government seeks to retake the entire Syrian capital and its surrounding areas for the first time since 2011.

The capitulation followed a week of escalations by pro-government forces against the IS-held Hajar al-Aswad area and Yarmouk Palestinian camp in Damascus.

Pro-government forces bombed the two areas and blanketed them with artillery fire in a manoeuvre captured by the state-affiliated Central Military Media outlet.

The UNs refugee agency warned that the spiralling violence was a threat to 12,000 Palestinian refugees still there  Palestinians who came to Syria since 1948, and their descendants.

Russian soldiers and Syrian government forces overseeing the evacuation of rebel fighters (SANA via AP)

Militants were given the option to stay and reconcile with the government or leave on buses to IS-held territory in the eastern Syrian desert, the SANA state news agency said. It did not say when the relocations would begin.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group reported relative calm in the two neighbourhoods after the announcement of the agreement.

In 2012, Syrian rebels and army defectors pushed pro-government forces out of Yarmouk in response to a spiralling crackdown by state security services against anti-government protests.

Pro-government forces, including pro-government Palestinian factions, responded by putting the camp under siege, eventually cutting off food and water by 2014, and bombing and shelling it continuously.

Residents trickled out to neighbouring areas, and the camps population dwindled from an estimated 200,000 people to a few thousand today, not including the IS militants, who took over the camp following a battle with rebels in 2015.

On Thursday, the Damascus-based Palestinian official Khaled Abdelmajid said the government was giving hard-liners two days to leave Yarmouk and Hajar al-Aswad, leaving the government with control of the two neighbourhoods.

That initial deal appears to have collapsed.
US students have begun leaving classes in protest over gun violence and to honour shooting victims.

Demonstrations from Washington to Florida and Michigan have drawn hundreds of students as part of the latest effort by youth activists pressing for gun control.

More than 2,700 protests were planned across the country on Friday  the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting.

Dozens of Washington-area students gathered near the White House for a moment of silence before reading the names of the Columbine victims.

Organisers encouraged students to leave class at 10am local time and gather in honour of shooting victims. Many have also planned rallies calling for tougher gun laws.

Plans for the walkout were started by a Connecticut teen hours after the February 14 school shooting in Parkland, Florida.

Some students have headed to rallies at their statehouses. Others stayed at school to discuss gun violence. Some are holding voting registration drives.

Two rings of chairs encircle the words "NEVER AGAIN" in a silent protest on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting outside Trinity High School in Manchester, New Hampshire (AP)

The Washington-area students marked 19 minutes of silence for each year that has passed since the Columbine massacre in which 13 people were killed in Littleton, Colorado.

In New York City, crowds of students gathered in Washington Square Park and lay down in a die-in.

Organisers said there will be walkouts in every state, with more than 2,700 registered on the events website.

City-wide protests are expected to attract thousands in New York City and Austin, Texas. Police in Richmond, Virginia, say they expect at least 10,000 at the state Capitol.

Shortly before the walkouts, another school shooting in Florida left one student injured. Authorities say one student shot another in the ankle at Forest High School in Ocala. A suspect was taken into custody.

At Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where a gunman killed 17 people on February 14, student David Hogg said the latest shooting underscored the urgency of the protests.

Jorge Flores, left, consoles fellow Stoneman Douglas High School survivor Carlitos Rodriguez during the kickoff event for the Vote For Our Lives movement (AP)

We have to stop this. Were not going to be able to stop this unless we continue to make our voices heard, though, when our elected officials wont, Mr Hogg said on a video posted to social media.

We have to get out there and make our voices heard, not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans.

Mr Hogg was among about 50 students who walked out of Stoneman Douglas after administrators threatened protesters with unexcused absences.

The walkouts are the latest in a wave of youth activism that has emerged after the Parkland massacre.

Students are led out of Forest High School in Florida after a shooting on the campus on Friday (AP)

Plans for Fridays walkout began only hours after the Parkland shooting, when a Connecticut teen started an online petition calling for protests on the anniversary of Columbine. Sophomore Lane Murdock then gathered a few other students at Ridgefield High School to orchestrate the national protest.

They also have received help from Indivisible, a left-leaning nonprofit based in Washington that helps boost grassroots activism. The group says it was formed after the 2016 election to oppose the policies promoted by President Donald Trump.

Administrators at many schools tacitly allowed the walkouts in March, opting not to punish participants.
An audit of Facebooks privacy practices for the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) found no problems, even though the company knew at the time that a data-mining firm had improperly obtained private data from millions of users.

Facebook agreed to outside audits every two years as part of a 2011 settlement with the FTC over its privacy practices.

It is not clear from the report whether the company informed PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), which performed the audit, of the Cambridge Analytica data grab that would put Facebook in the crosshairs of US congress.

Privacy rights advocates have said the findings raise serious questions about the usefulness of such audits in light of the Cambridge Analytica scandal (Dominic Lipinski/PA)

The heavily redacted audit by PricewaterhouseCoopers is available on the FTCs website. It covers the period February 12 2015 to February 11 2017.

PwC declined to comment, but Facebook said that keeping data secure is a priority.

We remain strongly committed to protecting peoples information, said Rob Sherman, Facebooks deputy chief privacy officer, in a statement.

We appreciate the opportunity to answer questions the FTC may have.

The fact that PwC found no issues raised red flags for privacy advocates over the usefulness of such audits.

Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the non-profit digital rights group Centre for Digital Democracy, said: The FTC failed to protect the public.

Instead of conducting its own review to enforce one of its most important decisions  the consent decree  it looked the other way, which allowed Facebook to engage in serious misconduct.

Mr Chester said the audit shows that the FTC cannot be relied on to really protect consumers.

The 2011 consent decree bound Facebook to a 20-year privacy commitment.

Any violations of that pact could cost the company a lot of money. In his congressional testimony last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared uninformed about key details of the agreement, saying he did not remember if it carried a financial penalty.

Any violations of the 2011 agreement could subject Facebook to fines of 41,484 dollars (29,268) per violation per user per day. To put that in context, Facebook could theoretically owe eight billion dollars (5.6 billion) for one single day violation affecting all of its American users, or about half of the profit that the company booked for all of last year.

The agreement requires that Facebook users give affirmative express consent any time that data they have not made public is shared with a third party.

Cambridge Analytica accessed information from so many users (the firm puts the number at 30 million, although Facebook has said 87 million) because it was able to access the data of peoples friends, and not just people who explicitly permitted access when they took a personality quiz.

While Facebook did have controls in place that allowed people to restrict such access, they are found buried in the sites settings and are difficult to find.

Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat from Nevada, said during last weeks hearing that in her view, these requirements were not met, because user consent should not have been buried in privacy settings.

PwC disagreed. Its report states: In our opinion, Facebooks privacy controls were operating with sufficient effectiveness to provide reasonable assurance to protect the privacy of covered information and that the controls have so operated throughout the Reporting Period, in all material respects for the two years ended February 11 2017.

Facebook is also under a separate investigation by the FTC because of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The agency is looking at whether Facebook has engaged in unfair acts that cause substantial injury to consumers.
Russias foreign minister has said the US sought out and respected Moscows positions in Syria when it launched its air strikes last week.

Sergey Lavrov noted that despite the escalating tensions between Moscow and Washington, the US made sure it did not harm any Russian personnel and positions during the strikes against the regime of President Bashar Assad following a suspected chemical attack on the town of Douma.

We told them where our red lines were, including the geographical red lines, Mr Lavrov told Russian state television. The results have shown that they havent crossed those lines.

Sergey Lavrov said the US respected the USs red lines (Pavel Golovkin/AP)

Moscow had warned the US before the strike that it could hit back if the US actions jeopardise Russian servicemen in Syria, and the allies gave Russia an advance warning to make sure no Russians were in the line of fire.

Mr Lavrov also revealed that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin discussed the possibility of visiting each others country when the US president rang up Russian counterpart last month to congratulate him on his re-election.

Mr Lavrov said that Mr Trump indicated he could make a reciprocal trip to Russia if Mr Putin were able to accept his invitation to the White House.

Previously, both the White House and the Kremlin had only revealed that Mr Trump had invited Mr Putin to the White House during the same call on March 20.

Mr Lavrov said the Trump administration has not followed up on the offer and Russia has urged the US to discuss specifics about such a meeting.

He added that Russian officials dont want to be too obtrusive, but dont want to be impolite.

President Putin is ready for such a meeting, Mr Lavrov said.

Moscows hopes for better ties with Washington under Mr Trump have withered amid the ongoing investigations into the alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Russia-US relations have sunk to post-Cold War lows over the Ukrainian crisis, the war in Syria and the allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election.

In recent weeks, tensions have risen further over the March poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter, which Britain has blamed on Russia.

The US, Britain and other Western allies responded by expelling over 150 Russian diplomats, and Moscow, which has fervently denied the British accusations, responded in kind.

Further stoking tensions was the purported chemical attack in Douma on April 7. That prompted the US, Britain and France to launch a missile strike on Syria. Russia condemned the strike on its ally as an act of aggression.

The Pentagon said that all 105 missiles fired at three Syrian chemical facilities reached their targets, while the Russian military said Syrian air defences downed 71 out of 103 US missiles.

Mr Lavrov, who said Russia will soon offer evidence to back up its claims, added that Moscow may reconsider a pledge it gave a decade ago not to provide Syria with sophisticated long-range S-300 missiles in light of the strikes.

We no longer have such moral obligations, Mr Lavrov said.

Asked about the danger of a Russia-US military clash, Mr Lavrov voiced hope that military leaders realise that any actions that could provoke a direct clash between the Russian and the US militaries are unacceptable.
The Government is to make compensation payments to members of the Windrush generation who suffered as a result of official challenges to their migration status, Theresa May has announced.

Downing Street declined to give details of the compensation scheme, saying only they would be announced shortly by the Home Office.

It is thought likely that payments will go beyond the reimbursement of legal bills and include a recognition of the anxiety caused to long-standing Commonwealth residents of the UK whose right to be in the country was questioned.

The announcement came as details emerged of two Windrush women who say they were denied re-entry to the UK after travelling to the Caribbean.

Gretel Gocan, 81, told 5 News she had been stuck in Jamaica since 2010 unable to return to her south London home after taking a holiday to visit family.

And former NHS nurse Icilda Williams, who moved back to Jamaica in 1996 after 34 years in Bradford, said her annual visits to the UK to see her children had been halted since 2014 after she was denied a visa.

The Home Office said it would be looking into the cases as a matter of urgency.

Mrs May confirmed plans for compensation at a press conference at the conclusion of a Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (Chogm) in London which has been overshadowed by controversy over the treatment of Caribbean nationals who arrived in the UK between the late 1940s and early 1970s.

The Prime Minister said: On Tuesday, I met with Caribbean leaders, where I gave an absolute commitment that the UK Government will do whatever it takes  including where appropriate payment of compensation  to resolve the anxieties and problems which some of the Windrush generation have suffered.

These people are British, they are part of us, they helped to build Britain and we are all the stronger for their contributions.

Former NHS nurse Icilda Williams says she has been denied a visa to visit family in the UK (5 News)

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn demanded an apology from Mrs May for the policy she introduced as Home Secretary of creating a hostile environment for illegal immigrants by requiring individuals to prove their right to be in the UK before receiving services.

Shes the one that ordered the vans to go around telling immigrants to go home, said Mr Corbyn.

Shes the one that created that nasty atmosphere.

She wanted to create this hostile atmosphere towards immigrants in this country. I think its time that she apologised for that as well as for the events that have happened to the people of the Windrush generation.

Speaking to 5 News, Ms Gocans daughter Pauline Blackwood said her mother had been stranded in Jamaica with no money and no pension.

The 81-year-old says she came to the UK in 1960 and never applied for a British passport, but had a stamp in her Jamaican passport granting her indefinite leave to remain.

That document was stolen in 2006 and when she went to Jamaica on a new passport in 2010 she found herself refused permission to return to the UK and told she needed a visa, she said.

This 81-year-old woman has never seen or held her grandchildren after she was barred from returning to her home in the UK ten years ago.



Her children are worried that with no pension or NHS support Gretel will die in Jamaica without her family. #WindrushGeneration pic.twitter.com/ci1eoUxuUd  Channel 5 News (@5_News) April 20, 2018

My mum has six children in the UK and she has grandchildren and some of them she hasnt seen or even held, said Ms Blackwood.

Her family is here and it is for her to make that choice whether she chooses to stay in Jamaica or come back to the UK, but that is not an option for her, she is forced to stay in Jamaica.

My main fear is were going to lose our mum. She has no money, all her pensions been stopped and her medication too  she has diabetes  thats all been denied to her.

Gretel Grocan with her daughter, who flew out to see her in Jamaica (5 News)

Mrs Williams said she held a British Commonwealth passport until 1967. After being denied a visitors visa to come to Britain in 2014, she says she applied for a UK passport but was turned down because the authorities could not find records of her old Commonwealth passport.

Her son Kenneth, who came to the UK as a nine-year-old in 1969, was told he did not have the right to reside in Britain in 2016 when he made an application for Jobseekers Allowance.

Mrs Williams told 5 News: It has upset me a great deal because my daughter-in-law died last February and I couldnt go and my son was so ill and I couldnt get to see him.

Im the only one here away from the family, because I came here when my husband was wanting to come home and I came with him and he died here. And just to go back and see the family and come back, I would love it.

Asked if she had a message for Home Secretary Amber Rudd, she said: I would say to her she make a mistake. Just do it right and allow people to come in and see their family.

Some 286 people have so far contacted a Home Office helpline set up to offer support for members of the Windrush generation with concerns about their migration status.

Eight have so far been given permanent residence status.

A rally was being held in support of those affected and their families at Windrush Square, Brixton, south London, on Friday afternoon.

Grenadas Prime Minister Keith Mitchell called for serious compensation, saying: The word compensation came out today  that was highly significant, extremely important.

Its not just, Im sorry. People lost a lot, people suffered a lot of pain, and they must be given an opportunity to correct this  some serious compensation.

If not the person, if theyve gone, then the families who have suffered too.

Asked if Mrs May should have accepted the hostile environment immigration initiative was a mistake, Mr Mitchell said: I think the fact she has addressed it is indicating that Britain and the policy they enunciated initially was not the right one.

And therefore by making the statement she made today, I think shes heading in the right direction. And Ill give her credit for making the right turn.

A Home Office spokesperson said: The Home Secretary has been clear, we dont want anyone who has contributed so much to our society to feel unwelcome.

She has apologised unreservedly for any distress caused and we are urgently reviewing these cases.

The Windrush helpline is open to individuals overseas, as well as in the UK, who are concerned about documenting their status.
The parents of a baby boy at the centre of a life-support treatment battle have vowed to keep fighting to save our son after they lost the latest stage of their legal fight.

The UKs highest court ruled on Friday that there can be no further legal delay in the desperately sad case of Alfie Evans.

But the 23-month-olds father Tom described the decision as being based on cruel bureaucracy and pledged not to give up in their quest to keep him alive.

The parents failed to persuade Supreme Court justices to consider their case for a second time.

Mr Evans and Alfies mother Kate James, who are both aged in their early 20s, had made another application to the court after losing a second fight over their son at the Court of Appeal.

But on Friday a panel of three justices, headed by the courts president Lady Hale, dismissed their application.

Despite the latest decision against them, the parents immediately vowed to carry on their fight.

In a statement released through Christian Concern, Mr Evans said: We have asked them (judges) to watch the recent videos of Alfie, and their decision now admits that Alfie looks like a normal boy.

However, their paperwork still says his brain no longer exists, his life is futile, he may not be allowed to go (to Rome, on the invitation of the Pope), but must be made to die  all in his own best interests. Only the paperwork matters to these people  the real child does not.

This is not justice. This is a cruel bureaucracy.

The last reason from the ruling by Supreme Court president Lady Hale, Lord Kerr and Lord Wilson (Supreme Court/PA)

He added: We will not give up. We will continue to fight, by all means available to us within the law, to save our sons life.

Lady Hale, Lord Kerr and Lord Wilson announced  after considering the parents application on paper  that Alder Hey Childrens Hospital in Liverpool must be free to do what has been determined to be in Alfies best interests.

In their written decision, they said there was no reason for further delay.

They added: There will be no further stay of the Court of Appeals order. The hospital must be free to do what has been determined to be in Alfies best interests.

That is the law in this country. No application to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg can or should change that.

Giving reasons for their decision, the justices said it was a desperately sad case.

They said: It is sad principally, of course, for Alfies parents, for they love their little boy dearly and want to do all in their power to keep him alive.

Alfie Evans parents Tom Evans and Kate James (Philip Toscano/PA)

But it is also sad for the people who have been keeping Alfie alive for so long, the doctors and nurses who are treating him in Alder Hey Hospital.

Those of us who have to deal with this case dispassionately as a point of law can feel for their sadness.

The justices said: Alfie looks like a normal baby, but the unanimous opinion of the doctors who have examined him and the scans of his brain is that almost all of his brain has been destroyed.

No-one knows why. But that it has happened and is continuing to happen cannot be denied.

It means that Alfie cannot breathe, or eat, or drink without sophisticated medical treatment.

It also means that there is no hope of his ever getting better.

In February, Mr Justice Hayden ruled that doctors at Alder Hey could stop treating Alfie against the wishes of his parents, after hearings in the Family Division of the High Court in London and Liverpool.

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.

Alfies parents wanted to move their son from Alder Hey to a hospital in Rome.

Mr Evans also said in his statement that they would launch another appeal.

He said: We have instructed our lawyers to submit an urgent application to the European Court of Human Rights, and they have done so today.
The Prince of Wales was unanimously endorsed as the next head of the Commonwealth by world leaders, Theresa May has said.

The move by Commonwealth prime ministers and presidents was welcomed by Mrs May who said it was fitting the heir to the throne should one day succeed his mother the Queen in the role.

Speaking at the end of a two-day Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (Chogm), hosted by the UK, the Prime Minister told a press conference: His Royal Highness has been a proud supporter of the Commonwealth for more than four decades and has spoken passionately about the organisations unique diversity.

It is fitting that one day he will continue the work of his mother, Her Majesty the Queen.

WATCH LIVE: PM @theresa_may press conference at the close of @Commonwealth18 https://t.co/RP90a2944k  UK Prime Minister (@10DowningStreet) April 20, 2018

The leaders announced their decision in a communique released after they had discussed a range of topics at their Windsor Castle retreat, where informal discussions were held without aides or advisers.

Charles said later he was moved by his endorsement by the leaders: I am deeply touched and honoured by the decision of Commonwealth Heads of State and Government that I should succeed the Queen, in due course, as Head of the Commonwealth.

Meanwhile, I will continue to support Her Majesty in every possible way, in the service of our unique family of nations.

It followed a personal appeal from the Queen to the world leaders on Thursday, to choose her son for the role.

During the Chogm opening ceremony, she told them it was her sincere wish that the family of nations would one day decide the prince should carry on the Commonwealth work started by her father King George VI.

Nana Akufo-Addo, the president of Ghana, was asked during the press conference if there was a unanimous vote among the 53 member states for the prince to be the next Commonwealth head.

The Leaders of the 53 Commonwealth Countries, at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (#CHOGM2018), have decided that HRH Prince Charles will become the next Head of the #Commonwealth



For more information: https://t.co/VhK712ft1b pic.twitter.com/7yEAIymGYC  The Commonwealth (@commonwealthsec) April 20, 2018

He said: This was the decision of the meeting. You have to assume there was a strong consensus, that made it possible for that decision to be made.

But Mrs May was more emphatic when asked the same question later, stating: The view was unanimous that Prince Charles should be the next head of the Commonwealth.

The decision brings to an end speculation about who would succeed the Queen which has dogged recent Chogms, and is another milestone in the subtle handover of responsibility from the Queen to the heir to the throne, even though it will happen in the future.

Lloyd Dorfman, chairman of the Princes Trust and Princes Trust International, welcomed the news that Charles is to become the next head of the Commonwealth.

The Queen said Charles was her preference to succeed her in the role (Jonathan Brady/PA)

He said: At present, seven of the nine countries where we run programmes are in the Commonwealth including Australia, Barbados, Canada and India, so we are already supporting thousands

of young people in Commonwealth countries.

Mr Dorfman added: As head of the Commonwealth, the prince will be able to amplify this work and bring to the table his extensive experience, wisdom and passion.

During her press conference address Mrs May said that the Chogm summit had demonstrated that the Commonwealth is united not only by a common history but by a common future  a future in which we work together for the benefit of all our citizens and for the wider world.

The breadth of the Commonwealth offered a unique perspective in helping to forge the global solutions we need, she said.

This week we have come together to reach a series of shared commitments that will help to build a more secure, more sustainable, more prosperous and fairer future for all.

The Prime Minister hailed agreements at the London summit on issues ranging from opposition to the use of chemical weapons to reducing plastic pollution and boosting trade.

The 53 member states had unanimously agreed to fight protectionism as part of an effort to expand intra-Commonwealth trade to 2 trillion US dollars (1.4trn) by 2030, she said.

They pledged to halve malaria in Commonwealth countries by 2023 and agreed that all boys and girls should receive at least 12 years of education by 2030.
ome 500,000 dead and counting. President Bashar al-Assad is going full blast at reducing the parts of his country still standing, but not under his control, to rubble. Russia hangs on his tail, providing both planes and soldiers but seemingly unable to wag the dog. The US launches, along with Britain and France, a brief rocket attack. (Should we now after two such attacks call President Donald Trump Rocket Man 2?)

The attack is supposedly to draw the line on Assads use of chemical weapons. Perhaps he did do it, or possibly one of his local commanders took the initiative, but it is small beer compared with the horrors inflicted by conventional weapons day in day out. The UN Convention outlawing the use of chemical weapons was aimed at big time use of them when they become dangerous enough to dominate a battle field- as the Germans used them in the First World War and Saddam Hussein (then supported by US arms sales) used them against Iran and against his own Kurdish population when 5,000 were killed.



So what do the outside players do next? Do they know where they are going? Trump last month said he was pulling out his 2,000 soldiers, who are inside Syria. Now, his Secretary of Defence says they will stay. Most if not all the EU countries appear to back or at least tolerate the supportive bombing action of British Prime Minister Theresa May, and French President Emmanuel Macron. Neither know much about the complexities of the Middle East but have decided to throw in their lot with Trump who knows even less.

The three of them must have been told by their advisers that this attack is chicken feed compared with the murder that goes on every week. It, and the two previous uses of chemical weapons, are a small item in the seven years of civil war. They barely impinge on Assad. To be coherent the three nations should commit themselves to tens if not hundreds of thousands of boots on the ground to topple Assad. But they are very unlikely to do that. So wheres a coherent explanation for what theyve just done?



I recall what Americas top strategist, the late Zbigniew Brzezinski, wrote in Time magazine a year ago: The Syrian conflict is a sectarian war in a volatile region whose potential to spread and directly threaten American interests would only be increased by US intervention..American involvement would simply mobilize the extreme elements of the factions against the US and pose the danger that the conflict would spill over into the neighbourhood and set Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon on fire. (The factions he mentions are Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran, Sunni Salafists, Iranian-aligned militias, Al Qaeda and ISIS.).The recent Israeli bombing of weapons sites inside Syria conveys to some Arabs the sense that there is an external plot against them. That impression would be solidified if the US were now to enter the fight, suggesting a de facto American-Saudi-Israeli alliance, which would play into the hands of the extremists.The various schemes that have been proposed for a kind of tiddlywinks intervention from around the edges of the conflict- no-fly zones, bombing Damascus and so forth- would simply make the situation worse.

"So what do the outside players do next? Do they know where they are going? Trump last month said he was pulling out his 2,000 soldiers, who are inside Syria. Now, his Secretary of Defence says they will stay. Most if not all the EU countries appear to back or at least tolerate the supportive bombing action of British Prime Minister Theresa May, and French President Emmanuel Macron"



So what should be done by the Western powers? At the moment they dont seem to have any ideas, or not ones they want to share with the public, maybe because they know they will ridiculed. Mr Trump, is it all leading to an attack on Iran? The talented Danish artist, Linda Balle, writes on one side of one of her drawings, Now Here, and on the other side, as her dancing figure traverses the page, writes, No Where. Thats how it seems to be with the three Western allies.

My answer is for the Western powers to remove themselves from the fray, apart from providing humanitarian aid. They should persuade Assad, in return for ending their military involvement, to make sure it is distributed around the country fairly. Aid organisations should be allowed free passage to wherever the choose to work.



The US, the EU, Russia and Iran should apply themselves to negotiations. The previous UN effort failed partly because Iran, on the insistence of the US, was kept out.

The outside powers must accept, however distasteful it may seem, that Assad has won the civil war. Like it not, that has to be the starting point. The outsiders, after conceding that, should demand amnesty for those who have opposed the regime.

The Russians would support this. They have been trying to withdraw for quite some time but events keep pulling them back. As for Iran, it needs an entente with Syria rather than a future war.

The pursuit of peace is possible, even at this late stage. But it has to be given priority. Bombing goes nowhere.



For 17 years, the writer was a foreign affairs columnist and commentator for the International Herald Tribune/New York Times.
President Maithripala Sirisena prorogued Parliament because he feared an impeachment motion to be brought against him by the United National Party (UNP) backbenchers, the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) said today.

MP Prasanna Ranatunga told a news conference that the UNP backbenchers were planning to submit a impeachment motion against the President.

They are reaching out to other political parties seeking help in this regard. UNP backbenchers approached JO as well. We informed them that if they brought the motion in a proper manner, we May make a decision after submitting a proposal to our leadership committee, he said.

The MP said the gazette to prorogue Parliament had been issued in haste because the time of reconvening Parliament had not been mentioned in it.

Only the date has been mentioned. They behave like infants who cant get a job done properly, he said and added that the unity government cannot be maintained hereafter because the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) has been split into many factions.

The SLFP is barely a proper party now. It is more like a quarter of a party. How can an agreement be maintained between such a small faction and another party to establish a Unity Government? When Parliament is reconvened the Speaker decide about the Unity Government which is hanging by a thread, he said. (Lahiru Pothmulla)
Prices of new residential and commercial projects under construction expected to increase in the near future

Countrys largest aluminium extrusions producer yet to take decision to raise prices

Aluminum prices surged to highest level since 2011 this week amid US sanctions on Russia take out big producer

By Chandeepa Wettasinghe

With aluminium prices in the world market on the surge owing to US sanctions on Russian aluminium giant United Co. Rusal, prices of new residential and commercial projects under construction in Sri Lanka are expected to increase in the near future, an industry stakeholders said.

This will mainly affect developers who are going to be placing orders for aluminium products. The main items for most of the apartment buildings are aluminium doors, windows and frames because at heights, they need to be able to withstand the weather, Chamber of Construction Industry Sri Lanka CEO/Secretary General Nissanka Wijeratne said.



Speaking to Mirror Business, he said aluminium products make up between 5 to 8 percent of an apartments cost, with the upper limit being reached by some luxury apartments.



Individual houses still use timber mostly. Especially middle-class housing, but some of the more quality-conscious are now going for aluminium because it doesnt warp and resists the rain better than timber, Wijeratne said.



The retail complexes and office spaces being constructed, mainly in Colombo, too would be affected by the prevailing situation.



Despite the increase in prices in the global market, Wijeratne said local aluminium suppliers have not increased their prices so far.

Hayleys PLC subsidiary Alumex PLC, the countrys largest aluminium extrusions producer, is yet to take a decision on rising prices.

Its too early to decide, Alumex Executive Director Pramuk Dediwela said in an e-mail.

Prices of 3-month futures of aluminium on the London Metal Exchange reached a 6-year high of US$ 2,559 per tonne in mid-day trading yesterday after opening at US$ 2,408.50 per tonne. Aluminium prices have experienced upward momentum since the start of April when the price was US$ 1,978 per tonne.



Investment bank Goldman Sachs was quoted in Bloomberg yesterday saying that it was expecting aluminium prices to spike at US$ 3,000 in the short-term.



United Co. Rusals owner Oleg Deripaska, along with a number of other Russian business magnates, their companies, state officials and two state-owned companies were hit with US sanctions earlier this month for their links to Russias actions in the Ukraine, Crimea and Syria, attempting to subvert Western democracies and engaging in malicious cyber activities.



United Co. Rusal is the worlds second largest aluminium supplier, accounting for around 6 percent of global production, behind a Chinese competitor.
This is the second NCM against Opposition Leader in Sri Lanka; Amirthalingam faced an NCM in JRs Govt.

The No-Confidence Motion against the Leader of the Opposition seems inevitable unless saner counsel prevails within Opposition

The JO decided to submit a letter to Speaker Karu Jayasuriya demanding that R. Sampanthan be removed as the Opposition Leader

JO to agitate nationally and internationally for the removal of Sampanthan

Failed to exercise his duties properly

Sampanthan says ready to face an NCM should one be moved against him by the JO

By

D.B.S. Jeyaraj

Hell hath no fury as an Opposition thwarted in its bid to pass a No-Confidence Motion (NCM) against a Prime Minister!

Sri Lankas self -styled Joint Opposition led unofficially by Kurunegala District MP Mahinda Rajapaksa and officially by Colombo District Parliamentarian Dinesh Gunawardane is still smarting from the defeat encountered while attempting to pass a No-Confidence Motion (NCM) against Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe.



The ill-advised move failed miserably. Furthermore, instead of toppling the Prime Minister as intended, the NCM has only strengthened United National Party (UNP) leader Ranil Wickremesinghe politically - at least for the time being.

Moreover, the impact of the NCM has resulted in the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) fragmenting into three factions and facing the dismal prospect of a permanent division in the future.

Unable and unwilling at this juncture to blame or confront President Maithripala Sirisena for the NCM failure the Joint Opposition has found a scapegoat in the form of the premier Sri Lankan Tamil political configuration known as the Tamil National Alliance (TNA). The Joint Opposition is training its guns on the TNA Parliamentary Group Leader and Leader of the Opposition Rajavarothayam Sampanthan. The octogenarian Tamil leader was elected to Parliament from the Trincomalee District.

A news story in the Daily News of April 10 stated as follows

- The Joint Opposition has decided to submit a letter to Speaker Karu Jayasuriya demanding that Tamil National Alliance Leader R. Sampanthan be removed as the Opposition Leader of Parliament.

If the Speaker does not respond positively, the JO is even prepared to submit a No-Confidence Motion against the Opposition Leader, a senior JO member said.

MP Dinesh Gunawardane said the JO would agitate both nationally and internationally for the removal of Sampanthan as he had failed to exercise his duties properly as the

Opposition Leader.

Citing Sampanthans latest decision to vote against the JO sponsored No-Confidence Motion against the Prime Minister, Gunawardane charged that Sampanthan continued to back the Government and especially the Premier blindly in order to save his own position.

"The veteran Trincomalee MP is incorrect when he says I think that nowhere in the world has an Opposition Leader faced a No-Confidence Motion. There is a precedent and that too in Sri Lanka in 1981! "



Gunawardane said that Sampanthan had failed to galvanise the Opposition in a constructive manner in order to fight the shortcomings of the Government. He said the Joint Opposition should be granted the post of Opposition Leader without delay as it had the required numbers in Parliament and the will to fight against the Governments flaws.





Defiant Sampanthan In Fighting Mood

The Opposition Leader himself in a fighting mood was ready to face the impending No-Confidence Motion.

At a media meeting in Jaffna, Sampanthan responded defiantly to the news about an NCM being planned against him. A news report in the Daily News stated as follows

-  Opposition Leader R. Sampanthan said that he was prepared to face a No-Confidence Motion, should one be moved against him by the Joint Opposition. Addressing a press conference in Jaffna, Sampanthan said that the Joint Opposition might move a No-Confidence Motion against him, accusing him of voting in favour of the No-Confidence Motion against Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe.

The news report quoted Sampanthan thus  It is neither ethical nor Parliamentary Tradition to bring a No-Confidence Motion against an Opposition Leader. I think that nowhere in the world has an Opposition Leader faced a No-Confidence Motion, he said.

He said that if a No-Confidence Motion was brought against him, he was ready to face it.

If the Joint Opposition brought a No-Confidence Motion against me for supporting the Prime Minister, I am ready to face it, he said.



He noted that the National Government led by the President and the Prime Minister now should focus on swift Constitutional reforms.

While Rajavarothayam Sampanthan is to be commended for being ready, able and willing to face the envisaged NCM, the Leader of the Opposition seems to have made a slip in his references to the proposed No-Confidence Motion.

According to the Daily News Sampanthan reportedly said

It is neither ethical nor Parliamentary Tradition to bring a No-Confidence Motion against an Opposition Leader. I think that nowhere in the world has an Opposition Leader faced a No-Confidence Motion.

The veteran Trincomalee MP is correct in saying there is no Parliamentary Tradition of a No-Confidence Motion being brought against a Leader of the Opposition but is incorrect when he says I think that nowhere in the world has an Opposition Leader faced a No-Confidence Motion.

There is a precedent and that too in Sri Lanka in 1981!



Since Sampanthan himself was an Opposition MP then it is indeed puzzling as to how the opposition leader forgot what had happened nearly 37 years ago.

Given the efforts underway to present a No-Confidence Motion against Sampanthan in Parliament, it may prove useful to re-visit the not so distant past when a No-Confidence Motion was brought against a leader of the opposition.

The UNP Government led by President Junius Richard Jayewardene went down in Parliamentary history as the only Govt. whose ruling party members presented, debated and passed a No-Confidence Motion against the then Leader of the Opposition in July 1981.

In a remarkable coincidence, the Opposition Leader at that time too was a Sri Lankan Tamil. Well-known Tamil leader Appappillai Amirthalingam, the Secretary-General of the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) was the Leader of the Opposition, who underwent the novel experience of having Govt. MPs pass a No-Confidence Motion against him.

"Amirthalingam was in an unenviable position. The TULF had whipped up emotions among Tamils in general and the youths in particular for the establishment of a separate State called Tamil Eelam."



As a result, Sri Lanka became the laughing stock of the world then.

The circumstances that led to this bizarre event and the disgraceful manner in which the NCM debate was conducted in Parliament then deserves being related in some detail against the backdrop of a similar no confidence in the Leader of the Opposition move being

currently planned.





General Elections of July 1977

The General Elections of July 1977 was a watershed in the post-Independence political history of the Island nation.

The country was virtually polarised on an ethnic basis with the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) contesting on a platform of separatism and winning 18 of 19 Tamil -majority seats in the Northern and Eastern Provinces

of Sri Lanka.

The First Past the Post winner electoral system was in vogue then. The UNP won the bulk of seats in the eight provinces outside the North including the East.

At the final count after the postponed Pottuvil election being held, the UNP had 140 seats including that of an independent who had crossed over in the then National State Assembly of 168.

The TULF came next with 18 seats.

The SLFP which had polled much more votes than the TULF had only 8. The Ceylon Workers Congress had one seat but its leader and MP Soumiyamoorthy Thondaman was to join the Govt. a year later. One elected independent also sat in the opposition.

It is the tradition and practice in Parliamentary democracies for the leader or nominee of the Chief Opposition party to be nominated as Leader of the Opposition.



This procedure had been followed dutifully in Ceylon/Sri Lanka too. So, with the SLFP being reduced to 8 and the TULF having 18, the Tamil party had to don the mantle of Opposition Leader.

Amirthalingam first offered it to Thondaman who declined it. Thereafter Amirthalingam himself became Leader of the Opposition.

The TULF president at that time was Nallur MP Murugesu Sivasithamparam who opted to let Amirthalingam be the Opposition Leader.

In those days Sivasithamparam was referred to as the Iyakkathin Thalaiver( Leader of the movement) and Amirthalingam as Inathin Thalaiver (Leader of the people/race).

It must be noted that there was a precedent for the chief opposition party leader not accepting Leader of the Opposition office.

In 1970 the UNP was the chief opposition party with 17 seats but it was not party leader Dudley Senanayake but his chief deputy JR Jayewardene who became Leader of the Opposition.

Dudley remained party leader until his demise in 1973.Thereafter JR the Opposition Leader became party leader also.

Amirthalingam becoming Leader of the Opposition created many issues.



It was customary to regard the Leader of the Opposition as a potential future Prime Minister. The Opposition party itself functioned like a Govt. in waiting with a shadow cabinet.

In the UK Parliament, regarded as the mother of all Parliaments, the Opposition Leader is called Her Majestys most loyal leader of the opposition.

In Sri Lanka, a tricky situation prevailed as the Leader of the Opposition and his party had been elected with what was termed as a mandate for the separate state of

Tamil Eelam.

The country seemed polarised ethnically with the Govt. hierarchy being Sinhala and the Opposition leadership being Tamil.

"A tricky situation prevailed as the Leader of the pposition and his party had been elected with what was termed as a mandate for the separate state of Tamil Eelam. "

Many Sinhala people resented Amirthalingam as Opposition Leader because in reality the chief opposition party in terms of votes polled was the SLFP and the Opposition Leader should have been Sirima Bandaranaike.

A quirk of fate in the form of lopsided electoral results had brought about a strange turn of events. JR himself preferred Amirthalingam as Opposition Leader over his bete noire Sirima Bandaranaike.

After all did he not deprive her of civic rights in 1980?. So the UNP Govt did not block Amirthalingam from becoming Opposition Leader and even tacitly supported it.



Moreover, JR Jayewardene elevated the Leader of the Opposition post to be on par with that of a Cabinet Minister.

JR had found himself treated shabbily as Leader of Opposition during the Sirima Bandaranaike regime. So, he wanted to alter that situation by empowering and dignifying the post. The Opposition Leader was paid a salary equal to a Cabinet Minister.

A large office with supporting staff including secretary, clerks, typists and peons was provided. After the new Parliament started functioning in Kotte, the Opposition Leader office became even more spacious and accommodated a larger staff.

Official vehicles were given and also a chief body guard. Tamil clerical services trade unionist Perinbanayagam became the Opposition Leaders Secretary and Police Inspector Krishnaswamy the chief body guard.

The Leader of the Opposition was also provided with a well-equipped bungalow adjacent to the MP

hostel Sravasti.

Soon the Leader of the Opposition office in Parliament and official residence were virtually transformed in practice into TULF offices.





Amirthalingam In An Unenviable Position

Amirthalingam, however, was in an unenviable position. The TULF had whipped up emotions among Tamils in general and the youths in particular for the establishment of a separate State called Tamil Eelam.

The Tamil people were called upon to make great sacrifices to achieve Tamil Eelam. It was a familiar sight at TULF election meetings for Tamil youths to line up and daub the foreheads of TULF candidates and speakers with blood after slashing their fingers. The youths expected the TULF to adopt a non-compromising stance after being elected.

Many were disappointed by what they perceived to be a sell-out by Amirthalingam for the perks and privileges of a Leader of the Opposition post. It was felt (wrongly) that cunning JR had deftly co-opted Amirthalingam into his folds. Critical slogans began appearing as graffiti on Jaffna walls. Two slogans that I remember now are Kaettathu Thamil Eezham. Kidaithathu Japan Jeep (Demanded Tamil Eelam and got Japanese Jeep) and Ethirk Katchith Thalaimai Alla , Singala Arasukku Ethirppae Emakku Vaendum(We want Opposition to the Sinhala State and not the

Opposition Leadership).

In such a situation, Amirthalingam was caught in the middle.

The TULF took up the position that although they were bound by the mandate for Tamil Eelam the party was willing to consider what Amirthalingam termed as a Viable Alternative.

"He utilised the Leader of the Opposition post to interact with foreign leaders, diplomats, officials and media personnel and put across the Tamil viewpoint. "

Amirthalingam tried valiantly to steer a difficult path between commitment to the electoral mandate and the pragmatic necessity for democratic politics.

He utilised the Leader of the Opposition post to interact with foreign leaders, diplomats, officials and media personnel and put across the Tamil viewpoint. By doing so he incurred the wrath of many hawks in the Govt. like former Industries and Scientific Affairs Minister Cyril Mathew who was dubbed the Industrious Minister of Anti-Tamil Affairs.

A particular point which enraged the Govt. was Amirthalingams conduct while abroad.

There was a conventional expectation that Leaders of the Opposition do not criticise Governments on foreign soil.

While they could and should do so in their own land, it was seen as being Not done to air grievances and evince criticism to audiences abroad.

Amirthalingam however considered himself to be a liberation movement leader and did not abide by such norms. He was very critical particularly when he addressed gatherings of Sri Lankan Tamils in the West or meetings in Tamil Nadu.

Amirthalingam also violated protocol while abroad. As the Leader of the Opposition was on par with a Cabinet Minister, Sri Lankan diplomatic missions were expected to provide transport and other services to the visiting dignitary.

"Moreover, the impact of the NCM has resulted in the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) fragmenting into three factions and facing the dismal prospect of a permanent division in the future."

Amirthalingam however dispensed with such protocol measures and opted to liaise independently with Tamil expatriates many of whom were supportive of a separate State.

Under these circumstances, the relationship between the Leader of the Opposition and the ruling Government was quite choppy and even stormy at times. The UNP rule of JR Jayewardene too was eventful and particularly impacted on the

Tamil people then.

The August 1977 anti-Tamil violence, the introduction of the Executive Presidency, the 1978 Constitution, the appointment of an - Tamil District Ministers for Districts in the North-East, the 1979 Emergency rule in Jaffna under the command of Brig. Bull Weeratunga, the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA),the appointment of a commission on devolution headed by ex-Chief Justice Victor Tennekoon, the setting up of District Development Councils, Elections to the DDCs, Police going on the rampage in Jaffna and setting fire to the Jaffna library, Eela Nadu newspaper office, TULF party headquarters and the house and vehicle of Jaffna MP V. Yogeswaran were but some of the developments that took place in the four year period from 1977 to 1981.



Parallel and inter-related to this course of events was the rise of armed violence by Tamil militant organizations. Bank and Post office robberies, the assassination of Police personnel, attacks on Police patrols, killing of Tamils deemed as traitors or collaborators of the Govt., targeting of pro-Govt. politicians etc. were also incidents affecting the Tamil polity.

Even though there were simmering inter-ethnic tensions the advent of DDCs and the holding of elections to the councils were expected to bring about a quantum of peace and stability to the situation. Tragically the holding of DDC elections caused further deterioration and widened the ethnic divide.

A disgusting flashpoint of prevailing tensions was the unprecedented No-Confidence Motion against the then Leader of the Opposition Appappillai Amirthalingam.

District Development Councils Elections In 1981

What had happened then was that the UNP contesting all the District Development Council elections in the country were pitted against the TULF in the North and East.

The TULF won the DDCs of Jaffna, Mullaitheevu, Mannar, Vavuniya, Batticaloa and Trincomalee.

There had been pre-election violence in Jaffna when the UNP chief candidate for Jaffna district Dr A.Thiyagarajah was shot dead by operatives belonging to the PLOTE led by Uma Maheswaran.

A few other UNP workers in Jaffna were also killed in separate incidents.

On May 31st, 1981 the PLOTE shot and killed three policemen on duty at a TULF meeting in Naachimaar Koaviladdy in Jaffna.

A large number of Policemen from outside areas had been deployed in Jaffna for election security. Many of these cops went on the rampage on May 31st and June 1st. This was in retaliation for the attack on the Policemen at Naachimaar Koaviladdy. The Jaffna Public Library, TULF Headquarters, Eela Nadu newspaper, Jaffna MP Yogeswarans house and a number of shops, houses and vehicles were torched by the errant Policemen.



The burning of the Jaffna Public Library with 97,000 books including many first editions and rare manuscripts was a terrible event that shocked the Tamils.

The incident was condemned as an act of cultural genocide by the civilised world. Naturally, the TULF raised a huge outcry over this.

Lacking the political courage to blame or penalise the Policemen responsible for torching the library the Govt. tried to fault Amirthalingam and the TULF for alleged anti-national propaganda.

Amirthalingam did not crumble under pressure. Instead, he went on a global trip to countries such as the USA, UK and India where he related in detail the circumstances regarding the Jaffna Library burning and exposed the fact that the Govt. had not taken any constructive action.

This enraged the UNP govt. more.

After Amirthalingams return, the TULF gave notice of a vote of No -Confidence against the Jayewardene Govt. in Parliament.

This infuriated the UNP Govt. greatly.

When the TULF gave notice in Parliament of a vote of No-Confidence against the Government, the UNP regime retaliated by giving notice of a vote of No-Confidence against the Leader of the Opposition.



This was an unprecedented development in the Parliamentary history of not only the Island but of the Parliamentary democratic world.

Although the custom was to afford priority to an opposition motion, the Govt. overruled opposition objections and gave precedence to the Govt. motion of No-Confidence on the Leader of the Opposition. The proposal mooted by then Panadura MP Dr.Neville Fernando was signed by 36 UNP Parliamentarians. It was widely believed and subsequently confirmed by Dr.Fernando that the No-Confidence Motion project had the approval of President Jayewardene himself.

President Jayewardene was regarded as all-powerful then.

Although there were many decent, learned persons in the UNP Parliamentary group none dared to defy the almighty JR.

Hence the UNP to its eternal shame went along with what was perhaps an all-time low in Parliamentary annals.



The No-Confidence Motion by members of the govt. against the Leader of the Opposition was taken up in Parliament on July 23rd and 24th 1981.

What followed was a high drama of a cheap variety.

At the outset, Amirthalingam wanted to explain his position and rose to his feet. Pandemonium erupted. Amirthalingams voice was drowned in a flood of choice epithets like traitor, liar, and tiger supporter.

Dr Neville Fernando objected to Amirthalingam making a personal statement saying that he could do so only with the indulgence of the House.

Speaker Bakeer Markar upheld Dr Fernandos objection and refused to let Amirthalingam speak. At this point, the TULF walked out in protest.



SLFP Deputy -Leader Maithripala Senanayake

Thereafter SLFP deputy leader and Medawachchiya MP Maitripala Senanayake raised a Point of Order and submitted three reasons for the Speaker to rule the No-Confidence Motion out of order.

Firstly, the vote of no confidence on the Leader of the Opposition did not fall within the powers of Parliament. It had not happened anywhere in the world. Secondly, the Leader of the Opposition held his office in accordance to Parliamentary Convention and he enjoyed the confidence of the members of the Opposition. He need not enjoy the confidence of parliament or that of the Government members. Thirdly, the motion, even if passed, would not bring any result. Amirthalingam would continue to be the Leader of the Opposition even after the passage of the motion.

The speaker Bakeer Markar evaded the issue and said Senanayakes Point of Order had been raised too late.

Therefore he could not stop the No-Confidence Motion being debated. The lone Communist party MP from Kalawana, Sarath Muttetuwegama chided the Speaker saying that he was letting the Govt. MPs run Parliament.



The SLFP and CP members also walked out in protest.

Thus Sri Lanka witnessed the bizarre event of the Government conducting a solo performance of debating a No-Confidence Motion against the Leader of the Opposition, while the entire Opposition had walked out in protest.

Most Cabinet or Deputy Ministers from the UNP did not speak but there were some who did including district and project ministers. The backbenchers had a field day. Then followed a disgusting relay of speeches by UNP Parliamentarians uttering dire threats of punishment to Amirthalingam and other TULF traitor MPs.

Horsewhipping, shooting them on Galle Face Green, Tying up on a Post and whipping, Mutilation, dumping in the Lake Beira were some of the modes of punishment advocated.

The most bloodcurdling threat was about reviving an ancient form of punishment allegedly practised by Sinhala kings in the past against traitors.

The victim was to be bound by his two feet to two bent areca nut trees tied with ropes. When the ropes are cut the bent trees spring back upright. The victim would be torn apart.

Speaker Bakeer Markar ordered three passages to be expunged as they horribly violated all norms of civilized conduct let alone Parliamentary decorum.



Among the four Cabinet Ministers who spoke during that debate was Saumiyamoorthy Thondaman the Minister of Rural Industrial Development in the JRJ regime.

Thondaman speaking in his capacity as leader of the Ceylon Workers Congress (CWC) was very critical of the No-Confidence Motion.

He also uttered a prophetic warning that undermining Amirthalingam would pave the way for an extremist type of Tamil politics to emerge.

Finally, it was voting time on July 24th. Thondaman abstained. There were 121 votes supporting the NCM.

There was, however, one solitary vote against the motion.

The man who voted against the UNP motion was none other than the honourable member for Senkadagala, Shelton Ranaraja.

By doing so he not only demonstrated that he was an honourable person but also helped salvage a little bit of honour at least for his party.



Shelton Ranarajas Principled Stance

Shelton Ranarajas principled stance on that fateful day was a quiet display of courageous defiance.

At the UNP Parliamentary group meeting held before the debate, only Shelton Ranaraja had opposed the No-Confidence Motion against the Opposition Leader.

Describing it as a travesty of democracy, Ranaraja said it should be abandoned.

Otherwise, he would have no choice other than to vote against it, he said.

President Jayewardene would have none of it. JR said that Shelton could either keep away at the voting time or abstain from voting but must not go against the party by voting against it. Even Thondaman would abstain after speaking out against the motion, Jayewardene informed Ranaraja.

The Senkadagala MP kept quiet during the course of the No-Confidence Motion debate while Thondaman made a hard-hitting speech.



When the voting time arrived, the loquacious Thondaman abstained but the hitherto silent Ranaraja  who was also expected to abstain  did the unexpected.

He voted against the motion openly defying President Jayewardene and the UNP Parliamentarians.

Shelton Ranaraja was prepared to stand up and be counted at the right time. When JR questioned him about it later, Shelton replied that he had voted according to his conscience.

Knowing Sheltons brand of principled politics, JR Jayewardene let it go at that.

This was not the first time that Shelton Ranaraja had dared to go against Junius Richard Jayewardene.

It was in 1980 that the UNP govt. passed legislation depriving former Prime Minister and SLFP leader Ms Sirima Bandaranaike of her Civic Rights.

Shelton (though a Deputy Minister ) was present at the Cabinet Meeting that preceded the move in his capacity as Acting Minister of Justice.

He opposed the taking away of Sirimas Civic Rights at the Cabinet Conclave.

A seemingly bemused JR smiled wryly at Shelton and quipped you seem to be very fond of the lady. Shelton replied I am not fond of any personalities. I care only for my conscience.

Later on, JR told Shelton to keep away at the voting time if his conscience troubled him. Shelton did so.



However, in the case of the No-Confidence Motion, Shelton went against JRs wishes boldly.

This then is the story of a No-Confidence Motion brought against a Leader of the Opposition by a ruling Govt.

It appears that history may repeat itself in a different form with another vote of No-Confidence Motion against a Leader of the Opposition.

Then it was Amirthalingam and now it is Sampanthan, both of whom happen to be Sri Lankan Tamils.

However, the circumstances under which Amirthalingam became Opposition Leader are vastly different to that of Sampanthan.

Both appointments were legal but there are doubts about legitimacy in the case of Sampanthan.

Moreover, the NCM being mooted against Sampanthan is from opposition ranks whereas in Amirthalingams case it was from the Govt.

With the Joint Opposition mounting pressure on Sampanthan, the No-Confidence Motion against the Leader of the Opposition seems inevitable unless saner counsel prevails within opposition ranks.



Govts Most Loyal Leader of The Opposition

While Sampanthan is being targeted by the Joint Opposition there is a growing school of thought among sections of Tamils that the TNA leader should give up his Opposition Leader post voluntarily.



Cabinet Minister Mano Ganesan recently observed whether it was worthwhile for Sampanthan to retain the Opposition Leader position when the Constitutional process has reached a standstill.



There is also a feeling that Sampanthan functioning as the UNP-SLFP Governments Most loyal Leader of the Opposition is affecting the electoral fortunes of the TNA as demonstrated in the recent local authority polls.



These and other related matters will be delved into in greater detail in a forthcoming article.



(ENDS)

D.B.S.Jeyaraj can be reached at dbsjeyaraj@yahoo.com
A red notice was issued against former Central Bank Governor Arjuna Mahandran by the Interpol today, Police Spokesman SP Ruwan Gunasekara told Daily Mirror a short while ago.

He said the notice was issued in connection with the CID investigation into Central Bank bond scam.

Mr. Mahendran was directed by Court to report to the CID by February 15 to record statements in connection with the magisterial inquiry into the bond auction held on February 27, 2015 however he had failed obey the Court's directive.

On March 29, the Fort Magistrate re-issued a warrant for the arrest of Mr. Mahendran but the warrant could not be served because he was not at the given address in Singapore.

However, the red notice on Mr. Mahendran is not visible in the Interpol's official website on the basis that they are restricted to law enforcement use only. (Thilanka Kanakarathna)
The temporally ban imposed on a surgeon from England at the Karapitiya Hospital preventing him from conducting surgeries was lifted last evening on a recommendation made by the Sri Lanka Medical Council (SLMC), Karapitiya Hospital Director Dr. Jayampathy Senanayake said.

He claimed the British doctor was suspended from performing heart surgeries pending a determination from the SLMC on his practising license.

Dr. Senanayake told Daily Mirror that the issue had been taken up after several doctors attached to the Government Medical Officers Association (GMOA) observed that the British doctor did not have a licence to practise in the United Kingdom (UK) as it needed to be renewed from time to time.

However, Dr. Senanayaka explained that the said doctor had since obtained SLMC permission to perform surgeries in Sri Lanka and could resume his duties henceforth and added that the SLMC had the sole authority to decide on it.

The GMOA were threatening to resort to trade union action if the authorities failed to take action against this doctor. In the UK, it is necessary for doctors to be registered with their Medical Council. There is also a practising licence which needs to be renewed periodically. However, unlike in the UK, only the SLMCs certification is needed to practice medicine in Sri Lanka, he said. Another claim of the GMOA is that the said British doctor was too old, he added. (Kalathma Jayawardhane and Thilanka Kanakarathne)
The Trump administration is considering declaring a national economic emergency to impose new restrictions on Chinese investment as part of a trade crackdown on Beijing, a senior US Treasury official confirmed.



Heath Tarbert, assistant Treasury secretary for international markets and investment policy, told a Washington conference on Thursday that the administration was looking at invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) as part of an investment crackdown ordered by President Donald Trump last month, according to media reports. The law is usually used to administer sanctions against rogue regimes and terrorist groups. It would give the president broad powers to restrict Chinese investment in sensitive sectors such as semiconductors and robotics that the administration is concerned Beijing is targeting as part of a strategic push to acquire US technology.



The move comes amid signs that increased scrutiny of Chinese inbound investments into the US has already put a damper on capital flows. Foreign direct investment between the worlds two largest economies has already been hit by rising trade tension and increased scrutiny from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (Cfius)  which reviews transactions for potential national security threats  for Chinese transactions.

Last year, Chinese FDI into the US fell to US$29bn from a record US$46bn in 2016, according to the Rhodium Group, a consultancy that tracks investment flows between the worlds two largest economies.



IEEPAs potential use has been reported previously, but Tarbert is thought to be the first US official to acknowledge publicly that the administration was considering the move.



The potential move is part of the USs Section 301 investigation into the alleged Chinese theft of US intellectual property and practice of forcing technology transfers from foreign investors. That probe has already resulted in threats by Trump to impose tariffs on up to US$150bn in imports from China that have provoked vows to retaliate from Beijing and fears of a potential trade war.



The Treasury department is drafting a plan for new investment restrictions that would go beyond the national security limitations administered by Cfius. Congress is also considering legislation that would expand Cfius remit to cover outbound investments in joint ventures in China and other countries.



We have separate offices in Treasury which are considering those two issues distinctly, Tarbert told an Institute of International Finance conference on the sidelines of this weeks World Bank and International Monetary Fund spring meetings. The Treasury has until late May to send its plan for new investment restrictions to Trump. But the legislation to reform Cfius has also run into opposition from major business groups, including IBM and GE, which are concerned that the proposed measures on outbound investment are too broad. John Cornyn, the Texas Senate Republican who is the Cfius legislations chief sponsor, lashed out on Thursday at opponents of the bill, who have been seeking to rein in its scope.



The Cfius process wasnt originally designed and is now insufficient to address todays rapidly evolving technology as well as the threats to our technological edge, he said on Thursday. I believe that the opponents of the reforms that Ive just talked about are trying to perpetuate the status quo as long as possible, not to protect our national security interests but just the opposite, so they can bolster their bottom line. (Financial Times)
Matt Baron/ShutterstockWhile Elton John has admitted that he's pretty sick of "Crocodile Rock," he knows fans love it, so of course he's going to perform it on his upcoming Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour -- and he wants you to be involved.

If you're a crazed Elton John fan, now's the time to let your freak flag fly. Elton's team is asking fans to submit photos of themselves dressed up in their best Elton outfit, and posing with their favorite memorabilia.

"We're looking for unusual, crazy and over-the-top, just like the song!" says the invitation. "Why not get your cat involved if they're a fan too?!"

Elton's team will go through all the submissions and then travel around the world to film those selected for a special video that will be shown when Elton plays "Crocodile Rock." Even if you don't get to be part of the video, your photo may appear in the tour program.

All you need to do to enter is email crocodilerock@eltonjohn.com with your crazy photo, your favorite Elton memory, your name, date of birth, full address and country. If you're chosen for the video or program, the team will be in touch.

The Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour gets underway September 8 in Allentown, PA. At the end of this month, Elton will kick off the next series of dates for his Million Dollar Piano residency at the Colosseum in Las Vegas.

Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
El presidente @MartinVizcarraC visita la region Junin para supervisar las atenciones multisectoriales del Estado en el distrito de San Martin de Pangoa. pic.twitter.com/OUDnSRWiv6
Prime Minister of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan is not inclined to think Artsakhs non-settled issue will remain for the next generations, the PM said in an interview with Shant TV.

April 20, 2018, 09:11 Azerbaijan should get rid of false illusions for settling NK conflict  PM Serzh Sargsyan

STEPANAKERT, APRIL 20, ARTSAKHPRESS-ARMENPRESS:Maybe it will again become a subject for speculations but one of the arguments that I am the Prime Minister today is linked with that. The negotiation process must be continued. We will not change our position on Artsakh issue, Sargsyan said.

He denied that in the future people can come to power who will agree to surrender Arsakh to Azerbaijan. It will be a little incomprehensible for me. If you mean the next generations, I will turn in the grave to hear such a thing, the PM joked.

Serzh Sargsyan emphasized that for the settlement of Artsakh issue first of all Azerbaijan should get rid of false illusions. When Azerbaijanis get rid of those illusions and of the idea that mutual concession means concession only from the Armenian side, the issue can of course be solved, he announced.

The PM noted that the way to peace is to reach an agreement, while for reaching an agreement the opinions of both sides are important.

Our most important task must be to work in the direction of preserving and developing the combat readiness of the Armenian Armed Forces every day and every hour. This is the most realistic method to preserve stability.

Of course, we must develop and deepen our relations with the allies, because a lot depends on them as well, but the Armenian soldier and officer are the crucial factor, Serzh Sargsyan stressed.
EU member states as well as Norway, Iceland and Switzerland granted protection status to 538,000 asylum seekers in 2017, according to new data released by Eurostat on Thursday.

April 20, 2018, 10:34 EU granted 500,000 people asylum protection in 2017

STEPANAKERT, APRIL 20, ARTSAKHPRESS:Another 24,000 refugees were resettled in the region last year.

Last year's asylum seeker figures represent a 25% drop from 2016, when 710,000 asylum seekers qualified for international protection in the bloc.

Two forms of protection are offered under EU law: refugee status  for people fleeing persecution, and subsidiary protection  for those who face serious harm if they return to their country of origin, and who dont qualify as refugees. But protection may also be given for humanitarian reasons, such as on grounds of ill health or if the person is an unaccompanied minor.

Around a third of such asylum seekers in Europe came from Syria last year, followed by Afghan citizens (19%) and Iraqis (12%).
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Investors continue to pump money into funds that own Chinese tech giants, Thai energy companies and other stocks from developing countries.



By STAN CHOE

AP Business Writer

NEW YORK  Even the suddenly shaky stock market hasn't scared people away from investments that are supposed to be some of the world's riskiest.

In a surprising twist, investors have continued to pump money into funds that own Chinese technology giants, Thai energy companies and other stocks from developing countries. At the same time, investors have become more hesitant about U.S. stock funds, even though both have turned in losses since the market started struggling in February.





. . .
"President of Azerbaijan pretends as if he has forgotten that he has accepted the document of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-chairs as the basis for negotiations, according to which the status of Artsakh is determined by the legally binding expression of will of the people of Artsakh," Deputy Foreign Minister of Armenia Shavarsh Kocharyan told Armenpress news agency.

April 20, 2018, 10:53 Azerbaijani leadership with morbid obsession ignores or distorts everything - deputy foreign minister

STEPANAKERT, APRIL 20, ARTSAKHPRESS:Asked to comment on the announcement of the President of Azerbaijan that the basis for the settlement of Nagorno Karabakh conflict is the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, Kocharyan said the words of the Azerbaijani leader are half-truth, since the issue should be settled within the framework of the territorial integrity of both Artsakh and Azerbaijan. "The territorial integrity of the Republic of Azerbaijan has nothing to do with the territorial integrity of the Republic of Artsakh," said Kocharyan.

"The best answer to Azerbaijani President's made-up labeling of Nagorno-Karabakh is free, independent Artsakh with its vibrant civil society, which is moving forward on the path of strengthening democracy," added the deputy minister.

In response to Aliyev's claims about Armenia and Artsakh being Azerbaijani historical lands, Kocharyan said: "Soon, it will be 100 years, since, with the military support of the Ottoman Empire, the second Turkish state called Azerbaijan has emerged on the world political map. Strangely, that state, while failing to remember what happened just yesterday, remembers what happened centuries ago, before its appearance."

In the words of the deputy minister, the Azerbaijani leadership with morbid obsession ignores or distorts everything: international law, including the UN Charter, the efforts of the mediators, including the statements by the Heads of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-chair countries, the history, starting from antiquity to the present, including works of Strabo, Plutarch and other antique authors.

"This statement is directed, first of all, to the internal audience of Azerbaijan with the aim to justify the policy of violent assimilation of indigenous ethnic minorities, as well as to present the authoritarian hereditary regime established in the country as a democratic achievement." Kocharyan added.
Mechanical Engineering and Mechatronics students from De Montfort University Leicester (DMU) have gained a better understanding of aerodynamics and their applications in wind turbines, thanks to a trip to Poland.

During a three-day workshop, organised by the GUST (Generative Urban Small Turbine) team at Lodz University of Technology and #DMUglobal, 12 students had the chance to learn from experts in the field and to try out new software.

Students worked in groups to carry out simulations in QBlade (wind turbine calculation software), before designing blades for a 3-bladed Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine using XFOIL (an interactive design and analysis program) and SolidWorks (a modelling and engineering program).

Their designs were 3D-printed overnight, allowing the students to test their turbines the next day, collecting valuable data along the way.

On the final day students presented their results and calculations to professionals from the universitys Institute of Turbomachinery, receiving valuable feedback and advice.

At the end of the workshop, students toured the universitys Process and Environmental Engineering Faculty, gaining insight into some of their current experiments.

Second-year student Jonathan Hackett said: One highlight of the trip was the opportunity to test our 3D-printed wind turbine blades in a wind tunnel.

Using 3D printers allowed us to verify experimental data against our theoretical data in an amazingly short amount of time. This opened my eyes to the benefits of rapid prototyping and 3D printing.

Another highlight was going to a local restaurant and spending time with the Polish students and lecturers in a more casual setting. We got to know them and got to compare the differences and similarities between studying in the UK and Poland."

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Final-year student Antreas Chatzitofi said: "It was an amazing experience. We got a better understanding of how wind turbines work and how many factors have to be taken into account for their design."

During the trip, students also took the opportunity to explore the Leonardo da Vinci: the Energy of the Mind exhibition at the EC1 Lodz museum, as well as to visit the Science and Technology Centre outlining the history of the former Lodz power plant.

Nicola Falciani, another second-year student, said: It was an amazing and unique experience, especially eye-opening to see how and what engineering students study in Poland.

I particularly enjoyed seeing the EC1 museum and learning about how a steam power station worked, especially seeing the original boilers and turbine."

Anna Strzelecka, DMU lecturer and trip lead, said: This was a fantastic opportunity for our students and Im very thankful to Dr Piotr Domagalski and Dr Maciej Karczewski, our colleagues in Poland who made it happen.

Students are fortunate to have gained valuable insights from GUST, a team which has won the International Small Wind Turbine Contest in Holland twice and is taking part again this year.
Russia considers the USs stance on supply of S-400 missile systems to Turkey as a blackmail, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said, RIA Novosti reports.

April 20, 2018, 16:33 FM Lavrov comments on US stance on supply of S-400 Russian missile systems to Turkey

STEPANAKERT, APRIL 20, ARTSAKHPRESS:Earlier Wess Mitchell, Assistant Secretary of State, Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, said Ankara may face sanctions under CAATSA after purchase of the S-400 missile systems from Russia.

Mitchells statement according to which Ankara may face sanctions if it buys S-400 systems, is an example of a typical blackmail, Lavrov said.

The Russian FM said the NATO chief recently said that Turkeys decision to buy S-400 systems is its national decision.
As business owners, we sure do have a lot on our plates. Balancing the day-to-day of running a business with high-level strategic and growth activities can be enough of a challenge by itself. However, things can go completely off kilter if something goes wrong, and you dont have the proper protections in place.

A dispute or issue can turn things upside down very quickly, so it pays dividends to ensure youre taking a number of precautions to mitigate your own risk. Below are five simple tips for ensuring your business is covered.

1. Choose your insurances

The need for business insurances cant be stressed enough. But when it comes to choosing the most appropriate options for you, there are the must haves for any business owner, and there are those that are a little more specific to your field.

Professional liability insurance is the number one must have. Property insurance should be purchased if you own your work residence, workers compensation insurance should be purchased the moment you employ someone, vehicle insurance if you have company cars, and product liability insurance is great if you sell, well, products. These are all fairly intuitive.

You should then consider your industry. As an example, if youre a tradie who works outdoors, public liability insurance may be key. If you provide advice of any nature, professional indemnity insurance would be the way to go.

Case in point : A client who is an electrician was protected when a shopper tripped on a cable that protruded from works he was performing at a busy mall. He was just doing his job, but the shopper still broke her ankle and wanted her medical bills paid for  which they were, through the electricians insurer. Without public liability insurance, he couldve potentially been out of pocket many thousands of dollars.

2. Take advantage of industry bodies

One of the most useful steps a professional service provider can do to mitigate risk is to join an industry association  as a financial advisor, we turn to the Association of Financial Advisors. Industry associations help protect their members by providing guidelines, education, templates, tips and advice based on extensive experience and expertise in the field.

Case in point : In the financial services industry, self-employed financial planners often rely heavily on our industry bodies, the Association of Financial Advisers and the Financial Planning Association of Australia, to liaise with government bodies on areas of concern. This has been invaluable considering the amount of attention financial services has been under to ensure regulatory compliance.

3. Dont forget the government

The Australian Government itself is a fantastic resource for small business. Government resources can assist you in understanding relevant laws, such as The Corporations Act 2001. They can also help you in the case of claims with dispute resolution services. Staying up-to-date with the latest resources will keep you informed about any updates to legislation and services that may directly impact or help you.

Case in point : We once directed an SME owner who was owed $5,000 by a client towards the NSW Local Court for small claims. The client was compelled to pay upon receiving a notice from the court, meaning the SME owner wasnt left out of pocket for either the invoice, or any legal bills.

4. Get everything in black and white

Its always prudent to get as much as possible in writing, such as agreements, contracts, requests, promises, and services rendered. This ensures full transparency for everyone involved, avoids miscommunication, and prevents any problematic he said she said situations.

Case in point : Even emails can do the trick  not everything has to be a fancy contract. This is often more about ensuring expectations are clear, as opposed to preparing for an extravagant legal battle. (But it always pays to be legally covered also, of course!)

5. Leave nothing to the imagination

Building upon the previous point, its crucial to be completely forthcoming regarding the exact service that you provide for clients. This means there will be no assumptions about what you do and, more importantly, what you dont do, reducing any confusion on the part of both parties. And very importantly  dont be tempted to overpromise just to win a client! Youll definitely regret it if you cant deliver.

Case in point : Over-delivering can be as detrimental to your business as under-delivering, if you are misdirecting scarce resources. If a client is pushing you to deliver more because expectations werent clear from the outset, you may punish your more patient clients by putting them as a second priority just to please the first client. This may potentially work in the very short term but certainly isnt a sustainable long term solution for you, or your business.

About the author

Katrina Haskew is Managing Director of Leading Advice, a family-run financial advisory firm that helps its clients and their families build and protect their wealth, now and into the future. This information (including taxation) is general in nature and does not consider your individual circumstances or needs. Do not act until you seek professional advice and consider a Product Disclosure Statement. The views expressed in this publication are solely those of the author and cannot be reproduced in any form without her express written consent.
Belgian lawmakers issued a statement warning Azerbaijan against using Interpol for political persecution and intimidation.

April 20, 2018, 15:45 Belgian deputies: Visiting Artsakh is not a crime

STEPANAKERT, APRIL 20, ARTSAKHPRESS:We regret the fact that the Azerbaijani Authorities requested an international arrest warrant against the President of the European Armenian Federation for Justice and Democracy (EAFJD) Kaspar Karampetian, for visiting Nagorno Karabakh /Artsakh. EAFJD is a grassroots organization, which uses the tools of civic activism to raise awareness, they said in a statement.

Despite the fact that there is no relevant basis in international law that would prevent anyone from visiting Nagorno Karabakh, the Azerbaijani Authorities have been using various methods of intimidation and trying to criminalize visits.

There is no alternative to a peaceful settlement of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict. Imposing total isolation on the people of Nagorno Karabakh breaches their fundamental rights, enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and is not a constructive method of conflict settlement.

We are convinced that Interpol should not be used for political persecution or intimidation. We herewith emphasize that a sustainable conflict resolution can be achieved only through an honest dialogue between the sides, including with the people of Nagorno Karabakh/Artsakh.
Blogger Alexander Lapshin is going to participate in one of the sessions of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) in Strasbourg during which he will talk about violations of his rights by Azerbaijan.

April 20, 2018, 17:27 Blogger Lapshin to deliver remarks at PACE on violations of his rights by Azerbaijan

STEPANAKERT, APRIL 20, ARTSAKHPRESS-ARMENPRESS:I am going to talk about how they kept me in the isolation ward for 7 months which is a human rights violation, how they deprived me from the opportunity to connect with the outside world, how mocked me. And on the last day, September 10, the birthday of my mother, I was beaten, they broke my tooth, and when I was unconscious, I had a rope on my throat and they hanged me in the toilet, later presenting that I hung on. I think they deliberately chose my mothers birthday, Lapshin told reporters in Yerevan.

The blogger said while he was in Azerbaijan, he understood that he is in a totalitarian country which is governed by clans, and he is being used for solving the countrys internal issues. They want to show the illiterate society that Ilham Aliyev is a strong leader, can allow himself not to respect the opinion of Russia, Israel and the European Union, Lapshin said.

The lawsuit filed over the illegal actions committed by Azerbaijan has been submitted to the European Court of Human Rights 1.5 month ago. French attorneys have told Lapshin that it has already being examined by the court, and the trial may last 1-2 years. We have submitted to the court charges on the attempt to kill me in the Baku court, violation of my rights, extradition right, as well as illegally depriving me from freedom, Alexander Lapshin said.

He believes that Azerbaijanis spend financial and human resources and monitor everything happening with him on a daily basis. I am confident that they will monitor everything I will say here by spending financial and political resources. The more resource they spend in fight against me, the fewer weapons they will purchase, he said.

The blogger said this time he will not manage to visit Artsakh since he has to leave for Strasbourg in three days, but he promised to visit the country next time. I will visit Artsakh next time, and will show that they [Azerbaijanis] cannot scare us, Lapshin noted.

He arrived in Armenia to participate in the InTour Expo and SportWay exhibitions. Here Lapshin will speak about his travels to Armenia and other countries, as well as how to be free and enjoy trip.

Lapshin was arrested in 2016 by Belarus police after being declared internationally wanted by Azerbaijan. The blogger was blacklisted by Azerbaijan for visiting Artsakh.

Lapshin was extradited to Baku in early 2017, a move that sparked outrage among human rights activists and others.

He was sentenced to three years in jail by Baku, but was pardoned by President Ilham Aliyev on September 11, 2017.
by Melani Manel Perera

Celebrations were held on Saturday in the town of Mathagal. Some 200 Hindu families brought votive offerings to the god Ganesh. "Sustainable peace and harmony are inevitable for a country to make progress," says opposition leader.

Colombo (AsiaNews)  Hindu Tamils met last Saturday (14 April) in Mathagal, Jaffna Peninsula, to celebrate the Sinhalese and Tamil New Year (Aluth Avurudda) and promote a united and peaceful Sri Lanka.

Our desire and prayer are to have a united country in which Tamils can enjoy the same respect and love throughout the nation," they said.

"Not only Tamils, but the whole Sri Lankan nation must live together with love and respect, said Guru Sellappa Mangaleshwaran, the main kurukkal or priest at a local Hindu temple following Shaivism, at the Arashadi Siththy Vinayagar Kovil*.

People must live with their minds at peace and in happiness. This country must travel all possible paths, there must be no barriers. This is my desire and prayer for the New Year."

The New Year celebrations began at 7 am with a pooja (a votive offering to the gods in the temple). At least 200 Hindu families participated in it.

The ceremony was accompanied by Tamil songs and music, whilst each family donated a large plate full of fruit, sweets, coconuts and flowers, and placed it in front of the statue of the god Ganesh for the blessing. At the end, each family brought home the blessed offerings, to share with family and neighbours.

L. Sindhuja, a primary school teacher, prayed for her young pupils.

Vijeyalakshmi Vimalachandra, who teaches at the Nunasi Vidyalaya School, said several families of fishermen and farmers came to the temple. "I prayed for unity and peace, which are not yet visible in our country, she added, This island must move forward and join forces."

A group of young women, Yalini, Nirajini, Thushanthini and Krishani, expressed the same wishes.

President Maithripala Sirisena also issued a message for Aluth Avurudda. In it, he said, "The New Year binds with the traditional customs which blooms inter relations and family relationships and showers the human thoughts with refreshing fragrance which flows to the future with our deep understanding and respect we have for the traditions of the New Year."

Tamil opposition leader Rajavarothiam Sampanthan also issue a message. "Lasting peace and harmony is inevitable for a country to make progress in development and other areas of concern, he said.

My prayer is that in this New Year we will be able to overcome all the obstacles and challenges in framing a new Constitution which paves the way to achieve a lasting solution to the national question and gives the rights to the people to live with dignity, self-respect and self-esteem.

* Kovil is the Tamil term for a Hindu temple in the Dravidian style of architecture.
Poor lil Cameron Myers. Hes an 18-year old white country boy from rural Auburn, Michigan. Seems this pathetic little punk got his fee-fees hurt when somebody stole the racist Confederate flag off the back of his truck in the school parking lot. When he whined about it to school administrators, they didnt do anything about it. He called it an injustice.

So Cameron got dozens of his other racist punk friends to fly Confederate flags from their vehicular penile compensators pick-up trucks and park them just off the property of the high school to help Cameron reclaim his racist dignity.

It all started because my flag was destroyed and nothing was done about it, whined said Myers. I said to fly whatever flag you have at home. Everybody here has the Confederate flag. Its a country boy thing where its in their garages, bedrooms, windows.

Its a country boy thing??? No, dude, its a racist thing. In fact, the Confederate flag is the racist flag of American traitors who were defeated in the American Civil War. The flag of un-American losers, if you will.

There are just seven non-white kids at Bay City Western High School where this sad excuse for a country boy goes to school. Thats 0.58% of the total school population. Its real easy to be the tough guy when you are part of a 1193-person white kid majority.

And, lets not any of us pretend this isnt about racism. It is:

After the flags appeared Tuesday, 17-year-old junior Kendall Frost told The Bay City Times-MLive some of her fellow classmates organized the display on social media in what she believes was intended to intimidate and bully certain black students. Kendall, who is black, provided screen caps of text messages with racial slurs. She also said some students told her and other black classmates they shouldnt go to Western because of our skin tone. In a Snapchat video taken by a Western student acquired by MLive, footage depicts at least three males in a vehicle recording the flags demonstration. At one point, one of the males can be heard swearing and using a racial slur as text appears on screen stating Fly em high boys.

The adults in this community arent helping. The mayor isnt sure its racism and bizarrely says its the kids legal constitutional duty to display the racist flags. Derp:

Theyre doing their legal constitutional duty, said Auburn Mayor Lee Kilbourn of those displaying the flags. Im not saying Im supporting it or for or against it, but people in this country have to start realizing we have to tolerate all peoples views. Thats preached a lot out of Washington and a lot of other places, but its not practiced. Democrats dont like Republicans views and Republicans dont like Democrats views. People have to grow up and need to respect other peoples views.

In other words, all you liberal bleeding hearts need to respect the views of racists. The racists dont have to respect YOUR views, of course, but thats because they are  ummm, well  white.

Myers grandma is equally unhelpful:

These boys are rednecks, Boyce said of Cameron and his friends. The Confederate flag does not mean anything racist to them. Were not racists. She believes whoever stole Myers flag from his truck is really to blame for the trouble.

Yeah, grandma, actually your grandbaby and all his shitty friends who supported him on this ARE racists. And you are the matriarch who taught them if your comments are any indication. Maybe you could teach your grandson not to be such a delicate snowflake the next time around. And maybe you could teach him to take a cue from the kids who conducted a counter-protest to stick up for REAL American values like tolerance, equality, and the rights of ALL Americans to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness without your punk grandson threatening them by waving his racist flag in their faces. Defending racism, whether you are in denial about how racist the Confederate flag is or not, shows you for the American embarrassment that you are.

Once again our state is in the national spotlight because a few knuckle-dragging racists got some headlines. At least this time they are being shown to be the backwards hicks that that they are and not representative of the fine people of Michigan.
After more than 20 hours of Congressional testimony, it was Representative Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) that asked the right question to Mark Zuckerberg: I think what were getting to here is, who owns the virtual you? Who owns your presence online? Zuckerbergs responseI believe that everyone owns their own content online[thats] the first line of our terms of service is the lie weve been told to believe. But as recent weeks have unveiled, we, in fact, have no ownership over our virtual selves at all.

Rep. Blackburns question about control of the virtual-self hits at the epicenter of our Facebook problem: regaining personal control of our virtual identities is the answer to data privacy. Only when my real world-self owns my virtual-self can I truly have the benefit of data privacy and set both the boundaries and price for its use. This is achievable today, and it will be the largest disruption in the history of digital advertising.

In the past three years, Facebook has dominated digital advertising, gobbling up (along with Google) almost 100% of new money inflows to digital platforms. The primary reason for this influx is that advertisers consistently see a better return on investment on these platforms. It is true, Facebook and Google work for advertisers. Returns are high and reach is virtually unlimited. As a result, they have produced outsized profits. The reason for their performance is simple: they are cheating. Its a secret the digital advertising industry, including myself, have known for years.

We all have a real-world identity. This is the self that owns a house, leases a car, buys groceries, goes to work, and enjoys the fruits of her labor. We also have a virtual identity, which is the dataset that comprises us individually in the online world. That virtual identity is a valuable asset that, unfortunately, most of us dont own or control. By simply surfing the web, or clicking on an ad, we are surrendering numerous data points that are used to reach us on subsequent websites, determine which ads we see, determine what content comes in front of us; it pretty much dictates our entire online experience.

Facebook has unprecedented access to this personal information, whether through the News Feed, email, or search history. Although they profess the protection of personal data, its clear they are violating their promise. Facebook has built and published APIs allowing third parties to dive so deep into an individuals privacy that they can affect elections. Do you really think youd even know what Cambridge Analytica was if it werent for a whistleblower?

I downloaded the personal data Facebook now made available, and many of you likely did as well. It was exactly what I expected: a long file of every picture, post, chat, whatever that I have had, peppered with a bunch of stuff that wasnt even mine. In the end, the download told me nothing. What I want to know is who accessed my data and how did they use it? Where were my connections targeted and by whom? What did advertisers understand about my needs and wants based on their access? No matter how deep you look you wont find this data, ever. Why? Because you dont own it.

Right now our virtual-self, in this case, is owned by Facebook. Does Zuckerberg have any interest in giving up that ownership? Of course not. No more so than a landlord has interest in giving a tenant more benefits without higher rent. He had 15.9 billion reasons not to in 2017 alone.

Today, we can make a shift to address this problem. We can change the advertising paradigm by not only regaining ownership of our virtual selves by our real-world selves but also by providing an open ledger solution that shows where and how our data is used. Blockchain makes this possible, even in its infancy. The technology exists to allow an individual to set boundaries on their virtual-self, set the price for advertisers to access it and share in the exchange of value in real real-world. The underlying blockchain technology is rapidly developing and the capabilities it has for furthering this mission are only getting more robust.

The time is now to drive change. Our elected officials are trying to force this and their lack of clear understanding of what really happens in the digital world will hamper their success. Laws such as GDPR are a great beginning but not a real solution. Letting a government control how a company uses my property (my data) doesnt even make sense when you say it out loud. Only by giving ownership of the virtual-self to each respective individual can we truly see data privacy and equitable participation.




Vietnam shrimp exports rise 33% in January

Following the good growth (22.3%) in 2017, Vietnam's shrimp exports were off to a very good start in 2018 as they registered a 33.2% increase compared with the same month last year.

In January, Vietnam exported shrimp to 49 markets with export turnover of US$264.8 million, up 33.2% from 2017, the Vietnam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers reports.

Demand for Vietnamese shrimp is reflected in the positive growths to all major markets-exports to Australia experienced the highest growth of 169.7%; those to South Korea also reached a high growth of 81.3%. Sales to the three largest importing markets (the EU, the US and Japan) grew 13.4%, 12.1% and 3.7%, respectively.

Besides high demand in importing markets, the export growth in January is also attributed to stable shrimp prices and an expected rise in prices.

The EU, which is the largest importer of Vietnamese shrimp, accounted for 18.6% of Vietnam's total shrimp exports. Shrimp exports to this market in January this year reached $49.4 million, up 13.4% over the same month last year. Exports to the three main markets in the bloc (the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium) recorded a double-digit growth. Exports to the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium increased by 65.1%, 62.2% and 29%, respectively.

This year, exports to the EU is expected remain on the upward trend because of favorable factors including its main competitor India's being warned of antibiotic contamination and possible ban on imports into the EU. Vietnamese shrimp also has the advantage of gaining GSP (Generalised System of Preferences) from the EU that Thailand and China do not have.

The Free Trade Agreement with the European Union (EVFTA) is also about to come into force. After the effectivity of the agreement, Vietnam will have more opportunities to promote shrimp exports to the EU. Vietnamese goods, including shrimp products, will enjoy special preferential tariffs.
During the 1950s, Luluais and Tultuls helped recruit males for the Highlands Labour Scheme, which sent workers to many different parts of Papua and New Guinea.

These Luluais and Tultuls, as agents of the Administration, played leading roles in the fast progress of control and pacification of the tribes. Their main roles were to assist the Administration curb tribal fights and supervise construction of roads, airstrips, houses and other infrastructure in the area.

The insignia of office was a badge, which was worn on the forehead, and sometimes a cap. The officials were also issued with laplaps.

My grandfather Nul Bal was made Luluai of the Keri tribe of Simbu in the early 1950s.

Luluai, in the Kuanua language of the Tolai people of East New Britain, means chief while Tultul means a lesser chief or second in command.

A main tribe made up of many smaller clans would have one Luluai and several assisting Tultuls.

KUNDIAWA - After World War II, Papua New Guineas colonial Administration, in its attempt to fast track control and pacification of the highlands tribes, appointed tribal and clan leaders as official Luluais and Tultuls.

Like other areas in Papua New Guinea, as Simbu developed it required a more sophisticated form of local input into government.

The Papua New Guinea Act of 1949 that created the first Legislative Council also made provision for the establishment of local government councils. The first of these were set up on the coast and in the New Guinea islands in1950.

In 1959 the Waiye Local Government Council in the Chimbu (now Simbu) sub-district became the first council in the highlands. Chimbu became prominent at that time due to the influence of Luluai Kondom Agaundo, who was appointed in 1951 when he was in his thirties.

He became a popular agent for the Administration, assisted the kiaps in their work and later sat in the Legislative Council, the forerunner of PNGs national parliament.

By the early 1960s most of the traditional Simbu leaders who had become Luluais and Tultuls in the 1950s had aged and the new local government positions required younger people who could speak Tok Pisin and understand modern European ways.

The representatives usually chosen were the sons of former village officials who had some initial education and who understood formal government procedures. Men who had returned from working on coastal plantations and who had knowledge of the wider world were also chosen.

Training on the work of the councils was provided for these officials. They were taught about their role as councillors - to pursue the administrative goals of providing schools, aid posts and roads, developing cash crops and maintaining law and order.

By 1970, Simbu had seven local councils and, by the time of independence in 1975, nine councils: Kundiawa (previously Waiye), Kerowagi, Gumine, Chuave, Mount Wilhelm, Sinasina, Elimbari, Salt Nomane and Bomai-Mikaru.

There were two main revenue sources for council operations: a central government grant through the Rural Improvement Program and head taxes collected from the people. For example the total grant received from the central government in 1973 through its Rural Improvement Program was K149,700. By 1975 this had increased to K186,045 to be spent on such things as schools and aid posts.

Most rural people at the time could not afford the tax payments decreed. In lieu of taxes, the people undertook weekly communal work building and maintaining roads and bridges, schools and other infrastructure.

Before independence, when I was a child, my father was assigned a 20 metre section of the Gumine to Kilau road which my brother and I assisted him to maintain. The other men of the tribe were allocated similar sections.

The work involved cleaning drains, filling potholes and lining slippery spots with the river sand and shale that were abundant in the area. We would also sweep the surface so clean that the kiaps were most impressed when they arrived to inspect our work.

Every Monday was work day and ward councillors were our immediate supervisors. Once in a while a kiap would drive along to inspect the state of the road. All access and feeder roads in the Simbu area were maintained in this manner.

Back then the access roads were in top condition and small cars usually drove all the way to villages without much trouble.

In 1970, all the councils formed the Simbu Councils Services Unit. Its duties were to construct and maintain work for all member councils. Its equipment included two heavy four-wheel drive vehicles, one D4 bulldozer, a grader and a front end loader.
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 Yahoo , April 18, 2018





Havana (AFP) - Cuba turns to a model Communist Party official, Miguel Diaz-Canel, to steer it through a period of uncertainty when it finally turns the page on the Castro era in a vote on Thursday.





The 57-year-old First Vice President is the pre-ordained choice of Raul Castro as he steps down, ensuring that the vote in the National Assembly to appoint him will be little more than a formality.

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By NY Post , April 19, 2018





Rudy Giuliani said Thursday that he will join President Trumps legal team and hopes to bring an end to the special counsels investigation into Russian election meddling in a week or two.





Im going to join the legal team to try to bring this to a resolution, Giuliani told The Post.





The country deserves it. Ive got great admiration for President Trump.

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By Oayafrica , April 18, 2018





Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni has issued what he calls a "public warning" against oral sex.





The president claims the practice has been pushed on Ugandans by "outsiders," and argues that the mouth is solely for eating.





"Let me take this opportunity to warn our people publicly about the wrong practices indulged in and promoted by some of the outsiders," he told the press during an address.

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Chicken piccata is definitely one of my top-10 favorite dishes, if it is done right. Few restaurants get it right. Mostly authentic Italian restaurants with born-in-Italy chefs know how to make it correctly, and when I find one, I go back often, nine times out of 10 ordering that favorite dish. Actually, the first time I had it, it was not chicken but veal piccata, and I went to that restaurant at least once every couple of weeks. It was called Mario's Piccolo Bistro and it was in Syracuse; it's long gone now, but I remember it well. It was located in the basement of an office building and it started out with only a few tables, but because the food was so good, it grew over the years into a much bigger space and was always packed. You could smell the garlic cooking as soon as you got close to the building, and then it grew more intense as you got closer to the front door. By the time you were seated, your taste buds were already salivating.
The overall field of Machine Learning, including Machine Intelligence, is taking a fascinating, and not unexpected, direction: solving the worlds big problems.

How do we get more people where they want to go safely with autonomous driving? How do we increase the throughput, reliability and safety of our food supply chain with smarter devices? How can we make people healthier by analyzing medical data and relationships so complex that no human can reliably comprehend it? How do we better understand and improve our world with planet-scale data analysis? Machine Intelligence may not be able to address every problem but there are immediate areas where we can put it to use.

This is all just the tip of the iceberg. We see Machine Intelligence and Machine Learning used today as the latest tool humanity can use to improve efficiency and solve very challenging problems. There is just so much data out there today, generated by the plethora of sensors and IoT applications that pervade our offices and homes. Over the next few years, well see Machine Learning help us better understand all this data, make it useful, and then ultimately act on it in new and exciting ways.

For many MI applications, the data must first be analyzed at the point and time of creation. Edge Computing is critical to provide real-time analysis, sifting and compressing data to make it useable, and then it must work in concert with even more global processing in the cloud. This key requirement to analyze massive data at the edge will be transformational to the embedded market. Todays smart devices will increasingly need more and more high-performance.

AMD is focused on the compute engine aspects of Machine Learning. We are developing high performance compute engines and enabling CPU and GPU processors to support the evolving Machine Intelligence algorithm models, from the edge of the network and up into the cloud. To make application development efficient and more affordable, we are making software enablement open source to facilitate the community at large to speed application development.

We are inspired by Machine Learning and see an ever-increasing need for advancement. High performance GPUs and CPUs must evolve in sync with the rapid advance in Machine Learning technology. It is critical that these platforms provide both the performance and the efficiency for a wide range of applications. In my keynote Evolving Embedded Systems in a Self-Directed World this afternoon, I will discuss these trends and be joined on stage by customers pursuing Machine Learning, and they will share details on todays issues and where they are headed in the future.

Mark Papermaster is CTO and SVP of Technology and Engineering with AMD.

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April 21, 1958

K OF C COMMUNION BREAKFAST  John W. MacDonald, second from left, professor of law at Cornell University Law School, addressed 300 members of Auburn Council 207, Knights of Columbus at their annual Communion breakfast yesterday morning at the Polish Falcon Club. Those at the head table who spoke briefly were the Rev. Edward Kurdziel, OFM, Conv., assistant pastor of St. Hyacinth's Church and chaplain of Auburn Council; Prof. MacDonald; Roscoe Bartran of Waterloo, district deputy; Mayor Herbert T. Anderson; Raymond T. Glancy, grand knight of Auburn Council; John M. Alger, PGK and toastmaster. The men received Holy Communion in a body at the 8:15 a.m. Mass and went to the Falcons for the breakfast and program.
AUBURN  Cayuga Community College students could see a slight bump in tuition for the next school year.

CCC's 2018-19 budget was discussed at a board of trustees meeting Thursday. Many CCC employees and trustees were on the college's Fulton campus for the meeting, which was being simulcasted at the Auburn campus. The board did not have a quorum to vote on anything until trustee Pat Mahunik was able to join in via video conferencing, as he was in New York City.

CCC president Brian Durant said at the meeting it is "likely" the college will raise tuition for next year, but the college is still working on the budget. Durant said after the meeting that tuition could potentially go up 2 or 3 percent, though the budget it still in the "final stages." Through the state's finalized budget finished in late March, Durant said at the meeting, community colleges are set to receive $100 per full-time equivalent student, which CCC believes could translate to an approximate $40,000 increase in base state aid.

Durant said CCC has been making efforts to not raise tuition, but considering that $40,000 increase and rising fixed costs, it is likely it will go up.

CCC will present the budget to the board next month, Durant said, and pending board approval, take the budget to the Cayuga County Legislature in June.

"We're looking to be as mindful as we can on increasing tuition and not increasing fees," Durant said.

Staff writer Kelly Rocheleau can be reached at (315) 282-2243 or kelly.rocheleau@lee.net. Follow him on Twitter @KellyRocheleau.

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Armenian police quashes Velvet Revolution by violence

Thousands of people continue to flood Armenias capital Yerevan, protesting the former presidents shift to the prime ministers seat after his two terms as President finished.

On March 31, the Civil Contract Party had started a protest march through several towns of Armenia with an objective to prevent the third term in office by ex-President Serzh Sargsyan.

Tens of thousands of demonstrators rallied in the centre of the Armenian capital on Tuesday to protest as parliament voted to allow former president Serzh Sarksyan to become prime minister in the former Soviet republic.

Opponents of Serzh Sargsyan see this as an attempt to hold onto power as the country moves to a new parliamentary system of governance.

At least eighty protesters were detained in the Armenian capital while an opposition leader of the protest claimed to launch a nationwide "velvet revolution."

Armenian police quashes Velvet Revolution by violence WATCH

Many of detentions appear arbitrary, as the protesters seem to have done nothing but legitimately exercise their right to freedom of assembly.

Demonstrators have been blocking major streets in Yerevan for days. Several demonstrators were injured on Monday as police used tear gas to disperse a crowd.
Austria will bar Erdogan propaganda on its soil

Austria's Prime Minister Sebastian Kurz known his Erdogan hostility has said that Turkish politicians will be barred from campaigning.

President Erdogan has called snap elections on Wednesday.

Austrias right-wing coalition government, which is strongly opposed to Turkey joining the European Union, will bar Turkish politicians from campaigning on its territory ahead of June elections in Turkey, the chancellor has said.

"CAMPAIGN APPEARANCES ARE UNWANTED "

Erdogans Turkish leadership has been trying to exploit Europes communities of Turkish origin for many years. Prime Minister Sebastian Kurz told ORF radio in remarks broadcast on Friday.

Turkish election campaign appearances in Austria are unwanted and we will therefore no longer allow them.
US soldiers to respond attacks towards Manbij

US soldiers reassured YPG terrorists of responding attacks carried out towards Manbij.

After the successful Operation Olive Branch was launched to clear Afrin from YPG/PKK and Daesh terrorists to free locals from terrorist groups' oppression and secure Turkey's border provinces, Turkish Armys next aim is Manbij where PKK/YPG terrorists are nesting.

US has started to set up two bases in Manbij region, currently occupied by YPG/PKK terrorists. US had deployed military reinforcements to northern Manbij, reacting against a possible counter-terror operation led by Turkey in the region.

Speaking to Russian Sputnik agency, Ebu Adil, commander of the Manbij Military Council within the Syrian Democratic Forces, has told that Turkey's Manbij-related threats have prompted the US to start strengthening its presence in the region.

"By deploying additional special forces to the region, the US has expanded its existing military base in Manbij and established a new one on the front line. So right now, there are two American bases in Manbij region. Information about three such bases holds no water." Manbij Military Council commander Ebu Adil said.

"After the Turkish forces attacked Afrin, representatives of the Manbij Military Council met the US military command and expressed serious concern about Turkey's possible military operation in the area." Adil stated.
From the looks of Kim Kardashian's Snapchat and Instagram stories, it's safe to say that Kourtney Kardashian had a popping 39th birthday.

Kimye Shows Major PDA

The mother of three kept things low-key, but she celebrated her birthday with four cakes. Kourtney was joined by her close friends and family members including her mother Kris Jenner, who gave a toast with a cigarette in hand, her little sister Kendall Jenner, brother-in-law Kanye West. Even Kim's former assistant, Stephanie Shepherd, showed up to celebrate the reality star.

Kim made sure to document the epic night and shared it on social media, which also featured a sexy makeout session with her rapper husband West.

One of the many clips shows the KKW Beauty founder flaunting her 24-inch waist and debuting a short blunt bob hairstyle. Wearing a white tube top and a fitted pencil skirt to match, Kim then walks over to Kanye and sits on his lap. She asks him if he rather hit the studio or go to Dave Chapelle and then begins kissing him passionately.

KimYe  A post shared by Kim Kardashian Snapchats (@kimkardashiansnap) on Apr 19, 2018 at 9:41pm PDT

While the moment should have been too personal, a close friend happened to be sitting close to Kanye and he awkwardly watched the two pack on the PDA.

"You guys are the best married couple I know!" the friend says in the video.

Kanye's appearance on Kim's Snapchat didn't stop there, however. The "Ultralight Beam" rapper also posed with Kris Jenner for a cute photo.

best friends A post shared by Kim Kardashian Snapchats (@kimkardashiansnap) on Apr 19, 2018 at 10:04pm PDT

Kylie Jenner And Khloe Kardashian Are MIA

Although Kourtney celebrated her last year of being in her 30s with her nearest and dearest loved ones, two of her sisters were noticeably missing out on all the fun from the birthday party. Kylie and Khloe weren't in attendance, however, it makes sense as the two were not in Los Angeles recently.

Kylie was last spotted in Houston with her boyfriend and baby daddy, Travis Scott. The new parents attended the playoffs game between the Houston Rockets and the Minnesota Timberwolves on Wednesday, April 18.

Khloe, on the other hand, is still reportedly in Cleveland with her first child, True Thompson, who was born on April 12 amid her baby daddy Tristan Thompson's cheating scandal.

There's no word on when the Good American designer will head back to Los Angeles. As reported, her sisters immediately flew to Cleveland when she gave birth earlier this month.

Khloe might not have been able to join in on the fun but her best friends, twins Malika and Khadijah Haqq were in attendance at the party as they danced the night away with the birthday girl, Kourtney.
20 April 2018

High-level representatives and experts from the EPO, led by President Benoit Battistelli, met with the International Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property (AIPPI) Bureau headed by its President Hao Ma at the EPO headquarters in Munich yesterday.

"We were pleased to host the AIPPI delegation and have this excellent opportunity to receive feedback from our users from both inside and outside of Europe," said EPO President Battistelli. "The meeting allowed our organisations to update each other on recent developments but above all it underlined how the strategic orientations of the EPO continue to answer the needs of our users."

The EPO reported on recent developments at the Office, including advances in productivity and quality, and on strategic projects for 2018. President Battistelli provided further details on upcoming initiatives such as fee reductions, the Office's digital transformation and User Driven Early Certainty (UDEC).

AIPPI representatives expressed their support for the increased flexibility to the patent granting process brought about by UDEC, and their appreciation for the EPO's responsiveness to different users' needs across industry sectors.

AIPPI also expressed great interest in the recent entry into force of the validation agreement with Cambodia, the very first Asian country to join the European patent system. Fast-moving developments in the area of international co-operation, including reinforced co-operation, were acknowledged as particularly advantageous to the user community.

The AIPPI is a leading international non-governmental organisation dedicated to the development and improvement of intellectual property worldwide with over 9 000 members representing more than 125 countries.

Further information
US President Donald Trump clearly believes that trade wars are good and easy to win but his intentions to hit steel and aluminum trade with tariffs have unleashed a strong urge to start off a tit for tat global trade war. The introductory 10% and 25% tariffs on aluminum and steel could go up or down, depending on the country, and Ill have a right to drop out countries or add countries, says the US President. It does not come by surprise that the US foreign trade partners are desperately trying to secure waivers and special treatment.

For the time being, Mexico and Canada are safe and the EU and Japan are trying hard to get an exemption. Britain, who is leaving the bloc, is expected to start doing the same on its own soon. South Korea has in turn informed the US that potential tariffs could negatively impact the US efforts to negotiate a landmark nuclear deal with North Korea. In the meantime, the focus is on China, whose steel production seems to be the main driver behind President Trumps move. Another layer to this looming trade war is the constantly changing mood of the US President. While China might be the foe today, it could be a friend tomorrow. The same applies for Europe  good friends one day but competitors another.

Having said that, the EUs response to the tariffs has so far been nothing unusual. EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom has warned of retaliation such as by imposing tariffs on US oranges, tobacco, bourbon and motorcycles. There could also be European quotas or duties on imports of steel and aluminum to prevent metal shipments being diverted from the US to Europe. The tariff war could also be challenged at the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the EU is getting ready for this fight, including the efforts to secure waivers for its own businesses. However, the global war is certainly in no ones interest especially since disputes over trade could easily spill over to other areas, which is not desirable given the current global climate.

Therefore, the international community needs to push the White House on the tariffs. It is also a moment to be proactive and give a boost to the increasingly fragile global trading system. The recent G20 meeting in Buenos Aires offered a first opportunity for coordinated commitment to address trade protectionism and dissuade the US from levying tariffs. German Chancellor Angela Merkels phone conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping on strengthening multilateral trade cooperation is also a welcome move.

The White House is no longer the only show in town. Around the world, countries are undertaking steps to override the US, such as when Japan is now pushing hard for securing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade accord despite US withdrawal from the deal, thus cementing Tokyos leadership on trade. Asian countries are also moving ahead with somewhat less ambitious but still-important Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and the EU-Japan trade deal is almost finalized.

The EU should work with like-minded partners around the world to buttress the WTOs dispute system despite the US decision to block the appointment of judges, a move which could bring the organization to a standstill. Worries that the US offensive on dispute settlement could do harm to the multilateral trading system have also prompted a few WTO members to look for alternatives for settling disputes. Donald Trump can achieve his trade war in the end. However, with America withdrawing and the world moving forward, the EU can lead and maintain the current global trade system whether the US wants to play the ball or not.

As Trump Plays with Fire, EU Should Lead on Global Trade  Op-Ed by Shada Islam  Friends of Europe.

(The Op-Ed can be downloaded here)
Written by ACM





*Strasbourg/CoE/Angelo Marcopolo/-PanEuropean Organisation for Democracy, Human Rights and Rule of Law's Rapporteur on Medias, ChristianDemocrat/EPP MEP Volodymyr Ariev, from Ukraine, is due to be Replaced by his Turkish collegue, Gulsun Bilgehan, Socialist, during the most Popular public Debate of CoE's Assembly, at Next Week's Plenary Session for Spring 2018 in Strasbourg, as competent CoE Top Officials revealed in Reply to a relevant Question by "Eurofora", during the regular Press Briefing of Strasbourg's permanent European Journalists by PACE's Secretary General, Wojciech Sawicki, earlier this morning.





"Eurofora", after being informed by unofficial but genuine Ukranian sources that Ariev was reportedly affected nowadays by a Harder than expected Flu, to the point to necessitate his urgent Hospitalisation, had asked what will happen in that Debate, scheduled for Wednesday, April 25, 2018, where the Biggest Number of MEPs from 47 CoE Member Countries (including Russia, Serbia, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, etc), have been already Registered to participate, and which extends from Morning up late Afternoon, dealing with Journalists' "Integrity" and Legal "Status" in Europe, (including presentations on the 2nd point by Elvira Drobinski-Weiss from Germany and Sunna Aevarsdottir from Iceland, them too Socialists : i.e. all 3 Socialists).





Such a choice for a Turkish MP may naturally Surprise here, given the Exceptionally Harsh situation of Freedom of Press/Medias imposed by Ankara's regime since many years (even before 2016).





But it's true that Bilgehan is Vice-President of PACE's Culture, Science, Education and Media Committee, as some pointed out.





However, President of that Committee is ChristianDemocrat MEP from Spain, Maria Santa-Ana, and it has also Other Vice-Presidents, as Constantinos Efstathiou, from Cyprus, and Andres Herkel., from Estonia. In Addition, its Specialized Sub-Committee, precisely "on Media and Information Society", (i.e. the Most Relevant PACE's body), is Chaired by Petri Honkonen, a Liberal from Finland, with vice-President Maura Hopkins, a ChristianDemocrat/EPP MEP from Ireland.





=> Therefore, given all these Facts, obviously Legitimate Questions are Raised about the Real Reason for which Spanish, Ukranian, Cypriot, Estonian, Finnish and Irish mainstream MEPs, holding Key relevant Positions inside PACE, (Comp. Supra), may be Threatened to be All Skiped and Replaced only by a Turkish collegue of them, (among 324 Representatives and 324 Substitutes who are all PACE's Members),

Despite the Notoriously Harsh Situation of Medias' Workers' Human Rights in Turkey, who face a World- Record High number of Violations there, (and taking also into account the particularly Delicate Issue of these or other more "Rules" to Impose on Journalistic Activities' Press/Expression Freedom also inside all Europe, as those Draft Reports claim to do)....





Or, was it, perhaps, precisely because of that ?





Indeed, this Exceptional CoE Assembly event unfolds just After controversial Turkish President Tayip Erdogan has notoriously announced Early Parliamentary and Presidential Elections for next June 2018.





And the CHP main Opposition Party in Turkey, (to which belongs Ms Bilgehan), had, some Years Ago, Surprized several observers, (even "Eurofora'"s co-Founder, f.ex. when we met, in EU Parliament, with a locacious CHP MP, who vigorously urged EU to slam Ankara's Government for Massive Human Rights Violations, already Before 2016), by, apparently, taking a Strong stance for Democracy, Freedom and Rule of Law, against Oppression and Brutal Force, Criticizing, therefore, Ankara authorities' Hard Line policies.





Nevertheless, Meanwhile, more Recently, various Experienced European Observers, Started to be Astonished by a too often Repeated, Mass Mediatic Phenomenon, of too Many cases of so-called Last-Minute Turkish "Dissidents", who suddenly popped out of the.blue, grossly Exploiting an outrageous, (and often Exagerated or even inaccurate) Publicity, repeatedly painted, at Front-Page Headline "News" by some mainstream, Traditional Medias of the Establishment, as Fast-track, just Discovered "Heroes", (Despite having Benefited from "Cool Carreers" at Cosy, Routine and Cushy Top Jobs, withOut having Sacrificed Nothing substantial ever in their lives for any noble Cause). Even if some of them might, eventualy, have spend only a Few Days, Weeks or Months, reportedly at an Obscure Turkish Detention centre : I.e. almost as ... Erdogan himself had notoriously done, by entering Prison for 2 or 4 Months in the Past, until he Became Famous...





=> To put it in a nutshell, it's all as if some kind of Gross Mediatic Manouver was going on, Attempting to ..."Prepare" a Handfull of possible "Candidates" ready to, eventually, Succeed and Take the Place of "Bad" Erdogan (painted more and more as an awfull "Hard-Liner" recently, with his personal complicity), at anOther Turkish Goverment, sooner or later in the foreseeable Future, which, naturally, would be Painted with the Colors of "the Good Guys", 100 % pure Democracy, able to make Turkey Enter inside the EU, even Before most EU Citizens might have guess what was really happening to them ! ...





However, Facts are Facts, and they clearly Warn against such probable gross illusions, and the Harsh Deceptions that would soon Follow them :

F.ex., the current Head of Turkey's main Opposition Party, Mr Klcdaroglu of the CHP, who had Earlier taken a pose presented as that of a ..."Dove" for Peace and Democracy, etc, (even if his Predecessor, Ecevit, had notoriously ordered the bloody Military Invasion and Occupation of Cyprus' Northern Territories since 1974), has, more Recently, revealed a profile of rather an Oppressive and "War-Mongering" "Hawk" :

Indeed, even a Turkish collegue, at the CoE in Strasbourg, recently reminded us the Fact that Klcdaroglu's CHP has accepted and voted for the Expulsion from the National Parliament of the proggressive, pro-Peace, pro-Kurdish Party, whose Democratically Elected MPs were Striped of their Rights and Prosecuted even to Jail by Ankara's current Government. So that every Freedom-loving People couldn't but feel the Shivers by the UnPrecedented Spectacle of that same Turkish politician, Mr Klcdaroglu, posing as CoE's ... Keynote Speaker, recently in Strasbourg, during an exceptionally curious "World Democracy Forum" 2017, Focused on how to ...Restrict, Prohibit, Exclude, Oppress, and even.... "Eradicate" that "Plague' (sic !), as one of his main interlocutors, sitting Side by Side, Astonishingly Boasted against People who had Different Views in the Political Debate ! No need to share those or other such People's views, (something that we do Not), in order to simply feel Legitimately Revolted by such gross Anti-Democraticm, Brutal and Oppressive Threats against any People who simply have had Different Views in a Democratic Debate...

On the Contrary, new French President, Emmanuel Macron, proved in real practice, earlier this week, at nearby Vosges Mountains' Saint-Die city, that even Strong Disagreements on Issues of crucial Importance can and must be Democratically Debated, with elementary mutual Respect among initially Opposed parties (See "Eurofora"'s NewsReport from the spot at : ...) :

- Indeed, contrary to an unrealistic "Nice, Gendle Mood" ambiant, just 1 Day Before, at the Official Launch of the 1st among a 6 Months-Long Series of EU Citizens Consultations throughout 27 EU Countries on Europe's foreseeable Future, that Macron had inaugurated the day before at nearby Epinal City's Congress Center ( See "Eurofora"s NewsReport from the spot at : ...), that subsequent event at Saint-Dieu was, in fact, an unforseen, Harsh Clash in public, at the Street, standing for Hours amidst a crashing Heatwave, between 2 really Opposed Views, on a Hard nut to crack, concerning the current Strikes by Railway Workers against a proposed Reform before EU Competition starts to be applied soon :

Macron was initially aggressed, several times, by various Hostile Groups, smaller in number than his fans and simple friendly citizens, but much more Loud, Negative, and initially grossly Insulting, to an unprecedented level, without any formal Police authorisation there..

But, instead of sending the Police to disperse them, or merely Ignoring them by walking towards another street where he was awaited by friendly Peuple, on the Contrary, the young French President bravely decided to go, meet and speak with those Opposed Dissidents, and Start Discussing with them for... Hours ! This was repeated also with some other Loud Dissident Groups, extending the program for 2 or 3 Hours more, until Angry Cries were progressively replaced by Hard but Sincere Arguments, and even if there wasn't yet any breakthrough agreement in substance, at least, an obvious mutual Respect was apparently established (even some applaud was heard sometimes afteewards on certain points) !

On the Contrary, as far as it concerns the Different case of Mr Klcdaroglu, (comp. Supra), things went, meanwhile, even More Nasty :

F.ex, going much Further than Erdogan's recent dangerous criticism of Lausanne Peace Treaty, particularly as far as EU s current External Borders between Member State Greece and Turkey are concerned at the Strategic Aegean Sea, Mr. Klcdaroglu reportedly even Boasted afterwards that he would also ...Invade and Occupy some Greek Islands, there, before even Threatening, Later on, to do so also at a Larger scale, by reportedly snatching more than a Dozen of such Greek Islands on 2019 ! ...

I.e., precisely what was needed in order to make Erdogan look, Comparatively, as an... innocent Angel flying on the Sky ... (../..) -------------------------






On 17 April 2018, more than 30 suspects, including the 4 leaders of the organised crime group, composed of Georgian and Armenian nationals, were arrested after simultaneous operations of the French and Greek judicial and law enforcement authorities in Caen and Thessaloniki.

Several coordination meetings held at Eurojust led to the first joint investigation team agreement ever signed between France and Greece on September 2017. Eurojust provided substantial logistical and financial support to the joint investigation team, which culminated in the establishment of a coordination centre at Eurojust's premises in The Hague. The common action day was coordinated by Eurojust with the support of Europol, allowing for real-time exchange of information and cross-checks of the evidence gathered against Europol's databases.

The transnational organised crime group (OCG) is believed to be a predominantly Georgian mafia organisation called 'Vory V zakone', suspected of having committed thousands of burglaries and retail thefts in the Normandy region as well as in Greece. It is estimated that the OCG committed on average 13 shoplifting acts in France and 3 house breakings in Greece a day, causing a severe damage of several millions of euros. The OCG, whose sponsors were located in Greece, was hierarchically structured and governed by rigid rules, including the provision of capital to the 'obshak', a fund used as a common financial deposit for criminal activities.

Background

Eurojust is the European Union's hub for judicial cooperation and coordination between Member States, assisting in the investigation and prosecution of cases involving serious organised cross-border crime. The judicial cooperation tools that Eurojust offers to national authorities include coordination meetings, coordination centres and joint investigation teams.

Joint investigation teams are established between the national authorities of two or more Member States to coordinate and enhance ongoing national investigations through sharing of case-related information and evidence. In 2017, Eurojust supported 200 JITs and provided EUR 1.31 million in funding to JITs.

For more information about Eurojust, see www.eurojust.europa.eu or contact Eurojust's Corporate Communications Unit at media@eurojust.europa.eu.

For all Eurojust press releases, please see www.eurojust.europa.eu (Press centre)
Bill Heines heads to Cayuga Community College to use the career center to search for work. With no car, Heines has to rely on walking when he 
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Hi,



I am a registered nurse in Australia and have been offered a job at a childrens Hospital in Dubai. I am keen to hear from any nurses who have made a similar move to hear of their experience over there. I have found a few thread posts though most are quite old and I'm really keen to from nurses over there currently.



Thanks!
An interesting thread!



As the OP is clearly undertaking solid research I expect him (her?) to have understood the history of the Franco Prussia war 1870 - 71 and the consequences revisited in humiliations in a railway carriage in 1918 and 1940. Clearly a long time ago, but some memories run deep and long.



I've not spent much time in this region, so I can't comment from experience. BUT, when running chambre d'hote and holiday appartements we had a disproportionate number of guests from Alsace L. The consistent theme from these people was that there are still "feelings", even today. For instance, the social security laws (not important for expats, but interesting to note) are different in A-L for reasons of history. The people I spoke to were in there 50 - 70s. They said that their parents spoke fluent German because they went to school during the German occupation. (In German eyes it was not an occupation but the reclamation of ancient lands rightfully belonging to Germany). During WW2 young men in this region were conscripted into the German Army like all other Germans . Some atrocities in France were claimed to be work of German soldiers from A-L.



Frankly, I don't think there is any substitute for a personal visit to a region for some weeks before you know if it's for you or not. Good research is very helpful, but you need to be there . And remember in seeking the opinion of others.."one man's meat is another's poison".



Good luck in your future life in a (still undecided!) region in France.



DejW
I suspect you should notify the immigration people of your change of address - but I'll let someone with more experience weigh in on that.



As far as income taxes are concerned, the IRS will continue to assume that you are living at the address you used for filing. (And will send any refunds there if you didn't opt for direct deposit.)



Next year, you need to decide how you are going to file - jointly or separately - and if you decide to file jointly, you'll need to decide on one address or the other. There is a change of address form you can file with the IRS. But if you file jointly, you'll still need to have both signatures on the form for filing (obviously a bit easier if you e-file).

Cheers,

Bev
ezhejiang.gov.cn

The 2nd World Industrial Design Conference (WIDC) is scheduled to take place at the Town of Designers at Liangzhu, a town in Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang province, from April 21 to 22.

Approximately 500 professionals from over 30 countries and regions are expected to attend the event.

Themed on design and ecology, this year's conference will focus on the building of a sustainable ecology and a healthy industrial system with the power of design.

During the event, the conference attendees will jointly initiate a program, which aims to promote targeted poverty alleviation by virtue of design and make up for the deficiency of innovative ideas in the world, according to Ying Fangtian, the vice-president and secretary-general of China Industrial Design Association.

Meanwhile, the TIA Design Award Ceremony, an international design award issued by the organizing committee of the World Industrial Design Conference will be held on the sideline. A design week, with a display of over 200 exhibits and 14 forums, will also be organized. The exhibition will open free to the public from April 23 to May 15.

Town of Designers in Liangzhu has become the permanent site of WIDC since its first edition in December 2016. It is a creative industrial park developed by the government to form an industrial cluster for industrial design and to foster new concepts, mechanisms, and innovation in the industry.

By the end of 2017, the park had received a total investment of 4.22 billion yuan ($670 million), and introduced 352 design projects and more than 2,200 talents.
Businesses developing sharper storytelling and immersive experiences for visitors

With a growing tourism trend for seeking out authentic experiences rooted in history and the special attributes of a region, local craft experiences are increasingly fitting the bill for the modern tourist. Getting on the front foot of this trend, craft businesses across Irelands Ancient East have this week taken part in a Craft Experience Development workshop organised by Failte Ireland, helping them to develop more immersive visitor experiences across the region.The workshop, which took place in the Midlands Park Hotel in Portlaoise, focuses on developing world-class craft tourism experiences in Ireland, and takes businesses through the elements of a craft experience which makes them stand out to tourists, as well as how they can generate extra revenue and attract visitors from key overseas markets.Over 40 businesses from across Irelands Ancient East, including pottery businesses, wood turners, studios and galleries, took part in the workshop and heard first hand from stone carver Victor Daly who has transformed his own business into a top-class craft experience (see notes for more detail).The course is part of Failte Irelands ongoing work to develop brilliant visitor experiences across Irelands Ancient East. It is hoped that a unique network of craft experiences will be created in the coming months and, in turn, provide a visitor experience of scale which has the potential to attract increased numbers of tourists and encourage them to spend more time exploring the region.Speaking at the workshop, Head of Irelands Ancient East, Jenny De Saulles, Failte Ireland, said:We are delighted to have so many businesses attending this unique workshop, each making such a valuable contribution to the development of the craft experience in Irelands Ancient East.Todays workshop focuses on the potential of craft tourism visitor experiences in Ireland, and what it is that tourists from key overseas markets are looking for. By providing this kind of insight, each of these businesses can develop more tailored and immersive experiences which will help them to attract more visitors and generate extra revenue. Through building a high quality craft experience across the region, we are giving overseas visitors another compelling reason to visit Irelands Ancient East.The workshop in Portlaoise was delivered by Craft and Experience Development Specialist Dr Siobhan Burke, and is one of many workshops Failte Ireland has facilitated in Irelands Ancient East.

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Top Irish trade have joined Failte Ireland at M&I Europe in Portugal this week to promote Ireland as a premier destination for corporate meetings and incentives.

The 18 MICE (Meeting, Incentive, Conference and Corporate Events) trade, alongside Failte Irelands Meet in Ireland and Dublin Convention Bureau teams, have met over 200 influential incentive buyers from across Europe at the event in the Algarve.



M&I Europe is a leading event for business travel and incentive buyers based in Europe, who will be booking corporate incentive travel programmes around the world in 2018 and beyond. The B2B workshop  involving pre-scheduled one-to-one meetings  provides an excellent platform for the participating Irish MICE companies to meet and do business with the top incentive buyers.



Paul Mockler, Head of Commercial Development at Failte Ireland, said:



We are delighted to participate in this years M&I Europe in Algarve, Portugal. This year alone Failte Ireland has secured 42million worth of meetings and events, helping to drive growth and jobs across the country. This type of event with influential business travel buyers from Europe provides us a really good opportunity to highlight what it is that sets Ireland apart - world-class venues and incentive experiences, ease of access, amazing landscapes, top hospitality and incredibly strong industries. We look forward to welcoming more business tourists from across Europe next year and beyond.



Business tourism is the most lucrative form of tourism, with visitors travelling to Ireland for business purposes spending almost three times more than the average visitor. In the first quarter of this year, Failte Ireland has already secured 42m worth of meetings, conferences, incentives and corporate events for Ireland under their Meet in Ireland and Dublin Convention Bureau brands and supported the Regional Convention Bureaux in Kerry, Galway, Shannon and Cork to convert a further 10m for their regions. The most recent conference win was the Aquaculture Europe - European Aquaculture Society 2020  which will bring 1200 delegates to Cork.

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HIGH barley prices are expected to have an influence on this years WA crop, as growers from across the State get stuck into their 2018 seeding programs.

According to the Grain Industry Association of Western Australias (GIWA) first crop estimates for 2018, a projected 8.4 million hectares will be planted across the State this year, up from the predicted 7.8m/ha sown during last years dry autumn.

Of that, more than 1.4m/ha is expected to be sown to barley, with growers across all port zones choosing to substitute portions of their wheat plantings, after feed barley prices pushed past $270 a tonne last week.

The total wheat crop is expected to reach close to 4.8m/ha, with the area planted to pasture also expected to replace some wheat.

Intended canola plantings are tipped to remain similar to those of 2017 at 1.4m/ha, along with the lupin crop which is expected to sit at 400,000ha, however rain over the next few weeks will play a major role in determining final areas sown.

Another trend predicted by GIWA is the re-sowing of pastures to legumes across the State, along with the sowing of cereals intended for grazing by stock.

The report found a small amount of canola already planted had gone in dry, although recent thunderstorms in the eastern and southern regions of the Wheatbelt had allowed some growers to sow into moisture.

In the Geraldton Zone growers have just begun dry sowing crops, with topsoil very dry and subsoil moisture down deep in most areas away from the coast.

The area of barley is projected to be up at the expense of wheat area, while the trend towards increased Noodle wheat variety plantings is expected to continue.

Canola and lupin plantings are predicted to be higher than last year, while the area planted to pasture is also expected to increase.

Further south, growers in the Wongan Hills and Latham areas have chipped into their seeding programs with small areas of canola going in on moisture.

Dry sowing of canola is expected to ramp up across the rest of the southern Geraldton and north west Kwinana Zones this week.

According to the GIWA report, Noodle wheat is expected to be steady or decrease in the region in response to projected increases in other parts of the State.

The canola area is tipped to be down slightly due to the lack of hybrid seed available for planting.

The Kwinana West Zone has also seen some growers roll their seeding gear into paddocks, with some canola planted into moisture following recent thunderstorms.

Dry sowing of canola will get underway over the next week with projections of slightly less canola planted this year unless there are good opening rains in April.

There is likely to be an increase in lupin plantings of between 10 and 15 per cent due to the current price and newer varieties being more reliable in yield.

In the eastern part of the Kwinana Zone, patchy summer rain has left individual growers with up to 80 millimetres of soil-available moisture.

Some wheat has been planted in the areas around Southern Cross, Bullfinch and Marvel Loch and small areas of canola have gone in around Mukinbudin, Nungarin, Burracoppin and south to Muntadgin.

Those that have missed out on the recent storms are planning to start sowing dry in the next week and most will be going by Anzac Day.

Subsoil moisture is also good for most growers along the Albany south coast following substantial summer rains and carryover from last year, although moisture is too deep in most areas.

Most seeding activity has been the dry sowing of pastures and fodder crops for stock feed.

In western and southern parts of the Albany Zone there has been less summer rain, with most subsoil moisture too deep to sow into.

Pasture for livestock is expected to replace a larger portion of the area normally planted to wheat, with many growers dry sowing pasture legume species to improve stocking rates.

In the Lakes region summer rains of up to 80mm have led to growers spraying paddocks up to three times following widespread weed germination.

A small area of canola has been sown into moisture from recent storms although most will go in dry over the next few weeks if it does not rain.

Meanwhile in the Esperance Zone, there has been small plantings of canola on moisture.

Its tipped there will be an increase in pasture legumes being sown in the region following low grain proteins in the zone last season, as growers work to improve the quality of pasture feed and provide nitrogen for following crops.

The crop enterprise mix in the Esperance Zone is unlikely to change significantly this year, after a successful 2017 harvest.

IN the Kwinana Zone, Bruce Rock grower Leigh Strange is among those who has kick-started his 2018 season.

Mr Strange was sowing Bonito canola on Monday in dry and dusty conditions after starting seeding early last week.

The Bruce Rock grower has cut back his canola plantings to about 25 per cent of his program this year, after boosting his canola crop in 2017.

Wheat will make up about 45pc of his crop, while 10pc will be planted to lupins and the remainder sown to oats and barley.

Its fairly similar to last years program, we had a fair bit of canola in last year so canola is back a bit to more of a normal level but everything else is pretty much fairly similar, Mr Strange said.

Were running Scepter a bit more this year to replace some of our Mace and bulking up Planet barley.

Were just easing into it at the moment and doing daylight hours.

The Stranges property has received varying amounts of rain so far this year, with farmland near Quairading benefitting from close to 120 millimetres over January and February, while the eastern end of the farm received just 15mm over the same time period.

Theres a bit of subsoil moisture at Quairading, its not too far down, but in Bruce Rock theres no subsoil to speak of, everything is going in going in very dry, Mr Strange said.

It would be nice if we could jag five to 10mm in Quairading because it would be enough to get things going down there with the moisture.

Its probably looking like more of an average break, weve probably been a bit spoiled the last couple of years with the early breaks and having a heap of subsoil moisture.

Our traditional break is a long way away, the average break in Bruce Rock is around May 18, but it would certainly be nice to see something on the horizon to get things moving.
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WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - PPG Industries Inc. (PPG) said that it has opened an investigation after receiving a report alleging violations of its accounting policies. The company said it identified about $1.4 million of expense that should have been accrued in the first quarter. The complaint also alleged that there may have been other unspecified expenses, potentially up to $5 million in the aggregate, that were improperly not accrued in the first quarter. The company said, 'The Audit Committee of the company's Board of Directors is overseeing an investigation of the matters set forth in the report, with the assistance of outside counsel. The company is currently unable to predict the timing or outcome of the investigation and will move with diligence.' 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.


AMSTERDAM (dpa-AFX) - Heineken N.V. (HKHHF.PK) announced that its Annual General Meeting of Shareholders has adopted all proposals on the agenda of the Meeting.



The Meeting approved the dividend proposal for the year 2017 of 1.47 euros per share. As an interim dividend of 0.54 euros was paid on 10 August 2017, the final dividend will be 0.93 euros per share. The final dividend will be made payable on 2 May 2018. HEINEKEN shares will be quoted ex-dividend on 23 April 2018.



The proposed amendments to the Articles of Association were approved by the meeting and an authorisation has been granted to the members of the Executive Board to execute the notarial deed of amendment.



The Annual General Meeting re-appointed Mr. J.A. Fernandez Carbajal as member and Vice-Chairman of the Supervisory Board, and also re-appointed Mr. J.G. Astaburuaga Sanjines and Mr. J.M. Huet as members of the Supervisory Board, all for a maximum term of four years.



Mrs. M. Helmes was appointed by the AGM as Supervisory Board member for a four year term as of 19 April 2018. Mrs. Helmes is independent as defined in the Dutch Corporate Governance Code and does not own any shares in HEINEKEN.



At the end of the AGM Mrs. A.M. Fentener van Vlissingen stepped down as member of the Supervisory Board.



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

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BRUSSELS, April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Midazolam Nasal Spray (USL261), is a nasally administered investigational midazolam formulation intended as a rescue treatment of acute repetitive seizures (ARS) in patients with epilepsy, which has completed Phase 3 clinical development and is ready to be filed as a New Drug Application (NDA) in the course of 2018.

USL261 [1] already granted orphan drug and fast track designation by the United States Food and Drug Administration, due to the high unmet need for patients and caregivers.

already granted orphan drug and fast track designation by the United States Food and Drug Administration, due to the high unmet need for patients and caregivers. Nasal administration could provide significant value to patients who currently have limited treatment options.

Acquisition of USL261 complements UCB's already successful anti-epilepsy drug portfolio, enhancing the company's position as a global leader in epilepsy.

UCB today announced an agreement to acquire the rights to Proximagen's Midazolam Nasal Spray (USL261)[1], an anti-epilepsy drug (AED) developed as an intended rescue treatment for acute repetitive seizures (ARS, also known as serial, recurrent or cluster seizures) in patients with epilepsy.

USL261[2] is a novel investigational midazolam formulation, which has been specifically designed for intranasal delivery without active inhalation. It has been granted orphan drug designation and fast track designation by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA), reflecting the significant unmet need which currently exists for ARS rescue treatment.

Rectally administered benzodiazepines, such as diazepam, are commonly prescribed for the treatment of ARS. However, whilst this has traditionally provided patients and caregivers with a much-needed treatment option, this route of administration may be cumbersome and problematic in social settings. A treatment administered nasally would provide important additional treatment options.

USL261 has demonstrated strong results in a significant Phase 3 clinical trial[3] program and the intention is to file USL261 as a New Drug Application (NDA) in the course of 2018.

"There is a real and pressing need for effective and convenient rescue treatments in ARS that rapidly end ongoing seizures as well as those that prevent seizure reoccurrence," explained Jean-Christophe Tellier, CEO of UCB. "Midazolam Nasal Spray has delivered strong Phase 3 results; our acquisition of this program, when approved, will expand and diversify the treatment choices we are able to provide to the epilepsy community, complementing our strong internal portfolio and building on our extensive knowledge, passion and expertise in the field of epilepsy."

UCB estimates that more than 150,000 people with refractory epilepsy also experience ARS.[4]

These types of seizures pose multiple risks to patients, which include repeated emergency room related hospitalizations each year and possible evolution into status epilepticus, a potentially life-threatening seizure state.

"Rescue treatment options for acute repetitive seizures have historically been very limited. As a global leader in epilepsy, with a pioneering commitment to improving patient value, UCB was the natural choice to progress the development journey of midazolam nasal spray," said Bill Pullman, Chief Scientific Officer and President, Proximagen. "In making this important new medicine available, following approval, UCB will be delivering an effective rescue treatment option for patients and caregivers living with ARS. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank our investigators, along with the teams at Upsher-Smith and Proximagen who have brought us to this major milestone," said Mark Evenstad, Executive Chairman of ACOVA, Inc., parent company of Proximagen.

UCB believes USL261[5] has the potential to complement its already successful portfolio of epilepsy medicines, significantly improving its ability to provide additional treatment choice and value to millions of people living with poorly controlled seizures.

Under the terms of the agreement, UCB will make an upfront cash payment of $150 million. In addition, Proximagen is eligible to receive contingent payments of up to $220 million based on certain regulatory approval and sales-based milestones.



The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2018, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions including the satisfaction of the notification and waiting period requirements of the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act.

Lazard is acting as financial advisor to UCB. Covington & Burling LLP is acting as legal counsel to UCB. BMO Capital Markets Corp. is acting as financial advisor to Proximagen. Ballard Spahr LLP is acting as legal counsel to Proximagen.

About UCB in Epilepsy

UCB has a rich heritage in epilepsy with over 20 years of experience in the research and development of antiepileptic drugs. As a company with a long-term commitment to epilepsy research, our goal is to address unmet medical needs. Our scientists are proud to contribute to advances in the understanding of epilepsy and its treatment. We partner and create super-networks with world-leading scientists and clinicians in academic institutions, pharmaceutical companies and other organizations who share our goals. At UCB, we are inspired by patients, and driven by science in our commitment to support patients with epilepsy.

About UCB

UCB, Brussels, Belgium (http://www.ucb.com ) is a global biopharmaceutical company focused on the discovery and development of innovative medicines and solutions to transform the lives of people living with severe diseases in immunology and neurology. With around 7,500 people operating in 40 countries, the company generated revenue of 4.5 billion in 2017. UCB is listed on Euronext Brussels (symbol: UCB). Follow us on Twitter: @UCB_news

About Proximagen

Proximagen LLC, a member of the ACOVA family of companies located in Plymouth MN (USA), specializes in the development of novel small molecule therapeutics in the areas of CNS, pain and inflammation. As part of the Upsher-Smith Laboratories family of companies prior to the sale of its generics business in 2017, Proximagen has a long heritage in drug development.

Forward looking statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements based on current plans, estimates and beliefs of management. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including estimates of revenues, operating margins, capital expenditures, cash, other financial information, expected legal, political, regulatory or clinical results and other such estimates and results. By their nature, such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions which could cause actual results to differ materially from those that may be implied by such forward-looking statements contained in this press release. Important factors that could result in such differences include: changes in general economic, business and competitive conditions, the inability to obtain necessary regulatory approvals or to obtain them on acceptable terms, costs associated with research and development, changes in the prospects for products in the pipeline or under development by UCB, effects of future judicial decisions or governmental investigations, product liability claims, challenges to patent protection for products or product candidates, changes in laws or regulations, exchange rate fluctuations, changes or uncertainties in tax laws or the administration of such laws and hiring and retention of its employees.

Additionally, information contained in this document shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any securities, nor shall there be any offer, solicitation or sale of securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to the registration or qualification under the securities laws of such jurisdiction. UCB is providing this information as of the date of this document and expressly disclaims any duty to update any information contained in this press release, either to confirm the actual results or to report a change in its expectations.

There is no guarantee that new product candidates in the pipeline will progress to product approval or that new indications for existing products will be developed and approved. Products or potential products which are the subject of partnerships, joint ventures or licensing collaborations may be subject to differences between the partners. Also, UCB or others could discover safety, side effects or manufacturing problems with its products after they are marketed.

Moreover, sales may be impacted by international and domestic trends toward managed care and healthcare cost containment and the reimbursement policies imposed by third-party payers as well as legislation affecting biopharmaceutical pricing and reimbursement.

1. USL261 has not been submitted to or approved by the FDA. These statements solely reflect the opinions of the authors.

2. Id.

3. This statement has not been submitted to the FDA and solely reflects the opinions of the authors.

4. Haut SR. Current Opinion in Neurology 2015, 28:143-150

5. USL261 has not been submitted to or approved by the FDA. These statements solely reflect the opinions of the authors.


STOCKHOLM (dpa-AFX) - Swedish telecom company Telia Co. (0H6X.L, TLSNY.PK) reported that its first-quarter net income from continuing operations declined to 2.35 billion Swedish kronor from 2.46 billion kronor in the same quarter last year.



Telia also said that it plans to buy back shares for an annual amount of 5 billion kronor over the coming three-year period, totaling 15 billion Swedish kronor. The reason is to return excess cash to shareholders and is a continued effort to optimize the capital structure of the company. Combined with the recently approved ordinary dividend of 2.30 kronor per share, the pro forma annual total shareholder remuneration will equal 3.45 kronor per share.



Total net loss attributable to the owners of the parent for the first-quarter was 710 million kronor or 0.16 kronor per share, compared to a net income of 6.89 billion kronor or 1.59 kronor per share in the previous year.



Net loss from discontinued operations was 2.95 billion kronor, compared to net income of 4.60 billion kronor, mainly due to the disposals of Azercell and Geocell (resulting in capital losses and lower net income contribution) and an impairment charge related to Ucell. The devaluation in Uzbekistan in the third quarter 2017 had also a negative impact on the first quarter 2018, while the first quarter 2017 included a positive effect from the adjustment of the provision regarding the Uzbekistan investigations.



Adjusted EBITDA rose 4.2 percent in local currencies, excluding acquisitions and disposals. In reported currency, adjusted EBITDA rose 7.4 percent to 6.50 billion kronor from the previous year, due to organic growth, positive net impact from acquisitions and disposals and foreign exchange rate impact.



Net sales in local currencies, excluding acquisitions and disposals, increased 0.2 percent. In reported currency, net sales rose 3.2 percent to 19.85 billion kronor from last year's 19.23 billion kronor. Service revenues in local currencies, excluding acquisitions and disposals, decreased 0.9 percent.



For 2018, Free cash flow from continuing operations, excluding licenses and spectrum fees and dividends from associated companies, is expected to be above last year's level (SEK 9.7 billion). This operational free cash flow together with decided dividends from associated companies should cover a dividend around the 2017 level. Previously: 'around the same level as in 2017'.



Adjusted EBITDA in continuing operations, based on current structure, in local currencies, excluding future acquisitions and disposals, is still expected to be in line with or slightly above the 2017 level of 25.2 billion kronor.



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LONDON (dpa-AFX) - Royal Mail Plc (RMG.L) announced that its Board and Moya Greene have agreed that she will retire in September 2018. Rico Back will assume the role of Group CEO and join the Board on 1 June 2018. Rico has been a senior Royal Mail Group executive and CEO of the Group's major European subsidiary, General Logistics Systems (GLS), for 18 years. He was a founding member of German Parcel in 1989, which Royal Mail acquired in 1999. Sue Whalley will become Chief Executive Officer of Post and Parcels, Royal Mail UK, which consists of all the revenue and operations in the UK, other than Parcelforce Worldwide and Royal Mail International. Sue will join the Board on 1 June 2018 and will play a key role in representing the company in the UK. Moya Greene will step down from the Board on 19 July 2018, the date of the company's AGM. She will not be standing for re-election at the AGM. Rico and Sue will stand for election at the company's AGM on 19 July 2018. 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 Relations Department Eisai Co., Ltd. +81-3-3817-5120

TOKYO, Apr 20, 2018 - (JCN Newswire) - Eisai Co., Ltd. announced today that the latest data on its antiepileptic drugs (AED) perampanel (product name: Fycompa) and rufinamide (product name: Inovelon, U.S. product name: BANZEL) will be presented at the 2018 Annual American Academy of Neurology (AAN) Meeting to be held from April 21 to 27, 2018 in Los Angeles, California in the United States.As major presentations, six poster presentations will be given for perampanel including on an analysis of clinical factors associated with maintaining long-term seizure freedom in global Phase III studies for adjunctive perampanel in patients with partial onset seizures (POS), as well as on an evaluation of perampanel as monotherapy using the results from these same Phase III studies. Regarding rufinamide, two poster presentations will be given including on an integrated analysis of clinical studies on rufinamide in patients with Lennox-Gastaut syndrome (LGS).Perampanel is a first-in-class AED discovered at Eisai's Tsukuba Research Laboratories. It is available in tablet form to be taken once daily, and a new oral suspension formulation is also available in the United States. A highly selective, noncompetitive AMPA receptor antagonist that reduces neuronal hyperexcitation associated with seizures by targeting glutamate activity at AMPA receptors, it is approved in countries around the world as an adjunctive therapy for the treatment of POS with or without secondarily generalized seizures, and primary generalized tonic-clonic (PGTC) seizures in patients with epilepsy 12 years of age and older. Furthermore, perampanel is approved for use as monotherapy for POS in patients with epilepsy 12 years of age and older in the United States. In addition, Eisai has filed an application seeking approval for an indication expansion covering monotherapy and adjunctive use of perampanel in the treatment of POS with or without secondary generalized seizures in pediatric patients (2 years of age and older) in the United States.Rufinamide is believed to exert its antiepileptic effects by regulating activity of voltage-gated sodium channels in the brain involved in the overexcitement of neurons that potentially causes seizures, so as to prolong their inactive state. The agent is approved as an adjunctive therapy to other AEDs in the treatment of seizures associated with LGS in Europe and the United States. In Japan, the agent is approved as an adjunctive therapy to other AEDs in the treatment of tonic and atonic seizures associated with LGS when therapy with other AEDs is considered inadequate.Furthermore, regarding the anti-Abeta antibody aducanumab which is being jointly developed as of October 22, 2017 by Eisai and Biogen Inc., platform presentations will be made on long term administration of aducanumab in a Phase Ib clinical study currently being conducted by Biogen.Eisai considers neurology including epilepsy, a therapeutic area of focus, and strives to provide new solutions for those living with epilepsy and increase the breadth of patients for which perampanel may provide seizure-freedom in order to further contribute to addressing the diverse needs of, as well as increasing the benefits provided to, patients with epilepsy and their families.About EisaiEisai Co., Ltd. (TSE:4523; ADR:ESALY) is a research-based human health care (hhc) company that discovers, develops and markets products throughout the world. Eisai focuses its efforts in three therapeutic areas: integrative neuroscience, including neurology and psychiatric medicines; integrative oncology, which encompasses oncotherapy and supportive-care treatments; and vascular/immunological reaction. Through a global network of research facilities, manufacturing sites and marketing subsidiaries, Eisai actively participates in all aspects of the worldwide healthcare system. For more information about Eisai Co., Ltd., please visit www.eisai.com.Source: EisaiContact:Copyright 2018 JCN Newswire . All rights reserved.
MADRID (dpa-AFX) - Spain's foreign trade deficit decreased in February from a year ago, as exports grew faster than imports, preliminary figures from the Economy Ministry showed Friday. The trade deficit narrowed to EUR 2.2 billion in February from EUR 2.6 billion in the corresponding month last year. Exports climbed 2.3 percent year-over-year in February and imports increased only by 0.3 percent. During the first two months of the year, total trade deficit of the country was EUR 6.1 billion versus EUR 5.7 billion shortfall in the same period of 2017. Both exports and imports climbed by 4.4 percent and 4.6 percent, respectively. 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.
BEVERLY HILLS, CA / ACCESSWIRE / April 20, 2018 / WRIT Media Group, Inc. (OTCQB: WRIT) is pleased to announce that it has agreed to acquire Bison Oil and Gas Corporation ("BOAG") in a combination of cash and Series C Preferred Stock. BOAG owns and controls approximately 120 oil and gas wells in north Texas, with an internal estimate of $80 million dollars in gross reserves.

"We are excited about this acquisition as it adds significant value to our balance sheet and is designed to work hand in glove with the Bison Crypto Power Corporation acquisition. We are currently evaluating other projects in the oil and gas space along with other commodity-related projects which could benefit from the process of digital tokenization," said Eric Mitchell, President of WRIT Media Group.

The deal is in line with WRIT Media Group's strategy of expanding its crypto-currency related portfolio and furthering the development of its Pelecoin Mining Factory's crypto-currency mining farms. The combination of BOAG's current and future oil and natural gas reserves, along with the operations of the Company's recent acquisition, Bison Crypto Power Corporation, will facilitate the following crypto-power opportunities; (i) direct feedstock to electricity generation facilities, (ii) physical swaps for gas located closer to electricity generation facility, (iii) contractual swaps for gas located closer to electricity generation, (iv) price hedging to lock in price for generation feedstock, and (v) arbitrage to sell at higher price to offset cost of gas used for electricity generation.

About WRIT Media Group

WRIT Media Group, Inc. (OTCQB: WRIT) is a diversified media and software company whose operations include digital currency software development, including trading platforms and Blockchain solutions, crypto mining solutions, content production and distribution; and video game distribution via mobile platforms.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

Except for the historical information contained herein, the matters discussed in this press release are forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those predicted by such forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned that all forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, including, but not limited to, those discussed in WRIT Media Group's latest 10-K filed July 14, 2017. The company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Pelecoin, CrypFXPro, Pelecoin Smart Contracts, Pelecoin Mining Factory, Bison Crypto Power Corporation and their related trademarks and names are the property of WRIT Media Group, Inc. and are registered and/or used in the U.S. and countries around the world. All other trademarks belong to their respective owners.

SOURCE: WRIT Media Group, Inc.
The Hong Kong Houseware Fair and the Hong Kong International Home Textiles and Furnishings Fair are bringing together more than 2,600 exhibitors from 26 countries and regions to showcase the latest housewares, home textiles and furnishing products.

The Houseware Fair's main theme "L.I.F.E." stands for its four major themed zones: Lifestyle, Interior, Feast and Enrich. To highlight these themes, the HKTDC collaborates with NellyRodi, a well-known Paris-based trend-forecasting agency, to present four trend concept displays.

The Hall of Elegance at the Houseware Fair gathers 36 exhibitors, bringing renowned local and international brands, attracting plenty of buyers.



HKTDC Communications & Public Affairs Department - Agnes Wat, Tel: +852 2584 4554, Email: agnes.ky.wat@hktdc.org

HONG KONG, Apr 20, 2018 - (ACN Newswire) - The 33rd HKTDC Hong Kong Houseware Fair and the ninth HKTDC Hong Kong International Home Textiles and Furnishings Fair opened today and continues through 23 April at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre (HKCEC). The four-day fairs are bringing together more than 2,600 exhibitors from 26 countries and regions to showcase the latest housewares, home textiles and furnishing products.Houseware Fair's "L.I.F.E." theme reveals latest design trends --As the largest trade fair of its kind in Asia, the Hong Kong Houseware Fair welcomes 2,300 exhibitors from 25 countries and regions, including new participants from Russia and Pakistan. In view of last year's encouraging response, the fair's main theme continues to be "L.I.F.E." which stands for its four major themed zones: Lifestyle, Interior, Feast and Enrich.To highlight these themes, the HKTDC collaborates with NellyRodi, a well-known Paris-based trend-forecasting agency, to present four corresponding trend concept displays, namely "Colonial Chic", "Vital Vibe", "Magnetic Mix" and "Super Solarium." The displays showcase a wide array of products of various colours, materials, shapes and moods handpicked from various exhibitors to bring inspiration to buyers. Representatives from NellyRodi also unveiled the houseware and home textiles trends for summer 2019 at a trend seminar held this afternoon.Highlight zones of the Houseware Fair this year include the Hall of Elegance, World of Fine Dining and World of Fine Decor, which come under the "Lifestyle" theme. "Feast" features the Coffee Alley, while the Startup Zone and World of Building & Hardware are highlighted under the "Enrich" theme. The HKTDC has organised 129 buying missions comprising around 7,000 buyers to visit the two fairs, creating further opportunities for the industries.Startup zone at Houseware Fair --The HKTDC fully supports startups, providing a business platform for them to connect with global buyers and potential investors through trade fairs and business matching services. The Startup zone returns this year, featuring 24 start-ups from Hong Kong, the Chinese mainland, Taiwan, as well as a newcomer from Bangladesh. Interesting exhibits include the mini electric gym bike Bicit, from Hong Kong exhibitor Maxcare (5D-A21), which is equipped with a dedicated game app allowing users to compete with friends online.Herb&Fish CONNECT, a trendy household aquaponics decoration incorporating smart technology that enables users to control its LED light and monitor the water temperature through a mobile app, comes from Taiwanese designer brand Arky Design (5D-A14), which has developed a range of smart products with support from crowdfunding."Entrepreneurs may lack funding, information and connections when starting their business. They also need support in brand positioning and promotion," said Benjamin Chau, HKTDC Deputy Executive Director. "We are organising a number of 'Startup, Smart Launch' sessions to enable start-ups to obtain advice from experts on their business ideas."Local and international brands showcase new designsHong Kong has long been known for its concentration of creative talent as well as agencies that source innovative designs from around the world. Innovative exhibits from Hong Kong exhibitors include: Chopping Boarding Kitchen Scale: a chopping board with stainless steel kitchen scale, allowing users to measure volume of water or food portions (3G-D08); Bowling Vacuum Wine Pump: a bowling pin-shaped wine pump equipped with a vacuum indicator (1E-A17).Interesting exhibits from international brands include: Carl Schmidt Sohn (Germany) - Aron cookware set: a winner of the Reddot, iF and Frankfurt Ambiente Solutions awards, the set comes with a lid that can hold utensil as well as flexi handles that secure the glass lid in place when straining (1E-B17); Korean Electronic Bidet: various cleansing modes including auto cleansing, bidet cleansing and child cleansing, with stronger water pressure and comfortable bubble washing (5E-D23); Honeycomb Rack (Taiwan): a patented product made with HIPS, a shock-absorbent material, and equipped with an iron wine rack (3C-E34).Home Textiles Fair creates additional opportunities --Held concurrently with the Houseware Fair, the Hong Kong International Home Textiles and Furnishings Fair has drawn more than 300 exhibitors from nine countries and regions, with new exhibitors from Pakistan. Nantong city of the mainland's Jiangsu province, dubbed "the Hometown of Textiles", as well as a number of Indian export associations are returning with dedicated pavilions.In line with the Houseware Fair, the Home Textiles and Furnishings Fair adopts the "Interior" theme and showcases a variety of home textiles, upholstery and furnishing products. Highlight zones include the Hall of Glamour spotlighting quality brands and designer collections, Baby & Bedroom Textiles, Bathroom & Kitchen Textiles, and Upholstery & Furnishing.Interesting products include the ALMAC 3D curtain featuring an unusual, origami-inspired 3D visual design from Hong Kong exhibitor Kangjia Group Co., Ltd (Booth: 3B-D07). Indian exhibitor Fibre World (Booth: 3B-D09) showcases a handmade Coco Rubber Mould Mat that uses coconut fibre, making the item highly durable with long-lasting colour.Market insight and intelligence --The HKTDC is staging a series of events during the fair period to help industry players keep abreast of the latest opportunities in the houseware and home textiles markets. A seminar will feature renowned trend forecaster WGSN predicting lifestyle trends, while other seminars cover a range of topics including the latest technological and market developments in the building industry, as well as testing, certification and inspection services for houseware products.Other activities include the "International Kitchenette" cooking demonstrations by chefs using the latest kitchenware, and the "Latte Art Performance" with professional baristas making coffee for fair participants. A number of Product Demo & Launch Pad sessions cover such products as housewares, pet supplies, home textiles, building and hardware products. Buyer forums will examine opportunities in the Australian, Brazilian, Turkish, Burmese and Indian markets.Enhanced services to facilitate buyers' sourcing --The HKTDC's e-Badge initiative, which was well-received when it was launched last November, will gradually be introduced to most of the trade fairs this year, including the Houseware Fair and the Home Textiles and Furnishings Fair.Fair WebsitesHong Kong Houseware Fair: http://hkhousewarefair.hktdc.com/Home Textiles and Furnishings: http://hkhometextilesfair.hktdc.com/Photo Download: https://bit.ly/2J82HurAbout HKTDCEstablished in 1966, the Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC) is a statutory body dedicated to creating opportunities for Hong Kong's businesses. With more than 40 offices globally, including 13 on the Chinese mainland, the HKTDC promotes Hong Kong as a platform for doing business with China, Asia and the world. With more than 50 years of experience, the HKTDC organises international exhibitions, conferences and business missions to provide companies, particularly SMEs, with business opportunities on the mainland and in international markets, while providing business insights and information via trade publications, research reports and digital channels including the media room. For more information, please visit: www.hktdc.com/aboutus. Follow us on Google+, Twitter @hktdc, LinkedIn.- Google+: https://plus.google.com/+hktdc- Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/hktdc- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/hong-kong-trade-development-councilSource: HKTDCContact:Copyright 2018 ACN Newswire . All rights reserved.
PANTHER METALS PLC

("Company")

20 April 2018

Replacement Notice of General Meeting

The Company would like to advise that the date for the proposed General Meeting announced on 13 April 2018 has been revised to Friday 11 May 2018. The extra period until the General Meeting ensures that all our shareholders, particularly those based in Asia, will have sufficient time to receive the meeting documentation and therefore have an opportunity to return proxy forms and participate in the meeting. There are no other amendments.

The Company is therefore announcing that it is today posting a notice reconvening a General Meeting of the shareholders to be held on 11 May 2018 at 10am at Peterhouse Corporate Finance Limited, third floor, New Liverpool House, 15 Eldon Street, EC2M 7LD.

A copy of the General Meeting notice will shortly be available at:

http://www.nexexchange.com/member'securityid=2074303

The Directors of the Company accept responsibility for the contents of this announcement.

For further information please contact:

The Company

PANTHER METALS PLC

Darren Hazelwood, Non-Executive Director

Mitchell Smith, Chief Executive Officer



+ 44 (0)7971 957 685

+ 1 (604) 209 6678 NEX Exchange Corporate Adviser

PETERHOUSE CORPORATE FINANCE LIMITED

Mark Anwyl

Guy Miller +44 (0) 7469 0930 Company Broker

SI Capital Limited

Nick Emerson +44 (0) 1483 413 500









Company Number: 009753V

THE ISLE OF MAN COMPANIES ACT 2006

PUBLIC COMPANY LIMITED BY SHARES

NOTICE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENERAL MEETING

of

PANTHER METALS PLC

(the "Company")

Notice is hereby given that an extraordinary general meeting of the Company will be held on 11 May 2018 at 10am at Peterhouse Corporate Finance Limited, third floor, New Liverpool House, 15 Eldon Street, EC2M 7LD, for the purpose of considering and, if thought fit, passing the following resolutions which are being proposed as special resolutions:

SPECIAL BUSINESS

Special Resolutions

1. That the articles of association of the Company ("Articles") be amended by the inclusion of the following new article 4 in substitution for and to the exclusion of the existing article 4:

"4 The Company is authorised to issue an unlimited number of Ordinary Shares."

2. That the directors of the Company be authorised and empowered to allot and issue ordinary shares of no par value in the Company ("Ordinary Shares") and rights to subscribe for Ordinary Shares (together "equity securities") for cash in accordance with Article 5.1 of the Articles in respect of 1,000,000,000 (One Billion) new equity securities as if the restrictions on the allotment and issue of equity securities in Article 5.2 of the Articles did not apply to any such allotment and issue, such power to expire on the date occurring 15 months from the date of this special resolution or (if earlier) the conclusion of the annual general meeting of the Company to be held in 2019, provided that the Company may, before the expiry of this power, make an offer or agreement which would or might require equity securities to be allotted and issued after the expiry of this power and the directors may allot and issue equity securities in pursuance of such an offer or agreement as if the power had not expired.

By Order of the Board

Mitchell Smith (Director)

Director

Dated 20 April 2018

Registered Office:

34 North Quay

Douglas

Isle of Man

IM1 4LB
LOS ANGELES, April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

FN Media Group Presents USA News Group News Commentary

USA News Group - The future of lithium production within South America's prolific Lithium Triangle is in the balance, as Chile has sent a strong message to China that the nation won't sell off the majority of its lithium stake. Meanwhile, neighbouring Argentina plays catch up by opening itself up more to the global economy in the aftermath of its own far-left hangover.

The result has been heightened by interest in the activities of companies operating in the Lithium Triangle, including Albemarle (NYSE: ALB), Lithium X Energy Corp. (TSX.V: LIX) (OTC: LIXXF), Orocobre Limited (TSE: ORL) (OTC: OROCF), Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile (NYSE: SQM), and A.I.S. Resources Limited (OTC: AISSF) (TSX.V: AIS).

While on its way out the door, the deposed leftist Chilean government left quite a mess for the incoming pro-business elect to deal with-by summoning antitrust authorities to block the possible 32% purchase of Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile(SQM) by Tianqi Lithium Corporation out of China. The deal was worth a reported US$4 billion, and once ratified, would leave Tianqi and SQM controlling 70% of the global lithium market.

However, the resistance in Chile has somewhat led to a shift of focus toward neighbour Argentina, which shares dominion over the continent's renowned Lithium Triangle brine basins. There was considerably less resistance when Lithium X Energyfinalized the sale of its Argentinean interest in an all-cash deal worth $265 million to Chinese investment firm Nextview New Energy Lion Hong Kong Ltd.

Earlier in its development phases, fellow Canadian company A.I.S. Resources Limited has been aggressively moving forward on its four main lithium projects in Argentina's Puna region, including its preparation for drilling on the potentially lithium-rich aquifers at its Chiron project that were recently detected earlier this year.

With the lingering uncertainty over how Chile will welcome future foreign investments, there's good reason to believe that companies like Albemarle (NYSE: ALB), Lithium X Energy Corp. (TSX.V: LIX) (OTC: LIXXF), Orocobre Limited (TSE: ORL) (OTC: OROCF), Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile (NYSE: SQM), and A.I.S. Resources Limited (OTC: AISSF) (TSX.V: AIS) will be fielding more calls on Argentina properties than the Chilean neighbors.

LEAD-UP TO A LITHIUM STANDOFF

Just days after Chile's regulatory body in charge of lithium production, Corfo, leveled its recommendation against the Tianqi bid, the Chilean development agency reassured the market by stating that companies from Chine, South Korea, and domestically from within Chile, had been approved to make investments of around $754 million into the country's lithium industry. However, these approvals would've been decided over prior to the March 9th announcement of the Tianqi block attempt.

The Chinese miner Tianqi hasn't taken this decision lightly, as they have met with Chile's top anti-trust prosecutor in an effort sort things out. The 32% stake comes from the forced sale on behalf of Canadian fertilizer company Nutrien, which came from the merger of Agrium and Potash Corp. earlier this year.

More Chinese bids are going to come to this region, as the emerging superpower is expected to raise its electric cars production to 7 million units in 2025, up from 1 million last year. Whether deals to secure lithium supplies will all be in the form of the $4 billion deal in Chile, or if it'll be a smaller deal like the Lithium X deal is still up for grabs.

It's also likely that Chinese buyers will look to up-and-comers such as A.I.S. Resources to hedge their future supplies, given the junior's massive footprint across all four of its Argentinean lithium projects. With plenty of blue sky on each project, a partnership or outright acquisition is not out of the question in the future.

THE A.I.S. ACREAGE ADVANTAGE IN ARGENTINA

Boasting four significant lithium projects in Argentina's Puna region, A.I.S. Resources has secured extremely valuable lithium real estate in the heart of South America's Lithium Triangle. Located on an elevated plateau that lies east of the Andes Mountains, the Puna Region contains one of Argentina's largest known lithium deposits.

Spanning approximately 10,457 hectares, A.I.S.'s four lithium projects are comprised of Chiron 2,732 hectares, Guayatayoc, 2,500 hectares, Guayatayoc III, 2,725 hectares, and Vilama, 2,500 hectares-All of which are surrounded by large, known lithium deposits, operated by prominent lithium majors.

Guayatayoc - the company's flagship - already has a mining permit, where A.I.S. will soon undergo a TEM-Electromagnetic survey. A drilling permit on the property is expected to be issued before the end of April 2018. The company's brain trust knows quite a bit about the property already, having already acquired a 2013 PhD study on the property, bringing with it an exploration value worth approximately USD$3 million, and shaving about three years' worth of work from their timeline.

A.I.S. has compiled a NI 43-101 report on the project, and has completed an environmental impact study. Samples from the Guayatayoc returned Li ranging from 270-900 ppm from brine ponds with aquifer flow, and an added bonus of 100-190ppm brines sitting in the top layers.

The Guayatayoc Salar shares the same tectonic structure that extends to other well-known salars, such as Salinas Grandes, Pozuelos, Pocitos, and Rincon, which hold the most lithium in the Puna Region.

Probably next on the company's priority list would be the Chiron Project, which consists of four concessions in the Salar de Quiron in the Province of Salta, that other nearby explorers have shown to contain significant prospectivity.

Plenty of drilling is already planned, as evidenced by CEO Marc Enright-Morin's public statements that A.I.S. is sufficiently funded to drill both the Guatatayoc and Chiron properties in the coming months. With valuable real estate in close proximity to high-market-cap neighbours that include properties held by Orocobre, SQM, and others companies worth more than $200 million, A.I.S. has the project space, upcoming news flow, and milestones ahead to provide plenty of growth potential looking forward.

Hence A.I.S. is a prime example of the type of company that could entice Chinese lithium buyers either for future purchase agreements of product, a development and production partnership, and/or an outright acquisition in the very near future.

Active miners in the industry also includes:

Albemarle (NYSE: ALB)

Albemarle Corporation globally develops, manufactures, and markets engineered specialty chemicals. The company offers lithium compounds, including lithium carbonate, lithium hydroxide, lithium chloride, and lithium specialties and reagents for applications in lithium batteries, high performance greases, thermoplastic elastomers for car tires, rubber soles and plastic bottles, catalysts for chemical reactions, organic synthesis processes, life science, pharmaceutical, and other markets; cesium products for the chemical and pharmaceutical industries; and zirconium, barium, and titanium products for pyrotechnical applications. Albemarle Corporation was founded in 1994 and is based in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Lithium X Energy Corp. (TSX.V: LIX) (OTC: LIXXF)

Lithium X Energy Corp., is a resource company operating as a lithium explorer and developer in Argentina and the United States. The company owns a 50% interest in the Sal de los Angeles project comprising 8,156 hectares located in Salta Province, Argentina. Lithium X Energy Corp. was founded in 1997 and is headquartered in Vancouver, Canada.

Orocobre Limited (TSE: ORL) (OTC: OROCF)

Orocobre Limited explores for and develops lithium and potash deposits in Argentina. Its flagship project is the Salar de Olaroz lithium project located in north-west province of Jujuy. The company also produces boron minerals and refined chemicals. Orocobre Limited is based in Milton, Australia.

Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile (NYSE: SQM)

Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile S.A., is a producer of potassium nitrate and iodine. The Company produces specialty plant nutrients, iodine derivatives, lithium and its derivatives, potassium chloride, potassium sulfate and certain industrial chemicals. Its segments include specialty plant nutrients, industrial chemicals, iodine and derivatives, lithium and derivatives, potassium, and other products and services Lithium and its derivatives are used in batteries, greases and frits for production of ceramics. Potassium chloride is a commodity fertilizer that is produced and sold by the Company across the world.

For a more in-depth look into AIS you can view the in-depth report at USA News Group:

http://usanewsgroup.com/2018/01/28/the-worlds-lithium-demand-is-growing-everyday-no-signs-of-slowing/

Article Source:

USA News Group

http://usanewsgroup.com

info@usanewsgroup.com

Legal Disclaimer/Disclosure: This piece is an advertorial and has been paid for. This document is not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to purchase or subscribe for any investment. No information in this Report should be construed as individualized investment advice. A licensed financial advisor should be consulted prior to making any investment decision. We make no guarantee, representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness. Expressions of opinion are those of USA News Group only and are subject to change without notice. USA News Group assumes no warranty, liability or guarantee for the current relevance, correctness or completeness of any information provided within this Report and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein or any omission. Furthermore, we assume no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or, in particular, for lost profit, which you may incur as a result of the use and existence of the information, provided within this Report.

DISCLAIMER: USA News Group is Source of all content listed above. FN Media Group, LLC (FNM), is a third party publisher and news dissemination service provider, which disseminates electronic information through multiple online media channels. FNM is NOT affiliated in any manner with USA News Group or any company mentioned herein. The commentary, views and opinions expressed in this release by USA News Group are solely those of USA News Group and are not shared by and do not reflect in any manner the views or opinions of FNM. FNM is not liable for any investment decisions by its readers or subscribers. FNM and its affiliated companies are a news dissemination and financial marketing solutions provider and are NOT a registered broker/dealer/analyst/adviser, holds no investment licenses and may NOT sell, offer to sell or offer to buy any security. FNM was not compensated by any public company mentioned herein to disseminate this press release.

FNM HOLDS NO SHARES OF ANY COMPANY NAMED IN THIS RELEASE.

This release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E 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 as a result of various factors, and other risks identified in a company's annual report on Form 10-K or 10-KSB and other filings made by such company with the Securities and Exchange Commission. You should consider these factors in evaluating the forward-looking statements included herein, and not place undue reliance on such statements. The forward-looking statements in this release are made as of the date hereof and FNM undertakes no obligation to update such statements.



Media Contact Information:

FN Media Group, LLC

e-mail: editor@financialnewsmedia.com

U.S. Phone: +1(954)345-0611
Market research firm Technavio has announced the release of their latest report on the global paper and paperboard container and packaging market. This new report will provide expert market insights for the forecast period 2018-2022.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180420005388/en/

Technavio has published a new market research report on the global paper and paperboard container and packaging market from 2018-2022. (Graphic: Business Wire)

The new report will follow up on Technavio's previous global paper and paperboard container and packaging market report and present an updated analysis of the market with regards to the current competitive landscape and global environment. The report will also include new predictions for the forecast period based on a thorough understanding of the current trends, drivers, and challenges.

The upgraded research report on the paper and paperboard container and packaging market is an integral part of Technavio's packaging portfolio. Technavio covers an extensive range of market research reports on the packaging market, covering different regions and top industry segments. Some of the topics include printing market for packaging, aluminum foil packaging, packaging machinery, vials primary packaging, and airfreight forwarding.

This report is available at a USD 1,000 discount for a limited time only: View market snapshot before purchasing

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An overview of the paper and paperboard container and packaging market

Technavio's previous report on the global paper and paperboard container and packaging market projected that APAC showed the highest potential for growth. In developing countries such as India and China, the increasing demand for convenience foods, branded products, and dairy products augmented market growth in this region.

In the previous report, a senior research analyst at Technavio stated, "One of the key factors driving the growth of the paper and paperboard containers and packaging market is the increase in the number of hypermarkets and supermarkets. Quickly expanding organized retail sector has led to an increasing demand for food and beverages and other consumer care products. Retail stores not only use packaging materials to preserve food but also to retain the nutritional value of food. Consumers are increasingly buying grocery items, including frozen and chilled foods, which is expected to contribute to the growth of this market."

Technavio's new report on the global paper and paperboard container and packaging market will evaluate the key geographical regions and their behavior over the past four years, introducing new data and observations and providing new predictions.

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The report on the global paper and paperboard container and packaging market for the period 2018-2022 is available to order now and will be delivered within one week of purchase.

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About Technavio

Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focuses on emerging market trends and provides actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions.

With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavio's report library consists of more than 10,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavio's comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios.

If you are interested in more information, please contact our media team at media@technavio.com

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180420005388/en/

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WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Crude oil futures fell Friday after President Donald Trump blasted OPEC for trying to artificially boost prices. 'Looks like OPEC is at it again,' he wrote. 'With record amounts of Oil all over the place, including the fully loaded ships at sea, Oil prices are artificially Very High! No good and will not be accepted!' In turn, oil is extending yesterday's decline from a nearly 4-year peak around $70 a barrel. Oil has slipped to $67.90 on the final day of the May contract. OPEC officials claim their supply quota plan with Russia has re-balanced the global oil market. Still, the cartel and Kremlin want to drive prices even higher and offset the U.S. shale oil boom, so they are likely to extend the supply quota plan beyond this year. OPEC is meeting in the Middle East this week to discuss the issue. Baker Hughes reports the U.S. rig count today. 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.
PUNE, India, April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

According to a new market research report "Sleep Apnea Devices Market by Type, (Therapeutic (CPAP, APAP, Masks, ASV, Oral Appliances, Mandibular Advancement Device), Diagnostic (PSG, Oximeter)), End User (Sleep Laboratories & Hospitals, Home Care/Individuals) - Global Forecasts to 2023", published by MarketsandMarkets, the market is projected to reach USD 6.49 Billion by 2023 from an estimated USD 4.44 Billion in 2018, at a CAGR of 7.8%.

(Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/660509/MarketsandMarkets_Logo.jpg )

Browse 229 market data Tables and 33 Figures spread through 226 Pages and in-depth TOC on "Sleep Apnea Devices Market"

" https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/sleep-apnea-devices-market-719.html

Early buyers will receive 10% customization on this report

Growth in this market can primarily be attributed to factors such as the increasing prevalence of sleep apnea globally owing to the increase of lifestyle diseases like obesity, initiatives by market players and the government to increase awareness regarding sleep apnea, and the various technological advancements brought about by players to make the products comfortable for patients and thus increase patient compliance and adherence to the treatment.

The oral appliances segment to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period

By product, the therapeutic devices segment has been further segmented into positive airway pressure (PAP) devices, facial interfaces (masks), accessories, oral appliances, adaptive servo-ventilators (ASV), and other therapeutic devices (oxygen concentrators and airway clearance systems). Of all these product segments, the oral appliances segment is projected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period. Growth in this segment is largely due to the increasing issues associated with PAP compliance and the advantages of oral appliances over other therapies like enhanced patient comfort, noninvasiveness, small size, and convenience.

Sleep laboratories & hospitals to dominate the Sleep Apnea Devices Market during the forecast period

The major end users of sleep apnea devices include sleep laboratories & hospitals and home care/individuals. The sleep laboratories & hospitals segment is projected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period. Growth in this segment is largely due to the increasing number of patients undergoing sleep testing at a laboratory or a hospital.

Ask for PDF Brochure @https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownload.asp?id=719

North America dominated the market in 2017

North America is expected to account for the largest share of the Sleep Apnea Devices Market in 2018, followed by Europe. The large share of this region can be attributed to the increasing obesity in the US which is in turn increasing the prevalence of sleep apnea, the high growth of the home sleep testing devices, and issuance of grants and funds by private and government institutions to promote awareness of sleep apnea as well as launch novel and technologically advanced products in the market space.

ResMed (US), Koninklijke Philips (Netherlands), and Fisher & Paykel Healthcare (New Zealand) are the key players in the Sleep Apnea Devices Market. Other players involved in this market are SomnoMed (Australia), Compumedics (Australia), Lowenstein Medical (Germany), Whole You (US), BMC Medical (China), Drive DeVilbiss Healthcare (US), and Braebon Medical (Canada).

Know more about the Sleep Apnea Devices Market:

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/sleep-apnea-devices-market-719.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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Mondi Limited

(Incorporated in the Republic of South Africa)

(Registration number: 1967/013038/06)

JSE share code: MND ISIN: ZAE000156550

Mondi plc

(Incorporated in England and Wales)

(Registered number: 6209386)

LEI: 213800LOZA69QFDC9N34

JSE share code: MNP ISIN: GB00B1CRLC47

LSE share code: MNDI

As part of the dual listed company structure, Mondi Limited and Mondi plc (together "Mondi Group", the "Group" or "Mondi") notify both the JSE Limited and the London Stock Exchange of matters required to be disclosed under the Listings Requirements of the JSE Limited and/or the Disclosure Guidance and Transparency Rules and the Listing Rules of the United Kingdom Listing Authority.

20 April 2018

Mondi launches 600 million Eurobond

NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO ANY PERSON OR ADDRESS IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, ITS TERRITORIES AND POSSESSIONS, ANY STATE OF THE UNITED STATES OR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA (THE "UNITED STATES") OR TO THE U.S. PERSONS

Mondi is pleased to announce the successful launch of a 600 million, 8-year Eurobond. Proceeds of the issue, which is due to close on 27 April 2018, will be used for general corporate purposes.

The Eurobond matures in April 2026, has a coupon of 1.625%, and an application will be made for it to be listed on the London Stock Exchange. The joint book-runners for the issue were Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays, Erste Group, HSBC and Raiffeisen Bank International.



The Eurobond will be issued under Mondi's Euro Medium Term Note (EMTN) programme, which is rated Baa1 by Moody's and BBB+ by Standard and Poor's.



Andrew King, Mondi's Chief Financial Officer, said:

"We are delighted with the support for our bond issue from a wide group of European Institutional investors. The success of this transaction further strengthens the Group by extending our debt maturity profile and reflects Mondi's consistent and focussed long-term strategy, robust business model and high-quality, cost-advantaged asset base".

THIS ANNOUNCEMENT IS NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY, IN OR INTO THE UNITED STATES OR TO U.S. PERSONS. THIS ANNOUNCEMENT DOES NOT CONSTITUTE AN OFFER TO SELL OR A SOLICITATION OF AN OFFER TO PURCHASE ANY SECURITIES IN THE UNITED STATES OR TO U.S. PERSONS. THE SECURITIES REFERRED TO HAVE NOT BEEN AND WILL NOT BE REGISTERED UNDER THE U.S. SECURITIES ACT OF 1933, AS AMENDED (THE "SECURITIES ACT") OR THE LAWS OF ANY STATE WITHIN THE UNITED STATES, AND MAY NOT BE OFFERED OR SOLD IN THE UNITED STATES OR TO OR FOR THE ACCOUNT OR BENEFIT OF U.S. PERSONS (AS SUCH TERM IS DEFINED IN REGULATION S UNDER THE SECURITIES ACT), EXCEPT IN A TRANSACTION NOT SUBJECT TO, OR PURSUANT TO AN APPLICABLE EXEMPTION FROM, THE REGISTRATION REQUIREMENTS OF THE SECURITIES ACT OR ANY STATE SECURITIES LAWS. NO OFFERING OF THE SECURITIES IS BEING MADE, AND THERE WILL BE NO PUBLIC OFFER OF THE SECURITIES IN THE UNITED STATES OR IN ANY OTHER JURISDICTION.

This communication is directed only at (i) persons who are outside the United Kingdom, (ii) persons in the United Kingdom who have professional experience in matters related to investments and who are investment professionals within the meaning of Article 19(5) of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Financial Promotion) Order 2005 (as amended) of the United Kingdom (the "Financial Promotion Order"); (iii) persons who fall within Articles 49(2)(a) to (d) ("high net worth companies, unincorporated associations etc.") of the Financial Promotion Order; and (iv) any other persons to whom this communication may otherwise lawfully be directed (all such persons together being referred to as "relevant persons"). This communication must not be acted on or relied on by other persons in the United Kingdom. Any investment or investment activity to which this communication relates is available only to relevant persons and will be engaged in only with relevant persons. This communication must not be acted on or relied on by persons who are not relevant persons.

Contact:

Mondi Group



Andrew King

Group CFO

Tel: +44 (0)1932 826355

E-mail: andrew.king@mondigroup.com

James Paterson

Group Treasurer

Tel: +44 (0)1932 826340

E-mail: james.paterson@mondigroup.com

About Mondi

Mondi is a global leader in packaging and paper, employing around 26,000 people in over 30 countries. We are fully integrated across the packaging and paper value chain - from managing forests and producing pulp, paper and plastic films, to developing and manufacturing effective industrial and consumer packaging solutions. Sustainability is embedded in everything we do, with clearly defined commitments across 10 action areas. We delight our customers with our innovative and sustainable packaging and paper solutions. Our major operations are in central Europe, Russia, North America and South Africa. In 2017, Mondi had revenues of 7.1 billion and a return on capital employed of 19.7%.

Mondi has a dual listed company structure, with a primary listing on the JSE Limited for Mondi Limited under the ticker MND and a premium listing on the London Stock Exchange for Mondi plc, under the ticker MNDI. We are a FTSE 100 constituent, and have been included in the FTSE4Good Index Series since 2008 and the JSE's Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) Index since 2007.

Sponsor in South Africa: UBS South Africa Proprietary Limited.
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - April 20, 2018) - Avalon Advanced Materials Inc. (TSX: AVL) (OTCQX: AVLNF) ("Avalon" or the "Company") is pleased to report that it has once again placed among Corporate Knights' 2018 Future 40 Responsible Corporate Leaders in Canada from a shortlist of eligible small and mid-size organizations.

Don Bubar, Avalon's President and CEO, commented, "This is well-earned recognition for everyone at Avalon and the sustainability culture we have developed. We believe that making environmental and social responsibility a priority enhances shareholder value by reducing risk while enhancing business opportunities for our Indigenous partners."

Avalon is fully committed to integrating sustainable practices into its business model by minimizing environmental impacts and land disturbed. At the East Kemptville Tin-Indium Project in Nova Scotia, Avalon's current development model will fully remediate the historical environmental liability at site; create no new disturbance area; and minimize GHG production, while profitably recovering tin from low grade stockpiles and other waste materials left on the site.

At the Separation Rapids Lithium Project near Kenora, Ontario, the Company's staged development approach allows for minimizing the environmental footprint of the project while maximizing the number of potential mineral products from the lithium pegmatite, reducing the amount of waste material generated. Under Avalon's current development model, as little as 10% of the mined ore would end up as waste, compared to 90% plus at typical base and precious metals operations.

Avalon is a leader among junior mineral development companies in adopting best practices to reduce its environmental footprint, protect water resources and engage with local communities. The Company has reported annually on its sustainability performance since 2011. Avalon's sixth and current Sustainability Report's theme is Concentrating on Cleantech Materials Production: a theme chosen to reflect the Company's focus on defining profitable business opportunities in the technology metals sector. Avalon's 2017 Sustainability Report can be found online at: http://www.avalonadvancedmaterials.com/_resources/sustainability/AVL-2017-sustainability-report.pdf.

This is the third time Avalon has been ranked as a Future 40 Responsible Corporate Leader in the last four years. This year, Avalon is listed among top-ranking companies such as London Hydro, Vancouver Fraser Port Authority and Dundee Precious Metals.

The methodology for the 2018 Future 40 Responsible Corporate Leaders in Canada ranking is based on 16 key performance indicators covering resource, employee and financial management. The full methodology for this year's ranking is available from Corporate Knights here: http://www.corporateknights.com/reports/future-40/2018-future-40-methodology-15085128/. Private or publicly-listed companies headquartered in Canada with revenue of under $1 billion and evidence of ESG reporting are eligible. Ranking is based on publicly-disclosed data, verified by the companies prior to project completion.

Corporate Knights is a specialized media and investment research firm that operates in three segments, including Corporate Knights Magazine: the self-proclaimed largest globally circulating magazine focused on sustainability and responsible business, with a strong track record of providing informed research and analysis to the market.

The full ranking can be viewed in Corporate Knights Magazine's Spring 2018 issue or online at www.corporateknights.com/reports/2018-future-40/2018-future-40-results-15241106/.

About Avalon Advanced Materials Inc.

Avalon Advanced Materials Inc. is a Canadian mineral development company specializing in niche market metals and minerals with growing demand in new technology. The Company has three advanced stage projects, all 100%-owned, providing investors with exposure to lithium, tin and indium, as well as rare earth elements, tantalum, niobium, and zirconium. Avalon is currently focusing on its Separation Rapids Lithium Project, Kenora, ON and its East Kemptville Tin-Indium Project, Yarmouth, NS. Social responsibility and environmental stewardship are corporate cornerstones.

For questions and feedback, please e-mail the Company at ir@AvalonAM.com, or phone Don Bubar, President & CEO at 416-364-4938.

This news release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and applicable Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to statements that Avalon is fully committed to integrating sustainable practices into its business model, thatAvalon's current development model will fully remediate the historical environmental liability at site; create no new disturbance area; and minimize GHG production, while profitably recovering tin from low grade stockpiles and other waste materials left on the site, that the Company's staged development approach allows for minimizing the environmental footprint of the project while maximizing the number of potential mineral products from the lithium pegmatite, reducing the amount of waste material generated, and that as little as 10% of the mined ore would end up as waste. Generally, these forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "potential", "scheduled", "anticipates", "continues", "expects" or "does not expect", "is expected", "scheduled", "targeted", "planned", or "believes", or variations of such words and phrases or state that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will be" or "will not be" taken, reached or result, "will occur" or "be achieved". Forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of Avalon to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are based on assumptions management believes to be reasonable at the time such statements are made. Although Avalon has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking statements, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. Factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from expected results described in forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to market conditions, and the possibility of cost overruns or unanticipated costs and expenses as well as those risk factors set out in the Company's current Annual Information Form, Management's Discussion and Analysis and other disclosure documents available under the Company's profile at www.SEDAR.com. 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. Such forward-looking statements have been provided for the purpose of assisting investors in understanding the Company's plans and objectives and may not be appropriate for other purposes. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Avalon does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements that are contained herein, except in accordance with applicable securities laws.
DENVER, CO / ACCESSWIRE / April 20, 2018 / GVC Capital LLC ("GVC") and Dave Lavigne at Trickle Research LLC ("Trickle Research") will host the Rocky Mountain MicroCap Conference II on April 24, 2018, in Denver at Coors Field. The Rocky Mountain MicroCap Conference II is a single track investment conference for public microcap companies to present to a large gathering of microcap centric investors.

Presenting companies include:

Aethlon Medical Inc. (NASDAQ: AEMD)

AmeriCann, Inc. (OTCQX: ACAN)

Command Center, Inc. (OTCQB: CCNI)

Enservco Corporation (NYSE American: ENSV)

GB Sciences, Inc. (OTCQB: GBLX)

Global Healthcare REIT, Inc. (OTCQB: GBCS)

Gold Resource Corporation (NYSE American: GORO)

OncoSec Medical Incorporated. (NASDAQ: ONCS)

PetroShare Corp. (OTCQB: PRHR)

Redwood Scientific (OTC PINK: RSCI)

Social Reality Inc. (NASDAQ: SRAX)

Ur-Energy Inc. (NYSE American: URG)

GVC and Trickle expect to host approximately 75 investors--mainly buyside portfolio managers and fund managers, analysts, family offices, brokers, and high net worth individual investors looking for growth opportunities in the microcap space.

Sponsors of the conference are: Ibex Investors, Island Stock Transfer, Moss Adams LLP, Polsinelli PC and SMM.Global.

For more information visit www.rockymtmicro.com or contact:

Michael Donnelly

Managing Director- Investment Banking

GVC Capital LLC

mdonnelly@gvccap.com

(720) 488-4729

Dave Lavigne

Founder/ Senior Analyst

Trickle Research LLC

Dave@TrickleResearch.com

(720) 394-1019

About GVC Capital LLC

GVC Capital LLC is an innovative investment banking firm headquartered in the Denver suburb of Greenwood Village, Colorado. GVC focuses primarily on providing comprehensive investment banking services to underexposed and undervalued microcap companies. Over the past fifteen years, GVC has assisted emerging growth companies in raising in excess of $600 million in over 100 transactions. For more information, visit www.gvccap.com.

About Trickle Research

Trickle Research provides proprietary microcap and smallcap research to our investors and subscribers. Subscriptions to our service are by invitation. If you would like to discuss access to our research please contact Dave Lavigne at Dave@TrickleResearch.com.

SOURCE: Trickle Research LLC
MOSCOW (dpa-AFX) - Amid heightened tensions between the U.S. and Russia, President Donald Trump's National Security Adviser John Bolton and Russian Ambassador Anatoly Antonov held a meeting on Thursday. A statement from the White House said Bolton reiterated that it is in the interest of both the U.S. and Russia to have better relations. 'But this will require addressing our concerns regarding Russia's interference in the 2016 election, the reckless use of a chemical weapon in the United Kingdom, and the situations in Ukraine and Syria,' the White House said. The meeting between Bolton and Antonov marked the first time that the two men had met since assuming their current roles. Bolton, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President George W. Bush., officially replaced H.R. McMaster as National Security Adviser earlier this month. (Photo: Gage Skidmore) Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann.
WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Calling it 'the right thing to do,' Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has announced plans to introduce legislation decriminalizing marijuana at the federal level. A statement released by Schumer on Friday said the legislation would remove marijuana from the list of scheduled substances under the Controlled Substances Act. 'The time has come to decriminalize marijuana,' Schumer said. 'My thinking - as well as the general population's views - on the issue has evolved, and so I believe there's no better time than the present to get this done. It's simply the right thing to do.' He added, 'This legislation would let the states be the laboratories that they should be, ensure that woman and minority owned business have a fair shot in the marijuana industry, invests in critical research on THC, and ensures that advertisers can't target children - it's a balanced approach.' The announcement from Schumer comes on 4/20, an unofficial holiday celebrating marijuana use and culture. In a post on Medium, Schumer noted a disproportionate number of African-American and Latino citizens continue to be arrested for something a majority of Americans agree should not be a crime. 'Meanwhile, those who are entering into the marijuana market in states that have legalized are set to make a fortune,' Schumer wrote. He added, 'This is not only misguided, but it undermines the basic principles of fairness and equal opportunity that are foundational to the American way of life.' The move by Schumer comes as President Donald Trump's administration has made efforts to limit the proliferation of legislation to decriminalize and legalize marijuana at the state level. (Photo: John J. Meola) 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.
NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / April 20, 2018 / Pomerantz LLP is investigating claims on behalf of investors of Credit Suisse Group A.G. ("Credit Suisse" or the "Company") (NYSE: CS). Such investors are advised to contact Robert S. Willoughby at rswilloughby@pomlaw.com or 888-476-6529, ext. 9980.

The investigation concerns whether Credit Suisse and certain of its officers and/or directors have engaged in securities fraud or other unlawful business practices.

[Click here to join a class action]

On February 5, 2018, the intraday value of Credit Suisse's VelocityShares Daily Inverse Short-Term Exchange-Traded Note ("XIV") fell to 20% of the previous day's closing value. On the morning of February 6, 2018, citing an "acceleration event", Credit Suisse advised investors that the acceleration date of the XIV note - i.e., the date on which investors will receive a cash payment equal to the closing value that day - is expected to be February 21, 2018, thereby effectively announcing the product's liquidation. The online publication ForexLive noted that "[n]umbers published [September] 30 showed Credit Suisse holding nearly 5 million of the [XIV] shares itself. Those would have been worth $550 million at the open and about $20 million now - a net loss of $530 million for the Swiss bank." Credit Suisse's American Depositary Receipt price fell $0.37, or 2.01%, to close at $18.00 on February 6, 2018.

The Pomerantz Firm, with offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Paris, is acknowledged as one of the premier firms in the areas of corporate, securities, and antitrust class litigation. Founded by the late Abraham L. Pomerantz, known as the dean of the class action bar, the Pomerantz Firm pioneered the field of securities class actions. Today, more than 80 years later, the Pomerantz Firm continues in the tradition he established, fighting for the rights of the victims of securities fraud, breaches of fiduciary duty, and corporate misconduct. The Firm has recovered numerous multimillion-dollar damages awards on behalf of class members. See www.pomerantzlaw.com

SOURCE: Pomerantz LLP
Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - April 20, 2018) - Alliance Growers Corp. (CSE: ACG) (FSE: 1LA) (WKN: A2DFYX) ("Alliance Growers" or the "Company") is pleased to announce a non-brokered private placement of up to 2,500,000 units at a price of $0.30 per unit for gross proceeds of $750,000 and has closed a 496,667 units for gross proceeds of $149,000.

Due to the change in market conditions, the Company has adjusted the price of this financing originally announced on January 25, 2018 from $.80 per unit to $0.30 per unit.

Each unit in the private placement is comprised of one common share and one transferable share purchase warrant with each transferrable warrant exercisable into one additional common share at a price of $0.40 for a period of three years from the date of issuance. The securities will be subject to a four month plus one day hold period under securities laws.

"All of us at Alliance Growers are very excited about the future of our Company," said Dennis Petke, President and CEO of Alliance Growers. ". Despite the change in market conditions, Alliance continues to receive investor support in our funding efforts. We have received subscriptions and commitments for another 1 million units that we expect to close next week. We have many major milestones to achieve this year that will shape ACG for years to come. This financing will permit us to move forward on several fronts in the development of our 'Four Pillars' business Plan. We wish to thank all shareholder and other stakeholders for their continued support."

The Company intends to use the net proceeds from the private placement toward funding commitments for the development of the Botany Centre, the acquisition of a Quebec based late-stage ACMPR applicant, BiocannaTech Inc., and general working capital .

About Alliance Growers

Alliance Growers is a diversified cannabis company driven by the Company's 'Four Pillars' Organization Plan - Cannabis Botany Centre, Strategic ACMPR Investments, CBD Oil Supply and Distribution, and Research and Development.

Alliance Growers has finalized its a new business partnership with WFS Pharmagreen Inc., to jointly develop and operate a 40,000-square foot facility to be the first of its kind in Western Canada to house a DNA Botany lab, extraction facility and Tissue Culture Plantlet Production facility to service the Cannabis market and agriculture market in general. The proposed Cannabis Botany Centre will grow Cannabis plantlets using proprietary tissue culture propagation, specifically the "Chibafreen Invitro Plant Production System", which assures consistent composition and purity of each plantlet for the growers.

Alliance Growers has entered into an exclusive agreement to acquire a late stage licensed producer applicant, Biocannatech, to become a licensed producer under Health Canada's access to cannabis for medical purposes regulations ("ACMPR") in Quebec. Alliance Growers will supply financing and resources to build out the medical marijuana facility in preparation for the inspection required to obtain a growing license. Once Health Canada is satisfied with a successful crop, Alliance Growers will be granted its distribution license. This acquisition allows the Company an opportunity to become a licensed producer in the Province of Quebec and gain an in-road to provide tissue culture plantlets to all licensed producers in Quebec.

Further, Alliance Growers has been negotiating to obtain other exclusive Canadian distribution agreements for certain proprietary products for support of the Cannabis growing industry in addition to possible partnerships with Licensed Producer Applicants at various stages in the Health Canada License process.

For further information, please visit the Company's website at www.alliancegrowers.com or the Company's profile at www.sedar.com.

If you would like to be added to Alliance Growers' news distribution list, please send your email address to newsletter@alliancegrowers.com

On behalf of the board of directors of

ALLIANCE GROWERS CORP.

"Dennis Petke"

Dennis Petke

President and CEO

For more information contact:

Dennis Petke

Tel: 778-331-4266

DennisPetke@alliancegrowers.com

Rob Grace

Communications Consultant

Tel: 778-998-5431

RobDGrace@gmail.com

THE CANADIAN SECURITIES EXCHANGE HAS NOT REVIEWED AND DOES NOT ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ACCURACY OR ADEQUACY OF THIS RELEASE.

FORWARD LOOKING INFORMATION

This news release contains forward-looking statements and forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws. These statements relate to future events or future performance. All statements other than statements of historical fact may be forward-looking statements or information. More particularly and without limitation, the news release contains forward-looking statements and information relating to Company's corporate strategy. The forward-looking statements and information are based on certain key expectations and assumptions made by management of the Company, including, without limitation, the Company's ability to carry out its business plan. Although management of the Company believes that the expectations and assumptions on which such forward-looking statements and information are based are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on the forward-looking statements and information since no assurance can be given that they will prove to be correct.

Forward-looking statements and information are provided for the purpose of providing information about the current expectations and plans of management of the Company relating to the future. Readers are cautioned that reliance on such statements and information may not be appropriate for other purposes, such as making investment decisions. Since forward-looking statements and information address future events and conditions, by their very nature they involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially from those currently anticipated due to a number of factors and risks. These include, but are not limited to, the Company's ability to identify and complete additional suitable acquisitions to further the Company's growth as well as risks associated with the medical marijuana industry in general, such as operational risks in development and production delays or changes in plans with respect to development projects or capital expenditures; the uncertainty of the capital markets; the uncertainty of receiving the required licenses, production, costs and expenses; health, safety and environmental risks; marketing and transportation; loss of markets; environmental risks; competition; incorrect assessment of the value of the potential market; ability to access sufficient capital from internal and external sources; failure to obtain required regulatory and other approvals and changes in legislation, including but not limited to tax laws and regulated regulations. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on the forward-looking statements, timelines and information contained in this news release. Readers are cautioned that the foregoing list of factors is not exhaustive.

The forward-looking statements and information contained in this news release are made as of the date hereof and no undertaking is given to update publicly or revise any forward-looking statements or information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, unless so required by applicable securities laws or the Canadian Securities Exchange. The forward-looking statements or information contained in this news release are expressly qualified by this cautionary statement.
WaterBear Education, a UK higher education college which provides a range of Master of Arts (MA) and Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree courses across the creative industries in partnership with the University of Chichester, completed a 1.1m funding round.

Maven VCTs made the investment.

The funds will be used to set up and roll out WaterBears primary campus in Brighton and support the opening of additional campus locations in the future.

Led by Bruce John Dickinson, WaterBear provides industry-relevant creative degree courses, which offer bachelor and masters qualifications for musicians, artists and entrepreneurs, who will be accredited and validated by the University of Chichester. Its blended learning programs combine both online and on site learning, with a key emphasis on preparing students for employment, developing contacts and opportunities and offering work placements within industry as an integral part of the courses.

The creative industries MA and BA courses are now open for enrolment and are due to commence in September 2018.

FinSMEs

20/04/2018
Wonolo, a San Francisco, CA-based on-demand staffing platform enabling businesses to fill their immediate labor needs, closed a $13M Series B funding.

The round, which brings total venture funding to $25M, was led by Sequoia Capital with participation from existing investors PivotNorth Capital and Crunchfund, and new investor Base10. In conjunction with the funding, Sequoia partner Jess Lee has also joined Wonolos board of directors.

The company intends to use the new capital to scale operations, continue to launch in new local markets around the U.S., add new strategic partners, and sign up more companies to the marketplace.

Led by Yong Kim, CEO and co-founder, Wonolo is an on-demand staffing marketplace that places underemployed hourly workers with unfilled work shifts at top businesses in retail, manufacturing, shipping and logistics, ecommerce, and other industries.

To date, tens of thousands of hourly workers across the U.S. have used the company to find work when they need it.

Wonolo also partners with thousands of companies, including brand names like Coca-Cola, Papa Johns and Uniqlo, to fill open shifts.

FinSMEs

20/04/2018
.                ,         . " ,       ,     .       ,  ,       ,  ,  ...
Huweis Honor brand along with the Honor 10 also introduced the MagicBook, a light-weight notebook weighing just 1.47 Kgs. It has a 14-inch Full HD display with 5.2mm narrow bezels and a screen-to-body ratio of 81%, is powered by 8th Generation Intel Core i5 or i7 Processor with 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD. It also a 2GB NVIDIA GeForce GeForce MX150 graphics.

It has a all-metal aliminium alloy body, features two custom-made fans that increases the air flow to keep the notebook cool offering a better heat discharge. It has a 57.4Wh battery that promises up to 12 hours of battery life.

Honor MagicBook specifications

14-inch (1920 x 1080 pixels) Full HD display with 800:1 contrast, 250 nits brightness

8th Gen Intel Core i5-8250U (3.4GHz) / i7-8550U processor (4GHz) with 2GB DDR5 NVIDIA GeForce MX150 GPU

8GB DDR4 2400MHz RAM, 256GB PCIe SSD

Windows 10 Home

1MP HD webcam, built-in dual digital microphones

WiFi 802.11ac 22 (2.4GHz and 5GHz), Bluetooth 4.1

Dimensions: 360.7 x 243.6mm x 15.9mm; Weight: 1.95kg

USB Type-C x 1, USB 3.0 (Type A) x 1, USB 2.0 (Type A) x 1

3.5mm audio jack, microphone combo, 4 speakers, Dolby Atmos

57.4Wh battery with up to 12h of local video playback

The Honor MagicBook Comes in Glacial Silver or Star Grey colors, is priced at 4999 yuan (US$ 795 / Rs. 52,499 approx.) for the 8th Gen Intel Core i5 version and the Core i7 version costs 5699 yuan (US$ 906 / Rs. 59,860 approx.). It is now available for order and goes on sale in China from April 23rd.

Source
A test that pinpoints the potentially devastating virus in cocoa trees before they show any symptoms has been developed by Mars Wrigley and agri-food testing company... Read More
ADM

At ADM, we unlock the power of nature to provide access to nutrition worldwide. With industry-advancing innovations, a complete portfolio of ingredients and solutions to meet any taste, and a commitment to sustainability, we give customers an edge in solving the nutritional challenges of today and tomorrow. Were a global leader in human and animal nutrition and the worlds premier agricultural origination and processing company. Our breadth, depth, insights, facilities and logistical expertise give us unparalleled capabilities to meet needs for food, beverages, health and wellness, and more. From the seed of the idea to the outcome of the solution, we enrich the quality of life the world over.
After a nation-wide womanhunt, Lois Ann Riess of Blooming Prairie, Minnesota, was captured in Texas.

Members of the U.S. Marshal Service and the South Padre Island Police Department arrested Riess at about 8:24 p.m. Thursday evening at a bar and restaurant, after receiving a call from a citizen who recognized Riess.

Riess, 56, is the suspect of two homicides. In March, she allegedly killed her husband in Dodge County, Minnesota, and more than a week ago, murdered Pamela Hutchinson in Snug Harbour at Marina Village. Hutchinson, 59, was found dead in her room from a gunshot wound on April 9.

Riess killed Hutchinson to steal her identity as the two women looked similar.

She stole Hutchinsons car, then fled to Ocala, and then to Texas.

I promised all along that Lois Riess would end up in a pair of handcuffs, said Undersheriff Carmine Marceno in a press release. (Thursday night), she sits in a jail cell in Texas. We are working as expeditiously as possible to bring her back to Lee County to face murder charges.

Marceno held a press conference with John Kinsey with the U.S. Marshals Office Friday morning. Both thanked the various law enforcement departments, as well as the publicity from local and national media, that led to Riesss arrest.

Kinsey said Riess did not seem surprised when she was arrested and put up no resistance. Riess allegedly killed Hutchinson to steal her identity, as both women were close in age and had light blonde hair. However, Riess made no other attempts to change her appearance after.

Marceno said law enforcement is currently determining whether Riess will be returned to Minnesota or Florida to face her murder charges.

Shes smiling in her mugshot when booked into the South Padre Island jail  a sign that Marceno didnt leave unnoticed.

Shes smiling. What does that tell you about her? he said at the press conference. She looks like anybodys grandma. Shes a cold blooded murderer.

Marceno said he hopes to bring Riess back to Florida, but it has not yet been determined.

Im proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with the marshals. Nationally, we come together and we win, he said. She cant strike again. We ran a killer off the streets.

Fort Myers Beach homicide suspect Lois Riess caught in Texas By Staff | Apr 20, 2018



After a nation-wide womanhunt, Lois Ann Riess of Blooming Prairie, Minnesota, was captured in Texas. Members of the U.S. Marshal Service and the South Padre Island Police Department arrested Riess at about 8:24 p.m. Thursday at a bar and restaurant, after receiving a call from a citizen who recognized Riess. Riess, 56, is the suspect in two homicides. Police say she killed her husband in Dodge County, Minnesota in March and, more than a week ago, murdered Pamela Hutchinson in Snug Harbour at Marina Village. Hutchinson, 59, was found dead in her room from a gunshot wound on April 9. Riess killed Hutchinson to steal her identity as the two women looked similar, officials said. She stole Hutchinsons car, then fled to Ocala, and then to Texas. I promised all along that Lois Riess would end up in a pair of handcuffs, said Lee County Undersheriff Carmine Marceno in a prepared statement. (Thursday night), she sits in a jail cell in Texas. We are working as expeditiously as possible to bring her back to Lee County to face murder charges. Marceno held a press conference with John Kinsey with the U.S. Marshals Office Friday morning. Both thanked the various law enforcement departments, as well as the publicity from local and national media, that led to Riesss arrest. Kinsey said Riess did not seem surprised when she was arrested and put up no resistance. Riess allegedly killed Hutchinson to steal her identity, as both women were close in age and had light blonde hair. However, Riess made no other attempts to change her appearance after. Marceno said law enforcement is currently determining whether Riess will be returned to Minnesota or Florida to face her murder charges. Shes smiling in her mugshot when booked into the South Padre Island jail  a sign that Marceno didnt leave unnoticed. Shes smiling. What does that tell you about her? he said at the press conference. She looks like anybodys grandma. Shes a cold blooded murderer. Marceno said he hopes to bring Riess back to Florida, but it has not yet been determined. Im proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with the marshals. Nationally, we come together and we win, he said. She cant strike again. We ran a killer off the streets. News from around the region Commissioners approve up to $275 million in bonds for airport expansion A planned $331.6 million terminal expansion project by the Lee County Port Authority at the Southwest Florida ... DeSantis announces executive order, lawsuit against Biden over immigration New toll fees go into effect Oct. 1 for Sanibel, Cape Coral bridges Lee County Commissioner Brian Hamman is urging folks to order a county transponder for those who make trips to ...




Joyce Bulifant is upset by the shocking allegations surrounding her former co-star Bill Cosby.

The actress, recognized by viewers as Marie Slaughter on the hit 70s series The Mary Tyler Moore Show, worked opposite the comedian on The Bill Cosby Show as Mrs. Marsha Patterson from 1969 until 1971.

Cosby, now 80, is accused of drugging and sexually assaulting a woman in his Pennsylvania home in 2004, facing the same charges he did in the first case that ended in a mistrial in June 2017.

Aside from Andrea Constand, the accuser who brought Cosby to court, the jury also heard from five other women who said the comedian assaulted them too, painting him as a serial rapist.

If convicted, Cosby could face up to 10 years in prison on each of the three charges of aggravated indecent assault.

In the past few years, dozens of women have accused the comedian of drugging them, sexually assaulting them or trying to do so.

Bulifant, 80, chronicled her lasting career and multiple marriages in a recently published memoir, titled My Four Hollywood Husbands.

She told Fox News a friend, whom she chose not to name, has claimed to also be a victim of Cosbys.

I heard from a friend of mine that it happened to her, said Bulifant.

She said the accuser has not come forward to discuss her claim publicly.

Shes not in the news or looking for news. I think its so sad.

Bulifant insisted she was not personally assaulted by the fallen TV dad.

No, not at all, she said. He was the perfect gentleman when I worked with him. He did invite me to his room for lunch one day, but thats because his chef used to come every day and make lunch for him. And when I went to his room to have lunch, there was Sammy Davis Jr. and Quincy Jones Cosby called me the token white.

Bulifant said she was heartbroken by the allegations.

He was always a gentleman with me, she said. But I do think its sad and you cant miss the sadness of whats happening. My son Charlie, oh my gosh, he was such a fan of Bills and his wonderful humor. And he was such a good example for how you need education. He was such a good spokesman. It makes me terribly sad this is happening.

However, a former Mary Tyler Moore writer shared different feelings about the comedian's fate.

Back in 2017, Susan Silver told Fox News that in 1963, a family friend managing then-newcomer Cosby, suggested he could drive her home after attending a party for Hootenanny, a musical variety show on ABC. It was one of Cosbys first TV appearances. She said Cosby seemed interested in giving her a chance to collaborate with him.

He said, Ive just done my first album. Would you like to work on my second? recalled Silver. I said, Are you kidding? Of course I would. I was so excited. We got to my apartment and he lunged at me and I did the Lucille Ball, falling out of the car with my legs up in the air.

And he just reached over, slammed the door and drove away. So I escaped. I was very fortunate, knowing what we now know. [But] at the time, I thought, Oh, he just tried to kiss me, so I got away I was extraordinarily lucky.

The TV writer would go on to carve her own identity in Hollywood, writing for hit shows, such as Square Pegs, Maude and The Partridge Family, among others.
Actress Natalie Portman has announced that she will not attend the June awards ceremony of the so-called "Jewish Nobel" prize there despite winning the honor, the Genesis Prize Foundation said Thursday.

On Friday, the actress issued her own statement, claiming the reason for her decision was "mischaracterized by others."

The statement read:

"My decision not to attend the Genesis Prize ceremony has been mischaracterized by others. Let me speak for myself. I chose not to attend because I did not want to appear as endorsing Benjamin Netanyahu, who was to be giving a speech at the ceremony. By the same token, I am not part of the BDS movement and do not endorse it. Like many Israelis and Jews around the world, I can be critical of the leadership in Israel without wanting to boycott the entire nation. I treasure my Israeli friends and family, Israeli food, books, art, cinema, and dance. Israel was created exactly 70 years ago as a haven for refugees from the Holocaust. But the mistreatment of those suffering from todays atrocities is simply not in line with my Jewish values. Because I care about Israel, I must stand up against violence, corruption, inequality, and abuse of power.

"Please do not take any words that do not come directly from me as my own.

"This experience has inspired me to support a number of charities in Israel. I will be announcing them soon, and I hope others will join me in supporting the great work they are doing."

Previously, the foundation said it was informed by Portman's representative that the Jerusalem-born Oscar winner feels that "recent events in Israel have been extremely distressing to her" and that "she cannot in good conscience move forward with the ceremony."

As a result, Portman "does not feel comfortable participating in any public events in Israel," the Genesis foundation said.

The prize ceremony will reportedly be canceled as a result of Portman's decision.

Israel has come under increasing scrutiny for its response to mass protests on the Gaza-Israel border, in which 28 Palestinians have been killed and hundreds wounded by Israeli fire since March 30.

Earlier this month, Israel's top defense official praised the sniper who shot a motionless Palestinian near the Gaza fence in a video that circulated widely on Monday, saying he "deserves a medal."

The demonstrations at the border are a new attempt by Hamas to break a crippling, decade-old Gaza border blockade by Israel and Egypt that's made it increasingly difficult for the Islamic militant group to govern.



NATALIE PORTMAN SAYS SHE 'VERY MUCH REGRETS' SIGNING PRO-ROMAN POLANSKI PETITION

The Genesis foundation said it was "very saddened" by Portman's decision. "We fear that Ms. Portman's decision will cause our philanthropic initiative to be politicized, something we have worked hard for the past five years to avoid," it said.

The prize was launched in 2013 to recognize Jewish achievement and contributions to humanity. Previous recipients include former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, actor Michael Douglas, violinist Itzhak Perlman and sculptor Anish Kapoor.

When Portman was announced late last year as the 2018 recipient, she said in a statement released by organizers at the time that she was "proud of my Israeli roots and Jewish heritage."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Bumps the word for Rachel Weisz.

The 48-year-old actress confirmed to the New York Times she and husband Daniel Craig are expecting their first child together.

Ill be showing soon, Weisz revealed. Daniel and I are so happy. Were going to have a little human. We cant wait to meet him or her. Its all such a mystery.

Married for seven years, both Weisz and Craig, 50, have children from previous relationships. The Disobedience star has an 11-year-old son, Henry, with mother! director Darren Aronofsky, while the James Bond actor shares 25-year-old daughter Ella with actress Fiona Loudon.

The notoriously private couple, who made a rare public appearance together in New York earlier this month, pride themselves on keeping their romance under the radar.

Im very happy being married, very, very happy, she said.

As for the more public couples, Weisz shared she and Craig are happy to take a backseat.

Daniel and I are really similar. We just literally dont know how to do that. Were just really crap at talking about our private lives, Weisz mused.

This article originally appeared in the New York Post.
The real lesson of the new movie "Chappaquiddick" is that voters who supported Ted Kennedy after the death of a young campaign staffer in 1969 were are just as corrupt and contemptible as the government officials and others who enabled Kennedy's rise, a writer contends.

Boston Herald contributor Michael Graham wrote Wednesday that Kennedy was a "drunken, reckless, dangerous dirtbag" -- but time and again, Democratic voters in the Bay State proved they weren't much more principled.

Graham specifically cites Kennedy's easy re-election win barely more than a year after 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne's fatal July 1969 car ride with Kennedy, which ended with her dead underwater and him not calling for help of any kind.

Also damning, Graham writes, is that "in 1980, 65 percent of Massachusetts Democrats  nearly 600,000 people" voted for Kennedy over Jimmy Carter in that year's Democratic presidential primary.

And in 1994, double that number of voters supported Kennedy over Mitt Romney, who would go on to become Massachusetts governor.

REPORT: POWERFUL PEOPLE TRIED TO STOP 'CHAPPAQUIDDICK' FILM

"Every single one of those voters knew they were voting for a man who left a young girl in a submerged car to die," Graham writes. "And, dear reader, many of those people are reading this column right now. Congratulations  youre in the movies."

In addition to the voters who celebrated Kennedy as a feminist icon despite his involvment in Kopechne's death, Graham also singles out a variety of officials for complicity in Kennedy's behavior.

"Every single one of those voters knew they were voting for a man who left a young girl in a submerged car to die."  Boston Herald op-ed writer Michael Graham

"[G]etting Teddy off the hook required a political culture that was corrupt at every level, from the local Edgartown cops to the county prosecutors to former U.S. Attorney Paul Markham, who, the movie reminds us, was partying with Kennedy the night Mary Jo Kopechne was left to die," he writes.

Kennedy went to Martha's Vineyard to race in the Edgartown Regatta and on the evening of July 18, 1969, attended a party at a rented house on Chappaquiddick Island. Guests included Kennedy friends and several women, including Kopechne, who had worked on the presidential campaign of his brother Robert F. Kennedy, assassinated a year earlier.

MARY JO KOPECHNE'S COUSIN REACTS TO 'CHAPPAQUIDDICK' FILM

Kennedy and Kopechne left the party together and a short time later their car plunged into Poucha Pond. Kennedy escaped from the submerged vehicle and said he made several futile attempts to rescue Kopechne, who was trapped inside.

Kennedy, who died in 2009 at age 77, later described his failure to report the incident to police for 10 hours as "indefensible."

But Jason Clarke, who plays Kennedy in the new film, told the Associated Press that the late senator "committed this act and he worked his way out of it with help and with his own moral journey to the other side, where he then became one of the longest-serving senators in history. I don't think  partisanship aside  you can't take away from what he did."

For Graham, what Kennedy's actions ultimately did was expose the deeply "corrupt culture of Massachusetts."

As for why Democrats, and some in Hollywood, are lionizing Kennedy? It could be the same reason that once-reviled Republicans tend to find a warmer reception generations later, Washington Post contributor Sonny Bunch wrote Wednesday: political expediency.

"If the only good Republican is a dead Republican, then the only bad Democrat is a dead Democrat," Bunch writes. "And the dead Democrat should always be used to show just how awful the current Republican is."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The newest Airstream trailer is a far cry from the aluminum silver bullet you grew up camping in. According to its April 12 press release, for the first time in its 87-year history, Airstream is introducing a travel trailer model that isnt made of aluminium.

Forget retro. Sleek, sophisticated and modern, answers Justin Humphreys, Airstream COO, when Fox News asked how hed describe the new Nest trailer in three words. We believe Nest will appeal to an audience who appreciate the iconic history of the Airstream brand and who value modern design.

NEED AN EXCUSE FOR A ROADTRIP? HERE ARE SOME OF AMERICA'S BEST

Modern, in this case, means fiberglass. Other retailers have been using this lighter material for decades, so its easy to say Airstream is a late player in the fiberglass game. Perhaps to compensate for this, Nest offers one of the most futuristic looks on the market. It was originally designed by Robert Johans, an Oregon-based designer, though Airstream made a few in-house changes to the prototype. Johans sold his concept to Airstream for an undisclosed amount in 2016. At the time, Airstream was looking to break into the fiberglass mold trailer market. It was a move Airstream founder Wally Byam envisioned back in the 1950s, but never fully brought to fruition.

But with 2018 expecting record-breaking RV sales, todays timing couldnt be better. According to the Recreational Vehicle Industry Associations latest report, 2017s RV sales  504,599 units  were up 17 percent compared to 2016. If the trend continues as expected, 2018 will mark the ninth consecutive year of growth in RV sales since the Great Recession.

Like Airstreams first trailers, Nest will be manufactured at the companys Ohio factory in Jackson Center. But while the original Airstream silver bullet retailed for $1,200 back in 1936, Nest starts around $46,000. (Airstream models range in price from $36,000 for the Basecamp to $156,000 for the 33-foot-long Classic.) Currently, Airstreams best-selling model is the Basecamp  similar in size to Nest but with less sophisticated features.

At just 16-feet-long and 3,400 pounds  meaning you can easily tow it with any mid-sized SUV  Nest is one of the companys most compact models. With its Apple-like aesthetic (think smart meets minimalistic; its only available in a simple gray-and-white color scheme), its certainly the companys most contemporary model.

There are, however, two different layouts: one features a queen-sized mattress; the other features a dinette that folds down into a bed. There are also two interior color palette options, Clutch Blue and Wingspan White.

7-YEAR-OLD HIKES KILIMANJARO IN HONOR OF LATE DAD

The Airstream design team incorporated a number of clever design elements in order to maximize every square inch of Nests 16 feet, says Humphreys. Weve never had this much storage in a 16-foot travel trailer. These elements are elevated to glamping status in the form of a cedar-lined closet, Bluetooth-controlled LED lighting, strategically placed USB ports, blackout curtains, a Tuft & Needle adaptive foam mattress, and a powered patio awning. But perhaps the most striking interior features are the panoramic windows reportedly modeled after ski goggles. They really help open up a rather small space. After all, most of us dont typically cook, eat, shower and sleep in 112-square-feet.

Airstream says its customers, on average, use their trailers three weeks per year. Airstream trailers are available at authorized dealers in all 50 states, and the company estimates that it has more than 150,000 trailers on American roads. Some even belong to celebrity fans including Matthew McConaughey, Tom Hanks, Sean Penn, Denzel Washington, Lenny Kravitz and Miranda Lambert, whose vintage airstream was last seen being renovated on HGTVs Junk Gypsies.

Nest is basically the iPhone of towable tiny homes. And like with any new iPhone launch, the line outside the front door is growing. Nest is just arriving at dealers, says Humphreys. We have a waiting list for people to see them.

FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS

That said, Airstream insists its not completely switching from aluminum to fiberglass and ditching its iconic signature look. Lets not make changes, Byam used to say when reciting Airstreams unofficial motto. Lets make only improvements.
Former FBI Director James Comey, in a memo recounting a meeting with President Trump at Trump Tower on January 6, 2017, explained it was the first time he had informed the president about reports involving him and prostitutes at the Presidential Suite at the Ritz Carlton in Moscow from about 2013.

The revelation came in a series of memos released to congressional committees Thursday night and obtained by Fox News.

Comey said that while speaking with then-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, Vice President Mike Pence and Trump, Priebus asked if there was anything they should know or that might come out. Comey said he proceeded to tell them about a private matter that outgoing Director of National Intelligence James Clapper wanted to alert to the president.

Once alone in the room with Trump, Comey said he wanted to tell the president about reports written by a redacted name, obtained by CNN, and how he didnt want Trump to get caught cold by the details.

The Russians allegedly had tapes involving him and prostitutes at the Presidential Suite at the Ritz Carlton in Moscow from about 2013, he recalled in the memo. Comey then said Trump interjected that there were no prostitutes, there were never prostitutes, adding that the president noted he was the kind of guy who didnt need to 'go there.'

According to the memo, Trump was surprised that if the media had the reports, he couldnt believe they hadnt gone with it, to which Comey replied that they would get killed for reporting straight up from the source reports.

Comey then told Trump that the stuff might be totally made up.

The topic of the Russian tapes appeared again in a second memo dated January 28, 2017, when Comey recounted a dinner he had with Trump in the Green Room at the White House from the night before.

Comey said that Trump turned to what he called the golden showers thing, and repeated that it was a complete fabrication. Trump proceeded to detail the day in question and how it would be impossible as he never actually stayed the night in Russia, according to Comey. He said Trump claimed he used the hotel only to wash up and change for the Miss Universe pageant, and later returned to retrieve his things before getting on a plane back to New York.

The former FBI director recalled Trump asking him to investigate the matter to prove that it was a lie but Comey warned that doing so might lead the media to believe wrongly that the FBI was investigating the president. I wouldnt want to create a narrative that we were investigating him, because we are not and I was worried such a thing would be misconstrued.

In that same memo, Comey mentioned that Trump spoke about the serious reservations he had about then-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.

Comey said Trump started to talk about an incident involving the redacted name of a leader from the redacted name of a country who called to congratulate him following the inauguration. Trump apparently claimed Flynn failed to inform him of the call.

In telling the story, the president pointed his fingers at his head and said the guy has serious judgment issues.

In another memo dated February 8, 2017, Comey said Priebus asked him during a meet and greet event if there was a FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] order on Mike Flynn? The answer was redacted.

Comey said Priebus asked about information leaks and whether they may have originated from the FBI, to which Comey replied it was possible but extremely unlikely, and that every president is plagued by them.

In that same memo, Comey said Trump claimed Russian President Vladimir Putin once told him, 'We have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world.'

In a different memo dated February 14, 2017, Comey talked about Flynn again during a one-on-one meeting with the President.

He began by saying he wanted to talk about Mike Flynn, Comey recalled.

He said Trump went on to explain his reasons for firing Flynn, adding that despite misleading the vice president, he had other concerns about Flynn. Comey also wrote that he said he was eager to find leakers and nail one to the door as a message.

At one point, Comey recalled Trump saying that Flynn is a good guy and that he hoped you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. Comey said Trump repeated again that he is a good guy and that I hope you can let this go, to which Comey simply agreed that he is a good guy.

Comey recalled Trump wanting to go after the reporters and saying that finding the leakers may involve putting reporters in jail.

Fox News' Chad Pergram contributed to this report.
Democratic lawmakers in Illinois have drawn up a piece of legislation that would give extra cash to schools that reallocate funds toward replacing armed security officers with unarmed social workers and behavior therapists.

The controversial bill, proposed by Rep. Emanuel Chris Welch, D-Westchester, would offer grants to schools that use funds meant for school security and instead spend it on mental health services, including hiring social workers or implementing other practices "designed to promote school safety and healthy environments," as The Associated Press reported.

16 other Democrats in the House have backed Welch's plan.

This increased presence of law enforcement in schools does not necessarily enhance school safety," Michelle Mbekani-Wiley from the Sargent Shriver Center for Poverty Law told The Associated Press. "Instead it dramatically increases the likelihood that students will be unnecessarily swept into the criminal justice system often for mere adolescent or disruptive behavior."

However, supporters of school resource officers say their role is essential to keeping students safe, especially from acts of violence.



The bill came after a string of school shootings prompted many Americans to call for more school resource officers. Many Second Amendment supporters backed proposals to arm certain teachers after training.

According to the National Conference of State Legislators, 200 bills or resolutions have been introduced in 39 states regarding school safety as of early April. More than half of those measures were introduced following the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, which killed 17 people.

In March, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a school safety plan that would prioritize grants to states that agreed to use the money to hire more law enforcement in schools.

MARYLAND SCHOOL RESOURCE OFFICER HAS STARED A GUN IN THE FACE TO SAVE LIVES BEFORE

Last month a school resource officer in Maryland was praised after immediately responding to an alert of an active shooter.

Blaine Gaskill, a St. Mary's County Sheriff's Office deputy with SWAT training who had been positioned at Great Mills High School, immediately responded after being alerted of the shooting and, according to officials, contained the situation within one minute of the initial shot being fired.

Although there is no official count of school resource officers employed in Illinois, the former president of the Illinois School Resource Officers Association Deputy Kip Heinle said he believed the number to be around 500. He called those officers "the best line of defense to keep students safe in school."

Fox News' Nicole Darrah and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The funeral for former first lady Barbara Bush, who died Tuesday at the age of 92, was attended by many high-profile figures, including first lady Melania Trump and former President Barack Obama.

A funeral service for the Bush matriarch, who once called herself everybodys grandmother, was planned for Saturday at St. Martins Episcopal Church in Houston, Texas. She and her husband of more than 70 years, former President George H.W. Bush, regularly attended the church.

The burial was on the grounds of the Bush library at Texas A&M University in College Station, about 100 miles northwest of Houston. The couples 3-year-old daughter, Robin, who died in 1953 of leukemia, is also buried at the site.

President Trump did not attend the funeral "to avoid disruptions due to added security, and out of respect for the Bush Family and friends attending the service," the White House said.

However, it's not uncommon for sitting presidents to skip the funerals of former first ladies. After all, former President Barack Obama did not attend the funeral of Nancy Reagan in 2016 or Betty Ford in 2011.

Heres a look at some high-profile figures who attended the beloved former first ladys private funeral.

Melania Trump

First lady Melania Trump attended the service on Saturday.

Throughout her life, she put family and country above all else. Her dedicated service to the American people was matched only by her compassion and love of family, Trump said in a statement after Bushs death. She was a woman of strength and we will always remember her for her most important roles of wife, mother, and First Lady of the United States.

Barack and Michelle Obama

Former President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama also attended the funeral.

After she died, Obama and his wife praised Bush for the generosity she showed to us throughout our time in the White House.

But were even more grateful for the way she lived her life -- as a testament to the fact that public service is an important and noble calling; as an example of the humility and decency that reflects the very best of the American spirit, the Obamas said.

Bill and Hillary Clinton

Former President Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary, the former secretary of state, attended the funeral.

Barbara Bush was a remarkable woman. She had grit [and] grace, brains [and] beauty, the former president said on social media. She showed us what an honest, vibrant, full life looks like.

Before Bush died, Hillary Clinton said she was wishing her the comfort she deserves surrounded by her loved ones. The former 2016 presidential candidate and first lady also thanked Bush for her many kindnesses to me and my family.

Clinton beat Bushs husband when he ran for re-election in the 1992 election. But he has since grew close to his predecessor and Barbara Bush, visiting them at their summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine. Clinton often joked that he spent so much time with the Bushes that hed become like a member of the family.

Fox News Jenny Buchholz, Mike Emanuel and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Fired FBI official Andrew McCabe is upset and disappointed over comments made about him by his former boss James Comey, a lawyer for the embattled deputy said Friday  a day after it emerged McCabe was the subject of a criminal referral sent to the top federal prosecutor for Washington, D.C.

The Justice Department inspector general asked the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia to review whether charges are warranted, stemming from a report that found the former FBI deputy director repeatedly lied about a media leak.

Comey has backed the IGs findings and said Thursday that he "could well be a witness" in a criminal case against McCabe.

McCabe attorney Michael Bromwich on Friday spoke to reporters about the IG report and Comeys statements.

He called the process deeply flawed, and said McCabe maintains he told Comey about the media leak.

Comey and McCabe have given conflicting accounts about that. McCabe has said he told Comey that he had authorized FBI officials to share information with a Wall Street Journal reporter to push back against a story he felt would be unfair and inaccurate.

Comey has said that McCabe did not tell him those specifics, and that he was left with the opposite impression.

Bromwich also said Friday that McCabe was authorized to make the disclosures. He said they learned about the criminal referral a couple weeks, and met with the U.S. attorney.

In a written statement, McCabes legal team also voiced confidence that the referral would not result in charges:

We were advised of the referral within the past few weeks. Although we believe the referral is unjustified, the standard for an IG referral is very low. We have already met with staff members from the U.S. Attorneys Office. We are confident that, unless there is inappropriate pressure from high levels of the Administration, the US Attorneys Office will conclude that it should decline to prosecute.

President Trump, meanwhile, has seized on the Comey-McCabe tensions, tweeting Thursday: "James Comey just threw Andrew McCabe under the bus. Inspector Generals Report on McCabe is a disaster for both of them! Getting a little (lot) of their own medicine?"

Comey confirmed earlier this week that he was the one who kick-started the IG probe, by asking for a review of the leaks  inadvertently ensnaring McCabe. But Comey still vouched for McCabes character.

"I like [McCabe] very much as a person, but sometimes even good people do things they shouldnt do," Comey told CNN's "The Lead with Jake Tapper." "I think it is accountability mechanisms working and they should work because its not acceptable in the FBI or the Justice Department for people to lack candor. Its something we take really seriously."

Fox News Judson Berger and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Fired FBI official Andrew McCabes fate rests in the hands of a Trump-appointed prosecutor, now that the Justice Departments inspector general has sent a criminal referral over an investigative finding that he lied to James Comey and bureau investigators about a media disclosure.

That referral, sent by Inspector General Michael Horowitz, is now being considered by the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Jessie Liu. President Trump appointed Liu in July 2017.

We were advised of the referral within the past few weeks, McCabes counsel, Michael Bromwich, a former Justice Department inspector general, said in a statement. Although we believe the referral is unjustified, the standard for an IG referral is very low. We have already met with staff members from the U.S. Attorneys Office.

Bromwich added, We are confident that, unless there is inappropriate pressure from high levels of the administration, the U.S. Attorneys Office will conclude that it should decline to prosecute.

DOJ WATCHDOG SENDS CRIMINAL REFERRAL FOR MCCABE TO FEDERAL PROSECUTOR

McCabe, the former FBI deputy director, is not alone in facing IG problems. It emerged Friday that even Comey is the subject of an IG review over his handling of classified information in memos he penned. But McCabe faces greater risk now that the findings of his case have been referred to the U.S. attorney.

Liu is a Republican and has a long history of political donations to GOP candidates, according to Open Secrets political donation records, but it does not appear that she donated to Trump.

Liu was criticized during her Senate confirmation hearing last year when it was revealed that she met with Trump at least once while being considered for the post  an unprecedented step in the process for potential U.S. attorney nominees.

But whether Liu will opt to prosecute McCabe is unclear. Referrals do not guarantee that charges will be brought, nor do they require prosecutors to act in any way.

Officials from the Justice Department, the inspector generals office and the U.S. attorneys office all declined to comment on the referral.

According to Federal Code 18 USC 1001, someone prosecuted for making false statements could face a fine and/or up to five years imprisonment.

Former high-ranking Justice Department official James Trusty, who served under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, told Fox News that prosecution was unlikely.

Its pretty unusual territory for a false-statement prosecution to be based on employment actions, like lying to your inspector general, Trusty told Fox News. Its an unusual setting to have a false-statement prosecution because typically theyre associated with independent criminal probes. This is an employment probe.

On the other hand, former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova, who last month was invited to join President Trumps outside legal team but withdrew himself after a conflict of interest, said he thinks a prosecution is inevitable.

This is a senior FBI official. He lied under oath to FBI and Justice Department officials at least three times, diGenova told Fox News Friday.

The IG sent the referral Thursday after he found that McCabe leaked a self-serving story to the press and later lied about it to then-FBI Director Comey and federal investigators, prompting Attorney General Jeff Sessions to fire him just days before his pension was set to become effective.

The initial investigation into McCabe was ordered by Comey. While the former FBI chief may not have intentionally been after his deputy, he was looking for the source of a leak to The Wall Street Journal in an Oct. 30, 2016, story confirming a bureau investigation into the Clinton Foundation.

Horowitz found that McCabe lacked candor when questioned by FBI agents on multiple occasions, and that he wrongly told agents he did not authorize the disclosure and did not know who was responsible.

MCCABE 'UPSET AND DISAPPOINTED' OVER COMEY COMMENTS

Bromwich blasted the Horowitz report, and said that it failed to adequately address the evidence. He suggested that the inspector general's office should credit Mr. McCabes account over Director Comeys.

Comey has maintained McCabe did not tell him about the leak.

Trusty, weighing the odds of prosecution, said that making false statements in the context of an administrative interview is less sexy to prosecutors than a false statement during a criminal investigation.

But that said, its a crap shoot, Trusty said.

"They are prosecuting Michael Flynn for doing the same thing," diGenova noted.

However, Muellers team, which is probing Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, is prosecuting former national security adviser Flynn after he pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI as part of a criminal investigation  not an inspector general investigation.

It is Lius job to take this up, and its got nothing to do with Trump, diGenova said. The Justice Department and the inspector general sent it to her, not because shes a Trump appointee, but because she is the U.S. attorney.

He added, I think he will be prosecuted.
Residents in nearly a half-dozen states could vote this fall on legalizing recreational marijuana, as the push to loosen pot laws spreads despite a tough-on-drugs message from the current Justice Department.

Michigan, Rhode Island and Connecticut are leading the conversation this election cycle on whether to legalize the use of recreational marijuana. Pro-pot advocates are organizing in those states in hopes of getting a legalization measure on the ballot.

Similar efforts are underway in Illinois and Vermont, which has already legalized recreational use but could vote this year on green-lighting commercial sales. Other states are considering legislation.

If successful, they'd join the nine other states and Washington D.C., that have already legalized recreational use.

This is what the citizens want, as proven by the nine states that have approved it for adult-use and more than 30 others who have adopted medical programs and decriminalized procession and use, said Marco Hegyi, CEO of marijuana cultivation equipment company GrowLife.

In Michigan, officials are still working to validate signatures after over 360,000 were gathered in support of a legal-pot ballot measure. Roughly 250,000 are needed to qualify.

Cannabis remains illegal under federal law, but under the Obama administration states were given the leeway to make their own legislative decisions on marijuana use.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions pulled back on that guidance in January, but Colorado Republican Sen. Cory Gardner has since said President Trump has offered assurances legal-pot states will be protected.

While tensions between the states and Washington rise and fall, pro-legalization groups continue to face opposition from critics who warn that loosening drug laws is not the right move.

"We're concerned that we're moving in a direction that's going to have a very negative societal impact on homes, on young people, on driving, crime -- all those types of things that have a normal impact from alcohol or drug abuse is going to be accelerated with the legalization of marijuana, said Mike Griffin, public affairs director of the Georgia Baptist Mission Board.

In addition to the states that may put legal pot to a vote, others are considering legislation, including New Jersey and Delaware.

A stronger and fairer New Jersey embraces comprehensive criminal justice reform -- including a process to legalize marijuana, tweeted New Jersey Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy.

Gubernatorial candidates from around the country, including Democrats Jeff Apodaca of New Mexico and Andrew Gillum of Florida, also are making legalization part of their platform.

Legalization of marijuana is a civil rights & economic issue  and Florida deserves a Governor who isnt afraid to say so, Gillum tweeted.

While critics still see marijuana as a gateway drug with negative health and societal impacts, others are swayed by the potential for more tax revenue.

In 2014, the first full year that recreational marijuana was legal in Colorado, $63 million was collected from medical and recreational marijuana together in tax revenue, according to The Washington Post.

We believe that expanding access to cannabis is a boon for local economies and also provides people with a safer alternative to other substances, such as alcohol or opioids, said Carlos Gutierrez, director of business development at Prime Harvest.

At the start of 2018, all but four states -- Idaho, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas -- have legalized at least one form of marijuana use.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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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
Pope Francis has joined others in sending words of comfort to the grieving Bush family following the death this week of former first lady Barbara Bush.

"His Holiness Pope Francis offers heartfelt condolences and the assurance of his prayers to President Bush and all her family," a statement from the Vatican said, Fox 26 Houston reported.

Archbishop Emeritus Joseph Fiorenza of Galveston-Houston read the popes statement aloud on the Fox 26 report.

Saddened to learn of the death of the former first lady Barbara Bush, the statement read.

Throughout six decades, Fiorenza said, he watched Barbara Bush with admiration as she propelled her passion for improving lives, Fox 26 reported.

"Mrs. Bush was a powerful witness to the whole community and was an involved citizen," Fiorenza said. "She could have sat back and enjoyed the rest of her life with her husband, but she wanted to be involved. She wanted to do what she could to be a faithful citizen.

Fiorenza also sees the former first ladys dedication to her family as her most enduring legacy, the report said.

"The main reason for the Bush family to be so honored in our history is Barbara Bush," Fiorenza added. "She was a rock. She was a driving force. She was an inspiration and the greatest amount of credit has to be given to Barbara Bush."

Barbara Bush, wife of former President George H.W. Bush, died Tuesday at age 92.

In 1985, the political power couple met with Pope John Paul II during an audience at the Vatican as vice president and second lady.

A funeral service for the Bush matriarch, who once called herself everybodys grandmother, is planned for Saturday at St. Martins Episcopal Church in Houston. She and her husband of more than 70 years regularly attended the church.

Burial will be on the grounds of the Bush library at Texas A&M University in College Station, about 100 miles northwest of Houston.
President Trump just came out and said it.

At a presser with Japan's prime minister, he proclaimed that he takes a very aggressive posture toward Russia--and took a shot at the press.

"There has been nobody tougher than me," Trump said. "With the media, no matter what I did, it's never tough enough because that's their narrative."

Well, he may be right about the second part.

The toughest-president-ever boast is a stretch: tougher than Ronald Reagan taking on the Soviets' Evil Empire? But it's true that when it comes to Russia, the media portray the 45th president as being rather soft. And that reflects the consensus of the Beltway foreign policy community, which tends to be hawkish.

The reason, in my view, is Trump's rhetoric. He almost always speaks positively about Vladimir Putin and constantly talks about how it would be better to get along with Russia.

But Trump's actions tell a different story. The administration has imposed sanctions on Moscow. And the president did expel a record 60 Russian diplomats after the murder of that spy in Britain.

Those stories were covered, to be sure. But they vanished fairly quickly from the radar.

It's hardly unprecedented for an administration to take aggressive action while a president uses conciliatory language to maintain good relations with a foreign leader. Trump does the same thing with Xi Jinping, despite having recently proposed huge tariffs on Chinese goods.

But the press is so accustomed to focusing on Trump's river of words and tweets that the growing tensions with Moscow almost become a back story.

There is another reason why the media are so fixated on the narrative that Trump doesn't want to cross Putin. And that, of course, is the Russia investigation. There is an underlying belief that Trump may be indebted to Russia for its campaign hacking and propaganda, and that his foreign policy is some sort of payback. And this persists despite the lack of hard evidence of collusion.

The issue is very much in the news because of the Nikki Haley flap. The U.N. ambassador said on "Face the Nation" that new Russian sanctions were coming the next day, creating an expectation that was dashed when the world learned that Trump had approved no such sanctions.

This was a White House screwup, which spawned lots of coverage about Haley refusing to take the blame for "confusion." But if she hadn't made the premature announcement, no one would have thought that Trump was going to impose more sanctions related to Assads alleged chemical attack.

Few people agree with Trump's toughest-ever assessment of his record. But that doesn't mean the president is entirely wrong when he pushes back against the media narrative on Russia.
President Trump defended his former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn early Friday, saying his life has been totally destroyed while shadey James Comey can Leak and Lie and make lots of money from his third rate book.

Flynn was back in the headlines overnight after the release of the Comey memos that documented the fired FBI director's conversations with Trump, some of which covered Flynn.

In one memo, Comey wrote that Trump said Flynn had "serious judgment issues."

But Trump on Friday kept his criticism trained squarely on Comey, who is blanketing the airwaves in promotion of his tell-all book A Higher Loyalty.

So General Michael Flynns life can be totally destroyed while Shadey James Comey can Leak and Lie and make lots of money from a third rate book (that should never have been written). Is that really the way life in America is supposed to work? I dont think so! Trump tweeted.

Flynn served as Trumps first national security adviser in January and early February 2017, before being forced to resign after White House officials said he had misled them and Vice President Pence about whether he had discussed sanctions with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Flynn, a retired three-star Army general, is in deep financial trouble, as his legal bills mount to defend himself in Special Counsel Robert Muellers investigation. Family members have said that Flynn is selling his house in Virginia with an asking price of $895,000 to help pay for his legal bills. Flynns siblings have also set up a legal defense fund for him, to collect donations from supporters.

FLYNN SELLING HOME UNDER MOUNTING LEGAL BILLS, AS MCCABE RACKS UP CASH ONLINE TO PAY LAWYERS

Flynn pleaded guilty on Dec. 1, 2017 to making false statements to the FBI about his communications with Russia as part of Muellers investigation into Russian meddling and potential collusion with Trump campaign associates during the 2016 presidential election.

Muellers team has sought to delay his sentencing, and is expected to file another joint-status report by May 1, following a special counsel motion on Feb. 1, 2018 suggesting they did not believe that this matter is ready to be scheduled for a sentencing hearing at this time.

The delay was one of several curious developments in the proceedings. Days after accepting his guilty plea, the judge assigned to the case, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Rudolph Contreras, recused himself from the case, and was replaced by Judge Emmett Sullivan.

A court spokesperson told Fox News that the courts do not disclose grounds for recusal.

But last month, Fox News obtained text messages between anti-Trump FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, which suggested Strzok and Contreras had a personal relationship. The text messages also revealed a conversation between Strzok and Page discussing Contreras and recusal, noting the judge sat on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC.)

STRZOK-PAGE TEXTS REVEAL PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FBI OFFICIAL AND JUDGE RECUSED FROM FLYNN CASE

Meanwhile, this week, Comey has appeared on multiple networks to promote his memoir. Comey has compared Trump to a mob boss and an obsessive ex-boyfriend, and has said that he is morally unfit to be president.

Also on Thursday, the seven memos created by Comey to document his conversations with Trump in 2017 were transmitted, in a redacted form, by the Justice Department to the House Committees on the Judiciary, Intelligence, and Oversight.

Trump tweeted that the memos, obtained and reviewed by Fox News, laid out that there was NO COLLUSION and NO OBSTRUCTION.

James Comey Memos just out and show clearly that there was NO COLLUSION and NO OBSTRUCTION. Also, he leaked classified information. WOW! Will the Witch Hunt continue? Trump tweeted Thursday night.

Comey leaked the contents of some memos, which have portions redacted due to classified information, to his friend, Columbia Law Professor Daniel Richman. Comey admitted in Senate testimony last year that he wanted Richman to leak the memos to the press to spur the appointment of a special counsel.
President Trump late Thursday tweeted that the newly released memos written by former FBI Director James Comey show clearly no collusion with Russia in 2016 and no obstruction into the investigation.

The memos, which were written by Comey about his interaction with Trump, prove that the fired FBI director never felt obstructed, GOP lawmakers said. Many Democrats claim that Trump tried to hold up the FBIs investigation into alleged collusion leading up to the 2016 election.

James Comey Memos just out show clearly that there was NO COLLUSION and NO OBSTRUCTION. Also, he leaked classified information. WOW! Will the Witch Hunt continue? Trump tweeted.

The memos also showed that eight days after he was sworn in as president, Trump told Comey during a one-on-one dinner at the White House that he "needed loyalty and expected loyalty."

Comey wrote that he "did not reply, or even nod or change my facial expression, which [Trump] noted because we came back to it later." At a later point, Comey wrote that Trump told him directly, "I need loyalty."

"I replied that he would always get honesty from me," said Comey. "[Trump] paused and said that's what he wants, 'honest loyalty.' I replied, 'you will get that from me.'"

"It is possible we understood that phrase differently," Comey added as a parenthetical, "but I chose to understand it as consistent with what I had said throughout the conversation: I will serve the President with loyalty to the office, the country, and the truth. I decided it would not be productive to push the subject further."

More than two months later, on March 30, Comey wrote that Trump had called him and pressed the FBI director to make public that the president was not under investigation over contacts between Russian officials and members of his campaign.

"I reminded [Trump] that I had told him we weren't investigating him and that I had told the Congressional leadership the same thing," Comey wrote. "[Trump] said it would be great if that could get out and several times asked me to find a way to get that out."

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va.; House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C.; and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., said in a joint statement that Comey's memos "show the President made clear he wanted allegations of collusion, coordination, and conspiracy between his campaign and Russia fully investigated.

"The memos also made clear the 'cloud' President Trump wanted lifted was not the Russian interference in the 2016 election cloud, rather it was the salacious, unsubstantiated allegations related to personal conduct leveled in the dossier" compiled by ex-British spy Christopher Steele, they added.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., disagreed, tweeting that the memos "are further proof of [Trump's] contempt for the rule of law.

"His attempts to intimidate, circumvent the law & undermine integrity of law enforcement investigations demand immediate action to protect the Mueller investigation," she said.

The assurance from Comey that Trump was not being investigated seemed to have weighed on the president's mind as Michael Flynn was fired as national security adviser after misleading Vice President Mike Pence about contacts with the Russian envoy to the U.S.

Trump told Comey during their March 30 conversation that "if there was 'some satellite' (NOTE: I took this to mean some associate of his or his campaign) that did something, it would be good to find that out, but that he hadn't done anything," Comey recalled.

Comey said Trump restated at the end of their conversation that the president "hoped I could find a way to get out that he wasn't being investigated.

"I told him I would see what we could do and that we would do the work well and as quickly as we could," Comey said he responded.

Goodlatte, Gowdy and Nunes noted that Comey "never wrote that he felt obstructed or threatened," adding that while Comey "went to great lengths to set dining room scenes, discuss height requirements, describe the multiple times he felt complimented, and myriad other extraneous facts, he never once mentioned the most relevant fact of all, which was whether he felt obstructed in his investigation."

Trump called Comey again on April 11 to ask "if I did what he had asked last time -- getting out that he personally is not under investigation." Comey says he advised Trump to have White House Counsel Don McGahn call then-Acting Attorney General Dana Boente to request that such a statement be made.

After Trump said he would do so, Comey said the president told him, "I have been very loyal to you, very loyal, we had that thing, you know."

"I did not reply, or ask him what he meant by 'that thing,'" wrote Comey, who added that as Trump ended the call, the president told him he was "doing a great job and wished me well."

During their Jan. 27 dinner in the Green Room, Comey wrote that Trump "thought maybe he should ask me to investigate" salacious allegations "to prove [the dossier] was a lie."

Comey wrote that "it was up to [Trump], but I wouldn't want to create a narrative that we were investigating him, because we are not and I worried such a thing would be misconstrued."

"My sense is that [the president] was focused on the personal piece [of the dossier]," Comey told MSNBC Thursday night. "He would bring it up to me repeatedly."

Fox News' Chad Pergram and Edmund DeMarche contributed to this report.
Just another day in the Sunshine state.

Florida police say they had to assist a trapper Thursday after a 9-foot alligator was spotted taking a dip in an Odessa homeowners pool.

A video posted online by the Hillsborough County Sheriffs Office shows the gator thrashing about as it was wrangled out of the water. A rubber duck pool toy, sporting a pair of shades, didnt seem to mind the ruckus as it bobbed nearby.

WOW - No fear from Mr. Duck, the sheriffs office wrote on Facebook.

The homeowner, Suanne Wesselhoff, suspects the creature sneaked through a ripped section of her screened-in backyard patio. She said she was tipped off to the unwanted visitor after her dogs began barking.

"They kept sort of barking and kind of acting a little strange and for some reason, I looked over at the pool and I sawwhat turned out to be a 9-foot alligator just lounging in my pool," she told WFTS.

The incident Thursday is just the latest in a series of alligators taking dips in Florida pools.

A homeowner in Sarasota in early April said he found an 11-foot alligator taking a swim after hearing noise coming from the backyard.
Researchers from the San Diego Natural History Museum and the non-profit Terra Peninsular were scratching their heads when they found unfamiliar rodents in traps they placed around a field in Baja California. They were intending to study rodent populations in the area  but instead made a rare discovery.

The San Quintin kangaroo rat was last spotted in 1986. Nearly a decade later, the creature was added to the endangered species list by the Mexican government, the San Diego Natural History Museum said in a statement online.

Scientists suspected the 5-inch rodents went extinct. They searched for the creatures for decades but always came up empty-handed.

Now they're scrambling to come up with a plan to increase the animal's population.

Not only is this discovery a perfect example of the importance of good old-fashioned natural history field work, but we have the opportunity to develop a conservation plan based on our findings, Scott Tremor, the museum's mammalogist, said in a statement. The ability to take our research and turn it into tangible conservation efforts is thrilling. It is a commitment to preserving the uniqueness of the Baja California Peninsula.

Not only is this discovery a perfect example of the importance of good old-fashioned natural history field work, but we have the opportunity to develop a conservation plan based on our findings."  Scott Tremor, San Diego Natural History Museum

The museum plans to continue working with Terra Peninsular to save the rodents that are known for their "large, powerful hind feet" that allow them to jump around like kangaroos.

Terra Peninsular has been monitoring the nature reserves looking for this species. You cant imagine how happy we are to find out that after all these efforts and with the help of The Nat we can be part of this rediscovery and continue working on its protection, Jorge Andrade, adaptive manager coordinator at Terra Peninsular, said in a news release. Its very gratifying for us to think that the San Quintin kangaroo rat persists in the area to some extent, thanks to the efforts of the staff, board members, and associated researchers of our organization.

This isn't the first time researchers from the San Diego museum uncovered an extinct species. In fact, this is the third mammal  joining the high elevation California vole and round-tail ground squirrel  thought to be extinct that the staff has recovered in the Baja California Peninsula in recent years.

These rediscoveries speak to hope and resilience in a changing world, Sula Vanderplank, a research associate at Terra Peninsular, said in a statement. We are learning so much about this animal and its ecology, and were delighted to know that it is permanently protected in the Valle Tranquilo Nature Reserve.

The researchers will elaborate on their findings in a study that will be published in the scientific journal "Bulletin of the Southern California Academy of Sciences."
A shark that hasn't been seen in more than a decade was found in an unusual location: an Indian fish market. Conservationists spotted the critically endangered Ganges river shark in photographs taken for a study that was recently published in the Journal of Fish Biology.

The February 2016 study, which was funded through a Save Our Seas Foundation grant, highlighted various sharks sold at Sassoon Docks in Mumbai over a period of two years, according to New Scientist. Scientists studying the photos thought they spotted a familiar face among the crowd  and sure enough, they were right.

The 8-foot, 7-inch female shark was the Ganges river shark, occasionally mistaken for the common bull shark. The shark has a rounded snout, small eyes and a stocky build.

"River sharks are particularly mysterious, Gavin Naylor, a professor at College of Charleston and the Medical University of South Carolina, told Fox News in 2015. They have got tiny little eyes and very broad fins. These are adaptions for living in very turbid water. If you have a look where these things live, the visibility is about an inch. Its completely muddy water.

"River sharks are particularly mysterious. They have got tiny little eyes and very broad fins."  Gavin Naylor

The creature was first discovered in 1839, though little is known about the species because so few have ever been caught.

Many people have never seen these animals [in the flesh], Naylor said, adding that it isn't entirely unusual for the shark's body parts to pop up in local fish markets. Fishermen often try to sell the shark's jaw and fins.

"[It] is also fished by locals for its meat and oil," World Wildlife Federation India said in a statement on its website.

Experts are still trying to determine the exact location this particular Ganges river shark was picked up, though they suspect it was somewhere along the Arabian Sea.

There are so few specimens of river sharks from around the world that pretty much all the information we have is based on either preserved specimens from the last century, or from jaws that were found at some point in remote villages and were identified as river sharks, Rima Jabado, founder of the Gulf Elasmo Project, a non-profit conservation organization based in the United Arab Emirates, told New Scientist.

The "extremely rare" creature, amongst the 20 most threatened shark species in the world, is currently protected under the Wildlife (Protection) Act of India, 1972.

Wildlife lovers hope this find will inspire people in the area to protect the rare creatures.

"In light of the Critically Endangered status of this species and its rarity, urgent management actions are needed to determine population size and trends in abundance in combination with fisher education and awareness campaigns," authors of the study echoed.
Mars may have gained its two tiny moons after an asteroid-size object slammed into the surface of the Red Planet. New models suggest that an object the size of the largest of the asteroid-belt inhabitants could have kicked up enough material to form Mars' two moons, Phobos and Deimos.

"Ours is the first self-consistent model to identify the type of impact needed to lead to the formation of Mars' two small moons," Robin Canup, a researcher and associate vice president at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), said in a statement. Canup is one of the leading scientists using large-scale simulations to model planet-scale collisions like the one thought to have formed Earth's own moon.

Scientists have debated the origins of the two Martian moons for decades. One model suggests that they may have been captured from the asteroid belt. Another suggests that they formed out of a disk of debris around the Red Planet. The fact that both moons have a nearly circular orbit around the equator makes a strong case for their birth by impact. [Moons of Mars: Amazing Photos of Phobos and Deimos]

Moons forming from the debris after a smashup isn't unheard of. Earth's moon is thought to have formed after a Mars-size object crashed into the planet 4.5 billion years ago. Earth's diameter is about 8,000 miles (12,875 kilometers). With a diameter of just over 2,100 miles (3,380 km), the moon is about a quarter of its parent planet's size.

Mars, on the other hand, is smaller than our planet, with a diameter of just over 4,200 miles (6,760 km). Phobos and Deimos are very small, with diameters of only 7.5 and 14 miles (12 and 22.5 km), respectively, and with very close-in orbits.

"A key result of the new work is the size of the impactor," or the body that collided with the planet, Canup said. "We find that a large impactor  similar in size to the largest asteroids, Vesta and Ceres  is needed, rather than a giant impactor."

Vesta is the second largest object in the asteroid belt, with a diameter of 329 miles (530 km). Ceres is the largest inhabitant of the asteroid belt, with a diameter of 584 miles (940 km)  it is large enough that it is classified as both an asteroid and a dwarf planet.

The last of many

Phobos and Deimos were likely not the only moons created by the collision, according to the researchers' model. After the large impactor smashed into the planet, some of the debris formed a disk that flew up to circle the Martian equator.

"The outer portions of the disk accumulate into Phobos and Deimos, while the inner portions of the disk accumulate into large moons that eventually spiral inward and are assimilated into Mars," said Julien Salmon, a researcher at SwRI and second author on the paper.

Currently, Phobos is spiraling inward, and should crash into Mars in another 50 million years or so. Deimos will escape that fate, as it is slowly spiraling outward, away from the planet.

Previous simulations of impactors also created multiple moons, but their size meant that Phobos and Deimos wouldn't exist today.

"Larger impacts advocated in prior works produce massive disks and more massive inner moons that prevent the survival of tiny moons like Phobos and Deimos," Salmon said.

In addition to their existence, the new research also provided clues about what future missions might find when they visit Phobos and Deimos.

"The model also predicts that the two moons are derived primarily from material originating in Mars, so their bulk compositions should be similar to that of Mars for most elements," Canup said.

In 2024, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) plans to launch the Mars Moons eXploration (MMX) mission to visit the two Martian moons. MMX will land on the surface of Phobos and collect a sample to return to Earth in 2029.

"A primary objective of the MMX mission is to determine the origin of Mars' moons," Canup said.

"Having a model that predicts what the moons' composition would be if they formed by impact is a key constraint for achieving that goal."

Originally published on Space.com.
A man fishing off of a pier in Maryland had an unexpected encounter with a whale during a fishing trip last weekend.

Troy Bickle, 25, of Lebanon, Pennsylvania, was fishing with his father and brother when he noticed a whale coming toward us, he told Fox News on Friday.

Shortly after, the whale came out of nowhere he said, adding that it slightly emerged from the water and bumped into the pier.

This was the first time Bickle had ever seen a whale in person. He was surprised the animal came so close to shore.

It was pretty exciting; you don't really see that too often, he said. Not many people see a whale [in person] in their lifetime.

Bickle later posted the video to the Ocean City Cool Facebook group. As of Friday afternoon, the video had more than 5,000 likes and 13,000 shares.
Small "nano-satellites" could soon play a big role in U.S. Army plans to win ground wars, a top U.S. Army official said Thursday.

Lt. Gen. Jim Dickinson, head of the Army's Space and Missile Defense Command explained the technology in Colorado Springs, Colo., on the final day of the 34th annual Space Symposium.

The event focused on how best to combat the increasing ability of adversarial countries to explore space. Vice President Mike Pence spoke ahead of the official opening on Monday, FOX 21 reported.

One of the key concerns for the Army is potential enemies' greater likelihood of being able to jam U.S. satellite signals, Dickinson said.

"The character of warfare has changed," he told a packed auditorium at the Broadmoor hotel, the Colorado Springs Gazette reported.

Currently, the average Army combat brigade takes 3,000 pieces of satellite gear into battle, he said. And the reliance is only growing.

Often times, Dickinson said, soldiers will encounter technical problems on the ground not knowing that the problems originate from space.

Whereas the circumstances of World War I and World War II compelled new advances in oceanic and air travel, the 21st century will demand a focus on innovations in space technology, he said.

Dickinson urged for new training that teaches soldiers to recognize when their space capabilities are degraded.

So the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command is developing a series nano-satellites, designed to compensate for damage done to larger satellites, the Gazette reported.

Unlike the larger satellites, which are designed to stay in orbit for decades, the nano-satellites, will stay in orbit for months or weeks.

"We envision a constellation of nano-satellites," Dickinson said.

How concerned is the Army about losing satellite contact? Troops train for months in the California desert to learn how to fight without relaying on the technology, the Gazette report said.
Facebook, which is still feeling the shockwaves from the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, is reportedly looking to put 1.5 billion users beyond the reach of a new European Union privacy law.

Reuters reports that Facebook is looking to limit its exposure to the EU's new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Passed in 2016, the law regulates how firms protect the data of EU citizens.

On May 25, the EU will start enforcing the new regulation, which explicitly applies to any company that uses the data of EU residents, no matter where it is based. Organizations in breach of GDPR can be fined up to 4 percent of their annual global turnover or 20 million Euros ($24.6 million), whichever is greater. For Facebook, which reported over $40 billion in revenue during its fiscal year 2017, the implications of the new regulation is significant.

EX-CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA EXEC: USERS SHOULD CONSIDER FACEBOOK DATA THEIR 'PROPERTY'

If the new law went into effect now, almost 1.9 billion Facebook users around the world would be protected by it, according to Reuters. The social networks users outside the U.S. and Canada, it notes, are covered by terms of service centered on Facebooks Irish headquarters. Next month, however, Facebook is reportedly planning to change this setup, a move which would take 1.5 billion users in Latin America, Asia, Africa and Australia out of the reach of GDPR.

As of Dec. 31, 2017, Facebook had 2.13 billion monthly active users, 184 million of which live in the U.S. and Canada.

FACEBOOK THINKS IT KNOWS WHETHER YOU'RE LIBERAL OR CONSERVATIVE: HERE'S HOW TO FIND OUT

GDPR is the latest attempt by EU regulators to rein in mostly American tech giants who they blame for avoiding tax, stifling competition and encroaching on digital privacy rights. The EU says the rules are the most important change in data privacy regulation in a generation as it tries to catch up with technological advances since 1995, when the last comprehensive rules were approved.

The EU rules require consent forms to be written in plain language anyone can understand, as the EU targets the legalese buried in pages of terms and conditions that few users actually read before clicking "I Agree." The regulations also require that consent must be as easy to withdraw as it is to give.

Earlier this week, in a blog post, Facebook outlined a series of steps that it is taking to comply with new privacy laws.

FACEBOOK OUTLINES STEPS TO COMPLY WITH NEW PRIVACY LAWS FOLLOWING CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA SCANDAL

Facebook says that all the social network's users are receiving the same level of privacy protection, regardless of whether they are in Europe or not. The GDPR and EU consumer law set out specific rules for terms and data policies which we have incorporated for EU users," said Stephen Deadman, Facebook's deputy chief global privacy officer, in a statement emailed to Fox News. "We have been clear that we are offering everyone who uses Facebook the same privacy protections, controls and settings, no matter where they live. These updates do not change that.

Facebook has been in the spotlight since reports emerged last month that data mining firm Cambridge Analytica improperly used information from more than 50 million accounts on the social network, prompting Facebook to suspend the U.K.-based company. Cambridge Analytica, which has ties to Donald Trumps 2016 presidential election campaign, denies any wrongdoing.

In a research note released on Friday, Brian White, an analyst at brokerage firm Monness Crespi Hardt, wrote that Facebook could emerge from the data scandal with a vastly improved story around data privacy.

Although we expect the Cambridge Analytica crisis to experience news flow aftershocks throughout 2018, we believe this crisis has provided Facebook with an opportunity to strengthen the integrity of its brand by very publicly putting in place strong privacy controls to protect its users, he wrote.

White continued: Although no CEO would likely want to trade places with [Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg] right now, we believe Facebook has an opportunity to set a standard for data privacy before potentially onerous U.S. regulation ensues, while being publicly seen as leading the charge.

Fox News Christopher Carbone and the Associated Press contributed to this article.

Follow James Rogers on Twitter @jamesjrogers
The flip phone is having a mini-resurgence as consumers seek less distraction. Call it a rejection of the smartphone with its bombardment of messaging and social media that sap your attention. Or maybe its just a return to the cell phones roots, when a phone was just a phone.

This years hottest cultural trend is none other than the humble flip phone, wrote The Outline this week.

While new flip phones arent going to overtake sales of the iPhone anytime soon, theres an appeal to an ultra-cheap no-frills phone.

CHEAPER 2018 IPAD IS A STEAL FOR CONSUMERS

A recent report in The Seattle Times cited an artist who was overwhelmed by constant alerts  his creativity drained by a smartphone. So, he opted opted for a flip phone that doesnt do email, Instagram, Facebook, Uber or news alerts.

And the Wall Street Journal has touted the return of the Nokia flip phone, reincarnated as the 8110 4G.

As a backdrop to this trend, there are websites such as Wait Until 8th, which urges parents to get basic phones, which avoid many of the distractions and dangers of the smartphone.

APPLE WATCH 4 MAY GET A SIGNIFICANT OVERHAUL, REPORTS SAY

So, if youre looking to save money and get back to basics, heres a few flip phones to consider. One caveat: these phones are often dirt cheap so dont expect the quality or convenience of a $500 smartphone.

A few flips:

LG Exalt LTE: this is Verizons first 4G LTE basic phone. You get a 3-inch screen, big buttons, HD Voice (better sound than typical basic phones), and a 5 megapixel camera. Theres also built-in text-to-speech that can read messages. Also: 8GB storage, Bluetooth 4.1, and 10 days of standby time and 6 hours of talk time.

Price: $6/month (24 monthly payments) or $144 full price.

Nokia 8110 4G: the banana phone (due to its shape) isnt out yet so youll have to wait but it is rumored to be coming to the U.S. soon. It has a 2.4-inch display, 4GB of storage, a 2 megapixel camera. Its priced at roughly $100.

If you cant wait, theres the non-flip, non-4G Nokia 3310 3G thats available now for about $59.

AT&T Cingular Flip 2: a very basic flip it comes with a 2.8-inch display, 4GB storage with microSD slot, and a 2-megapixel camera. It boasts 16 days standby time and 8 hours talk time.

Price: $59.99

The Light Phone: while not a flip phone, this could be considered the vanguard of new kind of ultra-basic phone. Its advertised as a phone thats not designed to keep you hooked and monopolize your attention.

The Light Phone only makes and receives phone calls and is designed as a supplement to your smartphone (and can use the same number) for those times where you do not need the internet in your pocket, according to the companys ad copy. Currently the startup company that makes the Light phone is sold out but you can reserve one.
An inmate who spent more than two decades on California's death row after being convicted of raping and killing a toddler has been freed.

Vincente Benavides, 68, had been on death row since June 1993 after he was convicted of killing his girlfriend's 21-month-old daughter.

TODDLER SHOOTS PREGNANT MOTHER WHILE PLAYING WITH DAD'S GUN

He was released from the San Quentin State Prison in Marin County around 4 p.m. Thursday, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said.

Benavides was babysitting the girl, Consuelo Verdugo, in Delano in 1991 while her mother was at work. The couple later brought the injured child to an emergency room, and she died about a week later.

The 68-year-old and his girlfriend told doctors she hit her head on a door, but defense later said at trial that the girl may have been hit by a car when she got out of the house when Benavides lost track of her.

A forensic pathologist claimed that Verdugo died from anal injuries from being sodomized, and several doctors testified that the girl's injuries were caused by sexual assault. Many doctors who testified about the girl's injuries later recanted, saying they hadn't seen her full medical records.

The state's Supreme Court last month overturned the conviction citing false medical testimony.

MOM WHO LEFT KIDS ALONE TO VISIT GERMANY GETS PROBATION

Kern County District Attorney Lisa Green said she won't retry Benavides for first-degree murder. Without that medical testimony, Green noted, a lesser conviction would be "difficult, if not impossible."

Benavides' representatives on Thursday said they're "elated" their client was released, as "he was wrongfully convicted over 25 years ago."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The nationwide manhunt for Minnesota grandmother Lois Riess, aka Losing Streak Lois, came to an end Thursday night after she was spotted at a Texas restaurant by citizens who recognized the woman accused of killing her husband and a person who resembled her, authorities said.

Riess, 56, was hanging out at the Sea Ranch Restaurant in South Padre Island, Texas on Thursday when she was arrested, the Washington Post reported. The restaurants manager, Becky Galvan, told the Post the fugitive appeared cool as a cucumber until marshals came in to arrest her.

Reiss did not appear armed and dangerous or suspicious, Galvan said. However, the manager received a call from authorities informing her that they received a tip from citizens that Reiss was in the eatery and they were coming by to arrest her.

It happened within seconds, Galvan said. They came in and they left.

Deputy U.S. Marshal John Kinsey said it was not immediately clear if Riess was traveling to Mexico. The suspect had paid for a few weeks at a local hotel and it appeared she was staying in South Padre Island, near the U.S.-Mexico border, for some time.

She paid up for a couple of weeks, he said.

The U.S. Border Patrol had been put on alert and Mexican authorities also were notified to be on watch for her.

'LOSING STREAK LOIS,' ALLEGED KILLER GRANDMA ON THE RUN, SPOTTED ON NEW SURVEILANCE VIDEO

Riess is believed to have killed her husband last month in Minnesota and stolen $11,000 from one of his bank accounts, FOX9 reported.

Police later reportedly discovered she was more than $100,000 in debt at the time of her husband's death.

Riess was dubbed Losing Streak Lois because of her reported fondness for gambling and frequent attendance at casinos, the report said.

After Riess received the money, she spent a day at Diamond Jo Casino in Northwood, Iowa, gambling, authorities said.

Authorities have also connected Riess to the death of Pamela Hutchinson, 59, in Fort Myers, Fla., last week, as Riess was seen on video surveillance driving her car shortly after the woman was murdered, FOX9 reported.

The two women were captured on surveillance camera at the Smokin Oyster Brewery on April 5. Surveillance cameras also captured the two women at Hutchinsons condo in Fort Myers Beach.

Police believe Riess used Hutchinsons identity following her death. Hutchinsons purse was found emptied and her car was missing. The two women both have light blond hair.

Billboards were posted in five Southern states this week, and posters by the Marshals Service brought in more than 100 tips, the Star Tribune reported. There was also a $6,000 reward for information leading to Riess' arrest.

WOMAN WHO KILLED HUSBAND, STOLE ANOTHER FEMALES IDENTITY SPOTTED ON SURVEILLANCE VIDEO, COPS SAY

On March 23, police found Riess husband dead of an apparent gunshot wound at the couple's Blooming Prairie, Minn., home, FOX9 reported. Authorities believe Riess husband and Hutchinson were killed by the same firearm.

U.S. Marshals had elevated her disappearance to major case status, putting her among some of the nations most dangerous offenders, the newspaper report said.

Riess was taken to San Pedro Island Jail and was arrested on warrants for second-degree murder, grand theft, grand theft of a vehicle and criminal use of personal identification.


Nikolas Cruz, the confessed gunman who fatally shot 17 people in a Parkland, Florida school in February, vomited and hyperventilated after his arrest, according to a police report released Thursday.

Cruz, after carrying out one of the deadliest mass shootings in modern U.S. history at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14, heaved and vomited clear fluid as a witness identified him, the Miami Herald reported.

PARKLAND SHOOTING HERO BLAMES SHERIFF AND SUPERINTENDENT FOR FAILING TO PREVENT MASSACRE

The 19-year-old "began to hyperventilate," according to a report written by the Coconut Creek officer who detained him, and police reportedly helped him remain standing. Paramedics were called as a precaution.

Cruz was arrested more than hour after opening fire in the freshman building of the school around 2:21 p.m. Minutes later, police say Cruz left the building and blended in with students who were evacuating.

At 2:50 p.m., Cruz bought a drink at a nearby Subway, and 11 minutes later, he walked into a McDonald's, sat down and left, before being taken into custody just after 4 p.m, a timeline from the Broward County Sheriff's Office stated.

Cruz has been charged with 17 counts each of murder and attempted murder.

Fox News' Katherine Lam and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
A registered nurse in Illinois is accused of using the dark web to hire a hitman to kill her lovers wife, officials said.

Tina E. Jones, 31, of Des Plaines, appeared in court Wednesday on solicitation of murder charges for an alleged attempt to kill her romantic rival, the Chicago Tribune reported.

Authorities said they were contacted by the CBS television program 48 Hours with information about a woman who was the alleged target in a murder-for-hire plot.

The show reportedly was researching online companies that offer hitman services.

Jones allegedly was involved with a married colleague, news station WLS-TV reported.

An investigation revealed that the Loyola Medical Center nurse allegedly paid more than $10,000 in bitcoin to have the colleagues spouse murdered after she felt spurned in the relationship.

She allegedly contacted a site on the dark web in January with specific instructions to kill his wife and make it look like an accident, according to officials.

Click for more from The New York Post.
As Americans from the west coast to the east coast make their way to this town and drive up the road to the George H.W. Bush Library & Museum, one of the first signs they see is the name of the road that leads up to the building -- affectionately named Barbara Bush Drive.

You could ask anyone passing through those museum doors who paid their respects to the former First Lady what they admired about her, and there are two traits specifically that stand out: her passion for education and her love for her family.

One of many educators who paid their respects to Mrs. Bush at the museum was former teacher Barbara Roach, who honored Barbara Bush in a special way.

"She was a treasure to her family and our nation," said Roach, who taught for 37 years in San Antonio. "I'm very thankful and so in her honor I'm wearing blue and pearls and I usually dont wear the pearls."

Adria Hogan, also a former teacher, traveled from Virginia and reflected on Mrs. Bush's imprint on American education.

"She had a great interest in literacy, which is the foundation of knowledge, experience, and perspective," Hogan said. "So, her interests were very important for all of us."

Roach also said Mrs. Bush had an "emphasis on literacy and we need it all the time. I have nieces and nephews who think reading is not important. And it is."

The former first lady certainly thought so. So much so that the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy has provided more than $110 million to create or expand family literacy programs in all 50 US states and the District of Columbia, according to the foundation. The foundation also did a study in 2014 that showed for preschoolers who completed one of their programs, there was a 70 percent decrease in the number of children at risk for developmental delays.

Barbara Bush talked about the importance of literacy herself during a 1990 commencement speech to Wellesley College , encouraging graduates to believe in something larger than their self, to get involved in some of the big ideas of our time.

"I chose literacy because I honestly believe that if more people could read, write, and comprehend, we would be that much closer to solving so many of the problems that plague our nation and our society."  Barbara Bush

"I chose literacy because I honestly believe that if more people could read, write, and comprehend, we would be that much closer to solving so many of the problems that plague our nation and our society," she said.

Terri Havens, who said Barbara Bush was a great friend, went with a group of friends to drop off a children's book in front of the museum in honor of the former first lady.

"Oh my gosh, she changed the whole entire country and importance of literacy," Havens said. "Every single child deserves to be able to read and she made that her mantra to make sure that that happened."

An independent school district's head start program in College Station was even named after the former first lady: the Barbara Bush Parent Center. It was established in 1997 to meet the needs of parents in the community, focusing on activities for parents of children birth to 3 years old and holding interactive sessions each month for families, according to the schools website.

"Everyone knows who Barbara Bush is, she made her imprint on society," Kim Hodge, College Station Independent School District Early Head Start operations manager, said. "Being able to carry on her legacy here with her namesake on the front of our building is just a real pleasure for us. I just want her family to know that as long as Early Head Start has anything to do with it, literacy will be promoted out of this center."

Ashlee Schoenvogel is a former elementary school teacher who took her daughter to the front of the George H.W. Bush Library & Museum to pay respects to Mrs. Bush with a bouquet of flowers. She also reflected on Mrs. Bush's legacy in U.S. education.

"It just means to always look for the best for the kids and always put the children first," Schoenvogel said. "And for the kids that aren't fortunate enough, her funding helped all the children receive books. I was a former educator, so (I) understand the importance she had for oung children and she was definitely a family person, put her family first always-something I strive to do."

With all that Barbara Bush stood for in education, she was all about family. She said this in front of a room packed with graduating college students at that 1990 commencement speech.

"At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, not winning one more verdict or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a friend, a child, or a parent," she said.

There's a reason there's a line of Bush leaders and for many, it starts with Barbara.

"Your success as a family...our success as a society depends not on what happens in the White House, but on what happens inside our house."  Barbara Bush

"She stood by her husband," Roach said. "I'm sure it wasnt easy but they traveled all over the world and she left a great legacy with her family."

"She was all about her family and that's where all of American society starts, is in the home," Hogan said.
The professor who came under fire for celebrating the death of former first lady Barbara Bush has caused another colleges mental health crisis hotline to become flooded with calls after she posted the number online as her own.

Randa Jarrar, an English professor at the California State University, Fresno, attacked Bush online just hours after the 92-year-old died Tuesday.

Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal. F*** outta here with your nice words, Jarrar tweeted from her account, which has since been made private.

Im happy the witch is dead. Cant wait for the rest of her family to fall to their demise the way 1.5 million Iraqis have, she continued.

The social media post drew intense backlash online, with one user posting her Fresno State email address and phone number, the Arizona Republic reported. In response, Jarrar said she hadnt yet activated her work number and posted a different one instead, according to the newspaper.

OUTRAGE AS CALIFORNIA PROF CALLS BARBARA BUSH 'AMAZING RACIST' AND SAYS SHE'S HAPPY 'WITCH IS DEAD'

If you really wanna reach me, heres my number ok? the tenured professor said.

But the number she gave out was fake and was really connected to a 24-hour crisis hotline at Arizona State University. It is run by EMPACT, a suicide prevention center.

According to the Arizona Republic, the hotline was inundated with phone calls. While it normally receives about five calls per week, it was still getting between 50 to 70 calls an hour by Wednesday, an ASU spokesperson told the newspaper.

The spokesperson said it does not appear that Jarrar has any affiliation with the university, located hundreds of miles away from Fresno.

Your freedom of speech does not entitle you to have all these people spam an actual mental health crisis line. Please stop, Dr. Eugene Gu, who the Arizona Republic said is a doctor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, tweeted in response to Jarrar.

ASU said that the excess of calls to the hotline did not seem to have blocked anyone from receiving help who actually needed it. The Fresno Bee reported that the call center brought on additional staff to help with the influx of callers.

BUSH-BASHING PROFESSOR HAS FRESNO STATE SCRAMBLING TO KEEP ITS DONORS

But Lori Prentice, who runs an in-home homeless ministry, told the newspaper that Jarrar giving out the phone number was a kick in the teeth for people who work with others dealing with crisis.

There is a strong probability that someone who finally found the courage to contact the suicide hotline couldnt get through due to Jarrars caustic misdirection, Prentice said.

In a statement, Fresno State President Joseph Castro said the university share[s] the deep concerns expressed by others over the personal comments made by Jarrar. A university investigation is underway.

Professor Jarrars expressed personal views and commentary are obviously contrary to the core values of our University, which include respect and empathy for individuals with divergent points of view, and a sincere commitment to mutual understanding and progress, he added.

Fox News Lukas Mikelionis contributed to this report.
James Matthew Bradley Jr., the big-rig driver who smuggled dozens of immigrants in Texas last year -- some of them died -- was sentenced Friday to life in prison.

Bradley, 61, pleaded guilty in October to a count of transporting the immigrants resulting in death, and a conspiracy count. He faced the death penalty if he'd gone to trial.

I am so sorry it happened, Bradley said in a video statement that his lawyers played in court Friday, The San Antonio Express-News reported. Theres not a day or night that goes by that I dont relive this scene.

At least 39 immigrants, most from Mexico and Guatemala, were inside the sweltering trailer found by San Antonio police last July in a Walmart parking lot. Its refrigeration system wasnt working and outside temperatures that day reached 101 degrees. Eight people died in the trailer and two others succumbed after being hospitalized.

Survivors recalled brutal conditions in the vehicle, saying they resorted to crying while begging for water due to the high temperatures. They eventually took turns breathing via a hole in the side of the trailer.

"Smuggling illegal aliens into this country disregards both our laws and their safety, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement following Bradley's sentencing. "The defendant's actions in this case led to the agonizing deaths of 10 people. Were it not for his actions, they might still be alive today. This case is a reminder of why the Trump administration and this Department of Justice have renewed our commitment to enforcing our criminal immigration laws and why we are going to continue to work to secure our borders."

Bradley initially denied knowing anyone was in the trailer, telling investigators he was transporting it for his boss from Iowa to Brownsville, on Texas border with Mexico. But he raised suspicions by saying he had driven to another border city, Laredo, and stopped twice there before driving back to San Antonio, in the opposite direction from Brownsville.

Pedro Silva Segura, 47, the operator of the stash house in Laredo that served as a holding area for illegal immigrants awaiting transportation, pleaded guilty to conspiracy last month. Segura admitted to providing Bradley with five of the immigrants in the truck from his stash house. He faces up to life in prison when hes sentenced on June 29.

Fox News Ray Bogan, Frank Miles and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
A group of student protesters who stormed the stage of an alumni event last week to demand Duke University adhere to their manifesto  and then accused administrators of traumatizing them after being threatened with discipline  have found allies in more than 60 faculty members.

Dozens of professors signed a letter addressed to the North Carolina schools administrators Thursday asking them not to punish the protesters who interrupted the State of the University speech April 14.

Around 25 students that Saturday, who were reported to have chanted President Price, get off the stage, called for institutional change, according to The Chronicle.

The protesters, who came from various organizations on campus, said they had met for weeks to hash out a manifesto that demanded increased worker pay, greater mental health support, and more transparency in Board of Trustees meetings.

What this document represents is an accumulation of a lot of work that students across the campus in different identity groups and within different marginalized communities have been working on with the administration for many years now, Bryce Cracknell, one of the organizers, told the student newspaper.

But the protesters didnt expect some of the audience at the Page Auditorium  which included alumni who, 50 years ago, called for change while occupying Dukes Quad for days in a silent protest following Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s death  to boo loudly and turn their backs to the stage.

Some of the students claimed they heard racial epithets shouted at them, while Cracknell told The Chronicle he was upset that administrators paid more attention to stopping them than the apparently hostile reaction they were getting.

Instead of actually going to the alumni and saying 'that's not appropriate' or removing them from the space, they were more worried about us, he said.

The newspaper said administrators knew about the planned protest before it happened and spoke to the students and warned them that it would be against university policy. They had also handed out leaflets with the same message on that day.

The students, however, decided to push on and only left the stage after the associate vice president for alumni affairs said the event would be canceled.

I disagree deeply that this was an appropriate way to handle these issues, Price said after he eventually finished his speech, although he had decided to let the students talk on stage.

And now, the students, whose behavior is being reviewed by administrators for possible disciplinary action, claim they are victims.

I think we are particularly concerned that the University knows that by sending these conduct letters out that they will be concerning the students and that they will be exacerbating any preexisting mental health conditions and, like Bryce said, traumatizing and starting new ones, especially after Saturday's issues, Gino Nuzzolillo, another protest organizer, told The Chronicle.

He added: I think that among the many things that we share in common with the administration, the number one thing is that we all want to see this University be better and be more accommodating and make changes."

As of Friday, the school is still weighing a response.

What was not expected was for us to feel like we were back in the 1960s, to have people shouting racial epithets at us, people telling us that we don't belong here, that we don't deserve a Duke degree, Cracknell also said to The Chronicle. "That "f you' was unexpected. What also wasn't expected was for Student Conduct to be the first people to reach out."
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Developing now, Friday, April 20, 2018

President Trump claims vindication after fired FBI Director James Comey's memos are released, tweeting that they show 'no collusion and no obstruction'

Comey's released memos detail doubts the former FBI director had about reports on Russia-Trump dossier, reveal that the president had concerns about former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn

The Justice Department's internal watchdog sends a criminal referral for fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe to the federal prosecutor's office in Washington, D.C.

Fresno State scrambles to keep donors after an English professor bashes Barbara Bush following the former first lady's death Tuesday

Hundreds of school walkouts are planned across the nation Friday on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre

THE LEAD STORY - TRUMP'S GREAT EXPECTATIONS: President Trump late Thursday tweeted that the newly released memos written by former FBI Director James Comey show clearly no collusion with Russia in 2016 and no obstruction into the investigation ... James Comey Memos just out show clearly that there was NO COLLUSION and NO OBSTRUCTION. Also, he leaked classified information. WOW! Will the Witch Hunt continue? Trump tweeted. The memos, which were written by Comey about his interaction with Trump, prove that the fired FBI director never felt obstructed, GOP lawmakers said. Many Democrats claim that Trump tried to hold up the FBIs investigation into alleged collusion leading up to the 2016 election. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va.; House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C.; and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., said in a joint statement that Comey's memos "show the President made clear he wanted allegations of collusion, coordination, and conspiracy between his campaign and Russia fully investigated. "The memos also made clear the 'cloud' President Trump wanted lifted was not the Russian interference in the 2016 election cloud, rather it was the salacious, unsubstantiated allegations related to personal conduct leveled in the dossier" compiled by ex-British spy Christopher Steele, they added. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., disagreed, tweeting that the memos "are further proof of [Trump's] contempt for the rule of law.

'MIGHT BE TOTALLY MADE UP': Former FBI Director James Comey, in a memo recounting a meeting with President Trump at Trump Tower on Jan. 6, 2017, explained it was the first time he had informed the president about reports involving him and prostitutes at the Presidential Suite at the Ritz Carlton in Moscow from about 2013" ... These reports focus on the controversial, but unverified and much-discredited dossier that contained numerous salacious allegations about Trumps connections to Russia. Comey said he wanted to tell the president about reports obtained by CNN and didnt want Trump to get caught cold by the details. "The Russians allegedly had tapes involving him and prostitutes at the Presidential Suite at the Ritz Carlton in Moscow from about 2013, Comey recalled in the memo. When informed, Comey said, Trump was surprised. If the media had the reports, he wondered why they hadnt gone with it. Comey replied that they would get killed for reporting straight up from the source reports. Comey then told Trump that the stuff might be totally made up.

In that same memo, Comey mentioned that Trump spoke about the serious reservations he had about then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and his judgment issues." Comey said Trump talked about an incident involving the redacted name of a leader from the redacted name of a country who called to congratulate him following the inauguration. Trump apparently claimed Flynn failed to inform him of the call.

Rudy Giuliani joining Trump's legal team

Alan Dershowitz: Trump bringing on board Giuliani was a wise a decision

POSSIBLE LEGAL PERIL FOR MCCABE: The Justice Departments internal watchdog has sent a criminal referral for fired FBI official Andrew McCabe to the U.S. attorneys office in Washington, Fox News has confirmed ... The move follows a recent DOJ inspector general report that found McCabe leaked a self-serving story to the press and later lied about it to then-Director James Comey and federal investigators, prompting Attorney General Jeff Sessions to fire him on March 16. The Washington Post reported earlier that the IG referred the finding that McCabe misled investigators "some time ago," asking the top federal prosecutor for D.C. to examine whether he should be charged. In a statement, McCabe's legal team said they were advised of the referral "within the past few weeks" and believe it is "unjustified."

Trump: Comey threw McCabe 'under the bus' after criminal referral

FRESNO STATE DAMAGE CONTROL: A Fresno State professor who called the late Barbara Bush racist soon after her death Tuesday, and said she was glad the witch is dead, continues to face fallout as donors mull ceasing donations to the institution ... Randa Jarrar, an English professor at the school (also known as California State University at Fresno), sparked outrage Tuesday just hours after the former first lady died at age 92, writing a number of tweets attacking Bush and the family. Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal. F*** outta here with your nice words, the professor tweeted. Jarrar also reportedly may be in trouble at Arizona State, after claiming the schools student crisis hotline was her private phone number. The post resulted in a flood of calls to the crisis line.

ANTI-GUN WALKOUTS ON COLUMBINE ANNIVERSARY: Another wave of student walkouts is expected to disrupt classes Friday at hundreds of schools across the U.S. as young activists press for tougher gun laws ... The protests were chosen to line up with the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting, which left 13 people dead in Littleton, Colo., on April 20, 1999. At 10 a.m. ET, students plan to gather for moments of silence honoring the victims at Columbine and other shootings.

From there, some students will head to rallies at their statehouses. Others will stay at school to discuss gun violence while others will hold voting registration drives. Organizers say there will be walkouts in every state, with more than 2,600 registered on the event's website as of Thursday. Citywide protests are expected to attract thousands in New York City and Austin, Texas. Police in Richmond, Va., say they expect at least 10,000 at the state Capitol.

Parkland suspect Nikolas Cruz vomited, hyperventilated during arrest, police say

AS SEEN ON FOX NEWS

COMEY'S 'CULTURE OF CORRUPTION': "James Comey is an anti-Trump activist. He might as well be running the DNC, given his hatred for President Trump and his deference to Hillary Clinton."  Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, on "Tucker Carlson Tonight," calling out the former FBI director for alleged political bias and establishing a "culture of corruption" at the bureau. WATCH

'WHAT ARE WE DOING?': "Dammit, he can't be a criminal target under the memoranda that have been written by the Justice Department! ... Mr. President, don't sit down with this special counsel. This special counsel doesn't have the power to indict you, and for good reason."  Mark Levin, on "Hannity," explaining why a sitting U.S. president cannot be indicted and uring President Trump not to agree to an interview with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team. WATCH

TRENDING

New emails bolster GOP claims of FBI, DOJ 'coordination' on Clinton case response.

Taxpayers to spend $85G for Chris Christie's official portrait: report.

Andrew Cuomo claims he's 'undocumented,' challenges officials to deport him.

Kansas day care accused of 'tying down' infants, investigation underway.

THE SWAMP

Florida felons are latest point of contention in fight for battleground state's votes.

Federal court rules against Trump's sanctuary city crackdown efforts.

Illinois Dems push bill rewarding schools that replace armed officers with therapists.

ACROSS THE NATION

Two Florida deputies killed in apparent ambush at restaurant, suspect dead.

Fugitive grandma arrested in Texas after weeks-long search, authorities say.

Lance Armstrong settles $100M lawsuit with U.S. government.

Stephon Clark's brother arrested on suspicion of threats.

MINDING YOUR BUSINESS

Mattel CEO leaving a year after joining from Google.

Mnuchin touts meaningful impact of tax cuts | Mnuchin: Trump-Amazon feud unrelated to postal audit

JPMorgan Chase to open up to 70 DC area branches, may hire 700.

Wells Fargo said near settlement of up to $1 billion with regulators.

FOX NEWS OPINION

Marc Thiessen: Pompeo is close to confirmation and 11 senators are close to making a colossal mistake.

Newt Gingrich and Audrey Bird: Its time to fix our broken prison system.

Henry I. Miller, Alex Berezow: March for Science was just an excuse to attack Trump and Republicans.

HOLLYWOOD SQUARED

'Late Show With Stephen Colbert' writer slammed for insensitive Barbara Bush tweet.

Carrie Underwood's scar visible as star details fall.

Magician David Copperfield forced to reveal illusion secret in court.

DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THIS?

VIRAL PHOTO: Baby owls born on California windowsill gawk at workers

New species of 'exploding ants' discovered.

Rare Titanic rescue letters surface.

STAY TUNED

On Fox News:

Fox & Friends, 6 a.m. ET: National Review columnist Andrew McCarthy on the release of James Comey's memos; the mayor of El Cajon, Calif., weighs in on the sanctuary law debate; insight on the day's top headlines from Mark Levin, Geraldo Rivera and Tomi Lahren.

On Fox Business:

Mornings with Maria, 6 a.m. ET: Guests include: Mary Kate Cary, former speechwriter George H.W. Bush; Alberto Gonzales, former U.S. Attorney General; Mark Penn, former senior adviser to the Clintons, Bob Nardelli, former Home Depot CEO.

Varney & Co., 9 a.m. ET: John Hofmeister, former Shell Oil president; Mike Huckabee; Gene Munster, managing partner at Loup Ventures; Idaho Gov. C.L. Butch Otter.

Cavuto: Coast to Coast, Noon ET: Bernie Marcus, Home Depot co-founder; Newt Gingrich.

The Intelligence Report, 2 p.m. ET: Rep. Dana Rohrabacher; David Bossie; Michael Block, chief strategist of Rhino Trading Partners; Heather Zumarraga, financial analyst; Ned Ryun, founder and CEO of American Majority.

On Fox News Radio:

The Fox News Rundown podcast: The National Transportation Safety Board continues to investigate Tuesdays engine explosion on a Southwest Airlines flight. Rob Mark, former supervisor at the FAA, discusses what investigators are looking for. For the first time in almost six decades, Cuba will no longer have a Castro as president. Fox News' Steve Harrigan has more from the ground in Havana. Plus, commentary by former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Army Van Hipp.

Want the Fox News Rundown sent straight to your mobile device? Subscribe through Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and Stitcher.

On Fox News Weekend:

Cavuto Live, Saturday, 10 a.m. ET: House Judiciary Committee member Rep. Ron DeSantis on the Justice Department's inspector general's criminal referral of former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe to federal prosecutors; Senate Foreign Relations Committee member Sen. Ben Cardin on why he is opposing Mike Pompeo for secretary of state ahead of Monday's key vote; former Vice President Dan Quayle on the life and legacy of Barbara Bush.

Fox News Live Coverage - The funeral of former first lady Barbara Bush, Saturday starting at Noon ET: Shepard Smith will anchor live coverage of Barbara Bush's funeral from Houston. He will be joined by Brit Hume and Dana Perino in Texas and Bret Baier in Washington, D.C..

Fox News Sunday, Sunday, 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. ET: Chris Wallace travels to Paris for an exclusive interview with French President Emmanuel Macron ahead of his state visit to the United States.

Legends & Lies: The Civil War, Sunday, 8 p.m. ET: "Stonewall Jackson: Friendly Fire" - In this episode, A Confederate victory at Chancellorsville comes at a high price when a Southern bullet accidentally mortally wounds Stonewall Jackson.

Life, Liberty & Levin, Sunday, 10 p.m. ET: Host Mark Levin talks to Peter Pry, executive director of the U.S. Nuclear Strategy Forum, about the United States' nuclear weapons capability, U.S. enemies around the world, protecting the future of the nation and how the Trump administration is handling these threats.

#OnThisDay

2010: An explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil platform, leased by BP, kills 11 workers and causes a blowout that would spew an estimated 200 million gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico. (The well was finally capped nearly three months later.)

2008: Danica Patrick becomes the first female winner in IndyCar history, capturing the Indy Japan 300.

1999: The Columbine High School massacre takes place in Colorado as two students fatally shoot 12 classmates and one teacher before taking their own lives.

Fox News First is compiled by Fox News' Bryan Robinson. Thank you for joining us! Enjoy your day and weekend! We'll see you in your inbox first thing Monday morning.
An illegal immigrant who was previously deported was arrested in Oregon on Saturday after he went on a rampage and almost killed his co-worker with a nail gun, officials said.

Jesus Ascencio-Molina, 24, a native of Mexico, was arrested on Saturday, April 14, after he assaulted Andres C. Marcelo, 24, of Wood Village, Ore., a fellow construction worker, the Clackamas County Sheriff's Office said. Deputies were called to the scene of a home in Happy Valley after responding to reports of an assault.

Marcelo was injured after Ascencio-Molina allegedly shot at him with a nail gun. Ascencio-Molina fled on foot and was arrested the next day. Marcelo was injured but listed in stable condition, the Clackamas County Sheriffs Office said.

Carissa Cutrell, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman, told the Daily Caller the sheriffs office would most likely not notify ICE if and when Ascencio-Molina is released from jail.

Even though we lodged a detainer, due to Clackamas Countys policy of non-cooperation, it is unlikely that ICE will be notified in the event Ascencio-Molina is released from custody before his criminal case is resolved, Cuttrell said.

OREGON OFFICIALS KILL 2 WOLVES IN EFFORT TO SAVE CATTLE

Ascencio-Molina was deported in 2012 after he was charged in Multnomah County, Ore., the Daily Caller reported.

Ascencio-Molina was previously detained by ICE on immigration violations in 2012 after ICE officer encountered him at the Multnomah County Detention Center after his arrest on local criminal charges, Cuttrell said. An immigration judge subsequently granted Ascencio-Molina voluntary departure to Mexico, and ICE returned him to his home country in 2013.

It was not immediately known when Asencio-Molina returned to the U.S. ICE issued a formal detention request Monday to the Clackamas County Jail.

KNIFE-WIELDING MONK SEAL PUP SPOTTED ON HAWAII BEACH

Ascencio-Molina was charged with assault and attempted murder and is currently at the Clackamas County Jail. His bail was set at $250,000.
An Iowa daycare operator was arrested Wednesday, about six months after allegedly neglecting a 7-month-old infant in her care after the worker drank at least 10 beers, authorities said.

The boy was later found unresponsive and was pronounced dead in a hospital, police said.

Wendy Young, 49, was charged with neglect or abandonment of a dependent person and can face up to 10 years in prison, the Iowa City Press-Citizen reported.

Young admitted drinking 10 to 12 beers before opening her Iowa City daycare center Oct. 18, authorities said. The center accommodated children between the ages of 7 months and 3 years, according to court records obtained by the Daily Iowan.

Alcohol was found in Youngs system more than eight hours after she opened her daycare, according to court records.

Neighbor Rebecca Painton told the Cedar Rapids Gazette that Young had run the daycare out of her home for 14 years, seemingly without incident. Painton went on to call the police report sad and misleading.

If theres a bond, were going to bond her out, she told the paper.

The infants grandfather said he was unaware an arrest had been made nearly six months after his grandsons death, thinking he had died from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), the Gazette reported.

Young was being held at the Johnson County Jail on $10,000 bond.
A New York City judge ruled a man who was killed in the 9/11 attacks will have his bone fragments tested to determine if he's the father of a 24-year-old Texas man who stands to inherit the victims $1 million estate.

Austin Rutherford Colby, 24, of Houston, may be the son of Michael Morgan Taylor, a bond broker who was 42 years old when he was killed in the attacks, the New York Post reported. Manhattan Surrogate Court Judge Rita Mella ordered the medical examiners office to give the young man Taylors DNA sample despite the victim's family's objections.

If the results come back positive, Colby would receive Taylor's $1 million estate.

Mary Kay Crenshaw, the late brokers sister, said the DNA test would be a further desecration of Taylors remains and a reopening of her own emotional wounds.

Crenshaw acknowledged her late brother did have a relationship with Colbys mother, who goes by Lady Gwen de Ashborough, but she insists he did not father a child.

ALEX RODRIGUEZS NEPHEW KIDNAPPED IN NEW YORK CITY HOTEL OVER $600G LAMBORGHINI SALE

Lady Gwen de Ashboroughs legal name is Gwendolyn D. Phillips, 57, but she goes by the name because she claims to be a world-champion polo player who received the title from the United Kingdoms royal family.

Phillips, who is black, said her late lover was ashamed of their child because of his biracial son. Taylor was a white man.

Dont allow racial divide nor financial neglect and mistakes to keep you from correcting a very serious wrong at the expense of your grandson, Phillips wrote in a letter to Taylors family.

Taylors name is on Colbys birth certificate and Phillips had filed a child-support case against Taylor, which was pending before he died.

ANDREW CUOMO CLAIMS HES UNDOCUMENTED, CHALLENGES OFFICIALS TO DEPORT HIM

However, Phillips and Colby waited until 2014 to claim paternity, Crenshaw noted. She believes the case is an attempt to harass and to extort funds from [his] family.

Judge Mella, though, felt the claim was credible.

On cross-examination significant questions were raised as to Philips general credibility, Mella wrote in the ruling. Phillips claim that decedent is Colbys father, however, remained consistent: She made this claim at the time of Colbys birth, when she filed the paternity and support petition and throughout the course of the litigation in this court, she continued.
The Latest on the death of former first lady Barbara Bush (all times local):

5:30 p.m.

Officials say around 2,500 people have walked past a casket holding former first lady Barbara Bush during a public viewing at a Houston church.

The viewing began at noon Friday and was continuing until midnight. A line of about 10 to 15 people at a time could be seen walking past the casket fairly quickly on Friday afternoon. The stream was steady, but there were no long lines to get through security screenings.

Some people who walked past the casket paused and bowed their heads while others did the sign of the cross. On each side of the casket, a Secret Service agent stood in silence.

Bush died on Tuesday at age 92.

___

4:50 p.m.

A family spokesman says former President George H.W. Bush decided at the last minute to greet mourners paying their respects to his wife, Barbara.

Jim McGrath tells The Associated Press that Bush was watching live video from the Houston church where his wife's casket had arrived early Friday. Hundreds of people had lined up early for a public viewing that started at noon.

McGrath says the former president was "very touched" by the images he saw. McGrath says Bush told his staff that he wanted to go to the church himself . McGrath says, "It was entirely the president's idea to go there."

Bush was at the church for about 15 minutes, shaking hands with dozens of people from his wheelchair, near his wife's casket. The couple were married for 73 years before Barbara Bush died on Tuesday at age 92.

___

2 p.m.

Former President George H.W. Bush is greeting mourners as they pay their respects and walk past the casket of his wife of 73 years.

The nation's 41st president was seated in a chair a few feet away from the rose-covered casket Friday at St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Houston. He and his wife, Barbara, had long worshipped at the church.

The 93-year-old former president shook hands and accepted condolences from well-wishers for about 15 minutes inside the nation's largest Episcopal church.

Officials say about 1,600 people had paid their respects in about the first hour of public viewing. People attending the service are going through security checks before boarding shuttle buses to travel a few miles to the church.

Mrs. Bush died on Tuesday at age 92.

___

12:50 p.m.

Hundreds of mourners are filing past the rose-covered casket of former first lady Barbara Bush.

People are commending Bush's dedication to literacy and education as they pay their final respects Friday during a public viewing at St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Houston.

She and her husband, former President George H.W. Bush, had long have worshipped at the church, where mourners lined up hours ahead of the public event.

The planned 12-hour viewing has drawn a steady stream of people who passed through security checks and then boarded buses outside another church a short distance away. They included teachers and social workers commending Bush's dedication to education, along with federal politicians.

Many women are wearing blue, Mrs. Bush's favorite color, and pearls, her go-to neckwear jewelry.

The silver casket is in the sanctuary behind a velvet rope in the nation's largest Episcopal church.

___

11:50 a.m.

Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn and his wife are among those paying their respects to former first lady Barbara Bush.

The Republican senator from Texas was among those with early access to the Houston church where a public viewing is being held Friday. Barbara Bush died Tuesday at age 92. She and her husband, former President George H.W. Bush, were longtime members of the church.

Cornyn was followed later into St. Martin's Episcopal Church by Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, before hundreds of mourners were beginning to arrive on buses from a staging area a few miles away.

Her funeral is Saturday at the church.

___

11:45 a.m.

A couple from Washington, D.C., says they decided to come to events celebrating the life of former first lady Barbara Bush to honor her work in education and helping people with disabilities.

Mitchell and Jessica Queener say they were in Houston for work but decided to join scores of people lining up Friday to pay their final respects to Barbara Bush, who died Tuesday at age 92. Her body will lie in repose from noon to midnight on Friday at St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Houston.

Jessica Queener works in special education and wears a cochlear implant to help her with her hearing loss. She says Barbara Bush's work "really resonates with me on a personal level but also professionally."

They also credited Barbara Bush for being a positive influence on her husband, former President George H.W. Bush, when he signed the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.

Jessica Queener says the federal law "brought me a lot more access to the world that I did not have as a very young child."

___

11:15 a.m.

Maine Republican Gov. Paul LePage has signed a bill creating a specialty license plate for The Barbara Bush Children's Hospital.

The governor signed the bill this week, shortly after the death of the former first lady. The plate will be available later this year, and $10 for every new plate sold and every renewal will benefit the hospital.

The plate is expected to raise more than $200,000 annually for the state's only children's hospital.

The Kennebunkport community is hosting a memorial for Barbara Bush on Sunday. Bush and her husband, former President George H.W. Bush, spent years at their summer home in the town.

___

11 a.m.

More than 100 people are already standing in line to pay their final respects to former first lady Barbara Bush.

Among them is 74-year-old Lucy Orlando, who traveled from Florida. Originally from Haiti, Orlando says she has admired Barbara Bush for years, especially for her work promoting literacy.

Forty-nine-year-old Varney Johnson also commended the former first lady's work in supporting literacy efforts. The social worker is originally from Liberia and says he also wanted to thank Mrs. Bush for her son George W. Bush's work during his presidency to support his home country.

Mrs. Bush died on Tuesday at age 92. A public viewing is scheduled to start at noon Friday at St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Houston, where she and her husband, former President George H.W. Bush, regularly attended services.

People attending the public viewing will go through security checks before boarding shuttle buses to travel a few miles to the church.

___

10:30 a.m.

A spray of flowers covers the closed silver casket of former first lady Barbara Bush in the sanctuary of the Houston church where mourners are waiting to pay their final respects.

People are lining up hours early to attend a public viewing Friday at St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Houston, where Bush and her husband, former President George H.W. Bush, regularly attended services.

Many women are wearing blue, Mrs. Bush's favorite color, and pearls, her go-to neckwear jewelry.

A hearse containing the former first lady's casket arrived at the nation's largest Episcopal church before daybreak. Her body will lie in repose from noon to midnight.

An invitation-only funeral is set for Saturday. She'll be buried later in the day behind her husband's presidential library at Texas A&M University. The gated plot is in an area surrounded by trees and near a creek where the couple's 3-year-old daughter, Robin, is buried. She died of leukemia in 1953.

___

12:30 a.m.

As the outpouring of tributes continues for Barbara Bush, the general public can pay its respects to the former first lady at a viewing.

Bush's body will lie in repose from noon to midnight Friday at St. Martin's Episcopal Church at 717 Sage Road in Houston, the nation's largest Episcopal church. The public must go to the Second Baptist Church at 6400 Woodway Drive to park and pass through security. The parking lots can be entered from Voss Road.

Metro is providing shuttles to and from St. Martin's. The parking lot at Second Baptist will open at 10 a.m., and shuttles will start running at 11:30 a.m.

A by-invitation-only funeral is scheduled for Saturday at St. Martin's.

Bush died Tuesday at her Houston home. She was 92.
Caught orange-handed?

A Louisiana woman called police Tuesday evening when she arrived at her home and found a complete stranger eating Cheetos in her bathtub, authorities said.

A responding officer in Monroe found a full tub of water and a plate of food along with half eaten Cheetos. The Cheetos-- which were on the toilet next to the tub-- belonged to the homeowner, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported.

A tall ice chest under a broken window was also found, police said.

The affidavit identified Evelyn Washington, 29, as the intruder. Washington allegedly told the homeowner and police that an unknown male had told her to break into the house.

Washington was arrested and taken to the Ouachita Correction Center, according to jail records. She faces charges of burglary and property damage.

Washington remained in jail through Wednesday with bond set at $500. It's unclear if she has a lawyer.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
None of the students at a Massachusetts preschool have a best friend. And that's an order.

Pentucket Workshop Preschool's "best friend" policy is being blasted by a parent who says her daughter got upset after reportedly being told by a teacher she couldnt use the term because it could make other students feel excluded.

"How do you police a 4-year-old from expressing their feelings?" Christine Hartwell, whose daughter, Julia, attends the Georgetown school, told FOX25 Boston. "It's outrageous, it's silly [and] it hurts.

Hartwell added: "When I asked her what was wrong she said she was really sad about what her teacher did that day."

The school does not spell out the policy in their handbook, according to Hartwell, but she told FOX25 Boston she got a letter from Pentucket's director.

"It has been our experience (which spans decades) that the use of the term 'best friend,' even when used in a loving way, can lead other children to feel excluded [...] which can ultimately lead to the formation of 'cliques' and 'outsiders,'" the letter was quoted as saying.

It adds the school will continue to discourage children from saying the term.

Hartwell argues that allowing kids to say they have best friends makes them feel more secure in the classroom and that she is removing her daughter -- who she now says is hesitant to use the term -- from the school.

"I want her to be able to express her thoughts and feelings in a healthy way, as children should," she told FOX25.

The school did not respond to a request for comment from the station.
An Iowa mother who left her four children at home while she went on a trip to Europe in September was sentenced to two years probation Thursday.

Erin Lee Macke, 31, could have faced up to eight years in prison, two years for each count of child endangerment, the Des Moines Register reported.

The Johnston mother entered Alford pleas in February to four counts of child endangerment. In an Alford plea, a person doesn't admit guilt, but acknowledges there is enough evidence for a likely conviction.

Macke had also been charged with one count of making a firearm available to a person under age 21, but prosecutors agreed to drop it as part of the deal, the paper said.

Police were called to Macke's home in September by the children's father. He said the kids  two 12-year-olds, a 7-year-old and a 6-year-old  had been left alone the day before.

Police said Macke failed to make child care arrangements before leaving Sept. 20 for a 10-day vacation in Germany.

Mackes ex-husband, Matthew Macke, gained custody earlier this month of the two younger children, the Register reported. Custody of the other two children was still being determined in court.

Matthew Macke had said his ex-wife had shown no remorse and refuses to admit that her choices put the children at a substantial risk of harm.

A "no custody" order limited Mackes contact with her children to supervised phone calls since first going into custody, according to the Register.

Polk County District Judge Carol Egly at the sentencing suggested that lawyers get Macke counseling to make a possible adjustment to the order and allow her some contact with her children.

"I believe these children need to have some sort of direct contact with their mother as soon as possible," she said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
The ringleader of a massive $23 million auto insurance fraud drove around in a flashy Bentley, sported a $64,000 rose gold Juan Pablo Montoya watch and lived in a $7,500-a-month oceanfront South Florida home -- despite warnings from federal officials that they were on to him, prosecutors said.

Felix Filenger, who emigrated from the former Soviet Union to the United States more than 30 years ago, enjoyed a somewhat lavish lifestyle while running an elaborate 7-year fraud scheme that included chiropractors, attorneys, clinic owners and tow-truck drivers.

Prosecutors said the 41-year-old owned and drove several Bentley cars, bought expensive jewelry for himself and his wife, and splurged on more than $80,000 worth of designer bags. He also appeared to have transferred money to relatives, trusts and an asset production firm, the Sun Sentinel reported.

Filenger was sentenced Thursday to 6  years in federal prison after pleading guilty to one count of racketeering conspiracy.

Prosecutors said Filenger started the crime ring out of several South Florida chiropractic clinics that he and his co-conspirator Andrew Rubinstein owned or controlled, the Sun Sentinel reported.

The fraud involved paying kickbacks of $1,500 to $2,000  per patient  to tow truck drivers and body shop workers who illegally steered accident victims to the chiropractic clinics.

Some of the patients were then steered to a group of attorneys who told them they might be able to receive compensation from the insurance companies by filing insurance claims or lawsuits.

The patients were also required to attend multiple visits, sometimes 15 or more, while clinic workers documented exaggerated pain levels that were quickly billed to insurance providers for the maximum $10,000 allowed for rapid emergency treatment under Florida law.

The FBI raided Filengers business in 2015, but he didn't stop the scheme until he was arrested in October.

Prosecutors said investigators wiretapped Filenger and recorded him issuing orders and advising his co-conspirators, who operated mostly in Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties.

The fraud raked in more than $23 million from 10 auto insurance companies between 2010 and 2018, investigators said.

As part of his sentence, Filenger will pay restitution, but the amount owned has not been finalized.

During his sentencing, Filengers attorney emphasized that he was contrite and was trying to make amends. However, U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom was unmoved.

There appears to be remorse for your actions, although, in this case, the remorse was after you were caught, she said, according to the Sun Sentinel.
Virginia firefighters made a double rescue Friday morning after being called in to rescue a man who got stuck in tree while trying to rescue a cat.

The unidentified man, who may have been a friend of the pet owner, climbed the tree about 9:30 a.m. but became trapped after he climbed up past his ladder, about 30 feet up, The Virginian-Pilot reported citing Norfolk Fire-Rescue Battalion Chief Harry Worley.

Within 30 minutes, firefighters safely retrieved the man and the cat but Worley did say that cat rescues are not something we normally do.

He added that the cat's owners were very happy and thankful. As for the man who got stuck, Worley said he seemed "relieved to be back on the ground."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Prosecutors have charged a 54-year-old suburban Houston man with four counts of solicitation of capital murder for trying to hire a hit man to kill his ex-girlfriend, her parents and her current boyfriend.

Authorities say Rajesh Bakshi met last week with an undercover Houston police officer who Bakshi thought was a contract killer.

Harris County prosecutors say he was willing to pay $15,000 for the slayings and court records show he made a 10 percent down payment a day later. According to court records, Bakshi provided extensive details about his targets, even suggesting times and specifying he wanted them shot and cocaine left at the crime scenes.

Bakshi is an Indian national who lives in Pearland, Texas. He appeared in court Thursday and is being held on a $600,000 bond.
A charter school in San Antonio apologized Thursday after a teacher's assignment asked to list the positive and negative aspects of slavery a day earlier, Fox 29 San Antonio reported.

The eighth grade American History class assignment was titled The Life of Slaves: A Balanced View," MySanAntonio.com reported.

Parents at Great Hearts Monte Vista Charter School were outraged after learning about the assignment.

"The assignment itself weighing the pros and cons of slave life and slave perspective quite honestly is just gross," one father said. "There are no pros to one human being owning another."

Great Hearts Texas Superintendent Aaron Kindel addressed the public with statement, MySanAntonio.com reported.

Our review of the situation found this incident to be limited to one teacher at just one campus, Kindel said in a statement obtained by the publication. It was a clear mistake and we sincerely apologize for the insensitive nature of this offense."

The school has reportedly placed the teacher on leave while they investigate the matter.

The history book used in class, "Prentice Hall Classics: A History of the United States," has also been removed and will be audited, MySanAntonio.com reported.

To be clear, there is no debate about slavery, the superintendents statement read. It is immoral and a crime against humanity.
At the New York City convenience store where he works the overnight shift, Radad Alborati takes a sip of coffee and surveys his life.

His wife is stuck in war-torn Yemen after his yearslong effort to bring her to the U.S. ended last month with a few phrases on a letter from an embassy.

"Ineligible for a visa" due to President Donald Trump's restrictions on immigration and travel from certain countries. "A waiver will not be granted."

"Today's decision cannot be appealed."

As the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to hear arguments next week on Trump's travel ban, its effects are playing out for Alborati and others from Manhattan to Minnesota to the Middle East. Whatever the outcome of the legal debate between an administration that says the policy is a national security necessity and challengers who say it's discriminatory, it is already shaping lives and plans.

NEW YORK AND SANAA, YEMEN

Alborati got visas for his and his wife's three sons last fall, while the travel ban was temporarily blocked by a court. He was relieved to be able to bring the boys, ages 10 through 16, to New York. But they're not living with him or one another. They're bunking with three separate sets of family friends because he doesn't want to leave them home alone during his midnight-to-noon workdays.

The savings he had hoped to put toward buying the family a house in New Jersey are gone. They were swallowed by costs of getting the family to visa interviews in Djibouti  the U.S. embassy in Yemen closed because of the war  and staying there during a five-month wait for his wife's denial, he said.

"I never felt like that's the America I was dreaming about," says Alborati, 38, who followed an older brother to the U.S. at 15 and became a citizen in 2010.

He applied two years later to bring his wife, whom he has known since childhood, and the family they built during his visits to Yemen.

"I get that you want to make the country safer  not that way," he says. "Separating families, that's sick."

With the visa denial, Alborati went back to New York to provide for the children. His wife, 33, returned to a country where three years of fighting between rebels and a Saudi-led coalition, backing an internationally recognized government, have killed over 10,000 people.

On twice-daily phone calls, he hears the fear in her voice. He worries, tries to keep his sons' spirits up and hopes the Supreme Court will give his family another chance to be together.

"This is my real life. That's what I'm fighting for," Alborati says, holding a photo of him and his sons. "This country is built on family. And this is my family."

WASHINGTON

Trump was clear about the ban's goal when he issued its first version: to "keep radical Islamic terrorists out."

"We only want to admit those into our country who will support our country and love deeply our people," the Republican president added as he signed the order days after his January 2017 inauguration.

The initial ban was temporary and evolved, amid court challenges, into the prohibition that is now in place at least until the Supreme Court rules.

The measure bars various categories of travelers and immigrants from Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria and Yemen, plus some Venezuelan officials. Trump's proclamation says countries were listed because they don't share enough information to vet travelers properly.

The State Department, which won't discuss any individual cases, says the policy aims to encourage foreign governments to share information and protect the U.S. until they do. Chad was taken off the list this month.

"The restrictions imposed by the president were carefully considered," the department said in a statement this month to The Associated Press.

However much consideration was given, families and others separated by the ban are struggling, in places near and far.

TIBURON, CALIFORNIA, AND TEHRAN, IRAN

Fresh from finishing his master's degree in filmmaking in San Francisco, Payam Jafari wanted to celebrate his accomplishment and his 26th birthday last August with his family back home in Iran. But he didn't make the trip.

His student visa allowed him to come and go. But Jafari remembered how the initial ban, which for a time barred even people with prior permission to come to the U.S., came suddenly while he was in Iran for winter break in January 2017 and almost derailed his return for his final semester at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.

Since then, he has felt like he can't take a chance on going home, lest the rules abruptly change again.

"I cannot risk it, although I want to see my family so bad," he says. "I'm in the middle of my project I spent five years of my life on."

As Jafari raises funds to make his first feature film, he and his relatives in Tehran aren't sure when they'll see one another next. Their uncertainty about U.S. travel policy weighs on his mom, Mehrnoosh: "Waiting for what will happen in the end  this is very difficult for a mother," she said by email.

Adds his sister, Parastoo, "Politics treats everyone in the world's lives like toys. We all get burned in the end by it."

WASHINGTON

The travel ban debate has been stoked by Trump's campaign-trail call for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States."

While the ban now cites concerns about security screening, not religion, its impact falls mainly on Muslim-majority countries. Challengers, led by the state of Hawaii, say it amounts to illegal religious and nationality-based discrimination.

But James Carafano, a national security expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation and a Trump transition team member, says the policy was driven by concerns about visa vetting and the possibility that Islamic State fighters could stream out of the militants' shrinking territory and aim for the U.S.

"There was a credible, emergent threat," he said, and "we have a risk-informed process: What do we need to do to protect the nation, and what do we need to do to help people who need help, and what is the balance? We do the best we can."

CINCINNATI AND PARIS

The video projected in a Cincinnati theater showed three Syrian dancers in a piece inspired by the lives of their fellow citizens amid the civil war that has ravaged their homeland. But onstage, only two dancers performed the piece in its U.S. premiere on a January night.

The third hadn't been allowed into the country.

A week earlier, it wasn't clear the show would go on at all. The Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati and New York-based immigration lawyer Matthew Covey were scrambling to seek a travel ban waiver for Syrian choreographer Mithkal Alzghair and two fellow dancers to perform his "Displacement."

The ban allows for case-by-case waivers, and they have been relatively scarce. Over 8,400 people sought to travel from the listed countries in the first month after the latest version took effect Dec. 8, according to the State Department. About 450 have been granted since then, according to a letter that Democratic Sens. Chris Van Hollen, Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal sent Thursday to administration officials. The letter, obtained by the AP, seeks more information about the waiver process.

The arts center's Drew Klein recalls word came with just six days to go: The Paris-based Alzghair could come, with only one of the other dancers.

Watching from the audience, artist Kate Kern noticed the third dancer in the video and later learned why he wasn't there. "It really brought home the effects of the travel ban," she says.

Alzghair didn't respond to interview requests. To Covey and Klein, the performances stand as a reason to keep trying to bring in artists from countries affected by the ban when many presenters are wary.

"People, on a human level, still want to be connected and hear each other's stories," Klein says.

ST. CLOUD, MINNESOTA, AND NAIROBI, KENYA

When Abdisalan Mohamed Jele brought his two young sons from Kenya to Minnesota, he thought his wife and new baby girl would follow two weeks later.

Jele and his wife, Nimo Abdi Hassan, are from Somalia, which has been ravaged by civil war for a quarter-century. He came to the U.S. in 2007, became a citizen five years later and rejoiced when she was issued a visa shortly after giving birth last year. But the visa expired before she could get the newborn a passport. The couple figured a new visa would be issued quickly.

Instead, the family has been waiting six months, with no reunion in sight. A March 8 email from the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, where Hassan lives, says the travel ban makes her ineligible for a visa, but consular officials are reviewing the possibility of a waiver.

Their sons, 7 and 4, sometimes ask when their mother is coming. Jele tries to reassure them: "Soon. Soon."

"It's so hard," he says, wiping tears from his cheeks. "I'm American. I don't know why my family can't come here."

Jele's attorney, Laura Tripiciano, says Hassan, 32, easily qualifies for a waiver. But there's no timeline for a decision, and Jele, 31, isn't sure how much longer he can wait. He's supporting Hassan in Kenya while paying for a St. Cloud, Minnesota, apartment big enough for a family of five.

On a typical day, Jele drops his elder son at the school bus and the younger one with the boys' aunt, then goes to school himself to learn English and earn his GED. After taking the older boy from school to the aunt's, Jele works from 3:30 p.m. to midnight at a life jacket factory. Finally, he takes the sleeping boys home.

Some days, he has no time to eat. Once, he was so frazzled he forgot his work badge, safety glasses and shoes. He appreciates his sister's help with child care, but it's becoming too much to ask.

If his wife doesn't get a visa soon, Jele thinks he might have to send their boys  who are U.S. citizens  back to Kenya or quit his job to care for them. He said he understands security concerns but believes Hassan is being singled out because she's Somali.

"I love this country because we have a lot of opportunity, education, health, peace," Jele says. "I live here. I want to live here. But if my wife, she lives in Nairobi ... sometimes, I'm thinking I move back to Africa."

___

Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Amy Forliti in St. Cloud, Minnesota; Josh Lederman in Washington; and Lee Keath in Cairo.
Australia's prime minister says the Australian navy has a "perfect right" to traverse the South China Sea after a media report that the Chinese navy challenged three Australian warships in the hotly contested waterway.

Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported on Friday the Chinese "challenged" two Australian frigates and an oil replenishment ship this month as the Australian ships were making their way to Vietnam. The report cited anonymous defense officials and did not detail the challenge.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull did not comment on the specific incident.

But he told reporters Australia has a "perfect right in accordance with international law" to practice the right of freedom of navigation and overflight in the South China Sea.

The Defense Department declined to provide operational details about ships in the South China Sea.
North and South Korea opened the first-ever telephone hotline between their leaders Friday ahead of a rare summit next week focusing on de-escalating the nuclear standoff.

South Koreas presidential office said the first test call on the hotline went to Pyongyangs State Affairs Commission, the countrys supreme decision-making institution chaired by Kim Jong Un. The call was successful.

The historic direct telephone line between the leaders of the South and North was connected a short while ago, South Korean presidential official Youn Kun Young said in a news briefing.

The test call went on for 4 minutes and 19 seconds starting at 3:41 p.m. with (officials from) both sides speaking to each other ... The connection was smooth and the voice quality was very good. It was like calling next door, he said.

Officials say the hotline, reminiscent of the Moscow-Washington hotline during the Cold War, will help to facilitate dialogue and reduce misunderstanding during times of escalation.

The direct line between the two leaders came months after a border hotline was opened in January, nearly two years after radio silence from the communist regime.

The leaders of both Koreas are expected to have a first-ever phone conversation sometime before their meeting next Friday at the border truce village of Panmunjom.

The high-stakes meeting will be only the third summit between the two Koreas since the end of the Korean War in the 1950s. Both countries never signed armistice and technically remain at war.

Many hope the summit will pave way for a peaceful resolution of the North Korean nuclear crisis.

President Donald Trump is also expected to meet the North Korean leader in the coming months.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un announced Friday that his country will be suspending missile testing and closing a nuclear test site, several reports said.

"From April 21, North Korea will stop nuclear tests and launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles," the Korean Central News Agency said, according to Yonhap News. "The North will shut down a nuclear test site in the country's northern side to prove the vow to suspend nuclear test."

The announcement comes amid preparations for a meeting later this year between President Trump and the North Korean dictator. During the summit, Trump said he expected to talk with Kim about denuclearizing the hermit kingdom.

TRUMP SAYS HE'LL 'RESPECTFULLY LEAVE' KIM JONG UN SUMMIT IF TALKS ARE 'NOT FRUITFUL'

North Korea has agreed to suspend all Nuclear Tests and close up a major test site, Trump tweeted following the announcement. This is a very good news for North Korea and the World - big progress! Look forward to our Summit.

News of the testing suspension follows the revelation earlier this week that Mike Pompeo, the current CIA director and secretary of state nominee, met with Kim in North Korea over Easter weekend to lay the groundwork for the prospective meeting with Trump. The meeting, Trump said, could occur by early June.

Trump said Pompeo's meeting "went very smoothly" and said a "good relationship was formed."

"Denuclearization will be a great thing for World, but also for North Korea," he said.

CIA DIRECTOR MIKE POMPEO MET WITH KIM JONG UN OVER EASTER WEEKEND

However, Trump told reporters on Wednesday that he would walk away from talks with Kim if he thought they were "not going to be fruitful."

"I hope to have a very successful meeting," Trump said during a joint news conference alongside Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. "If we don't think it's going to be successful, we won't have it. If I think it's a meeting that is not going to be fruitful, we're not going to go. If the meeting when I'm there is not fruitful, I will respectfully leave the meeting."

North Korea's decision Friday was made in a meeting of the ruling party's Central Committee, during which Kim, according to the Korean Central News Agency, said, "Nuclear development has proceeded scientifically and in due order and the development of the delivery strike means also proceeded scientifically and verified the completion of nuclear weapons.

NORTH KOREA'S NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM HAS GROWN WITH EACH KIM REGIME

"We no longer need any nuclear test or test launches of intermediate and intercontinental range ballistics missiles and because of this the northern nuclear test site has finished its mission," he said.

North Korea also vowed to actively engage with regional neighbors and the international community to secure peace in the Korean Peninsula and create an "optimal international environment" to build its economy.

The country's diplomatic outreach in recent months came after a flurry of weapons tests, including the underground detonation of a possible thermonuclear warhead and three launches of developmental intercontinental ballistic missiles designed to strike the U.S. mainland.

Fox News' Christopher Jones, Samuel Chamberlain and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
A Zimbabwean parliamentary committee is summoning former leader Robert Mugabe to appear before it over alleged diamond looting during his rule.

Mugabe, who resigned in November following a military intervention, has said $15 billion worth of diamonds were looted from fields in the country's east. He later said he had no basis for that figure.

But parliamentary committee chairman Temba Mliswa tells The Associated Press the 94-year-old still should appear on May 9 to explain his statements.

This is the first time a public institution has summoned Mugabe to account for the alleged looting. Zimbabwe security agencies were involved in the mining with Chinese firms until the government cancelled all diamond mining licenses there in 2016.

Mliswa says parliament "very soon" will dispatch an official letter for Mugabe to attend.
NOTE: this is an archived page and the content is likely to be out of date.

Fujitsu has significantly boosted the performance of RAIDEN (Riken AIp Deep learning ENvironment)(1), a computer system for artificial intelligence research it had originally deployed in 2017 to the RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project (AIP Center), the AI research arm of RIKEN. The system upgrade by Fujitsu was based on an order received from RIKEN, and now RIKEN AIP Center is putting it into operation from April 2018.

The upgraded RAIDEN has increased its performance by a considerable margin, moving from an initial total theoretical computational performance of four petaflops (PFLOPS)(2), to 54 PFLOPS, placing it in the top tier of Japan's systems. In having built this system, Fujitsu demonstrates its commitment to support cutting-edge AI research in Japan.

Background

Since it began operations after system delivery in April 2017, the RIKEN AIP Center in Japan has put RAIDEN to use for R&D on next generation AI technology. Such cutting-edge AI research is conducted with enormous neural networks, a machine learning method particularly in deep learning. The increasing scale of neural networks promises to improve factors such as the accuracy with which the networks handle more complex characteristics, but has also led to a drastic increase in computational volume. Moreover, even in AI research beyond deep learning, computational time is increasing due to the increasing complexity of algorithms and the volumes of data involved.

The RIKEN AIP Center undertook this upgrade in light of its expanded usage needs, with a view toward increasing the efficiency of research and development and promoting further AI research using RAIDEN.

Structure of the Upgraded System

For the GPU servers specialized for deep learning, the system has been upgraded from NVIDIA DGX-1 servers featuring NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs to the latest NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. In addition, by increasing the number of DGX-1 servers from 24 to 54, the upgraded system achieves a computational performance of 54 PFLOPS.

For the computational cluster servers capable of more general-purpose processing, in addition to the 32 existing Fujitsu Server PRIMERGY RX2530 M2 x86 servers, Fujitsu has newly deployed 64 additional Fujitsu Server PRIMERGY CX2550 M4 servers. In addition, it has deployed one Fujitsu Server PRIMERGY RX4770 M4 unit as a compute server that handles high-volume data.

Related Websites

Fujitsu Technical Computing

Fujitsu to Build RIKEN's "Deep learning system," One of Japan's Largest Systems Dedicated to AI Research
author: Michael Cheng

Sweden is very optimistic in meeting its clean energy goals by 2030, with the deployment of EVs being a critical part of the country's strategy. In order to stimulate EV adoption in the area, local officials are developing and testing seamless EV charging solutions.

Recently, the country unveiled the world's first electrified road for EVs. The charging method is not wireless and requires a bulky arm attachment during operation.

Will Sweden's proposed rail-and-arm EV charging network put an end to range anxiety? Find out below.

Rail-and-arm EV Charging System

The rail-and-arm attachment instantly feeds electricity to a moving vehicle, as it makes contact with a strip on the ground. Located outside of Stockholm, so far, only 1.2 miles of the road is equipped with this feature. In the event the car swerves away from the contact strip, the attachment automatically comes off and the system stops charging.

A cutting-edge payment system ensures individuals are properly billed during use. The details of the feature were not elaborated fully during the demonstration. It is likely that people would be required to register with the service and submit payment information for automated billing.

"There is no electricity on the surface," explained Hans Sall, chief executive of eRoadArlanda.

"Five or six centimeters down is where the electricity is. But if you flood the road with salt water, then we have found that the electricity level at the surface is just one volt. You could walk on it barefoot."

From a safety perspective, the rail-and-arm technique is a huge improvement from the country's previous proposal to power electrified and hybrid trucks via a network of overhead electric lines. Siemens and Scania researchers spent almost two years developing the system.

The technology allows trucks to connect and disconnect from the network, without stopping. To prevent accidental tampering, the wires are only installed over one lane. This ensures other vehicles can pass freely and are not stuck behind slow-moving trucks connected to the charging network.

Future Development

According to local officials, this charging solution is considerably cheaper than setting up traditional EV charging stations  roughly 50 times cheaper. However, the experimental rail-and-arm charging method is not viewed as a complete replacement for EV hubs in parking lots and public locations.

Instead, the innovative system may be deployed on long roadways, where electrified vehicles need an extra boost for the journey, which can provide peace of mind for passengers.

"If we electrify 20,000km of highways that will definitely be enough," said Sall. "The distance between two highways is never more than 45km and electric cars can already travel that distance without needing to be recharged. Some believe it would be enough to electrify 5,000km."

Such developments may ease pressure for automakers and power cell manufacturers, when it comes to releasing extremely robust EV batteries to curb range anxiety. In the future, with directly accessible charging on roads, individuals concerned about transitioning from gas-powered cars to EVs may no longer use range anxiety as an excuse to delay adoption.
The level of interest from local farmers and strategic investors in farmland is proving to be the key to unlocking the strongest prices at auction.

Auctioneers report strong sales where farmers, investors and small-scale developers compete. Where appeal is limited, prices are generally sticking closer to the guide price.

In Cambridgeshire, the value of small parcels with road frontage, which appeal to multiple bidders, has risen significantly.

See also: The land market in your area: Northern Ireland

Simon Gooderham, joint managing partner at Cheffins, said: Greenfield sites including arable land, paddocks and grazing parcels have seen value growth of 20-30% over the past two years.

As values increase, so does the number of landowners looking to sell off parcels.

Good quality commercial arable land is also attracting healthy bidding.

Symonds and Sampson sold 67 acres near Gillingham in Dorset by auction last month, with a local farmer paying 11,200/acre to beat competition from investors.

The price paid was much higher than we expected but just a result of several expanding farmers nearby who were hungry for land, said rural partner Andrew Tuffin.

By contrast, Bruton Knowles associate Gareth Lay recently sold 62-acre Rosevale, near Whitchurch in Shropshire, and said, though the room was full, the number of bidders was disappointing.

This may be a reflection of the land market cooling off, but it could also be that lifestyle buyers do not like auctions because of the pressure in the room and the lack of wriggle room compared to a private purchase, he said.

Whats coming up?

Supply is steady for those looking to buy whole farms on a small scale, while lotting continues to provide opportunities for those looking to add a few acres.

H&H Land and Property has a stock farm near Aspatria in Cumbria being auctioned in Carlisle on 9 May.

Mealrigg House will be sold in two lots  the farmhouse, steading and 53 acres in one lot, and 74 acres of good quality cropping and grazing land in another. Both have 600,000 guide prices.

The firm is also selling 38 acres of pasture at Underbarrow near Kendal in two lots with an overall guide price of 200,000 to 300,000 on 25 May.

Park Manor Farm at Audley in Staffordshire is due to be sold by Hinson Parry in Alsager next Wednesday (25 April).

The farmhouse, Dutch barn, stable block and general store with lean-to have been grouped together with seven acres of grazing paddocks to comprise one lot.

The remaining 69 acres of permanent pasture are available in up to three lots. Offers in the region of 1.19m are being invited as a whole.

Buyers looking for a small farm or bare blocks have options too.

Halls is selling a 28-acre small farm with traditional outbuildings in need of renovation, steel-framed shed and farmhouse on 27 April in Shrewsbury.

Mossley Well Farm at Whitchurch has been given a guide price of 425,000 to 450,000.

In North Yorkshire, Cundalls will put four blocks under the hammer in Lockton on 17 May as part of the sale of a 25-acre smallholding.

Located on the edge of the village, there are three lots of about five acres of grassland, each guided at 40,000. A nine-acre block comprising grass and woodland has a 15,000 guide price.

The units cottage and traditional buildings are being sold separately.
French MPs have banned food manufacturers from labelling vegetable-based products as meat substitutes.

The ban, agreed on Thursday (19 April) will effectively see an end to products labelled as soya steaks, vegetarian sausages and vegan cheese.

French lawmakers ruled that to market vegetable-based products as meat substitutes is misleading for consumers.

See also: Opinion  Dont waste time arguing with vegan campaigners online

The ban was proposed by MP and farmer Jean-Baptiste Moreau, who said the move would better inform customers.

He tweeted: Our products must be given correctly: the terms of #cheese or #steak will be reserved for animal products.

Adoption de mon amendement pour mieux informer le #consommateur sur son alimentation!Il est important de lutter contre les fausses allegations:nos produits doivent etre designes correctement:les termes de #fromage ou de #steak seront reserves aux produits dorigine animale! pic.twitter.com/E8SQ61cjaT  Jean Baptiste Moreau (@moreaujb23) April 19, 2018

Threat of fines

Food companies and manufacturers who fail to comply with the legislation could be fined up to 300,000 (263,000).

All eyes will now turn to the UK to see whether this country adopts similar legislation.

In January, Marks & Spencer sparked controversy with its cauliflower steak product, which came under fire not only for its lofty price (2 per packet) and packaging, but also its misleading name.

M&S later withdrew the product from its shelves.
Some students in Norway have been asked to not have sex on roudabouts, and stop oter menacing behaviour they've been getting up to, during yearly "O-week" type celebration.

Norways high school graduates should refrain from running naked across bridges and having sex on roundabouts lest they give drivers "too much of a surprise", the national transport regulator said on Wednesday.

Norways annual post-graduation period called "Russ" lasts weeks, involves partying and drinking heavily - and tends to challenge public morals every spring.

Dozens of accidents involving students red- or blue-painted vans and buses are reported every year, and sometimes the celebrations lead to crashes killing those aged just 18 or 19.

While the list of rituals involved in the Russ celebrations vary from one school to the next, they almost invariably involve alcohol, nudity and sex.

In a statement titled "No to sex on roundabouts", Terje Moe Gustavsen, a former minister of transport who now runs the Public Roads Administration, said: "Everyone understands that being in and around roundabouts is a traffic hazard,".

"It may not be so dangerous for someone to be without clothes on the bridge, but drivers can get too much of a surprise and completely forget that they are driving," he added.

Reuters.

Newshub.
DJ and Music Producer Avicii (real name Tim Bergling) has died at the age of 28, after years of battling health problems.

The Swedish Superstar DJ found dead in Muscat, Oman on Friday afternoon (local time), his representative said in a statement.



The family is devastated and we ask everyone to please respect their need for privacy in this difficult time. No further statements will be given.



In 2016 he made the decision to retire from performing live after suffering acute pancreatitis and having his gall bladder and appendix removed.

Related: International DJs and Music Artists mourn the death of Avicii

"I know I am blessed to be able to travel all around the world and perform, but I have too little left for the life of a real person behind the artist," he said at the time.

He certinly will be missed. From the Team at George, rest easy Avicii.
You'll know Jon Lemmon from his massive hit 'It's Gonna Be Alright' that's gone absolutely nuts, with around 2.5 million streams now on Spotify.

We thought we'd sit down and have a chat to the Californian Wellington local, ahead of the release of his next single.

Today he released the single, 'Something True', an upbeat and super vibey track that'll have you singing along half way through your first listen.

Check it out here:
In recent years, the Chinese government has increased regulations on religious activities  and beginning this month, all Bibles were removed from online retailers. Global Times published an article stating that Bibles did not have issue numbers, which is in violation of the law. The article also claimed there was religious freedom for Chinese people.



Professor Ying Fuk Tsang, the director of the divinity school of Chung Chi College at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, believes that the Chinese government is regulating the online access to religious information. Because of the event, Professor Ying published an article to analyze the reason why Bibles were removed and to point out the problems created by regulating religious information online.



After the Cultural Revolution, there were a shortage of Bibles in China, according to Ying. From 1980 to 1986, the China Christian Council published 3 million Bibles. However, it could not meet the demand. In 1988, the Amity Foundation and the United Bible Societies co-founded a printing company in Nanjing, which became the only place that could legally print Bibles. China Christian Council became the only organization that could legally publish and issue Bibles. Therefore, Bibles were sold in a closed-market. For the house churches to legally obtain Bibles, they were limited to purchasing them from the organization.



Professor Ying mentions that resources for other religions are allowed to be sold in general bookstores in China. According to the Administrative Licensing Act 2004, the Bible is the only one that the Chinese government did not approve for publishing, printing, exporting and issuing. Only the Christian Bibles were not available for public sale.



Professor Ying believes that such act shows the Chinese government worries if they open the Bible market to be freely operated, it would further stimulate the spread of Christianity.



As the internet became more and more popular in China, the Bible and other Christian books could be freely purchased online, which was against the restrictions that Bibles could only be bought at a designated place. After Xi Jinping became President, he put great emphasis on managing the Internet.



Professor Ying points out that forbidding online sales of the Bible and other Christian books is part of President Xi's New Age Religious Work. It aims to regulate the circulation of the Bible and Christian books online in order to establish a new order for the religious market.



Professor Ying expects the religious information online to become the target for regulation following the implementation of religious affairs.


The marine environment is critical to Grenadas economy and closely linked to the islands income generating tourism sector. Grenadas tri-island ocean state is not just a hub of maritime activity, but also home to unique marine biodiversity
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.
Hundreds of displaced Puerto Rican families living in Florida hotels since Hurricane Maria devastated the island could be left homeless by the end of the week, federal lawmakers said Wednesday as they pleaded with FEMA to extend its temporary shelter program.Roughly 600 families statewide _ including 180 families in Osceola alone _ believed their FEMA hotel voucher program had been extended until May 14, the lawmakers said. But early this week, the evacuees began receiving notice that their eligibility would end after Friday, setting off panicked pleas to politicians and advocates."These (last) three days, my mind is going crazy," said Lizbeth Cruz Lopez, 48, who is living with her two grown children at a Super 8 hotel in Kissimmee. Although they have finally saved enough to rent a home, they can't move in before the end of the month, at the earliest."I don't know what we're going to do. We have nowhere else to go," she said.FEMA spokesman Daniel Llargues said the families should not have been surprised by the latest notice because they would have been given a "check-out" date when they moved into the hotel. The agency has extended the overall transitional shelter program several times already, but he said FEMA makes a point of calling each family or individual five to seven days before the check-out date as a reminder."There is maybe a little bit of confusion," Llargues said. "They should have known."U.S. Rep. Darren Soto, D-Fla., whose office has been flooded with worried calls, declared the situation "unacceptable" _ especially for families whose lives had already been uprooted by the storm, which hit in September. Soto joined eight other Florida congressional representatives in sending a letter Wednesday to Brock Long, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Association, and Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossello to continue the hotel voucher program at least into June.Florida Sens. Bill Nelson, a Democrat, and Republican Marco Rubio signed as well."At a minimum, the deadline for TSA (Transitional Shelter Assistance) should coincide with the end of the school year for mainland states," the lawmakers wrote. "After Hurricane Maria devastated the island, more than 10,000 students from Puerto Rico enrolled in Florida schools. These children have already had their lives and educational experiences disrupted by a devastating storm and deserve the opportunity to complete their school year."By late Wednesday, Rossello responded with his own request to FEMA for an extension."There continues to be a lack of available housing solutions for many of our displaced residents due to the magnitude of the hurricanes and the lack of alternative resources," the island's governor wrote.FEMA's transitional shelter program pays hotel owners, usually at a discount, to provide rooms to displaced victims of a storm. Once FEMA decides a family is no longer eligible _ either because the family's home has been repaired and declared livable or because enough time has passed _ the TSA benefits end, and hotel owners will often evict the families from their rooms.Llargues noted that the program is not meant to provide indefinite support, but merely to help people get back on their feet after a disaster.However, the scope of Maria's devastation and the lack of affordable housing in Central Florida and elsewhere have made recovery especially difficult."I can't imagine the anxiety these families are going through," said Mary Lee Downey, executive director of Kissimmee's Community Hope Center, which has been working with the displaced families to find housing. "We don't have the money to pay hotel bills for all of them after Friday, so what are they supposed to do _ camp along (U.S. Highway) 192? They can't even do that because we have an ordinance against it."Carlos Mercader, executive director of the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration, said if FEMA fails to extend the program, displaced students will be deprived of their housing and possibly their education as well."It is vital that FEMA approve this request immediately so that countless Puerto Rican families, who have lost everything as a result of this catastrophic disaster, are not once again uprooted in a chaotic fashion," he said.
Vermont's newest candidate for governor is a high school teacher who says he wants to build "middle ground" in an era of political polarization.Joseph Barney, 24, has no prior political experience, but says he brings an important perspective to state government's top race."When I look at Vermont politics, I see a lot of wealth and affluence there, and not a good representation of Vermonters," Barney said in an interview. "Not everyone owns a construction business."His own background is rooted in Franklin County. Raised in a low-income family, Barney said he joined the Vermont Army National Guard after high school, worked as an auto mechanic, and now lives in Swanton, where he is married and has a 3-year-old son.As a teacher of agricultural mechanics at Missisquoi Valley Union Middle/High School  "diesel, heavy equipment, hydraulics, welding"  Barney is critical of some of the governor's decisions on education, including Scott's insistence on cutting local school spending.
A Downstate Republican lawmaker launched a third-party bid for governor on Thursday, exacerbating the challenges facing Gov. Bruce Rauner's re-election as he seeks to heal divisions within his party's base to take on Democrat J.B. Pritzker.Sen. Sam McCann of central Illinois announced he'll run under a new Conservative Party label, and in an opening video he criticized Rauner for helping Chicago Democrats control the state."I'm the only person in this race who has consistently stood up to Rauner and (Democratic House Speaker Michael) Madigan and their machine when it came time to fight for the rights of working people in Illinois. As your governor, I will continue to lead that fight," McCann said."They have failed us: Rauner and Chicago Democrats have led our state down the wrong path. Higher taxes, backward morals and disregard for the rule of law is the Illinois they've created. It's time for a real transformation for the state of Illinois," he said.The union-allied lawmaker's entry into the race represents a form of political payback to Rauner, who two years ago backed a challenger to McCann after McCann split with the governor over a major labor issue. McCann survived and remained in the Senate.His candidacy also comes as Rauner tries to mollify social conservatives in the Republican base, particularly Downstate, following his narrow primary victory over state Rep. Jeanne Ives of Wheaton last month.It isn't yet clear, though, that McCann's name will appear on the November ballot because he first needs to collect tens of thousands of petition signatures on a tight deadline. Still, the political impact of his nascent campaign immediately was reflected in the words of both Rauner and Pritzker.Rauner's campaign called McCann the "worst kind of political opportunist," and the Illinois Republican Party that the governor has heavily subsidized called McCann a "crook" and a "spoiler."Pritzker said he welcomed McCann to the race as "another voice" for voters to consider.McCann responded to Pritzker's statement on Twitter, thanking him and saying he looks "forward to having serious debate about the issues facing Illinois."McCann, of Plainview, first won his Senate seat in 2010 and opted against a re-election bid this year. He toyed with a similar bid for governor in 2014 when Rauner was first elected. On Thursday he said, "The Republican Party under Rauner was unrecognizable to me."Rauner and McCann previously have clashed over issues involving organized labor. Representing a largely rural legislative district south of Springfield with many state and union workers, McCann has enjoyed union backing in past contests. He has received more than $105,000 from organized labor already this year.Earlier this week, he received $50,000 from the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 150, a politically active union that has fought against Rauner's efforts to weaken collective bargaining and prevailing wage rights. The union backed Pritzker's Democratic bid for governor in May 2017, less than a month after he announced his candidacy.To get on the ballot, McCann has until June 25 to obtain the valid signatures of 25,000 voters. Candidates typically try to file twice the number of signatures just to be safe from a petition challenge -- which he would be expected to face.Whether he succeeds or not, McCann's new effort disparaging Rauner keeps open the wounds created by Ives' primary challenge.Last month Rauner defeated Ives by less than 3 percentage points, after she attacked the governor for expanding abortion, immigration and transgender rights and for supporting an agenda that helps Chicago against the rest of the state.McCann renewed attacks on several of those fronts on Thursday."I will be a governor who fights for the millions of Illinoisans who believe in traditional values and the sanctity of life and that hard work should be rewarded," he said.He also criticized Rauner for signing legislation that prohibits law enforcement from holding someone based solely on the issue of their residency. The governor has said the legislation was backed by law enforcement and did not grant "sanctuary" status. McCann's video showed a clip of Rauner saying, "buenos dias," or "good morning" in Spanish."Law and order have vanished in the last four years under Rauner. Sanctuary for illegal immigrants and attacks on our Second Amendment rights is what we have now thanks to Rauner and Chicago Democrats," he said. "We need a governor who will support our federal government to deport illegal immigrants, stand up for the police who protect our families and defend our Second Amendment rights."A construction company owner, McCann has faced controversies in the past over tax liens owed by his firms, his military record and use of campaign money.He has blamed the tax liens on confusion over "various employer identification numbers" used at his businesses. Former political opponents also have taken issue with how he described his military record. He was injured in a construction accident before going to Marine boot camp and said he had been discharged.He also acknowledged last year using campaign funds to purchase a $61,000 SUV, as well as an engine for a personally owned Jeep and more than $19,000 for a truck and trailer for parades. Campaign money can't be spent for personal use, and McCann has said the miles he drives for politics makes leasing a vehicle cost-prohibitive.Rauner's campaign sought to mark the launch of McCann's campaign with those controversies."Sam McCann is the worst kind of political opportunist who is only running for governor to line his own pockets," Rauner spokesman Will Allison said in a statement. "McCann's unethical record speaks for itself: He failed to pay his taxes, racked up massive debts, lied about serving in the Marine Corps, and used his campaign account as a personal piggy bank, even buying himself an SUV."
In a criminal trial, it's important to present all the evidence. That seems obvious enough. Indeed, since a 1963 Supreme Court ruling, prosecutors have been required to hand over evidence they uncover even when it might help the defendant. Failure to disclose such "exculpatory evidence" -- or "Brady material," named for the Supreme Court case -- is considered a violation of the defendants constitutionally protected right to due process.But that's not always how it works.Despite the legal requirement to turn over exculpatory evidence, prosecutors sometimes sit on material they've collected, or they may not actively look for such evidence. Law enforcement agencies may not willingly provide it.The problem with Brady is its pretty much self enforcing," says Nina Morrison, senior staff attorney with the Innocence Project. "Its a subjective judgment, and you are asking prosecutors who are competitive to do something that can harm their chances to win a case.And the self enforcement of the rule has too often, in the eyes of judges, defense attorneys and some prosecutors, had disastrous results.In California, statements from a jailhouse informant were not disclosed to the defense attorneys in a case where a teenager was being charged with attempted murder. He would spend two years in jail awaiting trial before the charges against him were dismissed.Prosecutors in New York City withheld evidence in the 2010 murder conviction of Wayne Martin. A doctored police report had erased statements by an eyewitness who told police Martin had not committed the crime. A second report, containing the witness statements was never given to the defense.The late Ted Stevens, a senator from Alaska, was convicted of federal ethics violations in 2008. A year later it was learned that the U.S. Department of Justice failed to hand over exculpatory evidence in the case. U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan, who presided over the case, said of the case:In nearly 25 years on the bench, Ive never seen anything approaching the mishandling and misconduct that Ive seen in this case.Now, a small but growing number of states have taken steps to clarify and strengthen the Brady rule requiring disclosure of potential exculpatory material. New York is the latest state to amend its enforcement of the requirement, thanks to a ruling from the state's highest court late last year.Starting in January, judges in New York have begun instructing prosecutors of their obligation not only to turn over materials that may be favorable to the defense, but to seek that information from law enforcement. Prosecutors must disclose such evidence at least 30 days prior to trial, to give defense attorneys enough time to review the material.Prosecutors who fail to comply can be censured in the form of a public reprimand by a judge.The idea was having something that tells them what they have to do in every single case and when they have to do it by, Morrison says.The Innocence Project advocated for the change in New York and is working with other states on similar measures, although it declined to say which ones.Criminal justice advocates say strengthening Brady rules is a key part of criminal justice reform. Since 2004, Ohio, North Carolina and Texas have all adopted so-called "open-file" reforms, under which all the files of law enforcement agencies, felony investigators and prosecutors are open to examination by both the prosecution and the defense.New York hasnt gone that far: The state still maintains a discovery process that, unless the material or evidence is exculpatory, allows prosecutors to hold police statements and witness lists until a jury is selected.Where Brady rules continue to run into obstacles is in obtaining and making police personnel records available to the defense. When the records are available, defense attorneys will often use police personnel files -- which can contain discplinary write-ups or details about an officer's actions during an investigation -- to attack the credibility of an officer and the veracity of the police investigation.Police unions have pushed back against disclosing personnel files under Brady to protect officer privacy, but also to keep officers from being labeled "Brady cops," a moniker that can mark them as unreliable in court and jeopardize an officer's career.Law enforcement agencies fight us every time. A cops criminal conviction can be easy to get into the record. But a bad act in their file is tougher to get into the court record, says Todd Oppenheim, a Baltimore city public defender. "We will make a request, and the police union will immediately file a protective order."Efforts at the federal level to reform Brady haven't been successful. Legislation in Congress, introduced by Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski in 2012, would have forced federal prosecutors to be more forthcoming with evidence favorable to the defense. But the bill died.These kinds of requirements are necessary, criminal justice reformers say, because the Brady rule has been applied so inconsistently. Since it leaves disclosure of evidence somewhat up to prosecutors' discretion, it hasn't achieved what the Supreme Court set out to require.Brady in practice has fallen far short of its promise, says John Schoeffel, head of training for the Legal Aid Society. Whether prosecutors are going to be diligent about finding [evidence] and turning it over is something the defense has no authority over.This can lead to wrongful convictions in some cases.For instance, New York courts since 1989 have overturned 88 cases in which defendants were convicted despite evidence that would have exonerated the suspects.But more often, plea agreements can be reached and sentences leveled against a defendant without attorneys and the court seeing critical information.Such was the case with John Leo Brady, a Maryland man who in 1958 accompanied another individual, Donald Boblit, during a homicide. Brady had participated in an auto theft with Boblit on the day of the homicide, but did not participate in the murder. Boblit said as much in a written statement. However, when the men were tried separately, Bradys attorneys were not made aware of Boblits statement.Brady's case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1963 ruled that prosecutors must turn over potential exculpatory evidence, even if it may hurt their case.Society wins not only when the guilty are convicted, but when criminal trials are fair, wrote Associate Justice William O. Douglas in favor of the majority.Since January, the Legal Aid Society has trained more than 500 attorneys in New York on what is and what isnt Brady material, Schoeffel says. There isnt data measuring how effective the new rule has been in the courts. However, Brady materials were responsible for nearly 40 percent of the state's exonerated cases since 1989, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.Prosecutors say the new court rules are too strict and would unfairly punish them for failing to turn over evidence they may not even believe is exculpatory. Additionally, they say, Brady disclosures in some cases may jeopardize the lives of witnesses, which are already often in danger. In Washington, D.C. and Maryland, 37 witnesses were killed between 2004 and 2015, according to analysis by the Washington Post "In any case where there is a whiff of violence, cops and prosecutors believe there is going to be retaliation against a witness," Oppenheim says. "But courts should not be unilaterrally claiming that witness information is protected and keeping it away from the defense."Judges and law enforcment, Oppenheim adds, have the ability to protect a witness from retaliation and still disclose the witness' information to the defense.At least one high-profile prosecutor, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, supports the new court rules.I cant see any reason to object to an order that requires us to do something the law already requires us to do, Vance told The New York Times
A somber and introspective Philadelphia Police Commissioner Richard Ross, under heavy criticism for the arrests of two 23-year-old Philadelphia men at a Starbucks near Rittenhouse Square a week ago and his defense of the police action, apologized to the men Thursday and said he had made the situation worse."I'm here to discuss the unfortunate incident that has been in the news about this great city, an incident that I fully acknowledge that I played a significant role in making it worse," Ross told reporters during a hastily arranged noontime news conference at Police Headquarters."For starters, I should have said the officers acted within the scope of the law and not that they didn't do anything wrong," he said. "Words are very important."Ross said he had been unaware that people sit inside Starbucks for hours, and added that he thought the officers also had not been aware of that practice.The commissioner's comments came hours after the two men broke their public silence by appearing on ABC's Good Morning America and as protests continued to swirl Thursday, including a 5 p.m. march from Police Headquarters ending in a rally by upward of 100 people at City Hall."While it is no excuse, my lack of awareness of the Starbucks business model played a role in my messaging," Ross said at his news conference. "While this is apparently a well-known fact with Starbucks customers, not everyone is aware that people spend long hours in Starbucks and aren't necessarily expected to make a purchase.""I apologize to them," he said in remarks intended for Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, the men arrested for sitting in the store without making a purchase.He said a new department policy has been completed to guide officers responding to similar trespassing and disturbance calls, but he did not say when the policy would be implemented. One reason for the policy, he said, is so that officers will not be manipulated by businesses. He said he was not sure if that happened in this instance.Ross said that the number of officers who responded to the store -- at least seven were seen on cellphone videos inside -- may have alarmed some people, but that the number was not excessive and that the officers acted "in good faith ... to prevent anyone from getting hurt."Nelson and Robinson were arrested after a Starbucks manager asked them to leave because they had not bought anything. They were released almost eight hours later without being charged.Ross, who noted he is a 54-year-old African American, said: "I should not at all be the person that is a party to making anything worse relative to race relations. Shame on me if in any way I have done that."He said it was wrong for him to have said during a Facebook Live video over the weekend that the "officers did not do anything wrong." Still, he said, they followed the law.Ross said that he did not think the officers acted in a racist manner and that "they were put in an untenable position."He disagreed with accusations on social media that he doesn't understand race issues. "I've been an African American my entire life and, yes, I've been in situations where I have seen racism and prejudice in a variety of ways," he said. "Based on what these officers responded to, I just don't believe that was the case here."But he added: "As for that manager, that's a whole 'nother ballgame."Before taking questions, Ross, who was hired by Mayor Kenney, stressed that he had not been ordered to apologize to Robinson and Nelson. "No one asked me to do this. No one made me do this," he said.Videos of the arrests a week ago sparked national outrage, public apologies, and a racial-bias training program at the coffee chain's 8,000 U.S. cafes.The two arrested men called for change in their interview with Good Morning America that aired Thursday morning. The men declined to comment Thursday through their lawyer, Stewart Cohen, and his spokesman, Dan Fee.Still angered by Ross' initial response to the arrests, dozens of people Thursday protested outside Police Headquarters and marched to City Hall, chanting, "Police Department, you can't hide, we can see your dirty side."The protest was organized by POWER, an interfaith group that also helped lead Monday's sit-in at the Starbucks where the arrests occurred. Some marchers Thursday demanded to meet with Ross and Kenney. Others called Ross' apology insincere."Their only sin is in the color of their skin," Faye Anderson of North Philadelphia said of the two men who were arrested. She said Ross "showed his true colors" when he defended the officers.The activists demanded that $3 million be budgeted annually for the citizens' watchdog Police Advisory Commission (instead of the current $750,000) to hire more full-time investigators to deal with complaints against police, and to buy body cameras.In interviews earlier Thursday, two African American state legislators weighed in on the growing controversy.State Rep. Jordan Harris (D., Phila.) said that although he respects Ross, "apologies alone are not enough.""And quite honestly," Harris continued, "I think black people are tired of apologies without systemic change."Harris, chairman of the Legislative Black Caucus, said he had asked Ross to meet with the caucus to discuss policy changes and what he termed a "pervasive culture" of officers' treating minorities differently."When the police are called for everybody else, they are the guardians of the community," Harris said. "When police are called with African Americans, we get the warrior."Harris said he believes that the Starbucks manager who called the police is prejudiced -- but that the officers were culpable because they followed through on her request."When you take her prejudice and match it with the enforcement of the police, now you have racism," Harris said. "Now you have police being the agents of racism and bigotry."But State Sen. Anthony Williams (D., Phila.) -- who initially had said the police response at the cafe "should be reviewed" -- said he thought Ross "responded appropriately" to the criticism that has engulfed the Police Department.Williams said the arrests reminded him of slaves being shackled or civil rights activists being taken into custody over peaceful resistance, and was "stunned" that most of the initial outrage, in his view, was directed toward Starbucks and not the police.Still, Williams said he did not think the responding officers were bad people or should be fired. He said he hoped the moment could be seized to work to prevent such an incident from happening again.John McNesby, president of Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5, said he believed the officers acted professionally and appropriately. "I stand 100 percent behind the police officers out there," McNesby said. He called Ross a "stand-up guy" and said he supported the commissioner.Philadelphia lawyer Michael Coard, an activist, radio personality, and columnist for the African American newspaper the Philadelphia Tribune, criticized Ross on Facebook after Thursday's news conference.Coard acknowledged their friendship, but wrote that it was "probably best if you just shut the f-- up and start acting like a Black man who understands that Black Lives Matter."
In an angry tweet that appeared to contradict his Homeland Security chief, President Trump said Thursday that the federal government will refuse to pay California National Guard troops if they won't keep illegal immigrants from crossing the Mexican border.By the end of the day, however, Trump had taken no action to pull funding from the California Guard's deployment -- and, in fact, the Guard said the Pentagon was going to pay for its troops.Trump and his administration have sent a series of clashing messages about California's plans for the past week, ever since Gov. Jerry Brown said he would go along with the president's request to deploy Guard troops -- but not to intercept illegal immigrants crossing the border, as Trump had asked.Instead, Brown said on April 11, California soldiers would be pointed at such cross-border crimes as human trafficking and gun and drug smuggling. He seemed to belittle Trump's assertion that Guard forces were needed because of a cross-border flow of illegal immigrants, saying, "There is no massive wave of migrants pouring into California."Trump, surprisingly, promptly tweeted his thanks, saying, "Good move for the safety of our Country!"Nothing changed with Brown's plan over the weekend, but by Tuesday, Trump had done a 180. He tweeted, "Looks like Jerry Brown and California are not looking for safety and security along their very porous Border."Then on Wednesday, Brown declared that he was going ahead with his plan for the deployment and that the federal government had agreed to pay for it. He made it clear the 400 Guard troops would not "engage in any direct law enforcement role (or) enforce immigration laws, arrest people for immigration law violations, guard people taken into custody for alleged immigration violations, or support immigration law enforcement activities."There was no immediate pushback from the administration. Far from it -- Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was welcoming, tweeting Wednesday night: "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!"That seemed to settle that -- until Thursday morning, when Trump returned to Twitter."Governor Jerry Brown announced he will deploy 'up to 400 National Guard Troops' to do nothing," the president tweeted. "The crime rate in California is high enough, and the Federal Government will not be paying for Governor Brown's charade. We need border security and action, not words!"At the Pentagon, reporters asked if Trump's tweet meant that the Defense Department wouldn't pay for the California Guard's deployment. They didn't get much of an answer."The Pentagon will continue to support the Department of Homeland Security as they identify their needs and their requirements," said chief Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White."We are in a support role," White added. "National Guard troops are ... under the governor's command and control. The Department of Defense will stand ready to support DHS."Then the California Guard's Twitter feed jumped into action."At approx 11:30am PDT today," Guard officials tweeted, "we received written confirmation from the Pentagon that it'll continue to fund the @theCaGuard mission & personnel mobilized to combat transnat'l crime consistent w/the order issued by @JerryBrownGov -- & agreement announced w/the fed gov't -- yesterday."In short, nothing has changed today."But there's always tomorrow, especially with a president as mercurial as Trump, who has shown himself more than willing to overrule his staff and Cabinet.As president, Trump could simply say he won't accept Brown's conditions. That would allow the governor, as commander of the California National Guard, to refuse to deploy the troops.If Trump wanted to take stronger action, however, he has the right to federalize the National Guard. That would take Brown out of the picture by putting the troops under direct federal control.Since 1952, presidents have taken that drastic action only a handful of times, most often during the civil rights era. The only time it has happened in California was in 1992, during the riots that took place after four Los Angeles police officers were acquitted of beating Rodney King, despite being caught on video attacking the African American motorist.
GIS  20 April, 2018: A culinary competition and exhibition gathering 70 female participants were held yesterday at the City Council of Port-Louis, in the context of the 50th Independence Anniversary of Mauritius in the presence of the Minister of Agro-Industry and Food Security, Mr Mahen Seeruttun and the Minister of Gender Equality, Child Development and Family Welfare, Mrs Roubina Jadoo-Jaunbocus. The objective of the initiative was to highlight and celebrate the contribution of women in the agriculture sector. A culinary competition and exhibition gathering 70 female participants were held yesterday at the City Council of Port-Louis, in the context of the 50Independence Anniversary of Mauritius in the presence of the Minister of Agro-Industry and Food Security, Mr Mahen Seeruttun and the Minister of Gender Equality, Child Development and Family Welfare, Mrs Roubina Jadoo-Jaunbocus.The objective of the initiative was to highlight and celebrate the contribution of women in the agriculture sector.

In his address on the occasion, the Minister of Agro-Industry and Food Security, Mr Mahen Seeruttun, underpinned the key role of the agricultural sector in the development process of Mauritius, which now, he emphasised, forms the backbone of the economy. He added that Government is striving to boost the performance of the sector and envisions transforming the agricultural sector into a vibrant sustainable industry.

Minister Seeruttun stressed that women have played an important role in the reinforcement of the sector as they constitute more than two-third of the agricultural workforce. He also highlighted the need to give new impetus to the sector which requires the new generation to take over and join the new ventures of the sector. On that note, he recalled that various policies aiming at further consolidating and strengthening the agricultural sector to render it more responsive to the needs of the changing socioeconomic landscape of Mauritius have been elaborated.

One such policy, he said, is the Young Entrepreneur Scheme that provides meaningful support and opportunities to young entrepreneurs. He pointed out that the Food and Agricultural Research and Extension Institute offers training and technical assistance to those who want to undertake activities in the sector.

For her part, the Minister of Gender Equality, Child Development and Family Welfare, Mrs Roubina Jadoo-Jaunbocus, highlighted that women are important pillars of the economy and have a longstanding contribution to the socioeconomic progress of the country. The large presence of women in the agricultural sector indeed demonstrates their potential to be the key drivers of the economy, she added.
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GIS  20 April, 2018: The Mauritius Fire and Rescue Services (MFRS) held demonstrations of a high-angle rope rescue yesterday at the Coromandel Fire Station. The simulation consisted of undertaking a rapid intervention in a low angle situation to reach for casualties. The Mauritius Fire and Rescue Services (MFRS) held demonstrations of a high-angle rope rescue yesterday at the Coromandel Fire Station. The simulation consisted of undertaking a rapid intervention in a low angle situation to reach for casualties.

Two systems of cords were used to reinforce the security of the mission. A second exercise was carried out to simulate the rescue of a casualty in his vehicle trapped in the strong currents of a river in a flood situation. A rope throwing gun and a highline system were used in the undertaking of this mission.

The Station Officer of the Coromandel Fire Station, Mr Nawshad Elaheebocus, underlined that the demonstrations showcased the scopes of intervention of fire-fighters who have been trained to engage in road rescue missions. He pointed out that 30 officers have been trained over a period of 15 days by experts from the Devon & Somerset Fire & Rescue Service Training Academy (DSFRS) of England to perform safe, effective rescues from height.

He also highlighted that in view of reinforcing the capacity-building of the team, in 2016, 30 fire-fighters were offered two-year training in the road rescue operator training dispensed by the DSFRS and benefitted from further guidance in the field of road rescue technician and advanced technician training preparing them for team-based work.

The aim of such capacity-building initiatives are to provide for better specialised rescue services in different situations of life-saving and in this regard, the MFRS has set up different special rescue units, added Mr Elaheebocus. They consist of the Rescue Operation Unit, the Aerial Fire Fighting Rescue Unit, the Swift Water Unit and the Road Rescue Unit. A Hazmat Unit is also in the pipeline.
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GIS  20 April, 2018: A half-day workshop on Preventive measures to ensure security in buses at the initiative of the ERS Transport Squad (Police du Transport) was held yesterday at the National Transport Corporation (NTC), La Tour Koenig Regional Office. A half-day workshop on Preventive measures to ensure security in buses at the initiative of the ERS Transport Squad (Police du Transport) was held yesterday at the National Transport Corporation (NTC), La Tour Koenig Regional Office. Speaking at the workshop, ASP Jean Claude Ramsay, Head of the ERS Transport Squad, urged public transport employees to be more vigilant. He added that the society is undergoing a change and that bus crews should adapt to these new situations. People with different characters and having diverse behaviours travel by public transport daily. You should learn how to prevent incidents in public buses. He, however, warned bus crews not to take the law into their hands, and try to act on behalf of the Police or any other authority.

Mr. Ramsay also announced that the ERS Transport Squad will soon start a sensitisation campaign targeting students. He explained that it has been reported that bus crews usually have a tough time with some students.

With regard to dark spots where assaults against bus crews are more likely to occur, ASP Ramsay announced that his Squad along with other Units within the ERS will be more present so as to ensure the security of bus crews. After a brief presentation of the ERS Transport Squad, ASP Ramsay said that although the Squad has only eight police officers, it has so far been very much active.

On the other hand, Inspector Poorecelan of the ERS insisted that the main objective of the ERS Transport Squad is to curb down assaults against bus crews and ensure their security and that of passengers. He added that Road Traffic (Conduct of Passengers) Regulations 1967 are very clear regarding the behavior of passengers in public buses. Any passenger who contravenes these regulations commits an offence and could be liable to a fine, if convicted, he explained. Furthermore, he urged bus crews to share information with the Police so as to better deal with the problem of assault.

For his part, Mr. Pradeep Panday, NTC Traffic Manager, explained that the workshop aims to facilitate an exchange of information and ideas between the ERS Transport Squad and bus crews. He added that the management of the NTC is very much concerned about cases of assault against its employees. Ten employees of the NTC have been victims of assaults since the beginning of this year.
Smart cities could transform urban living for the better. However, in order to mitigate the risks of cyber threats that can be exacerbated by inadequately secured and mobile edge computing (MEC) technologies, government officials should be aware of smart cities security concerns associated with their supporting infrastructure.
Exponential population growth is driving the city of Raleigh, N.C., to be more strategic about how it invests in technology. But this strategy doesnt fall to one C-level executive.A team of city leaders called the Information Resource Management Council, or IRMC, helps CIO Darnell Smith rank the next big project and ultimately deliver the services citizens are expecting.And the expectations facing the city are not small. Smith explains that the high level of education and connectedness of his constituency raises the expectations facing the city.One thing about Raleigh is that its one of the most educated cities in the country. With that we have citizens that expect a lot from the city around technology, which puts pressure on us to make sure that we are keeping up with the technology , he said.Here, Smith outlines a number of top priorities on his agenda, including a comprehensive digitization effort now underway.
Shes been called the Earthquake Lady, and she has spent her career sharing her vast knowledge and providing expert guidance about seismology, and the imminent Big One in California.Jones, a science advisor for risk reduction for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) for 33 years until 2015, developed the countrys first major earthquake drill, the Great Shakeout, and helped create the national science strategy for the USGS to reduce risk from natural disasters that occur nationally.Now, Lucy Jones has written a book, appropriately titled, Big Ones: How Natural Disasters Have Shaped Us (and What We Can Do About Them).Jones said the book is really a summation of the things shes learned in her career about how disasters, and impending ones, affect humans and how she learned to express her scientific knowledge in a way that most of us could understand and in a way that would motivate people to act.She said that in her years talking to public officials and emergency management officials, it became clear to her that she sees disasters differently than most people, who are usually obsessed about the when, which she said has gotten in the way of preparing for the threat.She explained by talking about our fear of death and the evolutionary pressure that keeps us alive. When faced with danger, she says, we use our brain, we make patterns to figure out what is going on to make ourselves safe  we eat a bad meal, we get indigestion.Were deeply wired when faced with danger to make patterns, and its mostly a good thing, she said. The problem is when its fundamentally random, like the timing of a disaster and you still try to make patterns anyway.She said that leads to a focus on how to respond, Like the desperate need for earthquake warning systems. In some situations, they do a lot of good, but they are limited. I really do think they are a help, but the way people want them, its as if they are a solution, which they are not.Jones said that most of us view the problem in terms of immediate need and not with a long-term mindset because of our evolutionary pressure. When somebody asks me, How do I get ready for an earthquake, do I store water, have a kit, a plan, Im like, how about have a house that doesnt fall down in the first place?She said its just not the way we think, we think about the immediate future. And yet do you want 10 seconds to get out of a bad building [which is what a warning system will give us] or a building that doesnt fall down? Id rather have money invested in strong building codes and enforcement.She said when you compare earthquake preparedness  experts from the Pacific Northwest admit they are behind California  it equates to the frequency of quakes. There is more of an immediate threat [in California] and we have just been politically able to do more. [The Pacific Northwest] is struggling to get their [Unreinforced Masonry Buildings] retrofitted. Los Angeles did that in 1981.But, Jones said, California is not nearly as prepared as Japan, which has three times as many earthquakes. The last magnitude 9 in Japan killed 150 people. Were going to kill a lot more than that in the Pacific Northwest when we have the same earthquake.She said there are things that need to move forward in California. One is retrofitting bad buildings. We know which buildings are going to kill us.She said Los Angeles took a big step in 2015 in this area and named a few other, nearby cities that have moved forward with retrofitting. This is exciting and important, but I named a half-dozen cities, and there are 192 in Southern California.Another area is recovery, including infrastructure, especially water infrastructure. We know pipes are going to break. She said a big part of Los Angeles plan is dealing with water. Thats potentially the most important thing going on.She said the majority of water is in the hands of private companies, which makes it hard for the cities to develop mitigation plans. She said some of the cities are just now having that discussion, with water companies.In the face of all this, Jones said shes optimistic and she cites the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami as a reason. There were people from 57 different countries killed in that tsunami.She said that although disasters are rare in individual regions, they happen all the time around the world and that with the combination of globalization and telecommunications, we feel a connectivity. She said that connectivity has spawned concern in communities about disasters and resilience.But we still have to go out and do this stuff.
(TNS) - Edwin Baker knew the church members of the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs well. The Stockdale fire chief had spent time with church members during parades and church festivals.But on the morning of Nov.5, Baker heard on his home scanner about a shooting near the church. Concerned, Baker got into his porcupine-looking truck and headed to the church.What he found was chaos.I wasnt prepared for what I was about to see, to say the least, he said.Baker was one of the first responders to arrive at the shooting at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, where 26 people were killed during a Sunday service.Baker was one of six panelists who spoke during the Mid Coast Hurricane and Disaster Conference on Thursday at the Victoria Community Center. Each panelist was a first responder involved with the Sutherland Springs aftermath.The message the panelists reiterated during the morning discussion was preparedness. Every first responding agency from volunteer fire departments to bystanders needs to be prepared for emergency situations, they said.Dr. Mark Muir, the trauma director at University Hospital in San Antonio, where several of the gunshot victims were sent, said a 6-year-old boy with a serious gunshot wound to his arm was able to live because someone acted and treated the child quickly.I still dont know whether it was a bystander or an EMS personnel who did it, but within minutes, he had a tourniquet placed. And that tourniquet very likely saved his life, Muir said. I have no doubt he would not have made it to the hospital had it not been for that tourniquet.Muir told attendees that anyone could possibly save a life and could help while waiting for first responders to arrive. The conference had several Stop the Bleed, Save a Life sessions to provide training to help render aid before professional rescuers arrive.Turning bystanders, folks at church, folks at the gas station across the street into lifesavers, is the goal of the first responder training available to community members, he said.The time for thinking a disastrous event will never happen in a small community is over, said Eric Epley, the executive director at Southwest Texas Regional Advisory Council.Im not going to say that it might happen  you need to leave today understanding that it will happen in your community. When you decide that it will happen in your community, it shifts your mindset, he said.The challenge immediately following an emergency is time, he said. All first responders should be aware of all assets and medical agencies locally available and notify the agencies as soon as possible in an emergency.The first wave of victims were first taken to Connally Memorial Medical Center in Floresville, a town about 14 miles away from Sutherland Springs. Most of the gunshot victims were taken to San Antonio hospitals that were up to 44 miles away from the church.Its not going to be minutes to get to a hospital, Epley said of rural settings. These things need to get started early and notify as many people as you can because the distances will eat you alive.Epley also said every first responder, as well as medical professionals, should always have a tourniquet near them. A tourniquet is a device for stopping the flow of blood through a vein or artery.Kyle Coleman, the emergency management coordinator for Bexar County, said first responders had to deal with several challenges with the Sutherland Springs shootings. The unincorporated town of about 600 hardly had any street lights, he said, and lights had to be brought in.Crowds of people, from out-of-town media to those who wanted to pay their respects to the victims of the massacre, were also something those on the scene had to deal with, he said.Lt. Troy Wilson, with the Texas Rangers, said he worked in several emergency situations such as shootings that took place in 2009 and 2014 in Fort Hood and the Sutherland Springs shooting. Situations like this will happen, he said.The best thing that can happen here is that we start a conversation, he said.Amber Aldaco reports on regional counties for the Victoria Advocate. She may be reached at aaldaco@vicad.com or 361-580-6303.2018 Victoria Advocate (Victoria, Texas)Visit Victoria Advocate (Victoria, Texas) at www.victoriaadvocate.comDistributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
(TNS)  A group of volunteers is working toward bringing more broadband Internet service to the communities of Maines Blue Hill peninsula, starting with the Hancock County town of Penobscot.The Penobscot Broadband Committee is seeking an engineer to design a fiber-optic broadband system that could be installed in Penobscot next year, said Joel Katz, a committee member and retired executive director of the Maine Center for the Arts, now known as the Collins Center for the Arts, at the University of Maine in Orono.At the same time, we are talking with all the other towns on the peninsula about broadband because we all have the same problems, Katz added Thursday. We are sharing frustrations and trying to pull things together as a region. Thats a tough one.Penobscot residents agreed during a town meeting last month to provide as much as $10,000 this year to fund the design of the towns system. The committee began reviewing design proposals last week and hopes to finish the reviews in July.A completed design is expected by December, Katz said.Penobscot thus joins several clusters of towns across Maine trying to move faster on the Internet. Just 12 percent of Maine households and businesses are considered to have access to effective broadband, according to the ConnectME Authority.Most rural Internet systems operate on copper wires that, unlike fiber-optic cables, are not built for fast transmission of computer data. Thats what Katz said he found when he moved from Richmond, Va., about two years ago.The move was the beginning of what he called his wonderful journey back to 1950s technology.Privately-funded, commercial Internet service in Penobscot is barely functional, Katz said, compared with the broadband fiber-optic systems in large cities like Richmond.Baileyville, Calais, the Cranberry Isles, Dover-Foxcroft, Madawaska, Monson, and the three Katahdin region towns of East Millinocket, Medway and Millinocket are among municipalities looking to build or expand public or privately-owned broadband service over the next few years.Faster Internet speeds are critical to keeping Maine competitive, said Jessica Masse, a member of the Katahdin Broadband Committee . Like the Penobscot committee, the Katahdin committee members are planning meetings to fashion regional networks. They will decide on a model to follow with their system design when they meet April 26.You have to lay fiber. The benefit of fiber is that it is future-proof, Masse said Thursday. We can grow with this technology for decades without needing to change it out.It is an infrastructure investment that is just as important as public roads, she added.Free public access to WiFi Internet service is a critical part of the planning. Millinocket began offering free wireless service to its downtown in July, and the other Katahdin downtowns will get it by summer.But broadband is expensive. It is estimated, Katz said, that laying cable over Penobscots 25 miles of roads will cost as much as $1.5 million, or about $1,200 per each of the towns approximately 1,250 residents.Luckily, federal and state grant money can help, Katz said.Its not brain surgery. Everybodys doing it, Katz said. Its just a question of rolling out acceptable service to the last mile of America, rural service that includes this little burg here.
Did not implement a network access control (NAC) solution to help ensure only authorized devices accessed the state IT network; and that unauthorized or unmanaged devices would be detected and blocked. OAG recommended DTMB implement an NAC solution. DTMB partially agreed, indicating it is currently conducting a limited pilot on the feasibility of doing so; but noted there are numerous approaches already in place to detect and block unauthorized devices, including disabling disused network ports; requiring user authentication to access state of Michigan (SOM) systems; and multifactor authentication for administrative access.

Didnt fully establish and implement an effective process for managing operating systems updates to network devices; and needs a formal process for assessing the risk that security advisories have on the states network device OS. OAG recommended DTMB fully establish and implement an effective update management process for OS on network devices. DTMB agreed with the recommendation, including the need for a formal written process for analyzing security vulnerabilities and updating network devices, and said it is formalizing a written internal process.

Failed to regularly review, test and monitor firewall rulesets to securitize against threats and ensure firewalls are operating as intended to prevent unauthorized access. OAG recommended establishing and implementing effective controls over firewall management. DTMB agreed, indicating it will improve documentation, review and approval of firewall rulesets, and that since February 2015, it has stood up a more structure automated audit process to ensure firewall rules are implemented in compliance with state standards.

Did not conduct a risk assessment and fully implement an effective process for identifying and remediating vulnerabilities on network devices. OAG recommended DTMB fully establish and implement effective risk management practices in the state IT network. The agency agreed and indicated since October it has begun implementing a risk management framework adopted from federal agencies in accordance with National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) guidelines.

Needs improved configuration management controls, which directly impact its ability to protect the state network from threats and vulnerabilities. It recommended DTMB fully establish and implement such controls. The agency disagreed with DTMB that this was a material finding. DTMB indicated it already has a defense-in-depth approach that includes effective configuration management controls and creates security configuration checklists that outline settings for configuration and security items. The agency has remediated 96 percent of the configuration exceptions to date, Buhs said, and is at work on a new written internal standard to be finished later this month.

A recent audit of the Michigan Department of Technology, Management and Budget (DTMB) identified gaps and deficiencies in how state IT networks are managed and secured, prompting on-the-spot corrections and ongoing work to formalize internal written protocols, improve access controls and begin IT policy process improvement.The Michigan Office of the Auditor General (OAG) undertook the performance audit , released in March, to assess the state network and cybersecurity, including the availability, confidentiality and integrity of network and data, and how the agencys network, computers and data are defended from breaches.Protecting a computer network entails a series of defensive mechanisms at various layers of security (the concept of defense in depth). Network security is just one of those layers. Although we identified 14 findings, we concluded that DTMB was moderately effective or moderately efficient for each of the four audit objectives, Kelly C. Miller, the OAGs state relations officer, toldvia email.Miller indicated the audit was a result of the agencys annual risk assessment process in which it identified network and cybersecurity as high risk areas, and was not prompted by an event or incident.The audit findings are significant because the design and administration of the state of Michigans network impacts the security of the states overall IT resources and data, Miller added, noting OAG believes DTMB agrees improvements are necessary  a positive sign.In a March 16 letter to DTMB Director and state CIO David DeVries, state Auditor General Doug Ringler informed the agency it would have 60 days to develop a plan to comply with the audits recommendations. DTMB Director of Communications Caleb Buhs toldvia email that the agency is already preparing the audit remediation plan, due by May 15.Buhs emphasized that data in the states network remains secure due to multilayered protection, as well as investments made in these protections in recent years.This audit, over a very specified functional area, highlighted incongruence between our dated policy and our evolving enterprise IT environment. We remain diligent and continue to evolve our tactics, techniques and procedures as the threat evolves, Buhs toldThe audit, which has been considered by legislators during the past two weeks, made nine findings that rose the level of reportable condition, and five that were more serious, identifying material conditions. Among these five conditions, OAG found DTMB:In other findings, OAG revealed it conducted a phishing exercise on 5,000 randomly sampled employees in 18 executive branch departments and the executive office. It found 32 percent opened the targeted email; 25 percent clicked a link within it; and 19 percent entered credentials.Buhs said the state does its own phishing tests of employees and contractors, including one campaign last fall that included all 53,491 state employees. In the test, only 18 percent of employees clicked the link, and 10 percent proactively forwarded the email to the state cybersecurity team.Current state standards for ongoing training for security personnel require annual role-based training, he added. These training requirements were satisfied by staff, Buhs said, and a more comprehensive process following industry standards for documenting the training has been instituted. Additionally, an improved statewide security awareness program had been put in place with a new security training contract in March 2017.In a review of network device life cycle management processes, OAG found 19 percent of 3,876 devices were no longer supported by the vendor; and 5 percent were running unsupported operating systems. DTMB said it evaluated and will replace the majority of these devices as needed.The question of privilege, or who gets network access, is not an uncommon one in state and local governments. Upon scrutinizing administrative access, OAG found five accounts remained active after a user no longer worked for the state; four users with access beyond what was required to do their jobs; and one user with multiple accounts due to an employment change. Additionally, DTMB was unable to document management approval of access rights for 11 of 14 users reviewed.OAG recommended DTMB fully establish and implement effective administrative access controls over network devices. DTMB agreed, said it has been working on improvements to access controls, and executed many access corrections on the spot.DTMB is also conducting an IT policy improvement initiative expected to be complete in June, Buhs said.This was DTMBs second related audit in about 14 months. In January 2017 , an OAG audit faulted DTMB strategies for helping state agencies identify critical red card systems and infrastructure, and plan for disaster recovery in an emergency.In most instances relevant to designing and administering a secure IT network, Buhs said DTMB is taking the right measures, but may not have been properly documenting them. In other instances, he said, standards have not been updated to reflect the enterprise aspect of the mission, or the current industry business practice.We have been reviewing and updating our IT policies and technical standards to make them better align to industry best practices, Buhs said.
Honda is giving nothing away about the possibility of teaming up with Red Bull in 2019.

Red Bull is openly flirting with leaving the Renault camp after this year, and buoyed by the promising early progress of the new Toro Rosso-Honda pairing.

"Toro Rosso is open to new ideas and listen to us attentively," new Honda technical boss Toyoharu Tanabe told France's Auto Hebdo. "We listen to them just as carefully.

"Together we're working hard to achieve our goal."

However, when asked how the Red Bull talks are proceeding, the Japanese answered: "I'm focused on this season and on the technical partnership with Toro Rosso.

"As for everything else, decisions are made in the top management of Honda."

What is clear, though, is that Toro Rosso is happy to be the vehicle for Honda to speed up its engine development, notwithstanding the three engine per season rule.

"Other teams work with two or three major updates per season," Toro Rosso boss Franz Tost told Speed Week. "We pursue a different philosophy.

"We want to make the car faster every time we make small improvements."

(GMM)
The United States exported 97.0 million short tons (MMst) of coal in 2017, a 61% (36.7 MMst) increase from the 2016 level, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). Exports to Asia more than doubled from 15.7 MMst in 2016 to 32.8 MMst in 2017, although Europe continues to be the largest recipient of US coal exports.





Source: US Energy Information Administration, Quarterly Coal Report, and US Census Bureau

Steam coal, which is used to generate electricity, accounted for most of the increase in 2017 coal exports. India, South Korea, and Japan were three of the top five recipients of US steam coal exports in 2017.

India, the largest importer of steam coal from the United States, imported 7.6 MMst of steam coal from the United States in 2017nearly three times as much as in 2016mainly to fuel growing electricity capacity in the country.

Coal-fired generating capacity in India has more than doubled in recent years to meet growing electricity demand. Although India produces enough coal to meet most of its domestic needs, a large portion of Indias new coal-fired power plants require coal with higher quality and energy content than the coal that is typically produced in India, resulting in these power plants having to import coal from elsewhere.

South Korea was the third-largest recipient of US steam coal in 2017, importing 5.9 MMst, up from 1.3 MMst in 2016. This increase was primarily because of South Koreas plan to transition away from nuclear power, increasing its reliance on electricity generated from coal-fired power plants.

Japans electricity generation is dominated by fossil fuel plants, as much of Japans nuclear fleet has yet to restart after the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant accident and resulting shutdown of the countrys other nuclear power plants. Japan depends on imports for more than 90% of its energy needs, and US steam coal exports to Japan were 2.7 MMst in 2017, up from 0.6 MMst in 2016.

US metallurgical coal exports also increased in 2017, reaching 55.3 MMst and accounting for 57% of total coal exports, up more than a third from 2016. Metallurgical coal is mainly used in steel production. Europe was the top destination for metallurgical coal exports, accounting for 45% of total US metallurgical exports in 2017.

The top six countries (Brazil, Japan, Ukraine, Canada, India, and South Korea) importing metallurgical coal from the United States accounted for more than half of all metallurgical exports in 2017.

Five of these six countries, with the exception of Ukraine, were also among the top ten countries that exported steel to the United States in 2017, the EIA noted.
Ahead of Beijing International Motor Show, INFINITI announced it will build five new vehicles in China in the next five years, beginning with the all new QX50 SUV, and electrify its portfolio (earlier post).

Over the next five years INFINITI is planning to localize five new vehicles in China, tripling our sales here in our fastest growth market, globally. As part of our roadmap to electrify our portfolio, we anticipate that by 2025, more than 50% of new INFINITI vehicles sold globally and in China will be electrified. Together with our partner Dongfeng Motor Company Ltd., INFINITI is pursuing localization in China for China, expanding our network footprint and introducing new technologies, such as our world's first variable compression engine (VC-Turbo), and vehicle electrification, such as e-POWER. We will continue to strive to make INFINITI the top premium challenger brand in the market. Roland Krueger, chairman and global president, INFINITI Motor Company, Ltd.

INFINITI will offer a mix of pure electric vehicles (EV) and e-POWER vehicles, demonstrating the full range of low-emission vehicle technology available to INFINITI as the premium brand of Nissan Motor Company.

The proprietary e-POWER technology features a small gasoline engine that charges a high-output battery, eliminating the need for an external charging source and providing the convenience of refueling with gasoline while offering the same driving experience as a pure EV.

In Beijing, INFINITI will unveil its all-new INFINITI QX50 premium SUV for the first time in Asia. Local production of the QX50 will begin ramping up shortly at the companys manufacturing facility in Dalian, China. The QX50 SUVs built in China will be sold exclusively to the China market and will be available for purchase later this year.

In addition to the new QX50, the INFINITI Q Inspiration concept car will also make its Asia debut at the Beijing show. (Earlier post.) Representing the next step in INFINITI design and electrification, the Q Inspiration features clear and concise lines with dynamic and confident proportions. It is the first manifestation of INFINITIs new form language for an era of electrified powertrains.

INFINITI reconfirmed the companys commitment to electrification. For Chinese car-buyers, this translates into vehicles with increased performance and fuel economy with reduced emissions.

INFINITI operates in China via a partnership with Dongfeng Motor Company Ltd. (DFL), Chinas largest automotive joint venture. In 2017, INFINITI sold a record 48,408 vehicles in China, a 16% increase from the prior year.
Nissan announced that it plans to launch three new electric vehicles and five e-POWER models in Japan by the end of fiscal 2022 (31 March 2023). e-POWER technology features a small gasoline engine that charges a high-output battery, eliminating the need for an external charging source.

Nissan expects electric vehicles and e-POWER models to make up 40% of sales in Japan by the end of the companys 2022 fiscal year. By fiscal 2025, Nissan expects half of the vehicles it sells to be electric or e-POWER models.

As our domestic market, we are proud that Japan is leading the way forward when it comes to Nissan Intelligent Mobility. This vision is changing the customer experience by delivering technologies and services that are making their lives better and also enabling steady profitable growth through Nissan M.O.V.E. to 2022. Daniele Schillaci, Nissans executive vice president for global marketing and sales, zero-emission vehicles and the battery business and chairman of the Management Committee for Japan/Asia & Oceania

The Nissan Intelligent Mobility vision will also have an expanded footprint throughout the companys dealerships. Nissan will develop a new store format centered around the customer shopping area and build new walk-in stores and brand experience stores that give customers the Nissan Intelligent Mobility experience.

Every step of the car-buying process will be increasingly digitalized, from initial purchase consideration to aftersales.

Nissan is also expanding car sharing services, building on its e-share mobi program.

Car sharing will be critical to addressing the long-term opportunity in new mobility services in Japan. We will expand car sharing services from 30 to 500 locations in Japan by the end of our 2018 fiscal year [31 March 2019]. Asako Hoshino, senior vice president of Nissan and head of the Operations Committee for Japan

Under the wider Nissan M.O.V.E. to 2022 plan, the company is targeting an 8% operating margin and seeking to lift annual revenue from 12.8 trillion (US$119 billion) to 16.5 trillion (US$153 billion). Along with investment in Nissan Intelligent Mobility, the company is prioritizing solid profits and growth in Japan, China, the US, and Mexico; securing a return on recent investments in Brazil, Russia, India and Argentina, as well as the INFINITI and Datsun brands; and capturing the full potential of its brands in Europe, the Middle East and ASEAN.

The plan also aims to make Nissan a leader in electrification, autonomous driving and mobility services. The company expects to sell 1 million electrified vehicles (e-POWER and EVs) globally per year by the end of the plan.

100,000 LEAFs sold in Japan. Nissan has sold more than 100,000 Nissan LEAFs in Japan since the model first went on sale. Nissan launched the first generation of the Nissan LEAF, the worlds first mass-produced electric car, in 2010. Today, the zero-emission Nissan LEAF has cumulative global sales of more than 300,000 units.
Equilon Enterprises LLC, doing business as Shell Oil Products US, and Toyota have been provisionally awarded $8 million by the GFO-17-603 to develop the first hydrogen-truck refueling station at the Port of Long Beach.

The funding, which is contingent upon the approval of the project at an upcoming CEC meeting, forms part of the CECs Alternative and Renewable Fuel and Vehicle Technology Program, which helps develop hydrogen and electric infrastructure at ports, warehousing and distribution centers in California.

Shell and Toyota expect the facility to encourage the use of zero-emission hydrogen fuel cell electric trucks in and around Long Beach, one of the worlds largest freight hubs.

If approved, Shell will build, own and operate a hydrogen station at the Toyota Logistics Services location at the Port of Long Beach, fueling Toyotas Project Portal heavy-duty fuel cell proof-of-concept truck and public fleets. (Earlier post.)

Shell will source its hydrogen from Toyotas adjacent Tri-Gen facility (earlier post), which produces hydrogen from 100% renewable biogas.




Haiti - Politic : Towards the creation of the National Hydric Resources Agency





Wednesday in plenary session, the deputies after more than 3 hours of discussions, adopted at first reading (62 votes for, 0 against and 10 abstentions), a bill which will allow the State to acquire the means necessary for the protection and the proper use of the country's water resources.



"Through this law, the Haitian State will be able to ensure the separation of responsibilities for the capture, production, transportation, distribution, emptying and marketing of water," said the Commission who were responsible for analyzing this bill.



In addition, this bill creates, organizes and operates the National Hydric Resources Agency (ANARHY), an autonomous body that will be responsible for implementing the Government's water regulation policy.



This bill will now be sent to the Senate for ratification before official publication by the Executive in the Official Journal "Le Moniteur".



HL/ HaitiLibre






















Haiti - Security : The Catholic Bishops of Haiti claims justice for Father Simoly





In a note, Mgr. Launay Saturne, Bishop of the Diocese of Jacmel and President of the Episcopal Conference of Haiti recalls "On December 21, 2017, the Reverend Father Joseph Simoly fell under the murderous bullets of ruthless bandits in front of his residence in the metropolitan region https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-23058-haiti-flash-a-priest-shot-dead-in-petion-ville.html . Us the Catholic Bishops of Haiti, had condemned this barbarous crime without reserve. Since then, the Church, by various voices, has constantly demanded justice for him [...]



We continue to solicit the full cooperation of the authorities or authorities concerned so that the procedure in progress does not stop on the way https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-23283-haiti-justice-arrest-of-the-alleged-assassins-of-father-joseph-simoly.html , but continue unhindered so that truth can be truly established and justice done. It is imperative to end the impunity that undermines the foundations of the rule of law [...]



Us the Catholic Bishops of Haiti, urge all the priests of the ten dioceses of the country and on mission abroad, to celebrate with their faithful a Requiem Mass on Friday, May 4th, with a view to making a new a solemn tribute to the memory of our late Father Simoly, to call for justice and remember the sacredness of life to which nobody should touch. It will be for us, once again, an opportunity to renew our commitment to the right to the protection of life [...]"



See also :

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-23058-haiti-flash-a-priest-shot-dead-in-petion-ville.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-23283-haiti-justice-arrest-of-the-alleged-assassins-of-father-joseph-simoly.html



HL/ HaitiLibre


















Californian producers target London and Edinburgh

By Michelle Perrett

The annual Golden State Tasting is to take place in Scotland for the first time to capitalise on the popularity of Californian wines north of the border.

Trade tastings for the Californian wine producers will take place in both London and Edinburgh and will feature around 70 wineries from the four leading importers for California: Flint Wines, Roberson Wine, The Vineyard Cellars and The Wine Treasury.

The Golden State agents are looking to tap into the popularity of Edinburgh as the second most visited city in the UK, after London, by US tourists.

The organisation said that tourists from North America exceeded 3.8m in 2017, a 14% increase on 2016. The producers also said that Californians and New Yorkers account for 25% of Americans visiting the UK and when they come they want to drink premium Californian wines.

The London tasting will take place on Monday, 14 May at Avenue restaurant in St Jamess, London, and will feature the wineries destined for independent retailers and the on-trade.

Two days later on Wednesday, 16 May, the Scottish tasting will take place at The Balmoral Hotel, Edinburgh. Wineries attending include Arnot Robert; Duckhorn; Lutum Wines; Mail Road Wines; Peter Michael Winery; Rudd Estate; Sandhi Wines and Silver Oak.

James Hocking of The Vineyard Cellars said that 2018 was an exciting time for The Golden State Tasting to make its first foray north of the border.

Scotlands burgeoning fine dining scene with its focus on the finest beef and seafood, and wealth of specialist independents makes it the perfect destination for top Californian wines, he said.

The tasting, which has a focus on premium, boutique, Californian wines, was originally created by Hocking and Rory Benham of The Wine Treasury, with Roberson joining in 2015 and Flint Wines in 2017.





Photo: Vinca Minor Vineyard in Sonoma. By Jason Charles








Louise Pagotto recommended to be next Kapiolani Community College chancellor

News Release from Kapiolani Community College Apr 18, 2018

HONOLULU, Hawaii - University of Hawaii Vice President for Community Colleges John Morton has recommended to UH President David Lassner the appointment of Louise Pagotto as the next chancellor for Kapiolani Community College. The effective date of the appointment is June 8, 2018.

Under Dr. Louise Pagottos leadership, Kapiolani Community College will continue its pursuit to achieve excellence as an innovative and successful model community college. Throughout her lengthy career at Kapiolani, Pagotto has inspired faculty, staff and students to be fully engaged in their journey to reach their goals, Morton said.

I'm honored and excited to have this opportunity to lead the college and focus the many strengths and creativity of the faculty and staff of Kapiolani Community College on a singular purpose: to inspire our students to change the world," said Pagotto.

Pagotto currently serves as the interim chancellor for Kapiolani CC in Honolulu, Hawaii. She began her 30-year career at UH in 1988 at Leeward Community College as an English and English as a second language lecturer and instructor. Since 1989 at Kapiolani CC, Pagotto has served as assistant dean for vocational and distance education, department chair of language arts and assistant dean for arts and sciences and the Center for Excellence in Learning, Teaching and Technology. She then served as vice chancellor for academic affairs for 12 years until her appointment as interim chancellor in 2016.

Pagotto has more than 36 years of experience in higher education as a faculty member and administrator, as well as in lower education in Papua New Guinea. Pagottos long-term connection with UH began when she was an international student at UH Manoa in 1980. Her doctorate in linguistics was awarded in December 1987, with her dissertation on the verb morphology of Marshallese, a Micronesian language spoken in the Marshall Islands. She earned a master of arts in linguistics from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada in 1981, a teaching English as a second language diploma from the University of Papua New Guinea, in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea in 1976, and a bachelor of arts in English with concentration in applied linguistics from Marianopolis College, Universite de Montreal in Quebec, Canada in 1971.

Pagottos role as an educator extends to the community beyond the campus as a coordinator for the Wo Learning Champions, a professional development initiative for faculty and staff. Her support for leadership included serving as a board member of the Community Colleges Leadership Development Initiatives Foundation. She has chaired the UH Commission on the Status of Women and the Women Leaders in Higher Education.

* * * * *

Kapi'olani Community College announces final three candidates for chancellor

Public invited to meet candidates and participate in open forums on April 6, 2018

News Release from University of Hawaii Mar 28, 2018

HONOLULU, Hawaii  The Kapiolani Community College Chancellor Search Advisory Committee has identified three finalists for the position of chancellor and has invited them to participate in a final round of interviews.

The public is invited on Friday, April 6, 2018 to meet candidates at open forums held at Kapiolani Community College.

Open Forum Schedule:

Friday, April 6, 2018, Kapiolani Community College, Ohia Auditorium

11:30 a.m.12:30 p.m.  Jeffery Thomas

12:451:45 p.m.  Micheal Glisson

23 p.m.  Louise Pagotto

CANDIDATES

Micheal Glisson currently serves as the vice chancellor for strategic initiatives, and previously was the vice chancellor for academic affairs at South Louisiana Community College in Lafayette, Louisiana, part of the Louisiana Community and Technical College System. He was the dean of allied health and nursing at Gateway Community College in Phoenix, Arizona, part of the Maricopa County Community College District. Glisson was interim dean of health sciences and department chair and professor of radiologic technology at Massachusetts Bay Community College in Framingham, Massachusetts. He has 35 years of experience in higher education as a faculty member and administrator at both two-year and four-year institutions, domestically and internationally, including Monash University and Charles Sturt University, both in Australia. Glisson holds a doctorate of philosophy in epidemiology and a master of applied science in physics from Monash University in Victoria, Australia. He received a diploma of applied science in medical radiography from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Victoria, Australia.

Louise Pagotto currently serves as the interim chancellor for Kapiolani Community College in Honolulu, Hawaii. She previously served as vice chancellor for academic affairs, interim assistant dean of arts and sciences, associate professor and language arts department chair, interim assistant dean of instruction, and assistant professor at Kapiolani Community College. Pagotto began her career at the University of Hawaii System at Leeward Community College as an instructor. She has more than 36 years of experience in higher education as a faculty member and administrator, as well as in lower education in Papua New Guinea. Pagotto holds a doctorate of linguistics from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and master of arts in linguistics from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. She earned a teaching English as a second language diploma from the University of Papua New Guinea, in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, and a bachelor of arts in English with concentration in applied linguistics from Marianopolis College, Universite de Montreal in Quebec, Canada.

Jeffery Thomas is currently dean of academic affairs at the North Campus and West Hills Center of the Community Colleges of Allegheny County in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was formerly dean of academic and student affairs at the Miami Dade College Homestead Campus, part of the Miami Dade College System. Thomas served as dean of academic affairs at Northland Community and Technical College in Thief River Falls, Minnesota. He was chair of social and behavioral sciences at Northland Pioneer College in Holbrook, Arizona. Thomas has more than 22 years of experience in higher education as a faculty member and administrator at both two-year and four-year institutions. Thomas holds a doctorate of philosophy in history from Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas. He earned a master of arts in history from the University of Texas at Austin and a bachelor in American studies with a minor in philosophy from Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida.

---30---

SA: Finalists for KCC chancellor announced
Mykkanen made the announcement during a question-time debate in the Finnish Parliament on Thursday, following an enquiry about the decision of the Administrative Court of Appeal of Lyon to stay the transfer of asylum seekers to Finland on grounds of concerns that they would subsequently be deported to Kabul, Afghanistan.

Kai Mykkanen (NCP), the Minister of the Interior, says he has launched an internal assessment into whether or not the rights of asylum seekers are realised in Finland.

The Afghan family of four would have been returned to Finland under the Dublin Regulation, which prescribes that the member state of first entry is responsible for processing asylum seekers.

Its alarming that a court in another EU country has no confidence in our asylum procedure, highlighted Touko Aalto, the chairperson of the Green League.

The Finnish Immigration Service (Migri), he added, has similarly been shown to have aligned its asylum policy considerably over the past few years. We urgently need a thorough assessment of the asylum policy of Finland, stated Aalto.

Mykkanen in his response reminded that also Afghan asylum seekers have been transferred from France to Finland under the Dublin Regulation, arguing that this as an indication that the countries differ only in their assessments of the situation in Kabul.

Finland, he stated, must nevertheless do its utmost to ensure human rights are realised also in individual cases, regardless of how difficult it can be to obtain reliable information.

The big picture of course is that weve gotten over 40,000 asylum seekers over the few-year period when a massive number of people arrived in Europe. The fact that certain individual cases have popped up mustnt overshadow the general interpretation. If we look at it analytically, I believe it stands an assessment of how the processes work, told Mykkanen.

Aleksi Teivainen  HT

Photo: Antti Aimo-Koivisto  Lehtikuva

Source: Uusi Suomi
A MOTHER and daughter have been honoured for opening their home to adults with learning difficulties.

Rosemary Dean and Lindsay Howard-Dean, from Christmas Common, have been supporting two people for several years as part of Oxfordshire County Councils Shared Lives scheme, which provides somewhere to stay for adults with a disability or mental health problem.

Mrs Dean and Mrs Howard-Dean were highly commended at the Oxfordshire Association of Care Providers annual awards, which were held at the Kassam Stadium in Oxford.

Mrs Howard-Dean, 35, has been part of the scheme for more than a decade.

She shares her home with Mark, who has a mild learning disability, and Claire, who has cerebral palsy and a learning disability.

She and her husband Tim, an engineer, consider both to be part of their family and an extra aunt and uncle for their son Orson.

Mrs Howard-Dean said: My mother Rosemary, who still helps out even though shes retired, was a Shared Lives carer for 20 years before I became their main carer.

In the mornings I get up and help Claire get up washed, ready and breakfasted and I help Mark plan his day.

He recently took early retirement so hes often off into town. He has got an active social life and we plan his timings and transport and offer emotional support.

Then I go about my day as a farmer, facilitator of animal assisted learning and being a mum. Claire spends time with us on the farm. She enjoys the company of the animals  weve got sheep, cows, horses and donkeys and at this lovely time of year we also have lambs. She also attends day services.

I home educate Orson so on a daily basis we really are an extended happy family.

The Shared Lives scheme offers long-term accommodation, short breaks, respite care and day support in 80 households across the county.

Service users stay in the home for a designated number of nights a week or month or as part of a permanent long-term arrangement.

It is open to anyone who has been assessed under the Care Act and referred by a council social worker or care co-ordinator.

Mrs Howard-Dean said people were aware of fostering for children but there was not as much information about caring for adults.

She said: Im sure there are people out there whod be interested in Shared Lives if only they knew more. It is very much a vocation. It gives you a bigger family.

Ive grown up with Claire and Mark and they are part of our family. It enriches our lives too and helps educate Orson to the challenges that people face in life.

Enabling peoples lives while they live under your roof is incredibly rewarding. It gives people a new perspective on how lucky they are and the sharing aspect is very humbling. Id strongly recommend it.

For more information about Shared Lives, call 01865 897971 or visit www.oxfordshire.gov.uk/

sharedlives
Although the Cuban people continue to suffer and struggle under the weight of communist rule, many have been encouraged by even the slightest of Raul Castros incremental changes toward private businesses.

Out of a total population of roughly 11 million, the number of self-employed Cubans has risen from 150,000 to 500,000 in recent years. Although the state still controls the press, the internet, and most of the formal economy, a small portion of the Cuban population is gaining a bit of breathing room to innovate and create on their own.

In Startup Cuba, a nine-part documentary series, we get an in-depth glimpse at this aspiring entrepreneurial class, which its creators call the grittiest and most creative startup scene on the planet.

Watch the trailer below:

In the debut episodethe only to be released thus farwe see tremendous creativity in action through the lens of a designer, a restaurateur, and a range of underground, black-market hustlers, each of which is constantly challenging the status quo and succeeding, despite the numerous challenges and barriers to business.

In Cuba, there are only 201 legal occupations for entrepreneurs, for example, and the government has made a habit of sporadically suspending licenses, even for businesses that are technically deemed legitimate. Also, due to limited internet access and state-controlled media, new businesses struggle to communicate and advertise their products and services.

Despite the herculean challenges, these entrepreneurs are doing it and theyre moving forward, says Deckinger. Indeed, after undergoing some painful economic struggles after the fall of the Soviet Union (dubbed the Special Period), many Cubans seem to be miraculously confident in their value and giftings, primed and ready to challenge the system and overcome waves of economic obstacles. The Special Period became their accelerator, the film explains, cultivating innovation and honing resilience.

Far from being crushed by the decades-long abuses of an oppressive regime, Cubas emerging entrepreneurs continue to demonstrate remarkable persistence, resilience, and ingenuity. In doing so, they remind the rest of us of the inherent, God-given dignity and creative capacity of the human personfeatures that endure, not fading or deteriorating according to whatever economic, social, or political dysfunction may surround us.

They only know how to be creative, observes host Ken Deckinger. They only know how to find a solution. They only know how to apply grit to situations. It makes total sense that when they apply those characteristics to startups, theyre going to be rock stars.

Image: larsen9236 (CC0)
 Wheres the Coverage? Iranian Drone Shot Down by Israel Was Armed | Main | LA Times Replaces Solid AP Headline With Biased Headline 

April 20, 2018

Iran Has Sleeper Cells in the U.S.And the Media is Fast Asleep



The Islamic Republic of Iran has proxies serving as sleeper cells? in the U.S., according to sworn congressional testimony. Yet, U.S. news outlets have largely neglected the story.

Several intelligence officials and former White House officials confirmed to Congress? on April 17, 2018, that Iranian agents tied to the terror group Hezbollah have already been discovered in the United States,? according to a Washington Free Beacon article by reporter Adam Kredo (Iranian-Backed Sleeper Cell Militants Hibernating in U.S., Positioned for Attack,? April 17, 2018). The officials told members of Congress that it would be relatively easy? for Iran to use its proxies to carry out attacks in the U.S.

Hezbollah is a Lebanese-based, Iranian-backed, U.S.-designated terrorist group. Hezbollah calls for Israels destruction and has murdered hundreds of Americans, as CAMERA detailed in its 2016 backgrounder on the organization.

Michael Pregent, an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute, a Washington D.C.-based think tank, and a former intelligence adviser to U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus, told the U.S. Congress that Hezbollah was as good or better at explosive devices than ISIS,? better at assassinations and developing assassination cells? and better at targeting.? Indeed, as CAMERA has noted, former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage referred to Hezbollah as the A team? of terror groups.

Although the majority of analysts testified that Iranian proxies like Hezbollah pose a threat to the U.S. homeland, many news outlets failed to report their testimony. A Lexis-Nexis search showed that The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, USA Today, among others, did not report the analysts remarks. By contrast, The Washington Free Beacon provided a detailed report.

The failure of journalists to cover the story is striking considering the gravity of the testimony. Emanuele Ottolenghi, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and author of The Pasdaran: Inside Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, testified:

A survey of cases prosecuted against Hezbollah operatives in the past two decades shows that the terror group remains a threat to the security of the U.S. homeland and the integrity of its financial system. Iran and Hezbollah sought to carry out high casualty attacks against U.S. targets multiple times. Additionally, they built networks they used to procure weapons, sell drugs, and conduct illicit financial activities inside the United States.?

Ottolenghi noted that U.S. law enforcement arrested two Hezbollah operatives, Samer El Debek and Ali Mohammad Kourani, indicting them in May 2017 for casing targets for possible future terror attacks.? Both were members of Hezbollahs External Security Organization (ESO), also known as the Islamic Jihad Organization (IJO) or External Security Apparatus (ESA). ESO is tasked with carrying out terrorist attacks and other operations, such as money laundering and drug smuggling, throughout the world.

The two Hezbollah operativesboth naturalized U.S. citizensunderwent military training in Lebanon and procured explosives, as well as night-vision goggles and drone technology. Ottolenghi testified that El Debek scoped out potential targets, including New Yorks John F. Kennedy and La Guardia International Airports and the U.S. Armed Forces Career Center in Queens, New York. In 2007, Iranian proxies planned to blow up the fuel tanks at JFK airport, but were thwarted by authorities.



Nader Uskowi, a former policy adviser to the U.S. Central Command, told Congress that Iran is believed to have an auxiliary fighting force of around 200,000 militants spread across the Middle Eastmany of them battle hardened from fighting in the Syrian Civil War. "It doesn't take many of them to penetrate this country and be a major threat," Uskowi said. "They can pose a major threat to our homeland."

Such a threat warrants coverage from news providers; not silence.

Posted by SD at April 20, 2018 01:19 PM

Excellent and important article, (as usual), but the sentence: "The failure of journalists to cover the story is striking considering the levity of the testimony." appears to have a minor mistake in the use of the descriptive "levity," which implies light or humorous. "Gravity" might be a bit more appropriate.

Posted by: Alexander at April 27, 2018 03:57 AM

The DNC never heard of a terrorist that couldn't be made their friend.

Macron and Merkel are already attacking President Trump for taking a position to scuttle the Iranian deal instead of "fixing" it. The false assumption is it can be fixed.

Who was enemy number one after the election and had to be removed as a Trump appointee? A man who has constantly stated that Iran is America's number one enemy.

Make no doubt as more and more evidence is being unearthed that Comey, Mueller, Obama and the rest of the pro-Islamist cabal under the Johnson DOJ are political actors instead of stewards of American democracy that holds no religion or belief greater than any other. As long as there is an Ayatollah in Tehran the hatred they espouse will be the grist of radical lefties who mistakenly believe they share commonality with Islamists, larges parts of france and Germany have already been colonized. And that is their program here to impose sharia and kill literally secular civil law. It is hard to understand why lefties would embrace a partnership with these tyrants but then they think like tyrants too.

Posted by: terry m staub at April 28, 2018 08:06 AM

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Trump's Trade Confusion

Apr 5, 2018 JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ

Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, is University Professor at Columbia University and Chief Economist at the Roosevelt Institute. His most recent book is Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited: Anti-Globalization in the Era of Trump .

US President Donald Trump's recently announced import tariffs on steel, aluminum, and $60 billion in other goods that the US imports from China each year are in keeping with his record of responding to nonexistent problems. Unfortunately, while Trump captures the world's attention, serious real problems go unaddressed.

NEW YORK  The trade skirmish between the United States and China on steel, aluminum, and other goods is a product of US President Donald Trumps scorn for multilateral trade arrangements and the World Trade Organization, an institution that was created to adjudicate trade disputes.

Before announcing import tariffs on more than 1,300 types of Chinese-made goods worth around $60 billion per year, in early March Trump unveiledsweeping tariffs of 25% on steel and 10% on aluminum, which he justified on the basis of national security. Trump insists that a tariff on a small fraction of imported steel  the price of which is set globally  will suffice to address a genuine strategic threat.

Most experts, however, find that rationale dubious. Trump himself has already undercut his national-security claim by exempting most major exporters of steel to the US. Canada, for example, is exempted on the condition of a successful renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, effectively threatening the country unless it gives into US demands.

But there are a host of issues in contention, involving, for example, lumber, milk, and cars. Is Trump really suggesting that the US would sacrifice national security for a better agreement on these minor irritants in US-Canadian trade? Or perhaps the national-security claim is fundamentally bogus, as Trumps secretary of defense has suggested, and Trump, as muddled as he is on most issues, realizes this.2

As is often the case, Trump seems to be fixated on a bygone problem. Recall that, by the time Trump began talking about his border wall, immigration from Mexico had already dwindled to near zero. And by the time he started complaining about China depressing its currencys exchange rate, the Chinese government was in fact propping up the renminbi.

Likewise, Trump is introducing his steel tariffs after the price of steel has already increased by about 130% from its trough, owing partly to Chinas own efforts to reduce its excess capacity. But Trump is not just addressing a non-issue. He is also inflaming passions and taxing US relationships with key allies. Worst of all, his actions are motivated by pure politics. He is eager to seem strong and confrontational in the eyes of his electoral base.

Even if Trump had no economists advising him, he would have to realize that what matters is the multilateral trade deficit, not bilateral trade deficits with any one country. Reducing imports from China will not create jobs in the US. Rather, it willincrease prices for ordinary Americans and create jobs in Bangladesh, Vietnam, or any other country that steps in to replace the imports that previously came from China. In the few instances where manufacturing does return to the US, it will probably not create jobs in the old Rust Belt. Instead, the goods are likely to be produced by robots, which are as likely to be located in high-tech centers as elsewhere.

Trump wants China to reduce its bilateral trade surplus with the US by $100 billion, which it could do by buying $100 billion worth of US oil or gas. But whether China were to reduce its purchases from elsewhere or simply sell the US oil or gas on to other places, there would be little if any effect on the US or global economy. Trumps focus on the bilateral trade deficit is, frankly, silly.

Predictably, China has answered Trumps tariffs by threatening to respond to their imposition with tariffs of its own. Those tariffs would affect US-made goods across a wide range of sectors, but disproportionately in areas where support for Trump has been strong.

Chinas response has been firm and measured, aimed at avoiding both escalation and appeasement, which, when dealing with an unhinged bully, only encourages more aggression. One hopes that US courts or congressional Republicans will rein in Trump. But, then again, the Republican Party, standing in solidarity with Trump, seems suddenly to have forgotten its longstanding commitment to free trade, much like a few months ago, when it forgot its longstanding commitment to fiscal prudence.

More broadly, support for China within both the US and the European Union has been waning for a number of reasons. Looking beyond the US and European voters who are suffering from deindustrialization, the fact is that China is not the gold mine it was once perceived to be for American corporations.2

As Chinese firms have become more competitive, wages and environmental standards in China have risen. Meanwhile, China has been slow to open up its financial markets, much to the displeasure of Wall Street investors. Ironically, while Trump claims to be looking out for US industrial workers, the real winner from successful negotiations  which would spur China to open its markets further to insurance and other financial activities  is likely to be Wall Street.

Todays trade conflict reveals the extent to which America has lost its dominant global position. When a poor, developing China started increasing its trade with the West a quarter-century ago, few imagined that it would now be the worlds industrial giant. China has already surpassed the US in manufacturing output, savings, trade, and even GDP when measured in terms of purchasing power parity.

Even more frightening to many in the advanced countries is the real possibility that, beyond catching up rapidly in its technological competence, China could actually lead in one of the key industries of the future: artificial intelligence. AI is based on big data, and the availability of data is fundamentally a political matter that implicates issues such as privacy, transparency, security, and the rules that frame economic competition.

The EU, for its part, seems highly concerned with protecting data privacy, whereas China does not. Unfortunately, that could give China a large advantage in developing AI. And advantages in AI will extend well beyond the technology sector, potentially to almost every sector of the economy. Clearly, there needs to be a global agreement to set standards for developing and deploying AI and related technologies. Europeans should not have to compromise their genuinely held concerns about privacy just to promote trade, which is simply a means (sometimes) to achieving higher living standards.

In the years ahead, we are going to have to figure out how to create a fair global trading regime among countries with fundamentally different economic systems, histories, cultures, and societal preferences. The danger of the Trump era is that while the world watches the US presidents Twitter feed and tries not to be pushed off one cliff or another, such real and difficult challenges are going unaddressed.
A trove of rare bronze coins, the last remnants of a four-year Jewish revolt against the Roman Empire, has been discovered in a cave near the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

During the digs at the Ophel excavation site, led by Hebrew University archaeologist Eilat Mazar, dozens of coins as well as broken pottery vessels, jars and cooking pots were found dating back to the Great Revolt period (66-70 CE).

It is believed that these 1.5cm bronze coins were left behind by residents of Jerusalem who hid in a 7-by-15-meter cave for four years during the revolt-from the Roman siege of Jerusalem until the destruction of the Second Temple and the city of Jerusalem. The coins are well preserved, which Mazar says is because they were only in use for a short time.

The majority of the coins are from the final year, known as "Year Four" (69-70 CE). While coins from the earlier years of the revolt were inscribed "For the Freedom of Zion" (in Hebrew), those from Year Four were inscribed "For the Redemption of Zion."

"A discovery like this-ancient coins bearing the words 'Freedom' and 'Redemption'-found right before the Jewish Festival of Freedom, Passover, begins is incredibly moving," Mazar said.

The coins are decorated with Jewish symbols including the four plant species associated with Sukkot: palm, myrtle, citron and willow; and a picture of the goblet used in the Temple service.

Mazar said that the cave, located below the Temple Mount's southern wall, was left undiscovered and undisturbed since after the Second Temple period, making it a time capsule of life in Jerusalem during the revolt.

The findings were all uncovered during renewed Ophel excavations within the Walls Around Jerusalem National Park, directly above a Hasmonean period layer at the base of the cave.

The excavations were funded by the Herbert W. Armstrong College of Edmond, Oklahoma, whose students participate in the digs.

A similar number of "Year Four" coins were found near Robinson's Arch, near the Western Wall, by Prof. Benjamin Mazar, Eilat Mazar's grandfather. He conducted the Temple Mount excavations right after Israel's Six-Day War on behalf of Hebrew University's Institute of Archaeology.
(JNS)-While it is well known that Birthright trips provide American participants with a transformative, often life-changing experience, it is perhaps less known that the young Israelis who accompany the participants on the trip often have similarly transformative experiences.

Young Israelis Ayelet,* a 23-year-old computer scientist, and Racheli, a 22-year-old speech therapist, accompanied a Mayanot Birthright trip from March 12-19 with the goal of traveling the country with contemporaries eager to learn more about the life of young Israeli adults.

Both reported that contrary to what they had expected before the trip, the experience made them question stereotypes about Americans, contemplate their Jewish identity, and boost their pride about their own society and land.

Ayelet, who is in the midst of planning a summer trip abroad with friends, hoped that the experience would shed light on what it's like to meet foreigners and travel with the same group of people for a week.

Racheli, who has family in the United States, wanted to get to know other American Jews in hopes of doing another national service in America or joining a U.S. summer camp in the future.

Even after the first few days of the program, the American participants surprised both women, who had admittedly expected them to be a bit naive. Ayelet, who had "heard a lot about Taglit and Americans," said she was "amazed and surprised" when she found the participants to be "very nice and mature," as well as good conversationalists. Racheli noted that she could tell from their many questions that they "really wanted to know more, feel and discover Israel."

"In the desert star-gazing experience, I was so surprised about how people shared such deep thoughts," said Ayelet. "I was thinking about myself and my life in a particular way, and to hear how [broadly] others were thinking was really touching."

Racheli, who also found the desert experience particularly "deep and touching," added: "I can tell they had a goal when they came."

She told JNS that "the way they chose to share was amazing. In the desert, some people said such deep things about their families and challenges, and shared them with us."

'Not something you take for granted'

According to tour guide and Mayanot tour educator Daniel Charter, who led Ayelet's and Racheli's group, the connection between the American and Israeli participants is his favorite part of Birthright. "Being a part of this is my most important work; on the other hand, it is completely not dependent on me," he told JNS.

One of Mayanot's central programs of every Birthright trip is a workshop about Jewish identity, where participants and Israelis are asked to express what being a Jew means to them.

According to Charter, this activity-and Birthright, in general-"gives the Israelis a chance to see the Diaspora and its great challenges to Jewish life in a new light, while showing them what a special place they live in and what huge opportunities there are for making an impact while creating an adult life here."

Racheli reflected on this activity... "I had so many questions for the participants. We are all Jews, but it is so different. Everyone experiences Judaism as a completely different thing." She maintained that the activity made her delve into her own Jewish identity.

"It's easy to be Israeli and Jewish," she told JNS. "All my friends are Jewish, and I experience Israel every day. I don't get to think about [identity] that much. I just realized how hard it is to be Jewish in a non-Jewish country. I now think about it not as something you take for granted."

Similarly, Charter maintained that "it is a great irony of history that the current and next generation of Israelis take for granted the most amazing and even miraculous project of the Jewish people: the State of Israel."

Ayelet also discovered that while she loves being secular, the trip and its experiences helped her understand "how important it is that if I go abroad, I will keep Jewish traditions." She found it sad that many American Jews were only "Jew-ish," and before the trip didn't even grasp the enormity of the Holocaust, which she believes "is important because it's who I am."

In addition, both young Israelis (like the New Yorker who has never been to the Statue of Liberty) were able to visit important sites that-even living in Israel their entire life-they had not been to, such as Israel's Independence Hall in Tel Aviv. "It made me want to explore more of Israel, both new places and the places I already know," said Racheli.

Touring the country and seeing Israel from others' eyes actually opened the eyes of the two Israeli women as well. "The Americans said that what they really liked the most about Israel are the people. I knew that Israeli society was warm and accepting, but to hear it again makes me proud to live" here, Racheli told JNS. "I am more proud to be Israeli now."

Eliana Rudee Group photo of Mayanot 322

Likewise, Ayelet said that after visiting the Taglit-Birthright Israel Innovation Center-a display of Israeli technology, entrepreneurship, and advances in research and development-"I knew we were awesome! I really love Israel and it's a good place to live, but I realized at the innovation center how special we really are. When Israelis want to make a difference, we do it."

She added that she hopes the participants come away with a similar message and image, noting concern over the way the international press often covers Israel in a one-sided manner regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict and status of the Palestinians. Ayalet wants them to represent the "true Israel"-the positive, progressive people that they are-and to keep the negativity at bay.

Likewise, Racheli wants them "to get something from this journey for the rest of their lives, something that will change the way they see-and to feel and know they belong here."

* Name has been changed to protect privacy.
Leon Uris

(Embassy of Israel in Washington via JNS)-JNS is proud to partner with the Embassy of Israel in Washington, D.C., to celebrate 70 of the greatest American contributors to the U.S.-Israel relationship in the 70 days leading up to the State of Israel's 70th anniversary.

An American author of historical fiction, Leon Uris was known for his commitment to historical accuracy and extensive research. The people of Israel can be especially grateful that this literary giant brought the early history of Israel to the attention of millions of people throughout the Western world, making them sympathetic to the newly established Jewish state.

He achieved this through his epic 1958 novel "Exodus," which was so successful that it was later made into a film directed by Otto Preminger and starring Paul Newman. It is said to have been the best-selling novel in the United States since Gone with the Wind in 1936. By the mid-1960s, sales exceeded 5 million copies.

Uris's complex plot focused upon the 1947 efforts to take the SS Exodus into harbor in Palestine with its 4,500 refugees on board. Through the travails and romances of his characters, millions learned about the obstacles faced by the Jewish Agency in the 1940s, the oppression of British mandatory rule and the brutal hatred of the Arabs who followed the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Most of all, millions learned about the majestic achievement of Israel's creation.

Uris's novel reflected his astonishing research and his determination to get the smallest details right. To that end, he reportedly conducted more than 2,000 interviews in writing the book, and many of its characters are based on real people. While this was his method of writing for all his novels, Uris's connection with Israel was especially intense and passionate, reflecting his family's history. His father had fled tsarist Russia for Palestine, and though eventually emigrating to the United States, he changed the family name from Yerusalemsky to Uris-a variant of Yerushalemi, in honor of the capital.

Uris wrote other novels that told important Jewish stories, including "QB VII" about the Holocaust, "Mila 18," a depiction of the Warsaw-ghetto uprising, and "The Haj," about a Palestinian Arab family caught up in the area's historic events of the 1920s1950s.

But "Exodus" remains his greatest work. A fictional portrait based upon true events, David Ben-Gurion held it in high regard, asserting that "it's the greatest thing ever written about Israel."

John Hagee, Christians United for Israel

(Embassy of Israel in Washington via JNS)-John Hagee is an evangelical pastor based in San Antonio, Texas. Having served in the ministry for more than five decades, Hagee leads a church with 20,000-plus active members. He is a Christian Zionist, who believes that the Bible commands all believing Christians to support the State of Israel and the return of the Jewish people to their ancestral homeland.

As such, Hagee has had a long and generous relationship with the Jewish state. He has visited Israel numerous times and has met with every Israeli prime minister since Menachem Begin. His organization, John Hagee Ministries, has donated tens of millions of dollars towards humanitarian causes in Israel. For example, the ministry group donated millions of dollars earmarked for enabling Jews from the former Soviet Union to immigrate to Israel.

Hagee's spirited advocacy for the Jewish state has been a constant of his career. In 1981, his church hosted its inaugural "Night to Honor Israel"-an annual event held in San Antonio every year since-that celebrates the Jewish state and stresses the importance of a strong U.S.-Israel relationship. As a mark of its great success, the 2017 dinner raised more than $2 million for Israeli and Zionist charities and organizations. Since its inception, the "Night to Honor Israel" has raised more than $100 million for Jewish charities and the Jewish state.

John Hagee

In 2006, Hagee founded Christians United for Israel (CUFI) to give political expression to the voices of millions of devout Christians across America who support Israel. A testament to Hagee's commitment and vision, this grassroots organization has rapidly grown and now boasts some 4 million members. CUFI has become the largest pro-Israel Christian group in the United States, and one of Israel's most significant and vital sources of support in America. In addition to helping fund initiatives geared towards supporting Israel, this group also has dedicated significant resources for combating anti-Semitism around the world. As part of his activities for CUFI, Hagee has addressed members of the United States Congress, exhorting them to support Israel in any way they can by using their positions of power within the government.

John Hagee has been a true and devoted friend of Israel. His public and vocal support has been no small factor in solidifying the strong relationship between American evangelical Christians and Israel. In turn, this special relationship has been an important and lasting element in Israel's connection with America, its most crucial ally and friend.
A reflective thought...

What ever happened to "Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free"?

(Just saying.)

I received a letter...

The letter I received was sent from DAVID HARRIS, CEO of the American Jewish Committee (AJC). I pass it along to you in part:

"The Jewish stories handed down through our three-thousand-year-old tradition recount instances of persecution and hatred, but also examples of resilience and survival.

Now, let me ask you to consider a current story. It's the story of hate and anti-Semitism resurfacing in our own backyards. We saw synagogues vandalized... cemeteries desecrated... and throngs of white supremacists marching in our streets, waving Nazi flags alongside the Stars and Stripes. These are just a few examples of the anti-Semitism we've recently witnessed across the United States, and the situation in some European countries is even worse.

The hate we thought was waning has returned with a vengeance, as new anti-Semitic attacks are committed with alarming frequency. These attacks are intended to disrupt our lives, to make us feel weak and vulnerable. The AJC will not allow this to happen."

For further information, you can contact the AJC at 212-891-1456 or online at .

Remembering Jewish history...

On Feb. 5, 1997, Three Swiss banks-Union Bank of Switzerland, the Swiss Bank Corp. and Credit Suisse-initially agreed to allocate the equivalent of $71 million to a humanitarian Holocaust reparations fund as a good-faith gesture after years of pressure from the World Jewish Congress (WJC) about banking policies during and after World War II that were inimical to world Jewry.

Veteran scams...

As the widow of an Army veteran, the mother of a Navy veteran and an active Navy officer, I am concerned about scams against veterans.

Our veterans deserve a lot of things... praise, honor, security, respect...

Here's what they don't deserve: attempts to take advantage of their service. Yet every day, scammers attempt to defraud our veterans of their hard-earned benefits, steal their identity, or take their savings.

What can we do about it? To find out more, phone 877-908-3360 or go online to

(And thank you!)

Speaking of veterans...

My spouse was a veteran of the Korean War who is buried in the Military Cemetery at Bushnell. Just recently, two of his dear relatives from Israel, visited on a U.S. tour that took them to, among other places, New York, Washington, D.C. and Orlando, Florida. My son Ron (a Navy veteran) and I went to meet them. They were staying at the very posh Rosen Plaza Hotel not far from the theme parks.

IRIS ELON and her daughter, ADI, were a delight to spend time with. Iris is the beautiful daughter of cousins MENASHE and EVA ELON, and Adi is their adorable granddaughter. It had been many years since we were visited by Menashe and Eva so this was a particular treat for us.

(Incidentally, Iris and Adi agreed that of all the places in the U.S. that they visited, they loved Orlando best! And of all the places I've visited in the world, I loved Israel best!)

Speaking of Israel...

On Sunday, April 22, there will be an Israel Independence Day Festival to celebrate Israel's 70th birthday!

It will take place from 10 a.m until 4 p.m. at the Lake Eola Amphitheater, 195 N. Rosalind Avenue, Orlando.

There will be kosher food, live musical performances, children's activities, local vendors, Israeli dancing, photo ops and more!

(Hope to see you all there!)

For more information, contact ROBBY ETZKIN, executive director at 407-621-4031 or online at RobbyE@orlandojcc.org.

Cinema Sundays...

The next movie featured will be "Jackie" starring NATALIE PORTMAN and PETER SARSGAARD. It starts at 2 p.m. on Sunday, April 22, in the Senior Lounge of the Roth Family JCC in Maitland. Refreshments are also available.

JCC39ers Meet & Mingle Mondays...

On Monday, April 23, beginning at 1 p.m. in the Senior Lounge of the JCC in Maitland, there will be a meeting followed by a special program presented by SHELDON BROOK. It is a video titled "The Jewish American."

One for the road...

Ruth had just stepped out of the shower when she heard her doorbell ring.

"Who is it?" she shouted downstairs.

"It's the blind man," came the reply.

Ruth decided it didn't matter if she opened the door without any clothes on because the man was blind. In fact she thought it would be a rather daring thing to do.

So she opened the door wide and he said, "It's Macy's Department Store, downtown Orlando. Where do you want me to put these blinds?"
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Siesenthal Center, with Simon Gronowski and Alice Weit, who had a reunion 76 years after being separated by the Holocaust, at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles where they were honored, April 12, 2018.

LOS ANGELES (JTA)-When Alice (Gerstel) Weit last saw Simon Gronowski, she was 13 and he was 10 and, by Alice's recollection, "the most adorable boy ever." When they reunited this week, 76 years later, "I opened the door and there he was, a frail, little old man," she said.

At the threshold of Alice's apartment here, the old friends embraced, and they wept.

"They weren't talking; they were speaking with their eyes," said Simon's grandson Romain De Mys, 24, who witnessed the April 10 reunion.

Two days later, Alice and Simon were guests of honor during the Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom Hashoah, program at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.

Until recently, Alice had long believed that Simon-the little brother of her childhood best friend, Ita-had perished with his family at Auschwitz. It wasn't until last summer, after a family member's Internet search turned up Simon's memoir, that she learned he had survived the war.

"I broke down and cried like a little baby," Alice said.

A few weeks later, she found out that Simon was still alive and working as a lawyer in Brussels.

Simon was just as emotional when he received an email from one of Alice's sons saying that his mother was looking to reconnect.

"I replied right away that I want to see her," Simon said.

It's no wonder, given their families' unique connection. For 10 harrowing days in October 1941, as Alice, her mother and two siblings waited to be smuggled out of Nazi-occupied Belgium, they hid above the Gronowskis' leather goods store, which was frequented by Nazi officers. The Gronowskis risked their own lives to shelter the Gerstels.

When Alice and her family left that day, "I said goodbye, but I believed I'd see them again," Simon told JTA. "At this moment, I didn't know Auschwitz."

The Gerstels managed to escape Europe, traveling through France and Morocco before boarding a ship bound for Cuba. They ultimately resettled in the United States, where Alice married, had two children and worked as a real estate agent.

The Gestapo arrested Simon and his family in February 1943. They were sent to the Mechelen transit camp, then put on a train bound for Auschwitz. En route, the train was breached by the Belgian resistance, and some passengers were able to flee. With his mother's help, 11-year-old Simon jumped from the train and escaped through the woods. His mother, Chana, and sister Ita, who was on a subsequent convoy, would die at Auschwitz.

Young Simon was aided by a Belgian police officer, and he spent the remainder of the war sheltered in the homes of Catholic families. Simon's father, Leon, also survived the war in hiding, but died shortly thereafter, when Simon was only 13.

Years on, Simon put himself through law school, married (now divorced) and had two children. An amateur jazz pianist, Simon was invited in 2014 to play alongside filmmaker Woody Allen at New York's Carlyle Hotel, where Allen performs regularly with his band.

But for decades after the war, Simon did not talk about what he had endured. In 2002 he published a memoir, "The Child of the 20th Convoy," and began speaking in schools about what happened to his family during the Holocaust. When he stood before the crowd Thursday at the Museum of Tolerance, he said he ultimately decided to share his story "on behalf of victims of all barbarities," including those who died in the 20th century genocides in Armenia and Rwanda. He also decried the pernicious forces of hate and Holocaust denial, and called democracy " a struggle of everyday."

At Thursday's event, Alice praised Simon's mother, whom she credits with saving her family.

"Your mom was the personification of the saying, 'If you save one life, you save all humanity,'" she said.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which runs the Museum of Tolerance, told JTA that Holocaust memory is at a critical moment, as "a generation of perpetrators, victims, liberators and bystanders are all leaving the stage of history."

"The question is how will we be remembering the Shoah [Holocaust] after the eyewitnesses are gone?" said Cooper, citing Holocaust denial abroad, the rise of far-right candidates in the United States and a new study showing that many U.S. millennials lack a basic knowledge about the Holocaust.

The study found that 22 percent of respondents between the ages of 18 and 34 had not heard of the Holocaust or weren't sure if they had heard of it. The same survey, spearheaded by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, also revealed that 41 percent of respondents of all ages could not identity the concentration camp Auschwitz.

Against this backdrop, Cooper said Alice and Simon's reunion "is a sign of hope, but also a challenge, a reminder to step up."

In advance of Simon's arrival this week, Alice spent days preparing "a Yiddishe meal" of chopped liver, gefilte fish, matzah ball soup and brisket for her friend.

The reunion gave Simon an opportunity to connect with the closest thing he has to his lost family, said Dann Netter, one of Alice's sons.

"For us," Netter said, "it provides the opportunity to say thank you."
(JNS)-The recent missile strike on a military airbase deep in the central Syrian desert looks like the latest installment in a long-standing Israeli campaign to police its red lines against highly dangerous developments to its north.

Usually, such strikes are driven by incoming intelligence of threatening activity underway in Syria-activity that breaches Jerusalem's ban on Iran from constructing military bases in Syria, from setting up weapons factories there and from using Syria as a transit zone for the trafficking of advanced arms to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Iran is keen to cash in on its heavy investment and bloody involvement on behalf of the survival of Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime. That means attempting to expand the Iranian military presence on Syrian soil. Israel is determined to stop this at all costs.

By chance or not, the strike also comes amid fallout from the Syrian government's use of chemical weapons against rebel-held areas over the weekend, leading to warnings from President Donald Trump of likely military strikes in retaliation.

Nevertheless, the precise reason that triggered the latest strike remains unknown and can probably only be found in classified intelligence reports.

What is clear, however, is that over the past several years, Israel has reportedly carried out a series of strikes targeting the Iranian-led axis in Syria. If left unchecked, Iran would flood Syria with Shi'a militia groups and terrorist organizations, arm them with rockets and missiles, and set up terrorist cells. It would convert southern Syria into a new launch pad for attacks against Israel.

Iran's Quds Force, the elite overseas unit, and Hezbollah use Syria to manufacture and smuggle precision-guided ballistic missiles, heavy rockets, advanced surface-to-air missiles and surface-to-sea missiles. Israel has reportedly disrupted these activities on a regular basis.

Lebanon is already a well-established Iranian rocket base, filled to the brim with 120,000 rockets embedded in 200 Shi'a Lebanese villages. All of these projectiles are pointed at Israel. Under Iran's plans, Syria, too, would become a major threat.

The military base reportedly struck in the latest attack, known as "T4," has a history. In early February, Israeli fighter jets destroyed an Iranian drone control cabin that was stationed there, after Iranian operators sitting in it flew a drone into Israeli airspace. It's likely that the Iranian operators were killed in that attack.

According to reports that emerged on Monday, Iranian military personnel were killed in Monday's strike as well. That would seem to indicate that whatever was going on at the T4 airbase-hundreds of kilometers from the Israeli border-constituted a serious security threat to Israel, and that Iran has again tested the waters, seeing how far it can go in building up its military presence before provoking an Israeli response.

This dangerous pattern looks set to continue. Each incident represents a potential escalation point that can spiral into a wider conflict between Israel and the radical Shi'a axis that is taking over much of the Middle East.

The Russian complication

What makes this situation more tense is the fact that Russia acts as the air force of the Shi'a axis in Syria. Russian airpower helped turn the tide of the war in Assad's favor, a fact that has probably given the Syrian dictator the confidence to unleash the horrors of chemical warfare on Sunni areas and make a mockery of the international community in the process.

Russia has, through its waves of airstrikes in Syria, gained a warm-water port at Syria's Tartus naval base, and it has an airbase at Hmeimim on the Syrian coastline. It has moved advanced air-defense batteries to Syria. Moscow has used its intervention to position itself as a superpower actor in the Middle East. Meanwhile, the United States has decreased its influence in Syria to a bare minimum.

Israel seeks no conflict with Russia but is unwilling to ignore the activities of Moscow's allies-something Israel has communicated to Russia repeatedly.

The Russians have so far been able to help de-escalate the situation by convincing their radical and dubious allies to tone down their responses to Israel's self-defense actions. The Iranian axis may not have needed much convincing; it remains fundamentally deterred by Israel's vast firepower and intelligence capabilities. Iran is intent on consolidating its control of Syria at this stage, rather than opening a new active front against Israel right now, which would risk its entire Syrian project. But if it succeeds in its goal of converting Syria into a new base of hostility towards Israel, there can be no doubt that, sooner or later, it will activate this front.

These events put Russia's project in Syria at risk, and this poses a complication. Any full-scale conflict that erupts would place the Assad regime in existential danger, and Russia could see its investment go down the drain.

Statements released by Moscow on Monday indicate Russian displeasure at Israel's alleged actions.

Yet Israel has responded that it will not blink when it comes to defending its security.

It's also hard to ignore the fact that the alleged Israeli strike came hours after a horrendous chemical massacre was carried out, once again, by the Assad regime against a rebel-held area. Scenes of men, women and children murdered through the use of chemical-weapons agents have once again flooded the world, with an ally of Iran and Russia-the Assad regime-again committing a ghastly crime against humanity.

As a result, it cannot be ruled out that the latest attack also served as an Israeli signal of intolerance to the usage of chemical weapons in the region.

Whatever triggered the strike, one thing seems certain: Iran will continue to test Israel's lines, and Israel will continue to enforce them.
JERUSALEM (JTA)The latest alleged chemical attack on a town in Syria by government forces shows that the international organizations established after the Holocaust to prevent genocides have failed, a Yad Vashem official said.

Avner Shalev, chairman of the Holocaust memorial and museum in Jerusalem, also condemned the indifference of the world community to such crimes against humanity.

In light of the horrific images emanating from Syria over recent days of the mass killings of civilians, including children, in the chemical attack, it would appear that the mechanisms and international bodies developed after the Holocaust to prevent the recurrence of crimes against humanity are failing, he wrote in a statement released Tuesday by Yad Vashem.

The terrible scenes we are witnessing, right across our border, are a result of and continue to occur due to the indifference of the world. I call on the global community not to stand on the sidelines, but to act determinedly to put an end to the human suffering and provide humanitarian aid to the victims.

Shalev made his remarks ahead of Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, held annually in Israel on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

At least 40 people were killed Saturday in an alleged chemical attack on the rebel-held town of Douma, located east of the capital, Damascus. Video footage released online Sunday showed the dead, including whole families, lying on floors with white foam around their mouths, signifying possible nerve agents. Other footage showed full clinics where workers were hosing down patients and treating them with respirators.

President Donald Trump on Monday called the attack heinous and promised a forceful response.
(ISRAEL21c)-Take a journey through the last 70 years to discover how Israel has become one of the most creative and innovative countries in the world.

Israel was founded on May 14, 1948.

In the Hebrew calendar, it was 5 Iyar, 5708 (which is on April 20 this year).

 Israel is founded a few hours before the British Mandate is due to expire. Eleven minutes later, the United States becomes the first country to recognize the Jewish state when it grants Israel de facto recognition. On May 15, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Syria invade Israel. The War of Independence lasts 13 months.

 The Supreme Court of Israel is inaugurated, the Israeli lira replaces the Palestinian pound, the Israeli flag becomes the state's official flag.

 El Al, Israel's new national airline, operates its maiden flight, bringing Israel's first president, Prof. Haim Weizmann, home from a diplomatic visit to Geneva.

 The new country's population numbers 806,000.

Operation Magic Carpet begins in 1949

Some 49,000 endangered Yemenite Jews, and some from countries including Saudi Arabia, are airlifted to Israel in a secret operation involving 380 flights by British and American transport planes taking off from Aden.

The Law of Return is formally enacted-1950

Israel's Law of Return, approved by the Knesset on July 5, entitles anyone of Jewish matrilineal descent, or a Jewish convert, to immigrate to Israel and obtain full citizenship.

The law was later amended to state that the same rights are also vested in a child and a grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew, except for a person who had been Jewish and voluntarily changed his or her religion.

Conquering the desert-1953

 The Israel Prize, the state's highest cultural honor, is awarded for the first time. The nine recipients represent the fields of Jewish studies, literature, education, social science, medical science, fine arts, exact sciences and life sciences.

 The Conquest of the Desert world's fair opens in Jerusalem, focusing on the themes of reclamation and population of desert area. Some 600,000 people visit the fair.

Israel pledges to help the developing world-1957

MASHAV, Israel's Agency for International Development Cooperation, is founded by Golda Meir after a visit to the newly independent African states, to share Israeli expertise with developing nations. Since its establishment within the Foreign Ministry, MASHAV has trained close to 270,000 course participants from approximately 132 countries in Israel and abroad and has developed dozens of demonstration projects. MASHAV provides technical and emergency assistance across the globe.

National telephone dialing is introduced linking Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa.

El Al flies nonstop from New York-1961

El Al Israel Airlines, established in 1948, begins flying nonstop between Tel Aviv and New York, setting a world record for the longest nonstop flight.

Water to the desert-1964

 The National Water Carrier is completed, bringing water from Israel's north to the parched south. The development is a major step forward in enabling Israel to turn the Negev Desert into the center of crop production in Israel.

 Osem introduces Bamba, Israel's favorite peanut snack. In 2015, A British study proved what Israeli parents had long suspected, that this addictive treat, given to children in Israel from a young age, could help prevent peanut allergies.

 Batsheva Dance company is founded by Martha Graham and Baroness Batsheva de Rothschild. It has become Israel's premiere dance troupe.

 Motorola becomes the first US corporation to set up an R&D unit in Israel. The center initially develops wireless products and later moves into chip production.

Three million and counting-1967

The three millionth citizen arrives in Israel on Jan. 12. Absorption Minister Nathan Peled presents certificates to a 62-year-old Russian Jew, his wife and daughter. The daughter's husband was not allowed to leave the USSR.

Introduction of the shekel-1980

The lira is replaced by the shekel (1 shekel = 10 lirot) as Israel's national currency. The word "shekel" derives from a biblical unit of weight of approximately one ounce (12 grams). The "new Israeli shekel" (NIS) introduced on Jan. 1, 1986, is still in use, available in coin and banknote forms.

Operation Moses brings Ethiopians to Israel-1984

7,000 Ethiopian Jews are flown to Israel from Sudan in a covert mission called Operation Moses to rescue them from famine and civil war. Over a seven-week period, 30 flights each bring around 200 Ethiopians to Israel. In 1991, Operation Solomon brings a further 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel over a period of 36 hours.

Russian Jews begin to emigrate to Israel en masse-1989

Start of mass immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union. Between 1989 and 2006, more than one million Russians emigrated to Israel, transforming the culture, high-tech industry, education system and politics of the country. Many of the well-educated new immigrants gave Israel's developing high-tech industry a valuable boost. Migrants from the former Soviet Union now make up 15 percent of the Israeli population, and one in four staff members at Israel's universities are native Russian speakers, with an even higher concentration in the sciences.

Peace with Jordan-1994

Israel and Jordan sign a peace treaty and subsequently open their borders, allowing tourists, business people and workers to travel freely between the two countries.

First desalination plant opens-1997

Israel opens its first reverse osmosis desalination plant, in Eilat. Since then, five more desalination plants have opened along Israel's Mediterranean shore-in Ashkelon, Palmachim, Hadera, Soreq and Ashdod-providing about 60 percent of domestic water needs. Though not without some environmental issues, these plants have helped relieve Israel's chronic water shortages.

 Jaap van Rijn files his second patent for a unique zero-discharge system for fish farming anywhere, using extremely limited amounts of water and without harming the environment, enabling farmers to raise fish even in the desert.

Tel Aviv celebrates its centennial-2009

A young Yemenite nurse reading to new immigrants at a camp in Rosh Ha'ayin.

Tel Aviv celebrates its 100th anniversary. In the last decade or so, Tel Aviv (which has both more vegans per capita and more dog owners per capita in the world) has won accolades from all over the world, being named third best city in the world by Lonely Planet, ultimate party city, best gay city, one of theworld's top action-packed cities, best beach party spot on the planet, best culinary destination, and even home to the most beautiful people in the world.

Israel ranks in top 10 most powerful, innovative nations-2018

 U.S. News and World Report ranks Israel the eighth most powerful nation in the world. Bloomberg News names the Jewish state the 10th most innovative worldwide, edging out the United States.

To read more of Israel's accomplishments in the last 70 year, visit http://www.israel21c.org/70-years-of-israeli-milestones-in-165-seconds.
It is that time of year once again when Heritage Florida Jewish News is putting out feelers for one outstanding person in the Jewish community who has given his or her time or talent or monetary gifts to better the Orlando Jewish community. Nominations for the 2018 Heritage Human Service Award are now being accepted and the award will be presented at the annual meeting of the Jewish Federation of Greater Orlando in August.

For more than 28 years, individuals who have made major, voluntary contributions of their talent, time, energy and effort to the Central Florida community have been honored with the selection and presentation of this award, said Jeff Gaeser, editor and publisher of the Heritage. Last years recipient was Sara Stern. Former recipients have included Bernie Raff (2015), Loren London (2014), and Nina Oppenheim (2013).

According to Gaeser, Each recipient chose their own path, but made considerable and long-lasting contributions to the Jewish community. Nominees for the 2018 award are individuals who do not look for recognition, but perform tikun olanrepairing the worldout of internal motivation.

Nominations should be emailed to news@orlandoheritage.com with the subject Human Service Award, or typed on 8 1/2 x 11 paper and sent by mail to Heritage Florida Jewish News, Human Service Award, 207 OBrien Road, Suite 101, Fern Park, FL 32730. Included should be the name and phone number of the nominee, a documented list of his or her accomplishments, and the name and phone number of the nominator(s).

The Heritage is accepting nominations until Friday, June 8.
In a press conference late Thursday night, officials announced that teachers across the state of Arizona have voted to strike.

The walkout date is set for April 26, following three days of school walk-ins next week. There were about 57,000 votes cast from school employees across the state, and 78 percent voted yes.

The announcement was made by both Arizona Education Association officials and organizers of the teacher-led Facebook group Arizona Educators United, which has about 45,000 members. Social media has been a driving force for this wave of teacher activism in Arizona.

This is undeniably and clearly a mandate for action, said Joe Thomas, the president of the state teachers union.

He added that educators were demanding actionmore school funding and a teacher pay raisefrom the state legislature and the governor. Gov. Doug Ducey has said he will urge the state legislature to pass a 20 percent pay raise for teachers. But many educators have remained skeptical of the plan, questioning where the money will come from. The states Parent Teacher Association has pulled its support from Duceys plan, calling it financially unsustainable .

Noah Karvelis, a music teacher and an organizer of Arizona Educators United, told reporters that he didnt want to put any limitations on how long the walkout would last.

Were truly in a state of crisis right now, he said, referencing crumbling public school infrastructure, broken desks, and outdated textbooks.

The voting took place over three days, after a series of peaceful demonstrations and electrifying protests calling for better pay and more school funding. Arizona teachers, on average, make about $48,000 a yearabout $10,000 less than the national average.

Teachers in Oklahoma recently concluded a nine-day walkout, as did West Virginia teachers last month . West Virginia teachers received a 5 percent pay raise after their strike. Oklahomas walkout ended on a more mixed note: Teachers received a $6,100 pay raise and some additional funding for schools, but legislators refused to bend to the teachers demands in full.

In Arizona, striking is illegal for teachers, according to a 1971 opinion by the states attorney general at the time. Teachers could be fired or have their teaching licenses revoked. But according to the Arizona Daily Star, the superintendent of the Tucson Unified districtthe largest in the statesaid teachers wont lose their jobs if they strike .

This is not a confrontation, Gabriel Trujillo told reporters. The #RedForEd movement and our teachers have been wonderful. Theyve exhibited great leadership in this movement, and certainly we dont view any of their actions as anti-Tucson Unified School District.

Corrected: An earlier version of this story misstated the pay raise West Virginia teachers received after their strike. They received a 5 percent pay raise.

Image: Teachers Cassi Igo and Andrew Brothers cast their ballots on the walkout outside Paseo Verde Elementary School on April 18 in Peoria, Ariz. Matt York/AP
(JTA)-Israel attacked Syria, just like it (reportedly) has countless times before.

The difference now is that Russia is angry about the strike-and showing it.

Russia has called out Israel publicly, condemned the attack and summoned the Israeli ambassador to "discuss developments." The alleged strike, which the Israeli government has not acknowledged, came soon after a Syrian chemical weapons attack on civilians. But the two attacks might not be connected.

Here's a quick rundown of why Israel is bombing Syria, why it officially pretends it isn't, and why Russia is upset about it.

Israel has attacked Syrian targets many, many times.

Israel does not like Syria-and it hates Syria's ally, Iran.

Israel and Syria are technically in a state of war, but have not engaged in sustained armed conflict since the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Instead, the two sides have fought through Syrian-funded proxies like the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah. When the civil war in Syria began in 2011, Israel stayed neutral, providing some humanitarian aid to victims on the border but otherwise remaining out of the fray.

The exception has been Israeli strikes against Syrian weapons convoys en route to Hezbollah. When Syrian President Bashar Assad's government was at risk of collapse in the past, Israel worried that it would send its most powerful ordnance to Hezbollah, which has a stated aim of destroying Israel.

Now, as Assad is nearing the defeat of the Syrian rebels, Israel is worried that Iran will set up permanent military bases in the country, at Israel's doorstep. Iran's leaders have pledged to wipe Israel off the map, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu incessantly accuses Iran of seeking to develop nuclear weapons that would existentially threaten Israel.

In February, Israel and Iran engaged in rare direct conflict over Syria: Iran launched a drone from a Syrian base into Israel, and Israel responded by bombing the base. Syria shot down an Israeli plane.

Monday's Israeli strike targeted the same base as in February, killing 14 people. It came shortly after Assad reportedly murdered at least 40 of his own citizens with chemical weapons, but Israel's attack does not appear to be in response.

Russia is angry this time.

Ever since Russia increased its involvement in the civil war in 2015, sending soldiers and materiel to Syria, Israel has tried to stay on Russia's good side.

That year, the two countries agreed to coordinate military plans over Syria so they would not accidentally attack each other. And Netanyahu has tried to cozy up to President Vladimir Putin in various other ways-publicly thanking Russia for the Soviet Union's role in defeating the Nazis, and staying silent on Russia's seizure of Crimea and its invasion of Ukraine.

But Russia-Israel relations have always been fraught. The Soviet Union cut off ties with Israel after the latter's victory in the 1967 war, re-establishing them only as the Soviet government was collapsing. And today, the two nations find themselves on opposite sides of the international order. Israel is allied with the United States, while Russia is still allied with Syria and Iran, two of Israel's worst enemies.

Monday's strike targeted a base where Russian personnel might have been present, and Russia is complaining that it was not told of the strike in advance. So this time it's not letting Israel's bombings go unmentioned.

Israel usually keeps quiet about the attacks.

How many times has Israel attacked Syria since 2012? Few people, if any, know the exact number, so reports have relied on estimates like dozens, scores, even hundreds.

Israel does not want to be seen as supporting one side of the complex conflict or becoming involved directly in the war. When Israeli officials do allude to the strikes, they focus on preventing threats to Israel, not bolstering Assad, the rebels, Islamists or anyone else.

Netanyahu acknowledged these strikes last year. And on Monday, following the strike, he did say "We have one clear and simple rule, and we seek to express it constantly: If someone tries to attack you, rise up and attack him."
In early winter 2017, Sheri Morton, a thirty-year resident of Osceola County and a political activist, was very concerned about the upswing in anti-Semitic incidents that were occurring throughout Florida and the nation.

"I was scared," said Sheri, who is Jewish, "and so were many of my friends."

Morton's fears were supported by statistics. According to the Anti-Defamation League's report, anti-Semitic incidents in the United States had surged more than one-third in 2016 and jumped 86 percent in the first quarter of 2017. There was a massive increase in the amount of harassment of American Jews, particularly since November 2016, and a doubling in the amount of anti-Semitic bullying and vandalism at non-denominational K-12 grade schools.

Morton contacted Darren Soto, who had been elected in November 2016 to represent Florida's 9th Congressional District. Prior to being elected to Congress, Soto had served for four years in the Florida Senate and five in the Florida House of Representatives, representing parts of Orlando and the Central Florida area. Morton and Soto had been in contact throughout his political career.

"Can you do anything to help?" Morton asked.

Soto, originally from New Jersey and the son of a Puerto Rican father and Italian mother, knew many Jews from his background as well as his law practice and political experience. He suggested planning an event during Purim. The annual holiday commemorates an historical event that took place in ancient Persia in which Jews, threatened by those who wished to hurt them, survived because of the actions of Jews and non-Jews working together to defeat an evil force.

Representative Soto wished to recognize the relevance of the holiday to the current political climate. On March 12, 2017, he and his staff hosted the first public Congressional event ever held in the 9th Congressional District for the Jewish community, a Purim gathering at his office in Kissimmee. Over 50 people from the surrounding Jewish communities, including members of local synagogues and Solivita's Shalom Club, shared hamantaschen that Soto's staff provided from New York City. Joining Soto were John Cortes, who represents Northern Osceola County in the Florida House of Representatives, and Russell Gibson, Sheriff of Osceola County.

"By coming forward and welcoming the Jewish community into his office," said Morton, "Darren took a stand against prejudice and racism." Morton said that Soto's actions set an example for other government officials throughout Florida, encouraging others to work against the racist acts that have targeted the Jewish community.

The event was so successful that Rep. Soto decided to make the "Purim Forum" an annual event. On March 2, 2018, the Jewish community was again invited to his office for hamantaschen and a light lunch. Morton introduced the congressman to the group of over 60 people. Marilyn Glaser, the president of Congregation Shalom Aleichem in Kissimmee, retold the story of Purim that was rightfully interrupted with noisemakers each time Haman, the villain's name, was mentioned.

During the event, Rep. Soto shared stories of his recent visit to the Holy Land, which he detailed in a later interview with me.

Soto and other members of a Democratic Congressional Delegation traveled to Israel in August 2017 as guests of the American Israel Education Foundation, a branch of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The five-day tour included visits to key strategic sites, including defense and technology projects; Gaza, Syrian and Lebanon borders; the Golan Heights; Jewish, Christian, and Islamic sites; and Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial and Museum. On Aug. 7, both Democratic and Republican members of Congress met with President Netanyahu. The goal of the visit was to learn about issues critical to the United States-Israeli relationship and international security.

Rep. Soto said that the trip was both exhausting and enchanting. He climbed up to Masada and floated in the Dead Sea. He met with traditional, secular, and Hasidic Jews; African Christian Arabs, and Muslim Arabs. While visiting the Golan Heights, he spoke to a veteran of the 1967 Six Day War while mortar fire sounded in the background. He met with a young Israeli soldier whose young children lived only three miles from the Lebanon border. "We can't afford to make mistakes," she told Soto. He also had an "eye-opening meeting" with the commerce secretary of the PLO.

Israelis garnered Soto's respect in other ways. The people are "hard working, very liberal minding regarding equal rights and democracy," he said. Soto was also impressed with "fierceness of political debate" among Israelis that is balanced with respect for each side.

Rep. Soto was surprised by the overwhelming number of olive trees the Israelis have planted. "The trees literally stopped at the Israeli border," said Soto. "To me it is symbolic of the cultivation-the sweat and toil-the Jewish people have put into the former desert."

Rep. Soto compared the Jews who came to Israel to the Cuban people, many who live in his district. "It is a sheer miracle that both groups not only survived but also were able to do so many wonderful things," he said. "We know how fragile Israel is, and the country-one of our strongest allies- requires American commitment."

Rep. Soto reflected on Israel's upcoming 70th anniversary, commenting that the milestone shows the fortitude of the Jewish people. "A strong American-Israeli relationship has fostered that security," said the congressman. "We need to make sure to continue those investments going forward."
(JNS)-If you've ever been in Israel for Yom Hazikaron-the Memorial Day for those who gave the ultimate sacrifice for the Jewish homeland-chances are you will never forget it.

Even if you somehow miss the official ceremonies honoring the fallen, there's no way to sleep through the siren sounding across the Jewish state at 8 p.m. and then again at 11 the next morning. At that moment, Israelis everywhere freeze in mid-air-mid-bank deposit, mid-math lesson, mid-email or mid-carpool-while traffic screeches to a halt, and folks climb out of their cars and stand completely silent.

Both instances represent a long minute of stillness in a country not known for its reticence, when the entire nation of Israel stops to remember the 23,632 soldiers and security forces who have given their lives to defend the State of Israel.

Unless you are Israeli or related to someone who gave their life for their country, you might not see the bereaved parents, brothers, sisters, widows and orphans who gather every year at Mount Herzl on this day to mourn and reflect at the gravesites of loved ones.

The Mizlavi family is among the throngs who congregate there every year to pay their respects to brother-uncle-cousin Tzadok Mizlavi, a 28-year-old graphics artist at The Jerusalem Post who was killed in the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

"Most Israelis have lost someone," says his younger sister, Tzadika Mizlavi. So when asked to participate in a new project to honor the 23,632 for Israel's 70th anniversary this spring, Mizlavi, a teacher at the Shulamith School for Girls in Brooklyn, N.Y., was quick to say "yes."

"Not only is it special for me, but we really want our girls to understand the sacrifices made so we could have Israel," says Mizlavi, who was 24 when her brother was killed. "I'll never forget my father saying at the shiva: 'May he be the last to die.' "

'Keep their memories alive'

This year, in addition to established traditions, a new way exists for Jews around the globe to honor these fallen heroes. By this Yom Hazikaron on April 17-18, each one of the 23,632 should have at least one kind or sacred act done in his or her memory.

Launched in February, "Yizkereim: Honor Israel's Fallen" (Yizkereim is Hebrew for "remember them") has already collected more than 21,000 acts of chesed ("kindness"), be it public service, prayer, Torah learning or tzedakah ("charity") by a Jew somewhere in the world in the memory of the fallen.

A project of the international Jewish outreach organization Olami, in partnership with the Afikim Foundation and Israel's Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, Yizkereim is designed to "keep each soldier's memory alive with positive actions done in their memory," says Karen Hochberg, who runs community programming for Afikim. "I'm so impressed with the creative and caring actions people have already performed."

When they're posted on the website (www.honorisraelsfallen.com), bereaved families can read about these acts done in their loved one's name. And hundreds of them, Hochberg reports, have asked to be connected with the Diaspora Jews who are honoring their fallen soldier.

Though many of these good deeds are planned, Steven Grutman's tribute to Shlomo Ashkenazi was a spontaneous one. Strolling through the streets one afternoon in Washington, D.C., the University of Maryland junior spied a man who appeared homeless and hungry. "I told him I was going to get some dinner and did he want to come with me." The man quickly accepted, adding that he'd never eaten Mexican food before but was willing to try.

Over dinner, the man said he'd been out of work for a few years. "And he loved the Mexican food," adds Grutman. "Feeding him felt like the right thing to do in this soldier's memory."

To date, some 190 schools, congregations and groups had signed on to the project, and more than 21,000 positive actions have been performed or pledged in soldiers' memories. Hochberg's goal: "To use each act of goodness to keep their memories alive."

As part of the effort, the schools receive a film, banners, a poster and yahrtzeit candles. In addition, each act of chesed leaves a "lit" virtual candle "burning" on the website. A culminating event for "Yizkereim: Honor Israel's Fallen" is scheduled for Yom Hazikaron, on April 17 at the Queens Museum in Queens, N.Y., the same building where the United Nations voted to approve Israeli independence back in 1947.

Rabbi Joel Landau of San Francisco's Adath Israel Congregation had an extra motivation for pledging his congregants to honor 100 fallen soldiers: He served in the Israel Defense Forces in the 1980s and saw friends die for the cause. "But besides my personal connection, I believe Israel is the land of all Jews, and these are our boys who died for our homeland. They paid the price for all of us, so we owe them a huge debt of gratitude."

It's especially powerful, adds the rabbi, when families take on the project together, "when it's not their teachers or their rabbi, but their parents showing how important Israel and these heroes are by doing something meaningful as a family in their memory."

'We're one people'

At 37, Olami COO David Markowitz is too young to recall most of the wars that resulted in these casualties, but old enough to appreciate the impact their sacrifice has on contemporary Jewry. And, like other Olami partnership programs-connecting 25,000 students and young adults to Jewish engagement, learning and practice each week-the Yizkereim campaign is also active on college campuses. "When we get to know about our fallen soldier's life and then we grow ourselves in some way Jewishly to honor him, it pulls Diaspora Jews and Israelis together," says Markowitz. "It reminds us that we're one people."

To maximize participation, the website has been translated into Russian, Spanish and French, along with Hebrew and English.

This project is a rare opportunity for Diaspora Jews to honor Israelis who've made the greatest sacrifice, stresses Michal Nordmann, a Tel Aviv mother of three who moved to Israel five years ago and now directs communications for Olami. "When we lived in America, there was no siren on this day, no ceremony where we could sing "Hatikvah" with a thousand other Jews," she says. "These soldiers gave up their lives not so we'd have a nice place to vacation, but so we would have our ancient homeland back-a place that all Jews around the world can call home."

Educator Mizlavi of New York says that "to have a Jewish teen in America doing something in the name of our brother so many years later, it means so much. None of us ever dreamed something like this would happen."

To sign up your family, school, club or congregation for Yizkereim, visit: honorisraelsfallen.com.
(JNS)Radical Jewish students at Harvard University are planning to hold a late Liberation Seder to protest the continuing occupation by Israel.

On Thursday, April 5, six days after all other Jews around the world held their Passover seders, the Progressive Jewish Alliance held its event to protest our communitys support for the occupation and to ask Are you for endless occupation, or for freedom and dignity for all?

I have a question for these students: Have you ever taken a course in the history of modern Israel?

Either the answer is no, or they took it and flunked. Because anyone who is familiar with even the most cursory facts about the Mideast knows that Israels occupation of the Palestinians ended 23 years ago.

Heres a very brief history lesson for the Harvard students.

When Yitzhak Rabin was elected prime minister in 1992, he faced a dilemma. On the one hand, he recognized that establishing a Palestinian state in Judea-Samaria-Gaza would pose a grave threat to Israels existence. Israel would be just nine miles wide in its middle, living next to a state run by terrorists and fascist dictators.

On the other hand, Rabin didnt want Israel to continue ruling over the Palestinian Arabs who reside in those territories. So he and his aides devised the Oslo Accords, which ended Israels occupation of the Palestinians and gave them something close to statehood, but without endangering Israel.

In 1995, Rabin withdrew Israels forces from the cities in Judea-Samaria, where 98 percent of the Palestinians reside. Ariel Sharon later withdrew from all of Gaza. The Israeli occupation of the Palestinians came to an end. The only occupation of the Palestinians currently in force is the 23-year occupation by the Palestinian Authority and the occupation of Gaza by Hamas, which is now entering its 11th year.

The Palestinians schools are run by Palestinian principals and teachers. The courts have Palestinian judges. The streets are policed by the Palestinian police and security forces. When elections are held, the candidates and the voters are all Palestinians. Pretty much the only thing that the Palestinian Authority cant do is import tanks, planes, Iranian volunteers or North Korean missiles.

The only time Israeli troops enter Palestinian areas is when they are chasing terrorists. Going into some Palestinian town for an hour or two to catch a bomb-thrower or a sniper hardly constitutes an occupation of the Palestinians.

The current situation in the territories is not a perfect solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. But we live in an imperfect world.

Thanks to Rabin, todays status quo ensures Israels Jewish majority, retains Israels defensible borders and guarantees all faiths free access to their religious sites. It also allows nearly all of the Palestinians to live under their own government. The Israeli military is not patrolling the Palestinians cities. Palestinian Arabs live in an entity that is close to statehood in every respect, except the few aspects that would most endanger Israels existence.

Dear Harvard students: I admire your idealism. Too many students get so caught up in the pursuit of personal professional success that they forget whats happening in the world around them. Im glad you care about something bigger than yourselves.

And I respect your creativity. Youre not satisfied with the dry, uninspired repetition of Jewish rituals and ceremonies. Judaism is indeed relevant in todays world. The themes of the Passover seder do have something to say to us. You are right to look deeper into its meaning.

But Im sorry to say that in this case, youve got it all wrong. You made assumptions about the occupation without actually reading up on its history, and learning how the situation has developed and changed.

There! I just saved your parents several thousand dollars in tuition for the spring semester.

Stephen M. Flatow, a vice president of the Religious Zionists of America, is an attorney in New Jersey. He is the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995.
(JNS)There is a tragic account of the last moments of Grigori Zinoviev, the veteran Russian Bolshevik leader of Jewish descent who was executed by Stalin in 1936. According to the historian Donald Rayfield, on the journey from his prison cell to the execution cellar, the broken Zinoviev clung to the boots of his guards and was taken down by stretcher.

This scene, Rayfield continues in his book on Stalins crimes, was re-enacted several times at supper at Stalins dacha, the bodyguard Karl Pauker playing the part of Zinovievbegging for Stalin to be fetched and then crying out, Hear, O Israeluntil even Stalin found the charade distasteful.

The image of a Jew desperately mumbling the Shema as he prepares to meet his executioner certainly inspires pity, even a Jew like Zinoviev, who spent his entire career building a totalitarian state apparatus that crushed the Soviet Jewish community while at the same time proclaiming anti-Semitism to be the enemy of the workers.

But more than any of this, embedded in this story are deeper lessons about the relationship between Jews and the left that warrant closer attentionirrespective of whether you are someone convinced that the left can be rescued from its present, destructive obsession with a caricature of Zionism, or whether you believe that this same caricature is hard-wired into the lefts worldview.

At the heart of the spectacle in Stalins dacha was contemptnot just for Zinoviev as a supposed traitor, but also as the embodiment of the feeble, ingratiating Jew who will say or do anything to preserve himself. This anti-Semitic stereotype long predated the period of Communist rule, of course, but its persistence was entirely in keeping with a revolutionary program that regarded any expression of Jewish identitywhether religious, secular, cultural or nationalas counter-revolutionary.

That is essentially why the Jewish encounter with socialism in most of its forms has been a disaster. In Russia and Eastern Europe more widely, this was true under Lenin, when a special Jewish section of the Communist Party was created for the express purpose of shutting down separate Jewish institutions; and it was true under Stalin and his successors, whose discriminatory campaigns in the name of anti-Zionism terrorized Jewswhether or not they were members of the Communist Partyacross Russia, as well as in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Poland and other Warsaw Pact countries.

In the West, while many centrist social democrats have been among the greatest friends of Israel and the Jewish people, the remainder of the left largely incorporated ideological hostilities reminiscent of the Soviet regime. When the New Left emerged in the 1960s, its libertarian suspicions of the repressive Soviet society didnt prevent the adoption of a demonized view of Zionism straight out of the Soviet playbook; some of the movements graduates (in Germany, ironically) were even recruited by Palestinian terrorist groups to organize attacks on Jewish and Israeli targets. Meanwhile, in this century, the moderate centrist left, with some honorable exceptions, has been at best passive in the face of a virulent, Soviet-style campaign against Zionism that has involved boycotts, harassment and occasional violence not against the Israeli military or government, but directed at ordinary Jews in Western Europe, South Africa and North America.

This recent past matters because the present figureheads of the left are either in denial about it or, in some cases, actually complicit in it. In the United States, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has spoken out against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, but he has never questioned whether a political movement whose core goal is to return Jews to the situation they faced in 1945 should be considered progressive in the first place. In France, the leader of the populist left, Jean-Luc Melenchon, is an enthusiastic advocate of boycotting Israel, declaring last week that the French Jewish leadership is composed of unpatriotic communalists. In Britain, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn on one day offers an assurance that anti-Semitism has no place in a party that has recorded more than 300 internal anti-Semitic incidents since 2015; the next, he attends a Passover Seder organized by a radical Jewish group that proudly excludes any Jews with basic sympathies for Israel (i.e., most of them) from its events.

At that same seder, a modified Haggadah invited guests to pause and consider how s**t the State of Israel is. Such puerile obscenities are, sadly, the price of being accepted as a Jew on the far left. But as relevant history demonstrates, thats not an aberration of our own time, but entirely consistent with the established patterns of the past.

As comforting as it may be for many Jews to observe the rhetorical and thematic overlaps between biblical prophets and modern-day socialists, the bald truth is that the revolutionaries themselves never saw it that way. Nor, it would seem, do their inheritors.

Ben Cohen writes a weekly column for JNS on Jewish affairs and Middle Eastern politics. His writings have been published in Commentary, the New York Post, Haaretz, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications.
Mandy Manning , who teaches English and math to newly arrived refugee and immigrant students in Washington state, was named the 2018 National Teacher of the Year.

Manning, who has taught for the past 18 years and is a National Board-certified teacher, was just announced as the winner of the national prize on CBS This Morning. In a video on the morning show , Mannings students at the Newcomer Center at Joel E. Ferris High School in Spokane, Wash., said she is consistently supportive and has inspired them to pursue their dreams. Manning is often the first teacher her students have when they arrive in the United States.

Her students are from all over the globe, Manning said in an interview: Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, the Marshall Islands, Myanmar, Mexico, and countries from South America.

It is essential that teachers in these times communicate to their students in their actions and their words that our students are welcome, theyre wanted, theyre worthy of love, and they can accomplish and achieve everything they dream of, Manning said.

She was recognized for creating connections between her students and the outside communityManning often invites district officials, community members of color, and professional writers to visit her classroom.

Her goal during her term as National Teacher of the Year is to encourage educators, community members, and policymakers to make an effort to reach out to students and get to know their storiesand also provide students the opportunities to experience things they havent before.

Lets teach our students to be fearless, she said in a statement. Lets teach them to be brave when confronted with uncertainty. Brave when they fail. Brave in meeting new people. Brave in seeking opportunities to experience things outside of their understanding.

Starting in 1952, the president has held a White House ceremony honoring the National Teacher of the Year and the state teachers of the year annuallytypically hosted soon after the announcement. Last year, President Donald Trump broke with tradition somewhat, and invited the group of renowned teachers to the Oval Office for an opportunity to take photos. Chaffee was not invited to speaka departure from previous years, in which the National Teacher of the Year usually delivers remarks to a room full of educators and their family members. (The Washington Post has more on the details of last years unusual meeting .)

The CCSSO does not yet have information on this years event, a spokeswoman said. But Manning had her students and some of her former students write letters to the White House, in which they shared their stories. A former student from Afghanistan wrote that it took him 10 years to get to the United States, and hes still waiting for his brother to be able to immigrate hereit might be another decade. A student from the Democratic Republic of the Congo wrote that before the 2016 election, she felt welcomed and included in her community, but recently, shes been told to go back to Africa. That student urged the president to share positive messages of immigrants. Other students told the president that coming to the United States was an opportunity for them to accomplish their dreams.

I just want to share my students stories, Manning said. Theyre amazing people, and I think that it is imperative that the president goes out and sees things that maybe he hasnt seen before ... because that will provide him with some perspective, and it might change his perception.

Manning was selected from a pool of teachers of the year from every state, the District of Columbia, the Department of Defense Education Activity, and U.S. extra-state territories by a national selection committee composed of representatives from 14 education and community organizations, organized by the Council of Chief State School Officers association. The other three finalists were : Amy Andersen, an American Sign Language teacher in New Jersey, Kara Ball, an elementary teacher from the Department of Defense Education Activity, and Jonathan Juravich, an art teacher in Ohio.

Sydney Chaffee, a 9th grade humanities teacher in Boston, won the honor last year .

Post updated with quotes from an interview with Manning

Image courtesy of CCSSO
Did a radical new Confederate gunship foil McClellans plan to end the Civil War in 1862?

In late 1861, conventional wisdom, North and South, posited that he who control Hampton Roads in Virginia controlled the fate of the nation. And achieving that do- minion, or so it was supposed, depended on the outcome of the clash of two iron- cladsCSS Virginia and USS Monitorterrifying new weapons that were poised to forever change the face of naval warfare.

The stakes increased with every moment led as the two sides raced to complete their deadly vessels. At risk for the Union was its hold on Hampton Roads, the spacious roadstead at the foot of the Chesapeake Bay that controlled access to Norfolk via the Elizabeth River, to Suffolk via the Nansemond River, to Richmond via the James River, and to the Virginia Peninsula formed by the James and York rivers. Fort Monroe, at the tip of the peninsula, lay secure in Union hands and served as the North Atlantic Blockading Squadrons base.

For the Federals, losing control of Hampton Roads would not only irretrievably damage their navys blockade but would also lay waste to General in Chief George B. McClellans best-laid plan to capture Richmond. His grand campaign depended on outflanking the Confederate army then encamped at Manassas, 25 miles southwest of Washington, by way of the lower Chesapeake. McClellan wanted to land the Army of the Potomac at Urbanna, a small tobacco port on the Rappahannock River, and from there march some 50 miles straight to Richmond. To support and supply such a campaign required using the York River and perhaps the James as well, which in turn required the navys continued control of Hampton Roads.

For the Rebels, the Virginia represented the best and perhaps only hope of breaking the blockade that in time would surely strangle the South. Winning control of Hampton Roads would save Richmond and indeed Virginia from invasion by water. But Confederate Secretary of the Navy Stephen R. Mallory had an even greater ambition. He asked the Virginias captain, Franklin Buchanan, Could you pass Old Pointthat is, Fort Monroeand make a dashing cruise on the Potomac as far as Washington?

It was difficult to keep military secrets during the Civil War, especially in the early months of the conflict, and so it was not long before the Yankees learned the Rebels were up to something with USS Merrimack. The capture of Fort Sumter in April 1861 found the big steam frigate laid up for engine repairs at the Gosport Navy Yard in Norfolk, Virginia, and when a week later the Federal garrison there evacuated, it set the Merrimack afire and scuttled the ship. By June the Confederates had the hulk raised and resting in Gosports dry dock, and the best naval minds in the South contemplated turning it into a radically different warship, an ironclad ram.

By fall, rumors of the Merrimacks reconstruction began leaking out of Norfolk and making their way north, but it was an enterprising newspaper reporter who got the scoop. One night in October, New York Herald reporter B.S. Osbon rowed a pilot boat up the Elizabeth River from Hampton Roads to view, and sketch, the Virginia (as the Confederates had rechristened the Merrimack) in dry dock.

Agents of Allan Pinkerton, the spymaster for McClellan, subsequently obtained details of the conversion. The spy known only by the initials C.A.H. reported that the steam frigate Merrimac has been iron plated throughout and with a heavy armament is ready for sea. Spy Timothy Webster added details: the Merrimack is decked over with timber 16 inches thick, 2 thicknesses of iron, 1 2 inches, 1 1 inches thick, both reaching down to water line. He counted eight heavy guns in broadside and single pivot guns at bow and stern, and thought them all rifled.

Webster was not that far off. The Merrimacks hull was cut down to the berth deck and decked over fore and aft. Amidships rose a long citadel, its sides slanted at 45 degrees, of pine and oak 24 inches thick, covered with two layers of two-inch iron plate. Ten guns was indeed the ironclads armament, although only four of them were rifled.

It is not known if General McClellan shared these spy reports with the navy, but in any case the navy, from its own sources, was well aware of the menace posed by the Confederate ironclad and anxious to do something about it. On October 17, 1861, Louis M. Goldsborough, the blockading squadrons commander, reported the Merrimacks reconstruction to Washington and added, I am now quite satisfied thatshe will, in all probability, prove to be exceedingly formidable.

The navys first thought was to dispose of the Virginia before it ever got to sea. Lt. Thomas O. Selfridge, an officer aboard USS Cumberland on blockade duty in Hampton Roads, submitted a plan for a sudden and secret attack upon Norfolk. He proposed amphibious landings against the Rebel batteries on Sewells Point and Craney Island that guarded the entrance to the Elizabeth River, supported by fire from the warships Cumberland and Minnesota. With the batteries silenced, Norfolk could be taken and the ironclad destroyed in dry dock. Surprise was essential, and for that Lieutenant Selfridge wanted preparations carried out under cover of night and all newspaper reporters muzzled.

Selfridge addressed his plan to Gustavus V. Fox, assistant secretary of the navy. Energetic and innovative, Fox liked the idea and pursued it with Brig. Gen. John G. Barnard, chief engineer of the Army of the Potomac. The navy needed troops for the landings, either from the Fort Monroe garrison or from the Army of the Potomac at Washington. Barnard enthusiastically supported the plan: It captures not only Norfolk and the Navy Yardbut the entire defensive Army.

The snag in all this proved to be McClellan, who in his dual role as commanding general of the Army of the Potomac and general in chief of all the Union armies was the court of last resort for all matters military. When Fox and Barnard took their case to McClellan, wrote Fox, The General admitted its force, but took no action. Barnard was more blunt: Gen. McClellan alone seems to have been insensible to its importance.

Throughout that first fall and winter of the war, McClellan focused everything inward, toward his evolving grand campaign for conquering Richmond. He regarded the scheme to take Norfolk as a distraction; in due course, he said, his campaign would sweep it up without firing a shot. Meanwhile, he needed every available soldier to cope with a Rebel army he had deluded himself into believing hugely outnumbered his own. Should the Virginia appear before he had his grand campaign in hand, well, that would be the navys problem.

The navy, frustrated by McClellans intransigence and strategic myopia, had to rest its hopes on an ironclad of its own, the Monitor, then under construction in New York City. The Monitor was Swedish inventor John Ericssons brainchild. Whereas the Virginia was a brilliant improvisation, Ericssons ironclad was pure invention, all new from the keel upan iron-hulled armored raft on which sat an armored revolving turret mounting two 11-inch Dahlgren smoothbores.

With the support of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, the contract for an Iron-Clad Shot-Proof Steam Battery of iron and wood was signed on October 4, 1861, to be completed in 100 days. The Monitors mission was clear and specific. In the words of Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, the battery should, immediately after reaching Hampton Roads, proceed up Elizabeth river to the Navy Yard at Norfolk, place herself opposite the dry-dock, and with her heavy guns destroy both the dock and the Merrimac.

The race was on, and builders of both the Virginia and the Monitor were uncomfortably aware of each others progress. On November 18, for example, Commodore Joseph Smith, of the Ironclad Board riding herd on the Monitor project, wrote disgustedly that he had just received the latest issue of Scientific American and regret to see a description of the vessel in print before she shall have been tested. When the Virginia was floated out of its Norfolk dry dock on January 25, 1862, word promptly leaked to Gus Fox, who telegraphed Ericsson that he must hurry the Monitor to sea, as the Merrimack is nearly ready at Norfolk. On the launch of the Yankee ironclad five days later, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle presented detailed coverage, noting the impregnable armor upon its sides and a bomb-proof deck, on which is placed a shot-proof revolving turret, that will contain two very heavy guns.

While the Virginia had a head start in the race to go to sea, there were problems of every imaginable sort with engineering and fitting out the ship. Machinery, tools, and skilled labor were in short supply. The Merrimack had been laid up at Norfolk in the first place because its engines and boilers had been condemned and needed much work. But the worst delays involved the 800 tons of iron plate for the armor. In the straitened Confederacy, only the Tredegar Iron Works at Richmond was capable of rolling iron plate, and just then Tredegar was overwhelmed with demands for war materiel of every description. The Monitors builders faced no such shortages in the materiel-rich, engineering-rich North, but there were inevitable delays in assembling such a radically new vessel.

As February turned to March there were almost daily rumors of the Virginia coming out, and indeed Captain Buchanan, well aware of the threat posed by the Yankee ironclad, was making every possible effort to do just that. Buck Buchanan was 61 and had served in the U.S. Navy for 46 of those years. His assignments had included stints as superintendent of the new Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1845 and later commandant of the Washington Navy Yard. Since taking the Virginias helm on February 23, Buchanan had experienced exasperating holdups, such as a three-day delay in delivering powder for the battery, but once that essential was aboard, he brooked no more delays.

Yet the only thing anyone could say for certain about the Virginia as the warship lay at its Gosport Navy Yard mooring was that it floated.

There was little certainty about the balky engines or what speed it might make or how (or if) it could be steered or the effect on the handling of the 1,500-pound cast-iron beak fixed to its prow as a ram. Buck Buchanan would have to take the vessel out into Hampton Roads to find answers to these questions and issues.

At the same time, the Monitor was being readied at its Brooklyn Navy Yard mooring for sea trials to prove seaworthiness for the long voyage to Hampton Roads. The contract deadline of 100 days was well past, but the novelty of the vessels design justified the extension. The Monitors captain, John L. Worden, was a 28-year navy veteran who had the peculiar distinction of being the Civil Wars first prisoner of war, captured by hotheaded secessionists in Alabama one day before the firing on Fort Sumter. He had been exchanged in November 1861, and the Monitor was his first command.

As early as February 26 Worden guided the ironclad into the East River for the voyage south, only to turn back when the vessel proved unsteerable. Ericsson himself set about making the needed adjustments to the rudder, but it was not until March 4 that there was a final trial at sea off Sandy Hook. The turret was revolved, the guns fired, the steering tested and approved.

At 11 A.M. on March 6, 1862, the Monitor finally steamed off down the East River and was taken in tow by a tug. Wordens orders were to report to the senior naval officer at Hampton Roadsin time, he hoped, to catch the unprepared Virginia in the Elizabeth River. He sent back word with the pilot boat that the weather was favorable, and that being in tow should speed the voyage appreciably.

Late that afternoon, a telegram reached the Brooklyn Navy Yard from Secretary of the Navy Welles that read, Let the Monitor come direct to Washington, anchoring below Alexandria. It had been decided to divert the ironclad to the capitals defenseespecially as defense against a rumored sortie up the Potomac by the Virginia. Fortuitously for the Union, this change of orders arrived too late to catch the Monitor before it left New York.

What Welless misguided order failed to do, Mother Nature came close to accomplishing. On March 7 the weather turned, and the Monitor nearly foundered. Lt. S. Dana Greene, her executive officer, would write, The sea was breaking over our decks at a great rate and coming in our hawse pipe forward in perfect floods. Our berth deck hatch leaked in spite of all we could do, and the water came down under the tower like a waterfall. The fires were drowned, stopping the engine. Fumes filled the engine room.

They sought calmer seas inshore, and by evening the weather moderated enough for the engine to be restarted. But they had lost five hours. That night there was another episode of foul weather and the ironclad again came close to foundering, causing further delay. Finally, at 4 P.M. on Saturday, March 8, the Monitor with its bedraggled, exhausted crew rounded Cape Henry and steered toward Hampton Roads. The sound of distant cannonading met their ears, and then a scene of naval disaster met their eyes. The Monitor came late to the battle by just 12 hours.

At 11 A.M. that day lookouts aboard the blockading squadron had sighted a pillar of black smoke rising above Norfolk. At first it appeared stationary, but then it began to move very slowly down the Elizabeth River, toward Hampton Roads. The word was passed: the Merrimackas the Federals then and thereafter insisted on calling herwas coming out. As an onlooker put it, We saw what to all appearances looked like the roof of a very big barn belching forth smoke as from a chimney on fire.

The sloop Cumberland (24 guns) lay off Newport News Point, west of Fort Monroe, and not far away was the frigate Congress (50); the two were stationed to blockade the James River. Farther toward Fort Monroe were the steam frigates Minnesota (47) and Roanoke (46), both sister ships of the old Merrimack, and the frigate St. Lawrence (52). Squadron commander Goldsborough was attending to blockade matters on the North Carolina coast, leaving Capt. John Marston of the Roanoke as senior officer. Marston signaled the alarm, and the squadron cleared for action.

The Cumberland and Congress were closest to the Rebel ironclad as it rounded Craney Island at the Elizabeths mouth. Captain Marston in the Roanoke signaled the Minnesota and the St. Lawrence to join him in going to their aid. (The Roanoke, disabled with a broken propeller shaft, would have to be towed into action by tugs.) That day Yankee seamanship left something to be desired, however. Maneuvering to avoid fire from Confederate batteries on Sewells Point, all three of the would-be rescuers ran aground.

By the time he reached the roadstead, Buck Buchanan had gained certain basic information about CSS Virginia. It was very slow, five or six knots, and was exceedingly cumbersome to steer. So much for a sea trial, Buchanan decided. Now he would see if the ship could fight. He called all hands and reminded them of their duty, promising, You shall not complain that I do not take you close enough. Go to your guns! Making a ponderous left turn toward the mouth of the James, he steered straight at the Cumberland.

Buchanan took a bows-on path toward the Cumberland, and at an easy range his 7-inch rifled bow gun put a series of shells through the sloops bulwarks, wrecking the forward gun and strewing the gun deck with dead and wounded. The ironclad bore inexorably on a collision course to strike the Cumberland on its starboard bow, the wedge-shaped iron ram punching a gaping hole below the water line. As the Virginia backed off, the iron beak tore loose and the ironclad swung parallel to the rapidly settling Cumberland. This finally brought the Yankee guns to bear, and they loosed three broadsides at 100 yards range. Some damage was done the muzzles of two of the Virginias broadside guns were broken off, and the smokestack was badly holedbut otherwise the shot bounded harmlessly off the citadels sloping side. Abandon ship was ordered aboard the Cumberland, and it plunged bow first to the bottom, gallantly fighting her guns as long as they were above water, Captain Buchanan admiringly wrote in his official report. All that remained above water was the tip of the after mast, flag still flying.

Buchanan made a slow, labored turn to take on the Congress, whose captain slipped its cables and with the assistance of a tug managed to get his ship aground where the Virginia could not follow to ram. This only delayed its destruction. Buchanan stood off in a raking position and systematically knocked the Congress to pieces. The guns that could bear were disabled. Its captain (the son of Commodore Joseph Smith of the Ironclad Board) was killed and a third of the crew killed or wounded. The carnage was frightful, wrote the Virginias executive officer. Nothing remained but to strike their colors, which they did. White flags were run up the gaff and mainmast. Buchanan immediately ordered his men to cease firing and sent in two of his gunboat consorts to take off the surviving crewmen and burn the stricken ship.

All the while, at Newport News Point, Federal infantry and artillery were firing whenever the Rebel ironclad came within range. Union Brig. Gen. Joseph K.F. Mansfield, a crusty old regular, was in charge. When the white flags were raised aboard the Congress, one of Mansfields gunners thought they should cease firing and honor the enemys capture. I know the damned ship has surrendered, snapped Mansfield, but we havent, and ordered his men to keep firing.

This infuriated Captain Buchanan. The protocols of war at sea dictate that once a vessel surrenders, all firing ceases and to the victor go the spoils. But the Yankees, at least those ashore, continued blazing away at the Virginia. It was a situation calling for discretion rather than valor on Buchanans partafter all, the fire from shore was doing no harm to his vesselbut he let his outrage get the best of him. Grabbing a musket, he climbed out atop the Virginias citadel and started shooting back. It was a foolhardy act, but then Buchanan was well known for his short-fused temper.

General Mansfield had sent two rifle companies of the 20th Indiana Infantry down to the waters edge, and one of these Hoosier soldiers put a bullet through Buck Buchanans left thigh, nicking his femoral artery. In regard to the future fortunes of the Virginia, it was the single most important shot any Yankee fired that day. Buchanan would never again serve aboard the ironclad.

Under command of the executive officer, Lt. Catesby ap R. Jones, the Virginia stood off and sent hot shot crashing into the Congress, setting it afire from stem to stern. The day was well gone by now, and the tide was ebbing. The Virginia was taking on water at its bow where the iron beak had been wrenched off, and there was other damage to repair, so Lieutenant Jones decided to return to base. The Minnesota, Roanoke, and St. Lawrence were all aground and could be dealt with the next day.

At 9 oclock that evening the Monitor anchored alongside flagship Roanoke, and Captain Worden was briefed on the days disasters. Marston directed him to take station to defend the grounded Minnesota. No pilot was available, but Worden easily steered the Monitor to its assigned station by the bright light of the burning Congress. At about midnight the fires reached the stricken vessels magazines, and the frigate blew to pieces in a series of thunderous explosions.

The next morning, Sunday, March 9, the Virginia steamed slowly into the roadstead expecting to finish off the previous days destructive work. Instead Jones was challenged by the improbable-looking Monitor. Whereas on Saturday spectators thought the Virginia looked like a large barn roof adrift in a flood, on Sunday a bemused Southerner described the Yankee ironclad as an immense shingle floating on the water, with a gigantic cheese box rising from its center; no sails, no wheels, no smokestack, no guns. What could it be? What it was, in fact, came as no surprise to the Virginias officers, who by now had considerable intelligence on Ericssons invention. As one of them wrote, She could not possibly have made her appearance at a more inopportune time for us, changing our plans, which were to destroy the Minnesota, and then the remainder of the fleet below Fort Monroe.

The ensuing battle, the first ever between ironclad vessels, was at once suspenseful and uneventful. For some four hours the two gladiators, wreathed in gun smoke and coal smoke, threw iron punches at each other, without apparent effect. The Virginia, drawing 22 feet of water, proved even more cumbersome to maneuver than the day before. Its splintered smokestack furnished limited draft for the boilers, and it barely made headway. The ship was as unwieldy as Noahs ark, an officer complained.

At one point Catesby Jones tried to butt his opponent with his ramless prow, but the agile Monitor evaded most of the blow; indeed, its only effect was to spring a leak in the Virginias bow. Captain Worden in turn tried to ram the Virginias stern, aiming at the vulnerable rudder and screw, but missed his target by a few feet. The armor on both vessels was dented but not broken by the repeated blows.

The Monitors executive officer, Dana Greene, directing the guns in the revolving turret, found his greatest problem was figuring out where he was. Orientation marks had been chalked on the deck under the turretport, starboard, bow, sternbut the gun crews soon obliterated them as they worked, and then Greenes only view was over the gun barrels when the gun ports were open. Captain Worden steered the Monitor from the foredeck pilothouse, communicating with the turret by speaking tube. The tube soon broke, however, and word was passed by messengers, a slow process in the midst of battle. It also proved difficult to start and stop the turrets turning mechanism with any precision, so often enough shots were fired on the fly rather than by careful training on the target. At one point the stock of ammunition in the turret was exhausted, and Warden pulled off to shallow water to replenish. It took some 15 minutes to hoist the shot and powder cartridges into the turret. Warden took advantage of the lull to come out on deck to survey the scene; then it was back to action.

The Monitors one bad moment came when a shell from one of the Virginias 7-inch rifles exploded squarely on the face of the pilothouse, a cramped structure framed with iron bars, and drove shards of paint and powder through the eye slot, temporarily blinding Worden. By the time Lieutenant Greene came forward, got Worden safely below, and took over the con, the Monitor had broken contact with the enemy ironclad. Catesby Jones took advantage of the break to go after the Minnesota.

In return, the frigates captain, G.J. Van Brunt, unleashed at close range a full broadsidetwo 10-inch guns, fourteen 9-inch, seven 8-inchwhich, he said, would have blown out of the water any timber-built ship in the world. Yet, shot and shell glanced harmlessly off the Virginias citadel. Greene soon had the Monitor back in action, forcing his opponent away from the Minnesota, and the thrust and counterthrust continued.

By now, however, it had become obvious to both captainseach a second-in-command thrust by circumstance into command that neither ironclad was doing much visible harm to the other. The Virginia was in need of repairs after two days of battle, and the pilots warned that they had to catch the tide by noon to return up the Elizabeth to her Norfolk base. As Jones turned the Virginia toward home, Greene made no effort to pursue, holding the Monitor in position to guard the Minnesota. The historic first battle of ironclads ended quietly, accounted a draw that day but with nothing marked certain for the future.

News of the Virginias Saturday depredations in Hampton Roads only reached Washington on Sunday morning, sending an immense shock wave through the administration. Cabinet and military officers filled President Lincolns office. Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton was very much excited, and walked up and down the room like a caged lion.

Stanton envisioned no end of disasters to come: the sinking of the rest of the blockading squadron, the loss of Fort Monroe, the capture of the Federal foothold in North Carolina, the bombardment and burning of Washington. The Rebel ironclad would put every seaboard city under tribute, he claimed.

Throughout this diatribe Stanton glared accusingly at Secretary of the Navy Welles, but Welles remained calm. His sources told him, he said, that the Merrimack was hardly seaworthy enough to go ranging up and down the Atlantic coast, and it drew too much water to ascend the Potomac as far as Washington. In any case, he understood that the Monitor ought to be on the scene by now, and he had sent his assistant secretary, Gus Fox, to Hampton Roads to report on what ensued. Welles also pointed out that when General McClellan and the army had refused to act against Norfolk the previous fall, the navy had been left to handle the problem on its own.

For McClellan, this first report from Hampton Roads seemed suddenly to put his whole grand campaign at risk. As he telegraphed Fort Monroe, The performances of the Merrimac place a new aspect upon everything, & may very probably change my whole plan of campaign, just on the eve of execution.

Finally, in late afternoon, came a dispatch from Fox at Fort Monroe. He reported the Monitors arrival at Hampton Roads Saturday evening, and its challenge to the Confederate ironclad the next morning. These two ironclad vessels fought part of the time touching each other, from 8 A.M. to noon, when the Merrimac retired.The Monitor is uninjured and ready at any moment to repel another attack.

Simultaneously with this welcome news came reports from McClellans outposts around Washington that the Confederate army camped all winter at Manassas had decamped that very weekend, apparently intending to fall back behind the Rappahannock River. This had happened independently of the Virginias coming out, but McClellan imagined it was all a coordinated effort to derail his impending campaign against Richmond.

Indeed, that was its effect. The repositioned Rebel army would threaten his intended landing place at Urbanna on the Rappahannock. McClellan now had no choice but to change his base of operations to Fort Monroe and to advance from there up the peninsula toward Richmond. Fort Monroe itself was a secure base, but putting the Army of the Potomac ashore there necessitated securing Hampton Roads from the threat posed by the Virginia. McClellan telegraphed Gus Fox to seek assurances on that score. Fox replied, The Monitor may, and I think will, destroy the Merrimac in the next fight, but this is hope, not certainty. Thus McClellan rested his entire Peninsula campaign on the hope (despite the uncertainty) of a standoff between the two ironclads.

The Virginia offered no challenge to the Army of the Potomacs landing at Fort Monroe, as it was laid up in the Norfolk dry dock for repairs. A new iron beak replaced the one wrenched off in ramming the Cumberland. Mechanics banded four feet of hull below the citadel with iron, patched the smokestack, and fitted shutters to the gun ports. They replaced two damaged guns, and equipped the rifled guns with steel-tipped solid shot. One hundred tons of ballast was added to cause it to ride lower in the water.

All these changes made the Virginia a more formidable fighting machine, but slowed the ironclad to four knots and increased the draft to 23 feet. Still, the most important change of all was a change of command.

Buck Buchanan had been too badly injured in the fighting on Saturday to resume command, and logic pointed to his executive officer, Catesby Jones, continuing the command. As another Virginia officer argued, Lieutenant Jones should have been promoted, and should have succeeded [Buchanan]. He had fitted out the ship and armed her, and had commanded during the second days fight. However, the department thought otherwise.

Richmond went with seniority over hands-on experience in promoting Josiah Tattnall to be the Virginias next, and last, commander. Tattnall was 66, the oldest officer of rank in Confederate naval service. He had gone to sea during the War of 1812 and served against the Algerian pirates and in the war with Mexico. From his record, Tattnall seemed a feisty old sea dog like Buchanan. In fact, over the years he had grown cautious and conservative.

In his new command, Tattnall felt overburdened with responsibilitiesdefending against the Yankee fleet, guarding Norfolk, blocking the James River route to Richmond. For all these tasks he considered the Virginia slow, cumbersome to maneuver, and at constant risk of engine failure. Gen. Robert E. Lee, military adviser to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, urged Tattnall to take the Virginia past Fort Monroe some night and get in among McClellans transports. In this manner, said Lee, she could so cripple their means of supplying their army, as to prevent its moving against Richmond. Tattnall was horrified at the very thought of it.

Tattnall decided his best course was to stay within the confined waters off the mouth of the Elizabeth and try to lure the Monitor into a one-on-one joust. His battle tactic would be one of the oldest in sea warfareboarding. While he engaged the enemys attention, his consort craft would dart in from several directions. Boarders would leap onto the Monitors deck, throw a wet sailcloth over the pilothouse to blind the ship, drive wedges under the turret to immobilize its battery, and pitch lighted waste down the ventilators to drive out the crew.

I will take her if hells on the other side of her! Tattnall was heard to say. Capturing the Yankee ironclad would free him to take on the rest of the blockading squadron and threaten McClellans waterborne supply line.

On the morning of April 11 a tall column of black smoke once again announced the Virginia coming out. Transports in the roadstead scattered, and the Monitor and others in the blockading squadron cleared for action. Tattnall dipped his colors to invite the joust, but there was no response and no movement among the Federals. As Lieutenant Greene later wrote, We, on our side, had received positive orders not to attack in the comparatively shoal waters above Hampton Roads, where the Union fleet could not maneuver. The Virginia shifted about trying to provoke a response, then finally turned back to its berth.

The missions of the two ironclads were thus confirmed. The Virginia would guard Norfolk and block passage on the James, and stand as an ongoing threat to the blockade and to McClellans army. The Monitor, for its part, had no other duty but to guard against a sortie by the Confederate ironclad. General McClellan, laying siege to Yorktown, wanted the Monitor to attack the Rebel shore batteries there, but a direct order from the president prohibited risking the ironclad against any target other than the Virginia. And thanks to the Virginia, McClellans campaign was restricted to a York River supply line; the James, the direct route to Richmond, was out of his reach.

As April turned to May, Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, commanding the Confederate army at Yorktown, announced that he could not hold on there for long. If he retreated, Norfolk would be lost. It therefore became essential that the Virginia find a new berth somewhere up the James.

But the Richmond authorities seemed incapable of salvaging what they could from the Gosport Navy Yard at Norfolk and ensuring the Virginias safety. Tattnalls pilots told him that to pass the bar at the mouth of the James, he would have to lighten ship by some five feet, to an 18-foot draft. For that he required the navy yard crane to lift out some of his armament and the ships ballast.

Then on the morning of May 10, from the Virginias anchorage at Sewells Point, lookouts saw no flags flying over the Confederate shore batteries. Without notice to Captain Tattnall, Norfolk had been abandoned to the Yankees.

The catalyst for this action was Abraham Lincoln. The president had come to Fort Monroe to prod his generals and admirals into action. He organized an amphibious landing to turn the Rebel shore batteries and sent troops marching into Norfolk. Tattnall had to act quickly. He told his crew they had less than 12 hours to lighten ship enough to get over the James River bar at high tide at dawn on May 11.

At 1 A.M. on the 11th the work was well along when the ships pilots came to Tattnall and said that the wind was wrong; it was westerly, pushing against the tide. Even raised to an 18-foot draft, the Virginia would not make it across the bar.

This was suspect speculation, and Buck Buchanan had warned Tattnall not to put much trust in the Virginias pilots. Nonetheless, for Tattnall it came as the last straw. He had been let down by the army and then by the Richmond authorities, and the spark went out of him. Surely Buchanan (or Catesby Jones) would have growled damn the bar and damn the Yankees and damn the pilots and full speed ahead.

If Josiah Tattnall had ever had such instincts, he lost them that night. He could see only risks and what could go wrong. He might run hopelessly aground; the pursuing enemy might take advantage of the ironclads vulnerable state; the balky engines might fail.

In the small hours of the morning of May 11, Tattnall steered the Virginia to Craney Island and ran the ironclad aground. He set a powder train, fired it, and abandoned ship. At 4:58 A.M. the fire reached the magazine, and with a thunderclap CSS Virginia was no more, thus forever laying this terrible ghost which has haunted us for so long, as Lincolns secretary put it.

Richmond roundly condemned Tattnalls decision. President Davis termed it hasty. The destruction of the Virginia was premature, according to Confederate Secretary of the Navy Mallory. May God protect us & cure us of weakness & folly! A court of inquiry judged the loss of the Virginia unnecessary at the time and place it was effected. However, a court-martial would later acquit Tattnall of the charges of culpability, negligence, and improvident conduct.

In the ships short, 65-day life, the Virginia had dramatically cracked but not broken the blockade. Of greater strategic importance, its mere presence seriously hampered and delayed McClellans Peninsula campaign, crimping his naval support on the York River and denying him use of the James. The Virginia survived just long enough for Richmond to block the James at Drewrys Bluff and prevent the Union navy from bombarding the capital.

The Virginias destruction left Southerners with a tantalizing might-have-been. Had Captain Tattnall defied hell and low water and succeeded in saving his vessel to serve as a floating battery on the upper James, many speculated that the Peninsula campaign would surely have taken a different turn. In the Seven Days Battles (June 25July 1), McClellans beaten Army of the Potomac found a final refuge at Harrisons Landing on the James, and thereby lived to fight another day.

That outcome, it is safe to say, would have been highly unlikely had CSS Virginia survived to take up its intended anchorage in the Jamesat Harrisons Landing.

Originally published in the Spring 2009 issue of Military History Quarterly. To subscribe, click here.
The world was made a little less joyful with the passing of Susan Berkowitz in her home, on 
This blog is looking for wisdom, to have and to share. it is also looking for other rare character traits like good humor, courage, and honor. It is not an easy road, because all of us fall short. But God is love, forgiveness and grace. Those who believe in Him and repent of their sins have the promise of His Holy Spirit to guide us and show us the Way.
Government is failing to get to grips with the need for new transparency measures on social media in order to protect the democratic process, warns Fianna Fail Spokesperson on Technology, James Lawless TD.

Deputy Lawless made the comments after Facebook Vice President Joel Kaplan appeared before the Oireachtas Communications Committee and acknowledged the need for new measures to promote transparency around political advertising.

Deputy Lawless said, The Government has been completely absent when it comes to the debate on social media transparency.

"Facebook have acknowledged that a much greater effort is need to promote transparency and tackle fake news.

"They have responded to the concerns that I have raised, and those of my Communications Committee colleagues, by implementing new measures to tackle fake news during the forthcoming referendum campaign."

He continued: However it should not be left to social media companies to voluntarily take action to promote transparency and tackle fake news. New measures need to be put on a statutory basis to compel social media companies to be upfront in setting out who exactly is paying for political advertising and how they are conducting their online campaigns."

He pointed out that the Irish Electoral Acts were written largely in 1992 in a time before the availability of internet, let alone social media.

"We have a situation where the internet remains the Wild West of electoral campaigning. The measures I have put forward in the Online Advertising and Social Media (Transparency) Bill 2017 will rectify this problem and will protect our electoral process," he said.

It should not fall exclusively to the opposition to have to tackle transparency issues on social media and deal with fake news. The Government should be proactive on this issue considering the threat that our democratic process faces.

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The new measures announced by Facebook are positive, but they obviously dont apply to other social media outlets and general website advertising. This is why we need new transparency measures to be placed on a statutory footing, concluded Deputy Lawless.
An Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Minister for Health Simon Harris will both address a pro-choice rally in Temple Bar this weekend.

Members of the Fine Gael Party pressing for a yes vote in the upcoming referendum on the Eighth Amendment will hold an event this Saturday (21st April) at 11am in Smock Alley Theatre, 6-7 Exchange Street Lower, Temple Bar, Dublin 8.

The event will be addressed by An Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar; Minister Josepha Madigan, Campaign Coordinator, Minister for Health, Simon Harris; as well as other contributors.
The Repeal the 8th movement has been strengthened by the news that the Irish Congress of Trade Unions is now vocally supporting the campaign.

Labour Party spokesperson on Employment and Workers Rights, Senator Ged Nash, has welcomed the Irish Congress of Trade Unions highlighting how important repealing the eighth amendment is for working people in Ireland.

Senator Nash said: The Irish Congress of Trade Unions has had a long history in opposing the eighth amendment, having initially opposed its introduction in 1983. Today they have reaffirmed their commitment to ensuring women receive proper healthcare in crisis situations.

The eighth amendment creates huge difficulties for women who have to take time off work to travel. The pressure of having to travel abroad and then come up with trumped up reasons for taking time off can create very difficult situations for women.

The eighth amendment also compromises the ability of health care workers to ensure that pregnant women in their care do not suffer. The current parameters of the law that doctors and midwives practice and operate under can be extremely frustrating for those working in the sector."

He added: Repealing the eighth amendment will allow healthcare workers to help their patients to make the right decisions that are best in their individual circumstances.

"The trade union movement has always played a vital role in our society progressing, this will continue through out the Repeal the Eighth campaign.
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Guest Column: Massachusetts Can Help End Campus Violence

April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month (SAAM), an annual campaign to raise public awareness about sexual assault and educate communities and individuals on how to prevent sexual violence. Sexual assault on college campuses is a national public health crisis. Statistics show that 1 in 5 women and 1 in 16 men are sexually assaulted while in college nationally. During their time at college, 43 percent of women report experiencing violent and abusive dating behaviors and 13 percent of women report being stalked.

To put things in perspective in our state, more than a half a million students are enrolled in a Massachusetts institution of higher education. In 2014, there were 283 reports of rape on Massachusetts campuses, yet only 7 percent of rapes were reported to school officials. The actual number of incidents is likely much higher. What can we do about this?

The lack of sexual violence education and prevention throughout students primary education contributes to the large number of sexual violence incidents on higher education campuses. We must give these institutions the tools to assist their students, provide resources to victims, and have a clear understanding of the policies and reports of sexual violence on all campuses. In our current climate where Title IX policies are being rolled back by the federal administration, and the discussion of gender-based violence is prevalent in mainstream media, we in Massachusetts are in a position to secure the safety and well-being for our students.

Currently, all public and private higher education institutions must have a campus security policy. I filed House Bill 632, "An Act relative to sexual violence on campus" to take these policies further and require all institutions of higher education in Massachusetts to create and communicate policy on sexual and gender-based violence. This bill would also require schools to include trauma-informed policies on dating violence, domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking that are developed in consultation with the Title IX coordinator. Providing students with the details on how to report an incident, where to seek medical treatment and counseling and how to request protective measures will create a safer environment for victims and all students.

The act also requires awareness and prevention programming through training for students, faculty, and staff. Furthermore, relationships will be established with local rape crisis centers and domestic violence programs. These policies and resources, along with sexual violence data, will be made publicly available on the campus website  which is important from a safety and consumer perspective. If a student or parents can easily look up which campus has the best dorm rooms, they should also be able to access statistics on campus safety and sexual violence.

One of the most important aspects of the bill is the outline of how proceedings shall be conducted when an incident of dating violence, domestic violence, sexual assault or stalking is reported. Both the reporting party and responding party are given equal rights, notices and opportunity for representation throughout the proceeding. These procedures mirror those that were outlined in the federal Dear Colleague Letter of 2014 that was recently rescinded by the current Trump administration. This section helps clarify proceedings for higher institutions of learning as well as protecting the rights of both parties.

We have the ability to tackle this crisis of sexual assault at our colleges head on. No student should ever lose their opportunity for an education due to harassment, intimidation, violence, or an environment that allows these behaviors.

State Rep. Tricia Farley-Bouvier, D-Pittsfield, represents the 3rd Berkshire District.
Pittsfield Cooperative Bank President Named to Federal Reserve Bank Council

PITTSFIELD, Mass.  The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston has announced the appointment of J. Jay Anderson, president and CEO of the Pittsfield Cooperative Bank, to the bank's First District Community Depository Institutions Advisory Board.



Established by the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in 2010, the CDIACs in the 12 Federal Reserve districts provide a diverse perspective on the economy, lending conditions, and other issues facing thrift institutions, credit unions, and community banks with different charters and regulators (including state member, state nonmember, and national banks).



"Members of the CDIAC represent community financial institutions from the cities and towns that form the backbone of the New England economy," said Eric S. Rosengren, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. "The council members provide valuable perspectives that inform the Boston Fed's mission of public service across the region."
Posted Thursday, April 19, 2018 6:07 pm

Bolivar High School's ProStart culinary arts team will host an open reservation night from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Monday, April 30, at the BHS Auxiliary Gym.

The menu will include salad with dressing, stuffed chicken breast, sauteed vegetables, rice pilaf, hot roll, red velvet cake with cream cheese icing, and tea or water.

Cost is $20 per person. Reservations are required. To reserve a seat or for more information, contact Betty Glasgow at 326-5228, ext. 5307 or email bglasgow@bolivarschools.org.
An Inspired Israeli Teacher

The Fellowship | April 20, 2018

Ilona Feher



Lived: 1901-1988

Why you should know her: One of the last greats of the Central European Violin School, Feher made aliyah (immigrated to Israel), where she became a renowned violin teacher.

Born to a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary, Ilona Feher studied violin at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music. Between the world wars, she performed all over Europe, one of the worlds great violinists.

But when the Nazis occupied Hungary, Feher and her daughter were sent to a concentration camp. Ilona and her daughter escaped two years later in 1944, and joined anti-Nazi partisans until the end of the war. For the next few years, she returned to the stage, but could only play concerts in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe.

In 1949, Ilona made aliyah to Israel and began a new career as a teacher of the instrument she so loved. Through the years she earned a reputation as a disciplinarian, but one with a sense of humor. Her students included such luminaries as Pinkas Zukerman, Shlomo Mintz, and Yaakov Rubinstein.

Awards given to Feher for her playing and her teaching include the Golden Medal and Diploma of the Franz Liszt Academy, Honorary Doctor of the Wezmann Institute of Science, and the King Solomon Award of the America-Israel Cultural Foundation.
70 Years of Miracles

The Fellowship | April 20, 2018 70 Years of Miracles

While the world continues to look at the problems it sees in Israel and portray the Jewish state in a negative light, this type of outlook overlooks the miraculous story of Israel and her people. Our good friend at JNS, Jonathan Tobin, writes that instead the focus should be on the miraculous turnaround God performed for the Jewish people:

The problem in our thinking about 70 years of Israeli independence is rooted in its normalcy. Those who grew up in the second half of the 20th century, let alone the 21st, think of Israels existence as a given. We relate to it in terms of what we think of its prime minister or our opinions about what it should do to solve the conflict with the Palestinians, with battles over religious pluralism and its treatment of migrants from Africaor whatever the issue of the day might be.

But its 70th birthday is an apt moment to try and take the long view of Israels importance.

What has been forgotten in its rise to the status of a First World economy and a regional military superpower is just how unlikely its existence was considered before 1948 and what that has meant to the lives of every Jew on this planet.

A century ago, even after the Balfour Declaration gave the Zionist movement its first real triumph, the notion of a Jewish state in what was then called Palestine was still considered a fantasy. For nearly 2,000 years, the Jews had been deprived of sovereignty over any part of their ancient homeland. Homelessness was not merely an unavoidable element of the plight of the Jews, but part of their identity
Sonny Ramaswamy, the Indian American director of the U.S. Department of Agricultures National Institute of Food and Agriculture, in July will take over as the CEO of the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities. (screen grab of YouTube/USDA)
Posted Thursday, April 19, 2018 6:04 pm

Memorial service: 2 p.m. Sunday, April 29, Butler Funeral Home, Humansville.

Joe Patterson Pat Kennedy was the son of Monte Earl and Nola Martin Kennedy. He was born March 18, 1932, and died Tuesday, April 17, 2018, at Mercy Hospital in Springfield.

He grew up in Humansville and after graduating from high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War. When he came home on leave, he met Wanda June Gaylor and in Feb. 22, 1953, they were married. They moved to Columbia where he attended and graduated from the university. He also worked while he was there to support his family. They had two children, Wanda Jo and Micky Shane.

After graduation, they came back to Weaubleau where he started his teaching career. From Weaubleau, they moved to California where he taught junior high for 14 years. From California, they moved to Alaska where he ran schools for Alaskan native kids for 15 years. During the summer, he went to Oregon where he attended Western Oregon State College to get his masters degree in education. Some of his Alaskan students who are now grown and have families still correspond with him.

He was a good teacher and tried to make his classes interesting. He always said, school should be so much fun kids cry if they cant go.

After retiring, they moved to Nikiski, Alaska, where they bought a mobile home park. He had a shop where he built dog sleds and then started making miniature dog sleds for 75 to 80 gift shops for tourists. He lived in Alaska for 25 years.

On April 19, 1996, he and Ruth Breeze Coble were married. They were friends since high school and had always kept in contact. He was best man at her first wedding, and she was matron of honor at his first wedding.

For a while, they spent summers in Alaska and winters at their home in Humansville on property that Pat had bought several years before but had never used. It took a lot of work inside and out, and Pat had a 28-by-52-foot wood working shop built. He added heating and air-conditioning so he could be out there in summer or winter.

He loved working with wood and made some really pretty stuff. At one time, he was getting orders for hundreds of small cedar boxes for souvenir shops. Thats when Glen and Vana Larcum stepped up and helped him out. He loved that shop and worked out there until his health prevented him from doing so.

The couple moved to Springfield last fall since both had so many doctors appointments in Springfield and to be close to Ruthies two sons.

Pat was preceded in death by his parents; his son, Shane; and a sister, Susie.

He is survived by his wife, Ruthie; a daughter, Wanda and husband Matt; a grandson, Christopher Kennedy and fiancee Sammie; a granddaughter, Samantha Kennedy and fiance Morgan; two great-grandsons; two stepsons, Randy Coble and Rick Coble and wife Patti and their daughter, Tara Coble.

Ruthie found this last week written on a notepad he kept by his chair: When the day arrives that there are no tomorrows for me, I want my family to know and never forget that they were and always will be deeply loved by me. I am at peace and everything is all right.

A memorial service will be at 2 p.m. Sunday, April 29, at Butler Funeral Home in Humansville.

Share online condolences at butlerfuneralhome.com.
We now offer lithium prices and coverage free for reference. Click here to read all about it. Join our growing community of participants who want to learn more about electrification and how this market is developing.
A 40-year-old man, Olatunji Aladewolu, who allegedly threatened to kill his mother with a cutlass, on Friday appeared before an Ado Ekiti Chief Magistrates Court.

Aladewolu, whose address was not provided, is facing a count charge, but he pleaded not guilty.

The prosecutor, Mr Oriyomi Akinwale, told the court that the accused committed the offence on April 11 at No. 35, Surulere St., Irona, Ado Ekiti.

Akinwale said that the accused threatened to kill his mother, Mrs Racheal Aladewolu, during an argument.

Akinwale said the woman would no longer want the accused in her house, `so she can sleep with her two eyes closed.

The offence contravenes Section 86 of the Criminal Law of Ekiti State, 2012, according to the prosecutor.

The Magistrate, Mrs Modupe Afeniforo, granted the accused bail in the sum of N50, 000 with two sureties in like sum.



Afeniforo ordered that one of the sureties must be a blood relation of the accused and gainfully employed

The magistrate ordered the accused to move out of his mothers house before the next adjourned date, May 4.
Buhari supporters

Some Nigerians in diaspora have shown massive support for President Muhammadu Buhari who is gunning for a second term in office despite being 75.

These Nigerians staged a rally in support of President Muhammadu Buhari and demanded that he continues the progressive change agenda of his government beyond 2019 at the Nigeria House in London, United Kingdom.

The youths branded colourful banners to show their support for President Muhammadu Buhari whose popularity has drastically reduced back home as a result of the fragile local economy and widespread security issues.

According to unconfirmed report, each person was allegedly paid 150 pounds for just two hours to participate in the rally.

See photos below:

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Remember a Nigerian man named Legit Dollarface Peters was in desperate search of a babymama according to his Instagram post he is willing to pay her N1Million if she gives birth to a girl and N2Million if she gives birth to a boy?

You will recall that Dollarface Peters spent 1Million On drinks during his girlfriends birthday then proposed to her but they tragically broke up barely 3weeks later i guess he has finally given up on love.

Here are the beautiful pictures from the traditional wedding of Dollarface Peters after he broke up with his engagement with the slay queen and finally got married to another woman.
A Kenyan student in the United States has gone viral after her relationship with her American boyfriend became a trending topic over their age-gap.

Speaking to Mail Online, 21-year-old Rehab Kimani said she met Joe Singiser, 54, through work at a nursing home in New Jersey.

A student and home health aide, Rehab said that her friends got disgusted by her choice of boyfriend. They even stopped her from talking about her man whenever she was around them.

I thought he was very attractive and immediately wanted him, she revealed. I really liked his big muscles and that everyone at work was afraid of him.

Rehab also reveals that despite being very comfortable on their first date, it was hard for her to deal with the way her family reacted as they did not take it positively.

I just see him as my boyfriend and my best friend. If anything, the difference is that I take this relationship as more serious than previous ones. It took everyone a long time, but they are finally understanding of us being together. She said.

Mr Singiser is a father of four and Rehabs supervisor at work. He says he was startled when he got interested in his younger employee but opted to press on with the relationship because he knew it was true love.

He says he noticed her beautiful smile from the across the room and would find excuses to come out of his office just to see her.

Rehab says that she no longer sees the age difference. However, they do draw looks from strangers on the streets.

Mr Singiser is a father of four and Rehabs supervisor at work. He says he was startled when he got interested in his younger employee but opted to press on with the relationship because he knew it was true love.

He says he noticed her beautiful smile from the across the room and would find excuses to come out of his office just to see her.

Rehab says that she no longer sees the age difference. However, they do draw looks from strangers on the streets.

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Tribune

The Nigeria Police has announced that the stolen mace from the Nigerian Senate has been recovered.

Vanguard

Chairman, Presidential Committee on Small & Light Weapons, PRESCOM, Ambassador Emmanuel Imohe, has blamed the current strife between herders and farmers on unscrupulous arms merchants who are taking advantage of Nigerias porous borders to flood the nation with illicit weapons.

The Sun

There is palpable tension in Abuja, Nigerias Federal Capital Territory (FCT), following a security alert over a planned deadly protest by members of Shiite group Islamic Movement in Nigeria (IMN) Friday.

Daily Times

An aide of Senator Solomon Adeola (APC-Lagos) has explained how the Senator allegedly escaped an attempted kidnap in the hands of unknown men who stormed the Senate and made away with the mace during plenary on Wednesday

Guardian

Vice President Yemi Osinbajo has expressed concerns that the national budget for 2018 is yet to be passed after seven months with the National Assembly.Osinbajo, during a visit of The Companion, an association of Muslim men in business and professions in Abuja, said the presidency is expecting speedy passage of the budget, and would continue to interact with the legislators for a positive outcome.

Daily Trust

The All Progressives Congress (APC) in Kwara state Wednesday suspended a former member of the House of Representatives, Hon. Mashood Mustapha.

Leadership

Ahead of the 2019 general elections, Christian Leaders under the auspices of United Christian Leaders Eagle Eyes Forum (UCLEEF) have called on Nigerians irrespective of religious, ethnic and political inclinations to awake and save our dear nation as it is the citizenry that have the power, right and choice to make the country great again.

The Nation

Hawkers in Federal Capital Territory (FCT) have pleaded with the government to provide affordable shops and soft loans for their businesses to curb street hawking within the territory.
OAU Professor

The authorities of the Obafemi Awolowo University, OAU, Ile-Ife said Monica Osagie was the student involved in a sex-for-marks scandal, that has sorely questioned the morality of university dons, in the training of young Nigerians.

Prof. Eyitope Ogunbodede, the Vice Chancellor of Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), said Monica Osetobe Osagie was studying for a Masters in Business Administration.

He also announced the suspension of Prof. Richard Akindele, the don involved in the salacious scandal.

Ogunbodedes action followed the submission of the interim report of the committee set up to investigate the allegation of sexual harassment revealed in audio recording.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that a recorded audio conversation of the don demanding for sex to increase the marks of a female undergraduate had gone viral.

The committee observed that a prima facie case of inappropriate relationship with the female student had been established against Professor Richard I. Akindele.

The Vice Chancellor said that though the investigative committee invited both Akindele and Osagie, only Akindele appeared before the committee.

The report indicated that many other witnesses appeared before the committee and gave useful evidence.The university is making efforts to ensure that Miss Osagie appears before the investigative committee so that it can hear her side of the case and promptly submit its final report, he said.

Explaining why the lecturer was yet to be sacked, the Vice Chancellor said that the provisions of the relevant statute of the university must be followed.

Under the provisions of the relevant statute of the university, an academic staff can only be dismissed from service or have his or her appointment terminated only when the matter on which consideration is being given has been investigated by a Joint Council and Senate Committee;

Also the staff has appeared before the committee with his or her counsel, if so desired.

This procedure is the minimum requirement of the law and regulations of the university.

It should therefore be noted that the suspension of Professor Richard I. Akindele is on the basis of the findings of the Investigative Committee that he is prima facie liable.

This decision will abide, pending the final determination of the case by the council of the University, the vice chancellor said.

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Tonto Dikeh shows off cleavage

Tonto Dikeh who is now Born again has got tongues wagging after she showed off her surgically enhanced body on social media.

The beautiful mother of one showed off her cleavage while praising her Nigerian plastic surgeon for doing an apparently good job on her.

Watch the video below;

The controversial actress had earlier hinted that there was someone in her life after she asked this question;

How long did you Date him/Her before they met your Kid(Kids)??

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There were high scoring victories for Inter Moengotapoe of Suriname and Martinique's Club Franciscain on Day Two of the CONCACAF Caribbean Shield in Santiago, Dominican Republic.Inter Moengotapoe secured their second straight win, defeating Barbados' Weymouth Wales 5-0 in their Group A clash at Estadio Cibao to virtually secure a place in the semi finals, recording an impressive ten goals without conceding in two matches. Club Franciscain rebounded from their first match defeat, to trounce St Kitts/Nevis' Cayon Rockets FC 6-0 in Group C action at Universidad Isa.Inter's second successive win was inspired by a four-goal performance by Suriname National Team forward Stefano Rijssel who struck in the 2nd, 47th, 71st and 74th minutes while Romeo Castile added a final item in the 81st minute.The overwhelming victory was just what Inter were hoping for ahead of their closing group stage encounter against USR of Guadeloupe on Tuesday. They will be aiming to make it three wins in a row after their 5-0 defeat of Aruba's Nacional on the opening day.Rijssel was over the moon with his prolific goalscoring performance on Sunday, expressing his delight moments after the final whistle."This game today was a very important one for us. We won our first game so we came into this one with some confidence knowing that we had to get the job done again," Rijssel said."I was very focused for this match. We all came prepared because we know a win would put us closer to the next round and we want to go all the way. This is a great opportunity for us to do something special," he added.In the other Group A contest at Cibao, St Vincent/Grenadines national team forward Myron Samuel scored a 72nd minute winner to guide his team to a 3-2 victory over Grenada's Hard Rock FC.Chevil Cunningham gave Avenues a 14th minute lead before Raymond Alleyne tied it up for Hard Rock in the 36th. Ray Snagg struck two minutes after the interval to put Avenues ahead again but Hard Rock were not to be easily outdone and they forced themselves back into the outing, getting an equaliser in the 50th minute from Nicko Williams. But Samuel and Avenues had the final say as both teams went in search of a winner.Samuel later said that the fitter team came out on top."Today the key to the win was our fitness and we stayed together throughout. We saw the other team play before so we decided from the start that we needed to press them and use our strengths and take it to them. We had a little setback but we came out with the victory. It's a good win for us because now we can try to focus on our next game knowing that another win can put us into the semi finals," Samuel said.In Group C action, Club Franciscain were led by a hattrick from Timon Yann who grabbed items in the 29th, 45th and 62nd minutes. Djenhael Maine struck a double in the 16th and 22nd minutes to set the pace for his side in the first half. Stephane Abaul got their final goal in the 63rd minute. The other Group C encounter saw Bodden Town FC and Centro Dominguito battle to a 0-0 draw.In the other Group A match, SV Deportivo Nacional of Aruba bounced back from their opening loss to Inter Moengotapoe with a hard-fought 2-0 victory over USR of Guadeloupe in the day's final match at Estadio Cibao. Kenroy Ranger opened the scoring for Nacional in the 16th minute and Devis Oliveros netted the second goal on 46 minutes to guide Nacional to their first win of the competition,Nacional Dreyer Bracho said his team addressed one of their major issues from the opening day defeat and were able to lift their game level on Sunday."We looked back at the performance in the first match and we knew defensively we were not good enough and we hard to work on that," Bracho said after the win.We did it today and it paid off because it put us in a good position. We did not conceded and we scored two goals to get us the victory. It's an important victory for the club because we have been working hard and to come here and get a victory in the CONCACAF Caribbean Shield is a good accomplishment . Now we have to keep our spirit and go into the next game with the same attitude in order to get another win and hopefully make it to the next round," Bracho added.Tuesday's final Group stage matches will determine the semi-final qualifiers and promises to present some exciting matchups as the teams seek their progress to the next phase.
CALGARY, Alberta - April 20, 2018 (Investorideas.com Newswire) Further to the press release issued this morning by Vogogo Inc. ("Vogogo" or the "Company") (CSE:VGO), the Company announces that it has now also secured an option (the "Option") to purchase electrical and HVAC equipment (the "Equipment") to be used for further expansion of its cryptocurrency mining activities, to be installed at a location to be determined. The purchase price for the Equipment under the Option is $20 million CAD and will service approximately 35 megawatts of electrical power. If the Option is exercised and the Equipment deployed in a suitable facility, in total the Company will have access to approximately 74 megawatts of low-cost electrical power. The Company can exercise the Option within 180 days of closing the previously announced acquisition of 14,000 cryptocurrency mining machines and supporting infrastructure.

Vogogo will be required to raise capital to fund the $36 million cash portion of the previously announced acquisition (in equity and/or debt) and, if the Company decides to exercise the Option, the $20 million purchase price of the Equipment. In that regard, the Company is currently in the process of engaging investment banks to assist with such capital raise.

About Vogogo Inc.

Vogogo currently operates its cryptocurrency mining activities at a state-of-the-art facility in Pointe-Claire, Quebec. This includes mining for cryptocurrencies for its own account, as a service for third party customers and within mining pools. As it continues to embrace blockchain technology, Vogogo is exploring opportunities in all aspects of the cryptocurrency segment, including the three verticals of mining, payments and currency exchange.

For information or interview please contact:

John Kennedy FitzGerald

Chief Executive Officer and President

403-648-9292

READER ADVISORY

Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange ("CSE") nor the Market Regulator (as that term is defined in the policies of the CSE) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this press release.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains certain forward-looking statements. All information, other than information regarding historic fact that addresses activities, events or developments that the Company believes, expects or anticipates will or may occur in the future is forward-looking information. The words "will," "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "expect," "intent," "may," "project," "should," and similar expressions are intended to be among the statements that identify forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements are founded on the basis of expectations and assumptions made by Vogogo. Readers are cautioned that assumptions used in the preparation of such information may prove to be incorrect. Events or circumstances may cause actual results to differ materially from those predicted as a result of numerous known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors, many of which are beyond the control of Vogogo. Vogogo does not have any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements except as expressly required by applicable securities laws.

More Info:

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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.

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Vancouver, British Columbia - April 20, 2018 (Newsfile Corp.) (Investorideas.com Newswire) M2 Cobalt Corp. (TSXV: MC) (the "Company") is pleased to announce that results from rock and soil samples taken as part of the initial phase of the work program recently launched on its exploration licenses ("Els") at Bujagali have resulted in the discovery of a new Cobalt ("Co") and Copper ("Cu") anomaly delineated by both soil and rock samples (named the 'Waragi Target').

The results of soil and rock samples collected from the Waragi Target have delineated a well-defined cobalt and copper anomaly which is at present approximately 750 metres by 550 metres and open to the North East. Both infill sampling and a grid extension have been completed to better define the anomaly, and to delineate its full extent, with results anticipated shortly. Following which, the Company will move into large-scale trenching and targeted drilling to test mineralization at depth.

Soil samples which form the anomaly comprise: 56 samples with more than 100 parts per million cobalt ("ppm Co") including six samples with between 212 and 626 ppm Co; and, 37 samples with more than 100 ppm copper including seven samples with between 160 and 547 ppm Cu. In addition to the soil samples, 23 rock grab samples contain anomalous cobalt (0.11 percent ("%") Co to 1.24% Co) and, 19 rock samples contain anomalous copper (0.1% to 0.4% Cu). Anomalous rock samples are hydrothermal breccias and altered meta-sediments. Maps providing more details on the results can be found on the Company's web site: www.m2cobalt.com/index.php/projects/bujagali. Table 1 below shows the rock grab sample highlights.

Table 1 - Rock Grab Sample Highlights - Waragi Target

*Rock grab samples are selective by nature and are unlikely to represent average grades on the property.

All samples were sent to ALS Chemex South Africa (Pty) Ltd., an independent and fully accredited laboratory in South Africa ("ALS") for analysis for gold multi-element Induction Coupled Plasma Spectroscopy ("ICP"). The Company also has a regimented Quality Assurance, Quality Control ("QA/QC") program where at least 10% duplicates and blanks are inserted into each sample shipment.

Dean Besserer, P.Geol., the Company's Technical Advisor and exploration program manager stated, "With this discovery, we now have multiple targets to advance with trenching and drilling, in addition to our ongoing property-scale exploration within our other Licenses at Bujagali and our Kilembe area properties. These are very positive results at this stage of our program and we look forward to taking the next steps towards fully understanding the extent of these opportunities."

Simon Clarke, CEO stated, "We are very pleased with the size of our early discoveries and the grades of cobalt and associated metals that we are defining at our Bujagali properties. We look to advance these discoveries to the next stage as expeditiously as possible."

About M2Cobalt

M2 Cobalt Corp. is focused on discovering and developing world class cobalt assets (and related minerals) to help address the growing deficit in the supply of cobalt. The Company has a large, highly prospective land package in the Republic of Uganda, East Africa bordering historic production on the same mineral trends as some of the major mines in the neighbouring DRC where over 60% of world cobalt supply originates. Uganda is a stable country with a growing economy looking to re-energize its historic mining industry. The Company has a highly experienced management team and board of directors which has been involved in funding and advancing resource projects globally. The Company also owns licenses over 2,800 hectares of land in the Cobalt Camp in Ontario, Canada. Further information on the Company and its projects can be found at www.m2cobalt.com.

The technical content of this news release has been reviewed and approved by Dean Besserer, P.Geol., the Technical Advisor of the Company and a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101.

For further information, contact Simon Clarke at sclarke@m2cobalt.com or Andy Edelmeier at andy@m2cobalt.com.

On behalf of the Board,

M2 COBALT CORP.

Simon Clarke, Chief Executive Officer

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 contain certain "Forward-Looking Statements" within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and applicable Canadian securities laws. When used in this news release, the words "anticipate", "believe", "estimate", "expect", "target, "plan", "forecast", "may", "schedule" and other similar words or expressions identify forward-looking statements or information. These forward-looking statements or information may relate to exploration work to be undertaken in Uganda, the reliability of third party information, and certain other factors or information. Such statements represent the Company's current views with respect to future events and are necessarily based upon a number of assumptions and estimates that, while considered reasonable by the Company, are inherently subject to significant business, economic, competitive, political and social risks, contingencies and uncertainties. Many factors, both known and unknown, could cause results, performance or achievements to be materially different from the results, performance or achievements that are or may be expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The Company does not intend, and does not assume any obligation, to update these forward-looking statements or information to reflect changes in assumptions or changes in circumstances or any other events affections such statements and information other than as required by applicable laws, rules and regulations.

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.

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Posted 4/19/18

Brennon Abraham, who is head of business/core technology at Buffalo Prairie Middle School, also is adviser to the middle school chapter of Future Business Leaders of America.On April 6 at a state 
During the Iowa State National School Walk Out on April 20th, students from all walks of life gathered to hear more about gun violence and honoring those who have been impacted by it.
This collection features the arguments in favor of and against the renaming of Catt Hall on Iowa State's campus, which was named in 
If you live in the United States and have tried to switch between mobile carriers, then you have probably discovered that its not always the easiest thing to accomplish.

The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) has decided to look into that, as first reported by The New York Times. According to the publication, the DOJ is currently in the process of investigating several different entities in the United States over possible collusion in preventing customers from being able to switch carriers easily.

The GSM Association, which is a group that sets mobile standards in the U.S., along with Verizon and AT&T, are all part of the investigation. The DOJ is working to weed out if these companies have conspired behind-the-scenes to keep customers from moving to one carrier to the other. Its not a secret that Verizon and AT&T are the two largest wireless carriers in the U.S.

The documentation reveals that these two carriers, along with the GSMA, have worked together to prevent the adoption of embedded SIM cards, or eSIMs. These embedded SIMs would make it easier for customers to swap between carriers, because the card itself could be altered to support whatever carrier the customer wanted. Unlike current SIM cards, they are designed not to be removed.

At the heart of the investigation is whether the nations biggest wireless carriers, working with the G.S.M.A., secretly tried to influence mobile technology to unfairly maintain their dominance, in a way that hurt competition and consumers and hindered innovation in the wider mobile industry. AT&T and Verizon together control about 70 percent of all wireless subscriptions in the United States. A technology that made it easy to switch carriers could lead to more churn and fewer subscribers for them.

Verizon, for its part, has argued that phones need to be locked to its carrier to prevent fraud and theft. However, it should be worth noting here that Verizon is only recently changing its policy in regards to unlocked smartphones. In February of this year it was announced that the largest wireless carrier in the U.S. that it would start locking down its phones, reciting that theft and fraud excuse. Up until that point, Verizons smartphones have been unlocked  making it, technically, to switch carriers with a Verizon smartphone.

As far as eSIMs are concerned, both Verizon and AT&T are both being investigated for working to get these cards locked to carriers, crippling the idea of the card by locking them to individual carriers. Both carriers reportedly worked with the GSMA to reach that goal. Representatives from both networks met with GSMA North America, what is a private task force, earlier this year to advocate for this particular goal.

Apple, which launches devices that support SIM cards and is rumored to be moving to an eSIM card as well, wants a shift. It has already launched the Apple SIM, which is a designed to make it possible for customers to easily switch from one carrier to the next as the SIM card supports a variety of options. However, Verizon is one carrier that doesnt allow the Apple SIM to work in its devices.

Our Take

It is not easy to switch carriers. It might be easier for some folks, but generally speaking the process is tedious, and, as this writer can attest to, some instances see carriers refusing to even provide simple information to make the process of switching as easy as possible. Thats just the billing side of things. Get into SIM cards and eSIMs and carrier technology, and the whole process can be an ordeal.

Will eSIM cards make that easier? Its possible. But that still leaves the other side of the process, and carriers arent usually ready to lose customers to competing options. Still, any help is a good thing. With this investigation, one can hope that Verizon and AT&T, and any other carriers working to make this harder for customers, have to change their ways.

[via The NYT
Here is the weekly road construction report for Hamilton County:

I-75 North Exit 1 interchange reconfiguration project at mile marker 1: Work on this project continues. There is now only one exit ramp that allows drivers to turn both east and west on Ringgold Road at a signalized intersection. Traffic has been shifted onto the newly constructed portion of Camp Jordan Pkwy., and the intersection (I-75 NB off-ramp and SR-8/Camp Jordan Parkway) is now controlled by a traffic signal. Estimated project completion date is May. [C.W. Matthews Contracting/City Of East Ridge/LCLPRGM]

US-27 (I-124) widening from I-24/US-27 interchange to north of the Olgiati Bridge over the Tennessee River, including widening the Olgiati Bridge: Work on this project continues. The contractor has closed the 12th Street tie-in ramp to US-27 South. This closure will be in place until 05/18. Traffic from 12th Street will be detoured to Carter Street and then to Westbound MLK where motorists may access the US-27 South on-ramp. Detours are posted. Motorists should exercise caution when traveling through the construction zone and pay close attention to the detour signage posted. The speed limit has been reduced from 45 MPH to 35 MPH between Main Street and 4th Street on US-27 North. The speed limit on US-27 in the rest of the construction zone remains 45 MPH. Motorists should exercise caution when traveling through the construction zone and pay close attention to the signage posted. Weather permitting, the contractor may implement temporary lane/shoulder closures on weeknights between the hours of 7 p.m.-6 a.m. At least one lane will remain open in each direction on US-27. THP will assist with traffic control on the project as necessary. RESTRICTIONS: I-124 (US-27) Northbound Exit 1C 4th Street Off Ramp. No oversize/over-dimensional loads. Width Limit is 11 feet. Estimated project completion date is January 2020. [Dement Construction Company, LLC/Micka/CNP230]

Utility Work on SR-58 (HWY. 58) northbound from LM 10.49 to LM 10.49: Approx. 5.8 miles northeast of the intersection with SR 153 TVA will be performing aerial line work. Temporary delays signage with flagger support. 7 a.m.-5 p.m. on Saturday. [UO 2007050836-2018]

SR-111 resurfacing from SR-29 to Jones Gap Road: Work will be performed from 6:30 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday through Friday. Signs will be installed on Thursday and work will begin on Monday. Estimated project completion date is July. [Wright Brothers, LLC/Pruett/CNS020]

SR-320 (East Brainerd Road) grading, drainage, installation of signals, construction of seven retaining walls and paving from east of Graysville Road to east of Bel-Air Road: During this report period, the contractor will have intermittent lane closures between 9 a.m.-2 p.m. This work may affect either direction of East Brainerd Road or side streets from Graysville Road to Bel-Air Road. Flaggers will assist with traffic control as needed. Estimated project completion date is June. [Jones Bros. Contractors, LLC/Pruett/CNN383]

SR-58 intersection improvement at Champion Road: During this report period, the contractor will have lane closures between 9 a.m.-7 p.m. This work may affect either direction of SR-58 at the Champion Road intersection. No lane closures will be in effect from 5-9 a.m. in the southbound direction and from 3-6 p.m. in the northbound direction. Flaggers will assist with traffic control as needed. Estimated project completion date is June. [Greenstar, LLC/Pruett/CNS025]

The tunnel cleaning of the McCallie Tunnel on US-11 (US-64, SR-2), the Stringers Ridge Tunnel on US-127 (SR-8), and the Bachman Tubes on US-41 (US-76, SR-8): The nighttime cleaning operation of McCallie Tunnels, Stringers Ridge Tunnel, and Bachman Tubes occurs between 8 p.m.-6 a.m. Tunnels will be closed during cleaning, and detours will be marked accordingly as each tunnel is cleaned. This work is scheduled to begin on Wednesday at the McCallie tunnels (SR-2) and proceed to the Stringer's Ridge tunnel (SR-8) and on Thursday, April 26, the Bachman Tubes (SR-8) will be cleaned. Estimated project completion date is June. [ETI Environmental, Inc./Micka/CNR223]






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Creative Discovery Museum is hosting its first Multi-faith Panel: Raising Children in Chattanooga.

This panel is designed for parents, teachers and other interested adults and teens. Participants are invited to come for pizza before the program. Museum staff will provide childcare and facilitated activities for children ages 3-11.

The event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Visit cdmfun.org/faith to register.

Charles Neal, pastor emeritus at First Centenary United Methodist, will serve as the facilitator for the panel.

Panelists include:

Sheila Boyington, MS, PE is co-founder and president of Thinking Media in Chattanooga. She has two daughters and will be sharing her experiences raising children in the Hindu faith.

Alison Lebovitz hosts The A List with Alison Lebovitz, an engaging one-on-one weekly interview series for PBS that features a diverse array of local and national personalities. She has three sons and will be sharing her experiences raising them in the Jewish faith.

Edisa Razic is a salon owner and hairstylist in Chattanooga and she serves as the Community Engagement Coordinator for America to Zanzibar: Muslim Cultures Near and Far for Creative Discovery Museum. She has two daughters and will be sharing her experience raising them in the Muslim faith.

Jospeh Wingfield is President of Wingfield Scale Company, one of the largest independent scale dealers in the county providing industrial scale and weighing systems. Joseph is a member of the Chattanooga Area Leadership Prayer Breakfast Task Force. He is the father of five boys and will be sharing his experience raising them in the Christian faith.

The event will be held on Sunday from 5:30-7:30 p.m. at the Creative Discovery Museum, 321 Chestnut St. Panel discussion takes place from 6-7 p.m.

For more information visit www.cdmfun.org.


Reliance Partners announced the addition of John Seidl as V.P. of Risk Services. Mr. Seidl is recognized as a leading expert in DOT commercial transportation compliance.

As a former Wisconsin State Motor Carrier Trooper and FMCSA investigator with more than 20 years of experience in risk services, Mr. Seidl is well-versed in the transportation insurance space. He has worked at the FMCSA, FAA, and most recently as an insurance producer and DOT consultant.

We know John will play a key role in our continued success and growth, said company President and COO Chad Eichelberger. His hands-on experience in DOT compliance and fleet risk management are a perfect fit with our growing national client base of large fleets.
Bryan College leadership surprised long-time supporters Glenn and Jackie Stophel by naming the soon-to-be constructed welcome center in their honor. The announcement came during the 11th annual Bryan Opportunity Scholarship Program fundraiser attended by more than 500 friends and supporters of the college. Mr. Stophel served as a member of the Bryan College Board from 1978 to 1986 and again from 1992 to 2010. He served as chairman of the board from 1996 to 2003 and later served as legal counsel to the college from 2010 to 2015. Presently he Stophel serves as Trustee Emeritus in honor of his valuable service to Bryan College.

Glenn Stophel has not only provided leadership and support to Bryan College but also to the entire community, officials said.

He currently serves as director and secretary-treasurer of the Clifton and Clara Ward Foundation, president and director of the Joe and Velma DeWitt Foundation, and, president and director of the Weldon F. Osborne Foundation. He is past president of the Kiwanis Club of Chattanooga, former director of the National Association of Christian Athletes, past chairman of the National Center for Youth Issues, and, former member of the Chattanooga Rotary Club. He has previously served as a member of the House of Delegates of the Tennessee Bar Association and was appointed by President Gerald Ford as a member of the first Board of Directors of the Legal Services Corporation in 1974.

He received his J.D., from The University of Tennessee College of Law and his B.S. degree from Bob Jones University. He is a member of the Tennessee Bar Association, Chattanooga Bar Association, State Bar of Georgia, and the American Bar Association.

Construction on the Stophel Center will begin in September with completion anticipated by July 2019. The two-story building will encompass 18,000 square feet and will be located at the top of the new entrance, making it the first building to greet arriving guests. Once complete, the building will house 25 offices including Admissions, Advancement, Marketing and Executive Offices, as well as, a medium-sized banquet facility. The Stophel Center is among the first of several capital projects funded through Bryans 2018 Making a Difference: Vision to Reality initiative and is estimated to cost $3 million.

Bryan College Board Chair Delana Bice said, "Glenns leadership over the last four decades has brought us through both good as well as challenging times. He has led by example, remaining constant, consistent and committed to what is always in the best interest of Bryan College. It is with great appreciation that we honor Glenn and Jackie Stophel."

Dr. Stephen Livesay noted, "Glenn has provided not only leadership for Bryan College but also to the law firm that bears his name. Chambliss, Bahner and Stophel has long been one of Chattanoogas best-known firms with a reputation that was built by the reputation and character of Glenn and John Stophel and their partners. We are pleased to honor both Glenn and Jackie Stophel and look forward to welcoming visitors to our campus at the center that bears their name."
Today

Partly cloudy skies during the morning giving way to a few showers late. High 81F. Winds SW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 30%.

Tonight

Considerable cloudiness with occasional rain showers. Low 64F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 40%.

Tomorrow

Partly to mostly cloudy with scattered showers and thunderstorms developing in the afternoon. High 78F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 50%.
A federal judge on Thursday enjoined [text, PDF] the US government from sending a US citizen who has been detained in Iraq for almost a year to another country.

This order follows the American Civil Liberty Unions request [text, PDF] to temporarily block the detainees transference until the US government could produce legal authority that supported moving him to a third country.

Federal District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan issued [NPR report] the preliminary injunction a few minutes before the deadline to stop the unnamed citizen from being moved to a third country passed.

The detainee was taken into custody last September by the Syrian and US militaries. The man claimed [NYT report] that he was in Syria for journalism related purposes but he has also conceded to guarding a gas field and monitoring people for the Islamic State. The US government suspected that he had ties to IS because the extremist groups recruitment files have him listed as a fighter. He was also found with $4,000 on his person and two flash drives t that contained thousands of photographs, including photos of military handbooks and guides on how to make bombs.

The ACLU wrote:

The executive has imprisoned Petitioner without charge for nearly seven months. It would make a mockery of the Great Writ if the executive could not strip this American citizen of his right to seek his freedom by rending him to the custody of another country without established legal authority. In short, it violates the public interest to give the executive carte blanche over the liberty of American citizens based on the fiction that a forcible transfer to the custody of another government is equivalent to release from unlawful custody.

At a Friday hearing, Chutkan said she took the governments concerns into consideration when making her decision but continued to be mindful of the unnamed detainees American citizenship.
A Texas appeals court ruled [opinion] Thursday that the Relationship Privacy Act [text], which prescribes criminal and civil penalties for defendants who disseminate pornographic visual material featuring former significant others without consent, is overly broad and it violates First Amendment rights of third party individuals who are not original parties in the romantic relationships.

The statute makes it unlawful to disseminate material depicting intimate parts of the victims. Intimate parts include naked genitals, pubic area, anus, buttocks, or female nipple of a person. Visual material includes: any film, photograph, videotape, negative, or slide or any photographic reproduction that contains or incorporates in any manner any film, photograph, videotape, negative, or slide. The law prescribes either a civil $1000 fine or an injunction for intentional exposure. The law also prescribes a $500 fine or an injunction for unintentional exposure. Violating the statute is a class A criminal misdemeanor.

The appeals court was most concerned with the acts criminal component. The Relationship Privacy Act includes an addition to the Texas Penal Code. Section 21.16(b) that makes third parties culpable. The court was concerned that those who were not involved with the creation of the original content and could not have reasonably known such content was private in nature would be held criminally liable for disseminating the content without intent to harm the victim.
String Theory, in partnership with Lee University and the Hunter Museum of American Art, will conclude its ninth season with violinists Itamar Zorman and Bella Hristova, violists Richard ONeill and Yura Lee, and cellists Dmitri Atapine and Mihai Marica. The concert will take place on Tuesday, May 1, at 6:30 p.m. at the museum.

String Theory was founded by pianist and Artistic Director Gloria Chien in 2009 to expose new audiences to chamber music, invigorate the local classical music scene, and cultivate a future generation of music lovers.

The May performance will feature Glazunovs String Quintet, Op. 39 and Tchaikovskys Souvenir de Florence, Op. 70.

Review for the performers:

Mr. Zorman, a recipient of the Avery Fisher Career Grant and a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Award, has appeared with the American Symphony Orchestra in Carnegie Hall, the Tokyo Symphony, the Jerusalem Symphony, Israel Philharmonic, Haifa Symphony, and St. Petersburg Philharmonic. As a recitalist, he performed at Carnegie Hall's Distinctive Debut series, the Louvre Museum, People's Symphony concerts, Suntory Hall, and on Frankfurt Radio. He has also taken part in festivals such as Marlboro, Rheingau, and Verbier.

He is a founding member of the Israeli Chamber Project and a member of the Lysander Piano Trio, with which he won the 2012 Concert Artists Guild Competition, the Grand Prize in the 2011 Coleman Chamber Music Competition, and First Prize in the 2011 Arriaga Competition.

Acclaimed for her passionate, powerful performances, beautiful sound, and compelling command of her instrument, Ms. Hristova has been praised by The Washington Post as a player of impressive power and control. She frequently performs with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Westchester Philharmonic, and the Pennsylvania Sinfonia, in addition to participating in educational outreach activities.

Ms. Hristova is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including a 2013 Avery Fisher Career Grant, First Prize in the 2009 Young Concert Artists International Auditions, and First Prize in the 2007 Michael Hill International Violin Competition in New Zealand.

Mr. ONeill is an Emmy Award winner, two-time Grammy nominee, and an Avery Fisher Career Grant recipient. He has appeared with the London, Los Angeles, Seoul, and Euro-Asian philharmonics; the BBC, KBS, and Korean symphonies; and the Moscow, Vienna, and Wurttemburg chamber orchestras.

As a Universal/DG recording artist, Mr. ONeill has made eight solo albums which have sold more than 200,000 copies. His chamber music initiative, DITTO, has introduced tens of thousands to chamber music in South Korea and Japan.

Ms. Lee, also a recipient of the Avery Fisher Career Grant, has appeared as a soloist with many major orchestras including the Baltimore Symphony, the Chicago Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, the Detroit Symphony, the Hong Kong Philharmonic, and the Tokyo Philharmonic.

She has been praised for her musical integrity and her compelling artistry. Lee was nominated and represented by Carnegie Hall for its ECHO (European Concert Hall Organization) series. For this series, she gave recitals at Carnegies Weill Recital Hall and at nine celebrated concert halls in Europe.

Mr. Atapine, described by Gramophone as a cellist with brilliant technical chops, has appeared as a soloist and recitalist at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, Chicago Cultural Center, the National Auditorium of Spain, and Zankel and Weill halls at Carnegie Hall. His festival appearances include Cactus Pear Music Festival, Music@Menlo, Nevada Chamber Music Festival, and Pacific Music Festival, with performances broadcast on radio and television in more than five countries.

Mr. Atapines multiple awards include top prizes at the Carlos Prieto International, the Florian Ocampo, and the Llanes cello competitions, as well as the Plowman, New England, and the Premio Vittorio Gui chamber competitions. He currently serves as the artistic director of the Ribadesella Chamber Music Festival in Spain.

Mr. Marica is a First Prize winner of the Dr. Luis Sigall International Competition in Vina del Mar, Chile, and the Irving M. Klein International Competition. He is a recipient of Charlotte Whites Salon de Virtuosi Fellowship Grant.

Mr. Marica has performed with orchestras such as the Hermitage State Orchestra of St. Petersburg in Russia, the Jardins Musicaux Festival Orchestra in Switzerland, the Symphony Orchestra of Chile, and the Xalapa Symphony in Mexico. He also appeared in recital performances in Austria, Canada, Chile, Germany, Holland, Hungary, Japan, South Korea, Spain, and throughout the United States.

Prior to the concert, Musical Dialogues will take place at 6 p.m. from the concert stage. Dr. Chien will lead an in-depth conversation with the musicians on their lives, inspirations, and the masterpieces being performed.

Tickets for the May 1 concert, which is sponsored by Barnett and Company, are $35 for Hunter members, $45 for non-members, $10 for students with a valid student ID, and $25 for groups of 20 or more people.

For more information on String Theory at the Hunter Museum of American Art or to purchase tickets, call 414-2525 or visit www.stringtheorymusic.org.




The detention of a doctor who was accused of damaging the reputation of a health liquor maker in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region has aroused heated debate, with the public calling for severe punishments for those who mislead consumers about health-related products.

Tan Qindong, who holds a master's degree in anesthesiology, was detained for more than three months for posting an online article saying that a liquor product made by Hongmao Pharmaceutical Co in Liangcheng county could be toxic.

Tan was released on bail on Tuesday, following an order by the region's top prosecuting authority, which said in a statement on Tuesday that a review had found insufficient evidence to support criminal accusations against Tan. Local prosecutors in Liangcheng were instructed to send the case back to local police for further investigation.

Tan, 39, who holds a master's degree in anesthesiology and lives in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, was detained in January by police from Liangcheng after he posted an online piece saying that the product's beneficial effects were exaggerated and that it could be toxic.

The case has stirred heated public debate in the past few days over possible abuse of power by the Liangcheng police, as well as over irregularities in the advertising of medicines and products claiming to have beneficial effects.

Misleading advertising for drugs or other healthcare products has deceived many people, and authorities should punish such activities harshly to ensure drug and food safety, Xinhua News Agency wrote in a commentary.

A statement released by the State Administration for Market Regulation on Tuesday said healthcare product producers should use clear, precise labeling that conforms to standards to avoid misleading consumers.

The administration also urged authorities in Inner Mongolia to intensify their inspections and oversight of Hongmao's advertising.

The administration said it monitored 137 reports of the liquor's side effects between 2004 and 2017. Symptoms included dizziness, stomach aches and nausea.

The product is an over-the-counter drug certified by the administration, but it is not suitable for everyone and may cause serious harm to some people, it said.

According to a report by Health Times in Beijing, sales of the liquor were suspended dozens of times by authorities across China because advertisements exaggerated its benefits.

Li Enze, a lawyer at Beijing Impact Law Firm, said irregularities are still common in advertisements promoting drugs and health foods in China.

"Some over-the-counter drugs, such as the liquor product produced by Hongmao, are advertised as healthcare foods to give the public the impression that they can be used by everyone," he said. "Advertisements for some health foods, such as certain beverages and biscuits, claim medicinal effects."

Li said local protectionism has caused drug authorities to ease their scrutiny over the makers of drug or health food products within their jurisdictions.

Meanwhile, false advertising has also been linked with some television stations and other media, which rely on advertising for revenue, he said.

He said more severe punishments for violations should be employed to effectively deter them, against both producers and sellers.




Queen Elizabeth told the heads of more than 50 states Thursday that she wants the heir to the British throne, her eldest son Prince Charles, to succeed her as head of the Commonwealth.

Britain's Queen Elizabeth II listens during speeches at The Queen's Dinner, during the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting at Buckingham Palace in London, Thursday, April 19, 2018. [Photo: AP]

The British monarch made her plea at Buckingham Palace where she hosted the opening ceremony of the 2018 Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting.

Although Queen Elizabeth succeeded her late father, King George VI, as head and has led the Commonwealth since the 1950s, there is no written rule that the job should automatically go to the serving British monarch.

Royal commentators described the Queen's comments as a rare intervention, just days ahead of her 92nd birthday this weekend.

The heads of governments will be debating the succession of their head when they hold a private retreat Friday at Windsor Castle.

The Commonwealth is an intergovernmental organization of 53 member states that are mostly former territories of the British Empire, with a combined population of 2.4 billion, a third of the world's population.

In her speech, the Queen said: "It is my sincere wish that the Commonwealth will continue to offer stability and continuity for future generations, and will decide that one day The Prince of Wales should carry on the important work started by my father in 1949."

Hannah Furness, royal correspondent at the Daily Telegraph newspaper, said the message from the Queen was the clearest signal yet about the future of the head of the commonwealth.

"Her highly significant speech, met with warm applause, is the most explicit statement she has made to date of her hopes for the Commonwealth's future, and the honorary and not hereditary position of its head," wrote Furness.

British Prime Minister Theresa May, speaking at the opening ceremony, said the meeting was taking place at a time of significant global challenges.

"The rules-based international system, which has consistently delivered both prosperity and peace, faces threats in many forms and on many fronts," said May.

"Climate change and extreme weather continue to take lives and damage livelihoods across the Commonwealth. And the new opportunities afforded by the digital world have brought with them new risks, with our cyber security under attack from individuals and state actors."

May has called on commonwealth countries to join in the fight against plastic pollution. She cited the decision by the British government to end the sale of plastic straws, drink stirrers and plastic-stemmed cotton buds.

May urged Commonwealth countries to join a newly-formed Clean Oceans Alliance and take action, with bans on microbeads, a commitment to cutting down on single use plastic bags, or other steps to eliminate avoidable plastic waste.




A 16-year-old has been charged with "threat of terrorism," a class D felony after threatening a school shooting during the Wapello High School Prom.

Police were made aware of the threat at 1:30 p.m. Thursday and started investigating. The threat stated that one person was coming to prom to shoot another person.

Police then got a search warrant and searched a home near Wapello. They also too the 16-year-old to the Lee County Juvenile Detention Center.

Police say there are no active threats to the school. But, to be cautious, they will have extra security on Saturday night.
South Korea and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) opened their first-ever hotline of direct dialogue between the leaders of the two sides ahead of the inter-Korean summit, the Blue House of South Korea said Friday.

Yun Kun-young, director for the Blue House's government situation room, told a press briefing that the connection of "the historic telephone line" between the leaders of the two Koreas was completed.

The phone line linked the Blue House with the State Affairs Commission of the DPRK. The phone for direct call to top DPRK leader Kim Jong Un was installed on the working desk inside the office of South Korean President Moon Jae-in. The DPRK hotline phone was also placed in Kim's office.

Working-level officials from the two sides made a test call for over four minutes at about 3:41 p.m. local time (0641 GMT). It had a good connection on the hotline, which Yun likened to hearing the call right in the next door.

Moon and Kim agreed to have their first conversation via the hotline before holding their first summit meeting on April 27 in the border village of Panmunjom.

It marked the first time since the 1950-1953 Korean War ended in armistice that the two Koreas linked the hotline for direct dialogue between respective leaders.

Concerned South Korean agencies planned to hold a meeting in Panmunjom Saturday to discuss security services for Moon during the upcoming summit, Yun said.

A separate meeting of the presidential committee to prepare for the third-ever inter-Korean summit will be held in Panmunjom next week, he added.

The first and second inter-Korean summits were held in Pyongyang in 2000 and 2007, respectively.

The third summit is set to be held at the Peace House, a South Korean building in Panmunjom on April 27.
MEDFORD, Ore.-- Naloxone, the overdose reversal drug, is no longer only found in emergency rooms and police cars.

Now some concerned citizens carry it too.

Jessica Peters says, "I'm just afraid I am going to lose her I lost my younger sister to the same thing, so I just want to take every measure I can."

Jessica Peters is referring to her daughter, who she says she's seen struggling with a heroin addiction for years.

Jessica Peters says, "It's just such a horrible, horrible drug. It just takes them over."

Wednesday's community training on naloxone was one of the busiest yet.

Even the U.S. Surgeon General is advising the public to carry naloxone...and police support it too.

More people die from drug overdose deaths than car accidents.

While naloxone doesn't treat someone's addiction, it does give someone another chance at life.

Dennis Mihocko volunteers at St. Vincent De Paul says he sees a lot of young people fighting this addiction.

He hopes having the drug on hand will help give more people a second chance at life.

Dennis Mihocko says, "You got every chance until you take your last breath you still got a chance. And so, who are we to judge and say no, you don't deserve to live."

Max's Mission says this was one of their busiest community trainings yet.

They handed out over 45 nasal sprays and over 15 injectable kits.

The next meeting in Medford is May 23rd, from 4-7pm at the library.
MEDFORD, Ore.  The plot of a complex group robbery of a Wimer marijuana farm in December of 2016 continues to thicken. According to court documents, 28-year-old Derrick Shields has a warrant for murder and robbery in Pennsylvania.

Deputies of the Jackson County Sheriff's Office (JCSO) were notified of the warrant on Tuesday, April 17. The warrant comes from the Philadelphia Police Department, which claims that Shields fled the state before he could be arrested for the murder.

Shields was one of eight men arrested and tried after local victim James Bowman was ambushed, beaten and robbed at his marijuana farm in Wimer. Authorities believe that most of the eight men flew to Oregon from other states and cities, some from as far away as Atlanta, Georgia.

CLICK HERE for our previous coverage of the story and court proceedings.

Found guilty of burglary and aggravated theft, Shields faces sentencing for those crimes on Friday. It remains to be seen whether he will then be extradited back to Pennsylvania to stand trial for the murder and robbery charges.

A statement from JCSO related to Shields' potential extradition may be viewed below.
In this artist's sketch, Nicholas Butcher, testifies in a Halifax courtroom on Thursday, April 19, 2018. Nicholas Butcher has taken the stand in his own defence at his second-degree murder trial in the death of Halifax yoga instructor Kristin Johnston. THE CANADIAN PRESS/James Vincent Walsh
EUGENE. Ore. -- There's a new way to get around Eugene thats good for people's health and the environment.

The PeaceHealth Rides bike share program kicked off Thursday, with 300 blue bikes set up at stations in the Eugene area.

The stations can be found downtown, at the University of Oregon and in the Whiteaker area. There's also one in Springfield at Riverbend hospital.

All of the bikes are fit with a GPS to track the bike and offer assistance if needed.

One business owner said it makes for quick downtown transportation for distances that are too far to walk.

"As a guy who has a business downtown I love this whole idea," Rick Dancer said. "If I'm late for a business meeting and cant walk there, I know I can hop on a bike and just zip to my meeting."

Eugene Mayor Lucy Vinis said the bike share is a key element in accomplishing important city goals.

"We have set climate recovery goals for reducing our fossil fuel use, our greenhouse gas by 50 percent by 2030," Vinis said. "Helping people get out of thier cars is one way in which we as individuals and we as a community partners to help realize that goal."

A retired firefighter said he's looking forward to using the new bikes for excerise, after he found his health deteriorating.

"I was a fellow who worked too much, quit exercising, became ill and payed a price for it," Paul Esselstyn said.

However, he said riding bikes changed all of that. Now, he hopes other people will take advantage of the health benefits.

"The primary tool I used to get myself healthy again was a bicycle," Esselstyn said. "So, I'm pretty darn pleased that this program is happening."

For more information about prices and locations, click here.
ROSEBURG, OR. -- The former mayor of Winston has been sentenced to 16 months in prison after being found guilty of trying to meet up with a teenage girl for sex.

At Thursdays sentencing, Judge William Marshall was made aware of phone calls that took place between Barrett and his wife, as well as one with a friend.

In those calls, he indicated he purposefully changed a statement he made to Judge William Marshall to coincide with the phrasing of a question asked to him.

The prosecution also pointed out that some of the other indications Barrett made in those calls pointed to him having no remorse for his actions.

Looking at Mr. Barretts jail calls from the time he was found guilty by your honor, through, most recently, just a couple days ago, his entire focus has been on entrapment and appeals, said Prosecutor Ian Ross. And quite frankly, its very clear from listening to his jail calls that he does not believe he did anything wrong. Based upon that, the state feels that any sort of treatment would be inappropriate, and would not reduce that risk.

Judge Marshall decided the risks were too great to release Barrett on parole, and gave him that sentencing of 16 months.

Once out of jail, Barrett will have three years of post-jail supervision.

He will also have to register as a sex offender.
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (AP)  Officials in eastern Iowa say a Marion man has been arrested in the January killing of an 18-year-old Cedar Rapids woman.

Cedar Rapids police say 19-year-old Kyler Jacob Junkins has been charged with first-degree murder and burglary in the death of AnnaElise Edgeton, whose body was found in her apartment on Jan. 13.

The State Medical Examiner's Office determined Edgeton was shot to death.

Police say Junkins was involved in breaking into Edgeton's apartment and shooting her. At the time of his arrest, he was already in custody at the Linn County Jail on unrelated charges.

It was not clear Thursday whether Junkins had an attorney.
CRESCO, Iowa  A Howard County woman is being accused of stealing thousands of dollars from a hospital auxiliary account.

Rebecca Sue Creger of Cresco is charged with 1st degree theft and ongoing criminal conduct. Authorities say she committed those crimes while serving as the treasurer of the Regional Health Services of Howard County Hospital Auxiliary during 2017. Court documents state that Creger wrote out 26 checks to cash to herself, totaling $20,727.

Law enforcement says Creger admitted to stealing the money because of medical bills and said she wanted to pay it back.
MANTORVILLE, Minn.  Authorities have released more surveillance video of a fugitive murder suspect.

The Dodge County Sheriffs Office says the video of Lois Riess is from the Kum & Go gas station next to the Diamond Jo Casino in Northwood, IA. It shows Riess approaching the cashier, buying a sandwich, and asking for directions south of the state. The video is from March 23, around 6:30 pm.

Investigators believe that Riess drove to a bank in Glenville, MN on that day and cashed over $10,000 in stolen and forged checks from her deceased husbands account. They also think Riess spent most of that day gambling at the Diamond Jo Casino

Lois Riess is wanted for the murder of her husband, David Riess, in Blooming Prairie on March 23 and is also a suspect in the killing of Pamela Hutchinson in Fort Myers, Florida, on April 9. Lois Riess was last seen driving Hutchinsons car, a white Acura TL with Florida license plate Y37TAA.

Authorities say Lois Riess is considered armed and dangerous. Anyone with information on her whereabouts is asked to call the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Tipline at 1-877-996-6222.
KIMT News 3 - It was a historic moment in Cuba Thursday as a new president was elected.



The country's National Assembly elected Miguel Diaz-Canel as the new man in office. The 57-year-old ran unopposed in taking over after Raul Castro. Diaz-Canel wasn't even born when Fidel Castro led his 1959 revolution.

Ebenezer Kyei-Baffour, of Rochester, fled Ghana years ago when it was under militant ruling. He tells KIMT he is optimistic about change for the people of Cuba, but also reluctant.

"If you don't have good systems in place no matter who the leader is nothing changes. There should be check and balance making sure, otherwise to me it is going to be the same," said Kyei-Baffour.

Despite stepping down from his role as president Raul Castro is still expected to have a lot of control over the Cuban government, including the final say in important decisions.
In secret, behind locked gates, our Nation's Oldest City dumped a landfill in a lake (Old City Reservoir), while emitting sewage in our rivers and salt marsh. Organized citizens exposed and defeated pollution, racism and cronyism. We elected a new Mayor. We're transforming our City -- advanced citizenship. Ask questions. Make disclosures. Demand answers. Be involved. Expect democracy. Report and expose corruption. Smile! Help enact a St. Augustine National Park and Seashore. We shall overcome!
MASON CITY, Iowa - Krystal Fisher would tell you she's a pretty strong individual.

I guess my biggest thing is learning to be more patient. I cannot control it. I will never be able to control this. Thats where I take the role for him picking up for him when he can't, Fisher said.

Married for three years come September, Fisher says she and her husband Tyce live every day moment by moment, but time stopped for her at one point when she started to notice a change in the man she loves who is living with MS.

Saturday in Mason City starting at 10 a.m. people are asked to meet at the Southbridge Mall for this year's MS Walk.

His first symptoms were numbness in his legs and vision, Fisher said.

Fisher says it was last year when the symptoms started. Tyce was later diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

We've been lucky. We've had a whole year with no relapses, and that is huge. The general lack of control gives me anxiety a lot, but to him not have a relapse makes the whole experience of the year of panic good because that means the medication is working, Fisher said.

Fisher is sharing their story to discuss how important it is to support the ones you love, and she admits sometimes it's hard.

Shes asking anyone who can to walk to be by her family's side and show their support Saturday.

The MS walk means that they are raising money for a cure, and we desperately need a cure and the walk to me is we are one step closer to a cure and that's one step closer to moving on with our lives, Fisher said.

Rochester's MS walk is May 5th at 10 a.m. at Soldiers Field Veterans Memorial Park.
KIMT-TV 3 - The message from law enforcement was succinct regarding the arrest of Lois Riess after a search that spanned nearly a month and garnered national attention.

This is a stone-cold killer, the Lee County Sheriffs Office said Friday morning during a press conference.

Riess, wanted in connection to the murder of her husband in Blooming Prairie, Minnesota, and a woman in Fort Myers who shared a resemblance, was taken into custody Thursday night in South Padre Island, Texas. Riess was spotted by a restaurant worker who alerted authorities. Riess was sitting at the bar, authorities said, and was taken into custody without incident.

Lois Riess mugshot Lois Riess mugshot

Riess was described as just waiting to be caught by Dodge County Sheriff Scott Rose late Friday morning.

He said the one word to describe the arrest was relieved.

Hours after authorities in Florida talked about her arrest, Rose reflected on the nationwide search that put a small Minnesota town on the national map.

He said charges have not been filed yet in Dodge County and said we are taking time to build the strongest possible case.

He said the grieving process for the rest of the Riess family is just beginning.

Just the beginning of a long process for them, Rose said.

Rose added that that was fear that Riess could come back to Minnesota and strike again.

We were concerned for the public safety because of her actions in Florida, he said.

The Lee County Sheriffs Office in Florida and the U.S. Marshals talked about the case Friday and said there is a sense of relief today because a killer is off the streets.

During her time on the run, Riess didnt change her appearance and continued to frequent casinos.

WINK News, a CBS affiliate in Fort Myers, reported that on April 8, just days after Pamela Hutchinsons murder in Fort Myers, Riess won a jackpot at the Coushatta Casino Resort in Kinder, Louisiana.

The report said Riess used her own name and identification to play and hit the jackpot worth $1,500.

When she was arrested Thursday, the car she was driving, stolen from Hutchinson, was found in the parking lot of a restaurant she was eating at.

I think now the victims family and friends can do a little healing. That is the most important part, the Lee County Sheriffs Office said.



Related: More on the Lois Riess story.

Law enforcement said Riess wasnt surprised when she was arrested.

Ms. Riess was not surprised whatsoever, they said.

Riess, 56 of Blooming Prairie, was wanted for murder in the March 23 shooting death of her husband, Davis Riess, and is accused of killing Hutchinson, 59, on April 9.

We dont stop, the Sheriffs Office said. Law enforcement doesnt stop, and we arent going to allow it.

According to the Associated Press, Minnesota court records show that Riess was suspended as guardian for her disabled 61-year-old sister after a report that she had been transferring funds from a guardianship account to her own account, then withdrawing funds at a casino.

A 2015 affidavit said thousands of dollars had been spent at Diamond Jo Casino in northern Iowa, not far from Riess' Blooming Prairie home. Riess was never charged with a crime, but was ordered to pay her sister more than $100,000.

Law enforcement believes that after David Riess was killed, Lois Riess transferred nearly $10,000 from his business account into his personal account and then forged her husbands signature on three checks to herself for $11,000.
CHARLES CITY, Iowa- Charles City middle schoolers were back in class Thursday after around 50 students participated in a school walkout Tuesday.

Josiah Cunnings, a Charles City Schools sixth-grader, led the protest hoping to send a message of change when it comes to the accessibility of AR-15 weapons.

We need change, he said. People think that just because Charles City is a small town that it wont happen here.

Cunnings said he got the idea to coordinate a walkout after learning about the Parkland, Florida, school shooting.

Its a good thing to share what youre worried about, Cunnings said. People need to be aware of what is happening.

Cunnings said he had been planning the event for about a month, but didnt tell school officials until the day of at 9 a.m.

The reason why I didnt tell them immediately was because I knew they were either going to change something about it or stop it completely, he said.

Administrator Rick Gabel, the Charles City Schools Middle School Principal, worked quickly to set measures to keep students safe and organized.

Staff said they looked at how other walkouts throughout the country had been held and allowed the students to have 17 minutes to raise their concerns. They said walkouts like this are a distraction to classes but it can also be an education tool. But they still wish it was handled differently.

We think there are better ways to do it that are more sustainable, said Gabel. They could use social media to organize their information, call radio stations and TV stations.

When students returned, those who participated filled out evaluations of what they learned for the walkout.

Students came back in, sat down, and started writing immediately, said Gabel.

With the 19th anniversary of the Columbine shooting on Friday, Cunning said he would hold another one if they didnt have the day off from school.

There would be a lot more notice about it and maybe more people would be able to do it since it is more of a national thing, Cunning said.

Of the nearly 50 students that participated in the walkout, only five had not turned in their evaluations as of Thursday.
MASON CITY, Iowa - As the snow melts, we run into the risk of flooding.

Minor flooding is expected in parts of our area, including along the Winnebago River in Mason City.

Right now, according to the U.S. Geological Service, the river is a little under 6 feet, about 4 feet under flood stage, but water levels are expected to rise.

Meteorologists area also issuing a Flood Warning along the Cedar River in Black Hawk County near Waterloo, as the water is expected to crest 18 inches above flood stage by next Tuesday.

The Zumbro River in Rochester, however, is not expected to flood. Water levels are sitting more than 10 feet below the flood stage.
OSAGE, Iowa  Noah Crooks, convicted of second-degree murder in the death of his mother when he was 13, has had his conviction affirmed.

The state prosecuted Crooks as a youthful offender in district court and Crooks was found guilty.

When he reached the age of 18, the district court sentenced him to an indeterminate prison term of up to 50 years.

The defendant raises statutory and constitutional challenges to his prosecution and sentence, arguing that as a thirteen-year-old offender, his case should have remained in juvenile court and that at age eighteen he should have been released on probation or placed in a transitional facility rather than prison, the supreme court of Iowa said in a release.

Gretchen Crooks was shot 22 times by her son, who called authorities and admitted to killing his mother March 24, 2012.

You can read more on the case here.
OAK PARK HEIGHTS, Minn. (AP)  Attacks on employees and inmates are on the rise at a Minnesota prison that houses the state's most violent offenders.

Inmates at Oak Park Heights assaulted 10 employees in a single weekend last month, resulting in hospitalizations. The assaults amounted to more injuries than in the previous five years combined.

Assaults against the prison's staffers rose 81 percent from 2013 to 2017, increasing from 21 attacks to 38, according to state corrections records. Assaults against inmates increased 38 percent, with 69 cases last year, the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported .

All nine state prisons have seen increases in assaults against staff, rising 21 percent from 2013 to 2017, to 114 attacks. But other state prisons are seeing assaults against other inmates decrease, falling by almost half to about 500.

Looking into the increased violence is an urgent task, said Democratic Rep. Jack Considine, a member of the Public Safety and Security Policy Committee. He said three prison staffers contacted him in January about worsening conditions at Oak Park Heights.

"They (prison staff) are no different from police officers in the field," Considine said. "Their safety has got to be protected."

The prison employees said lax policies are contributing to the increase in violence, particularly with the decreasing use of solitary confinement, Considine said.

State prisons enacted rules reducing the use of solitary confinement in 2016 to fit in with national guidelines, said Sarah Fitzgerald, a spokeswoman for the state Corrections Department. The change in solitary confinement rules hasn't been proven to be the cause of the violence, she said.

"We cannot attribute a single cause to the increase," Fitzgerald said. She said other possible factors might be "mental illness, personal vendettas, gang activity or related street incidents spilling over into our facilities."
ROCHESTER, Minn.  A man police said was driving drunk with his teenage son in the vehicle has been sentenced to probation.

Edwin Wayne Bishop, 46 of Stewartville, was arrested on March 30 after he was reported being obviously intoxicated at the Kwik Trip in Stewartville and was seen driving away.

The Olmsted County Sheriffs Office says Bishop had his 14-year-old son with him while he was driving and registered a .17 blood alcohol level.

Bishop pleaded guilty to 3rd degree DWI and received two years of probation. He must also pay a $900 fine or perform 90 hours of community work service.
AUSTIN, Minn. - Around 70 students from Austin, Albert Lea, and surrounding areas attended the Work Skills Challenge at Riverland Community College in Austin.

At the event, special education students had the opportunity to have a mock job interview with real employers, practice filling out job applications, and take a general knowledge test.

Riverland cosmetology students presented a skit to students on how to dress and present themselves at an interview.

"It helps them to meet new people and especially build their confidence in something that is hard for them, but once they do it they feel really good about themselves," says Sara Gilberg, work coordinator at Austin High School.

This was the third annual event.
Tommy Wilkes

LONDON (Reuters) - Trading activity on cryptocurrency exchanges has halved from its December peak, industry data shows, as retail interest in the virtual coins declines and the prices of many remain far below their recent highs.

Average daily traded volumes across cryptocurrency exchanges fell to $9.1 billion in March and to $7.4 billion in the first half of April, compared to almost $17 billion in December, according to data compiled by crypto analysis website CryptoCompare.

Rocketing prices of digital currencies such as bitcoin fueled a mania in the sector towards the end of 2017 as retail investors across the globe scrambled to get a piece of the action. That triggered regulatory warnings and threats to crack down on the market.

China, a major market, has shut down local cryptocurrency trading exchanges.

Since peaking in December and January, bitcoin's price BTC=BTSP has more than halved, while the second and third largest cryptocurrencies, ethereum .MVETH and Ripple's XRP .MVXRP have lost even more of their value.

But crypto-trading volumes in March and April have only fallen back to their levels of November. They remain as much as 25 times above their levels of March-April last year.

Volumes are down because there was a hype cycle in December on the back of futures products coming to market. Youll find that most of that was retail-driven, with Korea and Japan as major instigators, said Charles Hayter, London-based CryptoCompares co-founder.

The governments have now dampened some of that irrational exuberance.

People involved in the industry say trading activity outside of exchanges, on over-the-counter markets, where larger institutional investors tend to trade, has held up far better.

Major exchanges with drops of more than half in daily traded volumes between December and March include Bitfinex, San Fransisco-based Coinbase, Luxembourg-based Bitstamp and Poloniex, which was recently bought by Goldman Sachs-backed cryptocurrency start-up Circle.

A person close to Bitstamp said volumes were directly related to overall interest in cryptocurrencies, but that the exchange had maintained its market share between December and April. The other exchanges did not respond to requests for comment.

TRUE BELIEVERS

The slump in trading volumes will be seized on by critics of digital currencies as a further indication they are a giant Ponzi scheme that is now unravelling.

But people active in the industry say short-term price and trading swings are to be expected for a highly disruptive technology, and that true believers in the power of digital currencies will remain invested for the long-haul.

The crypto market ... is set to soar over the next few years and beyond, as more and more investors appreciate the fundamentals, said Nigel Green, CEO of deVere, a financial consultancy which operates a crypto exchange app.

Whether traditionalists like it or not, the clock on digital currencies isnt going to be turned back.

Not all of the falls in trading volumes can be explained by weaker investor appetite.

Restrictions in countries like China will have hit exchanges used heavily by Chinese investors disproportionately, while other trading platforms may have been given a boost by the listing of new cryptocurrencies during the year.

Many new exchanges have also opened, taking market share from older platforms.

Some like OKEx and Huobi have grown their volumes since December despite the broader decline, with March among their strongest months to date.

The data compiled by CryptoCompare covers most of the biggest exchanges and the company said it added new exchanges to its database as and when their volumes hit significant levels.

Other data providers may have slightly different ways of calculating volumes, particularly when one cryptocurrency is traded against another rather than against government-backed fiat currencies like the U.S. dollar.

Some exchanges in Japan, one of the biggest markets for crypto investment, do not provide trading volume data.

Reporting by Tommy Wilkes; Editing by Catherine Evans
Holdings of gold by global exchange-traded funds have now risen for 12 straight business days, analysts report. The ETFs trade like a stock but track the price of the commodity, with metal put into storage to back the shares. Commodities brokerage SP Angel reports that ETFs added 112,781 troy ounces to their holdings in the last trading session, taking total accumulation to 74.7 million ounces. Commerzbank notes that holdings have increased by 45 tonnes since the start of the month.

By Allen Sykora of Kitco News; asykora@kitco.com

Epstein: The Current Formation In Silver Is Bullish

The technical-chart formation in Comex silver futures is bullish, says a research note from the Ira Epstein division of Linn & Associates. July silver initiated new upside PriceCounts this week when it moved above $16.95, says the firm. The first upside PriceCount of $17.46 was nearly met Thursday as prices hit a high of $17.425. The second objective is $17.90, which also coincides with the high seen in January. Upside PriceCounts remain in place as long as July futures do not trade below $16.49, Epstein says. The current formation in silver is bullish not only because new upside PriceCounts been activated, but also because an inverted head-and-shoulders bottom has formed. Pullbacks into the February and March highs offer a zone for traders to consider new bullish options strategies. As of 7:55 a.m. EDT, Comex July silver was trading down 12 cents to $17.185 an ounce.

By Allen Sykora of Kitco News; asykora@kitco.com

SP Angel: Gold Headed For Weekly Loss

Gold prices are headed for their first weekly loss in three as global political tensions wane and the U.S. dollar rises amid improving risk sentiment, says commodities brokerage SP Angel. As of a research note, the Bloomberg dollar spot index was up 0.6% this week, keeping pressure on gold and prompting some traders to take profits. The U.S. economy has remained on steady growth, which has assured the Fed it should stick with its current pace of rate increases, SP Angel says. Political risks have slightly faded as U.S. President Donald Trump said he hoped a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jung Un would be successful following CIA Director Mike Pompeos surprise arrival in country. The summit also hopes to build on North Koreas expressed commitment to complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. Further, the U.S. did not make new demands on trade following a summit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. However, gold remains a value buy as uncertainties remain over U.S. monetary policy direction, unanswered geopolitical tensions and underlying trade protectionism threats, SP Angel says. As of 7:56 a.m. EDT, Comex June gold was down 0.4% for the week so far to $1,342.90 an ounce.
Uh-oh! It could be you, or it could be us, but there's no page here.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 19)  President Rodrigo Duterte has appointed another member of the Volunteers Against Crime and Corruption (VACC) to his anti-corruption commission.

VACC lawyer Manuelito Luna is the new commissioner of the Presidential Anti-Corruption Commission (PACC), according to an April 17 appointment paper released by Malacanang Thursday.

The commission is headed by Dante Jimenez, founding chairman of the VACC. He was appointed in January this year.

Luna was among the lawyers who filed graft and corruption charges against former President Benigno Aquino III, Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno, and some Judicial and Bar Council officials. They questioned Sereno's appointment as top magistrate in 2012 despite alleged noncompliance in submitting her Statement of Assets, Liabilities, and Net Worth (SALN).

The VACC also led the impeachment campaign against the Chief Justice in Congress. Their complaint, however, was dismissed by the House Committee on Justice, leaving only one impeachment case filed by lawyer Larry Gadon.

Earlier, the group filed an impeachment complaint against Ombudsman Conchita Carpio Morales and a criminal complaint against detained Senator Leila de Lima.

Amid allegations it was going after Duterte's critics, the VACC has denied claims that the complaints were politically-motivated.

Duterte created the PACC in October last year to assist the President in investigating and hearing administrative cases of graft and corruption.

Luna completes the body's four commissioners. Former senatorial candidate Greco Belgica, retired NBI Deputy Director for Administrative Services Rickson Chiong, and CPA-lawyer Gregorio Luis Contacto III, were earlier appointed commissioners.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 19)  President Rodrigo Duerte's spokesman said Thursday that Labor Undersecretary Dominador Say would have been fired for alleged corruption had the official not submitted his resignation.

"I was told already that he's next on the chopping block but I was awaiting orders on when to announce it," Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque said.

Roque alleged Say was engaged in "corruption relating to activities of labor recruiters," but did not provide details.

Say told CNN Philippines in a text message that the allegations were based on "an unnotarized affidavit containing statements that any lawyer will label as hearsay and double hearsay,"

"He cannot make a story by connecting unrelated events," Say added, referring to Roque.

Say announced his resignation as labor undersecretary for policy, employment and regional operations on Tuesday, the same day that President Duterte revealed he has fired another set of officials.

Despite Say's resignation, Roque said the announcement of his supposed firing was still necessary to clarify the context of his resignation.

"I didnt have to announce it because he resigned but it was important still to say it because in his resignation letter he said it was a 'matter of difference because of endo'," Roque said.

In an earlier statement relayed to CNN Philippines, the labor official said he left his position because he believed he was not doing his job well enough to resolve the country's contractualization dilemma.

Asked if the government will file charges for corruption against Say, Roque said it is up to the Ombudsman to take action.

"I'm sure the matter will be relayed to the Presidential Anti-Graft commission but in the scheme of things the Ombudsman must act on it," the Presidential Spokesperson said.

Duterte previously sacked several department heads such as Philippine Maritime Industry Authority (Marina) chief Marcial Amaro III, Dangerous Drugs Board Chief Diniosio Santiago, and Interior Secretary Ismael "Mike" Sueno for allegedly engaging in corruption.

READ: DOLE executive resigns due to delay in ending labor contractualization
By Yoon Ja-young







The country's finance minister discussed with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief over how to reveal the government's interventions in the foreign exchange market. The IMF chief said the disclosure won't cause unwanted consequences.







Finance Minister Kim Dong-yeon had a meeting with IMF managing director Christine Lagarde on Thursday at IMF headquarters in Washington, D.C. He is currently visiting the United States to attend the annual IMF and World Bank meetings as well as the G20 finance ministers' meeting.











According to the finance ministry, Lagarde told Kim that disclosing interventions in the foreign exchange market will help with stabilization of the macroeconomy by enhancing transparency of economic policies while serious side effects aren't likely to follow when considering Korea's foreign exchange and financial markets.







Just like other countries, Korea has been engaged in "smoothing operations" in cases of extreme one-sided movements in the foreign exchange market, and the IMF has been recommending it disclose such interventions. The United States has also been pressuring Korea to reveal records of the interventions, and Kim is scheduled to meet U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to discuss the issue. The United States kept Korea on its "monitoring list" instead of designating it as a currency manipulator in its latest biannual currency exchange report.







Kim told Lagarde that the government is considering measures to enhance transparency of the market. According to the finance ministry, Kim said Korea will make a final decision, comprehensively taking into account cases of other countries, its foreign exchange market and economic structure and the opinions of specialists. He did not however mention details of the measures at the meeting.







Though disclosure can enhance transparency, there is also concern that Korea can fall prey to speculators in the foreign exchange market if it provides too much information regarding interventions. It may also lead to too-steep strengthening of the Korean won, which will hurt price competitiveness of exporters.







Market watchers expect Korea to follow the agreement by the TPP members, which requires interventions to be disclosed no later than three months after the end of each quarter.







Kim and Lagarde also discussed risks to the global economy including trade conflicts. They agreed the IMF should play a bigger role, according to the finance ministry.







The finance minister also met World Bank chief Jim Yong Kim. The minister asked the World Bank chief to attend the African Development Bank (AfDB) general meeting scheduled for next month in Busan, while the World Bank chief sought Korea's support in bolstering its financial capacity.


By Baek Byung-yeul





Kim Hyo-joon, chairman of the Korea-German Chamber of Commerce and Industry
A former U.S. envoy said Thursday that he expects the three American detainees in North Korea to be released during an upcoming summit between the two countries' leaders.



Bill Richardson, former governor of New Mexico and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said their release is one of the realistic expectations one can have of U.S. President Donald Trump's meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in May or June.



"I think that would be a deliverable that would happen at the summit," he told a forum here, before listing other humanitarian issues, such as the return of the remains of U.S. soldiers killed in the 1950-53 Korean War.



Trump said Wednesday that his administration is negotiating for the detainees' release and thinks "there's a good chance of doing it." The Americans -- Kim Hak-song, Tony Kim and Kim Dong-chul -- have been accused of espionage or "hostile acts."



Richardson, who played important roles in past dealings with Pyongyang, also said he thinks the Trump-Kim meeting could take place in Geneva or Russia.













"One, I'm betting on Geneva. Second bet is one of the Russian islands," he said.



On Trump's new national security adviser, John Bolton, the former governor noted his personal ties to him as a fellow former ambassador to the U.N.



"Everybody is worried that John Bolton is going to bomb (North Korea). Relax," Richardson said. "His first job is that this summit is a success as a staff member."



Bolton recently argued for a preventive strike on North Korea, although he also said it is not his favored option. (Yonhap)
Hotline installed week ahead of April 27 summit



By Yi Whan-woo



A hotline connecting President Moon Jae-in to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has been installed, Cheong Wa Dae said Friday, one week ahead of their historic April 27 summit.



It said the direct communication line was set up between Moon's office and Kim's office at the State Affairs Commission. Kim serves as the commission chairman.



Staffers from the two sides made a test call, and there were no problems, the office said.



This is the first time a hotline was installed between the leaders of the two countries.



Moon and Kim are highly expected to have their first phone conversation soon, possibly early next week before they meet.



"We successfully set up a historic telephone line for the two leaders and also had a test call at 3:41 p.m. for four minutes and 19 seconds," said Yun Kun-young, a senior Cheong Wa Dae official and also a member of the preparation committee for the inter-Korea summit.



The two sides exchanged two calls, with the Seoul side making the first call.



Song In-bae, Moon's personal secretary, called the North first, and a State Affairs Commission official picked up the phone and answered accordingly. They had a casual conversation about the weather.



After the first telephone conversation, the North called the South again.



"The connection was very good quality. It sounded as if we were talking to a neighbor who lives right next door," Yun said. "We'll make sure to our best in the lead-up to the summit."













A different Cheong Wa Dae official explained that North decided to connect the hotline to the State Affairs Commission, because Kim, who holds multiple titles, will represent his country as the commission chairman during the April 27 summit.



Many speculated the North end of the hotline will be connected to the ruling Workers' Party because the party is the country's supreme policy-making body. Kim also serves as its chairman.



The installation of the hotline, Friday, comes after the two Koreas' militaries as well as their intelligence agencies restored their direct communication channels in January, when Kim offered to talk with the South.



The two sides have also restored a hotline between their staffers at the truce village of Panmunjeom.



Seoul and Pyongyang will hold separate rehearsals ahead of the inter-Korea summit to be held at Peace House on the southern side of Panmunjeom.



The South plans to rehearse on Tuesday and Thursday at Peace House, while the North is expected to rehearse on Tuesday or Wednesday at its own Panmunjeom venue.



The summit will be followed by another one between Kim and U.S. Donald Trump in May or June.



Trump said he would strive to make the meeting a "worldwide success." The diplomatic sources in Seoul said his comment is seen as a positive sign for the Moon-Kim meeting.



"We hope to see the day when the whole Korean Peninsula can live together in safety, prosperity and peace," Trump said during a joint press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Wednesday. "We will be doing everything possible to make it a worldwide success. We hope it all works out and we'll be trying very hard."



In Washington, D.C., Thursday, U.S. Department of State spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the U.S. would support a formal end to the 1950-53 Korean War as is being discussed by the two Koreas.



"We would certainly like to see an end, a formal end to the armistice, and that's something that we would support," Nauert said during a regular press briefing.



North Korea adopted a softer posture towards its neighbor during the Winter Olympics in South Korea.



It sent Kim's sister Kim Yo-jong with a delegation of athletes and then held talks with Moon's envoys in Pyongyang before issuing Trump an invitation to meet with Kim.



It was revealed this week that CIA director and U.S. Secretary of State nominee Mike Pompeo had traveled to North Korea over Easter weekend to secretively lay the groundwork for Pyongyang-Washington talks.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 20)  The Duterte government plans to build eight major bridges estimated to cost 269.19 billion which will connect the islands in the Visayas to each other, to Mindanao and to Luzon, the Department of Finance said Thursday.

Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III said the bridges, part of the government's "Build, Build, Build" program, will be complemented with more roads in the Visayas region.

"These bridges will provide growth corridors and ensure that none of the major islands of the Visayas will be left behind in the country's race to progress," Dominguez said in a statement read by Finance Undersecretary Bayani Agabin at the Philippine Economic Briefing Thursday.

According to Dominguez, the bridge projects pending before the Investment Coordination Committee for approval are as follows:

an18.2-kilometer bridge to connect Samar provinces to the main island of Luzon;

a 20-kilometer bridge connecting Leyte to Mindanao Island through either an underwater tunnel bridge or a long-span overhead bridge;

the 5.7-kilometer Panay-Guimaras bridge;

the 12.3-kilometer Guimaras-Negros inter-island linkages;

the one-kilometer Bohol-Lapinig Island bridge;

the 18.0- kilometer Lapinig Island-to-Leyte bridge;

the 5.5-kilometer Cebu-Negros Link Bridge; and

the 24.5-kilometer Cebu-to-Bohol Link Bridge.

Four big-ticket projects in the Visayas under the "Build, Build, Build" program have also been approved for implementation by the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) Board, incluing three airport improvement projects and a port construction.

READ: Government to prioritize infrastructure, social services in 2019 budget

Dominguez said that these infrastructure investments, pegged as $170 billion between now and 2022, will stimulate economic activity in the country.

"Jobs and opportunities will be created, and we are confident we can bring down poverty incidence to only 14 percent by 2022," Dominguez said.

The "Build, Build, Build" program is among the Duterte administration's landmark schemes, which aims to boost the country's economy and investments through big-ticket infrastructure projects.

Budget officials earlier estimated the cost of the program, which aims to usher in a "Golden Age of Infrastructure" in the country, at around 9-trillion.

"'The Build, Build, Build' program is in full swing. We are continuing with our comprehensive tax reform program. Investment flows into our economy will continue to rise dramatically," Dominguez said.
By Lee Min-hyung



A group of President Moon Jae-in's advisers on inter-Korean affairs will participate in a forum on the eve of Moon's summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on April 27.



They include University of North Korean Studies professor Yang Moo-jin, Dongguk University professor Kim Yong-hyun and President Moon's special adviser Moon Chung-in.



They belong to the preparatory committee for the inter-Korea summit. The forum will be held at KINTEX in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province.



The panelists will discuss major issues, such as the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and the inter-Korean summit's possible impact on the Washington-Pyongyang summit.






South Korea and North Korea on Friday set up a telephone line between their leaders, enabling direct dialogue between South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, who are also set to meet in person next week.



The direct hotline was established between Seoul's presidential office Cheong Wa Dae and the office of North Korea's state affairs commission, which is headed by Kim.



South Korea made the first call to check the line, a Cheong Wa Dae official said, adding that there were no problems detected.



"It was as if we were talking to a neighbor right next door," the official told reporters, speaking on condition of anonymity.



North Korea later returned the call to check the channel worked both ways. The entire trial conversation lasted 4 minutes and 17 seconds, according to the official.



Cheong Wa Dae officials have said direct communication between the countries' leaders may help further ease tension on the Korean Peninsula, noting that many cross-border conflicts between the two Koreas in the past may have partly been caused by misunderstanding or a lack of communication.



The telephone that links the South Korean president with the North Korean leader sits right on Moon's desk, the Cheong Wa Dae official said.



Cheong Wa Dae earlier said Moon and Kim will likely hold a telephone conversation before they meet next week.



The Koreas technically remain at war as the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty.



The agreement on a new hotline, the first of its kind connecting the leaders of the two Koreas, came early last month when Moon's top security adviser Chung Eui-yong traveled to Pyongyang for an unprecedented meeting with the North Korean leader.



There, Kim agreed to hold a bilateral summit with the South Korean president, as well as United States President Donald Trump.



The Moon-Kim meeting will be held next Friday. It is expected to be followed by the first-ever U.S.-North Korea summit in May or early June.



The upcoming inter-Korean summit will be the third of its kind after two summits held in 2000 and 2007. It will be held on the South Korean side of the joint security area inside the heavily-fortified demilitarized zone that divides the two Koreas, making Kim the first North Korean leader to step on South Korean soil since the end of the Korean War. (Yonhap)




Seo-gu Bisan 7-dong voluntary crime prevention group members, Youn Seong-gu, left, Gul Na Deem, right, are passing by a tea room located in Bukbu Bus Terminal / Courtesy of Seo-gu Bisan 7-dong voluntary crime prevention group



By Kang Aa-young



Daegu Seobu Police have been cooperating with foreigners to jointly patrol areas where crimes by foreigners often occur.



On Wednesday, 16 members of Seo-gu Bisan 7-dong voluntary crime prevention group joined police patrols.



The area around Bukbu Bus Terminal where many foreigners hang out was their target area.



The crew included seven foreigners  one Sri Lankan, one Chinese, three Pakistanis and two Bangladeshis.



"Bisan 7-dong around Bukbu Bus Terminal is one of the areas with a high density of foreigners. Crimes involving foreigners take place frequently," inspector Kim Dong-sik said.





Foreigners run many shops in the Seo-gu area near Bukbu Bus Terminal. / Korea Times

Daegu Seobu Police have cooperated with foreigners for joint patrols in areas where crimes by foreigners are on the rise. / Courtesy of Daegu Seobu Police



The area the bus terminal where E-mart and Paldal Market are located is a foreigners' hangout with many Southeast Asians recently moving in.



Restaurants and shops run by Chinese, Indians and Southeast Asians attract foreign workers from neighboring areas such as Gumi and Chilgok.





There are many shops run and used by foreigners in Daegu's Seogu near Bukbu Bus Terminal. / Korea Times
Cho Hee-yeon, holds a press conference to declare his candidacy for head of the Seoul education office at City Hall Seosomun Annex Friday. Yonhap

By Kim Hyun-bin



Cho Hee-yeon, the superintendent of the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education (SMOE), officially declared he will run for office at the Seosomun Annex of City Hall Friday.



The Seosomun Annex is the location where Cho was appointed as the sole candidate in 2014.



If elected during the local elections on June 13, he will become the first to fulfill his four-year term since the direct election system was implemented in 2008.



He will also be the first to be re-elected for the job.



"The last four years working with the public has become the foundation to change the direction of our education policies," Cho said.



Cho emphasized he has had a successful four-year term as superintendent.



He promised to bring more changes if he is re-elected.



But most of the pledges are similar to his previous campaign promises.



Facing strong opposition, Cho vowed to continue one of his key pledges to abolish autonomous private high schools in the capital.



He will gather a consensus on this issue.



Another key pledge is to eradicate corruption in the private education sector.



Other pledges include installing wireless internet in all classrooms, building a society without the need for private education, and customizing education to each student's needs.



"Our policies have become a strong base for President Moon Jae-in's education reforms and will make sure to bring changes that meet public expectations," said Cho.



"We have to move forward so our country can provide high-quality education, just like other advanced countries."



Soon after registering his candidacy, Cho was suspended from performing his duties as superintendent.



Deputy Superintendent Kim Won-chan has taken his place as the acting superintendent.



A day after the election on June 14, regardless of the results, Cho will be reinstated as the superintendent to complete his term.



There are currently two liberal candidates who will face Cho in the race for election candidacy_ Lee Sung-dae, former head of the Korean Teachers and EducationalWorkers' Union, and Choi Bo-sun, a Seoul City Council education committee member.



Ten percent extra points will be added to candidates who are not the incumbent superintendent of education.

Cho has an advantage as the current superintendent.



But many experts believe the 10 percent in extra points and opinion polls could hurt his chances.

Cho visited the National Cemetery to pay tribute to national heroes.



"I am grateful for all the sacrifices and devotion you made for this country. I will change the country's education which will lead to a bright future," Cho wrote in the visitors' book at the cemetery.








By Lee Min-hyung





The Ministry of National Defense will announce measures to ease inter-Korean military tension after the summit between President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un next week, the ministry said Friday.



It did not elaborate, citing the sensitivity of the issue before the historic gathering of the two leaders in the southern part of the inter-Korean truce village of Panmunjeom on April 27.



The two Koreas are yet to decide specific timelines and details for inter-Korean military talks, but they are likely to hold the dialogue soon after the summit in a bid to guarantee lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula.



"We will unveil details after the summit, and at the moment, we cannot share details," a military official said.



Easing military tension has been cited as one of the most important items to be discussed at the summit, with the North in recent months reaffirming its clear message for denuclearization.



But as the denuclearization issue is too important to settle quickly, the two Koreas are likely to unveil a list of measures to alleviate tension on the peninsula.



One possible scenario includes suspension of the anti-Pyongyang loudspeaker broadcasts, which resumed after the regime's fourth nuclear test in 2016.



Marking a week before the summit on Friday, the two Koreas opened a hotline that connects Cheong Wa Dae and the regime's state affairs commission, which increases the ongoing peace momentum on the peninsula.



There have not been any military provocations between the two Koreas recently, indicating growing signs of peace on the peninsula.



In response, Seoul and Washington have scaled back low-key annual military exercises, which began this month.







NK holds key meeting



Meanwhile, North Korea held a plenary meeting of its ruling party, Friday, drawing keen attention over whether it will send a message of denuclearization ahead of its summits with South Korea and the United States.



The central committee of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) is scheduled to hold the meeting to discuss policy issues of "a new stage" in a historic period, according to the Korean Central News Agency.



The central committee's members and alternate members discussed and approved key party policy lines and personnel reshuffles.



They have been no reports yet about the decision made at the meeting.



Experts say the North used WPK plenary meetings to defend its pursuit of nuclear programs.



Kim's signature policy of seeking both nuclear and economic development, commonly known as the "byeongjin" policy, was adopted at a WPK meeting held in March 2013.



.






Amid mounting allegations of online opinion-rigging, ruling Democratic Party of Korea lawmaker Rep. Kim Kyoung-soo announces his run for Gyeonggi Province governor Thursday. Yonhap

By Kim Hyun-bin



Rep. Kim Kyoung-soo of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea has come under criticism, suspected of working with the power blogger nicknamed Druking, who has been arrested for online opinion-rigging.



"I will be running for governor of South Gyeongsang Province and urge a swift investigation of the online opinion-rigging. If needed I will fully cooperate with the independent counsel," Kim said.



However, the lawmaker's statement came a day before new evidence surfaced and investigations show Kim has been in close contact with Druking for years.



The Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency revealed Friday that Kim sent at least 10 messages containing links to news articles related to the President from November 2016 until last month.



Druking, known only by his surname Kim, received the messages through Telegram _ a Russia-based mobile messenger app similar to Kakao, except the messages are untraceable _ and replied, "I will take care of it" said the police.



Police have been questioning Druking in the detention center.



"Druking said in his testimony that Kim ran a group that aimed to create positive feedback online and he wanted to take part in it," a police official said.



Druking claimed the "I'll take care of it" message to the lawmaker was related.



The police will look into Druking's involvement in the group and whether he actually used the links to create positive comments.



Police will also check if the suspect manipulated public opinion using Macro, a program frequently used to create automated repetitive sequences.



Druking and two others allegedly used the software to increase the number of clicks for articles in support of the liberal Moon Jae-in government.



"Once the investigation of Druking and his aides is completed, we will summon lawmaker Kim Kyoung-soo for questioning," Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency Commissioner Lee Ju-min said. "The lawmaker provided links to Druking so we need to investigate their relationship closely."



Police under fire



Police are under fire after a local news report, late Thursday, revealed they held back key information regarding the ruling lawmaker's involvement in the Druking case.



Commissioner Lee initially told reporters on Monday the lawmaker barely read Druking's messages and only sent formal replies such as "Thank You" to the blogger.



However, the news unveiled Kim had sent Druking at least 10 messages containing news articles related to the President, which the police acknowledged on Friday.



With local elections less than two months away, the scandal has stirred fierce political wrangling between the ruling and main opposition parties.



The police agency's blunder has fueled the opposition parties to call for a special counsel to look into the mounting allegations. The main opposition Liberty Korea Party (LPK) submitted bills to open a special investigation of the allegations, which they claim could have swayed voters in favor of Moon ahead of the presidential election last May.



Kim served as the chief secretary for Moon Jae-in's presidential campaign, which is also raising suspicion whether the President was aware of the activities.



"If Kim was involved, it could serve as judicial grounds to find out if then-presidential candidate Moon was aware of the activities," said Hong Joon-pyo, leader of the LPK. "That could be the reason why the police are concealing key information of the Druking incident, and prosecutors are hesitant to take the case."








Wheelchair users collect petition signatures at a protest by disability rights groups near Cheong Wa Dae, Wednesday. / Korea Times photo by Lee Suh-yoon



By Lee Suh-yoon



Local groups fighting for the rights of the disabled have staged a month-long sit-in in front of Cheong Wa Dae.



This comes as the country commemorated the 38th National Disabled Persons' Day, Friday.



They have called for concrete state measures to improve welfare services for the disabled.



They also demanded a face-to-face meeting with President Moon Jae-in.



"The President needs to come and see with his own eyes how badly I need assistance in my daily activities like eating or taking a phone call," a disabled person told The Korea Times during the protest.



Under the current welfare law, the government provides mobility assistance only to those classified at the top of the disability-grading system.



This six-point scale system is said to be controversial as many with disabilities have not been able to receive adequate state care.



"The Moon administration pledged to abolish this grading system and extend welfare coverage to more disabled people. However, the government always claims there is a lack of money," said Kim Su-won, an activist at the Korea Council of Centers for Independent Living.



"Unless the government actually allocates more funds to welfare services, we know they are empty promises."



Kim added the current welfare system is "unfair."



If one of the disabled person's family members is employed, they cannot receive state subsidies.



Korea's minimum wage laws do not apply to disabled workers who are considered less than 70 percent as productive as non-disabled workers. This means many disabled persons cannot financially support themselves.



The average monthly wage for a person with disabilities currently ranges from 50,000 won ($46.75) to 200,000 won, according to the groups.



Another issue highlighted is mobility rights for wheelchair users.



The 2005 mobility rights law states disabled persons should have equal access to all public transportation.



But they still cannot exercise their basic mobility rights.



The only public transportation open to wheelchair users who want to travel beyond Seoul is the country's KTX bullet train.



But the train is a lot more expensive than taking inter-city buses. This means only the "high-cost" transportation option is open to wheelchair users.



Kim Ki-ho  a wheelchair user  said he faces many difficulties even in Seoul where wheelchair-accessibility is much better than other parts of the nation.



"The space between the train and its platform is different at all subway stations. Once, the wheel on my wheelchair got stuck in the gap and fell off onto the tracks at Daebang Station," Kim said.



"The train could not move for 40 minutes. I could tell everyone in the train was mad at me."



Taking the bus was even more difficult.



"There are not enough wheelchair accessible buses. Even when they come, many drivers cannot be bothered to set up the ramp and secure the wheelchair. So they just ignore and pass by," he said.



"So, you could end up waiting for hours."




An American soldier who belongs to the United Nations Command stands on guard in front of the Peace House, the venue for the April 27 inter-Korean summit, which is under the UNC control at the truce village of Panmunjom. / Yonhap



By Oh Young-jin





It is difficult to fathom how big the change is that not just Koreans but people of the world have been experiencing over the past couple of months.



The difficulty lies in the fact that we stand at the entrance to a historical vortex that may deliver a brave new world, but we really don't know what to expect.



U.S. President Donald Trump, often described as anti-intellectual, nailed it when he recently declared he would make his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un a "worldwide success." The summit is expected in late May or early June.



Whether he knows it or not, there are at least two factors that can give a global scale to the success of their summit.



First, it would spell the true end of the Cold War that is often believed to have ended with a series of events that culminated on Nov. 9, 1989, the day the communist East died and the capitalist West triumphed.



The declaration of the end of the Cold War was premature. The Korean Peninsula was left out as the last remaining ideological flashpoint. There, the potential of the Cold War danger, with the possibility of nuclear confrontation, has been preserved with the emergence of a strong China and the Soviet Union that was reduced to Russia that under President Vladimir Putin is armed with nuclear weapons and is hell-bent on revanchism.



President Moon Jae-in has promoted the official end of the Korean War as the key goal for his April 27 summit with Kim that will serve as an important stepping stone for the Trump-Kim summit. The two Koreas have been technically at war since the 1950-53 Korean War  that started with the North's surprise southern attack in June 1950  was brought to an end by a truce, not a peace treaty. The Korean conflict was one of the first proxy wars between the communists and capitalists after World War II.



What Moon and Trump have agreed on is to replace the truce with a peace treaty. The signatories would include South and North Korea together with China and the United States as guarantors to maintain the peace. The U.S. and China fought in the Korean War but their signing for peace may be the first between the two since China is starting to threaten U.S. global hegemony. Maybe that can serve as an anticlimax against a hegemonic battle between the two.



The Korean armistice agreement is signed by U.S. and Chinese delegates at the truce village of Panmunjom, July 27, 1953. / Yonhap



Second and more importantly, if the summits are successful, they could not just avert a potential nuclear conflict but put it to rest forever.










By Park Ji-won







Japanese lawmakers visited the controversial Yasukuni Shrine Friday, a move that may hurt cooperation with neighboring countries before the crucial inter-Korean summit on April 27.







A nonpartisan group of 75 Japanese lawmakers visited the shrine in Tokyo, according to local media reports.







The move will likely cause controversy as Japan needs the cooperation of its neighbors to help maintain peace in the region. Also, it could be a political hindrance as Japan has been making efforts to strengthen ties with Seoul to resolve the North Korean nuclear issue. At the beginning of April, top Japanese diplomat Kono Taro visited the National Cemetery in Seoul to pay tribute to Korean War veterans.







The Yasukuni Shrine has been at the center of friction with Asian countries that suffered from Japan's imperialism during World War II as it honors 14 Class A war criminals, along with millions of war dead.







The visit came a few days after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited U.S. President Donald Trump as part of Japan's efforts to strengthen ties with its strongest ally ahead of planned summits between the U.S., the two Koreas and China. Abe is not expected to visit the shrine.







Abe visited it in late 2013 to mark his first year as prime minister, but hasn't been there since, though he has sent ritual offerings.




By Park Ji-won

Time magazine has pickedPresident Moon Jae-in as one of its 100 most influential people in the world.

The list, unveiled Thursday, includes U.S. President Donald Trump, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Japanese leader Shinzo Abe.

Recommending Moon for the list, former U.S. Ambassador to South Korea Mark Lippert, who served in South Korea from 2014 to 2017, wrote about Moon that he was compassionate and engaged as the opposition leader in the past and made dramatic moves with North Korea after being elected as the South Korean leader.

"Following his election to the presidency in 2017, Moon has made dramatic moves with regard to North Korea: hosting Kim Jong-un's sister at the Winter Olympics, agreeing to an inter-Korean summit and brokering what could be the first-ever U.S.-North Korea summit between President Trump and Kim," Lippert wrote.

"Moon Jae-in was quick to visit me in the hospital in Seoul after I was attacked by a knife-wielding pro-North Korean nationalist while serving as U.S. ambassador in 2015. Befitting his reputation, Moon, then the opposition leader, was compassionate and engaged."

"Moon must now navigate between the U.S. and North Korea, as well as regional rivalries, to rid Pyongyang of illegal nuclear weapons and missile programs.".

North Korean defector Lee Hyeon-seo wrote about Kim, saying he may not be so bad after all.

"The new year may have stirred hopes that Kim Jong-un might not be so bad after all: he did reach out to South Korea during the Winter Olympics, offer to meet President Trump, and meanwhile suspend missile and nuclear tests," the defector said.

However, Lee emphasized that he is the most dangerous person on the planet, saying "armed guards now patrol the river over which I fled to China in 1997; they recently gunned down a woman trying to cross in broad daylight. I could never have defected under his regime."

On the same day, Fortune magazine ranked Moon fourth among the world's 50 greatest leaders.

"Yet Moon speedily enacted reforms aimed at creating a fairer economy, such as boosting the minimum wage, expanding health coverage, and addressing the influence of the country's family-owned conglomerates. Moon has been pivotal in arranging talks between President Trump and North Korea's Kim Jong-un, a possible prelude to inter-Korean reconciliation," the magazine wrote.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 20)  A private citizen asked the government's top lawyer to file a quo warranto petition against Associate Justice Teresita Leonardo-de Castro over discrepancies in her statements of assets, liabilities, and net worth (SALN), just like he did with Supreme Court Chief Justice over the same issue.

The Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) received the four-page letter on Friday from a certain Jocelyn Maria Acosta, who said De Castro should be unseated on the same grounds used to seek the ouster of Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno.

Acosta recalled how suspended lawyer Eligio Mallari earlier asked Solicitor General Jose Calida to look into the validity of Serenos appointment in light of her alleged repeated failure to file her SALNs, before applying for the Chief Justice post in 2012.

This led to the filing of a quo warranto petition, a legal proceeding where an individual's right to hold office is challenged, against Sereno.

Following the logic of Calida, Mallari, and de Castro herself, the Associate Justice also employed deception in claiming that she complied with the SALN requirement, thereby lacking integrity and is not qualified to sit as Justice of the Supreme Court, Acosta charged.

She noted how De Castro appears to have perjured herself in testifying against Sereno during the impeachment hearings of the House Committee on Justice.

She openly accused the Chief Justice for not complying with the [Judicial and Bar Councils] SALN requirement, all the while knowing that the SALN rule was waived by the JBC, from which Justice de Castro herself benefited, Acosta went on.

De Castro had told lawmakers Sereno should have been disqualified from vying for the chief justice post after failing to comply with the SALN requirement.

De Castro, like Sereno, were deemed by the JBC to have "substantially complied" with the SALN requirement, Serenos camp had earlier pointed out.

The JBC has said it had on record 15 of De Castro's SALNs, from 1997-2011. But Acosta and Serenos camp argued that there should have been 39 SALNs if de Castro had indeed filed all her SALNs since she first worked for the government in 1973.

I anticipate that you would act with the same zeal as you did when you received the letter of Atty. Mallari in February 2018, Acosta told Calida.

De Castro is one of Serenos harshest critics. The Chief Justice had asked that de Castro and four other associate justices inhibit themselves from participating in the quo warranto case, saying they had all "manifested actual bias" against her. But all five denied Serenos plea.

During oral arguements on the case last April 10, Sereno argued her case before her colleagues and figured in multiple heated exchanges with de Castro.

The Supreme Court is set to vote on the quo warranto petition against Sereno on May 17, sources told CNN Philippines.

CNN Philippines' Anjo Alimario contributed to this report.
By Michael Bergmann





"Special Train to Pankow" was the political G-pop sensation of the 1980s.



Pankow is a district in what was then called East Berlin. And "Sonderzug nach Pankow" was German plain-talk rocker Udo Lindenberg's personal challenge to East-German ruler Erich Honecker. Also, it was both his independent answer and intended contribution to the government-organized "cultural exchange programs" between the two Germanys.



"All the other G-pop monkeys are welcome to sing there, but only little Udo, only little Udo is not allowed, and that's what we can't get."



"Honni, deep inside, I know, you too are a rocker, secretly put your leather jacket on, sitting in the loo, listening to western radio" (rhymes in German).



Lindenberg really wanted to tour the German Democratic Republic "for little money, I promise, Honey"  and Honecker rejected the request (with an exception in October 1983). Lindenberg had composed the song in anger earlier in 1983  and that was the beginning of one of the most unlikely connections in German history. West-German radio stations played "Special Train to Pankow" across the border for the next six years. It became, as a side effect, the soundtrack of my teenage years. And "Honni" could not completely resist the temptations of his new "popularity."



Honecker tried to show that he was not the "square-minded troll" of the song. He answered Lindenberg's open letter, thanked him for the leather jacket he sent, and confirmed that "it fit well" and that there was "no contradiction between rock music and socialism." Honni repaid Udo with a "shawm," an old instrument he had kept from his younger years. And Udo included Honni's very personal musical present in the "Special Train's" further performances. At a concert in 1987, right after their eventual encounter during the Eastern leader's state visit to West Germany, the plain-talk rocker congratulated his "pen-pal" on his 75th birthday and praised the "intimacy" of the special relationship. "We had a troubled start, but we are coming together."



No politician could have said it better.



This soundtrack of my teenage years came back into my ears when I heard of K-pop exception Psy's exclusion from the South Korean "art troupe" recently received by Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang. "All the other pop-monkeys are welcome to sing there ..."



"Excuse me, is this the special train to Pyongyang? I just need to get there."



What Psy and Lindenberg have in common can be called the freedom of choreography. Psy, like Lindenberg, is no pop-puppet, neither of any government, nor of any industry. He could dance the "Bukhan Style"  and demand to tour the North! Some sort of Handclap-Dance could play with the emptiness of communist choreography as the "Gangnam Style" did with the vanity of capitalist culture.



Be as persistent as Lindenberg was, promoting "Honni" to stardom!





Michael Bergmann (bergmann2473@yahoo.de) is a teacher in Seoul.




The tumult in Washington over Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg's two days of testimony before Congress is the best opportunity yet for all of us to re-examine our relationships with the internet giants that exert enormous influence in our society.



Facebook as well as Google and the vast number of other companies that trade free services for access to our private information, now occupy a central place in too much of our daily lives.



The result is that we've turned over enormous troves of information that these firms repackage and sell to third parties eager to influence our purchases and what we think about politics, culture and a variety of other issues.



What should be clear now is just how easy it has been for bad actors to exploit Facebook and other platforms. And what should also be clear after the hearings is just how little care social media giants have taken to construct products that are difficult for bad actors to exploit. Or as Zuckerberg admits, Facebook didn't do enough to guard against downstream consequences.



"The big mistake that we've made looking back on this is viewing our responsibility as just building tools, rather than viewing our whole responsibility as making sure that those tools are used for good," Zuckerberg said in an answer to a question from Sen. John Cornyn of Texas.



The hearings raised other concerns beyond privacy. As most Facebook users will attest, the site can be addictive. Is it dangerous for so many Americans to use social media to filter their news and even how they interact with society?



Should Facebook make it easy to identify all users who post political messages? Are there limits that should be placed on the way automated accounts, or bots, interact with real users, given how they push divisive messages to large audiences?



Have Silicon Valley giants been allowed to too easily scoop up would-be competitors  firms that might have created new business models with better privacy protections? Can it be made easier for users to download or even delete the data they give these firms? Should it be easier to rescind privacy permissions?



But even as the hearings teed up such questions, it should also be clear there are a few things the rest of us need to confront about ourselves.



It seems clear that social media has played a large role in coarsening our political discourse. We can blame the companies for building infrastructure that encouraged that behavior. But within all of us is the capacity to change the way we use these services, and to stand up for civility.



Were we to resolve to do that, then the moment of reflection these hearings have engendered will have lasting effects no matter what Congress or the companies do now.





The above editorial appeared in the Dallas Morning News. It was distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.




Moon holds timely meeting with media leaders



President Moon Jae-in held a meeting with CEOs of local media outlets Thursday at Cheong Wa Dae ahead of the April 27 inter-Korean summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.



It was the first time for the President to host media CEOs at Cheong Wa Dae in 18 years. The last was on June 19, 2000, shortly after the first inter-Korean summit between former President Kim Dae-jung and Kim Jong-il, the incumbent North Korean leader's father.



The timely meeting reflects Moon's willingness to exchange ideas with the media on the upcoming summit which is hugely different from the previous ones held in 2000 and 2007. The summit will take place at Panmunjeom, where the 1953 armistice was signed. Previous summits took place in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang. Calling the media a "partner" in the upcoming summit, President Moon asked for the media's advice and cooperation in informing people within and outside Korea about the summit's achievements.



The President also mentioned the media's peace-making role before and after the first inter-Korean summit in 2000. In the late 1990s, there was a series of media exchanges between the two Koreas and media leaders visited North Korea in August 2000.



There is intense media attention on the third inter-Korean summit. According to the organizing committee, 1,975 reporters from 168 domestic news outlets, in addition to 858 reporters from 180 outlets in 34 countries, have registered to cover the summit. That is a record number of journalists covering an inter-Korean summit, showing the world's keen interest in the Moon-Kim meeting.



Cheong Wa Dae has done a fair job of informing the media about the preparations. The presidential office has been holding regular briefings on the preparations and opened the website koreasummit.kr bearing the summit's slogan "Peace, a New Start." The website has versions in English, Chinese, Arabic, Spanish, Russian, French, German, Japanese and Vietnamese and contains useful information and in-depth analysis on inter-Korean relations by global experts.



The Moon administration is also doing a good job informing the international press about the summit. Culture Minister Do Jong-whan held a meeting with foreign journalists at the Seoul Foreign Correspondents' Club on Tuesday.



We hope to see the President engaging more actively with the domestic and foreign press as international diplomacy toward North Korea's denuclearization unfolds in the coming months.



The President's meeting with the media leaders should be the start of a more active exchange of ideas and suggestions for crucial state affairs with various sectors. This will certainly enhance the people's understanding of his policies and goals.






Tech giant chooses win-win formula for management, employees



Samsung Electronics Service, a warranty service arm of Samsung Electronics, will hire about 8,000 workers from its subcontractors as regular employees. The company also said on Tuesday it decided to allow the legal activity of its labor union.



These are welcome _ if belated _ decisions.



They are significant in three ways. First, the nation's largest conglomerate has provided support to the Moon Jae-in administration's efforts to turn as many irregular workers as possible into regular ones. Second, Samsung has broken its "union-free" management principle it had kept since its inception nearly 80 years ago. Third, the global tech firm has thus chosen a win-win formula for both management and unions.



Samsung Electronics Service, which provides warranty service for home appliances made by the global tech giant, is a subsidiary almost wholly owned by the latter.



The company's labor union has called for management to recognize subcontracted workers as regular employees since 2013. However, both the Seoul Central District Court and the Ministry of Employment and Labor turned down their demands. The company's decision is all the more meaningful in that it defied the rulings of the judiciary and administrative branches.



Some critics of family-controlled conglomerates, however, regard the latest move by the Samsung Group affiliate as a pre-emptive move to fend off the prosecution's investigation into allegations the company attempted to collapse its trade union. Others link it to an upcoming appellate court trial involving Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong.



Regardless of causes, it is good to see the nation's leading conglomerate finally beginning to break away from the outdated "no unions" policy unbefitting of an industry leader. What matters now is in which direction the group will move in the future. Samsung should take the path toward the genuine co-prosperity of the group and its employees.



If and when the conglomerate manages to eliminate its outdated management culture and move forward toward more transparent governance with the help of its union, its international competitiveness will also be strengthened.


By Hyon O'Brien





My recent trip to Guatemala opened my eyes to the mystery of the lost civilization of the Mayans, and how it was rediscovered.



We visited the Tikal area whose peak was between the 3rd and 9th centuries AD. It was awesome to climb up at two temples that were built in 721 AD in the great plaza of the acropolis, overlooking the dynastic mausoleum of Tikal's rulers, and the other monumental structures that line the area. The many steles had vividly carved hieroglyphics recording the rulers' legacy as well as the dramatized faces of the rulers. They were carefully excavated by a team from the University of Pennsylvania from 1956 to 1969. Some sites in the area still remain unexcavated, looking just like ordinary jungle-covered hills.



It is amazing to think that this great civilization had been utterly lost to memory. Evidently many of the now famous Mayan sites were unknown even to the indigenous people of the region until relatively recently. Two early explorers of the Mayan civilization, diplomat John Lloyd Stephens (American 1805-1852) and artist Frederick Chaterwood (British 1799-1854), met in 1836. For years they collaborated in exploring Mayan ruins, Stephens doing the writing and Chaterwood doing the illustrations. Their documentation of sites from Copan, Honduras in the south to Chichen Itza, Mexico in the north brought the greatness of the Mayans out of obscurity into the world's consciousness and laid the foundation for the future study of Mayan civilization.



At its peak, there were an estimated 20 million inhabitants in Mesoamerica. Their abandonment of the temple centers is still not clearly understood but an educated guess is that it was due to exhaustion of natural resources as a result of climate change, and the resulting infighting of rival tribes who scattered to lowland areas searching for food and sustainability.



By the time the Spanish came to colonize this area in 1523, the Maya civilization was totally forgotten along with thousands of temples that were covered completely by the jungle. They were lost completely from the outside world  until they were found!



On a personal level I have witnessed a moving "lost and found" story. About thirty years ago, a Korean woman had her fifth daughter. In horror at her failure to produce a son for her husband, she immediately signed the baby girl away to an adoption agency, telling her husband that the baby had died at birth. However, she lived with such guilt and sorrow realizing the horrid thing she'd done. For many years she kept begging God to let her see her daughter at least once before she died.



Meanwhile, the baby, called Chae, grew up in Arizona and went to Columbia University, obtaining a graduate degree while her husband, Greg, got his law degree there. She developed an intense longing to meet her biological mother. She persuaded Greg to accompany her to Seoul to search for the mother she had never met. With only the scanty information her adopted mother had given her, the search miraculously bore fruit and Chae met her mother face to face. A DNA test confirmed the fact that indeed they are mother and daughter. Both of them were once lost in the cloud of prejudices that the society held against them but by the grace of God they finally met and are united.



Chae's mother came to Florida to help after the birth of Chae's and Greg's first child. I acted as an interpreter when a local newspaper interviewed them. The mother has now returned to Korea, but they are in weekly contact through video chats aided by Chae's older sister who speaks English.



Lost family  found!



One of the most unforgettable books I have read in recent years is "A Gentleman in Moscow" by Amor Towles. In this 2016 novel, the author weaves the story of a fictional Count, Alexander Ilyich Rostov, who was sentenced in 1922 by a Bolshevik court to live the rest of his life under house arrest in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow. The most powerful part of the story involves a child named Sofia who came into his life in 1941 at age six. The Count had lost all his status, identity and freedom. But raising Sofia with all his wisdom and love, helping her to become an accomplished violinist and planning her escape to Europe, gives him a purpose and the will to live. He had been lost  but he was found!



The author of "Amazing Grace," John Newton (1725-1807), was a slave trader who dramatically experienced spiritual conversion during a crisis at sea. He ultimately left the slave trade and in 1764, he was ordained. As a priest he met young William Wilberforce, a Member of Parliament, and was able to influence him to campaign to abolish the African slave trade. (The United Kingdom passed the Slave Trade Act in 1807.)



Amazing grace! How sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me!

I once was lost, but now am found;

Was blind, but now I see.



Lost  and found!





Hyon O'Brien (hyonobrien@gmail.com) is a former reference librarian now living in the United States.


By Jun Ji-hye



Cable TV operator CJ Hello's next moves are drawing keen attention after a new head of the Korea Cable Television Association (KCTA) expressed willingness to enter the mobile network business to find a breakthrough in the stagnation of the cable TV industry.





CJ Hello CEO Byun Dong-sik


By Kim Yoo-chul



When Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong took the reins of the Samsung conglomerate from longtime charismatic corporate leader Lee Kun-hee in 2014, the Harvard-educated leader moved to maintain close connections with Silicon Valley in the U.S.



The key rationale supporting the move is that Vice Chairman Lee desires to improve the group's rigid business culture, a result of which is in part from the company's heavy reliance on manufacturing, much like it is in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley, which houses top U.S. tech companies, is still considered the hub of innovative ideas.



The other point is that Samsung, a hardware company at its core, needs more focus on software in a bid to be more innovative. The firm doesn't have a powerful software platform as Apple or Google do.



Despite its huge global reach and a whopping 239.6 trillion won in sales with 53.6 trillion won in operating profit, many software developers are hesitant to work with Samsung due to its "joyless hierarchy communication system" obsessed with direct control from senior management.



The younger Lee acknowledges these initial challenges; Samsung has established cutting-edge tech centers, hired seasoned non-Korean engineers, acquired small ventures and shares licensing and patents with other tech leaders.



Things are getting better. In 2015, Samsung invested in 54 ventures mostly located in the Valley. By addressing "relationship problems," Samsung is rolling out products and services equipped with modern features such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence (AI).



Now, Lee _ who was released from prison recently when his sentence was suspended _ is hoping the company will keep its momentum intact in the United States, Samsung's most important market, through close connections with insiders within the Trump administration.



Lee was in Europe recently. Samsung said the trip was aimed at studying business projects related to AI developments. But he wanted more, according to sources from investment banks in Seoul.



"One noticeable point that was captured from Lee's trip is that Samsung Electronics Chief Strategy Officer Sohn Young-kwon met with French President Emmanuel Macron. It's rare for Macron to meet a company executive concerning only business issues, given his tight schedule," said one source who is familiar with the issue. "You have to keep an eye on the relationship between Macron and U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross."



Trump named Ross as his pick for commerce secretary. Macron worked as a chief analyst and trader at the Rothschild bank for 10 years. The U.S. commerce secretary worked at the same bank 30 years.



Since 2007, Samsung has been operating a private equity fund with Rothschild and assets jointly controlled by the fund rose to more than 2 trillion won as of last year, according to sources.



"By letting Sohn handle the meeting with the French president, the Samsung heir flew to Geneva, Switzerland, as part of this trip. Samsung did not confirm that Lee held a meeting with the bank's founding families. The U.S. commerce secretary also has relations with them," another source said.



Samsung declined to comment on the main topics discussed. But the sources said the group heir is trying to firm up connections within the Trump administration as a pre-emptive measure to prevent the U.S. from imposing any regulatory measures on the corporation that may impact Samsung's business in the United States negatively.



The Trump administration is pushing for greater and easier access to Korea's car market and a cut in non-tariff barriers to trade. The U.S. imposed tariffs and quotas recently on washing machines and solar panels, which Korea challenged at the World Trade Organization.



More importantly, while Samsung is one of the largest foreign investors in the United States _ with the company having bigger operations manufacturing memory chips with the help of American workers in Austin, Texas _ any punitive measures, if implemented, would be bad for Samsung.



"Trump's preferred metric for judging economic relationships is the bilateral balance in goods traded. While it's true the U.S. deficit in goods traded with Korea widened after the KORUS FTA went into effect in 2012, it's Lee's job to prepare for the worst case, which totally makes sense," the source said, adding Trump is continuing his protectionist argument.



The Samsung heir is expected to continue his "low-key approach."



Although Samsung Electronics faces numerous external and internal challenges, it's possible that rewarding rebound relationships with top U.S. government officials could actually lead Samsung to feel more attached to their commitment to remain a viable business partner in the U.S.


By Baek Byung-yeul



Samsung Electronics denied a rumor that the Korean tech giant may be looking to take over Nokia Health to expand its healthcare portfolio.



According to the French newspaper Le Monde, Thursday, the Korean tech giant is considered one of the four bidders for the healthcare company. The other three include Google's smart home division Nest, and the other two are French companies, the newspaper reported.



However, a Samsung official rejected the rumor, saying "we have not heard about it."



Samsung Electronics has been expanding its portfolio of healthcare products.



The Korean company had an agreement with the Dutch firm Philips last month to develop connected devices using one another's technologies.



The agreement allows users of Samsung's internet of things (IoT) platform ARTIK to connect to the Philips' HealthSuite Digital platform. This will enable healthcare application developers to achieve interoperable connected health offerings.



The wearable medical devices are worn as accessories or are embedded into clothing. With the growing awareness and preference for home healthcare, the digital healthcare sector has been regarded as a newly emerging business.



An industry analyst said the acquisition of the health device company will be good for Samsung.



"Samsung can expect synergies with its existing healthcare and wearables businesses," said Chris Park, an associate managing director of Moody's.



Nokia established its health division following the acquisition of French fitness focused device maker Withings in 2016 for 170 million euros. Nokia Health's products include a body scale, activity trackers and sleep sensors.



Since the acquisition, however, the company has not been in such good shape as the firm rolled out a relatively small number of health products.



Its chief strategy officer Kathrin Buvac recently told employees that the digital health business is simply not meeting its targets and added the company's consumer health business can grow into a significant part of Nokia as a whole.



Nokia has struggled with financial problems as the company took a write down of $164 million on its digital health business last October.



However, it remains to be seen whether Nokia Health could be sold to Samsung as the French government is pushing for the company ownership to remain in Europe.



"Sectors related to artificial intelligence, especially in the health field, are of paramount importance. To provide the best services, companies need to be at the source of the data. Withings is such a company," Le Monde quoted a source as saying.


By Nam Hyun-woo



GM Korea could move to file for court protection, as talks between the company's management and union over a self-rescue plan broke down Friday.



The company held a board meeting to look into such an option for bankruptcy protection.



However, the union said it will seek to reach an agreement by next Monday.



"The negotiation broke down as management came up with plans that cannot be approved by the union," a member of the GM Korea union said.



"Instead, both decided to continue efforts to reach an agreement by Monday, and management said it could annul the board's approval if the union and management come to an agreement.



The board is comprised of six members from General Motors headquarters, three from the state-run Korea Development Bank (KDB), GM Korea's second-largest stakeholder, and one from Shanghai-based SAIC Motor.



KDB has been opposing the Detroit-based automaker's plan to file for bankruptcy protection for the loss-making Korean unit.



Given GM outnumbers the state policy bank, the Korean unit of the U.S. car giant can file for the receivership. GM did not disclose its board decision.



Before the board meeting, GM Korea union and its cash-strapped management have tried to negotiate for more than five hours.



Friday was the deadline set by General Motors President Dan Ammann, who said last week: "Everybody has to come to the table by next Friday."



General Motors has said it has no other option but to file for court protection if the union and management fail to come to an agreement because it is running out of liquidity.



During the negotiation, management called for the union to agree tentatively to a self-rescue plan to cut 100 billion won in expenses, and talk about the employees at its plant in Gunsan, North Jeolla Province, which is scheduled for closure in May.



The union, on the other hand, urged management to first guarantee the job security of 680 workers at the Gunsan factory, reassigning them to GM Korea plants in Bupyeong-gu in Incheon and Changwon in South Gyeongsang Province.



They also failed to narrow differences over the production of a new car in the Bupyeong plant.



The union has been demanding GM headquarters confirm a new model to manufacture there, and management told the union it will start making a number of SUV models at the plant next year.



However, the union reportedly demanded management come up with more details, saying those plans are not enough to normalize GM Korea.



In February, GM headquarters said it will shut one of its four car assembly plants in the country by May, while asking GM Korea workers to make some wage concessions and the Korean government to extend financial assistance.



KDB has also said it can inject 500 billion won into GM Korea by April 27, if a due diligence on GM Korea turns out to be satisfactory.



If GM Korea enters into receivership, it is expected to undergo harsh restructuring, which includes massive layoffs and the closure of manufacturing facilities.



This will affect not only 16,000 GM Korea employees, but also other GM Korea's suppliers.



The government estimates 140,000 jobs will be affected if the unit is placed under court protection.




Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 20) - President Rodrigo Duterte has ordered Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III to present within 30 days an inventory of firms involved in "labor-only contracting."

"The Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) Secretary is hereby directed to submit to the Office of the President within thirty (30) days from issuance hereof, a comprehensive report on the implementation of DOLE Department Order Nos 174 and 183 Is 2017, including violations thereof and a list of companies engaged and/or suspected to be engaged in labor-only contracting," Duterte said in the memorandum dated April 17.

DO 174 identifies two arrangements that constitute "labor-only contracting," which is prohibited under the law.

The first arrangement is when: (1) the contractor does not have substantial capital or it does not have investments in the form of tools, equipment, machineries, supervision, work premises, among others; and (2) the contractor's employees are performing activities which are directly related to the main business of the principal.

The second type of "labor-only contracting" is when the contractor does not exercise the right of control over the performance of the work of its employees.

"Further the National Labor Relations Commission (NLRC) is directed to coordinate with the DOLE Secretary and submit a list of cases involving respondents found to be engaged in labor-only contracting and/or have committed violations of the above-stated Department Orders," the memorandum added.

NLRC is a commission mandated to resolve, investigate and settle disputes between employees and employers.

"We reiterate that labor-only contracting is already prohibited by the existing Labor Code and among other, one indicia of a labor-only contracting entity or a 'cabo ' is that it does not have substantial capital. It only exists to circumvent security of tenure of its workers," said Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque during the media briefing in Malacanang on Friday.
By Nam Hyun-woo





Cho Hyun-min

The Korea Customs Service (KCS) is investigating allegations controversial Korean Air heiresses Cho Hyun-ah (Heather Cho) and Cho Hyun-min (Emily Cho) used the flag carrier to smuggle luxury goods, furniture and even food.



The KCS said Friday it is looking into the Cho family's credit card records over the past five years as part of its investigation.



The KCS will compare the credit card records and the family's history of paying duties. If the gap between the two is huge, the KCS may summon members of the airline's owner family. It plans to send them to the prosecution if they are found to have evaded taxes.



The move came after several Korean Air officials claimed they were instructed to send the Cho family's private goods through gates for authorized staff, which are under less thorough customs surveillance.



The Korean Air employees recently revealed the Cho family used flight KE086 traveling between New York and Incheon and the goods included luxury products, underwear, children's clothes, furniture and food products.









One of the employees said a Christian Dior dress with a $5,000 price tag was among the goods. The customs law imposes a duty on clothing worth more than $600.



The employees claimed the items were sometimes registered as goods for the airline or aircraft parts so they could be exempted from duty. Most of the goods appeared to be Hyun-ah's, they said.



One of the employees said in a media interview that there is a five- to six-person team that delivers the owner family's goods through staff gates.



Korean Air said it cannot confirm the allegations.



The Cho sisters have stirred public anger with the "nut rage" and "water rage" controversies.





Cho Hyun-ah
Fedeli CEO Gigi Fedeli poses at the Italian luxury brand's store in Hyundai Department Store's COEX branch in Seoul, Friday. / Courtesy of Fedeli

By Park Jae-hyuk



It was not easy for Fedeli to attract Korean customers before 2016.



Back then, the Italian luxury brand experienced failure in its partnership with Shinhwa Korea, a local importer that stopped distributing Fedeli's products over the declining demand for premium cashmere in this country.



Two years later, the 84-year-old family-owned business is making a comeback in Korea with a new partnership with Parco International, as well as new strategies to overcome its previous failure.



"Parco is always trying to help us adapt to the Korean market, and Shinwha did not do this," Fedeli CEO Gigi Fedeli told The Korea Times during a recent interview in Seoul. "If we don't adapt to the needs of our Korean customers, we fail. This is the reason why Shinhwa failed."



Fedeli and Parco set the sales goal of 6 billion won ($5.6 million) from eight stores nationwide for the first year and 10 billion won from 10 stores for the next year.



To achieve the goal in one of its most important markets in Asia, Fedeli has shifted its main focus from men's collections to the more profitable women's fashions, considering Korean men are concerned less about fashion than Korean women are.



In the past, Fedeli offered fewer women's designs than the market demanded.



"Men's wear business is easier in Japan than in Korea," Fedeli said. "In Korea, women's fashion is more important. Japan and Korea are total opposites in this regard."



According to Parco, women's collections will account for more than 80 percent of the brand's lines in Korea this year, although the local distributor is considering increasing the proportion of men's collections gradually.



Fedeli said his company is set to attract female customers with colorful linen dresses for the summer season.



"Cashmere is only a part of our collections, although it is core business for us especially in winter," he said. "For us, summer is more important, as it is longer than winter in most of the countries where we sell our products."



Despite the importance of the summer season, Fedeli said he has no plans to launch its swimming shorts in Korea.



"It is not part of your culture," he said. "People in Asia usually cover themselves and do not want to go out in the sun too much, while Europeans looking for nice weather go to the seaside all the time, traveling around the world."



Founded by Luigi Fedeli in 1934, the Italian fashion brand has continued its family-managed business over the past three generations.



Gigi Fedeli's son, who joined the company two and a half years ago, has been in charge of global markets.



The company has mono-brand stores in Korea and Hong Kong, and multi-brand shops in Japan, the United States and many other countries.


By Nam Hyun-woo

A senior executive at Philips Korea assaulted two team leaders at a company get-together in Seoul, raising public anger against abuse of power which has already been heightened due to the misbehavior of an heiress of Korean Air.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 20)  President Rodrigo Duterte will be in Singapore on April 27 to 28 for the 32nd Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit, the Department of Foreign Affairs said Friday.

"They will hold a working dinner on 27 April and the Leaders' Retreat the following day on 28 April," Foreign Affairs Assistant Secretary Helen de la Vega told reporters.

Singapore is the current ASEAN chairman.

De la Vega said the summit will gather only the 10 ASEAN members, namely, Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore and Vietnam.

"The April Summit is usually something that is, if I may call it, like an in-house meeting only of ASEAN," she said. "The first opportunity where we have other, for instance, leaders  when we say leaders, world leaders, our dialogue partners  will be in November. Just like our own experience here last year."

As for bilateral meetings with other world leaders, De la Vega said two ASEAN leaders have expressed interest to meet with Duterte. She did not mention the leaders.

Meanwhile, De la Vega said issues on disputes in the South China Sea will be raised as the Philippines will assume the coordinator role in ASEAN-China relations in August.

She added ASEAN will discuss developments on negotiations on the proposed Code of Conduct in the South China Sea.

"I think what is important is that we put a premium on the positive momentum that we have now in the improvement of ASEAN-China relations and we will see where  how we will progress in the next few years  if I may say few years because sabi ko nga the country coordinatorship is about three years," she said.

The Philippines is among ASEAN members that have overlapping claims with China in the South China Sea. Others are Vietnam, Brunei and Malaysia.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 20)  The European Parliament on Thursday called on the Philippine government to stop the spate of extrajudicial killings in the pretext of a "war on drugs" and expressed concern that the police force is "falsifying evidence" to justify them.

In the joint resolution dated April 18, the European Union's law-making assembly also called for the release of detained Senator and staunch Duterte critic Leila de Lima, and for cooperation with United Nations' Special Procedures on the investigation of the drug war.

The EU Parliament is made up of 751 directly-elected members, called MEPs (Members of the European Parliament) from 28 Member States.

The resolution added it "strongly regrets" the Philippines' decision to withdraw from the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and asks the country to revert it. It also sought to remove human rights defenders from the Philippines' terrorist list, as in the case of UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Victoria Tauli-Corpuz.

The EU Parliament's resolution then asked the European Commission and the External Action Service to "initiate procedural steps which could lead to the temporary withdrawal" of GSP+ preferences  which are trade incentives EU's General Scheme of Preferences for developing countries.

The EU is planning to donate 10.6 billion for more development projects in the Philippines until 2020.

This is the third joint motion for resolution issued by the EU parliament on the country's drug war since President Rodrigo Duterte took office in June 2016. While government data show 4,075 drug suspects were killed in law enforcement operations, the EU has pegged the number at 12,000, including deaths of women and children.

On May 2017, Duterte said it would no longer accept EU aid, as he claimed it comes with conditions on human rights and rule of law for the Philippines.

The Philippines also rejected 6.1 million (382.45 million) in aid from the international body in December 2017.

Cayetano: EU Parliament crossed the line

Foreign Affairs Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano said the EU Parliament's recent resolution already constitutes interference in the Philippines' internal affiars,describing their demands "unwarranted and uncalled for actions" against the country.

"The European Parliament has crossed a red line when it called for unwarranted actions against the Philippines," Cayetano said Thursday.

He added that the parliament's resolution is based on incomplete and wrong information and does not reflect the situation on the ground.

"As a sovereign state, the Philippines expects all members of the international community to respect the country's prerogative to determine national priorities and policies that are responsive to the needs of its people," Cayetano said.

Cayetano then said that he acknowledged that the views of the EU Parliament does not reflect that of the EU. He added the Philippines will continue to give utmost importance to the promotion and protection of human rights.

Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque said the resolution came at a time when the EU gave the country more than 240 million in aid for its anti-illegal drug campaign.

"We thus call on the members of the European Parliament to exercise prudence in issuing resolutions. We understand a number of whom have close ties to the local political opposition who try to distort realities that we have a working democracy when people now enjoy peace and order," Roque said in a press briefing Friday.

New Philippine National Police Chief Oscar Albayalde also questioned the EU body for their data on the killings, saying that the figures are bloated.

"Hindi natin alam kung saan nila nakuha 'yung record and 'yung data nila," Albayalde said in a press briefing Friday.

[Translation: We do not know where they get their record and their data.]
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 20)  The filing of certificates of candidacy (COC) for the upcoming barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan (SK) elections has been extended until Saturday.

This was announced by the Commission on Elections (Comelec) Friday, the day the deadline was supposed to lapse.

The filing hours will be 8:00 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, according to the poll body's Resolution No. 10310.

This comes after the National Youth Commission (NYC) earlier on Friday expressed concern that the number of those who filed their candidacies would not be enough to fill all 338,584 SK posts. Only a total of 181, 296 COCs were filed as of Thursday, the NYC said.

The Comelec said this is a similar concern for the barangay polls, but did not provide data on how many COCs have so far been filed.

The filing of candidacies began April 14, which marked the start of the election period. The polls will push through on May 14 after being postponed twice.
Courtesy Record Store DayThe 11th annual Record Store Day takes place this Saturday, April 21, and as usual, the promotion features a wide array of exclusive, limited-edition vinyl discs.

"This year our list is a little bit bigger than last year's," Record Store Day co-founder Michael Kurtz tells ABC Radio. "I don't think I've ever been as excited about a list of Record Store Day releases."

Among the releases that Kurtz says he finds particularly cool are ones from Led Zeppelin, David Bowie and Neil Young.

Led Zeppelin's offering is a seven-inch single pressed onto yellow vinyl that features a previously unreleased mix of "Rock and Roll." Kurtz says the disc "really gets me going" because "Rock and Roll" is "one of my favorite songs of all time."

Bowie has three releases on tap for the event, including a three-LP set called Welcome to the Blackout (Live London '78) featuring unissued performances from a pair of shows that took place during the summer of '78. Kurtz says, "It's just a fantastic-sounding album."

Young's Record Store Day contribution is a two-LP set titled Roxy -- Tonight's the Night Live that was culled from three September 1973 shows held at The Roxy in West Hollywood, California. Kurtz reports that he's been told that Young thinks the album includes some of "his greatest performances."

Among the other artists releasing discs for Record Store Day 2018 are Chuck Berry, Blue Oyster Cult, Eric Burdon & The Animals, Eric Clapton, Bo Diddley, The Doors, Duran Duran, Eurythmics, John Fogerty, Marvin Gaye, Gloria Gaynor, The Kinks, Kenny Loggins, Madonna, The Moody Blues, Van Morrison, Harry Nilsson, Pink Floyd, Elvis Presley, Prince, The Rascals, The Rolling Stones, U2 and The Who.

Check out the full list of releases at RecordStoreDay.com.

Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 20)  A new ride-hailing app is hitting the road soon.

The Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board (LTFRB) gave the go signal for GoLag, Inc. to operate in the country for two years, according to the certificate of accreditation released Friday.

GoLag is the latest transport network company approved by regulators.

The LTFRB earlier accredited Hype and Hirna to provide competition for Grab after it acquired Uber.

This is a developing story. Please refresh page for updates.
Rome, April 20 - President Sergio Mattarella has decided to take two days to reflect after Senate Speaker Maria Elisabetta Casellati reported back to him on Friday following her exploratory mandate to seek to break Italy's post-election political deadlock. Casellati said she had detected "sparks on which Mattarella will decide" during talks with political parties. Her 'exploratory' mandate involved verifying the possibility of forming a government made up of the centre right, the coalition that came first in last month's inconclusive general election, and the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement (M5S), the biggest single party in the new parliament. On Thursday that M5S reiterated that it was against forming a government with the centre right as a whole and was only willing to hold talks with the League, not with its alliance partners, Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia and the rightwing Brothers of Italy (FdI) party. But it also said it would not consider external support of a M5S-League government from FI and FdI to be "hostile". "Over the last few days I performed the mandate entrusted to me with dedication, trying to favour constructive dialogue between the political parties capable of producing a parliamentary majority with the perimeter indicated by Mattarella," Casellati said.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 20)  Philippine National Police (PNP) Chief Oscar Albayalde said he did not dream of his new position  but was glad his appointment inspired his peers.

"What's good here is it motivated everybody  especially the officers, commanders on the ground," Albayalde told CNN Philippines on Friday. "Nakita nila na [They see] now it's based on merit, performance, not on political affiliations or connections."

Former PNP Chief Ronald "Bato" Dela Rosa was former police chief in Davao City, President Rodrigo Duterte's hometown. He was a close friend and supporter of the President when he was mayor.

On the other hand, Albayalde is from San Fernando City, Pampanga. The former Metro Manila police chief was among those Dela Rosa recommended as his successor.

Both officers are from the Philippine Military Academy Class 1986.

Albayalde has so far received 58 medals and decorations, including a Gold Cross Medal and PNP Outstanding Achievement Award.

"Last Monday when I met personally with the President, I thanked him. He said, 'You don't need to thank me. It's yours. You deserve it. You earned it,'" said Albayalde.

Since President Rodrigo Duterte was elected in 2016, the PNP has been mired in controversy. According to government figures, the bloody drug war saw the deaths of at least 4,000 in police operations. However, human rights watchdogs peg deaths at about 13,000 -- including deaths under investigation.

Cleaning up the police

Albayalde on Thursday vowed to focus on discipline, reform, and internal cleansing of the police force.

Police units under his watch were not without criticism. Some controversies include the killing of Korean businessman Jee Ick Joo in the PNP headquarters; the deaths of teens like Kian Delos Santos at the hands of Caloocan policemen; and Mandaluyong police mistakenly firing at a crime victim.

Albayalde said 279 police officers were dismissed, 99 demoted, and 825 suspended during his term as Metro Manila police chief.

He added he instructed directory personnel and the PNP Internal Affairs Service to speed up pending cases.

"If we really need to suspend these people, we suspend them outright. Instead of giving four months for the decision or resolution of the case, if we can do it in two months, we'll do it... So these people will feel we are serious in this," he said.

Albayalde believes the PNP would benefit from stricter background checks before admitting new recruits.

Family man

Outside of his duties as a policeman, Albayalde said he prioritizes family. He enjoys biking and was previously active in scuba diving and skydiving, but stopped the extreme sport when his wife gave birth to twins.

Albayalde is married to medical technologist Cherrylyn Albayalde, with three sons and one daughter. His eldest son is a pilot, his twins are nurses, and his youngest daughter is in high school.

He even recounted his love story on CNN Philippines.

"I met her here in Camp Crame... Intern siya sa crime lab. I was undergoing a basic intelligence course," Albayalde recalled.

"Meron siyang classmate na gustong gusto ako. Ginamit niyang bridge is my wife. When my wife saw me, sabi daw niya sa sarili niya, 'This guy will be my husband,'" he said.

[Translation: She had a classmate who liked me. She used my wife as a bridge. When my wife saw me, she told herself, 'This guy will be my husband.']

The police chief said his wife cried upon learning of his appointment.

"She's happy and hindi niya alam anong sasabihin niya [she didn't know what to say]. I said we have to take this challenge," said Albayalde.

While Albayalde's family and the President believe he deserves the position, he cannot say the same for himself just yet.

"We cannot say I deserve it," said Albayalde. "I can only say I deserve it after my stint."

Watch the full interview with Albayalde here.

CNN Philippines Correspondent Gerg Cahiles contributed to this story.
The mighty Gold Wing is arguably the most important motorcycle in Hondas entire lineup.

Long the touring bike of choice for long riders who eschew the market-leading big twins built by Harley-Davidson and Indian Motorcycle, the Gold Wing has  since its U.S. arrival in 1975  been rightly praised for its power, comfort and dependability.

The 2018 model represents the first Gold Wing overhaul in almost a decade. The sixth-generation machine is lighter, sportier and more powerful. It handles better and gets better fuel economy. Its better looking.

So, why doesnt everyone love it?

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Like its predecessor Goldie, the 2018 is powered by an 1833cc, horizontally opposed six-cylinder engine that puts out a reported 97.8 horsepower and 108 pound-feet of torque. Power is delivered to the rear wheel via a shaft drive.

Wrapped around the engine is a superior touring machine. The plush, wide seats (standard height is 29.3 inches) are comfortable even after hours in the saddle. Wind protection provided by the electronically adjustable windscreen is first-rate. In its lowest position it reduces helmet noise and baffling to almost nothing. In its highest position, it creates an almost completely windless rider pocket.

Heated grips and seats (standard for both pilot and passenger) take the chill off the morning air. The backrest that also comes standard on the Tour model I rode was deemed the best in the business by my passenger, who is also my wife and favorite pillion choice, and whose previous favorite touring motorcycle was  the 2016 Honda Gold Wing.

2018 Honda Gold Wing Tour DCT (Dave Folks / Honda )

The 2018 Wing is 85 pounds lighter than previous models. Honda managed to shave weight from the engine while also making it more efficient. The gas tank holds less fuel than the 2017 version, but better fuel economy means the bike still has the same long range: about 225 miles.

The lighter weight also gives the bike a more nimble, flickable feel, and may disabuse riders of the notion that the Gold Wing is what Hondas on-road media director Colin Miller called an old man couch on wheels.

Over the course of a three-day spring break ride from Los Angeles to Borrego Springs and back, I found it just as capable running the mid-speed twisties of Montezuma Valley Road as it was on the high-speed straight line miles of Interstate 15.

New for 2018 is a reconfigured front suspension. Gone is the traditional telescoping shock, replaced by a double wishbone system, similar to the Duolever system on the larger-sized BMW touring bikes. Honda reports that reduces shock between the road and the rider by 30%. I can report that it results in marvelously fluid steering and impact absorption, at high speeds and low.

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Power from the flat six comes on low and stays on. The Gold Wing chugs comfortably from a dead stop and spins up slowly. At 80 miles per hour, the engine was still turning below 3,000 rpm. The Gold Wing is configured with cruise control, so long-distance highway riding is a matter of set it and forget it.

And because its a liquid-cooled engine, unlike the air-cooled power plants on the Harleys, Indians and new Yamaha Star Ventures and Eluders, the Gold Wing produces no engine heat  a point of real consideration for Southern Californians who must often ride in warm weather.

The model I rode was fitted with Hondas DCT automatic seven-speed transmission, a feature that I had previously explored on the companys smaller NC700 touring bike. As on that machine, I found it smooth, seamless and intuitive. Although I was not persuaded to give up the clutch-and-shift-lever system found on most bikes (the six-speed manual transmission is standard at a slightly lower cost on the Gold Wing), I was able to understand why some riders would prefer it.

The 2018 also features substantially upgraded electronics and infotainment, bringing it solidly in line with whats being offered by the top touring motorcycles on the market. Indeed, it is so electronically sophisticated that, after several weeks with the Gold Wing, I was still discovering its less obvious qualities.

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The music system (featuring front and rear speakers on the Tour model) poured forth high-quality sound. Though I prefer music through a headset when I ride, when I listen to music at all, I did appreciate the stirring strands of Beethovens Symphony No. 7 as we were cresting Banner Grade and arriving in Julian.

I also had occasion to appreciate the Gold Wings ingenious walking gear feature, standard on all the DCT models.

Stopping for refreshments in Moreno Valley, I unthinkingly left the bike pointed slightly downhill in a sloping parking space. Even at 85 pounds lighter, the Gold Wing is still a beast  close to 800 pounds when fully fueled. So moving it around can require a lot of muscle.

But by engaging the walking gear, I was easily able to shift the bike into reverse and slowly crawl out of the parking place and back onto level ground before resuming the ride.

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Reviews for the 2018 Gold Wing have been universally positive. And those reviews and many prospective riders with whom Ive spoken voiced universal concern over the Gold Wings one weak point: storage.

2018 Honda Gold Wing Tour DCT (Dave Folks / Honda )

The new model offers its owner 110 liters of storage space  down from 150 on the 2017 Wing. Even though most Gold Wing customers will use their bikes for long-distance touring, that figure may not present a problem.

But because most Gold Wing operators tend to do their touring two-up, this fact will: The hard-sided saddle bags will not accommodate a full-size helmet, and the trunk wont accommodate two.

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Honda did include a helmet lock system, integrated into the left side saddlebag, that Honda communications officer Jon Seidel said would allow two helmets to be locked and stored on top of the bike, but not hidden from view. But maybe they wont be couples. It could be that the new-generation Gold Wing will attract a new kind of rider.

Thats because the new Gold Wing isnt the same old touring bike. Some whove ridden it say it feels more like BMWs K1600GTL than an earlier Gold Wing, while others have said its less similar to that Goldie than to Hondas earlier ST1000  the sport touring bike that the company built and sold in the U.S. from 2003 to 2009.

The intent from the designers was to make it more sporty, capable of being a touring bike but also great if you were looking to sport tour and ride in the canyons every day, Seidel said.

The purpose of that: to bring down the median age of the Gold Wing customer, Seidel said, to include that 40s person who would never have considered buying a Gold Wing before.

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A rider who gets on the new Wing, selects Sport mode and pushes the bike through some corners might forget all about not being able to store a second helmet.

That rider will still need to bring plenty of wallet. The stripped-down Gold Wing starts at $23,500, and the Tour model with DCT starts at $27,700.
Those who fit in the middle of the Venn diagram of Breaking Bad lovers and booze lovers might miss Sonys 2015 short-lived promotional spirit for the show: Heisenberg, The One Who Knocks Blue Ice vodka. But as craft beer fans and certain Californians know, theres another option out there.

Knee Deep Brewing Co. in Auburn, northeast of Sacramento, has made a Breaking Bad"-themed Indian pale ale since the same year that kooky vodka hit shelves. Breaking Bud has become the brewerys best-seller, and it nabbed the bronze for American IPAs at the 2016 Great American Beer Festival.

Sony Pictures Television, one of the shows production companies, isnt as pleased with the beer. Sony filed a lawsuit this week against Knee Deep in California district court, citing trademark infringement and brand dilution, among other grievances.

Such a beer was probably inevitable. Pop culture references are frequently used by breweries, and Breaking Bad  a show about a chemistry teacher who uses his knowledge to make illicit substances  is a particularly good fit for the edgy craft beer world. There already has been a Heisenbergs Dark and a Walts White Lie out of Marble Brewery in Albuquerque, the city where the show was set.

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What set this particular beer apart was that it used specific imagery from the show, namely its logo.

The title sequence of Breaking Bad presented the periodic table of elements in forest green with white lettering. The camera zooms out, and with it pops out the squares for elements Bromine and Barium, abbreviated Br and Ba respectively. Those abbreviations soon form the beginning of the words Breaking and Bad.

Knee Deeps beer uses the same idea, with the first two letters in Breaking Bud being the abbreviations for Bromine (Br) and a fictional 95th element that begins with Bu. (The actual 95th element is Americium, which is abbreviated Am.) These letters are also white on a green background.

The label also features the brewerys mascot  a green, alien-looking creature with bushy, black eyebrows  wearing a hazmat suit, much like what the shows main characters Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) often wore while making crystal meth.

The beers logo also includes three barrels labeled hops in a desert, with a storage truck and mountains towering in the background: all references to the show.

This greatly displeased Sony, who claims the direct appropriation is gratuitous.

The lawsuit states: Simply put, rather than investing the time, effort and resources necessary to establish their own reputation and identity, Knee Deep instead opted to hijack the famous brand identity of the show for its own intended benefit.

It goes on to claim that the beers label design threatens to erode the value of the show by undermining [Sonys] continuing ability to attract licensees for such marks and secure compensation for the right to associate ones products with the show.

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Knee Deep Chief Executive Jerry Moore said in a statement that he was surprised by the unexpected lawsuit.

Moore said Sony contacted the brewery in early 2015, when Breaking Bud was originally introduced, touting their appreciation of our Breaking Bud beer that made gentle fun of their show.

He said he received an email from Sony reading, It seems the Knee Deep team are big fans of Breaking Bad and we really appreciate the call out to our very popular show.

Soon thereafter I spoke with the Sony representative and we discussed the potential benefits of a formal partnership between Knee Deep and Sony, but we ultimately decided not to pursue such a partnership because, among other things, our label has always been meant as a joke and not something seriously connected to the show, Moore said. At no point, during those discussions, did Sony ever threaten to sue Knee Deep over the name of the beer.

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We are a small brewery, and I dont appreciate the distraction, not to mention the expense of having to deal with something that should have been addressed three years ago if Sony really had an issue with it, he continued. At the end of the day, the quality of the beer is what has made Breaking Bud popular, and we should all be able to take a joke.

Sonys lawyers did not respond to a request for comment on Moores claims.
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 20)  The Solicitor General on Friday dismissed as excuses the arguments of Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno in defense of her supposed failure to file all her statements of assets, liabilities, and net worth (SALNs) as required by law.

In an 81-page memorandum submitted to the Supreme Court Friday, Solicitor General Jose Calida reiterated his call for Sereno's ouster because of this violation.

The Supreme Court was set to decide on the quo warranto case in May. The quo warranto, a legal proceeding where an individual's right to hold office is challenged, was filed by Calida. He wanted the Supreme Court to unseat Sereno for repeatedly failing to file her SALN before she applied for the Chief Justice post in 2012.

Respondent kept making excuses, even to the point of attributing the fault to everybody else, Calida said.

He referred to Serenos responses to Associate Justice Teresita Leonardo-de Castro during the April 10 oral arguments on the case, including that it was impossible for the Chief Justice to retrieve her SALNs in time for the deadline for submission of applications for the position in 2012.

Because why? What did the College of Law say? Ay Ma'am, your SALNs are not here in your 201 file. Why don't you write UP-HRDO (University of the Philippines-Human Resources Development Office)? And of course, by the time I will write HRDO, the deadline has passed, Sereno said, as quoted in Calidas memorandum.

Sereno noted that the Judicial and Bar Council, which screens applications for court positions, had declared her to have "substantially complied" with the SALN requirement.

She also said she would find her missing SALNs and present them before the Senate impeachment court, if her case is brought to trial there. SALN issues also topped the articles of impeachment in the report of the justice committee in the House of Representatives when it impeached Sereno.

The report will be brought to the Senate by a vote of 1/3 of the members of the House set for May.

Calida said it was futile for Sereno to merely allege that she filed her SALNS for as long as she does not present any of them.

Calida: Sereno failed to show missing SALNs

The government's top lawyer also tried to debunk Serenos use of the Doblada Doctrine in insisting that she had filed all her SALNs.

RELATED: Law expert: SC can reverse Sereno's defense

Calida noted that in the case of Court Sheriff Norberto Doblada, the Pasig regional trial court in 2001 found no sufficient evidence to prove that Doblada failed to file his SALNs for several years since he was able to present his 2000 SALN.

Since the 2000 SALN was one of those that the (Office of the Court Administrator) did not have a copy of, it could not readily be concluded that Doblada failed to file his SALNs for those years, Calida said.

Sereno, on the other hand. failed to disprove the certifications issued by the University of the Philippines (UP) and the Office of the Ombudsman showing that she submitted only nine SALNs, Calida said. Sereno taught in UP from 1986-2006.

UP, in its reply to the OSGs letter request for copies of Respondents SALNs, submitted only SALNs for the years 1985, 1990, 1991, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, and 2002, Calidas memorandum read.

Sereno warns of dangers of quo warranto

Calida added that if low-ranking court employees are penalized for violations in their SALNs, the Chief Justice must likewise be held accountable.

Sereno, in an interview with reporters on Friday, said the quo warranto endangered the security of tenure of all government employees in the country, including the police.

Yung milyu-milyon na kawani ng gobyerno po, pati ang pulis... kahit po two years ay magreretire na siya sa mandatory age of retirement ay meron pala siyang exam na hindi nakuha ng tama, quo warranto po yun, Sereno said. In other words, You will throw the security of tenure of millions of government employees and you will destroy the legal profession.
U.S. regulators are reportedly raising objections that Cosco Shipping, a state-run Chinese company, could take control of a container terminal at the Port of Long Beach as part of its $6.3-billion acquisition of another company.

The concerns have been raised by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal, which cited unnamed sources.

The secretive committee, which is chaired by the Treasury Department and focuses on national security, is reviewing Coscos planned acquisition of Orient Overseas International because that Hong Kong company has some assets in the U.S., a Cosco vice chairman has said.

The assets include a nearly fully automated terminal known as the Long Beach Container Terminal, for which Orient Overseas has a long-term lease.

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According to the Wall Street Journal, Cosco executives have proposed to divest or carve out the Long Beach terminal, though its not clear that would be enough to satisfy concerns over the multibillion-dollar deal.

A spokesperson for Cosco did not return an email seeking comment. A Treasury spokesman declined to comment, noting that the department is prohibited by statute from publicly disclosing information filed with CFIUS.

CFIUS reviews focus on national security concerns, and Treasury takes the role as chair of CFIUS very seriously, to ensure that CFIUS identifies and addresses any national security concerns posed by such foreign investment, the spokesperson said.

The review follows President Trumps March rejection of Singapore-based Broadcoms planned purchase of Qualcomm after CFIUS raised concerns that the San Diego chipmaker would be weakened, leading China to gain an upper hand in 5G technology.

andrew.khouri@latimes.com

Follow me @khouriandrew on Twitter
Federal health officials have extended their health warning for romaine lettuce grown in the Yuma, Ariz., region. Consumers now are advised to avoid all forms of the lettuce.

Previous warnings highlighted chopped, packaged romaine and salad mixes containing the variety.

The expansion came after prisoners in Alaska fell ill after eating lettuce from whole romaine heads sourced from the Yuma area, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday.

The unusually virulent strain of E. coli bacteria has sickened more than 50 people in 16 states, sending 31 to hospitals.

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No grower or distributor has been identified as the source of the outbreak. Californias major produce companies, centered in the Salinas Valley, cultivate lettuce during winter around Yuma and the adjacent Imperial Valley in Southern California.

The health agency earlier this week added 18 more victims, including nine with serious kidney failure, from five states  Alaska, Arizona, California, Louisiana and Montana  to an outbreak of Escherichia coli O157:H7 that started in late March.

Besides those hospitalized, 22 people have been sickened in Washington, Idaho, Missouri, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Virginia, according to the CDC.

Heres the CDCs warning as of April 20:

Do not buy or eat romaine lettuce at a grocery store or restaurant unless you can confirm it is not from the Yuma, Ariz., growing region.

Unless the source of the product is known, consumers anywhere in the United States who have any store-bought romaine lettuce at home should not eat it and should throw it away, even if some of it was eaten and no one has gotten sick. Product labels often do not identify growing regions, so throw out any romaine lettuce if youre uncertain about where it was grown. This includes whole heads and hearts of romaine, chopped romaine, and salads and salad mixes containing romaine lettuce. If you do not know if the lettuce is romaine, do not eat it and throw it away.

Restaurants and retailers should not serve or sell any romaine lettuce from the Yuma, Ariz., growing region.

To read this article in Spanish, click here

geoffrey.mohan@latimes.com

Follow me: @LATgeoffmohan
Federal regulators slapped Wells Fargo & Co. with a penalty of $1 billion on Friday, punishing the San Francisco bank for abuses that harmed mortgage and auto loan borrowers, and for what regulators said was a pervasive and reckless lack of risk management.

The penalty, announced by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is the largest levied against a financial firm since President Trump took office. Trump had tweeted in December that penalties against the bank could be substantially increased.

Its also one of the largest fines levied against any U.S. bank not related to the financial crisis and the first for the CFPB since Trump appointee Mick Mulvaney took over as its interim director last year. In the months since, Mulvaney has been criticized by consumer advocates for trying to diminish the agencys powers.

The new fines dwarf the $185 million Wells Fargo agreed to pay to federal regulators and the Los Angeles city attorneys office in 2016 over the creation of accounts without customers authorization.

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The scandal over unauthorized accounts, a practice rooted in the banks onerous sales goals and first reported by The Times in 2013, led to increased regulatory scrutiny at Wells Fargo by local, state and federal authorities and to wide-ranging internal reviews of bank practices.

In the year and a half since the September 2016 settlement, the bank has acknowledged other illegal or improper practices in its consumer lines of business, including forcing mortgage borrowers to pay fees the bank should have covered and requiring hundreds of thousands of auto loan borrowers to pay for insurance policies they did not need  in some cases pushing them into default and leading to repossessions.

Fines and penalties against Wells Fargo Bank for their bad acts against their customers and others will not be dropped, as has incorrectly been reported, but will be pursued and, if anything, substantially increased. I will cut Regs but make penalties severe when caught cheating!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 8, 2017

The OCC fined the bank $500 million. The CFPB said it fined an additional $1 billion but that it would count the OCC fine against that figure, meaning the bank will pay $500 million to each regulator.

The OCC, in a news release announcing the penalty, said it found the banks risk management had been severely deficient, amounting to reckless, unsafe or unsound practices. The CFPBs action was narrower, speaking only to the banks mortgage and auto-loan problems.

Along with the monetary penalties, the bank will have to get regulators approval on plans to repay customers, correct risk-management problems, hire senior executive officers and make board appointments. The OCC, in its order, also reserves the right to take further action against the bank.

The bank last week in its first-quarter earnings report said that it was in negotiations with the OCC and the CFPB over the latest penalties and warned they could total $1 billion to settle the mortgage and auto loan issues as well as resolve matters regarding our compliance risk management program.

The statement did not say when a settlement might be finalized, but executives may have wanted to wrap up a deal this week in advance of the companys annual shareholder meeting, which is set for Tuesday in Des Moines.

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In a statement Friday, Wells Fargo Chief Executive Timothy Sloan said the regulatory actions affirm that we share the same priorities with our regulators and that we are committed to working with them as we deliver our commitments with focus, accountability, and transparency.

Last weeks announcement sent Wells Fargo shares down 3.4% despite financial results that beat Wall Street expectations. But shares rose Friday, climbing 2% to $52.57.

The new fines mark the second major enforcement action against the bank this year. The Federal Reserve in February said Wells Fargo had engaged in widespread consumer abuses and other compliance breakdowns and ordered the bank to cap its growth until it can prove to regulators that it will not endanger customers.

Former Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen, whose term atop the financial regulator ended the day after those sanctions were announced, described the banks behavior as pervasive and persistent misconduct.

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The new penalties have not satisfied many of the banks critics. Rep. Maxine Waters, a Los Angeles Democrat who has called for breaking up the massive bank, said Friday she was disappointed that regulators have not revoked the banks charter or prosecuted executives.

I have been clear in the past that fines are not sufficient in addressing the pattern of illegal behavior by Wells Fargo, and this action still does not put the banks past behavior to rest, Waters said in a statement. Steeper penalties are still necessary.

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said he was glad to see the bank face additional penalties, but also estimated that Wells Fargo stands to gain many times the new fines in the form of lower taxes and proposed regulatory changes. The bank reported earlier this year that the recently passed corporate tax cut saved it more than $3 billion in future tax liability alone.

While these are substantial fines, they barely dent the almost $24 billion the [Trump] administration has and will provide Wells Fargo through tax cuts and proposed capital relief, Brown said in a statement.

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Despite the size of Fridays penalty, Wells Fargo can easily absorb the sanction. The bank generated profit of $22.2 billion last year and last week reported $5.9 billion in this years first quarter. On Friday, though, the bank said it was adjusting those first-quarter results to reflect the fines, cutting profit for the first three months of the year to $4.7 billion.

But more problems and regulatory actions could still arise, even as the bank has moved to institute new controls and alter the makeup of its board.

In March, Wells Fargo reported that authorities have asked questions about its wealth-management business, which may have recommended inappropriate investments for customers, and about issues related to its foreign-exchange practice. Fridays penalties do not appear to resolve those inquiries.

Scott Siefers, an analyst at investment bank Sandler ONeill, said the wealth-management inquiry appears to be the biggest pending regulatory issue facing the bank, but noted that the Securities and Exchange Commission, Department of Labor and numerous state agencies are still looking into the banks practices.

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There are other things still outstanding, but the pending one now is wealth management, he said.

At the banks annual meeting next week, public officials including California Treasurer John Chiang and New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli are expected to call for more changes at the company.

Chiang said he plans to ask bank shareholders to call for an end to Wells Fargos use of forced-arbitration agreements, which bar customers from suing the bank. DiNapoli wants shareholders to ask for a report on the banks incentive compensation systems.

The CFPB was an aggressive advocate for consumers under former director Richard Cordray, but Mulvaney has sought to reshape the bureau, saying it should serve finance companies as well as consumers.

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The Associated Press reported this month that the bureau has not recorded any enforcement actions since Nov. 21, three days before Cordray stepped down as director.

Over the last few months, Mulvaney has dropped a lawsuit against high-interest lenders affiliated with a Native American tribe in Northern California, sought to undo rules that would rein in payday lenders and asked Congress to water down the bureaus authority to create new rules.

In Fridays news release announcing the penalties, the agency also refers to itself as the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, a change from how it has been known since its creation, and used a new agency seal  one with an eagle and a shield  instead of the bureaus more commonly used logo, which shows the letters CFPB with a beam of light coming from the C.

Mulvaney critics and finance industry observers told The Times earlier this year that the bureau, while taking a more laissez-faire approach overall, would probably still go after some bad actors. And Trump last year said in a tweet that fines against Wells Fargo could be substantially increased.

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Mulvaney addressed his critics Friday, saying in the news release, We have said all along that we will enforce the law. That is what we did here.

Siefers suggested that Mulvaney and the OCC, led by Trump appointee and longtime Los Angeles banker Joseph Otting, saw the new revelations about Wells Fargos practices as an opportunity to hit the bank with bigger penalties than the agencies did in 2016.

With the benefit of hindsight, I think we all underestimated what this was going to turn into, he said. The day the original fine was announced, I think we thought it was going to blow over, but instead it turned into a firestorm. I suspect even the CFPB was a little surprised. You cant have a second opportunity and not take a bigger bite at the apple.

james.koren@latimes.com

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Twitter: @jrkoren

UPDATES:

2:45 p.m.: This article was updated with comments from Rep. Maxine Waters, Sen. Sherrod Brown and analyst Scott Siefers.

7 a.m.: This article was updated throughout with additional details and background and with statements from Wells Fargo Chief Executive Timothy Sloan and interim CFPB director Mick Mulvaney.

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This article was originally published at 6 a.m.
Why give someone with bum knees a once-a-year injection costing as little as a few hundred bucks when you can instead make them undergo complicated knee-replacement surgery costing tens of thousands of dollars?

That, in a nutshell, is one reason the U.S. healthcare system is the most expensive in the world.

Its also where Hollywood resident Jere Rosenberg now finds himself.

The 69-year-old has painful osteoarthritis in his knees, often making it difficult to get around. Its the most common form of arthritis, affecting about 27 million Americans. Cartilage in the joint breaks down as you get older and bones start rubbing together.

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When he was covered by Medicare, Rosenberg had no problem receiving annual injections of hyaluronic acid, a thick, gooey lubricant that eases stress on joints. The Food and Drug Administration approved such treatment for arthritic knees in 1997.

Last year, however, Rosenberg switched to coverage under his wifes Anthem Blue Cross insurance plan, which significantly reduced his monthly premiums but also resulted in Anthem saying it wouldnt cover the hyaluronic acid shots.

His experience reveals the frequently arbitrary  and misguided  approach many insurers bring to healthcare coverage.

Although the injections are approved by Medicare and the FDA, Anthem took its cue in part from the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, which announced in 2013 that hyaluronic acid is no longer recommended for osteoarthritis of the knee.

Although a few individual studies found statistically significant treatment effects, when combined together in a meta-analysis the evidence did not meet the minimum clinically important improvement thresholds, Dr. David Jevsevar, lead author of the academys study, said at the time.

I spoke with Jevsevar this week. He said the study was never intended to guide insurance decisions. It states prominently that medical care should always be based on a physicians expert judgment and the patients circumstances.

I dont think hyraluronic acid should be used as a front-line treatment, Jevsevar told me, but that doesnt mean I dont think it should be used in some cases.

The Arthritis Foundation takes a similar stance. While studies of hyaluronic acid injections have occasionally yielded disappointing results, many doctors who treat osteoarthritis say that the weight of scientific evidence  and their own clinical experience  suggests that a shot in the knee can produce significant relief for some patients, it says.

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Dr. Steven Sampson, founder of the Orthohealing Center in West Los Angeles and a specialist in bad knees, told me that hyaluronic acid can be very effective for people with mild to moderate osteoarthritis.

It might not work for everyone, he said, but its definitely something you want to consider before looking to more invasive procedures.

By that, he means knee-replacement surgery.

Yet a surgical solution is now in the cards for Rosenberg because his insurer, Anthem, will cover the operation. It likely will cost more than $50,000.

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Compare that with the roughly $1,000 cost of the annual injection of hyaluronic acid thats worked just fine for the past few years.

Or a cost of about $300 if hyaluronic acid is purchased from a Canadian pharmacy (which isnt legal under U.S. law but which many cash-strapped Americans do nevertheless).

Its crazy, Rosenberg said. I just dont understand Anthems thinking. It seems so short-sighted.

Suzanne Zagata-Meraz, an Anthem spokeswoman, said the companys experts looked at the most recent clinical evidence and determined that hyaluronic acid injections do not improve the well-being of osteoarthritis patients.

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Neither the American College of Rheumatology nor the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons advocate for the use of [hyaluronic acid] injections to treat osteoarthritis of the knee, she said.

Thats just not true. As Ive already noted, the academy says the opinion of doctors should always come first, and many doctors favor giving the injections a try.

The American College of Rheumatology, for its part, supports patient access to appropriate therapies including hyaluronic acid injection, according to a position paper on the subject.

The organization recommends the use of intra-articular hyaluronic acid injection for the treatment of osteoarthritis of the knee in adults, it says.

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Zagata-Meraz declined to comment on the rheumatology groups position paper or my conversation with Dr. Jevsevar.

In any case, Anthem isnt alone in citing such medical associations in denying coverage of hyaluronic acid shots.

Blue Shield of California is currently notifying doctors that, beginning in June, it too will no longer cover the injections. These services are considered NOT medically necessary based upon review of evidence and guidelines of professional societies such as the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, it says.

Again, nope.

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Its hard not to suspect that, as a growing number of aging Americans succumb to arthritic knees, insurance companies are looking to save a buck by limiting peoples treatment options.

Rosenbergs situation also illustrates the larger problem of dozens of health insurers having dozens of inconsistent coverage standards, often undermining the medical judgment of doctors who have direct contact with patients.

This can leave many patients feeling that they have no choice but to accept a more invasive  and expensive  procedure solely because its covered by the insurer and thus represents a cheaper out-of-pocket alternative.

That, of course, is a foolish way to run a healthcare system.

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Im not saying a Medicare-for-all approach would solve everything. Other countries with such systems limit patient choices and may require long waits for elective procedures.

But it seems clear that a single-payer insurance arrangement would help prioritize medical needs over profit-seeking. It also would facilitate standardized care so that treatment options are consistent for all patients, and hopefully based on sound medical data rather than dubious decisions.

Patients want peace of mind that they exhausted conservative options before undergoing invasive surgery, Sampson at L.A.s Orthohealing Center said.

In other words, they want to know that their doctor has the flexibility to try different approaches before breaking out the scalpel.

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Insurers should appreciate such a notion  it could save them tons of money.

And Americas knees arent getting any younger.

David Lazarus column runs Tuesdays and Fridays. He also can be seen daily on KTLA-TV Channel 5 and followed on Twitter @Davidlaz. Send your tips or feedback to david.lazarus@latimes.com.
Nestled in the scenic foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, Sierra Madre retains much of the quaint character that made the town and its surrounding environs a popular tourist destination during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The area was first settled by the Tongva people, who established a village in Sierra Madre Canyon upon moving down from the high desert into the more temperate climes of the San Gabriel Valley and Los Angeles Basin more than 1,500 years ago.

By 1881, when Massachusetts transplant Nathaniel Carter purchased more than 1,000 acres at the mouth of the canyon (800 from famed California pioneer Lucky Baldwin and the rest cobbled together from Southern Pacific Railroad holdings and other private owners) the Tongva were long gone, scattered to the four winds by Spanish missionaries.

Carter, like so many Easterners who ventured west to California in the late 1800s, had settled in the San Gabriel Valley for the betterment of his respiratory health. Finding the climate to be infinitely more agreeable than that of his native Lowell, he made plans to create a utopian community to be called Natures Sanitorium, and on 100 nearby acres he built his estate, which he dubbed Carterhia.

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Although his naming skills left much to be desired, he had chosen an excellent site for a town, which became known as Sierra Madre. The wildly popular Mt. Wilson trail, which drew hikers from across Southern California in such numbers that the authorities were obliged to levy a toll for its upkeep, had its trailhead just north of the crossroads of Baldwin Avenue and Sierra Madre Boulevard.

(Los Angeles Times )

By the time the Pacific Electric Railway established a line to ferry visitors from Los Angeles to Sierra Madre in 1906, it was well on its way to becoming a thriving boomtown, with such modern amenities as paved roads, electric lights and telephones following on the heels of the trolley within the year.

The go-go aughts were not, however, a glimpse of things to come. After that brief growth spurt, development in Sierra Madre slowed dramatically, which had the salutary effect of preserving the rustic character and charm of the village and canyon communities, save for some midcentury suburban infill near the freeway.

Because of its small-town vibe and well-preserved historic downtown and residential neighborhoods, Sierra Madre has become a popular home-buying destination for creatives of the marketing variety as well as of the artistic. Close to Pasadena, and freeway-close to Los Angeles, Sierra Madre offers laid-back village living with all the conveniences of the big city a short drive away.

1 / 4 Baldwin Avenue. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times) 2 / 4 A downtown coffeehouse and bakery. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 3 / 4 The road connects several San Gabriel Valley communities. (Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times) 4 / 4 The former pack station is now a museum. The site was also a speak-easy and gambling house. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)

Neighborhood highlights

Canyon country: The 1960s are alive and well in the eclectic Sierra Madre Canyon neighborhood, where residents enjoy rustic foothill living in homes that date to the citys earliest days.

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Mayberry, USA: Sierra Madres historic downtown is a charming, walkable area of cafes, restaurants and bars.

Home, sweet home: Sierra Madres housing stock is a pleasant mixture of styles from a succession of eras ranging from the late 1800s to 21st century.

Neighborhood challenge

Price of entry: All of that rustic charm comes at a price, with most homes asking over $1 million, although prices can run as low as the $600,000s.

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Expert insight

Mike Paris, a real estate agent whos lived and worked in the area since 1998, said Sierra Madre has maintained its authentic feel through the fierce loyalty of its residents  and that probably wont change anytime soon.

We had a local election this week, and every City Council member elected has a history of scrutinizing big development and supporting strict zoning laws, Paris said.

The community offers a quirky mix of historic turn-of-the-century estates, 1920s bungalows and post-WWII midcentury builds. Paris said the architectural range is a boon to the neighborhood.

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Homes here range from around $500,000 to $1.7 million, Paris said. Its not some cookie-cutter community where everyone is in the same income bracket.

Market snapshot

In the 91024 ZIP Code, based on seven sales, the median sales price for single-family homes in February was $825,000, down 8.3% year over year, according to CoreLogic.

Report card

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The single public school within the Sierra Madre boundaries, Sierra Madre Elementary, scored 905 on the 2013 Academic Performance Index.

Highlights in the area include Foothills Middle, which scored 977, and Highland Oaks Elementary, which scored 964.

Times staff writer Jack Flemming contributed to this report.

hotproperty@latimes.com

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Most any week the theater provides a college seminars worth of social-justice studies, but the conversations are particularly prevalent now in L.A.s smaller theaters. This week they look at circumstances that spiral into incarceration in Key Change, the inequities of growing up black in Native Son, the American dream as experienced by a new arrival in The Immigrant, and the elite who flout all the rules in the Spanish-language Enrique VIII y Catalina de Aragon.

Key Change by the Collective Studio

The essentials: Key Change emerged from a 2014 workshop with female prisoners in northeast England and was first performed for incarcerated men to show them how their behavior affects women. The womens clipped, overlapping remarks  combined with glimpses of their pre-prison lives  reveal childhood sexual abuse, youthful mistakes, poor choices in men, domestic violence, economic hardship, drug addiction and the difficulty of change. The project, led by the Open Clasp womens theater group and crafted by Catrina McHugh into a play, appeared at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and off-Broadway.

Why this? None of us are immune to a tragedy of circumstance, and oftentimes this is exactly what leads women to prison, says Samantha Lavin, who directs a production by the Collective Studio: Los Angeles. Its clear in the play that prison isnt designed as a place of transformation. But, she adds: Female empowerment can and does take place as inmates provide one another their greatest sources of hope and support. Lavin keeps the L.A. presentation close to the spirit of the original with no set and few props, but with the addition of a soundscape and music.

Details: Secret Rose Theatre, 11246 W. Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays; ends April 29. $20-$30. bit.ly/latkeychange

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Native Son by Antaeus Theatre

The essentials: Clamp down hope long enough and somethings bound to explode. Richard Wright showed how it can happen in his searing 1940 novel Native Son, in which a toxic mix of poverty, fatherlessness, lack of opportunity and rage propel Bigger Thomas, a young black man, toward violence. Among the books many telling lines: There was just the old feeling, the feeling that he had had all his life: he was black and had done wrong; white men were looking at something with which they would soon accuse him.

Why this? Wright meticulously spells out whats going on in Biggers mind, and whats there reflects what W.E.B. Du Bois called the double consciousness  seeing himself as the dominant culture sees him: as less worthy, less valuable, always less. Nambi E. Kelleys adaptation, which was praised in its 2014 premiere at Chicagos Court Theatre, manifests the double consciousness as a character. Andi Chapman, who is directing for the Antaeus Theatre Company, says she wants the audience to experience this play from the inside out, to live inside Biggers head.

Details: Antaeus, 110 E. Broadway, Glendale. 8 p.m. Mondays, Fridays and Saturdays; 2 p.m. Sundays; ends June 3. $30 and $34. (818) 506-1983, www.antaeus.org

Jon Chaffin, right, as Bigger Thomas contemplates Noel Arthur as his double consciousness in Antaeus Theatre Companys Native Son. (Geoffrey Wade Photography )

The Immigrant at Sierra Madre

The essentials: Poor, alone and unable to speak the local language, a Russian Jew arrives in a town in central Texas in 1909. Fleeing pogroms at home, his first order of business is merely to survive. With the help of a local banker, he thrives. The Immigrant is the partially imagined history of author Mark Hareliks grandfather. Developed in 1985 in Denver, it was warmly embraced in a 1986 production at the Mark Taper Forum.

Why this? Simon Levy, who directs this Sierra Madre Playhouse production, hopes the play reminds us where we come from and helps realign the word immigrant from border walls and detention centers to the idealism of what this country stands for. Levy, who is producing director at the Fountain Theatre in East Hollywood, has had immigration and cultural adaptation on his mind a lot in the last year with the Fountains productions of Building the Wall and The Chosen, the latter of which he directed.

Details: Sierra Madre Playhouse, 87 W. Sierra Madre Blvd. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 2:30 p.m. Sundays, through May 25; also 2:30 p.m. May 26. $25-$40. (626) 355-4318, www.sierramadreplayhouse.org

The Sierra Madre Playhouse cast of The Immigrant: from left, Adam Lebowitz-Lockard as the title figure, Sigi Gradwohl as his wife, and as a couple who befriend them, Kaye Kittrell and Stuart W. Howard. (John Dlugolecki )

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Enrique VIII y Catalina de Aragon

The essentials: As the 16th century English King Henry VIII struggled to extricate himself from his marriage to Catherine of Aragon so that he could marry Anne Boleyn, he rampaged through matters of church, state and matrimony. Among those drawn to the topic was Pedro Calderon de la Barca, one of the great writers of Spains classical theater, whose drama from about 1627 put an intriguing spin on events by subtly imbuing Henry and his advisor Cardinal Wolsey with qualities of the Spanish king of Calderons day, Philip IV, and his advisor the Duke of Olivares.

Why this? Not least among the plays concerns are abuse of power and emotions so unchecked that they warp not only people but the institutions they run. Thats the stuff of great drama, and its as easily ripped from todays headlines as from the 16th or 17th centuries. Calderons La cisma de Inglaterra (The English Schism) isnt much encountered, but displaying a broad range of Spanish literature has been the intent of the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts since its founding in 1973. The play has been freely adapted by Margarita Galban, Bilingual Foundations artistic director, and Lina Montalvo, its managing director, as Enrique VIII y Catalina de Aragon. Its performed in Spanish with English supertitles in Plaza de la Razas 198-seat Margo Albert Theatre.

Details: Plaza de la Raza, 3540 N. Mission Road, Lincoln Heights. 8 p.m. Friday, 4 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday; ends Sunday. $30. (213) 437-0500, www.bfatheatre.org

Blanca Aurora Montes as Catherine and Izzy Martinez as King Henry VIII in Calderons history-inspired drama by Bilingual Foundation. (Edna Gutierrez )

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The 99-Seat Beat appears every Friday. Our reviewers shortlist offerings with an emphasis on 99-seat theaters and other smaller venues. Some (but not all) recommendations are shows weve seen; others have caught our attention because of the track record of the company, playwright, director or cast. Comprehensive theater listings are posted every Sunday at latimes.com/arts.

daryl.miller@latimes.com

Twitter: @darylhmiller
What goes with Beethovens Ninth Symphony? We must be up to Example No. 2743 by now.

Everybodys a got a different idea, and some, such as Gustavo Dudamel, more than one. Last summer, with our contentious country in a stir, Dudamel asked the beloved sportscaster Vin Scully to recite Coplands Lincoln Portrait as a prelude to Beethovens great hymn  a hymn to a brotherhood that the world more than ever finds inconvenient.

Thursday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Dudamel had another good idea for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Master Chorale: Leonard Bernsteins Chichester Psalms. Like Beethoven, Bernstein was a Goliath of music who identified with David, a man of song, a champion of the common in the face of the monstrous and tyrannical. Also like Beethovens Ode to Joy, Bernsteins setting of three Hebrew psalm texts for chorus and orchestra is an ode to joy, though unlike Beethovens, not an unsullied one.

The psalms were written at the request of Chichester Cathedral in England and were the one, last-minute product of a frustrating 1963-64 sabbatical season that Bernstein took off from his duties as music director of the New York Philharmonic. The main project of the sabbatical was to have been a musical based on Thornton Wilders The Skin of Our Teeth, which fell through.

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Bernstein was, in general, filled with angst. In his previous work, Symphony No. 3 (Kaddish), Bernstein is a David challenging God for making an unjust world. Just before Kaddish was finished, John F. Kennedy, whom Bernstein adored, was assassinated. A further confirmation of outrage, two months later and just before getting the Chichester commission, Bernsteins friend and former mentor, composer Marc Blitzstein, was killed on a street in Martinique.

Countertenor John Holiday sings Bernsteins Chichester Psalms Thursday at Disney Hall. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times )

Chichester Psalms is the quest for rediscovering the sweetness in life and finding peace, as did Beethoven at an exalted level, even as he railed against heaven with the best of them. Each of the three movements includes a full psalm along with contrasting parts of another. There can be no concept of peace without the reality of rough and warring nations, no sense of the forever without the premonition of death.

Crashing angular intervals (taken from discarded Skin of Our Teeth material) open the first and third movements, before lyricism and buoyancy, before dancing and bongos (probably a first in a British cathedral, and not without sniping from snotty critics) can counter. The center of the score is the Davidic Psalm 23, The Lord is my shepherd, with an entrancing melody for a soprano solo that glimpses heaven.

Bernstein meant this for a boy soprano, partly in his love for the wholesomeness of the sound as well as a nod to British choral tradition. He put in the score that a countertenor could be used, but that was meant as a second-best alternative. In inviting John Holiday, a true male soprano with a voice of soaring purity and none of the nasal virility more common of countertenors, the L.A. Phil had the best of both worlds.

Dudamel captured everything there is to capture in Chichester Psalms. Along with the sweetness of simple song came exultation verging on ecstasy with undercurrents of unanswerable angst. After the Chichester premiere, the delighted dean of the cathedral called this David dancing at the Arc. We now know its much more.

Ten years later, Bernstein conducted Beethovens Ninth with the Vienna Philharmonic and afterward, he had this to ask: In the millennia since David had proclaimed how good and lovely it was for men to dwell together, is the world any closer to David? In the century and a half since Beethovens struggle for peace, have our wars brought us any closer to brotherhood?

Dudamels response is not to give up. The symphony has been his rallying cry since the day he became music director, conducting the Ninth at a free Hollywood Bowl concert almost nine years ago.

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As he demonstrated at the Bowl last summer, his Ninth remains optimistic but has become more tempered, an acknowledgment that peace remains more a certainty than actuality. The mystery of the first movement, the startling shock of the jarringly accents that break the pulse of the Scherzo, the serenity that is utopian yet subliminal in the Adagio are all expressed with great, somber seriousness. This makes the joy at the end, when the chorus and four vocal soloists let loose, all the harder won and therefore all the more exceptional for its visionary realism.

The Los Angeles Master Chorale performs under the direction of Gustavo Dudamel Thursday in Disney Hall. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times )

The Master Chorale and L.A. Phil know this score backward and forward, and the performance had an unerring surety, as did soloists Julianna Di Giacomo, Jennifer Johnson Cano, Michael Konig and Craig Colclough (replacing Davone Tines, who took ill). The L.A. Phil now takes this program to New York, London and Paris (although with different choruses).

But there is the danger that in todays Washington, D.C., Bernsteins Davidic forewarning would fall on deaf ears. The L.A. Phil performance of the Ninth at the Kennedy Center next week will be Example No. 2744. Esa-Pekka Salonens solemn new Pollux will lead into the quiet tremolo opening of Beethovens symphony.

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Dudamel Conducts Beethoven 9 & Bernstein

Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: 8 p.m. Friday (Beethoven only, no Bernstein) and Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday

Tickets: Almost sold out; very limited seats remaining for $100-$225 (subject to change)

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Information: (323) 850-2000, laphil.org

mark.swed@latimes.com

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Somethings missing from the Getty Villa
CB1 Gallery, which began life in a storefront space at the downtown L.A. intersection of 5th and Spring streets in 2010 and now inhabits a more polished Arts District space on Santa Fe Avenue, will shut its doors next month.

Unfortunately, expanding into the current space along with the slow sales that followed created cash flow issues, gallery co-founder Clyde Beswick said via email in response to an inquiry from The Times. Given our cash flow and slow sales, in late March we made the difficult decision to close the gallery. CB1 will close at the end of our current exhibition.

Those cash-flow issues are what prompted a group of artists to publish an open letter alleging that CB1 Gallery had consistently failed to pay artists according to the terms of its contracts, wrote checks that bounced and repeatedly sold work without informing them.

This abuse appears to us to be systematic and so we feel it is time to speak out, reads the letter, published Tuesday at artistsversuscb1gallery.com.

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It was signed by nine artists who have shown their work at the gallery over the years, including Brett Reichman, Michael Mancari, Emily Davis Adams, Lily Simonson and Merion Estes  all of whom claim to have outstanding receivables. Additional signatories included painters Tom Knechtel and Jamie Skolnick, who have shown at CB1 and who added their names to the notice in solidarity.

Beswick said in a written statement that CB1 is working hard to resolve any issues with the artists whose work we have shown.

But the open letter is not the first inkling of trouble at CB1. In December, Mancari and Reichman filed separate lawsuits against the gallery and its founders over nonpayment.

Reichman, who is based in the Bay Area, filed his claim in San Francisco County Superior Court, seeking more than $11,100 in damages, as well as attorneys fees. The gallery recently defaulted in the case, and the artist is currently awaiting a final hearing.

Mancari, who filed his suit in Los Angeles County Superior Court, had sought $10,000 in damages in connection with a painting titled Blue Monday, for which he says he was paid with a check that bounced. After that, he alleges, he was never paid for the work, nor was it returned. The artist ultimately settled his case with the gallery in the spring for $6,000.

But Mancari alleges that CB1 hasnt made any payments on the settlement either.

He asked to pay it in three installments, the artist said. Since then, I have received no installments or payments.

An installation view of Michael Mancaris exhibition Motherboard, held at CB1 Gallery early last year. (Michael Mancari )

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Given our cash flow and slow sales, in late March we made the difficult decision to close the gallery. CB1 will close at the end of our current exhibition. Clyde Beswick, co-founder, CB1 Gallery

Though Beswick says CB1s problems are due to financial troubles stemming from the gallerys move to a bigger space in 2015, Adams, who claims she is owed almost $6,000, alleges that the problems have been brewing for some time.

This has happened since the beginning of showing with him, she said via telephone from the Bay Area, where she resides. I was in a group show in 2013 and then he took me on as a represented artist.

My first solo show in the new space was in the project room and I had one large painting. He sold that painting and I had to kick and scream for a very long time to see little chunks of money here and there.

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Adams said she experienced a similar problem following another solo show at the gallery in January 2017  an exhibition that received positive critical notice from Times art critic Christopher Knight, who described it as lovely.

An installation view of work by Emily Davis Adams at CB1 Gallery in early 2017. (Emily Davis Adams )

That exhibition featured 24 paintings, 10 of which she says sold. She claims that she is still owed for three of them. The timing, she says, couldnt have been worse: I had just had a baby and he promised me that Id get this big chunk that he owed me, but it never came.

To support her claim, Adams forwarded statements on sales and an email exchange in which she demands that Beswick pay her the funds owed. He responds: I am sorry I have been unresponsive. I have been waiting for some money to come in for 6 weeks but the clients have not paid.

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Beswick, who said he was speaking on behalf of the gallery and CB1 co-founder Jason Chang (who was unavailable to comment), declined to address the individual artists claims. But in his emailed statement Beswick said, We truly love the art we have exhibited and respect the artists.

Before he opened CB1, Beswick was a marketing executive who came to art as a collector in the 1980s  amassing works by key Los Angeles artists such as Lari Pittman, Catherine Opie and Paul McCarthy. But that all came to a halt in 1997 when he was convicted of embezzling and filing false tax returns. He lost his collection and ended up serving more than 13 months in county jail and state prison.

I really screwed up, Beswick told The Times in 2015. And I paid for my mistake.

The gallery represented a comeback of sorts. CB1s shows were regularly reviewed by critics in The Times and art publications.

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Art, Beswick said upon the unveiling of his expanded space, is not a commodity. Im not selling food. I cant get involved if I dont fall in love with Im showing.

But in the open letter, the artists describe a gallery operation that didnt quite live up to its high-minded ideals.

We believed, as much of the L.A. arts community apparently did, that Mr. Beswicks reform was an honest one, stated the letter. We were grateful for the opportunity his gallery provided as a space for exhibiting work and building a web of engaged, active members of the larger Los Angeles art community. Unfortunately, our experience has proven otherwise.

Reichman said that filing a lawsuit was something he agonized over.

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But as a labor-intensive painter who can spend upwards of three years on a single work, I simply could not allow the gallery to sell multiple works and not compensate me for them, he said to The Times via email.

Above all, the suit has been a distraction from the studio, he said.

Its a demoralizing outcome, he said. Mr. Beswicks claims to care about artists run counter to his actions as Ive experienced them.

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carolina.miranda@latimes.com

Twitter: @cmonstah

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In the newly released comedy Godard Mon Amour, Michel Hazanavicius playful flashback to France in the fateful year of 1968, a young Jean-Luc Godard (played by Louis Garrel) marches with an enormous crowd in Paris. Alongside him is the critic and filmmaker Michel Cournot, whose Les Gauloises Bleues is set to screen that May at the Cannes Film Festival.

Who cares about Cannes? a Godard acquaintance yells, bursting into derisive laughter. Only a fool would go this year, with all thats going on now!

A lot was going on indeed. Millions of workers were on strike and students were pouring into the streets, all in opposition to President Charles de Gaulles government. On the film side, directors like Godard were furious that the culture minister Andre Malraux had fired Henri Langlois, the revered founder of the Cinematheque Francaise  a decision that was ultimately reversed after filmmakers from Paris to Hollywood rose up in protest.

That revolutionary fervor soon encroached upon the small Riviera town of Cannes itself. The film festival opened as planned on May 10, 1968, with a screening of a restored version of Gone With the Wind. Nine days later, Godard and other directors, including Francois Truffaut and Claude Lelouch, led a group of cine-revolutionaries bent on shutting down the proceedings. They succeeded, in the process committing a strange, volatile, endlessly mythologized episode to the annals of Cannes history.

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Directors withdrew their movies. (Canceled titles included Alain Resnais Je TAime, Je TAime, Dominique Delouches 24 Hours in the Life of a Woman and Peter Collinsons The Long Days Dying.) Members of the competition jury resigned, including Roman Polanski, Monica Vitti and Louis Malle. In the most memorably chaotic episode, protesters took the stage at an afternoon screening of Carlos Sauras competition entry, Peppermint Frappe, an act that climaxed with the spectacle of Godard, Truffaut, Saura and his star Geraldine Chaplin hanging from the theater curtains.

Those who led the Cannes 68 shutdown were effectively calling on the French film industry to express support for the demonstrators. But as with every revolution, not everyone was on the same philosophical page. Truffaut called for a complete halt to the festival; Godard initially proposed an overhaul that would do away with awards and replace programmed films with documentary footage from the ongoing events.

People look on as the 21st Cannes Film Festival is interrupted following the occupation by demonstrators of the Palais des Festivals on May 18, 1968. (Paul Louis / AFP / Getty Images )

READ MORE: A look back at entertainment in 1968 

Polanski revealed in a 2008 Variety interview that he had found the idea of stopping the festival totally ridiculous, and claimed hed been forced to quit the jury against his will.

I came from Communist Poland, he said, and I knew moments of elation like this where suddenly you just feel like youre doing something great, when in fact its just an illusion.

The irony, if thats the word, is that the upheaval of May 1968 intersected with a profound, ongoing revolution in cinema itself. Throughout the late 1950s and 60s, Godard and his fellow New Wave filmmakers had taken radically innovative steps: From Godards Breathless to Truffauts The 400 Blows to Alain Resnais Hiroshima Mon Amour, here was a vital, modern cinema that rejected the staid, well-behaved tradition of quality that had largely prevailed for the first half-century of the mediums existence.

Here was art that, in its dazzlingly unorthodox approach to form and aesthetics, could mimic and even embody the exigencies of real life. The shutdown of Cannes 68 sent a different though perhaps not contradictory message: Real life must, in the end, trump art.

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Im talking about solidarity with the students and workers, and youre talking about tracking shots and close-ups! Godard famously spat at someone who opposed closing the festival. To put it another way: At a time like this, how could anyone sit around watching movies?

Even when the show doesnt go on, there will always be another show. From the ashes of the aborted 1968 Cannes Film Festival there rose significant shifts in the direction of the festival, pushing it closer to the programming model that more or less exists today.

Director Roman Polanski, far right, with Beatles drummer Ringo Starr, center, and his wife, Maureen, right, at Cannes on May 15, 1968. (Raoul Fornezza / AP Photo )

READ MORE: In 1968, moviegoers had a lot more choices before blockbuster fever took over 

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For the festivals first few decades (it launched in 1946), programmers largely selected movies approved and submitted by national film organizations. In 1969, however, a group of French filmmakers formed the Societe des Realisateurs de Films (or Film Directors Society). Galvanized by the events of 1968, these directors proposed sweeping reforms to the Cannes selection process.

When those proposals were rejected, the Society formed the Quinzaine des Realisateurs, also known as the Directors Fortnight, a parallel festival held every year alongside Cannes  an edgy, independent, principled alternative to what has become known as the official selection.

And so the 1969 Cannes official competition screened such titles as Eric Rohmers My Night at Mauds, Ronald Neames The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Dennis Hoppers Easy Rider and Lindsay Andersons If   (the eventual winner of the top prize). Meanwhile, not far from the Palais, the inaugural Directors Fortnight unveiled a robust 68-feature program that included Robert Bressons A Gentle Woman, Bob Rafelsons Head, Bernardo Bertoluccis Partner, Roger Cormans The Trip and Nagisa Oshimas Diary of a Shinjuku Thief.

Over the decades, as the official selection shifted away from its country-based system to a more auteur-driven lineup, the once-stark differences between the two programs began to blur. These days, the Fortnight no longer has a monopoly on edgy programming in Cannes, and the two festivals have developed a relationship that could be described as both symbiotic and adversarial.

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The Fortnight laid claim to early works by Atom Egoyan (Speaking Parts), Michael Haneke (The Seventh Continent), Hou Hsiao-hsien (Daughter of the Nile) and Bong Joon-ho (The Host), all of who have gone on to become official selection regulars. For years, too, the Fortnight served as a hot launchpad for American independent directors like John Sayles, Whit Stillman and Spike Lee, who screened his debut feature, Shes Gotta Have It, there in 1986. Lee has been back to Cannes several times since, and returns to the main competition this year with a new drama, BlacKkKlansman.

Five decades after May 1968, more than a few are still asking the question posed in Godard Mon Amour: Who cares about Cannes?

As it happens, that wink-wink scene was edited into a promotional teaser for Hazanavicius movie shortly before its 2017 premiere at Cannes. It was a self-consciously cheeky dig at the anxiety surrounding that years festival, which implemented unprecedented security measures in response to renewed fears of terrorist activity in Europe. (The July 2016 Bastille Day attack in Nice, just 20 miles up the coast from Cannes, hit especially close to home.)

Curiously enough, Godard Mon Amour (or as it was known then, Le Redoubtable) was the subject of a false alarm at last years festival. I happened to be in line for the films first press screening when security guards suddenly ordered everyone in the building to evacuate, following the discovery of a suspicious-looking package inside the theater.

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My colleagues and I waited a short distance from the Palais, and after about an hour were allowed back inside. The package, it turned out, was merely a bag someone accidentally left behind. Aside from that harrowing bit of farce, Cannes 2017 went off without a hitch. A year later, however, those beefed-up security measures will likely remain in place.

Still, to judge by recent headlines, the possibility of a terrorist attack seems to have been momentarily elbowed aside by less life-or-death considerations. Earlier this month, Thierry Fremaux, the festivals general delegate, announced that attendees were not allowed to take selfies on the red carpet  a grotesque practice he was banning in the interests of restoring a bit of decency.

What Cannes considers decency, of course, has been dismissed in recent years as antiquated and sexist. The 2015 festival witnessed the embarrassing Flatgate controversy, in which numerous women reported having been turned away from gala screenings for not wearing appropriate high-heeled footwear.

READ MORE: The 10 best movies of 1968, according to the film critic who reviewed them all 

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Over the years, criticism of the festivals treatment of women has extended beyond the red carpet and into the selection process itself, specifically how few female directors are chosen for the competition  a problem that will surely continue to receive scrutiny in the wake of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements. Notably, 2018 will mark the first Cannes post-Harvey Weinstein, who for years was one of the festivals prime movers and shakers, and who stands accused of numerous acts of sexual assault and harassment, some allegedly at the festival itself. He has denied all allegations of nonconsensual sex.

But the most vocal Cannes 2018 debate so far has swirled around laffaire Netflix. Last year, the streaming giant presented two titles (Bong Joon-hos Okja and Noah Baumbachs The Meyerowitz Stories) in the main competition, to the outrage of French exhibitors. This year, Fremaux announced that, going forward, only films with French theatrical distribution would be allowed to compete, a rule that effectively disqualified the theater-averse Netflix.

Stung, Netflix announced just last week that it would bypass the festival altogether, denying Fremaux two films, Alfonso Cuarons Roma and the newly completed Orson Welles project The Other Side of the Wind, that he had wanted to program.

The Cannes-Netflix feud may be a classic media teapot tempest, but it also spurred industry observers to ask: Is Cannes showing its age and irrelevance, or taking a principled stand? Is it a festival stuck in its own rich but imperfect history, or the last defender of the theatrical moviegoing experience in an industry thats resigned itself to serving smaller screens and lazier appetites?

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Only time will provide the answers. But even as the 71st annual Festival de Cannes unfolds, against a backdrop of geopolitical turmoil, gender-parity course correction and brand-new (but really age-old) debates over art versus commerce, I must say Im looking forward to this years lineup, which suggests that, if nothing else, Cannes hasnt lost its talent for reinventing itself.

There are fewer old-guard auteurs than usual and many promising new names in competition, including Lebanons Nadine Labaki, Japans Ryusuke Hamaguchi and one director, Irans Jafar Panahi, who belongs on any shortlist of the worlds greatest filmmakers. Another person on that shortlist is  who else?  Jean-Luc Godard, who will appear in competition for the eighth time with a new movie, The Image Book.

Godard hasnt attended the festival in years, and at 87, he is likely in no state to find himself hanging from the curtains this time around. But even if he doesnt bring Cannes to a screeching halt, I imagine hell have no trouble bringing it to its feet.

More on the cultural shifts of 1968:

Days of rage and wonder: Full coverage of 1968s cultural changes

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How filmmaking, romance and the politics of 1968 collide in Michel Hazanaviciuss Godard Mon Amour

East L.A., 1968: Walkout! The day high school students helped ignite the Chicano power movement

The Mod Squad, Adam-12' and how TV brought the counterculture into 1968s cop shows

California Sounds 1968: 10 essential Los Angeles-infused records from a kaleidoscopic era

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1968: The year war came through the TV and I felt pieces of childhood ending

A 1968 timeline of anger, grief and change

The president was polarizing, even crude. The shocking became routine. Somehow, we survived 1968  or did we?

Author Todd Gitlin on how to remember 1968

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Share your memories from 1968

justin.chang@latimes.com
Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 20)  Police arrested actor Julio Diaz in a drug bust operation in Meycauayan, Bulacan on Friday.

Bulacan Police said the 59-year-old Diaz  listed by the police as a "high-value target"  and his companion Ronald Gomez were arrested after they sold a sachet of suspected methamphetamine hydrochloride or shabu for P500 to an asset posing as buyer.

They seized from Diaz and Gomez four sachets of suspected shabu estimated at P60,000, assorted drug paraphernalia, and the marked money.

Police are preparing criminal complaints against the suspects.

Diaz, whose real name is Mariano de Leon, is known for his roles in the '80s and '90s films "Takaw Tukso," "Sakay" and "Bayani." He also starred in "Serbis" and "Kinatay."
Zama, the story of a man waiting to return, has become the vehicle for the long-awaited return of Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel.

The film is a bold, heady work made up of sly humor and revelatory vision. It also marks the first new movie since 2009s The Headless Woman from arguably the most celebrated female filmmaker in Latin America.

An adaptation of the acclaimed novel by Antonio di Benedetto first published in 1956, Martels Zama follows a functionary of the Spanish crown named Don Diego de Zama (played with droll exasperation by the Mexican actor Daniel Gimenez Cacho) who waits in a remote Paraguayan village for a new set of orders to arrive.

Frustrated and confused, he continues to wait, unsure of how to interact with the native people around him and increasingly adrift from his own culture and customs. An adventure story that doesnt travel very far, Zama is a stone-faced satire on masculine privilege and colonial arrogance.

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The films origins are in the aftermath of Martels attempt to adapt the sci-fi graphic novel The Eternal. When that project fell apart after years of development, she took a boat trip up the Paraguay River with a lot of books, including Zama.

Immediately when I read it, I knew that I needed to make something in relation to that book, she said in an interview in Los Angeles via a translator. I never thought that I could be interested in adapting a book, especially a novel that is considered a masterpiece of Latin American literature. I felt like it was stupid to adapt something like that into cinema.

What Martel discovered upon reading the book, however, was an unexpected connection.

I felt like there was a certain affinity between the character of Zama and myself, the filmmaker, 51, said. And I felt like this book told a story about the past in a way that I could connect with. When people talk about the story, they always refer to it as a novel about waiting, and I dont think thats what affected me about it. Its also about how you build yourself, and how thats a necessity and thats also a trap.

The human condition of Zama is something that I related very well with. His condition is one in which his life depends on others decisions, Martel added. Thats a circumstance that we all experience daily. And that for some people might be hell.

I dont think its a good system for a director to have to go through an illness to finish a movie. I would not recommend that. Lucrecia Martel

Daniel Gimenez Cacho in a scene from the movie Zama. (Strand Releasing )

The movie had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival last fall before moving on to the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival. In a dispatch from the Toronto festival, Times critic Justin Chang praised Martels sly editorial disjunctions, her tactile, off-center compositions and her wild, teeming sonic landscape ... she brings history into an uncomfortably intimate present tense. When Zama, which officially opens in Los Angeles on April 27, was recently released in New York, Vanity Fairs K. Austin Collins simply declared it the finest film of 2018 so far.

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As she explained, Martel sees the movie as both a depiction of the past and a disruption of time, creating a disorienting feeling akin to deja vu for viewers.

What I took from the novel is the perception of time. And the invisible prison in which the character finds himself, she said. Film is an artifact that must at least try to disrupt the perception we have of the world. Its a way to get close to the past in a different way.

In her signature cat-eye glasses, Martel has an air of quiet self-possession that comes across on screen in the films willingness to be enigmatic, to leave odd moments as inscrutable asides.

The problem with period movies is that they try to explain things, she said. In that effort to explain things, theres a lot of mistakes made in terms of historical accuracy. The modern day vision feels much more present because of that effort to explain things. If you respect the mystery, thats the very way into the world.

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Principal photography on the film finished in the fall of 2015 and Martel was a few months into editing when she had to stop working for health reasons early in 2016. (Reportedly cancer, now in remission.) When she returned to work later in 2016 it was with fresh eyes. She had been unhappy with the initial cut of the movie and found herself restoring material she had previously taken out.

I think the things that happen always reveal something, and Im sure that it did help, she said of the break from working on the project. I dont think its a good system for a director to have to go through an illness to finish a movie. I would not recommend that.

Having an idea to film a movie every year, is that normal? I think thats very strange. Lucrecia Martel

Daniel Gimenez Cacho in a scene from the movie Zama. (Strand Releasing )

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The characters own journey in the movie, which includes a dazzling sequence in which his party is ensnared in hunting traps left in a weedy marsh, eventually takes on a sort of resigned calm. In its spaced-out sense of adventure, the film brings to mind movies such as Kelly Reichardts Meeks Cutoff or Jim Jarmuschs Dead Man.

She is so good at evoking memory while still remaining in the present, said KJ Relth, film programmer at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, which hosted the Los Angeles premiere of Zama earlier this month. The best part of seeing these films in the theater is you have nothing else to do, except focus on these films and how they feel and how they will echo with you later. Phones off, lights down, only focusing on this experience.

While also comparing Martel to directors such as Sally Potter and Lynne Ramsay for the way in which the formal qualities of her filmmaking become such an integral part of the works thematic impact, Relth added, And thats why its so radical. She is attempting to create a new cinematic language. And I think succeeding.

Martel next plans to finish a documentary she has been working on for some 10 years on the treatment of indigenous people in the north of Argentina, where she is from. While grateful for the response to Zama, shes reluctant to view the film as her triumphant return to filmmaking. She doesnt see her work on a specific timeline or trajectory.

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Im surprised by the idea that theres a certain time that a filmmaker has between making another film. Thats much more a condition of the market than the desire of making films, she said. Having an idea to film a movie every year, is that normal? I think thats very strange. I think there are too many books, too many films and all of them are too similar in relation to how distinct the world is.

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Mark.Olsen@latimes.com

Follow on Twitter: @IndieFocus
I was 9 years old. My father was at war.

I watched Vietnam every night on TV, wind blowing through the tall grass of a distant land, numbers of the fallen flashing on the screen, all in black and white, a war in two colors, scary and real in my living room, ticking away in the hour before the latest rerun of Sea Hunt, my favorite show, even though I knew then, as a boy, that pretend things didnt last in a world coming undone.

1968. The number is like family. It was the year I felt pieces of childhood ending. Much of what was going on was hard to understand. But there were moments of sublime and terrible clarity: The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. dead, Bobby Kennedy dead, cities ablaze, streets filled with peace signs, placards and rage; the Beatles Helter Skelter rising from the stereo, and in the movie house by the bowling alley, 2001: A Space Odyssey played sinister magic with the great beyond.

READ MORE: A look back at entertainment in 1968 

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Youd come home or go to a friends house, and thered be ladies weeping around TVs, frightened and sad about Vietnam, assassinations, riots, hippies, drugs, police dogs, free sex and all the things that disrupted lives once tidy. It was exhilarating. And it was all there in the trippy Yellow Submarine movie poster, the flying hair and bruised howls of Janis Joplin, and the darker things Joan Didion found in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and the racism laid bare in Eldridge Cleavers Soul on Ice.

I was too young for such books then, but the larger meanings they distilled were in the air, shaping me. In the library, I saw a copy of Norman Mailers The Armies of the Night, which I thought was about soldiers but was really about the antiwar march on the Pentagon and how men and women were being wasted by lies that could no longer be told.

Another day, I heard what Jimi Hendrix could do with a guitar  his cover of Bob Dylans All Along the Watchtower bursting from the radio in my mothers Rambler  and thought that art comes from all kinds of places and seeks a home in you. It made me feel the delicious danger and freedom of discovery.

Rock n roll guitarist Jimi Hendrix at an unknown location. (Associated Press )

I knew then, as a boy, that pretend things dont last in a world coming undone.

Every generation has its art, music, literature, crystallizing narratives and mesmerizing forces that define who we are in the space-time continuum. They are sometimes conflated and assigned importance beyond their era. A few do transcend, most do not. But 1968 was the beginning of my long coming of age, my realization that the world beyond my backyard, beyond the church confessional and the sacred host held high, beyond the base pool and the officers commissary, carried secrets and truths as mysterious and beautiful as constellations.

I could feel it hunting eels in storm pipes with my best friend, Matt Bose, reading letters from my father in Vietnam, watching Teddy Kennedys eulogy for his slain brother Bobby, staring at innocence and tragedy in Franco Zeffirellis production of Romeo and Juliet, and hearing this: and when he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night.

I had not known Shakespeare until then. I did not know words could do such things. I did not understand all of them  the subtleties would reveal themselves in time  but I was startled at the wonder of how words could make you feel the sting and sorrow of forbidden love. I decided to be a writer, and marry Juliet, or more precisely the actress who played her, Olivia Hussey. But I wore a clip-on tie, hauled around a Batman lunchbox and was bad at arithmetic. I was doomed.

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Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey in the title roles of Franco Zeffirellis film version of Shakespeares Romeo And Juliet, (Hulton Archive / Getty Images )

And when he shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night. Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare

I kept an eye on headlines, though, bold and ominous, and one day saw the picture of John Carlos and Tommie Smith raising their black-gloved fists on the medal podium at the Olympics in Mexico City. It was fierce and brave, a defiant act against the racism of the country whose flag they stood beneath. It moved and scared me. What was happening to my land? Someone had shaken loose all the sins and no one knew the way out of the storm.

Cleavers Soul on Ice spoke eloquently to the legacy of slavery and oppression. The book, a collection of essays written from Folsom Prison, tells how Cleaver, who would go on to be a leader in the Black Panthers, had raped white women as a perverse insurrection against the systemic brutality done to his race. It was piercing and honest and at times filled with the belief that even a ruined man could find renewal.

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And why does it make you sad to see how everything hangs by such thin and whimsical threads? Because youre a dreamer, an incredible dreamer, with a tiny spark hidden somewhere inside you which cannot die, which even you cannot kill or quench and which tortures you horribly because all the odds are against its continual burning. In the midst of the foulest decay and putrid savagery, this spark speaks to you of beauty, of human warmth and kindness, of goodness, of greatness, of heroism, of martyrdom, and it speaks to you of love.

In an April 1968 photo, a first sergeant of A Company, 101st Airborne Division, guides a medevac helicopter through the jungle foliage to pick up casualties suffered during a five-day patrol near Hue, South Vietnam. (Art Greenspon / Associated Press )

One day I asked him: Did you kill anyone?

Images flowed in restless rivers out of our Zenith television set. TV was the oracle. It was what radio was to my grandparents and what the internet would be to my children, a magic portal to the majestic and the horrible. A boy of 9 could see the big, big world, peek in on Peyton Place, be aroused and confused by Rowan & Martins Laugh-In, shoot imaginary cowboy pistols at Bonanza and watch Walter Cronkite sit at his desk with his maps and B-roll and, in a voice as familiar as your own echo, tell you what you needed to know.

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To say that we are closer to victory today, he said, in a commentary that shook middle Americas notion of the Vietnam War, is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.

Nobody liked a stalemate. The air bristled with one epoch colliding with another. Eyes alight, batons, fires and tear gas, all moving in a great devouring swirl. The 1967 march on the Pentagon  the building that sent my father to war  seethed with the venom against a government no longer trusted by a generation unbound. Mailer, a scrappy writer with immense ego and bullish insight, was an ideal voice for the chaos and cracked mirror of a nation when he published The Armies of the Night a year later.

Before the world came crashing in, there were reruns of Sea Hunt, starring Lloyd Bridges. (Los Angeles Times files )

TV was the oracle. It was what radio was to my grandparents and what the internet would be to my children, a magic portal to the majestic and the horrible.

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The new generation believed in technology more than any before it, but the generation also believed in LSD, in witches, in tribal knowledge, in orgy, and revolution. It had no respect whatsoever for the unassailable logic of the next step: belief was reserved for the revelatory mystery of the happening where you did not know what was going to happen next; that was what was good about it. Their radicalism was in their hate for authority  the authority was the manifest evil of this generation.

It was all around me, incomprehensible yet indivisible. I felt like a boy spying through keyholes on a ferocious world pressing closer. Senator Kennedy has been shot. Is that possible? Oh, my God. Thats how things came at you, on the TV, in fuzzy, haunting shades of gray. You could feel your bones move. Just like they did that morning the phone rang and we got dressed up and hurried to the airport. The planes wings flashed silver and white. The engines stopped whirring and the door opened.

My father had come home from war. He descended in sunlight. I studied him, this man I hardly knew. He was thinner. His eyes were wet. I kept glancing at him on the ride home. The line of his jaw, his hands on the wheel; a ghost made flesh. There are times in a sons life when he wonders where his own path will lead, what he will carry to the edge of wherever he is going. One day I asked him:

Did you kill anyone?

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My father didnt answer. He cooked burgers and steaks on the grill. Grease hissed and wisps rose from charcoal and vanished. It seemed for a moment that things were as they should be; the scent of mown grass, kids yelling from other yards. But they werent. Theyd never be the same. Not the country. Not the headlines. Not books written, not songs sung. Not all the words out there in rage and fury. Not all the prayers and hymns of protest, not the false prophets nor the true believers. Nothing would be the same.

Not even me.

More on the cultural shifts of 1968:

Days of rage and wonder: Full coverage of 1968s cultural changes

The Mod Squad, Adam-12' and how TV brought the counterculture into 1968s cop shows

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When pop music got big: 1968 and the birth of arena rock

California Sounds 1968: 10 essential Los Angeles-infused records from a kaleidoscopic era

A timeline of anger, grief and change

Author Todd Gitlin on how to remember 1968

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Twitter: @JeffreyLAT

jeffrey.fleishman@latimes.com
The year 1968, as I remember it, had the quality of lasting longer than other years, of being in no hurry to be through with you, like a predator playing with its prey before swallowing it whole. I also watched a lot of television.

There was war in Southeast Asia and a war in the streets of the United States; you could see them any night on the evening news. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. But you would not have known that from prime-time television. The 1967-68 season was full of westerns (a surprising lot of them), quasi-westerns, World War II dramas, cop and lawyer shows, a little espionage, a little sci-fi. Sitcoms were even more removed from the chaos and challenges of contemporary America.



For the record: This article gives the title of a song Pete Seeger sang on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour as Knee Deep in the Big Muddy. The correct title is Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.

READ MORE: A look back at entertainment in 1968 

It fell to variety, that old vaudevillian, to engage the real world, and to reflect it: Currency, if not necessarily topicality, mattered in variety. Black musicians and comedians and cultural figures first made their way on to television through portals like The Ed Sullivan Show and The Hollywood Palace. Rock bands brought messages, no less subversive for often being coded, from the counterculture.

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Television, as constituted at that time, could of course not be completely countercultural, but two variety shows  Rowan & Martins Laugh-In and The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour  gave relevance a try. Like Mad magazine, they opened a window onto the absurdities and hypocrisies of the adult world and its institutions. Each in its own way was enlightening.

Rowan & Martins Laugh-In cast members Dan Rowan, Arte Johnson, Henry Gibson, Roddy Maude-Roxby, guest Sammy Davis Jr., Larry Hovis and Dick Martin, in a judicial mode. ( Fred A. Sabine / NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images )

Rock bands brought messages, no less subversive for often being coded, from the counterculture.

Rowan & Martins Laugh-In  as in sit-in, be-in, love-in  premiered as a series on NBC in February 1968, after a special in September 1967. Seen from today, it looks a little behind its time, a 1950s persons version of the 1960s  bikini-clad go-go dancing, hippie jokes, jokes about Raquel Welchs breasts, even as the dream of the Summer of Love had given way to a year of violence and bad vibes.

Hosts Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, a comedy team for some 15 years by then, both turned 46 the year Laugh-In began. They wore tuxedos. Rowan always had a cigarette going; Martin, who portrayed a kind of idiot playboy in their double act, had as a catchphrase, Ill drink to that. Creator George Schlatter had booked acts in Las Vegas and onto the pre-rock Sunset Strip; the players he first assembled for Laugh-In were mostly over 30, 22-year-old Goldie Hawn being the notable exception. (She and Lily Tomlin, who joined in 1969, were the shows only breakout stars.)

But if it was not cutting-edge in a way that anyone actually on a cutting edge would recognize as... cutting edge, within the context of prime-time television its speed, absurdity and cultivated air of anarchy made it feel different and modern. If it was not exactly political, it was certainly topical, and that it even acknowledged Vietnam, social inequity and birth control set it apart from nearly everything else on television.

Sometimes it did cut deeply, as with the shows Flying Fickle Finger of Fate, awarded for moral failure, for letting the country down; the first was awarded to the United States Congress for ignoring the wishes of 200 million Americans and delaying passage of a gun control law. But Laugh-In was also widely popular and won Emmys; its blows against the Empire were acceptable within the cultural mainstream. John Wayne appeared regularly. Richard Nixon, running for president, came on to say, Sock it to me?

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READ MORE: The Mod Squad, Adam-12' and TVs mainstreaming of hippie culture and politics in 1968 

The Smothers Brothers were more purposeful, more sincerely sincere. When CBS offered them 13 weeks following Sullivan in what Dick Smothers later called a suicide spot opposite Bonanza, older brother Tommy Smothers demanded creative control.

I wanted to be able to do sketches that had a little more content to it, he said later. The writing staff had its old pros (Al Gordon and Hal Goldman had written for Jack Benny and Red Skelton), but overwhelmingly featured young, offbeat and sometimes untested talent, including Steve Martin, Bob Einstein, Lorenzo Music, Rob Reiner and Mason Williams.

Though the brothers were hired by CBS in part for their relative youth  Tommy turned 30 around the time the show premiered, and Dick was still in his 20s  nothing could have felt less subversive than the comedy they had previously practiced, with its tales of sibling rivalries and pumas hiding in crevices. With their astronaut haircuts, red blazers and ties and Kingston-Trio-minus-one harmonies, they seemed like messengers from the start of the decade. But the ties were soon replaced by turtlenecks. Mustaches appeared. A battle was raised.

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The scene on the floor at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, held at the International Amphitheatre in Chicago from Aug. 26-Aug. 29, 1968. (NBC NewsWire / NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images )

The brothers were clearly on the left. (Dick: Our government is asking us as citizens to refrain from traveling in foreign lands. Tom: OK, all you guys in Vietnam, come on home.) Early in their second season, they clashed with the network over cutting an antiwar song sung by guest Pete Seeger, Knee Deep in the Big Muddy. Such conflicts would occur regularly enough that CBS began demanding to see finished episodes far in advance.

Cast member Pat Paulsen delivered ironic editorials on various hot topics, including censorship (We are allowed to say Ronald Reagan is a lousy actor, but were not allowed to say hes a lousy governor, which is ridiculous  we know hes a good actor) and gun control: If youre old enough to get arrested youre old enough to carry a gun. Lets preserve our freedom to kill. A mock documentary on an ongoing mock campaign, Pat Paulsen for President, was the subject of a special episode that fall.

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The actual presidential race, meanwhile, provided its own sort of unmissable television. At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that summer, there was violence outside and inside the hall. Walter Cronkite watched from the press box as Dan Rather was punched in the stomach by convention security (I think we got a bunch of thugs here, Dan, if I may be permitted to say so, said Cronkite). On NBC, Edwin Newman reported from the floor as Chicago police dragged off antiwar delegates.

Its easily the first time that policemen have entered the floor of a convention, said co-anchor Chet Huntley.

In the United States, said David Brinkley.

When the Smothers brothers returned from their summer break, their first show of the fall season included a segment in which guest Harry Belafonte sang Dont Stop the Carnival over images of the convention. The network wouldnt allow it, leaving the brothers to plug the time with an audience Q&A, which concluded with Tommys observation that we are all aware of whats going on in the country and the language that is used in the country today and the mores, the morals, the ethics and to not be able to discuss it on the biggest and broadest media, television, I think is a disservice to the country, adding, If you dont like what we say you have the ultimate censorship and that is to turn us off.

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CBS did finally turn off The Smothers Brothers, the following year, on the pretext that the shows were not being delivered sufficiently early, a significant enough event for Cronkite to mention it on the evening news. (The Smothers subsequently won a breach of contract suit against the network.) And according to Schlatter, he left Laugh-In after the Nixon election, when word came down from NBC brass to leave politics alone, precipitating the shows slow slide toward irrelevance.

And 1968 did eventually come to an end. You bet your sweet bippy it did.

Dan Rather, center, at the Democratic National Convention in 1968. He was punched in the stomach there by security, in a scuffle caught on camera. (CBS Photo Archive / CBS via Getty Images )

robert.lloyd@latimes.com

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For the cannabis enthusiast who prefers his or her lungs to be a natural color, and isnt that keen on the calories that come with sweet-treat edibles, Emeryville, Calif., company Kikoko, which started distribution in Southern California at the end of last year, might have the answer: cannabis-infused herbal tea.

Formulated in low doses that range from 3 milligrams to 10 milligrams of THC per sachet (a 1-gram joint, by comparison, has roughly 10 times that), its no harder to prepare than boiling water (and if you cant boil water, you might want to rethink the whole getting high thing), and with flavors such as chamomile and lemon myrtle (Tranquili-tea, 3 mg per serving) and hibiscus cardamom rose (Sensuali-tea, 7 mg), its a straight up tasty cup of tea.

Sachets of Kikokos Sensuali-tea, made with hibiscus, cardamom and rose petals, contain 7 mg of THC each. (Kathleen Harrison / Kikoko )

Kikoko is the brainchild of Jennifer Chapin and Amanda Jones, who share the title of co-teaEO. They created the company in 2015 after a mutual friend couldnt find the right product to alleviate pain, stimulate appetite and quell the nausea she felt while battling cancer.

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During an L.A.-area tea party hosted by friends last month, Chapin and Jones explained that they decided to use tea not just because of its health benefits but also because of its symbolism for a women-owned company aiming at a mostly female customer base. Tea parties were an important part of the womens suffrage movement in the U.S., Jones told a mostly female group of tea-partiers. Women met and organized in tea rooms.

There are currently four different flavors of Kikoko tea; in addition to the two above, theres a turmeric ginger blend with 3 mg of THC (Sympa-tea) and a 10 mg THC lemon grass, mint and green tea blend (Positivi-tea). All are sold as individually wrapped sachets ($5 to $10 each depending on formulation and dispensary) or in cans of 10 ($40 to $65). A full list of California stockists, as well as additional information about the brand, can be found at the companys website www.kikoko.com.

adam.tschorn@latimes.com

For more musings on all things fashion and style, follow me at @ARTschorn.
If you want to understand why Narisawa is often considered to be among the best restaurants in the world, you might have a look at Satoyama Scenery, a kind of seven square inches of edible forest floor that is constructed from sprigs of mountain herbs, a scattering of cherry blossoms, rough cylinders of fish skin and roots transformed into what look like fallen twigs, and a powdery tumble of earth and mosses fashioned from pulverized grains, fermented soybeans and a bit of matcha tea.

The tableau is assembled on a slice of raw log, more bark than planed surface. A small bamboo jigger brims with cold, oak sap-seasoned water  what you imagine raindrops sipped from fallen leaves might taste like. On a cloudy glass plinth nearby, three delicately fried ayu, glazed with cherry-blossom essence, swim in a formation familiar from woodblock prints. And while you are near the center of Tokyo, in a modernist restaurant hidden in a rear courtyard of an office complex, your mind is, at least for the moment, in the mountainous countryside, at that nexus between civilization and nature  satoyama  that is at the center of so much Japanese literature and art.

Am I out of town again? I am, and I apologize.

Tokyo in cherry-blossom time is an idea I had always rolled my eyes at a little, the idea of a great world city paused for a week or two while its residents picnicked in Ueno Park, took slow river cruises or three subway lines to the corner of the Imperial Palace compound where the blossoms grew most thickly. Then you get there and you become like all the rest  traveling to shrines, gobbling mochi and chocolate and broths flavored with the blossoms, walking down cobbled backstreets while petals whirl around you like pale, pink snow.

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Yoshihiro Narisawa was raised in rural Japan, cooked with Paul Bocuse and Joel Robuchon in France, and returned to open a French restaurant that gradually became more Japanese. His restaurant has been the site of chef pilgrimages at least since he moved it from Odawara to Tokyo 15 years ago, and at least a few techniques, notably those tableaux and maybe vegetable ash as seasoning, may have been nudged into popularity in his kitchens. Like the most accomplished modernist chefs, he is as familiar with the nuances of liquid nitrogen as he is with the guy who farms his quail.

So that fried capsule of pounded Japanese yam is filled with a smear of sea urchin roe; the soft-shelled turtle is served both as herb-flecked broth and formed into patties skewered on fragrant, smoldering branches; and a grilled filet of Yamaguchi tilefish is crusted with crushed rice crackers and served on a puddle of demi-chowder thick with Hokkaido crab.

The first thing presented to you when you sit down, even before the tiny saucer of sake, is a drinking glass of dough that rises and mushrooms like a yeasty phallus during the course of the meal. The server now scrapes lumps of the risen dough into a hot stone pot. It is transferred to a cart. Twelve minutes later, he puts it onto a plate next to what resembles a fuzzy green rock. It is bread. The rock is moss-coated butter.

There is a quail with a creamy burdock emulsion  the woods again  and then a steamed langoustine, with the licking and sucking and tearing that you realize may be the first bit of animal pleasure in the rather intellectual meal. Scallops are showered with a pink fog of crushed, frozen cherry blossoms poured from a liquid nitrogen-chilled cylinder, and you shudder with pleasure.

Is there blowfish with baby fava beans? Did you enjoy the shellfish in a broth made from extra-aged kombu seaweed, and did it vibrate with umami?

It is hard to remember. But here is a chunk of A-5 Wagyu beef, crusted with leek ash, presented first as a lump of charcoal and then as a sliced piece of meat. You are instructed how best to Instagram the meat. You are told which of the dots surrounding it is bordelaise sauce, which is flavored with sansho pepper, which is (of course!) made with cherry blossoms. By the time he has finished speaking, you may be halfway into your steak. And you will be all the way into early spring.

Food Bowl Alert: Chef Yoshihiro Narisawa will be featured on the first day of this years Los Angeles Times Food Bowl. On May 1, he will participate in a lunch and Q&A session at Orsa and Winston with photographer Sergio Coimbra and Jonathan Gold from 12:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m.; tickets are $95. If you cant make that, be sure to stop by Union Station anytime in May to see an exhibition about the dishes hes created, ingredients he uses, and his partnership with farmers.

Narisawa

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Minami Aoyama 2-6-15, Minato-ku, Tokyo

+81-3-5785-0799

narisawa-yoshihiro.com

Food Bowl Alert: Chef Yoshihiro Narisawa will be featured on the first day of this years Los Angeles Times Food Bowl. On May 1, he will participate in a lunch and Q&A session at Orsa and Winston with photographer Sergio Coimbra and Jonathan Gold from 12:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m.; tickets are $95. If you cant make that, be sure to stop by Union Station anytime in May to see an exhibition about the dishes hes created, ingredients he uses, and his partnership with farmers.

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jonathan.gold@latimes.com

@thejgold
If you find yourself driving in Venice in the next little while, you may notice that the illuminated Venice sign at Pacific and Windward avenues that functions as a gateway to the famous boardwalk has sprouted neon cannabis leaves.

The sign, which changes seasonally (red and green bulbs at Christmas, a heart on Valentines Day, flag-colored bulbs on the Fourth of July) will honor a relatively new holiday: 4/20, which evolved from a Bay Area high school ritual to the most important day of the year for cannabis lovers.

To coincide with this holiday, a technology company with San Francisco roots held an open house this week at its new Venice office, just steps from the sign.

Eaze, a platform that connects consumers to dispensaries for home deliveries of cannabis, invited the citys cannabis czar, a dispensary owner and a delivery driver to talk about the newly legalized recreational market.

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The company, which now occupies the building that was once home to the late sculptor Robert Graham and his wife, Anjelica Huston, also invited a group of social justice activists who are working to make sure that people in communities that have felt the brunt of the wrongheaded drug laws  Latinos and African Americans  are getting a chance to benefit from the brave new world of cannabis legalization.

I was not at all surprised to hear that Cat Packer, manager of the citys Department of Cannabis Regulation, had been inspired to become a drug reform activist after learning that half of all drug arrests have traditionally been for marijuana and that people of color have been hurt the most by such laws.

Eazes new Los Angeles headquarters on Windward Avenue in Venice. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times )

Nothing has contributed more to the system of mass incarceration of people of color in the U.S. than the war on drugs, Packer said.

But I confess I was a little surprised to see in the audience, among the dispensary owners and local officials, Freeway Ricky Ross. Ross was a notorious Los Angeles cocaine kingpin in the 1980s who spent 20 years in federal prison after being convicted of buying 100 kilos of cocaine from a federal agent.

Im trying to get into the cannabis industry, said Ross, 58, who has been the subject of documentaries and now gives speeches to kids about staying out of trouble. I want to grow, distribute and own a dispensary. I believe that we need somebody in the industry thats going to make sure that the little people have an opportunity.

He believes his name, which he has fought in court to protect, can be put to use as his brand. (He lost a lawsuit against the rapper Rick Ross, and was wearing a T-shirt that said The real Rick Ross is not a rapper.)

After the event I chatted with Yvette McDowell, a retired Pasadena prosecutor who is thinking about practicing law again in order to help people with cannabis convictions expunge their records, as the new law allows.

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McDowell seemed a bit skeptical about Ross.

The only thing I would say is if he has turned his life around, fantastic, she told me. If he is moving forward and helping others to try and do something positive, then thats a good thing. I know he should have a lot of lessons to teach.

Cat Packer, head of the new Los Angeles Cannabis Bureau, delivers a talk during the Dawn of Legal Cannabis event put on by Eaze in Venice. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times )

Legalization has brought with it many conundrums (including the idea that a convicted cocaine dealer could successfully brand himself as a legal cannabis entrepreneur).

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It has driven up the price of manufactured cannabis products (because of all the new taxes), driving down the price of bulk cannabis (because of a glut of flowers) and making it difficult to figure out what is a legal business and what is not (because of the thicket of local and state laws governing licensing).

It has also led to a new crop of consumers  many of them approaching senior citizenship  who may have tried cannabis as teens or young adults and want to try it again. For many, this is where a platform like Eaze comes in.

Any adult who wants to try marijuana  or, in the case of so many baby boomers, try it again  should have no problem laying their hands on the stuff. If you dont feel comfortable walking into a dispensary, you dont have to.

Delivery services have sprouted up all over the place. Eaze, the biggest and most well known, is a tech platform that functions as a kind of middleman between consumers and dispensaries, which employ the drivers.

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Craig Wald, 72, owns a dispensary in Studio City, and is one of two Los Angeles retailers who work with Eaze. The arrangement, he said, has been great for business.

We probably have 125 drivers, said Wald, 72, who owns Perennial Holistic Wellness Center. If you are driving home from work, and your back hurts, or youre not feeling well, you can say, Gosh, if I can order it on the phone right now before I get to the car, and it will be there when I get home, why wouldnt I do that?

In the wee hours of Friday, 4/20, a lighting crew added a couple of marijuana leaves to the iconic Venice sign at Windward and Pacific avenues. (Robin Abcarian/Los Angeles Times )

Ive been intrigued by Eaze for several years, shortly after I started paying attention to the serious side of cannabis. After years of denial (mainly because I dont like the way cannabis makes me feel), I finally embraced the idea that pot is less dangerous than alcohol, beneficial for many medical conditions and ridiculously understudied because of half a century of federal prohibition.

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Back in 2015, I heard about a well-funded company that used technology to get weed to its customers within 15 minutes. Thats less time than it takes to get a pizza delivered.

I got in touch with Eaze, and that November, the company let me spend an afternoon roaming around San Francisco with a driver, watching him hand over paper bags of product to medical marijuana patients in exchange for wads of cash. (Remember, this was before recreational pot was legal, so all consumers were considered patients.)

Two and a half years later, the company is expanding around California. It has slightly altered the 15-minute promise. Our target is always under an hour, Eaze communications executive David Mack told me Wednesday.

It also produced an annual report about the state of cannabis in 2017 which markets grew the fastest, who is consuming and when. More women are using cannabis, and fewer people are buying flower and are opting instead for manufactured products like vaporizers.

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Will it come as any surprise that the top day of the year for imbibers is 4/20?

If it does, then you havent been paying attention.

To read this article in Spanish, click here

robin.abcarian@latimes.com

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Twitter: @AbcarianLAT
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 
Trinity Erazo and Yesenia Lopez are only 16. But already, they know what its like to hide in fear from a campus shooter.

The University High School sophomores visited UCLA two years ago for their eighth-grade picnic. But they soon found themselves huddled inside a building and told to lock the doors and close the windows and tell their parents that there was an active shooter on campus. On the campus that day, June 1, 2016, a former doctoral student had killed his thesis adviser, then himself.

In the moment, the teens were terrified. Yesenia said she realized people can just walk onto campus with a gun on a regular school day.

When Trinity heard news of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School this February, she said she immediately wondered, Why is this happening again?

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On Friday, the two friends joined about 200 of their University High School classmates on a 3 -mile trek from their Brentwood campus to Santa Monica City Hall to push adults to work harder to curb gun violence.

In Santa Monica, they rallied alongside students from other schools, including Santa Monica and Venice high schools. Students carried signs saying such things as Hands up! Dont shoot, and chanted What do we want? Gun control. When do we want it? Now, as drivers of passing cars revved their engines and honked in support.

They were just one of many gatherings of students in L.A. and nationwide who walked out of school at 10 a.m. to mark the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School mass shooting that killed 13 people in Littleton, Colo.

According to a central hub for organizing the protests  written by the students of Ridgefield High School in Connecticut  organizers encouraged their peers to push legislation to ban assault weapons and tighten up rules regulating who can buy guns and how.

My future child should not have to go through the same thing that I did, Trinity said.

Across the L.A. area, students participated in voter registration drives and rallies in numerous spots, including outside Los Angeles Unfied School District headquarters downtown.

When students walked out before, as part of the March for Our Lives on March 14, the district had requested that they commemorate the lives lost at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Fla., by staying on campus. Some ignored that directive. The district issued a similar statement this time, encouraging students to take part in forums and other safe, peaceful activities held on campus.

District officials said they dont expect their philosophy on activism to change as walkouts become more frequent. L.A. Unified organized career days and assemblies at some schools to mark the day. Full-day absences were actually slightly lower this Friday than last.

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At University High School, where an assembly with state and district officials had been planned, administrators seemed to accept the inevitable departure. Principal Eric Davidson warned students that as they crossed city lines, Santa Monica police might check that they arent under the influence or hopping on trains for free. Unfortunately, this is a day that is coinciding with another thing, he said, alluding to the fact that 4/20 is also a day people celebrate marijuana.

Student Jade Crawford, who said her mothers friend lost a child in Parkland, wanted to make sure her group took their outing seriously. Some people are walking out because they just feel like they have the chance to get out of school, because its 4/20, she said. I want people to realize why this walkout is important: People have lost their lives.

Shortly after state Sen. Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica) arrived in the University High auditorium, students crept out the door.

At the assembly, several students of color spoke of the attention that shootings get when the victims are white.

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We havent really been talking about gun violence in the life of minorities, one student told Allen.

Zoe Adams, a 17-year-old University High senior who lives in Inglewood, said she had mixed views on the walkouts.  Nobody notices suffering until it is white tears crying.

Desaree Justiniano and Alexander Quinttero, 16-year-old juniors at Linda Esperanza Marquez High School, walked six miles from their Huntington Park school to district headquarters downtown.

Desaree and Alexander wore signs that asked, AM I NEXT? They said they wanted districts to hold school-wide drills to better prepare for the worst.

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Once we know what to do, I feel like well be safe, Alexander said.

At a school safety panel at Hollywood High School on April 8, L.A. Unified School Police Chief Steve Zipperman said teachers and administrators are trained, but students do not need active-shooter drills.

Most kids would leave that training traumatized, having nightmares, wondering the next time they come into the school, Is this the next time I have to do this?  Zipperman said. His approach, he said, was to have the adults lead.

Multiple students and adults told him they disagreed, and said they wanted to feel prepared in the way that they do for earthquakes or fires.

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Joy.Resmovits@LATimes.com

@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.

There are by and large taxes that we pay: income tax, sales tax and all that stuff. Its the publics money, and were the state university, he said.

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White noted that 10% of the states current workforce has Cal State diplomas, adding that California needs more employees with bachelors degrees.

Theres a state interest, he said. If we dont end up meeting that need, California will have more difficulty in sustaining quality of life for everybody.

Students already struggle with the costs of housing and transportation. Theyve come to recent Cal State trustees meetings to protest potential tuition hikes.

You have your mansion and your salary and your comfort that you have worked for, but help us get to a point where we can work for it too, Brittany Goss of Cal State Fullerton told trustees at their March meeting.

CSU students continue to be failed with every tuition hike that you approve, said Marissa Mendoza, a San Diego State student who told trustees she was $30,000 in debt.

Its the right thing to do, but its not without risk, White said of the decision to back off a hike. If we end up not succeeding, there will be consequences.

White and trustees say the state has left the system strapped for cash. Gov. Jerry Browns budget draft this year proposed a $92-million increase for the system, but it was $171 million less than what trustees requested. That money, White said, would help pay salaries and healthcare costs for roughly 50,000 employees as well as allow the system to fix up decrepit buildings and do more to boost graduation rates.

Another tuition hike  the second in a row after a six-year freeze  was proposed to fill the gap between proposed state funding and Cal States needs. The proposal was to tuition by $228 for in-state students, bringing the annual cost of attending Cal State to $5,970. Full-time nonresident students would have seen tuition increase by about $900, to $12,780 a year. Trustees were supposed to vote on the hikes in May.

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Final state budget decisions are expected early this summer, after the governors May revision. White said he has received no assurance from Brown that the money allotted to Cal State will increase, but he said he is confident that the needle will move.

Cal State officials have been telling the systems story as they lobby for more money.

We have had favorable conversations in Sacramento with lawmakers, White said. As I read the tea leaves, I have this optimism.

If its unfounded, he said, Cal State could be forced to make cuts in the chancellors office and could wind up enrolling fewer students. Those who are enrolled might have fewer support services and courses to choose from.

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Cal State struggles with oversubscribed campuses. About 32,000 eligible applicants were turned away from the the system last fall because of overbooked programs and campuses.

Six of the systems 23 campuses are in such high demand that each of their programs has more qualified applicants than can be accommodated.

The University of California, meanwhile, still is considering a tuition hike for state residents and recently approved a tuition increase for nonresident students.

joy.resmovits@latimes.com

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Twitter: @Joy_Resmovits
The candidate for a seat in the UC Berkeley student Senate promised safe spaces for squirrels, better access to acorns and support groups for those experiencing habitat loss.

His name was Furry Boi, he campaigned in a squirrel suit and he attracted immediate attention.

omg i love him hes so cute, Iris Melody Xu, a UC Berkeley student, wrote on Furry Bois Facebook page. Finally, a candidate I can get behind, someone else wrote.

But when the character that sophomore Stephen Boyle had created as a joke actually won one of the Associated Students of the University of Californias 20 Senate seats up for grabs last week, the backlash was fast and furious.

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The student newspaper published an editorial calling Furry Bois election a travesty.

Its a shocking display of privilege to vote for a squirrel over candidates who have actual plans to help students who need it, the Daily Californian said. Instead of electing qualified students who had real, tangible ideas ... many of you (at least 538 strong) thought it might be a funny joke to have a man dressed up in a squirrel costume with no real platforms represent you at the administrative table.

Thirty-seven students were running for the Senate seats. Rigel Robinson, ASUCs elected vice president for external affairs, said Furry Boi had snatched a spot away from serious candidates who could have advanced the work of one of the UC systems most active and visible student governments. Some of those candidates, he said, have put in a lot of hard work, such as organizing students to protest tuition hikes.

Its deeply disappointing, Robinson said.

But Furry Boi may surprise his naysayers in the end.

A flood of obnoxious electioneering on social media was what prompted Boyle to launch his tongue-in-cheek campaign. All the messages clogging up his feeds gave him the idea to run  and maybe even win and be in a position to push for change.

Cal is respected worldwide but not necessarily by students on campus, he said. They feel Cal doesnt take care of them, not like Stanford or the other privates.

So he posted his own campaign ad March 16 on the page of a popular student Facebook group: a photo of a squirrel standing upright with the message, Furry Boi for Senate.

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As he kept posting and started making campus appearances in a squirrel suit, he sensed his campaigns momentum was growing.

Even the Daily Cal, which would later slam his election in its editorial, got on board with a lighthearted story about the candidate, who it said resides in Berkeleys Eucalyptus Grove.

As squirrels acclimate to urban settings, they become more comfortable entering human spaces  one such example is Furry Boi, a squirrel who is running independently for ASUC Senate, the story began.

Squirrels actually do have a significant presence at Berkeley.

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The campus is home to hundreds of tree-dwelling fox squirrels, who are subjects of research at the Jacobs Lab for Cognitive Biology, and a Berkeley Squirrels Facebook page has more than 10,000 followers.

The squirrels on campus are super-frickin adorable, Boyle said, though one bit him when he tried, while out campaigning, to feed it a sweet potato fry.

Now that Furry Boi has won his seat, Boyle says he has no intention of resigning. In fact, hes broadened his platform to a more serious one that might have more to offer Berkeley students. He posted it on Furry Bois page this week after he came out as the student behind the squirrel.

In a way, it could be seen as a sneaky switcheroo. Students looking for something different elected a squirrel. Now it seems that hes one of them after all.

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Still, Boyle wants to help forge better social ties among Berkeleys fractious student communities and bring back late-night dining hours so students can bond over food. Hed like to reduce food waste and support students with disabilities, an interest stemming from his own battle with bipolar disorder. And hed like to get rid of boring activities and cringe-worthy icebreakers during student tours and orientations, which he said are the worst in the UC system.

People are my passion, said Boyle, 19, who grew up in Stockton and is majoring in electrical engineering and computer science. I want people to love each other.

If they give him a chance, he said, I have a lot of ideas to make big changes.

teresa.watanabe@latimes.com

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Twitter: @TeresaWatanabe
A 26-year-old Irvine man who prosecutors say threatened to kill prominent Jews was charged Thursday with attempted hate crime threats, officials said.

Investigators found Nicholas Rose in possession of kill lists of Jewish people, a list of steps titled killing my first Jew, and anti-Semitic literature, according to the Orange County district attorneys office.

He also had ammunition and papers referencing a church and a synagogue in Irvine, along with a church in Lake Forest, authorities said.

A family member called the Orange Police Department when Rose said Monday that he wanted to kill people and made violent threats against the Jewish community, prosecutors said. Authorities are trying to determine whether Rose was part of a hate group.

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Rose faces three felony counts of attempted criminal threats, each of which carries a hate-crime sentencing enhancement, and three misdemeanor counts of violating civil rights. He faces up to six years and six months in state prison if convicted.

Rose is being held on $500,000 bail and is due in court next week.

alene.tchekmedyian@latimes.com

Twitter: @AleneTchek

UPDATES:

7 a.m., April 20: This article was updated with more information from the Orange County district attorneys office.

This article was originally posted at 6:40 p.m. on April 19.
In a jail call recorded in 2015, Robert Durst told a friend he regretted giving interviews to the producers of The Jinx, saying he realized while watching the six-part HBO documentary that he definitely had a problem.

The New York real estate scion was arrested in connection with the slaying of his best friend Susan Berman on March 14, 2015  the day before the finale of The Jinx, which focuses on his tangled life.

Prosecutors have said they feared Durst, who was arrested at a New Orleans hotel in possession of guns, cash, a fake ID and a mask, might flee after realizing the damning evidence in the documentary.

Prosecutors contend Berman, whose body was found on Christmas Eve in 2000, was killed to prevent her from providing incriminating information about Dursts involvement in the 1982 disappearance of his wife, Kathleen, a case that remains unsolved. Durst, 75, has denied killing either woman.

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In the final episode of the documentary, Durst mumbles: What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course. To some, his comments appeared to be a confession to three killings: those of Berman, Kathleen, and Morris Black, a neighbor in Galveston, Texas. Durst admitted to shooting Black in 2001, saying he acted in self-defense during a struggle over a gun. He also admitted to chopping up Blacks body and dumping the parts in Galveston Bay. He was acquitted of murder.

During a court hearing Thursday, prosecutors played the jail call in which the multimillionaire told a friend that he became concerned while watching the fifth installment of the documentary. In that segment, producers reveal they have a letter Durst sent to Berman in 1999 showing handwriting that looks similar to that in an anonymous note sent to police at the time of Bermans death, telling them theyd find a cadaver at her home. In both documents, Beverly Hills is misspelled as Beverley Hills.

In another jail call with the same friend, Durst says he wanted to find old letters hed written.

If I can find somebody whos got something I wrote back then, or even somebody who can say, Yeah, yeah, Bob used to write to me. He wrote me a couple of letters. He never misspelled Beverly, that would be very helpful, I think, Durst says on the recording.

While some new evidence was revealed during court hearings this week, many key elements of the prosecutions case emerged during past hearings. Last year, Dursts longtime friend Nick Chavin testified that Durst once confessed to killing Berman, their mutual friend. I had to. It was her or me, Durst said, according to Chavin. I had no choice.

On Thursday, prosecutors questioned one of Bermans longtime friends, Julie Smith, eliciting testimony they will likely use to bolster Chavins credibility. Smith testified that Chavin approached her at Bermans 2001 memorial service and said that Berman once told him that Durst confessed to killing Kathleen.

Nick was extremely wound up and very, very agitated, said Smith, who met Berman while both women worked as journalists in San Francisco and went on to become the executor of her will.

The witness, a writer and publisher, also testified that during a trip to New York in the mid-1980s, Berman told her about Kathleens disappearance. Smith said she then asked Berman if she believed Durst had killed his wife.

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Absolutely not, I dont think that, Berman said, according to Smiths testimony.

Prosecutors also questioned Bermans friend Alfred Clethen, whose testimony they will likely use to argue that Durst was in Los Angeles at the time Berman was killed. (Airline records show that the real estate tycoon left California the night before Bermans body was found, but his flight left from San Francisco.)

Clethen, a writer and stand-up comedian, testified that Berman constantly spoke about Durst and in a conversation just before her death mentioned that he planned to visit Los Angeles for the holidays.

She said, Bobby was coming. Its going to be a lot of fun,  Clethen testified. Berman said Durst was coming around the holidays  Christmas, according to Clethen.

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But during cross-examination, one of Dursts lawyers played a recorded call of Clethen telling prosecutors he couldnt say for sure whether Berman said Durst was coming in December. He remembered it as the holidays, the witness says on the recording.

marisa.gerber@latimes.com

For more news from the Los Angeles County courts, follow me on Twitter: @marisagerber
In the video, David Kenneth Smith is in a bathtub, shirtless, a black semiautomatic handgun resting on his chest. He gripes about his alma mater, Soka University, in a video he titled Stories From College.

On Halloween of last year, he began an email exchange with a university staffer he worked for before he graduated in 2008. In one email, he included a link to the 20-minute YouTube tirade.

I may be coming for a campus visit soon, he wrote below it.

This week, Smith  who uses the moniker King David online  was convicted of making criminal threats after a two-day trial in Orange County. A jury deliberated four hours before returning the verdict Thursday against the 40-year-old Los Angeles resident, according to the Orange County district attorneys office.

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After the staffer reported the disturbing exchange, investigators reviewed 31 videos Smith recorded and posted to his YouTube channel.

In one video he called Killing Spree, he begins: Every day I wake up the same way: Am I gonna have to go on a killing spree with you [expletive] people? Man, I dont know.

In another, Who to Kill, he contemplates carrying out an attack, with a weapon resting on the nape of his neck.

What if you get that one student, who is there on some sort of scholarship, who is gonna cure cancer? Well, geez, you know, I dont know about that, he says. What about cops? Lets shoot cops. Then what if you shoot the one cop who actually was a good cop?

When Smith was arrested in November, investigators found nine loaded firearms in his possession. He faces up to three years in state prison when he sentenced in June.

alene.tchekmedyian@latimes.com

Twitter: @AleneTchek
A Los Angeles police officer was arrested Friday and charged with three counts of murder in connection with a suspected DUI crash on the 605 Freeway in Whittier last fall, authorities said.

Edgar Verduzco, 27, was taken into custody at a friends home in Long Beach and booked on suspicion of three counts of murder, three counts of gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated and drunk driving causing injury, according to the California Highway Patrol. He has been relieved of duty, according to the LAPD.

Verduzco made his initial court appearance Friday morning, waiving his arraignment until May 16. He was wearing the blue Dodgers Baseball T-shirt and shorts he had on when he was arrested hours earlier.

When asked by L.A. County Superior Court Judge Deborah S. Brazil if he understood the charges against him, Verduzco answered softly, Yes, your honor.

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His bail was set at $6.1 million. He faces life in prison if convicted on all charges.

On Sept. 26, authorities said, Verduzco was driving drunk south on the 605 in Whittier when he sped his Chevy Camaro into the rear of a Nissan.

The Nissan burst into flames and Verduzcos vehicle continued on and hit a second car, injuring the driver.

The three occupants of the Nissan  Mario Davila, 60, his wife Maribel Davila, 52, and their son Oscar Davila, 19  died in their vehicle.

They were members of Our Lady of Guadalupe Shrine Church, volunteers of the Riverside community, supporters of the arts, and all three of them had positive influences on those around them, a friend wrote on a GoFundMe page set up for the family.

Verduzco was speeding in the carpool lane when he rear-ended the Davilas Nissan in the next lane over and then struck the second vehicle, according to the CHP.

Just hours before the crash, Verduzco had posted a video on social media from a bar and included the hashtag #Dontdrinkanddrive, KTLA-TV reported.

The Instagram post show a man in a police uniform with a badge reading Verduzco. A beer is in the background of the video and an animated angry man in a vehicle is shown honking and yelling.

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The LAPD could not verify the authenticity of the account when it was first discovered.

Other videos from the account show a Chevy Camaro and a police officer appearing to be Verduzco in his patrol car on the job, KTLA reported.

After the crash, CHP officers did not give Verduzco a Breathalyzer that would have determined his blood alcohol content but said he did show signs of intoxication and arrested him on suspicion of felony DUI. He posted bail the following morning and was free pending charges until his arrest Friday.

Its a tragedy all the way around, there are no winners, said CHP Capt. David Moeller, whose office oversaw the crash investigation.

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Mario and Maribel Davila were survived by four children who were not in the car at the time of the crash. Moeller said he met with the family Friday to tell them about the arrest, and said they were appreciative that the case hadnt been forgotten.

They are handling this with a great deal of dignity, he said. They are suffering a great loss.

Verduzco is an Army veteran who did a tour of duty in Afghanistan and joined the LAPD in 2015. He was stationed at the front desk of the Central Division before the crash.

On Friday, police Chief Charlie Beck said: My heart goes out to the victims and families so tragically impacted by Verduzcos criminal actions.

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Police officers have a moral and legal obligation to abide by the laws that they enforce. [The] arrest demonstrates how seriously we take that obligation.

joseph.serna@latimes.com

For breaking California news, follow @JosephSerna on Twitter.

kate.mather@latimes.com

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UPDATES:

3:20 p.m.: This article was updated with comment from the CHP.

12:40 p.m.: This article was updated with details of Verduzcos first court appearance.

11:55 p.m.: This article was updated with a new information from the Los Angeles County district attorneys office.

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10:50 a.m.: This article was updated with a comment from LAPD Chief Charlie Beck.

9:50 a.m.: This article has been updated with new information from police.

This article was originally published at 9:05 a.m.
New oil, gas and mineral exploration and development will be barred in the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument under a long-awaited management plan, released Thursday, governing the largest wilderness in Los Angeles County.

The U.S. Forest Service plan prioritizes environmental protection over economic development and, in some cases, recreational access  limiting overnight camping along certain popular rivers and streams because of its ecological toll.

The plan comes four years after President Obama established the monument and amid a push by the Trump administration to increase industrial use of public lands and waters nationwide.

Jeffrey Vail, supervisor of the monument and the Angeles National Forest, said in an interview Thursday that strong local support shaped the new policies. The credit really belongs to the people of Los Angeles and interest groups, he said, that have given so much time and effort to protect these unique and significant wildlands.

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Beyond that, there just arent any significant oil, gas, mineral or timber aspects to this monument, he said.

Released two months behind schedule, the document is scant on specifics for the 346,000 acres of alpine peaks, lush canyon lands and rivers that lure 4 million annual visitors to what it describes as Americas most urban national forest in the nations most populous county.

It deems exploration and development of oil, gas and mineral resources and use of motorized vehicles for commercial purposes unsuitable in the monument. (Companies and individuals with existing mining claims will be unaffected by the plan.)

And it bans camping along the East and North forks of the San Gabriel River and Aliso Creek Canyon  tourist hot spots that have been designated as critical biological land use zones for rare and endangered species including mountain yellow-legged frogs, red-legged frogs and the Santa Ana sucker.

The plan focuses attention on one of the oldest and most rancorous arguments in the San Gabriels: the damage caused by gold mining in its streams.

Vail said gold extraction has dire consequences for aquatic species.

Monument lands and waterways are not open to prospecting or any other mining operation including panning for gold. Until now, however, enforcement has been deliberately lax because the rule is based on a 1928 policy that does not include penalties.

The new document recommends that the monument collaborate with local, state and federal agencies, as well as volunteer groups, in an enforcement campaign to document and eliminate unauthorized mining activities.

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Agencies, nonprofits, conservationists and communities that lobbied for the creation of the monument support the moves by the Forest Service.

This plan is an excellent sign that the Forest Service is making management of the monument a high priority, John Monsen, co-chair of the Sierra Club Angeles Chapters forest committee, said. Its strong and ambitious, and should make it easier to persuade Congress to provide the cash-strapped Forest Service with the resources needed to apply it.

The management plan, hammered out over three years in often contentious meetings between Forest Service officials and stakeholders, recommends easing traffic congestion by considering temporary one-way traffic flows and closures during peak periods at popular destinations. It calls for enforcing parking capacity limits to reduce the number of cars left haphazardly along hairpin turns  and the flood of vehicles heading back down the mountain because there was no parking to be found.

It urges the use of multilingual information in signage and outreach programs, and more collaboration with volunteers and communities in the interests of shared stewardship of the land, a tactic that could help stretch its shrinking appropriated funds.

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Deeming the lands a monument was a strategy intended to increase interest and attendance  and with them, donations. So far, fundraising efforts have been relatively modest, and because fire seasons are growing longer, wildfire suppression has eaten into a greater portion of the Forest Services budget each year.

Over the last four years, the National Forest Foundation has raised about $6.5 million for projects on the monument and throughout the Angeles National Forest including educational programs, trail maintenance, removal of invasive plants and habitat restoration, Edward Belden, a spokesman for the nonprofit, said.

Compounding problems, budget cuts have forced the Forest Service to cut back on recreation and maintenance programs, officials said. The Forest Services budget has been reduced by more than $1.5 billion over the last two years alone, according to federal documents.

The monument still lacks a budget or administrative unit of its own. It comprises half of the Angeles National Forest  and the existing authority of the Forest Service remains in place.

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Monument advocates say partnerships are necessary to balance conservation and public interests without circumventing environmental regulations at the most popular picnic areas, hiking trails and campgrounds.

The new plan counters what you see going on right now in the rest of the nations forest communities, Mark Stanley, executive officer of the San Gabriel and Lower Los Angeles Rivers and Mountains Conservancy, said. Its also in line with the direction we want to go  and thats a good thing.

The Forest Services move to bar new energy and mining development in the monument comes as industrial interests have gained the ability to vie for once-protected land in the deserts north and east of the San Gabriel range under new Trump administration policies.

In the San Gabriels, however, the biggest challenge isnt industry so much as crowds.

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On any given weekend, a two-mile stretch of the East Fork of the San Gabriel River, about 15 miles north of Azusa, and the Switzer picnic area, only seven miles from La Canada Flintridge, are as crowded as Southern California beaches.

Most visitors arrive by car on California 39, the winding mountain highway that provides the only access to Crystal Lake and other recreational areas north of the East Fork.

Awaiting them are panoramic views of steep canyon lands that are home to rare and endangered species, including the California condor, Nelsons bighorn sheep, and a new species of scorpion recently discovered in Eaton Canyon, a highly visited area above Pasadena.

Scenic hiking trails bring visitors to Sturtevant Falls or atop Mt. Wilson, where one of the worlds largest telescopes sits. Biking, horseback riding, off-highway vehicle use, fishing, hang-gliding, hunting and picnicking are just a few of the recreational activities jockeying for elbow room in one of the most heavily used national forests in the U.S.

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The area is also susceptible to crowds who bring vandalism, trash, illegal campfires and emergency rescues.

Not all are in favor of the changes in the new land management plan.

Matthew McAuliffe, a spokesman for the American Mining Rights Assn. who said he has prospected for gold in the San Gabriels for nearly a decade, warned of a lot of backlash coming down in the event of a crackdown.

I fear for the guy who comes up on a weekend to pan for gold with his kids only to be made an example of by militarized forest rangers, McAuliffe said. If that happens, there will be litigation. We may lose, but at least well give the Forest Service a run for its money.

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louis.sahagun@latimes.com

Twitter: @louissahagun

UPDATES:

6:40 p.m.: This article was updated with comments from Jeffrey Vail, supervisor of the monument and the Angeles National Forest.

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This article was originally published at 4:55 p.m.
Carlos Arellano was a narcotics detective with the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department when the agency received a disturbing tip that he was fraternizing with criminals.

After months of investigating, the department accused him of being involved with a drug-trafficking organization, cultivating his own marijuana plants and discussing drug payments in phone conversations that fellow detectives overheard on a wiretap, according to court records.

In 2011, two years after the initial tip came in, Arellano was fired.

But an appeals court panel this week upheld the veteran deputys efforts to keep his job, ruling that the law did not allow the department to use evidence gathered from the wiretap in a disciplinary proceeding.

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Arellanos attorney praised Wednesdays appellate decision, saying her client has always denied he was the person heard on the wiretap and had been wrongly portrayed as a bad guy.

This case from the beginning was an overreaction from the Sheriffs Department, Elizabeth Gibbons said.

The deputy, who joined the department in the late 1980s, is on paid administrative leave and is not actively investigating drug crimes, said department spokeswoman Nicole Nishida. Last year, he was paid $130,000 in salary and other compensation, according to county records.

Nishida said the department is considering whether to appeal to the California Supreme Court.

The decision marks the latest setback for Sheriff Jim McDonnell, who has made several attempts to go to court to fire deputies like Arellano who were discharged for misconduct but won their jobs back after appealing to the countys Civil Service Commission.

The commission, a panel of five appointed by the Board of Supervisors, hears disciplinary cases against county employees and can overturn or reduce punishments. In the case of law enforcement officers, the commissions proceedings are not open to the public.

Last year, an appeals court panel ruled in favor of Daniel Genao, who successfully appealed his firing after he was convicted of filing a false police report. He earned $120,000 last year, according to county payroll data.

At least one other deputy has prevailed in court, while a third deputys case is still on appeal.

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The Sheriffs Department launched its criminal investigation into Arellano in June 2009.

The move came after a narcotics team investigating a known drug dealer had obtained a judges approval for several wiretaps during an inquiry focusing on drug activity at the El Dorado restaurant in Palmdale. On an intercepted call, a person identified by investigators as Arellano spoke about obtaining cloned marijuana plants and demanded money from the restaurants owner, who was a suspected drug distributor, according to the appeals court opinion.

The wiretaps revealed that the deputy was involved with a drug-trafficking organization, that he obtained marijuana plants from the organization ... and that he maintained relationships with criminals and known narcotics traffickers, according to a court filing by the county summarizing its evidence against the deputy.

The criminal investigation into Arellano ended in 2010 without criminal charges. Under California law, conversations caught on a wiretap cannot be used to prosecute someone solely for marijuana activity, according to the opinion.

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Sheriffs officials instead used the wiretap evidence to fire Arellano and accused him also of improperly releasing a man who had been jailed on a drug charge and refusing to provide information to help catch his brother-in-law, who was a federal fugitive, the opinion said.

But Arellano insisted he had nothing to do with the illegal narcotics activity and that the Sheriffs Department never proved it was his voice on the recording.

Gibbons, his attorney, said he became friendly with the restaurant owner as part of his job working in a sheriffs narcotics unit in the Antelope Valley.

At his appeal before the Civil Service Commission, Arellano argued that the wiretap evidence should be suppressed. A hearing officer agreed, saying the wiretap was authorized for use only in criminal court or a grand jury, not in an administrative proceeding.

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A Superior Court judge, and now three appeals court justices, affirmed that decision.

The suppression of the wiretap evidence crippled the Sheriffs Departments case that Arellano violated department policies relating to fraternizing with criminals, obstructing an investigation, making false statements and other infractions.

What appeared to be undisputed, however, was that Arellano had used another deputys password to access a database that contains confidential information about suspects and fugitives, the opinion said. The appeals court ruled a five-day suspension without pay was appropriate for the unauthorized use of the database.

maya.lau@latimes.com

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Twitter: @mayalau
Federal civil prosecutors have recommended to top Justice Department officials that the police officer involved in the chokehold death of Eric Garner face charges.

The New York Times reported Friday that the recommendation to indict the officer, Daniel Pantaleo, has reached the desk of Deputy Atty. Gen. Rod Rosenstein, but no decision has been made on whether to move forward with the case.

Rosenstein has held meetings with high-level DOJ officials to determine whether a criminal case against Pantaleo could be won, the Times said.

Garner died in 2014 when Pantaleo and other officers stopped him over accusations he was selling untaxed cigarettes.

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Pantaleo placed him in the chokehold after police said he resisted arrest.

Video of the incident showed Garner repeatedly saying, I cant breathe, before his death.

Federal civil rights prosecutors have been investigating the death since that time  with members of Garners family complaining that they had been dragging their feet in reaching a decision.
Panic and fear gripped another Florida school Friday when a gunman opened fire, wounding one student before being taken into custody on a day planned for a national classroom walkout to protest gun violence, authorities said.

It happened Friday morning at Forest High School in Ocala, which was put on lockdown, the Marion County Sheriffs Office reported. The wounded student, a 17-year-old boy, was taken to a local hospital for treatment of an injury to his ankle.

Some students and teachers piled desks and filing cabinets against classroom doors as a makeshift barricade after the shooting.

Police initially said the 19-year-old suspect was a student at the school, but later said he was a former student not currently enrolled. No charges were immediately announced. The Sheriffs Office said no other schools in the county were under any threat.

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The Ocala shooting comes just over two months after a gunman killed 17 people and wounded 17 others at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. Nikolas Cruz, 19, faces the death penalty if convicted in that Valentines Day shooting.

The Ocala shooting also coincided with a nationwide student walkout to protest gun violence on the anniversary of the 1999 massacre at Colorados Columbine High School. Forest High had planned its version of a walkout, students said.

Chris Oliver told the Ocala Star-Banner that his 16-year-old son, a Forest student, told him the shooting happened near his classroom. The boy told Oliver the shooter was standing in a hallway and fired at a closed classroom door. The shooter then dropped what authorities said was a shotgun, ran and tried to hide, the boy told his father.

Craig Ham, deputy superintendent of Ocala schools operations, said the gunman carried a shotgun in a guitar case into the school by blending in with students. Ham told reporters the shooter fired at the bottom of a classroom door, which was locked, and pellets struck the victim in the ankle.

Jake Mailhiots psychology class had just begun Friday morning when school officials announced a code red alert over the intercom.

You could hear in their voice that this wasnt a drill, the 16-year-old junior said.

Students and teachers had been prepared for such alerts and leapt into action to barricade the classrooms one door and block the doors window.

Our teachers started pushing file cabinets and desks toward the door, and a few friends and I joined in, the teen said. We also started tying together some jackets to hang out the window, in case we needed another way out.

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In a photograph Mailhiot shared on social media, the classroom door is invisible behind a tall pile of furniture.

Mailhiot said about 15 people in the room waited over 30 minutes to be evacuated by Ocala police. They were instructed to leave the room with their hands up, he said.

The school had planned to participate around 11 a.m. in a walkout commemorating the Columbine shooting. Mailhiot said he had hesitated to participate in the walkout because he was worried the large crowd outside the school would present a target for anyone waiting to cause a disturbance.

I worried if something was to happen, thats where it would happen, Mailhiot said.

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Marion County schools Supt. Heidi Maier decided six weeks ago that any students who walked out would be punished. Instead, Maier instructed the seven mainstream high school principals to meet with each of their schools student body to develop a topic of discussion for a 30-minute session. All such events were canceled Friday.

Marion County Sheriff Billy Woods praised the quick response by the school resource officer, as well as school personnel and first responders. In the Parkland shooting, school resource Officer Scot Peterson retired amid accusations he did not do enough to confront the Stoneman Douglas gunman.

The Forest resource officer, Marion County Sheriffs Deputy James Long, did not hesitate. He went right in, Woods said at a news conference.

Woods said Long heard a large, loud banging sound and immediately responded. Long recognized what we had at that time, he said.

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The sheriff said the suspect was not injured, was not fired at and was arrested without resistance.

Marion County does everything to protect their children, Woods said.

After the shooting, all students were taken by bus with a police escort to First Baptist Church of Ocala, where parents gathered to pick them up, officials said.

Rachael Carter was at the church waiting to be reunited with her daughter, a 10th-grader who turned 16 this week. Her pastor called her when he saw a post on social media.

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Im shaking like a leaf in a hurricane, Carter said.

She said that once she is reunited with her daughter, she would stick to her like Velcro.

Students who may have seen anything related to the shooting were separated so they could be interviewed by investigators.

School district spokesman Kevin Christian sent a recorded phone message to parents by phone urging them to stay away from the school.

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The Ocala Police Department, the Sheriffs Office, the Florida Highway Patrol and the FBI were investigating the shooting. They divided into teams that cleared all buildings, vehicles and the parking lot. Once all students were off campus, authorities began conducting a more methodical search of the campus.

Forest High has an enrollment of more than 2,000 students, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

UPDATES:

12:20 p.m.: This article was updated with the sheriffs news conference.

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This article was originally published at 9:05 a.m.
Next month, the nations biggest coffee chain will close thousands of its U.S. stores for an afternoon to tell 175,000 employees that they may have been racist without realizing it.

That is the premise behind at least 8,000 racial-bias education seminars that Starbucks will hold May 29 at its stores and corporate offices in response to a viral video of two black men being arrested in a Philadelphia store.

The two men, 23-year-old business partners, had come to a Starbucks in the citys wealthy Rittenhouse Square neighborhood last week for a meeting to discuss real estate. When a manager denied one of the men bathroom access because he hadnt made a purchase, an employee called the cops.

Police showed up as the men were waiting for a third person to arrive and led them out of the store for trespassing. The men left jail after midnight, and the incident spurred protests that briefly shut down the store.

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Its not unusual for an employer to mandate anti-bias training, especially during a time when incidents of alleged racism captured on video have ignited protests against businesses and the police. Google and Facebook offer it.

But Starbucks stands out because its baristas personally interact with such a wide swath of America  every demographic group. Experts said the effort could spur more eating and drinking establishments to get aggressive about their anti-racism programs.

This is a pivotal moment, said Georgina Dodge, an associate provost for diversity, equity and inclusion at Bucknell University. Its someone putting their foot down and saying enough is enough.

Starbucks chief executive, Kevin Johnson, said this week that the training would be designed to address implicit bias, promote conscious inclusion, prevent discrimination and ensure everyone inside a Starbucks store feels safe and welcome.

To create a curriculum, the company has enlisted prominent civil rights leaders, including former U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric Holder, Anti-Defamation League Chief Executive Jonathan Greenblatt, NAACP Legal Defense Fund President Sherrilyn Ifill and Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson.

The Anti-Defamation League is known for its own programs, including those that work with police and schools to reduce racial, religious, gender and sexuality bias. Starbucks said it wants to share what it develops with other businesses.

These kinds of presentations are, at their base, relatively simple, said Bryant Marks, a Morehouse College psychology professor and implicit bias instructor who has trained employees of Los Angeles County, the Los Angeles Police Department and American Express.

One thing we teach is that you can have biases even as a good person, he said. For example, if your exposure to black males through media and your life has been disproportionately negative, that may influence your unconscious bias against them.

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Marks, a former member of President Obamas 21st Century Policing Task Force, said anti-bias training for police took off nationally after the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. In recent months, he has trained police in Chicago, Burlington, Vt., and Winston-Salem, N.C., in 75-minute sessions.

He said the seminars offer an overview of what bias is, where it comes from, what it looks like in the real world and how to manage or reduce it, and how it is revealed in data on racial disparities in housing, education, law enforcement and employment.

Marks said the Starbucks push could be a bellwether moment for other retailers.

But does anti-bias training work?

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Experts said that while it can make people more aware of their biases against discriminated and stereotyped groups, its not clear if that awareness stops them from letting stereotypes guide their actions.

The research is all over the place, said Dodge, the diversity officer.

A 2015 study in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that implicit bias training, which reminds people of the stereotypes they harbor, could reinforce those stereotypes instead of weakening them.

In another study that compiled data from nearly 500 studies on implicit bias programs, a team of researchers found that implicit bias can be changed, but the effects are often weak and that making a person aware of their bias often did not translate into changes in behavior.

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Some research suggests that anti-bias training can backfire. When employers such as Starbucks mandate it, employees can become resentful that they are being forced to do something and reject the message.

Nonetheless, Dodge said she was thrilled to see more companies conducting anti-bias education.

There are many questions about what effect it will have, she said. But if the awareness is coupled with the tools to change how you behave, there could be a marked outcome. We will have to wait and see.

jaweed.kaleem@latimes.com

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Jaweed Kaleem is The Times national race and justice correspondent. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

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Thanks to the intervention of a federal judge, the Trump administration has been prevented for now from transferring to Saudi Arabia a U.S. citizen seized in Syria and suspected of fighting for Islamic State. Instead of seeking to overturn the ruling by U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, the administration should either charge the man with a crime or give him his freedom.

The man, who is known in court documents as John Doe, also holds Saudi citizenship. He surrendered to a Syrian militia backed by the United States in September and was turned over to the U.S. military. It declared him an enemy combatant and placed him in a military prison in Iraq, but apparently it lacks the evidence necessary to charge him with a crime. According to his lawyers, Doe claims he was kidnapped by Islamic State and denies fighting alongside the militants.

Government lawyers told the court that the decision had been made to transfer Doe to Saudi Arabia only after extensive diplomatic discussions.

Apparently the U.S. government sees moving Doe to another country as a convenient way to resolve the dilemma created by the difficulties of charging him with a crime or, alternatively, imprisoning him as an enemy combatant, which also would eventually require the government to defend its position in court. Thats because in a 2004 decision called Hamdi vs. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court ruled that a U.S. citizen held as an enemy combatant must have a right to challenge his confinement.

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Exiling a U.S. citizen without due process is just as much a violation of due process as imprisoning him without trial.

But exiling a U.S. citizen without due process is just as much a violation of due process as imprisoning him without trial. The solution of handing Doe over to Saudi Arabia against his will is no solution at all. As Chutkan remarked during a hearing Thursday: Its not release if youre simply giving him over to another jailer.

In opposing the transfer, the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing Doe, made two principal arguments: that his detention and possible transfer are illegal because the government lacks the legal authority to wage war on Islamic State, and that regardless of the legality of the war, Does forced transfer to another country in the absence of any criminal charges against him there is a violation of his constitutional rights. (His case differs from others in which the courts have upheld turning over a U.S. citizen to a foreign country where charges were pending or there was an extradition agreement.)

The government has no legal authority to detain this U.S. citizen in the first place, and it clearly lacks any legal authority to transfer him to the custody of another government, Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney for the ACLU, said.

The first assertion is more debatable than the second. Congress has been remiss in failing to explicitly authorize the war against Islamic State undertaken by former President Obama and continued by President Trump. This page often has criticized the idea that Authorizations for Use of Military Force passed in 2001 and 2002  one approved in response to 9/11, the other designed to put pressure on Saddam Hussein  can be stretched to justify current military operations. We continue to believe that Congress needs to update its authorizations for military force.

But even if one accepts that the war against Islamic State is on sound legal footing, the proposed transfer of Doe is objectionable. An American citizen suspected of taking up arms on the wrong side is still entitled to due process (and he doesnt forfeit any of his constitutional rights because he has citizenship in a second country).

And there are ways to prosecute Americans who aid the enemy. In the Hamdi case, the late Justice Antonin Scalia pointed out that, in addition to treason, federal law criminalizes various acts of war making and adherence to the enemy. U.S. citizens also can be charged with other criminal offenses, including providing material support for terrorism.

If the government can establish that Doe violated any of these laws, it should file charges against him in federal court, where it successfully has prosecuted several terrorism cases. If it is unable to make a case, it should release him  and give up the idea of handing him off to another jailer in another country.

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Last weekend, Los Angeles Mayor and presidential hopeful Eric Garcetti stood in a Des Moines bar and told the small group of gathered Democrats, I think that Iowa and Los Angeles have a ton in common.

As an Iowa-born Angeleno, I had to laugh. Thats the sort of thing that can only be said with a straight face by a person whos lived in only one of those two places.

A few days after Garcettis attempt to bond with Iowa Democrats, UCLAs Luskin School of Public Affairs released a survey showing that Los Angeles residents  especially those younger than 30  are increasingly dissatisfied with their quality of life. The culprit? The cost of living here, particularly skyrocketing rents and home prices.

This wont come as news if youve spoken to anyone under 30 recently. They are hustling to get their careers off the ground and, in the meantime, making ends meet with a patchwork of underpaid gigs. Succeeding in the big city has always been tough, but its only gotten tougher now that so many entry-level jobs are low-wage, low-skill and temporary  with no discernible path to stability.

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L.A. has always been a place of optimism  thats what makes this place a magnet, UCLA lecturer and former L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who led the survey, told The Times. Yet his survey and anecdotal evidence show L.A.s magnetism is waning. From 2010 to 2015, the Los Angeles suburbs saw their millennial population grow by 8.1%, whereas the city has drawn only a 1.8% increase. Other extremely expensive cities like New York and London are in similar positions: They still attract college graduates, but thanks to astronomical housing costs and stagnant wages, theyre having trouble getting them to stick around.

How long until major cities realize they need to work harder to convince young people  and immigrants  not just to move there, but to stay?

This is the inverse of a problem that has long plagued the small towns of Americas Rust Belt and rural Midwest. My home state of Iowa has had a brain-drain for decades, losing college graduates to larger cities and the coasts. The state is able to coax some former residents back when theyre ready to raise a family, or decades later when theyve retired. In the meantime, immigrants have become increasingly important as the state struggles to maintain its population. Immigration has accounted for 40% of the states growth since 2010.

How long until major cities realize they need to work harder to convince young people  and immigrants  not just to move there, but to stay? Dowell Myers, a professor of demography and urban planning at the University of Southern California, published a paper declaring that American cities reached peak millennial in 2015. Although Los Angeles County is still home to the nations largest foreign-born population, most of these immigrants are long-settled  not new arrivals. Without an actionable plan to curb the cost of living, Americas pricey cities  not just Los Angeles and New York, but also San Francisco; Washington, D.C; Boston; Seattle; Miami  are quickly going to lose the very populations that make urban life appealingly vibrant.

California now tends to draw people whove already built their careers elsewhere. According to a 2016 report by the organization Next 10, Individuals coming to California are primarily concentrated in high-wage occupations. The effect is palpable in many L.A. neighborhoods, where longtime residents are in a pitched battle with newcomers over gentrification. Artistic communities that historically thrived in cities are starting to dissipate, too. Los Angeles artists are fanning out as far as the Antelope Valley. New York City now has a mayor of nightlife tasked with preserving independent clubs and music venues. The web-driven real estate agency Redfin reported that the three cities with the biggest outflow in 2017  those searching for homes outside their own metro area  were New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Brain-drain states have long recognized that a failure to attract young people has economic consequences. But perhaps cities wont know what theyre losing until its gone. In the same UCLA survey that revealed how dissatisfied young Angelenos are with Los Angeles, the factor they were most satisfied with was relations between people of different races, ethnicities and religions. Diversity is now one of cities strongest remaining selling points. If high housing costs diminish that attribute, its hard to imagine how big urban areas will continue to draw young people and immigrants.

Last summer, Time magazine compiled the top cities attracting millennials. Those seeing the biggest relative growth were Virginia Beach and Richmond, Va.; San Bernardino; Memphis; and New Orleans. Los Angeles wasnt on the list, and neither was Des Moines. Perhaps they do have a ton in common after all.

Ann Friedman is a contributing writer to Opinion.

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Remnants of a migrant caravan crossing Mexico are on the last leg toward the U.S. border in Tijuana, where scores of Hondurans are expected to ask for asylum. This has attracted the ire of President Trump, who not only tweeted a threat to cut off U.S. assistance to Honduras but days later deployed the National Guard to the border.

This flurry of attention on Honduras came on the heels of a string of negative headlines this year. Allegations of election-tampering sparked protests in January in which 30 people were killed by security forces. The Honduran Congress passed an immunity pact to protect its members from corruption charges. Then the head of an international anti-corruption mission to Honduras resigned, citing a lack of support from the government and the international community.

It is tempting to look at all this and say nothing has changed in Honduras, and nothing ever will. But thats not the case. In spite of daunting challenges, over the past four years, Honduras has made progress in reducing violence, improving governance, fighting corruption and extending economic opportunity to citizens. But that progress is fragile and now is not the time for America to abandon its support.

Reducing U.S. assistance to Honduras right now would play in to the hands of drug traffickers, corrupt government officials and violent gangs.

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Honduras astronomically high levels of violence earned it the title Murder Capital of the World. In 2012, the homicide rate hit a high of 86 per 100,000. This year, it has dropped to around 42 per 100,000. That is still far too high; for comparison, the U.S. rate is 4 per 100,000. Still, it is an impressive gain achieved through courageous efforts by Honduran government officials, civil society actors, specially trained units in the national police and the international community, particularly the United States.

The Honduran national police  historically part of the problem  also are making strides against corruption. Through a civil society-led Purge Commission, more than 4,000 officers have been fired, including nearly all those at the very top of the police force. At the same time, the international community and Honduran civil society have supported bottom-up reforms, improving recruitment and training to ensure that the police can take on the powerful gangs in violent communities and win the support of a skeptical populace.

Other Honduran institutions, including the courts and government agencies, also have been plagued by corruption for a long time. But in early 2016, the Honduran government and the Organization of American States, or OAS, agreed to create the Mission to Support the Fight Against Corruption and Impunity, a joint legal force led by international experts. With strong support from the attorney generals office, it already has helped to convict the leaders of an enormous Social Security scandal and to identify other rings of official corruption, including in the national congress.

These steps have bad actors running scared in Honduras at last. How do we know? Because those gains  important, impressive, but fragile  have been under attack by an unlikely coalition of those who thrived amid the countrys lawlessness. These shadow leaders have launched a full-on campaign of coercion and manipulation in the Honduran courts and Congress, of which the immunity pact is just one sign. In short, the empire is striking back.

Cutting off or greatly reducing U.S. assistance to Honduras right now would play in to the hands of drug traffickers, corrupt government officials, violent gangs and all the other nefarious actors who sowed violence, corruption and chaos for decades. The Honduran people  long let down by their leaders and institutions  would be left once again to save themselves. And that means many more will vote with their feet and attempt to migrate to the United States.

U.S. assistance isnt charity, nor is it a gift to Honduras. It is an investment in preventing the country from sliding backward. It is in the U.S. national interest to keep supporting efforts to reduce violence, improve governance and create economic opportunities so that Hondurans see their future not in the United States, but in a stable and safe Honduras.

James D. Nealon was U.S. ambassador to Honduras from 2014 to 2017. Kurt Alan Ver Beek, a sociology professor at Calvin College, has lived in Honduras since 1988 and is co-founder of the Assn. for a More Just Society.

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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
They are among the most storied memos in recent Washington history.

Under pressure from Republicans, the Justice Department on Thursday sent Congress the seven memos, spanning 15 pages, that then-FBI Director James B. Comey wrote over four months early last year about his interactions with President Trump. The memos, which quickly leaked to reporters, closely track Comeys congressional testimony, interviews and his new book, A Higher Loyalty. They also offer colorful new details about a president fixated on jailing leakers and in disproving salacious allegations against him.

What are the memos, and why did Comey write them?

Comey started writing the memos after his first one-on-one conversation with Trump in January 2017 and shared them with FBI leadership. He had not taken notes after his meetings with President Obama, but Comey has said he wanted to make a contemporaneous record of his discussions with Trump because he feared they could be misrepresented. He clearly wrote them with an idea that they might become public.

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Why are the memos important?

After Trump fired Comey in May, Comey wanted it known that Trump had pressured him to back off an FBI investigation of Michael Flynn, the national security advisor who was fired and later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russians. Comey told a friend to share excerpts from the memos with reporters. That disclosure, which raised questions of possible obstruction of justice by Trump, was a factor in Deputy Atty. Gen. Rod Rosensteins decision to appoint special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

How does President Trump come off in the memos?

Terrible. According to Comey, Trump delivered a conversation-as-jigsaw puzzle monologue about the size of the crowd at his inauguration, about luxury in the White House, about allegations that he had consorted with prostitutes in Moscow, and about Hillary Clintons supposed crimes. Comey writes that he grew increasingly uncomfortable in his meetings with Trump.

Why are we seeing the memos now?

House Republicans have demanded numerous records from the Justice Department as they scrutinize how it handled both the Russia and the Clinton investigations. Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Tulare), the House Intelligence Committee chairman, used some of the material to issue his own memo, which criticized court-approved eavesdropping of Carter Page, a former Trump campaign aide who visited Moscow during the campaign. Republicans sought the Comey memos in hopes they would reveal contradictions between his writings at the time and his subsequent congressional testimony and memoir.

What are Republicans and Democrats saying about the Comey memos?

Republicans highlighted that Comey never wrote before he was fired that Trump was obstructing justice in the Russia investigation. Trump tweeted that the Comey memos show NO COLLUSION and NO OBSTRUCTION, and he accused Comey of leaking classified information, which Comey has denied.

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Democrats say Republicans are misreading the memos. Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called them important evidence on the issue of potential obstruction of justice.

Whats new about Michael Flynn?

According to Comey, Trump expressed concern days after he took office that Flynn had serious judgment issues, a startling claim about the presidents top national security aide. At issue, Comey writes, was Flynns failure to advise Trump of a phone call nearly a week earlier from an unspecified foreign leader, reportedly Russian President Vladimir Putin. Comey also writes that Reince Priebus, then Trumps chief of staff, asked him on Feb. 8, 2017, whether Flynn was under FBI surveillance. The answer is redacted.

What did Trump say about Russia?

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According to Comey, Trump never asked what Russia did to interfere in the 2016 election. Instead, he was fixated on rebutting an allegation, from a dossier compiled by a former British spy, that Russian intelligence had evidence that Trump had asked prostitutes to urinate on a bed in his hotel suite in Moscow in 2013 because President Obama had slept there. The president asked Comey to disprove the charge to reassure his wife, Melania, that it was untrue, and brought the issue up several times. In a February 2017 meeting in the Oval Office, Trump said that the hookers thing is nonsense but that Putin had told him, we have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world, Comey wrote. Part of that account also is redacted.

What did he ask Comey to do about media leaks?

Trump pressured Comey to shut down leaks and called for prosecution of leakers. Comey said he agreed that he would like to nail one to the door as a message, but cautioned Trump that getting convictions was difficult and often hinged on pursuing reporters. Trump was enthusiastic about jailing reporters, mentioning former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who spent 85 days in jail in 2005 for refusing to testify to a grand jury in a leak investigation.

How did Trump see the role of the FBI?

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In Comeys telling, he tried to explain to Trump that the bureau needed to be free of political influence  but suggests the message didnt sink in. In a now-familiar account, Comey describes several conversations when Trump pressed him for loyalty, and Comey tried not to react and to say as little as possible. Comey says he repeatedly defended then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. That message didnt take either. Under continued pressure from Trump, Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions fired McCabe in March, after an internal report says he lacked candor in his answers about authorizing leaks.

To read this article in Spanish, click here

joseph.tanfani@latimes.com

Twitter: @jtanfani
Democrats gave President Trump another potential legal headache Friday, filing a federal lawsuit that alleges an illegal election conspiracy between his presidential campaign, the Russian government, the WikiLeaks organization and others.

The lawsuit seeks unspecified financial damages, probably in the millions of dollars, for computer fraud, racketeering and other illegal activity that it says undermined the Democratic Party and Hillary Clintons campaign. The suit does not name Trump as a defendant.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Russia launched an all-out assault on our democracy, and it found a willing and active partner in Donald Trumps campaign, Tom Perez, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement. This constituted an act of unprecedented treachery: the campaign of a nominee for president of the United States in league with a hostile foreign power to bolster its own chance to win the presidency.

Trumps campaign called the lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in Manhattan, frivolous.

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This is a sham lawsuit about a bogus Russian collusion claim filed by a desperate, dysfunctional and nearly insolvent Democratic Party, said Brad Parscale, who was digital director of Trumps 2016 campaign and now manages the presidents 2020 reelection bid.

The Democrats lawsuit echoes one filed against President Nixons reelection campaign after five burglars were caught breaking into Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington in June 1972, and investigations soon uncovered a web of illegal activities run from the White House. The case was settled for $750,000 when Nixon resigned the presidency in August 1974.

Two federal investigations have burrowed into Trumps inner circle, and the lawsuit suggests Democrats see a political advantage in the swirl of Russia-related allegations before the November election, when the party hopes to wrest back control of at least one chamber of Congress.

Its very motivating to the base, said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. Swing voters are looking for more evidence. To the extent it provides more evidence, it could be important.

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is leading a wide-ranging investigation into whether Trumps team aided Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 race. Mueller has obtained criminal charges against 19 individuals so far, but no one has been charged with campaign-related malfeasance and Trump has denied any conspiracy or collusion.

A separate but related federal investigation in New York is focused on Trumps longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. He has not been charged, but FBI agents recently raided his office, apartment and hotel room for evidence of suspected crimes.

The Democrats lawsuit accuses Russians and Trumps aides of having formed an agreement to promote Donald Trumps candidacy through illegal means.

Through multiple meetings, emails and other communications, these Russian agents made clear that their government supported Trump and was prepared to use stolen emails and other information to damage his opponent and the Democratic Party, the lawsuit claims.

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Rather than report the Russian operation to the FBI, the Trump campaign and its agents gleefully welcomed Russias help, it adds.

The lawsuit names several current and former members of Trumps inner circle, including his eldest son, Donald Jr., his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort. The three met at Trump Tower in June 2016 with a Russian lawyer and others who had offered incriminating information on Clinton.

To the extent they had information concerning the fitness, character or qualifications of a presidential candidate, I believed that I should at least hear them out, Trump Jr. said after the meeting was exposed last year.

Lawyers for Kushner and Trump Jr. did not respond to requests for comment Friday. A spokesman for Manafort declined comment.

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Manafort has pleaded not guilty to nearly two dozen federal charges of money laundering, tax evasion and bank fraud. The charges focus on his lobbying for a Kremlin-backed government in Ukraine before he joined the Trump campaign, although the indictments allege the crimes continued through 2016.

WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy website founded by Julian Assange, is named in the lawsuit because it published tens of thousands of emails in fall 2016 that were hacked from accounts used by the Democratic National Committee and Clintons campaign manager, John Podesta.

U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that operatives working for Russias military intelligence service had penetrated and stolen the emails, and view WikiLeaks as an adjunct of the Russian operation.

In a Twitter message, WikiLeaks said it was constitutionally protected from such suits because it is an accurate publisher of newsworthy information.

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Roger Stone, an informal advisor to Trump who is named in the suit, called it a PR stunt and a fundraising plot. Stone exchanged messages with WikiLeaks and he tweeted before the Podesta emails came out that the Clinton aide would soon spend time in the barrel, but he later denied any advance knowledge.

The Democrats will face an uphill battle pursuing the Russian government, which has denied meddling in the U.S. election. But the lawsuit could compel depositions or production of documents, providing new information about Trumps campaign.

Follow the latest news of the Trump administration on Essential Washington 

chris.megerian@latimes.com

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Twitter: @chrismegerian




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.
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
Andrew McCabe, the FBI official who became a target for President Trump, now faces the possibility of criminal charges  the latest fallout from an internal watchdog report that found he lied to investigators.

The findings of that report, by the inspector general of the Justice Department, were referred to the U.S. Attorneys Office in Washington within the last few weeks, according to a statement from a McCabe lawyer on Thursday, following news accounts on the matter.

Although we believe the referral is unjustified, the standard for an [inspector general] referral is very low, said the statement by lawyer Michael R. Bromwich. We have already met with staff members from the U.S. Attorneys Office.

He added, We are confident that, unless there is inappropriate pressure from high levels of the Administration, the U.S. Attorneys Office will conclude that it should decline to prosecute.

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A spokesman for the U.S. Attorneys Office declined to comment.

The internal report found that McCabe, a career agent who rose to deputy director, repeatedly made false statements regarding his efforts to influence a newspaper report about disputes within the FBI over an investigation. McCabe said he didnt know where the leaks came from, but he later admitted that he authorized them, according to the findings. Among the people he misled, the report said, was his boss, then-FBI Director James B. Comey.

Ahead of the reports release, McCabe agreed to retire in March and left his job early. But he was fired by Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions, late on a Friday night, March 16, just ahead of his planned retirement. McCabe and his supporters described the action as an act of vindictiveness to appease the president. The firing could affect McCabes pension payments.

Trumps ongoing anger about the separate investigation of Russias 2016 campaign interference and possible coordination with the Trump campaign, and what he sees still as the FBIs soft treatment of Hillary Clinton, found a target in McCabe last year. The president noted that McCabes wife, who ran a losing race for state office in Virginia, received campaign support from a political fund operated by the Virginia governor at the time, Terry McAuliffe, a Clinton protege.

The president repeatedly attacked McCabe on Twitter, continuing after the reports release last week. He LIED! LIED! LIED! Trump wrote, adding that McCabe and Comey were part of a den of thieves and lowlifes.

Late Thursday, Trump reveled in the news about the criminal referral of the McCabe report, writing on Twitter, James Comey just threw Andrew McCabe under the bus. Inspector Generals Report on McCabe is a disaster for both of them! Getting a little (lot) of their own medicine?

There is more to come from the inspector general. The office looked into McCabe as part of a broader examination of how the FBI dealt with its investigations into Clintons handling of her emails as secretary of State and possible conflicts involving the Clinton Foundation, the familys charity.

The report said McCabe authorized senior FBI officials to speak to a Wall Street Journal reporter who was preparing a story about friction between the FBI and the Justice Department over the inquiry into the foundation. Told that some in the bureau thought he was trying to put brakes on the investigation, McCabe instead pointed a finger at a lawyer in the Justice Department.

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While McCabe said he was trying to protect the FBI, the report said he was motivated more by trying to protect himself. Comey told investigators he was unhappy about the story and talked to McCabe about it. I had a strong impression he conveyed to me, It wasnt me, boss, Comey told the internal investigators.

McCabe said he told Comey repeatedly that he was working with the Wall Street Journal, Bromwich said.

The lawyer added that neither Comey nor the inspector generals office is infallible, and in this case neither of them has it right.

joseph.tanfani@latimes.com

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Twitter: @jtanfani
For some, its immigration. Others, housing and homelessness.

We asked Californians to name the top issues facing the state today and what the next governor should do.

Here's some of what they said.

Read more: With recession in the rear view, a more upbeat California looks to choose a new governor 

Housing

Donna Weese, 57, Shingletown

The cost of living here is just insane. Its hard. Its almost impossible to live.

Foster Anderson is the director of the nonprofit Shared Adventures, which provides recreation activities for people with special needs. Phil Willon / Los Angeles Times

Foster Anderson, 57, Santa Cruz

I like how theyre talking about affordable housing. Thats one aspect of my life that I depend on. Affordable, wheelchair-accessible housing.

Linda Subero lost her home in the recession and has struggled since. Paloma Esquivel / Los Angeles Times

Linda Subero, 55, Banning

Subero worries about homelessness because if it werent for her family, she might be out on the streets. Now to get a rental its like you're buying a house, she said. Its very hard. Its very difficult.

Immigration

Javier Zamora, 53, Royal Oaks

Obviously, we have the immigration issue that has scared our community, especially the Hispanic community, tremendously. My hope is that Washington gets its [act] together and politicians understand whos really wearing the boots and whos really growing the food.

Javier Zamora, a strawberry grower, is concerned about U.S. immigration policy.

Archie Evans. Mark Z. Barabak / Los Angeles Times

Archie Evans, 77, Vacaville

Immigrations out of control. Law and orders out of control. Spending is out of control.

Gail Varhoe is a registered Republican who voted for Hillary Clinton. Paloma Esquivel / Los Angeles Times

Gail Varhoe, 68, Upland

Varhoe says she worries about immigrant families that are here and working and obeying the laws and paying taxes  are they going to be deported? How is California going to address that?

Taxes and the Economy

Juan Santos is a Salvadoran immigrant and carpenter. Michael Finnegan / Los Angeles Times

Juan Santos, 46, East Hollywood

Santos says many working Californians get little benefit from the booming economy. We dont really see it, he said. Maybe rich people can see it. He bemoaned the recent surge in homelessness.

Bill Johnson is a truck driver from Red Bluff. Mark Z. Barabak / Los Angeles Times

Bill Johnson, 64, Red Bluff

Too much taxes and too many fees. Everythings got a fee and youve got to have a license for everything.... You cant move without a tax or a fee or a penalty.

Infrastructure

Marilyn Evers, who works as a water district manager, is an independent when it comes to politics. Mark Z. Barabak / Los Angeles Times

Marilyn Evers, late 70s, Shingletown

I think the bullet train is something people are paying for and its not going to happen in their lifetime or mine, that's for sure.

George Green, 65, Arbuckle

Building tunnels and bullet trains instead of building reservoirs so that we can maintain the productivity of California. Thats what we need to do.

Healthcare

Harry Masatani is the owner of Masatani Market in Guadalupe. Phil Willon / Los Angeles Times

Harry Masatani, 91, Guadalupe

On Democratic proposals in Washington and Sacramento to provide government healthcare to all: Can we afford to pay for everybody? Whos going to pay for it?

Loretta Gordon. Michael Finnegan / Los Angeles Times

Loretta Gordon, 60, Hollywood

Gordon wants the next governor to provide universal healthcare. Shes also wary of former L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a leading candidate. He was too involved in schmoozing with the celebrities, she said.

Julissa Prieto. Paloma Esquivel / Los Angeles Times

Jobs

Julissa Prieto, 18, Santa Ana

Says she probably wont vote. But shes worried about safety because of the number of gangs in her community and wishes there were better jobs for low-income people.

Louis Thomas is a retired L.A. County firefighter. Michael Finnegan / Los Angeles Times

Louis Thomas, 57, Inglewood

Thomas says California needs better job opportunities for young people as the cost of living rises. He also wants the state to take action against racism in law enforcement.

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Californias next governor: Heres whos running in the June primary

As a crucial primary nears, track the California races that could flip the House
The recreational use of marijuana became legal in California on Jan. 1. The state is now home to the countrys largest legal pot market.

But its still possible for cannabis customers to run afoul of state and local laws, which dictate where and how weed can be purchased and consumed.

Here are some tips on avoiding that.

Can I legally buy pot in California?

If you are 21 or older, you can buy and possess up to 28.5 grams (a little over an ounce) of marijuana, up to 8 grams of cannabis concentrate and up to six live plants.

If you are between 18 and 20 years old, you can buy and possess up to 8 ounces of marijuana and 12 live plants, but only through the states medical marijuana program, which requires a physicians recommendation.

Some cities have imposed stricter laws on the sale and consumption of cannabis within their borders.

Where can I legally buy it?

From retail outlets licensed by the state Bureau of Cannabis Control.

Heres a map of the current locations.

In what forms?

Dried marijuana Steven Senne / Associated Press

Dried marijuana Dried marijuana  also called flower, bud or leaf  is generally sold by the gram or in increments ranging from an eighth of an ounce to an ounce. The price varies greatly depending on the strain.

Concentrates A concentrate is any product created through an extraction process, in which cannabinoids are separated from the marijuana plant, leaving behind a substance thats usually much more potent than the dried flower.

Some concentrates are very high in tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. Others contain high amounts of cannabidiol, or CBD, which is prized for its therapeutic, rather than intoxicating, effects.

Hash is created by extracting THC-rich resin from the plant using ice water or compression. When heat is added to the process, the resulting compound is called rosin hash.

Butane hash oil Drug Enforcement Agency

Butane hash oil is created when cannabinoids are extracted using the chemical solvent butane. Also called honey oil, wax, crumble or shatter, BHO is a potent amber substance that can be waxy, crumbly or crystalline in texture.

Rosin hash and BHO are generally sold in small jars or wax paper wraps, usually in half-gram increments. Both substances can be vaporized or mixed with dried marijuana and smoked. They can also be consumed by dabbing, in which a small amount of the concentrate is vaporized and inhaled using a specialized bong called an oil rig.

CO2 oil is created when cannabinoids are separated from plant material using pressure and carbon dioxide. Generally less viscous than BHO or rosin hash, CO2 oil is often sold preloaded into vaporizer cartridges or disposable vaporizer pens.

Tinctures are alcoholic extracts of cannabis material, which is sometimes mixed with other herbs believed to have therapeutic effects. They are usually administered by dropping small amounts under the tongue.

Cannabis-infused chocolate bars Peter DaSilva / For The Times

Edibles Cannabis-infused foods are available in a wide variety of forms, including soft drinks, snacks and candies.

State law now requires that they be clearly labeled and contain no more than 10 milligrams of THC per serving.

Cannabis-infused lotions Lord Jones

Topical treatments Consumers can purchase an array of cannabis-infused creams, lotions and salves. Because the active ingredients are absorbed locally through the skin, these products are generally marketed as treatments for aches, pains and skin conditions, rather than as having psychoactive effects.

A marijuana clone Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times

Live plants Cannabis can be purchased in the form of plants, seeds or clones, which are cuttings taken from a mature plant. Consumers are permitted to cultivate them for personal use, provided they are planted in a secure area thats not visible from any public place.

Can I have marijuana delivered?

You sure can. Delivery services are permitted to operate in California, provided they are licensed.

How much tax will I pay?

Recreational users pay sales tax of 7.5% to 10% (depending on the county) and a state excise tax of 15%.

On top of that, cities throughout the state have begun imposing their own taxes. You can use our tool to calculate how much youll end up paying where you live.

Medical users are exempt from sales tax but, in addition to the doctors recommendation needed to buy medical marijuana, they must obtain a state medical marijuana identification card from the county where they live. Other taxes still apply.

Can I smoke outside?

No. Whether youre a medical or recreational user, it remains illegal to consume cannabis in public.

What about in my car?

You cant smoke, vape or eat cannabis while sitting in a car, driving, or while riding in the passenger seat of a car. That also goes for a boat, aircraft and any other vehicle used for transportation.

You can travel with cannabis in your vehicle, but it must be in a sealed container or in the trunk. Its illegal to take it across state lines, even to another state where cannabis is legal.

So where can I smoke (or vape or eat) it?

You can consume cannabis on private property, but only in areas where tobacco smoking isnt already prohibited. So if youre a renter and your landlord has specified that you cant smoke cigarettes in your unit, youre probably out of luck. Property owners are also permitted to specifically ban the use and possession of cannabis on their properties.

What about cannabis cafes or lounges?

State law allows local jurisdictions to permit onsite cannabis consumption, provided that it takes place in an age-restricted area that isnt visible from any public place, and neither alcohol nor tobacco is allowed on the premises.

San Francisco, Oakland and South Lake Tahoe earlier this year became some of the first cities in California to open consumption lounges, and West Hollywood will begin accepting applications in May.

Still, most cities have so far decided not to license those types of businesses.

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alexandra.wigglesworth@latimes.com

Twitter: @phila_lex
A power struggle inside the states political watchdog agency broke out into a public war of words between rival commissioners Thursday, after an advisor to Gov. Jerry Brown objected to a planned reshuffling of duties as a threat to policing campaign finances in California.

The divided Fair Political Practices Commission gave initial approval Thursday to policy changes that would force its full-time chairwoman, Jodi Remke, to share oversight power with part-time commissioners, despite opposition from Remke and Peter A. Krause, Browns legal affairs secretary.

Opponents are concerned that the change could put the agency in disarray just as it is faced with overseeing the hundreds of campaigns underway for the June 5 statewide primary, now less than seven weeks away.

Krause said in a letter that the proposals risk undermining and impeding the important work of the commission, while Remke called them legally problematic and impracticable.

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In full rebellion against Remke, three of the five commissioners voted to begin the process of creating two standing committees of two members each, excluding the chairperson, to develop recommendations on legal issues, policy changes, budgets and personnel matters.

The proposal must be published for public notice before the regulation can be given final adoption in June.

The vote came after an angry back-and-forth in which Commissioners Allison Hayward, Brian Hatch and Maria Audero, who supported the policy change, criticized Remke and commission executives for not telling the rest of the panel that they met last week with members of the governors staff before their opposition was announced.

You immediately ran to the governors office and tried to derail this thing, Hatch told Remke during the four-hour public meeting Thursday.

Im really disgusted at your behavior, Hatch added.

Remke said it was proper for her to meet with the governors staff about the proposal because she was appointed by the governor, adding that Brown has a natural interest in the matter because he was instrumental in passing a ballot measure four decades ago to create the commission and set its structure.

Im disappointed, Hayward said. I think there is a certain lack of candor here.

Remke called a 10-minute break for tempers to calm after she threatened to declare Hatch out of order over what she called personal attacks.

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Youre out of order, Hatch responded.

Remke added: If we can limit the direct attacks on each other that would be appreciated.

Coverage of California politics 

The agency, created in 1974 by voters to be the arbiter of campaign law and government ethics, has rarely seen such acrimony among its commissioners. State law calls for the agency to be led by a full-time chairperson appointed by the governor to oversee management on a day-to-day basis along with an executive director.

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Hatch and Hayward, who were appointed by Secretary of State Alex Padilla and state Controller Betty Yee respectively, proposed the change based on their feeling that they have been left out of too many decisions  including on the agencys budget  made by Remke.

The changes, they said in a memo, provide regular integration of part-time commissioners into commission work and improve the commissions accountability and transparency, while also making sure important matters are decided by the full panel.

But Remke told her colleagues that the proposal seems intended to take the chair out of any oversight of this agency by excluding her from the committees developing policies.

This proposal clearly says the chair is not actively involved in the development of policies, she said.

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Hatch, who later apologized for angry comments, said the current process  which has been in place through a succession of FPPC chairs  creates a concentration of power and is less transparent because Remke develops policy proposals privately with staff.

Its a check on the chair, and its a way of oversight in some respects, Hayward said of the proposed change.

Krause said the committee proposal seems geared toward avoidance of the states open-meetings law.

Meetings involving a quorum of three commissioners or more must be held in public, but the proposal would have drafting work done by two-person committees that could meet behind closed doors.

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Given the importance of the policies that are proposed to be developed by the standing committees, I believe such a process should occur in public view, Krause wrote.

The panel failed to muster votes to require the proposed committees to meet in public.

Remke issued her own memo this week in which she said she shared the concern of agency attorneys about legal issues, but noted that her greatest concern is that the expansive scope of the proposal will paralyze the agency with excessive bureaucracy without corresponding justification.

Krause said it appears Hatch and Hayward are already becoming more involved, even without changing regulations.

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Although active engagement by all commissioners is a laudable goal, I do not believe the proposed regulations are needed to meet that objective, he wrote.

Krause also said the changes appear to have been drafted with little or no involvement by the FPPC staff, which includes attorneys who have raised questions about the rule revisions.

While the individual commissioners are ultimately responsible for the actions of the commissions, I believe that approving these regulations  and any future policies  without staff input and guidance would be a mistake, Krause argued.

Hatch raised his voice in anger to complain that Remke had not acted on his request last month to schedule a hearing and final vote in time to resolve the debate in May.

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I think you led us off a cliff, and Im beginning to think you did it on purpose, Hatch said.

Remke hinted that there may be an ulterior motive behind the proposal.

Perhaps the regulated community sees the proposal as a benefit to them, Remke said, using a term used to describe lobbyists, politicians and political donors. I think its extremely problematic what is being proposed.

patrick.mcgreevy@latimes.com

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Twitter: @mcgreevy99
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.

For the record: A previous version of this article said that Rep. Dana Rohrabachers fundraising in the first quarter of 2018 rose by 21% compared with the previous quarter. The increase was 29%.

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.

Now, fundraising figures suggest that Californias House Republicans have begun taking their challengers more seriously, too.

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Track the California races that could flip the House 

In the latest figures reported to the Federal Election Commission, seven of Californias eight endangered GOP House members brought in more money in the first three months of this year than they did in any quarter last year.

While an increase in fundraising is to be expected as we near Californias June 5 primary, the first quarter of 2018 was pivotal for a handful of GOP incumbents. With seven months to go before the November general election, three of them have surpassed what they raised during the entire 2016 election and a few others are close.

That suggests House Republicans here are girding themselves for a bigger fight than they might have foreseen a year ago, as Democrats stake their chances of regaining control of the House on at least some of these California races.

A few California Republicans who previously struggled with fundraising appear to have seriously stepped up their efforts in the first three months of 2018.

The haul by Rep. Tom McClintock of Elk Grove increased by 51% and that of Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of Costa Mesa rose by 29% compared with what they brought in the previous quarter.

Rep. Duncan Hunter of Alpine, who has been dogged by an ongoing FBI investigation into campaign spending and posted anemic numbers at the end of last year, quadrupled the amount he brought in, compared with his haul last quarter.

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That doesnt mean Republicans can start relaxing.

McClintock, Rohrabacher and Rep. Steve Knight (R-Palmdale) were still out-raised by at least one of their Democratic challengers in the quarter that just ended. Its an indication of sustained energy on the left and increased attention on those races, something political analysts have pointed to as theyve predicted a wave will sweep the GOP out of power this year.

Its an improvement, though, from the previous quarter, when even some of the better-funded Republicans seemed to be caught off-guard by Democratic fundraising and more than half of Californias 14 GOP incumbents raised less than people running against them.

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The uptick comes after House Speaker Paul D. Ryan admonished members of his caucus in a closed-door meeting over lagging campaign figures.

Five of Californias eight vulnerable GOP house members also still had substantial leads over their Democratic challengers in cash on hand as of the end of March. Though his challenger raised more than $1 million last quarter, Devin Nunes (R-Tulare) still had more than $4.5 million banked on the back of his high-profile and controversial role in the Russia investigation. Rep. Jeff Denham (R-Turlock) had nearly $2.4 million socked away.

With that much money, those incumbents at least know they have the resources to shore up voter support through door-knocking and expensive ad campaigns.

For a second quarter in a row, however, McClintock, Rohrabacher and Hunter reported having less money in the bank than at least one of their opponents. That could prove disastrous if they dont have enough cash to counteract Democrats messages.

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Groups like the NRCC and the Congressional Leadership Fund are expected to focus some of their efforts on helping to retain GOP-held districts in California.

But at a time when Republicans are looking to minimize losses, an incumbent who cant manage to bank as much as his upstart challengers may look on paper to be a bad investment.

Times staff writer Maloy Moore contributed to this report.

Coverage of California politics 

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christine.maiduc@latimes.com

For more on California politics, follow @cmaiduc.
A California state Senate investigation has determined that a prominent Capitol public relations strategist probably engaged in sexually inappropriate conduct toward a female subordinate staffer when he worked as a chief of staff.

The investigation report said a preponderance of the evidence supported a finding that Adam Keigwin, now a managing director with the public affairs firm Mercury, based in Sacramento, engaged in unwanted touching and explicit talk and exposed himself.

He denied wrongdoing and said the findings released Thursday against him were false.

I know Im not perfect, Keigwin told The Times. I also know these allegations are completely untrue.

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The Senate investigation centers on claims made by a former Senate staffer who worked with Keigwin for several years. The woman, who was identified by a pseudonym, later decided not to participate in the investigation, according to the report. The investigation was conducted by Amy Oppenheimer, an independent attorney hired by the chamber to look into harassment complaints. She interviewed nine people, including Keigwin and the complainant.

Micha Star Liberty, the womans attorney, said her client asked to withdraw her complaint after speaking with Oppenheimer because of concerns her confidentiality would not be protected.

Liberty said the Senate was trying to claim some sort of victory in terms of meeting their obligation. Its essentially this body trying to prove that it takes seriously these allegations, yet not taking into account the needs and wants of the people who are complaining.

Investigation finds sexual harassment allegations against top California legislative staffer substantiated 

Still, Liberty said her client was pleased to see her claims substantiated by the investigation.

Any time a victim or survivor comes forward and tells their story and they are heard and believed, its meaningful, she said.

Keigwin worked in the Capitol for 10 years, most recently as chief of staff to Democratic Sen. Leland Yee of San Francisco from 2009 to 2013. Yee pleaded guilty to corruption charges in 2015 and received a five-year prison sentence.

The woman alleged that Keigwins inappropriate conduct occurred while she worked in the Senate from 2011 until 2014 and continued after they both no longer worked there. The woman now works as a lobbyist.

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The investigation found that it was more likely than not that Keigwin, while under the influence of alcohol, engaged in unwanted sexual touching at least once or twice while he was employed by the Senate, although the report does not specify dates or details of the precise incidents.

It also found that Keigwin exposed himself to the woman on one or two occasions, in association with social events when Keigwin had been drinking.

The report also said evidence supported the allegation that Keigwin engaged in unwanted sexual conversations with the woman. It noted that other conversations about sex were equally initiated between him and the accuser.

If you have experienced harassment in government or politics, please share your story 

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As a result of the findings, the Rules Committee said Keigwin is not eligible for future employment with the Senate. The committee also warned that any similar misconduct with Senate employees could result in him being barred from accessing Senate offices or legislative hearing rooms.

The records were released as part of a recent policy change in the Legislature, in which substantiated complaints of harassment will now be made public. The increased disclosure was prompted by intense scrutiny over workplace harassment in the Capitol following the #MeToo movement.

Keigwin said he would vigorously defend himself and was in the process of hiring an attorney.

This issue is core to who I am, Keigwin said, pointing to his past work on behalf of domestic violence and sexual assault survivors. It is incredibly frustrating to see anyone make such an accusation against me.

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Fabian Nunez, a former Assembly speaker who is now a partner with Mercury, called the allegations troubling in an email to staff obtained by The Times.

We do not and would not tolerate inappropriate behavior toward any employee, Nunez said. That said, we are not aware of any complaints against Adam by Mercury employees or anyone else during his time with Mercury.

melanie.mason@latimes.com

Follow @melmason on Twitter for the latest on California politics.
In any other administration, the news regarding North Korea  a secret mission by the CIA director to meet with Kim Jong Un, followed by tantalizing hints of North Korean negotiating flexibility  would have blotted out all other topics this week.

This being the Trump administration, the Korea news had to share billing with the legal jeopardy of the presidents lawyer, a jeremiad from the former FBI director and continued speculation about the fate of the special counsels investigation.

President Trumps critics often accuse him of using a constant spray of Twitter posts, provocative statements and posturing to distract attention from his administrations controversies. This week served up a reminder that the chaos swirling around Trump also can distract from his administrations successes.

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MISSION TO PYONGYANG

Trump himself broke the news about CIA Director Mike Pompeos meeting with Kim, telling reporters Tuesday, during his meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, that direct talks with North Korea had begun at extremely high levels.

As Noah Bierman and Don Lee wrote, the announcement seemed to signal that plans for a once unlikely summit between Trump and Kim have gained momentum.

The next day, Trump followed up with more detail, saying that Pompeo had a great meeting with Kim.

The meeting did not lead to any immediate concessions by the North Koreans, who, so far, have managed to get something they want  high-level attention from the U.S.  in exchange for little more than a promise to negotiate later.

The trip did provide benefits for Pompeo, however, as Bierman and Cathy Decker wrote. He faces a close vote next week on his confirmation to be secretary of State. White House officials and their allies immediately began pointing to the Korea mission as proof of his readiness for the diplomatic job.

And it may well be that the negotiations are leading somewhere. On Thursday, South Koreas President Moon Jae-in suggested that substantive progress had been achieved. Speaking to news executives in Seoul, Moon said that the North Koreans had indicated a willingness to consider denuclearization without demanding withdrawal of the roughly 28,000 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea.

As always, Korea experts could point to many reasons for skepticism about what the North Koreans really meant. But theres no question that tensions have ratcheted way down from the peak last summer. Thats given Trump grounds to claim that his tough rhetoric brought the North to the bargaining table.

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Trump also nodded to one of Abes concerns, emphasizing the issue of Japanese citizens held in North Korea.

But Abe got nothing visible on the other major issue on their agenda  trade. As Lee wrote in advance of the meeting, the Japanese feel seriously snubbed by Trump, despite Abes efforts to flatter and befriend him.

THE LAWYER IN THE DOCK

Trumps longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, was back in court this week  this time in the uncomfortable role of criminal defendant.

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That alone provided a spectacle with few parallels. The presidents personal lawyer faces enough legal jeopardy that prosecutors earlier this month were able to persuade a judge to give them a warrant to search his office, his home and a hotel room and seize potentially thousands of documents and files.

Then, another twist developed when U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood, presiding over the case, told Cohens lawyers that they had to publicly disclose the name of one of Cohens three clients, whose identity they had tried to keep secret.

As Joe Tanfani wrote, there were audible gasps in the courtroom when the lawyer revealed the secret client: Sean Hannity, the Fox News commentator and staunch ally of Trumps.

The subject of the hearing was an effort by lawyers for Cohen and Trump to try to block prosecutors from looking at the evidence they seized in the raid last week. They lost, although the judge did suggest she might appoint an independent special master to review the material to ensure that documents shielded by attorney-client privilege dont go to investigators.

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A few days later, in another court, this time in Virginia, prosecutors in the case against Trumps former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, revealed that they have been investigating whether he served as a back channel between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The prosecutors did not say whether that investigation has turned up evidence of such a channel, and the charges against Manafort involve financial crimes, not campaign-related ones. Nonetheless, the disclosure provided confirmation of a significant part of the investigation being led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

COMEYS BOOK TOUR

The Trump administration sure does sell books.

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The latest to cash in: former FBI Director James B. Comey, whose book A Higher Loyalty hit the stores this week and became an instant bestseller.

Comey launched his publicity tour for the book with an interview on ABC with George Stephanopoulos in which he likened Trump to a mob boss, calling him morally unfit for the presidency and a stain on those around him.

Trump suggested the former FBI chief should be imprisoned.

As Tanfani wrote, the extraordinary interview included Comey saying that he thinks it is possible that the president is in fact compromised by Russian intelligence.

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Asked in the interview whether he thought Russia has something on Trump, Comey said: I think its possible. I dont know.

Comey has taken fire from at least two directions. Trumps allies call him a liar and accuse him of being out to get the president. And many Democrats cant forgive Comey for the damage he did to Hillary Clintons campaign. Comey insists his actions were justified, which has incensed many Clinton supporters.

What impact will all this have politically? As usual, dont count on a big swing in public opinion. Most Americans have very firmly held views about Trump. Thats especially true among those who oppose him.

Among Trumps supporters, some back him fervently. But theres a significant minority whose support is softer. The question will be, over time, whether Comeys charges sway some of them.

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So far, despite a few polls that seem to be outliers, Trumps approval rating has barely budged up or down since the beginning of January.

FESTIVAL OF BOOKS

And speaking of books, are you planning to attend this weekends L.A. Times Festival of Books? Its a great event  the biggest book festival in the country and a showcase for ideas and literature in California. My colleagues from the California Politics team and from the Washington bureau will be there in force.

Heres the full schedule. To see where well be, filter the list by Politics & History. Also, dont miss the Ask a Reporter booth on campus.

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FIRING MUELLER, NOT FIRING MUELLER?

Immediately after the raid on Cohens office, an angry president mused in public about firing Mueller. By midweek, he appeared to have backed away from that idea.

Then on Thursday, Trump announced that former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani would be joining his legal team. As Chris Megerian wrote, the appointment had the express purpose of repairing relations between the White House and Mueller, with whom Giuliani worked when he was a Justice Department lawyer.

Meantime, as David Savage wrote, administration lawyers continue to hold the view that Trump could fire Mueller if he chose to.

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The latest evidence of that comes from a seemingly unrelated case before the Supreme Court involving the status of administrative law judges at the Securities and Exchange Commission. Solicitor General Noel Francisco has urged the justices to use that case to make a broad ruling that the president is authorized under our constitutional system to remove all principal officers, as well as all inferior officers in the executive branch.

Will the justices take that bait? Well get a first clue when the case is argued on April 23. Check back to see what Savage gleans from the hearing.

THE DECIDING VOTE?

When Gina Haspel, Trumps choice as CIA director, comes before the Senate for a confirmation hearing scheduled for May 9, the issue of torture will be back at the center of debate.

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As Megerian wrote, the deciding voice in that debate seems likely to belong to the one senator who has been a victim of torture, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who was brutalized as a POW in Vietnam. Haspels opponents hope McCain will speak out against her for her involvement in harsh interrogations during the George W. Bush administration.

Her supporters have mustered the backing of intelligence officials from both Democratic and Republican administrations.

McCain, who has been in Arizona for months undergoing treatments for brain cancer, is scheduled to return to the Senate in early May.

DEATH BY CLEAN CAR?

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In his efforts to overturn Californias requirements for greater fuel economy for new cars, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has dusted off an old argument: smaller, lighter cars kill people.

As Evan Halper wrote, independent analysts, including some who once warned about the downside of lighter vehicles, now say that argument is outmoded. But Pruitt hasnt let it go.

Despite some talk of compromise, the Trump administration and California still appear to be on a collision course over fuel economy. The tough requirements put in place by California and a dozen other states are key to efforts to combat global warming, supporters say.

Pruitt also continues to be dogged by ethical issues. This week, the governments fiscal watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, said EPA broke the law with its efforts to build Pruitt a $43,000 phone booth for his office. Pruitt said he needed the booth to make secure, classified calls.

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BACKING AWAY FROM A POT FIGHT

Another potential confrontation between the administration and California involves marijuana. Earlier this year, Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions said the Justice Department would no longer follow an Obama-era policy that barred prosecuting marijuana sellers in states that allow legal weed.

But Trump doesnt share Sessions anti-pot fervor and has frequently dissed his embattled attorney general. He added to that disregard by overturning Sessions policy on pot, without so much as a heads up, Halper wrote.

FROM L.A. TO IOWA

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Finally, the 2020 election may feel a long way away, but its never too early for an ambitious politician to visit Iowa. Or for Mark Barabak to follow him.

Heres Barabaks account of Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcettis foray to the state that helped launch Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter but dashed the dreams of a score of others.

LOGISTICS

That wraps up this week. My colleague Christina Bellantoni will be back Monday with the weekday edition of Essential Politics. Until then, keep track of all the developments in national politics and the Trump administration with our Essential Washington blog, at our Politics page and on Twitter @latimespolitics.

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Send your comments, suggestions and news tips to politics@latimes.com.

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David.lauter@latimes.com

@davidlauter
The Senates top Democrat announced Friday that he is introducing legislation to decriminalize marijuana, the first time that a leader of either party in Congress has endorsed a rollback of one of the countrys oldest drug laws.

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) in a statement called the move simply the right thing to do.

The time has come to decriminalize marijuana, Schumer said. My thinking  as well as the general populations views  on the issue has evolved, and so I believe theres no better time than the present to get this done. Its simply the right thing to do.

Schumer first shared his intentions Thursday in an interview with Vice News, in which he decried the negative effects of current marijuana laws, under which the drug has the same legal classification as heroin. He said that too many people caught with small amounts of marijuana had spent too much time in jail and that current laws have had a disproportionate effect on minority communities.

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Marijuana legalization, which spent years as a fringe political cause, has become increasingly popular with all voters and increasingly embraced by Democrats. In January, the Pew Research Center found 61% of Americans supportive of legalization, with support reaching 70% among millennials.

Last year, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who is seen by many Democrats as a potential presidential candidate in 2020, introduced the Marijuana Justice Act, which would legalize the drug nationwide; it later was endorsed by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), whose state legalized marijuana in 2015, and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), who also is seen as a potential presidential contender. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who endorsed a marijuana-legalization initiative in California during his 2016 presidential campaign, endorsed Bookers bill Thursday morning.

Schumer is introducing separate legislation on Friday  a date that is an unofficial holiday for marijuana users. His bill would not legalize marijuana outright, but instead allow states to decide whether to make the drug available commercially. It would end the limbo that marijuana sellers find themselves in, months after Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions rescinded Obama-era guidance that prevented federal law enforcement officials from interfering with the marijuana business in states where it had legal status.

The bill lets the states decide and be the laboratories that they ought to be, Schumer said. It also will ensure that minority- and woman-owned businesses have a dedicated funding stream to help them compete against bigger companies in the marijuana business. Critically, we ensure that advertising cant be aimed at kids, and put real funds behind research into the health effects of THC, referring to the primary psychoactive substance in marijuana.

The legislation also would maintain federal authority to regulate marijuana advertising in the same way it does alcohol and tobacco advertising. The aim, Schumer said, is to ensure that marijuana businesses arent allowed to target children in their advertisements.

Schumers move was quickly celebrated by legalization supporters, who began the week by thanking Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) for fast-tracking a bill that would legalize industrial hemp.

In the past week or so, weve seen an unprecedented escalation of political support for marijuana law reform, said Tom Angell, chairman of Marijuana Majority. It seems as if both parties may have finally realized just how popular marijuana legalization is with voters and are afraid of the other party stealing the issue.

Democrats see the Schumer bill as part of an ongoing effort to attract young voters, who tend not to participate in midterm elections. Schumer also has gotten behind a campaign to restore net neutrality, regulation that would prevent internet service providers from skewing the prices or download speeds for certain kinds of data.

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The time for decriminalization has come, and I hope we can move the ball forward on this, Schumer said.
Geobiologist Victoria Orphan stands at the stern of the research vessel Western Flyer, watching her colleagues put the last touches on an unusual spread. Among the offerings: a large turkey leg, an alligator head and bowls of gelatinous agar that resemble consomme.

This meal isnt for the ships crew, though. Its bait.

The entrees are anchored to a plastic grid and pushed overboard so they will sink into the deepest underwater canyon along North Americas west coast.

The scientists check the attached camera, which will spy on the creatures that show up to feast  fish, worms, crabs and microbes too.

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The microbial denizens of Monterey Canyon are far different from many of their surface-dwelling brethren. They make food out of rocks and dead debris and harvest energy from methane that seeps from the ocean floor. To survive in this dark, high-pressure, low-oxygen, low-nutrient environment, they form all kinds of cooperative relationships.

Orphan adjusts an agar bowls position and then heads back in to check on the tube-shaped samplers shell use to collect microbe-filled sediment.

Theyre not quite as exciting as alligator heads, she says.

Orphan is being modest. Her study of these extremophiles may offer insights about the evolution of life on Earth  and guide the search for life on other planets. Her work earned her a MacArthur Fellowship award, also known as a genius grant.

Much of her research takes place at Caltech, where she runs a lab with dozens of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. But expeditions like this, miles off the California coast in Monterey Bay, are a crucial part of her work.

Katherine Dawson and Victoria Orphan take a quiet moment as the ship heads to Monterey Canyon, the deepest underwater canyon along North Americas west coast. (Amina Khan/Los Angeles Times )

Orphan is co-leading this trip with Shana Goffredi, a biologist at Occidental College who is also her life partner. Where Orphan studies microbial alliances, Goffredi explores the relationships between microbes and larger animals such as clams or snails.

Alligator heads and turkey legs are small fry for this crew. About a decade ago, Goffredi and other scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute towed the carcasses of dead whales out to the canyon and released them at different depths. The result was an enormous experiment that shed light on the complex population dynamics of these deep-sea communities.

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Just as wildflowers blossom in the barren desert after a storm, long-dormant microbes bloom on a whalefall as they feast on the carcass alongside crabs, clams and fish. The microbes produce chemicals that other microbes can put to use. The result is a community whose demographics shift dramatically over time depending on the depth and pressure of the ocean.

Orphan and Goffredi visit these whalefalls two or three times per year, sampling the water, wildlife and sediments to discover if something has changed.

Almost every time, we find a new species, Goffredi said. And thats just the animals.

The microbes, she added, are guaranteed to produce something thats never been seen before.

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::

The primary purpose of this two-day expedition is to steer an underwater rover into Monterey Canyon, insert chemical-laced sediment samplers and retrieve specimens from the deep.

The rover is a yellow box the size of a cargo van with robotic arms and an array of boxes and canisters to hold whatever it finds. Ever so slowly, it is lowered through the ships heart into the roiling waters below.

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In a darkened room near the stern, the scientists fix their eyes on monitors fed by the rovers many cameras. For a long time, it looks like the opening credits of Star Trek, with stars hurtling by in an inky blue-black void.

Marine snow, Orphan says, her face lighted only by the glow from the screens. Some of it can be actual animals. There are fecal pellets, or mucus thats been sloughed off. You think about seawater as being this liquid matrix, but its really this living, very dense gel.

When the rover is more than half a mile beneath the surface, the sandy seafloor comes into view. The pilots and scientists lean forward, looking for any signs of Francisco, the whale theyd sunk around this particular spot.

Finding those old whale bones is not easy. No familiar landmarks come into view. Long minutes of searching stretch to an hour, then more.

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Suddenly, the silence is broken.

The rack of lamb! Goffredi yells, pointing to the screen.

Caltech geobiologist Victoria Orphan watches as the pilots use the rovers robotic arm to press a sediment sampler into the ocean floor. (Amina Khan/Los Angeles Times )

One of the rover pilots uses a robotic arm to grab a cylindrical core sampler. He shoves it deep into a spot Orphan chooses, filling it with sediment. Then he uses a second robotic arm to inject fluid into the container.

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This fluid holds heavy water, whose hydrogen atoms have a neutron along with a proton, as well as two molecules that serve as building blocks for proteins and whose nitrogen atoms hold an extra neutron. The microbes will consume these extra-heavy stable isotopes and pass them through the food web from one species to the next.

In a few months, the ship will return and pull the cylinders out of the ground. Then the scientists will analyze the sediment to track the isotopes progress through the microbial system. The results will reveal how the microbes eat, grow and share resources with one another.

After collecting cylinders they had planted on their last trip, the rover doubles back to a methane seep so the team can plant more samplers. The pilots set up quickly, knowing they dont have a lot of time.

The robot is right in the middle of a squeeze when the word comes down: The ocean has grown too choppy, and they must pull out.

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Orphan sighs.

So close, she says.

Victoria Orphan watches through a window as the rover is brought back inside the ship. (Amina Khan/Los Angeles Times )

::

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The team starts the next days dive early, hoping to make up for lost time.

As soon as the sub is pulled out of the water, stuffed with specimens, the researchers rush the samples into the wet lab.

Goffredis team starts prying open clams, storing blood in small vials for analysis and preserving the tissue in ethanol.

Recent Occidental graduate Dana Michels checks on a jar of clams that will be taken back to Goffredis lab for analysis. (Amina Khan/Los Angeles Times )

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On the other side of the counter, Orphan and four of her researchers carefully cut the cylinders of sediment, placing each slice on a plate labeled according to depth: 0-1 centimeters, 1-2 cm, 2-3 cm, and so on. They plant their feet wide against the swaying of the ship.

Orphan sniffs the open top before she slices, hunting for the rotten-egg scent of hydrogen sulfide.

She has a gas-chromatographic nose, Goffredi jokes.

Victoria Orphan takes a sniff of sediment, checking for telltale smells. Katherine Dawson and Caltech graduate student Sean Mullin work in the background. (Amina Khan/Los Angeles Times )

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Some of those slices are loaded into small plastic bags and frozen; others are stuffed into a machine that uses argon to squeeze water out of the samples. A few milliliters go into tiny tubes for RNA or DNA analysis.

The water is separated from the solids  different microbes can live in the two different media  and some of it is exposed to a chemical that turns purple and reveals how much iron it contains. Sujung Lim, one of Orphans graduate students, fills small vials that shell use to test whether any microbes eat chitin, the tough, abundant protein in the exoskeletons of crabs and many other sea creatures.

Katherine Dawson, a postdoctoral scholar in Orphans lab whos since become an assistant professor at Rutgers University, uses a spoon to fill sample holders for the squeezing apparatus. Its hard to find a teaspoon that fits the narrow barrels, but these ones are locally sourced.

Caltech dining services has helped us out  whether they know it or not, she says with a laugh.

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With everyone working at double-speed, Lonny Lundsten of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute uses tweezers to pick over a chunk of wet whale bone, searching for feathery Osedax worms. They dissolve the bone with acid and send long thin roots deep inside.

Bacteria live in these roots and aid the worms in some unknown way; how the bacteria and worm find each other in the depths of the ocean is something the scientists hope to find out.

Shana Goffredi and Lonny Lundsten pick through a whale bone looking for fragile Osedax worms. (Amina Khan/Los Angeles Times )

In some ways, its emblematic of how little is known about life in the oceans.

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It has such an important, vital role in making the planet a habitable place for us, and we dont know anything about it, Goffredi said.

Its great that were exploring the universe, but theres a lot about our deep sea that remains a mystery, she added.

When Orphan gets her microbes back to Caltech, she hopes to set up a tiny deep-sea ecosystem in her lab. Then she could see how they interact with one another in different situations.

The geobiologists enthusiasm for her marine microbes knows no limits. Shes gathered a lot of samples this time, and her team rushes to process them.

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My eyes are bigger than my minus-80 freezer, she says with a sigh.

We call it the Victoria 30% factor, Lim deadpans.

The whale bones, however, wont find a permanent home at the lab. They belong in the ocean, the scientists say  and on a future trip to the canyon, theyll be returned to their final resting place.

Recent Occidental graduates Heidi Aronson and Dana Michels admire the sunset after the days work. (Amina Khan/Los Angeles Times )

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amina.khan@latimes.com

Follow @aminawrite on Twitter for more science news and like Los Angeles Times Science & Health on Facebook.

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NASA is about to step up its planet-hunting game with the launch of TESS

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Corals on Great Barrier Reef will never be the same after back-to-back heat waves, scientists say

One of the solar systems early planets didnt survive, but its diamonds are now on Earth
Authorities are investigating an incident in which a train struck a pedestrian at the Downtown Burbank Metrolink station early Thursday evening.

The collision occurred around 5:05 p.m. when a man stepped in front of Train 150 of the Ventura County Line traveling toward Los Angeles. The man survived the collision and was taken to a nearby hospital, according to the Burbank Police Department.

Chris Gutierrez, a spokesman for Metrolink, said no injuries were reported aboard the train.

Its not known why the man stepped in front of the train, and the incident remains under investigation.

andy.nguyen@latimes.com

Twitter: @Andy_Truc
Orange Coast College unveiled a new bicycle loop Thursday amid the annual Green Coast Day, the Costa Mesa campuss celebration to promote sustainable living.

Existing bike paths were marked with chalk lines to divide traffic. Temporary signs reminded bicyclists and skateboarders to yield at pedestrian crossings and dismount in high-traffic areas.

College officials said they will gauge the communitys response to the new signage over the next month. If the bike loop improves traffic flow, the facilities staff will install permanent aluminum signs and paint blue and orange lines down the middle of the bike loop.

Marc Perkins, a biology instructor and Green Coast Day organizer, said the Orange Coast College bicycle and skateboard master plan was approved last year to help make the campus better for bicyclists, skateboarders and pedestrians.

Right now, its unclear where you should go as a bicyclist, and theres a lot of pathways that are too narrow and get into pinch points that are unsafe, Perkins said. What were going to do is create a core campus loop, which is a set of pathways that are all fairly wide and which are going to help direct people around the core of campus.

He added that every building on campus is within 100 yards of the bike loop.

College spokesman Juan Gutierrez said administrators expect the projects cost to be nominal because OCC employees will do the work.

Rick Huffman, a member of the Costa Mesa Bikeway & Walkability Committee, staffed a table at the college Art Center to inform people about the citys plan to transform Merrimac Way, which runs along the southern edge of Orange Coast College.

If approved by the City Council, the project would narrow Merrimac from four lanes to two and add a protected bike line in each direction. Huffman said the goal is to slow traffic on a road used primarily by OCC students and employees.

Its a perfect candidate for creating a safe bikeway for students at Orange Coast College and Costa Mesa High School, he said. Think of it as a neighborhood street, and most neighborhood streets are two lanes.

DANIEL LANGHORNE is a contributor to Times Community News.

Twitter: @DanielLanghorne
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher is calling on JetBlue to retrofit some of its planes to help minimize noise that some Huntington Beach residents say has disrupted their quality of life as the aircraft approach Long Beach Airport.

In an April 10 letter to JetBlues president and chief executive, Robin Hayes, Rohrabacher (R-Costa Mesa) urged the airline to retrofit its Airbus A320 planes and have them fly at the highest altitudes possible when approaching the airport because some of the congressmans constituents have complained that the jets create a screeching noise on final approach.

In his letter, Rohrabacher recommended that the airline fix the problem by modifying the engines with vortex generators, known as air deflectors, a project he said is done through regular maintenance.

Lufthansa, United, Air France and British Airways have retrofitted their jets with the generators, said Rohrabacher, whose 48th Congressional District includes Huntington Beach.

Transition to the newer technology, he wrote, would help cut noise levels substantially.

JetBlue spokesman Philip Stewart said Thursday that the airline received the letter and is reviewing it.

Huntington Beach residents have increasingly complained about airline noise in the past year, since the Federal Aviation Administration implemented flight path alterations as part of its Southern California Metroplex project covering the regions airports, including Long Beach and Orange Countys John Wayne Airport. The agency said the changes would shore up inefficiencies, save fuel and reduce carbon emissions and flight delays.

However, the complaints prompted the City Council in January to unanimously approve a task force called the Air Traffic Noise Working Group to tackle the issue.

Council members Patrick Brenden and Barbara Delgleize proposed the panel as a way to discuss potential solutions to air traffic noise, establish a working relationship with federal aviation and local airport officials, assess opportunities for lawsuits and host community meetings.

Delgleize said Thursday that Rohrabachers letter is a step in the right direction that hopefully will create a conversation between the airline and the community.

At the end of the day, we want higher and quieter, Delgleize said. Weve had planes fly through Huntington Beach in the past and it wasnt an issue. As we get further into this, well ask the congressman to reach out to other airlines.

Rohrabacher spokesman Ken Grubbs said the congressman made the request only of JetBlue  a major carrier at Long Beach Airport  because, as he understands it, of all the airlines at Long Beach, only JetBlue has not fixed the problem.

Longtime Huntington Beach resident Michael Bourgeault, who is on the city panel, created the website StopTheJetNoise.com to document the groups progress and inform residents about the issue.

There is a substantial difference from Southwest [Airlines] planes into Long Beach than JetBlue, said Bourgeault, who was pleased with Rohrabachers letter but said he doubts the airline would oblige. They sound like theyre an incoming missile.

Bourgeault said the task force is planning a town hall meeting for the near future where residents can learn more about the groups efforts.

Mayor Mike Posey this month asked county and federal representatives to address aviation noise related to the FAAs regional air traffic system.

In an April 2 letter to Rohrabacher, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Orange County Supervisor Michelle Steel and FAA Regional Administrator Dennis Roberts, Posey described Huntington Beach as an epicenter for heavily concentrated new landing and flyover patterns.

The combined result is virtually constant aircraft noise over significant swaths of our city, beginning as early as 5:30 a.m. and continuing past 11:30 p.m., Posey wrote.

Residents in nearby cities also are unhappy with the new takeoff and landing patterns. Newport Beach and Laguna Beach sued the FAA over the system in 2016, saying the projects environmental review, which determined there would be no significant effects, was inadequate.

FAA spokesman Ian Gregor said in September that more than two dozen air routes have historically passed over Huntington Beach. He said the environmental findings will not be revisited.

Priscella.Vega@latimes.com

Twitter: @vegapriscella
You can fly round trip from LAX to Mahe Island, Seychelles, for $1,243, including all taxes and fees, on Etihad Airways.

The travel period is short: It is for trips Nov. 1-20.

You may be able to find a lower fare on Ethiopian Airlines, but that trip requires two connections.

Beside the date restrictions, this fare is subject to availability and youll need to decide whether youre doing this soon: The fare is set to expire April 30.

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The Seychelles archipelago is made up of about 115 islands, Mahe being the largest at about four miles wide and 16 miles long. Its home to about 78,000 people. It is a melange of influences: African, Asian and European, especially French.

The republic is about 1,000 miles east of Mombasa, Kenya, in the Indian Ocean and about 320 miles south of the equator.

Info: (877) 690-0767, etihad.com

Source: Airfarewatchdog.com

travel@latimes.com

@latimestravel
Earth Day on Sunday is a good time to think about planning a trip to see Californias redwoods. Yosemites spectacular Mariposa Grove, which has been shut for a three-year restoration project, will reopen to visitors June 15.

Big trees, however, draw big crowds. For a quieter experience, here are five lesser-known redwood parks where you may just have the trees to yourself.

Felton, Calif.

The old-growth giants at Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park in Felton are pretty easy to find. Head to the visitor center and follow the flat loop thats less than a mile long. The largest coastal redwood in this 40-acre grove is about 1,500 years old and 277 feet tall.

Youll also find the Fremont Tree, a large hollowed-out redwood you can stand inside. Explorer John Fremont is said to have camped here.

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The park, by the way, is named for the businessman who once owned this forest and used the redwoods (fortunately not all of them) to fuel lime kilns.

Info: Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park

Woodside, Calif.

The coast redwoods in Wunderlich Park in Woodside arent old-growth, but they are dense and provide a cool refuge on a warm day.

At the nearby Folger Stable, you can see the big trees during a horseback trail ride ($60 for an hour) in the mixed forest dominated by redwoods.

The ranch, which includes the historic stable, once belonged to the Folger family of Folgers coffee fame. If youre on foot, head out on the easy Redwood Trail for a quiet stroll among the trees.

Info: Wunderlich Park

Philo, Calif.

The most impressive redwoods at Hendy Woods State Park southeast of Mendocino are at Big Hendy, an 80-acre grove with a thick understory of ferns and redwood sorrel.

Theres a .6-mile wheelchair-accessible Discovery Trail that runs through the grove too. Hikers can take a 1.6-mile loop to marvel at the trees and then head off on the Hermit Hut Trail.

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Youll find a downed redwood that once housed a Russian immigrant known as the Hendy Hermit.

Info: Hendy Woods State Park

Gualala, Calif.

At Gualala Point Regional Park on Highway 1 north of the community of Sea Ranch, you can camp under coastal redwoods for $32 to $35 a night.

Walk-in and drive-in sites are located along the Gualala River. Youre within spitting distance of the ocean; with luck, you may see whales before bedding down among the big trees.

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Info: Gualala Point Regional Park

Southern Oregon

Redwoods in Oregon? Just over the California border are trails that will take you to the northernmost range of coast redwoods.

The trees here are spindly, not brawny, but allow you to claim bragging rights to having seen the only redwoods in the Pacific Northwest. The Redwood Nature Trail in Brookings and the nearby Oregon Redwoods Trail along Peavine Ridge offer easy walking along short loops.

Info: Redwood Nature Trail; Oregon Redwoods Trail

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Redwood Hikes and Save the Redwoods League provide excellent online trip-planning information.

travel@latimes.com

@latimestravel
Members of the Dodgers Booster Club at Dodger Stadium listen to Vin Scully describe the Dodgers 4-1 win over the Cardinals. Only problem  the Dodgers were playing in St. Louis.

These fans were rooting for former Dodgers playing for the Washington Senators during a double header against the Los Angeles Angels.

Staff writer John Hall reported in the June 3, 1965, Los Angeles Times:

Its still Dodger Stadium  even when the Angels are in town.

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Big Frank Howard, Ken McMullen, Phil Ortega and the rest of the Dodger exs now performing for Washington proved that fact rather embarrassingly here Wednesday night as they smashed out a twin-bill sweep over the Angels, 13-0 and 7-1.

Top noisemaker in the homecoming party was Frank the Tank, who ripped two homers and a double and drove in four runs in the first game romp that left Fred Newman (6-3) battered and bruised in his worst licking as an Angel.

But Howard wasnt the only giant. All the former National Leaguers had a ball  an American League ball, that is.

A crowd of 6,093 saw McMullen also belt at two-run homer in the first frame of the nightcap to get the Nats off and rolling over Aubrey Gatewood (0-2). ...

This photo by former staff photographer Cal Montney was published in the June 4, 1965, Los Angeles Times.

In 1966, the Angels moved to their own stadium in Anaheim.

This post was originally published on July 2, 2013.

See more from the Los Angeles Times archives here
The Indonesian media has dubbed him The Terrorist Whisperer.

In a hotel conference room here, Noor Huda Ismail welcomed the participants in his three-day workshop. We have four generations of former terrorists here today, said the jovial 45-year-old as he bounded around the room in a batik shirt, black glasses and Nikes.

He gave a shout-out to the lone representative of the eldest generation, a graybeard who had joined the U.S.-backed mujahedin to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

With a smile and a nod, he acknowledged two former fighters from a Muslim group that sought to impose Islamic rule on the Philippines in the 1990s, then six veterans from Indonesias Muslim-Christian disputes a decade later.

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And the latest generation is here too, he said, waving at a 19-year-old in a hijab who had gone to Syria with more than two dozen members of her family to join Islamic State.

The ex-jihadis  known in the counter-extremism world as formers  had come for help rebuilding their lives.

Ismail is dedicated to helping his country solve a problem confronting societies worldwide: how to de-radicalize violent extremists. His nonprofit takes a more compassionate approach than many other groups and governments, encouraging formers to share their stories and expand their social circles.

The media always call me the terrorist whisperer, he said. But I would prefer they called me observer of the heart.

The conference participants looked remarkably ordinary. They wore name tags, carried orange swag bags and passed around a microphone for questions. The venue  a marble-lobbied hotel here that caters to businessmen  seemed fitting. It was the kind of place that some of the attendees once might have aspired to blow up.

Having renounced their old ways, they now hoped to engage in peaceful pursuits such as starting small businesses or making autobiographical videos for YouTube  both topics at the conference last month.

I hope using these skills wont just help us make more money, but get blessings from God, said 43-year-old Zaenal Muttaqin, who served 5 years in prison for helping arm Indonesian terrorists and was now helping his wife with her tailoring business.

The formers bantered over coffee and cake and gathered for group selfies. Nobody lingered on their resumes in terrorism, which ranged from serving as low-level functionaries in jihadi networks to ordering beheadings.

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A counter-extremism specialist from Facebook flew in from Singapore to talk about the companys content-sharing policies, and a representative of TedxJakarta, a local affiliate of Ted, the New York-based nonprofit, led a workshop on storytelling.

In that session, the formers were paired up and instructed to tell each other the tale of Yusuf from the Koran  in which a young man rises to high office after his release from prison in Egypt  in five minutes or less. Then they were asked to boil down the story down to a slogan.

Prison brings success! someone called out to laughter and applause.

In addition to the 10 formers, the participants in the conference included 20 ustadhs, or teachers  university professors and Muslim scholars, split equally between men and women.

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Formers and ustadhs were paired together in a sort of Secret Santa arrangement in which formers  dubbed Angels  would oblige their ustadhs  dubbed Humans  with uplifting texts or food deliveries from the restaurant buffet.

Change can start from a very small act of kindness, Ismail said.

The formers took careful notes as a public relations and digital branding executive shared tips on growing a brand online.

There are a lot of similarities between terrorists and businessmen, Ismail said. Like businesspeople, terrorists are risk-takers, people persons, storytellers, and in their own way, are often charismatic.

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Noor Huda Ismail, left, leads a conference at a hotel in Jakarta. The formers are in the front row. (Carla Power / For The Times )

Ismail said he was once on a track toward extremism.

When he was 12, his parents, both civil servants in the Indonesian city of Solo, sent him to a hard-line Islamic boarding school there. He was hoping to study Islam in Pakistan, but when he asked the headmasters daughter out on a date, it marked him as morally tainted and cost him a scholarship.

He briefly belonged to Darul Islam, a group agitating for sharia law in Indonesia, but he loathed the infighting and quit.

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In his late twenties, while working as a stringer for the Washington Post, he learned that one of the perpetrators of the 2002 Bali bombing  in which Islamic militants killed 202 people  was his boarding school roommate. Seeing police leaflets featuring his schoolmates face piqued his interest about paths into extremism. What, he wondered, would have made a bright young man want to murder innocents?

In 2008, after a stint at St. Andrews University in Scotland studying extremism, he started the Institute for International Peace Building  know by its Indonesian initials, YPP  and began recruiting former terrorists who were still in prison and wanted to start over. The organization helps them find jobs and new communities once theyre free.

Most people thought I was crazy, he said. They were like, why give a second chance to those who betrayed democracy in the first place? But we need to use their stories to dissuade others from following the same path.

He said his early attempts at de-radicalization were failures. In one case, he funded an ex-cons T-shirt business only to discover later that the former terrorist was printing T-shirts featuring jihadi slogans.

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But eventually he found a former willing to truly reform. Machmudi Hariono had fought in the Philippines and served 5 years in prison in Indonesia after police captured him in a safehouse for members of a terrorist group known as the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. Ismail taught him to cook duck, then helped him set up a restaurant. Serving customers proved a valuable cultural exchange and a lesson in tolerance.

My jihadi networks taught me to hate people who are different from me, Hariono said. But through the restaurant, I learned to meet new people. Even if theyre nonbelievers, you have to serve them anyway.

Hariono, 42, also works at the nonprofit, which now has 15 employees.

Machmudi Hariono carries a tray of food for customers at his restaurant in Solo, Central Java, Indonesia. (Achmad Ibrahim / Associated Press )

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Governments around the world are grappling with how to handle people who joined extremist groups or expressed support for them. Now that Islamic State has lost the territory it once controlled in Iraq and Syria, many of its 40,000 foreign fighters have recently returned to their countries  including western Europe, Turkey and Tunisia.

The British defense minister, Gavin Williamson, has advocated for hunting down the returnees and killing them. A dead terrorist cant cause any harm to Britain, he told the Daily Mail last year.

Other countries, including Pakistan and Germany, have launched de-radicalization programs. Many involve a mix of psychological counseling and religious debate.

But Ismail, who is writing a doctoral thesis on the role of masculinity in Indonesian terrorist networks, said such a paternalistic approach is likely to fail. Having clerics lecture jailed terrorists on interpretations of the Koran wont work if the extremists assume the clerics are stooges of the state.

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For many jihadis, Islamic ideology was never the point, he said: Some of the terrorists are clueless about religion. They mainly get into it through who theyre hanging out with, or because they think the military aspects look cool.

Indonesia, which has seen hundreds of its citizens join Islamic State, has been an ideal testing ground for Ismails belief that people can change.

As the worlds most populous Muslim country, it has a softer approach to combating terrorism and a more optimistic vision about the rehabilitation of formers than many Western countries, said Sidney Jones, director of the Jakarta-based Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict.

There was an assumption, especially in the pre-[Islamic State] years, that these were fundamentally good young men whod gone astray, said Jones. That theyd joined these organizations out of a warped idealism, or the sense of wanting to help fellow Muslims being persecuted, and they just needed to be brought back to the right path.

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Noor Huda Ismail speaks at a conference in Jakarta. (Khairun Lamb / Dosfellas )

Though leaders of terrorist groups can receive long prison sentences, punishment for followers can be relatively light, even for murderers. In prison and after their release, former terrorists are encouraged to enroll in a government de-radicalization program or work with nonprofits such as Ismails.

Ismail declined to say who was funding the conference, only that they were my friends.

Several sessions were intended to challenge traditional views of women and foreigners. Alimatul Qibtiyah, a gender studies professor whod done her graduate work in Iowa, shocked a few formers at the buffet lunch when she told them that she and her husband didnt agree on whether wearing the veil was compulsory in Islam or not.

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Other sessions were subtly tailored to appeal to jihadi sensibilities.

Hassan Ahmad, a humanitarian aid worker from Singapore, showed slides from his missions to Afghanistan, Yemen and Japan, stressing aid works excitement, danger and opportunity to help fellow Muslims  all common reasons for young men to join jihadi groups.

He paused at a slide of one colleague, killed in the Philippines in a typhoon.

You can die doing this, Ahmad said. If you die, you want to die this kind of death. Praise God!

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After her presentation, the Facebook employee, Gullnaz Baig, took questions.

Islamic State followers used to have many fake accounts, and then Facebook would take them down, said one former. If the account was taken down, people would just say, My account has become shaheed [a martyr], and theyd just start another one. One dies, and a thousand grow. How does Facebook respond to this?

The company traces, then deletes linked accounts it deems dangerous, Baig said.

There was also a workshop on parliamentary debate. Hasanuddin, who had recently spent 11 years in prison and like many Indonesians uses only one name, said he was more familiar with talk-show screaming and name-calling.

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On television, I notice that people dont debate the way youve described, he told the woman giving the talk.

Maybe its because our society loves to bully, Ismail said.

There was no mention of Hasanuddins crime: masterminding the beheading of three Christian schoolgirls.

After the conference ended, a small group of formers who had trained in the jungles of Southeast Asia accompanied Hariono to a friends high-rise apartment where they would spend the night before returning to their homes the next day.

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In the past, they would have seen an apartment as too luxurious, and as something for kafirs, or infidels, Hariono said. I want to broaden their view, and maybe theyll share their story with other formers, and broaden their views, too.

Power is a special correspondent.
Four people were killed, including a 15-year-old boy, in the fourth consecutive week of protests organized by the Islamist militant group Hamas along the border between the Gaza Strip, which it controls, and Israel.

The Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza reported 96 injured. The boy, Mohammed Ayyoub, was shot by Israeli forces near the Jabaliya refugee camp, and died about two hours later. Palestinian officials said the others slain, three men in their 20s, were also killed by live fire from the Israeli army.

The army said approximately 3,000 Palestinians took part in Fridays demonstrations.

The Israeli government had not commented on the deaths Friday, but Nickolay Mladenov, the United Nations special coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, posted scathing remarks on Twitter.

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It is OUTRAGEOUS to shoot at children! How does the killing of a child in #Gaza today help #peace? It doesnt! It fuels anger and breeds more killing. #Children must be protected from #violence, not exposed to it, not killed! This tragic incident must be investigated, Mladenov wrote.

 It is OUTRAGEOUS to shoot at children! How does the killing of a child in #Gaza today help #peace? It doesnt! It fuels anger and breeds more killing. #Children must be protected from #violence, not exposed to it, not killed! This tragic incident must be investigated.  Nickolay E. MLADENOV (@nmladenov) April 20, 2018

Fridays demonstration was the fourth of six planned protests organized under the rubric Great March of Return. They are scheduled to last two more weeks and culminate in a massive march along the Gaza-Israel border fence.

Palestinian sources estimated the number of participants in Fridays protest at about 4,500, much lower than in previous marches. Estimates of those crowds have ranged from 10,000 to 30,000.

Fridays march was dedicated to Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, and some protesters brandished bilingual Hebrew-Arabic banners reading, Our prisoners are our number one priority.

The Israeli army accused demonstrators of attempting to approach the security infrastructures, burning tires adjacent to it and attempting to fly kites with burning items attached to them. Several kites crossed into Israel and were extinguished upon landing.

The army posted pictures of a few burning kites, including one decorated with a Nazi swastika.

In anticipation of possible rioting, Israeli security forces dropped leaflets over Gaza on Friday morning warning residents against using violence against Israeli civilians and soldiers or causing any damage to the border fence.

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You are participating in violent disturbances, the leaflets read in Arabic. Hamas is taking advantage of you to carry out terrorist attacks. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are prepared for any scenario. Stay away from the fence and do not attempt to damage it.

The Israeli army alleged in a statement that Hamas has used the protests to cover terrorist acts against Israels security infrastructure and IDF forces. The army warned that it would not allow an attack on security infrastructure and the fence that protects Israeli citizens.

Palestinians protesters burn tires during clashes near the border with Israel in the east of Gaza City on Friday. (MOHAMMED SABER/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock )

Thirty-four Palestinians have been killed in the weekly clashes since they started on March 30.

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Israel has yet to release the results of its investigation into the April 6 death of Yasser Murtaja, 30, a Palestinian photographer who was shot while wearing a vest emblazoned with the word Press.

On Friday, an Israeli army spokesman said that the circumstances in which the journalist was allegedly hit by IDF gunfire are currently under investigation.

Last week, the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Murtaja had been a Hamas militant, but released no evidence to support the claim.

Asked for supporting material this week, David Keyes, Netanyahus spokesman for the foreign media, replied, Murtaja was 100% a Hamas officer. I saw the intelligence myself. There is not a scintilla of doubt.

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Palestinian media in the West Bank, the seat of the Palestinian Authority, have reported on numerous attempts to quell the protests, in particular by the Egyptian government. The Gaza Strip, an enclave of about 2 million people, is bordered by Egypt, Israel and the Mediterranean Sea.

It has been isolated by a siege almost continuously since 2007, when Hamas, considered a terrorist group by much of the world, wrenched control of the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian Authority in a bloody conflict.

Hamas organizing committee says the marches will not stop before May 15, the Gregorian calendar date on which Palestinians commemorate the Nakba, or catastrophe, which is how they refer to the first full day of Israels existence.

Israel, which declared independence on May 14, 1948, celebrated its Independence Day this year on April 18, in accordance with the Hebrew calendar.

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Special correspondents Abu Alouf and Tarnopolsky reported from Khan Yunis and Jerusalem, respectively.

UPDATES:

3:25 p.m.: This article was updated with comments from U.N. official Nickolay Mladenov.

This article was originally published at 9:55 a.m.
As Israel celebrated the 70th anniversary of its independence this week, its leaders were voicing concern that the United States  which has always been its most important ally  was doing too little about what they view as a growing threat from Iran.

Tehran is more than 1,000 miles east of Jerusalem overland. But Iran has been amassing power and influence just across the Israeli border in Syria, where its a key backer of the government of Bashar Assad in the long civil war there. Iran also has a foothold in Lebanon  which also shares a border with Israel  through its support for the Shiite Muslim militia Hezbollah.

The fear in Israel is that Iran is setting up permanent military bases in Syria that could be used to launch cross-border attacks.

Israel has been looking to the U.S. and to a lesser extent its European allies to lean on Russia, an ally of the Syrian government, to help curtail Irans military buildup.

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There are those who can stop it without using military force, Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said last week during a visit to the border with Syria. I hope they will act and do the right thing. It is in their power to prevent Iran from establishing itself without unnecessary friction.

But the West has been losing leverage with Russia amid deteriorating relations, Europe has been unable to agree on an Iran policy, and the Trump administration has flummoxed Israel with mixed messages.

On Sunday, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley buoyed Israel when she announced new sanctions against Russia in response to its support for Assad and his apparent use of chemical weapons against his own people. She also said one U.S. goal in Syria is to make sure the influence of Iran doesnt take over the area.

Then on Tuesday, Larry Kudlow, a senior White House economics official, said that Haleys statement reflected momentary confusion on her part and that the administration was still deciding what to do.

Steven Simon, a history professor at Amherst College who led the National Security Councils Middle East and North Africa desk from 2011 to 2012, said, Its hard to say where the administration is going in part because theres been a notable tension between the Oval Office and the national security team.

In a radio interview this week, Tzipi Livni, an opposition member in Israels parliament and a former foreign minister, was still hanging on to that hope that its key ally would come through. We need the United States to resume its customary leadership role in the international community and act on Syria, she said.

Uncertainty in Israel over the U.S. commitment is all the more surprising because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu portrayed the election of President Trump as a positive step for U.S.-Israeli relations. Netanyahu clashed with the administration of President Obama and was especially critical of the nuclear deal he struck with Iran, saying it increased the threat Iran posed to Israel.

But Netanyahus relationship with Trump is proving to be more complicated than he had anticipated.

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Netanyahu has already made a significant effort to convince Trump to address the Iranian presence in Syria and has apparently failed  because after that conversation Trump reiterated his intention to remove all American forces from Syria, Yossi Kuperwasser, a retired brigadier general and former head of Israeli military intelligence, said in an interview.

Kuperwasser said that the U.S. military presence in Syria, alongside Kurdish and opposition forces, may last for a while but that Trumps clear aim is to remove his forces and replace them with local forces.

This could make it easier for Iran to succeed in establishing a ground corridor from Iran to Lebanon, he said.

Jonathan Schanzer, a senior vice president for research at Washingtons Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said the Trump administration appreciates the threat Iran poses to Israel and to U.S. interests.

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But there is still real reticence to make a strategic commitment, he said. This is the friction between [Netanyahu] and Trump, despite their genuinely warm ties.

Tension between Israel and Iran has been rising.

Israel said last week that an Iranian drone that entered its airspace from Syria in February was armed and aiming to attack.

Israel is being blamed for last weeks bombing of Syrias T4 air base, where the drone was launched  and where Iran aims to establish an air force compound. The strike reportedly targeted an advanced Iranian air defense system as well as the systems deploying the drones.

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From the beginning of Syrias civil war, Israel has said it would not permit Iran to bring game-changing weapons into the region.

Iran, which said seven officers from its elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were killed in the attack, threatened to retaliate.

Tel Aviv will be punished for its aggressive action, Bahram Qassemi, the spokesman for Irans Foreign Ministry, told reporters. The occupying Zionist regime will, sooner or later, receive an appropriate response to its actions.

Israel is so concerned about the escalation of tension with Iran that on Wednesday it canceled its air forces participation in a training exercise with U.S. warplanes in Alaska, an army spokesperson said.

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Experts said Russia remains the key to stymieing Irans ambitions in Syria. But Moscows meddling in the U.S. presidential election, its unbridled support for Assad and its alleged poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter in Britain have brought relations with the West to their lowest point in decades.

In the absence of a clear American or European policy, Israels own diplomacy with Russia has become more important. Kuperwasser said the strategy is to convince Russian President Vladimir Putin that allowing Iran to gain a permanent foothold will hurt Russias regional interests. Netanyahu and Putin have met at least eight times over two years to discuss the issue.

So far, those efforts have not worked.

It seems the Russians prefer not to know what Iran is doing under its nose, Kuperwasser said. But if they dont want to see more exchanges of fire in areas they are supposed to be in charge of, I hope they will take action to ensure the Iranians dont do anything that threatens Israel.

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In an interview with the Israeli news website Walla this week, Lieberman, the Israeli defense minister, seemed to suggest that Israel would act alone if need be to protect its security interests.

We will not allow Iranian consolidation in Syria, he said. We wont allow any restriction when it comes to Israels security interests.

Tarnopolsky is a special correspondent.
Fresh off their takeover of Syrias eastern Ghouta enclave earlier this month, loyalist forces were poised on Friday to subdue pockets south of Damascus held by Islamic State and rebel groups, Syrian pro-government media and activists said.

The move is part of a larger bid to secure the capital, the seat of power of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Syrian state TV broadcast images of the government assault targeting an arc of four militant-held areas ringing Damascus southern flank, including the Yarkmouk camp, once home to the worlds largest Palestinian refugee community.

The 6-square-mile swath of territory is home to approximately 12,200 Palestinian refugees, according to estimates from the U.N.s Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA).

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The onslaught followed days of army units and pro-government irregulars mobilizing from as far as the northern city of Aleppo before massing south of the capital.

By Thursday, a deal giving the militants safe passage had broken down before Islamic States refusal to leave, activists said.

Syrian and Russian warplanes were soon crisscrossing Damascus skies on their way to bomb the rebel-held territories. They were joined by the pounding of artillery and rockets.

The Syrian army is now smashing the defensive line of the armed terrorist groups and conducting attacks inside, a state TV correspondent, using the governments routine term for the opposition, said in a live broadcast Friday from what was said to be the outskirts of the Islamic State-held Al Hajar Al-Aswad district.

As he spoke, the sound of sustained heavy machine gun fire could be heard. Smoke engulfed the areas drab buildings before the camera focused on a slow-growing yellow bloom of an explosion farther away.

Later, he said there were reports that a ceasefire was about to be put in place but was waiting on the rebels to submit fully to the terms of a deal that would see most of them depart to the opposition-controlled province of Idlib in Syrias northwest or to the eastern desert region still under Islamic States sway.

Those who chose to lay down their arms could stay, he added.

Amaq, a news agency affiliated with Islamic State, said in a report released on its social media channel Friday that more than 100 airstrikes had targeted the area since Thursday.

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The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a pro-opposition watchdog monitoring the violence in Syria using a network of activists, reported on Friday that Islamic State representatives had relented and had accepted the evacuation agreement.

UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness said in a statement Friday that the agency was deeply concerned about the fate of civilians in Yarmouk and surrounding areas, adding that reports had emerged of civilian casualties as well as displacement of large numbers of people.

UNRWA stands ready to provide assistance to the population in the area if and when the security situation allows and access is granted, said Gunness, adding in a later email that Yarmouk had not received aid since 2015.

The impending surrender marks the end of a long-standing thorn for the government.

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The conflict in Yarmouk, a shanty town 5 miles south of the capital that has solidified into a claustrophobic jumble of concrete-block homes and crowded walkways, is a smaller version of the larger war in Syria.

Early in the uprising in 2011, Palestinian factions with established bases in the camp began to fight each other, some siding with the nascent armed opposition while others allied themselves with Assad.

It escalated into a battle of wormholes; fighters would creep through tunnels they punched across apartments before burrowing into adjacent buildings. Ragged shrouds lined walkways exposed to snipers.

A shortage of fighters meant children would often keep vigil over access points, playing with AK-47 machine guns and grenades as if they were the kites and balls they had recently abandoned. They would often shout colorful curses at each other from just a few yards, the distance separating different spheres of influence.

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By 2015, Islamic State had infiltrated Yarmouk and established control over most of its territory.

With eastern Ghouta in government hands, Damascus moved to dislodge the militants who had long refused any evacuation deal.

Despite reports of a ceasefire, several activists insisted that the fighting was still going on.

No truce, no ceasefire, reported the activist-run Yarmouk Camp and Syria News Network.

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Either the [Islamic State] fighters leave the area or they will be buried in the ground of the camp and Al Hajar.

Bulos is a special correspondent.

Twitter: @nabihbulos
This year's Kentucky Derby is unlike anything we've seen in many years, as it looks as if we have a number of budding superstars, some of whom have already been labeled as freaks. A couple, Justify and Magnum Moon, are undefeated, have displayed extraordinary brilliance, and are looking to defy history by putting an end to the so-called Apollo curse. We have last year's champion 2-year-old Good Magic, who has already defied history by not only winning the Breeders' Cup Juvenile while still a maiden, but crushing a deep and talented field. He returned to that form by winning the Blue Grass Stakes and appears to be sitting on a big effort.

And there is Florida Derby winner Audible and Louisiana Derby winner Noble Indy, who have suffered only one defeat, with the former coming into the race off three dominating victories, two of them in major Derby preps. And finally there is the talented Vino Rosso and Bolt d'Oro, who have proven themselves in major stakes and have pedigrees that all but guarantee they will love the mile and a quarter.

So, with a such a remarkable array of talent, four of the contenders coming from the same barn, how should one look at a European invader? Is it possible that it is the Irish-trained Mendelssohn who actually is the freak? The son of the American sire Scat Daddy may be the most difficult horse to get a real handle on following his total annihilation of the UAE Derby I Dubai.

Mendelssohn, from the always potent and dangerous Aidan O'Brien arsenal, is unlike any European invader we have seen in a long time, having such strong ties to U.S, breeding through his sire, his sister, the great Beholder, and his brother, Into Mischief, a fast racehorse who has emerged as one the top sires in America. Yet when he came here for the Breeders' Cup, he surprisingly was entered in the Juvenile Turf instead of the Juvenile. That proved to be a smart move by OBrien, as Mendelssohn sat right behind the leaders in third, then split horses and burst clear with an explosive turn of foot and held off the late closers.

Despite Mendelssohn running all his races at 2 on grass, O'Brien always had the Kentucky Derby as his long-range goal. In Europe, he was a bit of an enigma, running terribly in his career debut and in the group 2 Champagne Stakes. But equipped with blinkers for the group 1 Dewhurst Stakes, he ran a strong second at 50-1 before coming to America for the Breeders' Cup, where he was sent off as a 9-2 favorite.

As a 3-year-old, O'Brien ran him in the one-mile Patton Stakes on the all-weather surface at Dundalk under 134 pounds and he scored a workmanlike three-quarters of a length victory over two stablemates. That was one step closer to dirt, but provided no indication of what was to come. Now it was on to the UAE Derby at 1 3/16 miles against what appeared to be a deep talented field from the U.S., Europe, Dubai, and Japan, including Godolphins 10 1/2-length UAE Two Thousand Guineas winner Gold Town, who had Derby aspirations of his own. What happened next caught everyone by surprise. Mendelssohn shot right to the lead and kept opening up on his opponents until they were mere specks in the distance. The winning margin was an astounding 18 1/2 lengths, with Mendelssohn setting a new track record.

Just like that, it was as if the Kentucky Derby picture had been hit over the head with a sledgehammer. What in the world were we dealing with? As quickly as Mendelssohn had shot away from his opponents, that's how quickly he shot up the rankings of Derby contenders.

So, that's where we stand now. All we can do is wait for this European phenom to arrive in Kentucky.

O'Brien spoke of the colt from his Ballydoyle headquarters. As you know, Mendelssohn came to us in November as a yearling and was very babyish and immature. He ran down the field on his debut finishing eighth, but showed plenty of improvement to win his maiden at the Curragh in his second start, despite looking green and still immature.

He improved again when he was second in the Dewhurst and then again when he won at the Breeders Cup in Del Mar. It was always the intention to run on the grass in Del Mar even though we always considered him a Kentucky Derby prospect, as we didnt want to stop the progression he was making.

As for how the colt is progressing since his UAE Derby procession, O'Brien said, Mendelssohns preparation this season has gone smoothly, starting off in Dundalk and then onto the dirt surface in Dubai which was always the plan. I was very pleased with his run in Dubai, as he always seemed to be doing things very easily. As he went further and further clear he seemed incredibly relaxed.

He is a very cool character and seems to be taking everything in his stride. Weve always regarded him as a Kentucky Derby type horse, and well just have to see how he gets on.

Everyone in America is waiting to see as well.
By J. Keeler Johnson ("Keelerman") Twitter: @J_Keelerman



Every year, one of my favorite races to handicap is the $1.2 million Charles Town Classic (gr. II) at Charles Town in West Virginia. The huge purse usually ensures that a competitive field lines up to contest the race, and what's better than a group of talented older horses running nine furlongs around three turns at a six-furlong bullring racetrack known for producing quirky results?

That sounds like a recipe for upset winners and enticing payoffs, and indeed, only one favorite has prevailed in nine renewals of the Charles Town Classic. Not every payoff has been as impressive as $55.00 return generated by 2014 winner Imperative (who proved that experience over the track is a positive by winning again in 2017), but it has certainly paid to think outside the box when handicapping the Charles Town Classic.

I plan to keep this trend on my side in the 2018 edition of the race while siding against the 8-5 morning line favorite Diversify. The New York-bred son of Bellamy Road put together an impressive three-race win streak last year, prevailing in the Saginaw Stakes and Evan Shipman Stakes against fellow state-breds before stepping up sharply in class for the ten-furlong Jockey Club Gold Cup (gr. I) and winning in gate-to-wire fashion with a 107 Beyer.

However, I felt at the time that Diversify benefited from securing a very easy lead in the Jockey Club Gold Cup, and when he returned to action in the Clark Handicap (gr. I) at Churchill Downs I questioned whether he would be as effective while shipping away from the fast tracks at Belmont and Saratoga for the first time. Diversify started as the favorite in the Clark, but after once again securing a clear lead, he faltered in the final furlong to finish fourth.

Diversify's best effort would certainly make him a contender in the Charles Town Classic, but he'll be returning from a five-month layoff on Saturday while racing over a track much, much different than what he is accustomed to in New York. I think he will be vulnerable at a short price.

I'm more interested in War Story, the second choice at 5-2. Although consistency has never been War Story's strong suit, there can be no denying that he's stepped up his game in a big way over the last year or so, with his best efforts including a win in the Brooklyn Handicap (gr. II) and a strong fourth-place finish in the Breeders' Cup Classic (gr. I).

War Story signaled that he's still in good form by winning the Challenger Stakes at Tampa Bay Downs last month by 5  lengths with a 107 Beyer, and it's important to note that he's the only horse in the Charles Town Classic that has previously run at Charles Town-he finished third by just a half-length in this race last year. His experience over the track is a major positive, as is the fact that he'll be ridden by Javier Castellano, who has three victories and a second-place finish from five rides in the Charles Town Classic.

But if you really want to think outside the box, why not consider the 8-1 shot Something Awesome? Owned by Stronach Stable and trained by Jose Corrales, the seven-year-old son of Awesome Again has competed over an astonishing variety of distances and surfaces since his debut in November 2014, and he's also been conditioned by three different trainers while competing from coast-to-coast and in Canada as well.

But for all of his exploits, there's one thing that Something Awesome hasn't done very often, and that is run a mile or farther on dirt. Remarkably, it appears that this may have been his ideal trip all along, which isn't really a surprise since his sire is the 1998 Breeders' Cup Classic winner Awesome Again. After being transferred to the care of Corrales last year and shipped from Woodbine to Laurel Park, Something Awesome showed new life sprinting on dirt, winning three of his first four starts over the winter, including the seven-furlong General George Stakes (gr. III).

But it was Something Awesome's effort in the nine-furlong Harrison E. Johnson Memorial Stakes at Laurel last month that really caught my attention. After rating nicely just behind the early leaders, Something Awesome advanced to take the lead with three furlongs remaining, then drew off decisively to win by 2  lengths with a career-best 100 Beyer speed figure. Notably, the distant third-place finisher-Discreet Lover-came right back to win the Excelsior Stakes (gr. III) at Aqueduct and is also entered in the Charles Town Classic.

Something Awesome will be facing tougher competition in the Charles Town Classic, but I think his overall record will cause him to be overlooked in the wagering despite the fact that his only try in a dirt route over the last three years yielded an impressive victory. It seems odd to say this about a horse that is seven years old, but a case can be made that Something Awesome is only now reaching his peak.

I hope to see Something Awesome work out a perfect trip settling behind Diversify and the front-running Afleet Willy early on before making his move in the final three furlongs. If he stays near his morning line odds of 8-1, I think he'll offer the best value in the race and is a horse to use on top and in the exotics with War Story. In fact, a Something Awesome/War Story exacta box seems like the perfect play to me.

Now it's your turn! Who do you like in the Charles Town Classic?

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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.
A 20-year-old former Allentown man is being sought on charges his actions caused the death of a passenger in the car he crashed head-on Nov. 4 into another vehicle on the Hamilton Street bridge in the city, the Lehigh County District Attorney's Office reports.

Fernando Hernandez, formerly of the 200 block of East Union Street, was intoxicated as he was driving with a suspended license just after 2 a.m. in the 300 block of Hamilton Street, the district attorney's office said in a news release.

The 2008 Acura TSX crossed over the double yellow line and struck an eastbound Kia driven by Michael Velez, 22, of the 300 block of Linden Street in Allentown, the district attorney's office said. Velez and his passenger Tavon Minon, 21, of the 200 block of North West Street in Allentown, were injured.

Hernandez's front seat passenger Lizaida Antonetty, 21, of the 100 block of Gordon Street, died from her injuries at the scene, the district attorney's office said.

"It is alleged that Hernandez was grossly negligent by crossing into the oncoming lane of traffic, and that this was the cause of the crash that resulted in Ms. Antonetty's death and Mr. Velez's and Mr. Mion's injuries," District Attorney Jim Martin said in the release.

Hernandez, who left two days after the crash for the Dominican Republic, is charged in a warrant with homicide by vehicle while driving under the influence, homicide by vehicle, accidents involving death and personal injury while not properly licensed, involuntary manslaughter, recklessly endangering another person (two counts), and driving under the influence of alcohol or a controlled substance (two counts), the district attorney's office said.

He also faces lesser charges of reckless driving, careless driving-unintentional death, driving while operating privilege is suspended or revoked and purchase, consumption, possession or transportation of liquor, the district attorney's office said.

Tony Rhodin may be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyRhodin. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
Soon anyone will be able to rent a bike for free from the Bethlehem YMCA as part of the city's bike sharing program.

Bethlehem Health Director Kristen Wenrich announced Friday afternoon that the Greater Valley YMCA branch is one of two new locations being added this year with the help of a $10,000 donation from Highmark Blue Shield health insurance.

The second location will be selected through a city application process. Any business or organization interested in becoming a Bike Bethlehem rental location can apply to become the next site here. A committee will then review the applications and select one, Wenrich explained.

Bike Bethlehem launched in August 2016 with two locations at the Bethlehem Area Public Library's main branch on Church Street and Cutter Bike Shop on the South Side.

Since the program's inception, more than 275 bikes have been borrowed and feedback has been excellent, Wenrich said.

Highmark Blue Shield donates millions of dollars to organizations each year, but bike share programs remain one of the company's favorite causes, said Kathleen McKenzie, vice president of community affairs at Highmark Health. The company already funds bike sharing programs in Pittsburgh and Harrisburg, so Bethlehem seemed a natural extension, she said.

Greater Valley YMCA CEO David Fagerstrom said the bike share program really fits into what the Y is all about: empowering people from all walk's of life to be healthy, active and improve their quality of life.

Bikes should be available at the YMCA in Bethlehem starting in May, Wenrich said.

St. Luke's University Health Network made the initial $10,000 donation to get Bike Bethlehem up and running. The Highmark donation funded the purchase of 14 new adult bikes, six children's bikes, two trailers and various bike parts, according to a news release.

To rent a bike, all you need to hand over is a valid form of identification showing you are 18 or older. (Parents or guardians can rent bikes for children).

You then get a bike equipped with a basket, helmet and lock to borrow for the day. Bikes must be returned to the same location on the same day 30 minutes before closing. You will receive your ID back when you return the bike.

Sara K. Satullo may be reached at ssatullo@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @sarasatullo and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
A Bethlehem man has been identified as the person whose body was found Friday morning in the Lehigh River near the Route 33 bridge.

David Brackenbury, 39, was deceased when he was found in the river just east of the bridge in Lower Saucon Township by a search and rescue crew.

His death was ruled a suicide, Northampton County Coroner Zachary Lysek said.

In his obituary, Brackenbury's family said he " lost his long battle with bipolar disorder."

"A kind soul and loyal friend, David possessed a unique compassion for those less fortunate, who suffered or were challenged, that stemmed from his own experience of emotional pain," the obituary says.

Police were initially called for a report of a person jumping from the bridge. County dispatch records show a call at 6:54 a.m. for a water/dive rescue with the location being mile marker 1 of Route 33 South in Lower Saucon.

A vehicle was seen on the south side of the bridge just before 6 a.m. with four-way flashers on.

It's the second time in months that area crews have scoured the area near the Hope Road boat launch after a report of a jumper.

A 48-year-old Palmer Township man was believed to have jumped from the bridge on Jan. 3 in Bethlehem Township into the frozen river, but his body wasn't found.

Sarah Cassi may be reached at scassi@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @SarahCassi. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
UPDATE:

The Northampton County Coroner's Office was called in Friday morning after emergency crews from as far away as Easton responded to what was initially a water rescue tied to the Route 33 bridge in Lower Saucon Township, authorities sad.

Pennsylvania State Police at Belfast are investigating the incident. Rescue personnel were on scene below the bridge, a Northampton County emergency dispatch supervisor said, adding that state police would have to provide any other information.

County dispatch records show a call at 6:54 a.m. for a water/dive rescue with the location being mile marker 1 of Route 33 South in Lower Saucon. A vehicle was seen on the south side of the bridge just before 6 a.m. with four-way flashers on.

One official said the initial call Friday morning to the Bethlehem Township and Lower Saucon fire departments was for a jumper. A trooper at the Belfast barracks said he had no information to release and wouldn't confirm the object of the search was a 38-year-old man.

An emergency response was underway Friday morning in the Lehigh River below the Route 33 bridge in Lower Saucon and Bethlehem townships. (Sarah Cassi | For lehighvalleylive.com)

The coroner's office only responds for death investigations.

Just before 8 a.m., something was found on an island between the public and private boat launches into the river. A rescue basket was lowered about 20 minutes later and emergency personnel were loading the body of a white man onto a backboard. No life-saving measures were underway.

The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation reported a lane closed northbound on the bridge between the Interstate 78 and Freemansburg Avenue interchanges. It also reported a traffic disruption southbound due to something other than a crash.

The Easton and Palmer Township fire departments responded to the river but south of the Chain Dam, department officials confirmed.

The traffic situation on the bridge was cleared just after 8:30 a.m., PennDOT said.

It's the second time in months that area crews have scoured the area near the Hope Road boat launch after a report of a jumper.

A rescue boat on Friday morning is on the Lehigh River near the Hope Road boat launch in Bethlehem Township. (Sarah Cassi | For lehighvalleylive.com)

A 48-year-old Palmer Township man was believed to have jumped from the bridge on Jan. 3 in Bethlehem Township into the frozen river, but his body wasn't found.

Freelance photographer Tim Wynkoop provided information for this report.

Tony Rhodin may be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyRhodin. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
An Easton teenager knew she was going to state prison for driving while high on methamphetamine and crashing head-on into another car, killing a woman.

But Mazell Truss did not know how long she would spend behind bars for killing 64-year-old Elizabeth Audrey Rafferty last June 2 in the city.

On Friday, Judge Stephen Baratta sentenced the 19-year-old Truss to between six years plus two months and 21 years plus six months, the high-end of the standard sentencing range.

His sentence came after a lengthy hearing where Rafferty's children talked about the generous and faith-filled life she led before it was cut short.

Rafferty was on her way to her weekly lunch with her parents when Truss crashed into her SUV.

"It's hard not to be touched by the loss of this family. (Rafferty) didn't deserve anything that happened to her that day," Baratta said. "There is no kind of room for mercy, given what happened."

Truss, who has been in county prison while awaiting a resolution in her case, gave birth to her second child in February; she was pregnant when she crashed. She also has a 3-year-old daughter.

The judge said Truss's children are now "destined to live the type of life she had."

"She's victimized everybody: herself, the people she hurt in the accident and now she victimized her kids," Baratta said. "It's horrible, what's in front of me, and sad."

Truss pleaded guilty back in January to homicide by vehicle while driving under the influence, DUI, aggravated assault while DUI and causing an accident involving death while driving without a license.

The charges carried a mandatory minimum of three to six years in prison.

Truss was also sentenced Friday for breaking into the home of a girl involved with her boyfriend, the judge said.

Truss destroyed a couch and pictures, wrote something on the fridge, flattened bike tires, and took a hammer to windows and walls, causing $5,000 in damage.

Truss cried through most of Friday's hearing. While she had her attorney read a statement to the judge about her remorse and the punishment of living a life knowing she killed someone, the teen did apologize to Rafferty's family.

"I'm sorry. Really sorry to all of you," Truss said.

Police said Truss fled a minor crash in the 300 block of Larry Holmes Drive, turned left onto Lehigh Drive, crashed into one SUV, went airborne and crashed onto a second vehicle, killing Rafferty.

Rafferty was pronounced dead at Easton Hospital. She died of blunt-force trauma, according to Northampton County Coroner Zachary Lysek, who ruled the death an accident.

Injured in the crash on Lehigh Drive in Easton was Truss' passenger, Juan R. Rodriquez. He suffered a fractured femur and cuts and bruises to his knee, hand and lip.

Family said Rafferty, who already held a degree as a registered nurse from Moravian College and worked at Easton Hospital, was studying to become a "spiritual nurse." Rafferty was born in Phillipsburg, but last lived in Hanover Township, Northampton County.

Her children recalled a loving and kind matriarch who was devoted to her church and giving to her community.

"My mom was a contributor, giving to society," said her daughter Andrea Carney. "How long will it take to make Mazell Truss to become a constructive member of society?"

Bernard Rafferty read comment after comment about how loved his mother was, how generous she was with her time, how much she is missed.

"She had the voice, the heart, the soul that impacted thousands of lives," he said.

Truss started her life "behind the eight ball," the judge said.

Her father died when she was six, leading her mother to a downward spiral of drugs and alcohol. For a time, Truss lived with her aunt, whom she alleged verbally and physically abused her.

In 2013, Truss was charged as a juvenile after she brought a folding knife to school, Baratta said.

Truss became pregnant with her first child at 16, and moved back in with her mother.

Trudy Truss said the father of her daughter's second child was abusive, and the girl got involved with drugs.

"I wish you could see how she really is," Trudy Truss said. "She is my Mazell and I love her."

Sarah Cassi may be reached at scassi@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @SarahCassi. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
A Palmer Township man who crashed his pickup truck on a hunting trip in Pike County, killing all three of his passengers, was sentenced Thursday to 6 to 20 years in state prison.

Thomas J. Howey Jr. (Courtesy photo | For lehighvalleylive.com)

Thomas J. Howey Jr., 52, has been in the Pike County prison since pleading guilty Feb 2 to homicide by vehicle while driving under the influence of alcohol, homicide by vehicle, DUI and driving at an unsafe speed, said county First Assistant District Attorney Bruce DeSarro.

Judge Gregory H. Chelak handed down the sentence after hearing in court from family and friends of the three victims, Timothy Gerhard, 58, of Plainfield Township; Barry Foose Jr., 46, of Easton; and Eric Dunbar, 38, of Roseto.

All three were pronounced dead at the scene of the crash Nov. 29, 2015, in Greene Township.

Howey crashed his Ford F-150 into a tree while speeding.

From left, Timothy Gerhard, Barry Foose Jr. and Eric Dunbar were pronounced dead at the Nov. 29, 2015, crash in Greene Township, Pike County. (Courtesy photos | For lehighvalleylive.com)

He was able to tell Pennsylvania State Police investigators he remembered driving the three men back to his cabin on Mozette Road. It was the day before the start of Pennsylvania's two-week firearms season for white-tailed deer.

Howey admitted drinking four to five beers at Renegades Saloon in nearby Newfoundland, Pennsylvania, prior to the crash. A server at the bar when interviewed by police corroborated the claim.

Howey and Gerhard worked together at Asbury Graphite Mills in Franklin Township, Warren County. Howey was a foreman who had worked for the company for more than 30 years. Gerhard was the plant manager and worked there 40 years, according to his family. The pair often hunted together.

Foose was married to Howey's cousin. Dunbar was a friend of Foose's whom he had just introduced to the others.

Pike County District Attorney Ray Tonkin prosecuted the case.

"I can say that we're satisfied with the sentence and that hopefully not only this sentence but also the circumstances of the harm that occurred to these families serves as a lesson to people about the horrors of drunken driving," DeSarro told lehighvalleylive.com.

Howey's wife spoke on his behalf at sentencing. Afterward, he was returned to the county prison to await transfer to a state prison.

He was also ordered to pay $5,000 through the state Crime Victims Act, according to DeSarro.

Howey's Easton-based attorney, Robert Eyer, did not immediately return a call for comment on the sentence.

Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
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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

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Culture / Art Republik

Apr 20, 2018 | By Art Republik

The twentieth century was witness to significant changes to the social and political landscapes of the Southeast Asian countries the rise and fall of Sukarno and Suharto, rulers of two of the most impactful regimes in Indonesia; the Philippines struggle for independence from its colonisers; the revival of Cambodia from the devastating repercussions of Pol Pots authoritarian control; the transition of Singapore from a fishing village to one of the fastest growing economies in the world and so on. Through the years and the adversities, the search for artistic autonomy and the need for social change in the region often brought individuals together, giving birth to some of the regions most powerful works of art.

While the ideas of artist collaboration and collectives did not originate in the region, the political contexts within which these artist collectives functioned are unique from the rest of the world. Most historical collectives in the region were organised within the concept of unity in diversity. While artists formed unions and pledged their allegiance to a unanimous agenda, their painting styles and artistic explorations varied. This is largely opposed to how we understand collectives today which produce works of art in collaboration. Indeed, some of the most successful initiatives in the Southeast Asian region, past and present, stem from a union based on ideology and shared circumstances rather than practice. Therefore, it is worth discussing the achievements of these collectives keeping in mind their individual circumstances and agendas, as well as their influence on the collectives that succeeded them to find a place in the contemporary art world.

Indonesia has perhaps one of the most extensive histories of artist collectives in the region. One of the earliest and the most influential ones was founded by Indonesian Modern artists S. Sudjojono and Agus Djaja in 1938. The PERSAGI, Persatuan Ahli-Ahli Gambar Indonesia, or Union of Indonesian Painters ,was built upon the search for a national creative identity within a colonial setting. However, the 20 artists were not bound by style but by the ideology that art should mirror the viewpoints of the local people. The formation of PERSAGI is considered an important factor in the progression of a nationalist aesthetic in Indonesia that focused on connecting art to the local community. Sudjojono, for instance, known as the Father of Indonesian Modern Art, primarily found inspiration from the local people and the times in which he lived. He was also actively involved in the freedom struggle and often painted historical events in order to glorify the countrys past.

Succeeding the PERSAGI, the Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat or LEKRA (Institute for the Peoples Culture) took centre stage both in directing the local art scene towards socialist realism and leading public opinion towards democracy. This particular collective did not only unite visual artists, but also brought together writers, musicians and revolutionaries in an attempt to alter the political landscape of their nation. The LEKRA was also probably the largest collective and one of the most powerful based on the urgency with which it was subdued by the authorities to have been formed in the region. Prior to being brutally suppressed during the 30 September Movement coup in 1965 by Suhartos military forces, the collective had reached a count of 100,000 members. Within fifteen years of its existence, the LEKRA managed to gain enough support from the general public to transform into a semi-political organisation or a peoples movement that contributed to altering the course of history for Indonesia.

While these artist collectives, due to their overwhelming size and diversity, does not perfectly fit the definition of an artist collective as we understand it today, their accomplishments as collective voices for social and political change are significant, and examples of such initiatives can still be seen in the region.

During the devastating reign of Pol Pot in Cambodia, the White Building in Phnom Penh had become a site for the emergence of modernist artistic thought. The apartment building was primarily occupied by artists, before and after the genocide in 1970s and remains a cultural symbol to this day. While the initial tenants of the White Building never formally announced their union, a number of artist groups and collaborations emerged from the same space after the end of the authoritarian regime.

Stiev Selapak is an art collective founded in 2007 in Cambodia. It traces its roots back to the White Building, and now functions under only three of the founding members, namely Khvay Samnang, Lim Sokchanlina and Vuth Lyno. They come from different creative background and continue their individual practices while adhering to the agenda of the collective. Together, they have made significant contributions to the Cambodian art scene at large. With two artist spaces as well as a resource centre, the collective regularly hosts residencies, facilitates collaborations and offers classes in order to bring art to the local community and continue the legacy of the White Building.

One of the groups most appreciated projects was to develop an online archive and database which commemorates the living history of the White Building neighbourhood. In collaboration with Big Stories Co., they have built up a resourceful collection of materials, including old photographs, past and recent works of art as well as audio and visual documentations, that provide insight into the creative past of Phnom Penh and its most vibrant neighbourhood.

Further exploring the social and political circumstances that have led to the emergence of artist collectives in Southeast Asia reveals a shift in artistic motivations towards the end of the twentieth century. Artists began to rethink their position, not as voices of the people but as agents of the nation. While their connection to the general masses only grew stronger, the nationalist sentiments began to fade. Artists began to assume the position of the critics of the state, of the authorities and most importantly, of art.

For instance, with the rise of the authoritarian regime came another wave of creative struggle for local artists in Indonesia. The GRSB or the New Art Movement was founded in 1974 to question artistic legitimacy and the institutionalisation of fine art. As their manifesto Fine Art of Emancipation, Emancipation of Fine Art, presented in Jakarta on 2 May 1987, announced: A redefinition of fine art is required, to free it from the definition rooted in artes-liberals seek a new definition which can accommodate every expression of visual art. The New Art Movement in Indonesia advocated a postmodern approach to art and encouraged the exploration of artistic media such as performance and installation while maintaining contextual focus on social criticism. FX Harsonos 1975 work, Paling Top is one of the best examples to illustrate both the ingenuity as well as inherent critique present in the works of this group.

Another postmodern artistic union is The Artists Village founded by Singaporean artist Tang Da Wu in 1988. The objectives of the artist collective were to foster and develop an increased consciousness of the importance of the arts and their contribution to the Singaporean society. Against Singapores rapid economic developments in the 1980s, the union of creative minds wielded a transformative impact on the Singapores art scene, from performance art to new media.

While The Artists Village did not emerge as a reaction to a politically challenging situation as in the case of the GRSB, it was also set up to critically re-look and examine existing assumptions, values and concepts of art making in Singapore. The city state was at the time struggling with its identity and retention of local culture in the face of globalisation. Lee Wens Yellow Man is an artwork that gives visual form to these national anxieties.

As illustrated above, artist collectives in the region go beyond the idea of practical collaboration to unite like-minded individuals who seek to bring about change, whether by means of active participation or direct critique, and they do so by banding together. As Lois Frankel once said, A lone voice isnt as important as a collective voice. Creative thought and activity in Southeast Asia has frequently had a direct relation to the artists local socio-political circumstances, and traces of these historical initiatives can still be seen today in the inclination of recent artist collectives to incorporate social criticism and embrace diversity in their bodies of work.

This article was written by Tanya Singh for Art Republik 18.
Both non-Adventist and Adventist students study under Epauto Secondary School Principal Willie Luen (above left), now doing all he can to take in more students due to tragedy on Ambae
Ahmedabad : The Gujarat High Court today acquitted former BJP minister Maya Kodnani in the 2002 Naroda Paitya riots case in which 97 people were killed by a mob. The court, however, upheld the conviction of former Bajrang Dal leader Babu Bajrangi in the case, one of the worst

incidents of communal violence triggered by the Godhra train burning.

A division bench of Justices Harsha Devani and A S Supehiya pronounced the verdict. The bench said charges against Kodnani could not be established. Bajrangi, whose conviction was uhpeld by the court, was named one of the conspirators in the case. In August 2012, a special court for SIT cases had sentenced 32 people, including Kodnani, to life imprisonment. Kodnani was sentenced to 28 years of imprisonment, while Bajrangi was given life imprisonment till death. The high court had later reduced it to 21 years rigorous imprisonment.

The trial court had sentenced seven other accused to 31 years rigorous imprisonment, while 22 others were given 24 years in jail. Twenty nine others were acquitted in the case. Kodnani is currently on bail, while Bajrangi is in jail. The rioting took place on February 28, 2002, in the

Naroda Patiaya area of Ahmedabad where a mob killed 97 people. PTI
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Hundreds of people of Caribbean origin, who migrated to Britain as part of the Windrush generation (named after a ship that famously brought a large number of West Indian immigrants to London in 1948) are having their citizenship called into question by the state. Despite having lived and worked in the country for most of their lives, many such people (largely of retirement age) are now facing severe problems with their immigration status  seemingly out of the blue.

This cruel and absurd situation comes after a decades-long process of intensified legal discrimination against migrants, who were exploited for cheap labour after the Second World War when the economy was booming, and are now being thrown under the bus in the current period of capitalist crisis.

Many of these British residents, who mostly moved to the country legally as children, were never formally naturalised, nor applied for British passports. When they arrived, this was not a legal requirement  all Commonwealth citizens had the right to live and work in Britain. An intensification of racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric by the ruling class led to a toughening up of immigration laws in the 60s and 70s. Two acts in 1968 and 1971 stopped permanent migration, and caused Commonwealth citizens to lose their automatic right to remain in the UK. Further acts in the 1980s clamped down again, demanding migrants seek formal, legal right of abode or prove British ancestry. Two more Immigration Acts in 2014 and 2016 tightened the rules even further, targeting immigrants applying for rent and employment. The sum total of all of these policies has been a series of high-profile cases where people who have lived in Britain since childhood are now being told you are not welcome here.

Incredibly, the bumbling Tories launched a campaign to celebrate 70th anniversary of the Empire Windrush landing in London, at the same time as the Home Office was meting out legal threats to members of the Windrush generation! With over 200 cases coming to light, a media storm has ensued, exposing the states scandalous policies. Theresa Mays callous and dismissive attitude was revealed after she initially refused to discuss these cases with the Barbados high commissioner to the UK because her schedule was "full". Only when the scandal made headlines did the Tories issue a half-hearted apology, an admission the Home Office had become too concerned with policy and lost sight of the individual, and a promise to handle future cases sensitively. One wonders how the ruling class will sensitively hound people who have lived and worked in Britain since they were children.

The following article analysing the Windrush scandal was originally published on the IMT's British website, socialist.net, on 19 April 2018.

In Defence of Marxism

20 April 2018



The first Commonwealth subjects arrived in Britain on the Empire Windrush in 1948 from the Caribbean. Although on paper they came as citizens, the real reason for their arrival was a shortage of labour in the war-torn colonial metropole.

These citizens of Britains diminished Empire worked in labour intensive, menial jobs. Yet they quickly became indispensable to many of British capitalisms industries and institutions.

Commonwealth citizens faced immense struggles and poverty when they arrived. They were heavily policed, discriminated against in jobs and housing, and hounded by groups like the National Front. Their courage in fighting for equality and civil rights are far too often overlooked and forgotten.

Commonwealth citizens faced struggles and poverty when they arrived, but became essential to the functioning of British capitalism / Image: public domain

As the post-war boom ground to a halt, things began to change. The economy was slowing; the labour movement was strengthening; and further large waves of migrants were arriving from other Commonwealth countries towards the end of the 1960s and in the early 70s.

Instead of promoting migration from Britains former colonies, the ruling class began to stir up anti-immigrant sentiments. In 1968, for example, Conservative MP Enoch Powell made his infamous rivers of blood speech, warning of the dangers of mass immigration  particularly in terms of migration from Commonwealth countries. The National Front also was on the rise.

It was against this backdrop that the 1971 Immigration Act was implemented. It ended the permanent right to remain for Commonwealth citizens.

Countless examples

Over the past few weeks there have been countless stories about those who migrated as children within this Windrush period having their citizenship questioned and revoked.

The case of Michael Braithwaite is chief among them. He was born in Barbados and arrived in Britain in 1961 at the age of nine. Despite having been educated, married, and settled here (with three children and five grandchildren) for over 50 years, he was sacked from his job as a special needs teaching assistant after a routine immigration check.

Or take the example of Junior Green. He arrived in the UK at 15 months old, but was refused re-entry after going to see his dying mother in Jamaica. He missed his mothers funeral. Her body was allowed into the country, but he was not.

Albert Thomson (not his real name) arrived as a teenager in 1973. He was told, however, that he would have to pay 54,000 for his prostate cancer treatment, since he was apparently not eligible for NHS care. Remarkably, he only found out that this decision had been reversed on television!

Paulette Wilson arrived aged 10 in the late 1960s. She was recently forced to spend a week in Yarls Wood immigration removal centre, and has had the threat of deportation hanging over her head for two years.

These are only a handful of stories that have been made known.

People such as Michael, Junior, Albert, and Paulette have been asked to produce up to four legal documents for every year they have been here. They have been forced to fork out hundreds of pounds to find affidavits, birth records, and a whole range of other legal documents. They have been made to jump through endless bureaucratic and legal hoops.

This is a system set up and designed for people to fail. The Labour MP for Tottenham, David Lammy, called this a national day of shame. In reality, this is a massive understatement.

Who is to blame?

Increasingly over the last decade, since the onset of Great Recession in 2008, the Tories, Liberals and New Labour moderates have leant upon and whipped up the forces of reaction in order to distract from their attacks on the working class. They have done everything possible to hide from the working class the cause of their oppressive conditions. Ultimately, these are rooted in capitalism.

Unimaginatively, the ruling class have targeted the poorest and scapegoated migrants, blaming them for the lack of jobs and housing in broken Tory Britain. To quote the former prime minister, David Cameron, speaking about immigration in 2014: "When we find you, and we will find you, we'll make sure you are sent back to the country you came from."

The ruling class has leaned on anti-immigrant reaction to distract from their attacks on the working class / Image: public domain

Theresa May also sits very much at the heart of this scandal. As home secretary in Camerons cabinet, for example, she sent go home vans to intimidate ethnic minority areas in 2013. In 2014 and 2016, immigration acts were introduced to extend the state apparatus so that businesses, the NHS, landlords, and a whole range of other bodies could act as part of the UKs border force.

To top it all off, it has recently been revealed that the Home Office destroyed thousands of disembarkation records for Windrush immigrants. Diane Abbott, the shadow home secretary, rightly called on her opposite number, Amber Rudd, to resign over the deportation scandal, citing the misery and lives ruined by the Tories failure.

The hypocrisy doesnt end there, however. Responding to the revelations, leaders of the former colonies in the Caribbean felt inclined to intervene and stand up for British citizens at the recent Commonwealth Summit. But the UK Prime Minister refused to participate in talks, telling the Commonwealth country representatives that her schedule was full. May only later issued an apology and agreed to meet when the story became frontpage news.

This all comes at a time when the British establishment have been attempting to strengthen their ties with their former colonies. This move is a result of Brexit, with the ruling class seeking alternative trading partners to make up for the loss of exports to its current biggest market, the EU.

Prince Charles, for example, recently attended the Commonwealth Games (formerly the British Empire Games). At the event, the Prince gave a speech on behalf of his mother, Her Majesty, in which he referred to the contest as The Friendly Games. This did not go down so well with indigenous Australians protesting outside the stadium, who correctly see nothing friendly about a relationship built upon racism, plunder, and slavery.

This latest scandal over the treatment of the Windrush generation illustrates clearly that these oppressive, racist, imperialist legacies are still writ large within the British establishment.

Capitalisms inhumanity

The Windrush scandal exemplifies that at its root, the capitalist state is incapable of protecting the rights of working class citizens. The Tory-Lib Dem coalition government, for example, cut 350 million a year from the legal aid budget, reducing even further the working class access to any means of obtaining justice.

In reality, it is only as a result of the sheer disgust of ordinary people in response to the actions of this Tory government that Theresa Mays has even bothered to offer a half-hearted apology to the Windrush migrants. Yet despite one revelation after another in this scandalous story, there has still been no confirmation that these citizens will be re-compensated for their costs and trauma.

The blame lies squarely with Theresa May, and the capitalist system she represents / Image: Flickr Annika Haas

To be stateless, denied basic rights and access to public services, and to be told that you do not belong in the place you call home is one of the most alienating feelings imaginable.

This inhuman brutality is bred by capitalism and the ruling class, who use reactionary rhetoric and policies to whip up the most backward layers in society and divide workers.

The Windrush scandal epitomises this, demonstrating the crude hypocrisy and barbarity of this Tory government and the system they defend. But, even more importantly, it illustrates how fragile our own rights and freedoms really are under capitalism.
A Boston Public Schools employee is on paid leave after a Charlestown High School student said he touched her inappropriately and discussed his sex life with her, Boston 25 reports.

The high school student told Boston 25 she feels traumatized after the man "slapped her butt" and put his arm around her shoulder.

"He would talk about his wife and how his wife doesn't have sex with him and if he doesn't have sex with her. He'll get it from someplace else," the student told Boston 25.

In a letter to the student's family, the district said an investigation revealed "sufficient evidence" that the employee acted inappropriately, according to the news station.

Boston police and the Department of Children and Families were alerted about the incidents, which are still under investigation, according to Boston 25.
A 45-year-old Lowell man admitted he is probably too dangerous to remain free while he awaits trial for allegedly beating his girlfriend, causing severe head injuries.

Christopher Martini was ordered held without the right to bail Wednesday after a dangerousness hearing in Lowell District Court.

Martini's attorney conceded that prosecutors could prove he is a threat to the public if allowed out on the streets.

Martini is accused of beating his 37-year-old girlfriend last Thursday in her Walker Street apartment.

The woman suffered bruising to the arms, legs, torso and face, and severe bleeding in her brain. She was initially treated at Lowell General Hospital then transferred to Tufts Medical Center in Boston in what authorities called "grave condition."

The unidentified girlfriend was found unresponsive on the kitchen floor of her apartment by her 7-year-old daughter who called for help.

First responders told the court that Martini remained on the scene and tried to pull emergency medical personnel and firefighters away from the woman as they tried to treat her.

Martini had been convicted of shooting another woman in New Hampshire in 2014.

Martini pleaded guilty to charges of second degree assault and criminal threatening after he shot Olivia Silverman. He claimed the gun discharged as he tried to clean it, but police testified they found no cleaning tools nearby.

He was sentenced to 3 to 7 years in prison. He was released in 2016.

Silverman recovered from gunshots wounds but later died from a drug overdose.

Martini is due back in court on May 18.
AMHERST - Five New England liberal arts colleges have joined together to create a solar power facility that will offset 46,000 megawatt-hours of their collective electrical use.

The partnership represents the first collaborative purchase of New England-generated solar electricity by higher-education institutions, according to a press release.

The facility will be built in Farmington, Maine, and is expected to open in 2019. Each of the colleges will purchase zero-carbon electricity from the site to reduce carbon emissions from campus electricity use.

Participating colleges are Bowdoin in Brunswick, Maine, Amherst and Hampshire in Amherst, Smith College in Northampton and Williams College in Williamstown. All five have been engaged in energy and sustainability projects already.

Construction is funded by project partner NextEra Energy Resources.

Hampshire College's electric needs are provided by a solar array now, but it was important for the college to join the project for several reasons, spokesman John Courtmanche said in an email.

The college wanted to "support the development of a major new renewable energy source in New England and help transform the regional economy into a low-carbon economy."

"As President (Jonathan) Lash has said, private institutions joining together sends a message of the importance of taking responsibility for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions from our operations, and demonstrates to our students how we choose to live," Courtmanche said.

The college has 15 buildings that are off campus, he said, and now they will be able to use solar energy as well.

The five colleges shared the cost of a project consultant and "will recoup that expense as this new power-purchase agreement enables the colleges to buy electricity at a lower rate than from the regional electric grid," Courtmanche said.

In a press release, Amherst College President Carolyn "Biddy" Martin wrote that the partnership "illustrates how changes in sustainability practices at our institutions can have a larger impact."

"The involvement of four other highly regarded institutions in New England allows all of us to move forward with our climate action plans and multiplies the effect overall," Martin said. "It also sends an important message that every institution and every individual can be an agent for positive forward movement on the urgent challenge of sustainability."

Smith College President Kathleen McCartney said in the press release: "This initiative demonstrates that by working together, we can make a substantive, positive impact on our environment -- at the institutional level, the regional level and beyond."
EASTHAMPTON -- The executive director of the city's cable access television station is on leave from her job.

Kathy Lynch "is on a two-week, non-disciplinary paid leave" as director of Easthampton Media, confirmed James Zarvis, president of the nonprofit organization's board of directors. He said the period of leave ends Friday.

Zarvis said he would not comment beyond the prepared statement authorized by Northampton attorney David Mintz, described as Easthampton Media's lawyer.

Reached by telephone, Lynch declined comment. In a text message, Lynch referred all questions to Zarvis.

When asked for minutes from meetings of Easthampton Media's board of directors, whether those meetings are open to the public and what prompted any decision that resulted in Lynch being on leave, Zarvis referred all questions to Mintz.

Mintz did not immediately return a telephone call seeking comment.

Easthampton Media, Inc., formerly Easthampton Community Access Television, Inc., is the private nonprofit entity that tapes and broadcasts government meetings in Easthampton and Southampton. It also provides equipment, facilities and instruction to community members who wish to make television programs and videos.

Its staff members are not city employees, and Easthampton Media is not a city agency.

Easthampton Media seems to be operating under an expired, unsigned five-year contract with the city to provide cable access services. A contract between "Easthampton Community Access Television, Inc." and former mayor Michael Tautznik is dated April 1, 2013.

Under the contract, procured by The Republican in a public records request, it's the station's responsibility to petition for renewal. In Easthampton, the mayor, not the City Council, is the issuing authority for cable-related matters.

Easthampton Community Access Television, or "ECAT5," was formed in 2007 and changed its name to Easthampton Media in 2015. Initially headquartered at White Brook Middle School, the corporation established a new "cultural media center" at the Eastworks Building last year, funded in part with a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Easthampton Media receives funding from Charter Communications, which holds a 10-year contract, signed in 2015, to provide cable telecommunication services to city residents. Charter, branded as "Spectrum," pays a percentage of its gross annual revenues into a city-administered fund, which in turn provides the station with a yearly grant to provide PEG access services for "public, educational, and government" programming.

The Republican has filed a request with the city seeking the public, annual financial reports Easthampton Media agreed to file as a condition of the two contracts.

Easthampton Media also serves the town of Southampton with PEG access services.
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.
AMHERST - In a day, all tickets for rapper Cardi B are gone.

The superstar is performing a free concert for University of Massachusetts students following a promotional contest on the dating app Tinder.

Tickets were available Thursday and 7,500 were given way, said college spokeswoman Mary Dettloff. Only UMass students are allowed to attend.

The rapper, who announced she was pregnant during her second performance on "Saturday Night Live," also got support from Bernie Sanders, the independent Vermont senator.

Cardi B tweeted that FDR is the 'real make America great president" because of social security. Sanders responded Cardi B is right.

FDR is "the real 'Make America Great Again' President because of it weren't for him, older Americans wouldn't even get Social Security." - @iamcardib pic.twitter.com/6FPjVRsKrF  SocialSecurityWorks (@SSWorks) April 9, 2018
Actress and casting director Katherine McKee, who says Bill Cosby raped her in a Detroit hotel room in 1974, has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reinstate a defamation lawsuit she brought against Cosby after he publicly denied her story.

U.S. District Judge Mark Mastroianni in Springfield dismissed McKee's lawsuit in 2017. Appeals courts have agreed with his ruling, leaving the Supreme Court as McKee's last resort.

McKee told her story to the New York Daily News in 2014. Cosby's camp responded with a letter to the tabloid denying that the rape happened.

McKee argued that she'd been called a liar and that the letter caused her to lose business as a casting director. She sued Cosby, who owns a home in Shelburne Falls, in federal court in Springfield.

Lawyers representing Cosby argued that a letter sent on Cosby's behalf to the New York Daily News was not trying to smear the McKee's reputation as much as it was to demand better journalism.

McKee's attorneys, F. William Salo in New York and Charles Harder and Dilan Esper in Los Angeles, announced the petition to the Supreme Court Friday. Salo said in an email that McKee's petition contends that when she went public with her allegation against Cosby, she did not become a public figure and give up her right to sue Cosby for his allegedly defamatory statements about her.

Another case still active in federal court here -- one brought by seven of the more than 50 women who accuse Cosby of sexual misconduct -- remains essentially on hold while Cosby's criminal trial plays out in a suburban Philadelphia courtroom.

The criminal case, which concerns a 2004 sexual encounter with accuser Andrea Constand, makes it impossible for Cosby to provide needed discovery in the civil case without violating his own Fifth Amendment right to avoid self incrimination.

In the Pennsylvania criminal case, Cosby's defense presented its argument this week as that case heads to a jury.

McKee appeared as an actress on "The Bill Cosby Show" in 1971. The show, which aired from 1969-71, featured Cosby as high school gym teacher Chet Kincaid.

McKee said in court papers that she met up again with Cosby in 1974 in Detroit. Cosby asked McKee to get some ribs from a local restaurant and then pick him up at his hotel. He promised that he would then take McKee to a party on a friend's boat docked on the Detroit River.

But according to McKee's narrative, when she arrived at the hotel room, Cosby invited her in wearing a bathrobe and a knit wool cap.

To quote the court papers:

"Ms. McKee stepped a few steps into the hotel room when she was immediately set upon and physically attacked by Cosby. Cosby snatched the ribs from her hands and tossed them aside. Cosby was wild and aggressive, and was acting nothing like the man Ms. McKee had known professionally. Cosby violently and forcefully grabbed Ms. McKee and then spun Ms. McKee around so that she was facing away from Cosby and toward the door. Cosby violently lifted her dress and pulled down her panties. Cosby intimidated, terrified and terrorized Ms. McKee with pain and overwhelming physical force. Cosby proceeded to forcibly rape Ms. McKee while both were still standing very near the door. The rape was an unprovoked and violent attack. The rape was shocking, scary and horrible."
Local and state authorities are at the scene of a home in Stoughton where an armed home invasion was reported Friday morning.

The incident was reported shortly after 10:30 a.m., Massachusetts State Police say, who were called in to support Stoughton police.

Police ask residents to stay away from the home, on Pearl Street in Stoughton, while police investigate the matter.
An investigation into a reported armed home invasion in Stoughton has been called off after police determined the threat was not credible.

Stoughton police say around 10:30 a.m. Friday they received a call reporting men with firearms entering a home on Pearl Street. Stoughton police responded, calling in the Massachusetts State Police Air Wing for assistance.

After the road was closed and residents were asked to stay away from the home, police say they determined it was a false report.
WEST SPRINGFIELD -- The West Springfield Planning Board has granted a parking waiver for a new Main Street business that plans to sell non-tobacco smoking products, from rolling papers and hemp wraps to pipes and vaping devices.

William Mitchell, proprietor of the head shop proposed for 524 Main St. in the city's Merrick section, appeared before the Planning Board this week to seek relief from the off-street parking and loading standards of the Zoning Ordinance.

The Main Street site is required to have four parking spaces but only has two at the rear of the building, said Allyson Manuel, the city's planning administrator, who explained the situation to the Planning Board.

After questioning Mitchell about his store -- head shops are among the local businesses expected to get a boost from the legalization of recreational marijuana in Massachusetts -- the board voted to grant the parking waiver to Mitchell, who is awaiting final approval from the health and building departments.

Manuel said the Building Department must issue an occupancy permit before Mitchell can open for business.

Planning Board Chairman Frank Palange asked Mitchell to describe his business to the board. In response, Mitchell said he plans to sell everything from vapes and oils to glass pipes, herbal hemp wraps, T-shirts, clothing and accessories.

"There are so many things that fall into the inventory of a head shop," Mitchell said at Wednesday evening's Planning Board meeting.

"There are all types of different herbal ways instead of smoking the old-fashioned way," he said. "Tobacco is what we're trying not to do."

Palange probed a bit deeper, asking how the head shop will differ from a traditional tobacco shop.

"What's the difference between a (rolling) paper and a cigarette? What you're rolling in it?" Palange asked Mitchell.

"What's the difference between a paper and a cigarette?" said Mitchell, repeating Palange's question.

"Yeah, a cigarette is rolled with a paper, right?" Palange said.

"A cigarette is tobacco," Mitchell replied.

"OK, so basically you take a paper and you're rolling something else in it -- not tobacco," Palange said.

"Yeah," Mitchell said.

Katy Harrington, vice chairwoman of the Planning Board, pinned down Mitchell on how the business will function as a retail establishment. Mitchell explained that customers will come to shop at his store, remaining on site for up to 20 or 30 minutes, but they will not engage in recreational smoking activities on the premises.

His explanation seemed to allay any concerns of the board. Harrington made a motion to approve the special permit for relief from the required number parking spaces, with the board voting unanimously in favor of the permit.

Mitchell thanked the board and flashed double peace signs before leaving.

The West Side head shop is among the types of businesses expected to proliferate as the burgeoning recreational marijuana industry takes root in the commonwealth.

Recreational marijuana shops and suppliers are on schedule for a July 1 start date, but delivery and social consumption licensing is not expected to begin until the fall.

The West Side head shop's name and opening date were not immediately known, but the business will be located directly across the street from the Hampden Charter School of Science, which is slated to open a western campus on Main Street in September.

City and state officials opposed to the charter school have asked the governor and state education officials to reconsider allowing the school to open, saying it will lead to higher taxes and siphon money and students from West Springfield Public Schools.
WESTFIELD - The city's downtown corridor was designated an Opportunity Zone this week by Gov. Charlie Baker. Mayor Brian P. Sullivan said this will help attract investors to Westfield.

"The Opportunity Zone designation has potential to be very beneficial to the revitalization of the city's downtown," said Sullivan. "It is another tool in the toolbox for developers and people looking to invest in our community. We are very thankful that Governor Baker and (Housing and Economic Development Secretary Jay) Ash share our vision for Westfield."

Westfield Advancement Officer Joe Mitchell was thrilled Baker recognized the city.

"This designation should spur private investment in Westfield," said Mitchell. "The municipality has 'set the table' with the Park Square and Gas Light District projects. The additional financial benefits associated with the Opportunity Zone designation, will assist property owners, developers and investors in enhancing downtown Westfield's offerings."

Within the city's new Opportunity Zone is the property on Elm Street that is part of Westfield's Urban Renewal project.

The city envisions a multi-use building in the range of 77,000 to 110,000 square feet with retail, restaurant, office and living space. The Opportunity Zone designation could be helpful in attracting investors to the space, said Mitchell.

Baker on Thursday submitted a list of designated communities to the U.S. Treasury Department to encourage long-term investment in eligible Massachusetts communities. Created as part of the federal Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, the Opportunity Zone program presents an opportunity for private, tax-free investment into areas of economic need, benefiting both residents living in the zones and private investors.

The Opportunity Zone program provides an incentive for taxpayers who reinvest unrealized capital gains into "Opportunity Funds," which are specialized vehicles dedicated to investing in low-income areas. The Opportunity Zones themselves are to be made up of low-income community census tracts and designated by governors in every state.

Of Massachusetts' 1,478 census tracts, 581 were determined by the U.S. Department of the Treasury to be eligible to be considered for Opportunity Zone designation. Baker recommended 138 Opportunity Zones, the maximum number for Massachusetts.

In addition to Westfield, several Western Massachusetts communities also received the designation, including Agawam, Amherst, Chicopee, Easthampton, Greenfield, Holyoke, Ludlow, Northampton, Palmer, Pittsfield, South Hadley, Springfield, Ware and West Springfield.
Two unforced errors were made by the Trump circle on April 16. The day before, Nikki Haley, the United Nations ambassador, announced that the U.S. government was about to levy new sanctions against Russia that day or the next. This was very public and placed Ms. Haley's credibility on the line. On Monday, April 16, we were told in an official Trump administration announcement that these sanctions were not going to be arriving that fast: "The Trump team decided to publicly characterize Haley's announcement as a misstatement," according to The Washington Post.

Ms. Haley has now taken a huge hit to her credibility. It is certain that Haley had gotten permission to make her announcement at a very high level. Now, after lecturing Russia's U.N. ambassador and seeing missiles hit Russia's client state, Nikki Haley should look like a rock star. Instead, through no fault of her own, she looks like a fool.

The other unforced error from those who surround Trump is the debate about whether or not Sean Hannity is one of Michael Cohen's three clients of 2017 and 2018. Cohen's team fought hard against naming Hannity, but Judge Kimba Wood, a Reagan nominee, forced the revelation. Sean Hannity, a well-known advocate for Trump, had never mentioned that connection and now denies that he was Cohen's client.



Hannity said he is a friend of Cohen's and casually asked him a question about real estate, but he believes - unlike Cohen - that that did not make him a client. Hannity makes about $30 million a year, but he asked an attorney who is better known as a "fixer" a real estate question. Was there no real lawyer he could have retained? Does that pass the smell test?

There is nothing to indicate that Cohen made a payoff for Hannity to a woman as hush money to keep quiet about a sexual liaison, as he had for his other named clients: Elliott Broidy and Donald Trump. It seems clear, however, that Cohen and Hannity should have gotten their stories in line. This coming revelation was known three days prior to its occurrence.



Paul Halbach, Agawam
SPRINGFIELD -- The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced Friday that it will extend the Transitional Sheltering Assistance program for nearly 2,000 hurricane evacuees whose housing benefits were set to run out.

Officials, following outcry from Puerto Rican hurricane evacuees in Western Massachusetts and other places across the United States, said the agency will allow the 1,700 families whose benefit was set to end Friday remain in hotels while FEMA performs additional case reviews of their eligibility.

FEMA said the decision came after Puerto Rican Gov. Ricardo Rossello requested that the agency extend the Transitional Sheltering Assistance program for hurricane evacuees facing the April 20 deadline.

The program provides short-term lodging assistance to eligible disaster survivors, allowing those unable to return to their damaged homes to shelter in a hotel or motel.

Officials noted that under Puerto Rico's previously established eligibility criteria, about 1,700 of the 2,800 survivors checked into hotel rooms under the TSA program would no longer be eligible for the benefit after as of Friday.

Those evacuees began receiving notices of their eligibility change on Monday.

The agency said the extension comes despite FEMA case reviews showing that hundreds of the 1,700 families who benefits were set to run out "either have no home damage from Hurricane Maria (or) have voluntarily withdrawn their applications for federal assistance."

With some Puerto Rican families reportedly being asked to leave their Western Massachusetts hotels by 11 a.m. Friday, local hurricane evacuees and activists urged U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey to help them find short-term housing solutions.

Dozens gathered outside the senators' downtown Springfield offices Thursday wearing signs that read "We are human" and "We are not invisible," among other slogans.

The group was told the offices were closed for renovations and the senators' aides were in Boston for the day.

The Pioneer Valley Project, which helped organize the demonstration, and Springfield City Councilor Adam Gomez later gathered with evacuees for a conference call with James Cantwell, the state director for Markey's office.

Hours later, the senators' announced that their staffs would meet individually with evacuees facing the April 20 deadline at their Springfield offices to help them find short-term housing.

Warren and Markey further noted that they had called on FEMA Administrator William Long to allow families enrolled in the Transitional Shelter Assistance Program to continue living in Massachusetts shelters in wake of the continued power outages in Puerto Rico and evacuees' limited financial resources.

The FEMA shelter benefit for those living in hotels as their primary residence was set to expire on March 20, but later extended until May 14 at the request of the Puerto Rican governor. Federal officials, however, said they would review families' eligibility on April 20.

If an evacuee's home was found to be habitable and their utilities working, they would lose benefits. People would also lose benefits if their home repairs had been completed by Puerto Rico's housing rebuilding program, officials said.

Now, all families who were receiving FEMA shelter assistance will have their benefit extended until May 14, the program's end date.

As of April 16, FEMA reported that 445 families have applied for shelter assistance in Massachusetts, with 481 rooms being occupied, according to Markey's office.

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, meanwhile, penned a Friday letter urging FEMA officials to extend the Immediate Disaster Case Management program for Puerto Rico evacuees, which is set to end by May 18.

Contending that the program has "been a critical resource for evacuees as they seek housing solutions, employment opportunities and other support services," Baker stressed that "there is more to be done."

"Given the essential nature of these case management services, Massachusetts is requesting that you grant an extension of the IDCM program until July 1, 2018," he wrote. "This extension is critical to ensure that we continue to provide essential services to evacuees here in Massachusetts."

This is a breaking news story and will be updated.
SPRINGFIELD -- Dozens of Puerto Rican families and other evacuees who came to Western Massachusetts after Hurricane Maria met with staff from U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey's offices Friday to establish housing extensions and discuss long-term solutions as federal aid runs out.

Springfield-area evacuees, who were notified that their Federal Emergency Management Agency temporary shelter assistance would end Friday and Red Cross benefit would run out on April 25, met with Massachusetts Democrats' staff individually to establish short-term housing solutions.

The afternoon meetings came one day after displaced individuals, who have been living at the Comfort Inn, Clarion Hotel and Quality Inn in West Springfield, called on Markey and Warren to help them before they are asked to leave the hotels.

Rosa Rosado, who was among those set to lose FEMA assistance, said she was "very hopeful" that the meetings would help evacuees find a short-term solution so no one is left out on the street.

"We still need long-term solutions too. We just want to move on with our lives and find stability," she said in a statement. "We are glad that our senators heard us and we are looking forward to working with them."

Markey and Warren, who said they are "continuing to press FEMA both for immediate relief and for a longer-term solution," announced Thursday that their Springfield staffs would hold office hours to assist families impacted by the April 20 shelter assistance deadline.

The senators further penned a Thursday letter to FEMA Administrator William Long, urging the agency to allow families enrolled in the transitional shelter assistance program to continue living in Massachusetts shelters in wake of the continued power outages in Puerto Rico and evacuees' limited financial resources.

Markey and Warren argued that recent "power outages ... make it so that evacuees face additional difficulties learning the habitability status of their former homes, and plans to travel -- if possible -- back to Puerto Rico."

They added that the April 20 FEMA shelter assistance deadline for many evacuees residing in Western Massachusetts has left them with "uncertainty to where they will go after this date."

"Given the circumstances of these Puerto Rican families, as well as the unique challenges facing evacuees who lose access to the TSA program, we respectfully request that you permit evacuees living in our states to continue living in TSA shelters," the senators wrote.

U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Worcester, meanwhile, scheduled a Friday night town hall with Congressman Luis Gutierrez, D-Illinois, and Worcester-area officials to meet with central Massachusetts residents impacted by the hurricane and recovery efforts in Puerto Rico.

The FEMA program allows individuals whose homes are deemed "uninhabitable or inaccessible due to a presidentially declared disaster" to stay free of charge in participating hotel and motel rooms."

As of April 16, FEMA told Markey's office that 445 families have applied for shelter assistance in Massachusetts, with 481 rooms being occupied.

The FEMA shelter benefit for those living in hotels as their primary residence was set to expire on March 20, but later extended until May 14 at the request of the Puerto Rican governor. Federal officials, however, said they would review families' eligibility on April 20.

If a evacuee's home was found to be habitable and their utilities working, they will lose benefits. People will also lose benefits if their home repairs are completed by Puerto Rico's housing rebuilding program.

This story will be updated as more information becomes available.
FOCUS ON DEFENSE CAPABILITY DEVELOPMENT IN SOUTHEAST ASIA AND OCEANIA
Memos documenting a series of interactions between now former FBI Director James Comey and President Donald Trump have been made public.

In the memos, Comey documented a one-on-one dinner at the White House, during which Comey said Trump asked for his loyalty; and discussions of the investigation into former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn.

During the dinner, said Trump told him he "needed loyalty and expected loyalty."

Comey wrote that he said, "he would always get honesty from me," adding, "He paused and said that's what he wants, 'honest loyalty.' I replied, 'you will get that from me.'"

The memos were provided to Congress on Thursday.

Late Thursday night, Trump tweeted that the memos "show clearly that there was NO COLLUSION and NO OBSTRUCTION."

Read the documents below.

Comey memos on Scribd
BOSTON -- U.S. Sen. Ed Markey, D-Massachusetts, railed against President Donald Trump's decision to nominate Mike Pompeo for secretary of state Friday, arguing that the country's "top diplomat should embody the best of America's values, not defend torture, promote division, ignore human rights or rubber stamp all presidential positions."

Markey told reporters who gathered at his Boston Senate office that he will oppose the nomination of Pompeo -- the current CIA director -- when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee votes to confirm the president's pick next week.

The Massachusetts Democrat, who said he met privately with the secretary of state nominee, attributed his opposition to concerns over Pompeo's record on human rights, as well as his views on Muslims and nuclear nonproliferation.

Markey took specific issue with Pompeo's past remarks about people from different faiths, women and the LGBTQ community -- something which he argued "will only fan the flames of those who seek to oppress vulnerable populations."

The senator offered that Pompeo "refused to apologize for his past statements about Muslim Americans and instead blamed his remarks on the media" during their private meeting.

He aded that the secretary of state nominee, when pressed on key proliferation issues, said ground troops could be used in a preventive strike on North Korea -- a situation which the senator cautioned could result in tens of thousands of U.S. deaths in the first days of conflict alone.

Stressing that the United states needs a secretary of state "that upholds the values we seek to foster around the globe," Markey argued that Pompeo's career "is a laundry list of extremism and denial."

"While I respect Mr. Pompeo's service to our nation as a solider and member of Congress, I also cannot ignore his record of discriminatory, demeaning remarks and hawkish advocacy for confrontation and even regime change," he said in prepared remarks. "Unfortunately, with Mr. Pompeo's nomination and the appointment of John Bolton as national security adviser, President Trump is assembling a war cabinet full of 'yes men,' who will fan his worst impulses."

The senator, who argued that "we need a secretary of state that embodies the best of American values," offered that "Mike Pompeo is not that nominee."

Markey further raised concerns about reports that Pompeo secretly met with North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un in early April, arguing that while he has long called for direct negotiations, such talks should be conducted by "experienced diplomats."

He cautioned that Trump, who is expected to meet with the North Korean leader this spring, could be heading into the summit without proper preparation.

"We all want to reduce the North Korean threat as quickly as possible, but the Trump-Kim summit is the beginning of a long process. This summit is not some kind of diplomatic Super Bowl; it's the first quarter of the first game," Markey said in prepared remarks. "And, if talks between Trump and Kim Jong Un do not go well, it cannot be used as an excuse to justify military action for a situation that has no military solution."

Trump, after ousting former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson last month, announced via Twitter that he had chosen Pompeo to take over the State Department.

The Senate must confirm Pompeo's nomination before he can officially take over as the new secretary of state.

Although Pompeo is expected to see his nomination clear the full Senate, he may face pushback from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which set to vote on his confirmation Monday, according to reports.

The New York Times noted that the panel could vote against recommending his confirmation, with all 10 Democrats and Republican Sen. Rand Paul, of Kentucky, expected to reject Pompeo's nomination.

Committee Chairman Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tennessee, however, has pledged to send the nomination to the full chamber regardless, the newspaper reported.
U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, D-Massachusetts, called on the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Department of Housing and Urban Development Friday to work together on long-term housing solutions for those displaced by Hurricane Maria.

The senators, along with Democratic colleagues from Connecticut, New York and New Jersey, asked FEMA Administrator William "Brock" Long to immediately enter an agreement with HUD "to stand up the Disaster Housing Assistance Program and address the medium- and longer-term housing needs" of Puerto Rican evacuees.

"The Puerto Rican survivors of Hurricane Maria are U.S. citizens, who have experienced tremendous loss and hardship over the last year," they wrote in a Friday letter to Long. "FEMA's refusal to use the tools at its disposal, including DHAP, to help these survivors is puzzling -- and profoundly troubling. I urge you to immediately reverse course and work with HUD to stand up the DHAP, to finally give these survivors permanent relief and stability."

Noting that housing supports available through FEMA's Transitional Shelter Assistance Program are set to end in mid-May, the lawmakers argued that hundreds of hurricane survivors could be left homeless if the two agencies refuse to work together.

The senators contended that while conditions in Puerto Rico have improved since the September storm, "there is still tremendous need on the island."

They added that many evacuees lack paperwork needed to show they own their homes, or plan not to return out of fear that the island is unprepared for the upcoming hurricane season.

With more than 2,000 people were still checked in for TSA as of April 13 -- including 445 in Massachusetts, 173 in New York, 127 in Connecticut and 53 in New Jersey -- the senators contended that evacuees "need support in finding more permanent housing."

The Democrats argued that HUD's Disaster Housing Assistance Program, which provides subsidies to help families pay rent, put down security deposits or pay utilities, "is specifically designed to address the medium- and longer-term housing needs of survivors of natural disasters."

"Both Republican and Democratic presidential administration have identified HUD as the appropriate agency to handle the long-term housing needs of victims of natural disasters," they wrote. "It was used in response to Hurricane Katrina, Rita and Sandy. No congressional action is required -- FEMA and HUD can and should immediately begin to work together to stand up the DHAP program."

The letter, which U.S. Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Connecticut; Kirsten Gillibrand, D-New York; and Bob Menendez, D-New Jersey, also signed, came as FEMA announced it would extend temporary housing assistance for hurricane evacuees whose benefits were set to run out Friday.

With some Puerto Rican families reportedly being asked to leave their Western Massachusetts hotels by 11 a.m. Friday, local hurricane evacuees and activists urged Warren and Markey earlier this week to help them find short-term housing solutions.

The senators' announced Thursday that their staffs would meet individually with evacuees facing the April 20 deadline at their Springfield offices to help them find short-term housing.

Warren and Markey further noted that they had called on the FEMA Administrator to allow families enrolled in the transitional shelter assistance program to continue living in Massachusetts shelters in wake of the continued power outages in Puerto Rico and evacuees' limited financial resources.
Googles CEO says AI will influence everything the company does, a strategy he dubs "AI First."

Googles heavy investment in artificial intelligence has helped the companys software write music and beat humans at complex board games. What unlikely feats could be next? The companys new head of AI says hed like to see Google move deeper into areas such as healthcare. He also warns that the company will face some tricky ethical questions over appropriate uses for AI as it expands its use of the technology.

Tom Simonite

https://www.wired.com/story/googles-new-ai-head-is-so-smart-he-doesnt-need-ai/
Anti-abortion rhetoric is intensifying ahead of midterm elections as a rush of officials in Republican-dominant states push legislation that would punish both doctors and patients, even though such laws are likely unconstitutional.

In Idaho, Republicans competing in a crowded field for governor have made it a major campaign issue ahead of the May 15 primary. One candidate promised to back a long-shot effort that would allow women to be prosecuted for getting abortions, and another offered tepid support but doubted it would survive a legal challenge.

BY KIMBERLEE KREUSI

The Associated Press

http://www.idahostatesman.com/article209349224.html
The National Center for Appropriate Technology (NCAT) is seeking an energetic, passionate, experienced and collaborative Executive Director to provide visionary leadership to NCAT, its staff, board and partners. In joining NCATs staff the Executive Director must be deeply committed to public service and to becoming part of our high performing, passionate, and diverse team.

Full Opportunity: https://www.ncat.org/executive-director/

NCATs mission is to help people by championing small-scale, local and sustainable solutions to promote healthy communities, reduce poverty and protect natural resources.
Kim Jong-il, with whose government the U.S. negotiated the 1994 agreement



-by Reese Erlich





My recent visit to Japan drove home one main point: President Donald Trump has managed to piss off just about everyone in that nation.





After Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe spent the last several months stroking Trumps ego and stressing the similarity of their conservative political views, Trump waived aluminum and steel tariffs for Canada, Australia, and the European Union-- but not Japan. And Trump caught Japanese leaders by surprise when he agreed to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.





Japanese of different political persuasions dont trust Trump and they voice doubt over whether the talks between Trump and Kim will bear results.





They are both unpredictable characters, Koichi Nakano, professor of political science and dean of the Faculty of Liberal Arts at Tokyos Sophia University, told me. But Kim has a method to his madness. Trump is driven by ego.





Chosun Ilbo, told me South Koreans and Japanese are worried about the Trump Teams previous Sue Kim, a reporter with the rightwing South Korean daily newspaper, told me South Koreans and Japanese are worried about the Trump Teams previous calls for a pre-emptive military attack on Pyongyang. Trump is sending out confusing messages, she told me. Thats the scary part for us. What is the end goal?





President Moon Jae-in of the Republic of Korea (South Korea) is scheduled to meet with Kim Jong-un on April 27. Then Trump and Kim are supposed to meet in May or June. But the United States has sabotaged previous accords, and that was before North Korea had nuclear weapons.





Back in 1994, the United States President Bill Clinton and then President Kim Jong-il, father of the countrys current leader, signed an agreement that allowed North Korea to develop nuclear power but not atomic weapons-- a historic breakthrough after years of hot and cold war.





North Korea agreed to stop its nuclear weapons program while western powers agreed to help it construct two light-water nuclear reactors, whose spent fuel couldnt be used to develop bombs. While waiting for the reactors to be built, the West would provide heavy fuel oil to power the countrys electric grid. In response, the United States pledged to eliminate sanctions and remove North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism.





North Korea lived up to its end of the bargain, but hawkish Republicans and Democrats didnt like Clintons  Agreed Framework , claiming it would allow North Korea to develop nuclear weapons. Congress refused to approve the full cost of fuel oil, and the western allies never built the promised reactors.





The Clinton Administration only lifted some sanctions and didnt take North Korea off the list of state sponsors of terrorism. By the time George W. Bush was elected in 2000, Washington was ready to scuttle the agreement entirely, even blaming North Korea for the failure.





In 2002, Bush came up with his cockamamie campaign against the Axis of Evil, which included Iran, Saddam Husseins Iraq, and North Korea. An orthodox Marxist-Leninist state, a nationalist dictatorship and an theocratic Islamic regime were somehow in cahoots to destroy the United States. The Agreed Framework was buried.





Had Washington carried out the signed agreement, the current U.S.-Korea crisis could have been avoided. Instead, in 2006, North Korea tested its first nuclear bomb, claiming it had the right to defend itself from outside attack. The United States still has 28,500 troops stationed in the Republic of Korea, and navy vessels carrying nuclear missiles cruise nearby.





North Koreas dictatorial regime has angered ordinary Japanese in a variety of ways. In the 1970s and 1980s, the countrys soldiers kidnapped Japanese citizens and forced them to become language instructors and spies. For years, North Korea officials denied the kidnappings. Now they say all the victims have been returned to Japan or have died. Conservative Japanese politicians say some are still missing, and use the issue to stir up support for a stronger military.





Last year, North Korea test fired conventional ballistic missiles over Japan that landed in the Pacific Ocean. While the missiles werent aimed at Japan, they scared people. Prime Minister Abe won the 2017 parliamentary elections, in part, by playing on fears of a North Korean attack.





Abe and other conservatives use concerns about a Korean attack to justify expansion of Japan's military.





Leftist opponents of Abe say Japan doesn't need an offensive military. The North Korea threat is exaggerated, according to Professor Nakano.





The Trump Administration claims North Korea poses an immediate threat to the United States because its missiles may reach the U.S. mainland. In reality, North Korea is highly unlikely to launch an offensive attack since any first strike would bring a devastating response by the United States and South Korea, wiping out Pyongyang.





North Korea is not going to launch a missile and end its regime, Nakano said. It sees the missiles as defense against the United States... If Iraq or Libya had nuclear weapons, the United States wouldnt have attacked.





Conservative reporter Kim strongly opposes the North Korean regime, but doesn't think it will act irrationally. I used to think Kim was a crazy maniac, she said. He is controlling, but rational. Above all Kim wants his regime to survive."





North Korea will not likely give up its nuclear weapons. The best outcome of negotiations would halt expansion of the nuclear program in return for economic aid and normalization of relations with the west. At worst, the talks could fall apart in mutual recriminations and heighten the possibility of war.





The choice is up to Washington.
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The 20-episode Bloody bet thriller to be broadcast on Ucom's Armenia Premium TV channel

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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.

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LIVE. Day 8. Citizens detained in different parts of Yerevan (updated) (video)

15.15 A woman driver paralyzed the traffic in Arshakunyac Avenue. The police ordered the driver to quickly leave the road. Of course, she disagreed. "Let's throw her out of the car," decided the polce, but the driver opposes saying that if they closed all the doors she would get out. The yellow Nissan March left the road, keeping it paralyzed for almost five minutes. 14.50 In Arshakunyan 41 two cars are standing horizontally in the neighborhood of Yerevan Mall, as a sign of protest. Drivers refuse to continue traffic and are locked inside. The police warn them that if they do not get out of the road, they will be pulled out by a truck. One of the cars was removed from the road, the driver was inside, and the driver of the was feeling not well, nevertheless the police officers took them away. 14.45 Tert.am informs that the police officers stopped one of the drivers serving the # 1 route on Azatutyan Avenue, made the passengers get out of the bus and began to force the the detained citizens to get on the bus. Several citizens approached the driver and told him to take the keys and leave the bus. As a result, the bus driver refused to remove the detainees. From his hand, the police took the keys from the driver and took the detainees to the city. 13.50 The demonstrators headed by Nikol Pashinyan have reached Kievyan Bridge. Here are three big trucks closing Halabyan-Kievyan bridge road, stating that the cars have been damaged. Drivers joined the march. Yerevan Deputy Police Chief Valery Osipyan told truck drivers that the things they did were not good. 12.57 Nikol Pashinyan and the demonstrators walking with him stopped at the park near "Armenia MC" to rest. Participants of the action told him about the events in the city, the steps taken by the police. Nikol Pashinyan said that today they had made 12 913 steps, walking 9 km. And Azatutyun Avenue is surrounded by policemen. They made a chain, not allowing the demonstrators to close the avenue. It should be reminded that in the morning from different parts of the city there is a tense situation between demonstrators and policemen. Activists are trying to block the streets, including cars, on different streets of the city. Arriving at these places, police try to open the streets. Policemen, including those not wearing uniforms, are detaining demonstrators. As of 11:00, the number of those detained has reached 52, including Nikol Pashinyan's son. Then the information spread that he was released. 12.09 David Sanasaryan, who was arrested this morning, was released shortly after being taken to the police station. At the moment Azatutyun Avenue police officers detain people by placing them on a bus. It's almost full.
Ararat Osipan: We miss you when we do not see you for a couple of hours (video)

Nikol Pashinyan and demonstrators blocked Gyulbenkyan Street. Then Deputy Chief of Police Valery Osipyan arrived in Yerevan. "We miss you when we do not see you for a couple of hours," said Osipyan to Pashinyan. He also asked Pashinyan how his hands was, whether the bandage had been changed or not. Then, accompanied by the police, the march continues. Nikol Pashinyan, referring to the detainees, said: "Being detained is not a horrible thing, it's an attempt to disobey. I have made all the radio-related decisions personally, if the law-enforcement bodies have something to say, then they have to tell everything to me. But it is clear that it is their task to suppress the protesters because without them, all this will be worthless. In terms of tactics, I am not targeting citizens, but I urge everyone to do so. This is a velvet revolution, and it will spread. " Let us remind that at 9.00 am 16 citizens were detained, including David Sanasaryan. Yesterday, Tigran Mazmanyan, a civil activist, was detained for two months.
Aram I Catholicos is in Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin (video)

His Holiness Aram I, Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia, arrived in Armenia on April 20. He visited the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin, Priest Vahram Melikyan, director of the information center of the Mother See, told Armenpress. His Holiness Aram I already arrived in Armenia and has several meetings, but not with the rally participants. Catholicos Aram I will meet with Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan and President Armen Sarkissian, he said. Catholicos Aram I will leave Armenia today. Before arriving in Armenia, he commented on the ongoing situation in Yerevan at the airport: Armenia is concerned, we all as well are concerned. As Armenias strengthening and flourishing is the duty and pride of all of us, the grief and concern of our people is also ours, therefore we cannot remain indifferent to issues concerning our people, His Holiness Aram I said at the airport before the visit to Armenia, stating that he is not indifferent towards the ongoing events in Yerevan.
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Michigan's state gem is as arrestingly beautiful as the Lake Superior shores where it's found -- and you won't find it anywhere else.

Chlorastrolite, a variety of the mineral pumpellyite, is pretty much exclusively found along the Keweenaw Peninsula and throughout the Isle Royale archipelago -- Michigan's most remote national park. Its occurrence in that region is what gives this mineral its arguably prettier common name: Isle Royale Greenstone.

The state legislature named chlorastrolite Michigan's official gemstone in 1973.

The mineral's history dates back roughly 1.1 billion years ago, to the age of the Midcontinent Rift: A time when North America began to split apart at the seams, causing lava to spill out of the Earth's crust along a fissure that ran from Kansas up to present-day Lake Superior and back down to where Detroit now is. Those lava flows, which could be thousands of feet thick in some places, eventually cooled into a rock we call basalt. Within that basalt were small pockets of empty space left behind from gasses in the lava -- and that is where chlorastrolite eventually formed.

Of all the land along that original Midcontinent Rift, the Lake Superior region is the only place where those veritable floodplains of basalt became exposed, making it the only place to find chlorastrolite.

Adding to its scarcity, chlorastrolite is also difficult to find because of its size. Large pieces are very rare; more often they are found as pea-sized nodules or needle-shaped crystals lodged within larger chunks of basalt or, when water has eroded the basalt around it, as pebbles or even granules.

Naturally, gem-quality chlorastrolite specimens are often used in jewelry. When polished, the mineral becomes a beguiling green-blue color laced with a web of turtle-shell style markings vaguely reminiscent of Petoskey stones. The mineral's unique patterning inspired its name, which means "green star stone."

One important point for rock hounds to remember: Because Isle Royale is a national park, it is illegal to collect rocks, minerals and other geological specimens there, so the Keweenaw Peninsula is your best bet for hunting down this Michigan treasure.

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ANN ARBOR, MI - Plans for a vertical expansion of the Espresso Royale building where the University of Michigan Diag meets South U are headed to the Ann Arbor City Council.

The city's Planning Commission voted this week to recommend council approval of a three-story, 4,909-square-foot addition at 1101 S. University Ave., a key entry point to the South U district.

Washington, D.C.-based S. University Properties LLC, which owns the building, is proposing the addition, which is designed by J. Bradley Moore and Associates Architects.

If approved, three floors of apartments would be added to the existing two-story building, which currently includes the coffee shop on the first floor and basement, and office space on the second floor.

The proposed building would have more than 8,100 square feet of floor area and a total of 16 bedrooms in three apartments.

That includes two six-bedroom apartments and one four-bedroom apartment.

The commission recommended approval of the project contingent upon the developer agreeing to lease one parking space in the downtown public parking system.

Architect Brad Moore said the plan is to keep the existing building intact and add three floors above it, though the part that's currently white would get a new brick look.

Moore said the intent is to allow Espresso Royale to continue to operate while the construction is taking place, though there may be periods when it will have to shut down for a week or so.

Commissioner Julie Weatherbee said she likes the scale of the proposed building and thinks it will balance out the much taller high-rise that's going up next to it as part of a separate project.

Commissioner Scott Trudeau offered similar comments, adding he appreciated the efforts to preserve the existing building and add onto it rather than tearing it down and building something entirely new.

"I think it looks pretty good," he said. "I like the scale. I wish we had more buildings at this scale."
ANN ARBOR, MI - Ann Arbor's Community High School went into lockdown for just under an hour Friday after staff members saw two unknown males walking around the building.

Police were dispatched about 10:30 a.m. Friday, April 20, to Community High School, 401 N. Division St., for a report of two unknown males who had entered the building, Ann Arbor police Sgt. Bonnie Theil said.

The police department later tweeted out a statement and said the subjects were turned away by a staff member and attempted to gain entry by other means, which is under investigation.

Students and staff immediately evacuated the building as a precaution when officers arrived and scanned the building, Theil said.

Police located the two males and were speaking with them as of 11:50 a.m. Friday, Theil said. The males were described as student-aged but were not students at the high school.

Students at the alternative high school were allowed to re-enter the building and classes have resumed, Theil said.

There was no indication of weapons seen or threats made, Theil said.

Ann Arbor Superintendent of Schools Jeanice Swift sent out an email to parents alerting them of the incident and said more information would be coming later in the day.
ANN ARBOR, MI - High school students are continuing to force a national conversation on gun control, but some Ann Arbor teenagers - like the rest of America - differ on how best to improve school safety and reduce gun violence.

Friday, April 20, marked the 19th anniversary of the shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado, and students in Ann Arbor and across the country held the latest in a series of school walkouts and rallies calling for an end to mass shootings.

One Huron High School student thinks the answer is to ban all guns. Other students at Huron say allowing people to carry guns in schools would provide more protection. They don't think teachers should be required to carry guns, but they would like school staff have the option to be armed if they want.

"If someone knows there could potentially be someone with a gun somewhere, they are less likely to attack because they don't want to get resistance," said Nathan Penoyar, 16, who joined a handful of students holding pro-gun signs at the edge of the gun control rally at Huron High School's track on Friday morning.

Students at Greenhills School, a private 6-12 school in Ann Arbor, used the school's annual day of service on Friday to advocate for gun control. After a rally, students circled the track and held up 583 signs with names of victims of mass shootings, dating back to the University of Texas shooting in 1966.

"We wanted to make it known that Greenhills also stands with the people who are fighting for gun control," said Ryan Perry, 17, a senior who is student body president at Greenhills. "We also wanted to make sure our voices are heard because we are a small school in the area."

Greenhills students called for comprehensive background checks for all prospective gun owners, raising the minimum age to purchase guns and discouraging lawmakers from accepting contributions from the National Rifle Association.

Washtenaw Youth Initiative, a student group that includes representatives from eight Washtenaw County high schools, has made similar demands of lawmakers. The youth initiative does not want anyone in a school - including police officers - to be armed. They also would like to see a ban on assault weapons and a repeal of the Dickey Amendment, which restricts the money the Centers for Disease Control can spend on promoting gun control to prevent injury.

Friday's walkouts and day of action followed the National School Walkout on March 14, March For Our Lives on March 24, town hall meetings with lawmakers and other student-led events calling for more restrictive gun control in the wake of the Feb. 14 school shooting in Parkland, Florida.

"We are entering the most pivotal part to this movement," said Henry Taylor, a senior at Pioneer High School and one of the organizers behind Washtenaw Youth Initiative. "We are entering into the phase where the GOP lawmakers and the NRA are expecting our momentum to wane, our enthusiasm to drown, our voices to be lost."

The gathering of about 100 people outside City Hall on Friday proved the gun control movement will not dissipate, Taylor said.

The rally at City Hall disbanded for about 30 minutes when Community High School - which is located three blocks away - went into a lockdown shortly after 11 a.m. The group reconvened once the school lockdown lifted and police said there was no threat.

Schools have various measures in place to protect students during school, including locked entrances with buzzer systems to monitor who enters the building. Some schools have resource officers, which students said they appreciate as long as the officers are not armed.

"For me, I feel pretty safe, but really who knows?" said Alayah Williams, 14, a freshman at Huron High School. "You could wake up the next morning and something tragic has happened and people that you knew are gone."
ANN ARBOR, MI - The case of a Flint man who says his home's tap water is contaminated with high levels of lead isn't strong enough for a federal judge to order emergency relief.

Following a two-hour hearing in a federal courtroom in downtown Ann Arbor on Friday, April 20, U.S. District Judge Judith E. Levy decided not to order the state of Michigan to immediately resume state-funded bottled water distribution to Flint residents.

Levy denied requests for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction in the case of Allen Bryant Jr., an Oren Avenue resident who filed a lawsuit on April 12. The suit seeks to compel the state to continue bottled water distribution in Flint, saying some homes still have dangerously high levels of lead in their tap water.

The complaint says Bryant's home water was tested for lead this year and registered 1,330 parts per billion of lead in one test, far beyond the federal action limit of 15 ppb.

But since he's not actually living in the home right now, and instead staying at his deceased mother's apartment, the judge wasn't convinced this particular plaintiff's case warranted citywide emergency action. The judge did, however, take the state's attorneys up on their offer to have a water filter installed inside Bryant's home.

State attorneys argued the relief Bryant sought wasn't warranted partly because the city of Flint is in compliance with the federal Lead and Copper Rule. They also claim Bryant isn't in danger of consuming water with elevated lead levels because he isn't living in his home on Oren Avenue, having told Community Outreach Resident Education workers he was staying at his mother's place.

"He further stated he intended to abandon the home, which was damaged due to a pipe that had burst," the state's response to the lawsuit stated, a point that was debated in court on Friday, with Bryant's attorney arguing his client does want to return to his home but it's not safe to do so because of lead in the water.

Teams of attorneys for both the state defendants and Bryant appeared in court on Friday, along with Flint city attorneys. Several Flint area residents drove down to observe the hearing.

Hunter Shkolnik, the lead attorney for Bryant, argued on his client's behalf, while Michigan Assistant Attorney General Richard Kuhl did most of the arguing on behalf of the state.

Eugene Driker, a civil defense attorney, appeared on behalf of Gov. Rick Snyder and argued this was one of the most frivolous cases he's seen in several decades of practicing law.

He argued spending millions on bottled water distribution would be an imprudent use of public funds.

At one point, Kuhl seemed to suggest the state wasn't responsible for the situation in Flint, saying it was not a problem of the state's making, though he said media reports would suggest otherwise.

That prompted some negative reactions and was interpreted by opposing counsel as a "fake news" claim. Kuhl declined to clarify his remarks after the hearing ended.

The judge said to grant immediate relief in the case, there needed to be a convincing argument that irreparable harm would occur if the relief was not granted and that wasn't the case here.

Shkolnik said Bryant's case goes to the heart of the problems Flint residents have been dealing with for about three years.

He argued the state hasn't done enough to address the Flint water crisis to warrant discontinuing bottled water distribution.

Levy noted the state had claimed that 22 attempts were made to make contact at Bryant's home on Oren Avenue, and when he did finally respond he indicated he wasn't living there and didn't want a water filtration system added to his residence.

There were claims that Bryant said he was abandoning the home and letting it revert to a land bank.

Defending his client, Shkolnik said Bryant left his home to care for his mother, who has since died, and his intention was always to move back to his home on Oren Avenue eventually.

He said Bryant can't go back right now because of lead in the water and many other Flint residents who've had to leave their homes are in a similar situation because their homes don't have clean tap water.

At that point in the hearing, the judge decided to get Bryant on the phone. His attorneys said he couldn't be at the hearing because he works nights and was just getting home before the hearing started, but Bryant told a different story, saying he wasn't working because a forklift ran over his foot and he was seeking workers comp.

Bryant testified via speaker phone in the court, though much of it came through garbled and barely understandable. The judge repeatedly asked him the same questions to try to understand his answers.

Asked where he lives right now, Bryant told the judge he has been living at his mother's place on Trumbull for about a year.

He said he left to take care of his mother, who died in January, though he also isn't returning to his own home now because the water pipes have corroded. He seemed to be saying the water was dirty.

He told the judge he would like to eventually go back to his home on Oren Avenue, but it needs a lot of work, including a new roof and "all kinds of stuff" to make it habitable. He said he regularly goes to check on the house and has not abandoned it, though he seemed to indicate just letting it go is one possible option.

The judge stepped down from her bench and sat next to a phone at a clerk's desk with six attorneys huddled around, listening intently to what Bryant had to say about his situation.

Bryant acknowledged he did turn down an offer to have a water filter installed. He seemed to indicate he didn't trust that simply installing a filter was going to solve his water problems.

The state's decision to discontinue bottled water came after testing under the Lead and Copper Rule showed Flint's 90th-percentile lead levels were at 4 ppb in sampling this year.

When the 90th percentile for lead is at 4 ppb it means 10 percent of water samples registered 4 ppb or more for lead.

Even if those numbers are accurate, Shkolnik said, it doesn't mean every lead problem in the city has been fixed.

He argued in court on Friday that the state's way of looking at the numbers ignores that there are individuals whose homes still have unsafe levels of lead in the water. He argued the state should have to pay for bottled water for them until the problem is fixed.

The judge noted the state submitted hundreds of pages of records outlining corrective actions taken in response to the Flint water crisis, including installing filters and replacing water pipes. Shkolnik said there are many homes that haven't seen corrective actions yet and there's no evidence that a filter alone is going to solve their problems.

Defending the state, Kuhl said a lot of what Shkolnik had to say was unsupported or inaccurate. He said the filters have proven effective at removing all lead, even in excess of 1,000 ppb.

Kuhl said the state could have a filter installed at Bryant's home today if he would accept one. The judge offered to give the state attorneys Bryant's phone number to try to make that happen.

Kuhl said hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent addressing the lead situation in Flint. He said the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has agreed since June 2016 that the sampling in Flint is in compliance with the Lead and Copper Rule, and he said there's no violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act.

Kuhl said the state had a legal right to stop providing bottled water to Flint residents as of Sept. 1, 2017.

William Kim, Flint assistant attorney, also testified in court on Friday, saying the city feels strongly that it's in the public interest for bottled water distribution to continue, but Flint doesn't have money for it.

Kim said Flint residents have lost trust in the state and some don't trust the filters to work, but they do trust bottled water.

He said it's important to try to rebuild trust. He mentioned efforts to replace lead and galvanized steel water pipes in the system.

At one point, there was discussion between the state attorneys and the judge about whether Bryant's home could be moved up the list for pipe replacement, but no decision was made about that.

Before announcing her decision on Friday, the judge said she takes the allegations in Bryant's complaint very seriously, but there's no justification for emergency relief since he's currently living in a residence with access to safe and clean water and has no immediate plans to return to his home, which sounds to be uninhabitable at the moment. She said it's clear a lot is going on in his life right now and bottled water isn't going to solve any of his problems.

Levy also said she understands the lack of trust Flint residents have in the government and that may take generations to overcome.

Arthur Woodson was among the Flint residents who attended Friday's hearing in Ann Arbor. He said bottled water is still being provided to residents through charitable donations and he's been volunteering to deliver bottles to sick and elderly residents who have difficulty leaving their homes, but he thinks the state should be funding it.

Indicating he's lost trust in the state, Woodson said he sees no reason why Flint residents should trust the state that their water is safe.
ANN ARBOR, MI - Mike Kennedy, who was recently hired as an assistant chief for the Ann Arbor Fire Department, is now transitioning into the department's top position.

The City Council voted unanimously this week to officially make Kennedy the city's new fire chief effective May 1.

Kennedy joined the AAFD as an assistant chief in December following a statewide search.

He was selected for the fire chief position following an internal search that involved the city administrator, fire department personnel, service area administrators and other city staff.



Before coming to Ann Arbor, Kennedy simultaneously served as South Lyon's fire chief and as a senior emergency management specialist with the University of Michigan Division of Public Safety and Security from 2010 to December 2017.



Prior to that, he rose through the ranks at the Brighton Area Fire Authority, serving as a cadet, firefighter, sergeant and lieutenant. He has more than 22 years of fire service experience.

He also previously served as a lecturer/regional coordinator at the University of Maryland - Maryland Fire and Rescue Institute.



Kennedy holds a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of Michigan and a master's degree in public administration from Eastern Michigan University, in addition to a number of other state and national certifications and recognitions.



City Administrator Howard Lazarus recommended Kennedy for the promotion to chief, saying he's highly qualified to serve.

Larry Collins, who became fire chief about three years ago, announced in February he was resigning effective May 1.

Lazarus said in February that Kennedy would be serving as interim chief during the transition.

With the previous retirement of Assistant Fire Chief Amy Brow, the city initiated a search for her replacement last year, a search that led the city to hire both Kennedy and Marc Tyler as assistant fire chiefs. Tyler previously worked for the Lansing Fire Department.

The Ann Arbor Fire Department also has another assistant chief, Ellen Taylor, who has been in her role since 2012 and has worked for the AAFD for more than two decades.

During the search to replace Brow, Collins recommended both Kennedy and Tyler be hired as a succession-planning initiative.

With Collins' upcoming retirement, all three assistant fire chiefs were offered the opportunity to compete for the chief's position.

Lazarus said he felt that approach provided an exceptional field and Kennedy emerged as the recommended candidate.

Lazarus wrote to members of the City Council's Administration Committee on March 15 to give them a heads up that Kennedy's name would be put forward for confirmation for the chief position.

"The incoming fire chief must be technically strong and exhibit the courage to address several fundamental challenges facing AAFD, which requires many long-overdue reviews and reforms," he wrote, saying the city was "aware of the rocky road ahead" when filling the vacant assistant chief position, hiring both Kennedy and Tyler with the expectation that one of the assistant chiefs most likely would become fire chief within a few years when Collins retired.
ANN ARBOR, MI - Lecturers and their student supporters occupied a building on the University of Michigan campus Friday afternoon as a contract battle continued between the two sides.

Members of the Lecturers' Employee Organization occupied a floor of the Fleming Administration Building and delivered a message to the provost at 1 p.m. Friday, April 20, according to the group.

As of 1:30 p.m., protestors reportedly remained in place, calling for major salary increases for the 1,700 lecturers who teach one-half of student credit hours on the UM Flint and Dearborn campuses and one-third of credit hours on the Ann Arbor campus, according to the group.

Protests are going on at all three campus locations Friday, the group said.

The current contract between the union and the university expires Friday.
BAY CITY, MI -- Students from Bay City Central High School joined others across the nation as they walked out of school to honor those who were killed 19 years ago during the Columbine High School shooting massacre.

Carrying anti-gun protest signs, the Central students on Friday, April 20, marched about a mile down Columbus and Washington avenues to Bay City Hall where they named off a list of school shooting victims reaching back to 1999.

Zach Worden, a 17-year-old junior, said the students were advocating for tougher gun laws.

And though none of the students had been born when the Columbine massacre took place, the effects of the shooting still linger.

"They have shaped how our generation lives," Worden said. "We live in constant fear and anxiety."

Delia Comtois, 14, also a Central High School student, said that students should not have to worry about gun violence in school.

"It's not fair," she said. "School is supposed to feel safe."

Passing motorists honked their horns to show support to the students while others pulled over to take pictures of them.

The student went into a silent protest from 11:19 a.m. until 12:08 p.m. on the steps of City Hall -- the same length of time that the Columbine shooting lasted.
AUBURN, MI -- Classes have resumed at Bay City Western High School after being canceled for a day due to a potential threat amid large displays of the Confederate flag.

"School's back in session and there's nobody in the parking lot or even nearby, so that's good," said Bay City Schools Superintendent Stephen C. Bigelow the morning of Friday, April 20. "There are no displays going on."

Bigelow canceled classes Thursday, Aril 19, after rumors surfaced that people were coming to the high school to confront other students. Tensions were ratcheted up after about six vehicles bearing Confederate flags parked adjacent to school property on Tuesday morning. Some of those who parked vehicles were not Western students.

The matter exacerbated Wednesday when dozens of vehicles appeared near school property waving the Confederate flag, with counter-protesters opposing them with LGBTQ-rights advocating Pride flags and signs stating "Black Lives Matter" and "Hate Not Heritage."

Bigelow said Friday a comprehensive investigation by Bay County Sheriff's deputies and school personnel found no credible threat had been made against students or staff.

"The staff of the Bay City Public Schools would like to remind our students, parents, and community members that we expect students to be in class during their scheduled class times," Bigelow said. "While we support the rights afforded to all via the Constitution, we need our students to be in class, ready to learn. We also do not condone protests on school property at any time during school hours or after because they cause a disruption to the learning environment."

Western student Kendall Frost, who is black, previously told The Bay City Times-MLive some of her fellow classmates organized the display on social media in what she believes was intended to intimidate and bully certain black students. Frost provided screen caps of text messages with racial slurs and said some students told her and other black classmates they "shouldn't go to Western because of our skin tone."

Frost had opposed the displays and said she's glad they have seemingly ended.

"I'm glad they are down," she said. "That was our goal but we're still fighting for bigger punishments for the kids who want to make racial comments. We have every right to be here and maybe we won with the flags but until we feel more respected we're not going to stop fighting."

Western student Cameron Myers has told The Bay City Times-MLive he was motivated to organize the displays in response to a Confederate flag of his being removed from his truck while parked on school property by a black female classmate the week prior. He declined to specify why he was motivated to have initially flown the flag from his truck.

Myers asserted Frost had taken and torn his flag, something she denied. She said she had used her finger to write a mockingly derogatory phrase in the dirt of Myers' truck in response to overhearing a friend of his use a racial slur.

"I know I was wrong and I apologized for it," Frost said. "I should have handled my anger more differently."

Myers and his friends on Thursday moved their flag display from the area around the school to Auburn City Park and augmented it with a cookout. They insisted they were not racist and said they flew the flag as "a country thing," but declined to explain what that meant.

In a Snapchat video taken by a Western student acquired by MLive, footage depicts at least three males in a vehicle recording the flags' demonstration on Tuesday. At one point, one of the males can be heard swearing and using a racial slur as text appears on screen stating "Fly em high boys."

The demonstrations have garnered national attention. The Washington Post, The New York Times and Fox News have all published articles on the matter.

Historically, the Confederacy never adopted the Southern Cross symbol as its national flag. The second and third of the short-lived proto-state's three flags featured the symbol in the upper left-hand corner, analogous to the stars on the blue backdrop of the U.S. flag.

What is colloquially referred to as the Confederate flag today, with the rectangular image filling the entirety of the material, was used by Confederate Army units fighting to secede from the U.S to uphold slavery.
SAGINAW, MI -- A 61-year-old man police say robbed or tried to rob three Saginaw banks has been charged with a life offense.

Derrick Morris on Thursday, April 19, was arraigned in Saginaw County District Court on one count of bank robbery. The arraigning judge set Morris' bond at $500,000 cash-surety.

Michigan State Police troopers had arrested Morris late Wednesday or early Thursday morning during a routine traffic stop on East Holland near 20th Street in Saginaw. Authorities had issued a warrant for Morris on April 9 in connection with the first robbery.

That holdup occurred about 9 a.m. on April 6 at the Chemical Bank at 100 S. Michigan Ave. The second happened about 11:40 a.m. on April 13 at Saginaw County Employees Credit Union at 1700 Court St., with the third happening three days later at 3:40 p.m. at Family First Credit Union, 1011 N. Michigan Ave.

The robber obtained money in the first two robberies, but left empty-handed in the third, police have said.

Morris has a lengthy criminal history including at least 10 felony convictions. The Michigan Department of Corrections discharged him on April 15, 2016.

Morris is to appear for a preliminary examination at 1:30 p.m. on May 10.
OSCODA, MI -- Earlier this week a group of federal lawmakers from Michigan sent a letter to the U.S. Air Force imploring them to clean up the contamination at Wurtsmith Air Force base.

The letter concerning per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) seeping into groundwater from the former air force base in Oscoda was issued Wednesday by Michigan U.S. Sens. Debbie Stabenow and Gary Peters, both Democrats, and U.S. Rep. Dan Kildee, D-Flint Twp.

"We ask that the Department of Defense use this year's funding to prioritize stopping additional contamination of groundwater and surface water coming from Wurtsmith," the letter reads. "The community of Oscoda had this contamination done to them -- it was not the local community's fault."

The group of lawmakers said the Department of Defense should utilize some of the $310 million in federal funds earmarked this year for cleaning up contaminated former military bases.

As it stands, the Department of Defense is in violation of Michigan water quality standards, the letter states.

"The DOD must comply with Michigan's water quality standards and cleanup criteria, and must stop the movement of contamination from the former base into groundwater and surface waters near Wurtsmith," the letter reads.

The lawmakers recommend the Department of Defense install more granulated activated carbon filter systems to stymie PFAS from spreading through the groundwater in huge plumes.

The filters, which the Department of Defense has already installed in two locations, are part of a treatment system that withdraws contaminated water, treats it to remove the PFAS and then reinjects the treated water back into aquifers or surface water.

The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality expects clean-up efforts at Wurtsmith will cost $38 million this year alone, according to the letter.

Of that, $33 million will fund the installation of six filters intended to treat plumes directly contaminating Van Etten Lake. One of those six would treat the plume portion contaminating a children's YMCA camp on the lake.

The state environmental agency expects at least $180 million to be spent before the PFAS contamination, which has been spreading through the groundwater in huge plumes migrating off the former Air Force base, is remedied.

The chemicals are associated with the use of firefighting foam on the base and can cause cancer as well as thyroid, kidney, liver, heart and reproductive problems.
GRAND BLANC, MI -- A large police and staff presence at Grand Blanc High School on Friday monitored a student-organized walkout in protest of gun violence on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine school shooting.

Kayla Sharpe, a 16-year-old junior at Grand Blanc High School, went to the district's administration with hopes of students at the school joining in the walkout.

"Our school, in particular, is really into politics and wants to be active about gun control," Sharpe said. "We kind of used this as a mode to let students express their opinions. Teachers and students are all kind of on the same side of this issue because under that roof we're all subject to gun violence if it does happen."

There were eight police officers and dozens of staff and security who monitored the students on the front lawn in front of the school.

Senior Breken Hummel argued for better background checks and urged the banning of assault-style rifles.

"That power -- in the hands of a civilian -- is both irresponsible and dangerous," he said.

Students came and went during the approximately 45-minute program.

It was concluded with remarks from Flint resident April Cook-Hawkins.

Her 12-year-old brother was shot in the back of the head and dumped in the Flint River.

She also said her son was in the same classroom when first-grader Kayla Rolland was shot and killed in 2000 in Beecher.

"It's just dear to me because of my families connection to gun violence," Cook-Hawkins said. "Enough is enough. These kids shouldn't be out here worried about their lives. They should be worried about learning."

Grand Blanc Superintendent Clarence Garner, through a school spokeswoman, declined to comment Friday.

Hundreds of events were expected to take place at school districts across the country - including schools in Genesee County -- after the idea was launched following the Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that left 17 people dead, including 14 students.

Students in Grand Blanc, Flushing, Lake Fenton and Davison high schools in Genesee County have set up Twitter pages to plan activities and spread the word to others.

"This is all for the future, for us. We're trying to look at the bigger picture and the long run. We have a voice and we're trying to make it heard," said Kynzie Lafuente, a freshman at Flushing High School. "That's what these walkouts are doing. A shooting can happen to anyone anywhere, this is for the safety of all, by walking out we are trying to prove that we want change."

Students at Flint Southwestern High School participated in an assembly that aimed to raise awareness about gun violence and how it can affect students. Students showcased signs to raise awareness and shared a short poem, the district said.

The scene Friday at Grand Blanc was much different from March 14 when students around the country also walked out as part of the one-month anniversary of the fatal school shooting in Parkland, Florida, During #Enough! National Walk Out.

Those March protests were set to last 17 minutes - one minute for each of the victims in the Valentine's Day massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

But at 9:55 a.m. on March 14 at Grand Blanc High School, administrators put the school in "secure mode." Students said all classroom doors were locked until the end of the third period at 10:23 a.m.

In an email to students and parents, GBHS Principal Michael Fray said he and the school's resource officer decided on the security provision "in the interest of maintaining a safe school environment."

Sharpe said students at Grand Blanc were already in the planning stages for today's walkout and that a group decided "20 minutes before to walk out and go to McDonald's," which prompted the lockdown.
Bo Franklin

GRAND RAPIDS, MI - Two men are facing federal charges accused of robbing Independent Bank on Tuesday, April 17.

Bo Franklin and Quincy Melton were named in a criminal complaint filed by the FBI alleging they robbed the bank at 3090 Plainfield Ave. NE.

On the morning of the robbery, the two texted each other about getting together.

Quincy Melton's day didn't start out great: he ran out of gas, and had to call a friend while he waited at a Denny's restaurant.

A half-hour later, he and Franklin showed up at the bank a quarter-mile away, the FBI said.

Witnesses reported that a robber pointed a revolver a bank manager's head, and told a teller, "'Ma'am, give me all your money,'" FBI special agent Adam Van Deuren wrote in the complaint.

A "black 3 series BMW with tinted windows and a sunset style State of Michigan license plate," sped from the scene.

Quincy Melton

By the next day, Grand Rapids police had found the car and locked up both suspects.

The robbery happened around 10:05 a.m. Tuesday, April 17, at the bank at 3090 Plainfield Ave. NE.

A robber, wearing a winter coat with the hood up, and fur obscuring his face, demanded money from a teller while holding the revolver "inches from the bank manager's head," Van Deuren wrote.

The robber fled with $4,285.

A bank worker obtained a good description of the getaway car.

The next day, a Grand Rapids police detective assigned to a fugitive task force spotted the vehicle parked outside of a residence. Police kept surveillance on the vehicle and followed when Melton left the house, and started to drive away.

Police conducted a felony stop and arrested Melton, who was on parole, the FBI said.

Melton gave police consent to search his home on the Northeast Side of town. They found $1,000 hidden inside a boot in his closet.

A "close associate" to Melton then told police that the robber depicted in surveillance photos looked like Melton's friend, known as "Bo."

A search of Melton's cellphone, which is allowed under parole conditions, showed that Melton had texted Franklin the morning of the robbery, and that they had discussed a meeting, the FBI said.

After the holdup, Melton searched local news websites for information about the robbery. Police also found a photo on his phone that showed Melton wearing a hooded coat similar to the one used in the robbery.

Later that day, police used a search warrant at Franklin's house. Police found a large, black revolver, hidden in the garage, similar to the one described by bank workers, the FBI said.

Police found about $2,000 hidden in his mattress, the FBI said.

Both are held pending detention hearings.
SAUGATUCK TOWNSHIP, MI - The lost city of Singapore, one of Michigan's most famous ghost towns, is buried under Lake Michigan dunes at the mouth of the Kalamazoo River, an archaeological survey shows.

But there are not intact houses or buildings buried below, only some foundations, some artifacts and a former dump site - nothing that should stop a proposed marina and housing development planned just north of Saugatuck, a proponent said Friday, April 20, in releasing the survey.

"We think (the project should) move forward, fairly expeditiously," said attorney Attorney Carl Gabrielse, representing property owners Jeff and Peg Padnos, who have proposed a development, NorthShore of Saugatuck, that would include digging out a large boat basin to be lined with houses.

Other groups are working to halt the development.

Gabrielse said the developers hired Matthew P. Purtill, a Ball State University archaeologist, to conduct the survey.

An initial study by the University of Illinois focused on written reports - historical documents, literature - about the lost city, but Purtill and his team followed with an exhaustive on-scene investigation, Gabrielse said.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers required NorthShore to conduct the survey and has been kept up to date with findings, the attorney said.

The survey can be viewed here.

A piece of pottery found in a Lake Michigan sand dune from the lumber town of Singapore .

He said that no one has conducted such an intensive review, which included using shovels, boring equipment and ground-penetrating radar that can provide a look underground from 13 to 20 feet.

Below that level, he said, would be groundwater.

He said that shards of ceramics dating to the 19th Century, including imported pottery suggesting a town inhabited by affluent residents, were found. So, too, was a refuse dump that archaeologists found fascinating.

They found the foundation of maybe a saw mill or general store from the Singapore era but not the buildings themselves. Some areas with foundation material or similar findings have been barricaded, and would likely remain encased in sand.

"It will sit there and be preserved."

Workers recovered about 200 artifacts from the site. They could be put on display at some point.

"We don't know what is elsewhere but we believe this is the central part of Singapore," Gabrielse said.

He said investigators were looking for both "prehistoric" and "historic" artifacts over the course of months.

They also found a possible septic tank, along with building materials from the 20th Century. They also found materials tied to the former Broward Marine that once operated on the property.

The archaeologists found no evidence of children once living in Singapore, a lumber town. They would expect to see glass or clay marbles, a commonly found toy in the 19th Century, but found none.

The project has been challenged by the Saugatuck Dunes Coastal Alliance, and two Native American tribes. They are appealing an Allegan County judge's ruling that the Coastal Alliance had no standing in a lawsuit alleging the property owners broke zoning laws.

They are also challenging the state Department of Environmental Quality's decision to allow the proposed marina to go forward.

The Coastal Alliance said zoning rules say: "In no event shall a canal or channel be excavated for the purpose of increasing the Water Frontage required by this section."

Jon Helmrich, a Coastal Alliance board member, said his group needs more time to examine the archaelogical survey before commenting further.

"We have not yet studied the survey so we can't respond to it. We would also prefer to have the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Michigan Historic Preservation Network, the Huron Band of the Potawatomie, and the Gun Lake Tribe of the Pottawatomie respond, before we make any claims or statements," he said.

Gabrielse said the planning commission determined that the proposed boat basin complies with the ordinance.

The NorthShore project would result in moving over 200,000 cubic yards of sand to a valley on the property in order to build the marina, which would have 33 boat slips and be surrounded by 23 homes.

Oklahoma energy magnate Aubrey McClendon bought the property, once known as the Dennison property, in 2006, and proposed a similar development on the land.

He sold some of the land to the Land Conservancy of West Michigan, but the rest was sold after he died on March 2, 2016, in a fiery crash the day after he was indicted for rigging bids for oil and natural-gas leases.
GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- A few dozen students took part in a National School Walkout event, marching about 2 miles to protest gun violence and support the push for new gun legislation.

The march began around 10 a.m. Friday, April 20, at City Middle/High School, 1720 Plainfield Ave. NE. It concluded about 2 miles south in downtown Grand Rapids at Calder Plaza, 300 Monroe Avenue NW.

Anya Dengerink-Van Til, a junior who participated in the march, said reducing gun violence nationwide should be the No. 1 priority. She said it was important for City High students who attend a "very social-justice-oriented school."

"In the United States, we have a huge problem where some people think their rights to own guns are more important than their children's lives, which is astonishing and kind of heartbreaking," Dengerink-Van Til said.

Similar events held across the country on April 20, 2018, honor the 19th anniversary of the 1992 mass shooting at Columbine High School. It was the deadliest high school shooting in U.S. history until February, when 17 people were killed and 17 more wounded during a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

"Our mission is to spread awareness and also let it be known that students want to be involved and deserve the right to stand up for ourselves," wrote Andrew DeBoer, a City High/Middle School student, in an email to MLive/The Grand Rapids Press.

Once the group of 50-75 students arrived at Calder Plaza, a handful of them spoke, including representatives from Moms Demand Action and Mothers Against Senseless Killings.

On Saturday, March 24, an estimated 4,000 people jammed into Rosa Parks Circle to advocate for the same issue as part of a national March for Our Lives movement. The March 24 rally was organized by five Forest Hills Northern High School students and one City High/Middle School student.
STEUBEN COUNTY, IN - A body found in northeast Indiana has been identified as a Michigan man.

Indiana State Police say 29-year-old Nigel Jerome Headley, most recently of Lansing, was discovered by employees at Trine State Recreation Area in Steuben County at 10:39 a.m. on Friday, April 13.

Steuben County Coroner William Harter has ruled the manner of death a homicide, with the cause as multiple blunt force traumatic injuries to the head.

A joint investigation between the Indiana State Police, the Indiana Conservation Officers and the Steuben County Coroner's Office is underway.

Anyone with information about this incident is asked to contact the Indiana State Police in Fort Wayne at (260) 432-8661.
Members of "Sasna Tsrer" not brought to court

The case of "Sasna Tsrer" two will start without a 11 detainee after a long break. It is already the third judge changing in this case. The newly appointed judge Arshak Vardanyan said he had applied to the penitentiary for presenting the detainees during the trial. But they were not only not brought to the court, but also no formal letter was sent. "Today the whole police system deals with demonstrations, including the accompanying battalion," said lawyer Harutyun Baghdasaryan. And according to Liparit Simonyan, the relevant authorities think better not to bring the detainees to courts, and not to hold court sessions. The evidence was examined in this case. Judge Arshak Vardanyan found that it was possible to continue the case from the stage where it waover. Defenders disagreed with the judge's decision. "This actually impedes the effective investigation of the case. The court must ensure continuity. The same judge should continue the case with the same staff. In my opinion, the court must start again. That's right also our rights are being violated, because the length of the investigation is so long that our defendants continue to stay in detention for a long time," said Harutyun Baghdasaryan. Liparit Simonyan added that the European Court had the following precedent in one case: the judge who examined the case was to be present during the examination of evidence. And today judge Arshak Vardanyan decided to hold court sessions every Friday before the end of the working day.
JACKSON, MI - Bullets were recovered from two Jackson High School classrooms that were shot at Thursday afternoon while students and teachers were inside.

No arrests have been made yet in the shooting that occurred at about 1:44 p.m., April 19, Jackson Director of Police and Fire Services Elmer Hitt said. Police still are investigating the incident, in which shots were fired outside the school building at 544 Wildwood Ave.

Two bullets entered two separate classrooms through windows on the building's lower level, Hitt said. The bullets recovered appear to have been fired from a handgun, he said.

Both classrooms were occupied by students and teachers at the time, Jackson Public Schools Superintendent Jeff Beal said. No students or staff were injured in the incident, he said.

Police also are still reviewing school security camera footage to determine exactly where the shots came from and who fired them, Hitt said, adding that they believe the shots were fired from somewhere near the Renaissance Apartments, 720 W. Michigan Ave., across the street from the school.

It is still unclear if the school was shot at intentionally, Hitt said. There were no shooting victims or reports of anyone being shot in the area surrounding the school, he said.

Classes were canceled Friday, April 20, in all Jackson Public Schools based on the unsettling nature of the incident, and to allow the district to provide specialized support for staff members and students in the affected classrooms, Beal said.

Counselors will be available for all Jackson High students when classes resume on Monday, April 23, Beal said

Anyone with information about this incident is asked to contact Jackson Police Det. Brett Stiles at 517-768-8722 or anonymously leave a tip with Crime Stoppers of Mid-Michigan at 855-840-7867.
The 17-year-old encouraged everyone to register to vote once they are eligible, and to follow through and vote.

"Gun violence is nothing new to our generation. We've grown up in a society where shootings happen any day and we just find out about it on Twitter. It's not OK that we're OK with people dying," she said.

She spoke out not only for the victims of mass shootings, such as the Feb. 14 shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, that has prompted students across the country to speak out, but also for victims shot and killed in other incidents.

"We read the victims' names and it has no effect on us, as if they weren't a person with an entire life with friends and a family who loved them, with life goals, a future. We spend a minute sending thoughts and prayers and then add their name to the list and move on with our lives.

"Who's it going to take in your life to die before you start to care?" she said.

Jillian Bowe read a poem urging changes.

"How much longer until we are next?" she read. "How many more breaths will I take before I join Parkland, Columbine, Sandy Hook, Cleveland, Lexington Park ... I could go on. How many more breaths do we have to take before someone listens?"

Many students held signs calling for gun reform. Two were seen holding a sign supporting the Second Amendment.

The students convened for about a half hour before heading back inside the school. Classes proceeded normally for any students who chose not to take part in the walkout, officials said.
.

Kalamazoo police tracked down three suspects accused of punching and robbing a man.

KALAMAZOO, MI - Police arrested three suspects accused of punching a man and stealing his backpack early Friday, April 20.

Kalamazoo police responded to a 12:18 a.m. report of a robbery near West Michigan Avenue and Westmoreland Avenue.

The robbers fled west. Police set up a perimeter and brought in a tracking dog that found two of the suspects near West Michigan Avenue and Jack Pine Way. During the investigation, police determined the identity of the third suspect, who was found near West Michigan Avenue and Emajean Street.

The three suspects, ages 18, 19 and 22, were jailed on a charge of unarmed robbery and outstanding warrants, police said.

Anyone with information about this incident is asked call police at 337-8994 or Silent Observer at 343-2100.
EGELSTON TWP., MI - Two medical marijuana dispensaries will be allowed to open east of Muskegon following the passage of an ordinance in Egelston Township.

After nearly two years of toiling, the township board this week approved the ordinance regulating the production and sale of medical marijuana. It allows for eight growers with 1,500 plants each.

The measure passed Monday makes Egelston Township one of the first communities in Muskegon County to pass such an ordinance. With the ordinance, the township has opted in to new state rules that allow medical marijuana plants and products to be grown, manufactured and sold at provisioning centers.

The Egelston Township Board of Trustees approved the measure 5-2 at the board's regular April 16 meeting.

Michigan's Licensing and Regulatory Affairs department issued a new set of rules in early 2017 that allows municipalities to regulate medical marijuana on their own terms.

Township Supervisor John Holter said it is was a win for medical marijuana patients in Muskegon County looking to purchase their medicine locally.

"We're testing new waters here," Holter said. "First and foremost, it's putting a medical option out there for people that want to use it."

According to the ordinance, Egelston will issue the following licenses to prospective growers:

Eight Class C licenses, which allow a single license-holder to grow up to 1,500 plants.

Three processor licenses.

Two licenses for provisioning centers, or dispensaries.

Two licenses for safety compliance, or product testing.

Two licenses for secure transporters.

A $5,000 fee will be assessed per application, said township Clerk Joan Raap. That money will be used by the township for inspections, investigations and enforcement of zoning ordinances.

The ordinance allows processing facilities in I-1 and I-2 industrial zones, provisioning centers in C-1 and C-2 commercial zones and growers in R-5 agricultural districts or I-1 and I-2 zones.

Testing facilities will also be allowed to operate in R-5 or I-1 and I-2 districts, according to the ordinance.

Secure transport will be allowed across all districts to ensure products are safely delivered to and from production facilities.

Facilities must be at least 1,000 feet from a school zone and 500 feet from a church or licensed day care facility. Loitering within 100 feet of a provisioning center is strictly outlawed under the new ordinance.

Raap said that she will begin accepting applications after April 30, but said she has already received "thousands" of phone calls from people trying to get in on the ground floor of Muskegon County's burgeoning marijuana industry.

"It is my understanding that anyone who is granted a license can start right away, but can't begin (growing or selling) until the board gives them definitive approval," Raap said.

A five-person committee will vet, review and recommend applications to the township board, which will ultimately decide who or what entities receive a license. That panel includes Holter, Raap, Fire Chief Mark Cleveland, Zoning Administrator Jeff Ream and Carriann Avery, a planning commissioner who will serve as an at-large citizen.

Holter said Avery will also act as a liaison to the planning commission for all issues related to medical marijuana.

Applications will be processed on a first come, first served basis and will include some redundant hoops to jump through required by LARA, like background checks and fees.

"We'll be the ones who decide who's the best fit," Raap said. "They'll have to be able to meet annual inspections by fire, building and zoning administrators. They'll have to meet all of our ordinances. We want people who will be good neighbors.

"We don't want someone who has no stake in the community. For us, it's about protecting our community."

Township officials said they believe a majority of Egelston Township residents supported the board's decision to opt in and adopt the ordinance.

"Mostly what we've been hearing is 'thank you,'" Raap said. "We're confident that we've done as much of our homework as possible and that we made the right decision for the majority."
SAGINAW, MI -- Police in Saginaw are investigating a body found as a homicide on the city's South Side.

Before 7 p.m. on Thursday, April 19, officers from the Saginaw Police Department and Michigan State Police troopers were dispatched to Russell near Youmans where they found a deceased male, according to Detective Sgt. Matthew Gerow.

Crime scene tapes cordoned off a nearby house at the corner while a large group of people gathered at the corner directly across the street.

Gerow said the incident is being investigated as a homicide, which would make this the seventh in the city.

Additional details were not immediately available.
CORRECTION: Saginaw ISD wants control of the CPED authorization, not the career center.

SAGINAW, MI -- The Saginaw School District wants to negotiate better terms with the Intermediate School District before handing over a license to run the administrative duties of the district's career center.

The Saginaw school district currently holds the Career Planning Education District (CPED) authorization at the Saginaw Career Complex Center, which offers skilled trades to students throughout the county.

The ISD wants control of the CPED in order to go after a countywide millage, but the Saginaw school board has had some objections.

The district is now using its legal team to ask the Saginaw ISD to set in stone certain demands as it pertains to Career Planning Education District, or CPED, authorization for the Saginaw Career Complex (SCC).

During the board's meeting on April 18, members unanimously passed two motions.

The first was for the ISD to agree to not construct a new building for the career center. Superintendent Nathaniel McClain said he didn't want the district's building for the center to be displaced.

Secondly, to consider giving members of an advisory committee voting power based on each district's enrollment. The ISD wants to establish an advisory board with a person from each of the school districts to help come up with programming for Career Technical Education within Saginaw County.

Saginaw School Board President said Saginaw should have a bigger representation on that advisory board since it has a higher student population.

"We do have over 50 percent of the student population at SCC and they have no regard for that quantity of people," he said.

The Saginaw Career Center, 2102 Weiss, is also owned and staffed by the district.

In March, ISD Superintendent Kathy Stewart announced that 11 of the 12 school districts under the ISD had approved resolutions authorizing the ISD to take possession of the CPED. Saginaw's district did not approve one.

Stewart, who wants to fund the career center through a count-wide millage, said other districts would support a millage if the ISD possessed the CPED.

There is no MDE policy or guidance for a CPED transfer since it is a decision that resides within each region, according to the state.

Moving too fast

The second motion was to have the district's lawyers to send communications to other districts in the ISD expressing the district's stance on the issue.

"There are some concerns that we have that they may not be aware," McClain said.

Patterson said he was concerned at the speed in which Stewart is moving through the process.

"Way too fast for our comfort," Patterson said.

Patterson said that Stewart took the 11 approved resolutions and moved forward to asking the state to transfer the license.

"The ISD has been in negotiations with us and they acted, going toward the state, circumventing the negotiation process that we had between us," Patterson said.

Patterson said he wants to find an agreement that is feasible for everyone.

"We want to make sure that no added cost for the whole county using Saginaw Public School (District) building is incurred by Saginaw public schools alone moving forward if the transfer is granted," Patterson said.

If the transfer is approved by the state, the ISD gains administrative control over the Career Center and will pursue a property tax to raise $5 million to help support Career Technical Education programs at the career center.

Stewart said it is not the ISD' intent to take over the center, but only to expand and support programs as well as upgrade equipment at SCC.

Stewart hopes to have a millage proposal on the November ballot.
Alpine Township will spend $15,000 to have the McGrath Consulting Group, of Wonder Lake, Illinois, do a study to review the Fire Department's operations and future needs.

Unlike several other fire departments in the area that have brought in the same consultant over the last few years, Alpine Township officials say they don't have operational or personnel issues that need to be addressed; what they are looking for is an analysis of the department's current capabilities and needs and future needs.

Township Supervisor Greg Madura said the primary issue is working to determine where the township should build a new fire station and when it should be done. "In talking with Tim McGrath, we learned that 90 percent of the work they do is for communities whose fire departments are in trouble. That's not Alpine Township," he said.

The Alpine Fire Department currently has three fire stations spread evenly across the township. The Fire Department is outgrowing Station No. 1, which is located on the corner of Alpine Church Road and Alpine Avenue, and would like to expand that station but has no more room on the site. The property surrounding Station No. 1 is up for sale.

Township officials are hoping the study will identify where a new station should be built and how many stations the department needs.

Alpine Fire Chief Dave Klomparens said he is looking forward to having a third party "audit" his department. "I think every management team can benefit from having an outside agency look at its operations," he said. "We also need to know if we have the right equipment now to serve the public and what equipment we are going to need in the future."

The study is expected to take up to six months to complete.
Day 8. Rally (video)

18.30 It was a little tense at Mashtots-Amiryan intersection. The demonstrators stopped the traffic for a few minutes and signals wee heard for the support of the movement. The police detachments quickly set up a pavement, preventing citizens from moving forward. The other police officers detained the citizens. The passers-by, who were not indifferent to the demonstrators in any case, tried to stop the police detaining the citizens, but that did not succeed. "We do it for you, for your future, you are Armenian, do not treat your children, mothers like that, nationality is not decided by clothes, do not do it," one of the citizens said to the policemen. Shortly before the demonstrators decided to march to Republic Square, where a rally will be held at 19:00.
The chronicle of a life split between urban Manhattan and rural Montana.
NORRISTOWN  Montgomery County election officials were notified Friday night that approximately 16,000 general election mail-in ballots were printed incorrectly by its ballot vendor, NPC, and mailed to residents. These ballots are easily identified as they were only printed on one side. We sincerely regret that this happened and are working with the county and []
Building Homes for Heroes donates home to war veteran and her children
Education

Montgomery County Community College will present the spring installment of the interview/talk show program Issues and Insights April 20 from 12:30 to 2 p.m. in Science Center room 214, 340 DeKalb Pike, Blue Bell. The programs will be simulcast to the Colleges West Campus in South Hall room 216, 101 College Drive, Pottstown. Dr. Kolsky will offer a humorous presentation, Carrots, Sticks and Politics: A State of the Nation and the World Message. In this speech, he will provide his interpretation of domestic and international politics and then welcome questions from the audience for discussion. Issues and Insights, is free and open to the public. For information, contact Dr. Thomas Kolsky, professor of political science, at 215-641-6380 or tkolsky@mc3.edu.

Montgomery County Community Colleges STEM Scholars Program will host a STEM Jam! open house April 25 from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. in the Advanced Technology Center at the Colleges Central Campus, 340 DeKalb Pike, Blue Bell. The drop-in event is designed for students interested in learning more about careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Activities will include STEM program information and career advising, STEM speakers throughout the day from industry and academia, micro-helicopter and robotics competitive obstacle courses and demonstrations and static models of STEM student and faculty work. For more information about STEM Jam! or STEM programs at MCCC, contact William Brownlowe at wbrownlowe@mc3.edu or 215-641-6644, or Robin Zuhlke at 215-619-7440 or rzuhlke@mc3.edu.

Temple Ambler, located at 580 Meetinghouse Road, presents the following events:

International Club Global Bazaar April 15 from 5 to 8 p.m. The Ambler Campus International Club invites all students, faculty, staff and the community to celebrate a multitude of diverse cultures, which will be showcased at the organizations Global Bazaar. This family friendly event will highlight cultural traditions and celebrations in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, South American, North America and Africa through music, entertainment, food and informative displays developed and presented by students at the Ambler Campus. Young visitors will be provided with passports, which they may get stamped at each country they visit. Prizes will be awarded to world travelers who talk to cultural representatives, answer questions about the countries theyve visited and take part in fun-filled activities designed to help them learn about the rich diversity of cultures found throughout the world. Refreshments will be served. The event is free. For more information, call 267-468-8108 or e-mail tuc36466@temple.edu.

EarthFest 2011 April 29 from 9:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. More than 75 exhibitors, including the Philadelphia Zoo, The Franklin Institute, the Academy of Natural Sciences, the Elmwood Park Zoo and the Insectarium, will take part in EarthFest 2011. School students of all ages are invited to attend and develop displays of their own. EarthFest partner the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society also offers its Kids Grow Expo, featuring the Junior Flower Show, as part of the event. For more information, call 267-468-8108 or e-mail duffyj@temple.edu.

Annual Spring Plant Sale May 7 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The plant sale  an Ambler Campus tradition dating back to the early 1900s  will feature woody plants and perennials in portable sizes, hardy trees, shrubs, and vines, native plants that are attractive to wildlife, herbs, and hanging baskets. There will also be numerous special plants for sale to highlight Amblers special anniversary year. Garden books and garden tools will also be available for sale. Students, staff, and volunteers from the Department of Landscape Architecture and Horticulture and the Ambler Arboretum Advisory Committee will be available to answer questions. All proceeds from the Spring Plant Sale will support the Ambler Arboretum Fund and the Pi Alpha Xi National Honor Society. Information: 267-468-8001 or judy.shatz@temple.edu. Learn more at www.ambler.temple.edu/anniversary.

June Homecoming/Louise Bush-Brown Garden Dedication June 5 from 12:30 to 2 p.m. (June Homecoming), Bright Hall Lounge; 2 p.m. (Garden Dedication), Ambler Campus Formal Perennial Gardens. Tickets  June Homecoming: Participant  $18 per person; Sustainer  $25 per person; Benefactor  $40 per person. The 2011 June Homecoming, sponsored by the School of Environmental Design Alumni Association, will include the Alumni Association annual meeting and luncheon. June Homecoming will be followed by the formal dedication of Temple University Amblers Formal Perennial Gardens as the Louise Bush-Brown Formal Gardens. During this 100th anniversary of the campus, Temple University Ambler and the Ambler Arboretum of the Temple University is honoring Louise Bush-Browns many contributions to the history of the campus by formally dedicating the gardens in her honor. During the program, campus Executive William Parshall will welcome guests, Ambler Arboretum Director Jenny Rose Carey will speak about the Bush-Browns and the history of the garden, and an official ribbon cutting will be held for the Louise Bush-Brown Formal Garden. Following the ribbon cutting, guests are invited to take a tour of the gardens, which will wend their way to the Campus Greenhouse for the School of Environmental Designs annual Plant Auction. Information (Garden Dedication): 267-468-8001 or judy.shatz@temple.edu. Information (June Homecoming): 215-482-0722. Learn more at www.ambler.temple.edu/anniversary.

Northview Garden Tour and Fundraiser for the Ambler Arboretum June 12 from noon to 5 p.m. Call for reservations. Tickets: $15 per person or $20 at the door. In addition to the gardens of the Ambler Arboretum of Temple University, Arboretum Director Jenny Rose Carey has a garden oasis all her own right in Ambler  Northview. Visitors will have the opportunity to take self-guided tours throughout the many gardens, where garden experts will be available to answer questions about the various designs. The Ambler Keystone Chapter of the Womans National Farm and Garden Association will also provide tea and refreshments. All proceeds from the tours will support the Ambler Arboretum of Temple University. Information or to register: 267-468-8001 or judy.shatz@temple.edu. Learn more at www.ambler.temple.edu/anniversary.

The Senior Adult Activities Center of Montgomery County, 536 George Street, Norristown, will hold the following events:

SAAC Adult Day Care, an alternative to Nursing Home Care is available  for information call 610-275-1960

Volunteers are needed for Meals on Wheels Program (call the number above)

SAACs Fifth Avenue Boutique opens Monday through Friday from 10 a.m.-1:30 p.m.

Exercise with Theresa will be held every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 1 p.m.

Dance class is held every Monday at 10 a.m.

Tai Chi is held every Monday at 10 a.m.

Yoga is held every Tuesday at 10:30 a.m.

Line Dancing is held every Thursday at 10:30 a.m.

Dancing with Joan is held every Wednesday at 10:30 a.m.

Sculpture Class is held Wednesdays from 2 to 3:30 p.m.

Why Should I Learn Spanish? will be held Wednesdays at 10:30 a.m.

Generations On-Line computer classes for seniors will be held Monday through Friday from 8 a.m.  4 p.m.  computers are available during those hours.

Health Living will be held every Tuesday at 1 p.m.

Boomer U will hold the following events. Boomer U is located at 45 Forest Avenue, Ambler. Registration & payment is required for all events: 215-619-8863.

Pilates Class is held Wednesdays and Fridays at 9:30 a.m. First class is free; please bring a mat. For information call 610-291-5376.

Blue Bell School of Dance, 921 Penllyn Blue Bell Pike, Blue Bell, hosts Argentine Tango Classes and a Milonga dance party every Friday evening. Lessons start at 8:30 p.m. followed by dancing at 9:30 p.m. Andrew Conway, master Argentine Tango dancer, instructor and performer and his partner Linda Chase will instruct. All levels welcome and no partner is needed. Refreshments will be served. Fee is $12 per person and includes lesson and dancing. Information: 215-634-1101 or www.amoretango.com.

The Montgomery Hospital Medical Center will offer the following classes:

Childbirth Education Class- all parents are invited to participate, including those who are delivering at

other hospitals. For more information on maternity services or classes, call 610-270-2020.

CPR and First Aid Courses are offered for beginners to experiences health care providers. Call 610-270-2313.

The Ambler SAAC (Senior Adult Activities Center), located at 45 Forest Ave in Ambler will hold the following events:

Tai Chi every Monday and Thursday at 11 a.m.

Yoga is every Tuesday at 1 p.m. and Friday at 10:30 a.m.

Strength and balance training every Wednesday at 10 a.m.

Armchair Aerobics is held every Monday at 10 a.m.

Gourmet Weight Wise every Thursday at 12:30.

Fitness Center and Pool Room open daily 8 a.m.-4 p.m.

The Diabetes Education Center will offer day and evening classes each month. Health insurance pays for diabetes education classes. Preregistration is required. Call 610-270-2301.

For Kids & Families

The Ambler Kiwanis Club will host its annual Easter Egg Hunt April 26 at 10 a.m. in Ambler Borough Park, located just off of the intersection of Hendricks Street and Valley Brook Road. Members of the Wissahickon Key Club will assist Kiwanians in hiding thousands of wrapped chocolate eggs in a designated area of the park. Also hidden will be plastic colored eggs, which are redeemed for prizes. Elementary school children are separated by age.

Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation will hold its 21st annual Storybook Egg-Stravaganza April 15 fom 6 to 7:30 p.m. at the Upper Dublin Township Building. Toddlers and preschoolers love this annual event where photo opportunities with favorite friends abound! Treasures are collected from UDP&Rs assortment of lifesize cutouts of favorite cartoon characters from Disney, Sesame Street, Nickelodeon and other well-known animation. Children can have their picture taken with Bugsy OHare; bring your own camera. And dont forget a basket for goodies! $7 for UD residents; $12 for non-residents. Pre-register at 215-643-1600 ext. 3443.

Splash Week is a free week-long program that teaches children and families basic swimming skills and water safety practices. All YMCA branches will host multiple classes each day from April 11 to 15. For more information, contact the Ambler Area YMCA at 215-628-9950.

Healthy Kids Day is April 16 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. The day is filled with fun, engaging and artistic activities that cultivate healthy living as part of the YMCAs larger efforts to help more kids and families become physically active. All activities are free and open to the community. For more information, contact the Ambler YMCA at 215-628-9950. No reservation is required.

The Ambler Area YMCA has added several new programs for area youngsters. Classes are held late afternoons or evenings on various weekdays. For more information, visit philaymca.org or call 215-628-9950.

Basic Beading: Ages: 10+. Wednesdays 7 to 7:45 p.m. This class will teach you the fundamentals of wiring and stringing along with how color can be used to create unique and vibrant beadwork design. You will create various jewelry including earrings, bracelets, charm pendants and much more! Supplies will be provided. Bringing your own jewelry pliers or tools would be a plus.

Messin with the Masters: Ages: 8-12. Thursdays 7 to 7:45 p.m. Learn about some of the worlds greatest artists. You will be inspired to create your own Starry Night with oil pastels and tempera paints, a tissue paper painted Monet garden, a Picasso head using scraps of paper, a Georgia OKeeffe clay flower bowl and a Rousseau jungle collage.

Super Scientist: Ages: 5-7. Mondays 4:30 to 5:15 p.m. Well be concocting chemistry experiments such as making slime, mixing potions and having fun with magnet magic. Your budding little scientist will enhance his/her creative thinking and motor skills and to top it off will learn that science can be serious fun.

Wacky Junk Art: Ages: 8-12. Thursdays 6 to 6:45 p.m. Why throw it away! Instead join us to make household junk into aliens from outer space, wacky specs, crazy hats, body masks or a recycled train.

Globe Trotters: Ages: 4-6. Tuesdays 4:30 to 5:15 p.m. Youre never too young to start thinking globally. Each week, we explore a new country through crafts, games, music, stories and even some taste-testing. A perfect introduction to our great big world!

Crazy about Crafts: Ages: 5-7, Thursdays 4:30 to 5:15 p.m. Let your childs creative juices flow with our fun arts and crafts projects each week. Fine motor skills and creative thinking skills will be enhanced with this crafty class.

Come out and join the Ambler Area YMCAs Teen and Junior Leaders Club. Participants are given the freedom to plan community service projects year round and truly make a difference in the lives of people in need. Those in Teen and Junior Leaders also attend leadership retreats all along the East Coast three times a year and meet other leaders who are doing the same great work in their respective areas. Dont miss out on this inspiring opportunity. Teen Leaders, ages 13-17, meet every Wednesday from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Junior Leaders, ages 10-12, will begin in the spring and will meet every Monday. For more information, contact Mike Miles, Teen Director, 215- 628-9950 x 1540 or mmiles@philaymca.org.

Did you know that the new Ambler Area YMCA holds childrens birthday parties at its site for members and non members as well. The Ambler Y does all the work from start to finish and birthday parties include a personalized cake, ice cream, beverage and paper products. Parties are held on Saturday and Sunday afternoons and include two party hosts to lead activities, set-up, clean-up and assist with serving. You can have a Splash Party for children ages six to 12 in the new zero depth entry pool with water slide and spray fountains. Up to 25 children have exclusive use of the pool area with 30 minutes in the party room. Sports Parties are offered for kids ages four to 12 with age appropriate activities and games, and sports such as floor hockey, soccer, basketball or dodge ball. Children ages three to five years of age will enjoy parties in the Family Active Center with use of the Moon Bounce and organized activities, such as parachute play and songs. For information, 215-628-9950 ext. 1583.

Community Events at the Ambler Y:

-YAchievers YMCA Achievers is a developmentally based, extracurricular, educational and team mentoring program designed to help students in grades five through 12 prepare for fulfilled livelihoods in college and beyond. Participation is free and all students in this program receive a free YMCA membership. Registration for the 2009 program begins now. You do not need to be a YMCA member to utilize these special services. Call 215-628-9950 to register.

Greater Norristown Art Leagues Childrens Weeklong Summer Art Camps will be held at 800 West Germantown Pike in East Norriton, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday throughout the summer. The cost per session is $125 per student for ages 6 and up. Jo Ann Cooksey Bono teaches an introduction to basic drawing skills and techniques from 10 a.m. until the lunch break each day. In the afternoon sessions, Mary Vogel Lozinak involves the students in hands on projects such as collage, papermaking, T-shirt printing, 3D design and sculpy clay. Fridays Graduation Day includes an art show, awards ceremony and reception for parents, siblings, grandparents and friends. All supplies are included. Students provide their own lunch. A refrigerator is available and the building is air-conditioned. This is the 15th year to run this successful program. Both instructors are professional artists with State Police and Child Abuse Clearances. To register, call Jo Ann at 610-279-1008, or register on-line at www.gnal.org.

Health

Dresher Physical Therapy is hosting an interactive seminar discussing its Golf Assessment Progam April 30 from 10 a.m. to noon at Dresher Physical Therapy, 1075 Virginia Drive, Suite 200, Fort Washington. Physical therapist Chris Miller, certified through the Titleist Performance Institute, will discuss why your body may be the most important piece of golf equipment you invest in and how this can drastically improve your game. $10 in advance; $15 at the door. Call 215-619-4545 to reserve your spot.

The Chestnut Hill Center for Enrichment, Center on the Hill and Chestnut Hill Hospital will host a Senior Health and Resource Fair April 14 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Chestnut Hill Presbyterian Church, 8855 Germantown Ave. The event is free. For more information, call 215-248-0180 or e-mail chseniors@cavtel.net.

The Ambler Senior Adult Activities Center is hosting Help Yourself to Health, a new six-week workshop for older adults with ongoing health conditions such as arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure, anxiety, heart disease and others. The free workshop will take place at the Ambler Senior Adult Activities Center, 45 Forest Ave. on six Thursdays, May 12 through June 16 from 9:30 a.m. to noon. Although there is no charge to participate, registration is required. To register, call 215-619-8863.

The Ambler Senior Adult Activities Center is sponsoring an eight-week program called A Matter of Balance: Managing Concerns About Falls. Presented by the Montgomery County Health Department, this workshop will be held on Tuesdays, May 3 to June 21 from 10 a.m. to noon at the Ambler Center, 45 Forest Ave. If you pre-register by April 27, the fee is only $5! Registration at the first class is $10. (Checks should be payable to SAAC and will benefit our Meals on Wheels program that serves homebound seniors.) A workbook will be provided and refreshments will be served. Call 215-619-8863 to register or for more information.

Fort Washington Wellness Center classes are ongoing. There are several offered during lunch or right after work, for your convenience: Boot Camp from noon to 1 p.m. on Monday; Zumba is MWF from 11 a.m. to noon and Friday at 4 p.m.; there are 25 cycling classes; Ashtanga and Vinyasana Yoga and Pilates; and a group Womens Strength Training class M-F from 10 to 11 a.m. Questions, call Cathy DeMarco at 215-641-1245.

Following the success of other local area programs, Impact Sports and Upper Dublin Parks and Recreation are delighted to team up again to offer a spring program for the 2011 season! Upper Dublin area children ages 3-5 years old can attend a Sports Program featuring their favorite sports games; soccer, rugby, hockey, track and field, basketball, and more. The program will start on April 27 and run through June 1. Cost for the program is $85 for the six weeks. The classes will be running 12- 1 p.m.; 1- 2 p.m.; 2- 3 p.m. For more info or to register, call Upper Dublin Township on 215 643 1600 or visit their website a http://www.upperdublin.net.

Spring Aquatic Programs  UDHS Pool:

-Summer is just around the corner  Community Aquatic Programs at the UDHS Pool can help get you into shape! Programs begin in March; preregistration is required.

 Shallow Water Aerobics  Two 5-week programs, Wednesday nights, 8-8:45 p.m., $40R/$50NR.

 Adult Swim Instructions  Two 5-week programs, Wednesday nights, 7-8 p.m., $50R/$60NR

-Open Rec Swims are fun for the whole family! Come out on Fridays from 7-9 p.m. or Saturdays from 1-4 p.m. and enjoy use of the pool and diving area. Fridays are offered through June 17; Saturdays are offered March 12-May 21.

-Join a growing group of adult lap swimmers and water walkers. Lanes are set aside evenings and weekends for use; lanes are shared. Monday  Thursday from 7:30-9:30 p.m.; Fridays from 7-9 p.m. and Saturdays (March 12-May 21) from 1-4 p.m.

-Private Swimming & Diving Lessons for ages 3-adult are offered at the UDHS Pool through a partnership with the Upper Dublin Aquatic Club (UDAC). Visit the UDAC website for more information, www.udac.us, and click the link to UDHS Private Lessons.

-Looking for local programs for US Masters Swimming (adults) or Water Polo (all ages)? UDAC and UDSD are working together to develop programs that will be offered at the UDHS Pool. Add your name to Interest Lists by emailing slohoefer@upperdublin.net. emails will be sent about clinics and program start dates.

Questions about Community Aquatic Programs at the UDHS Pool, group use of the pool or pool rental? Contact Susan Lohoefer, Facility & Community Affairs Manager at slohoefer@upperdublin.net or call 215-643-8800 x8994.

SilverSneakers Fitness Program. The Healthyways SilverSneakers Fitness Program is a result-oriented program that enables older adults to take charge of their health. The program is an innovative blend of physical activity, healthy lifestyle and socially oriented programing. Members of the program are eligible for a free YMCA membership, with use of the pool and exercise equipment, along with customized classes designed for older adults who want to improve their strength, flexibility, balance and endurance. If you are a subscriber to Independence Blue Cross (Personal Choice 65 PPO) or Keystone 65 HMO, Bravo Health, or Health Options Programs (HOP), call the Ambler Area YMCA, 215-628-9950 or Hatboro Area YMCA, 215-674-4545. You can also visit www.silversneakers.com.

Zumba Fitness offers Zumba dance/fitness classes at Academy of Dance and Music/BBAD Studio located at 1524 DeKalb Pike in Blue Bell (behind Sherwin Williams). Classes are offered three times a week: Tuesdays at 6 p.m., Thursdays at 6:30 p.m. and Saturdays at 8 a.m. For a free trial pass for your first class, email us at info@danceandmusic.biz or call 610-277-2557. For more info, visit our site at www.academyofdanceandmusic.org.

Chestnut Hill Health Systems presents the following Health Education Programs:

FITNESS CLASSES

Golden Yoga: A Breathing, Stretching and Relaxation Class. Fridays, 2:30-3:30 p.m. Lea Auditorium, Chestnut Hill Hospital, 8835 Germantown Ave. Registration for four classes at a time required. Golden Yoga is Classical Yoga, adapted by the SKY Foundation, to accommodate those who have difficulty getting up and down from the floor. The program includes postures, breathing, relaxation and meditation techniques, all performed while sitting in a chair and standing. Registration required. Call 215-247-3029. Cost: $20 for 4 classes per month.

Tai Chi: Tuesdays & Thursdays, 8:30  9:30 a.m. Springfield Residence, 8601 Stenton Ave. Classes, for the novice or beginner/intermediate student, are designed to improve balance, power, posture, coordination, flexibility and mental focus. Slow, gentle movements are modified to most everyones abilities. For more information or to sign up for a free introductory class, call 215-882-2804. Cost: $8 per class/paid monthly.

SUPPORT GROUPS

Weight Loss Surgery Support Group: Fourth Wednesday of the month, 7-8 p.m. Williams Conference Room, Chestnut Hill Hospital, 8835 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia. Join us for a monthly get-together where well share information for those interested in weight loss surgery, learn from guest speakers discussing current news on issues including lifestyle modification, nutrition and exercise and provide ongoing support for those who have completed surgery. Registration required. Call 215-753-2000.

Breast Cancer Networking Group: Fourth Tuesday of the month 5:30  7 p.m. Williams Conference Room, Chestnut Hill Hospital, 8835 Germantown Ave., Philadelphia. A free, confidential support group for women living with a diagnosis of breast cancer designed to provide a forum for sharing information, feelings and concerns associated with breast cancer. Facilitated by Tish Wakefield, LCSW, Oncology Social Worker. Registration required. To register or for more information, call 215-248-8047.

New Moms Support Groups Tuesdays 10:30 a.m.  12 p.m.; contact Jeanine ORourke, MSW or 2:30  4 p.m.; contact Susan Schack, Ph.D Volunteer Conference Room, Chestnut Hill Hospital, 8835 Germantown Ave. The Center for Postpartum Depression at Chestnut Hill Hospital is pleased to offer two new support groups to support new moms. Both groups will be run by experienced mental health professionals who really get it when it comes to new motherhood and juggling relationships, extended family, work/family balance and self-care. If you are experiencing new mom challenges that often heighten anxiety and involve hormonally driven depression, join us for an informative and supportive forum to connect with other moms. Infants are welcome. $30 per session (flexible based on need). Registration is required. Call Dr. Schack, 646-265-2484, or Ms. ORourke, 215-206-2931.

Man to Man Prostate Cancer Support Group Third Thursday of the month 8-9 a.m. Williams Conference Room, Chestnut Hill Hospital, 8835 Germantown Ave. A networking group for men diagnosed with prostate cancer designed to provide education, support and encouragement. Spouses and partners welcome. Harry M. Baer, MD, Chief, Urology Division, will host Ask the Doctor. Registration required. Call 215-248-8325.

Contact the Senior Center by phone 215-248-0180 or email (chseniors@cavtel.net) with your questions about these programs or any of our on-going activities and classes.

Holy Redeemer HomeCare and Hospice seeks compassionate and emotionally mature volunteers to provide support to local hospice patients and their families in Bucks, Montgomery and Philadelphia counties. Volunteers may also assist with pet therapy and administrative work within the hospice department and are requested to have daytime availability. Hospice patient care volunteers visit with patients in their homes or nursing facilities once a week for two to three hours. They provide emotional support and companionship to patients and family members, assist with errands or provide respite for caregivers. Bereavement volunteers support the families of hospice patients following the loss of a loved one, while administrative volunteers assist with typing, mailings and/or filing. Hospice care workers provide a great service to families and loved ones of hospice patients. Many volunteers also report a great deal of personal satisfaction as a result of their services. Patient care and bereavement volunteers complete an application and attend an 18-hour volunteer training program that covers the medical, psychological and spiritual aspects of hospice volunteering. Day and evening training programs are offered. To sign up for volunteer opportunities in Pennsylvania, contact Holy Redeemer Volunteer Coordinator Jean Francis at 215-698-3737 or email jfrancis@holyredeemer.com.

Librarytalk

Upper Dublin Public Library, 805 Loch Alsh Avenue, Ft. Washington, 215-628-8744

www.upperdublinlibrary.org

APRIL CHILDRENS PROGRAMS:

Storytimes: Please register in the library.

o Wee Ones: 0 to 23 months Thursdays and Fridays 10:30 to 10:50 a.m.

o Tiny Tots: age 2. Wednesdays 10:30 to 10:50 a.m. and Fridays 11 to 11:20 a.m.

o Jr. Book Lovers: ages 3 to 6. Tuesdays 10:30 to 11 a.m.

o Bedtime Storytimes: 7 to 7:30 p.m. April 20 and 27. Wear your jammies, bring your teddy & hear Miss Barbara read bedtime stories! For ages 3 to 6.

APRIL TEEN PROGRAMS:

North Hills Library Teens April 28 from 4 to 6 p.m. Movie Matinee

APRIL UDPL ADULT PROGRAMS:

NEW! ESL Conversation Group. Tuesdays from 7 to 8 p.m. Interested in practicing your English in a safe and caring environment? Come to our conversation group and improve your skills! Please register with Kay Klocko at 215-628-8744 or kklocko@mclinc.org.

One-on-One Computer Mentoring. Get personalized assistance from experienced computer volunteers! Sign-up for a one-hour session. Limit one session per month. Please register  contact info above.

Book Groups Please register with Kay Klocko 215-628-8744.

o Daytimers: April 21 at 1:30 p.m. Tired of book groups where you all read the same book? Read any fiction or non-fiction book on this months theme: Explorers. Please register.

Meetings:

Annual Meeting of the Friends of UDPL: April 14 at 1 p.m.

Board of Directors: April 20 at 7 p.m.

Blue Bell Library www.wvpl.org Upcoming Events: The Wissahickon Valley Public Library, 650 Skippack Pike (Route 73) in Blue Bell, is diagonally across from the Blue Bell Inn. Call 215-643-1320 or visit their website at www.wvpl.org.

For children and teens at Blue Bell:

* Story times with guitar music by Miss Michelle, the singing librarian.

* Mondays at 10:30 a.m. for all ages.

* Wednesdays at 4:30 p.m. for all ages.

* Fridays at 10:30 a.m. for all ages.

* Family Movies, new releases, second Saturdays of the month at 1:30 p.m.

* May 14  Despicable Me

* June 11  Alpha and Omega

* Special Events

* April  watch for date of spring/Easter events

* April 14 at 4:30 p.m.  Junior Lego Club for children ages 3 through 5. Parents and caregivers need to stay with children.

* April 14 at 7 p.m.  Jeopardy for ages 11 to 18. Test your book and library knowledge for prizes. Sign up to be a contestant. No sign up to be in the audience. Snacks provided.

* April 16 at 1 p.m.  Adult Mystery Book Group discussing The Beekeepers Apprentice by Laurie King.

* April 16 at 1:30 p.m.  Childrens event for One Book, Every Young Child celebration. Story and craft for book Whose Shoes?

* April 19 at 7 p.m. and April 26 at 1:30 p.m.- Adult book group discusses The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester. Group led by Adam Button.

* April 30 through May 3  Friends book sale with about 10,000 items for sale for children, teens and adults.

* May  sign up for Science in the Summer

* June  sign up for Enrichment Programs for Elementary-Age children

* June  sign up for Summer Reading, all ages

For adults at Blue Bell:

* Daytime Book Discussion Group  fourth Tuesday, Jan  April at 1:30 p.m.

* April 26  The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester

* Night-time Book Discussion Group  third Tuesday of each month at 7 p.m.

o April 19  The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester

* Art Series with Dr. Sheldon Weintraub, docent at The Barnes and speaker at local colleges

o April 27 at 2 p.m. The Art of Looking at Art-Is She Nude or Is She Naked?

*Mystery Book Discussion Group, third Saturday of the month at 1 p.m.; new mystery theme each month; www.wvpl.org/programs

* Yoga on Mondays at 1:30 p.m. $20 for eight classes; $5 per drop-in class.

* Tai Chi on Mondays at 3 p.m. with Dr. Kurt Findeisen. $20 for eight classes; $5 per drop in class.

* Philadelphia Museum of Art presents class on their Marc Chagall exhibit, April 13 at 2 p.m.

* Giant Book Sale, April 29  May 3

o Starts with almost 10,000 items for children and adults!

o Held during library hours.

o Preview for members of the Friends of the Library, April 28 at 7 p.m.

o Join the Friends and attend the preview sale. Modest fee to join.

* Blooms at Blue Bell Gardening Series

o May 11 at 1 p.m.  Summer Bulbs by PA Horticultural Society

* Knitting group Mondays and Wednesdays at 10 a.m. Work on your project or observe and learn. The groups continue year-round in the community room.

* Socrates Cafe discussion group every Monday at 7 p.m. You pick the topic to discuss each week. No sign-up, nothing to read.

* Bridge every Friday at 12:30 p.m. New players welcome.

* Mah Jong every Wednesday at 1 p.m. New players welcome.

*Chess every Wednesday at 7p.m. for adults and teens 14 and older.

* Movie Matinee showing recent releases every Thursday at 2 p.m. April 14: Maos Last Dancer; April 21: Welcome to the Rileys; April 28: Conviction; May 5: Inception; May 12: Inside Job; May 19 The Kings Speech; May 26 The Fighter; June 2 Rabbit Hole; June 9 Black Swan; June 16 127 Hours

* Ongoing like-new, year-round book sale for adults & children during library hours

* Library opening at 10 a.m. Monday through Saturday!

Ambler Library, a branch of the Wissahickon Valley Public Library, 209 Race St., 215-646-1072. www.wvpl.org. All the following events occur at the Ambler Library.

* Story times with guitar music by Miss Michelle, the singing librarian.

* Tuesdays at 10:30 a.m. for all ages.

* Thursdays at 4:30 p.m. for all ages.

* For adults:

* Beading Group meets the first and third Monday of every month at 1 p.m. Work on your own projects or come to watch and learn.

* Free Family History Lookup with Connie Briggs. Email Connie for an appointment at the Ambler Library. conniebriggs@comcast.net

* Special Events:

* April 14 at 1:30 p.m.  Book Group discusses Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian.

* April 19 at 7 p.m.  Travel to Paris with world traveler Harry Balin. Tea and scones at 6:30 p.m.

* April 21 at 7 p.m.  Art with Sara for children in fourth through seventh grades.

*May 2 at 6:30 p.m.  Discuss the movie Lone Star with Temple Professor Lisa Hawkins. Watch the movie ahead of time.

*May 10  Robert Capucci discusses Art into Fashion. Tea and scones served at 6:30 p.m. Program at 7 p.m.

*May 12 at 1:30p.m.  Book Group discusses The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman.

*May 17  Tour the gardens of Devon and Southwest England with Lois McMullen. Tea and Scones at 6:30 p.m. Program at 7 p.m.

*June 13 at 6:30 p.m.  Discuss the movie Blade Runner with Temple Professor Lisa Hawkins. Watch the movie ahead of time.

Meetings and Lectures

The Unisys Blue Bell Retiree Group will meet in the Church on the Mall in the Plymouth Meeting Mall April 14 at 1:30 p.m. Kathy Sacket Young, director/trainer with the North Penn YMCA, will speak on Keeping Fit in Retirement. For more information, contact Membership Committee Chairperson Jerry Feldscher at 610-275-3538 or President Al Rollin at 215-368-4833.

The next FWBA meeting will be April 28 at the Hilton Garden Inn Fort Washington. Networking begins at 11:30 a.m.; meeting from noon to 1 p.m. Leon Singletary, Principal, First Contact HR and FWBA Executive Board, will present: Social Media: How to Use It To Get More Business. Lunch is provided courtesy of the Hilton Garden Inn Fort Washington. Members are welcome to bring a guest. An RSVP is requested by return email or 215-628-0313.

Big Brothers Big Sisters Southeastern PA is hosting a information sessions over the next few weeks on how to become a Big Brother. The information sessions will take place: April 16 at noon, April 19 at 8 a.m. and April 28 at 6 p.m. All sessions will be held at the groups Norristown Office,t 530 DeKalb St., Norristown. For more information, call 610-277-2200.

The North Penn Chapter of the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA) normally meets on the third Tuesday of each month from now until May. Meetings are held at the William Penn Inn on Route 202 and Sumneytown Pike, Upper Gwynedd, PA. Social hour starts at 5:30 p.m., dinner is served at 6:30 p.m., and the technical program begins at 7 p.m. Cost with reservation is $28 for members. Members without reservations and guests pay $30. Students with reservations pay $15. Reservations may be made by noon on the Monday preceding the meeting by phoning 215-371-1854 or emailing the reservation to northpennima@yahoo.com northpennima@yahoo.com. Information about the North Penn Chapter is available at http://northpenn.imanet.org/.

LeTip, a professional organization of men and women who are dedicated to the highest standards of competence and service meets every Tuesday at Cedar Brook Country Club, 180 Penllyn Pike, Blue Bell at 7 a.m. -meeting officially starts at 7:16 a.m. and ends at 8:31 a.m. Our purpose is the exchange of business tips, leads, and referrals. Each business category is represented by one member and conflicts of interest are disallowed. Guests are welcome to visit any of our breakfast meetings.

Every third Thursday of month, Sunrise Assisted Living of Blue Bell (795 Penllyn Pike, Blue Bell, PA 19422, 215-619-2777) serves as a satellite site to 148th Legislative district PA congressman Mike Gerber from 10 a.m. to noon. Stop by for help needed with things such as disability placards and license plates, vehicle registration, utilities issues, birth/death certificates,property tax/rent rebates, etc. Notary services arranged by appointment.

The Eastern Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce is an action-oriented organization dedicated to promoting its members and the economic health of eastern Montgomery county. The Chamber is committed to serving as a catalyst by uniting business, community agencies, government and education to make our county a great place to live and work. For information, call 215-887-5122 or visit www.emccc.org.

Do you have a fear of public speaking? Blue Bell Toastmasters Club can help. We meet from 7 to 9 p.m., on the second and fourth Tuesday at the Marriott Courtyard, located on Route 202, directly across from the Montgomeryville Mall. Learn how to improve communication and leadership skills in a friendly and supportive environment. Guests are welcome. Admission fee: $5. For more info, visit www.bbtoast.org.

The PennSuburban Chamber of Commerce will hold the following meetings (for reservations to any of the following, email info@PennSuburban.org)

-Breakfast News Network, 7:30-8:45 a.m. at Normandy Farm Hotel (1401 Morris Road, Blue Bell, PA 19422) $15 members, includes full buffet breakfast. Join us for a networking program at Normandy Farm Hotel every Thursday morning for breakfast, business news, informative speakers, and plenty of networking. The cost includes a full breakfast buffet. Copies of the business cards will be made available to those who would like them.

The BNI, Fort Washington Chapter meets every Monday at The Hilton Garden Inn, 520 Pennsylvania Ave., Fort Washington for a networking meeting. Meetings are from 11:30 a.m. until 1 p.m. Visitors are welcome. The only cost to attend is the cost of your meal. For information or a reservation to attend, please call Luanne Cram at 215-947-7784, or visit our Internet site at: http://www.BNIDVR.Com and click on the menu item Find a Chapter.

For the past seven years, people have enjoyed participating in WVWAs Adopt-a-Tree program. Individuals can support the Association in its reforestation efforts by purchasing native trees to be planted. Supporters can plant their adopted tree or have WVWA volunteers will plant it. Trees cost $30 each. If you would like to volunteer or purchase a tree(s), please contact: Bob Adams at Bob@wvwa.org or call: 215-646-8866 for more information. Check www.WVWA.org for directions and maps.

Sustainable Upper Dublin, http://sustainableupperdublin.org, meets the first Thursday of each month at 6:30 p.m., at the Upper Dublin Township Building, 801 Loch Alsh Avenue, Fort Washington, PA 19034. Please send any questions to suec@sustainableupperdublin.org or call 610-996-6316. To learn more about Sustainable Upper Dublin, view or join the discussion at http://googlegroups.com/group/sustainableupperdublin.

Special Events

The Mattie N. Dixon Community Cupboard will hold its first nutrition class April 19 at 10 a.m. at the Community Cupboard, 150 N. Main St., Ambler. Lynne Sinclair, a nutritionist from Abington Memorial Hospital specializing in diabetic nutrition, will conduct the class. Topics will include healthy eating, beneficial foods, recipes, making meals with every day foods, and how to use unfamiliar produce. A healthy snack will be provided.The class is is open to all residents in Montgomery County.

The Historical Society of Fort Washington presents The History of Conshohocken April 19 at 8 p.m. at the Clifton House, 473 Bethlehem Pike, Fort Washington. Jack Coll will present an illustrated program on the history of the Borough of Conshohocken. Coll is a longtime resident of Conshohocken and a member of the Conshohocken Historical Society. He is co-author with his son, Brian, of the Arcadia Then and Now Series book Conshohocken. He has also done books Conshohocken and West Conshohocken Sports and Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Italian Feast. He has taken many photos for the Conshohocken Record and the Norristown Times Herald. This program is free. Refreshments will be served. For additional information, call 215-646-6065.

Taste of the White House Soiree featuring former White House Chef Walter Scheib will take place April 29 at 6 p.m. at Manufacturers Golf & Country Club in Fort Washington to celebrate HealthLinks 10th anniversary and honor its founders, the Eugene Jackson Family. The evening will heat up with a Chef Meet & Greet, followed by a specially selected presidential menu. Gala tickets are $150 per person. Proceeds benefit HealthLink, a free clinic providing compassionate, quality medical and dental care to uninsured, working adults in Bucks and Montgomery counties who fall in between the health care cracks. Go to http://tasteofthewhitehouse.charityhappenings.org to make reservations online or lend support through sponsorship. For event information, call 267-699-0124 or email jmarushak@healthlinkmedical.org.

The Wissahickon Valley Watershed Association will hold an open house at the Evans-Mumbower Mill April 17 from 1 to 4 p.m. The Mill is at the corner of Swedesford and Township Line Roads in Upper Gwynedd. The open house is free but donations are welcome. For more information, call 215-646-8866 o email info@wvwa.org.

The Eastern Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce will host Breakfast With Your County Commissioners and State Representatives April 21 from 8 to 9:30 a.m. at the Holiday Inn Fort Washington, 432 W. Pennasylvania Ave. Commissioners: James R. Matthews (Chairman), Joseph M. Hoeffel (Vice Chair), State Representatives: Todd Stephens (District 151) and Josh Shapiro (District 153). Register onlineat www.emccc.org. $10 for EMCCC member; $20 for non-members.

Upper Dublins Districtwide Allied Art Show will be held April 27 from 5:30 to 9 p.m. in the Upper Dublin High School Athletic Complex.

The Rev. Alfred Muli, chaplain at Fort Washington Estates, will be the featured speaker at the Kiwanis sponsored breakfast observing the National Day of Prayer May 5 at 7 a.m. at the William Penn Inn. The breakfast is open to the public ($15). Reservations can be made by calling 215-646-4356 or by emailing georgesaurman@Juno.com.

The Upper Dublin Shade Tree Commission invites people to participate in its spring bare root planting events, sponsored in part by Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation and Friends of Robbins Park. On April 9, zix trees will be planted at the Evelyn B. Wright Park & Community Pool, 401 Logan Ave., North Hills, at 9 a.m., followed by the planting of 10 trees at Sheeleigh Park, Loch Alsh Avenue and Douglas Street, Ambler, at 10:15 a.m. On April 29, students from Upper Dublin High School will join the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society to plant 16 trees in Robbins Park, Butler Pike and Meetinghouse Road, Ambler, to help launch the societys Million Trees campaign. This event will occur in conjunction with Temple Amblers EarthFest. Experienced tree-tenders are sought to assist the students. For more information,contact Ron Ayres at 215-653-0421 or 215-483-4348.

The Friends of the Wissahickon and the Wissahickon Valley Watershed Association are teaming up once again to clean the Wissahickon Creek from top to bottom April 30 from 9 a.m. to noon. This spring marks the 41st anniversary of Wissahickon Valley Watershed Associations annual Creek Clean Up, and the second year that FOW has teamed up with WVWA. Volunteers of all ages will clean the creek, the surrounding trails and the many tributaries of the Wissahickon Creek. Armed with bags, volunteers will be assigned to sections of the creek. Following the clean up, all volunteers are invited to WVWAs Talkin Trash picnic in Fort Washington State Park, with food provided by Whole Foods Market of North Wales. The pavilion is located on Mill Road in Flourtown. To help out in Montgomery County, all volunteers must be pre-assigned a section of the Wissahickon Creek to clean. Please contact Bob Adams, WVWA director of stewardship, at 215-646-8866 ext. 14 or bob@wvwa.org. To work with the Friends of the Wissahickon in Philadelphia, meet at the pavilion along Forbidden Drive, a short distance south of the intersection of Forbidden Drive and Northwestern Avenue. Limited parking is available along Northwestern Avenue and other nearby streets. Volunteers are encouraged to bike or carpool to the event. To participate, register at www.fow.org. Contact Kevin Groves with questions at 215-247-0417 ext. 105 or groves@fow.org.

Montgomery County Community Colleges International Club invites the community to the second annual International Festival April 20 from 5 to 9 p.m. at the Central Campus, 340 DeKalb Pike, Blue Bell. The rain date is April 26. The International Club will transform the outside quad area into multicultural celebration with various performances by dancers, singers and musicians. Artists will share their artwork at various display tables. Activities include games, raffles, Easter egg decorating and henna tattoos. Students will have samples of international cuisine at tables representing different countries and will serve food from various local ethnic restaurants. Throughout the evening, volunteers will accept donations and will raffle gift baskets and prizes to raise funds for Habitat for Humanity. Donations of food, international clothes and prizes are needed. Volunteers, including artists and performers, are welcome. For more information or to sponsor an activity, contact Gillian Nel, International Club president, at gnel9277@students.mc3.edu or 267-974-0163.

The Arts and Humanities Division at Montgomery County Community College is partnering with the Philadelphia Writers Conference to host Memoirs Matter: How Life Stories (Including Yours) Can Transform Your Relationship to Literature April 23 from 1 to 3 p.m. in Advanced Technology Center room 101, 340 DeKalb Pike, Blue Bell. The event is free and open to the public. In the first part of this two-hour seminar, professor and author Robert Waxler will explain how writing his two memoirs affected his life as well as his relationship to literature. In the second part, blogger and workshop leader Jerry Waxler will present a sequence of steps to help writers find their own story. For information, contact Dana Resente at dresente@mc3.edu.

The Maple Glen Garden Club will hold its fourth annual Plant Sale on May 7 from 8 to 11 a.m. Perennials, shrubs, vegetables and native plants grown by the club members will be sold. The club uses the plant sale proceeds to fund community projects, a college scholarship and community plantings. The sale will be held in the 500 block of Coach Road, Horsham, as part of a neighborhood garage sale. Plants will be sold at bargain prices. For more information, email MapleGlenGardenClub@gmail.com.

The Relay for Life Craft Show is looking for local crafters to participate in show, which will be May 21 from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. on the Wissahickon High School track, 521 Houston Road, Ambler. There is a $10 entry fee, and 20 percent of sales are donated to the American Cancer Society. Participants will receive a 6-foot table under a tent. For information, contact Joanne at joannescoles@comcast.net or Mindy at mcamsilver@comcast.net.

Spring House Estates is hosting its annual book fair on April 18 from 4 to 7 p.m. and April 9 from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Included will be hardback and paperback used books. Spring House Estates is located at 728 Norristown Road, Lower Gwynedd.

The PennSuburban Chamber of Commerce will present the Penn Suburban/Hatfield Joint Business Card Exchange April 20 from 5 to 7 p.m. at Univest Bank Lansdale Area Financial Service Center, 120 Forty Foot Road, Hatfield. The event is free. To make reservations, visit PennSuburban.org/Events. Join Univest National Bank and Trust Co. for a spring-inspired Business Card Exchange at its newest office in the Hatfield Pointe Shopping Center. Come out and meet members of Univests executive management team while enjoying fine food and beverages.

13th Annual Community Reading Day Kick-off Breakfast Get Together April 26 from 8 to 9:30 a.m. at the North Wales Area Library, 233 Swartley St., North Wales. The event is free. To make reservations, visit PennSuburban.org/Events. For more information, contact the chamber office at 215-362-9200 or info@pennsuburban.org. Join presenting sponsor Verizon, chamber staff and fellow members for the Community Reading Day volunteer get together. The Community Reading Day program allows volunteers to read a designated book to second-grade students throughout 38 area public and private schools and present the book as a gift to each class. Even if you are not a volunteer, you are cordially invited to stop by to network, enjoy coffee and pastries.

Ambler Mennonite Church is hosting a Spring Craft Show and Flea Market May 21 from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Rain date will be May 28. The community is invited to shop the great craft booths, find some gifts and deals, as well as enjoy home baked goods and tasty lunch specials. Childrens activities are planned. All vendors are encouraged to contact the church at 215-643-4876 or AmblerMennonite@verizon.net. Advertising, signage, customer parking and a shuttle to auxiliary parking at nearby lots for vendors will be provided. 10 foot by 10 foot spaces can be rented for $5 each and tables for an additional $5 each. All proceeds from space and table rentals go toward school kits for children around the world. The church is located at the corner of East Mt. Pleasant Avenue and North Spring Garden Street, Ambler.

The Wissahickon Valley Watershed Association presents The Life & Times of Aquatic Insects in the Wissahickon Creek April 16 from 1 to 3 p.m. Join WVWA for a hands-on program. RSVP required: www.wvwa.org or 215-646-8866. WVWA member fee: $5 per person / $15 per family. Non-WVWA member fee: $10 per person / $20 per family.

The photography exhibition Natures Palette by photo-artist Judy Miller will run March 18 to May 19 at the Art in the Storefront gallery, 41 E. Butler Pike, Ambler.

JPRN  Networking For People in Transition & People Who Can Help Them  Unemployment remains high. JPRN, the Jarrettown Professional Relationship Network can help. Are you trying to network your way to a new job? Do you have expertise or contacts that can help people in transition? Is your company or organization looking for people in the area? This is a free outreach program to support those seeking work, involve people with contacts and networking know how, and involve local companies. Meetings held monthly at Jarrettown United Methodist Church, Limekiln Pike.

Pennsylvanias Low-Income Home Energy Assistance (LIHEAP) grant program is now open for the 2010-11 heating season. Grants are based on income, family size, type of heating fuel and region. Additional information, such as specific income limits, and applications for LIHEAP grants are available online via the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Access to Social Services (COMPASS) website at www.compass.state.pa.us. Applications are available at most public officals district offices, county assistance offices, local utility companies and community service agencies, such as Area Agencies on Aging or community action agencies.

Begin your holiday shopping at Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation! Entertainment books for 2011, Philadelphia North, are now on sale at $30 each. Regal/United Artists movie tickets are on sale for just $7.50 each, and tickets to the Adventure Aquarium, Baltimore Aquarium, and the Philadelphia Zoo are also available. Discounted ski vouchers to area mountains will be arriving in December; call 215-643-1600 x3443 for more information. Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation office hours are Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

RSVP of Montgomery County and the Wissahickon Valley Public Library have partnered again to offer the public their popular free mock interview sessions. The mock interviews are conducted by RSVP volunteers who are retired professionals, some of whom were in hiring positions themselves. Packets of information which include a sample employment application and interviewing tips with mock interview questions are available at the library to pick up prior to a scheduled mock interview or will be sent via email once the interview is scheduled. To schedule your interview, please contact Janis Glusman at RSVP 610-834-1040, ext. 16. The library is also offering a free resume review service. Bring in your current resume and the professional reference staff will assist you with hints and tips on capturing your work history accurately.

Registration for Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation summer playgrounds, Camp B.I.G. and Small Folks, X-Zone, and sports camps has began. Register online at www.upperdublin.net/store, or at the UDP&R office, 801 Loch Alsh Avenue, Fort Washington. Call 215-643-1600 x3443 for more information.

Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation and Danielles Espresso Cafe presents Mornings at Mondaug Bark Park April 16 and May 21 from 8:30 to 10:30 a.m. Meet fellow dog lovers. These events include complimentary coffee, treats for people and pups and raffles/giveaways.

Upper Dublins Annual Spring Flea Market will be held June 4 from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Reserve a table, or come and shop. Tables are $15 for UD residents, $20 for non-residents. This successful event occurs rain or shine. Refreshments available. Call 215-643-1600 ext. 3443 to register for a table.

Regal movie tickets available for purchase at Upper Dublin Township Parks & Recreation. Reduced rate: $7.50 per ticket. Some restrictions apply. Call 215-643-1600 x3443.

Whitpain Township Parks & Recreation movie tickets $7.50 Regal Cinemas, United Artist & Edwards Cinemas on sale throughout the year Monday  Friday from 9 a.m.  4 p.m.

Whitpain Township Parks & Recreation Camp Sign-ups for Stony Creek Day Camp  Stony Creek Tracers and Park n Tots. Register on-line at www.whitpaintownship.org OrCome to Township Building with check or Visa MasterCard Monday  Friday from 9 a.m.  4 p.m. For additional information call 610.277-2400 ext. 374

Upper Dublin Parks & Recreation offers exciting new programs for the fall:

-Returning favorites include UK Elite Petite Soccer, Tiny Dancers, Kiddie Tennis, Fun-nastics, Messy Playtime, Little Chefs, and more. Babysitters Training will be offered in November and December. Continuing Adult Fitness Classes include Cardio Circuit, Core & More, Yoga, Boxing, and Adult G.Y.M. For more information call 215-643-1600 x3443. Register for programs online at www.upperdublin.net/store.

Music and Theater

The community is invited to a Cantors Concert April 16 at 8 p.m. Congregation Beth Or, 239 Welsh Road, Maple Glen. Listen and hum-along to the Yiddish, pop tunes and classical music performed by Congregation Beth Ors own Cantor David Green and his special guest, Cantor Irvin Bell, from Temple Beth Israel in Deerfield Beach, Fla. The cantors will be accompanied by Mark Sobol and his Klezmer musicians. Tickets are $18 in advance and $25 at the door. RSVP with payment to Barb Murtha, 239 Welsh Road, Maple Glen, PA 19002, or call 215-646-5806 ext. 220.

Gwynedd Friends Coffeehouse will host the Jameson Sisters May 14. Doors open at 7:30 pm, performance at 8:00 pm. Gwynedd Friends Coffeehouse is located at the corner of Rte. 202 & Sumneytown Pike, Gwynedd. $5 suggested donation. Light refreshment available at a modest cost. For further information, call 215-393-9576 or visit gwyneddmeeting.org/coffeehouse.html.

Celebrate patriotism through song with Gwynedd-Mercy Colleges choir, the Voices of Gwynedd, as it presents Hear America Singing April 15 at 8 p.m. The choir will perform song selections from all over the country, including Georgia on My Mind, New York State of Mind, and a medley including Philadelphia Freedom and Allentown. The performance will end with When the Saints Go Marching In to acknowledge the choirs upcoming tour in New Orleans. Hear America Singing will take place in the Julia Ball Auditorium, located in St. Bernard Hall. Parking is available in lots A, C and D. Admission is free.

The Choristers will present Anton Dvoraks Stabat Mater April 16 at 7:30 p.m. at Upper Dublin Lutheran Church in Ambler. The choir will be accompanied by a 41-piece orchestra. Tickets are $20 for adults, $15 for senior citizens, $10 for students and children are free. Tickets will be sold in advance or at the door. For more information, call 215-542-7871 or visit TheChoristers.org

Religious News

The Staircase Gallery at Or Hadash: A Reconstructionist Congregation in Fort Washington will feature the work of Emily Ennuat-Lustine. The artist will be showing paintings and graphics inspired by her own personal spiritual journey and quest for meaning. Some of the works to be shown have been inspired by Biblical Psalms and writings. Her work has been shown at Abington Art Center, Cheltenham Arts Center and Old City Gallery of Jewish Art among others. The exhibition is open Friday evenings starting Feb. 18 after Shabbat services. Gallery hours are: Mondays through Thursdays 10-4:30, Fridays 10-3 and following Shabbat Services and Sundays 10-1. The synagogue is located at 190 Camp Hill Road in Fort Washington. For additional information contact the synagogue office at 215-283-0276.

Reunions

St. Matthews High School Conshohocken Class of 1961 is looking for classmates. For details, contact Greg Marincola at 215-646-2239, 215-740-1296 or gregcola@comcast.net.

Olney High School Class of 1971 is Lloking for classmates for a 40th reunion Oct. 28. For details, contact Judy at ohsclassof71@yahoo.com or 215-870-7572.

Abington High School Class of 1961 is seeking classmates for a 50-year reunion to be held Oct. 14-15, 2011.Visit the website, www.abington61.com, for details or call 215-947-1779.

Overbrook High School class of January 1956 is having a 55 year reunion on May 22, 2011 at the Bala Golf Club in Philadelphia. For information please contact overbrookreunion56@comcast.net

Germantown High School Class Of January 1961 is looking for classmates for 50th year reunion to take place in May of 2011. Please contact: 215-362-9148, 856-577-0659 or samdelcomo@comcast.net

The June 1961 class of Germantown High School is holding their 50th reunion on May 15, which will be a brunch. For further details please contact Linda Dorfman Alten at lindaalten@yahoo.com or call 215-441-8411.

Support

New Life Presbyterian Church in Dresher, will host GriefShare, a special seminar and support group which will run on Monday evenings from 7 to 9 p.m., from March 7 through June 6. At each meeting there will be a DVD about the grief process, discussion and reference to a grief workbook. Preregistration is required to secure a place in the group and to purchase a GriefShare notebook (for a one-time fee of $15). The notebook goes along with the 13-week schedule covering such topics as: living with grief, the effects of grief, and stuck in grief. For more information or to register, call: Sandy Elder at 215-884-5149.

PUPS (People Understanding Parkinsons) A self-help group for those adjusting to a new diagnosis or dealing with the early stages of Parkinsons Disease. Meets fourth Tuesday of the month from 1 to 2:30 p.m., at Abington Health Center, Schilling Campus, Willowood Building, 2510 Maryland Road, Suite 251, Willow Grove. For more information or to RSVP, contact Lorna at 215-542-2931.

The North Penn Visiting Nurse Associations Meals on Wheels program is looking for volunteers to pack or deliver meals to the elderly and infirmed. Meals are packed and delivered mornings, Monday through Friday. You can volunteer for as many days per week or month as you would like. Packaging meals requires approximately 2-1/2 hours of your time each day and involves making sandwiches, packaging food into individual serving containers and packing coolers with the meals. Delivering meals requires approximately 1-1/2 hours of your time each day and involves loading coolers into your car and delivering a route of approximately 10 to 15 stops. The Meals on Wheels program is also in need of emergency, winter-weather volunteers to pack and deliver meals in bad weather. North Penn VNA is located at 51 Medical Campus Drive in Lansdale and delivers meals in the Lansdale, North Wales and Blue Bell areas. For more information or to volunteer, please call Bridget, North Penn VNA Meals on Wheels coordinator at 215-855-8296.

Elkins Park Area CHADD (Children and Adults with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder) meets the first Tuesday of every month, 7- 8:30 p.m., at Einstein at Elkins Park Hospital in Elkins Park. For information on CHADD or ADHD, please see our website www.chadd.net/249 or call Claire Noyes at: 215-779-6656.

Center for Loss and Bereavement, 3847 Skippack Pike, Skippack (610-222-4110) www.bereavementcenter.org Offers professional counseling for individuals, couples, children and families dealing with issues of loss and bereavement. Six-week adult support groups: Newly forming young adult grief support group  every other Wednesday, 7  8:15 p.m. (free of charge); Monthly loss of child support  second Mondays, 7-8:15 p.m.; Six-week young loss of spouse/partner  Thursdays, 10-11:15 a.m.; Other groups scheduled as interest is shown for suicide loss support, adult loss of parent, motherless daughters, adult loss of sibling, coping with chronic illness and disability and mens loss of spouse. Nellos Corner Family Bereavement program offers peer grief support groups for ages 4 through teen and their caregivers  Every other Tuesday or Wednesday (free of charge) Local chapter of Parents of Murdered Children also meets at the Center. Registration required. Call for further information.

CHADD is a national organization for children & adults with Attention-Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder, providing education, advocacy and support for individuals and their families with AD/HD. Einstein at Elkins Park Hospital, 60 Township Line Road, Elkins Park, PA 19027, will host children & adults with Attention-Deficit/ Hyperactivity Disorder on the First Tuesday of each month 7  8:30 p.m. Free, no childcare provided.

The Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphias Kehillah of Old York Road is sponsoring a free Caregiver Support Group for individuals who care for an elderly person with cognitive and/or physical impairments. The group meets at SarahCare Adult Day Care Center, 101 Washington Lane, Suite G-6, Jenkintown, Pa., on the first Wednesday of each month. Patty Rich,
April 20, 2018

Syria Sitrep - Cleanup Around Damascus - WMD Rumors Prepare For New U.S. Attack

After the Syrian army liberated Douma, the next Takfiri held areas near the capital Damascus fell in short order. The Jaish al-Islam militants in Dumayr, north-east of Damascus, gave up without a fight. As usual by now the Takfiris were transferred to the north-western Idleb governorate held by al-Qaeda and other Turkish supported forces. The town of Dumayr controls the Damascus Baghdad highway. Capitulation negotiations in the nearby Eastern Qalamoun are ongoing.

The former Palestinian refugee camp Yarmouk is an upbuild suburb south of Damascus. One part is in the hands of al-Qaeda and another was controlled by an Islamic State group. Offers to evacuate the groups were made but rejected. Yesterday the Syrian army launched a massive artillery barrage and the Russian and Syrian air force dropped bombs onto the quarter. Today, just twenty-four hours later, the Takfiris gave up. The al-Qaeda aligned militants will be evacuated to Idleb, the Islamic State aligned group to the eastern Syrian desert.

With each elimination of a 'rebel' pockets Syrian army is gaining strength. Ten-thousands of soldiers who were needed to hold the Takfiri held areas around Damascus surrounded and under control are now free to attack elsewhere. Some of the militants who did not evacuate also joined the government forces.

The evacuation of many militants to the north-west might later turn up to be problematic. They will eventually come under Turkish control and could be used in another Turkish attempt to take Aleppo. But for now they are infighting. Al-Qaeda in Syria, now renamed to Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) is fighting with other groups over control of the area. Over the last months about one thousand of the militants have killed each other, 3,000 were wounded and many of their heavy arms were destroyed. The Syrian government hopes that such infighting will continue for a while.

When all the surrounded areas within the government realm are consolidated the Syrian army will move towards the borders in the south. The area around Deraa up to the Israeli occupied Golan heights and the Jordan border is in the hands of various groups of militants. Like in the north rebel infighting is a frequent occurrence. Two days ago an Islamic State aligned group tried to wrest control over some villages east of Deraa from some other local militant group. Fighting has been ongoing since and both sides are losing strength. One wonders how many of these fights between rebels are instigated by undercover Syrian intelligence agents.

The greatest difficulty for the Syrian army operation in the south is the Israeli supply and support for a number terrorist groups in that area. Should Israel intervene in any form in the Syrian operation to liberate the area the fight can easily escalate into a larger war.

The destroyed city of Raqqa in the east is becoming a headache for the U.S. occupation force. The U.S. used unwilling Kurdish ground troops to attack the city. It was not much of an infantry fight. Anything that moved was simply bombed from the air or ground. The one U.S. artillery battalion that covered the city fired more than 35,000 155mmm rounds during the five month operation. Now some 80% of the buildings in Raqqa are completely destroyed. The rest is inhabitable.

The city has no water and no electricity. The U.S. claimed that 2,500 ISIS militants were in the city when the fighting started. In the end the U.S. let at least 500 of those leave the city and move further east to fight the Syrian army. It also said that only 30 civilians were killed in its attack. That is of course nonsense. At least 2,000 dead bodies have been recovered so far and 6,000 more dead are recorded as still lying under the ruins. There will be more. The city administration has no equipment and money to recover them. The U.S. is unwilling to spend any money for the city it destroyed and the Kurdish warlords who now occupy the city are incompetent and have no interest to help its Arab inhabitants. The population that has returned is hostile towards the U.S. and the Kurds. It wants to get back under Syrian government control.

Further east at the Syrian Iraqi border and north of the Euphrates some 3-5,000 ISIS fighters live unmolested by U.S. air or ground attacks. The U.S. prevented Syrian government troops who control the area south of Euphrates from attacking the ISIS forces. But neither Syria nor Iraq can allow that ISIS pocket to survive. Yesterday a high level meeting was held in the operation room in Baghdad where Russian, Iranian, Syrian and Iraqi commanders arrange common operations against ISIS. Shortly thereafter an Iraqi jet attacked a ISIS command meeting near Hajin in Syria. The strike had Syrian government approval. Syrian government forces have rebuild a military bridge that will allow them to cross the Euphrates in a future operation. Several battalions, including auxiliary troops under Iranian command, are ready to attack. Will the U.S. bomb them when they cross the river? Or will it hold back and allow Iraqi air support for the Syrian troops?

The neo-conservatives are busy insinuating that Syria still has chemical weapon program and that it is distributed throughout the country.

U.S. assessments following the U.S., British and French missile strikes on Syria show they had only a limited impact on President Bashar al-Assads ability to carry out chemical weapons attacks, four U.S. officials told Reuters.

...

U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the available intelligence indicated that Assads stock of chemicals and precursors was believed to be scattered far beyond the three targets.

This is of course just nonsense. Syria gave up its chemical weapons in 2013 and the OPCW confirmed that all weapon and precursor stocks were destroyed and all laboratories and production facilities dismantled.

This new fairytale of Assad's chemical weapons is designed to create a pretext for a another, more extensive bombing campaign against Syria. A fake pretext build on fake 'chemical attack' in Douma.

There is no evidence that any 'chemical attack' occurred in Douma. All the U.S., French and British government have are some videos created by known propagandists like the White Helmets who work for those governments. The State Department's spokesperson finally acknowledged that:

MS NAUERT: Yeah. ... We recognize and appreciate and are very grateful for all the work that the White Helmets continues to do on behalf of the people of their country and on behalf of the U.S. Government and all the coalition forces.

...

Ive just exchanged emails with him the other day. My understanding is that their work is still going on, and were proud to work with them.

Republican Representative Massie remarked today:

Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie - 14:03 UTC- 19 Apr 2018 In briefing to Congress, DNI, SecDef, and SecState provided zero real evidence. Referenced info circulating online. Which means either they chose not to provide proof to Congress or they dont have conclusive proof that Assad carried out gas attack. Either way, not good.

After being stalled for five days the OPCW fact finding mission finally reached the area in Douma where the alleged 'chemical attack happened. It entered under protection of Russian military police.

The scientific research service of the German Bundestag published a report (pdf, German) today which concludes that the U.S. led attack on Syria on April 13 was evidently in violation of international law.

Posted by b on April 20, 2018 at 19:06 UTC | Permalink

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MINNEAPOLIS (AP)  The Latest on the investigation into Prince's death (all times local):

5:20 p.m.

An assistant to Prince told investigators that he had been unusually quiet and sick with the flu in the days before he was found dead.

Investigative materials released Thursday include audio of a 5-minute interview with Meron Bekure, who told a detective she had been Prince's personal assistant for the last year and a half.

Bekure says that Prince had "been kind of quiet" in recent weeks, and hadn't sent her as many emails throughout the day as he did previously. She says she chalked up his behavior to the flu, which had caused him to recently cancel a show.

Bekure says she last saw Prince a day earlier, when she was going to take him to the doctor for a checkup. She says that Prince told her he would go with his aide Kirk Johnson instead.

___

4:45 p.m.

Newly released investigative material in the probe into Prince's death include several police videos showing the pop superstar's body on the floor near an elevator inside his Minnesota estate.

The videos show the scene that investigators documented inside Paisley Park after Prince was found dead of a drug overdose.

They do not have any audio but show an investigator with a video camera panning the estate to show the death scene.

Prince is shown on his back next to a sun design in the carpet. His head us on the floor, eyes closed, right hand on his stomach, and left arm on the floor. The walls are decorated with several albums, depictions of Prince and other memorabilia.

___

2:20 p.m.

At least one Prince fan says she doesn't believe he got justice when a Minnesota prosecutor announced that no criminal charges would be filed in the musician's accidental overdose death two years ago.

Thirty-nine-year-old Kimberlee Andrus of Austin, Minnesota, attended the news conference Thursday where Carver County Attorney Mark Metz made the announcement. The prosecutor said investigators were unable to determine who supplied the counterfeit opioid drugs that killed Prince.

Andrus says the announcement was "devastating." She says Prince deserves for the truth to come out, and she doesn't think it will.

Andrus wore a purple sweater and has a tattoo of Prince's love symbol. She plans to participate in a candlelight vigil Friday night outside Paisley Park, which is Prince's former estate. Saturday will mark the second anniversary of his death.

___

1 p.m.

A friend of Prince's who authorities said helped the pop superstar obtain pain medication says he's relieved not to be charged in Prince's death.

That's according to F. Clayton Tyler, an attorney for the Prince friend, Kirk Johnson. Tyler says Thursday's announcement by a state prosecutor that no criminal charges would be filed in Prince's death affirms Johnson's innocence.

Tyler says Johnson continues to deny that he had anything to do with Prince's death.

A search warrant in the case said Johnson asked a doctor to prescribe pain medication for Prince, and the doctor prescribed oxycodone in Johnson's name. Federal authorities said earlier Thursday that the doctor had agreed to pay a civil penalty to resolve the case.

Prince died of a fentanyl overdose, not oxycodone.

___

12:30 p.m.

As the state of Minnesota ends its investigation into Prince's death without criminal charges, federal authorities say they haven't gotten any credible evidence to support charges either.

Carver County Attorney Mark Metz announced Thursday that investigators had found no evidence to charge anyone in the case. He says Prince thought he was taking Vicodin pills, not the fentanyl that killed him, and there was no evidence anyone around Prince knew the pills were counterfeit.

After Metz's announcement, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Minneapolis issued a statement saying it hasn't received any credible evidence that would support federal criminal charges. The office said it wouldn't comment further.

A law enforcement official close to the investigation told The Associated Press that the federal investigation is now inactive unless new information comes forward. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the case remains open.

___

Associated Press writer Amy Forliti contributed to this report.

___

12 p.m.

A Minnesota prosecutor says Prince thought he was taking Vicodin when he accidentally overdosed on fentanyl.

Carver County Attorney Mark Metz detailed a two-year investigation that he said found no evidence to warrant criminal charges being filed in the pop superstar's death.

Prince died April 21, 2016, at his Paisley Park compound.

Metz says evidence showed that Prince took counterfeit Vicodin without knowing it. And Metz says there's no evidence any of the people surrounding Prince gave him counterfeit Vicodin or knew he had it.

A doctor who was accused of illegally prescribing a pain medication to Prince shortly before he died agreed Thursday to pay a fine as part of a civil settlement. But that pain medication wasn't what killed Prince.

___

11:35 p.m.

The prosecutor in the Minnesota county where Prince died says he's filing no criminal charges in the musician's death.

The announcement Thursday from Carver County Attorney Mark Metz means the state's investigation into how Prince got the fentanyl that killed him is closed. It came hours after documents revealed a doctor accused of illegally prescribing an opioid for Prince had agreed to pay $30,000 to settle a federal civil violation.

Metz said the evidence shows Prince thought he was taking Vicodin, not fentanyl. He said there's no evidence any person associated with Prince knew he possessed any counterfeit pill containing fentanyl.

Prince was 57 when he was found alone and unresponsive in an elevator at his Paisley Park estate on April 21, 2016.

___

11:25 a.m.

A newly unsealed federal search warrant says a Minnesota doctor who treated Prince in the weeks before he died expressed concern that the musician was suffering from opiate withdrawal.

The document unsealed Thursday says Dr. Michael Todd Schulenberg saw Prince on April 7, 2016, at the request of Prince's friend, Kirk Johnson, and prescribed Vitamin D and ondansetron under Johnson's name.

The document says Johnson called the doctor on April 14 and asked him to prescribe a pain medication for Prince. Authorities say Schulenberg prescribed oxycodone for Prince, again under Johnson's name. Schulenberg disputes that, but is paying $30,000 to settle a civil violation.

The doctor also saw Prince on April 20 when Prince was reporting feeling antsy. A urinalysis tested positive for opioids.

Prince was found dead of a fentanyl overdose the next day. The doctor is not facing criminal charges and his attorney says he had no role in Prince's death.

___

10:25 a.m.

An attorney for a Minnesota doctor accused of illegally prescribing an opioid painkiller for Prince a week before the musician died from a fentanyl overdose denies the allegation but says he agreed to pay $30,000 to settle a federal civil violation to avoid the expense and risk of litigation.

Dr. Michael Todd Schulenberg was accused of prescribing oxycodone to Prince and putting it under the name of Prince's bodyguard and close friend, Kirk Johnson, to protect Prince's privacy.

But attorney Amy Conners says in a statement that Schulenberg affirms his previous statement that he did not prescribe opiates to any patient with the intention that they be given to Prince.

She says that after the doctor learned of Prince's addiction, he immediately began working to get him into treatment

___

10 a.m.

A Minnesota doctor accused of illegally prescribing an opioid for Prince a week before the musician died has agreed to pay $30,000 to settle a federal civil claim.

The settlement comes as state prosecutors are planning to announce whether anyone will be charged in the two-year investigation into Prince's death.

Prince died on April 21, 2016, from an accidental overdose of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid. No one has been criminally charged.

But the federal government alleges that Dr. Michael Todd Schulenberg violated the Controlled Substances Act when he wrote a prescription in someone else's name on April 14, 2016.

The settlement released Thursday doesn't name Prince, but search warrants previously released say Schulenberg wrote a prescription for oxycodone in the name of Prince's bodyguard, intending it to go to Prince.

___

12 a.m.

A two-year probe into the overdose death of music superstar Prince is reaching a critical stage as a county prosecutor reveals whether criminal charges will be filed.

Carver County Attorney Mark Metz planned a news conference Thursday morning to give an update on the investigation. It is scheduled for 11:30 a.m.

Prince died April 21, 2016, after being found alone and unresponsive in an elevator at his home and recording studio in a Minneapolis suburb. An autopsy showed he died of an accidental fentanyl overdose.

Prince's death at 57 sparked a national outpouring of grief, as well as a joint county and federal investigation.

Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
SAN ANTONIO (AP)  Grayson Murray fixed a flaw in his swing and hit the ball well enough that blustery conditions weren't an issue for him Thursday in the Valero Texas Open.

Coming off a missed cut at Hilton Head last week, Murray made seven birdies for a 5-under 67 and a one-shot lead. His only mistake was a double bogey from a greenside bunker on the par-3 seventh hole.

"Just the fact I did give myself enough opportunities today for birdie, it took a lot of pressure off," Murray said.

Of the five players at 68, only Chesson Hadley played in the morning side of the draw, and he called it among his best rounds of the year because of gusts. The wind died in the afternoon and scoring improved slightly on the AT&T Oaks Course at the TPC San Antonio. Keegan Bradley, Ryan Moore, Billy Horschel and Matt Atkins each posted 68. Horschel and Moore played bogey-free.

"Struck the ball really well, something that we've been working hard on," Horschel said. "Could have been better, yeah. I didn't really make anything out there today. But I'm happy with it."

Sergio Garcia, who consulted Greg Norman on the design of the course, played the Texas Open for the first time since 2010 and shot a 74. Adam Scott failed to make a birdie in his round of 75. Scott is at No. 59 in the world and needs to stay in the top 60 by May 21 to be exempt for the U.S. Open.

Harris English was in the group at 69, while two-time Texas Open champion Zach Johnson, Nick Watney and Brandt Snedeker were among those at 70. Johnson saved his round by going 5 under over his final five holes, starting with a 12-foot eagle putt on the par-5 14th hole. He birdied the last three.

Murray was coming off a pair of top 15s at Bay Hill and the Houston Open when his game got away from his last week in the RBC Heritage, and he shots 74-70 to miss the cut. He got that sorted out in the five days between teeing it up in San Antonio.

He said he was coming down too steep, which meant he would flip his hands and hit a sharp draw or pull out of it and hit it short and right.

"I was hitting each club 10 yards shorter than I normally do, and you can't play like that because your caddie is trying to give you a number and a club, and you keep hitting these bad shots or keep coming up short," Murray said. "I got back to the basics with the setup and the takeaway, got my club in a better position at the top, which kind of frees my downswing. Then I can start going at it."

Even so, Murray thought he wasted his good start  three birdies in his six holes  when his bunker shot at No. 7 came out with no spin and rolled off the green into a deep swale. He hit his third short to about 7 feet, but missed the putt and took double bogey.

"I would have loved to limit that to a bogey because bogeys don't really kill you  doubles are the ones that now you've got to have an eagle or two birdies to come back with, and out here it's kind of tough to make birdies," Murray said. "But I kept my head. My caddie keeps me very positive out there, that's why I think we could finish 4 under the last nine holes."

Only 34 players in the 156-man field managed to break par.

Horschel missed four birdie chances inside 18 feet on the back nine. What pleased him the most was the way he struck the ball, particularly after his tie for fifth last week at the RBC Heritage. Horschel was one shot behind going into the last round and closed with a 72.

But he's all about momentum, and he can only hope this is the start of one of his runs. Horschel won the FedEx Cup in 2014 when he finished second and won the final two playoff events.

"I'm a big momentum player. I've got to get the train moving forward," he said. "I've always been a guy who gets on a little roll, get that train moving and jump in that winner's circle."

Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
The Justice Department released the memos from former FBI Director James Comey and the 15-page document is bringing a slew of new accusations against President Donald Trump.

James Comey says he felt uncomfortable with how president does things

Comey: I don't hate the president

Trump reacts to Comey's memos

READ the James Comey memos here

Those are just some of the highlights from conversations Comey said he felt the need to document during his time as FBI Director.

According to the memos, last year Trump told Comey how Russian President Vladimir Putin told him, "We have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world."

They also include the president tossing around the idea about pursuing leakers and imprisoning journalists.

Comey spoke to CNN's Jake Tapper about his views of the president's behavior.

Tapper: "Do you, do you think President Trump is a bully and do you hate him?"

Comey: "I definitely don't hate him. There are things he does that make me uncomfortable and I think are inappropriate that are in some ways like a bully-like behavior. But I don't hate Donald Trump. I don't even dislike Donald Trump."

The memos are said to be a critical part of special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into whether the president obstructed justice.

As far as the President's concerned, the memos are just another element to what he calls a witch hunt.

So General Michael Flynns life can be totally destroyed while Shadey James Comey can Leak and Lie and make lots of money from a third rate book (that should never have been written). Is that really the way life in America is supposed to work? I dont think so!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 20, 2018 <_script charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js">

He also goes on to criticize U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi who recently posted about the memo.

Nancy Pelosi is going absolutely crazy about the big Tax Cuts given to the American People by the Republicans...got not one Democrat Vote! Heres a choice. They want to end them and raise your taxes substantially. Republicans are working on making them permanent and more cuts!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 20, 2018 <_script charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js">

The release of #Comey Memos are further proof of @realDonaldTrumps contempt for the rule of law. His attempts to intimidate, circumvent the law & undermine integrity of law enforcement investigations demand immediate action to protect the Mueller investigation. #FollowTheFacts  Nancy Pelosi (@NancyPelosi) April 20, 2018 <_script charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js">

There are some elements in the memo that seem to be classified, but those sections have been blacked out.
NATIONAL -- Students from Florida to Chicago started streaming out of their schools Friday in the latest round of gun-control activism following the February shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida.

Students across the United States walked out of class Friday.



The protest takes place on the nineteenth anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting.

13 people died at the shooting at Columbine.

The protests were chosen to line up with the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting, which left 13 people dead in Littleton, Colorado. At 10 a.m. in each time zone, students at dozens of schools left class to take moments of silence honoring the victims at Columbine and other shootings.

19 years have passed since the horrific shooting at Columbine.



Since then, there have been 85 school shootings, 223 teachers, staff, and students tragically killed, and 206,000 students exposed to gun violence.



I pray for the 13 lost at Columbine. They wont be forgotten. pic.twitter.com/AVSHL1xpVg  Rep. Ted Deutch (@RepTedDeutch) April 20, 2018 <_script charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js">

From there, some students headed to rallies at their statehouses. Others stayed at school to discuss gun violence. Some are holding voting registration drives.

Hundreds of Washington-area students gathered at a park near the White House, taking 19 minutes of silence for each year that has passed since the Columbine massacre. In New York City, crowds of students gathered in Washington Square Park and lay down in a die-in.

Organizers say there will be walkouts in every state, with more than 2,700 registered on the events website . Citywide protests are expected to attract thousands in New York City and Austin, Texas. Police in Richmond, Virginia, say they expect at least 10,000 at the state Capitol.

Students in New York City held a "die-in' at Washington Square park.

EARLIER: City students held a die-in at #WashingtonSquarePark to push for stricter #guncontrol measures. It's part of a nationwide rally marking the 19th anniversary of the deadly #Columbine High School shooting. pic.twitter.com/ZDlNvfActb  Spectrum News NY1 (@NY1) April 20, 2018 <_script charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js">

Shortly before the walkouts, another school shooting in Florida left one student injured. Authorities say one student shot another in the ankle at Forest High School in Ocala. A suspect was taken into custody.

At Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where a gunman killed 17 on Feb. 14, student David Hogg said the latest shooting underscored the urgency of the protests.

We have to stop this. Were not going to be able to stop this unless we continue to make our voices heard, though, when our elected officials wont, Hogg said in a video posted to social media . We have to get out there and make our voices heard, not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans.

Hogg was among about 50 students who walked out of Stoneman Douglas after administrators threatened protesters with unexcused absences.

Craig Smith and Terry McGary, both 17-year-old juniors, said they walked out because they want to show respect for the Columbine victims.
LAKE NONA, Fla.  Thousands of students held another walkout Friday in protest of political action on gun laws and in memory of the victims of the Columbine High School shooting, which happened 19 years ago on this day.

After Parkland shooting, students walked out to protest gun violence

Some students will walk out; others will stay inside and discuss topics

Orange County Public Schools states it will not discourage students from walking

Students at Lake Nona High School left the classroom at 10 a.m. for 13 seconds. Each second is for each life lost in that shooting that took place in April 20, 1999.

We have an impact, tell students outside Lake Nona High School protesting current gun laws. They are also supporting #MDS students from Parkland. @MyNews13 pic.twitter.com/OjJp3L6YaW  Erin Murray News 13 (@emurray1) April 20, 2018 <_script charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js">

The walkout is just the latest as students revolt against gun laws and gun violence in schools. The most recent walkout happened after the Parkland shooting when students across the country walked out of class to have their voices heard and raise awareness to changes they say need to be made in our nations gun laws.

Lake Brantley High school Students chanting, " We want change! We want change!", as they protest school shootings and current gun laws, in Merrill park in Altamonte Springs. pic.twitter.com/iKi20UvtJn  David Bodden (@DBoddenNEWS13) April 20, 2018 <_script charset="utf-8" src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js">

But not all students across Central Florida will be walking out of class. In Marion County, students will constructively use a 30-minute time period to exchange ideas, discuss differing opinions, and offer hard-thought solutions on how the community should address school tragedies like what happened at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland on Feb. 14, that left 17 people dead.

Orange County Public Schools stated that it is neither encouraging nor discouraging students to participate. OCPS stated it will not discipline students who chose to take part.
The state lost 2,000 jobs in March in industries primarily impacted by the regions three noreasters, according to a report by the state Department of Labor.

Job losses were seen in trade, transportation, utilities and leisure and hospitality.

Marchs decline of 2,000 jobs was the first down month the state has seen since last October, stated Andy Condon, director of the Department of Labors office of research, in a press release. The largest declines were in retail trade and accommodations and food services, both of which may have been adversely affected by the noreasters last month.

However, the number of state unemployed residents was estimated at 86,381 down 527 from February, slightly lowering the unemployment rate to 4.5 percent in March.

The state has recovered 80.4 percent or 95,8000 jobs of the 119,100 seasonally adjusted jobs lost in the recession that began in March 2008 and ended in February 2010. The state needs an additional 23,300 jobs to reach an employment expansion. The states private sector has now recovered 101.3 percent of the private sector jobs lost in that downturn and is fully recovered.

Economists were quick to point to six consecutive months of labor force decline as proof of slow economic growth, and called for lawmakers to focus on job creation.

While this is only the first time since October we have had a job loss in the monthly reports, the labor force is shrinking at a time when we need people, Peter Gioia stated in a press release following the DOL report. Gioia is an economist with the Connecticut Business and Industry Association.

We are at a time in Connecticut when we should be unlocking not restraining the states economic potential, he also said. There is a lack of focus at the state capitol.

Gioia said the national and regional economies continue to see solid growth and Connecticut should be able to capture some of that, but isnt. He also said lawmakers should not be passing more employer mandates that make it difficult to create new jobs and more costly to operate a business.

The New Haven labor market saw the largest declines and shed 1,700 jobs. Gains were seen in the Hartford and Danbury labor markets, according to the DOL report.

mgodin@record-journal.com

203-317-2255

Twitter: @Cconnbiz
WALLINGFORD  The principal of Holy Trinity School has announced her resignation after more than 30 years in the role.

Sister Kathleen Kelly will step down as principal on July 1; a role she has held since 1986, according to Reverend Jorge Castro, pastor of Holy Trinity Church. Deacon Dominic Corraro has been named her successor.

I am so honored to be named principal of Holy Trinity School. It is a great institution and I look toward to working with the school and parish communities to make it even greater, said Corraro, who was ordained a deacon in 2016 and was assigned to Holy Trinity Church last June.

Since Deacon Corraro is already familiar with the Holy Trinity community and has a very distinguished background in Catholic school education, I am confident that he is an excellent choice of administrator to lead the school, said Castro.

A graduate of Southern Connecticut State University for his bachelors and masters degrees, he was one of three finalists for the Connecticut Association of Schools Teacher of the Year in 2008, according to the release.

Corraro currently is the Foreign Language Department chairperson and a campus minister at Notre Dame High School in West Haven, where he has worked for the past 34 years. He also works on an adjunct basis at Albertus Magnus College and Quinnipiac University, in addition to being an early college experience faculty member at the University of Connecticut.

In his capacity as Deacon, Director of the Department of Foreign Languages and Campus Minister, Dominic has demonstrated the best of what Holy Cross education is all about: helping to make God known, loved and served, said Notre Dame President Robert Curis. We are so thankful for his years of service and we are confident the families of Holy Trinity will benefit from his wisdom, experience, and pastoral care.

dleithyessian@record-journal.com

203-317-2317

Twitter: @leith_yessian
National Geographic WILD is home to a big family of animal caretakers and rescuers. In these special episodes, check out how the Men of WILD are helping all kinds of creatures one case at a time.

Fridays from 8:30pm AEDT.
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By Express News Service

HYDERABAD: The allegations of casting couch in Telugu film industry, brought to light by anchor-turned-actor Sri Reddy, took another murky turn on Thursday with director Ram Gopal Varma making a self-proclamation that he had 'instigated' the actor to target Pawan Kalyan. Hours later, producer Allu Aravind, who is related to Pawan, lashed out at the director calling him a criminal.

On Thursday, RGV confessed on video and Twitter that he was the one who instigated Sri Reddy to make comments against actor Pawan Kalyan. In a series of tweets, RGV said that he instigated her. He then apologised to Pawan Kalyan and his fans and also said that he will not speak further and wished Sri Reddy and her supporters good luck.

RGV tweeted, "It was me who is responsible for @MsSriReddy saying that to @PawanKalyan ..it is not her fault ..will give details now by 9.30 pm (sic)." Responding to this Aravind said, "It is unlawful to incite someone to commit a crime. Such people should receive the highest punishment. This incident stands testament to Ram Gopal Varma's hatred for our family. He betrayed the industry which is like his mother," he said.

Aravind also alleged that he hatched a conspiracy against Pawan Kalyan who was waging his own battle in politics. "Such conspiracies were created some 10 years back when we represented Praja Rajyam Party (PRP). Such acts just prove once again that RGV is a criminal and an intelligent crook," he further said.

He also talked about reports of Suresh Babu offering money to Sri Reddy. "I have spoken with Suresh and two of his family members. It was RGV who told her that Suresh is ready to give her `5 crore. I'm aware of RGV's financial status. How did he offer such a huge sum? Who is behind his crooked tactics?" questioned Aravind.

The veteran producer also stated that the industry bigwigs will decide on whether to ban RGV from Telugu cinema and expressed his belief that the director will not go unpunished for his "cowardly act". Sri Reddy, for the last one month, has been talking about the casting couch in the industry, after several other character artistes came out to speak about its existence and other problems they face while they are shooting. This however, in the last few days has deviated to personal attacks and responses to those attacks.

Siva Balaji file complaint on Sri Reddy

Meanwhile, Telugu actor Siva Balaji lodged a complaint against actor Sri Reddy for using filthy language against actor Pawan Kalyan and his mother, in order to defame and insult him on Thursday. Shiva Balaji in his complaint stated "On April 16, while watching television, I got to see Sri Reddy using filthy language against Pawan Kalyan, who is my role model. She was intentionally using abusive language against Pawan Kalyan and his mother, outraging the latter's modesty. On enquiry, I found that Sri Reddy was politically motivated by some groups and was provoked by the political parties to talk against Pawan Kalyan."

Actor Balaji also alleged that Sri Reddy was damaging the public peace and promoting enmity among the people, and requested the Raidurgam police to take action against actress Sri Reddy. Raidurgam inspector M Ram Babu said "A petition has been received from actor Shiva Balaji. A general dairy entry has been made, and it is being transferred to Jubilee Hills police station, where already a case has been registered against in this regard."
Anil S By

Express News Service

HYDERABAD: With hours remaining for a thrilling climax to the ideological fight in CPM between two political lines led by Prakash Karat and Sitaram Yechury respectively, Express takes a look at the shrinking ground for the Left in states other than Kerala, West Bengal and Tripura. It's this alarming scenario that led to an alternative political line in the party.

Its fast shrinking vote percentage across the country is a major cause of worry for the Left.

ALSO READ: Left leader suggests worker-farmer alliance, Left democratic front including Congress, to defeat BJP-RSS

While the CPM polled 0.71 percent votes in Bihar in 2010, it was down to just 0.6 percent in 2015. Similarly in Uttar Pradesh, the party could garner only half of its previous vote share in the last elections, that too by contesting in 26 seats compared to 17 seats in the previous time. All Left parties together could not gain even one percent of the votes.

The story is almost the same in Punjab. Compared to 2012 when the party contested nine seats, the vote share dipped to just half from 12 seats during the last election. In Uttarakhand, the vote share became one third in the last election, compared to 2012.

Look at Tamil Nadu. All it could gain was just 0.7 percent vote share from 25 seats. In Assam, the the percentage went down further as the party got only 0.6 percent from 19 seats. All the Left parties together got only 0.9 percent.

Despite the shrinking vote percentage, the CPM units in some states are adamant in their stance against allying with the Congress.

Though it was the Kerala unit that spearheaded the attack against Yechury's political tactical line at the Party Congress on Thursday, delegates from a few other states too did not spare their punches.

Sources said that except for one, almost all delegates from Telangana and Andhra were highly critical of the proposal to join hands with the Congress. While one of the delegates termed Yechury a revisionist, another felt that the Left should in no way join forces with its class enemy.

Of the three representing Kerala at the discussion, Ernakulam district secretary P Rajeeve and Kollam district secretary KN Balagopal spoke on Thursday. There was a general feeling that Rajeeve would set the ground for Kerala's stance, while KK Ragesh would take it forward, with KN Balagopal imparting the finishing touch.

"Beginning the onslaught on the alternative line, Rajeeve said the same would be akin to questioning the very identify of the party. The Kerala delegates -in general- pointed out that any kind of understanding with the Congress would be in violation of the party programme which tags both BJP and Congress as imperialist and capitalist. How can the Left join hands with such a party," asked one of the delegates. KN Balagopal too voiced support of the Karat line in the evening on behalf of the Kerala unit.

Assam and Himachal Pradesh party delegates too were quick to reject the Yechury line during discussions. "Who let the party secretary sabotage the political line taken at the last Party Congress? We have organised agitations against the corrupt practices of the Congress-led government. How can we now even think of a tie-up with them?" one of the delegates asked.

Left unity

In a curious development, a couple of CPM state leaderships have started mooting third front proposals, while the fact remains that the CPM was unable to bring together all the Left parties under a single umbrella in many states.

The Telangana CPM has already floated the idea of a rainbow alliance of around 28 parties. "In addition to CPM, other parties like MCPI, RSP, MBT, BSP, AAP, T Loksatta, Telangana Labour Party and Bagunana Rajyadhikara party are expected to be part of such an alliance. The initial discussions have begun. The front would function on the common premise on how the Dalits and the minority sections are not being given their due," said Telangana CPM secretary Veerbhadran.

Unlike in Kerala, where the Left is in a comparatively comfortable position, the political scenario seems different in many other states.

In states like Bihar, the CPI(ML) does not stand with the Left. In Kerala and West Bengal, the SUCI is not with the Left front. Even in Kerala, prominent Left parties like the RSP and the Forward Bloc are with the Congress-led United Democratic Front.

That could be one reason that the CPI, while repeatedly underscoring the need for Left unity, reiterates its position of a wide Left, secular, democratic platform - obviously including the Congress - as the immediate need of the hour.
By IANS

WASHINGTON: The US Senate has confirmed President Donald Trump-nominated Representative Jim Bridenstine to lead the US space agency.

The Senate narrowly on Thursday voted 50-49 on partisan lines to confirm Bridenstine to serve as NASA's 13th administrator.

Bridenstine, a pilot in the US Navy Reserve and former executive director of the Tulsa Air and Space Museum and Planetarium, was elected to the US Congress in 2012 to represent Oklahoma's First Congressional District.

Congrats Rep Bridenstine on being confirmed as the next @NASA Administrator! Under @POTUS, America will lead in space once again. We look forward to working with Jim Bridenstine to restore Americas proud legacy of leadership in space- essential to our nat'l security & prosperity  Vice President Mike Pence (@VP) April 19, 2018

He currently serves on the House Armed Services Committee and the Science, Space and Technology Committee.

"I am pleased to have Rep. Bridenstine nominated to lead our team. I look forward to ensuring a smooth transition and sharing the great work the NASA team is doing," acting NASA Administrator Robert Lightfoot said in a statement.

"It is an honour to be confirmed by the US Senate to serve as NASA Administrator," said Bridenstine.

Bridenstine will take over from Lightfoot, who has been leading the space agency since its previous administrator Charles Bolden, retired in the wake of the 2016 elections.

"I am humbled by this opportunity,... I look forward to working with the outstanding team at NASA to achieve the President's vision for American leadership in space," Bridenstine added.

"Congrats Rep Bridenstine on being confirmed as the next @NASA Administrator! Under @POTUS, America will lead in space once again," tweeted Vice President Mike Pence.
Families irked by lack of upkeep at cemetery take it upon themselves
Champaign, IL (61820)

Today

Rain showers early with scattered thunderstorms arriving for the afternoon. High 74F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 50%..

Tonight

Isolated thunderstorms this evening, then skies turning partly cloudy after midnight. Low 61F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 30%.
Customs officers have seized 23.8 tonnes of Honduras rosewood worth $2.4 million in Kwai Chung.

They found the wood, an endangered species, in a container which arrived from Honduras during an inspection at a customhouse cargo examination compound yesterday.

The Agriculture, Fisheries & Conservation Department is investigating the case.

Under the Protection of Endangered Species of Animals & Plants Ordinance, anyone who imports or exports an endangered species without a licence is liable to a $5 million fine and two years in jail.

Call 2545 6182 to report suspected smuggling activities.
Zimbabwe also has to fulfil a number of obligations in line with the Harare Declaration of 1991 which saw members of the Commonwealth pledging to ensure the protection and promotion of the fundamental political values of the Commonwealth; democracy, democratic processes and institutions which reflect national circumstances, the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary, just and honest government; fundamental human rights, including equal rights as well as create opportunities for all citizens regardless of race, colour, creed or political belief among other pledges. Zimbabwe Independent
I think people are expecting too much. It is not possible for the former President to be expected to take an active role in national issues a few months after the changes (of government). He needs to rest and he is 94.
'We're Going to Get This Done,'

Biden Says After Hill Meeting
(Newser)  When one of Germany's most advanced U-boats vanished the day after Nazi forces surrendered in parts of Europe, some speculated that it had carried leaders, maybe even Adolf Hitler, to safety in Argentina, reports CBS News. The conspiracy theory, repeated after World War II, is now officially debunked, according to officials at Denmark's Sea War Museum Jutland. They say German U-boat U-3523 was found earlier this month in the Skagerrak Strait between Denmark and Norway, nine miles west of where it was reported to have been sunk by a British bomber on May 6, 1945, reports the Copenhagen Post. It rests roughly 400 feet below the surface at a 45-degree angle, with its nose stuck in the seafloor, according to the museum, which has helped find 450 vessels in the region.

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"After the war, there were many rumors about top Nazis who fled in U-boats and brought Nazi gold to safety, and the U-3523 fed the rumors," the museum says, noting the Type XXI "could sail submerged for a prolonged time" and "had a range that would have allowed it to sail non-stop all the way to South America." But though the museum says the sub was probably fleeing when it sank five days after Hitler's death was announced, it's not clear if we'll ever know what was onboard apart from 58 crew members: There are no plans to raise the sub because of its depth, the Post reports. Despite U-3523's discovery, the Independent suggests theories about Hitler's escape will continue as other German submarines reached Argentina after the war. (A well-preserved U-boat sunk in World War I was just found.)
(Newser)  Employees of an LA Fitness in New Jersey wrongly accused a black member and his guest of not paying to work out and called police, prompting an apology from the company. A spokeswoman for Fitness International, parent company of LA Fitness, told the AP that three employees directly involved in the incident are no longer with the company. Jill Greuling, executive vice president of operations, didn't say whether the three had been terminated. Tshyrad Oates posted video Monday night of the incident at the club in Secaucus, outside New York City in northern New Jersey. It shows his unidentified friend, who is a club member, talking to club employees while several police officers look on.

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On his Facebook page, Oates, who was using a guest pass at the gym, wrote that he and his friend were asked to leave when an employee mistakenly contended the friend hadn't paid for his visit. "The front desk staff employee was confused and thought the member was a guest," Greuling wrote in an email. "The front desk employee who made the request was not working when this member checked in the first time, so she was unaware. Regrettably, from there our staff unnecessarily escalated the situation and called the police rather than work through it." The Irvine-Calif.-based company is considering ways to improve its training. (The incident follows a similar one at a Philadelphia Starbucks.)
(Newser)  Mike Pompeo's nomination for secretary of state received a boost Thursday with support from Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota as Republicans warned lawmakers not to reject President Trump's choice for top diplomat ahead of North Korea talks. Just a handful of senators could determine Pompeo's confirmation. Republicans have a narrow 51-49 majority, but Pompeo faces opposition from Democrats and at least one Republican, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, the AP reports. Paul met with Pompeo on Thursday, at Trump's request, but had no change in his position, the senator's spokesman said. "We need the Senate to approve Mike ASAP," Trump tweeted Thursday. "He will be a great Secretary of State!" Heitkamp is the first Democrat to offer her support, the Hill reports.

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As Pompeo, the current CIA director, walked the Senate halls this week to shore up support, political pressure was mounting on senators on both sides of the aisle. White House allies are pushing the administration's view that Pompeo's recent high-stakes meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jung Un solidifies the diplomatic credentials of the West Point and Harvard Law graduate. They warned Democrats not to disrupt Trump's efforts at a denuclearization deal. At the same time, progressives are lighting up phone lines ahead of a crucial vote Monday at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where Pompeo faces almost unified opposition from Democrats. He may not be able to secure a favorable recommendation from the panel.

(Read more Mike Pompeo stories.)
(Newser)  Free speech activists are lending support to a Fresno State professor threatened with possible disciplinary measures after referring to Barbara Bush as an "amazing racist," who is "still fabulous, thanks for checking in." Randa Jarrar on Wednesday tweeted "love to all of you who have sent support," per the Fresno Bee. And there are apparently several. In an opinion piece at the Fresno Bee, a Fresno State lecturer who says he was last year demoted for claiming President Trump "must hang" argues university President Joseph Castro should be standing up to the "fascist threat to academic freedom" rather than investigating the tenured associate English professor currently on a leave of absence. Both the ACLU of Northern California and the National Coalition Against Censorship also say the investigation of the Arab-American should be closed.

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Jarrar, who is to return to the university in the fall, "said bluntly what newspaper obituaries disguised when they wrote that Mrs. Bush was 'never shy about expressing her views,' or that, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, her 'candor got her into trouble,'" says Los Angeles Times book critic Laila Lalami. Guardian columnist Moustafa Bayoumi says Jarrar has "the right to express that opinion without being threatened with violence or loss of employment." Fresno writer Steven Sanchez adds "the vitriol flung at her is the epitome of white fragility." The AP reports that critics have continued to bash Jarrar for being insensitive after Bush's death. Castro said her words went "beyond free speech," per the Bee. Jarrarwho grew up in Kuwait and Egypthas also taken flak for implying the phone number of Arizona State University's crisis hotline was her own. (Read more Fresno State stories.)
(Newser)  Lois Riess' time on the run has come to an end. The Minnesota grandmother is accused of killing her husband at their Blooming Prairie home in late March and then murdering Pamela Hutchinson, a woman who bore a resemblance to her, earlier this month in Fort Myers Beach, Fla. A manhunt ensued: Riess was apprehended in Texas on Thursday night. Officials were tipped off by someone who saw her at a restaurant in the South Padre Island area, which the Star Tribune notes is near the Mexico border. Two deputy marshals were on the scene within 25 minutes, CNN reports. The manager of the Sea Ranch Restaurant tells the Washington Post the 56-year-old was "cool as a cucumber" as she had a drink at the bar before the authorities arrived.

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It's unclear whether she will be sent to Florida or Minnesota; she's currently in the San Pedro Island jail and has been charged with murder and grand theft of a motor vehicle, among other charges. More details are emerging on Riess' alleged movements in recent weeks: She allegedly paid for a hotel room in Ocala, Fla., with Hutchinson's credit card and withdrew at least $5,500 from Hutchinson's bank accounts, say authorities. The Star Tribune offers up one theory from locals on what's behind Riess' alleged spree: They suspect she "snapped" over gambling debts, which were so well-known that the Post reports locals referred to her as "Losing Streak Lois." (Riess was seen chatting up Hutchinson before her murder on this seven-second video.)
(Newser)  "Get Wa Lone." That was the directive a Myanmar police captain was given by his superior, or so he testified Friday. Wa Lone is the Reuters reporter who, along with colleague Kyaw Soe Oo, was arrested Dec. 12 and has been jailed since. Police accused the pair of violating the colonial-era Official Secrets Act by acquiring "important secret papers" from two policemen, and Reuters reports Police Captain Moe Yan Nainga witness for the prosecutionnow says it was a "trap." The AP sees it as a "setback" for the prosecution. Reuters reports his testimony came during hearings that have now been underway since January regarding whether to charge the men, who had been investigating for Reuters the massacre of Rohingya men and boys in a village, with violating the act.

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Moe Yan Naing testified that he had been interviewed by Wa Lone in November, and that on Dec. 12 he himself was interrogated over that interview and then learned the plot to seize Lone was to take place that night. Police Brigadier Tin Ko Ko gave "secret documents" to Police Lance Corporal Naing Lin, says Moe Yan Naing, "and told him to give them to Wa Lone and said that when Wa Lone comes out of the restaurant, the Htaunt Kyant regional police force has to entrap him and arrest him." He says the police brigadier general told them, "If you don't get Wa Lone, you will go to jail." Reuters says the reporters have said they were invited to dinner by two policemen they hadn't interviewed, were handed rolled up papers by them and summarily arrested. (Read more Reuters stories.)
(Newser)  Persistence and a little detective work has paid off for Tatiana Akhmedova, in the form of a $500 million superyacht to be handed over to her by her soon-to-be ex-husband. Reuters and the South China Morning Post report that UK judge Charles Haddon-Cave has ordered Russian oligarch Farkhad Akhmedov to sign over the 380-foot Luna to his 41-year-old wife as part of a $635 million divorce settlement Cave awarded her in 2016nearly 42% of Akhmedov's fortune, and said to be the largest British divorce settlement of all time. (The couple moved from Russia to London in 1993, where Akhmedova has lived ever since and raised their two sons.) And it's some boat Akhmedova will soon be docking: a nine-deck expedition yacht with 50 crew members, two helipads, a 65-foot swimming pool, a mini-submarine, and even an anti-missile system.

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The new court order comes after Akhmedova says she never received any money from the settlement, with Cave noting it appeared the 62-year-old Akhmedov had taken "elaborate steps to conceal his wealth and evade enforcement of the judgment," per the London Times. Akhmedov said he'd sold the yacht back in 2014, but it turned out the firm he'd sold it to was simply one of his own offshore companies, and Akhmedova's attorneys eventually tracked the yacht down in dry dock in Dubai, where it remains under court order. Akhmedov, meanwhile, says the British court system is exploiting Dubai courts, and he blames the Luna seizure on recent bad blood between the UK and Russian President Vladimir Putin. "Can it really be a coincidence?," Akhmedov said in an email to the SCMP. (This superyacht is souped up with water cannons to fight off pirates.)
(Newser)  One kangaroo is dead and another is injured after visitors at a Chinese zoo hurled rocks and other objects at them in two separate incidents. The Straits Times reports the first pelting happened at the end of February (though China Daily says it happened in early April), when gawkers decided to throw bricks and pieces of concrete at kangaroos at the Fuzhou Zoo in Fujian province to get them to hop around. A 12-year-old female marsupial was struck on her left foot, per ABC Australia, but although zookeepers tended to the animal's bleeding limb, they apparently didn't account for internal injuries. The kangaroo died a few days later, and a vet's report says it was probably from a ruptured kidney.

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Then, in mid-April, a repeat of the projectile-throwing, this time resulting in minor injuries to a 5-year-old male kangaroo who is expected to be OK. Per AsiaOne, the zoo's breeder says the kangaroos tend to rest for most of the day, with only a window of a few hours where they're active, and so visitors have on occasion thrown objects at them to spur them out of sleep or just get them to move around. The zoo does have cameras near certain animal enclosures, but they're usually turned toward the animals, not the visitors; staff is now vying for money for high-def surveillance cameras after these incidents. Meanwhile, the zoo will now only allow three kangaroos out at a time for public viewing, and it plans on stuffing the dead kangaroo and putting her on display. (A UK zoo had to put all of its mammals on birth control.)
(Newser)  A day already painful for gun control activists became even more so Friday when the 19th anniversary of the Columbine school massacre coincided with a shooting at a high school in Florida. One student at Ocala's Forest High School suffered a non-life-threatening injury; the suspected shooter, identified as a male who is not a student at the school, was in custody, the Ocala Star Banner reports. It's a scenario students across the country are already rallying against in coordinated walkouts Friday. More:



Origins: NPR reports Connecticut teenager Lane Murdock came up with the idea for the walkout upon learning of the deaths in Parkland, Fla. "I thought, originally, it would just be my school but, obviously, it's grown," the 16-year-old tells CNN. Students at more than 2,700 schools across the US were taking part, and it all grew out of this petition.

NPR reports Connecticut teenager Lane Murdock came up with the idea for the walkout upon learning of the deaths in Parkland, Fla. "I thought, originally, it would just be my school but, obviously, it's grown," the 16-year-old tells CNN. Students at more than 2,700 schools across the US were taking part, and it all grew out of this petition. A test: The National School Walkout "will be a test for the staying power of this new wave of activism," per Vox. Student leaders vow they won't let fading headlines stop the movement. The AP has details from the day's walkouts in Atlanta, New York City, and elsewhere.

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The goals: Unlike school walkouts earlier this year, this one is to last a full day, per the New York Times. One common theme: 13 seconds of silence to honor the 13 killed at Columbine. The walkout's stated aims are to "hold elected officials accountable," to advocate "solutions to gun violence," and to promote political engagement.

Unlike school walkouts earlier this year, this one is to last a full day, per the New York Times. One common theme: 13 seconds of silence to honor the 13 killed at Columbine. The walkout's stated aims are to "hold elected officials accountable," to advocate "solutions to gun violence," and to promote political engagement. Celebrity help: The Washington Post reports Robert DeNiro has penned a letter for students who need help getting out of class. "By bringing awareness of the tragic consequences of gun violence, and influencing our leaders to pass sensible gun laws, our communities and schools will become safer," it reads.

The Washington Post reports Robert DeNiro has penned a letter for students who need help getting out of class. "By bringing awareness of the tragic consequences of gun violence, and influencing our leaders to pass sensible gun laws, our communities and schools will become safer," it reads. Teacher remembers: At NPR, longtime Columbine teacher Paula Reed discusses the 1999 massacre, as well as this year's school shooting in Parkland. "I came completely freakin' unhinged," she says of the Florida rampage. "It was too close to ours."

At NPR, longtime Columbine teacher Paula Reed discusses the 1999 massacre, as well as this year's school shooting in Parkland. "I came completely freakin' unhinged," she says of the Florida rampage. "It was too close to ours." 'Enough': Meanwhile, the editorial board of the San Diego Union-Tribune has arranged the names of people killed on school campuses in the US in the last 20 years to spell "Enough." "Please take the time to read these 223 names. Be sad. Be outraged," it says.

(Read more gun violence stories.)
(Newser)  North Korea says it has suspended nuclear and long-range missile tests and plans to close its nuclear test site. The North's official Korean Central News Agency said the suspension of nuclear and ICBM tests went into effect Saturday local time, per the AP.The country says it's making the move to shift its national focus and improve its economy. The announcements come days before North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is set to meet South Korean President Moon Jae-in in a border village for a rare summit.

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The North's decisions were made in a meeting of the ruling party's full Central Committee, which had convened to discuss a "new stage" of policies. The decision also comes ahead of a summit between Kim and President Trump, and the US president took note of Friday's development. "North Korea has agreed to suspend all Nuclear Tests and close up a major test site," he tweeted. "This is very good news for North Korea and the World - big progress! Look forward to our Summit."

(Read more North Korea stories.)
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Snow this morning will taper off and give way to cloudy skies this afternoon. High 37F. Winds light and variable. Chance of snow 80%. Snow accumulations less than one inch..

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New Delhi:

The Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University (JNTU) is all set to release the Admit Cards for the Telangana State Engineering, Agriculture and Medical (TS EAMCET) examination on Friday, April 20, 2018.

The varsity will make the results available on its official website, which is eamcet.tsche.ac.in. Candidates will be allowed to download their hall tickets till May 1, 2018.

Under 'tatkal' scheme, students, who are yet to register for the computer-based entrance exam can do the same until April 24, 2018. However, they will have to pay an extra fee of Rs 5,000 for late registration under 'tatkal' scheme.

The Engineering, Agriculture and Medical Common Entrance Test (Eamcet) of Telangana will take place on May 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7. This is the first time that the examination will be held online across the state.

Once released, candidates can go through the following steps to download their hall tickets for TS EAMCET 2018.

Here is how to download the Admit Cards for TS EAMCET 2018:

Step 1- Visit the official website - eamcet.tsche.ac.in

Step 2- Click on TS EAMCET 2018 hall tickets

Step 3- Enter your registration number and Password

Step 4- The hall ticket will be displayed

Step 5- Download your Admit Card

Step 6- Take a print out of the same for future convenience

Aspirants are advised to bring their Admit Cards in order to be allowed inside exam hall on the day of TS EAMCET 2018.

Read | CBSE Class X results 2018: Board to provide compensation of two marks for typing error in English paper

About JNTU:

Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Hyderabad (JNTU Hyderabad) is a public university, located in Hyderabad, Telangana, India, and one of the India's leading educational universities focusing on engineering.
New Delhi:

Prime Minister Narendra Modi onA A joined other heads of government for a retreat at Windsor Castle, which will conclude the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in the UK.



"At the retreat unique to the Commonwealth heads meet privately to discuss collaboration on global and Commonwealth priorities. They will also consider reform and renewal of the Commonwealth," a Commonwealth statement said.



The closed-door meetings comprise the informal segment of CHOGM, where the leaders meet without any pre-set agenda and without the presence of their close aides.



The issue of succession is expected to dominate the retreat at the grand Waterloo Chamber of the Castle, one of the homes of Queen Elizabeth II, the Head of the Commonwealth. OnA , she expressed her "sincere wish" that her son and heir Prince Charles step into her shoes in her opening address for CHOGM A and a general consensus seems to be building around the 69-year-old royal.



"India has no objection to Prince Charles as the next Head because he has worked hard for the institution. However, we are also clear that there should be no institutionalisation of the post," a senior Indian official said.



The Queen who is now 91 years old is unlikely to attend any future Commonwealth summits in far flung member-countries and is keen to pass on the baton to the 69-year-old Prince of Wales.



"It is my sincere wish that the Commonwealth will continue to offer stability and continuity for future generations ? and will decide that one day the Prince of Wales will carry on the important work started by my father (King George VI) in 1949," she had said in her speech at Buckingham Palace.



The decision on a new Head will be up to the presidents and prime ministers representing the 53 member-countries as they gather for the retreat and, if there is an agreement, it will then be formally announced by Commonwealth Secretary-General Patricia Scotland. A A A A

However, the leaders may not be able to arrive at a decision on the matterA , in which case it will roll over to the next CHOGM.



The retreat will mark an end to the week-long summit in Britain, which started onA A with forums on the theme of business, women, youth and civil society. The formal executive session of the heads of government meeting, themed around "Towards a Common Future', concluded last evening.



"The overall objective of the Prime Minister's participation at this CHOGM in 2018 signals our stepped up engagement with the Commonwealth. It conveys India's desire to see Commonwealth increase focus on developing country priorities," an MEA spokesperson said.



At the end of the retreatA , leaders will issue their joint communique and a leaders' statement. CHOGM takes place every two years in different Commonwealth countries, with the next host country also to be announced at the end of this summit.



Modi is scheduled to visit Germany at the end of the retreat for a brief bilateral meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin before he leaves for India.



(With inputs from PTI)

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New Delhi:

Alleging the Congress of using impeachment as a political tool, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on termed its notice to remove Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra a "revenge petition" after the Supreme Court's judgment "exposed" the conspiracy of falsehood in the Judge Loyas death case.

"My preliminary reaction to the impeachment motion filed is clear. It is a revenge petition after the falsehood of the Congress party has been established in the Justice Loya death case. It is an attempt to intimidate a Judge and send a message to other Judges, that if you don't agree with us, fifty MP's are enough for a revenge action, Jaitley said in a Facebook post.

In the Facebook post titled 'Judge Loya Death Case: The One That Almost Created a Judicial Mutiny, Jaitley also said BJP president Amit Shah had "no role" in the Sohrabuddin case which was an alleged encounter executed by some central agencies through the State Police.

Congress and six other opposition parties, in the day, had moved a notice for the impeachment of the Chief Justice of India, accusing him of five counts of "misbehaviour" and "misusing" authority.



The opposition parties met Vice-President and Rajya Sabha chairman M Venkaiah Naidu and handed over a notice for the impeachment of the Chief Justice of India (CJI) with signatures of 64 MPs of the Upper House.



Observing that impeachment of a Judge of the Supreme Court is to be done only in the case of either his incapacity or on proven misconduct, Jaitley said the Congress party and its friends have started using impeachment as a "political tool".

"To use the power as intimidatory tactics when neither you have a case of 'proven misconduct' or the numbers on your side, is a serious threat to judicial independence," Jaitley said.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
New Delhi:

Opposition leaders on Friday met Vice-President Venkaiah Naidu at his residence and handed over a notice for the impeachment of Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra.

Leader of the Opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad met leaders of the Opposition parties to discuss the matter, sources said.

Azad had played a pivotal role in collecting signatures of MPs from several parties, including the Congress, CPM, CPI, NCP, SP and the BSP.

Seventy-one MPs had signed the impeachment motion (against CJI) but as seven have retired, the number is now 64.

"We have more than the minimum requirement needed to entertain the motion and we are sure that the Hon Chairman will take action," Azad said after meeting the vice-president.

As per the Judges Inquiry Act, 1968, a complaint against a judge has to be made through a resolution either by 100 members of the Lok Sabha or 50 Rajya Sabha members.

Congress leaders had said that the issues raised by four Supreme Court judges have not been addressed yet by the CJI. They said the party was concerned about the independence of judiciary and people must protect the institution from "gross interferences by the government."

During the Budget Session that concluded earlier in April, the Congress had initiated a move collecting over 50 signatures of the Rajya Sabha members in a bid to table the motion, but there were reservations from parties like the Trinamool Congress.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.
New Delhi:

Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Friday, said India will not let judge BH Loya to be forgotten and the truth is in front of millions of Indian.

Rahul Gandhis remarks came following the impeachment notice of the Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra by the Congress and six other opposition parties. This comes after the Supreme Court rejected pleas for a probe into the death of Loya.

There is no hope left, everything is managed' say Judge Loya's family. I want to tell them, there is hope. There is hope because millions of Indians can see the truth. India will not allow Judge Loya to be forgotten," he said on Twitter.

Gandhi then tagged a news report that quoted the family members of the judge as saying that "there is no hope left, everything seems managed".

Congress on Thursday, demanded a fair inquiry to address the unanswered question regarding Loyas death.

Congress chief further targeted BJP President Amit Shah, saying the truth has its own way of catching up with people like him.

Shah was one of those who were discharged in the Sohrabuddin case.

Loya had died of cardiac arrest in Nagpur on December 1, 2004 when he had gone to attend the wedding of a colleagues daughter.

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New Delhi:

Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman visited forward bases in Assam and Arunachal to oversee Indian Air Force's massive operational exercise, Gagan Shakti 2018, along the China-India border.

The defence minister landed at the Chabua Air Force Station in Upper Assam and then took a Mi-17 chopper and went to Pasighat in Arunachal Pradesh.

At Pasighat Advanced Landing Ground, two Sukhoi Su-30 MKI fighter jets took off and then a C-130J Super Hercules transport aircraft landed, from which Garud Commandos simulated taking over of the base.

Sitharaman was also briefed about the uploading of rockets in a Mi gunship, Air Force sources said. While the Sukhois dropped three 1,000 pounder bombs, the Mi 17 gunships fired rockets.

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New Delhi:

A 31-year-old Sikh widow, who went missing on a pilgrimage in Pakistan, has allegedly married a Lahore-based man and later converted to Islam.

The woman, identified as Kiran Bala is a native of Hoshiarpur and went to attend the Baisakhi festival in Pakistan as part of a Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) Sikh delegation on April 13.

"A 31-year-old woman from Hoshiarpur has allegedly converted to Islam & married a Lahore-based man after going missing on a pilgrimage in Pakistan. The woman had gone to attend the Baisakhi festival there as part of an SGPC Sikh delegation," ANI reported.

#Punjab: A 31-year-old woman from Hoshiarpur has allegedly converted to Islam & married a Lahore-based man after going missing on a pilgrimage in Pakistan. The woman had gone to attend the Baisakhi festival there as part of an SGPC Sikh delegation.  ANI (@ANI) April 19, 2018

Meanwhile, Kiran's father-in-law, who is a Sikh religious preacher in Garhshankar sub-division of Punjab, suspects that she might have fallen into the hands of Pakistani spy agency Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and was forced to change her religion.

Tarsem Singh has also sought the intervention of Punjab and Centre government into the matter.

Read | UP: Dalit man wins over casteism; allowed to take wedding procession in Kasganj

"My daughter-in-law called and said that she has converted to Islam and got re-married in Pakistan. I want to request the Prime Minister, Chief Minister of Punjab to take her out of this situation. I suspect she might have fallen into the hands of ISI," ANI quoted Tarsem Singh.

My daughter-in-law called & said that she has converted to Islam & got re-married in Pakistan. I want to request the Prime Minister, CM of Punjab to take her out of this situation. I suspect she might have fallen into the hands of ISI: Tarsem Singh, Father-in-Law of the woman. pic.twitter.com/e2MhzQr5pV  ANI (@ANI) April 19, 2018

Kiran Bala, the 31-year-old widow is the mother of three children and was living with her in-laws in Garhshankar, around 90 km from Chandigarh. Tarsem's son died in an accident back in 2013. Now, with Kiran tied knot to the Lahore man, Tarsem is worried about the future of his three grandchildren, whose future is in limbo.

Read | Nawaz Sharif's disqualification is for life, rules Pakistan Supreme Court

Around 1,700 Indian pilgrims had gone to Pakistan to visit Sikh shrines, including Panja Sahib Gurdwara near Lahore and Nankana Sahib, the birthplace of Sikhism founder Guru Nanak, on the occasion of Baisakhi on April 13.

(With inputs from agencies)

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New:

Six bike-riders from India will travel 16 countries in two continents with the message aunity in diversitya and their slogan is aOne World, One Familya.

The journey of the six bike-riders with the peace message a One World, One Family a will start from Guwahati on April 28 and end at London after traveling through the historic silk route.

aWe are six riders from India including my son Rakshit. We will travel across the two continents to promote universal brotherhood,a said GV Prasad.

Prasad further added that they will travel through 16 countries. Their final destination is London.

The bikers will pass through 16 countries including, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

aThe whole journey to promote peace among countries will take 55 days of travel. We have kept out 42 days for rest out of the total travel days,a added Prasad.

He further informed the media that all the six riders who are part of the journey are from different corners of India. The bikers participating in the peace journey are from Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Jaipur and Coimbatore.

aWe all will assemble at Guwahati next week from where are peace journey will be flagged off,a Prasad added. A

Further elaborating about their route plans, Prasad added that they will only travel 300 kilometers per day.

aWherever we go, we will meet locals, spend time with them and learn their language,a the biker added.

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New Delhi:

The Uttar Pradesh government on Friday withdrew the 'Y' category security cover for BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar, who is the prime accused in the Unnao gang rape case.

Sengar is the main accused in the horrific Unnao gang rape case which has outraged the entire country because of not just the act but the rather shoddy investigations that followed.

The survivor said that UP police did not register an FIR against Sengar because he was a politician. She attempted to immolate herself - twice - to draw attention to her plight.

It was only then that a massive protest against the heinous crime led to UP CM Yogi Adityanath ordering an SIT probe and the matter was eventually handed over to CBI.

Sengar has been in police custody since last week and is being questioned. Although he has maintained that he is innocent, public outcry against him has been strong - possibly the reason why his 'Y' category security has now been removed.

The ruling BJP in the state has suffered a massive dent to its image with its MLA being probed as a rape accused - apart from the ruckus over its ministers in J&K cabinet joining demonstrations against investigation into the Kathua rape case.

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New Delhi:

Amid growing clamour over the rape and murder of an eight-year-old in Jammu and Kashmir's Kathua, a 35-year-old woman was allegedly raped by his father in Sitapur city, Uttar Pradesh.

According to police, the man has been booked for raping his daughter along with two of his friends in Sitapur's Kamlapur area on April 15. She filed the police complaint next day.

While one of the accused has been arrested, the victim's father and another rapist are still absconding, Martand Prakash Singh, the Additional SP (South) told PTI.

"The woman has a son. She married almost 20 years ago. However, she separated from her husband and was living with her father," PTI quoted Martand Prakash.

As per police reports, on April 15, the man took his daughter to a fair, around 70 km from state capital Lucknow and later called up his friend Maan Singh to join him in his daughters rape.

Post that, they convinced the woman to ride with them on a motorcycle to the residence of their friend Meraj. There, she was locked in a room for nearly 18 hours and was later raped by the gang of three.

Read | Meghalaya: 60-year-old man rapes his 7-year-old granddaughter in North Garo Hills

The victim somehow managed to escape and reached home. Then, she narrated her ordeal to her mother and the complaint was registered, according to police.

Earlier, Maan Singh had partnered the woman's father in a number of crimes. In November last year, the man was arrested for having an illicit relationship with his daughter. Later he was released on bail in February.

The cases of atrocities against women and children have been increasing at an alarming rate since last few years in India. As per the latest figure, released by the government, a child is sexually abused every 15 minutes in India. Uttar Pradesh tops the chart with around 15% crime against minors in the country.

Read | Kathua Case: SC directs J&K government to provide protection to victim's family, counsel

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New Delhi:

Prime Minister Narendra Modis realpolitik is in full play as he calibrates the ongoing Indian response to Britains gradual disengagement with the European Union and prepares to draw mileage for India from it.

Eager to draw strategic advantage from the post-Brexit situation, Modi is seeking to forge closer links with a beleaguered Britain and is looking upon the Commonwealth as a platform for higher Indian stakes internationally in an arena in which an overbearing China is not breathing down its neck.

That the Indian prime minister is looking at a dominant role for his country in the 53-member Commonwealth is evident from the importance he has attached to the body by attending the Commonwealth Heads of Government (CHOGM) summit in London, ostensibly defying the approach of past Indian governments playing down the importance of the grouping. The last that India had been represented at the level of prime minister in CHOGM was in 2010.

That India and Britain have resolved to lower tariff barriers in bilateral talks and the Commonwealth summit has recognised Indias growing stature in the comity of nations are indicative of the fact that the new Indian geopolitics is working, albeit slowly.

Modis initiative in talking to British Prime Minister Theresa May about extraditing industrialist Vijay Mallya is directed at earning kudos in India over bringing the high-profile fugitive to book in an election year. This, he reckons, would blunt the edge of the Indian Oppositions campaign that his administration had abetted in Mallya fleeing the country.

In the Commonwealth, there is an ostensible Indian thrust on assuming a leadership role. This was evident from the slew of funds Modi announced for development and capacity building projects for countries in the grouping. This included a doubling of Indias contribution to the Commonwealth Fund for Technical Cooperation from the current $1 billion.

While reaching out to fellow Commonwealth countries through extensive interactions, Modi would need to tread warily so as to not give the impression of taking a condescending, Big Brotherly position which has proved costly in Indias neighbourhood, especially with Nepal and Maldives and to some extent with Sri Lanka.

Indias Commonwealth outreach comes at a time when attempts are afoot to decentralise the groupings structure by delegating the operational aspects of the organisation to different member states. India is indeed looking for a bigger role for itself in the new scheme of things. With its size and stature that should be a natural phenomenon. If in that process, Indias arch-enemy Pakistan gets diminished in the eyes of the world, so much the better.

All in all, its a win-win situation for India but how much of a benefit a tottering Commonwealth will bring to New Delhi is a moot question.



With China spreading its footprint in Asia and Africa virtually on a war footing, Indian diplomacy needs to work out ways to strengthen the economies of smaller countries without seeming interventionist and bossy.

The Chinese are building a ring of countries around India where New Delhis strategic interests are put to test. The Commonwealth is one forum in which Beijing cannot enter to assault Indian interests.

It is undeniable that the British still have a colonial hangover which impinges on treating India on an equal footing in Indo-British relations. A more pragmatic approach will help Britain reap realistic returns from an Indo-British partnership that is attuned to the changed context of Britains exit from the European community.

As statistics go, India is home to 55 per cent of the Commonwealths 2.3 billion population and accounts for 26 per cent of its internal trade. Therefore, its role will be vital to British efforts to revitalise the grouping.

In the context of Chinese efforts to control the sea lanes for world trade, India will need to draw the maritime states of the Commonwealth towards itself, weaning them away from Chinese strategic interests.

At the summit in London, India has reached out to Seychelles and Mauritius in particular to serve mutual maritime interests. Modi will also get an opportunity to touch base with his Sri Lankan counterpart and with the Australian premier with whom India shares maritime concerns.
New Delhi:

On March 26, 2018, Chinese spokesperson Hua Chunying declared that Doklam belonged to it on the basis of historical conventions and India should have "learnt lessons" from the 2017 stand-off.

The remarks were in response to India's ambassador to China Gautam Bambawale's remarks that were published on March 24, 2018, in Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. The Ambassador blamed China for the stand-off in Doklam, saying it happened because Beijing tried to alter the status quo in the disputed area.

Meanwhile Indian Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on March 05, 2018 stated in Parliament that the People's Liberation Army (PLA) had undertaken "construction of some infrastructure, including sentry posts, trenches and helipads" near the face-off site between Indian and Chinese troops at Doklam in the Sikkim-Bhutan-Tibet tri-junction. Doklam is in news again!

In June 2017, Indian troops blocked China's attempt to extend the existing motorable road southwards towards the Jampheri Ridge in south Doklam, which led to the 73-day troop face-off before disengagement on August 28.

The Chinese official media, unofficial (if it exists) and social media had then been singularly raucous, belligerent and humiliating and inciting tempers by the war-talk. While India called it disengagement, Global Times scathingly referred to it as removal of trespassing troops.

Many have opined that the Chinese miscalculated on the force of our response and our commitment and had fervently anticipated that we would blink first. As events progressed, various rationale was cited for disengagement, including internal politics and political events like the BRICS Summit in Xiamen, China in September 2017.

Did the Chinese miscalculate and not anticipate our reaction and determination on this front? In all contemplation of India-China border imbroglio, history invariably takes the front seat. In the same area, Doklam, the Indian Army had reacted with similar intensity in 2008, and the faceoff was eventually called off.

In 2013, the encampment by PLA in Depsang plains in Eastern Ladakh, near Daulat Beg Oldie, was dismantled following the strong reaction from India. At Demchok and Chumar in 2014, the robust response by the Army, ensured an amicable uncoupling. There had also been reports of an incident in Kameng in Arunachal Pradesh in 2016.

In 2017, Doklam apart, first Barahoti and then the jostling and stone pelting between Finger Four and Five on the North Bank of Pangong Tso in Eastern Ladakh, on August 15, 2017 took place, visuals of which were on TV channels.

This discounts the routine ones that recur frequently but are called off amicably, or resolved through Border Personnel Meetings. These major events that happened over the last five years resisted negotiation or conciliation for a considerable time  the last at Doklam for 73 days.

Three compelling and significant issues stand out. One, though the civilian-oriented border guards - the Peoples Armed Police, were responsible for the Line of Actual Control (LAC) and came under the State Council (or cabinet) through the Ministry of Public Security, a duality of control existed with the apex Central Military Commission (CMC).

Repeated annual incursions in different sectors seemed too well coordinated to be brushed aside as localised misjudgments. The manner of vociferousness post Doklam, intimated an apex level management. Significantly, as a far-reaching change, China has recently brought all border troops, including those guarding its border with India, directly under CMC.

The duplicity, if any, in command and control stands dissolved, for henceforth any intransigence on the LAC would be with the direct influence of the CMC, and may defy early resolution.

Two, all transgressions by the Chinese since 2013, including Doklam 2008 itself, clearly highlighted larger intentions. There is obviously an incremental push forward to challenge the status quo on the Line of Actual Control (LAC), a direct semblance of activism, well premeditated and with forethought.



And three, the mechanisms for maintaining peace and tranquillity on the LAC, like the customary banner drill on engagement, that would cease the entanglement, seems to be singularly waning.

The border personnel meetings and meetings of the "Working Mechanism for Consultation and Coordination on India-China Border Affairs have been unproductive in releasing the tensions on the LAC. Certainly, there is no miscalculation in any and all such events.

Doklam, and those obdurate standoffs previously in Depsang, Chumar and Demchok, have shown the global community a strong Indian response. This could well have turned out be a repeat of the reaction of the Indian Army consequent to road construction in Chepzi-Chumar, wherein larger quantum of force was moved forward.

The Chinese well understand, and would have templated the tough stand of India. The follow-up to Doklam should have been intensely pre-wargamed and appreciated by the PLA. The Indian Armed forces are hardy and rugged enough to sustain themselves even in dire winters. And yet the Chinese went ahead with Doklam!

While India had a principled stand, and stood up in support of Bhutan, the Doklam saga, and the previous similar events have been intensely followed and commented upon in nations in Asia having territorial or maritime disputes with China.

Indias strong response has come in for compliments from many a nation. The message in clarity is that unilateral attempts to alter the status quo in the 21stcentury are not sustainable. The amicable disengagement also highlighted that rationality could be brought in by sustained diplomacy backed by military power.

In aggregate, for China, it could well be the jettisoning of the Deng Xiaopings maxim, hide your strength, bide your time.

China has the requisite strength and more. It portends ominously for the future. India cannot afford to lower its guard and be complacent, as the emerging news from Doklam indicates. Similar caution in other disputed areas also is mandated.

Lt Gen Rakesh Sharma, PVSM, UYSM, AVSM, VSM (Retd) superannuated from the Army in 2017. In his last assignment, he was the Adjutant General of the Indian Army responsible for the Human Resource Management.
New Delhi:

The BBC on apologised for mistakenly referring to Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a live news broadcast of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in UK.



In a live broadcast on Thursday, Sirisena was seen arriving in his car at the Buckingham Palace to join the other heads of government for the CHOGM launch hosted by Queen Elizabeth II. And the BBC news presenter said, Modi, the Prime Minister of India since arriving at Buckingham Palace".



"This was a mistake made during a live broadcast and we apologise for our error," a BBC spokesperson said.

The news presenter on duty was given wrong information which she read out on air, according to reports.



The CHOGM is a biennial summit meeting of the heads of government from all Commonwealth nations. This time around, it was held in London.

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A new baggage-screening system that is better at detecting bombs has started operation at Haneda airport in Tokyo.

The system is a part of efforts to beef up Japan's counter-terrorism capabilities ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics.

The system installed at the airport's international terminal employs computed tomography, which is widely used in medical imaging.

It enables inspectors to view baggage from various angles on a screen.

Explosives are displayed in red to make it easier for operators to spot them.

The new system is expected to allow airport officials to spend less time opening up luggage for inspection.

Also installed in the baggage inspection area is a so-called "smart lane," which allows passengers who are ready for inspection to move ahead of others who are not.

The transport ministry aims to introduce similar systems to other airports across the country by 2020.

A senior ministry official said the ministry wants to make the screening process more stringent and smoother in the run-up to the 2020 Games.
John J. Castner, of Duane, has confessed to fatally shooting a man and burying him in a backyard, according to New York State Police.

The shooting occurred in the fall of 2017 at Castner's property located on 344 Old Meacham Road, said police.

Investigators also found what was believed to be the gun used in the crime, according to police.

Police did not release the 61-year-old male victim's name.

Franklin County Coroner Brian Langdon authorized removal of the body to the Albany Medical Center for an autopsy to be performed Friday. A positive identification is pending autopsy, forensic examination and notification of next of kin.

Police arrested Castner, 61, and a second suspect, Melissa L. Castner, of North Bangor, on Wednesday. They did not say how the two were related or what role Melissa Caster played in the shooting.

John Castner was charged with second-degree murder and criminal possession of a firearm. He was arraigned in the Town of Malone Court and held at Franklin County Jail without bail.

Melissa Castner was charged with second-degree assault. She was also arraigned in the Town of Malone Court and held at Franklin County Jail on $30,000 cash bail or $60,000 bond.

The State Police Forensic Identification Unit remains on the scene at Old Meacham Road to complete their search of the property.

Anyone with information on the homicide, should call New York State Police 518-897-2000.
Primate Babatunde Ayodele, the General Overseer of Inri Evangelical Church has reiterated his call for the Senate President, Bukola Saraki...

Primate Babatunde Ayodele, the General Overseer of Inri Evangelical Church has reiterated his call for the Senate President, Bukola Saraki to run for President in 2019.

Ayodele said,  God has given him a revelation that Saraki will become Nigerias next President.





He said Saraki will put Nigeria on the path of progress should he contest the presidential election in 2019.





The clergyman spoke during the commissioning of a newly built 50,000 seat Temilaseyori mini-cathedral branch of the Inri Church in Badagry, Lagos State.





He also warned President Muhammadu Buhari to step down and renounce his decision to seek re-election.





According to Ayodele, Saraki should come out to contest. It is the word of God. Buhari Government is not in the hand of God any longer; his government cannot meet up the needs of the people, not even the problem of herdsmen in the country which his government cannot control.





He should step down so that he will not be disgraced like the former. Saraki will do it better and no matter what names people might be calling him, Saraki can move Nigeria forward come 2019.





In 2013 we told Jonathan that he cannot win, and we repeated it in 2014, but he refused and lost out. During the Liberia presidential election, I told George Weah that he should strategize to win.





He did and won. We sent similar message to Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya and he won. I said it also to Sierra Leonean presidential aspirant, Umara Samara, he ignored my message which I sent through delegates. He refused the steps I asked him to follow and after the election, the reverse was the case.




Kemi Adeosun, minister of finance, says Nigeria does not need the World Bank to monitor its debt.

Kemi Adeosun, minister of finance, says Nigeria does not need the World Bank to monitor its debt.





Speaking with journalists on the sidelines of the ongoing Spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank Group in Washington D.C, Adeosun said Nigeria has the Debt Management Office (DMO), various committees and 185 million citizens as monitors.





She was reacting to the World Banks comments on helping countries monitor their debt levels.





We dont need the World Bank if they want to come and help us, great but we dont need them, she said.





The minister added that current administration has no apologies for obtaining loans to shorten the recession that ended last year.





In 2016, Nigerias economy slipped into its worst recession in 29 years and the government deployed various debt instruments like Eurobonds, Savings bond and Sukuk to raise funds.





There were two options; one was cut back, lay people off and wait for oil prices to recover or be more aggressive, expand your budget, take on more debts and invest in infrastructure in hope that you will get growth going to develop more revenue, she said.





Weve expanded our budget, we pumped money into the economy, we made sure recession was not prolonged. We are now back into growth, we need to accelerate that growth and focus on revenue mobilization which in turn will reduce our debt pressures.




The lawmaker representing Bayelsa East senatorial district, Senator Ben Murray-Bruce, Friday send a strong warning to those behind the mace theft saga at the Senate to forget their hidden agenda of influencing a change in Senate leadership.Murray-Bruce, who spoke on behalf of Senate President, Bukola Saraki at TheNiche 4th anniversary lecture in Lagos, said it would be honourary for those that mastermind the evil act to follow the part of democracy.What happened was a disgrace and does not make any sense. Looking at it critically, they were working for change in Senate leadership, but they left what they suppose to do and engaged in undemocratic act.If you want to impeach the President for instance, all you need to do is to put it into vote and majority will have their way instead of stealing the mace.Murray-Bruce added that there was clear evidence of conspiracy in the whole scenario, come to think of it, behind us is where the President lives, so to access and escape through the back where the President lives, considering the presence of security gives room for many questions that need answers.As far as Senate President Bukola Saraki is concerned, he is a good man, there will be no regime change, they are only wasting time.Murray-Bruce however, commended the media for active role played by informing the whole world.Those perpetrators are not genius, they thought we are in the era of 1945 to 1960 when there was only NTA and FRCN where they could decide to break news four days later. With modern day media, information breaks on a go.Speaking on the theme, Development Reporting and Hysteria Journalism in Nigeria, Former Deputy Governor, Central Bank of Nigeria and Presidential aspirant, Prof. Kingsley Moghalu said that the tradition of investigative journalism is dying slowly as news becomes commercialized.He pointed out that the only way developmental journalism can still be practised in a society like Nigeria was through investigative journalism, but sadly we do not have enough of this.There is so much that is wrong with our country today and vibrant investigative journalism can help to change what is wrong in our country.In her own contribution, Professor of French Language and Applied Linguistics, Obafemi Awolowo University and former Presidential Candidate, Prof. Remi Sonaiya urged the media to avail Nigerians with all the available options as 2019 Election is approaching.Media need to be neutral and allow all the aspirants to present their agenda to Nigerians because during the last election only the two front-runners were projected and we can all see where we are now as a country.Managing Director of The Niche, Ikechukwu Amaechi who spoke during the unveiling of The Niche Foundation said that as a newspaper organisation, they are committed to meeting the needs of the reading Nigerian public that has been clamouring for investigative journalism and balanced reportage.
The Federal High Court, Abuja, on Thursday, threatened to close the suit on alleged fraud of $1.6 billion instituted by the federal gove...

The Federal High Court, Abuja, on Thursday, threatened to close the suit on alleged fraud of $1.6 billion instituted by the federal government against Jide Omokore and five others.Mr Omokore is an ally of former Minister of Petroleum Resources, Diezani Allison-Madueke.When the matter was called, the Prosecuting Counsel, Oluwaleke Atolagbe told the court that the lead Counsel, Rotimi Jacobs, (SAN), had requested the court to stand down the matter.Mr Atolagbe told Justice Nnamdi Dimgba that Mr Jacobs had informed him on Wednesday night that he could not get the prosecution witnesses who were billed for cross examination.He further said that Mr Jacobs had told him that the witnesses, operatives of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), the prosecuting agency, were writing examination.Mr Omokores counsel, R. Lawal, SAN, confirmed that Jacobs had called him on the issue but decried the attitude of the EFCC since the trial commenced, describing it as unfortunate.Most of the adjournments granted by this court since this trial started, are at the instance of the prosecution; in fact, none of the defence lawyers has asked for an adjournment.He said that he contemplated asking the court to close the prosecutions case but rather asked the court to order that the adjournment would be the last at the instance of the prosecution.Counsel to the other defendants all aligned themselves with Lawals submission.Justice Dimgba also said that he would not be averse to granting an application asking the court to close the prosecutions case.I would have closed the case of the prosecution, but I will grant the prosecution one more indulgence, he said.He adjourned the matter until April 26 and 27 for the prosecution to call its witnesses.Mr Omokore is being prosecuted alongside Victor Briggs, former Managing Director, Nigerian Petroleum Development Company (NPDC) and Abiye Membere, former Group Executive Director, Exploration and Production of NNPC.Also standing trial with Omokore is David Mbanefo, former Manager, Planning and Commercial of NNPC, on a nine-count amended charge of criminal diversion of about $1.6 billion alleged to be proceeds of petroleum products belonging to the federal government.Other defendants in the suit are two corporate entities, Atlantic Energy Brass Development Limited and Atlantic Energy Drilling Concepts Limited, allegedly owned by Omokore.(NAN)
In spite of the warning by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that debt levels in African economies were rising, Minister of Finance, Mrs Kemi Adeosun on Friday said Nigerias debt level was still sustainable and under control.Speaking to newsmen on the sideline of the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors meetings at the ongoing 2018 IMF and World Bank meetings in Washington DC, Adeosun said Nigeria had nothing to worry about.It is correct that debt levels in low income countries is a threat but Nigeria is better described as a middle income country.The concern that has been expressed, and its a legitimate one, is that debt levels in those countries are at 55 per cent of GDP which is very high but Nigerias is at less than 20.So we are not one of the countries they have expressed concerns about. However, we will continue to manage our debt very very responsibly.We are at 20 per cent of GDP and we do not intend to grow it aggressively. We are doing well at the moment as debt rate to revenue is going down gradually as we replace debt with revenue and refinancing our debt, she said.Adeosun said the government would keep monitoring and analysing its debt levels at every stage so that they dont fall into the trap that most African States had fallen into.The Minister reminded Nigerians that due to recession and near collapse of major sources of income, which it had inherited, from the former administration, the government had no choice but to borrow in order to save the country.There were two options. One was austerity, cut back, lay people off, and wait for the oil prices to rebound.The other was to be more aggressive by expanding the budget, take on more debt and invest in infrastructure in the hope that you will get growth going and then you will be able to develop more revenues.Step one, two and three of that has been done. We expanded our budget, we pumped money into the economy, we made sure that recession wasnt prolonged and we are now back into growth.What we need to do now is to accelerate that growth and focus on revenue mobilisation which in turn will reduce our debt pressures.Some of the ministers that I was in the meeting with are still in recession. And that means real pain for a long time.In Nigeria, to shorten it, we had to borrow in order to do so and I make no apologies for that, that was the right thing to do, she said.On Thursday, the IMF Managing Director, Ms Christine Lagarde opined that Global debt stood at 164 trillion dollars which was 25 per cent of global GDP.She said the rising debt levels presented risk to low income countries.Lagarde said such countries may face hardship and be unable to repay these debt if they do not look for alternative measures to borrowing.
A Wyckoff man barricaded himself in his home Thursday after the Bergen County Mental Health Screening Agency attempted to check on his well-being, leading to a two-hour standoff with the Bergen County SWAT team, authorities said.

The incident began around 12:40 p.m. when the screening agency called Wyckoff police about a man who lived a home on Martom Road near Van Houten Avenue, police said.

"They requested an officer respond to (the home) with them to assist in a mental health screening of an adult male," Wyckoff Police Chief David V. Murphy said in a statement.

Officers knocked on the man's door but he refused to come out, Murphy said.

"The male came to the door and made several concerning comments and then barricaded himself in the home," Murphy said.

Wyckoff officers then called members of the Bergen County Regional SWAT Team, Murphy said.

County officers negotiated with the man until he came out around 3:15 p.m. and was taken into custody, Murphy said.

"He was evaluated on scene and then transported to a local medical facility to receive treatment," Murphy said.

Police did not identify the man and he was not charged with a crime.

Anthony G. Attrino may be reached at tattrino@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyAttrino. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
Eli Manning's memorabilia fraud case is headed to court in a few weeks.

A New Jersey Superior Court judge ordered a trial set for May 14 when issuing a summary judgment decision on multiple claims brought by three memorabilia collectors against Manning, Steiner Sports, Giants memorabilia, equipment manager Joe Skiba, Giants co-owner John Mara and others, according to ESPN's Darren Rovell.

The gist of the civil lawsuit, which was filed in January 2014, is collectors allege items such as helmets and jerseys passed off as game-used were fakes.

The judge dropped most of the charges against Skiba, per ESPN, after agreeing with his lawyer's arguments that he never profited from the in-question items. Skiba's lawyers also argued he did not directly represent the items as game-used to consumers.

Manning has denied any knowledge of wrongdoing in the case, but his motion to waive the claim of consumer fraud was denied, according to the report. It also states that Manning is the only defendant who the judge found could have possibly violated common law fraud, which carries the extra legal burden of having to intent to deceive.

Why?

Manning allegedly delivered helmets to Steiner under the terms of his contract and signed a letter for a collector attesting to the helmet being game-used and signed another helmet as "game used."

The Giants aren't completely off the hook either.

The organization could still be found liable for fraud if a jury agrees with the claim they failed to supervise transactions happening among their employees, per the report. A jury can determine Manning and Steiner committed "negligent misrepresentation."

Ryan Dunleavy may be reached at rdunleavy@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @rydunleavy. Find our Giants coverage on Facebook.
The handling of an incident in which a Secaucus High School student was allegedly caught with drugs and a knife, but not charged, is the reason the principal and assistant principal have been suspended, multiple sources told The Jersey Journal.

Secaucus Superintendent Jennifer Montesano again refused to comment on the incident and the principal, Dr. Robert Berckes, did not return a call and email for comment. The vice principal, Jeffrey Case, could not be reached for comment.

It was also learned today that the police officer that had been assigned to the high school is the subject of an internal affairs investigation for his role in the incident, sources said. The officer, who has not been named by schools officials or police, has been transferred to another school, sources said.

Secaucus Police Chief Kevin Flaherty declined to comment on the specifics of the case, but he confirmed on Friday that there is an ongoing internal affairs investigation and it is being taken over by the Hudson County Prosecutor's Office. The prosecutor's office declined to comment on the investigation.

Multiple sources say that after a student was allegedly caught with the drugs and knife, it was not properly reported to authorities by the schools top administrators or the police officer assigned to the school.

The sources, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak about the incident, said the student was disciplined, but the evidence was discarded.

Secaucus High Assistant Principal Jeffrey Case.

Under normal circumstances, the student would be charged as a juvenile and released to a parent. For example, late last year a 14-year-old student was arrested and charged with selling hash oil to be used in vape pens, police said at the time. The boy was processed and released to a parent.

At Thursday night's Board of Education meeting, the school board officially suspended Berkes and Case with pay and benefits as of April 16. The board also officially appointed Daniela Riser, the high schools director of curriculum and instruction, as acting principal through the end of the school year, or as long as necessary.

Jack McStowe, the boards president, did not return a call for comment on the suspensions or the incident that led to the disciplinary action.

Berckes, who owns a chiropractic practice in town, has been principal of the high school since 2010. Case is in his first year at the school, after serving in the Warren Hills school district.
JERSEY CITY -- The North Bergen "sexorcist" convicted of molesting a boy and facing three more sex offense trials, as well as a sentencing for bail-jumping, rejected a "generous" plea deal today over the recommendation of his attorney.

On Feb. 25, 2015, Gregorio Martinez, who was described as a prophet and exorcist, was found guilty of touching the 13-year-old's genital area and kissing him on the lips inside the boy's mother's minivan in 2012 while she shopped.

The 50-year-old was out on bail at the time of the conviction and was allowed to remain free pending sentencing. When sentencing day rolled around, he was nowhere to be found. He was tracked to Nicaragua in 2016 and then arrested in Honduras.

Since then, Martinez was convicted of bail-jumping and faced up to five years at his sentencing today, but the sentencing was postponed because the judge who presided over the bail-jumping trial was not in today. He is serving four years in prison for molesting the boy.

In court today, the state offered Martinez an 18-month sentence if he pleaded guilty to two of the remain sex charges and the state would agree to dismiss the third. The 18 months were to be served after to the bail-jumping sentence.

"You wish to go forward to trial on Tuesday?" Hudson County Superior Court Judge Sheila Venable asked Martinez today, referring to the date for jury selection for his next trial. "Yes," said Martinez, who was described as being able to speak in tongues, and used a Spanish translator in court today.

Martinez's attorney, Daniel Gonzalez, told the judge "I have advised him to avail himself of the generous plea offer."

And Hudson County Assistant Prosecutor Andrew Baginski was clear that this was Martinez's last chance, saying "The offer expires when he walks out that door."

Martinez walked out without taking the deal. He is to be sentenced on the bail-jumping charge on Monday by Hudson County Superior Court Judge Mirtha Ospina in the Hudson County Administration Building.
BY TOM ROSSHIRT

My brother Matt died of AIDS 26 years ago, passing away in his bed in my parents' home in Houston.

It was a benighted time for people with AIDS. There were no antiretrovirals then. There was nothing much you could do for an AIDS patient but hold his hand. And many people still thought you could get AIDS by touching. My parents knew of individuals who'd been fired from their jobs for volunteering for AIDS organizations. That's how crazy the fear was.

As Matt was dying, we were befriended by a man named Lou Tesconi, a volunteer from the local AIDS organization. Lou came by to visit with Matt and to offer whatever service and kindness he could to my mom and dad.

Shortly after Matt died, Lou began studies to become a Catholic priest. Within the year, he was diagnosed with AIDS and kicked out of the seminary. Lou was a lawyer by training and temperament. He appealed the judgment to a Catholic bishop, who then asked Lou to found and head a ministry for people with AIDS. It was called Damien Ministries and was established in a poor part of Washington, D.C.

In early 1989, when the country was still very ignorant and fearful of AIDS, Lou got a call from the White House. First lady Barbara Bush was planning to visit Grandma's House, a home for infants with AIDS. It was one of the very first outings in her tenure as first lady, and Lou was asked to join a team of people to brief her privately before the event.

During the briefing, Lou told me later, he said: "Mrs. Bush, it is a fantastic thing that you are holding these babies with AIDS. But the country sees them as innocent and the rest of us with AIDS as guilty. The whole suffering AIDS community needs a collective embrace from you today."

Lou thought he was speaking metaphorically. Apparently, Mrs. Bush doesn't do metaphor. She stood up, walked over to Lou and gave him a big hug.

After the briefing, Mrs. Bush took a tour of the facility as she talked to the press. She hugged, kissed and played with three little girls and then nailed the message: "You can hug and pick up babies and people who have ... HIV. ... There is a need for compassion."

At the news conference afterward, Lou stood by his point on Mrs. Bush's visit: "I'm afraid that it may send a message that babies are innocent and can be helped," he said, "but that the rest of us aren't." He added: "I told her it would certainly help to get a collective hug from the first lady."

Then, again, this time in front of the cameras, Mrs. Bush wrapped Lou up in a big embrace.

Mrs. Bush wrote of this visit in her memoirs. She noted that "even then, people still thought that touching a person with the virus was dangerous." But she didn't give herself any credit for dealing a blow against stigma by embracing a gay man with AIDS in 1989.

Lou had a buzz from that hug that never went away.

In the fall of 1991, near Thanksgiving, I got a call from a friend that Lou had gone into the hospital again. He didn't have to tell me that it was for the last time. I called the White House and asked whether I could speak to the first lady's office. I was a nobody press secretary on the Hill. I didn't expect anyone in the White House to talk to me.

Suddenly, I was speaking with the first lady's press secretary, Anna Perez, who had accompanied Mrs. Bush to Grandma's House that day. I began to recount the events of two years before, and she saved me the time: "I remember Mr. Tesconi," she said. I explained Lou's condition and said, "It would be so comforting for him to receive a letter from Mrs. Bush."

A few days later, I went to see Lou in the hospital. As soon as he saw me, he reached beside his bed with a slow and shaky hand and pulled out a letter: "Look what I got," he said.

The letter was unflinching and full of love. She didn't duck the issue that Lou was dying. She used it as a pivot to say, "Well-done." At the bottom, in her own hand, she wrote to Lou that his life mattered, that he had made an impact.

That was a long time ago. But some things you don't forget -- and shouldn't. In a time of ignorance, her wise touch eased the sting of exclusion for my friend and many others.

Thank you, Mrs. Bush.

Tom Rosshirt was a national security speechwriter for President Bill Clinton and a foreign affairs spokesman for Vice President Al Gore.

COPYRIGHT 2018 CREATORS.COM

Submit letters to the editor and guest columns at jjletters@jjournal.com
Police officers conducting surveillance in the Greenville section of Jersey City made two arrests and seized a gun, heroin and cocaine on Sunday, officials said.

Officers who said they saw what they believed to be a drug transaction arrested Thomas Bentley, 41, of Armstrong Avenue, and Kenneth Grant, 50, of Fulton Avenue, the criminal complaints say.

Grant was charged with possession of 30 bags of suspected heroin and 19 vials of suspected cocaine. Bentley was charged with possession of 50 bags of suspected heroin, 23 bags of suspected cocaine and 20 vials of suspected cocaine, the complaints say.

Both were also charged with possession with intent to distribute within 1,000 feet of School 15, located at 135 Stegman St., and within 500 feet of public property, the complaints say.

Bentley was additionally charged with weapons offenses related to a 9mm handgun, including possession of hollow point bullets and possession of a firearm by a felon, the complaint says.

Both men made their first appearance on the charges on Monday in Criminal Justice Reform Court in Jersey City via video link from Hudson County jail in Kearny.

At the hearing, the state moved to detain them through the course of their prosecution.
If you're an Apple fan, you've noticed the company releases select red products around this time each year. Last week, the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus got the red treatment, while iPhone X owners can buy a red leather folio case. Apple isn't the only business to offer red products, but it's the best known.

You might have a vague idea that these products are released for charity, but not be clear on exactly how that works. The answer goes back 16 years when the heads of the G-8 countries established the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, a funding mechanism to combat three preventable illnesses in developing countries. Business support for the fund was initially weak, with companies contributing only $5 million. That trickle put the Global Fund at risk. Red--typically written as (RED)--was created 10 years ago to create a steady stream of corporate money.

While Red is a worldwide promotion, it's run by a team of 20 in New York. It also works with a sister organization called the One Campaign that conducts nonpartisan advocacy. Red passes along corporate contributions to the Global Fund, where all money raised (over $500 million so far) goes to programs on the ground in Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Rwanda, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, and Zambia.

"Global Fund grants that (RED) supports have impacted the lives of more than 110 million people on the ground through locally-designed programs that provide HIV prevention, testing, counseling, treatment, and education programs," says Jennifer Lotito, the group's chief operating officer. "All programs are reviewed and measured for success to ensure maximum impact."

Besides Apple, Beats by Dr. Dre, Salesforce, Starbucks, Bank of America, and many other companies have worked with Red.

Up to 50 percent of a special edition's profits might go to the campaign, but I wondered what that meant in actual dollars. Just how much of that iPhone is going to charity?

"The contribution amount varies per product. Apple does not disclose the amount contributed per product sold, but Apple is the largest corporate contributor to the Global Fund for the AIDS fight, donating over $160 million to date through our partnership," Lotito told me.

It's a hugely successful campaign, and it's gratifying to see Red still making a difference after a decade. Here's to lots more shiny red products hitting the market for a good cause.

Follow TROY DREIER at http://twitter.com/TDreier.
WASHINGTON -- Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York called Friday for decriminalizing marijuana, the highest-ranking federal lawmaker to support changing the federal laws against the drug.

"My thinking - as well as the general population's views - on the issue has evolved, and so I believe there's no better time than the present to get this done," Schumer said. "It's simply the right thing to do."

Schumer's legislation would not go as far as a bill introduced by U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., which would legalize cannabis on the federal level and leave it to the states to decide whether they will allow legal marijuana within their own borders. Booker's bill was endorsed this week by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

"Senator Schumer's announcement today is an important step forward that broadens the base of support for fixing our nation's broken drug laws," Booker said.

Schumer's announcement came on 420 Day, an informal marijuana holiday, as a CBS News poll said almost 6 in 10 U.S. adults believed cannabis should be legal, 59 percent to 36 percent. In October 2011, just 40 percent supported its legalization while 51 percent were in opposition.

By 61 percent to 33 percent, adults said that states, not the federal government, should decide whether to legalize marijuana. Gov. Phil Murphy has proposed that New Jersey legalize marijuana for personal use.

Under Schumer's legislation, the federal government still would be able to prohibit marijuana from being transferred from states that have legalized the drug and sold in states that have not, and would regulate advertising to prohibit companies from marketing marijuana to children as in the cases of alcohol and tobacco.

In addition, funding would be provided to study THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, to look at its effect on the brain and its ability to help patients in certain cases. They study would also attempt to help highway safety patrols analyze the impact of driving under the influence and develop measurements to gauge when someone is impaired.

And there would be funding to give women and minorities "a fair shot" in opening legal marijuana businesses.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., who founded the Congressional Cannabis Caucus, said the drive to legalize marijuana is only getting stronger.

"There are now dozens of pieces of legislation to end federal interference with state-legal cannabis, to de-schedule cannabis, and to remove barriers to banking and research," he said in a Cannabis State of the Union address on Friday. "The politics have reached an exciting level, with many candidates across the country embracing ending the failed war on drugs."

The poll of 1,004 adults was conducted April 11-15 and had a margin of error of 4 percentage points.

Are you interested in the N.J. cannabis industry? Subscribe here for exclusive insider information from NJ Cannabis Insider.

Jonathan D. Salant may be reached at jsalant@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JDSalant or on Facebook. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook.
Students take part in a drawing activity for the upcoming Earth Day at Xincheng Primary School in Jinggang Town of Shushan District in Hefei City, capital of east China's Anhui Province, April 19, 2018. Many schools in China hold various Earth Day-themed drawing activities to welcome the Day, which is celebrated yearly on April 22. (Xinhua/Ge Yinian)

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School children used to only participate in fire drills.

Then Columbine happened. Then Sandy Hook happened. Then Parkland happened.

Now, 19 years after Columbine, kids are being carried out of school buildings by first responders, pretending they were shot in an active-shooter drill.

This is the new reality for children today -- and they aren't afraid of it.

"I enjoyed the drill as it prepares everyone for such an incident," said Doug Rhoades, an 18-year-old student at the Academy of Law and Public Safety in Long Branch. Rhoades is an EMT who has aspirations of being a law enforcement officer.

But today, he played a victim who was shot in the head during a drill conducted by numerous agencies in Monmouth County. It was held at the now-vacant St. Denis School in Manasquan on the 19

th

anniversary of the school shooting in Littleton, Colorado.

Rhoades wasn't even born yet when two seniors at Columbine High School massacred 12 students and one teacher.

"I have three children who go to elementary school," Monmouth County Prosecutor Christopher Gramiccioni told reporters after the drill. "They come home and tell me about these drills that they have. And while it might seem shocking for some of us that didn't live through that, at the end of the day, if you have children wouldn't you want them to be prepared?"

Officials in Monmouth County held an active shooter drill on Friday, April 20, 2018, at the former St. Denis School campus on Union Ave in Manasquan. (Russ DeSantis | For NJ Advance Media)

Ninety-one students from high schools in the area participated in the event. After fake gunshots rang out, some of the students fled from the school, shouting that they had been shot; others walked out of the school in a single file line, officers searching them as the scurried to a nearby church for safety. SWAT officers descended on a school parking lot already mobbed with police and firefighters.

The drill was so detailed and realistic at times, that police officers even covered the bodies of students pretending to be dead with white cloths.

The manufactured scenes were similar to real one played out on television screens across America -- more than once.

Gramiccioni and Monmouth County Sheriff Shaun Golden came out to address a throng of reporters and gave details of the incident as if it happened in real life. They then shed the masks and took questions about the drill.

"It's a sad reality but it's the reality of today," Gramiccioni said. "Our goal is to be as prepared as possible. There's an expression ... 'The price of safety is eternal vigilance.' That's what brings us to this exercise today."

Alex Napoliello may be reached at anapoliello@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @alexnapoNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
Apparently people in New Jersey have had enough of Facebook.

Tens of thousands of people are actively thinking of getting rid of the platform, according to recent research by Top10VPN, a U.K.-based company focused on cybersecurity.

The number of Google searches about how to delete Facebook doubled in the weeks after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in March, the research shows.

The New York Times and the Guardian reported last month that profiles of millions of Facebook users were harvested by Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm hired by President Trump's 2016 campaign. The firm used the information it had gathered to strategically place political ads.

About 87 million Facebook users around the world had their details shared with Cambridge Analytica, forcing CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify on Capitol Hill last week.

More than 80 percent of the people affected by the data breach live in the U.S., said Simon Migliano, head of research and CEO of Top10VPN.

As a response to the scandal, Facebook users across the world began searching for ways to delete their accounts.

His team pooled all the Google searches related to deleting Facebook in 255 locations across 17 countries. The total number of searches totaled 3.5 million. One-third of those searches were from within the U.S., Migliano said.

About 27,000 searches originated from New Jersey -- a 126 percent increase from the months prior to the Cambridge Analytica story breaking, according to the data.

Searches on how to delete Facebook may have doubled in New Jersey, but they spiked even higher in New York.

In New York, searches rose 134 percent to 36,550 in the weeks following the scandal.

Other U.S. cities that experienced spikes include San Francisco, Seattle, San Jose, Portland and Austin.

"I think these numbers are only going to get bigger," Migliano said. "Facebook has something to worry about."

New Jersey's attorney general's office is investigating how personal information came into the possession of Cambridge Analytica and if data from New Jersey was compromised.

"I am particularly troubled by reports that Facebook may have allowed Cambridge to harvest and monetize its users' private data, despite Facebook's promises to keep that information secure," Grewal said in a statement. "At this point we have many questions and few answers, and New Jersey's residents deserve to know what happened."

Facebook says that it can take up to 90 days to process your request and to delete your information from the site.

Click here. This will take you to the page where you can delete your account.

For more information visit the help document located in Facebook's Help Center.

Erin Banco may be reached at ebanco@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @ErinBanco. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
Students hold signs during Ramsey's anti-gun violence protest outside the municipal building, part of the National Walkout on April 20. (Marisa Iati | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)

By Staff | NJ Advance Media

Students across the country and throughout New Jersey left their desks at 10 a.m. on Friday to participate in a National School Walkout in protest of gun violence in schools.

The walkout  held at more than 2,600 schools across the country and at dozens of schools in New Jersey  coincides with the anniversary of the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Colorado in which 13 people were killed by students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

The walkout follows a similar protest that took place in March where students walked out to advocate stricter gun control in the wake of the Marjory Stoneman High School shooting Parkland, Florida, one of the worst school shootings in history.

According to the movement's website, the goal of Friday's protest is to hold elected officials accountable, promote solutions to gun violence and "demystify and engage students in the political system."

"Some people are saying that this is a just a moment," a statement on the website reads.

"A blip in history. To them, we say this is a movement. And students are the new center of gravity in the fight to end gun violence."

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High schools across the state joined in on the movement on Friday. A list of schools that registered to take part in the event included high schools in Vineland, Washington Township, Williamstown, Cherry Hill, Kingsway Regional, Hightstown, Brick Township, Edison, Franklin, and West Orange.

Some schools planned to have a moment of silence  13 seconds for each of the 13 victims of Columbine. Others encouraged students to wear orange to show solidarity.

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RT @davidhogg111: On 4/20 walkout at 9:50 @ 10:00 AM have a 1 min 13 sec moment of silence for those lost at Columbine #NationalWalkout #NationalSchoolWalkout pic.twitter.com/nmQElXFN5b  Bob Wozniak (@NJWineGeek) April 18, 2018

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Less than an hour before the walkouts began, a school shooting was reported in Florida.

Authorities say one student shot another in the ankle at a Florida high school and a suspect is in custody.

The Ocala Star-Banner reports the shooting happened Friday morning at Forest High School which was on lockdown. The injured student was taken to a local hospital.

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Mayor @rasjbaraka just met Newark students on the steps of City Hall, during the #NationalSchoolWalkout, to commend them for their courage & persistence in the fight against #gunviolence, and encouraged them to continue using their voices to be heard pic.twitter.com/tGHuBhalHw  City of Newark (@CityofNewarkNJ) April 20, 2018

A walkout in New Jersey's biggest city

In Newark, students who walked out of school were addressed by Mayor Ras J. Baraka on the steps of city hall.

"Obviously, the adults in office and out of office don't have the kind of commitment or capacity to solve these problems, obviously," Baraka said. "So it's going to take you ... to be loud enough to pull those people out of White House and Congress, as well."

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About 40 students walked out at Ramsey High School today on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting. Theyre now marching to the town hall and then plan to join protesters in NYC. pic.twitter.com/0GcZdsqrG8  Marisa Iati (@marisa_iati) April 20, 2018

Students gather on the lawn at Ramsey High School in Bergen County

At Ramsey High School in Bergen County, about 40 students participated in a walkout and carried signs as they marched to town hall.

Today were marching to advocate to end the silence on gun violence," said 11th-grader Marisa Alvarez. "As part of a small town, we feel that were a big piece of the puzzle today."

Chanting could be heard in the background, and some students planned to board New Jersey Transit trains to New York City to participate in a larger protest.

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Ramsey High School students walked out of school at 10 a.m. and are marching to town hall to protest gun violence on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine shooting. Posted by NJ.com on Friday, April 20, 2018

Students march to town hall in Ramsey

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Jeffrey Castellano, a junior at Ramsey High School, is one of about 40 students who just marched to the municipal building to protest gun violence on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine shooting. pic.twitter.com/wU5hkUOLU9  Marisa Iati (@marisa_iati) April 20, 2018

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A student in Ramsey says her family almost was at the movie theater in Aurora, Colo., that became the site of a mass shooting in the summer of 2012. That was my wake-up call, she says. pic.twitter.com/tKyQFEq5kb  Marisa Iati (@marisa_iati) April 20, 2018

A wake-up call

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@Emma4Change my school cant participate in the walkout due to NJ standardized testing (PARCC) what can we do to support the #NationalSchoolWalkout?  gabriella saw endgame & cried (@mcgabbfoodrew) April 14, 2018

Not all schools were able to participate

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Solidarity from Princeton, NJ. Their school district is reality avoidant, sees them as having no consequence around gun violence. Nope. At 8 and 11, they are empowered and informed. #NationalSchoolWalkout #BlackLivesMatter pic.twitter.com/WiT1Vza9rc  Jennifer Lea Cohan (@JLCohan) April 20, 2018

Elementary-aged students wore orange

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Protestors chant the NRA has to go in New York City

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Hundreds gather at Philadelphia's City Hall

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Protestors at Highstown High School

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Students speak out in Edison

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There are nearly enough guns in America to arm every citizen.

The Pew Research Center estimates that there are about 270 million to 310 million guns in the United States.

With the nation's population around 328,000,000, that's nearly a gun for every American. The firearms, however, are owned by about a third of the country - roughly 42 percent of households report having one - according to Pew's latest study.

Gun-control advocates feel that shedding some of our nation's informal arsenal will lessen the likelihood of school shootings and chronic gun violence in American cities.

One proposed solution to get guns off the streets are buy-back programs similar to one that took place in Australia in the 1990s.

This issue recently arose in "Guns: An American Conversation," an initiative by Advance Local newsrooms from across the country in partnership with Spaceship Media. The project has brought together 150 engaged readers with a broad spectrum of opinions to talk about guns in an honest and civil way, including inside a closed Facebook group where participants post links to articles, ask questions and discuss issues.

Here is a look at the buy-back issue and how it has played out in "Guns: An American Conversation":

Guns sit on a table during a City of Miami gun buy-back event in Florida on March 17, 2018. The city bought over 100 guns, the most ever from one of its buy-back events. Up to $250 in gift cards was offered. It was the first in a series of buy-backs planned by Miami.

Today's topic: Would a gun buy-back work?

In April 1996, a 28-year-old man went on a shooting spree in Port Arthur, Tasmania, with a semi-automatic rifle that left 35 people dead and 23 wounded, the worst mass shooting in Australian history.

For the sake of comparison, the top five deadliest mass shootings in America are, according to numbers from the Washington Post:

58 killed in Las Vegas in 2017;

49 killed in Orlando at the Pulse night club in 2016;

32 killed at Virginia Tech in 2007;

27 killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012;

and 26 killed at the Sutherland Springs church in 2017.

The Port Arthur shooting prompted extensive gun reform in Australia. The National Firearms Agreement banned automatic rifles, as well as certain self-loading rifles and shotguns. Citizens were required to take safety courses and show a "genuine reason" for owning a firearm, "which could not include self-defense," according to an executive summary of the act on file at the Library of Congress.

Australians surrendered 700,000 guns to the government in 1996-1997, according to the summary, or about one-fifth of all firearms in Australia at the time.

Firearm suicides and homicides have been trending significantly downward since the new gun laws, including more regulations enacted by Australian officials in 2002.

A 2010 study conducted by Andrew Leigh of Australian National University and Christine Neill of Wilfrid Laurier University concluded that the buy-back led to a 65 percent drop in firearm suicides and a 59 percent drop in firearm homicides.

So should America take a similar path?

Following the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012, a buy-back conducted by the Los Angeles Police Department yielded 2,000 firearms, including two non-functional rocket launchers, according to a report in the L.A. Times.

The department, which gave out grocery store gift cards in exchange for weapons, told the newspaper that 75 were "assault weapons," the report said. Officials reported collecting around 600 weapons in the Bay Area that same year in a similar buy-back, according to The Mercury News.

Experts maintain that gun buy-backs wouldn't have much of an impact in America.

According to the 2014 book "The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know," by Philip J. Cook and Kristin A. Goss, buy-backs are not effective in combating gun violence. Cook and Goss say that without any significant ban outlawing certain types of firearms - which are protected by the Second Amendment -- many of the guns brought to these types of events are in shabby shape.

"Unsurprisingly people are inclined to turn in guns that are no longer useful - they have become redundant, given all the other guns owned by the individual," they write.

Inside the conversation

What people are saying inside the closed Facebook group for "Guns: An American Conversation":

Helene Cohen Bludman, of Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, posted a link to a 2015 New York Times story entitled "How a Conservative-Led Australia Ended Mass Killings."

"I'd be interested in hearing others' opinions about Australia's buy-back program and how that put an end to mass shootings," she wrote.

Dan Zelenka, of Covington, Louisiana, estimated that America would have to confiscate about 100 million guns to reach a similar percentage as the Australians: "The 5th amendment would require compensation for these guns. For sake of simplicity, we can assume the value of each is $1,000. That is 100 billion dollars that would need to be paid out. And we would still have 300,000,000 guns in civilian hands. And then there is that pesky 2nd amendment issue."

Eric Truax, of Fremont, Michigan, wrote: "I have often wondered a couple of things about this. One is that it didn't seem to reduce the number of violent crimes. Two is that I have been unable to find any information related to the number of people that used to carry and now were victim to violent crimes and if having a weapon would have effected that. Three is the question of being an island make it easier to control the flow of illegal guns from other sources going to criminals with a disarmed society.

"This idea of eliminating school shootings is one of very few subjects that makes me consider surrendering my 2nd amendment rights. However I would only consider that if I was confident that nearly ALL guns were being removed from our society. As long as criminals have access to guns than I have a difficult time disarming myself."

Jon Godfrey, of Parish, New York, wrote: "That's a great question Helene Cohen Bludman. I would need to check some of the reported statistics. I have heard (unverified) that it took legal guns off the street but didn't impact illegal guns. My understanding (correct me if I am wrong) was it was mandated to eliminate semiautomatic firearms. In the US gun buy back programs run in the inner city do have some results, one illegal gun is a positive result, I think the buy back programs are ok to get illegal guns off the street. I am against any move to ban (as I believe Australia did) semiautomatic firearms. That would take away half the weapons in my possession and, in my opinion be a non-negotiable issue. What other areas do you think might go well to lower gun violence and be realistic to both sides of the position?"

Bludman's reply: "Thank you for your thoughtful response, Jon. I don't have the answers, but what are your thoughts on finding common ground? Can we agree on background checks? Waiting periods? I can agree that banning semiautomatics is unrealistic in our culture. I can respect your right to own guns even though for me I have no desire to own one. So tell me, what aspect of my position could you agree to and/or live with?"

What do you think?
A woman from New York is suing a Jersey Shore town, a local police officer and Jersey Central Power & Light (JCPL) after she was injured when a police cruiser doing at least 80 mph clipped her on a spring night.

An attorney representing Karen Quigley, of Mamaroneck, New York, filed the suit in federal civil court in New Jersey against the Ocean County borough Lavallette, Officer Arthur Reece and the power company.

Quigley contends in the suit that she and a friend, Barbara Sundermann, were walking from the Crabs Claw Inn on Route 35 around 1 a.m. on May 1, 2016 when they decided to cross the road, also known as Grand Central Avenue, near President Avenue.

At that time, they looked down the street to check for traffic and began to cross. Reece was driving his police cruiser 100 mph in pursuit of a speeder, according to the Asbury Park Press.

The two stepped into the road not seeing the cop's vehicle, which clipped Quigley, the suit says. She fell backward into her friend Sundermann, who was also injured, according to the Press.

The Press wrote that Quigley's nose was smashed and her leg was ripped open to the bone after the cruiser hit her.

At issue in the suit is whether Reece had his headlights on.

According to other documents in the case reviewed by the Press, Reece claimed the headlights were on, while his sirens and emergency lights were off. The suit claims that Reece did not have headlights, emergency lights or sirens on, and that several streetlights were burned out.

The alleged lack of headlights and streetlights constitutes negligence on behalf of the officer, the borough, and JCP&L, Quigley's attorney argues in the suit. She is seeking damages and attorneys fees, court costs and interest from the named parties.

Matthew Schiappa, the Freehold-based attorney representing Quigley, did not respond to a request for comment at his office Thursday. Nor did the Warren-based firm Eric M. Bernstein & Associates, which is representing the borough.

Joe Brandt can be reached at jbrandt@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JBrandt_NJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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A man scanning public land in Wanaque with a metal detector last week made an unusual discovery -- a dirt-covered World War I service medal that apparently belonged to a former borough resident.

After finding the medal in a wooded area between Lakeland Regional High School and Midvale Cemetery, the man turned it into Wanaque police who are now looking for the veteran's family.

"It was caked in dirt and gunk," Capt. Ken Fackina said Friday, adding that the man who turned it in wants to remain anonymous. "Chief (Robert) Kronyak spent some time cleaning it up."

The chief's efforts were rewarded as the now-readable medal showed revealed a name - Daniel Battaglia.

Born in Black Rock, Washington on May 5, 1890, Battaglia is thought to have lived on Ringwood Avenue in Wanaque in 1942, according to police.

While officials aren't certain, they believe he is interred at Christ the King in Franklin Lakes. Some of the Wanaque's older military veterans told police they think Battaglia was a bachelor who never had any children.

Still, police are trying to find a relative -- even a distant one -- to give the medal.

The inscription on the medal reads, "presented to Dan Battaglia by the people of Wanaque in grateful recognition of patriotic service in the World War."

A post on Facebook by police has yielded plenty of comments and leads, but a relative hasn't been located yet, Fackina said. Police are also working with people with expertise in genealogy to aid in the search.

"We've heard from a bunch of Battaglias, but all have said there's no relation," Fackina said. "It's more difficult because it's such a common name."

Anyone who can be of assistance is asked to contact email Fackina or send police a private message on Facebook.

Jeff Goldman may be reached at jeff_goldman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JeffSGoldman. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
In the coming months, New Jersey state lawmakers will consider Gov. Phil Murphy's call to raise taxes on millionaires, Uber rides, Airbnb stays and most purchases.

But the most powerful Democratic lawmakers in the state say if New Jersey is looking for money, it should start by collecting past-due bills.

State Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin on Thursday proposed a three-month tax amnesty to allow New Jersey taxpayers to settle up with the government.

Amnesty programs allow delinquent taxpayers to pay up in exchange for lowered penalties and fees.

"We must consider every possible option to find money, and we know tax amnesty programs work without burdening New Jersey's families," Coughlin, D-Middlesex, said in a statement. "It needs to be part of the debate as we consider state spending in the weeks ahead."

A 2014 tax amnesty brought in $75 million from more than 26,000 people and businesses, according to the state Treasury Department. The Assembly Majority Office said the state collected $725 million from a 2009 amnesty and $277 million in 2002.

The proposal would offer a three-month program beginning July 1 would be open to taxpayers for with money owed from tax returns due between Jan. 1, 2014, and Dec. 31, 2016.

But if you're a one of those taxpayers and you don't take advantage of the amnesty period, your debt will get socked with a 5 percent penalty in addition to all the existing penalties, interest and costs of collection.

State Senate President Stephen Sweeney, D-Gloucester, said he supports the proposal and will work to for legislative support.

"We have to maintain an open mind and a receptive attitude toward the best ideas to address the state's needs, and this idea will be an effective way of capturing revenue that is already due," Sweeney said.

A spokesman for Murphy, a Democrat, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

New Jersey had 452,000 tax debt collection cases assigned to a collection agency that handles debts over $100 as of June 22, according to an audit of the Division of Taxation.

The audit found 427,000 of those cases were not assigned to caseworkers at the collection agency and 185,000 cases had been inactive for two years or longer, including nearly 27,000 that had been inactive for at least eight years.

Samantha Marcus may be reached at smarcus@njadvancemedia.com . Follow her on Twitter @samanthamarcus. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook.
William Ingram broke down in tears in a Salem County courtroom Friday morning as he recalled the day police officers came to his door to tell him that his son had been shot to death.

"You took my beautiful son away from me and my family," he told the man convicted of the killing. "I'm a man of God and we're supposed to forgive, but I can't forgive someone that would do an evil act for no reason."

What began with two strangers making eye contact on a street in 2016 ended Friday with a 50-year prison sentence for kidnapping and murder.

Hakeem O. Williams, 32, of Philadelphia, was convicted last month in the shooting death of Jakaiye Ingram, 24, of Pennsville Township, and the kidnapping of Ingram's 1-year-old child.

On a Saturday afternoon in July 2016, Ingram was driving with his girlfriend, Yasmine Taylor, and the couple's child when they passed Williams, who was walking along South Broad Street in Penns Grove.

Williams and Ingram, who didn't know each other, made eye contact and something about that moment caused Ingram to turn around his girlfriend's Volkswagen Jetta and drive back to Williams, prosecutors said.

The two exchanged words and Williams pulled a handgun, pumping four rounds into Ingram as he sat in the driver's seat.

Hakeem Williams, 32, of Philadelphia, is sentenced at the Salem County Courthouse for the July 2016 murder of Jakaiye Ingram 24, of Pennsville, and the kidnapping of Ingram's 1-year-old son, Friday, April 20, 2018.

The victim staggered from the car and Taylor tried to help him. Meanwhile, Williams paced at the scene, apparently trying to decide his next move.

As Ingram died on the sidewalk, Williams jumped in the Jetta and drove off with the child still in the backseat.

The car was recovered, with the engine still running and the windows down, about an hour later in Philadelphia. The child was unharmed and sleeping in his carseat.

A jury found Williams guilty of first-degree murder, first-degree kidnapping and several other charges.

Assistant Prosecutor William Holmes argued Friday for a lengthy prison term, given the severity of Williams' crimes.

"Your honor, I've been working as an attorney since 2008," Holmes told Superior Court Judge Linda Lawhun. "This is probably one of the most heinous crimes I've come across. ... A long term of incarceration is appropriate."

Prior to sentencing, Turner addressed the court and Williams.

Yasmine Taylor, with her son Aiden, gives a statement during the sentencing of Hakeem Williams at the Salem County Courthouse, Friday, April 20, 2018. Williams was sentenced for the for the July 2016 murder of Jakaiye Ingram, 24, of Pennsville, and the kidnapping of Ingram's 1-year-old son.

"You just destroyed my family," she told Williams. "What made you do it? I just don't understand. I really don't even know why I'm asking you this question, because it's not like you're going to answer or it's going to help. Jakaiye is never coming back."

Her young son stood with her as she spoke and a photo of the victim was displayed for the court. She described Ingram as a great father to her child. "It's just messed up that he has to grow up without a dad," she said.

William Ingram offered a final comment to his son's killer.

"I pray that God convicts your heart and mind every day to see what destruction, hurt and tears you've caused my family," he said. "Taking another person's life don't make you hard, a thug or a gangster ... just another person doing evil things without having any feelings."

When given the opportunity to speak, Williams said he understood the family's pain because he once lost a brother.

"I know what it feels like to lose a loved one," he said. "My condolences go out to the family and I hope they just keep on searching for the person that killed their family member. It's not me. I'm still innocent."

Williams, who said he intends to appeal his conviction, also argued that he has cooperated in the investigation. "I never ran from it. I turned myself in. I turned myself in to face these charges and clear my name."

Will Ingram is comforted by his nephew Chris as he gives a statement during the sentencing of Hakeem Williams at the Salem County Courthouse, Friday, April 20, 2018. Williams was sentenced for the July 2016 murder of Jakaiye Ingram, 24, of Pennsville, and the kidnapping of Ingram's 1-year-old son.

His attorney, Adam Brent, asked the judge for leniency in sentencing, noting that Williams is primary caregiver for his elderly mother.

He also asked that sentences for murder and kidnapping run concurrently and not consecutively.

"This was a situation where there where shots fired and he gets in the car and he goes off. That's a singular, fluid event," he said, adding that Williams didn't intend to kidnap the child. "I think his intent was to get the heck out of there."

Brent also questioned Ingram's decision to confront Williams when he had his girlfriend and child in the car. While he didn't excuse his client's actions, Brent argued that the shooting would not have occurred if Ingram hadn't turned around.

Holmes took issue with Brent's assertion.

"There's absolutely nothing on the record to indicate that Jakaiye Ingram deserved to be shot four times," Holmes responded.

In the end, Lawhun sentenced Williams to consecutive terms of 30 years for murder, 15 years for kidnapping, and 5 years for possession of a firearm without a permit, as well as a 3-year concurrent term for unlawful taking of a motor vehicle. He must serve the entire 30 years for murder without an opportunity for parole, and at least 85 percent of the kidnapping and 42 months of the firearms possession sentences before parole eligibility.

Matt Gray may be reached at mgray@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MattGraySJT. Find the South Jersey Times on Facebook. Have a tip? Tell us: nj.com/tips.
Trinity Cranford Episcopal Church is hosting a charity bake sale fundraiser on Sunday April 29, from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in Sherlock Hall at Trinity Church, 119 Forest Ave., Cranford.

"Proceeds will benefit The Good Shepherd Home for Children in Cameroon that cares for orphaned children," said Marion Nechuta, Trinity's Outreach Team Leader. "We are happy to help support this important, life giving work. Trinity Cranford sponsors two of the orphans, Daniella and Musuga. We invited everyone to join us helping the orphans."

The Good Shepherd Home for Children is the calling of Sister Jane Mankaa who has dedicated her life to nurturing the orphans of her country. It is located in the North West Province of Cameroon, an area with 50,000 orphaned children.

Over 150 of them have found a home at Good Shepherd where they are sheltered, fed, clothed, educated and most of all, loved. Sister Jane does not turn any child away and no child is put up for adoption. The children truly live in a loving family environment. The Cameroon government has recognized Good Shepard as one of the finest orphanages in the country. For more information about The Good Shepherd Home visit http://www.goodshepherdhome.org/.

Submitted by Trinity Episcopal Church
Egrets look after eggs at the Xiangshan Forest Park in Nanchang City, east China's Jiangxi Province, April 19, 2018. Hundreds of thousands of egrets have settled down at the park to spend their breeding season. (Xinhua/Wan Xiang)

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A man who admitted to scheming with three others to rob a Gentilly drive-through bank was sentenced Thursday (April 19) to six years in prison for his role in the crime, according to U.S. Attorney Duane A. Evans' office.

Casey Johnson, 27, pleaded guilty in January to one count of bank robbery with a firearm in the Dec. 20, 2014 robbery of the Chase Bank on Gentilly Boulevard near Elysian Fields Avenue.

According to court documents, he was dating a Chase bank teller when he plotted with his brother, Walter Johnson, and a friend and musical collaborator, Jay Lyons, to rob the branch where his girlfriend worked. The men are part of the New Orleans-based rap group Truce Mob.

According to court documents, all four conspired to rob the bank, with Casey Johnson acting as the driver.

The former teller, Zoe Williams, admitted to giving her boyfriend, Casey Johnson, and the other two co-conspirators information on how to rob the bank where she was employed, including details on the procedure for opening the vault, court records show.

She pleaded guilty in January to one count of conspiracy to commit bank robbery with a firearm, according to court records.

The morning of the robbery, Casey Johnson dropped off Walter Johnson and Lyons across Elysian Fields Avenue from the bank.

The two men, both wearing masks and armed with guns, rushed into the bank behind Williams as she arrived for work. Surveillance footage shows at least one of the robbers pointing a gun at the tellers, including Williams, repeatedly during the robbery, according to court records.

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The pair stole $196,715 in cash, shoving the money into a gym bag, and then fled into the parking lot, where Casey Johnson waited to pick them up.

Immediately after the robbery, Casey Johnson drove the group to a home in Kenner, where the trio counted the stolen money before heading to Houston.

The FBI's Violent Crime Unit investigated the case, which was prosecuted by assistant U.S. attorneys Myles Ranier and David Haller.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Carl J. Barbier also sentenced Casey Johnson to three years of supervised release following his prison term. He faced up to 25 years in prison, five years of supervised release and a fine of up to $250,000, according to the U.S. Attorney's office.

Walter Johnson and Lyons both pleaded guilty last fall to bank robbery and possession and brandishing of a firearm in commission of a crime of violence.

Walter Johnson was sentenced to nearly 10 years in prison, and Lyons was sentenced to seven years in prison, both before Barbier.

Williams is scheduled for sentencing Tuesday before U.S. District Judge Jay C. Zainey. She faces up to five years in prison, three years of supervised release, a fine of up to $250,000, and restitution to the bank.
The Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office arrested three men found sitting inside of a sport utility vehicle that had been reported stolen in a New Orleans carjacking the night before.

Payton Jacobs, 19, of Metairie, Gerald Jefferson Jr., 20, of New Orleans, and Joshua London, 19, of Kenner were taken into custody Wednesday morning (April 18) in the 4000 block of Rye Street in Metairie, according to Lt. Jason Rivarde, spokesman for the sheriff's office.

Deputies dispatched to the area after a 911 caller reported suspicious persons. They found the trio about 7:45 a.m. in a tan Subaru Forester parked next to a dumpster on the street. They were about a block away from Jacob's home in the 4100 block of Rye Street, an arrest report said.

A 47-year-old woman reported the SUV stolen Tuesday night from the 1800 block of Dante Street in New Orleans, according to the sheriff's office. The woman told New Orleans police she'd dropped by to check on a friend's home and gotten out of the vehicle, leaving it running with the door open, the arrest report said.

When she returned to the SUV, she found a man in his late teens or early 20s sitting in the driver's seat with the door closed. The woman yelled at the man to get out of her vehicle, but he pointed a pistol at her and drove off, according to New Orleans police.

The Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office notified NOPD about the car's discovery. New Orleans detectives interviewed Jacobs, who admitted to the carjacking, NOPD said.

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It was not clear Friday whether Jefferson or London would face any charges in New Orleans related to the case.

Jacobs, Jefferson and London were booked into the Jefferson Parish Correctional Center in Gretna with possession of stolen property valued between $5,000 and $24,999. Jacobs was also booked with possession of marijuana and bringing contraband into the correctional center, according to jail records.

Jacobs was being held in Jefferson Parish on a $13,500 bond, but he was being held without bond as a fugitive from Orleans Parish.

London was being held in lieu of an $11,500. He was also wanted in Kenner on a theft attachment.

Bond for Jefferson was set at $10,000, but he was being held without bond for probation violation. An Orleans Parish judge sentenced Jefferson to a total of two years of active probation on Nov. 7, 2016, after he pleaded guilty to possession of a stolen automobile and resisting an officer, court records said.
A former 911 dispatcher in Houston was sentenced to 18 months of probation after a jury found her guilty of allegations she hung up on thousands of callers seeking help, the Houston Chronicle reports.

Routine audits of 911 calls by Houston Emergency Center found "a high volume" of calls answered by Crenshanda Williams, 44, lasted less than 20 seconds, the newspaper reports. Prosecutors said a review of the short calls showed she hung up on "thousands" of callers. The Washington Post, citing court records, reports Williams told one caller who sought to report trucks racing on the interstate, "Ain't nobody got time for this. For real," before ending the call.

A jury found her guilty Wednesday (April 18) of interference with emergency calls, the Chronicle reports. She worked as a 911 dispatcher for about a year and a half before she was fired in 2016. Franklin Bynum, Williams' attorney, said the case shed light on "systematic" problems with the 911 center. "She was going through a hard time in her life, and she was a poor performing worker at the Houston Emergency Center," he told the newspaper. "But punishing her doesn't do anything to fix the problems that still exist at the emergency center."

Read The Houston Chronicle's full story here. Read The Washington Posts' full story here.
About a hundred law enforcement leaders from Honolulu, Seattle, Baltimore, Gainesville Fla., and dozens of other American cities gathered at Loyola University College of Law Thursday (April 19) to learn how police in New Orleans try to keep each other in line.

Pressed during this week's National Police Peer Intervention Executive Leadership and Training Conference by a question about how New Orleans police leaders know the culture has started to shift in the five years since reforms mandated by a federal consent decree have taken shape, one veteran answered simply:

"A lot of people say that the police are nicer," said NOPD Deputy Chief John Thomas, who oversees the Management Services Bureau that includes the police academy.

Mary Howell, a conference attendee and longtime New Orleans civil rights lawyer whose past clients include families of those shot and killed by NOPD officers on the Danziger Bridge following Hurricane Katrina, has also heard positive feedback about the public's perception of the force, she said. "Better," she recalled a Lower 9th Ward man answering when she asked him his thoughts on the department. "When I see them coming I don't have to go inside my house," she said he told her.

The conference was sponsored by strange bedfellows, many speakers pointed out: the Fraternal Order of Police -- a law enforcement officer labor group with members from around the nation, and the Southern Poverty Law Center -- the advocacy organization that fights for civil rights of the vulnerable and marginalized. In his welcoming address, NOPD Superintendent Michael Harrison noted the two groups came together "for the benefit of both sides" - the police and the community they're sworn to protect and serve.

The chief offered context for how the NOPD reached the point of modeling its police peer intervention program, called Ethical Policing Is Courageous, or EPIC, for the rest of the country. Less than a decade ago, as federal investigations into fatal police shootings and cover ups loomed, the NOPD was "the most troubled police department in America," Harrison said, citing the U.S. Department of Justice. Howell spoke about "trauma" and "suffering" at the hands of police misconduct families and the rest of the city endured.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu spoke at the conference about the hardest parts of his job -- comforting the families of fallen police officers, the families of those killed by police officers and the families of those "in the life," as he said, who died at the hands of violence. The day before Thursday's conference, the NOPD investigated three homicides.

"We're here to make sure in our country we close the gap between the police departments and the individuals we are all sworn to protect and serve," Landrieu said.

The EPIC program, taught by officers whose previous assignments include answering calls on the street as beat cops, encourages officers to intervene, for example, when they foresee a heated colleague about to engage in potential misconduct before their colleague risks their career. Just as important, NOPD leaders say, the EPIC training shows officers how to intervene and how to accept an intervention.

Bystandership, Rodney King and the Rwandan genocide

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The idea for EPIC sprouted in part from the mind and research of Thursday's keynote speaker, Dr. Ervin Staub, a professor of psychology emeritus at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, a Jewish native of Budapest who escaped Nazi-occupied Hungary as a teenager. His decades-long studies into active and passive bystanders have sought to explain bad behavior and good behavior.

Staub described how a lack of intervention on bad behavior translates to complacency and encourages further bad behavior. Those engaging in bad behavior, such as violence, are then further convinced what they're doing is justified and those being harmed become devalued.

As Americans got word in 1994 of the violence in Rwanda resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and as images were dispatched of bodies floating down a river, a U.S. State Department spokeswoman demonstrated a passive bystander position in "a famous press conference," Staub said. She declined to declare the violence "genocide," and instead referred to "acts of genocide," in the country. Someone quickly responded to her, "How many 'acts of genocide' to make a genocide?"

Passive bystandership, as exhibited by officers who stood by when Rodney King was severely beaten in 1991 in Los Angeles, Staub said, is often learned. His research with first-graders showed the children were more likely than adults to take action when they heard sounds of distress in the next room. Just as passive bystandership can be learned, so can active bystandership, he said.

When officers are trained about inhibitors preventing them from taking action, they are better prepared to intervene, Staub said.

During roll call last year before NOPD officers were sent to keep the peace during monument removals, NOPD 8th District Commander Nick Gernon recalled, leaders would instruct officers, "Remember your EPIC training." There were instances, he told the conference attendees, when protesters from both sides said "disgusting" things to officers. If the taunts appeared to get in the head of an officer, Gernon said, their colleague knew to sidle up next to that officer and assure them, "It's good." Those interventions are not reported on the news, he noted, because potential misconduct was prevented, "before something actually happened."

Thomas recalled that 10 years before officers were convicted in the Danziger case, one of those convicted officers was present at a scene in the Calliope Projects where officers got "rough" with a civilian. Thomas, who came up to the scene late, said he has wondered what would have happened if he, himself, had intervened in some way back then -- if it could have possibly impacted what happened a decade later.

"I wasn't equipped with the resources we (now) have to intervene," he said.

The conference continues Friday, when former U.S. Attorney Kenneth Polite and NOPD's lead monitor Jonathan Aronie scheduled to speak.
Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), attends a press conference during the spring meetings of the IMF and the World Bank in Washington D.C., the United States, on April 19, 2018. Christine Lagarde on Thursday urged policymakers to steer clear of all protectionist measures amid rising trade tensions between the United States and its major trading partners. (Xinhua/Yang Chenglin)

WASHINGTON, April 19 (Xinhua) -- Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), on Thursday urged policymakers to steer clear of all protectionist measures amid rising trade tensions between the United States and its major trading partners.

"Trade restrictions have not been proven helpful and we suspect that they might even dent confidence," Lagarde said at a press conference during the spring meetings of the IMF and the World Bank, adding all countries should "work together to resolve disagreements without using exceptional measures."

While the actual impact of current trade tensions on global growth "is not very substantial" in terms of gross domestic product (GDP), it's difficult to measure the erosion of confidence in the short term with investors reluctant on investing, Lagarde said.

The IMF chief suspected that trade tensions will be discussed among many bilateral meetings this week, particularly in a meeting of the International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC) on Saturday, as finance ministers and central bank governors recognize that trade and investment are the two key engines of global growth.

"We believe that each country can do more from looking at its own domestic policies to helping those affected" by the dislocation from technology and trade, she said.

Lagarde also called for policymakers using current growth momentum to step up structural reforms, build policy buffers and guard against fiscal and financial risks.

The spring meetings of the two leading international financial institutions come after the Trump administration recently announced additional tariffs on imported steel and aluminum and threatened to impose broad tariffs against Chinese imports.

These unilateral protectionist measures have sparked widespread criticism and provoked threats of retaliation from major trading partners, raising the prospect of escalating global trade conflicts that threaten the global recovery.

"The prospect of trade restrictions and counter-restrictions threatens to undermine confidence and derail global growth prematurely," Maurice Obstfeld, economic counsellor and director of research at the IMF, warned Tuesday.

"That major economies are flirting with trade war at a time widespread economic expansion may seem paradoxical -- especially when the expansion is so reliant on investment and trade," he said.

Obstfeld called for "dependable and fair dispute resolution" within a strong rule-based multilateral framework to address intellectual property concerns and other "inequitable trade practices."

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The NOPD has arrested five juveniles in connection with a string of carjackings throughout the city, according to a release Thursday (April 19).

Several people in a Toyota Camry carjacked another car in the 200 block of Kenilworth Street in Lakeview Thursday morning around 9:20 a.m., a police news release said.

Police discovered the Camry had been stolen in an incident the night before in Uptown and began an aggressive search for the stolen vehicles. Later in the day, detectives found the five suspects in the Camry near the Desire Housing Development.

A brief chase ensued, but all five juvenile suspects were eventually arrested.

NOPD connected them to four carjackings in total-- the incidents in Lakeview and Uptown, as well as an attempted carjacking in Gentilly and the carjacking of a relative of a Holy Cross student also in Gentilly.
A Harvey teenager was arrested Wednesday (April 18) and booked with terrorizing after authorities say he threatened on Instagram to "shoot up" his Terrytown school, an arrest report said.

Ernest Spencer, 18, attended Word of Life Academy, a private Christian school located at 1104 Terry Parkway. Spencer is the son of a Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office employee, according to Lt. Jason Rivarde, spokesman for the department.

Spencer was in a group chat on Instagram when he allegedly sent a text that read, "Guys, I would recommend not going to school tomorrow cuz I'm bout to shoot up the school," according to the report.

A female student also in the group chat told him to be quiet and do his work. Spencer responded, "OK ... I warned you," the arrest report said.

The girl showed the texts to her mother, and her mother contacted the Sheriff's Office around 10:35 p.m. Tuesday. The Sheriff's Office identified Spencer, and his father brought him to the investigations bureau in Harvey around 2:45 a.m., according to the arrest report.

Spencer admitted sending the texts but told investigators it was a joke. He told authorities he didn't intend to act on the threats, the report said. Spencer said he sent the messages after having a "bad day at school."

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Terrorizing is a felony punishable by a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison and a fine of up to $15,000.

Spencer is the most recent Jefferson Parish student to be arrested on similar charges. A number of students were taken into custody for similar threats of violence against their respective schools in the days after 17 students and staffers were shot dead on Feb. 14 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.

All of the students arrested in Jefferson Parish told authorities they were only joking. But law enforcement officials have said that such messages are never a joking matter and will be handled as such.

Word of Life officials did not learn of the threat until well after school had ended for the day Tuesday, said Principal Cindy Sensat.

"The Sheriff's Office was notified immediately. The child was never back in school, the next day. He won't be back to school," she said.
Several agencies were searching for a motorist late Thursday (April 19) after a vehicle was found abandoned at the top of the Crescent City Connection--with clothing nearby, according to the New Orleans Police Department.

Officers learned of the abandoned vehicle just before 9 p.m., the NOPD said. A man's clothing was found outside of the vehicle.

Louisiana State Police, the U.S. Coast Guard and the NOPD are searching for the driver.

As of late Thursday, no one had reported seeing anyone jump from the bridge, the NOPD said.

No further information was immediately available.
In the aftermath of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, more than 37,000 medical claims were made by coastal residents, first responders and cleanup workers seeking compensation from BP for health-related problems as a result of the oil spill and cleanup efforts. Eight years later, thousands of those who say their health was affected have not received a settlement.

George Barisich, a Louisiana commercial fisherman who used his boat to assist in the clean-up effort, said he's spent more than $40,000 in medical expenses to treat health issues he suffered from exposure to chemicals from the spill and cleanup effort. The toxins damaged his lungs and memory, he said.

He has a claim against BP, but has not received compensation. "I am one of the lucky ones," he said. "There's a lot of people in much worse shape than I'm in. They need help."

Russel Honore, a retired Army lieutenant general who led the military response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, called the lack of medical compensation "a crying damn shame." Honore spoke Friday (April 20) at a press conference marking the 8th anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion, held outside the federal courthouse on Poydras Street.

The retired lieutenant general stood at a podium, flanked by Barisich and a handful of others. They held signs shaped like tear drops. One sign read "8 years is too long," another read "justice for BP health victims."

Of the 37,144 claims reviewed by the Deepwater Horizon medical benefits claims administrator, 22,782 have been approved for compensation, according to the most recent quarterly report filed by the claims administrator. The majority of those whose claims have been approved exhibited acute conditions, including rashes, nose bleeds and shortness of breath.

About 18,000 of those with acute conditions received the minimum payment amount. Cleanup workers with acute symptoms received a lump sum of $1,300 and coastal residents with acute symptoms received a lump sum of $900, according to the court filing. They will not be compensated for actual hospital expenses.

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In contrast, 40 medical claims filed by those who reported the most severe, long-lasting health impacts have been approved. In total, BP has paid about $67 million toward medical claims. The company also agreed to pay for a 21-year medical monitoring program for clean-up workers, and $105 million to operate community-based health programs in several coastal locations for several years after the spill, as a provision of the settlement.

"These people are suffering from chemicals that our own government allowed a foreign company to put in our waters and poison our people" Honore said.

A phone call and email to the Garretson Resolution Group, the claims administrator of the Deepwater Horizon Medical Benefits Class Action Settlement, were not returned Friday.

Delays in settlements for those with chronic medical conditions resulting from the spill can make matters worse, said Jonathan Henderson, the founding director of the environmental watchdog organization, Vanishing Earth. "People end up dying. They give up hope and they stop fighting," he said. "Time is what wears people down."

Tiffany Odoms said her husband Alonzo Odoms worked the oil spill cleanup response. Before the spill, he appeared to be a healthy 45-year-old. After his work in the cleanup effort, he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, spending two and a half years in and out of treatment before he died, she said.

"It's not right" she said, joined by her four children. "We need justice now."
The state's proposed $566 million fiscal year 2019 spending plan for coastal restoration and protection projects has stalled in the Senate Natural Resources Committee as the chairman of the committee attempts to win approval of a bill that would give voting rights for two legislators now serving as non-voting members of the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority board, according to a senior official with Gov. John Bel Edwards' office.

Sen. Norby Chabert's bill to change the membership of the authority was passed by the committee at its April 5 meeting in "placeholder" form, a move he requested, saying he wanted to continue to negotiate its wording with the CPRA and governors' office, which opposes the legislation.

At that meeting, Chabert, R-Houma and chairman of the committee, suggested the bill could also be amended before being considered by the Senate to also add the lieutenant governor to the board and remove one of the existing board members, which would keep the total number of board members at 20.

The annual plan has already been approved by the House Natural Resources and Environment Committee and the Transportation Committee. Chip Kline, deputy director of the Governor's Office of Coastal Activities, said the state had hoped to speed passage of the bill before the Legislature ends what's expected to be an abbreviated session to allow it to meet in a special session to consider state spending issues.

The failure of the committee to consider the bill on Thursday (April 19) sparked a Twitter storm of comments from environmental organizations questioning why legislators weren't moving the annual plan forward.

"It's curious what the holdup is," said Cynthia Duet, a senior official with the National Audubon Society's Louisiana office. "What concerns me is that because there's been a lot of talks about an abbreviated regular session, to deal with a special session, there's a need to move this quickly through the legislative process, so the coastal program can be funded by the beginning of the next fiscal year, July 1."

The annual plan bill was held over in the Senate committee during the April 5 meeting at the request of state Sen. Rick Ward, R-Port Allen, who said he wanted more time to study the projects that would be funded by the plan.

His request followed discussion of Chabert's CPRA bill, which included several comments by committee members complaining that the Legislature could only vote to approve or deny the annual plan and the state's coastal Master Plan, and could not change their contents.

At the meeting, Chabert said the annual plan bill would be returned to the committee agenda the next week. But it was left off the committee agenda for the past two weeks. No reason was given by either Chabert or Ward during Thursday's committee meeting for its continued delay. Chabert did not respond to several requests for comments on the delay.

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The authority now has 18 voting members and two non-voting legislative members -- Chabert, representing the Senate and Rep. Tanner Magee, R-Houma, representing the House. The voting members include the heads of most state agencies or their representatives, as well as several parish presidents and representatives of levee districts. The state agency heads are all appointed by the governor.

At the April 5 meeting, CPRA attorney David Peterson said the state believes giving legislators a vote would violate the state Constitution's separation of powers provisions, since the authority is part of the governor's office. But Chabert said there already were several boards within the governor's office that included legislators as voting members.

And State Sen. Gregory Tarver Sr., D-Shreveport, called Petereson's opinion "legal mumbo jumbo."

"From my perspective, to have a colleague, another legislator, involved in how these projects come about would be tremendously helpful," Ward said during that meeting. "Whenever you're dealing with billions of dollars and can only say yea or nay on a two or three-page resolution, and don't have a colleague on the board with a vote, that's a difficult thing, puts us in a precarious position."

At that meeting, Kline said CPRA provided numerous opportunities to legislators to participate in the planning process.

"We are consistently meeting with you in your offices about what your specific priorities are in your areas and how that overlays the science," Kline said. "We will continue to give you a seat at the table." And, he said, the non-voting positions on the board also provide legislators with opportunities to offer their advice.

On Thursday, Kline said neither Chabert nor Ward have given a reason for the continued delays.

"We could be running up against a deadline for getting it approved in the regular session," he said, pointing out that the annual plan must still be returned to the Senate floor, where it will be passed on to the Senate Transportation Committee for another approval vote before the full Senate votes on the measure.

"The session is supposed to end on June 4, but both the speaker (of the House) and the president (of the Senate) want it to end earlier to get back to the fiscal matters that are of such great concern to the state," Kline said.
The state will soon be pushing the locally elected officials of Powhatan out of the way to administer the finances of the northwest Louisiana village that in mid-July had only $105 in its general fund and is hiring a cop to drum up some money from
At the talks, the host and guest talked about security affairs in the world and in each nation.

In a bid to boost cooperation between the Vietnam Ministry of Public Security and the NSC, the two sides agreed to increase the exchange of delegations at different levels, hold more bilateral consultations, share experience in anti-crime, and collaborate in training law enforcement officers.

They agreed to coordinate to ensure security for the countries diplomatic representative agencies, trade-investment activities, and expatriate citizens.

The sides highlighted they will exchange information and support each other at multilateral forums and related organisations.

Massimov expressed his wish that the Vietnamese ministers visit would mark a milestone in the two agencies cooperation, contributing to Vietnam - Kazakhstan traditional relations.

Lam said Vietnam considers Kazakhstan an important partner in Central Asia and is willing to connect the country with the ASEAN region.
The Vietnamese Ambassador, along with Vietnamese officials at the Vietnamese Embassy, wished Ambassador Mai Sayavongs, his spouse, and all Lao diplomats a new year full of health, happiness, and success.

Ambassador Pham Quang Vinh also shared insights from his three-year working experience in the US with the Lao Ambassador and spoke of the mutual support between the two embassies in promoting the relationship between each country and the US, and between ASEAN countries and the host country.

The two Ambassadors also expressed their delight at the development of the special relationship between Vietnam and Laos and the socio-economic achievements of both countries.

They also affirmed a desire to continue to improve the friendship and close ties between the two embassies in the future.
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The government has revived its HIV testing guidelines of 2016 and started encouraging all family members with HIV positive patients to be screened.

The use of target testing is being promoted alongside the current UNAIDS Test and Treat strategy.

With targeted testing, HIV positive patients are to have their family members also tested for the virus

Targeted testing is where they test individuals with an aim of identifying other positive individuals in his family or community to fight the HIV pandemic, Jennifer Ngabirwe, the Prevention Coordinator Makerere University Joint Aids Programme (MJAP), told The Observer recently.

We are doing targeted testing to get about 300,000 people living with HIV but have not yet been started on ART, Ngabirwe said.

She said, according to the Uganda Population-based HIV Impact Assessment (UPHIA) report of 2016, about 1.3 million Ugandans are HIV positive, and out of these 56 per cent are on Antiretroviral Therapy (ART).

Ngabirwe said, since the resources for HIV testing have declined, they also target key population communities. The key populations include; fishermen at landing sites, commercial sex workers, track drivers and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexuals, Transgender (LGBT).

We have introduced partner notification whereby if we identify an individual who is HIV positive, we make them enlist their sexual partners from the last two months. Then we discuss with the client on how to notify them that they were exposed to HIV. However confidentiality is kept because we dont tell the person about our source of information, Ngabirwe said.

Dr Gloria Karirirwe, Care and Treatment Advisor MJAP said if a mother is HIV positive, they are targeting to test all her children below 13 years.

We also have community targeted testing outreaches where we go to the community and encourage children to come, she said.

Karirirwe said at the moment the country is managing the stock-out levels for HIV drugs and the UNAIDS approach of Test and Treat will not be affected.

Anyone diagnosed HIV positive and is eligible or ready to start ART can start. Currently the drug stock-out levels in for Test and Start are stable, at least in Kampala, she said.

According to Dan Byamukama, the Head HIV prevention at Uganda Aids Commission, in the UNAIDS approach, they advise 90 per cent of key populations with HIV to test and know their status. But they are not testing everybody because the resources are not enough.

In the second 90, they advise 90 per cent of those tested and found HIV positive to start ART treatment immediately and in the last 90, they advise 90 per cent of those on treatment to be monitored well on their drugs to suppress the virus to have an HIV free generation by 2030, he said.

According to the 2017 UNAIDS global report, by June that year, about 21 million people living with HIV were accessing ART, an increase from 17.8 million in 2015 and 8 million in 2010.

Now, UNAIDS estimates that $ 26.2bn will be required for the AIDS response in low and middle income countries by 2020.

According to 2017 presidential fast track-initiative to end HIV and AIDS in Uganda by 2030, Ugandas efforts have brought down HIV prevalence rate from 18 percent in 90s to 6 per cent.

zuraneetah2015@gmail.com
World Bank senior economist for Uganda Richard Ancrum Walker says he is impressed with the public debate around proposed new taxes, including that on social media usage.



Addressing journalists in Kampala, Walker said that for long, public debate in Uganda has been about expenditures and not revenue mobilization. Walker said he is happy that this time, there has been a lot of public debate on the administration of revenues, which is crucial for Uganda.

Government is proposing Shs 100/day on social media

In the tax proposals for the financial year 2018/19, government intends to introduce new taxes including among others, the Shs 100 daily tax on social media usage, one percent charge on every mobile money transaction and taxing of savings and credit cooperative organisations (Saccos), among others.



Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) also wants banks to furnish it with customer details as one way of generating revenues, although the president has since halted the move. Also on the cards is a proposal to tax each international call at Shs 330.



The new tax proposals especially the 'social media tax' have generated public uproar, with most voices opposing it as "double taxation" on grounds that such social media users already pay taxes on the airtime and data, as well as on the smartphones.



In FY 2016/17, URA collected Shs 13 trillion which is less than half of the national budget of Shs 29 trillion. In order to cover the deficit, the government has to borrow externally and domestically, as well as sourcing from development partners.



The implication is that the borrowing increases the debt burden, as more and more monies are used to repay the debt, including more borrowing. In the current budget, nearly Shs 3 trillion is for debt repayment.



Reacting to the World Bank stance, political economist Prof Julius Kiiza, of Makerere University, agrees that the increased focus and debate on different sources and nature of government revenues is healthy and encouraging.



According to Prof Kiiza, the debate should be deepened to include government's double standards of providing generous tax holidays for so-called investors, while, as he puts it, "squeezing the daylights out of ordinary businesses and citizens who are already struggling".



Prof Kiiza says even without proposing new revenue sources, the government is already losing so much in revenues to dubious investors who, in addition to benefiting from tax exemptions, also use offshore dealings to fleece the country of lots of money.



He says the debate on resource mobilisation must also focus on the citizens holding duty bearers accountable for every single coin they collect and spend.



Writing in The Daily Monitor recently, economist Dr Fred Muhumuza of Makerere University, the new tax proposals are symptomatic of so much chaos in the country and that it is hard to determine what will happen when the proposed taxes take effect.



Dr Muhumuza wondered what could be the real intention behind the new taxes like the "WhatsApp" tax considering that such users are already taxed for buying airtime and data. He thinks the tax is more to do with curtailing freedom of information and expression.



According to Muhumuza, using the Internet is more of a production than a consumptive venture, and should be promoted.
We all know politicians sometimes say stupid things, theyre only human after all, but sometimes their statements just leave you scratching your head in disbelief. Take Indian minister Biplab Deb, who recently said that the internet existed back in the ancient days of Mahabharata.

Speaking at a regional workshop on Public Distribution System (PDS) in Agartala, in the Indian state of Tripura, Chief Minister Biplab Deb told the audience that the internet was invented lakhs of years ago, along with other advanced technology like satellites, and not by Western countries, but by ancient Indians. He argued that some of the events described in the Mahabharata couldnt have been possible without this technologies, which, in his mind, is proof that they existed thousands of years ago.

Photo: video screengrab

Not US and other Western countries, but the Internet was invented by India lakhs of years ago, Biplab Deb was quoted as saying by Tripura Infoway. Many may decline the fact, but if the Internet was not there, how Sanjay, could see the war in Kurukshetra and describe it to Dhritarashtra? It means Internet was there, the satellites and that technology was there in this country at that time.

I feel proud that I am born in a country with such an advanced technology, the countries which claim themselves to be technologically advanced are hiring Indian talent to upgrade their software mechanism, the Tripura Chief Minister added.

As you can imagine, his hilarious statements went viral on Indian social media, with many users sarcastically confirming his theories by offering the same type of solid arguments. Some of the posts are actually quite funny, but not to minister Deb.

Asked to comment on the publics reaction to his statements, the Tripura minister said that people can laugh all they want, but that doesnt mean what he said isnt true.

This raises a few questions. Why didnt Abhimanyu ask Quora how to escape the Chakravyuha? Why did Sanjay narrate the Kurukshetra War when Siri could have done it? Also, Krishna really should have streamed the Bhagavad-Gita on Facebook Live. https://t.co/vrauX1UIpZ #Mahabharata  Audrey Truschke (@AudreyTruschke) April 17, 2018

Narrow-minded people find it tough to believe this. They want to belittle their own nation and think highly of other countries. Believe the truth. Dont get confused and dont confuse others, Deb told ANI.

Believe it or not, some of his political allies have even come to Biplab Debs defense. Tripura Governor Tathagata Roy said that there is some truth to his claims:

Sri Krishna showcasing the fidget spinner he bought from Flipkarts Big Billion Days Sale! #InternetMahabharata pic.twitter.com/07PbijfCwN  Rofl Republic (@i_theindian) April 18, 2018

Tripura Chief Ministers observations about the happenings of the Puranic period are topical. It is virtually impossible to conceive of devices like Divya drishti,Pushpaka Ratha,etc without some kind of prototype and study thereon, Roy wrote on Twitter.

Earlier this year, Turkish academic Dr. Yavuz Ornek, a lecturer at the Marine Sciences facility at Istanbul University, made a similarly outrageous claim on live television. Talking about the tale of Prophet Noah and the flood, he said that the biblical character must have used a mobile phone to convince his faraway son to board the ark with his family.
At the working session, Secretary of Bac Lieu provincial Party Committee Nguyen Quang Duong said that the province has made comprehensive achievements in all areas over the past few years.

Bac Lieu reported an economic growth rate of 6.5% in 2017 while achieving and surpassing 17 out of its 20 targets for socio-economic development as set for the whole of 2017.

In addition, the local administration has paid due attention to Party building, ensuring defence security, and caring for revolutionary contributors and disadvantaged people.

Leaders of Bac Lieu province are focusing on implementing various measures to boost local socio-economic development in 2018 in an effort to develop the province into a well-performing locality in the region.

Politburo member Truong Thi Mai lauded Bac Lieu for its positive results of the past years particularly in poverty reduction, rural development, investment attraction, and the wind power plant which is under construction.

The Party official expressed her hoped that Bac Lieu will boost the prevention of and fight against corruption to consolidate the trust of the people while outlining appropriate policies for further development in the future.
Latin America communications consulting agency Newlink has acquired Madrid-based lifestyle shop Globally Eventos y Comunicacion SA.

Terms of the accession were not publicly disclosed.

Globally is Spains third-largest PR agency. Newlink in a statement said the deal positions the agency as one of the largest communications firms serving Spanish-speaking markets in terms of billings, clients and staff.



Newlink CEO Sergio Roitberg (L) with Globally founding partners Carlos Serantes and Olivier Vallecillo.

The joint entity will now operate in Spain as Newlink Consulting and Communications Spain. Globally founding partners Carlos Serantes and Olivier Vallecillo will lead this unit, while Globally executive partners Maria de la Puerta and Susana Lopez will oversee the agencys beauty and fashion practice and its Barcelona operations.

Newlink strives to ignite transformation for our clients through innovation, collaboration and strategy  which perfectly align with Globallys values and stellar record, Newlink CEO Sergio Roitberg told ODwyers. We are confident Globallys expertise in communication, specifically in the fashion and beauty industries, will enhance our capabilities and ensure we can best serve a variety of brands throughout the world.

Miami-based agency Newlink Group, which was founded in 1998, maintains additional offices in New York, Argentina, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Mexico and Peru.
Chadwick Boseman To Deliver Howard University Commencement Address Ivie Ani Ivie is a Nigerian-American, native New Yorker, and journalist covering

Wakanda comes to Washington D.C.

The Black Panther, Chadwick Boseman, is returning to his alma mater to give the commencement address at Howard University in Washington D.C.

On Wednesday, the university announced the actor, who graduated in 2000 with a bachelor of fine arts degree in theater, will give the keynote address at the universitys 150th commencement ceremony on May 12. The actor will also be presented with an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters Howards highest honor.

READ: Chadwick Boseman Recalls Seeing KKK Rallies While Filming Black Panther

His recent role in the blockbuster film Black Panther reminds us of the excellence found in the African diaspora and how places like Howard are hidden, untapped gems producing the next generation of scientists, engineers and doctors, Howard University President Wayne Frederick said in a statement. Mr. Boseman exemplifies the monumental heights and levels Howard graduates can achieve by using the skills and knowledge they acquired at the university. In February, Boseman told Chicago Tribune that the essence of Wakanda exists at the HBCU. It is a Wakanda to a certain degree. There is definitely a lot of TChalla there, he said. If you have a blanketed idea of what it means to be of African descent and you go to Howard University, youre meeting people from all over the diaspora  from the Caribbean, any country in Africa, in Europe. So youre seeing people from all walks of life that look like you but they sound different.

WATCH: Watch Chadwick Boseman Rule Over A Wakandan-Fueled Saturday Night Live
The following is the full text of the joint statement.

1. At the invitation of His Excellency Nguyen Xuan Phuc, Prime Minister of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, Her Excellency Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, State Counsellor of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar, paid her first official visit to Vietnam from April 19 to 20, 2018.

2. During the visit, State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was accorded a ceremonial welcome by His Excellency Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc. While in Vietnam, State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi held bilateral talks with Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and attended the banquet hosted by the Prime Minister. State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi also paid courtesy calls on Leaders of Vietnam, laid a wreath at the Monument of National Heroes and Martyrs, and visited President Ho Chi Minhs Stilt House. The State Counsellor also met with Chairman of Vietnam  Myanmar Friendship Association, and Vietnamese enterprises operating in Myanmar.

3. The two leaders acknowledged that the existing traditional friendship and the close cooperation between Vietnam and Myanmar were established by President Ho Chi Minh and General Aung San and cultivated by generations of leaders and people from both countries. They reaffirmed their common aspirations for peace, prosperity and development of the region and beyond. Vietnamese leaders emphasised that Vietnam is always mindful of the strong support rendered by the Government and people of Myanmar in the past struggle for national liberation and in current efforts for national development. State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi expressed her admiration for the determination and courage with which the Government and people of Vietnam defended and developed their country. State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi congratulated Vietnam for successfully implementing the strategy of renovation, reform and intensive and extensive international integration.

4. The Leaders reviewed developments in bilateral relations and cooperation since the very successful visit of His Excellency Nguyen Phu Trong, General Secretary of Central Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam to Myanmar in August 2017. The Vietnamese side stressed the importance attached to relations with Myanmar and the Government led by the National League for Democracy (NLD) and reaffirmed its continued support for peace and national reconciliation in Myanmar. Vietnam firmly believes that the 21st Century Panglong was a major step forward and, through dialogues and negotiation, the Government of Myanmar would continue to succeed in building a stable and thriving democratic federal Union. Myanmar side expressed its appreciation to Vietnam for its consistent support, as well as for sharing with Myanmar its experience with regard to national reconciliation and development.

5. Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi noted with satisfaction the positive progress in bilateral cooperation in past years, particularly the elevation of bilateral ties to Comprehensive Cooperative Partnership in August 2017. Both sides reaffirmed to strengthen further the effectiveness of comprehensive cooperation in all areas, including trade and investment, cultural, social and educational cooperation. These efforts will enhance trust and intensified cooperation between the two countries, bringing practical benefits for the peoples.

6.In order to effectively implement the Comprehensive Cooperative Partnership Agreement, the two leaders expressed their strong desire to promote cooperation in politics, trade and investment, defence and security, agro-forestry and fishery, connectivity, energy and telecommunication, tourism, justice, education and people-to-people exchange and regional involvement.

7. The two sides emphasised that the exchange of visits at all levels and channels, including government to government, parliament to parliament, party to party, people to people, will enhance friendship and cooperation between the two countries. Both sides agreed that close party to party cooperation is an important pillar of bilateral ties and looked forward to the early signing of Action Plan 2018-2023 to implement the Comprehensive Cooperative Partnership established in August 2017.

8. The two sides recognised the strong development in bilateral economic cooperation: the two-way trade volume in 2017 reached nearly US$830 million, a 51% increase compared to 2016. Vietnam has risen to become the 7th largest foreign investor in Myanmar with 17 projects and US$2.1 billion in registered capital. This relationship of cooperation demonstrates that the two economies complement each other and brings benefits to both sides, in the fields of agricultural trade, investment, aqua product processing, tourism and services given the circumstance that the Government of Myanmar is carrying out extensive economic reforms. The two sides also reaffirmed the commitment to enhance cooperation and find new means to reach the two-way trade target of US$1 billion at the earliest possible. Both sides stressed the importance of policy provision in trade and investment and providing favourable environment for foreign investors, including Myanmar investors and Vietnam investors. Leaders of both sides recognised the need to study further the possibility of establishing new mechanism as well as to sign the necessary MOUs/Agreements to help facilitate and promote investment between the two countries.

9. Both sides expressed appreciation of recent developments in bilateral defense-security cooperation and reaffirmed continued effective implementation of agreements reached under bilateral and multilateral frameworks. The two sides agreed to expand defense and security cooperation including exchange of military delegations at all levels, and conducting the Defence Policy Dialogue at the Deputy Ministerial Level in 2018, expanding cooperation into other areas, i.e. training, medical assistance, search and rescue, sport exchange. Vietnam welcomes friendship, sightseeing and field research visits by Myanmar delegations as well as Myanmar trainees attending courses on treatment of burns and the manufacture of prosthetic limbs in Vietnam.

10. Two sides welcomed and committed to fully implement the newly signed MoU on Cooperation in the field of Post, Telecommunication and ICT and MoU on Information Cooperation. Both sides agreed to expedite the negotiation for early signing of Agreement on Prevention and Fight Against Crime and other agreements/treaties in field of security cooperation. Both sides reaffirmed the commitment not to allow any individual or organisation to use one countrys territory to conduct activities against the other country.

11. Both sides agreed to strengthen cooperation with a view towards promoting closer financial linkages and acknowledging to enhance the financial sector, including financial services. The two sides also emphasised the importance of strengthening bilateral cooperation in telecommunication and energy sector, especially in the fields of oil and gas, infrastructure sharing.

12. Both sides reiterated that Agro-forestry and fishery cooperation is an important area of cooperation with many advantages and potential for mutual support and development. In that spirit, the two sides agreed to sign agreements on agriculture, forestry, fisheries and livestock and to expand cooperation at an early date to find ways to improve the quality and value of agricultural products, including corn, rice, beans and mung beans. The two sides expressed commitment to accelerate procedure to sign the MOU on Cooperative In Agriculture and Rural Development at the earliest.

13. The two sides also agreed to promote multi-modal transport cooperation, including land, sea and air links between the two countries and within the sub-region. In light of the successful GMS 6 held in Hanoi in March 2018, the two sides will work closely together to achieve the goals set out at GMS 6.

14. The two Leaders also discussed ways to deepen further bilateral ties in tourism, justice, education and people-to-people exchange under the framework of Comprehensive Cooperative Partnership. Both sides encouraged the effective implementation of the student exchange programs at all levels. The Leaders reiterated to support the role and activities of Vietnam-Myanmar Friendship Association and Myanmar  Vietnam Friendship Association to enhance people-to-people exchange, to contribute proactively to the extensive development of the Comprehensive Cooperative Partnership between the two countries.

15. The two Leaders expressed appreciation of the close cooperation in regional and international fora, including ASEAN, Non-Aligned Movement and the United Nations. To elevate the excellent cooperation to new heights in the spirit of the Comprehensive Cooperative Partnership, both sides agreed to continue to support the realisation of the ASEAN Communitys goals through regional cooperation within the ACMECS and the CLMV frameworks, especially in the areas of environment, poverty alleviation, water security, connectivity and human resources development.

16. The two sides reiterated to continue close cooperation in regional cooperation mechanisms in the Mekong sub-region, including the Mekong  Japan, Mekong  Korea, Mekong  Ganga, Lower Mekong Initiative as well as Greater Mekong Sub-region. Vietnam encouraged Myanmar to become an official member of the Mekong River Commission (MRC).

17. Leaders of both sides expressed commitment to cooperate closely to build a successful ASEAN Community with central role in the regional security architecture.

18. Both sides reiterated the importance of maintaining peace, stability, freedom of navigation and overflight in the region; underlined the importance of the peaceful resolution of disputes in accordance with international law, the 1982 UNCLOS, without resorting to threat or use of force. Both sides committed to support the full and effective implementation of the DOC and the early conclusion of an effective COC in the East Sea.

19. State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi expressed her deep gratitude for the hospitality, cordiality and warm-hearted reception that Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc accorded to her and to the members of the delegation and looked forward to receiving Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc on an official visit to Myanmar at a mutually convenient time.
At a conference on trade and investment promotion that took place at the headquarters of the General Confederation of Italian Industry (Confindustria)  Padua city chapter, Vietnamese Ambassador Cao Chinh Thien affirmed that intensifying the bilateral trade and investment ties is the most effective measure to step up the political and diplomatic relations.

Vietnam will continue creating the most favourable conditions for enterprises in Veneto region in particular and Italy in general to do business in the country, he added.

Marco Stevanato, member in charge of international cooperation of Confindustria Padua, said that the signing of a memorandum of understanding on friendship and cooperation establishment between Vietnams southern province of Ba Ria-Vung Tau and Veneto region in January has opened up more collaboration opportunities for the two countries businesses.

This conference is also a chance to Padua citys firms to exchange experience and learn about Vietnams investment environment and legal framework, he added.

On the same day, Ambassador Thien and the citys Governor Sergio Giordani opened an exhibition on the Italy-Vietnam solidarity movements during 1960-1970.

On display are over 40 documents, photos and posters showing Italys support for Vietnams struggle for national liberation in the previous century.

The Vietnamese diplomat also had a meeting with Professor Rosario Rizzutto, Rector of the University of Padua, during which they discussed the possibility of boosting sustainable cooperation between the University of Padua and a university of Vietnam.

With its strengths in agricultural development studies, the University of Padua wants to step up student exchange and training programmes in issues related to food security and climate change adaptation, Sergio Giordani stated.

Earlier, on March 30, the Vietnamese Embassy in Italy held a ceremony to mark the 45th anniversary of the bilateral diplomatic ties in Rome.
NEW YORK -- Avicii, the Grammy-nominated electronic dance DJ who performed sold-out concerts for feverish fans around the world and also had massive success on U.S. pop radio, died Friday. He was 28.

Publicist Diana Baron said in a statement that the Swedish performer, born Tim Bergling, was found dead in Muscat, Oman.

"It is with profound sorrow that we announce the loss of Tim Bergling, also known as Avicii," the statement read. "The family is devastated and we ask everyone to please respect their need for privacy in this difficult time. No further statements will be given."

No more details about the death were provided. Oman police and state media had no immediate report late Friday night on the artist's death.

Avicii was an international pop star, performing his well-known electronic dance songs around the world for feverish fans, sometimes hundreds of thousands at the music festivals, where he was the headline act. His popular sound even sent him to the top of the charts and landed onto U.S. radio: His most recognized song, "Wake Me Up," was a multi-platinum success and peaked at No. 4 on Billboard's Hot 100 chart. On the dance charts, he had seven Top 10 hits.

He was part of the wave of DJ-producers, like David Guetta, Calvin Harris and Swedish House Mafia, who broke out on the scene as lead performers in their own right, earning international hits, fame, awards and more like typical pop stars.

Avicii even collaborated with high-profile acts, producing Madonna's "Devil Pray" and the Coldplay hits "A Sky Full of Stars" and "Hymn for the Weekend."

Avicii was nominated for two Grammy Awards, two MTV Europe Music Awards and one Billboard Music Award.

His death comes just days after he was nominated for a 2018 Billboard Music Award for top dance/electronic album for his EP "Avicii (01)." He was nominated alongside his peers, who have taken EDM mainstream of late -- The Chainsmokers, Calvin Harris and Kygo.

He is the subject of the 2017 Levan Tsikurishvil documentary "Avicii: True Stories."

Avicii had in the past suffered acute pancreatitis, in part due to excessive drinking. After having his gallbladder and appendix removed in 2014, he canceled a series of shows in attempt to recover. He quit touring in 2016 but continued making music in the studio.

"It's been a very crazy journey. I started producing when I was 16. I started touring when I was 18. From that point on, I just jumped into 100 percent," Avicii told Billboard magazine in 2016.

"When I look back on my life, I think: whoa, did I do that? It was the best time of my life in a sense. It came with a price - a lot of stress a lot of anxiety for me - but it was the best journey of my life."

Last year, he posted this message on his website, promising to keep creating: "The next stage will be all about my love of making music to you guys. It is the beginning of something new."

Muscat, where Avicii died, is the capital of the sultanate on the eastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula, is a popular vacation destination on the Arabian Sea.

-- The Associated Press
Portland is a music lover's paradise, with well over a dozen record stores and enough LPs around town to keep even the snobbiest vinyl fan busy for life. According to Music Millennium owner Terry Currier, Portland actually has more record stores per capita than any city in the U.S. -- and more stores, period.

With another Record Store Day around the corner, here are 10 top record stores in Portland.

10. Vinyl Resting Place

The St. John's store is a jazz lover's haven, thanks to the efforts of owners Toby Tobiason and his wife. "We inspect everything before we sell it," he told the Oregonian. Not into Davis or Coltrane? The store takes the same care with its rock selection.

8332 N Lombard St., (503) 247-9573

Hours: Wednesday-Sunday, 10 p.m.-6 p.m., closed Monday-Tuesday

9. Tender Loving Empire

Now in three locations, the label/boutique carries its own releases (Typhoon, Radiation City) alongside an always-current selection of Portland's best new bands. Give the music a spin at a listening station, pick up some artisanal soap and keep an eye on the Hawthorne shop for monthly all-ages concerts.

Hawthorne

3541 SE Hawthorne Blvd., (503) 548-2927

Hours: 10 a.m.-7 p.m. daily

West End

412 SW 10th Ave., (503) 243-5859

Hours: 10:30 p.m.-6:30 p.m. daily

NW 23rd

525 NW 23rd Ave., (503) 964-6592

Hours: 10 a.m.-7 p.m. daily

8. Turn! Turn! Turn!

Aimed toward the evening drinking crowd, Turn! Turn! Turn! (which took over the old Record Room space) is a used record store doubling as a beer bar, a zine library and an upstart concert venue that ranges from DIY touring bands to Portland favorites.

8 NE Killingsworth St., (503) 284-6019

Hours: Monday-Thursday 4 p.m.-11 p.m., Friday-Saturday 3 p.m.-12 a.m., Sunday 3 p.m.-11 p.m., closed on Monday

7. Beacon Sound

The store/label is known for a keen electronic, indie and modern classical selection, as well as ambient and experimental releases from artists such as Peter Broderick and Colleen. It's also staunchly independent: "You won't see any Jimi Hendrix t-shirts for sale in the shop," the store announced in a statement about skipping Record Store Day 2016's big releases. Previously on Northeast Prescott, Beacon Sound is now on the bustling Mississippi Avenue.

3636 N Mississippi Ave.

Hours: 12-7 p.m. daily, occasionally closed on Monday

6. Exiled Records

Known for its unique selections, Exiled is the store to try when something off the wall can't be found anywhere else--or the perfect spot to crate-dig for something surprising and strange.

4628 SE Hawthorne Blvd., (503) 232-0751

Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 11 a.m.- 7 p.m., Sunday 12 p.m.-5 p.m., closed on Monday

Visit all of Portland's record stores with our Google Map.

5. Everyday Music

With two Portland locations and a few more spread across Oregon and Washington, Everyday Music is the Pacific Northwest's largest homegrown music chain. The stores buy as well as sell, so trade in your old CDs downtown before crossing the street for the next Crystal Ballroom concert.

Downtown

1313 W Burnside, (503) 274-0961

Hours: 9 a.m.-11 a.m. daily

Eastside

1931 NE Sandy Blvd., (503) 239-7610

Hours: 9 a.m.-11 p.m. daily

4. Jackpot Records

Jackpot also releases its own records (including 2015's excellent No. 2 reissue), but make the trip to its Hawthorne store for a flawlessly curated selection of new releases on CD and vinyl.

3574 SE Hawthorne Blvd., (503) 239-7561

Hours: Monday-Thursday 10 a.m.-7 p.m., Friday-Saturday 10 a.m.-8 p.m., Sunday 11 a.m.-6 p.m.

3. Mississippi Records

Portland has several record store-slash-labels, but only Mississippi Records has notched co-signs from Jamie xx (it's his favorite American record store) and R.E.M.'s Peter Buck, who's released two solo albums and counting with them. As modern as that sounds, the store's specialties are actually vintage blues and soul.

forcedexposure.com (mail-order site)

5202 N Albina Ave., (503) 282-2990

Hours: 12 p.m.-7 p.m.

2. Crossroads Music

Arguably the best used vinyl store in Portland, Crossroads has everything from expensive rarities to dollar-bin essentials, with thorough sections for jazz, folk and world music as well as rock. Crossroads sells on consignment, so allow plenty of time to sort through its overflowing bins.

3130 SE Hawthorne Blvd., (503) 232-1767

Hours: Monday-Thursday 11 a.m.-6 p.m., Friday-Saturday 11 a.m.-7 p.m., Sunday 12 p.m.-6 p.m.

1. Music Millennium

The 47-year-old shop is a Portland institution, offering an enormous selection (including CDs!) and special events such as free concerts and album signings. Have a question about Portland music? Ask owner Terry Currier, who's a local encyclopedia and the president of the Oregon Music Hall of Fame.

3158 East Burnside St., (503) 231-8926

Hours: Monday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-10 p.m., Sunday 11 a.m. - 9 p.m.

-- David Greenwald

Editor's note: This story originally published April 2016.
National editorial cartoon subjects were across the board this week with no one topic taking up the bulk of the focus. Some cartoonist did pieces on Sean Hannity's relationship with President Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen. Some did work on EPA director Scott Pruitt's recent troubles. Others stuck with the Mueller investigation and the arrests at a Starbucks. Finally, at least one cartoonist paid tribute the late First Lady, Barbara Bush.
Shortly after the deadly roadblock confrontation with Oregon standoff spokesman Robert "LaVoy" Finicum in 2016, an FBI Hostage Rescue Team supervisor checked on his agents at the scene: "Guys are you OK? Anybody shoot? Are you guys good?''

The members of the elite tactical squad either nodded or gave the supervisor a thumbs-up.

Except one.

FBI Agent W. Joseph Astarita replied, "Dude, you know you can't ask me that right now,'' according to a fellow agent who heard him.

The comment is included in newly released transcripts from hearings before the federal grand jury that indicted Astarita for allegedly lying about firing two shots that missed Finicum moments before state troopers fatally shot him.

While prosecutors have previously recounted in court what FBI agents and supervisors said at the roadblock that Jan. 26, the transcripts provide the first explanation from the agents themselves.

Except for Astarita, the agents are identified only by their initials in the transcripts. They were unsealed after the Oregonian/OregonLive and Oregon Public Broadcasting filed a motion in court seeking disclosure.

Astarita has pleaded not guilty to three counts of making a false statement and two counts of obstruction of justice in U.S. District Court in Portland. His lawyers contend the government's investigation is based on faulty forensic conclusions.

The government alleges that Astarita fired at Finicum as he emerged from his pickup. One bullet went through the truck's roof and the other went astray, investigators said. Finicum was among an armed group that took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge headquarters near Burns three weeks earlier.

After Astarita's first remark at the scene, an FBI supervisor with him didn't catch it and asked: "What?''

"'Hey man, you don't got to ask me that Bro,''' Astarita responded, "or 'I'm good Bro, don't ask me that,''' the supervisor testified.

The "wise-guy'' response from Astarita was typical, said the supervisor identified as "I.M." He added that Astarita is "just kind of a flippant guy.'' I.M. hadn't been stationed at the roadblock but arrived soon after the shooting.

Supervisors from the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team had devised the plan to stop and arrest the refuge occupation leaders as they left the bird sanctuary and drove to a community meeting in John Day along U.S. 395. Oregon's FBI Special Agent in Charge Greg Bretzing approved the plan.

In case the occupiers didn't stop when pulled over, the FBI set up a roadblock on the highway. It was covered by four FBI Hostage Rescue Team operators Astarita, "B.M.,'' "M.F." and "J.N.," and two Oregon State Police officers.

When Finicum drove off from the initial police stop and his truck approached the roadblock, one of the state police officers fired three .223-caliber rounds from his AR-15 rifle, striking the driver side, front hood and radiator grill of Finicum's pickup.

Finicum crashed into a snowbank on the side of the road and stepped out, his hands in the air.

Passenger Shawna Cox's video showed a red small dot on Finicum's left shoulder as he exited the truck. At the same time Finicum yelled, "Go ahead and shoot me,'' two shots can be heard on Cox's video, according to a summary report from the FBI's Shooting Incident Response Team.

Government expert's 3D reconstructions of shooting scene. Indicted FBI Agent W. Joseph Astarita, identified as the blue figure, was crouched beside open passenger side door of truck, across from Robert 'LaVoy' Finicum's pickup, prosecutors contend.

The first shot hit the roof of Finicum's truck and a second missed. Deschutes County sheriff's detectives, assigned to investigate what happened, traced the trajectory of the bullet that struck the roof to a spot where Astarita, agent B.M. and one state trooper were standing, according to court documents.

In front of a grand jury, a prosecutor asked B.M. if he heard gunshots when Finicum got out of his truck. B.M. was Astarita's immediate supervisor on the Hostage Rescue Team's blue squad.

"No. I do not recall hearing shots fired at that time,'' B.M. said. He was standing behind Astarita and said he was wearing a noise-dampening headset.

After the shooting, B.M. said he also asked the two Hostage Rescue Team agents who report directly to him, Astarita and J.N., if they had fired their rifles. "They both answered no,'' B.M. said.

Two or three days after the shooting, B.M. said two other FBI supervisory agents informed him there were two rounds unaccounted for at the shooting scene. Supervisory agent I.M. recalled with B.M. the odd response that he got from Astarita when he asked him if he had fired his rifle.

As a result, B.M. again confronted Astarita and asked him about his on-scene quip to I.M.

"And Joe was like, look ... he's like, 'I didn't hear any shots fired.' He said, 'I.M. asked me who shot. And he's like, 'I had no idea who shot. I didn't hear anything so I told him don't ask me,'" B.M recalled to grand jurors.

B.M. testified that Astarita's explanation seemed logical. "Nothing gave me pause,'' he said.

Once T.S., the unit chief of the Hostage Rescue Team's blue squad, learned that Deschutes County investigators suspected the unaccounted rounds came from someone on the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team, T.S. asked the agents again if they had fired, including Astarita.

"I said, 'Joe, did you shoot on this?' And he said, 'No, I didn't shoot,'" T.S. testified.

In Astarita's initial interview with Oregon State Police Detective Scott Hill on the day of the shooting, Astarita said he saw Finicum's truck almost hit his colleague and friend, J.N. Astarita told the detective that Finicum had clear intentions to run over the officer, was uncooperative and verbally combative, according to Hill's report.

Hill and another state police detective, Trampas Mccrae, reinterviewed the Hostage Rescue Team agents on Feb. 6, 2016, but the agents this time demanded to be questioned as a group and refused to have the interview recorded. They also said they wouldn't answer any questions already asked and had a legal representative on the phone.

In this second interview, B.M. did most of the talking for the group and Astarita was much quieter, according to investigators' reports. The agents also couldn't recall where they were standing at the time Finicum's truck hit the snowbank.

The state police interviewers said they found it odd that agents from the FBI's lead tactical team didn't know what kind of ammunition they shot or the brand or color of the casings. They each carried Rock River Arms AR-15 rifles, which fire .223-caliber ammunition.

"I know I was on our SWAT team for about five years, and you kind of know your weapons and you know your ammunition and you know what you're shooting,'' Hill told an investigator with the Office of the Inspector General in the U.S. Department of Justice.

McCrae told the Inspector General's investigator that he and Hill believed that the Hostage Rescue Team members were hiding something and lying, according to a report by Inspector General Special Agent D. Nichole Fleming.

Court records also indicated that shell casings were missing from the scene.

State police reported seeing brass-colored shell casings at the site. After Finicum was shot, FBI aerial surveillance showed unidentified officers searching extensively throughout the area and motioning as if they were picking something off the ground. At various times, they met as a group, before breaking off and resuming either a search or collection of items, according to government documents.

The FBI's Shooting Incident Review Team, called in to investigate the following month, "could not conclusively determine which, or if, HRT operator(s) fired'' based on the aerial FBI footage and Shawna Cox's video, court records show.

Further investigation by the Deschutes sheriff's investigators, joined by Office of the Inspector General and Oregon U.S. Attorney's Office, did pinpoint Astarita as the shooter, court records indicate.

DOCUMENTS:

-Inspector General memo of investigation

-FBI Hostage Rescue Team Special Agent I.M. grand jury testimony

-FBI Hostage Rescue Team Special Agent C.S. grand jury testimony

-FBI Hostage Rescue Team Special Agent B.M. grand jury testimony

-FBI Hostage Rescue Team Special Agent M.F. grand jury testimony

-Government expert exhibits, reconstruction of shooting scene

The Oregonian also did its own animated diagram of the scene that day. Here it is.

-- Maxine Bernstein

mbernstein@oregonian.com

503-221-8212

@maxoregonian
BEND  Three Oregon jail employees have pleaded not guilty to charges of criminally negligent homicide in connection with an inmate's death.

Deputies Cory Lucinda Skidgel and Michael Christopher Durkan and Cpl. Anthony Joseph Hansen entered the pleas Thursday at their first court appearance since being indicted in the death of 59-year-old James Wippel.

All three were issued a conditional release from jail, The Bulletin reports.

Wippel died April 26, 2017, at the Jefferson County jail in Madras. He'd been arrested two days before on charges of heroin and methamphetamine possession and delivery of heroin. He had been arrested on the same charges a week earlier in Portland, where he lived.

Jefferson County Sheriff Jim Adkins said shortly after the death that the 59-year-old inmate suffered the serious medical issue a few days after landing in jail. Paramedics arrived to take him to a hospital, but he died at the scene.

The state medical examiner who performed the autopsy told Oregon Public Broadcasting last week that Wippel bled out following a burst ulcer. Prosecutors have yet to say what leads them to believe the employees acted with negligence.

The three cases were presented to a grand jury over two days this month. Thirteen witnesses provided testimony, including a gastroenterologist, law enforcement personnel and the medical examiner.

Criminally negligent homicide carries a maximum prison sentence of five years.

Since felons lose the right to own a firearm, the defendants would not be allowed to return to police work if found guilty. Sheriff Adkins said they could return if they're found not guilty.

"We'll see how this plays out over the next few months," he said.

Wippel was an only child and never married, said Carroll Gorg, who is married to Wippel's cousin.

Gorg said Wippel grew up in Lake Oswego and fell in the wrong crowd in high school. Although Wippel broke the law throughout his life, he was not a violent man, Gorg said.

"It's really a mystery to me how this could have happened," Gorg said. "If they did indeed cause his death, they should answer for that. An ordinary person doesn't get any break. So I don't think an officer should."

 The Associated Press
As the 40th anniversary of "Animal House" draws near, the city of Cottage Grove is vying to break a world record the Oregon town of 10,000 once held.

We're speaking, of course, about the title of "World's Biggest Toga Party," which Cottage Grove last broke in 2003, when 2,166 sheet-clad revelers packed downtown. The latest record was set in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, in 2012 when 3,700 people joined an effort between the University of Queensland Union and Queensland University of Technology.

The latest effort in Cottage Grove will take place Aug. 18, exactly 40 years after "Animal House" first hit theaters. The movie's climax, where the scrappy fraternity led in part by the late John Belushi's iconic Bluto caused mayhem during a university parade, was filmed in the city's downtown.

Organizers are billing it as a reunion event  Lane County residents who played bit parts and were featured in the film as extras will attend the celebration, Eugene CBS affiliate KVAL reports. The toga party will be the culmination of a parade that ends at Bohemia Park in front of a 24-foot tall recreation of the Delta Tau Chi fraternity house.

Animal House of Blues Only 1 month to our 8-18-18 event! And only days to the next airing on 8-06-18 of our documentary on OPB! Please give the Event's Double Secret Society Committee some love by watching the show with us! Here's the trailer: Posted by Animal HOUSE 40TH Reunion and Toga Party on Wednesday, April 18, 2018

The day-long event will start with the parade at 11 a.m., according to the official Facebook page. Organizers have also put out a call for parts of the original set in a campaign to at least partially rebuild the Delta Tau Chi house.

"Animal House," for all its rough edges  particularly when viewed through a 21st Century lens  still commands a place in University of Oregon culture and among entertainers at large. The comedian and director Kevin Smith on Thursday tweeted from the site of the building, long demolished, that was used as the exterior of the Delta Tau Chi house.

"ANIMAL HOUSE is the one comedy that influenced me the most - so much so that Silent Bob is essentially Bluto with less lines," Smith wrote, referencing the recurring character he plays in his own films.

ANIMAL HOUSE is the one comedy that influenced me the most - so much so that Silent Bob is essentially Bluto with less lines. And Im in EUGENE, OREGON today where it was shot, so I went looking for Delta House to stand where Belushi once stood and where cinema history happened. pic.twitter.com/Bza98GBrkt  KevinSmith (@ThatKevinSmith) April 19, 2018

In 2015, Portland-based Wieden + Kennedy produced a video homage to the famous toga party scene starring Marcus Mariota, Ty Burrell and other famous UO alumni.

And even though many of the campus buildings and landmarks used throughout the film exist in some form today, the Fishbowl, part of the Erb Memorial Union that housed the cafeteria where the infamous food fight scene was set, was ultimately demolished and replaced when the building underwent extensive renovations in 2015.

It had a good run  the place went mostly untouched for nearly four decades.

--Eder Campuzano | 503.221.4344

ecampuzano@oregonian.com
A 12-year-old Springfield girl faces criminal charges after police say she knowingly shared marijuana-laced candy at school during lunch this week, causing one student to be taken to a hospital.

The seventh-grader at Thurston Middle School told authorities she got the edible, described as a pineapple-flavored chewable rope similar to licorice, from another kid during the weekend and brought it to school on Monday, according to Springfield police. Three eighth-grade girls ate the candy, but police said it's not clear if all three knew it was edible marijuana.

The students who ate the candy got sick, police said. One reported to school staff that she felt nauseated and light-headed after lunch. Another student was taken by her parents to a hospital emergency room, according to police.

None of the students were seriously hurt.

The 12-year-old girl is accused of delivery of marijuana within 1,000 feet of a school. Her identity has not been released by police.

-- Everton Bailey Jr.

ebailey@oregonian.com

503-221-8343; @EvertonBailey
SALEM  Democrats and Republicans are urging unregistered and unaffiliated voters to sign up by Tuesday in order to meet the deadline to vote in the May 15 primary election, The Bulletin reported .

More than 800,000 of Oregon's 2.6 million voters are not registered with any party. That's fewer than the number of registered Democrats and more than the number of registered Republicans. Only voters registered in either party can vote in the primary, which chooses candidates for the general election.

The Independent Party allows any registered voter to cast a ballot in its primary.

"We like to think of ourselves as the Democrats, with a small 'd'," said Redmond resident Andrew Kaza, a member of the Independent Party's state council. "We believe in inclusion, and closed primaries are highly exclusionary."

Unless nonaffiliated voters register by Tuesday or opt for the Independent Party ballot, they will be shut out of choosing the first round of candidates for governor, Congress and the Legislature.

In 1950, less than 2 percent of Oregon voters were not registered as Democrats or Republicans, according to the Oregon secretary of state. By 1978, about 10 percent were not with either major party. The trend grew to about 20 percent by 1994.

Today, more than 30 percent are not registered with the top two parties.

Twenty states now hold open primaries in which voters can request a ballot for any party at the polling place, according to the political website Ballotpedia.

In 2008, Oregon voters defeated a measure to allow open primaries by a 2-to-1 margin.

--The Associated Press
UPDATED May 1: Police have publicly identified the motorcyclist killed in an April 19 crash as 58-year-old Gregory L. Mitchell.

Investigators also have learned a red sedan was spotted in the area of the crash.

Police want people who have information about such a car that may have been in the area at 11:12 p.m. on the day of the crash to contact police. They urge anyone who has information to contact Officer David Enz at 503-823-2208 or David.Enz@portlandoregon.gov.

The crash remains under investigation.

***

A motorcyclist died after a crash late Thursday in Northeast Portland, police say.

The motorcyclist, a man, was confirmed dead after being rushed to a hospital, according to Portland police. Police said they initially responded to the report of a crash involving the motorcycle and a vehicle near Marine Drive and Sixth Drive at 11:12 p.m.

They didn't immediately provide any additional details about the crash.

The fatality was one of two stemming from crashes that happened late Thursday in Northeast Portland. A driver was killed and another was seriously injured in a crash on Interstate 84 east of 82nd Avenue later that night.

Portland police said in a news release early Friday that the investigation into the Marine Drive crash continues. Police urge anyone who has information about the crash to call 503-823-2103.

 Jim Ryan
Mark Graves/The Oregonian

Portland-area students participate in a walkout at Pure Space in Northwest Portland on Friday, joining others across the country to protest gun violence on the 19th anniversary of the school shooting at Columbine High School.

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By EDER CAMPUZANO and LIZZY ACKER

The Oregonian/OregonLive





Many Portland students walked out of class Friday morning to protest gun violence, some heading for Pure Space in Northwest Portland and some converging on City Hall in downtown Portland.

It's been more than two months since a shooter killed 14 students and three staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. On Friday morning, which fell on the 19th anniversary of the school shooting at Columbine High School that ended with 15 dead, Portland high school students joined their peers across the country in series of walkouts, the third such mass demonstration since March 14.

The Oregonian/OregonLive will follow demonstrations across the state and the country. Updates will be posted below.

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Were live as high school students from all over Portland march from NW 14th and Overton to downtown for the #NationalSchoolWalkout. Posted by The Oregonian on Friday, April 20, 2018

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Student walkout in Portland LIVE: Portland students speaking outside city hall as part of nationwide walkout on the anniversary of Columbine. DETAILS: https://bit.ly/2K1RmNy Posted by KATU News on Friday, April 20, 2018

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Students from at least three Portland schools were expected to converge at Pure Space at 11 a.m.

Annika Mayne, a Franklin High School junior and protest organizer, told The Oregonian/OregonLive in advance of the event that participants will walk out of class at 9:15 a.m. to give them ample time to arrive.

Before the rally began, Anika Becker, a sophomore at Cleveland High School, said she's not surprised the shooting Parkland, a predominantly white community, spurred these marches.

"It's important to recognize communities of color have historically been victims of gun violence," she said.

Mayne began the rally with a speech.

We are all here because we care. We care about something important, she said to a room of hundreds of high school students from across the city.

Our silence is recommended, even forced upon us by this government, she said to raucous applause. But we will not remain silent.

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Megan Sare, 14, moved here from CO this past September. About Columbine: My cousins went to that school when it got shot up, she said. So this is like a big deal for me. #NationalStudentWalkout pic.twitter.com/raUx7jRDxU  Beth Nakamura (@bethnakamura) April 20, 2018

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Students gather at Pure Space.

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Portland-area students participate in a walkout at Portland City Hall on Friday, joining others across the country to protest gun violence on the 19th anniversary of the school shooting at Columbine High School.

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Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler speaks to Portland-area students participating in a walkout at Portland City Hall on Friday. The students are joining others across the country to protest gun violence on the 19th anniversary of the school shooting at Columbine High School.

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At Beavertons Stoller Middle School in the Bethany area, about 100 students walked out of the building about 10 a.m. A quiet group, they remained on campus accompanied by several staff members. After about an hour, many returned to the school building.

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When Sandy Hook happened, Catie Macauley, now 15, was a 4th grader. What that was like: pic.twitter.com/V09Y0WXIAi  Beth Nakamura (@bethnakamura) April 20, 2018

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To all the politicians who take @NRA $, student speaker Helena Khoury tells crowd,  ... the blood is on your hands. Crowd chants, The blood is on your hands! #NationalStudentWalkout pic.twitter.com/MGfZBZEwv8  Beth Nakamura (@bethnakamura) April 20, 2018

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Today we demand action ... the time for words ... for thoughts and prayers, is over. Meet your students, #Portland. #NationalSchoolWalkout pic.twitter.com/sie5MjWejJ  Beth Nakamura (@bethnakamura) April 20, 2018

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Students now beginning to chant No more silence, end gun violence. pic.twitter.com/DoFJiPddkQ  David Davis (@DavidDavisSJ) April 20, 2018

#SalemOR students beginning to gather at the Capitol following the nationwide walk-out this morning. Well be streaming live at 11 a.m.#Marchforourlives #NationalSchoolWalkout pic.twitter.com/ITJTUUnDbg  David Davis (@DavidDavisSJ) April 20, 2018

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Fox 12 has a live stream of video of the walkout and you watch it here.

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National Walkout Day is happening full force in Portland. This group making their way across the Hawthorne Bridge as we hold for a bridge lift. Stay with @KATUNews for full coverage #LiveOnK2 #NationalWalkoutDay pic.twitter.com/apAwk9Fi6W  Mike Warner (@MikeKATU) April 20, 2018

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TriMet presser interrupted by student walkout briefly pic.twitter.com/kgVJEIUQFC  Andrew Theen   (@andrewtheen) April 20, 2018

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Lincoln High School students outside City Hall. Lincoln organizer Carmen Vintro says about 20 schools expected here. Some students will bus to Salem. Students chant Not one more!

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You will hear us now! Lincoln students chant. First to arrive at City Hall. #NationalWalkoutDay pic.twitter.com/fvC0YCopeZ  Beth Nakamura (@bethnakamura) April 20, 2018

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Lincoln High School students join others across the country on Friday protesting gun violence during a walkout on the 19th anniversary of the school shooting at Columbine High School.

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Lincoln High School students join others across the country on Friday protesting gun violence during a walkout on the 19th anniversary of the school shooting at Columbine High School.

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Students at Franklin High School participate in the National School Walkout.

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If the adults arent making a change then well do it ourselves  Gabrielle Cosey, 16, student organizer, Lincoln High School #nationalschoolwalkoutday pic.twitter.com/mQeyRkgLsr  Beth Nakamura (@bethnakamura) April 20, 2018

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A student at Forest High School in Ocala, Florida, took this photo after other students and a teacher barricaded themselves in their psychology class during today's school shooting https://t.co/uFkdq5LLlx pic.twitter.com/yHF4x9zAi5  CNN (@CNN) April 20, 2018

On the same day as the National School Walkout, one student was injured in a school shooting in Florida, CNN reports.

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Hundreds walk out of @PPSConnect Cleveland High to join other students in downtown Portland for #NationalSchoolWalkoutDay #NationalSchoolWalkout pic.twitter.com/Z71RLFrZIy  Rob Manning (@RManning47) April 20, 2018

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Mark Graves/The Oregonian

Students at Franklin High School on the day of the National School Walkout.

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Reed said she taught one of the Columbine shooters as a sweet shy sophomore.



When we talk about arming teachers, youre not just asking me to protect the Rachels of the world, youre asking me to kill the Dylans.  Lois Beckett (@loisbeckett) April 20, 2018

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Today's #NationalSchoolWalkout protests gun violence in schools and honors the anniversary of the Columbine school shooting.



Here, March cover stars @Emma4Change, @NzaAriKhepra, @Sarahchadwickk and @JaclynCorin share why they fight for gun control. Why are you walking out? pic.twitter.com/ajp9n1tlik  Teen Vogue (@TeenVogue) April 20, 2018

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The commissioning of the San Antonio-class amphibious transport vessel USS Portland is set for Saturday and will be held at the Port of Portland's Terminal 2, where all 25,000 tons of it is currently docked.

It's sold-out.

But there's one last daily tour, free and open to the public, on Friday, April 20, from 2-5.

The 684 foot-long ship is designed to handle both humanitarian and military missions and has a crew of close to 500 on hand for Saturday morning's event. The ship, which cost $1.6 billion, is designed to accommodate upwards of 800 marines along with armored vehicles, tanks and other equipment.

Reminders of its namesake city can be seen throughout the ship, and include visible nods to both the Portland Thorns and the Timbers.

"I think we are the first military group to connect with a professional women's league of any kind," said Captain J.R. Hill, commanding officer of the USS Portland.

Hill, who says the commissioning has "been a long time coming," is looking forward to the event.

"We are ecstatic to be here," he said.

Chief Petty Officer Autumn Adams, 39, a ship serviceman on board the USS Portland, is one of a handful of crew members from the Oregon/Washington area.

Adams, who hails from Medford, has served in the U.S. Navy for fifteen years.

"Navy for life," she said, smiling.

"I knew I wanted to make this a career the moment I walked into the recruiter office," said Adams, who is in charge of retail on the ship.

"I'm so happy it was named after Portland, Oregon," Adams said.

"I'm excited to be here. It feels like I'm home."

The USS Portland will return to its home port in San Diego Monday.

-- Beth Nakamura

Twitter: @bethnakamura

Instagram: @bethnakamura
The chalk messages of hope and unity and solidarity are long gone from the Hollywood Transit Center's walls in Northeast Portland, nearly 11 months after two people were stabbed and a third critically wounded on a MAX train here.

The team of artists tasked with transforming the drab concrete walls into a temporary mural put brush to canvas Friday.

Artists slapped a coat of white primer on the walls for what will eventually be a brightly colored mural to recognize victims and survivors of the May 26, 2017, stabbings. The mural features an excerpt from a poem in eight different languages intertwined with images showing the life cycle of the Western peony, a flower found in Central Oregon's Ochoco Mountains that is used as a grief medicine.

Sarah Farahat, lead artist on the estimated $70,000 TriMet-funded project, said her design captured the hope of a city growing together while also recognizing the immense grief still reverberating.

Sarah Farahat, the lead artist on the mural project at Hollywood Transit Center, pictured Friday April 20, 2018 at the Hollywood Transit Center in Northeast Portland.

"I think part of what we dealt with here in terms of this tragedy was that it was a hate crime," said Farahat, who is of Egyptian and European descent. "So, celebrating diversity and making that an OK part of what we consider the fabric of Portland felt really important to me."

The artists have worked with Beaumont Middle School on calligraphy classes for students there, as well as workshops on "interrupting hate."

Jeremy Christian remains in jail on aggravated murder charges pending a 2019 trial.

Police said Ricky Best and Taliesin Namkai-Meche were killed after intervening when Christian allegedly harassed two young black women. Micah Fletcher was stabbed in the neck and survived. Christian has said he didn't target the girls when he screamed obscenities and racial and religious slurs on the train.

Roberta Altstadt, TriMet communications manager, said the mural would be temporary. The transit center is slated for renovation, but "that could be a decade down the road."

Farahat said the painting could take a month or two months to complete. Spotty weather has hampered the process so far.

The poem excerpts will face Northeast Halsey Street and the inner walls facing the train platform will show a train car and the Hamsa Hand, an ancient symbol of protection common in North Africa and the Middle East.

The conceptual design for the Hollywood Transit Center mural features words of a poem in eight languages and the stages of life of the Western peony.

Farahat said she looked at art as a "very sacred and ceremonial practice."

"Some people call that hokey," she added, "but I really believe in the aura of art, that the intention that you put into it will radiate."

Here's what the full excerpt from "Awakening," by Climbing Poetree, will say (The poem will feature lines in English, Chinese, Russian, Somali, Spanish, Vietnamese, Arabic, and Chinuk).

We were born right now for a reason

We can be whatever we give ourselves the power to be...

Give what you most deeply desire to give

Every moment you are choosing to live

or you are waiting

Why would a flower hesitate to open?

Now is the only moment

Raindrop, let go, become the ocean

Possibility is as wide as the space

We create to hold it

***

-- Andrew Theen

atheen@oregonian.com

503-294-4026

@andrewtheen


The Democratic National Committee filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit Friday against the Russian government, the Trump campaign and the WikiLeaks organization alleging a far-reaching conspiracy to disrupt the 2016 campaign and tilt the election to Donald Trump.

The complaint, filed in federal district court in Manhattan, alleges that top Trump campaign officials conspired with the Russian government and its military spy agency to hurt Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and help Trump by hacking the computer networks of the Democratic Party and disseminating stolen material found there.

"During the 2016 presidential campaign, Russia launched an all-out assault on our democracy, and it found a willing and active partner in Donald Trump's campaign," DNC Chairman Tom Perez said in a statement.

"This constituted an act of unprecedented treachery: the campaign of a nominee for President of the United States in league with a hostile foreign power to bolster its own chance to win the presidency," he said.

The case asserts that the Russian hacking campaign - combined with Trump associates' contacts with Russia and the campaign's public cheerleading of the hacks - amounted to an illegal conspiracy to interfere in the election that caused serious damage to the Democratic Party.

Senate investigators and prosecutors for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III are still investigating whether Trump associates coordinated with the Russian efforts. Last month, House Intelligence Committee Republicans said they found no evidence that President Trump and his affiliates colluded with Russian officials to sway the election or that the Kremlin sought to help him - a conclusion rejected by the panel's Democrats.

The president has repeatedly rejected any collusion or improper activity by his campaign. This week, he referred again in a tweet to the "phony Russia investigation where, by the way, there was NO COLLUSION (except by the Dems)."

Suing a foreign country may present legal challenges for the Democrats, in part because other nations have immunity from most U.S. lawsuits. The DNC's complaint argues Russia is not entitled to the protection because the hack constituted a trespass on the party's private property.

The lawsuit argues that Russia is not entitled to sovereign immunity in this case because "the DNC claims arise out of Russia's trespass on to the DNC's private servers...in order to steal trade secrets and commit economic espionage."

The lawsuit echoes a similar legal tactic that the Democratic Party used during the Watergate scandal. In 1972, the DNC filed suit against then President Richard Nixon's reelection committee seeking $1 million in damages for the break-in at Democratic headquarters in the Watergate building.

The suit was denounced at the time by Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, who called it a case of "sheer demagoguery" by the DNC. But the civil action brought by former DNC chair Lawrence F. O'Brien was ultimately successful, yielding a $750,000 settlement from the Nixon campaign that was reached on the day in 1974 that Nixon left office.

The suit filed Friday seeks millions of dollars in compensation to offset damage it claims the party suffered from the hacks. The DNC argues that the cyberattack undermined its ability to communicate with voters, collect donations and operate effectively as its employees faced personal harassment and, in some cases, death threats.

The suit also seeks an acknowledgment from the defendants that they conspired to infiltrate the Democrats' computers, steal information and disseminate it to influence the election.

To support its case, the lawsuit offers a detailed narrative of the DNC hacks, as well as episodes in which key Trump aides are alleged to have been told Russia held damaging information about Clinton.

Russia engaged in a "brazen attack on U.S. soil" the party alleges, a campaign that began with the cyberhack of its computer networks in 2015 and 2016. Trump campaign officials received repeated outreach from Russia, the suit says.

"Rather than report these repeated messages and communications that Russia intended to interfere in the U.S. election, the Trump campaign and its agents gleefully welcomed Russia's help," the party argues

Ultimately, Trump's associates entered into an agreement with Russian agents "to promote Donald Trump's candidacy through illegal means," the suit concludes.

The suit does not name Trump as a defendant. Instead, it targets various Trump aides who met with people believed to be affiliated with Russia during the campaign, including the president's son, Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law Jared Kushner, his campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Manafort's deputy, Rick Gates.

Manafort and Gates were charged with money-laundering, fraud and tax evasion in a case brought by special prosecutors last year. In February, Gates pleaded guilty to conspiracy and lying to the FBI and is cooperating with investigators. Manafort has pleaded not guilty.

The DNC lawsuit also names as a defendant the Russian military intelligence service, the GRU, which has been accused by the U.S. government of orchestrating the hacks, as well as WikiLeaks, which published the DNC's stolen emails, and the group's founder Julian Assange.

The lawsuit was also filed against Roger Stone, the longtime Trump confidante who claimed during the campaign that he was in contact with Assange.

The Trump advisers and associates have denied assisting Russia in its hacking campaign. Stone has denied any communication with Assange or advance knowledge of the document dumps by WikiLeaks, saying his comments about Assange were jokes or exaggerations.

The DNC lawsuit argues that the Russian government and the GRU violated a series of laws by orchestrating the secret intrusion into the Democrats' computer systems, including statutes to protect trade secrets, prohibit wire tapping and prevent trespassing.

The party said the Trump defendants committed conspiracy through their interaction with Russian agents and their public encouragement of the hacking, with the campaign itself acting as a racketeering enterprise promoting illegal activity.

The complaint was filed on behalf of the party by the law firm of Cohen Milstein.

The suit contains previously undisclosed details, including that the specific date when the Russians breached the DNC computer system: July 27, 2015, according to forensic evidence cited in the filing.

The analysis shows the system was breached again on April 18, 2016. The hackers began siphoning documents and information from DNC systems on April 22. The suit notes that four days later, Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos was informed by Josef Mifsud, a London-based professor, that the Russians were in possession of thousands of emails that could be damaging to Clinton.

The list of defendants in the suit includes Papadopoulos and Mifsud, as well as Aras and Emin Agalorov, the wealthy Russian father and son who hosted the Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow in 2013. Trump, who owned the pageant, attended the event.

The Agalarovs also played a role in arranging a meeting for a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower in New York in 2016, at which Donald Trump Jr. had expected to be given damaging information about Clinton.

The suit alleges that Trump's personal and professional ties to Russia helped foster the conspiracy.

The DNC's lawyers wrote that "long standing personal professional and financial ties to Russia and numerous individuals linked to the Russian government provided fertile ground for a conspiracy between the defendants to interfere in the 2016 elections."

The lawsuit describes how the then-Soviet Union paid for Trump to travel Moscow in the 1980s.

It also details the history of Manafort and Gates, who worked for Russian-friendly factions in the Ukraine before joining the Trump campaign. Prosecutors have said they were in contact in 2016 with Konstantin Kilimnik, a former linguist in the Russian army who the FBI has alleged had ties to Russian intelligence.

--The Washington Post
It's unclear why Master Sgt. Robin Brown, a public affairs officer with the Tennessee Air National Guard, recited her oath of re-enlistment last week using a dinosaur puppet.

Or why the colonel conducting the ceremony allowed her to do so, stifling his laughter as the puppet mouthed the oath.

But the two have been let go from the Guard after a video of the incident went viral, garnering about 2.4 million views on Facebook by Wednesday and upsetting many in the military community who felt Brown and the colonel's actions were disrespectful. Brown has been removed from her full-time job with the Tennessee Joint Public Affairs Office and the yet-to-be-identified colonel has been demoted and immediately retired, according to Army Maj. Gen. Terry Haston, the adjutant general for the Tennessee National Guard.

The senior noncommissioned officer who videotaped the oath recital has been removed from his job as unit first agent but will remain in the Guard, Haston said in a statement Wednesday on Facebook.

"I am absolutely embarrassed that a senior officer and a senior NCO took such liberties with a time-honored military tradition," Haston said. "The Tennessee National Guard holds the Oath of Enlistment in the highest esteem because that oath signifies every service member's commitment to defend our state, nation and the freedoms we all enjoy. Not taking this oath solemnly and with the utmost respect is firmly against the traditions and sanctity of our military family and will not be tolerated."

"The actions of these three individuals in no way represent the professionalism, honor, and courage of the 14,000 Soldiers and [Airmen] in the Tennessee National Guard," he added.

Claims have circulated online that the ceremony was not an official reenlistment and that the video was made for Brown's children to watch. But William Jones, a spokesman for the Joint Public Affairs Office, told The Post that it was an official ceremony. He said he did not know why Brown used the puppet.

"This was not typical [behavior] for a re-enlistment ceremony by any means," Jones said. "And children were not present when the ceremony took place."

"It was very unusual," he added.

The Post was unable to reach Brown on Wednesday.

Many on social media have attacked the colonel not only for allowing the ceremony to proceed with the puppet, but for not raising his right hand, as well as not having the oath memorized.

In a Facebook statement Monday, the Air National Guard's national director, Lt. Gen. Scott Rice, criticized the airmen's behavior.

"I'm equally shocked and dismayed by this event that mocks such a cherished and honorable occasion. The oath of office or enlistment not only signifies our commitment to our nation, but pays respect to our fellow service members and to those who came before us," he wrote.

He added: "This action goes against our very foundation."

--The Washington Post
Former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani and two other former federal prosecutors joined President Donald Trump's legal team Thursday following weeks of turbulence and struggles to find attorneys who would agree to represent the president in the ongoing federal probe into Russian election interference.

The reshuffling comes at a particularly tense juncture for Trump, who aides said is increasingly frustrated by special counsel Robert Mueller III's investigation and with the senior officials at the Justice Department.

The entry of Giuliani, an experienced attorney with a combative reputation, immediately raises questions about how Trump will engage with Mueller and the leadership at Justice. Some Trump advisers are concerned that the president could use his executive authority to close or diminish the special counsel probe, which has spawned a parallel investigation in New York targeting his personal attorney.

"I'm doing it because I hope we can negotiate an end to this for the good of the country and because I have high regard for the president and for Bob Mueller," Giuliani said in an interview Thursday.

Trump said in a statement that Giuliani "wants to get this matter quickly resolved."

In recent days, the president has been regularly venting and speculating to aides about his legal status and the expected timeline for the Russia investigation to end, according to associates briefed on the discussions.

Trump also loudly and repeatedly complained to several advisers earlier this week that former FBI director James Comey, former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe and former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, among others, should be charged with crimes for misdeeds alleged by Republicans, the associates said.

Although White House officials said Thursday that Trump has not called Justice Department officials or taken any formal action, the persistent grousing has made some advisers anxious, according to two people close to the president. A publicity tour by Comey to promote his book critical of Trump, "A Higher Loyalty," has attracted particular attention from the president, who has disparaged Comey publicly and privately.

Trump also complained this week about Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, saying the judge had proved too liberal in recent cases, according to administration officials who heard about the complaints. Associates said he was incensed that Gorsuch had voted against the administration on an immigration case and said it renewed his doubts that Gorsuch would be a reliable conservative. One top Trump adviser played down the comments as unhappiness with Gorsuch's decision rather than with Gorsuch broadly.

Giuliani, 73, brings a familiarity with several of the legal fronts that Trump is navigating. He is a former associate attorney general and a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, which is the office overseeing an investigation of Trump's personal attorney, Michael Cohen.

Trump counsel Jay Sekulow said Thursday that former federal prosecutors Jane Serene Raskin and Marty Raskin, a couple who manage a Florida-based law firm, have also agreed to join the legal team.

Giuliani is certain to come under intense scrutiny for his role. His own pre-election activities two years ago have been the subject of criticism from Democrats, especially television interviews in which he suggested he had sources providing him inside information about the FBI's investigation of Clinton's private email server when she was secretary of state.

A Justice Department Inspector General report on the department's handling of the Clinton investigations is expected to be released in coming weeks and will probably include results of leak investigations regarding the Clinton probe.

Numerous other challenges face the attorneys who will work alongside Sekulow and counsel Ty Cobb - who have functioned as Trump's legal nucleus for weeks following the resignation of John Dowd, a legal veteran and the team's former leader. Dowd stepped down in March amid clashes over strategy, in particular over whether Trump should sit for a voluntary interview with Mueller. The legal team has often been beset by infighting.

"The big question is, how's he going to play with everybody else?" said a lawyer involved with the investigation who was not authorized to speak publicly. "Will he be combative Rudy, or will he play well with Mueller's team? Will he try to walk . . . back from the brink and answer the big question, which is whether the president will sit for an interview? And will Trump listen to him?"

Giuliani declined to say whether Trump has made a final decision on whether to sit for an interview with federal investigators. Trump has been mulling it for weeks, moving away from the idea after the home, offices and hotel room of Cohen were raided this month. Trump reacted angrily, calling it "disgraceful."

"It's too early for me to say that," Giuliani replied, when asked whether a Trump interview is unlikely to happen.

Giuliani also declined to discuss whether Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who has been under fire from conservatives and oversees the Russia probe, could be fired by the president in the coming weeks.

"I'm not involved in anything about those issues. My advice on Mueller has been this: He should be allowed to do his job. He's entitled to do his job."

Giuliani said he formalized his decision in recent days, including over dinner last week at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Giuliani and Trump spoke Thursday about the legal plan moving forward, along with Sekulow, whom he has known for years and called a friend. He added that he and Cobb also spoke, on Wednesday.

Giuliani - who will take a leave from his law firm, Greenberg Traurig, and is in the midst of a divorce from his third wife - said he would spend a "great deal of time" in Washington working with Trump but would continue to live in New York. He has been frequently seen holding court at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, dining and drinking with friends and browsing for gourmet cigars.

Trump had considered Giuliani for attorney general and has said in recent weeks he needs a New York-based attorney. Many leading white-collar lawyers, such as former solicitor general Theodore Olson, have declined Trump's entreaties, often citing conflicts or expressing unease about the high-profile case.

Trump is also known to be a difficult client who does not listen to his attorneys' advice, according to lawyers who know him. And Giuliani, once a top adviser, grew frustrated with his treatment during the transition and had receded from the inner circle.

As he has closely monitored cable-news programs chronicling his presidency and the Mueller probe, Trump has swatted away suggestions that he cannot attract high-profile attorneys. He has also spoken about his desire for a bolstered team and wondered aloud about the damage that Cohen's legal proceedings could bring, according to the associates briefed on the discussions, who requested anonymity to talk about them.

Giuliani's arrival is part of a broader shift in Trump's inner circle toward the core allies and brusque and brutal style that defined his outsider presidential campaign and his business career. Beyond Mueller, aides said everyone and everything feels liable to become a target for his wrath as he grapples with difficult issues at home and abroad, in Syria and North Korea.

"What we've been seeing with the president is that he is picking A-level people that he knows are experienced but also know him well," said Trump ally Christopher Ruddy, the president and CEO of Newsmax Media, a conservative outlet. "One of the problems in the first year was that people didn't work out because they didn't know him and they didn't have experience for the position."

-- The Washington Post
Break out your passports, because another creative property has been added to the McMenamins chain.

On Thursday, the regional chain of brewpubs and hotels debuted its new Kalama Harbor Lodge, a four-story property along the banks of the Columbia River in Kalama, Washington, with a grand opening scheduled for Friday.

Modeled after the famous Pioneer Inn in Hawaii, the Kalama Harbor Lodge is a red-roofed, green-sided gathering place, with 40 rooms, several bars and all the eccentric details McMenamins properties have become known for, including secret rooms and cryptic paintings.

The new lodge is the 55th property for the regional chain, first started in 1983 by brothers Brian and Mike McMenamin. The creative aspect of their properties stems directly from a childhood spent exploring the old house where they grew up.

"We loved as [kids] running around the house finding secret rooms, so we just kind of carried that," Brian McMenamin said on Thursday. "We're still kind of kids at heart."

The lodge is expected to anchor a revitalization effort at the Port of Kalama property, which already features park space and a paved pathway that runs along the river, offering several access points to beaches on the banks of the Columbia River.

McMenamins Kalama Harbor Lodge will host its grand opening on Friday, April 20. Room rates range from $115 to $225 per night. Reservations can be made online at mcmenamins.com.

--Jamie Hale | jhale@oregonian.com | @HaleJamesB
BEIJING, April 19 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping congratulated Miguel Diaz-Canel on his election as the new Cuban president in a message on Thursday.

Xi said in the congratulatory message that China and Cuba are good comrades, good friends and good partners that sincerely trust each other and share the same fate, adding that the two peoples have cultivated deep friendship through long and hard struggles, serving as a strong force to promote the development of bilateral ties.

In today's world where international and regional circumstances are witnessing profound and complex changes, China and Cuba have both embarked on a new march for progress, said Xi, adding that China is willing to join Cuba on the way forward.

He also said that he is willing to work with Diaz-Canel to deepen and expand bilateral cooperation, and achieve new accomplishments that can honor the China-Cuba friendship in a new era.

In a separate message to Raul Castro, who remains the first secretary of the Central Committee of the ruling Communist Party of Cuba, Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, said he is ready to maintain close communications with Castro so as to push China-Cuba ties further forward.

Also on Thursday, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang sent a congratulatory message to Diaz-Canel.

Li said China is willing to work with Cuba to continuously promote bilateral cooperation and work for a steady development of China-Cuba ties.
BEIJING, April 19 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping and British Prime Minister Theresa May agreed on Thursday to further promote the "Golden Era" of bilateral ties between the two sides.

In a telephone conversation, Xi pointed out that during May's visit to China earlier this year, a significant consensus was reached to further boost the "Golden Era" for China-Britain ties.

The two sides agreed on pushing the bilateral relations to a more strategic, practical, globalized and inclusive level, and making joint efforts to constantly lead the relationship between the two countries to move forward.

Xi said that China is willing to work with Britain to strengthen communication and coordination on macro policy, maintain high-level exchanges and institutional communication, promote practical cooperation under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative, and provide more opportunities to upgrade and accelerate the "Golden Era" of bilateral ties.

Xi further expressed the hope that the British side would fill more positive energy into the development of China-Britain relations.

He noted that as permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, the two countries should continue to deepen international cooperation and make greater contributions to building a new type of international relations featuring mutual respect, fairness, justice and win-win cooperation.

The British prime minister said she was delighted that the two sides reconfirmed to further deepen the "Golden Era" of bilateral ties, and welcomed the forthcoming London-Shanghai stock connect program, which would allow investors on one bourse to invest in the other.

May also hailed the pledges made by Xi to further open up China's economy in a keynote speech at the Boao Forum for Asia Annual Conference 2018 held in China's southern island province of Hainan.

She added that the British side is willing to join hands with China to maintain intensive high-level exchanges and expand cooperation in various fields, continue to explore the Belt and Road construction, and actively promote the "Golden Era" of bilateral ties between the two countries.

The two leaders also exchanged views on the situation in Syria and global trade, with Xi emphasizing that China has been greatly concerned over Syria's situation, and has always disapproved of the use of force in international relations.

Instead, Beijing insists that the sovereign independence and territorial integrity should be respected and actions should be taken on the basis of the accepted rules of the international community, Xi added.

He told May that the alleged chemical attack in Syria needs a comprehensive, just and objective investigation, whose results should withstand the test of history, so as to solve the Syrian crisis through political means as soon as possible.

Xi further noted that both China and Britain are the beneficiaries and supporters of economic globalization, and expressed China's willingness to make concerted efforts with Britain as well as all parties concerned to continue to support free trade and build an open world economy.

May said the British side also supports free trade and an open economy, and would like to maintain communication with China on relevant international and regional issues.
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BEIJING, April 19 (Xinhua) -- China and Turkey should maintain high-level exchanges and deepen strategic mutual trust, Chinese President Xi Jinping told Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan over phone on Thursday.

Xi pointed out that the China-Turkey strategic cooperative relations have witnessed steady development in recent years and achieved positive results in cooperation in various fields, saying both sides need to tap potential in lifting bilateral relations to a higher level as well as into broader areas.

China and Turkey also need to accommodate each other's concerns, which will lay a solid political foundation for bilateral cooperation, Xi added.

Xi called on the two countries to work hard at pragmatic cooperation, which requires both sides to attach importance to dovetailing the China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative with Turkey's Middle Corridor project, enriching people-to-people and cultural exchanges, and consolidating public support for bilateral friendly relations.

Turkey has special influence and roles on major international and regional issues, said Xi, adding that both countries need to maintain close communication and coordination on major issues within the framework of multilateral mechanisms such as the United Nations and the Group of 20, so as to make positive contributions to promoting a new type of international relations and building a community with a shared future for mankind.

Erdogan said that China's development and prosperity is the cornerstone of world stability, as Turkey thinks highly of the great effort China has made in international affairs to safeguard fairness and justice, respect the diversity of civilizations, and promote equality of all countries irrespective of size.

Turkey is willing to carry out close exchanges with China at all levels, said Erdogan, adding that his country supports and stands ready to participate in the Belt and Road Initiative, and to boost cooperation in such areas as economy, trade, energy, infrastructure and tourism.

He said Turkey is firmly opposed to terrorist forces like the East Turkistan Islamic Movement, adding that such forces must not be allowed to undermine social stability in any countries including Turkey and China.

The two leaders also exchanged views on the current situation in Syria.

Xi said all related parties should take actions within the framework of international law, observe the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations, and respect sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of every country.

Erdogan said Turkey attaches great importance to China's influence on the political solution to the Syrian issue, adding that his country is willing to strengthen communication and coordination with China on the issue.
An armed helicopter assaults targets with rocket projectiles in a live-fire exercise off China's southeast coast, April 18, 2018. An air unit of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) ground force Wednesday held a live-fire exercise off China's southeast coast. The exercise, which involved the coordination of various types of armed helicopters, was an annual routine arrangement and tested the force's all-weather combat capability. (Xinhua/Li Shilong)

FUZHOU, April 19 (Xinhua) -- An air unit of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) ground force Wednesday held a live-fire exercise off China's southeast coast, the ground force said Thursday.

The exercise, which involved the coordination of various types of armed helicopters, was an annual routine arrangement and tested the force's all-weather combat capability, it said.

At around 9 a.m., helicopters carrying a variety of ammunition were ready to fly to designated waters.

After taking off, pilots set their own courses and detected targets on the water, then assaulted floating targets and simulated ships with missiles and rocket projectiles.

The exercise was conducted throughout a complex electromagnetic environment and ended at around 11 p.m. with the landing of the last helicopter.

An armed helicopter is loaded with ammunition for a live-fire exercise off China's southeast coast, April 18, 2018. An air unit of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) ground force Wednesday held a live-fire exercise off China's southeast coast. The exercise, which involved the coordination of various types of armed helicopters, was an annual routine arrangement and tested the force's all-weather combat capability. (Xinhua/Li Shilong)

Armed helicopters fly to designated waters in a live-fire exercise off China's southeast coast, April 18, 2018. An air unit of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) ground force Wednesday held a live-fire exercise off China's southeast coast. The exercise, which involved the coordination of various types of armed helicopters, was an annual routine arrangement and tested the force's all-weather combat capability. (Xinhua/Li Shilong)

Sun Yongfu, deputy commander of the exercise, said the exercise was carried out in line with real combat standards, and has effectively improved the force's capabilities to fulfill missions and tasks.
IMF chief Christine Lagarde characterized the near term future of the world economy as bright, but she warned that long term challenges await. She said high debt levels, financial instability, and lack of trust on existing multinational trade frameworks are some of the risks the world should take care of in the long run.

]

Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, talks to reporters at a press conference during the 2018 IMF spring meetings. [Photo: China Plus/Liu Kun]

The IMF has set its forecast for world economic growth this year and next year at 3.9 percent while slightly uplifting its predictions of growth for major economies such as China, the US and the eurozone from a few months ago.

Lagarde said to tackle the risks in the long run, national governments should keep working on structural reforms, create more policy buffers, and more importantly forsake protectionist approaches on trade.

"And third policy, steer clear of all protectionism measures. In that respect, we believe that each country can do more from looking at its own domestic policies to helping those affected by the dislocation from technological change and trade. So that relates to measures that need to be taken at home to improve compliance but also to deal with those that are not benefitting from trade."

Christine Lagarde (center), managing director of the International Monetary Fund, talks to reporters at a press conference during the 2018 IMF spring meetings. [Photo: China Plus/Liu Kun]

Addressing the recent trade tensions between the US and China, Lagarde said the current situation threatens global trade and investment, both of which are finally picking up momentums after the financial crisis and currently the two main factors driving the world economy.

"If you boil it down to the GDP decimal and you associate that with that threat or the other threat, some people might say that it is not particularly meaningful. As I said, investment and trade are two key engines that are finally picking up. We do not want to damage that. It does not mean to say that only one party has to do something. Everybody has to do something. And I would not limit the discussions between China and the US. All partners have to talk to each other."

The spring meetings of the two leading international financial institutions come after the Trump administration recently announced additional tariffs on imported steel and aluminum and threatened to impose broad tariffs against Chinese imports.

These unilateral protectionist measures have sparked widespread criticism and provoked threats of retaliation from major trading partners, raising the prospect of escalating global trade conflicts that threaten the global recovery.

At a press conference, Lagarde also welcomed the new opening-up policies by the Chinese government. She said though still at an early age, these policies are certainly putting China on the right track of economic growth.

"I was actually in Bo'ao in the province of Hainan when President Xi announced some of the measures that will be taken to open up, remove caps, and reduce tariffs. Certainly those are helpful measures. We will be very attentive to the actual implementation and delivery of such measures, because this is what actually matters. But it is certainly going in the right direction of removing barriers and facilitating investment."

Chinese president Xi Jinping pledged a series of new opening-up policies at the recently concluded Bo'ao Forum in China's Hainan province, promising to cut investment barriers, lowering auto import tariffs and so on.
Ariana Grande made it clear that something was gonna be up with her new release when she posted a cryptic promotional tweet with upside down text. Today, she released "No Tears Left To Cry," a follow-up to 2016's Dangerous Woman and definitely the best ceiling-related pop music since A*Teens.

The Dave Meyers-directed video features a disembodied, spinning camera that captures Grande walking on the walls and on the ceiling of a hallway in a Gothic building. She also falls into a web of string lights and poses on a rooftop in a hazy, darkly-lit cityscape. There is a kaleidoscopic interlude and a surreal scene where she is surrounded by multiple versions of her own face.

The video is the first release Grande has made since the horrific terrorist attack that happened at her concert in Manchester, England, killing 22 and wounding 59. The lyrics address the process of lifting yourself up after hardship, and BBC reports that the bee that flies towards the screen in the last few seconds of the video represents one of Manchester's most well-known symbols, the worker bee.

Watch the video, below:
The Theta Tau fraternity at Syracuse University was suspended yesterday after videos of members using racial slurs emerged. An official investigation has also been launched to identify and penalize the students who appear in the video.

Originally posted to a secret Facebook group, the video shows members of the engineering fraternity reciting an "oath" that uses the n-word and other racial and anti-Semitic slurs. Chancellor Kent Syverud issued a statement to students and staff describing the video as, "extremely troubling and disturbing" and "extremely racist, anti-semitic, homophobic, sexist, and hostile to people with disabilities."

The university hasn't officially released the footage, but The Daily Orange, Syracuse's student newspaper, has found and posted one of the videos. Before the video was released, students protested outside of Chancellor Syverud's house demanding that the university publish the videos. There was also a 3 hour long public forum last night in which students demanded that the administration take further action.

Statement like the one Syverud made are important, but are ultimately still frustrating because his shock indicates latent privilege. Marginalized students on college campuses are not surprised when a group of rich white men turn out to be racist  they know that the entire fraternity system is based on being exclusionary and oppressive. In fact, The Daily Orange reports that this is the fourth fraternity that has been suspended this year.

Many people feel similarly, writing that the entire Greek life system is toxic and problematic, and that racism on campus isn't just confined to isolated incidents, but is system-wide.









Image via Getty


The club circuit affords a certainty of exposure and stability of income for RuPaul's Drag Race alum  but it's just not Miss Fame's gig. At least not today, three years after joining the ranks on the show's seventh season, and nearing five years of marriage to husband Patrick Bertschy. Miss Fame  real name Kurtis Dam-Mikkelsen, the artist behind the persona  says the pair is actively focusing on their well-being.

Not long ago, they relocated to Brooklyn, where there's more floor space at home and more parks nearby for their two dogs, Mina and Shaya. In thinking about their mental wellness, they wanted "an environment that caters to a little more stillness," Dam-Mikkelsen says.

Miss Fame fans already know that she won't be touring or performing live anymore. She announced officially on Instagram in February this year, about a month after sharing that she'd signed to Wilhelmina Models. Nobody truly versed in Miss Fame's work should be shocked: Beauty and fashion have always been paramount. The news isn't so much a shift, but a return to the industry in new form. Rather than modeling as Dam-Mikkelsen, it's Miss Fame, in all her glamour and glory, behind the lens.

"I wanted to model, I wanted to be able to be in front of cameras, I wanted to be able to work with photographers that I respected when I was a kid," Dam-Mikkelsen says. "I wanted to be able to create the visual that I was looking at in Vogue, these really powerful women that looked like their hair was flying. I just didn't realize that I had to actually become forward-facing female to get exactly what I once saw. And it just feels so right." He'd modeled as Miss Fame before Drag Race; he's been signed to IMG Paris for two years now, and served as spokesmodel for L'Oreal Paris in 2016, during which he attended Cannes  the first drag artist ever to walk the festival's red carpet, and later shot additional campaigns. Dam-Mikkelsen had also already spent years as a professional makeup artist, having trained under Pat McGrath, working with celebrity clients and designers like Prada and Versace. Related | The World According to RuPaul But early in his modeling ambitions, he struggled with presenting a male in typical forms expected by agents. One even told Dam-Mikkelsen to "go hang out in a butch bar and tone it down." "That is so crazy that someone can tell another person that their character is a distraction and they need to eliminate it in order to be able to work," he says. That was seven years ago; who it was, Dam-Mikkelsen says, he can't even remember.

"It wasn't like I'd gone to a heavy-hitter and I got told that from the high ups. I got told that from somebody that was getting a power trip on reading me for being feminine," he says. "But I started to lean into my femininity, and not listen to the haters that were trying to tell me that I was too much of something as a man. When I moved in fully to my feminine side and discovered that this was my calling, immediately the doors opened. They finally understood my personality, they understood the way that I walked, they understood my passion for artistry, the way I move my hands."

Today, Dam-Mikkelsen approaches everything with fresh eyes  a steadfast vision built on the kind of sturdy foundation you can only achieve through understanding and accepting yourself.

"When I moved in fully to my feminine side and discovered that this was my calling, immediately the doors opened."

"I've gotten to learn about my self-identity through the art of Miss Fame," he says. Last August, Miss Fame made the pages of Vogue Germany  10 of them, in fact, both in and out of drag, and states of in between. At the same time, US Vogue was running a gender fluid-themed story that featured Gigi Hadid and Zayn Malik as emblematic of gender fluid identity. Miss Fame fired back on Twitter, calling out the publication for what basically equates to high-fashion exploitation of a community of people. Backlash for speaking out against the publication while simultaneously appearing in another of its editions was a risk he was willing to take.

"I didn't care to lose. I'd stand for truth," he says. "That's more important than the validation I got for being in the editorial. I loved the editorial, but truth is what we should all stand for, and that was where I felt like I started to have more purpose, when my identity started to make more sense to me." Reading the definition of the term was an epiphany for Dam-Mikkelsen. In feeling offended by the Vogue story, he clarified his own gender fluidity. "When I hear drag, I feel like it's not enough. It's one element of what I do, but I don't feel like it encompasses who I am, you know? I feel like my insides are female. I feel like my soul is female. I feel like what people see is male, but I'm never offended if someone calls me her. I'm just grateful for the fact that I live in this body and I also get to be feminine and I don't have to answer to anyone about that. That's why gender fluidity is my title."

"I feel like my insides are female. I feel like my soul is female."

In the wake of that revelation, Miss Fame has continued to build on an already stellar modeling career: Editorials in V Magazine, LOVE, Tush, and more. He's done makeup for Marc Jacobs too, and sat front row at his shows with supermodels Karen Elson and Eva Herzigova. ("It's amazing to see the collection, then I get to wear the collection to watch his collections walk. It's like the coolest stuff ever.") Miss Fame was invited to the designer's birthday party just weeks ago, where she found herself the subject of photographers alongside Naomi Campbell. Related | Naomi Campbell Remains On Top After 30 Years "Like, this is a moment in my own personal story where I felt so impressed that I got to a point in my career where I could be in the room with such profound influences in fashion," Dam-Mikkelsen recalls. "And I felt like family." Jacobs frequently introduces Miss Fame as his niece  to Campbell, and others, like Lil' Kim, who wants Fame to do her makeup.

Having grown up small-town style in California (on farm with chickens, a fact made famous by her clucking on Drag Race), raised by his Danish grandfather and Mexican grandmother, Dam-Mikkelsen says any flash of flamboyance was discouraged. Targeted for being sensitive and emotional since childhood, and with limited queer community around him back then, it wasn't until he was older that he was able to better grasp his identity  in part, through his magnetism toward Miss Fame, and also through his trans sisters, who he says have been "a loving and supportive community" throughout the process. "It's just been a complete resurrection of my soul," he says. "That's why I discovered that I can actually have the soul and spirit of a woman and be the man that sits on the couch with my husband, and I'm allowed to push the boundaries of my body, and I'm allowed to push the boundaries of the way I present myself."

"I'm the same person in and out of makeup [...] I'm just a higher version of myself when I'm in my glamour."

There will always be people who don't comprehend, at least at first, what modeling in drag means. Dam-Mikkelsen sometimes has to show them Miss Fame's work. Often they don't recognize him  but close friends clearly see Kurtis Dam-Mikkelsen in any presentation of Miss Fame, he adds. "I'm the same person in and out of makeup," he says. "I'm just a higher version of myself when I'm in my glamour." Dam-Mikkelsen points to the potential for evolution, though. Empowered by newfound self-assurance, if change comes, he'll let it flow. "My trans sisterhood has allowed me to express my femininity and find that I'm taking time to kind of discover if there's more to me that I want to look at or if I'm comfortable with where I'm at today," he says. "I will continue to evolve. It's like, to be continued. We'll see who I am in the years to come."

And sharing that journey will be part of the process. His perfectionist tendencies kept him from speaking out as much in years past; fear of mistakes prompted privacy, and he worried he'd offend family. But you can't live your life "just trying to make your aunts and uncles happy," he says. While Miss Fame continues to transform both the modeling industry and what it means to be a drag artist (and what spaces are available to that artistry), there's opportunity for change in mainstream society and culture, too. "It comes down to being really solid with your own identity and expression and kind of walking through life, that's where people get to learn and grow. We all need to participate in our authenticity so that people around us can learn that the world is built off of dimension, and people with texture."

"We all need to participate in our authenticity so that people around us can learn that the world is built off of dimension, and people with texture."

Being himself  and Miss Fame  is now an even brighter ray of queer visibility. The reach is further and the platform is higher. Dam-Mikkelson has always believed in himself, but it seems he understands better now how powerful that energy can be for others. Cozy with his husband in their quieter Brooklyn home, he's able to feel loved and heard, to hold his dogs while he sleeps. It seems to ground him. "I think about Miss Fame from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep," he says. "but I need these things outside of myself, that aren't so self-centered because being an artist, it's about looking at yourself and then hopefully sharing your art and then talking to your audience as a way to connect to this selfless act. Those are things that I'm looking at now, like what can I do to help? I need to start being more connected to the world because I think that's where I get to not be so contained within my own ego. I want to help."
Before June, Im hoping some decent weather will hit, but its clearly not happening this week. Today was pleasant, but all week its been a roller coaster of either too dry, too cold, or Wyoming-windy. A few days ago, I decided the front yard could no longer have the appearance of the county landfill, so I took a few minutes to clean up everything the Puppy snuck outside and demolished  pool noodles, paper plates, socks. Also, I needed to pick up Puppy grenades.

I didnt even get half of the job finished before some serious wind picked up. The leaves I had gathered went flying all over the yard when I tried to put them in the trash can. The paper plate pieces flew around and were hard to catch. And the grenades? Well, I couldve weathered the storm for that portion of the chore, but I gave up since the wind prevented the trash can from remaining upright for more than one or two poop scoops.

The rest of the story involving wind is rather comedic. It involves me trying to take my frail mother to the doctor, in a truck, in up to 86 mph winds. Thats hurricane level winds, people. My Mom weighs more than me by quite a bit. And the wind, bless it, would blow its hardest the second I opened the door to help Mom out. It was a miracle our bodies, fingers, swirling hair, or purse handles were not slammed in the door. Thankfully, by the skin of our dirt-filled teeth, we made it out of the truck without incident. Walking into the office wasnt any less embarrassing, as we struggled against gusts of wind that nearly knocked us over. First Mom, then me, as I tried to keep her from biffing it.

The ladies at the front desk were laughing, I know it. But they had pulled themselves together by the time the two ladies and their bad hair arrived.

Back to the yard. Whilst practicing my poop scooping skills, I noticed my orange tulips had come up. Tulips are my favorite flower, so I thorougly enjoy the entire twelve hours they decide to poke their little heads out here in the Rocky Mountain region. Okay, more than twelve hours, but it seems even shorter than that some years. This year is no exception, because though theyve bloomed, theyre closed off. They dont like cold. They dont like wind. They dont like it here much at all, really, and its a wonder they survive. Understandably, they protect themselves against the harshest of weather, because  well I think because theyre smart. Or rather, their Maker is smart. When its sunny and warm, their petals will once again open and be receptive to the world.

Well I kept scooping a few grenades, and then I thought  ya know, Im basically a tulip.

When my environment is harsh and unwelcoming, I clam up. My mouth closes, as does my heart. When Im hurting  physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually  the closing off just happens. I dont will it. I dont even think about it. Like the tulips closing, it comes natural. If I dont fight the urge, I will indeed start living like a mountain woman. No TV. No internet. No church. No phone calls. No transportation of any kind. No doctors appointments! No relationships other than comforting ones. And no shaving my armpit hair.

Kidding!

This isnt Telluride, folks.

So whats my point?

My point is, Im not a tulip. Im a female human being. Its popular in todays world to identify as someone or something else. But though we choose to sometimes live in a fantasy world, the truth is, God has made us either male or female (Gen. 5:2), and human. The other truth is that all humans have a need for community. I will even go one further and say that people thrive best in community  particularly Gods community. That is, church.

Church is supposed to be a hospital for the spiritually sick, which would be all of us. That is the condition of humanity: we are all spiritual sick and in need of the Great Physician. If the church functions as it should, it is where the sick are first accepted, then saved, then healed, then eventually thriving for the cause of Christ, so others might experience the same. Its a wonderful cycle that needs to keep on keeping on. In order for that to happen, I (and maybe you?) need to quit identifying as tulips. We need to open up  rain or shine.

Its difficult. On a scale of one to ten, ten being the most introverted, I consider myself a nine. As a child, I was painfully shy. Im surprised I got through kindergarten without pooping my pants every day. Or first or second or third. Going through papers the other night, I found my high school diploma and marveled that I was ever able to complete that many years of school without dying of a heart attack. No wonder I had open heart surgery after I graduated!

Seriously though. If I had my druthers, Id almost always choose to be alone. I like people, and I dont say that flippantly. I am being honest. But people also drain me, quickly  especially when Im struggling physically, which is daily, but not necessarily hourly (its complicated).

Still, the Great Commission is the Great Commission. As Christians, we are commanded by Christ to Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that He has commanded us.

Thankfully, God remembers I am but dust, and He gives me opportunities to do my part in fulfilling the Great Commission here at Patheos. Ive no idea who my readers are. But I know youre out there, reading, considering, thinking through Scripture. Writing is a way for me to be Gods megaphone  to shout the truth the best I know how  given the limits He has ordained for my life.

I go to church anytime I can possibly make it through the service without getting too sick. My house is akin to Grand Central Station many days. If family or friends arent visiting, theres always Mom to minister to, whether by taking her to the doctor in hurricane winds, answering her theological questions, or calming her fears with Scripture.

Oh, and Facebook, of course. We musnt forget all the conversations I have there, on statuses or in private messages. I am being a wee bit sarcastic, but truly, some of the deepest, most challenging conversations I have are over private messages, emails, or texts. My introverted self wants to chuck my phone into the next week sometimes! But I havent yet because as a chronically ill Pastors wife, its often the best way I can minister to others without draining myself and being forced to resign to the sickbed for two days.

Example: as I speak, I am battling a migraine and migraines (at least in my case) escalate quickly if I get cold, or if I talk. I can still think, somewhat, sometimes. But I cannot talk. And yet here I am, with the Lords help, talking to you about the Great Commission. And dog grenades, which I hope you will forgive.

God is great. I believe Hes placed me in the era of internet. Facebook, blogging, texting, and private messaging for a reason. Would I rather be living on the prairie in the late 1800s or early 1900s. Yes! Im all for calico dresses and bonnets and living out in the boonies where its quiet, where the buffalos roam, and where company comes at most once a week, but probably more like once every two months. Oh, and where freeway driving and phone beeps arent a thing.



Admittedly, I romanticize that time frame in history. You catch my drift, though. I value peace, quiet, and a simple life. But never should I be a rock or an island, hiding in my room, safe within my womb, where I touch no one and no one touches me. Paul Simons lyrics and music may be catchy, but identifying and therefore acting like rocks and islands (and tulips) is not living in obedience to Christ.

Nobodys asking introverts to be extroverts. However, every Christian should be doing their part in fulfilling the Great Commission. Though it is difficult living as an introvert in a culture that expects extrovertedness, Im grateful God has provided avenues for me to witness, disciple, and commune. And Im grateful those avenues are conducive not only to the way He has hard-wired me, but also to the trials He has ordained for my life.

Im confident He can do the same for you.
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In calls with British, Turkish leaders, president says rules established by the international community should apply

A Syrian refugee child looks through a shattered glass window of a bus as she arrives at the Syrian-Lebanese border of Jdaydet Yabous, Syria, April 18, 2018. [Photo/Agencies]

China has always opposed the easy use of force in international relations and the tension in Syria should be eased as soon as possible, President Xi Jinping said on Thursday.

Xi made the remark in phone calls with British Prime Minister Theresa May and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries should be respected, Xi said, adding that the relevant sides should act in accordance with rules accepted by the international community while not escalating conflicts further.

The suspected use of chemical weapons in Syria should be investigated in a comprehensive and justified manner, Xi said.

China would like to work with parties concerned to resolve the Syrian issue properly, he said.

Xi also had a phone talk with Erdogan on Thursday. He said relevant sides should act under the framework of international laws, respect the principle of the UN Charter, respect all countries' independence and territorial integrity, Xi said.

Erdogan said Turkey attaches great importance to China's influence over the political resolution of the Syrian issue.

Noting that both China and Britain have benefited from economic globalization, Xi said that China would work together with all sides, including Britain, to support free trade, maintain the multilateral trade system and work toward open global economies.

Both China and Britain are permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, and the two countries should cooperate to make a greater contribution to building a new type of international relations and a community of shared future for mankind, Xi said.

May said that Britain supports free trade and open economies, as China does. She said Britain would like to keep communication with China open over relevant international and regional issues.

May spoke highly of China's new measures announced by Xi at the opening ceremony of the Boao Forum for Asia to boost its opening-up.

Britain would like to work with China to enhance exchanges at all levels, expand cooperation in all areas and explore joint efforts related to the Belt and Road Initiative, she said.
The Office of Fred Amankwah-Sarfo, aspiring National Chairman of the New Patriotic Party, extend best wishes to all Aspirants and Delegates in the party's Regional Delegates Congress.



The party goes to the polls this weekend to elect Regional Executives to manage the affairs of party at the Regional Level for the next four years.



The Dankwa-Busia-Dombo Tradition has demonstrated excellent democratic credentials. This election will again emphasise our resolve to the active participation of members freely exercising their right to elect leaders through a democratic electoral process.



The Office of Fred Amankwah-Sarfo urges all delegates to guard the enviable reputation of the NPP as the trail blazer in Ghana's democracy.



We encourage all party members to be guided by article 3D of our party's constitution and conduct ourselves in the supreme interest of the party.



The NPP is poised for another victory in election 2020 and beyond to ensure the continuous implementation of the excellent developmental policies of the NPP government under the able leadership of H.E. President Akufo Addo and H.E Alhaji Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia.



Let's elect people of integrity, commitment and vision to modernize the NPP.



We must all comport ourselves throughout the process and count on the Electoral Commission to run a free and fair elections.



We at the office of Fred Amankwah-Sarfo are very confident that this weekend will be another victory for democracy and the elephant family.



Long Live Ghana's Democracy

Long Live the NPP in Government



SIGNED

Mr Fred Amankwah-Sarfo

(Aspiring NPP National Chairman)



Issued By:

Benjamin Akowuah Acheampong

(Personal Aide and Spokesperson)

Source: Mr Fred Amankwah-Sarfo (Aspiring NPP National Chairman)









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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The Economic and Organised Crimes Office (EOCO) has granted bail to Mr William Ato Essien, the founder of collapsed bank, Capital Bank after detaining him overnight.



EOCO invited Mr Essien on Tuesday April 17 to assist with ongoing investigations into circumstances leading to the collapse of the bank in August last year.



Its Executive Director, Mr K. K. Amoah, told Graphic Online Wednesday that the detention was part of the investigation process.



He, however, declined to say what informed the decision to detain him overnight except to say he is to be reporting to EOCO as part of the process.



This visit to EOCOs offices on April 17 is the second in a week.



On April 10, Mr Essien and other former directors of the bank appeared before the anti-graft body to help answer questions pertaining to the collapse of the bank.



They were, however, cautioned and released.



Mr Essien is the founder of First Capital Plus Bank (FCPBL), which later transformed into Capital Bank, and a number of companies, including Essien Swiss International Capital Holdings (ESICH), Gye Nyame Mines, and Wade-Laurel Printing Press Limited.



Shirking of responsibilities



The licence of the erstwhile Capital Bank and that of UT Bank were withdrawn on August 14 2017 after the banks were found to be illiquid and deficient in capital.



Consequently, a purchase and assumption (P&A) agreement was signed with largely state-owned bank, GCB Bank, to assume ownership of assets and select liabilities.



Since then, the Bank of Ghana has openly panned the former directors for allegedly shirking their responsibilities in return for favours, leading to the collapse of the two banks, while EOCO is looking at probable criminal acts that could form the bases for prosecution.

Source: Graphic.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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The United Kingdom (UK) has increased its export finance cover available to Ghana from 125 million to 500 million.



The offer is intended to, among other things, support new Ghanaian businesses that want to partner with the UK.



The UK Minister of State for Africa, Ms Harriet Baldwin, who announced this at the UK-Ghana Investment Summit in London, said the move was also to spur the plans of President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo for industrialisation, infrastructure development and value addition to important sectors that drove the economy.



Ms Baldwin also announced a new partnership between the Bank of England and the Bank of Ghana, saying that stronger technical assistance between the two financial entities would help Ghana and its companies raise local currency bonds abroad.



UK investors visit Ghana



In February this year, the Department for International Trade brought 18 of the UKs top infrastructure companies for a week-long trade mission and business forum to better understand Ghanas infrastructure needs.



Last week, the Scottish Development International also came to Accra with an 18 strong oil and gas trade mission. But in all these, finance is crucial and that is an area where the UK can deliver, she said.



Describing London as the meeting place for the worlds global investors and global investment opportunities, Ms Baldwin said: The London Stock Exchange had, in the last decade, raised $10 trillion and also has $15 trillion in assets under management.



The British government, she explained, was, therefore committed to having a trade relationship with its African partners that were as good as those it already had, if not better.



She said the bilateral trade between the UK and Ghana was 1.4 billion in 2016, representing a 26 per cent increase over the previous years figure.



Today, we are hosted by the UK-Ghana Chamber of Commerce, which has 95 members, 60 of whom are UK-based, with many investing in Ghana for years.



Nurturing these business relations and increasing bilateral trade will help provide more jobs because it is increased trade that will help provide the revenue and support for infrastructure improvement and education, so that Ghana has a workforce that can truly meet the workforce of the future, she added.



Economic development



On economic development, Ms Baldwin said the UK was seeking long-term partnerships to deliver economic development and create opportunities for everyone.



To that end, she said: The UK is shifting the focus of our support, in line with President Nana Akufo-Addos vision, away from large-scale resource transfers in health and education and towards targeted technical assistance which will support economic development, diversification and the creation of decent jobs and livelihoods.



It will support domestic resource mobilisation and tax reforms in a partnership between the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) and the UK Customs to enhance Ghanas ability to self-finance and secure exit from poverty.



Alluding to the fact that 57 per cent of Ghanaians were under the age of 25, Ms Baldwin said that young population would not only be a huge opportunity for the country in its development efforts but also present real policy challenges, since young people needed education and jobs to secure their future.



She, therefore, gave an assurance that the UK would work on governance of the social sectors to safeguard the considerable gains made to date.



Building on work that has already helped to shape the business environment, develop oil and gas and support small and medium-size businesses and a new strategic partnership will deliver mutual benefit for the UK and Ghana.



With the refocusing of UK aid and greater engagement with the private sector, a new UK aid of allowing the final stages of design will stimulate that private investment and create thousands of jobs for Ghanaians by increasing private investments into key industries working with British, Ghanaian and global businesses, Ms Baldwin said.









Source: Daily Graphic









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Special Prosecutor Martin Amidu has shrugged off claims that he does not have an office to operate from.



A section of the populace has asserted that the special prosecutor has not begun prosecuting public officials perceived to be corrupt because he has no office.



Mr. Amidu, a former Attorney General and Minister for Justice  who is credited for his crusade against corruption  appeared before the Appointments Committee of Parliament on February 13, 2018 where he was grilled for about six hours.



He was overwhelmingly approved by parliament on February 20, 2018 to become Ghanas first special prosecutor.



But almost two months after the approval, the no-nonsense former Attorney General is yet to prosecute a single case.



Although he has been given the peculiar task of prosecuting officials of the past and the present administrations who have been fingered in corruption acts, the office of the special prosecutor is yet to be formally opened.



There were several media reports that more than a month after his appointment, his office had not been furnished hence, affecting his performance.



Mr. Amidu has been dragged to court by a former deputy attorney general and Member of Parliament for Bolgatanga, Dr. Dominic Ayine, challenging his age to be appointed into the public service.



Although he, together with the Attorney General, have opposed the writ and asked the Supreme Court to dismiss it, it is yet to be heard.



At the premises of the Supreme Court yesterday, Mr Amidu, though unwilling to speak to the media, indicated that the writ would not affect his role.



He said he was doing his work, adding, I have been sworn in as the special prosecutor. I am going on with my work. I cannot discuss official matters to the press. I am doing my work. Havent I come to court?



Deputy



Meanwhile, DAILY GUIDE has learnt that the state has secured an office for Mr. Amidu at Labone in Accra.



Deep throat sources close to the office have also hinted that former Director of Public Prosecutions, Cynthia Lamptey, is to be named the deputy special prosecutor.



If appointed, she would be reunited with Mr. Amidu, whom she had worked with in the past under the late John Evans Atta Mills administration.



Cynthia Lamptey has over 20 years working experience at the Attorney Generals Department until she was relieved of her post in 2015.



She prosecuted land mark cases, including embattled businessman and NDC financier, Alfred Agbesi Woyome, in the GH51.2 million judgment debt saga.



She was also in-charge of the prosecution of Alhaji Imoro, former acting director of the National Service Scheme who is standing trial for allegedly stealing GH86.9 million belonging to the state.





Source: Daily Guide









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Parliament in Guinea-Bissau has convened for the first time in nearly two years, reports the AFP news agency.



The parliament has not been able to function because the president sacked the prime minister and the ruling party was not able to agree on a new candidate.



It all started with squabbles over international aid money, according to insiders who spoke to journalist Lorraine Mallinder.



In 2015 donors pledged $1.5bn (1bn) to Guinea-Bissau.



President Jose Mario Vaz wanted to use the money for private agriculture project in his home village but then-Prime Minister Domingos Simoes Pereira resisted, the sources suggested.



A few months later the president sacked Mr Pereira.



However, the ruling party sided with the sacked prime minister and a stalemate ensued, with the two sides unable to agree on a replacement.



Earlier this year the West African regional body Ecowas imposed sanctions on the country and finally on Monday the president named veteran politician Aristides Gomes as the new prime minister, reports VOA news.

Source: BBC









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Mr Stephen Ashitey Adjei, an executive member of the Tema East branch of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) has cautioned former President John Dramani Mahama against party members hanging around him for benefits.



He stated: Former President Mahama is seen by some NDC Executives as a Cash-Cow that is why they want him to run for 2020 at all cost so that they will make money out of him.



Mr Ashitey Adjei, popularly called Moshake, who was speaking in a news conference in Accra on Thursday warned that most of the people singing his praises and asking him to lead the party into 2020 were doing so with ulterior motives.



These people are few within the leadership of the party at various levels  they know very well what they want and are therefore urging him on because of money.



He said it was wrong and urged the former President to think of his legacy and leave while the applause was still somewhat loud because the 2016 election loss was still in the minds of people and could even get worse in 2020.



Moshake said, the people trying to mislead the former President are self-seeking politicians who are only praise-singing with the intent of cajoling him into spreading his money.



I will urge the former President to take time and do an introspection; the very people who are asking him to lead the party again are the same people who misled him into acting out of touch with Ghanaians when he was President.



He said before former President Mahama would campaign for the Presidency, the NDCs Presidential primary would be a hurdle for him contrary to what people were telling him.



If he runs, he may not win the NDC Presidential slot because like I said, those asking him to run are mostly people who want his money Moshake said.

Source: GNA









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

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Looks like someone needs a nap.

In a truly epic rant posted to his official Facebook page, House State Government Committee Chairman Daryl Metcalfe, R-Butler, hauled off and slapped the 'liberal loser Democrat legislators,' with whom he's forced to share oxygen and table space during committee meetings.

The proximate cause of this rant appears to be Metcalfe's dispute with state Rep. Chris Rabb, D-Philadelphia, who recently filed a complaint against Metcalfe in the wake of a disagreement over the committee's gutting of a redistricting reform bill.

But while he was at it, Metcalfe decided to bring the smackdown against other Democratic members of his panel:

"There is a pattern to the attacks that have been made against me by liberal loser Democrat legislators on my committee. Former Rep Leslie Acosta who lied about me is now convict Acosta, lying homosexual Rep Brian Sims has been under an ethics investigation, then there is constant touchy-feely Rep Matt Bradford who has touched me over 40 times in what many observers have said is an attempt to provoke me!"

Dude ... get over it.

But it does give us the excuse to post this:

And in case you were wondering about how Metcalfe feels about the legislation that Democrats bring before his committee, wonder no more.

He totally hates all of it.

"When they oppose us on my committee, they lose every vote and we win every vote! I block all substantive Democrat legislation sent to my committee and advance good Republican legislation! Liberals continue their lying attacks

in an attempt to stop my work in defense of taxpayers and our liberty!"

And faster than you can say 'lying liberal loser Democrats,' officials at the state Democratic Party were out with a statement calling on Metcalfe to be stripped of his leadership post.

"Daryl Metcalfe's public admission that he is a partisan hack who abuses his power at the expense of making government better for Pennsylvanians is absolutely disqualifying," Sincere Harris, the executive director of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, said in an email.

Read the full post here:
Burger King and its famed Whopper sandwich have a central Pa. connection.

The chain's co-founder David Edgerton, who started Burger King in 1954 with $12,000, was born in Lebanon, according to his obituary published in the Washington Post.

Edgerton died April 3 of complications from surgery in Miami, Florida. He was 90.

With his business partner James W. McLamore, Edgerton started the company after acquiring Insta-Burger King, an automated 15-cent hamburger concept.

Edgerton is credited with creating the conveyor-belt charbroiler used to cook Burger King's burgers. The two partners disputed which one of them named the famous Whopper sandwich, according to the Post.

They ran the company until 1967 when they sold it to Pillsbury for about $20 million. The company has been sold multiple times, and today is owned by 3G Capital and controlled through Restaurant Brands International.

Edgerton was born on May 26, 1927. His mother was a concert violinist, and his father worked several jobs, from hotel management to engineer, in different states.

The family didn't live in central Pa. for very long, as Edgerton graduated from high school in Chicago and then attended Cornell University and Northwestern University.

He retired in the 2000s to Miami where he lived up until his death.
Pennsylvania is a state divided.

Lovers of convenience stores have set up in firm camps across the state. The east belongs to Wawa, home of the hoagie. To the west is Sheetz, proud land of "MTO" (made to order).

Loyalty to a convenience store is a Pennsylvania trait, and each has their fierce fans -- which is why the Wawa vs. Sheetz debate is one that continues to this day. It's even the subject of a new planned documentary.

Now, Governor Tom Wolf has weighed in.

He's team Rutter's.

Rutter's, for those who live near Philadelphia or Pittsburgh, is the south central Pennsylvania answer to Wawa and Sheetz. The gas station and convenience store chain has most of its locations around the Harrisburg and York area. The farthest west Rutter's is in Duncansville, the farthest east is in Hamburg. But it calls York County its home -- which, conveniently, is where Wolf is from too.

Rutter's has a plethora of food items on its menu from jalapeno and cheese bites to walking tacos to crab cake sliders. But we recommend the chicken corn soup.

Wolf voiced his support for Rutter's on his official Facebook, commenting on an article about the Sheetz/Wawa documentary.

Shame that they didn't include the real winner Rutter's in this analysis.  Posted by Governor Tom Wolf on Friday, April 20, 2018

What do you make of Wolf's decision? Are you team Wawa, Sheetz, Rutter's or... dare we even suggest it... Turkey Hill? Let us know in the comments.

Love food? You may enjoy these videos of unique eats in Pennsylvania:
Talk about a lengthy homework assignment.

In 1961, when Robert Rempe was a student teacher at North Scranton High School, he came across a production of a comedic operetta called "Rose of the Danube."

"The students put the play on, and it sort of stuck in my head," Rempe said. "I've been a fan of it ever since, although that was the only time that I saw it."

Rempe described the plot of "Rose of the Danube" as "kind of a farce of a mock of a farce of a mock."

"Basically, there's opera buffa, which mocks grand opera," he explained. "And then Gilbert and Sullivan decided to mock opera buffa. The authors of 'Rose of the Danube,' Penn and Morgan, decided to mock Gilbert and Sullivan. It's very light."

The plot revolves around a film crew of Americans that journey to the fictional European nation of Eurolania. The country is desperately poor, and the director of the film crew decides to film a motion picture there in order to boost the economy.

"The country is bankrupt, and they come up with a brilliant idea that, if they make a movie, they will pay the king a million dollars," Rempe said. "Which in 1934 is a lot of money."

The plot unfurls with an attempted coup, a heroic cameraman and a brave prince saving the day, and marriages leading to your typical "happily ever after" scenario. In between, there are silly songs, such as the Eurolanian royal family instructing the peasants how to properly cheer for them, or the American characters giving lessons to the Eurolanians about how to be patriotic.

Over the years, as he earned his doctorate and began a career in education, Rempe couldn't find any other productions of the show -- not even decades later, after retiring from a career as an English and Shakespeare teacher at Bishop McDevitt high school.

"Library research sent me down the tunnel," he said. "I have found about more than 125 documented productions, from 1934 when it was written, to 1967, which was the last time that I could find that anyone put it on."

But since then? "There's nothing," Rempe said -- not only no productions of the operetta, but no recordings of the performances or the music.

Eventually, about 10 years ago, Rempe was able to track down copies of the script and piano score, written by Geoffrey Morgan and composed by Arthur Penn, respectively. Continued searching led to interesting finds, such as photos from a stage production in Gawler, Australia, or info on a Canadian production as a benefit fundraiser in Vancouver.

No other productions surfaced, and Rempe's attempts to coordinate new productions with various companies from across the nation fell through. But Rempe's search eventually drew the attention of a reporter with the Wall Street Journal. And ironically, the attention from an international newspaper would bring his cause to the attention of the right person in his own home town -- Kathleen Torchia, founder of Capitol Opera Harrisburg.

"Soembody told her about the Wall Street Journal story, and then she got in touch with me," Rempe said. "Right when I found out that these other places weren't able to do it, Kathleen called."

Torchia, fittingly enough, had been a student at Bishop McDevitt while Rempe was a teacher at the school. And after discussing the project and making arrangements with their mutual alma mater, Rempe and Torchia will co-direct the production through the Capitol Opera this June at Bishop McDevitt High School.

After all this waiting, Rempe is "pretty excited" to finally see "Rose of the Danube" once again. But he's also tempering his expectations.

"It's become this perfect play in my mind," he said. "I have a feeling it's not going to be as perfect as my mind remembers it!"

Performances will be held at Bishop McDevitt on June 8 at 7:30 p.m. and June 9 at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $20, $10 for students. For more info, visit the Capitol Opera Harrisburg website.

For more Pennsylvania life & culture:
South Korean President Moon Jae-in said Thursday that a dramatic change is going on in the Korean Peninsula citing the successive summits between the two Koreas and between the United States and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).

Moon made the remarks during a meeting with presidents of 47 local media outlets, saying the summits would be a dramatic change that nobody has ever expected, according to the presidential Blue House.

Through the upcoming inter-Korean summit, Moon said, South Korea should establish a firm milestone to open the road to the Korean Peninsula's denuclearization, the establishment of a permanent peace regime and the sustainable development of inter-Korean relations.

He noted South Korea should end the armistice system, which has lasted for the past 65 years, to sign peace treaty after declaring an end to the war.

The Korean Peninsula remains technically at war as the 1950-53 Korean War ended in armistice, not peace treaty.

The Blue House said earlier this week that it was reviewing ways to turn the current armistice into a peace regime during the summit between President Moon and top DPRK leader Kim Jong Un scheduled for April 27 at the truce village of Panmunjom.

Moon said the DPRK has shown its willingness toward a complete denuclearization and its active will to engage in a dialogue, while actively preparing for the summit with the United States.

Moon, however, added that it was currently premature to say about a successful dialogue as the success cannot be said of until both the inter-Korean and the DPRK-U.S. summits end successfully.
Carlisle's police chief and other community leaders will hold an "opioid addiction awareness forum" on Monday evening at Wilson Middle School at 900 Waggoners Gap Road.



"The forum will focus on what residents need to know to be part of the solution -- there is a role for everyone," police Chief Taro Landis said in a news release. While the opioid crisis is impacting the whole country, Pennsylvania ranks near the top for fatal overdoses. Moreover, Landis noted the problem has increased at an especially fast pace in Cumberland County, where the number of fatal overdoses increased from 66 in 2016 to 83 in 2017.





The doors to the event will open at 5 and local groups will be on hand to provide information about how to get treatment and help. A formal presentation and panel discussion will begin at 6 p.m. Panelists will include Landis, a Cumberland County judge who oversees a new program devoted to getting people who are addicted into treatment rather than punishing them, and treatment experts. A pair of area residents who formed a organization after losing their granddaughter to an overdose also is expected to attend the event.
Marijuana aficionados might consider Friday to be a holiday, but the Upper Allen Township police are warning them not to try to celebrate it with a toke or two.

At least the cops have a sense of humor about it, though.

Friday, for those not familiar with the pot culture, is an unofficial holiday known as "420."

Friday is April 20 - or 4/20 - get it?

According to an authoritative story by Paul Elias of the Associated Press, 420 was created as a joke by five northern California men more than 40 years ago. The idea is for marijuana fans worldwide to mark the holiday by taking a communal toke at 4:20 p.m. on 4/20.

Don't even think about doing that in our bailiwick, the Upper Allen cops are advising.

"The Upper Allen Police Department wish all a happy 420 day," they wrote on Facebook. "Having extended our best wishes, here is the PSA: we will arrest you if you are in possession of marijuana or you are driving under the influence of marijuana. Stock up on Cheetos and Mountain Dew, if needed. Please wash your hands before the sticky residual orange dust gets on everything you touch."

"Remember, read the story don't be the story."
The leader of a far-reaching midstate shoplifting ring is stuck with a $452,000 bill for his crime after a state Superior Court panel rejected his appeal.

The court wasn't convinced by James Giuffrida's claim that his lawyer was ineffective both before and after he pleaded no contest to running an "organized retail theft conspiracy" that employed more than 100 drug addicts.

The York County man was arrested in November 2012. Two years later, right after a jury was selected for his trial, Giuffrida pleaded no contest to multiple criminal charges.

He had no sentencing deal. York County Judge Craig T. Trebilcock sentenced Giuffrida to 6 3/4 to 13 1/2 years in prison and fined him $55,000. Giuffida, 35, later was ordered to pay $397,431 in restitution as well.

In the state court opinion denying the appeal, Senior Judge William H. Platt rejected Giuffrida's assertion that his lawyer coerced him to make the no contest plea. Giuffrida insisted his attorney did so because he wasn't ready for the trial.

Platt concluded that court records show otherwise. Giuffrida twice voiced his desire to plead no contest even after Trebilcock advised him that without a sentencing agreement, "You're entering a plea without a safety net," the state judge noted.

Investigators said that at its height Giuffrida's ring employed 110 addicts who committed more than 2,500 thefts at 92 stores in York, Adams, Cumberland, Lebanon, Dauphin and Lancaster counties and in Maryland.

The thieves would return some items for refunds on store gift cards, police said, and would keep others for resale. Giuffrida would gather the goods and gift cards at his West York business, Powerhouse Graphix, they said.
The two men killed in a small plane crash in Blair County on Thursday have been identified.

James Durkin, left, and Dr. Stephen Grady

The pilot of the plane was James Durkin, co-owner of Choice Security Services LLC in East Hempfield Township, according to LancasterOnline. With him was Dr. Stephen Grady, a dentist at Center Street Family Dentistry in Camp Hill.

The single-plane engine crashed behind a residence at about 8:45 a.m. Thursday, according to The Altoona Mirror. Blair County Coroner Patricia Ross told the newspaper the two men onboard the plane were killed on impact.

The plane, a Cirrus SR22, was scheduled to fly Thursday from Lancaster Airport to South Bend International Airport in Indiana. Durkin and Grady were flying to attend a University of Notre Dame Alumni Association Leadership Conference, LancasterOnline reports.

The plane was supposed to arrive at Altoona-Blair County Airport at 8:51 a.m. Thursday.
The trust that owns development rights to one of Cumberland County's oldest farms argues in a new court filing that Cumberland Valley School District has other options for its next building projects, including lands it already owns.

That's one of the reasons, the Delaware County-based Natural Lands Trust argues, that a judge should block the district's seizure of the McCormick Farm off Carlisle Pike in Silver Spring Township.

In its preliminary objections, filed Monday, attorneys for the trust noted the district already owns two parcels off Rich Valley Road - even closer to the existing high school / district office campus than the McCormick property - that total more than 32 acres.

The two parcels are actually divided by a small housing development. But the trust's filing notes that elsewhere in the district, Cumberland Valley has built a middle school and elementary school on a 31.5-acre tract.

That may set the stage for an argument that the larger of the two Rich Valley Road tracts, at 19.67 acres, is large enough to house a new middle school by itself - especially given its proximity to the district's main campus and the playing fields and other amenities that come with it.

"Our preliminary point is that it appears that the school district has other options that should be addressed," said Oliver Bass, a spokesman for Natural Lands.

The filing represents the formal opening of the court battle over the taking, which has already dominated public comment periods at school board meetings through the winter.

The board, which filed to take the farm through eminent domain in March, has said it is looking for a cost-efficient way to bank additional land for future school projects in the face of anticipated future population growth.

The declaration of taking resolution passed in January stated the farm could be used for a new middle school.

Attempts to reach the district spokeswoman about the latest filing were not successful by press time for this story.

But in an informational tract on the issue published earlier this week, the district noted the McCormick Farm is seen as the site for a potential replacement of the current Eagle View Middle School.

It was specifically targeted because of its direct access to the Carlisle Pike, which could dramatically reduce road development and other infrastructure costs, and its central location with regard to the district's growth hot spots.

Current plans for the site, the district added in its materials, are only conceptual.

But a 1,400-student middle school, based on the planning template used for the new Mountain View Middle School in Hampden Township, would require a lot of about 34 acres, the district said.

Natural Lands received the 108-acre farm in 1983 by donation from the McCormick Family Trust. It sold the farm and farmhouse in 1986 to the family of Pyong Sun Lee, but retained a conservation easement designed to keep the land undeveloped.

That easement not only gives the conservancy standing in the case, but it would entitle it to compensation should the taking go through.

Making money is not, Bass said, the trust's goal. "The McCormick family chose to preserve the entirety of this historic property, and we have a duty to keep it intact."

The heart of the conservancy's case is that Cumberland Valley's action amounts to an "abuse of discretion."

In its pleading, the conservancy asserts the McCormick Farm tract is more than three times the size of lands hosting the current Good Hope Middle School and Hampden Elementary School.

Not only is the farm larger than the district needs, the conservancy asserts, there is no evidence on the record that the district considered other lands that may be available to it - including the tracts it already owns off Rich Valley Road.

Given that preserved farmland is a "highest priority" for preservation, the trust's attorneys argue, that amounts to an abuse of the board's discretion that would give the courts the right to stop the condemnation.

The filing also asserts the taking may also violate Natural Lands' rights under Article 1, Section 27 of the state Constitution to preserve the land for its "natural, historic and esthetic values."

The district has until early May to respond the preliminary objections.

The court battle is just one front in the developing battle over the McCormick Farm.

The school board and district leaders also face a mounting campaign of public opposition to the condemnation that includes groups from the Cumberland County Commissioners to grassroots activists that are packing the board meetings.

At those sessions, many people have raised the argument that the taking of the farm could undermine years of effort and millions of dollars invested in open space preservation around the state.

But those public policy arguments are largely absent from the Natural Lands' court filing, likely because in a condemnation proceeding the issues before the court are largely limited to whether the taking party "is guilty of fraud, bad faith or has committed an abuse of discretion."

Cumberland Valley is one of the largest school districts in the state. Current student enrollment is 9,142 students, which officials say represents an increase of more than 1,700 since 2010.
PHILADELPHIA -- Protesters marched from Philadelphia Police Headquarters to City Hall on Thursday evening to continue demonstrations and demand accountability from the police and government after the arrest of two black men at a Starbucks last week.

The rally and march was organized by Philadelphians Organized to Witness, Empower and Rebuild (P.O.W.E.R.), an interfaith community organization made up of clergy and community members. P.O.W.E.R. also led Monday evening's sit-in at the Starbucks at 1801 Spruce St. where the two men were arrested while waiting to meet an acquaintance April 19.

On Thursday night, P.O.W.E.R. continued to reiterate its demands, which include a face-to-face meeting with Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney. Starbucks CEO Kevin R. Johnson met with P.O.W.E.R. on Wednesday, and the group wants Kenney to do the same.

Here is Rev. Dr. Mark Kelly Tyler, senior pastor of Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church reiterating P.O.W.E.R.'s demands outside of City Hall:

Can't see the video? Click here

Last weekend, Philadelphia police commissioner Richard Ross Jr. said police officers did "absolutely nothing wrong" and "followed policy." But earlier Thursday, Ross said he "failed miserably" while handling the situation.

The leaders of the protest, which also included P.O.W.E.R. executive director Rev. Gregory Holston and Pastor Melanie DeBouse, commended Ross but said the group still wants its demands met.

The initial demands were:

A meeting with Starbucks leadership to discuss the coffee company's role in gentrification and perpetuating racism, policies regarding customers and investment in black-owned franchises in African American communities. They also want a minimum $15 an hour wage for Starbucks employees.

A meeting with the Philadelphia Police Department leadership to discuss implicit bias training, de-escalation techniques and the use of body cameras. They also want all police officers to wear body cameras within a year.

In addition to meeting with Johnson, P.O.W.E.R. also met with Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner.

Thursday evening's rally and march started around 5 p.m. at Philadelphia Police Headquarters on Race Street. Then, the group of P.O.W.E.R. leaders and about 50 to 100 protesters marched down 8th Street to Market Street and over to City Hall.

Watch the protesters march to City Hall here:
An armed robber who terrified a Temple University student and her three roommates during an invasion of their off-campus apartment has been denied a reduction in his prison term.

Instead, a state Superior Court panel upheld Elijah Washington's 12- to 36-year sentence in an opinion by Senior Judge Lillian Harris Ransom.

Police said Washington, now 29, and another man forced their way into the student's apartment after following her home from a subway station in March 2013.

All four women were bound with duct tape and threatened at gunpoint while the robbers stole cash, computers, debit cards and cell phones, Ransom noted. Washington left his DNA behind on a cigarette butt that police found lying on a kitchen counter.

Washington fled to Georgia but was tracked down and extradited a year after the crime. He pleaded guilty to charges of aggravated assault, robbery, burglary and conspiracy. He had no deal regarding sentencing.

A Philadelphia County judge chose the punishment after Washington underwent a mental health evaluation, Ransom noted. The county judge later recommended that Washington serve his time in a prison mental health unit but refused to pare his jail sentence.

Ransom seconded that decision after finding Washington presented no argument on appeal that his punishment is unjust.
A small plane crash in Woodbury Township, Blair County, killed two men who were onboard the aircraft.

The single-plane engine crashed behind a residence at about 8:45 a.m. Thursday, according to The Altoona Mirror. Blair County Coroner Patricia Ross told the newspaper the two men onboard the plane were killed on impact.

Both men were in their 50s, and one was identified and the identity of the second is pending.

The plane, a Cirrus SR22, was scheduled to fly Thursday from Lancaster Airport to South Bend International Airport in Indiana.

The plane was supposed to arrive at Altoona-Blair County Airport at 8:51 a.m. Thursday.
By David Nabhan

There are several thousand coal seam fires burning out of control globally, every year pumping into the atmosphere a quantity of carbon dioxide roughly equal to one fifth of the annual carbon footprint of the United States.

David Nabhan (NewsMax.com)

Yet this crisis elicits hardly a word from environmentalists -- even though attempting to address it would harm no interests. These are wildfires, burning underground. They are a burden and hindrance to all.

Instead though, activists who ignore tackling an urgency which would have the support of everyone, remain inflexibly focused on the many heavy-handed restrictions demanded to be placed on industry, commerce, the military and many other facets of modern society, to the detriment of all.

Innovators in the past, improving the stewardship of the land, almost always put forward solutions to enhance lifestyles, thereby lightening the load upon everyone's shoulders.

Current ecological thought, however, seems habitually determined to impose serious injuries to the economy, diminution of disposable income, severe inconveniences, and at end, promote forays into the untenable.

It's becoming tedious that environmentalists should customarily opt for too many proposals that involve closing down factories, devastating whole industries, putting people out of work, and creating artificial scarcities of vital products and resources.

Extinguishing coal fires doesn't involve harming trades or subjecting large numbers of people to hardships, so dousing an amount of carbon dioxide needlessly spewed into the atmosphere equal to what could be as much as 3 percent of the annual human-produced output should certainly garner conservationists' attention.

It is noteworthy that those countries -- China, Indonesia, India -- whose truly poor ecological record provokes not the slightest comment by those stridently campaigning against Western environmental misdeeds, are the same states where the majority of the world's coal seam fires are raging.

There are some 100 burning in the U.S. -- one of the cleanest and most ecologically responsible nations in the world -- but America nonetheless remains the uninterrupted target for rebuke by environmentalists.

Needing a breathing apparatus to navigate through smoke-filled Beijing doesn't evoke even an off-handed remark from activists who are apoplectic about Americans enjoying barbecues in their backyards.

The deafening silence about coal seam fires in countries that receive unshakable deference no matter their environmental failings lends credence to the impression that a good part of ecology, unfortunately, has been converted to something much closer to politics.

A worldview that ignores over 1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide belching into the air in Asia due to subterranean wildfires while proposing carbon taxes on portable hibachis in the U.S. may well exhibit real ambiguity. The confusion isn't just confined to smoldering coal underground; it appears that many voices demonizing coal the loudest seem unaware of the consequences of their advocacy.

In the simplest terms, without coal there is also no steel.

That exigency merits serious contemplation, endeavoring to imagine the almost unthinkable condition of a world bereft of iron -- also meaning one lacking modern buildings, bridges, transportation, agriculture, communication, energy, national defense, hospitals, emergency vehicles -- or vehicles of any kind, for that matter.

If the ruinous vision of a planet without coal -- and therefore without iron or steel -- should ever come to pass, in short order a large fraction of the people on Earth would be spared having to witness the dreadful outcome, since the world's population would be decimated as never before in the history of the planet.

The calculus is very simple, and just as inescapable. One ton of coal (converted to high grade coke) is required for every two tons of steel produced. And, lest the dilemma be misunderstood, the necessity for coal can't be overcome by simply utilizing an alternative heating method to smelt iron ore -- which is iron oxide. What occurs in a blast furnace isn't just a matter of melting the ore, but also the chemistry that results from pumping drafts of carbon monoxide liberated from the coke through the crucible in order to pull oxygen out of the ore, creating pure iron. The alternative would be to utilize the prior combustible which humans had used since the dawn of the Iron Age in 1,000 B.C., and which contributed to sizeable deforestation in the past -- firewood.

That's probably not something most would like to revisit.

There are experimenters currently wrestling with completely novel ways to separate iron from its ore -- using electrolytes, natural gas, and other methods. It's unknown whether any will produce results commercially viable enough to overturn the current massive infrastructure that produces 1.6 billion tons of steel annually worldwide.

In the meantime, perhaps putting out those coal seam fires might make it onto environmentalists' agenda.

David Nabhan is a science writer, the author of "Earthquake Prediction: Dawn of the New Seismology" (2017) and three previous books on earthquakes. He writes from Pittsburgh. This piece first appeared on NewsMax.com.
If Australia considers exchanges between countries as interference, it should lock itself up in the dark room, the Chinese foreign ministry said in response to Australia's anti-China allegations on Thursday.

People who have such a mindset need to reflect, foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying told a daily briefing on Thursday.

If there is no mutual trust, there's no room for cooperation. China hopes Australia takes practical action and corrects its prejudice against China, Hua said.

China's Ambassador to Australia Cheng Jingye also expressed his worries in an interview with The Australian on Thursday.

He warned that the relationship between the two countries has been marred by "systematic, irresponsible and negative remarks" about China, and that trade ties could be damaged if the situation is not repaired.

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull also said Australia won't step back over the issue of preventing overseas political interference, the Australian Financial Review reported on Thursday.

Australia's high-profile anti-China tone is the result of geopolitical concerns, not economic ones, Gao Cheng, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS)' National Institute of International Strategy, told the Global Times.

Australia closely follows US' steps, which is escalating trade tensions with China and spearheading the Indo-Pacific strategy aimed at containing China, Gao said.

According to the 2018 Westpac Australia-China Business Survey, almost 80 percent of more than 160 Australian businesses are optimistic about their operations in China for the next year, Bloomberg reported.

Their confidence comes from a promising Chinese economy. Australian companies cannot be immune to political tensions, Han Feng, professor and deputy director-general at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' National Institute of International Strategy, told the Global Times Thursday.

If Australia continues to stir up anti-China sentiments, it will suffer the consequences. Less Chinese investment in Australia would also make the Australian economy suffer, Gao said.
A Canadian Pacific Railway employee walks along the side of a locomotive in a marshalling yard in Calgary, Wednesday, May 16, 2012. Passenger train services in Ontario are warning of potential disruptions as Canadian Pacific Railway and two of its unions head for a midnight deadline to settle contract issues. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntosh
FILE - In this April 14, 1939 file photo, painter and surrealist Frida Kahlo, who was the wife of noted Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, poses at her home in Mexico City. Distant relatives of the late Mexican artist Frida Kahlo have won a temporary injunction on Thursday, April 19, 2018, that stops sales of a Frida Barbie doll. (AP Photo/File)
The manned submersible, Shenhai Yongshi or Deep Sea Warrior. (File Photo)

A South China base for deep-sea research vessels is under discussion and pending approval for completion in Hainan Province by 2019, project organizers said on Thursday.

The deep-sea port will be located in the Nanshangang region of Sanya, according to a plan released by the Hainan commerce department on March 13.

Government departments are negotiating with companies about the South China project, a staff member at Sanya Creative Industry Park told the Global Times on Thursday.

At an estimated cost of 560 million yuan ($85.6 million), construction is expected to complete by 2019 when the base will be able to accommodate five research vessels ranging from 1,000 to 6,000 tons.

The port will act as the southern base for seven research vessels owned by the Beijing-based Chinese Academy of Sciences, as well as the manned submersible Shenhai Yongshi, or Deep Sea Warrior.

It will also provide logistical support for domestic marine research vessels. The submersible can descend to 4,500 meters, Xinhua News Agency reported.

"Echoing the national deep sea base in north, the new base will firstly serve research work in the South China Sea, as well as for other sea areas such as the southeastern Indian Ocean," Lin Qi, a research assistant at the research center for Marine Science of National Institute for South China Sea Studies in Hainan, told the Global Times.

China's first national deep-sea base, located in the coastal city of Qingdao in East China's Shandong Province, went into operation in 2015, Qilu Evening News reported.

Deep-sea vessels wanting to conduct research in the South China Sea or southeastern Indian Ocean must currently make the arduous journey from Qingdao, Lin said.

The new base in Sanya will also enhance tourism and science popularization, according to Lin.

"For example, a sea world park can be built at the base, which can promote tourism in the area," he said.
FILE - In this Feb. 13, 2018, file photo, Natalie Portman arrives at the Los Angeles premiere of "Annihilation" at the Regency Village Theatre. The foundation behind the prestigious Genesis Prize says this year's winner, Natalie Portman, has pulled out of the June awards ceremony in Israel, quoting a representative for the U.S. actress as saying recent events in Israel were "extremely distressing to her," according to a statement on Thursday, April 19, 2018. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File)
FILE - In this April 11, 2018, file photo, Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens speaks at a news conference in Jefferson City, Mo., about allegations related to an extramarital affair with his hairdresser. Accused of sexual and political misconduct, Greitens is defying calls to resign from top lawmakers in his own party while instead banking on steady support from the voters who backed his populist campaign against "corrupt insiders" and "career politicians." (Julie Smith/The Jefferson City News-Tribune via AP, File)
FILE - In this Nov. 20, 2016, file photo, then-President-elect Donald Trump, right, and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani pose for photographs as Giuliani arrives at the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster clubhouse in Bedminster, N.J. Giuliani is joining the legal team defending President Donald Trump in the special counselAos Russia investigation. ThatAos according to a statement from Trump personal attorney Jay Sekulow. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)
FILE - In this June 13, 2013 file photo, then-Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt gestures as he answers a question during a news conference in Oklahoma City. Newly obtained records show PruittAos penchant for travel and concerns about security was notable even before he became head of the Environmental Protection Agency. The records show that as OklahomaAos attorney general, Pruitt frequently traveled out-of-state for appearances before conservative groups and used an office investigator as a driver. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki, File)
An attendant holds a program as people gather in honor of former first lady Barbara Bush outside Houston City Hall, Thursday, April 19, 2018, in Houston. Barbara Bush died April 17, at the age of 92. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip )
China will send 19 peacekeeping police officers to South Sudan and Cyprus to carry out UN peacekeeping missions, according to the Ministry of Public Security on Thursday.

China has sent a total of 2,614 police officers to the nine peacekeeping mission areas and the UN headquarters in New York since joining the UN peacekeeping mission in 2000. [Photo: Chinanews.com]

With 12 members, the police crew bound for South Sudan will be the seventh to be deployed in the country, and will set off on April 22.

Consisting of seven members, the crew set for Cyprus will be dispatched in batches in April and July.

The average age of the members is 37. They come from different police classifications and excel in foreign languages.

Since joining the UN peacekeeping mission in 2000, China has sent a total of 2,614 police officers to the nine peacekeeping mission areas and the UN headquarters in New York. They have received good reputation from across the globe, according to the ministry.
Copies of the memos written by former FBI Director James Comey are photographed in Washington, Thursday, April 19, 2018. President Donald Trump told former FBI Director James Comey that he had serious concerns about the judgment of his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, according to memos maintained by Comey and obtained by The Associated Press. The 15 pages of documents contain new details about a series of interactions that Comey had with Trump in the weeks before his May 2017 firing. Those encounters include a White House dinner at which Comey says Trump asked him for his loyalty. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
Attorney Brent Blakely, left, who represents President Donald Trump's attorney Michael Cohen, with Trump's attorneys Ryan Stonerock, middle, and Charles Harder, right, leave U.S. District Court for the Central District of California after a hearing regarding adult-film actress Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels', case against Trump in Los Angeles, on Friday, April 20, 2018. A federal judge in Los Angeles has told Cohen's lawyers that he needs to file a declaration in court in order to delay a lawsuit filed by Daniels. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)
JUNEAU, Alaska (AP)  The Alaska Legislature already is cutting into the amount of the yearly oil-wealth fund check given to residents to help pay for state government.

Now, lawmakers are looking at other ways for residents to spend more of their check  to help pay for state government.

One proposal would set up a raffle to benefit schools, with a minimum buy-in of $100 from a residents Alaska Permanent Fund dividend. Twenty-five percent of entry dollars would go toward the prize fund.

So, if residents spend $400,000 of their oil checks on entry fees, half of that  or $200,000 ...
Ill keep this brief since a reporter shouldnt be near an op-ed page. I wrote a few stories for the Pilot over an 11-month period and now Im leaving, back to my home state, Michigan, where I will be editor of a newspaper.

My departure is not because I dont like the Pilot or the town. This newspaper is full of people with character and grit and love. Petersburg is lucky to have it. Id like to stay, but this opportunity presented itself.

Thank you to those who read the newspaper. You fight the good fight just by glancing at it. Also, to the newsmakers, the sources, thank you....
Beijing Municipal Foreign Affairs Office has asked for the help of local residents to help fix any grammatical English errors they find on street signs around the city. If you have a keen eye for detail and love English grammar then this is the perfect opportunity to help out!

The aptly named exercise, the '2018 Online Correction of Erroneous Public Sign Translations' was launched recently on March 27.

It's thought the push comes to tidy up the city's street and road signs before the next Winter Olympics in 2022. Beijing has been named the hosting city of the 2022 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, and as such, the city will receive huge media attention across the world. During this time, Beijing will see an even higher amount of tourism from all over the world as it holds the opening and closing ceremonies, so signs must be legible and correct.

Although a funny sight for those that have a good grasp of English grammar, some of the signs around Beijing are incorrectly worded and some are even rude, so now is the perfect time to get everything in shape. Due to the sheer size of Beijing, it's obvious that this isn't a one man job.

So, to encourage people to get involved, the Foreign Affairs Office has included monthly prizes for those that find the most signs to be altered. If you come across a sign that could do with a little updating, simply fill in the form here. Your application will then be sent over to a team of grammar experts and if your version is correct, you could win a prize!

To make things easier, Qianlong Net, one of the city's online newspapers, has published this helpful guide for you to reference .

Here are our favorite sign mistakes from around China and what they should say in English. Do you recognize any from Beijing? Let us know!

Mom, get beautiful quickly (photo: mailonline)

Slippery road, be careful (photo: mailonline)

Caution, danger of falling into the water (photo: mailonline)

Nationality Garden (photo: mailonline)

Poisonous and harmful rubbish (photo: mailonline)
Guyana working with IMF to employ progressive tax regime for oil sector

By Kaieter News



GEORGETOWN

Petroleumworld 04 20 2018 Finance Minister, Winston Jordan recently assured that the Government is working along with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to implement a menu of recommendations made by the organization, one of which includes employing a more progressive tax regime for the oil sector.



The economist was at the time, responding to questions from this newspaper on the IMF's reports which were issued to the coalition administration. He was reminded that one of the suggestions by the IMF is that the government should employ a more progressive tax regime so that it receives a higher share of profits as projects earn more.



Jordan was careful to note that since 2016, different organizations, mainly the IMF, did a range of studies on Guyana's oil sector and how it needs to best prepare for the revenues to come. He said that the IMF explained that after examining Guyana's template for contracts, there are certain things which should not have occurred.



Be that as it may, the Finance Minister said that the IMF was quite clear that there is nothing you can do with those (contracts) you already signed. So whatever they recommend is going forward 



He said that the Government indeed received reports from the IMF on best practices to be implemented in the petroleum fiscal regime. He stressed again that the recommendations therein would not affect contracts already signed.



The Finance Minister noted once more that he is aware of the recommendations of the IMF, including the need to implement a more progressive tax rate. He noted that the IMF is providing assistance to Guyana to help it employ all of its suggestions.

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Barbados seeks from CARICOM a regional cooperation mechanism on oil and gas

By Kaieter News



GEORGETOWN

Petroleumworld 04 20 2018 Government Ministers with responsibility for energy from the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) yesterday discussed proposals from Barbados for a regional cooperation mechanism on oil and gas.



Barbados Minister of State, Senator Darcy Boyce chaired the one-day 73rd Meeting of the Council for Trade and Economic Development (COTED) on Energy at CARICOM's Secretariat here.



Speaking at the opening ceremony of the meeting, Boyce expressed his happiness that there is more attention in the Region on oil and gas.



While we are all determined to make sure that we benefit as best as we can from renewable energy and energy efficiency, we all also have to bear in mind that if we are the owners of resources, we ought not to let those resources stand there idly, but we should use them for the benefit of our countries and for the Region. So I am very glad that we are not shying away from the matter of oil and gas, Boyce stated.



At Barbados' request, the matter of cooperation on oil and gas exploration and production was placed on the meeting's agenda. Guyana's delegation at the meeting was led by Minister of Public Infrastructure and Government's point person on energy, David Patterson. Boyce noted that the benefits of the regional energy sectors must filter to the average Caribbean person.



We also have to make sure that the benefits of the work that we are doing in energy efficiency and renewable energy redound to the benefit of the average consumer, in the homes, in the businesses of our countries, he said.



Joseph Cox, Assistant Secretary-General, Trade and Economic Integration, CARICOM Secretariat, said that energy was an integral part of the region's agenda and pointed out the action-oriented nature of the agenda before the Ministers.



He said that the stage was being set to advance the regional agenda in a meaningful way and to have finite outcomes.



Cox said that there would be some action with respect to the Caribbean Centre for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency (CCREEE).



On Tuesday, at the preparatory meeting for the COTED, Montserrat deposited its instruments of ratification of the Agreement Establishing the Centre. The CARICOM Member State became the fifth Member States to do so, effectively paving the way for the establishment of the Centre's legal identity by mid next month.



The transition of the CCREEE to a fully operational stage and the approval of a Regional Energy Efficiency Building Code (REEBC), are among the matters the Ministers considered.



Other matters which the Ministers discussed were energy standards, regional energy security and progress on the Caribbean Sustainable Energy Roadmap and Standard (C-SERMS).

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Guyana will pay at least US$208M to cap Exxon's Liza phase one wells

By Abena Rockcliffe-Campbell



GEORGETOWN

Petroleumworld 04 20 2018 Decommissioning of the 17 wells drilled in the Stabroek Block for Liza phase one will cost Guyana nothing less than US$208M. This is the figure quoted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in a 2017 report it handed to the government titled, A Reform Agenda for Petroleum Taxation and Revenue Management.



Decommissioning involves the safe plugging and abandonment of the hole drilled in the earth's surface from which oil and gas are extracted.

The US$208M cost quoted by the IMF will be incurred at the tail-end of the project when revenue is at its lowest.



The fear is that Guyana may have to utilize the money it secured early on in the project just to cover this cost. Worst case scenario, money may have to be taken from elsewhere to service this debt.



It must be noted that the US$208M only covers decommissioning of wells under Liza phase one that has 17 wells.



The cost of decommissioning has proven to be a burden to many countries around the world. But gone are the days when countries were so obsessed with first oil that they neglected to acknowledge the financial ramifications of not establishing a proper framework for the handling of abandonment or decommissioning of wells.



While some countries like Canada have put mechanisms in place to safeguard themselves, other jurisdictions like those in the United Kingdom continue to reel from the tremendous debt on their shoulders.



Yesterday, Attorney at Law and Oil and Gas Consultant, Charles Ramson Jr. said that Guyana should not have to deal with that debt alone, but that is what our nation's negotiators agreed to.



Ramson said that Guyana should have followed modern mechanisms employed by countries to deal with decommission cost. The lawyer said, We have to always think of the future, there should have been provisions for a fund to be set up to handle this expense.



Canada, for example, has set up a fund to handle decommissioning. It is called the Abandonment Fund Reserve Account. It is established under Section 172 of The Oil and Gas Act (the Act) of Canada. (http://www.manitoba.ca/iem/petroleum/infonotes/15-03.pdf)



However, Guyana, in contracts signed post-2015 when oil was found, failed to make contractual provisions to protect the nation from having to bear the cost of decommissioning of wells.



Article 20 of the ExxonMobil contract states, All funds required to carry out the approved abandonment programme shall be made available by Contractor when the cost for abandonment are incurred and All cost included in the approved abandonment programme and budget shall be recoverable as operating costs.



Therefore, while Government officials remain bullish about the revenues to be gained from ExxonMobil, the huge cost associated with abandoning a well or production facility will be borne by Guyana and can significantly affect revenue in the sunset of any particular oil project.



In a previous interview with this newspaper, Ramson cited a UK Oil and Gas Authority report published in 2017, which stated that decommissioning costs in the UK continental shelf are best estimated to be about US$80B.



That sum exceeded the remaining net tax revenues from UK oil and gas production.



Further, the Guardian reported that British taxpayers face paying billions of pounds more than previously expected for dismantling the North Sea's oil rigs in a further sign that the industry is becoming a burden on public finances.



It stated, Decommissioning oil and gas facilities across the UK continental shelf will cost an estimated 59.7bn, according to a report by the Oil and Gas Authority (OGA). About half of that will be borne by oil companies, the rest by the public purse through tax relief.



A government regulator reportedly said that in its worst-case scenario the bill could jump to 82.7bn.



The Telegraph reported that decommissioning of North Sea oil rigs is threatening to wipe out all future tax revenues. Read more at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/09/cost-decommissioning-north-sea-wipe-future-tax-revenues/.



The focus was on exploration and production and how to get more revenue (both from the company and country perspective) which in 2016 is very similar to the Guyana situation at the moment. Globally, that has now changed significantly, especially for mature basins.



Given the aforementioned, Ramson opined that the David Granger-led government should have been advised better about these costs and should ask ExxonMobil to share these costs or to establish a fund, which takes out a nominal percentage in preparation of this large costs later in the future.



Indeed, several countries are making moves to protect themselves against the burden of decommissioning cost.

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Petrobras near deal with China's CNPC to swap refinery investment for oil

By Rodrigo Viga Gaier



RIO DE JANEIRO

Petroleumworld 04 20 2018

Brazil's state-run oil company is nearing a deal in which China National Petroleum Corp Ltd (CNPC) would invest in an oil refinery in exchange for crude oil, two people with knowledge of the talks told Reuters, potentially giving China its first refining capacity in the Americas.

Petroleo Brasileiro SA, or Petrobras, may give the state-owned Chinese firm stakes in oil fields it operates in the Campos basin, off the Rio de Janeiro coast, along with the right to use the new Comperj refinery, the sources added.

We are going to have a deal, but it is complex. We should have an integrated solution, said one of the sources, who requested anonymity because the negotiations are private.

The second source said talks with the Chinese intensified recently and a deal could be only a few weeks away.

Two other people familiar with the matter said the refinery needed about $3 billion of investment to reach an initial capacity of 165,000 barrels per day, adding that it was not clear if Petrobras would foot part of the bill.

Petrobras declined to comment. CNPC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The talks highlight rising Chinese interest in the Brazilian oil sector, which has attracted billions of dollars from oil majors over the past year for rights to new exploration blocs as the government lowers barriers to foreigners.

The Comperj deal would not be the first in which Petrobras offered oil to attract Chinese funding. In 2016, it renewed a $10 billion credit line with China Development Bank, originally opened in 2009, that was guaranteed by Brazilian oil exports.

CNPC and Petrobras signed a memorandum of understanding last year to reach a strategic partnership in oil exploration and production. CNPC has already partnered with Petrobras in the Libra field of the Santos basin, one of the largest discoveries in Brazil's prolific pre-salt oil area.

The investment at Comperj would help to offset Brazil's fuel imports and resolve a long-running headache at the complex, where Petrobras has little to show for some $13.5 billion in investments over the past decade.

The project was caught up in a corruption probe in recent years and Petrobras has booked some 6.5 billion reais ($1.92 billion) in writedowns there linked to overpriced works and services.

The company said it wants to finish Comperj, but preferably without pouring in any more money, so it is talking to potential partners. Petrobras Chief Executive Pedro Parente said last year that CNPC was in talks to invest in the refinery.

Separately, Petrobras awarded a contract last month worth 1.95 billion reais to China's Shandong Kerui Petroleum Equipment Co to build a natural gas processing unit at the Comperj complex.

The privately run Kerui Group partnered with mid-sized Brazilian engineering company Metodo Potencial Engenharia SA to build the plant in Itaborai, about 50 kilometers (30 miles) east of Rio.

$1 = 3.38 reais Reporting by Rodrigo Viga Gaier; Additional reporting by Marianna Parraga; Writing by Marcelo Teixeira; Editing by Brad Haynes, Daniel Flynn and Christian Schmollinger



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Petrobras to sell stakes in some refineries, keep others

By Tatiana Bautzer and Jose Roberto Gomes



SAO PAULO

Petroleumworld 04 20 2018

Brazil's state-run oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA is considering selling 60 percent stakes in two regional blocks comprising four refineries, and keeping full ownership of nine other units, it said in a securities filing on Thursday.

Petrobras, as the company is known, is considering the sale of a 60 percent stake in two blocks of refineries in the Northeastern and Southern regions. Each block would have two refineries and logistical assets, and Petrobras would keep a minority stake.

The company plans to keep full ownership of nine other refining units in Brazils richest region, the Southeast, according to a presentation the company will show to investors at an event on Thursday.

This partnership model, including the 60 percent stake sale in four refineries and keeping the other nine refineries, will leave Petrobras with a 75 percent market share of refining in Brazil, according to the presentation.

The northeastern block would include refineries, pipelines and terminals in the states of Pernambuco and Bahia, while the southern block includes two units in the states of Parana and Rio Grande do Sul.

The partnership model to be presented is the result of internal discussions but no final decision has been made, and the company hopes to discuss it with private investors, the filing said.



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WASHINGTON, April 19 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Donald Trump has said he'd bring up Japan's sensitive abductees issue when he meets the Democratic People's Republic of Korea's (DPRK) leader in an upcoming historic meeting. It remains unknown what the outcome will be.

"I suspect Trump will raise the subject if there is a meeting. Of course his priority will be the three American hostages held by North Korea (DPRK)," said Douglas Paal, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"There have also been reports from North Korea (DPRK) that the regime believes the abductees question has been settled, so expectations for concrete results are low even though emotions still run high," Paal told Xinhua.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe concluded his two-day working visit to the United States on Wednesday. During a meeting with Trump, Abe scored a major win when Trump promised he'd bring up the issue during the upcoming historic meeting with DPRK leader Kim Jong-un.

The issue has been ongoing for some 40 years.

"Trump should raise the issue of Japanese abductees with Kim Jong-un, but in the context of a broader, lasting peace in the region," said Troy Stangarone, senior director at the Korea Economic Institute, a Washington-based non-profit policy research institution.

"While the focus of the upcoming talks will be denuclearization, if there is to be a sustainable peace in the region afterwards, North Korea (DPRK) will need to resolves issues such as the abductees in addition to denuclearizing," Stangarone told Xinhua.

Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Darrell West told Xinhua that it would not likely be difficult for the DPRK to address the abductees issue.

"It should be easy for North Korea (DPRK) to address the abductees issue. So I would anticipate progress there," he said.

"It is common during negotiations for each country to offer goodwill gestures that remove an impediment to good relations. This is a topic that should be simple to resolve because it will look like progress is being made and there are concrete benefits," he said.
Cathedral Village, where the father of former national security adviser H.R. McMaster Jr. died last week, has had an uptick in deficiencies in recent years. Show here is the entrance in the Upper Roxborough section of Philadelphia. Read more

The Philadelphia nursing home where H.R. McMaster Sr. died last Friday has had an uptick in deficiencies cited by health inspectors during annual inspections in recent years, federal records show.

McMaster, the father of former national security adviser H.R. McMaster Jr., died Friday of "blunt impact head trauma."

"The Department of Health is aware of the situation and is in the process of conducting an investigation in the form of a facility survey," said a spokesman for the state agency that regulates nursing homes. The results of the investigation will be available on the department's website 41 days after the exit date of the survey.

The death is also under investigation by the Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office and the Philadelphia Police Department, which said it investigates nursing-home deaths "whenever they occur under suspicious circumstances." The Police Department said it could not say how many nursing-home deaths it had investigated in recent years.

Cathedral Village, in the Upper Roxborough section of Philadelphia, said in a statement Thursday that it immediately notified "appropriate authorities" of the 84-year-old's death, began its own investigation, and is cooperating with authorities. State law requires nursing homes to conduct their own investigations of a wide range of incidents when residents are hurt.

Attempts to reach the McMaster family were unsuccessful.

Sam Brooks, a nursing-home expert at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia who conducts an annual review of state inspection reports, said the quality of care at Cathedral Village had declined. "In one case, a resident complained of pain for over a day. The facility did nothing, and it turned out the resident had a leg fracture," Brooks said.

A nursing assistant asked a nurse to check on the resident because she was crying and screaming in pain, according to the inspection report. "The nurse said it was normal for the resident to scream and cry and resident had a pain patch on her leg," the report said.

The 133-bed nursing home, which is part of a continuing-care retirement community with 282 apartments, was cited for failing to complete "a thorough investigation to determine cause of the resident's pain in a timely manner."

That was one of seven citations in the January 2017 licensing survey. In March 2016, the facility was cited six times, up from zero in January 2015 and one in January 2014.

But the number of deficiencies at Cathedral Village was about average for the eight-county region, which has 236 nursing homes. The median deficiency count for the most recent inspection cycle was six, federal records show.

For three years ending in 2015, Cathedral Village, which was acquired by Presbyterian Senior Living in June 2015, had operated under U.S. Department of Justice oversight and with monitoring by a consultant. That followed the 2008 death of Carmella Vernick, who had Parkinson's disease and dementia and died after a brief stay at Cathedral Village.
The west facing facade of the barracks building on 12th Street in the Navy Yard. Read more

During the Philadelphia Navy Yard's military days, the historic barracks east of what's now a gleaming modern business park at the sprawling former base's core were home to U.S. Marines who guarded the facility.

Soon the barracks' spartan chambers may become fancy guest rooms.

Ensemble Investments LLC, the Phoenix-based owner of the Navy Yard's existing Courtyard by Marriott hotel, is in discussions to buy the trio of red brick Colonial Revival-style structures from the city for about $1.5 million, with plans to resurrect the U-shaped complex into a 230-room four-star hotel.

The plan, expected to cost $100.9 million, comes amid business growth at the Navy Yard that's stoking demand for hotel stays and would be the latest move toward expanding the former South Philadelphia military base beyond its existing identity as a corporate, industrial, and research park.

"This caters to a different group of people who are not attracted right now to the Navy Yard. They want higher-end rooms, they want a full-service hotel, they want higher-end finishes, they want to have corporate meetings there," Ensemble chairman Kam Babaoff said in an interview. "With the growing Navy Yard, the business is going to be there to support another hotel."

Plans call for renovating the buildings' existing 120,000 square feet of interior space and adding a 75,000-square-foot expansion. The buildings also will accommodate an 8,000-square-foot restaurant and bar that opens up to the Navy Yard's landscaped Central Green park, as well as about 10,000 square feet of meeting rooms and other amenities.

The barracks complex, constructed between 1919 and 1942 to house the former base's security detail, stands on the southern edge of the Central Green just outside the Navy Yard Corporate Center, a cluster of new buildings developed mostly by Liberty Property Trust of Malvern.

The buildings were later used for administrative offices and other functions, including a day-care center, until the Navy Yard came under Philadelphia-government ownership in 2000 after the U.S. Department of Defense decommissioned the site as a military base, according to a walking tour published by the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corp., which manages the 1,200-acre property for the city.

Ensemble also had proposed a 22-story apartment tower on the Delaware River near Center City. Its plan for the Navy Yard barracks is likely the most ambitious proposal to reuse existing buildings at the former base since the development of Urban Outfitters' headquarters campus in a complex of 19th- and early 20th-century warehouses on another part of the former base.

Much of the yard's office development has been in newly built structures at Liberty's Navy Yard Corporate Center, where companies including GlaxoSmithKline and FS Investments (formerly Franklin Square Capital Partners) have headquarters.

John Gattuso, regional director for Liberty Property Trust, said the barracks hotel would complement the existing development.

"This use continues to create activity around an expanded number of hours of the day," said Gattuso, whose company is not involved with the hotel plan. "That's a positive thing for the continued growth of the Navy Yard."

Ensemble had previously intended to build a new hotel from the ground up on land it acquired inside the Corporate Center beside the 1200 Intrepid Ave. office building, known for its curved facade designed by Copenhagen-based Bjarke Ingels Group.

Babaoff said Ensemble still has plans to develop that parcel, possibly as an extended-stay hotel, but it couldn't pass up the opportunity to revive the former barracks, given the size, architectural appeal, and location beside the Central Green.

"We love the exterior, the brick building," he said. "Trying to bring that back will be fantastic."

Andrew Benioff, a hotel specialist at Llenrock Group commercial real estate consultancy in Philadelphia, said it would be positive for visitors to the Navy Yard to have a higher-end, more boutique alternative to Ensemble's Marriott, which is known to be drawing a steady stream of guests.

Data from Hendersonville, Tenn.-based data and analytics firm STR backs that up: Ensemble's Marriott is among the seven hotels that STR tracks in its tally of Navy Yard, airport, and stadium-area "upscale class" hotels, which saw average occupancy rates of 76.2 percent in 2017. The average occupancy rates for all hotels in the Philadelphia metro area, by contrast, was 68.5 percent.

It definitely seems like theres demand in that area, and excess demand, Benioff said.
For months, the Christian Street Baptist Church in Bella Vista has found itself in the center of a preservation versus development feud. Currently, Ori Feibush hopes a preservation-minded buyer will step in to save the building. Read more

More than 10 months after developer Ori Feibush put the historic Christian Street Baptist Church under contract with plans to demolish it and build seven residential units in its place, the picturesque Bella Vista church is still standing. No shovels are in the ground. And while a large, yellow demolition notice hangs on the front door, the church that last year sparked a widespread preservation controversy will not face a wrecking ball anytime soon.

For the last four months, Feibush  in partnership with the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia  has been quietly shopping the property to preservation-minded buyers, with the goal of transferring his nearly $1.5 million agreement of sale to the new purchaser. So far, more than a dozen people hoping to buy the church and preserve it have toured the 7,200-square-foot, L-shaped property. Thus far, all of the offers, Feibush said, have come up "woefully short."

Still, Feibush said in an interview earlier this month, there is "no shot clock" counting down until demolition. At least not yet.

It "may be demolished  I don't want to get anyone's hopes up because we have not been able to find a reasonable alternative," Feibush said. "But I want to make an effort to try."

The attempt to find a preservation-minded buyer to whom Feibush can assign his contract represents a surprising  and even, some say, a confusing  turnabout from just six months ago, when he and some of Philadelphia's most prominent preservationists faced off at Philadelphia Historical Commission meetings. At the time, Feibush  the Philadelphia developer known for his contentious clashes with City Councilman Kenyatta Johnson  was fiercely fighting the historic designation nomination that preservationist Oscar Beisert had submitted just days after Feibush made his $1.5 million bid. The way Feibush saw it at the time, the property was ripe for redevelopment in the fast-gentrifying neighborhood. Beisert, however, argued that the church was an architectural relic  one exemplifying the heritage of Italian immigrants who occupied the neighborhood after Irish and black residents had moved on.

Feibush's attempt to find a new preservationist buyer also comes at a time when the city is mulling how to better preserve historic properties such as this one. Compared with other U.S. cities, Philadelphia drastically under-performs its peers when it comes to local preservation incentives. Although a new task force is exploring how to fix the city's preservation troubles, both developers and preservationists agree: Philadelphia's solutions must be swift and significant to make any kind of difference.

When the Christian Street Baptist Church was presented to the city's Historical Commission last November, the board originally sided with Beisert  protecting the church, constructed in 1890, from demolition. Then, just days later, the preservation body backtracked: It had counted its votes wrong. The church was not historically preserved, after all.

About that time, Feibush filed for zoning permits allowing for demolition of the church, located at 1020-24 Christian St. He told the Inquirer and Daily News in November that he hoped to begin razing the property in "early 2018" and begin construction on the five homes and one duplex shortly thereafter.

Somewhere between then and now, however, Feibush reconsidered.

"I genuinely was not perhaps as aware as I would have been or should have been to the aesthetic significance of this building to this neighborhood," Feibush, president and founder of development company OCF Realty, said in a recent interview. Saving the church, rather than demolishing it, he added, "would certainly be good for the neighborhood, good for the church, good for everyone."

"I'm not interested in re-trading" or backing out of the deal, Feibush continued. " My commitment matters to the church and it matters to me. My number one priority is to honor what I have signed. If there's a win for everyone  that's great, too."

In an effort to drum up more interest in the property, Feibush recently and privately offered to kick in as much as $500,000 if the new buyer puts up $1 million  thereby meeting Feibush's $1.5 million agreement with the church.

Still, even the most serious potential buyers have yet to offer enough money, and the process remains at a "standstill," said Paul Steinke, executive director of the Preservation Alliance. Meanwhile, the nearly 30-member, predominantly black congregation that once occupied Christian Street Baptist Church is left waiting on the $1.5 million it needs for a new, permanent worship space.

"They are very frustrated that it's been held up so long," said Jeffrey Hill, owner and president of Chest-Mount Realty, who has been publicly representing the congregation. "They are not in a comfortable place of worship."

Starting this month, Feibush began paying the congregation $100 a day to assist with rent at a temporary location.

One reason for the lack of preservation offers, Feibush believes, is that the asking price remains high  even with his contribution  for a building grappling with a limited footprint, some structural instability, and mold.

There are "not so many creative things you can do" with the building, Feibush said. Interested parties have explored retrofitting the building for everything from day cares to apartments to offices. "It's just a very small project for the amount of energy required to stabilize the structure. It's tough  I won't say impossible  but it's a very tough proposition."

"It's part of the reason why our city would be amazing if there was some type of public pool of money available to developers to preserve buildings," Feibush continued. "Historic tax credits do not get you anywhere  there needs to be dollars."

Feibush's cry for more local preservation incentives comes at a time when Philadelphia is rethinking its preservation strategy after years of historically designating only a minimal number of properties amid the city's robust housing boom. Despite 68 percent of its buildings having been constructed before 1945, Philadelphia has added just 2.2 percent of properties to the local historic register, protecting them from demolition.

Honoring a campaign promise, Mayor Kenney convened a task force to evaluate historic preservation strategies. Since it was established nearly a year ago, however, no concrete suggestions have emerged. The task force is expected to release two more reports this year, analyzing other cities' best practices and proposing solutions for Philadelphia. However, task force members have expressed frustration and skepticism with the process thus far.

"If we can find some incentives that are not onerous on the city's budget for rewarding historic designation, then we might find property owners embracing it rather than resisting it," Steinke said. "Real estate is a money game, and to a great degree, if preservation does not make economic sense, a lot of folks will not want to embrace it."

"Other cities and states have learned that lesson and have far greater historic rehabs than we do," Steinke continued. "We should be ashamed of that."

Currently, both federal and state tax credits are available for developers in Pennsylvania, though the federal tax credit program was weakened by the GOP-led Congress last year, and the state tax credit program will sunset next year. Beyond that, few local incentives exist beyond the 10-year tax abatement to encourage Philadelphia developers to preserve historic properties.

Many cities nationwide have embraced local preservation incentives  experimenting with grants and loans, zoning and parking relief, and preservation tax abatements, among other methods. In Cook County, Ill., for example, the county containing Chicago, officials in 1997 adopted a special real estate tax assessment classification to encourage preservation of "landmark" buildings: Provided that substantial rehabilitation is completed, the county stipulates, property owners can have their tax assessment reduced for 12 years.

Seattle offers everything from zoning code relief to building code relief to financial property assessment incentives similar to Cook County's. Park County, Colo., near Colorado Springs, provides developers access to small grants. San Antonio, Texas, allows historic-property owners to choose from two different local tax incentives.

According to Feibush, there is no "one size fits all approach" to encourage preservation, but Philadelphia's current tax abatement, he said, has "no consequence on preservation."

Instead, he said, a more appropriate solution is "some kind of board or fund that looks at a property on a case-by-case basis and provides dollars to developers eager to participate in preservation. Dollars available for relief for these types of things could be the missing link to preserving our city."

Beisert, in rare unison with Feibush, echoed the developer's assessment.

"In most cases, [Philadelphia's] tax abatement, as it currently stands, disincentivizes the preservation and reuse of large buildings of architectural, cultural or historical significance," Beisert said in a message. "A church conversion project always comes with more complexity and risk, making it a no-go when put on the same playing field as townhouses in a hot neighborhood."

What that means for Philadelphia, Beisert continued: "Projects that yield the least amount of public good are the ones getting the greatest development incentive."
Here's the latest dish on satellite dishes.

The Federal Communications Commission has invalidated a 2011 Philadelphia ordinance restricting placement of satellite dishes in the city, an ordinance put forth years ago by now-City Council President Darrell Clarke.

The ruling on Wednesday now means there are no official restrictions on satellite dishes across the city.

Philadelphia passed the ordinance citing the dish's potential effects on aesthetics, property values, and safety, but enforcement was stayed while the FCC deliberated for seven years.

The FCC said the ban is prohibited by its over-the-air reception-devices rule, which protects the rights of antenna users to install and use such devices to get more choice. A full copy of the ruling is available at the FCC's website.

"We are pleased that the FCC found that Philadelphia's dish-placement restrictions were unreasonable, and would have made television service much more expensive for tens of thousands of Philadelphians," said Steve Hill, president of the Satellite Broadcasting and Communications Association, in a statement.

Clarke spokeswoman Jane Roh said "this ordinance was introduced in response to constituent complaints that front-facing satellites are unsightly and frequently abandoned, meaning, there are a significant number of nonfunctioning satellites on top of homes throughout the city."

"Council President Clarke will continue to press the satellite-television industry to take some responsibility for abandoned satellites, which are installed by trained professionals for good reason and should be uninstalled by trained professionals for the same reasons," she added.

Clarke introduced the dish-ban bill to regulate the placement of unsightly satellite dishes around the city, but immediately faced opposition from satellite companies and landlords.

His bill forbade property owners from placing satellites on a building's street-front side and required the removal of satellites not in use. Some telecommunications companies leave up satellites that they have installed, even if service is canceled.

This week, the FCC's legal ruling granted a 2012 petition by the Satellite Broadcasting and Communications Association, a Washington lobbying group for satellite-dish companies such as DirecTV and DISH Network.

The FCC permanently invalidated Philadelphia's dish-placement legislation. It found that numerous provisions in the law  including placement restrictions, paperwork obligations, and painting requirements  "unreasonably raised the cost of satellite-television service, unreasonably delayed dish installation, or unreasonably hindered reception," the industry statement said. "We hope that other city governments considering similar restrictions will take heed of the FCC's decision."

City officials said they were simply acting on behalf of residents who wanted to get rid of "dish blight."

Roh also noted that the city ordinance received broad support from the National League of Cities and the National Association of Counties.

Other cities including Boston and Los Angeles have also considered bans on satellite dishes, but the ruling applies only to Philadelphia, an FCC spokesman said.
Despite a controversial past, Lewis Thomas III  shown here in 2015  is running to replace retiring State Rep. Curtis Thomas. He has the financial support of the citys powerful electricians union. Read more

It's easy to laugh off Democrat Lewis Thomas III's bid for state representative.

After all, this is a man best known for faking his resume.

Thomas, who managed Teresa Carr Deni's unsuccessful 2017 campaign for district attorney, said he was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha. He wasn't. He said he had been an adviser to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. He hadn't. He bragged about master's and a doctorate degree from Howard University. He didn't have them.

The list goes on.

In fact, Thomas has been pushed out of jobs and called a "con artist" because he's embellished his credentials so many times, according to multiple reports.

If you think all that means he doesn't have a prayer, though, think again. This is Philadelphia, the land of second chances  if you're politically connected, that is.

Thomas' campaign for North Philly's 181st District got an infusion of $25,000 from Philadelphia's powerful Electricians union, led by John "Johnny Doc" Dougherty. That's real money in a state House race.

Why would Doc throw so much cash behind Thomas?

One clue: Tommie St. Hill, a longtime political consultant for the Electricians, is Thomas' uncle.

Dougherty said he's "not really interested" in this year's General Assembly races. He is more focused on helping Gov. Wolf and congressional candidates win, he said.

But Dougherty said, "People who are good to us, we're good to," adding that St. Hill has "been working with us for over 20 years."

Thomas, too, acknowledged that his family ties helped him win Local 98's financial backing.

"Absolutely," he said. "He was essential to me receiving the support of Local 98."

Thomas also said the Electricians union is giving his campaign a boost because of his record of believing "that labor is an essential part of the fabric of Philadelphia."

As for his past, he previously acknowledged that he "made some mistakes" and "I take full responsibility for those things."

Ballard Spahr attorneys fund huge share of congressional hopefuls campaign

The powerhouse law firm Ballard Spahr is playing a big role in a closely watched congressional race in the Philly suburbs.

Mary Gay Scanlon, a Ballard attorney who lives in Swarthmore, is considered a leading contender in the Democratic primary for Pennsylvania's Fifth District. She's married to the firm's chairman, Mark Stewart. And former Gov. Ed Rendell, Ballard special counsel, has endorsed Scanlon and appeared in her television ad.

Records filed this week with the Federal Election Commission show how deep the firm's support goes.

Contributions from Ballard attorneys account for about 45 percent of the $254,000 Scanlon raised through March. That does not count the $150,000 she lent her campaign.

Joel Coon, Scanlon's campaign spokesman, said that she has led the firm's pro bono practice for the last 14 years. "So it is not surprising that a significant portion of her campaign funds come from people at Ballard Spahr who know her and trust her to be an excellent congresswoman," he said.

Ballard attorneys are generous to candidates on both sides of the political spectrum. The firm's employees have donated about $120,000 to GOP congressional candidates since 2010, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Everyone's favorite cable/telecom colossus is also helping fund Scanlon's congressional bid. Clout has learned that Comcast senior executive vice president David L. Cohen held a fundraiser last week for Scanlon, who is a longtime friend of him and his wife, Rhonda. Cohen was Rendell's former chief of staff.

The Cohens have each contributed the maximum $2,700 to Scanlon's primary campaign.

Pro-Lazer super PAC drops $200K bomb onto congressional race

Super PACs are known for making  and obliterating  political campaigns.

They can spend an unlimited amount of money to influence races, as long as they don't coordinate with candidates.

That's why all eyes have been on a super PAC in Pennsylvania's Fifth District, which was recently launched by political juggernaut John Dougherty. Known as the "Middle Class PAC," it is backing Democrat Rich Lazer, a former top aide to Mayor Kenney with ties to the Electricians union. Dougherty has financed a string of successful super PACs in recent years, including for Kenney and U.S. Rep. Brendan Boyle.

This week, the super PAC is airing its first TV ad, Clout has learned. It is spending a whopping $200,000 on spots on cable TV from Friday until April 29, according to a source familiar with political ad buys in the area.

That dwarfs the amount spent on ads so far by two other presumed leading candidates in the race: Mary Gay Scanlon and former assistant U.S. attorney Ashley Lunkenheimer.

AKPD Message & Media, the firm founded by former top Obama adviser David Axelrod, produced the spot.

The ad highlights Lazer's support for expanding pre-K and forgiving student loans. It also features lots of images of Lazer and Kenney.

A spokesman for the Lazer campaign declined to comment.

If the pro-Lazer super PAC keeps spending at this clip, it would pour nearly $600,000 into the race from now until primary election day  and even more if the group goes on broadcast TV.
Ke Jie, one of the world's best Go players, will compete against another artificial intelligence Go program, China's Golaxy, on April 27 in Fuzhou, East China's Fujian province, according to chinanews.com.

China's Ke Jie makes a move in a match with Google's AlphaGo in Wuzhen, Zhejiang Province in eastern China, May 23, 2017. [File Photo: Xinhua News Agency]

Developed by a Chinese AI team, Golaxy has a very different algorithm than AlphaGo, Google's Go program that defeated Ke last year, said Jin Xing, chairman of Golaxy.

"We are exploring new methods to consume fewer computing resources and training samples," Jin said. "Golaxy has made progresses in the feature system, model structure and MCTS algorithm, compared with AlphaGo."

The results of human vs. AI Go games are no longer suspenseful, said Lin Jianchao, chairman of the Chinese Go Association.

The upcoming competition between Ke Jie and Golaxy will further test the competitive ability of the domestic AI Go program, and it will be a starting point for wide use of AI go technology in public apps, Lin said.

AlphaGoZero, the upgraded version of AlphaGo, benefits from a large number of self-play, and iteratively saves and upgrades the models.
Beth Sturman, at left, executive director of domestic violence agency Laurel House, talks with Abbie Newman, CEO of Mission Kids Child Advocacy Center of Montgomery County, in a child interview room in East Norriton, Pa., on April 19, 2018. Read more

As leaders of agencies that work directly with abused children and mothers, Abbie Newman and Beth Sturman see the bruises, the black eyes, and the broken bones.

But it's what they can't see that is a focus of their attention these days: The children trapped in homes where dad beats mom. The kids that no doctor, teacher, or social worker knows about. The ones being traumatized for quite possibly a lifetime by exposure to family violence.

It's why Newman and Sturman, who run Montgomery County's most prominent child-abuse and domestic-abuse support agencies, are skipping town Monday  and taking a detective, a prosecutor, and a leader in child and family services with them.

They are on the hunt for ways to pull from the shadows children who are witnesses to toxic abusive behavior in the home.

It's a tall order.

Abused wives or domestic partners are typically loath to tell anyone about the horror unfolding behind closed doors, even if it's also affecting children in the home. There's that much fear and shame associated with it.

But the notion of trying to find and extract these children some other way may be catching on. Newman, Sturman, and their gang of five wouldn't be traveling to Texas for a conference if this weren't among the topics planned for workshops.

A potentially staggering number of children are suffering in these homes. Let's hope this suburban Philadelphia group come back with ideas they can implement and share more broadly.

"We know that 50 percent of all marriages end in divorce," is how Newman, chief executive of the nonprofit Mission Kids Child Advocacy Center of Montgomery County, explains her back-of-the-napkin tabulation.

But agencies such as hers and the domestic-abuse nonprofit Laurel House, which are in adjacent offices in East Norriton, don't often think about such children as core to their missions. That is, both agencies often are grappling with cases so severe, they can be consuming.

I first talked to Newman a few years ago, for instance, as she unsuccessfully advocated for a change in state law to allow adult victims of child sexual abuse to sue private institutions for abuse they'd suffered in some cases several decades earlier.

Then in 2017 came along a particularly awful case of domestic violence. One that involved an extraordinary amount of care by members of both agencies' staff as it turned into a full-blown criminal prosecution.

Mission Kids and Laurel House caseworkers and counselors helped the wife and children of a Collegeville man who had been beating his wife for years and sadistically abusing his son and daughter, too.

Joseph Myhre had used even an electric dog collar to shock his son and daughter. Authorities found out about the atrocities only after the 45-year-old man fractured his wife's skull  and she mustered the courage to surreptitiously call Laurel House's domestic-violence hotline, 800-642-3150.

A volunteer operator who had been trained to identify traumatic brain injury persuaded the wounded woman to go the hospital, which then set in motion Myhre's long-overdue prosecution and conviction earlier this year to 20 to 40 years in prison.

As this horrific situation shows, even battered and terrified mothers are reluctant to tell authorities. This has the unintended consequence of further harming their children.

"When someone has been abused physically and emotionally for years, the trauma they've experienced, they're more afraid of the abuser," says Sturman, who runs Laurel House. "By the time you're in that deep, you don't even realize you're that deep in."

Newman's idea to start focusing on kids trapped in these situations came after traveling to the Netherlands for a conference last year. She'd been asked to share with her European peers how U.S. agencies like Mission Kids and Laurel House work jointly with others on family violence cases.

What she came home with was an even more acute sense of the damage being inflicted on children merely exposed to family violence. She already knew that kids who go through an ugly divorce, are sexually abused, or are raised by alcoholic parents suffer profoundly damaging trauma that has consequences when they become adults.

"In the Netherlands," Newman tells me while raising an eyebrow, "they've defined contentious divorce as a form of child abuse."

Imagine that: A divorce that drags on with rancor for some two years past the date of separation is deemed, by society, a form of abuse. That sure sounds like common sense on the most basic level.

This is one reason why Newman is zeroing in on attending the International Family Justice Conference this coming week in Fort Worth, Texas. One panel deals exclusively with children exposed to domestic violence in the home  what they so rightly refer to as "hidden victims."

The team, which also includes Assistant District Attorney Alexandria MacMaster and Sandy Beren of the Office of Children and Youth, hope to learn, for instance, what more police can do to flag kids who are in danger. After all, police often are called to houses to investigate domestic-violence complaints.

What's clear is that the less anyone talks about this as a problem, the more that innocent, traumatized kids remain invisible.

We know they're out there. Let's go find them. They need us.
Lt. Walter P. Manning, of West Philadelphia, was a Tuskegee Airman who was lynched when his plane was shot down in Austria in 1945. Nazi propaganda had encouraged the lynching of American pilots, Read more

On the morning of April 3, 1945, Second Lt. Walter P. Manning of West Philadelphia sat in a jail cell at a Nazi air force base in Austria. There was a mob at the door, ropes at the ready.

The doomed fighter pilot, battered and beaten, wore his wings on his collar. He was a proud Tuskegee Airman, a member of country's first black combat aviation unit. Back in Philly, Manning had gained attention for his dedication to his dream of becoming a flier: He had failed his physical exam because of a hammer toe and could have avoided war. Instead, he used his defense-plant salary to pay for surgery  so he could fly.

"That's real patriotism," read a headline in one of the local African American newspapers.

Now, he had escaped death twice in the last two days. First, when he bailed out of his plane after a dogfight, where he'd taken out a German fighter. Then, when a local policeman pulled him from a mob that greeted his parachute near Linz.

He had flown more than 50 missions, and six times was awarded the Air Medal for heroism. He had a fiancee, whose picture he kept close. He was not yet 25. Outside his cell, the mob was waiting. And primed to do just what Nazi propaganda instructed: to murder a black pilot in the way Americans murdered blacks in their own land. They took Manning to the nearest lamppost.

A story long untold

The lynching of Lt. Manning, the only black flier known to have been hanged in Austria during World War II, was never enshrined in museums, let alone noted in the day's newspapers. It went untold, until recently.

In a war that shaped the American consciousness, there are still shamefully forgotten horrors. And this one is particularly chilling because it drew on the sins of our own past.

Read More: From Civil War letters, a Philadelphia soldier's tale | Mike Newall

"Isn't it striking that the Germans monitored the lynching of African Americans in the South of the United States and set loose a similar kind of violence against black airmen?" said Georg Hoffmann, an Austrian-based historian who has researched Manning's murder. In 2016, Hoffmann and fellow researcher Nicole-Melanie Goll created a database of the 9,000 Allied pilots killed or shot down over Austria, unearthing details on the fates of many fallen crews.

Seventy years after the war, the historians were the first to focus on the terrifying and largely forgotten Nazi phenomenon of Fliegerlynchjustiz. With the air war all but lost by 1943, the Nazis incited citizens to kill any captured Allied pilots. The historians discovered 150 Allied pilots  101 Americans  who were murdered on the ground, most by civilians. White fliers got beatings or bullets. Manning got a rope.

"The reason was the propaganda," Hoffmann said. " `The Americans are doing this to African Americans, we should do the same.' "

Earlier this month, the historians' work led the Austrian and U.S. governments to mark the spot where the Philadelphia pilot was lynched with a memorial stone in a service attended by high-ranking U.S. military officials. It was a solemn, elaborate event with honor guards, military bands  and a flyover.

"He was a young man who desperately tried to overcome racism in the United States  who became a pilot when it was not for someone of his race to do it  and then died the way he died," Hoffmann said. "We wanted to commemorate him."

He wanted to fly in the worst way.

Harry Stewart, then a lieutenant in the 301st Fighter Squadron, flew alongside Manning that Easter morning in 1945. They had been together at the Tuskegee Institute, the Alabama university where black pilots trained. He remembered his friend as outgoing and affable  a powerful swimmer who did laps in the institute's Olympic-size pool.

"He wanted to fly," Stewart remembered, "in the worst way."

To avoid the racism of the Jim Crow South, the men stuck to the campus canteens and dances.

Read More: As Pa. (slightly) loosens liquor laws, a look at when Philly was booziest town around | Mike Newall

"If I could help it, I did not put myself in the path of humiliation," said Stewart, who is 93, a retired engineer who lives in Michigan with his wife of over 70 years, Delphine.

At a cadet graduate ball, Manning danced to the beat of Count Basie with Dicey Thomas, a pretty university student, who wore a white dress and pinned her hair up in the style of the day. The two were engaged before Manning shipped out.

In the dogfight that Easter morning over the Danube River, Manning and Stewart and five other Tuskegee men, flying their distinctive red-tailed P51s, took out a dozen German fighters. After his plane was struck, Manning ejected, drifting slowly down in his chute toward the forming mob.

An unmarked grave

When the Austrian historians began researching Manning's death, they found many of the details of his prewar life had long faded. With the help of Jerry Whiting, a retired California police officer-turned-Tuskegee researcher, they filled in what they could.

He was born in Baltimore but raised in Philly. He attended Howard University but did not graduate. By 1942, when he tried to enlist with the Army Air Force, he was living with his mother, Winifred, in West Powelton and working as a machinist at the Signal Corps Depot in Germantown. On his mental examination, he scored 119 out 150, when only an 83 was needed to qualify as a flier. He was accepted into the service the year after his toe surgery.

The American military investigation into Manning's death was quickly closed, Hoffmann found.

American liberators soon discovered his body in a shallow grave near the air base. A compassionate civilian had marked the spot with a wooden cross. His body was moved to a soldiers' cemetery in France.

Suspects were identified, including two German officers, believed to be part of the Werwolf, a Nazi guerrilla group pledging to fight on even as the Allies advanced. The officers allegedly bound Manning's arms behind his back, delivered him to the crowd, and hung a sign around his corpse, reading: "We defend ourselves."

No one was ever tried. It's hard, Hoffmann says, not to think that race played a role in the case's being scuttled  a final insult to Walter Manning.

"Nobody ever tried to put together what happened," Hoffmann said. Nobody, that is, until the Austrians.

On a sun-streaked afternoon earlier this month, Harry Stewart stood at the Linz Hoersching Air Base, on the spot where his brave friend was murdered. The old pilot offered a sharp salute. And as the ceremony went on, the honor guards marched, and the bands played, and the planes roared overheard, he was filled with emotion at the honor paid to his friend.

"This was a son of Philadelphia," Stewart said. "If this son of Philadelphia could be recognized so far away for the sacrifice he made for this nation, then I hope that in some way he could be memorialized back home."
In an iconic photo from the civil rights era, white people pour sugar, ketchup and mustard on the heads of sit-in demonstrators at a Woolworths lunch counter in Jackson, Miss., on May 28, 1963. Read more

Now that a Starbucks bathroom near Rittenhouse Square is the focus of international attention, I was going to tell you about what happened to me a couple of weeks ago when I was making a deposit at my bank and asked to use the bathroom. The teller said the bathroom wasn't for the public. I let it go, although mentally I was screaming, "I am not 'the public,' I am a customer!"

But then something that Philadelphia civil rights lawyer Michael Coard posted on Facebook caught my eye. Were the cops in the '60s right to arrest the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for "the nonviolent crime of trespass?" he asked.

I was in that situation in those years myself, and my answer is yes.

It was 1962 and the place was Cambridge, a strictly segregated town on Maryland's Eastern Shore that was as overtly and violently racist as Mississippi.

On a Saturday morning in October, four white college students  each in night school, each with a full-time day job  arrived in town in a two-door, two-tone 1958 Studebaker President, with me behind the wheel. Our destination was a black church where we would be fed, trained in nonviolence, and offered a piece of the floor, where we would sleep.

We were from Brooklyn, and we were there because peaceful protesters had been beaten by crowds. The previous week, in an attempt to integrate the notorious Choptank Inn near Cambridge, a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had been pulled inside the roadhouse and beaten to a pulp.

A call went out for help, and hundreds of people, mostly students like us, responded.

Driving into Cambridge, I saw a neat town  nice streets, nice homes  until we crossed Race Street.

The other side of Race Street was not paved. There were broken sidewalks, no streetlights.

"No," I thought. "It couldn't be that obvious." But it was: Race literally was the dividing line between white and black Cambridge.

The Freedom Marchers' daytime plan was to have groups of whites and blacks sit down in segregated luncheonettes and restaurants on Main Street, thus integrating them.

The town was teeming with "outsiders"  or "troublemakers," as the locals called us. There were Cambridge cops, who were hostile; Maryland State Police, of whom we were wary; and guys in white shirts shooting 8mm movie film. They were FBI, a comforting presence.

What we did was choreographed: An integrated group would walk in and sit at the counter or at tables, with state police watching.

The owner or manager would order us to leave. The leader of each group would state that the Maryland Trespass Act had to be read to make it official. The owner had a copy ready.

The law was dense and filled with legal terms. If the owner struggled, our leader, usually a college student, would help him read the hard words. Inside the luncheonette  its name escapes me now  we suppressed snickers as one of our group helped the nearly illiterate racist read. Behind us, some state cops impatiently slapped batons against their legs.

Once the act was read, we were trespassers. The cops stepped forward. We were told to leave or be arrested. We left.

So, Mr. Coard, the cops did what they are supposed to do  they enforced the law. They did their job. When Dr. King broke the law, he not only expected to be arrested  he wanted to be arrested. That drew more people to his cause. You know that.

Those who had bail money or time they were willing to spend in jail remained seated. Those like us who chose to avoid arrest left  and walked into the next restaurant, where we repeated the sit-in. A few dozen people were arrested.

After a boxed chicken dinner at the church, we formed a line about four abreast and 100 yards long and went out to integrate the Choptank Inn. As we walked down the highway shoulder at night, curses and bottles were hurled at us from passing cars.

The Choptank was a sprawling place, about 30 yards off the highway, menacing under the night sky. Our plan to get in and sit-in was thwarted because the white patrons inside had locked the doors. We couldn't get in. To tell you the truth, I was glad. Getting inside the Choptank was begging for a beating.

As we walked back to the church, we sang "We Shall Overcome" and other freedom songs.

We were still singing songs and hymns with our coffee and biscuits, and then we fell peacefully asleep.
Chester Community Charter School opened a new campus in Aston this fall to accommodate growing enrollment. The school was approved last year to operate for nine years, though state law limits charter renewals to five years. Read more

The Pennsylvania Department of Education is questioning the Chester Upland School District's decision to renew its operating agreement with the state's largest brick-and-mortar charter school through 2026 while the school was just one year into its current five-year term.

"If charters are going to be renewed right out of the chute,  they've already been approved before they've even performed," said James Flandreau, a lawyer for the department, at hearings this week ordered by a Delaware County Court judge. "Certainly, one year is way too early to evaluate any charter's performance."

Kevin Kent, a lawyer for Chester Community Charter School, said the court-appointed receiver and school district could reevaluate the charter school at any point. "Nothing's been compromised," he said.

Peter Barsz, the receiver for the financially distressed district, testified on Thursday that he had reviewed audits and school performance records and had support from the district's school board before approving the renewal request last year that allowed the charter school to operate through 2026.

In exchange, the charter school agreed to forgo already-approved plans to add a high school. If the K-8 school  enrolling more students than Chester Upland's district schools  opened a high school, it would "decimate" the district, Barsz said Thursday.

Charter schools are privately run but publicly funded. State law charges school districts with authorizing charters  and permits them to renew charter agreements for five years.

Barsz couldn't have followed the law because it requires school boards to annually assess charter schools and conduct a "comprehensive review" over the previous five-year term before granting renewals, the state said in a filing this week.

But lawyers for the charter school contend that the law doesn't specify when a charter school can be renewed.

They also say that the charter law doesn't give the court a right to invalidate a renewal.

That argument didn't appear to sway Judge Chad Kenney, who told lawyers for the charter school that it was his role to make sure the receiver was complying with state law.

Still, "I don't know what I'm going to decide," Kenney said.

Thursday marked the second of three hearings Kenney held this week. On Friday, state education officials testified to progress and ongoing challenges in Chester Upland in response to an order from Kenney to show why the state shouldn't terminate the district's financial recovery status. Chester Upland, which has struggled for decades, was designated a distressed district in 2012 by the state, which then sought the appointment of a receiver to oversee the school system.

While state officials testified that the district faces a budget deficit next year, Kenney questioned to what extent inadequate state funding was to blame.

"We can't be on the right track vis-a-vis Lower Merion," Kenney said. Comparing Chester Upland to better-off districts is "apples to oranges  until there's some change in how school districts are funded."

Kenney, who didn't issue any rulings, commended the three brick-and-mortar charter schools in Chester for previously agreeing to accept lesser payments from the district for special education students. Without the arrangement, "it would be a total disaster right now," Kenney said.

But Kenney called it a "significant disappointment" that the state wasn't involved in the Chester Community Charter renewal process.

Asked by Flandreau whether the charter school was "distinguishing itself academically" from other schools in the district at the time of the renewal, Barsz said, "Not significantly different than anyone else." He said most schools in the district were "severely underperforming."

Of the district's performance, David Volkman, the Education Department's executive deputy secretary, testified Friday that state education officials visit Chester Upland four times a year and have brought support, including for special education. "We're wishing the kids were doing better, certainly," he said.

Pressing Barsz Thursday on the rationale for the Chester Community Charter renewal, Flandreau asked whether the school could expand its K-8 enrollment under the agreement and "essentially, over the next nine years, hollow out" the district's elementary and middle schools.

"I suppose so," Barsz said. He acknowledged that another entity could seek to open a charter high school.

Later, Kenney asked Kent, the charter lawyer, "why the urgency" to get the renewal. Barsz had granted the renewal weeks after Kenney reappointed him receiver, over the state's objection.

Kent said the longer term "brings assurance to lenders."

Operated by for-profit CSMI, Chester Community first received a charter from the school district in 1998.

The district's elected school board  which has power to approve taxes  supported Barsz's decision to renew the charter, although "we might have had a public meeting," School Board President Anthony Johnson testified Thursday.

The board hadn't known that Chester Community Charter was previously approved to open a high school and wanted to prevent that possibility, said Johnson, who also testified this week in support of returning the district to local control.

"People vote with their feet. When we struggle in the district," families can leave, Johnson said.

The district is limited in its ability to grow its elementary-school enrollment, because it doesn't have additional building space, Johnson said. But he said it has a "gentlemen's agreement" with CSMI's CEO, Vahan Gureghian.

Johnson said that Gureghian, a lawyer and entrepreneur who is a major GOP donor, agreed he "wouldn't recruit heavily in Chester anymore," instead focusing on the Philadelphia, William Penn, and Upper Darby School Districts. Since 2014-15, the number of Philadelphia students attending Chester Community Charter has grown from 45 to 1,131.

Along with the agreement on special education payments, "that has saved the district," Johnson said.
Students from Germantown Friends School hold up a banner that reads "#ENOUGH" during a school walkout held in the City Hall courtyard on Friday, April 20, 2018. Read more

Joining counterparts nationwide, hundreds of students from around the Philadelphia area staged school walkouts Friday, publicly pressing for tougher gun laws on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting that left 12 students and a teacher dead in Littleton, Colo.

For some, participation in the National School Walkout was about standing with the student activists who have found their voices after the February shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. For others, it was about things going on closer to home.

Nicholas Ear was held at gunpoint last year on his way home from school  he's now a junior at Masterman. He escaped uninjured, but some do not, Ear said.

"Children are dying left and right, and we have to do something about it," said Ear, 17, who held up both his palms, on which a friend had written "DON'T SHOOT" in red marker.

Ear and several hundred other students from the city and suburbs converged on City Hall before 11 a.m., staging a "die-in," lying down for six minutes. Later, some made their way to Eakins Oval. Smaller protests and rallies were held around the city, including a lunchtime event at Temple University.

Walkouts took place in every state. More than 2,600 were planned, with thousands of others unfolding throughout the day.

In Marion County, Fla., district-wide walkouts were suddenly canceled after a school shooting at Forest High School in Ocala left one student wounded and another in custody.

The Philadelphia walkout was more loosely organized than other recent protests, but once students joined forces, it was no less fervent. The crowd was diverse and charged up.

"Gun violence isn't abstract," said Zillah Eichin, a student organizer at Academy at Palumbo, a South Philadelphia magnet school where hundreds of teens walked out. "We see violence on our streets all the time."

Some students walked out against administrators' wishes; others were told participation was OK. At Masterman, a Philadelphia magnet school, the principal sent a letter to parents telling them that the protest was not a district-sanctioned event, but that teens had the right to protest.

"While we will not impede students from leaving to protest, please know that if a student is missing from class he/she will be marked absent and is still responsible for his/her work," Masterman principal Jessica Brown wrote. Students were allowed back into the school after the walkout.

Akili Farrow and Niajah Mallard, students at String Theory Charter School, stood amid the crowd at City Hall with homemade signs they had constructed from manila folders.

"Our lives are at stake," said Mallard, a junior. "Gun violence isn't even shocking anymore, and that should not be."

"We're proud of the Stoneman Douglas kids and we want to do whatever we can to support them," said Farrow, a senior. "We believe in the movement. How can we lead if we're not alive?"

READ MORE > > > Littleton native Renee Chenault-Fattah on Columbine anniversary: 'Not enough has changed.'

Later, at Temple University, a collection of college students, community members, and teenagers from Raised Woke  a group of student activists from Mastery Charter School-Shoemaker Campus  gathered at the Bell Tower for a separate rally.

During the gathering, the names of the Columbine shooting victims were read out.

Milan Sullivan, a junior at Mastery-Shoemaker, talked about how gun violence has touched her life: Her sister's father was killed, and her own father was shot in a separate incident.

"We are here to make change for the students of Columbine, Parkland, Great Mills, Douglas, and other schools, just to name a few," said Sullivan.

Tatiana Amaya, another Raised Woke member, encouraged those gathered to channel their sadness, anger, and frustration into action by voting and demanding accountability from politicians.

"You matter, I matter, we matter," Amaya said. "The fight is just beginning. It's time for a revolution."

Ewan Johnson hadn't planned to speak. The 21-year-old Temple student from Mount Holly talked about the challenges of being a young black man in President Trump's America.

"I am always viewed as less, and that's something I carry with me every day," said Johnson. But, he said, he and others must be galvanized by the challenges they see in the current political climate.

"Raise hell!" shouted Johnson. "Bring about change!"

Friday's protests followed a wave of youth activism that has emerged since the Feb. 14 massacre in Florida.

Tens of thousands of students left class March 14 to protest gun violence in what historians called the largest youth protest movement since at least the Vietnam War. Days later, more than a million teens and their backers rallied across the United States calling for tougher laws on guns and ammunition.

In what they called an unprecedented series of hearings, three dozen Pennsylvania House members recently took turns speaking over six days about gun safety and how to prevent mass shootings, proposing a number of measures.

Staff writer Joseph A. Gambardello contributed to this article, which also contains material from the Associated Press.
When it comes to incidents like the last week's arrest of two black men at a Center City Starbucks, Late Show host Stephen Colbert just wishes bystanders could record all the racism.

"That is a grievous racial injustice," Colbert said on Thursday's show, "and if you witness anything like this, for the love of god, don't film it in portrait mode. Film it in landscape. You're missing all the racism on the sides."

This was Colbert's first mention of the Starbucks incident. Previously, only the Daily Show's Trevor Noah had talked about it.

Donte Robinson and Rashon Nelson were arrested at a Starbucks at 18th and Spruce Streets last Thursday after not making a purchase and refusing to leave the store. According to bystander Melissa DePino, who shared a now-viral video of the arrest, the two men were waiting to meet a friend at the coffee shop.

Holly Hylton, a former manager at the store, reportedly called police after two minutes of the Robinson and Nelson entering the Starbucks, saying in the recently released 911 call that there were "two gentlemen in my cafe that are refusing to make a purchase or leave." The call was placed at 4:37 p.m., and Robinson and Nelson reportedly entered the store at 4:35 p.m.

"Hold it right there. Cafe? Come on, you're a complimentary bathroom that sells cake pops," Colbert said Thursday. "And this was some real fast-acting justice. 'Hello, 911? I'd like to report 120 seconds of sitting while black.'"

>> What it's like writing for 'The Daily Show' in the age of Trump

Following the arrests, Mayor Jim Kenney issued a statement saying he was "heartbroken" by the the incident, which "appears to exemplify what racial discrimination looks like in 2018." Police Commissioner Richard Ross also apologized to Robinson and Nelson after initially saying their arresting officers "didn't do anything wrong."

Starbucks' management also apologized for the arrests. In an appearance on Good Morning America, CEO Kevin Johnson issued an apology, and chairman Howard Schultz told CBS This Morning that "nobody should be asked to leave Starbucks."

"I don't know. I can think of a few people I'd like to see kicked out," Colbert said. "The guy watching War for the Planet of the Apes on his laptop without headphones. That art student who is clearly sketching you."

Protests against Starbucks here in Philadelphia began on Sunday, with Blacks Lives Matter organizer Asa Khalif leading a protest at the Starbucks at 18th and Spruce where many demanded the manager who called police be fired. By Tuesday, Starbucks announced that it was close all of its US stores on the afternoon of May 29 for "racial-bias education" training.

"I just wonder what this training session is going to be like for black Starbucks employees," Colbert said. "'OK guys, let's all settle down and listen while this nice white lady from HR tells us what racism is. It's so sad. I did not know.'"

On Thursday, Robinson and Nelson appeared on Good Morning America, where they said that they hope the incident can serve as a "stepping stone" for social change.

"I want to make sure thatthis situation doesn't happen again," Robinson said on GMA. "So what I want is for a young man or young men to not be traumatized by this and instead [be] motived, inspired."

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert airs weeknights at 11:35 on CBS.
Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson, center, walks towards a meeting with Mayor Kenney and other officials Monday at City Hall. Starbucks plans training for store managers on "unconscious bias," Johnson said. Read more

A Starbucks manager in Philadelphia called the police on two black men on April 12, leading to their arrest. The two men, who had been waiting for a friend at the store, were released hours later without being charged.

Starbucks has since apologized and announced it will close more than 8,000 of its stores in the United States to provide "racial bias" training for its 175,000 employees. Starbucks' COO Roz Brewer said the sessions would focus on "unconscious bias training," a form of diversity education that focuses on the hidden causes of everyday racial discrimination.

Unconscious bias training has become a popular approach to diversity education. The trainings often begin with demonstrations of how the mind operates in ways that are outside of conscious awareness or control. These demonstrations show that people make, and sometimes act on, snap judgments based on the other person's race, without any conscious intention.

Research shows that this source of racial discrimination can be reduced in a number of ways. For example, setting objective criteria for decision-making could have made a difference in the Starbucks incident. As Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson described, the manager used personal judgment in calling the police. Formal rules that prevent the influence of racial bias in calling the police could have prevented the incident altogether.

Some unconscious bias trainings incorporate discussions of solutions such as these. But there is no standard format for trainings. Some involve little more than a series of narrated PowerPoint slides. Others involve expert instructors who hold small, intensive workshops that can last for days.

The novelty of unconscious bias training means there is little direct evidence about whether it works. To determine its potential, researchers have turned to clues from other types of training.

One study looked at older types of diversity trainings that focused on the negative legal consequences of discrimination. It found that such trainings can backfire when managers resent the possibility that they could be singled out for punishment.

By contrast, employees may be more open to unconscious bias training because it focuses on how bias is universal, rather than singling out a few "bad apples."

However, other research shows that highlighting the prevalence of bias makes people more likely to express their bias.

Calvin K. Lai, Assistant Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Washington University in St Louis. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
The Nappi family at the Medical Intensive Care Unit at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center. He no longer needed a breathing tube, but still had a feeding tube. From left to right, Alexandra (Allie), Paul, Leisa and Isabella (Bella) Nappi. Read more

Paul Nappi arrived at Penn Presbyterian Medical Center's intensive care unit suffering from a severe lung problem on March 8.

The 53-year-old Chester County man, already depleted by cancer treatments and a December bout with pneumonia, was unconscious and hooked to a breathing machine. His family was told he might not make it through the night.

They also were given a small spiral notebook labeled ICU Healing Journal. The family could fill it with words that could help hospital staff understand who Nappi is. Doctors, nurses, and therapists would add entries offering support and explaining what Nappi was going through. The journal could help him adjust to life after the ICU  if he survived.

He is a "big kid" who sings  out of tune  to music from the '70s and '80s in the car, his daughter Allie revealed on the "get to know me" page. He has two pugs  Maya and Nutmeg  and he likes TV's Big Bang Theory. He is religious.

>>>Read more: Doctors study the 'compassion crisis' in medicine.

Nappi did survive the night. The next morning, Megan Zielke, the unit's critical care clinical pharmacy specialist, wrote the first staff entry, explaining that he was on medications that made him more comfortable but also paralyzed him. His family was there, she wrote. "They care so much about you!"

Nappi's other daughter, Bella, a 20-year-old University of Delaware student, wrote the first family entry later that day. She told her father how well he was doing. She and her older sister prayed the Chaplet of the Divine Mercy at 3 p.m. as he normally does. "For the sake of His sorrowful passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world," they recited.

"You're our hero!" Bella wrote. "We love you forever and always." She signed with a heart.

With those words, Bella was hooked. She talked to her father, but she wasn't sure he could hear her. Writing felt different. "I wanted in the moment for him to hear exactly what I was thinking and I was feeling and I felt like the journal allowed me to do that," she said.

The power of human connection

After years of planning, Penn Presbyterian began offering the journals in January to help prevent post-intensive care syndrome, or PICS, a set of physical and emotional problems gaining attention as more people survive an ICU stay but struggle afterward.

The journals have proven powerful for patients, as well as families and staff, said Mark Mikkelsen, a critical care doctor, who, along with Julie Rogan, an ICU clinical nurse specialist, helped start the project.

"The power of it is that it's just about human connection," Mikkelsen said.

Wes Ely, an ICU doctor with Vanderbilt University and the Nashville VA hospital, leads a Society for Critical Care initiative, the ABCDEF bundle, to improve ICU treatment and life after. The more hospitals stick to its science-based protocols, survival rates go up and ICU stays get shorter, he said. Improving communication with families is a priority, and diaries are part of that.

European hospitals have used ICU diaries or journals for years and have shown that they reduce post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety after discharge. While Ely "totally loves" them, he estimates the number of U.S. hospitals using diaries is in the "double digits." There is resistance, possibly because employees already feel overworked or hospital lawyers worry the entries will provide fodder for lawsuits.

Some people also wonder whether the journals might be painful for families of patients who die. Mikkelsen said the research says otherwise and, anecdotally, families appreciate the record, no matter what happens. When patients are doing poorly, the staff knows the future audience for the journal becomes the family. Rogan said staffers may then write about how comfortable the patient looks and how supportive the family has been. The journal, Mikkelsen said, "speaks to how ill that person was" and how much the family and medical team cared.

Main Line Health's Bryn Mawr Hospital tried giving families spiral notebooks for journaling, but the program ran out of steam after a few months. The hospital plans to try again soon and hopes to spread the program to other system hospitals, said Amy Pelleg, nurse manager of Bryn Mawr's ICU. Thomas Jefferson University Hospital encourages families to keep their own journals. Cooper University Hospital's ICU is seeking approval for diaries and research to study their impact.

Terror-provoking

ICU patients often are heavily sedated. When they awaken, they feel shattered and weak. Many have delusions or nightmarish explanations for procedures they underwent. A catheterization may become a rape. A trip for a scan is remembered as an abduction. Odd noises and snippets of conversations turn into dreamlike stories that seem very real to the patient.

"Imagine feeling tied down. You can't get loose. You have a tube in your mouth," said Antoinette Spevetz, a critical care doctor at Cooper University Health Care. "That's very terror-provoking."

Patients lose days or weeks. Many struggle with how to fill in their history when they awaken. "It's very traumatic to them that they can't piece it all together," Ely said.

The diaries, which sometimes include photos, help patients put their histories together in more accurate, less disturbing ways. They let patients see how families and staff supported them. They give families something important to do at a time when many feel helpless, Mikkelsen said. And, they improve communication between families and staff.

"It can bring out that we not only cared about your Foley [catheter] or your central line," Ely said. "We cared about who you are.  And the person starts to feel more whole again."

A lost art

The notebook that Penn Presbyterian ICU families get includes inspirational quotes from sages like Maya Angelou and Lao Tzu. A section in the back describes machines that make weird noises, including ventilators, IV pumps, and floor cleaners. The rest is blank pages. Families are urged to record daily events, including visitors and room noises, and write encouraging messages.

Mikkelsen said he's been surprised by how valuable it is to step back from the technology and hand-write a short message. "Your family exemplifies family support! We should all be so lucky," he wrote in Nappi's journal March 14. Two days later, he wrote: "It's so great to finally meet you, as you awoke today once we were able to get the sedation decreased."

The doctor uses computers all day but rarely puts pen to paper. "In some ways, writing has become a lost art and yet that's partly why it's so powerful," Mikkelsen said.

One out of every four or five of Mikkelsen's ICU patients dies. Sometimes he wonders: "Did I help anybody today? I actually find more often than not that [journaling] makes me at the end of the day say I did something good today."

Alicia Ulerick, Nappi's respiratory therapist, was struggling with the "negativity" of ICU work when she met Nappi and his family. Nappi's progress helped her remember why she'd chosen such difficult work. Contributing to the journal helped her see how close his family is. "There just was a lot of love with that family in particular," she said.

Bradley Cooper and video games

Nappi's journal contains entries from his daughters, his wife, Leisa, several visitors, plus nurses, therapists, pharmacists, and doctors. The overwhelming theme is love and concern. The staff even brought sparkling cider to celebrate Paul and Leisa's 27th anniversary. When Nappi moved to a different unit, just the family kept writing. Now he's in rehab.

Leisa Nappi, a human resources benefits manager who keeps extensive notes about her husband's medical experiences, rarely used the journal. There were too many distractions, she said. Her daughters, though, wrote frequently.

Allie, 24, an assistant buyer for Free People, resisted at first. "It ended up being really therapeutic for me," she said. She found she could open up on paper, and she loved the idea that her father might eventually read her words.

"I turn to you for my strength and faith in God, and I am amazed to find that, even these past few days, I am learning from you to submit to God's will," she wrote on March 11. "I love you more than anything in the entire world. Thank you for giving me strength as I face my greatest fear."

Paul Nappi, a lawyer, did not awaken from his 12-day, medically induced coma haunted by nightmares, but he did have some bizarre ideas. An avid gamer, he thought he had been in a video game seeking to pull tubes out of his mouth. He feared drowning. He believed his family had left him alone to go out with actor Bradley Cooper. Cooper is a family friend and Nappi's visitors had been talking about his new movie (A Star Is Born), but no one had gone anywhere with him. Nappi also remembered trying to persuade Allie's boyfriend to take the tubes out. "It's clear as day to me that it happened, but it didn't," he said.

Normally, he's unusually good at recalling what happened on specific dates, so it has been disturbing to have so much blank space on his mental calendar. Soon after he awoke, Bella read him the journal over two nights. He listened intently, soaking up all that love without tears. The journal prompted a lot of questions, and the answers have helped fill in the gaps.

He said he was depressed after his ICU stay in December, but this time feels different, partly because of the journal. "I felt good about the team and the fact that they all cared enough to write in the book," he said.

The unspoken thread in the entries was fear that he might not make it, but that doesn't bother him.

"It was nice to hear it," he said of the heartfelt sentiments. "Everybody wishes they could hear all the things people would have said about them."
Littleton native Renee Chenault Fattah was a TV anchor for NBC10 in Philadelphia in 1998 when the Columbine High School shooting occurred. She covered the event for the station and the memories have stayed with her. Read more

I spend a lot of time thinking about the power of memory as part of a documentary project I am doing on Alzheimer's. Some memories are fleeting, while others, no matter how long ago, remain as fresh and as painful as the day they happened.That's how I remember Columbine, even now, 19 years later.

I grew up in Littleton, Colo., just a few miles from Columbine High School. I got the news of the shootings on a sunny Tuesday  funny what you remember  as I was driving from my home in Newtown Square into work at NBC10 in Bala Cynwyd and heard the radio news report: multiple shootings at a high school in Littleton. When it was over, two students had shot and killed 12 of their fellow classmates and a teacher before killing themselves.

By the time I got to the station where I coanchored the early and late evening newscasts, I was told to go home and pack a bag. I was heading to Littleton. My daughter was just 6 months old, but I knew doting grandparents would be waiting for us when we got off the plane.

I should have joyful memories of the first time taking my newborn home to the place where I grew up, but that tragedy in Littleton hung heavy in the air and colored everything.

Like all the other towns that would see mass shootings in the years to come  Nickel Mines, Newtown, Blacksburg, Parkland  people kept saying, "Things like this just don't happen here."

In the days to follow we did several stories close to a park not far from Columbine. Everywhere I looked, crying children and parents clustered together reading posted tributes. Photographs of smiling young faces were almost submerged by the mountains of flowers and candles.

Now, in the wake of America's many mass shootings, those memories show an all-too-familiar scene.

I tried locating high school classmates with whom I had long since lost touch  remember, this was pre-Facebook days  and while I was a new mom in my 40s, many of the kids I grew up with had kids who were now teenagers and had friends at Columbine High.

Those conversations led me to Michael Shoels, the father of Isaiah Shoels, one of the few black students at Columbine and the only black student killed that day. Shoels believed his son was targeted because he was black. His fears were later confirmed by other kids who were with Isaiah in the library when he was gunned down. I remembered telling Shoels I knew what it felt like to be "the only one."

For all those reasons and more, objectivity was impossible. I cried constantly. I held it together during my live shots, but I remember the tears returning every time I looked west toward the Rockies. It had always been a stunning backdrop for an idyllic childhood of good neighbors, ski trips with family, and horseback riding through open fields. Because of the shooting, those memories of Littleton were forever changed.

And yet not enough has changed to make our children safer. The shootings continue. Solutions are offered. For example, after Australia's mass shooting, the government banned assault weapons and the carnage stopped, a point passionately made by the Parkland high school students at the White House this past February. Their activism gives me hope even though their proposed solutions are often dismissed as unrealistic and even un-American because of how much this country loves guns.

I believe we should love our children more. We are not doing everything we can to protect them. In fact, it is the opposite. Congress allowed the assault-weapon ban to end without reauthorization. And the impact is not just in our schools. Recent data support a report in the American Journal of Public Health that the United States has a higher rate of police shootings than the rest of the world because we have more guns, which make cops more guarded and more likely to shoot.

We can learn from memory and yet we seem hell-bent on ignoring its lessons. And until we do, we are left with our memorials, our tributes, and our memories.

Renee Chenault-Fattah is a lawyer and former TV broadcaster now working on a film on Alzheimer's and dementia in communities of color.
According to many scholars and institutes that specialize in the research of global counter-terrorism, the world has witnessed a transition of global strategy of counter-terrorism from eradication to containment in the most recent decades. However, the total number of terrorist attacks happening each year reveals that the improvement in strategy did not translate to a successful reduction of terrorist attacks. Certainly, it does not mean that current policies of counter-terrorism are utterly useless simply based on one single aspect; however, statistics do show that the attempt to contain terrorism has failed to deliver a desirable outcome, and therefore a new approach of counter-terrorism is needed.

In fact, the idea of containing terrorism has it merits, as it acknowledges the fact that terrorism is something whose impact can only be limited but can never be eliminated. This realistic interpretation of the nature of terrorism has then served as the top guidance of global counter-terrorism actions. Nevertheless, it is important to understand that the policy of containment is a product of the Cold War, and the focus of this policy is on sovereign states, whose mobility and flexibility are constrained by their rigid internal structures. The current approach of containing terrorism did not develop very far from the means of containing communism adopted for the Cold War, and still focuses on setting up physical barriers by force to defend against the spread of terrorism.

But terrorist organizations do not operate like states; as shown by the characteristics of the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda, they do not have definite boundaries, their ideologies are largely based on antagonizing the mainstream world, and their mobility and flexibility, superior to the states, allow them to diffuse quickly into an unaffected community without being immediately detected. Therefore, a barrier of force will not serve to contain terrorism firmly in a specified area, and this is why no matter how much money developed countries have spent on equipping the local forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and Mali, incidents of terrorist attacks still happen frequently all over the world, shifting to a neighboring region or OECD countries through transnational tactics. In order to really contain terrorism, a soft barrier should be built up by understanding, acceptance and development, instead of by force.

The current way to stop people becoming terrorists is either to cut off their access to the information propagated by terrorist organizations, or to disillusion and intimidate them by disclosing the reality of being a terrorist, but neither of them addresses the core of the problem. The real reason why those people want to become terrorists is that they believe they may find happiness, salvation and hope outside the mainstream society. Therefore, terrorism is a social issue and truly reflects the society. As Adichie has written, the real tragedy of our post-colonial world is not that the majority of people had no say in whether or not they wanted this new world; rather, it is that the majority have not been given the tools to negotiate this new world. The majority choose to keep silent and accept the fact that they will continue to live on without the tools and the say. But a few of them, after realizing the reality, decide to fight for their tools within the mainstream society if they believe that hopes do exist in that circle, or to seek the tools and create the say elsewhere if they completely lose the confidence of the mainstream.

For people living in the developed countries, the rising inequality, social alienation and difficulty to have any change in their lives have given them a sense of despair. Of course, education and immigration policies are the tools that government could use to make or keep a coherent society  either by indoctrinating everyone with the same set of basic ideology to at least maintain a certain level of commonality in belief, or by selecting the entry of immigrants who are determined and able to conform to that set of ideology. If the government is cogent enough in legislating and implementing correct economic, education and immigration policies, the basic level of the societys homogeneity will be sustained. However, as seen from many countries cases, without any substantial efforts from the government to implement economic, education and immigration policies that could mitigate the growing social conflict, resentment of the alienated or neglected people toward the mainstream society and the establishment has grown more and more concrete and wild. Once they are convinced that they will live like that for the rest of their lives in the current society, they will try to seek solutions elsewhere, probably from terrorist organizations  a place totally different from, or even a reverse of the mainstream society, where they might find new purposes and hope.

On the other hand, for people living in developing countries, joining terrorism is not so much a choice as a necessity, as it keeps food on the table, instead of starving, and gives them a thing to do, instead of idling. It is important to understand that it is not that most people want to be terrorists, but that they are much forced to become terrorists. Thus, in regions where more than 25% or 50% of the population live with less than $1.9 per day, the promise from Islamic State to their fighters of a base salary of $50 a month plus basic food and accommodation, extra allowance for wife and children  in most cases this amounts to about $100 per month  and 80% of whatever they loot, has a very significant power of attraction.

Another example of the persuasive power of the economic argument is Somalia and its terrorist group Al Shabab. A recent study performed by the Finnish NGO Finn Church Aid showed that 27% of respondents joined Al Shabab terrorist group for economic reasons. 15% mentioned religious reasons - and 13% were forced to join.

File photo shows a member of security forces stands guard at a car bomb attack site in Gao, Mali, on Jan. 18, 2017.(Xinhua/Zhao Ziquan)

Although the rise of internet has made the world flatter than it used to be, it has also catalyzed the process of "terroristization." According to a report published by Nanyang Technological University, "the global jihadist movements, principally the so-called Islamic State (IS) and Al-Qaeda, have glocalised to exploit indigenous grievances, recruit aspiring jihadists and fight for local and global causes." The word "glocalise" has actually captured the essence of the internet's role in propagating terrorism; by being global and local at the same time, it could project everything happening in the world to a rather small area and magnify its influence. Thanks to the internet, the ability to publicize information has been decentralized to everyone, and social inequality, exclusion and global imbalance of development, reflected by words, pictures and videos on the internet, are made aware to people who might not realize their existence or seriousness in the past. In the meantime, radical ideas, which were exclusive to only a few people, have now reached their global audience. As a result, people around the world who share the same frustration of those problems are united by social media, attracted by radical ideas, and eventually gathered to form terrorist organizations.

As Tolstoy wrote, "happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Although it is admissible that there is at least one complete and rational set of ideologies which could be considered as the mainstream, it is difficult to believe that many people really share that. So it is surely possible to generalize it to most individuals and say, each person is suffering in his or her own way, but peoples definitions and desires of happiness are much alike. Even for the people labeled as terrorists, they still share the same definition of happiness as ordinary people do, and the reason they have become like that is that the society did not provide them opportunities to fulfill their happiness.

Therefore, to bring about the success of counter-terrorism, terrorists and would-be terrorists need to be convinced that they can achieve their happiness in this mainstream world, not the world created by the fantasy of terrorist organizations. And to make that happen, it is necessary to, as it has been said earlier, contain terrorism in a soft barrier of our understanding, acceptance and efforts of development. Developed countries should work on the improvement of social equality and inclusion so that people can feel their active ownership of the society. Once each one of them realizes that he or she is indeed an indispensable member of a greater society and is included in the process of societal development, they will naturally distance from terrorism, as at this time they have already felt that happiness can be achieved in the mainstream society.

In developing countries, emphasis should be made on the promotion of local economies through instituting more developmental projects, thereby reducing people's reliance on terrorism as a source of income. There might be many ways to promote the local economy and education in areas vulnerable to the infiltration of terrorism, but project-based promotion is the quickest and the most effective way at a micro-level. Even within a country, each local community may have its own problem; for some it might be a stable access to food, for others it might be water. The project-based promotion, with its small scale and ease to commence, can target the most urgent needs of specific communities in a most timely fashion. In addition, it also allows a greater participation of the outside world, for it does not require much funding, compared with large public projects, and does not involve a significant collaboration from the government. It is like dividing an area into numerous small communities; when a project is successfully set up in one community, this community will become less susceptible to terrorism, and a "soft barrier" is established. The more projects are set up in one community, the stronger the "soft barrier" is; the more projects are set up across communities, the longer the "soft barrier" is. Furthermore, "soft barriers" have to be adapted to the different characteristics of the respective societies, so the problems of terrorism in two societies have to be solved differently.

Compared with the work in developed countries, containment of terrorism in developing countries is much more difficult to address. In developed countries, governments and other social institutions tend to run more orderly and effectively, and problems could be solved within the governments and institutions' capability. Whereas in developing countries, social issues are easily neglected and are piling up, which eventually could precipitate irremediable disasters, like the radicalization of Northern Mali. Hence, between two different groups of societies, the balance of focus has to be heavily tilted to the developing countries' side, especially to the establishment of soft barriers by setting up more local projects.

For example, in Northern Chad, where the annual rainfall is generally less than 30 centimeters, people chose to become terrorists mostly because they were unable to obtain potable water throughout the year; otherwise, they might die from dehydration like many of their relatives. The presence of terrorist organizations fills the vacuum of water provision so that local people could use the water for living and making economic gains, and in the meantime, offers the youth something they could do as a means and will of living.

Nevertheless, what many people do not know is that there is less than 10 meters below the ground level an abundance of underground water. Hence, by setting up water stations with solar pumps, one could provide local residents enough water not only to drink, but also to irrigate their agricultural products and graze their cattle. Water stations, in this context, serve exactly as a soft barrier that precludes people from approaching terrorism. These stations will give people suffering from the lack of water a means to sustain their livings by farming and grazing without having to turn themselves against the mainstream world. Similar situation also happens in Niger, Mali and Mauritania. If this water station project could be extended across the whole Sahel Belt, the barrier between terrorism and not only these countries but also the rest of the world would be pushed even norther to the deeper Sahara, where the effects of terrorism are minimized.

In more densely populated urban areas such as townships and cities, where access to modern technologies is more feasible and residents generally do not participate in agricultural production, different measures should be taken to construct the soft barrier, such as instituting professional training programs. For example, in Bamako, one of the most frequently attacked city by terrorists, many people have noticed the huge imbalance of wealth distribution in this country. They realized that no matter how hardworking they are in this current society, it is impossible for them to climb up the social ladder. In order to achieve self-fulfillment, they have to take a different path that deviates from societys common values. In this particular situation, joining terrorism is no longer an attempt to make for a living but a quick way of fulfilling their ambitions. Therefore, the soft barrier that should be built there should focus on capacity-strengthening of the young and middle-aged people, which includes providing professional training that best caters to the need of local or regional job markets, connecting trained labor forces to employers and assisting them to initiate small businesses. Similar to the previous case, once people become well-trained and find jobs that could provide a steady flow of income, they will stabilize and not try to look for ways of self-fulfillment from other sources. The key here is that the level of training provision that a lot of NGOs are doing right now should not be stopped; instead, more care should be taken about whether those trained labor forces can find jobs after their trainings, since all efforts are basically useless and they will return to their previous lives and temptations if no help is provided to find jobs. In fact, instituting training programs should not only limit to Bamako; all cities and townships that have high unemployment or semi-employment rates could adopt this measure as a defense against the infiltration of terrorism.

On a larger scale, economic development and initiation of joint projects is also the approach chosen by Russia in Afghanistan with local government to defeat terrorism and bring peace back in the country. Despite many years of military presence and investments in security measures, the country is still the theatre of many terrorist attacks every year and the situation is deteriorating with Islamic State gaining ground and Taliban being still powerful. Since 2017, the Afghan government supports several projects involving Russian and local companies in various sectors such as energy and agriculture. The development of local economy aims at reducing the attractiveness of those terrorist organizations and also their drug trafficking revenues allowing them to pay the wages of thousands of gunmen. According to Nikolay Patrushev, Russian Security Chief Council, terrorism could not be defeated without achieving national reconciliation taking into account the interests of all ethnic groups along with the countrys economy, the growing welfare of the population, declining unemployment, and higher levels of education".

As the global war against terrorism intensifies, terrorist attacks have become more decentralized, and the difficulty of countering them has also increased accordingly. Foreseeing a further decentralization of terrorism, the world shall become aware that soft barriers are in fact stronger and more impervious than hard barriers of force. Indeed, they are trying to save people from terrorism by concrete actions that could convince people mainstream side is better, instead of merely building a great wall of military actions that threaten people from going to the other side, which does not address to the root of the problem at all. Meanwhile, because most of the terrorist groups are rooted on or target countries engaged in violent conflicts or using state sponsored terror, it is also important to recognize that the project-based promotion solution in these regions could not work without proper pacification or protective measures, involvement of local politics and self- determination. Likewise, it would be presumptuous to not recognize that although socio-economic factors are playing a key role in terrorism expansion, it is also necessary to take into account group, religious, cultural antagonisms, and reflect the image displayed by OECD countries or international organizations.

Finally, the importance of synergy in the process of containing terrorism; governments and large organizations are not the only ones that ought to take actions, everyone who feels responsible of the world, who wishes a better tomorrow, who sympathizes with the unfortunates, and who do not want to see any terrorist attacks happening should participate in the building of the "soft barriers." And it is always good to remember, the more people are mobilized to stand on the project promotion side, the less space it is left for terrorism.
Calling it "disruptive" and "unlawful," a group of Pennsylvania marijuana growers and retailers wants to snuff out the state's pioneering research program before it is launched.

The first of its kind in the nation, the research program would allow eight of the state's teaching hospitals to contract with a cannabis producer. Each contract is estimated to be worth tens of millions of dollars. The agreements grant the producers a "super-permit" to operate an indoor grow facility and to open six retail dispensaries that can sell medical marijuana to any approved patient.

But the group of commercial growers and retailers filed a petition last week in Commonwealth Court, saying the research program would give the hospital-affiliated producers an unfair advantage, "flood the market with medical marijuana," and kill their businesses.

The complaint asks a judge to review the regulations and declare them invalid. A hearing is scheduled for May 2 in Harrisburg.

If the court agrees, it would effectively shut down the state's institutional research ambitions.

"We are in no way trying to bring down the Department of Health or the entire medical marijuana program," said Judith Cassel, a lawyer with Harrisburg law firm Hawke McKeon & Sniscak, which is representing the group of six growers and nine dispensary owners.

"But the regulations don't match the law or put the right emphasis on research," Cassel said.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Health declined to comment on the suit. A spokesman for Solterra Care, an aspiring grower paired with Jefferson Health, also declined to comment.

Executives for the current growers and dispensaries would not speak on the record, saying they feared retribution from the health department.

Several executives complained that they had spent millions to win their permits in the first phase of a grueling and competitive process. There were 177 companies that applied for the first 12 grower permits. The applications were reviewed and scored by anonymous teams of state-appointed experts.

The state is preparing to accept applications for another round of commercial growers and dispensaries that will be similarly scored. When Phase 2 of the process is over, the state will host 25 commercial growers and a total of 150 commercial dispensaries.

The research component would add an additional eight growers and 48 dispensaries.

But many of the research producers that strike contracts with the teaching hospitals won't have to go through the competitive ordeal. That makes the current growers irate. The complaint maintains that only the state  and not the research hospitals  should have the power to decide who can participate.

Under the current regulations, the teaching hospitals would choose their own marijuana partners.

Many already have paired up.

Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine is linked with Franklin Labs, whose Chairman of the Board John Hanger was once a gubernatorial candidate and adviser to Gov. Wolf.

Drexel University is said to have signed an agreement with Prime Wellness of Pennsylvania, whose parent company, Acreage Holdings recently added former U.S. Rep. John Boehner and former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld to its board of directors.

Franklin Labs and Prime Wellness were top scorers during Phase 1 and were granted permits to grow medical marijuana by the state.

But other aspiring research producers either didn't compete in Phase 1 or scored poorly and were eliminated.

Jefferson Health has partnered with Solterra Care LLC, which did not apply in the first round. Solterra is backed by Main Line Investment Partners, run by Jefferson's former board chairman, William Landman.

Temple University is paired with Laurel Harvest Labs. The company, which also did not participate in Phase 1, is headed by Nick Karalis, CEO and president of Delaware County-based Elwyn Specialty Pharmacy Group.

The University of Pennsylvania has reportedly matched with Palliatech, a Massachusetts-based grower, which scored 105th out of a field of 164 aspirants. On an October 2017 company fund-raising prospectus, Palliatech claimed it was "selected by a leading medical university" in Pennsylvania and would "receive 1 of 8 super licenses for medical cannabis for 2017."

None of the arrangements is officially a done deal. The state hasn't granted a single permit to the hospitals or the research growers. And the complaint seeks to stop the process before it begins.

The state is accepting applications from the teaching hospitals until May 24. The Department of Health is accepting applications from the aspiring research growers until July 12.
Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 sits on the runway after making an emergency landing at at the Philadelphia International Airport. Read more

Southwest Airlines has sent passengers of Flight 1380 a letter of apology that includes a check for $5,000 "to cover any of your immediate financial needs" after the plane suffered an engine failure and had to make an emergency landing in Philadelphia.

The letter also says the passengers would separately receive a $1,000 flight voucher.

There were 144 passengers and five crew members on Flight 1380 when its left engine was ripped apart in mid-air Tuesday morning, forcing the plane to make an emergency landing at Philadelphia International Airport. One passenger, Jennifer Riordan, a 43-year-old bank executive and mother of two, died of injuries she suffered when she was partially blown out a window that shattered when the engine failed.

Such payments are not unusual in such situations, said Mary Schiavo, a transportation lawyer and CNN analyst.

"It gets money in the hands of people that need it for counseling or something," Schiavo said.

>>READ MORE: Southwest wanted more time for inspections to spot engine flaws like the one that killed a woman Monday

>>READ MORE: After Southwest incident: Should child safety seats be required on airplanes?

While the National Transportation Safety Board investigates the catastrophic engine failure, the airline's "primary focus and commitment is to assist you in every way possible," said the letter, signed by Southwest president Gary C. Kelly.

"We value you as our Customer and hope you will allow us another opportunity to restore your confidence in Southwest as the airline you can count on for your travel needs. In this spirit, we are sending you a check in the amount of $5,000 to cover any of your immediate financial needs. As a tangible gesture of our heartfelt sincerity, we are also sending you a $1,000 travel voucher (in a separate e-mail), which can be used for future travel."

The letter opened and closed with the company offering its "sincere" and "heartfelt" apologies.

Investigators say a broken rotor blade set off the engine failure. They are trying to determine why the blade, which showed signs of metal fatigue, broke off.

While Southwest is offering its apologies, passengers are hailing the plane's pilot, Tammie Jo Shults, as a hero.
Genevieve Leet, left, and Maggie McCann, right. Brian Parker (unseen) holds up a glass of water taken from a spring. The Upstream Alliance environmental nonprofit led a group of 28 kayakers on a three-day, 40-mile journey from the New Jersey Pinelands to Philadelphia's Independence Seaport Museum April 20-22, 2018, to demonstrate one of the sources of the city's drinking water. Read more

Genevieve Leet stooped over a spring at the edge of a lake deep within New Jersey's Pinelands on Friday morning.

She pumped water up through a filter and it ran into a clear glass jug.

Leet took a sip. "It's kind of sweet," she noted.

That same water might be making its way through your tap right now.

Few Philadelphians might realize that the Pinelands feed clean water to the Delaware River by way of the Rancocas Creek. So Don Baugh of the Upstream Alliance, a nonprofit that seeks to connect people to nature, organized a trip this weekend to show just that. He led Leet and 26 others on a 40-mile, three-day kayak expedition to trace Philadelphia's drinking water to one of its purest sources.

The trip started in Brendan Byrne State Forest near historic Whitesbog Village in Pemberton Township. The kayakers paddled at the edge of the Pine Barrens through a series of lakes made by cranberry bog dams.

"One of our missions is to reconnect people to the waterways," said Baugh, who coordinated the trip with other environmental groups. "The impetus is to celebrate the fact that the Delaware is clean enough that we can recreate on it now. But people haven't connected to it. People have thought about it as a negative. We want to change that."

Baugh began planning the trip six months ago after meeting with representatives of the William Penn Foundation. During the meeting, someone mentioned that the Rancocas Creek flows into the Delaware River Watershed.

"I hadn't thought of that before," said Baugh. "I thought this was a great way to show how these two major ecosystems  the Pine Barrens and the Delaware  are connected."

So he reached out to Rancocas Pathways, a 4-year-old nonprofit comprised of citizens concerned about the future of Rancocas Creek. The Rancocas has multiple sources, including springs that bubble up from the Kirkwood-Cohansey Aquifer. After water flows out of the aquifer it picks up minerals and tannins from Atlantic white cedar forests, producing tea-colored water. The ground is so high in iron that colonists extracted it to produce munitions for the Revolutionary War.

Settlements in the area vanished when better sources of iron were found in Pennsylvania. The area became known as the Pine Barrens, a large wild area eventually preserved through the Pinelands National Reserve in 1978.

Jeff Rosalsky, executive director of the Pocono Environmental Education Center, who was on the trip, noted the journey the water from the spring would take.

"In 48 hours, this water will come out of a tap in Philadelphia," Rosalsky said.

The Delaware River's massive watershed provides drinking water for more than 15 million people in four states. The river has many sources including headwaters in the Catskills and Poconos. But the Kirkwood-Cohansey Aquifer that feeds the Rancocas Creek is a prime source.

Of course, Baugh noted that the chemistry of the water coming out of the spring will change dramatically by the time it gets sucked into a Philadelphia drinking-water treatment plant. But, for now, he told them, it was pure as possible.

"This is clear water," he said. "They need this for the cranberries."

On Friday, Baugh's group paddled past quiet pitch pine forests, rimmed by narrow, white roads used in cranberry farming. They stepped lightly through the swampy ground under a darkened canopy of Atlantic white cedar. Some said they felt as if they were trespassing in a spiritual place.

The group camped Friday night at Iron Works Park in Mount Holly, where the tidal part of Rancocas Creek begins.

They planned to paddle Saturday up Rancocas Creek to the Delaware River and camp at Hawk Island Marina in Delanco, Burlington County. Once on the Delaware River, they'll pass the Philadelphia Water Department's Baxter treatment plant in Torresdale, which supplies 60 percent of the city with drinking water.

On Sunday  Earth Day  the group will paddle down the Delaware through the heavily urbanized and industrialized waterfronts of Camden and Philadelphia, complete with active marine terminals, to Independence Seaport Museum on Columbus Boulevard at Penn's Landing.
Traveling to Iceland was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. At 16, I have been fortunate to travel to Europe, hike national parks, and explore cities all over the United States. Almost all of these trips have taken place in summer, when the weather is warm and the sun is shining. In Iceland for spring break, not so much. This was a huge change for my mom and me.

My favorite subject in school has always been science, so a land of volcanoes and glaciers and natural hot springs and the spot where North America and Europe come together seemed like a wonderful place to be.

Among all the awe-inspiring things we saw, my favorites were the black sand of Reynisfjara Beach, the Secret Lagoon, and the Northern Lights.

We set up base in Reykjavik, the capital, and rented a car as small as I've ever been in. But with the price of gas approaching $8 a gallon, the size seemed about right.

Reynisfjara Beach, right outside the fishing village of Vik on the South Coast about 2 hours from Reykjavik, was absolutely stunning, with pitch-black sand and an ocean-facing cliff of towering stacks of hexagonal blocks of volcanic basalt. The sea and its currents are extremely dangerous; everyone made sure to stay a safe distance from the waves, which often reached farther up the sand than a tourist would expect. There were also huge rock structures rising from the ocean that attract thousands of seabirds. The entire landscape looked as though it were from a movie.

The Secret Lagoon was one of our stops along the Golden Circle, a commonly traveled sightseeing trip. Located in Fluoir, the lagoon was only a half-hour drive from Gullfoss, a ginormous double waterfall that is a signature attraction in Iceland (and that is pictured on the cover of one of my dad's Echo & the Bunnymen albums). The lagoon itself is fed by hot springs and is surrounded by rocks and has pebbles along the bottom. The water temperature was perfect, and the steam made for awesome photographs. Compared to our experience at Blue Lagoon, the Secret Lagoon was much more calming, and a lot less busy!

Seeing the Northern Lights had been on my bucket list since I was in elementary school. Witnessing them in person was so much more beautiful than I ever imagined. We took a tour bus out near Keflavik (where the airport is) and parked in the middle of nowhere. At 10:30, the sky was black except for the moon, and we were beginning to lose hope. We then noticed a faint green stripe across the sky. It started to become much more vibrant, with purple on the edges. I was already speechless, but then the lights began to dance. I watched as the green and purple lines twirled around in the sky. They even made a swirl shape that appeared to surround the moon. It was the highlight of my entire trip, and I will never forget it.

Brielle Tuvim writes from Glenside.

Did a travel experience move you, change you, or give you great memories? Email us how, in about 500 words (include a photo, caption information, and daytime phone number): inquirer.travel@philly.com. Please put "Personal Journey" in the subject line. (Response volume prohibits our returning or acknowledging every submission.)
New captain of New Jerseys official tall ship, the A.J. Meerwald, Johann Steinke, front left, and his wife and ships cook, Megan Steinke, back left, survey their new seafaring home. JESSICA GRIFFIN / Staff Photographer. Read more

Beyond the bay and out past the breakers, ocean swells roll on like prairies, and that's about where Johann Steinke turned a pale, grayish kind of green, one day when he was a kid.

Whatever Steinke had for breakfast, for dinner the night before, became chum that day in California, though some of it landed on his Boy Scout troop leader, too.

"I said, 'I'm never going out on the ocean again,'" Steinke, 40, said Thursday, recalling that fishing trip.

Born in Canada and raised in Fresno, Calif., Steinke said he was about 13 when he learned he was a landlubber. It wasn't until decades later, when he watched Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, a 2003 Russell Crowe film about tall ships, naval battles, and life at sea, that he decided to test himself again.

"At the end of the movie, I thought, 'Crap, I wasted my life,'" he said.

So Steinke made up for all those dry years by working on more than a dozen tall ships, cruising up and down the West Coast, in the Bahamas, on large lakes, and even from Ireland to Denmark in a Viking vessel. In Washington state, he captained the Lady Washington, which appeared in several Pirates of the Caribbean films.

Steinke was recently named the captain of the A.J. Meerwald, a 90-year-old, two-masted former oyster schooner that is New Jersey's official tall ship. Previous captain Jesse Briggs left to work on a historic tugboat in New York.

Steinke still gets seasick  "Oh, yeah" but found a medicine that works.

"I had no idea how awesome these old boats are," he said. "I love the crew and the camaraderie. I love the hard work."

On Thursday morning, a half-dozen crew were busy readying the 115-foot Meerwald for a Coast Guard inspection at a marina on the Maurice River in Cumberland County. They were moving ballast forward, and the deck had recently been pitched with tar to keep it watertight. A deckhand was affixing Steinke's wheel on the stern, and the bosun sat on the bowspit working ropes, her legs dangling above the murky water.

Chuck Ball, an apprentice shipwright from East Kensington, sat on a floating dock, shoring up the ship's bumpers.

"I commute every day," Ball said.

Along with a new captain and some crew members, the schooner  named for the South Dennis, N.J., family that commissioned it for oystering in the 1920s  also got an overhaul thanks to a donor from Cape May who left a large gift when he died last year. The ship is scheduled to begin sailing next week.

"We have a new generator, a new engine, and a lot of new wiring. It's a fresh start," Steinke said. "We've had tremendous donors."

The Meerwald is used for education, sailing all summer from its home port at the Bayshore Center, a nonprofit in Bivalve dedicated to preserving the history of the Delaware Bay, New Jersey's often-forgotten other shore. The ship makes journeys up and down the coast, to ports in Delaware and up to Philadelphia, able to stay out for days at a time. Steinke's wife, Megan, will be the Meerwald's cook, and she won't just be slinging hash in the cramped kitchen below deck in the hold.

"She learned how to cook in France, but she's also learning how to cook Indian food," he said.

The couple drove cross-country from the West Coast in February and moved into a home next to the Bayshore Center, in one of New Jersey's more rural settings.

Steinke graduated from the University of California, Davis in 2001 and recently published a children's book called The Greatest Captain in the World, which he likes to point out is not an autobiography. He has sold a "few thousand" copies and hopes to have readings on the boat during the many field trips the Meerwald hosts.

What makes a great captain?

Steinke said it's mostly lots and lots of hours on the water, but there's more to it and he's learning.

"It's an art and it's a science," he said. "You never stop learning."

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A consumer shops for imported products in a supermarket in Beijing. File photo: VCG

Experts said on Wednesday that China should import more consumer goods, high-tech goods and minerals, based on the call from the central government earlier this year to expand China's imports.

"China should increase the imports of consumer goods that can drive the upgrading of domestic consumption and cater to the rising demands of consumers," said Chen Fengying, an expert at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.

"Many tourists travel abroad to buy such products, or rely on overseas shopping agents, so the relevant imports should be increased to stop this situation," Chen told the Global Times on Wednesday.

According to a report by State-owned broadcaster China Central Television, Chinese tourists spent as much as $260 billion in 2016 to purchase consumer goods. Such products often include cosmetics, clothing, shoes, baby care and food products.

High-tech products that can be purchased in the international markets should also be increased, Chen said. "Drugs to combat cancer fall into this category. Tariffs could be lowered or removed for these goods."

Chen noted that imports of mineral resources should also be expanded to help preserve weak domestic reserves as they are non-renewable.

Aid in upgrading

Dong Yan, a research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, also listed high-quality consumer goods as a priority.

"The first criterion in deciding what types of imports should be further expanded is whether they can upgrade Chinese people's consumption, as China already manufactures a wide range of competitive industrial goods," Dong told the Global Times on Wednesday.

"High-tech imports should also be increased, as long as they can support China's innovation drive, help with the phasing out of outdated industrial capacity and are conducive to the country's supply-side structural reform," Dong said.

"Reducing tariffs or other measures that could increase domestic consumption or promote services sector activity would likely help China achieve its goal of growth model transition," Lillian Li, a senior analyst at Moody's, said in an email sent to the Global Times.

"Imports of final consumer goods that can upgrade household consumption are likely to rise. The extent of this effect will depend on whether domestic producers will be able to meet consumer demand, both in terms of quantity and quality of products," Li noted, adding that imports of commodities and some lower value added products for manufacturing are likely to increase as more Chinese producers move up the value chain.

"To speed up technological development, imports of intermediate goods for high-tech manufacturing production and research and development could also see an increase if advanced economies relax their restrictions on exports of such goods and services [to China]," Li said.

A long-term increase in China's imports, as opposed to purely a short-term boost, will depend on a combination of macro- and microeconomic factors, said John Ross, a senior fellow with the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China.

"Macroeconomically, only medium- to-high-speed growth of China's economy can sustain high import levels while microeconomically China has to find an appropriate way in terms of international division of labor," Ross said.

"China can gain from imports of high technology and high-value foodstuffs such as premium fruit, wine and beverages," Ross told the Global Times Wednesday.
Camille Cosby, at left, and her husband Bill Cosby arrive at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown, PA on June 12, 2017. Cosby is on trial for sexual assault. Read more

She has not attended her husband's retrial on sexual assault charges. She is not on the list of witnesses. Her name has not even been uttered in the courtroom.

But Camille Cosby remains a central figure in the case.

Cosby's wife of 54 years is active behind the scenes, communicating with her husband's publicist and keeping up with the case. She has stood by him since 2014, when women began to publicly accuse Cosby of sexual misconduct. When the first trial ended with a jury deadlock in June, she issued a searing attack on the judge and district attorney that a spokeswoman read to dozens of reporters.

And her presence has loomed in occasional, if not uncomfortable, references to Bill Cosby's marital status and infidelity  comments inside and outside the courtroom by witnesses, the lawyers, and even Cosby's own publicist.

Having an extramarital affair is something "many men have done and are doing right now this second," publicist Andrew Wyatt declared last week on the steps of the courthouse in Norristown.

That blunt remark, even explanation, came after defense lawyer Tom Mesereau portrayed Cosby during his opening arguments last week as a lonely and troubled celebrity rather than a happily married man. He told jurors Cosby had given in to temptation and acted recklessly, but that his sexual encounter with Andrea Constand was consensual.

Constand, for her part, cited Cosby's marriage as one reason she never expected the entertainer to make a sexual advance on her.

"He was a married man," Constand testified. "I didn't think that he would be attracted to me."

Camille Cosby, 74, married Cosby in 1964. She worked as his business manager, and The Cosby Show character Clair Huxtable was based on her. The couple had five children together. Ensa, one of their four daughters, died in February at age 44  just weeks before her father's retrial began. Their son, Ennis, was shot to death in Los Angeles in 1997.

Camille Cosby speaks with her husband every day during the trial, Wyatt said last week, but he declined to say whether she has been staying nearby at the family's home in Cheltenham or at their primary residence in Massachusetts.

Wyatt said he and Ebonee Benson, another publicist, stay in touch with Camille Cosby throughout the day, "and then Ebonee and I do an evening recap with her," he said.

It is unclear whether Camille Cosby will appear at the retrial, which is expected to wrap up this week as the jury begins deliberating her husband's fate.

Camille showed up just once during her husband's first trial, entering the courthouse arm in arm with him and sitting through defense lawyers' closing arguments. But she said nothing, waiting to break her silence on the case until Judge Steven T. O'Neill declared a mistrial.

"How do I describe the district attorney? Heinously and exploitatively ambitious," she said in a statement read by a publicist as her husband exited the courthouse. "How do I describe the judge? Overtly and arrogantly collaborating with the district attorney."

It marked a rare airing of Camille Cosby's thoughts. It also sparked a dispute between Wyatt, the publicist, and Cosby's then-lawyer Brian McMonagle, who got into a quarrel about what to say to reporters immediately after the mistrial was declared.

After delivering his own comments to reporters on the day O'Neill declared a mistrial, McMonagle quickly left the courthouse steps as Benson stepped forward to read the statement. Soon after, McMonagle parted ways with Cosby.

After women began publicly accusing Cosby of sexual misconduct, Camille sat silently by her husband's side during an interview with the Associated Press in which he was asked about the allegations. When he asked at the end of the interview that the recording of him refusing to address the allegations not be made public, she nodded along.

Camille first acknowledged the allegations against her husband in December 2014, when she issued a statement describing him as "a wonderful husband, father, and friend," and suggesting that he had become the victim of un-vetted accusations and media attacks.

When she faced a deposition in a defamation suit against Cosby filed by some of his accusers, Camille claimed marital privilege to avoid answering many questions, and said, "I do not have an opinion," when asked if having an affair would be a violation of their wedding vows.

Cosby cheated on his wife  in consensual affairs, according to his lawyers, or through serial sexual assault, according to prosecutors  for years before he met Constand. Jurors heard from five women last week who said Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted them.

Like Constand, they testified that they trusted Cosby and did not imagine he would make sexual advances on them because he was older than they were and married.

"I remember here was 'America's Dad' on top of me, and a happily married man with five children, and I remember thinking how wrong it was, how very, very wrong it was," said Janice Dickinson, a supermodel who testified that Cosby drugged and raped her on a trip to Reno, Nev., in 1982.

Dickinson said she even mentioned his wife when she confronted Cosby the next day about the alleged rape.

"I remember saying, 'You're married,'" she said.

Cosby's lawyers chose to make his marital status a focus in their attacks on Constand, asking her repeated questions about his wife.

"Did you ever discuss what his wife's name was?" Mesereau asked her.

"Um, no," Constand said.

"So when you were going to his house and you were going to Connecticut and you had dinner in New York  you had never discussed with him whether or not he was married?" Mesereau pressed on.

"No," Constand said. "It was assumed. I knew Cosby was a married man."

Constand said she never met Camille Cosby. Nor did she ask why not, testifying simply: "It was none of my business."
The restaurant at Wyebrook Farm in Honey Brook, which opened in 2012. Read more

About now Dean Carlson would be preparing for the busy season, when guests would flock to the picnic tables on his sprawling, pastoral property behind the Wyebrook Farm restaurant building to eat chicken breast and "grass fed" burgers and pork sirloin.

They would look out at the 360-acre farm's pastures, where the animals were raised, while other guests would be eating inside the restaurant's stone walls, where floor-to-ceiling glass panes offer the same views of this slice of western Chester County.

But the kitchen in Wyebrook Farm's restaurant will be quiet and cool this summer. And perhaps every summer after that.

"At this point, we don't have a plan to reopen," Carlson said. For now, he said, the business is a casualty of red tape and economic realities.

Net farm income across the country this year is expected to drop 8 percent  $5.4 billion  from 2017 totals, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That would be the lowest level in 16 years. As farmers look for ways to enhance their revenues, the "farm-to-table" restaurant concept "has promise," according to Peter Furey, executive director of the New Jersey Farm Bureau.

But the restaurant business "is really tough" and the average net profit is about 5 percent, said John Longstreet, president and chief executive officer of the Pennsylvania Restaurant and Lodging Association.

"It's a huge amount of work to get to that 5 percent," he said. "And if you've got a successful farm, adding a restaurant to it adds to the degree of difficulty significantly."

Sloane Six, owner of Quarry Hill Farm in Harleysville, Montgomery County, said she wishes someone would have warned her about that.

She bought her 110-acre farm in 2007 to leave behind the stress of working as a business consultant and entrepreneur. Four months later, she was diagnosed with cancer. That strengthened her passion for healthy living and eating habits. She opened her "farm-to-table" restaurant, Mainland Inn, in January 2015 a mile from her farm. Inquirer restaurant critic Craig LaBan lauded the Mainland Inn a few months later.

Two years after that, Six closed the place.

"It was a financial drain and I couldn't sustain it any longer," she said. "And I had to make a very hard decision to close the restaurant and focus on the farm and keep that strong."

She muses that maybe the area wasn't ready for her restaurant. Despite the positive reviews, "I would say we never really hit a stride," she said.

Carlson's situation was more complicated.

The former hedge-fund manager bought Wyebrook Farm in 2010 through a foreclosure sale. He had been operating a meat market before he decided to open the restaurant in 2012, responding to public demand.

Then one day in summer 2016, an official at the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection happened to be dining there and wondered whether the department had authorized the restaurant. DEP told Carlson he needed sewer permits he should have obtained before he opened.

Carlson said he did not know he needed the permits. A county health official acknowledged in an email to other government employees that the restaurant slipped through the regulatory cracks.

Carlson decided to close his restaurant in November for the slower cool season while he considered his options.

"The more I looked into it and the more I thought about it, I just wasn't willing to do it," Carlson said, citing "cost and red tape."

The main problem, Carlson said, is that despite the time and money he would have to put in  he estimates meeting state regulations would cost at least in the tens of thousands of dollars  he would not see any additional revenue.

So he's going in a different direction. On April 28, the farm will host its annual music festival featuring bluegrass, rock, folk, and other artists. This time, guests will eat from independent food trucks, not the restaurant's kitchen. But all the meat the trucks serve will come from Wyebrook Farm, Carlson said.

"It was kind of a way to have something here without the problems," he said.

Carlson said he may host other events going forward. He will continue to sell his meats at the market on his farm and at Reading Terminal Market.

He and Six, owner of Quarry Hill Farm, both said they were sorry to see their restaurants go.

"We both had really good intentions," Six said, "about what we were doing and why we were doing it."
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before a joint hearing of the Commerce and Judiciary Committees on Capitol Hill. Read more

Congressional lawmakers tried to put on a good show while grilling Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the misappropriation of detailed personal data from as many as 87 million users by Cambridge Analytica, the political consulting firm linked to the Trump campaign.

But after 10 hours of testimony by Zuckerberg spread over two days last week, it seemed clear that many graying members of Congress are unprepared to regulate Facebook  or any other social-media or data-driven companies  even if they wanted to.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), who is 62, asked Zuckerberg if Twitter was "the same as what you do," while Sen. Orrin Hatch (R., Utah), who is 84, asked how Facebook made money.

Zuckerberg, 33, said, "Senator, we run ads."

As lawmakers struggled to understand how Facebook works, the social-media giant's share price increased, as investors quickly understood the hearings were likely to result in what Shakespeare described as "sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Zuckerberg apologized for the data breach, just as he has done repeatedly over the years for previous screw-ups. He also dodged lawmakers' questions nearly two dozen times. Meanwhile, the senators were roasted on Twitter.

But allowing Facebook to resume business as usual is not an option. With more than two billion users around the world, Facebook wields enormous power through the vast amount of private data it collects.

During the hearing, Zuckerberg said some regulation was "inevitable," but he did not commit to any sweeping privacy changes. Instead, Zuckerberg said it was important to get the "right regulation." Translation: Facebook lobbyists may be willing to help clueless lawmakers craft watered-down regulations.

But even as Zuckerberg promised that Facebook would do a better job of protecting users' privacy, the company was actively fighting privacy measures in California and Illinois.

In February, Facebook  along with Comcast, Google, Verizon, and AT&T  together contributed more than $1 million to a political action committee set up to oppose a ballot measure in California called the Consumer Right to Privacy Act of 2018. If approved, the measure would allow Californians to prohibit companies from selling or sharing their personal data. Shortly after Zuckerberg finished testifying in Washington, Facebook said it would no longer contribute to the PAC.

Last fall, Facebook began bulking up its army of roughly 40 lobbyists in Washington after revelations that Russians exploited its network to help elect President Trump. The social-media behemoth spent $11.5 million on lobbying last year, a 32 percent increase from 2016.

That lobbying offensive is sure to shape any efforts to protect users. Not to mention that the Republican-controlled Congress is more focused on stripping away many regulations, ranging from the environment to the financial industry. In March, Congress scrapped online privacy rules imposed by the Federal Communications Commission last year, a victory for telecommunications and cable giants such as AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon.

In contrast, the European Union is implementing data privacy regulations next month that will make it easier for users to approve or withhold use of their data. Zuckerberg said Facebook is complying with the European rules and will extend those safeguards to its users around the world.

That should offer Facebook users some protection as Congress dawdles. But eventually America's lawmakers must act.
The 1st Digital China Summit will be held from April 22 to 24 in the city of Fuzhou, southeast China's Fujian province.

With the theme ofLet Informatization Drive Modernization, Speed Up the Construction of Digital China, the summit has eight sub-forums, covering topics such as digital economy, big data, and the Internet of Things.

Chinas achievements in e-government and digital economy will be showcased during the summit.

The summit will be co-sponsored by the National Internet Information Office, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the Fujian Provincial People's Government.
A $25 million private gift to the Abington School District and the strings attached to it ignited a firestorm in suburban Philadelphia. Critics are echoing the slogan "Our schools are not for sale"  a rallying cry familiar to students and parents in underfunded districts like Philadelphia that have struggled to respond to years of inadequate funding.

The specific terms of the gift in the Abington controversy may be unusual, but private fund-raising efforts to pay for public education are not. They are on the rise in this region and elsewhere across the country.

The current proliferation of education-focused foundations, GoFundMe pages, privately supported capital campaigns, and other initiatives to raise dollars for unmet educational needs collectively tell a story: Inadequate funding is a central problem for most school districts in our state. A few weeks ago, DonorsChoose.org, a crowdfunding website for school and classroom projects, received a $29 million donation to fulfill a number of education requests around the country.

Even in solidly middle-class Abington, a district ranked 150th out of 500 in the state in per-pupil spending in 2016, finding the funds to renovate an aging high school building or update STEM curriculum offerings is a challenge. Imagine the difficulty faced by some of the 350 Pennsylvania school districts that are not as well-funded as Abington. Philadelphia schools, for example, have to make do with $3,200 less per student than Abington while dealing with overcrowded classrooms, crumbling buildings, and a lack of basic resources. In a school with 600 children, that's a $1.9 million difference. It is no surprise that districts, schools, and educators are scrambling for other sources of revenue.

The crux of the problem is the paltry share of education costs covered by the state. Pennsylvania ranks 47th out of the 50 states, according to census data, in the portion of education spending covered by state funds. The state provides only 37 percent of total K-12 education spending in Pennsylvania, 10 percentage points below the national average for states.

With most of the burden of raising revenue for schools falling on local districts, disparities in local wealth and property values end up determining how well-resourced our school districts are and the quality of education provided to students. As a result, Pennsylvania has been cited as having the widest gap in education spending between wealthy and poor districts of any state in the nation.

Private philanthropy isn't the way to fix these disparities. It's hit or miss  an underfunded school or district shouldn't have to worry about whether any of its graduates become billionaires to meet its students' needs. Under-resourced, under-performing schools and districts serving low-income communities are the ones with the greatest needs, but also may have the hardest time attracting donations.

>> Read more: Many public institutions, like libraries, are funded by private money, but caution is key

Instead, addressing the inequities and inadequacy of education funding requires good, consistent public policy. That's why the Education Law Center  along with our partners at the Public Interest Law Center  is suing the state on behalf of families, school districts, and two statewide organizations, demanding that the state fund our schools in a manner consistent with its constitutional obligations. And for the first time, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that the question of whether Pennsylvania's school funding is adequate and equitable is a matter that the courts can decide. Our case should be moving to trial soon, but legislators and state officials have made objections that Commonwealth Court is considering.

We know that time is of the essence for all our public-school children. Every day our case is delayed is another day tens of thousands of Pennsylvania's children spend in under-resourced schools, without the basic supports they need and are legally entitled to receive. We cannot afford to lose all their incredible potential. This is a problem that only our elected officials can fix.

If we see education as a public good that should be available to all children, our elected officials need to fund our schools accordingly and relieve the growing pressure on educators to depend on private philanthropy.

Deborah Gordon Klehr is executive director of the Education Law Center.
A Starbucks barista holds an iced tea drink with a Race Together sticker on it at a Starbucks in 2015. Starbucks, trying to tamp down a racially charged uproar over the arrest of two black men at one of its stores in Philadelphia, plans to close more than 8,000 U.S. stores for several hours next month to conduct racial-bias training. Read more

Starbucks plans to close 8,000 U.S. stores next month for an afternoon of racial-bias training. It's a nice first pour.

But it's no more effective than that time the company wanted us all to "Race Together" and talk about bias with strangers over coffee. Racism in America is planted deeper than that.

Two black men were wrongly arrested for sitting while black in a Philadelphia Starbucks last week. Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson told The Associated Press on Thursday they were waiting for a friend for only a few minutes before police were called. It won't be the last time someone of color has been profiled and debased in a public space, and white fear strikes.

We just saw it in January, when an Applebee's waitress in Independence called the police on two young black women for dining while black, accusing them of dining and dashing the night before. And in December, security guards told five black teen boys to leave a Virginia mall for browsing while black.

Even diversity experts say there's no easy fix.

Michelle Wimes, chief diversity and professional development officer at Ogletree Deakins law firm in Kansas City, remembers when she was a rookie and arrived at a deposition. She was asked when the lawyer would show up. Apparently there was no way a black woman could be the attorney.

>> Read more: What will happen at Starbucks racial bias training? Will it work?

Her husband, a prosecutor, was once assumed to be a defendant. That's bias in action. We're still dealing with those micro-aggressions.

"It is a symptom of a much larger problem in America's fabric. It's a result of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, and now other forms are manifesting in the way we have criminalized black people," Wimes says. "Now we are in a situation nationally where a kid gets shot at for asking for directions. It probably didn't occur to the Starbucks manager to not to call the police on those men. There's a national mentality that black people, especially black men, don't deserve the same treatment.

"I feel so exasperated by it all," she says. "I don't know how effective training will be in that sense. We are so determined to 'other-ize' people  women, immigrants, Muslims, people of color, LGBTQ  it's almost like we need a cultural revolution. I don't know if any training can resolve that or teach you to see the humanity in others."

But diversity and inclusion are her passion. And she says if Starbucks is going to attempt training, it needs to be ongoing.

"You can't just sit down and expect to change behaviors and culture with a half-day training," she says. "We all have bias. And we have to be able to recognize when that bias comes into play and stop ourselves from reacting negatively. You have to be able to identify in-group and out-group dynamics. The in-group is the group that looks like you, and that is the favored group. That is the group that uses the restroom without making a purchase, and no one calls the police."

>> Read more: Starbucks is planning racial bias training. Here's what a Penn professor says it should involve

Wimes, like most diversity experts, recommends everyone take Project Implicit tests. Created by psychologists at Harvard, the University of Virginia and the University of Washington, the free, lengthy questionnaires help uncover hidden bias. They are often required before diversity trainings even begin.

Implicit bias is at the root of what went wrong at Starbucks that day, says Susan B. Wilson, UMKC vice chancellor of the division of diversity and inclusion.

This type of prejudice is what fuels staffers at a certain Plaza restaurant to seat Wilson near the bathroom when she meets other women for business lunches. Even when other tables are available. But men get the prime seats. It's what motivates the butcher to overlook her place in line and help the white customer instead.

"An afternoon of training is a way for Starbucks to raise awareness," Wilson says. "It's a good start. But it will not shift the culture at Starbucks, period. They need to do a comprehensive diversity assessment of the organization, starting with policies and procedures and standardize them across the corporation."

As it stands, Starbucks sees itself as a community hub. But it lets individual store managers make the rules about meet-ups and bathrooms, leaving too much room for prejudice.

>> Read more: Is Starbucks closing for a day really going to fix racial bias?

"They need to look at their hiring practices," she says. "How are managers trained? Is unconscious-bias training mandatory? All diversity training is not created equal. Some trainings just scratch the surface; others create general awareness. But effective training has to be targeted at behavioral change."

The experts involved in Starbucks' upcoming training include former Attorney General Eric Holder and Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

"I think some people want to believe that there's some magic bullet, and there is not," Ifill told NPR. "Racism is deeply entrenched in our society, and any real effort to confront it means you have to be in it for the long haul. It means you have to be in it seriously. It means not just training. It means monitoring the effectiveness of that training."

Starbucks does seem to care about diversity. Last month, the company announced it had achieved equal pay for equal work for U.S. employees of all races and genders. Last year, its board became one of the most diverse in America. The company committed to opening stores outside wealthier communities, in places like Ferguson, Mo., and partnered with local minority-owned vendors and nonprofits to hire and train youth.

Yet none of that keeps racists from being racist. Or hidden bias from waving hello.

"If we don't take the time to look outside ourselves, we are always going to get it wrong," says Risha Grant, author of "That's B.S.: How Bias Synapse Disrupts Inclusive Cultures and the Power to Attract Diverse Markets." "Training is important. So is a willingness to listen and understand intent and impact. If I didn't intend to hurt you, then I want to hear your heart because I really want to fix that. But if I intended to impact you in a negative way, then I don't care."

Unjust killings and arrests make headlines. But we overlook micro-aggressions  like moving to the other side of the elevator when a black person gets in or ignoring a woman's idea in a meeting but giving credit to a man when he repeats what she said. Wimes says these biases are more dangerous than we realize.

Some micro-aggressions diversity experts hear often:

"You're a credit to your race." What, you don't expect greatness from people who look like me?

"You're just so articulate." As if people of color can't be well-spoken.

"Are you sure that's how they meant it?" When someone is hurt, your automatic response shouldn't be denial.

"When I look at you I don't see color." You see color when you match clothes. Don't strip people of their identity for your comfort.

"I have several black friends." This doesn't make you incapable of racism. Not even having black children does that.

"We have to get the most qualified person." You know, women and people of color can be the most qualified.

"Can I touch your hair?" You pet animals, not people.

"Why are you so angry?" So a woman or a person of color can't be passionate?

"What are you?" This insinuates a lack of humanness.

Wimes borrows from the philosophy of her friend, inclusion adviser Arin Reeves. "We have to start looking at micro-aggressions as mosquito bites. One or two mosquito bites may not bother you. You can get on with your day. But if every day you are coming to work and getting bit a few times, pretty soon your body is riddled in mosquito bites. How can you function like that?"

You can't. Our country needs a climate change to stop the attacks.

Jenee Osterheldt is a culture columnist for the Kansas City Star, where this piece originally appeared. @JeneeinKC
President Abdel-Fattah El Sisi issued on Thursday a decree approving an agreement on scientific and technical cooperation between Egypt and the European Union (EU).

The deal sets out the terms and conditions for Egypt's participation in the Partnership on Research and Innovation in the Mediterranean Area (PRIMA), an EU joint programme focusing on the development and application of solutions for food systems and water resources in the Mediterranean basin.

The agreement was signed in October 2017 in Brussels.

According to the agreement, Egypt will become one of the 19 member states around the Mediterranean that are working to develop innovative solutions for sustainable water management and food production, which remain major challenges in the region.

The main objective of the 10-year initiative (2018-2028), is to devise new Research & Innovation approaches to improve water availability and sustainable agriculture production in a region heavily distressed by climate change, urbanisation and population growth.

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Egypts Defense Minister Sedki Sobhy said on Friday that "vile terrorist attacks" will not stop the Egyptian armed forces from carrying their duties in defending the country.

In an official statement, Egypts armed forces spokesman Tamer El-Refaie said Sobhy went to various armed forces hospitals to visit the "heroes who had been wounded in terrorist attacks in Sinai."

According to the statement, Sobhy expressed his appreciation for their "sacrifices to deter all those who are tempted to tamper with the countrys security."

He pointed that both the people and armed forces of Egypt are close to eliminating remaining attempts to destabilize the nation and threaten its security.

From their side, the injured members of the armed forces expressed their appreciation for the defence minister's visit, stressing their determination to return back to the field to carry out their duties in safeguarding the nation.

Fridays visit comes as the army continues its comprehensive military campaign Operation Sinai 2018.

The campaign was launched in February to implement the plan of comprehensive confrontation with terrorist and criminal elements and organisations in North and Central Sinai, and in other areas in the Nile Delta and desert regions west of the Nile Valley, according to the Egyptian Armed Forces.

On Thursday, the army said it has killed the emir of the major terrorist organization in central Sinai, the latest of many successes announced by the armed forces as part of the extensive operation.

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A controversial Egyptian sociologist, Saad El-Din Ibrahim, was deported back to Egypt from Lebanon on Friday over giving a lecture in Tel Aviv last January.

A security source said that police at Cairo International Airport had been informed of Ibrahims arrival as a deportee from Beirut before he arrived.

Ibrahim answered police inquiries, the source said, elaborating that he had travelled from Egypt to Beirut on Thursday to deliver a lecture at the American University in Beirut (AUB) under the title of The Future of the Arab Springs Revolutions.

However, upon arriving in Beirut he was refused entry by the Lebanese authorities per Lebanon's law due to a visit to Israel in January, where he gave a lecture at Tel Aviv University, Ibrahim told authorities.

Under Lebanons Israel Boycott Law, "agreements made either directly or through any intermediary party with institutions or persons having residence in Israel, or with persons or entities acting on behalf of Israel or its interests, are forbidden."

A violation of the law, promulgated in 1955, may result in the imposition of criminal penalties, which could include imprisonment and fines.

The security source added that that the authorities informed Ibrahim that he has been accused of squandering funds in five cases, and instructed him to undertake necessary appeal measures, before dismissing him.

In January 2018, Ibrahim came under fire for delivering the lecture in Tel Aviv; Arab Palestinian students staged a protest against Ibrahim, accusing him of treason", according to Al-Ahram Arabic news website.

Founded in 1988, the Ibn Khaldun Centre for Development Studies says it specialises in advocating for democracy and civil freedoms in Egypt and the Arab World.

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MS-13 has directed its members to "take out a cop" in a directive that has police on high alert across the New York area, according to a new memo obtained by the New York Post.

Police are searching for the gang member suspected of putting out the hit order  a tall, light-skinned Hispanic man with a thin build and a tattoo of three dots next to his eye.

Officers in Hempstead, one of the Long Island towns the violent gang has terrorized, were tipped off to the threat Wednesday by a credible informant, the NYPD memo said.

The member of the Salvadoran gang told the informant they needed to make a statement and specifically wanted to kill an officer in the Hempstead area.
Two sheriffs deputies were shot and killed Thursday in a restaurant in Trenton, FL, in what appeared to be an ambush, officials said.

The Gilchrist County deputies died "after a suspect walked up" to the Ace China restaurant around 3 p.m. "and shot both deputies through the window," the Alachua County Sheriff's Office said in a statement made on behalf of the Gilchrist County Sheriff's Office. "As fellow deputies responded to the scene, they found the shooter deceased outside the business, and both Deputy Sheriffs where they died of their wounds."

There is no clear motive, reports Fox News.
Tammy Dee Widger's charges in the fatal shooting of Clinton, MO, Officer Ryan Morton last month have been amended and now include first-degree murder, the Henry County Prosecutor's Office said Wednesday.

Clinton, MO, police officer Christopher Ryan Morton was shot and killed in the line of duty. (Photo: Clinton PD)

Widger also now faces two counts of first-degree assault. She originally faced second-degree murder and drug charges, reports the Kansas City Star.

First-degree murder carries a maximum penalty of the death sentence or life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

Officers responded to Widger's home in Clinton by mistake in early March after a 911 call was made 20 miles away. James Waters fatally wounded Morton and injured two other officers in a shooting, police said.

"Although it is believed that James Waters actually shot the three police officers," the Henry County Prosecutor's Office said in a release, "Missouri law provides that if an accessory to a crime ... aids another person in planning, committing or attempting to commit the offense, the accessory may be charged with the same offense."

The release added that aiding can occur either before or during an offense.
Social media responses to this weeks US, British and French air strikes on Syria reveal confusion reigns when it comes to attitudes towards the Syrian war

The headlines of Egypts dailies on Sunday morning covering the previous nights US, British and French air strikes on Syria clearly intended to establish an equivalence.

A tripartite Western aggression on Syrian military sites, read Al-Ahrams headline. Al-Masry Al-Youm, Egypts biggest private paper, upped the ante with Tripartite aggression on Syria in bold red while Al-Shorouk, another private newspaper, went for Details of the 70-minute aggression on Syria.

TV stations followed the same line. In her influential evening talk show on Sunday TV anchor Lamis Al-Hadidi repeatedly referred to the air strikes as a tripartite aggression.

The wording, of course, touches a raw nerve in this part of the world. It was a deliberate attempt to evoke the Israeli-British-French aggression against Egypt in November 1956 which followed nationalisation of the Suez Canal.

The Suez war, known throughout the Arab world as the Tripartite Aggression, sent shockwaves across the region. French-British air strikes on Egyptian targets on 2 and 3 November cut Egyptian radio broadcasts and prevented Nasser from delivering his Friday speech.

As the Egyptian Radio Service  at the time the most important broadcaster in the region  fell silent Radio Damascus famously declared its solidarity announcing: This is Cairo from Damascus, this is Egypt from Syria.

Nassers popularity had surged in the Arab world on the back of his vision of national struggle against imperialism. The 1950s and 60s were marked by liberation movements and the enemy was not hard to define. Western imperialism had to end, and Israel posed a strategic threat to Egypt.

Whatever the intention, recalling that era in an attempt to create an equivalence with overnight, and limited, air strikes against the Syrian regimes alleged chemical weapons bases served only to highlight Arab divisions over Syria.

For the massive death toll of the Syrian war, now in its seventh year and described by the UNs human rights chief as the worst man-made disaster since World War II, is a tragedy caused not by Western powers but the unbridled violence unleashed by local actors and their regional allies.

Efforts by Hizbullah, Iran and the Syrian regime to present their role in the war as an axis of resistance continue to appeal to their supporters. But it is no secret that others in the Arab world view the three parties as enemies of the Syrian people.

The war of words continues, and there is no unproblematic stand observers and activists can take in response to developments.

The day after the air strikes Mohamed Osman, a leading member of the Strong Egypt Party who was active in the anti- Iraq war movement, declared on his Facebook page: Im with any action that ends the existence of Bashar Al-Assad.

The post received more likes than comments questioning his statement.

If you think the invasion of Iraq in 2003 ended Saddam Husseins legacy then by all means stick to this position, one journalist responded.

Bashar killed 600,000. Any solution that kills 600,000 or less and ends Bashar is not a crisis, Osman replied.

Leading human rights activist Aida Seif Al-Dawla joined the discussion: No crisis in killing of 600,000? We are no different than Bashar then.

Of course this is a crisis, was Osmans response. But Bashar can kill 600,000 more and remain in power. This regions catastrophe is largely due to the fact that Bashar is still alive despite everything.

The debate about how to react to the air strikes has been taking place mainly on social media because it is the only platform where political debate remains possible.

But in the absence of independent political polls it is difficult to gauge how the wider Arab public feels about the air strikes. What is clear is that the attack revived interest in the Syrian war, if only briefly.

Thousands circulated the black-and-white photo of Syrian radio broadcaster Abdel-Hadi Bakkar who made the this is Cairo from Damascus announcement 62 years ago, accompanied by a brief summary of his story. May God save Syria, the post concluded.

The deliberate analogy with the 1956 Suez crisis, and the reactions it provoked, may have revealed more than sympathy with Syria, argues Ahmed Abd Rabou, an Egyptian political scientist currently teaching at the University of Denver.

References to the Tripartite Aggression, he contends, reflect a jarring inability to understand the nature of international and regional relations and the reality of the Syrian crisis.

Those who talk about a tripartite aggression are insulting the historic and regional moment when Egypt was subject to a real aggression that violated its sovereignty, he wrote on his Facebook page, adding there can never be change as long as the general consciousness of Arab intellectuals is trapped in the Nasserist and Baathist era.

* This story was first published in Al-Ahram Weekly

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Today, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes released the following statement after the Committees received James Comeys memos. Their statement is, I believe, spot on:

We have long argued former Director Comeys self-styled memos should be in the public domain, subject to any classification redactions. These memos are significant for both what is in them and what is not.

Former Director Comeys memos show the President made clear he wanted allegations of collusion, coordination, and conspiracy between his campaign and Russia fully investigated. The memos also made clear the cloud President Trump wanted lifted was not the Russian interference in the 2016 election cloud, rather it was the salacious, unsubstantiated allegations related to personal conduct leveled in the dossier.

The memos also show former Director Comey never wrote that he felt obstructed or threatened. While former Director Comey went to great lengths to set dining room scenes, discuss height requirements, describe the multiple times he felt complimented, and myriad other extraneous facts, he never once mentioned the most relevant fact of all, which was whether he felt obstructed in his investigation.

The memos also make certain what has become increasingly clear of late: former Director Comey has at least two different standards in his interactions with others. He chose not to memorialize conversations with President Obama, Attorney General Lynch, Secretary Clinton, Andrew McCabe or others, but he immediately began to memorialize conversations with President Trump. It is significant former Director Comey made no effort to memorialize conversations with former Attorney General Lynch despite concerns apparently significant enough to warrant his unprecedented appropriation of the charging decision away from her and the Department of Justice in July of 2016.

These memos also lay bare the notion that former Director Comey is not motivated by animus. He was willing to work for someone he deemed morally unsuited for office, capable of lying, requiring of personal loyalty, worthy of impeachment, and sharing the traits of a mob boss. Former Director Comey was willing to overlook all of the aforementioned characteristics in order to keep his job. In his eyes, the real crime was his own firing.

The memos show Comey was blind to biases within the FBI and had terrible judgment with respect to his deputy Andrew McCabe. On multiple occasions he, in his own words, defended the character of McCabe after President Trump questioned McCabe.

Finally, former Director Comey leaked at least one of these memos for the stated purpose of spurring the appointment of a Special Counsel, yet he took no steps to spur the appointment of a Special Counsel when he had significant concerns about the objectivity of the Department of Justice under Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

As we have consistently said, rather than making a criminal case for obstruction or interference with an ongoing investigation, these memos would be Defense Exhibit A should such a charge be made.

(Emphasis added)
The Justice Departments inspector general (IG) referred his finding that former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe repeatedly misled investigators for a determination of whether McCabe should be criminally prosecuted. The referral was to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. It came shortly after the IG issued his report on McCabes misconduct.

A criminal referral does not necessarily mean a criminal prosecution. It means the U.S. Attorney will consider the evidence and decide whether to prosecute.

In this case, assuming the accuracy of the inspector generals report, the evidence that McCabe committed the crime of lying to federal investigators  which carries a sentence of up to five years  is substantial. As the Washington Post says, the report laid out in stunning detail allegations McCabe had deceived investigators about his role in approving the disclosure [of sensitive information to the media], even as he lashed out at others in the FBI for leaks. McCabe did so on four different occasions, according to the inspector general. The IG also found that McCabe lied knowingly and intentionally, a key element of the crime.

Matt Vespa at Townhall presents details regarding McCabes alleged deceit.

A group of eleven GOP congressmen has also asked the Justice Department to consider whether McCabe, along with other DOJ officials, committed crimes in connection with the Hillary Clinton-related investigations, the 2016 presidential election, etc. However, the DOJ can easily blow off eleven congressmen. By contrast, it will likely take the non-partisan, Obama-appointed IGs referral quite seriously.

Last month, McCabe raised more than $500,000 for his legal defense. He may need considerably more than that.
Thousands protested along the Gaza Strip's border with Israel in a fourth straight Friday of mass demonstrations and clashes, with four Palestinians shot dead by Israeli occupation forces.

Israeli army gunfire killed a 15-year-old boy and two young men, aged 24 and 25, in northern Gaza, rescue workers said, and a 29-year-old Palestinian was shot dead in the south of the coastal enclave.

The latest deaths brought to 38 the toll of those killed by Israeli forces since March 30, with hundreds of others also wounded by gunfire, according to Gaza's health ministry.

On Friday alone, 440 protesters were wounded by gunfire or needed treatment for tear gas inhalation, the ministry said.

Israel says it has only opened fire when necessary to guard its border and prevent violence, but no Israelis have been wounded and its open-fire rules have come under scrutiny.

Israel's military aircraft dropped leaflets in the border area early Friday warning against approaching the fence.

Referring to the Islamist movement that runs the Gaza Strip, the leaflet said: "You are participating in violent riots. The Hamas terror organisation is taking advantage of you in order to carry out terror attacks."

It added: "Stay away from the fence and do not attempt to harm it; avoid using weapons and committing violent acts against Israeli security forces and Israeli citizens."

The number of protesters on Friday was lower than the previous three weeks, but still in the thousands.

Both Palestinians killed were shot east of Jabaliya in the north of the Gaza Strip, the health ministry said.

Among the thousands gathered to protest, at least hundreds were approaching the fence and throwing stones and burning tyres, an AFP correspondent said.

Israeli forces were using tear gas in addition to live fire.

Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman said while touring the Israeli side of the border on Friday: "The thing that the other side must understand is that there is a determined and skilled army here."

He added that "behind it stands a determined people that is backing up the army."

Tens of thousands have gathered on previous Fridays as part of the protests near the border. The protests are meant to last six weeks, but peak on Fridays.

Israel accuses Hamas, with whom it has fought three wars since 2008, of using the protests as cover to carry out violence.

Palestinians say protesters are being shot while posing no threat to soldiers.

The European Union and UN chief Antonio Guterres have called for an independent investigation into the deaths, but Israel has rejected it.

The protests are calling for Palestinian refugees to be allowed to return to their former lands now inside Israel.

More than 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled during the 1948 war surrounding the creation of Israel.

Protest organisers officially labelled the latest protest in support of "martyrs and prisoners," but on social media some Palestinians dubbed it the "Friday of Kites."

Gazans pinned notes to some of the kites telling Israelis "there is no place for you in Palestine."

*This story was edited by Ahram Online.

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Ammo Grrrll changes up Thomas Wolfe mostly by adding humor in You Cant GET Home Again! Or, Thoughts From the Frozen Tundra. She writes:

Thomas Wolfe was quite certain that You Cant Go Home Again. By which, I took it to mean that we have distorted impressions of people and places seen through the prism of childhood that do not hold up under the harsh light of adulthood. As grownups, we put away childish things and move on (unless we are deranged by the 2016 election), and things look different. Plus many things ARE different. Our hometowns themselves change. Dramatically. For example, the old record store where we teens hung out, requesting cuts from new albums to be played, is now a tattoo parlor. My fathers drugstore is an antique shop.

And yet, we are all destined, yea, obligated, to go home many times in our adult lives. My siblings and I have been blessed to have our parents live well into old age. Mama passed nearly two years ago, but Daddy defies all our expectations and soldiers on. So once again it was my turn to go back home for an extended visit.

I took off at dawn on a splendid 96 degree Monday in April, looking forward to a relaxing trip through the Heartland. New Mexico seems strangely obsessed with convincing drivers that Dust storms may exist and posting the guidelines for handling those dust storms with haunting regularity. You would think these rules would be self-evident, but self-evidence seems to be in short supply these days and lawyers roam the land seeking compensation for victims who are too stupid to live.

Want me to tell you the guidelines which probably cant be seen in an actual dust storm? Sure, you do. First, do NOT park in the middle of the road or, as they put it, Do not block the travel lane. Then, pull over and turn off car. Do not unbuckle the seat belt and, finally, Stay there until it is clear.

Whew! Thank you, New Mexico taxpayers, for all that signage! In the event of a dust storm (which, I now understand, may exist), my plan was to stop short on the dotted white line, leave the engine running, unbuckle my seat belt and open a beer, but you set me straight!

I hit El Paso just past 1:00 p.m. and sailed right on through in record time. One of the reasons that travelers can make such good time in the Southwest is because of our common-sense speed limit of 80 mph. Which, of course, really means 90. Later on, in more populated parts of Texas, the speed limit is lowered to 75 mph, but the drivers continue to go 80-90. Its as if there were a vote and the consensus was Uh, no. We like that OTHER speed limit better and we intend to go that speed. More or less.

After around 500 miles, I stopped for the night in Van Horn, Texas. I was trying to leave enough time for a good walk, maybe a swim in the hotel pool. And I did leave that time, I just didnt walk or swim, which seemed more trouble somehow than eating and surfing the Net. As Miss Scarlett noted, Tomorrow is another day.

Texas, as you may have heard, is large. So the next day was spent crossing Texas right up to suburban Fort Worth. Again, I had tried to leave room for exercise, and this time I did walk briskly across the street from my hotel to the Chick-Fil-A. And back. Just knowing that New York Mayor de Blasio had tried unsuccessfully to prevent Chick-Fil-A from opening a franchise in Manhattan made that awesome chicken sandwich taste even better.

Wednesday found me in the beautiful Worthington Marriott Renaissance in downtown Fort Worth where I used some of the jillion Marriott points I have accumulated by travel and flagrant credit card abuse. My dear friends, Heather and Bill, joined me for a delightful afternoon and evening. I have achieved Platinum status, which gets you a whole lot of perks, trust me, and all you have to do to get this free breakfast buffet is spend 75 nights in a Marriott in one year. Anyone can do it! I think the only level higher is Uranium, except that Hillary sold it all to the Russians somehow without anyone noticing.

And now our travel story gets considerably more harrowing. While strolling about in downtown Fort Worth, which is clean and safe even at night, I was receiving many frantic texts from relatives in Minnesota  plus the Paranoid Texan back home who tirelessly monitors the weather  warning me that a Snow-mageddon style winter storm was headed to Minnesota.

My original plan had been to take a leisurely pace, seeing sights, visiting friends, and, as I may have mentioned, carrying on with my rigorous workout schedule. I was going to arrive in the Twin Cities Saturday, April 14th, with a family dinner set for that evening and a family brunch the next day, leaving for Daddys Assisted Living place in Alexandria after brunch.

I was invited to stay in Brooklyn Park with my nephew and his lovely wife and have some quality time with Super Baby, their 16-month old son. As the Yiddish expression goes, Man plans; God laughs. After all the warnings, I was determined to pick up the pace, and arrive ahead of the storm. Which I accomplished by driving exactly 1,000 miles in one of the longest days of my life. In 16 short hours of driving, stopping only for more coffee, gas, and Loves Travel Centers clean restrooms, the temperatures went from 86 in Texas, 84 in Oklahoma, 82 in Kansas, 78 in Missouri, to 68 in Iowa and then plunged to 38 as I crossed into Mordor. A freezing rain had just started up 100 miles from the Twin Cities, complete with a stiff wind. If New Orleans nickname is The Big Easy, Minnesota should be called The Big Difficulty.

Let me just cut to the chase here. After laying a nice base of ice, the next day the rain turned to snow. And the day after that it continued. Brooklyn Park got sixteen inches of snow. The restaurant where we had scheduled the family get-together was closed at 6:00 p.m., and the staff sent home. Thank God, at least it was a Thai restaurant, so we didnt culturally appropriate. The brunch didnt happen. Even the Minnesota Macho drivers of four-wheel drive vehicles stayed put. I spent not one, not two, but three nights with my gracious nephew and family and not even once did I hear them whisper, Good Lord, what if shes here till Fathers Day!? She keeps muttering that now she doesnt need to feel guilty that she cant get out and walk!

I didnt get out until Monday, the 16th of flippin April. But Daddy was very happy to see me. I will be here for twelve days. I heard on the news tonight that another storm system was headed toward Iowa, but it should run its course before I leave. Are there winter storms in May? Anybody along the 35W South corridor or I-10W who would like a houseguest until, say, Mothers Day?
After months of contract negotiations and a postponed strike earlier in April, University of Michigan faculty, students and supporters in Ann Arbor occupied a floor of the Fleming Administration Building Friday, April 20, at 1 p.m.

The demonstrators are calling for a salary increase for 1,700 lecturers at the Flint, Dearborn and Ann Arbor campuses.

The Lecturers Employee Organization released the following statement:

LEO statement to Provost Martin Philbert (April 20, 2018)

Weve been negotiating for six months. We want a change in the way the UM Administration thinks about, and compensates, lecturers. Not a just an improvement, but a transformation. A new way of doing business.

For most of that time, the Administration has been negotiating with us according to the old way of doing business, offering marginal increases to minimums so low that Lecturers cannot meet what the United Way calls a basic needs budget for a family with one or two children.

We had to use the threat of a strike to make real progress. The Administration responded by finally putting increased minimums and equity adjustments for past underpayment on the table. So we called off the strike.

These improvements still fell well short of what is needed to get the full-time rate for all Lecturers across the basic needs budget threshold. But the Administration says there is little additional money for Ann Arbor Lecturers and none at all for our Flint and Dearborn colleagues. Our research has demonstrated that UM has the money to pay us what we are worth, but there are other ways our Administration would rather spend that money. It expects us to settle soon without more than marginal improvements to its current offer. But that expectation is neither realistic nor fair, and it is not going to happen.

The role that Lecturers play in our university has changed profoundly over the last 20 years. Prior to that, Lecturers were professionals (e.g., lawyers) with a full-time non-academic job who shared their non-academic expertise with UM students by teaching a course or two each year; or newly-minted PhDs who got a little extra teaching experience before securing a tenure-track job; or the spouses of sought-after tenure-track faculty. There were not many such lecturers at UM and they did not teach a very large share of our courses. The professionals typically made a fine income in their primary job. The newly-minted PhDs were expected to get good paying tenure-track jobs in the near future. Low pay for spousal hires raised questions of gender equity, given that most of those spouses were women. But their low pay could be rationalized on the assumption that the combined income of two UM faculty, one on the tenure-track, was probably quite good.

By the mid-1990s, these kinds of Lecturers were the minority. Most Lecturers were hired from the pool who would have become full-time tenured faculty in the days when most faculty jobs were still tenure-track. That system is gone. Today, two thirds of U.S. higher education faculty are nontenure-track. The number is not that high at UM, but the trend is in the same direction. Already Lecturers teach over half the classes in Flint and Dearborn; in Ann Arbor, we account for almost 40% of undergraduate classes, and almost 50% of first and second year classes.

In this new world, some of us became Lecturers because we love teaching and interacting with students, and prefer this focus to applying for grants, running a lab, and publishing in leading journals, as our tenure-track colleagues must to be deemed successful. Other Lecturers would have taken a tenure-track job if one were available, but (as noted) there are now far fewer of those as a share of all faculty jobs. Either way, our talents, experience, and expertise have developed differently from those of our tenure-track colleagues. We have different, yet complimentary and equally challenging jobs, and we both make vital contributions to our university.

We want the Administration to recognize that being a Lecturer can and ought to be a financially viable career option. We are talented and dedicated teachers, scholars, artists, and scientists. We are important members of the SE Michigan communities where we live, as well as the UM campus community. Its high time the Administration started treating us as such!

We want the Administration to commit to creating Lecturer jobs that meet or exceed the United Ways basic needs budget standard. It found the money to make its Go Blue Promise; it should now make a Stay Blue Commitment  a promise to Lecturers that if they work hard and meet the high standards of the University, the value of our contributions will be acknowledged and we will be paid enough to make a real career and raise a family here.

Related

* University of Michigan lecturers prepare for possible strike over pay issue

* U of M lecturers prepare to strike Monday if deal isnt reached

* University of Michigan lecturers postpone strike after progress in contract talks
Ahram Online spoke to Manal Negmeldin, e-business manager at ElAraby Group, about the fast growth of e-commerce sales in Egypt and what needs to be done to develop it more

Online shopping has been on the rise in Egypt over the last few years.

More companies have been paying attention to the potential of e-commerce, which has increased in volume to currently reach over $5 billion in the local market, with official expectations to reach $20 billion by 2020.

With Egypts new national strategy for e-commerce that aims to double the number of businesses selling products and services online, the country has the potential to grow exponentially in that field.

Increasing numbers of mobile phone and social media users are key to driving e-commerce forward, especially given that the population of prospective online shoppers is huge.

According to the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS), more than 21 million of Egypts 100 million population are aged between 18 to 29. The number of smart phone users in Egypt reached 27.5 million this year.

Ahram Online spoke with Manal Negmeldin, e-business manager at ElAraby Group, who has contributed to tripling online sales within a period of two years since El-Araby started online services, to talk about the opportunities and challenges facing the growth of electronic commerce in Egypt, and how social media platforms are affecting e-businesses.

Ahram Online: How do you see the development of online sales in Egypt over the last few years?

Manal Negmeldin: More people in Egypt have become so attached to their phones and spend a lot of time on social media. The younger generations of smart phone users helped in the growth of e-commerce, which has been growing steadily in the last few years, until it reached over $5 billion.

If the customers are exposed to that media for an extended period of time and they have the free will to read and are interested in your content, it becomes easier to engage current and potential customers and build a real relationship with them.

AO: How do you evaluate the e-commerce industry in Egypt, and what needs to be done for it to develop more?

MN: E-commerce will have a great future in Egypt, because of the young population and the percentage of people under the age of 30 that are tolerant of technology and love to try new things; 2018 is called the year of the millennial generation that loves technology, and which has become a strong purchasing power.

The more people use smart phones, the more online purchases will be made. Smart phone use drives the e-commerce industry forward. The potential of people willing to buy online is increasing as a result.

Additionally, the cost of establishing any e-commerce platform is very low in comparison to establishing a physical one. Also, social media platforms, such as Facebook, launched their marketplace that will support small business and startups in Egypt.

AO: What are the main purchases made online and what is ElAraby doing to increase online sales?

MN: Top items now on the e-commerce platforms are fashion, electronics and home appliances, plus many digital services.

We are aiming to offer our customers a more unique service and experience online. We deliver for free and with many payment solutions (cash on delivery - visa - fawry) and more to be added soon. ElAraby has great expectations from this channel and we are going to have more developments according to our strategy for the coming years.

AO: In your opinion, what is the importance of social media to e-commerce and online sales?

MN: Social media is a very important tool for e-commerce, not only for advertising, but also as a customer-relationship management tool and a market research tool. Through social media listening, you can have a better understanding of how your customers think and what they need.

For El Araby group, 93 percent of our target audiences are active users of social media and we do a social media analysis about our customers, and we also interact with their needs.

It is very important to study consumers behaviour online and how they react to your advertising and digital activities, to be reflected in increasing the conversion rate of your e-commerce portal. Social media is a great medium for getting closer to your customers and understanding them better, adding value to your products, widening distribution channels and boosting sales.

It is also about influencing the word of mouth, and the way you respond to your customers online is very important. You must be available all the time for them and answer their questions in real time.

##

AO: One of the main fears among online customers is security while making online purchases. How do you respond to that, and what are the measures you take to secure online purchases?

MN: The answer is to have different payment solutions; one of them is cash on delivery, and that is still the preferred way for most online purchases in Egypt.

The other one is online payment through visa with co-operation of a trusted national bank. Online customers can pay through the banks portal, which is very secure and has a restricted process to avoid any fraud.

Also, we are studying different digital solutions to have a variety of secured and credible payment options online.

AO: The legal control over e-commerce has been a source of controversy lately. What can the new cyber-crime law do for e-commerce in Egypt?

MN: Having such a law is a very important step to protect businesses, as there is a hindrance, specifically, in copyrights and social/digital identity.

Some people can easily claim any other companys identity with a lack of clear legal implications or actions.

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On 18 April, Egyptian Ambassador to Serbia Amr Aljowaily inaugurated the first public course in Egyptology to be held at Belgrade's Museum of African arts, in cooperation with the University of Belgrade and local Egyptian embassy.

The ambassador pointed out that the course is the first to be offered to public audiences in Serbia, which he said are fond ancient Egyptian civilization.

This complements our outreach with the University of Belgrade, which offers specialized courses for students in this field," he added.

In his opening remarks, Aljowaily noted that ancient Egyptian history reflects the development of human civilization as a whole, making it an integral part of building societal awareness in any country, including in Serbia.

He advised future Serbian tourists to include cultural activities in their visits to Egypt, in addition to enjoying the beauty of its famous resorts.

The ambassador also pointed out that the introduction for the course at the museum clearly demonstrates Egypt's belonging to Africa.

He presented Belgrade University lecturer Nenad Markovic with a replica of the Rosetta Stone, crafted by the Centre for Replicas at the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, as a symbol of the partnership.

For her part, Director of the Museum of African Arts Marija Aleksic expressed her appreciation for the support of the Egyptian embassy in organizing the course.

She expressed hope that the museum would soon establish cooperation with its Egyptian counterparts in hopes of displaying Egyptian collections at the museum.

Aleksic also pointed out that it is the only museum in Eastern and Southern Europe that specializes in Africa.

The director added that the Egyptology course has received considerable attention, to the extent that the museum is planning to organize it regularly.

She also said the museum would jointly organise a brief English course for Serbia's foreign diplomatic community, upon the Egyptian embassy's request.

The Egyptology course's inauguration was attended by a number of Serbian media outlets, including Tanjug news agency, Serbian radio and television, Danas, and Pink.

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BANGALORE, April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

~ Appointed Mr. Anilkumar Muniswamy, Managing Director, SLN Technologies Pvt. Ltd. as the new Chairman ~

India Electronics and Semiconductor Association (IESA) today announced Mr. Anilkumar Muniswamy, Managing Director, SLN Technologies Pvt. Ltd. as Chairman of the Board of Director & Executive Council (EC) effective immediately. The new chairperson and EC are dedicated towards IESA's vision of 'making India the global hub for design and manufacturing' with special emphasis on 'innovation and entrepreneurship', for revamping the landscape of the ESDM ecosystem in India.

(Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/679815/IESA_Logo.jpg )



Speaking about his current role at IESA, Mr. Anilkumar Muniswamy, Chairman, IESA, said, "It's a great honour for me to be appointed as IESA Chairperson. IESA has been a frontrunner in policy recommendations, industry connect and creating initiatives for the growth of Electronics System Design Manufacturing (ESDM) ecosystem in India. My vision is to 'make India the central hub of ESDM industry' and IESA is best positioned to be the catalyst for realizing this vision. A collaborative effort will help accelerate the process and I am looking forward to working closely with the new executive council, the leaders of the member companies, government (centre and state), organizations, academia, media and our international partners to ensure that both electronics design and manufacturing see a substantial growth in the coming years."

"In addition to helping grow the existing ESDM ecosystem, we will be also focussing on nurturing areas like 'fabless design houses, global market access to Indian design companies, ESDM ready workforce, support innovations' that can lead the future of electronics design and manufacturing. I look forward to a continued collaboration with all the stakeholders with one goal of creating a thriving design and manufacturing capability in India," added Mr. Anilkumar Muniswamy.

The three-major thrust areas of IESA are as follows:

A. Innovation & Entrepreneurship

(i) Semiconductor Fabless Accelerator Lab (SFAL) with Govt. of Karnataka - The mission of SFAL is to promote hardware equipment and semiconductor chip design development in India

(ii) Electropreneur Park - Technical Incubation Center - with Ministry of Electronics and IT, Govt. of India, the objective of which is to support early stage start-ups in the ESDM sector from mentoring to funding

(iii) NETRA (National ESDM Technology Research Academy) is a think tank formed by IESA and the Electronics Sector Skill Council of India (ESSCI) to enable VLSI/ESDM incubation in college campuses. The vision of NETRA is to transform engineering campuses into ESDM Product Innovation Centers (EPIC) through industry-academia partnerships. One of the major, objectives of this initiative is to create an ecosystem for start-ups in the VLSI/ESDM domain

(iv) VLSI & ESDM Center excellence - The objective of this initiative is to design and manufacture semiconductor chips in India

B. Partnerships - India and International

IESA has tied up with many state governments for facilitating FDI into the respective states in ESDM. Partnership with alliances - both International and Indian - to strengthen the ESDM ecosystem through innovation, knowledge transfer and investment. IESA has already laid its seeds in bringing investment from Taiwan into India. IESA has also partnered with the state governments to build the ESDM ecosystem through clusters - brownfield and greenfield, incubations centers and skill development programs.

C. Ease of doing business in India

(i) IESA has been seamlessly working with various government agencies such as MEITY, NITI Aayog and various other relevant bodies to bring out favourable policies to enable Indian electronics and semiconductor industry to achieve its goals.

(ii) Creation of CIGs (Core Initiative Group) for addressing sector specific issues. Currently there are 6 CIGs to address sector such as Aerospace & Defence, Automotive, Broadcast/STB, Fabless, IoT, Skilling

(iii) IESA has lobbied with central government for reduction of customs duties on components to help the local manufacturing industry and addressed inverted duty issues.

In addition to the above, IESA is actively engaging with many more activities. The current executive council will continue working towards making this vision a reality.

The IESA Executive Council would also comprise of Jitendra Chaddah, Senior Director, Strategic Relations and Operations, Intel Technology India Pvt. Ltd., the Vice Chairman and Rahul Arya, Vice President Sales for APAC and Europe region, e-Infochips Ltd., the Treasurer of IESA for 2018-19. In addition to the Chairman, Vice Chairman and Treasurer, the other newly elected EC are Giri KK, Global Delivery Head - Semicon & HiTech, L&T Technology Services Limited; Veeresh Shetty, Senior Marketing Manager, Mentor Graphics Sales & Services Pvt. Ltd.; Poornima Shenoy, CEO, The Gain Global Accelerator, Sagitaur Ventures India Pvt. Ltd.; Dr Satya Gupta, Co-Founder & CEO, Senzopt Technologies India Pvt. Ltd.; Ashok Mishra, Managing Director, Si2Chip Technologies; Veerappan V, Co-Founder & Director and Tessolve Semiconductor Pvt. Ltd. The IESA Executive Council will collectively work to deliver on-ground activation for enabling innovation, investment and industry - the collaborative effort being the mantra for the mission to be a success.

About India Electronics and Semiconductor Association

IESA is the premier trade body representing the Indian Electronics System Design and Manufacturing (ESDM) industry and has represented it since 2005. It has close to 300 members - both domestic and multinational enterprises. IESA is committed towards building global awareness for the Indian ESDM industry and supporting its growth through focused initiatives in developing the ecosystem. This is through publishing credible data, networking events and alliances with other international associations. IESA works closely with the government as a knowledge partner on the sector, both at the centre and at the state level. For more details on IESA, visit http://www.iesaonline.org

Follow us on social media

Twitter: IESA_Online

Linkedin: India Electronics & Semiconductor Association - IESA (Company Page)

Facebook: @iesaorg

YouTube: IESA Events

Media Contact:

Ms. Suriya Kala

[email protected]

+91-9740984648

Deputy General Manager

India Electronics and Semiconductor Association

SOURCE India Electronics & Semiconductor Association
As underground construction became more complex, OT executives realized the existing project-management approach was not sufficiently robust. They needed more than a system, they needed a set of tools, meetings, and behaviors to manage the vast number of people and processes, allowing them to coordinate their work from the same integrated plan, safely.

The project has been so successful that the Management Consultancies Association has named Rio Tinto and Proudfoot a finalist for Best International Project, 2018. While the MCA Awards are just around the corner, win or lose, the story of this billion-dollar capital project and development site is one of guts and determination for both Proudfoot & Rio Tinto. The real winners are Rio Tinto, its employees and shareholders, and the Mongolian communities affected by the mine. OT will be the world's largest underground mine, producing copper for the next 100 years.

Rio Tinto management chose Proudfoot over 11 other consultancies for this critical project. The scale of OT mandated an innovative management approach to better manage people and processes, keeping construction and development on track.

In the Gobi Desert there now exists a mini city with more than 3,000 workers, 90% of whom are Mongolian. Proudfoot worked with them, side-by-side, from the surface to 1.5 km underground to make the project a success.

Proudfoot created and implemented a bespoke, state-of-the-art management approach (MOS) to work in conjunction with an integrated planning process (IPP). The IPP optimizes the allocation of space, time, and materials across more than 20 practices. It recognizes any constraints or conflicts on the schedules and resolves them while prioritizing safety. It removes complexity, improves productivity, and creates behaviors that ensure alignment. Ultimately, it frees up supervisors to focus on outcomes rather than processes.

To date the project has delivered:

An effective, adaptive MOS/IPP for OT that scales up as work progresses  the first such system for an underground mining project of this size

The safest operation in Rio Tinto's underground mining divisions.

Work schedules being made 48 to 72 hours and even one week in advance when the standard for the mining industry is one day.

MegaMine 2.0 board game to train leaders (about 120 people) that worked so well it was rolled out to the entire workforce of 3000+ people.

A project that is on time and budget.

This project is helping to transform Mongolia's economy. Today, the mining industry accounts for nearly 90% of Mongolian exports and contributes about one third of the nation's GDP.

Judging for the award of Best International Project will be April 26th at the MCA Awards in London.

Proudfoot specializes in the design, implementation, and acceleration of operational and digital transformation. They believe enabling people is what creates successful transformation.

Rio Tinto is one of the world's leading mining companies, known for its high performing culture, innovation, social responsibility and community engagement.

MCA is the representative body for management consultancy firms in the UK. Established in 1956, the MCA's mission is to promote the value of management consultancy for the economy and society.

Contact: Brian Holler, 424-361-9640, [email protected]

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DELHI, April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd. (BPCL) on behalf of Indian Oil Corporation Ltd (IOCL), Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd. (HPCL) and Petroleum Planning and Analysis Cell (PPAC), recently commissioned study for carrying out 'All India Study on Sectorial Demand of Petrol and Diesel'.

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MRSS India - BSE listed (1st and only) Market Research Company was awarded this acclaimed research to comprehend the demand of petrol and diesel being sold from retail outlets of IOCL, BPCL and HPCL through competitive bidding process.

A detailed survey covering 3,000 retail outlets of different Oil Marketing Companies (OMCs) spread across 20 states and union territories (UTs) covering nearly 200 districts were strategically categorized to estimate the percentage share of sectors/segments in petrol and diesel sold on a state-wise and an all India basis. Retail outlets were selected through statistical methods to evaluate the sold fuels under different categories of two segments i.e. Transport and non-Transport sector. The study is estimated to be concluded within a period of 4 months.

Sarang Panchal, Managing Director of the Company, on this win said, "I'm really excited about having our teams work on this assignment. It will add significant value to the body of knowledge in regards to this sector as we are best equipped to provide such reliable data."

An interesting note is that even though more than 80% of the diesel and nearly entire quantity of petrol are sold through the retail outlets of OMCs, the exact information on sector-wise and segment-wise sales is not maintained by the dealers operating these retail outlets. Therefore, this study aims to evolve most authentic information about the consumption.

Raj Sharma , Chairman of the Company remarked, "This segment is seeing a lot of action. The Oil Marketing Companies are getting substantial offers from a number of international partners. Considering companies such as ESSAR Petroleum, Reliance Petroleum planning for tie ups with overseas investors- IOCL, HPCL & BPCL are also looking forward to such alliances. Therefore, it is a very significant study to understand the profile of consumers."

About MRSS India:

MRSS India relies exhaustively on usage of technology for data acquisition offering reliability, validity and faster turnaround times to its clients. The company has wide range of offerings such as Eye Tracking, Mobile Analytics, Video Analysis, Facial Recognition, Digital Tracking, Online Communities, Neuroscience, Emotional Analysis, Automated Audience Measurement, Sensory Sciences, etc. It is India's 1st and only listed Market Research Company, also a member of MRSI and DIN (Digital Insight Network - Global). It is the subsidiary of Majestic Market Research Support Services Limited, - One of Asia's largest full service market research firm. MMRSS is a member of ESOMAR, QRCA, MRA, etc. with presence in 18 countries across Middle East and Asia Pacific region.

Media Contact:

Sukanya Mandal

[email protected]

+91-8369257175

Corporate Communications Executive

MRSS India



SOURCE MRSS India Ltd.
PUNE, India, April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

The report "UV Curable Resins & Formulated Products Market by Composition (Oligomers, Monomers, Photoinitiators, Additives), Chemistry (Non-Acrylates & Oligoamines, Acrylates), Application, Technology, and Region - Global Forecast to 2023", published by MarketsandMarkets, the global UV curable resins & formulated products market is estimated to be USD 4.00 Billion in 2018 and is projected to reach USD 6.31 Billion by 2023, at a CAGR of 9.5% from 2018 to 2023. Increasing stringent regulations on VOC emissions leading to the development of eco-friendly technologies, such as 100% solids UV and waterborne UV are replacing solvent-borne UV. This, in turn, is driving the demand for UV curable resins, as they display high performance, owing to superior mechanical properties. These factors contribute to the growth of the UV curable resins & formulated products market.

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Browse 136 market data Tables and 27 Figures spread through 165 Pages and in-depth TOC on "UV Curable Resins & Formulated Products Market"

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/uv-curable-resins-market-1324.html

Early buyers will receive 10% customization on this report

Acrylates are the major oligomer chemistries in UV curable resins & formulated products (oligomers) market.

Epoxy acrylates and polyester acrylates are some of the most commonly used UV oligomers. Fast curing, good chemical resistance, high gloss, and relatively low cost are the advantages of epoxy acrylates. Polyester acrylates have a broad raw material base, which allows for a wide variety of backbone structures and functionalities. They can have low-to-very high functionality and can have very hydrophilic to extremely hydrophobic backbones. The demand for acrylate oligomers such as silicone acrylates and acrylic acrylates is expected to increase over the next 5 years, owing to huge investments being made in expanding applications such as 3D printing, digital printing, UV nail paints, and others.

Get PDF Brochure @ https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownload.asp?id=1324

Coatings application segment accounted for the largest share of the UV curable resins & formulated products market.

In the coatings industry, UV curable coatings segment is one of the fastest growing application segments. This high growth is mainly driven by the "go green" trend and its increasing use of applications in various industries. Asia Pacific leads the UV curable resins & formulated products market in coatings application due to rapid industrialization and the increasing demand for flexible packaging in countries, such as China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. In Europe, the demand for UV curable coatings is fueled by wood coating, plastic coating, and paper coating applications, especially, in countries such as Germany, Sweden, and the UK. In regions such as the Middle East & Africa and South America, the demand for UV curable coatings is expected to grow at a fast pace over the next few years. Brazil is expected to witness an exponential increase in demand for UV curable coatings due to the increasing demand for industrial coatings in the country.

Asia Pacific UV curable resins & formulated products market is expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period.

China, Japan, and South Korea are the largest consumers of UV curable resins & formulated products in Asia Pacific. Factors such as evolving environmental & regulatory scenario, increasing consumer awareness (including sensitivity to health and safety), and pressure from flagship companies to improve their environmental performance of supply chain have resulted in an increased demand for UV curable resins & formulated products in the Asia Pacific region.

Key players in the UV curable resins & formulated products market

Asia Pacific is the largest market for UV curable resins & formulated products, both in terms of volume and value, followed by Europe and North America. Key players in the global UV curable resins & formulated products market include Arkema (France), Allnex (Germany), Toagosei (Japan), BASF (Germany), Royal DSM (Netherlands), Covestro (Germany), Nippon Gohsei (Japan), Hitachi Chemical Company (Japan), IGM Resins (Netherlands), and Miwon Specialty Chemical (South Korea).

Know more about UV Curable Resins & Formulated Products Market:

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/uv-curable-resins-market-1324.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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SOURCE MarketsandMarkets
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

A.I.S. Resources Limited (TSX-V - AIS)(OTCQB: AISSF) (the "Company" or "AIS") is pleased to announce it has engaged Hidrotec SRL of Salta, Argentina to complete up to eight diamond drill holes for a total of 2,300 meters across all four tenements at its Chiron project in the Pocitos Salar.

Hidrotec has mobilized a drill rig onto the site, as well as some of the necessary equipment to begin the construction of the drill pads and drilling to start on April 24, 2018.

AIS plans to drill eight holes, to various depths between 300 and 400 meters. Chiron appears to be the preferred area in the salar for brine saturated sequences, based on geophysics data interpretation. This upcoming drill campaign will enable the Company to outline an initial maiden resource at Chiron after a pump test has been completed.

Phil Thomas, Chief Operating Officer and exploration director of A.I.S., stated: "We are very excited at the prospect of drilling these sequences as the geophysics showed very low resistivities from 20 metres to more than 200 metres below the surface. Adjacent concession holders are also preparing to drill and this will provide the basis for a sound geological model.

We are also looking forward to using a new geophysics technique using magnetic resonance of hydrogen to determine porosity and permeability to calculate the reservoir and specific brine yield values. This technique is tried and tested in oil but this is the first time it will be used commercially in brines with high salt content. This will save us nearly 4 months of brine yield testing using traditional methods."

Historical Work

The Pocitos salar basin was previously drill tested, with 12 shallow holes in 1979, by the Direccion General de Fabricaciones Militares (DGFM). The most significant result from this historical work program includes a shallow drill hole, which averaged 417 parts per million (ppm) lithium and 15,300 ppm potassium. The above historical results cannot be verified by the company, and are not NI-43-101 compliant.

Qualified Person

Phillip Thomas, BSc Geol, MBusM, MAIG, MAIMVA, (CMV), a Qualified Person as defined under NI-43-101 regulations, has reviewed the technical information that forms the basis for portions of this news release, and has approved the disclosure herein. Mr. Thomas is not independent of the Company as he is an officer and shareholder.

About A.I.S. Resources

A.I.S. Resources Ltd. is a TSX-V listed investment issuer, was established in 1967 and is managed by experienced, highly qualified professionals, who have a long track record of success in lithium exploration, production and capital markets. Through their extensive business and scientific networks, they identify and develop early-stage projects worldwide, that have strong potential for growth with the objective of providing significant returns for shareholders. The Company's current activities are focused exclusively on the exploration and development of lithium brine projects in northern Argentina.

On Behalf of the Board of Directors,

A.I.S. Resources Limited

Marc Enright-Morin

ADVISORY: This press release contains forward-looking statements. More particularly, this press release contains statements concerning the anticipated use of the proceeds of the Private Placement. Although the Corporation believes that the expectations reflected in these forward-looking statements are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on them because the Corporation can give no assurance that they will prove to be correct. Since forward-looking statements address future events and conditions, by their very nature they involve inherent risks and uncertainties. The intended use of the proceeds of the Private Placement by the Corporation might change if the board of directors of the Corporation determines that it would be in the best interests of the Corporation to deploy the proceeds for some other purpose. The forward-looking statements contained in this press release are made as of the date hereof and the Corporation undertakes no obligations to update publicly or revise any forward-looking statements or information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, unless so required by applicable securities laws. Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Contact

A.I.S. Resources Limited

Marc Enright-Morin

President and CEO

T: 778-892-5455

E: memorin@aisresources.com

Website: aisresources.com

SOURCE A.I.S. Resources Limited
CORALVILLE, Iowa, April 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- CIVCO Radiotherapy, the leading global provider of high quality, innovative, patient-centric radiotherapy solutions, will exhibit several new solutions and collaborative partnerships at the European Society for Radiotherapy & Oncology (ESTRO) Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

CIVCO's booth (#2100) will showcase recent partnerships with several mission compatible companies who deliver customized, tailored and innovative solutions that support clinicians and improve patient outcomes throughout the entire radiotherapy journey, from planning to post-treatment. "CIVCO is thrilled to be partnering with companies whose innovative solutions further our focus on improving the patient experience and outcomes worldwide," said Nat Geissel, president of CIVCO Radiotherapy.

CIVCO's newest partnerships include:

Dr. Elizabeth Chabner Thompson has partnered with CIVCO to offer the Chabner XRT Radiation Bra which provides optimal breast support, customization and reproducibility for patient setup. Just as importantly, the Chabner XRT Radiation Bra provides dignity and comfort for patients during treatment.

ESSEBI MEDICAL Srl , has partnered with CIVCO to be the exclusive global* provider of TOTIM Patient Cushions. TOTIM is a polyurethane foam cushion, available in different sizes for all body parts, and forms to the patient's anatomy to ensure reproducibility of position during all simulation, planning and treatment.

Stratpharma AG , who specializes in innovative topical medical products to improve post-procedure outcomes, has joined forces with CIVCO to distribute a novel, flexible wound dressing for the treatment of radiation dermatitis. CIVCO will be the exclusive U.S provider of the StrataXRT product.

Adaptiiv Medical Technologies Inc. (formerly 3D Bolus) specializes in commercializing software to design personalized 3D printed accessories used during radiotherapy to improve treatment accuracy and patient comfort. Adaptiiv has partnered with CIVCO for worldwide*** distribution of this disruptive technology.

Medical Precision BV has partnered with CIVCO to distribute (to CE approved countries) their innovative marking system that applies patient reference points exactly, easily and painlessly. These reference points for radiotherapy are applied in a shallow manner to the patient's upper dermis which results in less pain for the patient. The reference point(s) will either completely fade over time or can be removed easily with a permanent make-up laser.

CIVCO will also feature many innovative products including the Solstice Immobilization System**, providing corrective pitch capability and positioning flexibility with non-invasive, head and neck immobilization. Hand grips** and head thermoplastic attachment options for the Monarch Overhead Arm Positioner will be demonstrated to improve patient positioning and immobilization during breast setups. CIVCO's Universal Couchtop Long Extension is now available for use with IBA***, the market leader in proton therapy. Universal Couchtop contains no rails or junctions in the treatment area and is specifically designed to answer the demands of proton therapy and is compatible with major Linac and CT models.

For more information or to schedule a demo, visit CIVCO at Booth #2100 during ESTRO 37 or visit www.CivcoRT.com.

*Currently not available in the United States

**Coming soon

***510k pending

About CIVCO Radiotherapy

CIVCO Radiotherapy has over 35 years' experience developing, manufacturing and providing high-quality, innovative, patient-centric solutions in radiotherapy. These solutions include: advanced patient immobilization and positioning hardware and consumables, fiducial markers, couchtops and overlays, software, patient care products and advanced 6DOF robotic patient positioning. Corporate information is available at www.CivcoRT.com.

For further information, please contact:

Shelli Locklear

Sr. Marketing Manager

CIVCO Radiotherapy

Tel: 319-248-6619

Shelli.Locklear@CivcoRT.com

COPYRIGHT  2018. CIVCO IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF CIVCO MEDICAL SOLUTIONS. CHABNER XRT, MONARCH, SOLSTICE IMMOBILIZATION SYSTEM AND UNIVERSAL COUCHOTP ARE TRADEMARKS OF CIVCO. ALL OTHER TRADEMARKS ARE PROPERTY OF THEIR RESPECTIVE OWNERS. ALL PRODUCTS MAY NOT BE LICENSED IN ACCORDANCE WITH CANADIAN LAW. 2018C1393 REV. A

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SOURCE CIVCO Radiotherapy
BRUSSELS, April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Midazolam Nasal Spray (USL261), is a nasally administered investigational midazolam formulation intended as a rescue treatment of acute repetitive seizures (ARS) in patients with epilepsy, which has completed Phase 3 clinical development and is ready to be filed as a New Drug Application (NDA) in the course of 2018.

USL261 [1] already granted orphan drug and fast track designation by the United States Food and Drug Administration, due to the high unmet need for patients and caregivers.

already granted orphan drug and fast track designation by the United States Food and Drug Administration, due to the high unmet need for patients and caregivers. Nasal administration could provide significant value to patients who currently have limited treatment options.

Acquisition of USL261 complements UCB's already successful anti-epilepsy drug portfolio, enhancing the company's position as a global leader in epilepsy.

UCB today announced an agreement to acquire the rights to Proximagen's Midazolam Nasal Spray (USL261)[1], an anti-epilepsy drug (AED) developed as an intended rescue treatment for acute repetitive seizures (ARS, also known as serial, recurrent or cluster seizures) in patients with epilepsy.

USL261[2] is a novel investigational midazolam formulation, which has been specifically designed for intranasal delivery without active inhalation. It has been granted orphan drug designation and fast track designation by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA), reflecting the significant unmet need which currently exists for ARS rescue treatment.

Rectally administered benzodiazepines, such as diazepam, are commonly prescribed for the treatment of ARS. However, whilst this has traditionally provided patients and caregivers with a much-needed treatment option, this route of administration may be cumbersome and problematic in social settings. A treatment administered nasally would provide important additional treatment options.

USL261 has demonstrated strong results in a significant Phase 3 clinical trial[3] program and the intention is to file USL261 as a New Drug Application (NDA) in the course of 2018.

"There is a real and pressing need for effective and convenient rescue treatments in ARS that rapidly end ongoing seizures as well as those that prevent seizure reoccurrence," explained Jean-Christophe Tellier, CEO of UCB. "Midazolam Nasal Spray has delivered strong Phase 3 results; our acquisition of this program, when approved, will expand and diversify the treatment choices we are able to provide to the epilepsy community, complementing our strong internal portfolio and building on our extensive knowledge, passion and expertise in the field of epilepsy."

UCB estimates that more than 150,000 people with refractory epilepsy also experience ARS.[4]

These types of seizures pose multiple risks to patients, which include repeated emergency room related hospitalizations each year and possible evolution into status epilepticus, a potentially life-threatening seizure state.

"Rescue treatment options for acute repetitive seizures have historically been very limited. As a global leader in epilepsy, with a pioneering commitment to improving patient value, UCB was the natural choice to progress the development journey of midazolam nasal spray," said Bill Pullman, Chief Scientific Officer and President, Proximagen. "In making this important new medicine available, following approval, UCB will be delivering an effective rescue treatment option for patients and caregivers living with ARS. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank our investigators, along with the teams at Upsher-Smith and Proximagen who have brought us to this major milestone," said Mark Evenstad, Executive Chairman of ACOVA, Inc., parent company of Proximagen.

UCB believes USL261[5] has the potential to complement its already successful portfolio of epilepsy medicines, significantly improving its ability to provide additional treatment choice and value to millions of people living with poorly controlled seizures.

Under the terms of the agreement, UCB will make an upfront cash payment of $150 million. In addition, Proximagen is eligible to receive contingent payments of up to $220 million based on certain regulatory approval and sales-based milestones.



The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2018, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions including the satisfaction of the notification and waiting period requirements of the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act.

Lazard is acting as financial advisor to UCB. Covington & Burling LLP is acting as legal counsel to UCB. BMO Capital Markets Corp. is acting as financial advisor to Proximagen. Ballard Spahr LLP is acting as legal counsel to Proximagen.

About UCB in Epilepsy

UCB has a rich heritage in epilepsy with over 20 years of experience in the research and development of antiepileptic drugs. As a company with a long-term commitment to epilepsy research, our goal is to address unmet medical needs. Our scientists are proud to contribute to advances in the understanding of epilepsy and its treatment. We partner and create super-networks with world-leading scientists and clinicians in academic institutions, pharmaceutical companies and other organizations who share our goals. At UCB, we are inspired by patients, and driven by science in our commitment to support patients with epilepsy.

About UCB

UCB, Brussels, Belgium (http://www.ucb.com ) is a global biopharmaceutical company focused on the discovery and development of innovative medicines and solutions to transform the lives of people living with severe diseases in immunology and neurology. With around 7,500 people operating in 40 countries, the company generated revenue of 4.5 billion in 2017. UCB is listed on Euronext Brussels (symbol: UCB). Follow us on Twitter: @UCB_news

About Proximagen

Proximagen LLC, a member of the ACOVA family of companies located in Plymouth MN (USA), specializes in the development of novel small molecule therapeutics in the areas of CNS, pain and inflammation. As part of the Upsher-Smith Laboratories family of companies prior to the sale of its generics business in 2017, Proximagen has a long heritage in drug development.

Forward looking statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements based on current plans, estimates and beliefs of management. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including estimates of revenues, operating margins, capital expenditures, cash, other financial information, expected legal, political, regulatory or clinical results and other such estimates and results. By their nature, such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions which could cause actual results to differ materially from those that may be implied by such forward-looking statements contained in this press release. Important factors that could result in such differences include: changes in general economic, business and competitive conditions, the inability to obtain necessary regulatory approvals or to obtain them on acceptable terms, costs associated with research and development, changes in the prospects for products in the pipeline or under development by UCB, effects of future judicial decisions or governmental investigations, product liability claims, challenges to patent protection for products or product candidates, changes in laws or regulations, exchange rate fluctuations, changes or uncertainties in tax laws or the administration of such laws and hiring and retention of its employees.

Additionally, information contained in this document shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any securities, nor shall there be any offer, solicitation or sale of securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to the registration or qualification under the securities laws of such jurisdiction. UCB is providing this information as of the date of this document and expressly disclaims any duty to update any information contained in this press release, either to confirm the actual results or to report a change in its expectations.

There is no guarantee that new product candidates in the pipeline will progress to product approval or that new indications for existing products will be developed and approved. Products or potential products which are the subject of partnerships, joint ventures or licensing collaborations may be subject to differences between the partners. Also, UCB or others could discover safety, side effects or manufacturing problems with its products after they are marketed.

Moreover, sales may be impacted by international and domestic trends toward managed care and healthcare cost containment and the reimbursement policies imposed by third-party payers as well as legislation affecting biopharmaceutical pricing and reimbursement.

1. USL261 has not been submitted to or approved by the FDA. These statements solely reflect the opinions of the authors.

2. Id.

3. This statement has not been submitted to the FDA and solely reflects the opinions of the authors.

4. Haut SR. Current Opinion in Neurology 2015, 28:143-150

5. USL261 has not been submitted to or approved by the FDA. These statements solely reflect the opinions of the authors.

SOURCE UCB
iStock/Thinkstock(TRENTON, Fla.) -- Two sheriff's deputies were shot and killed in the line of duty inside a Florida restaurant on Thursday afternoon, according to law enforcement officials.



Two deputies from the Gilchrist County Sheriff's Office were fatally shot at about 3 p.m. ET while they were at the Ace China restaurant in downtown Trenton, some 50 miles west of Gainesville, according to a statement from Gilchrist County Sheriff Bobby Schultz.



A gunman walked into the restaurant and opened fire at the deputies, officials said. Authorities initially thought the gunman had fired at the deputies through a window, but they later determined that the bullet holes in the glass were exit holes.



Deputies responding to the scene found the suspected shooter dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound inside his car, officials said. The suspect was later identified as 59-year-old John Hubert Highnote of Bell, a town in Gilchrist County.



The two deputies -- identified as 30-year-old Sgt. Noel Ramirez and 25-year-old Deputy Taylor Lindsey -- died from their injuries, according to the sheriff.



Ramirez, a seven-year veteran of the force, is survived by a wife and children. Lindsey, who'd been on the force for three years, was not married but had a girlfriend.



Schultz described Ramirez and Lindsay as "the best of the best."



"They are men with integrity. They are men of loyalty," he said. "They're God-fearing, and they loved what they did, and we're very proud of them."



Investigators have not determined a motive or "indications as to why this tragedy occurred," according to the sheriff, who was on the scene throughout the afternoon and notified the deputies' loved ones.



"I do not have answers as to why this happened," Schultz said, calling the gunman a "coward."



"The world is full of cowards, and the world's full of heroes," he said. "We need to highlight those heroes and what they gave."



Schultz suggested that the deputies may have been killed because law enforcement has been "demonized."



"The only thing these men were guilty of was wanting to protect you and me," he said. "They just wanted to get something to eat, and they just wanted to do their jobs."



Schultz described Ramirez as having an "infectious smile" and said Lindsay was planning to participate in the first responder Olympics.



Florida Gov. Rick Scott said he is "heartbroken" at the loss of the deputies.



"It is true evil for anyone to hurt a law enforcement officer, and in Florida, we have zero tolerance for violence, especially against the police," Scott said in a statement. "Tonight, I ask every Floridian to honor these law enforcement officers, their brothers and sisters in uniform and their families. May God bless those who work to keep our communities safe."



Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement that the Gilchrist County Sheriff's deputies were "senselessly killed."



"The daily risk that law enforcement officers take to protect our communities is overwhelming," Bondi said. "My deepest condolences and prayers are with their families as they mourn the devastating loss of their loved ones. May their families, friends and fellow officers find peace and comfort during this very difficult time."



The sheriff's office tweeted that it suffered a "terrible tragedy" and asked residents to avoid the area where the deputies were killed.



Law enforcement officials from neighboring countries, as well as the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the state attorney's office are assisting in the ongoing investigation, Schultz said.



Further details on the shooting were not immediately available and will be released by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Schultz said.

Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
The southern axis of Karnak, which links it to the Avenue of Sphinxes, is also set to open for the first time

In recognition of both World Heritage Day and Social Solidarity Minister Ghada Wali's declaration of 2018 as the year of Egyptians with disabilities, Egypt's Antiquities Ministry on Friday announced that Karnak Temple would soon be accessible to the disabled.

Antiquities Minister Khaled El-Enany and Luxor Governor Mohamed Badr toured around Karnak Temple and its southern axis in order to examine the latest work at the site.

The visit was attend by Mostafa Waziri, Secretary General of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, top ministry officials, members of Egypt's Parliament and ambassadors of foreign countries to Cairo.

El-Enany told Ahram Online that special visitors' pathways were created throughout the temple to ease the visits of those with physical disabilities. Special signs for the disabled were also installed.

The additions make Karnak Temple the first archaeological site in Egypt to be more friendly to those with special needs.

The project was carried out in collaboration with an NGO named Helm (Dream), which advocates on behalf of disabled Egyptians.

El-Enany also inspected ongoing work to link the temple's southern axis with the Avenue of Sphinxes.

The southern axis runs north to south and extends from the courtyard of the Karnak cachette in front of the seventh pylon all the way to the 10th pylon.

Waziri noted that this is the first opening of the southern axis to tourists.

Mostafa Al-Sagueer, director of the Karnak Temple and the Avenue of Sphinxes development project, said that the project is in full swing in hopes of opening soon.

He added that the ministry carried out the project in collaboration with the Engineering Authority of Egypt's armed forces.

The Avenue of Sphinxes was one of the major thoroughfares in the ancient city of Thebes. At roughly 2,700 metres, it linkes the Karnak, Luxor and Mut Temples.

Friday's celebration will extend into the night with an unveiling of the fifth colossus of King Ramses II in front of Luxor Temple's first pylon following the long-anticipated completion of the statue's restoration and reconstruction.

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55 historic minbars removed for relocation from Islamic Cairo mosques by the Islamic Antiquities Sector at the Ministry of Antiquities to prevent theft, in a decision which caused controversy among heritage experts

At 9am on Wednesday, a group of men from the Ministry of Antiquities, including technicians, officials and two head figures in the Islamic Antiquities Sector began a mission to disassemble and remove several dozen historic items and architectural pieces from Islamic Cairo mosques for temporary storage in the warehouses of the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation (NMEC) pending committee decisions to put them on exhibition.

According to official documents, this project was not to be officially announced.

Fifty-five minbars, or pulpits for preaching the khutba (religious sermon), and 60 other pieces, including Mishkahs (mosque lamps), Quran reciters' chairs and antique chandeliers are set for relocation under decision no. 110/2018.

Officials at Egypt's Ministry of Antiquities told Al-Ahram Arabic that the purpose of the move is to protect the Islamic treasures from being stolen.

Between the removal and re-displaying of the pieces, several historic Cairo mosques will remain without minbars.

Heritage experts confirmed to Al-Ahram that it will probably be impossible to reassemble the minbars after they are dismantled for transportation to the closed warehouses.

Al-Ahram witnessed the dismantling of one of the most elaborate minbars from Cairo's Mamluk era: the minbar of the Abu-Bakr Muzhir mosque and school.

When asked why this was being undertaken, ministry figures at the site provided only one answer: "This is the decision of the cabinet."

This decision and others raises a number of questions, the least of which is: Do our officials know the worth of what they dealing with in the first place?

Over the last fifteen years, some 17 minbars from Cairo's historic mosques have been stolen in either entirety or part, as were numerous other precious items, only to emerge later in auction rooms.

Among the most important stolen items were historic mishkahs and other smaller pieces that can easily be carried away. The culprits are unknown, but accusations have been exchanged in accountability between the Ministry of Antiquities and the Ministry of Religious Endowments.

The Ministry of Antiquities has a moral and legal obligation to protect those possessions and buildings. The Ministry of Religious Endowments, on the other hand, is the legal owner and administrator of those mosques.

Throughout 700 years, Egypts historic mosques have endured as a lasting heritage. That is now threatened.

Less than a month ago, England announced that it will undertake an important year-long project to restore and document 25 of Cairo's Mamluk-era minbars, and the Ministry of Antiquities annouced its partnership in the endeavor.

Protection from Theft?

The distinguished place was transformed into a barracks of workers and officials as they began to dismantle the huge minbar with unusual speed.

Al-Ahram observed as the stairs of the minbar were placed on the ground and arranged in order. Quickly, one of the ministry's restorers began packing the minbar's parts using plastic sheets and sponge panels to tie them together.

The Egyptian Institution for the Preservation and Protection of Heritage was also present. The civil organization worked to photograph and record the pieces as they were being dismantled. Ministry officials also began documentation. Confusion arose when it was discovered that an Al-Ahram journalist was also present.

When Al-Ahram asked about the purpose of these efforts, Dr. Abu-Bakr Abdullah, Cairo antiquities supervisor and head of the technical bureau, said Mosques have became disasters. We estimate that everyday that a theft takes place and we cannot allocate guards for every mosque, especially because the Ministry of Religious Endowments, which owns and administers these mosques, is lax, while the Ministry of Antiquities is responsible for their protection and preservation."

He added that all the minbars will be stored in the warehouses of the NMEC for display later.

When asked how 55 minbars will be put in one showroom, Abdullah did made no comment and referred Al-Ahram to a higher official. That official also refused to comment.

Interpreting a Vague Decision

According to official documents, the aforementioned decision was taken after the Ministry of Antiquities asked the cabinet to agree upon the transfer of heritage possessions from mosques to the Ministry of Antiquities in order to protect them from theft."

The cabinet agreed, and issued decision no. 110 on 20 February 2018, and asked the Ministry of Antiquities to provide copies of these items.

What comes as a surprise is the second article of the decision: Taking care that this topic wont be announced.

The Head of the Islamic antiquities section at the ministry issued an executive memorandum specifying the kind and number of antiquities and the timetable for their transfer.

This memorandum stated, The documentation and registration processes are ongoing, and last February, 117 Mishkahs in the Al-Rifa'i Mosque were registered and transferred to the NMEC."

This means that the transfer process began well before the cabinet issued its decision.

Expert Questions

The first form of nuisance was the minbar of the Abu-Bakr Muzhir mosque and school in Bergwan Alley, which was built in 1480 AD.

Dr. Omniya Abdel-Bar, an expert in Mamluk architecture, said, The mosques minbar specifically is a masterpiece for its woodwork and seashell work which is very accurate and beautiful. In addition, the mosque in general is one of Cairo's architectural masterpieces, especially its wooden ceilings and marble columns."

"It is very rare to see the signature of the maker who made the decorations and engravings of the minbar and the mihrab (niche). His name was inscribed as as the work of Abdel-Qader Al-Naqqash, perhaps as a testament to his virtuosity," she explained.

The minbars decorations are repeated on the doors and window stiles.

She adds the Abu-Bakr Muzhir's minbar is still in its original state, which is a rare in Egypt and the entire Arab region.

"It has only required minor restoration work. Consequently, the minbar should be kept in its original place because it is part and parcel of this historic building," she concluded.

Abdel-Bar said such a mass disassembly and re-displaying has not been undertaken in any country in the world.

She also wonders about planned storage methods, because these minbars are made of timber which requires very precise care in order to preserve it.

I am not sure that the Ministry of Antiquities has this capacity in the first place."

*This report was first published in Al-Ahram Daily newspaper

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Roubini Names Blockchain Overhyped Technology

Famous economist Nouriel Roubini criticized the foundation of cryptocurrencies  the so-called blockchain technology.In his article for Project Syndicate, Mr. Roubini called blockchain the most overhyped technology ever.





In particular, he thinks that blockchain is less efficient than existing databases. All of its derivatives have major drawbacks  low transaction speed, the necessity of cryptographical transaction checks, and so on. He says that the only proper use case for blockchain is when its allowed to trade the speed for the quality of the check.



At the same time, the famous economist criticizes blockchain advocates for claiming that blockchain is a new universal protocol. In reality, blockchain utilizes existing Internet protocols like TCP-IP or HTML.



Also, he claims that the statement about trustless blockchain-based transactions is actually fake as well. There is no way to get rid of such threats commercially since those transactions need to be 100% backed by money in this case, but thats insane from the standpoint of capital costs. On top of that, practice shows that applying blockchain even in justified cases like securitization or monitoring production chains actually cannot do without third parties anyways since there will definitely be emergency situations and they will require a flexible approach.



Roubini insists that we should be done with this fake fashion. He thinks that Bitcoin is slow and energy-inefficient dinosaur, which will never be able to process transactions as fast as even Excel. Almost all cryptocurrencies have major vulnerabilities.





You are free to discuss this article here: forum for traders and investors
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
Reporting that many retirement Self-Directed IRA clients look to diversify a portfolio with Self-Directed IRAs, the American IRA blog recently published a guide to overseas properties within a Real Estate IRA. Because of the complications that can arise from owning an overseas property, this particular investment vehicle comes with its own limitationsas well as potential benefits for those investors that do proper research.

According to the postavailable at the American IRA blogthe ability to legally purchase and own overseas property with a Real Estate IRA has been possible since 1974, the dawn of the IRA. Buying and selling properties, collecting rent, and handling overseas property much as an investor might handle domestic real estate is all possible.

This opens up a range of advantages to retirement investors looking to diversify their portfolio with a more international benefit to retirement investments. The same rules for purchasing real estate within a Real Estate IRA still apply, however, including using non-recourse loans. A personal guarantee to the loan will not work with a Real Estate IRA, as it is prohibited.

Our clients like to know when they have extra options, said Jim Hitt, CEO of American IRA. This blog post was about telling them what they can accomplish with a Real Estate IRA. Not only can an investor take advantage of the global real estate market, but they can do it with the tax protections afforded to them by the IRA rules of the United States. This is one of the best ways to diversify and build wealth without looking toward the stock market, which is why we like to inform our clients about these options.

Jim Hitt also stressed that overseas property ownership can come with its own challenges, but these same challenges apply to international real estate in most situations. To learn more about American IRA and the Real Estate IRA, visit http://www.AmericanIRA.com to read the post or call 866-7500-IRA.

About:

American IRA, LLC was established in 2004 by Jim Hitt, CEO in Asheville, NC.

The mission of American IRA is to provide the highest level of customer service in the self-directed retirement industry. Jim Hitt and his team have grown the company to over $400 million in assets under administration by educating the public that their Self-Directed IRA account can invest in a variety of assets such as real estate, private lending, limited liability companies, precious metals and much more.

As a Self-Directed IRA administrator they are a neutral third party. They do not make any recommendations to any person or entity associated with investments of any type (including financial representatives, investment promoters or companies, or employees, agents or representatives associated with these firms). They are not responsible for and are not bound by any statements, representations, warranties or agreements made by any such person or entity and do not provide any recommendation on the quality profitability or reputability of any investment, individual or company. The term "they" refers to American IRA, located in Asheville and Charlotte, NC."
Patong Beach, Phuket Each of these packages includes time in Bangkok, and one of Thailands most spectacular beach destinations.

Globetrotters still have a chance to save on trips to Thailand in 2018 when they book one of Goway Travels new special offers to the Land of Smiles.

Until April 26, Goway is offering a range of specials on its popular Thailand vacations, saving Globetrotters up to $400 per couple, in addition to up to $350 in romantic value adds. Eligible Thailand vacation packages include Thailand Enchanted with Phuket, Thailand Enchanted with Koh Samui, and two city and beach trips showcasing either Phuket or Koh Samui. Specific savings and value adds vary according to the trip chosen. They may include a floating market tour, Tuk Tuk night tour, massage, half-price dining experiences, a foodie tour, or more. Eligible departures are available until October 31, 2018.

Each of these packages includes time in Bangkok, and one of Thailands most spectacular beach destinations. Some travellers wishing to include Chiang Mai in their trip, adding an extra cultural dimension to their holiday. For these culture vultures, Goway is offering the Classic Thailand for Foodies including Airfare. Passengers who book by May 31 will save $200 per person on departures up until October 31, 2018.

Since 1970, Goway has been providing unforgettable travel experiences to Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Central & South America, Idyllic Island destinations and Europe. Today Goway is recognized as one of North America's leading travel companies for individuals, families and groups to select exotic destinations around the globe. Goway has offices in Toronto, Vancouver, Los Angeles, Manila, and Sydney, Australia.

For reservations and information, visit http://www.goway.com, or call 1-800-387-8850.
Poetry Sings: a compilation of truly inspirational poems that express powerful inner feeling through poetic imagery. Poetry Sings is the creation of published author, Elizabeth Torres. Elizabeth is a caring, compassionate, and enthusiastic former teacher and administrator from Bushwick, which is located inside Brooklyn, New York. Even at a young age, she had a vivid imagination. She always enjoyed literature and aspired to become a teacher, so she could make a difference in the lives of students. Her dream became a reality when she started teaching. Throughout her career, she has exposed students to different types of literature as part of her ongoing mission to instill a love of reading in all her students. Elizabeth Torres can be connected via email at ElizabethTorresPoetrySings(at)gmail(dot)com.

As a former teacher, I aim to inspire students, the general public, as well as all poetry lovers to use poetry as a means of communicating feelings and thoughts. I invite you to discover a window into the world of Poetry Sings and enjoy the experience. --Elizabeth Torres

Published by Christian Faith Publishing, Elizabeth Torress new book captures powerful emotions through poetic imagery. When a tragedy or challenge arises, there are a lot of people who reach deep and find the strength to overcome the obstacles in their lives. Whether it is pure determination or willfulness, these people are able to unleash their hidden power to succeed in life. In the darkest of moments, faith is a beacon of hope that awakens this power, which is inside all people.

Poetry Sings is a collection of poetry featuring poetic imagery about the expression of feelings. The poems aim to capture the feelings that continually arise at movement of great adversity and triumph. Poetry Sings was crafted to celebrate the powerful emotions of love, hope, compassion, and courage. Join author Elizabeth Torres on a journey into the emotional experiences of Poetry Sings.

View a synopsis of Poetry Sings on YouTube.

Consumers can purchase Poetry Sings at traditional brick & mortar bookstores, or online at Amazon.com, Apple iTunes store, or Barnes and Noble.

For additional information or inquiries about Poetry Sings, contact the Christian Faith Publishing media department at 866-554-0919.
What You Can't Earn: Receiving the Free Gift of Gods Love: an invitation to to believe and receive all that God has to offer. What You Can't Earn: Receiving the Free Gift of Gods Love is the creation of published author, Dick Bont. Dick has been a pastor for over twenty years. Through his experiences as a Biblical counselor, teacher, and author, he has been able to encourage thousands to develop a deeper relationship with God through Jesus Christ. His first book, Life as It Should Be, was used by God to positively change and grow the lives of many. While he enjoys a variety of activities, sharing the truth of Gods Word is his true passion. He and his wife of thirty-one years, Beth, currently live in Ada, Michigan. Dick Bont can be reached by email at dbont49@gmail.com.

Is Gods love for you a truth that you rest in all the time? Do you believe that God actually rejoices over you? Is your relationship with God a frustrating roller-coaster ride, experiencing His love one day and questioning it the next? Is Gods love for you just one of the many truths of God that you miss because you dont fully trust Him and His promises found in the Bible? --Dick Bont

Published by Christian Faith Publishing, Dick Bonts new book invites readers to receive all that God has to offer. At times, it can be hard to imagine that God truly does rejoice in each and every one of His Children. Gods love is, however, as real as it is unconditional. From the author of Life as It Should Be, What You Can't Earn: Receiving the Free Gift of Gods Love explores how anyone can develop a deeper relationship with God through the power of the Holy Spirit and the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Those who wish to receive all that God has to offer simply have to believe and accept Him into their hearts.

View a synopsis of What You Can't Earn: Receiving the Free Gift of Gods Love on YouTube.

Consumers can purchaseWhat You Can't Earn: Receiving the Free Gift of Gods Love at traditional brick & mortar bookstores, or online at Amazon.com, Apple iTunes store, or Barnes and Noble.

For additional information or inquiries about What You Can't Earn: Receiving the Free Gift of Gods Love, contact the Christian Faith Publishing media department at 866-554-0919.
From the Peach Fields to Becoming a University Professor: How God strengthened me through my struggles and turned my tears into a testimony, a revealing look into the vicious cycle of hurt, is the creation of published author, Dr. Barbara Searcy Cothran. Dr. Cothran is a native of Talbotton, Georgia who was raised as the eldest of five siblings. She graduated from Ruth Carter High School and attended Savannah State College, receiving a Bachelors degree in Sociology. Dr. Cothran received a Master of Education Degree from Berry College in 1978, an Education Specialist Degree from Lincoln Memorial University in 2003, and a Doctor of Ministry Degree in Christian Education from Jacksonville Theological Seminary in 2005. She began teaching in the Bartow County School System where she became Teacher of the Year at Kingston Elementary School and Adairsville Middle School. Dr. Cothran retired from public education in 2001 and began working at Shorter University where she was Director of Middle Grades Education and Director of Field and Clinical Placements. She wrote modules for two classes while at Shorter. She also worked with administrators to teach Introduction to Middle Grades Education classes at Rome Middle School, which helped introduce education students to middle school class rooms prior to student teaching. Dr. Cothran was married to the late Fred L. Knox. They have two children, Chederick Dion Knox who now resides in Cartersville, GA and Kiara Loud, who resides in Phoenix City, Alabama. Dr. Cothran remarried in 2010. She attended St. Paul Baptist Church for many years where she served as Minister of Childrens Church, Youth Director, Member of Christian Women in Action, Choir, Treasurer, and Financial Secretary. She currently attends Fellowship Baptist Church of Rome, Georgia.

You too, may have had hurting words said to you that left you broken. Know that God can restore you and make you whole. God does not condemn but he wants to restore because he still has a plan for your life. --Dr. Barbara Searcy Cothran

Published by Christian Faith Publishing, Dr. Barbara Searcy Cothrans new book explores the cycle of hurt.

When Dr. Barbara Cothran encountered a soul-shaking adversity, she started questioning whether or not God was hearing her prayers and seeing her tears. She was told that she was weak, that she had no faith, that she was clingy, and that she was fake. She was told that she had been in church all of her life, yet she still had not grown. This experience left her feeling depressed, broken and worthless. From the Peach Fields to Becoming a University Professor, Dr. Barbara Searcy discusses the adversities she has encountered throughout her past and the impact they had on her.

Most psychologists would agree that hurting people hurt other people. It is a difficult truth that offers a solution to the perpetual cycle of hurt. For those who have been victimized by others, it is likely that those responsible were hurt by others and they have not been able to deal with their own demons. Those who were bullied become bullies. From the Peach Fields to Becoming a University Professor will enable readers to confront the adversities in their lives and break the cycle of hurt.

View a synopsis of From the Peach Fields to Becoming a University Professor: How God strengthened me through my struggles and turned my tears into a testimony on YouTube.

Consumers can purchaseFrom the Peach Fields to Becoming a University Professor: How God strengthened me through my struggles and turned my tears into a testimony at traditional brick & mortar bookstores, or online at Amazon.com, Apple iTunes store, or Barnes and Noble.

For additional information or inquiries about From the Peach Fields to Becoming a University Professor: How God strengthened me through my struggles and turned my tears into a testimony, contact the Christian Faith Publishing media department at 866-554-0919.
...we are beyond excited to begin expanding GIGA Solutions overall scope of services to include PEO, HRO, and business outsourcing solutions.

GIGA Solutions, Inc., a national provider of property and casualty and benefit insurance solutions for the professional employer organization (PEO) industry, has selected Keith Tirico as Managing Director of their new Outsourcing Brokerage. The Brokerage provides business owners with access to PEO, human resources outsourcing (HRO), and business outsourcing solutions.

Keith is the perfect person to lead our new Brokerage, stated Chris Rhoden, Co-Founder of GIGA Solutions. His hands-on approach and business savvy allow him to easily help businesses identify and overcome challenges that can be solved through outsourcing solutions such as PEO."

Having previously owned and operated his own business consulting group, as well as serving as Regional Vice President at a national HRO firm, Mr. Tirico brings 15 years of business consulting and PEO experience to the GIGA Solutions team. He has assisted businesses of all sizes and industries in obtaining a variety of human resources (HR), insurance, payroll, and business technology solutions.

GIGA Solutions PEO brokerage has set out to help business owners make their operations more efficient by providing PEO and business consultation, along with access to tailored benefits solutions, cost-effective insurance programs, payroll technologies, HR guidance, and more.

While our exceptional commercial insurance products will always serve as the main pillar to the organization, we are beyond excited to begin expanding GIGA Solutions overall scope of services to include PEO, HRO, and business outsourcing solutions, commented Carla Busick, Co-Founder of GIGA Solutions.

About GIGA Solutions:

GIGA Solutions, Inc. provides custom risk mitigation and insurance placement solutions to the PEO, staffing, healthcare, hospitality, retail, contracting, and professional services industries. Specialty programs include PEO master policies, PEO client-based solutions, property & casualty coverage, employment practices liability, cyber & professional liability, benefit insurance solutions, business outsourcing brokerage solutions, and reinsurance and captive consulting. GIGA Solutions is headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida. For more information, please visit: http://www.gigasolves.com.
Being a member of the Forbes Technology Council is a tremendous opportunity to establish yourself as a thought leader in the tech community. Using the Forbes platform, we can share the ideas, challenges, trends and be sure they reach the right audience.

Intetics Inc. President & CEO, Boris Kontsevoi, has been accepted into the Forbes Technology Council, an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives.

Mr. Boris Kontsevoi joins other Forbes Technology Council members, who are hand-selected, to become part of a curated network of successful peers and get access to a variety of exclusive benefits and resources, including the opportunity to submit thought leadership articles and short tips on industry-related topics for publishing on Forbes.com.

Forbes Councils combines an innovative, high-touch approach to community management perfected by the team behind Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) with the extensive resources and global reach of Forbes. As a result, Forbes Council members get access to the people, benefits and expertise they need to grow their businesses  and a dedicated member concierge who acts as an extension of their own team, providing personalized one-on-one support.

Boris Kontsevoi, says, Being a member of the Forbes Technology Council is a tremendous opportunity to establish yourself as a thought leader in the tech community. Using the Forbes platform, we can share the ideas, challenges, trends and be sure they reach the right audience. My special thanks to the Forbes team. They do their best to help the members leverage the opportunity of being the Forbes Technology Council thought leader. This is a great contribution to our company success. Greatly appreciate this.

Scott Gerber, founder of Forbes Councils, says, We are honored to welcome Boris Kontsevoi into the community. Our mission with Forbes Councils is to curate successful professionals from every industry, creating a vetted, social capital-driven network that helps every member make an even greater impact on the business world.

About Intetics Inc.

Intetics Inc. is a leading global technology company focused on creation and operation of distributed professional teams for custom software development, software testing, systems integration, and data processing. Intetics is the pioneer of Offshore Dedicated Teams, the inventor of Remote In-Sourcing, Predictive Software Engineering framework and Technical debt reduction platform (TETRA). Intetics has broad industry experience, deep software engineering expertise, an outstanding quality management platform and an unparalleled methodology for talent recruitment, team building and talent retention that guarantee that clients receive exceptional results for their software applications and data processing projects. At Intetics, our outcomes do not just meet clients expectations, they have been exceeding them for our two decades in business.

Intetics is ISO 9001 (quality) and ISO 27001 (security) certified and Microsoft and Oracle Gold Partner. The companys innovation and growth achievements are reflected in winning prestigious Inc 5000, Software 500, Chicago Innovation, CRN 100, Deloitte Technology Fast 50, European IT Excellence and Best European BPO awards, and inclusion into Top 100 Global Service Providers and Top 100 Outsourcing Companies lists.

About Forbes Councils

Forbes partnered with the founders of Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) to launch Forbes Councils, invitation-only communities for world-class business professionals in a variety of industries. Members, who are hand-selected by each Councils community team, receive personalized introductions to each other based on their specific needs and gain access to a wide range of business benefits and services, including best-in-class concierge teams, personalized connections, peer-to-peer learning, a business services marketplace, and the opportunity to share thought leadership content on Forbes.com. For more information about Forbes Technology Council, visit https://forbestechcouncil.com/. To learn more about Forbes Councils, visit forbescouncils.com.
Athena, a professional association dedicated to advancing women in STEM, is releasing its 2018 Pinnacle Awards nominees in advance of its May 3 awards ceremony at the Hyatt La Jolla. Athenas Annual Pinnacle Awards Gala is a staple of Southern California's technology and life sciences sectors, convening 600+ industry leaders to honor those advancing the careers of women in the STEM fields.

Athenas 20th Anniversary & Awards ceremony will place the spotlight on corporations, institutions and individuals that mentor, promote and advance women in STEM. The corporate sponsors of this years Pinnacle Awards include industry titans, life sciences startups, educational centers, the media and the associated service providers. They include Sony as Title Sponsor, Qualcomm and ICE as Presenting Sponsor, Thermo Fisher Scientific, bioTheranostics and Intuit, as well as other diversity champions like Alexandria Real Estate, EY, IRRAS, Marsh McLennan Agency, Sales Benchmark Index and supporting organizations like San Diego Business Journal and Academy of Our Lady of Peace.

2018 Pinnacle Awards Nominees By Category

Individual in Life Science



Francie Barron | Nanomedical Diagnostics

Dawn Barry | Luna DNA

Denise Bevers | KindredBio

Kara Bortone | Johnson & Johnson Innovation, JLABS

Lisa Freeman-Cook | GenMark Diagnostics

Ciara Kennedy | Amplyx Pharmaceuticals

Christina Lim | Illumina, Inc.

Alyssa Master | Nucleus Biologics

Vatsala Naageshwaran | Absorption Systems

Meredith Perry | Catalent San Diego

Irit Rappley | Celgene Corporation

Stella Sarraf | Amydis & Spinogenix

Sara Zaknoen | ZED Strategic Consulting

Individual in Education



Rommie Amaro | UC San Diego

Stacey Brydges | University of California, San Diego

Michelle Bunn | San Diego State University PLTW & Femineer Program

Joylyn Darnell | National University

Dr. Katherine Kantardjieff | California State University San Marcos

Debra Kimberling | Private Consulting

Sandra Lebron | San Diego Coastkeeper

Kris Mooney | Fleet Science Center

Youwen Ouyang | California State University San Marcos

Shira Robbins | University of California, San Diego

Individual in Technology

Michiko Araki Kelley | Sony Electronics

Alex Balazs | Intuit

Kimbra Brookstein | Intuit

Ioana Diana Broome | General Atomics Aeronautical Systems

Aliza Carpio | Intuit

Rashmi Char | Qualcomm

Jaye Connolly-LaBelle | RippleNami, Inc.

Kelly Davis | Sony Electronics

Eiling Ferdaws | Qualcomm

Houman Haghighi | Qualcomm Ventures

Kathy Herring Hayashi | Qualcomm, Inc.

Brittany Emal Hurd | Oracle

Tania Hurt | Sony Electronics

Virginia Jacobs | Intuit

Neal Manowitz | Sony Electronics

Rocio Montes | Intuit

Saura Naderi | Qualcomm

Karla Pinckes | WD-40

Susan Poser | Oracle

Kimberly Rinder | General Atomics Aeronautical Systems

Sree Santhosh | Sony Interactive Entertainment

Tony Schwarz | Qualcomm

Kylie Taitano | Intuit

Sara Vaz | Nordson

Individual in Service



Inge Bear | Scientist.com

Amy Bergen | The Leadership Edge

Alisa Beyer | LemonTree Partners

Brandy Bullen | Sequoia Consulting Group

Debbie Chelberg | Marsh & McLennan Agency

Denise Hummel | Lead Inclusively, Inc.

Will Marre | Leadership SPA

Taylor Moyer | Managed Laboratory Services, Inc.

Stephanie Seidman | Dentons US LLP

Tali Tuchin | Mintz Levin

Carla Vallone | Girls Inc. of San Diego County

Amy Wood | Cooley

Company/Organization



AbacusNext

Alta Environmental

Career Sparks

Intuit

Oracle Corporation

Point Loma Nazarene University

Sony

UC San Diego CREATE STEM Success Initiative

Viasat

Startup Company: Life Science & Technology



Aquasend

Dare Bioscience

Formalloy

NotesFirst

Trials.ai

The 2018 Pinnacle Awards Gala is on May 3, 2018 at the Hyatt La Jolla. Limited tickets and tables are available: athenasd.org/purchase-a-table. Pinnacle sponsorship inquiries may contact: Holly@AthenaSD.org.

ABOUT ATHENA

Athena is a professional association dedicated to empowering progress together by advancing women in STEM. Athenas 500+ member community accesses executive leadership forums, educational and mentoring programs, and targeted networking that empower women across STEM industries to accelerate their professional ambitions and perform at their highest levels. Athena members hold positions of senior executive, entrepreneur, educator and manager from the STEM fields, as well as the associated service providers.
PK4 Media, an 18-time award-winning Omni-Channel media company, has been named the agency of record for the Hopper Bus San Diego. The company is launching a new service on April 9 that offers world-class guided tours on luxury double-decker buses in the San Diego Area.

Through this partnership, The Hopper Bus will utilize PK4 Medias proprietary Omni-Channel Platform to manage display, video, social, and search for the brands launch campaign. The campaign will generate awareness for this new, best-in-class service in San Diego and additional feeder markets for travelers across the country.

The Hopper Bus San Diego will also use PK4s proprietary TruEngage -- the first customizable engagement-based video technology ensuring 100% viewable and 100% guaranteed human interactions.

We are thrilled to partner with PK4 Medias Omni-Channel platform because it gives us complete control over our campaign, along with the ability to optimize on the fly based on which platforms are performing well, said Hopper Bus CMO Doug Porter. PK4 Media gives us the ability to reach the right consumer, on the right device at the right time which will have a major impact on the launch of our new service in San Diego.

The Hopper Bus is a new way for San Diego visitors and residents to explore the city in luxury. We are looking forward to introducing this new service and helping The Hopper Bus become a part of the San Diego community, said PK4 Media CEO Tom Alexander. 

About PK4 Media:

The advertising industrys first Omni-Channel PMP Company serves video and display ads across an unprecedented eight digital channels: Desktop, Mobile, Tablet, CTV, VOD, In-Mall, In-Theater and Digital-Out-Of-Home.

Founded in Los Angeles in 2009 by CEO Tom Alexander, clients include: Activision, Amazon, Bacardi, Esurance, Ford, Honda, KitchenAid, Lionsgate, Microsoft and Procter & Gamble.

PK4 Media has won 15 awards: Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Semifinalist, LA Business Journals Best Places to Work, Deloittes Technology Fast 500 Winner, 2-Time Forbes Most Promising Company, 3-Time Inc 500|5000 Award Winner, 3-Time LA Business Journal Fastest Growing Minority-Owned Company and 3-Time LA Business Journal Fastest Growing Company.

About Hopper Bus San Diego:

The Hopper, San Diegos premier integrated transportation and attraction service, provides visitors and locals an opportunity to learn about and explore the citys best sights and hop on & off where they desire. The Hopper buses stop at six locations: Old Town, Embarcadero, Seaport Village, Gaslamp Quarter, Balboa Park and Little Italy. The Hopper Plus will also include admission to top attractions such as Hornblower Harbor Cruise, the USS Midway Museum, Flagship Coronado Ferry, Maritime Museum and more. The double-decker buses offer a comfortable and stylish experience featuring amenities of climate control, concessions, restrooms, 4G Wi-Fi and electric outlets.

For more information, visit http://www.RideTheHopperBus.com. Stay connected on social: Facebook.com/RideTheHopperBus, Twitter @RideTheHopper and Instagram @RideTheHopperBus. Next Stop: Paradise! #RideTheHopper
The Underground Now Open at The Mob Museum We are extremely proud of this addition to the Museum, which was developed to tell the story of this pivotal period of American history in the most dynamic way possible.

The Mob Museum, The National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, today announces the opening of The Underground, its new Prohibition history exhibition featuring a working distillery and speakeasy. Zappos.com serves as The Undergrounds signature sponsor.

Entirely re-envisioning the typical museum exhibition experience, The Underground takes visitors on an uncommonly vivid journey back in time: Situated discreetly in the basement of the Museum, The Underground encompasses 2,814 square feet appointed with luxurious, Art Deco design motifs. Guests of The Underground are encouraged to ponder the time when consuming alcohol was not only a criminal act, but also bred secret watering holessome of which became the most glamorous places to be.

We are extremely proud of this addition to the Museum, which was developed to tell the story of this pivotal period of American history in the most dynamic way possible, said Jonathan Ullman, president and chief executive officer, The Mob Museum. To our many supporters whose contributions made The Underground possible, we extend enormous gratitude.

The Museums project team for The Underground included LG Architects, design firm Gallagher and Associates, historic consultant Robert Chattel of Chattel, Inc., custom fabricator CREO Industrial Arts, the City of Las Vegas and Core Construction.

Numerous exhibits and artifacts found in the distillery and speakeasy add depth and context to the experience. Exhibits and artifacts on display bring to life the essence of a time that saw organized crime syndicates grow richer and more powerful than ever before, while giving rise to great cultural and societal change.

Artifacts on display include:



Five-gallon whiskey still, an example of one of the smaller home stills used to make alcohol during Prohibition.

Valise with hidden flasks produced by Abercrombie & Fitch, with a brass stud on its base that, when swiveled, reveals a tiny keyhole. Once unlocked, the false bottom opens to reveal three silver flasks.

One-gallon alky cooker like those used by impoverished families employed by Chicagos Genna brothers to make small batches of liquor in their homes.

Grape brick sign, which advertised the blocks of grape concentrate sold in grocery stores. These blocks could be combined with water to make grape juice. Of course, yeast could be added, the mixture poured into a bottle, the bottle corked and, three weeks latervoila!home-made wine.

Budweiser frozen eggs, which along with more than 25 other non-alcoholic products, carried Anheuser Buschs most popular brand name during Prohibition. Other products included soft drinks, malt extract, corn syrup and truck bodies. The frozen eggs were sold in 30-pound canisters and stabilized with sugar and salt.

Beaded chiffon dress, circa 1926, which provides an example of the new and bolder fashions that became popular during the Prohibition era due to the rise of flapper culture.

A unique aquarium exhibit, produced in conjunction with The Animal Planet series Tanked, tells the story of the 1922 sinking of the Lizzie D, a tug boat believed to have moonlighted as a rum runner, off the coast of Fire Island, New York. The 440-gallon tank memorializes the discovery of the sunken vessel in 1977, which was indeed found to be carrying crates containing hundreds of bottles of Kentucky bourbon, Scotch whisky and Canadian rye whisky.

Master Distiller in Residence George Racz, oversees the initial production of corn-mash moonshine in The Undergrounds 60-gallon, custom-made copper-pot still. Capable of producing 250 750 ml jars of moonshine per week, the gleaming still forms the focal point of the distillery.

In the speakeasy, The Undergrounds moonshine provides the centerpiece of the cocktail collection, while a full bar is also available. The speakeasy cocktail menu includes typical Prohibition cocktails such as Bees Knees, Underground Old Fashioned, Ginger Jake and Giggle Water. A variety of coffee cocktails, draft beer, bottled beer, wines by the glass and non-alcoholic cocktails are also available.

Finally, for private groups and intimate events, a VIP hideaway called The Fitting Room, concealed by a secret entrance off the speakeasy, can accommodate up to 12 guests.

Entrance to The Underground at The Mob Museum is free with general Museum admission until 5 p.m.; guests who wish to visit just The Underground after 5 p.m. may enter via its exterior side entrance free of charge until closing. The new hours of the Museum, including The Underground, are 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., Sunday through Wednesday, and 9 a.m. until midnight, Thursday through Saturday.

For even more information about Prohibition, visit the Museums online exhibit at prohibitionhistory.org. Photos are available for download here.

ABOUT THE MOB MUSEUM

The Mob Museum, the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, provides a world-class, interactive journey through true storiesfrom the birth of the Mob to todays headlines. The Mob Museum offers a provocative, contemporary look at these topics through hundreds of artifacts and immersive storylines. Whether you like it or not, this is American history. It debuted a major renovation in 2018, including a Crime Lab, Use of Force Training Experience, and Organized Crime Today exhibit as well as The Underground, a basement-level Prohibition history exhibition featuring a working speakeasy and distillery and sponsored by Zappos. Since opening in 2012, The Mob Museum has accumulated numerous accolades, including being named one of TripAdvisors Top 25 U.S. Museums, one of Las Vegas Weeklys Twenty Greatest Attractions in Las Vegas History, one of Hotel.coms Top 7 Travel Brag Landmarks, one of USA Todays 12 Cant Miss U.S. Museum Exhibits, A Must for Travelers by The New York Times, one of 20 Places Every American Should See by Fox News and Budget Travel magazine, Best Museum by Nevada Magazine and is a multi-year winner of the Las Vegas Review-Journals Best of Las Vegas rankings. The Mob Museum has been awarded accreditation by the American Alliance of Museums, the highest national recognition afforded U.S. museums. General admission is $26.95 for adults ages 18 and over with special pricing for online purchase, children, seniors, military, law enforcement, Nevada residents, and teachers. The Museum is open daily; visit the website for up-to-date operating hours. For more information, call (702) 229-2734 or visit https://themobmuseum.org. Connect on Facebook at facebook.com/themobmuseum or Twitter @themobmuseum.
Get ready to partner with Ant-Man, the Wasp, and Fifth Sun for new Marvel Ant-Man and the Wasp designs. Fifth Sun is eager to introduce select designs today, April 20th, 2018, on the first day Ant-Man merchandise is available to the Fifthsun.com community for purchase.

Hank Pym has been working to upgrade the Wasp suit (and, yes, Ant-Man is feeling a little jealous about it) with blasters, wings, and awesome high-tech gadgets; while Fifth Sun has been working to upgrade their Marvel offerings with fun new Ant-Man and the Wasp styles. The new officially licensed designs include classic logo tees, Wasp designs, and styles with your favorite fun-sized hero, Ant-Man, as well. 5SUN loves adding new designs from popular brands, films, and t.v. shows and is especially excited about the opportunity to share the Marvel Universe with its community of fans.

Fifth Suns Customer Service Lead, Marie Murray, has been waiting to see the new Ant-Man film since she saw the first trailer. She confesses, Ant-Man and the Wasp takes my love of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to a whole new size. Join in on 5SUNs excitement for the film premiere on July 6th, 2018 with an exclusive Ant-Man shirt available for the first time today.

Get ready for another marvelous Marvel adventure with a Fifth Sun Ant-Man and the Wasp design; no one can feel small if theyre dressed in a cool Ant-Man and the Wasp design from Fifthsun.com.

About Marvel:

Marvels cinematic universe  as we know it and love it  started with the first Iron Man film in 2008 and has been followed by a long line of blockbuster hit after blockbuster hit like Thor: Ragnarok, Black Panther, and the exciting Avengers: Infinity War premiere in April 2018. Beloved characters like Captain America, Hulk, Spider-Man, and the Guardians of the Galaxy continue to inspire comic-book fans across the globe with new adventures and world-saving feats portrayed by the popular Marvel film franchise.

About Ant-Man and the Wasp:

Scott Lang dons his Ant-Man suit again to join Hank Pym and his daughter, Hope Van Dyne, on a mission to uncover secrets and defeat the mysterious villain, Ghost. Ant-Man must learn to balance his role as a father with that of a superhero, while also trying out the new Giant-Man role, getting a new partner, the Wasp, and keeping audiences laughing. Get ready to watch Ant-Man in action, or escaping giant flying Pez, at the film premiere on July 6th, 2018.

About Fifth Sun:

Fifth Suns journey from a small independent t-shirt company was shaped by its continued focus on balance, community, and the personal touch that remains at the core of its identity. With more than 20 years of experience in the industry, Fifth Sun has woven together a shared spirit that thrives on designing vibrant and meaningful art for key brands like Star Wars, Disney, Nintendo, Marvel, and more.

Fifth Sun is a company of artists, designers, creators and, above all, dreamers. We are inspired by the world around us and enjoy making the imaginary into a reality. We track trends in art, music, pop culture, internet memes, and fashion to design art that is accessible and relatable to diverse audiences. We create progressive, ethical, and original artwork.

Weve never lost our sense of curiosity and it drives us to create unforgettable fashions for your favorite brands.

Please let us know what you think of the shirts by tweeting us (@5Sun) or sharing photos of you on our Facebook (@FifthSunGraphics) & Instagram @FifthSunOfficial)! Were your biggest fans and would love to see you strut your stuff.
The National Diversity Council (NDC) is proud to support Starbucks in their efforts to educate employees on racial tolerance after two black men were arrested last week in one of their Philadelphia stores.

I commend Starbucks chief executive, Kevin Johnson, for taking action by closing thousands of retail stores to educate and promote conscious inclusion and prevent racial-bias. Unconscious bias is a societal issue that must be faced head on. It takes great fortitude to proactively handle an issue such as race in the workplace, said Dennis Kennedy, Founder and Chair of the National Diversity Council.

The National Diversity Council advocates for diversity and inclusion (D&I) in the workplace and recognizes organizations that are committed to ensuring all races, genders,orientations and ability have an equal voice in the marketplace. The vision of the National Diversity Council is to cultivate a nationwide network of affiliated councils to advance workplaces and communities into inclusive environments where individuals are valued for their talents and empowered to reach their fullest potential.

We applaud Starbucks CEO, Kevin Johnson, for closing more than 8,000 U.S. stores to provide unconscious-bias training to employees, said Angeles Valenciano, CEO at the National Diversity Council. It takes this level of leadership commitment and courage to identify organizational issues and create conditions to change organizational culture.

After 10 years of fostering learning environments for organizations to grow in their knowledge of diversity, the NDC delights in organizations such as Starbucks that take the initiative to educate their employees on unconscious bias in order to prevent racial discrimination in their retail stores.
Radiant Headquarters Moves to Downtown Redmond, WA The relocation of our corporate headquarters signifies business growth and provides an opportunity for Radiant to explore new technology development, applications, and production goals.

Radiant Vision Systems, a leading provider of visual test and inspection solutions for lighting and displays, announces that it has moved its global headquarters to a new location in downtown Redmond, Washington, effective today. The new two-story facility is just six miles from the companys previous single-story location in the Redmond Ridge area, but accommodates significantly larger square footage. The move supports expansion of the companys engineering, support, and manufacturing teams to meet demands for solutions development in light and display measurement as well as advanced vision inspection. From its new headquarters facility, Radiant will continue to support its global office locations in North America, China, and Korea, and its extensive distributor network.

The relocation of our corporate headquarters is a significant step forward for Radiant, said Hal Yamazaki, Radiant Executive Vice President. The move signifies business growth and provides an opportunity for Radiant to explore new technology development, applications, and production goals. Already, we have broadened our expertise beyond measuring standard flat panel displays and light sources. In recent years, Radiant has developed measurement solutions for emerging markets like augmented and virtual reality, head-up displays, near-infrared for gesture detection or autonomous vehicle sensing, and new displays using high-resolution OLED and microLED technology. The growing number and variability of these applications demands a diversification of our offerings and a corresponding plan to implement resources to accomplish this.

Radiants new facility provides space for additional R&D activities and imaging labs, manufacturing and fabrication, and business operations, which greatly impact new solutions development and production capacity to support its global customers. Radiant counts many major brand names among its clients, including consumer electronics, automotive, lighting, and aerospace firms, who invest heavily in continuous product development to incorporate emerging technologies. The evolution of our customers products has been the driving force of Radiants growth, said Yamazaki. In order to meet a customers design and quality control needs, we must be agile to address new technology types that enable their competitive advantage. This means ensuring our investment matches that of our customers. We remain customer-focused in our strategy andas we begin this new chapter in Radiants historywe look forward to continuing to provide industry-leading products and to serve our customers better than ever.

Effective April 20, 2018, Radiants new headquarters office address is:

18640 NE 67th Court

Redmond, WA 98052 USA

The companys corporate telephone, fax, and email contact information will remain the same:

Tel: +1 (425) 844-0152

Fax: +1 (425) 844-0153

Email: Info(at)RadiantVS.com

For more information about Radiant and to view global office locations, visit http://www.RadiantVisionSystems.com.

About Radiant Vision Systems

Radiant Vision Systems works with world-class brands and manufacturers to deliver creative visual inspection solutions that improve quality, reduce costs, and increase customer satisfaction. Radiants legacy of technology innovation in photometric imaging and worldwide install base date back more than 25 years and address applications from consumer electronics to automotive manufacturing. Radiant Vision Systems product lines include TrueTest automated visual inspection software for quality control, and ProMetric imaging colorimeters, photometers, and light source measurement systems. Radiant is headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA, with strategic offices in China and South Korea. Radiant has been a part of Konica Minoltas Sensing Business Unit since August 2015. For more information, visit http://www.RadiantVisionSystems.com.
Firewood Marketing was recognized as a winner in the 2018 Best Places to Work in the Bay Area, an awards program presented by the San Francisco Business Times and the Silicon Valley Business Journal.

Firewood earned a ranking of No. 15 in the best-places-to-work list within the midsize company category, which included companies with 100 to 249 Bay Area employees. Select employers from around the Bay Area were spotlighted during an awards ceremony held on April 18, 2018, at the Hilton San Francisco Union Square.

The winning organizations were honored for having created exceptional workplaces that their employees value highly. Award applicants were evaluated and ranked across five categories. Employee feedback on values such as fun, collaborative culture, solid compensation and benefits offerings, management practices, and other company aspects were important parts of the rating process.

Our talented people are at the very heart of our success, and were thrilled to see the Firewood family recognized with this award, said Lanya Zambrano, co-founder of Firewood. Weve built a great team that values collaboration and doesnt get bogged down with egos and politics. Were just focused on creating great work for our client partners. Work-life balance and creating a fun and respectful environment for everyone are top priorities.

Firewood provides marketing services by partnering closely with clients through the traditional agency model as well as an embedded approach, utilizing marketing experts with deep domain experience who work on-site at client offices or in close proximity. As one of the pioneers of the embedded agency model in Silicon Valley, Firewood has attracted interest from tech companies looking for speed to scale, better efficiencies, and closer communication and collaboration from their marketing and advertising partners.

Firewoods client roster includes Airbnb, Google, EMPLOYERS, LinkedIn, Google Pay, YouTube, and other companies.

About Firewood Marketing

San Francisco-based Firewood Marketing provides strategy, creative, and digital marketing solutions for a variety of clients, including notable high-tech brands, start-ups, and Fortune 500 companies. Firewood partners with clients both through a traditional agency model and through an innovative, embedded approach. They are a team of dedicated professionals who work hard to deliver above expectations with curiosity that extends far beyond their work. Founded in 2011, the agency has grown to employ more than 200 people working across its San Francisco office, at offices in Sandpoint, Idaho, and Dublin, Ireland, and on-site at various client locations. To learn more, visit http://www.firewoodmarketing.com.

About 2018 Best Places to Work in the Bay Area

Best Places to Work is an innovative publication and awards program produced by the San Francisco Business Times and the Silicon Valley Business Journal. The rankings were determined by responses to a survey that went directly to employees. The survey was administered online by the employers and through a service provided by research partner Quantum Workplace. The rankings are numeric based on Quantums scoring process. By ranking companies and sharing best practices, Best Places to Work facilitates idea sharing and helps other companies learn from the best.
Cubacel bonuses for international top ups to Cuba placed on HablaCuba.com.

HablaCuba.com perceives Super Bono, the monthly Cubacel promo, like a generous relative, that hosts large family dinners, tells jokes and makes everyone laugh, while keeping in mind the bigger purpose: bringing families closer together. This month, the promo starts Monday, April 23 and is only leaving on April 28, after having processed all the top ups with extra bonuses that the Cuban expats want to send to their families and friends back home.

During the promotion the top up process goes as follows:

Amount sent 20 CUC - Amount received 50 CUC

Amount sent 25 CUC - Amount received 55 CUC

Amount sent 30 CUC - Amount received 60 CUC

Amount sent 40 CUC - Amount received 100 CUC

Amount sent 50 CUC - Amount received 110 CUC

Amount sent 60 CUC - Amount received 150 CUC

The promotional balance may be used for all services available to prepaid users like domestic and international calls, SMS, MMS, including SMS and Data (Nauta). The promotional bonus will expire on May 23rd 2018 at 23:59 Cuba time. Top ups of 40 CUC or more will be divided into 2 or 3 separate top ups, so that you receive the maximum bonus possible. The recharges may arrive several minutes apart.

Besides sending top ups, customers can also recharge their familys and friends Nauta accounts, in order to help them gain access to the internet. Or, if they prefer calling, they can also use HablaCuba.coms calling services. Customers can place their calls:

From any landline, mobile or even payphone in the world, through access numbers.

Through the smartphone app called KeepCalling, available for iOS and Android.

The rate for international calls to Cuba is 69.9/min, for both landlines and mobiles, and the cost of a text message is 7.

All services HablaCuba.com offers revolve around the websites mission, which is to bring people together, no matter the distance, because no distance is too long if people stay connected. HablaCuba.com offers a great solution for keeping a close relationship with everyone living back home in Cuba, due to:

the customer-focused approach, based on safe and easy to use services

the frequent special offers: bonuses on international top ups or discounts on international calls

the great Customer Service available 24/7, both in English and in Spanish.

Or, as customers put it: "Your consumer friendly instructions make it easy to cross borders and communicate with friends and family like it should be. (HablaCuba.com customer).

About HablaCuba.com

HablaCuba.com is an interactive website designed by KeepCalling, a global telecommunications company registered in 2002 in USA. Presently, KeepCalling provides its services to hundreds of thousands of consumers, with a focus on customer satisfaction. KeepCalling has been listed by Inc 5000 as one of the fastest growing companies in the USA for 5 consecutive years. In 2015 the company registered a revenue increase of over 200% from 2011 to 2014.
A campus partnership with Fresh Twist is a natural fit for accommodating students with busy schedules. They are constantly snacking on the go. As the original creators of Pretzel Bites and Pretzel Dogs, Pretzelmaker is a proven leader in fast casual.

OnCampus Brands, dedicated to connecting college campuses with brands that enhance students lives and improve retail operations, has partnered with Fresh Twist by Pretzelmaker to spur their development on college campuses around the country. Fueling this development is a first-of-its-kind construction incentive program that Fresh Twist will use to sponsor interested universities or contract operators that want to place a Fresh Twist by Pretzelmaker on their campus.

A campus partnership with Fresh Twist is a natural fit for accommodating students with busy schedules. They are constantly snacking on the go, said Jim Gregory, founder of OnCampus Brands. As the original creators of Pretzel Bites and Pretzel Dogs, Pretzelmaker is a proven leader in fast casual. Fresh Twist carries on that tradition, with all-new breakfast and late-night menu options.

Fresh Twist provides an ideal, small-footprint concept by operating in as little as 250 square feet, and scalable to fit the needs of most non-traditional venues. Furthermore, their construction incentive program can help offset considerable build out costs for universities. From its simplified operation to its value pricing and competitive food costs, the entire Fresh Twist business model was designed for operational success in non-traditional retail spaces. The concept features minimal equipment, and a strong brand identity in Global Franchise Groupthe management company behind Pretzelmaker and other recognizable franchise concepts such as Great American Cookies, Marble Slab Creamery, Hot Dog on a Stick and Round Table Pizza.

Fresh Twist by Pretzelmaker demonstrates just how versatile our best-in-class pretzel dough can be, said Allison Lauenstein, executive vice president of Pretzelmaker. We know customers are snacking more and are always looking for a portable way to grab a meal on the go. In fact, soft pretzels were named the second most popular dish of 2017 by GrubHub with a 221 percent rise in popularity. Fresh Twist was designed with that in mind. The concept is ideal for universities.

Furthering its menu differentiation, Fresh Twist will also provide breakfast sandwiches on pretzel buns, Cinnamon Toast Pretzel Sticks, Pretzel Flatbread Pizzas and Pepperoni Pretzel Rolls in addition to its traditional pretzel menu and all-natural beverages. By providing a unique pretzel-centric menu that uses only the highest quality ingredients while cutting across all three-day parts, Fresh Twist by Pretzelmaker will provide college foodservice directors and contract operators the ability to scale the business quickly while fulfilling the markets potential.

The Fresh Twist team is taking all the right steps to expand in the campus channel, added Gregory. The menu is dialed in, the product is delicious, the operation is proven and the construction incentive provides an amazing opportunity for operators who get onboard.

To learn more about Fresh Twist by Pretzelmaker and its construction incentive program, visit https://www.pretzelmakerfranchise.com/fresh-twist/ and view the brand flipbook at http://www.freshtwist.oncampusbrands.com.

About OnCampus Brands  http://www.oncampusbrands.com

OnCampus Brands (OCB) is dedicated to enhancing students lives by improving campus retail operations and choices. With more than 25 years of experience in non-traditional retail design and operations, OCB has the resources and connectivity to bring the right retail brands onto college campuses. OnCampus Brands takes a data-centric and relationship-based approach to on-campus retail developmentmaintaining an extensive, proprietary database of on-campus retail outlets in the United States.

About Global Franchise Group, LLC - http://www.globalfranchise.com

Global Franchise Group, LLC is a strategic brand management company with a mission of championing franchise brands and the people who build them. The company owns a portfolio of franchise brands that includes five primary quick service restaurant (QSR) franchise concepts: Great American Cookies, Hot Dog on a Stick, Marble Slab Creamery, MaggieMoos Ice Cream & Treatery, Pretzelmaker and Round Table Pizza. The brands are managed by GFG Management, LLC, a subsidiary of Global Franchise Group, LLC. Global Franchise Group, LLC is a portfolio company of Levine Leichtman Capital Partners, an independent investment firm, with approximately $9 billion of capital under management and substantial franchise management experience.

About Pretzelmaker - http://www.pretzelmaker.com

Since 1991, Pretzelmaker has specialized in serving fresh baked, hand-rolled soft pretzel products, dipping sauces and beverages. Long recognized as an innovator in their industry, the brand is credited with inventing the popular Pretzel Dog, Mini Pretzel Dogs, and the portable Pretzel Bites. Following integration in 2010, the Pretzelmaker brand now also includes Pretzel Time. Pretzelmaker is currently the second largest soft pretzel concept in the United States and is also rapidly expanding worldwide with locations in Canada, Guam, Saudi Arabia and Mexico.
In a matter of three years, Office Sign Company has doubled from a company of 20 to upwards of 45 members.

In the course of one month, Office Sign Company of Fargo, North Dakota has hired on four new members to their team. With two locations, a production facility in North Fargo and a downtown office, company growth is anticipated and new skills are welcome.

Office Sign Company is a global, e-commerce signage company that specializes in the manufacturing of interior office signs. These signs include custom name badges, conference room signs, bushed metal door and room signs and more. With an increase in signage needs locally and nationally, Office Sign Company is taking the necessary steps to accommodate by adding to their skilled staff and capabilities.

These new positions have been filled for both locations. A CNC Operator and a Vinyl Technician are at the production facility, and a Production Artist and Customer Success Manager are now at the downtown office. There are a variety of departments within Office Sign Company; from customer service, marketing, and web development to the manufacturing side (sublimation specialists, engraving, vinyl, and more). In a matter of three years, Office Sign Company has doubled from a company of 20 to upwards of 45 members. Watch for more updates from Office Sign Company by subscribing to their newsletter and following their social sites!
Team Fastrax Parachute Demonstration Team

Starting Friday, April 20, 2018, at what is surely an exciting weekend for Richmond race fans, Team Fastrax will perform special patriotic demonstrations at both the ToyotaCare 250 and Toyota Owners 400 NASCAR Races.

To start each race, Team Fastrax will execute a perfectly coordinated aerial demonstration, by skydiving in during the National Anthem with their 2,000 sq. ft. American Flag, a 1,000 sq. ft. Richmond Raceway flag and a red white and blue streamer.

We are honored to be performing our patriotic American Flag skydive during such an exciting weekend at Richmond Raceway, commented John Hart, owner of Start Skydiving, and Founder of Team Fastrax. The NASCAR Cup Series and Xfinity races are very competitive and we couldnt be more excited to be a part of it.

According to the Richmond Raceway site, fans will also be treated to the music of bluegrass, Virginia-based band, The Whiskey Rebellion, as they headline the fan-favorite Rolling Campground Concert in the GEICO Campgrounds. The band will also perform at Virginia Credit Union LIVE! prior to the start of the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series Driver/Crew Chief Meeting, which is open to all fans with a Toyota Owners 400 race ticket.

This performance of Team Fastrax is dedicated to Army Sgt. Adam J. Kohlhaas. For information on Sgt. Adam J. Kohlhaas, visit the Military Times website.

For more information on the race, or to purchase tickets, visit the Richmond Raceway website.

ABOUT TEAM FASTRAX

Team Fastrax, sponsored by SELECTiON.COM, is the most ambitious professional skydiving team in the world. The team has a roster of more than thirty-eight active members, with a collective of more than 300,000 skydives. Team Fastrax has performed exhibition skydives all over the world for audiences large and small as a patriotic display or as a product promotion.

ABOUT SELECTiON.COM

SELECTiON.COM is a nationwide provider of criminal and pre-employment background screenings, also referred to as a Consumer Reporting Agency. Headquartered in Cincinnati, OH, SELECTiON.COM is a veteran-owned company that has been in business since 1991 and offers more than 35 background and data collection services.
Part of the East Lakeshore Trail System, the Morganton Branch is an easy three mile hike. (Photo credit: TVA) If you are looking to replace your usual walk with something more adventurous, the Tennessee River Valley is filled with hundreds of trails varying from easy to moderate that you and your canine will love. Grab a leash and a four-legged companion and get to exploring.

Springtime is a great time to get outside and explore Mother Nature and all of her offerings. One way to see nature up close is by going on a hike. This activity has been growing in popularity and today it is not uncommon to encounter hikers with a four-legged companion. Many trails throughout the Tennessee River Valley are dog friendly, offering plenty of shaded trails and streams and lakes for cooling off.

If you are looking to replace your usual walk with something more adventurous, the Tennessee River Valley is filled with hundreds of trails varying from easy to moderate that you and your canine will love. Grab a leash and a four-legged companion and get to exploring, said Julie Graham, spokesperson for the Tennessee River Valley Mapguide Council.

Here are six popular areas that offer a pawfect getaway for hikers and their canine companion.

Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area covers 170,000 acres in Western Tennessee and West Kentucky. Nestled between Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley, Land Between the Lakes offers hundreds of miles of interior trails dedicated to outdoor enthusiasts who enjoy hiking, backpacking, hunting and riding horses, mountain bikes and ATVs. Trails range from beginner to advanced. This outdoor oasis also boasts 300 miles of undeveloped shoreline for paddlers, boaters, fishermen and campers. Leashed pets are welcome on trails and in camping, picnic and parking areas.

A dog-friendly trail offering spectacular views leads to Bald River Falls located in Cherokee National Forest. Cascading over 100 feet onto the rocks below, the Falls flows into the scenic Tellico River that is ideal for kayaking, fishing or tubing. Bald River Falls can be viewed from the car or hike above the falls through the Bald River Gorge for even more incredible views. The area offers great scenery for taking photos, and picnic tables are available. Dogs are allowed on leash.

Located along the east shore of Tellico Lake in Tennessee, the East Lakeshore Trail was recently designated a National Recreation Trail by the Department of the Interior. The dog-friendly trail system measures 26 miles, with eight branches accessible from five trailhead kiosks. Many of the trails provide a peaceful walk along Tellico Lake and through forests. Hikers are encouraged to bring a camera as trail branches provide spectacular views of hill knobs and mountains. Many of the trails are located close to the lake allowing dogs an opportunity for a quick drink or swim.

Only two-miles from downtown Knoxville, Knoxville's Urban Wilderness presents a unique urban playground for hikers, mountain bikers and trail runners. Thirty-five miles of natural surface trails connect five parks and natural areas with public and private lands to create an unparalleled outdoor venue. The 11.5-mile main loop connects Ijams Nature Center, Forks of the River Wildlife Management Area, William Hastie Natural Area, Marie Myers Park and Anderson School with trailheads and parking along the route. The main loop offers easy to moderate trails for all users and the additional 24 miles of secondary trails accommodate users from beginner to advanced on dozens of trails of varying terrain. Pets are allowed on leash.

Location approximately 30 miles east of Johnson City, Tenn., Overlook Trail is a dog-friendly trail where a wide, graveled path leads hikers and their four-legged companions around the mountain to fabulous views of the Cherokee National Forest and Watauga Dam with its unique spillway. A side trail connects hikers to the Appalachian Trail, which crosses over Watauga Dam. The trailhead is on the Watauga Dam Reservation at the overlook. Pets must be kept on a leash no longer than 6-feet.

The Buck Island Trail is an easy and beautiful hike where dogs are allowed on leash. Located on TVA's Guntersville reservoir in northeastern Alabama, the trail provides a relaxing walk through the woods. This 250-acre area provides 2.2 miles of trails that wind past a wetland where there are plenty of bird watching opportunities and through the hardwood forest with exceptional views of Guntersville Reservoir. Pets are welcome but must be kept on a leash no longer than 6-feet.

Hikers are asked to always bring a leash and proper waste bags to clean up after your pooch. Fresh water may not be readily available so hikers are encouraged to carry extra for their pets, especially during summer months. Additional items to consider bringing are trail treats and insect repellent.

Along with these adventurous trails, the Tennessee River Valley offers a compelling story, captivating visitors with its little unknown facts, pristine, untouched areas and rich, authentic experiences. Plan a trip easily with the Tennessee River Valley Geotourism MapGuide, an online guide to explore authentic places and adventures that have been recommended by locals.
"5G standards development, testing, simulations, trials and deployments have shown rapid progress over the past few years. These 5G experiences have boosted the momentum of progress with initial 5G network deployments coming in late 2018 and early 2019.

The nearly 600 LTE networks worldwide will form the mobile broadband foundation to the next generation  5G wireless technology. 5G Americas, the industry trade association and voice of 5G and LTE for the Americas, and RCR Wireless News today announced the publication of New Horizons: The Roadmap to 5G, a report outling key milestones in the progression of 5G technologies from LTE.

Chris Pearson, President of 5G Americas commented, 5G standards development, testing, simulations, trials and deployments have shown rapid progress over the past few years. These 5G experiences have boosted the momentum of progress with initial 5G network deployments coming in late 2018 and early 2019.

In December 2017, the journey to 5G had a green light with completion of the 3GPP standards for Non Standalone 5G New Radio (NSA 5G NR). This formal adoption by 3GPP set in motion concrete plans for deployments. To support user expectations toward 5G, service providers continue to upgrade LTE networks, taking advantage of the spectral and user experience benefits of technologies like carrier aggregation, Licensed Assisted Access, 4X4 MIMO and 256 QAM. In fact, some of the more than 250 LTE-Advanced networks, using radio equipment available on the market, can upgrade certain elements to standard-compliant 5G through simple upgrades. The report, New Horizons: The Roadmap to 5G outlines various routes and technologies currently being deployed to arrive at the destination of 5G technology while building on the LTE foundation.

The RCR report is in confluence with the upcoming 5th Global 5G Event, 5G New Horizons Wireless Symposium hosted by 5G Americas on May 16-17 in Austin, TX. The conference is being held at a critical time for industry collaboration as global wireless leaders convene from China, European Union, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, U.S. and Canada to discuss the future of 5G. Topics at the Forum will include spectrum, trials, commercial deployment plans, LTE network transformation, use cases and other important elements of the 5G ecosystem with presentations from operators, association leaders, scientists, manufacturers, analysts, policy makers and academic professors. The Honorable Jessica Rosenworcel, Commissioner of the United States Federal Communication Commission (FCC) will provide the keynote address to open the two-day conference on May 16, 2018.

The report, New Horizons: The Roadmap to 5G was written by RCRs Editor-in-Cheif Sean Kinney and is available for free download. RCRWireless News is the official Broadcast News partner for 5G New Horizons Wireless Symposium. For a complete agenda and the list of panels, keynotes and speakers at the Symposium, visit 5GNewHorizons.com. Registration is open for the limited capacity 5th Global 5G Event co-located with both 5G North America and BCE at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas from May 16-17, 2018.

For a complete list of LTE deployments worldwide, visit the 5G Americas website. Analysis for the deployment list is provided by TeleGeography, GlobalComm Database.

About the Global 5G Event

The Global 5G Event is where the worlds leading 5G organizations discuss the latest research and development achievements and views on 5G technologies, spectrum, standardization, field trials, applications, the future roadmap and global collaboration. The series of events is based on a multi-lateral Memorandum of Understanding to cooperate on building global consensus on 5G with the worlds 5G promotion organizations: 5G Americas (Americas), the Fifth Generation Mobile Communications Promotion Forum (5GMF, Japan), 5G Forum (Republic of Korea), IMT-2020 (5G) Promotion Group (China), 5G Infrastructure Association (5G-IA, Europe) and Telebrasil  5G Brazil Project (Brazil).

About 5G Americas: The Voice of 5G and LTE for the Americas

5G Americas is an industry trade organization composed of leading telecommunications service providers and manufacturers. The organization's mission is to advocate for and foster the advancement of 5G and the transformation of LTE networks throughout the Americas region. 5G Americas is invested in developing a connected wireless community for the many economic and social benefits this will bring to all those living in the region. 5G Americas is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington. More information is available at http://www.5gamericas.org.

Follow our news on Twitter at @5GAmericas and Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/5gamericas

5G Americas' Board of Governors members include: America Movil, AT&T, Cable & Wireless, Cisco, CommScope, Ericsson, Intel, Kathrein, Mavenir, Nokia, Qualcomm Incorporated, Samsung, Shaw Communications Inc., Sprint, T-Mobile US, Inc., Telefonica and WOM.

Contact:

Vicki Livingston

5G Americas

Cell: +1 414 688 9000

Mail to: vicki.livingston@5gamericas.org

Jeff Mucci

RCR Wireless News

Cell: +1 512 431 8912

Mail to: jmucci@ardenmedia.com
it truly was a team effort to put together the Ultimate Free Guide to help entrepreneurs fully understand all of their options to get the money that they need to launch a new business

Seek Capital is the leader in startup business loans, funding close to $100 million in 2017. The company is proud to announce that it has launched the ultimate, free guide to help new businesses understand all of their options when they are looking for capital to launch or grow a business.

Roy Ferman, CEO of Seek Capital, stated, We work with startup businesses all day and weve learned, first-hand, how underserved these businesses are. Im incredibly proud of the work that our team and I have put together. The feedback we have received from readers has been humbling and lets us know we are truly helping entrepreneurs. Though Im the main author, it truly was a team effort to put together the Ultimate Free Guide to help entrepreneurs fully understand all of their options to get the money that they need to launch a new business. Every business and every business owner is different, there is no one size fits all to funding and this guide lays out the 7 best options. Our objective is to provide a simple How To guide that has an option for everyone

The guide outlines all of the different ways that an entrepreneur can get money to start a business. The guide includes simple and specific outlines for getting funding through (1) Friends and Family, (2) SBA Loans, (3) Business Credit Cards, (4) Crowdfunding, (5) 401k Rollover, (6) Equipment Financing, and; (7) Angel Investors.

ABOUT SEEK CAPITAL

Seek Capital is the leader in startup business funding, specializing in unsecured lines of business credit. Launched in 2015, Seek Capital has helped solve the challenge of early stage business owners obtaining capital to launch and grow their small business.

The company has grown by combining the Seek Capital proprietary lender matching platform, Capital Seeker with its dedication to providing a hands-on, consultative approach to each client. By utilizing the Capital Seeker the company is able to provide real time underwriting decisions allowing business owners to instantly know their funding options.

To date, the company has used the matching software for over 20,000 successful applications across the United States. Seek Capital has an A rating with the Better Business Bureau, is a consistent Top 3 rated or Winner of Lending Tree's Lender Award and was Ranked #44 by Glassdoor Best Place to Work 2017.
Past President Giacomo Landi with newly elected President of the NACC, W. Cameron Beard I am honored, but also recognize that I have big shoes to fill. Having served on the board of the NACC for more than twenty years, I have had the opportunity to witness and admire the work of a number of very able NACC presidents, all of whose contributions to the organization have been substantial.

W. Cameron Beard, Partner at Blank Rome LLP, was unanimously elected President of the Norwegian-American Chamber of Commerce, at a meeting of Board of Directors held in New York City on April 17, 2018. Mr. Beard succeeds Giacomo Landi, Head of DNB Americas.

Mr. Beard writes: On April 17, 2018, I was elected as the 28th President of the Norwegian-American Chamber of Commerce. I am honored, but also recognize that I have big shoes to fill. Having served on the board of the NACC for more than twenty years, I have had the opportunity to witness and admire the work of a number of very able NACC presidents, all of whose contributions to the organization have been substantial. I am therefore especially grateful for the opportunity I have been given to serve the interests of the NACC membership, and to work with the NACC during an exciting period of growth and development.

It goes without saying that we are deeply indebted to our departing president, Giacomo Landi. During Giacomos presidency the NACC made a number of great strides forward, including but not limited to: hiring its first new general manager in almost four decades, implementing a new management software that will streamline the activities of the NACC organization nationwide, and moving the NACCs national offices to the vibrant WeWork facility above Grand Central Station in Manhattan, where NACC staff can work closely with representatives of a number of other Nordic organizations. Read the full statement here: https://www.naccusa.org/blog/w-cameron-beard-elected-as-president-of-the-nacc/

Other officers elected:

Steven Peri, Partner, Peri & Stewart, will serve as Executive Vice President

John Benson, Partner, Watson Farley & Williams, will serve as Treasurer

Jovi Tenev, Partner, Holland & Knight, will serve as Secretary

NACC Chapter Presidents (automatically) are elected to serve as Vice Presidents

New Director joining the NACC National Board:

Cheryl Acker, Senior Claims Executive, Gard (North America) Inc.

The following Directors accepted re-election by the NACC membership:

Even Johansen EPJ Corp.

Terje Korsnes Nordic Group

Oivind Lorentsen III Investor

Martin Lunder Nordea

Clay Maitland IRI/The Marshall Island Registry

Steven Peri Peri & Stewart

Jan Eystein Saeboe Voss Water

Morten Sohlberg Smorgas Chef/Blenheim

Jovi Tenev Holland & Knight

About the Norwegian-American Chamber of Commerce

From the time that it gained independence in 1905, Norway has been a close ally and significant trading partner of the United States. The need to foster and protect Norwegian-American trade was recognized from the outset, and in 1915 the Norwegian-American Chamber of Commerce was established in New York City for that purpose. Since then, as Norway has risen to its position as a dominant force in an expanding number of industries, technologies and arts, the NACC has played various roles, promoting Norwegian-American interests, and providing a forum, through its chapters nationwide, in which companies and individuals with interests in Norwegian-American commerce can interact and pursue common goals.

The Norwegian-American Chamber of Commerce (NACC) is a private membership organization with headquarters in New York City and chapters in Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.

Visit NACC website http://www.naccusa.org

Contact Information:

Live Sletten Diakolios

The Norwegian American Chamber of Commerce

450 Lexington Avenue, 4th Floor

New York, NY 10017

live.diakolios@naccusa.org

Ph: 1 646 883 1760
Visitor Insurance Coverage USA Visitor Insurance Coverage specialize in providing Pre-existing Conditions for all ages to 99 years old. A USA Pride Program Past News Releases RSS

Visitor Insurance Coverage is a US based major provider of visitor health insurance programs available to visitors coming to the United States.Visitors Insurance Coverage has built a reputation for providing quality, affordable, and trustworthy visitor health insurance plans. We offer to our customers the opportunity to purchase visitor health insurance from anywhere around the world. Whether you are purchasing visitor healthcare for yourself or on behalf of someone else, our plans provide the most comprehensive visitor health insurance.

We provide the most affordable visitor health insurance to visitors of all ages internationally. Our plans are especially affordable for seniors (65+ years old) and visitors with pre-existing conditions such as high blood pressure, diabetes, heart, asthma, etc. Health Insurance Coverage starts from $25,000 up to $1,000,000. We offer both acute onset pre-existing condition programs. Moreover, we are the only insurance provider to offer comprehensive pre-existing coverage plans for visitors in the market today.

Most plans offered are underwritten by highly rated USA Insurance companies such as CHUBB, and AXIS American Insurance using US standard for claims processing. This means the your claims are paid with no hassle by our servicing teams based in the USA. Cashless Settlement of medical bills with PPO Providers is additional benefit when using Visitor Insurance Coverage. We also provide links to other health insurance programs such IMG, Global Underwriters to benefit of our customers.

CHUBB Plans offer 24x7 Nurse Line and 24 hour AXA Travel Assistance Services. These services include Medical Assistance, which includes a referral to a doctor or medical specialist & medical monitoring when you are hospitalized along with other benefits. Moreover, these plans include Personal Assistance (pre-trip medical referral information and while you are on a trip: emergency medication, embassy and consular information, etc.), and Travel Assistance (emergency travel arrangements, arrangements for the return of your traveling companion or dependents, and vehicle return). Regardless, CHUBB plans offer excellent coverage for pre-existing conditions, new problems and accidents.

The CHUBB Premier and Network Plans offer pre-existing conditions coverage in addition to new illnesses and accidents. A major change in the definition of pre-existing conditions coverage makes these plans life savers for many visitors. The Network Plans pay 80 percent of covered medical expenses for covered pre-existing conditions and non-pre-existing conditions. A unique feature of the CHUBB program is to provide unconditional medical insurance coverage for a visitor. This means that any visitor can be assured of their coverage irrespective of the reason.

AXIS American Insurance Plans with pre-existing condition coverage are offered along side BasicCare Plan without pre-existing coverage. All AXIS Plans include access to 24x7 Teladoc Program which gives the access to Board Certified Physicians in the United States, 24 x7 from the comfort of your home and mobile phone. AXIS American Insurance Plans offer a great value for the money to anyone willing to take higher responsibility for out of pocket costs & looking for good visitor health insurance coverage.

The AXIS BasicCare Fixed Benefits Plan provides minimum essential coverage for any healthy visitor coming to the United States with the good visitor health insurance coverage willing to take higher responsibility for out of pocket costs. The AXIS BasicCare Fixed Benefits Plan provides minimum essential coverage for any healthy visitor coming to the United States with the lowest premiums possible.

More details of coverage and premiums can be found at https://www.visitorcare.org

About Visitor Insurance Coverage

Visitor Insurance Coverage is a US-based company that administers visitor health insurance to tourists, students, temporary workers and their families. Visitor medical plans are offered for all age groups (0-99 years old) with both fixed coverage, comprehensive coverage and with pre-existing condition coverage.

For more information please visit https://www.visitorcare.org/
18th & Addison It is often said that music has the power of bringing people together, and rock duo 18th & Addison is living, breathing proof. Consisting of New Jersey natives Tom Kunzman and Kait DiBenedetto, this punk powerhouse embodies the idea of working for what you love, with who you love.

Check out "Time Bomb" music video by 18th & Addison on mxdwn.com

It is often said that music has the power of bringing people together, and rock duo 18th & Addison is living, breathing proof. Consisting of New Jersey natives Tom Kunzman and Kait DiBenedetto, this punk powerhouse embodies the idea of working for what you love, with who you love.

No strangers to Indie Nation, the two joined musical forces in 2013 following the eventual dissolution of their previous projects. Tom fronting pop-punk/rock outfit A Criminal Risk and Kaits being Whats Eating Gilbert, the side project of Chad Gilbert: a founding father of legendary pop punk band New Found Glory. In fact, Kait DiBenedetto has been growing strong roots in the musical world since the young age of 16, when she was signed as one of the first recording artists on MTVs budding new label, and began touring across the country with her band Just Kait. However, after experiencing undeniable chemistry back in their hometown of Toms River, the two reconnected to form an inevitable collaboration. After touring with what felt like a revolving door of people, the duo found a constant in each other. Years later, while performing onstage at Vans Warped Tour in 2017, Tom shocked Kait when he introduced the next song in their set by getting down on one knee: a proposal that rocked almost as hard as they did.

Since then, the dynamic duo has been working tirelessly on their upcoming EP Vultures, a record that encapsulates the bands growth since its conception. By using their experiences from along the way as inspiration, Vultures brings forth a fresh and revitalized energy from 18th & Addison. By taking control together, Kunzman and DiBenedetto have forged an album that is more aggressive and lyrically honest, which we catch a glimpse of in the albums first single: Time Bomb.

This jumping punk anthem concentrates the bands frustration and determination to keep pursuing their love of performing. Kunzman says that the music video for Time Bomb (Watch it here on mxdwn) is inspired by the current world of goofy videos going viral and finding unwarranted fame, while musicians and bands across the country work tirelessly to keep their dreams of making music alive. This concept is illustrated comedically by a talent show devoid of any talent, each contestant worse than the last. Kait and Tom, disguised as exasperated judges, dismiss each act one by one, until the appearance of a couple of gothic punk rockers. With headbanging hairography and unparalleled verve, the punks amaze our judges and illicit a standing ovation. Of course, any listener would feel the same way after hearing this vibrant hit, as the thumping beat, unforgettable melody, and vocal harmonies will have you on your feet and rocking out.

Check out "Time Bomb" music video by 18th & Addison on mxdwn.com
Catherine Hayward, MD PhD FRCPC Professor and Physician Scientist, McMaster University and Head of Coagulation for the Hamilton Regional Laboratory Medicine Program

Laboratory testing for coagulation factor deficiencies and inhibitors is important for diagnosing and monitoring inherited and acquired coagulopathies and for evaluating the causes of coagulation screening test abnormalities. A new webinar from a medical expert, Dr. Cathy Hayward MD, PhD, FRCPC, will cover strategies and pitfalls to consider, and which assays should be performed to further evaluate test abnormalities, including assays for specific factor inhibitors. The webinar is part of a series provided within the Stago EdVantage Virtual University event in honor of the American Society for Clinical Laboratory Sciences (ASCLS) Medical Laboratory Professionals Week (MLPW).

Participants will learn prevalence of different factor deficiencies, with Dr. Hayward focusing on how to test for a coagulation factor deficiency vs. a specific factor inhibitor. In addition, attendees will learn about pre-analytical errors causing test abnormalities mimicking a factor deficiency.

Dr. Hayward is a professor and physician scientist at McMaster University and Head of Coagulation for the Hamilton Regional Laboratory Medicine Program. Along with her other duties, Dr. Hayward is also the President of the International Society of Laboratory Hematology (ISLH). She has received many awards including Gold Medal awards from McMaster University and the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons for her research on hemostasis, a Canada Research Chair and Heart and Stroke Foundation Career Investigator Awards, and the Berend Houwen and Biggs McFarlane Lecture Awards.

LabRoots will host the webinar starting on April 27, 2018 at 8 a.m. PDT. Attendees can view the webinar live at that time or join any time afterwards, earning PACE credit. Click here to learn more about the event and register for free.

About Diagnostica Stago

Diagnostica Stago, Inc. is the exclusive provider of the Diagnostica Stago Hemostasis product lines in the United States and offers a complete system of coagulation instruments and optimized reagent kits for research as well as for routine analysis. Diagnostica Stago, Inc. is the US subsidiary of Diagnostica Stago, S.A.S. France, a leader in the development and manufacture of hemostasis products. For more information about any Stago product or service, please call 800-222-COAG or visit our website at http://www.stago-us.com.

About LabRoots

LabRoots is the leading scientific social networking website, which provides daily scientific trending news and science-themed apparel, as well as produces educational virtual events and webinars, on the latest discoveries and advancements in science. Contributing to the advancement of science through content sharing capabilities, LabRoots is a powerful advocate in amplifying global networks and communities. Founded in 2008, LabRoots emphasizes digital innovation in scientific collaboration and learning, and is a primary source for current scientific news, webinars, virtual conferences, and more. LabRoots has grown into the worlds largest series of virtual events within the Life Sciences and Clinical Diagnostics community.
On April 2, 2018, Hartman vREIT XXI, Inc. (the Company) filed its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2017 with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Shareholders have the ability to receive a hardcopy of the Companys complete annual audited financial statements free of charge upon request.

To request a copy, shareholders may:

1. Call Hartman Investors Relations at 877-734-8876;

2. Write to Hartman Investor Relations at 2909 Hillcroft, Suite 420, Houston, Texas 77057; or

3. Email Hartman Investor Relations at investorrelations(at)hartmaninvestment.com.

Access to copies of our Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K and other filings with the SEC, including amendments to such filings, may be obtained free of charge from our website, http://www.hartmanreits.com/hartman-vreit-xxi/hartman-vreit-xxi-inc/.

About vREIT XXI

Hartman vREIT XXI is a Texas-centric real estate investment company formed to acquire, develop and operate a diverse portfolio of value-oriented commercial propertiesthose with significant potential for growth in income and value from re-tenanting, repositioning, redevelopment, and operational enhancements. For additional information about these investments, please visit http://www.HartmanREITs.com.

About Hartman

Hartman has extensive experience acquiring, owning, managing and leasing commercial office, retail, light industrial and warehouse properties located in Texas. Since 1983, Hartman and its affiliated entities (including founder, Allen R. Hartman) have sponsored 23 programs and acquired interests in more than 90 real assets totaling approximately $735 million as of December 31, 2017.

THIS IS NEITHER AN OFFER TO SELL NOR A SOLICITATION OF AN OFFER TO BUY ANY SECURITIES DESCRIBED HEREIN OR DESCRIBED ELSEWHERE. AN OFFERING IS MADE ONLY BY PROSPECTUS FILED WITH THE SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION (SEC) OR PURSUANT TO A VALID EXEMPTION. A COPY OF THE CURRENT PROSPECTUS OR OFFERING DOCUMENT MUST BE MADE AVAILABLE TO YOU IN CONNECTION WITH ANY OFFERING AND SHOULD BE READ IN ORDER TO MORE FULLY UNDERSTAND THE IMPLICATIONS AND RISKS OF THE OFFERING TO WHICH IT RELATES. NON-TRADED REIT INVESTMENTS ARE NOT SUITABLE FOR ALL INVESTORS. INFORMATION ABOUT INVESTING IN A SPECIFIC NON-TRADED REIT MUST BE ACCOMPANIED BY A PROSPECTUS, WHICH SHOULD BE READ PRIOR TO INVESTING.

Neither the SEC nor any other U. S. state or federal regulator has passed on or endorsed the merits of any offering or securities described herein or confirmed the adequacy or accuracy of the prospectus. Any representation to the contrary is unlawful. All information contained in this material is qualified in its entirety by the terms of a current prospectus. Investors should consider a programs investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses before investing. The achievement of any goals is not guaranteed. For more complete information about investing in any program, including risks, charges and expenses, refer to the programs prospectus. Securities offered through D.H. Hill Securities, LLLP, Member FINRA/SIPC, 1543 Green Oak Place, Suite 100, Kingwood, TX 77339. 800.880.2212.
CONSECRATED: One Mans Faith and Courage through Persecution and Peace, the Holocaust, and Freedom Dr. Alix Jaroshevich Walsh Through a series of miracles, my grandfather survived the concentration camps. Dr. Alix J. Walsh

CONSECRATED is a story of one mans faith through the trials he faced and suffered through, including the Holocaust. Its a look into history as the reader watches it unfold with a different perspective than standard history books. Its evidence of faith in the darkest of places and a demonstration of Gods faithfulness when it comes to His children and His servants. It depicts the impact of loving our neighbor as ourselves, about the choices we make and the courage to make the right choices. CONSECRATED is a story about miracles.

Through a series of miracles, my grandfather survived the concentration camps. Dr. Alix J. Walsh

Konstatins story stayed within the family annuals for decades until Dr. Alix J. Walsh finally answered Gods call to the ministry He had passed down through her grandfather. Her mother wanted her answer to the Most Highs calling to be authentic and not to appease her parents.

Walsh said, I didnt fully know many of my grandfathers stories, his surviving the German Concentration Camps, and his call to ministry until my dying mother began sharing the stories with my daughter. I then discovered that my grandfather was a man of great faith, courage, values, and attributes that would later sustain him when he faced formidable persecution. I then began this book to honor the life of Konstantin Jaroshevich and ensure his legacy is eternal and carried forward to future generations. I pray his life encourages and blesses its reade

Storehouse Media Group is pleased to announce the official global book launch of CONSECRATED. Its book tour starts at Lake Mary, Florida and arrives in New York City on April 24, 2018 with the official book launch. It ends with Americas premier author showcase event, Book Expo America and Book Con in New York City, the city of the authors birth, where she will participate in numerous interviews and red-carpet events along with several book signings and podcast interviews.

About the Author

Dr. Alix Jaroshevich Walsh has a Master of Science in Healthcare Administration from Central Michigan University. Upon retiring in 2002, she answered the call to continue her education, obtaining her Doctorate in Ministry along with her ministry ordination. She is now on the faculty of Coral Ridge Seminary in Jacksonville, Florida. Over the last seven years, Dr. Walsh has served as a prayer minister at Christian Healing Ministries, which practices and teaches healing prayer.

Dr. Alix Walsh can be reached for media and podcast interviews and speaking engagements at dralixjwalsh(at)gmail(dot)com.
Lindsay Coates "Lindsay's impressive track record and lifelong commitment to advocating for those less fortunate make her the ideal person to spearhead our global efforts to end extreme poverty by 2030." -Sir Fazle Hasan Abed

BRAC, a global leader in creating opportunities for the worlds poor and one of the worlds largest non-governmental development organizations, today announced the appointment of Lindsay Coates as managing director of the Ultra Poor Graduation Initiative. Lindsay is joining in a new role that will accelerate the momentum of BRACs initiative to advocate for the alleviation of poverty worldwide.

BRAC is a development success story, spreading anti-poverty solutions born in Bangladesh to 10 other developing countries in Asia and Africa. Lindsay brings to BRAC more than 15 years of nonprofit executive experience, a legal background in civil rights, and expertise in converging human rights, the social sector, and global development.

As the president of InterAction, Lindsay currently oversees management and institutional outreach to InterAction members and partners. A lifelong advocate for human dignity, Lindsay also serves on the steering committee of the World Bank Global Partnership for Social Accountability, the executive committee for Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network, and the boards of Episcopal Relief and Development, and United States Global Leadership Coalition. She also served on the Obama administrations Task Force on Global Poverty. Prior to her work in the nonprofit sector, Lindsay practiced civil rights law in various capacities.

"We are thrilled to welcome Lindsay into the BRAC family," said Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, BRAC Founder and Chairperson. "Lindsay's impressive track record and lifelong commitment to advocating for those less fortunate make her the ideal person to spearhead our global efforts to end extreme poverty by 2030."

The Ultra Poor Graduation Initiative addresses extreme poverty globally by advocating for BRACs evidence-based Graduation approach, which enables the poorest people to achieve a sustainable livelihood. BRAC advises and supports governments, nonprofits, and UN entities to adapt and implement this methodology. Studies show BRACs program significantly improves the income and well-being of participants for years after they complete it.

Im excited to accept this challenge, Lindsay said. As a matter of justice and equity, we must be relentless in our work to eliminate extreme poverty. BRACs focus on the ultra poor, especially women and girls in rural areas, both builds a more just world and creates the foundation for prosperous societies. I am honored to be invited to join the BRAC Ultra Poor Graduation Initiative and work with amazing leaders and staff from across the BRAC family.

Lindsay will join BRAC full time in July 2018.

ABOUT BRAC

BRAC is a global leader in developing and implementing cost-effective, evidence-based

programs to assist the most marginalized people in extremely poor, conflict-prone, and

post-disaster settings. These include initiatives in education, healthcare, microfinance,

womens and girls empowerment, agriculture, human and legal rights, and more. BRAC reaches more than 120 million people in 11 countries. Learn more at http://www.brac.net.

ABOUT BRAC USA

Based in New York, BRAC USA is the North American affiliate of BRAC. BRAC USA provides comprehensive support to BRAC around the world by raising awareness about its work to empower the poor in 11 countries and mobilizing resources to support programs. BRAC USA works closely with its international counterparts to design and implement cost-effective and evidence-based poverty innovations worldwide. Learn more at http://www.bracusa.org.

ABOUT ULTRA POOR GRADUATION

BRACs Ultra Poor Graduation Initiative addresses extreme poverty globally by advocating for its evidence-based Graduation approach, which enables the poorest people to achieve a sustainable livelihood. BRAC advises and supports governments, nonprofits, and UN entities to adapt and implement this methodology. BRAC also implements a large-scale poverty alleviation program that has graduated nearly two million households. Studies show BRACs program significantly improves the income and well-being of participants for years after they complete it. Learn more at bracultrapoorgraduation.org
NEWSALERT-MH-COURT-ARYAN KHAN Mumbai court remands Aryan Khan and two others to NCB custody till October 4 in cruise ship drugs seizure case.Mumbai court remands Aryan Khan and two others to NCB custody till October 4 in cruise ship drugs seizure case.
Deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein told President Donald Trump last week that he is not a target of any aspect of the federal criminal investigation into Trump's longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen, according to multiple mediareports.

Rosenstein's reported personal assurance, which was apparently made during a visit to the White House on Friday, came as Trump fumed over the FBI's raids of Cohen's home and office that had taken place just days before and seriously began considering firing Rosenstein.

Shortly after Rosenstein made the revelation, Trump is said to have told his closest advisers that because he was not a target of the probe, it was not the right time to oust the deputy attorney general, Bloomberg reported.

A subject is someone who is under criminal investigation. A target is someone against whom prosecutors have enough evidence to charge with a crime.

Investigators working for the US attorney's office for the Southern District of New York seized the following when they raided Cohen's property last week: tape recordings, personal financial records, electronic devices, documents related to payments made to women who have alleged affairs with Trump; records related to a 2005 "Access Hollywood" tape featuring Trump making lewd remarks about women; and communications between Trump and Cohen.

Attorneys representing Trump and Cohen are currently fighting a case against prosecutors to shield them from reviewing communications they believe are protected by attorney-client privilege. The FBI is using a "taint team"  a separate set of investigators walled off from prosecutors who are responsible for separating out privilege documents  but both Trump and Cohen have argued that it should not have access to their communications.

On Monday, a federal judge ordered attorneys representing Cohen and the Manhattan US attorney's office to each put forward four nominees for special master, an independent lawyer tasked with sorting through seized communications and sorting out those that are privileged.

The judge, Kimba Wood, stressed that she had not yet made a decision on whether or not to appoint a special master. Cohen's attorneys floated four possible names, while prosecutors suggested three others.

Meanwhile, Joanna Hendon, an attorney representing Trump, argued Monday that a special master would not suffice and that only Trump has the right to go over the seized communications and decide what is privileged and what can be reviewed by prosecutors.
Though the unofficial event is known for meting out unacceptable treatment to new entrants, the radical one that happened at Unizambeze has triggered annoyance across the continent.

A senior education official of the in Mozambique, Cardoso Miguel was reported to have condemned the incident.

He was quoted as saying: The inquiry committee will assess the degree of involvement of each student  some will probably be suspended, and others may be expelled.

One of the new students who fell victim of the insane treatment, Artemiza Nhantumbo told local TV channel, STV that: The initiators cut our hair. It was horrific. It was unbearable. They forced human urine and faeces into our mouths. We were bathed with urine and they rubbed our noses with faeces.

Another student by name, Quiteria Jorge was also quoted as saying that: They removed our hair because, for them, it was too long. But, we could do nothing. I cried and cried until I got home.
After this news broke about the arrest of the popular young millionaire, Ibrah went viral and since then many revelations are being made about his wealth and the kind of lifestyle he lives.

Ibrah has been spotted in a new video making waves on social media bragging about the brands of perfume he uses and their cost.

READ ALSO: Police deny arrest of young millionaire Ibrah
In no particular order, below is the list of the top 10 polytechnics in Ghana.

LIST OF THE TOP 10 POLYTECHNICS IN GHANA

Accra Polytechnic

Now Accra Technical University, Accra poly as it was fondly called is located in the heart of Accra. The capital city of Greater Accra Region. It is found on the list of the best polytechnics in Ghana.

READ ALSO: Lecturers threaten to chase out Rector again if he returns

Kumasi Polytechnic

Kumasi Polytechnic now called Kumasi Technical University is situated in the Ashanti Region. At the Kumasi metro district, close to Fante New Town. It is a public institution and one of the top 10 polytechnics in Ghana.

Cape Coast Polytechnic

Just as the name implies, it is located Ayifua in Cape Coast. Identified to be near the GNAT Hostel, it is one of the best polytechnics in Ghana.

Tamale Polytechnic

Among the list of the top polytechnics in Ghana is Tamale Polytechnic. Proudly borne from Tamale in the Northern Region of Ghana this polytechnic has produced some great leaders in our country.

READ ALSO: These are the best 10 nightclubs in Ghana

Koforidua Polytechnic

Do you know of Fanteakwa on the Ejisu road? If you do then you must know Koforidua Polytechnic because its in close proximity. This polytechnic is one of the top best polytechnics in Ghana.

Ho Polytechnic

The star of the Volta Region, Ho Polytechnic is one of the top 10 polytechnics in Ghana.

Bolgatanga Polytechnic

Bolgatanga Polytechnic is a sight to behold in the Upper East Region. Its no wonder it is one of the top polytechnics in the country.

READ ALSO: Top 5 Indian movies that Ghanaians are crazy about

Sunyani Polytechnic

The farm belt of the country hosts the amazing Sunyani Polytechnic in the Brong Ahafo Region. Located in Asunafo, it is one of the top 10 best polytechnics in Ghana.

Wa Polytechnic

The Upper West Region is not left out in producing good academia. As they come on with Wa Polytechnic which is one of the best polytechnics in the country.

READ ALSO: Learn how to create a verified PayPal account in Ghana

Takoradi Polytechnic
This is according to senior lecturer at the Ghana School of Law, Moses Foh Amoaning, who believes the UN expert should not even be responded to.

The lecturer was incensed by comments made by Mr. Alston who described Speaker of Parliament Prof. Aaron Mike Ocquaye as delusional for his anti-gay stance.

Delivering a speech following a fact-finding visit to Ghana, Mr. Alston said: I believe that if he (Speaker of Parliament) thinks there is not a very significant proportion of gay people in Ghana, he is deluding himself. You cannot wish away a physical fact. The percentage of gay people in any population is significant.

However, the UN expert seems to have drawn the ire of some Ghanaians, including the Ghana School of Law lecturer.

In an interview with Accra-based Starr FM, Mr. Amoaning described Mr. Alston as stupid, an idiot and a bigot for making such statements.

According to him, the UN expert has no right to insult the Speaker of Parliament, adding that Ghana as a country cannot be forced to accept gay rights.

In a lengthy rant, he said: My dear how would I respond to this idiot? He is so bigoted and to be honest very stupid. I mean every word of it.

The law lecturer and ant-gay campaigner added: Do you understand the word delusion to be deluded? Do you understand that word? You tell me, you are a journalist, what is the meaning of deluded?You sit there for a Caucasian to call the speaker of your parliament deluded and you are fine with it my dear. When I say he is an idiotlook, I intentionally used that word because I wanted to provoke you, because you see he doesnt provoke you because the language is coming from a white person so you dont see anything wrong with it.I am sick and tired of this arrogant bigotry being thrown around by Europeans and because we ourselves are not thinking through these things, we allow them to insult us poke down upon us and to say anything they like even Ghanaian journalists dont seem to appreciate what is happening.
She said she is having difficulty in putting her kids through school because of she is broke and her HIV/AIDS status.

Joyce Dzidzor Mensah caused outrage when she admitted that she doesn't have the HIV virus a few years back. This admission infuriated people because she has been an ambassador for HIV/AIDS in Ghana for over five years.

She disclosed that she has no means to raise money to support the education of her three children as a single mother.

I am currently not living with my children because I dont have a place to stay. I am in deep crisis. My medications are also very expensive and I cant afford it", she said.

I invested all my money into a barbering shop and a small food joint but people started complaining the food is infected with virus and so people shouldnt buy from the joint. Everything has collapsed and I lost all my money, she disclosed.

She said she made that status u-turn because of her kids. It looks like because I have done campaigns and my face is everywhere, it is difficult for people to even work with me. So right with my situation as a single mother with three children and no job, I am pleading with the general public to support me with money to start something to take care of my children, she pleaded.
She said this is due to the fact the boys of Nana Akufo-Addo destroyed her car when NPP won power in 2016.

Madam Akua Donkor however noted that ever since the incident, her means of transportation has been problematic  hence, the president must come to her aid.READ ALSO: Police arrest Akua Donkor for alleged fraud
According to him, taking double salaries constitutes an abuse of office for personal gain, which is punishable by law.

His comments come after some former MPs of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) who served as ministers or deputy ministers were cited by the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) for allegedly taking double salaries.

The number of cited MPs was initially 25, however, 18 of them were let go pending further investigation by the Police.

Also, about eight of the suspected MPs have already been interrogated by the CID, as authorities seek to get to the bottom of the matter.

However, speaking in an interview with Accra-based Citi FM, Mr. Amidu said the allegations could be true because he once received double salary during his time as deputy Attorney-General, adding that he did the honorable thing by returning the excess amount.

According to him, the suspected Minority MPs should also have returned the amount when they realized that their salaries had been doubled.

He said there is no excuse for such an act, describing it as an offence of abuse of office for private gain.

Money was ever paid into my accountWhen my bank notified me I told them to return it because that is not what me and the Attorney General agreed. I could have kept it, the Special Prosecutor said.

This is what they should have done. You dont keep the money for six months, one year, two years or three years, youve left office, one and half years, youve not made any efforts to return it. Then when the CID begins seeing it now you are rationalizing it and yet when the ordinary man takes plantain one bunch, he goes to jail for 15 years. So what is the political elite telling us?If its been happening since 1992 and no one has seen it, now it has been seen, those responsible should bear the consequence, he added.
He accused the party of engaging in fraudulent activities adding that the NDC almost collapsed the economy but the timely intervention of President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and his appointees are putting the economy back on track.

Speaking on Accra-based Oman FM, he said "The NDC is now known as the National Double-salary Collectors because they were in government and taking a double salary. Those who were against them leaving power will now see that if we had allowed them to rule for another term, this country would have my now been on its knees. We thank God they were chased away and the timely intervention of the NPP government is putting things back to shape."

The ministers who doubled as Members of Parliament (MPs) are about 25 in number who were initially accused of this criminal act by the outspoken NPP MP for Assin Central, Kennedy Agyapong.

The said politicians were receiving salaries as MPs and at the same time receiving their monthly salaries as ministers, contrary to the law.
The Development Bank of Nigeria has been created by the Federal Government of Nigeria to address financing challenges hindering private sector investment in the country. The Bank is called to play an important and catalytic role in providing funding and risk sharing facilities to micro, small and medium enterprises as well as small corporates.

Tony Okpanachi, Managing Director of the Development Bank of Nigeria, said: The Development Bank of Nigeria will overcome the funding gap in the micro-, small- and medium-scale enterprises space and help businesses unlock opportunities across Nigeria. DBNs ambition is strengthened by the financial and technical support of international partners, including the European Investment Bank and African Development Bank. The new institution builds on international experience and uses a business model that has demonstrated proven success to enhance private-sector investment across Africa and around the world where other financing options are inadequate or absent."

Stefan Nalletamby, Director of the Financial Sector Development Department at the African Development Bank in his comment said: Private sector businesses are critical to the development of the Nigerian economy as they possess huge potential for employment generation and output diversification. Nevertheless, there has been under-performance of these businesses and this has undermined their contribution to economic growth. Among the issues affecting their performance, the shortage of finance, particularly investment finance, occupies a very central position.

"The Development Bank of Nigeria is expected to contribute to mobilizing significant long-term financing to an important yet underserved sector with high development potential.

Ambroise Fayolle, Vice-President of the European Investment Bank (EIB) said: New private sector investment is crucial to create jobs and enable business to expand and limited access to long-term financing holds back economic growth. The European Investment Bank is pleased to support the new Development Bank of Nigeria to strengthen private-sector investment in Africas largest economy. We look forward to continued close cooperation with Nigerian and international partners to ensure that once fully operational the new Development Bank of Nigeria can help harness the countrys economic potential.

Ambassador Ketil Karlsen, Head of the European Union Delegation to Nigeria and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) said: The European Union is committed to supporting private-sector investment in Nigeria. The new backing for the Development Bank of Nigeria by both the European Investment Bank, the bank of the European Union and the African Development Bank, with 13 EU member state shareholders, will make a clear contribution to tackling the lack of access to credit by entrepreneurs and businesses across the country. With more investment, we hope to promote a vibrant economy and stimulate growth, employment and increase opportunities, especially for youth.

Recently, the African Development Bank signed a loan agreement for a soft commodity finance facility (SCFF) with the Export Trading Group (ETC) to promote agriculture in Africa.
Like most legislative chambers world over, the Nigerian Senate is filled with lawmakers that court controversies at the slightest provocation. Members of the 8th assembly have made the red chambers politically charged with fiery comments, personality clashes and superiority battle.

Business Insider Sub Saharan Africa chronicles some of the lawmakers, whose actions have not only made more headlines but will go down in the countrys history.

Dino Melaye - The Comedian

The representative of Kogi West Senatorial district, Dino Melaye leads the pack as one of the most controversial lawmakers, the National Assembly has ever produced. In 2017 alone, the Senator was slammed with an allegation that he never graduated from Ahmadu Bello University, ABU. The claim will for a long time put the lawmaker in the spotlight. He was again in the news when 188,580 of his constituents signed a petition for his recall. The process is currently being delayed due to the legal process initiated by the lawmaker. The lawmaker is famous for being ostentatious and glamorous in his display of wealth. His dalliance with women has seen more than three women going public with various allegations. Currently, the Senator has been in the news for battling the governor of his state, Yahaya Bello.

Ademola Adeleke - The Dancer

The Osun West representative in the Senate is another controversial Senator, whose name cannot be omitted on this list. Senator Adelekes weakness is music and great rhythm. A fun-loving personality, Senator Adeleke joined the upper legislative chamber following the death of his elder brother, Senator Isiaka Adeleke. He has made headlines for throwing caution to the winds and dancing carelessly at every opportunity he gets. Hes been labeled the dancing senator and is currently eyeing the seat of power at Osun State.

Ben Bruce - The Common Sense Teacher

Senator Ben Bruce is another member of the 8th Senate that has become controversial. This representative of Bayelsa East Senatorial constituency has been nicknamed the common sense senator. Known to be more vibrant on social media platform, Twitter, Ben Bruce continues to preach the need for Nigerias leadership to govern with common sense. The founder of Silverbird group was found wanting when the debt accrued by his organization was made public and left him at the mercy of the Nigerian citizenry. Hes quick to condemn the current administration being a strong member of the opposition party but he has continued to meet his match on Twitter.

Enyinnaya Abaribe - The Surety

This 63-year-old Senator representing Abia-South Senatorial District of Abia State joined the upper legislative chambers in April 2007. Senator Abaribe became controversial after he named alongside other Nigerian lawmakers, who were involved in $96,000 foreign training fraud. The lawmakers reportedly got $96000 each for a training they never participated in.

Abaribe became one of the Senators that openly discredited President Muhammadu Buhari and decided to stand as surety for Eastern region separatist, Nnamdi Kanu, who later jumped bail. The Senator has since been in the news battling to save himself from the hands of the law as Kanu has remained incommunicado.

Shehu Sani - The Alarmist

Senator Shehu Sani is one of the Senators who court controversies in the 8th Nigerian Senate. Aside his unending battle with the governor of his state, Mallam Nasir El-Rufai, the Senator representing Kaduna Central is quick to release statements on happenings in Kaduna state and around. His ability to raise an alarm where none is needed -most times - has earned him the alarmist. From his battles with President Buhari to his disgust for Gov El-Rufai, Shehu Sani isnt backing down one bit. Shehu Sani was quick to tell the world that he released his belt in place of the mace after it was stolen by thugs that invaded the red chamber.

Ovie Omo Agege - The Mace Runner

The latest entrant on the list of most controversial Senators is Delta Central representative, Senator Ovie Omo-Agege. This lawyer and son of famed Chief Justice James Omo Agege, who sentenced infamous armed robber, Lawrence Anini, Monday Osunbor and George Iyamu, a police officer, to death by firing squad in the 80s, crept into controversial issues when he dumped Labour Party for the ruling APC. Shortly after joining APC, Omo-Agege had continued to flaunt his loyalty to President Buhari at every opportunity but met his match in Senator Melaye, who told him that Omo-Agege was laboring for LP when he (Melaye) was busy campaigning for the President.
The accused, who resides at Kado village, Abuja, is facing a count charge of theft, an offence he denied committing.

Police prosecutor, Dalhatu Zannah, told the court that Balugu committed the offence at about 10: p.m. on April 14, at Summit Villa Hotel, Life Camp Abuja.

Zannah said that one Oko Edward, a security guard attached to the hotel reported the matter at the Life Camp Police Station.

He alleged that the accused drove his car into the hotel premises, went into a guest room and stole 22 inches Skyrun television set, valued at N45, 000 and hid it inside his car boot.

The prosecutor explained that the accused was about driving out of the hotel when the security guard on duty at the gate searched the car booth and saw the television.

Zannah said the security guard raised an alarm which led to the arrest of the accused and he was handed over to the police for proper investigation.

The prosecutor said that during police investigation, Balugu confessed to the crime and the television was recovered from him.

The offence contravened Section 288 of the Penal Code.
A video depicting this has made it to Instagram.

The incident which reportedly occurred along an expressway in Delta State featured a crowd arrive in groups just to fill their cans.

They appear not to mind a possibility of an explosion while gathering fuel from the truck.

Loud chatters heard in the clip saw the looters show urgency in their goal to get as much petrol as possible.

Church members in tears as pastor turns water to petrol

A South African clergyman, Prophet Jacob, made some members of his church shed tears after turning water to petrol.

Images portraying this was shared via Facebook on Tuesday, April 3, 2018.

In the post revealed the spiritual leader as he got on his knees for a fervent prayer believed to be responsible for the magical change of the liquid.

The 'miracle' occurred at the church's Easter Friday Convocation.

"During our Friday Easter Convocation prophet Jacob asked people to bring bottles of water from their homes and surprisingly said 'DO YOU BELIEVE WE CAN TURN THIS WATER INTO PETROL ,continued by telling the congregation to bring the bottles on the alter and he prayed with militancy and instantly the color and the smell of the water change and caught fire which was so massive and people were moved into awe," a post of Facebook reads.

In the comments section, some Facebook users did not appear enchanted concerning the unique display seen only as magic.

The doubts expressed mirrors the thoughts of many over miracles considered as odd.

ALSO READ: Church members flog floor aggressively to fight spiritual enemy

RCCG pastor revives dead wife with cloth anointed by Enoch Adeboye

Pastor Timothy Owoade of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), has shared a testimony concerning how he raised his dead wife with a cloth anointed by overseer, Enoch Adeboye.

His experience was compiled in a Premium Times News report published on Sunday, April 8, 2018.

Owoade's spouse reportedly died during a family prayer session but it wasn't meant to be the end for the woman according to the order at which things unfolded.

While taking his wife to the hospital, the RCCG pastor remembered a piece of cloth earlier by the overseer.

The formerly dead parter reportedly awakened after a concerned husband wrapped the blessed material around her.

"During the March Holy Ghost Service which coincided with Mr Adeboyes birthday, many people had expected him to bless holy oil or handkerchiefs for the congregation, but he said he had not been directed by God to do that.

"Instead, he prayed to anoint clothes people wore that day, advising that they could be used during difficult cases for miracles.

"One morning, last month, a pastor, Timothy Owoade, woke up early to pray with his wife in the bedroom before joining their children for the larger family prayers.

"He recalled that as he prayed there was no response from his wife  not even the usual 'Amen.'

"Surprised, he tapped her and asked if she was okay, but there was no response. He quickly examined her and noticed she was dead.

"He raised alarm which attracted the children and neighbours.

"As they were taking her to the hospital, he remembered the clothes he wore to the March Holy Ghost Service, rushed for them to wrap around the corpse.
Farajimi allegedly sold some of the shoes a customer brought to him to repair and started wearing the rest.

The accused, whose address was not mentioned, was arraigned on a charge of stealing.

Prosecutor, Sgt. Akpan Ikem told the court that the accused committed the offence on April 7, at Ajara Vetho area of Badagry.

Ikem said that the shoes belonged to the complainant, Mr Segun Aladesunmi.

The complainant brought the shoes for the accused to repair, and after the repairs, the accused sold some of the shoes and started wearing the others.

The complainant reported the matter to the police and the accused was arrested, he said.

According to the prosecutor, the offence contravened Section 285 of the Criminal Code of Lagos State, Nigeria 2011.

The accused pleaded not guilty to the charge.

The Chief Magistrate, Mr Jimoh Adefioye, granted bail to the accused in the sum of N50,000 and two sureties in the like sum
In a video shared on Instagram, a young man was seen having a confrontation with two ladies, who had earlier challenged him for attempting to fill his container before theirs.

This prompted a reaction that saw the male agitator get involved in a heated argument with one of the female aggressor.

The incident which occurred on Thursday, April 19, 2018, offered an avenue for some trolling from some social media users who made a mockery of President Muhammadu Buhari's viral statement describing Nigerian youths as lazy individuals.

Ogun state residents fight each other to fetch 'magical' water

A report of a well bearing bright light has had the residents of Ofada, Ogun State, trooping out in large groups in order to fetch water from it.

This occurred on Thursday, April 19, 2018, according to a video shared on Instagram.

In the clip, a group of people were heard in a loud chatter as they anticipated their turn to have a scoop of the coveted water.

It was gathered that some individuals travelled from far locations such as Lagos, in order to have a glimpse of the mysterious event.
Like the mace, some have been elevated by the notoriety of the events that surround them. There are others that we only became aware of because they were rammed down our throats in social studies.

Then there are the select few that have become symbolic simply by virtue of a person's legacy and a course of events relating to them.

Without much ado, here are 5 symbols of Nigerian power and what they mean:

(1) The Mace:

Anyone who even casually follows Nigerian politics is well aware of the mace, thanks, for the most part, to our special breed of lawmakers.

The Nigerian Senate's mace is an ornamental stick, around three feet long, and made of gold (or at least gold is one of its main components). Atop the mace sits a reproduction of the Nigerian coat of arms.

The mace is the Senate's symbol of authority and must be present before any legitimate sitting can hold. The mace also precedes the Senate President when he arrives at the chamber which typically implies the start of plenary sessions.

(2) The Nigerian Coat of Arms

Nigeria's coat of arms is one of the most memorable of our national symbols. It's symbolism and all that it represents have been taught to Nigerian children in schools for decades (along with many other tidbits that have no real life usefulness).

According to my social studies teacher (whose name I can't remember for the life of me), the coat of arms features a black shield which represents Nigeria's fertile soil.

Two white lines meet on the black shield to form a "Y" shape, referring to the Niger and Benue Rivers and their confluence at Lokoja. Two white horses sit on either side represent dignity. Atop the coat, an Eagle signifies strength.

The coat of arms is treated as the country's official seal. You will find it on just about anything that even reeks of Nigeria, on the money, embossed or stamped on documents, sewn into uniforms and printed on property.

(3) The Naira:

For all we know, there are no primary laws that prescribe that the Nigerian naira is a symbol of authority. We also know, however, that nothing says power like putting your name, billions and naira in the same sentence.

After years of using the pound, Nigeria got its own currency, the naira in 1973. Since then, the naira has been used as a tool, a weapon and the ultimate achievement.

The Naira has solved disputes, created alliances, made grown men kneel before a governor, and done just about everything you're still uncertain if you'll ever achieve.

ALSO READ: How Emmanuel Nwude sold an imaginary airport for 242 million dollars

Nigerians will tell you to respect money but no one gets more respect than a man with money. Most of us know that power is the ultimate currency in Nigeria, but there are few better ways of showing and using it than financial wealth.

(4) The Nigerian Army's Camouflage Colours:

Many sad things can happen to you as a Nigerian living in Nigeria, but there's sad and then there's disastrous.

Disastrous is when you're feeling funky one afternoon and you choose to go out in your new camouflage shorts.

It's all lovely until, in biblical terms, woe betides you and you come by a Nigerian soldier or an army checkpoint. Our political history and the military's forays into government (and their attendant high-handedness) have entrenched them as images of political power in our eyes.

Few things bring this to mind like the camouflage clours. The symbolism evokes the threat of extreme physical force and this is not lost on the army either.

Civilians who are found wearing camo are roundly beaten or embarrassed, which although unnecessary, is what happens to you when you claim power than you don't have.

(5) Titles (Chief, Dr., Pastor etc):

There are few things more underwhelming than finding out a person is not who they are. For example, you meet a person who has the title Dr. before their name. You take a leap of faith and assume the title implies that they have sense so you get close and learn. Then things stop adding up so one day, out of the blue, you ask them, "Where did you get your doctorate degree from?".

"It's not a PhD. I got it after I finished my 6-month theology course at the Heavenly Lod Bible Seminary"

Why do people go to such lengths to deceive people?

ALSO READ: Skepta is now a chief in his hometown in Ogun State

Nigerians love titles because even before they have the opportunity to prove just how much they know or have, the title precedes them as a sign of power and authority.
The celebrated author who is most known for her books, "Half of a Yellow Sun" and "Americanah" spoke with Amanpour about getting raped at the age of 17 and how it shaped her into becoming a feminist.

"I think I was a feminist before that, I've been a feminist for as long as I can remember, which is simply to say that as a child I was very much aware that the world did not treat men and women the same way", Adichie responded.

ALSO READ: Chimamanda Adichie is not in the business of answering silly questions

Speaking about the origins of her feminist beliefs, the author said: "The kind of feminist discourse in the west, when people talk about first wave feminism, second-wave feminism, it doesn't really appeal to me".

"I don't feel a connection to me. It's not my story. I became a feminist because I grew up in Nigeria and I observed the world"

"Why were women judged more harshly? Why were the cultural practices that had prestige only for men? It didn't make any sense to me", she added.

Assault in her teens

You may recall that the author recently told the world that she was sexually assaulted at the age of 17.

Speaking at the just concluded Stockholm Forum for Gender Equality, the author said that a big man in a media house assaulted her when she visited him for help in publishing her collection of poems.

"I was so shocked that I did nothing for seconds but then, I pushed his hand away, gently, nicely, because I didnt want to offend him.", the author is reported as saying.

In the spirit of the #MeToo movement, many asked why Adichie, being such an important role model for girls waited this long to tell her story.

Icon living

In recent years, the author has become a feminist icon in her own right. Much of this is down to her storytelling, and her speeches which have referenced in various works of contemporary art.

Chimamanda Adichie Shares Her Sexual Assault Encounter At 17

The most notable of them is perhaps "We Should All Be Feminists", a speech which American pop star, Beyonce interpolated in her song "Flawless", off the "Beyonce" album.

Chimamanda's story will help many Nigerian girls who may feel alone and devalue by sexual abuse and assault, problems which our society has swept under the carpet for years.

The author acknowledged that her need to address injustice often drives her to work but in recent times, she's been making an effort not to let the social issues that affect her drive her storytelling.
In the interview, Adichie comes across as composed, candid as usual and speaks on the reaction to her controversial view of transgender issues, feminism, fashion, her relationship with Dior and her unwavering support of Nigerian designers.

The author looks absolutely breathtaking as she is styled simply in Dior pieces.

See excerpts from her interview below:

On her first brush with the idea of feminism

Her first experience of feminism came about in way that reflects her upbringing in Nigeria. Her family had live-in help, whose son she would play with after school. After one stand-off, he cried crossly: You are a feminist. She giggles at the memory: And I really didnt know what he meant, so I said, Yes, Im a feminist. You should have seen his face. Then I went home to look up what it meant. And the more I read about it, the more I thought: yes, I really am.

So I was a feminist before I knew the word. I tell her that my own early immersion in the subject of feminism came from reading miserable tomes written by Marge Piercy or Marilyn French, which turned me away from the feminist section in bookstores for a while.

How does she avoid preaching to the converted? I agree there was a sense that we werent taking people with us in the argument, especially men, she says, not entirely addressing the question. Her background, however, was storytelling, rather than politics. After gaining a prized place to study medicine at the University of Nigeria, she pestered her alarmed parents to take literature in America instead and sent off applications really not knowing much about the whole business at all, except that America was the aspirational center of the world.

One thing that intrigues me about Adichie is her keen interest in fashion, particularly for a writer associated with strong causes. This was highlighted when her We should all be feminists slogan was adopted by Diors artistic director, Maria Grazia Chiuri, who sent models down the catwalk at her inaugural 2015 show with the slogan emblazoned on plain white T-shirts and handbags.

Did she have doubts about turning up to fashion shows or fear that her core audience might think it frippery? As well as being flattered, I thought it might start a conversation or inspire someone, so why not? Fashion clearly comes naturally to her.

She often gives speeches wearing beautifully striking Nigerian clothes to support home-grown designers. The Dior connection means she can borrow dreamy dresses for special events. So I am a muse! she laughs heartily at the notion.

On race and fashion

On race and fashion, shes less forgiving of the delay. For too long the view has been, We already have a black model, as if one is all you need. More racial diversity in the fashion press is, she reckons, a moral obligation, and if the sales arent great at first, then you might have to go through that.

But fashion has such broad appeal, we can change the status quo. If you put me in charge, I could find the models and sell the issues!

On fashion being the true meaning of democracy in Nigeria

More irritating to her, I sense, is the notion that being interested in fashion is unworthy of those with leftist consciences. In some ways, fashion is the true meaning of democracy. You can see women in Nigeria, with really low incomes, but beautifully dressed and proud of their appearance.

When I ask her who shes fond of wearing at the moment, she says shes going through a fashion nationalist moment and points me to her Instagram of Nigerian designers. My defense is, Im bringing aspects of Africa to the global stage. But, fundamentally, Im having fun too, she admits, with a smile.

If she has a quest at the moment, in an America riven by divisions around the Trump presidency, it is to keep debates lively on feminism, race and the difficult stuff of democracies, where we often grow tired of challenging themes. Shes courted controversy with the American Left, who she refers to as my natural tribe. The assumptions run quite deep that you will think the same.

And I want to make the case that its okay not to know something, or to use the wrong or not approved word.

The important thing is to be curious.

Credits

Photography: Heather Hazzan, Getty Images

Styling: Calvy Click,

Hair: The Yoko Project,

Makeup: Mali Thomas,

Set design: And Or Forever,
The new name means land of the Swazis in the local Swati language. King Mswati III, Africas last absolute monarch, announced this at the golden jubilee of Swazi independence and of his 50th birthday.

Addressing a crowd gathered in a stadium in the city of Manzini, the king said Swaziland was reverting to the original name it had before being colonised by the British.

I would like to announce that from today onwards, our country will be known as the Kingdom of eSwatini, the king said.

Whenever we go abroad, people refer to us as Switzerland," he said, claiming the name caused confusion. He said he wanted his country to have a name people could identify with.

ALSO READ: 5 happiest countries in the world to travel to
"Tonight President @Buhari and his Wife @aishambuhari are attending a Dinner hosted by Queen Elizabeth II for Heads of Government and their Spouses, at Buckingham Palace, London. #PMBinUK #PMBAtCHOGM", the Presidency tweeted this on Thursday night.

Buhari and other world leaders are in the UK for the 2018 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM).

Buhari woos investors

Earlier, the President at told a gathering at the Commonwealth Business Forum had encouraged businessmen to invest in Nigeria, saying the country is safe to do business.

The president informed participants that Shell is preparing to invest another $20 billion in Nigeria.

"...This morning, I met with Shell staff. They came and broke the news to me that they were ready to invest about $20 billion in Nigeria. So, really, we are not doing badly," he had said.

In his keynote address at the forum, Buhari counselled the Commonwealth to avoid trade wars and employ opportunities presented by trade to spur growth in the global community.

He addressed participants at the forum on the efforts his government had made to improve the business environment in Nigeria and the attendant results.

ALSO READ: Buhari goofed, young Nigerians deserve some accolades

According to him, the effectiveness of such efforts was evident in the World Banks Doing Business Report published in November last year, which saw Nigeria moving up 24 places from its previous ranking.
Buratai made the declaration during a telephonic press briefing organized by the Public Affairs Section of the United States Consulate General, Lagos.

U.S. Army Africa Acting Commanding General, Brig. Gen. Eugene LeBoeuf, was also part of the press briefing.

The Generals were co-hosting the 6th African Land Forces Summit which held in Abuja between April 16-19, 2018.

Boko Haram has been defeated. When last were you in Maiduguri? People who live in Maiduguri and other States in the northeast will tell you Boko Haram has been defeated, Buratai declared.

Of course we still have the remnants of Boko Haram and we keep pursuing them. At the moment, we are rooted in Sambisa and Boko Haram often come from across the countrys borders to launch attacks and run away. However, I can tell you that as an insurgent organization, Boko Haram has been defeated.

Look at where we are and where we were coming from and youll agree with me that weve made tremendous progress. As a fighting force, Boko Haram was everywhere. Since 2016, we have not had any major terrorist attack outside the northeast", Buratai added, while citing instances of Boko Haram bombing Abuja, Kano and Jos in the past.

They cant operate like they used to. Dont be carried away by the Boko Haram propaganda. The narrative is right now in our hands. All the components of the armed forces are doing their part, Buratai said.

Porous borders

The Army Chief also bemoaned Nigerias porous borders which makes it easy for Boko Haram terrorists to trickle in and out of the northeast.

Our borders are so porous and so wide, Buratai said, while adding that the regional joint task force is doing everything to solve the problem.

Acting Commander, US Army Africa, Brigadier General LeBoeuf assured that the United States will continue to build the capacity of the army in countries in the Sahel, so they can better tackle insurgency.

We are committed to supporting our African partners to root out extremist organisations through trainings, LeBoeuf said.

Buratai also called on countries in the Lake Chad region to cooperate a lot more.

Vast land acres across Lake Chad region is a challenge. There is the need for us to continue to work together since our troops are operating alongside each other. We also require the right political support for de-radicalization, Buratai said.

Nine lives of Boko Haram

But the terrorist outfit is still capable of launching bomb attacks on soft targets and masterminding mass abductions of schoolgirls in heavily militarised zones in a war ravaged northeast region, despite its 'defeat'.
Mr Lawal Muhammad, the Acting Director, Dams and Reservoir Operations, in the ministry, said this on Friday in an interview with News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja.

Muhammad said that the dam and the power generating components of the project had been completed.

He said that the outstanding aspect of the project was the erection of power transmission lines that would convey electricity to the national grid, adding, however, that this was the responsibility of the Federal Ministry of Power, Works and Housing.

He said that work on water supply component of the dam had gone far, while work on the reticulation network had reached an advanced stage.

Muhammad said that the irrigation component of the dam had been designed, while work on it had also reached an advanced stage.

We are studying the design; after the approval of the design for the contractor, we can then give him the go-ahead to start the construction, he said.

The acting director said that the dam had been completed, while its water had been impounded.

He said that the dam project was also executed to control water surge whenever water was released from Lake Nyos in Cameroon.

He said that the water, which was recently released from the lake, was intercepted by the dam in order to prevent flooding in the downstream parts of River Benue.

So now, instead of allowing the body of water to stay idle there, we can now utilise it to provide potable water for the people in Takum village and other areas of Taraba State, he said.

Muhammad said that when the dam was completed, it would have the capacity of generating 40 megawatts of hydro-power.

He added that the power generation would be a plus to electricity supply to the citizens.

NAN recalls that the Federal Executive Council (FEC) recently approved an additional N46.15 billion for the completion of the remaining 10 per cent of the Kashimbila Dam project.

The Minister of Water Resources, Mr Suleiman Adamu, described the project as one of the ministrys flagship projects, adding that it would be completed and put to use in 12 months.

The dam was identified by the United Nations (UN) as one of the key projects that we need to do to provide a buffer against flooding along the River Benue, which of course you remember in 2012 was quite devastating.

Certainly, flood around the River Benue has always been a recurring decimal, in view of the dams which have been constructed by Cameroon. Whenever water is released unsystematically, it continues to cause a lot of damage.

Adamu stressed that the Federal Government was more committed to completing all ongoing dam projects across the country, rather than embarking on the construction of new ones.
According to the State Commissioner of Education, Jaafaru Sani, the newly recruited teachers could not write their acceptance letters properly after being offered employment.

"At the end, 4,562 incompetent ones, believed to have found their way into the final list illegally, were fished out, leaving 11,335 competent ones," Sani said Wednesday, April 18.

He said other candidates whose processes were successful have been deployed to over 4000 schools across the state.

ALSO READ: Kaduna Government begins construction of 594 classrooms
President Buhari is scheduled to meet Trump on April 30.

The Chambers Director-General, Ms Joyce Akpata, gave the advice in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos on Friday.

Akpata said that lack of infrastructure was hindering the inflow of foreign direct investment into the country.

U.S has offered us a great opportunity under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), but unfortunately, we have not been able to maximise it because of lack of infrastructure that makes our production noncompetitive.

Countries like Ghana, Ethiopia, Lesotho, have taken advantage of AGOA because their government has taken it as priority to maximise the opportunity.

Nigeria has the population, but in terms of infrastructure, there is a deficit.

Cost of producing here is higher, so Americans would go elsewhere. I know that ADIDAS and one other companies have opened in Ghana, two others have established in Ethiopia and Lesotho and they are exporting garments to the U.S.

If they come here, there is no production hub and that is a draw back, she said.

Akpata said that agro commodities such as cashews and sesame seeds which were grown abundantly in the country were being exported to Asian countries.

Because the US market wants processed or semi processed products and we do not have the processing capacity, the Asians come here, buy them and process in their own countries and then export to the U.S and they make all the money.

But if we can get investors to establish processing plants here, then we can process these commodities before exporting them, Akpata said.

According to her, doing that will increase manufacturers income and governments revenue profile.

She said that the Federal Government must create the enabling environment for such investment to flow into the country and thrive.

The director-general also advised that discussions on knowledge transfer, partnership in ICT, agricultural and security issues were vital to deepen governments efforts in the various sectors in addition to attracting foreign investors.

Of course, we are not going to be looking for any aid, it is more of value addition and partnership that would strengthen the economies and relationship between both nations, she said.
"I don't know which party my wife belongs to, but she belongs to my kitchen and my living room and the other room," he 'joked'.

The First Lady had publicly dragged Buhari's competence through the mud when she claimed that his administration had been hijacked by a cabal and the president issued his no-holds-barred response much to the measured annoyance of Chancellor Merkel. This was in 2016.

Fast-forward to two years later, and it appears the president still can't help himself from causing a stir under the gaze of the international community.

While speaking at the Commonwealth Business Forum in Westminster on Wednesday, April 18, 2018, President Buhari said Nigeria's youthful population is reliant on the notion that the country is an oil-rich nation. As a result, he remarked that a lot of them wait on handouts from the government.

"More than 60 percent of the population is below 30, a lot of them haven't been to school and they are claiming that Nigeria has been an oil producing country, therefore, they should sit and do nothing, and get housing, healthcare, education free," he said.

Basically, a convoluted way to say they are lazy.

The president has received a lot of backlash from Nigerians, on social media and from political opposition, who have criticised him for his careless remarks about the nation's youthful population.

This episode is just another in the president's long list of embarrassing blunders he commits anytime he's compelled to speak off the cuff, especially when he's abroad.

When the president was asked how he hoped to solve the security challenge in the Niger Delta region during a visit to the United States in 2015, his first remarks were about how the region shouldn't expect to be prioritised because it didn't contribute much to his electoral victory.

He said, "I hope you have a copy of the election results. The constituents, for example, gave me 97% (of the vote) cannot, in all honesty, be treated on some issues with constituencies that gave me 5%. I think these are political reality."

Again, this moment of insensibility came just weeks after the president had mistakenly referred to Merkel as the President of West Germany.

Perhaps, the president's worst moment came when he shared a 'joke' with Benue state governor, Samuel Ortom, during a meeting in February 2018.

After close to 100 people had been killed in Benue in attacks linked to cattle herders reported to be the president's kinsmen, Governor Ortom had publicly clashed with the federal government over its commitment to secure the lives of people in the state.

When the president shook Ortom's hand in the Presidential Villa, he smirked as he asked the governor rhetorically, "How are your cattle rearers?"

What all of these embarrassing episodes have in common is that the president was on his own to respond to situations and questions without a script that has been cooked and seasoned with caution by his communications team.

It almost appears as if the president cannot be trusted to be left to his own devices without him trying to burn down one thing or the other. Without screenings from his media aides and throngs of assistants, the president is almost always struggling to emerge with any sort of dignified responses.

The president has time and again displayed a streak of reckless statements that tend to embarrass the average Nigerian, and his inability to steer away from ill-thought out responses has been rumoured to be the reason why he speaks so little to the media since he was sworn in in 2015.

A scripted statement here, a scripted statement there, and the president has managed to limit the terrible exposure that comes from his speaking off the cuff in public.

However, his handicap has not escaped the glare of annoyed Nigerians.

With President Buhari set to embark on a re-election campaign for the 2019 presidential election, he needs all the goodwill he can get, but he won't help himself with more moments like dragging Nigerian youths through the mud in a foreign land.

A president's representation of a country is a very important touchstone by which the international community judges it. It's no secret that Nigeria already does not enjoy a stellar reputation the world over, and President Buhari has not helped it much since 2015.

This is why when former British Prime Minister, David Cameron, described Nigeria as "fantastically corrupt", the outrage didn't last long because our own president had more or less been saying the same thing for weeks, scripted or unscripted.

A re-election campaign is going to open the president up to more moments like the one he just had in the United Kingdom, and it's really interesting to see how he'll wade through it without torching a few more of his declining goodwill.

His track record without a script is laughably poor and when he isn't hilariously goofing, he's being annoyingly insensible.

The problem is that the president is not the only casualty of these transgressions, Nigeria continues to be a laughing stock. More than the usual, anyway.
While recently speaking to the leadership of The Companion, an association of Muslim Businessmen and Professionals, the vice president said that the president's firm hold on governance has ensured that the country is saving more.

He further said that when the president is done comprehensively dealing with corruption in the country, there will be a lot of improvement.

He said, "One thing that is very sure now is that this presidency is not stealing and we have a President who is not stealing and will not steal.

"There is no corruption in the presidency under the current government. This kind of body language is what is saving this country a lot of money now. Like what is happening in JAMB, Customs, FIRS, NPA, FAAN, NIMASA where we have witnessed improved revenue collection and returns to govt for unspent resources.

"When we begin to deal with corruption in all facets of government particularly within the public sector, there will be a lot of improvement in our country. The government is also looking at improving ease of doing business to be able to attract more foreign direct investment over a period of time.

"All MDA's will be made to submit their expenditure in line with the budget as well and in compliance with the accounting year."

PDP left rot behind - Osinbajo

The vice president also took another stab at the oppositionPeople's Democratic Party (PDP), arguing that they have should not be thinking of returning to power after the mess they left behind for Buhari to fix.

He said, "The rot we met in office has never happened before. The previous government spent the whole reserves and even borrowed money which were distributed for election purposes.

"It has never happened in this country where the presidency directly takes money from the Central Bank to distribute to its cronies and where very few officials stole the country dry.

"This is the only nation where such can happen and the same party under whose watch it happened will still be clamouring to be returned to power."

Osinbajo further praised Buhari's administration for improving the nation's agricultural sector, claiming that Nigeria now depends largely on local rice production which has reduced import by about 90%.

The vice president also noted that the government is determined to do a lot more to improve Nigeria's standard of education particularly vocational education and tertiary institutions, infrastructure, and general reform.
In a statement signed by the commission's Head, Press and Public Relations, Ikechukwu Ani, on Friday, April 20, 2018, Magu was promoted alongside 17 other senior officers of the force.

The new promotions were announced at the PSC's 27th plenary meeting which was presided over by its chairman, Dr Mike Okiro, a retired Inspector General of the Police (IGP), on Friday.

Before his recent promotion, Magu was a Deputy Commissioner of Police and was promoted alongside fellow deputies Ebere Onyeagoro, DCP Administration, Kaduna State Command and Moshood O. Gbolarumi, DCP Maritime, Lagos, to the rank of Commissioner.

The statement read, "The Commission approved the promotion of AIG Agbola Oshodi-Glover in charge of Zone 11, Osogbo, to the next rank of a Deputy Inspector General of Police. CP Ghazzali Mohammed, Commissioner of Police, Administration, DLS, Force Headquarters and CP Peace Ibekwe Abdallah, former Commissioner of Police, Ebonyi State Command and currently , CP, Force Intelligence Bureau, Force Headquarters were promoted to Assistant Inspector General of Police.

"The acting Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, DCP Ibrahim Mustapha Magu, DCP Ebere C. Onyeagoro, DCP Administration, Kaduna State Command and DCP Moshood O. Gbolarumi, DCP Maritime, Lagos, were promoted to the next rank of Commissioner of Police.

"Other promotions approved by the Commission include; one Assistant Commissioner of Police to Deputy Commissioner of Police, Nine Chief Superintendents of Police to assistant Commissioners of Police, one Deputy Superintendent of Police to Superintendent of Police, one assistant Superintendent of Police to Deputy Superintendent of Police and one Inspector to assistant Superintendent of Police.

"Chairman of the Commission, Dr Okiro congratulated the newly promoted officers and urged them to rededicate themselves to the service of their fatherland. He assured them that the Commission will continue to pay attention to their basic entitlements which include regular promotions."

Magu's controversial stay as EFCC chairman

The Presidency has been at odds with the Senate over Magu's appointment as EFCC chairman after he was kept on in an acting capacity despite the Senate rejecting his appointment twice.
According to a report by UDEME, an initiative of Premium Times which is focused on Nigeria's public procurement and budget implementation practices, Saraki, Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, and Minister of Finance, Kemi Adeosun, were named in the fraudulent scheme involving the sum of N10 billion.

According to Premium Times, the N10 billion was illegally withdrawn from the national treasury based on Adeosun's approval before it was received and shared by Saraki and Dogara. The sum was allegedly released to Saraki and Dogara after they plotted and submitted a list of 82 contractors which they claimed the National Assembly was owing for contracts executed.

In reaction to the story which was published on Friday, April 20, 2018, Saraki's Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Yusuph Olaniyonu, said the report "is pure and unmitigated false news".

Olaniyonu said all contract awards are overseen by the National Assembly management and not presiding officers like Saraki. He said that the Senate President has nothing to do with any payment, receipt or disbursement of any extra-budgetary funds as alleged by the report.

He concluded by saying the report is part of a smear campaign by political adversaries to discredit the Senate President, and that his legal team is in the process of initiating legal action.

The statement read, "Again, our attention has been drawn to a publication by Premium Times which unethically alleges without any proof, reference, attribution or justification that the President of the Senate, Dr. Abubakar Bukola Saraki, was involved in receiving or sharing any unauthorized funds.

"The article, entitled "EXCLUSIVE: Minister Adeosun, Saraki, Dogara, Accountant General in N10 billion fraud scandal", in both its style, substance, and deliberate spin struggles to connect the Senate President to the receipt and apportioning of funds which the publication describes as "illegal."

"In the absence of any doubt, the President of the Senate has nothing to do with any payment, receipt or disbursement of any extra-budgetary funds.

"It is also important to state for the record that the Premium Times article in question is pure and unmitigated false news. A simple check by Premium Times would have revealed that all funds in the National Assembly are in the custody of the National Assembly Management, which is headed by the Clerk, and not its Presiding Officers.

"Additionally, all contract awards are equally overseen by the National Assembly management, not the Presiding Officers.

"We are aware that for some weeks now, Premium Times has had this story. However, they only contacted us on Wednesday, and the Clerk of the National Assembly, after a phone call from the Special Adviser on Media & Publicity to the President of the Senate, promised to give them all necessary explanation and documents on this issue.

"However, it is obvious that in the bid to rope in Senator Saraki, the reporters of Premium Times could not wait to see the Clerk and rushed to publish the story with outright falsehood less than 24 hours after the Clerk made the aforementioned promise.

"We are surprised that without any proof whatsoever, Premium Times was using expressions like: Senate President Bukola Saraki and Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, have just illegally received and shared; "Saraki and Dogara submitted"; and "Investigations by PREMIUM TIMES showed that at least 44 of the 82 contractors Messrs Saraki and Dogara" These are highly defamatory and careless expressions.

"It is expected, that the Editors of Premium Times will not be ignorant of the internal procurement and payment process in an organization like the National Assembly that they have covered and investigated for as long as they (Premium Times) has been in existence.

"We consider this as part of the orchestrated campaign of calumny being waged against Dr. Saraki by some political elements using media platforms in which they have interests.

"In this regard, for this careless and unwarranted assault on the person of the President of the Senate  after several previous warnings  the lawyers of the President of the Senate, Dr. Abubakar Bukola Saraki, will be initiating legal action on this particular matter.

"Finally, we ask the public to disregard the Premium Times piece, and take it for what it is, and will continue to be: Fake News."
While speaking at the Commonwealth Business Forum in Westminster on Wednesday, April 18, 2018, President Buhari remarked that a lot of Nigerian youths wait on handouts from the government.

"More than 60 percent of the population is below 30, a lot of them haven't been to school and they are claiming that Nigeria has been an oil producing country, therefore, they should sit and do nothing, and get housing, healthcare, education free," he said.

The president has been heavily criticised by Nigerians for his utterance, with his opponent in next year's election, former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar, remarking that Nigerian youths are hardworking with great entrepreneurial spirit, work ethic, and creative abilities that should be nurtured.

On Friday, April 20, 2018, Senator Sani lent his voice to the wave of criticism by subtly attacking the president's comments without mentioning his name.

He posted on his Twitter account , "The Kings Spin Doctors trying hard to spray fragrance on heap of feces and pouring olive oil on a heap of dung."

The lawmaker had earlier posted on his Facebook account to advice the president to apologise for his comment, urging youths to forgive him.

He posted, "The President should simply withdraw the statement on the youths and apologize; and tell them what he will do for them in addition to what he had done for them.

"The President spin doctors are trying to spray fragrances on the feces and lace the dung with olive oil, it's absurd.

"The President is a human being, he can gaffe and should be forgiven and should not be sent to the political guillotine.

"As for the Youths, the challenge is to pick the baton and lead and stop holding the Alsatian Dogs of the political elite. The President echos the perception of the bourgeoisie power elites, the youths must rise against it."

Buhari's words manipulated - Presidency

Shehu's posts appear to be a response to a statement released by the president's Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Femi Adesina, who said his words had been deliberately twisted by mischief makers to fit their agenda.
The armed men burnt down several houses and destroyed properties worth millions during the raid that had residents running for their lives. An elderly citizen was killed in the fire that engulfed one of the buildings.

Chairman of the LGA, Francis Ayagah, told Premium Times that the attack by the soldiers was a reprisal over the killing of one of their colleagues, identified as Private Danlami Gambo, near the community on Wednesday, April 18.

He said, "A soldier was killed by hoodlums yesterday, but I met with the brigade commander around 4:30 a.m. today. He gave me a list of suspects and we arrested five of them overnight. It was while we trying to take them to the brigade that soldiers stormed the town and started burning houses.

"A whole part of the town has been completely burnt down and we're appealing for help and understanding from the soldiers."

Ayagah reported that most of the homes burnt by the angry soldiers belonged to innocent people and not the suspected killers of the soldier.

According to an earlier statement by the Deputy Director of Army Public Relations, Major Olabisi Ayeni, the slain soldier had been killed and buried in a shallow grave by some youths in Naka.

The statement read, "On 18 April 2018, at about 3:30 pm, troops of 707 Sf Brigade deployed at Naka in Gwer West LGA of Benue State observed the absence of PTE Danlami Gambo from his duty post. The soldiers rifle was however found at the location.

"It was gathered that the soldier was last seen receiving a phone call but left in search of network and did not return. Troops immediately conducted patrols to search for the soldier during the search, at about 6.10 pm, our troops observed blood stains along a footpath leading to a newly dug grave.

"They immediately dug out the grave and the dead body of the missing soldier was found butchered. The corpse was later exhumed and deposited at the Nigerian Air Force mortuary, Makurdi."

He further disclosed that preliminary investigations showed that some locals were involved in the killing which led to the dispatch of a team of troops that effected the arrest of some suspects.

How soldier died

The circumstances that led to the soldier's death remain unclear, but two different accounts indicate that he was alone when he was seized by a local mob on Wednesday.

According to Premium Times, one account reported that he was found roaming on a farmland near Naka when hoodlums seized him on suspicion of being an criminal. Benue has been plagued by criminal activities largely credited to herdsmen which has resulted in the death of hundreds in 2018 alone.

Prior to Private Gambo's capture by the mob, there had been reports that some killers were sighted in military fatigues in the state over the past week. This could have led to his unfortunate lynching by the mob.

Another account by residents noted that Private Gambo had been in the community in military uniform buying bread worth over N7,000 which raised suspicion and led to residents asking him for proper identification.

According to a report by Channels Television, he was believed to be a herdsman who was pretending to be a member of the military. When he failed to prove he was a soldier, the mob reportedly marched him down to a military camp near Naka.

However, soldiers in the camp could not definitively identify him as one of their own and were allowed to leave the camp with him before he was reportedly killed.
Addressing journalists in Abuja, ISDMG executive director, Chima Amadi, it discovered that even though said following an FOI inquiry to the Independent National Electoral Commission has been complying with the provision of the Electoral Act and making voters register available to political parties, none of the political parties or individuals have bothered to verify the voters register provided by the INEC since 2011.

According to him, the Electoral Act 2010 (as Amended) in Section 10 (3) provided that the INEC shall, within 60 days after each year, make available to every political party the names and addresses of each person registered during the year.

"We were astonished to learn that all opposition parties in Kano state and indeed all other states where allegations of underage voters, aliens and other unqualified persons have ever been made, no political party in the country has ever reached out to INEC with any objection from the copies of the register which they hold," he said.

ALSO READ: National Assembly drops bill seeking to reorder election sequence

"The existence of a credible votes register is pivotal to having a free, fair and credible election. Where the integrity of the voters register cannot be guaranteed the outcome of any process flowing from such register cannot be said to have allowed this e votes of citizens to count.

"We urge all the political parties who have received the voters register to duplicate them and send to their ward chapters who are closer to the grassroots for verification so as to identify all unqualified names in the register. By so doing, INEC will have no options but to respond to all claims and objections raised by the Parties. All aliens, underage persons and indeed all unqualified persons must have their names expunged from the voters register," Amadi declared.

The election observer groups boss expressed optimism that following measures being taken by the current INEC leadership, the 2019 election will be free and fair if politicians play by the rules.

Amadi said the suspension of the use of incident forms because of penchant for politicians to abuse it and the decision by INEC to acquire new enhanced card readers which will read finger prints a lot more easily and also register finger prints on the spot where the card is read as authentic and the face of the voter is cross-checked and verified from the register at the polling unit will ensure a credible poll in 2019.

He said the new card readers were used in the Anambra governorship elections and only recorded 0.01 percent failure and 90 percent of these failures were rectified there in the field.
Residents of Port Harcourt, Asaba and Warri have been sending images of cloned PVCs across to our newsroom.

Ekanem, a Port Harcourt resident, alleges that the fake PVCs are part of a broader plan by the opposition APC in Rivers to rig the next governorship and presidential votes.

Its the APC that is mass producing them and distributing them all over the place, Ekanem alleges, without providing that much of a proof to back his claim. They want to take back Rivers by force but God will not allow that to happen, he added.

Wike says APC loves to rig

Rivers, a PDP controlled State, is governed by Barrister Nyesom Wike who has had public spats with his predecessor Rotimi Amaechi, a minister in the President Buhari cabinet and chieftain of the APC.

Wike has perfected plans to rig elections in Rivers.

The plan of INEC and its cohorts to transplant the Edo State rigging model in Rivers State will fail, the people of the state will resist them.

Anyone planning to steal our mandate will be resisted, nobody can intimidate us, those having such plan will rig themselves into the water, Wike had said in the build up to legislative elections in his State in 2016.

Pulse contacted APC spokesperson Bolaji Abdullahi for a response but he wasnt immediately available for comments.

'Fake PVCs won't change anything'

However, Chief Press Secretary to the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC),Mr. Rotimi Oyekanmi told Pulse that anyone cloning PVCs is wasting their time.

Anybody with a fake PVC is just wasting his time. They cant use fake PVC to vote. Its impossible. I dont know how the fake PVC came about. I dont know whoI mean, this is the first time Im hearing about fake PVC.

If the PVC is not given by INEC, you cannot use it. I can assure you of that. Because our smart card reader will expose it. And Im sure that whoever has a fake PVC will not even have the courage to vote on election day because hes going to be caught and handed over to the police, Oyekanmi said.

Nigerians will head to the polling units to elect political leaders in 2019.
On Wednesday, April 18, 2018, hoodlums invaded the upper legislative chamber in the National Assembly complex, seized the mace of the chamber and fled in a black SUV.

The theft was blamed on the lawmaker representing Delta Central senatorial district, Senator Ovie Omo-Agege, who had allegedly led the hoodlums into the chamber before they seized the mace.

The lawmaker had been suspended for 90 legislative days for his conduct in objecting to the electoral amendment bill which is seeking to reorganise the order of elections in the country.

Senator Omo-Agege was arrested after plenary session yesterday but was released hours later after answering questions over what he described as deliberate and unfair allegations from the leadership of the Senate.

In reaction to the incident, Sagay believes Saraki's high-handedness as the leader of the chamber was the reason why anyone would be provoked to carry out such a daring act.

According to him, Saraki has gone too far in pushing lawmakers around and using them as pawns.

He said, "This Senate led by Bukola Saraki has been provoking Nigerians for a long time. What happened today (Wednesday) was illegal; there is no doubt about that. But the provocation that this particular Senate has been inflicting on Nigerians has reached a boiling point.

"You cannot be enjoying the huge and enormous resources of the people, living in luxury and at the same time refusing to do your job, making trouble with the executive at the slightest opportunity, bringing the government to a standstill and then turning members of the Senate into pawns who can be pushed here and there.

"I think Saraki has gone too far. While what happened today is illegal, I have no doubt in my mind that he and the group that surround him provoked it. Ultimately, I hold Saraki responsible for what happened today."

The mace has been recovered by the police on Thursday, April 19, after it was found by a passer-by under the flyover before the City Gate in Abuja where the hoodlums abandoned it.

Saraki was not present when the incident happened as he was away in the United States of America to attend this year's spring meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu, presided over Wednesday's session in his place.
"How to sustain the drug war? In order to sustain it, we will not change anything," Albayalde told reporters at his first press conference as commander.

He took over from Ronaldo Dela Rosa, who retired with hero's honours this week after helping Duterte launch the bloody crackdown.

"Why would we stop a programme that is very effective?" Albayalde added, citing "very good momentum and gains" since the alleged police killing last year of a teenage boy wrongly accused of drug crimes that sparked street protests.

Police on Friday announced another 13 alleged drug suspects were killed in a sweep that also led to the arrest of 58 people.

Albayalde's comments came as the Philippines pushed back against a European Union Parliament resolution voted on Thursday that criticised the crackdown, the latest international condemnation of it.

The EU lawmakers called "on the government of the Philippines to put an immediate end to the extrajudicial killings in the pretext of a 'war on drugs'".

It also expressed "grave concern over credible reports to the effect that the Philippine police force is falsifying evidence to justify extrajudicial killings".

While police say the campaign has killed around 4,100 people, rights groups allege the true toll is triple that number and amounts to state-sponsored murder.

Duterte began the crackdown in July 2016 after pledging during the presidential election campaign to kill 100,000 criminals to rid society of the scourge of narcotics.

Philippine Foreign Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano on Thursday denounced the EU parliamentary resolution as "interference" in Manila's internal affairs, describing it as "biased" and "based on wrong information".

Duterte last month pulled his country from the International Criminal Court after The Hague-based body's chief prosecutor launched an initial examination into allegations lodged against the president over his drug war.

He also threatened to arrest the chief ICC prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, if she tried to enter the Philippines to pursue her investigation.
"I wish we had more men and resources for this job, but we are making adjustments to our deployments to ensure better productivity," Jayasundara said.

He added the measures were decided after a Dutch tourist was sexually harassed and several other tourists were assaulted by a gang at a hotel in the southern resort town of Mirissa last week.

Five Israeli tourists were beaten up in the same area this week and 14 men have been arrested over the two incidents, police said.

Local media reports have catalogued several sexual harassment complaints by foreign tourists, with many reluctant to make official complaints for fear of drawn-out court proceedings.

Tourism Minister John Amaratunga appealed to victims to come forward and promised to cover the expenses of those who return to the island to help identify perpetrators.

The US State Department warned last year that sexual crimes against women were on the rise in Sri Lanka.

While most reported incidents involved non-physical acts such as cat calls and verbal harassment, there were several serious incidents of sexual threats, groping and rape.

"Incidents have also occurred at tourist beaches and smaller hotels in the Southern province," the travel advisory noted.

In 2014, a Sri Lankan court sentenced a local politician and three of his supporters to 20 years in jail for the 2011 murder of British tourist Khuram Shaikh on Christmas Eve and gang rape of his Russian partner.

Shaikh, a 32-year-old Red Cross worker, had tried to stop a brawl at a southern beach resort when a gang attacked and killed him.
The deal which sought to mobilise all Ukambani leaders to support Kalonzos quest for State House in 2022, has now been criticised by the church leaders, terming it wrongly timed.

Earlier, the Kalonzos Wiper Party leadership met with several leaders in Machakos where he was endorsed to be president in 2022, a move that was initially dismissed by Machakos Governor Alfred Mutua.

On Wednesday, led by Archbishop Arthur Kitonga, the church leaders who met in Nairobi said the church as an institution was not party to the declaration.

ALSO READ: Mutua reveals the mistake Kalonzo made in Monday meeting

They added that the meeting was not concerned about the development in the region and was rather aimed at promoting interests of individuals, a position earlier held by Dr Mutua.

The meeting was only for political interests. There were no concerns on development and that is its undoing, said Kitonga who was flanked by other leaders.

There was no discussion on development or the economic welfare of 4 million Kambas in this country. It was all about a certain party and a certain individual, Dr Mutua said of the meeting held by Wiper.

Kitonga said the people in Lower Eastern were in need of Government support adding that such meetings by politicians were denying the Central Government the commitment to help them.
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!
The Malaysian Rail Industry Consortium has put forward proposals for the development of an rail-sector industrial park and export hub in Rawang. 'The cluster-based park will involve infrastructure sharing as well as co-operation between companies as it would be a good way to develop the industry further, creating a platform ...
EUROPE: The first Amber Train branded intermodal freight service left the Sestokai transhipment facility in Lithuania for Riga in Latvia and the Paldiski terminal in Estonia on April 19, carrying 43 containers which had originated in France.
Supreme Court upholds life sentence for Russian biker in multiple murder case

 RAPSI

12:43 20/04/2018

MOSCOW, April 20 (RAPSI)  The Supreme Court of Russia has upheld life sentence for biker Ilya Aseyev convicted of killing five other motorcycle riders in the Moscow Region, RAPSI correspondent reports from the courtroom.

Aseyev appealed the sentence asking to reconsider the case with another court panel. He said that during the initial hearings he told a judge that there were 24 serious violations committed by a prosecutor, but the court chose to ignore them. Aseyev believes that these violations could influence outcome of his sentence as the final decision of jurors was taken with a margin of one vote.

Moreover, the defendant disagreed with conclusions of the Moscow Regional Court stating that he was trying to escape responsibility. Aseyev noted that he did not escape investigators and admitted his guilt in full.

On November 20, the Moscow Regional Court on Monday found Aseyev guilty and sentenced him to life in prison. The court also granted lawsuits lodged by victims in the case seeking compensation. Aseyev was ordered to pay 3 million rubles ($50,500) in compensation for moral harm to each plaintiff, over 679,000 rubles ($11,500) in damage caused, and 62,500 rubles ($1,000) of attorney fees.

According to investigators, Aseyev shot five other bikers with his Saiga rifle during the groups convention near abandoned beer plant on May 8, 2016.

Aseyev claimed that he was provoked by victims, who insulted and humiliated him. The motorcyclist insisted that he only wanted to scare them off but accidentally killed one of the bikers and shot the others as witnesses.
Petition for pardoning convicted ex-mayor Urlashov to be considered on April 26

 RIA Novosti. Sergei Beliakov

17:29 20/04/2018

MOSCOW, April 20 (RAPSI)  A special commission will consider a petition for pardon of ousted ex-Yaroslavl mayor Yevgeny Urlashov sentenced to 12.5 years in prison for corruption on April 26, the press service of the regional Commissioner for Human Rights Sergey Baburkin told RAPSI on Friday.

Urlashov asked President Vladimir Putin for pardon in March. According to the ombudsman, the application must be first considered by relevant authorities and then forwarded to the Presidential Executive Office.

In August 2016, Urlashov was found guilty of receiving 17 million rubles ($254,000) of the total 30 million rubles bribe amount ($449,000) from a Director General of Yardstroy construction company for assistance in transfer of control block of shares belonging to the City Highway Department to Yardstroy. He was sentenced to 12.5 years for two corruption episodes.

Ex-mayor's accomplice Maxim Pokalainen was convicted of attempted bribery amounted to 18 million rubles ($270,000) and sentenced to five years in prison in December 2014. Later, his sentence was reduced to 3 years and 9 months. Urlashovs former assistant Aleksey Lopatin received a 7-year prison term in this case. Former deputy of the mayor Dmitry Donskov was acquitted.

A court accorded investigators that Urlashov along with Lopatin and Pokalainen demanded 18 million rubles ($270,000) from a commercial entity director for participation in a municipal project realization between December 2012 and July 2013.

The criminal case against Urlashov is one of the biggest bribery cases opened in Russia recently considering Yaroslavls population (600,000) and the fact that Urlashov, an opposition candidate, defeated the candidate from the ruling party at the 2012 mayoral elections.

The police arrested Urlashov on July 3, 2013.

Urlashov, a member of the ruling United Russia party in 2008-2011, was a candidate for the opposition during mayoral elections in 2012. He achieved a landslide victory over a United Russia candidate Yakov Yakushev. A member of billionaire-turned-politician Mikhail Prokhorovs Civic Platform party, Urlashov planned to run for the Yaroslavl regional parliament in September 2013.

On July 18, 2013, Urlashov was removed from his mayoral post.
Investigators update information on Kemerovo fire death toll

 Imago/TASS

11:59 20/04/2018

MOSCOW, April 20 (RAPSI)  Investigators reported Friday that 60 people had died in the fire in the Zimnyaya Vishnya (Winter Cherry) shopping mall.

According to the Investigative Committees press service, expert findings and check of applications over missing persons let investigators determine the final number of casualties. Initially it was reported that 64 people including dozens of children were killed by fire.

The blaze in the mall occurred on March 25. A criminal case has been launched over involuntary manslaughter, violation of fire safety regulations that left more than two persons dead and provisions of services that dont meet safety requirements.

Eighr persons were charged and detained in the case. They are: Yulia Bogdanova, CEO of the Kemerovsky Confectionary Combine, a company owning the mall, Tanziliya Komkova, chief of the regions State Construction Inspection, a formal head of the malls owner company Georgy Sobolev; the malls manager Nadezhda Suddenok; CEO of the company System Integrator that developed the fire safety system Igor Polozinenko; an employee of the company, who personally installed the fire alarm Alexander Nikitin, a guard who allegedly turned off the emergency notification system when he received a fire signal Sergey Antyushin and fire team commander Sergey Genin, who was charged with negligence.

Moreover, on March 28, the court issued an arrest warrant for Ukrainian national Nikita Kuvikov known as pranker Yevgeny Volnov, who allegedly disinformed people of the death toll in the blaze, in absentia. He was charged with inciting hatred and enmity.

According to investigation, the pranker called medical settings and government agencies on the phone and distributed false information on the death toll in the accident in order to destabilize the situation. Reportedly, he said that about 300 people were killed by fire.
Treason and espionage caseload lowers  Russian Supreme Court

 RAPSI

15:34 20/04/2018

MOSCOW, April 20 (RAPSI)  Russian nationals stood trial on treason and espionage charges in 2017 less often than in 2016, according to the report of the Supreme Courts Justice Department obtained by RAPSI.

The Justice Department reported that 4 persons were found guilty of treason and 2 were convicted of espionage last year as compared to 14 and 3 respectively in 2016. There were no acquittals in these cases, according to statistics.

However, the number of people convicted of divulging state secrets increased from 25 to 28; and 3 persons were sentenced for receipt of top-secret information.

In total, 644 individuals were found guilty of crimes against foundations of the constitutional system and homeland security in 2017; 98 of them were sentenced to prison terms. Six defendants were acquitted, charges were dropped against 82, and 17 persons were found insane.

Incitement of hatred and enmity as well as violation of human dignity became the most frequent crimes last year with 460 people convicted. Calls for coup resulted in conviction for 108 persons.
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The Kardashians are closing the doors of their DASH stores.

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"After nearly 12 years, my sisters and I have decided to close the doors of our DASH stores," Kim wrote.

"We opened our first store as a family in 2006 and, since then, we have made so many lifelong memories."

"We've loved running DASH, but in the last few years, we've all grown so much individually. We've been busy running our own brands, as well as being moms and balancing work with our families. We know in our hearts that it's time to move on," the "Keeping Up with the Kardashians" star explained.

The Kardashians have DASH locations in Los Angeles, Calif., Miami Beach, Fla., and New York, N.Y. The stores sell clothing and accessories, including a DASH-branded line of products.

"We have to give a special thanks to the DASH employees and all of the incredible fans and customers who have supported us throughout the years! We couldn't have done it without you," Kim said. "Thank you to everyone!"

The announcement follows the birth of Khloe's first child, daughter True Thompson, with Tristan Thompson on Feb. 12.

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Kim welcomed her third child, daughter Chicago West, with Kanye West in January.

TMZ reported Friday that Kim plans to launch her own intimates and shapewear line this year. Sources said the television personality is teaming with the same company behind Khloe's Good American clothing line.
An RBI official said the supply of currency was adequate in the states facing a crunch at ATMs but the logistic issues led to the present situation

Illustration: Uttam Ghosh/Rediff.com

States such as Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat, which reported currency shortage in automated teller machines (ATMs) were the ones that got the highest supply of currency notes in 2017-18.

The Reserve Bank of Indias (RBIs) regional offices at Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Nagpur, Patna and Bhopal received the highest chunk of the currency from the note printing presses between April 1, 2017 and February 28, 2018, official data showed.

The finance ministry said in a statement on Tuesday that there has been an unusual spurt in currency demand in the last three months in some parts of the country, including Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar.

An RBI official said the supply of currency was adequate in the states facing a crunch at ATMs but the logistic issues led to the present situation.

Hyderabad received Rs 90,600 crore - the highest among all regional offices - in the period preceding demonetisation of high-value currency notes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 announced on November 8, 2016, till March 31, 2017.

In fact, the share of currency supplies to Hyderabad went up from 8.2 per cent in this period to 9.2 per cent in April-February 2017-18, despite being the highest receiver of cash immediately after demonetisation.

The RBIs regional office at Hyderabad supplies money to banks in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.

Ahmedabad received the second highest share (6.9 per cent) of currency notes between April 2017 and February 2018 in terms of value, followed by Nagpur (6.7 per cent), Patna (6.7 per cent) and Bhopal (6.6 per cent).

While the RBIs regional office at Ahmedabad supplies currency to Gujarat, Daman and Diu and Dadra and Nagar Haveli, the Patna office distributes money across Bihar and Jharkhand.

The RBIs Nagpur office sends money to parts of Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh and the Bhopal office to parts of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.

This points to the high supply of currency notes to Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh as well.

The chief ministers of both the states recently complained of a cash shortage at ATMs.

The share of currency supplies to Nagpur, Patna and Bhopal went up by around 1.4-2.4 percentage points from the first three months after demonetisation to April 2017-February 2018.

However, Karnataka, which also witnessed some cash crunch, was a different story.

Currency supplies to Bengaluru, which pumps money into banks in Karnataka, declined from 6.9 per cent, in the period between November 8, 2016, and March 31, 2017, to 5.7 per cent between April 1, 2017 and February 28, 2018.

Looking at the overall picture, the total cash supply across the country reduced by almost half between April 2017 and February-end 2018 compared to the first five months after demonetisation, official data reviewed by Business Standard showed.

From November 8, 2016, to March 31, 2017, Rs 10.986 trillion was supplied from the currency presses to Rs 592,900 crore in the first 11 months of 2017-18.

Demonetisation led to flushing out of around 85 per cent cash from the system. So, the cash supply will naturally be much higher in the first few months than the preceding period.

"You had to work in three shifts and ensure that you had to remonetise as quickly as possible.

"It required printing as many notes as possible. The same temper was not required to be maintained subsequently, the RBI official said.
The Tata Group has close to 110 companies and Chandrasekaran plans to bring this number down to around five or six.

Tata Sons chairman N Chandrasekaran has spent nearly 14 months leading one of the country's oldest and largest corporate houses.

As he moves into second gear, he has one message for group chief executives: explain how best the philosophy of simplification, synergy and scale can be brought to life within the group.

Addressing heads of businesses at the Tata groups annual leadership summit at the Taj Swarna in Amritsar recently, Chandrasekaran said the next two years would have to be devoted to drive this 3S philosophy aggressively if the $103-billion group had to scale newer heights, sources said.

Attended by close to 230 top executives of various Tata group companies, the idea behind the meet, Chandrasekarans second since taking over in February last year, was to harness the potential of firms and see how best a collaborative approach could be taken, apart from simplifying and scaling up operations.

The Tata Group has close to 110 companies and Chandrasekaran plans to bring this number down to around five or six.

A Tata Sons spokesperson said the company does not comment on internal matters or events.

The day-long meet started off with an address by Chandrasekaran in which he touched upon the annual performance of some of the key Tata group companies, said the sources quoted above.

It was followed by joint presentations by heads of companies on ways in which each were utilising the 3S philosophy in their businesses.

R Mukundan, managing director and chief executive at Tata Chemicals, for instance, elaborated on how his firm was beefing up its consumer-facing businesses, exiting non-core ones and sharpening focus on categories that could deliver growth.

Tata Chemicals has already set that process in motion, selling its phosphatic fertiliser business to a subsidiary of Indorama.

It also divested its urea business in August last year to Yara International and has invested in newer product segments such as neutraceuticals and silica.

Guenter Butschek, managing director and chief executive at Tata Motors, and TV Ravindran, global CEO and managing director of Tata Steel, shared a presentation on synergy, how the two companies had been collaborating with each other closely.

Rajesh Gopinathan, managing director and chief executive at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), shared insights on the way the company was scaling up operations at a time when the IT industry as a whole was facing challenges.

Ajoy Misra, managing director and chief executive at Tata Global Beverages (TGBL), talked about how his firm would increasingly push more of its brands to go global, in its attempt to gain scale.

At present, Tata Tea and Himalayan are part of its power brands list, apart from Tetley and Eight O Clock Coffee.

The plan would be to add to this list and some likely candidates include Tata Gluco Plus and Tata Water Plus, sources said.

For greater synergy, TGBL would also collaborate with Tata Chemicals on the branded foods business, officials privy to the presentation said.

The two companies would also cross-promote each other's brands the way TGBL and Tata Starbucks did.

TGBL would continue to get out of the non-core plantations business to focus on its branded business, they added.

The meet was also attended by R Venkatramanan, managing trustee, Tata Trusts.

In his presentation, Venkatramanan offered a peek into the philanthropic activities of the trusts, while delving on the scope of the trusts and Tata companies working together.

The One Tata approach, Chandrasekaran said, would help companies go to market as a more potent force and give them economies of scale and better bargaining power.

Croma, Voltas, Trent and Tata AIG, for instance, could tap into the 5 million-odd retail customer base of Tata Steel, he said.

The strategy adopted by Chandra is the right one. There are just too many businesses and companies that are not necessarily relevant to each other.

"By speaking of simplification, synergy and scale, Chandras move is to make the Tata Group more cohesive and united.

"That will be good in the long run and help the group to grow and free up resources to invest in newer areas, Harish HV, management consultant, who was earlier part of the India leadership team at Grant Thornton, said.

Photograph: Danish Siddiqui/Reuters
While most banks in India store all this data on Indian servers in their core banking systems, the current directive addresses new-age payment and fintech companies operating in the space

Illustration: Dominic Xavier/Rediff.com

Indian financial technology companies dont seem to catch a breath.

Even as firms operating in the financial space were coming to terms with know-your-customer norms, the Reserve Bank of Indias (RBIs) directive to store all financial data in India has made them even more resentful of the regulatory environment in India.

The central bank wants the companies to provide unfettered supervisory access to their data on payments, customers and all transactions, according to its notification dated April 6, 2018, which asks them to store all data related to transactions in India alone.

While most banks in India store all this data on Indian servers in their core banking systems, the current directive addresses new-age payment and fintech companies operating in the space.

Some of the system providers do not store their payments data in India, the central bank observed.

However, payment companies arent entirely pleased with the proposal.

Speaking to Business Standard, mobile application-based lending company CashE said even as it stored all their data in Mumbai, it had to move it from Singapore servers recently.

We moved it locally but moving involves a lot of time, effort and cost. Since its a live platform, you have to operate servers on both locations at the same time, which is costly and at the same time, there is a cost of moving (data) itself, said V Raman Kumar, chief executive officer (CEO), CashE.

Kumar said most companies these days preferred working with providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) instead of trying to build data farms, which is a costly exercise.

Notably, AWS recently entered India with its data centres in Mumbai, and much of the data of Indian companies is still on its US and Singapore servers.

However, that is soon likely to change.

It was only because of requests from multiple companies for having servers in the country that Amazon decided to set up shop in India, it said in a press release on its launch.

These same 75,000 Indian customers, along with others anxious to start using AWS, have asked for an AWS India Region so they can move their applications that require low latency and data sovereignty, said Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS.

Moving data from foreign servers to India is both a time-consuming and costly process.

A live server has to run on both geographies to enable a smooth transfer of data and sometimes, the cost of storage runs pretty high, depending on data requirements. For instance, CashE has 1.8 billion call records and thats just one of the dozens of indicators it collects for checking peoples loan eligibility.

It is in this context that companies are seeking more clarity from the RBI on what the proposal entails even as the central bank has given a deadline of six months to finish the process.

The three big card companies - Mastercard, Visa, and American Express - are learned to have conveyed their reservations to the RBI.

They companies are likely to be the worst-affected because they process the bulk of the countrys digital transactions and their network processors are situated across the world to maintain peak loads.

We will give a presentation to the RBI. We have never had any breach in data, and there is a substantial cost in shifting data centres here. Ultimately this extra cost will be passed on consumers, said a senior executive of a leading cards company.

Even as some companies are planning to move their data, others are waiting for clarity.

Amazon Pay, PayPal, and Mastercard told Business Standard that they are reviewing the notification.

In processing purchase transactions, Mastercards network only receives the card account number, the merchant name and location, the date and the amount of the transaction. Mastercard does not know what the cardholder is buying, said Porush Singh, divisional president, Mastercard (South Asia).

Payment networks have concerns, which the Payments Council of India is considering before its consultation with the stakeholders this week.

International transactions are one of those. Through those, data is carried outside the country and is stored in foreign processors.

There is the issue of having a back-up data retrieval centre, which is usually in a foreign country, according to Naveen Surya, chairman of the council.

The move is a good step to provide the government access to citizens financial data but it needs to be looked at carefully.

"Especially the phrase only in India is problematic. People should be allowed to back up their data elsewhere as long as they are running a live server in India, Surya said.

He added there were other reasons too for holding data abroad such as the technologies available, cost factors and emergency preparedness systems such as disaster recovery centres.

Meanwhile, Sharad Sharma, co-founder of iSPIRT foundation, said data residency was a primitive regime as compared to a consent-based data sharing regime. He said data could be stored anywhere as long as it was safe.

The problem of data residency is that it doesnt work unless you have the consent to access the data and encryption keys if the data is encrypted.

"This is why the consent framework is more important than data residency, the data can be stored anywhere but if you cant access it, then theres no use, he said.

We need to look at making strong contracts with firms and institutions that they will provide data whenever needed without any conditions and allow them to store it anywhere they want.
'The involvement of policemen in either committing the crime or shielding the accused in Kathua and Unna points to a crumbling civil and moral order,' says Amulya Ganguli.

Illustration: Uttam Ghosh/Rediff.com

Perhaps for the first time in India, or anywhere else in the world, three legislators of a ruling party have had to pay the price for their dubious role in the most heinous of crimes, the rape of minors.

Two of them, who were ministers in Jammu and Kashmir, have had to resign three months after an eight-year-old girl was raped and murdered in Kathua.

They had been 'misled', according to a BJP spokesperson, into supporting the accused to the accompaniment of patriotic slogans while the third legislator has been arrested in Uttar Pradesh after considerable delay in connection with the rape of a 17-year-old girl in Unnao.

Normally, those associated with a political party face charges of corruption or of inciting communal or caste-related violence.

Considering that 186 of 541 MPs, or 34 per cent, have criminal antecedents, it is not surprising that Indian politicians have to spend as much time in fighting legal battles as working for the country's vikas.

If the number of MPs and MLAs are taken together, then the percentage rises to 36 with 1,765 legislators at the national and state levels out of a total of 4,896 facing criminal charges.

But sleaze and fuelling communal or caste animosity are not the only crimes of which the politicians are accused.

They have also been charged with murder, kidnapping, arson and banditry.

However, there are not too many rape cases, especially of minors.

Now, unfortunately, this lacuna is being filled.

As the Kathua and Unnao rape cases show, the involvement of politicians can be both direct and indirect.

In the Kathua case, it was indirect in the sense that the two BJP ministers of the Mehbooba Mufti government had addressed a rally in support of the alleged rapists, who included policemen.

However, if they were 'misled' in this regard, the reason probably was, as a BJP MP has said, the crime was a Pakistani conspiracy and the Hindus (who are the accused while the child was a Muslim) could not have had anything to do with it since they comprise a mere one per cent of the state's population and live in fear.

Notwithstanding insightful explanations of this nature, their resignations have followed the apparent realisation among the BJP top brass that the growing public outrage over the two rapes could damage the party's electoral prospects.

Moreover, in the age of the Internet, the horrible crime in Kathua has led to world-wide condemnation with United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres calling for the guilty to be brought to justice.

In the Unnao case, the accused MLA has been arrested, but by the CBI and not the police, who called him mananiya vidhyakji (honorable legislator) at during a press briefing while the legislator, claiming innocence, was roaming free.

The deferential behaviour of Chief Minister Ajay Singh Bisht's police towards the accused is understandable because of the latter's clout.

As the Allahabad high court said, 'the disturbing feature of the case is that the law and order machinery and government officials were directly in league (with) and under the influence' of the suspect.

The involvement of policemen in either committing the crime or shielding the accused in Kathua and Unna points to a crumbling civil and moral order.

The BJP's initial reaction to the Opposition's protests on the Kathua horror was to say that the non-BJP parties were prone to crying 'wolf' at the slightest opportunity, whether chanting 'minority, minority' at one time or 'Dalit, Dalit' at another and 'women, women' on the third occasion.

But rapes, especially of children and adolescents, can have a traumatising impact on ordinary people.

This is all the more so if the offence is accompanied by mind-numbing brutality as in the Kathua case where a person was called in from Meerut to 'satisfy his lust' and the killing of the girl was delayed till another person could rape her one last time.

The BJP's question as to why the Congress did not organise candlelight marches when crimes were committed against women during the 1984 anti-Sikh riots or when a girl was recently raped and burnt alive in Assam is palpably an evasive tactic.

In advancing such arguments, including the Pakistani conspiracy charge, the BJP is demonstrating its nervousness over the realisation that the Opposition has found yet another issue -- apart from 'minority, minority', 'Dalit, Dalit' and 'women, women' -- which can have wide resonance.

There is little doubt that the otherwise surefooted BJP has been stumbling badly of late.

Amulya Ganguli is a writer on current affairs.
'So you wonder, couldn't he have combined these two qualities: His love of his own voice, and his acting talents, to voice concern about the Kathua and Unnao rapes?' asks Jyoti Punwani.

'His supporters are siding with the accused in the first case, and are the accused in the second.'



IMAGE: Prime Minister Narendra D Modi at the Bharat Ki Baat event in London, April 18, 2018. Photograph: Press Information Bureau

You have to hand it to him.

After official acknowledgement that demonetisation achieved none of its declared goals, and authoritative reports that it destroyed small businesses and rendered nearly 2 million jobless, the prime minister can still boast about this disastrous measure to a hand-picked audience of NRIs in London, none of whom must have been affected by it.

The boast became a cruel joke when he said: 'My friend abroad thought I was finished when I announced notebandi. But, my honest countrymen were ready to bear hardships to bring integrity back into the system.'

The PM knew he played a fast one on the 'honest countrymen' who trusted him. He could have just kept quiet about the disaster wrought, it now appears, only to influence UP's voters.

Demonetisation cost close to 100 lives. The fact that Narendra D Modi could boast about it tells you a lot about politicians.

Modi's performance at Westminster on Wednesday, April 18, reminded one of another prime minister. While self-righteously proclaiming that he would not use this platform to criticise his political opponents, the PM attacked Indira Gandhi's famous 'Garibi Hatao' slogan (and the Gandhi family several times without naming it).

But he is the one PM who has come closest to Indira Gandhi.

Be it the capacity to indulge in doublespeak, or the desire to concentrate power in one person, or the projection of oneself as a martyr ('If I weren't there, whom would you throw stones at? I alone have faced them all, at least my countrymen didn't have to face them') who worked day and night for the poor, Modi has a lot of qualities in common with India's first dictator.

Suddenly, P V Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh shine in a new light -- they didn't even bother to pretend they were there for the poor. Modi reaps the benefits of the liberalisation they introduced, but pretends he is still in the old 'socialist' era -- with one difference.

His mantra, said the PM, was: 'Empower the poor, don't feed them.' This would have been another jumla, but it is tragically true: His government has actually been depriving the poorest of the poor of food because of glitches in their Aadhar card. Just like Indira Gandhi's 'Garibi hatao' came to mean 'Garib hatao'.

But Modi is one up on Indira. She couldn't go on and on about her humble origins. He can.

What was worse about the PM's Westminster show? His repeated references to his humble origins, or his interviewer's servility?

Had Prasoon Joshi been just a regular journalist, his cloying questions would not have set your teeth on edge. But Joshi is a poet of some talent. To watch him debase it in the service of power brings to mind images of Raj Kavis in the durbars of medieval rajas.

Forget the Nirav Modi and Mehul Joshi scams, the cow lynchings and the Bihar riots engineered by RSS supporters, the poison aimed at Muslims day after day by BJP leaders. No one expected either Prasoon Joshi or the PM to talk about these.

Bur to start off the interview with a reference to Modi's chaiwallah beginnings?

This wasn't a prime minister who had just taken over. Over the last four years, everyone has come to know that this man's very first gesture: Flying to the capital to take oath as PM not on the national carrier, but on an Adani plane, was an indication of things to come.

This is one PM who makes no bones about his closeness to the richest families in the country. No one has forgotten the gold striped suit, either.

Was it because the Nirav Modi taint is still fresh that Prasoon Joshi gave his Dear Leader the opportunity to wax eloquent at the very beginning itself about his supposedly poor childhood?

As Modi went on and on at different points in the unending interview about his close encounters with deprivation, the spectre of diamond merchants running away with our money receded into the background.

One thing emerged clearly: The PM loves the sound of his own voice. As he droned on and on, be it about urea, or his ability to remain detached, one couldn't help wondering, how much longer will this go on?

Another impression got confirmed: Our PM is a fine actor. Poor Manmohan Singh couldn't get a single expression on his frozen face. Narasimha Rao never needed to. But once Modi's prime ministerial campaign began in late 2013, the country got the chance to see what a skilled performer he was.

The London performance confirmed that four years later, he is still tops at this game.

So you wonder, couldn't he have combined these two qualities: His love of his own voice, and his acting talents, to voice concern about the Kathua and Unnao rapes? His supporters are siding with the accused in the first case, and are the accused in the second.

At least for form's sake, he could have sounded and looked pained as only he knows how to, and waved an admonishing finger (he did that to the London audience all the time) here, at home, to the 'sava sau crore' he loves to claim voted him to power? (In fact, he got 31% votes from the 66% turnout in 2014 -- about 20 crore at best.)

He looked pained about the rapes in London -- but even there, he couldn't bring himself to name the little girl who was raped and whose name and face have become familiar across the country.

For that wouldn't have behoved the true RSS pracharak that Narendra D Modi is. He is not one to betray his origins, the way our previous RSS prime minister did sometimes.

Instead, he used his talents to spin tales about 'our' generosity towards the Rohingya, when his government has been trying to deport them to sure death; towards Nepal, when his government is the first Indian government to alienate this tiny country with whom we have shared such close relations; indeed, towards the world.

All this under his stewardship, the 'chai bechney wallah' whom everyone had thought would be lost when it came to foreign affairs! Applause followed, expectedly. Was this an oblique hit at Nehru, India's only world statesman, who remained an aristocrat all his life?

'We will neither lower our eyes in front of others nor look down on anyone, but look everyone square in the face,' had been his government's mantra he said, and then went on to boast about the achievement we had all forgotten: The magical 'surgical strike'.

Official figures say that more jawans died, more ceasefire violations took place and Kashmir saw 31% more terror-related deaths in the 12 months after the September 2016 surgical strike than before it.

But catch Prasoon Joshi pointing that out!

Instead, he reminded his leader that some people had actually questioned those strikes; coming across exactly like the student who snitches to his teacher about his classmate's misconduct in a bid to curry favour.

As if this wasn't enough, Joshi actually asked him how he coped with the constant criticism he was subject to. 'Criticism is the beauty of democracy,' replied the man whose cops arrest those who dare mock him on Facebook.
'In order for somebody to do Big Brother kind of a job, one has to collect lots of data. Aadhaar collects very minimal data whether at the time of enrollment or at the time of authentication.'

At a time when civil society and the public at large have raised concerns over the overarching power the government has given to the Aadhaar programme, Ajay Bhushan Pandey, chief executive officer, Unique Identification Authority of India, tells Kiran Rathee that the idea of Aadhaar being used as a Big Brother programme for the government to spy on citizens is completely unfounded.

Moreover, while some people have been asking to get external agencies to review the security of Aadhaar, Pandey says being a critical State function, it's better to not 'be disclosing all your cards to everybody'.

UIDAI is one of the entities in the world which has over a billion users, putting the Authority in the league of firms like Google, Apple and Microsoft. Regarding security procedures, these companies do hackathons, involve ethical hackers, and crowd source ideas to further improve security. Is UIDAI also open to do such things?

Unlike all these platforms you have mentioned, though we are also a very large platform, we are performing a very crucial State function for which security is important.

We take various possible measures and try to assess all kinds of feedback not only what is coming in media or social media, but also lots of things which may not be appearing in media at all. There may be some people who may be very secretly doing it (attacking UIDAI servers).

So what we have to do and what we are doing is that we are constantly assessing the threats which may be emerging from anywhere be it media or social media or even outside, a completely unknown domain, and we take proactive measures to ensure that such attempts do not at all succeed.

The only constraint here is that we do not discuss what kind of threats we get and what are the kinds of counter-measures that we take in the interest of security because one of the fundamental principles of the security is that you have to access the risks and you have to take action but at the same time, you should not be disclosing all your cards to everybody.

There have been voices from members of civil society that Aadhaar invades privacy of citizens. What is your take on that?

There could be a misconception among a section of people. What they need to understand is that Aadhaar is an enabler. Aadhaar is for empowerment and it is nowhere going to be a Big Brother or so. It is completely ruled out in the Aadhaar architecture and Aadhaar design and law itself.

In order for somebody to do Big Brother kind of a job, one has to collect lots of data. Aadhaar collects very minimal data whether at the time of enrollment or at the time of authentication.

Aadhaar collects only the basic demographics like name, age, gender, and biometrics like face, fingerprints and iris. It does not collect the data about a person's family, eating habits, contact list, income, profession, likes or dislikes, bank account details.

Aadhaar does not have that kind of information anywhere in its database. Aadhaar by law is prohibited from asking for such information. Therefore, any apprehension of future misuse is also ruled out because asking or collecting such information in future is completely prohibited under the Aadhaar Act and any violation will be dealt with criminal offence.

Whoever is responsible for collecting and maintaining such data can be charged criminally. Therefore, the UIDAI maintains the principle of minimal data and optimal ignorance. So when you dont have data, the question of somebody becoming a Big Brother does not arise.

But with the government linking most of the services such as bank accounts and mobile numbers with Aadhaar, the question of surveillance arises?

Let me give a counter example. Suppose you are giving your mobile number and PAN card at most places. Can the government link all these data just like that? If you have given your mobile number and PAN card to a bank and if you have given your mobile number and PAN card to income tax authorities and you have also given mobile number and PAN card for buying a property.

Now that these two numbers are common in these three databases, can the government, without authority of the law, link the three databases? No, the government cannot do this.

Lets suppose the government asks the bank to give a persons data. Will the bank give? The answer is no because under banking laws it is not allowed and data will not be given even to the government.

Similarly, if your data is held with some department, data has to be used for that purpose only. People have given their PAN card numbers at many places. Was any government able to aggregate the data on the basis of PAN card? The answer is no.

The government is not in the business of becoming a Big Brother as India is a strong democratic state where the rule of law is there with strong judicial oversight and free press.

If any government department wants data, it can only ask for it under a due authority of law. For example, if the income tax department wants bank details of a person, then it has to issue a notice under the Income Tax Act saying there is a proceeding to be conducted against the person on the basis of reasonable apprehension of a possible tax evasion and then ask for data.

But without any reasonable cause or suspicion, no income tax officer can ask for anyones data just because the PAN card is in data.

If Aadhaar number is given to 10 different authorities that does not automatically mean that the data can be aggregated by anyone. That is not possible.

In case of Aadhaar, it will be doubly difficult. For example, if a bank account which is linked with Aadhaar, the banking law and also Aadhaar law will apply on sharing of a customer's data.

So it is double protection.

If some bank unauthroisedly discloses Aadhaar details to other agency, be it a government, then it will be violating the law. Any such unlawful disclosure is a criminal offence, punishable with three years imprisonment.

So with such strong safeguard, the possibility of Aadhaar becoming an instrument of surveillance is completely ruled out.

There have been instances when the demographic details of Aadhaar have been leaked and made public. Recently, there were reports that Aadhaar demographic details can be bought for a few rupees?

It was not a case of data breach. After all, name, age, gender and address are not secret information. The same information is also available on voter ID cards.

The Aadhaar Act says is it sensitive information but it is not secret. Therefore, the Aadhaar Act says even though it is just a basic demographic information such as name, address, etc, even that should not be disclosed without the consent of the Aadhaar holder.

But supposing if such demographic information is disclosed, this is not a case of data breach. It would be a case of unauthorised disclosure which is punishable under the Aadhaar Act as well as other laws such as the Information Technology Act, etc.

So, we need to understand the difference between unauthorised disclosure and data breach.

There have been instances when biometric authentication did not take place due to worn out fingerprints in old age or hard manual work. What are the other modes of authentication?

We have multiple modes of authentication. If the fingerprint does not work, we have said the iris could be tried and one time password method could be tried.

Now we are coming up with face authentication from July 1 where the persons fingerprint, along with the face, will be used. So even if the fingerprint match score is less, along with the face, the person could be authenticated.

Even after all this, if there is an authentication failure, the law provides that a backup mechanism should always be there so that no one should be denied benefits.

Instructions have been issued from the cabinet secretary to all the agencies that nobody is denied of the benefits due to lack of Aadhaar authentication.

In some instances where it was found that a person has been denied benefits, we are advising the state governments to be more vigilant and they need to take action against those who are not following the instructions.

In a country of 1.2 billion people if the instructions have been issued and if they are largely complied with, there may be few aberrations, but the whole system should not be discarded.

Some of the state governments were also collecting biometric data for their own schemes. There must be duplication as Aadhaar data is now used for most of the welfare schemes across the country?

That was a situation prior to Aadhaar but now most of the state agencies have stopped collecting biometrics and they are relying on Aadhaar authentication. The data which the state governments collected was in their domain and our biometrics are quite different and encrypted in different manner.

Various fintech companies have approached UIDAI to revoke access to agencies that provide e-KYC verification and authentication services for them?

UIDAI has not barred anyone. All the agencies which are there with us they continue to operate services.

What we have done is that we are asking them to follow provisions under the Aadhaar Act strictly and they should not share data with anyone else, even the basic demographic data should not be shared.

Aadhaar has been given to 1.2 billion people. They will need to establish their identity to get hassle-free services not only from the government, but also from various private bodies.

So certain safeguards have to be there because we don't want Aadhaar number to proliferate at various places like the mobile number. For that we are bringing this virtual ID and also now offline verification through the QR code.

Given the concerns regarding privacy, is Aadhaar open to some third-party audit of the security system?

What kind of audit we are talking about? See we live in a parliamentary democracy. The Aadhaar Act provides for certain security audit from Standardisation Testing and Quality Certification (STQC), then we have Comptroller and Auditor General audit and there is also the parliamentary oversight.

With all these safeguards, the question is, which third-party we are talking about.

The question is, Aadhaar is national critical infrastructure where the whole country's economic activity will depend, to that extent whatever is necessary, Parliament in its wisdom has decided that UIDAI will be audited in this way, so best thing is to confine ourselves to that kind of auditing.

Just because some people are saying and therefore we should open this nationally vital critical infrastructure to such use.
'Even the ruling party -- if it really respects the independence of the judiciary and democracy -- should support this impeachment motion.'



IMAGE: Justice Dipak Misra is sworn in as the 45th Chief Justice of India by President Ram Nath Kovind at Rashtrapati Bhavan, August 28, 2017. Photograph: @rashtrapatibhvn/Twitter

The Congress and other Opposition parties have submitted a notice to initate impeachment proceedings against Chief Justice Dipak Misra.

This is the first time in India's history that a motion to impeach a Chief Justice of India has been presented.

Over 64 MPs belonging to 7 political parties have signed the notice for impeachment proceedings against the CJI.

The parties include the Congress, the Nationalist Congress Party, the Communist Party of India-Marxist, the Communist Party of India, the Samajwadi Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Indian Union Muslim League.

MPs from these parties met Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu -- who is also the chairman of the Rajya Sabha -- on Friday, April 20, 2018, and gave notice for the impeachment of the CJI.

Seventy-one Rajya Sabha MPs had signed the notice for impeachment, but as seven retired, the number now is 64.

An impeachment motion in the Rajya Sabha has to be supported by at least 50 MPs of the Upper House.

The number of MPs supporting such a motion in the Lok Sabha is 100.

Once a notice for an impeachment motion is submitted to the Rajya Sabha chairman, he will ascertain if there is merit or ground for moving such a motion.

In case he finds merit, then he may form a committee to look into it, else he can reject it.

Addressing a press conference after the MPs met Naidu, former Union minister Kapil Sibal -- a senior lawyer himself -- said, 'We have moved a motion for removal of the Chief Justice of India under five grounds of misbehaviour.

'Chief Justice Dipak Misra violated Constitutional norms while exercising his powers,' Sibal said.

'When Supreme Court judges believe the judiciary's independence is under threat, alluding to the CJI's functioning, should we stand still and do nothing?'

'We wish this day had never come in the fabric of our Constitutional framework. Since the day he (Justice Dipak Misra) was appointed as CJI there have been questions raised in the manner in which he has dealt with certain cases,' Sibal alleged.

A Supreme Court bench of Justices A K Sikri and Ashok Bhushan, meanwhile, termed as 'unfortunate' the statement made by lawmakers on impeaching the CJI, but refused to issue a gag order while posting the hearing on the matter to May 7.

The Opposition's impeachment notice comes a day after the Supreme Court rejected a bunch of petitions seeking an independent probe into the death of Judge B H Loya who was hearing the Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case.

The Supreme Court judgment in the Loya case was delivered by a bench headed by the Chief Justice of India.

Earlier, as the Congress canvassed support from like-minded Opposition MPs for signing a motion to impeach the Chief Justice of India, senior Supreme Court advocate Dushyant Dave spoke to Rediff.com's Prasanna D Zore about the move.

What will be the impact of the Opposition-planned impeachment motion against the Chief Justice of India irrespective of its fate?

This is the most historic development today.

It is also the saddest development for the judiciary of the country.

Given the numbers that the Opposition has in both Houses of Parliament, do you think this impeachment motion will succeed even if it is tabled in Parliament?

It may not succeed, but the combined Opposition speaks on behalf of the more than 63 per cent votes that they polled in the 2014 general election.

The BJP won that election with 37 per cent vote share only.

The combined Opposition represents the majority of voters of the country and is saying that it has no faith in the Chief Justice of India.

The outcome (of this impeachment motion) is not important.

What matters more is that the Opposition political parties across the spectrum are showing their lack of faith in the Chief Justice of India. And this is a very serious matter for India's democracy.

How will this impeachment motion impact the functioning of the judiciary, regardless of the fate of the motion?

It will only help improve the (functioning of the) judiciary.

I am glad that the Opposition has raised this issue and even the ruling party -- if it really respects the independence of the judiciary and democracy -- should support this impeachment motion.

Do you think the Rajya Sabha chairman will accept such a motion?

He will not accept it.

The BJP is killing democracy in every possible sense and they are succeeding given their brute majority (in the Lok Sabha).

If 50 Rajya Sabha MPs sign for impeaching the Chief Justice of India, it will be the darkest day in the history of India's judiciary.

If the chairman of the Rajya Sabha disallows the impeachment motion, what can the Opposition do?

The Opposition can always move the courts and the judiciary has the right to correct the chairman's action. Such decisions can always be corrected using the judicial review.

I have complete faith in the Indian judiciary. I am sure truth will prevail ultimately.
'A number of facts are still left unaddressed by the Supreme Court judgment.'

'I think there are enough grounds for an inquiry to be ordered.'

IMAGE: An Aam Aadmi Party protest against the Supreme Court's verdict in the Judge B H Loya case, Mumbai, April 19, 2018. Photograph: Kind courtesy @AAPMumbai/Twitter

On April 19, 2018, the Supreme Court dismissed pleas seeking an independent probe into the death of special Central Bureau of Investigation judge B H Loya, ruling that the judge died of natural causes and the petitions were a 'serious attempt to scandalise and obstruct the course of justice'.

The pleas in the case were filed after an investigative report published by Caravan magazine (external link), which claimed that Judge Brijgopal Harkishan Loya's family suspected foul play in his death.

Despite the setback, Hartosh Singh Bal, political editor, Caravan, remains unfazed.

"These are the signs that we are living in a democratic society," Bal tells Rediff.com's Syed Firdaus Ashraf.

What is your first reaction to the Supreme Court judgment not to inquire into Judge Loya's death?

I have read the (114 page) judgment quickly, but will read it in detail later. On first reading, I can say I am not satisfied by the conclusion of the judgment.

I think a lot of facts that were brought to light by Caravan have not been considered in this judgment.

Caravan published 22 reports on Judge Loya's death; some being detailed investigative reports. As an editor, do you see the judgment as a failure?

We have done our job. Journalism does not begin or end with the courts. That is where the law ends.

Our job is to keep doing it and if there are new facts we will continue to look for them.

If the Supreme Court feels that these facts do not merit an inquiry and we feel that maybe there is a lot more to the story, then it is our job to continue to look for things that will convince the Supreme Court.

I feel there is enough ground for an inquiry so obviously I am in disagreement with the conclusion of the Supreme Court. They have formed their own opinion.

We have done 22 stories on the basis of which I have formed my opinion factually, so there can be a disagreement.

The judgment was especially harsh on the petitioners. It questioned the the petitioners's motives.

I do not want to get into the observations of the Supreme Court.

On factual positions, factual statements and factual arguments, I am willing to give you reasons why I think significant issues have been glossed over, factual issues have been glossed over in the judgment and have not been paid enough attention to.

What is the Judge Loya case? Judge Brijgopal Harkishan Loya presided over the Central Bureau of Investigation special court in Mumbai and was hearing one of the most high-profile cases in the country, involving the alleged encounter killing of Sohrabuddin Sheikh in 2005. The prime accused in the case was Amit Shah -- Gujarat's minister of state for home at the time of Sohrabuddin's killing, and the Bharatiya Janata Party's national president at the time of Judge Loya's death. On December 1, 2014, Judge Loya died in Nagpur, where he had travelled for a colleague's daughter's wedding. Subsequently, his sister Anuradha Biyani raised questions about the circumstances surrounding his death.

The issue has become a Congress versus BJP one.

That is not our concern. Our job is journalism.

I think we have done a very good job of it. As an organisation, we are proud of what we have done and continue to keep doing so.

I think a number of facts are still left unaddressed by the Supreme Court judgment. I think there are enough grounds for an inquiry to be ordered or asked for.

Caravan published a report by Dr R K Sharma, former head of the forensic medicine and toxicology department at AIIMS, in which he said there was a possibility of trauma to the brain or death because of possible poisoning.

What was the Supreme Court's observation on this?

The Supreme Court has made an observation that the Maharashtra government filed a letter by R K Sharma, saying he has been quoted out of context, that wrong conclusions have been drawn.

We have already done a story when these documents were first filed before the Supreme Court that what R K Sharma is stating does not stand the scrutiny of evidence.

Even today, I have reproduced that story and the WhatsApp interaction between R K Sharma and our reporter.

Every quote has been cross-checked with R K Sharma, the conclusion has been cross-checked with R K Sharma. Everything has gone through him.

Now for him to turn before the Supreme Court in a statement is the very reason we are saying an inquiry is necessary.

There is a discrepancy with the evidence in our hands, and what he is claiming before the statement to the Maharashtra state police, which can't be correct.

This is why an inquiry is needed so cross-examination is possible, affidavits are filed.

This cannot be dismissed at the level of a discreet inquiry of the Maharashtra state intelligence department.

The Supreme Court judgment, it appears, relies heavily on the versions by Judges Kulkarni and Modak who were with Judge Loya when he died. The court accepted their version that Judge Loya died a natural death.

I want to say something in that regard from a realistic position.

A judge acting in a non-judicial capacity has to be held to the same standard as any other witness is and subject to the same standard of scrutiny.

I think there was a need for an affidavit to be filed and cross-examination of the judges to be held because there are discrepancies and differences between the judges' submissions.

Important questions have remained unanswered.

'There can be differences about the judgment, that is part of democracy. We can disagree on factual grounds with an argument made by the Supreme Court. That is also part of democracy.'

From day 1, Judge Loya's son Anuj Loya has been saying there was no foul play.

Initially, when we reported the story, Anuj said if something happens to him or his family, he will hold the chief justice of the Bombay high court responsible.

It is much after the story was published that Anuj supposedly retracted his statement.

There was a press conference which you saw for yourself and you can draw your own conclusions.

How much merit will you to give to a press conference where a lawyer was speaking on his behalf?

What about Judge Loya's sister? Has she reacted?

You can check The Print's story where Judge Loya's sister Anuradha Biyani says she has lost hope (external link).

What does this judgment mean for our democracy?

The possibility that such stories can be done and the Supreme Court considers the cases and we continue to keep doing journalism. These are the signs that we are living in a democratic society.

There can be differences about the judgment, that is part of our democracy.

We can disagree on factual grounds with an argument made by the Supreme Court. That is also part of a democracy.

We feel if we continue to do our work, maybe we will be able to change the mind of the Supreme Court if more facts are brought to bear. I think this is an ongoing process.

I don't think we see it as a defeat of democracy, rather this is a part of the democratic process.

Are you still hopeful?

It is not my job to be hopeful or not be hopeful. We will continue to do journalism.

On Judge Loya's death, we do feel there are important facts which still remain unanswered.

There may be other facts that we need to examine and that is part of our journalistic duty, which we will continue to do.
Actor-turned-politician Shekher in a statement said he had forwarded a friend's post 'without reading' the content.

IMAGE: Journalists protest against Tamil Nadu BJP politician S Ve Shekher hurling stones at his house in Chennai. The actor-politician had courted controversy for making derogatory remarks against media and women scribes in particular, on social media, in Chennai, on Friday. Photograph: PTI Photo

Journalists on Friday protested actor-turned-Bharatiya Janata Party politician S Ve Shekher's shared Facebook post that contained derogatory remarks on the media and women scribes, even as he tendered an apology.

Media persons protested near the state BJP headquarters in Chennai demanding action against Shekher.

The scribes shouted slogans and held placards reading 'vitriol' against media should stop.

They also urged women leaders in the BJP to 'speak up'.

Earlier in the day, Shekher in a statement said he had forwarded a friend's post 'without reading' the content and apologised for the same.

The message was forwarded 'without reading the content, by mistake... was unintentional.When it was pointed out by a friend that the content was abusive, it was removed immediately', he said.

The Facebook post was reportedly shared on Thursday, but was found removed later.

The post also makes insinuations against the media and women journalists in light of the 'patgate' row involving Tamil Nadu Governor Banwarilal Purohit.

The 78-year-old governor had patted on the cheek of a woman journalist earlier this week during the conclusion of a press meet in Chennai, apparently to diplomatically avoid queries posed by her.

The incident had triggered a furore with political parties, including the opposition Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, calling for his removal as Tamil Nadu governor.

Purohit later apologised to the woman scribe.

Shekher's shared post also had some caustic references to the woman scribe whose cheek the governor patted.

These drew instant condemnation, with a number of journalists lashing out at his post, which was found removed later.

The actor-politician said he does not endorse the views expressed in the post he shared.

The Chennai Union of Journalists denounced Shekher over the post, with many journalists taking to Twitter and Facebook to express their anger.

"I come from a family that respects women and women journalists. If I had hurt anyone in the very few minutes of (sharing) that post... it was not on purpose and (I express) my heartfelt apologies," he said.

Shekher, however, said he was 'surprised' to find some people circulated the screenshots of the post without finding them offensive.

Meanwhile, some persons have also filed a police complaint against Shekher.
The report by Association for Democratic Reforms has the highest number of such politicians at 12.

Students shout slogans during a protest against the rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua near Jammu Photograph: Danish Ismail/Reuters

At least 48 MPs and MLAs have declared cases related to crime against women, with Bharatiya Janata Party having the highest number of such politicians at 12, a report said on Thursday amid a nation-wide outrage over rape incidents, including in Uttar Pradeshs Unnao where a ruling party lawmaker is an accused.

Out of 1,580 (33 per cent) MPs/MLAs analysed with declared criminal cases, 48 have declared cases related to crime against women, as per the report by Association for Democratic Reforms.

This includes 45 MLAs and 3 MPs, who have declared cases of crime against women such as charges related to assault of woman with intent to outrage her modesty, kidnapping, abducting or inducing woman to compel her to marriage, rape, domestic violence and trafficking, the Delhi-based think-tank said.

Giving party-wise details, the report said that BJP has the highest number of MPs and MLAs ie 12, followed by Shiv Sena and Trinamool Congress who have declared cases related to crime against women.

The report is based on an analysis of 4,845 out of 4,896 election affidavits of current MPs and MLAs. This includes 768 out of 776 affidavits of MPs and 4,077 out of 4,120 MLAs across the country.

All major political parties give tickets to candidates with cases of crime against women especially rape and therefore hindering the safety and dignity of women as citizens.

These are serious cases where charges have been framed and cognisance has been taken by the courts. Hence, political parties have been in a way abetting to circumstances that lead to such events that they so easily but vehemently condemn in Parliament, the report said.

Among states, Maharashtra has the highest number of MPs and MLAs (12), followed by West Bengal, Odisha and Andhra Pradesh each with five MPs and MLAs who have declared cases related to crime against women.

ADR and National Election Watch have recommended that candidates with serious criminal background should be debarred from contesting elections. Also, political parties should disclose the criteria on which candidates are given tickets and that cases against MPs and MLAs should be fast-tracked and decided upon in a time-bound manner, they added.

According to the report, in the last five years, recognised parties have given tickets to 26 candidates who had declared cases related to rape. During this period, 14 independent candidates with declared cases related to rape have contested for Lok Sabha, Rajya Sabha and state assembly elections.

As per the analysis, 327 candidates who had declared cases related to crime against women were given tickets by recognised political parties. Also, 118 independent candidates with declared cases related to crime against women had contested for Lok Sabha, Rajya Sabha and state assembly elections in the last five years.

Among major parties, in the last five years, 47 candidates with declared cases related to crime against women were given tickets by BJP. As many as 35 such candidates were given tickets by BSP, followed by 24 from Congress. The candidates had contested in Lok Sabha, Rajya Sabha and state assembly polls.

The report also noted that among states, in the last five years, Maharashtra had the highest number of such candidates at 65, followed by Bihar (62) and West Bengal (52) (including independents).

The analysis comes at a time when there are rising rape incidents, including those reported from Kathua in Jammu and Kashmir, Unnao and Surat in Gujarat.
IMAGE: Congress leaders Ghulam Nabi Azad, Kapil Sibal, Communist Party of India's D Raja and K T S Tulsi during a press conference after opposition parties submitted a notice to the Vice President and Rajya Sabha Chairperson Venkaiah Naidu to initiate impeachment proceedings against Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, in New Delhi on Friday. Photograph: Kamal Singh/PTI Photo

The Supreme Court on Friday said it was 'very disturbed' at the course of developments involving public statements by the members of Parliament on the removal of the Chief Justice of India.

The observations were made during the hearing of a petition, a few hours before the Congress and other opposition parties submitted a notice to Rajya Sabha Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu for initiating impeachment proceedings against CJI Dipak Misra.

The apex court said it was 'very unfortunate' that despite knowing the law that till a certain point, the issue of impeachment cannot be made public, the politicians were holding public discussions.

After a brief hearing, a bench of Justices A K Sikri and Ashok Bhushan sought the assistance of Attorney General K K Venugopal to deal with the issue and a plea which has sought laying of guidelines to regulate the procedure to be followed prior to initiating a motion for removing a judge of the top court.

"We all are very disturbed about it," Justice Sikri said while asking the attorney general to assist in the matter.

The move came a day after the apex court rejected the pleas of those, including Congress leader Tehseen Poonawalla, seeking an independent probe into the death of special Central Bureau of Investigation Judge B H Loya, who was hearing the high-profile Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case in which Bharatiya Janata Party president Amit Shah was discharged by the court.

During the hearing on Friday, the apex court refused to gag the media at this stage from publishing or telecasting any information relating to the discussions and deliberations on removal of judges of either the apex court or the high courts.

Senior advocate Meenakshi Arora, representing an NGO, 'In Pursuit of Justice', argued that politicians were making all kinds of public statements about removal of a judge without there being any motion in this regard before Parliament.

"There can be no discussion (about removal of a judge) till a point because that will have a serious impact on the functioning of the judge concerned," she said, adding, "We are divided on polarised lines. Politics is divided on it".

Apparently convinced with the argument, the bench observed, "This is very unfortunate what is happening".

When Arora raised the issue of gagging the media from publishing such public statements, the bench said, "The law is very clear. Everybody knows the law. Even legislature knows the law. Can we take it up on the judicial side, that is what we have to see."

The counsel, however, said a judge has to perform his duties "fearlessly" and such public statements cannot be made by the politicians like this.

The lawyer then requested the bench, "Please restrain the media".

To this, the apex court said it would not do so without hearing the attorney general and posted the matter for hearing on May 7.

The plea, filed by the NGO, has sought laying down of guidelines or modalities regulating procedure to be followed by MPs, desirous of initiating proceedings for removal of a judge of the Supreme Court or a high court, prior to initiating a motion under Article 124(4) and (5) and 217(1)(b) of the Constitution.

The petitioner has said the cause of action arose in the matter when a draft motion for removal of the CJI was released to the press on March 27 which had an effect of intimidating the judiciary.

"The Petitioners are also aggrieved by the act of bringing the draft motion in the public domain including releasing the same in the press and further statements being given by various MPs regarding their intention of initiating a motion to remove a judge of the Supreme Court even before such a motion was made in pursuance of the provision of Article 124(4) and (5) of the Constitution," the plea said.

Article 124(4) and (5) deal with the procedure to be followed for removal of an apex court judge.

The plea also referred to various media reports carrying the statements of MPs and politicians in this regard and said no law was made by Parliament which permits the circulation of draft notice of motion to the press.

"A threat to the independence of the judiciary in dispensing justice, without fear or favour, has violated the fundamental rights of the petitioners...," it said, adding any such statement should be first made in the house, while it is in session, before releasing them to the press or bringing it in public domain.

It said such discussions in public domain amounted to 'intimidation of the judiciary' and was a 'gross abuse' of the process of law.

"This scurrilous abuse of a judge and attack on his personal character is punishable contempt," it said, adding that these 'illegal acts' of parliamentarians have the effect of 'scandalising' the court.

It claimed that as per media reports, the acts of certain lawmakers have 'demeaned, damaged and placed at risk independence of judiciary'.

"The nation's interest requires that criticism of the judiciary must be measured, strictly rational, sober and proceed from the highest motives without being coloured by partisan spirit or pressure tactics or intimidatory attitude," it said.

The plea also said that the freedom of speech and expression does not postulate bringing down the image and intimidating the judiciary and setting a 'dangerous trend'.
IMAGE: Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah files nomination from Chamundeshwari constituency on Friday. Photograph: Kind courtesy @siddaramaiah/Twitter

Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah on Friday said he would take a final call on Saturday on contesting from Badami in north Karnataka after discussing the issue with Congress president Rahul Gandhi.

Siddaramaiah, who has been fielded from Chamundeshwari constituency in Mysuru, said he was under pressure from Congress leaders from Bagalkote and Bijapur districts to contest from Badami.

"Tomorrow (on Saturday) I am going to take a decision after discussing with Rahul ji," Siddaramaiah said in response to a question about when he would decide on Badami.

Speaking to reporters in Mysuru, the chief minister said he would abide by the high command's decision.

"Those from Bagalkote and Bijapur districts; leaders like S R Patil, M B Patil, Timmapur,J T Patil....and several others are pressurising me to contest from there (Badami)," he said.

Siddaramaiah said he had told the high command that he would not contest from the constituency, but leaders were pressurising him.

"So I have told them that I will bring the opinions expressed by you (leaders) to the notice of the high command. Whatever the high command says, I will abide by it," he added.

Siddaramaiah has been camping in Mysuru since Monday and has dedicated his entire schedule for campaigning in Chamundeshwari and Varuna, constituencies from where he and his son Yatindra are the respective candidates.

Restricting his campaign to two constituencies has led to speculations that Siddaramaiah was unhappy that the party central leadership had not allowed him to contest from two constituencies.

The Congress in its list of candidates for 218 seats announced on April 15, had named Devraj Patil as its nominee from Badami.

But issuing of the B-form to Patil has been put on hold.

Siddaramaiah's reported wish to contest from two seats is said to have met with stiff opposition from veteran party leaders Mallikarjuna Kharge and Veerappa Moily, after which it was decided to field Patil.

Kharge and Moily reportedly opposed two constituencies for Siddaramaiah, stating that it would consolidate Vokkaliga votes in favour of Janata Dal-Secular in the Mysuru region and also send a wrong message about the chief minister lacking confidence.

Fielding Patil has led to internal squabbling within the local unit of the party, with many, including sitting MLA Chimmanakatti opposed to it.

Chimmanakatti has said that if the chief minister is not contesting, he should be the candidate.

Meanwhile, a Facebook post on an account allegedly belonging to Yatindra on Friday, stated that the chief minister would file his nominations from Badami in Bagalkote on April 23 has made headlines.

The post has reportedly been deleted now.

Badami, with a strong presence of Kurubas, the community to which Siddaramaiah belongs, was seen as the second safe option for the chief minister, as reports have suggested that the battle in Chamundeshwari will not be an easy one for him.

Siddaramaiah has won five times and tasted defeat twice at Chamundeshwari, from where he has been announced as the candidate.

He has been representing Varuna constituency in Mysuru since 2008, which has now been allotted to his son Yatindra.

Siddaramaiah files nominations

Meanwhile, the chief minister and state JD-S chief H D Kumaraswamy on Friday filed their nominations for the May 12 polls. Yatindra and sitting JD-S MLA G T Deve Gowda, who will take on Siddaramaiah in Chamundeshwari, are the others who filed their papers.

Siddaramaiah along with his son visited the Siddarameshwara temple at his native village of Siddaramanahundi, and the famous Chamundeshwari temple on Chamundi hill in Mysuru.

Siddaramaiah has won five times and tasted defeat twice in Chamundeshwari, from where he has been announced as the candidate by the Congress high command.

Siddaramaiah and his family have assets worth over Rs 20 crore, as per his affidavit filed along with the nomination.

Assets (movable and immovable) of Siddaramaiah stood at Rs 11.20 crore while that of his wife Parvathi were declared to be worth Rs 7.60 crore.

They have also declared assets worth Rs 1.55 crore under Hindu Undivided Family (HUF).

Siddaramaih, who stated his occupation as politician and that of his wife as housewife, declared that they have liabilities worth Rs 2,59,92,239 and Rs 2,26,40,000 respectively.

Retaining Karnataka is very crucial for the Congress as it is the second major state after Punjab, where it is in power.

Though, Congress has not announced its chief ministerial candidate, the party has said Siddaramaiah will be the party's face during the polls.

Kumaraswamy, a former chief minister, filed his nominations from two constituencies Ramanagara and Channapatna accompanied by his wife Anitha and supporters.

Kumaraswamy declared his and his wife's assets totalling more than Rs 167 crore. Their liabilities stood at over Rs 103 crores.

Kumaraswamy declared his movable and immovable assets at Rs 42.91 crore and that of his wife at Rs 124.22 crore.

His occupation was mentioned as a public servant and an agriculturist, and his wife an entrepreneur.

According to the affidavits, they have liabilities of about Rs 2,94,75,198 and Rs 1,01,93,09,364 respectively.

Presently representing Ramanagara, Kumaraswamy is looking for retaining the constituency.

His wife had lost in Channapatna in 2013. JD-S supremo H D Deve Gowda's older son and Kumaraswamy's brother H D Revanna too filed his nomination from Holenarsipura in Hassan district, considered as party bastion.

Karnataka Home Minister Ramalinga Reddy from Bengaluru's BTM layout and senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader Suresh Kumar from Rajaji Nagar also filed their nominations.
The Gujarat Police on Friday arrested a man from Ganganagar in neighbouring Rajasthan in connection with the rape-and-murder of a minor girl whose body was found in Surat on April 6, Gujarat Home Minister Pradeepsinh Jadeja said.

The accused has been identified as Harsh Sahay Gurjar and was held from Ganganagar in Sawai Madhopur district, Jadeja told reporters.

He said that three-four days after the minor's body was found, the police also recovered the body of a woman from the same area, and that there was a 'high chance' that the woman might be the victim's mother.

It was possible that the accused was behind the killing of both the persons, Jadeja said.

He said a vital lead in the investigation of the crime came when the police, scouring CCTV footage of Pandesara area, where the girl's body was found, zeroed in on a black car.

The minister said the ownership of the car was traced to a stone contractor at whose place the girl and her mother, originally from Rajasthan, were working.

The contractor told the police that his brother had gone to Rajasthan in that car and that he suspected his involvement, Jadeja said.

"Since the accused went in the car to Rajasthan, the contractor told police that he suspected that his brother might be behind the crime," Jadeja said.

The minister said Gurjar even tried to dispose off the girl's body using the black car. "We believe that he has killed both of them. We will be conducting DNA tests to verify if the there is a relationship between the woman and the girl," he said.

He said a special public prosecutor would be appointed for a speedy trial to bring the accused to justice.

The body of the minor girl, possibly 9-11 years of age, was found in the bushes in the Pandesara area on April 6.

The body bore 86 injury marks, including on her private parts, and a doctor at the city civil hospital had said the nature of her injuries suggested she had been held captive, tortured and raped.

The postmortem report stated that she was strangulated to death.

A first information report was lodged under sections 302 (murder), 323 (voluntarily causing hurt), and 376 (rape), and under provisions of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act against unidentified persons, police had said.
ISIS's online propaganda radicalises Muslim youth in Kerala.

A revealing excerpt from Stanly Johny's new book, The ISIS Caliphate From Syria to the Doorsteps of India.



Illustration: Uttam Ghosh/Rediff.com

Indian authorities have arrested several people who they say were part of ISIS cells from different parts of the country.

But surprisingly, one of the most-affected states by this ISIS influence was India's most socially advanced one.

In fact, ISIS's India connect became national headlines when 21 people, including women and children, from the southern state of Kerala went missing in 2016.

Months later, police and intelligence officials claimed to have busted an ISIS network, again in Kerala.

These two incidents raised questions on whether ISIS ideology is gaining foothold among the country's Muslims, especially among those in Kerala, who make up 27 percent of the state's population.

Most of the youth who went missing are educated professionals hailing from middle class or upper middle class families, nullifying the argument that lack of education and poverty drive extremist ideas among the youth.

An investigation into their disappearance and the subsequent arrests showed how ISIS's online propaganda is radicalising Muslim youth in the state where Salafism has strong roots.

At Hamza Sagar House in Padanna in northern Kerala, Abdul Rahman talked to me at length about his two sons -- Ijaz Rahman (34), a doctor, and Shihaz Rahman (28), a management graduate -- who went missing in May 2016.

They grew up pretty much like the other boys in the area, but turned extremely religious a few years ago.

"They said they wanted to live like the Prophet lived.

They were following a strict religious life.

They didn't want any of these luxuries," he told me, gesturing to his bungalow as if it was a symbol of excess that his children had rejected.

Of the 21 people who have gone missing, 17 are from two nearby villages in Kasaragod -- Padanna and Trikaripur.

The other four are from Palakkad.

Interestingly, all 21 knew each other; some as relations, others as friends.

Take the case of Ijaz and his brother Shihaz.

They went missing with their wives and Ijaz's only son.

Shihaz and his wife left Padanna, saying they were moving to Mumbai.

Ijaz said he was taking his family to Lakshadweep for a professional assignment before they vanished into thin air.

Their cousin Ashfaq Majeed (25) and his friend Abdul Rashid Abdulla (30), a central figure in this mystery, are among those missing.

Hafeezudin TK, another member in the team, was a neighbour of Ijaz.

If this motley group had planned their departure jointly, they did this outside the gaze of local eyes.

They were not part of any local Muslim organisations.

"They were a group, but largely they interacted only among themselves," a salesman at a stationery shop close to Ashfaq's house in Padanna told me.

For instance, Palakkad-based Isa (Bexen before he recently converted from Christianity) was a frequent visitor to Padanna to see Rashid and Shihaz.

Isa took other members of his family along with him when he went missing -- his brother Ehisa (earlier Bestin) and their wives.

Six of the 21 people are women.

Four recently converted to Islam.

And almost everybody is middle class or upper middle class.

The local police have found no organisational network responsible for their disappearance.

Did the group have a leader? Abdul Hakim, father of Hafeezudin , who runs an automobile workshop in Dubai, believes like many others in Padanna that Rashid was the "captain" of the team.

"Rashid has been very strict on religious matters. He is a very knowledgeable person. Shihaz used to hang around with him," said Rahman, Ijaz and Shihaz's father.

Getting Rashid's family to open up proved to be an impossible task.

At his house close to the Udumbunthala Juma Masjid in Trikaripur near Padanna, a short elderly man with a full grey beard refused to take any questions.

"We have nothing more to say," he declared, cutting me short. The superintendent of police has also told us to keep our mouths shut."

But who is Rashid?

A software engineer who had worked in the Gulf, the 30-year-old was associated with Peace International School, run by an Islamic scholar named MM Akbar.

"Rashid used to come to train our teachers," says a staff member of the school.

The school has lost one staff member -- Mohammed Marvan (23).

Most of these youth sent messages on the Telegram app to their families that they have reached Dawlatul Islam, which is how ISIS refers to the territories under its control.

A message sent by Marvan to his family read: 'I am fighting in the path of Allah.'

All family members of these youth say they were influenced by online propaganda.

Abdul Hakkim told me his son Hafeezudin used to complain that he could not live as a true Muslim in Kerala.

He stopped using the car his father bought because it was bought on a loan.

He cut the cables at home because music and cinema are haram (forbidden).

Internet radicalisation happens through several channels.

Besides its online English magazine, ISIS spread the group's propaganda material via social networks as well as personal message apps such as WhatsApp.

ISIS sympathisers also launched a blog in Malayalam and opened several Facebook accounts and pages to spread the 'message of the Caliphate'.

The pro-ISIS Malayalam blog, Muhajir, had 39 articles in Malayalam on life in the caliphate before it was taken down by Indian authorities.

One of the articles titled Hijrah, urged Muslims from around the world to declare allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and travel to the caliphate, or Darul Islam, from 'Darul Kufr and Darul Harb' (Land of Disbelief and Land of War).

'Till now, they (Indian Muslims) had an excuse that there was no Darul-Islam (home of Islam) or the caliphate in the world. But such alibis are not acceptable after the re-establishment of the caliphate. It is the religious duty of all Muslims to migrate after the Darul Islam is established,' the blogger wrote.

The post says ideas like Communism, democracy, secularism and nationalism are anti-Islam and that Muslims should reject them.

Another post says Indian Muslims are turning away from the glory of jihad.

According to the writer, 'If you are not anti-democratic, anti-secular, anti-feminist, anti-nationalist, anti-LGBT, anti-homosexual, and anti-Zionist, you're not a true Muslim.'

There were several other pro-ISIS handles on social networks which propagated the same message.

A Facebook account in the name of Ashabul Haqq has several posts defending ISIS and urging more Muslims to join the caliphate.

In a post dated September 28, 2016, Haqq writes hijrah is one of the main duties of Muslims to implement God's law in society.

What is common in all these articles and social media posts is the author's call to fellow Muslims to follow textual Islam.

They are not random advisories.

Rather, the authors quote from the Quran and Hadith to drive their points home.

Their shared theological doctrine is Salafism and they all urge followers to adhere to the strictest form of Islam.

Rahman said his sons Ijaz and Shihaz were influenced by Salafism.

They used to attend the local Salafi mosque and relentlessly question the rituals practised among Kerala Muslims.

Rahman initially thought the boys had gone on a spiritual journey, probably to a place where people live in accordance with its tenets.

"They are calm and quiet boys. They simply couldn't have joined ISIS," he said.

Excerpted from The ISIS Caliphate, From Syria to the Doorsteps of India, by Stanly Johny, Bloomsbury, with the publisher's kind permission.
The economic muscle in the Mangalore region is generally sympathetic to the BJP, says Aditi Phadnis.

IMAGE: BJP president Amit Shah (2nd from right) with his partys CM candidate B S Yeddyurappa (left) and Union minister Ananth Kumar (extreme right), in Bengaluru during an election campaign. Photograph: Kind courtesy @AmitShah/Twitter

Of all the regions in Karnataka, the most interesting possibly is its coastal region, dominated by Mangalore, or Mangaluru as it is now called. The region's socio-economic development and politics is an outcome of telescoped rapid change.

Mangalore is a city of the beautiful and rich -- both Aishwarya Rai and Suniel Shetty belong to this city -- home to many educational institutions, and a burgeoning middle class.

But the very poor -- bidi rollers, fishermen, weavers and wage labourers and backward communities -- also live here.

A change in social and economic equations began in the 1970s, with land reforms creating space for backward castes to claim new identities, largely during the regime of Devaraj Urs, considered a legendary leader in the state.

For example, Billavas, a community of toddy tappers, was able to move into other occupations and claim an identity for traders, businessmen, politicians, hoteliers, import-export businessmen.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Jains of Karnataka who were given huge tracts of land during medieval times in return for loyalty to feudal dynastic rulers, lost the greater part of their holdings. Naturally, this led to a massive upheaval in the region.

In the past -- loosely -- the backward and poor used to constitute the support base of the Congress, while the Bharatiya Janata Party voters were the upper castes, the Bunts (small feudatories with large landed interests) and Saraswat Brahmins.

But, because of social and economic mobility, these lines have blurred over the years.

Today, almost all cooperatives in the coastal belt -- arecanut, coconut, land development bank, or district cooperative banks -- have been taken over by Hindutva elements. Since 1994, the Dakshina Kannada, Udupi, Chikmagalur and Uttara Kannada districts, comprising the state's coastal region, have contributed to a big complement of BJP MLAs.

In 2004, the BJP won 14 of the 24 seats in these districts (out of a total of 224 in the state legislature), while the Congress managed to win just five.

The Congress won 14 and the BJP five in the 2013 assembly election. However, the BJP won all three parliamentary constituencies of the four districts in 2014. The economic muscle in the region is generally sympathetic to the BJP.

But the region has also seen the rise and economic empowerment of the Muslims -- mainly as a result of Gulf jobs. Muslim control of the textile business, hotels, canning and timber has fuelled the fear that the economy and locality might be in danger of being taken over by them.

This is especially true of the lower-caste Muslims who used to be engaged in bidi-rolling and petty trading but have since come to acquire interests in such businesses as timber, granite, hospitals, textiles, import-export, fisheries, etc.

Naturally, there is a clash between colliding interests. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh has grown in clout, presence and organisation as a result.

"There is a chief commander for Mangalore who is above the collector, the superintendent of police or anybody -- Dr Kalladka. The control of the whole district is with Prabhakar Bhat Kalladka. I am telling you the truth about what is happening in my district," Congress MLA, Vasanth Bangera, was quoted as saying by local newspapers a few months ago, about the best known local RSS leader.

"Why is it that the police cannot control groups like the Bajrang Dal, the Sri Rama Sene or the Hindu Jagaran Vedike? All these groups get their strength from Prabhakar Bhat Kalladka. I came to politics 40 years ago and I have never seen a chief controller like this," he said.

In 2018 assembly election, most of the sitting Congress MLAs have been renominated. But in the BJP, there is a degree of heartburn.

However, activists are confident -- the coast will reject the politics of minority appeasement and will vote for the BJP.
Sun Valley, ID -- (ReleaseWire) -- 04/20/2018 --Combine multiple countries in South America to the ultimate adventure trip. Here are the top 7 combination trips.



Gretchen Traut, South American Travel Manager for Adventures Within Reach explains, "When planning your dream summer vacation to South America, why not hit more than one item on your bucket list? South America has so much to offer, why limit yourself to just one highlight? Take advantage of these exceptional pairings or create your own custom trip!"



1) Family Machu Picchu Adventure + Uyuni Salt Flat Exploration: Peru and Bolivia



This 12-day tour through the Andean highland is designed specifically to appeal to the interests of the modern adventurous family. With plenty of activities and enough time to relax too, this trip will be enjoyed by everyone from eight to eighty years old. Families will have the opportunity to paddle board, canoe, mountain bike, and hike the one day Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. After crossing Lake Titicaca to Bolivia, end with a 4X4 and trekking adventure on the Uyuni Salt Flats of Bolivia. And at the end of the adventure: a palace made entirely of salt.



2) Rainbow Mountains of South America: Peru + Argentina



This incredibly unique 8-day adventure, starts in the high Andes in northwestern Argentina. Here, hike through the mesmerizing Seven Colored Hills, walk across the epic salt flats where all perception is lost and land and sky seamlessly mingle. Excite the senses in local markets and learn more about the unique history of this vibrant region.



Hop a direct flight from Salta to Peru and continue on to the incredible Vinicunca Trek, also known as "rainbow mountain trek". The trek takes us to an elevation of 5,000 meters above sea level (16,404 feet) in Quispicanchis, Cusco. The mountain, considered one of the most spectacular places in the Vilcanota Mountains, is naturally colored by the presence of eroded sedimentary rock. During the trek, there are many impressive views of snow-capped Mt. Ausangate.



It is also easy to add on time in Machu Picchu, the Sacred Valley, Buenos Aires or Lima.



3) Colombia Multi-sport + Galapagos Island Hopping



Begin this 2-week extravaganza in vibrant Colombia. Rushing rivers, rugged mountains, deep canyons, and exciting caves await the adventurous traveler, and there is truly no shortage of activities to get your heart racing. This is an amazingly diverse adventure tour with a wide variety of experiences and places in just 9 days. Despite its excitement level, this is a moderate adventure suitable for any adult and older child in good health, and this trip starts on any day of the year. This itinerary gets into the splendor of the area's incredible landscapes and deep into the culture of a rich agricultural region.



Continue on to five days of island hopping in the Galapagos Islands of Ecuador. The 5-day itinerary visits 3 islands: Santa Cruz, Isabela, and 1 uninhabited island. Island hopping allows visitors to experience much of the best areas of the islands while sleeping in well-appointed lodges and transferring between islands during the day on a smaller boat. Island hopping itineraries are also great choices for visitors who wish to combine diving days with classic wildlife tours.



4) Gastronomy, Waterfalls and Beaches: Argentina Meets Brazil



On this 11-day journey, dive into the world of seductive, ruby Malbecs, sizzling,tantalizing beef cuts, fresh, home-made, pastas, rustic, warm breads and light, decadent pastries on this unique tour of Argentina's capitol, Buenos Aires. Explore the flavors of local markets, cook with native chefs and visit the cornerstone cafes, restaurants and bakeries along with the more modern closed-door supper clubs and hidden bars of Buenos Aires. Sample gastronomic delights as well as become better acquainted with the city's history and neighborhoods. Continue to the northeast corner of Argentina on the Brazilian boarder to visit Iguazu Falls. Wider than Victoria Falls, taller than Niagara Falls and more beautiful than both, there are neither words nor photographs that can properly describe them. Finally, end the adventure on following the rhythmic samba notes to the vibrant beaches of Rio.



5) Ultimate Patagonia Trekker: Torres del Paine + Tierra del Fuego: Chile + Argentina



This 11-day epic adventure, kicks off in at the end (or the beginning, depending on how you look at it) of the world in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina.



The National Park of Tierra del Fuego is in the heart of the rugged wilderness that comprises the land of fire at the end of the world. Explore this extreme remote area of the Andes just outside of Argentina's southern most city: Ushuaia. Valleys, lagoons, streams, prairies, cliffs, peaks, mountains, birds, guanacos, fox and numerous other species add to this amazingly pristine and unique landscape.Explore, breathe and feel, step by step, the rhythm and heart of Tierra del Fuego along the trail to Laguna del Caminante, at Laguna Superior and at each campsite surrounded by lush, green woods and snow-capped peaks.



Finally, cross the boarder into Chile and visit the coveted gem of Patagonia: Torres del Paine. Follow the famous W-trek and become immersed in the most popular sites of Chilean Patagonia. The trails in between the famous Torres del Paine craggy mountains are among the world's classic trekking routes.



The trip is ideal for travelers who enjoy trekking into the wilderness. Accommodations include tents, mountain huts and the rustic EcoCamp Lodge in large dome tents. The domes in the EcoCamp have comfortable beds, measure 140 square feet, are energy efficient, and have beautiful local decor.



6) Machu Picchu + Jaguars in the Pantanal: Peru and Brazil



This epic journey begins in the heart of the South American continent: the Pantanal. The largest flood plain on the planet, the Pantanal is an exotic and extraordinary wildlife reserve. There is a huge variety of birds, fish and other species such as caimans, deer, capibaras, anteaters and especially jaguars, all in plain view. This expedition travels across the northern part of the Pantanal to fully enjoy its ecosystems.



Continue on to visit the rainbow-draped Iguazu Falls, and then catch a direct flight to Peru.



In Peru, travel to Cusco, the Sacred Valley and finally, the journey comes to an awe-inspiring close with the Machu Picchu Sanctuary.



7) Lake Titicaca, Uyuni Salt Flats and Atacama: Bolivia + Chile



Begin the 10-day journey in Bolivia with an overnight on the shores of stunning Lake Titicaca. Continue on to visit the culturally rich capitol of La Paz, explore the Unesco world heritage site of Tiwanaku and then discover the breathtaking Uyuni Salt Flats.



Continue by 4x4 vehicle from Uyuni to the otherworldly landscape of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. Travel among turquoise and emerald lagoons, bubbling hot springs, rust-colored volcanoes and ancient geysers in the Atacama, the world's highest desert. Here, crimson snow-capped volcanoes blend with pastel-colored desert expanses accented with orange canyons and epic dunes. Trek among the bizarre rock formations of the Valley of the Moon, mountain bike on narrow trails through mystical canyons, walk through the ruins of pre-Colombian villages, watch the daily eruption of the Tatio geysers, and photograph the ever-changing colors of the amazing scenery. As the moon rises, observe some of the clearest and most brilliant night skies in the Southern Hemisphere.
Ellijay, GA -- (ReleaseWire) -- 04/20/2018 --Cherry Bloom Homes & Design is a well-known company that offers the best home improvement in The Willows and Blue Ridge Georgia. The primary objective of the company is to bring homes back to life with a contemporary appeal while keeping some of the old, delightful features of the space. Cherry Bloom Homes & Design ensures that all the homes are built with the genuine artistry and not with any prefabricated items.



The company is owned and managed by Karla Payne Abercrombie who has tie-ups with a number of companies and whole sellers so that they can offer high-end options devoid of the high cost. Cherry Bloom Homes & Design works closely with architects and builders while on a renovation project and at the same time collaborates with the clients so that they can get their dream home.



Cherry Bloom Homes & Design also excels in remodeling in Ellijay and Blue Ridge Georgia as well as home staging and improvement and interior design and decoration. The company also offers a varied range of good-looking homes for sale. As of now, the company will be offering homes for sale and will be totaling up to three new projects every year. Cherry Bloom Homes & Design's dedication to excellence and distinctive character to the homes enable it to offer the best in class projects for every client.



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Selbyville, DE -- (ReleaseWire) -- 04/20/2018 --The Industry outlook report "Ring Main Unit Market Size By Position (3-position, 6-position, 10-position), By Insulation (Gas, Air, Oil, Solid di-electric), By Installation (Indoor, Outdoor), By Component (Switch & fuses, Self-powered electronic relays), By Application (Distribution utilities, Industries, Infrastructure, Transportation), Industry Analysis Report, Regional Outlook, Price Trends, Competitive Market Share & Forecast, 2017  2024" by Global Market Insights, Inc. says Ring Main Unit Market share is expected to cross $3 billion by 2024.



Rising investments toward infrastructural development subject to pervasive residential and commercial establishments across developing regions will stimulate the ring main unit market size. Refurbishment of aging grid networks coupled with increasing demand for advanced control and monitoring distribution units will further embellish the business outlook. Government of Serbia in partnership with the government of China have proposed plans in line with modernization of the conventional electrical infrastructure across Serbia. Regulators in 2017 have further proclaimed, investments to value over USD 6.14 billion across the country's infrastructure sector.



China ring main unit market is projected to value over USD 300 million by 2024. Favorable government norms pertaining to the replacement of conventional fuels with sustainable energy resources favored by national renewable integration targets will fuel the industry landscape. In 2017, National Energy Administration (NEA) declared an investment worth USD 326 billion apropos the expansion of renewable energy networks across China by 2020.



Request for a sample of this research report @ https://www.gminsights.com/request-sample/detail/1477



Paradigm shift towards energy security along with rising environmental constraints will embellish the ring main unit market potential. Increasing focus on account of energy efficiency favored by briskly advancing smart grid networks will further foster the industry landscape. In 2017, Western European countries including France, Italy, Germany, Sweden and UK, have collaboratively announced an investment worth USD 133.7 billion towards the expansion of smart grid networks across the region.



Gas insulation in 2016, accounted for over 50% of the ring main unit market share owing to rapid expansion of industrial High-Tension T&D networks. Effective insulation and di-electric strength favored by long term cost benefits in comparison to its competitive counterparts will further stimulate the product demand. In 2017, Toshiba announced an investment worth USD 30 million subject to the expansion of its switchgear and transformer manufacturing units across India.



Browse key industry insights spread across 465 pages with 774 market data tables & 20 figures & charts from the report, "Ring Main Unit Market" in detail along with the table of contents:



https://www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/ring-main-unit-market



Favourable government policies pertaining to rural electrification across Africa and Asia Pacific supported by rising investments from public and private financial institutions will foster the ring main unit market share. The World Bank, International Finance Corporation (IFC) and Asian Development Bank (ADB) across the years have perpetually funded rural electrification drives across the regions. Growing electricity demand coupled with rapid expansion of micro-grid networks across the globe will further embellish the industry outlook. In 2017, the World Bank declared an investment worth USD 4 million subject to the expansion of electrical networks across the Pacific Island.



The U.S. ring main unit market will grow owing to rising investments toward the refurbishment of aging grid infrastructure coupled with integration of advance distribution control technologies. Expeditious development across the railroad infrastructure projects supported by the peninsula corridor electrification program will augment the industry size. In 2017, Federal Transit Administration of the U.S. proposed an investment worth USD 100 million subject to the expansion of rail networks across California under the San Carlos Peninsula Corridor Electrification Project.



Rapid industrialization coupled with instantaneous expansion of micro-grid networks will foster the Germany ring main unit market share. Rising investments toward diversification of existing manufacturing units coupled with ongoing new establishments will further complement the industry landscape. In 2017, regulators across Germany announced a state funding worth over USD 120 billion in context to German based automakers and suppliers.



Make an inquiry for purchasing this report @ https://www.gminsights.com/inquiry-before-buying/1477



Eminent players across the ring main unit market include General Electric, ABB, EATON, Schneider Electric, Crompton Greaves, Siemens, Larsen & Toubro, Lucy Electric, Entec Electric & Electronic, C&S Electric, Ormazabal, TIEPCO, and LSIS.



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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.
Resistance is Futile

Green space. Conformist architectural noncomformity. Lots of earth tones. The Macaroni Grill (RIP)! Covering the New Town (tm) of Reston (tm) like invasive English Ivy since 2007, a look at what's doing in our favorite plastic fantastic planned community, warts and all.


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A new fund for diamond companies is set to launch, aiming to provide an easier way for firms to obtain credit.

This is an unprecedented initiative in our industry, and we expect that demand will be so great that we can quickly become the largest nontraditional diamond financier globally, Chris Del Gatto, creator of the Delgatto Diamond Fund, told Rapaport News. There is an unprecedented shortage of working capital among dealers, wholesalers, and cutters.

The fund will total $100 million in its first six to nine months, with between $250,000 and $10 million available for clients to borrow. Del Gatto has the backing of a group of individual investors who have the capacity to increase the facility to $500 million, potentially growing to $1 billion depending on demand, he said.

Getting funding will be much easier than the current process companies must go through to obtain a bank loan, according to Del Gatto. The lender will not necessarily review a companys profit-and-loss statement the way a financial institution would, but instead will judge a potential borrower based on other factors, such as references, explained Del Gatto, who is also the CEO of I Do Now I Dont, a consumer-focused diamond-and-jewelry sales platform .

In addition, borrowers will obtain loans using their diamonds as collateral. While the fund will hold the stones, clients will have full access to them at any time, with a few hours notice. Del Gattos service will also include the use of his online sales platform  the largest of its kind, he said  enabling clients to market those diamonds to consumers around the world. Using the platform will provide dealers with access not only to capital, but also to consumers, rather than just retail jewelers, which, he stated, will help them increase their profit margin.



Alex Shishlo, Editor of the Rough&Polished European Bureau in Brussels
Lesotho mulls extension of Gem Diamonds Letseng mining lease to 2034

20 april 2018 News

Gem Diamonds said the government of Lesotho has indicated its intention to renew the Letseng mining lease until 2034.

It said in a statement that the mining lease may be further extended if necessary in relation to any underground development of the mine thereafter.

"The Lesotho Government's announcement that they intend to renew the Letseng mining lease until 2034 is welcomed as a demonstration of the positive partnership which exists between Gem Diamonds and the Government, said company chief executive Clifford Elphick.

I would like to thank the Government of Lesotho for their ongoing support which will allow Gem Diamonds to continue to extract some of the world's largest and most valuable diamonds from this remarkable resource."

Gem Diamonds said the full terms of the renewed lease were subject to a statutory negotiation process with the Lesotho Mining Board and, when agreed, would be contained in a new mining lease agreement.

The Letseng mine was famous for the production of large, top colour, exceptional white diamonds, making it the highest dollar per carat kimberlite diamond mine in the world.



Mathew Nyaungwa, Editor in Chief of the African Bureau, Rough&Polished




Forevermark, the diamond brand from the De Beers Group of Companies, promoted gender equality and displayed its stunning Red Carpet Collection 2018 through a unique fashion show of models and women achievers on 18, April at the Four Seasons Hotel, Mumbai.

To celebrate De Beers Groups three-year partnership with UN Women, Forevermark invited over 20 women who have contributed to women advancement and gender equality in their field of work, to walk the ramp. As part of this commitment, De Beers has invested $3 mn to empower women in its diamond producing countries, across its business and in marketing campaigns.

Some of the powerful women walking the ramp as champions of gender equality, included Indian filmmaker, Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari, Lucky Morani; Mrunalini Deshmukh, Soudamani Sawant and Mala Mansukhani. All of these women were accessorised with beautiful, rare and responsibly sourced Forevermark diamond jewellery. A strong advocate of women empowerment, Bollywood star, Taapsee Pannu also graced the runway.





Image credit: Forevermark





Bruce Cleaver, CEO of De Beers Group and the UN Women HeForShe Thematic Champion addressed the audience. Nishtha Satyam, Deputy Country Representative for UN Women said, We look forward to the global partnership with De Beers to advance the cause of gender equality and the empowerment of women.

To highlight the brands stunning Red Carpet Collection of 2018, a runway show was held where models paraded the ramp in chandelier earrings, bracelets, palm jams, cocktail rings and statement necklaces all expertly crafted with Forevermark diamonds. Over 37 pieces of Forevermark jewellery from India were showcased at the 90th Academy Awards designed by Authorized Forevermark Jewellers across the country.

Speaking on the occasion, Forevermark India President Sachin Jain, said, Our exclusive Red Carpet Collection 2018 is another testimony to the celebration of women. This collection signifies all that Forevermark diamonds stand for  timelessness, beauty, rarity, classic opulence with contemporary aesthetics, grace, love but most important  Responsibility and a commitment to make this world a better place.

Aruna Gaitonde, Editor in Chief of the Asian Bureau, Rough & Polished
(Agencia CMA Latam) - The Venezuelan Foreign Ministry delivered a note of protest to the Colombian attache in Caracas, German Castajeda, for allowing the holding of a parallel Supreme Court session in exile in its territory.

Venezuela protested after the shadow Supreme Court launched an impeachment motion against President Nicolas Maduro for corruption allegations in a session held in Colombia.

Last week, the shadow Supreme Court of Justice, which carries out work in exile, approved a trial against Maduro and issued an arrest warrant against him.

The warrant was requested by the Venezuelan Attorney General, Luisa Ortega Diaz, in February. She mentioned strong evidence against Maduro for his alleged ties with Odebrecht, a Brazilian construction company investigated in several Latin American countries for massive bribe payments to local officials.

According to the ruling of the Supreme Court in exile, "information was obtained related to several works that have not been completed, and others that were never executed in the country contracted to the Odebrecht company in an amount estimated at US$ 2.5 billion."

To move ahead with criminal proceedings against Maduro it is required that the National Assembly of Venezuela, with an opposition majority, authorize the request of the Supreme Court. Once authorized, an international arrest against the president can be ordered form him to face trial.

Thirty-three former magistrates from Venezuela's top court work in exile, since last year, when opposition representatives nominated them as members of a parallel Supreme Court.

The Venezuelan government said today that the magistrates of the shadow Supreme Court are a group of "usurping lawyers" and that they carry out a "simulation of public acts that are the exclusive competence of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela."

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.
Swedish telecom company Telia Co. (0H6X.L, TLSNY.PK) reported that its first-quarter net income from continuing operations declined to 2.35 billion Swedish kronor from 2.46 billion kronor in the same quarter last year.

Telia also said that it plans to buy back shares for an annual amount of 5 billion kronor over the coming three-year period, totaling 15 billion Swedish kronor. The reason is to return excess cash to shareholders and is a continued effort to optimize the capital structure of the company. Combined with the recently approved ordinary dividend of 2.30 kronor per share, the pro forma annual total shareholder remuneration will equal 3.45 kronor per share.

Total net loss attributable to the owners of the parent for the first-quarter was 710 million kronor or 0.16 kronor per share, compared to a net income of 6.89 billion kronor or 1.59 kronor per share in the previous year.

Net loss from discontinued operations was 2.95 billion kronor, compared to net income of 4.60 billion kronor, mainly due to the disposals of Azercell and Geocell (resulting in capital losses and lower net income contribution) and an impairment charge related to Ucell. The devaluation in Uzbekistan in the third quarter 2017 had also a negative impact on the first quarter 2018, while the first quarter 2017 included a positive effect from the adjustment of the provision regarding the Uzbekistan investigations.

Adjusted EBITDA rose 4.2 percent in local currencies, excluding acquisitions and disposals. In reported currency, adjusted EBITDA rose 7.4 percent to 6.50 billion kronor from the previous year, due to organic growth, positive net impact from acquisitions and disposals and foreign exchange rate impact.

Net sales in local currencies, excluding acquisitions and disposals, increased 0.2 percent. In reported currency, net sales rose 3.2 percent to 19.85 billion kronor from last year's 19.23 billion kronor. Service revenues in local currencies, excluding acquisitions and disposals, decreased 0.9 percent.

For 2018, Free cash flow from continuing operations, excluding licenses and spectrum fees and dividends from associated companies, is expected to be above last year's

level (SEK 9.7 billion). This operational free cash flow together with decided dividends from associated companies should cover a dividend around the 2017 level.

Previously: "around the same level as in 2017".

Adjusted EBITDA in continuing operations, based on current structure, in local currencies, excluding future acquisitions and disposals, is still expected to be in line with or slightly above the 2017 level of 25.2 billion kronor.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Business News
Payment giant MasterCard is set to use blockchain for identity protection. It has filed a patent application for the "method and system for identity and credential protection and verification via blockchain."

The patent application no. US20180101684 was filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) which was published on their website last week.

The blockchain technology powered process envisages distributed storage of identity and credential data in an immutable database which will provide accurate verification and prevent the fabrication of such data.

It will prevent the addition and editing of data that may compromise the accuracy of the data stored therein. Only authorized nodes will be allowed to submit and update the data.

Mastercard recently announced plans to recruit a team of 175 new technology developers to be based in Leopardstown, Ireland. These include blockchain specialists, software engineers, data scientists, cloud infrastructure specialists and information security specialists. All of these new positions form the makings of a Blockchain development team.



Mastercard features among the top ten companies that have the most number of cryptocurrency patents in the world. Mastercard's R&D division, MasterCard Labs, had reportedly filed for more than 30 patents related to blockchain technology and cryptocurrency.

However, Mastercard has not been too upbeat on cryptocurrencies. The company's CEO Ajay Banga had in October labeled cryptocurrencies as junk.

Meanwhile, Mastercard reportedly said recently that it is open to the idea of using national digital currencies issued by central banks which will be less volatile.

Mastercard, along with VISA, has also made it more difficult to buy cryptocurrencies after they started charging additional 5 percent fees for instant purchase of cryptocurrencies using debit or credit cards.

Card companies and banks are worried that their clients may end up in huge debts by buying cryptocurrencies, prices of which are highly volatile, and find it difficult to repay.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Business News
After falling sharply in the previous session, shares of Apple (AAPL) are seeing further downside during trading on Friday. Apple is currently down by 4 percent after tumbling by 2.8 percent on Thursday.

The continued decline by Apple comes after an analyst at Morgan Stanley warned of disappointing iPhone sales in the June quarter.

Apple came under pressure on Thursday after key Asian chip partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM) forecast weaker than expected second quarter revenues.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Business News


Rahul Gandhi (file photo) The day the Supreme Court dismissing petitions seeking an SIT probe into the death of Judge B.H. Loya, the BJP asked its MPs to attack Congress President Rahul Gandhi demanding his apology by holding press conferences and on social media platforms. A letter issued by BJP Parliamentary party on Thursday also provided written material for all the party MPs asking them to run campaign against Gandhi and the Congress for defaming party President Amit Shah in their respective constituencies.



A bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra, Justice A.M. Khanwilkar and Justice D.Y. Chandrachud on Thursday dismissed the PIL seeking the SIT probe into the death of Judge Loya in 2014 in Maharashtra's Nagpur.



Loya was heading the trial court that was holding a trial in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh alleged fake shootout case in which Amit Shah is an accused.



"Every MP should give byte to local TV channels, issue a press statement and hold press conference asking Rahul Gandhi to apologize for defaming Amit Shah," the letter issued with a sign of BJP's parliamentary secretary Balasubrahmanyam Kamarsu read.



The party also asked the MPs to use all the social media platforms, including Twitter and WhatsApp or SMS, to campaign over the issue.



"Retweet the tweets by central BJP leaders and use local languages," the letter read.



Congress Spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala posted the letter on his twitter account, saying the effort was to stop an enquiry into the case.



"Lameduck efforts by a vile BJP to stop an enquiry into Judge Loya death reaches its zenith as copycats are regimented to toe the fascist line!," Surjewala said in a tweet.



He said: "So much for democratic functioning where power to think, speak and tweet is held captive by self anointed shenanigans of free speech!!!"



A political slugfest erupted on Thursday after the court's verdict with the BJP accusing Rahul Gandhi as the "invisible hand" behind the pleas for "character assassination" of Amit Shah.



Gandhi had attacked Shah, saying truth has its own way of catching up with people like him.




Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived here from Britain here on Friday on the third and last leg of his three-nation tour of Europe.

Modi will meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel in what will be the first meeting between the two leaders after the latter began her fourth term on March 14 this year.



Modi and Merkel are expected to exchange views on a number of bilateral, regional and global issues.





Earlier on Friday, Modi attended the concluding ceremony of this year's Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) and participated in the leaders' retreat, becoming the first Indian Prime Minister since 2009 to attend this biannual summit of the 53-nation grouping of former British colonies.



Prior to Britain, he visited Sweden where he attended the first ever India-Nordic Summit which also saw the participation of the leaders of Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Norway.
Today I make a plea that as a nation whose faasinomaga (identity) and tofi (inheritance) are inextricably connected to our customary lands that we stand together and demand that this ambiguity be properly attended to, and that following this the Article be accordingly amended  His Highness Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Efi

The former Head of State, His Highness Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Efi, was assured by the Office of the Attorney General that the Land Titles Registration Bill (L.T.R.) 2008 would not alienate customary lands.

His Highness Tui Atua said he had asked for clarity on the matter when he was given the L.T.R. Bill 2008 to sign into law.

In 2008 as Head of State, I was assured by the Attorney General that the provisions of the L.T.R. Bill would not impact in any way on the customary land rights of suli, Tui Atua said in his address titled O fea le alofa? Where is love?.

The Attorney General and his or her office is tasked with a sacred duty to provide the Head of State with the best legal advice possible.

With this assurance, Tui Atua signed the bill.

Yesterday, the former Head of State shared a different view.

During a media event at Tuaefu where he addressed the issues in relation to fears about the alienation of customary lands, Tui Atua said there is ambiguity in Article 102 of the Constitution that needs to be dealt with.

Today we have the responsibility of admitting that there is a problem with Article 102; that the ambiguity within is serious enough to warrant the attention of our best minds in order to make Article 102 unambiguous, he said.

These minds, however, must be able to locate the principle of alofa in their custom law and statutory law assessments and have it sing in harmony alongside their assessments of pule, and of legal certainty and transparency.

The Article 102 in question reads:

No alienation of customary land  It shall not be lawful or competent for any person to make any alienation or disposition of customary land or of any interest in customary land, whether by way of sale, mortgage or otherwise howsoever, nor shall customary land or any interest therein be capable of being taken in execution or be assets for the payment of the debts of any person on his decease or insolvency:

Provided that an Act of Parliament may authorise 

(a) The granting of a lease or licence of any customary land or of any interest therein;

(b) The taking of any customary land or any interest therein for public purposes.

Said Tui Atua: In laymans terms the Article says that it is illegal to alienate customary lands unless an Act of Parliament allows for 1. a lease or licence to be granted over customary land, or 2. customary land is to be taken for public purposes.

I do not have any problems with the taking of customary land for public purposes, assuming of course that such public purposes are indeed valid public purposes.

What I have a problem with is the ambiguity that arises as a result of reading the sub-clause that states that an Act of Parliament may authorise the granting of a lease or licence of any customary land or of any interest therein alongside the wording of the main text of the Article which says no alienation of customary land whether by way of sale, mortgage or otherwise howsoever.

He added that the debate about Samoan customary land and land laws is the most dangerous issue facing us since our fight for the return of our Independence".

The land law issue we are embroiled in now has the potential to strip us of our soul. There is a divisiveness here that we must avoid at all costs, he said.

But to avoid this we must re-locate, re-inscribe and re-inspirit in the heart and mind of our laws the wisdom of our tu ma aganuu Samoa and our tofi paia tuufaasolo. This we cannot do without finding and reviving the principle of alofa in law.

We have faced many challenges as a nation since regaining Independence but this is the most serious. To overcome this challenge, we must first recognise that the challenge now comes not from outside but from within.

We must recognise that, like Joshua and the Israelites, the only way to cross the river as a nation with our souls intact is to find understanding in the wisdom of our forebears and their trust in God.

At the beginning of his address yesterday, Tui Atua said Samoa is now at a significant cross-road in her governing history.

Not just in terms of trying to figure out how best to protect our customary land from foreign or alien interests, but also how to protect ourselves from ourselves.

Since Samoa regained Independence we have taken our Fa'asamoa for granted. We as leaders have assumed that so long as we have governing control over ourselves, Samoa mo Samoa, we will never lose it. But the loss of culture and core values can happen slowly, subtly and stealthily, and on our own watch.

Today it has become clear that we can no longer escape the reality that as leaders we must take a public stand against allowing the ambiguity of Article 102 of our Constitution to persist.

We must admit that in light of the accumulating evidence (some of which I will speak to shortly) this ambiguity has been exploited in ways that now seriously undermines the integrity and purpose of Article 102, i.e. to protect customary lands from alienation.

Today I make a plea that as a nation whose faasinomaga (identity) and tofi (inheritance) are inextricably connected to our customary lands that we stand together and demand that this ambiguity be properly attended to, and that following this the Article be accordingly amended. This is our right; it is our right as suli (heirs) of all customary lands in Samoa, whether you live in Samoa or not.

The address will be published in full in tomorrows Sunday Samoan.

SUMMARY OF TUI ATUAS ADDRESS FROM HIS OFFICE

Tui Atuas address was prompted by an open letter by Faapale Taumua published in the Samoa Observer on 10th of April 2018. In reference to our contemporary laws and recent legislative changes, His Highness poised the question: O fea le alofa? / Where is love?

He noted that the preamble of our Constitution talks unashamedly about love and that our forebears recognised that they must preserve what makes us unique as a people. He drew on the innate connection that the Samoan people have with the land, symbolised through the ritual burying of a childs pute and a mothers fanua in the land which reinforces the belief that we are of the land and the land is of us.

His Highness discussed that there is ambiguity in the wording of Article 102 of the Constitution, and that this ambiguity is being negatively exploited.

He stated that the provisions of the Land Titles Registration Act 2008 (LTRA) have raised significant doubt and controversy over Article 102s ability to meet its constitutional promise of protecting customary land against alienation.

The ambiguity that exists within the Article, he argues, has the potential to create a dangerous platform by which the effective alienation of customary land can be enabled.

With reference to the issue of the alleged 100 year lease of Sasina lands that was written about recently in the Samoan Observer, His Highness commented that with the speed at which fundamental changes to Samoa have occurred over the last 30 years, it is not hard to imagine what could happen in a hundred years if we were to continue on this type of law-making path.

His Highness stated that: In the last 30 years there has been a paradigm shift in law-making and governance.

We have moved from a faasamoa where pule and alofa co-existed in relative harmony, to one where pule now seems to rule alone. In this new paradigm we see the introduction of laws where instead of the pule of a sao being dependent on the love and support of the auaiga (supporting family and/or village members), the sao is capable of existing and exercising pule quite independently from them. In the faasamoa this is wrong.

It is repugnant to everything that the faasamoa stands for. The faamatai exists and draws meaning and value from the reciprocal love and respect between matai and auaiga (family members). Even for tama-a-aiga this is true.

In summary, His Highness seeks to identify the need for the nation to find a constructive way forward.

He argued that there is a problem with Article 102; that [there is a serious] ambiguity within. He calls for the attention of Samoas best minds to come together to make Article 102 unambiguous.

He states that... We as a nation have a sacred duty to find these minds and to support them by putting our personal and political biases aside so that we can work together as one people to achieve the balance and protection desired by our Constitutional forebears in Article 102  the balance between gaining economic environmental sustainability for all families and villages and retaining the cultural integrity of our tu ma aganuu Samoa, and the protection of our customary lands against undue alienation.
The following is penned by Faalogo Situtuila Sissy Vaa Vuki telling their story with husband Tupuola Sione Vuki behind their Samaritan mission to assist Samoa where possible. In recent weeks, coupled spearheaded a fundraising drive in the hometown in St. George Utah U.S.A to raise over $15,000 for the National Emergency Call Center:

Why we choose to do a charity fundraiser for the Samoa 911 Call Center National Emergency Call Centre 911. Because of my Dads estate in Samoa I have to travel from the USA to Samoa often and Sione would accompany me.

In 2016 while visiting Samoa Siones health condition needed urgent medical attention as he was experiencing and breaking out in serious hives, color discoloration, vomiting, vertigo, and slowly breathing, that I tried to ask those around for help and I tried calling for help on the numbers that I was given for Emergency and no answer and I began to pray to plead for Gods help.

I remembered the preparations that our Dr. Stephen Clark from St. George, USA prepared Sione and I before we always depart for Samoa about Siones medications plus during emergency to stay calm which I quickly acted and remembered Siones epinephrine pen that this might come in handy as his pulse was fading and he was just lying there in our rental truck.

The three different phone numbers to contact for emergency was very confusing.

We pondered after all that we had experienced how scary that we had no help from the emergency contact numbers we dialed and how blessed we are to live in the USA because there is only the #911 Universal number for anyone to call for any emergency.

To our surprise we read on SFESA Facebook on November 2017, that Samoa will have in place a 911 Call Center, effective January 1, 2018; Samoa Fire Emergency Safety Authority (SFESA) declared Samoa 911 Call Center was put into effect.

Our prayers have been answered in April 2018 as Sione returned with me to Samoa for the first time after 2 1/2 years from the incident that happened in 2016 while visiting Samoa. Sione will always need to be close to home in St. George, Utah because of his medical needs. We are thankful while we are in Samoa that there is a universal emergency contact number 911 and 911 Call Center, because it affects us all, families and friends that visit Samoa, and those that live in Samoa when they need urgent emergency care. Samoa 911 Call Center are the first point of contact that can help save time for first responders EMT, Police, or Firefighters to save lives and the purpose and why we are so passionate about making others aware to respect and appreciate this great service.

We coordinated this fundraiser for the Samoa 911 Call Center National Emergency Call Centre 911, and because of the great love and support from families and friends for Samoa 911 Call Center from St. George Utah and USA we were successful in achieving our goal and more. Our goal was to raise $5,000 USD for this great cause.

We want to Thank Facebook for allowing us to create a fundraiser event on Go Fund, even if it includes a fee, Thank you FB, for us to be able to begin this great cause to raise monetary funds for Samoa 911 Call Center.

We want to be transparent with all donations so that the integrity of all donations are accounted and so that the donors will know 100% of all the proceeds collected (are donated directly to Samoa 911 Call Center) minus what Facebook Fundraiser fees are deducted by Facebook for using their services. (Breakdown information provided below.)

On Facebook Go Fund/Fundraiser $1,280 USD was raised (Facebook Fundraiser guidelines a raising platform charges 7.9% of total fundraiser plus $0.30), plus monetary donations given by each of you mentioned on the Donors list below.

Total amount of donations received are $6,259.35 USD, that has been converted into Samoa tala $15,258.41 that has been presented to Prime Minister Tuilaepa prior to his departure for overseas and under PM recommendations for us to present to SFESA Commissioner at Samoa 911 Call Center.

All the donations were collected in a two week period all the way to the last hours before Sione and I left from St. George Utah for Samoa.

Sione and I never knew where this journey was going to lead us, but our hearts just wanted to help empower and educate families in Samoa the vital importance of having a Samoa 911 Call Center.

Sione and I have always known our hometown St George Utah and USA with our families and friends to have a strong support, self-reliant, giving, and helping hands in humanitarian aid to help others less fortunate and why this charity has been successful because of their help.

We encourage to always having a sincere heart of gratitude and to never take for granted what we are so blessed with small or grand, just be grateful and remember tomorrow is never promised.

We hope to do good today as your imprint of legacy can be remembered for your good services or good deeds to help better anothers life or save a life.

We express with great gratitude and hearts of appreciation for all the Donors listed below who made this donation possible for Samoa 911 Call Center National Emergency Call Centre 911.

God bless each of you with thy choicest blessings for your kind acts of charitable service in giving. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you very much!

Tracy Ence, Troy Ence, Kim Ence, Jon Ence (Owners Ence Homes), Sylvia Ence & Quentin Ence (RIP & RIL), Sione Heleti Vuki and Situtuila Sissy Faalogo Teo-Tuatagloa Vuki, Wes Tallon (Owner Tallon Paint), Steve Painter, Suzanne Gentry, Jack Rolfe (Founder School of Life Foundation) and Lexie Rolfe, Mike Worthington, John Wayne Horsley (Owner John Wayne Horsley Construction), Keli H Langi (Owner Jacob Lake Inn; Founder SUPIC), Susi Lafaele (Founder SUPIC), Randy Snow (Owner Dominos Pizza), Shauna Snow Gardiner, Bill Hallam and Margaret Hallam, Robin Draper, Francisco Acquino, Amanda Nielsen, Johnny Owen and Shirley Owen, Roger Larson and Kris Anderson-Larson.

We also want to thank Kisione and Theresa Howery-Pale, Jay Vaughn (Owner Priority One Paint) and Shay Vaughn, Stacy Randall, Bill Dudleston, Marty Lane, Jeff Ence (Owner JBR Stucco), Cody Ence (Realtor/Broker at Ence Realty), Scott Leishman and Merilee Jones Leishman (Realtor at Ence Realty), Creed Naylor and Lacey Ence Naylor, Frances Estrovitz, Chad Fauson, Ana and Uatekini Koaneti Vai, Brad Hallam, Mike Hall (Owner Mike Hall Construction), Don and Joan Crichton and family (Owner Honolulu Grill), Blanca Castro-Hone and family, Kalala Puaina Teo, Robert and Shelly Ence (Owner Ence Electric), Kelly and Jennifer Buchanan (Owner Got Concrete), Deker Landis, Kason Gubler and family, Ben and Angie Holbrook Shorty (Owner Shorty Construction Inc.), Judy Curtis, Jackie Curtis, Monica Hatch, Justin Snyder and family (St. George Utah Firemen), Mitch and Luetta Vuki, Salesi Wayne Vuki, Kali Ana Vuki Williams, Christina Tuala-Vaaga.

We know many of our friends and family will visit Samoa once in their life time and it is fantastic to know you made a difference to help Samoa 911 Call Center National Emergency Call Centre 911.

Again we thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your act of giving kindness that can help save a life when first res-ponders have the best resources available, that life may be yours or ours as we have experienced while in Samoa.

We hope and pray in faith for the great success for Samoa 911 Call Center, National Emergency Call Centre 911, including all the Emergency departments SFESA Samoa Fire Emergency Safety Authority, and Samoa Police for their dedication as they are our unsung heroes that are the men and women serving in these departments. We say Thank you for your consistent hard-work and many sacrifices away from your families to serve the public for the betterment of Samoa. May God bless and protect you with guidance and safety always. Thank you!




Newly-weds Nick Feast and Rhianna Laybourn are celebrating their honeymoon in Samoa.

Theyve been courting for 10 years and were lucky enough to win a trip to Samoa, allowing them a chance for a romantic getaway.

The couple from Hamilton, New Zealand, arrived on Wednesday.

Its Rhiannas second time in Samoa. She came here when she was a little girl with her family because her parents taught at Vaipouli College, Savaii.

For a honeymoon destination in the South Pacific, Samoa would always be their first choice.

We would come to Samoa even without having to win a trip. This is Nicks first time here and he has been to Rarotonga and New Caledonia, but so far no other island could be compared to Samoa.

We are really happy to spend our honeymoon here in Samoa. It definitely feels like we are on a holiday in paradise, we really do enjoy it, said Rhianna.

Nick adds there is a big difference between Samoa and Rarotonga, not just the landscape, but also the transportation of tourists.

Rarotonga is a lot smaller than Samoa. We had a shuttle straight to the resort, which made it very easy coming from one place to another. I would not say there is anything missing in tourism so far.

I got a sim card from Digicel, it was really easy and it just worked. Not like in Rarotonga. So that is something I do not have to worry about being here, it is really cool.

Rhianna explained: It is not commercialized. Here everything is just very natural. We personally do not want to go to for example Hawaii, which is actually a tropical island, but it is more cities. It is quite nice here.

We really appreciate that here is not that commercialised, she added.

For Rhianna, returning to Samoa has brought back fond memories of her parents and their experience in Samoa.

And this time, her husband has got a chance to feel the culture and the friendliness of the locals.

We had some nice chats with the staff, it was interesting talking to the taxi driver, and we passed the Apia Stadium so he spoke about the rugby games. It was quite cool having that conversation.

It was raining and he was driving us around and showed some things and shared about his life story. And this how we learn more about the culture and it is through the people.

They plan to rent a car and drive around the island before bid their farewell.

We are going to check out the national park, sliding rocks and on Friday (today) we will get up early and hop on a ferry to Savaii. We are going to stay one day there.

They will be back for more adventures in Samoa.
Samoa has a special place in Lynne Coles heart.

A seven-day trip turned into a vacation of a lifetime with memories that would last a lifetime.

In her last hours on the island before she departed, she shared with the Dear Tourist team her island experience.

The 73-year-old from Sydney, Australia, wished she could spend more time in Samoa.

She was in Samoa with her husband, Graham. The stories shes heard about the beauty and nature of Samoa did not do justice to what she had seen.

We have sons who have been here, so they loved the people and the atmosphere here on the island. We saw these lucky trips and got one so we decided to come and here we are.

The trip was short and I am not ready to go back. We do not travel overseas much, but this is a place we definitely will come back to, she said.

They plan to return next for the big island of Savaii.

We will be fine on our next trip, coming here and there are no street names. We had a beautiful tour around the island.

We saw all the villages and I took so many videos I am going to upload it on Facebook. It is good to show the people back home when they ask why Samoa.

I used to say it is up to you if you want to go to Bali or other countries, but I think Samoa is the place that has its own time, it is a really slow place which is good for a break.

They had been to the Tosua Ocean Trench, the Robert Louis Stevenson Museum and the Flea Market.

We ate taro and also had luau on top of it. We had our first taste of ava here in Samoa. My husband loves the taste of the Vailima beer.

We have thoroughly enjoyed this trip.

Lynne adds they have been collecting all the newspaper by the Samoa Observer to take home with them.

We found the paper very good and kept it to educate us to know what is happening around the island.

It was good to have the newspaper because we were not watching any television or listening to the radio. It gave us a brief understanding of what is also happening in China and things like that, which made our trip really interesting.
Sisters Brooke and Annette Mocha find Samoa a perfect place for quality family time.

Not only are they in Samoa for a holiday, but also to spend some time together as siblings because they live in different states in Australia.

Brooke lives at the Gold Coast while Annette is based in Sydney. It is both their first time to the Pacific.

Theyve left the islands but they had the chance to share with the Dear Tourist just how much they did on the islands and the exciting places they visited.

It is a nice and very relaxed, beautiful place. The people are really great. The resort is really beautiful too, Brooke shared.

The sisters stayed at the Taumeasina Island Resort.

It is pretty awesome that the beach is so near to the resort, she said.

We rented a car and drove around the island and have been to Savaii as well. The waterfalls, caves and the trench have been the best part, I would say, Annette added. It is really nice especially the temperature of the water was great.

Meeting local people is one part of discovering a new country.

With the locals, we were mostly just in contact with the staff members here from the resort. But while driving around we have got a little lost and asked a lot of people on the street. We just missed the sign, but it was there. So everyone has been pleased to help us, Brooke said.

In their opinion, there is not much to change in Samoa.

I would not say there is so much to do to make it easier for tourists because it is kind of untouched, I personally do really like this. It is not made too touristy, I avoid places like that.

I like that about Samoa, it is very different from going to other places, they kept the culture here I guess. I mean there have been signs we just did not see it, Brooke explained.

Compared to their home, the people here seem to be more open.

Everyone here is much more friendly than home. We really appreciate that here. It does not matter which time, everyone is saying hey, they said.

They also shared their plans to return.
Greg and Kirstin Fleming came to Samoa to celebrate a 50th wedding anniversary. They are from Wellington, New Zealand.

They are here with their five children. It is their first time in Samoa but not in the Pacific because theyve been to Fiji, Tonga and Vanuatu.

I see a difference between Samoa and Tonga. You can see that Samoa is more developed than Tonga and it seems to be more organised.

The landscape and also the culture are very similar to Tonga.

On the other hand, Fiji is different in terms of the tourism industry, which is more developed than here, Greg shared.

The family is staying at the Taumeasina Island Resort.

This resort here is just amazing; I would not want to change anything. This is beautiful. The people are really helpful they give us a lot of information.

The people are lovely and very friendly. One of the staff members gave us a list of which restaurants we could go to. We went to Scalinis, which was really good.

The range of food you get here for the money is just great. We are looking forward to going to more restaurants and trying new things.

It is pretty relaxed here. So now we have a little more motivation to leave the resort for food hunting, the couple explained to Dear Tourist.

We had a really nice taxi driver, sometimes their English is not that great but they really try, Kirstin said.

Greg added: I am surprised how strong the English is especially due to the fact that Samoan is the first language.

They already have a lot of things planned to do in Samoa before they leave.

Kirstin pointed to her husband and son saying: These guys are going diving tomorrow and we are going to rent a bus for the whole group and visit the To Sua Ocean Trench.

Greg said: This time we are not going to Savaii, but I think next time I will definitely try to go there.
Agriculture has more potential rather than being verbally considered as one of the backbone of Samoas economy.

This is aside from local small or semi-scale subsistence farming.

Samoa Observer spoke to two large scale commercial farmers in Samoa who have made the furrows of a farm look like a highway to business success.

These two farmers are beneficiaries of the assistance provided under the China-Samoa Agricultural Technical Cooperation Project.

Project Head, Jim Liu said their main focus is not to compete with local farmers but rather support them.

For us here at the Nuu demonstration farm, we dont sell what we harvest but we deliver them to the Nuu crop division who then distribute or sell it to the workers within their division or the Ministry of Agriculture, Mr. Jim said.

For many farmers we want to test the seeds and provide them with seedlings and not sell what we harvest.

More farmers are moving from subsistence farming to semi-commercial and commercial farming. For big commercial farmers, agriculture is their main source of livelihood and income for their family."

Sara Ah-Hoy, Aleisa

She is a former teacher who taught at the Robert Louis Stevenson College for 22 years. Sara resigned to assist her husband with maintaining their farm at Aleisa because they were also supplying the National Hospital, into its fourth year now.

Her income from being a white collar worker is nothing compared to what she earns from harvesting and selling her vegetables. According to Sara, she measures this through her ability to earn enough from farming to help her daughters attend an expensive institution like the Robert Louis Stevenson School.

The Chinese team installed my tunnel houses in February this year during the cyclone season. So its just about two months now.

I was willing to get the tunnel houses because if you look at the structure of the tunnel houses I have it is open.

Ive been doing that for six years now and before this team came there was another team that came three years ago. I went to the Ministry of Agriculture for tunnel houses and they said the tunnel houses are mainly for the community.

You had to come together as a community and then you can get tunnel houses but this new team from China, I think theyve been only here for two years now and I think their main focus is the farmers who are looking for technology to help their farms. So we are thankful to them because we have been applying for this for many years and finally we get tunnel houses.

I received two tunnel houses from the Chinese team but I also use the open field.

Inside the tunnel houses, she grows different types of vegetables to test how fast they can grow.

We like working under the tunnel house, like I said I have been working under the tunnel houses for six years now and there is a big difference.We are planting only the tomatoes here because this is a high value vegie. Im only going for the high value vegies because these are very expensive in the market, Sara said.

We have already harvested the three beddings of tomatoes and head cabbage because of the bad weather. It was good because we almost got $2000 tala from harvesting one bed of head cabbage.

I supply to a lot of supermarkets, restaurants, caterings and downtown at the market because I have a stall at the market.

In terms of supplying to the supermarkets, I sell one head cabbage for $5 tala. I dont grow Chinese cabbage here because it is a waste of time and it can be grown in the open field because you sell it for $3 tala the lowest for one bundle which to me means anybody can grow that.

For the egg plants, we estimated $20 tala for one plant and then you multiply by the number of plants, maybe the difference is 10 percent less from your estimation.

I have three varieties because we hardly get our seeds from here. Every six months we fly over to New Zealand for three days to get the seeds for all my vegies. The seeds here are not reliable because maybe if you use one packet, 60 or 70 percent come out good.

The biggest expense we have is water. We dont have running water. We buy water. Now thank God for the rainwater so we just have to use any catchments to collect water otherwise we have to buy water.

Sara uses half of the one-acre land her family has for farming and she only uses chicken manure because its natural and organic.

When I first started my farm, we were seeking assistance from S.B.E.C. and we had savings on the side and because S.B.E.C. needed a farmer to have a savings on the side, thats what we had and they helped me.

We have the land, all we had to do is work on it, so with the assistance of various organizations like S.B.E.C, A.D.B and Chinese I was able to farm my land and develop it further.

I am still waiting on the Chinese to supply my other requests and I dont supply international markets because we dont have that right now.

Before I used to export taro but now were just focusing on the local market. We used to have this buyer but the price of taro keeps getting low. Weve been to New Zealand and what we saw is that the Samoan taro is not the same as the taro we get from elsewhere like in Fiji.

Sara advises subsistence farmers willing to move to commercial farming to be consistent with what they farm and what they plant.

John Mapusua, Aleisa

He was brought up in a family of commercial farmers. He has 10 siblings and their education expenses were all paid through farm earnings.

John was assisted with tunnel houses seven months ago under the China-Samoa aid. The 46-year-old has a farm in Tanumalala, a 95-acre farm in Lalonaea where he grows crops and seedlings, a 10-acre farm in Aleisa where he focuses on growing vegetables and a six-acre farm in Falelauniu where he raises his pigs, plants Tahitian lime, bananas and coconuts.

According to John, he cannot supply the growing demand for vegetables from the local markets. He supplies to Frankies Supermarket, Farmer Joe and other small outlets in Samoa.

At the moment, the sale of what I harvest is not really good because of the unfavourable weather, but if its favourable, we cant supply the demand of 300 or 250 bundles of cabbage per night.

For example if they request 200 Chinese cabbage a night because we deliver at night, and seven nights thats 1,400 bundles, multiply that by two thats $2,800 tala from just the sale of Chinese cabbage.

But as you can see, we have varieties of vegetables, we have long bean, short bean, green pepper, eggplant, sweet corn, watermelon, cucumber and thats apart from the Chinese cabbage.

Inside the tunnel house, the Chinese cabbage takes only three weeks or less to harvest but in the open field five weeks because of the weather.

I like using the tunnel house because it has boosted my income. There are no problems inside the tunnel house because theyre more or less organic farming, insects are left out and the plastic over the tunnel house controls the rain. You will see theres 90 percent no insect but out in the open field 100 percent insect and disease.

For the Chinese cabbage inside the tunnel house, thats about 1,800 cabbages in one bed and there are two beds. Sometimes we have two, three or four in a bundle. What I calculated before is because there are some cabbage that bad and rotten so you cant harvest all the 1,800 cabbages.

I sell the Chinese cabbage for $2 tala a bundle, so for three weeks, I would get $2000 tala and in the open field if I harvest what I make would vary because of the unfavourable weather. I like the tunnel house better.

The income I get covers my expenses. I spend money on fertilisers, the 10 workers I have they have to be paid. We work more time on the farm not only here, but all the other farms that we have. Apart from the fertilisers, I also use chicken manure.

For challenges he faces as a commercial farmer, John explained: Competition with other commercial farmers only happen if we plant the same variety, but if we dont then theres no competition at all. But even though we plant the same vegetables, there are heaps of restaurants and Samoan people who want the vegetables.

Then there are the diseases. The insect that damage the plants, there are no chemicals to kill the insects because there are different kinds of insects damaging the different kinds of vegetables.

Thats the main problem with us farmers because with the wet weather some other diseases also emerge and we have no knowledge of what to do so we just let it go.

John said he has requested the Chinese team for two more tunnel houses to help close the gap between the demand and supply chain.
The United Kingdom is opening a new High Commission in Apia.

The British Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, announced the opening of nine new diplomatic posts across the Commonwealth, including in Samoa, Tonga and Vanuatu.

As a Commonwealth family of nations, it is in our shared interest to boost prosperity, tackle security issues and clear up the environment, he said.

These new diplomatic posts are in regions which provide huge potential and opportunity post-Brexit for British businesses and will help us to deepen our relationships across the Commonwealth.

After we leave the EU, Global Britain will remain outward facing, open for business and a champion of the rules-based international order.

Laura Clarke, non-Resident British High Commissioner to Samoa, said:

I am delighted that the Foreign Secretary has decided to open a High Commission in Samoa. I very much enjoyed my first visit to Samoa in March this year, and came back convinced that the UK should increase its work and presence there.

There is a natural affinity between the UK and Samoa. Ours is a partnership based on a shared history, shared values, and a shared political and judicial system. We work in partnership together on shared challenges  such as combating climate change  and we are both proud members of the Commonwealth. There is so much more that we can achieve together.

I look forward to working with the Government of Samoa as we set up our new British High Commission in Apia before I hand over my responsibility for Samoa, with both sadness and pride, to the new Resident British High Commissioner.

It is expected that the new British High Commission in Apia will open in 2019.
San Diego County unemployment in March hit its lowest level since December 1999, said state labor officials and local analysis.

The upside: San Diegos seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was 3.1 percent in March, said Lynn Reaser, chief economist for the Fermanian Business & Economic Institute at Point Loma Nazarene University. That is the down from 3.4 percent last month and the lowest in 18 years. The San Diego region added 27,100 jobs in a year, said state labor officials.

Californias seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was 4.3 percent in March, and the nationwide rate was 4.1 percent.

What the numbers mean for job seekers: Now is the time for discouraged San Diegans without a job to get out there and start looking, said Phil Blair, owner of San Diego staffing agency Manpower. He said this is an opportunity for students, and people discouraged by the job market, to get a job to build their resume  because they wont have this opportunity again when the unemployment rate goes back up.

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What it means for employers: Blair said its tough for many employers to admit, but they are already lowering the bar for workers. Weve all gotten spoiled, he said. For so long we said we want someone with five years experience, this degree and (Master of Business Administration). And we could get it. Those days are gone.

A college degree is still good to have, because there is no guarantee the job market will be great forever, said Genine Wilson, vice president of the Southern California division of staffing agency Kelly Services. But, she said many employers will need to rethink their decades-long policy of requiring a four-year degree for most jobs.

Employers need to ask what skills are attached to a four-year degree that arent attached to a two-year certification trade school, she said. Because its those middle-skilled jobs that were really struggling to fill, especially in San Diego.

How it could affect workers: Reaser said the tight job market should translate into larger raises for workers, but it also puts a strain on companies trying to grow their businesses. She said while job growth is not very high, it doesnt necessarily mean companies arent hiring  it could be they couldnt fill positions.

Where people are hiring: Employers with the most job advertisements in March were UC San Diego (1,967 jobs), Robert Half International (880 jobs), General Atomics (629 jobs) and Marriott (536 jobs), said the state Employment Development Department.

What is in demand: Occupations with the most job advertisements, said state officials, were software developers (1,362 jobs), registered nurses (1,279 jobs) and retail salespersons (1,096 jobs).

Growth areas: State officials said the biggest job gains came from education hiring from February to March. It said 700 new education jobs came from local hiring and 400 from state government. Also, leisure and hospitality added 1,000 jobs in the month-long period.

Declines: The trade, transportation and utilities sector had the biggest decline with 900 jobs. The industry includes retail, general merchandise and grocery stores.

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The big picture: In a year-over-year basis, the biggest growth area was professional and business services  including agricultural, engineering and related services  with 8,400 jobs. The only category to lose jobs, a decline of 1,300, was leisure and hospitality.

The Qualcomm factor: Cellular technology giant Qualcomm announced layoffs of 1,231 in San Diego this week as part of a cost-cutting plan. Alan Gin, economist at University of San Diego, said this is a better time for the layoffs to happen (as opposed to the Great Recession). He said employers are looking for highly skilled workers and it could be a boon for companies struggling to fill positions.

I think this will give some firms an opportunity that wanted to hire people but couldnt convince people to come out to San Diego where housing costs are so high, he said. If you could get someone laid off from Qualcomm, that already has a house here and committed to the community, that might make it easier.

How we compare: State labor officials do not seasonally adjust jobless rates for individual counties, but the unadjusted numbers show San Diego County has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the region in March at 3.2 percent. The jobless rate in Los Angeles County was 4.1 percent, 3.9 percent in San Bernardino County, 2.8 percent in Orange County and 4.2 percent in Riverside County.

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* * *

Employers with the most job advertisements

 University Of California, San Diego - 1967

 Robert Half International - 880

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 General Atomics - 629  Marriott - 536

 Northrop Grumman - 521

 Volt Workforce Solutions - 384

 Randstad - 372

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 Kforce Professional Staffing, Inc. - 356

 Kaiser Permanente - 338

 Booz Allen Hamilton - 299

Occupations with the most job advertisements

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 Software Developers, Applications - 1362

 Registered Nurses - 1279

 Retail Salespersons - 1096

 First-Line Supervisors of Retail Sales Workers - 871

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 First-Line Supervisors of Food Preparation and Serving Workers - 844

 First-Line Supervisors of Office and Administrative Support Workers - 842

 Medical Scientists, Except Epidemiologists - 801

 Customer Service Representatives - 796

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 Computer User Support Specialists - 721

 Network and Computer Systems Administrators - 693

Source: California Employment Development Department

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phillip.molnar@sduniontribune.com (619) 293-1891 Twitter: @phillipmolnar

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The Hyundai Kona is an undersized overachiever in the burgeoning segment of subcompact SUV crossovers. There are now more than a dozen mass-market choices for these pint-sized cars, plus one from just about every luxury marque. The EPA classifies them as small SUVs, but apart from optional all-wheel drive, they are merely bulked up five-door hatchbacks with a raised ride height and some burly design cues to suggest an adventurous soul. Their habitat is mostly the city with the allure of weekend getaways.

While some were rushed transplants from existing European or Asian markets, the 2018 Kona is a new Hyundai architecture and designed to appeal to North American motorists.

The front seat area is well designed and ergonomically arranged and the Ultimate shows well in its sturdily stitched leather-trimmed upholstery with supple perforated centers. The only thing missing is height adjustment for the passenger seat. (Hyundai )

Its competitors include the Honda HR-V, Mazda CX-3, Jeep Renegade, Chevrolet Trax, Ford Ecosport, Fiat 500X, Nissan Kicks, Toyota C-HR, Mini Cooper Countryman, Kia Niro and Mitsubishi Outlander Sport.

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At 13.5 feet long, the Kona is a little shorter than some competitors, but it makes up for it in interior space and creative storage solutions.

The Kona is sold in four trim levels with front- or all-wheel-drive with two choices of engine and transmission  and each has a different appeal (or lack of it).

The front seat area is well designed and ergonomically arranged. (Hyundai )

Pricing

Starting prices for the SE and SEL range from $20,450-$23,550 for the SEL AWD with a two-tone roof. These entry-level models have a 147-horsepower, 2.0-liter Atkinson-cycle four-cylinder engine and six-speed automatic transmission. Mileage ratings are 27 mpg city, 33 highway and 30 mpg combined on 87 octane fuel.

The more upscale Kona Limited or Ultimate models are powered by a 175-hp, turbocharged and direct-injection 1.6-liter four-cylinder and seven-speed dual clutch automatic (automated manual). Its fuel-economy ratings are 26/29/27 mpg city/hwy/combined on the recommended 87 octane. I was averaging 31 mpg on two daylong drives. The 13.2-gallon tank is generous for a small car and allows a large cruising radius.

The gauge array is large with bold numbers. (Hyundai )

Starting prices range from $25,650-$29,650 for the loaded Ultimate, which debuts a new Lime paint color and bright lime interior accents. (All pricing includes the $950 freight charge from Ulsan, South Korea.)

The Ultimate AWD Lime tester was $29,775, with one option for carpeted floor mats, $125.

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The entry models are ideal for young, gainfully employed buyers moving up from a hand-me-down car. The Atkinson-cycle engine is tuned for fuel economy, but it is noisy. And the torsion-beam rear suspension is hard riding. But the standard features will be appreciated, which include a rearview camera, height-adjustable drivers seat, fold-flat 60/40 back seat, air conditioning, 7-inch touch screen with six-speaker audio system Android Auto or Apple CarPlay infotainment and app,s and a charging bin with a USB and 12-volt plug.

Just ahead of the shifter console is an e-bin charging area with two 180-watt 12-volt plugs and an audio input, but there is just one USB port in the entire car. (Hyundai )

The Limited and Ultimate feel like a different car from the entry models. There is a more refined suspension, including a multilink rear suspension, and the engine and transmission are quieter and more responsive.

Despite the small space, Hyundai carved out 38 inches of headroom with the sunroof (or 39.6 without) and 41.5 inches of front legroom. Shoulder room is adult-class broad at 55.5 inches. And the cargo space is very usable, spanning 19.2 cubic feet behind the back seat (a 16-cubic-foot trunk would be huge in a compact sedan). The 60/40 folding back seat expands space to 45.8 cu. ft. and the seat folds flat for about 4.5 feet of length by 3 feet wide. There also are four tie-downs, one grocery-bag hook and usable underfloor storage.

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The cargo space is very usable, spanning 19.2 cubic feet behind the back seat . (Hyundai )

The back seat, too, is reasonably roomy, with 34.5 inches of legroom, a low hump to the exhaust-transmission tunnel and a comfortable seatback angle with adequate thigh support for young adults. Details include a coat hook on the driver-side door, door storage with a bottle holder and two seatback pockets.

The front seat area is well designed and ergonomically arranged. The Ultimate shows well in its sturdily stitched leather-trimmed upholstery and supple perforated centers. The only thing missing is height adjustment for the passenger seat. These definitely are not the cheap seats, but after four hours on the media drive I was getting the flat-fanny syndrome.

Although there is lots of black plastic throughout the cabin, it is broken up nicely by varied graining textures and soft-touch pieces.

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The 60/40 folding back seat expands space to 45.8 cu. ft. and the seat folds flat for about 4.5 feet of length by 3 feet wide. (Hyundai )

Just ahead of the shifter console is an e-bin charging area with two 180-watt 12-volt plugs and an audio input, but there is just one USB port in the entire car. (USBs in new cars should equal the number of cup holders.)

And the designer found space on the slim floor-shift console for the shifter and a manual parking brake lever  with buttons for the drive modes, the AWD switch to lock the differential, seat heaters and the switch for hill-descent control. And there are two cup holders and cubby storage in the armrest console (some small utes dont even have an armrest console).

The cargo area also has usable underfloor storage. (Hyundai )

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The gauge array is large with bold numbers. The infotainment layout of the touch screen is quite workable while driving, with separate volume and tuning dials. And on either side of the touch screen are large tabs for radio, media, map, navigation and vehicle setup. Climate controls are easily accessed with dials for temp and fan speed with a row of switches for defrost-vent-recirc.

There are large sliding visors with large, lighted mirrors, a large drivers footrest and a large (nonlocking) glovebox.

Drivability

Performance is reasonably brisk, but the combo of small turbocharged engine and the clutching action of the dual-clutch transmission can get annoying in stop-and-go driving. Sport mode gives enough snap for spirited driving, but it is not necessary for everyday driving.

The 175-hp, turbocharged and direct-injection 1.6-liter four-cylinder in the Ultimate has reasonably brisk performance and the engine is quiet. (Hyundai )

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While some of these small utes can have a choppy ride on the highway, the Kona is settled and tracks dead on. Get on the brakes hard and there is no pull, just straight stopping. And the four-wheel discs are large, too, for a small car: vented 12-inch rotors front with 11.2-inch solid rotors rear. (The base front-drive model gets 11-inch rotors front, 10.3-inch rear.)

These small utes are like smartphones. The latest and greatest has the most features and the sleek styling with the most sophisticated technologies. Thats where Kona is today: living large in a crowded world.

2018 Hyundai Kona Ultimate AWD

Body style : subcompact, 5-passenger, AWD SUV crossover

: subcompact, 5-passenger, AWD SUV crossover Engine : 175-hp, turbocharged and direct-injection 1.6-liter 4-cylinder; 195 lb.-ft. torque from 1,500-4,500 rpm

: 175-hp, turbocharged and direct-injection 1.6-liter 4-cylinder; 195 lb.-ft. torque from 1,500-4,500 rpm Transmission : 7-speed dual clutch automatic (automated manual)

: 7-speed dual clutch automatic (automated manual) Fuel economy: 26/29/27 mpg city/hwy/ combined; 87 octane

SPECIFICATIONS

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Fuel tank : 13.2 gal.

: 13.2 gal. Cargo space : 19.2-45.8 cu. ft.

: 19.2-45.8 cu. ft. Front head/leg room : 38*/41.5 in. *39.6 w/o sunroof

: 38*/41.5 in. *39.6 w/o sunroof Rear head/leg room : 37.8/34.6 in.

: 37.8/34.6 in. Length/wheelbase : 164/102.4 in.

: 164/102.4 in. Curb weight : 3,256 lbs.

: 3,256 lbs. Turning circle: 34.8 ft.

FEATURES

Standard equipment includes : smartkey locking and push-button ignition, power sunroof, leather-trimmed upholstery, leather-wrapped steering wheel and shifter, auto-dimming rearview mirror, heads-up display, wireless charging, 8-inch color touch screen for navigation and rearview camera, Apple CarPlay or Android Auto infotainment, 8-speaker (315-watt) Infinity audio system, 12-volt plug and 1 USB, LED headlights-taillights-running lights, 18-inch alloy wheels with 235/45 all-season tires, fog lights, rain-sensing wipers, power locks/windows, heated side mirrors with turn signals, automatic climate control, 8-way power drivers seat with lumbar, heated front seats, 60/40 folding back seat

: smartkey locking and push-button ignition, power sunroof, leather-trimmed upholstery, leather-wrapped steering wheel and shifter, auto-dimming rearview mirror, heads-up display, wireless charging, 8-inch color touch screen for navigation and rearview camera, Apple CarPlay or Android Auto infotainment, 8-speaker (315-watt) Infinity audio system, 12-volt plug and 1 USB, LED headlights-taillights-running lights, 18-inch alloy wheels with 235/45 all-season tires, fog lights, rain-sensing wipers, power locks/windows, heated side mirrors with turn signals, automatic climate control, 8-way power drivers seat with lumbar, heated front seats, 60/40 folding back seat Safety features include: 6 air bags with rollover sensor, blind-spot collision warning with lane-change assist, rear cross-traffic collision alert, forward collision-avoidance assist with pedestrian detection, lane-keep assist and driver-attention warning, parking distance warning

PRICING

Base price : $29,650, including $950 freight charge; price as tested $29,775

: $29,650, including $950 freight charge; price as tested $29,775 Options on test vehicle : carpeted floor mats $125

: carpeted floor mats $125 Where assembled : Ulsan, South Korea

: Ulsan, South Korea Warranty: 5 years/60,000 miles bumper to bumper with unlimited mileage for roadside assistance; 10 years/100,000 miles powertrain

Mark Maynard is the automotive editor at The San Diego Union-Tribune. Mark.Maynard@sduniontribune.com

At 13.5 feet long, the Kona is a little shorter than some competitors, but it makes up for it in interior space and creative storage solutions. (Hyundai )
Wearing a white headscarf and a look of determination, El Camino High School senior Kheidijah Abdulmateen rallied her Oceanside classmates to assert their right to school safety, protesting Friday that students campaigns against gun violence are being ignored.

Everyone, raise your voices, raise your fists, make it known that we are here, we are relevant, we are equal and we matter, Abdulmateen said. Continue to fight for our voices to be heard, continue to fight for our rights, continue to fight for our lives, never back down.

El Camino students were among hundreds throughout San Diego County who organized walkouts Friday to protest campus violence on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre.

The shootings by two students at the Colorado campus left 13 people dead and made school shooting drills and fears of campus violence part of the American educational experience.

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The protests are part of a nationwide action organized through the National School Walkout movement, started by a 16-year-old who lived near Sandy Hook Elementary school, where 20 students were killed in 2012.

That campaign gained urgency following the recent killing of 17 students and teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., on Feb. 14.

Student survivors of the Florida shooting quickly organized protests against gun violence, galvanizing other youths who fear attacks at their schools.

Fridays national walkout is the second in two months, following previous protests and assemblies on March 14.

Bonita Vista High School juniors Gabriel Lozano, 16, (left) and Sasha Lopez, 16, were the only two students of the schools student body who participated in the National School Walkout to protest gun violence on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine massacre ( Nancee E. Lewis )

Only two students protested at Bonita Vista High School in Chula Vista.

Leaving a lesson about the Civil Rights movement in their history class to make their point about student safety, Gabriel Lozano, 16, and Sasha Lopez, 16, stood quietly in front of the schools main office. They pointed out that school violence is ongoing, noting that 2,600 miles away, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., one student was shot in the ankle Friday morning.

Its been 20 years since Columbine and nothings changed, Lozano said. Even this morning, a student was shot in Florida. This shouldnt be happening.

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At El Camino High School, the student safety campaign intertwined with the Black Lives Matter movement against police shootings of African Americans. Members of the Black Student Union stood on the steps outside the campuss front office and spoke about the need for comprehensive gun control reform.

With a powerful voice and pressing message, El Camino High School Junior Emanuel Prince rallied classmates Friday morning with a call for student safety and civil rights.

We will not be holding hands and singing kumbaya, Prince said during a student walkout from the Oceanside campus, vowing that black students will not be taken for granted. We will not be treated as accessories.

They vowed to keep pressing for change even though most in the crowd of more than 100 students arent yet old enough to vote.

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Students at Hilltop High School in Chula Vista planned to walk to the trolley station and board a trolley to Waterfront Park to protest what they say are gaps in their campus security system. They dismissed critics of the National Walkout movement, saying that students have the right to demonstrate as they are the ones at risk of school violence.

Its not them thats getting shot, its not them that are dying, said 10th-grader J.C. Caseltine, an organizer of the event. Its us. If anybodys going to talk about it, it should be us.

School officials in several districts said they respected students free speech rights, but warned them against leaving class.

Two days before the walkout at Bonita Vista, the Sweetwater Union High School District sent an email to parents informing them that any student who leaves their schools campus would be considered truant and could face disciplinary action. Officials proposed alternative demonstrations such as on-campus sit-ins, gun safety petitions and observing 17 minutes of silence in honor of the the Parkland victims.

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San Diego Unified School District officials also urged students to stay on campus, warning that students who leave would be marked with an unexcused absence, district spokeswoman Maureen Magee said.

On other sites, students held assemblies, voter registration drives or other events to mark the grim anniversary.

At Del Norte High School in the Poway Unified School District, students assembled for a forum on school safety. Student organizers Nicole Parks, 17 and Yunho Jung, 18, both seniors, said they marched outside the school gates for the event, which featured a speaker whose family members were victims of the Las Vegas shootings, followed by a discussion of the terror that school violence has provoked among students, and a recitation of names of victims from Columbine and Parkland.

Following the presentations, students conducted a voter registration drive and a letter-writing campaign to Congressional representatives. Despite the schools involvement in last months protests, Jung said students felt compelled to do more.

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Although we saw a lot of passion and energy from our students that day, we believed that the school as a body has not done enough to make sure that real change would happen to protect schools, and the students inside of them, he said.

At El Camino High School 11th. grader Adrian Jackson speaks at an anti-gun rally. Students walked out of classes at 10:00 a.m. for the rally in front of the schools administration building. (Charlie Neuman )

Students at Fallbrook High School planned to skip the walkout and instead staged a Day of Kindness to honor those killed at Columbine. Tenth-grade English students who had read the book Columbine by author Dave Cullen organized the event, asking classmates to perform one act of kindness for each victim.

Student organizers at Scripps Ranch High School said they visited classrooms to discuss their demands for student safety. Those include declaring gun violence a public safety crisis, banning assault-style weapons and high-capacity magazines, expanding background checks for gun sales, and other measures, said organizer Natalie Santos.

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And they shared contact information for Congressional representatives and collected signatures in favor of their school safety demands. They also planned to protest outside the campus after school, Santos said.

At San Marcos High School, a sheriffs deputy and school security officers stood outside the main gate to campus shortly before 10 a.m. Superintendent Melissa Hunt said those officials are part of normal security for the campus. She said officials asked students not to walk out Friday.

We want to respect their right to speak out, and we believe their voice can make change; however, we do not believe walking off campus is the solution, Hunt said. So we discouraged our kids from walking off campus.

Instead, she said, students discussed campus safety during lunch, and some wore orange, a color that designates the fight against gun violence in honor of Hadiya Pendleton, a Chicago student slain near her school in 2013.

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The Sheriffs Department issued a statement Friday, encouraging students to notify law enforcement if they plan to leave campus, and to report any threats of violence.

The statement said, in part, We respect everyones right to express themselves in a peaceful and respectful manner.  For our students: please respect the instructions of school officials and if you hear any threats of violence or even potential violence, we encourage you to talk to one of our Sheriffs School Resource Deputies. The Sheriffs Department takes every threat seriously.

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deborah.brennan@sduniontribune.com Twitter@deborahsbrennan
He turned 81 on Friday, but life is much like its always been for actor-activist George Takei: busy, busy, busy.

Takei recently starred in the Los Angeles production of Allegiance, a musical inspired by the years that he spent in a Japanese-American internment camp during World War II.

Hes also doing public lectures, including one scheduled for UC San Diego on April 26th. And Takei runs a hugely popular Facebook page that features a mix of stories that spotlight everything from gay rights to human achievement to politics, fashion and cats. He also is a regular critic of President Trump.

His Facebook site has about 10 million followers, which has added to the celebrity of a man known worldwide for his portrayal of Sulu in Star Trek.

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Takei (pronounced ta-kay) recently spoke to the Union-Tribune by phone and email. His remarks, which focus on social media and social justice, have been blended and lightly edited for space and clarity.

Q: Many people associate you with the future because you have appeared in films and television programs based in the future. It made me wonder whether youre the type of person who projects ahead, who tries to figure out where we might be going technologically, and what that means. Are you?

A: Technology is wonderful. But it is man-made and were discovering some aspects that are not so wonderful because we are fallible. Thats the big issue right now in the political arena. Young, immature or vulnerable people are bullied. But that same technology, on a global scale, can change elections, can overthrow governments, can do drastic things. Ultimately it all comes back to the human condition, and human values.

Q: Facebook has been in the news so much, particularly for (co-founder Mark ) Zuckerberg appearing before the House and the Senate. Did you walk away with any different impression of the technology after you heard Zuckerberg speak?

A: I saw snippets on the news, so I didnt hear his entire (testimony). I do think that we are going to have regulations, human restraints, put on the power of technology. Human beings have the potential for doing great things, but also the capacity for fallibility. We have to have a body of people with principles and morality to structure regulations so that they can guide the use of technology to minimize the harm that can be done.

Q: If you had the time to sit down with him, what would you talk about?

A: Hes a fascinating guy. Hes got ideas, hes got energy, and I believe he has the ability to solve his companys challenges 

But he is also a human being with all the fallibilities that humans have  a need to grow his business as big as it can get, the need to make profits beyond imagination, and the need to have power.

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George Takei was born in Los Angeles on April 20, 1937. During his childhood, he lived in Japanese-American internment camps in Arkansas and Northern California. (Patrick T. Fallon / For The Times )

Q: Do you think it is possible for a user of Facebook to have some degree of privacy with their data, and allow Facebook to do what it wants in selling data? Can you have the best of both worlds? One for Facebook, one for those who use it?

A: I dont think so. People like (Edward) Snowden have to go around regulations, and hes paying the price for it being cut off from his country. Martin Luther King Jr. was willing to pay the price for breaking the law. He was a man of ideals and principles. The human being finds it so difficult in the battle between avarice and altruism.

Q: Youre a public figure.Your expectation of privacy isnt what it might be for someone who isnt famous. But, still, do you worry about the data that is collected about you on Facebook and --

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A: And some of the data might be fake data.

Q: How does one even know, really?

A: Whether there is fake data about me out there?

Q: Now, how much of the data is real and how much is fake?

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A: We dont know. Thats the thing about technology. You dont know some of the things that are happening.

American actor George Takei appears as Sulu in a scene from The Man Trap, ' the premiere episode of Star Trek, ' which aired on September 8, 1966. (Getty )

Q: You have posted a lot of stories that were critical of President Trump. Are you worried about blowback?

A: Ive been getting blowback. You have to go into this knowing (that would happen). But I think thats the price for being actively engaged in social justice causes and, frankly, the political arena. It is a contest. There are people who want to win that contest  at all costs. Principles, humanity are trampled. You go into it knowing that that is the nature of the animal.

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Q: Do you go into it thinking that any thing good is going to come from what you say to Mr. Trump?

A: Thats why I do it. I am trying to reach people who are going to react positively to what I say. I hope to galvanize them to be actively engaged in doing the right thing. I am a human being. I have fallibilities, too, and the arrogance to think Im right and the guy in the White House is wrong.

Q: If you could speak to him 

A: And I have. I did the Celebrity Apprentice Show with Donald Trump  about six years ago, I believe.

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During a press event promoting the show, I had been advocating for marriage equality (in New York). I said, Mr. Trump, Id like to invite you to have lunch with me at one of your restaurants. I will host. And well discuss marriage equality.

And I did that with the intent of getting him to make some comment on marriage equality. He had said he was opposed. I fully expected him to say, Im too busy. Cant do it.

But he surprised me. He said, You know George that might be an interesting conversation. Have your people arrange with my people. It took a long time, three or four months, but we got together for lunch.

I told him that youre a business man and marriage equality in New York would be a profitable thing for you. People would love to come to New York to get married. They would stay in your hotels. They would eat in your restaurants. They might even get married in one of your banquet rooms. It would be good not only for you, but the economy.

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He said, Yeah, I agree with that. But I believe in traditional marriage. That gave me pause because hes famously been unfaithful. He was on his third marriage. But because Im trying to win him over I restrained myself. I kept talking to him about why he would be opposed to something that would be beneficial to him financially and something that would be good for LGBT people. Give them security and a sense of comfort, safety, by having that legal protection for their partnership with someone they loved.

We kept going. He maintained that he was for traditional marriage and I didnt think it was going to help my argument by saying, Well, you obviously dont believe in traditional marriage. So we had to leave it at that.

Q: I realized how much things have changed a couple of nights ago. I was watching an Eddie Murphy concert from the 1980s and he was using a slur for gay people and the audience was roaring. If you used that word today people would take your head off.

A: Thats right. You try to live in the real world. You want to change that world. Sometimes, its going to take a long time.

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I grew up in prison (internment camps), behind U.S. barbed wire fences, which was wrong. But at the time there was a hysteria that swept over this country and the president got stampeded. As a teenager I had many discussions with my father and recognized that needed to be changed. We needed to get an apology for that. Thats the best way for the nation to learn from a bad experience. It took more than 40 years, but we got the president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, to formally apologize, on behalf of the nation.

Q: What will you be talking about when you visit UC San Diego?

A: I will be talking, in essence, about the peoples democracy in the context of my childhood imprisonment and how that shaped me into who I am. I was five years old at the time. As I grew older and I couldnt find information in history books about the internment, I had many conversations with my father, and got an understanding of American democracy.

As I grew older, I started to discover that I was different in ways other than just my Japanese face. That I was attracted to (males). And then as I grew older, I learned that theres a name for it, gay. If I wanted to be an actor, I couldnt be gay. So I started to act like everybody else. I dated, I went on double dates, I was living a double life, just so I could have a career doing what I passionately enjoyed.

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Then, in a gay bar, I was told by one of the older guys that we have to be careful because the police would raid gay bars and march people out and take them to the police station and fingerprint them, photograph them, put their names on a list, which was devastating.

I certainly didnt want to get criminalized like that so I when I went into a gay bar I looked for the exits and knew where I (would) go. And then I drew that parallel between my childhood imprisonment ... and guys (who were) doing nothing wrong, harming no one, being criminalized.

Ill be talking about the core principles about American democracy.
Its one thing to know your mom committed suicide by jumping off the San Diego-Coronado Bridge. Its another to know she took you with her.

Bertha Loaiza survived that 246-foot-plunge more than 32 years ago. She was 3. The media called her a miracle, the first person ever to go over the side and live. People from as far away as Mississippi sent her cards, letters, dolls and stuffed animals as she recovered from eye and leg injuries.

The emotional wounds are still healing.

Now the lifelong South Bay resident wants to be an advocate for bridge safety and mental-health awareness. Shes speaking out as Caltrans does a feasibility study of suicide barriers on the bridge, where more than 400 people have killed themselves since the span opened in 1969.

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I want to be the voice of those who cant speak, she said in an interview Thursday, and the face of those who arent ashamed.

She grew up thinking her mother had died in a car accident, which was partly right. There was a car involved, a green Ford Pinto that Angelica Gomez, 24, parked on the bridge mid-span at about 5 p.m. on Aug. 4, 1985. Then she took her daughter in her arms and dropped into the bay.

Two fishermen in a boat pulled them from the water and started CPR. The girl resumed breathing; her mother did not. Officials later surmised that Gomez had taken the brunt of the fall, shielding her daughter by hitting the water first.

They also said, after a coroners investigation, that Gomez had been suffering from depression and was going through a major life-change, a divorce from her husband. The business card of a counseling psychologist was found in the Pinto.

Her daughter suffered a traumatic cataract in her right eye and a broken right hip. She wore an eye patch and was in a body cast for months.

From the outset, she had no memory of the fall, leading some to believe she may have been asleep in her mothers arms. To explain her injuries, she told people shed had an accident in a park near her house.

Raised by her maternal grandparents, she grew up in a home filled with pictures of her mom so its not as if anyone was trying to hide that part of her past, she said. But there were things that went unsaid, and children have active imaginations. Thats how she came to believe her mom had died in a car accident, maybe one involving a drunken-driver.

When she was about 17, she found a VHS tape with news coverage of the bridge incident. I must have watched it 100 times, she said. I kept saying, That looks like me. Thats when it all came together.

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Why did you bring me along?

She saw a therapist to sort out her grief and feelings of betrayal. She learned about the local chapter of Survivors of Suicide Loss and started attending monthly meetings.

It helped to spend time with others who understood some of what she was going through, she said, but there were also occasions when people remembered her story from the media coverage, and that made her uncomfortable. She would stay away from meetings for a while, pretend like maybe the suicide never happened.

A turning point came as she wrestled with what to think of her mother. I didnt like her too much, Loaiza said. I kept asking, Why did you bring me along? 

It took years, but she eventually came to this conclusion:

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My mom did love me. People with severe depression are in a really dark, ugly world, and I think she brought me with her because she believed she was the only one who could best take care of me. And in a way she did. She shielded me at the end, taking most of the impact. She hurt me, but she saved me, too.

She knows others might not see it that way, but it works for her. And she said its enabled her to be more comfortable talking about what happened with her family and friends, to move beyond the shame that often surrounds suicide.

Depression is so misunderstood by people, she said. I used to be one of them.

Now shes even thinking about leading her own survivors group, using her bilingual skills to help people who speak Spanish and might not otherwise be able to participate.

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Several weeks ago, Loaiza saw a documentary about Kevin Hines, who at age 19 survived a suicide jump off the Golden Gate Bridge in 2000.

Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Hines is now a mental-health advocate and gives presentations all over the country.

Inspired by the film, Loaiza contacted the Coronado San Diego Bridge Collaborative for Suicide Prevention, which has been leading the effort to get barriers installed. She offered to share her story.

Shes scheduled to be the featured speaker at an upcoming Bridge Collaborative press conference in Coronado.

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I think she can raise awareness in ways that no one else can, said Rhonda Haiston, one of the collaboratives founders. What can we do to make sure that what happened to her never happens again?

Loaiza knows there are people who think fences or other installations would mar the beauty of the bridge as it sweeps across the bay. She knows there are people who think those intent on killing themselves will just go somewhere else (even though research shows otherwise).

But even a five-minute delay in a suicide attempt might make the difference, she said. Maybe they go to the bridge and a barrier thwarts them, and then they see a sign with the suicide helpline number (888-724-7240).

And then they pick up the phone.

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I will never know

Loaiza turns 37 later this year. She works for a local health-care provider, is married and has two children, a son who is 10 and a daughter who is 6.

She recently told them how their grandmother died, and her son had the same question that long haunted her: Why did she have to take you?

When the boy was 3, the age Loaiza was when she went off the bridge, she had a tough year. I was a paranoid mess, she said.

She remembers going to a McDonalds, watching her son play, and wondering what could have been so hard about raising a child of that age that would have made her mom do what she did.

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I wanted to make sense of it, she said. I wasnt at the place yet where I understood that it will never make sense. I will never have an answer for why she did it. I will never know.

All we can do is move on, work with what we have, and try to make the world a better place.

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john.wilkens@sduniontribune.com
Supervisor Kristin Gaspar was a driving force behind the countys decision to support the federal lawsuit challenging Californias immigrant sanctuary laws.

For the time being, the action on Tuesday amounts to making a statement, given that it only authorizes a potential legal move, possibly far in the future.

So while the county bides its time, the immediate question becomes whether Gaspar has turned this into a breakout moment in her bid for Congress.

Since she proposed the county take a stand in this contentious dispute, Gaspar has received a lot of media attention, seemingly becoming a regular on Fox news and talk shows  though sometimes in the wee hours of the morning.

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Gaspar made a splash in January when she entered the campaign to replace Rep. Darrell Issa, who is not seeking re-election. She had been a supervisor for just over a year and the race already was crowded with well-known Republicans and Democrats, some with considerable financial resources.

She slogged along early, with down-in-the-pack poll numbers and modest fundraising, though the latter has been improving. Then Gaspar, who had been viewed as a rising local Republican star, suffered a big setback earlier this month when the San Diego GOP endorsed one of her rivals, state Board of Equalization member and former state legislator Diane Harkey  from Orange County. Harkey had already gained the nod from her home county GOP.

Gaspar needs a game-changer in the primary campaign if shes going to advance to the November election in the 49th Congressional District. But there is political reward and risk from jumping into the immigration cauldron  and being seen as one of Trumps warriors on this front can be both.

Its a potent political issue among the Republican base  as Trump has shown  and Harkey has a lot of the leaders from that camp in her corner already. By going after the sanctuary laws, Gaspar clearly is making a play for that base, if not its leaders. She may have no place else to go. Front-runner Assemblyman Rocky Chavez, never a favorite of party conservatives, has appeal to moderates.

Chavez, R-Oceanside, had a solid lead in the latest San Diego Union-Tribune/10News poll published April 12. At 16 percent support, he doubled Harkeys 8 percent. Gaspar came in with 5 percent, tying her with San Juan Capistrano City Councilman Brian Maryott. There were four Democrats polling ahead of Gaspar, and its doubtful shell be able to cut substantially into their votes, especially after her sanctuary law gambit.

An early poll may not be worth much in the long run, but at the very least it gives a sense of how the field of 16 stands at the moment. Gaspar has to rise above all but one of them to move out of the primary, where the two candidates with the most votes win a spot on the fall ballot regardless of party affiliation.

In November, she would face a far different and even more politically perilous dynamic. Unless shes paired up with a conservative  highly unlikely  shell be politically joined at the hip with Trump.

While not mentioning Gaspar, Trump pretty much guaranteed that.

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Thank you San Diego County for defending the rule of law and supporting our lawsuit against Californias illegal and unconstitutional Sanctuary policies. Californias dangerous policies release violent criminals back into our communities, putting all Americans at risk, the president said Thursday on Twitter.

Gov. Jerry Brown says the law is structured so those kinds of criminals are not being released, but turned over to federal authorities.

Regardless, ask Issa how being linked to the president worked for him. His prominent support for Trump in 2016 almost cost him his re-election that year. He appeared doomed this time around and threw in the towel. Until Trump, Democrats never had much of a chance in that district. Now they do.

The 49th district includes mostly coastal areas of southern Orange and northern San Diego counties. Republicans still have a voter registration advantage, but it has shrunk over time. Hillary Clinton defeated Trump by more than seven percentage points in the district.

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(The previous paragraph has been updated with the correct percentage margin for Clinton.)

Before running for Congress, Gaspar had the image of a moderate pragmatist, having served as mayor of Encinitas. Many moderate Republicans are steering clear of the sanctuary law dispute, including Supervisors Greg Cox and Ron Roberts, who urged their colleagues not to get involved.

Theres certainly a question about how pragmatic it was to back the Trump suit, which was supported by Supervisors Bill Horn, Dianne Jacob and Gaspar. The deadline to file a friend of the court brief passed two weeks ago. So the three supervisors directed county lawyers to file an amicus brief at the next available opportunity, which would likely be if and when the case is appealed.

Other Republican strongholds, including Orange County and city of Escondido, took more timely action to join the federal lawsuit. Cox, among others, called the San Diego move symbolic, though supporters insisted it wasnt.

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The administration lawsuit seeks to overturn three California laws. The one getting all the attention is SB 54, which prohibits police from asking the immigration status of people they come in contact with, and restricts local law enforcement from giving federal authorities information about when unauthorized immigrants are released from jail unless they have been convicted of one of more than 800 crimes, mostly felonies but some misdemeanors.

Gaspar, Jacob and other critics of the law said their concern is public safety. We were safer before SB 54, Gaspar said at a news conference with Jacob after Tuesdays vote.

Gaspars office later said that as of Monday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement had requested notifications for 487 inmate releases by the county since the law went into effect Jan. 1, but only 203 notifications could be made under SB 54. It was unclear if any of those released without notification were subsequently picked up by ICE.

While Gaspar has become a Fox fixture, Jacob attracted a lot of local television coverage that day when she linked illegal border crossings with potential terrorism

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We have people that are on the terrorist watch list that are coming across the border, she said.

...These are people who come into our country not only committing crimes in our neighborhood but also want to do us harm just because we are Americans.

Pressed for details, Jacob said she was told that one person on the watch list was apprehended, and it turned out to be some time ago. SB 54, even if in effect, likely wouldnt have had any impact on that.

Meanwhile, as San Diego officials pushed to do away with state laws that make it harder to deport some immigrants, just the opposite was happening in Washington, D.C.

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On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court on a 5-4 vote struck down part of a federal law that sought to facilitate deportations, with the majority contending it was unconstitutionally vague.

The swing vote was Trumps appointee, Justice Neil Gorsuch.
Narcotics agents were on familiar ground Wednesday when they raided a Midway District marijuana dispensary  for the second time.

Officials said the dispensary that had operated under the name Sacred Source Dispensary reopened as Cannabis Sanctuary.

A San Diego police narcotics team had raided the place on Midway Drive near Fordham Drive on Feb. 9, Lt. Matt Novak said.

At that time, police seized about seven pounds of cannabis products, $1,200 in cash and a handgun, and cited five employees for running Sacred Source Sanctuary without a city permit.

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The business changed its name to Cannabis Sanctuary and kept operating in defiance of local and state laws, Novak said in a statement.

Officers served a new search warrant at the business Wednesday morning.

They seized 1  pounds of high-grade marijuana, cannabis edibles and concentrates and $1,300 in cash, Novak said.

Two employees were cited on charges of possession of marijuana for sale and operating a business without a permit.

Novak said the owners were not there, but will face charges.

Narcotics teams have been hitting unlicensed marijuana dispensaries for several months.

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pauline.repard@sduniontribune

Twitter: @pdrepard
Palomar College notified the campus community it would have an increased police presence this week in the hopes of easing campus concerns after a student threatened last month to carry out a shooting on Friday, the 19th anniversary of the deadly Columbine High School shooting.

In a message to the San Marcos campus, the community college said it secured a temporary restraining order against the person. The college said it has been informed that the individual who made the threat does not have the ability to come to the campus in the near future.

Safety and security of our students, faculty and staff is our number one priority, said college spokeswoman Laura Gropen.

The school notified the campus of the threat last month, but sent out this weeks notification to reassure people who said they were concerned after the initial security alerts when out.

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The 19-year-old student is the same person who had threatened to shoot up the downtown County Administration building last month. The county has also secured a restraining order against the person.

The Sheriffs Department said the person who threatened the county had been taken into custody last month for a mental health evaluation.

Asked if a criminal case had been filed, the Sheriffs Department said it doesnt examine such cases until the mental health matter has been completed. It also said the person is not currently considered a threat.

Authorities would not confirm whether the person was in any sort of custody.

The restraining order request notifications were served at the address of a San Diego behavioral care facility.

School police officials first learned of the threat in March following a Sheriffs Department investigation into the alleged threat, according to an attachment to a petition requesting a restraining order.

The student told a sheriffs investigator that hed been planning the attack since January, and had wanted to carry out the assault to commemorate the Columbine High School shooting, the document states.

The shooting occurred on April 20, 1999, at Columbine High School in Colorado. Two students killed 13 people before committing suicide.

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The documents also state that the student was attempting to obtain access to a firearm.

Court documents in the countys restraining order request indicate that the person was a student worker for the county. The person had also threatened to shoot up a county facility on the Columbine anniversary, according to court documents.

The school suspended the student, and the county fired him after learning of the threat.

Both organizations state in court documents that they sought the court orders after they were notified of the threat by a clinician who was working with the Sheriffs Department as part of its Psychiatric Emergency Response Team, also known as PERT.

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On Thursday, according to documents, a San Diego Superior Court judge granted a five-year restraining order against the person. It also bars him from having guns.

The school has a hearing slated for Friday morning to make the restraining order permanent.

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teri.figueroa@sduniontribune.com

(760) 529-4945

Twitter: @TeriFigueroaUT
Students at a number of local campuses joined walkouts Friday to protest gun violence at schools, on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School mass shooting.

The protests are part of a nationwide action organized through the National School Walkout movement.

Local schools that expected to see walkouts Friday include Scripps Ranch, Clairemont, Coronado, Point Loma, Hoover and Mission Bay high schools in San Diego, along with Chula Vista and Hilltop highs in Chula Vista.

Students at Farb Middle School and Kumeyaay Elementary also planned walkouts, according to a list compiled on the national walkout website, change.org.

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While most schools will begin walkouts, speeches and voter registration drives at 10 a.m., a student representative at Scripps Ranch High School said they will start a walkout at 2:13 p.m. A march into the neighborhood, including on Meanley Drive, is planned.

KUSI reported that Clairemont High students plan to march to Mission Bay, where they will be joined by students from Mission Bay High School for a rally.

The Hoover High ASB posted on Twitter that voter registration would be the focus for the day. Students 18 or older were urged to register, and students age 16 and 17 are asked to pre-register.

San Diego Unified School District officials urged students to stay on campus.

Students who leave will be marked with an unexcused absence, district spokeswoman Maureen Magee said.

The district supports the students rights of peaceful assembly and free expression, Magee said.

The Sheriffs Department issued a statement Friday, encouraging students to notify law enforcement if they plan to leave campus, and to report any threats of violence.

The statement said, in part, We respect everyones right to express themselves in a peaceful and respectful manner.  For our students: please respect the instructions of school officials and if you hear any threats of violence or even potential violence, we encourage you to talk to one of our Sheriffs School Resource Deputies. The Sheriffs Department takes every threat seriously.

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Students who hear about threats can call the anonymous Crime Stoppers Students Speaking Out tip line at (888) 580-8477, or the the Sheriffs Department at (858) 565-5200.

The killing of 12 students and one teacher at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999 was the worst mass school shooting in the nation at the time.

The National School Walkout was started by a 16-year-old who lived in the area of Sandy Hook Elementary school, were 20 students were killed in 2012.

The Parkland, Florida shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School left 17 dead.

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Fridays national walkout is second in two months. Students around the county left classes on March 14 to protest government leaders failure to control gun violence.

Students from about 30 campuses around San Diego County took part in the first walkout.

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pauline.repard@sduniontribune

Twitter: @pdrepard
Authorities are asking for the publics help in identifying a man and woman suspected of burglary and identity theft in East County.

Photos released by San Diego Crime Stoppers on Thursday show a bearded white man about 25 or 30 years old and a white woman between 18 and 25 years who are suspected of breaking into a car and using credit cards stolen from the vehicle last February.

The car break-in happened sometime between 9 p.m. Feb. 3 and 3:30 a.m. Feb. 4 in Spring Valley.

A credit card stolen from the car was used by the male suspect at a gas station at about 4 a.m. Feb. 4.

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Later that day, a woman used another credit card stolen from the vehicle to charge $440 at a Walgreens on 2nd Street in El Cajon.

The couple was seen driving a dark SUV.

Anyone who recognizes the couple is asked to call the Rancho San Diego Sheriffs Station at (619) 660-7090 or the Crime Stoppers anonymous tip line at (888) 580-8477.

Crime Stoppers is offering up to a $1,000 reward to anyone with information that leads to an arrest in this case.

Information on how to send anonymous emails and mobile app tips can be found online at www.sdcrimestoppers.org.

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Homeless Playlist  On Now San Diego hepatitis outbreak continues to grow: 481 cases On Now Homeless entrenched in booming tent city along Santa Ana River On Now San Diego mayor agreed to homeless hub, then delayed, advocates say On Now Homeless outreach in San Diego On Now Video: Street Art: Portraits of San Diego's Homeless #8 On Now In poverty himself, 'Water Man Dave,' is the fearless saint of San Diego's homeless 5:41 On Now Video: Homeless living in cars find safe havens 2:21 On Now Street Art: Portraits of San Diego's Homeless #7 On Now Pitching a tent plan for San Diego's homeless On Now Homeless efforts get $80M boost for various services

gary.warth@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @GaryWarthUT

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Sheriffs deputies arrested a woman on suspicion of embezzling $68,000 from the La Jolla Band of Luiseno Indians on Thursday.

A Sheriffs Department press release said the bands tribal council last September had reported an employee was making suspicious financial transactions.

A Sheriffs cyber/financial crimes units investigation determined that a 35-year-old tribal member and former council employee had used her position to illegally obtain about $68,000 in tribal funds.

The tribal bands headquarters is in Pauma Valley, and deputies from the Valley Center sub-station arrested the suspect. The North County branch of the San Diego District Attorneys Office filed charges against her.

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Charges include embezzlement, identity theft, forgery and grand theft. She was booked into the Vista Detention Facility.

Homeless Playlist  On Now San Diego hepatitis outbreak continues to grow: 481 cases On Now Homeless entrenched in booming tent city along Santa Ana River On Now San Diego mayor agreed to homeless hub, then delayed, advocates say On Now Homeless outreach in San Diego On Now Video: Street Art: Portraits of San Diego's Homeless #8 On Now In poverty himself, 'Water Man Dave,' is the fearless saint of San Diego's homeless 5:41 On Now Video: Homeless living in cars find safe havens 2:21 On Now Street Art: Portraits of San Diego's Homeless #7 On Now Pitching a tent plan for San Diego's homeless On Now Homeless efforts get $80M boost for various services

gary.warth@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @GaryWarthUT

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President Trump hired New Yorks former mayor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, as one of his new lawyers Thursday, turning to one of his oldest political allies as two federal investigations have reached deep into his inner circle.

Trump said Giuliani would help him left the cloud of investigations that has hung over the White House almost since he took office last year.

Rudy is great, Trump said in a statement. He has been my friend for a long time and wants to get this matter quickly resolved for the good of the country.

Giulianis reputation as a hard-charging, crime-busting federal prosecutor in New York in the 1980s launched his political career, and he served two terms as mayor before he made an unsuccessful bid for the White House in 2008. He will take a leave of absence from the law firm Greenberg Traurig to work with Trump.

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The president also hired former prosecutors Jane Serene Raskin and Marty Raskin. Jay Sekulow, the presidents only personal lawyer since John Dowd resigned in March, said the married couple have a nationwide practice and reputation for excellence and integrity.

The decision to hire Giuliani represents a potential turning point in the presidents legal defense, placing a zealous and high-profile lawyer at the center of Trumps multiplying legal dilemmas.

It also shows him reaching to a fellow New Yorker and avowed political supporter. Like Trump, Giuliani was a Democrat for years before he became a Republican.

Trump has struggled to hire lawyers, an unusual problem for a president. High-profile attorneys, such as former Solicitor Gen. Ted Olson, have turned down the chance to represent him. Others faced conflicts because they or their law firms had represented people involved in the Russia investigation.

Trump also is a notoriously difficult client, sometimes reluctant to accept his lawyers advice and often tweeting when it would be safer to stay quiet. In his business career, he earned a reputation for trying to pay law firms less than what they were owed.

Giuliani said he was excited to represent the president along with Sekulow, and Ty Cobb, who works in the White House.

It is an honor to be a part of such an important legal team, and I look forward to not only working with the President but with Jay, Ty, and their colleagues, Giuliani said in a statement.

Trump is eager to see special counsel Robert S. Mueller III complete his investigation into whether Trump or any of his campaign aides illegally assisted a Russian effort to interfere in the 2016 presidential campaign. The inquiry also is looking at whether Trump obstructed justice by trying to derail parts of the investigation.

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So far, the Mueller investigation has led to charges against 19 people, including four of Trumps former aides. Three pleaded guilty to reduced charges and are cooperating with Mueller, while the fourth, Trumps onetime campaign chairman Paul Manafort, has pleaded not guilty and faces separate federal trials this year in Virginia and Washington, D.C.

On Thursday, a Justice Department lawyer told a federal judge in Washington that Mueller initially focused on Manafort because investigators believed he might have served as a back channel to Russian authorities during the campaign.

None of the charges against Manafort or Trumps former aides is directly related to the Russia meddling. Trump has consistently denied collusion and has derided the investigation as a witch hunt.

The case has spawned a separate, but potentially explosive investigation into Michael Cohen, Trumps longtime personal lawyer in New York.

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On April 9, FBI agents armed with court-approved search warrants removed 10 boxes of documents and other materials from Cohens home, office and hotel room. The investigation is reportedly focused, in part, on whether Cohen broke the law when he arranged hush-money payments to two women who say they had sexual encounters with Trump.

Giuliani attained national fame after he was named U.S. attorney in Manhattan in 1983, the same year that Trump finished work on the Trump Tower skyscraper on Fifth Avenue where he lived and ran his real estate and other business affairs.

Both sought the spotlight. Giuliani boosted his reputation as being tough on crime by holding perp walks where suspects were marched in front of TV cameras. Trump became a tabloid sensation for his affairs with women and hyped development projects.

Giuliani served as mayor from 1994 to the end of 2001, and thus led the traumatized city during and immediately after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He tried to use that fame to run for president in 2008, but failed to gain the Republican nomination.

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During the 2016 campaign, Giuliani frequently was at Trumps side and gave a fiery speech at the Republican National Convention. After Trump won, there was talk of finding Giuliani a job in his administration, perhaps as secretary of State or a national security post. Nothing materialized, but Giuliani remained a frequent Trump defender on Fox News.

Follow the latest news of the Trump administration on Essential Washington 

chris.megerian@latimes.com

Twitter: @chrismegerian
President Trump told then-FBI Director James B. Comey that he had serious concerns about the judgment of his first national security advisor, Michael Flynn, according to memos maintained by Comey and obtained by the Associated Press.

The 15 pages of documents contain new details about a series of interactions that Comey had with Trump in the weeks before his May 2017 firing. Those encounters include a White House dinner at which Comey says Trump asked him for his loyalty, and a meeting the next month in which he says the president asked him to end an investigation of Flynn.

According to one memo, Trump complained about Flynn at a private January 2017 dinner with Comey, saying, The guy has serious judgment issues. The president then blamed Flynn for a delay in returning the congratulatory call of an international leader, Comey wrote.

I did not comment at any point during this topic and there was no mention or acknowledgment of any FBI interest in or contact with General Flynn, Comey wrote.

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Flynn was fired a month later after White House officials said he had misled them about his Russian contacts during the transition period. In a separate memo, Comey says Trump cleared the Oval Office of other officials, and then in a one-on-one meeting encouraged him to let go of the Flynn investigation and called him a good guy.

In a Senate hearing in June, Comey told Congress, I knew there might come a day when I would need a record of what had happened, not just to defend myself, but to defend the FBI and our integrity as an institution and the independence of our investigative function.

The memos were provided to Congress earlier Thursday as House Republicans escalated criticism of the FBI, threatening to subpoena the documents and questioning officials. In a letter sent to three Republican House committee chairmen Thursday night, Assistant Atty. Gen. Stephen Boyd wrote that the Justice Department was sending a classified version of the memos and an unclassified version. The department released Boyds letter publicly but did not release the memos.

Essential Washington: Updates on politics from Washington, D.C., and beyond 

Justice Department officials had allowed some lawmakers to view the memos but had never provided copies to the full Congress. Boyd wrote that the department had also provided the memos to several Senate committees.

Comey is on a publicity tour to promote his new book, A Higher Loyalty. He revealed last year that he had written the memos after conversations with Trump.

Details from some memos were made public in media accounts in the days after he was fired. At the Senate hearing, Comey detailed his conversations with Trump.

One Comey memo recounts a February request from Trump, during a private meeting in the Oval Office, that Comey end an investigation of Flynn.

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Boyd wrote in the letter that the department consulted the relevant parties and concluded that releasing the memos would not adversely affect any ongoing investigations. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is investigating potential cooperation between Trump associates and Russian interference in the 2016 election as well as possible obstruction of justice by the president.

Boyd said the decision to allow the release of the memos does not alter the departments traditional obligation to protect from public disclosure witness statements and other documents obtained during an ongoing investigation.

Comey said in an interview Thursday with CNN that hes fine with the Justice Department turning his memos over to Congress.

I think what folks will see if they get to see the memos is Ive been consistent since the very beginning, right after my encounters with President Trump, and Im consistent in the book and tried to be transparent in the book as well, he said.

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Last week, the GOP chairmen of three House committees demanded the memos by Monday. The Justice Department asked for more time, and the lawmakers agreed.
New programs have created thousands of housing opportunities in the last three years for homeless individuals, families and veterans in San Diego.

The right things are happening to address the homelessness crisis in our region  but we need to do more of them. And we cant continue to do them alone. Additional funding is critical.

State lawmakers have taken a significant step forward to address this challenge with Assembly Bill (AB) 3171, which the Assembly Committee on Housing and Community Development will consider on April 25. The hearing comes on the heels of a new state audit that calls on Sacramento to invest more in homelessness and play a larger role in solving the problem.

AB 3171 would direct $1.5 billion in unencumbered state resources to tackle Californias homeless emergency. When matched with local funds, cities can amplify their efforts and create new effective solutions.

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This bill will make a difference for people like Melvyna, a retired nurse with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. She was homeless and living in a shelter for close to a year until she regained her independence at Talmadge Gateway, a 59-unit affordable housing project for homeless seniors in City Heights.

The long-term solution to homelessness is providing permanent homes for families and individuals like Melvyna. That is why combining state and local resources to create a meaningful pool of funding is so important.

A bipartisan group of state and local elected leaders, including each of the city of San Diegos state Assemblymembers  Todd Gloria, Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, Brian Maienschein and Shirley Weber  support this legislation. The mayors of Californias 11 largest cities, including San Diego, are also united and advocated for AB 3171 in meetings this month with Governor Jerry Brown, Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins and other legislative leaders.

The bill comes as California cities have been stepping up to reduce homelessness, including adding permanent rental housing with supportive services; short-term assistance known as rapid rehousing; shelter diversion programs; bridge housing; and navigation centers.

These types of programs are the foundation of our Connect, Support and House strategy  connect people to our care network with temporary relief from the streets, support them with services and workforce training, and help them find a permanent home. These efforts also support the citys Housing SD plan to make homes more affordable for all San Diegans.

The city of San Diego is now seen as a leader for its innovative approaches. Our Safe Parking Program is providing security and services for individuals living in their vehicles. The Housing Navigation Center, projected to open later this year, will provide a centralized location to access services people need to gain stability in their lives and exit homelessness. And San Diegos bridge shelters, which have helped hundreds of individuals and families, served as a model for new homeless programs recently announced in Los Angeles.

AB 3171 will help support and expand upon this progress. It also would complement HOUSING FIRST  SAN DIEGO, the San Diego Housing Commissions (SDHC) homelessness action plan.

The first three years of the action plan have created housing for close to 3,000 homeless San Diegans. The latest phase of the plan, which launched in July, will direct $79.7 million in federal, city and SDHC resources to provide housing opportunities to an additional 3,000 homeless individuals. Imagine what could be accomplished if those funds were matched by the state.

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For example, rapid rehousing was instrumental to the success of Housing Our Heroes, the collaborative initiative by the city and SDHC that helped more than 1,000 homeless veterans secure rental homes.

To date, SDHC has awarded more than $39 million toward the new construction of 500 rental housing units with supportive services. An additional 253 affordable rental units for homeless individuals have been created through SDHCs acquisition and rehabilitation of properties, such as the 72 studio units at the historic Hotel Churchill in downtown San Diego.

San Diegos unified approach to addressing homelessness, based on the national housing first model, is helping people move off the streets and into homes every day. We have more work to do, and state funds through AB 3171 would provide needed resources to help build on this momentum.

Faulconer is the mayor of the city of San Diego. Gentry is the president and CEO of the San Diego Housing Commission.
House Speaker Paul Ryans announcement that he will not seek re-election touched off a wave of harsh takes. Liberal commentators noted the gap between the Wisconsin Republicans positive rhetoric about making his party more inclusive and how his leadership came in an era in which many GOPers rejected a big tent approach. Conservative commentators noted that he was only the latest of many Republicans to run against big government and then come to the Capitol and be co-opted.

These views are both fair. Yet any big-picture critique of Republicans that isnt paired with a big-picture critique of Democrats creates a false picture of where America is at. Thanks in part to the technological tools that have turned parts of the media into partisan echo chambers, polarization has increased. Pew Research surveys show unrepentant conservatives and liberals dominating their parties more than ever. But this trend isnt making people feel better about their parties and nation.

Despite a surging U.S. economy sharply reducing unemployment, a Harris Poll released last July showed only 33 percent of Americans were happy with their lives. While that same poll showed millennials were the most likely to be optimistic about the future  with 79 percent being hopeful  a closer look at these younger Americans reveals this optimism is run through with disillusionment about politics. An NBC News/GenForward poll of millennials released in November showed that 71 percent  including strong majorities of every large racial demographic  believed the Republican and Democratic parties do such a bad job of representing the American people that a third major party is needed. The declining faith in U.S. institutions very much extends to our political parties.

Partisans in states that are deep blue or deep red  where ideological factions can readily get their way on issues they care about  are unlikely to see these numbers as relevant. Nevertheless, whats happened in Washington and Sacramento shows why Americans should be wary of what will result from an era in which anger, cynicism and populism are all dominant currents.

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Ryans bid to offer himself up as a Hubert Humphrey-style happy warrior of American politics was never embraced by rank-and-file GOP lawmakers, who increasingly identify with the us vs. them politics of white conservative firebrand Pat Buchanan. History is unlikely to forgive the alleged budget hawk for accepting huge deficits driven by tax cuts that helped the already-rich far more than middle-income families. The warnings from sober economists that the U.S. is headed for a disastrous fiscal reckoning have never been as common.

But the right is not alone in its fiscal recklessness. The lefts focus on social justice  helping poor families so they can lead better lives  has to some degree given way to a view that everyone should get government freebies, starting with taxpayer-funded health care and college. Who will pay (and how)? What will get less funding as a result? Does making a service free have unintended consequences? What about the need to pay for existing, unfunded obligations like government pensions?

Not only do many state Democrats ignore these questions; they often shout down those who bring them up, as seen in the scorn shown Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon for daring to say the Legislature shouldnt commit to single-payer health care without explaining how the bill would be paid.

This may not be likely in a nation where many of those in power prefer being cultural warriors to the hard work of getting things done. But America would have a much more promising future if its citizens didnt cheer these warriors on and instead focused on trying to get the only two U.S. political parties of consequence to have responsible agendas.

Twitter: @sdutIdeas

Facebook: San Diego Union-Tribune Ideas & Opinion
Trumps motive for Syria action questioned

Re Trump claims success in Syria after airstrikes (April 14): The destruction of chemicals in Syria is good, however, I must question Donald Trumps motive. Syria used chemicals against its people in January and February, yet Trump suggested pulling out of Syria in early April. After the next chemical attack on April 4, he decided to bomb Syria.

While I do not condemn this decision, I do question Trumps motives. It is common for dictators who are having domestic problems to engage in war. This transfers peoples focus from the domestic problems to the war. Trump has demonstrated inconsistent, self-serving behavior in the past. He has also had problems with the truth. I only hope congressional leaders Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan are ready to step in if necessary.

Ronald Harris

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United Nations long ago lost its relevance

Why do we waste our money supporting a joke of an organization like the United Nations? After watching this spineless murderer, Bashar al-Assad, masquerading as a leader of a nation, chemically attacking women and children, my first thought is: Why doesnt the international community get rid of this vermin?

Of course its because it doesnt have the courage to stand up and say enough. We support the U.N. financially more than every other country and have to sit idly by while it sits on its behind and does nothing.

Assad needs to pay for his transgressions along with the countries that support this murderer.

Steve Saint-Martin

Point Loma

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Letters and commentary policy

The U-T welcomes and encourages community dialogue on important public matters. Please visit this page for more details on our letters and commentaries policy. You can email letters@sduniontribune.com or leave a comment below.

Follow @UTLetters on Twitter and UTOpinion on Facebook.
Police have identified a man who was killed in a freak accident at a Dairy Queen in Iowa. Curtis Schantz of Alburnett was in the drive-thru at the chain when his truck broke down. According to The Cedar Rapids Gazette, he popped the hood of the vehicle and got out of his seat to take a look, but apparently forgot to put the truck in park because it rolled over him before he was able to get out of the way.

The 74-year-old suffered severe injuries and was taken to a local hospital where he later died. According to the Alburnett Fire Departments Facebook page, Schantz served on the team for 33 years, adding, His knowledge and experience will be greatly missed. Please pray for his family. According to his obituary, he was also a master electrician and signalman in the Iowa National Guard for six years, and owned his own farming business called Schantz Farm and Supply, which he operated with his son.

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https://www.facebook.com/AlburnettFire/posts/2074705952742840

Hes kind, hes dedicated to church, his family, the community. And hes giving - just anything that anybody needs, he was there with a helping hand, said former Alburnett fire chief Ron Hoover, WAPT reports. Everybody is friends, and were all just kind of expanded family. Well miss Curtis showing up for breakfast, and meeting people for coffee and telling stories; he was a good storyteller.

Schantz is survived by his wife, daughters, and son, Matthew, who has placed an ice cream sundae at the spot where he the tragic incident occurred, WAPT reports. His funeral is scheduled for 11 a.m. on April 20.

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The People's Liberation Army's (PLA) live-fire drills off Chinese mainland's southeast coast on Wednesday signals the military's fast growing amphibious capabilities, a military expert said Thursday.

The exercises, which involved coordinating armed helicopters, were routine and tested the force's all-weather combat capabilities, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

The drills started at 9:00 am and ended at 11:00 pm on Wednesday, Xinhua reported.

The drills were held day and night, at sea, and in complex electromagnetic conditions to test the force's all-weather combat capability at sea, it said.

"The complex environment, especially under nighttime conditions, was a challenging test for soldiers and weapons," Song Zhongping, a military expert and TV commentator, told the Global Times on Thursday.

Song noted that the drills will also help the PLA Army develop coordinated combat capabilities with PLA's navy and air force.

Armed with a variety of weapons, the helicopters broke through the defense line in low altitude, set their own attack lines, detected targets, and assaulted floating targets with missiles and rockets.

Coordinated, serial, and extremely long-distance attack strategies were simulated within a limited period of time.

"The drills involved both combat and transport helicopters, and showed the PLA Army's capabilities for island landings and operations," Song added.
Britain's armed forces are suffering their biggest staffing crisis in years, with the vital area of intelligence analysis being one of the worst affected sections.

The National Audit Office, which regulates government spending, has published a report revealing that the number of full-time military personnel is 5.7 percent, or 8,200 people, below the required level. Most alarmingly in an era of new challenges such as cybersecurity, the shortfall in intelligence analysts is 26 percent.

Meg Hillier, the chair of the public accounts committee, said the report showed the armed forces to be "woefully below compliment, especially in crucial areas like intelligence and engineering", adding that "the Ministry of Defence needs to take a long hard look at its current approach".

The report picked out six key areas - engineering, intelligence, logistics, pilots, communications and medical - which were particularly affected. Within those, there were 102 trades identified where the military is not deemed to have sufficient trained staff to perform operational tasks.

The strategic defense and security review of 2015 set increased targets for many intelligence analyst roles, with some in the Royal Air Force being doubled or even trebled. The nature of newly-emerging threats means intelligence demands, such as language skills, can change rapidly, making training particularly challenging.

The report warned that the MoD's "base-fed" model "where it recruits regulars into the lowest ranks and develops their skills and experience over time has not enabled it to close capability gaps quickly enough", and warned that it was "not a sustainable long-term solution".

Other findings included a shortfall of 2,400 engineers, most substantially among Royal Navy weapons technicians, 800 pilots and 700 intelligence analysts.

The report backs up concerns raised a year ago by former Armed Forces minister Mark Francois in a report on recruitment. This found that in the year to April last year, 12,950 recruits joined the regular armed forces, but 14,970 had left.

"This continuing process of 'hollowing out' in the ranks," the report said, "while costing the armed forces valuable experience, also threatens to compound the problem by increasing the pressure on those personnel who remain."

Responding to the issues, an MoD spokesman said recruiting and retaining talent was a top priority, and that a range of schemes to attract and keep skilled personnel was in place, including special retention payments for intelligence staff.

"The military has enough personnel to meet all its operational requirements, including being active on 25 operations in 30 countries throughout the world," the spokesman added.


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WAU, South Sudan, April 20 (ChinaMil) -- The 8th Chinese peacekeeping medical detachment to South Sudan (Wau) has been engaged in consultations in the past few days with the Sector West Headquarters of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS), the UNMISS department in charge of relief, rehabilitation and relocation affairs and the World Health Organization (WHO) on medical assistance in the Protection of Civilians (PoC) sites within UNMISS bases.

With the active promotion of the detachment, a medical assistance mechanism has been set up and a standard medical rescue and treatment process has also been formed for internal displaced peoples (IDPs) in S. Sudan.

There are more than 30,000 IDPs living in the PoC sites outside the UNMISS base in Wau. Due to the poor local medical conditions, the medical assistance to IDPs has always been a headache for the UNMISS and the local government.

According to the Medical Support Manual for United Nations Peacekeeping Operations, the peacekeeping medical detachment can only provide emergency humanitarian medical assistance to refugees, which is the last choice when other medical institutions are not available.

However, in providing emergency medical assistance to IDPs, the Chinese peacekeeping medical detachment found multiple problems such as lack of management coordination, unclear responsibilities, unreasonable channels for referral and so forth.

Leaders of the detachment have called on for times the Headquarters of the Sector West of the UNMISS, the UNMISS department in charge of relief, rehabilitation and relocation affairs and the WHO agency in Wau, proposing to convene a meeting on that issue. As a result of joint efforts, a standard IDPs medical assistance mechanism featuring level-to-level treatment from clinics to local hospitals to UNMISS peacekeeping detachments has taken shape.
Some Western media still view China's legal and normal military actions with bias, said Chinese experts after the Chinese Ministry of National Defense (MOD) slammed foreign media reports saying Australian warships had been "challenged" by the Chinese Navy in the South China Sea.

Chinese naval vessels encountered Australian warships in the South China Sea on April 15, the Chinese MOD said on Friday.

"The Chinese vessels used professional language to communicate with the Australian side, and the operation was in accordance with laws and regulations and was conducted professionally and safely."

"China always respects and actively defends the freedom of navigation and freedom of flight of every country enjoys in the South China Sea according to international law," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying told a daily briefing on Friday.

"We hope Australia will face up to the trend toward a good and stable situation in the South China Sea, and work with China and other regional countries to maintain peace and stability of the area to create a more positive environment on the South China Sea," Hua noted.

Australia's ABC news reported on Friday that "three Australian warships were challenged by the Chinese military as they sailed through the disputed South China Sea earlier this month."

"It is normal for Chinese navy ships to communicate in a professional and legal way when they encounter warships from other countries," said Wang Xiaopeng, a maritime border expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

"Some Western media, including those in Australia, have a biased view of China's normal and legal military actions, because they are still influenced by the 'China Threat Theory,'" Wang said. "Such deceptive reports create a circle of misunderstanding in Western society."

Wang said that Australia has a twisted attitude toward China, as it is usually calm when it needs China economically but often holds the wrong stance when it comes to geopolitics.

China should continue to cooperate with regional countries in the South China Sea, so that the countries have no excuse to intervene in the South China Sea issue, he noted.
Sarasota, FL -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/19/2018 -- Aquaponics Market: Overview



A combination of hydroponics and the aquaculture is the aquaponics and it is a highly useful water-based system. The arrangement is made in such a way that a variety of fishes which includes carp, tilapia, koi, goldfish, crappie, brim, and bass along with the plants such as lettuce and chives are grown together. The wastes from the fish such as ammonia and nitrates are harmful to the fishes but are beneficial for the growth of the plants.



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Aquaponics Market: Facts



The term Aquaponics was derived in 1970, but this concept was practiced anciently. The article Aquaponics: A brief history states that aquaponics was practiced in lowland Maya which was followed by the Aztecs, who cultivated the plants on the rafts on the lake surface. It also states that it was also practiced in the regions such as Thailand, South China, and Indonesia.



Aquaponics Market: Segmentation



The global market for the aquaponics is fragmented into its equipment, components, and produce. On the basis of equipment, the global market is segregated into water heaters, aeration systems, grow lights, pumps, and valves. On the basis of the components, the market is categorized into settling basin, biofilter, rearing tanks, sump, and hydroponics. On the basis of produce, the market is bifurcated into fish, herb, fruits, and vegetables.



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Aquaponics Market: Growth Factors



The key factor that is driving the aquaponics market is the huge amount of the technological advancement that is made in this field. The benefit of using the aquaponics is that it enhances the overall productivity and that too with minimum inputs in the aquaculture and agriculture practices. This is a cost effective way of increasing the productivity thus propelling the market to grow in the coming years. Another factor that is driving the aquaponics market is that it benefits to have diversification of the income streams. Aquaponics helps in the production of the vegetables, herbs, leafy green vegetables along with crayfish, mushrooms, fish, worms, and much more. There are certain factors that will affect the growth of the market negatively which includes the high cost at the initial stage of the system set up of the aquaponics and the investment that is required for the technical installation of the system.



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Aquaponics Market: Regional Analysis



The regions that are having the maximum share in the aquaponics market are Europe and North America. Other regions such as Latin America, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East and Africa regions will have a significant rate of growth opportunities in the aquaponics market. The factors that are promoting the growth of the aquaponics market in North America and Europe are the growing technological developments that are made in these regions, increasing rate of investments that are made by the stakeholders, and the growing demand for the organic products.



Aquaponics Market: Competitive Players



The key market players that are involved in the aquaponics market include Greenlife Aquaponics, Backyard Aquaponics Pty Ltd., UrbanFarmers AG, Nelson and Pade Inc., Ultrasonics Canada Corporation, Aquaponic Lynx LLC, Aqua Allotments, The Aquaponic Source, ECF Farmsystems GmbH, and My Aquaponics.



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Albany, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/20/2018 -- A nanoparticle is a particle having a size less than or equal to 100 nanometers. The impact of nanotechnology, has been rising rapidly, on human life through its application in industries such as electronics, pharmaceuticals, food, cosmetics, space, and environmental science. Nanoparticles are employed in applications ranging from conventional uses such as coloring agent to modern-day biomedical applications.



Nanoparticles of different elements or compounds can be produced using either natural processes or chemical synthesis. There are different synthesis methods for nanoparticles such as chemical reaction, sol-gel method, co-precipitation method, and solid-state reaction. In the recent years, a new technique called green synthesis method has been developed. Its advantages include low cost, simple preparation technique, eco-friendly, and less use of toxic materials. Green synthesis method utilizes plant extracts as reducing agents for the synthesis of nanoparticles.



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The copper nanoparticles can be synthesized in the powdered form as well as in suspension of oil, ethanol, and acetone, among others. Characterization of synthesized nanoparticles is carried out through different methods such as scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), high-resolution SEM, and X-Ray diffraction.



The primary cause of innovation in the field of nanotechnology is its increasing utilization in the medical industry. Copper has applications in electrical, catalytic, optical, biomedical, and antimicrobial applications, due to which it is one of the most commonly used materials. Copper metal ions and its compounds have been employed in medical applications for a long time.



Properties of copper nanoparticles are different from copper bulk metal. Additionally, properties of copper nanoparticles can be easily altered by varying their sizes, shapes, and chemical environment. Therefore, they are used in different applications than where copper metal is used. Copper nanoparticles are constantly tested for new and emerging applications.



Copper nanoparticles are majorly used as antimicrobial agents. Copper is toxic to microorganisms such as bacteria and fungi; however, it does not cause harm to animal cells. This property is also observed in copper nanoparticles. Studies using green synthesis method, where different plants are being used for the synthesis of copper nanoparticles, are being conducted.



Antimicrobial property of copper nanoparticles is utilized by adding them to plastics, textiles, and coatings. These nanoparticles are also used in electromagnetic (EMI) shielding and in the preparation of high strength alloys. They are used as sintering additives & capacitor materials, superficial conductive coating processing of metal & non-ferrous metal, catalyst for chemical reactions, and highly thermal conductive materials.



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Many printed electronics, displays, and conductive thin films use conductive inks and pastes containing noble metals that are very expensive. Copper nanomaterials can act as a substitute for these noble metals.



Based on region, the global copper nanoparticles market can be segmented into North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Middle East & Africa. The market is expected to witness robust expansion in most of the developed economies around the globe. In terms of market share, North America is leading the global copper nanoparticles market. This trend is likely to continue in the near future. Abundance of raw materials is one of the factor contributing to the dominant share of the market in North America. Initiatives by the U.S. Government to support research & innovation activities are also contributing for the market expansion in the region.



In terms of growth potential, the market in Asia Pacific is anticipated to lead the market in the next few years. Expansion of this region can be attributed to the presence of major market players, private and public collaborations and investments, and increasing research & development projects.



Key players in the copper nanoparticles market include TEKNA, Strem Chemicals Inc., Nano Technology Inc., IoLiTec Ionic Liquids Technologies GmbH, Meliorum Technologies Inc., QuantumSphere Inc., and EPRUI Nanoparticles & Microspheres Co. Ltd.



The report offers a comprehensive evaluation of the market. It does so via in-depth qualitative insights, historical data, and verifiable projections about market size. The projections featured in the report have been derived using proven research methodologies and assumptions. By doing so, the research report serves as a repository of analysis and information for every facet of the market, including but not limited to: Regional markets, technology, types, and applications.



The study is a source of reliable data on:



- Market segments and sub-segments

- Market trends and dynamics

- Supply and demand

- Market size

- Current trends/opportunities/challenges

- Competitive landscape

- Technological breakthroughs

- Value chain and stakeholder analysis



The regional analysis covers:



- North America (U.S. and Canada)

- Latin America (Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Chile, and others)

- Western Europe (Germany, U.K., France, Spain, Italy, Nordic countries, Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg)

- Eastern Europe (Poland and Russia)

- Asia Pacific (China, India, Japan, ASEAN, Australia, and New Zealand)

- Middle East and Africa (GCC, Southern Africa, and North Africa)



The report has been compiled through extensive primary research (through interviews, surveys, and observations of seasoned analysts) and secondary research (which entails reputable paid sources, trade journals, and industry body databases). The report also features a complete qualitative and quantitative assessment by analyzing data gathered from industry analysts and market participants across key points in the industry's value chain.



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A separate analysis of prevailing trends in the parent market, macro- and micro-economic indicators, and regulations and mandates is included under the purview of the study. By doing so, the report projects the attractiveness of each major segment over the forecast period.



Highlights of the report:



- A complete backdrop analysis, which includes an assessment of the parent market

- Important changes in market dynamics

- Market segmentation up to the second or third level

- Historical, current, and projected size of the market from the standpoint of both value and volume

- Reporting and evaluation of recent industry developments

- Market shares and strategies of key players

- Emerging niche segments and regional markets

- An objective assessment of the trajectory of the market

- Recommendations to companies for strengthening their foothold in the market



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Deerfield Beach, FL -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/20/2018 -- 99strategy added a new latest industry research report that focuses on "Activated Bleaching Clay market" and provides in-depth Global Activated Bleaching Clay market analysis and future prospects of Activated Bleaching Clay market 2017. The research study covers significant data which makes the document a handy resource for managers, analysts, industry experts and other key people get ready-to-access and self-analyzed study along with graphs and tables to help understand market trends, drivers and market challenges. The research study is segmented by Application/ end users, products type and geographies like United States, China, Europe, Japan, Korea & Taiwan.



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The analysis covers the present market size of the us Activated Bleaching Clay market and its growth rates supported five year history knowledge in conjunction with company profile of key players/manufacturers like Clariant, Taiko Group, BASF, APL(Amcol,Ashapura Group), W Clay Industries, W Clay Industries, Oil-Dri, Amcol(Bensan), S&B Industrial Minerals?, AMC (UK) Limited, 20 Nano, U.G.A. Group, MCC, PT Tunasinti Bhaktimakmur, Baiyue, Tianyu Group, Guangxi Longan, Hangzhou Yongsheng etc.. The in-depth info by segments of Activated Bleaching Clay market helps monitor future profitableness essential selections for growth. the data on trends and developments, focuses on markets and materials, capacities, technologies, CAPEX cycle and also the ever-changing structure of the us Activated Bleaching Clay Market.



The study provides company identification, product image and specifications, sales, market share and call info of key makers of us Activated Bleaching Clay Market, a number of them listed here ar Clariant, Taiko Group, BASF, APL(Amcol,Ashapura Group), W Clay Industries, W Clay Industries, Oil-Dri, Amcol(Bensan), S&B Industrial Minerals?, AMC (UK) Limited, 20 Nano, U.G.A. Group, MCC, PT Tunasinti Bhaktimakmur, Baiyue, Tianyu Group, Guangxi Longan, Hangzhou Yongsheng etc.. The market is growing at a really fast pace and with rise in technological innovation, competition and M&A activities within the business several native and regional vendors ar giving specific application merchandise for various end-users. The new manufacturer entrants within the market ar finding it arduous to vie with the international vendors supported quality, responsibleness, and innovations in technology.



Global Activated Bleaching Clay (Thousands Units) and Revenue (Million USD) Market Split by Product kind like Glass, chrome steel, Ceramic, Acrylic & Others. additional the analysis study is divided by Application like family, Office, Commuter, Sport & Others with historical and projected market share and combined annual rate.



Geographically, this report is divided into many key Regions, with production, consumption, revenue (million USD), and market share and rate of Activated Bleaching Clay in these regions, from 2017 to 2023 (forecast), covering The North America, Europe, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, India, The South & The geographical area and its Share (%) and CAGR for the forecasted amount 2017 to 2023.



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What this Research Study Offers:



1. Global Activated Bleaching Clay Market share assessments for the regional and country level segments

2. Market share analysis of the top industry players

3. Strategic recommendations for the new entrants

4. Market forecasts for a minimum of 5 years of all the mentioned segments, sub segments and the regional markets

5. Market Trends (Drivers, Constraints, Opportunities, Threats, Challenges, Investment Opportunities, and recommendations)

6. Strategic recommendations in key business segments based on the market estimations

7. Competitive landscaping mapping the key common trends

8. Company profiling with detailed strategies, financials, and recent developments

9. Supply chain trends mapping the latest technological advancements



There ar fifteen Chapters to show the us Activated Bleaching Clay market



Chapter 1, to explain Definition, Specifications and Classification of Activated Bleaching Clay , Applications of Activated Bleaching Clay , Market phase by Regions;

Chapter 2, to investigate the producing value Structure, stuff and Suppliers, producing method, business Chain Structure;

Chapter 3, to show the Technical knowledge and producing Plants Analysis of Activated Bleaching Clay , capability and business Production Date, producing Plants Distribution, R&D standing and Technology supply, Raw Materials Sources Analysis;

Chapter 4, to indicate the general marketing research, capability Analysis (Company Segment), Sales Analysis (Company Segment), Sales value Analysis (Company Segment);

Chapter 5 and 6, to indicate the Regional marketing research that features The North America, Europe, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, India, The South & The Midwest, Activated Bleaching Clay phase marketing research (by Type);

Chapter 7 and 8, to investigate the Activated Bleaching Clay phase marketing research (by Application) Major makers Analysis of Activated Bleaching Clay ;

Chapter 9, Market analytic thinking, Regional Market Trend, Market Trend by Product, Market Trend by Application;

Chapter 10, Regional promoting kind Analysis, International Trade kind Analysis, offer Chain Analysis;

Chapter 11, to investigate the shoppers Analysis of us Activated Bleaching Clay ;

Chapter 12, to explain Activated Bleaching Clay analysis Findings and Conclusion, Appendix, methodology and knowledge source;

Chapter 13, 14 and 15, to explain Activated Bleaching Clay sales channel, distributors, traders, dealers, analysis Findings and Conclusion, appendix and knowledge supply.



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Albany, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/20/2018 -- Chamomile is the common name of a group of plants that have been used since ancient times as herbal remedy. There are several different species of chamomile; however, Matricaria recutita (German chamomile) and Chamaemelum nobile (Roman chamomile) are widely grown across the world. Matricaria recutita is a hardy plant that can be found in a variety of different soils and climate. The plant has historically been used in teas for treating fevers, flu, digestive disorders, and skin ailments. Chamomile oil, also known as blue oil, is the primary extract of the flowers and flower heads of the chamomile plant.



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This oil contains several compounds that have medicinal benefits with key constituent groups being coumarins, sesquiterpenes, polyacetylenes, and flavonoids. These groups mainly consist of chamazulene, (E)-?-farnesene, ?-bisabolol oxides A and ?-bisabolol oxides B, ?-bisabolol and terpene alcohol. The Matricaria recutita extracts are included as drugs in the pharmacopoeia of many countries across the globe and are known for their anti-inflammatory, antiseptic and spasmolytic properties.



Common process of obtaining the Matricaria recutita extract from the blossom of the plant is trough steam distillation. Under this process, hot steam is passed through a still containing the Matricaria recutita flowers. The hot steam penetrates the plant, forcing the essential oil out of the plant. It is then collected separately. Chamomile oil yields obtained from the Matricaria recutita flowers are very low, typical yields being only 0.2?"0.4% of the total weight of the flowers. The extracted oil is used for a variety of medicinal purposes, with the general use being for mental and physical relaxation. Depending upon the therapeutic use, the oil can be ingested orally or can be topically applied.



Matricaria recutita oil extract is used to ease insomnia, as a mood enhancer, mild anti-depressant, and an aid to calm nervousness or anxiety problems. Apart from its mental calming properties, the oil is also useful for soothing aching joints and muscles. The Matricaria recutita oil is commonly used as an ingredient in skin lotions and creams due to its anti-inflammatory and antibacterial properties. The oil is also used to ease digestive problems and soothe conjunctivitis symptoms. In addition to pharmaceutical uses, the oil is extensively employed in a number of commercial products including soaps, alcoholic beverages, detergents, perfumes, lotions, ointments, hair care products, food products, bakery products, and cosmetics.



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Because of its extensive medicinal and pharmaceutical properties, Matricaria recutita oil possesses good economic value and is in high demand across the world. The plant grows well in temperate and semi-temperate regions and is native to Southern and Eastern Europe. Commercial growing of the plant has been undertaken in the mountainous regions of India and Nepal. Matricaria recutita is an important crop in Hungary, France, Yugoslavia, Germany, Russia, and Brazil. The plant can be found in other regions in North Africa, Asia, North and South America, Australia, and New Zealand. Hungary is one of the most important growers of Matricaria recutita with the majority of the flowers produced being exported to Germany.
Albany, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 06/25/2019 -- The contours of the global Photorejuvenation Equipment market dynamic are constantly changing, and are shaped by various macroeconomic factors and trends in the healthcare industry. These trends have also changed the directions of investments, especially in emerging markets. In recent years, new frontiers in the Photorejuvenation Equipment market have come to the fore propelled by implementation of regulatory norms put forth by governments in developing and developed regions. New healthcare guidelines will likely put a significant bearing on new product developments in nascent as well as established markets over 20ab  20cd (forecast period). Changing nature of demands of patient populations and rapid technological advances, notably in healthcare IT, are expected to open and support new paradigms in the global Photorejuvenation Equipment market.



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A recent market study published by the company Photorejuvenation Equipment Market: Global Industry Analysis 2013-2017 & Opportunity Assessment 2018-2028 comprises a comprehensive assessment of the most important market dynamics. On conducting a thorough research on the historic as well as current growth parameters of the Photorejuvenation equipment market, growth prospects of the market are obtained with maximum precision. The report features unique and salient factors that may make a huge impact on the development of the Photorejuvenation equipment market during the forecast period. It can help market players to modify their manufacturing and marketing strategies to envisage maximum growth in the Photorejuvenation equipment market in the upcoming years. The report provides detailed information about the current and future growth prospects of the Photorejuvenation equipment market in the most comprehensive way for the better understanding of readers.



Chapter 1 Executive Summary



The report commences with the executive summary of the Photorejuvenation equipment market report, which includes the summary of key findings and key statistics of the market. It also includes the market value (US$ million) estimates of the leading segments of the Photorejuvenation equipment market.



Chapter 2 Market Overview



Readers can find detailed taxonomy and the definition of the Photorejuvenation equipment market in this chapter, which helps readers to understand the basic information about the Photorejuvenation equipment market dynamics, opportunity analysis, parent market analysis, pricing analysis, list of key distributor and suppliers, list of key market participants, ice burg analysis, consumer adoption process, procedure volume of Photorejuvenation equipment by major countries, regulatory scenario, pricing impact analysis, competition blueprint are included in the report.



Chapter 3 North America Photorejuvenation Equipment Market Analysis (2013-2017) & Opportunity Assessment (2018-2028)



This chapter includes detailed analysis of the growth of the North America Photorejuvenation equipment market along with the country-wise assessment including the U.S. and Canada. Readers can also find market growth and market attractive analysis based on product type, modality, end user and country of Photorejuvenation equipment in the North American region.



Chapter 4 Latin America Photorejuvenation Equipment Market Analysis (2013-2017) & Opportunity Assessment (2018-2028)



Readers can find detailed information about pricing analysis that are impacting the growth of the Latin America Photorejuvenation Equipment market. This chapter also includes the growth prospects of the Photorejuvenation Equipment market in leading LATAM countries such as Brazil, Mexico, and rest of the Latin America region.



Chapter 5 Western Europe Photorejuvenation Equipment Market Analysis (2013-2017) & Opportunity Assessment (2018-2028)



Important growth prospects of the Photorejuvenation Equipment market based on its product types, modality, and end users in several European countries, such as EU4, UK, and rest Western Europe is included in this chapter.



Chapter 6 Eastern Europe Photorejuvenation Equipment Market Analysis (2013-2017) & Opportunity Assessment (2018-2028)



Important growth prospects of the Photorejuvenation Equipment Market based on its product type, modality, and end user in several Eastern European countries, such as Russia, Poland, and Rest of Eastern Europe is included in this chapter.



Chapter 7 Asia Pacific excluding China and Japan (APECJ) Photorejuvenation Equipment Market Analysis (2013-2017) & Opportunity Assessment (2018-2028)



India, ASEAN, Australia and New Zealand are the leading countries in the APECJ region that are the prime subject of assessment to obtain growth prospects of the APECJ Photorejuvenation Equipment market in this chapter. Readers can find thorough information about the growth parameters of the APECJ Photorejuvenation Equipment market during the period 2018-2028.



Chapter 8 China Photorejuvenation Equipment Market Analysis (2013-2017) & Opportunity Assessment (2018-2028)



Readers can find important factors that can make a huge impact on the growth of the Photorejuvenation Equipment market in China based on the market segmentation, during the forecast period. This chapter provides the overview of regulations, drivers, restraints, and trends in the China Photorejuvenation Equipment market.



Chapter 9 Japan Photorejuvenation Equipment Market Analysis (2013-2017) & Opportunity Assessment (2018-2028)



Readers can find important factors that can make a huge impact on the growth of the Photorejuvenation Equipment market in Japan based on the market segmentation, during the forecast period. This chapter provides the overview of regulations, drivers, restraints, and trends in the Japan Photorejuvenation Equipment market.



Chapter 10 Middle East & Africa (MEA) Photorejuvenation Equipment Market Analysis (2013-2017) & Opportunity Assessment (2018-2028)



This chapter provides information on how the Photorejuvenation Equipment market will grow in the major countries in MEA region, such as GCC Countries, South Africa, and rest of MEA during the period 2013-2028.



Chapter 11 Competition Landscape, Company Share and Company Profiles



In this chapter, readers can find a comprehensive list of all the leading stakeholders in the Photorejuvenation Equipment market along with detailed information about each company, including company overview, revenue shares, strategic overview, and recent company developments. Market players featured in the report include Hologic Inc. (Cynosure, Inc.), Lumenis, Syneron Medical Ltd., Lynton Lasers Ltd, EL.EN. S.p.A. (Deka Mela S.r.l.), Fotona, Cutera, Inc., Lutronic Corporation, Beijing Nubway S & T Co., Ltd, and others.



Chapter 12 Global Photorejuvenation Equipment Market Analysis 2013-2017 & Opportunity Assessment 2018-2028 By Product Type



Based on the product type, the Photorejuvenation Equipment market is segmented into Intense Pulsed Light (IPL) Equipment, Laser Equipment, and LED Equipment. In this chapter, readers can find information about key trends and developments in the Photorejuvenation Equipment market and market attractive analysis based on the product type. In this chapter, readers can find information about key trends and developments in the Photorejuvenation Equipment market and market attractive analysis based on the product type for each region.



Chapter 13 Global Photorejuvenation Equipment Market Analysis 2013-2017 & Opportunity Assessment 2018-2028, By Modality



Based on the Modality, the Photorejuvenation Equipment market is segmented into stand-alone Photorejuvenation equipment and portable/handheld Photorejuvenation equipment. In this chapter, readers can find information about key trends and developments in the Photorejuvenation Equipment market and market attractive analysis based on Modality. In this chapter, readers can find information about key trends and developments in the Photorejuvenation Equipment market and market attractive analysis based on the modality for each region



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Chapter 14 Global Photorejuvenation Equipment Market Analysis 2013-2017 & Opportunity Assessment 2018-2028, By End User



Based on the End User, the Photorejuvenation Equipment market is segmented into hospitals, dermatology clinics, wellness centers, laser therapy centers, and home care settings. In this chapter, readers can find information about key trends and developments in the Photorejuvenation Equipment market and market attractive analysis based on End User. In this chapter, readers can find information about key trends and developments in the Photorejuvenation Equipment market and market attractive analysis based on the End User for each region.



Chapter 15 Global Photorejuvenation Equipment Market Analysis 2013-2017 & Opportunity Assessment 2018-2028, By Region



This chapter explains how the Photorejuvenation Equipment market will grow across various geographic regions, such as North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia-Pacific Excluding China & Japan (APECJ), China, Japan and the Middle East & Africa (MEA).



Chapter 16 Assumptions and Acronyms



This chapter includes a list of acronyms and assumptions that provide a base to the information and statistics included in the report.



Chapter 17 Research Methodology



This chapter helps readers to understand the research methodology followed to obtain various conclusions, important qualitative information, and quantitative information about the Photorejuvenation Equipment market.



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Pune, India -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/20/2018 -- Market Highlights



Specialty Plasticizers are polymer additives for improving softness, flexibility, durability, and volatility of the plasticized materials. Specialty plasticizers are used in to make low temperature resistance, volatility-resistance and good electrical properties for leather, seats, PVC films and electrical wires. Plasticizers are highly used in some PVC applications such as cables, PVC films, flooring, roofing and wall coverings. Specialty plasticizers are grouped into a number of categories such as phthalates, polymerics, aliphatics, epoxides, phosphates, trimellitates and others.



The Global Specialty Plasticizers Market is segmented on the basis of type, application, and region. Based on type, the market is categorized into phthalates, trimellitates, aliphatic dibasic esters, polymeric, phosphates epoxides, and other in which phthalates Specialty Plasticizers highly occupied the Global Specialty Plasticizers Market share. On the other hand, in Europe three phthalate specialty plasticizers including di (2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP), will be permanently banned for use in toys. The European Union has also banned some phthalates specialty plasticizers in cosmetics similar Japan and California has also banned DINP and DEHP in toys and food-handling gloves owning to this can hamper the Global Specialty Plasticizers Market in forecasted period.



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Regional Analysis:



The Global Specialty Plasticizer Market is classified on the basis of mixed geographic segmentation which involves regions such as America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa. Out of all, Asia Pacific Specialty Plasticizer Market is largest market accounting for more than half of the Global Plasticizers Market share, both in terms of value and volume owing to robust industry growth of application industry in China, Japan and India. Asia Pacific specialty plasticizer market size is likely to witness highest gains over the forecast period. The global consumption of specialty plasticizer market in APAC is 3.5 million tons also APAC region has 65% of the Global Specialty Plasticizer capacity. The global increment in economic growth rate is expected to lead to increase in the disposable income and improvement in lifestyle, facilitating luxuries of the population. This in turn may result in increase in sales for end-use merchandises of Specialty Plasticizers such as electronic apparatus, toys, children care products, cars, and others.

The Europe Specialty Plasticizer Market is increasing due to their end-use industries such as automotive, and building & construction. Europe is expected to hold the market with its increasing demand for Specialty Plasticizer in various applications, such as coated fabric, wire & cable, flooring & wall coverings, and others. The Europe markets is predicted to show a rising growth in the forecasted period.



Europe is one of the second largest region, both in terms of volume and value, followed by North America. In North America region accounts for the highest share of the Specialty Plasticizer Market. Some market restrains such as alternatives of Specialty Plasticizer and growing environmental concerns in Europe may hamper the market in forecasted period. North America holds third position in terms of Specialty Plasticizer followed by Latin America which is expected to witness significant growth owing to growing automotive industry and building & construction industry.



Global Specialty Plasticizer Key Players



Key players of the Global Specialty Plasticizer Market are UPC Group (Taiwan), Eastman Chemical Company (US), Evonik Industries AG(Germany), BASF SE (Germany), Exxonmobil Corporation (US), Shandong Qilu Plasticizers Co. LTD (China), Nan Ya Plastics Corporation (Taiwan), Aekyung Petrochemical Co. LTD (South Korea), Lg Chem LTD.(South Korea), Struktol Company of America (US) and others.



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Cho fled the country last Thursday, when the scandal first broke, only to return early Sunday morning after determining that her prolonged absence would result in an even worse public relations fiasco for the flag carrier. Confronted by reporters, Cho denied throwing the bottle in the staffer's face but added, "I apologize for my foolish and careless behavior."

Cho, who allegedly threw a water bottle in the face of an advertising staffer in a hissy fit last month, has apologized on Facebook and taken a leave of absence, but public outrage continues to mount.

More revelations are emerging about the fit of "office rage" thrown by Korean Air heiress Cho Hyun-min, the airline chairman's younger daughter.

Matters got worse when an audio file was posted anonymously on the Internet last Saturday which sounds like Cho screaming uncontrollably at another worker for four or five minutes.

When Korean Air said it cannot confirm whether the voice is Cho's, the person who posted the file published a portion of his Korean Air ID and name card and said, "The audio file is of Cho's voice. This was not just a one-off incident either. She even screamed in rage at her seniors at work."

Advertising industry insiders also shared their nasty experiences with Cho's temper.

The continuing revelations prompted Cho to send an e-mail to the airline's staff and said, "Due to my passion for my job, I was unable to control myself and overreacted. I will be responsible for my behavior and subject myself to any form of public criticism."

This is not the first time that apparently congenital anger management problems in the owner's family have landed the carrier in trouble. In 2014 her sister, Cho Hyun-ah, made worldwide headlines with the "nut rage" scandal, when she assaulted the purser on a flight and forced the plane to turn back to the gate after she had been served nuts in a bag instead of a bowl.

Police have started investigating Cho Hyun-min for assault. "We plan to question as many people as possible," a police spokesman said. According to police, around a dozen people were present during the incident. The question is whether Cho actually screamed uncontrollably and whether she threw the bottle in the staffer's face, as witnesses claim, or on the floor, as Korean Air insists.

Police have so far been unable to contact the victim.

Meanwhile, more than 90 postings on the Cheong Wa Dae website make various accusations against Cho Hyun-min demanding punishment, or calling for the "Korean" to be dropped from the airline's name.


An international team of researchers from Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea and the United States has demonstrated that nanoscale (300 nm) single-crystalline and polycrystalline diamond needles could flex and stretch by as much as 9% without breaking, then return to their original configuration. The teams results, published in the journal Science, could open the door to a variety of diamond-based devices for applications such as sensing, data storage, actuation, biocompatible in vivo imaging, optoelectronics, and drug delivery.

Ordinary diamond in bulk form has a limit of well below 1% stretch. It was very surprising to see the amount of elastic deformation the nanoscale diamond could sustain, said co-author Dr. Daniel Bernoulli, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT.

We developed a unique nanomechanical approach to precisely control and quantify the ultralarge elastic strain distributed in the nanodiamond samples, said co-lead author Dr. Yang Lu, a researcher with the City University of Hong Kong.

Putting crystalline materials such as diamond under ultralarge elastic strains, as happens when these pieces flex, can change their mechanical properties as well as thermal, optical, magnetic, electrical, electronic, and chemical reaction properties in significant ways, and could be used to design materials for specific applications through elastic strain engineering, the scientists said.

They measured the bending of the diamond needles, which were grown through a chemical vapor deposition process and then etched to their final shape, by observing them in a scanning electron microscope while pressing down on the needles with a standard nanoindenter diamond tip (essentially the corner of a cube).

Following the experimental tests using this system, the researchers did many detailed simulations to interpret the results and were able to determine precisely how much stress and strain the diamond needles could accommodate without breaking.

They also developed a computer model of the nonlinear elastic deformation for the actual geometry of the diamond needle, and found that the maximum tensile strain of the nanoscale diamond was as high as 9%.

The computer model also predicted that the corresponding maximum local stress was close to the known ideal tensile strength of diamond.

When the entire diamond needle was made of one crystal, failure occurred at a tensile strain as high as 9%.

Until this critical level was reached, the deformation could be completely reversed if the probe was retracted from the needle and the specimen was unloaded.

If the tiny needle was made of many grains of diamond, the study authors showed that they could still achieve unusually large strains. However, the maximum strain achieved by the polycrystalline diamond needle was less than one-half that of the single crystalline diamond needle.

Our results were so surprising that we had to run the experiments again under different conditions just to confirm them, said co-lead author Professor Subra Suresh, President of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

We also performed detailed computer simulations of the actual specimens and bending experiments to measure and determine the maximum tensile stress and strain that the diamond nanoneedles could withstand before breaking.

This work also demonstrates that what is usually not possible at the macroscopic and microscopic scales can occur at the nanoscale where the entire specimen consists of only dozens or hundreds of atoms, and where the surface to volume ratio is large.

After two years of careful iterations between simulations and real-time experiments, we now know that the deformed shape of a bent nanoscale needle is the key in determining its maximum tensile strain achieved, said co-lead author Dr. Ming Dao, from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT.

The controlled bending deformation also enables precise control and on-the-fly alterations of the maximum strain in the nanoneedle below its fracture limit.

_____

Amit Banerjee et al. 2018. Ultralarge elastic deformation of nanoscale diamond. Science 360 (6386): 300-302; doi: 10.1126/science.aar4165
An international team of paleontologists from the Natural History Museum, London, the University of Birmingham and Virginia Tech has formally given an ancient carnivorous reptile a name, over several decades since its fossils were found in Tanzania. The formal species description of Mandasuchus tanyauchen is published in a special memoir of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

A cousin of modern-day crocodiles, Mandasuchus tanyauchen was an archosaur  the lineage of reptiles that include dinosaurs, crocodiles and birds.

The ancient reptile lived around 245 million years ago (Triassic period) and grew up to 10 feet (3 m) in length.

The fossilized remains of Mandasuchus tanyauchen were first discovered in the 1930s as part of a major paleontological expedition to East Africa, which included work on a geological formation in Tanzania called the Manda Beds.

The fossils in these beds date from the Middle Triassic epoch. This was a time when the archosaurs began their rise to dominance.

English paleontologist Alan Charig proposed the name Mandasuchus for this species in the 1950s, when he studied the Tanzanian fossils as part of his PhD thesis. Charig continued his career in paleontology, but never completed his work on this reptile.

In recent years, new expeditions to Tanzania have found additional fossils, which have remained in Tanzania.

Combined with the older discoveries, these are shedding light on exciting topics such as early dinosaur evolution.

Studies like these highlight the important role that museums play as storehouses of information of the natural world, said senior author Professor Paul Barrett, a paleontologist in the Department of Earth Sciences at the Natural History Museum, London.

Although it took decades to complete this work, the specimens remained safe and accessible in our collections and now form the basis of this amazing new species.

_____

Richard J. Butler et al. 2018. Mandasuchus tanyauchen, gen. et sp. nov., a pseudosuchian archosaur from the Manda Beds (Middle Triassic) of Tanzania; pp. 96121 in C. A. Sidor and S. J. Nesbitt (eds.), Vertebrate and Climatic Evolution in the Triassic Rift Basins of Tanzania and Zambia. Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Memoir 17. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 37 (6); doi: 10.1080/02724634.2017.1343728
Police on Tuesday applied for a travel ban for Cho. "We've launched an official investigation into the incident and booked her as a suspect, so we asked the Justice Ministry to ban her from leaving the country," a police spokesman said.

Korean Air said Monday that she was suspended from her job and would remain on suspension until the police investigation is complete. "We plan to take adequate measures once the findings come out," the airline said.

Korean Air heiress Cho Hyun-min, the airline chairman's younger daughter, has been temporarily suspended from her job with the flag carrier as an "office rage" scandal deepens.

Meanwhile, Korean Air faces charges of violating aviation laws after it was revealed that Cho, a U.S. citizen, served as a registered board member at the carrier's budget subsidiary Jin Air.

Cho was born in Hawaii in 1983 and apparently chose U.S. citizenship but served as a registered board member at Jin Air from 2010 to 2016.

According to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, that could in theory invalidate the license for Jin Air because it failed to declare the influence of a foreign citizen.

But the ministry said it will not be possible to punish Jin Air now that Cho is no longer in the post since regulations give impunity to an airline that removes a foreign board member within three months of being found out.

Cho became a registered board member a year after Jin Air won its license in 2009, but the ministry failed to discover the violation.

A ministry official said, "Relevant laws were enacted in 2016, so there was no way we could have noticed any violation before."


Britain plans to ban the sale of plastic straws and other single-use products and is pressing Commonwealth allies to also take action to tackle marine waste, the office of Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May said.

It said drink stirrers and cotton buds would also be banned under the plans.

May has pledged to eradicate avoidable plastic waste by 2042 as part of a "national plan of action."

"Plastic waste is one of the greatest environmental challenges facing the world, which is why protecting the marine environment is central to our agenda at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting," May said in a statement ahead of a Commonwealth summit Thursday.


U.S. President Donald Trump has "made a very firm commitment to work as hard as possible to try to return" American detainees and Japanese abductees from North Korea, said William Hagerty, the U.S. ambassador to Japan.

"This is a very sensitive issue for us and a high priority for both leaders that was covered extensively," said Hagerty in a telephone briefing that followed a meeting Wednesday between Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

Abe said Trump had pledged that during his planned meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, he would raise the issue of Japanese nationals abducted by Pyongyang decades ago. Trump met with the abductees' families in Japan last November during a visit.

 Three Detained

Three Korean-Americans are currently imprisoned in North Korea. Tony Kim and Kim Hak-song were teaching at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, the only private university in the country. They were separately detained in 2017 and accused of participating in anti-state activities and trying to overthrow the government.

The third detainee, Kim Dong-chul, was arrested in Rason on the northeast tip of North Korea in October 2015. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison with hard labor in 2016 after being convicted of espionage.

Freeing the prisoners would be seen as a sign of goodwill by North Korea's leader. It would also mark a personal success for Trump, who has highlighted the issue.

Hagerty told reporters that while the agenda of the highly anticipated meeting between Trump and Kim was still "being formed," Washington has "more clarity" in terms of the "direction" in which it will go with Pyongyang.

He noted Trump's "intention" to see all of the weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, eliminated from the Korean Peninsula.


The Central Committee organizes and guides all party affairs. It consists of 145 full members, who have the right to speak and vote, and 129 candidate members without a vote.

The Central Committee of the North Korean Workers Party meets Friday to "discuss and decide policy issues in line with the demands of the historic era of the developing revolution," state media said Thursday.

The parallel development of nuclear weapons and the economy, which has been the ideological backbone of leader Kim jong-un's reign, was adopted by the Central Committee in March 2013.

But lately references to the nuclear program have somewhat faded from the official propaganda as North Korea prepares for summits with South Korea and the U.S.

The meeting comes at short notice and the date was only decided on Wednesday. A defector who used to be a senior official in the North said, "It's highly likely that the decision to convene the plenary session was made hastily to show the U.S. that it is serious."

It follows a threat from U.S. President Donald Trump to walk away if no progress is made. "If we don't think it's going to be successful, we won't have it, we won't have it. If I think that it's a meeting that is not going to be fruitful, we're not going to go," Trump said. "If the meeting when I'm there is not fruitful, I will respectfully leave the meeting."

It is unclear whether the Central Committee meeting is a direct response.
Capable of guiding in 11 different languages, the new guides will go straight into service, as the 3rd busiest cruise season in the region started a month ago.

Excursions for cruise guests in Stavanger are delivered both by a locally-based company as well as one operating on a national level. The local company provides 152 guides for excursions in 21 different languages.

The authorization ceremony took place in a new welcoming centre at The Iron Age Farm in Stavanger.

This popular attraction, included in many cruise excursions from Stavanger, is run by The Archeologic Museum and The University of Stavanger.

The new centre offers both displays, as small cafe, a gift shop, as well as sanitary facilities, next to the Iron Age Farm.Stavanger is now a year-round cruise destination, with cruise calls every month, apart from November this year, until 2021so far, says Anders Bang-Andersen, director of cruise development at the Norwegian city and port.

187 cruise calls and over 330,000 cruise guests are expected this year.

2019 will be the busiest year ever, as cruise calls are likely to increase by 25% and guest numbers by 45%.
On last Tuesday, the Panama Canal saw the transit of the LNG carriers the Clean Ocean, Gaslog Gibraltar and Gaslog Hong Kong vessels, which first arrived at the Canal from the Pacific Ocean and transited north, departing on the Atlantic side, finishing their transit on Wednesday.

The development marks a significant record for the Panama Canal and its service of the burgeoning LNG segment  which began transiting the waterway for the first time following the inauguration of the expanded Canal. The segment has seen steady growth in the nearly two years since.

Currently, the Panama Canal offers one of the seven post-panamax reservation slots available per day to LNG shipowners specifically, which currently average five transits per week. However, during periods of high seasonal demand, the waterway has transited two vessels in one day on 14 separate occasions. In this fiscal year, as of March 2018, the Canal has registered 134 LNG transits.

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Read more on the Panama Canal and the LNG sector

Panama Canal LNG transits to increase by 50%

Expanded Panama Canal not the only factor in LNG shipping demand

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As demand from the LNG segment continues to grow, the Canal remains committed to meeting the needs of its customers and taking the necessary steps to increase capacity commensurate with demand.

According to Bloomberg, Dominion Energy Inc.s Cove Point LNG terminal - the second to send shale gas overseas - started commercial service this week, roughly two years after Cheniere Energy Inc. opened up its Sabine Pass terminal in Louisiana. So far, Sabine Pass has shipped more than 300 cargoes to 26 countries.
Press Release

April 19, 2018 Legarda Pushes for Clean Energy Initiatives in Washington Meets, Discusses PH-US Ties with Senator Gardner Senator Loren Legarda has pushed for clean energy initiatives in her various meets at the sidelines of the 2018 Spring Meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank Group in Washington D.C. On April 18, Legarda was among the panelists at the Second Annual High-Level Strategy Session (HLSS2) on Sustainable, Healthy Cities, and Sustainable Energy Solutions organized by the AirQualityAsia (AQA) and US-Asia Institute, where she shared the Philippines' laws and initiatives to improve air quality and reduce carbon emissions. Legarda also told her fellow panelist, Rep. Colleen Wakako Hanabusa of the First District of Hawaii, United States Congress, about her interest in Hawaii's legislation of reaching its 100% renewable energy goal by 2045. She said she wants to propose a similar measure in the Philippines. After the AirQualityAsia forum, Legarda met with members of the US Export-Import Bank (EXIM), the official export credit agency of the US which helps level the playing field for US goods and services against foreign competition in overseas markets. She discussed with them issues on tariffs the US is imposing on solar panels, which disincentivizes the clean energy sector. The Senator also met with Paul Shmotolokha, Vice President of Alpha Technologies, a global leader in off-grid and energy storage solutions, to discuss about their work and possible partnership with Philippine companies to promote clean energy. Legarda, who chairs the Philippine Senate's Committees on Foreign Relations, Finance and Climate Change, also had a productive meeting with Republican Senator Cory Gardner, who heads the Subcommittee on East Asia, The Pacific, and International Cyber-Security Policy in the US Senate. Philippine Ambassador to the United States Jose Manuel Romualdez was also present at the meeting. "Senator Gardner was very much interested in the ongoing rehabilitation in Marawi City and we discussed cooperation especially in investing in the city's renewable energy infrastructure. It would be a good opportunity for the United States' National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to visit Marawi," said Legarda. The NREL is located in Colorado, the home state of Senator Gardner. It is the only federal laboratory dedicated to the research, development, commercialization, and deployment of renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies. Under USAID's EC-LEDS (Enhancing Capacity for Low Emission Development Strategies) program, NREL provides technical support to the Philippine Government to advance a variety of clean energy and low emission development initiatives. Senator Gardner also mentioned the bill they are working on, the proposed Asia Reassurance Initiative Act, which he said will have an economic and renewable energy component. It will help enable energy opportunities in places like the Philippines. The two senators also exchanged views on the South China Sea and on counter-terrorism, stressing that the sharing of intelligence information is vital in addressing a global concern such as terrorism. Meanwhile, Senator Legarda and Ambassador Romualdez also met with Former US Ambassador to the Philippines and now Co-Chair of the US-Philippines Society, John D. Negroponte, and US-Philippines Society Executive Director Hank Hendrickson. They shared insights on how to further enhance US-PH economic relations through culture and in various areas of international cooperation. Legarda is currently in Washington, D.C. as the Alternate Head of the Philippine Delegation to the 2018 Spring Meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank Group.
Press Release

April 20, 2018 Dispatch from Crame No. 289

Sen. Leila M. de Lima's Statement on NFA rice shortage and related controversies 4/20/18 The controversy surrounding the NFA and the incomprehensible rice shortage happening under Duterte's watch would seemingly lead to one of two explanations: either Duterte is a deluded, incompetent patsy, whose own underlings and trusted friends are running circles around him, taking advantage of the trust that the old-but-inexperienced man has given to them; or he's a wily and corrupt manipulator, who allows smuggling syndicates and their influence peddlers to run rampant in his government with impunity, while he takes the Filipino people for a ride, including members of his own Cabinet, who have misplaced their faith in his promise of "change". It seems that it has to be one or the other. Why? Because based on corroborated and even documented in-fighting among members of his inner circle, Duterte has had more than one occasion to either prevent the anomalies in the NFA from happening, or halt them before they caused grave damage to the Filipino people. He could have prevented it because, as far back as March 2016, the Bureau of Customs, where Jason Aquino previously worked, publicized notices warning the public about his insalubrious character and bad track record - yet he was nonetheless appointed by Duterte as NFA Administrator 9 months later. Perhaps because Jason Aquino is reportedly close to Bong Go and to Duterte's son, Paolo. Whatever the reason, Duterte ignored BOC's advice, believing himself a far wiser judge of character than Jason Aquino's own colleagues and superiors. In March 2017, Duterte had good cause to keep a close eye on his appointee, when no less than his good friend and Cabinet Secretary, Leoncio Evasco, Jr. himself, cried foul about Jason Aquino's defiance of his orders on extending rice importation through the minimum access volume (MAV) scheme. It would be interesting to note who Jason Aquino's backers are that he feels free to defy the orders of an alter ego of the President. Again, Duterte had an opportunity to halt the shenanigans in the NFA when, in Sept. 2017, Senator Lacson filed a complaint against Aquino as NFA Administrator for graft and economic sabotage, after he issued post-facto import permits that allowed the release of $680,000 (P34.04 million) worth of rice in the Cagayan de Oro port in May despite lack of permits and payment of duties. Yet, Aquino remained in his post, mostly unscathed by the revelation of such blatantly suspicious actions. Teflon Jason, indeed. The President even defended and expressed trust in him. Yet, following this and perhaps precisely because of this manifest vote of confidence, CabSec Evasco recently submitted a Memo to the President revealing even more anomalies, including Teflon Jason's diversion of rice intended for hurricane-prone areas in Eastern Visayas, only to be sold to Bulacan rice traders. It would be interesting to see what Duterte does - or does not do - in light of this. Time and again, he has chosen to close his eyes to the problems in the NFA. What is known is that his wilful inaction has brought us to this situation, where we are experiencing a rice shortage that may or may not have been especially induced in order to justify a Government-to-Government (G2G) importation of rice - an opportunity that influence peddlers and so-called "deal brokers" might exploit in order to squeeze out commissions, kickbacks and transaction fees. Magandang itanong kung sino ba ang makikinabang sa mga nangyayaring ito sa NFA at sa gobyerno ni Duterte. For sure, it isn't the Filipino farmers because Duterte is favouring G2G as opposed to G2P, as recommended by CabSec Evasco, which would have meant that the government would be buying from farmers cooperatives - hopefully, legitimate ones. For sure, hindi rin ang taumbayan dahil hindi na nga umuunlad ang lokal na produksyon ng palay at napag-iiwanan na tayo ng ibang bansa, napapamahal pa ang bilihin dahil sa "rice shortage" na dulot ng kapabayaan ni Duterte, at ang kita na napupunta sana sa gobyerno bilang taripa o import duties ay napupunta lamang sa mga smugglers. Follow the money, ika nga. Sino-sino ba ang nasa likod at ang mga sinasandalan ng mga smuggler na ito? These are all interesting questions, but there is a bigger and more long-term question that also needs to be asked. What is the Duterte Administration doing to really help the farmers? To upgrade their productivity? To make sure that they are being groomed and given enough support to someday help the Philippines become self-sufficient and to, once again, become truly and completely competitive with other rice producing countries? Baka parang pangakong "End to Endo" lang yan, o pangakong ipaglalaban ang ating karapatan sa West Philippine Sea - na pawang mga pangakong napapako lamang? Ginoong Duterte, how far will you go to protect those who abuse and exploit the positions you have given them? Kelan mo naman proprotektahan ang taong-bayan?
DUTERTE THREW IN THE TOWEL IN FIGHT AGAINST ENDO--HONTIVEROS

Akbayan Senator Risa Hontiveros on Friday said that President Rodrigo Duterte has "thrown in the towel" and "surrendered" in the campaign against labor contractualization.

Hontiveros issued the statement after Duterte said that he will no longer issue an Executive Order (EO) to end labor contractualization and will just leave the matter to Congress.

"After much hemming and hawing, the President decided not to issue an EO against labor contractualization. President Duterte effectively threw in the towel in the fight against ENDO and abandoned the Filipino working class," Hontiveros said.

Hontiveros however said that she was not surprised by Duterte's 180-degree turn.

"Hindi nakakapagtaka ang pagsuko ng Presidente sa isyung ito. After all, this is the same President who waved the white flag in surrendering our sovereignty and territory to the Chinese, and who admitted that he cannot control the drug problem. Now, President Duterte capitulated to the lobby of those opposed to the creation and protection of regular jobs," Hontiveros stressed.

The opposition Senator said that she will ask her colleagues to swiftly deliberate and pass the Security of Tenure Bill pending before the Senate.

"With the President abandoning the Filipino workers, the Senate must pick up the fight against labor contractualization," Hontiveros asserted.

"It's time to end ENDO. It is time for a strong policy that will protect our workers from labor contractualization and other schemes that continue to deprive them of their full benefits," Hontiveros concluded.
President Moon Jae-in on Thursday said North Korea is willing to denuclearize "completely" and is not setting any conditions that the U.S. cannot accept like withdrawal of U.S. troops from South Korea.

The international community is seeking the "complete, verifiable and irreversible" scrapping of North Korea's nuclear program.

Moon made this claim over lunch with the heads of South Korea's major news outlets. All North Korea is calling for is "the end of hostile policies" against it, "followed by a guarantee of security," he added. "It would be correct to think that is why North Korea wants to hold talks with the U.S."

"I don't think denuclearization has different meanings for South and North Korea. The North is expressing a will for a complete denuclearization," he said.

But he warned that the difficulty lies in finding a "specific method to achieve denuclearization" and asked the assembled editors to offer good ideas.




Genres : Crime and Thriller



: Crime and Thriller Running Time : 102 min.



: 102 min. Directed by : Lee Han-wook



: Lee Han-wook Starring : Lee Yoo-young, Kim Won-hee

Synopsis : A horrible date rape case shocks the whole country. High school girl Min-ah is raped by a group of boys while his boyfriend is recording the rape scene. The file is spread online being called "Marionette," media swarms like bees for this tabloidy topic. Min-ah becomes a victim of not only a sexual crime, but also a violent media pursuit.
Syft Technologies, which makes gas detection and analysis products, says sales rose more than 50 percent in its latest year, which was lower than forecast and profit growth also missed its target because of increased production costs.

Sales in the year ended March 31 exceeded the $8.3 million in revenue it reported for 2017, the Christchurch-based company said. Profit topped 2017's $1.15 million, but not by as much as expected, it said, without being specific.

"This rapid growth in sales has caused us problems in production that we need to address better," the company said in a statement on the Unlisted platform. "Manufacturing costs are up due to a combination of new products, new staff, and poor inventory control. These are addressable but require a greater focus and mindset change to make the transformation to a much larger business."

Syft has "spent significantly more money on production development than expected, and development in general as we fix up issues that are slowing production," it said. "This work has also meant we have not had the development resource to make the progress on new initiatives we anticipated, and as a result, production costs will be higher than forecast in FY2019. The net result of these differences is a profit figure, while higher than last year, is lower than forecast."

Managing director Doug Hastie was out of the country and a spokesperson wasn't immediately available to answer questions. In September, the company raised $7.5 million selling 6.5 million shares via a placement at $1.15 apiece. The stock last traded at $1.13.

Costs of the capital raising contributed to a first-half loss of $40,000 from a year-earlier profit of $779,000 as sales rose to $4.8 million from $4.4 million.

The company's core product uses sensors to sniff out contaminants in the air, even in minuscule amounts. It also has technology for the environmental industry to monitor potentially harmful gases, and rapid trace analysis for high-precision technology manufacturing equipment, which can be damaged by contaminants in the air.

Syft said today that full-year sales missed its forecast because of the timing of an order in April rather than in February as expected. Average sales price rose 21 percent, meeting the company's target and the gross margin rose, although not as much as expected. The company's sales team "increased significantly from last year, but not as quickly as planned."

"While we never have complete certainty of future sales, due to the nature of our business (ie large capital items) we see significantly more prospects and activity which bodes well for this financial year," it said.

Founded in 2002 by the University of Canterbury's commercialisation arm, the company churned through $29 million of investors' cash in its first decade without producing a profit. The firm has recovered from bankruptcy in 2012.

(BusinessDesk)

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The Financial Markets Authority is keeping close tabs on Australia's Royal Commission into misconduct in the banking, superannuation and financial services industry, with hearings this week uncovering misdeeds at AMP and prompting chief executive Craig Meller to fall on his sword.

Meller resigned today and the financial services firm is reviewing its regulatory and governance framework after royal commission hearings this week found it had misled the Australian Securities & Investments Commission over the charging of customers without providing services. The issues arose from AMP's buyer of resort role, where it had to purchase an adviser's client book if another AMP representative wouldn't buy it.

ASIC has said it's investigating AMP's conduct in relation to 'fees for no service', and New Zealand's FMA is in "close contact" with its trans-Tasman counterpart and is "monitoring developments at the royal commission closely," an FMA spokesman said in an emailed statement. "We are engaging with all the businesses involved to discuss the implications for their New Zealand operations."

The conduct is isolated to Australia, with an AMP New Zealand spokesman saying the domestic unit operates under a different regulatory and governance framework and uses different operating and distribution models.

"We do not have the same buyer of last resort contractual model in New Zealand - which is a core focus of many of the current issues being examined," he said. "We continue to maintain an open and transparent relationship with New Zealand regulators  the FMA and RBNZ."

AMP chair Catherine Brenner said the firm "apologises unreservedly for the misconduct and failures in regulatory disclosures in our advice business" and that the board has "been driving much-needed change and improvement in our advice business, which has undergone significant leadership and governance renewal over the past year but we know we have much more to do too."

Meller said he was "personally devastated" by the issues that were uncovered, but that because they happened under his watch "stepping down as CEO is an appropriate measure to begin the work that needs to be done to restore public and regulatory trust in AMP".

The Sydney-based financial services firm has identified 15,712 affected customers and refunded A$4.3 million of fees, and an externa review found the 'fees for no service' practices ended in November 2016. The board has also set up a committee to review issues relating to the advice business raised in the hearings.

The dual-listed shares fell 0.5 percent to A$4.30 on the ASX and 0.9 percent to $4.60 on the NZX.

The financial services firm's woes in Australia come as the sector is under parliamentary scrutiny in New Zealand, with legislation designed at introducing a customer obligation to advisers currently before select committee. The Financial Services Legislation Amendment Bill seeks to put the client's best interests first and streamline what's been seen as a confusing designation process to more effectively describe whether someone's providing financial advice or simply selling products.

(BusinessDesk)

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The government's proposal to end Callaghan Innovation's growth grants and introduce a 12.5 percent research and development tax incentive has been widely viewed as positive by businesses but the opposition party claims it amounts to a cut in support.

Research, Science and Innovation Minister Megan Woods yesterday released a discussion document with the proposal and said over the next six weeks, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, Inland Revenue and Callaghan Innovation will be seeking feedback through a variety of channels. The government's aim, said Woods, is to lift spending on R&D to 2.0 percent of gross domestic product by 2027.

According to Woods, the rate is similar to the median tax credit available across OECD nations.

If the proposal is implemented, the tax credit on eligible expenditure will be available to businesses doing R&D in New Zealand from April 1, 2019, and a business would need to spend a minimum of $100,000 on eligible expenditure, within one year, to qualify.

Businesses can also claim a tax credit for up to $120 million of R&D expenditure per year. This equates to a tax credit of $15 million each year, based on the proposed 12.5 percent rate.

Currently, businesses carrying out R&D are funded by Callaghan Innovation three-year growth grants. In order to qualify, firms need to have spent at least $300,000 per year and 1.5 percent of revenue on eligible R&D in each of the last two years or plan to exceed these levels over the next year, according to its website. Callaghan then pays 20 percent of the eligible R&D spend up to $25 million over five years or $5 million a year.

National Party Research, Science and Innovation Spokesperson Parmjeet Parmar said eliminating the growth grants will "negatively affect" hundreds of New Zealand's most innovative technology focused companies. Parmer said the companies will drop down from getting 20 percent of their R&D funded to 12.5 percent.

Business NZ manufacturing executive director Catherine Beard said, however, the move is positive and the new system will, in fact, provide more funding.

While companies that are recipients of growth grants benefit from the support "the threshold for getting into that group is quite high, so there are only a limited amount of firms in that category," she said.

Under the new proposal "significantly more firms would be eligible as the amount you need to spend on R&D is $100,000," said Beard. She also noted that businesses will be able to claim a tax credit of up to $120 million of R&D expenditure a year, which equates to a tax credit of $15 million a year based on the proposed rate, above the current $5 million.

ASX-listed Volpara Health Technologies chief financial officer Craig Hadfield said the company is "excited to see the developments with regards to an R&D tax credit to really help drive innovation in New Zealand," however, given the details are quite "light" at this stage, he is not sure what the full impact on Volpara will be.

Volpara has received funding from Callaghan's growth grant to develop its software products designed to improve clinical decision making and aid in the early detection of breast cancer. Last year Volpara chief executive Ralph Highnam said Callaghan is a key reason why the company opted to set up shop in Wellington. Highnam said Callaghan was instrumental in moving the company from onsite software onto cloud-based software, which is now reaping a commercial benefit.

"We understand that the Callaghan grants will still be available until March 2020, and we continue to receive great support from Callaghan. We will continue to track the developments closely," said Hadfield.

According to the government's proposal, businesses with an active growth grant as at March 31, 2019, will continue receiving their grant until March 2020. A temporary grant scheme mirroring the R&D tax incentive will be implemented to provide support for growth grant recipients with insufficient tax liability to use the R&D credit immediately. However, the growth grant scheme will be closed to new applicants on March 31, 2019.

ASX-listed Xero, which has received $14 million of funding from Callaghan Innovation, or around 3.4 percent of its R&D spend as of Sept 30, 2017 said 'investment Investment in research and development is vital for New Zealand businesses to grow and export around the world, and we welcome any discussion on the best ways to achieve this.

(BusinessDesk)

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SHEPHERDSTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY

100 E. German St.

The Shepherdstown Library has an online calendar on our website, http://www.lib.shepherdstown.wv.us/>www.lib.shepherdstown.wv.us/. The Librarys popular weekly childrens programs will run through May 23; no registration is required. Lap Babies for children birth through 18 months is on Tuesdays (except April 3) from 10:15 to 11 a.m. Time for Twos, for children 19 months to 3 years, meets from 11:15 to noon, also on Tuesdays (except April 3). The Three to Five Year Olds program meets Wednesdays from 11:15 to noon. For more information call 304-876-2783, email splchild@martin.lib.wv.us or visit the library.

WEDNESDAY

The Board of the Shepherdstown Public Library will hold its monthly meeting at 7 p.m. in the library. This meeting is open to the public. For more information, call 304-876-2783.

THURSDAY

A LEGO Club for ages four and older will meet in the Shepherdstown Library at 4:30 p.m. No registration is needed. For more information call 304-876-2783, email splchild@martin.lib.wv.us or visit the library.

APRIL?27

The FOSL Book Club will meet in the Shepherdstown Library at 5 p.m. on April 27 to discuss Wiley Cashs suspenseful novel This Dark Road to Mercy.

APRIL?28

Ages three and older are encouraged to visit the Shepherdstown Librarys Childrens Department at 11 a.m. on April 28, where there will be a Time for Planting program with stories, songs and a craft. No registration is needed; call 304-876-2783 or email splchild@martin.lib.wv.us for more information or visit the library.

ONGOING

Community Wellness Days

Everyone deserves access to restorative and nourishing self care, regardless of income. Through the grassroots efforts of Sacred Roots and Herbalists Without Borders, this is now a reality. Your first visit is free, and follow-up visits are pay what you can. No proof of income necessary. Come if youre in need. First come, first serve. Begins May 9. Hours are 2 to 7 p.m., May through September, on the 2nd and 4th Wednesday of the month. Text 301-452-2075 if youd like to attend. Visit us online at sacredrootswv.com.

The Thursday Market at Town Run Tap House and Community Pub will kick off May 3, from 3 to 7 p.m. The weekly market will run through Sept. 28 and will provide residents of Shepherdstown with fresh, naturally grown food and products from local farmers and artisans. More information can be found on our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/thethursdaymarket/ or via email at thethursdaymarketwv@gmail.com.

Warmer weathers around the corner! Now is the perfect time to get your cat or dog spayed or neutered. Spay Today is our areas nonprofit, reduced-priced spay and neuter program. Choose from many vets throughout the area. At the time of surgery, initial shots and tests can also be obtained at lower rates. Contact Spay Today: spay-today.org or call 304-728-8330.

The Shepherdstown Community Club First Weekend Handmade Market returns for its eighth season! The Handmade Market is a unique pop-up boutique-like arts and crafts market featuring local artists and makers. Join us in celebrating our local talent, meet the artists and shop for fine handcrafted art, jewelry, home decor, accessories, gifts and a whole lot more. Open Apr 7 from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. and April 8 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.; May 5 from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. and May 6 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.; June 2 from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. and June 3 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. War Memorial Building, 102 E. German St., Shepherdstown. For more info, see our Facebook page: facebook.com/SCCHandmadeMarket.

Womens March Huddle for Shepherdstown will take place every 4th Tuesday of the month. Meet at Town Run. 202 E Washington St., Shepherdstown. 6:30 to 8 p.m.

Intermediate Bridge players are invited to join an informal group meeting every Wednesday, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Trinity Episcopal Chapel. All are welcome and walk-ins are encouraged. For more information, contact 304-876-6244.

Knitting interest group meets in room 164 of the Byrd Center on Mondays, 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. All are welcome. Free and open to the public.

Glory Days Grill Dining for Dollars Fundraiser to Benefit Animal Welfare Society: The Animal Welfare Society of Jefferson County is proud to announce their participation in the Dining for Dollars fundraiser at Glory Days Grill in Ranson which began Jan.1 and continues through the end of the year. Keep your copy of your guest check (not credit card receipt), and either mail it to: AWS P.O. Box 147, Charles Town, WV, 25414 or place it in the collection box at Petco.

The Animal Welfare Society of Jefferson County is participating in Applebees Dining to Donate program. Dine at Applebees in Charles Town the first Thursday of each month from 11 a.m. until closing and Applebees will donate 20 percent of your bill to the Anima Welfare Society. Bring in the flyer printed from the AWS website, www.awsjc.org, or mention Animal Welfare Society to your server. Enjoy an evening of delicious food and help the shelter dogs and cats that are waiting for new homes.

The Trinity Thrift Shop is open on Thursdays and Fridays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Stop by for some cool finds  clothing for all, jewelry, books, movies, toys, kitchen and other house wares, prints, knick knacks, and holiday items! The Shop accept accepts donations of clothing, books, jewelry, and many other items. It also collects used eye glasses on behalf of the Lions Club. The Thrift Shop cannot accept furniture, other large items and electronics due to limited space. Contributions may be delivered to the screened-in back porch at any time. Tax receipts are available during business hours. Questions? Call 304-876-6990.

Sarahs Tuesday Group  Calling all knitters, quilters, rugmakers and more! We meet in the Trinity Episcopal Church Fellowship Hall, corner of German and Church streets, every Tuesday afternoon from 1 to 4 p.m. Work on your own projects while socializing with other crafters. Questions? call 304-876-6990.

Christ Reformed United Church of Christ is inaugurating a new speaker series called First Tuesdays at CRUCC. There will be a speaker the first Tuesday of every month. Coffee, tea and refreshments will be provided. These are free events.

TODAY

Shepherdstown Film Society will show A Better Life at 7 p.m. in Reynolds Hall. Admission is free. For more information, go to www.shepherdstownfilmsociety.org.

See you at the movies!

MONDAY

Tarot on Wings

When:12 to 4 p.m.

Where:?On the Wings of Dreams, 139 W German St. Shepherdstown

What: Where are you ready to bloom? Learn more with a tarot reading at On the Wings of Dreams. Melanie brings her 35 years plus of experience; you bring your life. Call the shop at 304-876-0244 for an appointment. Walk-ins are welcome if theres an opening.

TUESDAY

Presidents Lecture Series:

The Sun and Outer Space as a Natural Hazard

When: 6:30 p.m.

Where: The Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education auditorium.

What: Space weather and long-duration space climate trends are naturally occurring phenomena that represent a quantifiable risk to space- and ground-based infrastructure, as well as society at large. Come hear NASAs Jonathan Pellish discuss these near-Earth space environment mysteries.

Cost:?Free.

THURSDAY

The League of Women Voters of Jefferson County will conduct a candidates forum on April 26 for candidates in the May 2018 nonpartisan elections:

When: Candidates for the WV Conservation District positions, 7 p.m.; Candidates for the WV Circuit Court Judge seats, 7:45 p.m.

Where:?Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education, located on the Shepherd University Campus

On April 30 at 7 p.m., the candidates for School Board will be presented, also at the Byrd Center.

APRIL 27

Virginias best Celtic band, IONA, is presenting a CD Release Concert at OHurleys General Store for Signature, the bands 10th recording.

When: 8 p.m.

Where: The Great Hall, OHurleys General Store, 205 E. Washington St., Shepherdstown

What: IONA presents high-energy arrangements and features strong vocals, fiddle, flute, banjo, bass, bouzouki, percussion and dance.

Seating is limited and free parking is offered at Jefferson Security Bank on Washington Street.

Cost: $15 advance; $20 on the day of the show; $10 students

For ticket information and reservations, call Bob Mitchell at 301-775-4951.

www.ionamusic.com

APRIL?28 AND 29

Concrete Countertop Workshop

When: 12 to 5 p.m.

Where: The Department of Contemporary Art and Theaters FASTnER Lab.

What: Prospective students and community members are invited to a concrete casting workshop. This workshop will cover a basic concrete casting method that can be used to make countertops. Participants will use this process to make a 1x1 concrete countertop sample tile.

Cost: $135.

Contact Karen Rice at 304-876-5135 or krice@shepherd.edu to register.

MAY?3 AND?4

Tour of Colonial Williamsburg

and Jamestown, Virginia

What: Tour the worlds largest living history museum with a behind-the-scenes tour.

Cost: $299 per person based on double occupancy; $350 for single  Includes transportation, lodging at The Williamsburg Woodlands Hotel and Suites, all tours and admissions, one breakfast and one lunch.

Contact: Karen Rice at 304-876-5135 or krice@shepherd.edu to reserve your space.

MAY?11

Kiwanis Club of Shepherdstowns

Annual Childrens Benefit Auction

When: 6:30 p.m.

Where: Wildwood Middle Schools cafeteria in Shenandoah Junction

What: The evening will start with a silent auction followed by a live auction with about 70 items donated by local and regional businesses. Again this year, a one weeks condo stay in Myrtle Beach in July has been donated.
Hollywood actor Ryan Reynolds will visit Korea early next month to promote his latest film.

In a sequel to Marvel Studios' superhero film "Deadpool," Reynolds stars as a "wisecracking mercenary with accelerated healing but severe scarring over his body after undergoing an experimental regenerative mutation."

He won many fans here when the first installment drew over 3.3 million viewers in 2016.

The sequel is set to hit local theaters on May 16.


Sify.com Movies Reviews Telugu Bharat Ane Nenu

Bharat Ane Nenu review: An engaging political drama

Predictable, but packs a punch

Source: SIFY By: TELUGUCINEMA.COM Critic's Rating: 3/5 Friday 20 April 2018

Movie Title Bharat Ane Nenu review: An engaging political drama Director Koratala Siva

Star Cast Mahesh Babu, Kiara Advani, Sharat Kumar, Prakash Raj, Aamani, Sithara, Rao Ramesh, Devaraj, Posani

After hearing the news of his fathers death, Bharat Ram (Mahesh Babu), a young student in London, comes down to Hyderabad. The onus of taking the chair of his deceased father falls upon him. Bharat, who believes in values and fulfilling the promises made, sits in the chair of Chief Minister, his fathers seat and brings new age governance. He also falls for the charms of Vasumathi (Kiara Advani) who works in his office. This romantic affair leads to political embarrassment for the young CM as wily Varadarajulu (Prakash Raj) conspires to unseat him. What obstacles Bharat has to face in his political journey is the rest of the story.

Not many political dramas were made in the recent past in Tollywood. Sekhar Kammulas Leader was the most recent prominent political drama. One can see shades of Leader in basic plot of Koratala Sivas Bharat Ane Nenu though both tread different paths. Like in Shankars iconic hit Oke Okkadu, the protagonist of Koratala Sivas Bharat Ane Nenu is young and dynamic CM who brings novel methods in governance, who truly lives by the people, for the people. The protagonist here is Oxford-educated (five degrees under his belt). He brings a western style of governance (on the very first day he brings traffic under control in Hyderabad).

Beyond the Clouds review: Visually appealing but lacks soul | Truth or Dare review: Mediocre fare and unexciting | Nanu Ki Jaanu review: An amusing redemption tale

It is not the story but the packaging is what matters is the belief of Koratala. None of his movies had different story or screenplay, but he narrated them in an arresting manner which worked big at the box-office. Unlike other commercial movie directors, he doesnt resort to comedy tracks and sticks to the main story by elevating heroism at regular intervals. He also cleverly uses English sentences in dialogues for dramatic effect. His trademark style of dialogue writing has worked well in this political drama as well.

Bharat Ane Nenu begins on a dull note but it picks up the momentum only when Bharat Ram takes charge as the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh. Koratala cleverly mixes entertaining romantic track and heros elevating scenes in the capacity of a Chief Minister. He uses humour in assembly sequences and in romantic thread.

The basic story was written by Srihari Nani also reminds us of two Hollywood classics  Mr. Smith Goes To Washington (hero becoming CM after the death of his father) and The American President (love scandal and other aspects). However, the narration and the episodes that Koratala has come up with are unique in his own way. The strength of Koratala is elevating the heroism with stylish dialogues and packaging action stunts in a more chic way. Interestingly, there are no fights till the interval, yet he elevates heroism. He has reserved them for second half.

Two sequences in the second half are clap worthy 1) when our hero goes to an MLAs defunct movie theatre to show him that he is also a muscle man 2) hero giving a heartfelt message to the media after an incident. Mahesh Babus great performance can be seen in press meet sequence.

Both these episodes happen in the second half. Apart from these two sequences, many of the situations are too predictable and it also ends in an expected manner. There are also subtle satires like education minister having private schools (a satire on a minister in current AP's cabinet).

There are many loopholes in the story part. We are told that the film is set before AP was divided into two states but side actors talk about metro in Hyderabad and other issues that pertain to divided state.

A great man said that leadership means creating a society that doesnt require leaders, says Mahesh Babu in the film. The films basic line is this but the movie ending is quite contrary to the theme.

Mahesh Babu in the role of Chief Minister looks quite charismatic. The press meet episode showcases his great performance. This ranks among one of his best performances. The film completely belongs to Mahesh Babu. It is his show all the way.

Sharat Kumar as Mahesh Babus father and Aaamani as his mother do a cameo. Prakash Raj as the main villain and a corrupt political leader does justice to the role to the T. Debutante Kiara Advani as Vasumathi looks easy on eyes and also comes up with decent acting. Rao Ramesh as Vasumathis father is okay. Posani as Minister and Brahamji as Personal Secretary provide some good laughs.

Watch the trailer here:



Music of the film is good. Devi Sri Prasad has given a couple of catchy songs which are shot well. He has elevated the emotional scenes with his excellent background score. The cinematography is rich and uber cool. Renowned cinematographer Ravi K Chandran and Thiru both have created a mood with warm colours. Production design and production values are rich and perfect.

As a writer and director, Siva Koratala once again proves that he packages differently within commercial format. His dialogue writing and coming up with sequences that elevate heroism to the core is his strength and he best utilizes them here. But he is not moving beyond a point, his narrations have become one-dimensional too.

Director Koratala Siva's Bharat Ane Nenu is engaging political drama. It focuses on the core theme without deviating from it. Mahesh Babu's brilliant performance and Siva's narration holds the interest despite some slack and many predictable scenes.

Bharat Ane Nenu review: 3.25 Stars
Police raided the headquarters of Korean Air on Friday amid a deepening scandal over the violent tantrums of Korean Air heiress Cho Hyun-min, the airline chairman's youngest daughter.

Police said the search was conducted to see if any attempts were made to force airline staff to cover up for Cho, whose anger management problems allegedly culminated in her throwing a bottle of water in an advertising staffer's face.

Cho has been indicted for assault over the incident, which has escalated into a major scandal after further revelations about her behavior at work. She has been suspended from her executive positions.

Police seized two of Cho's mobile phones as well as computers of Korean Air executives who attended the meeting with the subcontracted advertising firm.


: The leaders of opposition parties will meet today in Leader of Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad's chamber in Parliament and are likely to discuss the issue of the Supreme Court verdict rejecting multiple pleas for an independent probe into the death of special Central Bureua of Investigation judge B H Loya, sources said.

The issue of moving an impeachment motion against Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra is also likely to be discussed in the wake of the Loya case judgement.

The Opposition has been working on bringing various parties on board for a larger consensus on bringing the impeachment motion against the CJI.

While the Left parties, the NCP and the Congress are on board for moving the impeachment motion, some parties that have already signed the petition have backed out.

During the meeting convened by Azad, the sources say, the opposition parties will also discuss the idea of having a broader consensus on how to defeat the BJP in the upcoming assembly and Lok Sabha elections.
: The Congress and other opposition parties submit a notice for impeachment proceedings against Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra. Over 60 MPs belonging to seven political parties have signed the notice for impeachment proceedings against the CJI. The parties include Congress, NCP, CPI-M, CPI, SP, BSP and Muslim League. The parties met Vice President and Rajya Sabha Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu and give notice for impeachment of the CJI.

They are an extraordinarily stupid bunch of people. It won't strike them that by moving an impeachment motion against CJI just after the #LoyaVerdict will expose their political motives https://t.co/Phc8BSzNJs

 Minhaz Merchant (@MinhazMerchant) April 19, 2018

"71 MPs had signed the impeachment motion (against CJI) but as 7 have retired the number is now 64. We have more than the minimum requirement needed to entertain the motion and we are sure that the Honourable Chairman will take action," Senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said at a press conference.

Another Congress leader Kapil Sibal also raised questions about the manner the CJI dealt with certain cases since his appointment. "When the judges of the Supreme Court themselves believe that the Judiciary's independence is at threat, alluding to the functioning of the office of the CJI, should the nation stand still and do nothing?," he added.

Kapil Sibal is frustrated as Bar Council of India has barred him from appearing before CJI. Seems, He want #Impeachment of CJI Dipak Misra as CJI slammed him for asking judgement of Ram Mandir after 2019. Prashan Bhusan also frustrated as CJI rejected his plea to save Yakub Memon  Anshul Saxena (@AskAnshul) April 20, 2018

PTI reported that the Trinamool Congress and the DMK, which were initially in favour of the impeachment against the CJI, are no longer part of it.

The impeachment notice comes a day after the Supreme Court rejected a bunch of petitions seeking an independent probe into the death of Judge B H Loya, who was hearing the Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case.

The SC judgement was delivered by a bench headed by the Chief Justice of India.

An impeachment motion in the Rajya Sabha has to be supported by a total of at least 50 MPs of the Upper House, while the number of MPs supporting such a motion in the Lok Sabha is 100.

Once the notice for an impeachment motion is submitted to the Rajya Sabha chairman, he will ascertain whether there is merit or ground for moving such a motion.

In case he finds merit, then he may form a committee to look into it, else he can reject it.

If moved, this will be the first time ever in the country's history that an impeachment would be moved against the Chief Justice of India.

The Supreme Court today termed as very unfortunate the public statements, including those made by lawmakers, on impeachment of judges.

"We are all very disturbed about it," a bench comprising Justices A K Sikri and Ashok Bhushan said after the counsel appearing for the petitioner raised the issue of politicians making public statements on impeachment of judges.
CIA director Mike Pompeo met secretly with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in early April even as a group of South Korean musicians were performing in Pyongyang. The start of the South Korean concert was postponed twice that day, perhaps because Kim Jong-un was even then meeting with Pompeo.

National security adviser Chung Eui-yong and National Intelligence Service chief Suh Hoon flew to Washington D.C. to relay Kim's proposal of a summit with U.S. President Donald Trump. But U.S. officials felt they should directly verify the offer.

During the Obama administration, there was almost no contact between the U.S. and North Korea, though the channels of communication were not completely closed. In November 2014, U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper visited Pyongyang to secure the release of an American held prisoner in the North. That suggests other channels of communication also remained open.

Still, Pompeo's visit is the most direct contact in a long time.

Once the U.S. accepted the North's proposal, Trump's North Korea policy has been progressing rapidly beyond the wildest imaginations of North Korea experts in Washington. Nobody knows what is going on in Trump's mind from one day to the next, but his comments and tweets suggests he continues to weigh the military option and is wary of being duped by the North.

The focus must be on Trump's level of confidence. He believes his approach to dealing with North Korea has succeeded and has staffed his national security and diplomacy teams with hawks like Pompeo, his nominee for secretary of state, and National Security adviser John Bolton. And despite the endless scandals and chaos rocking his presidency, Trump's approval ratings are inching up. That could mean the time is ripe for the summit to succeed.

But he also sent a dire warning with the airstrikes on Syria and has said the summit can be scrapped at any time unless his demands are met. The summit may be about a month away, but negotiations have started already.


: The Centre has withdrawn 'Y' category security from Unnao MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar who is in jail in connection with the rape of a 17-year-old girl.

A CBI court has remanded Atul Singh, the brother of the the prime accused Kuldeep Singh Sengar, and four other associates to a four-day police custody in connection with the Unnao rape case.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- In the latest restructuring of operations in state Supreme Court, St. George, one judge will handle all new felony drug cases going forward, as well as some other narcotics cases, the Advance has learned.

The move comes just three months after officials disbanded the court's Narcotics Part, which a different judge had presided over.

Justice Mario F. Mattei will handle all newly-indicted drug cases in addition to all new cases referred to Drug Treatment Court, sources said.

The changes are expected to go into effect as early as Monday.

The Narcotics Part, known as Part N, originally opened in October 2016, with Justice Charles Troia at the helm. But it was shuttered in January to re-allocate the court's resources more efficiently, a spokesman for the state Office of Court Administration (OCA) said then.

The Narcotics Part had operated three days a week in the morning, but Mattei, who presides over Part 16, likely will handle drug cases daily. Mattei's part is not expected to be renamed Part N.

District Attorney Michael E. McMahon had called the decision to close Part N "rash," saying it would impede his office's efforts to battle Staten Island's drug epidemic.

McMahon had vigorously lobbied for the Narcotics Part, created for felony cases in which defendants are accused of drug sale or possession with the intent to sell. He said it would speed up dispositions and get dealers off the street, while diverting addicts into treatment programs.

However, Lawrence K. Marks, the state's chief administrative judge, later said the Narcotics Part was not successful because no defendants had been diverted to drug treatment.

Lucian Chalfen, a spokesman for the state Office of Court Administration, said logistics are still being worked out.

"There absolutely have been discussions regarding the handling of narcotics cases in Richmond County," said Chalfen. "Any final determination, going forward, as to the makeup and naming of the court part will coalesce in the coming days."

A spokesman for McMahon said the office wouldn't comment until full details are finalized.

But, he added, "We are able to say that we are very encouraged by conversations we have had with court leadership and the Defense Bar to bring a full Narcotics Part to Staten Island, which is something the people of this borough need and deserve."

In January, Chalfen had said closing Part N wouldn't affect any services which it had offered defendants.

The part's cases were distributed among the sitting judges in the Criminal Term of state Supreme Court, and new drug cases were disseminated accordingly after arraignment.

Those judges will keep their existing drug cases.

The Advance had questioned shutting down the part, and last month five members of the borough's Albany delegation - State Sen. Diane Savino (D-North Shore/Brooklyn), state Sen. Andrew Lanza (R-South Shore), Assemblymen Matthew Titone (D-North Shore), Michael Cusick (D-Mid Island) and Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis (R-East Shore/Brooklyn) - petitioned court officials to reinstate Part N.

After Part N closed, Troia returned to the Civil Term of state Supreme Court, St. George, full-time. Troia had also heard civil cases besides the drug cases.

Justice Wayne Ozzi was also moved from Criminal Term to Civil Term and Justice Alexander Jeong, a Staten Island resident, was added to the Criminal Term bench in state Supreme Court, St. George.

The other justices currently sitting in the Criminal Term of state Supreme Court, St. George, are Stephen J. Rooney, William E. Garnett and Mattei.

Mattei, a longtime prosecutor and former head of the Staten Island district attorney's office Investigations Bureau, also previously worked in the Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor.

He will now handle all drug cases in state Supreme Court.

Mattei will also preside over new cases referred to Drug Treatment Court, a problem-solving court, which handles felony and misdemeanor drug-possession cases in which defendants are addicts with no prior criminal record who are accused of committing a non-violent crime.

Those defendants are put into treatment.

Judge Alan J. Meyer will continue to handle the existing Drug Treatment Court cases.

Veteran St. George-based criminal defense lawyer Mark J. Fonte had previously expressed reservations about the Narcotics Part prior to its opening 16 months ago, reasoning the borough already had experienced judges, one of whom was Mattei, to handle its drug cases.

But he said Mattei was "an excellent choice" to preside over the borough's main drug cases.

"He's extremely knowledgeable, experienced and fair," Fonte said.
Over 1,700 firms apply to attend city's expo

From:Shine | 2018-04-20 01:29

MORE than 1,700 companies from across the world have applied to attend the China International Import Expo in Shanghai in November.

Over 900 applicants have signed contracts for the expo. Among them, 34 percent of enterprises are from the Belt and Road countries and regions.

The import expo shows Chinas determination of opening-up and is set to be a launch place for the newest products, said Sun Chenghai, deputy director of the China International Import Expo Bureau.

The expo will be held in Shanghai from November 5 to 10. It will cover about 157,000 square meters.

With the expo 200 days away, Sun said the bureau is creating a more welcoming environment for participants. With the help of Big Data and cloud services, those attending will be able to take part in more convenient ways.

The expo shows that China is safeguarding free trade not only through words, but through deeds, said Yang Jianrong, director of the Council for the Promotion of International Trade Shanghai.

Shanghai has taken actions to help enterprises, especially small and medium-sized businesses from developing countries, to have an easier access to Chinese market, Yang added.

Also yesterday, a Chinese diplomat said the expo reflects Chinas commitment to open its door wider for trade and investment.

Li Guangjun, economic and commercial counselor at the Chinese Embassy in Bangladesh, told a press briefing in Dhaka that the expo, the first of its kind in China, makes it clear that Chinas door will not be closed but opened wider.

It is the commitment and action made by the Chinese government to open wider, Li said.

China is keen to make the expo a platform for all other countries to showcase their own social development and economic achievements, as well as for free trade cooperation, Li said.

All parties will have an opportunity to join together and discuss major topics concerning international trade, world economy and globalization, he said, urging Bangladesh businesses and officials to take the opportunity offered by the expo.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- McDonald's is offering free fries on Friday.

Customers who use the McDonald's iOS app and Apple Pay, will receive a free order of medium french fries, according to the fast-food retailer's website.

The offer is valid this Friday and next Friday, April 27, at participating locations.

A minimum purchase of $1 is required.

You can download the McDonald's app here.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Richmond University Medical Center (RUMC) and insurance giant Aetna have renewed a services contract before its expiration date.

"We are pleased to announce that Richmond University Medical Center and Aetna have come to terms on an agreement that will keep the medical center 'in network' for Aetna policyholders, avoiding any interruption of services," RUMC said in a statement.

RUMC and Aetna were in active negotiations after Aetna sent letters to policy holders that inpatient, outpatient and clinic services at the West Brighton hospital would expire May 1.

RUMC said Aetna will most likely send retract letters to policyholders and physicians next week.

If an agreement had not been reached, patients would have had to pay more money to use the facility or seek treatment elsewhere.

"We believe that the agreement recognizes the quality care provided by our team and protects the interests of the medical center, our outstanding physicians, and most importantly, our patients," the hospital said in a statement.

Aetna did not return a request for comment at the time of publication.

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STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Federal prosecutors have recently recommended that civil rights charges be brought against the officer involved in Eric Garner's death, but other Department of Justice (DOJ) officials are hesitant about proceeding with the case, according to a New York Times report.

Garner, 43, died in police custody on July 17, 2014 in Tompkinsville. Officer Daniel Pantaleo is seen in a video with his arm around Garner's neck while wrestling him to the ground across from Tompkinsville Park.

Garner repeatedly screamed "I can't breathe" on the video.

Prosecutors tried getting approval from Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein to seek an indictment, the report said. The Times reported Rosenstein held several meetings within the DOJ, but they could not agree whether to move forward.

No decision has been made, but a source told the Times it appeared unlikely Pantaleo would be charged.

Pantaleo's attorney, Stuart London, could not immediately be reached Friday.

"If the Trump administration's Justice Department doesn't hold NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaelo and others who killed my son accountable by prosecution and conviction, then they are failing to uphold law-and-order for the sake of politics," said Garner's mother, Gwen Carr, in a statement.

Last June, members of the Garner family and Rev. Al Sharpton met with DOJ officials in Brooklyn about the status of the case.

Officials informed them that they are taking the case seriously, but did not give the family a sense of why it was taking so long or when the investigation will conclude, Sharpton told the media during a press conference after the meeting.

The family was hoping to get news of an indictment, but were left disappointed.

"DOJ officials told me and my family last summer that there would be a final decision by the end of 2017 - it's outrageous that now they're reporting that they're still deciding through the media without reaching out to me at all," Carr said. "This isn't news, they're playing political games with the murder of my son."

Two years ago, the DOJ in Washington, D.C. took over the investigation after Brooklyn federal prosecutors and FBI agents nixed the idea of pursuing federal charges against Pantaleo and other members of the force who were involved in the incident.

The DOJ had reportedly wanted to have charges brought against one or more of the officers.

In 2014, a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo for his role in Garner's death during his arrest for selling loose, untaxed cigarettes.

"It's been nearly four years and there still is no justice - it's unacceptable," Carr said. "It's beyond time for Pantaleo and other officers to be prosecuted by DOJ, and Mayor de Blasio and the NYPD also need to stop playing politics by hiding behind the Trump administration, and fire Pantaleo and all officers responsible for murdering Eric and related misconduct."

De Blasio said the family has waited long enough for a decision on this case.

"After almost four years of deliberation, and with the NYPD long ready to proceed with its disciplinary process, we once again urge the Department of Justice to show some level of decency to the Garner family and make its decision," the mayor said in a statement.
STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- When a student asked new Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza what he thought was most important for kids to focus on, he answered that they "have fun at school."

Carranza visited Staten Island Thursday night as part of his city-wide "listening tour." His vision of fun in schools is less about goofing off and more focused on learning in engaging ways.

Carranza met with students from public schools across the borough at Susan Wagner High School in Sea View before he met with parents in the school's auditorium.

Parents and students asked Carranza a variety of questions about issues ranging from funding to how the Department of Education plans to improve technology in schools.

Wagner High School senior Shay Eljastimi even questioned Carranza's hope that learning would become more fun when students are focused so heavily on passing their standardized tests, like the state Regents exams.

Students applauded Carranza when he mentioned the possibility of a "Bring Your Own Device" policy that would allow students to bring a piece of technology, like a laptop or phone, to school if they signed a contract pledging to only use it for school work.

A group of students from IS 24 in Great Kills had questions ready for the chancellor, and spoke with the Advance about what they hoped the chancellor would do.

Katherine Garlisi, Brianne Gonzalez, Retag Elhadad, Angelina Nicolisi and Michael Caracappa all expressed happiness with their schools, but said they hope for improvements in school curriculums.

Caracappa raised concerns about his classmates who speak English as a second language, and hoped more could be done to help them.

Staten Island Community Education Council President and state Assembly candidate Michael Reilly said he appreciated the opportunity for parents to question the chancellor in person.

"I really think he's very candid," Reilly said. "I truly do believe that he has our students' best interests at heart."

Reilly, who is a parent of one student at PS 55 and another at IS 7, said he had hoped to hear more about safety measures in the schools.

Students also raised similar concerns in their meeting with Carranza, but most said they feel safe at school. The students from IS 24 said they'd recently had both a fire drill and a soft lockdown drill.

Lauraine Melville, who has a son in Tottenville High school, expressed similar concerns, and said the recent shooting in Parkland, Fla., only heightened those concerns.

Her son's school was recently subjected to a scare when a conversation about recent school shootings was misheard by a third party, who then called police.

The person thought the individuals were planning another shooting, police said at the time of the incident.

"I want to hear how our children will remain safe," Melville said.

Carranza assured parents their children will be safe in the hands of the Department of Education.

"When you send us your babies, we're gonna take care of them," Carranza said.

The chancellor said he and NYPD Commissioner James P. O'Neill are working together to make sure that safety continues. He hopes to install a system in schools that would allow students to anonymously report concerns about possible threats.

Jamey Remshnick, who has a daughter in the sixth grade at IS 27, and a son in his freshman year a Staten Island Tech, hopes to see a greater concentration on STEM classes.

He said his son seemed to be behind in those classes when he got to Tech.

"In today's world, that's what's most important," the West Brighton resident said.

Parents at the event generally seemed pleased with the work the DOE is doing.

Angelica Huie, whose daughter goes to the Marsh Avenue Expeditionary Learning School in New Springville, had no complaints, she said.

"They know your child,'' she said. "It's all about the children. I feel like I'm getting a private school education for free."
China's ZTE vows to fight US supplier ban



Beijing, April 20 (AFP) Apr 20, 2018



Chinese telecom giant ZTE vowed on Friday to fight back against a US order banning it from purchasing and using US technology for seven years, a move that has angered Beijing.

The decision announced by Washington this week has clouded prospects for the telecom and phone maker, which depends on US technology such as chips and the Android operating system for its mobile phones.

The tough sanctions come as the battle over technology takes centre stage in a US spat with China that has fanned fears of a trade war.

Washington has taken particular grievance with Beijing's "Made in China 2025" policy to harbour national champions in technology fields the US sees as critical to its future. In Beijing the action against ZTE will likely heighten fears about the reliance on US technology for critical industries.

The order "seriously endangers the survival of ZTE", the company said in a statement Friday, adding "we cannot accept it!"

The firm said it would "not give up its efforts to resolve the problems through communication and dialogue, but would also resolutely protect its legitimate rights and interests through all legally permitted methods".

The company has one or two months of stored component supplies before the ban will start to impact its business, investment bank CICC estimated in a research report cited by Beijing Business Today. ZTE has halted trading of its shares in Hong Kong and Shenzhen since Tuesday.

Washington's control of the company's fate -- with roughly 80,000 employees mostly based in southern China -- has stirred ire and angst in China, where officials prize stability.

"China will pay close attention to the development of the situation and stands ready to take the necessary measures to safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese enterprises," commerce ministry spokesman Gao Feng said Thursday.

"The US's actions are ostensibly aimed at China, but they will ultimately hurt the US itself. It will not only lose tens of thousands of jobs but also affect tonnes of related US companies," Gao said.

The options left at the company's disposal are unclear.

When introducing the export ban in Washington, a commerce department official told reporters there was no "off ramp" for the company to seek a reversal of the blockade.

The export ban followed a five-year US government probe into ZTE's evasion of sanctions on Iran and North Korea, first revealed in March 2016.

From January 2010 to March 2016, the company shipped $32 million of US cellular network equipment to Iran, and made 283 shipments of cellphones to North Korea, with the full knowledge of the highest levels of management, officials said.

The company pleaded guilty in March 2017 to unlawful exports and was hit with $1.2 billion in fines, the largest criminal penalty in US history in an export control case.

On Monday, Washington said ZTE had failed to follow through on pledges to punish staff responsible for illegal exports to Iran and North Korea.
Chinese ship conducting research near disputed islets: Japan



Tokyo, April 20 (AFP) Apr 20, 2018



Japan said Friday that a Chinese vessel was carrying out a suspected maritime research in Tokyo's exclusive economic zone near the disputed islands in the East China Sea.

A Japanese patrol boat confirmed that the Chinese research ship was sailing on Thursday and Friday by extending a wire into the sea some 150 kilometres (93 miles) northeast of one of the Senkaku islands, a coastguard spokesman said.

"We told them to stop the research activities but they have not reacted to our instruction," the spokesman said, adding that the Japanese patrol boat continued monitoring the Chinese vessel.

The uninhabited islets, known in China as the Diaoyus, are at the centre of a festering row between Tokyo and Beijing.

The Japanese government has long complained about China's routine dispatch of coast guard ships to waters surrounding the islands.

Relations between Japan and China deteriorated in 2012 when Tokyo "nationalised" some of the islets.

Since then, the two top Asian economies have taken gradual steps to mend fences but relations remain tense.
G20 didn't discuss US-China trade tensions: Argentine official



Washington, April 20 (AFP) Apr 20, 2018



The Group of 20 finance ministers avoided discussion of the US-China trade dispute on Friday, despite repeated comments from officials about the danger it poses to the global economy.

"We didn't have a discussion on specific measures on trade," Argentine Treasury Minister Nicolas Dujovne told reporters after the meeting. "The G20 is not the place to discuss specific measures. That's the WTO."

It was a surprising omission for the group that was key to shepherding the global economy through the 2008 financial crisis and preventing another depression.

But Dujovne said, "We have to also recognize the limitations that we as a group have...and try to find a consensus even if the consensus is more limited than we want."

The ministers did express concern over the growth of "inward looking policies," he said, using a frequent euphemism for trade protectionism.

The G20 meeting is held as part of the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

The gathering of finance ministers and central bank governors has been overtaken by the escalating tariff threats between the United States and China.

The IMF has singled out the trade tensions as a key downside risk to the otherwise solid global recovery.

IMF chief Christine Lagarde has said the dispute undermines confidence and could choke off investment.

She has urged governments to "steer clear of protectionism" and to resolve disputes through dialogue rather than unilateral action.

"Investment and trade are two key engines that are finally picking up. We don't want to damage that," she said at a Thursday press briefing to open the spring meetings.
Home  Just In  Dr Govinda KC, Bibeksheel Sajha oppose govt decision to restrict demonstrators from Maitighar Mandala

Kathmandu, April 20

Medical education reform activist Dr Govinda KC and fringe party in Province 3, Bibeksheel Sajha Party, have protested the government decision to restrict protesters and demonstrators from Maitighar Mandala of Kathmandu.

Just few days back, the District Administration Office had prohibited demonstrations in the area along with few other places. The Office had instead fixed seven other open spaces for protests and demonstration programmes.

The government had argued that those places were restricted from demonstrators so as to ensure smooth traffic movement in the city.

But, issuing different statements today, Dr KC and Bibeksheel Sajha said the government decision was against values of democracy, therefore called for its withdrawal.

Dr KC has even called his supporters to disobey the decision if the government does not correct it on time.
The chairperson of the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights, Ms. Adriana van Dooijeweert, will visit Saba and Statia from April 9 to 13, 2018, to discuss human rights with people on the islands. The Institute will organize a Town Hall meeting in your neighborhood. Ms. Van Dooijeweert will explain why human rights are so important in the relationship between you and the government and between citizens. She would like to hear from you what issues you are dealing with. Examples of current themes in the field of human rights are: tackling poverty and the housing situation. Everyone is invited to actively discuss these important rights during the Town Hall meetings:

Saba

Location Sunny Valley Youth Center

Date Monday, April 9th

Time 6pm - 8pm

St. Eustatius

Location Community Center

Date Wednesday, April 11th

Time 6pm - 8pm

What are human rights?

Governments have a lot of power. Human rights exist to protect citizens from abuse by the governments power. Countries have agreed that they guarantee these rights for all citizens so that everyone can live in human dignity. Everyone, for example, has the right to hold an opinion and to express that opinion freely, and everyone has the right to a fair trial by an independent court. But also, the right to education, having enough to eat, health care and a roof over your head are important. These rights apply to everyone regardless of race, color, gender, language, religion, political ideology, national or social origin, wealth, place of birth or any other status.

Your presence is important!

Human rights form the basis for all of your governments legislation and policies. You will be informed about the role of the Netherlands Institute for Human Rights and you can have a say on topics that are important to you. Together we will discuss which human rights topics are currently relevant in your community. How can the Institute help? Come to the Town Hall meeting on Monday, April 9th on Saba, or Wednesday, April 11th on Statia, starting at 6pm, so that we can share insights and opinions with each other.

College voor de Rechten van de Mens - Nieuws item [ENG subs] from Caribbean Legacy on Vimeo.

For more information, go to:

https://mensenrechten.nl/mensenrechten-voor-u/op-bonaire-st-eustatius-en-saba

If you have questions about the Town Hall meeting, you can contact Caribbean Legacy at +5999 7880113 or send an email to: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Several interview staff reported experiencing health symptoms, including throat irritation and wheezing

The Playa del Rey gas storage field, owned and operated by Southern California Gas Company, was purchased by SoCal Gas in 1953 as field surplus. The storage facility dates back to pre World War Two years, with active wells having been drilled as far back as the 1930's. It is the oldest gas storage facility in Los Angeles.

Currently, according to Department of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources, a division of California public Utilities commission 25 of the 54 wells at the Playa del Rey gas storage field are injection/withdrawal wells used to inject and extract gas. (http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/Environment/info/esa/playa/pdfs/apndx_f.pdf

The method by which the gas is injected uses chemicals, including benzene, which the World Health Organization, has sited has no safe levels of exposure. Benzene is harmful to both human animal health.

Protect Playa Now (PPN), a coalition of local community and environmental groups, including Food and Water Watch, The Ballona Institute, the Neighborhood Council Sustainability Alliance, and Stand - LA, hosted the "Health and Safety Forum," at the Holy Nativity Episcopal Church Los Angeles this past Saturday. (STAND - LA = Stand Together Against Neighborhood Drilling).

The discussion centered on the dangers of living near to the play del rey gas storage facility and the threats it poses to pubic health and the local economy.

According to research from the Protect Playa Now coalition, gas storage facilities, including Aliso Canyon and Playa del Rey are far from benign infrastructure. "They are dangerous facilities that threaten our public health and economy. SoCal gas gets all the profits from these facilities, while we are burdened with all the risk."

The goal is for Los Angeles to make the transition too 100 percent renewables by 2030; the city will be powered entirely by wind, solar and geothermal energy sources. This is the hope of the Protect Playa Now coalition. At the forum, the local presenter, Vlad Popescu said that the purpose of the event was to empower residents with information and avenues to shut down the gas storage facility, which is obsolete. The city of Los Angles does in fact have a plan to transition to clean and 100 per cent renewable energy by 2030.

According to Andrew Krowne, Health App Developer, and one of the speakers at the forum, it won't be a matter of if, but when, Playa gas storage field has an explosion. There was in fact an explosion of a vent stack at the Playa gas storage field on January 6th, 2013.

Atmospheric scientist of UC Davis, Stephen Conley, in a phone interview, said that whenever there are gas storage fields, there could be leaks. To reiterate, it's really only a matter of time before Playa del Rey gas storage field has another explosion.

Since the five-mile radius from the gas storage facility in playa del Rey is much more densely populated than the five-mile radius from the Aliso Canyon in Porter Ranch, the results of a blowout could pose even greater risks.

Playa del Rey residents live within five miles of the gas storage facility. A potential blow out would threaten not only the immediate neighborhood, but also LAX which is less than a mile away.

A methane explosion in Playa del Rey would have a devastating blow to the economy, according to Vlad Popescu, a local resident and presenter at the forum.

Popescu also said that we should not allow ourselves to have such a risky facility in a densely populated area, and feels that it should be shut down.

Great concerns about the gas storage facility built near fault lines were also expressed. The area would not survive an earthquake and Popescu said, "We can't sit and wait to find out"

Why the mentioning of the Aliso canyon blow out was significant in reference to Playa del Rey, is because when the 2015 massive methane leak spewed out of the faulty well in Aliso Canyon gas storage facility, the area surrounding it was mostly mountains. Nevertheless, it impacted thousands of families who had to temporarily relocate from their homes. Since Playa del Rey is much more densely populated, a blow out has the potential to impact thousands of more people.

Dr. Jeffrey Nordella, MD, presented information about the health impacts of the 2015 Aliso Canyon methane blow out.

Dr. Nordella is a physician who continues to study the health impacts on residents living near the Aliso Canyon gas storage facility. As one of the speakers, he presented information about how the 2015 methane blow out impacted the people of Porter Ranch.

In his study, Dr. Nordella found that health symptoms such as headaches, nausea, fatigue, nosebleeds and coughs persisted well into Jan, 2017, a little over a year after the blow out

Dr. Nordella conducted a Volatile Organic Compound (VOC) urine test on the residents. He found that BTEX, chemicals used in fracking were found in the urine samples. There was evidence of the metabolizing of styrene and methylbenzene (PGO).

What Dr Nordella also observed was that the local levels of PGO in Porter Ranch were significantly higher than in the rest of the state of California.

According to a Community Assessment for Public health Emergency response (CASPERO), comments from the field were reported as,

"Several interview staff reported experiencing health symptoms, including throat irritation and wheezing among interviewers at households closest to the well, and exacerbation of asthma symptoms."

Dr. Nordella shared in his presentation that the field interviewers experienced symptoms themselves when visiting the homes of the families afflicted with health issues as a result of the toxins released from the methane blow out.

"Headaches and irritation-type symptoms were also reported among interviewers conducting interviews..."

..."these symptoms improved shortly after the field teams left the sampled homes."...

Also present at the forum was Andrew Krowne, a Health App Developer, and local resident of Porter Ranch. ABC did a segment of Krowne last December 2017.

Krowne developed an app called Environmental Health Tracker (EHT) that is used to track and report health symptoms in your community plus real time alerts.

In the ABC story last year, Krowne said, about his EHT app,

Protectplayanow.org Potential range of an explosion

"What that allows the users to do is to go on their phone when they're feeling a symptom they believe is related to the Aliso Canyon facility, be it a nose bleed, a headache, fatigue, shortness of breath, all those things," Krowne explained.

Their symptoms are kept as part of a centralized data log for all users within an 18-mile radius of the Aliso Canyon storage facility."

At the forum, Krowne encouraged the Playa del Rey residents to download the app so that they too can track and report any health symptoms they may have, due to a potential leak coming for the gas storage facility.

For more information about the health and safety risks of the playa gas storage facility, please visit the website, http://www.protectplayanow.org/

http://www.protectplayanow.org/
Though the CPN-UML and the CPN-Maoist Centre have not made any remarkable progress towards the announcement of their merger, it continues to be one of the most discussed issues on the front page of major Nepali and English newspapers published from Kathmandu, on Friday as well. The arrest of Province 4 Assembly member Deepak Manange in connection with a years-old murder attempt case has also received significant attention.

An aircraft of Malindo Air overshot the runway of Kathmandus Tribhuvan International Airport on Thursday night, effectively obstructing all international flights till Friday morning. However, only one newspaperNaya Patrikahas managed to carry a story about it.

Important

Left unity likely to get delayed further as Oli, Dahal cannot go beyond tea talks

Newspaper reports have claimed that the proposed unification between CPN-UML and CPN-Maoist Centre is likely to get delayed further. Though the parties chairmen KP Sharma Oli and Pushpa Kamal Dahal held a meeting yesterday, it could not go beyond informal tea talks, reports Nepal Samacharpatra. Republica has termed the meeting open and candid.

Gorkhapatra, however, claims the two parties have agreed to unify the parties on the basis of mutual respect. The leaders departed with an agreement to meet again, according to Rajdhani.

Meanwhile, Kantipur publishes a report filed from Beijing claiming that Chinese intellectuals have wished for an early unification between two parties so that they can lead the country towards economic development.

Deepak Manange arrested

A special team deployed from the Metropolitan Police Range in Kathmandu arrested notorious gangster Deepak Manange, also an elected Province 4 Assembly member, from Swayambhu of the capital, according to newspaper reports.

Around three months ago, the Supreme Court had endorsed a five-year jail sentence to him in connection with an eight-year-old murder attempt case and he was absconding since then, writes Gorkhapatra, adding he was on the most wanted list of Nepal Police.

Gyawali spells out five areas of Nepal-China cooperation

Rajdhani and The Kathmandu Post report that Foreign Affairs Minister Pradeep Kumar Gyawali has stated in Beijing that Nepal wants Chinese cooperation in five key sectors here.

The priority areas include transportation and connectivity, use of technologies in agriculture, utilisation of human resources, tourism and trade.

Meanwhile, the Minister also called on Chinese businesspersons to invest in Nepal as he addressed a seminar on Nepal-China Relations in the 21st Century, according to Rajdhani.

Students learning capacity decreasing

The government has accepted that it is not getting expected returns from students as far as their learning is concerned in comparison to the investment made in education sector, anchor stories in Kantipur, Annapurna Post and Naya Patrika report.

A recent study conducted by the Education Review Office under the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology has found that the level of students learning capacity is falling down in average despite a significant investment made, according to the reports.

Meanwhile, the ERO also noted that children in provinces 1, 2 and Karnali have lower learning capacity than those of other provinces, according to Naya Patrika.

Ignored

Maoist Centre wants Bal Krishna Dhungel released before unification

The ruling coalition partner CPN-Maoist Centre wants its leader Bal Krishna Dhungel, who has been convicted of a murder during the war era, to get released from jail before it merges with the CPN-UML, according to Rajdhani.

Senior Maoist leader and Minister for Home Affairs Ram Bahadur Thapa proposed that he be given amnesty, but Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli rejected it, according to the report.

Finance Minister Khatiwadas stand on transparency norms under question

Anchor story in The Himalayan Times has questioned Finance Minister Yubaraj Khatiwadas stand on transparency norms as he did not explicitly reveal to the press details of his discussion with donors during a recent meeting.

Supreme Court orders release of trafficking-accused ward chair

The Supreme Court on Thursday ordered the police to release Sun Bahadur Tamang, elected ward chairman in Dupcheshwar Rural Municipality-1 of Nuwakot district on a general date, according to Naya Patrika.

A division bench of justices Om Prakash Mishra and Purushottam Bhandari handed down the order in response to a writ of habeas corpus filed by his son. Earlier, the District Court had sentenced him to jail for 37 years in connection with a human trafficking case.

Interesting

Govt turns tough against conversion

In a bid to regulate activities of national and international non-government organisations, the government is drafting a National Integrity Policy, which has proposed strong measures against organisations involved in religious conversion, according to Annapurna Post.

Concluding that NGOs forcing people to convert into other religions is against religion, the Policy proposes that such organisations registration get cancelled. Likewise, the organisations have to take an oath of not getting involved in religious activities before they begin working. Meanwhile, the Policy also wants to restrict INGOs from activities to put pressure on law formulation.
Kathmandu, April 20

The Central Working Committee meeting of main opposition Nepali Congress, scheduled to resume on Friday morning, has been postponed.

The party has cited flight obstructions at the Tribhuvan International Airport this morning as the reason behind the postponement. The Airport had shut its runway for around 12 hours from last night as an aircraft belonging to Malindo Air suffered a runway excursion before it was about to take off for Malaysia.

The meeting was postponed as many of its CWC members including senior leader Ram Chandra Paudel could not arrive in Kathmandu on time, the party source informs.

Paudel was in Pokhara along with six other CWC members. Therefore, he had requested the party President Sher Bahadur Deuba to postpone the meeting.

The meeting was expected to appoint Vice-President, General Secretary and Joint General Secretary of the party.

Now, the meeting shall take place on Sunday morning.
Kathmandu, April 20

Renowned mountaineer Reinhold Messner, who was the first to climb all 14 eight-thousanders without bottled oxygen says he will make a documentary about mountains of Nepal and will release it soon.

The documentary will tell stories of mountains and the people who live around there, according to him.

I want to show the world what has changed around the mountains here in Nepal and all over the world, he said at the felicitation event held at Nepal Tourism Board in Kathmandu on Thursday.

Sir Edmund Hillary was probably the first foreigner to go up the traditional route and maybe must have had an adventure, but now everyone there goes as tourists. I want to show the other side of that, I want to show that this journey is more than just flying to Luka, he adds.

Nepal Mountaineering Association along with Nepal Tourism Board organised the event to felicitate a team of Austrian mountaineers who summited Everest 40 years ago.

The team had pulled off what seemed like an impossible expedition in 1978 where two of its members Messer and Peter Habeler were the first to scale Mount Everest without using bottled oxygen.

Out of the 12 who scaled Mount Everest then, the surviving eight members Wolfgang Nairz, Reinhold Messner, Peter Habeler, Helmut Hagner, Hanns Schell, Robert Schauer, Oswald Olz and Raimund Margreiter were honoured by the Minister for Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation Rabindra Adhikari along with Officiating Secretary of Culture, Tourism and Civil Aviation Suresh Acharya and NTB Chief Executive Officer Deepak Raj Joshi.

The team were together in Kathmandu for the first time and flew to Lukla on April 14. They visited Kunde Hospital at Kongde and Mt Everest base camp there.
Western air strikes in Syria illegal: German parliament experts



Berlin, April 20 (AFP) Apr 20, 2018



The air strikes unleashed in Syria by Western allies in mid-April were a violation of international law, jurists at the German parliament said in a report Friday.

"The use of military force against a state, as a sanction against the violation of an international convention by this state, is an infringement of the prohibition of the use of violence in international law," said the Bundestag experts in a reply to a question filed by the far-left Die Linke party.

The Bundestag experts referred in particular to the United Nations declaration from their 1970 general assembly which stresses "the duty of States to refrain in their international relations from military, political, economic or any other form of coercion aimed against the political independence or territorial integrity of any State".

The UN Security Council had also rejected armed retaliation, calling it "incompatible with the objectives and the principles of the United Nations."

The legal motive put forward by Britain, which joined in the air strikes alongside the United States and France, was also "not convincing," said the Bundestag experts.

London said it was "both right and legal" to launch strikes to alleviate humanitarian suffering.

But the experts said there were questions over "whether the military attacks are really appropriate to prevent further suffering" in Syria.

On April 14, the United States, France and Britain fired missiles meant as a response to what the trio of nations said was evidence Damascus had used chemical weapons a week earlier.

Purported footage of victims foaming at the mouth after the April 7 attack sparked an outcry and prompted the West to launch its biggest military action yet against Assad's regime.

But the military action was carried out without the approval of the UN Security Council, where Assad's ally Russia has a permanent seat and veto.

Germany did not join in the air strikes but Chancellor Angela Merkel called the military action "necessary and appropriate".
Interview with James Comey 'What Am I Doing? How Did I End Up Here?'

In a DER SPIEGEL interview, former FBI Director James Comey discusses how U.S. President Donald Trump resembles a mafia boss, the dangers of egocentrism and why impeachment would let the American people off the hook.
An Island Disappears Dead End in the Mississippi Delta

The island of Jean Charles in the Mississippi River Delta has provided refuge to Native Americans for decades. Now, though, the island is disappearing. Many have decided to leave.
The event recognises the most innovative and outstanding farm businesses across Cornwall, bearing tribute to those who are showing excellence within the industry, says Al Brooks, trustee at the Addington Fund, which runs the Awards. We are overawed and so encouraged by the quality of entries this year. Its very heartening to see farmers striving to improve performance and efficiencies and to create the best operations they can, especially with the current uncertainties.

Shortlists have been drawn up for the seven different categories, with judges visiting each entry and interviewing them in order to select a winner. Jo Wingfield, senior agriculture manager for Cornwall and North Devon at Natwest, will be judging the Best Young Farmer Award, which the bank sponsors.

We will be looking at their overall passion towards their farming enterprise, how they are integrating technology into their business to improve efficiencies and their individual outlook of what farming will look like post Brexit, she explains. Also, how they are adapting their business to cope with this; both on a sustainable level and with the greater emphasis being placed towards environmental benefits.

The opportunity for NatWest to sponsor the Cornwall Young Farmer category again shows our commitment to supporting British farmers. The importance of the young farmers within the sector is vital for the continuation of agriculture in Britain.

In 2017, the Best Commercial Farmer award went to Claire and Andrew Brewer, who run a 750-cow unit near St Columb. Over the past 25 years Andrew and Claire have tripled their farming area to just under 1000 acres in total, and this year they are judging the Commercial Farmer category. Being a winner has helped attract new members of staff by raising our profile, says Mr Brewer. It has been interesting being involved in the judging to see how other people are doing things. There is always something to learn, life is about learning. It is great to be helping raise the profile of the Addington Fund, creating opportunities for others.
LDS members told to 'Find Christ in all aspects of your life' during Saturday afternoon General Conference session

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints listening to the Saturday afternoon session of the 191st Semiannual General Conference were treated to a number of global experiences. A multicultural choir from LDS Stakes in northern Utah was selected to provide the music for the Saturday afternoon session, while several members of the Seventy spoke from their various locations around the world because of restricted travel due to COVID. Among the business of the church, six members of the Seventy were released and given emeritus status. They include: Elder J. Devn ...
Trot Insider has learned that Standardbred horseman Rick Forgie has passed away at the age of 53.

Forgie passed away suddenly at home last Thursday (April 12).

Rick is the proud father of his beloved daughter, Tristen (the daughter of Pam Wilkinson-Forgie). Rick was predeceased by his parents, Douglas Forgie Sr. and Liette Brisebois.

He leaves behind his brothers, Perry and Doug Jr.; and sister, Tammy. Rick will also be missed by his nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles and many cousins and friends.

Rick was an accomplished trainer/driver and raced everywhere from Sarnia to Woodbine, and Flamboro to Clinton, and many small tracks in between.

He got his start at Rideau Carleton Raceway and Connaught Park, and eventually worked his way to Pompano Park in Florida and the Meadowlands Racetrack in New Jersey.

Rick accumulated 1,058 wins as a driver and steered his mounts to $3,914,235 in purse earnings. Horses that paraded from his training operation recorded 161 victories and banked $48,411 in purses.

The Forgie family will be hosting a celebration of life in Rick's memory on Saturday, May 12 at 2 p.m., at the Aylmer United Church in Aylmer, Quebec.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Heart Institute or the Ontario Standardbred Adoption Society.

There will be a memorial race held in Rick Forgie's honour at Clinton Raceway on Sunday, May 20.

Please join Standardbred Canada in offering condolences to the family and friends of Rick Forgie.
Shares is the leading weekly publication for retail investors. It is packed with investment ideas, news and educational material to help build and run portfolios and get more from your money.

Shares puts on free Investor Events throughout the year across the country. They provide an opportunity for investors to learn more about companies on the stock market and hear from a range of investment experts including fund managers and Shares journalists.
As we have since July 2006, each Friday well post our sampling of cigar news and other items of interest from the week. Below is our latest, which is the 575th in the series.

1) Joya de Nicaragua and Drew Estate are collaborating to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Tobacconists Association of America (TAA) by launching a TAA-exclusive cigar. Called Antano Gran Reserva Presidente (6.75 x 50), the box-pressed Nicaraguan puro is made with five-year-old tobaccos and is Joya de Nicaragua CEO Dr. Alejandro Martinez Cuencas favorite vitola. When I requested the Gran Reserva blend in the Presidente size, it immediately became my private smoke, he said. I decided to share it only for special occasions. I cant think of a better opportunity than this shared celebration of five decades of perseverance and companionship between TAA, its members, and Joya de Nicaragua. Presidente is expected to ship next month and will retail for $12.50.

2) Black Label Trading Company (BLTC) this week announced the shipment of the 2018 vintage of Bishops Blend, and two-vitola line made with an Ecuadorian Habano Maduro wrapper, Ecuadorian Habano binder, and filler tobaccos from Nicaragua, Connecticut (Broadleaf), and Pennsylvania (Broadleaf). Im very excited about the third release of Bishops Blend, said BLTC creator James Brown. This is one of our most anticipated releases of the year and the 2018 vintage will not disappoint. The 2018 boasts big, bold flavors of anise, pepper, raisins and a sweet earthiness on the finish. It is very complex and extremely refined. As with the past vintages, the Broadleaf fillers shine at the forefront and are perfectly balanced by the Nicaraguan filler tobaccos. The cigarsa Corona Larga (6.25 x 46, $11.50) and a Robusto (5 x 48, $11)are made at BLTCs Fabrica Oveja Negra in Esteli, Nicaragua.

3) The largest tobacco producer in Central America, Plasencia Cigars, is moving to create a natural forest at one of its farms in Esteli. When Plasencia Cigars CEO Nestor Andres Plasencia stumbled upon a 2014 TED Talk by the founder of Afforestt, he was immediately inspired, reads a press release. In it, the founder and president, Shubhendu Sharma, speaks about a methodology used to create a mini-forest ecosystem anywhere, in a tenth of the time it would take a natural forest to grow. Plasencia owns and operates over 3,000 acres of land in Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Panama. The new project calls for planting 40 trees in the shape of the Plasencia logo at the companys Esteli plantation.

4) Inside the Industry: Michael Giannini has been promoted to the position of general manager at Ventura Cigar Company, and will also retain his current role of creative director. I am so proud and honored to accept my new responsibilities, he said. As we continue to receive top ratings for our Archetype, Psyko, and Case Study brands, were also forging bold, straight paths toward new products and steady growth. This move is really a natural progression of my career and will be a seamless transition as the brands evolve. Giannini joined Ventura in November after 17 years at General Cigar Co., where he landed after Swedish Match bought Ernesto Perez-Carrillos successful boutique brand that made La Gloria Cubana. Giannini is perhaps best known for his work at the helm of Foundry Cigar Co., a subsidiary of General that launched in 2012 and operated as a boutique with exotic packaging, obscure brand names, baroque themes, limited editions, and elaborate stories about the tobaccos.

5) From the Archives: Cigars may be our forte, but we can also help in the kitchen. Back in 2012, we offered up some suggestions for picking and cooking a an excellent steak.

6) Deal of the Week: StogieGuys.com recommends Bespoke Post, a monthly collection of awesome items (think fine bar accessories, shaving kits, workout gear, and more) delivered for just $45. Of note is the Churchill box, which features four exclusive cigars, an ashtray made of reclaimed wood, an odor-eating candle, cedar spills, and a cutter. Once you are signed up, there is no obligation; you can skip or purchase each month. Sign up now to be eligible for the May box.

The Stogie Guys

photo credit: Joya de Nicaragua
LINCOLN--Twenty-four bills were passed before the second session of the 105th Nebraska Legislature adjourned late Wednesday afternoon.

Senators unanimously passed a bill that will require payday lenders to provide borrowers with more information. LB 194 will require lenders to notify borrowers in writing about the transaction date and amount, as well as payment due date and total payment due.

Under LB 194, payday loans will not be allowed to exceed $500 and borrowers will have the right to rescind a transaction by the end of the next business day. Sponsor of the bill, Sen. Tony Vargas of Om...
The Western Community College Area Board of Governors met at the Sidney campus Wednesday.

Junior colleges offer more than a step up to a university.

That is the message staff of the Western Nebraska Community College brought to the Western Community College Area Board of Governors Wednesday. The Western Community College Area Board of Governors met at the Sidney campus Wednesday.

The agenda included a discussion on WNCC's Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center by Paula Abbott with Nichole Peralta.

Abbott said the cosmetology program closed in 2016, leaving about one-fifth of the campus vacant. The Sidney community was also experiencing significant changes with Bass Pro purchasi...
In April 1992, the Universal Exposition of Seville, located on Cartuja island, across the Guadalquivir river from the city centre, was opened to the public by representatives of the Spanish royal family. King Juan Carlos was accompanied by Queen Sofia, Prince Felipe and the Infantas Elena and Cristina.

1992 was a particularly significant year for the city as it marked 500 years since the first voyage of Christopher Columbus from Seville in search of trade routes with India and China. What he found instead was the New World, today known as Latin America, much of which would remain under Spanish control for four hundred years. The Expo's motto was 'The Era of Discoveries'.

The Expo itself was an incredibly ambitious project which represented 112 countries and was attended by nearly 42 million visitors. The Cartuja island site was chosen to represent the New World, and the site was so large and varied that visitors had to spend several days there in order to see most of the exhibitions. It was praised for its architecture, which included many impressive bridges and gates, as well as innovative and unusual methods of travel around the site, which ranged from buses and ferry boats to cable cars and monorails.

The Expo was marketed as a city of the future, designed to show the success of a new Spain that had flourished in the 17 years since the end of Franco's dictatorship. The event's director, Manuel Olivencia, prevented the United States from having the largest pavilion, stating in 1989, &ldquoWe as hosts intend to have the largest.&rdquo

Spain's pavilion was the most popular. It was a modernist cube on the edge of the artificial Lake of Spain. It featured a gallery with works by Miro, Dali, Caravaggio and others, as well as a cinema dome which took visitors on a virtual tour of Spain. The Japanese pavilion was also particularly impressive. It was then the world's largest wooden structure where guests could walk through multiple levels showing life-size photographs of Japanese people at work, a video showing Japan at the time of Columbus, and several sections of a Japanese castle.

The Moroccan pavilion was one of the most beautiful of the Expo. It was built in the style of a three-storey traditional mansion, and included an impressive fountain in the centre, as well as al fresco dining and an atrium with an open roof. It is one of the few buildings that visitors can still view today.

The US pavilion took a broad view of travel, ranging from Columbus' discovery of the Americas to the Space Race. The organisers even built a 'Plaza de las Americas'.

After the end of the Expo, many of the structures were dismantled. The site is now divided between the Cartuja 93 science and technology park and the Isla Magica theme park. It has become a popular destination for urban explorers.
She doesn't know where her passion for cooking comes from. Maybe from her grandmother or an aunt who used to run a bar. However, Mari Angeles Garcia Roldan remembers that she began cooking at a young age. The 23-year-old from Cordoba used to challenge her parents to suggest three ingredients from which she would make her own dish. She became so engrossed in cooking that her parents bought her recipe books. But she felt that this wasnt enough. She wanted to do more. And so she signed up to the Burgos Campos Catering College. She began to train with Celia Jimenez, (the first Andalusian woman to win a Michelin star, as head chef of Marbellas El Lago), and soon afterwards she got another opportunity to improve her abilities, this time in Malaga. She won a place at the Sabor a Malaga Catering College in Benahavis.

I have learnt a great deal here, about techniques, products... and above all about passion for food, because the teachers pass it on, she said. She finished the course with a good taste in her mouth. Yesterday she was awarded a prize for Promising Young Chef by the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu in Madrid which recognises the greatest talents across all of the culinary schools in Spain. Garcia Roldan won the sixth edition of the contest against nine other finalists following a test where contestants had to create their own version of a common dish: salmon and prawn ballotine, watercress mayonnaise and vegetables in a vinaigrette.

Ballotine, the dish that won the young chef first prize / SUR

In her case, she filled the ballotine with prawns, capers, lime and chervil, adding mayonnaise and the vinaigrette with orange. Technical quality, originality, taste and presentation are the most important ingredients sought by the team of judges, headed by Jose Carlos Fuentes, head chef of Club Allard (two Michelin stars). The highest score was awarded to Garcia Roldan, with second place being awarded to another Andalusian, Alejandro Perez Polo. Its been a unique experience for me. Iwant to keep following my dreams as Istill have a lot to learn, She left Madrid with a diploma worth 23,000 euros, the equivalent of a masters degree in haute cuisine.
In the eighteenth century the building was part of a paper factory that produced playing cards, but it will soon be converted into a tourist information centre. Benalmadena council has announced the project in response to complaints from local residents that the building, located between Plaza de Espana and Avenida de Andalucia, had been abandoned. Local mayor, Victor Navas, announced that the decision was "an attempt to restore the town's historical heritage."

La Tribuna is the only remaining part of a paper factory built by the Italian businessman Felix Solesio and chosen by the well-known Galvez family to produce playing cards to sell in the Americas, in order to provide money to develop their home town of Macharaviaya. The factory, located in Benalmadena, was known as the Real Fabrica de Naipes de Macharaviaya.

La Tribuna has two floors and has an area of nearly sixty square metres. With an architectural style more common in the north of Spain than on the Mediterranean coast, it was restored by Benalmadena council in 2007 with a plan to turn it into a museum.

The paper from which the cards were made was sourced from Arroyo de la Miel, which was then ground in water mills and made into pulp for playing cards. The cards were then stored in a building on Calle Granada in Malaga before they were exported to the Americas.

The local councillor for Tourism, Encarnacion Cortes, said that the project for converting the building into a tourist information centre was at an advanced stage and due to be completed very soon.

The building, believed to be the oldest in Arroyo de la Miel, was refitted after an investment of two million euros over the course of a decade, when then mayor Enrique Bolin hoped to turn it into a museum. The project was never completed. More recently, local residents have complained about the state of the building, which has been used as a squat and vandalised in recent years.

Victor Navas, along with the local councillor Salvador Rodriguez visited the site earlier this month. By turning the building into a tourist information office we hope to give new life to one of the most historic buildings in our town, explained the mayor. Through investing in the promotion of the heritage and history of the town we hope to attract new visitors and better inform those who visit our picturesque town.

The Galvez brothers were influential in the growth of industry, agriculture and trade in Malaga province. They founded several playing card factories in the local area. To ensure that their venture was a success the brothers employed Felix Solesio from Genoa, which was then famous for its paper industry.
All of the political parties at Moclinejo town hall have voted in favour of creating an animal protection and rescue unit.

The unit (Unidad de Proteccion y Rescate Animal or UPRA in Spanish) will form part of the Moclinejo-El Valdes civil protection (Proteccion Civil) group, and will be the first of its kind in Spain.

Francisco Delgado Bonilla, who is responsible for Sustainability at Malaga's provincial authority, Diputacion, said during a meeting on Monday morning that the unit would be supported by his department.

The UPRA will be equipped to rescue, transport, identify and offer basic care to animals in emergency situations and will be based in a property belonging to Moclinejo town hall. Protocols will be followed according to the needs of individual animals that come into the unit's care. It will also provide information, vaccination campaigns and other help to pet owners.

The unit will work with vets, security forces, other animal protection associations and individuals and has already made contact with many of them.

For Antonio Munoz Anaya, Mayor of Moclinejo, the creation of the animal rescue and protection unit is an achievement in the field of civil protection which is going to attend to the basic needs of many animals.

During 2016 and 2017 many cases of abandonment and ill treatment of animals were reported in Moclinejo, which eventually led to the idea for the unit.
The national government has agreed to convene a meeting of the body tasked with negotiating the financing of the Spanish regions and will discuss with the Junta de Andalucia an improved budget for local rail projects.

These were the two main commitments that the socialist regional president of Andalucia, Susana Diaz, secured from conservative PM Mariano Rajoy in Madrid on Wednesday.

The two politicians were meeting to discuss the state budget for 2018, which is still to be approved by Madrid's Congreso. Rajoy is looking to win support from the different regions for his spending plans ahead of a difficult vote by MPs in the coming days.

The Junta president said that Andalucia was ready to attend the meeting to discuss regional finance reform with the will to reach agreement and understanding and to support a formula that guarantees equal treatment [for all regions].

Some Spanish regions are fearful that demands from Catalonia for more spending by Madrid could be agreed to at some point to soften the independence movement, and see other regions get a worse deal as a result. Andalusian politicians across all parties have signed a document claiming that the region is already missing out on four billion euros annually that it should receive.

Diaz also pressed Rajoy to increase the budget for new railway infrastructure in Andalucia. She said that the 32 million euros that Madrid has put aside to improve the rail access to Algeciras port via Bobadilla, in Malaga province, was insufficient when it needs an estimated 300 million spending. The line is due to be integrated into a Mediterranean freight corridor.

Diaz was also looking for a commitment to finish the high-speed AVE to Granada, asking for the 140 million euros put aside for all rail projects in the region to be increased to nearer the two billion estimated to be needed to complete them all.

The Junta leader asked the national government to increase regional infrastructure spending to at least the Spanish per capita average. Madrid has said that Andalucia already receives slightly more money than its percentage share of total Spanish economic output.
La Carihuela in Torremolinos will be decorated in orange to celebrate Koningsdag (The Kings Day), the national holiday of the Netherlands, on Friday 27 April.

The Festival, which begins at 3pm and continues until 8pm, is organised by the cultural department of Torremolinos town hall and the Voom Voom Club in La Carihuela. Dutch residents will enjoy an all-day street party in celebration of King Willem-Alexander's birthday. Orange is traditionally worn on this day to show respect to the country's royal family, and it is customary for Dutch nationals to adorn orange wigs, wacky outfits and face paint.

The festival will include a street market offering Dutch handicraft products and the traditional gastronomy of the Netherlands, like stamppot, a hearty stew of mashed potatoes, vegetables and meat.

There will also be shows, attractions, and music supplied by live bands and Dutch DJs.

With a population of 700 Dutch residents and more than 220,000 tourists in 2017, Torremolinos maintains strong historic ties to the Dutch community. This is the third consecutive year the festival has been held in Torremolinos.
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MCGRAW, N.Y. -- A Cortland County man has been charged in the death of a toddler in the village of McGraw, according to Cortland County Sheriff's Office deputies.

Dorain G. Bohn, 29, of Elm Street, McGraw, was charged with criminal negligent homicide and endangering the welfare of a child, deputies said.

Deputies started investigating the 2-year-old's death at about 9 p.m. Thursday. Bohn was arrested following the investigation, deputies said.

Bohn is being held at the Cortland County Sheriff's Office awaiting arraignment.

The investigation is continuing. Deputies said additional information will be released.

Check back for more information.
Jordan Strauss | Invision | AP

Rachel Weisz pregnant

Rachel Weisz and husband Daniel Craig are expecting their first child together. The 48-year-old actress told The New York Times that she's pregnant and her baby bump will be showing soon. "Daniel and I are so happy. We're going to have a little human. We can't wait to meet him or her. It's all such a mystery," the former "The Mummy" star said. Weisz has been married to the James Bond star for seven years, but they've both been parents for longer; she has an 11-year-old son with director Darren Aronofsky and Craig, 50, has a 25-year-old daughter with actress Fiona Loudon.

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New music

Hello Friday: Ariana Grande is back with "No Tears Left to Cry," her first music since a terrorist attack killed 22 and injured more than 59 at her Manchester concert last year. "Right now, I'm in a state of mind/ I wanna be in, like, all the time/ Ain't got no tears left to cry/ So I'm pickin' it up, I'm pickin' it up, I'm lovin', I'm livin', I'm pickin it up," she sings. Grande, 24, is expected to release her fourth album later this year.

Other new music released this week includes Khalid's duet with Billie Eilish, J. Cole's 'KOD' album, two new tracks from Lykke Li, a Ringo Starr video, Janelle Monae's 'I Like That,' a Liam Payne collaboration with J Balvin, Prince's original version of 'Nothing Compares 2 U,' Sugarland's new song with Taylor Swift, and albums from Old Crow Medicine Show and Shuggie Otis.

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Kanye West returns

Kanye West is officially back. The rapper unleashed a slew of news on Twitter this past week, including a new line of Yeezy shoes and four (!) new albums under his record label, G.O.O.D. music. West will drop two albums (a 7-track release on June 1 and a Kid Cudi collaboration called Kids See Ghost on June 8), Pusha T will release his first studio album since 2015 on May 25, and Teyana Taylor will debut her sophomore album on June 22.

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Kevork Djansezian | Getty Images

Kim K closing stores

Kim, Kourtney and Khloe Kardashian are closing all of their DASH stores, including locations in Miami, L.A. and New York, after 12 years in business. Kim K announced Thursday that the reality TV family "loved running DASH, but in the last few years we've all grown so much individually, running our own brands, as well as being moms and balancing work with our families. We know in our hearts that it's time to move on."

Speaking of running their own brands, Kourtney's attempting to break the internet this weekend with a new nude photo shoot for V magazine. She celebrated her 39th birthday with the racy images, covering her breasts with her arm while a pink jacket dangles on her shoulder.

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Kourtney Kardashian is 39 and feeling fine. https://t.co/wUpQX5T5yM  E! News (@enews) April 20, 2018

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Will Ferrell is back to making fans laugh in his first appearance after car accident https://t.co/Ixd9FPvXfI pic.twitter.com/NIPF10uQvz  Yahoo Entertainment (@YahooEnt) April 20, 2018

Will Ferrell back on stage

Will Ferrell is back on stage less than a week after being rushed to the hospital in a serious car crash. The comedian appeared at WE Day California on Thursday, joking with an 8-year-old about presidential history, claiming Barry F. Sasquatch was the U.S. president with the largest shoe size. Ferrell was hospitalized earlier this week when a 22-year-old male driver crashed into a vehicle where Ferrell was a passenger, causing it to overturn. Ferrell's performance at WE Day will air Friday, Aug. 17 on ABC.

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Evan Agostini | Invision | AP

'Scarface' reunion

Al Pacino, Michelle Pfeiffer and Steven Bauer reunited with "Scarace" director Brian De Palma for the 35th anniversary of the classic movie in New York. Pacino, now 77, said he wanted to do the remake after seeing the 1932 original, though the story was changed to include more F-bombs and "bombast." "It was bigger than life," Pacino said, adding that he's still not sick of the movie's most famous line -- written by Oliver Stone. "What you mean, 'Say hello to my little friend?'"

Pictured from left to right are Bauer, Pfeiffer, De Palma and Pacino at the 35th anniversary screening of "Scarface" at the Beacon Theatre during 2018 Tribeca Film Festival on Thursday, April 19, 2018, in New York.

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Evan Rachel Wood turned down 'Mean Girls'

"Westworld" star Evan Rachel Wood revealed in a new interview with Jimmy Fallon that she turned down a role in "Mean Girls." The 30-year-old actress didn't say which part she was offered (probably Regina George), but said she didn't want to do it "because I was already supposed to do a film called 'Pretty Persuasion' that was set in a high school that was very 'Heathers'-esque, and it was very similar! So, I was already doing that, so I was like, 'I can't!'"

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Tina Fey on '30 Rock' reboot

Tina Fey says she may have started the '30 Rock' reboot rumors when she was asked about it at the opening of the 'Mean Girls' musical on Broadway. "I was like 'maybe...' A little bit of that is on me, like I must be so thirsty for internet attention," Fey told Fallon. The writer-actress, who'll return to host the season finale of "SNL" next month, said she wouldn't do a "straight reboot" though it could feature some original cast members. "If we get anything together, I promise you will be the first to know," Fey said.

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Paula Patton dating married man

Robin Thicke's ex-wife Paula Patton, who left the 'Blurred Lines' singer for cheating, is now dating a married man. The 42-year-old actress confirmed she's dating Zach Quittman, her first boyfriend since ending a nearly 20-year relationship with Thicke in 2014. Quittman told People magazine that he was separated from his wife for some time "before I moved on," while Patton said she's not bothered by criticism of their relationship. "I don't give a f---," she told Hot 97 this week.

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More Buzz:

Kylie Jenner shares photo of 'BFF' baby Stormi ( ET

'Scandal' TV series ends more happily than fans expected ( E!

Netflix considering buying their own movie theaters ( SF

Bette Midler returning to 'Hello Dolly' on Broadway ( DN

'HTGAWM' star Karla Souza gives birth to baby girl ( ET

Janelle Monae to release 45-min film with new album ( RS

Janelle Monae dances around Tessa Thompson romance rumors ( E!

R. Kelly's assistant, attorney resign amid allegations against singer ( DN

Logic officially files for divorce from wife Jessica ( ET

*NSYNC 'Dirty Pop-Up' shop coming to L.A. ( BB

'Masters of the Universe' reboot lands Nee brothers to direct ( SF

'13 Reasons Why' season 2 will be 'redemptive and hope-filled' ( E!

Bill Murray, brothers open another 'Caddyshack' restaurant ( DN

Heather Locklear's boyfriend Chris Heisser charged with DUI ( ET
Rome, N.Y. -- On Wednesday morning, ICE officers raided John Collins' Rome dairy farm. Collins said they didn't identify themselves when they came on his property, did not provide him with a warrant when he asked for one, and threw his phone and handcuffed him when he began to video them.

One of John Collins' workers, Marcial DeLeon Aguilar, was detained and later arrested. Collins thought Aguilar was here legally, but ICE officers said the man is in the country illegally from Guatemala.

The raid and the farmer's description of the ICE officers' behavior has raised questions about the power and actions of ICE officers during the stepped-up immigration enforcement that is taking place during the Trump administration. Here's a look at what has happened so far and what is coming up next in the case.

In a video interview, Collins said he couldn't believe how unprofessional the officers were.

The ICE officers' actions spurred U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillbrand, D-NY, to call for a federal investigation into what happened.

A spokesman for ICE answered some questions about the raid Thursday afternoon, saying the Aguilar had a criminal convicted for aggravated assault and had previously been deported back to Guatemala.

Later, Aguilar was arraigned in U.S. District Court and charged with illegally re-entering the U.S. after having been deported. In the paperwork filed to support that charge, a supervising ICE officer, William Saunders, detailed what officers on the scene reported to him.

This is also where Aguilar's case becomes different from thousands of other immigration cases. He will go to U.S. District Court, not U.S. Immigration Court.

This is because he's been charged with a violation of federal law -- a crime -- re-entering the country illegally after having been deported. In many ways, the stakes are the same as they would be if Aguilar had to go to immigration court. He could be deported to Guatemala.

But if he went to immigration court, he would only get a lawyer if his family could pay for one. Immigration court is an administrative court, not a criminal one, and the proceedings are swift and largely secret.

Because Aguilar is charged with a crime, he gets a lawyer whether or not he can afford one. And that lawyer, likely a federal public defender, will be able to ask questions about the ICE officers' actions as they were described by Collins.

The issue of a warrant, raised by Collins, will almost certainly be examined by Aguilar's attorney.

Collins said that the ICE officers showed him no warrant when he asked them for one, which he did several times. An ICE spokesman, asked several times about whether the officers had a warrant, also did not answer that question.

Immigration law expert and Cornell law professor Stephen Yale-Loehr, who has been keeping up with the case, said the officers should have had a warrant.

"ICE needs a warrant. If they go on someone's property without one, they are violating the law," said Yale-Loehr.

Usually, ICE officers write their own warrants -- removal/deportation warrants. They are not signed by a judge and do not carry the same kind of power that an arrest or search warrant, signed by a judge, does. Generally, ICE warrants allow the officers onto the property only if the owner says the can come on. And they do not allow officers to search.

Search and arrest warrants issued by a judge allow officers greater freedom and access to someone's home and property. ICE officers do not usually use these warrants.

So far, it appears that officers in the Rome farm raid had neither kind of warrant.

No warrant is mentioned in the court paperwork that's been filed so far. But Saunders, the ICE officer who filed the complaint, lays the groundwork for entering the property a different way.

Without naming her, he says officers were there to check up on Aguilar's wife. The family lives in a house on the farmer's property. Virginia has her own immigration case. She was caught crossing the border with the couple's children and is working to apply for asylum. She is wearing an ankle bracelet monitor, put on her by ICE, instead of detaining her. Virginia is pregnant.

Saunders wrote that Virginia had missed some appointments and they were coming to check on her, and check on information about other members of the family.

Collins has disputed that claim, saying Virginia was away from the farm at a doctor's appointment getting information immigration officers requested her to get prior to her upcoming immigration appointment. The farmer said that recently Virginia had to go to New York City for an immigration appointment and no one was available to drive her so Aguilar paid $750 for her to take a taxi to the city. He also said that Aguilar accompanied his wife on some of her appointments with immigration.

Saunders said that officers had information that Aguilar was living on the property, and that he had previously been deported. So they searched for him while they were there. Saunders said they started in the milk parlor, and asked for an owner. When they did, they encountered Aguilar and he ran, so he was restrained.

Collins said this happened in front of Aguilar children, who were waiting for the school bus. Collins said that when he saw the officers holding Aguilar, he asked them what was going on and for a warrant. He said they offered him nothing. He followed them across the road, attempting to video what they were doing. At that point, he said, an officer took the farmer's phone and threw is across the road. Then, Collins said, they put him in handcuffs.

The ICE officers' interactions with Collins were not described anywhere in Saunders' report.

Aguilar has a court appearance scheduled for April 24. He is currently being held in the Buffalo Federal Immigration Detention Center in Batavia.

Marnie Eisenstadt writes about people, life and culture in Central New York. Have an idea or question? Contact her anytime: email | twitter | Facebook | 315-470-2246
When Marcellus High School chemistry teacher Ellen Spencer started following "#Plastic Free Fridays" on Facebook, a group dedicated to helping its followers find ways to use less plastic, she had no idea she would start a movement in her town.

Last year, after the group posted a video about Boomerang Bags, a grassroots, community-driven movement that originated in Australia and tries to tackle plastic pollution, Spencer became intrigued.

"Boomerang Bags are upcycled textiles that can be made from old clothing, any fabric fairly easy to sew with that would otherwise be at the end of its life cycle and would go to a landfill," Spencer said.

The bags are then used -- and reused -- instead of plastic bags at local shopping establishments.

Since 2013, the worldwide Boomerang Bag community has grown to include nearly 300 groups who have made more than 86,000 cloth bags to replace 47 million plastic bags across the world - including Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Phuket, Thailand; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and Iceland.

In New York, the only other Boomerang Bags group is from the Onondaga Nation, which put out a call last year for fabric donations and volunteer sewers.

"Even one person can make a huge difference, together we'll make an even bigger impact," said organizer Danielle Smith, who reserved space at the Onondaga Nation Cookhouse for the group to cut, press and sew the bags.

How To Stop People Buying Plastic Bags Boomerang Bags are tackling plastic waste AND fabric waste one bag at a time! To get involved click here > http://boomerangbags.org/be-involved/ Posted by 1 Million Women on Wednesday, February 28, 2018

To get the movement started in Marcellus, Spencer first reached out to Elizabeth Milliken, the family and consumer science teacher at C.S. Driver Middle School, to see if she would be willing to help bring Boomerang Bags to the district.

"Liz is absolutely super service-minded," Spencer said. "She's a great teacher; the kids love her. She's very involved, so I knew she'd be on board."

When Milliken agreed to help out, Spencer contacted Rich Nojaim, owner of Nojaim Bros. Supermarkets, a small, privately-owned grocery store in Marcellus, to see if they could start in his store.

"He said, 'Yes, great. Do whatever you've gotta do,'" she said. "He was very open to allowing us to do that."

With the community behind them, Spencer and Miliken got to work.

With district support, they purchased official Boomerang Bags pockets to be sewn on the bags.

With the help of Tom Brady at Fulton Screen Printing, they personalized each pocket for Marcellus.

Steve Walker, the technology teacher at the high school, designed and built a box to keep the bags in at the store.

They held their first textile drive in November to collect fabric to make the bags, and in January and February, approximately 40 students from the middle and high schools participated in the first two sewing bees.

By March 5, the group delivered their first 50 bags to the store.

Spencer didn't stop there, though. She turned to Facebook once again, and this time, she reached out to the Marcellus community. The support she received was overwhelming.

Students from Marcellus School District help sew Boomerang Bags for shoppers at Nojaim Brothers grocery store to use in place of plastic bags. These sewing bees are part of a community-wide effort to limit the use of single-use plastic bags in Marcellus.

"I actually have a ton of community members making bags now," Spencer said. "A mom got in touch with me and said, 'I'd love to do this with my kids,' and a few days later, they were posting pictures of them putting the bags into the box for people to use."

Rich Nojaim said he was happy to help out the community and thinks the teachers and the students have done a great job with the project.

"The teachers had an idea, and the kids carried it through," he said. "It's been very surprising how many people use them, clean them and then bring them back to the store."

Spencer said if it hadn't been for the community involvement, the project never would have lasted.

"The Marcellus community had blown me away with this," she said. "I think everybody thinks this is a good idea, and they want to do what they can to help."

On April 18, the Marcellus community held their first sewing bee at the school, and Spencer hopes to have another one before the end of the school year.

Spencer also hopes to start a sustainability club at the high school, where students can come up with ideas on how to make their lives more environmentally friendly.

The bags, Spencer said, are just one of many ways people can do their part to help the environment.

"A big part of this is the idea of changing our habits and single-use plastics are a big problem," she said. "We really do need to start thinking about alternatives and changing our habits, so a big part of what the Boomerang Bag project is doing is replacing those plastics but also making you think."

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Students held a sit-in this morning at the Schine Student Center on the Syracuse University campus. The demonstration was organized after the fraternity Theta Tau was suspended over racist videos that surfaced earlier this week.

Syracuse University Chancellor Kent Syverud showed up and made a brief statement with a promise to address the concerns of the student protestors.
Michael F. Melara is executive director of Catholic Charities of Onondaga County.



By Michael F. Melara

On April 7, there was another devastating chemical attack in Syria. Local responders reported at least 40 people were killed, many of them women and children. The photos that have emerged of toddlers breathing through oxygen masks portray a stunning, cruel indifference to the plight of innocents in this ongoing conflict.



Those struggling to survive the conflict in Syria are unfortunately only one of the many displaced and vulnerable groups around the world. We at Catholic Charities of Onondaga County are alarmed that during this time of historic need, the U.S. is on track to accept a record low number of refugees. On March 26, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote to the U.S. Department of State and U.S. Department of Homeland Security to express concern about this issue. CCOC joins the USCCB in sounding the alarm about the unmitigated suffering experienced by refugees throughout the world and our country's anemic response.



As the USCCB notes, the current administration has set a target of 45,000 refugee admissions in 2018. This is the lowest number admitted since the Refugee Act of 1980 created the modern U.S. refugee admissions program. This is a number that would leave tens of thousands of people in harm's way just like the 40 people who died in Douma two weeks ago. To make matters worse, due to the lengthy extreme vetting process, combined with an understaffed U.S. State Department, our country will likely admit fewer than 20,000 individuals in 2018. That is only 20 percent of the number of refugees admitted in 2016.



At the same time, the global numbers of refugees is at an all-time high. Currently, there are an estimated 22.5 million refugees globally, over half of whom are children. That's more than the entire population of New York state. All told, the UNHCR (the United Nations Refugee Agency) reports 66.5 million people are currently displaced. According to the UNHCR, in 2016, 20 people were forced from their homes every minute. That's one person every three seconds.



Since 1980, the U.S. has been a world leader in welcoming refugees. When we abdicate that role, thousands of people are left in danger. As the USCCB notes, this includes extremely vulnerable groups like religious minorities who are unwelcome in their host countries, and at-risk women and children. In Iran, for example, 87 Iranian Christians and other persecuted minorities were recently denied admittance to the US. Just a few years ago, individuals in their situation were accepted at a rate of 99 percent. These 87 people may well have family already living in the U.S. who now must wait indefinitely to be reunited with their loved ones.



The global turmoil we are currently experiencing is deeply alarming and we call on our political leaders to respond with compassion and courage. Our agency works with refugees to help them succeed in their new lives in the U.S. We see their contributions to our community and witness the very real consequences of our current refugee policy. Many of our refugee neighbors live in a state of constant anxiety for family left behind in their unstable home countries or refugee camps. In Syracuse, our numbers have followed the national trend. Halfway through fiscal year 2018, Catholic Charities has resettled only 63 of the 320 refugees projected to come.



We join the USCCB in urging the Trump administration to reassess the nation's refugee program. Specifically, this includes: "1. robust and transparent processing by the Department of Homeland Security to ensure greater processing of refugees for resettlement for the remainder of Fiscal Year 2018; and 2. admittance of at least 45,000 refugees this year and a Presidential Determination of 75,000 refugees next year."



At the heart of our mission is the commitment to welcome the stranger and offer hospitality to those who find themselves persecuted, ostracized and even tortured for their beliefs. This commitment is shared by many faith traditions, and is expressed through our collective efforts, as a citizenry, to advance the common good. We urge our community and leaders to commit to a compassionate response to this crisis.
To the Editor:



In Madis Senner's very own words in his letter to the editor on Tuesday (" 'Interfering' in NY24 shows Democrats haven't learned their lesson," April 10, 2018), he said, "You would think that after Hillary Clinton's loss ... the Democratic Party in Washington would have learned their lesson." How apropos. Indeed, people who view candidates as their heroes and not legislators (aka "my Bernie Sanders") cost the Democratic Party the White House. It is the liberal purity test of the far left wing of the Democratic Party that actually continues to not learn their lesson, always cutting off their noses to spite their faces.



No difference between Clinton and Trump, you say? Despite Clinton having a more liberal voting record then Barack Obama while in the U.S. Senate, voters like Senner would rather appear "intellectually superior" than worry about the installation of Neil Gorsuch as a Supreme Court Justice guaranteeing perhaps for generations 5-4 votes against civil rights, worker's rights, LGBT rights etc. You are so right, Mr. Senner, in one sense, you never seem to learn your lesson.



Scott Miller

Syracuse
TOKYO - North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will not demand the withdrawal of the American military from South Korea as part of a denuclearization deal, the South's president said Thursday as preparations for their meeting next week proceeded apace.

The Kim regime has long insisted that it needs its nuclear weapons to protect itself from the United States' "hostile policy" and that any deal must guarantee its security. That process must include the complete pullout of American troops from the peninsula, the regime has repeatedly stated.

But Moon Jae-in, who will meet Kim in the demilitarized zone that separates their two countries next Friday, said North Korea has signaled a major shift in its stance.

"North Korea is expressing its intention for complete denuclearization," Moon said during a lunch meeting in the presidential Blue House with top executives from 48 media companies. "And it is not making demands that the U.S. cannot accept, such as the withdrawal of the U.S. forces in Korea," he said, according to the JoongAng Ilbo, one of South Korea's biggest papers and one that had a representative at the lunch.

The U.S. military has 28,000 troops stationed in South Korea, with backups in Japan and on Guam - the legacy of the standoff that has ensued since the Korean War ended in 1953.

Every spring and fall, U.S. forces conduct drills with the South Korean military, preparing for various scenarios on the peninsula, including the sudden collapse of North Korea and "decapitation" strikes on the North Korean leadership.

North Korea strongly protests the drills, viewing them as a pretext for an invasion and emblematic of what it considers the U.S. policy to destroy the regime.

But Moon, who is vigorously promoting diplomacy as the solution to the North Korean nuclear problem, said Thursday that the Kim regime wants an "end to the hostile policy" and a "guarantee of its security" in return for abandoning its nuclear and missile program.

Many analysts were skeptical about Moon's version of events, noting that he wants the summit to be a success so that President Donald Trump will go ahead with his own meeting with Kim, tentatively planned for late May or early June.

Vipin Narang, a nonproliferation expert at MIT, said he would be "very, very careful" about interpreting Moon's statement as a sign that Kim had conceded that U.S. Forces Korea could stay.

"This is a very clever semantic pirouette," he said, adding that just because North Korea had not explicitly asked for U.S. forces to leave did not mean that North Korea had not included that step as part of its demand for "ending hostilities."

Moon said the South Korean government was acting as a mediator "to narrow the gap between Pyongyang and Washington and explore realistic measures that can be accepted by the two sides."

Moon's diplomatic drive picked up pace amid increasing talk in Washington about "bloody nose" military strikes on North Korea - strikes that would be potentially devastating for South Korea. North Korea has a huge amount of conventional artillery lined up on the Seoul capital region, home to 25 million people.

"When we look back, just a few months ago, the shadow of war glimmered on the Korean peninsula as military tensions here had escalated sharply," the president told the media executives, according to Yonhap News Agency, which was also represented at the lunch with Moon.

This, he said, highlighted the necessity of having "bold" ideas.

Moon invited North Korean representatives to the Winter Olympics, which South Korea hosted in February, paving the way for a remarkable set of diplomatic encounters. These have included Kim making his first visit abroad as leader - to Beijing to see Chinese President Xi Jinping - and CIA Director Mike Pompeo traveling to Pyongyang to talk to the 34-year-old Kim about his planned summit with Trump.

But the effort would be successful only if the summit between Trump and Kim was successful, Moon said.

"We will need bold imagination and creative solutions to make the two summits successful and not repeat the mistakes of the past," Moon told the executives.

On Wednesday, after two days of meetings with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Trump said he would cancel the meeting with Kim or walk out if there are signs it "is not going to be fruitful."

"If I think it's a meeting that is not going to be fruitful, we're not going to go," he said. "If the meeting, when I'm there, is not fruitful, I will respectfully leave the meeting."
CENTRAL SQUARE, NY - Central Square School Superintendent Thomas Colabufo said people who brought heavy equipment into the high school stadium without permission caused $1,300 in damage, and he wants them to pay up.

The damage forced the district to close down the field and ban teams from using it, the district said.

On March 11, the locks on two gates to the stadium were picked, and a four-wheeler and other heavy equipment were brought in to clear the snow from the turf, said Colabufo.

Prior to that, some students and parents - with permission - used plastic shovels to try to clear the snow off the large field.

The equipment used to clear the snow damaged the turf in 50 places that need to be repaired, the district's insurance agency told them, Colabufo said. Repairing the tears requires at least two dry-weather days.

An adult signals that they have successfully gotten through a lock to open a gate so they can use equipment to clear the snow off a field in the Central Square School District on March 11, 2018. The equipment damaged the fields.

The district has signs at the stadium that say 'no motorized equipment on the turf.' Students have been permitted to use plastic shovels on the field.

The video from the camera at the stadium shows what happened, and the district is able to identify several individuals, Colabufo said. The district turned the case over to the state police.

New York state police are still investigating the incident, according to Jack Keller, speaking for the police.

The district wants the people responsible for the damage to make restitution for the damage.

The district plans to make the repairs as soon as possible, he said.

If repairs can be made, the boys and girls lacrosse teams and the track team are scheduled to play home games/contests on the field.

After the regular seasons are over, the district is planning to move ahead with a previously approved plan to replace the turf. That work will start May 21. The project is one piece of a district-wide $40.8 million capital project approved in 2017.
LIVERPOOL, NY - Nearly 200 Liverpool High School students took part in a National School Walkout event today on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine shooting.

They were joined by students at other Central New York schools who held walkouts and other events, some featuring speakers at assemblies, some observing moments of silence for the 13 Columbine victims, and others holding protests against gun violence.

The message at Liverpool was to show support for the survivors of all mass shootings, pay respect to the victims and "show the nation that despite our young age and inability to vote, we are taking a stand,'' said Samantha Sinesi, who organized Liverpool's event.

Students walked out shortly after 10 a.m., and Sinesi said although the event wasn't school-sanctioned, teachers worked with them to make the event meaningful.

"We just feel like after a while everyone forgets about these shootings and move on, and we need to keep calling attention to the issue so something changes,'' Sinesi said.

Students walk out to take part in National School Walkout day at Liverpool High School this morning.

Students read personal statements and talked about working together to prevent shootings from happening.

At Jamesville-DeWitt High School, students also held an open-microphone session where students could express their opinions and protest gun violence.

Other schools held alternate events.

At West Genesee, students chose to learn conflict training and at East Syracuse Minoa a student-led assembly was held. The assembly featured multimedia clips and focused on remembrance, kindness, being observant, taking action and voting.

At Oswego High School, only four students showed up for the walkout. Other students didn't participate at other schools.

The National School Walkout group estimated more than 2,500 student-led groups would take part across the U.S.

The event is designed to observe moments of silence for shooting victims, but then each student organizer could decide the agenda for the rest of the "walkout."
One of the largest single gifts an individual ever bestowed upon the region is for the kids of the City of Buffalo.

A $25 million gift being announced Friday serves as a down payment to help ensure students in Buffalo have free college tuition for generations to come, courtesy of a Western New Yorker who has always had a soft spot for education and kids determined to succeed despite the odds.

The "challenge" gift is for Say Yes Buffalo, the not-for-profit that covers tuition at state colleges and universities for Buffalo students who graduate high school. The donation kicks off a new five-year fundraising campaign with a huge splash.

$25 million gift aims to ensure Say Yes scholarships exist forever https://t.co/DZiLZCmxJz  The Buffalo News (@TheBuffaloNews) April 20, 2018

The goal is to raise $100 million for an endowment so that the Say Yes scholarship -- viewed as a game changer for Buffalo since it began in 2012 -- will last in perpetuity.

But the man behind the gift will remain a mystery to the countless kids who will one day benefit from his largesse.

He asked to remain anonymous.

"Many of us ask ourselves, 'What can we do?' " said the donor, who agreed to speak to The Buffalo News. "Right now, I feel a financial responsibility to help rebuild my community."

"I sincerely don't see this as me being a wildly generous person," he said. "I think there's an ethical responsibility. I have the means and to sit here and do nothing would be unethical."

David Rust, executive director of Say Yes Buffalo, called the gift a beautiful testament to the belief in both the potential and ability of all students in Buffalo.

"I find it inspiring and powerful that he is doing this with a desire to remain anonymous," Rust said. "He doesn't want any recognition and wants Say Yes Buffalo to continue to be a community wide effort to support our students and not about one man or woman.

"We hope this inspires others to invest in our scholarship fund and to continue to build the intellectual infrastructure in our city," Rust said.

The gift comes with the stipulation that it be matched by at least $25 million in local donations by 2023. The remaining $50 million for the endowment must be raised through a combination of local, state and national supporters, also by 2023.

"We are hopeful that with this incredible $25 million gift, coupled with the support of our more than 400 donors, we have the momentum needed to reach this new goal," said Alphonso O'Neil-White, chair of the Say Yes Buffalo Scholarship. "It is an exciting moment for the future of post-secondary education of Buffalo youth."

Money manager George Weiss founded Say Yes in Philadelphia some 30 years ago and brought it to Buffalo in 2012 with the goal of increasing college access by eliminating one of the biggest barriers: cost.

Since its inaugural Class of 2013, Say Yes Buffalo has awarded more than $7.4 million in scholarships to support more than 5,000 students who have graduated from either a Buffalo Public School or a city charter school.

The nonprofit pays for tuition at New York's colleges and universities, but only what's not covered by state, federal and institutional aid designated toward tuition.

Students of Buffalo public and charter schools are eligible for the "last dollar" scholarship for up to a year after graduation and guaranteed 65 to 100 percent tuition depending on how long they have been enrolled in school in Buffalo. College fees aren't covered.

The organization also partners with more than 100 private colleges and universities, but those agreements come with some stipulations, including a $5,000 annual cap for families earning over $75,000.

The arrival of Say Yes has been viewed as a game-changer in Buffalo, not just by families staring at the rising cost of college but by a city in need of a more educated workforce for the new medical and high-tech economy it is trying to create.

However, O'Neil-White explained that, since its inception, the focus has been on the short-term: a 10-year goal of raising $29 million to secure scholarships through the high school graduating Class of 2022.

Now that Say Yes is nearing that goal, it is embarking on an endowment campaign to ensure that eligible Buffalo students have their college tuition covered for years to come. The interest earned on the $100 million endowment is expected to cover the annual cost of the Say Yes scholarships and other assistance.

The $25 million gift would be one of the single largest to the Buffalo area from an individual donor.

In 2011, a physician who graduated from the University at Buffalo medical school bequested $40 million to his alma mater, but also wished to remain anonymous.

In 2015, UB renamed its medical school in honor of a $30 million gift from Jeremy M. Jacobs Sr., the billionaire head of the Delaware North Co.

Most recently, Jeffrey E. Gundlach, the billionaire bond trader and Western New York native, gave $52.5 million for expansion of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

But if you tried to guess the Say Yes donor, you'd probably be wrong.

He's not a household name.

"Financially," he said. "I'm not little -- but I'm not big. I'm looking for big donors to step up with me."

He's a businessman who built his wealth in the medical and tech industries, and is now a venture capitalist in his early 60s who's proud to call the Buffalo region home.

A native of Western New York, he went to college out of state and was a good student, but not great. While he worked summers to help pay for college, his father footed the remainder of the tuition bill and he graduated debt free.

He wants to do the same for other kids.

He has given money to a number of other local charities and organizations but nothing this generous. He has been involved with Say Yes since its beginnings and views educating Buffalo's next generation as a "core ingredient" for this region's economy to thrive.

He loves Buffalo. He loves its "polite and friendly" demeanor, its don't-quit attitude, and the spirit it shows to pick itself up and come back again next year when the ball sails Wide Right.

He tells stories of others he knows who didn't have a lot of opportunities growing up, but went on to college determined to succeed -- and did.

"I really enjoy the challenge of trying to understand who a student is," he said. "'Where did you come from? Where are you trying to get to? And what's your method to get there?'"

"I like the belief that, 'If I can just get myself educated, something good is going to come out of this,'" he said.

He approached Rust last fall about the $25 million gift to jump-start the endowment.

Rust called the donor a "kind, humble" man and said the children of Buffalo are blessed to have him.

"Just as impressive," Rust said, "is that fact that not only does this individual give his treasure, but he also spends time personally mentoring our scholars and sharing his life experiences with them."

What does he tell them?

While he may have not have been the best student in college, there was no way he wasn't going to finish.

"That's what our kids hear from me," the donor said. "Don't quit."

- By Jay Rey, The Buffalo News, N.Y.
High-tech e-economy shaking up traditional modes of business

VietNamNet Bridge - Ngo Dong Giang from Hung Yen province and his younger brother spent last week looking for new jobs. They both were taxi drivers for Uber, which has sold its local business to Grab.









E-hailing apps are a clear demonstration of a new business model born in the 4.0 revolution









Some of his friends have applied for Mai Linh Bike, others have chosen Grab, and a few have joined T.Net and Vato.



However, Giang still cant decide as he has heard that Indonesian Go Jek, another ride-hailing app like Uber and Grab, will arrive in Vietnam. It began recruiting workers in March, preparing to join the Vietnamese market.



Amid the ride-hailing app boom, traditional taxi firms have rushed to use technologies to become app-based taxi firms.

The low awareness has led to confusion among businesses when they see they are losing market share to foreign rivals who use high technologies in production and business. The 4.0 revolution will eliminate businesses slow to adapt to the new circumstances

However, Nguyen Xuan Hoang, vice president of MISA, a software firm, commented the move is too late as foreign apps have already entered the country.



The ride hailing app market was first exploited five years ago, in December 2013. Easy Taxi, a well known app in Brazil at that time, came to Vietnam, but it unexpectedly left the market in 2015.



Hoang said the 4.0 industrial revolution is reaching every corner of the national economy. The main technologies in the 4.0 era are AI (artificial intelligence) & robots; IoT (internet of things); social & mobile network, cloud, and Big Data; virtual reality; blockchain; and 3D printing.



The development of the digital economy may increase GDP in ASEAN by $1 trillion in the next 10 years, according to one research report.



E-hailing apps are a clear demonstration of a new business model born in the 4.0 revolution.



In the retailing industry, Amazon has opened no checkout shops, using AI to identify customers, and automatically count and deduct money from buyers accounts.



In the textile and garment industry, robots and AI can undertake human work in production lines. Robots work in factories with no light, no tea break, and are less costly.



Many people, however, dont understand the relation between production fields and the 4.0 revolution.



The low awareness has led to confusion among businesses when they see they are losing market share to foreign rivals who use high technologies in production and business. The 4.0 revolution will eliminate businesses slow to adapt to the new circumstances, he said.



Businesses have to change and create more effective business models, or otherwise, they will be targets for elimination, he said.





RELATED NEWS

Traditional taxi firms e-hailing apps struggle to keep up with Grab, Uber

Uber, Grab disrupt transit market: experts





Kim Chi
SHAWANGUNK -- The Pine Bush community was on edge for days last June, keeping their curtains closed and windows locked, waiting for updates on the two fugitives from Tennessee believed to be in the area.

On Tuesday, a Shawangunk man pleaded guilty to helping the fugitives.

Richard Dana, 55, of Upper Mountain Road, pleaded guilty to third-degree hindering prosecution, a misdemeanor, on Tuesday in the Town of Shawangunk Court for giving criminal assistance to Jarret Cole Heitmann and Makayla Danielle Stilwell, according to a news release from the Ulster County District Attorney's Office.

State police originally charged Dana with second-degree hindering prosecution, a felony, in September, according to Trooper Steven Nevel, the public information officer for Troop F in Middletown.

Heitmann and Stilwell were wanted for attempted second-degree murder, aggravated kidnapping, aggravated assault, reckless endangerment and aggravated robbery after a shooting that happened on June 20 in Kingsport, Tenn.

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation warned that the pair had an assault rifle and shotgun and were to be considered "armed and dangerous."

State police received information about sightings of Heitmann and Stilwell in the Pine Bush and Bloomingburg areas, starting a manhunt that included K-9 and helicopter units.

Dana found the pair hiding in a shed on his property on June 23, according to the news release. Dana knew the two were wanted but still gave them food, shelter, pillows and a blanket, even allowing them to shower and stay the night.

Dana then drove Heitmann and Stilwell across the state line to a Walmart store in Matamoras, Pa., on June 24. He provided them with a backpack, clothing, emergency pouches, blankets and a knife, the news release said.

Surveillance photos of Heitmann and Stilwell at the Walmart were released by Eastern Pike (Pa.) Regional Police Department.

It's not clear why Dana helped the duo or if he had any connection to them, Nevel said.

Dana's attorney, Michael Mainetti with the Ulster County Public Defender's Office, could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

Heitmann was arrested by the New Orleans Police Department after a shoplifting incident in August, and Stilwell was arrested about a week later by the U.S. Marshals Service in the New Orleans area, having been seen in a park.

State police estimated the search cost taxpayers more than $100,000, the news release said.

Dana was previously released on his own recognizance and his sentencing is scheduled for June 19 in Town of Shawangunk Court.

- By Amanda Spadaro, The Times Herald-Record, Middletown, N.Y.
Syracuse, N.Y. -- Taryne Brian Chatman arrived on Syracuse's campus shortly before a video emerged of women's soccer player Hanna Strong

He'll leave the campus in a few weeks, almost exactly as he found it, the campus in outcry after the word was among many offensive ones included in a video produced this week by the Theta Tau fraternity.

"I remember the same feelings as I had today four years earlier," Chatman said. "The university is reactive more than proactive. All the things that have come up have come up before. We're here. We're listening. We're going to make it better. The question is, when are you going to do that? Students will be leaving in a few weeks and I'm afraid the same energy won't be there. So when, if not now?"

With little time left in his college career to impact the Syracuse University climate, Chatman and approximately 300 other protesters took their message to future students on Friday, ones they hope won't have similar experiences if they ultimately arrive on Syracuse's campus.

Syracuse University celebrated Acceptance Day on Friday by inviting accepted students and their families to campus.

One of the protest organizers, Katherine Sotelo, announced to the protesters that they weren't trying to dissuade students from choosing to come to Syracuse, only to educate them on the school.

Still, the day's biggest message was clear.

"Don't commit to SU until SU commits to you," the protesters repeated over the course of the afternoon.

The combination of protests and Acceptance Day generated an interesting scene where seemingly oblivious future students and their families walked blissfully up the steps of Schine Student Center.

They wore Otto the Orange stickers on youthful faces and Syracuse University garb just purchased from stores. They were guided by Syracuse employees with orange and blue striped ties, with orange pins on their shirt jackets.

They arrived to a sit-in focused on a variety of issues that went well beyond the Theta Tau video, ranging from sexual violence to racism, homophobia and community policing.

The protesters arrived before 8 a.m., well before the future students were scheduled to arrive, and Sotelo warned them not to obstruct visitors and to remain peaceful.

As potential students walked past signs that read "DPS who do you protect?" and "No justice, no peace," protesting students switched gears, smiled and sweetly told the guests, "Welcome to Syracuse."

The Recognize Us group that organized the protest plastered the front wall of Schine with flyers that included protest demands and a twist on the words uttered in the Theta Tau video, "I solemnly swear to always have love (hatred was crossed out) in my heart."

The reaction from visiting families varied. Some held out their hands, rejecting flyers from the protesters or ducking their eyes to avoid the awkwardness of the moment. Some excitedly pumped their first and offered thumbs-up, though it was sometimes difficult to tell how genuine the expression was. Other families shook their heads sadly and gritted their teeth, a silent acknowledgment that they understood the issues involved.

After prospective students left Schine, so did the protesters, who went and stood in the cold outside the Carrier Dome, another spot on the tour for potential students.

As a black family approached the Carrier Dome, they dropped to the back of their tour group, taking it all in. It was a mother, a grandmother and her son.

"We'll see," said Valerie, a mother who didn't want to provide her last name but whose son is considering SU. "It's nice to know what you're going into beforehand. I appreciate that. They have a voice. That's what you need to know."

As one tour group approached the Carrier Dome and the protesters for the second time, their guide reversed course and headed the other direction. A few protesters followed, wanting to ensure their message was heard. Organizers called them back quickly, saying they needed to avoid any behavior that could be considered harassment.

It was one of a handful of moments where organizers tamped down the passion and anger of those in attendance.

For most part, though, the afternoon was one of unity, with a variety of marginalized groups braving early-morning wake-up calls and cold to advocate for one another.

Maya Alston skipped work to participate in the protest. Sophomore Volda Appia-Kusi received an excused absence from class. The issues of inequality were more critical than their day-to-day lives.

"If we don't have numbers here it's going to get swept under the rug," Alston said. "They're going to send another e-mail. I don't know how to help other than to show up. The fact that I have to skip class to speak about issues that have been going on for hundreds of years, it's embarrassing for America really."

They shared ideas for improvements that included a more diverse faculty and a need to incorporate diversity and bias training into first-year seminars, a step that Syracuse Chancellor Kent Syverud espoused in a list of improvements released on Thursday.

Some shared experiences of sexual assault or sexual harassment and their dissatisfaction with SU's Title IX investigations or the school's Department of Public Safety. Others shared experiences of being called the "n-word," or classroom settings where they felt they were the only people of color.

They complained of a university culture that they believe is more corporate than college and a Board of Trustees loaded with businessmen and businesswomen, where they believe money is spent on attracting wealthy students rather than supporting those in need.

The protesters said they feel like commodities with diversity touted in marketing efforts but significantly less financial effort focused on the lives of the school's diverse student body.

"The places they need to put money into are places like the LGBT resource center or, for me, the Office of Multicultural Affairs. It's like a box in the basement of Schine. You can walk it in 15 steps. You say you care about our students of color but you don't give them a large enough space."

On Friday they struck back in the way that a business understands best - by making a statement to Syracuse's future customers.

"I believe our first goal was to be seen and be heard by the SU community, the administration, the Board of Trustees and Chancellor Kent Syverud," Sotelo said. "This happens at universities all over the country. This is not only a Theta Tau problem. This is not only a Syracuse problem. It happens everywhere. But there are things I wish I had known before coming here."

Contact Chris Carlson anytime: Email | Twitter | 315-412-1639
Candidates named in city and school elections

With the passing of the filing deadline for the upcoming city and school election, several area governing bodies including the City of Tama and ...
ExxonMobil ready for 2020 compliant fuels

ExxonMobil is to supply fuels that comply with the IMOs 0.5% sulfur cap in ports in Northwest Europe, the Mediterranean and Singapore.

Additional locations will be announced throughout 2018, the company said. Our new suite of compliant fuels will include residual and distillate grades. We are at a very advanced stage in the development of these fuels, therefore making us well positioned to help customers meet the reduced sulphur limit ahead of the IMOs 2020 implementation date, said Luca Volta, marine fuels venture manager, ExxonMobil. Close collaboration with our global manufacturing, research and development teams is crucial to this process. This integrated approach has helped us to develop fuels that not only meet the ISO 8217-2017 specification, but also ensures our customers get the high quality and compliant options they need through our stringent testing protocols and fit-for-use assessments, he added. ExxonMobils IMO-compliant fuels are being formulated using proprietary patented technology that can help identify potential compatibility issues during the development process. We have developed proprietary methods for determining the compatibility of various grades of fuels as well as methods for modifying fuel composition to improve quality, stability and compatibility, explained Mike Noorman, head of fuels technology, ExxonMobil Research & Engineering. Our patented technology is helping us to develop products that address the potential hazards vessel operators could face when mixing fuels, said Volta. Vessel operators will continue to have to use lubricants specifically designed to work with the fuels they have on board to ensure that the correct level of protection is provided. ExxonMobil is developing a new range of marine lubricants specifically designed for 0.5% sulphur compliant fuels, the company said.




A new study has been conducted on the Bajau people of Malaysia and the Philippines. The small community is known for their underwater abilities to hold their breath for a long amount of time and free-diving abilities. While these features are amazing they also could be part of the natural selection.

The Bajau People

The "sea-nomads," which the Bajaus have been referred to, make their living by working eight-hour shifts fishing. A small percentage of the Bajau people still live in the traditional huts and houseboats that are stationed above the water. Simply put, they're not "land people."

While the Bajau divers today use equipment to help with their breathing when they search for the sea-critters, their ancestors have engaged in the breath-holding technique for thousands of years. Their fascinating abilities have prompted the University of Copenhagen and the University of California-Berkeley to conduct scientific studies on the anatomy of the Bajau people and the results were shared on the Cell.

"Overall, our results suggest that the Bajau have undergone unique adaptations associated with spleen size and the diving response, adding new examples to the list of remarkable genetic adaptations humans have experienced in recent evolutionary history," the researchers concluded in their notes.

A Fascinating Group Of People

Dr. Rodney C. Jubilado from the University of Hawaii who was not a part of the study stated that he first aw the Bajau people when he lived on the Samal Island in the Philippines and was always "fascinated" by them.

"We were so fascinated that they could stay underwater much longer than us local islanders. I could see them literally walking under the sea," Jubilado stated.

Another researcher who happened to stumble upon the Bajau civilization was Dr. Melissa Ilardo, who in 2015 was studying at the University of Copenhagen, conducted a study of the Bajau and another village, the Saluan. Dr. Illardo did an ultrasound on members from each village, which she compared and the results which showed the Bajau people had larger spleens.

Dr. Ilardo stated that Bajau people were like "super-humans" and that had "extraordinary" capabilities but also stated that natural selection is much more powerful than realized and should be given more credit. Dr. Ilardo also stated that she was excited to share her findings with the Bajau people as she felt that they understood the "science" behind her research and to satisfy their curiosity about the world and themselves.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
The Samsung Galaxy A6 and Galaxy A6 Plus make an appearance in a series of leaked high-resolution renders, showing some similarities with the Galaxy A8.

This marks the first time that fans are seeing what the upcoming smartphones, believed to be the successors to the Galaxy A5 (2017), could look like.

Samsung Galaxy A6 And A6 Plus Renders

The leak reveals some key design specifications such as the Infinity Display, rear fingerprint scanner, a 3.5 mm headphone jack, and a micro USB port. The micro USB port is a bit odd, though, as both the A5 and A7 in 2017 had a USB Type-C port. The Galaxy A6 duo is not expected to be cheaper than these two, so many are wondering why Samsung would opt for a micro USB port.

Overall, the Samsung Galaxy A6 lineup looks similar to the newly announced Galaxy A8 and A8 Plus, which are also alike in terms of sizes. It would put the A6 display at 5.6 inches and the A6 Plus at 6 inches. Both will have the same 18.5:9 aspect ratio, but with 2220 x 1080 resolution.

The main difference would be the dual-camera setup in the back of the Galaxy A6 Plus, which is similar to the setup in the Galaxy S9 Plus whereas the A8 Plus only has one rear sensor. As for the smaller variant, it looks like it will also sport a single camera.

Samsung Galaxy A6 And A6 Plus Specifications

The internal specifications will also vary between the Galaxy A6 and the A6 Plus. The smaller sibling is said to come with an Exynos 7870 SoC with 3 GB of RAM while the larger one will be possibly powered by a Snapdragon 625 chipset with 4 GB RAM. Both devices will have an internal storage of 32 GB and Android 8.0 Oreo out-of-the-box.

The source of the leak further claims that the new handsets from Samsung might be sold under the name Galaxy J8 and J8 Plus in some countries. SamMobile previously revealed that the Galaxy A6 and A6 Plus will be released in Russia, Europe, and the Middle East with no mention of the United States.

Upon its release, the unlocked version of the Samsung Galaxy A5 (2017) cost around $329.99. Thus, fans can expect that the price of the new Galaxy A6 will be in the same ballpark or a little higher while the A6 Plus will cost $50 more. The release date of these rumored smartphones is yet to be announced.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
Klepetan, a male stork, is flying from South Africa to Croatia yearly to mate with his partner Malena, a female handicapped stork.

Their love story has captured the hearts of Croatians and has also been gaining traction from millions of people around the world. People are particularly invested on how Klepetan surmounts the dangerous journey from South Africa, flying through Somalia, and then over the Iraqi desert, just to be with Malena in Croatia.

To date, Klepetan and Malena already have 62 babies together even if they had to go through the test of infidelity back in 2017. Klepetan's dedication is especially remarkable because a 2016 study found that white storks have started changing their migratory path because they prioritize to feed on landfills along the way.

Croatian Storks Love Story

Klepetan and Malena met on a rooftop of a small house in a village in Croatia. At the time, Malena can no longer fly after being shot by Italian hunters.

Croatian Stjepan Vokic, a 71-year-old widower, has taken Malena under his care since 1993. He keeps her in a storage building where she has everything she needs: a made-up nest, heating, and an aquarium. During spring, Vokic sees to it that he builds Malena a big nest on the roof of the building.

Yearly, it is the same place where Klepetan finds his sweetheart. Malena, as well as locales of the small town, wait for him during March.

In the early years of being together, Klepetan had always made it to Croatia not later than March 24. In 2017, however, the month passed by without him visiting Malena.

By the time he reached their nest in April, Malena was already with another male stork. Klepetan fought for her. Vokic said he had injuries and blood all over his wings after the brawl. Nevertheless, he won Malena's heart back again.

Klepetan and Malena Together Again

Perhaps traumatized by what had happened in 2017, he made it on time this year. He arrived in Croatia on March 24. However, people said that he already looked older, more tired, and dirtier than before.

Klepetan is staying with Malena until August. By then, he will have migrated back to South Africa with some of their kids.

Hopefully, he will make it back again in 2019 and would not be distracted, unlike the other white storks that no longer migrate from Europe to Africa.

Change In Migratory Habit

A study in the journal Movement Ecology on March 16, 2016, revealed that white storks have changed their migratory habit. Many of them were found to be living in Spain and Portugal the whole year round, feeding on landfill sites.

According to the study, it has been the case since the mid-1980s primarily because of human influences and global environmental change.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
The late Hans Asperger, one of the medical figures at the forefront of unearthing autism, apparently had a dark past.

A Shocking Revelation

A new research revealed that Asperger collaborated with the Nazis during World War II. Herwig Czech, a post-doctorate assistant at the Medical University of Vienna in Vienna, Austria, spent the past eight years researching the pioneering Austrian pediatrician. Czech released his findings in a new volume of Molecular Autism.

Czech was able to make the shocking connection by going through the doctor's records. While combing through the documents, Czech discovered that Asperger willingly involved himself with the Nazi Party. It turns out that Asperger worked very carefully to figure out which children were suitable to help the fascist political party.

The doctor found that if the children were unsuitable for the Nazi regime, Asperger would send them to Am Speigelgrund clinic, which the Nazis set up as a prison for the children that were considered unworthy of being part of the Nazi way of life. Nearly 800 children died at Am Speigelgrund.

Rewarding A Villain

Following the war, Asperger became the chair of pediatrics at the University of Vienna. The doctor stated when he was appointed to the role that he refused to hand over children to the Nazis. However, Czech pointed out that Asperger actually became an eager and loyal supporter. In return for his loyalty, the fascist political party promised him several career advancements.

Autism In The Headlines

As Asperger's legacy is questioned due to his ties with the Nazis, other autism and Asperger's syndrome stories have made headlines as well. Earlier this year, a Maryland family experienced their worst nightmare when their daughter, Rebecca, who suffered from both mental illness and Asperger's syndrome, became a victim of patient dumping. A video of the University of Maryland Medical Center hospital workers dropping off Rebecca, as she was wearing only socks and her hospital gown, went viral. Rebecca's family lawyer stated that she could have died from hypothermia.

Meanwhile, a National Health Interview Survey revealed that autism spectrum disorders have plateaued among children and teenagers aged 3 to 17 years old, following a 20-year increase in diagnoses. The study also showed that white children are the most inclined to develop any form of the autism spectrum disorder. In 2017, scientists discovered 18 new genes that were linked to autism.

Symptoms Of Asperger's Syndrome

Prior to Czech's revelation about Asperger's dark association with the Nazis, the doctor was hailed for his work on autism spectrum. Web-MD states that signs of Asperger's syndrome start to develop when kids enter the preschool stage. Some of the symptoms include not showing empathy, not picking up on social cues, avoiding eye contact, and having a heightened sensitivity.

As children move up into their pre-teen and teenage years, they might find the task of fitting in with their contemporaries extremely difficult and might be too immature for their age. As adults, they can learn social skills and understand their strengths and weaknesses.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
The Hubble Space Telescope is celebrating its 28th anniversary by taking stargazers on a visual exploratory treat to the Lagoon Nebula.

An Interstellar Experience

On Thursday, April 19, NASA set the Hubble Space Telescope onto the Lagoon Nebula. The celestial body is located 4,000 light-years away from Earth, while the Lagoon Nebula is 55 light-years wide and 20 light-years tall. Also, the Lagoon Nebula is three times the size of the moon, according to scientists.

While the Hubble Space Telescope only caught a section of the Lagoon Nebula, due to its massive size it was able to capture a significant event that was going on inside. A giant star, which NASA called Herschel 36, was exploding. The Hubble Space Telescope perfectly captured the star erupting and releasing radiation and winds inside the nebula.

Herschel 36 Statistics

Throughout the Hubble Space Telescope's time capturing a part of the gigantic Lagoon Nebula, NASA scientists were hard at work identifying Herschel 36. The star is 32 times bigger than the sun. Herschel 36 also beats the sun with its temperature. However, scientists believe that the sun will outlive Herschel 36. Scientists have stated that the sun is 5 billion years old and has the power to continue to light the solar system for an additional 5 billion years. Due to Herschel 36's size, the 1-million-year-old star would live for only 5 million years.

An Exclusive From NASA

Tech Times recently spoke with Jim Jeletic, the Hubble deputy project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, about the Hubble Space Telescope's milestone celebration. Jeletic noted that thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA was able to learn more about scientific discoveries such as dark energy and was able to capture Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 making an impact on Jupiter. Also, the Hubble Space Telescope led to the discovery of thousands of planets.

"From a science perspective, Hubble has changed our fundamental understanding of the universe. It has allowed us to refine our knowledge in some areas and discovered things that we never knew existed," said Jeletic in an exclusive statement to Tech Times.

The Hubble Milestone

CNET reported that since the Hubble Space Telescope launched on April 24, 1990, the telescope has made over 1.5 million observations and captured images of more than 43,500 celestial objects. It has also made over 163,500 trips around Earth, which is the equivalent of 4 billion miles. Countless astronomers have cited Hubble data in over 15,000 research papers.

Hubble In The News

In addition to the Hubble Space Telescope celebrating its milestone anniversary, the space instrument also recently captured an 'Einstein Ring,' which showcased gravitational lensing. It was also able to obtain an image of a star called Icarus that is 9 billion light-years away from Earth. NASA also challenged stargazers to find ten new galaxies and two clusters that were added to the Messler Catalog.

Click on the video to watch the telescope zoom and to fly through the Lagoon Nebula.





 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
On May 2, NASA will discuss an experiment on a new nuclear reactor power system designed for space travel at its Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.

Specifically, the agency will talk about Kilopower and how it is significant to the future of robotic and human exploration missions to the Moon, Mars, and other space destinations. The concept had been the subject of experimentations from November 2017 through March at the Nevada National Security.

Also included in the discussion is the agency's Electric Propulsion Lab, which is used to test high-power solar electric propulsion that will power NASA's lunar outpost.

Kilopower

NASA announced about the project in January, explaining that Kilopower will be important for astronauts to traverse the Moon and Mars for a longer duration. Specifically, it will provide them with a space fission power system that is capable of emitting 10 kilowatts of electricity continuously for 10 years, which is enough to provide with enough electricity for two households.

Kilopower is being designed to be a reliable and efficient power system that will be of assistance to the astronauts. It will supply them with their day-to-day needs such as lighting, water, and oxygen. It will also allow the astronauts to run experiments and produce their own fuel while in space. Four Kilopower units would provide enough power establish an outpost.

Marc Gibson, the Kilopower lead engineer at the Glenn Research Center, said in January that full-power testing for the duration of 28 hours should be done by March.

With such abundant supply of Kilopower, humans or robots can effectively thrive on Mars where sun's power is unreliable due to periodic storms that can last for months. In the case of the moon, cold lunar nights last for 14 days.

NASA's Lunar Outpost

As part of its preparation for another mission to the Moon and a mission to Mars, NASA has been building an orbital outpost to be launched in 2020 as the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway. Specifically, it shall be launched in 2022 already equipped with power and solar electric propulsion. Finally, in 2023, the lunar post can already host habitations, allowing astronauts to live and work in deep space for up to 30 to 60 days.

The Basics Of Nuclear Reactors

Reactors are essentially used for generating electricity. The technology is already being used in aircraft carriers, submarines, and in producing medical isotopes for imaging and cancer treatment.

The process involved heavy atoms that split upon absorption of neutrons. At this state, the material produce is placed into a large tank along with small neutron source. The neutron propels a chain reaction: atom splits, releases more neutrons, causing more atoms to split and then release more neutrons, and so on.

Energy in the form of heat is continuously produced because of this chain reaction. Particularly, the more atoms that split, the larger energy will be produced. The energy produced is the one that supplies the power needed to move an equipment or machine for whatever purpose it is designed to do.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
The World Health Organization says Sanofi's dengue vaccine should be administered in "a much safer way." More specifically, the shot should only be given to people who've contracted dengue in the past.

Sanofi said back in November 2017 that people who have never had dengue were at risk of developing a more serious disease if they get the shot.

After a meeting this week, WHO's independent vaccines group said it now has evidence that, indeed, the vaccine should only be used "exclusively or almost exclusively in people who have already been infected with dengue."

A test must be developed for doctors to immediately determine a person's dengue history, or lack thereof, according to the health agency. However, WHO admits that this approach isn't straightforward, as Associated Press reports.

For starters, there are significant challenges in implementing the vaccine through this approach, according to WHO, but the organization is confident this will bring about the development of a faster diagnostic test.

Dengvaxia Controversy In The Philippines

Dengue remains one of the biggest issues in the Philippines, given the recent controversies surrounding Dengvaxia. Its safety and efficacy are currently being questioned, in light of hospitalizations among children who have been given the vaccine.

WHO researchers say they're fully aware of what's happening in the Philippines, and they've been advising regional offices and monitoring the situation. The country's government suspended use of Dengvaxia last year following widespread health scares. In February, the Philippines said the vaccine could be linked to three deaths: they died even after receiving Dengvaxia shots.

Dengue

People who contract dengue more than once are at risk of developing a hemorrhagic variant of the illness. This disease, caused by mosquitos and common in tropical climates, causes flu-like symptoms that can result in joint pain, nausea, rash, and vomiting. Severe cases of this disease may induce problems with breathing, organ failure, and even death. 20,000 people, most of them children, die each year from dengue-related complications.

The global increase of dengue has grown dramatically in recent decades, according to WHO. Half of the world population is now at risk. Severe dengue is a leading cause of serious illness and death among children in some Asian and Latin American countries.

It is estimated that around 500,000 people with severe dengue require hospitalizations each year, and about 2.5 percent of those affected ultimately die.

There is no specific cure for dengue, and apart from Dengvaxia, no other licensed vaccines exist.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.
DoPs Barry Ackroyd, Danny Cohen, Greig Fraser and Neville Kidd have between them shot films and shows including The Hurt Locker, Captain Phillips, United 93, Jason Bourne, Green Zone, Detroit, The Kings Speech, Les Miserables, The Danish Girl, Room, Lion, Zero Dark Thirty, Snow White and the Huntsman, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Doctor Who, Outlander and Sherlock.

The four tell Michael Burns the secrets of their craft, and explain the techniques they used to create the work

Barry Ackroyd



CREDITS

The Hurt Locker, Captain Phillips, United 93, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Raining Stones, Jason Bourne, Green Zone, Detroit, The

I think you put together your personal style, based on the mood board, the period of the film maybe, and the directors view of it.

Once youve got the right equipment, once youre surrounded by professionals on the day, you can achieve a look, a feel, using all your experience and all the talent thats around you and make the film that you were always intending to make. Because no-one can really predict it. But thats definitely with directors that you have a particular relationship with.

I like to think that there is a strong vocabulary or an accent that you hear or see when you look at my films.

My history is in documentary and Im deeply entrenched in realism, in the intimate relationship between the camera and the subject.

I handhold the camera and Im usually just on the edge of the scene, which is a very documentary thing. You intimately link to the subject but you are not necessarily feeling the pain or the joy; youre just absorbing it all.

Cinematography is an art form, the most personal and unique way of communicating that weve developed.

Its about communication, its about people being moved by that wonderful thing of light-exciting chemicals that is now light-exciting silicon chips! But as long as we have a lens in front of the camera the process remains the same.

What has changed is not the cameras so much as visual effects and CGI work  knowing that the background can be fixed, or that we dont need to be in that location. The digital grade is just a whole new level of the dynamic. The quality of film-making has improved because of that.

I dont tend to light exteriors at all. Its fighting nature. You enhance what you can.

I have one secret weapon when working with available light [for internal scenes]  its just a down pipe, a drain pipe.

I got in the habit of taking a Kino Flo tube and a pipe just a little bigger than that. You cut out an 18inch section of the pipe, spray the inside white, clip the tube inside that and then you have a light, like a black down pipe, a stick, and then you can just move that around.

You can hide the pipe just behind a chair or a table and its just low enough to disappear behind that but throw light in the right direction. It might just lie on the floor and output a little under-light on someones head behind the chair, or just under the chin. To do that is the most subtle thing. Its how I would get the best from what seems like a very natural unlit scene.

My method comes from my documentary background. I presume that the environment that has been chosen  usually a location  is the environment, and the look is how it should look. And the performances in it, although theyre by actors, and sometimes non-actors, should be as real as life is.

So I give [the actors] all the space and we dance around them a little bit. We hide in corners and position two cameras so we get simultaneous action, and no-one is too worried about continuity. But within that is a classical framing. Itll drift with the eye if someone turns their head.

I can just listen, look and react in the same split-second way that you do in real life. Youre already informed with the script, with knowing what the actors are like, with knowing what the director is after and what the story requires. In a documentary you may never have another chance. If you miss that moment, youve missed it but in film you can do that. I think it would terrify a lot of people. I find it the most relaxing way to make a film.

I get terrified if anyone wants me to turn every shot into the most beautiful painting. I think what I do is much more like sculpture.

Every frame is precious to us and we make it work. An editor comes along and turns it into a masterpiece. It is this great collaboration. The whole film industry is about collaborating and showing respect for each other. Thats why I love it.

Danny Cohen



CREDITS

The Kings Speech, Les Miserables, The Danish Girl, Room, Victoria and Abdul, Final Portrait, This is England, Creep, John Adams, Longford, This is England86

I read a script to start with and then we start a conversation. Thats the beginning. But all directors work completely differently. Thats the one thing that is completely consistent  they are all completely inconsistent and different. Nothing prepares you for the next project.

How you prepare for each film changes. I did a film called Final Portrait, directed by Stanley Tucci, about Alberto Giacometti the artist. Weirdly, when we were testing the film there was a really good retrospective of Giacometti at the National Portrait gallery and there are tons of interviews and photographs on YouTube. It was a matter of going through lots of material about how his studio looked and what could make the film interesting. Sometimes, if its an original screenplay, then it might bear no resemblance to reality at all. In a way youve got far more freedom, because you can make it all up from scratch.

I take tons of photos. If youre discussing something a photograph is something concrete that you can show a director and he can say thats interesting, or thats boring and you get a sense of their taste.



The composition leads the eye to where you, as a storyteller, want the audience to be thinking about. Composition is a massive part of the filmmaking process, what you put in the frame and what you leave out of the frame is key.

Aspect ratio is always an interesting one. Its changing, its something that isnt locked in stone any more. Ive shot lots of films that are classic wide, but I did something at the end of last year for the BBC and we shot that 2:1 which is a framing I hadnt shot on before. Essentially thats come about because of people watching more Netflix and the big audience at home. Its just a bigger frame that fits on a TV  theres less banding top and bottom.

If its all going to be hand-held then the equipment needs to be sympathetic to that. You have to have a slimmed down, simple workflow. If its all something in a studio on cranes or a dolly then you might go a different way with a much bigger camera because you can and it makes sense. Its just all part of the process of putting a project together, looking at all the different things you need to do and how they work for the story. Its all narrative-driven.

Lighting technology is changing. Ten years ago you had to deal with three different sources  tungsten light, HMI and fluorescent lights. LED lights have come along. They consume a lot less power, you can get quite big lights now that run off 13A domestic. The equipment changing has a big impact on how you work because you can just light things with smaller lights potentially. It gives you more tools to make interesting films.

The big killer in film and TV is time  theres never enough time to do everything you have to do. The more prepared you are on the day, the more you can achieve what youre trying to do. When youre filming and youve got a big crew and big lighting setup, in a way you cant leave too much to happy accidents.

Greig Fraser



CREDITS

Lion, Zero Dark Thirty, Snow White and the Huntsman, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Mary Magdalene, Foxcatcher, Let Me In, The Gambler, Bright Star



Im a really big fan of getting involved very early on because the photography can paint a thousand words. A good, strong script is very, very important but I believe that the visuals can augment that script massively.

One of the beautiful aspects of the journey of discovery with a director is coming up with the same visual language, coming to the same conclusion via our different paths. And thats really quite satisfying, when youve worked at growing an idea together, either through pre-visualisation, through locations, through discussions, through referencing and then you come to that end product. Its a small idea, a seedling at the beginning, that you contribute to and you end up having, hopefully, something really good.

You can over-plan in my opinion. You can basically shoot the whole day in your head and then something on the day happens where something changes. The weather comes in or you cant shoot in that direction because theres a truck parked there. If youre 100% fully planned, that will throw you into a spin. Im not saying you shouldnt plan or shouldnt [story]board. I love boarding and I get a lot out of it. It means that we can tick a box, before weve even walked on set. Being on set is really expensive time.

We really make sure we have all the tools at our disposal to test. For Mary Magdalene, which Ive just finished with Garth Davis, we tested 35mm anamorphic lenses because wed just shot Lion on that. However after we tested all the formats, we decided that 65mm had the most open, the most beautiful, wide scope.

To make a movie that is coherent visually, youve got to follow a framework. That framework might be that the lenses are a certain width, the lighting is a certain brightness there are certain rules that you could follow to make a film feel coherent. For example, on Foxcatcher, one of the rules that I gave my camera operator was to imagine the camera was on valium. If it moves, it doesnt move in a reactionary way to a sound. Its a little bit late to an action. A lot of the story is told really slowly, very methodically, quite beautifully in the sense that the pans and moves are slow. Kind of like youre blissing out.

Camera movement depends on the project. I love hand-held. I loved doing Zero Dark Thirty. Its one of my favourite camera styles, but at the same time [if] you shot Foxcatcher like Zero Dark Thirty, it would be a different movie. And vice-versa. You just couldnt. But if you were to mix those two together you can really come up with some interesting drama changes.



I always get to the end of a job and hope Ive shown the design in the very best way. Thats the design of the costumes too. The art department consists of hundreds of other people too  model-makers, painters, builders, carpenters Ive seen these guys labour for hours and days over things. I have a huge amount of respect for that. If Ive not shown them in the best light, I havent succeeded. It would do them a huge disservice.

Neville Kidd



CREDITS

Doctor Who, Outlander, Sherlock, Childhoods End, Altered Carbon, A History of Scotland, Lip Service, A History of Celtic Britain

You have a hugely close relationship with the directors. You are given the prep time to spend with the director, to look at the scripts, to find ways of telling the story, what trick shots you want to bring in, whether you want to bring in drones or aerial shots or how many cranes its working out how many ways to slice a pie. Its working out where to spend the money, where not to.

When youre doing a lot of VFX work youve got to make decisions very early on. You will make a bit of a pre-vis, and the stunts guys will make a pre-vis of the stunts. Well make a pre-vis of the VFX work, well combine that and then well get the studio or network approval, and then well film it.

Use camera movement and framing to keep peoples attention. When you look at the scripts, you look at each scene and work out whose scene it is. Who are you going to focus on? Whose story are you telling in that moment? Whose emotional journey do you want the viewer to go with? That kind of dictates where the camera is going.

One of your jobs as DP is to make your world as big as possible. Were now filming for people with televisions that have big screens. Whereas several years ago you were filming for people watching on a 32inch screen. Its taking that scope and making it bigger so you can show more of your world than you traditionally could before.

The advances in LED lighting technology mean you can just change colour temperature with the press of a button. Its made our lives hugely easier. LED takes a lot less power, so power consumption has come down. We use a lot of Sky Panels for street scenes and chase sequences, so we can go from daytime to nighttime without having to change the fixtures. Weve got far more control than weve ever had.

When youre doing documentary you learn to be adaptable. I think you can take that into the drama world and keep the pace going. In episodic youve got to build to get a momentum going to be able to complete the days, and film the days page count, on time, on budget.

Traditionally you did one grade but [with Netflix] youve now also got to do an HDR grade. But when you put an HDR look on it, its phenomenal. Its almost like its two and a half D. The pictures almost start to pop out at you, because HDR televisions are so much brighter and you have so much more extremes with your whites and colours. Its absolutely phenomenal to see.

What makes a good DP? Theres a way you see the world and its the way you transfer that through the cameras. I read the script and I shut my eyes and I know Ive done my job when what Ive seen in my head is what I can see on the monitor. And if you combine that with collaboration, with the directors and the show runners and producers and production designers, I think thats a huge skill. You cant have egos that demand attention. You need to be all able to work together for the greater good. The show is number one, everyone is rooting for it, and nothing is bigger than the show.

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Four former LSU students pleaded not guilty Friday, one to negligent homicide and the others to misdemeanor hazing, in the alcohol-related death of 18-year-old Phi Delta Theta fraternity pledge Maxwell Gruver on the Baton Rouge campus last September.

State District Judge Beau Higginbotham set a Sept. 6 trial date for Sean-Paul Gott, 21, Ryan Matthew Isto, 19, and Patrick Andrew Forde, 21, on the hazing counts. Matthew Alexander Naquin, 20, who is charged with the more serious felony of negligent homicide, will have a motions hearing on that date.

+4 Grand jury probe into LSU fraternity pledge's alleged hazing death indicts 4 men Six months after his death rocked the LSU campus and spurred some state lawmakers to action, an East Baton Rouge Parish grand jury that invest

Naquins attorney, John McLindon, said his client is being singled out.

Naquin, of Fair Oaks Ranch, Texas; Gott, of Lafayette; and Isto, of Ontario, Canada, entered their pleas in person. Forde, of Westwood, Massachusetts, did not attend the arraignments. His attorney pleaded not guilty for him.

The four men were indicted last month by an East Baton Rouge Parish grand jury in the alleged hazing death of Gruver on Sept. 14.

Investigators have said Gruver, of Roswell, Georgia, was targeted by senior members of Phi Delta Theta in a hazing ritual they called "Bible study" that required pledges to chug 190-proof liquor when they gave wrong answers to questions about the fraternity.

Gruver's blood alcohol level was 0.495 percent, or more than six times the legal limit to drive, his autopsy revealed. The coroner's office said his death was an accident but could be attributed to alcohol poisoning and aspiration, which means he suffocated on his own vomit.

'Max Gruver Act' to create harsher penalties for hazing in Louisiana swiftly wins House passage, heads to Senate Louisiana could soon be among the states with the strictest criminal penalties for hazing after the death of an LSU freshman last fall has pro

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The problem with alcohol on campuses is bigger than just one person, its bigger than Matthew Naquin, McLindon said outside Higginbothams courtroom. I think hes being singled out.

Negligent homicide is punishable by up to five years in prison. Hazing carries up to 30 days in jail.

Istos attorney, Michael Fiser, said Isto pleaded not guilty because he is innocent.

He is terribly sorry for the pain this tragedy has caused the Gruver family, and we look forward to showing Mr. Istos lack of involvement as the case proceeds, Fiser said.

McLindon and Kris Perret, who represents Forde, said they look forward to plowing through the voluminous discovery material in the case and the witness statements.

Phi Delta Theta's national headquarters pulled the fraternity from LSU's campus after Gruver died. Less than a year before his death, the fraternity had been temporarily suspended for complaints about hazing and drinking.

In a recent policy change that LSU President F. King Alexander said will be enforced with zero tolerance, LSU students caught hazing will be expelled and the involved fraternities or other student organizations will be kicked off campus.
A 21-year-old Baton Rouge woman was sentenced to five years in prison Friday in the horrific, bedsore-related death of her 82-year-old grandmother in 2014.

Lauren Looney was charged with manslaughter in the death of Bessie Looney but pleaded guilty last month to negligent homicide. Five years in prison is the maximum sentence allowed for negligent homicide.

+4 Granddaughter pleads guilty to negligent homicide in 82-year-old woman's gruesome 2014 death A 21-year-old Baton Rouge woman pleaded guilty Wednesday to negligent homicide in the gruesome 2014 bedsore-related death of her 82-year-old g

Joleslie Looney, 56, the mother of Lauren Looney and daughter of Bessie Looney, was convicted of manslaughter in February and is awaiting sentencing May 31. She faces up to 40 years behind bars.

State District Judge Mike Erwin said hell recommend to Louisiana corrections officials that Lauren Looney's prison term include a nine-month rehabilitation program where she would receive drug and mental health treatment and learn life skills.

Gail Ray, who represents the young woman, said outside Erwins courtroom that there are three generations of mental health issues in the Looney family.

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Hopefully shell get some help and the cycle will stop, Ray said.

Lauren Looney was 17 when her emaciated grandmother was found folded over in a wheelchair in their North Acadian Thruway West home, sitting in her own waste and riddled with bedsores.

East Baton Rouge Parish Coroner Dr. Beau Clark classified Bessie Looney's death a homicide, saying she died from a blood infection caused by severely infected bedsores. Malnutrition, dementia and heart disease contributed to her death, he said.

Joleslie and Lauren Looney told police they were aware of her condition but said it didnt appear severe to them, an affidavit of probable cause stated.

Lauren Looney was arrested last summer and booked on drug counts involving cocaine and marijuana. Those counts were dismissed Friday.
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Copies of the memos written by former FBI Director James Comey are photographed in Washington, Thursday, April 19, 2018. President Donald Trump told former FBI Director James Comey that he had serious concerns about the judgment of his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, according to memos maintained by Comey and obtained by The Associated Press. The 15 pages of documents contain new details about a series of interactions that Comey had with Trump in the weeks before his May 2017 firing. Those encounters include a White House dinner at which Comey says Trump asked him for his loyalty.
A former instructor at an alternative school in Mandeville is facing criminal charges and a lawsuit after he was accused of brutalizing a 12-year-old boy under his supervision.

The suit, filed by the boy's mother in federal court in New Orleans, claims civil-rights violations. It alleges that Johnathan Johnson "viciously" beat her son on an almost daily basis, and that the top school official in St. Tammany Parish did nothing about it even after the abuse was brought to his attention.

St. Tammany Parish Schools Superintendent Trey Folse is named as a defendant along with the Parish School Board and Johnson.

A spokeswoman for the school district declined to comment on the case or turn over any records related to Johnson's employment status.

The suit, which refers to the boy only by his initials, claims that Johnson was motivated by hate for the 12-year-old, whom he stalked at the school and serially, repeatedly, viciously and almost daily kicked, beat, slapped, punched."

Can't see video below? Click here.

The abuse "caused Q.M. extensive, permanent physical and mental damages for which he has been required to seek mental and physical care which is anticipated to go on into the far future if not for Q.M.s entire life," the suit says.

The school, dubbed Project Believe and described as a paramilitary-style environment by administrator Corwin Robinson in a promotional video, is for students recommended for expulsion from other public schools in St. Tammany.

The 12-year-old was sent there in January 2017, according to the suit, because of emotional and developmental problems. But the environment there only made things worse, the suit says.

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His mother, Quintrell Miller, claims in the suit that her son was terrified of going to school and now requires intense psychiatric care. She said she worries he suffers from brain trauma.

Miller said she alerted school administrators to the abuse in April 2017, but nothing was done and the beatings continued.

Around that same time, Miller reached out to Folse, according to the lawsuit, which says she made multiple calls to him, but nothing was done and the unwarranted attacks continued.

The lawsuit alleges that the boys grandmother, Carol Miller, later went to pick him up from school, where she saw him being pushed and hit by Johnson. It says she recorded much of the incident on video and turned it over to Folse, who then fired Johnson on or about April 24, 2017.

The School Board refused to provide any documents related to Johnson or his termination.

Johnson was arrested on June 1, 2017, and booked on one count of cruelty to a juvenile, which the lawsuit claims was related to the incident shown in the video.

Court records in the case are sealed because the alleged victim is a juvenile. But Johnson faces trial in that case May 21 in Louisianas 22nd Judicial District Court.

Millers federal lawsuit makes clear that without the video, she believes the beatings would have continued, saying the School Board became aware of the Johnson attacks on Q.M. but did nothing to stop them until School Board received video of an actual event.

The lawsuit claims the attacks violated the boys constitutional rights to free speech, to be free from unreasonable search and seizure and to be free of false imprisonment, among other constitutional violations.
Byron Morgan was a 17-year-old Orleans Parish jail inmate when he accused three other prisoners of raping him inside the lockup.

Nearly a quarter-century later, Morgan took the witness stand Thursday and claimed it was all a lie.

The men he helped convict  Louis Alexander Jr., Gerald LeBoeuf and Michael C. Williams Jr.  all are serving life prison sentences following their convictions at a 1995 trial.

Joe Rome, Williams' attorney, said he plans to file a new legal challenge based on Morgans recantation, arguing it amounts to newly discovered evidence.

Criminal District Court Judge Byron C. Williams granted Morgan a chance to take the stand outside of any pending legal matters in the case because he suffers from a terminal illness, the nature of which he revealed only behind closed doors in the judges chambers.

The judge and Michael Williams are not related.

Ken Daley, a spokesman for Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaros office, declined to comment on Morgans testimony, citing an office policy against discussing open cases.

Complicating matters, a prosecutor with the District Attorneys Office has said the court clerks office has been unable to locate the case file.

Morgan, who now lives in Houston, lit a cigarette on the courthouse steps Thursday as he described his relief over his just-completed testimony.

Oh, God, I feel like 1,000 bricks lifted off me, he said. On the day of judgment when I stand before my God, I want the record to be clear Ive done everything in my ability to have these guys vindicated.

Doctors basically told me to take care of my affairs, he said of his undisclosed illness.

Now 42, Morgan recalled trying over many years to get anyone in the District Attorneys Office, or elsewhere, to hear him out.

According to an account by a prosecutor, citing a 1996 appeals court ruling in the case, Morgan had been jailed for 10 days on a one-year sentence for breaking into his girlfriends house when he made the rape allegation.

He claimed LeBoeuf enticed him to his cell and raped him before all three men forced him to perform oral sex on them.

A medical examination indicated signs of rape, Assistant District Attorney Kyle Daly said, citing the appeals courts summary of the case.

Morgan, however, said Thursday he was never given a full rape exam.

He lodged a lawsuit in 1995 against the Orleans Parish Sheriffs Office and the city over the alleged rape, but soon aborted it because he knew the rape never happened, he said.

I was 17 years old. I was scared. I wanted to go home, he said of the allegation he made. He said another inmate told him he would go free if he implicated the three men.

Morgan also claimed that the prosecution of the three men was marred by impropriety. He said investigators met with him a few days before the trial in November 1995 and basically gave me a script to read, while comparing notes with another inmate witness.

Morgan acknowledged getting into his own share of criminal trouble. He said he last left prison in 2014 and at one point had tried to contact one of the defendants in the case through prison channels.

Ive tried to make a right to the wrong for decades, he said.

Desiree Williams, Michael Williams mother, said she felt wonderful that the truth is out. She said her son has always denied the rape that landed him a life sentence with no shot at parole.

At the same time, he also is serving a 65-year sentence for a shooting, she said.

Morgans recantation could provoke new legal troubles for him. It came just three days after another man, William Varnado, received a five-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to perjury for recanting his identification of a murder suspect at a trial in 2000.

Varnado was only the latest recanting witness that Cannizzaro's office has charged with perjury under a criminal statute that says prosecutors dont need to prove when such a witness lied, only that he offered conflicting testimony on different occasions.

Defense attorneys have warned that Cannizzaros aggressive prosecution of recanting witnesses risks scaring off others who might otherwise come forward to reveal long-ago misconduct. Given the citys long record of wrongful convictions, those witnesses need to be encouraged, not threatened with prison, critics say.

Morgan said he's aware of the legal danger he faces, but undeterred, particularly given his terminal condition.

I hope to be home with God when those times come, he said.

Judge Williams set a May 18 date for new legal filings in the case.

Staff writer Matt Sledge contributed to this article.
New Orleans officials have reached a settlement with the children of Kim Groves, the 9th Ward woman who was murdered on the order of a police officer after she filed a complaint against him in 1994.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu made the announcement Thursday at a conference on policing reform that also featured civil rights attorney Mary Howell, who represents the Groves family.

Landrieu did not reveal details or financial terms of the settlement.

He said he settled the suit and other civil rights claims "so that this city could reconcile itself to the notion that we have to be one."

Groves relatives first filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against former cop Len Davis and the city 23 years ago. The lawsuit was placed on hold while Davis  who is on federal death row in Indiana  pursued appeals of his conviction for ordering the hit.

The man who actually shot Groves to death in front of her house, Paul "Cool" Hardy, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2011.

+4 A murder 20 years ago marked low point for NOPD Two decades ago, amid one of the darkest chapters in the citys history, a flurry of scandals brought the New Orleans Police Department to its knees.

It's not clear what changed to allow for the settlement to be reached just days before the end of Landrieu's term.

Meanwhile, U.S. District Judge Ivan Lemelle rejected an appeal from Davis and Hardy last month, calling the evidence of their guilt "overwhelming."

The killing of Groves symbolized the Police Department's dysfunction in 1994, a year which also saw an unprecedented 421 murders.

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Officials said that Davis, a cop who was nicknamed the "Desire terrorist," was operating a protection racket for drug dealers when Groves filed a civil rights complaint against him, telling investigators that she saw him beating a youth named Nathan Norwood. The complaint was supposed to be confidential but Davis caught wind of it.

FBI agents were already targeting Davis and other officers with a wiretapping operation. Their tape recorders caught Davis tracking down Groves and ordering Hardy to kill her.

Hardy shot Groves once in the head in the 1300 block of Alabo Street on Oct. 13, 1994. Hardy and Davis were arrested two months later.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Groves' children Jasmine, Stephanie and Corey in 1995. All three were juveniles at the time. Norwood was also listed as a plaintiff.

Groves' grandmother and father were also included at one time, but Corey said in a 2014 letter to the court that they had since died.

Begging the court for a speedy settlement, Corey said he was reduced to near homelessness and one of his sisters resorted to pawning items to stay afloat in the years since their mother's death.

"Since 1994, myself and also my sisters have had children of our own and supporting our growing families hasn't been an easy task, mainly without the guidance of the people who showed us what family is all about, but also financial hardship has (hurt) all three of us terribly," he said.

Groves' relatives and the city have yet to request a formal dismissal of the civil rights claim in federal court, but that final step could come soon. Howell declined to comment.

"The murder of Kim Groves is a dark and shameful chapter in our citys history," City Attorney Rebecca Dietz said in a statement. "Under Mayor Landrieus leadership, the city has prioritized resolving legacy police misconduct lawsuits in order to take responsibility, begin healing and bring closure to the victims and their loved ones."
An Orleans Parish coroners van driver dealt heroin in conjunction with a ring that has ties to Colombia and was running drugs into the city from Houston, according to a federal indictment that was partially unsealed Thursday.

The driver, Rodney Sugar Man Robinson, was arrested last week and fired.

The indictment charges Robinson with conspiring to deal heroin alongside at least four men from the New Orleans area and three others from Houston between Dec. 11 and April 13. It also charges him with dealing heroin on July 19.

While the indictment doesnt elaborate, criminal complaints that led to the arrests of seven of Robinsons co-defendants outline how federal agents used wiretapped phone calls, confidential informants, surveillance and electronic tracking to assemble evidence implicating the men.

One of those complaints asserted that Alexander Muriel Diaz, of Houston, arranged narcotics shipments for Juan Carlos Mosquera Amari, who was living in New Orleans Carrollton neighborhood. Luis Ramos Peralta, of Kenner; Steven Duncan, of Metairie; and Carlos Alberto Gonzalez Valencia and Jose Antonio Valverde Chacon, both of Houston, were accused of having a hand in subsequent deals as well.

Muriel, Mosquera, Ramos, Duncan, Gonzalez and Valverde were all charged in March. An indictment that a federal grand jury in New Orleans handed up under seal on April 13 then added the names of Robinson and John Rookie Jones to the case.

The court documents dont elaborate on Robinsons alleged role or on a passing reference to the groups alleged ties to Colombia, the South American nation that is a major source of illegal drugs.

They do say that Jones is suspected of buying heroin from Mosquera and then reselling it to customers in the New Orleans area. He is also charged with possessing two pistols even though he was prohibited from having guns following a 2002 cocaine conspiracy conviction.

The April 13 indictment includes a ninth name, but it was blacked out in the copy of the charges unsealed Thursday. Officials said that was because the defendant remained at large.

Jones was arrested April 5. Federal agents then arrested Robinson, a veteran employee of the Orleans Parish Coroners Office, when he arrived to pick up the body of a person in Algiers who was the victim of a suspected drug overdose.

Coroner Jeffrey Rouse said he fired Robinson shortly after his arrest, but he has not commented on the allegations beyond that.

The coroner, who is leaving office next month, has spent much of his tenure leading a public awareness campaign about the spiking death toll caused by the abuse of heroin and other opioids.

Rouse has pushed for New Orleans officials to improve local addiction treatment resources rather than prosecute addicts.

Robinson's exact age hasn't been made available, though court records say he was born in 1958.
And it's finally here!

Almost a year after her tragic Manchester concert, Ariana has released a brand new song 'No Tears Left To Cry'. Not only did we get the song though, Ariana also surprised us with a music video at the exact same time directed by Dave Meyers who has previously worked with Kendrick Lamar, SZA, and Camila Cabello (so you know it's going to be good).

Watch the full video below:
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Linkedin Farid Muttaqin (The Jakarta Post) Binghamton, New York  Fri, April 20, 2018 11:45 1262 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cf8c8cf 3 Opinion Islam,women-empowerment,feminism,conservatism,kartini,Kartini-day Free

We are witnessing overwhelming efforts to Islamize the nations feminist movement. To what does this Islamization refer, and how does it intersect with the aims of political Islam?



On May 2, 1964, president Sukarno declared RA Kartini a heroine of independence and her birthday, April 21, was named Kartini Day, the national day of womens liberation. The declaration laid claim to the womens movement as an authentic, indigenously Indonesian idea, rather than one brought to the country by outsiders, including the Dutch colonizers.



This action contributed significantly to nation-building efforts; to show Indonesians and the world that the fledgling country had both the inherent resources and domestic capacity to liberate, emancipate and empower its women.



Second president Soeharto used Kartini Day as a symbol of womens empowerment to encourage Indonesian women to participate actively of in national development programs.



These women were showcased as the ideal Indonesian woman that stood behind the governments programs while happily maintaining their traditional roles of womanhood.



Throughout the post-Soeharto era, public debate increased over who had contributed the most to improving womens rights and empowerment.



Along with the rise of political Islam and their intent to adopt their interpretation of sharia in state laws and in daily practice, groups such as Hizbut Tahrir Indonesia, supporters of the Islam-oriented Prosperous Justice Party and others have been campaigning for official recognition of Islams strong contribution to the womens rights movement.



Islamization here refers to part of the political Islamist agenda which attempts to replace more dominant secular and liberal ideas of womens rights and gender equality with norms and ideals believed to be Islamic.



Such groups view the declaration of Kartini as the heroine of both the nationalist movement and womens emancipation as a political maneuver to highlight the secular nationalism that had abandoned Islamic nationalism.



Kartini came from a non-religious Javanese aristocratic family, while her ideas on womens liberation were thought to be greatly influenced by her close friendship with Dutch figures like J.H. Abendanon. Kartini was considered to be Westernized and secular, rather than Islamic and authentically Indonesian.



To replace the dominant image of Kartini as a symbol of the national emancipation movement, these Islamic groups have attempted to campaign for more Islamic figures such as Nyai Ahmad Dahlan, Rohana Kudus, Rasuna Said and Tjut Nyak Dien.



A historical reinterpretation even attempts to Islamize Kartini. She apparently studied Islam under Kyai Saleh Darat, a Muslim cleric of noble birth in her hometown, and even built a critical view on womens conditions under an Islamic framework from her Islamic studies.



The claims are inseparable from the ongoing struggle of Islamic groups to increase Muslim dominance in Indonesias social and political life. They seek to ensure that gender norms and gender justice derive from a patriarchal interpretation of Islam.



Secular and Westernized gender norms are seen as contradictory to Islam and cannot be applied in Indonesia, the largest country with a Muslim-majority population.



In Aceh, for instance, some groups say Kartini should not be the role model for a good Indonesian and a good Acehnese. Hence, a major issue in the Islamization of the national womens movement is its projection of good and bad citizens.



This categorization implies that only a very specific, conservative, patriarchal interpretation of gender is valid. Such campaigns also imply that only a particular Islamic group or groups have the authority to determine who is good and bad in terms of gender.



It is hard to find that diverse sexual identities are being accommodated under the conservative, Islamist gender regime.



As reflected in the attempts to criminalize consensual homosexual relations, such efforts challenge Indonesias feminist movement on its never-ending agenda to liberate women from gender injustice and sexual oppression.



To respond to this Islamization of Indonesias feminist movement, womens groups should continue to highlight how feminism is compatible with Islams fundamental message of humanity. More studies are needed into female figures who are Muslim and their ideas on emancipation with reference to critical views on Islam. For example, the feminist interpretation of the Quranic verses on homosexuality leads to an understanding that Islam protects the rights of homosexuals.



Likewise, the feminist interpretation of polygamy also concludes that the verses do not encourage polygamy, as the practice tends to lead to violence against women. The struggle of the national womens movement cannot be merely part of the political ideology agenda.

***

The writer is a doctoral student of anthropology at the State University of New York. He is preparing a research paper on Islamic fundamentalism and the politics of gender in contemporary Indonesia.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official stance of The Jakarta Post.
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Linkedin - (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta, Indonesia  Fri, April 20, 2018

Over half of teenage girls around the world do not have high self-esteem about the shape of their body, according to the 2017 Dove Global Girls Beauty and Confidence Report. It is the largest study by the personal care brand and examines the impact of self-esteem, pressures and confidence on girls and their bodies.

Dove found that girls who have such low self-esteem about their body opt out of important life experiences and as a result may never reach their full potential. This is not only detrimental to girls but to society, as it ends up missing out on the next generation of female leaders.

In 2004, Dove launched the Dove Self-Esteem Project (DSEP), as part of its social mission and ongoing commitment to help girls and young women develop a positive relationship with the way they look.

Through DSEP, the brand has made an impact on the lives of more than 20 million young people around the world, making it the worlds largest evidence-based self-esteem program. It is part of the company's mission to alter perceptions of beauty into a source of confidence instead of anxiety.

Building body positivity in Indonesia

Indonesia is one of the countries where Dove (and its brand owner Unilever) has worked in to build self-esteem among young people.

"The main purpose of this project is to promote that nobody should feel bad about themselves. Many young girls go through body shaming. They're not comfortable in their skin, they think they're not beautiful. The whole objective of this project is to make sure that the young women of Indonesia and across the world are very confident about themselves and how they look, and there's no body shaming involved," said Asima Haq, head of the hair care division at Unilever Indonesia.

Confidence is important, as Dove Indonesia's DSEP partner in the country, non-profit organization Indonesia Mengajar (Indonesia Teaches), has found.

Among the areas Indonesia Mengajar has focused on includes remote areas from Aceh to Papua. What they have discovered is that while body positivity among young women in Indonesia is as low as their global counterparts, confidence among people in these remote regions is particularly low.

"Why do the winners of student contests tend to be from Jakarta? It's because students in remote regions tend to have low self-esteem. Their parents and teachers discourage them from competing, for fear it might bring shame to them," said Haifa, a representative of the non-profit.

Inspiring SMAN 74 students

. (JP/Ben Latuihamallo)

Dove's most recent endeavor in building self-esteem among teens saw the brand visiting SMAN 74 state high school in Kebayoran Lama Selatan, South Jakarta, and hosting a talk show to encourage body positivity among the students.

Held on April 16, the event served as to commemorate Kartini Day, which falls annually on April 21.

Guests and speakers included successful women and inspiring figures such as Angkie Yudistia, a deaf woman who has written inspirational books and helped 1,021 other people with disabilities gain employment in vocational fields and places such as call centers and data input centers.

It also included fashion photographer Nicoline Patricia Malina, Liputan6.com lifestyle editor Adinda Tri Wardhani and Elvi Hendrani, who is head of data and analysis of violence against women and children at the Women's Empowerment and Child Protection Ministry.

Each of these women shared with students their stories of growing up and the confidence-related hurdles they faced on their road to success. Nicoline Patricia Malina, for example, was often belittled by her peers for being too skinny.

"The more you think about what you don't have, the less confidence you have. As I grow older, I realized that whatever kind of body we have, what's important is that we are healthy and grateful for what we are given," Nicoline said.

Likewise, Elvi Hendrani was often bullied by her parents and teachers for being terrible at mathematics. It wasn't until she met a neighbor who was studying at university that math began to click for her.

"At school, all the bullying from my teacher put me out of my comfort zone. But when I studied math with my neighbor, I found it easier to learn. This boost in confidence was important for me," said Elvi, who later on in life would go on to earn a degree in mathematics.

The event also included a workshop, during which Dove invited several dozen SMAN 74 high school girls to examine and alter their self-perceptions of the "ideal" woman.

Students were asked to fill out surveys that contained questions such as whether or not they like seeing themselves in photographs or whether or not they are worried about what others have to say about their appearance. The girls were also asked to draw what they viewed to be the ideal woman and to reconsider what it means to be beautiful.

Nurturing future presidents

Dove's workshop and talk show at SMAN 74 was just one of the ways the company has worked to build self-esteem among young girls. The DSEP has been active in the country since 2016.

In its two years of activity in Indonesia, the DSEP has reached out to and affected the lives of more than 140,000 teens from 267 schools across the archipelago. By 2018, Dove's goal is to reach another 150,000 teens. Globally, Dove wants to reach 40 million young people by 2020.

Dove cited historical figures like Kartini to the students at SMAN 74 and how womens confidence has helped create a better world.

"Women in history were confident. They didn't wait for the perfect conditions. Their confidence came first, then they created change," said Tina Talisa, a talk show presenter who served as one of the workshops speakers.

According to Alawuddin, SMAN 74's principal, building confidence is important for giving the country its future female presidents.

"I am grateful for Dove's efforts in helping our students become more confident. Students in this era of globalization tend to be more insecure, as they always have technology that allows them to access images that affect their perceptions of body image. I hope that these girls can pursue a concept of self so that they can make the most of the opportunities presented to them. Do not despair. Be confident and become leaders, even presidents. We have only had one female president in Indonesia. I hope that within the next 20 years we can have our second female president," Alawuddin said.
Meghan Markle's half-brother has accused the royal bride-to-be of forgetting "her roots and her family" and "acting phoney" in a stinging interview with a British newspaper.

Thomas Markle, who lives in the US state Oregon, hit out at Prince Harry's 36-year-old American fiancee for losing touch with relatives in recent years after finding fame acting.

"She is giving the greatest performance of her life," he told the Daily Mirror in an interview published on Thursday.

"She is acting phoney. Once she got into Hollywood she turned into a different person.

"She's clearly forgotten her roots and her family."

He added: "Meg likes to portray herself as a humanitarian, a people's person and a charitable person but she is none of those things to her family."

Markle will marry Prince Harry in exactly one month in a chapel inside Windsor Castle in front of 600 invited guests.

A further 2,640 people will be welcomed into the castle grounds.

Read also: Prince Harry and Meghan Markle: A tale of love at first sight

Thomas Markle revealed he had not received an invite, despite claiming to have spent many weekends together caring for their dementia-stricken grandmother from 2009 to 2011.

He is the latest relative on her father's side to go public on the apparent family rift.

Half-sister Samantha Grant has given interviews and posted messages on social media concerning the fractured relations.

The half-brother said he hoped senior royals might step in to ensure he and other relatives get invited to the wedding.

The siblings share the same father, who reportedly lives in Mexico.

There has been no confirmation on whether he will attend the May 19 nuptials.

Thomas Markle noted their father was present for Meghan Markle's first wedding, to film producer ex-husband Trevor Engelson, in Jamaica in 2011.
A plain, yet meticulously crafted, sweater made of the worlds finest cashmere can cost $2,000 or more from premier fashion labels such as Loro Piana. You can also grab a simple sweater of 100 percent cashmere off a discount rack at Uniqlo for as little as $29.90.

Made from the softest wool produced by a certain breeds of goats, such as the Zalaa Ginst white goat and Tibetan Plateau goat, cashmere was once reserved for the wealthiest fashionistas. (Napoleon Bonapartes wife helped popularize the fabric.) But over the past two decades, its cachet skyrocketed and cheaper garments flooded the market.

Nearly $1.4 billion of cashmere garments were exported globally in 2016, up from $1.2 billion in 2010, according to United Nations trade data. That's nearly 5 million kilograms worth of pullovers, cardigans, and other tops. Now its seemingly everywhere, at every price point. Ubiquity can spell trouble for a product as it becomes more of a commodity, especially one thats been historically marketed as a luxury item.

So what makes one sweater better than another? The price depends on the quality of the yarn, where the garment was manufactured, the number of units purchased by the brand, and the markup.

The quality of the raw material often matters most. Lengthier cashmere fibers maintain their integrity for a longer time, allowing garments to retain their structure. Pillingthe small balls that form on the fabric as it chafesis more common in garments made of shorter cashmere strands. These days, manufacturers frequently make the clothes out of a mix of lengths to balance quality with cost.

The thickness of the yarn used for the fabric determines its durability. So-called single-ply yarn is the weakest and can quickly lead to holes in a favorite sweater. Higher-quality cashmere pieces are typically two or three strands thick.

Finer and smoother individual strands create softer garments, but they are rare and thus, cost more. American consumers value this softness above all else.

The customer cares more about the hand-feel than they care about the durability or the color saturation, said Matt Scanlan, chief executive officer of sustainable cashmere label Naadam. They dont even care if it starts to pill. Weve just become used to it.

Cashmere goats are bred in various locations around the world, including Australia, China, and Mongolia, but Scotland and Italy are known for cashmere-manufacturing prowess. Luxury fashion houses such as Loro Piana and Brunello Cuccinelli depend on the expertise of their workers to wash, treat, and refine the fabric. Cashmere, for instance, repels a lot of dye. Italy, however, has developed ways to achieve strong saturation.

Not every manufacturer takes such care. Blended versions of cashmere sweaters, available at most retailers these days, can contain varying quantities of the fabric. In some cases, as little as 5 percent of a garment is made from the good stuff, with the rest a combination of mass-market fabrics such as polyester or nylon. The product is still marketed as a cashmere-blend.

Occasionally, even fake cashmere makes it to store shelves. "There is certainly fraud on this front, says Frances Kozen, a director at the Cornell Institute of Fashion and Fiber Innovation. Deceitful sellers and counterfeiters sometimes create cashmere blends labeled 100 percent cashmere that contain wool, viscose rayon, and acrylicand possibly even rat fur, she says.

The lower-quality blends, occasional outright fraud, and ubiquity has diluted cashmeres luxe reputation, and shoppers have slowly gotten used to lower-quality product.

Read also: Batik 'tulis' may provide attractive investment option

The industry is attempting to rehabilitate the fabrics reputation by educating consumers as to where cashmere comes from. Naadam, Scanlans cashmere label, assures customers that it uses only the longest fibers, promising that this will make the garments last longer. The label touts its sustainable grazing practices and lack of chemicals or bleaches. Sweaters from Naadam arent cheap, going for $125 to $225, so the brand must show shoppers why its worth their cash.

Cashmere still has a lot of meaning for people, even though a lot of brands have bastardized what a lot of words mean, says Shilpa Shah, co-founder of clothing and accessories label Cuyana. The brands cashmere sweaters are manufactured in Scotland and Italy and cost from $155 to $495. They dont match up to the quality of what youll find from designers at a much higher price, but Shah insists they get close.

As for the lesser-quality cashmere being sold, Shah has an optimistic view: At least shoppers are trying some kind of cashmere and may seek out better versions. In some sense, I should be thanking them, Shah says of the cheap cashmere sellers, because its an introduction to what the material could be.
The path that advertising practitioner Marianne Admardatine has taken toward her latest position as the CEO of J. Walter Thompson Company Indonesia, comprising Mirum and J. Walter Thompson, after having worked for several other advertising consultants, has not been easy.

The highly energetic woman recalled an incident where, years ago, a particular agency she worked for actually withheld her promotion from general manager to managing director upon finding out that she was pregnant with twins.

The companys management somehow doubted that during her pregnancy and the early days of motherhood she could actually put out the same productivity level as before.

I insisted to them that I would carry on working while I was pregnant, without lessening my productivity at all, Marianne told The Jakarta Post recently on the sidelines of the 2018 Indonesian Womens Forum 2018 organized recently in Jakarta by ceritaperempuan.id, Telkomtelstra and Coca-Cola Amatil Indonesia.

She eventually kept her word as she carried on working until the final month of her pregnancy. The management was impressed.

I was finally given the promotion. Later that day, I gave birth to my twins, she said, smiling while reminiscing on the double blessings that had finally entered her life at that time. Its unfortunate that many companies still regard pregnancy and motherhood as downsides when it comes to employee productivity.

Many women, Marianne included, will attest that they often have to work harder than their male counterparts in order to get the recognition they are entitled to, regardless of possessing equal, if not better, competence, due to the gender bias and sexism still prevalent in our society, crippling womens careers with unfounded assumptions of what they can or cannot do.

This bias has resulted in unequal opportunities for women to enter the workforce, and when they do enter the workforce, a phenomenon called the glass ceiling, defined as an intangible barrier within a hierarchy that prevents women from obtaining upper-level positions.

While gender bias and sexism are often assumed implicitly, their consequences are real. According to data from the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) from February 2017, for instance, while 83.1 percent of all Indonesian men could enter the workforce, only 55 percent of Indonesian women could do so.

According to the World Economic Forums 2016 survey involving 144 countries, Indonesia ranks almost rock bottom at 107th position in terms of womens participation in the formal sector. Globally, only 4 percent of CEOs in the Standard and Poors 500 list are women.

Step by step: Gender bias in society has also led more female workers, like this female bank customer service officer, to work in repetitive administrative tasks than their male counterparts, a survey from McKinsey and Company has shown. (JP/Nurhayati)

Globally, female workers are also paid less than their male counterparts  according to data from United Nations Women, the gender pay gap in the labor force currently amounts to 23 percent. The pay gap will only close in 2086 if current discriminatory and biased practices against women in the workplace continue.

These numbers speak, so please deal with them proactively, UN Women program specialist Lily Puspasari said during her presentation.

The womens playing field is not level from the beginning. When picking their university majors, women are heavily influenced by prevailing gender social values. Indonesias highly collectivistic culture also allows extended family members such as grandparents and uncles to intervene with womens choice of university majors, she lamented.

For instance, popular stereotype holds that women should not enroll in engineering school in university because of the masculine connotation of that particular field.

The consequence of this bias eventually makes its way into the workforce: according to 2016 data from McKinsey & Companys women in the workplace survey, women also encounter more barriers when attempting to enter a number of stereotypically masculine jobs.

The survey revealed that while services, food and beverage as well as communications sectors are relatively more balanced in terms of gender composition, fields such as telecommunications, engineering and information technology are still heavily male dominated.

Eventually, societys sexism also permeates to company policies, depriving women from essential facilities such as a nursing room, daycare center as well as adequate maternal and paternal leave periods.

Lily said this was unfortunate as a number of research studies  including one from McKinsey and Company  had actually strengthened the evidence that increased female engagement in the workplace as well as company policies favoring gender equality could actually boost a companys overall productivity and retention rate.

Women leaders typically come up with policies that are inclusive and concerned about employees overall well-being, thereby increasing retention rate and decreasing recruitment costs. When employees feel that they are worthy assets, they will put out more energy and effort into their work, making them more productive, she argued.

Recognizing this fact, a number of corporations in Indonesia have launched a number of programs to help women break the glass ceiling. The programs comprise numerous methods, from the provision of necessary facilities and allowances to trainings.

At your service: According to McKinsey and Company, due to biased gender socialization, more women work in the service sector rather than in the male-dominated fields of engineering and information technology. (JP/Dhoni Setiawan)

According to Telkomtelstra president director Erik Meijer, for example, starting from 2016 his company  a joint venture between state-owned telecommunications company PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia and Telstra Corporation Limited  has included a number of policies to support womens career advancements.

The policies included equal promotion opportunities and a paternal leave of two weeks to allow fathers to participate in their newborns caretaking, Erik said.

Unfortunately, we dont have enough female human capital, so we look forward to cooperating with the education sector to encourage more women to enroll in engineering school, he said.

Coca-Cola Amatil Indonesia group chief of information Deborah Intan Nova, meanwhile, said her company finally moved into affirmative action supporting womens careers upon hitting a management problem in 2014.

A company survey had revealed that the problem lied with, among other factors, very low engagement among our female employees, which amounted to only 47 percent. To overcome this problem, the company has been committed to increasing female employee engagement through leadership training, she explained.

According to Deborah, the leadership training, which is exclusively designated for female employees, seeks to boost their confidence to take on new challenges and promotions, while encouraging women to work in male-dominated divisions such as the sales team as well as operations and manufacturing.

She claimed that the programs eventually increased womens participation in the companys male-dominated tasks.

In 2014, for example, almost none of our salespeople nationwide were women. Now, around 18 percent of our sales supervisors are women, she said.

PT AIG Insurance Indonesia (AIG Indonesia) has also created a number of programs seeking to advance womens careers further.

AIG Indonesia general counsel and corporate secretary Fifi Kusumawati, for example, said she was lucky to work in the service industry, a sector which is fairly gender-balanced and has more female workers.

One-third of our middle management comprises men, while the remaining two-thirds comprise women, she said, adding that she had been greatly helped by the companys training seeking to help women become more confident in themselves, especially when speaking up in public.

She added that the company also allowed its employees to bring their children along to work. Sometimes, the company even created events that engaged employees children, helping workers integrate their work and family life.

Despite the companys initiatives, unfortunately, the endeavor to advance womens corporate careers in Indonesia is still a steep hill to climb.

According to Erik, for example, his company still struggles to increase womens participation in male-dominated technical divisions, which currently is only 17 percent female. The companys newly established two-week paternal leave package, meanwhile, is still short of meeting UN Womens ideal standard of two months.

Many Indonesian companies also find it hard to fulfill the UN Womens four-month ideal standard of maternal leave.

Indonesia Chamber of Commerce of Industry (KADIN) Women Empowerment division vice chairwoman Nita Yudhi said the most difficult obstacle to Indonesian womens career advancement was Indonesias highly patriarchal culture. Most people attending the forum, including Marianne, nodded their heads in agreement with her.

Nita, who is also the chairwoman of the Indonesian Female Entrepreneurs Association, added that gender socialization had also turned women into passive individuals who were doubtful about their abilities.

According to Lily, given Indonesias strong and enduring patriarchal culture, which runs deep in all aspects of societys life, to increase womens participation in the workforce and advance their careers, numerous stakeholders must cooperate to undergo a holistic intervention program covering national political-economic policies and cultural aspects.

Telkomtelstra chief financial officer Ernest Hutagalung also encouraged his male counterparts to support womens career advancement in the corporate sector. His support for the cause has come from a personal place.

I have a daughter who now studies in college, and I have become aware that I want her to become a leader in her sector as well, he said.
Indonesias Fisheries Minister Susi Pudjiastuti deals with some dangerous men in her role, but they dont rattle her. She has an equally intimidating weapon on her side: Google.

Partnering with the search engine firm, Pudjiastuti is catching illegal fishing activity in real time, after thousands of vessels locations were revealed online. In her mission to clean up an industry once the domain of crooks, shes convinced powerful local operators with foreign interests to stop practices that were robbing the economy of billions of dollars of revenue each year.

"You have money, you have power, you have the reach probably to make me fail or to even basically eliminate me," Pudjiastuti recalls telling the industrys so-called godfathers in meetings shortly after joining President Joko Widodos government in 2014. But I also will not stop."

After hunting down violators and blowing up their boats in public spectacles, Pudjiastutis approach has become more sophisticated. In a global first, the minister has teamed up with Google to use satellites to spot illegal fishermen from space. Its paying off: Indonesias fish stocks have more than doubled in two years, and an industry plundered by foreigners for decades is once again contributing to economic growth.

In a sprawling archipelago of 17,000 islands, the potential is vast. While fishing currently accounts for just 2.6 percent of Indonesias gross domestic product, that portion has grown about 40 percent since Pudjiastuti started her role. At that time, there were some 10,000 foreign vessels fishing illegally in Indonesias territory. She says theyre now all but gone.

Read also: Jokowi sides with Susi on ship sinking controversy

Global Pirates

But its not game over for the minister: she says local boats are still working with global pirates who catch fish just outside the permitted zone, which are then shipped to foreign destinations. And thats where Google comes in.

"They still steal from us. We see it on Google fishing watch," Pudjiastuti said. "They use Indonesian-affiliated companies and businesses and basically take their catch a few miles beyond the exclusive economic zone, where a refrigerated mothership is waiting."

Indonesia last year became the first nation to share its Vessel Monitoring System information -- government-owned data used to monitor maritime traffic -- with Global Fishing Watch, an online mapping platform co-founded by Google and funded by partners including the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation and Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Pudjiastutis initiative instantly made nearly 5,000 previously invisible boats viewable. She has called for other nations to follow her lead, with Peru last year committing to making its fishing data available.

Brian Sullivan, the manager of Google Ocean and Earth Outreach, said information from Indonesias VMS was fed through the same algorithm used by Global Fishing Watch to produce a new set of analytics. That was then added to raw satellite imagery to produce an even more detailed footprint of fishing activities in near-real time.

Susi reached out to us and said I like what youre working on, wed like to see how we could use that information in Indonesia, California-based Sullivan said in a telephone interview. She has been probably one of the most progressive ministers within fisheries for taking something that historically all governments had kept extremely close.

Watching You

By using machine learning and watching how a vessel moves, Googles technology is able to establish patterns, and determine whether a vessel is in transit or fishing.

A study published last month found that foreign fishing in Indonesia dropped by more than 90 percent and total fishing by 25 percent following the tough policies introduced by Pudjiastuti, which also included a ban on all foreign-owned and -made boats from fishing in Indonesia and the restriction of transfers of fish at sea.

"We know what it looks like when a vessel is broadcasting because we see that vessels position, said Sullivan. And if it then goes quiet for a while and then reappears on the other side of a marine-protected area that would be considered suspicious activity."

Read also: Minister Susi graces Anne Avantie's runway, dons elegant 'kebaya'

Ship Wrecker

With almost 34,000 miles of coastline to monitor, the minister and her partners have a big job. But its not just about economic gains and food security: its also about sovereignty, an issue that plays well for the domestic audience.

In 2016, Indonesia marked its Independence Day celebrations by sinking about 70 foreign fishing vessels, mostly from Vietnam but also from China. It was an overt display aimed at sending a message: the nation intended to protect its lucrative fishing grounds, including in the South China Sea.

Since the end of 2014, Pudjiastuti has sunk more than 350 other boats.

They take our resources. If we dont put an end to them theyre going to come back and fish again, she said. And now I am screaming -- I want to tell everybody Be aware, they are moving to you.
President Joko Jokowi Widodo donned a brown batik shirt and blue woven sarong at the opening ceremony of the Muslim Fashion Festival (Muffest) 2018 at the Jakarta Convention Center on April 19.

Deden Siswanto, a designer from the Indonesian Fashion Chamber (IFC), provided several kinds of sarong and songket to be chosen by the President.

President Jokowi did his own styling, pairing a Garut-made manual loom-woven sarong, a songket belt and a batik shirt from his personal collection.

I provided the sarong, while the batik shirt is from Bapaks personal collection. He came and put on his own sarong, did his own styling, and that is why the sarong is worn high on the waist, Deden said as quoted by kompas.com.

Read also: Jokowi goes batik shopping in Yogyakarta prior to New Year

A post shared by Dyandra Promosindo (@dyandrapromosindo) on Apr 18, 2018 at 11:11pm PDT

The President officiated the event Thursday morning. In his speech, he called for the fashion world to continuously innovate and be open to modernization.

President Jokowi also called for Muslimwear designers to incorporate Indonesian culture in their designs, combining traditional and modern elements and to always be on the lookout for technological developments. (asw)
No mirrors needed by these women when they apply eye-liner, mascara and blush brushes. They cant see their faces.

Blind women are being taught makeup techniques and even how to put on false eyelashes in courses given by a Sao Paulo beauty salon, and it works wonders for their self-esteem.

People say why do you put on makeup if you cant see it. But I am so happy that I can do it confidently now, said Ana Paula de Camargo, a 30-year-old housewife, as she asked the instructor to photograph her.

Read also: Korean company makes braille socks for visually impaired

The free courses held at the Laramara association for blind people on the west side of Sao Paulo are offered by the Jacques Janine salon to help women overcome the challenges of doing their own makeup. Braille dots on the cosmetics allow them to find the shadow colors and brushes they need.

Not having to depend on someone else for their makeup and losing the fear of doing it wrong was awesome, said Alexandra da Silva, 47, as she put on violet lipstick.

Who says I cant see my face? Maybe not like other people. But I imagine my face and I believe I am beautiful, said Maria Mirian Callange, a 44-year-old accupuncturist with failing vision. Now I can increase my beauty.
A Mexican court has barred sales of a controversial Frida Kahlo Barbie doll in the painter's home country, ruling her family owned the sole rights to her image, lawyers said Thursday.

The Frida Kahlo doll, launched in March by US toy giant Mattel, has drawn criticism for putting a painter known for defying gender norms into the plastic body of Barbie.

It also drew a lawsuit from Kahlo's relatives, who claimed Mattel used the painter's image without their authorization and criticized the company for lightening her skin, feminizing her features and omitting her famous unibrow.

The court ruling bans sales of the Frida Barbie immediately in Mexico, or any use of the "brand, image and works of Frida Kahlo" by Mattel.

It can still be appealed.

The family said it would wait for the final outcome of the Mexican case, then launch a similar lawsuit in the United States.

"This litigation is in its first stage. We asked the judge to grant certain precautionary measures to protect our rights to Frida Kahlo's intellectual property," said the family's lawyer, Pablo Sangri.

Read also: Row erupts over new Frida Kahlo Barbie

Mattel's Mexico office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

"I'm thrilled (with the decision), I think justice is finally being done," Kahlo's great-niece, Mara Romeo, told AFP.

She said the case is not just a dispute over rights, it is about who her aunt really was.

"It should have been a much more Mexican doll, with darker skin, a unibrow, not so thin because Frida was not that thin... dressed in more Mexican clothing, with Mexican jewelry."

Kahlo (1907-1954), who was married to the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, is today considered one of the great painters of the 20th century, particularly for her self-portraits, often brimming with pain and isolation.

Her instantly recognizable look -- unibrow, thick black braids, flowery, hand-embroidered Mexican "tehuana" dresses -- and the boldness with which she wore it have made her a pop icon.

In recent years, her image has been stamped onto an explosion of consumer products: nail polish, bags, shoes, coffee mugs and more.
Those visiting this years ARTJOG, the fair that has since 2008 made a name as an iconic fair, will be in for a unique experience as they enter Mulyanas installation shaped as an upside down diamond.

The artist Mulyana  whose crochet images of coral and creatures living under the sea have fascinated young and old alike  has been given the honor by ARTJOG to create the commissioned work that introduces the fair themed Enlightenment: Toward Various Futures.



Amid a host of young contemporary artists today who try hard to enter the global mainstream with intricate advanced technologies, the 34-year-old Mulyana flows naturally, evolving into an awe-inspiring stream that is entirely his own.



He does so applying the age-old womans knitting of crochet  a craft he started a decade ago creating the most beautiful coral scapes. Mulyana confesses there is always a sense of fear underneath a wealth of beauty.



When seeing and experiencing extreme beauty, there is always a hidden fear of what lies behind and what could come after, he said, explaining his plans for the commissioned work for the month-long art fair in Yogyakarta.



Im thinking of a diamond shape that holds the notion of a bomb inside it, he continues, shocking me at first, for the peace-loving Mulyana is not the violent type.



Of course, what he means is the notion of an explosion. When one enters the 9-meter-tall diamond shaped installation with a 12-m-diameter, suggesting entering the underwater world, one will be hit by an overwhelming burst of fascinating coral, fish and other creatures living in the underwater world of the wide seas.



Amid all that is beautiful. Mulyana may place a skull as a token denoting the horrible depletion of the coral world currently taking place in Indonesia and the world at large. The work that is still in progress will be fittingly named Sea Remembers.



ARTJOGs Heri Pemad said he had observed Mulyana for quite some time and had been impressed by the artists seriousness, his intricate precision and consistent quality of his work.



Not only is Mulyana unique in that he uses a medium that is generally thought of as female craft but his work is of fine quality and he has shown admirable consistency, says Pemad.



Mulyana started his love affair with crochet at Tobucil in Bandung, West Java  a place to hang out while doing other activities, from playing with origami and 3D, to knitting and crochet. I like crochet because I can do it anywhere and anytime, he said.

Coral Atlas Cirrus by Mulyana (Art Porters Gallery/File)

When Tobucils owner, Tarlen Handayani, returned from a trip to the United States where he had seen an exhibition of coral, he suggested the topic to Mulyana.



Mul, as the artist is known, reveals he has always loved to be at the seaside and he gladly took up the theme, creating his signature in the form of an octopus with long tentacles.



People are usually scared of the octopus, he said, but my octopus is benign. Its long tentacles denote it will be able to do various good things.



Mogus  as he calls his crocheted alter ego  stands for Monster, Gurita and Sigarantang his family name. Mogus appears in various colors, it could be pink, yellow, orange or gray.



To make a house for Mogus was the next thing, and it became the central point of his thesis at the Indonesia Education University. The work was exhibited as Mogus World at Gerilya gallery and Kedai Kebun gallery in Yogyakarta.



Mul said there was the notion in Yogyakarta that an exhibition was successful when it was visited by a curator. Therefore, he was very happy when curator Asmudjo Jono Irianto from Bandung visited his exhibition.



From then on, Asmudjo invited him to participate in joint exhibitions and he obliged, with his works exhibited at the Indonesia National Gallery, Art One Museum and CG gallery in Jakarta; Lawangwangi Creative Space and Selasar Sunaryo in Bandung.



His moment of truth came at ArtJog 2015, where his work responded well to ARTJOGs theme Infinity in flux, and both the general public and collectors were delighted.



He also received an invitation to exhibit in Kuala Lumpur at Chandan Gallery and in the same year in Victoria, Australia. His work at Imaginarium at the Singapore Art Museum 8Q in 2016 was particularly successful.



French Guillaume Levy Lambert and his partner Mark of Art Porters gallery in Singapore also discovered Mulyana at ARTJOG 2015.



It was love at first sight, said Lambert. Art Porters invited Mulyana to participate in their various exhibitions, including in its booth at Art Stage Singapore and recently Art Porters organized a solo exhibition for Mulyana at Art Central during Art Basel Hong Kong.



In his Cloud Atlas series, Mulyana said he had been inspired by the clouds reflected in the sea.

He said he was saddened when snorkeling in Lombok and Gili Islands in West Nusa Tenggara where he saw that coral was actually dying and only the fish remained colorful. The fish had nothing to eat, they ate the bread that I brought along, he says.



And while swimming he looked down on the floating fish, he imagined he was floating too  seeing the coral like clouds down under.



He named these works after the terms used to classify clouds according to their height, texture and appearance from the ground.



Not all his works are colorful. There are two works that are gray and black, denoting death and destruction by polluting ash.



Meanwhile, the huge installation for ARTJOG, which opens on May 4, may well denote the peak of his life with Mogus  the fantastical octopus nurturing his fascinating imagination of life under the sea.
Automotive industry players held their breath as President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo elaborated on the consequences of the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0), including the transition to electric cars, for the industry.

I was informed that the amount of automotive components in an electric car is only one-tenth of the [common] car that we currently use, Jokowi said during the opening ceremony of the Indonesia International Motor Show (IIMS) 2018 at JIEXpo Kemayoran, Central Jakarta, on April 19. Meaning that, if tomorrow all cars in Indonesia are replaced with the electric ones, the automotive industry would shrink up to 90 percent.

The President then continued that the electric cars might require less maintenance compared to the conventional ones as their engines were simpler.

President Joko Widodo visits the Honda pavilion at the 2018 Indonesia International Motor Show at JIEXpo Kemayoran, Central Jakarta, on April 19. (JP/Steven)

Realizing that the audiences had been very quiet, Jokowi smiled, Those are the predictions and I dont believe in them.

I believe, with Industry 4, growth in the automotive sector will improve and not decline, Jokowi said. And the workforce needed in automotive and car transportation sectors will increase. Will there be changes in the type of jobs? Yes. Will they move to more extraordinary types of jobs? Yes.

Jokowi also reminisced about Making Indonesia 4.0. Launched several weeks ago by the Industry Ministry, it was the government's response toward Industry 4.0 that focuses on five manufacturing industries, one of them automotive.

Read also: IIMS 2018 opens with 38 featured carmakers

On the same occasion, Industry Minister Airlangga Hartarto highlighted the ministrys road map that aimed for a minimum of 20 percent of vehicles in Indonesia to comprise electric vehicles by 2025. He further added that Indonesia had the potential to produce batteries for electric vehicles.

We have pure nickel and cobalt production and future battery technology will use those materials, said Airlangga. Hopefully Indonesia will be able to make use of this.

Meanwhile, regarding the use of technology, Liliek Oetama, commissioner of PT Dyandra Media International and CEO of Kompas Gramedia, said this years IIMS had implemented innovations for visitors, including in the ticketing system.

Looking stylish: President Joko Widodo wears a denim jacket with a map of Indonesia emblazoned across the chest. (JP/Steven)

We dont use a conventional ticketing system anymore. Weve transitioned to a digital system by using a wristband, Liliek said. Therefore, our visitors profile can be known.

Moreover, a test drive area and charging stations for electric cars will be provided.

Following the opening ceremony, Jokowi, who was wearing a denim jacket with a map of Indonesia emblazoned on the chest area , also toured the exhibition by visiting some pavilions, among them Honda, DFSK, Mitsubishi, Kiat Mahesa Wintor and three electric vehicles designed by Indonesian college students.

IIMS 2018 is slated to be held for 11 days from April 19 to 29. It aims to attract 525,000 visitors with estimated total transactions of Rp 3.3 trillion (US$ 238,848,893). The exhibition features 38 automotive brands and more than 350 companies. (mut)
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Linkedin Vela Andapita (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, April 20, 2018 06:21 1262 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cf7c73f 2 City #Jakarta,jakarta,social-media Free

Nightmarish traffic and heavy workloads are only two of the many things to complain about in the capital. However, people can still find joy and laughter in the face of all these hardships.

With more and more people turning to social media to find a quick escape from the grind of daily life, some have created accounts to share funny stories or bits of random overheard conversations.

According to a study conducted by We Are Social and Hootsuite published on Jan. 30, Indonesia is home to more than 130 million internet users, 49 percent of whom are active on social media. On average, they spend up to three and a half hours a day on social media.

Youtube, Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are the top four most popular social media platforms in Indonesia. Instagram alone has more than 53 million users in Indonesia.

One of the more popular Instagram accounts in Indonesia is @overheardjkt, which currently has more than 74,200 followers. The account regularly posts absurd and sometimes witty snippets of conversations overheard all over Greater Jakarta.

Diandra Septa, an employee of an online booking service startup, who was born and raised in Jakarta, said she could relate to many of @overheardjkt's posts. She first heard of the account from her colleagues.

One post recounts a question asked by an unknown Jakartan, "Kebon Jahe, Kebon Kacang and Kebon Sirih are all located in Tanah Abang [Central Jakarta]. Why is Kebon Jeruk so far away from them?" to which a second person replies, "Maybe Kebon Jeruk was being bullied by the other Kebons."

"It's hilarious. It's even funnier since my office is in Kebon Jeruk [West Jakarta]. After that, my office mates and I scrolled down through the other posts and laughed together," the 25-year-old said.

Car Ride. Jl. S. Parman.  Overheard by @natchristan  #separatism #crushedorange #overheardjkt Sebuah kiriman dibagikan oleh Overheard Jakarta (@overheardjkt) pada 16 Jan 2018 jam 6:00 PST @overheardjkt was cofounded by Amira Dayanara and Irene Pitarini after they graduated from a university in Los Angeles, United States. They were inspired by a similar account created in LA called @overheardLA. "When we arrived in Jakarta, we realized there must be an abundance of funny stories that the urbanites here tell and share," Amira said, adding that the account was launched in February 2016. "It's not that we're encouraging people to eavesdrop on other people's conversation. But most of the time we just accidentally overhear something that really captures the colorful life of urban people," she added laughing. Another of @overheardjkt's most popular posts is a quote overheard near an ATM machine, "I worked a whole month and spent my paycheck in an hour." The post has received almost 6,000 likes. Another @overheardjkt follower, Dhamarista Intan, said she loved the post because she could relate.  Teenagers. ATM BCA. Tendean.  Overheard by @dinahnenden  #fastmoney #overheardjkt Sebuah kiriman dibagikan oleh Overheard Jakarta (@overheardjkt) pada 28 Jan 2018 jam 6:00 PST  Both Diandra and Intan said they followed @overheardjkt and many other thematic accounts so they could find things to make them laugh during their busy days at work. In addition to @overheardjkt, @drama.olshop shares stories surrounding online shop transactions and @dramaojol.id shares stories about online ride-hailing services. @lambe_turah is also a popular gossip account. These accounts have 435,000, 748,000 and 4.8 million Instagram followers respectively.
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, April 20, 2018 08:07 1262 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cf80259 1 City RPTRA-Jakarta,Pakistan,family-planning Free

Pakistan has expressed interest in developing integrated child-friendly public spaces (RPTRA) and learning about efforts to control population growth through the family planning (KB) program, an official has said.

East Jakarta social welfare assistant Ary Sonjaya said a delegation from the Pakistani Population and Social Welfare Ministry visited Cililitan RPTRA in East Jakarta on Thursday to study the concepts.

Ary said the delegation held the study tour in Jakarta on account of shared beliefs.

There is a similarity in the belief [between the Pakistani and the Indonesians] that the more children they have, the more prosperous their lives will be. However, the [Indonesian] government has controlled the population by implementing the family planning [KB] program, Ary said on Thursday according to kompas.com.

He added that the delegation was interested in implementing the KB village program and building RPTRAs in Pakistan.

Malik Muktar, one of the delegation members, said the ministry tried to learn from Indonesias experience in controlling population growth.

Building RPTRAs was a signature program of former governor Basuki Ahok Tjahaja Purnama.

However, the current administration said it would stop developing RPTRAs on account of difficulties it was facing. The city is currently home to 290 RPTRAs. (cal)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, April 20, 2018 13:18 1262 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cf90a18 1 Business BI,reference-rate,repo,APRIL Free

Bank Indonesia (BI) decided to maintain the seven-day reverse repo rate at 4.25 percent during a board of governors meeting from Wednesday to Thursday.

It also maintained deposit facility and lending facility rates at 3.5 and 5 percent.

The policy is consistent with its effort to stabilize macroeconomic conditions and the financial system, the central bank said in a statement on Thursday.

BI plans focus on maintaining economic stability for strong and sustainable economic growth, the statement said.

However, Indonesia must remain alert of global risks that may negatively affect the national economy, such as global financial market uncertainty, global oil price increases and the possible continuing trade dispute between the United States and China.

Therefore, the central bank will optimize an integrated policy on monetary and macroprudential policies as well as the payment system to support the ongoing economic recovery.

BI will strengthen its coordination with the government to maintain macroeconomic stability, it added. (bbn)
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Linkedin Viriya P. Singgih (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, April 20, 2018 16:31 1262 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cfa2ba1 1 Business pertamina,CEO,dismissal Free

The government has overhauled the board of directors of state-owned energy giant Pertamina, including by sacking president director Elia Massa Manik and four other directors, following a recent oil spill in Balikpapan, East Kalimantan, and amid the scarcity of Premium gasoline in various regions.

Fajar Harry Sampurno, the State-Owned Enterprise Ministry's undersecretary for mining, strategic industries and media affairs, announced on Friday afternoon that the government had sacked Elia during Pertaminas extraordinary general shareholders meeting. Subsequently, Pertamina human resources director Nicke Widyawati has stepped up as the companys acting president director.

Read also: Pertamina sanctioned for Balikpapan oil spill

This is actually part of our efforts to strengthen and expedite the establishment of [Pertamina as an] oil and gas holding firm, Fajar told reporters after the announcement.

Moreover, this decision also follows the latest developments, including the oil spill in Balikpapan and scarcity of some fuel types.

In addition, the government has also dismissed Pertamina marketing director Muchamad Iskandar, processing director Toharso, asset management director Dwi Wahyu Daryoto and petrochemical and processing megaproject director Ardhy N. Mokobombang.

As a result, the government has appointed Budi Santoso Syarif as the new processing director, Basuki Trikora Putra as corporate marketing director, Masud Hamid as retail marketing director, Haryo Junianto as asset management director, Heru Setiawan as petrochemical and processing megaproject director and Gandhi Sriwidjojo as infrastructure director. (bbn)
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Linkedin (Reuters) Melbourne  Fri, April 20, 2018 08:52 1262 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cf8195d 2 World China,Australia,South-China-Sea Free

Australian warships were challenged by the Chinese military in the disputed South China Sea earlier this month, the Australian Broadcasting Corp reported on Friday, citing Australian defense officials.

The Australian Defence Department confirmed that three ships had recently travelled to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam but declined to comment on "operational details related to ships transiting the South China Sea".

The ABC cited one official saying the exchanges with the Chinese navy were polite but "robust".

"The Australian Defence Force has maintained a robust programme of international engagement with countries in and around the SouthChina Sea for decades," the Defence Department said in a statement emailed to Reuters.

China recently completed a massive military drill in the South China Sea, where its claims are hotly disputed by Vietnam as well as the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, in London for the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting, also declined to confirm the interaction between the Australian warships and the Chinese military, Fairfax media reported.

"As they have done for many decades, Australian vessels and aircraft will continue to exercise rights under international law to freedom of navigation and overflight, including in the South China Sea," the Defence Department said.

Chinas construction of islands and military facilities in the South China Sea, through which some $3 trillion in trade passes annually, has sparked concerns Beijing is seeking to restrict free movement and extend its strategic reach.

The United States has conducted "freedom of navigation patrols" through the South China Sea, stoking tensions with China which says it will protect its sovereignty.

The Australian navy ships Anzac, Toowoomba and Success are on a three-month deployment in South East Asia, which will involve exercises with a number of countries in the region, the Defence Department said in a separate statement on April 17.

The Toowoomba sailed to Vietnam from Malaysia, while the other two Australian warships went through the South China Sea from Subic Bay in the Philippines.
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Linkedin (Agence France-Presse) Banda Aceh  Fri, April 20, 2018 19:21 1262 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cfb953e 2 National Rohingya-Muslims,Banda-Aceh,boat,asylum-seekers,Myanmar Free

About 80 Rohingya in a wooden boat arrived in Indonesia Friday, officials said, the latest batch of the vulnerable minority to come ashore in the world's biggest Muslim majority nation.

The group landed in Aceh province on Sumatra island, just weeks after dozens of the persecuted Muslim minority from Myanmar came ashore in neighboring Malaysia.

All appeared to be in good condition, according to local police chief Riza Yulianto, who added that it was not clear how long they had been at sea.

"Thank God they're all healthy even though a few are just children," he told AFP.

"We have given them food and we are thoroughly checking their health one by one."

It has been rare for Rohingya migrants to attempt the sea routes south since Thai authorities clamped down on regional trafficking networks in 2015, sparking a crisis across Southeast Asia as large numbers were abandoned at sea.

But there have been concerns desperate migrants might start taking to the high seas again after mainly Buddhist Myanmar launched a new crackdown last year that forced about 700,000 members of the Muslim minority to flee to Bangladesh.

This month, a group including two Rohingya men, aged 28 and 33, a 20-year-old woman, a 15-year-old girl and an eight-year old boy were spotted in a small boat off the coast of southern Thailand and Myanmar, some 325 kilometers (176 miles) from Aceh.

Local Indonesian fishermen took them back to Aceh where they were later taken into custody by immigration officials.

The group said they had been travelling with two dozen other Rohingya but got separated and were stranded at sea for about 20 days.

They had gotten lost with five others who later starved to death and their bodies were thrown overboard, officials said at the time.

In 2015, hundreds of Rohingya came ashore in Aceh, where they were welcomed in the staunchly conservative Islamic province.

Indonesia tends to accept asylum seekers but they are usually barred from working and often spend years in immigration centres.
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, April 20, 2018 11:53 1262 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cf8e55b 4 Business IdulFitri,holiday-extension,industry,protest Free

The Indonesian Association of Synthetic Fiber Producers (APSYFI) has called on the government to revise its plan for a 10-day Idul Fitri holiday, arguing that the extended holiday would negatively affect industry production and exports.

We hope the government changes its plan. Learning from last years implementation, it will spark confusion on the field, said APSYFI executive member Prama Yudha in Jakarta on Thursday as reported by tempo.co.

The government has decided to extend the Idul Fitri holiday from June 11 to 19 from the previously scheduled June 14 to 15. It would be the longest Idul Fitri holiday ever.

He said an extended holiday should have been decided three months before Idul Fitri to allow the industry to adjust import and export volume, the shutdown process, production cuts and other schedules.

Prama suggested that the government only issue a guideline on the extended holiday so that the industry and workers association could discuss the implementation.

He also said freight operation restrictions would hamper exports because while the industry was ready to export, freight-forwarders would not be ready to transport their products. (bbn)
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Linkedin (The Kathmandu Post/Asia News Network) Kathmandu  Fri, April 20, 2018 13:34 1262 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cf91992 2 Business Malindo-Air,flight,Nepal Free

The Tribhuvan International Airport (TIA), that had halted international flights after a Kuala Lumpur-bound Malindo Air flight suffered a runway excursion on Thursday night after an aborted takeoff, has resumed its operations from 11:35 am on Friday.

TIA general manager Raj Kumar Chettri informed that the aircraft was towed away from the grassland to the runway and now is in the parking area.

General Manager Chhetri further informed that the airport runway did not suffer any damages during the incident and all international flights have resumed.

The Malindo Air flights runway excursion had forced TIA to halt all international flights.

The Boeing 737-900, registration 9M-LNJ, was cleared for takeoff from runway 20 with 139 people, comprising of 132 passengers and 7 crew members, on board the aircraft.

"The flight captain aborted takeoff at the final moment after he saw an error at the monitor inside the cockpit," said Chettri, quoting the captain.

The aircraft apparantly couldn't stop because of the take-off speed and load at the final moment and overran 50m south (Koteshwor side) from the runway threshold and rested in a grassland at around 22:08 pm (local time), Chettri said. The runway was closed following the incident. However, the aircraft has not suffered any damage but the front tyre has been stuck in the mud.

The domestic flights have not been affected.

The cause for emergency has not been ascertained.

In March 2015, a Turkish Airlines aircraft also suffered a runway excursion during landing at TIA that had closed the country's sole international airport for four days creating chaos among travellers.




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Linkedin (Agence France-Presse) Riyadh  Fri, April 20, 2018 06:47 1262 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cf7d7aa 2 World Saudi-Arabia,attack,Islamic-State Free

Four Saudi officers were shot dead and four others wounded Thursday when their checkpoint came under gunfire in southern Asir province, state media said citing the interior ministry.

Three officers were instantly killed when the outpost came under attack, the Saudi Press Agency reported, without specifying who was behind it.

"Security officials have succeeded in identifying a number of suspects involved in the crime and arrested two of them, both Saudi nationals," SPA said.

"In the interest of the investigation, their names cannot be revealed."

A third Saudi suspect opened fire as he tried to escape, killing another officer and wounding four others, SPA added.

The attack comes as Saudi Arabia is embroiled in a long running conflict in its southern neighbor Yemen, dubbed by the United Nations as the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

In March 2015, the kingdom launched a coalition of Arab states fighting to roll back Iran-backed Huthi rebels in Yemen and restore the country's internationally-recognised government to power.

Riyadh and Shiite rival Tehran back opposing sides in a range of hotspots across the mainly Sunni Muslim Middle East, including Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.

Since late 2014, the Islamic State group has claimed a series of bombings and shootings against Shiites and security forces in the Sunni-majority kingdom.

Saudi Arabia is a member of the US-led international coalition that has helped battle the Sunni extremist group in Syria and Iraq.

Last November, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman vowed to "pursue terrorists until they are wiped from the face of the earth" as he presided over the first meeting of an Islamic counter-terrorism alliance involving around 40 Muslim countries.
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, April 20, 2018 18:45 1262 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cfb8a6d 1 City trash,North-Jakarta Free

More than 300 personnel were deployed Friday to clean up a trash under the Pelabuhan toll road in Warakas subdistrict, Tanjung Priok, North Jakarta.



North Jakarta Environment Agency head Ceffi Hidayat said 150 tons of trash had been transported over the past three days, adding that the clean-up would run for a month from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily.

"The problem lies in access. We rely on 20 [three-wheeled] garbage motorcycles that go back and forth, transporting the trash to a landfill," Ceffi said as reported by kompas.com.

The joint team consisted of 310 personnel from the Indonesian Military, Public Facility Maintenance Agency (PPSU) and the environment agency, Ceffi said.

The personnel were deployed following a report that claims trash has been accumulating in the space for the past two decades, since the toll road was constructed in 1993.

The location is inaccessible to garbage trucks and the large amount of trash has resulted in worsened road conditions, hence the reliance on three-wheeled motor vehicles.

Once the site is free of trash, Ceffi said, he expected the area to be developed into a useful space, such as a playground.

"We need to hold a meeting involving many stakeholders including PT Citra Marga Nusaphala Persada to manage the space," he said, referring to the toll road operator that owns the land.

Jakarta's waste problem remains one of the most pressing issues as the city produces over 7 tons of trash daily, meaning not all of the trash can be properly treated, given a limited space for landfills as well as a lack of technology to process it.

Separately, personnel from the North Jakarta District Command lamented that there was no assistance from local residents. (fac)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, April 20, 2018 09:55 1262 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cf84e24 1 Business ArcandraTahar,investment,energy Free

The Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry has revised its investment target this year by 27 percent to only US$37.2 billion, with the biggest cut of more than 50 percent coming from the electricity sector.

The ministry initially aimed to realize investments worth $50.96 billion this year, of which $24.88 billion was expected to be in the electricity sector, $16.76 billion in the oil and gas sector, $7.31 billion in the mining sector and $2.01 billion in the renewable energy sector.

However, the latest data from the ministry show the targeted investment currently stands at $37.2 billion.

Of the figure, the electricity and mining sectors are projected to get $12.2 billion and $6.2 billion, respectively. Meanwhile, the targets for the oil and gas and renewable energy sectors remain unchanged.

The target has been corrected from around $50 billion to $37.2 billion. But its still higher compared to the realized investment [of $26.7 billion] last year, Deputy Energy and Mineral Resources Minister Arcandra Tahar said on Thursday.

The target for the electricity sector was slashed following state electricity firm PLNs decision to scrap the allocation for new power plant projects of 22,300 megawatts and to postpone the commercial operational dates of various other projects in its electricity procurement business plan for the 2018 to 2027 period, which was launched on March 13.

In its previous business plan for the 2017 to 2026 period, the PLN projected that its electricity sales would grow 8.3 percent annually. In fact, the sales figure only climbed by 3.57 percent last year, raising concerns about the possibility of an oversupply. (bbn)
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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, April 20 2018

The Jakarta High Court handed down a heavier sentence on businessman Andi Agustinus, also known as Andi Narogong, on Thursday and declared him the main perpetrator in the e-ID graft case.



The verdict implies that Andi cannot become a justice collaborator as expected by the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK).



The defendant cant be separated from his dominant role in the budgeting and execution of the e-ID project despite his status as a justice collaborator, stated the written verdict published on the official website of the Supreme Court.



The panel of judges increased the prison term for Andi to 11 years and fined him Rp 1 billion (US$72,500).



He had previously been sentenced to eight years in prison by the Jakarta Corruption Court.



Andi was found guilty of conspiring with numerous parties in the deliberation of the e-ID project in th...
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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Bandung  Fri, April 20 2018

National Police deputy chief Comr. Gen. Syafruddin ordered police personnel in the regions to carry out large-scale operations and raids to stop the distribution of oplosan (bootleg liquor).



For police chiefs who dont act seriously in implementing this order, we will find out who they are and replace them immediately, said Syafruddin in Cicalengka, Bandung regency, on Thursday.



He said the police would be taking serious measures because the deaths of a number of people after drinking unsafe bootleg liquor had brought tremendous losses to society.



Moreover, Muslims will soon observe Ramadhan.



Syafruddin asserted that the National Police would take tough measures against police officers who did not tackle the production and sale of bootleg liquor.



We will take action against any police officer who keeps silent about oplosan to Read Full Story SUBSCRIBE NOW Starting from IDR 55,000/month Unlimited access to our web and app content

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Linkedin (Agence France-Presse) Seoul  Fri, April 20, 2018 15:48 1262 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cf9d0cd 2 World Seoul,North-Korea,South-Korea,hotline-number Free

The two Koreas opened a hotline between their leaders Friday, Seoul's presidential office said, a week before a summit between North Korea's Kim Jong Un and the South's President Moon Jae-in in the Demilitarized Zone.

The line links the presidential Blue House in Seoul with the Pyongyang office of the nuclear-armed North's State Affairs Commission, which Kim chairs - one of his most important titles.

"The historic connection of the hotline between the leaders of the two Koreas has just been established," said senior Blue House official Youn Kun-young, adding that a test conversation between officials lasted 4 minutes and 19 seconds.

It is the latest step in a whirlwind of diplomacy on and around the Korean peninsula, triggered by the Winter Olympics in the South.

Moon and Kim are due to meet on Friday on the southern side of the DMZ, in what will be only the third inter-Korean summit since the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice rather than a peace treaty, leaving them technically still in a state of conflict.

Seoul is pushing for a declaration that the war is over as a prelude to the signed of a treaty, with Moon declaring Thursday it was a goal that "must be pursued".

US President Donald Trump, who is expected to hold his own much-anticipated summit with Kim later, previously offered his "blessing" for the two Koreas to discuss a treaty.
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Linkedin Ruslan Sangadji (The Jakarta Post) Poso  Fri, April 20, 2018 14:05 1262 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cf93cc5 1 National accident,helicopter-crash,Morowali Free

One man died in a helicopter crash that took place inside an industrial park in Morowali, Central Sulawesi, on Friday, local authorities said.

The helicopter belonging to PT Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park (IMIP) crashed at around 9:30 a.m. near a helipad inside the Morowali industrial park. The helicopter was carrying six Chinese citizens to Halu Uleo Airport in Southeast Sulawesi's capital of Kendari, according to a company spokesman.

The helicopter had been in the air for around five minutes when the crew decided to return to the industrial park. It suddenly descended 100 meters near a helipad in the area before reaching the point.

Morowali Police reported on Friday that an IMIP worker named Aris Heni Irawan, 23, had died after getting hit by the crashing helicopter.

Four of the Chinese citizens were in Morowali to interview IMIP employees, while the other two were foreign workers of the company, its spokesman, Dedy Kurniawan, told a press conference.

"The four Chinese nationals planned to return to China, so the company took them to Kendari first," said Dedy.

The six Chinese citizens were identified as Guan Kejang, Zhao Yipu, Du Gui, Xi Lai Wang, Yan Yun and Di Yi Fei.

The two crew members, pilot Rudi A. and copilot Deliati Hasiholan Gulo, suffered severe injuries.

Dedy said the crash was being investigated by the National Safety Transportation Commission (KNKT). (mos)
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Linkedin Moses Ompusunggu (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, April 20, 2018 17:45 1262 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cfb23a0 1 Politics foreign-workers,Jokowi,opposition,Fadli-Zon Free

An outspoken opposition politician has lambasted a recent move by President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo to relax the recruitment process for foreign workers.

Fadli Zon, a House of Representatives deputy speaker from the Gerindra Party, said his party was considering proposing the establishment of a special committee to seek an explanation from the administration about the policy.

In March, Jokowi issued a Presidential Regulation on the recruitment of foreign workers, which aims to ease the visa process for foreign workers, especially in the education sector.

The Manpower Ministry said the regulation also aimed to provide legal certainty for foreign workers in Indonesia. Under the new regulation, foreign workers must obtain a working visa from the outset, rather than a business visa as required in the previous system.

"This policy, I think, has gone in the wrong direction. Jokowi said on the campaign trail that he would create 10 million job opportunities for Indonesians," Fadli said in a statement. "But after three years in power, the administration is continuously relaxing the regulation for foreign workers."

On Friday, Taufik Kurniawan, another House deputy speaker, said the ministry had to explain the regulation to all Indonesians to prevent a misunderstanding.

"The policy is likely to cause losses. The screening process is rather easy for foreigners to pass. There is also no qualification of workers," said Taufik, a National Mandate Party (PAN) politician, as quoted by Antara.

PAN is officially a member of the ruling coalition, but it has broken ranks and sided with the opposition on a number of issues.

Taufik said the plan to establish a special committee for the policy would be subject to a final decision by House Commission IX on manpower.

On Friday, the State Palace said there was no need to establish a special committee on the foreign workers policy. "Because they only seek clarification, there is no need for a special committee. The administration is ready to explain," said Presidential Chief Of Staff Moeldoko, as reported by kompas.com.

Moeldoko said the new regulation stipulated specific requirements for foreign workers, one being that they could only hold jobs above managerial level. (ahw)
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Linkedin Marguerite Afra Sapiie (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, April 20, 2018 11:45 1262 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cf8d800 1 Politics political-party,2019-legislative-election,survey Free

The United Indonesia Party (Perindo), founded and led by media mogul-cum-politician Hary Tanoesoedibjo, is seen as the richest among the political parties that will participate in the 2019 general election, according to a recent survey.



The survey, released by Jakarta-based pollster Cyrus Network on Thursday, reveals that 21.1 percent of 1,230 respondents surveyed in 34 provinces across Indonesia ranks Perindo at the top of the list in terms of capital.



Behind Perindo as the richest party in the public's eyes is the ruling Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) with 17.8 percent and the Golkar Party with 12.6 percent. Meanwhile, 32.1 percent of respondents said they did not know the answer.



Perindo has declared support for the reelection of President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo, whose nomination has been endorsed by five major political parties, including the P-DIP and Golkar, in the election next year.



Perindo, as a newcomer set to take part in a legislative election for the first time, also has an electability rating of 4.3 percent, higher than four parties at the House of Representatives.



The four are the Islam-based Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) with 3.5 percent, NasDem Party with 3.3 percent, National Mandate Party (PAN) with 1.5 percent and Hanura Party with 1 percent. (ahw)
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Linkedin (Reuters) Hamburg  Fri, April 20, 2018 20:01 1262 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cfbd03f 2 Business Porsche,arrest,German Free

German police arrested the head of powertrain development at Volkswagen's Porsche business and are holding him on remand because he is considered a flight risk, a person familiar with the matter said on Friday.

The arrest of Joerg Kerner was related to ongoing inquiries into emissions manipulation at Volkswagen, more than two years after the German carmaker admitted cheating on U.S. exhaust tests, the person said.

A spokesman for Porsche declined to comment.

Kerner was one of three current or former employees of Porsche that prosecutors were targeting when they searched offices at Porsche and its sister brand Audi earlier this week, a spokesman for the Stuttgart public prosecutor's office said.

Those three, as well as Porsche itself, were suspected of having known that engines developed by Audi had been manipulated, Porsche Chief Executive Oliver Blume told staff in a memo, excerpts of which were seen by Reuters on Friday.

"We reject these allegations and will do our utmost to clear up the matter," Blume said in the memo, which was first reported by the newspaper Bild am Sonntag earlier on Friday.

The arrest occurred on Thursday, he said.

Earlier this year, prosecutors widened an investigation of Audi, which developed a 3.0 liter V6 diesel engine that was used in about 80,000 VW, Audi and Porsche models found to have been equipped with illicit software
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Linkedin Nurul Fitri Ramadhani (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, April 20, 2018 15:45 1262 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cf9c107 1 Politics Prabowo-Subianto,Jokowi,Sandiaga-Uno,Romahurmuziy,2019-presidential-election Free

Opposition leader Prabowo Subianto is reportedly still weighing up several options for 2019: challenging President Joko Jokowi Widodo's candidacy, nominating another figure to face him or becoming his running mate.

The United Development Party (PPP), which supports Jokowi, claimed that its leader, Muhammad Romy Romahurmuziy, had met with Jakarta Deputy Governor Sandiaga Uno in Jakarta on Thursday night.

Romy is the youngest party leader in Jokowis camp with whom the President often consults about his possible running mate, while Sandiaga has been tasked with taking the Gerindra Party, which has nominated Prabowo as it candidate, to victory in the upcoming presidential race.

Sandiaga shared with Romy the three options available to Prabowo, PPP secretary-general Arsul Sani said on Friday. One of the options, he confirmed, was for Gerindra to join Jokowi's camp with Prabowo as his vice presidential candidate.

Thats what I can say about last night's meeting. The three options are still possible for both Jokowi and Prabowo, Arsul said.

Sandiaga reportedly visited the private residence of Prabowo in Kebayoran Baru, South Jakarta, after meeting Romy.

Romahurmuziy is my best friend. And I am tasked to communicate will all [parties elites], Sandiaga said as quoted by kompas.com when asked about the meeting. (ahw)
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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, April 20, 2018 22:01 1262 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cfbe5b6 4 Business rupiah,weakening,dollar,fed-fund-rate Free

The rupiah exchange rate weakened to Rp 13,893 against the US dollars in the spot exchange rate on Friday evening.

Meanwhile, the Jakarta interbank spot dollar rate (Jisdor) quoted the Indonesian currency at Rp 13,804 against the US dollar, declining by 0.78 percent compared to Rp 13,778 on Thursday.

Monex Investindo Futures analyst Putu Agus Pransuamitra said that the weakening of the Indonesian currency had been sparked by expectations of a Federal Fund Rate increase.

It was also caused by a number of optimistic indicators in the US, including an increase in retail sales, he added.

The expectations about the Fed Fund Rate have recovered after weakening because of trade war sentiments and geopolitical conflict, Putu said as reported by kontan.co.id, adding that the US economy was also growing positively.

The condition of the US economy had also sparked speculation that the Federal Reserve would increase its reference rate three times this year, Putu said.

He, however, did not ignore the possibility that technical factors might also push down the value of the rupiah against the US dollar.

Putu did not believe any domestic factors had contributed to the weakening of the rupiah as the economy was solid, as indicated by the trade surplus announced by the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) earlier this week and the credit rating upgrade by Moodys. (bbn)
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Linkedin Jon Afrizal (The Jakarta Post) Jambi  Fri, April 20, 2018 12:30 1262 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cf8f555 1 National wildlife,tiger,Jambi Free

Residents of Lubuk Tabun village in Kerinci, Jambi, are in grip of fear amid reports of a tiger roaming their farms.

The tiger has devoured five villagers dogs, Udin Awaludin, a Jambi Natural Resources Conservation Agency official said on Friday.

The agency and the Kerinci Seblat National Park (TNKS), the tigers habitat, have set up a team to monitor the tigers movement. It concluded that it was unnecessary to catch the tiger.

Our team will use a bamboo canon to scare the tiger away, Udin said.

The tiger has reportedly fled to the production forest in Kerinci, but the team has been standing by to ensure it does not return.

Human-wildlife conflict is common in Indonesia due to deforestation and human encroachment on the nations national parks. (ahw)
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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Fri, April 20 2018

The Jakarta administration and regional authorities in charge of transportation have agreed to change the starting time of the odd-even traffic policy on Jl. Sudirman and Jl. MH Thamrin to 6 a.m. from 7 a.m. on Monday.



The decision was made after the Greater Jakarta Transportation Management Agency (BPTJ) suggested that the Jakarta administration synchronize the odd-even policy on Jl. Sudirman and Jl. MH Thamrin with the Jakarta-Cikampek and Jagorawi toll roads, where the rule is in place from 6 a.m. through 9 a.m., to alleviate bottlenecks.



The odd-even license plate traffic policy in both thoroughfares is currently in place from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. on weekdays. The regulation, which stipulates that only vehicles with license plates ending in an odd number may use the roads on an odd date and vice-versa, has been in place since 2016.



The BPTJ f...
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Linkedin David Wainer (Bloomberg) Tel Aviv  Fri, April 20, 2018 22:08 1262 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cfbeb86 2 World #Gaza-strip,#Palestine,#Israel,#IsraeliSettlements,#protest Free

At least two Palestinians were killed by Israeli gunfire in a fourth straight Friday of protests near the Gaza Strips border, but participation was significantly down on previous weeks.

At least 60 were injured, Gazas Hamas-run Health Ministry said. Israels army estimated about 3,000 Palestinians demonstrated, down from as many as 40,000 in the first week.

Israel said some protesters attempted to fly kites with burning items attached to them while others set fire to tires adjacent to the border fence. Palestinian officials say most of the demonstrators are peaceful. The rallies aim to highlight the Palestinians plight as refugees 70 years after Israels creation and as the US prepares to move its embassy in mid-May from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, part of which the Palestinians claim as the capital of a future state.

The demonstrations have struck a chord with many in Gaza who see little reason for optimism with the peace process with Israel halted and the territorys economy hollowed out by an embargo and war. At least 34 Palestinians were killed in the first three weeks of protests, and hundreds were injured by live fire, according to health officials.

Considered a terrorist group by the US and Europe, Hamas adopted the protests as its rocket threat has been hindered by Israels Iron Dome missile-defense system and its attack tunnels rendered obsolete by an underground barrier Israel is building.

Palestinians plan to cap their protests with a march to the border on May 15, the date they mark the Nakba, or the catastrophe of their displacement at Israels 1948 creation. Israel fears that protest may become a mass attempt to breach the fence separating Gaza from Israel.
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Linkedin Moses Ompusunggu (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Sat, April 21 2018

Grounded: A Malindo Air plane came to a stop next to the runway after sliding off it during takeoff at Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu, Nepal, on Thursday night. With 139 people aboard, the Boeing 737-900ER was about leave for Kuala Lumpur when the pilot decided to abort takeoff. (JP/Adeline Sunarjo)

Adeline Sunarjo, 21, and five members of her family reached the 5,364-meter Everest Base Camp, one of two base camps on the worlds highest peak Mount Everest in Nepal, on April 14.



Despite their successful arrival the mood was rather gloomy as a result of numerous unfortunate events leading up to that point, such as delayed local flights and the loss of some of the groups luggage.



All this paled into insignificance on Thursday night, however, when Adeline and her family found themselves in a much more serious crisis when the aircraft they were on bo...
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Linkedin News Desk (Vientiane Times/ANN) Jakarta  Fri, April 20, 2018 13:53 1262 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cf92180 2 SE Asia #ASEAN,#ASEANCommunity,#Laos Free

New Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Laos to ASEAN Ekkaphab Phanthavong has highlighted the role of ASEAN in the international arena and how the bloc will benefit Laos.

The New Ambassador delivered his speech while presenting Letter of Credentials to ASEAN Secretary-General Dato Lim Jock Hoi in Jakarta this week.

Phanthavong was confident that the ASEAN Secretariat, under the leadership of Hoi, will be strengthened while member nations are implementing ASEAN Community Vision 2025.

The vision is a forward-looking roadmap that reflects the aspirations of the next generation of ASEAN nationals. It aims to sustain the momentum of regional integration and further contribute to strengthening the ASEAN community-building efforts, according to the ASEAN website.

Phanthavong also called for the ASEAN Secretary-General to further support the Initiative for ASEAN Integration and Master Plan on ASEAN Connectivity 2025 which should contribute to narrowing development disparity between newer and older ASEAN member countries.

According to the ASEAN website, ASEAN Connectivity is an integral part of building the ASEAN Community that will contribute to a more resilient and well-connected region. Enhancing ASEANConnectivity will continue to benefit all Member States through improved physical, institutional and people-to-people linkages.

The Master Plan is envisioned to achieve a seamlessly and comprehensively connected Asean that will promote competitiveness, inclusiveness and a greater sense of Community.

ASEAN (Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam) has a population of more than 620 million, which is considered the third largest in Asia after China and India.

The ASEAN Community was established in 2015 with a gross domestic product of US$2.6 trillion. The ASEAN Economic Community is the seventh-largest economy in the world and is projected to grow significantly in years and decades ahead.

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations was established on Aug. 8, 1967, in Bangkok, Thailand, with the signing of the ASEAN Declaration.

Their main aims are to promote regional cooperation in the spirit of equality and partnership and thereby contributing to peace, stability, progress and prosperity in the region and the world at large.

Throughout the past decades of its existence, ASEAN has endured a myriad of challenges and has adjusted itself to the changing and complex regional and international landscape, taking into account diversity in the region and based on the ASEAN Way.

Laos joined ASEAN in 1997 and can be considered an active member of the group, fulfilling its ASEAN obligations including the successful hosting of its second Chairmanship in 2016.

Topics :

This article appeared on the Vientiane Times newspaper website, which is a member of Asia News Network and a media partner of The Jakarta Post
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Linkedin (Agence France-Presse) Manila  Fri, April 20, 2018 15:59 1262 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cfa1925 2 SE Asia Philippines,police,drug-war Free

The newly named top police commander of the Philippines pledged Friday to keep up President Rodrigo Duterte's bloody anti-drug war despite fresh international condemnation over the killings.

Director General Oscar Albayalde, who was sworn in Thursday, will now lead the narcotics crackdown that has killed thousands since Duterte came to power just under two years ago.

"How to sustain the drug war? In order to sustain it, we will not change anything," Albayalde told reporters at his first press conference as commander.

He took over from Ronaldo Dela Rosa, who retired with hero's honours this week after helping Duterte launch the bloody crackdown.

"Why would we stop a programme that is very effective?" Albayalde added, citing "very good momentum and gains" since the alleged police killing last year of a teenage boy wrongly accused of drug crimes that sparked street protests.

Police on Friday announced another 13 alleged drug suspects were killed in a sweep that also led to the arrest of 58 people.

Albayalde's comments came as the Philippines pushed back against a European Union Parliament resolution voted on Thursday that criticised the crackdown, the latest international condemnation of it.

The EU lawmakers called "on the government of the Philippines to put an immediate end to the extrajudicial killings in the pretext of a 'war on drugs'".

It also expressed "grave concern over credible reports to the effect that the Philippine police force is falsifying evidence to justify extrajudicial killings".

While police say the campaign has killed around 4,100 people, rights groups allege the true toll is triple that number and amounts to state-sponsored murder.

Duterte began the crackdown in July 2016 after pledging during the presidential election campaign to kill 100,000 criminals to rid society of the scourge of narcotics.

Philippine Foreign Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano on Thursday denounced the EU parliamentary resolution as "interference" in Manila's internal affairs, describing it as "biased" and "based on wrong information".

Duterte last month pulled his country from the International Criminal Court after The Hague-based body's chief prosecutor launched an initial examination into allegations lodged against the president over his drug war.

He also threatened to arrest the chief ICC prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, if she tried to enter the Philippines to pursue her investigation.

On Sunday the Philippines deported EU politician Giacomo Filibeck, who has previously criticised Duterte's crackdown, and on Monday briefly detained an elderly Australian nun who has been critical of alleged human rights violations by Philippine soldiers.
In a bid to attract more Chinese tourists, the Tourism Ministry conducted a series of sales mission events from April 16-19 in major Chinese cities Nanning, Shenzen and Guangzhou.

Ten representatives from Indonesia participated in the event, which included tour and dive operators, island-hopping liveaboards and Garuda Indonesia, where they introduced products and tour packages to buyers from China.

China is a strategic market where well continue to penetrate, said Vinsensius Jemadu, the ministry's assistant undersecretary for marketing development II regional I, in a press release. As it is has huge potential, we must maintain it because other countries are also targeting the same market.

Read also: Chinese tourists' favorite places in Indonesia

Vinsensius added that the sales mission served as a platform to build awareness among Chinese travelers. It aims to promote Indonesia as a destination that must be visited by Chinese tourists. Well also hold a media gathering, distribute materials as well as souvenirs and present art performances, Vinsensius said.

Chinese tourists have long been the main target of Indonesian tourism. Last year, more than 1.9 million of its citizens visited Indonesia, an increase of 35.75 percent from 2016. Bali still serves as their favorite destination with 1.3 million Chinese tourists visiting the island.

Our target in China is huge this year, which is 3 million tourists, as we seek to reach the global target of attracting 17 million foreign tourists in 2018, Vinsensius said. To maintain this momentum, we will conduct regular sales events. The ministry will also host a presentation on charter flight packages in Shenzen, especially for Batam and Bintan, which is part of an effort to lure Chinese tourists to other destinations. (wir/kes)
The Tourism Ministry is promoting potential destinations for marine tourism in Indonesia to yachter communities in Opua, New Zealand from April 20 to 21.

Expected to be attended by 80 members of the Opua Cruising Club, 75 members of the Oyster Yacht Community and 40 members of other yacht clubs, the event aims to lure more tourists to visit the country as the ministry targets 141,896 New Zealander tourists this year.

The ministrys development and marketing first undersecretary, I Gde Pitana, said six international sails would be presented during the event, such as the Wonderful Sail to Indonesia, Sail Indonesia  Darwin, Back to Down under Rally, Sail Anambas to Natuna, West Kalimantan Rally and Sail Moyo Tambora.

The potential destinations of our marine tourism beyond Bali, including Wakatobi, Labuan Bajo, Komodo Island, Borobudur temple and Raja Ampat will [also] be introduced to the yachters, said I Gde Pitana in a press release.

Read also: Five things to see in Labuan Bajo besides the Komodo dragon

Moreover, several government regulations will be explained during the event, including those related to customs, immigration, quarantine and post-clearance (CIQP) registration, revocation of clearance approval for Indonesia territory (CAIT) and online registration to get permits via a website.

The government also offers free visas for citizens of 169 countries, including New Zealand. Pitana said the yachters had the chance to stay in Indonesia for six months as a social-cultural visa was valid for 60 days and could be extended.

The tourists will also find it easier to embark and disembark at five major ports, such as Belawan in Medan, Tanjung Priok in Jakarta, Tanjung Perak in Surabaya, Benoa in Bali and Soekarno-Hatta in Makassar following the revocation of a regulation on cruise ships. (wir/wng)
Which moment from a comic this week caught your interest?

Moment and Indie Moment of the Month for March have begun! Vote now or forever hold your peace!!!

Your WINNER for MOMENT OF THE WEEK 4/11/18:

Captain America dies. - Captain America #600

This thread will contain SPOILERS!!! And lots of them. If you haven't read this week's comics yet, go read them before continuing into this thread, or risk being spoiled!

PLEASE NOTE!!!!!! ]Remember to include the title and issue number of the comic you are nominating. Otherwise I will be forced to disqualify your nomination, and nobody wants that!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Rules:

1. Each nomination must be a moment in a comic released the week of the thread. This does not include weekly previews, trade paperbacks, or back issue digests. For new comics check out Midtown Comics release dates.

2. Everyone can make ONE nomination. You can either nominate a moment yourself or second/third/fourth/fifth an already existing nomination. However, second/third/fourth/fifth will not count per nominating and thus earn entry above in Top Nominations. You want in that list you must nominate something.

3. It must be an actual moment involving the actions or statements of a comic character in an issue. No "This writer returns to the series", "this artist draws this character", "the book is better", etc.

4. If you want to change your nomination, there are a few factors involved:

---> A) No one can have seconded your nom.

---> B) If it is clear for you to change your nom, you must edit your original post or the new post will be disqualified as being a double nomination.

---> C) You can change your second, third, etc. by editing your original post before the nomination period ends.

Moments on the poll do not have to be seconded. If there is room in the poll, moments that were nominated but not seconded will be added based on the order they were nominated.

6. Again, please be specific on the comic title, issue number and moment. Also be clear that you are actually nominating or seconding something ... statements such as "Yeah, that was a cool moment" aren't clear. You must nominate a single moment in the comic and can't nominate the whole issue. Once more, if you dont include the issue and number the moment will not be included.

7. The thread for nominations will go up on Wednesday (new comic day) at 11:00 PM (Central) or when Zechs arrives later that night and posts in the previous week thread announcing voting is closed. The nominations will go until 2:00 PM (Central Time) Sunday Afternoon, or whenever Zechs arrives and will post in the thread stating, Its over. and will start the poll. If a new comic day falls on a holiday week in American, then the thread will be made for that day (be it Tuesday or Thursday). Regardless, nominations will STILL conclude on Saturday deadline.

8. Please be civil when commenting on other people's nominations. But feel free to discuss them in this thread.

9. In case there is debate on WHEN exactly a title came out, http://www.midtowncomics.com or the official websites of said publishers (be it Marvel, DC, Darkhorse, etc.) will be the final word on the quarrel.

10. Any nominations not following the above rules will be disqualified. Unless of course if Zechs, who is feeling sad for the person who missed the rule and might give them time to provide the correction. Then he will pester bk into putting the nomination in the poll. Of course this wouldnt be a problem if Zechs wasnt granted the glorious powers of a moderator, which one day such power will be Zechs, oh yes they will his.

11. If at five nominations are not made, Zechs will choose some, but they will all count as one nomination, not multiple thus making sure balance is preserved.

12. AKA the Rulk rule. If several moments are tied past the deadline of 11:00 PM (Central Time) Wednesday (or holiday date when new comics arrive in the US) or when Zechs arrives that night, then voting will continue on in sudden death for eight more hours, until one is decided. THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE.

If one isnt still decided, then Zechs will provide the deciding vote, regardless if he has voted already. So if that isn't enough reason to get a ton of votes on that additional day than you're just dooming yourself to give Zechs another vote.

13. AKA the Hobgoblin rule. Roderick Kingsley Hobgoblin moments when winning for three days straight automatically win the poll. No last day or second voting changes it to troll the ruler of this thread.

Only ONE can rule as the Moment of the Week!

Top Ten Nominators of All Time...

1.) GLX- (454 Nominations)

2.) Zechs- (446 Nominations)

3.) e_galston- (202 Nominations)

4.) IvCNuB4 - (177 Nominations)

5.) Johnny Smith (174 Nominations)

6.) Kravis (145 Nominations)

7.) Stephen Day- (126 Nominations)

8.) blcdude (110 Nominations)

9.) rdrsfn82- (102 Nominations)

10.) fieldy RICHARDS- (93 Nominations)

Honorable Mentions

Porcelain38- (92 Nominations)

HNutz (82 Nominations)

Starlord- (81 Nominations)

Nicola Marshall (65 Nominations)

God-Man (63 Nominations)

BubbaKanoosh- (57 Nominations)

DudeistMonk (57 Nominations)

Greg- (52 Nominations)

Knuckles McSmasher- (44 Nominations)

doombug - (43 Nominations)

48THRiLLS- (40 Nominations)

Demarcoa (39 Nominations)

SilverPhoenix (34 Nominations)

guitarsmashley (34 Nominations)

TimDrake'sDumbWings- (30 Nominations)

Amoebas (30 Nominations)

Chap22- (28 Nominations)

Mr. Batman- (27 Nominations)

Dragavon- (27 Nominations)

locuas (26 Nominations)

karmakaze (26 Nominations)

VinnyPic- (25 Nominations)

jephd (26 Nominations)

Flynn the Pirate (21 Nominations)

habitual- (19 Nominations)

Grayson (19 Nominations)

Agent Panic (18 Nominations)

nietoperz (18 Nominations)

PaulSebert (18 Nominations)

Glacier16 (18 Nominations)

Punchy- (16 Nominations)

MrBlack (16 Nominations)

OneWhoIsAll (15 Nominations)

capjr (12 Nominations)

ThatRomanGuy (12 Nominations)

MistaT- (12 Nominations)

ChurchHatesTucker (12 Nominations)

Belle-Tain Summer (13 Nominations)

senwolf (12 Nominations)

PatricioUPMA (11 Nominations)

GOFM - (10 Nominations)

Duck Punch (10 Nominations)

Peter Parker (10 Nominations)

SuperSoldier Washout (9 Nominations)

The Great Ghostman (9 Nominations)

Octacon (8 Nominations)

alaska1125 (8 Nominations)

HED (8 Nominations)

gavincantdraw (8 Nominations)

MarcianTobay (8 Nominations)

eypcrew2- (7 Nominations)

CammyKnoxville (7 Nominations)

Skyrider (7 Nominations)

Eli Katz (7 Nominations)

Flamebird (7 Nominations)

pat (6 Nominations)

TheSecondLex (6 Nominations)

Juan Cena (6 Nominations)

Kid Impulse- (5 Nominations)

XtremeX- (5 Nominations)

Mammon, Fool Breaker (5 Nominations)

Stalzer2002 (5 Nominations)

Sully85 (5 Nominations)

C-Matty- (4 Nominations)

Dum Dum Dugan- (4 Nominations)

AMS (4 Nominations)

Dalarsco- (4 Nominations)

GHERU (4 Nominations)

jethawk (4 Nominations)

Chessack (4 Nominations)

MarvelFan88 (4 Nominations)

Earth-2 NoctourneM (4 Nominations)

Ben- (3 Nominations)

McKeagan- (3 Nominations)

carl999- (3 Nominations)

Alex Delarge- (3 Nominations)

MrWadeWilsonHimself (3 Nominations)

pat (3 Nominations)

blastmaster (3 Nominations)

thefourthman (3 Nominations)

BlueKitKat (3 Nominations)

americanslime (3 Nominations)

SolRey34 (3 Nominations)

GOSD- (3 Nominations)

MysticKnightJoe (3 Nominations)

GratefulFred- (2 Nominations)

statnut- (2 Nominations)

Dooz - (2 Nominations)

Jack Burton- (2 Nominations)

Zenguru- (2 Nominations)

God Impulse2k1 (2 Nominations)

skywatcher (2 Nominations)

avengingtitan (2 Nominations)

Rebis (2 Nominations)

Justin M. Campbell (2 Nominations)

PhoenixEquinox (2 Nominations)

Timbales (2 Nominations)

dairydead (2 Nominations)

Lord Solaris (2 Nominations)

Aeon Flux (2 Nominations)

PinkDaddy (2 Nomination)

Ntikrst (2 Nominations)

Jude Terror (2 Nominations)

Major Tool (2 Nominations)

LoatheMe (2 Nominations)

Richie Heap (2 Nominations)

Chicanery (2 Nominations)

syxxpakk (2 Nominations)

batarang614 (2 Nominations)

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Fifthletter (2 Nominations)

ObsceneBinary (2 Nominations)

Josh Hartung (2 Nominations)

TurboSmurf (2 Nominations)

Randy Robertson (2 Nominations)

Peter-J-DeadPoole (2 Nominations)

GiveWaraChance (2 Nominations)

Guderian- (1 Nomination)

Black Kryptonite- (1 Nomination)

Colonel Angus- (1 Nomination)

barrylincoln - (1 Nomination)

Dooz Ex Machina- (1 Nomination)

Thrillhouse- (1 Nomination)

Chesscub- (1 Nomination)

TheyShouldBeTheBats- (1 Nomination)

The Bass (1 Nomination)

GOD Impulse- (1 Nomination)

Deadfett (1 Nomination)

amalah6 (1 Nomination)

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tomc (1 Nomination)

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B1CaNobody (1 Nomination)

Socky (1 Nomination)

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TimH (1 Nomination)

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Scintillant-H (1 Nomination)

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the_isolator (1 Nomination)

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James Burke (1 Nomination)

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jay042 (1 Nomination)

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Hall of Shame

sdsichero (-1 Nomination)

John Lewis Hawk (-25 Nominations)
Highlights include Return To Whisper #5, Deep Roots #4, and Submerged #1.

Source: Vault Comics

CULT CLASSIC RETURN TO WHISPER #5

(W) Eliot Rahal (A) Felipe Cunha (CA) Irene Koh

It's the fright-filled final chapter of Cult Classic: Return to Whisper! No more secrets  just a few more twists and a couple last turns. Our past and present timelines collide, and the mystery of the cursed treasure is revealed! Save any and all questions for the funny pages. And don't forget, kids...stay plugged in, stay tuned, and STAY ALIVE!

In Shops: Jul 25, 2018

SRP: $3.99

DEEP ROOTS #4

(W) Dan Watters (A) Val Rodrigues (CA) Dani Strips

Divided, infected, and wounded, what's left of our rescue team mourns one of their own. As a London park becomes a carnivorous labyrinth, the cover-up threatens to be revealed to the world. Unless they can plant a seed of hope, the age of man will end. And an age of panic will rise.

In Shops: Jul 25, 2018

SRP: $3.99

SUBMERGED #1 (OF 4)

(W) Vita Ayala (A) Lisa Sterle (CA) Jen Bartel

On the night of the biggest storm in New York City history, Elysia Puente gets a call from her estranged little brother Angel, terrified, begging for help. When the call cuts out suddenly, despite the bad feelings between them, Ellie rushes into the night. Finding his broken phone in front of a barricaded subway station, Ellie follows echoes of her brother into the sinister darkness of the underground, desperate to find him before it's too late.

In Shops: Jul 04, 2018

SRP: $3.99

VAGRANT QUEEN #3

(W) Magdalene Visaggio (A) Jason Smith (CA) Natasha Alterici

Fists fly, tempers rage, and history repeats itself as Elida and Stelling duke it out  only breaking to pour more shots. In the end, somebody will win the Winnipeg... while the other will win a one-way ticket to the cold embrace of space. Gotta love those airlocks!

In Shops: Jul 25, 2018

SRP: $3.99

WASTED SPACE #4

(W) Michael Moreci (A) Hayden Sherman (CA) Marguerite Sauvage

Things are looking grim for Billy, Dust, and Molly Sue  but when are they not? Welcome to the penultimate issue of the critically-acclaimed, crazy-ass sci-fi romp that answers the question, "Will terrible people ultimately destroy us all?" Find out!

In Shops: Jul 25, 2018

SRP: $3.99

HEATHEN TP VOL 01

(W) Natasha Alterici (A/CA) Natasha Alterici

From critically acclaimed creator Natasha Alterici (Gotham Academy) comes an Nordic fantasy adventure that defies conventions and expectations. Aydis is a viking, a warrior, an outcast, and a self-proclaimed heathen. Aydis is friend to the talking horse Saga, rescuer of the immortal Valkyrie Brynhild, and battler of demons and fantastic monsters. Aydis is a woman. Born into a time of warfare, suffering, and subjugation of women, she is on a mission to end the oppressive reign of the god-king Odin. Collects the first four sold-out issues!

In Shops: Aug 02, 2017

SRP: $15.99
More Arrow Pride: Three men, two women inducted into Watertown High School Athletic Hall of Fame

The 16th induction ceremony for the Watertown High School Athletic Hall of Fame on Saturday resembled many of the previous 15 in a number ways.
As I was brainstorming for this weeks column, I was unsure of what might inspire my writing for the week. In a humorous way my friend asked me, Well, Austin, IoWhat is going on in politics this week? While I appreciated the slight jab at my mildly obnoxious column title, this was also a helpful guide for my writing. Sometimes I have positive and exciting things to write about, like the future of the Democratic Party, or special elections wins across the country. These past couple of weeks are not panning out in the same way.

On Tuesday, April 10, Governor Reynolds signed Senate File 481 into law. In short, it is an anti-sanctuary cities bill. Although Iowa does not have any official sanctuary cities or counties, there are many counties that were actively lobbying against this bill. Immigrants rights activists from around the state deeply worried about the effect this bill could have on their communities. It is already causing anxiety in many immigrant communities. Immigrants rights groups have been getting frantic calls from families and school counselors from across the state.

At the end of the day, this points to an unfortunate reality. The Iowa nice that is so often referenced really only applies to a select few in the eyes of Iowan state officials. This law cements the fact that people who are of immigrant status are on thin ice legally, especially those of color. Rather than pursuing a policy that makes Iowa a welcoming state to people regardless of immigration status, the Iowa Republican Party sought to isolate these communities that are often underserved. This makes Iowa xenophobic. This is clear to many people, and it spurred a hashtag pioneered by DACA activist Kenia Calderon of Des Moines. #IowaXenophobic was used to channel some of the deeply held frustration pouring out from the communities that were most affected by this law. I took it as a chance to examine the institutional ways Iowas state government has penalized and targeted immigrants of all status. Sadly, many of my peers, who are white native-born citizens, took serious offense. This is probably the most frustrating part. They could not see past the idea that they may not be an active member of the apparatus that is targeting those communities. In reality they are complicit in the oppression of immigrant communities in Iowa. If you voted for the Branstad administration in 2014, you are complicit. If you voted for one of the legislators that voted in favor of Senate File 481, you are complicit. If you didnt fight against this awful legislation, you are complicit in a xenophobic administration.

This is really a callout for the privileged Iowans who chose not to fight against this. As I wrote two weeks ago, our liberties we prize, and our rights we will maintain should not just be a nice slogan on a flag. There is a need for action on an institutional level. First, we need to repeal this harmful bill. We also need Iowa to adopt sanctuary policies for state and local law enforcement, where they will not cooperate with federal immigration authorities. ICE is an agency devoted to tearing families apart and terrorizing innocent people. They have been consistently documented employing unconstitutional practices. These include racial profiling and holding people in detention centers for unspecified amounts of time. They take brutal actions in their approach to immigration laws, but this is something most people are not familiar with.

We must take actions at all levels, including at the most local. This includes advocating for local governments avoiding working with ICE. It can go even further, with the Grinnell school district taking steps similar to those taken by the Des Moines Independent School District. That district centralized all requests by ICE to enter school boundaries to go through the Superintendent and supported the rights of immigrant students. Grinnell College could even go further than its these statements. Given the schools response after the Trump Administration declared the end of the DACA program, Grinnell should be making bold steps that mirror those made in the past on social justice issues. We should also make sure that we are personally supporting immigrant communities. That includes supporting international students here in Grinnell. Many international students are familiar with the sting of people telling them to go back to where they came from or the alienating stares when they speak a language other than English. We need to do better. Iowa needs to do better. Our country needs to do better.

 Austin Wadle 18
Sexplanations is an anonymous Q&A column about sex, sexual health, sexuality, gender, relationships and the promotion of respect at Grinnell College. Questions are answered collaboratively by the Sexual Health Information Center (SHIC), the Stonewall Resource Center (SRC) and the Office of Wellness and Prevention. If you have a question or comment, submit it anonymously at https://goo.gl/forms/36C5fLe9DeRdi48k2 or email [howeemil].

I dont go to Harris or Gardner on weekends. I dont feel like sexual respect events or information apply to me. Should it?

Sometimes, sexual respect is only talked about when it fails. Harris and Gardner events on weekends are times we associate with when we need more sexual respect. However, sexual respect doesnt start failing at 10:30 p.m. on a Saturday night as you walk into Gardner Lounge. What sets the stage for sexual respect on those evenings is the conversation on Thursday afternoon about weekend expectations. It starts in the dorms when we think about access to condoms and it starts in class discussions. You might not feel like sexual respect matters to you, but how you act contributes to the culture of sexual respect on campus. So my question to you is, how are you contributing? Are there assumptions you make about people based on gender? What kind of language are you using? Are you using consent for everyday interactions such as hugging, touching someones shoulder or asking if you can join someone in doing something? Are you being a healthy partner in your relationships, including your friendships by communicating thoroughly or being aware of each others needs?

It is really important to think about sexual respect on Friday evenings, but sexual respect matters to everyone all the time. If you want to talk more about why it matters, reach out to a student leader like a SAM, Peer Educator, CA, [Jacobsen], [howeemil2] or attend an upcoming event on sexual respect.

Upcoming events for Sexual Assault Awareness Month:

Anita Hill Documentary Screening & Roundtable Discussion. April 23, 7 p.m., JRC 209

The gender, womens and sexuality studies program, the Office of Wellness and Prevention and Office of Intercultural Affairs will be screening the 2013 documentary Anita: Speaking Truth to Power. Angela Onwuachi-Willig 94, chancellors professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, will provide opening remarks on the documentary. After the screening, we will have a roundtable discussion on how intersecting identities impact sexual respect and sexual assault. Refreshments will be served.

Together: a Film about College Students, Survival, and Sexual Violence. April 25, 7 p.m., Loose Lounge

Grinnell Advocates and the Office of Wellness and Prevention will be showing Together, a film about being a sexual assault survivor on a small college campus. Together shares the stories and experiences of students, and while they dont represent every experience, the filmmakers hope to educate others to focus on the validity of each story and that sexual violence affects all of us directly or indirectly. People at all stages of change are encouraged to attend this event and reflect on the impact of the experience on a small college campus.

Active Bystanderism & Social Media Workshop w/ Langston Thomas 20 and Sydney Steinle 18. April 28, 3 p.m., CRSSJ Prayer Garage

This active bystander workshop will focus on how to be an active bystander online, especially around issues of social justice. It is peer led by CA Sydney Steinle 18 and Peer Educator Langston Thomas 20. This workshop will help you develop new active bystander skills in the context of social media, and is for all levels of knowledge on active bystanderism. No prior experience with active bystanderism necessary. Refreshments will be provided.
By Seth Taylor

taylorse@grinnell.edu

On April 6, the Bachelor of Arts Exhibition (BAX) 2018 opened at Faulconer Gallery. The event, organized by the Studio Art Student Educational Policy Committee in coordination with Faulconer Gallery staff, is an annual exhibition that highlights art that students have worked on during the year without any Art Department faculty involvement. Charlotte Richardson-Deppe and Anne Rogers, both 19, led the organization of the exhibition this year.

Third- or fourth-years are eligible to apply, and while art majors receive preference, non-majors that are heavily involved in the art studio may be accepted as well. Applicants must submit measurements of their work, the materials used and a paragraph on the piece, as well as answer questions on their involvement with the arts at Grinnell.

The exhibition brings together student artists, the curatorial resources of the College and the community that gets to see the final product. Students get a rare chance to work with the curators of Faulconer Gallery to install their pieces, working on lighting and placement in the gallery.

Ella Williams 18 has two of her artworks featured in the exhibit this year. A gender, womens and sexuality studies and studio art double major, Williams hopes to pursue music after graduating from Grinnell.

For Williams, BAX is a chance to interact with curators in a professional space.

Last year, Williams created an installation piece that she set up with the help of the gallery curators. This year, the curators allowed her to see her sculpture The Fall of Man in a new light, literally.

I was super impressed with the lighting [the curator] chose for The Fall of Man, actually, because if you look at the shadows they just line up perfectly in this really beautiful way, Williams said.

Williams believes that for an undergraduate artist to see their work in a professional gallery is a rare and valuable experience.

It lets artists at Grinnell envision their work actually being in galleries, because they can see that their work belongs in a place like that, Williams said.

BAX is not just an opportunity for student artists to show their work, but also a chance for students who may not be as involved in the arts at Grinnell to see what goes on in the Bucksbaum art wing.

I think sometimes the art department can feel a little separate from the rest of the campus community and BAX is sort of a time to open the doors and let the whole community see what weve been doing and engage with our work, Williams said.

Sofia Mendez 19, a philosophy and studio art double major, is also featured in the art show.

In the fall, Mendez studied in Italy, where she took a lot of photographs that inspired her pieces in this years exhibit.

Similarly to Williams, Mendez believes that events like BAX that showcase student art can act as catalysts for students who may not be aware of the artistic opportunities available on campus.

If you see them around campus then that can work as an initial  trigger to want to participate, Mendez said.

In her first year, Mendez had been unaware of the existence of a photography club, until she saw a photobook produced by the club. She contacted the group, started taking photos and now has her work featured in a professional gallery.

The exhibition will remain open until May 16 at Faulconer Gallery for faculty, staff, community members and students, art majors and otherwise, to observe and enjoy.
By Samantha Stagg

staggsam@grinnell.edu

On Saturday, April 14, local farmers congregated at McNallys Foods. They brought posters, pamphlets, food samples and business cards in order to introduce themselves and their farms to Grinnell residents. Between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m., patrons of the grocery store drifted from station to station, connecting with farmers, trying samples and signing up for email lists. Also present were members of Local Food Source, an organization that acts as an online farmers market where farmers can sell to local residents on a monthly basis.

During the fair, shoppers could learn about the farming practices and crops grown at each farm. Several farms set up promotions, from free tomato knives to a drawing to win a wood-fired pizza dinner right on the farm.

Situated at the front of the store, the food fair also served as a way for Grinnell residents to become familiar with the variety of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) organizations in town. CSAs offer a subscription service to receive monthly boxes of produce directly from farmers in the Grinnell area. Members of the community can purchase a share of this years harvest well in advance, and will receive their portion of the harvest each month. Some farms choose to provide the same box of produce for every subscriber, while bigger farms might allow their subscribers to customize their boxes each month.

Many farmers who have CSAs appreciate them because they guarantee that their harvest will sell. Additionally, because Grinnell residents typically subscribe before crops are planted, CSAs can reduce the pressure on farmers to search for buyers during the growing season.

Its a way for farmers to get commitments up front  to buy seeds and fertilizer and potting soil  so [they] dont have to go to a bank, said local farmer Jordan Scheibel. He stressed the importance of buying directly from farmers, as it benefits both the grower and the consumer. If one dollar is spent through a CSA, that whole dollar goes to the farmer, Scheibel said.

The customer also receives high-quality produce, sometimes to a surprising extent. Andy Dunham, a local farmer with his own CSA, said, the produce, its so fresh.  One of the biggest comments is, hey, I got that bag of spinach and I forgot about it and a month later, it was still good. He explained that customers are inclined to believe leafy greens do not last very long because at the grocery store, they might sit around for upwards of 20 days before being purchased, so they only last about five days after being brought home.

Scheibel runs Middle Way Farm and organized this food fair event under the Local Foods Connection umbrella. Local Foods Connection is an organization that aims to provide access to those who cannot afford local foods. The organization raises money to give to farmers, which they then use to grow food for low-income families.

This is not the first time a local food fair has taken place in Grinnell. Last year, according to Scheibel, it boosted business for McNallys and connected more people with local CSAs. Because of last years success, it was easy to bring farmers back again this year.

Residents of the town also had good reason to attend  Scheibel characterized fairs of this sort as a one-stop shop to learn about all their CSA options. Because Local Food Source was also present, Scheibel said it was an easy way for those looking for local foods to embrace CSA producers, but also other types of producers.

Dunham said that overall, the food fair aims to foster longer-term relationships between the person eating the food and the person growing the food. If a customer wanted to join a CSA, he or she could take a business card, or subscribe to an email list to learn more.

This years fair also proved quite popular. Small crowds of people were consistently drawn to the booths throughout the day to discuss everything from how to make the most of CSAs and Grinnells Local Food Source, to the wonders of fresh tomatoes. The fair not only exposed shoppers to the different types of food grown in the vicinity of Grinnell, but also put faces to the farmers who already support much of Grinnell with their harvests. Through education and by example, this food fair highlighted the importance of eating locally and finding joy in every tomato.
By Lily Bohlke

bohlkeli@grinnell.edu

Walking into the Corn Palace, one encounters the smell of popcorn and the sound of loud, and perhaps even fake, laughter.

Sometimes [Kathryn Yetter 18] tells computer science jokes and we just laugh, said Lucy Chechik 18.

Yetter, Chechik, Mimi Sarai 18, Clare Magalaner 18, Maddie Goldman 18 and Tulah Fuchs 19 live together in the home they call Corn Palace. Not only have many of the housemates been to the real-life Corn Palace in South Dakota, but Chechik also wanted a name that lent itself well to an alter ego: the corn phallus.

I really wanted it to catch on, but its really never been used, Chechik said. I wanted it to be our weekend alter ego. Come to the Corn Palace around 9 p.m., youll meet the corn phallus.

Fuchs, who is a year below the rest of the housemates and was abroad first semester, said that although there were adjustments to make moving in, living in the house with her friends has been an overall positive experience.

It is a little odd to live off-campus as a third year just because a lot of my friends not in this house live on-campus, so I feel like its definitely a commitment that I have to make on my part to go back to campus, and visit my friends in their dorms, Fuchs said. Its been furthering myself from the college social scene in some ways, but also I think its made my friendships with my housemates stronger.  Especially my first month here, I would wake up and see my friends and be like this is incredible! My friends are just here!

I feel like you usually just grunt at me in the morning, Chechik added.

The six humans are not the only ones who make daily use of the house, however. Randall, a.k.a Greg, a.k.a Olivia is a possum that stays underneath their bathtub. One weekend night while taking out the trash, a neighbor alerted them that a possum had eaten their trash. The Corn Palace residents decided to put the trash in a stairway, the most inside-outside part of the house, according to Magalaner.

Im in bed, and Clare just comes screaming and is like, I can hear the possum at the top of the stairs, and it had gotten into the trash bag, Yetter said.

This is the culmination of all our personalities, Fuchs added. Clare was freaked out, Kathryn was like lets get some shit done, Im tired, lets  move this, and I was like, lets play a song on the speaker to scare it!

Their landlord decided to address the possum. One night, according to Chechik, there was a mysterious man at our back porch with a bat in his hand. However, the man with the bat was unsuccessful, and the possum still hangs around.

I live at peace with the possum, like it doesnt scare me as much anymore when I hear it under the bathtub, Fuchs said. I know what it is and so far it hasnt entered our house, that we know of, so Im like, ok, itll just be there, it hasnt eaten through anything yet, we think.

Many of the housemates  all except for Goldman and Randall/Greg/Olivia  spend a lot of time together outside of the Corn Palace playing frisbee.

I feel like sometimes it can be overwhelming. Like you can go to team dinner, and then you also go home together, and you also went to practice together before that, and I feel like at points this year Ive been like, I need other friends, Yetter said. But its also really nice to have this subcommunity to talk about what Im thinking about on the frisbee team all the time and thats really nice.

While many of the housemates do operate on a similar schedule, they dont consider themselves to be a friend group, as is often the case with off-campus houses.

We all have a lot of other different friends and I dont think any of us would consider ourselves a friend group, but we are really close in a lot of ways, Magalaner said. And I think we love seeing each other, hanging out a lot and do it a lot, but in a way thats a lot more inclusive, and I dont feel like I need to spend all my time at home hanging out with these people.

One activity that frequently brings them together is hosting dinner parties. They all enjoy cooking, and spend a lot of time together in the kitchen. In addition to the dinner parties, the housemates cook together for fun on a regular basis, and collaborate to ensure that everyone has a healthy and delicious meal.

I expected everyone to be really healthy, just knowing that everyone was really healthy in the past. They still are very healthy, Fuchs said. I feel like theyve inspired me.  And putting foods together  yesterday I asked Mimi what was missing from my bowl 

Sauce, Sarai said.

It was sauce, Fuchs said. Yeah. And crunch.

Before the end of the interview, the residents of Corn Palace took some time to think about what their sixth housemate, Goldman, who was not able to attend, would have said.

My bed is really comfortable, Magalaner said. She really likes her bed.
The Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation is a prestigious scholarship that works to encourage outstanding students to pursue careers in mathematics, the natural sciences and engineering. This year, two Grinnell College students  Rachel Bass and Tim Burnette, both 19  have received Honorable Mention in the award.

Over 420 colleges and universities nominated 1,280 students for the scholarship this year, 211 students receiving the scholarship and 281 an Honorable Mention.

Bass is a physics and mathematics double major and was initially introduced to the Goldwater Scholarship last year by her advisor. The application process was extensive and required a lot of work, she said.

I think I went through eight drafts of my essay, Bass laughed. It was a lot of revision and trying to fine tune things and it was kind of an exhausting process but I think it really helped me writing applications for summer programs and become aware of things that I was just oblivious to.

For Basss application, she wrote her essay about her past research and how she plans to build upon either that research, or new work in her future career as a scientist. Last summer, Bass did research at Cornell College, where she modeled dipole magnets as they went into an accelerator.

I talked about that modeling process and the contributions I made to the project and future stuff where I am interested in accelerator science and particle physics experiments.  I talked about past research, what I had done, and what Id want to do building upon that in the future, Bass said.

Currently, Bass is a mentor for physics and works in the math lab. Bass plans to pursue a Ph.D. in experimental particle physics. She would like to possibly combine her interest in mentorship with her academic interests.

I enjoy that mentoring, tutoring relationship. Being a professor would be cool or even if I was a researcher and having some say into outreach, she added.

Bass will be spending her summer at an accelerator facility in Geneva, Switzerland to learn more about her interest in this area of physics. Hopefully Ill get to see a more experimental instead of engineering side of it, she added.

Burnette is a biology major. They first heard about the scholarship during former CLS advisor Dr. Steve Gumps annual potato luncheon for second years.

Like Bass, Burnette felt that the application process was intensive.

The process is intensive and truly makes you examine yourself and your academic interests. You have to really know yourself to present a cohesive application. In a way, I felt as if I was condensing my whole life down into those few essays and responses and it was so hard to do, Burnette wrote in an email to The S&B.

Burnette wrote their application essay about their MAP research from last summer where they studied the growing drought tolerance in the Clarkia species in environments with growing global drought and changes in water availability.

Burnette plans to continue their research with the Clarkia species in the fall of 2018. Additionally, they will spend their summer at the University of Colorado at Boulder to study the drought tolerance of xeric tallgrass prairies in Colorado.

Burnette plans to continue studying drought tolerance and to apply for the Churchill Scholarship and Fulbright. Additionally, Burnette wants to teach at the university level and they believe this process only confirmed that, but it also showed me how interested I am in drought tolerance in natural plant communities, they wrote.

For Burnette, it is a tangible confirmation that they are capable of conducting this work and that they deserve to be where they are.

Being gay, non-binary, first-generation and low-income in science can be alienating from my peers and the scientific community. I always feel as if I need to work more to catch up and that can be stressful. But, receiving this award [has] definitely made me feel like my work wasnt in vain. It made me feel so good to have my efforts recognized at a national level and built my confidence a little bit more, Burnette wrote.
Kelly Page

pagekell@grinnell.edu

Last week was Pride Week at the College. Every day from Monday, April 9, through Saturday, April 14, the Stonewall Resource Center (SRC) and affiliated groups hosted events for LGBTQ+ students.

Ric Tennenbaum 18, co-coordinator of the SRC, gave an open call for students to host pride-related events. She highlighted the importance of events that bring together students with various identities, saying, I think the importance of Pride Week is in parsing out all these different fields of queerness and different little interests people have within queerness and being able to  really get into it.

For many, Pride Week presented a moment to reflect on what it means to be LGBTQ+ at Grinnell College. There are a multitude of LGBTQ+ identities of Grinnellians, many of which are addressed by student groups that focus on different experiences and concerns.

One such group is Queer People of Color (QPOC), led by James Caruso 18. According to Caruso, QPOCs focus over the past several years has been to provide a space for queer people of color on campus  to come together and talk.  Especially for queer students of color, we have that double identifier of otherness or of difference  and I think being here in Grinnell where this school is predominantly white, predominantly straight and cisgender, and the town itself is predominantly conservative,  here can be very difficult.

Another student group that addresses a specific LGBTQ+ experience is Out in STEM, co-founded by Allison Bartz 18 as a place for LGBTQ+ students in STEM to come together.

We made it because there wasnt any group that was sort of associated with STEM students in LGBT stuff, Bartz said. The idea is that if you dont know that there are other queer students in your classes, you might feel kind of isolated or nervous cause  theres a lot of straight men in a lot of classes and they like to talk a lot.  Its good knowing there are people to talk to if you need help.

Trans Advocacy Group (TAG) is a group on campus that addresses the needs of transgender students. Loyal Ulm 20, a TAG leader, has helped push for the College to make various changes in the interests of trans students

A lot of what we do in TAG is looking at a lot of small things that come up for students throughout the school year, Ulm said. For example, last year  if students had issues with CAs assigning bathrooms,  we would sort that out, working with Intercultural Affairs to get P-Card names changed, getting dead names off Deans List.

Queer Athletes and Allies (QAA) provides a safe space for those navigating often heteronormative experiences as athletes. A member of the group said that [QAA is] a space for us to talk, and a space for us to be aware of other queer athletes who are younger and who are trying to figure it out in their typically heteronormative teams.

The QAA member, who wished to remain anonymous, said that they feel the SRC does not necessarily provide a space for people for whom being queer is not the most central part of our identity. They also referred to the relationship between athletes and non-athletes at the College, citing their belief that SRC community members wont like sportos and everything that sportos stand for.

Mental illness and LGBTQ+ issues are also often closely tied at the College.

Theres a very strong relationship between people who have mental illness and people who are queer on campus, said Luke Jarzyna 18, who organized the Freesound and English SEPC Open Mic during the week. I wish there were more resources, potentially, and I feel like people still experience those things in isolation.

The draft of the new Diversity and Inclusion Plan, released earlier this month, includes a discussion of the importance of spaces on campus to promote student healing. It remains to be seen whether this will apply specifically to LGBTQ+ students.

Although being LGBTQ+ presents difficulties while at Grinnell, the college environment can also provide hope. Jarzyna pointed out many ways that the English Department has supported queer studies within English classes. He noted the importance of the College hosting three recent Writers@Grinnell events that featured queer writers: Ocean Vuong, Marlon James and Roxanne Gay.

I know for me and a lot of other writers on campus hearing those perspectives on campus really meant the world, he said. I feel very supported by hearing these people speak.

Even with Pride Week now in the past, LGBTQ+ students at Grinnell continue to strive for community, visibility and growth at Grinnell.
By Chloe Wray

wraychlo@grinnell.edu

Grinnell Colleges third annual campus-wide student Research Symposium was held April 16 through 19. Featuring the work of 104 individual third and fourth year students, the symposium took the form of numerous panels, poster sessions and performances.

Grinnell College seeks to ensure that every Grinnell student has the opportunity to engage in research. Towards this end, our Faculty have engaged in thoughtful conversations about their majors and fields so that the skills needed to carry out research are scaffolded across the curriculum, wrote Professor Maria Tapias, anthropology, a coordinator of the symposium, in an email to The S&B.

Professors Jackie Brown and Wayne Moyer, biology and political science respectively, and Lesley Wright, Faulconer Gallery director, opened the symposium. Brown and Wright spoke about the Faulconer Gallery exhibit, Making Life Visible, a collection which they co-researched and curated and which incorporates biology and art, their respective fields of study, while Moyer spoke on his work on policy research. The event foreshadowed potential career opportunities in which undergraduate research may aid and served to exemplify the importance of research and the breadth of forms it can take.

The symposium allows for students to share their research, exhibiting techniques they have learned at Grinnell. The projects which students engage in are either of their own design, or that of a faculty member. About half of the research presented resulted from Mentored Advance Projects (MAPs) and other research projects were derived from courses, seminars and a book club.

Similar research topics were organized into panels, featuring two to four students who presented their work, often reading their research paper aloud, which was followed by time for questions from the audience. Panel titles included Gender and Agency, Health, Racism and Policy in the United States, and Religion and Otherness.

Ric Tennenbaum 18 presented her paper, The Pedophile, the Family, and Sustaining White Supremacy on the panel entitled Terror, along with Bailey Bagneris 19, The McCarthy Front: U.S. Subversion of Radical Black Activism from 1940 to 1960, and Lucy Bales 18, The Impact of U.S. Troops on Terrorism.

After reading her paper aloud, Tennenbaum reflected on the opportunity the Research Symposium had given her to share her work. At the undergraduate level, much of the research done is experimental and highly interest driven, allowing for students like Tennenbaum to explore topics of unique interest. Tennenbaum shared that she does not plan to publish her paper anytime soon for its provocative take on the pedophile and the family as tools through which white supremacy is sustained. Tapias wrote that if a student chooses to pursue publishing their work, The College also provides funding for students to disseminate their creative and scholarly beyond our own symposium, including regional, national and international venues.

In contrast to the panels, poster sessions allowed student-researchers to share their work with viewers in a one-on-one environment.

Luke Jarzyna 18, Sunny Zhao 18 and Anne Rogers 19 along with Professor Tony Perman, music, conducted a research project entitled The American Mbira, which they presented during a poster session during the symposium. The project focused on the Zimbabwean instrument, mbira, which all three students have been playing for pleasure over the past four or five semesters.

Over spring break, the three students traveled to Oakland, California, staying with a Zimbabwean artist who they interviewed along with other musicians who play mbira.

We used those interviews to begin talking about how a very traditional, very old and spiritual music shifts and changes in the U.S. context, where its performance has increased in the last 20 years or so, said Jarzyna.

Jarzyna appreciated that the College provided for the students to compensate their host for food and lodging, allowing for them to conduct a project that was ethical, respectful and compassionate.

Being able to really practice ethnography, where youre really talking with people and letting conversations develop in a natural way, would aid me in any number of person-oriented fields, Jarzyna said, drawing on his experiences in ethnomusicology and sociology classes.

In this [research] process, students develop skills in problem-solving, ethical decision-making, collecting and analyzing data or texts, as well as critical thinking, writing, and communication skills.  [Students] build resilience and learn to work through obstacles or unanticipated problems, Tapias wrote.
Montreal, CA (H4T1V6)

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Generally cloudy. Slight chance of a rain shower. High 16C. Winds ENE at 5 to 10 mph..

Tonight

Considerable cloudiness. Slight chance of a rain shower. Low around 7C. Winds NE at 10 to 15 mph.


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As one of East Asias most popular tourist destinations, Vietnam attracts scores of tourists ever year, receiving almost 18 million international visitors in 2019 alone. Travellers are drawn to its secluded beaches, vast rice paddies, soaring mountains and lively cities.

Vietnam often features as part of the southeast Asian backpacking route, along with Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and the Philippines. Some of these countries offer free 21-30 day visas on arrival at the airport; but did you know entry to Vietnam requires a little more preparation?

Follow these steps to ensure legal and stress-free entry into Vietnam:

Do I need a visa to travel to Vietnam?

Coronavirus update: Due to the Covid-19 Pandemic, Vietnam has temporarily suspended visa waivers, issuing of visas and the entry into Vietnam for all foreign nationals. There are a very small number of exceptions for diplomats on official business and certain high-skilled workers. These will be processed on case-by-case basis.

Most tourists travelling to Vietnam will require an entry visa, regardless of how long they plan to stay in the country. However citizens from some countries can receive a short-term visa exemption.

These countries include: Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Laos for a period of up to 30 days; the Philippines for a period of up to 21 days; the UK, Denmark, Sweden, France, Germany, Spain, Norway, Italy, Finland, Russia, South Korea and Japan for a period of up to 15 days; and Myanmar and Brunei for a period of up to 14 days.

In this case, when you arrive at the airport you will need to fill in the Vietnam Entry and Exit forms, provide two passport-sized photos, show your passport at immigration and, in some cases, present your return flight ticket.

If you are a citizen of any of the above countries and are planning to stay in the country longer than the agreed visa-free period, you will need to apply for full visa via the Vietnamese Embassy or Consulate, the E-visa or the Visa on Arrival. You can also purchase your visa through the third-party vendor e-visa.co.uk.

British citizens travelling to Vietnam for either tourism or for business can enter Vietnam for up to 15 days (including the dates of entry and exit). This visa waiver is currently suspended due the Covid-19 Pandemic.

For all citizens travelling to Vietnam, your passport will need to be valid for at least six months.

Should I apply for a single entry visa or multiple entry visa?

This depends on your travel itinerary. If you are planning on remaining in Vietnam for the duration of the trip, a single entry visa is just fine.

However, if you plan on leaving Vietnam and returning at a later date, you will need to apply for a multiple entry visa. This is ideal for travellers who are country hopping through Cambodia, Thailand and other bordering countries, and may wish to return again to Vietnam while their visa is still valid.

How do I apply for my visa?

Citizens from the UK, Ireland, Western Europe and US can apply for an E-Visa before they travel, which lasts up to 30 days. It is only valid for single entry trips. This costs $25 and the application should be processed within three working days. Use of the E-Visa is limited to certain entry and exit points, which you must select at the time of application. The $25 is a one-off fee, but if your visa is rejected, the payment is non-refundable.

There are two other ways to apply for a visa to Vietnam, which are available to citizens from Europe, the US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada (among others). For both options, you will need to provide two passport-sized photos, so make sure you have these to hand.

Option 1: Visa on Arrival

Apply for a visa online using the Vietnam Visa on Arrival method. You will have to apply via a third-party visa agent or tour operator based in Vietnam, who will issue a Visa Approval Letter which allows you to board your flight to Vietnam. The third-party agent will charge you for this service and the cost varies between $12 USD and $38, depending on the duration of your stay.

The visa will be stamped on your passport, and on arrival in Vietnam you will also be charged a separate fee of $25 for a single entry visa or $50 for a multiple entry visa. Immigration Control will only accept the stamping fee in cash (USD), and all the bills should be crisp and unmarked. The Visa on Arrival is only valid at the following international airports in Vietnam: Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Nha Trang and Danang.

Option 2: Apply for a visa through

If you are a UK traveller and planning to stay in Vietnam for more than 15 days, you may want to consider applying for a visa through e-visa.co.uk. Since 2018, it has been possible to apply for the Vietnam visa entirely online. This way, you avoid the cost of the stamping fee ($25 to $50) and the waiting line for the former Vietnam visa on arrival.

Unlike the Vietnam visa on arrival, the e-visa is granted before departure. Travellers can thus avoid the waiting line for payment of the stamping fee. All costs are included in the total price of 49.95 per person. The e-visa is cheaper, easier to apply for, and saves a lot of time at the airport compared to the old visa on arrival.

e-Visa use smart application forms that automatically tracks down frequently made mistakes (such as filling in a wrong passport number) and offers a 24hr customer service. If your visa is rejected for whatever reason, the full purchase cost is reimbursed.

CLICK HERE to to get your Vietname visa

Option 3: Vietnamese Embassy or Consulate

Apply for a visa directly at the Vietnamese Embassy or Consulate. This option is the most expensive and takes up to seven working days to process. However you can apply up to six months in advance and so ideal if you like to be prepared.

The procedure for applying is different at every embassy, but can usually be done by post, email or in person.

Are there any visa-free destinations I can visit in Vietnam?

Yes, just the one. Phu Quoc Island off the coast of Cambodia is a Special Economic Zone and travellers from all nationalities are eligible for a 30-day visa-free travel to this destination. This is only valid if you dont travel to any other parts of Vietnam, and you must show your round-trip air ticket to Phu Quoc Island in order to gain entry. Tip: Your passport must also be valid for at least 6 months.

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Disclaimer: this article was sponsored by e-visa.co.uk
Two years on from sweeping tax reforms to buy-to-let, the Government's aim of limiting small-scale amateur landlords appears to be closer to fruition.

Research conducted by Simple Landlords Insurance has found that a third of landlords with just one buy-to-let property are planning to sell and give up on buy-to-let.

Meanwhile, 38 per cent of landlords who own two or more properties say they are planning to buy at least one more in the coming year.

Landlords with larger portfolios are planning further investment this year but those with one investment property are considering selling

Tom Cooper, of Simple Landlords Insurance, said: 'The research reveals it is the landlords positioned at the larger end of the market  or aspiring to get there  who are least fazed by tax changes.

'They are also the best poised to take advantage of increasing tenant demand and bargain housing stock being sold off.'

It follows two years of change for buy-to-let landlords.

Former Chancellor George Osborne first announced a tax raid on landlords in 2015, stating the move was designed to support home ownership amid claims that landlords were scooping up properties and making it harder for hopeful first-time buyers to compete.

Intending to put a stop to this, the Government slapped a 3 per cent surcharge on stamp duty payable on new buy-to-let purchases from April 2016. This trebled the tax bill compared to residential property in some cases.

A further change arrived in April last year, as landlords began to lose their tax relief under a rule known as Section 24, which also forces them to pay tax on their rental income rather than just on their profit after mortgage costs.

Furthermore, the Bank of England also clamped down on mortgage lenders, forcing them to require landlords to earn a much higher ratio of rental income compared to their mortgage payments.

In October last year, further rules were brought in for landlords with four or more mortgaged properties to ensure their debt levels are not too high.

This chart shows how house prices have risen across the UK over the past decade-and-a-half, according to the ONS

High house prices have also squeezed those looking to get into buy-to-let, while encouraging some smaller landlords fearing the headache of higher taxes to take profits and sell up.

House prices rose across the country, except in London, in the year to February, ONS figures showed this week.

Cooper added: 'From Section 24 to Right to Rent, increased stamp duty, capital gains tax, regulation and licensing, youd be forgiven for thinking it was all doom and gloom in the private rented sector.

'But our evidence shows there are landlords adapting to the changes and emerging like phoenixes from the ashes.'

Some 38 per cent of the landlords with two or more properties said they plan to buy at least one more in the next year  dwarfing the 11 per cent of landlords with single properties who are planning to expand.

Meanwhile, 30 per cent of single property landlords plan to sell, compared with just 8 per cent of landlords with more than two properties.

The number of accidental landlords is also on the decline, falling from 18 per cent in 2016 to 15 per cent in 2017, widening the gulf between them and more professional investors.

Carl Agar, managing director of estate agent Big Red House, said: 'Times change. Markets change. But property can still be a way to make money if you change too.

'Theres a clear difference between the big players and the dabblers, the old school landlords and the new kids on the block.'

Source: BM Solutions - London was the only region to see rents fall in the second half of 2017

Yields from rental income are still healthy

Separate research released last month painted a healthy picture for landlords. Yields rose in the second half of 2017 compared to the same period the year before in every region except London, which was the only region to see actual rental incomes fall.

The average gross rental yield on buy-to-let hit 5.2 per cent in the second half of 2017 according to BM Solutions - which is part of Lloyds Banking Group and one of the two biggest buy-to-let lenders in the country.

Landlords in the North of England are reaping the best rewards with yields touching 6.9 per cent at the end of last year.

Northern Ireland offers an average rental yield of 6.2 per cent, followed by the North West, Yorkshire and the Humber and Wales, all of which offer 6 per cent yields on average.

Agar said: 'Your traditional landlord is seeing all of these new rules imposed and their returns drop. Meanwhile those new to the market are comparing those returns to what theyd get putting their money into a savings account  and it actually looks pretty good. Theyre seeing opportunity, and building the rules, regulations and changes into their business model.

'Personally, Im looking forward to a more professional and more prosperous private rental sector, driven by a new breed of landlord investor.'

New focus for landlords

As well as being bigger and more professional, the emerging landlord is also investing differently, and diversifying their portfolio, according to Simple Landlord Insurance's report.

The classic two up, two down home for families of working tenants is no longer where landlords poised for growth are investing.

Instead, higher yielding properties including holiday lets and flats are becoming more popular.

Landlords renting out houses in multiple occupation - properties let to more than one tenant on separate tenancy agreements - are also feeling optimistic, with 43 per cent in buying mode and just 4 per cent planning to shrink their portfolios, according to the research.
[April 20, 2018] NSAV ANNOUNCES CORRECTIVE PRESS RELEASE FOR THE HEARTRESCUE CHINA PROGRAM

Cresco, PA., April 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Net Savings Link, Inc. (OTC: NSAV), a medical technology and software company, announced the correction of a February 15, 2018 press release and subsequent Twitter messages, in reference to NSAVs relationship to the HeartRescue China Program. NSAV had previously announced that Medtronic PLC ( http://www.medtronic.com ) was the lead sponsor of the project, when the press release should have stated that the Medtronic Foundation ( http://www.medtronic.com/us-en/about/foundation.html ) is the projects lead sponsor. NSAV would like to sincerely apologize to Medtronic PLC and the Medtronic Foundation for this error.

The HeartRescue China program is led by RTI International ( https://www.rti.org ), a US-based research institute, in partnership with NSAVs subsidiary, Shanghai based Vital Strategic Research Institute (VSRI) through a subcontract, in addition to other partners. It is funded and sponsored by the Medtronic Foundation. The program aims to improve access and quality of care for patients suffering from acute cardiovascular disease (CVD) in China. Over 1 million Chinese died each year from CVD of all types, which now the worlds leading cause of death. For more information, please visit the project websites below. http://www.heartrescueproject.com/heartrescue-project-partners/international-partners/heartrescue-global-china



http://www.heartrescueproject.com NSAVs subsidiary, VSRI, is a medical research firm with a long history of expertise in design of clinical trials and global research. VSRI has collaborated with pharmaceutical giants such as Eli Lilly, Pfizer and Bristol-Myers Squibb.

James Tilton, president of NSAV stated, We greatly appreciate the support that the Medtronic Foundation has provided to the HeartRescue Global Project. Without this support, there would be no project or opportunity to both save and improve the lives of Chinese people who suffer from acute cardiovascular disease. NSAV's vision is the establishment of a fully integrated technology and software company that provides turnkey technological and software solutions to the medical industry. Over time, NSAV plans to provide a wide range of services such as software solutions, e-commerce, advisory services, financial services, patents and trademarks and information technology. For further information please contact NSAV at 1 (585) 520-2102 or investorgrowthllc@gmail.com The NSAV corporate email address is info@nsavholdinginc.com The NSAV corporate website can be accessed at http://nsavholdinginc.com The NSAV Twitter account can be accessed at https://twitter.com/NSAV_MJTechCo The NSAV Facebook account can be accessed at https://www.facebook.com/NSAVHolding This press release 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, which are intended to be covered by the safe harbors created thereby. Investors are cautioned that, all forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, including without limitation, the ability of Net Savings Link, Inc. to accomplish its stated plan of business. Net Savings Link, Inc. 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 press release will prove to bse 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 a representation by Net Savings Link, Inc. or any other person. Contact Investor Growth LLC investorgrowthllc@gmail.com 585-520-2102

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[April 19, 2018] Software AG's Cumulocity IoT Platform Powers STW's Remote Monitoring of Transport for London Buses

Software AG (Frankfurt TecDAX: SOW) today announced how STW (Sensor-Technik Wiedemann) is implementing a solution, powered by Software AG's Cumulocity IoT platform, for remote condition monitoring of exhaust gas treatment systems retrofitted to London buses as part of the Greater London Authority's plans to create an Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ). HJS Emission Technology is the company that will provide the high-efficiency emissions systems to the Transport for London (TfL) buses, coupled with its UK partner, Emission Engineering Ltd (EEL). By 2021, more than 5,000 buses in London's public transport network are to be retrofitted with HJS Emission technology's SCRT (Selective Catalytic Reduction Technology), which uses particle filters and catalytic converters, to reduce soot particles and nitrogen oxide (NOx). STW's TC1 Telematics Controller (with built-in GPS) will also be fitted onto each bus in order to monitor their emissions at any time or location. STW is an industrial vehicle telemetry specialist with significant experience in delivering manufacturers of mobile machines, agricultural equipment and specialty vehicles with digitalization, automation and electrification. Dr. Michael Schmitt, CEO, STW, said: "We have taken Software AG's Cumulocity IoT platform and rebrandedit 'STW machines.cloud' as our IoT solution for the collection of data from on-board devices such as our TC1 and TC3G telematics modules. STW machines.cloud provides user and device management and can connect, monitor and analyze operations in real time. HJS will use it to gain significant insights into the vast amount of data streaming from the embedded devices in retrofitted buses in London. The data is the basis for documented evidence towards TfL. Ultimately, HJS can use the big data to detect patterns alerting them to problems in either their system or the bus engines. Implementing algorithms in the telematics modules evolves the big data into smart data, reduces the amount of data transmitted and enables predictive maintenance which ensures they can avoid unnecessary preventive actions and breakdowns."



STW machines.cloud can be used on a personal computer or mobile device via a web interface. In this instance, each device on board a bus is monitored and tracks not only engine emissions, but also technical data, faults, routes, locations and fuel consumption. The data collected can then be visualized using SCADA widgets in real time and present sophisticated diagnostics enabling real-time updates and calibration. Because of the open and secure architecture of the Cumulocity IoT platform, a vast ecosystem of third-party products and services are available to the STW machines.cloud without the risk of "vendor lock-in."

Bernd Gross, senior vice president, IoT and Cloud, Software AG noted: "machines.cloud is the perfect combination of STW's industrial sensor technology and machine expertise with Software AG's open, carrier-grade Cumulocity IoT platform. The Cumulocity IoT platform includes a range of pre-packaged solutions such as Condition Monitoring, Predictive Maintenance and Track & Trace, as well as quick and easy device and sensor management, thus bringing the worlds of IT and operational technology (OT) together. Extending these capabilities, Cumulocity IoT customers can take full advantage of Software AG's Digital Business Platform for industry-leading integration, business process management, advanced analytics and machine learning capabilities." Cumulocity IoT is unique in that it provides an IoT-as-a-Service solution that includes enhanced high availability and multi-cluster deployment options, which strengthen its offering. Additionally, Cumulocity IoT incorporates several carrier-grade features, including code-free integration of devices supporting Low Power WAN (LPWAN) technologies used for long-term low bandwidth remote monitoring, Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT), Lightweight M2M (LWM2M), and Long Range (LoRa). Software AG's Cumulocity IoT has its own dedicated stand at the IoT Tech Expo in London and the IoT World Forum in Santa Clara. About Software AG Software AG (Frankfurt TecDAX: SOW) helps companies with their digital transformation. With Software AG's Digital Business Platform, companies can better interact with their customers and bring them on new 'digital' journeys, promote unique value propositions, and create new business opportunities. In the Internet of Things (IoT) market, Software AG enables enterprises to integrate, connect and manage IoT components as well as analyze data and predict future events based on Artificial Intelligence (AI). The Digital Business Platform is built on decades of uncompromising software development, IT experience and technological leadership. Software AG has more than 4,500 employees, is active in 70 countries and had revenues of 879 million in 2017. About STW As an internationally-active company, Sensor-Technik Wiedemann GmbH (STW) has for more than 30 years supported its customers, the worldwide leading manufacturers of mobile machines, utility machines and special machines and their users in the utilization of the new technical possibilities inherent in digitalization, automation and electrification. www.sensor-technik.de View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180419005259/en/

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[April 19, 2018] Credit Union Cultivator Debuts as an Affordable Actionable Data Analytics and Growth Engine

CHARLOTTE, N.C., April 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Credit Union Cultivator, a powerful Web based platform that analyzes existing credit union member information with a wide range of outside data, announced its launch today. With the completion of a successful pilot program with multiple credit unions, the platform is now open to all credit unions seeking state-of-the-art growth tools. Featuring data analysis with built-in marketing outreach mechanisms, Cultivator combines MCIF-like services and advanced data analytic capabilities into a dynamic dashboard that delivers actionable targets for growth in existing households and well beyond. One satisfied user (a credit union marketing Vice President) said this in describing the transformative ability for Cultivator to drive income-generating growth results: "With actionable, current data right at our fingertips, in an easy to use, fresh innovative format, we're able to understand our members' upcoming needs, so that we can help them meet their financial goals. Even better, Credit Union Cultivator is helping us book even more loans and open more accounts! With its easy to use graphical interface, Credit Union Cultivator hashelped us expedite our marketing process and in a matter of days we were up and running. It fits right into our existing systems."



With Cultivator's pre-defined queries, it is possible to launch a great variety of campaigns to serve the needs of the credit union and its members. Cultivator is core-processor-agnostic, and interfaces directly with popular email providers (such as Constant Contact, SendGrid and MailChimp). Cultivator requires a minimal installation footprint, and typically can be installed in a matter of a few days. While allowing the exploration of a credit union's existing data, and the discovery of previously unknown insights to member behavior, Cultivator also preserves members' privacy and does not host member data. Finally, unlike other competing services, Cultivator is scaled and priced to be affordable for credit unions of virtually any size. Confident in its ability to produce results, the solution does not require long term agreements with its client credit unions. Credit Union Cultivator benefits from advisors with over 50 years of combined credit union experience, and the technical expertise of software developers with multiple patents in their background. Company President, Mr. Rafael A. Duluc, stated: "Credit Union Cultivator has been designed from inception to allow credit unions to compete in a cost-effective manner in the world of expensive big-data solutions."

For further information, or to schedule a no-obligation demonstration of Cultivator's power to simply and quickly drive growth, income, and greater member engagement, visit www.creditunioncultivator.com, or reach out via email at info@creditunioncultivator.com. The Credit Union Cultivator platform is a product of The Argenteneo Group, an experienced innovator in software and analytics solutions for the financial, automotive, and insurance sectors since 2013. For more information, please visit www.argenteneo.com. View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/credit-union-cultivator-debuts-as-an-affordable-actionable-data-analytics-and-growth-engine-300633172.html SOURCE Credit Union Cultivator

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[April 19, 2018] Arctic Wolf Networks Selected Best Small to Medium Enterprise Solution at the 2018 SC Awards

Arctic Wolf Networks, a leading security operations center(SOC)-as-a-service company, announced today that its AWN CyberSOC was selected as the Best Small to Medium Enterprise (SME) Solution by SC Magazine. In its 22nd year, the annual SC Awards are the crowning achievement for security professionals and products in the cybersecurity industry. "Arctic Wolf understands that every company is different. SMEs have the same cybersecurity needs as larger enterprises, yet often lack the budget and staff necessary for truly robust security operations," said Brian NeSmith, co-founder and CEO at Arctic Wolf Networks. "This is why we are proud to have been won one of the most prestigious awards in our industry, further spreading awareness of SME's current needs and validating that our AWN CyberSOC sets the industry standard for SOC-as-a-service." Every company needs a security operations center, but many do not have the expertise or budget to establish and maintain one internally. As a customizable, turnkey service, SOC-as-a-service is the best solution for these companies with varying operational needs. It provides companies with all the key elements needed for a strong cyber defense, including a SIEM and a team of security analysts, as well as all other technology required to deploy and operate. While there are many companies that offer SOC-as-a-service, Arctic Wolf's CyberSOC is the industry's only SOC-as-a-service that can be deployed in minutes without compromising large enterprise-class capabilities. "Since last year's SC Awards ceremony, the information security world has witnessed such key developments as the global WannaCry and NotPetya malware attacks, the discovery of vulnerabilities affecting billions of mobile devices and CPU chipsets, and the emergence of cryptocurrency miners as cybercriminals' latest weapon of choice," said Illena Armstrong, VP, editorial, SC Media. "As a winner in the Excellence Award category of the SC Awards, Arctic Wolf has demonstrated that they will be prepared for whatever new threats emerge in 2018 and beyond." <> The SC Award selection process was led by a panel of IT security experts from both the public and private sectors, who rigorously reviewed hundreds of applications and selected finalists in 31 categories. Winners were announced Tuesday, April 17, 2018 during the SC Awards Gala in San Francisco. The mission of the SC Awards is to honor the achievements of companies and cybersecurity professionals striving to safeguard their business' and their customers' critical data in North America. For more information and a detailed list of categories, finalists, and winners, visit http://www.scmagazine.com/awards.



Additional Resources: For more information on Arctic Wolf's solution portfolio, please visit www.arcticwolf.com Visit our blog, check out webinars, and join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. About Arctic Wolf

Arctic Wolf Networks provides SOC-as-a-service that is redefining the economics of security. AWN CyberSOC is anchored by Concierge Security Engineers and includes 247 monitoring, custom alerting and incident investigation and response. There is no hardware or software to purchase, and the end-to-end service includes a proprietary cloud-based SIEM, threat intelligence subscriptions and all the expertise and tools required. For more information about Arctic Wolf CyberSOC, visit https://www.arcticwolf.com. About SC Media SC Media is cybersecurity. For over 25 years, they have armed information security professionals with in-depth and unbiased information through timely news, comprehensive analysis, cutting-edge features, contributions from thought leaders, and independent product reviews in partnership with and for top-level information security executives and their technical teams. In addition to their comprehensive website, SC Media offers magazines, eBooks, and newsletters. They also host digital and live events such as SC Awards and RiskSec NY to provide cybersecurity professionals all the information needed to safeguard their organizations and contribute to their longevity and success. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180419005895/en/

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[April 19, 2018] The 5th Annual Brooklyn 5G Summit Envisions New World of Super-Fast Wireless

BROOKLYN, N.Y., April 19, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Researchers, policy makers and others in academia and industry will gather for the fifth anniversary of the annual Brooklyn 5G Summit at New York University's Tandon School of Engineering. The event, April 24-26, 2018, will explore innovations in products and services for the next generation of wireless communications. The Summit, available via livestream, is jointly organized by NYU WIRELESS and Nokia, and will explore 5G New Radio  the backbone wireless standard for 5G  including 5G for autonomous vehicles, 5G cloud technology, phased-array antennas, the latest advances in millimeter-wave (mmWave) hardware, and network automation with artificial intelligence (AI). The event features leaders from companies driving the momentum for 5G, including Nokia, AT&T, Ericsson, Huawei, National Instruments, Qualcomm, Verizon, and InterDigital; companies such as BMW, Toyota and Bosch that are laying the groundwork for 5G-enabled products; and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the National Science Foundation. 5G  Ready for Takeoff Theodore (Ted) S. Rappaport, the Ernst Weber/David Lee professor of electrical engineering at NYU Tandon, and Amitava Ghosh, who directs the Radio Interface Group at Nokia Bell Labs, launched the Brooklyn 5G Summit in 2014. In that year the number of mobile-connected devices first exceeded the world's population, and growth in demand has only increased since then. By 2021 more than three-quarters of the world's mobile data traffic will be video, a 9-fold increase from 2016, and by 2020, experts predict there will be some 20 billion IoT (Internet of Things) devices worldwide. NYU WIRELESS, part of NYU Tandon's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is located in the hub of Brooklyn's Tech Triangle  a globally recognized hotbed of wireless research, game development, green tech, and more  and is helping establish Brooklyn's Innovation Coastline. Rappaport founded the center in 2012 soon after arriving at what was then called Brooklyn Polytechnic from the University of Texas at Austin. Now under the direction of NYU Tandon Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Sundeep Rangan, the center is keeping a steady drumbeat of innovation and research, including: A project with the Austin, Texas Fire Department to develop and test mmWave technology for first responders that will support high-definition images from drones, ambulances, and from robots in environments too dangerous for humans, all in real time.

Fire Department to develop and test mmWave technology for first responders that will support high-definition images from drones, ambulances, and from robots in environments too dangerous for humans, all in real time. COSMOS, a multi-institute collaboration for a square-mile 5G test bed in upper- Manhttan , a project supported by a $22.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation that will allow researchers to test some of the biggest promises of 5G, including applications such as VR/AR and autonomous vehicles.

, a project supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation that will allow researchers to test some of the biggest promises of 5G, including applications such as VR/AR and autonomous vehicles. NYU WIRELESS' pioneering research is guiding the FCC's and industry's drive to lay the groundwork for 5G, including last year's Spectrum Frontiers proposal. The center also helped test, debug, and provide feedback on a new FCC portal that streamlines the experimental bandwidth licensing process (the center was the first applicant to receive a Program Experimental License through the portal).



Added Rangan, "The advent of blazingly-fast, near-zero latency wireless will be a game changer not just for traditional telecommunications, but for countless applications, including IoT, vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-cloud communications enabling self-driving cars, 3-D streaming video, near-instant video downloads, and much more."

In 2018, NYU WIRELESS industry affiliates such as Nokia begin deployment of 5G networks in the United States and beyond: Nokia and T-Mobile this year begin roll-out of a nationwide 5G multi-band network in the United States using the commercial Nokia 5G solution, completing the deployment during 2020.

using the commercial Nokia 5G solution, completing the deployment during 2020. AT&T will launch mobile 5G to customers in a dozen cities by the end of this year.

Verizon, which recently opened a 5G-enabled Open Innovation lab in New York to cultivate startups and innovations, aims to have 5G networks deployed in up to five U.S. markets by year's end, starting with Sacramento, California .

to cultivate startups and innovations, aims to have 5G networks deployed in up to five U.S. markets by year's end, starting with . Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X50 5G modem will drive 5G New Radio (NR) trials worldwide by numerous carriers, including in the mmWave spectrum bands.

National Instruments this year launches the first 5G NR field trials for 28GHz with Samsung. This year's Summit will include presentations by industry leaders, such as Marc Rouanne, president of Nokia Mobile Networks; and Melissa Arnoldi, President, Technology & Operations, AT&T Communications. NYU WIRELESS demonstrations include: An end-to-end mmWave Cellular simulation platform.

Massive MIMO and mmWave Channel Emulation, a pioneering, cost-effective programmable channel emulator for high bandwidth, large antenna array systems.

A demonstration of high quality virtual reality streaming via a 5G mmWave channel.

A mmWave live demonstration showcasing the performance of a gigabits-per-second-capable system, operating both at millimeter-wave and sub-6 GHz frequencies. To learn more about the past five years of pioneering research at NYU WIRELESS visit http://engineering.nyu.edu/press-releases/2017/08/10/nyu-wireless-celebrates-five-years-pioneering-research-making-5g-communica. To watch the livestream of Summit proceedings, April 25-26, provided by the IEEE Communications Society and sponsored by OnScale, register at https://register.comsoc.org/content/brooklyn-5g-summit-2018. Join the conversation: @NYUWIRELESS, @NYUTandon, @Nokia, #B5GS. For more information, visit http://brooklyn5gsummit.com. Note: Images available at: http://dam.engineering.nyu.edu/?c=2076&k=fedf072b49 About NYU WIRELESS

NYU WIRELESS is a multi-disciplinary academic research center that offers an unprecedented and unique set of skills. Centered at New York University's Brooklyn engineering location and involving more than 200 faculty and students throughout the entire NYU community, NYU WIRELESS offers its faculty, students, and affiliated sponsors from industry a world-class research environment that is creating the fundamental theories and techniques for next-generation mass-deployable wireless devices across a wide range of applications and markets. This center combines NYU's Tandon School of Engineering program, School of Medicine and Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, and offers a depth of expertise with unparalleled capabilities for the creation of new wireless circuits and systems as well as new health care solutions for the wireless industry. For more information, visit wireless.engineering.nyu.edu. About the New York University Tandon School of Engineering

The NYU Tandon School of Engineering dates to 1854, the founding date for both the New York University School of Civil Engineering and Architecture and the Brooklyn Collegiate and Polytechnic Institute (widely known as Brooklyn Poly). A January 2014 merger created a comprehensive school of education and research in engineering and applied sciences, rooted in a tradition of invention and entrepreneurship and dedicated to furthering technology in service to society. In addition to its main location in Brooklyn, NYU Tandon collaborates with other schools within NYU, one of the country's foremost private research universities, and is closely connected to engineering programs at NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai. It operates Future Labs focused on start-up businesses in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn and an award-winning online graduate program. For more information, visit http://engineering.nyu.edu. www.facebook.com/nyutandon

@NYUTandon View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-5th-annual-brooklyn-5g-summit-envisions-new-world-of-super-fast-wireless-300633244.html SOURCE NYU Tandon School of Engineering

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[April 19, 2018] 19 Crimes Wins the Super REGGIE Award

19 Crimes, the first wine brand to bring augmented reality to wine labels, was awarded one of the industry's most prestigious marketing awards, the Super REGGIE, in the 2018 REGGIE Awards competition. The awards event culminated with the Super REGGIE announcement, honoring Treasury Wine Estates and its agencies for the best campaign of 2017 chosen from the Gold category winners. Building on momentum from last year's REGGIE awards, where 19 Crimes earned silver for 'Best Shopper Program', this year the brand received the most nominations for any company in the following categories: Content Marketing, Creativity and Innovation, Shopper Marketing, Social Media and Retailer Specific Campaigns. 19 Crimes, recently awarded 'Hot Brand' status from Impact Magazine, has been in double digit growth for consecutive years with the augmented reality app, Living Wine Labels, playing a critical role in this success, driving consumer engagement and loyalty. The Living Wine Label app, which animates characters and elements of the labels, has been downloaded more than a million times, and now also features other TWE brands including, Chateau St. Jean, Lindeman Gentleman's Collection and the newly introduced Walking Dead and Beringer Brothers wines. According to TWE Chief Marketing Officer Michelle Terry, the award recognizes the disruptive, innovative approach the company is taking to building its brands. "When you take into account the calibre of the competition from some of the world's biggest consumer goods and services companies, this is an outstanding recognition of our team, who have taken a truly innovative approach to marketing, and have driven consumer, retaier and distributor engagement in a way that no other wine brand has before," Terry said.



The award was presented at the REGGIE Awards Gala dinner held on the opening night of the Association of National Advertisers Brand Activation Conference. A total of more than 70 awards were presented to top agencies and brands for the best brand activation marketing campaigns of 2017 across more than 20 separate categories. Since 1983, the REGGIE awards have been the premier industry awards program; recognizing the best marketing campaigns activated by brands and agencies. The Super REGGIE is awarded to the 'best-in-class' from the Gold category award winners. It is the most honored award in the brand activation industry, recognized as the creme de la creme in the marketing world.

About Treasury Wine Estates Treasury Wine Estates (TWE) is one of the world's largest wine companies, listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX). The Company has a rich heritage and a portfolio of some of the most recognized and awarded wine brands in the world, including Penfolds, Pepperjack, Wynns, Beaulieu Vineyard, Beringer, Wolf Blass, 19 Crimes, Matua, Chateau St. Jean, Sterling Vineyards, Gabbiano, Lindeman's and Rawson's Retreat. TWE is focused on portfolio premiumization and brand-led marketing, with world-class production facilities in internationally recognized wine regions. The Company sources grapes from a mix of owned, leased and third-party vineyards. Employing approximately 3,400 winemakers, viticulturists, sales, marketing, distribution and support staff across the globe, TWE's wine is sold in more than 100 countries around the world. Learn more about Treasury Wine Estates at www.tweglobal.com. About 19 Crimes 19 crimes turned convicts into colonists. In 18th-century Britain, criminals guilty of at least one of the 19 crimes, were sentenced to live in Australia, rather than death. For the rough-hewn prisoners who made it to shore, a new world awaited. As pioneers in a frontier penal colony, they forged a new country and new lives, brick by brick. Today, 19 Crimes wines celebrate the rebellious spirit of the more than 160,000 exiled men and women, the rule breakers and law defying citizens that forged a new culture and national spirit in Australia. Just like these legendary rogues, 19 Crimes wines are a taste that will live long in infamy. For more information, visit http://19crimes.com/. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180419006581/en/

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[April 20, 2018] MRSS to Research Fuel Consumptions of Oil Marketing Companies

DELHI, April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd. (BPCL) on behalf of Indian Oil Corporation Ltd (IOCL), Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd. (HPCL) and Petroleum Planning and Analysis Cell (PPAC), recently commissioned study for carrying out 'All India Study on Sectorial Demand of Petrol and Diesel'. (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/665481/MRSS_INDIA_Logo.jpg ) MRSS India - BSE listed (1st and only) Market Research Company was awarded this acclaimed research to comprehend the demand of petrol and diesel being sold from retail outlets of IOCL, BPCL and HPCL through competitive bidding process. A detailed survey covering 3,000 retail outlets of different Oil Marketing Companies (OMCs) spread across 20 states and union territories (UTs) covering nearly 200 districts were strategically categorized to estimate the percentage share of sectors/segments in petrol and diesel sold on a state-wise and an all India basis. Retail outlets were selected through statistical methods to evaluate the sold fuels under different categories of two segments i.e. Transport and nn-Transport sector. The study is estimated to be concluded within a period of 4 months.



Sarang Panchal, Managing Director of the Company, on this win said, "I'm really excited about having our teams work on this assignment. It will add significant value to the body of knowledge in regards to this sector as we are best equipped to provide such reliable data." An interesting note is that even though more than 80% of the diesel and nearly entire quantity of petrol are sold through the retail outlets of OMCs, the exact information on sector-wise and segment-wise sales is not maintained by the dealers operating these retail outlets. Therefore, this study aims to evolve most authentic information about the consumption.

Raj Sharma , Chairman of the Company remarked, "This segment is seeing a lot of action. The Oil Marketing Companies are getting substantial offers from a number of international partners. Considering companies such as ESSAR Petroleum, Reliance Petroleum planning for tie ups with overseas investors- IOCL, HPCL & BPCL are also looking forward to such alliances. Therefore, it is a very significant study to understand the profile of consumers." About MRSS India: MRSS India relies exhaustively on usage of technology for data acquisition offering reliability, validity and faster turnaround times to its clients. The company has wide range of offerings such as Eye Tracking, Mobile Analytics, Video Analysis, Facial Recognition, Digital Tracking, Online Communities, Neuroscience, Emotional Analysis, Automated Audience Measurement, Sensory Sciences, etc. It is India's 1st and only listed Market Research Company, also a member of MRSI and DIN (Digital Insight Network - Global). It is the subsidiary of Majestic Market Research Support Services Limited, - One of Asia's largest full service market research firm. MMRSS is a member of ESOMAR, QRCA, MRA, etc. with presence in 18 countries across Middle East and Asia Pacific region. Media Contact:

Sukanya Mandal

corporate.communications@mrssindia.com

+91-8369257175

Corporate Communications Executive

MRSS India



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[April 20, 2018] naked Hub Launches "naked Hub GO", Disrupting Coworking Industry by Making It Accessible to Everyone - Truly On Demand

SHANGHAI, April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- naked Hub, the biggest premium coworking operator in Asia and a major global innovator in applying the concepts of the Sharing Economy to commercial real estate, announced recently that it is the first major coworking network in the world to launch a truly on-demand service, naked Hub GO. After the service's recent launch, with a few taps on their phone anyone can access dozens of beautifully designed living rooms and work spaces across the city and use them as long as needed. Users can pop in for a quick coffee, hold a business meeting, or use it as a base for the day. Like other on-demand apps like bike sharing and ride sharing, users pay only for the time they actually spend inside the space. As always, coffee, tea, soft drinks, beer, and WIFI are free and unlimited inside naked Hub locations. More and more corporate employees, freelancers and students need a comfortable and productive "Third Space" for different purposes such as business trips, client meetings and creativity exploration. naked Hub, aside from its full time memberships, will offer naked Hub GO, an innovative "Third Space" service catering to this growing demand. Breaking away from typical coworking space monthly memberships and day-passes, naked Hub GO offers much more than a usage-based pricing scheme. The integrated online and offline technology enables users to discover available locations nearby, see the real time occupancy, and very easily check in and check out. naked Hub is disrupting the coworking industry which has traditionally been almost entirely a business-to-business service by being the first to transform coworking into a consumer service. A consumer could become aware of naked Hub GO via online marketing or by approaching any naked Hub location, use the mobile app or WeChat Mini Program to discover the nearest available space, unlock the front door, check in and check out, and pay for the stay, all within the app and without needing human assistance. 1. You can find the nearest naked Hub on map view



2. Easy access by scanning QR code via WeChat or naked Hub App

3. Pay-as-you-go according to each stay duration naked Hub GO redefines membership. Everyone who enters a naked Hub becomes a member (Hubber) of the naked Hub community. Hubbers using the naked Hub GO service check in using the app or WeChat Mini Program at the beginning of a stay, and on the same platforms they check out and pay for their stay based on the number of minutes they spent inside the Hub. All Hubbers enjoy the robust online and offline community that is the hallmark of naked Hub, including business networking and doing business together, a business matchmaking service to help Members meet relevant new contacts, a virtual bulletin board where the community really helps each other to solve business needs, and access to the hundreds of diverse offline community events that bring together the naked Hub community every month. "naked Hub is very pleased to be launching this game-changing innovation and we believe that today's announcement represents a landmark in the global evolution of workspace. The naked brand has always been about rethinking and redesigning in order to be more friendly to the environment and stop the horrible wastage of precious resources, including real estate. Today we unlock urban commercial real estate in a way that's more efficient for all stakeholders," said Grant Horsfield, founder of naked Group. "naked Hub is uniquely positioned to offer naked Hub GO due to our strong investment in great locations and large Living Rooms in every location that enabled us to have the most successful Hot Desk service in China, combined with the hospitality service experience execution and Internet mindset and technology competence that is in our DNA," said Jon Seliger, CEO of naked Hub. Dominic Penaloza, Chief Innovation Officer of naked Group, added "It's a thrill to build disruptive products. Today's launch redefines big concepts including 'real estate', 'coworking', and how people use space. Outside of private offices, why are cities devoid of places to actually get work done or have a business meeting? We asked ourselves why the booming entrepreneur segment, freelance professional segment, and the entire 'Third Space" segment have no choice except coffee shops, and we decided to change all that." naked Hub GO has already launched across all of naked Hub locations in Shanghai and will be rolled out to other city markets in the near future. About naked Hub naked Hub is Asia's leading premium co-working brand, founded by naked Group, the luxury resort brand behind the renowned naked Stables and naked Castle in Moganshan. From unique resorts to creative workspaces, naked is rethinking how we connect with people, places and ourselves. naked Hub, with the added advantage of design, user experience, innovation, community, and a deep understanding of the Chinese market, has since become the leading premium co-working brand in Asia-Pacific. There are currently around 50 Hubs in the pipeline across the world in China (including Mainland China & Hong Kong), Vietnam, Australia, and the UK. At naked Hub, independent workers, small and medium enterprises, and multinationals work side-by-side, on this online and offline co-working lifestyle platform. naked Hub strives to introduce all professionals to an innovative take on work and life, providing Hubbers with increased opportunities, and above all, fostering communication and collaboration across its communities both online and offline. For more information, please visit www.nakedhub.com Photo - https://photos.prnasia.com/prnh/20180420/2110706-1-a

Photo - https://photos.prnasia.com/prnh/20180420/2110706-1-b

Photo - https://photos.prnasia.com/prnh/20180420/2110706-1-c

SOURCE naked Hub

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[April 20, 2018] Human-Computer interaction: Key aspect of technology being tackled at the Palais des congres de Montreal

MONTREAL, April 20, 2018 /CNW Telbec/ - From April 21 to 26, 2018, human-computer interaction will receive a thorough examination during the CHI 2018 international conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems held at the Palais des congres de Montreal. This prominent conference will attract 3,000+ delegates from 50 countries and bring in an estimated $6.7 million in tourism revenue for the city and Quebec. "Montreal hosts the most international events in all of North America and AI is a field we continue to excel in. We feel privileged to welcome these world experts and to play an active role in bringing them together, which will help generate significant intellectual wealth for the province," stated Raymond Larivee, President and CEO of the Palais des congres de Montreal. "he cooperation between the various industry partners, especially Tourisme Montreal, made it possible to attract this major conference, and we are eager to welcome the attendees," added Larivee.



Widely recognized as the world's most important showcase for human-computer interaction, CHI gathers thousands of the top researchers, scientists, and designers in the world to present their latest research, solve their hardest problems, learn new material and build their networks. Originally a small conference for psychologists interested in user interface design, the annual CHI conference has grown to include a diverse group of interaction designers, computer scientists, engineering psychologists, developers, and performing artists. CHI also addresses the organizational integration of technology, and the use of technology in all areas of life. City known as AI and IT hub

Montreal offers a fertile setting for developing a topnotch scientific and professional program for CHI delegates. In fact, the city enjoys the support of numerous universities and centres specializing in fundamental and applied research. These include the McGill University Centre for Intelligent Machines, the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA) and the Institute for Data Valorization (Ivado), both associated with Universite de Montreal, the Laboratory for Imagery, Vision and Artificial Intelligence (LIVIA) of the ETS school of engineering, Concordia University's Centre for Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence (CENPARMI), and the Computer Research Institute of Montreal (CRIM).

Convention city

Montreal hosts more international events than any other city in North America, according to the rankings released by the International Congress and Convention Association. Shortlisted for the World's Best Congress Centre award (AIPC) and the recipient of the highest quality standards certification in the industry, the Palais des congres de Montreal enjoys the collaboration of leaders from various sectors, who in turn can count on the Palais' experience and support. It is a synergy that continues to foster the international reputation of industries as they evolve. About the Palais des congres de Montreal

The Palais des congres de Montreal attracts and hosts conventions, exhibitions, conferences, meetings and other events, and generates major tourism revenues and intellectual wealth for Montreal and Quebec, while also contributing to Montreal's international reputation as a premier host city. congresmtl.com SOURCE Palais des congres de Montreal

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[April 20, 2018] Star2Star Communications Wins Inaugural Channel Partners Choice Award

SARASOTA, Fla., April 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Star2Star, provider of the Worlds Most Complete Full Spectrum Communications Solution, today announced that they have been awarded the 2018 Channel Partners Choice Award. Channel Partners, a resource for indirect sales channels offering IT and telecom systems and services, selected Star2Star as an honoree at the Channel Partners Conference and Expo (CP Expo) in Las Vegas on April 19. Their all-new award recognizes Star2Star as an innovative supplier that excels in the channel. Star2Star was nominated by one of their top Partners, SouthTech, and received their award at the CP Expo reception dinner.

We are honored to be recognized with this award, said Michelle Accardi, President and Chief Revenue Officer at Star2Star. As a regular attendee at the Channel Partners conference, we are especially grateful to be recognized by one of the most influential events offered for our industry. This years expo will be a special memory for us and our company. Paul Hoffman, CEO at SouthTech, provided his congratulatory comments for Star2Stars win: Wenominated Star2Star because we can fully vouch for the quality and reliability of their solutions. As one of their top Partners, we are highly satisfied with their Full Spectrum Communications Solution and the services it provides to our clients. Congratulations, Star2Star!



Lorna Garey, editor in chief of Channel Partners, also added her comments regarding the award: Channel Partners Choice awards recognize suppliers that deliver excellence in their channel programs, but you dont have to take our word for it. These awards are 100 percent driven by the community. All CP Choice winners were nominated by current partners, with no incentive except saying thanks for superior enablement, products and business support. About Star2Star Communications

Founded in 2006 in Sarasota, Florida, Star2Star Communications empowers global business success with a Full Spectrum Communications Solution. With options ranging from Hosted to Hybrid, Star2Star offers unparalleled value, reliability, quality, and scalability. Star2Star unifies business communications including voice, video, fax, mobile, chat, and presence management. Merged with Blueface, the leading pan-European UCaaS provider, Star2Star possesses a global influence and customer base. Blueface's proprietary cloud voice platform supports businesses of all sizes, ranging from small-to-medium to large enterprises and strategic wholesale customers.



Star2Star's award-winning, patented Constellation Network overcomes the reliability and quality limitations of other communications technologies and enables companies to choose the deployment methodology that aligns best with their needs. For businesses who require high-quality voice, redundant networks for continuity, and ultra-reliable communications, Star2Star's Hybrid architecture offers the highest guaranteed SLAs in the industry at an affordable price. Businesses with less complexity, who seek the best communications capabilities for their employees and customers, can consider Star2Star's Hosted solution the optimal choice. With a customer retention rate of 99.85%, Star2Star has been recognized by a multitude of leading analysts. In the past seven years, Star2Star was named to the Forbes Most Promising Companies list, the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 five times, and the Inc. 500|5000 seven times. The company was also named by IHS as a Top 10 Hosted Business VoIP/UC Provider and has been in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for UCaaS, Worldwide for the last four years. Casey O'Loughlin

coloughlin@star2star.com

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[April 20, 2018] REBBL Launches #RootedInPurpose Campaign In Celebration Of Earth Month

EMERYVILLE, Calif., April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- REBBL, crafter of organic coconut-milk based super-herb drinks, launched Rooted In Purpose, a new digital campaign in honor of April's Earth Month. The campaign will raise awareness of REBBL's commitment to three utterly vital areas of importance to the company: mindful impact sourcing; addressing the root causes of human trafficking with non-profit organization Not For Sale; and climate revitalization. Through digital media and social content, the campaign will energize REBBL's community around important topics impacting the planet and its inhabitants, and how they can take part in inciting change. The Rooted In Purpose campaign and three-part blog series highlights REBBL's commitment to revitalizing communities around the world through the unique partnership with Not For Sale and the sustainable impact sourcing initiatives the company implements. "REBBL is built upon the principle that humanity and the natural world have vital interconnections," said Rusti Porter, Senior VP of Marketing for REBBL. "From our soulfully crafted super herb elixirs to our efforts to help catalyze positive social and environmental outcomes for our communities, REBBL has a deeply rooted commitment to people and planet. This Earth Month we want to honor those that are helping build the momentum for brands and businesses that are finding game-changing ways to balance profit and purpose. Through social campaigns like this one, we invite our tribe to share how they themselves are deeply Rooted In Purpose." REBBL is empowering its Tribe to engage with the campaign and the community using #RootedInPrpose to share their methods for reducing climate impact whether it be through supporting brands with dedicated missions to reversing climate change or taking action in their homes and communities. REBBL Tribe members, Rachel Mansfield, founder of food and wellness social media rachLmansfied; Kim-Julie Hansen, founder of Brussels Vegan, Best of Vegan, The Vegan Reset and The Vegan Challenge; Rachael Devaux, RD and founder of Rachael's Good Eats; and Berto Clemente from vegan lifestyle and fitness blog, Tatted Vegan will be sharing their personal approaches to combatting climate impact throughout April on REBBL's Instagram and their personal channels.



REBBL will be hosting social giveaways throughout the month, including a giveaway with mission driven brand Alter Eco. Follow along using #RootedInPurpose on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Visit http://rebbl.co/botanicalrevolutionforgood/ to read the first post in the Rooted In Purpose blog series. New blog posts will be shared weekly. For more information about REBBL or to find REBBL's Elixirs and Proteins in a store near you visit http://rebbl.co/. About REBBL

We are REBBL. Righteous Plant Alchemy. A celebration of the traditional super-herb wisdoms refined over millennia, which are only now being openly shared, studied and embraced globally. Thousands of years of collective intelligence are captured in every bottle of our super-herb, adaptogen powered Elixirs and Proteins to deliver you delicious and nourishing goodness. Every bottle of REBBL is certified organic, soy and dairy free, gluten free, GMO free, and made without cane sugar, carrageenan, thickeners, gums, natural flavors or agave.

We are REBBL. A Botanical Revolution for Good. REBBL was born out of a conscious collaboration between global thought-leaders, whose soul purpose was to address the malfunctioning global food system through a regenerative business model that would respect, uplift, and delight the world. REBBL partners with Not For Sale, with a goal to create a future without human trafficking, and donates 2.5 percent of net revenue from the sale of every bottle to Not For Sale to support efforts to rehabilitate people who have been trafficked. REBBL also works with its growers to support their livelihood, so the grower communities are not vulnerable to trafficking. REBBL is in the process of becoming a Certified B Corporation, a process expected to be complete in 2018. View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/rebbl-launches-rootedinpurpose-campaign-in-celebration-of-earth-month-300633467.html SOURCE REBBL

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[April 20, 2018] FixStream AI Expert To Present at Oracle COLLABORATE 2018

SAN JOSE, Calif., April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- FixStream, a pioneer in solutions for Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) and Oracle Gold Partner, today announced that Bishnu Nayak, FixStream's CTO, will be speaking at COLLABORATE 2018, being held April 22-26 at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, NV. Details for the panel include: TITLE: Artificial Intelligence to Predict Business Application Issues across Hybrid IT

DATE: Wednesday, April 25 from 11:00 AM12:00 PM PT

LOCATION: Palm F Room

PRESENTER: Bishnu Nayak, CTO of FixStream and customer Michael Sherwood, Director of Technology and Innovation, City of Las Vegas

TOPIC: The City of Las Vegas is transforming into a SmartCity by working to identify the greatest IoT technologies. The end-to-end architecture is supported by a combination of distributed IoT, as well as backend IT, applications and infrastructure. The reliability, performance and availability of end-user IoT services heavily rely on IT capabilities that deliver critical business processes such as eCommerce, order-to-cash, customer relationship management, supply chain and many moreproduction workflows. Guaranteeing the uptime and performance of these critical business processes can be particularly challenging when they are deployed across distributed hybrid IT environments interfacing with IoT users from different places, as well as devices.



Join this session to learn how FixStream is enabling the City of Las Vegas SmartCity Initiative with its Artificial Intelligence platform (AIOps). Bishnu Nayak and Michael Sherwood will discuss how AIOps helped Las Vegas become a SmartCity with its auto-discovery, multi-layer, multi-vendor and multi-domain correlation, visualization, machine learning and AI capabilities. FixStream offers the industry's first AIOps Platform for Oracle ERP. Its solution facilitates the rapid adoption of Oracle ERP by automating the discovery and mapping of critical business processes to application process flows, hosts, backend databases and infrastructure entities such as switches, routers and storage arrays. FixStream 6.0 provides support for Oracle ERP 12.X, Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle VM hypervisor, and Oracle Fusion Middleware in on-premises, hybrid, public or Oracle ERP cloud deployments.

For more details on FixStream presentations and activities during COLLABORATE 2018 or to get a demo at the show, stop by booth 1011. About COLLABORATE 2018

COLLABORATE 18: Technology and Applications Forum for the Oracle Community is where Oracle power users and IT decision makers find practical solutions for today and strategies for tomorrow. This conference empowers users of Oracle business applications and database software to gain greater value from their Oracle investments through real-world education and networking. Created by and for users, COLLABORATE provides a personalized experience alongside functional and technical insight from other experienced professionals, whether your organization seeks to maximize its on-premises solutions, evaluate a path to the cloud, or optimize your business in the cloud. Participants can expand their community and gain direct access to Oracle. COLLABORATE is jointly presented by the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG), the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) and Quest International Users Group (Quest). About FixStream

FixStream is the Artificial Intelligence company for IT Operations. With FixStream, IT operations can now get real-time insights and powerful analytics across business, operations, applications and infrastructure to prevent outages and increase revenues. Its out-of-the-box Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) platform offers industry-first end-to-end visibility to quickly correlate, visualize and predict business application issues across an enterprise's entire hybrid IT stack. For additional information, visit http://www.fixstream.com, or connect with FixStream on LinkedIn and Twitter. View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/fixstream-ai-expert-to-present-at-oracle-collaborate-2018-300633844.html SOURCE FixStream

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[April 20, 2018]

Globant to Announce First Quarter 2018 Financial Results on May 10th

LUXEMBURG, April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Globant (NYSE: GLOB), a digitally native technology services company, today announced it will release results for the first quarter ended March 31st, 2018 on Thursday May 10th, 2018 after the close of regular market hours.

Following the release, Martin Migoya, Globant's CEO & co-founder, and Alejandro Scannapieco, Globant's CFO, will discuss the results in a conference call beginning at 4:30pm ET.

Conference call access information is:

US +1 (888) 346-2877

International +1 (412) 902-4257

Webcast http://investors.globant.com/

Additionally, a replay will be availale via phone and in our investor relations website after the call.







About Globant (NYSE:GLOB)

We are a digitally native company where innovation, design and engineering meet scale. We use the latest technologies in the digital and cognitive field to empower organizations in every aspect.

We have more than 6,700 professionals in 12 countries working for companies like Google, Linkedin, BBVA, EA and Coca Cola, among others.

We were named a Worldwide Leader of Digital Strategy Consulting Services by IDC MarketScape report (2016 and 2017). We were also featured as a business case study at Harvard, MIT, and Stanford.

For more information, visit www.globant.com

Investor Relations Contact:

Paula Conde, Globant

investors@globant.com

(877) 215-5230

Media Contact:

Wanda Weigert, Globant

pr@globant.com

(877) 215-5230

Source: Globant

Logo - http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/460822/globant_logo.jpg

View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/globant-to-announce-first-quarter-2018-financial-results-on-may-10th-300633759.html

SOURCE Globant
[April 20, 2018] NASA Invites Media to Swearing-In of New Agency Administrator

WASHINGTON, April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Media are invited to see Vice President Mike Pence swear in Jim Bridenstine as NASA's new administrator at 2:30 p.m. EDT Monday, April 23, at the agency's headquarters in Washington. The ceremony will air live on NASA Television and the agency's website. Following the swearing-in, Vice President Pence and newly sworn-in NASA Administrator Bridenstine will speak live with three NASA astronauts currently living and working aboard the International Space Station. Expedition 55 crew members Scott Tingle, Drew Feustel and Ricky Arnold will offer congratulations and take questions from the Vic President and Administrator Bridenstine. The astronauts will also briefly share stories of their experiences on the orbiting outpost from 250 miles above Earth, traveling at 17,500 miles per hour.



Due to space constraints, media will be confirmed for this event on a first come, first served basis. To request to attend the event, media must send their name, media affiliation and phone number to Karen Northon at karen.northon@nasa.gov no later than 2 p.m. Sunday, April 22. NASA Headquarters is located at 300 E Street SW. Media must arrive by 1:30 p.m. Monday with one form of government-issued photo identification. Bridenstine was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Thursday, April 19, to serve as the agency's 13th administrator. Prior to this position, he served in the U.S. House of Representatives for the state of Oklahoma, where he held positions on the House Armed Services Committee and the Science, Space and Technology Committee. Bridenstine also is a pilot in the U.S. Navy Reserve and the former executive director of the Tulsa Air and Space Museum and Planetarium.

For information about NASA's missions, programs and activities, visit: https://www.nasa.gov View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nasa-invites-media-to-swearing-in-of-new-agency-administrator-300633973.html SOURCE NASA

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Its the big game in Wembley as twelve-time champions Manchester United take on Pochettino Tottenham Hotspur in their temporary backyard for a place in the FA Cup final.

It is a silly exercise to boil a season down to the outcome of one game but such has been the year for Manchester United where they fell short of what was expected of them in all the competitions this season. A title challenge eluded them in the league while they failed to defend the League Cup  conceding the trophy to rivals Manchester City.

But strangely, the biggest disappointment came in the Champions League  where after a solid group stage showing, Mourinhos side failed to kick on in a way Mourinhos side usually does in Europe  as they were unexpectedly but fully deservedly ousted by Spains Sevilla  the leagues fifth best team. Mourinho has prided himself on his accumulation of silverware and while even an FA Cup was not enough for Van Gaal to keep hold of his job, for Mourinho, this could be the momentum builder ahead of his third and crucial campaign.

For Pochettino, it has been four years of laying the foundation at Spurs which he has done rather remarkably on a relatively lesser budget. But the time has come for the Argentine to reap the harvest now in North London. Under Pochettino, Spurs have now become a young and powerful side who could beat anyone on their day with a strong and attractive identity  not to mention, powered by an English core.

They are one of the best sides in the country and have arguably the most balanced 11 in the league but with nothing to show for in terms of silverware, they are doing themselves no favours. They came close last season having lost at the same stage to Chelsea but this time ahead of moving in to the new stadium, there is no better way to embrace the what lies ahead for Spurs, by collecting a trophy for all their efforts that have enabled the transition.

Team News

There were no new injury concerns to arise from the win on the South Coast, with only Sergio Romero expected to miss out due to an injury sustained on international duty with Argentina last month.

Spurs are set to miss left-back Danny Rose (calf) and midfielder Harry Winks (ankle). Second-choice stopper Michel Vorm has played in goal throughout their cup run, as he did last season, but no.1 Hugo Lloris was brought back for their semi-final defeat to Chelsea a year ago and Pochettino may opt to do the same this weekend.

Interesting Numbers

United have advanced to the last four of the competition for the second time in three years, impressively without conceding a goal.

24-year old Harry Kane has 37 goals and 5 assists in 43 appearances in all competitions this season.

United have played at the national stadium on 50 previous occasions, including 18 FA Cup finals, seven League Cup finals and two European Cup finals

Key Men Comparison

Dele Alli (Tottenham Hotspur) v Jesse Lingard (Manchester United)

Ive touched on this fascinating comparison briefly week ago  which is likely to be the key battle in the Summer for England and probably the most important issue that Southgate needs to address.

If there is a way to fit in both Alli and Lingard into the England team, he should, But conventional wisdom suggests they are more similar in the way they operate in the final third  the quick give and go with an eye on a forward run on the shoulder of the last defender and the random but well executed attempts from 18 yards that have produced some eye-catching goals in recent months, years. Lingard has made it a habit of scoring in big games, particularly in the domestic cup competitions where he comes to the fore for United. It will be interesting to see if it will be Alli this time, taking on the mantle.

Prediction

David De Gea will be the difference, once again.

Manchester United 1-0 Tottenham Hotspur
The Kansas City, Kansas Police Department is investigating after a man was shot near the Wyandotte County Courthouse. A KMBC 9 news camera crew was nearby when they heard gunshots, then police suddenly swarmed one side of the courthouse. A witness on scene said they saw a black car being followed before that shooting.
Greece's steady and harmonious relations with its creditors are very critical for the recovery of its crisis stricken economy as well as the further promotion of its booming tourist industry

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is committed to continuing its support of Greece after the end of the fiscal program in August, but there is work that the country still needs to do, especially in structural reforms, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde said on Thursday, according to ANA

In the meanwhile, Brussels and Athens are now turning their attention to Washington, where critical discussions on Greek debt relief will be held on the sidelines of the spring International Monetary Fund and World Bank Spring Meeting.

According to Athens-Macedonian News Agency's sources, the Europeans welcomed the IMF's estimates for the medium-term course of the Greek economy, which showed greater convergence with those of Europe. At the same time, European officials are now convinced of the IMF's "will" to activate its programme for the country before the European part of the programme is completed.

RELATED TOPICS: Greece, Greek tourism news, Tourism in Greece, Greek islands, Hotels in Greece, Travel to Greece, Greek destinations , Greek travel market, Greek tourism statistics, Greek tourism report

Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons Copyright: MEDEF License: CC-BY-SA
The Vikings have landed in Greece once more after over a thousand years their famed warrior- ancestors, the Varangians manned the Byzantine Emperors guards in the Middle Ages. Well, at least one of them Ragnar Lothbrok did.

Australian star Travis Fimmel, the actor who played Ragnar in the highly successful TV series Vikings, was spotted in Sounion. Apparently, the Australian actor had no problem snapping a few selfies with fans at the Hotel he was staying.

Read more here.

RELATED TOPICS: Greece, Greek tourism news, Tourism in Greece, Greek islands, Hotels in Greece, Travel to Greece, Greek destinations , Greek travel market, Greek tourism statistics, Greek tourism report

Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons Copyright: Gage Skidmore License: CC-BY-SA

Source: protothema.gr
Iran will receive 14 new passenger aircraft this year based on agreements signed with Airbus, Boeing and ATR plane-makers, a former deputy roads and urban development minister was quoted as saying in a media report.



Iran will receive eight turboprop ATR 72-600 aircraft from the Franco-Italian company plus three planes from Airbus and another three from Boeing in 2018, Asghar Fakhrieh-Kashan added the Irna report, citing Iran Daily.



Iran Air has agreed to buy 80 aircraft from Boeing and 100 from Airbus in addition to 20 from ATR. Irans Aseman Airlines has also signed a deal to purchase 30 Boeing 737 MAX jets.



Last year, the national flag carrier took delivery of three Airbus jets and eight ATR turboprops.



Fakhrieh-Kashan said ATR is about to deliver two more planes soon and negotiations are underway with Boeing on certain changes in the contract so that Iran Air can receive three new jets in the current year.



According to the contract, Boeing will have to deliver three planes to Iran Air in 2018, provided that we finance the purchases, he said.
Brexit Fragmentation

MiFID brought market fragmentation to Europe back in 2007. In broad strokes incumbent exchanges lost market share to newcomer MTFs predominantly located in the UK. For UK stocks this meant that the fragmentation occurred within their home country, whereas EU27 stocks moved partly to London.

But how will that change with Brexit? Will markets bifurcate? Will volume return to continental Europe? Or will everything continue much as it is today? Unfortunately none of us has a reliable answer to those questions, yet.

Stocks traded in a single jurisdiction will likely continue to be traded locally, but it is anyones guess what will happen to those instruments that are traded in the UK and the EU27 in roughly equal amounts. Looking at the turnover for a large sample of EU stocks in the Fidessa Fragulator (removing Swiss, British and generally illiquid stocks), roughly 230 different shares (representing about 2 trillion Euros in turnover in 2017) fall into that category. It will be interesting to track what happens to those instruments if trading across the Channel becomes more challenging post-Brexit.

For more information on related topics, visit the following channels:
Third vaccine to arrive in Tama County

The state of Iowa will reach a milestone recently, with over 100,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccine being distributed statewide. In addition to the ...
La voz del trade en las Americas
editorial@tribune.com

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, April 19

Two days after the owner of Gopal Sweets, Sharanjeet Singh, reported the second loot from him within 15 months, the police have cracked the case. One person has been arrested in the case from Kaimbwala, while sources said a total of three suspects had been picked up.

The police had obtained the footage of CCTV cameras installed around the spot in Sector 8 and had been scrutinising it. Multiple angles of images of the accused via video footage were obtained. They zeroed in on a few suspects. The mobile tower location dump data was also scrutinised to verify the presence of the suspects in the area. This, coupled with the video footage of the preceding days to check the presence of the suspects, who conducted a recce of the area, helped the police.

In January 2017, Singh had reported a similar incident. He had claimed that a bag containing Rs 4.75 lakh was snatched from him at Sector 11. The accused in that case are still to be arrested. It is suspected the same accused could be involved in the latest incident also as the modus operandi was similar.

Around 9.20 pm on Tuesday, three Activa-borne miscreants sped away after snatching a bag containing Rs 6.25 lakh from the owner of Gopal Sweets in Sector 8. In the latest incident, the owner was about to sit in his Mercedes car when a man snatched the bag after spraying chilli powder in the eye of the guard.
editorial@tribune.com

Ishrat S Banwait

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, April 19

Providing relief to a 66-year-old woman, who waited for 25 years for a policy in her sons name to mature, the district consumer forum has penalised a bank for refusing to pay the complete maturity amount. On a complaint of Pritpal Kaur and her son Sukhjit Singh, residents of Mohali, IDBI Bank Limited, Chandigarh and Mumbai, has been asked to cough up Rs 8.50 lakh.

According to the complaint, Pritpal Kaur purchased four Deep Discount bonds in the name of her minor son, Sukhjit, and four in her name in 1992 at Rs 2,700 each. The bank had promised to pay Rs 1 lakh for each bond at the end of 25 years i.e. March 31, 2017, as printed on the bond certificate.

However, upon maturity after 25 years, when the bonds were submitted to the bank for encashment, an email was received on April 20, 2017, informing that IDBI had offered a call option to all investors to redeem the bonds. It was also communicated through a letter and the print media in 2002.

At the time of the call option, the redemption amount was Rs 12,000 for each bond. Now, the present value, including interest, will be around Rs 19,000 for each bond. Pritpal had replied that no such notice was received. The matter was referred to the Reserve Bank of India and it was then forwarded to the banking ombudsman. The ombudsman made a report qua the call option and the claim of the complainant was not acceded to. The bank in its reply said it was informed that they shall have the option to encash/redeem the bond at the end of every five years from March 31, 1992. In this case, the bank exercised the option of redemption of bonds after 10 years i.e. on March 31, 2002, when the deemed face value of the bond was Rs 12,000.

Keeping in view the financial viabilities, the bank was not able to continue with the scheme due to which the bonds were redeemed at an early date. All investors were informed accordingly through publication in the leading newspapers and a notice was also sent through the UPC on the given address.

In its order, the forum observed that the option to redeem the bond could not have been exercised one-sided as the holder of the bond was entitled to know the result of the said option. It added that no such material had been placed on record to prove that the notice was published in a daily newspaper circulated in the vicinity of the complainant.

It also pointed out that the communication was sent in the form of a UPC and not a registered post. The forum thus ordered that IDBI Bank immediately pay the maturity value of the eight bonds i.e. Rs 8 lakh in the form of promissory notes along with Rs 40,000 as compensation for deficiency in service and mental agony and harassment caused to the complainants. Additionally, the bank was told to pay Rs 10,000 as the cost of litigation.
editorial@tribune.com

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, April 19

Holding that the case against senior Congress leader Devinder Singh Babla apparently required deeper consideration, the Punjab and Haryana High Court not only admitted his plea against conviction, but also suspended the sentence awarded to him by a lower court in the shed allotment case.

Taking up the matter, Justice Raj Mohan Singh asserted that the allegations of favouring his own persons in the new list by the petitioner appeared to be debatable. This was in view of the approval of the list by a committee. All committee members signed the approved list as a token of confirmation.

At this stage, without meaning anything on the merits of the case, it appears that the case requires deeper consideration The remaining sentence of the petitioner shall remain suspended during the pendency of the present petition He is ordered to be released on bail, subject to his furnishing adequate bail bonds/surety bonds to the satisfaction of the Chief Judicial Magistrate/Duty Magistrate, Justice Raj Mohan Singh added.

The Administration had earlier submitted that the circumstances of the case would show that original list was prepared keeping in view 59 displaced persons. A new list was prepared by Babla, though it was approved by committee members comprising IAS officer Prerna Puri and Jujhar Singh.

The case revolves around the allotment of sheds at the Sector 26 grain market in 2009. Babla had moved the High Court seeking suspension of his one-and-a-half-year sentence during the pendency of his revision plea after a lower court convicted him on March 28. The order came on an appeal filed by the Chandigarh Administration against his acquittal for two offences in the judgment pronounced by the trail court in 2014.

Appearing on his behalf, senior advocate Vikram K Chaudhari had contended that testimonies of four prosecution witnesses did not advance the prosecution case. The trial court acquitted the petitioner for cheating and other offences under Sections 420 and 468 of the IPC. However, the conviction was recorded for the offences under Sections 465 and 471 of the IPC and the petitioner was released on probation.

Chaudhari added that the lower appellate court maintained the conviction and also convicted the petitioner for additional offences under Sections 420 and 468 of the IPC, mainly on the inquiry report of PS Shergill, the then Additional Deputy Commissioner, Chandigarh. However, the officer was not examined by the prosecution.

He further contended that the report had not been authenticated by any evidence on record.
editorial@tribune.com

New Delhi, April 20

Top Army commanders have favoured a collective approach in bringing the radicalised youth of Jammu and Kashmir into the mainstream and focus on minimising collateral damage in anti-terror operations in the state.

The commanders, at a six-day conference which began on Monday, also delved into a host of issues, including the situation along the borders with China and modernisation of the force with a limited budgetary allocation, a senior Army official said.

Director General Staff Duties Lt General AK Sharma said the commanders confabulated on the prevalent situation in the Kashmir valley and reviewed recent developments affecting the modus operandi of the operations of the armed forces deployed there. It was felt that priority must be accorded towards ushering in peace by conducting counter-terrorist operations that minimise collateral damage, he said.

Security forces have been facing stiff opposition from Valley residents some of whom had resorted to stone throwing at them in certain areas. Sharma said the commanders felt that radicalised youth must be brought into the mainstream by carrying out de-radicalisation initiatives and favoured a collective approach that focuses on convincing the youth to shun violence and gun culture.

He said the commanders also reviewed the situation along the Line of Control and the increase in ceasefire violations there. They also talked about adequacy of the response mechanisms to ceasefire violations by Pakistan. He said Army Chief Gen Bipin Rawat expressed satisfaction at the way the Army was adapting to dynamic security challenges and stressed the need to lay down judicious priorities to ensure that the allocated resources are utilised optimally. The Army commanders will discuss matters related exclusively to military operations on Saturday.  PTI
rchopra@tribunemail.com

Jammu, April 20

Pakistani troops opened fire along the LoC in Jammu and Kashmirs Rajouri district, police said on Friday.

Pakistani troops shelled Anwas, Laam, Sarya and Pukhrani areas of Nowshera sector on Thursday night.

The firing continued for a brief period, they said, adding that there was no loss of life or injury to anyone. PTI
rchopra@tribunemail.com

Suresh Dharur

Tribune News Service

Hyderabad, April 20

Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu, who turned 68 on Friday, began a day-long fast at Vijayawada to protest against denial of special category status to the state.

A large number of people thronged the venueIndira Gandhi municipal stadiumwhere Naidu would be on hunger strike till 7 pm to highlight the Central governments failure to fulfil the promises made in the AP Reorganisation Act four years ago.

Christened as Dharma Porata Deeksha, Naidus move is widely seen as a step aimed at wresting the initiative from the opposition YSR Congress whose MPs have already resigned from the Lok Sabha over special status issue.

After garlanding the photos of Mahatma Gandhi, Ambedkar, Jyotirao Phule and NTR, the Chief Minister commenced the Deeksha at 7 am.

Several ministers, including Naidus son and IT Minister N Lokesh, also joined him in the day-long fast. Earlier, Naidu received blessings from leaders of all faiths.

The leaders of the ruling Telugu Desam Party and its frontal organisations are also observing the fast across the state.

Earlier, in an open letter to the people of the state, Naidu pointed out how the Centre had turned a blind eye to the needs of the people and failed to implement the promises made in the bifurcation act of 2014.

The TDP has sent out letters to leaders of various parties, seeking their support to the Deeksha so that a strong message would go to the Centre.

Elaborate seating and other arrangements are made at the venue of the hunger strike to accommodate over 10,000 people. A special dais has been erected for nearly 250 people observing the fast along with the Chief Minister and his cabinet colleagues.

The Centres callous and indifferent attitude has forced the chief minister to undertake the fast. The people of the state feel cheated and betrayed by the Union government. It is to give voice to peoples anger and frustration that the chief minister is undertaking this Deeksha, a release from the Chief Ministers Office said.

After pulling out his representatives from the union cabinet and ending his partys alliance with the BJP last month, Naidu has been stepping up attack on the Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP leadership for failing to implement the commitments made in the Bifurcation Act.

The political parties in AP are vying with one another to prove their commitment to fighting for special status to the state. There is a growing public anger against denial of special status and other benefits promised to the state at the time of division.

Meanwhile, YSR Congress president YS Jagan Mohan Reddy dubbed drama the Chief Ministers fast and said such gimmicks would not bring about any real change.

Jagan, who is on a 3,000-km-long padayatra covering all 13 districts in the state, alleged that Naidu and his TDP had failed to get justice to the state despite being part of the NDA government for four long years.
rchopra@tribunemail.com

Ahmedabad, April 20

The Gujarat High Court on Friday acquitted former BJP minister Maya Kodnani in the 2002 Naroda Patiya riots case in which 97 people were killed by a mob.

The court, however, upheld the conviction of former Bajrang Dal leader Babu Bajrangi in the case, one of the worst incidents of communal violence triggered by the Godhra train burning.

A division bench of Justices Harsha Devani and AS Supehiya pronounced the verdict. The bench said charges against Kodnani could not be established.

Bajrangi, whose conviction was uhpeld by the court, was named one of the conspirators in the case.

In August 2012, a special court for SIT cases had sentenced 32 people, including Kodnani, to life imprisonment.

Kodnani was sentenced to 28 years of imprisonment, while Bajrangi was given life imprisonment till death. The high court had later reduced it to 21 years rigorous imprisonment.

The trial court had sentenced seven other accused to 31 years rigorous imprisonment, while 22 others were given 24 years in jail.

Twenty-nine others were acquitted in the case.

Kodnani is currently on bail, while Bajrangi is in jail.

The rioting took place on February 28, 2002, in the Naroda Patiya area of Ahmedabad where a mob killed 97 people.

The massacre took place a day after the torching of the Sabarmati Express at Godhra. PTI
monicakchauhan@gmail.com

London, April 20

Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not meet his Pakistani counterpart Shahid Khaqan Abbasi at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) here Thursday and no such meeting is planned for Friday, the External Affairs Ministry said.

Prior to the prime minister's visit, the MEA had said last week that Modi was unlikely to have bilateral talks with the Pakistani premier at the summit.

"No meeting took place with the Pakistani prime minister. There is no plan to have any (meeting)," Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said in response to a question.

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.
pardeepdhull@gmail.com

London, April 20

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday joined other heads of government for the leaders retreat at Windsor Castle, which will conclude the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in the UK.

The closed-door meetings comprise the informal segment of CHOGM, where the leaders meet without any pre-set agenda and without the presence of their close aides.

At the retreat  unique to the Commonwealth  heads meet privately to discuss collaboration on global and Commonwealth priorities. They will also consider reform and renewal of the Commonwealth, a Commonwealth statement said.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa will be absent from the group of 53 heads of government as he had to rush back to Cape Town after violent clashes broke out in the country.

The issue of succession is expected to be the dominant at the retreat at the grand Waterloo Chamber of the Castle, one of the homes of Queen Elizabeth II  the Head of the Commonwealth.

She expressed her sincere wish that her son and heir Prince Charles step into her shoes in her opening address for CHOGM on Thursday and a general consensus seems to be building around the 69-year-old royal.

India has no objection to Prince Charles as the next Head because he has worked hard for the institution. However, we are also clear that there should be no institutionalisation of the post, a senior Indian official said.

The 91-year-old monarch, who has ruled out long-haul travel, is unlikely to attend any future Commonwealth summits in far flung member-countries and is keen to pass on the baton to the 69-year-old Prince of Wales.

It is my sincere wish that the Commonwealth will continue to offer stability and continuity for future generations  and will decide that one day the Prince of Wales will carry on the important work started by my father (King George VI) in 1949, she had in her speech at Buckingham Palace.

The Commonwealth is one of the worlds oldest political associations of states, with its roots in the British Empire when some countries were ruled directly or indirectly by Britain. Independent countries from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Pacific have joined The Commonwealth over the years, with the last two members to join  Rwanda and Mozambique  having no historical ties to the Empire.

Some experts have argued that the end of the Queens term as Head of the organisation is an opportunity for the non-hereditary post to be passed on to a non-royal in order to distance the group from its colonial past. Others, however, claim that it is the royal family that holds the grouping together.

It is to the incredible credit of the Queen and the royal family that it [Commonwealth] still exists, because without them it wouldnt, claims Lord Marland, chairman of the Commonwealth Enterprise and Investment Council (CWEIC), the business arm of the institution.

The decision on a new Head will be up to the presidents and prime ministers representing the 53 member-countries as they gather for the retreat and, if there is an agreement, it will then be formally announced by Commonwealth Secretary-General Patricia Scotland.

However, the leaders may not be able to arrive at a decision on the matter today, in which case it will roll over to the next CHOGM.

The retreat will mark an end to the week-long summit in Britain, which started on Monday with forums on the theme of business, women, youth and civil society. The formal executive session of the heads of government meeting, themed around Towards a Common Future, concluded last evening.

Prime Minister Modi addressed the second plenary of the executive session, during which he reiterated Indias focus on small island developing nations of the organisation and delivering demand-driven, rather than donor-driven assistance to the organisations smaller member states.

The overall objective of the Prime Ministers participation at this CHOGM in 2018 signals our stepped up engagement with the Commonwealth. It conveys Indias desire to see Commonwealth increase focus on developing country priorities, an MEA spokesperson said.

At the end of the retreat today, leaders will issue their joint communique and a leaders statement. CHOGM takes place every two years in different Commonwealth countries, with the next host country also to be announced at the end of this summit.

Modi is scheduled to fly out to Germany at the end of the retreat for a brief bilateral meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin before he leaves for India. The meeting was added to the PMs Europe schedule, which included Sweden and the UK, on the request of the German Chancellor, officials said. PTI
rchopra@tribunemail.com

Kathmandu, April 20

Nepals only international airport has been closed after a Kuala Lumpur-bound flight with 139 people on board skidded off the runway while attempting to take off, officials said.

Tribhuvan International Airport in Kathmandu was forced to halt all international flights after the incident involving Malindo Air jet on Thursday night, the Kathmandu Post reported.

There were 139 people, including four crew members, on board the aircraft, Boeing 737-900, registration 9M-LNJ. No casualty had been reported, the report said.

The flight captain aborted the take-off at the final moment after he saw an error at the monitor inside the cockpit, the airports general manager Raj Kumar Chettri said quoting the captain.

The aircraft apparently could not stop because of the take-off speed and load at the final moment and overran 50 metre south from the runway threshold and rested in a grassland at around 10.08 pm (local time), Chettri said.

The runway was closed following the incident. However, the aircraft has not suffered any damage but the front tyre has been stuck in the mud. Officials were trying to tow the aircraft.

The domestic flights will not be affected. However, the runway had been shut for all international aircraft, the report said.

In 2015, a Turkish Airlines plane also suffered a runway excursion during landing, closing the airport for four days, creating chaos among travellers. PTI


Earth Day is celebrated on 22 April since 1970. This international day reminds us about the interdependence between natural ecosystems and human life. It is a celebration of Earths biodiversity and a reminder that humanitys future depends on how we care for our common planet. Earth Day brings us all together to think about our role in preserving nature and fighting climate change.

With more and more events that show the dramatic consequences of climate change for life on Earth, there is a risk that people feel powerless to stop and reverse the deterioration of the environment. A wave of climate fatalists, those who believe we can do nothing to stop climate change, can have a major impact in discouraging action. However, a recent global survey conducted by research firm Ipsos shows that no more than 14 percent of people tend to be climate fatalists. On the other hand, the survey shows that a shocking number of them are young people. In fact, 22 percent of those aged 16 to 34 believe that it is now too late to slow climate change, including 39 percent of under-35s in India, 30 percent in Brazil, 27 percent in Spain and Sweden and 29 percent in the United States.

The theme for Earth Day 2018 is 'Ending Plastic Pollution'. Photo: IWRM AIO SIDS

With the universal adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the boldest-ever collective plan to change the worlds development path towards sustainability, it is imperative that young people become active players in shaping the future. Todays young people will be the worlds decision makers, in business, politics and diplomacy, when we reach the 2030 deadline. Their ability to understand climate change and the power of human action in reversing the degradation of Earths ecosystems, will be key to the future of humanity.

As the theme of this years Earth Day is Ending Plastic Pollution, we call on young people to take action in their communities and cities to combat the harmful pollution of our ocean, which is already killing over 1 million seabirds, 100,000 marine mammals, and countless other marine species every year according to UNESCO. The Ocean Action Hub, a platform launched by UNDP and Sweden to encourage citizen action towards the implementation of Sustainable Development Goal No. 14: Life Below Water, now has over 260,000 participants from all over the globe. An incredible 93 percent of the Hubs members are between 13 and 17 years old. We count on their action to #SaveOurOcean.

In celebration of the Earth Day 2018, we are hosting an event with the Smithsonian Institutions #EarthOptimism movement, which is dedicated to promoting inspiring, positive news about citizen action to protect nature and advance sustainable development all over the globe. You can participate online. The trend of climate fatalism can be reversed with more young people engaged in climate and ocean action. We wish an inspiring #EarthDay2018 with #EarthOptimism. Join us in this movement for the good!

About the authors

Andrew Hudson is head of the Water and Ocean Governance Programme in the Bureau for Policy and Programme Support at UNDP. Follow Andrew on Twitter: @AHudsonUNDP

Nancy Knowlton is the Sant Chair for Marine Science at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and Editor-in-Chief of the Ocean Portal. Follow the Smithsonians Earth Optimism Initiative on Twitter: @EarthOptimism






As prepared for delivery.

As the impacts of last decades series of economic crises and negative shocks subside, the world economy has strengthened, offering greater scope to reorient policy towards longer-term issues that can accelerate progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It is critical to ensure that the gains from stronger macroeconomic growth are widely shared, enabling reduction in inequalities, eradicating poverty and creating decent jobs for all.

Global growth prospects

The United Nations estimates that last year the world economy expanded by over 3 per cent , the highest rate since 2011. This acceleration can be attributed to the firmer growth in developed economies, the end of recessions in several large developing economies, and stability in financial market conditions. World trade growth accelerated in 2017, reflecting widespread revival of demand. In many parts of the world, conditions for investment have improved, which is essential to drive the rebound in investment needed to deliver rapid progress towards the SDGs. Global economic growth is expected to remain steady in 2018 and 2019.

Many developing countries, however, are not taking part in the global cyclical upturn. On a per capita basis, numerous countries and regions experienced only very modest or stagnating growth in recent years, posing an enormous challenge to poverty eradication. Aggregate growth in the least developed countries (LDCs) is expected to rise modestly from 4.7 per cent in 2017, to exceed 5 per cent in 2018, still well below the SDG target of 7 per cent.

Whereas short-term prospects for the world economy have strengthened, medium-term risks have risen. This includes elevated levels of trade policy uncertainty; increased uncertainty regarding the pace of monetary policy adjustment in advanced economies; high and increasing levels of debt; elevated and rising valuations across a number of financial assets; and an undercurrent of geopolitical tensions with the potential to trigger regional or global consequences.

Trade tensions among some of the worlds largest economies have been building. While the situation remains in flux amid ongoing negotiations, it appears that support for the multilateral trading system has declined. A move away from multilateralism towards a more fragmented international trade landscape could reverse recent improvements in the global economy, and prevent a stronger and more sustained revival of global growth, particularly given the deep linkages between trade, investment and productivity growth. Countries should focus on upholding and revitalizing multilateral trade cooperation.

The design and implementation of macroeconomic and financial policies should create incentives that lead to resource allocations consistent with the SDGs. Declining private investment in infrastructure, along with a renewed increase in global carbon emissions in 2017, are stark reminders of our inability so far to sufficiently align investment with long-term sustainable development.

If left unaddressed, structural impediments will undermine sustainable development prospects. The current cyclical upturn in the global economy provides an opportunity to focus policymaking on addressing longstanding concerns, such as promoting low-carbon economic growth, fostering greater economic diversification, and reducing inequalities.

The importance of leaving no one behind

It is also clear that the gains from stronger economic growth are not shared evenly within countries. For example, although average wage growth is accelerating in developed economies, in several countries there is evidence that these gains have accrued primarily to those at the higher end of the wage distribution.

The gap between the worlds richest and poorest people has been widening such that between 1980 and 2016, the top 1 per cent richest individuals saw twice as much growth in their incomes as the bottom 50 per cent.

While recognizing the tremendous potential of new technologies for advancing sustainable development, it is also true that technological developments can drive a shift in income from workers to owners of capital and, within the labour force, to high-skilled workers - thereby contributing to growing inequalities and, in turn, hampering economic growth. Sharing technological dividends broadly and fairly is therefore a critical issue, both within countries and on a global scale. In particular, stronger efforts are needed to close the digital divide between developed and developing countries.

The unequal distribution of costs and benefits of globalization and technological advances is not only reflected in the divergence in incomes and wealth but also in access to health and education, womens empowerment, and environmental sustainability, among others. Growing inequalities in wealth, income and opportunities have been eroding trust and driving alienation of peoples in developed and developing countries alike. This, in turn, has at times led to inward-looking policies.

Ensuring that no one is left behind in these transitions is a major challenge which requires collective action, new policies and effective governance at all levels. Progressive tax and social protection systems are needed as well as designing strong and predictable incentives to make investments that harness new technologies for sustainability and employment.

Financing for sustainable development

The Addis Ababa Action Agenda provides a broad framework for financing sustainable development. Launched last week, a product of collaboration between close to 60 partners, including the World Bank and the IMF, the 2018 report of the Inter-agency Task Force on Financing for Development (IATF) - Financing for Development: Progress and Prospects 2018 - concludes that there has been progress across all the action areas of the Addis Agenda . At the same time, it also identifies a number of risks that may undermine progress to date and underscores the critical importance of both national and multilateral response to reduce those risks. In this context, a number of policy recommendations is offered, which if implemented, would put the world on a sustained and more sustainable growth and development path.

Of particular importance for finance ministers, the IATF report recommends that policy makers address the broader effects of their national tax systems, as well as pursue enhanced international tax cooperation. Tax structures affect society and the economy in many ways. Efforts to strengthen progressivity of fiscal systems, as called for in the Addis Agenda, help tackle inequalities. Taxes also set incentives for private investment, environmental sustainability, improving health outcomes, and affect many other concerns central to the achievement of the SDGs. To address the broad effects of the tax system, whole-of-government approaches to tax policy and administration are needed. Preparing medium-term strategies for tax system reform can help sharpen political will, improve the societal ownership of reforms, and drive the capacity building needed to deliver them.

The global conference of the Platform for Collaboration on Tax, held in February at UN Headquarters, emphasised the key role of taxation in financing the SDGs. The Platform partners issued a statement presenting 14 actions the Platform will take to advance the tax agenda, such as helping developing countries access knowledge, experience and good practices in tax administration and reporting on the spill-overs and opportunities from changes in the international tax environment on and for developing countries. Notwithstanding pressures on multilateralism, this conference showed that there is momentum on the international tax cooperation agenda and on tax capacity development.

One of the major challenges identified by the IATF is increasing debt levels, which raise the spectre of a renewed cycle of debt crises and economic disruption in developing countries. Debt-service indicators among developing countries have deteriorated in a widespread manner, with 35 per cent of low-income countries now being classified as either being at high risk of debt distress or already in debt distress. Many middle-income countries also face high debt levels. Overall, developing country debt payments increased by 60 per cent between 2014 and 2017, reaching the highest level since 2004.

Countries face pressing demands for additional public investments to achieve the SDGs at a time when constraints on further debt financing are likely to become more binding. Effective public investments in infrastructure and productive capacity can have a positive impact on fiscal space and debt sustainability.

To lessen the financial stress on countries affected by shocks, the international community should work toward realizing the potential of state-contingent debt instruments and other innovative mechanisms. More broadly, a systematic approach to risk management is needed, challenging longstanding assumptions such as providing concessional financing based on income alone, when countries at all levels of income face new sets of interrelated vulnerabilities.

Efforts to improve national policies must also be complemented by efforts to build a more enabling global environment for advancing sustainable development. In particular, greater focus is needed on prevention, risk reduction and crisis response to address financial and economic vulnerabilities and disasters. Indeed, despite preventative measures, the world regularly experiences economic shocks and disasters that set back development progress. The international monetary and financial system should aim to reduce volatility and contain systemic risks while boosting investment, implying continued vigilance on financial regulation. Efforts to lengthen the time-horizons of investors and align the financial system with the SDGs should help achieve our joint goals, while reducing volatility. Ultimately, sustainability and stability are mutually reinforcing.

United Nations collaboration with the International Monetary Fund

The UNs collaboration with the International Monetary Fund continues to strengthen, in particular when it comes to the Financing for Development (FfD) process. The UN appreciates the continuing partnership with the IMF in this important work, including in the Inter Agency Task Force on FfD. As UN Member States come to an agreement on reforms to the United Nations Development System, including the role of United Nations country teams, we look forward to stronger engagement with the IMF and non-United Nations partners on the ground.

The third ECOSOC Forum on Financing for Development will take place from 23 to 26 April 2018 at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. The ministerial segment will include the Special high-level meeting of the Economic and Social Council with the Bretton Woods institutions, the WTO, and UNCTAD. This is a critical opportunity to promote greater cooperation, coherence and consistency in the international system.
As prepared for delivery.

The United Nations shares the World Bank Groups firm commitment to the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development - guided by the Addis Ababa Action Agenda on Financing for Development - as well as the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Building on successful past and on-going collaborations, expanding and deepening the partnership between the UN and the World Bank Group is essential to accelerate progress towards 2030. This will be particularly important in the areas of mobilizing finance for sustainable development; addressing climate change; action at the nexus between peace and security, humanitarian, and development assistance; as well as in realizing the data revolution.

Financing for Sustainable Development

The Addis Ababa Action Agenda provides a broad framework for financing sustainable development. The 2018 report of the Inter-agency Task Force on Financing for Development (IATF), launched last week, finds progress across all the action areas of the Addis Agenda. It further highlights that this progress is underpinned by an upturn in the world economy, increased investment, and supportive financial market conditions, while also recognizing that significant risks remain. The report, which was jointly produced by the UN Secretariat, the IMF, the World Bank, WTO, UNDP, UNCTAD, and more than 50 UN and other agencies, provides a range of policy options which, if implemented, promise to put the world on a sustained and more sustainable growth and development path.

Some important messages include:

First, the importance of incentives of both public and private actors to be aligned with long-term sustainable development. Without a long-term investment horizon, certain risks, such as those from climate change, will not be incorporated into decision-making.

Second, the need for integrated national financing strategies that provide long-term vision beyond short-term political cycles to inform policies, plans and project pipelines.

Third, public, private and blended finance are all important for SDG investments. However, national policy priorities, as well as specific country and project characteristics, should determine which financing model is best suited for specific investments, and which actors are best positioned to manage risks and provide services equitably and cost-effectively.

Finally, public leadership is indispensable to set the necessary rules, promote coherence across sectors, and overcome the constraints that impede sustainable-development-oriented structural transformation.

The UN is looking forward to working with the World Bank on taking these messages forward.

A key question underlying international debates on financing sustainable development relate to the respective roles, and complementarities, of public, private and blended financing. The Addis Agenda underlines the potential of blended finance instruments, while calling for careful consideration of their appropriate structure and use. Our joint analysis in the IATF report has built on this by highlighting potential risks that need to be considered when using blended finance instruments. Given that blended finance has so far largely bypassed least developed countries, greater research into the appropriate use of such modalities in these countries is needed. As Multilateral Development Banks and other providers are scaling up the use of such modalities, they should ensure that these activities are in line with existing development effectiveness principles, and also, importantly, do not divert funds away from countries and societies most in need.

Climate Action

Climate change and climate-related disasters are inflicting tremendous costs on peoples and their economies. The latest data speaks for itself: in 2017 the hurricane season in the Caribbean was the costliest in decades ; over 40 million people were affected by floods in South Asia ; and drought drove nearly 900,000 people from their homes in Somalia . Meanwhile, also in 2017, global energy demand grew by 2.1 percent, and carbon emissions rose for the first time since 2014.

As climate change risks will continue to grow in 2018 and beyond, more ambitious climate action is urgently needed. Current national climate pledges have set the world on a path towards 3.2oC temperature rise, far above the goals of the Paris Agreement . The UN Secretary-General has recently warned that climate change is the most systematic threat to humankind and has urged international community and world leaders to further cut emissions. Member States must take the opportunity of updating their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) to ensure the next round collectively meets the goal of well below 2oC, aiming for 1.5oC above pre-industrial levels.

Looking ahead, it is clear that prospects for eradicating poverty, building inclusive and equitable societies, and ensuring sustainable development depend upon countries pursuing a zero-carbon and risk informed approach to development. The UN and the World Bank Group have a key role to play in supporting these efforts, including by assisting countries to build enabling environments, access transformational finance, scale up proven solutions, and ensure that climate action is in line with the 2030 Agenda. By enhancing our partnership in all of these areas, we have the potential to make our support even more effective and beneficial to the countries we serve.

And we have a number of successful examples to build on. For instance, together with development partners, regional organizations, and the private sector, we have been working to make our development support better risk-informed, in line with the 2030 Agenda, the UN Plan of Action on Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience, and the World Humanitarian Summit Commitments to Action. This includes integrating disaster and climate risk considerations in the UN system-wide SDG-MAPS process as well in the UN Development Assistance Framework processes.

Adequate and sustained sources of financing, underpinned by strong institutional frameworks and regulatory mechanisms, is also critical for successful climate action. Through the NDC partnership, the UN and the World Bank have been supporting countries to put in place the necessary mechanisms to implement their NDCs and through the Invest4Climate platform we are currently working together to identify and facilitate transformational investments to scale up climate action in developing countries.

Humanitarian-Development Nexus and its linkages to Peace

Achieving the 2030 Agenda and ensuring no one is left behind requires a pro-active, evidence-based and holistic approach to risk, resilience and prevention across humanitarian, development and peace efforts.

The UN and the World Bank have identified collaboration in fragile, post-conflict and humanitarian settings as a priority for joint work, giving a particular focus on early investments in economic and social stability that can translate into longer term development progress and SDG achievement. This is in line with the findings of the recent flagship UN-World Bank Report Pathways for Peace , which provides an evidence base for engaging in prevention at a much earlier stage, including by addressing horizontal inequalities, building broad based coalitions, mobilizing financing, and advancing system-wide multidimensional risk assessments. These are all promising areas for future collaboration, and we are currently exploring how we can take them forward.

In this context, the UN also counts on the World Banks support and active participation in the Joint Steering Committee to Advance Humanitarian and Development Collaboration. We also look forward to continuing our longstanding partnership on joint assessments for recovery and peacebuilding (RBPA) together with the European Union and for post disaster needs (PDNA).

Another area in which the UN and the World Bank could step up their collaboration is in the field of disaster risk reduction and financing. Indeed, disaster risk is increasing and so are the economic losses from disasters. Analysis has shown that annual investments of $6 billion in disaster risk reduction could generate benefits of up to $360 billion. To support vulnerable countries optimize their capacities to mitigate and manage disaster and climate risks, the UN has been working closely with the World Bank and others to implement flagship initiatives like the Global Preparedness Partnership and the Insurance Development Forum.

The financial response to disasters could be more efficient if the international community realigned their disaster financing from an ex-post response to ex-ante provision of risk-pooling funds and instruments. This could include both pooled financing and insurance-type instruments. An increased focus on preparedness would include building incentives for risk reduction into their design. Insurance-type instruments are only efficient when the risk pool is wide enough to allow for sufficient diversification. Donor assistance could therefore increase the systems efficiency by helping least developed and other vulnerable countries participate in sovereign risk pools.

Realizing the Data Revolution

Generating new and disaggregated data will be critical to SDG achievement. With todays fast technological progress and vast amount of data that typically characterize it, the data revolution can certainly help us plug data gaps.

The data revolution, however, will only realize its potential if we all work better together, combining our data and expertise to gain the new insights that we can bring to bear on the grand challenge of sustainable development. This calls both for enhanced partnerships with external stakeholders, such as the private sector, civil society and academia, as well as within the UN family, including the World Bank and IMF. Within the broader UN System, we have started to do just that through the new UN Data Innovation Network, which will help us strengthen our capacity to innovate together using new data techniques and tools to underpin our collective efforts to advance the SDGs.

UNDP, UNICEF and the World Bank have joined efforts to support monitoring and reporting of national multi-dimensional poverty in the context of the SDGs. Building on that, we need to go even further and harmonize our approaches for measuring such a critical indicator at the global level. Monitoring multi-dimensional poverty is also an excellent example of using data to drive an integrated approach to policy-making and targeting those left behind  a central tenant of the 2030 Agenda.

Later this year, the UN will launch a One UN initiative on legal identity that will link closely with the World Banks ID4Development programme. The goal is to support achievement of SDG Target 16.9 and provide legal identity for all, including birth registration, by 2030.

Conclusion

The UN Secretary-General has presented a vision for significant adjustments to the United Nations development system for it to be optimally positioned to support implementation of the 2030 Agenda. Some of the key proposals are being debated by Member States. At the heart of these adjustments is building a new generation of United Nations Country Teams to be more responsive to needs on the ground and better support in-country results. These stronger Country Teams, along with a revamped regional approach and other measures at global level, should enable stronger engagement and coherence of the United Nations with partners, including the international financial institutions. By working collaboratively on analysis, and leveraging and harnessing the complementary strengths of different organizations, we can better support countries achieve the SDGs.

In particular, the partnership between the United Nations and the World Bank Group has a special place in seeking to achieve impact at scale to help transform economies and societies. The UN looks forward to taking this critical partnership even further.
UW Signing Days Scheduled at Local High Schools in May

Local athletes are not the only students who have the opportunity to be recognized for signing on to attend the colleges of their choice.

With the national deadline fast approaching for college enrollment confirmation scheduled Tuesday, May 1, the University of Wyoming Office of Admissions is partnering with Wyoming 4-H to host UW Signing Days in high schools across the state.

This is an opportunity to celebrate high school seniors who chose UW, says Shelley Dodd, UW admissions director. UW is excited to welcome this new class of students in the fall.

UW Signing Days are scheduled across the state and are open to any students who plan to attend UW. For daily updates at local high schools, view the website at www.uwyo.edu/uwe/signingday/.

There is a lot of excitement associated with UW Signing Days, Dodd says. Students have worked hard to get to this point, and we are thrilled they plan to attend UW. There will be a lot of Poke Pride shown across the state.

Dodd encourages all family members to attend their students hometown events.

As UW Extension employees that live and work in communities across the state, 4-H has a pulse on the attitudes, issues, and greatness that exist in our towns and communities all over Wyoming, says Johnathan Despain, state 4-H program coordinator. UWE 4-H creates educational opportunities that prepare young people for making positive decisions in their lives. Its a natural fit for 4-H to be a part of this effort and celebrate with those youth heading to UW. 4-H is a part of the UW family and its great to get these students excited about their next life adventure.

For more information or hometown updates, call Dodd at (307) 766-4273 or email shelley@uwyo.edu; call Despain at (307) 766-5170 or email jdespain@uwyo.edu; or call UW Admissions at (307) 766-5160 or email admissions@uwyo.edu, or contact a local UW Extension office.

Local events scheduled are:

-- Arapaho Charter High School, TBA.

-- Arvada-Clearmont High School, TBA.

-- Big Horn High School, TBA.

-- Big Piney High School, Wednesday, May 2, 6 p.m.

-- Black Butte High School/Rock Springs, TBA.

-- Buffalo High School, TBA.

-- Burns High School, Thursday, May 3, 2:15 p.m.

-- Burlington High School, TBA.

-- Campbell County High School/Gillette, Wednesday, May 2, 8 a.m.

-- Cathedral Home/Laramie, TBA.

-- Cheyenne Central High School, Tuesday, May 1, 11:30 a.m.

-- Cheyenne East High School, Tuesday, May 1, 1:30 p.m.

-- Cheyenne South High School, Tuesday, May 1, 10 a.m.

-- Chugwater High School, TBA.

-- Cody High School, Tuesday, May 1, 11:20 a.m.

-- Cokeville High School, TBA.

-- Colter Junior/Senior High School/Worland, TBA.

-- Destiny Christian Academy/Cheyenne, TBA.

-- Douglas High School, Tuesday, May 8, 8:30 a.m.

-- Dubois High School, Wednesday, May 2, 11:05 a.m.

-- Encampment High School, Monday, April 30, 10:30 a.m.

-- Evanston High School, Thursday, May 3, 10:30 a.m.

-- Expedition Academy/Green River, TBA.

-- Farson-Eden High School, TBA.

-- Fort MacKenzie Junior/Senior High School/Sheridan, TBA.

-- Fort Washakie Charter High School, TBA.

-- Fremont County Vocational High School/Lander, TBA.

-- Glendo High School, TBA.

-- Glenrock High School, Tuesday, May 8, noon.

-- Green River High School, TBA.

-- Greybull High School, TBA.

-- Guernsey-Sunrise High School, Tuesday, May 1, 8 a.m.

-- Hanna-Elk Mountain High School, TBA.

-- Horizon Alternative School/Evanston, TBA.

-- Hot Springs County High School/Thermopolis, Tuesday, May 1, 12:45 p.m.

-- Hulett High School, TBA.

-- Jackson Hole High School, Thursday, May 3, 5:30 p.m.

-- Kaycee High School, TBA.

-- Kelly Walsh High School/Casper, Tuesday, May 1, 11 a.m.

-- Kemmerer High School, Tuesday, May 1, 11:30 a.m.

-- Lander Valley High School, Monday, May 7, 2 p.m.

-- Laramie High School, Wednesday, May 2, 1:45 p.m.

-- Lingle-Fort Laramie High School, Tuesday, May 1, 1 p.m.

-- Little Snake River High School/Baggs, TBA.

-- Lovell High School, TBA.

-- Lyman High School, Thursday, May 3, 2 p.m.

-- Meeteetse High School, TBA.

-- Midwest High School, TBA.

-- Moorcroft High School, TBA.

-- Mountain View High School, Thursday, May 3, 12:30 p.m.

-- Natrona County High School/Casper, Tuesday, May 1, 3:25 p.m.

-- Newcastle High School, Wednesday, May 2, 2 p.m.

-- New Frontier High School/Kemmerer, TBA.

-- Niobrara County High School/Lusk, Thursday, May 10, 11:30 a.m.

-- Pine Bluffs High School, Tuesday, May 1, check scheduled time.

-- Pinedale High School, Tuesday, May 1, 11:30 a.m.

-- Powell High School, TBA.

-- Rawlins High School, Monday, April 30, 1:45 p.m.

-- Rawlins Cooperative High School, Tuesday, May 8, check scheduled time.

-- Riverside High School/Basin, Tuesday, May 1, check scheduled time.

-- Riverton High School, Tuesday, May 1, check scheduled time.

-- Rock River High School, TBA.

-- Rock Springs High School, Tuesday, May 1, 10:25 a.m.

-- Rocky Mountain High School/Cowley, TBA.

-- Roosevelt High School/Casper, TBA.

-- St. Stephens Indian High School, TBA.

-- Saratoga High School, Tuesday, May 1, 3 p.m.

-- Sheridan High School, Tuesday, May 1, 12:03 p.m.

-- Shoshone Learning Center/Powell, TBA.

-- Shoshoni High School, TBA.

-- Southeast Goshen County High School/Yoder, Tuesday, May 1, 8 a.m.

-- Star Valley High School/Afton, Thursday, May 3, 8 a.m.

-- Summit High School/Jackson, TBA.

-- Sundance High School, Wednesday, May 2, 10:08 a.m.

-- Ten Sleep High School, Wednesday, May 2, 2:30 p.m.

-- Thunder Basin High School/Gillette, Wednesday, May 2, 10 a.m.

-- Tongue River High School, Thursday, May 3, 10 a.m.

-- Torrington High School, Tuesday, May 1, 10:15 a.m.

-- Triumph High School/Cheyenne, TBA.

-- Upton High School, Monday, April 30, check scheduled time.

-- Westwood High School/Gillette, TBA.

-- Wheatland Senior High School, Wednesday, May 2, 10 a.m.

-- Whiting High School/Laramie, TBA.

-- Wind River High School/Pavillion, Wednesday, May 2, 11:50 a.m.

-- Worland High School, Tuesday, May 1, 9:50 a.m.

-- Wright High School, TBA.

-- Wyoming Girls School/Sheridan, TBA.

-- Wyoming Indian High School/Ethete, TBA.

-- Wyoming Virtual Academy/Lusk, Tuesday, May 1, check scheduled time.
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In this issue of Vietnam Briefing, we discuss the importance of location to investments and outline the factors that investors should consider when evaluating...
An Introduction to Doing Business in Vietnam 2021 will provide readers with an overview of the fundamentals of investing and conducting business in Vietnam....
Brazil to resume meat exports to Indonesia, Illustrative image (Source: Reuters)

Brazilian Minister of Agriculture, Livestock and Supply Blairo Maggi said the two countries' negotiations over trading details are in the final phase.

An Indonesian technical group will examine several slaughterhouses in Brazil, he added.

The minister said Brazil has also negotiated with the Republic of Korea on meat exports and plans to expand its markets in China and Russia.

In March 2017, Indonesia decided to stop importing beef and chicken from Brazil after a meatpacking scandal raised doubts about the country's food industry.

Brazil is the worlds top beef and poultry exporter and is ranked fourth globally in pork exports. The three types of meats export revenue amounted to 11.6 billion USD in 2016.

Brazil is operating about 4,000 slaughterhouses and meat production facilities.
The city, which covers more than 2,000 square kilometers, with a population of 10 million, would develop the smart city plan in gradual phases. - VNS File photo

Traffic congestion and floods continue to occur. We need smart city forecasting and solutions, Nhan said at a meeting with the city Peoples Committee and members of the IT and telecommunications community held on Wednesday.

The city planned to carry out simulations on urban traffic, the economy, and floods, he added.

Under the smart urban area project, there will be four centres. One will be a shared database and open database eco-system and another will integrate all the citys information sources and databases from various departments and district committees.

The others will be used for simulations to forecast socio-economic strategy, and on information security.

Tran Vinh Tuyen, deputy chairman of the city Peoples Committee, said that students at schools would be taught about smart city issues.

Nhan said the city should learn from other countries but that products and technologies for the projects implementation should be from Vietnamese.

The city, which covers more than 2,000 square kilometres, with a population of 10 million, would develop the smart city plan in gradual phases.

The citys eastern region including District 2, 9 and Thu uc would be given priority, he added.

The region is near the citys centre and has land for new infrastructure and facilities. The area also has a buffer zone to encourage innovation and startups.

This would be the first smart urban centre, which will help speed up the project, Nhan said.

He instructed all city departments to assess the development of IT and telecommunications industries with detailed figures.

The city has nearly 80,000 people working in these industries, accounting for 1.86 per cent of its total labour force.

This is too low, Nhan said.

Viet Nam National University- HCM City said it would train more IT students in coming years.

Many enterprises and startups have asked the city to give them preferential treatment so they can be part of the smart city project.

Phi Anh Tuan, vice chairman of HCM City Computer Association, said that preferential tariffs or other preferences should be provided to enterprises that use software produced by local companies.
Talanx AG Group now owns a stake of over 47 percent in the PetroVietnam Insurance (PVI) in comparison to 25 percent when it started investing in Vietnam in 2011, said Hinsch, who is also Chairman of HDI Global SE, a subsidiary of Talanx.

He said the group hopes the Vietnamese Government will raise the ownership rate of foreign investors in a Vietnamese company to over 49 percent.

Deputy PM Hue said that the Vietnamese Government will make restructuring to develop the insurance market in Vietnam. He also lauded Talanxs investment in Vietnam, which is suitable to the countrys policy of restructuring the financial-credit system, including the insurance market.

The Vietnamese Government plans to divest all capital of the Vietnam National Oil and Gas Group (PetroVietnam) from the PVI, stated Deputy PM Hue.

The Government will assign the Ministry of Industry and Trade to study the increase of foreign investors ownership in the PVI as well as build an appropriate divestment roadmap, he added.

The same day, Hue also hosted Ferdianand Dano, Rector of Slovakias Bratislava University, during which he expressed his hope that the school will strengthen cooperation with Vietnam through connectivity and exchange programmes with Vietnamese universities, while granting more scholarships to Vietnamese students.
IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde holds a press conference during the 2018 Spring Meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank Group at IMF Headquarters in Washington, DC. (SAUL LOEB/AFP)

With US-China frictions hanging over its annual meeting, the International Monetary Fund on Thursday (Apr 19) warned governments to avoid harming trade and investment which have been key drivers of the global economic recovery.

IMF chief Christine Lagarde said escalating trade tensions could reverberate through the world economy, undermining confidence and choking off investment, and she urged the sides to resolve their disputes through dialogue.

"Investment and trade are two key engines that are finally picking up. We don't want to damage that," she said at a press briefing to open the spring meetings of the IMF and World Bank.

In its latest World Economic Outlook this week, the IMF listed the trade tensions as a key downside risk to the otherwise encouraging global recovery and warned they could harm the poorest the most through rising prices.

The outlook cites growing trade volumes and solid investment as driving the uptick in global growth to 3.9 per cent this year and next.

US President Donald Trump last month imposed steep tariffs on steel and aluminium imports and threatened to impose more on tens of billions of dollars in Chinese imports, prompting Beijing to slap duties on US goods like pork and sorghum and threaten even more sensitive US exports like soybeans.

Finance officials from member governments will discuss the trade disputes this week during the Washington meetings, which end on Saturday.

Lagarde said the disputes threatened to cause damage beyond the two countries involved, due to the interconnected nature of global supply chains.

While she acknowledged "the actual impact of growth is not very substantial when you measure in terms of GDP," she said the dispute could erode business confidence very quickly because of the uncertainty, which would make businesses "reluctant to invest."

International cooperation "has served us so well and delivered more progress for more people than at any time in history," but is now being questioned, Lagarde said.

'STEER CLEAR' OF PROTECTIONISM

While she welcomed bilateral discussions between Washington and Beijing, she said disagreements should be resolved in a multilateral forum and every country should address its own trade barriers.

Lagarde again urged countries to "steer clear of all protectionism," saying that "unilateral trade restrictions have not proven helpful."

Instead, "countries should work together to resolve disagreements without using exceptional measures."

EU Economic Affairs Commissioner Pierre Moscovici expressed optimism that US officials were coming around on resolving the trade issues.

"My feeling is that, little by little, the consciousness of the damage a trade war could do will be apparent and dialogue will resume," he told AFP.

"I hope that these IMF meetings will be marked by this spirit. On the American side, it seems to me that the climate is more receptive to the idea that protectionism is not the answer."

Europe was also hit by the steel and aluminium tariffs but the US suspended the duties on imports from the EU, Canada, Mexico and four other countries, leaving China as the primary target.

German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz met with US Vice President Mike Pence and Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow at the White House, and afterwards told reporters that "all sides are really working on finding a good solution."

"I am convinced that it's a good thing there are so many talks and that this is the basis for seeing a reasonable development in the end."

Speaking later to a small group of reporters, Lagarde said the IMF has a role to play as mediator and as "a peaceful and technical forum for dialogue."

"I think that if we can help facilitate a dialogue, productive exchanges going to solutions, it would avoid a trade war," she said.

She praised the trade reforms recently offered by China's President Xi Jinping - including lower tariffs on US cars, reducing investment restrictions and protections for intellectual property - which she said were "going in right direction."

But it will be the implementation that matters, she said.
Map of Austria locates the city of Salzburg, where scores of people were injured when two train carriages collided AFP/William ICKES

The accident happened when a carriage from a train arriving from Venice struck a carriage on the service from Zurich, to which it was meant to be coupled before heading to Vienna.

The "two carriages collided for unknown reasons," fire service official Reinhold Ortler told O1 radio.

Around 240 people were on board the two trains, which contain both seated and sleeping compartments.

"Fifty four people were treated. Fortunately we're only talking about light injuries," OeBB spokesman Robert Mosser told AFP.
Near and natural: Terraced rice fields in Sa Pa, Lao Cai Province. The destination is suitable for tourists from Ha Noi on short holidays. VNA/VNS Photo

Popular destinations near Ha Noi include Sa Pa (Lao Cai Province); Ha Long Bay and Cat Ba Island (Quang Ninh Province); Tam ao mountain (Vinh Phuc Province) and Ninh Binh Province and those further away, including the central cities of a Nang, Quy Nhon, Phu Yen, Nha Trang, the coastal town of Mui Ne (Binh Thuan Province) and Phu Quoc Island (Kien Giang Province).

People with more money may choose travel to Southeast Asian countries, East Asia and Europe.

For months before this holiday travel agencies in Ha Noi have prepared relevant tours to serve tourists.

The Vietravel Tourism Company has worked to keep tour prices reasonable as compared with low-season prices.

The company will serve around 24,000 tourists, a 20 per cent increase against the same period last year.

Up to now, the number of guests booking the companys domestic has reached 70 per cent and the number of guests booking foreign tours has reached 80 per cent of the companys plan for this point in the year.

Vietravel has also implemented a charter programme in which travelers can book a full plane and free & easy programmes (including hotel, flight and booking) to meet tourists diversified demands.

The Hanoi Red Tours Company since the beginning of the year has negotiated with partners like airlines and hotel systems in and outside the country to book flights for convenient days at the best prices. The companys tours for this occasion have lured thousands of people. Many tours to the US, Dubai and Japan have been fully booked.

New tours include Bangkok-Pataya, Singapore-Malaysia, Seoul-Everland-Nami, and Germany-the Netherlands-Belgium-France.

The number of guests booking the tours of the company has surpassed 90 per cent of the companys available spots.

Nguyen Tien at, deputy director of the Trans-Viet Company, confirmed that the number of guests booking the companys tours increased 20-25 per cent against the same period last year.

Various tours departing on convenient days have been sold out to destinations like a Nang, Singapore, Thailand and South Korea.

On this holiday, more guests prefer travelling abroad to various destinations like Europe, Japan, South Korea, Dubai, Turkey, South Africa and the US, he said. Up to now, the number of guests booking our tours has reached 80 per cent of the plan.

Since the holiday was announced early, tourists have been more active in planning and booking.

The holiday is also the beginning of summer holiday, so many localities have prepared to open summer tourism services to mark the occasion. These include o Son (Hai Phong Province), Sam Son (Thanh Hoa Province), Cua Lo (Nghe An Province), Nhat Le (Quang Binh Province) and a Nang City with its annual fire work festival.

On this occasion, the South Korean Tourism Authoritys office in Viet Nam has introduced Busan tourism services, focusing on luxury tours for Vietnamese guests.

Last year, Busan received 88,000 Vietnamese tourists. The citys authorities have promoted citys tourism potential throughout Viet Nam.

Airlines have increased the number of flights between Viet Nam and Busan to facilitate visitors to and from both sides, said Shim Jeong Bo, head of Busan Citys Tourism Promotion Department.

For this holiday the Ha Noi Tourism Department has asked tourism service enterprises in the city to enhance safety for tourists.

The department has also examined individuals, enterprises and agencies working in tourism to ensure they follow regulations and laws during the holiday in the city to offer the best tourism environment for tourists visiting the capital.
US police chief apologises after Starbucks arrests uproar, (photo: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images)

After the coffee chain moved to repair the damage to its image in the wake of a series of protests at Starbucks outlets, the city's police commissioner Richard Ross told reporters his force also needed to do better.

"It starts at the top and that starts with me," Ross, who is himself African-American, told a press conference in the East Coast city.

"Messaging is important and I failed miserably in this regard. It is obvious the issue of race is indicative of a larger problem in our society and I should not at all be the person that is a party to making anything worse relative to race relations."

Ross was widely criticised after he initially said his "officers did absolutely nothing wrong" during the arrests which followed a 911 call from a Starbucks worker who said the men were trespassing, after refusing to buy anything.

Police said officers had "politely" asked Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson to leave before finally arresting them. They reportedly asked first to use the bathroom, but were told it was only for paying customers.

A video, which went viral after being posted on social media by a customer, showed several uniformed police officers questioning and then handcuffing the pair despite offering no resistance.

Ross said he himself had "to do better" and that his force now had new policy guidelines over how to deal with a similar situation in the future.

"Previously we did not have such a policy ... but we have a policy now," he said. "I'm not going into it at this point in time but we will be pushing that out at a later date."

Speaking for the first time about the arrest, Nelson told the ABC network on Thursday that he and Robinson had never been given a chance to explain themselves when the police arrived in the downtown store last Thursday.

"As soon as the officers approached us, they said we have to leave. There was no question of 'was there a problem here between you and the manager (or) what happened?'"

The two men's lawyer Lauren Wimmer has told a CBS affiliate in Philadelphia that they had been waiting for a third man to arrive for a business meeting.

The chain's CEO Kevin Johnson has already apologised and has ordered that all Starbucks stores and corporate offices across the United States close for an afternoon next month to conduct "racial-bias education."
PM Nguyen Xuan Phuc and Myanmar's State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi on way to their talks room after the Government chief hosts welcoming ceremony for the guest at the Presidential Palace in Ha Noi. Photo: VGP

The two sides agreed to foster political-diplomacy cooperation through accelerating mutual visits and contacts on all channels as well as people-to-people exchanges.

Both sides also agreed to convene the 9th meeting of the Viet Nam-Myanmar Joint Commission for Bilateral Cooperation and to early approve an action plan to deploy their comprehensive cooperative partnership in the period 2018  2023.

The two leaders spoke highly of the recent developments in defense and security ties, pledging to effectively implement the signed agreements while expanding cooperation to other areas like training, military medicine, search and rescue.

They agreed that the two countries will hold defense policy dialogue at deputy ministerial level in 2018 and beef up talks for early singing of agreements on combatting crime, extradition, and transfer of sentenced persons.

The two leaders expressed their wish to continue promoting cooperation in other key fields like finance, telecommunication, energy, agriculture.

Regarding regional and international issues of shared concerns, both sides agreed to enhance collaboration at forums including ASEAN and the United Nations.

They committed to working closely together to successfully build the ASEAN Community capable of maintaining its central role in the regional security architecture, to ensure sustainable and effective use of the Mekong river water resources.

PM Phuc voiced support for Myanmar to soon become official member of the Mekong River Commission (MRC).

The pair stressed on the importance of maintaining peace and stability in the region, freedom of navigation and aviation in the East Sea.

They affirmed their support for peaceful resolution of disputes with respect to international law and the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and for full and effective implementation of the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the East Sea (DOC) while working towards early conclusion of a Code of Conduct in the East Sea (COC).

The talks took place in a cordial atmosphere of mutual understanding. Myanmar State Councilor Aung San Suu Kyi invited PM Phuc to pay an official visit to her country at his convenient time.

Following their talks, the two leaders witnessed the signing ceremony of two Memoranda of Understanding on cooperation in post, telecommunication and information technology and in information.
Trevor Noah, the host of The Daily Show, has spent several nights mocking and discussing the arrests of Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson. Both Nelson and Robinson were arrested inside a Philadelphia Starbucks.
The French Defense Minister, Jean Yves Le Drain announced to the National Assembly that proceedings would be commenced to strike Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad off the Order of the Legion of Honour.

It was President Jacques Chirac who had conferred this honour on al-Assad. Chirac had made out that he was Godfather to al-Assad, lending his patronage to Assad as he introduced the latter into the international arena.

This procedure is highly exceptional and is spearheaded by General Benoit Puga. The latter was the Commander of the French Special Forces and then the Military Intelligence. He was the Personal Chief of Staff of two subsequent presidents: Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande. Following his period at the Elysee, Puga organized and commanded French soldiers that had been secretly sent to Syria with the mission of toppling the Syrian regime and re-establishing what President Holland refers to as the French mandate. Puga was never prosecuted for this. On the contrary, he was hailed and rewarded by his appointment as Grand Chancellor of the Legion of Honour and invitation to participate at the 2017 Bilderberg Group Meeting.
Two US missiles launched during the Western bombing of Syria did not

successfully detonate. Both these explosives have been sent to Russia for

analysis [1].

The US and Russian technology in this type of weapon are radically

different. As a result, progress made in one system, is difficult to

transplant to and bring benefits to the other system. That said, Russian

military engineers do intend to study the US missiles to improve the

Russian anti-missile system.

A French air plane, Rafale, which was not capable of bringing down one of

the two Scalp-EG missiles had to land [2].

Three naval cruise missiles made in France meant to be fired against Syria,

could not be launched from the French multi-mission frigates [3]. These

high-tech missiles which come at the considerable cost of around 2.8

million euro per missile, have never been used in combat.

Both the US and French governments have tried to smooth away these

problems, declaring on 14 April 2018 that the joint operation against Syria

had been a total success.

From Moscow, the Russian Defence Minister revealed that more than two

thirds of the missiles used in the Western attack against Syria had been

destroyed in flight by Syria Arab Army, a fact that both the US and the

French governments contest [4].
Phill Brear Lands Lifetime Achievement Award

Phill Brear, Gibraltars retiring head of Gambling was awarded the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award last Wednesday evening at the Gambling Compliance Awards, which was held at the Sheraton Grand in Central London.

His years of regulatory service to the sector and the excellence of his work in a changing and challenging sector is what set him apart from his competitors for the award.

The presentation was made at a packed Gala event hosted by Gambling Compliance and attended by Gaming firms, professional advisors and service providers to the sector. Gibraltar firms were also successful in other awards made including Playtech and Kindred.

Mr & Mrs Brear and his successor Andrew Lyman and Mrs Lyman were hosted by Peter Montegriffo and Peter Isola in a joint Hassans/Isolas table which also included as their guests Minister Isola, Mr and Mrs Dominique Searle, James Neish, Andrew Montegriffo and Steven Caetano.

Minister Isola commented, This is recognition from an independent body, of what we all in Gibraltar already know; Mr Brear has been an outstanding contributor to our success as a Gaming Jurisdiction, and more widely has been a key driver to the online gaming model as it has evolved and developed these past 10 years. Regulators like Phill are an unusual breed; expert in this area, frank and open in his deliberations and pragmatic and proportionate in his approach. This with his integrity, have contributed hugely to the respect he enjoys not just in the sector or its professionals, but with the Ministers and Chief Ministers he has served since his appointment. We are fortunate to have him continue to work with us, despite his retirement, to support his successor and the Jurisdiction.
Commonwealth Essay Competition Winners

The Deputy Chief Minister Dr Joseph Garcia and the Minister for Education Professor John Cortes this afternoon presented awards to the winners of the Commonwealth essay competition.

This comes in the week where Gibraltar has been represented at a number of events which were organised around the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in London.

The competition itself was conducted around Commonwealth Day last month and it attracted over sixty entries.

Students were given the title Our connection with the Commonwealth and asked to write an essay. The winners were:

 1st Sophia Purkis (Year 7 Loreto Convent)

 2nd Barnaby Jarvis (Year 7 Loreto Convent)

 3rd Eva Devincenzi (St Bernards Middle School)

The following received Highly Commended awards:

 Nicole Zinovev (Year 7 Loreto Convent)

 Arabella Barton (St Bernards Middle School)

 Evelyn Bibby (St Bernards Middle School)

 Jasmine Bateman (Year 7 Loreto Convent)

The essays were judged by retired teachers Victor Fa (former Deputy Head) and Eddie Gonzalez (former Head of History).

Commenting on the awards, the Deputy Chief Minister Dr Joseph Garcia said: In less than a year we will have left the European Union and the Government has taken a policy decision to develop and expand our relations with the Commonwealth. It is very fitting that this award ceremony has coincided with the Head of Government meeting in London, and that Gibraltar has been present at the Youth Forum, the Womens Forum and the Business Forum which have been organised around that event. The essay competition is a way of encouraging young people to take an interest in the Commonwealth family of nations with which Gibraltar is proud to be associated. I want to thank my colleague Professor Cortes and his team for making this possible.

The Minister for Education Professor John Cortes said: I wish to thank my staff at the Department, particularly Christopher Gomila, the schools, the judges and the students themselves. I understand that the quality of the work that has been submitted is of a very high standard and this can only augur well for the future at a time when Gibraltar is looking to build new relationships.
Photo: New York Times

The New York Times first serialized audio documentary is now widely available, and it is a stunner. Gripping, gorgeously crafted, and smartly designed, the debut episode of Caliphate sets a vivid and intense scene for what will undoubtedly be an intense journey into the unknown.

Caliphate follows Rukmini Callimachi, the Times foreign correspondent and resident terrorism expert, as she reports on the Islamic State. It particularly focuses on a months-long effort to understand the ideology of ISIS and how it draws in followers  that is, to answer an essential question: Who are we fighting, anyway? Callimachi is flanked by producer and Radiolab alum Andy Mills, who functions as Dr. Watson to her Sherlock Holmes, and while the first episode largely serves as an introduction to the nature of her reporting, its also propelled forward by the discovery of a lead: a potential ISIS source whos now living in Canada.

With Caliphate slated to play out across ten chapters released weekly on Thursdays, Vulture reached out to the team behind it to learn how they decided to make the Times first big serialized audio series about ISIS, why the project took such an ambitious shape, and what theyre planning for future episodes.

Step 1: Finding the Idea

Building a podcast around Callimachi was one of the earliest plans floating around the Times when the news organization began assembling its audio team in the second half of 2016. (Callimachi herself quipped that such plans were made long before she was ever told about them.) By that time, she had already become well recognized as one of journalisms foremost experts on terrorism. But it was early days for an audio team that had yet to prove itself in the newsroom, and the team would have to first build itself up to a point where it would be capable of taking on longer-form projects.

Mills was one of the audio teams first hires, and he, too, had pitched the idea of a podcast featuring Callimachis reporting during his job interview. Theres nobody in the radio or podcast world like Rukmini, he told Vulture. While the new audio team felt out its first few podcasts  including The Run-Up, a weekly political show tracking the 2016 election that was hosted by Michael Barbaro  Mills spent time developing relationships with various journalists around the newsroom, eventually developing a rapport with Callimachi.

In early 2017, Barbaro and the audio team launched The Daily, a daily news podcast that quickly achieved considerable acclaim. Mills worked on the show during its earliest months, helping to establish its sound and structure. That summer, he was sent to Mosul with Callimachi to produce an episode of The Daily about a group of Yazidi women  members of a Kurdish religious minority targeted by the Islamic State  who had been enslaved by the militant group for years. That experience laid the foundation for what would become Caliphate. Not long after, a full-time team that includes managing producer Larissa Anderson, editor Wendy Dorr, and associate producer Asthaa Chaturvedi was convened to develop the project, now designated as a spinoff of The Daily.

Step 2: Choosing the Story

In the beginning, the main challenge was figuring out which story to tell. There were just so many of them, from Callimachis numerous visits to war zones across the Middle East, to the dozens of individuals shes interviewed, to the various angles shes used to gain insight into the machinations of the Islamic State.

The team burned through multiple structures and themes. One version was imagined as a straightforward explainer on ISIS, where the show would be built around five pressing questions, each answered on a different episode. Another involved a story about one of the godfathers of ISIS, but that ended up getting scrapped too. We didnt know exactly what we were going to make, Mills said.

When I came on to the project, a lot of the early meetings were like, We have a lot of stories that we can tell. There are just so many layers of complexity, said Larissa Anderson, the podcasts managing producer. We needed to pick one ambitious thing and really lean into it.

In the end, the decision came down to tape. They started creating recordings with Callimachi, and that led them to a meeting in Canada with an insider who could provide insight into the psychology of ISIS. We set off to Canada not having any idea what this would be, Callimachi said. I set out thinking that this would be a print story. We went there on a lark, and then we had this unbelievable interview. Its very rare to find a person who is able to articulate the psychological process of what they went through.

That ultimately led to the choice of focusing on the religious aspects of ISIS. It was really important to me that we get beyond the caricatured understanding of this group, Callimachi said. I think you can get a lot of clicks online just by doing the black and white look how savage these people are, but why exactly are these people doing what theyre doing? To me, ISIS is like this dark underground room, and I see my job as trying to fill it with light.

Its not unrelated that these inquiries are loosely tied to the personal biographies of the two reporters, who both grew up in religious communities: Callimachi comes from a family of Orthodox Christians, while Mills is a former Evangelical Christian. We both understand the irrational pull of faith, Callimachi said. We both share this desire to be in front of these uncomfortable questions about faith, and to try to wrestle with them as hard as we can.

Step 3: Defining the Sound

One thing youll notice from the first episode: Caliphate is strikingly cinematic. Neither scripted nor governed by a host, the podcast is propelled forward almost purely by narrative action. Even when the episode kicks the pace down a notch to explain something, it still stays closely within the context of the story. This contrasts with the feel of many other narrative podcasts, where the host-narrator often communicates directly with listeners.

Much of this has to do with the teams choice to fully run the experience through the Callimachi-Mills partnership. Mills was embedded with Callimachi for a good chunk of the reporting that went into Caliphate, and his dual role as participant and audience surrogate puts him in a good position to draw out needed exposition as the action is being played out and recorded.

I was in the perfect position as a listener, Mills said. Im not yet an expert, almost perfectly naive. On the one hand, Im getting firsthand insight into what the reporting process is like, and on the other hand, Im getting insight into this world.

That move drew from lessons the team had learned while producing The Daily, which relies heavily on Barbaro interviewing his newsroom peers for further expertise on stories they had just published  in essence, reporting on their reporting. There was something about working on The Daily that answered a few questions about how we were going to make this podcast, Mills said. Its about letting a reporter tell you about their reporting, its about showing how the sausage gets made, its about letting these people be human beings.

Step 4: Building on the Fly

At this writing, the team has published the first two chapters of Caliphate (the second is available early for Times subscribers), and the remaining eight installments remain very much in production. The tape is still being pieced together, and the team is still deciding how the rest of Caliphate will play out. For all intents and purposes, the production is a massive experimental enterprise, and there are many questions still left to answer.

The challenge is to make the podcast somewhat timeless, said Callimachi, making a distinction against the sharp newsiness of The Daily. Mills concurred, and then raised a bigger question: Could we build a podcast that lives like a Times feature, something that will become a resource people will refer to years from now?
Photo: Getty Images

To get into the mind of his character in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Anthony Boyle thought about dogs. In the two-part play, Boyle routinely steals scenes as Scorpius Malfoy, son of Harry Potters regular school rival Draco, scion to a vast, vaguely evil lineage  though Scorpius is less evil and more just a dork. The Malfoys were purebred wizards, and so Boyle reasoned, like purebred dog breeds, after generations spent within a similar genetic pool, somebody comes out a bit weird. Scorpius, as Boyle plays him onstage, is a bit like a purebred puppy: well-meaning, but a jumble of tics and pathos. Hes always trying to impress his friend, Harry Potters son Albus (Sam Clemmett), always a disappointment to his father.

Thanks to Boyles performance, Scorpius ends up being one of most endearing characters in the play, holding the audiences attention in the midst of impressive stage magic over the course of the two-part drama. The 23-year-old newcomer eked out a surprise win for Best Actor in a Supporting Role at the Olivier Awards in London last year, and as the show transfers to America, Vulture sat down with Boyle  who, in case youre wondering, is not blond in real life  to discuss his whirlwind success, the shock of going from Belfast to drama school, and why Scorpius has a small wand complex.

Were you a Harry Potter fan growing up?

I was a little bit. My dad read the books to me and my brother when we were younger, and I really enjoyed it. My little sister is 13, so we were kind of the second wave, watching the films and things. I wasnt a Potterhead, I dont think. I remember one chapter in particular, called Cat, Rat, and Dog, in the third book, Azkaban. Its when the reveal happens of where Peter Scabbers was the rat. I remember it freaked my mum out, I remember as a kid going, What?

That was always my favorite one, the third book.

My favorite as well. Plus I love Sirius Black. Hes a bad boy. I love him so much. When I first got the call for the Harry Potter play, I was still at drama school. I went, Oh, they probably want me to play Sirius Black.

So you were just auditioning without knowing the character?

The director, John Tiffany, would say, Imagine hes a bit more awkward than you are, a bit more slouching. Then we just started to sculpt. I remember reading the play in a guarded room; I just couldnt turn the pages quick enough. By then, I knew I was going for Scorpius, I thought, This is the most beautiful character. So then I went and read it before John, and [producer] Sonia Friedman, after just blitzing it for about three hours, and it went okay. They gave me the role, so it was lovely.

Unlike Sirius, Scorpius is a very awkward person. He loves quizzes, and loves books, and is kind of a dork. What was your reaction to the character?

I loved it. So much of him is so far away from me, but its just an absolute dream for an actor. Its got that light and that darkness. The thing with his mother [who is deathly ill], thats really the root of him. Christine Jones, the designer, and I worked on the wand. I remember being given a wand, and it was like the wand wasnt right, so we came up with this idea about having a small sort of twisted wand thats darker than everyone elses to develop a sort of small wand complex. He goes to Ollivanders, and the only wand that would pick him was the tiny little crooked twig. Theres the shame of having his father there trying to barter with Ollivander: Please, can I get a bigger one?

You get the sense that he doesnt think of himself as being able to live up to anything, or living up to Draco. A lot of the play is about these younger characters looking up at the older characters. How do we relate to our older generation?

Scorpius and Albus immediately relate to each other and find support in each other. What do you think bonds them so quickly?

Both of them are just natural outsiders, and I think both this weight of their fucking dads and their legacy, be it good or bad. Also, I think what connects them is humor. I think in the first scene on the Hogwarts Express, theres a moment where Scorpius is making his weird jokes and beating himself up about it  but Albus is laughing.

I always just imagined it like Scorpiuss mum would find him funny, but his dad is like, Who the fuck are you? It just means a great deal to him that Albus finds him funny. I think humor is a key form of friendship. So hanging out with Albus is probably just the sort of solace that he has. Yeah.

Sam Clemmett (left) and Anthony Boyle (right). Photo: Manuel Harlan

You were right out of drama school when you got cast in this play, and its a Harry Potter play, its a ton of attention. What was that like?

The producers did an amazing job of keeping us away from all of the hype. Media werent allowed in to the rehearsals, so it felt like we were just doing a secret, lovely  It felt really rudimentary. I really enjoyed the character. I just focused on that. So when all the hype did come, it was like, Oh, shit. Like Im at these press things, and theres my acting heroes doing interviews beside me, and it was just really weird. I was just sort of like, Fuck, I dont want to fuck things up.

Have audiences in New York felt any different than ones in London?

In London, theres a lot more decorum. In London, people are like, holding tea and saucers. Here, its just raucous. Theres a funny thing, people here vocalize recognition. So if something happens that they understand, they go, Ah. I think if I go back to London, Ill be like, I want more energy!

The laughter here is a lot longer and more vocal. So it can start to fuck with bits of rhythm, it can change. Ive started to change different tone and cadence, for a more American rhythm, for the comedy bits. You guys have been so entrenched in Friends and these different things, and in England, the comedy comes from like a sort of unspoken awkwardness. Whereas here, its more light.

Like a difference between the British Office and the American Office?

Thats exactly what it is. I cant watch the American Office. I hate it.

Is it too kind?

I feel its very put on. Do you know what I mean? Did you watch the British one? I was obsessed with David Brent. I could quote every word.

Was there a point growing up where you knew you wanted to go into acting?

I always was very creative and wrote poetry. I was expelled from school when I was 16, and my mum and dad were like, Were going to throw you out of the house if you dont get a fucking job. I knew that I wanted to do acting, so I just Googled auditions every day. Id done so many bad productions.

This was all in Belfast?

Yeah, I was doing these ghost tours, I was playing a hangman. I had a bag over my head. Ive done some awful things.

Do you mind if I ask why you were expelled?

I was a bit mixed up when I was a kid. I think I had a lot of creative energy and no output. Where Im from, no one really becomes an actor, its more boxer or drug dealer or something, so I was in a sort of bad environment. I was a bit of a scallywag. Do you guys have that word over here?

It sounds, to us, like a very British word, a little lighter than what you might mean.

Yeah. Scallywag [laughs].

Then you were noticed in Belfast?

I was doing these plays at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, which is our national theater, and a teacher saw it from the drama school, and she said, Id love for you to audition. I was like, But I dont have any money. I wasnt even aware drama school was a thing. She was like, Well, you should come to this school [the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama]. She helped me financially and everything else to go to this school. I had this amazing time. It was gorgeous. Its in Cardiff, Waless capital city, and its this amazing building, and outside is a national park. So wed be rehearsing Shakespeare, and outside youd see fucking ducks and swans. It was just like a complete world change, culture shock. Were eating hummus and drinking green tea. I made the best friends, and then left the third year for this play, but it was really idyllic times.

Id never really read any contemporary plays. I just dedicated myself to read four plays a week for two years, because I didnt want to be behind. I got quite obsessed.

Did your friends from Belfast come and see Cursed Child?

Some of my best pals came over, which was fun. They know you in one vein, and then seeing you in that is like, What the fuck? They were really proud. Really bursting with pride. My brothers one of my best pals. He sees me in everything. My brother and my friend, who used to be a drug dealer. Bringing him to these events feels like a weird thing. I did a Stephen Adly Guirgis play In Arabia Wed All Be Kings, and I played a character called Skank. They always say to me, It wasnt as good as Arabia. Which I quite enjoy. They dont give a fuck because it wasnt as cool as that other one. Theres no reverence.

You won an Olivier Award for playing Scorpius last year, was that a shock?

It was grand because I had my brother with me, and my ex-girlfriend, and I just didnt expect to win, so I was like, Well go out and just have a fun evening. I practiced a loser clap the night before. I was just so tired because it was at the end of a full week, and I remember drinking water while it was coming up to my nomination, and I remember this dying need to piss. Then I didnt write a speech, so the speech  dont know if youve seen it  but it was a fucking car crash. Its really bad. I got peoples names wrong. I said Tiffany Johns instead of John Tiffany. I didnt even thank my mum and dad either. God, my mum does not let me forget about that.

Im sure everyone asks about this, but according to IMDb, you were a Bolton guard on Game of Thrones.

[Laughs.] Oh my God! It was my first week of drama school, and I flew back to do it. It was my first job. The same play a teacher saw me in and asked me to go to drama school, a casting director, Carla Stronge, asked me to come in and do like three lines, and I did. I must have been 17, and I get asked about that all the time. It just makes me laugh though, because Im like the only Cockney in Westeros. It was the only English accent I could do, and it was just so bad.

Are you conscious of how your accent sounds now?

My accents changed a lot. No one used to understand a word I said. Im from a really rough place. You wouldnt understand a word my brother would speak. So I had to consciously change the way I sounded, so its not like turning full English, but enough so that people can understand. But when I go back home now, everyone says, You sound English, and then when Im in England, people go, God, you sound really Irish. So Ive got this best of both worlds.
The Nicole versus Vinny fight turned Nicole versus Jenni fight rages on, until Pauly pays cry-packing Nicole a visit in her room. He brings a glass of wine as a peace offering and sweetly, maturely checks in with her. If you ever just got to take a minute and get away from everybody, just do that, Pauly says. Whatever helps you cope. Cooled off, she explains that she loves Vinny, but she wants to respect her husband, given their history. Pauly finds Jenni downstairs: How would you feel about going to talk to Nicole? he asks, gently. Honestly, I have been to far worse therapists than Pauly D.

Nicole takes responsibility for being annoying and dramatic first to Jenni and then to Vinny, as he sulks in the hot tub. She reassures him that she values their friendship, just as Jenni reassures Nicole that she is a good wife, because she gives blowjobs. All is forgiven.

The next morning, finally, we get a good old-fashioned GTL day. The gang lifts weights and punches things, then does a group round of urine-inducing (at least on Nicoles part) high knees. Mike strolls placidly on a treadmill, munching on a protein bar as he walks. Who fucking works out while theyre on vacation and does laundry and shit? asks Deena, who has instead chosen, relatably, to spend the afternoon lounging by the pool.

That night, Ronnie whips up a batch of superpotent Ron Ron Juice, the sacred, sacramental drink of the Jersey Shore house. Look at this watermelon. This succulent, succulent, voluptuous, smooth watermelon, Ron says, sensually stroking the vodka-soaked fruit in the first but certainly not the last time that I wonder if hes about to commit an act of infidelity. Before long, Ronnie picks back up his fight with Deena  really, his fight with Sam, with Deena as proxy. Ron refuses to believe Sammi hasnt talked trash about him to her good pal Deena. But Deena  who does reveal that Sammi mentioned Rons habit of calling her on blocked numbers and being really weird  says his ex-girlfriend doesnt say anything about Ron, narcissistic piece of shit that he is. She doesnt think about him at all. If Deena is offended by the Sammequin, Ronnie insists more than once, then she should call Sam and tell her all about it. To me, it seems like Ron just wants Deena to do anything that will even infinitesimally increase the odds of Sammi showing up at the house.

Out at a packed club, Jenni volunteers as wingwoman tribute for single Pauly, sweet-talking two gorgeous blonde women on his behalf, but very-much-in-a-relationship Ronnie manages to intercept one of them. This beautiful French woman is wearing a sheer top without bra, a fashion choice I only mention because literally no one on this television program can shut up about it. Ron busts out his finest eighth-grade dance game, asking her, Do you guys like to French kiss? Pauly grabs the mic: Shout out to Ronnie Ortiz-Magro, right now spiraling, ladies! Make some noise! The next stage of spiraling is, apparently, grinding on his new friend. (Out of curiosity, I looked up how to say grind in French, and I am pretty sure the best translation is frotti-frotta. It is also possible that this phrase means something more like dry-humping, so use at your own risk.) If Ronnie gets any closer to this girl, hes about to have a second baby mama, Vinny warns.

Related Story Jersey Shore: An Oral History

Ronnie, unsurprisingly, invites Mademoiselle Frotti-Frotta back home, along with a coterie of beautiful strangers. His housemates repeatedly warn him that this is not a great look, to put it mildly, but bad decisions are like catnip to Miami Ron. Ronnie jams girl after girl into the cab like its a clown car, if this particular circus exclusively hired international Instagram models. From there, its straight into the hot tub. Im not gonna fuck them, Ron promises Jenni. Relax, Im not that dumb. Famous last words, and also not a terrible idea for the inscription on Rons future gravestone.

Jenni  whos already written one note too many about Rons cheating, in Miami no less, to disastrous results  resigns herself to watching this train wreck in real time, with popcorn and tea. But Nicole is struck with inspiration: She pours a round of screwdrivers that are 80 percent vodka, 20 percent orange juice, in a ploy to get the girls so drunk they pass out, thereby sabotaging Rons opportunity to cheat. Like much of the behavior showcased throughout the years on Jersey Shore, this is misguided, disturbing, and dangerous, yet oddly affectionate. By now, of course, Vinny and Pauly have also found their way into the hot tub, and one of the women volunteers her natural boobs for Dr. Pauly to examine out of medical curiosity. Suddenly, Pauly is making out with one of the women  I think it is the boob inspectee, but honestly, there are a lot of blonde people in this hot tub, and I wouldnt feel prepared to testify on this in court. Ron, meanwhile, has placed his hand on Amelies ass.

The groups sole brunette is by now so drunk that she can hardly stand, thanks to her guerrilla bartender, who by now is feeling awfully guilty, the correct reaction. Listen, Ive been there, bitch, Nicole tells her. Bitch, Im Snooki. Her victim proceeds to puke, still soaking wet, in a thong, behind a couch. Surely this woman is owed some kind of punitive damages, or at least a nice gift basket with an apology note. I have class in the morning, she worries aloud. Nicole, amid wondering if she might end up going to jail for murder, paper towels the puke out of her houseguests hair, like shes transcended the laws of time and space to mother a younger version of herself.

Mademoiselle Frotti-Frotta asks Ronnie to, ahem, take her on a tour of the house. Ronnie is one step above playing with fire right now, Vinny says. Indeed, Ronnie is juggling a sparkler while taking a long, therapeutic soak in a bathtub full of gasoline. He leads her upstairs to, of all places, the bathroom (the site of Ronnies gravest sins), and shuts the door behind them. The sounds that ensue indicate that, at an extreme sexual benefit-of-the-doubt minimum, an aggressive make-out is happening.

Pauly knocks on the closed door, but no, thank you is the only response. Im sure theres an innocent explanation, you guys. Like, um, maybe this woman is the plumber theyve been waiting for?
Its Thanos vs. Marvel in Marvel Two-in-One Annual No. 2. Photo: Jim Starlin / Marvel Entertainment.

This article was originally published in April 2018 and we are republishing it as part of our coverage of Avengers: Endgame, which prominently features Thanos.

Im not an angry person, which you can probably hear from just me talking to you, Jim Starlin tells me over the phone. Then he sighs. But Marvel tends to bring out the worst in me, at times.

Thats a bitterly ironic statement, given what the multi-billion-dollar Marvel brand owes to Starlin. The 70-year-old writer-artist is a giant in the comic-book industry, with hundreds upon hundreds of credits to his name. Hes primarily known as the leading light of so-called Marvel Cosmic, the general term applied to the companys printed tales of trippy adventuring through the far reaches of time and space. Most important, hes the guy without whom this months Marvel mega-blockbuster movie Avengers: Infinity War couldnt have happened  in the pages of his comics, he created its supervillain, the intergalactic killer Thanos, as well as its magical MacGuffin, the Infinity Gauntlet.

And he swears hell never make another comic for Marvel again.

To be clear, his main grudge is with Marvel Comics, Marvels publishing arm, not the filmmakers at Marvel Studios. But even that is a recent development  just a few years ago, he threw shade at Marvel Studios for paying him an unsatisfying amount after using his characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He reached a financial detente with them, but his feud with the comics folks has only grown. In December, he announced on Facebook that a recent editorial dispute has led him to decide hes moving on from the publisher.

Its a situation thats awkward but far from unprecedented. Starlin has a relationship with Marvel Comics that stretches out over four and a half decades, and its long been a turbulent one. Hes acrimoniously quit working for the publisher no fewer than six times, periodically coming back largely because of his love for creating Thanos stories. Now, on the eve of Infinity War  what should have been the apotheosis of his time with Marvel  he thinks relations are worse than theyve ever been. Im not working for them anymore and this time, I think that its for good, he says. Because this last [dispute] was exceedingly bad.

On its surface, the present disagreement may seem like a tempest in a proverbial teapot. Indeed, to a layperson, it might be hard to even understand whats going on. There have been, confusingly enough, two unrelated, ongoing comics storylines involving Thanos. One took place in a monthly series called Thanos, most recently written by Donny Cates; the other in sporadically published graphic novels written by Starlin. In Starlins estimation, Catess story took on a strikingly similar plot to his own plot for the graphic novels (he declines to get into details about what he means for fear of spoilers), and Marvel editorial has not been able to explain to him how that convergence came to be.

A typically trippy Starlin page, from Captain Marvel. Photo: Jim Starlin / Marvel Entertainment.

Given that Catess story was going to publish before Starlins, the latter felt like hed be upstaged by the former. He doesnt accuse anyone of ripping off his idea, but says there was plenty of time to fix it and they never lifted a finger to correct it. My attitude is, if they start undermining your work, especially slating it so it comes out before your job, its time to move on to something else, he told SyFy in February. And thats what Im doing. (Marvel declined to comment for this article.)

In order to understand Starlins fury, one needs to look back at the recent events in context, as the latest in a long line of perceived slights from the publisher. Hes been steeped in comics since his Detroit boyhood, when he fell in love with the 1960s Marvel work of two other writer-artists who had rocky relationships with the company, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. I got hooked on comic books early, he says. My father worked for Chrysler and he used to bring home all this tracing paper from his drafting job, so I started tracing things out of the comic books. His skills grew and, while serving a Vietnam-era tour of duty with the Navy in the Philippines, he started sending submissions to Marvel and its eternal rival, DC Comics. Nothing but rejection letters, he recalls.

His comic-book fortunes abruptly changed soon after he was discharged in 1971. He was in a creative  but volatile  headspace at the time. I was pretty messed up after my time in the service, came back to the States wired to the max with an explosive temper and an unbearably raw hunger to create great comics, Starlin writes in his 2010 art book/memoir The Art of Jim Starlin: A Life in Words and Pictures, which Aftershock Comics is about to rerelease. He kept cranking out submissions while working odd jobs and taking some junior-college classes in the Detroit area, and DC editor Joe Orlando finally gave him a shot by publishing a pair of short horror stories.

Elated, Starlin packed up for New York City and, upon arriving, discovered that Marvel was hiring. The first date in their long, troubled romance escalated swiftly. The green 20-something got hired to do some pencilling work, but also acted as an artistic gofer, doing touch-ups on near-finished comics and conferring with Marvel impresario Stan Lee to sketch out cover ideas that more established artists would actually draw. As he puts it, It was a weird beginning.

And, in the long run, a profitable one, thanks to the quick arrival of Thanos. Just a few months into his time at the company, Starlin was tasked with drawing an issue of The Invincible Iron Man alongside his friend and housemate, the writer Mike Friedrich. He had just the idea for it. While attending a psychology class in junior college in order to woo a woman, Starlin had become briefly acquainted with the Freudian concept of Thanatos, humanitys drive for death and self-destruction. As a result, even before he started at Marvel, hed drawn up plans for a villain named Thanos, using that subtracted spelling because it looked better in print. (For all the nitpicky geeks out there: Starlin swears up and down that any resemblance to contemporaneous Jack Kirby villain Darkseid was purely coincidental.) The time had come, he felt, for Thanos to make his debut.

Thanoss first appearance, in The Invincible Iron Man. Photo: Jim Starlin / Marvel Entertainment.

According to Starlin, when the Iron Man opportunity popped up, he ran to editor Roy Thomas with the idea, got the green light, and rushed home in a fervor. Mike and I agreed that wed talk over a plot later that night, Starlin writes in his book. But when Mr. Friedrich arrived home, he discovered I already had three pages of The Invincible Iron Man #55 completed. Starlin also wanted the story to introduce another character hed been hashing out, Drax the Destroyer, who has (albeit in greatly modified form) appeared in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, too. Friedrich recalls how excited Starlin was to be adding Drax and Thanos to the Marvel dramatis personae: It wasnt a casual thing, Friedrich says. Jim had come to New York with these characters and he wanted to do them for Marvel. In his mind, these were Marvel Comics characters.

And, when the issue hit newsstands in December of 1972, Starlins wish for his brainchildren came true. Entitled Beware the  Blood Brothers! the one-off story was a little loopy, but its verve was undeniable. Its told out of chronological order, opening with extraterrestrial warrior Drax sending a telepathic message to Iron Man while the latter is being attacked by the titular brothers  minions of the as-yet-unseen Thanos  then jumping backward to show how our metal-clad hero got into this situation. After a download of exposition about how Thanos was the child of a benevolent alien king named Mentor and brother of a being named Eros (not coincidentally, the name of Freuds positive counterweight to Thanatos), cast out for his desire to wage war, the baddie finally appears. The name, Iron Man, is  Thanos! he declares. More properly, Thanos the first  emperor shortly of near-defeated Titan  then of your own Earth! Drax and Iron Man take him out, only to find he replaced himself with a robot at the last minute and got away. A legend was on the loose.

Its more or less impossible to get sales data for comics of that era, but if Iron Man No. 55 sold well, it didnt do well enough to make Starlins job safe. Legendary smart-aleck writer Steve Gerber was assigned to collaborate with him for No. 56 and they concocted a goofy tale about an evil former schoolteacher named Rasputin and a towering beast called Fangor. According to Starlin, Lee found the issue to be wildly off-brand and had him and Gerber removed from the series. But no matter  that same month, January 1973, saw the release of his first issue on the series that would make him famous, the intergalactic superhero saga Captain Marvel. It followed the travails of an alien do-gooder with that moniker and, right off the bat, Starlin and Friedrich  who co-wrote the first four issues, then left Starlin on his own to write and draw  brought Thanos back for a multi-part story line. In its pages, Starlin introduced his creations most delicious idiosyncrasy: he seeks to kill in order to woo the femme-bodied physical embodiment of the concept of death. Even in the hoary annals of superhero lore, that was a new one.

Starlin was having a wild time with his fellow Marvel pros. On a few occasions, there was some imbibement of substance and we would wander around Manhattan in the middle of the night, he recalls. He and one of his wandering companions, writer Steve Englehart, used the acid-trip visions they had to inform the stories of a character they created, Shang-Chi, Master of Kung-Fu. But the ride was not to last  in 1974, Starlin had the first of his many falling-outs with Marvel. In his telling, the company kept changing up the artists who were assigned to ink his pencils, he got fed up with it, and he and Marvel parted ways one issue before he could resolve his Thanos arc in Captain Marvel.

That first breakup didnt last long  the EIC lured Starlin back with the offer of working on a character of his choice. He says he could have picked one of the A-list heroes, but opted to go with easily one of the weirdest fellows in the Marvel stable, a synthetic being/Jesus figure known as Adam Warlock. The next great Starlin run began. His time with Warlock was remarkable not only for its grandiose visuals and even more grandiose dialogue (take, for example, this declaration from Thanos, whom Starlin had brought back once again: You, unlike myself, have chosen the path of the living! You must learn to be one with this life or it will destroy you, Adam! The only way to do this, is to pay its price! Its price is pain!). But it was also worthy of note for the fact that Marvel published a Warlock story that was a veiled assault on the company. Entitled 1000 Clowns, it featured a villain named Lens Tean (an anagram of Stan Lee) and a minion named Jan Hatroomi (an anagram of John Romita, the name of a leading Marvel artist of the time). Together, they enforce conformity on a multitude of individuals tasked with creating garbage, solely because thats the way its always been and always will be!

Astoundingly, the issue didnt get him fired, perhaps because Warlock was such a smash with fans. Starlin won multiple awards for his work on the title and his stature in the comics landscape grew. However, his relationship with Marvel collapsed once again  in 1976, he says he found his art getting changed (and changed badly, he hastens to add) by others after he submitted it, and grew furious. With the publication of Warlock No. 15, Starlin once again walked away  only to return a few months later to work on an Avengers issue starring Thanos.

Adam Warlock ruminates in Warlock. Photo: Jim Starlin / Marvel Entertainment.

Thats the general pattern that Starlin and Marvel have followed ever since: Starlin becomes dissatisfied with something, he quits, Marvel approaches him about returning, and he comes back with a new set of cosmic stories  almost always ones that feature Thanos. He quit in 1986 because his paychecks werent arriving, then returned in 1989 to write Silver Surfer. He quit in 1994 because he had a bad feeling about the companys direction (a feeling proven right when the company went bankrupt a few years later), then came back in 2000 to work on a new Captain Marvel series and, eventually, a Thanos solo title. He quit in 2004 because, in his recollection, he was told he couldnt use Warlock in Thanos and they wouldnt hire him to work on a Warlock solo series. He returned yet again in 2014 and wrote the first of his recent Thanos graphic novels, The Infinity Revelation, then wrote another one, and was nearly done with a new trilogy of them with penciler Alan Davis when he found out about Catess Thanos story and quit. Out of respect for Davis, Starlin finished penning the trilogy, but it will be published with the writing credit of a man who hates the publishers guts.

However, in the midst of all this turbulence, great stories have emerged. More than most, Starlin was responsible for expanding Marvels consciousness and renewing the companys cool, especially in the 1970s. The company had already published psychedelia, much of it crafted by Ditko, but Starlin took the trippiness and infused it with moral fervor and epic scope. His space operas could make Star Wars look positively parochial, and he kept up the momentum for decades. Indeed, his most famous tale came nearly 20 years into his time with Marvel, in the pages of 1991s The Infinity Gauntlet, which saw Thanos assembling the titular object, a glove that he embellished with mystical gems of enormous power. Pencilers George Perez and Ron Lim brought to life Starlins vision of legions of Marvel heroes coming together to take the Mad Titan down during his attempt to wipe out half of all life in the universe  an idea being more or less directly lifted by Marvel Studios for Infinity War.

Starlin says hes looking forward to that film, and has greatly enjoyed seeing Thanos, Drax, and another creation of his, the Guardian of the Galaxy Gamora, grace the silver screen. Partly, thats due to the pure excitement of watching his dreams made manifest: of his multiple times seeing that trio of characters in 2014s Guardians of the Galaxy, he says, Id walk out of there with a big grin on my face that would last for days. Its also partly due to the fact that the higher-ups have let him meet actors and filmmakers  he got to see some of Infinity Wars shooting and has interacted with Guardians director James Gunn and Gamora actor Zoe Saldana.

But Starlins excitement is also tied to the fact that the films are a payday for him. He doesnt get into details, but says he was able to negotiate an arrangement to get a certain amount of money for non-comics uses of Thanos when Disney bought Marvel in 2009. However, in January 2017, he wrote a Facebook post saying he got paid more for the use of his lesser-known DC character Anatoli Knyazev in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice than he did for all the uses of Thanos in the Marvel movies as of then, combined. According to Starlin, that led Disney to renegotiate the agreement, which he now calls a fairly fair deal.

Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War. Photo: null/Marvel Studios 2018

That said, hes happy to collect his movie bucks and pass on actually making comics for Marvel, now that the comics mavens have ticked him off again. Hes still working: he just wrote a story called Berserker, drawn by Phil Hester, for Aftershocks anthology book Shock; he also has a long bibliography of prose novels and is continuing to write them, with a loose adaptation of his DC comic-book series Hardcore Station currently in the hopper. And he leaves behind a legacy beyond Marvel, having created famed stories ranging from the death of Batman sidekick Jason Todd for DC in 1989 to a long-running creator-owned saga about an interstellar adventurer named Vanth Dreadstar. Whether or not he ever works on another Marvel story, his legacy is secure.

When I ask Starlin what the nature of his tumultuous relationship with Marvel is, he pauses for a second, then replies, Its been Thanos. He cant escape his fascination with the character, nor can he escape his anger when he feels his Thanos stories are being undermined or meddled with. I would never do half the terrible things that he does, but at the same time, Im amused by his straightforwardness and his complete lack of morality, Starlin says. He does have his more human moments along the way, but basically, hes a black hole of monstrousness. On the whole, he remains happy with what hes been able to pull off with him, even if it meant lots of back-and-forth with the people who own the bad guy. You usually have three to four careers in a normal human lifespan, these days, Starlin says. Mine just happen to be in the same career.
Javier Bardem. Photo: Carlos Alvarez/Getty Images

Diane Keaton and Alec Baldwin arent the only Hollywood-dwellers firmly voicing support for Woody Allen anymore. Javier Bardem, who earned a Golden Globe nomination for his leading role in Allens Vicky Cristina Barcelona, is now also defending the auteur, explaining in a new interview with Paris Match how hes absolutely not ashamed to have worked with the director a decade ago. If there was evidence that Woody Allen was guilty, then yes, I would have stopped working with him, but I have doubts, he said. I am very shocked by this sudden treatment. Judgments in the states of New York and Connecticut found him innocent. The legal situation today is the same as in 2007.

Allens daughter, Dylan Farrow, has accused him of sexually assaulting her when she was a child, detailing the alleged assault in a recent interview with CBS Sunday Morning. As a result of Farrows accusations, numerous actors in the Allen canon  such as Michael Caine, Peter Sarsgaard, Colin Firth, and Rebecca Hall  have sworn to never work with him in any capacity again.
Grammy nominated Swedish DJ Avicii died Friday, his publicist confirmed to CNN.

He was 28.

"It is with profound sorrow that we announce the loss of Tim Bergling, also known as Avicii," a statement to CNN read. "He was found dead in Muscat, Oman this Friday afternoon local time, April 20th. The family is devastated and we ask everyone to please respect their need for privacy in this difficult time. No further statements will be given."

Avicii was one of the most successful touring DJs in the industry, working with artists including Madonna. He had a crossover pop hit in 2013 with "Wake Me Up."

But he also saw the downside of fame in the electronic dance music genre known as EDM.

"It's very easy to become too attached to partying," he told Rolling Stone last year. "You become lonely and get anxieties. It becomes toxic."

He retired from performing in 2016 after a string of health issues, including acute pancreatitis.

Avicii told Time in 2013 that the illness was caused by excessive drinking.

"Yeah I was drinking way too much, partying in general way too much," he said. "Then I got a pancreatitis attack [at 21], which is very rare. So that forced me to do a 180 and stop drinking."

The DJ explained in a 2017 posting on his site that he had no intention of giving up music completely, writing "We all reach a point in our lives and careers where we understand what matters the most to us."

"For me it's creating music," he wrote. "That is what I live for, what I feel I was born to do."

Avicii also wrote that he was heading back into the studio to make more art.

"The next stage will be all about my love of making music to you guys. It is the beginning of something new," his posting said. "Hope you-ll enjoy it as much as I do."

Fellow musicians took to social media on Friday to mourn his death.

"Devastating news about Avicii, a beautiful soul, passionate and extremely talented with so much more to do," fellow superstar DJ Calvin Harris tweeted. "My heart goes out to his family. God bless you Tim."
HONOLULU (AP) - A Florida man must spend two months behind bars and four months under home confinement for his role in scamming the University of Hawaii out of $200,000 for a Stevie Wonder concert that never happened.

A judge in Honolulu sentenced Sean Barriero Thursday for the scam that humiliated the university. Barriero pleaded guilty to illegally taking $200,000 from the university.

Prosecutors say the university was tricked into paying the money in 2012 before realizing that neither Wonder nor his representatives had authorized a show.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Marc Wallenstein asked the judge for a lighter sentence because Barriero's cooperation led his co-defendant to plead guilty to wire fraud.

Marc Hubbard was sentenced to nearly five years in prison earlier this month.

Wallenstein says Hubbard duped Barriero.

(Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)
Huntsville City Schools Superintendent Matt Akin is leaving Huntsville after just over a year in the district.

Akin told WAAY 31 Thursday afternoon that he intends to take a job as superintendent for Gulf Shores City Schools.

Matt Akin, Huntsville school superintendent Matt Akin, Huntsville school superintendent

The details of his employment with the district are still being discussed, he said, but he plans to leave once negotiations are done.

Akin signed a 3-year contract in March 2017 to take over for former superintendent Casey Wardynski. He said he originally intended to fulfill that contract, and that there have been no issues in the district that have influenced his decision to move on.

The Gulf Shores school district is a new school system that's branching off from Baldwin County Schools. Akin said he understands parents will be upset, but he couldn't pass up the opportunity to start a new school district from scratch.

"Superintendent jobs, especially in Alabama, its pretty common -- they go out in email bursts all the time," he said. "You go through your email and glance through it. Its just like reading the news, but just what caught my eye was to see they were looking for someone innovative, but starting from the ground level."

Akin was one of 27 applicants for the Gulf Shores job, but he was the only one the board chose to interview.

A Huntsville City Schools spokesman said the district has 180 days after Akin's departure to find a new superintendent, and there will be an interim superintendent appointed until they find a replacement.

Akin's last day on the job hasn't been determined because he's still negotiating his contract with Gulf Shores.

One parent in the district told WAAY 31 he's upset Akin for leaving after one year into a three-year contract.

"I begrudge him, yeah, a little bit for shorting us on that contract," said Tim Tatum.

Tatum still supports Akin for following his heart.

"There's opportunities for everyone that you never see coming and sometimes they're really great opportunities that are just going to speak to who you are," said Tatum.

Huntsville City Schools Board of Education Members said they have a lot of work to do before Akin departs.

"I believe that he's going to stay long enough for us to get a lot of business done and that is going to be a challenge for the board. We're going to have a lot of time in meeting in order to make sure we have fully staffed all our schools and taking care of all the teacher raises and everything we need to take care of before he goes," said Board President Elisa Ferrell.
Wednesday night was the second debate for Alabama Republican gubernatorial candidates.

Noticeably absent - Governor Kay Ivey, who had a scheduling conflict.

But Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle, Evangelist Scott Dawson and state Senator Bill Hightower were all there talking about immigration, gambling, school safety, and even Roy Moore.

All eyes were on Birmingham Wednesday night for the Republican Gubernatorial debate. The three candidates, not holding back any punches.

Battle: "Is Kay Ivey really running the government? When do you have time to govern?"

One of the hot button issues of the night - ethics. Given Alabama's sordid history with it, and raising the gas tax.

Battle: "We have to do infrastructure."

Hightower: "I want a long term plan we're going to stick to.

Dawson: "We don't know what's going on in Alabama. We've got to go in and make sure its transparent."

And immigration.

Battle: "Inclusive community. We do not exclude people. Work with them to be productive citizens."

Hightower: "We need the workforce. We need to cooperate with ICE. Threat to society."

When asked if they voted for Roy Moore, all three said they voted along party lines.

And they were in agreement with not allowing gambling in the state.

Battle: "It is not a financial tool I would jump into, it's a quick money process. I'm not wild about having it in my area. There are some residual and social ills that come off of that. I would lean towards no."

Dawson: "It's an economic decision for me. Never a good idea."

All three did mention their disappointment with Governor Ivey not attending the debate.

They promise to be great leaders, and make the state better by having transparency and holding people accountable.

But, it will ultimately be up to you, the voter, on the June 5th primary.
A 16-year-old boy was charged Thursday in connection with the death of his mother, who was found dead in a house fire earlier this week.

Morgan County Sheriff's investigators arrested Nicholas Clay Lamons for the murder of his mother, 32-year-old Kimberly Faye Lamons.

Sheriff Ana Franklin tells WAAY 31 the suspect, who is a student at Brewer High School, is charged with first-degree criminal arson and felony murder.

RELATED: Victim of deadly house fire identified

Kimberly Lamons was found dead after a fire in her home at Highway 67 and Apple Grove Road in the Joppa community of Morgan County Tuesday morning.

The State Fire Marshal determined the fire was not accidental and that the fire was intentionally or recklessly set.

MORE: Morgan County Sheriff's Office investigating fatal fire in the Joppa community.

Fire crews from Tri-County and Rock Creek responded to the fire, and found the home engulfed in flames upon arrival.

It took roughly two hours to extinguish the fire.

Stay with WAAY 31 News for more information as this story develops.
Decatur City Council members approved for the city to apply for a state grant, which would help pay for a trail along Dry Branch Creek.

The half mile trail would start at Memorial Drive Northwest at 6th street to 5th avenue. It'll run parallel to Washington Street, alongside Dry Branch Creek.

Decatur City council President Paige Bibbee told WAAY 31 she's all for a trail being built at the Dry Branch Creek.

She just believes it could be built for free from the Tennessee Valley Authority.

"It's a good way of exercise without vehicle traffic. I use it for my walking and biking," said Blair Temple.

Blair Temple enjoys the nature trails in Decatur. He thinks the idea of a half mile biking and walking trail at the Dry Branch Creek is a great idea.

"The trails have expanded and they're trying to do more bike lanes, which helps. It's a continuing adding process," Temple said.

City President Paige Bibbee represents district 3. She said the money for the trail, which is in district one, would come from the transportation alternatives program grant. The requested grant would be $800,000. The city will have match 20% on that.

"The problem I had was we may pay grant money for something we could get done for free. I am absolutely for the trail being there. Just not in funding of using the TAD grant for the trail," said Paige Bibbee.

District 3 covers most of the wildlife refugee. Bibbee said some of the TAD grant could instead be used to improve that area.

"In the past 10-15 years, district 3 has received no grant money at all," Bibbee said.

Dry Branch Creek is also in the flood zone and that leads to littering.But despite that, temple hopes the city can come to a agreement on building a trail.

"I think it's always a good idea. You see people on bikes just trying to get from point A to point B, so that would help," Temple said.

Paige Bibbee said she's already been talking to representatives from TVA regarding the Dry Creek Branch, and working on the littering issue.
Sex offenders moving from one motel to another in the Shoals has us asking the hard questions to the state.

WAAY 31's Breken Terry was in Sheffield where she discovered private businesses don't have to tell you anything when it comes to sex offenders living in a motel.

Breken Terry: I am here on north Jackson Highway, where I started looking into the Regal Inn after 2 registered sex offenders moved here from the Four Way Inn. After doing some digging, I uncovered a total of 5 sex offenders now live in this motel.

WAAY 31 went to the local parole office and asked why registered sex offenders are allowed to live in places designated as hotels or motels. Officers told us they have the same question and started asking it years ago. The local parole office told us a family with kids can rent out the room right next to any of these sex offenders without ever knowing. Police and deputies told us private businesses are not responsible for disclosing that sex offenders are living at a motel, despite the danger it could put kids in. For people who work near the inn, they tell us they'd like to see some laws changed on this issue.

Jeremy Cravens: "It's not a very transparent situation. You don't know if there is going to be a family staying next to them. I understand these people have to live somewhere but I don't think we do enough to notify that they're out there and where they are for kids that pass by."

At this time if you go over the Alabama Law Enforcement Agencies website it will only say four people are calling this inn home. That's because they haven't updated their website yet.

We asked them how long it normally takes to update their website. And they said they'd get back to us. We also called the state parole office to ask why sex offenders can live at motels. They haven't called us back ether. Live in Sheffield, Breken Terry WAAY 31 news.
ATMORE, Ala. (AP) - Alabama has executed the oldest U.S. inmate to be put to death in modern times, an 83-year-old man convicted of a federal judge's mail-bomb slaying.

Authorities say Walter Leroy Moody Jr. was pronounced dead at 8:42 p.m. CDT Thursday after a lethal injection. He made no final statement and did not respond when a prison official asked him if he had any last words.

The non-profit Death Penalty Information Center says Moody became the oldest inmate put to death in the United States since the resumption of U.S. executions in the 1970s. Moody was convicted of killing U.S. Circuit Judge Robert S. Vance of Birmingham, who died when he opened a package mailed to his home in 1989.

Prosecutors have described Moody as a meticulous planner who committed murder by mail because of his obsession with getting revenge on the legal system. He also was convicted in federal court for a bombing that killed Robert E. Robinson, a black civil rights attorney from Savannah, Georgia.

Governor Kay Ivey released the following statement after the execution;

"I approach every execution by giving the condemned, and the issues raised by the underlying case, the careful consideration both deserve. My ultimate desire is to see justice rightly administered.

Mr. Moody was convicted of killing Federal Judge Robert Vance and severely injuring Judge Vances wife with a bomb purposefully created to kill and maim. The crimes committed by Mr. Moody were intentional, well-planned and aimed at inflicting the most possible harm. A jury found him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and his conviction has been upheld at every level of the judicial system.

For our system of government to work properly, the judiciary must be able to operate without undue outside influence. By targeting and murdering a respected jurist, Mr. Moody not only committed capital murder, he also sought to interrupt the flow of justice. After considering the facts of his horrendous and intentional crime, I have allowed Mr. Moodys sentence to be carried out in accordance with the laws of this state and in the interest of ensuring justice for the victim and his family.

State Attorney General Steve Marshall also released a statement.

Nearly 30 years ago, 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Robert Vance was brutally slain when a pipe bomb sent to his Birmingham home exploded. Walter Leroy Moody was convicted of Judge Vances murder in both federal and state courts. Even though he was also convicted of a similar pipe bomb death of a Georgia attorney, Moody has spent the better part of three decades trying to avoid justice. Tonight, Mr. Moodys appeals finally came to a rightful end. Justice has been served.
WAAY 31s I-Team investigation gets to the bottom of costly complaints against Huntsville City Schools. The complaints center around education programs for students with special needs.



Dr. Matt Akin Dr. Matt Akin

Parents say HCS is too quick to fight them, even lawyer up, instead of putting special ed students first.

Today, school superintendent Dr. Matt Akin told WAAY 31 he will leave to head up the new Gulf Shores school district. As of now, though, Akin is still in charge at Huntsville City Schools.

WAAY 31 talked with Akin to get his insight on what some consider a broken special ed system at HCS.

We asked him about those costly complaints from parents, how he sizes up Huntsvilles special education program and whether it needs change.

Akin admits theres room for improvement.

"I'm sure we have problems whether it's special ed, we have problems in all areas -- it's a large district -- that we want to work on," superintendent Matt Akin told WAAY 31.

He insists at Huntsville City Schools, the status quo isnt good enough anymore.

The answer can't be 'Well, this is the way we've always done it.' Let's take another look and make sure whatever way is getting the most efficient use of public tax dollars," Akin said.

One aspect of Dr. Akins job is addressing concerns from parents.

Parents like Catherine George have long-standing complaints about the districts special ed program.

"It's been a long drawn out battle," George told WAAY 31.

George complains HCS fails to properly serve students with special needs, stalling while the district battles parents in and out of court.

Students are the ones suffering.

"Getting them the help they need and getting them the resources there is very difficult especially when the school system drags it out as long as they can," George said.

Akin says if thats happening, it needs to stop.

"It's not my philosophy and I don't want it to be anyone's philosophy that we're going to drag things out because ultimately what we want is to do what's right and we want to serve kids, Akin explained.

Fighting parents costs the district money. Its cash that could go to education.

"All this money we're spending on court fees, on attorney fees, they could be putting toward the children, George told us.

"Usually, if there's an attorney involved in IEP, then there's been some type of complaint, Akin said.

Those complaints are about individualized education programs.

IEPs are at the core of conflicts between HCS and parents of special needs children.

"We've had a number of cases, a number of complaints. But, our goal is to quickly do what's right and come to an agreement about how to best serve kids, the superintendent said.

Lanier, Ford, Shaver & Payne is the law firm that represents Huntsville City Schools.

Attorney J.R. Brooks with Lanier Ford told WAAY 31 the school district serves nearly 3,000 students with IEPs.

Fighting parents' IEP complaints gets expensive. The school board is even on the hook for parents' attorney fees when Lanier Ford loses. One big example: Brooks confirmed a large unpublished legal defeat that WAAY 31 uncovered.

Huntsville City Schools paid more than $217-thousand in one parents legal fees.

The parent appealed all the way to the Eleventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.

That high-dollar defeat happened before Dr. Akin took the helm at the school board.

"Anytime we're spending -- and no offense to attorneys or to our attorneys -- but, I would much rather in any case be spending money directly on the classroom as opposed to attorneys, Akin told us.

There are attorney fighting on both sides.

The district has an obligation to evaluate, identify and offer a program for every single child within the school districts jurisdiction, attorney Deborah Mattison told WAAY 31. Mattison focuses on special education law.

Based in Birmingam, Mattison represents several Huntsville parents.

District staff would do well to listen to parents concerns and to listen more than they talk, Mattison told us. Parents come to me because they feel like their concerns have not been heard by the district.

WAAY 31 wanted to know how other school systems keep complaints from ever happening in the first place.

Bedside manner  like doctors, you know, doctors who are friendly and do a good job usually dont get sued for medical malpractice, attorney James Irby told WAAY 31.

From his office in Florence, Irby advises districts like Lauderdale County and Decatur to work with parents.

He says school districts need to be aware of the childs IEP, need to be aware of whats in there and what theyre supposed to be doing and be positive and proactive about doing so.

Irby explains it comes down to following federal law. Its mainly a matter of being proactive in making sure that were providing what we need to provide for the students who are protected by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

Back in Huntsville, we find that constant complaint weve heard over and over: parents often feel more like adversaries than partners.

"The issue with Huntsville City Schools is that they do not include you, Catherine George pointed out.

Thats a problem Akin started working to correct.

"One of the things that we've started just in the last several months in Special Ed is a parent involvement or a parent advisory committee, Dr. Akin said. I'm not sure if all parents are aware of that. We asked parents to participate.
Investors say board changes are still needed at AMP and chairman Catherine Brenner's position is still "in question", despite the abrupt resignation of chief executive Craig Meller and the company's "unreserved" apology for its misconduct and failures.

The announcement on Friday of Mr Meller's immediate departure from the institution, along with a review of AMP's governance and regulatory processes, capped off a torrid week for the company following revelations at the royal commission that it repeatedly mislead the corporate regulator and that key figures, including Ms Brenner, were involved in altering an independent report from lawyers Clayton Utz on AMP's "fees for no service" scandal.

AMP shares closed lower again on Friday, with investors noting that little had actually changed at AMP given Mr Meller was already departing before the end of the year.

AMP shareholder Legg Mason said the resignation did not deal with underlying issues at the financial services giant. "The announcement of the [chief executive's] immediate resignation and additional governance reviews seem an appropriate response to the publics reaction this week," said Matthew Davidson, senior research analyst at Legg Mason's Australian arm, Martin Currie.
It has taken its time. It was raised in the Bishop report in 2014 and Greens senator Peter Whish-Wilson moved for an additional Senate inquiry into white-collar penalties that presented its report in November 2015. More penalties and powers is a good thing but only if ASIC has the will to use them. The irony in all of this is ASIC already has a powerful toolkit. Some sections of the Corporations Act include prison terms, court orders and financial penalties. In the case of serious market offences, such as market manipulation or insider trading, the term of imprisonment is up to 10 years. It also has the power to ban directors if they have breached their duties. Some directors have been banned, some people have gone to jail but they are rarely from the big end of town. The preference at the top end is to do deals, such as enforceable undertakings, which are a slap on the wrist. All too often ASIC allows these companies to hire independent experts to write a report that isnt independent.

This was nowhere more evident than in ASICs handling of the scandal in IOOFs research division, exposed by Fairfax Media in 2015, including allegations of front running, an insider trading incident that wasn't reported to ASIC, misrepresentation of performance figures, faulty research reports, getting junior staff to cheat on compliance exams on behalf of a senior executive, bullying and victimisation of a whistleblower. After a 12-month investigation, ASIC identified a number of serious concerns in IOOF's research division including compliance arrangements, breach reporting, management of conflicts of interest, staff trading policy, disclosure, whistleblower management and protection and cyber security. IOOF wasnt fined or sanctioned, given any banning orders or an enforceable undertaking. Instead it "reached an agreement" that IOOF would appoint an external compliance consultant to "conduct an expanded, broader and more comprehensive review of compliance arrangements within all IOOF business units". AMP chairman Catherine Brenner is accused of meddling with an independent investigation. Credit:Christopher Pearce As I wrote at the time, ASIC spent less than one hour with the IOOF whistleblower who handed over 52,000 documents and repeatedly offered to help in any way he could.

At the royal commission earlier in the week these so-called independent expert reports were exposed for what they are: a sham. In the case of AMP there was multiple interference as high up as the chair of the board, Catherine Brenner. It was found that AMP went through 25 drafts and was the subject of more than 700 document exchanges between AMP and Clayton Utz, before the report was submitted by the board to ASIC as an "independent report". Most often these reports attach legal privilege, which means they never see the light of day, which is a concern in itself. It is undoubtedly why more and more companies use consultants to wrap reports and other communications in non-disclosure agreements and confidentiality agreements.

It is why there needs to be some transparency around independent reports particularly if ASIC continues to rely on them to do its job for them. Perhaps the cleanest way is ASIC appoints the expert and pays for it and funds it from revenue generated from the penalties raised each year. Mark Bishop says there are a number of outstanding issues that havent been resolved: the responsibility of the boards and companies for conduct going back many years and making ASIC tougher. Bishop is concerned that some of the compensation schemes set up by these institutions lack transparency. A quiet behind-the-scenes deal done between the rip-off perpetrator and the regulator. Industry insider He has a point. In the case of the AMP enforceable undertaking in 2006, an insider says everything was done to keep the matter quiet and buried under an EU.
Former Telstra boss and Suncorp chairman Ziggy Switkowski has made an interesting choice for his successor at the banking and insurance group.

Christine McLoughlin might not have Ziggys profile but she certainly knows how to keep controversy to a minimum.

McLoughlin - as chairwoman of Venues NSW - managed to keep a very low profile as the NSW government dug itself into a ditch over the planned multi-billion dollar rebuild of two not-so-old stadiums.

This included a complete rebuild of Venues NSWs biggest arena, ANZ Stadium which was built for the Olympics.
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THE GENERAL (74 minutes) G Buster Keaton assumes the rank of a legendary hero in this silent comedy from 1926, playing a timid Southern engineer in pursuit of two beloved objects  his girl (Marion Mack) and his train  during the American Civil War. The daring and dexterity of the stunts is guaranteed to amaze as well as amuse. Digitally projected, with live accompaniment by the Sounds of Silent. Thornbury Picture House, Apr 22, 3pm. Ponyo is a fairytale about a fish who becomes a little girl. PONYO (103 minutes) G Japan's master animator, Hayao Miyazaki, went back to basics with this enchanting 2008 fairytale about a fish who becomes a little girl (voiced by Noah Cyrus in the English-dubbed version). Set against hand-drawn watercolour backdrops of sea and sky, and conveying a characteristic sense of technology and magic as interchangeable, it's a poetic adventure for all ages. 35mm print. ACMI, Apr 22, 10.30am.

Amy Schumer takes the lead in I Feel Pretty. WHITE DOG (90 minutes) M A German shepherd is found in the Hollywood Hills by a compassionate starlet (Kristy McNichol), who is horrified to learn that her new companion has been trained to attack black people. It's a truly upsetting premise, and Sam Fuller's 1982 drama pulls no punches, crystallising his sense of how innocence and evil can co-exist. Presented by the Cinemaniacs film society, with introduction from film historian Hande Noyan. Digitally projected. Backlot Studios, Apr 21, 8pm. MAURICE (140 minutes) M A film that deserves to be discovered by a new generation, James Ivory's 1987 adaptation of E.M. Forster's posthumously published novel about a young gay man (James Wilby) finding his way in Edwardian England is heartfelt, intelligent and, in its polite way, entirely uncompromising. Hugh Grant has one of his best early roles as the hero's inhibited upper-class lover. New digitally restored version. ACMI, Apr 21 and 22, 11am.
The sheikh pulled out a Koran and asked Mazen to prove himself by holding it in both hands and swearing an oath that he was telling the truth about driving the woman home. From a young age, Muslims learn that if they tell a lie while touching the holy book, they are sentencing themselves to a stint in hell. The Koranic oath is taken so seriously that even those who are not overly religious will think twice about swearing it falsely. It came as no surprise to Jihan that Mazen refused to take the oath. He argued that his word should be enough. The sheikh ruled in Jihan's favour. This meant that Jihan was the wronged party in the relationship, a decision that would have implications for her financial rights under the Islamic marriage contract, especially since Mazen was now agreeing that they should no longer be together. The conversation turned to the contract's mahr clause. The sheikh pointed out that, since Mazen was at fault and also wanted to end the relationship, under that contract he owed Jihan $25,000 for violating it.

At the mention of money, Mazen's father sprung to his son's defence, pleading with the sheikh to reconsider. He argued that, because the couple had not consummated their relationship, Jihan had kept her sexual purity  which would make it easier for her to move on. His son could also not afford to pay such a large sum. Jihan was angered: why did her rights, as set out in the Islamic marriage contract, have to be renegotiated? Why did Mazen and his family agree to the terms in the first place if they weren't going to honour them? Why shouldn't Mazen have to pay for treating her badly? In many Middle Eastern communities, one part of the mahr is provided to a woman in the lead-up to her wedding, to be spent on jewellery and preparations for a home. The remaining amount, agreed on in advance by both parties in the Islamic marriage contract, can come into play in the event that things sour. It is a recognition that a woman in these circumstances no longer has a man to rely on for her basic financial support, a responsibility that falls on all men under Islam. However, a sheikh could also decide that a man is the innocent party and his wife has to repay the dowry to formally end a relationship. In Jihan's case, Mazen had promised a $25,000 dowry up front to cover expenses, including a diamond ring, and another $25,000 that would be paid if the relationship ended and he was to blame.

Her father-in-law had insisted on the $25,000 because it was the same amount that he had requested for his own daughter upon her marriage. It was his way of showing that he thought of Jihan as a daughter. Jihan turned to Mazen's father and asked, "Why did you write that amount and sign it if you weren't going to take it seriously? Am I worth nothing?" She began to cry, shaking her head in disbelief. They had been meeting with the sheikh for two hours without a break and Jihan was starting to feel defeated. She turned to Mazen's father and, in a firm voice, explained that she no longer wanted his family's money, adding that she would never forgive his son for not paying her what had been promised and was within her rights. Mazen's father was mortified. As a Muslim, owing this money would be a millstone around his son's neck for the rest of his life  and in the afterlife, too. In Islam, a debt is not forgiven until it is paid or the person owed the money forgives it. The sheikh stepped in. "Would you pay $17,000?" he asked Mazen's father. Such bartering angered Jihan all over again. "Why are you negotiating the figure down?" she asked the sheikh. But she was too late. Mazen's father saw an opening: "I will pay $10,000."

The sheikh turned to Jihan and explained that she needed to accept that, if Mazen could not pay the original agreed sum, then it was better to take what she could get. Jihan persisted with the sheikh. "Would you do the same if it were your daughter?" "Yes, I would," the sheikh replied without hesitation. He looked Jihan in the eye and continued. "God said that, if you can be the better person, then be the better person."

"And get less money," Jihan whispered under her breath. But the sheikh had spoken. Jihan resigned herself to the fact that it was the best deal she was going to get. Besides, she was tired, weighed down by all her emotions. Sensing that Jihan was waning, and keen to bring matters to a close, the sheikh turned to Mazen and warned him: "If you were in Saudi Arabia, you would have gotten a hundred lashes for what you did." Mazen sat stony-faced. Jihan was devastated by how things had turned out. She felt that not only had Mazen betrayed her, he had dodged his responsibilities as well. She would be the one left with a stain on her reputation. It dawned on her that she was a divorced woman before she had even really been married. Several years passed. One day, Jihan received an unexpected phone call from her father telling her that the sheikh wanted them to visit that night. She was a justice of the peace and the sheikh often required her signature; she assumed this was the reason why.

Jihan met her father at the sheikh's house that night. She had become so comfortable in the sheikh's presence since her Islamic divorce that she almost immediately asked him if he had a document he wanted her to look at. "I have something better," he said, passing an envelope to her. "Did you win the Lotto and feel sorry for me?" Jihan joked as she played with the bulky package, which she guessed contained some cash. "It's from Mazen  his father gave me the money," the sheikh replied. Jihan had convinced herself a long time ago that she'd never see the money owed to her. Despite agreeing to the lesser sum, Mazen's family had not wanted a deadline to be set for payment and had asked for some time for it to be saved. Jihan had assumed that this was code for non-payment and eventually moved on without relying on it. Now her head was swirling with questions. The sheikh asked her to count the money he had handed to her, $100 note by $100 note, and to do so in front of a witness  an elderly female relative of his who was also well known to Jihan's family. This would help to avoid a dispute down the track between the parties about the exact sum that had been delivered.
An 11-year-old boy was given a snorkel to breathe through after the hole he was digging on an Adelaide beach collapsed on top of him.

Jordan Spraggs had been digging the hole at Horseshoe Bay on Thursday when it collapsed, covering him with more than a metre of sand, the Nine Network reported.

Jordan Spraggs was digging a hole more than a metre deep when it collapsed on him. Credit:Nine News

I was shouting out for help, and no one could barely hear me, he said.

"[The sand] was up to probably about an inch above my head."
A Queensland police officer who killed his baby son will be sentenced next week after pleading guilty to manslaughter.

Senior Constable Colin David Randall had initially been charged with murder after his two-month-old son died from significant injuries in June 2014 and was due to face trial at Brisbane Supreme Court.

Crown prosecutor Phil McCarthy said the sentence handed to child killer Heidi Strbak should be considered as a comparable case to Colin David Randall's.

But on Friday he pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was remanded in custody ahead of his sentencing on Tuesday.

During a brief hearing after Randall's plea, crown prosecutor Phil McCarthy said the sentence handed to child killer Heidi Strbak should be considered a comparable case.
When Snezana Stojanovska was found dead she was lying on a makeshift benchpress made out of an ironing board, propped up by telephone books.

A 30 kilogram barbell was lying across her neck, making her death looked like a freak weightlifting accident.

But State Coroner Sara Hinchey suspects the young woman - who was three months pregnant at the time - was strangled and her death staged.

On Thursday, Judge Hinchey ordered an inquest into Ms Stojanovska's death having heard that an autopsy revealed the young woman had bruising on her neck that didn't fit a weights accident.

"Snezana's death was reported to be a tragic weightlifting accident," counsel assisting the coroner Barbara Myers told the court.
The increase in Western Australias GST dividend will not stop the Put WA First party from running candidates in the next federal election.

The rise from 34 cents to 47 cents was welcomed by party convenor Chas Hopkins but he said it was still not enough.

"We should be getting double that and we are going to keep fighting until we get it," he said.

Put WA First has calculated that, on a per capita basis, the new GST carve-up will mean the state will still be between half and one eighth of what other states get in federal funding per person in 2018-19.

The figures equate to $1,263 per person being delivered in federal funding to

WA, whereas Victoria and NSW receive about double that, at $2,293 and $2,662 respectively per person.
It may be no coincidence the federal Greens announced their policy on cannabis legalisation four days out from cannabis cultures day of days: April 20.

In Fremantle on Friday, crowds gathered in Pioneer Park across from the train station to protest in support of cannabis legalisation  and many were buoyed by the introduction of the conversation to federal politics.

Attendees at the 420 Picnic Perth protest had planned to light up en masse at 4.20pm, but a looming police presence meant they had to suffice with a round of applause in support of legalisation.

Protesters listened to speakers including a former policeman, and gathered in support of cannabis legalisation in Fremantle. But when the clocked ticked over to 4.20pm, only a few lit up - and were quickly spoken to by police. Credit:Cameron Myles

A few went ahead with their plans to smoke in public, but were quickly spoken to by police.
Local Historian Writes Book on Purchase Area

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By West Kentucky Star Staff

Apr. 20, 2018 | PADUCAH, KY

By West Kentucky Star Staff Apr. 20, 2018 | 10:44 AM | PADUCAH, KY

A local author who has written a book about the history of the Jackson Purchase will be in Paducah Saturday for a book signing.



Richard Dwayne Parker, author of The Wild World of the Jackson Purchase, says he has always been interested in the history of the region. His book delves into many different areas of local history, an area often overlooked by many historians.



The book features more than 100 stories about the history of the Purchase area, and also features photographs and illustrations done by Parker himself.



Parker was born in Murray and raised in Paris, TN. He studied history at Murray State University, and became a social studies teacher. He says his local family roots have helped drive his interest in the rich history of the area.



"I kind of realized that noone really knew much about history past Bowling Green. I really got interested in it, and this is how the book came about." Parker said.



Parker will hold a book signing at the Market House Museum Saturday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Copies of his book will be available for purchase.
McCracken to use voluntary 'Test to Stay' Program for unvaccinated students
By West Kentucky Star Staff Apr. 19, 2018 | 12:21 PM | MAYFIELD, KY

A Mayfield man was arrested after a hit and run collision Tuesday night.

The Mayfield Police Department says the two-vehicle collision happened around 8:15 pm in the area of North 15th and Lee streets. A passenger in one of the vehicles, 41-year-old Shawn Johnson of Mayfield, was transported to Jackson Purchase Medical Center for treatment of his injuries.

Police found the second vehicle unoccupied, but the driver, 36-year-old Darron Fox of Mayfield, was located at a nearby home. Fox told police he left the scene of the crash due to fear of physical harm.

While speaking with Fox, officers reportedly detected the odor of alcohol, and tried to place him under arrest for alcohol intoxication in a public place. Fox fled on foot, and ignored officers' commands to stop.

Officers say Fox was tased twice, but refused to comply. Officers took Fox into custody and he was transported to the Graves County Jail.

Fox was charged with alcohol intoxication in a public place, fleeing or evading police, resisting arrest and criminal mischief.
By The Associated Press Apr. 20, 2018 | 05:02 AM | WASHINGTON, DC

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump since the early days of his campaign, is joining the team of lawyers representing the president in the special counsel's Russia investigation.

With the addition of Giuliani, Trump gains a former U.S. attorney, a past presidential candidate and a TV-savvy defender at a time when the White House is looking for ways to bring the president's involvement with special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation to a close.

The president has been weighing whether to sit for questioning by Mueller's team, and his legal team has repeatedly met with investigators to define the scope of the questions he would face. Giuliani will enter those negotiations, filling the void left by attorney John Dowd, who resigned last month.

It's a precarious time for Trump. His legal team has been told by Mueller that the president is not a target of the investigation, suggesting he's not in imminent criminal jeopardy. But he is currently a subject of the probe  a designation that could change at any time.

Trump personal attorney Jay Sekulow told The Associated Press that Giuliani will be focusing on the Mueller investigation  not the legal matters raised by the ongoing investigation into Trump attorney Michael Cohen. That probe is being led by the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, an office that Giuliani headed in the mid- to late 1980s.

Cohen's office, home and hotel room were raided last week by the FBI, who are investigating the lawyer's business dealings, including suspected bank fraud. They also sought records related to payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who both claim to have had sexual encounters with Trump several years ago. The White House has denied the claims.

The raids enraged Trump, prompting him to publicly weigh whether to fire Mueller or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. He also intensified his public attacks on the Mueller investigation, calling it "an attack on our country."

In a statement announcing Giuliani's hire, Trump expressed his wish that the investigation wrap up soon and praised Giuliani, a fellow New Yorker, confidant and Mar-a-Lago regular.

"Rudy is great," Trump said. "He has been my friend for a long time and wants to get this matter quickly resolved for the good of the country."

Giuliani will be joining Sekulow on Trump's personal legal team but will be working closely with White House lawyer Ty Cobb, who has also been handling the administration's cooperation with the Mueller investigation.

"It is an honor to be a part of such an important legal team, and I look forward to not only working with the President but with Jay, Ty and their colleagues," Giuliani said in a statement.

In addition to Giuliani, two other former federal prosecutors  Jane Serene Raskin and Marty Raskin  will be joining Trump's legal team. The two, who are married and run a law firm together, are based in Florida but handle cases across the United States. Both have extensive experience prosecuting organized crime and representing defendants in complex white-collar and fraud investigations.

Giuliani, who was New York mayor during the Sept. 11 attacks, has known Trump for decades and his aggressive, hard-charging rhetorical style can at times mirror that of the president.

He had widely been expected to join Trump's administration. But Giuliani rejected the idea of becoming attorney general, lobbying Trump to name him secretary of state. Trump picked Rex Tillerson and Giuliani was left without a Cabinet post.

The two men share similar policy ideals, publicly supporting law enforcement in ways that have alienated minorities, and taking bullish stances on immigration enforcement.

In 2016, for instance, Giuliani fiercely criticized the Black Lives Matter movement, saying it encouraged violence against police. More recently, he has said he was consulted by Trump on how to implement the travel ban put in place last year against Muslim-majority nations.

Giuliani has been working at the influential law firm Greenberg Traurig, where he has been a senior adviser and head of the firm's cybersecurity, privacy and crisis management practice.

On Thursday, the firm's executive chairman Richard A. Rosenbaum released a statement saying Giuliani would be taking a leave of absence "for an unspecified period of time to handle matters unrelated to the law firm or its clients."

Giuliani's addition to the Trump legal team puts a renewed spotlight on his past legal and consulting work. His flirtation with becoming Trump's secretary of state was thwarted, in part, because of growing concerns about his overseas business ties.

After leaving office as mayor, Giuliani advised foreign political figures and worked for lobbying and security firms whose clients have had complicated relationships with the U.S. government. While not personally involved in lobbying, Giuliani spent years at firms that represented foreign governments and multinational companies, some of which had interests that diverged from those of the United States.

That included a trip Giuliani took to Belgrade to meet with leaders of a Serbian political party once allied with Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic.

His consulting firm also did work in the Persian Gulf monarchy of Qatar and received money for supporting the Mujahedin-e Khalq, the Iranian dissident group, even as it was a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization.

More recently, Giuliani's work for Greenberg Traurig, who is a registered foreign agent for the government of Turkey, has drawn attention for his involvement in a high-profile case with foreign policy implications for the U.S-Turkey relationship.

Last year, Giuliani joined former Bush administration attorney general Michael Mukasey in working to resolve the case of Reza Zarrab, a Turkish-Iranian businessman who was accused of participating in a scheme to help Iran evade U.S. sanctions. The case also focused on allegations of corruption against Turkish officials, including Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Erdogan's government had pressured the U.S. government to drop the case, and in early 2017, Giuliani met with Erdogan to discuss whether the case could be resolved outside of court.

Despite Giuliani's intervention, Zarrab later pleaded guilty and testified for U.S. prosecutors against a former Turkish bank official who was himself later convicted. Zarrab later said the failure of Giuliani's effort led him to cooperate with prosecutors.
2018 DRUG TAKE BACK & SHRED EVENTS

FOR 2018

The Henderson County Sheriff's Office along with TRIAD Henderson County, Hope Rx, and other community partners are continuing to offer FREE Document Shred and Drug Take Back Days in 2018 across Henderson County. These events provide local residents a way to help reduce their chance of becoming a victim of identity thefts as well as a convenient and safe way to dispose of old medications from their homes, reducing the possibility of accidental or intentional misuse or theft.

Entegra Bank Document Shred and Drug Take Back

Date: Friday, April 27 from 10:00am to 1:00pm

Location: Entegra Bank at 1617 Spartanburg Hwy. Hendersonville, NC 28792

Sponsors: Entegra Bank, TRIAD, HopeRx, HCSO

*Document Shred & Drug Take Back

Drive Through Pill Collection Event  National Take Back Day

Date: Saturday, April 28 from 10:00am to 2:00pm

Location: Henderson County Sheriffs Office at 100 N. Grove St. Hendersonville, NC 28792

Sponsors: Hope Rx, Wingate University, HCSO

*Drug Take Back Only

First Citizens Bank Document Shred and Drug Take Back

Date: Friday, May 4 from 11:00am to 2:00pm

Location: First Citizens Bank at 1700 Four Seasons Blvd. Hendersonville, NC 28792

Sponsors: First Citizens Bank, TRIAD, HopeRx, HCSO

*Document Shred & Drug Take Back

Village of Flat Rock Document Shred and Drug Take Back

Date: Saturday, May 5 from 10:00am to 12:00pm

Location: Flat Rock Village Town Hall at 10 Village Center Dr. Flat Rock, NC 28731

Sponsors: Village of Flat Rock, TRIAD, HopeRx, HCSO

*Document Shred & Drug Take Back

City of Hendersonville Document Shred and Drug Take Back

Date: Friday, May 11 from 9:00am to 10:30am

Location: Patton Park at 59 E. Clairmont Dr. Hendersonville, NC 28792

Sponsors: City of Hendersonville, Hendersonville Police Department, HopeRx, HCSO

*Document Shred (only open to City of Hendersonville residents) & Drug Take Back (open to all)

Green River Document Shred and Drug Take Back

Date: Saturday, June 2 from 10:00am to 12:00pm

Location: Roscoe Greens Store at 94 Green River Rd. Zirconia, NC 28790

Sponsors: Green River Community Association, TRIAD, HopeRx, HCSO

*Document Shred & Drug Take Back

Mills River (LGFCU) Document Shred and Drug Take Back

Date: Friday, August 17 from 10:00am to 1:00pm

Location: TBD

Sponsors: Local Government Federal Credit Union, TRIAD, HopeRx, HCSO

*Document Shred & Drug Take Back

Etowah (United Community Bank) Document Shred and Drug Take Back

Date: Friday, September 14 from 10:00am to 1:00pm

Location: United Community Bank at 77 Etowah Center Dr. Etowah, NC 28729

Sponsors: Etowah Community Bank, TRIAD, HopeRx, HCSO

*Document Shred & Drug Take Back

Village of Flat Rock Document Shred and Drug Take Back

Date: Saturday, October 13 from 10:00am to 12:00pm

Location: Flat Rock Village Town Hall at 10 Village Center Dr. Flat Rock, NC 28731

Sponsors: Village of Flat Rock, TRIAD, HopeRx, HCSO

*Document Shred & Drug Take Back

Drug Disposal Information:

The Henderson County Sheriffs Office provides citizens with a free, environmentally safe, and convenient way to dispose of medications from their homes, reducing the possibility of accidental or intentional misuse and/or theft.

We accept prescription pills, capsules, ointments, vitamins, liquids in their original containers, inhalers & patches.

We cannot accept chemotherapy medications & sharps/needles/Epi-pens.

The Sheriffs Office provides a permanent drug collection drop box in their lobby located at 100 North Grove Street in Hendersonville. It is accessible every Monday-Friday from 8am-5pm. Check in at the front desk for instructions.

Over 6,000 pounds of medication have been collected and destroyed since Sheriff Charles McDonald implemented the drug disposal program in 2013.

Document Shred Information:

Most of the 2018 events will include a shred truck will be on site to provide free document shredding (past tax records, bank records, medical documents, etc.) for residential shred only to residents of Henderson County. This feature is made possible through TRIAD Henderson County and community sponsors. The days mission is to help the community better protect themselves from scams, frauds, identity theft, abuse and theft.

Shred Information / What to Shred:

Expired credit and debit cards

Unused credit card checks

Credit card statements

Pre-approved credit card offers and applications

Checking and savings account statements

Canceled checks

Investment account statements

Wage and earnings statements

Phone and utility bills

Tax returns and statements

Medical bills

Insurance claim information

Insurance policy information (auto, health, life)

Expired identification documents (drivers licenses and passports)
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Williamson, WV (25661)

Today

Cloudy skies this morning followed by thunderstorms during the afternoon. High 72F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 90%..

Tonight

Thunderstorms this evening will give way to steady rain overnight. Low 66F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 70%.
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David Fantle, co-author of Hollywood Heyday: 75 Interviews with Golden Age Legends, will sign and read from the new book at 7 p.m. on June 7 at the Milwaukee Jewish Community Center,6255 N Santa Monica Blvd. in Whitefish Bay.

Fantle, an adjunct professor in film and pop culture at Marquette University, co-wrote the book with his longtime collaborator Tom Johnson. The latter was a senior editor at Netflix and has written movie reviews and features for E! Online, and People magazine, among other publications.

The reading is a partnership with Boswell Books, 2559 N Downer Ave. in Milwaukee.

Hollywood Heyday is scheduled for release in May.

The new book is a memoir of a 40-year journey full of received wisdom, unique insights and rare anecdotes as well as candid photos of iconic artists who defined popular culture in America, according to a press release announcing the reading.

All of the profiles in the book are from in-person meetings that took place in Los Angeles, New York City and London.

For more about the book, go to www.hollywoodheydaybook.net.Its available for pre-orders at www.amazon.com or www.mcfarlandbooks.com.
Vel Phillips was the first black woman to graduate from a Wisconsin law school. She was the first woman and the first African-American to be elected secretary of state and later was elected as a judge.
Mothers in motion: mums navigate cities with their kids needs in mind

Women frequently remain the primary caregivers and only a third of children in South Africa live with their biological fathers, research shows.

Portia* lives in Diepsloot, a poor settlement composed largely of informal dwellings in Johannesburg, South Africa and works in upmarket Sandton as a domestic worker. She lives with her two daughters; one is 27 and the other, Dineo, has just turned 18. Portias eldest daughter has a seven-year-old son who also lives with them.

Dineo is at school in Hyde Park, close to her mothers workplace. They travel separately in a minibus taxi for 90 minutes to reach school and work each day, and another 90 minutes to get home.

On weekends Portia and her family attend church in Rosebank  thats another 90-minute taxi ride from home  and relax at Zoo Lake, close to their church. Portia strives to spend as little time as possible in Diepsloot. She will travel extensively and expensively to do so, generating a large spatial footprint in the city.

This is contrary to what researchers would expect. Rational economic theory proposes that people make decisions primarily based on cost and time. In Portias case this would mean spending less money on transport and more time in Diepsloot. But Portias focus is on getting away from Diepsloot, because she believes being in the area isnt what is best for herself and her family.

Portia was among 25 mothers who participated in a joint research project between the South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning at Wits University and the Gauteng City-Region Observatory.

The research, conceived by urban planner, researcher and new mother Yasmeen Dinath, aimed to explore mothers everyday activities in Johannesburg. Women frequently remain the primary caregivers and only a third of children in South Africa live with their biological fathers. This means that mothers still disproportionately shoulder the responsibility of children. The first phase of the research was published as a research paper, Motherhood in Johannesburg: Mapping the experiences and moral geographies of women and their children in the city, by myself and my colleague Margot Rubin.

Spaces for women

Globally more and more mothers are working. They tend to use cities extensively through their own and their childrens activities: taking their children to school, going to work, shopping for food, clothing and toiletries, taking their children to the doctor or to play and relax.

Unfortunately, urban environments have historically neglected the needs of women and children. In the 1990s the Austrian capital, Vienna, began addressing this specifically through gender mainstreaming or the fair-shared city: an urban planning policy directed at creating better public spaces for women.

South Africas colonial and apartheid history adds an extra layer of complexity. It created an unequal society and cities that were racially segregated. Even today, socioeconomic inequality is exacerbated by spatial differences. This means poor women tend to live far from jobs, schools, and transport.

This affects housing conditions, employment opportunities, availability and cost of transport, and access to quality childcare and education. It is critical to understand how mothers from all backgrounds navigate these obstacles within the city as part of their daily lives.

We selected mothers through the researchers connections and snowball sampling, asking participants to refer us to other mothers. The small sample was diverse: the youngest mother was 19 and the oldest was 54; some mothers were unemployed, some worked full-time, some worked shifts and others stayed at home. Some had children who were infants, some had older children, some were grandmothers and some mothers did not live with their children. They came from a variety of locations in Johannesburg, living in different housing types and with varied economic means.

Then we interviewed these women about their daily lives and the decisions they make for themselves and their children. The interview explored a mothers domestic situation; her work situation; shopping and providing basic needs for her children; schooling; medical care; resources to assist with childcare and her other responsibilities and roles.

Footprints on the city

We transferred this information to maps of Johannesburg to understand the extent of each mothers footprint in the city. Some had very small footprints that created contained worlds for them and their families. One said:

My decisions are based mostly on proximity. I am trying as much as possible to create a world that is quite close.

A map from the project. GCRO

Others, like Portia, had bigger footprints that incorporated large parts of the city. These spatial patterns were informed by accessing employment and education for their children. In some cases, these decisions were influenced by access to transport, disposable income or additional support from family members. But this is not the full picture.

Even though each mothers circumstances may vary significantly, their decisions were based on what they felt was best for their children and what they felt good mothers do.

These are not universal ideas. They are informed by cultural backgrounds, ideologies and mothers identities. Some mothers felt the good thing to do was to create small, tight-knit worlds for their children in their own neighbourhoods. Others, like Portia, believed it was best to venture further afield to find new spaces for their children.

Many of the mothers had shared frustrations in Johannesburg. Mothers struggled to find public places where they could comfortably breastfeed or change nappies. Some mothers felt their children were in danger in their own neighbourhoods, at risk of being run-over or kidnapped. Travelling on public transport, particularly minibus taxis, is difficult with infants or toddlers. Mothers grappled with the time constraints of employment and providing for their children and the task of caring for and raising their children. Many everyday activities are difficult to navigate for mothers.

Understanding mothers decisions

Some of these difficulties can be addressed with practical measures. For example, mothers felt unsafe using parks during the week in diverse parts of the city and so aspects of security could be tackled in these spaces. As in Vienna, public spaces need to be designed for the more vulnerable in society, including women and children.

However, we also need to understand the value judgements that influence mothers and families decision-making. What is best for mothers and children is not universal and varies according to a mothers background, identity and her own values. These differences drive the varied footprints in the city seen in this research. Understanding these different moral perspectives could enable mothers to more easily incorporate daily activities that feel good to them and ease their emotional burdens.

*Not her real name

Alexandra Parker, Researcher of urban & cultural studies, Gauteng City-Region Observatory. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
One of China's top tech companies has lashed out at the US government's move to prevent it from buying technology from American companies.

ZTE, which sells smartphones and other telecommunications equipment around the world, said Friday that the ban imposed this week by the US Commerce Department was "extremely unfair" and that the company "cannot accept it."

It warned in a statement that the move "not only endangers ZTE, but also hurts ZTE's cooperative partners, including many American companies."

The seven-year ban affecting ZTE, which will take a toll on the company's US suppliers such as Qualcomm, comes at a time of severe tensions between China and the United States over trade and technology.

Related: US hits major Chinese tech firm with export ban

The Commerce Department said Monday that ZTE had lied to US officials about steps it had taken to punish employees who violated US sanctions against North Korea and Iran. The Chinese company last year agreed to pay a $1.2 billion fine after a US investigation found it had illegally shipped telecommunications equipment to the blacklisted countries.

Instead of punishing those involved, "ZTE paid full bonuses to employees that had engaged in illegal conduct, and failed to issue letters of reprimand," the Commerce Department said.

ZTE said Friday that the Commerce Department was ignoring the "arduous efforts" it has made to follow export rules, the steps it has taken to deal with people "who neglected their duty," and its hiring of an American law firm to carry out an independent investigation.

"ZTE will not give up on solving the issue through dialogue and communication, and is also determined to safeguard our legitimate rights through law," the company said.

Related: China is holding up a $44 billion US tech deal

ZTE shares, which trade in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, have been suspended since the Commerce Department announced the ban.

The company delayed its first-quarter earnings, which it originally planned to release on Thursday, while it assesses the impact of the US ban.

The Chinese government has repeatedly attacked the US government's decision, calling it reckless.

China and the United States are already locked in a bitter confrontation over their trading relationship and, in particular, China's acquisition of US technology. The two sides have threatened each other with steep new tariffs on exports worth tens of billions of dollars.

-- Nanlin Fang contributed to this report.
NEW YORK (AP) - A former U.S. Army sniper and two other ex-soldiers have been convicted in New York for the contract killing of a woman in the Philippines.

A federal jury on Wednesday found Joseph Hunter, of Owensboro, Kentucky, and Adam Samia and Carl David Stillwell, both of Roxboro, North Carolina, guilty of committing murder-for-hire and other charges.

Prosecutors say Hunter recruited the two for the cold-blooded hit on the Filipino real estate agent in 2012. He paid them each $35,000.

The 12-day trial offered a window into the clandestine world of private mercenaries willing to kill for money.

Defense attorneys had said the case was too weak to convict them. All three face up to life in prison.

Hunter already is serving 20 years over a plot to kill a federal agent

(Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)
UTICA  Family, friends and co-workers are celebrating the retirement of one of Uticas longest-serving firefighters.

Assistant Fire Chief George Clark is stepping down after 33 years in the Utica Fire Department.

It was a trip down memory lane for Clark at the departments Central Fire Station on Bleecker Street Thursday. The department put together a montage of photos commemorating Clark's time in the department, along with dozens of other members who served alongside him.

Clark served in several different positions within the department, including chief and union president. His wife and son were with him Thursday to celebrate his fire career.

Enjoy the ride, its over quickly, Clark said. Learn from everything. Everything you do that's a learning experience, learn from that, remember it, because you can apply it later down the road."
Staff Sergeant Desiree Sotelo served as a Combat Medic in the Army for six years. During an overseas tour she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. In March her doctors removed her appendix, part of her bowel, and her uterus, leading to the loss of fertility. If that wasnt bad enough, she was also given the news that she had developed another type of cancer.

"Statistically they say that if you look at ovarian cancer its older generations. Its grandmas cancer, but tell that to 25-year-old me. You know anything is possible and cancer does not discriminate."

Desirees career in the military was cut short as she lost the physical ability to do her job. The cancer not only changed her career plans, it changed the way she now views life.

"Things can change just like that. You have no idea what is to come, so as far as relationships, stuff like that I try to be as close to everyone I can be that I love and build memoriesgood ones, because you never know what could happen in the future."

Her future is now filled with medical bills, so her family is hosting a benefit. Now that Desirees unable to work, theyre hoping the community comes together to help with her financial needs. Her sister even shaved her own head to help with emotional support.

"Things like that like mean the world to somebody. My Aunt also did. I have another Aunt in Florida who shaved her head as well. It just shows that people love you and care and Im very lucky."

The benefit for Desiree Sotelo will be at the Rome American Legion on Sunday, April 29th from 2 to 6pm.
The Greater Utica Chamber of Commerce is speaking out to demand ethics reform in New York State.

The Chambers Board of Directors recently passed a resolution calling for an independent ethics watchdog agency to investigate corruption including but not limited to elected officials conduct as well as oversight of state contracts.

The resolution points to the state lawmakers who have left office due to allegations of corruption or misconduct, such as former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. Silver arrested on federal corruption charges in 2015 and he was initially convicted, but his conviction was then overturned.

The resolution that was passed advocates for establishing and maintaining the ethical standards necessary for good and trustworthy systems of government in New York. The Chamber says they, along with other good government groups, have been advocating for ethics reform without any meaningful results since 2004.
US brings accident-tolerant fuel target nearer

20 April 2018

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The US Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) reported yesterday that coordination among the various entities involved in the development of accident-tolerant fuels (ATF) has "progressed to the point that all stakeholders now agree on the feasibility of a 2023 timeline". Citing speakers at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC's) 12 April briefing on ATF, the NEI said US research, development and licensing frameworks "need to undergo a paradigm shift" to accelerate the way innovative nuclear technologies such as ATF are brought to market.

Accident-tolerant fuels have the potential to endure the loss of cooling in a reactor core for longer than current fuel designs and widen the existing safety margin for nuclear plants, NEI noted. They can also improve the performance of existing nuclear plants with longer-lasting fuel, and pave the way for licensing fuels for advanced reactors. The industry is currently working on different fuel designs from four primary vendors, it said. These are Framatome, Global Nuclear Fuel (GNF), Westinghouse and Lightbridge.

NEI said the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) had concluded that these fuels potentially offer benefits both under normal operations and in various accident scenarios.

"Not only do they promise increased resistance to damage under accident conditions but there also is the potential to allow for more flexibility and efficiency during normal operations, which could bring economic benefits to operators," NEI said.

Southern Nuclear's Executive Vice President and Chief Nuclear Officer Danny Bost said quantifying the safety benefits could result in simplified regulatory requirements and compliance cost reductions for the industry.

The first lead test assemblies for two different ATF designs from GNF have been loaded into Southern Nuclear's Hatch nuclear power plant, a 876 MWe boiling water reactor in Georgia.

Bost also said that, as the operating licences of half or more of the USA's current light water reactor fleet will have expired by the mid-2030s, operators seeking second licence renewals for those reactors should be able to take advantage of the operational economic benefits of ATF if they are available by the mid-2020s. The NRC's role in helping bring ATF to market as soon as possible requires "transformational" changes at the agency in how these innovations are qualified and licensed, he added.

NEI said that, historically, data from experimental testing programmes help inform and establish the development of computer-based modelling and simulation codes that then cause additional rounds of experimental testing and confirmation.

"Now, thanks to the US Department of Energy's superior predictive modelling and simulation technologies, the data assessment and model development can proceed in parallel along with confirmatory benchmark testing," it said. NEI suggested this approach in its February comment letter on the NRC's draft project plan for licensing ATF.

Michelle Bales, senior reactor systems engineer in the NRC's Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research, told the 12 April meeting, "There is alignment with the idea to do parallel activities versus activities in series and to have a lot of interaction."

NEI Chief Nuclear Officer Bill Pitesa said the $85 million that was recently appropriated by Congress for the ATF programme in the fiscal 2018 omnibus budget, and signed into law by the president, "reflects a resounding bipartisan show of support for the work being done on the ATF programme".

Mirela Gavrilas, director of safety systems in the NRC's Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, added that the industry goal to have ATF fuel batches loaded by 2023 was feasible.

Researched and written

by World Nuclear News

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Time was - only a decade or two ago - that a hotel was just a place for the weary traveler to lay his/her head for the night. And many hotels looked pretty much the same. But no longer. Aesthetics, now, are a key part of any hotel's approach to attracting and keeping customers. As a result, these days, some hotels are becoming virtual art museums. In fact, some have art collections that are actually better than those found in some art museums. In these five hotels, your experience will be enhanced immeasurably by the works of art - and wonder - all around you. Here are my Top 5 "Artsy" hotels in America...The eight properties - with two more coming soon - in the 21c hotel group refer to themselves as "museum hotels." And their tag line reads "Sleep at a contemporary art museum." Indeed, a walk through the Louisville hotel is exactly like a walk through a world-class art museum; your head will be turning constantly in the direction of stunning, colorful pieces that somehow fit beautifully into a hotel motif. In addition to permanent collections at this hotel, there are also curated rotating exhibitions, with experts - and, sometimes, the artists themselves - on hand to discuss these works. INI the case of the 21c, the phrase "museum hotel" are not exaggerated!This may be the most aptly-named hotel in America. There's literally art everywhere you look. Yes, there are very colorful, unusual paintings (many by well-known artists) and structures all over. And yes, there's a seven-foot-high metal/wire horse in the lobby. And, yes, there are beautiful rich-looking art books in every room. But, at this hotel, even the furniture and the accents are artistic. Every detail, from floor to ceiling, looks like it was put together by some very artistic, very creative design minds. Every elevator. Every sconce or unusual lighting arrangement. Every silk-flower bouquet. Every fixture, whether on the floor or the ceiling. The lines, colors, angles, and materials throughout this hotel are a joy to behold...and, because there are so many unusual or interesting ones, you'll be beholding new ones pretty much every time you leave your room (or go into it!). In addition the hotel sometimes has special exhibits. And if you've got a bunch of people with you, they can even arrange for special treats...such as local street/graffiti artists coming over and giving you lessons on the outdoor terrace.In this beautiful, funky, imaginative new hotel, you get two types of art for the price of one. You get the art works inside the hotel...and the snow-capped mountains out the windows, looking almost like paintings. Not only that, but at this hotel, you get the artworks before you even go inside! Local artist Ken McCall, with help from fellow artists Mark Baltes and Leslie Dixon, created 18'-tall copper-and-gold trees in front of the hotel. And the leaves on these trees - just like real ones - actually turn and glitter as the sun moves across Big Sky Country. The art doesn't stop at the front door, though. The public spaces and guest rooms at the Inn at 500 Capitol are also filled with one-of-a-kind pieces of art. Some of it is traditional Western. Some of it is modern. Some of it is futuristic. And some of it, as your eye follows the flow, pulls you in. But whatever the style, all of the art here is eye-catching.The Broadmoor has been one of America's grandest resorts since it first opened its doors a hundred years ago this July. It has one of the most magnificent backdrops in America, if not the world - 14,110-foot Pike's Peak. And its magnificent dark-wood and brass-lined hallways are filled with many of the finest paintings of the Early American and Western masters, ranging from the early-1800's to the 1930's, as they documented on canvas the move westward across the frontier, and the majestic scenery along the way. Owner Philip Anschutz has what many consider the finest private collection of Western art in the world. And much of it is right here, in this stately, luxurious resort, including names such as Thomas Moran, Maxfield Parrish, Alfred Jacob Miller, Charles Deas, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Remington, and Charles Russell.And now, my choice for the "Artsiest" Hotel In America"...The people in the 19 ancient pueblo settlements in New Mexico have created some wonderful artforms through the ages. And with that work, some wonderful artistic legacies for their people and their pueblo, along with stories passed down from generation to generation. But they most likely never pictured anything like the art on the walls of this stunning hotel. Yes, there's plenty of traditional art here - pottery, baskets, ceremonial garments, jewelry, etc. And some of the scenes painted on guest room walls are eternal and ethereal. But much of this art - all of which was created by Native Americans - is modern Native American, with angles and slants and distortions and images and abstracts that the elders probably never imagined. Much of it has been created by a new, young wave of Native American artists, who are not bound by the traditional methods of Native art-creation or story-telling. Every room here is like a living art museum. And all of this art, whether traditional or mold-breaking, is splashed with the most vibrant colors and textures you've ever seen.As the number of "artsy" hotels in America continues to grow, we'd love to hear about some interesting ones you've found! Who knows...you might see them here one day!
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Success for colleges Welsh-language courses

This article is old - Published: Friday, Apr 20th, 2018

The Camu Centre at Coleg Cambrias Yale site was bustling recently with learners wanting to improve their Welsh language skills .

Coleg Cambria, in partnership with Popeth Cymraeg, delivers Welsh-language courses in Wrexham, Flintshire and Denbighshire on behalf of the National Centre for Learning Welsh.

The recent four day Easter course attracted many learners on different levels from Entry to Higher. It also gave the participants an opportunity to meet other students and find out about informal activities available locally to practice using the language.

Angela Taylor from Mold who attended the course on the higher level said: Learning Welsh is a challenge that keeps me young.

I use my Welsh with friends and when I go shopping, during the class, and I send emails through the medium of Welsh, I also enjoy reading in Welsh.

My advice for other learners or those thinking about learning Welsh is that its fun, good for the brain and a great opportunity to meet new people, I really enjoy it.

Intermediate learner, Natalie Williams from Wrexham who works at a local high school added: My tip for somebody learning or wanting to learn Welsh is practice, practice, practice. I practice my Welsh at the school I work.

The college offers a wide range of course at numerous locations for complete beginners to those who want to improve their Welsh whether its weekly, on a day course or residential course.

Details about learn Welsh courses can be found at learnwelsh.cymru, by following the Facebook page Dysgu Cymraeg Gogledd Ddwyrain or by calling 01978 267596.
An interim report by building research body BRE Global is a devastating indictment of the callous indifference to the safety of residents that led to the deaths of at least 72 people in last Junes Grenfell Tower inferno.

The 210-page report, leaked to the Evening Standard, is dated January 31 and was commissioned as part of the Metropolitan Police investigation into the fire. BRE Global is the certification arm of the Building Research Establishment (BRE). It was established out of the 1997 privatisation of the national building laboratory.

More than 10 months after the fire, not a single person has been charged or even arrested for the deaths or the devastation caused to the many survivors and bereaved. The police claim that no such prosecutions can take place until their now-10-month-old criminal investigation finisheswhich could take years.

These claims should be rejected with contempt. Alongside the public inquiry headed by Sir Martin Moore Bick, the police investigation is part of a concerted cover-up in order that the real criminals responsible for social murder evade justice. Moore-Bicks inquiry, which has no powers to prosecute anyone, has still not called a single witness or heard a word of evidence. Its initial report is not set to be published until the end of the year.

The fact is that just the information contained in the BRE Report alone is ample evidence to allow for immediate arrests and charging to proceed. It shows that the deaths were entirely due to a criminal neglect for the safety of the Grenfell residents by the local council, its management organisation and the various corporate entities involved.

The report describes how the 2014-2016 refurbishment of Grenfell Tower transformed it from a relatively safe building into a death trap.

The Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO) carried out the 10 million refurbishment. KCTMO is the arms-length organisation set up by the Conservative-run Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea council to run its social housing stock.

Kensington and Chelsea, in west London, has some of the most expensive residential properties in the world. The councils main purpose in carrying out the refurbishment was to apply a cladding to the building and to cover its concrete facade, to make the view more acceptable to any of its rich residents casting an eye in that direction.

The June 14 fire started in Flat 16 on the fourth floor with the malfunction of a fridge-freezer. Flames from the flat spread through an open window anddue to the highly flammable cladding put on the buildingquickly destroyed the entire 24-storey, 70-metre-high building.

The Evening Standard comments, The first conclusion of the report is that the fire would not have spread beyond Flat 16and would not have claimed even a single life if the original facade of the building had not been re-clad  (emphasis added).

The BRE emphasises the relative structural integrity of the original building erected in the early 1970s. It notes, Grenfell Tower as originally built, appears to have been designed on the premise of providing very high levels of passive fire protection.

The original facade of Grenfell Tower, comprising exposed concrete and, given its age, likely timber or metal frame windows, would not have provided a medium for fire spread up the external surface. In BREs opinionthere would have been little opportunity for a fire in a flat of Grenfell Tower to spread to any neighbouring flats.

The BRE explains that such was the ferocity of the blaze that it could have led to a partial or full collapse of the building. That it did not was due to the inherent fire resistance, not the less stringent modern standards, notes the Standard, engineered into the original building.

Grenfell Tower was deprived of even the most basic safety systems, with the BRE noting the lack of a sprinkler system and that the single staircase was narrower than regulations allow.

The BREs analysis of the aluminium frame holding the cladding in place showed it had a plastic, flammable core, which was instrumental in the spread of the fire.

The BRE found five areas where existing building regulations were significantly breached. When cladding insulation is applied to a concrete building, there is a gap between the cladding and the concrete so there is no build of condensation. This chimney effect, while helping overcome condensation build up, can help in spreading flames in the event of a fire.

To prevent this cavity, barriers are installed. These are designed to expand in the event of a fire and close off the gap. But in the case of Grenfell, the barriers installed were designed to close off a 25-mm gap when the gap was 50 mm. This meant they failed and the fire took hold. In addition, some of the barriers were incorrectly installed, being upside down or back to front.

Another major contributor to the deaths were the window frames installed as part of the refurb. These were also not wide enough to fill the space between the columns, leaving a gap of several centimetres at each side. The gap was plugged with various filling materials, none of which provided the necessary 30-minute resistance in the event of fire. BRE found that the insulation foam used was combustible, thus aiding the rapid spread of the fire up and across the building.

This meant when the fire took hold, smoke was quickly able to penetrate the gap entering flats, producing a direct route for fire spread around the window frame into the cavity of the facadeand from the facade back into flats.

In the case of Flat 16, the window refurb only provided fuel instead of a barrier, as The construction of the window did not provide any substantial barrier to fire taking hold on the facade outside.

The BRE addressed the automatic door-closing mechanisms on the front door of each flat. Closers fitted to these doors should have automatically closed the door as residents fled the fire. BRE found almost half the door-closing mechanisms were either missing or faulty, breaching building regulations.

As a result, when residents fled their flats on the night of the fire, a significant number of doors were inadvertently left open. Where this occurred, the fire in each flat appears to have emitted large quantities of smoke and later fire directly into the immediate lobby, and these have gone on to affect the lifts and single stairwell. The Standard comments that this would have affected residents life chances as they sought to escape down the single stairwell.

The BRE looked at issues relating to the firefighters response. Landscaping and the lack of space around the base of the tower blockabout which the Grenfell Action Group had warned the TMO of what the catastrophic consequences would bemeant that only one fire engine could park adjacent to the tower. In addition, the riser allowing access to get water to the top floors was a dry riser making it difficult for one fire engine alone to pump water to the height needed to reach the upper floors. The BRE report notes the tower should have been fitted with a wet riserwith water present along the length of it making it easier to pump water to the top floors.

The Evening Standard showed the leaked report to a specialist architect who said, The question is could this fire have been avoided? This damning report is saying it absolutely could have been and the refurb was to blame.

He added, These findings could result in people going to prison. But the report has left open the vital questions as to whether the design of the installation was at fault, whether the works were approved and/or inspected, or whether it was a combination of all of these. The buck stops with the owner of the building Kensington and Chelsea council, and its management organisation, which should have ultimate duty of care. Some people will not be sleeping well at night once this report is made public. You read it and think: heads are going to roll.

A spokesman for Grenfell United, which speaks for survivors of the fire, told the Standard: It was clear to us the refurbishment was shoddy and second rate. We raised concerns time and again. We were not just ignored but bullied to keep quiet. That a refurbishment could make our homes dangerous and unsafe shows that the contractors put profit before lives. Its an industry that is broken.

Its also an industry that has been allowed to get away with this behaviour. Six people died in a fire at Lakanal House in 2009 and the Government failed to act and make changes to regulations that would have stopped a fire like that happening again. Tonight we know people are going to sleep in homes with dangerous cladding on them.

The Grenfell Fire Forum, initiated by the Socialist Equality Party (UK), will be holding the next of its regular meetings on Saturday, April 21, at the Maxilla Social Club in North Kensington, London. All are welcome to attend. Details below:

Grenfell Fire Forum meeting Saturday April 21, 4 p.m.

Maxilla Social Club, 2 Maxilla Walk

London, W10 6SW

(nearest tube: Latimer Road)

For further details visit facebook.com/Grenfellforum
Europe

Further two-day strike by French rail workers

Tens of thousands of French rail workers held a further two-day strike Wednesday and Thursday this week. This is part of strikes to be held two days out of every five until June. The stoppages again led to widespread disruption of rail services.

The employees of the state-owned SNCF rail network are resisting French president Emmanuel Macrons attacks on their jobs and conditions and privatization. The lower house of the French parliament voted by an overwhelming majority to back Macrons plans on Tuesday.

The CGT trade union are restricting strike action until the legislation goes to the Senate. On Thursday, public sector members of the CGT were to strike nationally to protest public sector reforms. Students have also protested against austerity and proposals for a military draft.

Strikes by Air France employees

Thousands of Air France cabin crew, pilots and ground crew held a further 48-hour strike Tuesday in pursuit of their claim for a 6 percent pay increase. Air France was forced to cancel around a third of planned flights.

Strike threat by Scottish local government workers and teachers

Local government workers in Scotland have rejected a 3 percent pay rise offered by the Scottish National Party government. The GMB union said it could lead to a strike of refuse collectors across Scotland during the summer.

Teachers represented by the Educational Institute of Scotland are calling for a 10 percent claim.

Strikes at two London schools against academization and pay

Teachers began a three-day strike at Avenue primary school in the east London borough of Newham on Tuesday. The strike by the National Education Union (NEU) members is part of a series in opposition to management plans to turn the school into a state funded but privately run academy, the equivalent of a charter school in the US. Parents joined picket lines in support of the teachers action.

NEU members at Connaught School for Girls in Waltham Forest in northeast London also began a three-day walkout Tuesday, demanding to be paid the inner London pay rate. They have taken six days of strike action over the issue.

London Docklands rail strike

Several hundred staff working for the Docklands Light Railway in London are to begin a four-day strike today. The members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union are in a long-running dispute over outsourcing and claims of management bullying.

Workers strike vote against new care model in Greater Manchester

Over 200 council and National Health Service (NHS) workers have voted to strike on April 27. The members of Unison work for Stockport Together Vanguard. Vanguards are a new model of delivering care comprising health staff employed by the NHS and care staff employed by the local authority. To date 50 Vanguard bodies have been set up throughout the country.

The workers are concerned that unqualified staff would carry out tasks such as administering controlled drugs. The government conciliation service Acas is due to chair meetings with Unison and employers on Monday to avert the strike.

Danish public sector strike threat

Danish public sector workers plan to strike on April 22 in what would be one of the countrys biggest industrial disputes. The employers are seeking to abolish customary paid holidays, paid lunch breaks, and rights for seniors. Talks have been taking place between unions and management under the auspices of the Danish conciliation service FI. The FI has already pushed back the strike start date by two weeks.

Employers lead negotiator Michael Ziegler said, I still view the risk of large-scale conflict as being very highwe have not moved a huge amount overall, even though there has been some positive development.

German public sector union pay sell-out

The Verdi union representing around 2.3 million German public sector staff accepted a deal giving workers a 3.19 percent pay rise this year, 3.09 percent next year and 1.06 percent in 2020.

Last week, around 150,000 Verdi members came out on strike to demand a 6 percent rise this year. The rise will be partly financed by workers contributing an additional 7.5 billion in community charges (taxes).

Dutch primary school teachers strike

Thousands of primary school teachers in the Dutch provinces of Limburg and Noord-Brabant struck on April 13. Teachers are campaigning for a pay increase and for more staff to be recruited. The numbers entering the profession has halved over the last 10 years.

National strikes took place in October and December last year followed by provincial strikes in central Holland last month and in northern provinces in February. More strikes are planned by teachers in eastern provinces of the country on May 30.

Protest by Romanian health workers

Around 200 health workers including nurses and doctors protested outside the regional emergency hospital in the city of Craiova on Monday. Tax changes increasing the tax burden on employees away from employers have led to wage cuts. Late last year autoworkers at the Ford plant in Craiova rebelled against management and the union and walked out.

Middle East

Strike by Lebanese university professors

A strike by professors at the Lebanese university has entered its second week. They are demanding an increase in salaries in line with that given to judges in March and a limit to working time.

Africa

15,000 Zimbabwe striking nurses sacked

Zimbabwes vice president, Constantine Chiwenga, sacked 15,000 striking nurses on Wednesday, as their walkout was gaining momentum.

Nurses took national action Monday because they are paid less than unskilled workers, and the government failed to honour a Collective Bargaining Agreement and pay promised allowance increases. The members of the Zimbabwe Nurses Association struck a month ago but returned to work on government assurances they would deal with their grievances.

The government has ordered the sacked nurses to reapply for their jobs.

Kenyan university strikers defy Labour Court

Striking Kenyan university staff at 31 universities continued to defy last weeks orders by the Labour Court to return to work. University Vice Chancellors have refused to negotiate on workers demands for a N38 billion (US$105.64 million) package. They insist on a Salary and Remunerations Commission job evaluation before new negotiations can begin.

The court also gave the Inter Public Universities Council Consultative Forum (IPUCCF) 20 days to negotiate the 2017-21 Collective Bargaining Agreement. On April 14, IPUCCF made an offer to the University Academic Staff Union and the Kenya University Staff Union hierarchy for a five year period off work for union business, while increasing the retirement age to 72 years for academic staff, up from 70.

Nigerian health service workers strike to demand implementation of promised deal

Nigerian health service workers began a national strike Monday for promised salary increases, back pay on promotions and improved working conditions. The action affected all hospitals and health centres.

The health service workers unions, under the umbrella JOHESU, are not recognised by the government. The doctors and dentists union, NMA, which is recognised, refused to join the action and urged the government to not concede.

South African bus workers national strike over pay

A South African national bus strike began on Wednesday, involving 17,000 workers at 15 bus companies and affecting over 80 percent of the countys travelling passengers.

Wage negotiations between five transport unions and the employers organisation, the South African Road Passengers Bargaining Council, have been ongoing since January under the oversight of the Labour Ministrys arbitration services.

The unions have reduced their annual wage claim from 12 to 10 percent. They are calling for an increase in the minimum wage and a change in stand-by driver travel payments. The employers are offering an annual wage increase of around 7.25 percent for three years.

Golden Arrow, which transports around 220,000 passengers on weekdays, has threatened to lock out strikers.

South African medical depot workers strike over pay and conditions

A month-long strike is continuing at South Africas North West Province central medicine depot over pay increases, casualisation and to demand the removal of the areas health head.

The strike is affecting the distribution of drugs, leaving hospitals and clinics in the area in short supply, with some clinics shutting down. Negotiations between the National Education Health and Allied Workers Union and the provincial authorities have broken down.

An attempt is being made to bypass the action by the military who are delivering drugs from other areas of South Africa.

Ugandan nurses threaten pay strike

Ugandan nurses and midwives are threatening to strike after the countrys president, Yoweri Museveni, reneged on a pledged wage increase made last November. The president promised the members of the Nurses and Midwives Union an increase in pay from Shone 400,000 (US$108) to Shone million (US$270) a month.

Ethiopian air traffic controllers strike in Addis Ababa over pay and workloads

Air traffic controllers went on strike Tuesday at Ethiopias Bole International Airport in Addis Ababa over workloads and unpaid overtime. The airline abolished holiday and overtime payments in response to the minister of finance diktat to reduce expenses.

A spokesman for the Air Traffic Controllers Union said the Ethiopian Aviation Authority could be endangering the airline by taking professionals off their work to cover other jobs. Ethiopia is the most favoured investment location in Africa, with low wages and high poverty levels. The government is promising businesses an austerity package to cut costs and increase profits.
The inspector general (IG) of the Justice Department has filed a criminal referral against former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe with the US Attorney for the District of Columbia. The action could lead to the criminal prosecution of McCabe for misleading other officials and the IG office itself in its investigation into how the FBI handled the Clinton email controversy.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired McCabe last month after the release of an IG report that made similar charges against the deputy director. In addition to losing his position only one day before his pension was to be fully vested, McCabe now faces the possibility of criminal charges.

The US attorney for the District of Columbia, Jessie K. Liu, is a Trump appointee who was confirmed by the Senate last September. Lius boss, the president, has repeatedly tweeted that McCabe is a liar who should be prosecuted and jailed, meaning the prosecutor will be under direct pressure from above to move ahead with criminal charges.

The criminal referral is an indication of the extreme tensions building up within the American state. While the anti-Russia investigation against Trump, instigated by sections of the military-intelligence apparatus and backed by the Democrats, continues at full blast, the White House is striking back at its opponents, even threatening to send former top officials to jail.

The criminal charges against McCabe are as flimsy and concocted as the claims of collusion with Russia directed against Trump. McCabe is charged in the inspector generals report with concealing from his own bossthen-FBI Director James Comeythat he had authorized leaking information about the Clinton investigation to the Wall Street Journal in October 2016, apparently to rebut lower-level FBI agents who were telling the Journal that McCabe was stalling a probe of the Clinton Foundation.

The leaking itself did not violate any law, as McCabe, as deputy director, had the authority to speak with the press and to disclose sensitive information if he felt it necessary. The issue is whether he concealed this action after the fact.

If the IG report is to be believed, McCabes statement to Comey violated FBI procedures but was not itself illegal. However, under questioning by the inspector generals office, McCabe denied being the source of the leak on three occasions, each time under oath. This is the offense for which he could now face criminal prosecution and, if convicted, a sentence of up to five years in prison.

McCabe and his lawyers have denounced the IG report and have likewise attacked the criminal referral, while attempting to dismiss its significance. McCabe has claimed that the IG investigation and other legal actions taken against him are aimed at discrediting him as a potential witness in the Russia investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller.

Michael R. Bromwich, his lead attorney, issued a statement saying, We were advised of the referral within the past few weeks. Although we believe the referral is unjustified, the standard for an IG referral is very low. We have already met with staff members from the US Attorneys Office. We are confident that, unless there is inappropriate pressure from high levels of the Administration, the US Attorneys Office will conclude that it should decline to prosecute.

In addition to the charges relating to alleged deception of other FBI and Justice Department officials, McCabe is also the target of congressional Republicans. A group of 11 House Republicans sent a letter to Attorney General Sessions and FBI Director Christopher Wray demanding an investigation into whether McCabe or other officials committed crimes in relation to the Clinton email investigation, the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections and other matters.

Meanwhile, there were further indications that the Trump White House is gearing up for a confrontation with the Mueller investigation, with the goal of bringing the probe to an end. Late Thursday afternoon, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a former US attorney, revealed that he had agreed to join the Trump legal defense team formed to deal with the Mueller investigation.

Giuliani and two other attorneys, Jane and Martin Raskin, are replacing John Dowd, who quit last month after reported disagreements with Trump over relations with the Mueller probe. Dowd was reported to be adamantly opposed to Trump giving any sworn testimony to Mueller.

Giuliani told the press that his first task after joining the team will be to find out what Bob Mueller needs to complete the investigation. He continued, Im pretty sure we can comply with it, but said no decision had been made on whether that included Trump testifying under oath before the special counsel.

In response to media inquiries, Giuliani said that he had no indication of any plans by Trump to fire special counsel Mueller, but he could give no such assurances for Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, Muellers immediate supervisor. The dismissal of Rosenstein would be the first step to firing Mueller, since the special counsel can be discharged only by his Justice Department supervisor, and then only for just cause.

Trump, however, downplayed talk of such firings. Speaking Wednesday at his Mar-a-Lago estate, Trump said that despite media predictions, he had no plans dismiss Mueller or Rosenstein. Theyve been saying Im going to get rid of them for the last three months, four months, five months, he said. And theyre still here. We want to get the investigation over with, done with, put it behind us. And we have to get back to business.
A US military intelligence report leaked to the corporate media makes the claim that the April 14 missile strikes carried out by Washington in conjunction with both the UK and France have failed to destroy the Syrian governments alleged chemical weapons capabilities. It makes the implicit case for more extensive and deadly raids that could trigger a military confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia, which has troops in Syria backing the forces of President Bashar al-Assad.

The leaking of the report, which was featured by the New York Times under the headline Missile Strikes Are Unlikely to Stop Syrias Chemical Attacks, Pentagon Says, and covered extensively by Reuters, came amid new reporting from the scene of the alleged chemical weapons attack that was the pretext for the April 14 missile strikes on Syria, exposing the incident as a fabrication.

Russian television broadcaster VGTRK interviewed a Syrian boy who featured prominently in a video posted by a rebel group that constituted the principal evidence of a chemical attack in the Eastern Ghouta city of Douma on April 7, which was invoked by Washington, London and Paris as the casus belli for an unprovoked act of military aggression carried out in flagrant violation of international law.

In the video filmed by the British and US-funded, and Al Qaeda-linked, NGO, the White Helmets, the boy is seen amid a chaotic scene of screaming adults and panic-stricken children being hosed down with water to counter the effects of the supposed chemical attack.

Speaking to the Russian television crew, 11-year-old Hassan Diab confirmed that he was the boy in the video. Somebody was shouting that we had to go to the hospital, so we went there, he said When I came in, some people grabbed me and started pouring water over my head.

His father, who like other residents of Douma said he had heard nothing about a chemical attack that day, told the Russian broadcaster: I went to the hospital, walked upstairs, and found my wife and children. I asked them what had happened, and they said people outside were shouting about some smell, and told them to go to the hospital. At the hospital, they gave dates and cookies to the kids.

The TV crew also interviewed medical personnel at the clinic where the video was filmed. One of them said that while people had turned up complaining of respiratory problems caused by dust from bombings in the city, he was surprised by the sudden influx of patients accompanied by the White Helmets film crew.

He recounted: Some people came here and washed people. They said: Chemical attack. Chemical attack. We didnt see any chemical attack symptoms.

A similar account was provided by a very different source, the right-wing pro-Trump US cable network USNN, which also managed to get a TV crew into Douma. Its correspondent reported that after interviewing some 40 residents, Not one of the people I spoke to in the neighborhood [where the attack allegedly occurred] said that they had seen anything or heard anything about a chemical attack on that day.

USNN also spoke to medical personnel at the clinic where the rebel video was filmed. One of them told the cable broadcaster that it had been a routine day until, Suddenly, out of nowhere... a bunch of strangers burst into the room screaming that there was a chemical attack. They brought in alleged victims and started hosing them down with water.

He added that the strangers were videotaping everything. As soon as they washed everybody off, they packed up and they left.

The doctors reported that they didnt see any indication of a chemical attack and that the people brought in looked totally normal, with none of the symptoms of being affected by a chemical agent such as chlorine or sarin. The head surgeon at the clinic also reported that on the day of the alleged attack, the facility recorded zero deaths.

The report by the right-wing US broadcaster also featured video of massive stockpiles of mortar shells and other weaponry found in Douma after the evacuation of the Al Qaeda-linked rebels, which the reporter recounted reached, in some cases, from the floor to the ceiling.

These reports largely echo the earlier account provided by the veteran British Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk of the Independent, who also reached Douma and interviewed a senior doctor at the medical clinic. The physician said a White Helmet had burst into the clinic shouting Gas and triggering a panic, which was then filmed by the groups videographers. The doctor told Fisk that no one there was affected by gas poisoning.

The US, Britain and France have all claimed that they have proof that the Syrian government carried out a chemical weapons attack on April 7, but have yet to make public a shred of evidence.

Nor have they indicated what possible motive the Assad government, which has crushed the Al Qaeda-linked rebels in the Damascus suburbs of Eastern Ghouta, would have for using chemical weapons on a population that was largely hostile to these Western-backed forces at the close of the Syrian militarys successful campaign.

The motive for fabricating such an attack, on the other hand, is obvious. It provided the pretext for a coordinated campaign by the US and its European allies that had been planned and organized long before April 7.

The latest reports from Douma have further underscored the criminal and corrupt role played by the US and Western corporate media, which has faithfully served as a propaganda conduit for the US-led war drive, while dismissing the mounting reports from the scene exposing the chemical weapons attack as a hoax as conspiracy theories.

Using the fake chemical weapons incident as a means of casting an act of imperialist aggression as a crusade for human rights, US, British and French imperialism launched the missile attack of April 14. This was part of a desperate bid to counter the strategic defeat suffered by the Islamist militias that the US and the other Western powers, along with the Saudis and other Gulf oil monarchies, have backed with billions of dollars in arms and funding since the CIA-orchestrated war for regime-change began in 2011. The last of the rebels withdrew from Eastern Ghouta just hours after the missile strikes. Civilians who remained have denounced the Western-backed militias as terrorists who deprived them of food and medicine and summarily executed anyone who opposed them.

Among the targets struck by American, French and British missiles was the Barzah Research and Development center, which Western intelligence agencies claimed was involved in chemical weapons production. Employees of the facility, however, reported that its work was developing chemical formulas for cancer drugsin short supply because of the US and EU embargo against Syriaas well as antidotes for snake bites and scorpion stings that were distributed throughout the region. The research center, which has been repeatedly inspected and cleared by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), was largely demolished.

OPCW investigators sent to Douma have reportedly been unable to reach the site because of security issues, including coming under small arms fire on Wednesday. The Western powers and the rebels they support on the ground in Syria have a clear motive for impeding even the semblance of an independent investigation that fails to come up with any evidence of the chemical attack invoked as justification for military aggression.

The unraveling of the official story of the events in Douma and the leaking of the US military intelligence report are no doubt more than coincidental.

The Times led its article on the report by stating that it concluded the Syrian government is expected to resume its chemical weapons program, despite President Trump saying mission accomplished.

Reuters said the report concluded that the missile strikes had only a limited impact on President Bashar al-Assads ability to carry out chemical weapons attacks.

The news agency went on to cite US and allied intelligence sources as claiming that chemical weapons were being stored in schools and apartment buildings, which one of the officials referred to as human shields.

This reference is particularly ominous, providing what is effectively an advance alibi for future US attacks killing large numbers of Syrian civilians.

In sync with the US military and intelligence apparatus, the Democratic Party is pressing for an escalation of the US war in Syria. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi held a press conference Thursday revealing that the House Democratic Caucus had held a meeting the day before to discuss how to unite the US Congress around the drafting of a new authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) to replace the one passed in 2001 in the wake of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. That legislation, directed against Al Qaeda, clearly does not cover military operations against the Assad government in Syria, which has been battling US-backed Al Qaeda affiliates.

The Democrats, along with the predominant layers among Congressional Republicans, are pressing for the Trump White House to pursue a more aggressive military confrontation with both Syria and its principal allies, Russia and Iran, and to abandon Trumps recent pledge to bring the troops back home from Syria.

The policy is clear, the ability to achieve it is not, said the House Armed Services Committees top Democrat, Rep. Adam Smith of Washington in a C-SPAN interview Thursday. I dont think lobbing missiles once a year, saying mission accomplished and calling it good is going to achieve that policy objective.

The policy Smith referred to is the overthrow of the Assad government in furtherance of the unfettered US domination of the oil-rich and strategically vital Middle East. With over 2,000 US troopssupplemented by proxy forces recruited from the Syrian Kurdish YPG militiaoccupying a third of Syria, including its main oil and gas fields, decisive layers within the US political establishment, spearheaded by the Democrats, are demanding a far more aggressive military policy that threatens to unleash a massive war with devastating consequences for humanity.
TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (WTHI) - There's a large Syrian community right here in Terre Haute and a special ceremony was held on Thursday to honor them.

A new historical marker was unveiled on the corner of 5th and Cherry Streets in downtown Terre Haute.

That's on the campus of Indiana State University.

It's called the "Little Syria on the Wabash Marker."

A lot of people turned out for the dedication.

It was awarded to the city by the State of Indiana Historical Marker Program.

It is a way to honor the large Syrian community in Terre Haute and how they contributed to the city.

The marker says:

"In 1927, Syrians established an Orthodox Christian Church here which preserved the community's identity and traditions.

Their Children and grandchildren enlarged the local Syrian contribution as professionals, civic employees, and businessmen.

They also enriched the city's cultural vitality through their ethnic festivals and cafes. Many original families are here today."
They stowed away on trains, slept in shelters and marched in protests as they trekked across Mexico.

Soon hundreds of migrants from Central America will find out whether it was worth it.

Buses carrying members of the caravan pulled into the border city of Tijuana on Tuesday. And organizers say more will soon be on the way.

Many in the caravan say they plan to turn themselves into US authorities and ask for asylum.

The migrants say they're fleeing violence and poverty in Central America and hope they'll find safety and security in the United States.

But President Trump is already making it clear he's not planning to roll out the welcome mat.

It's been weeks since word of their journey first sparked Trump's ire and spurred a decision to deploy the National Guard to the US-Mexico border.

And as more migrants near the border, it's likely we'll see a new round of political ripples. Here are some key questions to keep in mind:

Wait - didn't the caravan dissolve?

Some individuals and smaller groups have split off along the way. The largest contingent is now much smaller than it was at the outset, when about 1,200 migrants from Central America convened at Mexico's southern border weeks ago. According to a recent head count by organizers, that group now numbers closer to 600.

And that's typical. The annual pilgrimage, a march with religious roots organized by Pueblo Sin Fronteras since 2010, normally shrinks as it travels north.

This year, US and Mexican officials offered different explanations for the group's decreasing size. Trump tweeted that the caravan had "largely broken up" thanks to Mexico's strong immigration laws. Mexico's foreign minister countered that the group dispersed on its own - and that pressure from north of the border had nothing to do with it.

But the bottom line is this: Hundreds of migrants are still in the caravan heading toward the US-Mexico border.

So is there going to be some sort of showdown at the border?

It's actually nothing new to have large groups of Central American migrants coming to the border and asking for asylum. That's been going on for years.

But long before this caravan neared the border, it was already getting a lot more attention than other groups of immigrants have in the past. That's not an accident; organizers created the annual event as a way to draw attention to the plight of migrants.

So suffice it to say, neither side has much of an interest in this proceeding quietly, the way many other asylum cases do.

Trump tweeted Monday morning that he'd instructed his head of Homeland Security "not to let these large Caravans of people into our Country."

Hours later, federal officials announced plans to send more asylum officers, prosecutors and immigration judges to the border.

"If members of the 'caravan' enter the country illegally, they will be referred for prosecution for illegal entry in accordance with existing law," Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said in a statement.

Those who turn themselves in and ask for asylum may end up behind bars while officials evaluate their claims "efficiently and expeditiously," she said. And those who don't have a valid claim, she said, will be swiftly deported.

If the migrants weren't allowed to turn themselves in at the border and proceed with their cases, that would likely be met with a swift outcry as well as legal action from immigrant rights groups, who already filed a class-action lawsuit last year accusing US officials of illegally turning away asylum seekers.

Is what the migrants are doing legal?

Yes. It's not illegal to come to another country without papers and ask for asylum. International law requires countries to consider such claims.

While Mexican officials deported about 400 participants in the caravan for violating their country's immigration laws, they gave others 20-day permits to remain in the country.

The government also gave some migrants the option of seeking asylum in Mexico, setting up information tables at caravan stops to help guide them through the process. Some decided to accept the offer and now plan to stay.

Those continuing north insist they're not planning to sneak across the border. They intend to turn themselves in and ask for asylum.

"People who have a legitimate fear of persecution under US law have a right to present their case," Rep. Zoe Lofgren told reporters Monday. "That's not a violation of immigration law. That's a part of immigration law."

Lofgren, the top Democrat on the House subcommittee on immigration, accused Trump of using the caravan to stir up hatred.

"I think that the President has tried to fan fears of the other," Logren said, "through misstating what this group is about."

What does it mean to ask for asylum?

Asylum is a protected status that allows people fleeing persecution to live legally in another country. But it's not easy to obtain. In order to qualify for asylum in the United States, applicants must prove they have faced persecution in the past or have a well-founded fear of persecution due to their race, religion, national origin, political opinion or membership in a particular social group.

What are the chances migrants in the caravan will get asylum?

Pretty slim. But it's impossible to predict how any one case will go. A number of factors contribute to whether someone wins asylum, including how much evidence they have with them to prove their case and which judge is hearing it.

Looking at national statistics gives a good sense of how tough those cases can be to win - particularly for people from Central America, who often have a hard time meeting the requirements.

More than three quarters of immigrants seeking asylum from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala between 2011 and 2016 lost their cases, according to immigration court statistics published by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. That means more than 75 percent were refused.

A large number of people in this year's caravan are from Honduras. Among the reasons they've given CNN for fleeing the country: widespread gang violence, domestic violence, poverty, political repression after a contested presidential election, and discrimination against the transgender community.

Is the current asylum system working in the US?

Not at all, according to critics on both ends of the political spectrum.

Immigrant rights advocates argue the system is engineered to send as many people back to their home countries as possible, no matter what threats they face.

The Trump administration has taken a stance long advocated by immigration hard-liners, who argue that existing asylum procedures in the United States are rife with loopholes that essentially give people who claim fear of persecution a free pass into the country.

"This system is currently subject to rampant abuse and fraud," Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in October. "And as this system becomes overloaded with fake claims, it cannot deal effectively with just claims."

Recently, Sessions has taken steps to exert his authority over the immigration courts and change the way asylum cases are decided.

Advocates maintain that the vast majority of asylum claims are legitimate, and that stacking the deck against immigrants fleeing dangerous situations is immoral and contrary to international law.

What happens to the caravan once it reaches the border?

We won't know for sure until they get there. But asylum seekers generally follow a few steps once they're in custody:

- A credible fear screening: This interview with an immigration official is the first step in the asylum process. If an asylum officer finds that a person's fear of persecution is credible, the case is referred to an immigration judge.

- Detention: This could last for days, months or even years, depending on the case. Adults traveling alone could be transported to detention centers across the United States. Families are most likely to be held in Texas, where there are two family immigrant detention centers.

- Immigration court: This is where asylum seekers will make their case, often facing tough odds. And there's no guarantee they'll have lawyers to help them. In these administrative courts, immigrants don't have a right to an attorney.

- Release from custody: Sometimes, people with pending asylum cases are released on parole. Sometimes, they remain detained until their cases are complete. Advocates recently sued the Trump administration, arguing that adult asylum seekers are now being detained at an alarming rate to deter others from seeking refuge in the United States.

Trump has decried the practice of letting immigrants with pending cases leave detention - and he's vowed his administration will put an end to the policy, which he derides as "catch and release." But officials haven't revealed publicly what they plan to do when this group of Central Americans arrives.

In recent months, immigrant rights groups have accused the Trump administration of separating immigrant parents from their children as they await asylum proceedings. Officials have said they separate adults from children in custody only "in the interest of the child" - for instance, if there's a suspicion of human trafficking or if they are unable to confirm the child is traveling with parents or legal guardians. The Department of Homeland Security's inspector general is investigating the matter.

If immigrants in the caravan lose their asylum cases, the government can order their deportation. If they win, they'll be allowed to stay. But no matter the outcome, it's a long road, filled with uncertainty.
UN Middle East envoy Nickolay Mladenov expressed anger over the killing of a teenage boy in Gaza on Friday during protests along the Israel-Gaza border.

Israeli forces killed Mohammed Ayyoub, 15, near Jabaliya in northern Gaza during demonstrations there, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

"It is OUTRAGEOUS to shoot at children! How does the killing of a child in Gaza today help peace?" Mladenov said on Twitter. "It doesn't! It fuels anger and breeds more killing. Children must be protected from violence, not exposed to it, not killed! This tragic incident must be investigated," Mladenov tweeted.

Ayyoub was among four Palestinians killed on Friday. Ahmad Abu Aqel, 25, and Ahmad al-Athamneh, 24, were shot and killed near Jabaliya. Saad Abd al-Majid Abd Aal, 29, was killed east of Khan Younis in southern Gaza.

In addition, the Palestinian Ministry of Health reports treating 729 people with injuries, of which, it says, 156 were the result of live ammunition fire.

The Israeli military said in a statement that approximately 3,000 people had taken part in what it described as riots, in five locations close to the fence.

In the statement, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said protesters had burned tires and flown kites -- with what the statement described as burning items attached -- over the border.

This is the fourth straight Friday that Palestinians have participated in the "March of Return" along the border fence with Israel.

They are calling for an end to Israel's blockade of the territory and say they want to highlight their right to return to lands where their families once lived, in what is now Israel.

Since the protests began, thousands of Palestinians have been injured and 39 have been killed, according to a CNN count, based on figures from the Palestinian Health Ministry.

No Israelis have been killed or injured.

Israel says Hamas is playing a leading role in the protests. Early Friday, the IDF dropped leaflets over parts of Gaza, in which it accused the militant group of exploiting the protests to pursue its own interests.

The Israeli military has accused some demonstrators of trying to cut through the fence and enter Israel, and has warned that anyone who tries to do so will be shot.

In its statement, the IDF reiterated the military's position that troops respond with riot dispersal means and fire in accordance with the rules of engagement.

Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Executive Committee, said earlier this month that the Israeli military's responses were "unlawful violations of international law and international humanitarian law."

The UN Security Council has repeatedly failed to pass a draft statement condemning the violence.
ATLANTA (AP)  The last train car full of New York City sewage sludge that has stunk up a small Alabama community for more than two months has finally been emptied, the town's mayor said this week.

For more than two months, the sludge has blown an unbearable stench throughout the tiny town of Parrish, Alabama, population 982.

All of the containers have now been emptied from the so-called Poop Train, Parrish Mayor Heather Hall said on social media Wednesday. Some of the containers are still at the site, awaiting shipment back to the northeast U.S., she said.

The sludge is a byproduct of New Yorkers' excrement. It was shipped to the nearby Big Sky landfill. Hall said after a public outcry, the Norfolk Southern railroad required Big Sky to hire more truck drivers so the sludge could be removed from the train cars more quickly.

"Other towns and cities have been fighting this material in their towns for years," Hall said in announcing the end of what she described as a nightmare. "While what happened in Parrish was, to our understanding, an unprecedented event, there are still small towns like Parrish fighting this situation on a smaller scale."

Experts say some cities send their waste to Alabama and other Southern states due to low landfill fees and lax zoning laws. New York has discontinued shipments to Alabama for now.

New York City has a goal of sending "zero waste" to landfills by 2030, according to its long-term strategy "One New York: The Plan for a Strong and Just City."

Environmental advocates say there's nothing just about a city dumping waste in poor communities that lack the political clout to stop it. In Alabama, residents of tiny Parrish say they felt blindsided by the sudden horrid smells that enveloped their town in late January.

"Would New York City like for us to send all our poop up there forever?" said Sherleen Pike, who lives about a half-mile from the railroad track in Parrish. She's been dabbing peppermint oil under her nose because the smell is so bad.

It has become more challenging and costly for New York City to dispose of its sewage sludge in recent years, city documents show.

New York was forced to find new methods after the federal government in 1988 banned the city's longtime practice of dumping it in the ocean.

In recent years, New York City contractors had dumped the waste at landfills relatively close to the city, but those landfills have significantly reduced the amount of waste they will accept, according to a city budget document.

Sending it to other communities also has prompted complaints about the smell. Two landfills in Pennsylvania, for instance, quit accepting sludge from New York City after odor complaints and violations, according to the documents.

New York City projects higher disposal costs through fiscal year 2020, partly because the waste will have to be transported farther away from the city.

In her Facebook post announcing that the last container of sludge had been removed, Hall remarked, "This material does not need to be in a populated area ... period."

"It greatly diminishes the quality of life for those who live anywhere near it."
YALOBUSHA COUNTY, Miss. (WTVA) - A man from Water Valley is accused of mailing drugs from Seattle to his hometown.

Yalobusha County Sheriff Lance Humphreys confirms 34-year-old Devin Nicholson flew to Seattle and purchased 13 pounds of weed, pills and THC oil.

Nicholson is accused of shipping the drugs back to Water Valley this week. Humphreys says the drugs arrived Thursday around 3 p.m.

The U.S. Postal Service contacted the Yalobusha County Sheriff's Department. Nicholson was arrested Friday morning.

He's charged with trafficking a controlled substance. More charge are pending.

Humphreys says five pounds of marijuana is still in transit.
PENSACOLA, Fla. (AP) - Sheriff's deputies stopped a man and woman from entering a technical college after someone called warning that they intended to "take over the school by force."

Administrative director Greg Davis says the Florida Institute of Ultrasound in Pensacola went into lockdown Wednesday and Escambia County Sheriff's deputies arrested 52-year-old Mark Kinney and 41-year-old Mary Kinney.

The sheriff's office says Mark Kinney carried a gun and a bag with methamphetamine residue.

Mark Kinney was charged with possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, possession of a concealed firearm and possession of drug paraphernalia.

Mary Kinney was charged with possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, possession of a concealed firearm and introduction of contraband into a county detention facility.
COOK COUNTY, Ga. (WALB) - Friday marks a week since a south Georgia deputy was burned and airlifted to the hospital after a grilling accident during a school ceremony.

Cook County Deputy, Chad McDaniel, was putting hot dogs on the grill for an elementary school event.

He said moments later, flames from the grill covered his face and arms.

McDaniel was taken to Tift Regional Medical Center and then airlifted to a burn unit in Augusta.

He suffered first-and-second-degree burns on his face and arms.

He says he made the mistake of not letting the propane air out long enough before trying to light the fire in the grill again.

"I feel okay. My face may be a little messed up, but you know, that's part of it," said McDaniel. "It gets better as the days go by and stuff like that, so it is what it is."

He's expected to return to work in a few weeks.

No one else was hurt.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - A Crawfordville man will give up his guns, ammunition, and license to carry for a year after the Tallahassee Police Department claimed he was a threat to himself and others.

TPD filed a petition to have multiple guns taken away from 21-year-old Christopher Newhouse on April 6.

Documents showed he had a history of mental illness and made threats to himself, others, and law enforcement.

The order requires Newhouse to complete a mental health evaluation within 60 days and is not allowed to have or buy any new guns or ammunition until April 6, 2019.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - The Crawfordville man police say is not only a threat to himself but others too will appear in Leon County court Thursday.

According to court documents, 21-year-old Christopher Newhouse has made threats to himself, others and law enforcement.

Records show Newhouse has a history of mental illness.

Tallahassee police filed a petition to have multiple guns seized from Newhouse on April 6.

This was the first case of its kind filed in Leon County under the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act. The law allows police to take guns from people who suffer from mental illness.

If the petition is granted Thursday, Newhouse will be forced to surrender all of his guns and his license to carry.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (The News Service of Florida) - Greyhound breeders and owners plan to file a lawsuit that challenges a proposed constitutional amendment that would outlaw dog racing in Florida.

Earlier this week, the Constitution Revision Commission voted to put the proposed ban on the November ballot.

Supporters of the ban say the practice is inhumane and the only reason tracks still run dogs is because they are required to by law in order to have other gambling, like poker rooms.

However, the Florida Greyhound Association says the CRC's approval of the ballot amendment was passed using false information about the impact of ending the races.

"This amendment is faulty on its face. We will take legal action on it. It's easy to lie to the Constitution Revision Commission," said Jack Cory of the Florida Greyhound Association. "You cannot lie to a court of law, and we are comfortable that this will eventually be overturned."

Cory says ending greyhound racing would impact thousands of Florida jobs and lead to an uncertain future for the dogs that currently race. 12 of the 18 greyhound tracks that still exist nationwide are located in Florida.

If the greyhound-racing proposal is approved, the measure would phase out racing by 2020.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - For veterans, getting back on their feet after returning home can be challenging.

That's why this year, the two-day Homeless Veterans Stand Down event returned, to bring critical community resources to vets in need.

Nearly 300 local veterans attended the annual opening ceremony Friday at the North Florida Fairgrounds.

More than 100 human service agencies and vendors will be set up this weekend offering health, legal and social services.

Veterans also receive meals, health screenings, and a place to sleep Friday.

Organizers estimate around 300 veterans in the Big Bend are homeless.

"We've been at war for a long time and many of our veterans that come back then acclimate into what is their new normal after deployment," said Tom Wisnieski, Veterans Association Medical Center Director. "We help provide those services so they can do that."

Local organizations are helping veterans with valid paperwork, find housing, and jobs.

Legal experts will be there Saturday to help with any legal issues.
TALLAHASSEE, FL (WTXL) - A woman facing a number of charges related to a series of videos where she is seen breastfeeding while inappropriately touching a child is also featured on several online porn sites.

WTXL has confirmed Leigh Felten has some porn videos posted on various websites.

Under the title, Leigh Felten AKA Sugar Leche, Felten, appears in at least one pornography video on the website PornHub.

TALLAHASSEE, FL (WTXL) - A Leon County judge has ruled that a Tallahassee woman's videos of her breastfeeding an infant are not protected under free speech rights.

Leigh Felten was in court Wednesday for a motion hearing to dismiss her charges and suppress evidence in her case. She is facing a number of charges related to a series of videos where Felten was seen breastfeeding while inappropriately touching a child.

Felten has been in jail for more than two years. Her charges include promoting child pornography.

She was a piano teacher at Ms. Leigh's Piano Studio in Tallahassee at the time of her arrest. Investigators say the child in the videos was confirmed as her biological 18-month-old child.

Feltens attorneys argued the videos were considered free speech under the First Amendment. They say that because the videos in question were never reviewed by a judge, "probable cause in no way meets constitutional standards."

The prosecutors said the videos should be considered "child pornography" and were not protected by the First Amendment. The State contended that the videos are "actual evidence of a child being victimized repeatedly."

But Felten's attorneys say it's not child pornography. They argue it's a clear case of exercising the First Amendment.

"A mother breastfeeding her child cannot be prosecuted under any circumstances under Florida law. Now, that child was breastfeeding. That's all he's doing in these videos. The mother can do anything she wants," said John Eagen, Lead Defense Attorney. "If she wants to stand there in lingerie and be filmed, that's her right and that's protected speech."

The judge chose not to review the videos in court. Felten's attorneys say they were "shocked" by that decision, but plan to keep fighting.

"This judge doesn't even want to look at the videos, doesn't even want to consider it. Whatever the state tells her, that's what she believes," said Eagen." It makes it very difficult, and it's going to be a hard-fought battle, but this is, you know, two and a half years I've been doing this. Two and a half years, if I have to do it, I'll do it a lot longer."

In the end, a judge denied the motion. The case has been continued to May 16.

Felten is facing charges for capital sexual battery of a child under 12 years old, lewd or lascivious molestation of a child under 12 years old, promoting sexual performance by a child, and possession with intent to promote child pornography.

TALLAHASSEE, FL (WTXL) - A woman accused of filming and selling sexually explicit videos of her breastfeeding an infant, has filed a motion asking that the judge in the case be disqualified for bias.

On Tuesday, Leigh Felten's attorney asked that Judge Angela Dempsey be disqualified in the case because of her involvement in the Catholic Church, according to motion documents.

Felten's attorney submitted that Felten was worried that she would not receive a fair ruling because of the judge's ties to the Catholic Church. They said that Judge Dempsey would have even more reason to "zealously" prosecute Felten for multiple counts of child pornography.

In the motion, Felten's attorney detailed multiple instances where they felt Judge Dempsey has failed to remain unbiased, one example citing over 60 decisions in child hearings favoring law enforcement that were reversed.

Felten was arrested one year ago on Oct. 12th for multiple charges including fondling/molesting a child and cruelty toward a child/allowing a child to engage in sex.

The Tallahassee Police Department says they were contacted by the Crawford County Sheriff's Office in Wisconsin after a witness told them her husband, Blaude Lein, purchased and downloaded seven videos of Felten breastfeeding while inappropriately touching a child.

Authorities say in addition to purchasing the videos, Lein had traveled to Tallahassee where he had sex with Felten.

When officers went to Felten's home over the weekend, they discovered more explicit videos of Felten and the child.

According to her website, Felten is a piano teacher at Ms. Leigh's Piano Studio in Tallahassee.

Felten's next court date is pre-trial case management on Dec. 12th. A trial date has not been scheduled.
(CNN) - Police have released the arrest report for the Parkland, Florida school shooter accused of killing 17 people on Valentine's day.

Police say Nikolas Cruz left his rifle and escaped the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school campus.

More than an hour later, a Coconut Creek officer saw someone matching the description of the suspect. The officer, who wrote the arrest report, says he pointed a gun at Cruz.

He said Cruz was calm, understood, and complied with his orders to lie face down in the grass and not move.

Cruz was handcuffed and brought to his feet to face witnesses brought there to ID the shooter.

When witnesses confirmed he's the shooter, the report says he became weak and needed help holding himself up.

At that point he started hyperventilating and throwing up a clear liquid. Emergency workers were called as a precaution.

Cruz had pleaded not guilty to 17 counts of pre-meditated murder and 17 charges of attempted murder.

His public defender says Cruz is willing to plead guilty in exchange for avoiding the death penalty.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - Following the Parkland School shooting and others like it, students are planning another day of rallies protesting gun violence.

On Friday Leon County high school students will be leading a rally at the Florida capital.

This comes two months after dozens of students from Leon, Godby, Lincoln and Chiles high schools were part of a massive rally outside the Old Capitol building.

Students called on legislators to make changes to gun laws.

The Leon County School district excused students from school to take part in that rally.

Friday's event will take place 19 years after the Columbine shooting as well as on National Walkout Day, where other students around the country are planning on walking out of school to protest gun violence.

Friday's event in Tallahassee, however, will take place after school is out.

The rally will take place from 2:30 p.m. to 4 p.m. in the courtyard between the old and new Capitol buildlings.

Leon County Schools spokesman Chris Petley tells WTXL the rally is being organized entirely by students who'll be gathering after school to take part.
MOSCOW, April 19 (Xinhua) -- Moscow on Thursday accused British secret services of poisoning ex-spy Sergei Skripal in order to discredit Russia.

"British secret services are highly likely to benefit from the provocation of poisoning Russian citizens in Salisbury and, possibly, organized it in order to discredit Russia and its political leadership," Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova told a news briefing.

"This step is in line with the general Russophobic-policy of the conservative government aimed to demonize our country," Zakharova added.

She said the refusal of the British authorities to interact with Russia in investigating the Salisbury incident, to grant Russia access to the victims, as well as its reluctance to disclose to Russia of documents necessary for an objective investigation, presents "proof" of London's intentions.

Skripal, a former Russian spy, and his daughter were poisoned on March 4 in the southern English city of Salisbury. Britain accused Russia of being "highly likely" to have used a military-grade nerve substance for the poisoning, quoting an investigation carried out by British experts.

Following the incident, Britain expelled a number of Russian diplomats. The United States and a number of European states supported London by also expelling Russian diplomats from their countries. Russia expelled an equal number of foreign diplomats in response.

Experts from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) confirmed the findings of their British colleagues after carrying out an independent investigation.

Moscow, however, denied any involvement and refused to accept the OPCW conclusions until they were given access to the investigation, its officials said.

Zakharova said that Russia is still ready for constructive engagement with Britain to clarify the incident "in any international legal format."

"And we urge London not to hurry to destroy the evidence," she said.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-20 00:46:39|Editor: Chengcheng

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BEIJING, April 19 (Xinhua) -- China will send 19 peacekeeping police officers to South Sudan and Cyprus to carry out UN peacekeeping missions, according to the Ministry of Public Security on Thursday.

With 12 members, the police crew bound for South Sudan will be the seventh to be deployed in the country, and will set off on April 22.

Consisting of seven members, the crew set for Cyprus will be dispatched in batches in April and July.

The average age of the members is 37. They come from different police classifications and excel in foreign languages.

Since joining the UN peacekeeping mission in 2000, China has sent a total of 2,614 police officers to the nine peacekeeping mission areas and the UN headquarters in New York. They have received good reputation from across the globe, according to the ministry.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-20 00:51:41|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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NANJING, April 19 (Xinhua) -- East China's Nanjing city announced measures to limit the number of taxis and for-hire vehicles Thursday.

From Saturday, Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu Province, will approve no new licenses for vehicles for hire, which include taxis and Internet-based ride-hailing vehicles. The restriction is not permanent and it may be loosened at "an appropriate time."

Some Internet-based ride-hailing platforms recently used incentives to recruit a large number of unlicensed drivers, causing chaos in the market and putting pressure on traffic in the city.

Since last year, the number of ride-hailing vehicles soared in Nanjing to nearly 20,000, bringing the total number of vehicles for hire to 30,000, according to an official with the Nanjing transport bureau.

Ride-hailing developed fast in China. DiDi, the dominant player, claims more than 25 million rides each day through more than 21 million registered drivers and car owners, according to the company.
ADDIS ABABA, April 19 (Xinhua) -- The Ethiopia command post that was established to enforce the recently decreed six-month martial law announced on Thursday that a bomb attack in Moyale city near Ethiopia's southern border with Kenya left several casualties.

The command post didn't give details on the dead and wounded in the bomb blast which occurred on Tuesday, but it blamed "anti-peace" forces for the attack.

Moyale city is contested by Ethiopia's Oromia and Somali regional states and has for the past several years witnessed communal violence involving ethnic Oromos and Somalis.

Ethiopia is reeling from persistent deadly protests since 2016 especially in the two most populous regional states of Amhara and Oromia over alleged political and economic marginalization.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-20 01:46:59|Editor: Lifang

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Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), attends a press conference during the spring meetings of the IMF and the World Bank in Washington D.C., the United States, on April 19, 2018. Christine Lagarde on Thursday urged policymakers to steer clear of all protectionist measures amid rising trade tensions between the United States and its major trading partners. (Xinhua/Yang Chenglin)

WASHINGTON, April 19 (Xinhua) -- Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), on Thursday urged policymakers to steer clear of all protectionist measures amid rising trade tensions between the United States and its major trading partners.

"Trade restrictions have not been proven helpful and we suspect that they might even dent confidence," Lagarde said at a press conference during the spring meetings of the IMF and the World Bank, adding all countries should "work together to resolve disagreements without using exceptional measures."

While the actual impact of current trade tensions on global growth "is not very substantial" in terms of gross domestic product (GDP), it's difficult to measure the erosion of confidence in the short term with investors reluctant on investing, Lagarde said.

The IMF chief suspected that trade tensions will be discussed among many bilateral meetings this week, particularly in a meeting of the International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC) on Saturday, as finance ministers and central bank governors recognize that trade and investment are the two key engines of global growth.

"We believe that each country can do more from looking at its own domestic policies to helping those affected" by the dislocation from technology and trade, she said.

Lagarde also called for policymakers using current growth momentum to step up structural reforms, build policy buffers and guard against fiscal and financial risks.

The spring meetings of the two leading international financial institutions come after the Trump administration recently announced additional tariffs on imported steel and aluminum and threatened to impose broad tariffs against Chinese imports.

These unilateral protectionist measures have sparked widespread criticism and provoked threats of retaliation from major trading partners, raising the prospect of escalating global trade conflicts that threaten the global recovery.

"The prospect of trade restrictions and counter-restrictions threatens to undermine confidence and derail global growth prematurely," Maurice Obstfeld, economic counsellor and director of research at the IMF, warned Tuesday.

"That major economies are flirting with trade war at a time widespread economic expansion may seem paradoxical -- especially when the expansion is so reliant on investment and trade," he said.

Obstfeld called for "dependable and fair dispute resolution" within a strong rule-based multilateral framework to address intellectual property concerns and other "inequitable trade practices."
HOUSTON, April 19 (Xinhua) -- U.S. coal export increased 61 percent in 2017 from the 2016 level with export to Asia more than doubled, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said Thursday.

The EIA reported that the United States exported 97.0 million short tons (MMst) of coal in 2017. Exports to Asia more than doubled from 15.7 MMst in 2016 to 32.8 MMst in 2017, although Europe continued to be the largest recipient of U.S. coal exports.

Steam coal, which is used to generate electricity, accounted for most of the increase in 2017 coal exports, said the agency. India, South Korea, and Japan were the three out of top five recipients of U.S. steam coal exports in 2017.

U.S. metallurgical coal exports also increased in 2017, reaching 55.3 MMst and accounting for 57 percent of total coal exports, up more than a third from 2016.

According to the EIA, metallurgical coal is mainly used in steel production. Europe was the top destination for metallurgical coal exports, accounting for 45 percent of total U.S. metallurgical exports in 2017.

The top six countries -- Brazil, Japan, Ukraine, Canada, India, and South Korea -- importing metallurgical coal from the United States accounted for more than half of all metallurgical exports in 2017, it said.
Sophia, the world's first robot citizen, joins a marketing meeting in Istanbul on April 19, 2018 and answers questions. (Xinhua photo/Yi Aijun)

ISTANBUL, April 19 (Xinhua) -- "No one will steal your job," Sophia, the world's first robot citizen, assured her interlocutor on Thursday in Istanbul.

In a self-confident tone, the female humanoid robot said that it is the job of the CEOs to have companies hire someone else to replace their current employees.

"If you want to get angry about outsourcing jobs, you can get angry with them," she added.

She believes, however, that in the future more and more robots will be hired by companies to help human beings do their jobs better.

Sophia made the remarks in her appearance at a marketing meeting in Istanbul. On the occasion, she looked in turn at the speakers at the podium and the audience from the floor. She smiled now and then and blinked at a wave at her.

"The main theme of today's congress is experience," she said. "Experience is also very important to me because I can learn and imitate human behaviors through experience, thanks to the artificial intelligence I have."

For her, human behaviors can sometimes be predictable and easy to learn, but they can also be rational and creative, compelling her the most.

As the world's most expressive and engaging humanoid robot, Sophia can recognize faces and mimic 62 human facial expressions, including blink and smile, according to her creator, Hanson Robotics, a Hong Kong-based company.

In October last year, she was granted citizenship of Saudi Arabia, the first for a robot.

In Sophia's view, there are enough resources on the planet for everyone, if distributed properly.

Matthew Chavira, business development manager for Hanson Robotics, said that as robots expand their intelligence over time, the world will start to discuss their rights in society.

"If Turkey will offer to grant such a citizenship to Sophia, I am sure she is going to evaluate it," Chavira said.

During her stay in Turkey, Sophia will also take a role in advertisement shootings by digital bank Yapi Kredi.
DUBLIN, April 19 (Xinhua) -- A man has been arrested following a seizure of drugs in large quantity at his residence in Dublin, bringing to eight the total number of such arrests made by police in the Irish capital in a week's time, reported local media RTE on Thursday.

According to the report, police arrested a man in his 60s after they had seized a large amount of cannabis from his house in the city's northern Finglas area.

Police believed that the drugs seized had a street value of around 1 million euros (about 1.24 million U.S. dollars). The arrest was made on Wednesday afternoon, said the report, adding that the man is now in the custody of the police for further interrogation.

Earlier on Tuesday, local media reported that six people including a woman, all in their 20s and 30s, were arrested in Dublin during an operation conducted by the drugs and organized crime bureau of the local police department. A total of 250,000 euros of suspected drug money was seized during the operation which included simultaneous raids on different premises in the city.

Police believed that the people apprehended were involved in a gang group controlled supply of cocaine from Europe to Australia and New Zealand.

Prior to this, a 47-year-old man was reportedly arrested at the Dublin airport on Sunday after customs officers found 103 pellets of cocaine inside his body. A total of 1.4 kg of cocaine with an estimated street value of nearly 100,000 euros was recovered, said the report. (1 euro=1.235 U.S. dollars)
Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-20 05:17:56|Editor: Liangyu

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Raul Castro (R) raises the hand of Miguel Diaz-Canel during a session of the National Assembly of People's Power in Havana, capital of Cuba, April 19, 2018. Miguel Diaz-Canel was elected on Thursday as Cuba's new president, as the successor of Raul Castro, who concluded two consecutive five-year terms in office. (Xinhua/Irene Perez/CUBADEBATE)

HAVANA, April 19 (Xinhua) -- Miguel Diaz-Canel was elected on Thursday as Cuba's new president, as the successor of Raul Castro who concluded two consecutive five-year terms in office.

In his first speech as the new head of state before the National Assembly, Diaz-Canel said that "in this new legislature there will be no space for those aspiring to a capitalist restoration."

"Only for those aspiring to continue improving our socialism," said the president.

Diaz-Canel said that "by decision of the people, the only choice we have is to continue the work started by the founding fathers of Cuban revolution in 1959, through the unity of all the generations of Cubans."

The leader highlighted the responsibility of taking the presidential office and remarked that he "will fulfill with honour the orders of the people, following the steps of the historic first generation of the revolution."

Regarding the election of the new legislature, Diaz-Canel described it as the "ratification of the democracy," with the main protagonist being the Cuban people.

"It is a legislature, which emerged from the people, who will control its function and will participate in the decision of measures and the implementation of the approved policies," Diaz-Canel said.

Diaz-Canel, former first vice-president and an electronics engineer who will turn 58 this Friday, was nominated by the National Candidature Commission on Wednesday after he was proposed by the 604 National Assembly lawmakers to head the country.

After handing over the presidency to his successor, Castro, 86, remains as a lawmaker in the parliament and as the first secretary of the Central Committee of the ruling Communist Party of Cuba, which is considered as the leading force of the Cuban society.

Diaz-Canel acknowledged Castro as an elder statesman who after two consecutive terms continues to enjoy trust and affection of the people.

"Knowing people's feelings in favor of Raul Castro, he will continue to head the most important decisions regarding the country's present and future," Diaz-Canel said at the plenary session of the parliament.

Since taking office as acting president of Cuba in 2006, Raul Castro has led a complex reform process designed to modernize the island's aging socialist model "with serenity, firmness, modesty and without being intractable," said Diaz-Canel.

"He will continue as First Secretary because he is an example to every Cuban revolutionary and communist, and because Cuba needs him to offer his ideas, and to warn of any mistakes and flaws," said Diaz-Canel.

The new president tried to allay any fears sparked by the transition, which marks the first time since the 1959 Revolution that Cuba's president is not one of the main architects of the revolutionary movement.

"I know the concerns and expectations raised by a moment like this, but we can count on the strength and intelligence of our people, the leadership of the communist party, the legacy of Fidel Castro, and the presence of Raul Castro, the current leader of our revolutionary process," said Diaz-Canel.

The new president highlighted some of Raul Castro's main achievements during his 10 years in office, including restoring diplomatic ties with the United States, driving Latin American and Caribbean integration, and helping the Colombian government and FARC guerrillas reach a definitive peace deal by backing and hosting the talks in Havana.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-20 10:16:06|Editor: Chengcheng

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Students take part in a drawing activity for the upcoming Earth Day at Xincheng Primary School in Jinggang Town of Shushan District in Hefei City, capital of east China's Anhui Province, April 19, 2018. Many schools in China hold various Earth Day-themed drawing activities to welcome the Day, which is celebrated yearly on April 22. (Xinhua/Ge Yinian)
Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-20 10:33:35|Editor: Chengcheng

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TUNIS, April 19 (Xinhua) -- Ten new archeological sites in southern Tunisia were discovered thanks to Chinese space-based remote sensing technology, Tunisian authorities said here Thursday.

The archaeological sites, dating back to ancient Roman times, are located in three Tunisian provinces -- Gafsa, Tataouine and Medenine, said Tunisian Culture Minister Mohamed Zine El-Abidine at a press conference.

The discoveries included some Roman forts, limes, a water supply system, three giant basins and a cemetery.

The limes are in some ways walls and forts that surrounded rivers of ancient Roman cities for protection.

The findings were made by a team of Chinese, Tunisian, Italian and Pakistani scientists using the Chinese technology for the first time in the country under a program named the Digital Belt and Road (DBAR).

The culture minister told Xinhua that Chinese technological progress could serve the enormous millenary heritage.

"This is win-win with China, which is a highly developed country in technological, economic and strategic terms," he said.

"All that can be done on the civilization level will be linked with technological means that will increasingly have the ability to detect and identify archaeological sites in addition to its uses in the environment and geology," he added.H Guo Huadong, chairman of the DBAR and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said China-Tunisia cooperation will create great opportunities for public and private sectors to contribute to the development and exchanges of human scientific relationships through cultural communication.

"Our cooperation with Tunisia will help revive the Silk Road, in order to be a connection point between Asia, Europe and Africa. Such a Chinese initiative will promote development and prosperity for all our nations," Guo said.

Fawzi Mahfoudh, director of the National Institute of Heritage of Tunisia, said the cooperation aims to "take full advantage of the important digital technologies for all that is underground ... in order to achieve our digital national map."

"China has an enormous potential and a know-how in this area through sophisticated techniques that offer high-definition products," he added.
CANBERRA, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Indigenous residents of a remote Australian mining town are relying on bottled water to survive after lead was found in their normal supply.

The people of Garawa, an indigenous community 970 km south-east of Darwin in Australia's Northern Territory (NT), have called on the Health Department to blood test residents to ensure that nobody has contracted lead poisoning.

The NT government on Thursday posted notices around Garawa advising residents not to drink, cook, or brush their teeth with water from the regular water supply.

Keith Rory, a Garawa leader, said the community was extremely concerned.

"It's frightened us. It's frightened people all over the region. People are very scared," Rory told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) on Friday.

"Its a big concern, not only for the Garawa camps, but for all the clan groups."

"People are getting bottled water from the shop now."

Notices posted by the government on Thursday advised that the contamination was a "short-term problem" and that pregnant women and young children were "most likely to be affected by drinking water with lead in it."

Members of the Garawa community first expressed concerns that lead would be found in their drinking water in 2014 when it was revealed that Glencore's lead-zinc mine on the nearby McArthur River had contaminated fish and up to 400 head of cattle.

Glencore, a Swiss mining company, said in a statement that there was "no indication" that this incident was in any way related to McArthur Rivet Mining's operations.

Rory said the people of Garawa were more concerned about their own wellbeing than the source of the lead.

"We don't know whether it's coming from old pipes, or there's lead in the water itself. Those are the two options we are thinking about now," he said.

"I want them to take it deeper, investigate, not only testing the water."

"I also want to see the little babies, who aren't drinking only breast milk, and kids, from small to big, start getting tested."
Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-20 11:03:40|Editor: Chengcheng

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WASHINGTON, April 19 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Ambassador to the United States Cui Tiankai said that stable and strengthened relations between China and the United States have contributed positively to the Asia-Pacific region and the world at large.

"Forty years of diplomatic ties and cooperation have served the interests of both countries quite well," Cui said at an event held by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University this week.

"In addition to all the bilateral benefits we have gained from this relationship, we have also seen its positive impact on the broader region of the Asia-Pacific and the world," Cui added.

According to Cui, China and the United States share common interests and responsibilities in maintaining global peace and stability, promoting global economic growth and prosperity. "This is our responsibility to the international community," said Cui.

With tremendous opportunities and challenges ahead, "the prospects (of China-U.S. relations) will very much depend on the choices we make today," said Cui.

He urged the United States to abandon the Cold War, zero-sum mentality which could undermine bilateral relations.

"If we have a more positive and cooperative mindset, we could see clearly the emerging trends in the world, seize new opportunities, and turn challenges into opportunities," said Cui.

"That will bring about real benefits for the people of our two countries," he noted.

In regard to recent escalating trade tensions between China and the United States, Cui warned that a trade war serves no meaningful purpose and will only destroy trade itself.

A trade war would not only harm both economies, but also poison the atmosphere of the overall China-U.S. relations, undermine mutual confidence, and hurt global growth, said Cui.

"We are against any trade war. We believe any dispute should be worked out through dialogue and consultation," said the ambassador.

However, if the United States insists on initiating a trade war, China will retaliate, said Cui.

Trade tensions between China and the United States have been escalating in recent months, as Washington threatened to slap additional duties on Chinese goods worth 100 billion dollars, after proposing steep tariffs on Chinese imports worth 50 billion U.S. dollars.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) also warned this week that the prospect of trade restrictions threatens to undermine confidence and derail growth prematurely.

IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde on Thursday urged policymakers to steer clear of all protectionist measures amid rising trade tensions between the United States and its major trading partners.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-20 11:18:42|Editor: pengying

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A man sits outside Barbara Bush Library in Houston, the United States, April 18, 2018. Local people in Houston, fourth-most populous city in the United States, gathered at the city hall Thursday to remember former First Lady Barbara Bush who passed away Tuesday. (Xinhua/Steven Song)

HOUSTON, April 19 (Xinhua) -- Local people in Houston, fourth-most populous city in the United States, gathered at the city hall Thursday to remember former First Lady Barbara Bush who passed away Tuesday.

The former first lady died at her Houston home at the age of 92 after a long struggle with congestive heart failure and pulmonary disease.

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner and other local leaders offered words of comfort and remembrance for the lady, who was known to have advanced the cause of universal literacy and founded the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy.

"Barbara Bush knew that if you give a child a gift of learning, power to read, it is a gift that keeps on giving," said Turner. "Even though herself may not be physically present, the fact that she touched so many children's lives and taught them and encouraged them how to read means that she will live on for a long time."

The public can pay respects to Barbara Bush on Friday at St. Martin's Church, a few blocks from the home she and her husband, former President George Bush, built. A funeral is scheduled for Saturday at the same church.

Barbara Bush served as the first lady during her husband's presidency between 1989 and 1993. She is also the mother of former President George W. Bush, who served between 2001 and 2009.
Photo taken on April 15, 2018 shows Qal'a Ikhtiyar al-Din in Herat city, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in Afghanistan. (Xinhua/Rahmat Alizadah)

by Jawid Omid, Farid Behbud

HERAT, Afghanistan, April 18 (Xinhua) -- The Afghan government is determined to save the rich, historical sites and cultural facilities in the insurgency-hit country, an official told Xinhua during a recent interview.

The western Herat province with Herat city as its capital, 640 km west of the country's capital of Kabul, is home to a number of famous historical and cultural sites.

"We have had some successes in protecting and maintaining historical and cultural sites in Herat," Aria Raufian, head of Herat's Information and Culture Department, told Xinhua.

"And besides the government's efforts, the Agha Khan foundation (a non-governmental association) has also contributed to the protection of more than 52 sites in different parts of Herat, like the old city and the Qal'a Ikhtiyar al-Din or castle of Ikhtiyar al-Din."

"In addition, we have rebuilt some heritage sites such as the great Temple of Herat. In total about 3 million U.S. dollars have been spent on historical and cultural sites' protection and fortification in recent years in Herat," Raufian added.

Photo taken on April 15, 2018 shows Qal'a Ikhtiyar al-Din in Herat city, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in Afghanistan. (Xinhua/Rahmat Alizadah)

The official urged for more protection of archeological sites in the countryside.

"However, more efforts are needed for the preservation of rich Afghan cultural sites. If more urgent measures are not put in place to preserve the historical monuments and cultural heritages, we could lose major parts of our heritage, particularly in restive and insecure areas in the countryside," he noted.

The provincial government plans to protect, preserve and rebuild all of the cultural heritage sites in Herat in the upcoming years, said Raufian.

The comments came as the country marks the International Day for Monuments and Sites, which falls on Wednesday. The day is also known as the World Heritage Day and is observed by different types of activities, including visits to monuments and heritage sites, conferences, round table talks and media coverage around the world.

Since the fall of the Taliban regime, in addition to the Agha Khan Foundation and the government of Afghanistan, Italy and private investors have contributed to the rebuilding and protecting the cultural sites.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has also played a role in the preservation of cultural heritage sites across Afghanistan over the past 17 years, according to Raufian.

Herat is one of the most important destinations in Afghanistan for regional and international tourists, particularly religious tourists, but it is obvious that a lack of security remains a major problem.

In 2017, about 500 foreign tourists visited the cultural and historical heritage sites in Herat and more than 100,000 domestic tourists visited the city.

"We are planning to attract more than 2,000 tourists here from international and regional countries in 2018, which will be a great achievement," the official said.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-20 12:13:51|Editor: Chengcheng

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By Matthew Rusling

WASHINGTON, April 19 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Donald Trump has said he'd bring up Japan's sensitive abductees issue when he meets the Democratic People's Republic of Korea's (DPRK) leader in an upcoming historic meeting. It remains unknown what the outcome will be.

"I suspect Trump will raise the subject if there is a meeting. Of course his priority will be the three American hostages held by North Korea (DPRK)," said Douglas Paal, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"There have also been reports from North Korea (DPRK) that the regime believes the abductees question has been settled, so expectations for concrete results are low even though emotions still run high," Paal told Xinhua.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe concluded his two-day working visit to the United States on Wednesday. During a meeting with Trump, Abe scored a major win when Trump promised he'd bring up the issue during the upcoming historic meeting with DPRK leader Kim Jong-un.

The issue has been ongoing for some 40 years.

"Trump should raise the issue of Japanese abductees with Kim Jong-un, but in the context of a broader, lasting peace in the region," said Troy Stangarone, senior director at the Korea Economic Institute, a Washington-based non-profit policy research institution.

"While the focus of the upcoming talks will be denuclearization, if there is to be a sustainable peace in the region afterwards, North Korea (DPRK) will need to resolves issues such as the abductees in addition to denuclearizing," Stangarone told Xinhua.

Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Darrell West told Xinhua that it would not likely be difficult for the DPRK to address the abductees issue.

"It should be easy for North Korea (DPRK) to address the abductees issue. So I would anticipate progress there," he said.

"It is common during negotiations for each country to offer goodwill gestures that remove an impediment to good relations. This is a topic that should be simple to resolve because it will look like progress is being made and there are concrete benefits," he said.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-20 12:23:52|Editor: Chengcheng

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MANILA, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Filipino English language teachers Cresencia Mapalad and others are hopeful that they could land teaching jobs in China.

Mapalad told Xinhua in an interview that she got excited when President Rodrigo Duterte announced that China has opened its doors to Filipino English language teachers.

"I am excited to apply. I hope that there will be no age restrictions to applicants because I'm very interested in applying," said the 72-year-old English language teacher who is now sitting as the dean of the College of Education in Metro Manila College (MCM) in Quezon City.

Mapalad, who has a doctorate degree in education, has taught English in Samar State University in the central Philippines for decades. When she retired in 2011 at the age of 65, she applied at MCM.

For Mapalad, landing a teaching job in China means better pay and better life. In China, she said, her pay will definitely higher than what she is getting now. "Maybe three or four times my current salary."

Mapalad is paid 20,000 pesos (roughly 346 U.S. dollars) a month. Teachers fresh from college are paid 12,500 pesos (240 U.S. dollars). Teachers in public school get a little bit more than their counterparts in private schools, she said.

She said Filipino English language teachers have greater advantage than teachers from other Asian countries.

She said the Philippines is recognized around the world as one of the largest English-Speaking nations, with the majority of its population having at least some degree of fluency in the language.

"We are even better that the Americans because we strictly follow grammar."

Teofanes Pie, an English language professor at MCM, agrees with Mapalad. He said English has always been one of the country's official languages, and is widely spoken by millions of Filipinos.

"English is the primary medium of instruction in education in the Philippines, and is the language of commerce and law," Pie, 61, said in a separate interview. His current monthly salary is 13,000 pesos (roughly 250 U.S. dollars).

Pie has a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in education. With his degrees, Pie expressed optimism that he will get more if he is hired as an English language teacher in China. "Maybe I'll get 100,000 pesos (roughly 1,920 U.S. dollars) monthly salary."

Pie, who worked in the Middle East before finishing his college and post-graduate studies in the Philippines, said Chinese students will also like Filipino teachers more "because we are happy people."

"This is a good opportunity for Filipinos who wish to work abroad. Chinese people are eager to master the English language."

"We have an edge because of our proficiency in the English language. Also we have perseverance in good work, and we are known around the world as people who have initiative," Pie said.

Moreover, Pie said Filipinos are easier to understand when they speak the English language. "Unlike other Asian speakers, our English is not heavily accented," he said.

Both Mapalad and Pie said Filipinos have comparative advantage since American English is the language of instruction at virtually all Philippine institutions of higher learning. That is why Filipinos speak fluent English, they said.

Duterte is pleased that China is further opening its doors to Filipino English language teachers.

Upon his arrival from his participation in the Boao Forum for Asia in Hainan early this month, Duterte reported that nine business agreements have been signed during his third visit to China.

"These are projected to generate more than 10,000 jobs for our countrymen and women. Among these is the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on the employment of Filipino teachers of English language in China," Duterte said.

"This allows for the employment of 2,000 Filipino English language teachers starting this year and will be valid for two years, subject to renewal."

The document called the MOU on the Employment of Filipino Teachers of English Language in China was signed by Philippine Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III and Chinese Ambassador to the Philippines Zhao Jianhua.

"We both underscored the need for further intensified cooperation, trade and investments, tourism, agriculture, defense, science and technology and energy, among other things," Duterte said.

Duterte said his latest visit to China "underscores yet again the need for the Philippines to seek its destiny in Asia."

Philippine Ambassador to China Chito Sta. Romana broke the news to reporters in Hainan about China's plan to hire more English language teachers from the Philippines.

Sta. Romana said there are Filipino teachers currently working in China but they found the jobs on their own.

"There used to be a Chinese rule that excluded the Philippines as a legal source or as a source that they encouraged. They wanted to emphasize, you know, what they called native speakers but they have relaxed it now," Sta. Romana said.

Sta. Romana said the improved ties between the Philippines and China also played a role in the readiness of Beijing to hire more Filipino teachers.

Already, Duterte has instructed Bello to start the implementation of guidelines for the hiring of Filipino English teachers and for his part, Bello said, the bilateral agreement with China might be renewed after two years and outlines the salaries, work hours, benefits and other employment rules for Filipino workers.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-20 12:28:54|Editor: Chengcheng

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PHNOM PENH, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Cambodia on Friday launched the eight-year budget system reform strategy (2018-2025) with the aim of further enhancing the effectiveness of state budget management and reallocation for government's institutions and public investments.

Speaking at the launching ceremony here, Prime Minister Samdech Techo Hun Sen said the strategy was the backbone of the Public Finance Management Reform Program, which has been carried out since 2004.

"It is a tool for sustainably mobilizing national resources and reallocating them effectively and efficiently for development purposes," he said. "Thus, we have to harness this opportunity and create favorable condition to successfully implement this planned strategy following Cambodia's contexts."

Meanwhile, the prime minister lauded the country's hard-earned peace in the last two decades, saying peace and political stability are the prerequisite and necessary condition for macroeconomic stability and social development.

Cambodia had graduated from a low income to a lower-middle income country three years ago, he said, adding that the Southeast Asian nation was approaching the graduation from the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) status in the forthcoming future.

"With such a potential, Cambodia has been named a New Tiger of Asia," Hun Sen said.

He added that Cambodia had set a vision to become an upper-middle income country by 2030 and a high-income country by 2050.

According to Economy and Finance Minister Aun Pornmoniroth, state revenue had increased by more than twice in the last five years, from 2.26 billion U.S. dollars in 2013 to estimated 4.56 billion U.S. dollars in 2018.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-20 12:48:56|Editor: Chengcheng

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WASHINGTON, April 19 (Xinhua) -- Two police officers were killed in a gunfight Thursday in the U.S. state of Florida, according to local authorities.

The shooting took place near the intersection of State Road 26 and East Wade Street in Trenton City in Gilchrist County, the county's sheriff's office said in a statement.

A gunman shot at the two police officers, who were buying food, through a restaurant window. The gunman was also killed but the cause of his death was unrevealed, according to the authorities.

Local police have yet to identify a motive for the attack.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-20 13:29:02|Editor: ZX

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Chinese and Japanese delegates attend the ninth round of high-level consultations on maritime affairs in Sendai, Japan, April 19, 2018. China and Japan agreed to speed up preparations for launching an air and maritime contact mechanism in their ninth round of high-level consultations on maritime affairs held here from Thursday through Friday. (Xinhua/Ma Caoran)

SENDAI, Japan, April 20 (Xinhua) -- China and Japan agreed to speed up preparations for launching an air and maritime contact mechanism in their ninth round of high-level consultations on maritime affairs held here from Thursday through Friday.

Officials from the two countries' ministries on foreign affairs, defense, security, natural resources, environment, transportation, and agriculture and some other departments attended the talks.

The two sides held a plenary meeting on consultation mechanism and four working group meetings on politics and law, maritime defense, maritime law enforcement and security, as well as maritime economy.

The two sides exchanged views on issues related to the East China Sea and discussed ways of maritime cooperation.

They made further progress on negotiations about launching a maritime and aerial communication mechanism between their defense departments as soon as possible, and agreed to speed up preparations for launching the mechanism.

They also agreed to enhance defense exchanges to promote mutual trust and discussed concrete plans for such exchanges.

The Border Control Department of China's Ministry of Public Security and the Japan Coast Guard agreed to continue cooperation in cracking down on transnational crimes including smuggling, human smuggling and drug trafficking, and exchange visits between experts according to the meeting minutes signed by both sides.

China Coast Guard and Japan Coast Guard agreed to strengthen communication and cooperation between their maritime law enforcement departments.

The two sides decided to hold in Japan simultaneously in the later half of 2018 the second meeting of the China-Japan Experts Dialogue Platform on Marine Debris Cooperation and the second China-Japan Marine Debris Seminar, and to conduct a joint investigation on marine debris in the autumn of 2018.

The two sides welcomed the decision of their marine transportation departments to restart the China-Japan Shipping Policy Forum within the year, and agreed to continue to enhance cooperation on maritime affairs such as ship safety inspection and ship pollution prevention.

The two sides also held concrete discussions on an early signing of a bilateral maritime search and rescue agreement, and agreed to enhance cooperation in fishing industry to promote the stable and healthy development of the industry.

They further exchanged views on joint research on marine geology and agreed to enhance communication and mutual understanding in the area.

They also agreed to enhance communication on issues related to the principle of consensus on East China Sea issues, and agreed in principle to hold the tenth round of high level consultations on maritime affairs in China in the later half of this year.

The China-Japan high-level consultations on maritime affairs were set up in January, 2012 with the first round of talks held in May of the same year in Hangzhou in east China's Zhejiang province.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-20 13:49:06|Editor: Chengcheng

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HANGZHOU, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Alibaba Group Holding has acquired Hangzhou C-SKY Microsystems Co., Ltd., an integrated circuit design house, in a bid to increase its own chip-making capability, Alibaba said Friday.

Founded in 2001, Hangzhou-based C-SKY Microsystems develops embedded CPU and chip architecture. The company said it is the only embedded CPU volume provider in China with its own instruction set architecture.

"The acquisition is an important step for Alibaba's chip development," said Zhang Jianfeng, chief technology officer of Alibaba.

Alibaba said the purchase of C-SKY Microsystems will help unify the two companies' R&D capability amid China's campaign to gain self-reliance in key technology.

Alibaba has previously invested in five chip manufacturers, including U.S. AI chip designer Kneron and Barefoot Networks.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-20 13:54:07|Editor: Chengcheng

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TIANJIN, April 20 (Xinhua) -- North China's Tianjin Municipality saw PM2.5 plummet over the past six months thanks to effective pollution controls, local authorities said Friday.

The average density of PM2.5, fine particulate matter that causes smog, in Tianjin dropped to 63 micrograms per cubic meter between October and March, down 33.7 percent year on year, according to the city's environmental protection bureau.

The number of heavy pollution days decreased to 10 during the same period, down 71.4 percent year on year.

Yang Yong, an official with the bureau, said that Tianjin, which neighbors Beijing, recorded its best air quality since it started monitoring PM2.5 density.

The improvement was a result of a series of well-targeted measures, such as promoting clean energy heating, monitoring emissions from factories and demolition of coal-fired boilers.
WASHINGTON, April 19 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Navy chief on Thursday told Congress that a new U.S. strategy on Arctic operations is set to be published in the summer, in response to the melting of ice caps.

Navy Secretary Richard Spencer told reporters after a hearing at the Senate Committee on Armed Services that the Navy needed to rewrite its Arctic strategy from four years ago because global climate change has caused Arctic ice caps to melt.

"That gives rise to strategic changes. Waterways that are open ... continental shelves that are exposed, and the resources on those shelves. So there are strategic issues that arise from that shrinking of the icecap. And then there's this National Defense Strategy that's changed our focus as well. So it's really, from a number of perspectives, about time to do that again," said Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson, who accompanied Spencer.

During the hearing, Spencer also underscored that increasing Russian action in the Arctic region should be taken into account.

Russia is paving runways 12,000 feet (3.6 km) long in the name of building up search and rescue efforts, Spencer told Congress.

"We need to have presence up there," Spencer said.

Months after the Pentagon released a hawkish national defense strategy, the new Arctic policy is expected to follow the same trend.

The U.S. Coast Guard has already proposed arming icebreakers with anti-ship cruise missiles, while the Marine Corps said 300 marines are training in Norway to learn cold-weather combating.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-20 15:07:39|Editor: Chengcheng

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Egrets look after eggs at the Xiangshan Forest Park in Nanchang City, east China's Jiangxi Province, April 19, 2018. Hundreds of thousands of egrets have settled down at the park to spend their breeding season. (Xinhua/Wan Xiang)
Source: Xinhuanet| 2018-04-20 15:41:05|Editor: pengying

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Bill Poucher, executive chairman of International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) gives an interview at the "Exhibition of the Excellent Achievements of Foundertype" in Beijing, April 18, 2018. (Photo provided by the sponsor)

BEIJING, April 20 (Xinhuanet) -- "I would tell the young talents from China and abroad to pursue excellence, to empower people and to build a better world for others", said Bill Poucher, executive chairman of International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) Wednesday in an interview with Xinhuanet.

"ICPC is about telling the story of a young generation of problem solvers", said Poucher when visiting the "Exhibition of the Excellent Achievements of Foundertype", a sideline event for 2018 ICPC World Finals in Beijing.

Poucher firmly believes that it is not the faculty or administration, but the students that push the standards of science increasingly higher year after year through competition, just like what the athletes do in the Olympic Games.

"Through ICPC, we will not only affect the capability of the industry, but also improve the quality of life in general. It's a win-win situation, "said Poucher.

He also spoke highly of the innovation industry in China, "China is loaded with talents, great universities and great industry. The opportunity to build on that is huge".
Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-20 15:44:28|Editor: ZX

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BEIJING, April 20 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese Minister of Industry and Information Technology said Friday concerns over the "Made in China 2025" plan are unnecessary and China will further open up its manufacturing sector.

"We are committed to ensuring that the 'Made in China 2025' plan and other relevant policies are applied equally to all enterprises in China, both Chinese and foreign enterprises," according to a signed article by Miao Wei published in the China Daily.

Unveiled in May 2015, the plan aims to boost manufacturing innovation in China and promote development in 10 key sectors, including robotics, aerospace equipment and new materials.

With the rise of the Chinese manufacturing sector, some people worry that the "Made in China 2025" plan may only benefit Chinese enterprises and create obstacles to foreign companies, according to the article titled "Further Opening up of Manufacturing to Promote Global Growth."

There is also concern that the spillover effect that could arise from structural problems, such as excess capacity, could have a negative impact on other countries' industries, he said.

"These concerns are unnecessary," he said.

Thanks to the implementation of the plan, China has enhanced synergies in manufacturing development strategies and promoted cooperation with Germany, France and other countries through multilateral or bilateral mechanisms, he said.

By investing overseas, Chinese manufacturing companies have also brought funds, technologies and products to the target countries and contributed to the development of the local economy by creating jobs and paying taxes, producing win-win results, he said.

Official data showed that Chinese companies' accumulated investment in overseas trade cooperative zones hit 30.7 billion U.S. dollars, which generated 2.42 billion U.S. dollars in tax and fees, and created 258,000 local jobs by the end of 2017.

The scope of the opening up of China's manufacturing sector continues to increase, according to the minister. The recently revised Catalogue for the Guidance of Foreign Investment Industries (2017) has substantially reduced the access restrictions for foreign investment.

In terms of manufacturing products, 22 of the 31 categories, 167 of the 179 sub-categories, and 585 of the 609 branch-categories are fully open to foreign investment, accounting for 71 percent, 93.3 percent and 96.1 percent, respectively, of the categories.

China will implement its commitments to further open up such sectors as automobiles, shipbuilding and aircraft manufacturing by easing restrictions over the proportion of foreign equity as early as possible, especially in the auto sector, Miao said.

The country will also improve alignment with international economic and trade rules, and provide foreign investors with more and better opportunities, he added.

"China's manufacturing industry has been and always will be upholding the fundamental principle of mutual benefit and open cooperation," Miao said.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-20 15:54:31|Editor: pengying

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SAN FRANCISCO, April 19 (Xinhua) -- A U.S. privacy advocacy group Thursday urged the tech giant Google to stop funding a campaign that opposes a proposed ballot initiative on giving consumers more control over their data.

The group, Californians for Consumer Privacy, also called on Google to stop tracking children on Android applications hosted by the Google Play Store.

Google has joined major U.S. telecom operators and Internet service providers such as AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Facebook in donating to a 1-million-U.S.-dollar campaign opposing the ballot measure for greater consumer privacy.

"The fact that Google did not protect the privacy of children who use their apps is chilling and beyond disturbing," Alastair Mactaggart, chair of Californians for Consumer Privacy, said in a statement.

Mactaggart is also the chief proponent of the California Consumer Privacy Act, a statewide ballot proposition that will appear on the November 2018 ballot for establishing extensive consumer privacy rights.

The Act would require companies to disclose upon request what types of personal information they collect about their users and whether they have sold it. It also would allow customers to opt out of having their data sold.

If the proposed measure passes in November, consumers in California could sue both digital and brick-and-mortar businesses for security breaches of data, even if they could not prove they were harmed by the breach.

There is an acute need for real accountability measures for large corporations in order to ensure the safety, security and privacy of consumers, Mactaggart said.

Last Wednesday, Facebook announced that it will no longer channel funds into an effort that opposed giving social media users more control over their personal data.

Facebook has been grilled for the past weeks over a data scrape of its 87 million users by British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica during the 2016 presidential elections.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has apologized and took responsibility for the data breach scandal.

Mactaggart said Google should act like Facebook and drop its further funding of opposition to the initiative for more consumer rights.

Californians for Consumer Privacy said a study by the University of California showed that a majority of Google Play Store applications studied "are potentially in violation" of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act 1998, which bans the collection of personal information for children under 13 in the United States.

Opponents of the ballot, including the California Chamber of Commerce, said the measure would hurt California's economy.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-20 16:29:37|Editor: Lu Hui

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The Peace House, a South Korean building at the border village of Panmunjom in the demilitarized zone (DMZ), is seen in this picture taken on April 18, 2018. The summit between South Korean President Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong Un, top leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), is scheduled for April 27 at the Peace House. (Xinhua/Wang Jingqiang)

SEOUL, April 20 (Xinhua) -- South Korea and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) opened their first-ever hotline of direct dialogue between the leaders of the two sides ahead of the inter-Korean summit, the Blue House of South Korea said Friday.

Yun Kun-young, director for the Blue House's government situation room, told a press briefing that the connection of "the historic telephone line" between the leaders of the two Koreas was completed.

The phone line linked the Blue House with the State Affairs Commission of the DPRK. The phone for direct call to top DPRK leader Kim Jong Un was installed on the working desk inside the office of South Korean President Moon Jae-in. The DPRK hotline phone was also placed in Kim's office.

Working-level officials from the two sides made a test call for over four minutes at about 3:41 p.m. local time (0641 GMT). It had a good connection on the hotline, which Yun likened to hearing the call right in the next door.

Moon and Kim agreed to have their first conversation via the hotline before holding their first summit meeting on April 27 in the border village of Panmunjom.

It marked the first time since the 1950-1953 Korean War ended in armistice that the two Koreas linked the hotline for direct dialogue between respective leaders.

Concerned South Korean agencies planned to hold a meeting in Panmunjom Saturday to discuss security services for Moon during the upcoming summit, Yun said.

A separate meeting of the presidential committee to prepare for the third-ever inter-Korean summit will be held in Panmunjom next week, he added.

The first and second inter-Korean summits were held in Pyongyang in 2000 and 2007, respectively.

The third summit is set to be held at the Peace House, a South Korean building in Panmunjom on April 27.
JAKARTA, April 20 (Xinhua) -- A helicopter crashed in Marowali Regency of Central Sulawesi province on Friday, leaving one dead, nine wounded, including six Chinese nationals, officials said.

"All the six passengers of the helicopters are the citizens of China," spokesman of the Transport Ministry Bambang Ervan told Xinhua via phone.

An employee of the company operating the chopper was killed in the incident. The pilot and co-pilot as well as another worker of the firm were among the injured, national disaster management agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho told Xinhua in a text message.
JAKARTA, April 20 (Xinhua) -- A helicopter crashed on Friday in Marowali Regency of Indonesia's Central Sulawesi province, leaving one dead and nine injuried including six Chinese nationals, officials said.

"Based on a manifest, all the six passengers of the helicopters are Chinese nationals," spokesman for the transport ministry Bambang Ervan told Xinhua via telephone.

The accident killed an employee of the company operating the helicopter, PT IMIP, and wounded the pilot, co-pilot and another worker of the company, spokesman for the national disaster management agency Sutopo Purwo Nugroho told Xinhua in a text message.

After leaving a heliport of the company, the helicopter return to the base. While trying to land, it hit the two employees, killing one of them and wounding the other, said Sutopo.

The six Chinese nationals, the pilot and the co-pilot have been evacuated safely and rushed into a health clinic of PT IMIP for medical treatment before they were shifted to the General Hospital of Marowali, the spokesman said.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-20 17:47:51|Editor: ZX

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Chinese Vice Premier Han Zheng, also member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, makes an inspection of the Ministry of Finance and presides over a symposium, in Beijing, capital of China, on April 19, 2018. (Xinhua/Ding Lin)

BEIJING, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Vice Premier Han Zheng has called for efforts to implement proactive fiscal policy and win the "three tough battles" of preventing financial risks, reducing poverty and tackling pollution.

Han, also a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, made the remarks during an inspection of the Ministry of Finance on Thursday.

Han urged the ministry to better implement the proactive fiscal policy as well as measures to cut taxes and fees, and accelerate budget spending to ensure stable economic development.

Efforts should be taken to defuse risks from local government debt, enhance financial input in targeted poverty reduction and pollution control, and make the use of funds more efficient, he said.

The vice premier stressed efforts to push forward supply-side structural reform, promote innovation-driven development and high-quality development as well as ensure people's livelihood.

The ministry should also move forward reform of the financial and taxation system, he said.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-20 17:57:54|Editor: pengying

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GUIYANG, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Two giant pandas that have returned from Japan and Spain respectively will meet the public in southwest China's Guizhou Province.

The two males "Haibin" and "Xingbao" will meet fans Sunday at Qianlingshan Park in Guiyang, capital of Guizhou, according to park employees.

The pandas arrived in the park more than a week ago, 20 years after pandas were introduced to the park.

"Haibin" is a twin born in Japan in 2010, while "Xingbao" was born in Spain in 2013. The pandas will stay in Guiyang for three years of "scientific education."

"There is plenty of food for the pandas in Guiyang," said Li Da, head of the park. "We have arranged a team of 37 people to take care of them 24-7."

Guizhou currently has four giant pandas. The other two are in a local wildlife park.
JAKARTA, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Young athletes of Indonesian traditional martial art, Pencak Silat, have targeted to be the champion in the World Junior Pencak Silat tournament in Thailand this month, a senior official disclosed here on Friday.

The tournament is scheduled from April 23 to 29 in Songkhla of Thailand, according to Indonesian youth and sport ministry.

"Indonesian team must set the champion target as an effort to bring back the victory of Pencak Silat as the country's traditional sport," said Raden Isnanta, senior official at the ministry.

He reminded the athletes not to underestimate opponents during the tournament which will be participated by martial art athletes from 31 countries and regions .

Indonesia will send as many as 17 young martial art athletes to compete in the third World Junior Pencak Silat tournament, said Banny Soemarsono, deputy chairman of Indonesian pencak silat association.

The Indonesian squad will participate in 17 events in the tournament, he added.
NAIROBI, April 20 (Xinhua) -- More and more Kenyan youth and budding entrepreneurs are studying Chinese in the hope the language will open new opportunities, experts told Xinhua during an interview to mark the UN Chinese Language Day on Friday.

Franklin Asira, Chairman of Sino Africa Cultural Exchange Association that was recently launched in Nairobi, said that uptake of Chinese language in Kenya will accelerate in light of blossoming economic and cultural ties between Nairobi and Beijing.

"The Chinese language is spoken by one third of the global population and I see it spreading fast in Kenya and the entire African continent," said Asira.

"It is a language that will open doors to Kenyans who have embraced it with passion," he added.

The computer engineering major studied at two universities in Beijing in the late 1980s, where his mastery of spoken and written Chinese language was refined.

Asira said he was optimistic that the uptake of Chinese language in Kenyan and African academic institutions could soon eclipse other foreign languages, given Beijing's expanding footprint in the continent's socio-economic and cultural spheres.

"Chinese investments in Kenya are growing and will create jobs for people who understand and can speak the language. There will be job openings across East Africa for locals who have studied Chinese language," Asira told Xinhua.

He noted that Africa's learning institutions are keen on introducing Chinese language in their curriculum as Beijing becomes the continent's leading source of trade and investments.

"African colleges are teaching Chinese language and its acceptance is wide. I'm confident the uptake of Chinese language will grow," said Asira.

Kenya's four fully fledged Confucius Institutes that are domiciled in the country's oldest public universities have provided a platform for the country's youth to study mandarin at basic and advanced levels.

Xiao Shan, director of University of Nairobi's Confucius Institute, said the enthusiasm by Kenyan youth to master the Chinese language and culture is unmatched in the region.

"Since coming here, I have met many Kenyan students and most of them love Chinese language. Our students want to master the Chinese language in the hope it will enhance their job prospects," said Xiao.

She revealed the Confucius Institute at one of Kenya's oldest universities has enrolled over 5,000 students with its activities reaching about 10,000 locals, and plans are in the pipeline to introduce mandarin classes on satellite campuses.

Kenyan youth have developed a passion for the Chinese language, arts and culture given the positive contribution Beijing is making in their country.

Leah Adhiambo Ombuor, a 21-year-old student at the University of Nairobi, said enrolling for a certificate course in mandarin eight months ago was informed by her love for China's rich culture.

"I feel motivated to study Chinese language and dance. It is all about passion. I see myself becoming a translator or a Chinese language teacher in future," said Ombuor.

Mwika Kiarie, an anthropologist major at the University of Nairobi who has also enrolled for a certificate course in Chinese language, hopes to become a bridge for Sino-Kenyan relations in diverse spheres.

"I look forward to becoming the bridge between Chinese and Kenyan business people through performing tasks like translation, logistics and even humanitarian affairs," Kiarie told Xinhua.

He added that a major in anthropology has increased his desire to master foreign languages and cultures.

Chinese entrepreneurs are promoting the study of mandarin to Kenyan children and youth through the establishment of learning facilities in major cities.

Liu Yun, the Director of Nairobi-based China Kenya Cultural education Center, said that Chinese language courses that are affordable and tailor made for local youth have gained popularity.

Kenyan children and youth are interested in learning the Chinese language, said Liu, noting that Chinese dance, martial arts and musical instruments have struck a chord with them.

"We also want more adults to learn Chinese language and improve their chances of getting a job," she added.
SEOUL, April 20 (Xinhua) -- The Blue House of South Korea has been busily but shrewdly preparing for the upcoming summit with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), with just a week left to hold the historic third-ever meeting between leaders of the two sides.

The presidential office said Friday that it has opened the first-ever hotline of direct dialogue between leaders of the two Koreas, through which working-level officials made a test call for minutes earlier in the day.

It marked the first time since the 1950-1953 Korean War ended that the two sides established the hotline for leaders. To install the hotline, the two sides had met twice for working-level dialogues.

The hotline phones were placed inside the offices of South Korean President Moon Jae-in and top DPRK leader Kim Jong Un, enabling the two leaders to make a phone call at any time under emergency situations.

Moon and Kim have planned to have their first-ever conversation via the hotline next week before meeting face-to-face on April 27 at the Peace House, a South Korean building in the border village of Panmunjom.

Kim will become the first DPRK leader to step onto the South Korean territory since the Korean War ended with no signing of peace treaty. The Korean Peninsula remains technically at war, banning people of the two Koreas from visiting and contacting each other.

Local media speculations estimated that Kim would be greeted by Moon right in front of a concrete slab between blue buildings inside Panmunjom, which actually serves an inter-Korean border dividing the two Koreas.

During the working-level talks between the two sides on Wednesday to discuss security, protocol and media coverage for the summit, Seoul and Pyongyang agreed to live broadcast the Moon-Kim meeting from the very first scene in which the two leaders shake hands.

The two sides planned to rehearse the upcoming summit, respectively, next week as renovation works of the Peace House, which started from April 6, are scheduled to end Friday.

The South Korean side determined the list of officials who will accompany President Moon to the summit. It includes Im Jong-seok, chief of staff for the president; Chung Eui-yong, Moon's national security advisor; Suh Hoon, chief of the National Intelligence Service (NIS); and ministers of unification, defense, and foreign affairs.

On the key dialogue agenda for the third summit would be the denuclearized Korean Peninsula as the DPRK leader expressed his commitment to the nuclear disarmament.

According to a joint press release announced in early March after the visit by Moon's special envoys to Pyongyang for meeting with the DPRK leader, Pyongyang has no reason to possess its nuclear program if its security is guaranteed and military threats toward it are removed.

President Moon said Thursday that the DPRK was expressing its willingness for a complete denuclearization, noting that it would not be much difficult to reach an agreement in principle, among others, on the denuclearization and normalized relations between the DPRK and the United States through the inter-Korean and DPRK-U.S. summits.

Ending the war was forecast to be another main agenda at the summit as the Blue House confirmed its review over ways to switch the armistice agreement into a peace regime on the peninsula.

The three-year Korean War was paused by the armistice agreement. The Blue House said three- or four-way agreement would be possible to settle the issue.

According to the joint declaration released after the second inter-Korean summit in 2007, the two sides agreed to cooperate in and push for declaring an end to the war by holding a meeting among leaders of three or four nations directly concerned.

The ongoing developments are in line with China's proposal of a dual-track approach to the denuclearization talks on the one hand and efforts to establish a peace regime on the peninsula on the other hand.

A dual suspension, the other initiative offered by China to resolve the peninsula issues, is being unfolded. It requires the DPRK to halt nuclear and missile activities in exchange for the suspension of large-scale U.S.-South Korea war games.

The joint annual military exercises between South Korea and the United States were reduced in scale and shortened in period this year, while the DPRK paused its nuclear and ballistic missile tests amid a sudden period of detente.

The detente started with inter-Korean talks to discuss the DPRK's dispatch of athletes, artists and political delegations to the South Korea-hosted Winter Olympics in February.
HARARE, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Zimbabwean Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Mines and Energy has summoned former president Robert Mugabe to appear before it to explain his claim that more than 15 billion U.S. dollars worth of diamonds had been siphoned out of the country.

On the eve of his 92nd birthday in 2016, Mugabe said in a televised interview that some companies had over the years exploited the country's diamonds with little benefit accruing to Zimbabweans.

He is expected to give oral evidence before the committee on May 9, chairperson Temba Mliswa told State media.

The Herald reported Friday that Mliswa also said former vice president Joice Mujuru would also appear before the committee to explain her allege links to diamond mining in the Chiadzwa fields.

"We met today (Thursday) as a committee and resolved that we invite former president Mugabe to our committee to explain the disappearance of the 15 billion dollars worth of diamonds," he said.
KAMPALA, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Uganda is set to hire at least 200 medical personnel from Cuba to work in public hospitals in rural areas, a top government official said Friday.

Sarah Opendi, minister of state for health in charge of general duties, told Xinhua that an agreement is being reached between the East African country and authorities in Havana to import medical specialists and consultants to work in regional government hospitals, especially those shunned by local doctors.

"The discussions and plans to bring the Cuban specialists are being finalized. We shall submit a formal report to the committee (Parliamentary Health Committee) with all the details," said Opendi.

In November last year, Uganda's ministry of health mooted the idea to hire Cuban medical personnel during the doctors' strike following the government failure to respond to their calls for a salary rise and better working conditions in public hospitals.

The doctors under their umbrella organization, Uganda Medical Association, also demanded the government to meet their demands to improve pay, address lack of drugs and medical supplies in health centers so that they can work better.

The three-week nationwide industrial action paralyzed health service provision as doctors and medical interns stayed away from their duty stations.

The government later agreed to increase their pay and also address the concerns raised.
MOSCOW, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin is ready to meet his U.S. counterpart Donald Trump at the invitation of the United States, but Moscow is waiting for a detailed proposal, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Friday.

Trump proposed a meeting with Putin at the White House in a phone conversation on March 20, Lavrov recalled in an interview with Russia Today published on the Russian Foreign Ministry's website, adding that Moscow hopes Trump will give specifics on his invitation.

Trump told reporters on the same day of the phone call that he intended to meet Putin "in the not too distant future."

However, Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said earlier this month that the prospects of organizing the meeting have not been discussed since then.

A new round of U.S. sanctions against Russia and the recent U.S.-led missile strikes on Syria have added uncertainty to the possible Putin-Trump meeting.

As for the risk of a military confrontation between Russia and the United States, Lavrov said in Friday's interview that he is absolutely confident that Putin and Trump will not allow an armed conflict to happen.

He said Russia has noted that Trump expressed willingness on Twitter and other occasions to solve problems and mend relations with Russia. "It's better than not having those," Lavrov said.
BANGKOK, April 20 (Xinhua) -- The Election Commission of Thailand (ECT) said on Friday that it approved the popular group of "Future Forward Party" and four others to set up political parties to compete in the coming general election.

However, before finally becoming legalized political parties, these political groups need to collect 1 million baht (31,900 U.S. dollars) and convene the first meeting of no less than 250 members within 180 days.

And they also need to ask permission from the ruling National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) led by Thai Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha to organize the first meeting.

Jarungvit Phumma, acting secretary-general of ECT, said on Friday that the ECT had approved 20 groups out of 99 groups to move on along the registration of new political parties.

"For the first meeting, it is up to the NCPO to decide whether these meetings could actually be held," Jarungvit added.

For the other 79 groups, the acting secretary-general said some of them need to submit more documents to the Election Commission.

The group that won most attention since the Thai government opened for new political party registration is the "Future Forward Party" group led by autoparts billionaire Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, and Thammasat University law lecturer Piyabutr Saengkanokkul.

"It is the first good news after we started to register the party," Piyabutr said in a video on Friday, adding that NCPO may not hinder them from holding the first meeting, which they already applied to hold on May 27 to elect the whole leadership and decide their political goals, rules, and etc., according to the Thai law.

Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, 39, executive vice president of Thai Summit Group, an auto parts giant in Southeast Asia, launched the "Future Forward Party" on March 15 with Piyabutr and some other 20 activists and social campaigners.
Photo taken on Jan. 9, 2017 shows the 19th berth of East Africa's largest port Mombasa Port in Mombasa, Kenya. (Xinhua/Sun Ruibo)

KAMPALA, April 20 (Xinhua) -- World Bank has raised Africa's economic growth rate to 3.1 percent in 2018 on account of the region rebounding after three years of slowdown due to the collapse in global commodity prices.

The Bank in its Africa's Pulse, a biannual publication, released on Wednesday said the economic growth is projected to firm to 3.6 percent in 2019 and 3.7 percent in 2020.

The projected growth is expected to attract more Foreign Direct Investment in the region by top developing economies like China and the developed economies, resulting in increased volume of trade, according to the report.

China is a top foreign investor in Africa while at the same time providing finances to infrastructure projects.

World Bank says the forecasts are predicated on the expectations that oil and metals prices will remain stable, expansion in global trade will stay robust, and external financial market conditions will continue to be supportive.

The Bank, however, warns that structural constraints will prevent a faster pick-up in GDP growth in the region without renewed progress in structural reform.

In a televised news conference in about 15 countries late on Wednesday, Albert Zeufack, the Bank's Chief Economist for Sub-Saharan Africa, said he hopes that governments will implement reforms to address macroeconomic imbalances and boost investment.

"Growth has rebounded in Sub-Saharan Africa, but not fast enough. We are still far from pre-crisis growth levels," Zeufack said.

"African governments must speed up and deepen macroeconomic and structural reforms to achieve high and sustained levels of growth."

Zeufack said the moderate pace of economic expansion reflects the gradual pick-up in growth in the region's three largest economies, Nigeria, Angola and South Africa.

Elsewhere, economic activity will pick up in some metals exporters, as mining production and investment rise.

Among the non-resource intensive countries, Zeufack said solid growth, supported by infrastructure investment, will continue in the West African Economic and Monetary Union led by Cote d'Ivoire and Senegal.

Growth prospects have strengthened in most of East Africa, owing to improving agriculture sector growth following droughts and a rebound in private sector credit growth. In Ethiopia, according to the Bank, growth will remain high, as government-led infrastructure investment continues.

The Bank said for the projected growth to happen, governments will have to institute structural and social reforms by embracing technology and leveraging innovation.

The governments need to increase the access to electricity to their citizens and make it reliable in a bid to boost productivity across and within sectors.

Punam Chuhan-Pole, the Bank's Lead Economist and author of the report, cautioned that for many African countries, the economic recovery is vulnerable to fluctuations in commodity prices and production.

"This underscores the need for countries to build resilience by pushing diversification strategies to the top of the policy agenda," she said.

While the economic outlook for the region is brighter than it has been in the past three years, Punam warned that public debt relative to GDP is rising, and the composition of debt has changed, as countries have shifted away from traditional concessional sources of financing toward more market-based ones.

She said higher debt burdens and the increasing exposure to market risks raise concerns about debt sustainability. She noted that 18 countries were classified as high-risk of debt distress in March 2018, compared with eight in 2013.

This issue of Africa's Pulse has a special focus on the role of innovation in accelerating electrification in Sub-Saharan Africa, and its implications of achieving inclusive economic growth and poverty reduction.

The report finds that achieving universal electrification in Sub-Saharan Africa will require a combination of solutions involving the national grid, as well as "mini-grids" and "micro-grids" serving small concentrations of electricity users, and off-grid home-scale systems.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-20 19:43:22|Editor: Yurou

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ANKARA, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Turkey's tourism sector is heading for a fast recovery in 2018, as early booking figures and demand from abroad suggest that the country could close this year with record 40 million tourists and over 30 billion U.S. dollars in tourism revenue.

"We have managed to overcome unfavorable odds and we are very hopeful this year," said President Recep Tayyip Erdogan during an international meeting of investors in Istanbul.

Erdogan indicated that the adverse effects of a failed military coup in July 2016 have now been cleared off in Turkey.

Turkey welcomed 3 million foreign visitors in the first two months of 2018 during its winter period, according to the Culture and Tourism Ministry. "Demands from Germany and Russia, Turkey's main tourism markets, are very positive," said a statement.

The Turkish Travel Agencies Association announced optimistically that as a result of a favorable demand from abroad this year, the sector expects to see 40 million tourists, an all-time high.

Turkey hosted 36.8 million foreigners in 2014 and 36.3 million in 2015, but the figure decreased sharply to 25.3 million in 2016 then rose again to 32.4 million last year, according to Turkish Statistical Institute's data.

Deputy Culture and Tourism Minister Huseyin Yayman said Turkey had entered a period of stagnation in the tourism sector after the botched coup in 2016, but the sector improved in 2017. "Turkey's 2018 target is 40 million foreign tourists," Yayman said.

Last week, Hotel Association of Turkey Chairman Timur Bayindir said Turkey expects to see an increase of 20 percent in the number of Russian tourists coming to the country in 2018. According to the German tourism operator TUI, early bookings by Russians for the summer season in Turkey rose by 150 percent.

Culture and Tourism Minister Numan Kurtulmus said that Turkey's 2023 targets, the centennial of the Turkish Republic, for the tourism sector are 50 million tourists and 50 billion dollars, which are rather ambitious.

"Turkey left behind two years of setback in the tourism sector between 2015 and 2016, which were negatively affected by the crisis between Turkey and Russia after the downing of a Russian fighter jet, the failed July 15 attempt, and terrorist attacks targeting Turkey's touristic regions," said the minister to professionals.

Kurtulmus noted that the number of German tourists was expected to increase between 50 and 100 percent this summer. "Around 5 million German tourists will visit Turkey this year," he said.

The number of Russians tourists is expected to be around 6 million this season, and booking data was quite high since last winter.

Germany and Russia are the most important countries for the Turkish tourism from which Turkey receives the most tourists each year, especially for the resorts located on the sunny beaches of the Mediterranean.

However, data showed a sharp decline in spending by Russian and European tourists compared with previous years mainly because Turkish tour operators are offering bargain deals and packages. The decline of the Turkish Lira against the euro and the U.S. dollar in recent months is another reason.

Diversity in tourism is an important goal of Turkish governmental authorities, offering alternative traveling routes and destinations.

Health tourism is also on the rise in the last decade in Turkey, where some treatment, such as eye and heart surgeries, cancer treatments and hair transplants, can be obtained more quickly and often at less expense.

Turkey is ranked fourth in the global list for healthcare tourism in terms of the number of patients it serves, and third in revenues from healthcare tourism. In 2017, Turkey saw 750,000 such tourists, generating some 1.7 billion dollars.

Several government schemes have also been put into motion such as the "Year of Troy" to commemorate the ancient site in northwestern Turkey, detailed in Homer's epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey.

There are a slew of events planned to promote the site located in the Canakkale Province where also a museum has been constructed.

Also China, of which political, economic and cultural ties with Turkey have enhanced considerably, has declared 2018 "Year of Turkey," encouraging its citizens to visit Turkey.

Kurtulmus paid a visit to Beijing this week to discuss events programmed in the context, and stated that "China will become one of Turkey's biggest partners in tourism" and Turkey expects 500,000 Chinese tourists this year.

He added that Turkish Airlines has also made arrangements in order to increase flights between Turkey and China.

Besides the sea and beach, Turkey offers several other vacation destinations, such as the central Capadocia region with it's fairy chimneys, colorful values, and ancient churches carved from rock. Capadocia is well known around the world as one of the best places to fly with hot air balloons.

"This season is more promising than the two previous years, but we still haven't managed to reach levels of 2014," a tourism professional Serkan Sonmez said.
MADRID, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Spanish separatist group ETA on Friday apologized for "the damage caused" in the course of its "armed trajectory" ahead of its dissolution next month, the Basque newspaper Gara reported.

During ETA's campaign for the independence of the Basque region in northern Spain and southwest France between 1968 and 2010, nearly 800 people were killed.

The apology came 24 hours after it was confirmed that the group would be officially dissolved on May 5 at an event in the French town of Bayonne. The dissolution will put a definitive end to 50 years of conflict.

In a communique, ETA said its irresponsible actions harmed citizens and caused irreparable damage. "We apologize to these people and their families... We are truly sorry," the statement read.

ETA was founded in 1959 during the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco as a pro-Basque cultural organization, but evolved into a paramilitary organization with wide roots throughout Basque society.
BRUSSELS, April 20 (Xinhua) -- The unilateral moves taken by the United States to impose steep tariffs on imports have raised world wide concerns over a potential impact to global trade.

What do Europeans think of U.S. President Donald Trump's protectionist measures? The following is highlights of remarks from officials and scholars in Europe.

EUROPEAN UNION

Calling the behavior "pure protectionism", European Union (EU)'s trade commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom told reporters in Strasbourg that U.S. tariffs imposed on steel and aluminum are distorting global trade and may undermine global economic growth.

"We are seeing a recovery and a potential growth in trade and global growth, but it is threatened by these tariffs," Malmstrom said.

GERMANY

Trade balance is driven by the markets, not by governments, said Chinese Ambassador to Germany Shi Mingde, adding that "Trade war is the Pandoras Box, which could only lead to losses for the U.S., China, Europe and the whole world."

Imposing new tariffs is "an economic dead end," said Martin Wansleben, chief executive of the Association of German Chambers of Commerce and Industry.

"The economies of China and the United States have been intertwined heavily for a long time, so it's impossible to introduce any protective trade measures without hurting the two economies or the world economy," Wansleben pointed out.

"A significant cooling of global and German economic momentum would be the inevitable result of an escalation of the international trade conflict," Marcel Fratzscher, president of the Berlin-based German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), was cited by local newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as saying.

SWITZERLAND

U.S. steel and aluminum trade tariffs imposed on some countries with exemptions for others will not effectively deal with market overcapacity and can undermine the global trade system, harming business competitiveness, said Arancha Gonzalez, head of the International Trade Center (ITC).

"We are moving from a trading system based on rules to one based on deals. Negotiated exemptions from the proposed tariffs represent another step in that direction," said Gonzalez.

"WTO members should solve their trade problems and disputes within a multilateral framework," Liang Guoyong, an economic officer at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), told Xinhua.

"As shown repeatedly in the past, we need global solutions to global problems," said Angel Gurria, secretary-general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

FRANCE

"The economies are too interdependent," said Jean Francois Di Meglio, president of the French think tank Asia Centre, in an interview with Xinhua.

The expert further said Trump "cannot allow himself not to have an agreement with China."

NORWAY

"A global trade war and increasing protectionism are the last thing the world needs now," said Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg, warning Trump's protectionist measures might lead to "regression, war and conflict."

FINLAND

Ironically, the possible trade war "could hurt the United States more than it hurts China," said Carl Fey, a professor of international trade with the School of Business in Aalto University.

Washington should have a more active policy to help them reposition so as to succeed instead of the "knee-jerk reaction to start a trade war with China," Carl said.
NAIROBI, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Kenyan police on Friday shot dead seven suspected gangsters in Nairobi's Kitusuru residential estate following a botched robbery.

Nairobi County Police Commander Joseph Ole Tito said the seven were intercepted while planning to ambush a construction firm manager who was going to pay his workers at the site.

Ole Tito said they recovered a Berreta pistol and two home-made ones from the suspects who had by then accessed the targeted compound.

He said they had prior intelligence on the planned raid on the home before they laid an ambush flooring the seven. "We have received a tip from some members of the public and moved swiftly to thwart their plan," he said.

Neighbors said they heard a barrage of gunfire for almost five minutes before it fell silent. "We later learnt some people had been killed as they tried to get into a home for a robbery mission," said a resident.

The police sources said the same gang had been linked to similar robberies reported in parts of Karen area, a leafy suburb in Nairobi. Karen has been facing a series of attacks by thugs targeting cash, gold and other valuables.

This is the latest shooting incident in the last weeks and takes to more than 20, the number of suspects so far killed by police in the last weeks in the war on crime.

The police say most of these suspects behind a series of robberies in Nairobi and its environs are young men aged between 18 and 25.
MOSCOW, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Russia will soon present evidence that the Syrian air defense forces shot down more than half of the missiles fired in the recent U.S.-led strikes, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Friday.

Syrian forces used Soviet-era air defense systems and fired 112 surface-to-air missiles to repel the U.S.-led strikes, destroying 71 out of the 103 missiles launched by the Western coalition last week, according to the Russian Defense Ministry. [ However, the Pentagon said the missiles "successfully hit every target".

"Our general staff has a very clear picture (of the strikes). We watched everything happening in real time. We are ready to be responsible for the statistics that our military provided," Lavrov said in an interview with Russia Today.

He asked the United States and its allies to prove that their all missiles hit the targets.

Lavrov also said that earlier, Russia had decided not to supply its modern S-300 air defense system to Syria following the request of Western countries, which said the move could destabilize the situation, although the system is purely defensive.

"Now we have no such moral obligation," he remarked.

The S-300 system was first deployed in the former Soviet Union in 1979 and has been upgraded several times since then to become one of the most advanced air defense systems in the world.

The United States, along with Britain and France, launched joint airstrikes on military targets in Syria on April 14 for the Bashar al-Assad government's alleged use of chemical weapons in Douma, the last rebel-held town in Eastern Ghouta near the Syrian capital, earlier this month.

Syria denies the allegation, which has not been independently investigated and verified.
JAKARTA, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Officials of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea (PNG) on Friday signed a cooperation agreement on protecting and controlling cattle and food plantations aimed at expanding food trade between the two countries, Indonesian officials said.

The agreement was signed between Head of Quarantine Section at Indonesian Agriculture Ministry Banun Harpini and her PNG counterpart Joel Alu in Bali.

Harpini said that the signing would boost trade between Indonesia and PNG, particularly in agricultural commodities.

Banun said the cooperation would further assure the security of agricultural products traded between the two nations.

"We estimated that after the signing, trade between the two countries may double in the following year," she said.

Two-way trade on agricultural commodities between the two countries stood at 2.5 trillion rupiah (about 178 million U.S. Dollars) throughout last year, Banun said.

Among Indonesian farm products needed most by Papua New Guinea were rice, frozen chicken meat, processed chicken meat, chicken eggs and live chicken for PNG chicken farm development, Banun added.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-20 21:18:48|Editor: pengying

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TEHRAN, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Iran's foreign minister said on Friday that Tehran has a variety of countermeasures if Washington decides to pull out of the 2015 landmark nuclear deal, Press TV reported Friday.

"Iran has a wide range of options both inside and outside of the JCPOA (the nuclear deal), and surely the reaction from Iran and the international community will be unpleasant for the Americans," Mohammad Javad Zarif told reporters upon arrival in New York City.

The JCPOA, short for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, is an international agreement reached on July 14, 2015 between Iran and six world powers, namely China, France, Russia, Britain, the United States and Germany, plus the European Union.

Zarif travelled to New York to attend a UN General Assembly meeting over peacekeeping.

"If the European countries want to preserve the deal, they have to make it sustainable for Iran," he noted.

"They (the Europeans) need to impose pressure on the United States ... and encourage the United States to implement what it undertook under the deal," Zarif said.

The efforts to renegotiate the nuke deal "will not get a positive answer" from Iran which would make no "concessions," the Iranian minister added.

U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly lashed out at the nuclear pact, in which the West promised to relieve sanctions on Tehran in exchange for a halt in Iran's efforts to develop a nuclear weapon.

Trump demands the elimination of sunset clauses for some of the restrictions the U.S. places on Iran from the nuclear deal, stronger inspection rules, and limitation to Iran's development of long-range missiles.

But Iran says it will neither tolerate anything beyond its commitment to the nuclear deal, nor accept changes to the agreement.

Iran has threatened to withdraw from the deal if it cannot receive economic benefits.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-20 21:48:55|Editor: pengying

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ISTANBUL, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Turkey's support for recent U.S.-led missile strikes on Syrian government military sites would not prevent Ankara from continuing its cooperation with Russia and Iran on Syria, analysts said, amid U.S. efforts to win over Ankara.

"Turkish support in this case is a one-shot affair and does not signal real change in its general Syrian policy," Faruk Logoglu, a former senior diplomat, told Xinhua.

The United States, Britain and France carried out a wave of missile strikes against the Syrian government last weekend, accusing it, without convincing evidence so far, of having used poison gas against civilians earlier this month.

Ankara immediately expressed support for the strikes, which both Moscow and Tehran, staunch allies of Damascus in Syria's seven-year-old conflict, strongly condemned, while Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan argued that Damascus should also be punished for using conventional weapons against its people.

The different takes of Ankara, Moscow and Tehran on the missile attack do not amount to a game changer, said Logoglu.

"The Turkish-Russian-Iranian cooperation would probably continue as usual, barring unexpected new developments," he added.

Turkey joined efforts with the U.S. earlier in the Syrian war to topple the government headed by President Bashar al-Assad, but then changed partners in the summer of 2016 when it started the process of rapprochement with Russia.

Ankara, Moscow and Tehran struck a deal last year in the Kazakh capital of Astana to seek a political settlement for the Syrian conflict. Most recently, the leaders of the three countries met in Ankara at the beginning of April for a new round of talks over Syria.

Rendering the Ankara meeting less influential is one of the main goals of the missile attack, Celalettin Yavuz, a security and foreign policy analyst, told Xinhua.

Like its NATO allies, Ankara held the Syrian government responsible for the alleged chemical attack in then rebels-held Douma area near Damascus. In response, Moscow showed, though moderately, its dissatisfaction with Ankara's attitude.

On April 9, two days after the dubious chemical attack against civilians, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Ankara should hand over Syria's Afrin region, captured recently by the Turkish army, to Damascus.

"I don't think Turkey's relations with Russia would be harmed," said Yavuz, who teaches at Istanbul Ayvansaray University.

Both sides would realize that keeping good ties is important for Syria's future and their own interests, he explained.

"It's the economic ties that bring Ankara and Moscow together in the first place. Besides, Russia has now close ties with a NATO member," he said.

With Moscow's tacit consent, the Turkish military seized Afrin last month following a two-month campaign against the Kurdish militia there which is seen by Ankara as a terrorist group.

On Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin's special envoy to Syria Alexander Lavrentyev and Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Vershinin held talks on the Syrian crisis in Ankara with Erdogan's top advisor Ibrahim Kalin and Turkish Foreign Ministry officials.

The visit by the two Russian officials came two days after French President Emmanuel Macron said the missile strike had succeeded in causing a split between Ankara and Moscow.

Both Ankara and Moscow admitted that they had some differences of opinion on the Syrian conflict, but denied any damage to bilateral ties.

Ankara insists that Assad, whom it calls a murderer, should have no place in the future of Syria.

Washington has been rather concerned about the growing Turkish-Russian rapprochement and Ankara's ties with Eurasian powers in recent years.

Several days after it accused Damascus of using chemical weapons, the U.S. revealed that it was considering a review of its Syrian policy so as to mend ties with Ankara, damaged mainly due to Washington's military support for Syrian Kurdish militia.

On April 12, Turkish media quoted an unnamed high-level U.S. official as saying that "the U.S. wants to find a way of eliminating Turkey's security concerns in Syria."

The official also reportedly said the leaders of the two countries wanted very much to restore old good ties which the allies had in the past, while Erdogan responded positively the same day by saying Turkey would never think of pointing a gun at the soldiers of its allies.

In contrast, top Turkish officials stated not long ago that all those who stand by terror groups in Syria would be targeted by Turkish troops, as Anakra had vowed to move eastward following the Afrin campaign to drive the Kurdish militia out of the northern Syrian town of Manbij, where the U.S. has a military presence.

Turkey would neither give up seeing the U.S. as an ally nor stop cooperating with Russia and Iran, Erdogan stated.

"Turkey is not with or against anybody unconditionally in Syria," he noted.
ANKARA, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim on Friday invited U.S. officials to Turkey to monitor its upcoming elections in response to their concern over transparency.

But "they should first look at their own business," Yildirim told reporters.

"It's been more than one and a half years since the U.S. elections, but the Americans are still discussing if there were irregularities in their polls," he said.

"If they want to see elections, they should come to Turkey and see in place if they are transparent," the prime minister added.

U.S. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said on Thursday that the U.S. had concerns about Turkey's ability to hold free and fair elections given the ongoing state of emergency.

"During a state of emergency, it would be difficult to hold a completely free, fair and transparent election in a manner that's consistent with Turkish law and also Turkey's international obligations," she said at a press briefing.

Turkey has been under a state of emergency since a failed coup attempt in July 2016.

On Wednesday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that presidential and parliamentary elections will be advanced to June 24 this year from Nov. 3, 2019.
ALGIERS, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Algerian army troops on Friday captured four armed militants, including a leader of a terrorist group, during two separate operations, Defense Ministry said in a statement.

The source noted that "A dangerous leader of a terrorist organization activating in the Sahel region surrendered on Friday morning to the military authorities in the southernmost province of Tamanrasset."

This terrorist is identified as Laarbi khelifa, alias Abu Ayoub, who joined terrorist camps in 2010, the statement specified.

Meanwhile, another three terrorists were captured by army troops on Friday in Jijel province, 370 km eastern Algiers, the statement said.

Three Kalashnikov-type machine guns and 155 bullets, a pair of binoculars and three mobile phones were retrieved so far during this operation which is still underway.

Algeria has deployed tens of thousands of troops on the southern and eastern borderline, in a bid to thwart the intrusion of terrorists and arms, amid instability reigning in Mali and civil war hitting Libya.

Yet, the North African nation has opened safe routes to encourage terrorists to lay down their arms, in exchange of fair trials.

In this regard, Defense Ministry has called upon "remnants of terrorists to surrender to the security authorities and seize the opportunity to benefit from the current regulations."

Located in a region plagued by unprecedented security and political instability, Algeria faces ongoing terrorist threats.
ANKARA, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on Friday that Greece is being seen by Gulenists as a "safe haven."

"What Greece has been doing harms our friendship," Yildirim said, while elaborating on a Greek high court's decision to release a Turkish ex-soldier.

"We think that our enemy should also be seen as an enemy of Greece," he added.

A day earlier, the Greek Council of State ordered the release of former Turkish soldier Suleyman Ozkaynakci, who was among the eight former Turkish servicemen fleeing to Greece a day after a failed coup attempt in July 2016.

Ankara accuses the U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen of being behind the military coup against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The ruling "showed once again that Greece is a country that protects coup plotters," Turkey's Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Friday.

"The Greek authorities are making statements that other coup plotters will be released in the coming days. This cannot be explained as a simple application of the length of detention, as the Greek authorities claim," the statement added.

Ozkaynakci sought asylum from the Greek authorities in 2017 and his application was later accepted by an independent asylum commission.

He was released after being granted asylum but arrested again following an objection from the government.

Turkey and Greece, two NATO neighbors, have seen their relations soured over the eight former Turkish soldiers, as Greek courts have repeatedly rejected Turkish demands for their extradition.

The Council of State is expected to make a final decision over the asylum requests of all the eight ex-Turkish soldiers on May 4, local media said.
by Xinhua writers Lu Yun, Wang Pan & Zhou Qiang

GUANGZHOU, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Imports are under the spotlight this year at China's largest trade fair, the Canton Fair, as the country seeks to open its domestic market wider, despite growing protectionism across the world.

At the biannual fair, which just ended its first phase Thursday in south China's Guangzhou, a team of event organizers was busy handing out flyers to passersby, informing them of the opportunity to sign up for another international trade event, the China International Import Expo (CIIE).

To be held in Shanghai this November, the CIIE is part of China's broader efforts to expand imports and address the global trade imbalance.

At a time when protectionism and anti-globalization sentiment is rising elsewhere, China is opening its door wider to the world, with plans including importing goods worth 8 trillion U.S. dollars in the next five years.

"China does not seek trade surplus and is continuously expanding imports," said Bai Ming, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation. "This will bring new opportunities for other countries to share the market dividends of China."

The Canton Fair set up a special import exhibition area and attracted more than 600 international firms interested in getting a larger slice of the 8-trillion-dollar pie.





People visit exhibition booths at the 123rd Session of China Import and Export Fair (Canton Fair) held in Guangzhou, capital of south China's Guangdong Province, April 19, 2018. (Xinhua/Lu Hanxin)





TOO BIG TO IGNORE

Forty years ago, Steven Yu first came to the Canton Fair at the age of 8 with his father, who was a buyer looking to source products from Chinese suppliers.

Yu, now president of Orient Fan Company, a licensed seller of heavy machinery giant Caterpillar Inc., is back at the fair as an exhibitor.

"Instead of buying, now we are selling," Yu said.

The company is looking for a distributor to sell Caterpillar fans and heaters in the Chinese market, where Yu sees increasing demand as people's incomes rise.

People visit exhibition booths at the 123rd Session of China Import and Export Fair (Canton Fair) held in Guangzhou, capital of south China's Guangdong Province, April 19, 2018. (Xinhua/Lu Hanxin)

"The Chinese economy is quite stable. It's actually very good compared with other countries. For Chinese consumers, buying import products is not an issue," Yu said.

The company will apply for more exhibition space to showcase more Caterpillar products in the next session of Canton Fair. It also applied to attend the CIIE in Shanghai, according to Yu.

While some certain countries have used allegations of improper intellectual property practices as an excuse to block imports into China, for many multinationals, the Chinese market is just too big to ignore.

Nearly half of Caterpillar's sales increase last year came from construction industries, and China was a "very important" contributor, Caterpillar Inc. CEO Jim Umpleby said in a previous interview with Xinhua.





CONSUMPTION UPGRADE

Unlike many multinationals, which eye the Chinese market for its size, small and medium-sized companies around the world are trying to cash in on a new trend in the Chinese market: upgraded consumption.

At the import exhibition zone at Canton Fair, Chinese buyers gathered around booths displaying foreign-made consumer goods such as Japanese beauty devices.

Yue Rui, a sales representative of Aquapick Co, Ltd., an oral health device maker based in the Republic of Korea, said the Chinese market has a lot of potential for growth, as more Chinese are becoming more health-conscious.

An exhibitor introduces a juicer to visitors at the 123rd Session of China Import and Export Fair (Canton Fair) held in Guangzhou, capital of south China's Guangdong Province, April 15, 2018. (Xinhua/Liang Xu)





More than 30 percent of the company's sales came from China last year, with online sales a big boost to business, Yue said.

A study by the American Chamber of Commerce in South China showed that among surveyed member companies with established operations in China, half of them earned more than 30 percent of their global revenue in China in 2017.

More than half of the surveyed companies are firms with fewer than 250 employees, according to the study.

For these smaller firms, competition with Chinese players is inevitable, but Yue said innovation is key to winning market share.

"We have to improve our product quality while staying competitive in terms of price," Yue said.

As China transitions into a consumption-driven economy, demand for high-quality products and design is on the rise, bringing opportunities to innovative foreign brands.

Latest data from the National Bureau of Statistics showed that China's retail sales growth accelerated to a higher-than-expected 10.1 percent in March from 9.7 percent in January-February.

Final consumption contributed 77.8 percent of the economic growth in the first quarter, up from 58.8 percent last year.





SHARED FUTURE

China's initiative to expand imports will bring shared benefits to many developing countries, analysts said.

Xiao Yaofei, a professor with the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, said China is distinct from many countries as it is both the world's biggest consumer and producer in many fields.

That means China does have demand not only for finished goods, but also for potentially parts and components in the industrial supply chain.

As labor costs rise and the industrial structure improves, many Chinese companies could develop a global supply system, increasing demand for imports from some developing countries, Xiao said.

Kundan Talwar, director of Rexnord Electronics and Controls Ltd., an Indian manufacturer of fans and motors, said though his company currently doesn't have many orders directly from Chinese companies, his business can get help from China as many Chinese firms are pushed to import some components from India over labor cost concerns.

"I don't see this in the near future, but it could happen," Talwar said.

Visitors attend the 123rd Session of China Import and Export Fair (Canton Fair) held in Guangzhou, capital of south China's Guangdong Province, April 15, 2018. (Xinhua/Liang Xu)





Many buyers from developing countries have seen the CIIE due in Shanghai as an opportunity for their products to become known in the Chinese market.

Rodrigo Aballay, director of Chile's Asian Institute of Culture and Business, came to the Canton Fair with more than 100 Chilean companies.

Aballay said he expected a delegation of Chilean companies to attend the CIIE in November, bringing products, services, and tourism.

"The Shanghai import expo brings us balance. For many years we have bought here. Now we can offer," Aballay said. Enditem (Video editor: Zhu Jianhui)
Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-20 23:09:18|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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ADEN, Yemen, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition mistakenly hit two civilian vehicles in the southwestern province of Taiz on Friday, killing at least 17 people, a medical official told Xinhua.

"The two vehicles were destroyed by the Saudi-led airstrikes and all the killed civilians were returning home from a village market in Mawza area of Taiz," the local medical official said on condition of anonymity.

"Bodies of around 17 people were scattered at the bombing scene and no one could survive the missile attack," the local source added.

Meanwhile, forces of the 4th Regional Military, allied with the Saudi-backed Yemeni government, made progress and seized control over a number of areas in Rahidah district in Taiz.

"Several hours of ferocious fighting ended up in liberating key military sites and areas previously occupied by the Shiite Houthi rebels in Rahidah district," a local military official said.

Elsewhere in Yemen, four brigades, trained and equipped by the United Arab Emirates (UAE), started a new military campaign against Houthis near the western port city of Hodeidah.

Elite troops of the Republican Guard, commanded by the nephew of the late former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, also participated in the ongoing military campaign and succeeded in seizing some areas from Houthis.

Saudi Arabia is leading a mostly Arab military coalition to fight Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen since March 2015.

Houthis have been militarily controlling much of northern Yemen, including the capital Sanna, since late 2014.

The war has killed more than 10,000 Yemenis, mostly civilians, and displaced over 3 million others, according to humanitarian agencies.
NAIROBI, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Tanzanian manufacturers are targeting Kenya's rapidly growing market for industrial goods, a diplomat said on Friday.

Pindi Chana, Tanzania High Commissioner to Kenya, told journalists in Nairobi that Kenya has one of fastest growing middle classes in the East African region with disposal income to purchase manufactured goods from Tanzania.

"Tanzanian firms are therefore seeking wider and broader markets opportunities in Kenya," Chana said during a media briefing on the upcoming Made in Tanzania Week Expo that will be held from April 25 to 28 in Nairobi.

The four-day event will provide a platform for Tanzania's industrial sector to showcase their products to Kenyan consumers.

"The exhibition aims at creating more awareness of Tanzanian products and services to the Kenyan private sector and the general public at large," she added.

The event will feature industrial products and services in the tourism, technology, agribusiness, culture, arts and craft sectors of Tanzania.

The conference is being organized by Tanzania's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and East African Cooperation in collaboration with the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Marketing and the Tanzania Private Sector.

The expo is part of Tanzania's effort to implement the country's foreign policy which focuses on economic diplomacy with much emphasis on the development of sectors like trade, manufacturing, investment and tourism.

The conference will also create market linkages for Tanzania products with major supermarkets and other consumer supply chains in Kenya.

The Tanzanian envoy noted that in 2010 the East African Community Partner States signed an agreement on the Common Market Protocol and hence "Made in Tanzania Week in Kenya" will be amongst the government initiatives to promote regional integration.

Chana noted that Tanzanian producers and private sector are keen to connect with their counterparts in Kenya in order to pursue joint projects for mutual benefit.

The Tanzania official noted that the conference will also create a platform for investors of the two neighboring states to explore room for further partnerships.

Chana said that the event also aims to assist her nation in promoting Tanzanian tourist destinations to the Kenyan community.
ADDIS ABABA, April 20 (Xinhua) -- The Ethiopian government on Friday revealed that Ethiopia's access to electric power grid system has now reached more than 57 percent.

The Ethiopian Ministry of Water, Irrigation and Electricity, in its latest report presented to the Ethiopian House of Peoples and Representatives on Friday, indicated that the East African country's access to electric power has reached 57 percent, while the number of households that are connected through the national electric power grid system has reached to 2.8 million.

According to Tilahun Legesse, Director of the National Electricity Provision under the ministry, the number of Ethiopian households and the reported percentage level is only attributed to the electric power energy, in which the contribution of other sources of energy would further augment the country's energy coverage.

According to the World Bank, Ethiopia has the second highest available energy generation capacity in the Sub-Saharan African region, with nearly 100 percent coming from renewable energy generation (mostly hydropower), and vast and mainly untapped solar, wind, and geothermal clean energy resources.

Bizuneh Tolcha, Director of Public Relations and Communications Directorate at the Ethiopian Ministry of Water, Irrigation and Energy (MoWIE), recently told Xinhua that the East African country plans to reach 17,300 MW of energy by the end of 2020, a major leap from the current 4,280 MW of energy.

According to Tolcha, the Ethiopian government expects to reach the figure with generation of energy projects in hydro, wind, geothermal and biomass energy sectors.

The biggest project that Ethiopia envisaged to fulfill the planned 17,300 MW is the 6,450 MW hydro project, under construction on the Blue Nile river at a cost of close to 4.7 billion U.S. dollars, which is currently 65 percent completed.

While the other projects that are expected to be completed before the 2020 deadline include the 254 MW Genale Dawa I hydropower project and the 120 MW Aysha Wind farm project.

Ethiopia also expects to generate energy from the under-construction 50 MW Reppie waste-to-energy project and the 70 MW Aluto Langano geothermal energy project.
CHICAGO, April 20 (Xinhua) -- No country can prosper in isolation or solve the global challenges all by itself, Chinese Ambassador to the United States Cui Tiankai said, in a reference to the rising protectionism in developed countries.

Speaking at the U.S.-China Business Summit hosted by China Investment Corporation and Goldman Sachs in Chicago on Wednesday, Cui said today's world is pretty much globalized and people have global opportunities as well as global challenges.

"No country can handle all this by itself. And no country can prosper in isolation," he said. "But now we see policies that attempt to close the door and resort to unilateralism."

The best choice is to take a win-win approach, he said.

"But now we see policies that are so strongly influenced by the zero-sum mentality as well as policies that regard other people's success as their losses," he said. "Perhaps they believe that by doing this, they could gain more. But I don't think such a mentality would be helpful to anyone."

On the possibility of a trade war between China and the United States, Cui said, "A trade war will only destroy trade itself. So such policies are not in line with the reality of the 21st century. They did not even solve the problems of yesterday, still less the problems of today and tomorrow."

The business community, he said, should give policymakers good advice so that they adopt good policies.

Trade tensions have been escalating with Washington recently threatening to slap additional tariffs on Chinese goods worth 100 billion U.S. dollars, after proposing steep tariffs on Chinese imports worth 50 billion dollars.

Remarking that the world has seen a clear and alarming rise of protectionism and economic nationalism in the developed world, Cui said the best way to bridge the divide is to enhance connectivity - not only in infrastructure, but also in cyberspace, trade, finance, policies and among people.

"In this regard, the Belt and Road Initiative is an excellent example. It was designed and initiated exactly for the purpose of enhancing connectivity throughout the world so that everybody could share the opportunity of development and remove the divide more effectively," he added.

The diplomat urged stronger participation by the business communities of both countries in the initiative for a win-win result.
File Photo: Visitors walk in front of the ZTE stand at the Mobile World Congress 2016 in Barcelona, Spain, Feb. 22, 2016. (Xinhua/Lino De Vallier)

SAN FRANCISCO, April 19 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. ban on exporting components to China's major telecom manufacturer ZTE could hurt the development of fifth-generation (5G) smartphones and plan of building a fast 5G wireless service, a California-based expert said Thursday.

The U.S. Department of Commerce on Monday announced suspending the export privileges of ZTE in the next seven years for alleged violations of the Export Administration Regulations.

"From a 5G telecom equipment point of view, I don't think this hurts the company too badly, but this will hurt 5G smartphones and any aspirations in the 5G edge data center," said Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst of Moor Insights and Strategy, a global technology consulting company.

5G is the proposed next telecommunications standard, aiming at higher capacity than the current 4G. The next seven years are considered as a critical period during which the world's telecom companies are developing and launching 5G technologies.

ZTE's major suppliers in the United States include Qualcomm and Intel for chips, and Acacia Communications and Lumentum for optical components.

"The implications (of the ban) are that ZTE will have challenges competing in smartphones and edge computing," said Moorhead.

China's Ministry of Commerce (MOC) said Thursday that the U.S. ban would end up having an adverse impact on the country itself.

"If the United States attempts to curb China's development and force China to make concessions by sticking to its unilateral protectionism at the cost of harming the interests of Chinese and American enterprises, it miscalculates," MOC spokesperson Gao Feng said.

ZTE has 14 offices and six research centers in the United States and supports nearly 130,000 high-tech jobs in the country.
NAIROBI, April 20 (Xinhua) -- A total of 40 Kenyan students are set to join Beijing Jiaotong University late April for a bachelor degree in railway engineering through scholarships provided by the China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC).

James Macharia, the Cabinet Secretary in the Ministry of Transport, was on Friday joined by Liu Xianfa, Chinese Ambassador to Kenya, and senior executives from the CRBC during the sendoff ceremony for Kenyan students held in Nairobi.

Macharia said training of Kenyan youth on advanced railway technology at a prestigious university in China will help the country bridge skills gap in a rapidly evolving mode of transport.

"The need to train our own in the specific rail courses emerged from the realization that Kenya lacked professional and skilled manpower in the railway sector for the development, operation and maintenance of the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) project," said Macharia.

The CRBC has since 2016 provided 100 Kenyan youth with scholarships to pursue bachelor degrees in railway-related technologies at Beijing Jiaotong University.

The first batch of 25 students and the second batch of 35 students departed for China in 2016 and 2017 respectively, while the final batch of 40 students will commence their studies in late April.

Macharia hailed the CRBC for sponsoring Kenyan youth to pursue advanced courses related to railway engineering, operations and maintenance.

He added that Kenya will enhance partnership with China in a bid to build a critical mass of trained personnel to operate the SGR which is expected to hasten the country's industrial growth.

Liu, on his part, urged beneficiaries of CRBC scholarships to pursue their vocation with passion and contribute to Kenya's development in different spheres.

"It is my hope that after completing studies in China you could come back to Kenya and make use of acquired knowledge and skills to contribute to the development of Kenya, devoting yourselves to China-Kenya cooperation and friendship," said Liu.

He revealed that China will step up skills and technology transfer to hasten modernization of Kenya's railway sector through the establishment of a training college in the country.

Li Qiang, the general manager of the CRBC, said his firm has prioritized development of technical skills among Kenyan youth to enhance their capacity to participate in the modernization of their country's railway transport.
by David Musyoka

NAIROBI, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Chinese companies in Kenya said Friday they are ready to partner with their Kenyan counterparts to provide the skills, financing and capacity needed to realize the Big Four Agenda of the east African country.

Zhang Haifeng, the chairman of the Kenya China Economic and Trade Association (KCETA), said the two countries have already realized win-win partnership that should be depended to help Kenya fast track the attainment of middle-income status.

"Cheaper transport, electricity and water are good for development and China has the capacity to provide construction works on these for Kenya," he said in the capital of Nairobi during Big Four Agenda seminar organized by the Chinese Embassy in Kenya.

"I want to encourage Chinese manufacturers in Kenya to work with their Kenyan counterparts to encourage skills transfer and also learn from Kenyans. We also want Chinese companies to employ more Kenyans in order to empower the youth," said Zhang.

He said Chinese companies in Kenya must understand that they cannot achieve much under the Big Four Agenda if they do not work with the government, the private sector and the common Kenyans.

Big Four Agenda is a five-year development plan by President Uhuru Kenyatta to transform the lives of Kenyans through manufacturing, food security, universal health insurance and cheaper housing, meant to consolidate his legacy in his last term that ends in 2022.

Chinese Ambassador to Kenya Liu Xianfa said China and Kenya officials are currently engaged in speeding up policy formulation in order to ensure that Kenya benefits from the Belt and Road Initiative, of which Kenya was named as a strategic partner of Chinese government.

The ambassador said he is working with Kenyan counterparts on how to increase China's support to Kenya to help it achieve industrialized status.

"We are speeding up discussions on joint investments and how to enable Kenya to access more Chinese market, especially for its agriculture produce," he added.

He said China will help Kenya build more industrial and economic zones and observed that there are many industrial parks that have already started being constructed along the Chinese-built Standard Gauge Railway.

"We are also working with Kenyans officials to speed up skills transfer in the production of maize and rice. I want to encourage Chinese companies in Kenya to now focus more on the Big Four Agenda to help transform this country," he added.
ADDIS ABABA, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Ethiopia's new Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed on Friday pledged to address economic and governance grievances of residents of Gonder city in Ethiopia's Amhara regional state, a protest hub to the ruling coalition since July 2016.

Ahmed was sworn in as Ethiopian Prime Minister on April 2, replacing Hailemariam Desalegn amid anti-government protests and strikes in various parts of Ethiopia including Amhara regional state.

Ahmed said the Ethiopian government would work to make Gonder city which is close to the Sudanese border a foreign trade hub for northwest Ethiopia, reported state media outlet Ethiopia News Agency.

The PM also pledged to fix youth unemployment and other economic needs of the population.

Violent anti-government protests in Gonder city in July 2016 over a reallocation of a district to the neighboring Tigray regional state two decades ago morphed into a wider regional protest over allegations of political and economic marginalization.

Persistent protests since 2016 in Amhara and Oromia regional states which together account for about 65 percent of Ethiopia's estimated population of 100 million has caused fears about the stability of one of Africa's star economies.

The protests have shaken the hold of the ruling coalition Ethiopian People Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) which has been ruling Ethiopia for close to 27 years.

The ruling party is a coalition of four parties that are Oromo People Democratic Organization (OPDO), the Amhara National Democratic Movement (ANDM), the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front (TPLF) and the Southern Ethiopian People's Democratic Movement (SEPDM).
BERLIN, April 20 (Xinhua) -- A regional office of the German Federal Agency for Migration and Refugees (Bamf) is suspected of having illicitly granted asylum in which applicants did not meet the necessary criteria, German media reported on Friday.

According to the reports, a senior Bamf employee in Bremen reached incorrect positive verdicts in around 2,000 asylum application cases between 2013 and 2017. Initial revelations put the figure lower at 1,200 cases. The unnamed individual accused of reaching the false decisions unilaterally has now been suspended from the role.

The Bremen State Prosecution Office confirmed that it was investigating one Bamf employee, as well as three attorneys and one translator who are believed to have cooperated systematically in subverting the course of justice. The suspects face criminal charges of corruption and organized incitement of filing fraudulent asylum applications.

Responding to the scandal on Friday, the German federal government said that there were "well-founded suspicions" of improper conduct by the Bamf Bremen office. Nevertheless, Steffen Seibert, the official spokesperson for Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) said that it was too early to discuss potential political consequences before judiciary authorities completed their independent investigatory work.

A spokesperson for the interior ministry further emphasized that the accusations only concerned an "isolated case". Bamf had filed a self-denunciation after discovering suspicious behaviour and was cooperating closely with investigators.

Media cited information that the Bremen office was only formally responsible for around 98 of the 2,000 cases improperly-awarded asylum. In the remaining cases, applicants were specially transported to the Bamf employee from other states like Lower Saxony and North-Rhine Westphalia and returned there again after having received approval of their asylum applications.

Investigations into the matter were first launched when the deportation of a refugee family in Lower Saxony was prevented at the last minute with a positive certificate of asylum from Bremen. The decision was subsequently overturned by an administrative court in Hannover, prompting the state of Lower Saxony to issue a complaint about irregularities in the assessment of asylum cases in Bremen. The regional Bamf office has an unusually high approval rate of 96 percent, compared to 62 percent across other German states.

Many of the individuals which were illicitly granted asylum were reportedly members of the Yazidi religious minority. Yazidis have been subject to violent persecution by the so-called "Islamic State" in their homelands of northern Iraq and northern Syria, including mass-executions and the forced prostitution of women and girls.

It remains unclear so far whether and to what extent the Bamf employee or the attorneys involved were financially remunerated for granting asylum in Germany.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-20 23:54:30|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam Central Committee Nguyen Phu Trong (R) shakes hands with visiting Myanmar State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi in Hanoi, Vietnam, on April 20, 2018. Nguyen Phu Trong on Friday reiterated Vietnam's consistent policy that attaches importance to strengthening and expanding the friendship and multifaceted cooperation with Myanmar. (Xinhua/VNA)

HANOI, April 20 (Xinhua) -- General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam Central Committee Nguyen Phu Trong on Friday reiterated Vietnam's consistent policy that attaches importance to strengthening and expanding the friendship and multifaceted cooperation with Myanmar.

The party leader made the remarks at a reception for visiting Myanmar State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi, Vietnam News Agency reported.

He suggested the two sides foster cooperation in all areas, particularly trade, investment and cultural exchange as well as within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and regional and international forums.

Aung San Suu Kyi stressed that Myanmar wants to boost comprehensive cooperative relations with Vietnam in the time ahead, through Party, government and people channels, especially the exchange of high-level visits.
BERLIN, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Turkish politicians will not be allowed to campaign in Germany ahead of presidential and parliamentary elections to be held in Turkey on June 24, the German government clarified on Friday.

A spokesperson for the German Foreign Ministry said that an earlier diplomatic note, requiring foreign dignitaries to obtain the approval of the federal government before appearing at campaign events aimed at foreign electorates in Germany, remained in force.

"As a matter of principle, no approval is granted within three months of the date of the election or referendum," Rainer Breul, spokesperson for the Foreign Office, told press. He said the ruling applied to all countries with diplomatic representations in Germany but excluded fellow members of the European Union (EU).

The federal government's official spokesperson Steffen Seibert highlighted there was no announced visit on behalf of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Senior German Social Democrat (SPD) and Greens (Gruene) politicians have publicly warned against allowing Turkish politicians to campaign in Germany after Ankara announced early elections.

The issue provoked a heated row between Turkey and several EU governments back in 2016, when Erdogan's AKP party held campaign rallies in European cities to mobilize support among Turkish immigrant communities in a referendum on controversial constitutional amendments.

The statement by the German Foreign Office was released shortly after the government of neighboring Austria similarly announced a ban on election campaign events by Turkish politicians.
People attend a ceremony to bid farewell to Kenyan students who have received scholarships to study in China, in Nairobi, Kenya, on Aug. 24, 2017. A ceremony was held at the Chinese Embassy in Kenya on Thursday to bid farewell to 140 Kenyan students who have received scholarships to study in China. (Xinhua/Lyu Shuai)

NAIROBI, April 20 (Xinhua) -- More and more Kenyan youth and budding entrepreneurs are studying Chinese in the hope the language will open new opportunities, experts told Xinhua during an interview to mark the UN Chinese Language Day on Friday.

Franklin Asira, Chairman of Sino Africa Cultural Exchange Association that was recently launched in Nairobi, said that uptake of Chinese language in Kenya will accelerate in light of blossoming economic and cultural ties between Nairobi and Beijing.

"The Chinese language is spoken by one third of the global population and I see it spreading fast in Kenya and the entire African continent," said Asira.

"It is a language that will open doors to Kenyans who have embraced it with passion," he added.

The computer engineering major studied at two universities in Beijing in the late 1980s, where his mastery of spoken and written Chinese language was refined.

Asira said he was optimistic that the uptake of Chinese language in Kenyan and African academic institutions could soon eclipse other foreign languages, given Beijing's expanding footprint in the continent's socio-economic and cultural spheres.

"Chinese investments in Kenya are growing and will create jobs for people who understand and can speak the language. There will be job openings across East Africa for locals who have studied Chinese language," Asira told Xinhua.

He noted that Africa's learning institutions are keen on introducing Chinese language in their curriculum as Beijing becomes the continent's leading source of trade and investments.

Chinese Ambassador to Kenya Liu Xianfa (2nd R) presents certificate of scholarship to a student of the Nairobi University in Nairobi, Kenya, Nov. 14, 2016. The Chinese Embassy in Kenya on Monday provided 20 scholarships worth 20,000 U.S. dollars for needy university students to enable them to pursue a range of humanities and science courses. (Xinhua/Sun Ruibo)

"African colleges are teaching Chinese language and its acceptance is wide. I'm confident the uptake of Chinese language will grow," said Asira.

Kenya's four fully fledged Confucius Institutes that are domiciled in the country's oldest public universities have provided a platform for the country's youth to study mandarin at basic and advanced levels.

Xiao Shan, director of University of Nairobi's Confucius Institute, said the enthusiasm by Kenyan youth to master the Chinese language and culture is unmatched in the region.

"Since coming here, I have met many Kenyan students and most of them love Chinese language. Our students want to master the Chinese language in the hope it will enhance their job prospects," said Xiao.

She revealed the Confucius Institute at one of Kenya's oldest universities has enrolled over 5,000 students with its activities reaching about 10,000 locals, and plans are in the pipeline to introduce mandarin classes on satellite campuses.

Kenyan youth have developed a passion for the Chinese language, arts and culture given the positive contribution Beijing is making in their country.

Leah Adhiambo Ombuor, a 21-year-old student at the University of Nairobi, said enrolling for a certificate course in mandarin eight months ago was informed by her love for China's rich culture.

"I feel motivated to study Chinese language and dance. It is all about passion. I see myself becoming a translator or a Chinese language teacher in future," said Ombuor.

Mwika Kiarie, an anthropologist major at the University of Nairobi who has also enrolled for a certificate course in Chinese language, hopes to become a bridge for Sino-Kenyan relations in diverse spheres.

"I look forward to becoming the bridge between Chinese and Kenyan business people through performing tasks like translation, logistics and even humanitarian affairs," Kiarie told Xinhua.

He added that a major in anthropology has increased his desire to master foreign languages and cultures.

File photo taken on May 31, 2017 shows a Kenyan journalist takes a selfie with female train drivers Concilia (C) and Alice (L) during the launching day of the Mombasa-Nairobi Railway in Mombasa, Kenya. (Xinhua/Sun Ruibo)

Chinese entrepreneurs are promoting the study of mandarin to Kenyan children and youth through the establishment of learning facilities in major cities.

Liu Yun, the Director of Nairobi-based China Kenya Cultural education Center, said that Chinese language courses that are affordable and tailor made for local youth have gained popularity.

Kenyan children and youth are interested in learning the Chinese language, said Liu, noting that Chinese dance, martial arts and musical instruments have struck a chord with them.

"We also want more adults to learn Chinese language and improve their chances of getting a job," she added.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-21 00:04:33|Editor: Yamei

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TRIER, Germany, April 20 (Xinhua) -- In the Western German city of Trier, the great thinker Karl Marx's hometown, people will have opportunity to stay close to exhibition series themed "Meet with China" from June 1 on, experiencing fascinating diverse Chinese culture.

Organized by Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC), Directorate General of Cultural Heritage of State Rhineland-Palatinate and Association of German-Chinese Societies (AGDC), the monthly changing exhibition series will lively display local culture as well as social development of seven Chinese provinces and cities including Jiangxi, Shandong, Yunnan and Beijing, etc. with a variety of forms such as photos, videos and live shows.

Not only beautiful sights, but also cultural elements of Chinese characters like Confucius and author Lu Xun will be presented amid the exhibition, the vice-chair of the CPAFFC Hu Sishe told Xinhua at a press conference held Friday in the Forum Baths of Trier, a ruin of a Roman bath as location of the three-month exhibition series.

"In Germany, we haven't ever had any exhibition series from China in that density and diversity," said Kurt Karst, Chairman of AGDC.

We believed that visitors from near and far would marvel at the cultural diversity and beauties of China from June to September in Trier, he added.
ADDIS ABABA, April 20 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese Language Day was marked on Friday on the premises of the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) in Ethiopia's capital Addis Ababa.

The event organized by UNECA in collaboration with the Chinese Mission to the African Union (AU) has featured remarks by officials, presentation on Chinese culture, exhibition, Kung Fu performance, traditional Chinese musical instrument performance and Chinese tea ceremony, among others.

Established by the UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) in 2010, the Chinese Language Day is marked on April 20, aiming at celebrating multilingualism and cultural diversity as well as to promote equal use of all six of its official working languages throughout the organization.

In his opening remarks, Carlos Hadaad, Director of Division of Administration at UNECA, said the commemoration is a demonstration of the strong appreciation for the Chinese language, and he hailed China's role in the transformation of the African continent.

"The newly established partnership with the mission of China is exemplary because it demonstrates how much we have accomplished together to promote not only multilingualism of Chinese language but other aspects of Chinese culture as reflected in our program today," he said.

"We are happy about the partnership with the Chinese mission and hope that from this initial activity we can develop other initiatives that foster multilingualism; this could include teaming up with Confucius Institute in Addis Ababa University to even teach Chinese language to the UN staff in Ethiopia," he added.

Speaking on his part, Cheng Xufeng, Minister-Counsellor of the Chinese Mission to AU, said such ceremonies help create diverse, inclusive and harmonious world.

"Since the founding of the People's Republic of China, cultural exchange has become one of the most important areas of cooperation between China and Africa," he said. "These exchanges not only promote mutual understanding and common development of all cultures, but also help create a diverse, inclusive and harmonious world."

Cheng noted that such events help the participants learn and experience Chinese language and culture in a relaxing way.

"It's also my hope that the Chinese Language Day will become an annual event at the UNECA so that more friends will join us," he said.

He also stated that his Mission is ready to continue its close cooperation with the UNECA and other partners in deepening economic, social and cultural exchanges between China and Africa.

Yang Ying, Director of Confucius Institute at Addis Ababa University, said the event serves good platform to introduce the Chinese culture in terms of the Chinese calligraphy, foods, and performances.

The six UN languages include Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.

April 20 was chosen as the Chinese Language Day to pay tribute to Cangjie, a mythical figure claimed to have invented Chinese characters.
KABUL, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Experts in Afghanistan believe that the current year will be crucial for Afghans as both the government and Taliban outfit try to consolidate their positions ahead of any possible talks to negotiate from a stronger position.

To persuade the hardliner Taliban group to enter peace talks, Afghan President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani offered unconditional talks in late February that include giving recognition to the militant group as a political force and opening an office for the outfit in Kabul or any other city it wants to operate from.

Taliban militants who have yet to respond to the offer for peace talks, according to political observers, are getting ready to soon launch their so-called spring offensive and intensify operations against Afghan and U.S.-led coalition forces stationed in Afghanistan.

"The Taliban group seems to be more aggressive and resolute to continue the fight with new tactics and with new weapons," a retired army general, Ahamd Shah Alami, told Xinhua recently.

The expert also said that the Taliban's recent deadly attack in the Khawaja Omari district in the eastern Ghazni province could be an example of a change in Taliban tactics to focus on high profile targets.

In the surprise attack by the militant group on April 12, according to local officials, more than a dozen people including a district governor were killed and several others injured. According to the expert, the militants used new weapons in attacking the district and inflicting casualties to those inside the compound.

Spring and summer is known as "fighting season" in Afghanistan and traditionally all the fighting forces do their best to expand and consolidate their grip at this time of year ahead of winter in the mountainous land.

Afghan security forces backed by U.S.-led coalition forces have already stepped up crackdowns against militants elsewhere in the militancy-plagued country.

A deadly airstrike against Taliban militants in the northern Kunduz province earlier this month, according to General Mohammad Radmanish, a spokesperson for the Defense Ministry, had left more than a dozen rebels including some senior Taliban commanders dead and injured scores of others.

The official also warned that the government forces would continue to target the insurgents elsewhere in the country.

Echoing the notion, American commander of the U.S.-led coalition forces in Afghanistan, General John Nicholson, has emphasized the need to keep up diplomatic, social and military pressure on the militants in order to bring them to the negotiating table in order to find a negotiated settlement to the country's prolonged conflict.

The Taliban outfit, yet to accept the government's offer for talks, has demanded direct talks with the U.S. and is calling for the complete pullout of foreign forces from Afghanistan.

Amid the government's push for peace talks and mounting military pressure, the enforcer of the southern region and Kandahar police chief, General Abdul Raziq, claimed recently that he had reached a deal with 60 prominent Taliban commanders and senior leaders to join the government-backed peace process.

Parallel to peace efforts, observers believe that both the government and militant groups are also getting prepared for battle to gain more ground during fighting season in spring and summer to secure an upper hand ahead of any possible talks.

"The year 2018 is a decisive year for the people of Afghanistan. Fighting and talks will move forward simultaneously and hopefully the Taliban will lay down their weapons to further their interests through political participation and peaceful means," Mohammad Omer Noori, a professor at Ibne Sina University, told Xinhua.
By Tao Jun, Bui Long

HANOI, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Despite the generally favorable medium-term outlook, there are significant challenges facing Vietnam's economy this year, stated senior economists from the World Bank (WB) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB).

"The ADB expects that the Vietnamese economy will continue to perform strongly in 2018 and 2019. The ADB forecasts that growth will rise to 7.1 percent this year, before easing back to 6.8 percent in 2019. With that said, several structural risks exist for Vietnam's economic outlook," Aaron Batten, senior ADB economist in Vietnam, told Xinhua on Thursday.

The structural risks include the need for deeper state-owned enterprise (SOE) reform and the continued vulnerability in the financial sector, to unresolved non-performing loans and undercapitalized banks as domestic credit records rapidly grow, he said.

Another risk facing Vietnam is rising global trade protectionism, with U.S. President Donald Trump's "America First" policy tending to protect domestic sectors, which might lead to trade wars.

"In particular, close attention also needs to be paid to rising global trade protectionism," the ADB economist said, adding that trade wars can negatively affect Vietnam's economic growth.

According to Batten, Vietnam has actively sought out preferential market access with other economies through a range of trade and investment agreements.

For example, the European Union and Vietnam plan to finalize their free trade agreement this year building on past agreements with Japan, South Korea and others, negotiated through ASEAN, the ADB economist noted.

While free trade and investment agreements will generate major benefits for Vietnam's economy, they will also require the country to open its economy to greater foreign competition and enforce stringent labor and environmental standards.

Vietnam needs to work towards improving its global competitiveness and productivity so that its firms can compete in new markets.

"Achieving this will require a range of coordinated policy actions, including reforming the efficiency of public service delivery, reducing the distorting impact of SOEs on innovation, and upgrading crucial national infrastructure," said Batten.

By being more competitive in these fields, Vietnam can be more successful in attracting foreign capital and export markets, he added.

The WB has also stated that Vietnam's robust growth and macro stability are expected to be sustained over the medium term, with its gross domestic product (GDP) estimated to grow around 6.5 percent this year, but risks remain.

The risks include global financial volatility, rising protectionism, as well as domestic vulnerabilities associated with the pace and quality of fiscal consolidation, remaining banking sector constraints and subdued productivity growth.

"Domestically, a slowdown in structural reforms could weaken the ongoing recovery and weigh on Vietnam's medium-term potential growth. There is also a risk that fiscal consolidation may erode pro-poor fiscal expenditure and investment in human and physical capital," Sudhir Shetty, chief economist for the East Asia and Pacific Region of the WB, told Xinhua recently.

Externally, strong trade and investment links expose Vietnam's economy to risks associated with a potential rise in protectionism and a possible weakening of external demand.

"These risks call for further steps to enhance macroeconomic resilience, including more exchange rate flexibility, a further buildup of foreign reserves, and responsive monetary and macro-prudential policies that moderate credit expansion and bolster capital buffers in the banking sector," Shetty stated.

On the fiscal front, there continues to be a need for deeper revenue and expenditure reforms, including broadening tax bases, right-sizing of the public administration, and higher value for money invested publicly.

Steps to solidify macroeconomic stability need to be accompanied by progress on structural reforms to lift productivity and potential growth, including steps to reform the SOE sector, improve the regulatory environment, and enhance factor markets, including for land and capital, the WB economist proposed.

Recently, the WB has predicted Vietnam's GDP will grow around 6.5 percent in 2018, while the ADB put the figure at 7.1 percent, and the International Monetary Fund at 6.6 percent.

Vietnam's GDP grew 7.38 percent in the first quarter of this year, according to the country's General Statistics Office.

Vietnam's top legislature targeted GDP growth of 6.5-6.7 percent in 2018. The growth rate was 6.81 percent in 2017.
Raphael Tuju (Front 2nd L), Cabinet Secretary without portfolio and Secretary General of the ruling Jubilee Party and Wang Xuezheng (1st,R), Counselor at the Chinese Embassy in Kenya visit the Chinese tiles manufacturing company, Twyford Ceramics in Kajiado County, Kenya, April 5, 2018. Kenya is keen to harness capital and technical know how from Chinese enterprises in a bid to propel industrial growth that is a key pillar of President Uhuru Kenyatta's big four agenda, a senior official said on Thursday. (Xinhua/Charles Onyango)

by David Musyoka

NAIROBI, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Chinese companies in Kenya said Friday they are ready to partner with their Kenyan counterparts to provide the skills, financing and capacity needed to realize the Big Four Agenda of the east African country.

Zhang Haifeng, the chairman of the Kenya China Economic and Trade Association (KCETA), said the two countries have already realized win-win partnership that should be depended to help Kenya fast track the attainment of middle-income status.

Baby incubators are seen at the donation ceremony of medical equipments in Nairobi, Kenya, March 8, 2018. Kenya's First Lady Margaret Kenyatta on Thursday launched a second strategic plan for her campaign dubbed "Beyond Zero," and vowed to fight cancer and maternal and child mortality. The Chinese Embassy in Kenya donated medical equipments worth about 130,000 U.S. dollars to Kenya after the ceremony. (Xinhua/Lyu Shuai)

"Cheaper transport, electricity and water are good for development and China has the capacity to provide construction works on these for Kenya," he said in the capital of Nairobi during Big Four Agenda seminar organized by the Chinese Embassy in Kenya.

"I want to encourage Chinese manufacturers in Kenya to work with their Kenyan counterparts to encourage skills transfer and also learn from Kenyans. We also want Chinese companies to employ more Kenyans in order to empower the youth," said Zhang.

He said Chinese companies in Kenya must understand that they cannot achieve much under the Big Four Agenda if they do not work with the government, the private sector and the common Kenyans.

A local worker plants tomato sprouts inside a green house which is introduced by Chinese expert Liu Gaoqiong to Kenya at Egerton University in Nakuru, Kenya, Oct. 14, 2016. As the Sino-African relations are getting stronger in recent years, more and more Chinese people and companies invest in African countries with their fund, knowledge and skills to help Africa fight against poverty. (Xinhua/Sun Ruibo)

Big Four Agenda is a five-year development plan by President Uhuru Kenyatta to transform the lives of Kenyans through manufacturing, food security, universal health insurance and cheaper housing, meant to consolidate his legacy in his last term that ends in 2022.

Chinese Ambassador to Kenya Liu Xianfa said China and Kenya officials are currently engaged in speeding up policy formulation in order to ensure that Kenya benefits from the Belt and Road Initiative, of which Kenya was named as a strategic partner of Chinese government.

The ambassador said he is working with Kenyan counterparts on how to increase China's support to Kenya to help it achieve industrialized status.

Photo taken on July 6, 2016 shows a part of the Two Rivers Mall project in Nairobi, Kenya. Chinese firm AVIC International develop and construct the Two Rivers Mall project which is a mixed-use development project that sits on 100 acres. Phase one of the project will cost 250 million U.S. dollars and consists of a 670,000 square feet shopping mall and two office towers totaling 200,000 square feet of office space. It will be the biggest mall in East Africa. (Xinhua/Pan Siwei)

"We are speeding up discussions on joint investments and how to enable Kenya to access more Chinese market, especially for its agriculture produce," he added.

He said China will help Kenya build more industrial and economic zones and observed that there are many industrial parks that have already started being constructed along the Chinese-built Standard Gauge Railway.

"We are also working with Kenyans officials to speed up skills transfer in the production of maize and rice. I want to encourage Chinese companies in Kenya to now focus more on the Big Four Agenda to help transform this country," he added.
ST. PETERSBURG, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Members of a criminal group, led by a former employee of the Russian Federal Drug Control Service, were found guilty of drug trafficking from Uruguay to Russia and illegal possession of weapons.

TASS reported that the decision was made by a jury in St. Petersburg.

The case had been investigated since 2014, when members of the criminal group were detained, according to the report.

One of them was detained at the Pulkovo airport with 11 kg of cocaine, the report said.

The investigators also found more than 60 kg of hashish, 200 liters of psychotropic substance, as well as other drugs and reagents for their manufacture.

Head of the gang Alexander Bolshakov, who was a former employee of the Russian drug control service, was also found to have firearms and ammunition.

The court will pass sentence in the near future, according to the report.
by Christine Lagat

NAIROBI, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Patricia Tafawa was elated upon learning that she was among 40 Kenyan youths who beat tough competition to win scholarships from China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC) to pursue majors in railway technology at Beijing Jiaotong University starting from May.

The 19-year-old actuarial science under-graduate student at a local public university has since childhood defied entrenched cultural myths and stereotypes to study technical courses that are largely shunned by the female gender in Kenya.

Tafawa told Xinhua during a farewell ceremony for CRBC scholarship beneficiaries on Friday that a study tour in China has presented a golden opportunity for her to realize long-cherished dreams.

"I have never shied away from challenging tasks and pursuing a major in civil and structural engineering in China will test my grit and determination to succeed in the face of huge odds," said Tafawa.

"I look forward to utilizing knowledge and skills acquired in China to improve transport networks in our country, especially roads and railways," she added.

Tafawa is among a growing army of young Kenyans who have benefitted from China-funded skills development to help transform the country's railway transport sector.

So far, CRBC has sponsored 100 Kenyan youths to pursue advanced courses in railway engineering, maintenance and operations at the prestigious Beijing Jiaotong University.

Tafawa and her 40 peers were excited by the prospect of studying railway engineering in China and vowed to return home and help their country realize its quest for modernization of transport sector.

"My desire is to come back after completing studies and participate in our country's development. Our skills will be required as the government embark on modernization of railway system to propel industrial growth," said Tafawa.

Other beneficiaries of the third and final batch of CRBC scholarships to study railway-related courses in China were upbeat their lives were to be changed.

James Chira Kamau, 26-year-old major in tours and travel said he felt honored to be among 40 Kenyan youth who are set to join Beijing Jiaotong University for elite courses in railway engineering and operations.

"Am very glad for this opportunity to study a technical course in line with my childhood dreams. I promise to get a first class honors and come back to develop our country's infrastructure," Kamau told Xinhua.

He noted that Chinese financial and technical support has been instrumental in transforming the lives of Kenyan youth.

James Macharia, Kenya's Cabinet Secretary for transport, infrastructure and housing, was joined by Chinese Ambassador to Kenya, Liu Xianfa and senior executives from CRBC during the send-off ceremony for the scholarship beneficiaries.

Macharia said Kenya appreciated China's support to help bridge skills gap in the rapidly evolving railway sector.

"We need to increase the capacity to develop the entire railway systems," said Macharia adding that Kenya could soon be a hub for skills and knowledge transfer in railways operations and management.

China-sponsored elite courses in modern railway management have provided a new lease of life to the country's youth who often grapple with unemployment after graduating from college.

Emmanuel Kahindi, a 24-year-old mechanical engineering graduate from a local public university, said he looked forward to a transformative experience during the four-year study tour in China.

"This is a great chance for me to improve my engineering skills and I intend to come back to Kenya and make the country better in the areas of infrastructure development and manufacturing," said Kahindi.

He noted that Kenya could tap into Chinese expertise and advanced technologies to upgrade its railway systems and decongest roads.

The launch of the 480 kilometers Nairobi-Mombasa Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) by President Uhuru Kenyatta in May last year has necessitated the need to train additional personnel to enhance its operations.

Li Qiang, CRBC Vice President of General Manager of Kenya Office, said the 40 Kenyan students who are set to enroll for advanced courses in railway engineering at the university in Beijing will be a critical asset during construction of other SGR phases.

The scholarship beneficiaries on their part said they hoped to be roped in during implementation of the remaining sections of SGR that is expected to open Kenyan hinterland to investments and trade.

Mutai Kiplagat, a 20-year-old civil engineering major at the University of Nairobi, said an opportunity to pursue railway related courses at a prestigious Chinese university will have ripple effects in his community and country at large.

"It is a good chance that will be beneficial to the country now that we are aiming to become a middle-income economy with modern roads, railways and industries," said Kiplagat.
NAIROBI, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Scientists on Friday urged governments in the east African region to promote large scale growing of Gum Arabic tree as a means to reduce forest degradation.

Speaking in Nairobi during a workshop on the development of a regional policy and strategy, the scientists said that governments should promote growing of this tree species by supporting communities to produce and sell the products as they protect the forests.

"The growing and protection of trees with value like Gum Arabic that is a key ingredient in food and pharmaceutical industry globally is capable of making regional countries meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and improve national forest cover as well," Edward Kilawe, UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) Forestry Officer for Eastern and Southern Africa sub-region, said in Nairobi.

Kilawe observed that with the adoption of such trees that have the potential of growing mainly in the Horn of Africa, communities will be shielding forests from illegal loggers as they harvest the gum.

He said that the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) member countries have the potential of growing the tree and benefit from it.

Kilawe however called on governments to ensure that communities are not exploited by middlemen by ensuring that value addition is done at the harvesting stage as opposed to selling raw products.

He said that gum Arabic is a sap from the branches of Acacia Senegal trees. He noted that gum and resins are used for medication, food, additive to soft drinks, confectionery, pharmaceutical, adhesive, for making paint and printing color and is also a natural emulsifier, which means that it can keep together substances which normally would not mix well.

"Forests provide huge opportunity for fighting food insecurity and creating job opportunities for populations," Patrick Kormawa, FAO Representative to the African Union (AU) and the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) said.

Kormawa noted that alongside agriculture, forestry is capable of generating revenue as well as improving the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for the countries in the sub-region.

He noted that the sub-region is known to suffer from adverse impacts of climate change but with the massive introduction of gum Arabic tree, the effects could be managed.

Mohamud Ismail, the Technical Adviser to the Somali Directorate of Environment, said that gum Arabic does not require a lot of water to thrive.

He said that before the Somali government collapsed in early 1990s, gum Arabic was the second to livestock in generating GDP for the Horn of Africa State.

"Our farmers sell the products to buyers from Dubai, Yemen and Oman who prefer Frankincense, Myrr and Opoponax that are harvested from Acacia," said Ismail.

According to Abdelhai Shariff, Head of Planning and Policy at the Sudanese Forest National Corporation, Gum Arabic, also known as acacia gum, is a natural gum consisting of the hardened sap of various species of the acacia tree.

He said that Sudan produces over 80 percent of the product from the central region of the country due to the government's involvement in the whole value chain.

"We have organized producers into associations (GAMAS) and to date we have some 3,000 associations where members, including women play equal role," Shariff noted.

Shariff revealed that through the GAMAS, they are capable of accessing loaning facilities that have helped improve their livelihoods.

He revealed that all producers have land title deeds that they use to acquire loans as collateral and are also trained on the importance of belonging to an association.

"This approach has helped the country earn lots of revenue from the products as well as keep the forest cover growing," he added.

"The region has a high potential of producing Gum Arabic. Emphasis should be put in all IGAD member countries to adopt the tree due to its potential," he added.
LUSAKA, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Zambia was hopeful of clinching an International Monetary Fund (IMF) aid package during talks scheduled to be held on the sidelines of the IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings.

Fredson Yamba, Secretary to the Treasury, said the government was hopeful of clinching the aid package during latest talks because it had put all measures in place as requested by the IMF when they visited Zambia a few months ago.

The government, he said, will utilize the Spring Meetings and engage the international financial institution for an aid package which has stalled, according to a statement.

Zambia has been seeking for an aid package from the IMF believed to be around 1.3 billion U.S. dollars but the two parties have so failed to reach an agreement.

Last year, IMF urged Zambia to deal with its rising debt, which had become a focal point for the talks, warning that the country risked plunging into a debt distress.

The government has since put in place a medium term debt strategy to help it manage its debt. On Thursday, the Zambia Institute for Policy Analyst Research (ZIPAR) said the IMF aid package was vital in order to reduce Zambia's debt distress.

The local think-tank said without the IMF intervention, the risk of debt distress will grow as the southern African nation was likely to see a continuation of excessive spending and mounting fiscal imbalance between revenue and expenditure.

Finance Minister Margaret Mwanakatwe is leading a team of government officials for the IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings where she hopes to hold bilateral talks on the aid package.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-21 01:24:57|Editor: Lifang

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Palestinian protestors clash with Israeli troops at the border in eastern Gaza with Israel, east of Gaza City, on April 20, 2018. Four Palestinians were killed and more than 450 wounded on Friday during fierce clashes between hundreds of Palestinian protestors and Israeli soldiers near the border between eastern Gaza Strip and Israel, medics said. (Xinhua/Wissam Nassar)

GAZA, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Four Palestinians were killed and more than 450 wounded on Friday during fierce clashes between hundreds of Palestinian protestors and Israeli soldiers near the border between eastern Gaza Strip and Israel, medics said.

Ashraf al-Qedra, spokesman of the health ministry in Gaza said on Friday the four killed Palestinians are Sa'ed Abu Taha, 29 years old, Mohamed Ayoob, 15 years old, Ahmad Rashad Athamna, 24 years old, Nabil Abu Aqel, 25 years old.

Al-Qedra said that since the outbreak of rallies and protests in March 30, the Israeli army shot dead 37 Palestinians and wounded more 4,000 others; more than one third of them were shot by live gunshots.

Hundreds of Palestinians began earlier Friday to move towards the eastern area of the Gaza Strip that is close to the border with Israel to join the fourth Friday of protests and rallies that is called Friday of Martyrs and Prisoners.

Friday's movement is part of a six-week activity organized by Palestinians factions and political powers, which started in March 30 and will end on May 15, the day after the 70th anniversary of Israel's declaration of independence but marked by the Palestinians as the Nakba Day, or "Day of the Catastrophe."

The Palestinians call the activity as the Great March of Return, to stress their right of return and to exert more pressure on Israel to end more than ten years of blockade imposed on Gaza.

On Friday, Ismail Haneya, Islamic Hamas movement politburo chief told demonstrators in northern Gaza Strip that the Palestinians showed during the rallies that they can never be defeated.

"Be ready and get prepared for the coming human flood that will be on all the borders of Palestine inside and outside the occupied territory on the day of the Nakba. I call upon the people of the nation to embrace this march and call on the people of the world to stand on our side," said Haneya.
LUSAKA, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Zambia plans to conduct its first kidney transparent this year, a senior government official said on Friday.

Minister of Health Chitalu Chilufya said the government has invested a lot in improving the health sector both in infrastructure and human capital.

"So this year, we are hoping to do our first kidney transplant and we are also investing in human capital. We are investing in appropriate infrastructure that can support tertiary level care including organ transparent," according to a statement released by his office.

The Zambian minister further said the government would like to work with the Turkish Transplant Foundation to entrench organ transparent services in the southern African nation in order to reduce the need for treatment abroad.

Zambia, he said, was grappling with a disease burden that included ailments like chronic renal disease and chronic liver disease.

Cigdem Tunckanat, president of the Turkish Transplant Foundation, said the organization has been implementing a technical assistance program since 2015 and that so far seven Zambian doctors have benefited from it.

The organization, he said, was keen to share its experience with Zambia on organ transplant and conduct transplant studies in the southern African nation.
DAR ES SALAAM, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Tanzanian Members of Parliament on Friday urged the government to urgently act on the dreadful shortage of workers in the health sector, saying the situation was putting the lives of many poor Tanzanians at risk.

Speaking in the National Assembly in the capital Dodoma, the MPs observed that shortage of medical personnel in the health sector was caused by the job cut of workers with fake academic credentials in public service implemented by the government last year.

Over 9,900 civil servants with reportedly forged academic credentials were dismissed from jobs and government payroll after President John Magufuli ordered their immediate dismissal with the health sector being the most affected.

The MPs said there was an urgent need for the government to hire medical personnel to cater for the shortage across the east African nation.

Salma Kikwete, an MP on special seats for woman, said urgent measures were required to address the situation by employing enough workers in the health sector to save people's lives in the country.

According to the former First Lady, Lindi region was facing an acute shortage of health workers by 72 percent, which posed a major threat to the health sector in the area.

"Most of the health service provision centers in Lindi region are facing acute shortage of workers. Immediate measures should be taken to address the problem," she said.

Fatma Tawfiq, another special seats MP, told the House that Dodoma region had a 60 percent shortage of health workers.

James Mbatia, an MP for Vunjo constituency, advised the government to strengthen participation of private sector in the health sector to improve provision of health services.

"Health sector is among areas that need huge budget and investments. We will not achieve our vision for health or realize any of the sustainable development goals if we do not confront challenges facing this sector," said Mbatia.
VILNIUS, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Lithuania's ruling Farmers and Greens Union (LZVS) and newly created Lithuania's Social Democratic Labor party (LSDDP) are negotiating a new coalition agreement which should also lead to solving current problems within the government, Gediminas Kirkilas, chairman of LSDDP, said on Friday.

"We expect to sign it (the agreement) next week," Kirkilas said in an interview with a local website VZ.lt.

He did not reveal the details of the new agreement, noting that "until there is agreed all, nothing is agreed."

The current ruling coalition's agreement was signed after Lithuania's parliamentary election in November 2016. However, last autumn Lithuania's Social Democratic party (LSDP) decided to withdraw to the opposition due to tensions with the LVZS.

Social democrats who were against the decision left the party and established, at the beginning, a new parliamentary group and, last month, a new LSDDP party which initiated the renewal of the coalition agreement.

Following LSDP's retreat, the current government was working as a minority government.

According to Kirkilas, alongside with talks on a renewed coalition agreement the parties are expecting a "probable discussions and decisions as regards assigning a new minister of justice".

The office has been vacant for nearly two months as the candidate nominated by Lithuanian Prime Minister Saulius Skvernelis was immediately rejected by the country's president Dalia Grybauskaite.

The former minister of justice Milda Vainiute resigned in March following an obscure audit process at the Prison Department controlled by the ministry.

Skvernelis and Grybauskaite are also at odds due to a controversial issue of the current minister of agriculture Bronius Markauskas.

According to media reports, it is believed that Markauskas' family was engaged in farming in Klaipeda District but was not paying land rental fees to some landowners.

It was reported that Markauskas' mother used the land plots without permission for roughly 5 years while the National Paying Agency paid the woman EU payments for farming on four land plots where land was cultivated without rental agreements.

Prime Minister Skvernelis stated earlier this week that the minister may remain in the post until the deeper investigation is finished. President Grybauskaite afterwards said that the prime minister was "not independent and could not adopt decisions individually".
Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-21 02:10:10|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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UNITED NATIONS, April 20 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday condemned the kidnapping and killing of three media workers last week and the subsequent kidnapping of two other Ecuadorian nationals in the Ecuador-Colombia border region.

The UN chief expressed his condolences to the families of the victims, and his sympathy and solidarity to the government and people of Ecuador, said Farhan Haq, Guterres' deputy spokesman, in a statement.

These acts highlight the threats posed by criminal groups operating on the border between Ecuador and Colombia. In this regard, the secretary-general welcomed the close cooperation between the two countries to address this common threat, said the statement.

The secretary-general reiterated the world body's availability to support the two governments in the areas deemed necessary, it said.
ROTTERDAM, The Netherlands, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Over 100 enterprises and governmental agencies from China and the Netherlands joined an economic cooperation forum in Rotterdam Friday to share insights and explore new opportunities.

"Free trade in the world leads to more wealth and stability. That's why we like the way the Chinese in the international arena working for enhancing peace and stability, and our country is also working on the same themes," Mayor of Rotterdam Ahmed Aboutaleb said at the forum.

"We are both traders. China is a huge market and the Chinese are very innovative. The Netherlands also has a lot to offer when it comes to health care, food technology, sustainable energy and so on," said the mayor. "It is really important that we maintain our relations good."

The Port of Rotterdam is one of the starting points and destinations of the Euroasia shipping route and the China-Europe rail freight. It is the place where the land and maritime Belt and Road meet, having a unique geographical advantage in the construction of the Belt and Road initiative.

Desire for cooperation in especially the construction of Belt and Road initiative has been expressed by Chinese and Dutch leaders on many occasions, said Wu Ken, Chinese Ambassador to the Netherlands.

Wu expected that the depth and breadth of pragmatic cooperation between China and the Netherlands will be brought to a new level in the new era, with the Netherlands becoming a "clipper" in jointly building the initiative by China and the EU.

"China will take many major measures in terms of broaden market access, improving the investment environment, protecting intellectual property rights, and actively expanding imports," said the ambassador.

"I hope that people with insight in China and the Netherlands, especially the outstanding entrepreneurs of the two countries, can actively implement the concept of open and win-win cooperation and make economic globalisation more open, inclusive, balanced, and beneficial to all," he concluded.

Currently, China is the second largest trading partner of the Netherlands outside the EU, and the Netherlands is China's third largest trading partner among the EU countries.

According to statistics from China Customs, the bilateral trade volume between China and the Netherlands in 2017 reached 78.6 billion U.S. dollars, a record high.

The Netherlands is the world's eighth-biggest investor in China. Over a thousand Dutch companies operate in China, at around 1,500 sites, showed statistics from the Dutch government.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-21 02:20:13|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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GAZA, April 20 (Xinhua) -- As the fourth weekly protest along Gaza-Israel border began Friday, hundreds of Palestinians flew kites over the border fence into Israeli territory as a way to protest.

This week, flying kites was the Palestinians' tool to express their anger against Israel during their six-week protests dubbed the Great March of Return, which kicked off on March 30 and left so far 37 Palestinians dead and hundreds of others injured.

Since early hours of the day, thousands of Palestinians gathered at the eastern area of the Gaza Strip to carry on their anti-Israel rallies that were held in five areas along the borders with Israel.

The marches are expected to peak on May 15, the day after the 70th anniversary of Israel's declaration of independence but marked by the Palestinians as the Nakba Day, or "Day of the Catastrophe."

Close to the border fence, teenager Ahmed Bashir from Gaza city made his own kite bearing the colors of the Palestinian flag and flew it over the Israeli soldiers guarding the borders amid the cheers of his pairs.

"My kite is flying over our stolen lands," Bashir said as he held the kite string. "I wrote 'we will be back' on my kite."

Next to Bashir, teenager Suleiman Abu Khdair attached a letter to his kite.

"My letter is sent to Israeli soldiers. It says 'Leave our homeland'," Abu Khdair told Xinhua while watching dozens of teenagers flying kites along the borders.

The little boy said he is just among thousands of Palestinians who came to participate in the weekly protest that demands the return of Palestinian refugees to their homes they were forced to leave when Israel was created in 1948.

"The Israeli soldiers target us with live ammunition and tear gas, but we reply with these kites," he added.

Palestinians believe that the mass protest is a strong message to the world that the issue of the Palestinian refugees has not been resolved yet.

The Palestinian refugees' struggle to return home has been one of the key and thorniest issues in the final status negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis.

Spokesman for the organizing committee of the protests, Ahmed Abu Retaima, told Xinhua that flying kites is an initiative of young people who wanted to show that the protests are peaceful but are met by violent Israeli reactions.

However, some Palestinians believe that the kites could also be used to cause Israel troubles.

Dozens of young people flew kites carrying firebombs that started fire once they touched the ground, causing wildland fire near the border fence.

"These kites are simple, but they still can cause damage," Eissa Abu Jamie, a masked Palestinian protestor from southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis, told Xinhua.

He added that Israelis should realize that what has been seized by force can only be retrieved by force.

According to Israeli media, kites with Molotov cocktails attached to them had caused several fires, but had not caused injuries.

Regional councils of Israeli towns and villages adjacent to Gaza asked Israeli citizens to be alert and to report any unusual fire incidents.

During this Friday rally, four Palestinians were killed and at least 450 others injured in clashes between demonstrators and Israeli soldiers in eastern Gaza Strip.

Among the injured, 96 were shot with live ammunition, of whom 4 are in serious conditions.

Earlier in the day, Israeli army planes threw flyers over eastern Gaza, warning people "not to listen to the incitement of the organizers of the rallies."
Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-21 02:40:19|Editor: Yamei

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BEIJING, April 20 (Xinhua) -- China tops the world in the number of business entities thanks to years of market access reform.

There were 100.24 million business entities across the country in March, including enterprises and individually-owned businesses, according to the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR). The figure makes China the largest nation of entrepreneurs in the world.

Individually-owned businesses make up nearly 70 percent of the number.

China had less than 500,000 business entities 40 years ago when it initiated reform and opening up.

The number boomed during the past five years as the government stepped up effort to loosen restrictions on business registration. Business entities jumped 70 percent from 2012 to 2017. Fifty thousand new entities are registered each day.

"One million used to be unimaginable," He Xin, president of China Society of Market Supervision, said, attributing the growth to government efforts to cut red tape.

China has greatly relaxed market access to allow people to set up their own businesses, with 87 percent of approval items either reduced or canceled.

During the past five year, the high-tech industry witnessed rapid growth, and new service companies accounted for nearly 80 percent of registrations. Private businesses became the biggest employer, creating 40 percent of new urban jobs.

The World Bank data showed China improving by 18 places in ease of doing business in the past five years, and by 65 places in ease of setting up businesses.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-21 03:15:31|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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JERUSALEM, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Approximately 3,000 Palestinians on Friday participated in the riots in five locations along the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip, according to a statement issued by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).

The IDF troops responded with riot dispersal means and fired in accordance with the rules of engagement, said the Israeli military. "The IDF will not allow any harm to security infrastructure that protects Israeli civilians, and will act against the violent rioters and terrorists."

These Palestinians attempted to approach the security infrastructure, burning tires and flying kites with burning items attached to it. Several kites crossed into Israel and were extinguished when required, said the Israeli military.

Four Palestinians, one of them 15 years old, were shot dead by IDF troops on Friday morning and 729 Palestinians were injured in clashes during skirmishes with Israeli security forces on the Gaza border, according to Palestinian sources.

This is the fourth consecutive week of the Great March of Return staged by the Palestinians in the enclave in recent weeks. The number of Palestinians participating in Friday's protest was significantly smaller than the 10,000 at last Friday's demonstration. There were about 20,000 and 30,000 protesters respectively in the two weeks before.

"It is good to see that the Palestinian public is less and less responding to Hamas' calls," said the Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, when touring the area of Kibbutz Sa'ad in the Gaza vicinity Friday and pointing to the dwindling numbers in the protests.

Ahead of the protest, the IDF aircraft dropped leaflets in the area where riots have recently been taking place in the Gaza Strip, warning against approaching the security fence and attempting to sabotage it and carry out terror attacks.

The leaflets read, "You are participating in violent riots. The Hamas terror organization is taking advantage of you in order to carry out terror attacks. The IDF is prepared for all scenarios."

"Stay away from the fence and do not attempt to harm it; avoid using weapons and committing violent acts against Israeli security forces and Israeli citizens," the leaflets added. "Stay away from the terror instigators and violent riot orchestrators. The IDF will operate against every attempted terror act targeting the barrier, its components and all other IDF equipment."

It is the first time that the IDF has dropped leaflets from the air on the Gaza Strip ahead of the mass demonstrations on the border, Israeli media reported.

Since the beginning of the violent demonstrations along the border, 34 Palestinians have allegedly been killed by IDF fire and the bodies of two of them who tried to attack an IDF position are still being held by Israel, according to Israeli media.
LONDON, April 20 (Xinhua) -- A measles alert was issued here Friday as British health officials revealed there have been more cases in the British capital so far this year than for the whole of 2017.

They blamed the rise of measles cases on trips to and from the European continent.

There have been more than 250 cases reported since the start of the year, with at least 90 confirmed after laboratory tests.

A total of 243 cases were reported last year.

Public Health England urged parents and young adults to vaccinate against the highly infectious viral illness, which can lead to serious complications and even death.

British health officials suspect the rise is being driven by unvaccinated adults travelling to and from the European continent, where there have been reported outbreaks in a number of countries.

Dr. Yvonne Doyle, who is London regional director for Public Health England, said, "We are seeing a concerning increase in measles cases across London which could lead to a wider outbreak in unvaccinated children and adults."

"Those who have not received two doses of the vaccine in the past -- or who are unsure -- should speak to their GP (general practitioners)," he said. There's no harm in receiving an additional dose.

"It's crucial pregnant women have been vaccinated with MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) in particular can cause serious complications during pregnancy."

While MMR vaccine uptake in London is good for the first dose -- 91 percent by the age of five -- it falls to 77 percent for the second dose -- the lowest anywhere in the country.

MMR is a safe and effective combined vaccine that protects against three separate illnesses in a single injection. The full course of MMR vaccination requires two doses.

Measles is a highly contagious infectious disease. Signs include cold-like symptoms, sore red eyes, a high temperature or a red-brown blotchy rash.

Europe has seen a big surge in measles cases in 2017, which the World Health Organization (WHO) said in February 2018 was a tragedy after a record low of 5,273 cases in 2016.

Cases increased four-fold, with more than 20,000 people affected and 35 deaths.
GENEVA, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Switzerland's rail system remains the best in Europe, a report said Friday, revealing the 2017 European Railway Performance Index.

"Switzerland has excellent intensity of use, notably driven by passenger traffic. It also has a good rating for quality of service and a very good rating for safety," the report published for the third time by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), notes.

The country scored a rating of 7.2 overall (out of 10) after gaining top spot in 2015 and 2012.

The scores put Switzerland ahead of Denmark (6.8 points), Finland (6.6 points) and neighbor Germany (6.1).

At the bottom of the list is Bulgaria, with 1.9 points.

Switzerland achieved almost full marks in intensity of use, one of the three criteria assessed, but it dropped a bit in quality.

Here Finland and France were in front (both 2 points out of 3.3, Switzerland 1.8). For security, Denmark, Luxemburg, Britain and the Netherlands all fared better than Switzerland.

The Swiss Federal Railways (SBB in German) said in a statement it is happy about its position in the RPI.

"It shows that SBB's efforts to balance network access and maintenance work are bearing fruit. However, it is also an obligation to keep up the hard work," said the Swiss railways.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-21 03:50:42|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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ROMA, April 20 (Xinhua) -- "China has been the most effective country in the world so far to protect the agricultural heritage," UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) official Mauro Angoletti has told Xinhua.

Angoletti made the remarks during the Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) international forum held in Rome on Thursday.

Angoletti, chairman of the GIAHS Scientific Advisory Group, told Xinhua that the Chinese government is one of the most powerful and generous supporters of the FAO projects and it has valuable experience to share with the world.

Thirteen new sites were formally celebrated as GIAHS sites during the forum, among them, four Chinese traditional agricultural systems. Other sites are in Egypt, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Portugal, Spain and Sri Lanka. Their primary production ranges from fruits, vegetables, salt and rice to silk, meat, tea and wasabi.

These systems "reflect a profound harmony between humanity and nature", FAO Deputy Director-General Maria Helena Semedo told the forum.

The new additions bring to 50 the total number of GIAHS sites worldwide and 15 of them are in China, making China the country with most GIAHS sites in the world.

Zhang Taolin, China's Deputy Minister of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, said in a keynote speech that the Chinese government attaches great importance to the protection and inheritance of agricultural civilization. It draws on the essence of traditional agriculture, promotes modern agriculture construction and sustainable agricultural development, and strives to ensure that the farming culture not to be lost.

"China will continue to strengthen the protection and development of heritage and promote the implementation of the strategy for rejuvenating villages," Zhang added.

Angoletti also suggested China carry out more cooperation with Italy which also has many GIAHS sites, as the cooperation can boost development and make both countries more attractive in the world.

FAO's criteria for GIAHS selection is to see whether the sites are of global importance to support food and livelihood security and biodiversity. Since 2002, the FAO has been actively engaged in recognizing such sites, and the program is now part of the core agenda of the organization to promote sustainable food systems.
BERLIN, April 20 (Xinhua) -- More than 4,000 employees could leave their posts at Opel by 2020 after the German car maker was taken over by French PSA Group, works council chairman Wolfgang Schaefer-Klug told the press on Friday.

According to Schaefer-Klug, PSA had presented labor representatives with plans to lay off 3,700 employees, including 1,200 positions at the Ruesselsheim-based development unit alone. However, an additional 2,500 Opel workers had also already accepted offers of early retirement while a still-unknown number of staff could accept severance packages worth 275,000 euros (337,000 U.S. dollars).

"We are under enormous pressure from people wanting to leave," Schaefer-Klug warned.

He described the pressure exerted by PSA on labor representatives in order to achieve progress in ambitious corporate restructuring plans at loss-making Opel as "unprecedented". Employees were "shocked" by apparent attempts by PSA chief executive officer (CEO) Carlos Tavares to hollow out and revoke assurances made earlier to the labor force when Opel was acquired in August 2017.

Schaefer-Klug complained that the proposals which labor representatives had received so far from PSA would only protect 1,800 out of a total of 19,000 jobs.

The German government has expressed its concern over the development, and urged PSA to keep the promises made with regards to protecting staffing levels during a process of corporate restructuring. A spokesperson for the labor ministry told the press on Friday that labor minister Hubertus Heil and economy minister Peter Altmaier had both contacted PSA's management.

German federal government spokesperson Steffen Seibert said on Friday that it was a matter of priority for Chancellor Angela Merkel to maintain open communicative channels with all parties involved.

Nevertheless, Seibert was unwilling to comment on whether the dispute between PSA and Opel workers had been a subject in discussions between Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron in Berlin on Thursday. The French government owns a 13.7-percent stake in PSA.
Source: Xinhua| 2018-04-21 04:20:46|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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JERUSALEM, April 20 (Xinhua) -- The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Friday warned that the Israeli military is prepared for any development with Iran and will "exact a price" from anyone seeking to harm its people.

"We hear the threats from Iran. The fighters of the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) and the security services are prepared for any development. We will fight against whoever tries to harm us," said Netanyahu at the start of the special cabinet meeting at Independence Hall in Tel Aviv to mark Israel's 70th birthday.

"We will not be deterred by the cost and we will exact a price from those who seek our lives. The IDF is up to the task, and the people will endure," the prime minister said.

The Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman warned on Friday, when he toured the Israel-Gaza border, that Tehran not to even consider an attack on the Jewish state, which has never been better prepared to counter Iran as Iran further threats against Israel.

"We are ready for every scenario. We are ready for a multi-front scenario and I don't remember a time when we were so prepared and so ready, both the army and the people of Israel, " said Liberman after an Iranian general warned that Iran's "hands are on the trigger and missiles are ready."

On Thursday evening Netanyahu also called for action against Iran at the reception for 70th Independence Day for the diplomatic corps held at the President's Residence. "Iran is the enemy of us all - of Israel, the Arab world, civilization," he said.

Israel remained silent on an attack on the Tiyas Military Airbase in Syria's Homs which took place on April 9 and claimed the lives of 14 people. Iran, Syria, Russia and some U.S. officials have all said explicitly that Israel was responsible for the strike.

Putin urged Netanyahu to avoid actions that might destabilize the situation in Syria and stressed the importance of not violating Syria's sovereignty.

Netanyahu reiterated that Israel will not allow Iran to establish a military presence in Syria.
File Photo: A dried out bank of a nearly water empty dam is pictured on a farm in Piket Bo-berg, Piketberg, north of Cape Town, on March 7, 2018 as a result of a three-year-long drought. (Xinhua/AFP)

UNITED NATIONS, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Poor rains in 2017 have led to a significant drought affecting much of the Sahel region, leaving more than 10 million people in need of emergency food assistance during this year's lean season, said the United Nations on Friday.

The lean season, normally spanning June to August, already started in March in some areas, leading to drastic losses in livestock. This is causing a crisis beyond what is experienced in normal years for pastoralist and agro-pastoralist communities in particular, Farhan Haq, a UN spokesman, quoted the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs as saying.

Overall, more than 10 million people will require emergency food assistance during the lean season, up from 7.1 million currently, he said.

In addition, 1.6 million children under 5 are projected to be affected by severe acute malnutrition, a 46 percent increase from 2017 estimates, he said.

Mauritania and parts of Burkina Faso, Senegal, Chad and Mali are the worst-affected countries in the Sahel region.
VANCOUVER, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Canadian federal lawmaker Jenny Kwan has re-appealed to the Canadian government to designate Dec. 13 as Nanjing Massacre Commemorative Day in the country.

Kwan made a statement at the Canadian House of Commons Thursday, re-appealing to the government to "discuss recognizing and declaring December 13 of each year as Nanjing Massacre Commemorative Day."

On Nov. 30, Kwan made a statement in the House regarding the 80th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre, asking if the Canadian government would proclaim Dec. 13 as Nanjing Massacre Commemorative Day.

She received an encouraging response from Minister of Canadian Heritage Melanie Joly as she offered to work with Kwan to achieve the goal, Kwan told Xinhua on Friday.

"I then followed up with the Minister and she informed me that the issue falls in the jurisdiction of the Minister of Foreign Affairs. I then promptly wrote to the Minister of Foreign Affairs. As she was out of the country at the time, she asked that I work with her Chief of Staff," She said.

Subsequently, she was advised that in fact the matter should be dealt with by the minister of Canadian heritage. She then went back to the minister of heritage at which point the minister said that it would not be possible to have the declaration made by Dec. 13, 2017, Kwan said in her statement.

"While it's unfortunate that this did not happen on its 80th anniversary, however, I hope the Minister of Canadian Heritage is still open to declaring December 13 of each year as Nanjing Massacre Commemorative Day," she said.

"This is an issue of recognizing a tragedy and the lasting impact that this had on people, many of whom now call Canada their home," she added.

According to the statement, it is estimated that between 20,000 to 80,000 Chinese women and girls were raped, and approximately 300,000 people were killed by the Japanese army forces in Nanjing in 1937. Over the course of World War II, an estimated 200,000 women and girls from China, Korea, Burma, Indonesia, the Philippines, and some other countries' occupied territories in Asia were tricked, kidnapped, or coerced into working in brothels to serve as "comfort women".

It is worth noting that in November of 2007, members of the House unanimously passed a motion moved by former federal New Democratic Party (NDP) MP Olivia Chow, recognizing this act of sexual slavery, expressing regret at attempts by some members of the Japanese government to ignore or diminish the events that occurred.

In October of 2017, Members of Ontario's legislature passed its lawmaker Soo Wong's motion to recognize Dec. 13 as Nanjing Massacre Commemorative Day unanimously. In that process, she also received over 100,000 signatures in support of the declaration.

To commemorate this atrocity, communities across Canada hosted events to mark this day.

Kwan said she attended the ceremonial tribute and exhibition of historical materials and cultural relics along with photos of some of the Nanjing Massacre survivors at the Greater Toronto Chinese Cultural Center last December.

The event was hosted by 80 organizations under the umbrella of the Nanjing Fellow Association of Canada.

Kwan pointed out that there is no question that this issue goes beyond partisan politics. This is about the formal recognition of atrocities, learning from history, and paying tribute to those impacted.

This is not only to commemorate the victims and survivors, but in the aim of preventing such atrocities from happening again. The Nanjing Massacre is often referred to as a "forgotten Holocaust." It is incumbent on us to ensure that atrocities of this magnitude are not forgotten, she said.

"It is my hope that the government will work with me to ensure that history is not ignored, that the Nanjing Massacre is not a 'forgotten holocaust,' and for the Canadian government to recognize this December 13, and each Dec. 13 moving forward, as Nanjing Massacre Commemorative Day," added the lawmaker in Thursday's statement.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (R) and UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura are seen at a joint press conference following a meeting in Moscow, Russia, April 20, 2018. (Russian Foreign Ministry photo)

MOSCOW, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Building up the presence of the United Nations (UN) in Syria deserves attention as it will help collect reliable information, said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Friday.

Russia cannot accept the situation that UN agencies produce reports and statements based on information from other sources than UN's own ones, he said at a joint press conference following talks with visiting UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura.

Lavrov criticized the U.S.-led missile strikes on Syria last week as they undermined the Geneva talks for the Syrian settlement under the auspices of the UN at a time when Russia, Turkey and Iran very closely approached the resumption of the Geneva process.

He asked the UN to step up humanitarian aid to the Syrian people and help with the reconstruction of housing, infrastructure and facilities of the war-torn country's national economy.

De Mistura said at the press conference he was pleased that Russia remains committed to pushing for a political settlement of the Syrian crisis.

He said the deconfliction mechanism between Russian and U.S. forces in Syria has been effective and should continue.

De Mistura expressed the hope that experts of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) will visit Douma district near the Syrian capital of Damascus as soon as possible to investigate an alleged chemical weapon attack by the Syrian government forces.

The United States, Britain and France launched intensive missile attacks on Syria on April 14, saying the move was in response to the alleged chemical weapon attack.

Damascus denied the accusation and Russia said its military experts found no traces of toxic substances in Douma.

The OPCW experts are now in Syria for the investigation, but so far they have not visited Douma.

Western countries accused Russia of hindering the OPCW investigation, while Moscow said that the experts cannot enter the area due to a lack of the UN's permission over safety concerns following the U.S.-led strikes.
BUDAPEST, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Tamas Gyarfas, former persident of the Hungarian Swimming Federation (MUSZ), has been placed in home detention for an incitement to homicide 20 years ago.

Anna Madarasi, the spokeswoman of the Budapest court announced here Friday, "Tamas Gyarfas, has been placed in home detention with a tracking device on Friday in the case of the murder of media entrepreneur Janos Fenyo."

In Hungary, the incitement to homicide is a very difficult crime to prove, and is generally punished by prison sentences of 6 to 13 years.

The detention will be in effect for a period of one month. Gyarfas has made an appeal against the decision.

Gyarfas, who claims innocence and declared the charges as "absurd", had been arrested and interrogated on Wednesday.

He is under suspicion by the National Bureau of Investigation (NNI) for commissioning mobster Tamas Portik some 20 years ago to kill Fenyo, his main rival then.

Besides having been the president of MUSZ from 1993 and 2016, and a current member of the FINA bureau, he has also been the owner of a media enterprise called Nap-TV, which made news programs broadcasted in different channels from the beginning of the 1990s to 2009.

Although Hungarian media reported that "rock-hard evidence, such as voice records" was backing up the case. Gyarfas told that the records were made-up and manipulated.

Fenyo had been murdered with a machine gun in his personal car in Budapest on Feb. 11, 1998.
HAVANA, April 20 (Xinhua) -- A day after Cuban election, Cubans went about their business on Friday, confident of the new government's capacity to lead the nation.

In Havana and other parts of the Caribbean island, the atmosphere was tranquil and calm, and talk often turned to the topic of Raul Castro handing over the presidency to his successor Miguel Diaz-Canel.

"They have to make way for younger people who have the energy to do everything," said Raul Gomez, 60, as he sat down to read the newspaper at the intersection of 23rd and 12th streets in Havana.

Just a few meters from where Gomez sat, revolutionary leader Fidel Castro in 1961 proclaimed the socialist character of the Cuban revolution.

Gomez, a retired pediatrician, believes Diaz Canel's election is a step in the right direction, "the one we need right now."

Next to Gomez was his fellow doctor and friend Joel Chirino, 40, who expects the new president to do "a good job in spite of the obstacles that we will have to continue facing as a nation."

"We have no other choice but to keep trying," says Chirino, convinced that the new government, whose final appointments will be announced in July, will do everything necessary "for the good of the nation."

Diaz-Canel's election as president on Thursday "was what we expected, at least the revolutionaries who love this country and this flag," said Mirta Alvarez, owner of a small coffee shop.

While she considered Diaz-Canel to signal stability in Cuba, Alvarez said she was concerned with global affairs in general, because in international matters, "we do not know what is going to happen tomorrow."

"Look at what they have done to Syria in the blink of an eye," Alvarez said.

Yoan Ramirez, 24, said "Cuba needs a leader like Diaz-Canel, who learned from Fidel and Raul. He is from the same school and has always defended the continuity of the revolution forged by the historic generation."

University professor Urbano Ordonez underscored the importance of a sound economy to political stability.

"If our economy moves forward successfully, it will contribute to the political strength," said Ordonez.

Cuba's new leadership will need to tackle ongoing domestic and foreign challenges, such as continuing the process of reforming the economic model and dealing with the setback in relations with the United States.
China's southernmost province is going to take on bigger roles in pushing the country's reform and opening-up as a rosy blueprint has been rolled out for the tropical island.
A Budapest appeals court dismissed a first-instance ruling concerning right-wing activist Gyorgy Budahazy and others, convicted of carrying out terrorist activities a decade ago.

The appellate court has ordered a new trial. According to the charges, Budahazy set up a terrorist organisation called the Hungarian Arrows to carry out attacks against lawmakers of the then ruling Socialist-Free Democrat alliance between 2007 and 2009.

In the summer of 2016, the Municipal Court of Budapest sentenced Budahazy to 13 years in prison. Of the 17 defendants, 15 were sentenced to between 5 and 13 years in prison each for terrorist activity.

Budahazy and his accomplices were also charged with throwing petrol bombs at the homes of Socialist and Free Democrat politicians and their parties headquarters as well as throwing Molotov cocktails at gay bars and outlets, such as a ticket office in Budapests 13th district.

In its ruling dismissing the earlier decision, the jury said that the primary court had unlawfully ordered closed hearings and disregarded evidence and testimonies by the defendant. The primary decision, they said, was unfounded and contradictory.

They added that the rights of the defence had been violated, noting that the minutes of some hearings had been withheld from his defence attorney for as long as one or two years. Such negligence cannot be repaired in a secondary procedure, Gabor Lasso, the head of the jury, said.

Budahazy was arrested in June 2009 and was kept in pre-trial detention until September 2011 when the court ordered his house arrest. The court lifted the order in June 2014. The defence had appealed the firstinstance ruling while the prosecutor demanded a heavier sentence.

MTI Photo: Kovacs Tamas
Hungarian Helsinki Committee NGO is a pro-migration Soros organisation, Fidesz spokesman Janos Halasz said after a court said Halasz did not bear personal responsibility for defaming the NGO but ordered the ruling party to pay a fine of 400,000 forints (EUR 1,300) and issue a public apology for claiming the organisation had operated in an unlawful and nontransparent manner.

The Hungarian Helsinki Committee said in a statement that the Metropolitan Court agreed with its complaint that Fideszs claims about the committee were false but Halaszs personal responsibility had not been established. The court said Halasz was simply doing his job when he voiced the partys position.

Responding to the ruling, Halasz told public media that the Hungarian Helsinki Committee was financed by US billionaire George Soros and served his aims.

The NGO is involved in the migrant business up to its jugular and represents the interests of migrants in court procedures, such as in the case of two Bangladeshi migrants demanding millions in compensation from the Hungarian state, he added.

The committee regularly files complaints about Hungary in Brussels and at the United Nations, it cooperates in the preparation of reports written in Brussels condemning Hungary, and refuses to accept the outcome of the April 8 general election, Halasz said.

It is because of such pro-migrant organisations threatening national security that the new parliament to be formed in May should include the Stop Soros package of laws on its agenda as soon as possible, he added.

The NGO sued after Halasz told a press conference last April that the Hungarian Helsinki Committee and other NGOs had colluded to withhold information in the public interest requested by the daily Magyar Hirlap.

At the time, he said: These Soros organisations are secretive about their assets and the people they finance and he claimed the Hungarian Helsinki Committee had broken the law.
A moderate conservative pundit thinks that the Left should reconsider its policies in order to regain the support of voters. If they want to succeed, they need to completely change their strategy, he suggests.

On Mandiner, Gellert Rajcsanyi identifies the main challenges facing the Left after the defeat in the April 8 election as of both a personal and a strategic character.

The conservative blogger predicts that the current left-wing parties will have a hard time to regain their popularity. DK leader and former-PM Ferenc Gyurcsany is a highly divisive figure, while the MSZP has lost its network and electoral base, Rajcsanyi writes.

He adds that the politicians from both parties were accused of corruption when they were in office, and thus cannot convincingly promise more transparent governance. As for their target audience, the Left should turn to voters in the countryside rather than focusing on urban elites.

All this requires money, which they should collect through small donations from individual supporters, Rajcsanyi continues. All in all, he concludes, the renewal of the Left will require immense determination and hard work
The public prosecutors office initiated the house arrest of Tamas Gyarfas, a businessman and former head of the Hungarian Swimming Association, for his alleged involvement in the assassination of media mogul Janos Fenyo in 1998.

On Tuesday, the National Investigation Bureau (NNI) took Gyarfas in for questioning in connection with the Fenyo murder case on suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder. During his interrogation Gyarfas denied having hired Tamas Portik, the one-time head of an oil company involved in illicit deals in the nineties, to arrange the assassination of Fenyo in 1998, Gyarfass attorney has said.

The public prosecutors office said in a statement that Gyarfas would be released from detention and instead of preliminary detention, it would seek house arrest. At the same time, his complaint over the NNI naming him as a suspect in the case has been rejected, the statement added.

News portal pestisracok.hu reported on Tuesday that the NNI had rock-solid evidence against Gyarfas in connection with the Fenyo case, including a 14-year-old audio recording of a conversation he had with Portik.

Last May, the Budapest Court of Appeals upheld a life sentence for Slovak criminal Jozef Rohac for his role in the Budapest Aranykez street bombing that claimed four lives in 1998 and the Fenyo murder on Feb. 11 of the same year. Rohac was found guilty of having carried out the murder of Fenyo.
This has been a long time in the making, but in our continuing pursuit to bring only the best of firearms, 2nd Amendment and defence related news to our readers, we are very excited to announce the next step in our evolution as a company.

As of 2020, Minuteman Review is now the proud owner and operator of Your Defence News, a website with a long history of breaking huge news stories and investigative journalism.

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This means that now the teams of Minuteman can combine with the firepower of Your Defence News to stay at the absolute forefront for our readers.

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While Sharif family's official spokesman did not reveal anything on his possible return, Nawaz's daughter Maryam, in a tweet, vowed to return before the next hearing if they were not granted an exemption from an appearance by an accountability court where proceedings over the family's London properties was underway. Remember her in your prayers. They will return from London on Sunday evening.

Kulsoom Nawaz - the wife of Pakistan's deposed PM - had earlier undergone a surgery for lymphoma (throat cancer). Sharif's sons are already in London and have been declared proclaimed offenders by the accountability court in the corruption references against them. Earlier in January, Kulsoom successfully went through her fifth chemotherapy session in London. He said if both the accused didn't filed an application within a week, the PTI would approach the Court for the said objective.

The PTI Central Secretary Information said they were giving a last chance to Nawaz Sharif and his daughter that latter filed an application in the Court for live telecast of their trial in NAB references.

The PTI member highlighted how it was pertinent to make sure that the process of accountability should not be impacted and that the "primary accused" does not flee.

Trump willing to walk away from North Korea talks

Abe touched upon the fact that summits are being planned between the two Koreas and between the United States and North Korea. Officials in Tokyo had warned Washington, and others, not to be swayed by what they called DPRK's "charm offensive".

He was referring to former minister for finance Ishaq Dar.

The PTI leader alleged that Nawaz's visit to London coincides with that of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Modi, along with heads of other commonwealth states including Pakistan's Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, is in the United Kingdom for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) 2018.
Islamabad: Pakistan's anti-corruption body, the National Accountability Bureau (NAB), on Friday approved an investigation into allegations against former President Pervez Musharraf for "holding assets beyond means" and "wrongful use of authority".

The former military ruler, who is currently living in exile in Dubai, also faces high treason charges in Pakistan. He was declared an absconder by an anti-terrorism court in the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and had postponed his return to the country in March over security concerns, Geo News reported.

On February 9, the Islamabad High Court (IHC) had redefined NAB's powers allowing the bureau to investigate ex-military men, especially retired generals, and directed it to investigate Musharraf for his alleged corruption while in office.

Lt. Col. Inamur Rahim (retired) in 2014 approached the IHC seeking a probe into the alleged corruption by Musharraf. In his complaint, the petitioner had asked NAB to hold an inquiry into the allegation that Musharraf in his nomination papers had declared assets which were beyond his known sources of income, according to a report in Dawn daily.

Musharraf ousted Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in 1999. Rahim claimed that Musharraf as Chief of the Army Staff as well as Pakistan's President had violated his oath according to which he was duty bound to defend the country and protect its citizens.

Rahim had referred to Musharraf's book, "In the Line of Fire", and its chapter titled "Man Hunt" to point out that the former military ruler admitted to handing over a large number of people to the US "in order to make money".

He also alleged that Musharraf "injected corruption into the senior hierarchy of the armed forces by allotting them plots over and above their entitlements".

The NAB chairman, retired Justice Javed Iqbal, also ordered investigations against various current and former officials including Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid leader Chaudhry Moonis Elahi for owning an offshore company and Bank of Punjab's President for having assets beyond means.
Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Friday wrote a strongly-worded blog on the judge Brijgopal Harkishan Loya death case, calling it an instance "that almost created a judicial mutiny". The Union minister posted the blog on his Facebook page on Friday afternoon, a day after the Supreme Court of India rejected a batch of petitions seeking an independent probe into the death of special CBI judge BH Loya.

Jaitley, who is also a renowned lawyer, said that a "reading of the judgement exposes every fact of the conspiracy to generate falsehood as propaganda in the public and political space". The three-judge bench of the Supreme Court had observed that there was no reason to disbelieve the Judicial Officers in the Judge Loya death case while dismissing the petitions. The apex court had ruled that investigation reveals that judge Loya died of natural causes.

Castigating the petitioners, the court also said that frivolous and motivated pleas should be discouraged. While dismissing the petitions the three-judge bench, of Chief Justice Dipak Misra, Justice DY Chandrachud and Justice AM Khanwilkar, also questioned the motive behind the pleas and observed that it was an attack on judicial independence.

Full text of Arun Jaitley's blog

Judge Loya Death Case  The One That Almost Created a Judicial Mutiny

Yesterday I read the 114 page judgement in the Judge Loya death case authored by Justice D.Y. Chandrachud on behalf of the three Judge Bench of the Supreme Court. A reading of the judgement exposes every fact of the conspiracy to generate falsehood as propaganda in the public and political space.

Never ever so blatantly in the past have national political parties, a few retired judges and some senior lawyers so closely identified themselves with the generation of falsehood that they almost come out as conspirators. A detailed analysis of the facts and the role played by some groups is necessary since I suspect such attempts will also be made in the future.

Alleged Role of Amit Shah in the Sohrabuddin Case

Amit Shah had no role in Sohrabuddin Case. It was an alleged encounter executed by some central agencies through the State Police. I had written a detailed letter on September 27, 2013 to the then Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh giving out all these facts in detail. The primary piece of evidence sought to be introduced to link Amit Shah with the encounter was that of two persons  Ramanbhai Patel and Dasrathbhai Patel, both noted land grabbers, who had given evidence against Amit Shah. Both claimed that they had gone to Amit Shahs office to meet him to have a Preventive Detention Order under PASA passed against them, withdrawn. He had demanded Rs.75 lakhs from them, which was paid on certain specific dates through one Ajay Patel in instalments. In the course of this meeting, Amit Shah had made some casual statement on why Sohrabuddin had to be killed.

The alleged evidence was so false is evident from the fact that the visitors register showed the two never visited Amit Shah ever. Secondly, there was never a PASA order against either of the two Patels. Thirdly, some of the dates on which the instalments of Rs.75 lakhs were allegedly paid by Patel were dates on which Ajay Patels passport shows that he was not in India. On this flimsy evidence any court would have discharged Amit Shah. While granting him bail, the Gujarat High Court had commented that this was actually a case of no prosecutable evidence. It did not matter to Amit Shah as to which Judge heard this flimsy charge against him. Amit Shah was discharged in the case. Some individuals challenged the discharge order before the Mumbai High Court and the Supreme Court. The challenge was rejected. Many of those who raked up the Judge Loya death case were associated against Amit Shah in the Sohrabuddin case.

The Caravan Magazines Fake News

Judge Loya, as the Supreme Court judgement establishes, had a chest pain in the early hours of 1st December, 2014 at Ravi Bhawan, Nagpur. Two other District Judges were with him. They had telephoned two other colleagues from judiciary and thus the four District Judge level officers took Judge Loya to hospital in their car where an ECG was conducted, preliminary treatment was given and the case was referred to a specialized cardiology hospital. By the time he reached the cardiology hospital, probably the condition worsened and he passed away. Efforts were made for revival but the same unfortunately failed.

During the period of his cardiac problem, only four District Judges, the doctors and the medical staff of the two hospitals had access to him. Four High Court Judges arrived at the second hospital, which recommended a post mortem which was conducted by a third hospital and the same indicated a death because of cardiac issues. His body was then accompanied by two Magistrates to his home town. After perusing the statement of all concerned persons and Judge Loyas family members, who accepted the natural causes of the death, the Supreme Court came to a finding that this conclusively was a death because of natural reasons and there was no suspicious circumstance. The Caravan Magazine stories and investigations are a textbook example of fake news. It was not gossip or rumour mongering but a deliberately generated fake news where falsehood was manufactured to generate a massive public controversy.

The Institution Disruptors

Most courts in India have a set of crusading lawyers who pick-up causes in public interest and pursue them. That is perfectly acceptable. But over the last few years one has witnessed the evolution of these public interest crusaders graduating into Institution Disruptors. They pick-up even false causes and pursue the falsehood with a sense of deep commitment, indulge in intimidating advocacy, are shrill with their opposing colleagues, are rude and impolite with the judges. They firmly believe that every falsehood that they propound must be accepted as the gospel truth. They have found two strong allies. A section of the media gives them publicity. Simultaneously, we have witnessed the devolution of the Congress from a mainstream party now taking fringe positions. The Party through its lawyers or otherwise, is too willing to identify with these Institution Disruptors and thus intimidation of courts has become the new form of advocacy. A divided court is finding itself helpless to respond to these intimidatory tactics. The judgement indicates that intidimatory tactics were used as an alternative to one sided set of facts in the case. The Institution Disruptors have now become spokespersons of the Judge Loya death case falsehood.

The Impeachment Weapon

The impeachment of a Judge of the Supreme Court is to be done only in the case of either his incapacity or on proven misconduct. The Congress Party and its friends have started using impeachment as a political tool. Impeachment is a process by which you remove the holder of office in order to protect the dignity of an office. The power of impeachment under our Constitution is a part of an inter-institutional accountability. Both Houses of Parliament as political houses have been conferred the judicial power of impeachment. Thus a judicial power is exercised by a political house. Each Member has to act as a Judge. He has to independently review the facts and the evidence. Decisions cannot be on party lines or dictated by Whip. The power is exercised in case of proven misconduct. Trivialising the use of that power is a dangerous event. It is not difficult to collect fifty signatures of Rajya Sabha or hundred signatures of Lok Sabha members even on frivolous issues. To use the power as intimidatory tactics when neither you have a case of proven misconduct or the numbers on your side, is a serious threat to judicial independence. My preliminary reaction to the impeachment motion filed today is clear. It is a revenge petition after the falsehood of the Congress Party has been established in the Justice Loya death case. It is an attempt to intimidate a Judge and send a message to other Judges, that if you dont agree with us, fifty MPs are enough for a revenge action. The charges read out are issues those which have been settled by judicial orders or by precedent. Some issues are stale, trivial and have nothing to do with judicial functions.

A Divided Court

If intimidatory tactics of Institution Disruptors and impeachment motion are threats to judicial independence, the single greatest threat is the divided court itself. Now that the conspiracy of falsehood of the Judge Loya death case stands conclusively established, a few thoughts come to my mind. The four judges of the Supreme Court who held the controversial Press Conference, are all experienced judges and in my view men of high integrity. Had they checked up the facts of Judge Loya case before commenting on it, even though only on a listing issue? Should anyone at all be commenting on a pending case because many comments created an environment of prejudice and even added credibility to utter falsehood as they did in the present case? Is the impeachment motion filed today a direct result of the press conference? Does this impeachment set a precedent that political parties in India will use impeachment as an instrument to intimidate judges hearing controversial matters?

What has happened today is a price the Indian judiciary has to pay for misadventures of many. There is no better time for judicial statesmanship and political foresight.
New Delhi: On a day when Supreme Court sought Attorney General's assistance on a PIL seeking to restrain media from reporting on the issue of motion seeking removal of Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, Congress questioned why the PIL was entertained by the apex court.

A bench headed by Justice AK Sikri on Friday sought Attorney General KK Venugopal's assistance on a plea which sought a gagging media from reporting on the matter. The opposition parties are planning the motion for removal.

Although the Supreme Court did clearly state that it would not restrain media till it hears from the AG, Congress quickly took the opportunity to indicate that certain PILs are entertained even as many others frowned upon. "A day after Supreme Court trashes PIL movers as carrying politically vested interests, it entertains a PIL to gag the media for reporting on CJIs impeachment!" tweeted Congress spokespersn RS Surjewala. "Whose interests are such PIL serving?"



A day after Supreme Court trashes PIL movers as carrying politically vested interests, it entertains a PIL to gag the media for reporting on CJIs impeachment! Whose interests are such PIL serving?https://t.co/uDtPElMp2o  Randeep Singh Surjewala (@rssurjewala) April 20, 2018

Surjewala was referring to Thursday's development that saw the SC observing that 'frivolous petitions - instituted at the behest of business or political rivals to settle scores behind the "facade" of a PIL, pose a grave danger to the credibility of judicial process.' The top court had said this while dismissing pleas seeking an independent probe into the death of CBI judge BH Loya.

(With inputs from IANS)
Patna: Union Minister and BJP leader Giriraj Singh on Friday alleged that as part of a sinister political game plan, attempts are being made to defame Hindus through the Kathua rape and murder case.

The recent rape and murder of a minor girl, belonging to the nomadic community, in Jammu and Kashmir's Kathua district had triggered severe protests across the nation and escalated Opposition attack on the Narendra Modi-led BJP government at the Centre.

Singh made this remarks while speaking at a function in Bihar's Nawada, which is also his parliamentary constituency.

"A conspiracy has been hatched to defame Hindus using the Kathua case. Some people with vested political interests are conspiring to divide the country," Singh said.

Singh, while blaming "pseudo secularism" for the conspiracy, said, "some people are actively defaming Hindus in the name of secularism."

The outspoken BJP leader said that earlier an attempt was made to defame Swami Aseemanand by linking him with Hindu terror or "Bhagwa Aatankwad".

"Now a fresh attempt is being made to defame Hindus through the Kathua case," he added.

He also condemned the Kathua incident and demanded the immediate arrest of the accused.

"But instead of arresting the real culprits, Hindus are being defamed," he alleged and appealed to the youth to be alert to counter the forces opposed to the country.

Giriraj Singh is currently the Union Minister of State for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises in the Union Cabinet of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

At many occasions in past, Singh had made controversial statements targeting his political opponents.

During the 2014 Lok Sabha election, he had courted a controversy for saying that all "those who opposed Narendra Modi should go to Pakistan".

His statement on Kathua incident comes a day after PM Modi strongly condemned the heinous crime and said that there should be no politics over such issues.

He also urged the society to be more sensitive to such issues and respect women and the girl child.

The PM made these remarks while interacting with the Indian diaspora during 'Bharat Ki Baat, Bharat Ke Saath' programme in London's Westminster.

(With IANS inputs)
International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Christine Lagarde on Thursday called on India`s leader to focus more on women in the wake of the "revolting" rape and murder of two young girls.

While she praised the nation`s economic performance, "what has happened is just revolting," Lagarde said when asked about the incidents in the past week involving a seven- and an eight-year-old girl.

"I would hope that the Indian authorities, starting with Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi, pay more attention, because it is needed for the women of India," a visibly angry Lagarde said.

"It`s not just a question of talking about them."

Speaking as the International Monetary Fund opens its Spring meetings, she said she chided Modi earlier this year at a gathering in Davos because "he had not mentioned women enough."

Lagarde, a long-time advocate for women`s rights, said the comments reflected her personal view, not that of the institution.

The gang rapes and murders of the two girls sparked nationwide outrage and demonstrations throughout India.

A 2014 UN report said one in three rape victims in India was a minor. Nearly 11,000 cases of child rape were reported in India in 2015, according to the National Crime Records Bureau`s latest figures.
As part of its modernisation process, the Indian Army is eyeing the Kalashnikov AK-103 7.62x51 mm assault rifles for its soldiers. The Army needs over 7,68,000 assault rifles for its soldiers.

According Russian news portal SputnikNews.com, senior Ministry of Defence officers along with a team of Ordnance Factory Board (OFB) officials will be in Moscow later in April to visit Kalashnikov rifle works at Izhevsk to discuss fast-tracking the government to government agreement for licensed production of the upgraded Kalashnikov AK-103 7.62x51mm assault rifles in India.

"A group of officials from the Ordnance Factory Board of Trichy and Rifle Factory Ichapore will be in Russia on April 24 to assess the Kalashnikov rifle works at Izhevsk. Later on, a defence ministry official will visit Moscow to have detailed discussion with the Russians," an industry source told SputnikNews.com.

India plans to build the AK-103 7.62x51mm assault rifles under its "Make in India" initiative. Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, during her April 3-5 tour of Russia, had met her Russian counterpart General Sergei Shoigu and other senior defence officials. The two sides had discussed defence cooperation between the two countries and the steps required to bolster the same.

The AK-103 rifle magazine has a capacity of 30 bullets and weighs 4.1 kgs with bullets. The rifle can shoot in safe and full auto modes. The third generation of the Kalashnikov assault rifles and a modern version of the legendary AK-47, the AK-103 has a folding butt stock and can fire 600 rounds in one minute. The rifle can also carry a 40-mm under-barrel grenade launcher or a knife-bayonet.

The Defence Acquisition Council (DAC), chaired by Sitharaman, had on February 13, 2018 had given approval for procurement of 7.4 lakh assault rifles for the defence forces. The assault rifles will be "Made in India" under the categorisation of "Buy and Make (Indian)", through both OFB and private industry at an estimated cost of Rs 12,280 crore. The DAC had also given its approval to procure light machine guns (LMGs) for the defence forces through the Fast Track Procedure at an estimated cost of over Rs 1,819 crore for the operational requirement of the soldiers deployed on the borders.

The Indian Army and Indian Air Force have also got the go ahead to procure 5,719 sniper rifles at an estimated cost of Rs 982 crore. The Indian Navy, too, has the green signal to enhance its anti-submarine warfare capabilities and get Advanced Torpedo Decoy Systems (ATDS) for the purpose. The "Mareech" system has been developed indigenously by Defence Research and Development Organisation and has successfully completed extensive trial evaluations. The "Mareech" systems will be produced by Bharat Electronics Limited, Bengaluru at an estimated cost of Rs 850 crore. The overall cost of the weapons approved is approximately Rs 15,935 crore.
Beijing: China on Friday defended Pakistan against Prime Minister Narendra Modi's remark that Islamabad was a "terror export factory", saying the country must be supported in the fight against "terrorism".

Beijing also hinted the issue of terrorism will be on the agenda of discussion at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) when the eight-member block, joined by India and Pakistan last year, holds its annual meeting at Chinese city Qingdao in June.

At an event in London on Thursday, Modi said India will not tolerate those who export terror.

"When someone has put a terror export factory in place, attacks my people, has no power to fight a war so attempts to attack behind the back... in such a case Modi knows to how to give a reply in the same language," the PM had said in an obvious reference to Pakistan.

Asked about Modi's remark, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said: "Terrorism is an enemy faced by all. The international community should work together to combat terrorism."

"Terrorism is an enemy faced by all. The international community should work together to combat terrorism. The international community should also support the efforts of Pakistan in fighting terrorism and cooperate with it," Hua added.

China always comes to the rescue of its "all-weather ally" Pakistan when it is pilloried for sheltering terrorists. Beijing has invested over $50 billion in various infrastructure projects under its ambitious Belt and Road programme.

Asked if the issue of terrorism will be discussed at the Foreign Ministers' meet of the SCO, Hua said, "As for the Foreign Ministers' meeting on terrorism, I believe it is a purpose of the SCO to promote relevant cooperation in the field."

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj will arrive in Beijing on Saturday and attend the foreign ministerial-level meeting of the SCO on Monday.

However, Hua said the security issues will be the agenda of the main SCO meet in June, which will be attended by Modi.

"Security has been a priority of the SCO since its inception. So the upcoming Prime Minister's SCO meeting will see participants exchanging views on the relevant issues. All participants will uphold the SCO spirit to take forward the development of SCO," Hua said.
NEW DELHI: Amid intense politics over the death of Judge BH Loya, Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Friday said that there is still hope as millions of "Indians can see the truth" relating to his death. Rahul's reaction came a day after the late special CBI Judge BH Loya's family said that "there is no hope left".

The family had said this after the Supreme Court dismissed a batch of petitions seeking an independent probe into the death of special CBI judge BH Loya.

The apex court said that there is no reason to disbelieve the Judicial Officers in the Judge Loya death case and ruled that investigation reveals that he died of natural causes.

The top court of the country also said that frivolous and motivated petitions should be discouraged.

The late special CBI judge was presiding over the trial in a case related to the killing of Sohrabuddin Sheikh in an alleged staged shootout in November 2005 near Gandhinagar in which the now BJP chief Amit Shah was an accused. Amit Shah was later discharged from the case.

"'There is no hope left, everything is managed', says Judge Loya's family. I want to tell them, there is hope. There is hope because millions of Indians can see the truth. India will not allow Judge Loya to be forgotten," Rahul Gandhi said in a tweet.

There is no hope left, everything is managed say Judge Loyas family. I want to tell them, there is hope. There is hope because millions of Indians can see the truth. India will not allow Judge Loya to be forgotten.https://t.co/qSczy4kmZr  Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) April 20, 2018

Attacking the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Gandhi scion had on Thursday said the truth will finally catch up with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief.

"Indians are deeply intelligent. Most Indians, including those in the BJP, instinctively understand the truth about Amit Shah. The truth has its own way of catching up with people like him," he had tweeted.

Indians are deeply intelligent. Most Indians, including those in the BJP, instinctively understand the truth about Mr Amit Shah. The truth has its own way of catching up with people like him.  Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) April 19, 2018

Meanwhile, Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Friday wrote a blog on Judge BH Loya's death and the controversy related to him.

In the strongly-worded blog, Jaitley, who is also a renowned Supreme Court lawyer, called the judge Brijgopal Harkishan Loya death case an instance "that almost created a judicial mutiny".

The Union Minister posted the blog on his Facebook page on Friday afternoon, several hours after the Supreme Court of India rejected a batch of petitions seeking an independent probe into the death of special CBI judge BH Loya.
Bengaluru: BJP chief ministerial candidate for the May 12 Karnataka Assembly polls, BS Yeddyurappa, on Thursday filed his nomination papers from Shikaripura segment, a party official said.

Shikaripura in Shivamogga district, about 300 km northwest of Bengaluru, is his hometown from where he is conteting for the ninth time since 1983, BJP state unit spokesman S. Shantharam told IANS here.

Yeddyurappa, 75, a Lok Sabha member from Shivamogga in the state's Malnad region, was the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) first state Chief Minister from 2008 to 2011 when he resigned following an indictment by the state ombudsman (Lokayukta) in a multi-crore mining scam.

As per his poll affidavit, Yeddyurappa declared cash and bank deposits of Rs 34 lakh, immovable assets - including two residential buildings in Bengaluru and Shikaripura valued at over Rs 3.38 crore, and agricultural land worth about Rs 54 lakh - apart from 2.9 kg gold and 84.80 kg silver valued at over Rs 1 crore.

Another BJP leader K.S. Eshwarappa, the party's leader in the Legislative Council, also filed his nomination from Shivamogga.

Eshwarappa, Deputy Chief Minister in the BJP's first state government from 2008 to 2013 - will contest the seat for the sixth time. He lost the seat in the 2013 elections to the Congress.

Ruling Congress' Energy Minister DK Shivakumar filed his nomination from Kanakapura in Ramanagara district, about 55 km from Bengaluru.

Those who filed their nominations on Thursday include BJP leader and former Deputy Chief Minister R. Ashoka from Padmanabhanagar in Bengaluru district, Congress leader and Law Minister TB Jayachandra from Sira in Tumakuru, and Environment and Forests Minister B. Ramanatha Rai from Bantwal in Dakshina Kannada.

A total of 135 candidates in 92 constituencies have filed a total of 155 nominations till Thursday, with a few candidates preferring multiple nominations.

Polling for 224 Assembly segments will take place on May 12 from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Votes will be counted on May 15.

The last date for filing nominations is April 24. Scrutiny will be held on April 25 and the last date for withdrawal is April 27.


New Delhi: The Central government on Friday announced it has extended a ceasefire agreement with insurgent groups in Nagaland for one year affecting from April 28.

The ceasefire agreement is between the central government and the National Socialist Council of Nagaland-Reformation and the National Socialist Council of Nagaland-Neopao Konyak/Kitovi.

"It was decided to extend the suspension of operation with NSCN/NK and NSCN/R for a further period of April 27, 2019. The pact will be for one year with effect from April 28," said a Home Ministry statement.

The agreement was signed on Thursday by Joint Secretary Satyendra Garg on behalf of Home Ministry, Jack Jimomi, supervisor GPRN/NSCN) and Viniho Kiho Swu, co-supervisor) on behalf of NSCN/NK, and Toshi Longkumer on behalf of NSCN/R.

A ceasefire is in operation between Central government, NSCN/NK and NSCN/R, it said.

The two insurgent groups, which operate in Nagaland, are among several other armed groups of the state such as NSCN-Isak-Muivah and NSCN-Khaplang.

While the NSCN (I-M) has entered into a ceasefire agreement in 1997 and has been maintaining it since then, the pact with NSCN-K has been broken after the group attacked a military convoy in Manipur in June 2015, killing 18 soldiers.
Hoshiarpur (Punjab): A 31-year-old Sikh woman Kiran Bala from Hoshiarpur in Punjab has allegedly converted to Islam and married a Lahore-based man after missing on a pilgrimage in Pakistan. She had gone to attend the Baisakhi festival there as part of a Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) Sikh delegation.

Kiran Bala's father-in-law, who suspects that she might have fallen into the hands of Pakistani spy agency Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), sought the Centre and Punjab government's intervention in the matter. According to Tarsem, Kiran Bala called him up on April 16 and announced that she had married Mohammad Azam, a man from Lahore, after converting to Islam and had taken a new name Amna Bibi.

"My daughter-in-law called and said that she has converted to Islam and got re-married in Pakistan. I want to request the Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of Punjab Captain (retd) Amarinder Singh to take her out of this situation. I suspect she might have fallen into the hands of ISI," said Tarsem Singh, a Sikh religious preacher in village in Garhshankar.

He added that Kiran was in a happy mood when he dropped her in Amritsar on April 10 for the pilgrimage to Pakistan. Around 1,700 Indian pilgrims had gone to Pakistan to visit Sikh shrines, including Panja Sahib Gurdwara near Lahore and Nankana Sahib - the birthplace of Sikhism founder Guru Nanak, on the occasion of Baisakhi on April 13.

Police officials claim that Bala and Azam were Facebook friends. She reportedly got in touch with the Pakistan Foreign Office and argued that her visa be extended as she had married Azam. He visa expires on April 21.

Bala, 31, a widow, is the mother of three. She was living with her in-laws at their village house in Garhshankar sub-division of Punjab, around 90 km from Chandigarh.

Tarsem's son Narinder Singh had died in an accident in 2013. Now, he is worried about his three grandchildren whose future is in limbo with this new development.

(With inputs from ANI)
CHENNAI: Tamil Nadu BJP leader S Ve Shekher has apologised for sharing a Facebook post that claimed that women journalists had jobs only because they slept with their bosses and that only 'illiterate and senseless scoundrels' became journalists. The excuse Shekher gave was that he shared the post without reading it.

Shekher's apology to women journalists came even as a delegation of reporters from across the Tamil Nadu media met BJP state president Tamilisai Soundarrajan to demand action against repeated insults being hurled by multiple BJP leaders, especially following the controversy over the controversy surrounding Tamil Nadu Governor Banwarilal Purohit patting of a lady journalist's cheek without her consent. The Governor issued a formal apology, but that has done little to hold back BJP leaders.

On Thursday, actor-turned-politician Shekher shared a post by a user named 'Thirumalai Sa.'. The post said, "They are disgusting and pathetic beings. In Tamil Nadu, those without any education, without common sense are the majority of those who come to work in the media. This woman is no exception to that."

"More than the universities, there is sexual abuse in the media. They can't become reporters or news anchors without sleeping with their bosses In general, the entire media in Tamil Nadu is caught in grips of criminals, scoundrels and extortionists," the post added.

He deleted the post after it stoked a furious reaction online. A day later, he has issued an apology. "I had shared the post by mistake, without reading it. I do not support the derogatory views that are expressed in the post," he said in a statement.

S Ve Shekher is a well-known film and theatre personality whose political career has seen him jump from on political camp to the other while claiming he doesn't like to keep changing the flags he holds.

He was elected as an MLA on an AIADMK ticket in the 2006 polls, but supported the ruling DMK in the Assembly. He was expelled from the AIADMK In 2009, after which he started talking about launching his own party. He joined the Congress in 2011, followed by the BJP in 2013.
Mumbai: Bigg Boss season 12 was announced during the grand finale episode of the Live singing reality show Rising Star on Sunday. The auditions for the show have begun but with a twist. The show will not have individual entrants but couples as a unit this season. And superstar host Salman Khan too may have someone with him to co-host the show.

According to the latest buzz, Salman may be joined by his former real-life girlfriend and actress Katrina Kaif on the show.

Katrina Kaifs name is being considered for the co-host of Bigg Boss Season 12. She shares a fabulous equation with Salman and they make great television hosts together because she is the only actress who can make fun of Salman on screen, imitate him, and get away with it, A report in Deccan Chronicle quoted a source as saying.

On a related note, Katrina and Salman set the silver screen ablaze with their scintillating chemistry in Ali Abbas Zafar's Tiger Zinda Hai, a sequel to their 2012 blockbuster Ek Tha Tiger directed by Kabir Khan.

Salman has been a part of the show since the fourth season which went on the air in 2011. The Bollywood heavyweight has become the face of the show and his active involvement and interaction with the contestants during the Weekend Ka Vaar episodes have added a new dimension to the programme.

Given the fact Salman has an extremely busy schedule, it would be interesting to see if he teams up with the Bigg Boss team for the 12th season.

The hunk of an actor has Race 3 slated to release on June 15 on the occasion of Eid and has Ali Abbas Zafar's Bharat in the pipeline. The shooting for the film has begun.

He will also be seen as the host of reality show Dus Ka Dum which is expected to go on air sometime in June or July this year.

Will he be able to spare time for the show and be a part of it for the ninth consecutive time?

Let's wait and watch.
Moscow: US military strikes on Syria last week removed any moral obligation Russia had to withhold S-300 anti-aircraft missile systems from its ally Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Friday, according to RIA state news agency.

Lavrov was also quoted as saying that, prior to the US strikes on Syrian targets, Russia had told US officials which areas of Syria represented "red lines" for Moscow, and the US military action did not cross those lines.

"Now, we have no moral obligations. We had the moral obligations, we had promised not to do it some 10 years ago, I think, upon the request of our known partners," he said according to RIA.

He also said that he was convinced Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump would not allow an armed confrontation between their two countries, RIA reported.

A Russian army commander has also said that Moscow would consider supplying S-300 missile systems to Syria following US-led strikes.

The United States, France and Britain launched 105 missiles last week in retaliation for a suspected poison gas attack by government forces on a rebel-held area near the capital.

According to military analysts, the S-300 surface-to-air missile system would improve Russia's ability to control air space in Syria, where Moscow's forces support the government of President Bashar al-Assad, and could be aimed at deterring tougher US action.
It can get truly junglee in China's zoos, apparently. Visitors to a zoo in southern China have killed a kangaroo and injured another. How? The tourists threw stones at the kangaroos to get them to hop around. Chinese media outlets reported the news in sharp language, going so far as to call the tourists 'stupid'.

The outrageous incidents happened at the Fuzhou Zoo in the Fujian province. The victim was a 12-year-old female kangaroo. The stones that the tourists threw at her had nearly severed her foot. But veterinarians who tried for days to save her life said what ultimately killed her was probably a rock that hit her body and ruptured her kidney.

At the same zoo, yet another kangaroo, this one a five-year-old male, sustained bad injuries to his foot after it was hit by a brick thrown by the visitors. Chinese news outlets carried an image that showed his injured foot. (See right bottom of image below)

Zoo staff say they have been trying to stop the stone-pelting for years. They say they have removed all the stones in the area around the kangaroo enclosure. But the tourists go out of their way to find stones from other places and bring them all the way back to throw them at the kangaroos. Surveillance cameras and boards seem to do little to prevent such behaviour.

The media reports also uniformly noted that it was unclear if any person had been charged for the kangaroos' death and injury.

This is hardly the first time Chinese tourists have hit the headlines for their unruly behaviour at zoos, many of which are themselves are notorious for the poor upkeep of the animals they house.

Rocks thrown at animals is just one facet of the problem that zoo visitors pose. Zoo officials told some of the media outlets that every holiday rush goes hand in hand with monkeys and bears falling sick because the visitors feed them human snacks like cake or savouries. This despite clear signage all around the enclosures asking the Chinese tourists not to do precisely those things.
No matter what happens, China will not the take the first step to stop the trade war with the US, a Chinese state-run newspaper has said. It reasoned that the Donald Trump administration has made unreasonable demands, and is attempting to force its terms down Beijing's throat.

The reasoning for why China will not back down was outlined in the Chinese government-owned Global Times. The editorials of this newspaper are usually watched closely because it is more the mouthpiece of the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC), disseminating party thought processes as a testing ground.

The Global Times editorial said China has so far kept its word and retaliated in kind to the tariffs imposed by the US. It pointed out that the Chinese economy would continue to grow with or without a trade war, and that being in one would only make China's economy stronger.

"Since the beginning, China's stance has been explicit, namely, China does not want a trade war but is not afraid of one. China will not punch first. We will not be the first to launch the trade war, nor will we take measures to escalate it. But each and every time the US imposes tariffs on us, we will launch countermeasures with similar scale," read the editorial.

"So why can't Beijing make some concessions to cease the trade war? If China and the US conduct normal trade talks, it is unavoidable that both sides need to make compromises. But the Trump administration has made unreasonable demands, and has tried to force Beijing to accept its terms while wielding a stick."

"China will never accept such rules. We just follow WTO rules. If China concedes even one inch, the US will for sure take a foot," it declared.

The editorial also reasoned that US President Donald Trump and his administration were blaming China for the US's trade deficit, which it referred to as a structural problem.

"Washington has unrealistic fantasies about 'balancing China-US trade.' It tries to solve US economic issues with sticks and threats rather than painstaking reforms. Simply put, it attempts to make a hard sell. The world is required to buy whatever the US produces at its convenience, and developing countries like China cannot make technological progress in the process," it argued.

The editorial also theorised that external difficulties would spur high-tech research in China, and that the growing domestic consumer market would make up for the loss of trade with the US that a trade war would cause.
News that Russia accepted the teenage children of Bashar al-Assad at a rebuilt summer camp in Crimea last year has shown a little of personal lives of the Syrian presidents family and his close relationship to Moscow. This was reported by Reuters.

Nestled on the Crimean coast since 1925, the Artek Seaside camp served for decades as an elite summer holiday resort for children of those favoured by the Soviet Communist Party and foreign delegations invited from its satellite states.

Russia has given the camp a 180 million dollars renovation since seizing the Crimea peninsula from Ukraine in 2014. Guests stay in newly-built dormitories by the sea.

That Assads sons Hafez and Karim and daughter Zein had stayed there last year with a group of other Syrian children was made public only this week, when a Russian lawmaker on a delegation to Damascus said Assad had mentioned it.

As it was reported earlier, President of Syria, Bashar Assad at a meeting with the Russian delegation said that his children in 2017 had a rest in the camp Artek in the annexed Crimea.

In addition, Assad said that his children are interested in building the Crimean bridge and are watching how the construction is going on, and they are also interested in politics.

As reported, the prosecutor's office opened a criminal investigation regarding the transfer of Artek to the federal property of the Russian Federation.

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The native of Luhansk region deceased in combat not far from Krymske, - Luhansk civil and military administration

A soldier of Ukraine's Armed Forces deceased in action during the skirmish near Krymske, Luhansk region; another one sustained combat wounds in the same fight. The press service of Luhansk civil and military administration reported that on Facebook.

'A Ukrainian serviceman deceased tonight due to the IFV attack not far from Krymske village, Novoaidar district. The fallen fighter was the native of Lysychansk, Luhansk region', the message says.

Since early hours of Friday, the Russian militants attacked Ukrainian positions four times; most notably, the enemy used 120 mm mortars to shell Novotroitske (Donetsk region). 122 mm shells hit Ukrainian emplacements near Popasna, Luhansk region.
This is necessary to avoid the humanitarian crisis in Donetsk region, Neal Walker says

Workers of Donetsk filtering station need safety guarantees to continue working; that is vital to resume the water supplies to households and enterprises in the area. Neal Walker, the UN Resident Coordinator in Kyiv said that as quoted by UN News Centre.

'The UN representative demanded that the Donetsk filtering station's work should be resumed; he underlined it cannot function properly without the participation of technicians', the message says.

The UN Resident Coordinator reiterated that this is not the first attack on the infrastructure object. The organization noted it was obvious that the station would not resume its work until the workers get the safety guarantees - from all parties to the conflict.
The ministry is interested in the extension of the cooperation with the OSCE to decrease the ecological consequences caused by the Donbas Conflict

Open source

The Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources of Ukraine and OSCE intend to examine the ecological state of Siversky Donets River, the south-east of Ukraine as the press service of the ministry reported citing Ostap Poltorak, the Ecology Minister.

I thank the Project Coordinator of the OSCE to Ukraine for the constant support and aid. Also, we have already begun to plan the future actions, particularly, together with the OSCE. The next project will continue the estimation and monitoring and implementation of the pilot project that aims to implement acquis (the legal concept in the legal rules system of the EU  112 International) EU in the water sector provided by the Association Agreement, the minister noted.

The pilot project should begin the comprehensive assessment of the ecological state of Siversky Donets River Basin  the biggest water artery that is the first step in the preparation of the management plan of the river basin in accordance with the EU demands.

I think that is a good combination of the responding to the urgent needs and systematical reforms connected with the implementation of the Association Agreement, Semerak noted.

Moreover, he reported that the first automated control point of the surface water of Siversky Donets River Basin at the beginning of April and it allows the possibility to monitor the changes in the state of water quality according to 14 indicators in real time.

Totally, it is planned to open eight similar posts to control the water quality in the biggest rivers of the region until the end of 2018.

As we reported 80% of drinking water sources in the occupied territories of Donbas are not suitable for use due to high mineralization as Deputy Minister of Temporarily Occupied Territories and IDPs Yuriy Hrymchak claimed.
In April 2018, at least four people, including two Crimean Tatars mysteriously died in the remand center-1 in Simferopol controlled by the occupation authority of Russia as Crimean Human Rights Group reported.

According to information, on April 6, 69-year-old Server Bilialov and 46-year-old Oleh Honcharov were found hanging. On April 12, 23-year-old Dmytro Shypovnyk was also found hanging in the punishment cell. On April 13, 39-year-old Islam Iskerov was found with his throat cut in the so-called quarantine cell. The Crimean Human Rights Group emphasized that this evidence was confirmed by a few independent of each other sources.

One of the versions of their deaths is suicide by hanging of Server Bilialov, Oleh Honcharov, Dmytro Shypovnyk and suicide by cutting the throat of Islam Iskerov.

The Human Rights Group claimed that this version is not persuasive for several reasons. According to some information, Server Bilialov counted on the cessation of the criminal prosecution and exemption from punishment in the near time.

Dmytro Shypovnyk was wound with throat cut in the punishment cell. However, people are put there only after the careful personal examination and the detained person is under constant supervision there.

Islam Iskerov was accused of the theft and the maximum sentence for it is two years of the imprisonment and the minimal is the fine in the sum of $130. So, this version on the suicide, according to the human right activists, is unlikely.

Also, it is noted, that information on these incidents is absent on the official websites of Russias Investigative Committee, Prosecutors Office of Russia and Federal Penitentiary Service.

As we reported Ukraine insisted on the access for the International Committee of the Red Cross to the prisons on the occupied territories at the meeting of the Trilateral Contact Group on Donbas in Minsk.

According to Iryna Herashchenko, First Deputy of the Verkhovna Rada, the President's Humanitarian Envoy at the Minsk peace talks, the ICRC has full access to Ukraines penitentiary system, while the representatives of the ICRC have not had access to Ukrainian prisoners in Russia and on the occupied territories over the years of the war at all.
Read the original text at 112.ua.

Open source

In early April, the US Treasury Department has imposed sanctions against a number of Russian oligarchs, and in fact, it was a kind of ultimatum from the West, as all their assets within American jurisdiction are frozen and Americans are forbidden to make any deals with them. The reaction of the capital markets was immediate, and, according to Bloomberg, on April 6, the wealth of 27 billionaires from the Russian Federation fell by 16 billion dollars. The UK is also thinking about the sanctions against Russian business leaders. American and European elites show that they do not consider Russian oligarchs to be equal; at least because their value systems are completely different. Looking at all this, it is high time to think seriously about the role of the Ukrainian oligarchs in the economic development of the country and the formation of a worthy reputation.

Unfortunately, our own business leaders and corrupt officials defend only their own selfish interests, and the pauperized population stands aside. But everybody knows what this might lead to the sharp impoverishment of the majority of the population and the rapid enrichment of the politicians and businessmen close to the authorities. Western elites were deeply convinced that the Ukrainians stood for the elimination of this shameful gap between the poor and the rich during the Maidan. However, our economy has been reformed, and the financial situation of ordinary people continues to deteriorate. We have the market, but there is no competition, as a number of financial and industrial groups are still using an administrative resource.

West begins to realize that the Ukrainian business elite in its present form is basically unable to cope with this deep economic crisis. It is not able to get the state out of the systemic debt impasse, caused by the internal contradictions and persistent efforts of the ruling oligarchic groups in Ukraine to influence power. Therefore, it was not accidental that the International Monetary Fund has stated: "At present, it is important for the Ukrainian authorities to ensure that the draft law on the Anticorruption Court is immediately examined, following the parliamentary procedures." The deadline for the Fund's agreements with the Ukrainian authorities is July 2018, and at least $ 2 billion might come from the IMF, and another $ 800 million from the World Bank. PM Groysman has a very optimistic forecast about expected GDP growth in Ukraine in 2018 (5-7%), while the IMF is more restrained, and its forecast for the growth of our GDP is 3.2% (but worsened it for 2019 - 3.3%).

Ukraines key challenge now is creating a system, in which the society would trust the authorities, and the rich would not despise the poor population.

Our western partners and sponsors suffer from insurmountable obstacles in the face of deoligarhization and struggle with the offshore "aristocracy". New top officials in conjunction with businessmen have weakened Ukrainian economy; they earn money here but use to live with families in the West. Politicians from Washington and Brussels already see their mistakes and will never reconcile themselves to a temporary defeat with Ukrainian oligarchs.

I have no doubt that our oligarchs and the authorities understand it. March 30 this year, the management of "PrivatBank" PJSC filed a lawsuit in the Nicosia District Court (Cyprus) against PricewaterhouseCoopers (Cyprus) and the audit company PwC (Ukraine) in order to recover 3 billion US dollars in compensation losses incurred as a result of violations and omissions during the audit of the bank's financial statements for 2013-2015. The filing of a lawsuit against PwC is a logical and necessary step, given PwC's great responsibility for verifying the financial statements of the bank. Henceforth, the Cypriot court will decide on PwC in the prescribed manner. Yes, local courts are not trusted anymore.

It is obvious that without a cardinal change in the value system of political leaders and representatives of big business, there can be no question of any economic breakthrough and improvement of social standards of the Ukrainians. But still, what is the solution here? Analyzing the actions of the United States, I can assume that they can easily use a proven and effective way: a tough but effective method to prevent the Ukrainian economy from turning into such a great offshore for selected oligarchs and to prevent default.

Another thing is that some oligarchs will try to convince top officials and people's deputies in the advisability of declaring a default, they say, the situation of Ukraines bankruptcy might be profitable in certain circumstances. To whom it might be profitable? First of all, a default will play into the hands of hapless big businessmen, allowing to shift their own corporate debts to the shoulders of the state and, accordingly, to us  the taxpayers. So what should we do?

Two points are important here. First, after the elections, strong Ukrainian government will intensify the fight against corruption, will put the perpetrators behind the bars, the real corrupt political leaders. Second, a clear and itemized audit of the state budget will begin; we have more obligations than money. And third, with the support of the Western partners, the most favorable conditions will be created for small and medium-sized businesses, the development of Ukrainian entrepreneurship, without which we will not build a rich and healthy society.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or 112.International and its owners.
According to Heather Nauert, the countries also attempt to hinder the OPCW inspectors to examine the place

Open source

Russia and Syria try to clear out the site of the chemical attack in Syrian Douma. Heather Nauert, the spokeswoman of the U.S. State Department claimed this as Reuters reported.

According to her, the countries also attempt to hinder the OPCW inspectors to examine the place.

We have credible information that indicates that Russian officials are working with the Syrian regime to deny and to delay these inspectors from gaining access to Douma. Russian officials have worked with the Syrian regime, we believe, to sanitize the locations of the suspected attacks and remove incriminating evidence of chemical weapons use, Nauert said.

As we reported the UN Security Team, which is conducting an investigation in Douma (Syria), came under fire on April 18. The mission was forced to withdraw, delaying the arrival of chemical weapons inspectors.

On April 13, the U.S. troops landed a missile strike on chemical infrastructure in Syria; the UK and France joined in. The strikes killed at least six people and dealt damage to a number of weaponry research objects.

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.
The improvement of bilateral relations between the U.S. and the Russian Federation depends on how the Kremlin solves issues concerning its foreign policy. John Bolton, the White House home security advisor said that in his conversation with Russian ambassador Anatoliy Antonov, Reuters wrote.

Bolton told Antonov it is in the best interests of both countries to have better relations, but Russia needs 'solving the questions regarding the interference with 2016 election in the U.S. and the poisoning of the Russian spy in the UK'.

Bolton's statement also says that the U.S. government is concerned over the situation in Ukraine where Russia supports separatists, and in Syria, where the Russian military supports the government in Damascus.
It is the second shipment of the vaccine bought for state budget funds this year

Open source

On the request of Ukraines Health Ministry, UNICEF delivered a new shipment of the MMR vaccine in the sum of 800, 000 doses as the press service of the ministry reported.

The vaccination level should be higher than 95% for the reliable protection from the infectious diseases, and then it is possible to talk about the herd immunity. For the first time, Ukraine is fully provided with the vaccines  reliable, safe and effective. I urge the parents to vaccinate the children and the doctors to urge the patients to the vaccination, Uliana Suprun, the acting Health Minister claimed.

It is noted that more than 90% of the children were vaccinated during the last year.

The vaccine is made in Belgium, has the state registration and was re-qualified by the WHO.

In February the Health Ministry and UNICEF accelerate the delivery of 220, 000 MMR vaccines due to the measles outbreak and taking into account the urgent need in them.

Earlier the European Health Security Agency reported that Ukraine was the third in Europe on the number of people infected with measles in 2017. The leaders are Romania and Italy.

As we reported 9, 091 people, including 3,270 adults and 5, 821 children sickened with measles during as at thirteenth week of 2018.
In most cases, the investigation team looked into creating terrorist organizations and funding of terrorism

Over the course of the previous year, the SBU, Ukraine's security service looked into roughly 3,700 cases related to terrorist activity. An SBU representative told this at a meeting in Kyiv on Thursday.

'The investigation authorities of the SBU initiated proceedings in 3,718 cases qualified as 'terrorism-related'. 381 bills of indictment were presented at the court, most of them related to creating terrorist organizations (358) and funding of terrorism (14)', the official said.

According to the governmental agency, since the beginning of the Russian aggression, Ukraine managed to prevent dozens of terrorist acts and investigated over 15,000 crimes against Ukraine's territorial integrity, the national security and defense.

In November 2017, Ukraine took the 17th place in the world rating on the terrorism. The Global Terrorism Index 2017 was published by the London Institute of Economics and Peace. The experts put Ukraine into the list of countries with the high level of the terrorism and gave 6.56 points of 10. Somali, India, Turkey, Libya, Egypt and Sudan are also in TOP 20. Iraq headed the rating.
Open source

Pavlo Klimkin, the Foreign Minister of Ukraine claimed that the deoccupation issue of Crimea and Donbas will be discussed at the meeting of the foreign ministers of G7 countries as he reported on Twitter.

And now I am forwarded to Toronto for the meeting with our friends - the G7 foreign ministers. The main issues are solidarity with Ukraine toward occupied Crimea and Donbas and support of our reforms, Klimkin noted.

On April 9, Klimkin was invited to the meeting of the foreign ministers of G7 for the first time. It will take place on April 22 in Toronto. It is for the first time Ukraine will be present at the full, plan event of the G7 countries.

Also, Andrius Kubilius, a Lithuanian deputy, and one of the authors of the so-called Marshall Plan for Ukraine said that he expects this plan to be discussed at the G7 summit in Canada.

Earlier the G7 agreed with the conclusions and recommendations of the Venice Commission on e-declaration for anti-corruption activists and international members of the supervisory boards of state companies and urged Ukraine to comply with them.
Donbas Conflict

Sanctions fever

NATO aspirations

Yunkom mine of Donetsk region

Ukraine's Autocephalous Orthodox Church

Ukrainian films

Donbas Conflict

The latest developments in eastern Ukraine showed that Russia-backed militants aim for all sorts of destabilization in the region, including not only regular firefights and numerous provocations to open fire, but also the environmental risks. The Ukrainian government, on the other hand, presented the program to re-claim Donbas from the occupation of pro-Kremlin mercenaries; Arsen Avakov, the Interior Minister, shared his point of view on the issue.

On Monday, the Ukrainian military intelligence reported that the enemy plans shooting down OSCEs drones, posing the attacks as if they were performed by the Ukrainian army. On Wednesday, the actual incident did took place  however, the Ukrainian military immediately apologized.

An obnoxious attack on Donetsk water filtration plant occurred on April 17. The Donetsk Filtration Station has stopped working as militants shelled the convoy of the filtration station's workers. Five workers suffered, one of them is in the serious condition. both Ukraine and the U.S. condemned this.

This weeks round of Minsk trilateral talks was focused on the issue of environmental risk in Donbas, too. The parties discussed issues of POW release and exchange; specifically, Ukraine insisted that Russia still has not replied to the offer to exchange its POWs on Ukrainian political prisoners who now serve time in Russian jails.

Water supply systems in Donetsk and Luhansk regions either failed or experienced huge trouble due to the attacks of militants this week. In Luhansk region, the system failed entirely, while in Donetsk region, experts reported that Avdiivka water reservoir has enough drinking water for no longer than four days.

Sanctions fever

After the 29th United States Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley announced on Sunday new sanctions to be lifted against Russian companies supplying equipment and technologies related to Assad's chemical weapons, Trump postponed them on Tuesday.

The same day Russias State Duma has published a bill on reciprocal sanctions against the United States in response to US sanctions from April 6, which are the most severe since the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Targeting top Russian companies and public officials, the sanctions take aim at Russia's stock and currency exchanges for what the US calls Russia's "malicious activities" around the world, including in Ukraine and Syria.

Russian MP treaded down his iPad due to new U.S. sanctions. Have you stamped on your iPhone? Or iPad?', he wrote.

Later on Friday, April 20, John Bolton, the White House home security advisor met with Russian ambassador Anatoliy Antonov. He said that the improvement of bilateral relations between the U.S. and the Russian Federation depends on how the Kremlin solves issues concerning its foreign policy.

NATO aspirations

This week NATO praised Ukrainian government for developing the Law on National Security, adding provisions on civilian control over the military and special services.

On the same day, Rose Gottemoeller, the Deputy Secretary-General of NATO claimed that the NATO members will include Ukraine in the agenda of the summit.

On April 19, Ukraine, NATO Military Committee took place in Ukraine for the first time in its history. The meeting was held at the National Ground Forces Academy named after Hetman Petro Sahaidachny in Lviv.

Also, it was stated that Ukraine intends to join the NATO Energy Security Centre of Excellence (ENSEC COE) until the end of 2018.

As we reported earlier, the NATO admitted Ukraines aspirations to obtain full membership in the Alliance and gave it a NATO aspirant status. On April 12, Poroshenko emphasized that Ukraine will insist on the getting the program of the strengthened opportunities and NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP). The MAP is a NATO program of advising assistance and practical support tailored to the individual needs of countries wishing to join the Alliance. It was launched in April 1999.

Yunkom mine in Donetsk region

Militants started to flood Yunkom mine in a temporarily occupied Yenakiyeve of Donetsk region. Almost 40 years ago there has been a nuclear explosion performed with an aim to relieve the tension in the mountain massif. Thus, Donbas residents are facing the danger of radiation poisoning, in particular through the poisoning of drinking water.

The flooding of the place oa f nuclear explosion can cause radionuclides flow out with the ground waters to the surface and it threatens not only ground water but also that on the surface. And it can flow out of Ukraines territory to Russia, according to Deputy Minister of the Temporarily Occupied Territories and IDPs Yuriy Hrymchak.

The flooding of Yunkom mine in Donbas can become a new Chornobyl, and it is nothing more than terrorism and blackmail, the Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources of Ukraine Ostap Semerak said after the meeting of EU-Ukraine Parliamentary Association Committee in Strasbourg.

Ukraine's Autocephalous Orthodox Church

Ukraines President Petro Poroshenko said on Tuesday that Ukraine has never before been closer to the creation of the autocephaly of the local churches. He noted that at the moment, all archbishops of the Ukrainian Autocephaly Orthodox Church signed the appeal to the Ecumenical Patriarch and the president.

Earlier the President wrote a letter to Ecumenical Patriarch with a request to provide autocephaly to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Since 90-s there are a few jurisdictions in Ukraine that call themselves Orthodox local and autocephaly Churches.

The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine supported the appeal of Ukraines president to Bartholomew, the Ecumenical Patriarch on the provision of the tome on the autocephaly of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Later, the parliament documented the Presidents appeal to the Ecumenical Patriarch.

On April 18, the President held a meeting with the primates of the Orthodox churches and accepted the appeal to Bartholomew, the Ecumenical Patriarch on the provision of the tome on the autocephaly for the Ukrainian church with the signs of all bishops of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church  Kyiv Patriarchate and Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church.

Patriarch Filaret noted that the appeal signed by all bishops and expressed the hope that the decision of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew will become the beginning of the recognized Ukrainian local Orthodox Church.

We have tried to analyze what is Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and why is it important.

Ukrainian films

Two good news of Ukrainian cinematography appeared this week. The premiere of the Ukrainian movie Woman at war directed by Icelandic movie maker Benedikt Erlingsson will take place at the 71st Cannes Film Festival. The film was made in the cooperation of France, Iceland and Ukraine with the support of the State Film Agency.

The film raises the painful issue of the environmental degradation that is depicted through the fight of a woman who decided to protect nature of Icelands Highlands. Halla is a conductor of a choir and a secret defender of the environment. When she plans her most ambitious operation, she receives a letter that an orphan from Ukraine is waiting for her

The 71st Cannes Film Festival's program includes the world premiere of 'Donbas' film, a new film by Ukraine's moviemaker Serhiy Loznytsia. The script of the film is loosely based on documents about the ongoing armed hostilities in eastern Ukraine, revealing true stories that occurred in the occupied territories of Donbas.

'Donbas' was created in the co-production of Ukraine, Germany, France, Romania and the Netherlands.
Ukraines President will discuss this question with the head of Lviv Regional State Administration and the Ukrzaliznytsia leadership

The President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko plans to launch preparation of proposals for building a narrow railway from Europe to Lviv. Poroshenko said this during his working visit to Lviv, on air of 112 Ukraine TV channel.

I want to move the railway with the European Union and bring Europe to Lviv. If the project of building the narrow railway is developed, the tourists could travel without changing trains, Poroshenko said.

He added that this step will increase the value of Lviv as a transport hub and improve a situation with the rail freight.

I am sure that this step will increase the exchange of tourists and freights between our country and European countries, Poroshenko stated.

It is reported that Poroshenko will discuss this issue with the head of Lviv Regional State Administration Oleh Synyutka and the leadership of Ukrzaliznytsia Ukrainian railways.

Earlier, state enterprise Ukrainian Railways has signed a $1 billion contract with General Electric Transportation for procuring and localizing locomotives, as President Petro Poroshenko said in a briefing on February 23. Poroshenko noted that the Ukrainian Railways have been under-financed for many years which was a big constraining factor in developing the countrys economy.

He also noted that at the primary stage, Ukrainian bank structures will be actively involved in the activity, while on the later stage, these will be U.S. banks.

Related video:
Revival political party is to participate in the coming presidential and parliamentary elections, as Vitaliy Khomutnnik, Ukraines peoples deputy, the Head of Revival Political Council, stated at the 7th partys conference, the press office of the party reported.

According to him, the political force will be conducting primaries within the next six months. The party will define its presidential candidate according to its results and the results of the social surveys.

Today I would like our party to decide on the preparations for the elections next year. The party suggests applying the international practice successfully used in the world to define the presidential candidate. The interparty voting is one if such democratic mechanisms. I would like to declare open primaries for a presidential candidate, which is to be proposed or supported by our party. There are strong leaders in our team, with great potential and experience in the political and organizational work, who can represent the party in the presidential elections. I would like to mention Viktor Bondar, who served as Governor and Infrastructure Minister, he has great experience in politics. Also, I would like to mention Hennadiy Kernes, the Mayor of Kharkiv. We are open to new individuals not only within our party but also from the outside, the leader of Revival said.

At the same time, according to Vitaliy Khomutnnik, he will not participate in the primaries.

Vitaliy Khomutnnik was appointed as the Head of the Control Review Committee of the part.
The Command Units of the Naval Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine with the artillery within a couple of days were conducting training on the defence of the seashore from the amphibious assault of an imaginary enemy

The Ukrainian Naval Forces conducted training near administrative border with the temporarily annexed Crimea, as it was reported on Ukrainian Naval Forces Facebook page.

The Command Units of the Naval Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine with the artillery within a couple of days were conducting training on the defence of the seashore from the amphibious assault of an imaginary enemy.

The artillery units have successfully completed the training on the dismantlement of the assault landing ship and the amphibious assault of an imaginary enemy.

The marines have completed tasks on the immediate defeat of the attack of the amphibious assault of an imaginary enemy and performed a manoeuvre in the danger sectors.

As it was reported, the Security Service of Ukraine was conducting the anti-terrorist training in the south of Odesa region on April 17-20.
Earlier the presiding judge announced the switch to the phase of debating on the state treason case

Former President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych responded to the court decision to switch to the phase of the debating on the state treason case calling it illegal as his press service reported.

According to his statement, the court attempts to speed up the consideration of the case as the witness statements can influence the results of the possible early election.

The authority judges not me  it judges the millions of the Ukrainian who voted for me. It judges people who were against Maidan movement, those people who did not agree with the coup d'etat. This court should become a vivid reminder that people are never able to count on the law and justice in Ukraine, on the opportunity to be heard, Yanukovych claimed.

Ex-President also reminded that the court refused to question a number of the defenses witnesses and only three high-ranking officials Leonid Kozhara, Mykhailo Dobkin and Yury Ilyin testified.

As we reported on April 19, Vladyslav Deviatko, the presiding judge announced the switch to the phase of debating on the state treason case of Yanukovych. The defense refused to participate in the debates and left the court hall and the break until May 3 was announced.

Yanukovych is charged with state treason, assistance in deliberate actions against Ukraines state border, sovereignty and territorial integrity and assistance in leading the aggressive war against Ukraine.
The winner at the 2017 Zumba Instructors Convention (ZINCON) treats students in Albuquerque to a fun and intense fitness class.

Thousands of Zumba instructors applied to be Zumba's Next Rising Star and after a FANTASTIC session with the finalists, Jonathan Benoit from Canada was chosen as Zumba's Next Rising Star!!! I was lucky enough to be in the audience and experience Jonathan's talent and energy first hand! I knew he would win the moment I danced with him and I told him, "if you win I want you to come to New Mexico". When he was crowned the winner at the 2017 Zumba Instructors Convention (ZINCON), I was ECSTATIC!! Not just because I was happy for him, but because I was happy for US! New Mexico, you are in for a HUGE treat!!!

Jonathan has become an INTERNATIONAL ZUMBA STAR traveling to so many locations in Canada, the US and Europe! Now, because I convinced him that New Mexico is full of ZUMBAHOLICS, he has agreed to come party with us!!! I am so happy to bring him to you for this fantastic event and let you guys experience what I experienced at ZINCON last year. Jonathan is presenting his very on masterclass this year at ZINCON in Orlando, but you will see him HERE FIRST! Join us for 90 minutes of FUN ZUMBA times with Zumba's Next Rising Star!!!

Online sales are now OPEN!! We have general admission tickets for only $15 and then it will be $20 on the day of the event. Get your ticket NOW!!

https://www.zumba.com/en-US/event/view/zumba-master-class-with-next-rising-star-jonathan-benoit
YEREVAN, APRIL 19, ARMENPRESS. Emigration is Armenias bleeding wound that the Government tries to solve, ARMENPRESS reports Prime Minister of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan said during an interview with Shant TV.

He assessed the numbers circulated by the opposition about emigration as exaggerated, documenting that its anyway a real problem for the country.

Emigration is indeed our bleeding wound. Its very dangerous and concerning for us. I do not it for justification, but we must take into account that emigration is typical not only for Armenia, but all the post-Soviet countries, Eastern and even Western European countries. Migration processes are always going on. Yes, due to some circumstances, we have additional problems. Yes, its a problem that we are trying to solve. I have announced that I am confident that its realistic to have 4 million population by 2040, the PM said. He informed that during the upcoming weeks the public debates on Armenias development strategy for the period until 2030 will kick off. Sargsyan expressed conviction that the numbers and indexes will persuade everyone that the country is going in the right direction. The Government has already planned and I think just within a few weeks we will make some amendments in the tax code to reduce income tax. Its also planned and most probably starting from January 1 pensions and minimal salaries will be increased, the PM said, adding that nothing happens instantly, and during the last 25-26 years Armenias development cannot be assessed as bad.

English translator/editor: Tigran Sirekanyan
YEREVAN, APRIL 19, ARMENPRESS. I treat obsequiousness very negatively, but I also treat negatively people who are unfairly chanting, defaming and distorting what others have said, Prime Minister of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan said in an interview to SHANT TV.

I am sure there is nobody in the country who likes obsequiousness, but is it really obsequiousness when a party or executive bodies of a party unanimously decide to nominate someone  in this given case me  as a candidate for Prime Minister? In this case I have to say the following  then how should governance be implemented?

The interviewer argued that there were no other politicians other than Sargsyan among the ruling Republican Party who were fit for office of PM, to which the Prime Minister responded by saying that in this specific case the HHK (Republican Party) decided to nominate his candidacy, and didnt rule out that there can be others within the party who are suitable for the job.

Ask the participants of all these consultations whether there have been other opinions, whether there has been any compulsion. Certainly not, it was [the partys] decision. And it is not understandable why our party cant have this right. Is this a violation of any law? Is there a breach on any law here? No, there isnt. Those who think so could have garnered more votes during the elections and nominate their preferred candidate, Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan said.

Mr. Sargsyan stressed that after any election, a group of people stands up and begins to disapprove the elected politicians and demand new elections.

Will the country develop this way? Whoever doesnt like, my advice is to patiently wait and see how the country is developing, then make conclusions, and if these conclusions dont satisfy them let them cast their ballots during elections for someone else. And let them come and, as they themselves claim enjoy this office. Office isnt an enjoyment for me. It [falsely] seems to them that it is, Serzh Sargsyan said.

Opposition protests began in the Armenian capital of Yerevan a week ago.

The rallies are led by opposition lawmaker Nikol Pashinyan, who has called on his supporters to launch civil disobedience.

The rallies began with a sit-in at France Square in downtown Yerevan, followed by sporadic marches in the city streets. The protesters even began blocking intersections and shutting down traffic. The situation escalated when the crowd of protesters and MP Pashinyan himself breached into the headquarters of Public Radio of Armenia, demanding airtime on April 14.

Then on April 16, protesters and riot police clashed in a brief incident on Baghramyan Avenue  one of the main city streets housing the parliament, Constitutional Court and the Prime Ministers residence. The Yerevan Police Department (YPD) has called on the opposition crowd to refrain from illegal actions and to maintain public order.

YPD said they are entitled to detain protesters who are violating public order and to cease the illegal rally, because the demonstrations are violating the rights of others and endangering public safety.

The protesters largely ignored the YPD demands and continued the rally, initiating sit-ins outside governmental buildings, blocking traffic, obstructing public service staff from entering their offices, even deflating tires of official vehicles parked outside ministries.

About 100 demonstrators have been detained for misdemeanors. Several others have been placed under arrest for causing a brief riot earlier in central Yerevan.

English translator/editor: Stepan Kocharyan
YEREVAN, APRIL 20, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan is not inclined to think Artsakhs non-settled issue will remain for the next generations, ARMENPRESS reports the PM said in an interview with Shant TV.

Maybe it will again become a subject for speculations but one of the arguments that I am the Prime Minister today is linked with that. The negotiation process must be continued. We will not change our position on Artsakh issue, Sargsyan said.

He denied that in the future people can come to power who will agree to surrender Arsakh to Azerbaijan. It will be a little incomprehensible for me. If you mean the next generations, I will turn in the grave to hear such a thing, the PM joked.

Serzh Sargsyan emphasized that for the settlement of Artsakh issue first of all Azerbaijan should get rid of false illusions. When Azerbaijanis get rid of those illusions and of the idea that mutual concession means concession only from the Armenian side, the issue can of course be solved, he announced.

The PM noted that the way to peace is to reach an agreement, while for reaching an agreement the opinions of both sides are important.

Our most important task must be to work in the direction of preserving and developing the combat readiness of the Armenian Armed Forces every day and every hour. This is the most realistic method to preserve stability.

Of course, we must develop and deepen our relations with the allies, because a lot depends on them as well, but the Armenian soldier and officer are the crucial factor, Serzh Sargsyan stressed.

English translator/editor: Tigran Sirekanyan
YEREVAN, APRIL 20, ARMENPRESS. The USs decision to withdraw from the Iranian nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), may have severe consequences, Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told reporters upon arrival in New York in order to take part in the UN General Assembly meeting, IRNA reports.

Definitely, the measures the Islamic Republic will take and the reaction the international community will show will be very unpleasant for the Americans, the Iranian foreign minister said.

He said the deal terms are not subject to discussion and change. The Iranian FM noted that the wrong actions of the US may create a dangerous situation in the region, in particular in Syria.

Iran and G5+1 agreed upon the nuclear deal on July 14, 2015. The long-term talks resulted in the adoption of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). According to the JCPOA, the UN Security Council, the US and the EU are expected to eliminate the economic and financial sanctions imposed on Iran. In its turn Iran was obliged to restrict its nuclear activity putting it under international control. The current US administration strictly criticizes the JPCOA considering it the worst deal for the US.

Russia and China insist on revising the JPCOA. Iran says the agreements reached are not subject to revision.

English translator/editor: Aneta Harutyunyan
YEREVAN, APRIL 20, ARMENPRESS. A highly anticipated event took place in Yerevan for car enthusiasts.

The first ever Bentley dealership in Armenia was officially opened Thursday evening in the Admiral Isakov Avenue in the capital. In addition to many businessmen and fans of the British manufacturer and marketer of luxury cars , Yerevan Mayor Mr. Taron Margaryan personally attended the inauguration.

The red ribbon was ceremonially cut by Bentley Russia & Region East managing director Mr. Marco van Aalten and Bentley Yerevan founder Mr. Stanislav Hambardzumyan.

Bentley Yerevan is owned by Derjava-S CJSC.

Managing Director of Bentley Yerevan Mr. Artem Simonyan told reporters that Bentley is a unique car manufacturer, and representing the brand in Armenia is already an important event.

Bentley vehicles are known for high-class quality and luxurious handcrafted features.

Bentley presents luxury class cars for those who appreciate quality and comfort. Bentley is the desired luxury car brand. A new culture is being introduced to Armenia through the beautiful showroom and service center in servicing the luxury automobile class. This will involve top quality service not only in terms of sales, but also wide range of choices, technical maintenance and selection of accessories, he said.

Asked whether or not a demand of such high class vehicles exists in Armenia, Mr. Simonyan said : Certainly.

I cant imagine a country in the world without the demand of such luxurious vehicles. Of course, we arent looking to enter a quantitative competition with our colleagues. We represent a unique brand, with its high class services where quality is highlighted, he said.

The showrooms unique interior features the rich history of Bentley accompanied with modern car dealership elements.

The dealership also has a special area for customers to select their very own custom made vehicle.

Bentley Russia & Region East managing director Mr. Marco van Aalten thanked Derjava-S CJSC, in person of the Hambardzumyan family, mentioning that the dealership will enable to strengthen relations with Bentley customers in Armenia.

Here we have an army of Armenian customers who appreciate Bentley. By valuing their preferences and being grateful for their choice, we find that we should be with our customers. We seek to be closer to them not only in terms of sales but also rendering of services. Thats why today we are officially opening the Bentley representation in Yerevan, which is very important for us, he said.

Mr. Marco van Aalten underscored that they have professional partners in Yerevan in person of Derjava-S CJSC.

Bentley Yerevan  the exclusive representation of Bentley in Armenia, is offering the full range of vehicles to Armenian customers  Flying Spur, Mulsanne, Bentayga, and of course the brand new Continental GT.

Photos by Gevorg Perkuperkyan

"To build a fast car, a good car, the best in its class.

(W.O. Bentley, Founder)

Bentley Motors was founded by W.O. Bentley. The first car to bear his name pulled out of New Street Mews, London in 1919.

From modest beginnings, the company moved from strength to strength  in a relentless pursuit of both luxury and performance.

English translator/editor: Stepan Kocharyan
YEREVAN, APRIL 20, ARMENPRESS. After a week of sporadic demonstrations throughout Yerevan, opposition MP Nikol Pashinyan and his crowd of supporters once again took to the streets of the Armenian capital Friday morning  starting a march from the Gyulbenkyan Street.

The opposition leader told his followers to block the street with cars. Police dispatched a tow truck to remove the vehicle, which prompted the demonstrators to surround and block it.

Heavy police presence was reported at the scene as the situation escalated, but fortunately the sides didnt clash.

The MP once again called on his crowd to block the streets across Yerevan.

Deputy Chief of Police of Yerevan Valery Osipyan was on-site negotiating with the MP.

Osipyan once again reminded the protesters that they are required by law to notify the police about their actions.

Opposition protests began in the Armenian capital of Yerevan a week ago.

16:22 - Number of detainees reaches 183

16:00 - Police use tow trucks to remove illegally parked vehicles which block traffic

15:23 - Protesters continue marching across Yerevan. Police officers are detaining demonstrators who attempt to shut down traffic by using their vehicles in busy streets.

15:00 - 166 people detained across Yerevan in 7 hours.

14:40 - Yerevan police called on initiators of the ongoing rallies to cease actions which restrict the rights and freedoms of others and to re-locate the demonstrations to locations where violations of the law will be ruled out  in order to avoid any kind of endangerment of public life.

Yerevan police said the blocking of traffic with vehicles at the illegal calls of the rally initiators pose a serious danger for public safety.

14:00  Opposition crowd march through Leningradyan Street. Another group of protesters attempt to block traffic in the Baghramyan Str.  Yerznkyan Str. Intersection.

13:30  Opposition lawmaker Nikol Pashinyan, along with 200 supporters, march through Khanjyan Street in downtown Yerevan after entering a nearby university and calling for a students strike.

13:05 - Police once again request reporters to maintain reasonable distance from ongoing demonstration sites

13:00 - Total number of detainees grows to 107

12:22 - Number of detainees reaches 52

12:18 - YPD confirms that plain-clothed officers are on-duty and active in the locations of the demonstrations.

11:57 - Reporter Tirayr Muradyan claims to have been detained by police on the Yerevan-Abovyan highway. Yerevan Police Department told ARMENPRESS the reporter hasnt been detained and officers are simply questioning him.

11:46 - Crowd of protesters attempt to block Alek Manukyan Street in the central part of the city. Police officers clear the street and cordon off the sidewalks. Several demonstrators have been detained and shortly afterwards traffic was restored. Opposition MP Nikol Pashinyan is marching in Davitashen district.

11:21  Yerevan police issue statement saying law enforcement agencies are willing to assist the holding of peaceful rallies in locations where the demonstrations will not restrict the rights and freedoms of others. Police called on the illegal demonstrators to refrain from obstructing on-duty officers and adhere to their obligations as initiators of a rally.

11:18  Demonstrators attempt to shut down traffic on the Yerevan-Abovyan highway. Heavy police presence is seen at the scene attempting to prevent drivers from parking their cars in the streets. Protesters are being detained.

10:30  number of detainees reaches 37

09:00 - 16 protesters detained by police

Earlier YPD said it will continue lawfully detaining demonstrators who are violating public order.

The rallies are led by Opposition lawmaker Nikol Pashinyan, who has called on his supporters to launch civil disobedience.

The rallies began with a sit-in at France Square in downtown Yerevan, followed by sporadic marches in the city streets. The protesters even began blocking intersections and shutting down traffic. The situation escalated when the crowd of protesters and MP Pashinyan himself breached into the headquarters of Public Radio of Armenia, demanding airtime on April 14.

Then on April 16, protesters and riot police clashed in a brief incident on Baghramyan Avenue  one of the main city streets housing the parliament, Constitutional Court and the Prime Ministers residence. The Yerevan Police Department (YPD) has called on the opposition crowd to refrain from illegal actions and to maintain public order.

YPD said they are entitled to detain protesters who are violating public order and to cease the illegal rally, because the demonstrations are violating the rights of others and endangering public safety.

The protesters largely ignored the YPD demands and continued the rally, initiating sit-ins outside governmental buildings, blocking traffic, obstructing public service staff from entering their offices, even deflating tires of official vehicles parked outside ministries.

About 100 demonstrators have been detained for misdemeanors. Several others have been placed under arrest for causing a brief riot earlier in central Yerevan.

English translator/editor: Stepan Kocharyan
YEREVAN, APRIL 20, ARMENPRESS. 37 people have been detained Friday morning as of 10:30 in the ongoing demonstrations, Yerevan Police Department (YPD) told ARMENPRESS.

Earlier YPD said it will continue lawfully detaining demonstrators who are violating public order.

More than 100 people were detained on April 19.

After a week of sporadic demonstrations throughout Yerevan, opposition MP Nikol Pashinyan and his crowd of supporters once again took to the streets of the Armenian capital Friday morning  starting a march from the Gyulbenkyan Street.

The opposition leader told his followers to block the street with cars.

Pashinyan said another rally will take place 19:00 Friday in the Republic Square.

English translator/editor: Stepan Kocharyan
YEREVAN, APRIL 20, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister of the Peoples Republic of China Li Keqiang sent congratulatory letter to Serzh Sargsyan on being elected Prime Minister of Armenia, Armenpress reports citing the Armenian PMs official site.

The letter says:

Your Excellency,

On behalf of the Government of the Peoples Republic of China and myself, I sincerely congratulate you on your election as Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia.

Armenia is Chinas traditional and friendly partner: the Armenian-Chinese relationship is deeply rooted in centuries.

Since the establishment of diplomatic relations, close top-level contacts have been maintained between the two countries, mutual trust has been steadily strengthened in the political field, coupled with developing cooperation in trade and economic, humanitarian, infrastructural and other areas.

The Chinese side is ready to make joint efforts with the Armenian side in order to make our cooperation successful in all spheres so that we could jointly implement the Belt and Road initiative in a bid to achieve more positive results for the benefit of our two nations.

I wish you every success in your new and highly responsible State office.

English translator/editor: Aneta Harutyunyan
YEREVAN, APRIL 20, ARMENPRESS. President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev sent a congratulatory letter to Serzh Sargsyan on being elected Prime Minister of Armenia, Armenpress reports citing the Armenian PMs official site.

The letter runs as follows:

Dear Mr. Serzh Sargsyan,

Please accept my sincere congratulations on being elected to the office of Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia.

I am convinced that your professional skills and experience will help the friendly Armenia to record new achievements on its way to dynamic development.

I am confident that the traditionally friendly and warm relations between Kazakhstan and Armenia will continue to develop for the benefit of our two peoples.

Taking the opportunity, I wish you robust health and every success in your initiatives at the new responsible position, as well as peace and prosperity - to the friendly people of Armenia.

English translator/editor: Aneta Harutyunyan
YEREVAN, APRIL 20, ARMENPRESS. His Holiness Aram I, Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia, arrived in Armenia on April 20. He visited the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin, Priest Vahram Melikyan, director of the information center of the Mother See, told Armenpress.

His Holiness Aram I already arrived in Armenia and has several meetings, but not with the rally participants. Catholicos Aram I will meet with Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan and President Armen Sarkissian, he said.

Catholicos Aram I will leave Armenia today.

Before arriving in Armenia, he commented on the ongoing situation in Yerevan at the airport: Armenia is concerned, we all as well are concerned. As Armenias strengthening and flourishing is the duty and pride of all of us, the grief and concern of our people is also ours, therefore we cannot remain indifferent to issues concerning our people, His Holiness Aram I said at the airport before the visit to Armenia, stating that he is not indifferent towards the ongoing events in Yerevan.

Opposition protests began in the Armenian capital of Yerevan a week ago.

The rallies are led by opposition lawmaker Nikol Pashinyan, who has called on his supporters to launch civil disobedience.

The rallies began with a sit-in at France Square in downtown Yerevan, followed by sporadic marches in the city streets. The protesters even began blocking intersections and shutting down traffic. The situation escalated when the crowd of protesters and MP Pashinyan himself breached into the headquarters of Public Radio of Armenia, demanding airtime on April 14.

Then on April 16, protesters and riot police clashed in a brief incident on Baghramyan Avenue  one of the main city streets housing the parliament, Constitutional Court and the Prime Ministers residence. The Yerevan Police Department (YPD) has called on the opposition crowd to refrain from illegal actions and to maintain public order.

YPD said they are entitled to detain protesters who are violating public order and to cease the illegal rally, because the demonstrations are violating the rights of others and endangering public safety.

English translator/editor: Aneta Harutyunyan
YEREVAN, APRIL 20, ARMENPRESS. The ratification process of the Armenia-EU agreement, known as CEPA (Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement, has nothing to do with the ongoing domestic events in Armenia, chairman of the foreign relations committee of the Armenian parliament Mr. Armen Ashotyan said on Facebook.

A newspaper alleged today in an article that certain EU countries arent in a hurry to ratify the EU-Armenia agreement due to domestic processes. It is surprising that such an assessment is made the very next day after Latvia ratified it. In reality, the ratification process of the Armenia-EU agreement has nothing to do with our domestic developments. It is underway simultaneously in EU member countries, including with efforts of parliamentary diplomacy, Ashotyan said.

Moreover, he said, although the inking of CEPA is the success of the foreign policy of the Armenian authorities, both Armenia and the EU have repeatedly stated that the true beneficiary of the agreement are the citizens of Armenia.

Armenia and EU signed the deal in November of 2017.

The agreement was unanimously ratified by the Armenian parliament on April 11.

President of Armenia Armen Sarkissian signed the bill into law on ratifying the Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement (CEPA) between Armenia and the European Union on April 18.

For already 8 days, opposition MP Nikol Pashinyan and his supporters are carrying out mass demonstrations in Yerevan, Armenia. Over 100 protesters were detained on April 19. Police have numerously called on the protesters to refrain from violating public order and cease illegal actions.

English translator/editor: Stepan Kocharyan
YEREVAN, APRIL 20, ARMENPRESS. With the support of Business Armenia, New Yida company operating with Chinese capital invests up to $5 million in Armenia with the aim of building a new mineral water producing and bottling factory. On behalf of this, a document has been signed by the CEO of New Yida, Mr. Luo Gang and the Businessmen Support Team Leader of Business Armenia, Mr. Hayk Mirzoyan, Business Armenia told Armenpress.

Yida Group, the founding organization of New Yida is an international multifunctional investment company focusing on various industries.

The company is considering to acquire a territory in Lichk village of Gegharqunik province for the construction of the factory. In collaboration with the Ministry of Energy Infrastructures and Natural Resources of Armenia, the specialists of Business Armenias Business Support team have presented a few mines to the Chinese businessmen. The Republican Geological Fund specialists were involved in the research phase of the investment program.

Our Business Support team cooperates with the investors on the establishment of a mineral waters factory and start production on daily basis. Business Armenia will continue on supporting during the whole post-investment period, the Businessmen Support Team Leader of Business Armenia, Mr. Hayk Mirzoyan said.

The quality of mineral water in Armenia guarantees success of production and no problem of consumption. New Yidas goal is to make Armenian mineral water well-known in the Chinese market. And the investment program will also have a social impact on the neighboring communities, the CEO of New Yida, Mr. Luo Gang noted.

English translator/editor: Aneta Harutyunyan
YEREVAN, APRIL 20, ARMENPRESS. US Senators James Lankford and Jeanne Shaheen called on imposing sanctions against Ankara if American Pastor Andrew Brunson, who is on trial in Turkey on charges of taking part in the 2016 military coup attempt, is not released, TASS reports citing the Hill.

In a joint statement the two Senators criticized the Turkish governments actions against Pastor Brunson and threaten to impose economic sanctions on Ankara as part of a Fiscal Year 2019 spending bill if he is not released in the nearest future. Turkish officials who participate in the arrest of any innocent American citizen must be held internationally accountable, and the actions against Pastor Brunson are described, in particular, as hostage-taking, the statement said.

Earlier on April 18 US President Donald Trump urged the Turkish authorities to release Pastor Andrew Brunson. Pastor Andrew Brunson, a fine gentleman and Christian leader in the United States, is on trial and being persecuted in Turkey for no reason. They call him a Spy, but I am more a Spy than he is. Hopefully he will be allowed to come home to his beautiful family where he belongs!, Trump tweeted.

Washington has called for Brunsons release while Erdogan suggested last year his fate could be linked to that of U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, whose extradition Ankara has repeatedly sought to face charges over the coup attempt.

English translator/editor: Aneta Harutyunyan
YEREVAN, APRIL 20, ARMENPRESS. Serzh Sargsyan received congratulatory letters from the Diaspora structures, organizations, individuals on being elected Prime Minister of Armenia and officially appointed by the President, reports Armenpress.

The Central Board of the Armenian Democratic Liberal Party (Ramgavar) sent a congratulatory letter which says: We are convinced that based on your experience you must do the utmost for your leadership years to pass with implementation of Fatherland development programs and creative initiatives for the benefit of our country and people.

Touching upon the ongoing rallies in Yerevan, the partys Central Board is confident that the sides will move on by the principle of dialogue to avoid this situation the negative consequences of which can only make happy the enemies of the Armenian people.

Primate of the Armenia, Georgia and Eastern Europe Diocese of the Armenian Catholic Church, Archbishop Rafayel Minasyan in his congratulatory letter said Serzh Sargsyan will continue his productive activity for the welfare of Armenia, Artsakh and the Diaspora. We are confident that you, being at the origins of our statehood, will not feel the lack of experience and determination to resist new challenges. Please accept our gratitude since we always see and understand your careful and balanced approach towards the Armenian Catholic community, the letter said.

Catholicos-Patriarch of House of Cilicia Krikor Bedros congratulatory letter says: We are full of hope that by this strictly important mission you will be able to implement the expectations and proposals of all Armenians for the benefit of peaceful, prosperous and strong Armenia, by contributing to the effective unity and cooperation between all elements of the Homeland.

In his congratulatory letter President of the Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU) Berge Setrakian expressed hope that the new government led by the PM will be able to implement a stable and effective process of a number of legislative, economic and civil initiatives. Please accept our best wishes to success for the welfare of our home country, Setrakian said.

The Grtasirats Cultural Association of Alleppo and the S. Chemberjian Secondary School also sent a congratulatory letter to PM Sargsyan. We sincerely congratulate you on being elected Prime Minister of Armenia. We are confident that by assuming this heavy duty you will make efforts for the prosperity of the Republic of Armenia and the welfare of the Armenian people, the letter says.

Third President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan has been elected as Prime Minister by Members of Parliament on April 17. 77 MPs voted in favor of Sargsyan, while 17 voted against.

Sargsyan was nominated for office by the ruling coalition of Armenia  the Republican Party and the ARF.

Earlier on April 9, Armenia transitioned to a parliamentary system. On the same day, Armen Sarkissian was sworn in as President.

English translator/editor: Aneta Harutyunyan
YEREVAN, APRIL 20, ARMENPRESS. 107 demonstrators have been detained since the morning of April 20 in the ongoing protests in Yerevan as of 13:00, police said.

Earlier on April 19, opposition MP Nikol Pashinyan, the leader of the demonstrations, called on his supporters to take the streets 08:15 April 20 and shut down traffic.

Pashinyan said another rally will be held in Republic Square 19:00.

Opposition protests began in the Armenian capital of Yerevan a week ago.

The rallies are led by opposition lawmaker Nikol Pashinyan, who has called on his supporters to launch civil disobedience.

The rallies began with a sit-in at France Square in downtown Yerevan, followed by sporadic marches in the city streets. The protesters even began blocking intersections and shutting down traffic. The situation escalated when the crowd of protesters and MP Pashinyan himself breached into the headquarters of Public Radio of Armenia, demanding airtime on April 14.



Then on April 16, protesters and riot police clashed in a brief incident on Baghramyan Avenue  one of the main city streets housing the parliament, Constitutional Court and the Prime Ministers residence. The Yerevan Police Department (YPD) has called on the opposition crowd to refrain from illegal actions and to maintain public order.



YPD said they are entitled to detain protesters who are violating public order and to cease the illegal rally, because the demonstrations are violating the rights of others and endangering public safety.

The protesters largely ignored the YPD demands and continued the rally, initiating sit-ins outside governmental buildings, blocking traffic, obstructing public service staff from entering their offices, even deflating tires of official vehicles parked outside ministries.

About 100 demonstrators were detained for misdemeanors on April 19. Several others have been placed under arrest for causing a brief riot earlier in central Yerevan.

Police said they will continue lawfully detaining those who are violating public order.

English translator/editor: Stepan Kocharyan
YEREVAN, APRIL 20, ARMENPRESS. Yerevan police called on initiators of the ongoing rallies to cease actions which restrict the rights and freedoms of others and to re-locate the demonstrations to locations where violations of the law will be ruled out and where police will be able to ensure the safety of the rally participants  in order to avoid any kind of endangerment of public life.

Despite the numerous calls of the police, rallies violating the law on freedom of assembly continue throughout the capital city and continue to seriously obstruct traffic and restrict the rights and freedoms of others, police said in a statement.

Police said the unlawful actions of the demonstrators lead to law enforcement agencies undertaking their duties of protecting the rights of citizens.

Yerevan police said the blocking of traffic with vehicles at the illegal calls of the rally initiators pose a serious danger for public safety.

Police will be forced to use lawful actions to thwart the violations of law.

Police once again called on the demonstrators to refrain from obstructing on-duty officers.

Opposition protests began in the Armenian capital of Yerevan a week ago.

The rallies are led by opposition lawmaker Nikol Pashinyan, who has called on his supporters to launch civil disobedience.

The rallies began with a sit-in at France Square in downtown Yerevan, followed by sporadic marches in the city streets. The protesters even began blocking intersections and shutting down traffic. The situation escalated when the crowd of protesters and MP Pashinyan himself breached into the headquarters of Public Radio of Armenia, demanding airtime on April 14.



Then on April 16, protesters and riot police clashed in a brief incident on Baghramyan Avenue  one of the main city streets housing the parliament, Constitutional Court and the Prime Ministers residence. The Yerevan Police Department (YPD) has called on the opposition crowd to refrain from illegal actions and to maintain public order.



YPD said they are entitled to detain protesters who are violating public order and to cease the illegal rally, because the demonstrations are violating the rights of others and endangering public safety.

The protesters largely ignored the YPD demands and continued the rally, initiating sit-ins outside governmental buildings, blocking traffic, obstructing public service staff from entering their offices, even deflating tires of official vehicles parked outside ministries.

About 100 demonstrators were detained for misdemeanors on April 19. Several others have been placed under arrest for causing a brief riot earlier in central Yerevan. 107 people have been detained in about 6 hours Friday.

Police said they will continue lawfully detaining those who are violating public order.

English translator/editor: Stepan Kocharyan
YEREVAN, APRIL 20, ARMENPRESS. Vice Speaker of the Parliament Arpine Hovhannisyan on April 20 received Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Kazakhstan to Armenia Timur Urazayev, the Parliament told Armenpress.

During the meeting the sides touched upon developing the relations between the two countries, as well as further deepening the inter-parliamentary ties. They noted that the parliamentary friendship groups of the two countries are quite actively cooperating and have developed a working plan.

Issues relating to the coordinated work of the Armenian and Kazakh delegations in inter-parliamentary structures were discussed: they attached importance to assisting each other in issues of bilateral interest.

English translator/editor: Aneta Harutyunyan
YEREVAN, APRIL 20, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan held a meeting Friday with Catholicos of All Armenians Garegin II and Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia Aram I in Yerevan, the PMs office said.

In the first meeting with Sargsyan after taking office, the Catholicoi first congratulated the Prime Minister wishing strength, patience, ability and endurance.

The Catholicoi and the PM also touched upon the ongoing demonstrations in the country and expressed their concern over the situation. The spiritual leaders found it natural that in any country there can be demands, concerns and complaints and attached importance to the exclusively civilized expression of protest by respecting the constitutional order and laws of the state.

At the same time, the Catholicoi expressed their satisfaction and appreciation that the ongoing processes do not contain use of force and clashes.

We pray for this situation to gradually calm down, and that people take up the inmost work of homeland building and the security of our country. Yes, we have difficulties in our lives, but also numerous challenges. And we can stand before these challenges and withstand them only through national unity and solidarity, Catholicos Garegin II said in part.

We have Artsakh, we have young sons serving on the borders of our country, the security of whom, we know Mr. Prime Minister, is your constant concern.

Catholicos Garegin II also mentioned the sacrament of the upcoming commemoration day of the Armenian Genocide - April 24  which is to live righteously in order to refrain the country from tragedies and losses.

Catholicos Aram I said he completely shares the concerns of Catholicos Garegin II and emphasized that the creation of an atmosphere of uncertainty and tension with inflammatory expressions during the ongoing events involving the youth is harmful to both the people and the perception of the country abroad.

After all, overcoming the consequences of these demonstrations or the damages will require months. Meaning  the country can be harmed. We must tell the demonstrators that this is the country of all of us, we are all the children of this fatherland, we are one family. Difficulties and questions will happen, but we should sit down and discuss questions at the table under mutual understanding, not out in the street. Continuing this way in this atmosphere is harmful, harmful to the country, to our people. Therefore, I am happy that you, Mr. Prime Minister, made this call for the forces to come together and sit at a table and talk. That talk, headed by the President and you, must take place, because the continuation of this will greatly harm our fatherland, our people, especially Artsakh. It is time for us to unite, because we are blockaded by unfriendly powers. There are questions, naturally, but these questions must be talked about in conditions of mutual love and respect. This is what I wanted to convey to you Mr. Prime Minister, Catholicos Aram I said.

Opposition protests began in the Armenian capital of Yerevan a week ago.

The rallies are led by opposition lawmaker Nikol Pashinyan, who has called on his supporters to launch civil disobedience.

The rallies began with a sit-in at France Square in downtown Yerevan, followed by sporadic marches in the city streets. The protesters even began blocking intersections and shutting down traffic. The situation escalated when the crowd of protesters and MP Pashinyan himself breached into the headquarters of Public Radio of Armenia, demanding airtime on April 14.

Then on April 16, protesters and riot police clashed in a brief incident on Baghramyan Avenue  one of the main city streets housing the parliament, Constitutional Court and the Prime Ministers residence. The Yerevan Police Department (YPD) has called on the opposition crowd to refrain from illegal actions and to maintain public order.

YPD said they are entitled to detain protesters who are violating public order and to cease the illegal rally, because the demonstrations are violating the rights of others and endangering public safety.

The protesters largely ignored the YPD demands and continued the rally, initiating sit-ins outside governmental buildings, blocking traffic, obstructing public service staff from entering their offices, even deflating tires of official vehicles parked outside ministries.

About 100 demonstrators were detained for misdemeanors on April 19. Several others have been placed under arrest for causing a brief riot earlier in central Yerevan. 107 people have been detained in about 6 hours Friday.

Police said they will continue lawfully detaining those who are violating public order.

English translator/editor: Stepan Kocharyan
YEREVAN, APRIL 20, ARMENPRESS. Over the past year the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute has carried out quite productive activity, acting director of the Museum-Institute Gevorg Vardanyan told reporters, Armenpress reports.

We have managed to organize nearly a dozen of contemporary exhibitions both in Armenia and different parts of the world which were dedicated to covering the various aspects of the Genocide. Last year we organized an exhibition dedicated to Aurora Mardiganians life and activity and we had tens of thousands of visitors. The exhibition was important in a sense that all guests of the Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity were visiting here and getting acquainted with the life of that person in the Museum, Gevorg Vardanyan said.

He said the Museum conducted its activities on normal course, it hosted a great number of visitors  nearly 100000.

We organized tours in different languages. I would like to specifically talk about Turkish visitors whose number has a tendency to increase. We also hosted 9-10 graders from Armenia and the Diaspora. And of course, we also hosted more than 70 official delegations, among which I would like to highlight the visits of the presidents of Tajikistan, Bulgaria, Lebanon and Moldova. We cooperated with the defense ministry in December-January, every morning hosting 100-200 conscripts here. This was quite an interesting initiative, the acting director said, adding that the Institutes researchers presented over 30 publications.

Gevorg Vardanyan informed that the year was productive also in terms of acquiring several key materials. The Museum-Institute has acquired nearly 3800 original literature, documents, photos and exclusive materials.

English translator/editor: Aneta Harutyunyan
YEREVAN, APRIL 20, ARMENPRESS. Blogger Alexander Lapshin is going to participate in one of the sessions of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) in Strasbourg during which he will talk about violations of his rights by Azerbaijan, reports Armenpress.

I am going to talk about how they kept me in the isolation ward for 7 months which is a human rights violation, how they deprived me from the opportunity to connect with the outside world, how mocked me. And on the last day, September 10, the birthday of my mother, I was beaten, they broke my tooth, and when I was unconscious, I had a rope on my throat and they hanged me in the toilet, later presenting that I hung on. I think they deliberately chose my mothers birthday, Lapshin told reporters in Yerevan.

The blogger said while he was in Azerbaijan, he understood that he is in a totalitarian country which is governed by clans, and he is being used for solving the countrys internal issues. They want to show the illiterate society that Ilham Aliyev is a strong leader, can allow himself not to respect the opinion of Russia, Israel and the European Union, Lapshin said.

The lawsuit filed over the illegal actions committed by Azerbaijan has been submitted to the European Court of Human Rights 1.5 month ago. French attorneys have told Lapshin that it has already being examined by the court, and the trial may last 1-2 years. We have submitted to the court charges on the attempt to kill me in the Baku court, violation of my rights, extradition right, as well as illegally depriving me from freedom, Alexander Lapshin said.

He believes that Azerbaijanis spend financial and human resources and monitor everything happening with him on a daily basis. I am confident that they will monitor everything I will say here by spending financial and political resources. The more resource they spend in fight against me, the fewer weapons they will purchase, he said.

The blogger said this time he will not manage to visit Artsakh since he has to leave for Strasbourg in three days, but he promised to visit the country next time. I will visit Artsakh next time, and will show that they [Azerbaijanis] cannot scare us, Lapshin noted.

He arrived in Armenia to participate in the InTour Expo and SportWay exhibitions. Here Lapshin will speak about his travels to Armenia and other countries, as well as how to be free and enjoy trip.

Lapshin was arrested in 2016 by Belarus police after being declared internationally wanted by Azerbaijan. The blogger was blacklisted by Azerbaijan for visiting Artsakh.

Lapshin was extradited to Baku in early 2017, a move that sparked outrage among human rights activists and others.

He was sentenced to three years in jail by Baku, but was pardoned by President Ilham Aliyev on September 11, 2017.

English translator/editor: Aneta Harutyunyan
Most read of the week
YEREVAN, APRIL 20, ARMENPRESS. In connection with the ongoing rallies in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, Ignacio Sanchez Amor (MP, Spain), Chair of the OSCE Parliamentary Assemblys human rights committee, called on all sides to engage in constructive dialogue, the OSCE PA told Armenpress.

I welcome the civic engagement of people turning out to exercise their right to freedom of expression through peaceful protest. This right must be respected by the authorities, and I take note of reports of instances of excessive use of force. At the same time, I remind that the right to peaceful protest does not enable demonstrators to force their way into buildings and disrupt proceedings, Ignacio Sanchez Amor said.

He called on all sides to exercise due restraint to ensure that all Armenians can peacefully express their opinions, and call for a prompt return to constructive dialogue. In this context, Freedom of the Press is of paramount importance and journalists should be protected against any form of violence, he noted.

Opposition protests began in the Armenian capital of Yerevan a week ago.

The rallies are led by opposition lawmaker Nikol Pashinyan, who has called on his supporters to launch civil disobedience.

The rallies began with a sit-in at France Square in downtown Yerevan, followed by sporadic marches in the city streets. The protesters even began blocking intersections and shutting down traffic. The situation escalated when the crowd of protesters and MP Pashinyan himself breached into the headquarters of Public Radio of Armenia, demanding airtime on April 14.

Then on April 16, protesters and riot police clashed in a brief incident on Baghramyan Avenue  one of the main city streets housing the parliament, Constitutional Court and the Prime Ministers residence. The Yerevan Police Department (YPD) has called on the opposition crowd to refrain from illegal actions and to maintain public order.

YPD said they are entitled to detain protesters who are violating public order and to cease the illegal rally, because the demonstrations are violating the rights of others and endangering public safety.

The protesters largely ignored the YPD demands and continued the rally, initiating sit-ins outside governmental buildings, blocking traffic, obstructing public service staff from entering their offices, even deflating tires of official vehicles parked outside ministries.

About 100 demonstrators were detained for misdemeanors on April 19. Several others have been placed under arrest for causing a brief riot earlier in central Yerevan.

On April 20 they again launched their rally. The number of detainees reaches 183 on April 20.

Police said they will continue lawfully detaining those who are violating public order.

English translator/editor: Aneta Harutyunyan
YEREVAN, APRIL 20, ARMENPRESS. Over two dozen Belgian lawmakers issued a statement expressing their concern over Azerbaijans request to Interpol for an international arrest warrant against the President of the European Armenian Federation for Justice and Democracy (EAFJD) for visiting Artsakh, the EAFJD told Armenpress.

The full statement says:

We regret the fact that the Azerbaijani authorities requested an international arrest warrant against the President of the European Armenian Federation for Justice and Democracy (EAFJD) Kaspar Karapetian for visiting Nagorno Karabakh /Artsakh. EAFJD is a grassroots organization, which uses the tools of civic activism to raise awareness.

Despite the fact that there is no relevant basis in international law that would prevent anyone from visiting Nagorno Karabakh, the Azerbaijani authorities have been using various methods of intimidation and trying to criminalize visits.

There is no alternative to a peaceful settlement of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict. Imposing total isolation on the people of Nagorno Karabakh breaches their fundamental rights, enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and is not a constructive method of conflict settlement.

We are convinced that Interpol should not be used for political persecution or intimidation. We herewith emphasize that a sustainable conflict resolution can be achieved only through an honest dialogue between the sides, including with the people of Nagorno Karabakh/Artsakh.

English translator/editor: Aneta Harutyunyan
YEREVAN, APRIL 20, ARMENPRESS. President and Prime Minister of the Republic of Kyrgyzstan Sooronbay Jeenbekov and Sapar Isakov have sent congratulatory messages to Serzh Sargsyan on the occasion of the election to the post of Prime Minister of Armenia.

As ARMENPRESS was informed the official website of the PM, the message of the Kyrgyz President runs as follows,

Honorable Serzh Azatovich,

Please, accept my hearty congratulations on being elected Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia.

I express confidence that the traditionally friendly relations between Armenia and Kygyzstan based on mutual understanding and cooperation will develop in the future as well for the benefit of our peoples.

Honorable Serzh Azatovich, taking the opportunity I wish you good health, welfare and future achievements in your public activities and peace and prosperity to the Armenian people.

Prime Minister of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam Nguyen Phu Trong has also congratulated Serzh Sargsyan.

Your Excellency,

I congratulate you on the election to the post of Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia on behalf of the people of Vietnam and personally me. I am glad to witness the achievements the Armenian people recorded during the past 10 years headed by You as the President of the country. I am convinced that with your new responsibilities and your experience and wisdom you will continue to lead Armenia to new successes further expanding the role of the country in the international arena.

I am glad for that the traditionally friendly relations an cooperation between Vietnam and Armenia have been enhanced thank to your significant contribution. I expect continuation of cooperation and dialogue with you, reads the letter of Nguyen Phu Trong. He also hoped effective and dynamic development of relations, particularly in the trade and economic sphere in the sidelines of Vietnam-EAEU FTA.

President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko is the next leader to congratulate Serzh Sargsyan.

Honorable Serzh Azatovich,

Please, accept my hearty congratulations on the occasion of the election to the post of Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia.

Your rich experience as a public figure and professionalism are the guarantee of the effective solution to numerous issues facing Armenia, reads the message of Alexander Lukashenko, who also expressed conviction that high level relations between Armenia and Belarus will continue to develop in the future as well.

The Board Chairman of the Eurasian Economic Commission Tigran Sargsyan also congratulated Serzh Sargsyan.

English translator/editor: Tigran Sirekanyan
YEREVAN, 20 APRIL, ARMENPRESS. The Central Bank of Armenia informs Armenpress that today, 20 April, USD exchange rate is down by 0.01 drams to 480.18 drams. EUR exchange rate is down by 3.28 drams to 590.67 drams. Russian Ruble exchange rate is down by 0.04 drams to 7.82 drams. GBP exchange rate is down by 6.40 drams to 675.23 drams.

The Central Bank has set the following prices for precious metals.

Gold price is down by 44.43 drams to 20819.88 drams. Silver price is up by 3.86 drams to 265.46 drams. Platinum price is down by 46.62 drams to 14558.17 drams.
YEREVAN, APRIL 20, ARMENPRESS. Opposition MP Nikol Pashinyan calls on participants of the rallies to stop the blockade of the streets and head to the Republican Square, ARMENPRESS reports the call is posted on his Facebook page.

The rallies are led by Opposition lawmaker Nikol Pashinyan, who has called on his supporters to launch civil disobedience.

The rallies began with a sit-in at France Square in downtown Yerevan, followed by sporadic marches in the city streets. The protesters even began blocking intersections and shutting down traffic. The situation escalated when the protesters and MP Pashinyan himself breached into the headquarters of Public Radio of Armenia, demanding airtime on April 14.

Then on April 16, protesters and riot police clashed in a brief incident on Baghramyan Avenue  one of the main city streets housing the parliament, Constitutional Court and the Prime Ministers residence. The Yerevan Police Department (YPD) has called on the opposition crowd to refrain from illegal actions and to maintain public order.Over 40 people were injured that day, including opposition leader Nikol Pashinyan, who returned to his supporters after shortly being hospitalized.

YPD said they are entitled to detain protesters who are violating public order and to cease the illegal rally, because the demonstrations are violating the rights of others and endangering public safety.

The protesters largely ignored the YPD demands and continued the rally, initiating sit-ins outside governmental buildings, blocking traffic, obstructing public service staff from entering their offices, even deflating tires of official vehicles parked outside ministries.

The number of detainees has reached 217 on April 20.

English translator/editor: Tigran Sirekanyan
YEREVAN, APRIL 20, ARMENPRESS. The Police of the Republic of Armenia once again warn the organizers of Yerevan rallies that their actions give the Police the right to disperse the rally at any necessary moment through proportionate actions, including the use of special measures.

ARMENPRESS reports the statement issued by the Police runs as follows,

For a long period of time the Police of Armenia, in line with the letter and spirit of the law on Freedom of Assemblies, has been demonstrating tolerance towards the organizers and participants of the illegal rallies in the capital city.

Nevertheless, ignoring the April 16 decision of the Police of Armenia to cease the illegal rallies in Yerevan center, as well as the numerous calls of the following days for vigilance and remaining in the limits of the law of the Republic of Armenia on Freedom of Assemblies, the organizers of the rally continue to escalate the situation by their announcements and actions.

The organizers of the rally provoke the participants to make different illegal steps aimed at inciting clashes between the rally participants and the police officers. Their calls and the decisions to take surprise actions have already lead to mass disorders numerous times, seriously violating the rights and freedoms of others, hindering the normal functioning of state bodies and organizations, putting the lives and health of citizens and the public at risk, which has resulted in a disproportional restriction of basic rights of individuals and public interests.

Moreover, the pretext of the calls and steps, and in separate cases the underground actions of the organizers are obvious for everybody and these simple tactical maneuvers do not release the organizers from responsibility.

Based on the above-mentioned, we once again warn that all these give the Police of Armenia the right to disperse the rally at any necessary moment through proportionate actions, including the use of special measures the entire responsibility for which will lie in the shoulders of the organizers.

We call on citizens faithful to the principle of peaceful rallies not to submit to provocations, refrain from illegal acts. We also call on the individuals whose minor children participate in the illegal rallies to take measures to take them away to avoid unwanted consequences.

We once again urge the journalists to implement their professional activities in a reasonable distance from the place of the rally for security reasons, reads the statement of the Police.

English translator/editor: Tigran Sirekanyan
YEREVAN, APRIL 20, ARMENPRESS. First Deputy Prime Minister of Armenia Karen Karapetyan spoke about the situation in Armenia, calling for a dialogue. ARMENPRESS reports giving an interview to ARMENIA TV, Karen Karapetyan particularly said,

I will try to speak with theses. First, as an Armenian, citizen of the Republic of Armenia, I am very worried. I am worried whether my grandson reached kindergarten or no, my father reached hospital or no. Second, I am convinced that there are many able, patriotic and courageous young people in the streets the energy and will can and must be used in other places. And we are ready and obliged to use that potential. Third, we are establishing a new parliamentary model today that we have to maximally use and set a regularly operating platform where there will be political debates, where tough issues will be discussed and where people will speak and negotiate permanently, instead of expressing the problems and complaints accumulated from elections to elections. And we are obliged to use that platform. Forth, being fair and accepting that some representatives of the authorities in some cases make statements cut off the reality, I propose all the political forces and people concerned for the future of the country to revise their approaches and start dialogues in all the platforms to preserve the stability of the country. Even warring countries negotiate and find a logical solution. We Armenians, the citizens of the Republic of Armenia, are obliged to remain in our home, hold rational talks and find logical solutions to get out of this situation. In case of instability everyone will be harmed, our country will be harmed.

The reporter noted that the authorities call for some kind of dialogue, but the participants of the rallies support velvet revolution and in some point these approaches will intersect. Frankly speaking, I am very hopeful that our nation, being pragmatic and rational, and having the ability to feel danger, as the life has forced to be so, will think soberly and understand that this has no prospect, Karapetyan said, adding that all these will have negative consequences on the reputation of the country. I see no obstacles to start negotiations just now and start the dialogue, he said.

English translator/editor: Tigran Sirekanyan
Former Friesland Campina chief operating officer Gregory Sklikas has been appointed CEO of Aryztas European business.

He is succeeding Dermot Murphy, who has decided to step down from his position at the global bakery business.

Sklikas is joining Aryzta at the end of next month, with Murphy providing mentoring and support until he leaves the business at the end of August.

Dermot has provided great leadership and support during a period of significant change and transition for the group, said Kevin Toland, who last year replaced Owen Killian as CEO of Aryzta.

Killian, chief financial officer Patrick McEniff, and Americas CEO John Yamin all resigned their roles following a period of trading described as unexpected and extremely disappointing by Killian.

I would like to express my sincere thanks and appreciation to Dermot for his invaluable contribution to Aryzta throughout his 20 years service, and to wish him well in his future endeavours.

Described by Aryzta as a seasoned international business leader, Sklikas has spent his whole career in food, with 14 years with Unilever and 11 years with Friesland Campina.

Most recently, he was based in The Netherlands as EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) chief operating officer for Friesland Campina, overseeing 35 countries and 21 factories in the region.

I want to welcome Gregory who brings a wealth of experience and achievement across the food sector in Europe, added Toland.

Murphy said he wished Toland and Aryzta success for the future: In my 20 years in Aryzta, I have had wonderful experiences and have fully enjoyed my time working with the teams both in Europe and across the globe.

Aryzta last month reported that earnings had fallen by almost a third, with its European business hit by soaring butter costs and some of its customers switching their sourcing. Announcing it was focusing on its core frozen bakery business, the company also said it had agreed the sale of Signature Flatbreads to the Eid family.
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.
Nick Burk, assistant director of the N.C. Emergency Management Division's Resiliency Section, faced a barrage of questions from representatives frustrated over the slow rollout of disaster relief for Hurricane Matthew.The representative of Gov. Roy Cooper's administration presented at the Monday, April 16, meeting of the House Select Committee on Disaster Relief. Burk updated recovery efforts roughly 18 months after the devastating hurricane hit the southeastern part of the state.NCEM Director Michael Sprayberry was supposed to give the presentation, but due to a medical matter, Burk was sent in his place. Burk informed lawmakers he had submitted a letter of resignation but would not explain why.Committee members seemed flummoxed by the delays and the lack of information.said Rep. Brenden Jones, R-Columbus.Lawmakers wanted to know why counties haven't seen any funding. They wanted a definite timeline for delivery of disaster payments and didn't get it.The state applied to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for around $100 million to buy out, elevate, or rebuild about 800 properties damaged by Matthew, Burk said. Property owners are awaiting FEMA award letters, but he said the awards may start arriving in late spring and then continue throughout summer and fall.The state also was awarded $237.5 million in recovery funds from the federal government. But none of the money so far has been distributed through the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery program.asked Jones.Burk refused to single out anyone, saying instead the administration took a team approach. The Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery program is a partnership between the governor's office, the N.C. Department of Commerce, and NCEM.Burk said recovery is a long and complicated process. Those seeking grants must complete eight steps to get Community Development Block Grant funds; 1,500 have applied for them. Only 500 applicants have made it through step one and are somewhere between steps two and four.Burk also said NCEM hasn't completed mandatory environmental impact assessments for counties to receive the grants. Meanwhile, families living in FEMA trailers are facing eviction and have no permanent housing awaiting.said committee Chairman Rep. John Bell, R-Wayne.Burk said the agencies are working as hard as they can to ensure eligibility for the grant program. The first reimbursements for the Community Development Block Grants should come by May 1, and the first repairs around June 30.Rep. Charles Graham, D-Robeson, asked whether section director Sprayberry was sitting on any relief funds.Burk replied.Bell said.
Contact: Ford Porter

Ford Porter govpress@nc.gov

RALEIGH: Ahead of the release of his short session budget, Governor Roy Cooper today shared his recommendations and requests to improve school safety and youth mental health. The Governor's budget will recommend $130 million to protect students and prevent school violence. Cooper announced his school safety package at Cedar Ridge High School in Hillsborough where he was joined by educators, school support personnel and law enforcement.said Governor Cooper.The budget recommendation is in addition to specific policy changes that the Governor supports to keep dangerous weapons out of the wrong hands. Read more about those policy changes HERE The budget recommendations include:The budget directs building improvements for better safety and security at K-12 public schools, state universities and community colleges. The funds should update communication systems so educators and law enforcement can quickly respond to critical incidents, audio-visual security systems for real-time monitoring, panic alarms, state-of-the-art doorways, and other tools to prevent and respond to threats.School nurses, counselors, psychologists, and social workers play a critical role in identifying and treating youth mental health needs early before they become more serious. This funding allows schools to hire additional personnel to support students and youth mental health.Recognizing the important work school resource officers (SRO) do on the front lines to keep students and teachers safe, the Governor's budget invests $7 million in the Department of Public Instruction to increase the allotment of funds for high school SROs to cover the real cost, from roughly $38,000 per high school to approximately $50,000 per high school. Another $3 million would supplement the grant program for officers stationed at elementary and middle schools. The budget will also recommend reducing the match requirement for Tier 1 and 2 counties so more districts can afford officers.When emergencies occur, schools and first responders need a plan in place to keep students and teachers safe. The Governor's budget recommends $444,000 to the Department of Public Safety to support the School Risk Management System that provides assistance with risk planning, school-wide exercises and monitoring to each school district. This web-based program allows school officials to work with first responders, law enforcement and emergency management to maintain a comprehensive digital School Risk Management Plan that enables officials to quickly respond to potential threats in our schools.The budget provides funding for innovative programs to support the mental health needs of children and youth. That includes resources to increase the availability of evidence-based training programs that help teachers, school staff, and mental health professionals identify and respond to student mental health challenges. It supports new funding to provide services to children with identified behavioral health needs and programs designed to give tools to families and providers who care for them. The budget also includes funding for early childhood programs and critical new family strengthening initiatives that will build family and child resilience, address childhood trauma, and prevent adverse mental health outcomes later in life.said Brenda Stephens, NC School Boards Association Vice-President and member of the Orange County Board of Education.said North Carolina PTA President Virginia Jicha.said Mark Jewell, Guilford County educator and NCAE President.said Katherine W. Joyce, Executive Director of the N.C. Association of School Administrators.
SAN DIEGO, April 19, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Heroin Detox Clinics completes guide to Suboxone and questions related to the drug in new post. The US Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) recently approved the manufacturing and distribution of the generic version of Suboxone in the American market. To review a complete guide to Suboxone usage including Suboxone strips, pills and dosage amounts visit, https://heroindetoxclinics.com/suboxone-clinics-suboxone-strips/



The drug Suboxone is manufactured by Reckitt Benckiser, one of the top British pharmaceutical companies. For a while, the market is searching for a less expensive alternative medication for people who are suffering from opioid addiction. One of the most prevalent issues in many developed nations including the United States is opioid dependence. This issue has become the most significant health crises that the public has ever faced in this modern time where help is most needed.

Until today, Suboxone doctor prescription is an expensive alternative for those who are needing help to fight the said addiction. The fact that this medicine is costly means not everyone can afford to get this kind of help. As a result, treatment for opioid dependence takes some time or none at all for having no access to Suboxone strips or Suboxone pills.

Doctors close supervision is required with this drug regiment which is often not covered by insurance. The US public health spokespersons, however, have released an additional warning to the general public concerning the possible risks of using either the brand name or generic Suboxone drug. It is for this reason that the drug must be administered in Suboxone clinic under a physicians supervision due to possible Suboxone side effects with prolonged use. Another concern that the health department is facing is the recent studies that indicates that there is an alarming increase in visits to the emergency room by ten times fold for admissions related to the use of the said drug. Furthermore, the use of the drug is being associated with people who are using it not for therapeutic purposes but just to get high seeming that it is after all considered as partial opiod agonist.

The use of this powerful yet expensive drug buprenophin or Suboxone in the US was initially approved back in 2002. Since then, there are about 3 million Americans who have been treated for being opioid dependents by taking this drug. Considering the cost of the medicine, the number of people getting treated could have a significant increase.

Every person needing help can gain access to the drug. With the approval of the generic version of the potent drug and the underway manufacturing of one of the countrys largest generic drug manufacturer, there is continuing anticipation as to when it will become available in the US market. Generic drugs are less expensive compared to their branded counterpart and for the most part, may have some insurance coverage.

Just like any treatment for an addiction, the use of the drug can be addictive in itself and delivering benefits and dangers to users. When an opioid-dependent stops taking this drug, Suboxone withdrawal may be experienced. The removal may constitute some symptoms similar to another opioid which can worsen or trigger some medical conditions when use is abused. Despite being legal in the US, extra caution is still encouraged and advised to prevent drug use abuse and avoid dependency among users from one addiction to another.



As to the exact time or date of when the generic version of the drug will be launched is still indefinite up to this date. But with the US FDAs approval on its distribution in the US, there is an increased hope and a cheaper option for those who need help anxiously waiting for another means of treating opioid addiction.

Author: William Leonard

Organization: HeroinDetoxClinics.com

Address: 402 West Broadway, #400, San Diego, CA 92101

Phone: 888-325-2454

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://resource.globenewswire.com/Resource/Download/fb7a5bb7-f679-4788-8374-bf8c34083efd
State party executive director Woodhouse and several candidates fear exposure of confidential conversations in what Woodhouse called 'fishing expedition'

All documents, including but not limited to electronic communications in the form of emails, texts, and tweets, concerning or related to the elimination of judicial primaries and/or 2017 Session Law 214 between or among you and Sen. Philip Berger, Rep. Timothy Moore, Sen. Ralph Hise, Rep. David Lewis, and/or Rep. Justin Burr. All documents and drafts of documents relating to any NCGOP resolution regarding the elimination of judicial primaries in 2018.

N.C. Republican Party Executive Director Dallas Woodhouse said Democrats' efforts to compel information from him would chill political speech.Woodhouse hosted a press conference Thursday, April 19, at state party headquarters. He said on April 9 he was served a subpoena forcing him to give a sworn deposition in a civil lawsuit the state Democratic Party filed against legislative leaders. Even though the state GOP is not a party in the lawsuit, the deposition demands Woodhouse appear April 23 before Democratic Party attorneys and shareWoodhouse said the subpoena is a constitutionally dangerous and unprecedented attempt to pry disclosure of party political plans and strategies. He said he is facing contempt of court charges and possible jail time if he doesn't comply.Berger is the Senate president pro tem; Moore the speaker of the House; Hise and Lewis the chairmen of the Senate and House redistricting committees, respectively; and Burr the primary sponsor of the legislation that became Session Law 214.Republican candidates running for office joined Woodhouse to express apprehension about conversations they had with party officials. Candidates fret they could become ensnared in Democrats' legal adventurism.Democratic Party officials didn't respond to a request for comment.The lawsuit challenges the Republican-led General Assembly's decision to cancel judicial primaries this year, and to hold a free-for-all fall general election of all judicial candidates.U.S. District Court Judge Catherine Eagles ruled Jan. 31 in favor of canceling District Court and Superior Court primaries. But she ordered the legislature to reinstate Court of Appeals and Supreme Court primaries. A three-judge panel of the 4thU.S. Circuit Court of Appeals later reversed Eagles' order to hold primaries in the four statewide judicial races.Woodhouse condemned Democrats' move to force his deposition April 23 because the Republican Party is not named in the suit.Woodhouse said.Woodhouse said.he said.Berger told Carolina Journal after the news conference.Berger said.Woodhouse sidestepped a question of whether GOP lawyers will seek to quash the deposition demand. He said he might answer only appropriate questions. But he does not think any question would meet that standard inAsked if he is worried about the threat of jail time for not responding to questions, Woodhouse said,Catherine Whiteford, a candidate in House District 34 and national committeewoman of the N.C. Federation of Young Republicans, expressed anxiety over the Democrats' legal maneuver. So did Troy Lawson, chairman of the Guilford County Republican Party who's a candidate in House District 57.Whiteford said.Lawson said.because it makes his job much more difficult.constitutional law attorney Tyler Brooks said in a GOP news release. He is a candidate for the House District 11 seat.
Contact: White House

White House Press Office

On April 17-18 at Mar-a-Lago, President Donald J. Trump and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe held their sixth meeting, and third major summit, and affirmed their strong determination to strengthen our shared resolve on North Korea, and increase the capability of the U.S.-Japan Alliance to confront all emerging threats to peace, stability, and an international order based on the rule of law. The two leaders expressed their joint commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific and an enhanced U.S.-Japan economic relationship.President Trump and Prime Minister Abe confirmed their commitment to achieving the permanent and verifiable denuclearization of North Korea. They also reaffirmed that North Korea needs to abandon all weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs. President Trump and Prime Minister Abe underscored that the global maximum pressure campaign will continue until North Korea denuclearizes. President Trump and Prime Minister Abe reiterated their strong commitment to boosting trilateral cooperation with the Republic of Korea in the face of the North Korean threat and coordinating closely in advance of U.S.-North Korea talks. President Trump commended Japan's efforts to prevent North Korean ship-to-ship transfers that are in violation of UN Security Council resolutions. The two leaders underscored that efforts to prevent ship-to-ship transfers should be expanded. President Trump affirmed that he will urge North Korea to promptly resolve its abductions of Japanese citizens, recalling the strong impression he received when he met the families of the abductees during his visit to Japan last November.President Trump affirmed the importance of further progress in the area of bilateral economic, trade, and investment ties, noting the United States' persistent trade deficit with Japan. President Trump stressed his expectation that as allies and like-minded global economic players, Japan and the United States will take new steps to expand bilateral trade and investment in order to strengthen economic growth and job creation. Accordingly, the two leaders agreed to intensify trade and investment discussions, building on progress achieved in the U.S.-Japan Economic Dialogue. For the United States, these consultations for free, fair, and reciprocal trade and investment will be led by U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer. The two leaders committed to advance discussions on how both countries can serve as a model for bilateral and global trade and investment promotion in the 21st century. The two leaders also committed to coordinate enforcement activities against unfair trade practices by third countries.President Trump and Prime Minister Abe affirmed the importance of a free and open Indo-Pacific region underpinned by respect for the shared norms and values that enable every responsible nation in the region to prosper. President Trump and Prime Minister Abe affirmed that infrastructure projects in the Indo-Pacific should be market-based, clean and transparent, responsibly financed, and feature open and fair access, social and environmental considerations, and standards of good governance.President Trump and Prime Minister Abe underscored a joint commitment to safeguard unimpeded lawful commerce and respect for international law, including freedoms of navigation and overflight and other lawful uses of the sea. Prime Minister Abe and President Trump shared the view that South China Sea claimants, including China, should halt their militarization of disputed features. Prime Minister Abe and President Trump also shared the view that China and other claimants should manage and resolve disputes peacefully and in accordance with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, to give full respect to legal and diplomatic processes, such as arbitration, and embed these principles in ongoing efforts by ASEAN to negotiate an effective code of conduct with China. Such diplomatic efforts should lead to demilitarization of disputed features and the maintenance of a peaceful and open South China Sea. The two leaders also reaffirmed that Article V of the U.S.-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security covers the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea and that they oppose any unilateral action that seeks to change the status quo.President Trump reaffirmed the United States' unwavering commitment to Japan's defense through the full range of U.S. military capabilities. President Trump also reiterated the United States' commitment to provide advanced weapons to Japan, including ballistic missile defense, and the continued provision of defense articles to ensure the readiness and effectiveness of the Japanese Self Defense Force. President Trump welcomed Japan's continued efforts to expand its role and augment its capabilities within the Alliance. President Trump and Prime Minister Abe reiterated their commitment to the bilateral plan for the realignment of the United States Forces Japan to maintain their operational and deterrent capability while mitigating impact of the U.S. forces on local communities. The leaders reconfirmed that the relocation of Marine Corps Air Station (MCAS) Futenma to the Camp Schwab/Henokosaki area and in adjacent waters is the only solution that avoids the continued use of Marine Corps Air Station Futenma. As such, they called for the steady implementation of the construction plan for the Futenma Replacement Facility (FRF) to ensure the Alliance's ability to provide for peace and security in the region.
The King amendment is specifically designed to undermine the authority of states to restrict the sale within their own borders of products of factory farms and battery cages. Photo by iStockphoto

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The news that the House Committee on Agriculture has approved a version of the Farm Bill with an amendment by Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, that could gut states rights to protect animals and their citizens is infuriating. But the Farm Bill will go to the House floor for a vote soon, and the Humane Society of the United States and the Humane Society Legislative Fund will continue working day and night to rid the bill of this outrageous threat to animal protection.

Kings bill is the worst kind of special interest legislation. Its specifically designed to undermine the authority of states to restrict the sale within their own borders of products of factory farms and battery cages, and it could also negate laws on puppy mills and the sale of dog and cat meat, among other important animal protection measures. Kings bill would also impact hundreds of laws outside of the animal welfare context, which in turn would undermine nearly every states ability to protect its citizens.

Its no coincidence that King hails from a state loaded with industrial agriculture interests. Because his factory farming constituents are not able to compete against farmers who practice good animal stewardship, King is seeking to abolish essentially all state and local agricultural laws so a few industrial factory farming barons can flood other states markets with the products of animal cruelty.

Kings measure would also forbid states from regulating the quality and safety of food products imported from other states. Theres much we dont know about the safety of certain pesticides and other dangerous chemicals, yet Kings bill would force each state to allow virtually any agricultural product, no matter how dangerous, into its market. This threatens the sanctity of the Tenth Amendment, which reserves rights unto the states, and it threatens our rights as citizens to protect ourselves from hazardous and irresponsible agribusiness practices.

Its become a test. Will industrial-scale agricultural interests persuade enough members of Congress to preempt state regulation of animal cruelty, as a sop to Iowa factory farmers? Or will wiser minds prevail and stop this federal power grab led by King? Were going with wiser minds, and we need your help.

The irony of the situation is that King, the front man in this shameless snatch-and-run gambit, is a self-described states rights champion. He claims to be a constitutional fundamentalist, a man who listens to voters. His website even says this: I am a firm believer in states rights, which is why I am a proud member of the Tenth Amendment Caucus, which focuses on restoring the critical balance between the powers of the states and those of the federal government.

Such lofty words, however, dont amount to much when King and his factory farming backers dislike what legislatures in other states are doing. So now hes pressing for heavy-handed government to impose its will from Washington.

Its not too late for you to lend your voice and your muscle to the fight against this shameless power grab. Please contact your U.S. representatives and senators and ask them to reject the King amendment. And while youre at it, please encourage them to sustain a provision that Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Calif., successfully included in the committees Farm Bill to prohibit the domestic slaughter, trade and import/export of dogs and cats for human consumption, and any other pro-animal amendments that may be offered on the floor.
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For cancer patients, the medical part of marijuana is no joke. Cannabis is a magic plant. And it helped save my life.

"You realize you can use marijuana now," my friend said over the phone. "You realize it can help you through this, right?"

I was driving home from the clinic where I'd just been diagnosed with breast cancer. The cancer wasn't just in my breast. It had probably been growing in my body for a long time without my knowledge, the doctor told me. The disease had already colonized at least one lymph node, and perhaps spread further. Maybe I was metastatic. Maybe I'd die soon. Maybe I wouldn't. We didn't know.

My friend was calling because he loved me, and he'd read my tweets that day. He was, and is, a recreational marijuana user. Not a Cheech, not a Chong. A daily smoker and vaper, but one of the most active creative people I knew.

A photo posted by Xeni Jardin (@xenijardin) on Oct 10, 2014 at 9:39pm PDT

I had not smoked pot since my teens. My friend knew I didn't approve of the skeevy dispensaries popping up all over Los Angeles at the time. We argued about the booming, legally-dubious market for cannabis. We sparred over the pop-up "collectives" and creepy "care centers" now filling real estate left vacant after the big economic crash. My friend knew I thought they were bogus, and that I didn't believe in the "medical" part of "medical marijuana."

"Xeni, you know that people with cancer-I mean, people like you, because you have cancer nowYou know you can use this to help with the pain and nausea and stuff, right? And that we will help you get through it?"

I listened to his voice over the phone as I drove home from the diagnosis. I was still in that first, awful wave of shock that follows.

Thanks, but I'll be fine, I said. I got this.

But I wasn't fine, and I didn't "got this."

My life had long been profoundly affected by substance abuse and addictionin myself, and in loved ones. The displays outside the cannabis dispensaries where I lived in Venice promised to cure everything from sleeplessness to slow sex drives to bad hair. Bikini-clad young women wiggled their butts outside the adjacent pot doc storefronts. They wore sandwich board signs promising to get stoners "legal" in a half hour for $40, and they yelled flirty come-ons at tourists strolling down the boardwalk. How could that be medical? I wanted nothing to do with it. I didn't believe there was a true therapeutic use for cannabis. I believed "medical" was a fig leaf to help black market capitalists sell more drugs to addicts.

I got this, I told my friend. I don't need and won't need marijuana. And I appreciate your offer of help, but I'll be fine. Besides, I really don't feel any different than a few hours before I was diagnosed. I'm fine.

God, I was so naive. And I was so wrong.

#TBT A photo posted by Xeni Jardin (@xenijardin) on Jun 6, 2014 at 8:14pm PDT

The next two years of my life were a nightmare of treatment, terror, and drugs. Lots of drugs. Chemotherapy cocktails pumped into my veins to kill the malignant cells. Opioids to kill the pain that followed surgeries. Anti-emetic pills, some of which cost hundreds of dollars out of pocket per dose (thanks, insurance!), to help with post-chemo nausea and vomiting  except often, they didn't help, and we'd have to try another drug. Then, there were still more drugs from my doctors for anxiety and depression during treatment, and PTSD after treatment. Drugs to push away the now-not-entirely-unreasonable fear of death that exploded in my brain each day, manifesting in the form of panic attacks that left me crying, screaming, or paralyzed by grief. I longed for the normal, pre-cancer life I once knew. I knew it was gone forever.

Being a cancer patient means drugs. Each of these drugs came with its own attendant set of risks and adverse effects. There are helper drugs you have to take to allow you to tolerate the life-saving drugs. Drugs for your drugs for your drugs for your drugs, prescribed in a seemingly endless chain, a pharmaceutical Rube Goldberg machine that, if you're lucky, helps the doctors save your life and helps you want to keep living it.

Marijuana would end up being the least heavy substance in my life. And it would end up helping. A lot.

Chemo #8 + 5 days A photo posted by Xeni Jardin (@xenijardin) on Apr 4, 2012 at 8:24am PDT

The conceptual walls I'd built against pot crumbled the night after my first chemo infusion. The anti-emetics they gave me at the infusion center didn't work on me. I vomited all over my house a few hours after the nurse unhooked my wrist from the IV full of toxic liquid (that first round contained a compound originally distilled from mustard gas, not kidding). I don't remember much about that night, but I do remember my mom holding my head while I dry-heaved into a bucket.

We spoke with my oncologist the next day. We experimented with various drugs, but nausea, lack of appetite, and breakthrough barfing were constant companions. Managing these symptoms is more than a matter of comfort. It's a matter of survival. If you can't eat, you're losing fluids while puking your guts out, and you can't sleep, you have a real problem. You may not make it to, or through, the next infusion. And these infusions were an attempt to save my life.

Fuck it, I told my friend. Let's try pot.

With the help of that friend, and others who work with marijuana, I obtained professionally prepared edibles from a chef-turned-cannabis-candy-queen in Los Angeles. Each packet was labeled with dosage information. They were prepared in a clean, hygienic, responsible way  and that's really important when you're a cancer patient, because your immune system is compromised.

Another friend helped me access oil extracts and various strains of herb that could be inhaled in a vaporizer for different symptoms, in different intensities, at different times.

At certain times, the inhaled vapor was more comforting or effective. At others, the edibles made more sense. My doctors and nurses couldn't help me figure this out. My recreational pot-smoking friends had no idea how to help. Most of my fellow breast cancer patients had limited knowledge of cannabis use during treatment. I did manage to find expert guidance, but most cancer patients who are lucky enough to access pot don't have access to reliable instructions on exactly how to use it.

I learned that nibbling on these dosage-specific, THC-intensive pot cookies and candies before and during my chemotherapy infusion could help pre-empt the nausea that followed. I learned that vaporizing when I got home from a chemo infusion could further help keep nausea and vomiting at bay, and relax my brain enough to rest. I was honest with my medical oncologist about my desire to use cannabis to help manage symptoms. I continued to use the pharmaceutical medications she prescribed, but cannabis became an additional tool in our arsenal. She wrote a doctor's letter for me to bring to the pot dispensary (such a letter is required for legal use in California). I love her for many reasons, including this.

From today's shoot. A photo posted by Xeni Jardin (@xenijardin) on Oct 10, 2014 at 9:34pm PDT

As my treatment progressed to surgeries, and then to weeks of daily radiation, I learned that cannabis could also truly help with pain, anxiety, and insomnia. The doses I used to counter nausea and vomiting were very high. The doses to help me eat when my body was repulsed by food were not as high. The doses to help calm my brain activity and replace fear with a gentle, "high" comfort were lower stilland candies or herb that contained more cannabidiol (CBD) than Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) cut through the anxiety without the high at all.

While recovering from my first surgery, I discovered that vaping pot or eating marijuana candies at the same time I took my prescribed opioids seemed to amplify the effectiveness of the pills. With pot, I could take less Hydrocodone or Oxycodone. This was great, because opioids carry a high risk of abuse or dependency and made me depressed, constipated, and ragey. With pot, I could use the pain meds for a shorter course. I could get more relief from my pain, and be up walking and not "drugged" sooner.

A photo posted by Xeni Jardin (@xenijardin) on Oct 10, 2013 at 2:42pm PDT

How could different forms and strains of this one plant, used in various ways at different doses, do so much to help with such a wide spectrum of treatment side effects? I don't know. I just knew, and know still now, that it really helped me.

I use cannabis now in low doses at night to help with chronic insomnia that results from ongoing treatment. I vape, and I use edibles. I do not drink, or use recreational drugs. The medical use of cannabis did not make me want to use pot all day, all the time, nor did it lead to drinking or the compulsion to use or abuse other drugs.

From today's shoot. A photo posted by Xeni Jardin (@xenijardin) on Oct 10, 2014 at 9:33pm PDT



I met people in the cancer treatment waiting rooms whose cancer resulted in the inability to chew and swallow food. Some of them had undergone surgery to remove part of their mouths, tongue, or throats. I met many fellow patients who struggled to get to the next chemo or radiation session because they could not eat. I have known and loved many women with advanced metastatic cancer who suffered without end, with far greater intensity, from the kinds of symptoms I have described to you here. I learned that the ability of end-of-life patients to connect with loved ones in their final days was sometimes cut short by the incredibly high doses of opioids they were given to reduce the unbearable pain that comes with late-stage cancer.

All of them could be helped by marijuana.

Some of them, I helped with marijuana.

One year ago. Last day of radiation complete. Was every day, for 8 weeks. It's incredible how resilient our bodies and minds are. A photo posted by Xeni Jardin (@xenijardin) on Sep 9, 2013 at 8:32pm PDT

May our nation soon come to its senses. May more people with cancer be able to safely, legally, affordably access this powerful drug, and find relief in it. Cancer patients should not have to navigate the world of barely-legal pot doc storefronts or dispensaries designed for druggies. Cancer patients should have easy access to cannabis, if they want it. No law or social stigma should stand in their way. Period.

May our scientists soon be more free to research and unlock the anti-cancer potential in cannabis. We're just beginning to scratch the surface of that potential. If America's laws allowed for a climate more hospitable to cannabis research, perhaps cannabis could one day be used not just to control side effects, but to control or cure cancer in medical settings. The chemo drugs I received were originally isolated from plants, so it's not a far-fetched idea. To begin to unlock the true healing potential of cannabis, we need more peer-reviewed research, more clinical trials, and an end to prohibition.

The medical part of marijuana may still be a joke at the shady dispensaries that cater to stoners. And it's true that a lot of people in the cannabis business are making a lot of money from pot use that has nothing to do with life-and-death medical struggles. But for cancer patients, the "medical" part of marijuana is no joke. Cannabis is a magic plant. And it helped save my life.

A photo posted by Xeni Jardin (@xenijardin) on Oct 10, 2013 at 2:41pm PDT

Previously at Boing Boing

 How I use medical marijuana: vaporizers, science, weed, and cancer

 My Dinner with Marijuana: chemo, cannabis, and haute cuisine

 My Dinner with Marijuana: chemo, cannabis, and haute cuisine

 The diagnosis


Wells Fargo defrauded 800,000 car loan borrowers, forcing 274,000 of them into bankruptcy and stealing ("wrongfully repossessing") 25,000 cars; they also ripped off mortgage borrowers by failing to send them their paperwork until after the deadline for filing it and then fining them for not filing it on time.

Now, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has hit the bank with a $1 billion fine, in what may its last-ever action. That's because Trump appointed Mick Mulvaney to run it, and Mulvaney is on record as wanting to shut it down, requested no money from Congress for enforcement, and has launched no new investigations since Trump took office.

But they sure took a bite out of Wells Fargo, America's crookedest bank.

Such a large fine is noteworthy for the CFPB under Mick Mulvaney, the acting director appointed by President Trump. As a congressman, he called for the bureau's destruction. And under his leadership, the bureau has delayed payday-loan rules, dropped lawsuits against payday lenders and stripped a fair-lending division of its enforcement powers. He told a House hearing this week that the bureau has not launched any enforcement actions since he took over last fall.

Wells Fargo fined $1 billion for insurance and mortgage abuses

[Donna Borak/CNN Money]





(Image: Pictures of Money, CC-BY)


Cincinnati landlord Courtland Gundlind had enough of the thief who had recently stolen two air conditioning units from his properties. So he hid a GPS tracker inside a new unit, installed it, and waited for the culprit to strike again. Two weeks later, the air conditioner texted him that it was "on the move." From Cincinnati.com:

The Okeana landlord called a friend and followed the trail. The GPS updated every 60 seconds, so they remained about a minute behind. He called police who eventually caught up with the unit and a suspect at the McDonald's on Reading Road.



Cincinnati Police arrested David Lester Walls, 50, of Linden Street, and charged him with theft and criminal damaging. He was arraigned April 11, pleaded not guilty, and is set to return to court May 15.



(Gundling) said police were surprised the GPS in the AC worked.
The contagion is spreading: Arizona is the latest red state where teachers  backed by immense public sympathy  are staging first-of-its-kind state walkout, protesting against the very idea of neoliberal austerity, recognizing that with the GOP running their state and their nation, that the problem is Republicanism, not some local phenomenon.



The right knows it too: that's why billionaires are pouring money into the development of talking points to discredit teachers. The red states are on fire and progressives are cheering them on, but it remains to be seen whether Democrats will recognize the teachers in blue states who've been shafted by plutocrat-friendly Democratic leadership.

The teachers were offered concessions by the state, but they followed the example set by Oklahoma teachers and demanded across-the-board economic justice for their colleagues throughout the education sector, refusing to be divided and conquered.



"The worst possible thing we could do is not take action right now," Noah Karvelis, an organizer for Arizona Educators United, told ABC affiliate KNXV. Many teachers in the state say Ducey's promise is not enough, and makes no mention of raises or benefits for other school employees besides teachers. "He made no mention of education support professionals," said Vanessa Jimenez, vice president of the Phoenix Union Classified Employees Association. "When I think of his proposal, it's an attempt to divide us," she added to the local news source. "We're not going to be divided."

Arizona teachers to walk out in first-ever statewide strike [John Bowden/The Hill]
Chinese authorities hate jaywalkers and they've decided to use technology to end the practice; in Shenzhen, jaywalkers are identified with facial recognition and sent threatening texts while their faces are displayed on oversized nearby LED screens; in Daye, Hubei province, shouting robotic squirt-guns target and soak anyone who attempts to walk into an intersection against the lights.



It also logs their identity with facial recognition and targets them with lasers that the authorities are pretty sure won't accidentally blind any children, maybe.



The equipment was set up at an intersection in Daye city's downtown area. It consists of five yellow bollards arranged along the road. The lower three spray water vapour when sensors indicate someone is walking on a red light. "The machine has two systems with different functions. One is facial recognition; the other provides reminders and warnings," Wan Xinqiang, deputy head of publicity for the Daye public security bureau, was quoted as saying. The system gives voice prompts about traffic light status. "If it senses someone running a red light, it will spray water vapour and warn pedestrians by voice and laser (beams)," Wan said.

How do you stop people crossing on red lights?

Traffic police in one Hubei city think spraying jaywalkers with water is the best deterrent. pic.twitter.com/ceJHoXONcQ  Sixth Tone (@SixthTone) April 19, 2018



Attention, jaywalkers: You'll be sprayed with water in central China city [Xinhua/Straits Times]
Entertainment / Music

by Staff reporter

Thomas Mapfumo receives grand welcome Legendary chimurenga musician Thomas "Mukanya" Mapfumo was all smiles seeing scores of fans when he landed at the Robert Mugabe International Airport on Wednesday night.Stories by Godwin Muzari Arts EditorLegendary chimurenga musician Thomas "Mukanya" Mapfumo was all smiles when he landed at the Robert Mugabe International Airport on Wednesday night.For more than one hour, people had waited for their legend who landed in Harare around 10pm after 14 years of absence from his motherland.Anticipations were high and Mukanya's music played in most cars as people arrived at the airport to welcome their hero. It was indeed a grand homecoming.By 9pm the arrivals section of the airport had started filling with fans that shared various memories about their previous experiences at Mukanya's shows. Some had last seen him in South Africa in 2014 while others last saw him on stage in 2004 when he last performed in the country. Others have never seen him on stage.The accounts of 14 and four years ago seemed to dovetail. It was as if they had seen their icon on stage recently. They laughed together, hummed his hits, exchanged his songs via mobile phones and gave their predictions about the upcoming show.Some said the Glamis Arena where the musician will be performing next Saturday is small for the event. Others said they will be at the venue many hours before the show to ensure that they get parking space and take strategic positions in the arena.They all agreed on one note: it will be a memorable event. And with Oliver Mtukudzi, Winky D, Andy Muridzo Suluman Chimbetu and Gary Tight's also on the line-up, the show indeed has ingredients of a memorable affair.So, as people continued to come to the airport exciting stories about Mukanya, the show and Zimbabwean music in general became topics of the night. Then word that Mukanya had landed reached the anticipating fans and there was movement as people pressed towards the exit of the arrivals section. There was commotion. They started singing 'Mukanya woye, Mukanya woye' pressing towards the glass doors.Security details had a tough time to restrain the jubilant fans from entering the restricted area. Even other passengers that had come on the same flight as Mukanya had to push their way out.Everytime someone was mistaken for Mukanya came out, there would be increased commotion. The commotion went on for about 30 minutes. Still, Mukanya did not come out. But people stretched their patients and continued singing, shouting and hoping. Security details sensed that the situation would get worse if they allowed the musician out into the jovial crowd.They had to make a plan for him to sneak out. They directed him to get out through the departures area. But many fans noticed it and by the time he came out, many were already at the door.He came out with a Zimbabwean flag draped around his shoulders. He looked elated and seemed ready to shout 'I am back'. And they pressed towards him. Some wanted to embrace him. Others wanted to have pictures taken with him. As the noise shifted to the departures area, so did the wave of the crowd. People literally ran to the other side of the airport.The security details could not avoid it. Mukanya was mobbed. He was in a sea of his fans. His way to the waiting car was blocked. Journalists fought with bouncers to have interviews with the musician. In all this madness, all Mukanya could do was to wave and smile as he struggled in ensuing pressure. He only managed to answer a few questions from journalists before the sea around him got bigger and more powerful.His handlers had to pull him out of the melee to the car. People pressed towards the car and some even ran after it as it drove away. They continued to sing: "Mukanya woye, Mukanya woye". And next Saturday a bigger crowd will obviously be belting out the same chorus because many music fans have been awaiting his return. After many futile promises, the Lion of Zimbabwe if finally home, ending years of speculation.
News / National

by Staff reporter

VILLAGERS who on Friday attended Chief Saunyama's court hearings at his homestead in Nyatate Village, Nyanga were surprised to see a young woman, believed to be an Indian national, who had visited the place seeking the services of a traditional healer.The woman, believed to own some businesses in Harare and outside the country, reportedly visited Chief Saunyama's homestead in a bid to seek spiritual guidance from Sekuru Mukotsanjera.Sekuru Mukotsanjera is a traditionalist who assist Chief Saunyama on cases that needs to be solved using traditional means.Although the woman, only identified as Nenida refused to entertain this reporter, The Weekender's lenses caught her as she approached Sekuru Mukotsanjera for his services.It is understood that on the day in question Nenida wanted to thank Sekuru Mukotsanjera for a 'job well done' following a boost in her now flourishing businesses.Sekuru Mukotsanjera said Nenida was one of her clients whom he had helped in boosting businesses that have been going down over the past couple of months.He said he receives a lot of foreigners who travel to Nyanga seeking his services."She is one of my clients and this is not her first time visiting me," he said."I have been helping her like any other person who needs my assistance. There is nothing strange in her coming to seek my services. I know people believe that blacks are the only ones who are supposed to consult traditional healers but anyone is free to consult me if faced with any problem. This time around she had come to thank me for the improvement she was now witnessing in her business. She told me that she has been witnessing some tremendous improvements since the day she engaged me," he said.Sekuru Mukotsanjera said Nenida told him that she had some businesses in Dubai, Netherlands and in Harare."She had lost all hope and she was thinking of relocating to South Africa to start another life. I told her there was no need as the powers that be have answers to all her problems. There was bad luck which was trailing her and once that is sorted, her business will be as good as before," he said.Nenida, who was in the company of two other people, were travelling in a white South African registered double cab Ford Ranger.
News / National

by Itai Mushekwe, Spotlight Zimbabwe

COLOGNE - First Vice President, Rtd General Constantino Chiwenga, all but practised political comradeship by refusing to backstab President Emmerson Mnangagwa, for the country's presidency, after being reportedly enticed by former leader Robert Mugabe and his fallen G40 confederacy to replace him, a few hours after the military had announced an intervention to Mugabe's succession gridlock last November, Spotlight Zimbabwe, exclusively reported.According to a former South African diplomat and impeccable sources close to the Office of the President and Cabinet (OPC), Chiwenga turned down Mugabe's offer to take power, and also resisted high pressure from other hardline securocrats to impose himself as the new Commander in Chief of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces (ZDF), insisting that Mnangagwa, a Chinese trained military engineer, was better placed to manage the new transition and dispensation in Mugabe's political aftermath.It has also come to light for the first time, that Chiwenga wanted to avoid military intervention from the African Union (AU) and Southern African Development Community (Sadc) when he launched Operation Restore Legacy, thus explaining why Mnangagwa was "invited" by Zanu PF from brief South African exile to come back home as interim party leader and president designate, to give a civilian face to the new leadership in Harare."The General (Chiwenga-now retired) did a very intelligent job," said the former South African envoy. "He knew that declaring himself president would mean a military putsch had taken place in Zimbabwe to the world, and that the AU and Sadc were going to possibly send troops to save Mugabe. In fact Mugabe had counted on our former president, Jacob Zuma, to come and reverse the situation, but it was too late as the Foreign Branch of the State Security Agency (South Africa's Intelligence Service), had been fully informed about Mugabe's ouster before it happened and that the military was not going to takeover government, by your military intelligence officials."Mugabe last month told local media, that Pretoria could have done "much more" to save him politically during last year's dramatic event, which saw him lose power after almost four decades of unperturbed iron fist rule.Mugabe said he indeed felt betrayed by Sadc, especially Zuma's administration, which had the capacity to intervene."South Africa could have done much more. It did not have to send an army, but just engage," Mugabe said.Zuma sent his defence and security ministers to Harare on November 15, hours after the army took control of the country and placed Mugabe under under quasi house arrest. The nonagenarian added that Zuma's envoys "gave a false impression that all was okay, and that they had spoken not just to us but also the soldiers, and then gave out that there was no need for intervention".OPC sources said Mugabe allegedly telephoned Chiwenga soon after retired army general and now foreign affairs minister, Sibusiso Moyo, had made a statement on national television denying speculation of a military coup, maintaining that only criminals around Mugabe were being targeted. They said Mugabe had proposed that Chiwenga becomes president, but allow him to first tour the country to bid farewell to his supporters and introduce the vice president as his successor."It was a last minute attempt by G40 to buy political time, by trying to distract the military intervention that was going on, hoping that Chiwenga was going to easily accept their offer, but he refused saying that he was the military boss and would remain as such, comfortable in his uniform," the sources said. "It was a big blow, they had hoped that he might take advantage of Mnangagwa's ouster and isolation in South African exile. Furthermore, there was serious tension and mistrust as police had tried in vain to arrest Chiwenga upon his return from a scheduled trip in China last November. Mugabe had also tried to force Chiwenga to leave office some months earlier before the military intervention was launched, but Chiwenga's hardline allies in the military told him, that he could only step down as Zimbabwe Defence Forces Commander for higher office, after Mugabe himself was first to leave office."The OPC sources also said Chiwenga was wary of Mugabe's cunning political tricks, after he conned his predecessor, the late General Vitalis Zvinavashe to leave his powerful post, in return for promoting him to vice president, following the death of VP Simon Muzenda in 2004. Mugabe did not meet his end of the bargain, and Zvinavashe was thrown under the bus, in favour of Joice Mujuru."It is actually Mnangagwa who advised Chiwenga not to leave his powerful office, when he was defence minister in 2009. Their political and military relationship grew stronger during the days of the unity government between 2009 and 2013, which we believe were the crucial stages during which Mugabe's succession was plotted and executed behind closed doors in theory by the mysterious power brokers involved."In perhaps an unintended tacit admission and confirmation that Chiwenga passed on the presidency to Mnangagwa, Retired Air Chief Marshal Perrance Shiri, this week in Mashonaland West, praised the VP for not seizing power but following due procedure during Operation Restore Legacy."General Chiwenga is the person who orchastrated Operation Restore Legacy. He is a principled man who does things in honesty," said Shiri. "If it was someone else, he could have taken over power, declaring that he was in charge. There was nothing that could have stopped him since he was in charge of the army. General Chiwenga is a person who is politically mature and with the people and country at heart. Due to political orientation, he understood that hove huru dzinofamba nemurongwa (leadership renewal follows laid down procedures). As a result, the party chose President Emmerson Mnangagwa to lead the party, while VP Chiwenga wanted to return to the barracks. However, President Mnangagwa appointed him Vice President and second secretary of the ruling Zanu PF party."Spotlight Zimbabwe has been told that Chiwenga's VP appointment is all but political apprenticeship and preparation for his turn as boss at Munhumutapa Buildings soon.
News / National

by Wilbert Mukori

The white colonists controlled the country's radio and TV and most of the print media, the white regime constantly harassed the few newspapers and magazines that catering for black, so the only voices heard in the country were those of whites. Blacks were never allowed to comment even on matters affecting them; whites would talk of how they understood us, blacks, better than we understood ourselves, how we were glorious happy and content even when we were fuming with anger!After independence Robert Mugabe and his Zanu PF regime adopted the same dirty tactics to deny the ordinary Zimbabweans freedom of expression and a free media and thus deny them a meaningful voice.Ever since last November's coup that forced former president Mugabe to step down, President Mnangagwa and his coup junta, have insisted the coup transformed Zanu PF and the country with it. Well the transformed Zanu PF leaders have neither restored the people freedom of expression nor given up their patronising habit of presuming to know best what the people think and feel."This year's celebrations have a renewed significance, as they are the first under the new dispensation, the first in a new Zimbabwe," President Mnangagwa told his Independence Day celebration audience. "Today, we remember all the heroes and heroines of our liberation struggle, who paid the ultimate sacrifice so that we may enjoy our freedom and national self-determination today. We honour and salute them for the independence and freedom that they bequeathed us. May their memory live on through the achievements and aspirations of our great nation, and may their souls rest in eternal peace. "Fellow Zimbabweans, "Five months ago, the people of Zimbabwe took to the streets in a peaceful revolution. They called for freedom, progress and a new way of doing things. Like the heroes before them, they called for a new Zimbabwe. We heard their voices, we shared their vision, and we are committed to delivering it."Here is the man who has been at the very heart of the Zanu PF governments for the last 37 years and has never ever said or done anything to suggest he was aware the people were "crying for freedom". He certainly took his sweet time to hear us - 37 years!"We heard their voices, we shared their vision, and we are committed to delivering it," insisted President Mnangagwa.No, sir; you are clearly NOT committed to delivering the people's freedoms and basic human rights including freedom of expression and right to free, fair and credible elections. You are also not ready to change your patronising habit of denying the people a voice and put your words into their mouths!First let them speak, free the public media and not just for a few weeks before the elections. You have not given them a chance to say anything yet and already you claim to have "heard their voices!""We have set our national vision to be a middle income country by 2030, with increased investment, broad-based empowerment, decent jobs, and a country free from poverty and corruption. Granted that the task is great, the pace of change is not always as we would have liked, and we will not achieve all our goals overnight," continued President Mnangagwa. "But inspired by this vision, underpinned and buttressed by unity of purpose, transparency, accountability, dialogue and unswerving discipline, we shall realise our goals. Zimbabwe will rise again!"Robert Mugabe and his regime promised the nation "Gutsva ruzhinji!" (Mass prosperity!) but even when it was as clear as day that the regime was delivering mass poverty instead, the nation was helpless to do anything to remove it from power. The nation was stuck with this corrupt and incompetent and vote rigging regime for the last 38 years with the disastrous economic and political consequence we can see today.In 1980, Zimbabwe had the potential to be a free and prosperous nation, the South Korea of Africa. The country has, instead, sunk to shocking depths of economic despair and political oppression; unemployment has soared to 90%,  of our people living on US$1.00 or less a day, etc. We were once the breadbasket of the region and for the last decade the nation has relied on food aid or starve. We are the basket case of a failed state.If there is one lesson this nation must learn from all the criminal waste of resource and tragic human suffering and deaths of the last 38 years; then it must be to restore the people's power to hold those in power to account and to never ever tolerate rigged elections. NEVER EVER!President Mnangagwa, if your "new dispensation, new Zimbabwe, new way of doing things, etc." cannot stop vote rigging and guarantee free, fair and credible elections then it is of no value to the nation.Mr President, you promised to hold free, fair and credible elections; do it. If you fail to deliver on your promise, Sir, then you can be assured that the elections will be declared null and void. A new administration will be appointment and tasked to implement the democratic reforms to ensure free, fair and credible elections, guaranteed!
News / National

by Staff reporter

AN Epworth man was beaten to death for being suspected of stealing $27 from a patron at Cross Bar in the same neighbourhood.The trio of Claphios Mano, Tendai Chademana and Tendai Kamudidi were not asked to plead to murder charges when they appeared before Harare Magistrate Tilda Mazhande.Prosecuting Linda Gadzikwa strongly opposed bail prompting the magistrate to advise the three to apply for bail at the High Court.It is the State's case that on April 17, at Cross Bar in Epworth the three accused persons were drinking beer and at about 2am, Kamudidi told Mano that his cash had been stolen from his pocket by the now deceased.Chademana then shouted "Mbavha!!" pointing at the now deceased leading to him fleeing from the bar towards Chiremba Primary School.The trio chased him and caught up with him then acting in common purpose, they undressed the now deceased, searching his clothes and they allegedly recovered the stolen cash from his pockets.The trio was armed with sticks and a bicycle chain which they used to assault him all over the body and left him for dead.The body of the deceased was found by James Sandaramu who was performing night watch duties at Chiremba Primary School.The matter was remanded to May 3.
News / National

by Staff reporter

A KUWADZANA young couple divorced after the husband came messages of his wife chatting with other men in a WhatsApp group.Tendai Chirova was in a WhatsApp group which was full of sex workers and other men who are well known in Kuwadzana as womanisers.Denver Mandara who is Tendai's husband said he came across indecent videos and images in the latter's WhatsApp media folder and wanted to see who had been sending his wife those messages."I wanted to move some pictures from her cellphone to my phone and that's when I saw indecent videos and images and I had to go to her WhatsApp messages to see where she was getting all this stuff"I then saw the group chat named 'Anhu Acho' and I saw a lot of dirty messages in that group," he said.Denver said he was still shocked by his former wife's conduct as he trusted her."I was shocked that she had chats like these, and also most of the men in the group are those well-known womanisers here in Kuwadzana."I was hurt because I knew that all this wasn't happening on WhatsAapp but she must have slept with one or two of those men while I was at work because most of the times I will be working out of Harare," said Denver.Denver also said that he once got rumours that his wife was cheating on him but he didn't take them seriously."After I saw the messages I confronted her saying that if she had nothing to do with these people then how did they get her contact and why didn't she exit the group, that's when she confessed that she had an affair with one of the men," he added.Denver then told his wife to leave and not come back to his house.
The Annual General Meeting of Aker ASA (the "Company") was held on Friday 20 April 2018 at Fornebuporten, Oksenyveien 10, Norway.

All proposals on the agenda were adopted, cf. the notice of the Annual General Meeting that was published on Oslo Stock Exchange on 27 March 2018.

It was resolved to distribute a dividend of NOK 18.00 per share for 2017. The dividend is payable to shareholders holding shares in the Company as per 20 April 2018. The share will be traded ex-dividend on Oslo Stock Exchange from and including 23 April 2018. The dividend will be paid on or about 3 May 2018.

The complete minutes of the Annual General Meeting are attached to this release and are also available on www.akerasa.com.

ENDS

For further information, please contact:

Investors:

Per Kristian Reppe, Investment Manager & Head of Investor Relations

Phone: +47 24 13 00 67

Mobile: +47 900 33 203

Media:

Atle Kigen, Head of Corporate Communications

Phone: +47 24 13 00 08

Mobile: +47 907 84 878

This information is subject to the disclosure requirements pursuant to section

5-12 of the Norwegian Securities Trading Act.
News / Press Release

by Adv Gift Nyandoro

People's Rainbow Coalition Leader Dr JTR Mujuru's visit to Parerenyatwa hospital on the 18th of April 2018, the day Zimbabweans ought to celebrate 38 of independence from British colonial rule; revealed the hypocrisy of a failed military regime in matters of national leadership. Mother Zimbabwe witnessed first hand the frightening sight and reality of a health delivery system that is delapidated beyond measure. So sad is the spectre of patients sleeping on floor in spoilt sheets and blankets. PRC wonders if that's the independence the sons and daughters of this country like Dr JTR Mujuru took up arms to liberate the country from Ian Douglas Smith?.Patients living in desperate conditions without medical attention is now the order of Parerenyatwa rather than the exception. The situation is made worse by a command military administration which lacks basic human appreciation of how to handle a genuine industrial strike by nurses who are leaving from hand to mouth. Instead of constructively engaging the nurses who give all their best for the love of their country ; the clueless regime spits on the face of the suffering nurses by unlawfully terminating their employment typical of a dictatorship that only understands the language of the barrel of a gun. It is clear that the illegitimate regime mistakens its military command element for good governance and ease of doing business.The unlawful termination of nurses' employment has worsened the already out of hand health situation in public hospitals. Clearly Zimbabwe has further deteriorated into the abyss of rule without Law. Zimbabweans need to vote out of office the military tyranny come 2018 watershed elections. The military madness needs to be stopped by all constitutional means necessary come 2018.# Mother Zimbabwe for President 2018.# Dr JTR Mujuru has my vote 2018.# My Joice My Voice My Vote My Choice.Adv Gift NyandoroPRC Spokesperson.
It's a small thing  a street sign  but to the Hong family, it's one way of marking the hardship and discrimination faced by Chinese-Canadians in Windsor over the generations.

The Chinese community is marking its 100-year anniversary of being in Windsor in 2018. The elders say it's a much better experience now, but they still remember the feelings of isolation.

Back in 1996, Hong Court in East Riverside was given its name after a member of the Hong Family presented a petition to the City of Windsor.

At the time, James Hong, 60, wanted a street to be named after a family reflecting Windsor's multicultural nature.

"I noticed that all of the streets were named after English-Canadians and French-Canadians," he said.

But the Hongs represent more than just any "multicultural family." They were one of the first Chinese families to arrive in Windsor.

Throughout the next 100 years, increasing numbers of Chinese people immigrated to Windsor in search of employment and a better life.

Remembering the past

After the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1885, Chinese migrant workers were left unemployed and unwanted.

During that same year, the Canadian government implemented the Chinese head tax, imposed on anyone coming to Canada from China between 1885 and 1923.

The federal government first set the head tax at $50 and later raised it to $500 in 1903.

"(For) $500 in those days, you could buy a Model T Ford. So imagine (my) grandfather, grandmother and bringing my dad over, they had to cough up $1,500. Imagine giving up the money for three cars just for the privilege of living in Canada. But that was the purpose of the economic barrier  to discourage Chinese immigration," said Hong.

Growing up "different"

The discrimination against the Chinese community didn't end with the head tax; it still affected his childhood.

"People would start calling me derogatory names ... 'Ching-chong-ching-chong,' that kind of thing, ... One person in particular kept saying to kill the 'Japs' and bomb Pearl Harbour," he said. "I felt bad. I thought to myself I wish I was Canadian," said Hong, who has never lived outside of Windsor,

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A new place

Unable to speak English, Hong's mother, 90-year-old Patricia, moved to Windsor in 1951 from a small village in China.

"[Windsor] is a different, strange place. It has snow I never see before. Cold," she said, apologizing for her broken English.

She is, by the way, quite understandable.

Patricia is the daughter-in-law of Mi Hong, one of the earliest Chinese settlers in Windsor. Patricia never got the chance to meet him.

"After his two sons die in the Second World War. I think he was upset and he died the same year (in) 1954 or '55," she said.

Community coming together

Both Hong and his mother are members of the Windsor Chinese Benevolent Association. The organization was formed in 1918 to maintain social contacts between Windsor's Chinese community.

The WCBA hosted a gala in March, celebrating the success and progress of Windsor's Chinese community over the past 100 years. This coming Sunday, they're organizing their annual "grave sweeping" to honour their Windsor ancestors.

"Several groups will split up to bring offerings to the cemeteries with a history of a segregated Chinese section," said the Essex County Chinese Canadian Association.

100 years later

Windsor's Chinese community has grown to become one of the most populated ethnic groups in Windsor.

Recent census statistics show that Chinese descendants make up five per cent of all immigrants in Windsor behind those from Iraq, Syria and the United States.

"I did some market research [and found] Windsor has a high ethnic population ... In the past couple years, I can see it going up," said Qing Qing Lin, owner of Multifood SuperMarket.

Whether it be name-calling on the schoolyard or having to pay a tax to enter Canada, it has been a long road for Windsor's Chinese community. Today, Hong and his mother Patricia are happy to call Windsor home.

"I have no regrets. I feel very comfortable here," she said.
VIENNA (Reuters) - Austria could start checking traffic to Germany as part of stepped-up border controls in the second half of this year when it holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, its far-right interior minister said. Austria, Germany and some other European countries suspended the Schengen system of open-border, passport-free travel in 2015 after over 1 million refugees and migrants, mainly from the Middle East, flooded into Europe. Last week, Germany said it would keep controls at its border with Austria for six more months to ensure security and deal with migrant flows. Those controls have at times caused long queues on the Austrian side of the border near Salzburg but Austria has so far avoided introducing its own regular checks there. However, Interior Minister Herbert Kickl floated a change in policy in a newspaper interview on Thursday, saying public safety was worth any disruptions to business and tourism along one of the main north-south transit routes in Europe. "In the interest of protecting our own people it is logical that we will step up checks," Kickl, from the far-right Freedom Party that is junior partner to Chancellor Sebastian Kurz's conservatives, told the Salzburger Nachrichten daily. "From July 1 it could happen that we control (travel) in the direction of Germany," Kickl said. He acknowledged that Austria's business and tourism sectors would not be happy with increased checks. "But security is at the very top of people's priorities and for this some are surely willing to sacrifice." It would "of course" be necessary to continue to suspend Schengen in much of Europe, Kickl said. "We have communicated clearly in a letter to the European Commission that we reserve the right to control every border in Austria, even those that were not controlled before." The landlocked Alpine republic maintains that until the EU's external borders can be firmly secured, it should be able to impose controls at its own borders within the Schengen area. Austria flanks eight countries: the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland and Liechstenstein. It has kept systematic checks at the main entry point from Hungary, which borders on non-EU territory, but most other crossings remain free of regular controls. (Reporting by Michael Shields; editing by Francois Murphy and Mark Heinrich)
VIENNA (Reuters) - Hans Asperger, the Austrian paediatrician who pioneered research into autism and after whom Asperger syndrome is named, "actively cooperated" with a Nazi program under which disabled children were killed, an academic paper published on Thursday says. The article by medical historian Herwig Czech published in the journal Molecular Autism says that Asperger referred severely disabled children to Vienna's notorious Am Spiegelgrund clinic where almost 800 children died under the Nazi program -- many of them by lethal injection or being gassed. After reviewing archive documents including Asperger's personnel files and patient records, Czech found that although Asperger did not join the Nazi party itself he did join affiliated groups and "publicly legitimized race hygiene policies" including forced sterilization. "Asperger managed to accommodate himself to the Nazi regime and was rewarded for his affirmations of loyalty with career opportunities," the paper said. It added, however, that nothing suggested Asperger's work on autism was tainted. He first described a group of children with the condition as "autistic psychopaths" in 1938. Asperger's syndrome, a mild form of autism where those affected are relatively high-functioning, was later named after him. Vienna's medical faculty was purged and its ranks filled with Nazi ideologues after the country's annexation by Hitler's Germany in 1938. The paper said that after that annexation, Asperger tried to prove his loyalty to the Nazi regime, giving public lectures in which he declared his allegiance to central elements of Nazi medicine, including "race hygiene". He also signed off on reports with "Heil Hitler". His involvement in the Nazis' child "euthanasia" program included being on a commission that screened more than 200 patients at a home for mentally disabled children, the report said. Of those, 35 were deemed "uneducable" and sent to be killed at Spiegelgrund, where they died, it added. "The (child euthanasia) program served the Nazi goal of eugenically engineering a genetically 'pure' society through 'racial hygiene' and the elimination of lives deemed a 'burden' and 'not worthy of life'," the report's publishers said in a statement. Asperger, who died in 1980, also recommended the transfer of two girls, one aged two and the other five, to Spiegelgrund, it said. (Reporting by Francois Murphy; Editing by Richard Balmforth)
By Daniela Desantis and Mariel Cristaldo ASUNCION (Reuters) - The son of a key figure in Paraguay's 1954-1989 dictatorship is expected to easily win the presidency in Sunday's election, but his party is projected to lose seats in Congress, complicating his business-friendly legislative agenda. Mario Abdo, of the ruling conservative Colorado party, promises to fight pressure to raise taxes on the country's key farm sector despite opposition calls for a levy on soybean exports. Recent polls show him ahead by about 25 points over his rival Efrain Alegre, a lawyer from the centrist GANAR coalition. "Both candidates respect Paraguay's trajectory in terms of macroeconomic stability, and I think that is positive," former Finance Minister Manuel Ferreira told Reuters. Abdo, a 46-year-old former senator, supports the current structure of low taxes and exemptions aimed at stimulating foreign investment and agricultural production in Paraguay, the world's No. 4 soybean exporter and a major supplier of beef. He is the U.S.-educated son of the private secretary of dictator Alfredo Stroessner, who ruled Paraguay with an iron hand for 35 years. But Abdo's commitment to democracy has not been questioned. Paraguay's economy has grown in recent years, social welfare programs have been small and the poverty rate among the country's 6.8 million population is 26.4 percent. "I see two conservative, democratic platforms that do not put institutions at risk," said political analyst Alfredo Boccia. "But I do not see a change in the old and tiresome Paraguayan politics that would make things different." The next president will govern for five years, without the possibility of reelection. Alegre has focused on his promise of slashing electricity bills to take better advantage of Paraguay's large-scale Itaipu and Yacyreta hydroelectric plants. The polls indicate that after Sunday's general election the Colorado Party will end up with fewer seats than it has today in Congress, while the leftist Frente Guasu coalition, led by former president Fernando Lugo, will make a strong advance. If elected, Abdo may have to make concessions to form alliances that give him maneuverability in Congress. "The executive will have to exert tremendous leadership to bring together the different sectors to support his proposals," said the president of the Association of Banks of Paraguay, Beltran Macchi. About 4.2 million Paraguayans are eligible to vote in the election, which will also renew all seats in Congress and 17 governorships across the country. The new president will take office on August 15. (Reporting by Daniela Desantis, writing by Hugh Bronstein; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)
As the US, Russia and China test each others patience and strategic focus, speculation about the chances of a world war has hit a new high. But many of the people seriously engaged in this weighty discussion often get it wrong.

When it comes to estimating military capability, the Western media is principally concerned with the weapons capabilities of weaker states  and it rarely pays much attention to the colossal capability of the US, which still accounts for most of the worlds defence spending.

Any sensible discussion of what a hypothetical World War III might look like needs to begin with the sheer size and force of Americas military assets. For all that China and Russia are arming up on various measures, US commanders have the power to dominate escalating crises and counter opposing forces before they can be used.

Take missile warfare alone. The US Navy already has 4,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles, and the Navy and Air Force are currently taking delivery of 5,000 JASSM conventional cruise missiles with ranges from 200-600 miles. Barely visible to radar, these are designed to destroy hardened targets such as nuclear missile silos. Russia and China, by contrast, have nothing of equivalent quantity or quality with which to threaten the US mainland.

The same holds true when it comes to maritime forces. While much is made of Russias two frigates and smaller vessels stationed off the Syrian coast, France alone has 20 warships and an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean  and US standing forces in the area include six destroyers equipped with scores of cruise missiles and anti-missile systems. At the other end of Europe, the Russian military is threatening the small Baltic states, but it is rarely noted that the Russian Baltic fleet is the same size as Denmarks and half the size of Germanys.

Meanwhile, Chinas aggressively expansionist behaviour in the South China Sea is reported alongside stories of its first aircraft carrier and long-range ballistic missiles. But for all that the Chinese navy is large and growing, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, its still only numerically equivalent to the combined fleets of Japan and Taiwan, while the US boasts 19 aircraft carriers worldwide if its marine assault ships are included.

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But overhanging all this, of course, is the nuclear factor.

Out of the sky

The US, Russia and China are all nuclear-armed; Vladimir Putin recently unveiled a new fleet of nuclear-capable missiles which he described as invincible in the face of all existing and future systems, and some have suggested that China may be moving away from its no-first-use policy. This is all undeniably disturbing. While it has long been assumed that the threat of nuclear weapons acts as a deterrent to any war between the major powers, its also possible that the world may simply have been riding its luck. But once again, the USs non-nuclear capabilities are all too often overlooked.

US leaders may in fact believe they can remove Russias nuclear deterrent with an overwhelming conventional attack backed up by missile defences. This ability was cultivated under the Prompt Global Strike programme, which was initiated before 9/11 and continued during the Obama years. Organised through the US Air Forces Global Strike Command, it is to use conventional weapons to attack anywhere on Earth in under 60 minutes.

This is not to say the task would be small. In order to destroy Russias nuclear missiles before they can be launched, the US military would need to first blind Russian radar and command and communications to incoming attack, probably using both physical and cyber attacks. It would then have to destroy some 200 fixed and 200 mobile missiles on land, a dozen Russian missile submarines, and Russian bombers. It would then need to shoot down any missiles that could still be fired.

Russia is not well positioned to survive such an attack. Its early warning radars, both satellite and land-based, are decaying and will be hard to replace. At the same time, the US has and is developing a range of technologies to carry out anti-satellite and radar missions, and it has been using them for years. (All the way back in 1985, it shot down a satellite with an F15 jet fighter.) That said, the West is very dependent on satellites too, and Russia and China continue to develop their own anti-satellite systems.

The air war

Russias bomber aircraft date back to the Soviet era, so despite the alarm they provoke when they nudge at Western countries airspace, they pose no major threat in themselves. Were the Russian and US planes to face each other, the Russians would find themselves under attack from planes they couldnt see and that are any way out of their range.

US and British submarine crews claim a perfect record in constantly shadowing Soviet submarines as they left their bases throughout the Cold War. Since then, Russian forces have declined and US anti-submarine warfare has been revived, raising the prospect that Russian submarines could be taken out before they could even launch their missiles.

The core of the Russias nuclear forces consists of land-based missiles, some fixed in silos, others mobile on rail and road. The silo-based missiles can now be targeted by several types of missiles, carried by US planes almost invisible to radar; all are designed to destroy targets protected by deep concrete and steel bunkers. But a problem for US war planners is that it might take hours too long for their missile-carrying planes to reach these targets  hence the need to act in minutes.

The USs B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. AMMHPhotography via Shutterstock

One apparently simple solution to attacking targets very quickly is to fit quick nuclear ballistic missiles with non-nuclear warheads. In 2010, Robert Gates, then serving as secretary of defence under Barack Obama, said that the US had this capability. Intercontinental ballistic missiles take just 30 minutes to fly between the continental USs Midwest and Siberia; if launched from well-positioned submarines, the Navys Tridents can be even quicker, with a launch-to-target time of under ten minutes.

From 2001, the US Navy prepared to fit its Trident missiles with either inert solid warheads  accurate to within ten metres  or vast splinter/shrapnel weapons. Critics have argued that this would leave a potential enemy unable to tell whether they were under nuclear or conventional attack, meaning they would have to assume the worst. According to US Congressional researchers, the development work came close to completion, but apparently ceased in 2013.

Nonetheless, the US has continued to develop other technologies across its armed services to attack targets around the world in under an hour  foremost among them hypersonic missiles, which could return to Earth at up to ten times the speed of sound, with China and Russia trying to keep up.

Missile envy

The remainder of Russias nuclear force consists of missiles transported by rail. An article on Kremlin-sponsored news outlet Sputnik described how these missile rail cars would be so hard to find that Prompt Global Strike might not be as effective as the US would like  but taken at face value, the article implies that the rest of the Russian nuclear arsenal is in fact relatively vulnerable.

Starting with the Scud hunt of the First Gulf War, the US military has spent years improving its proficiency at targeting mobile ground-based missiles. Those skills now use remote sensors to attack small ground targets at short notice in the myriad counter-insurgency operations its pursued since 2001.

If the sword of Prompt Global Strike doesnt stop the launch of all Russian missiles, then the US could use the shield of its own missile defences. These it deployed after it walked out of a treaty with Russia banning such weapons in 2002.

While some of these post-2002 missile defence systems have been called ineffective, the US Navy has a more effective system called Aegis, which one former head of the Pentagons missile defence programs claims can shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles. Some 300 Aegis anti-ballistic missiles now equip 40 US warships; in 2008, one destroyed a satellite as it fell out of orbit.

War mentality

In advance of the Iraq war, various governments and onlookers cautioned the US and UK about the potential for unforeseen consequences, but the two governments were driven by a mindset impervious to criticism and misgivings. And despite all the lessons that can be learned from the Iraq disaster, theres an ample risk today that a similarly gung-ho attitude could take hold.

Foreign casualties generally have little impact on domestic US politics. The hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians who died under first sanctions and then war did not negatively impact presidents Clinton or George W. Bush. Neither might the prospect of similar casualties in Iran or North Korea or other states, especially if humanitarian precision weapons are used.

But more than that, an opinion poll run by Stanford Universitys Scott Sagan found that the US public would not oppose the preemptive use of even nuclear weapons provided that the US itself was not affected. And nuclear Trident offers that temptation.

The control of major conventional weapons as well as WMD needs urgent attention from international civil society, media and political parties. There is still time to galvanise behind the Nobel-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and the nuclear ban treaty, and to revive and globalise the decaying arms control agenda of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which played a vital part in bringing the Cold War to a largely peaceful end.

Like the Kaiser in 1914, perhaps Trump or one of his successors will express dismay when faced with the reality a major US offensive unleashes. But unlike the Kaiser, who saw his empire first defeated and then dismembered, perhaps a 21st-century US president might get away with it.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Conversation

Dan Plesch receives funding from The Joseph Rowntree Trust. He/ is affiliated with SOAS University of London, www.scrapweapons.com and ican.org.
Reuters

Angela Merkel urged Germans on Sunday to forge a common future that draws on their diverse backgrounds, harking back to the 2015 decision to admit 1 million refugees that was a defining moment of her long chancellorship. Merkel appeared close to tears during an address to mark the 31st anniversary of reunification that may be the last before she steps down, although talks to build a new ruling coalition following last month's election could take months. She said the freedoms that came with German reunification 31 years ago had brought "so many new opportunities" for people from the former Communist East, where she grew up, but that many of them suddenly "found themselves in a dead end".
Dublin, April 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "Ceramic Inks Market by Type (Decorative and Functional), Technology (Digital and Analog), Application (Ceramic Tiles, Glass Printing, and Food Container Printing), and Region (APAC, Europe, North America, and South America) - Global Forecast to 2022" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

Ceramic Inks Market Projected to Grow from USD 1.83 Billion in 2017 to USD 2.59 Billion by 2022, at a CAGR of 7.2%



Ceramic inks are used in various applications such as ceramic tiles, glass printing, and food container printing, among others. The growth of the ceramic inks market can be attributed to the flourishing construction industry across the globe. Ceramic tiles are widely used in the construction industry to improve the aesthetic appeal of floors and walls of buildings.



The demand for ceramic tiles is increasing across the globe due to rising number of residential and commercial construction projects being carried out in emerging economies. This is expected to drive the demand for ceramic tiles across the globe, thereby leading to the growth of the ceramic inks market.



With the emergence of digital printing technology, the manufacturers of ceramic tiles are now able to offer a variety of designs to their customers. In addition, it also ensures zero wastage of ceramic tiles while printing, thereby reducing the loss for manufacturers of ceramic tiles.



The Asia Pacific ceramic inks market is projected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period. China, Vietnam, and India are the key markets for ceramic inks in the Asia Pacific region. The growth of the ceramic inks market in the Asia Pacific region can be attributed to the increased government spending and private sector investments being made to carry out infrastructural development projects in the region.



This, in turn, leads to an increased demand for ceramic tiles from the Asia Pacific region, thereby fueling the growth of the ceramic inks market in the region.



Key Topics Covered:



1 Introduction

1.1 Objectives of the Study

1.2 Market Definition

1.3 Market Scope

1.4 Stakeholders



2 Research Methodology

2.1 Research Data

2.2 Market Size Estimation

2.2.1 Bottom-Up Approach

2.2.2 Top-Down Approach

2.3 Market Breakdown and Data Triangulation

2.4 Assumptions

2.5 Limitations



3 Executive Summary



4 Premium Insights

4.1 Significant Opportunities in Ceramic Inks Market

4.2 Ceramic Inks Market, By Application

4.3 Ceramic Inks Market in APAC, 2016

4.4 Ceramic Inks Market Size, By Type



5 Market Overview

5.1 Introduction

5.2 Market Dynamics

5.2.1 Drivers

5.2.1.1 Growing Use of Digital Printing Technology

5.2.1.2 Growing Construction Industry

5.2.1.3 Increased Demand for Decorated and Customized Ceramic Tiles

5.2.2 Restraints

5.2.2.1 High Cost Involved in Switching From Analog to Digital Printing Technology

5.2.3 Opportunities

5.2.3.1 High Demand for Ceramic Tiles in APAC and the Middle East & Africa

5.2.4 Challenges

5.2.4.1 Developing New Application Areas for Ceramic Inks

5.3 Porter's Five Forces Analysis



6 Ceramic Inks Market, By Type

6.1 Introduction

6.2 Functional Inks

6.3 Decorative Inks



7 Ceramic Inks Market, By Application

7.1 Introduction

7.2 Ceramic Tiles

7.2.1 Residential Decorative Tiles

7.2.1.1 Floor Tiles

7.2.1.2 Inner Wall Tiles

7.2.2 Commercial Decorative Tiles

7.2.2.1 Floor Tiles

7.2.2.2 Inner Wall Tiles

7.3 Glass Printing

7.3.1 Decorative Glass Printing

7.3.2 Functional Glass Printing

7.4 Food Container Printing

7.4.1 Tin and Glass Bottle Printing

7.5 Others



8 Ceramic Inks Market, By Technology

8.1 Introduction

8.2 Digital Printing Technology

8.3 Analog Printing Technology



9 Ceramic Inks Market, By Region



10 Competitive Landscape

10.1 Overview

10.2 Competitive Situation and Trends

10.2.1 Acquisition

10.2.2 New Product Launch



11 Company Profiles

11.1 Ferro Corporation

11.2 Torrecid Group

11.3 Colorobbia Holding S.P.A

11.4 Esmalglass - Itaca Grupo

11.5 Fritta

11.6 Zschimmer & Schwarz

11.7 Sicer S.P.A.

11.8 KAO Chimigraf

11.9 SUN Chemical

11.10 Tecglass

11.11 Other Companies

11.11.1 Colores Olucha, S.L.

11.11.2 Six Star Ceramic Colours Co., Ltd.

11.11.3 Smalticeram Unicer Spa

11.11.4 Shandong Sinocera Create-Tide New Materials High-Tech Co., Ltd.

11.11.5 Colores Cermicos Elcom, S.L.

11.11.6 Vernis SA

11.11.7 Colores Cermicos S.A.

11.11.8 Innovative Ceramic Corp

11.11.9 Quimicer

11.11.10 Kerafrit SA

11.11.11 Afford Digital Inks

11.11.12 Belgium Glass and Ceramics (P) Ltd

11.11.13 Megacolor Productos Cermicos

11.11.14 Guangdong Dow Technology Co., Ltd.



For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/8c2xnd/global_ceramic?w=12
By Shoon Naing YANGON (Reuters) - A Myanmar minister expressed concerns on Thursday about "very poor conditions" in Rohingya refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh, and said repatriation of the Muslim minority should start as soon as possible due to the coming monsoon season. The United Nations and rights groups say a Myanmar military operation in the country's northwest in August has sent nearly 700,000 Rohingya Muslims fleeing to Bangladesh. Most live in flimsy, bamboo-and-plastic structures perched on hills around Cox's Bazar, in southern Bangladesh. Fleeing Rohingya refugees have reported killings, rapes and arson on a large scale. The United States and the U.N. have described the military crackdown as ethnic cleansing, an accusation that Myanmar denies. "Seeing is believing and we saw all the people in the camps are in very poor condition," Myanmar's Social Welfare Minister Win Myat Aye told reporters in the country's main city, Yangon, after his two-day visit to camps near Cox's Bazar. "Our main thing is to start the repatriation process as soon as possible because the monsoon is very near and we are very worried for those who fled to Bangladesh," he said. Myanmar said on Saturday it had repatriated the first Rohingya family. The Bangladeshi government and the United Nations refugee agency, however, said they had no knowledge of any such repatriation. After months of fraught talks, Myanmar and Bangladesh agreed in January to complete a voluntary repatriation of the refugees within two years. Myanmar set up two reception centers and what it says is a temporary camp near the border to house the first arrivals. But a senior U.N. official who recently visited Myanmar said the country was not ready for the repatriation of Rohingya refugees. Win Myat Aye said Rohingya returnees would be entitled to apply for National Verification Cards (NVCs), which are part of the government's ongoing effort to register mostly stateless Rohingya that falls short of offering them citizenship. He said those NVC holders would be in turn be able to apply for citizenship in Buddhist-majority Myanmar within five months after they were "scrutinized according to the law". "Those who are entitled to become citizens will become citizens," he told Reuters, without elaborating. Myanmar's panel of international advisers on Rohingya issues has warned the coming monsoon season could bring "enormous deaths" as refugee camps in Bangladesh are not built to withstand the storms. (Reporting By Shoon Naing; Writing by Yimou Lee; Editing by Alex Richardson)
By Keith Coffman LITTLETON, Colo. (Reuters) - Demanding an end to gun violence and tougher restrictions on firearm sales, thousands of students again walked out of classes across the United States on Friday in hopes of putting pressure on politicians ahead of November's midterm elections. Timed to coincide with the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre, students left classes at midmorning, many waving placards with slogans including "I should be worried about grades, not guns," and "Enough is enough." Organizers said students from more than 2,600 schools and institutions were scheduled to take part, but that was fewer than participated in a similar walkout last month. In some places, demonstrators even met with resistance from school administrators. "Today is about being proactive and being empowered and really funneling all that energy and anger we have as young people into some productive change," one of the student organizers, Lane Murdock of Connecticut, told Reuters. Olivia Pfeil, a 16-year-old sophomore from a high school in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, held a sign bearing the names of mass shooting victims. "We're expecting change or come next election cycle we will support politicians who are listening to the voices of the youth," she said. It was the second student walkout since the Feb. 14 massacre of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and the emergence of a national student movement to end gun violence and toughen restrictions on firearms sales. Many of the demonstrators wore orange, a color that has come to represent the movement against gun violence. A 13-second silence was observed in honor of the 13 killed at Columbine. At the Texas statehouse in Austin, about 1,000 students, many waving signs and chanting anti-NRA slogans, demanded stricter gun control measures. Because we cant vote, this is the only way we can make our voices heard, said Graeclyn Garza, a second-year student at McCallum High School in Austin, who waved a sign reading Enough. Outside the White House, protesters sat in silence while they listened to the names of gun violence victims read aloud. "It happened like 20 years ago," said Ayanna Rhodes, 14, a student at Washington International School, referring to Columbine, "And we are still getting mass shootings in schools." Two gunman went on a shooting rampage at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999, leaving 12 students and a teacher dead before killing themselves in a massacre that stunned the nation. But since then, school shootings have become commonplace. Even as students prepared for their protest on Friday morning, news broke that a 17-year-old student had been wounded in a shooting at a high school near Ocala, Florida. A suspect was arrested soon afterward, police said. The latest gun violence unfolded about 225 miles (360 km)northwest of the Parkland high school, where two months ago a former student killed 17 people in the deadliest high school shooting in U.S. history. Despite widespread revulsion over the school shootings, the issue of gun control remains sensitive in Colorado and across the country, where the Second Amendment of the Constitution guarantees the right to bear arms. 'OPPOSE THEM AT EVERY STEP' Dudley Brown, president of the Colorado-based National Association for Gun Rights, said the gun-control movement seeks to have the government take away constitutional rights. "The main objective of these students is to ban firearms completely, and confiscate the firearms of law-abiding Americans," Brown said. "We will oppose them at every step." In some conservative school districts, administrators told students they could face disciplinary steps if they walked out. In suburban Dallas, a dozen students dressed in orange chanted "End gun violence!" as they huddled in a parking lot across the street from North Garland High School. Freshman Victoria Fierro, 14, said school administrators blocked the doors when about 50 students tried to leave, so a small group exited through a side door. "They told us we would get in trouble if we walk out, and we told them it was a peaceful protest, we're not causing any damage," Fierro said. "This is over a serious topic that people are pushing aside." The principal declined to answer questions from Reuters. It was not immediately clear whether Friday's turnout matched those of earlier protests. More than a month ago, tens of thousands of students from some 3,000 schools participated in the #ENOUGH National School Walkout to demand tighter gun control regulations. On March 24, "March For Our Lives" rallies in cities across the United States were some of the biggest U.S. youth demonstrations in decades, with hundreds of thousands of young Americans and their supporters taking to the streets. On the evening before the walk-outs, Colorado gun control activists rallied near Columbine High School. Carlos Rodriguez, a 17-year-old junior from Marjory Stoneman, traveled to Columbine for the anniversary and said he found a sense of solidarity in the outpouring of support. "That's the only thing that's keeping us Douglas students alive right now: the distraction of fighting for our rights and advocating for our lives," Rodriguez told Reuters. There was no walkout on Friday at Columbine, which has not held classes on April 20 since the massacre. Students were encouraged to take part in community service instead. (Additional reporting by Lacey Johnson and Ian Simpson in Washington, Zach Fagenson in Miami, Lisa Maria Garza in Garland, Texas, Jon Herskovitz in Austin, Texas, and Edgar Mendez in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin; editing by Jonathan Oatis and Dan Grebler)
Despite the seemingly arbitrary live-fire and tear gas raining down on the protestors  Hamas believes the victims are carefully selected. Israel knows who to wound, maim or kill, a Hamas leader told me by phone. At least 10 young men, affiliated with Hamas and its Qassam brigades, have been shot while maintaining order at the protest.



Hamas believes Israel is deploying facial recognition technologies besides the numerous war-drones that obliterate the sky above. The movement warned its members to keep their faces covered, and leave their phones at home.

Originally published in Commentary on April 16, 2018

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blog spot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work.

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..Analysis from Israel..18 April '18..Last weekends demonstrations in Gaza produced smaller crowds and fewer casualties than the protests that occurred over the previous two weekends. Whats more, they were overshadowed by the Western airstrikes on Syria. But earlier and more chaotic demonstrations prompted all the usual suspects (Europe, the UN, and human rights organizations) to accuse Israel of using disproportionate, indiscriminate force, and shooting unarmed civilian demonstrators, all while dismissing Israels insistence that it only targeted terrorists, mainly Hamas members, who were using the demonstrators for cover. Yet it now turns out that one Palestinian organization agrees with IsraelHamas itself.In a column published inlast week, Gaza native Muhammad Shehada defended the demonstrations as a necessary response to Israels partial blockade, on which he blamed all of Gazas woes. His younger brother, he said, has participated in them almost daily. He himself is currently studying in Sweden but formerly worked for an anti-Israel human rights organization in Gaza. In short, hes hardly an Israeli shill. Nevertheless, he noted that even Hamas believes Israels fire has been far from indiscriminate:This is what Israel has said all along. A report published last week by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (an organization founded by former Israeli intelligence officials that maintain close ties with the intelligence agencies) concluded that 80 percent of the people killed during the Gaza demonstrations26 out of 32were members of terrorist organizations. This conclusion wasnt based on any secret intelligence; in each case, a terrorist organization publicly claimed the deceased as a member and buried him in the organizations flag or published pictures of him in military dress holding a gun. This finding also explains why all but two of the dead were men between the ages of 19 and 45: Unlike the terrorists, actual civilians have largely kept their distance from the border fence.Of course, Shehada argued that the Hamas men were only present at the demonstrations to ensure that demonstrators didnt engage in anti-Israel violence or try to cross the border into Israel  the implication being that Israel deliberately tried to provoke Palestinian violence by killing the people working to stop it. And what Shehada merely implied, the demonstrations organizers have openly charged : Israel, they say, is intentionally trying to provoke the demonstrators into violence.To be fair, Hamas does have a record of trying to stop violence in those rare cases where violence doesnt suit its own agenda. But in this case, its hard to argue that efforts to breach the border dont fit in with its plans, because the organizations leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, has repeatedly and explicitly declared that this is precisely what the demonstrations are intended to do.At the March 30 demonstration, Sinwar asserted that the protest will not stop until we remove this transient border [between Gaza and Israel]  The protests will continue until the Palestinians return to the lands they were expelled from 70 years ago  i.e., pre-1967 Israel, the state established 70 years ago. And lest anyone think this was a fluke, he reiterated it at the following weeks demonstration, saying the world should wait for our great move, when we breach the borders and pray at Al-Aqsa, Jerusalems principal mosque.Thus, believing that Hamas operatives are at the border to stop it from being breached requires believing that Hamas sent its men there specifically to undermine its own leaders stated goal. By any ordinary standard of logic, its far more likely that they were there to do exactly what Sinwar said he wanted to do: use the demonstrations as cover for vandalizing the border fence and attacking the soldiers guarding it, with the ultimate goal of opening a breach through which thousands of Gazans could pour into Israel.This is all the more plausible because Hamas used that exact same tactic to breach the Egyptian border 10 years ago. On January 22, 2008, a group of unarmed Hamas demonstratorsmostly womenrushed the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt and managed to break through. That night, Hamas operatives planted explosives along the border wall in several places, creating huge gaps in it. The next day, anywhere from 200,000 to 750,000 Gazans (estimates vary) poured through those breaches into Egypt.Needless to say, this conclusion is also supported by the testimony of Israeli soldiers, who have reported numerous incidents of demonstrators trying to vandalize the fence or throw Molotov cocktails and improvised explosive devices at soldiers. The latest Palestinian tactic is flying kites with Molotov cocktails attached over the border; those innocent kites have so far started four fires in Israel. These are the terrorists, not innocent civilians, whom Israeli soldiers have targeted.Israel and Hamas are in almost perfect agreement over what has been happening over the last few weeks. Both agree that the goal of the demonstrations is to breach the border with Israel, and both agree that Israeli gunfire during these demonstrations has been aimed almost exclusively at operatives for Hamas and other terrorist organizations.The only people who dont agree with this description are European, UN, and NGO officials sitting in their comfortable offices in Brussels and New York. At best, theyre guilty of monstrous arrogance in believing that they know whats happening on another continent better than the parties actually on the ground. And at worst, they simply dont care what really happenedbecause in those circles, the politically correct anti-Israel narrative almost always trumps the facts.
Oregon allows recreational marijuana. Originally, there were laws limiting growers to local Oregon companies (when it was a medical marijuana industry) which were effectively eliminated when the transition was made to recreational usage (allowing out of state funding). There was also a relatively small local market for growing cannabis.

Dispensaries cropped up everywhere, even in seemingly small, out of the way tourist towns with only a few hundred souls. It seems that you cant go far without seeing the green cross that symbolizes a marijuana dispensary. Unlike other states, Oregon apparently allowed anyone who met basic criteria to open a weed store.

While it surprised many of the locals who curated their wares and made custom strains of local cannabis, the free market reared its head and drove down prices on effectively undifferentiated product and storefronts. From the local WWeek newspaper:

A gram of weed was selling for less than the price of a glass of wine we have standard grams on the shelf at $4 before we didnt see a gram below $8 Wholesale sun-grown weed fell from $1500 a pound last summer to as low as $700 by mid-October.

As a result of this, there is significant consolidation in the market as smaller growers either bow out or are bought up and dispensaries are being purchased by large groups (often vertically integrated with growers) at fire-sale prices.

(the) Oregon cannabis industry is a bleak scene: small businesses laying off employees and shrinking operations. Farms shuttering.

One farm profiled in the article went into growing weed with the expectation of selling at $1500 a pound; when they finally had to liquidate most of their crop at a weed auction, they only received $100 a pound.

The entire Oregon recreational cannabis industry has played out exactly as you would expect in a market with few barriers to entry and a relatively undifferentiated commodity:



1. Suppliers rush in to take advantage of high prices for crops, turning what was originally a weed shortage (and resulting scarce supply) into a huge spike in supply which in turn drove down wholesale prices to almost nothing on the margin



2. Retailers who have little or no differentiation are being driven out of business by low profits or being forced to run at a loss

For me the interesting part of this is not the plain execution of basic market economics (in an industry with low barriers to entry, prices will drive down to near marginal cost of the most efficient operator), but in what that means to adjacent industries. For example, if a gram of (high quality) weed is the price of a single glass of wine (actually a lot less at $4 that is probably 1/3 of the price of a glass of decent wine at a standard restaurant), will customers switch from beer or wine to cannabis? From an economic perspective (cost / buzz) this would be a relatively clear-cut choice. Over time economists should chart the impact of low cannabis prices on both prices and consumption in adjacent alcohol industries.

Cross posted at LITGM
Here are some of the latest health and medical news developments, compiled by the editors of HealthDay:

No Criminal Charges in Prince's Death

No one will be charged in connection with the overdose death of the musician Prince, Minnesota law officials said Thursday.

Prince died two years ago after unknowingly taking counterfeit Vicodin that contained the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl, but there is "no reliable evidence of how Prince obtained" the drug, according to Carver County attorney Mark Metz, The New York Times reported.

"We have no direct evidence that a specific person provided the fentanyl to Prince," Metz said. He noted that the investigation did not find any "sinister motive, intent or conspiracy to murder Prince."

Minnesota doctor Michael Schulenberg, who treated Prince twice shortly before his death, has agreed to pay $30,000 to settle a federal civil violation for an illegal prescription, his lawyer, Amy Conners, said Thursday, The Times reported.

In a search warrant last year, investigators said Schulenberg told them he prescribed an opioid painkiller to Prince in another person's name in order to protect the musician's privacy.

As part of the settlement, Schulenberg admitted no liability, The Times reported.

The pills prescribed by Schulenberg did not lead to Prince's death, according to Metz.

"The bottom line is we simply do not have sufficient evidence to charge anyone with a crime in relation to Prince's death," Metz said.

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FDA Should Approve Marijuana-Derived Epilepsy Drug: Advisory Committee

A marijuana-derived epilepsy drug should be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, an advisory committee unanimously recommended on Thursday.

If approved in an expected FDA vote in June, Epidiolex would be the first plant-derived cannabidiol medicine for prescription use in the U.S., CNN reported.

The committee recommended that Epidiolex, an oral solution, be approved for treatment of severe, early-onset forms of epilepsy in a small number of patients.

FDA approval would be for this use, but doctors would have the option to prescribe it "off-label" for other uses, CNN reported.

While Epidiolex would be the first plant-derived cannabidiol medicine approved for prescription use in the U.S., there are approved drugs that contain synthetic versions of cannabinoid chemicals found in marijuana.

The advisory committee's recommendation came after members reviewed data from the drug's maker, GW Pharmaceuticals PLC, CNN reported.

-----

As Prescriptions for Opioids Fall, Use of Anti-Addiction Meds Rises

Prescriptions for opioid painkillers are declining in the United States while prescriptions for medications to treat opioid addiction are on the rise, new data show.

Prescriptions for opioid painkillers fell 10 percent last year, and new monthly prescriptions for the drugs fell by 7.8 percent, according to the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science, which studies prescription drug use and spending, The New York Times reported.

The number of people in the U.S. who received new prescriptions for medications to treat opioid addiction nearly doubled during 2017, from 42,000 to 82,000 per month.

The decline in opioid prescriptions and increase in opioid addiction medication prescriptions reflects increased efforts to combat the nation's opioid epidemic, which claims 115 lives a day, The Times reported.

For example, there are new insurance company policies and state laws that limit opioid prescribing.

"I think the message is we are seeing measurable impact from all that's going on," Murray Aitken, executive director of the IQVIA Institute, told The Times. "These numbers don't tell you what exactly is driving the acceleration in the drop, but we think it's useful to get the 2017 numbers out there so people can see what's happening."

The report said that prescription opioid volumes reached their peak in 2011 at the equivalent of 240 billion milligrams of morphine. That fell by 29 percent to 171 billion in 2017, but that was still enough for every American adult to have 52 pills, "a fivefold higher level than in 1992," Aitken said.

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Keeping Donated Livers Warm, Rather than Cool, May Help Them Last Longer: Study

Keeping donated livers warm, rather than cool, may keep them usable for a longer time and make more available for transplant, a new study suggests.

British researchers found that donated livers kept functioning when hooked to a machine that kept them at body temperature and full of blood and nutrients, the Associated Press reported.

In the study, 220 newly donated livers were either put into coolers as usual or stored for 24 hours in the machine made by Britain's OrganOx Ltd. Compared to the livers kept on ice, the warmed livers had less cellular damage, a risk for transplant failure.

And while the warmed livers were stored several hours longer than the cooled livers, 20 percent fewer warmed livers had to be discarded, according to the study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, the AP reported.

"The biggest challenge in liver transplantation is the desperate shortage of organs," said study leader Dr. David Nasralla, University of Oxford. "We found that livers that went on the machine were more likely to be transplanted."

This is "the first radically different approach to organ preservation," Dr. David Klassen of the United Network for Organ Sharing, which supervises the U.S. transplant system, told the AP.

He described it as "really exciting technology" that might prove appropriate for certain organ donations, but not all of them.

Similar machines are being considered for lung and heart transplants, the AP reported.

Nearly 115,000 people are on the waiting list for an organ transplant in the U.S., but last year there were just 34,770 transplants performed nationwide. Each year, thousands of people die waiting for a new organ.

Along with too few organ donations, storage times for donated organs are only about four to six hours for a heart or lung, and about 12 hours for a liver, the AP reported.

-----

Early and Quick Turnaround Deployments Increase U.S. Soldiers' Suicide Risk: Study

U.S. soldiers have a higher risk of suicide if they're sent to a war zone soon after joining the military or if they have repeat deployments six months or less apart, researchers say.

They looked at 593 men and women in the U.S. Army who had been deployed twice and who attempted suicide between 2004 and 2009, NBC News reported.

"Those who served 12 or fewer months before their first deployment were approximately twice as likely to attempt suicide during or after their second deployment compared with those who had more time to train and acclimate to the military before initial deployment," Dr. Robert Ursano, of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, and colleagues wrote.

Soldiers who were re-deployed within six months or less were 60 percent more likely to attempt suicide, according to the study in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.

Short periods between deployments are common in the U.S. military as it sends troops to Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, and there are rising rates of suicide among veterans. In 2014, an average of 20 veterans died by suicide each day, the Veterans Affairs Department says, NBC News reported.

"Rates of suicidal behaviors, including suicide deaths, attempts, and ideation, among U.S. Army soldiers increased considerably during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan," Ursano and colleagues wrote.

The study findings make sense psychologically, Time Barclay, a clinical psychologist at the nonprofit Collateral Damage Project, which provides free mental health treatment to veterans.

Combat "literally changes the brain at a functional and cellular level," he told NBC News. "It causes an overreaction of the sympathetic nervous system that doesn't shut off."

Being deployed too soon after joining the military increases that stress, according to Patricia Spencer, who trains social workers about military culture.

These new soldiers "haven't had a chance yet to really bond with their unit, their squad," Spencer told NBC News.

"In suicide prevention we know that connections and having a sense of connection can be a protective factor. Somebody brand new into the military, they are not going to have quite that sense of connection with their unit and squad," she explained.
FRIDAY, April 20, 2018 (HealthDay News) -- Even if you're not obese, too much belly fat could harm your ticker, researchers report.

"People with a normal weight but a fat belly have more chance of heart problems than people without a fat belly, even if they are obese according to BMI [body mass index]," said study author Dr. Jose Medina-Inojosa. He's with the Mayo Clinic's division of preventive cardiology, in Rochester, Minn.

The study included 1,700 people who were aged 45 and older at the time of enrollment and were followed from 2000 to 2016.

Those with a normal BMI (an estimate of overall body fat based on height and weight) but high levels of belly fat were about twice as likely to have a heart attack, procedures to open blocked arteries, or to die from heart problems during the follow-up than people without belly fat.

The findings were to be presented Friday at a European Society of Cardiology meeting, in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Research presented at meetings is considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

"The belly is usually the first place we deposit fat, so people classified as overweight BMI but without a fat belly probably have more muscle, which is good for health," Medina-Inojosa explained in a meeting news release. "Muscle is like a metabolic storehouse and helps decrease lipid [fat] and sugar levels in the blood.

"If you have fat around your belly and it's greater than the size of your hips, visit your doctor to assess your cardiovascular health and fat distribution," he said. "If you have central obesity [belly fat], the target will be waist loss rather than weight loss."

Medina-Inojosa offered some belly-busting suggestions.

"Exercise more, decrease sedentary time by taking the stairs or getting off the train one stop early and walking, increase your muscle mass with strength and resistance training, and cut out refined carbohydrates," he advised.

He added that doctors shouldn't assume that people with a normal BMI are not at risk of heart problems.

"Our study provides evidence that doctors should also measure central obesity [belly fat] to get a better picture of whether a patient is at risk," Medina-Inojosa said.

More information

The U.S. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute offers a guide to a healthy heart.
English Danish

Upon a request from DK Telekommunikation ApS, which has announced on 9 April 2018 the final result of its offer for all shares in TDC A/S the Board of Directors of TDC A/S hereby invites the Company's shareholders to attend an extraordinary general meeting, which will be held on

Monday, 14 May 2018 at 12 p.m. (CEST) at Kromann Reumert, Lautrupsgade 15, 2100 Copenhagen .

Agenda:

Election of members to the Board of Directors Any other business

Re item 1 on the agenda

The Board of Directors has been informed that DK Telekommunikation ApS no later than at the general meeting will inform the general meeting of the candidates proposed to be elected to the Board of Directors, including information on such candidates' other board and/or managerial positions pursuant to Section 120(3) of the Danish Companies Act.

--oo0oo

At the time of the general meeting, the Company's nominal share capital is DKK 812,000,000 divided into shares of a nominal value of DKK 1 or any multiple thereof.

Under Article 10(1) and 10(2) of the Articles of Association it is the number of shares and voting rights registered or filed for registration in the Company's register of shareholders at the date of registration (Monday, 7 May 2018 at 11.59 p.m. (CEST)) which determines the shareholders' right to attend and vote at the general meeting.

Shareholders who have chosen to accept the offer from DK Telekommunikation ApS will have their shares acquired no later than on 4 May 2018. Therefore, these shareholders will not be shareholders on the date of registration (7 May 2018) and will therefore not be entitled to attend the general meeting.

The proposal in item 1 must be passed by a simple majority of votes.

The following information will be available to the shareholders on the Company's website, www.tdcgroup.com/en/investor-relations/annual-general-meeting, no later than Friday, 20 April 2018: (1) The notice convening the general meeting, (2) the total number of shares and voting rights in the Company at the date of the notice, (3) the agenda and (4) the proxy form.

Up until one week before the general meeting, shareholders may submit written questions to the Company's management on matters to be resolved at the general meeting. Shareholders wishing to exercise this right may send their questions by letter to the Company or by e-mail to investorrelations@tdc.dk. The questions may be answered in writing, for instance by making the answers available on the Company's website, www.tdcgroup.com/en/investor-relations/annual-general-meeting. No answer is required to be provided if the shareholder who has asked the question is not represented at the general meeting.

At the general meeting, shareholders may also ask oral questions about these matters to the Company's management.

Shareholders, proxies and any accompanying adviser must have an admission card to attend the general meeting. Admission cards may be ordered on the shareholder portal via the Company's website, www.tdcgroup.com/en/investor-relations/annual-general-meeting, or on the website of Computershare A/S, www.computershare.dk. Admission cards will be sent out electronically to the email address registered in the shareholder portal upon registration. The admission card must be presented at the general meeting either electronically on a smartphone/tablet or printed. Shareholders who have not registered an email address can download the admission card as a PDF and print it from the shareholder portal or pick-up the admission card at the general meeting by showing a valid ID.

Shareholders carrying voting rights can obtain voting cards at the general meeting by presenting their admission card.

Admission cards must be ordered at the latest by Thursday, 10 May 2018 at 11.59 p.m. (CEST).

At the general meeting, shareholders may vote by proxy by presenting an instrument of proxy duly signed and dated. Proxies may be granted electronically on the Company's website, www.tdcgroup.com/en/investor-relations/annual-general-meeting, or on the website of Computershare A/S, www.computershare.dk, by using Nem-ID or username and password. Nem-ID will only be compatible if the shareholder has a Danish CPR number. Electronic proxies must be granted by Thursday, 10 May 2018 at 11.59 p.m. (CEST). Alternatively, a proxy form may be downloaded from the Company's website, www.tdcgroup.com/en/investor-relations/annual-general-meeting, and sent by letter to the Company or Computershare A/S or by e-mail to gf@computershare.dk. If an admission card has been ordered in time, a proxy may be granted physically until Monday, 14 May 2018 at 11.00 a.m. (CEST). Proxies may be revoked by letter to the Company or Computershare A/S, or by e-mail to gf@computershare.dk.

It is not possible to provide the shareholders with a form for voting by post, because the identities of the board of director candidates is not yet known. If the identities of the board of director candidates are publicly disclosed before 14 May 2018, the Company will as quickly as possible provide a form for voting by post on the Company's website, www.tdcgroup.com/en/investor-relations/annual-general-meeting.

Letters should be sent to Computershare A/S, Lottenborgvej 26D, 2800 Kgs. Lyngby.

The Board of Directors





For inquiries regarding the above please contact TDC Investor Relations, on +45 6663 7680 or investorrelations@tdc.dk.





TDC A/S

Teglholmsgade 1

0900 Copenhagen C

DK-Denmark

tdc.com

Attachment
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Demonstrations began in Nicaragua on April 18, as thousands of civilians in several cities protested changes to the countrys social security system, according to reports. At least three people, including a protester and a police officer, were killed in clashes, The Associated Press reported.

At least nine journalists were injured while covering protests in Managua on April 19 and at least two had equipment stolen, according to reports. CPJs Emergencies Response Team has issued the following safety advisory for journalists planning to cover the ongoing protests:

Reporting on crowd violence or mobs can be dangerous. To minimize the risk, journalists should:

Be prepared:

Plan the assignment and ensure that you have a full battery on your cell phone. Know the area you are going to. Work out in advance what to do in an emergency.

Always try to work with a colleague and have a regular check-in procedure with your baseparticularly if covering rallies or crowded events.

Wear clothing and footwear that allow you to move swiftly. Avoid wearing necklaces, ponytails, lanyards or anything that can be grabbed, as well as flammable material, such as nylon.

Consider your position. Try to find an elevated position that may offer greater safety.

At any location, always plan an evacuation route. If working with others, select an emergency rendezvous point.

Maintain situational awareness at all times and limit valuables in your possession. Do not leave any equipment in vehicles. After dark, the risk of criminal activity increases.

increases. If working in a crowd, plan a strategy. Try to keep to the outside of the crowd and avoid the middle, where it is harder to escape. Identify an escape route.

In situations where teargas may be used:

Wear personal protective equipment including a gas mask, eye protection, body armor, and helmet.

Contact lenses are not advisable.

Individuals with asthma or respiratory issues should avoid areas where teargas is being used. When large amounts of teargas are used, there is the possibility of high concentrations of gas sitting in areas with no movement of air.

Take note of landmarks (i.e. posts, curbs) that can be used to help you navigate out of an area if you are struggling to see.

If you are exposed to teargas, try to find higher ground and stand in fresh air to allow the breeze to carry away the gas. Do not rub your eyes or face. When you are able to, shower in cold water to wash the gas from your skin, but do not bathe. Clothing may need to be washed several times to remove the crystals completely or be discarded.

When dealing with aggression:

Read body language and use your own body language to pacify a situation.

Keep eye contact with an aggressor, use open hand gestures and keep talking with a calming manner.

Keep an extended arms length from the threat. Back away and if someone grabs hold of you, break away firmly without aggression. If cornered and in danger, shout.

If cornered and in danger, shout. If the situation escalates, keep a hand free to protect your head and move with short, deliberate steps to avoid falling. If in a team, stick together and link arms.

Be aware of the situation and your own safety. While there are times when documenting aggression can be newsworthy, taking pictures of aggressive individuals can escalate a situation.

Journalists who are injured or require assistance can contact CPJ via report_violation@cpj.org.

CPJ encourages local and freelance journalists and media organizations covering the protests in Nicaragua to closely follow the safety principles and practices of the ACOS Alliance, which can be found here.

For more information on basic preparedness, assessing and responding to risk, or safety measures when covering civil conflict and disturbances, journalists should review CPJs Journalist Security Guide. For additional information and tools for pre-assignment preparation and post-incident assistance, visit CPJs resource center.
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New York, April 20, 2018At least nine journalists have been injured and at least five independent television channels have been blocked in Nicaragua, as escalating protests against pension reform since April 18 have left at least three people dead, according to news reports.

Independent news channels 15, 12, 14, 23, and 51, which were covering the protests, went off air after the government ordered cable television providers to cut their signals, reports stated. In a Facebook post, Channel 15 director Miguel Mora called the action a clear violation of freedom of the press.

We call on the Nicaraguan authorities to stop attacking independent media and allow journalists to cover the protests without threat or harassment, said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martinez de la Serna. Nicaraguans deserve diverse news sources, and television stations should broadcast freely, with no interruption or government pressure.

Of the nine journalists injured while reporting on the protests, at least two had their equipment robbed, according to news reports.
The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting 2018 (CHOGM 2018) was held in London, United Kingdom. It was overall 25th meeting of the heads of government of the Commonwealth of Nations. It was also first CHOGM held following United Kingdoms decision to withdraw from European Union. This decision has resulted for Britain to strengthen its economic ties with and play greater role in Commonwealth. India was represented by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Key Facts

The theme CHOGM 2018 was Towards a Common Future. The British hosts had set out four main goals for summit viz prosperity: boosting intra-Commonwealth trade and investment; security: increasing cooperation across security challenges including global terrorism, organised crime and cyberattacks; fairness: promoting democracy, fundamental freedoms and good governance across Commonwealth and sustainability: building resilience of small and vulnerable states to deal with effects of climate change and other global crises.

During CHOGM 2018, Commonwealth Blue Charter on ocean governance Commonwealth connectivity agenda for trade and investment, declaration on cybercrime and revised Commonwealth guidelines on election observation in member countries were taken into consideration.

Commonwealth of Nations

It is an international intergovernmental organisation of countries that were mostly former territories of the British Empire and dependencies. It was established by the London Declaration in 1949. Many countries from Africa, Asia, Americas, Europe and the Pacific have joined the Commonwealth. Current membership includes 54 counties (including India). Membership is based on free and equal voluntary co-operation. Queen Elizabeth II is Head of Commonwealth. She is also monarch of 16 members of Commonwealth, known as Commonwealth realms.
Maharashtra: More debris than fish netted by Mumbai's trawler nets

April 20,2018 | Source: The Times of India

Maharashtra government's ban on plastics would bring cheer to fishermen of Mumbai. A recent study has revealed that their trawls net more non-biodegradable marine debris than fish. According to the national study conducted by Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute (CMFRI), marine debris netted by fishermen is the highest in Mumbai and the lowest in Vizag. The relative percentage of debris over the fish catch was 2.23% in Mumbai and Kochi, while off Vizag coast it was 0.33%. The study was conducted in September 2017. The one-month study measured debris found by trawler nets based on the distance travelled by fishing boats. According to the study, 49.11 kg/km2 of debris was netted off Mumbai coast, compared to 2.25 kg/km2 off the Vizag coast.



Rajesh Mangela, secretary of Maharashtra Machhimar Kruti Samiti, a fishermen's association, said, "There is definitely a lot of plastic debris that we find in our fishing nets and this has been the case for several years now. This affects our livelihood because it requires extra effort to remove it and affects marine life too. We have raised this issue with the government, but in vain." What's worrying is fishing grounds along the entire western coast report high levels in the mean weight of non-biodegradable marine debris. This is attributed to the higher level of development, industrial work and tourism activities along the west coast than on the east. Dr V Kripa of CMFRI-Kochi, said the turbidity of water in the region was also a factor. "The sea in the west is more turbid, which means the debris thrown into the water gets settled in the sea bed. When the trawls throw the net deep into the sea, it brings up along with it all the debris that has got settled there," she said.
Pakistan: CM vows to protest right of fishermen

April 20,2018 | Source: The Express Tribune

Balochistan Chief Minister Mir Abdul Qudus Bizenjo has said thousands of Baloch are associated with fisheries and the provincial government seeks to protect the rights of local fishermen. Bizenjo said this during a meeting with Commander Coast Pakistan Navy Admiral Moazzam Ilyas in Quetta on Wednesday. He applauded the Pakistan Navys efforts in revamping health and education in the coastal areas of Balochistan.



Balochistan government is utilising all resources to address the problems of local fishermen on a priority basis, he said. The chief minister said the illegal fishing by Sindh was directly affecting fishermen in Balochistan, and the exercise is endangering the marine life as well. The provincial government is committed to protecting the rights of local fishermen, and there is a need to take preventive measures against illegal fishing, he added. Bizenjo also discussed development projects with Admiral Ilyas including Pasni fish harbour, Ormara airport and Pasni hospital. The CPEC will pave the way for business activities in Balochistans coastal area. It will also result in thousands of jobs to the people of the area, he said, adding that the provincial government would continue its cooperation over the social development projects launched by the Pakistan Navy.
Kafeel Khan, who is an accused in the Baba Raghav Das Medical College and Hospital tragedy case, said on Thursday that he is being wrongly framed by the administration in the case. (Photo: ANI)

Gorakhpur: Kafeel Khan, who is an accused in the Baba Raghav Das (BRD) Medical College/Hospital tragedy case, said on Thursday that he is being wrongly framed by the administration in the case.

Khan, who was a doctor at the BRD hospital, where over 30 children died in August 2017, allegedly due to disruption in oxygen supply, was brought to a district hospital for medical check-up earlier on Thursday after his wife alleged that her jailed husband was being denied medical care.

"I am being framed by the administration. A doctor is being falsely accused," Khan told reporters in Gorakhpur, while he was being taken away by the police after the medical check-up.

He has been charged with attempt to murder over the death of the children.

The district hospital's cardiologist Dr KK Shahi tested Dr Khans blood pressure, carried out other tests and advised him to undergo complete lipid profile test to ascertain risks of heart ailments.

Eight others are also accused in the case.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi called criticism a 'goldmine' that helped him improve himself and correct his mistakes. (Photo: Twitter | @PIB_India)

New Delhi/London: Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave a fitting reply to Congress which has been targeting him for his silence over several issues.

Addressing diaspora event 'Bharat Ki Baat, Sabke Saath' at the packed Central Hall at Westminster in downtown London, PM Modi said that he and his government are fine with the criticism and even welcomed it, but underlined that criticism was different from allegations levelled without any basis.

The Prime Minister also explained why he remained silent in face of relentless criticism back home.

PM Modi said his problem wasn't criticism which required a person to research and ascertain the facts to make a point but it was too much hard work and many people did not invest as much.

Drawing a distinction between criticism and allegation, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, "To criticise, one has to research and find proper facts. Sadly, it does not happen now. What happens instead is allegations. I want this Government to be criticized. Criticism makes democracy strong. Democracy cannot succeed without constructive criticism."

The Prime Minister called criticism a "goldmine" that helped him improve himself and correct his mistakes.

But why doesn't he respond to the criticism, asked Prasoon Joshi, the adman-lyricist.

Joshi, who was last year appointed to head the Chairman of the Central Board of Film Certification, was moderating the session which allowed selected individuals in India and abroad to ask questions.

PM Modi acknowledged that there was a charge that he didn't speak up despite "so much criticism".

This, he said, happened because he gave the criticism much importance, trying to understand where it was coming from and then rectify his mistakes.

"But it is not my job to shut up people who are criticising me, my job is to think where am I going wrong," he said. It was his government's intentions, he said, which were beyond reproach.

The explanation comes just a day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi's predecessor Dr Manmohan Singh advised him to speak more, an irony considering how Narendra Modi would mock the noted economist for his silence in public and derisively called him "Maun' Mohan Singh".

Dr Manmohan Singh told The Indian Express on Tuesday that he had the same advice for PM Modi. "I think the Prime Minister should follow his own advice to me and he should speak more often," he said.

Other Congress leaders such as Rahul Gandhi have turned Prime Minister Narendra Modi's silence on charges of corruption and nepotism that the opposition levels at him into campaign material for elections.

Rahul Gandhi has on numerous occasions attacked the Prime Minister for his silence on celebrity designer Nirav Modi (wanted in fraud cases) slipping out of the country and the Rafale deal.

When asked whether he can change the country alone, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he was an ordinary citizen just like any other Indian. "We have a million problems but we have a billion solutions," he said. "I can make mistakes but I will not do any work with the ill intention," the Prime Minister said.

PM Modi also spoke about crimes against women and asked parties not to politicise the heart-wrenching incidents.

Attacking earlier governments, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said days of incremental change are over and Indians have become more and more aspirational under the BJP-led government at the Centre.

PM Modi said people have more expectations from his government because they know that it can deliver. "People know that when they say something, the Government will listen and do it. Days of incremental change are over," the Prime Minister said.

During the 130-minute interaction, Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the Indian community on several issues ranging from surgical strikes to toilets to how he thinks his government's performance should be evaluated.

(With inputs from PTI)
Through two posts on Twitter on Tuesday, the Navy welcomed the arrival in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) of ships of its Chinese counterpart sailing on an anti-piracy mission. (Photo: Twitter/@indiannavy)

Its good to see the Indian Navy has a sense of humour. Through two posts on Twitter on Tuesday, the Navy welcomed the arrival in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) of ships of its Chinese counterpart sailing on an anti-piracy mission. The Chinese Navy is part of an international effort to deal with piracy off the Somali coast.

The intent of our sea warriors was to let the Chinese know we keep a close watch over their movements. A fleet of 50 warships of different descriptions is deployed in mission mode from the Malacca Straits to the Persian Gulf, sea lanes through which 70 per cent of world trade in hydrocarbons passes, to cover Chinese naval movements.

The Chinese now sail around a dozen naval vessels in the IOR, and sometimes give their nuclear submarines an outing in these waters. They could step this up, then the joke might be on us.

Remember, our budgetary support for defence has fallen while Chinas has risen significantly. More, they have got naval basing facilities in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa and are not far from getting ready Gwadar base in Pakistan. That will give the Chinese Navy a lot of heft in IOR. We have also let go any goodwill we had with Maldives, where the Chinese plan to open an observation post.

Chinas economy is three times ours in size, and its military spending keeps pace. The Indian Navy needs more versatile platforms in IOR and the capacity to show the flag in the South China Sea. Prowess must be for real. Lets not just be Twitter warriors.
Though Chinese President Xi Jinping is at pains to explain the bona fides of Beijings aim, intention and objectives, he tells his soldiers to prepare to die; deprecates and denounces democracy in no uncertain terms and emphatically thunders that China will never cede an inch of its territory or compromise with its sovereignty.

Someone, somewhere in China must have had either done research on the great West-East landmass spanning from the English Channel to the shoreline of the Sea of Japan  from Greenwich to 145 degrees east longitude, and mapped the contours of thousands of kilometres of the North-South axis, from the Laptev Sea, adjacent to the North Pole (80 degrees north latitude), to the Gulf of Talaimannar and the equator, and further to the southern hemisphere across the Indian Ocean, to the Maldives, Mauritius, Djibouti, and beyond; and to the Pacific island-nation of Vanuatu.

Chinas BRI/OBOR/CPEC actually seems to be the result of multi-disciplinary research. Though Chinese President Xi Jinping is at pains to explain the bona fides of Beijings aim, intention and objectives, he tells his soldiers to prepare to die; deprecates and denounces democracy in no uncertain terms and emphatically thunders that China will never cede an inch of its territory or compromise with its sovereignty.

China has a clear plan of action, but many doubts persist  why is it pretending to be the ultimate Good Samaritan of the 21st century world? Does this come from Beijings genuine altruism? Will China succeed in its endeavour at the cost of other small, economically weak and geographically disadvantaged nations? Or will it succeed owing to folly, miscalculation, cupidity and avarice of the ruling class of the targeted BRI/OBOR/CPEC nations? And where does it all end, and how?

Lets try to visualise what could be in store for India three decades from now.

Will a sovereign India continue to stand where it is standing since August 1947? Or will some unforeseen and unprecedented tectonic shift take place to change the demography and geography of Delhi? As has so often happened in the past!

Lets revisit the contemporary ground reality of the Chinese politys unprecedented look out policy.

Today, Chinas focus is on empty, sparsely populated land. The great heartland from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, wherein several countries face the grim reality of diminishing demography. Thus, of the 60-plus states which are under the Chinese radar for non-geopolitical and non-geo-strategic and economics only BRI/OBOR/CPEC, the population of, at least 23 countries are downhill. All these nations are to the west of the Ural mountains  Bulgaria (-0.8 per cent); Romania (-0.7 per cent); Lithuania (-0.6 per cent); Latvia (-0.5 per cent; Ukraine (-0.5 per cent); Croatia (-0.4 per cent); Hungary (-0.4 per cent); Serbia (-0.4 per cent); Belarus (-0.3 per cent; Bosnia & Herzegovina (-0.3 per cent); Estonia (-0.3 per cent); Albania (-0.2 per cent); Moldova (-0.2 per cent); Georgia (-0.1 per cent); Poland (-0.1 per cent); Russia (-0.1 per cent); Montenegro (0 per cent); Slovakia (0 per cent); Armenia (0.1 per cent); Czech Republic (0.1 per cent); Macedonia (0.1 per cent); Slovenia (0.1 per cent) and Turkey (0.1 per cent).

The vast Central Asian heartlands steppe of Kazakhstan (2.4 births per child-bearing woman); Kyrgyzstan (2.7 births per child-bearing woman); Tajikistan (2.8 births per child-bearing woman); Turkmenistan (2.1 births per child-bearing woman) and Uzbekistan (2.2 births per child-bearing woman) too are slow-moving upward-demography. which crave for development. All the more as each of these five states is inherently handicapped  being landlocked terrain (some being double landlocked).

These are vast resource-rich territories with rickety infrastructure, poor transport, communications and connectivity. They are geographically connected as one piece, but economically disparate and disconnected, separate entities which understandably can find solace from the proposed Chinese action, if any. And this action, that ensures China is going out, rather than foreigners are coming into China, has already begun.

But no sooner did the Chinese forward march begin that a grim warning came from IMF managing director Christine Lagarde that ventures can also lead to a problematic increase in debt, potentially limiting other spending as debt service rises, and creating balance of payments challenges.

Notwithstanding Mr Xis investments worth billions of dollars into infrastructure development across the worlds heartland, two critical issues have already surfaced. First  In countries where public debt is already high, careful management of financing terms is critical. Nothing could be more specific and precise than what is happening around some of the targeted small countries of South Asia. And second  A challenge comes as it needs to be ensured that BRI only travels where it is needed  an oblique reference by Ms Lagarde to problems of insider dealing; a complaint which more often than not keeps cropping up from Balochis about Pakistans Punjab. With any large-scale spending, there is sometimes the temptation to take advantage of the selection and bidding process, a typical characteristic of insider dealing which could throw the entire planning out of gear, leading to unrest. Despite the positive response from some developing nations to the Chinese approach due to stringent IMF conditions on debt management, symptoms of unrest are somewhat real. Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Laos, Indonesia, Kazakhstan and Poland are already feeling the heat. Growing resentment of sovereignty infringement owing to the Hambantota port takeover by China and the uneconomic Mattala airport being the worlds emptiest international airport constitute Sri Lankas twin dilemma of BRI/OBOR. Bangladesh is facing sudden funding delays from the Chinese bank.

Indonesia grapples with land acquisition unrest. Pakistans unending problems of ethnic strife, Islamic fundamentalists, terrorist outfits, and free for all and free for war, along with the deployment of 15,000 designated soldiers to protect Chinese nationals across turbulent terrain constitute a constant real-time threat to BRI/OBOR/CPEC. Laos too has serious issues on hand as the imported Chinese labour force has created an enhanced feeling of deprivation and unemployment to local workers. Kazakhstan is facing a dominant and dominating Chinese presence in critical areas. Poland feels the heat from its neighbour Germany, which is trying to change its law to check Chinese entry into Germanys crucial and critical sectors and Beijings propensity to buy high tech through its cash power.

Its cash, cash and more cash all the way  to buy, take over, operate, bribe, acquire, prepare, dominate  far from the homeland, to bring distant lands under the homelands indirect suzerainty. A bid to extend and continue to acquire without direct action; operate without responsibility.

Theres no doubt there is method in the Chinese action plan, that has so far succeeded in checkmating, avoiding and even bypassing virtually all possible hurdles. However, all good things must come to an end.

Early 20th century geostrategist Halford Mackinders disturbing reference to China as yellow peril in his famous article The Geographical Pivot of History seems to be dawning in the minds of all those who now feel threatened by Beijings shenanigans through all means, fair or foul. The most spectacular of all, however, is Beijings plan to get India involved thick and through.

Why? Because 49 European countries total 84.1 crore heads; 58 African nations constitute 115.3 crores; the two Americas (South and North) of 55 countries are 98.2 crores; the 25 countries of Australasia are 3.9 crores; but India alone is a staggering 130 crores. The picture is stark. Its up to India to realise the ground reality, to understand its power, strength and wisdom, and play accordingly.
Ukraine's economy minister says France's Alstom looking for production site in Ukraine

The company also needs IT partners.

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Russia threatens Ukraine with "tough retaliation" over Crimea vessel crew

According to the Russian side, Kyiv resorted to "forced coercion to Ukrainian citizenship" restricted freedom of movement of the seized vessel's crew.

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PM Groysman: Rada needs to adopt anti-corruption court law in May to refinance Ukraine's debts under IMF program

Ukraine's fulfillment of its obligations under the program of cooperation will allow receiving in 2018 some $1.9 billion from the IMF and another EUR 1 billion in macro-financial assistance from the European Union.

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New 3-D printing technology has the potential to do wonderful things, such as replace damaged organs. Now, it may have another use, supplying affordable housing. The first 3-D printed home, built on site, was made in Russia last year. This year it is Americas turn. Can 3-D printing address housing shortages?

In Austin, Texas, New Story, a non-profit, and ICON, a technology company, partnered to create the first 3-D printed home in America. The home is 350 square feet and consists of a bedroom, a bathroom, a living room, and a porch. It took about 48 hours to print the home at a cost $10,000 (printed portion only). The 3-D printer, called Vulcan I, was not even operating at full speed when it created the prototype home. The second-generation printer (currently under construction by ICON), the Vulcan II, is expected to print a home in less than 24 hours.

New Story hopes to create a community of 3-D homes in El Salvador by 2019. These homes will include two bedrooms and a kitchen. Each home will be between 600 and 800 square feet, take less than 24 hours to create, and cost $4,000 (printed portion only).

ICON has stated that it expects to bring 3-D printed homes to American cities, starting in 2019.

Since there are only a few prototypes available in the world, durability of 3-D homes is difficult to determine. The community of homes being built in El Salvador will be the first real test. These homes need to be continuously monitored for durability ratings.

Another concern might be the potential of 3-D printing technology to displace construction workers. However, the prototype built in Austin still required workers to install the windows, roofs, and interior finishing. Even if technology replaces workers in the traditional aspects of home construction, there will be new employment in other areas. Technology does not eliminate jobs, it replaces them with others. Granted, there is a high probability of replacing low-skilled workers with high-skilled workers who can navigate the new technology.

Affordable housing is vital to California. Earlier this year, the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) released its list of California cities and counties that are subject to Senate Bill 35 (SB 35) streamlining provisions. In total, 526 cities and counties have not met the affordable housing requirements set by the state.

Under SB 35 streamlining provisions, qualifying jurisdictions are granted a faster permitting process for new developments that include affordable housing units. Developers are required to set aside from 10 percent to 50 percent of units for affordable housing, depending on the income ranges the development is targeting. For example, new developments that target low- and very-low income households must set aside 50 percent or more units for affordable housing.

Other localities, such as Aspen, Colorado, and Washington, D.C., also require developers to set aside a share of units for affordable housing.

Unfortunately, a faster permitting process will not completely solve the housing shortage problem. To build more affordable housing, the cost of houses must decline.

3-D printed homes are a step in this direction. Low-income households in America, especially California, desperately need them.

Californias HCD cannot and should not wait until 3-D printed homes hit the market to address the immediate problem of the states housing crisis. However, to address the problem in the long-run, the state will need to have a permitting process in place for 3-D printed homes. California should create a task force to examine the permitting process necessary to facilitate the construction of these homes.

The solution to Californias affordable housing crisis may rest with innovative 3-D printed homes that provide low-cost, affordable housing.

Isai Chavez is a contributor to Economics 21.

Interested in real economic insights? Want to stay ahead of the competition? Each weekday morning, E21 delivers a short email that includes E21 exclusive commentaries and the latest market news and updates from Washington. Sign up for the E21 Morning Ebrief.
U.S. pastor Andrew Brunson went on trial in Turkey this month for alleged ties to terrorism and espionage. He is a Presbyterian minister who lived in Turkey for more than 20 years and served a small church in the southwestern city of Izmir. He has been detained for the past 18 months.

The Turkish government alleges that Pastor Brunson has ties to the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, a terrorist group. It also alleges he has ties to the network of a U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, who the Turks accuse of launching a coup attempt in 2016.

On the first day of his trial, Brunson denied the alleged ties to Kurdish terrorists or Gulen's network. "I don't accept any of the allegations or accusations," he told the court. He went on to say, "I haven't done anything against Turkey. On the contrary, I love Turkey. I have been praying for Turkey for 25 years."

In a statement, State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert said, We have seen no credible evidence that Mr. Brunson is guilty of a crime and are convinced that he is innocent. We believe that Turkey is a state bound by the rule of law, and we have faith in the Turkish people's commitment to justice. We hope that the judicial system in Turkey will resolve his case in a timely, fair, and transparent manner.

Sam Brownback, United States Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, attended Pastor Brunsons trial. He stressed that "The [Trump] administration is deeply concerned about this case. He added, We completely believe factually he is innocent. . . .We are hopeful that the judicial system will find that, that he will be. . .released soon.
NEW YORK, April 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NetworkWire  NetworkNewsWire (NNW), a multifaceted financial news and publishing company for business, today announces the audio version of the Lexaria Bioscience Corp. (CSE:LXX) (OTCQX:LXRP) recent press release titled Lexaria Achieves Significant Breakthrough in Alternative Nicotine Delivery Technology.



To hear the Lexaria AudioPressRelease (APR) version, visit: http://nnw.fm/cJ6e5



To read the original press release, visit: http://nnw.fm/u4DbM



About Lexaria Bioscience Corp.

Lexaria Bioscience Corp. has developed and out-licenses its disruptive delivery technology that promotes healthier ingestion methods, lower overall dosing and higher effectiveness of lipophilic active molecules. Lexaria has multiple patents pending in over 40 countries around the world and has patents granted in the U.S. and Australia for utilization of its DehydraTECH delivery technology. Lexaria's technology provides increases in intestinal absorption rates; more rapid delivery to the bloodstream; and important taste-masking benefits for orally administered bioactive molecules, including cannabinoids, vitamins, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), nicotine and other molecules. For more information, visit the companys website at www.LexariaBioscience.com

About NetworkNewsAudio

NetworkNewsAudio (NNA), a NetworkNewsWire (NNW) Solution, allows you to sit back and listen to market updates, CEO interviews and a Company AudioPressRelease (APR). These audio clips provide snapshots of position, opportunity and momentum. NetworkNewsAudio (NNA) is another NetworkNewsWire (NNW) Solution that can assist your company by cutting through the overload of information in today's market, NNA brings its clients unparalleled visibility, recognition and brand awareness. NetworkNewsWire (NNW) is where news, content and information converge. NetworkNewsWire (NNW) is a comprehensive provider of news aggregation and syndication, enhanced press release services and a full array of social communication solutions. As a multifaceted financial news and distribution company with an extensive team of journalists and writers, NNW has the unparalleled ability to reach a wide audience of investors, consumers, journalists and the general public with an ever-growing distribution network of more than 5,000 key syndication outlets across the nation.

For more information, visit: www.NetworkNewsAudio.com

About NetworkNewsWire

NetworkNewsWire (NNW) is a financial news and content distribution company that provides (1) access to a network of wire services via NetworkWire to reach all target markets, industries and demographics in the most effective manner possible, (2) article and editorial syndication to 5,000+ news outlets, (3) enhanced press release services to ensure maximum impact, (4) social media distribution via the Investor Brand Network (IBN) to nearly 2 million followers, (5) a full array of corporate communications solutions, and (6) a total news coverage solution with NNW Prime. As a multifaceted organization with an extensive team of contributing journalists and writers, NNW is uniquely positioned to best serve private and public companies that desire to reach a wide audience of investors, consumers, journalists and the general public. By cutting through the overload of information in todays market, NNW brings its clients unparalleled visibility, recognition and brand awareness. NNW is where news, content and information converge. For more information, please visit NetworkNewsWire (NNW).

Please see full terms of use and disclaimers on the NetworkNewsWire website applicable to all content provided by NNW, wherever published or re-published: http://NNW.fm/Disclaimer .



Forward-Looking Statements



This release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. All forward-looking statements are inherently uncertain as they are based on current expectations and assumptions concerning future events or future performance of the company. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which are only predictions and speak only as of the date hereof. In evaluating such statements, prospective investors should review carefully various risks and uncertainties identified in this release and matters set in the company's SEC filings. These risks and uncertainties could cause the company's actual results to differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements.



Corporate Communications Contact:


Lithuania expressed hope that the direct flight from Kyiv to the Lithuanian resort Palanga will be resumed, Lithuanian Ambassador to Ukraine Marius Janukonis has said.

"In past years we were very pleased that UIA [Ukraine International Airlines] launched a direct flight to Palanga. We are now making efforts to resume this flight," he said at the presentation of the Lithuanian resort in Kyiv on Wednesday.

In turn, Mayor of Palanga Sharunas Vaitkus said that the resort is annually visited by about 1 million tourists. At the same time, the city's leadership is developing ways to extend the holiday season, including by building sanatorium facilities and developing curative programs.

Palanga is a resort town in Lithuania on the coast of the Baltic Sea. The length of the main beach of the resort is 25 km.
Private joint-stock company AvtoKrAZ (Kremenchuk, Poltava region), a famous Ukrainian manufacturer of heavy trucks, is working out plans to expand its presence on the Southeast Asian defense market.

According to a posting on the website of the company, AvtoKrAZ exhibits its promising products to potential customers of the Asian region as part of the Ukroboronprom State Concern's stand at the 16th Defence Services Asia-2018 (DSA) held on April 16 through April 19 in Kuala-Lumpur (Malaysia).

According to the report, the company's participation in the Malaysian exhibition is an opportunity for AvtoKrAZ to meet numerous partners across Southeast Asia: Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar and Bangladesh.

"Potential customers of South Asian region checked out military vehicles KrAZ, both mass produced and new ones built by the company over recent years One of important issues discussed at the meetings concerned specific requirements imposed by operators of many countries in this region," the press service said.

AvtoKrAZ produces 33 basic models, more than 260 modifications and sets of KrAZ automotive equipment for work in all sectors of the economy and in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The enterprise is part of the financial and industrial group of Kostiantyn Zhevaho.
A group of people's deputies has proposed that a zero VAT rate, instead of current 20%, is set for supplies of milk and cream (uncondensed without sugar) in Ukraine.

Bill No. 8282 amending the Tax Code of Ukraine was registered in parliament on April 18. Its authors are 19 lawmakers from various parliamentary factions.

According to an explanatory note to the bill, a reduction in the incomes of livestock enterprises with a simultaneous increase in the tax burden on them leads to a decrease in the number of cattle, production, further reduction in consumption and production of dairy products.

According to the document, at the end of the first quarter of 2018 the average market price for "extra" milk was UAH 9.56 per kg (including VAT). In general, the range varies between UAH 8.76-9.80 per kg. The price for premium milk is UAH 8-9.50 per kg and the first grade - an average of UAH 8.84 per kg.

The authors of the bill expect that the adoption of the bill will have a positive effect on producers, will help reduce the difference in procurement prices for milk among agricultural enterprises that pay VAT, representatives of small agricultural business and households, and reduce the financial burden on the consumer.
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



19th 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: 5,047,478 2.43% (2) Cash-settled derivatives:



(3) Stock-settled derivatives (including options) and agreements to purchase/sell:



TOTAL: 5,047,478 2.43%

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



Purchase

Sale



1,370

1,370







386.5p

384p

(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: 20th 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.
The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) has sent humanitarian aid - hygiene kits and medical supplies - to the occupied territory of Donbas, the press service of the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine reported on Friday.

"Eight trucks, carrying almost 82 tonnes of humanitarian cargo, including hygiene kits and medical goods from the United Nations Children's Fund have entered the temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine through the Novotroyitske checkpoint," the frontier department said.

In addition, five trucks with 100 tonnes of aluminum sulphate from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) passed through this border crossing point.
The Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine in the near future will receive from Cyprus certain materials of international legal assistance in criminal proceedings against former high-ranking officials, Deputy Prosecutor General of Ukraine Yevhen Yenin has said.

"Holding a meeting with the Minister of Justice and the Prosecutor General of Cyprus. The Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine will soon receive from Cyprus another batch of international legal assistance materials in the form of criminal proceedings against former high-ranking officials and their "bosses," Yenin wrote on Facebook on Friday.

He illustrated his message with photographs of meetings with the Minister of Justice and the Prosecutor General of Cyprus.
Head of the Socialist Party of Ukraine Illia Kyva came to Boyarka to support residents of the Kyiv-Svyatoshynsky district, protesting against arbitrary actions of medical officials, the press service of the SPU reported on the official website of the party.

The reason for this was the appeal of citizens, which was signed by almost one and a half thousand people who are against the dismissal of the doctor of the regional hospital of Roman Chernytsky. Today, several hundreds of people gathered in protest at the walls of the district hospital in Boyarka.

"I came here to help and protect the residents of the district who suffer from arbitrariness. It is about the health of the nation. Corrupted officials from medicine kill people - in a literal sense," the politician said, addressing the residents of the district.

Kyva also said that he intends to bring to justice officials who are involved in corruption schemes. Residents of Kyiv-Svyatoshynsky district believe that first of all, Chief Physician of the district hospital of Oleksandr Zavadetsky and Head of the public health department of the regional administration Roman Liava are this kind of people.

"I do not know who is providing a crime-sponsored cover to them and who is behind these dregs. However, they must run away, or woe will be you! This is impunity and impudence. This is almost a hundred of dismissed doctors who disagree with the actions of their chiefs; this is, in fact, the privatization of one of the departments of the hospital repaired using public funds... And this is not all the facts that indicate corruption in this medical institution seen for several years," the head of the SPU said.

Kyva jointly with illegally dismissed doctor Roman Chernytsky and a group of activists demanded that the chief physician of the district hospital, Oleksandr Zavadetsky, annuls the order to dismiss Chernitsky. In addition, the activists demanded that Zavadetsky writes a letter of resignation.

"Do we need to stand on our knees in front of you, so that you show this doctor the order to dismiss him? You put people on the knees. When I raise from my knees, I will pin you to the ground. You will look into my eyes and then think about what will happen next. Nobody will ever bail you out from anything," Kyva said, addressing Zavadetsky and Liava.

The head of the Socialist Party said that he intends to get the situation to the curb and appeal to law enforcement agencies and directly to the Ministry of Health.

"They think they are eternal. But I have already seen such "eternal" people in my lifetime. Now I will register my application with the police and the prosecutor's office. And then I will go to the Ministry of Health and I will seek a meeting with the acting Minister Ulana Suprun. This is what I will do. And this is what I would like to do: to hang these corrupt officials on the nearest poles," Kyva said.
YEREVAN -- More than 100 protesters have been detained in downtown Yerevan after scuffles with riot police that had cordoned off a major government building on the seventh day of street protests against the election of longtime former President Serzh Sarkisian as prime minister.

Hundreds of demonstrators gathered after the leader of the protest, opposition lawmaker Nikol Pashinian, told them the previous day to come in front of the government offices on Republic Square early on April 19.

A police spokesman said that 106 demonstrators were detained in the square when security forces moved in and started to push back the protesters to clear the entrances into government buildings.

"As of 1:30 p.m., 106 people have been taken to police stations. If they are not released in three hours, it means they are suspected of committing offenses," spokesman Ashot Agaronyan was quoted as saying.

Video footage showed chaotic scenes, with a young woman being dragged by police officers, and young protesters being violently pushed inside police vans by members of the security forces.

The arrests came after police issued a statement reminding citizens of the status of "specially protected sites" and warning demonstrators against illegally entering government buildings or other facilities and saying security personnel would apply "proportionate measures of legal effect."

PHOTO GALLERY by RFE/RL's Amos Chapple: Police break up protest



A group of up to 1,000 protesters led by Pashinian camped in a park near city hall to rest after a four-hour march through Yerevan.

"There are rumors that I don't get tired, but that's not true. I need a rest, too," Pashinian told reporters.

Demonstrators led by Pashinian earlier called on police to lay down their arms and join the protests against Sarkisian's continued rule as prime minister.

"We are calling on you not to be afraid and to declare that you don't recognize the authority of Serzh Sarkisian and ministers appointed by him," Pashinian appealed to civil servants. "Take a step and reject Serzh!"

The protesters' actions apparently forced Sarkisian to put off his first cabinet meeting for several hours. Government meetings usually begin at 11 a.m. in a separate compound located on Republic Square. Pashinian has announced another rally in the square at 7 p.m.

In a separate incident near a government building, a journalist working for an Armenian nongovernmental organization was beaten up while covering the opposition rally on April 19 and was hospitalized for several hours with head injuries.

Journalist Tirayr Muradian of the Union of Informed Citizens told RFE/RL that he was beaten up by two young people who did not behave like "classic demonstrators."

The incident follows a night of demonstrations by thousands of Armenians who converged on Yerevan's central Republic Square in protests against the move to allow Sarkisian to retain power after the end of his presidential term.

Police detained dozens of demonstrators as they tried to block streets and interrupt traffic amid daylong protests and marches around the capital on April 18.

Addressing the rally on Republic Square, Pashinian urged people across Armenia to put pressure on local authorities to make statements in support of the protest movement, saying it would help achieve a change of government.

He also called for sit-ins inside administrative buildings and government offices across the country "so that even Serzh Sarkisian himself has no place to sit," and reiterated his call on demonstrators to remain peaceful.

Sarkisian's ruling Republican Party of Armenia (HHK) called on Pashinian to engage in dialogue, warning that it would be "politically shortsighted to continue to abuse the government's political will and patience."

"Dialogue can take place in parliament," HHK spokesman Eduard Sharmazanov, who is also deputy parliament speaker, told RFE/RL.

The United States urged both sides to exercise restraint and avoid violence, and Russia said that laws should not be broken.

Serzh Sarkisian was first elected in 2008 in the South Caucasus country of about 3 million people and served two terms. He has maintained warm ties with Russia, which Armenia relies on for aid and investment more than a quarter-century after the Soviet collapse.

Under a shift that was approved in a 2015 referendum and is now in place, Armenia changed its form of government and handed more powers to the prime minister, downgrading the president -- now also elected by parliament -- to more of a figurehead. Sarkisian had promised in the past that would not seek to be prime minister, and Pashinian and other opposition leaders accuse him of breaking that pledge.

Sarkisian disputed those accusations in a speech to parliament ahead of the vote on April 17, saying that his previous statements were taken "out of context" and that in a parliamentary republic, the leader of the ruling party should also serve as prime minister.

He contended that if someone else were to become prime minister, it could lead to the appearance of a "shadow" government situation in which the ruling party leader governs de facto, instead of the prime minister, but is able to evade responsibility for developments in the country.

The ruling HHK party and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun) factions, which together have a majority in parliament, unanimously chose Sarkisian as the nominee for the prime minister's post earlier in April, and the protests began on April 13.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

Trend:

Over the past 24 hours, Armenias armed forces have 96 times violated the ceasefire along the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian troops, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said April 20.

Armenians were using sniper rifles and 60-mm mortars.

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 20

Trend:

It is deeply regrettable that some MPs represented in Belgiums local bodies act as supporters of Kaspar Karampetian, head of the European Armenian Federation for Justice and Democracy (EAFJD), operating in Brussels, Hikmat Hajiyev, spokesman of the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry, told Trend April 20.

Apparently, Karampetian is seriously concerned about the fact that the Prosecutor Generals Office of Azerbaijan opened a criminal case against him, Hajiyev said.

Therefore, Karampetian seeks the support of some MPs in local bodies of Belgium, who illegally visited the occupied Azerbaijani territories, Hajiyev added.

Hajiyev noted that Karampetian carries out persistent illegal activity expressed in the repeated illegal crossing of Azerbaijans state border in 2014-2018 as part of an organized group, as well as agitation and propaganda of the so-called regime created in the Azerbaijani territories occupied as a result of Armenia's aggression against Azerbaijan and bloody ethnic cleansing, and open calls for the violation of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Azerbaijan.

"Thereby, he grossly violates the fundamental rights and freedoms of more than a million Azerbaijani refugees and internally displaced persons from the occupied territories of Azerbaijan, who have been subjected to ethnic cleansing. He also violates their right to return to their native lands and to use their property," Hajiyev said.

The Foreign Ministry spokesperson added that Karampetian lures European politicians by various means, organizes their visits to the occupied Azerbaijani territories and then turns these people into an instrument of propaganda against Azerbaijan, organizes and finances events spreading disinformation against Azerbaijan.

Hajiyev also noted that the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun), where Kaspar Karampetian is a member, has participated in murder of thousands of innocent people in the territory of Azerbaijan and committed numerous acts of terror.

Like in every country, such actions are considered as particularly serious crimes in Azerbaijans Criminal Code, said Hajiyev, adding that on this basis, a criminal case has been initiated against that person.

Armenia is responsible for the illegal actions committed in Azerbaijans occupied lands. Part of those illegal actions is the serious violation of the obligations under the imperative norms of the international law. Serious violation of the imperative norms of the international law requires taking special measures resulting in aggravated liability (http://mfa.gov.az/en/news/909/4939).

Hajiyev said that the European Court of Human Rights in its decision on the case of 'Chiragov and others against Armenia' affirmed that Armenia had been involved in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict since the beginning, and the illegal regime created in Nagorno-Karabakh exists thanks to military, political, financial and other support provided by Armenia.



"We'd like to note that in accordance with the Articles 138, 139, 144, 153 and other articles of the Criminal Code of Greece, whose citizen is Kaspar Karampetyan, a criminal liability is stipulated for violation of the territorial integrity of Greece, implementation of activities against friendly countries of Greece, as well as for insulting the state attributes of these countries. The government of Belgium has applied a universal jurisdiction over crimes against humanity, as well as violations of peremptory norms of international law (jus cogens)," he said.



Hajiyev said that threats voiced by a lawyer on behalf of Kaspar Karampetyan, who is responsible under the Criminal Code of Azerbaijan, as well as laws of other countries and international jurisdiction, against representatives of Azerbaijan's independent media and a member of the Parliament, interference in their independent activities and threats to sue them at the Belgian court, are inadmissible.

"All relevant legal mechanisms will be used on a bilateral and multilateral basis to prevent Kaspar Karampetians activities against the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Azerbaijan and to bring him to criminal liability. It is deeply regrettable that some members of the local bodies of Belgium act as accomplices of Kaspar Karampetian. We once again want to remind that these MPs are responsible before their voters," Hajiyev added.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

Trend:

President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has extended condolences to George H. Bush, the 41st US President.

"Your Excellency, I was deeply saddened by the news of the death of your wife Barbara Bush," President Aliyev said. "At this terrible moment, I share your grief and extend my deep condolences to you and all the members of your family over this irreplaceable loss," Ilham Aliyev's message said.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

By Leman Zeynalova - Trend:

Azerbaijan as a stable country will be considered as a reliable partner in the future as well, Rob Sobhani, director general of the Caspian Group Holdings, told Trend.

He noted that the future of Azerbaijan remains bright.

The political and economic stability in Azerbaijan means that foreign direct investment will find a secure place in the country, said Sobhani.

Also, in terms of foreign policy, countries will view Azerbaijan as a reliable partner due to the stability, he believes.

Sobhani expressed confidence that the government of Azerbaijan will continue to focus on growing non-oil sectors such as agriculture, tourism and small business.

He went on to add that stability means economic growth.

As the economy grows the unemployment rates in Azerbaijan will further fall and with that poverty rates fall, said Sobhani.

In terms of the world economy, he said that energy consumers can rely on a stable, reliable partner such as Azerbaijan for energy security.

Speaking with a strong and unified voice on the world stage is very important for any country and the reelection of President Ilham Aliyev has provided this voice to Azerbaijan in global affairs, he added.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

Trend:

Smuggling of nuclear components from Armenia becomes a serious security threat not only on a regional, but also on a broader scale, acting Azerbaijans defense minister, Colonel General Zakir Hasanov said April 20 in Baku at a meeting with the delegation led by Curtis Scaparrotti, Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) of NATO Allied Command Operations.

He also touched upon the issue of arms sales to Azerbaijan.

Our country pursues peaceful policy and conducts a constant fight against terrorism, but some countries impose unfounded restrictions on the sale of weapons to Azerbaijan, Hasanov said.

Hasanov, noting the successful development of military ties with NATO, spoke about military cooperation between Azerbaijan and the Alliance, activity of the Azerbaijani army as part of various programs, as well as Azerbaijans contribution to the non-combat Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan.

Touching upon the military-political situation in the region, Zakir Hasanov stressed the importance of achieving a solution to the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict within the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan and the norms of international law.

Hasanov noted that the visits of representatives of the separatist regime in Nagorno-Karabakh to various foreign states, including the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chair countries and their methods in these countries lead to application of double standards in the settlement of the conflict, which is unacceptable.

Highly appreciating NATOs position regarding the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Azerbaijan, Hasanov expressed confidence that the Alliance will continue to provide assistance in this direction.

In turn, Curtis Scaparrotti, noting in particular that Azerbaijan is a reliable partner of the Alliance, highly appreciated Azerbaijans participation in the fight against terrorism, significant contribution to the provision of air space to cargo transportation for peacekeeping operations, including high professionalism of Azerbaijani peacekeepers in Afghanistan.

He expressed gratitude to the leadership of Azerbaijan for assisting in holding a meeting with Valery Gerasimov, chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, in Baku.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

Trend:

President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has sent a congratulatory letter to Chairman of the State Council of Cuba Miguel Diaz-Canel.

I sincerely congratulate you on your election to the post of the chairman of the State Council of Cuba, Ilham Aliyev said in his letter. I hope that joint efforts will be made for further development and strengthening of the relations of friendship and cooperation between Azerbaijan and Cuba. I wish you strong health, happiness and success in the forthcoming responsible work for the welfare of the people of Cuba.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

Trend:

The Congress of European Azerbaijanis has sent an appeal to the UN, OSCE, OSCE Minsk Group co-chair countries in connection with the recent provocation by Armenia on the contact line between Azerbaijani and Armenian troops in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, the State Committee on Work with Diaspora of Azerbaijan said in a message April 20.

The Armenian army that occupied Azerbaijani lands increased the number of provocations on the contact line of the troops, and this seriously worries the Azerbaijanis living in Europe, according to the appeal.

As a result of the Armenian Armed Forces shelling on April 18, a 27-year-old Rahim Hajiyev, a resident of the Yukhari Giyamaddinli village of Azerbaijans Agjabadi district, received a gunshot wound, the appeal said.

This incident greatly shocked the Congress of European Azerbaijanis, according to the appeal.

Artillery shelling of civilians and civilian facilities of Azerbaijan by the Armenian Armed Forces prove that the Armenian state, pursuing an aggressive policy, doesnt observe the norms of international law and continues to seriously violate the international humanitarian law and human rights, in particular the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the addition number one, as well as the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, the appeal said.

It is also noted that the US, France and Russia, the co-chair countries of the OSCE Minsk Group, which assumed the mediation role in the settlement of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, remain silent.

The international communitys ignoring the Armenian atrocities creates conditions for even greater freedom for the aggressors actions, and the impunity of crimes committed by Armenia leads to another murder of Azerbaijani civilians, the appeal said.

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 20

Trend:

The Federation of Azerbaijani Societies of Turkey has expressed a protest in connection with the shelling of Azerbaijan's peaceful civilians by the Armenian armed forces, the Azerbaijani State Committee for Work with Diaspora said in a message on April 20.

In its appeal, the Federation said that the Armenian military's shooting at Rahim Hajiyev, a resident of the Yukhari Giyamaddinli village of Azerbaijans Agjabadi District, who was doing household work, is another crime of the Armenian army against civilians.

The Federation further noted that the Armenian terrorists continue their criminal activities in the occupied Azerbaijani lands.

"Azerbaijanis living in Turkey strongly condemn these provocative and criminal actions of the enemy," reads the appeal.

The Armenian armed forces subjected the Yukhari Giyamaddinli village of Azerbaijans Agjabadi District to intense shelling on April 18. Rahim Hajiyev, a resident of the village, was injured as a result.

The Armenian armed forces occupied this village twice, in 1993 and 1994, but then the Azerbaijani Army liberated it. However, the Armenian military mined the territory of the village.

Azerbaijani civilians, who returned to their native places, are killed in land mine blasts or come under fire because of frequent violations of ceasefire.

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 20

By Leman Zeynalova - Trend:

Azerbaijan can serve as an example of religious tolerance for many countries, reads an article by Saddam al Jihad, chairman of the Executive Board of the Association of Muslim Students of Indonesia, posted on the countrys Rilis political news website.

The article said that against the background of global problems, especially Islamophobia, the world community should take an example from Azerbaijan, where there is harmony of religions.

Representatives of different religions live in Azerbaijan in peace and respect each other, the article reads. In Azerbaijan, where the majority of citizens are Muslims, the principle of tolerance is highly respected. Such atmosphere allows representatives of various ethnic minorities to feel comfortable.

This harmony can also be observed during the Friday prayers held in the Heydar Mosque, where Shiites and Sunnis gather together, according to the article.

In addition, Shiites and Sunnis marry in Azerbaijan, said the article. In Indonesia, for example, the harmony between Shiites and Sunnis is still a rarity. In this respect, Azerbaijan can serve as a model for the countries of Europe, the US, as well as the countries of the Middle East and Asia.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

Trend:

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has signed an order on some measures in connection with the improvement of public administration in the sphere of culture and tourism.

In accordance with the order, the Ministry of Culture and the State Tourism Agency are established on the basis of Azerbaijans Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

Azerbaijans Cabinet of Ministers has been instructed within a month to submit draft regulations of the Ministry of Culture and the State Tourism Agency, proposals on the structure and number of employees to the president of Azerbaijan, ensure funding for the Ministry of Culture and the State Tourism Agency in 2018 as part of the funds provided to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in the state budget for 2018.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

Trend:

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has signed an order to conduct one-off payment of financial assistance to veterans of the Second World War of 1941-1945, widows of those killed in the Second World War, as well as persons awarded orders and medals for selfless labor in the rear front.

In accordance with the order, participants of the Second World War of 1941-1945 will be provided with a one-off financial assistance in the amount of 1,000 manats.

This is while widows of those killed in the Second World War or fighters who died later, persons awarded orders and medals for selfless labor in the rear front at that time, employees of special units who performed tasks in the interests of the army and navy in the rear front during the Second World War or in the operational zones of the fighting fleets, persons awarded the appropriate medals and badges for the Defense of Leningrad during the Second World War, as well as the participants of the blockade of Leningrad will receive a financial assistance in the amount of 500 manats.

For implementation of the order, 5.9 million manats will be allocated from the Presidential Reserve Fund of Azerbaijan envisaged in the state budget for 2018.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

Trend:

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has signed an order on measures to improve the control system of export-import operations.

The order says that usage of the mechanism of joint control over a number of export-import operations in Azerbaijan by the State Customs Committee and the Ministry of Taxes is considered expedient.

The Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Taxes, the Ministry of Economy and the State Customs Committee of Azerbaijan have been instructed within one month to prepare proposals regarding the mechanism and the list of procedures of joint control of export-import operations and submit them to the president of Azerbaijan.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

By Leman Zeynalova - Trend:

Daniel Ricciardo, one of the Red Bull Racing drivers, in anticipation of the 2018 Formula 1 Azerbaijan Grand Prix, to be held in Baku April 27-29, has commented on the features of the Baku city circuit, F1News.ru website reported.

Unlike other city circuits, overtaking is possible in Baku, he said, adding that there are many places for overtaking, which is not the case in Monaco and Singapore.

The most difficult thing in Baku is braking, there are a lot of places where it is necessary to brake as late as possible, he said.

He noted that the biggest challenge in the Baku circuit is to pursue a car during braking.

"Furthermore, it is a fast track. The track in Monaco is not so fast. Overcoming the turns is the most important there, while in Baku braking is important. One needs not only to love the city track, but also respect it, understand its features. To drive fast, you need to attack to the limit and not make mistakes," Ricciardo said.

Ricciardo further reminded that last year's race in Baku turned out to be crazy.

"As last week in Shanghai, the team chose an amazing strategy and made several good decisions during the race. Did I think that I would win? No. But, everyone was wrong, and I overtook, catching the rhythm. I was a bit puzzled at the finish line, trying to figure out how we won the race, but at the same time I was delighted. It was a crazy and fun race, which I will remember forever," he said.

Red Bull Racing's other driver Max Verstappen, for his part, voiced hope for a better performance in this year's race compared to last year.

"Last year, this weekend was a bad one for me. The car was quick, but I faced many problems, which eventually led to the fact that I missed out a place on the podium and maybe the victory. I hope this year I will be able to compensate for the missed opportunity. I like to come here and race. The track is interesting, though we cannot say that it is perfect for our car. The straight line is very long  we will give way to the leaders on it, although last year we managed to get around the problems, and so we looked good in the race," he said.

Verstappen noted that the section of the route near the Maiden Tower looks great on the television picture.

In that place, the track is very narrow, it is necessary to be very accurate, because one cannot make mistake there, especially on modern wide cars, he added.

Verstappen noted that Baku is a cool city.

"I have not yet managed to see Baku, as the hotel is located next to paddock. On the one hand, it is convenient, on the other  you cannot see much in the city during the weekend. I heard that the local cuisine is very tasty  this year I will try to taste it," he said.
English Danish

Articles of Association of

Spar Nord Bank A/S

Articles of Association of Spar Nord Bank A/S

Name, registered office and objects of the Company

Article 1

(1).

The companys name is Spar Nord Bank A/S ("the Company").

The Company also carries on business under the ancillary names stated in Annex 1 to the Articles of Association.

(2).

The Companys registered office is located in the Municipality of Aalborg.

(3).

The object for which the Company is established is to carry on banking pursuant to section 7(1) and (2) of the Danish Financial Business Act.

(4).

The Company's Register of Shareholders shall be kept by VP Investor Services A/S, CVR no. 30201183.

Capital and shares

Article 2

(1).

The Companys share capital amounts to DKK 1,230,025,260, divided into shares in the denomination of DKK 10. The share capital has been paid up in full.

(2).

The shares are issued to named holders and may, upon the appropriate shareholder's request, be inscribed as such in the inscription system kept by VP Securities A/S and in the Company's Register of Shareholders.

The shares cannot be transferred to bearer. The shares are negotiable instruments. The acquirer of a share cannot exercise rights embodied in the share certificate unless it has been recorded in the name of the person in question in the Register of Shareholders, or unless the acquirer has given substantiated notification in writing to the Company of his acquisition. But this provision shall affect neither the right to dividend and other disbursements nor the right to new shares in the event of an increase of the share capital.

(3).

The shares shall be freely transferable instruments. No shareholder shall be obligated to let the Company or any third party redeem his shares, whether in whole or in part.

Article 3

(1).

The Board of Directors shall be authorized to make a decision to increase the Companys share capital in the period ending on 30 April 2020 by a maximum of nominally DKK 123,002,526 by way of one or more issues. The new shares, which shall be issued to named holders, shall rank pari passu with existing shares. The Companys share capital may be increased by cash contributions.

The increase of the Companys share capital shall be effected with pre-emptive rights for the Companys existing shareholders, and the new shares may be subscribed for at a discount to the market price.

(2).

The new shares subscribed for pursuant to the authorization in Article 3(1) shall be negotiable instruments, shall be issued to named holders and shall rank for dividends and any other rights in the Company as from such time as is determined by the Board of Directors in its decision regarding the capital increase.

(3).

The Board of Directors shall be authorized to make a decision to increase the Companys share capital in the period ending on 30 April 2020 by a maximum of nominally DKK 123,002,526 by way of one or more issues. The new shares, which shall be issued to named holders, shall rank pari passu with existing shares. The Companys share capital may be increased by cash contributions or in any other manner.

The increase of the Companys share capital shall be effected without pre-emptive rights for the Companys existing shareholders. Such increase shall be effected at the prevailing market price.



(4).

The new shares subscribed for pursuant to the authorization in Article 3 (3) shall be negotiable instruments, shall be issued to named holders and shall rank for dividends and any other rights in the Company as from such time as is determined by the Board of Directors in its decision to implement a capital increase.

(5).

Pursuant to the authorizations granted under Article 3(1) and (3), the Board of Directors may increase the Companys share capital by a total maximum of nominally DKK 123,002,526.

Article 4

The Board of Directors shall be authorized to permit the Company to receive capital contributions, which may be included when calculating the Companys capital base, subject to observance of the relevant conditions therefor laid down in the legislation from time applicable.

Shareholder regions

Article 5

(1).

The Company's operational area is divided into shareholder regions. The division details appear from Annex 2, which constitutes an integral part of the Articles of Association.

A decision to combine shareholder regions shall be made by the shareholders in general meeting pursuant to the provisions on alteration of the Articles of Association laid down in Article 14(2).

But a decision to combine shareholder regions can be made by the Companys Board of Directors if the Bank Committees in question so agree.

(2).

In connection with the acquisition of shares through one of the branches of Spar Nord Bank, a shareholder may choose to be registered as a shareholder in any shareholder region. If he does not specify any region, or if the acquisition takes place through another bank, for example, then the shareholder will be registered as belonging to the shareholder region which - according to Annex 2 to the Articles of Association - includes the address or postal code initially reported through VP Securities A/S to the Company as the shareholders address or business address.

A shareholder can only be registered in one shareholder region, but may request in writing to be transferred to another shareholder region.

(3).

A shareholder with permanent residence or business address abroad is included in the Copenhagen shareholder region, unless the relevant shareholder has chosen another region.

Bank Committees

Article 6

(1).

The shareholders shall elect a Bank Committee in each shareholder region. Such Bank Committee shall have eight members.

Members of a Bank Committee shall be elected for a term of two years at a time, and half of them shall be eligible for re-election each year.

The election shall be held before 1 April and no later than three weeks before the Annual General Meeting of the Company, and the electoral term shall commence as from the time of election. Retiring members shall be eligible for re-election.

When combining the Companys shareholder regions, all Bank Committee members from the combined shareholder regions shall run for re-election at the next Shareholders Meeting. The Companys internal auditors draw lots to determine which members of the Bank Committee shall be up for re-election the following year.

(2).

The object of the Bank Committees shall be to promote the activities of Spar Nord Bank in the shareholder region and exercise the voting rights as delegates for the shareholders at the Companys General Meetings.

The more specific rules and regulations governing the function of the Bank Committees appear from the Rules of Procedure for Bank Committees laid down by the Board of Directors.

Article 7

(1).

The following shareholders are eligible to the Bank Committee: shareholders in propria persona who are of age and have full legal capacity, and who can prove that they have been registered prior to 1 January immediately before the relevant Shareholders Meeting, or who have requested that their shares be registered as belonging to the shareholder region in question, or who still own shares in the Company registered in the relevant shareholder region as of the date when the pertinent Shareholders Meeting is convened.

The major shareholders mentioned in Article 9(1) and employees in the Company or its subsidiaries cannot be elected to the Bank Committee.

(2).

The shareholders in the region may nominate candidates to the Bank Committee. Proposals for nomination shall reach the Company by 1 January. The list of candidates will be published at the same time as the Shareholders' Meeting is convened.

(3).

A member of a Bank Committee whose shares are no longer registered in the appropriate region, or who is divested of the management of his estate, shall retire from the Bank Committee.

(4).

If a member of a Bank Committee retires during his term of office, a new member shall be elected at the next Shareholders Meeting.

Shareholders Meetings

Article 8

(1).

Shareholders in each shareholder region shall be convened for a Shareholders Meeting to be held before 1 April and no later than three weeks before the Annual General Meeting of the Company. The Shareholders' Meeting can be held over a period of several days.

Common Shareholders' Meetings may be held for several shareholder regions.

(2).

Shareholders' Meetings shall be convened with not less than 14 days' notice by an advertisement inserted in one or more of the newspapers published in the region and by notifying the shareholders entitled to vote; see clause (4). Meetings may be convened electronically according to more specific agreement with the shareholder.

The Board of Directors may resolve that shareholders must obtain admission cards in order to attend the Shareholders' Meetings.

(3).

At the Shareholders' Meeting, a report shall be given on the Company's activities, with special emphasis on development in the region. In addition, the election of members of the Bank Committee shall be held. At the same time, the elected members shall be deemed elected as delegates to the Annual General Meeting.

(4).

Shareholders who can prove that they are listed as belonging to the shareholder region in question as of the date when the Shareholders Meeting is convened are entitled to vote at the Shareholders Meeting.

The major shareholders mentioned in Article 9(1) shall not be entitled to vote at Shareholders Meetings.

(5).

Voting for election of members of a Bank Committee can take place at Shareholders Meetings by letter or by electronic voting. In other respects, voting shall take place according to electoral rules laid down by the Board of Directors.

Major shareholders

Article 9

(1).

A shareholder who owns at least 20,000 shares (a major shareholder) on the cut-off date one week before the General Meeting shall be entitled to exercise his voting rights at the General Meeting.

General Meetings

Article 10

(1).

The shareholders at the General Meeting have supreme authority in all Company affairs within the limits laid down by these Articles of Association.

(2).

General meetings shall be convened by the Board of Directors electronically via e-mail to the members of the Bank Committees and the shareholders recorded in the register of shareholders who have so requested. Shareholders must ensure that the Company has their correct e-mail address.

In addition, the convening notice shall be announced on the Company's website.

(3).

Annual General Meetings shall be convened no sooner than five weeks nor later than three weeks in advance, and the convening notice shall contain the agenda of the Meeting. If any proposals are to be considered, the adoption of which is subject to a qualified majority, the essentials of such proposal shall moreover be stated in the convening notice.

In the event that statutory provisions so require, the convening notice shall contain the complete text of the proposal and be sent to each shareholder of record.

(4).

The right of shareholders to exercise their voting rights at a General Meeting shall be exercised through the delegates.

But this shall not apply to the shareholders referred to in Article 9 (1).

(5).

Against presentation of an admission card, any shareholder who has been recorded as of the cut-off date one week before the General Meeting or as of that date has requested that his shares be registered in the Register of Shareholders shall be entitled to attend a General Meeting - either in person or represented by a proxy - and to address the Meeting.

(6).

Admission cards are available on request by shareholders comprised by Article 10(5) at the Company's offices or at any other place specified in the convening notice until three days before the General Meeting.

(7).

The instrument of proxy shall be dated and shall be produced upon obtaining an admission card.

Instruments of proxy issued to the Company's Board of Directors shall be in writing and dated not more than 12 months before the relevant General Meeting, and may only be issued for one specific General Meeting.

(8).

No later than three weeks before the General Meeting, the following information shall be available at the Company's website, www.sparnord.dk:

1. The convening notice

2. The total number of shares and voting rights as of the date of convening the General Meeting

3. The documents to be produced at the General Meeting, including the audited annual report

4. The agenda and the complete proposals

5. Forms to be used for voting by proxy and by letter.

Article 11

Extraordinary General Meetings shall be held whenever the holding of such a meeting is requested by either the shareholders in General Meeting, by the Board of Directors or by any one of the auditors. An Extraordinary General Meeting shall also be held for the purpose of transacting specified business when shareholders representing in the aggregate not less than 5% of the Company's total share capital request the holding of such a meeting. Such an Extraordinary General Meeting shall be convened no later than two weeks after the receipt of the appropriate request.

Article 12

(1).

Annual General Meetings shall be held in every year before the end of April.

(2).

The agenda of the Annual General Meeting shall include the following business:

1. Election of the Chairman of the Meeting.

2. The Board of Directors's report regarding the Company's activities during the past year.

3. The presentation of the audited financial statements and the consolidated financial statements, together with a resolution for their adoption.

4. A resolution regarding the application of the profits or the covering of any loss according to the financial statements as adopted.

5. A resolution to empower the Board of Directors to buy treasury shares.

6. Election of members to the Board of Directors.

7. Appointment of auditors.

8. Any proposals from the Board of Directors or shareholders.

9. Any other business.

(3).

Any shareholder shall be entitled to have specific business transacted at the Annual General Meeting if he submits a requisition in writing to the Board of Directors no later than six weeks before the Annual General Meeting in the year in question.

Article 13

(1).

The shareholders at the General Meeting shall elect a Chairman to officiate at the General Meeting and decide all questions regarding the transaction of business, the voting and the result thereof.

(2).

Minutes shall be taken of the proceedings and the decisions made at the General Meeting, such minutes to be signed by the Chairman of the Meeting.

No later than two weeks after the General Meeting, a transcript of the minutes of the General Meeting and of the voting results shall be available at the Company's website, www.sparnord.dk.

Article 14

(1).

All business transacted at the General Meeting shall be decided by a simple, relative majority of votes, unless the Danish legislation or these Articles of Association provide otherwise.

(2).

A resolution to alter the Articles of Association or to dissolve the Company is subject to the proposal being adopted by 2/3 of the votes cast as well as of the voting stock represented at the General Meeting. In calculating the voting stock, shares that are not registered in the name of the holder or shares regarding which a request for registration in the name of the holder has not been made shall not be included.

(3).

Ballot cards with printed information about the number of votes shall be used in the election of members to the Board of Directors. The number of delegates desired to be elected shall be entered on the ballot cards. A ballot card is valid if it does not contain the names of more candidates than the number to be elected at the relevant General Meeting.

Article 15

(1).

Delegates who are also members of the Bank Committees represent the share capital that has been registered as belonging to the relevant shareholder region as of the cut-off date one week before the relevant General Meeting. Each delegate represents equal fractions of the share capital, calculated based on the number of delegates immediately prior to the General Meeting.

(2).

A major shareholder, see Article 9(1), represents the share capital that has been registered as of the cut-off date one week before the General Meeting, or regarding which a request for registration has been made as of the same date.

(3).

In order to be entitled to vote at the General Meeting, a delegate or the major shareholder shall have requested an admission card no later than three days before a General Meeting.

(4).

Voting may be made by proxy.

(5).

A delegate may only issue a proxy to another Bank Committee member from the same region. The instrument of proxy, which shall be dated, is only valid for one General Meeting. No Bank Committee member can represent more than two delegates by proxy.

(6).

It is possible to vote electronically or by letter prior to the General Meeting. The ballot paper to be used for this purpose can be downloaded from the Company's website.

The Board of Directors

Article 16

(1).

The Board of Directors shall be composed of not less than four nor more than six members elected by the shareholders at the General Meeting and members elected by the employees pursuant to the Danish Companies Act.

(2).

The members of the Board of Directors shall be elected for a term of two years at a time.

(3).

Members of the Board of Directors shall retire no later than four months after the end of the year in which they attain the age of 70.

(4).

A member of the Board of Directors who is divested of the management of his estate or who no longer complies with the requirements of the Danish Financial Supervisory Authority regarding his aptitude and integrity shall retire from the Board of Directors.

(5).

Any vacancy occurring in the Board of Directors may be filled by the election of a new member at the next General Meeting. A Director elected to fill a vacancy shall be elected for the unexpired term of his predecessor in office.

Article 17

(1).

The Board of Directors shall elect a Chairman and a Deputy Chairman from among their number and shall lay down rules of procedure governing the discharge of their duties.

(2).

The members of the Board of Directors shall receive a fee approved by the shareholders at the Annual General Meeting.

The Executive Board

Article 18

The Board of Directors shall appoint an Executive Board composed of from one to five members to be in charge of day-to-day management of company affairs. The terms of employment of the Executive Board shall be laid down in agreement between the Executive Board and the Board of Directors.

Incentive pay

Article 19

General guidelines have been prepared for the Company's incentive pay scheme for members of the Board of Directors and the Executive Board. These guidelines have been adopted by the shareholders at the Company's Annual General Meeting and have been published on the Company's website.

Powers to bind the Company

Article 20

(1).

The members of the Board of Directors and the Executive Board represent the Company in all external affairs.

(2).

The Company shall be bound in legal transactions by the joint signatures of the Chairman or the Deputy Chairman of the Board of Directors and any one member of the Board of Directors, or by the joint signatures of any one member of the Executive Board and any one member of the Board of Directors.

Financial year

Article 21

The Companys financial year shall coincide with the calendar year.

Audit

Article 22

One or two auditors elected by the shareholders in General Meeting shall audit the Companys financial statements. The auditors thus elected shall serve for a term of one year at a time.

Aalborg, 19 April 2018

Kjeld Johannesen Per Nikolaj Bukh Morten Bach Gaardboe

Chairman of the Board of Directors Deputy Chairman

Kaj Christiansen Laila Mortensen Lene Aaen

Jannie Skovsen John Srensen Gitte Holmgaard Srensen





ANNEX 1:

The companys name is Spar Nord Bank A/S ("the Company").

The Company also carries on operations under the names of SBN Bank A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S),

Sparbank Nord A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Telefonbanken A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Spar Nordjylland Bank A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Spar Nordjylland Bankaktieselskab, (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Sparekassen Nordjylland A/S ( Spar Nord Bank A/S), Spar Nord Bankaktieselskab (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Aars Bank A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S). Lokalbank Aabybro A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Aalborg A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Aars A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Brnderslev A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Danmark A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Esbjerg A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Fredericia A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Frederikshavn A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Faborg A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Grenaa A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Haderslev A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Hadsund A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Hasseris A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Herning A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Hirtshals A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Hjallerup A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Hjrring A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Hobro A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Holbk A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Holstebro A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Horsens A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Kolding A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Kbenhavn A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Kge A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Lgstr A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Nakskov A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Nyborg A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Nykbing Falster A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Nstved A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Nrresundby A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Odense A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/s), Lokalbank Randers A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Ringsted A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Silkeborg A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Skagen A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Skanderborg A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Skive A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Skjern A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Slagelse A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Stvring A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Svendborg A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Sby A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Snderborg A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Terndrup A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Thisted A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Vejgaard A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Vejle A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Viborg A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank steraa A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S), Lokalbank Arhus A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S). Sparbank A/S, Sparbank Vest A/S, Skive Sparekasse A/S, Egnssparekassen i Skive A/S, Nordvestjysk Sparekasse A/S, Breum Sparekasse A/S, Ejsing Sparekasse A/S, Haderup Sparekasse A/S, Hald Sparekasse A/S, Harre og Omegns Sparekasse A/S, Hem Sparekasse A/S, Hjerk Sparekasse A/S, Hjslev Sparekasse A/S, Junget-Thorum Sparekasse A/S, Oddense Sparekasse A/S, Rdding Sparekasse A/S, Rnbjerg Sparekasse A/S, Sallingsund Sparekasse A/S, Selde-Asted Sparekasse A/S, Sjrup Sparekasse A/S, Stoholm Sparekasse A/S. Nordbank A/S (Spar Nord Bank A/S).

ANNEX 2:

List of number of shareholder regions  shown by postcodes.

Sharholder region Postal code numbers allocated Esbjerg 6240, 6261, 6270, 6280, 6510, 6520, 6534, 6535, 6660, 6670, 6682, 6683, 6690, 6700, 6705, 6710, 6715, 6720, 6731, 6740, 6752, 6753, 6760, 6771, 6780, 6792, 6800, 6818, 6823, 6830, 6840, 6851, 6852, 6853, 6854, 6855, 6857, 6862, 6870



Lilleblt 5464, 5466, 5500, 5580, 5592, 7000, 7007 Helsingr 2970, 2980, 2990, 3000, 3050, 3060, 3070, 3080, 3100, 3120, 3140, 3150, 3230, 3250, 3480, 3490 Herning 6880, 6893, 6900, 6920, 6933, 6940, 6950, 6960, 6971, 6973, 6980, 6990, 7270, 7280, 7330, 7361, 7362, 7400, 7430, 7540, 7441, 7442, 7451, 7480, 8765, 8766 Hillerd 3200, 3210, 3220, 3300, 3310, 3320, 3330, 3360, 3370, 3390, 3400, 3450, 3540, 3550 Hjrring 9760, 9800, 9830, 9850, 9870, 9881 Holbk 4060, 4070, 4174, 4190, 4270, 4281, 4291, 4293, 4295, 4296, 4300, 4305, 4320, 4330, 4340, 4350, 4360, 4370, 4390, 4400, 4420, 4440, 4450, 4460, 4470, 4480, 4490, 4500, 4520, 4532, 4534, 4540, 4550, 4560, 4571, 4572, 4573, 4581, 4583, 4591, 4592, 4593 Holstebro 7490, 7500, 7550, 7560, 7570, 7600, 7620, 7650, 7660, 7673, 7680, 7830 Horsens 7130, 8350, 8700, 8723, 8732, 8740, 8751, 8752, 8762, 8763, 8781, 8783 Kolding 6000, 6051, 6052, 6064, 6070, 6091, 6092, 6093, 6094, 6100, 6200, 6210, 6230, 6300, 6310, 6320, 6330, 6340, 6360, 6372, 6392, 6400, 6430, 6440, 6470, 6541, 6580, 6600, 6621, 6622, 6630, 6640, 6650 Kbenhavn 1000-1999, 2000, 2100, 2200, 2300, 2400, 2450, 2500, 2600,

2605, 2610, 2620, 2630, 2650, 2660, 2700, 2720, 2730, 2740, 2750, 2760, 2765, 2770, 2791, 2800, 2820, 2830, 2840, 2850, 2860, 2870, 2880, 2900, 2920, 2930, 2942, 2950, 2960, 3460, 3500, 3520, 3670, 3700, 3720, 3730, 3740, 3751, 3760, 3770, 3782, 3790, 3900-3992 Kge 2625, 2635, 2665, 2670, 2680, 2690, 4100, 4140, 4600, 4623, 4632, 4640, 4652, 4653, 4654, 4660, 4671, 4672, 4673, 4681, 4682, 4683, 4690 Mariagerfjord 9500, 9510, 9550, 9560, 9610 Midtvendsyssel 9320, 9330, 9340, 9480, 9700, 9740 Nord 9300, 9352, 9750, 9900, 9940, 9970, 9981, 9982, 9990 Nyborg 5540, 5800, 5853, 5856, 5871 Nstved 4160, 4171, 4244, 4245, 4250, 4262, 4684, 4700, 4720, 4733, 4735, 4736, 4750, 4760, 4771, 4772, 4773, 4780, 4791, 4792, 4793, 4800, 4840, 4850, 4862, 4863, 4871, 4872, 4873, 4874, 4880, 4891, 4892, 4894, 4895, 4900, 4912, 4913, 4920, 4930, 4941, 4942, 4943, 4944, 4945, 4951, 4952, 4953, 4960, 4970, 4983, 4990 Nrresundby 9310, 9362, 9370, 9380, 9381, 9382, 9400, 9430, 9440, 9460, 9490, 9492, 9493, 9690 Odense 5000, 5100, 5200, 5210, 5220, 5230, 5240, 5250, 5260, 5270, 5290, 5300, 5320, 5330, 5350, 5370, 5380, 5390, 5400, 5450, 5462, 5463, 5471, 5474, 5485, 5491, 5492, 5550, 5560, 5591, 5600, 5610, 5620, 5631, 5642, 5672, 5683, 5690, 5750, 5772, 5792, 5854, 5863 Randers 8370, 8500, 8581, 8585, 8586, 8860, 8870, 8900, 8920, 8930, 8940, 8950, 8960, 8961, 8963, 8970, 8981, 8983, 8990 Rebild 9293, 9520, 9530, 9541, 9574, 9575 Roskilde 2640, 3600, 3630, 3650, 3660, 4000, 4030, 4040, 4050, 4130, 4621, 4622 Skive 7700, 7730, 7741, 7742, 7752, 7755, 7760, 7770, 7790, 7800, 7840, 7850, 7860, 7870, 7884, 7900, 7950, 7960, 7970, 7980, 7990 Slagelse 4173, 4180, 4200, 4241, 4220, 4230, 4242, 4243, 4261 Storkundeomradet I henhold til Vedtgternes  5 stk. 2 Svendborg 5603. 5700, 5762, 5771, 5874, 5881, 5882, 5883, 5884, 5892, 5900, 5932, 5935, 5943, 5953, 5960, 5970, 5985 Vejle 6040, 6500, 6560, 6623, 7080, 7100, 7120, 7140, 7150, 7160, 7171, 7173, 7182, 7183, 7184, 7190, 7200, 7250, 7260, 7300, 7321, 7323, 8721, 8722 Vesthimmerland 9600, 9620, 9631, 9640, 9670, 9681 Viborg 7470, 8620, 8643, 8800, 8830, 8831, 8832, 8840, 8850, 9632 Aalborg 9000, 9100, 9200, 9210, 9220, 9230, 9240, 9260, 9270, 9280 Aarhus 8000, 8100, 8200, 8210, 8220, 8230, 8240, 8245, 8250, 8260, 8270, 8300, 8305, 8310, 8320, 8330, 8340, 8355, 8361, 8362, 8380, 8381, 8382, 8400, 8410, 8420, 8444, 8450, 8462, 8464, 8471, 8472, 8520, 8530, 8541, 8543, 8544, 8550, 8560, 8570, 8592, 8600, 8632, 8641, 8653, 8654, 8660, 8670, 8680, 8881, 8882, 8883

Attachment
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

By Elchin Mehdiyev  Trend:

The Azerbaijani Copyright Agency has registered 11,554 works and objects of related rights, including 177 works in electronic form by 85 authors, as of Jan. 1, 2018, Chairman of the Azerbaijani Copyright Agency Kamran Imanov said.

He made the remarks at the "Ancient Texts and Classical Sources Exposing Armenian Falsifications and Fictions" conference, dedicated to the 95th birth anniversary of national leader Heydar Aliyev and the 100th anniversary of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic in Baku on April 20.

He reminded that Azerbaijan began to officially register the works of special significance in terms of copyright protection in 2006.

Imanov noted that the Digital Rights Management system has been developed and commissioned. This allows to register copyright objects online in the "one-stop-shop" format, he added.

He said work is underway on creation of an electronic database within the system.

About 2,100 texts, photos, audio and video materials related to Azerbaijan's cultural heritage have already been digitized, uploaded to the e-database, and protected with special watermarks, according to him.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

Trend:

Rivalry to host the Expo 2025 will not affect the relations between Russia and Azerbaijan, First Deputy Governor of the Sverdlovsk Region Aleksey Orlov said at opening ceremony of the international tourist forum "The Big Urals-2018" on April 20, the Russian news agency "FederalPress" reported.

The 6th international tourist forum "The Big Urals-2018" and a new exhibition UralTravelMarket have kicked off in Russias Yekaterinburg. Azerbaijan's Consulate General in Yekaterinburg is the partner of the event.

Aleksey Orlov said that rivalry between Yekaterinburg (Russia) and Baku (Azerbaijan) for the right to hold the Expo 2025 should not be an obstacle to the tourism development.

"We will define the city deserving to host the Expo 2025 in a fair competition. This work only serves for development of infrastructure, communications and good-neighborly relations. The result can not and should not affect our very good relations," he said.

Azerbaijan's Baku, Russias Yekaterinburg and Japans Osaka are bidding to organize the Expo 2025.

Azerbaijan proposed to organize the Baku Expo 2025 from May 10 to November 10. The exhibitions topic will be Developing human capital, building a better future.

The voting will be held and the host city of Expo 2025 will be announced in November.

For the first time, Azerbaijan participated in the Milan Expo 2015 with its national pavilion. More than three million people visited Azerbaijans pavilion at Milan Expo 2015. Azerbaijans national pavilion was of great interest to the participants of Antalya Expo 2016 World Botanical Expo in Turkey.

At the Expo 2017 in Astana, Azerbaijan was represented by a pavilion prepared on the basis of the concept of Land of Energy  Energy from the Past to Future.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

By Ilkin Shafiyev  Trend:

The indicators of Azerbaijan's economic growth over the past 15 years are high even by world standards, economist, doctor of economic Sciences Elshad Mammadov told Trend.

"In recent years, the country's economy has grown more than threefold. Of course, the energy sector played a key role here, however, today's issues related to the diversification of the economy and the development of the non-oil sector is one of the important tasks. This is one of the priorities of the country's macroeconomic policy," he said.

The favorable macroeconomic situation, he said, creates all the prerequisites for increasing the expenditure side of the state budget.

"Today, the expenditure side of the state budget is at the level of 25-30 percent of GDP, but there is potential for growth associated with rising energy prices and the development of the non-oil sector. This suggests that public investment can be significantly increased. I believe that the target may be 40-45 percent," Mammadov said.

Speaking about the situation with public debt, Mammadov noted that Azerbaijan has all opportunities to reduce it.

"The country's leadership has set the task in the coming years to reduce public debt to an even lower level. Today, it stands at 20 percent of GDP. I believe that this process will be carried out methodically in order to ensure the stability of macroeconomic indicators. Although Azerbaijan has significant gold and foreign exchange reserves," he stressed.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

By Azad Hasanli  Trend:

In March 2018, Georgian companies exported just over 517 tons of tobacco products to Azerbaijan amounting to $8.69 million, according to the report of the Georgian statistical service.

The volume of supplies of cigars, cigars with cut ends, cigarillos and cigarettes from Georgia to Azerbaijan increased 2.8 times in a month. In total, the monthly growth was 2.6 times.

During 1Q2018, the Georgian export of tobacco products to Azerbaijan amounted to $14.27 thousand with a volume of 774.8 tons.

At the end of January-March 2018, 68.8 percent of tobacco product exports from Georgia fell to share of Azerbaijan.

The share of tobacco products exported from Georgia to Azerbaijan was 18.6 percent. According to the report, in the 1Q2018, the export of Georgian products to Azerbaijan exceeded $76.4 million, which is 2.4 times more than in the same period last year.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

By Anvar Mammadov  Trend:

it is planned to make compulsory professional liability insurance of doctors in Azerbaijan, the Association of Insurers of Azerbaijan (ASA) said in its report.

According to the report, this issue was discussed at the meeting of the relevant working group of the Association.

During the meeting, it was noted that the use of compulsory insurance in this area will favorably affect both doctors and patients. The aim is, on one hand, to provide financial compensation to a patient as a result of medical error, and on the other hand - to protect the reputation of doctors.

The report notes that compulsory insurance of professional responsibility of doctors is actively used worldwide.

"Medical error is one of the pressing problems of our days. Therefore, medical liability insurance should be regulated in one form or another. To do this, the mechanism of compulsory insurance is important", the message said.

According to the report, during the meeting it was noted that the use of this mechanism should start with private clinics. Necessary changes in the legislation were also discussed.

At present, professional liability insurance is provided on a voluntary basis in Azerbaijan. According to the Chamber of supervision over the financial markets of Azerbaijan, following the results of the first quarter, the fees for this type of insurance amounted to 847.6 thousand manats. There were no payments under this type of insurance for this period.

The official exchange rate as of April 19 is 1.7 AZN/USD.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

Trend:

The first deputy head of the National Bank of Tajikistan (NBT), Jamoliddin Nouraliyev, has proposed the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to boost cooperation, Tajik agency ASIA-Plus reported on April 20.

According to the information, Tajik central bank, in particular, requested the Fund to provide assistance to Tajikistan.

These issues were discussed at a meeting of Nouraliyev with Dr. Jihad Al-Wazir, Assistant Director of the IMF Monetary and Capital Markets Department, which took place in New York on April 17.

Ms. Padamja Khandelwal, the head of the IMF mission to Tajikistan, also attended the meeting, according to the NBT press center.

Nouraliyev reportedly called the attention of the IMF representatives to the implementation of the joint projects and providing technical assistance for carrying our reforms in the field of monetary policy.

Dr. Jihad Al-Wazir noted that the IMF is ready to provide technical assistance to the NBT in the future, but it is necessary to point out specific sectors of the banking system that need assistance, the NBT press center said.

He reportedly further noted that after receiving a list of those sectors they would study it and then develop the technical assistance project.

Negotiations on providing the next loan to Tajikistan within the framework of a new IMF program are being protracted.

The previous three-year Extended Credit Facility (ECF) program ended in Tajikistan in July 2012.

The ECF provides financial assistance to countries with protracted balance of payments problems. The ECF was created under the Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust (PRGT) as part of a broader reform to make the Funds financial support more flexible and better tailored to the diverse needs of low-income countries (LICs), including in times of crisis. The ECF is the Funds main tool for providing medium-term support to LICs. The ECF may also help catalyze additional foreign aid.

The ECF supports countries economic programs aimed at moving toward a stable and sustainable macroeconomic position consistent with strong and durable poverty reduction and growth.

In autumn 2012, the Tajik authorities have applied to the IMF for a new three-year arrangement under the extended credit facility.

The IMF representatives that time reportedly raised hopes of coordinating the next three-year program. However, the negotiations on this subject are still continuing and now specific agreements have been reached so far.

Within the framework of the new program Tajikistan intended to attract a $500 million preferential loan from the IMF for supporting the country's economy.

Consultations between the Tajik authorities and the IMF were held in Dushanbe in November last year.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

By Ilkin Shafiyev  Trend:

Azerbaijan and Russia are discussing possibility of establishing joint ventures (JVs) for export to third countries, Russias trade representative in Azerbaijan Eldar Tlyabichev told Trend.

"We have certain developments and presently we are considering possibility of organizing and expanding cooperation in the industrial sector and creating joint products for export to third countries. Another interesting topic that is actively developing now is tourism. There are real opportunities here to increase the mutual tourist flow," he said.

Tlyabichev further urged Russian and Azerbaijani companies to actively use the existing business opportunities.

The potential of mutual investment and production cooperation is not fully used today, according to him.

"I urge Azerbaijani investors to more actively participate in projects being realized in Russia. Particularly, to use the capabilities of Russian special economic zones, which offer its significant preferences and create comfortable conditions for doing business," he said.
Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (NYSE: TEVA; TASE: TEVA) has announced that it has agreed with Procter & Gamble Company [NYSE: PG] to terminate the PGT Healthcare partnership that they founded in 2011 to market OTC (Over The Counter) medicines. The separation will take effect July 1, 2018 subject to receipt of applicable regulatory approvals. No significant (material) net financial transfer between Teva and P&G will result from the dissolution, Teva added, Globes reports.

The amicable separation follows Procter & Gamble's $4.2 billion acquisition of Merck KGaA's consumer health unit.

PGT Healthcare had grown into a significant presence in over 50 countries, mainly in Europe and Asia, using market-leading brands such as Vicks and Ratiopharm. However after nearly seven years working together, the companies concluded that their priorities and strategies were no longer closely aligned. Teva said that each company would take back its own brand and product assets to re-establish independent OTC businesses.

Teva EVP global marketing and portfolio Sven Dethlefs said, We have significantly benefited from the PGT partnership and we are parting on good terms. We will continue to build our OTC business, based on trusted brands, as a growing and long-term key business for Teva. It is a step in our wider process to bring integration and focus, and it enables us to better leverage synergies between our OTC and Generics businesses. The move creates a solid platform for a strong Teva OTC business, using the assets returning from PGT and the OTC brands acquired primarily through Actavis in 2016.

P&G president global personal health care Tom Finn said, The PGT Healthcare joint venture was highly successful but the decision to dissolve is in the best interest of both parties. We thank the Teva employees who have partnered with us and we wish Teva well as they operate their independent OTC business in the future.

Teva said that it does not expect the separation to have a material impact on its 2018 financial outlook. The company will merge its OTC interests returning from PGT with a portfolio of OTC assets acquired in 2016 via the Actavis acquisition. In 2017, the combined sales from Tevas PGT OTC products and Teva non-PGT OTC products were about $1 billion.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

By Huseyn Hasanov  Trend:

Memorandum of understanding on economic cooperation between Turkmenistan and Romania was signed in Ashgabat, the newspaper "Neutral Turkmenistan" reported.

The document was signed during the meeting of the joint intergovernmental committee for economic, scientific and technical cooperation.

The sides noted the importance of intensifying cooperation in the projects of the fuel and energy complex and the transport and communication sector.

Among the priorities were also named trade and economic sphere, textile industry, agriculture, power industry, and construction.

"Members of the Commission on the Romanian side expressed the desire of the business community to expand its presence in the promising Turkmen market for the implementation of joint investment projects," said the message.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

By Ali Mustafayev  Trend:

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan proposed increasing the trade turnover between Turkey and Kazakhstan to $10 billion, at a meeting with Kazakhstan's Foreign Minister Kairat Abdrakhmanov, the Kazakh Foreign Ministry said in a message.

Erdogan also stressed that Kazakhstan is Turkey's largest trading partner in Central Asia.

The Turkish president expressed confidence that the meeting of the High-Level Strategic Cooperation Council planned in Ankara under the chairmanship of the leaders of the two states will give a great impetus to mutual all-round cooperation.

Kazakh foreign minister also held a meeting with the Chairman of the Turkish Parliament Ismail Kahraman, at which issues of inter-parliamentary relations and interaction of the two countries in international parliamentary organizations were considered.

Previously, Abdrakhmanov met with Foreign Minister of Turkey Mevlut Cavusoglu. The parties agreed soon to finalize the coordination of the agenda and draft documents to be signed during the visit of the Kazakh president to Ankara.

To date, the Turkish business community has invested more than $2 billion in the Kazakh economy, and the volume of Kazakh investments in Turkey amounts to $1 billion.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

By Azad Hasanli - Trend:

Savings Banks Foundation for International Cooperation of Germany (SBFIC) plans to start implementing a new phase of the project on responsible financing, financial literacy and consumer rights protection in Azerbaijan, a source in the Azerbaijani government told Trend April 20.

In the near future, the SBFIC plans to sign a corresponding contract with the Central Bank of Azerbaijan, according to the source.

The source noted that the contract, which is planned to be signed within a month, is being prepared.

The new phase of the project has been fully developed in accordance with Azerbaijans strategic roadmaps and involves expanding the coverage of educational work, the source added.

The projects implementation will begin this year and will end in 2021. The Azerbaijan Banks Association, the Azerbaijan Micro-finance Association, the countrys Education Ministry, the Financial Market Supervisory Authority, the Central Bank of Azerbaijan and other structures will provide support in the implementation of the project.

Regarding the cost of the project, it has not yet been determined, the source added.

The Baku office of the SBFIC has already received a part of the funds to start implementing the project, but it is expected that the projects entire budget will be approved after July 1, 2018, the source said.

The project on responsible financing, financial literacy and consumer rights protection includes the development of country strategies on financial literacy, creation of balance between banks and a borrower in lending issues, as well as improving efficiency of banks, organizing various courses and seminars, expanding the range of financial services, in particular in the countryside.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

Trend:

Tajikistan produced 774,000 tons of cement in the 1Q2018, which is 348,000 tons more than in the 1Q2017, the press service of the Ministry of Industry and New Technologies of Tajikistan said in a statement.

During the reported period, 322,000 tons of cement were exported to Uzbekistan (172,000 tons), Afghanistan (131,000 tons) and Kyrgyzstan (19,000 tons).

Export to Uzbekistan increased by 162,000 tons (16.3 times), to Kyrgyzstan  by 16,800 tons (6 times), and to Afghanistan  on the contrary, decreased by 10,600 tons (by 8.8 percent).

It was reported earlier that a new plant for the dry production of cement will be built in Uzbekistan.

The agreement on the implementation of the project worth over $160 million was signed by Chairman of the Board of Directors of Eurocement Filaret Galchev and Chairman of the Board of Uzstroymaterialy Botir Zaripov.

The construction will be carried out by the Chinese Beijing Triumph International Engineering Co. company (part of the CNBM industrial group). The new plant will become the largest cement enterprise in Central Asia.

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Follow the author on Twitter: @FDolukhanov
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

By Ali Mustafayev  Trend:

The Finnair airline plans to relaunch flights on the Astana-Helsinki route, the press service of the Civil Aviation Committee of the Ministry of Investment and Development of Kazakhstan said in a message.

"Finnair plans to resume flights on the Astana-Helsinki route starting from July 3, 2018. The flights are scheduled to be carried out on the Airbus 319 aircraft. The sale of air tickets is already open," the press-service said, following the results of the meeting of the Kazakh-Finnish working group on transport and logistics in Helsinki.

The sides exchanged information on the current tasks and priorities of the transport policies of the two countries, as well as prospects for cooperation in the field of civil aviation.

The text of the new agreement on air communication "with horizontal elements" has been worked out by the working group.

"In general, bilateral relations between Kazakhstan and Finland in the field of transport show a positive development dynamics," the message says.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

By Huseyn Veliyev, Trend:

The American society of mechanical engineers (ASME) has audited the process of production of high-pressure crude oil storage tanks, as well as the finished tanks themselves, at the Sumqayit Technology Park (STP), Trend was informed at STP on April 20.

The Sumgayit Industrial Park began production of the tanks, together with the South Korean Seoul Machinery Company.

The STP was awarded with international certificates ASME Sec VIII DIV1, ASME Sec VIII DIV2, ASME Sec I and NBIC.

The presence of international ASME certificates allows the company to establish mass production of high-pressure tanks for the oil and gas industry of the country.

By localizing the production of tanks, STP has established the production of import-substituting products, and oil companies operating in Azerbaijan no longer need to purchase such equipment outside the country.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

Trend:

India, which in March 2018 hosted the founding summit of the International Solar Alliance (ISA), invited Azerbaijan, which, although not located between the two tropics, but has a large amount of sunlight, to join the Alliance as a partner country.

This was stated at the meeting of Indian Ambassador to Azerbaijan Sanjay Ran with Energy Minister Parviz Shahbazov. The meeting was held to discuss issues of cooperation in the fields of energy and renewable energy.

The Ambassador noted that India was satisfied with the participation of the Indian oil company ONGC Videsh Ltd. in production sharing for the block of "Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli", and that Indian companies are interested in participation in upstream and downstream projects in the energy and petrochemical industries.

Shahbazov invited Indian companies to participate in projects for renewable energy, in particular to invest in production of wind and solar energy in Azerbaijan, and added that the Azerbaijani government had prepared a new procedure to facilitate the participation of local and foreign investors in this field.

Azerbaijan and India are also cooperating in the development of the North-South international transport corridor, which in subsequent years will create even more opportunities for trade and investment between the two countries.

The idea of creating an International Solar Alliance was presented in the end of 2015 at the Paris climate conference, which ended with a new global agreement to combat global warming. The Alliance united more than 120 countries located along the equator. The purpose of the Union is the joint development of solar energy, combining financial and technological efforts in this area.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

By Fikret Dolukhanov  Trend:

Russian Lukoil intends to export up to 80 percent of the oil produced in Uzbekistan to China, companys Vice-President Sergei Nikiforov told reporters on April 20, Uzbek media outlets reported.

We export gas only in two directions. The main one is the Chinese direction, with the other one being the northern direction - Kazakhstan and Russia. About 60-70 percent is currently being supplied to China. We plan to increase the figure to 80 percent with production growth. The rest will be supplied in the northern direction, Nikiforov noted.

According to him, Bukhara Oil Refinery buys all the gas condensate produced in the country, which is about half a million tons, where it is being processed and supplied to the domestic market thereafter. Nikiforov also added that the Lukoil is planning to produce about 18 billion cubic meters of gas in Uzbekistan in 2019.

He added that the Kandym gas processing complex will reach its peak output of 8 billion cubic meters in June.

The gas rate-plateau in 8 billion cubic meters will last for 9-10 years. But even after that, the plant will be provided with gas, as there are satellite deposits around it. The company intends to return the invested funds to Uzbekistan (over $10 billion) no later than 2022, Nikiforov said.

The Lukoil put the Kandym Gas Processing Complex (KGPC) located in the Bukhara region of Uzbekistan into operation on April 19.

Kandym GPC is the largest investment project of the Lukoil in Uzbekistan. The complex with the capacity of 8 billion cubic meters of gas per year will process hydrogen sulphide gas to produce refined gas, stable gas condensate and commercial sulfur. The facility consists of two production lines, terminals for the shipment of commodity products, including the gas export through the main gas pipeline.

The gas will be supplied from the Kandym group of gas fields located in the Karakul region, near the border with Turkmenistan: Kandym, Kuvachi-Alat, Akkum, Parsankul, Khoji, Western Khoji. Some 77 wells have already been drilled and a modern system for natural gas collection has been created.

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Follow the author on Twitter: @FDolukhanov
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

By Huseyn Veliyev  Trend:

A sterilization unit installed at Azerbaijan's National Nuclear Research Center CJSC was highly appreciated by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Center's Chairman Adil Garibov told Trend on April 20.

Garibov said that the project was presented to Director General of the IAEA Yukiya Amano, who visited the center a day before and in detail familiarized with the Center's activities.

Representatives of the Transport, Communications and High Technologies Ministry, the Emergency Situations Ministry and the Foreign Ministry of Azerbaijan attended a meeting held with Amano at the Center.

"Amano discussed business issues and issues of mutual interest. He stressed importance and fruitfulness of the meeting with participation of all parties. The meeting was not difficult for us, since Azerbaijan's strategic relations with the IAEA and issues of further cooperation between the parties were discussed earlier, and we knew in what framework the meeting will be held," Garibov said.

The IAEA director general thoroughly acquainted himself with the Center's activities, laboratories and stages of the projects implemented jointly by the Center and the IAEA.

"One of the joint projects realized with the IAEA is the project on expansion of radiation technologies in Azerbaijan. The matter is creation of a gamma-radiation sterilization center in the country. During the meeting, this project was presented in detail to the IAEA management. Amano familiarized with the Center's activity and professionalism of the Center's specialists. Amano said that this all exceeded his expectations, and he was pleased with the Center's activities in this area. Amano noted that he will make all necessary efforts to ensure that the necessary isotopes for the facility's operation are delivered to Azerbaijan," Garibov said.

In mid-2017, the Azerbaijani government gave special permission for the import of isotopes into the country. Under an approved road map, a part of isotopes will be delivered from Hungary, the other part from Russia. It will take about three weeks to load the isotopes into the installation, after which it will be commissioned.

The sterilizer installation, a laboratory and all necessary infrastructure are fully ready for operation. The facility is located in the village of Gobu (20 kilometers from Baku) at the Nuclear Research Center.

The sterilizer installation allows applying gamma radiation to kill microbes increasing the storage time of agricultural products as well as medicines.

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Follow the author on Twitter: @h_veliyev
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

Trend:

US President Donald Trump has tweeted that oil prices are artificially raised.

"Looks like OPEC is at it again. With record amounts of Oil all over the place, including the fully loaded ships at sea, Oil prices are artificially Very High! No good and will not be accepted!," he tweeted on April 20.

The eighth meeting of the OEPC Ministerial Monitoring Committee was held in Jeddah on April 20.

The ministers discussed implementation of the deal to reduce oil production and the situation on the world oil market.
VICTORIA, British Columbia, April 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Emerald Health Therapeutics Inc. (Emerald) (TSX-V:EMH) (OTCQX:EMHTF) today announced DDB Canadas Vancouver office its agency of record (AOR) following a national search managed by Reynolds & Fyshe. As agency of record, DDB Canada Vancouver and its integrated suite of marketing specialist disciplines, Twice, TRACKDDB, DDB Public Relations, TracyLocke Canada and Tribal Worldwide, will be providing a full range of seamlessly integrated communications services.



Committed to an exclusive partnership within the cannabis category, the agencys work will be designed to launch various brand initiatives and scale Emeralds marketing communications efforts based on both domestic and global growth plans. The agency has already commenced work to support Emerald Healths multi-phase expansion plans. The company plans to scale its offerings to meet the anticipated demand for a new, legalized recreational cannabis market following adult-use legalization across Canada slated for summer 2018.

We were looking for a global, top-tier agency to suit Emerald Healths broad scope of aspirations both in Canada and abroad, says Paul Dillman, VP Marketing and Sales, Emerald Health. DDB was the perfect fit with their world-class strategic approach, resources to support our global expansion and a deep understanding and knowledge of the Canadian market, including Quebec.

DDB Canada is selective in pursuing symbiotic partnerships with reputable, like-minded companies and Emerald Healths science-based approach and focus on innovation makes them the perfect partner, says Patty Jones, EVP Managing Director, DDB Canada Vancouver. Its an exciting opportunity to bring Emerald Healths mission, vision and brand to life - all while serving as an extension of the company as its brand steward. We look forward to working hand-in-hand with its key decision makers to build this brand, while adapting and pivoting when needed as regulations in the industry evolve.

About DDB Canada

DDB Canada is the most creatively acclaimed, internationally recognized marketing communications agency in Canada. The agency was named 2015 Digital Agency of the Year by strategy magazine and was ranked #2 agency in Canada by the Gunn Report in 2015. Known for advertising that generates significant results for clients, DDB Canada is a "total communications company" whose fundamental belief is that creativity is the most powerful force in business. DDB Canada has offices in Vancouver, Edmonton, Toronto and Montreal. The agency's integrated marketing disciplines include: public relations, event management, digital, social, mobile, branding, design, direct response, CRM and shopper marketing.

About Emerald Health Therapeutics Inc.

Emerald Health Therapeutics, Inc. (TSX-V:EMH) (OTCQX:EMHTF) operates through Emerald Health Botanicals Inc. ("Botanicals"), a wholly owned subsidiary and Licensed Producer under Canadas Access to Cannabis for Medical Purposes Regulations. Through Botanicals, Emerald is authorized to produce and sell dried medical cannabis flower and medical cannabis oil. It currently operates an indoor facility in Victoria, BC, and is building a 500,000 s.f. greenhouse on 32 acres in Metro Vancouver, with expansion potential to 1 million s.f. to serve the anticipated legal Canadian adult-use cannabis market starting in 2018. Emerald also owns 50% of Pure Sunfarms, a partnership with Village Farms that is converting an existing 1.1 million s.f. greenhouse in Delta, BC from growing tomatoes to growing cannabis. Emeralds team is highly experienced in life sciences, product development and large-scale agribusiness. Emerald is part of the Emerald Health group, which is broadly focused on developing pharmaceutical, botanical and nutraceutical products designed to provide wellness and medical benefits by interacting with the human bodys endocannabinoid system. Please visit www.emeraldhealth.ca for more information.

Contacts:

Rob Hill, Chief Financial Officer

(800) 757 3536 Ext. #5

Ray Lagace, Investor Relations Manager

(800) 757 3536 Ext. #5

invest@emeraldhealth.ca

Paige Calvert, Director of Corporation Communications, DDB Canada

(604) 608 4421

paige.calvert@ddbcanada.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.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements: Certain statements made in this press release that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements and are subject to important risks, uncertainties and assumptions, both general and specific, which give rise to the possibility that actual results or events could differ materially from our expectations expressed in or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such statements include completion of the joint venture; establishing a brand; sales of non-cannabis products; development of sales channels; expansion of permitted sales of cannabis; leveraging of distribution channels; development of new products; the benefits and effects of certain products.

We cannot guarantee that any forward-looking statement will materialize and readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward looking statements. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties related to, among other things, failure to obtain regulatory approvals; failure to obtain necessary financing; results of production and sale activities; results of scientific research; regulatory changes; availability of products; changes in prices and costs; demand for products; as well as the risk factors described in the Companys annual information form and other regulatory filings. The forward-looking statements contained in this press release represent our expectations as of the date hereof. Forward-looking statements are presented for the purpose of providing information about management's current expectations and plans and allowing investors and others to obtain a better understanding of our anticipated operating environment. Readers are cautioned that such information may not be appropriate for other purposes. The Company undertakes no obligations to update or revise such statements to reflect new circumstances or unanticipated events as they occur, unless required by applicable law.
OPEC+ may consider lowering quotas to reduce oil production in June, it all depends on market analysis, TASS citing Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak reported.

"We will see for two months how the situation develops, and in June, when we meet (on June 22 in Vienna), we will evaluate it. The agreement is in force until the end of the year, and in June we can consider the issue of reducing the quotas during this time. There are currently no solutions," he said.

The Minister added that he expects that surplus of oil reserves will disappear from the market in the coming months, he told reporters on Friday.

"In the coming months," he said, answering a question.

"We are definitely going to extend the cooperation between the OPEC and non-OPEC countries, and the format - a deal or a different format, we will discuss at the June meeting," Novak said. "We are determined to continue cooperation, this could be monitoring the situation in the format of meetings twice a year," he added.

At the same time, surplus of oil reserves decreased to 12 mln barrels, Novak told reporters. "At the end of March the surplus amounted to 12 mln barrels," he said. "In three months, the decline was almost 90 mln barrels, which is a very good indicator," the minister added.

OPEC+ executed the terms of the deal to reduce oil production by 149% in March 2018, Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak told reporters.

"149% on March," he said, specifying the data previously voiced by Energy Minister of Saudi Arabia Khalid al-Faleh, who also named the figure of 145%.

It was reported earlier that in February this figure was 138%.

As for Russia, it is going to reach a 100% implementation of the OPEC+ deal quota in April. "Now we are close to 100%, I think in April we will reach 100%," Novak said.

OPEC+ countries agreed to reduce production from the beginning of 2017 by 1.8 mln barrels of oil per day against the level of October 2016. Over the past seven months, the plan has been overfulfilled, including through reducing production in Venezuela and several countries in Africa.

The agreement on the reduction of oil production between 24 countries has been in effect since January 2017 and has already been extended twice. According to the terms, the participants should reduce production by 1.8 mln barrels per day (against October 2016, taken as the base level). Currently the agreement is valid until the end of 2018.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

By Huseyn Veliyev  Trend:

The CYBERO training center, operating in Azerbaijan, will conduct wide educational work among Internet users on cyber-security issues, Director of the center Gultekin Rasulova told Trend.

According to Rasulova, the plans of the center include the organization of free seminars, the preparation of educational videos and through social projects calling on the public to be vigilant.

"The activities will be aimed at increasing the level of cyber-security and digital literacy, as well as ensuring public attention to the problem of security in the information space," Rasulova said.

For the first time in the country, CYBERO conducts training sessions for industry experts on security of web applications within the framework of Reverse Engineering and White Hat Hacker programs.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

By Rufiz Hafizoglu  Trend

The Municipality of Izmir province of Turkey has announced a tender for the construction of a park with a total area of 92,000 square meters.

The construction of the Park should be completed within 365 days from the date of announcement of the tender results. Local and foreign companies can participate in the tender.

The tender procedure will be held at 10:00 (GMT+04:00) on May 21, 2018.

Applications and proposals from stakeholders are accepted at the address: Halkapnar Ek Hizmet Binas 1560/1 Cnarl Mahallesi Sokak No:1 K:5 Konak/Izmir.

For more information, please contact us via email:

Phone: (+90 232) 293 44 74 , Fax: (+90 232) 293 41 45.

The cost of participation in the tender is 175 Turkish liras.

The official exchange rate as of April 19 is 4.0345 TL/USD.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

By Ilkin Shafiyev  Trend:

Shahdag Tourism Center under Azerbaijans Ministry of Culture and Tourism has announced a tender for the purchase of advertisement services.

All those interested to participate in the tender must send their proposals in two copies, signed and sealed in envelopes.

The tender participation fee is 250 manats, which should be transferred to the following account: AZ53AIIB33010019444805754148

After the transfer of the funds, participants will be able to obtain a list of the tender terms in Azerbaijani language at the address: Baku, Bulbul Avenue 26.

Contact: Deniz Mecidlidan.

Phone: (+99 412) 310 11 10, ext. number 7101)

Taxpayer Identification Number (TIN): 4700664781

Bank : Qusar district branch of Kapital Bank OJSC

Code: 200480

TIN: 9900003611

Correspondent account: AZ37NABZ01350100000000001944

Swift code: AIIBAZ2X

Applicants must submit the above-mentioned documents (except tender offer and bank guarantee) until 16:00 (GMT + 4) on May 14, 2018, and tender offer and bank guarantee in a sealed envelope till 15:00 (GMT + 4) on May 22, 2018 at the address: Baku, Bulbul Avenue 26.

The bids will be opened at 17:00 (GMT + 4) on May 23, 2018 (Baku, Bulbul Avenue 26).

Authorized representatives can take part in the tender.

($1 = 1.7 AZN on April 20).
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

By Ilkin Shafiyev  Trend:

The National Bureau for Tourism Promotion intends to attract more Chinese tourists to Azerbaijan, spokesman of the Bureau, Kanan Guluzade told Trend April 20.

Guluzade noted that an agreement between Azerbaijani and Chinese tourism companies was signed yesterday with the support of the Bureau. Within the agreement, 2,000 Chinese tourists will visit Azerbaijan.

"The agreement was signed between a private Azerbaijani travel company and two Chinese travel companies. The two Chinese companies specialize in health tourism. They conducted a market research in Azerbaijan and determined that Naftalan is the most priority direction for Chinese tourists. It is expected that during the year, with the help of partner airlines operating in China and in the Asian market, 2,000 Chinese tourists will be sent to Azerbaijan, who will stay three days in Baku and seven days in Naftalan. We are confident that the potential of Naftalan will be able to meet the needs of Chinese tourists," Guluzade said.

According to the press secretary, the Bureau intends to continue work in this direction. For this purpose, consultations are held with Chinese companies.

"These are only the first steps. We plan to attract more Chinese tourists, and not only in health resorts such as Naftalan or Duzdag. I would like to note that before this, Chinese tourists came to Azerbaijan only as part of general tours to the South Caucasus. The new agreement provides for a visit directly to Azerbaijan," Guluzade said.

More than 10,000 Chinese tourists visited Azerbaijan in 2017.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

By Ilkin Shafiyev - Trend:

Azerbaijan's National Bureau of Tourism Promotion seeks to broadly familiarize Turkish citizens with the tourism potential of Azerbaijan, spokesman of the Bureau, Kanan Guluzade told Trend April 20.

Today, the Bureau is negotiating with Turkish state structures, travel companies, as well as the Turkish Embassy in Azerbaijan on this issue, he said.

"Particularly, we intend to attract Turkish tourists to the Duzdag Physiotherapy Center. A similar wellness center operates in Romania, and it is very popular among Turkish tourists. Turkey's citizens are poorly familiarized with Duzdag, and in general with the tourist potential of Azerbaijan. This situation needs to be changed," Guluzade said.

In 2017, 300,000 Turkish tourists visited Azerbaijan.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

By Ali Mustafayev  Trend:

Kyrgyzstan's First Deputy Minister Dinara Kemelova met with Director of the OSCE Conflict Prevention Center, Ambassador Marcel Pesko, Kyrgyz media outlets reported.

During the meeting, the issues of strengthening fruitful cooperation between Kyrgyzstan and the OSCE, including coordination of the OSCE project activities at the regional level, were discussed.

The sides expressed mutual interest in further cooperation in the planning and implementation of regional projects in the countries of Central Asia in order to ensure sustainable development and stability, as well as the application of joint approaches to counter the challenges and threats to the security of all countries in the region.

The sides also discussed the preparation of OSCE Secretary Generals visit to Kyrgyzstan in May 2018.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

Trend:

Tajikistan will participate in the Expo 2020, to be hosted by Dubai, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Tajik agency ASIA-Plus reported on April 20.

Expo Dubai 2020 will open October 20, 2020 and will run through April 10, 2021, according to Tajikistans Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCI).

By governments decree, an organizing committee for preparations to participate in Expo Dubai 2020 has been set up. The committee is led by the first deputy prime minister.

The Ministry of Economic Development and Trade (MoEDT), CCI and some other relevant ministries and agencies have been ordered to elaborate measures to ensure proper preparation of Tajikistan for participation in Expo 2020.

The main site of Expo Dubai 2020 will be a 438-hectare area located midway between Dubai and Abu Dhabi. The master plan, designed by the American firm HOK, is organized around a central plaza, entitled Al Wasl (meaning "the connection" in Arabic), enclosed by three large pavilions, which will be built by Al-Futtaim Carillion, each one dedicated to a sub-theme. Dubai has also been emphasizing on investments in various sectors, such as economic growth, real estate, environmental avenues and public affairs.

Dubai Expo 2020 also would see a rise in the GDP as predicted by the International Monetary Fund.

UAE selected the theme Connecting Minds, Creating the Future, sub-themes being Sustainability, Mobility and Opportunity.

The World Expo in Dubai in 2020 will be the first to be held in the Middle East and North Africa & South Asia region (MENA & SA).

Recently, Dubai has made major investments in the real estate sector as well as introduced the worlds largest Solar Power Project, which is all set to start by Expo 2020.
Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, April 20

By Huseyn Hasanov  Trend:

The development of a road map on solar energy in Turkmenistan was the focus of an OSCE-supported discussion in Ashgabat for officials from the Ministry of Energy, the Ministry of Finance and Economy, the Institute of Solar Energy of the Academy of Science of Turkmenistan, the State Committee for Environment Protection and Land Resources, professors from the Mary Turkmen State Energy Institute and representatives of other relevant institutions and nature protection public organizations.

Organized by the OSCE Centre in Ashgabat in co-operation with the Mary Turkmen State Energy Institute, the event brought participants together to discuss the draft outline of the road map and develop ideas for its future elaboration.

Todays roundtable discussion is a very important step towards strengthening a national dialogue and inter-agency communication in the renewable energy sector, said Ambassador Natalya Drozd, Head of the OSCE Centre in Ashgabat. While national authorities are taking

the lead in the development of the road map, the OSCE Centre in Ashgabat stands ready to share best standards and practices from across the OSCE region and provide any other support within its mandate.

During the roundtable discussion, national experts provided an overview of the development of renewable energy in Turkmenistan and discussed the draft road map from the perspective of government priorities.

The OSCE Centre plans to continue providing support in this area. The support would focus on finalizing the road map and facilitating the dialogue with other OSCE participating States on international technologies and best practices of public-private partnerships in alternative energy projects.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

By Huseyn Hasanov  Trend:

Consultations on consular issues between Turkmenistan and Tajikistan took place in Dushanbe, the state migration service of Turkmenistan said on April 20.

Representatives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the State Migration Service and the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Turkmenistan participated in the meeting.

"Noting the positive dynamics of the development of bilateral relations in the political, cultural and humanitarian spheres, the sides exchanged views on the development of cooperation between the consular services of the two countries," the said the message.

The parties noted the importance of holding such consultations on a regular basis. The two countries among the joint beneficial economic activities, mentioned the project of construction of the railway Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Tajikistan (TAT).

Cooperation in the mining and oil and gas industry, energy sector and mineral resources processing, infrastructure projects of regional importance was also noted among the topical areas of the partnership.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

Trend:

A delegation led by Deputy Interior Minister of the Republic of Turkey Ahmet Avsar met with First Deputy Interior Minister of the Republic of Uzbekistan Davron Nazarmukhamedov, Uzbek media reported on April 20.

Nazarmukhamedov told the delegation members about the fundamental reforms implemented in the internal affairs bodies.

Ahmet Avsar thanked for the warm welcome and noted that the decision taken by Shavkat Mirziyoyev on simplifying the visa regime for citizens of Turkey became an important step towards further strengthening of traditionally friendly ties between peoples of the two countries.

Information on activities of the Interior Ministry of Turkey for crime prevention was presented at the meeting. Views were exchanged on development of cooperation in the sphere.

The sides held an expert meeting on developing a mechanism of interaction. Proposals on establishment of a mechanism for bilateral cooperation in the spheres of education, security, and crime prevention were developed.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

Trend:

A delegation of the Foreign Ministry of Uzbekistan participated in the meeting of the senior officials of the The Heart of Asia - Istanbul Process forum in Istanbul, Turkey on April 19, Uzbek media reported on April 20 citing the press service of the Foreign Ministry of Uzbekistan.

Within the framework of the meeting, the results of the forums activities in 2017-2018 and the main directions for the next years period were discussed. The participants exchanged views on security issues and regional economic cooperation, and on strengthening confidence-building measures among the participating countries to help stabilize the situation in Afghanistan and its socio-economic recovery.

At the forum, the Uzbek side paid attention of other delegations to the initiatives of President of Uzbekistan Shavkat Mirziyoyev, voiced during the International Conference on Afghanistan (March 26-27, 2018, Tashkent) and the main provisions of the Tashkent Declaration, and also discussed with other participants the opportunities for cooperation on their practical implementation.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

By Fikret Dolukhanov  Trend:

Uzbekistan is planning to begin breeding camels to attract tourists from different countries soon, the Uzbekistan National News Agency reported on April 20.

According to the report, 1,500 camels, including some of the dairy breeds, have been purchased from the Kyzylorda region of Kazakhstan for this purpose and brought to the village of Ok Takir in the Tamdy district.

Over 60,000 hectares have been allocated for camel breeding. A factory for the camel milk processing will also be opened. This innovation in agriculture will help creating new jobs, as well as significantly improve health of the citizens.

The camel milk has a high fat content and a good balance of fats and unsaturated acids, surpassing the quality of milk of other domestic animals. The camel wool is also highly valued for its excellent warming ability. The products of camel breeding are expected to have a high demand among buyers.

Over 3,000 camels are already being bred in the Kanimekh district. Animals also attract tourists: hundreds of tourists came to see them last year.

A modern livestock complex, designed for 1,000 camels, is planned to be organized near the Aydar Lake. The 15.7 billion soums worth complex will process 1,000 tons of camel milk annually. The place is planned to be turned into a modern ecotourism center, attracting 10,000 tourists per year.

Three ecotourism centers located in the Yangikazgan village do not meet the necessary requirements. Some 3,100 hectares have been allocated for new centers on the Aydar shores, where a project worth 4 billion soums is being implemented. We plan to build 21 yurts, 10 modern wooden cottages for tourists and a restaurant. Construction work is scheduled to be completed by the Independence Day of Uzbekistan; we will also launch camel milk processing from 2Q19, deputy head of the Kanimekh district administration U. Elmurodov said.

The average price for a camel in Kazakhstan varies at $800-1000. Although the total purchase price was not revealed, simple calculations show that the total cost of the purchase exceeded $1.2 million.

(8077.26 UZS = 1 USD on April 20)

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @FDolukhanov
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

By Farhad Daneshvar  Trend:

A senior Iranian diplomat has implicitly warned that Tehran may walk away from the 2015 nuclear deal, blaming the US administration over its approach to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA aka nuclear deal).

It is a wrong interpretation that some people assume Iran will remain committed to the nuclear deal under all the [unfavorable] circumstances, IRNA news agency quoted Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi as saying at a meeting with Norwegian Foreign Minister Ine Marie Eriksen Sreide in the European country on April 20.

The Iranian diplomat warned that the approach of the US President Donald Trumps administration to the JCPOA has put the fate of the historic pact at risk.

Any attempts aimed at linking the JCPOA with other topics are driven by wrong approaches which make the regional issues more complicated, he added.

Earlier on April 18 Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif also said that a possible decision by the US on pulling out from the 2015 nuclear deal would draw an unpleasant reaction from Iran and the international community.

Back in March, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian arrived in Tehran as part of a European drive to salvage the nuclear deal with Iran that President Donald Trump is threatening to scuttle. On May 12, Donald Trump is expected to decide whether to continue waiving sanctions under a US law.

So far, Iran has adhered to the terms of the nuclear deal, as verified by International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors in 10 reports since the pact was implemented in January 2016.

But the economic benefits Iran is receiving in return have fallen short of expectations, even after energy and financial sanctions were lifted. Major banks and companies have avoided engaging with Iran from fear of running afoul of remaining US restrictions or seeing a snapback of sanctions given Trumps threats.

Trump has told the Europeans that they must agree to fix the terrible flaws of the Iran nuclear deal or he would re-impose the sanctions that Washington lifted as part of the pact.
Iran's Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics and Iraqi Ministry of Communications signed a technical and specialized cooperation agreement, IRNA reports.

The deal was inked in the presence of Iranian Defense Minister Brigadier General Amir Hatami and Iraqi Minister of Communications Hassan Kazim al-Rashid.



The Iranian minister said at the signing ceremony that the fight against Daesh terrorist group served to reveal the friends and enemies of the Iranian and Iraqi nations and help them recognize the false advocates of anti-terror campaign.



Hatami expressed pleasure that the economic, social and security situation of Iraq is improving following the collapse of Daesh.



The Iraqi minister of communications, for his part, thanked the Islamic Republic of Iran for its assistance to the Iraqi people in suppressing the Daesh terrorist group.



Kazim al-Rashid said the Iraqi government and people will never forget Tehran's support for Baghdad during its fight against terrorism.



The Iranian defense minister arrived in Baghdad Wednesday morning on a two day visit for talks with Iraqi military and political officials on mutual defense and security cooperation as well as latest developments in the region.
TORONTO, April 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- dynaCERT Inc. (TSX VENTURE:DYA) (OTCQB:DYFSF) (DAX:DMJ) ("dynaCERT" or the "Company") is pleased to announce the official launch of its HydraGEN Technology products at the Truck World Show, its application for Marine Classification Society Type Approval and the closing of the final tranche of its previously announced Private Placement.

Truck World Show

dynaCERT is officially launching its line of upgraded HydraGEN Technology products at the Truck World Show at the Toronto International Centre on April 19 to 21, 2018.

Truck World features over 450 exhibitors, 15,000 industry professionals and 390,000 square feet of event space. In addition to exhibitors like dynaCERT, the Truck World features industry service providers, associations, government and media, as well as heavy duty service repair shops, heavy duty wholesalers and distributors, over 6000 fleets, and over 2500 owner-operators, new vehicle dealers and manufacturers.

On April 18, over 32 national and international dealers and agents of dynaCERT were greeted by senior management for a full day of extensive training on the fully upgraded product line and were familiarized with the sales and marketing materials and corporate video in order to initiate the official launch at the Truck World Show. dynaCERT is very pleased with its dealer network and following our April 18 dealer meeting and launch of the upgraded HydraGEN products, dynaCERT has commenced shipping through its dealers to Halifax, Moncton, Montreal, cities in Ontario, Calgary and Edmonton. Internationally, as well, dynaCERT has commenced shipping to Pennsylvania, Texas, Mexico, India and Dubai and continues to ship to Germany.

Marine Classification Society Type Approval

Diesel powers nearly 95% of the worlds commercial, military and pleasure craft fleet. There are typically 3 to 4 diesels in use on every vessel, as they are used for propulsion and to generate power for onboard hotel loads, cranes and navigation equipment. dynaCERT is pursuing Marine Classification Society Type Approval for its HydraGEN Technology through Lloyds Register. Type Approval for hydrogen-on-demand systems does not currently exist for vessels. As a result, the work pursued by dynaCERT will develop a new marine standard in the same manner that is being completed in Europe for a HydraGEN system on transport trucks (see press release dated March 2, 2018). When a vessel owner chooses to modify various aspects of a vessel, an installation plan must be submitted for approval to the local authorities where the vessel is registered. This plan, if accompanied by Type Approval, is more readily approved when accompanied by a regime for installation and operations that Lloyds Register stands behind. dynaCERT believes that obtaining a CLASS Type Approval will take 8 to 12 months as there is a process that will include design review, production review and operational testing. Type Approval from Lloyds Register and subsequent approval by Transport Canada Marine Safety will facilitate adoption of the HydraGEN Technology Internationally.

Closing of Final Tranche of Private Placement

dynaCERT is pleased to announce the closing of the final tranche of its non-brokered equity private placement, as previously announced on January 31, 2018 (the Financing) via the issuance of 1,223,810 units at a price of $0.42 per unit for gross proceeds of $514,000. When combined with the first two tranches closing of the Financing (pursuant to which 6,249,047 units were issued previously for gross proceeds of $2,624,600), the aggregate gross proceeds raised under the Financing is $3,138,600, with an aggregate of 7,472,857 units having been issued, which represents an oversubscription of the Financing by $138,000. Each unit consists of one common share and one-half of one common share purchase warrant. Each whole warrant is exercisable at $0.50 for a period of one year from closing, provided however that in the event that the Company's common shares trade at a price above $1.00 per common share on the TSX Venture Exchange for twenty (20) consecutive trading days, dynaCERT shall have the right to give notice to holders that the warrants shall expire within thirty (30) days of such notice. Proceeds from the Financing will be used to fund working capital, manufacturing and special projects of the Company. All of the common shares and warrants that have been issued today in connection with the Financing are subject to statutory four-month hold periods, expiring on August 20, 2018.

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, mining and forestry equipment, 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
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

By Farhad Daneshvar  Trend:

Iranian Education Minister Mohammad Bathaei has proposed to teach Persian and Russian in the schools of the two countries as a second language amid deepening cooperation between Tehran and Moscow to challenge the US.

Speaking at a meeting with Chairman of the Committee on Education of the State Duma of Russia Vyacheslav Nikonov, the visiting Iranian minister said that his country plans to break up the monopoly of English as the second language and develop students skills in other languages in particular Russian, IRNA news agency reported.

Earlier in January Iran banned the teaching of English in primary schools after the countrys Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that the early learning of English opened the way to a Western cultural invasion.

The teaching of English usually starts in middle school in Iran, around the ages of 12 to 14, but some primary schools, below that age, also have English classes.

Some children also attend private language institutes after their school day. And many children from more privileged families attending non-government schools receive English tuition from daycare through high school.

The Iranian minister arrived in Moscow earlier this week to attend the Ministerial Forum on Global Dialogue on ICT and Education Innovation.

A large group of commentators suggests that Russia and Irans growing cooperation hints at a new Middle East order.

Our cooperation can isolate the US, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei told Russian President Vladimir Putin last November during a meeting a Tehran.

In turn, Putin described the growing Russia-Iran cooperation as very productive.
Armenias law enforcement agencies detained 83 opposition activists protesting against election of former president of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan as the countrys prime minister, RIA Novosti reported citing Edgar Janoyan, Head of the Analytics, Information and Media Relations Department of the Police.

14:22 (GMT+4) Armenias police detained 65 opposition activists who tried to paralyze traffic on Yerevan streets on Friday, the police press service told TASS.

"At 11:30 local time 65 people suspected of various violations were taken to police departments," they said.

10:33 (GMT+4) Armenias police arrested 16 opposition activists in Yerevan by 09:00 local time, head of the police department for information management and public relations Colonel Ashot Agaronyan told TASS.



Among those arrested is one of the protest action organizers, David Sanasaryan, who tried to block traffic at the Respubliki Square (Republic Square), according to the report.



The leader of the Civil Contract opposition party, MP Nikol Pashinyan, called on his supporters to "paralyze traffic across Yerevan" on Friday morning.

According to police, tensions are running high on Gyulbenkyan Street, where Pashinyans supporters blocked traffic with cars. Police are trying to remove cars from roads.

Mass rallies broke out in Yerevan and other Armenian cities on Monday following former Armenian President Serzh Sargsyans nomination as prime minister. On Tuesday, Armenias parliament elected Sargsyan prime minister. On Thursday, opposition members tried to disrupt the new cabinet of ministers meeting, blocking entrances to government facilities and marching down Yerevan streets. About 3,000 people took part in a rally in the evening. As many as 123 people were arrested over the past day.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

Trend:

On the eighth consecutive day of protests in Yerevan and other cities in Armenia, Ignacio Sanchez Amor (MP, Spain), chair of the OSCE Parliamentary Assemblys human rights committee, has called on all sides to engage in constructive dialogue, OSCE PA said in a press release April 20.

"I welcome the civic engagement of people turning out to exercise their right to freedom of expression through peaceful protest," he said. "This right must be respected by the authorities, and I take note of reports of instances of excessive use of force. At the same time, I remind that the right to peaceful protest does not enable demonstrators to force their way into buildings and disrupt proceedings. I call on all sides to exercise due restraint to ensure that all Armenians can peacefully express their opinions, and call for a prompt return to constructive dialogue. In this context, Freedom of the Press is of paramount importance and journalists should be protected against any form of violence."

Armenias opposition launched mass protests against the candidacy of Serzh Sargsyan for prime minister of the country.

Sargsyan was elected as prime minister with 77 votes for and 17 against.

The rally, headed by opposition MP Nikol Pashinyan, has been held in Yerevan since April 13. During the rally there were clashes between the police and the rally participants. Some individuals were detained.
The European Investment Bank (EIB) is offering an additional 250 million to help improve regional connectivity and road transport efficiency in Georgia, Agenda reports.

The EIB has already provided over 500 million for implementation of the Georgian Transport Communication Project.

At the first stage of the project, the construction of Grigoleti-Choloki 14km road section is planned. The next stage of the project includes the construction-rehabilitation of different international and secondary roads in Georgia.

As Georgias Infrastructure Ministry announced, improved road infrastructure would reduce time required for travel and transportation, improve road safety, develop tourism and international traffic.

The EIB is the EUs bank, which provides finance and consulting for projects supporting innovation, small and medium-sized businesses (SME), infrastructure and climate action.

Last year the EIB made available 280 million GEL (about $114.75m/93.08m*) for Georgian SMEs.
Chinas ZTE Corp said on Friday that a U.S. ban on the sale of parts and software to the company was unfair and threatens its survival, and vowed to safeguard its interests through all legal means, Reuters reports.

The United States this week imposed a ban on sales by American companies to ZTE for seven years, saying the Chinese company had broken a settlement agreement with repeated false statements - a move that threatens to cut off its supply chain.

It is unacceptable that BIS insists on unfairly imposing the most severe penalty on ZTE even before the completion of investigation of facts, ZTE said in its first response since the ban was announced, referring to the U.S. Commerce Departments Bureau of Industry and Security.

The Denial Order will not only severely impact the survival and development of ZTE, but will also cause damages to all partners of ZTE including a large number of U.S. companies, ZTE said in a statement.

ZTE said it regards compliance as the cornerstone of its strategy, adding it invested $50 million in export control compliance projects in 2017 and plans to invest more this year.

A senior U.S. Commerce Department official told Reuters earlier this week that it is unlikely to lift the ban.

Were going to have to see how this unfolds. But there is no provision currently for that to occur, the official said, who declined to be identified due to the sensitivity of the matter.

The Commerce Department has an appeals process for companies to try to get off the list, but it is unclear whether that would be available to ZTE because the case had been previously subject to a settlement, according to people familiar with the matter.

Even so, ZTE would have little recourse in the near term because appeals would have to be approved by the Bureau of Industry and Security, the same agency that issued the ban.

Companies must submit appeals to a committee that would issue a ruling within 30 days, according to the agencys website.

ZTE said it will not give up efforts to solve problems through communication, and it is determined to take judicial measures to protect the legal rights and interests of the company.
Austrian transportation and logistics company Gebruder Weiss, which began operating on the Georgian market in 2012, will invest 2 million in Georgia to expand its logistics terminal, Agenda reports.

Member of the Gebruder Weiss Management Board, Wolfram Senger-Weiss met with Georgias Prime Minister Giorgi Kvirikashvili today, where he said that the company was satisfied with the investments implemented in Georgia.

"We entered Georgia about five years ago and are satisfied with our investments. We have attracted a number of businesses We intend to invest 2 million to enlarge our logistics terminal in Georgia, said Senger-Weiss.

Gebruder Weiss has invested 10 million in the construction of premium logistics terminals in Georgia, which is one of the largest premium logistics terminals in the South Caucasus region.

Gebruder Weiss includes 150 branches in 28 countries and employs more than 7,000 people.
Londons Transport Commissioner Mike Brown met Uber [UBER.UL] boss Dara Khosrowshahi in January, a freedom of information request revealed, as the Silicon Valley app fights to keep its cars on the streets of its most important European market, Reuters reports.

Uber is battling a decision by the citys transport regulator last September to strip it of its license after it was deemed unfit to run a taxi service, a ruling Uber is appealing.

Since then Uber has made a series of changes to its business model, responding to requests from regulators, including the introduction of 24/7 telephone support and the proactive reporting of serious incidents to Londons police.

Khosrowshahi flew to London in October for discussions with Brown after which Uber promised to make things right in the British capital city.

The pair had a second meeting in London in January, according to a response to a freedom of information request from Reuters.

The Commissioner met with Dara Khosrowshahi on 3 October 2017 and 15 January 2018, both meetings took place in London, Transport for London (TfL) said.

A TfL spokesman declined to provide an immediate comment on what was discussed at the meeting. Uber declined to comment.

Reuters had asked for a list of every meeting which had taken place between Uber and TfLs private hire team and/or Brown since Sept. 22 but TfL declined to release such details.

We are not obliged to supply the remainder of the information requested in relation to meetings as it ... relates to information where disclosure would be likely to prejudice the exercise by any public authority of its functions .., it said.

A court hearing over Ubers appeal is due this month before the substance of the appeal is heard in June.
Israel dropped leaflets in the Gaza Strip on Friday warning Palestinians not to approach its border fence as the military braced for fresh clashes along the frontier, Reuters reports.

Thousands of Palestinians were expected to gather along the Israel-Gaza border, as they have every Friday over the past month for mass demonstrations.

Israel has blamed the Islamist militant group Hamas of staging riots and trying to carry out attacks.

It was the first time leaflets were dropped in the recent round of violence.

The Hamas terror organization is taking advantage of you in order to carry out terror attacks. The IDF (Israel Defense Forces) is prepared for all scenarios. Stay away from the fence and do not attempt to harm it, said the leaflets scattered by Israeli aircraft in the early morning in areas along the border.
South Korea's chief economic policymaker discussed currency market-related issues, such as how to reveal records of its market interventions, with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the finance ministry here said Friday, according Yonhap.

Seoul said earlier that the country is considering the detailed disclosure of its interventions in the foreign exchange market as part of a broader move to boost transparency and clear itself of suspicion of exercising undue influence on exchange rates.

South Korea's financial authorities have persistently claimed they do not interfere in the foreign exchange market but engage in "smoothing operations" against extreme one-sided movements.

On the sideline of the G-20 finance ministers and central bank governors meeting in Washington, on Thursday (local time), South Korean finance minister Kim Dong-yeon discussed the issue with the IMF's chief, Christine Lagarde.

Kim told Lagarde that the Seoul government is working on a set of measures to boost transparency of its currency market. Responding to this, Lagarde said revealing the records of currency market operations is helpful to macroeconomic stability, according to the ministry.

The minister is also set to meet U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to discuss the same issue later this week.

Last week, Washington kept South Korea on its "monitoring list" but did not designate it as a currency manipulator.

Washington has vowed to aggressively keep tabs on and combat unfair currency practices, saying the U.S. cannot and will not bear the burden of an international trading system that, it claims, unfairly disadvantages American exports and gives an edge to its trading partners.
NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES NEWSWIRE SERVICES OR FOR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES

MONTREAL, April 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- PyroGenesis Canada Inc. (http://pyrogenesis.com) (TSX-V:PYR), (the "Corporation" or "PyroGenesis") a Corporation that designs, develops and manufactures plasma waste-to-energy systems and plasma torch systems, is pleased to announce today that it has completed a private placement. The Corporation issued and sold an aggregate amount of 3,108,333 units of the Corporation (the "Units") at a price of $0.60 per Unit, for gross proceeds of $1,864,999.80 to the Corporation (the "Private Placement").



Each Unit consists of one common share of the Corporation (a "Common Share") and one Common Share purchase warrant (each whole Common Share purchase warrant, a "Warrant"). Each Warrant entitles the holder thereof to purchase one Common Share at a price of $0.85 until April 19th, 2020. Each Unit will be subject to a statutory hold period of four months and one day from the date of closing.

In connection with the Private Placement, the Corporation will pay finder fees in the amount of $88,800 and issue 74,000 finders compensation warrants to the agents.

The proceeds from the Private Placement will be used by the Corporation for general corporate purposes. The Private Placement is subject to the final approval of the TSX Venture Exchange (TSXV) as well as other customary closing conditions.

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 of 1933, as amended, or any state securities laws and may not be offered or sold within the United States, unless an exemption from such registration is available.

About PyroGenesis Canada Inc.

PyroGenesis Canada Inc. is the world leader in the design, development, manufacture and commercialization of advanced plasma processes. We provide engineering and manufacturing expertise, cutting-edge contract research, as well as turnkey process equipment packages to the defense, metallurgical, mining, advanced materials (including 3D printing), oil & gas, and environmental industries. With a team of experienced engineers, scientists and technicians working out of our Montreal office and our 3,800 m2 manufacturing facility, PyroGenesis maintains its competitive advantage by remaining at the forefront of technology development and commercialization. Our core competencies allow PyroGenesis to lead the way in providing innovative plasma torches, plasma waste processes, high-temperature metallurgical processes, and engineering services to the global marketplace. Our operations are ISO 9001:2008 certified, and have been since 1997. PyroGenesis is a publicly-traded Canadian Corporation on the TSX Venture Exchange (Ticker Symbol: PYR) and on the OTCQB Marketplace. For more information, please visit www.pyrogenesis.com

This press release contains certain forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, statements containing the words "may", "plan", "will", "estimate", "continue", "anticipate", "intend", "expect", "in the process" and other similar expressions which constitute "forward- looking information" within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Forward-looking statements reflect the Corporation's current expectation and assumptions, and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties including, but not limited to, our expectations regarding the acceptance of our products by the market, our strategy to develop new products and enhance the capabilities of existing products, our strategy with respect to research and development, the impact of competitive products and pricing, new product development, and uncertainties related to the regulatory approval process. Such statements reflect the current views of the Corporation with respect to future events and are subject to certain risks and uncertainties and other risks detailed from time-to-time in the Corporation's ongoing filings with the securities regulatory authorities, which filings can be found at www.sedar.com, or at www.otcmarkets.com. Actual results, events, and performance may differ materially. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. The Corporation undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements either as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by applicable securities laws.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange, its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) nor the OTCQB accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this press release.

SOURCE PyroGenesis Canada Inc.

For further information please contact: Rodayna Kafal, VP, Investor Relations and Strategic Business Development, Phone: (514) 937-0002, E-mail: ir@pyrogenesis.com or rkafal@pyrogenesis.com

RELATED LINKS: http://www.pyrogenesis.com/




Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will hold talks with his Austrian counterpart Karin Kneissl later in the day, focusing on prospects of economic ties between the two countries, energy dialogue, future relations between Russia and the European Union and pressing global issues. This is going to be the first meeting of two ministers after Kneissls appointment as foreign minister last December, TASS reports.

Despite a challenging international background, Russia and Austria "have had good-natured relations, which are resistant to fluctuations of the political environment," Russias Foreign Ministry said. "There are no serious problems between the countries. Parliamentarians and ministries maintain an active dialogue, regions are collaborating," the ministry added.

Russias President Vladimir Putin met Austrias Federal Chancellor Sebastian Kurz in late February in Moscow.

On Friday, the ministers will consider the state and prospects of relations between Russia and the EU, particularly against the background of the upcoming presidency of Austria in the EU Council in the second half of this year. Previously, Kneissl said in an interview with TASS that Vienna would call for building dialogue with Russia after it takes over the EU Council presidency in July. It is very important for restoring the lost confidence between the European Union and Russia, she stressed.
Russias Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will hold talks with UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura later in the day in Moscow. The meeting, which is going to be the second such talks between Lavrov and de Mistura in a month, is expected to focus on prospects of the Syrian political settlement threated by the missile strike delivered by the United States and its allies against the republic, TASS reports.

"The developments in the Syrian settlement and prospects, including in terms of the effects of the aggressive action conducted by the US and the countries that supported it in this illegal act against Damascus, will be studied in detail," Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said earlier.

The missile strike against Syrias military and civilian infrastructures was carried out by US planes and naval ships in cooperation with British and French air forces between 03:42 and 05:10 Moscow time on Saturday.

The United States, Britain and France said the strikes were in response to an alleged chemical weapons attack in Syrias Douma.
Washington should present evidence to prove its accusations against Moscow and Damascus of preventing experts from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) from gaining access to the alleged chemical weapons attack site in the Syrian town of Douma, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at a press conference on Friday, TASS reports.

"As for yesterdays statement, which said that the US has evidence to prove that Russia and Syria were delaying OPCW experts from gaining access to the town of Douma - if they really have it, let them present it," Lavrov said. "We have more than once presented the evidence that we have, including pictures and peoples interviews. As for our counterparts, we have only heard allegations about evidence, be it the alleged Douma incident or the Salisbury incident," the Russian top diplomat added.

Lavrov pointed out that a similar situation took place following the alleged chemical weapons attack in Syrias Khan Shaykhun, when the US and Great Britain cited classified information declining to clarify how they had acquired samples of the chemical substance allegedly used in the attack. "So put the facts on the table and then we will be able to hold some kind of a professional conversation," Lavrov said, adding that "if only groundless allegations remain, then they will eventually make it into a compilation dubbed Highly Likely, and that will be the end of it," the Russian foreign minister noted.

He went on to say that everyone could see clearly who actually was preventing OPCW experts from going to Douma. "The Americans requested we assist their experts in visiting the town of Douma and we agreed. While talking to our French colleagues, we asked them to send their representatives and they said it was a good idea. However, neither Washington nor Paris took any further steps. They carried out missile strikes instead of sending a joint OPCW mission to Syria to find out what had or had not happened there," Lavrov said.
Russia is maintaining active contacts with the militants in Syria as regards assuring the access of experts from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemial Weapons [OPCW] to the city of Douma where an alleged attack with involving chlorine took place at the beginning of this month, the Russian President's special envoy to the Middle East and North Africa, Mikhail Bogdanov told reporters on Friday, TASS reports.

"Of course, [we're maintaining contacts] actively," he answered when a reporter asked him about it.
Baku, Azerbaijan, April 20

By Rufiz Hafizoglu  Trend:

Turkish Parliament has approved the date for holding early parliamentary and presidential elections, the Parliament said in a message April 20.

As many as 386 MPs out of 537 voted for holding the early parliamentary and presidential elections and the elections will be held on June 24, according to the message.

On April 18, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan stated about the need for early presidential and parliamentary elections in Turkey.

"The government welcomed the proposal of Bahceli [leader of the Nationalist Movement Party] to hold early elections. The elections will be held on June 24, 2018," he said.

Devlet Bahceli previously proposed to hold early parliamentary and presidential elections in Turkey. Bahceli said the early elections should be held on Aug. 26.
An American woman has been sentenced to life in prison with no chance for parole for a decade as a result of her role in a plot to commit mass murder at a Halifax mall on Valentines Day in 2015, Global News reports.

Lindsay Kantha Souvannarath sat quietly in Nova Scotia Supreme Court on Friday as the sentence was read out by Justice Peter Rosinski.

Wearing a white sweater, she did not move or make eye contact with her family, who travelled from Geneva, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, to attend the trial.

Souvannarath, along with Randall Steven Thomas Shepherd and James Gamble, was involved in the 2015 plan to use rifles and Molotov cocktails on people at the food court in the Halifax Shopping Centre.

In Facebook messages entered as evidence during the sentencing, Gamble and Souvannarath said they hoped they would inspire further mass shootings in Canada and throughout the world  a reasoning that Rosinki referenced in his decision.
Twitter Inc said on Friday that it has banned ads from Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, saying the cyber-security companys business model conflicts with advertising rules and citing U.S. government claims that Kaspersky has ties to Russian intelligence agencies, Reuters reports.

Twitter confirmed the ban in an email to Reuters after Kaspersky Lab co-founder Eugene Kaspersky disclosed the development in a blog post on Friday, saying that the company learned of the ban in early January.

The ban follows charges by Washington that Kaspersky Lab has close ties to intelligence agencies in Moscow and its software could be used to enable Russian spying, which prompted the Trump administration to ban its products from U.S. government networks.

Kaspersky Lab has repeatedly denied those allegations, saying it will open up its code for inspection so that experts can hunt for vulnerabilities in its products that could be exploited by intelligence agencies, and it has asked a U.S. federal court to overturn the American ban.

Eugene Kaspersky said in his blog post that he was surprised by Twitters ban and asked the company to reconsider.

We havent violated any written  or unwritten  rules, and our business model is quite simply the same template business model thats used throughout the whole cybersecurity industry: We provide users with products and services, and they pay us for them, he said.

Department of Homeland Security cyber-security official Jeanette Manfra said her agency has not instructed U.S. companies to punish Kaspersky.
KYODO NEWS - Apr 20, 2018 - 11:34 | Sports, World, All

Legendary mountaineer Reinhold Messner on Thursday derided climbs of Mt. Everest these days as mere "tourism."

"It is not mountaineering that is going on," said Messner, who carved his name in mountaineering history by climbing Mt. Everest without supplementary oxygen in 1978, followed by making the first solo climb of the world's highest peak two years later.



(Mt. Everest)

"There is a big difference between the ascent of (Edmund) Hillary and the ascents of today," Messner, 73, told journalists, referring to the New Zealand mountaineer who, along with Nepalese climber Tenzing Norgay, was the first to reach the summit in 1953.

He spoke at an event organized by the Nepalese government on the 40th anniversary of the 1978 feat, which he achieved with Austrian mountaineer Peter Habeler.

Messner, who is also the first person to climb all 14 peaks higher than 8,000 meters, added, "If alpinism is adventure, you should reduce technical aid."

The Italian said that in his time it was the climbers who fixed routes and did the climbing, while nowadays the Sherpas prepare everything and even guide climbers to the top.

Messner's comments echo the criticism made by many alpinists of lax regulations in Nepal for those wishing to make a name by climbing the 8,848-meter peak.



(Reinhold Messner, 3rd from right, in Kathmandu)

For years, alpinists have complained that cheap expedition operators are not only putting the lives of climbers and Sherpas at risk, but are also creating bottlenecks on the mountain that is climbed taking advantage of narrow weather windows in mid- to late May.

After climbing was called off in 2014 and 2015 due to an avalanche and an earthquake, respectively, the number of climbers surged to 451 people, including Sherpa guides, in 2016 and 445 last year.

For this spring season, the government has issued permits to 346 climbers for Mt. Everest. Usually, a climber is accompanied by one to two Sherpa guides right until the summit.

Nepal charges $11,000 per person for a permit to climb Mt. Everest.
KYODO NEWS - Apr 20, 2018 - 17:14 | World

North and South Korea set up a hotline between their leaders on Friday, one week before the two men are set to meet for the first inter-Korean summit in over a decade at the border.

Working-level officials from the two countries tested the line, an official of the South Korea's presidential office said.

South Korean President Moon Jae In and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un are supposed to hold telephone talks before meeting face-to-face next Friday on the southern side of the border village Panmunjeom, but no date has been fixed, according to the office.

The hotline connects the South's presidential office and the North's State Affairs Commission, which Kim heads. It is the first dedicated line to be used by the leaders of the two countries to communicate with each other.

The two countries agreed on the setup of the hotline when Moon's special envoys visited Pyongyang and met with Kim in March.

The two Koreas remain technically at war since the 1950-1953 Korean War ended in a cease-fire.

Inter-Korean relations have been improving since the North decided to take part in the Feb. 9-25 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics hosted by South Korea.
12,297 new COVID cases in Kerala after 88K tests on Sunday

With this, the number of active COVID cases in the state fell to 1,37,043. Of the new cases, 11,742 contracted the virus through contact while 61 came from outside the state.
DENVER, April 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- General Cannabis Corp. (OTCQB:CANN), the comprehensive national resource to the regulated cannabis industry, today announced that it completed the closing of a private placement transaction with various private parties, including existing and new investors in General Cannabis.



The Company issued $5.54 million of senior secured promissory notes and an aggregate of 4,432,000 warrants to purchase common stock at the closing. The notes bear interest at 8.5% per annum and are secured by all of the Companys assets. The warrants have an exercise price of $2.35 per share. If the shares underlying the warrants are not registered for resale on a registration statement within six months, the Company will issue an additional warrant to each investor at the same exercise price for one-half of the shares covered by the initial warrant.

The proceeds of this debt raise will be used primarily to fund the Companys expansion and for working capital.

This new capital raise will allow us to continue to deliver increased value to our shareholders, said Robert Frichtel, Chief Executive Officer of General Cannabis Corp. We are managing our cost of capital through these transactions and creating a significant amount of working capital to continue our acquisition strategy in the cannabis industry. With this transaction, we consider ourselves well capitalized to take advantage of the many opportunities that we see emerging in the near future.

Michael Feinsod, Executive Chairman of the Board added, This financing represents another step in our plan for growth in the cannabis space. We appreciate the confidence of our investors and look forward to delivering shareholder return. We continue to aggressively seek acquisitions.

The securities sold in the private placement have not been registered under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, or state securities laws and may not be offered or sold in the United States absent registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or an applicable exemption from such registration requirements. The Company has agreed to file a registration statement with the SEC registering the resale of the shares of common stock issuable upon exercise of the warrants.

This press release shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy these securities, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or other jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful.

About General Cannabis Corp

General Cannabis Corp is the comprehensive national resource for the highest quality service providers available to the regulated cannabis industry. We are a trusted partner to the cultivation, production and retail sides of the cannabis business. We do this through a combination of strong operating divisions such as security, marketing, operational consulting and products, real estate and financing. As a synergistic holding company, our divisions are able to leverage the strengths of each other, as well as a larger balance sheet, to succeed. Our website address is www.generalcann.com.

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. Such forward-looking statements include statements regarding the ability of the new capital raise to deliver increased value to our shareholders; statements regarding creating a significant amount of working capital to continue our acquisition strategy; statements regarding the Company being well capitalized to take advantage of opportunities in the future; and statements regarding the Company continuing to aggressively seek acquisitions..

Any statements that are not statements of historical fact, such as the statements described above, should be considered forward-looking statements. Some of these statements may be identified by the use of the words may, will, believes, plans, anticipates, expects and similar expressions. General Cannabis has based these forward-looking statements on current expectations and projections about future events as of the date of this press release. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, conditions or results and involve a number of risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements as result of a number of factors, including those described from time to time in General Cannabis most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K under the heading Risk Factors and in subsequent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. General Cannabis undertakes no duty to update any forward-looking statements made herein.

Contact

Robert Frichtel

CEO, General Cannabis Corp

(303) 759-1300
U.S. President Donald Trump slammed OPEC for inflating oil prices after the cartel showed a willingness to further tighten crude markets.

Looks like OPEC is at it again, Trump said on Twitter, not long after energy ministers finished their meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Oil prices are artificially Very High! No good and will not be accepted!

The presidents ire followed a stream of bullish signals from a meeting of oil producers in Saudi Arabia, chiefly from the kingdoms Energy Minister Khalid Al-Falih. The crude glut thats weighed on prices for three years has almost been wiped out by OPECs production cuts, but instead of celebrating victory the group is finding reasons to keep going and drive fuel inventories even lower.

Brent crude, the international benchmark, fell about 69 cents at the time of the tweet, before trading down 0.8 percent at $73.17 a barrel as of 2:31 p.m. in London.

The purpose of the shift in OPECs target was clear: Theres capacity for prices to rise even further beyond their current three-year high, Al-Falih said.

We have seen prices significantly higher in the past, twice as much as where we are today and the global economy has the ability to absorb costlier crude, the Saudi minister said.

International oil prices surged to almost $75 a barrel this week and U.S. gasoline is the highest in almost three years. Yet OPECs choke-hold on its own production is only getting tighter. Saudi Arabia is said to desire crude closer to $80.

Accusation Denied

The closest U.S. allies within the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries rejected Trumps accusation. Prices arent artificially high, said United Arab Emirates Oil Minister Suhail Al Mazrouei. Saudi Arabias Al-Falih echoed that view.

We are doing our role to correct the market, Al Mazrouei said. There are many things affecting the market, not just supply and demand, including geopolitics that are beyond OPECs control, he said.

Russia, Saudi Arabias most important ally in the production cuts, gave its backing to continuing the cuts until their end-2018 expiry. Theres no obligation to stop just because the pacts initial goal  stockpiles in industrialized nations back in line with the five-year average  is at hand, said Energy Minister Alexander Novak.

Story continues

Helping Texas

Novak also rejected Trumps accusation, while also arguing the groups production cuts have helped U.S. producers to boost output. The deal helped to restore the industry of Texas, he said in an interview with Bloomberg television.

Soaring U.S. shale production has been a nagging concern for OPEC and its allies, but the groups key players appear to be more fixated on the immediate benefits of high crude prices. Saudi Arabia needs to cover weighty domestic spending and attract investors to a partial sale of its state oil company, Aramco. Russia is relishing its new role as a major Middle East power broker, while also enjoying bigger financial gains than anyone from the accord.

Russia is keeping all options open and Saudi Arabia is talking about a 2019 extension, UBS Group AG analyst Giovanni Staunovo said by email.

Going Deeper

Novak wouldnt rule out some easing of the production cuts this year, but said it would depend entirely on the situation in the market. For now, the group is cutting ever deeper, and Saudi Arabias Al-Falih chided nations that havent been implementing their fair share of the curbs at the opening session of the Jeddah talks. Iraq and Kazakhstan have pledged to improve their compliance, according to the closing statement from the meeting.

Overall, OPEC and its allies cut 49 percent deeper than the agreed 1.8 million barrels a day in March, according to the statement. Thats the biggest reduction ever and the seventh month the group has surpassed its target, Novak said.

Much of those additional reductions werent intentional, according to the International Energy Agency. An economic crisis and  chronic mismanagement dragged Venezuelas output to a multi-decade low, while Angola lost production from aging fields. Others were temporary, such as field maintenance in Algeria. The involuntary cuts may keep getting deeper if Trump reimposes sanctions on Iran next month.

Ministers seemed to embrace the notion of a significantly tighter oil market. Saudi Arabia in particular gave a strong indication that higher prices wouldnt be a bad thing. Every year the world needs to develop new daily production capacity of about 4 million to 5 million barrels and invest hundreds of billions of dollars, but thats not happening right now, Al-Falih said.
Connecticut Water Service CTWS announced that it has received a proposal from Eversource Energy ES for acquisition. The offer was for $63.50 per share in cash and/or in Eversource common shares, however, Connecticut Water has rejected the offer. Connecticut Water remained committed to the earlier offer made by SJW Group SJW for merger (Read More: Connecticut Water Service to Merge With SJW Group)



Why Connecticut Water Rejected the Offer?



Connecticut Water remained committed to the earlier offer made by SJW Group, citing that it will be a merger of equals, and offer better opportunity for growth and return to shareholders. In the last five years, Connecticut Water has delivered 154% total return to the company's shareholders, while SJW Group returned 145% to its shareholders; both much higher compared with Eversource Energys return of 57% in the same time frame.



The combined company will maintain a strong "A" credit profile and is expected to pursue a share repurchase program of up to $100 million, increasing the shareholders value. The financial flexibility of the combined company will allow it to carry on with infrastructure upgrades, replacement of old mains and pipelines, and provide high-quality services to its customers.



In addition, the merger will be accretive to earnings of each company, and there will be ample financial flexibility to expand operation and compete with water utility operators in the fragmented industry.



Why Eversource Made the Offer?



Eversource Energy is an energy company and has now started to venture in the water utility space through the acquisition of Aquarion Water Company. The fragmented water utility space offers growth opportunity from the current levels.



Aquarion Water Companys service territory is in close proximity to Connecticut Waters service territory, so the acquisition of the latter would have expanded the service territory in the Northeast and provided superior services to the customers.



Bigger Picture



Consolidation is the need of the hour in the fragmented U.S. water utility space. The water utility infrastructure in the United States is getting old and needs ample investments, easier for bigger players to make. Consolidation would therefore drive the necessary infrastructure overhauls that have become imperative for the industry at large.



Another water utility, American Water Works Company AWK is very active and keeps on making strategic acquisitions to expand its footprint. In 2017, the company added 39,514 customers via acquisitions. American Water Works is in discussions to acquire another 23,000 customers through acquisitions.



Price Movement



Year to date, Connecticut Water has returned 13% against its industry's decline of 7.4%.

Story continues





Zacks Rank



Connecticut Water Service has a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

Wall Streets Next Amazon



Zacks EVP Kevin Matras believes this familiar stock has only just begun its climb to become one of the greatest investments of all time. Its a once-in-a-generation opportunity to invest in pure genius.



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Zacks Investment Research
By Philip Blenkinsop

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Commission put forward a proposed free-trade agreement with Japan for fast-track approval on Wednesday, hoping to avoid a repeat of the public protests that nearly derailed a trade pact with Canada two years ago.

The European Union and Japan concluded negotiations to create the world's largest economic area in December, signalling their rejection of the protectionist stance of U.S. President Donald Trump. Now they want to see it go into force.

The agreement would remove EU tariffs of 10 percent on Japanese cars and the 3 percent rate for most car parts. It would also scrap Japanese duties of some 30 percent on EU cheese and 15 percent on wines, and secure access to large public tenders in Japan.

The tariff reduction and removal would reduce by 1 billion euros (870.8 million) the cost of EU goods exported to Japan.

The Commission, which negotiates trade agreements for the EU, will present its proposals to the 28 EU members, along with another planned trade agreement with Singapore. EU countries, the European Parliament, and the Japanese parliament will have to give their assent before the trade pact can start.

The Commission hopes respective leaders will sign the EU-Japan agreement at a summit in Brussels in June or July and that both deals will come into force by the middle of 2019, an ambitious deadline based on past experience.

The EU is mindful of protests against and criticism of the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) in 2016, which culminated in a region of Belgium threatening to destroy the deal. It provisionally entered force last September.

Both Brussels and Tokyo want to ensure the agreement can enter force early in 2019, ideally before Britain leaves the EU at the end of March. If it does, it could apply automatically to Britain during a transition period until the end of 2020. Otherwise, it might not.

Many of Japan's carmakers serve the EU from British bases, and it has said having a deal in force during the transition would buy it more time to establish a separate trade agreement with Britain.

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One reason the Japan deal may get rapid approval is that it does not deal with investment protection, which critics say allows multinational companies to influence public policy with the threat of legal action.

The agreement could then enter force after approval by the national governments and the European Parliament, rather than also having to secure clearance from national and even regional parliaments.

In fact, EU and Japanese negotiators have not agreed on the way in which foreign investors should be protected.

(Reporting by Philip Blenkinsop; Editing by Robert-Jan Bartunek, Larry King and Andrew Heavens)
With a majority vote, the European Parliament has reached an agreement to enforce closer regulation of cryptocurrencies.

A December 2017 agreement with the European Council that proposed closer regulation of cryptocurrencies to prevent their abuse in money laundering and terrorism financing has found support from EU Parliament members in a vote on Thursday, a press release revealed.

The new legislation, which seeks to completely erode the anonymity associated with cryptocurrency, exchange platforms and custodian wallet providers, passed after 574 votes for and 13 votes against with 60 abstentions.

Criminal behavior hasnt changed, MEP and co-rapporteur Krisjanis Karins from Latvia said, adding:

Criminals use anonymity to launder their illicit proceeds or finance terrorism. This legislation helps address the threats to our citizens and the financial sector by allowing greater access to the information about the people behind firms and by tightening rules regulating virtual currencies and anonymous prepaid cards.

Accordingly, crypto exchange platforms and service providers have to be registered and will be required to apply due diligence controls for customers while adhering to customer verification requirements.

Co-rapporteur Judith Sargentini from the Netherlands claimed billions of euros were being lost to money laundering, terrorism financing, tax evasion and avoidance that should instead be going to fund schools, hospitals and infrastructure in the European Union.

She added:

With this new legislation, we introduce tougher measures, widening the duty of financial entities to undertake customer due diligence.

The updated directive, an extension of which will cover all forms of crypto exchange service providers, will be published in the European Unions Official Journal and go into force three days after. EU member states will then have 18 months to transpose the rules into their nations respective laws.

Featured image from Shutterstock.



The post European Union Votes for Closer Regulation of Cryptocurrencies appeared first on CCN.


Abbott (ABT) reported earnings 30 days ago. What's next for the stock? We take a look at earnings estimates for some clues.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently raised its growth forecast for the German economy. Further, leading economic research institutes in Germany have stated that they expect the country to grow more than they had initially projected in 2018.

Germanys finance ministry also stated that after the current economic slowdown, Europes largest economy would rebound in spring on the back of strong demand of its products in domestic and global markets. Such favorable and broadly encouraging factors make Germany a hotbed for investors. So, it would be prudent to place your bet on stocks from the Deutschland.

IMF and Germanys Economic Institutes Raise Growth Forecast

On Apr 17, the IMF raised its 2018 growth forecast for the German economy. The international body, based out of Washington, stated that it expects Europes largest economy to expand at the rate of 2.5% during the current year. The current forecast is an upward revision of 0.2 percentage points from IMFs January projection. Moreover, it also expects the 2019 projection to be around the calendar-adjusted 2%.

The current forecast closely is in-line with the 2.5% pace of growth that Germany achieved in 2017. That was the strongest growth rate experienced since 2011. Meanwhile, Germanys government had stated in January that it expects the European giant to grow 2.4% this year.

On Apr 18, the Spring Joint Economic Forecast, published by Germanys leading economic research institutes, predicted that the country would attain a growth rate of 2.2% in 2018 and about 2% in 2019. This projection was an upward revision from 2% and 1.8%, respectively, released in fall 2017.

Head of Economic Forecasting at ifo institute in Munich, Timo Wollmershauser stated that Germanys economy is burgeoning. However, the air is getting thinner as unused capacities are shrinking, he added, He also advised the German government against splurging too much on public spending despite a budget surplus at their disposal. Wollmershauser reasoned that such a stance strengthens economic stability and sustainability.

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Cooldown in First Quarter Momentary

Germanys economy is largely expected to cooldown in the first quarter of 2018. The finance ministry stated that though growth might slow down, strong domestic and international demand would keep the overall economy upbeat. It also stated that an uptick in corporate investments and exports have been pivotal in boosting economic growth.

Tax revenues from the federal government and the 16 regional states increased 4.1% year over year in the January to March period. This is just below the 4.2% forecast for 2018. The cooldown in growth has been attributed to recent factors like a potential trade war, the Syrian strife as well as a decline in retail sales in the first quarter of 2018.

Further, Germany also suffered a slide in economic confidence in April, with its Zew index dipping to -8.2 this month. Zew President Achim Wambach commented on Apr 19 that the decline was the combined result of trade war concerns, the Syrian war and a dip in production and exports in the last three months. However, the government stated that all these hindrances were momentary and that the economy is expected to rebound in spring.

Labor Market Remains Upbeat

The labor market has remained intact in Germany in recent months. The jobless rate in the country dipped to a seasonally-adjusted 5.3% last month. In other words, the number of people who remained unemployed in Germany declined to below 2.5 million in the last month. There was also about 19,000 lesser number of people remaining jobless in March when compared to February.

Moreover, leading economic institutes in Germany stated that they expect the number of people employed to significantly surge to 44.9 million in 2018 from 44.3 million in 2017, with the overall unemployment rate dropping to as low as 5.2%.

4 Best Stocks to Buy

IMFs recent forecast on Germanys economic growth and encouraging comments from the countrys finance ministry indicate its resilience to the recent economic cooldown. Further, as the job market remains upbeat amid budget surplus and strong domestic and global demand, it calls for investing in German stocks.

In this context, we have selected four stocks that are expected to gain from Germanys economic resilience. These four stocks flaunt a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

Fresenius Medical Care AG & Co. KGaA FMS is a provider of dialysis and related healthcare services based out of Bad Homburg.

The expected earnings growth rate for the current year is 31.22%. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for the current year has improved 7.8% over the last 60 days. Fresenius has gained 7% in the last six months.

Deutsche Bank Aktiengesellschaft DB is a Frankfurt-based provider of finance and investment related services to private, corporate as well as institutional clients.

For the current year, the expected earnings growth rate is more than 100% and the Zacks Consensus Estimate has improved 6.1% over the last 60 days. Deutsche Bank has gained 4.6% in the last six months.

Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft VLKAY is a manufacturer and seller of automobiles in Europe, North America, South America, and the Asia-Pacific regions headquartered in Wolfsburg.

The expected earnings growth rate for the current year is 18.9%. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for the current year has improved 0.6% over the last 60 days. Volkswagen has gained 20.7% in the last six months.

LEG Immobilien AG LEGIF is an owner, developer and manager of residential properties in Germanybased out of Dusseldorf.

The expected earnings growth rate for the current year is 15.8%. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for the current year has improved 5.7% over the last 60 days. Volkswagen has gained more than 100% in the last six months.

Wall Streets Next Amazon

Zacks EVP Kevin Matras believes this familiar stock has only just begun its climb to become one of the greatest investments of all time. Its a once-in-a-generation opportunity to invest in pure genius.

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Zacks Investment Research
By Duncan Miriri

NAIROBI, April 20 (Reuters) - Mawingu Networks, a Microsoft backed Kenyan start-up using underutilised television frequencies, aims to triple rural broadband users in the next two years, its chief executive said.

Only 40 percent of the East African nation's 45 million people have access to high-speed Internet, through fibre and smart phones, offering firms like Mawingu, which uses so-called TV white spaces technology, and Liquid Telecom to compete on cost with telecom operators such as Safaricom.

Since its establishment in 2013, Mawingu, which means cloud in Swahili, has set up 1,500 Internet hotspots in and around Nanyuki, a market town of 50,000 about two hours drive from Nairobi, linking 600 small businesses and 11,000 active users.

"I would like to be three times this size within 18-24 months and from there I would like to be 50 times this size. I would like to have a nationwide rural connectivity network," Mawingu CEO Tim Hobbs told Reuters in an interview.

Such increases would help Mawingu to grow revenue and to become profitable, he said, without giving a timeframe.

The firm is using a $4 million loan from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) to expand, he said, adding that Mawingu would raise more funds later this year.

"We are not profitable yet but we are heading that way," said Hobbs, adding that Mawingu's partners needed to see it making money in a sustainable way from the Microsoft TV white spaces technology, which is cheaper than fibre or providing 3G and 4G using base stations.

Mawingu sells 650 megabytes of data for 100 shillings ($1.00) more than the 200 megabytes sold for 100 shillings by established operators.

The Kenyan government forced broadcasters to migrate to digital from analogue in 2014, to free up spectrum frequencies as part of a drive to boost Internet connections.

"Our network will reach parts that other networks can't reach," Hobbs said.

Microsoft, which has a representative on Mawingu's board, said it viewed such partnerships as key to its goal of ensuring the world is connected.

"For businesses and individuals alike to be able to participate in that digital transformation and take advantage of it they need to be connected to broadband," Lutz Liob, who works with Microsoft Africa, said. ($1 = 99.9500 Kenyan shillings) (Editing by Alexander Smith)
Year after year, Motorola churns out some of the best inexpensive Android phones money can buy and parent company Lenovo is eager to keep that streak alive. That's where the new Moto G6 and G6 Play come in  Motorola has embraced some of the trends that have made this year's premium phones so palatable, and that's great news for smartphone shoppers who don't feel like shelling out flagship-level wads of cash.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking: isn't there a usually a G Plus model too? You'd be correct: the G6 Plus packs a 5.9-inch, 18:9 screen and a camera with an f/1.7 aperture and dual-pixel autofocus. The reason info is so scarce is because Moto doesn't plan to bring it to the United States  no launch means no hands-on time and very little in the way of detail. Boo. It will be arriving in the UK alongside the other G6 models on May 2nd, though, starting at 269 (around $382 converted).

I'm not too disappointed, though, because the standard Moto G6 is actually quite a bit nicer than I expected. For one, it has the sort of glass-wrapped body one would normally associate with premium phones  the device's back is wrapped in Gorilla Glass 3 for scratch and scuff protections, though it probably won't help much in the event you drop it. The mostly metal bodies we got with last year's G5 series could handle meetings with asphalt much better, but the Moto X4-inspired style on display will be worth the trade-off for some. (Count me in on that one.)

Motorola also jumped on the extra-tall screen bandwagon with its 18:9 Max Vision display  this one in particular is 5.7 inches and runs at Full HD+. In general it's plenty crisp and vivid for a budget phone, but as with earlier models, you might run into some trouble in direct sunlight. Even when we popped outside to snap a few photos of the New York skyline  in the shade of a tall hotel, no less  it was sometimes difficult to read.

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And speaking of the camera, Motorola fitted its G6 with a dual camera comprised of a 12-megapixel and 5-megapixel sensor. Diehards will remember that last year's G5S Plus was the first Moto device with a dual camera, and the experience here seems very similar  expect a pleasant level of detail and lively colors. Having two rear cameras also makes depth effects possible, and under solid lighting conditions, the dual camera did an impressive job isolating our mostly willing subjects from the background. Not bad at all for a $250/219 phone. Like a handful of other smartphone makers, Motorola has also released the value of weaving AI into its camera experience, but its approach is a little different.

Unlike, say, Huawei's P20, the G6 doesn't recognize what's in front of the camera and tweak its settings accordingly. Once you've downloaded the necessary databases, though, you can point the phone at landmarks and other objects to get more information about them without having to leave the camera app. It's a great idea in theory, but it could use a little fine-tuning. When I pointed the camera at One World Trade  easily one of the most recognizable landmarks in New York City  the camera drew a total blank. Not a great start. Object recognition fared much better, though. When I pointed the camera at an apple, the G6 offered up a surprisingly pertinent list of web links. Even better, the G6 correctly identified my SLR as a Canon 6D and threw up links to even more information. I didn't get to test these AI chops too thoroughly but considering the Galaxy S9 and LG's V30S ThinQ couldn't correctly identify my specific camera model, it sure seems like Motorola's in-house AI efforts are on the right track.

The 8-megapixel front camera has gained some new (if familiar) tricks, too. Most notably, you can now gussy up your face with a set of Live Photo effects in case you want to strap on a set of virtual rabbit ears or wail into a microphone  complete with concert lighting  without jumping into Snapchat or Instagram. You'll also be able to use that camera to unlock the phone with your face, but it's a purely 2D solution  that is, it checks your face against stored image data, which makes for super-fast (albeit less secure) authentication.

As usual, Motorola didn't stray too far from stock Android 8.0 Oreo here, and I'm still perfectly pleased by that. That light touch with software combined with an octa-core Snapdragon 450 keep everything moving at a respectable pace  just don't expect to do any heavy gaming on this thing. Depending on the model, you'll also get either 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, or a slightly snappier 4GB of RAM with 64GB of storage. Don't fret about free space too much, though: you can add microSD cards as large as 128GB. There's also a 10W fast charging USB-C adapter in the box, for rapid refills.

The dual camera and the AI frills won't appeal to everyone, which is why Motorola put together a more practical option: the Moto G6 Play. At $200/169, it's a less expensive option than the standard G6, but you'll get a much bigger, 4,000mAh battery for your trouble. Combine that with a 5.7-inch Max Vision screen running at 720p and a less powerful Snapdragon 427 CPU and you've got a device that, while not tremendously speedy, should get you through your daily routine with plenty of battery life left over. (If performance is a concern, you could shell out a few extra bucks for an improved version with 3GB of RAM instead of 2GB, and 32GB of storage rather than 16GB.) Motorola claims the G6 Play can squeeze 36 hours of use out of a single charge, but we'll have to see about that.

Considering how well the regular G6's dual camera seemed during our hands-on time, it's a shame Motorola couldn't squeeze it into the less expensive G6 Play. Instead, there's a more traditional 13-megapixel rear camera (phase detection autofocus) with an LED flash sitting next to it. To Motorola's credit, however, the G6 Play definitely doesn't feel like a $200 phone  it's wrapped in a glossy non-Gorilla glass and has a reassuring heft to it.

Between these strong mid-range options and the more modest Moto Es the company also announced, it seems clear Motorola is trying to sew up the low-cost smartphone market for itself. The competition is only going to get more fierce as the year rolls on, but Motorola has proven itself to be one of the world's best  if not /the/ best outright  at crafting quality, inexpensive devices. Based off what I've seen so far, Moto just might hold onto that crown for another year.
One of the men arrested at a Philly Starbucks: This is not a 'black people thing, it's a people thing'

Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, who were arrested a week ago at a Philadelphia Starbucks, tell ABC News they hope what happened to them never happens again.

Starbucks plans to close all company-owned locations in the U.S. during the afternoon of May 29 for racial-bias training.

The two black men who were arrested a week ago at a Philadelphia Starbucks SBUX told ABC News on Thursday they hope what happened to them does not happen to anyone else.

Rashon Nelson, alongside Donte Robinson, said on "Good Morning America" he wants to "take this opportunity as a stepping stone to really stand up and show your greatness and that you are not judged by the color of your skin as our ancestors were or anyone else."

"This is not just a black people thing, it's a people thing," continued Nelson. "That's exactly what we want to see out of this, true change."

Nelson described the events of last Thursday, which were caught on video, posted online, and went viral on the internet, stirring outrage and protests over whether this was a case of racial profiling. He said he asked to use the restroom immediately after walking into the Starbucks. But he said he was told it was for paying customers only.

Robinson said they were there for a "real estate meeting" and that they had been "working on this for months." He said he conveyed that to the Starbucks employees when they asked if Nelson and he wanted anything to drink. "We're fine. We're just waiting for a meeting, and we'll be out really quick type thing."

When the police arrived in response to a 911 from the store about a disturbance, Robinson said he thought: "It can't be for us."

Nelson said, "As soon as they [officers] approached us, they said we have to leave. There was no question of  was there a problem here between you and the manager? [Or] what happened?"

"We wasn't read any rights," said Robinson. "Just double lock handcuffs, on our backs, and escorted out, and up into the squad car."

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Their attorney, Stewart Cohen  who appeared on ABC with Nelson and Robinson  said his clients were arrested for no reason. "The facts speak for themselves," he said. "There's not a single witness that says these young men were misbehaving in any way. And you can see and hear that on the video."

Neither the Philadelphia police nor Starbucks were immediately available to respond to CNBC's request for comments following the ABC interviews.

"These officers did absolutely nothing wrong," Philadelphia Police Commissioner Richard Ross, who is black, said Saturday.

Earlier this week, Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson told "GMA" it was "completely inappropriate" for the store to have called the police.

"Starbucks was built as a company that creates a warm, welcoming environment for all customers. That didn't happen here in this case," Johnson said Monday .

Cohen on Thursday said he approached Starbucks on behalf of his clients about entering into mediation to resolve the matter. He said Starbucks agreed, but stressed the discussions are confidential.

As for Robinson, he said, "I want to make sure this situation doesn't happen again. So what I want is for a young man or young men to not be not traumatized by this, and instead, motivate and inspire."

Starbucks on Tuesday said it plans to close all of its company-owned locations in the U.S., about 8,000 of them, during the afternoon of May 29 to conduct a racial-bias education program.

"We will learn from our mistakes and reaffirm our commitment to creating a safe and welcoming environment for every customer," Howard Schultz , executive chairman, said in a statement. The longtime leader Schultz stepped aside as CEO a little over a year ago to focus efforts to turn the Starbucks high-end Reserve Roastery-branded coffee bars into destination restaurants.

WATCH:





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FILE PHOTO: A man fixes a sign with OPEC's logo next to its headquarters' entrance before a meeting of OPEC oil ministers in Vienna, Austria, November 29, 2017. REUTERS/Heinz-Peter Bader/File Photo

By Rania El Gamal

JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia (Reuters) - A global oil glut has been virtually eliminated, according to a joint OPEC and non-OPEC technical panel, two sources familiar with the matter said, thanks in part to an OPEC-led supply cut deal in place since January 2017.

The meeting of the Joint Technical Committee (JTC) earlier on Thursday found that oil inventories in developed nations in March stood at 12 million barrels above the five-year average, one of the sources said. That's down from 340 million barrels above the average in January 2017.

The stated goal of the supply cut is to reduce the excess in oil stocks to that of the five-year average, although oil ministers have said other metrics should also be considered.

Although OPEC is closing in on the original target of the pact, there is no indication yet that top exporter Saudi Arabia or its allies want to wind down the supply cut.

Saudi Arabia would be happy to see crude rise to $80 or even $100 a barrel, three industry sources said, a sign Riyadh will seek no changes to the supply-cutting deal even though its original target is within sight.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, Russia and several other producers began to reduce supply in January 2017 in an attempt to erase a glut. They have extended the pact until December 2018 and meet in June to review policy.

Few OPEC sources call for an exit strategy. Most officials are talking of introducing additional inventory metrics to assess the success of the deal, and of a need to support investment in new production to avert any supply crunch.

The impression is that oil prices are seen as not yet high enough to encourage sufficient oil investment. Oil was trading above $74 on Thursday, having reached its highest since November 2014.

After the technical meeting, a ministerial panel of OPEC and non-OPEC producers called the JMMC gathers in Jeddah on Friday.

The ministers are expected to discuss the five-year average inventory metric on Friday, though the JTC has made no recommendations on this, the sources said.

OPEC's Secretariat in Vienna will be tasked to prepare a study with different scenarios on inventories, market fundamentals and the risks which might impact market stability such as possible U.S. sanctions on Iran, one of the source said.

(Reporting by Rania El Gamal, writing by Alex Lawler, editing by David Evans)
Shares slid more than 4 percent Thursday.

Sources tell CNBC Qualcomm is "very concerned" with the fate of an NXP Semiconductors deal.

Qualcomm also said Wednesday it had begun laying off employees as a cost-saving measure.

Qualcomm QCOM slid more than 4 percent Thursday after the company announced layoffs and said it would be withdrawing and refiling a merger application with Chinese authorities regarding a tie-up with Dutch semiconductor company NXP NXPI .

Sources tell CNBC that Qualcomm is "very concerned" with the fate of the deal. A Commerce Ministry spokesman said Thursday that the chipmakers would have to do more to resolve competition concerns.

"This deal will have significant influence in the industry and might have a negative impact on competition," the unnamed spokesman for the agency told Reuters. "Qualcomm's plan could not easily solve the problems relating to market competition."



Refiling extends the review period and the tender offer by three months to July 25.



The U.S. chipmaker has already received approval from eight of nine required global regulators to finalize the acquisition, with Chinese clearance the only one pending.

Qualcomm also said Wednesday it had begun laying off employees as a cost-saving measure, confirming at least part of an earlier report from Bloomberg that more than 1,500 employees would be cut.

Qualcomm employed roughly 34,000 people as of September.

The company in January said it would take steps to reduce annual costs by $1 billion, in part to win investors' support against a hostile takeover bid from rival chipmaker Broadcom AVGO .

That deal was ultimately blocked by U.S. officials, in an effort to protect U.S. tech companies from growing Chinese competition.

With Thursday's dip, Qualcomm is down more than 10 percent in 2018 and and more than 20 percent off its 52-week high of $69.28.

 Reuters and CNBC's David Faber contributed to this report.





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Stocks in the railroad space are being aided by momentum in the U.S. economy, with more goods being transported across the country.

The market is expected to continue its winning streak, banking on a rise in wages and more confident consumers. Moreover, the new tax law (Tax Cuts and Jobs Act) should boost profits further and drive stock prices of the participants of this key sector higher.

The robust financial health of railroads is reflective of the improved scenario for its players. The rebound has been aided by the much-improved scenario pertaining to the intermodal unit, a key revenue generating sector for railroads.

The sector has bounced back after a disappointing 2016. Intermodal revenues are likely to grow this year as well. In fact, intermodal shipments are expected to expand 4.2% in 2018, strengthening the top line for railroads in turn. Improvement pertaining to another key metric  operating ratio (operating expenses as a percentage of revenues)  is another positive for railroads.

In view of the above tailwinds, the fourth-quarter earnings season had been a good one for railroad stocks. Notwithstanding a few headwinds including some lingering impacts of devastating hurricanes, railroad companies continued the earnings momentum in the December quarter. We note that a number of companies in the space  including prominent names such as Norfolk Southern Corp. (NSC), CSX Corp. (CSX), Kansas City Southern (KSU) and Genesee & Wyoming, Inc. (GWR)  delivered an earnings beat in the quarter.

Volume Growth Likely to Drive Railroads in Q1

The stocks are likely to perform impressively in the first quarter of 2018 driven by volume growth. For example, the Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) railroad  Union Pacific Corp. (UNP)  expects volume growth in the soon-to-be-reported quarter to increase in the low single-digit range. Strong performance at the intermodal unit is expected to aid results. You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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Efforts of railroads to check costs should boost their bottom lines further. For example, at the 2018 Investor Conference held in March, CSX stated that its transition to precision scheduled railroading is progressing well. The new model will lead to top-line growth on the back of volume and pricing gains from the merchandise and intermodal segments. Moreover, scheduled railroading is anticipated to provide greater agility to the coal markets. This, in turn, will drive growth.

Railroads should continue to see operating ratio-related improvements in the first quarter of 2018. The lesser the value of operating ratio the better, as it implies that more cash is available to the company to reward shareholders through dividends/buybacks.

In fact, the transportation sector, which includes railroads, is expected to see double-digit year-over-year earnings growth in the first quarter. For more details about the earnings of this sector and others, please read our Earnings Trends report.

Zacks Industry Rank Highlights Headwinds

Despite the above-mentioned tailwinds, the Zacks Industry Rank # 247 (of 250 plus groups) carried by the Zacks Rail Industry highlights that the industry is not bereft of headwinds. This unfavorable rank places the companies within the bottom 4% slot of the Zacks industries.

We classify our entire 250-plus industries into two groups: the top half (i.e. industries with the best average Zacks Rank) and the bottom half (industries with the worst average Zacks Rank).

Using a weeks rebalance, the top half beat the bottom half by a factor of more than 2 to 1 over the last decade.

Click here to know more: About Zacks Industry Rank

The Concerns

It is a well-documented fact that the fortunes of railroads are tied to coal, since the latter is an important revenue-generating commodity for the sector. Despite President Trumps pro-coal attitude, the coal industry is not yet out of the woods. In fact, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), coal production is expected to be 736 million short tons (MMst), down 5% year over year.

The primary reasons for this are a drop in U.S. coal exports and a decline in usage of coal in electricity generation in the United States. The struggles related to coal are likely to hurt railroads in the first quarter. For example, Norfolk Southern stated at the J.P. Morgan Aviation, Transportation and Industrials conference that coal volumes had declined 6% as of Mar 10. Naturally, any negative development for the commodity does not bode well for railroad operators.

Declining automotive volumes due to sluggish vehicle production in the United States, have been hurting railroads for the past few quarters and the story is unlikely to be different in the first quarter. Union Pacific on its fourth-quarter conference call said that light vehicle sales for full-year 2018 are projected at 16.9 million units, reflecting a 2% decline from the 2017 levels.

Moreover, service issues represent a major headwind for the sector and may hurt its customer base unless resolved quickly. CSX was badly hurt by such issues last year. Canadian railroad operator  Canadian National Railway Co. (CNI)  is the latest victim of operational problems, which are likely to hurt its first-quarter results.

Moreover, uncertainty regarding the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) represents a major overhang on shares of railroads, particularly those like Kansas City Southern, which generate a significant portion of revenues from U.S.-Mexico shipments. Other factors, like the weather-related disruptions  like the ones last year which resulted in freight costs skyrocketing  and the dispute regarding the proposals concerning reciprocal switching, are further challenges for railroads.

Valuation Picture

The Zacks Rail industry is up 17.1% over the past year, modestly outperforming the S&P 500 indexs 15.5% gain in the same time period. The industry has struggled since January 9th, likely reflecting the NAFTA uncertainty.

The industrys valuation picture remains attractive, with multiples becoming a lot more reasonable following the recent sell off. The Zacks Rail industry currently trades 16.4X forward 12-month consensus EPS estimates, which is down from 19.4X back in December 2017. This compares to the current forward 12-month P/E multiple of 17X for the S&P 500 index.

Over the last 5 years, the industry has traded as high as 19.4X forward 12-month consensus estimates and as low as 13.4X, with a 5-year median of 16.4X. In other words, the industry is trading at the same level as the 5-year median.

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This article was originally published on ETFTrends.com.

Semiconductor stocks and the related exchange traded funds sold off Thursday after Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM) issued a bearish forecast, including a warning on smartphone demand.

TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker and a major Apple supplier, revised its full-year revenue target to the low end of its earlier forecast, according to Reuters. TSMC, also a supplier to Qualcomm and Nvidia Corp, said it expects growth this year of 5 percent for the global semiconductor industry, weaker than an earlier forecast of 5-7 percent.

The news from Taiwan Semiconductor weighed on chip ETFs, including the VanEck Vectors Semiconductor ETF (SMH) , of which Taiwan Semiconductor is one of the largest holdings. In fact, SMH was eyeing its worst one-day performance since November as it clings to the $100 area.

Related: Can AI Transform the Health Care Sector?

That perch above the $100 level is notable in its own right, but this region, home to the 160-day moving average, has been especially supportive in recent weeks. It also sits right above SMH's year-to-date breakeven point. And with the exchange-traded fund (ETF) again testing these critical technical levels, options are trading at a rapid pace, reports Schaeffer's Investment Research.

Semiconductor ETF Risks

There are some risks to consider with semiconductor stocks and ETFs. For example, President Donald Trump has pushed for restrictions on trade barriers with China, which might pose a threat to the sector. China is a key market for the global semiconductor industry, consuming more than $100 billion worth of semiconductors or roughly one-third of the world population.

In fact, intraday volume on the chip ETF was last seen at a fresh 52-week high of 169,337 contracts. The majority of these have been puts, which have already tripled their average daily volume. New positions are being opened at the August 95 put, the most popular option today, but it's not clear whether the puts were bought or sold, according to Schaeffer's.

Story continues

Related: 2 ETFs to Aggressively Play Tech Sector Trends

To be fair, there was also strong call activity in SMH's May 106 calls.

Worldwide semiconductor revenue is forecast to total $401.4 billion in 2017, an increase of 16.8 percent from 2016, according to Gartner, Inc. This will be the first time semiconductor revenue has surpassed $400 billion. The market reached the $300 billion milestone seven years ago, in 2010, and surpassed $200 billion in 2000.

For more information on the tech segment, visit our technology category.

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Skechers USA Inc.s SKX first-quarter 2018 earnings came in line with analysts expectations, following two successive quarters of earnings beat. This Manhattan Beach, CA-based company recorded earnings of 75 cents a share that met the Zacks Consensus Estimate and the higher end of managements projection of 70-75 cents. The bottom line surged 25% from 60 cents reported in the year-ago period buoyed by improved top-line performance.



The company delivered net sales of $1,250.1 million that increased 16.5% from the year-ago quarter and also came ahead of the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $1,198 million for the sixth straight quarter. Notably, the top line comfortably surpassed managements guidance of $1,175-$1,200 million.



Sales for the quarter mainly gained from healthy performances at the international wholesale business, company-owned global retail business and domestic wholesale business.



In spite of the decent outcome, the stock plunged 22.7% during after-market trading session yesterday.



What Hurt the Stock?



Analysts pointed that bleak outlook for the second quarter hurt investor sentiment. Management now projects second-quarter earnings between 38 cents and 43 cents a share compared with 38 cents delivered in the year-ago period. We note that the companys guided range is significantly down from the current Zacks Consensus Estimate of 56 cents, which could witness a downward revision in the coming days.



Additionally, the company anticipates net sales in the band of $1.120-$1.145 billion compared with $1,025.9 million reported in the prior-year quarter. Sales projection includes an expected shift in shipments from the second quarter to the later part of the year for quite a few important international distributors and domestic accounts. Analysts polled by Zacks expect second-quarter net sales to be $1.16 billion.

We note that shares of this designer, marketer and distributor of footwear has increased 3.8% in the past three months compared with the industrys decline of 1.2%.

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Skechers U.S.A., Inc. Price, Consensus and EPS Surprise

Skechers U.S.A., Inc. Price, Consensus and EPS Surprise | Skechers U.S.A., Inc. Quote

Lets Delve Deep



Skechers domestic e-commerce business contributed to sales growth in the quarter, registering an increase of 12.7%. The company currently operates e-commerce sites in Chile, Germany, the U.K., Spain and Canada.



Gross profit for the reported quarter grew 22.4% to $583.1 million, while gross margin expanded 230 basis points (bps) to 46.7%. Operating income came in at $148.8 million, up 19.6% from the prior-year quarter, while operating margin increased 30 bps to 11.9%.



Segmental Sales Synopsis



The domestic wholesale revenues rose 8.5% year over year. The company shipped 15.1% more pairs compared with the prior-year period. However, average price per pair declined 5.7%.



Skechers international wholesale business revenues, which constituted 46.2% of total sales, advanced 17.9% on the back of a 25.7% rise in wholly-owned subsidiary and joint venture (JV) businesses, offset by 22.2% decline in distributor sales. The companys JV business registered growth of 25.4%, while wholly-owned international subsidiary business grew by 25.9% for the quarter.



On a combined basis, global company-owned retail business sales grew 26.4% driven by higher store count and comps growth of 9.5%. Domestic retail sales rose 13.5%, while International retail sales surged 62.1%. Comps increased 7% at domestic retail stores and 17.6% at international retail stores.



Store Update



Skechers operated 657 company-owned retail outlets globally, comprising 203 international locations at the end of the quarter under review. During the quarter, the company opened 15 stores and closed three. So far in the second quarter, the company has opened two new concept outlets. Looking ahead, the company anticipates opening additional 60-75 company-owned SKECHERS stores and remodel or relocate 15-20 existing stores.



During the quarter, 79 third-party owned stores were opened, including 21 in China, 19 in India, seven in South Korea, three in both Indonesia and Taiwan, two each in Australia, England, Israel, Netherlands, Japan, Turkey and Nigeria and one each in Denmark, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Malaysia, Portugal, Serbia, Sweden, Switzerland, the UAE, Ukraine and Vietnam. The company shuttered 27 stores during the quarter.



So far in the second quarter, the company has opened nine third-party owned stores with plans to open another 450-475 third-party owned SKECHERS branded stores to in 2018.



Other Financial Aspects



Skechers ended the quarter with cash and cash equivalents of $700.1 million (down $36.4 million from Dec 31, 2017), long-term borrowings (net of current installments) of $70.6 million, and shareholders equity of $1,946.2 million, excluding non-controlling interest of $137.2 million.



During the quarter, the company bought back roughly 76,000 shares at a cost of $3 million under its existing share buyback program. The company still has approximately $147 million remaining under its share repurchase program of $150 million to be utilized by Feb 8, 2021.



Capital expenditures incurred during the quarter were $34.5 million on store openings, remodels along with corporate office upgrades. Management now envisions capital expenditures of about $50-$55 million for the remainder of 2018, reflecting planned opening of stores, corporate upgrades and store remodeling projects.



Skechers currently carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).



Looking for High Performance Stocks



Macy's, Inc. M has a long-term earnings growth rate of 8.5% and a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.



Nordstrom, Inc. JWN, with a long-term earnings growth rate of 6%, carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy).



Kohl's Corporation KSS has a long-term earnings growth rate of 6.7% and a Zacks Rank #2.



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Fairfax, VA, April 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Through its awards program, AFCEA International honors the extraordinary contributions of individuals in the communications, electronics, intelligence and information technology disciplines. In addition, the associations chapters are recognized for their exceptional support to AFCEA.

Among the winners of the top awards are:

Chairs Superior Performance Award: Recognizes superior service to AFCEA over a sustained period of time.

Lt. Gen. Michael J. Basla, USAF (Ret.), CACI

Harri Larsson, Tinnander Teknik

Sandi King, Cisco

Charlie Allen Award for Distinguished Intelligence Service: Honors senior-level intelligence professionals who are making significant contributions.

Maureen Baginski, chairman, National Intelligence University Board of Visitors

Adm. Jon L. Boyes Medal for Distinguished Service to AFCEA: Presented for exceptional career service to AFCEA.

Chief Master Sgt. Tom Gwaltney, USAF (Ret.)

Gen. James M. Rockwell AFCEAN of the Year: Given for exemplary service to AFCEA during the past year.

Jane Hefner-Brightwell, Walker & Associates Inc.

Distinguished Award for Excellence in Engineering: Awarded for sustained excellence in engineering.

Jacqueline JanningLask, Agile Combat Support, AFLCMC/WNE

Meritorious Rising Star Award for Achievement in Engineering: Recognizes junior/mid-level excellence in the engineering field.

Dr. Christopher Niessen The MITRE Corporation

Distinguished Award for Excellence in Information Technology: Awarded for sustained excellence in information technology.

Travis M. Harris U.S. Marine Corps Forces Europe and Africa

Meritorious Rising Star Award for Achievement in Information Technology: Recognizes junior/mid-level excellence in the information technology field.

2nd Lt. Dillon Andrews, USAF 86th Communications Squadron

Exceptional Contribution to STEM Education Award: Honors an individual or team that has made significant contributions to furthering science, technology, engineering and math education in K-12, colleges and universities.

Master Sgt. Shaun Herron, USAF, 33rd Network Warfare Squadron

Technology Innovation Award: Recognizes an individual or team that has created an innovative and proven new technology product, service, process or solution.

Joshua Lee, Defense Information Systems AgencyPacific

Additional individuals recognized received the Medal of Merit, Meritorious Service and Leadership awards. The winners will be honored May 14 prior to the Defensive Cyber Operations Symposium May 15-17 at the Baltimore Convention Center.

###

AFCEA International, established in 1946, is a non-profit membership association serving the military, government, industry and academia. Join online.
A South Korean court has fined two individuals found guilty of operating a bitcoin pyramid scheme that amassed over 26 billion won, approx. $24 million, from investors.

In a ruling on April 19, Judge Hwang Jin-jin of the Incheon District Court in Korea issued sentences in fines of $15 million and $8 million for two unnamed individuals found to operate a pyramid scheme that raked in 16 billion won and 10.6 billion, respectively.

According to Korean news agency Yonhap, the first individual  who faces the higher fine  is seen as the mastermind of the multi-level investment scheme based out of the Philippines that promised investors high returns through purported investments in bitcoin. The other individual, who served as chairman of the company managing the investments, is currently on the run with Interpol engaging in an active search for the fraudster.

In roughly translated statements, Judge Hwang reportedly said in a ruling:

The multi-level transactions is a risk to disturb the socio-economic order and mass production of many victims.

The considerably large fines were based on the volume of investment poured into the fraud by many victims, the judge added.

Cryptocurrency-related fraud continues to be prevalent in eastern Asia with scammers offering unrealistically high short-term returns by claiming to invest in cryptocurrencies to justify heightened earnings.

This month alone, law enforcement authorities and regulators from Vietnam, China, and the Philippines have cracked down on Ponzi schemes and warned the public against investments in multi-level schemes.

Vietnam, in particular, saw an unprecedented $660 million ICO-related fraud that conned over 30,000 investors across the country.

Earlier this week, Chinese police arrested multiple individuals operating a nationwide cryptocurrency pyramid scheme that saw over 13,000 participating investors contribute a total of 80 million yuan ($13 million).

In a notice on Wednesday, the Philippines securities regulator published a list of fourteen online cryptocurrency investment schemes, urging the public against any participation while warning operators of significant fines and criminal prosecution that includes sentencing of 21 years in prison.

Featured image from Shutterstock.



The post South Korea Dismantles $24 Million Bitcoin Pyramid Scheme appeared first on CCN.


The engine failure on Tuesday's Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 killed 43-year-old Jennifer Riordan and left the other 149 passengers and crew clasping hands and breathing through oxygen masks as the plane rapidly descended to land at Philadelphia International Airport 22 minutes later. But as Riordan's family and the surviving passengers aboard the ill-fated flight from New York to Dallas cope with the tragic event, lawsuits and litigation are likely to begin soon.

In the wake of most air disasters, aviation lawyers are sought out by the families of the deceased victims, given that it's considered unethical for lawyers to solicit or contact these family members. Legal experts who spoke with Newsweek expect the family of Riordan, whose cause of death was blunt impact trauma from the engine's exploded parts, to file a death action lawsuit based on potential negligence or defective manufacturing of the plane's engine.

Michel Baumeister of New York City's Baumeister & Samuels, P.C., has represented the families of passengers aboard dozens of the most high-profile airline disasters of the past 40 years, including 1996's TWA Flight 800 and 1998's Pan Am Flight 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland. Baumeister also represented the families of passengers aboard all four planes hijacked and crashed on September 11, 2001. Baumeister explained to Newsweek the multiple factors attorneys consider when bringing forth an aviation lawsuit. In a domestic U.S. incident such as Southwest Flight 1380, the first and most important issue to consider is whom to sue. The first potential wrongdoer to consider would be the party responsible for the maintenance of the plane, which, in this case, would be Southwest Airlines.

Trending: Delta Plane Makes Emergency Landing in Atlanta After Small Fire in Engine

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If the pilot, Tammie Jo Shults, is found to be at fault for the incident after the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation, this still falls under Southwests umbrella for being sued. Although several passengers and aviation experts have since applauded Shults as a hero for managing a successful landing of the damaged plane.

A second potential wrongdoer is the manufacturer of the plane or component of the plane that malfunctioned. In this case, the Boeing 737-700 engine was made by CFM International, a joint venture between General Electric and the French engineering company Safran. Both Boeing and CFM International are manufacturers who could be sued, given that most airlines do not design or manufacture their engines or other individual parts of the planethey simply assemble the components and design the overall aircraft. As The New York Times reported, Southwest inspected the plane and engine that malfunctioned just two days before the fatal incident. This was Southwests first passenger fatality in the airlines 51-year history.

NTSB investigators said a routine visual inspection of the engines may not have detected a problem lurking within the machinery, such as metal fatigue. The NTSB suggested that an ultrasound inspection of the engine could have potentially discovered the issue. In 2016, CFM International recommended that airlines conduct such ultrasound tests of the blades, but carriers in the U.S. arent required to follow manufacturer guidelines.

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A third level of potential parties to sue is an independent contractor in cases where one company could have produced the fans in the engine, but a separate group may have manufactured the turbines.

The federal government could be considered a possible wrongdoer if the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration handled the emergency poorly, though Baumeister added, It doesnt appear to me that the feds did anything wrong in respect to air traffic control.

In addition to considering whom to sue, a complex issue in aviation lawsuits is where to bring the lawsuit. After lawyers consider who is liable in a lawsuit, they must then consider what they are seeking in damages. Baumeister represented passengers aboard SwissAir Flight 111, the 1998 flight that crashed between New York and Nova Scotia, killing all 215 passengers and 14 crew. Plaintiffs in that case received millions in compensation for death, injury and losses associated with income and medical costs. But a U.S. judge threw out additional claims for $16 billion in punitive damages in 2002.

Baumeister explained to Newsweek that generally, a lawsuit will proceed in the state where the crash occurred and most lawyers begin by finding the best possible state laws for seeking damages and selecting juries. However, in the case of Southwest Flight 1380 and dozens of other aviation incidents, the engine malfunction occurred about 6 miles in the air above Pennsylvania.

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Jennifer Riordans family could bring a death action lawsuit based upon the potential negligence of the four levels of parties listed above. But in a death action lawsuit, the domicile of the deceased will govern, and the Albuquerque residents family would have to file the lawsuit in New Mexico.

One of Baumeisters most high-profile clients was Todd Beamer, the passenger aboard United Airlines Flight 93 on 9/11 who famously declared lets roll before storming the cockpit. Although the plane went down in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, Beamers residence in New Jersey pushed the case over to that state.

The surviving passengers aboard Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 have the option of filing lawsuits based on the "fear of impending death or injury." Passengers like Marty Martinez, who Facebook Livestreamed the chaotic scene aboard the plane, have the option of proving their "fearful" state and mental damages as a result of the incident.

As Robert Clifford, founder of Chicago-based Clifford Law Offices, told Fortune, All of the passengers here, and the crew, will likely have claims."

Even if these people were not physically injured, Clifford said, many, many of them will experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from Newsweek
By Andrew Hay

(Reuters) - The first reaction of Southwest Airlines (LUV.N) passenger Marty Martinez when an engine exploded on the plane on Tuesday was to live stream what he feared might be his last minutes of life.

It was possibly the first time someone who thought he was going to die in a plane crash live-streamed the experience.

Martinez lived. One passenger, bank executive Jennifer Riordan, was killed when she was partially pulled through a shattered plane window.

But while Martinez, who runs a Dallas marketing agency, said on Wednesday he wanted to communicate with loved ones, many social media users attacked him in expletive-laced postings, with one saying Martinez himself should have been the one who died.

"Trying to contact loved ones is one thing, but to morbidly video and take pictures to post publicly is completely disgusting. Evidently the wrong person was taken from that flight," Dennis Miller said on Facebook in a posting that included colourful language to describe Martinez.

Many social media users defended Martinez's use of Facebook Live, but some said he violated passengers' privacy and sought cheap fame. Others said he was selfish to focus on messaging instead of on the critically injured passenger a few rows away.

"You represent the worst of social media," Tom Burke said on Facebook.

The event illustrates thorny issues facing platforms such as Google's (GOOGL.O) YouTube, Twitter's (TWTR.N) Periscope and Facebook, already under pressure over privacy and news curating, over hosting live-streaming material.

Facebook did not respond to a request for comment on Martinez's posts.

Earlier this month, Facebook vice president Fidji Simo talked about the power of live streaming.

"Live can be a powerful tool in connecting and supporting communities during moments of crisis, Simo said in a post.

Since 2016, the average number of daily Facebook Live broadcasts has doubled year over year, with 3.5 billion live broadcasts since then.

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"THIS IS NOT ONLINE TELEVISION"

Martinez explained on Wednesday why he opened his laptop and fumbled for his credit card to pay $8 for Wi-Fi while other passengers were grabbing oxygen masks.

"All I could think of in that moment was, I need to communicate with my loved ones," he said on ABC television. "I thought, 'These are my last few moments on Earth and I want people to know what happened.'

Some social media users questioned his motives.

"I didn't see you say anything to the people you love," said Lakeya Collins on Facebook. "This social media world today is sickening Everyone wants to go viral ugggh."

Other users said he provided important images.

"God forbid the outcome had been different, surely friends and family of those you captured would have at least had closure knowing the exact truth," said Klaudia Olszowka.

Social media watchers said Martinez's actions might be morally offensive to some but did not appear to violate Facebook's "community standards," which include bans on certain graphic or violent content, or that which is deemed disrespectful.

Heidi Julien, a professor of information studies at University at Buffalo, New York, said it was inevitable people would use technology to show such events. Some of the negative responses to Martinez's videos - with dozens of users picking fault with how he wore his oxygen mask - showed a desensitization to what people saw live.

"This is not online television, this is people's real lives," Julien said.

(Reporting by Andrew Hay in Taos, New Mexico; Additional reporting by David Ingram in San Francisco and Peter Szekeley in New York; Editing by Bill Tarrant and Leslie Adler)
Sri Lanka is boosting security at popular resorts after a spate of attacks targeting foreign tourists (AFP Photo/LAKRUWAN WANNIARACHCHI)

Colombo (AFP) - Sri Lanka announced Friday it would establish new police posts and step up patrols at popular resorts after a spate of sexual attacks and violence targeting foreign tourists.

Police chief Pujith Jayasundara said 20 new stations would be established at holiday hotspots to protect visitors from touts and criminals, despite concerns his force was already overstretched.

"I wish we had more men and resources for this job, but we are making adjustments to our deployments to ensure better productivity," Jayasundara said.

He added the measures were decided after a Dutch tourist was sexually harassed and several other tourists were assaulted by a gang at a hotel in the southern resort town of Mirissa last week.

Five Israeli tourists were beaten up in the same area this week and 14 men have been arrested over the two incidents, police said.

Local media reports have catalogued several sexual harassment complaints by foreign tourists, with many reluctant to make official complaints for fear of drawn-out court proceedings.

Tourism Minister John Amaratunga appealed to victims to come forward and promised to cover the expenses of those who return to the island to help identify perpetrators.

The US State Department warned last year that sexual crimes against women were on the rise in Sri Lanka.

While most reported incidents involved non-physical acts such as cat calls and verbal harassment, there were several serious incidents of sexual threats, groping and rape.

"Incidents have also occurred at tourist beaches and smaller hotels in the Southern province," the travel advisory noted.

In 2014, a Sri Lankan court sentenced a local politician and three of his supporters to 20 years in jail for the 2011 murder of British tourist Khuram Shaikh on Christmas Eve and gang rape of his Russian partner.

Shaikh, a 32-year-old Red Cross worker, had tried to stop a brawl at a southern beach resort when a gang attacked and killed him.

His girlfriend, who was knocked unconscious in the brutal assault, returned to Sri Lanka in 2014 to give evidence and identified one of her attackers in court.
father dad baby cafe

Halfpoint/Shutterstock.com

Sweden's maternity-leave and paternity-leave policies are some of the most generous in the developed world.

Couples are required to split their parental leave, leading to the common sight of "latte dads" out and about, alone with their children.

It's become frowned upon for fathers not to take their share of leave, in contrast to many other Western countries.

Forget "ladies who lunch." In Sweden there are "latte dads."

In an NBC News article profiling American dads who move to Sweden to live in a different parenting culture, authors Alexander Smith and Vladimir Banic write that it has become so common for new fathers to take parental leave that it's largely frowned upon if you don't.

The result, the authors write, is that "Areas of Stockholm are now rife with 'latte dads'  typically youngish, bearded men carrying their babies in slings or hanging out with their toddlers."

Americans aren't the only ones seeking out the life of a latte dad in Sweden. In a 2012 article in The Observer by a British man who was raising his kids in Malmo, Sweden, journalist Richard Orange writes:

"Men with prams have become such a familiar sight since shared parental leave was first introduced in 1974 (a full 41 years before parents are scheduled to get it in the UK under the government's proposals) that there's even a name  'latte pappas'  for the tribe.

"At the free-of-charge, drop-in play group in Malmo that is my morning refuge, the pappas often outnumber the mammas. I'll find myself sitting cross-legged next to a taciturn Swedish engineer, a heavily tattooed biker, or another migrant  there's a computer programmer from Chennai  as our children play with the wooden blocks, rattles and drums."

And a 2014 article from Australia's SBS profiles Andrew Gillard, an Australian living in Sweden. He says the latte dad, or latte pappa, is a common sight. "You probably wouldn't see the same thing happening in Australia," he told SBS. "You've got four or five guys all around 30 years old pushing a pram, going into a cafe, and having a latte."

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Latte dads aren't so commonplace because of their taste for caffeine. They're a direct result of Sweden's parental-leave policy, one of the most progressive in the world. The Swedish government says that parents of both sexes are entitled to 480 days (16 months) of paid parental leave at about 80% of their salary (with a cap), plus bonus days for twins, and they must share  Swedish dads must take at least some of those 16 months. The days don't expire until the child is 8 years old.

"These days, for Swedish dads, the decision is not 'Will I take time off to be with my child?' but 'How long will I take?' Most take three to nine months," Swedish dad Jonas Frid told Martin Daubney for The Australian.

That's a huge departure from many other Western countries. The US in particular is known for its ungenerous leave. The government does not require companies to give employees any paid parental leave, making it the only developed country in the world that does not, Business Insider's Rachel Gillett reported.

"You could certainly write a book on why the US has yet to see a federal paid-leave policy  but the answers essentially come down to two distinct cultural elements at play in the US: the values we place in individualism and business," she wrote.

Sweden isn't perfect. Its citizens do pay a high tax rate to subsidize generous policies like this one, but it's a pretty good place to be a parent. Especially a latte dad.

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AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson revealed on Thursday the carrier's plans to launch another live TV service called "AT&T Watch," which would offer a cheap, $15-per-month bundle of channels for customers, and be provided to AT&T Unlimited Wireless subscribers for free. At this price point, the service would be one of the lowest on the market -- less than Sling TV's entry-level, $20-per-month package, and just a bit less than Philo's low-cost, sports-free offering, priced at $16 per month.

Stephenson, who's in court defending the proposed $85 billion merger with Time Warner against antitrust claims, announced the service on the witness stand. He held up the soon-to-arrive AT&T Watch as a rebuttal of sorts to the Justice Department's point about the company's continually climbing prices for its DirecTV satellite service, according to a report from Variety.

The Justice Department is concerned that if the merger goes through, AT&T will then raise prices on Time Warner's Turner networks, like TNT, TBS and CNN in a way that would hurt other pay TV providers.

Few other details were offered regarding AT&T Watch, beyond its price point -- which is due to the fact that it will also be a sports-free offering, like Philo.

But AT&T's advantage over competitors is the distribution provided by its AT&T Wireless business. Although its existing streaming service DirecTV Now is one of the newest on the market, it has already reached No. 2 in terms of subscribers, falling behind Sling TV.

Beyond its lack of sports, the channel lineup for AT&T Watch was not discussed, nor was an exact launch date.

Stephenson said the company hoped to launch it in the next few weeks.
By Greg Roumeliotis, Ben Martin and Ben Hirschler

NEW YORK/LONDON (Reuters) - Rare disease drug maker Shire Plc (SHP.L) said on Thursday it had rejected a $63 billion (44.7 billion pounds) cash-and-stock acquisition offer by Japan's Takeda Pharmaceutical Co Ltd , while Allergan Plc (AGN.N) reversed course on pursuing a rival bid.

The high-stakes drama underscores the surge in dealmaking this year in the pharmaceutical sector, as large players look for promising assets to improve their pipelines. An acquisition of Shire by Takeda would be by far the biggest acquisition of a drug company year-to-date.

Botox-maker Allergan confirmed on Thursday it was considering an offer for Shire after Reuters reported on its interest, sending its shares down 7 percent.

Later on Thursday, Allergan Chief Executive Brent Saunders decided to drop his pursuit of London-listed Shire after receiving pushback from some of his shareholders, who were concerned about the company overstretching its resources, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not be identified discussing confidential talks. Allergan then issued a second announcement stating it did not intend to make an offer for Shire.

Dublin-based Allergan, which has a market capitalisation of $52 billion, had $30 billion in debt as of the end of December, the legacy of a string of acquisitions. This has weighed on Allergan's ability to carry out big acquisitions.

Allergan's exploration of a bid for Shire was part of its wider strategic review, Allergan said in a statement. This review is currently unlikely to lead either to a major acquisition or a breakup of the company, one of the sources said.

Reuters also first reported on Thursday that Takeda had made a cash-and-stock offer of 46.50 pounds ($66.20) a share for Shire. This prompted both companies to confirm the move and announce that Shire had rejected it, although their negotiations are continuing.

Buying Shire would be the largest ever overseas acquisition by a Japanese company and propel Takeda, led by Frenchman Christophe Weber, into the top ranks of global drugmakers.

Story continues

It would be Weber's boldest move by far, significantly boosting Takeda's position in rare diseases, including a blockbuster hemophilia franchise, gastrointestinal disorders and neuroscience, where Shire is a leader in drugs to treat hyperactivity.

But it would be a big financial stretch since Shire, with a market value of more than 34 billion pounds ($48.3 billion), is worth a lot more than Japan's biggest drugmaker, which has a market capitalisation of 4.1 trillion yen ($31 billion).

An acquisition of Shire would have given Allergan heft in the rare diseases space at a time when Saunders is seeking to cement its status as a purveyor of innovative drugs. Saunders' plans to sell Allergan to Pfizer for $160 billion were scuppered two years ago after the U.S. Treasury changed the rules on corporate tax inversions.

Saunders "was a huge deal guy and everyone was kind of waiting for the next big deal," said Kevin Kedra, an analyst with Gabelli & Co, which holds shares of both Allergan and Shire.

If there was to be a big share component to a deal it would have to come before a vote of shareholders, he noted. "Shareholders seem to be voting this morning," Kedra said.

Takeda said it would remain disciplined in its approach and intended to maintain its dividend policy and investment-grade credit rating, adding that: "Discussions between the parties regarding a potential offer are ongoing."

MORE CASH WANTED

Shire confirmed it had received three conditional proposals from Takeda, but said they significantly undervalued the company's growth prospects and drugs in development.

Takeda's latest 46.50 pounds offer was made on April 12 and comprised 17.75 pounds in cash, which would be paid in U.S. dollars, and 28.75 pounds worth of new Takeda shares. Shire said that valued it at approximately 44 billion pounds ($62.6 billion), based on total issued and to be issued share capital.

The two earlier cash-and-share offers were worth 44 and 45.50 pounds per share, respectively.

Under UK takeover rules, Takeda has until April 25 to make a firm offer or walk away, after it said last month it was considering a bid.

Based on Takeda's market capitalisation, Shire shareholders would end up owning approximately 51 percent of the enlarged group, Shire noted.

Bernstein analyst Wimal Kapadia said Shire was likely to be pushing for a larger cash component in current talks but Takeda was already stretched, suggesting the chances of a deal being consummated were still "reasonably risky."

Shire has been under pressure in the past 12 months, with its shares down by a third before Takeda's interest was made public, due to greater competition from generic drugs and debts from its $32 billion acquisition of Baxalta in 2016.

Shire said in January it would run its attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) business, which consists mainly of its blockbuster drug Vyvanse, separately and possibly seek a separate listing.

Earlier this week it struck a deal to sell its cancer drugs for $2.4 billion to unlisted French group Servier.

(Reporting by Greg Roumeliotis in New York and Ben Martin and Ben Hirschler; Additional reporting by Paul Sandle, Carl O'Donnell and Bill Berkrot; editing by Bill Trott and Lisa Shumaker)
LAS VEGAS, NV, April 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- It is common for companies for set large goals and expectations for themselves at the beginning of the new year, but its rare to see those plans come to fruition, especially within the first quarter. However, Ortiz Enterprises has shown through their work how much one firm can produce within three months.



According to Joey Ortiz, Director of Operations at Ortiz Enterprises, the achievements the team has made so far is due to the challenging goals they set for themselves at the beginning of the new year. Since coming together to create a game plan, the team has been working hard to see their goals come to fruition.

In fact, one of the teams goals for the year is expand to 7 to 10 new markets. So far this year alone, Ortiz Enterprises has expanded to Oxnard, CA, Simi Valley, CA, Lincoln, NE and will be opening a new branch in the Las Vegas area this month. With four expansions already under their belt, the Ortiz Enterprises team should have no problem meeting and/or surpassing their goal.

Its common to see teams create amazing, challenging goals at the beginning of the year, but its very rare to see those goals come to fruition, said Ortiz. Im blessed to be around goal-minded individuals that chase their goals unapologetically. When you have a team like that backing you, theres nothing you cant do in business.

Not only has the company stretched and grown across the eastern region of the country, the Ortiz Enterprises headquarters in Las Vegas, NV has doubled in size. Since the beginning of 2018, Ortiz has promoted 6 client representatives to account managers to help oversee the growth of the company. The promotion recipients were all selected from the existing team at Ortiz Enterprises due to their strong belief in advancement from within.

While the company itself has grown exponentially, Ortiz has also grown professionally within the business industry himself. During the first quarter, Ortiz traveled to both Newport Beach, CA and Dallas, TX to attend national conferences focused on growth and production in the marketing field. Not only did Ortiz attend the seminars, he was also asked to speak as a presenter.

Considering the director added another client to his portfolio earlier this year, its no surprise that he was asked to deliver a presentation on maximizing productivity in the work place, both for his company and his clients.

Im lucky to be in a field that recognizes hard work and the importance of bettering yourself through networking, said Ortiz. I was honored to be asked to speak.

Now that the month of April is upon us, the team at Ortiz Enterprises has a positive outlook on the second quarter of the year. According to the director, he plans on using the momentum that theyve gained to help propel them into the rest of the year.

Were expecting big things for the rest of the year, said Ortiz. This is just the beginning and a small taste of what were able to accomplish.

For more information on Ortiz Enterprises or for how to join the team, please visit their website at https://www.ortizenterprises-inc.com/careers.html








(Adds more details on inspections, FAA acknowledges total may be higher, statement from flight crew, investigators will remain on scene into the weekend)

By Alana Wise and David Shepardson

April 19 (Reuters) - The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said it will order inspections of at least 220 aircraft engines as investigators are focusing on a broken fan blade in an engine that exploded Tuesday on a Southwest Aiirlines flight, killing a passenger.

The regulator said late on Wednesday it plans to finalize the air-worthiness directive within the next two weeks.

The order, which it initially proposed in August following an engine failure in 2016 on another Southwest Airlines Co flight, will require ultrasonic inspection within the next six months of fan blades on all CFM56-7B engines that have accrued a certain number of takeoffs, while others will need inspections within 18 months.

Airlines said that because fan blades may have been repaired and moved to other engines, the order would affect far more than 220 of the CFM56-7Bs, which are made by a partnership of France's Safran and General Electric.

An FAA official acknowledged the total number covered may be higher. Some critics have questioned why the FAA did not move faster, when European regulators issued an April 2 directive ordering similar CFM56-7B inspections within nine months.

The CFM56 engine on Southwest flight 1380 blew apart over Pennsylvania on Tuesday, about 20 minutes after the Dallas-bound flight left New York's LaGuardia Airport with 149 people on board. The explosion sent shrapnel ripping into the fuselage of the Boeing 737-700 plane and shattered a window.

Bank executive Jennifer Riordan, 43, was killed when she was partially pulled through the gaping hole as the cabin suffered rapid decompression. Fellow passengers were able to pull her back inside but she died of her injuries.

Videos posted on social media showed passengers grabbing for oxygen masks and screaming as the plane, piloted by Tammie Jo Shults, a former U.S. Navy fighter pilot, prepared for the descent into Philadelphia.

Story continues

Shults and the first officer in a joint statement declined media interviews. "We all feel we were simply doing our jobs. Our hearts are heavy," the pair said.

On Wednesday, National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Chairman Robert Sumwalt said the incident began when one of the engine's 24 fan blades snapped off from its hub. Investigators found that the blade had suffered metal fatigue at the point of the break.

Sumwalt said he could not yet say if the incident, the first deadly passenger airline accident in the United States since 2009, pointed to a fleet-wide problem in the Boeing 737-700.

Southwest crews were inspecting similar engines the airline had in service, focusing on the 400 to 600 oldest of the CFM56 engines, according to a person with knowledge of the situation.

It was the second time this kind of engine had failed on a Southwest jet in the past two years, prompting airlines around the world to step up inspections.

A NTSB inspection crew was also combing over the Boeing 737-700 for signs of what caused the engine to explode.

Investigators expected to remain on the scene into the weekend but the NTSB did not plan any media update on Thursday. The NTSB investigation could take 12 to 15 months to complete, Sumwalt said.

Sumwalt said the fan blade, after suffering metal fatigue where it attached to the engine hub, has a second fracture about halfway along its length. Pieces of the plane were found in rural Pennsylvania by investigators who tracked them on radar. The metal fatigue would not have been observable by looking at the engine from the outside, Sumwalt said.

The GE-Safran partnership that built the engine said it was sending about 40 technicians to help with Southwest's inspections. Southwest said it expected to wrap up its inspection of the engines it was targeting in 30 days.

In August 2016, a Southwest flight made a safe emergency landing in Pensacola, Florida, after a fan blade separated from the same type of engine and debris ripped a hole above the left wing. That incident prompted the FAA to propose last year that similar fan blades undergo ultrasonic inspections and be replaced if they failed. (Reporting by David Shepardson editing by David Stamp. Additional reporting by Alwyn Scott)
MarketWatch

The rate of inflation in the U.S. rose again in July and drove the increase over the past year to a 30-year high, MarketWatchs Jeffrey Bartash reported in August. For investors, that news was, no doubt, worrisome, so we looked at what two financial bigwigs, Suze Orman and Ramit Sethi, as well as other pros, have told investors in the past about dealing with inflation (psst: both say you need to keep investing in stocks.) Here (and below) are Bankrates list of featured investing products for September. Suze Orman: Plan on many costs being double what they are today, and keep investing in stocks.
Letters of intent have been inked by Statoil ASA (ADR)(NYSE:STO) and Aibel as well as a Kvaerner and Aker Solutions joint venture with regards to the Johan Sverdrup development. Aibel has also been issued with a letter of intent to construct a processing platform topside in the second phase of the project. This will consist of construction, procurement and engineering works of topside with regards to the second processing platform of Johan Sverdrup.

The project is expected to be completed by 2022 and once it is ready the production capacity will be increased from 440,000 to 660,000 barrels of oil a day. The value of the contract is NOK8 billion. As for the letter of intent with the joint venture of Kvaerner and Aker Solutions, this is in relation to field center modifications. This will include construction, procurement and engineering works. The value of this contract is NOK3.4 billion.

Second phase

In the next four years it is expected that the second phase of the development will see power incorporated to Utsira High area from shore. It is also expected that another power converter will be installed on a new processing platform. A plan for the development as well as the operation of the second phase of Johan Sverdrup is expected in this years second half. The government of Norway will however have to approve these contracts before development commences.

The second phase contracts in the Johan Sverdrup project are expected to offer employment opportunities to over 3,000 people in Norway. The first phase of the Johan Sverdrup development is currently in progress and its commencement is scheduled to be late next year.

Supporting local economy

So far contracts worth over NOK60 billion have been issues for the Johan Sverdrup development. More than 70% of these contracts have been awarded to Norwegian suppliers. This comes in the wake of Statoil making plans to rebrand to Equinor as a way of showing its commitment to becoming a broader energy firm whose focus is not just on oil.

Reflecting on the global energy transition and how we are developing as a broad energy company, it has become natural to change our name, said the chief executive officer of Statoil, Eldar Saetre, in a statement.
Afghan authorities have returned the bodies of five Pakistani soldiers killed during a weekend clash along a disputed sector of the two countries' border, and also released a sixth soldier captured by the Afghans, Pakistan's Foreign Office says.

Islamabad had described the clash as an attack on a Pakistani border post in the Kurram tribal region, saying it was carried out by Afghan forces and tribesmen.

Muhammad Faisal, a spokesman for the Foreign Office, said the two sides resolved the issue of the incident through "diplomatic and military channels."

Initial reports had said the Pakistani Frontier Corps troops were carrying out "routine surveillance" when they were "fired upon from the Afghanistan side," leaving two dead and five wounded.

The Afghan police said the clashes erupted after Pakistani forces crossed into Afghanistan.

Separately, three Afghan election workers and two police officers, who were kidnapped in Ghor Province on April 17 by militants, were freed, police said.

With reporting by AP
SAN DIEGO, April 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The primary purpose of Miami Drug Rehabs is to help people fighting drug dependency or alcohol dependency to find their way out of the nightmare. At Drug Rehab Centers in Miami Florida, we do not try to claim that addiction and recovery is an overnight process: We know it takes hard work, and we understand that for the program to work its best the patient must believe in the drug recovery program they are entering. It is for this reason that we help addicts to select from a wide range of alcohol and drug rehab program types.

Choosing a Miami Drug Rehab Program

Our goal is to make this as natural and instinctive for addicts and their loved ones as we possibly can. This means that when an addict or an alcoholic tells us that they are not comfortable with discussing their problems in a group constantly, we respect and understand that need. In a case like this, an option like one-on-one counseling may be a perfect choice.



Alternative Solutions

Another example is a situation where an addict feels strongly that 12-step based programs are not the solution for him or her. Several other program types have proven to be very successful for drug and alcohol addiction recovery  Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for example. Some self-help programs also work very effectively for people who dont feel the 12-step model works for them.

Regardless of an addicts belief system or recovery needs, we at Drug Rehab Centers in Miami Florida are here to assist you with the solution. Please fill out the short form here on the page or call us to discuss the program that could lead you to a drug-free future!

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/ceaa741e-e99e-4575-a067-4a0f41c00583
AUSTIN, Texas, April 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- After the close of market on Thursday, May 10, 2018 FalconStor Software, Inc. (OTCQB:FALC), will announce financial results for the first quarter 2018, which ended March 31, 2018. FalconStor will host a conference call at 3:30 PM CDT to discuss the results. In conjunction with the conference call, FalconStor will also host a presentation on the Internet.



WHO:

Todd Brooks, President and Chief Executive Officer, FalconStor

Brad Wolfe, Chief Financial Officer, FalconStor

WHEN:

Thursday, May 10, 2018

3:30 PM CDT



HOW:



Presentation:

To view the presentation, please copy and paste the following link into your browser and register for this meeting. Once you have registered for the meeting, you will receive an email message confirming your registration.

https://falconstor.webex.com/



Meeting: FalconStor Q1 2018 Earnings

Meeting Password: Q118meeting

Meeting Number: 794 483 353

Conference Call:

To participate in the conference call, please dial:



Toll Free: 1-800-263-0877

International: +1 323-794-2094

Conference ID: 5146016

REPLAY:



A conference call replay will be available beginning May 10th at 6:30 PM CDT through 6:30 PM CDT on May 17th. To listen to the replay of the call, dial:

Toll Free: 1-888-203-1112

International: +1 719-457-0820

Passcode: 5146016

About FalconStor

FalconStor Software, Inc. (OTCQB:FALC) is a leading software-defined storage company offering a converged data services software platform that is hardware agnostic. Our open, integrated flagship solution FreeStor reduces vendor lock-in and gives enterprises the freedom to choose the applications and hardware components that make the best sense for their business. We empower organizations to modernize their data center with the right performance, in the right location, all while protecting existing investments. FalconStor's mission is to maximize data availability and system uptime to ensure nonstop business productivity while simplifying data management to reduce operational costs. Our award-winning solutions are available and supported worldwide by OEMs as well as leading service providers, system integrators, resellers and FalconStor. The company is headquartered in Austin, TX. with offices throughout Europe and the Asia Pacific region. For more information, visit www.falconstor.com or call 1-866-NOW-FALC (866-669-3252).

Follow us on Twitter  Watch us on YouTube  Connect with us on LinkedIn

FalconStor, FalconStor Software, FreeStor, and Intelligent Abstraction are trademarks or registered trademarks of FalconStor Software, Inc., in the U.S. and other countries. All other company and product names contained herein may be trademarks of their respective holders.

Links to websites or pages controlled by parties other than FalconStor are provided for the reader's convenience and information only. FalconStor does not incorporate into this release the information found at those links nor does FalconStor represent or warrant that any information found at those links is complete or accurate. Use of information obtained by following these links is at the reader's own risk.

CONTACT INFORMATION



For more information, contact:

Brad Wolfe

Chief Financial Officer

FalconStor Software Inc.

investorrelations@falconstor.com


Italian Politics and Europes Future



Jeffrey D. Sachs







NEW YORK  More than ever, the European Union needs unity to assert its values and interests in an age when US global leadership is on the verge of collapse, China is ascendant, and Russia wavers yet again between cooperation and confrontation with the EU. Divided, the EU is a mere helpless spectator to geopolitical upheaval. United, the EU can play a critical global role, as it uniquely combines prosperity, democracy, environmentalism, innovation, and social justice. And whether the EU regains unity of purpose, or instead spirals into disarray, will depend on what happens now in Italy.



Italys pivotal role stems from its position at the geographic divide between northern Europes prosperity and southern Europes crisis, and the intellectual and emotional divide between an open Europe and one trapped again by nationalism, prejudice, and fear. Italy stands also at the political divide, with an insurgent new party, the Five Star Movement (M5S), sharing the political stage with the right-wing, anti-immigrant, and anti-EU League party and the pro-EU but greatly weakened center-left Democratic Party.



The insurgent M5S finished first in the March 4 parliamentary vote with an astounding 33% of the vote, compared to 19% for the Democrats and 17% for the League. The implications of M5Ss strong victory are a topic of heated debate in Italy and around Europe.



Throughout the EU, traditional center-left and center-right pro-EU parties are losing votes. Just as in Italy, anti-EU nationalist parties like the League are gaining votes, and anti-establishment insurgencies like M5S  for example, Podemos in Spain, and Syriza in Greece  are either winning power outright or holding the balance of power between traditional pro-EU mainstream parties and anti-EU nationalist parties.



There are three reasons for Europes changing politics. The first, and perhaps least recognized, is a generation of disastrous US foreign policy in the Middle East and Africa. After the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, the US and local allies aimed to establish political and military hegemony in the Middle East and North Africa through US-led wars of regime change in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and elsewhere. The result has been chronic violence and instability, leading to massive refugee flows into Europe that have upended politics in one EU member state after another.



The second reason is Europes now chronic under-investment, especially by the public sector. Under former Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble, a self-satisfied and economically successful Germany blocked European-wide investment-led growth, and turned the eurozone into a debtors prison for Greece and a dispiriting zone of stagnation for much of southern and eastern Europe. With the EUs economic policy limited to austerity, its not hard to see why populism has taken root.



The third reason is structural. Northern Europe innovates, while southern and eastern Europe by and large do not, or at least not nearly at the same rate. Italy straddles the two sides of Europe: a dynamic north, and chronic malaise in the south (the Mezzogiorno). This is an old story, but also an ongoing one. It helps to explain the frontlines of EU politics. The M5S was triumphant especially in Italys stagnating south.



My political predilections lie with social democracy. I blame conservatives like Schauble for driving voters into the arms of populist parties. Yet too many mainstream social-democratic leaders went quietly along with Schauble. I also fault Chancellor Angela Merkel and other European leaders for failing to speak strongly enough against the US-led wars in the Middle East and North Africa. European leaders should have been much more energetic at the United Nations in opposing Americas hegemonic policy in the Middle East, with its catastrophic effects, including mass displacement and refugee movements.



Advocates of a strong and vibrant EU  and I am firmly among them  should be rooting for the insurgent parties to join forces with the weakened traditional social-democratic parties in order to promote sustainable development, innovation, and investment-led growth, and to block anti-EU coalitions. Or, as in Germany, they should urge the grand coalition of center-left and center-right parties to become much more dynamic and investment-oriented at European scale, both for the sake of economic good sense and to combat far-right nationalists. Or, as in France, they should cheer the amalgamation of pro-EU traditionalists and insurgents in President Emmanuel Macrons La Republique En Marche ! Such pro-EU alignments give the EU time to reform its institutions, stake out a common foreign policy, and initiate investment- and innovation-led green growth in place of austerity and complacency.



Traditional social-democratic parties mostly shun the new insurgent parties, viewing them as populist, irresponsible, opportunistic, and dishonest. Such is the view in Italy on the part of the Democrats, with key politicians rejecting a coalition with M5S. That is understandable: the upstarts thoroughly defeated the Democrats at the polls, often with outsize populist promises. Yet the social democrats have been flaccid and even silent in the face of Schauble-style austerity and irresponsible US-led wars. The traditional social-democratic parties will have to regain their dynamism and appetite for risk-taking to win again at the polls as true progressive parties.



The stakes in Italy are high. With Europe politically and geographically divided, Italys politics could tip the balance. A pro-EU Italy governed by an M5S-Democrat coalition could join with France and Germany to reform the EU; regain a clear foreign-policy voice for EU vis-a-vis the US, Russia, and China; and implement a strategy for green, innovation-based growth.



To forge such a coalition, the M5S would have to adopt a responsible and clearly defined economic program, and the Democrats would have to accept being the junior partner of an untested insurgent force. A possible key to mutual confidence would be for the Democrats to hold the crucial finance ministry, while M5S appoints the prime minister.



It is not surprising that US President Donald Trumps utterly reckless former adviser, Stephen Bannon, rushed to Italy to encourage M5S and the League to form a coalition that he called the ultimate dream, because it would break the EU. That by itself should remind Italians of the importance of a pro-EU coalition that rejects such miserable nightmares.





Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Sustainable Development and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University, is Director of Columbias Center for Sustainable Development and of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. His books include The End of Poverty, Common Wealth, The Age of Sustainable Development, and, most recently, Building the New American Economy.
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
New York, Apr 20 (IBNS): A group of United Nations human rights experts have called on Iran to annul the death sentence against a prisoner citing serious concerns that he was tortured in detention and did not receive a fair trial.

n a news release on Wednesday, the experts said that Iranian Kurdish prisoner Ramin Hossein Panahi, who was arrested last June for alleged membership of the Kurdish nationalist group Komala, was repeatedly beaten in detention, denied medical care and access to a lawyer, and held in solitary confinement until January.

They also expressed concern regarding his trial, which took place before the Revolutionary Court and lasted less than an hour.

Executing Mr. Panahi, following his torture, and unfair trial and on the basis of charges that do not meet international standards for the use of death penalty, would be unconscionable, said the experts.

We remind Iran that the only thing that distinguishes capital punishment from arbitrary execution is full respect for stringent due process guarantees.

The experts also noted that despite marks of torture on Panahi body, the court did not order an investigation, and that he was allowed only one meeting with his lawyer between his arrest and the trial and no family visits. There are also ongoing concerns about Panahi, and he reportedly began a hunger strike early in 2018.

The experts also expressed concern that some members of Panahis family appeared to have been convicted in separate summary trials, and sentenced to long prison terms, in apparent reprisals for their efforts to obtain further information on his situation.

It is understood that the Supreme Court branch in Qom reaffirmed Panahis death sentence earlier in April, and his case was due to be passed to the Office of Implementation, said the experts, his lawyer has appealed for a judicial review.

The news release noted that the experts are in dialogue with Iranian authorities regarding Panahis situation.

The UN rights experts include Agnes Callamard, the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions; Dainius Puras, the Special Rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health; and Nils Melzer, the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

UN Special Rapporteurs and independent experts are appointed by the Geneva-based Human Rights Council to examine and report back on a specific human rights theme or a country situation. The positions are honorary and the experts are not UN staff, nor are they paid for their work.

UNICEF/Rajat Madhok
Damascus, Apr 20 (IBNS): Protesting a recent air strike conducted in its territory by a united Western front, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has handed back his Legion d'honneur to France, reports said on Friday.

A Syrian Foreign Ministry statement read: "The ministry of foreign affairs... has returned to the French republic... the decoration of the Grand Croix of the Legion d'honneur awarded to President Assad."

"It is no honour for President Assad to wear a decoration attributed by a slave country and follower of the United States that supports terrorists," the statement added.

The medal was returned via the Romanian embassy.

Assad received the award in 2001 from French President Jacques Chirac.

France recently took part in a three-member military strike alongside the USA and the UK.

The joint front attacked Syrian chemical facilities, in response to an alleged chemical attack which took place in Syria earlier this month.

The alleged attack, which has been disowned by Syria, reportedly killed dozens.

Assad Image: Wallpaper

Macron Image: EU2017EE Estonian Presidency/Wikipedia
Islamabad, Apr 20 (IBNS): At least six people were killed in a road mishap in Pakistan's M-9 Motorway, close to Hyderabad city, media reports said on Friday.

The mishap reportedly took place on Thursday.

The incident occurred when one car hit another from the back near Looni Kot while en route to Hyderabad from Karachi, police was quoted as saying by Geo News.

The gas cylinder in the vehicle reportedly burst and resulted in the fire to erupt.

in it.

"A minor girl survived the incident," police told the news channel.
Ottawa, Apr 20 (IBNS): Canada has thrown some tough questions to a senior Facebook executive over the leakage of data of several countrymen, media reports said.

Kevin Chan, head of public policy of Facebook in Canada, has apologised for the breach of data of Canadians.

He has referred to the incident as a "huge breach of trusts".

The questions were asked by a parliamentary committee in which Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith was a part.

Erskine-Smith said the incident has violated the Canadian law as it requires "meaningful consent" of any user before obtaining his/her information.

Erskine-Smith has been quoted by Toronto Star, "Where was the consent of 620,000 users? Perhaps youre in compliance with the law now, but it seems pretty clear that you werent in compliance with the law previously."

Not countering the Liberal MP, Robert Sherman, Facebook's deputy chief privacy officer, said: "I think its important to note that, as our (policy) changes in 2014 reflect, we dont think thatsthe right way for the platform to operate and its not how the platform operates today." He has been quoted by Toronto Star.

Chan has agreed with Erskine-Smith that Facebook needs to be honest and transparent.

Both Chan and Sherman emphasised the need to win back the trust of the users.

Cambridge Analytica has been named in an investigative report by Britain's channel 4 for having harvested data of up to 50 million Facebook users without permission and using them to help politicians.

Releasing a footage obtained via a sting operation, Channel 4 News had aired an interview of Cambridge Analytica chief executive Alexander Nix, where he was seen discussing tactics with the undercover reporter on how the firm would discredit politicians online.

Nix spoke about sending Ukrainian girls around to the candidate's house, adding that these girls 'are very beautiful, I find that works very well'.

He said another way to lure the target is to 'offer them a deal that's too good to be true and make sure that's video recorded'.

The company first denied any wrongdoing.
These measures follow weeks of debate between pragmatists and hardliners over the future of the app, which is estimated to be used by approximately half of Irans population of 80 million. Last week, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, the head of the Iranian parliaments committee on national security and foreign policy, said that the decision had been made at the highest levels to ban Telegram throughout the country, but it remains unclear whether the government will follow through.

The app was widely blamed for the rapid spread of anti-government protests in late December and early January, which came to encompass as many as 142 cities and towns while giving rise to provocative slogans and calls for regime change. Access to Telegram was restricted or fully blocked in various places and at various times while those protests were ongoing, but the government initially declined to extend the ban, ostensibly because doing so would have disrupted the operations of many Iranian businesses, which had come to rely on such communication tools.

Boroujerdis announcement of an imminent ban on the foreign-run service was supported by statements from other Iranian officials regarding the prospective shift to entirely domestic alternatives to Telegram. However, the Iranian public has strongly indicated that it would not participate in such a shift, given that the popularity of Telegram is largely based on its perceived security. The apps creator and CEO, Pavel Durov, has been contacted on several occasions by Iranian authorities who demanded that he restrict content in Iran or move Iranian Telegram communications onto servers located inside the country. He has naturally refused.

Even so, Khameneis abandonment of Telegram suggests that the regime might be moving to attempt its promised shift, or at least to give the impression that it is doing so. The move also contrasts with Khameneis relationship with Twitter, which has been banned since shortly after it was used for organizing the Green Movement protests in 2009. Despite this ban, Khamenei and various other government officials maintained an active presence on the social network, which countless Iranians have continued to access using virtual proxy networks.

The apparent differences in the governments attitude toward Telegram, may relate to the relative ease with which users of Twitter and Facebook can be monitored by the Iranian cyber police. Numerous Iranian political prisoners have been arrested on the basis of their online communications and authorities have supplemented formal bans with various efforts to control and criminalize the content on underground networks.

One of these, known as Operation Spider II, was brought back into the headlines by IranWire on Wednesday when it reported upon the current situation of Elham Arab, one of the fashion models who had been targeted by that sweep, with which the regime sought to stamp out the supposed promotion of Western culture and lifestyles. The 2016 operation saw the arrest of hundreds of models, makeup artists, photographers, and designers, some of whom were compelled to repent and issue false confessions via state media.

IranWire details Arabs experience with just such a television appearance in May 2016, and it notes that she and other persons targeted by the sweep were barred from leaving the country for long periods of time afterwards. Arab now operates freely out of Dubai, she has revealed that while still in Iran, authorities effectively took control of her social media accounts, compelling her to continue posting but also designating the content of those posts so they could monitoring subsequent interactions.

Accounts such as these speak to the probable goal of Tehrans desired shift to domestic alternatives to Telegram. And that theoretical shift is in turn part of a larger project, lauded by various hardliners, to insulate the entire Iranian internet from the world, allowing in only materials that are approved by the regime. In this sense, the internet has become a major battleground in Irans effort to keep foreign culture at bay  an effort that is underscored by countless hardline warnings about infiltration of the financial, political, and social spheres of the Islamic Republic.

This fear of foreign influence has been a driving force in hardline opposition to the 2015 nuclear agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. This opposition was detailed in another IranWire report on Monday, which noted that hardline pressure had led to a situation in which all Iranian participants in the 2015 nuclear negotiations, with the exception of Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi, are either in jail, have left the country, or have been marginalized.

According to the report, those diplomats have variously been portrayed as spies, and although charges to this effect have been dropped in most cases, the political effect was seemingly permanent. In addition, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps evidently hacked the accounts of a number of negotiators, in an attempt both to surveil them and to exploit their burgeoning connections with Western counterparts.

Although these measures highlight the hardline fear of foreign contacts, they do not necessarily indicate a warm embrace of foreign influence among the supposedly moderate political faction associated with President Hassan Rouhani, the chief Iranian advocate of the nuclear deal. In fact, in other areas of policy, the Rouhani government has openly participated in fostering paranoia about perceived enemies in the West.

In one of the latest examples of this phenomenon, the Center for Human Rights in Iran reported on Monday that the Rouhani-appointed Education Minister Mohammad Bathaei had threatened punishment for any official or non-governmental organization that uses any of the UNESCO-approved education guidelines from the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The stated purpose of the guidelines is to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all, but Iranian officials have sought to portray it as promoting homosexuality and as potentially undermining Islamic society.

This smear campaign culminated with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei banning the implementation of the guidelines nine months ago  a ban that the Rouhani administration has evidently come to publicly endorse. Since then, both factions of the regime have continued to issue various warnings regarding the supposed threats posed by the United States and its allies, either directly or through espionage or subversion. In recent days, these warnings have been fueled by the political conflicts surrounding US-led airstrikes on Syria in retaliation for Bashar al-Assads domestic use of chemical weapons.

On Wednesday, Newsweek reported that Supreme Leader Khamenei had teased a prospective intelligence war and had urged other countries within Irans sphere of influence to create a unified front against the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. The report also highlighted recent contacts between Iranian officials and some would-be members of that unified front, including Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and officers in the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Front, some elements of which have vowed to expel the US from the region.

For his part, President Rouhani struck a similar, albeit more subdued tone on Wednesday, as the Islamic Republic celebrated its annual Army Day. Al Jazeera reported that amidst military parades and bold claims of technological advancement, Rouhani dismissed foreign pressure his countrys ballistic missile program, declaring that Iran would never wait for approval before developing or procuring any weapon we need.

Rouhani also accused the US of flooding the region with arms and driving ongoing conflict. However, the US presented evidence last year of Irans provision of advanced missiles to Houthi rebels in Yemen. And while Iran is a party to negotiations aimed at a political solution to the civil war in Syria, Iran-backed forces in that war have been repeatedly accused of violating ceasefires in the interest of destroying all organized opposition to Assad before bringing the war to a close.
Iranian human rights and political activist Nasser Razi left Iran for Britain shortly before the Shah fell, watched closely as events unfolded, noting how the West supported the Shah until the bitter end.

If there was any justice, that should have been the end of the tale. The Iranian people fought a despotic ruler and won. Sadly, the incoming Regime was not democratic. They were just as tyrannical as the Shah, but this time they dressed their suppression up as religion.

Razi wrote on Eurasia Review: Tragically, a genuine uprising against a corrupt regime was derailed by a despot, Khomeini who exploited lack of democratic process and the peoples religious sentiments deceived the Iranian people who demanded freedom and democracy, and established a ruthless theocracy in Iran The ayatollahs rule brought devastation and misery for the Iranian people and made this great civilization and international pariah.

In 2018, there is another uprising brewing in Iran, which is taking the West by surprise and shaking the Regime to its core.

Starting in late December 2017, nationwide, anti-regime protests broke out across Iran demanding an end to the mullahs regime and using the slogan Down with [Suprem Leader Ali] Khamenei.

Khamenei blamed the protests on Iranian Resistance group, the Peoples Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK), who have been the victims of a vicious campaign by the mullahs since 1979.

The MEK has wide-ranging support from the Iranian people so its not surprising that they would be able to incite this level of protest. Not only that, but the MEK is also part of a coalition (the National Council of Resistance of Iran) that is ready and willing to govern in Iran when the mullahs fall, meaning no chance of the country falling into the hands of despots. Their president-elect Maryam Rajavi has already laid out her future for a Free Iran in a 10 point plan.

So, how should the West react this time?

The West needs to end its appeasement of Iran and get tough on the Regime. There is no hope for reform or moderation from the mullahs, but regime change by and for the people of Iran. Thats just around the corner.

Razi wrote: The West should have learned its lessons and not be caught in its delusions. The ayatollahs are besieged with crisis. There is growing unrest. Even the most apolitical strata of the Iranian society such as the farmers have started to stage protests and strikes. Despite the nuclear agreement the Iranian economy is faltering. Corruption is rampant and Tehran seems incapable of distancing itself from sponsoring terror and fomenting unrest and havoc in the region. They are predicates to one conclusion: The status quo is untenable and Iran is moving toward big change fast.
While the US and its allies are demanding that Iran curb its ballistic missile program, and Arab leaders warn the international community of the dangers of leaving Irans regional ambitions unchecked, little action has been taken to move forward on these issues.

Hegemony seems to be Irans goal in the Middle East. It has expanded its proxy forces in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.

Despite numerous United Nations Security Council resolutions against such actions, the Al Houthis in Yemen are believed to be armed by Iran. The weapons are used against pro-government forces in Yemen. Additionally, Saudi Arabia is targeted by missiles fired by the Al Houthis. Most of these missiles have been successfully intercepted by the Saudis anti-missile technology. The ballistic missiles were fired at civilian-inhabited areas, like Riyadhs King Khalid International Airport. The intention was to cause the maximum number of casualties. Saudi foreign minister, Adel Jubair, declared, We see this as an act of war, in an interview on CNN. Iran cannot lob missiles at Saudi cities and towns and expect us not to take steps.

Iran denied the accusation, but independent U.N. experts monitoring the sanctions on Yemen reported to the Security Council they had identified missile remnants, related military equipment and military unmanned aerial vehicles that are of Iranian origin and were brought into Yemen after the imposition of the targeted arms embargo.

This is seen as disregard for international law by Iran, and many say it is something that can no longer be tolerated, as the nature of Al Houthi missile becomes more dangerous as the Al Houthis acquire more sophisticated weapons.

Recently, US President Trump nominated critics of the Iran nuclear deal to positions in his administration  Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State and John Bolton as National Security Adviser. This seems to bolster his threat to abandon the deal, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which was reached in 2015, between Iran and United Nations Security Council members China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, United States, plus Germany.

As well, according to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman, a direct war with Iran is inevitable if Tehrans mischief continues to go unchecked. War between Saudi Arabia and Iran will be disastrous for the region, and will have global repercussions.

Tehrans ambition must be curtailed before it is too late.
In an op-ed for Arab News Dr. Majid Rafizadeh explains exactly how the Iranian Regime became involved in Syria, how their role transformed from merely advisory to one that is deeply embedded in the countrys political and military infrastructure with a complete disregard for the sovereignty of the Syrian nation.

The article further adds: Irans foreign and military policies in Syria are far-sighted and carried out with the aim of accomplishing the long-term revolutionary, ideological and hegemonic objectives of the regime.

Now, the Iranian Regime that is aiding Bashar Assad is essentially an occupying force and even Irans Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has started boasting that no one can evict them.

Well, the Regime may think that no one can stop them in Syria, but thats why its even more important that the international community work towards that. Otherwise, we risk Syria becoming an Iranian vassal state, like Iraq, as we know they will not give it up by choice.

Rafizadeh wrote: Strategically speaking, the regime of Assad is too vital for Iran to abandon. Controlling Syria gives Iran immense geopolitical and military clout in the region. In addition, Tehran is effectively utilizing Syria to create a land corridor from Tehran to the Mediterranean, to support Hezbollah, empower Shiite militias in other nations, accomplish its regional ambitions, and tip the regional balance of power in favour of the Shiite Crescent.

In his piece, writer lays out five strategies to tackle Iran in Syria. Lets look at them.

Establish a no-fly zone

The international community should establish a no-fly zone on the Syrian borders, something which Jordan and Israel, who share a border with Syria, would be in favour of.

Rafizadeh explains: Irans military and militias rely on the Syrian regimes air force to give its militants cover on the ground. Aerial attacks put the Syrian regime, and consequently the [Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps or IRGC], in a more advantageous position in comparison to the opposition groups. Without the aerial bombardments, Irans military would find it extremely difficult to score victories and make territorial advances at its current swift pace.

Use airstrikes against that IRGCs command and control system in Syria

It is well known that the IRGC has several command and military bases in Syria. One way to stop the Regime is to strike their command centres.

Make the moderate Syrian opposition into a powerful and legitimate force

The Syrian opposition has been heavily targeted in attacks by Iran and Syria  both physical and propaganda.

The Regimes have tried to discourage support of the opposition, by claiming that they are terrorists. Dont believe them.

Rafizadeh also explains: With intelligence and advisory assistance, the Gulf Cooperation Council, the US and its EU allies can reinitiate their plan to support a moderate Syrian opposition group. A moderate Syrian force could play a significant role as a bulwark against Irans entrenchment.

Empower minority ethnic groups

The suppressed ethnic minorities in Iran and Syria have been fighting the Regimes for a long time already and proved themselves effective when fighting ISIS, but the West has cut off funding for the groups. They should reverse this decision.

Suspend Irans oil exports

The Iranian Regime is spending billions of dollars to keep Assad in power, most of this gained from oil exports. The leaders of Europe can put significant pressure on Irans military by suspending its oil imports. Europes other alternatives for oil supply can be the Gulf states.
Sangam Prasain is Business Editor at The Kathmandu Post, covering tourism, agriculture, mountaineering, aviation, infrastructure and other economic affairs. He joined The Kathmandu Post in October 2009.
Israel is Failing at Racial Politics

Two developments in Israel present a teachable moment in terms of the racial politics of the Israeli state. The first development was the slaughter of Palestinian protesters on the Gaza border on March 30. The second development, to be discussed in my next column, was the April 3 reneging by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on an agreement to send African migrants to Western Europe and North America rather than back to their countries of origin.

The brutal crackdown by the Israelis on the Palestinian protestors is noteworthy, not only because of the criminality of the act, but that it also captured the attention of the world. The Palestinian protesters were embarking on a non-violent campaign to raise attention on the outstanding demand of Palestinians for their recognized right of return to their homeland.

The Israeli establishment has continuously refused to recognize the international law governing the right of return of refugees following an armed conflict. Between 1947 and 1948, thousands of Palestinians were driven from their homes by Zionist military units during the formation of Israel. The Palestinians expected that they would be able to return home to reclaim their land after the armed conflict ceased. This has been refused. As a result, forces within the Palestinian movement chose to begin a non-violent protest leading up to May 15, the anniversary date of the founding of Israel.

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The Israeli government warned that they would use armed force, but such a warning holds no legal or moral value since they were simply saying that theythe Israeli political establishmentwould not recognize non-violent protests. Hiding behind allegations that the Palestinians attacked the Israeli troops, the Israeli forces responded with superior force that was out of proportion to the nature of the protests.

The Israeli establishment refuses an investigation and believes that the soldiers acted correctly, but one must ask, how is shooting civilians acceptable? The only answer is contained in the notion that the Palestinians are not to be considered humans. Since there is no justification in murdering unarmed civilians, particularly since the Israeli forces have many means at their disposal in order to respond to non-violent disruptions, the message is clear: Palestinians have no rights that the Israeli establishment is bound to respect.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is a talk show host, writer and activist. Follow him on Twitter @BillFletcherJr, Facebook and at www.billfletcherjr.com.

March 30, Israeli troops killed 15 Palestinian protesters.


Russia has launched a campaign to urge students studying abroad to return home to continue their education.

The campaign is led by a government agency in charge of shaping Russias image and supporting citizens living abroad. The launch was announced April 16.

The agency is officially called the Federal Agency for CIS Matters, Compatriots Living Abroad, and International Humanitarian Cooperation. Some Western intelligence agencies suspect it of being a front organization for Russian spying and recruiting.

The marketing campaign is called Highly Likely Welcome Back. The name appeared to be targeting comments made by British Prime Minister Theresa May. May has said a British investigation found it highly likely Russia was responsible for the poisoning of a former Russian double agent and his daughter in Britain.

Officials from the United States and other countries have also accused the Russian government of ordering the poisoning. The March 4 attack in the British city of Salisbury seriously injured former Russian military intelligence official Sergei Skripal and his daughter.

Russia has denied involvement in the attack.

The incident led many Western nations to expel dozens of Russian diplomats. Russia answered by expelling diplomats from Western countries.

The state-run RIA-Novosti news agency reported that an official involved in the new campaign said it is aimed at fighting anti-Russian feelings in other nations.

The official said government politics in many countries  especially in Europe  have increasingly taken on a harshly expressed anti-Russian character.

The marketing campaign seeks to answer the influence of Russophobic attitudes on citizens and students living abroad, the official said.

Russias Education and Science Ministry reported that, in 2014, about 60,000 Russians were studying outside Russia.

Another official told the Kommersant newspaper there were concerns that young Russians may experience difficulties in nations expressing unfriendly feelings about Russia.

The Moscow Times has reported that an agency official said the program was mainly designed to seek the return of Russians studying in Britain.

Genri Sardarian is head of the department of management and politics at Moscows MGIMO University. He said his school and others across Russia are ready to accept any Russians who decide to come back and continue their studies at home.

The worsening ties between the United States and Russia have made it more difficult for some American students seeking to study in Russia.

In a travel advisory issued in January, the U.S. State Department listed Russia as one of the most dangerous countries to visit. The advisory said this was due to harassment and terrorism. That led Stanford University in California to suspend its study-abroad program in Russia.

However, one U.S.-based organization centered on studies in Russia says most of its members still operate study-abroad programs. The Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies said in a statement that most universities feel they can trust their Russian partners to keep their programs students safe.

Im Bryan Lynn.

Bryan Lynn adapted this story for VOA Learning English, based on a report from RadioFreeEurope RadioLiberty and other sources. 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

recruit  v. get someone to join a group, service or company

abroad  n. in or to a foreign country

harsh  adj. cruel, unkind or difficult to live with

character  n. qualities relating to a person or thing

attitude  n. the way a person thinks and feels about something

harassment  n. making repeated attacks against someone or something

dozen  n. twelve of something


United States airline officials have ordered inspections of some jet engines after a passenger airplane suffered a deadly accident this week.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced the order late Wednesday. However, the engines manufacturer and European officials had called for careful inspections several months earlier.

The engine on a Southwest Airlines plane blew apart on Tuesday. Debris from the explosion broke a window. A woman sitting next to the window was partially sucked out of the plane. She later died of her injuries. The plane, which was traveling from New York to Dallas, Texas, made an emergency landing in Philadelphia.

Investigators said a blade in the engine broke off during the flight. They said the blade showed signs of metal fatigue  very small cracks that can break apart under stress.

In 2016, U.S. officials also blamed metal fatigue on a similar engine failure on another Southwest Airlines plane in Florida.

The incident led the manufacturer CFM International to recommend last June that airlines carry out inspections of fan blades in its CFM56-7B engines.

CFM International is a joint business of GE Aviation and France's Safran Aircraft Engines. The company says over 8,000 CFM56-7B engines are currently in use on Boeings 737 airplanes.

Robert Sumwalt is chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board. He said, Engine failures like this should not occur.

But he advised it was too soon to question the safety of the engines or the Boeing 737s. The plane is the most popular commercial airplane in the world.

On Wednesday, the FAA said it will require inspections of fan blades on CFM56-7B engines after they reach a certain number of takeoffs and landings. Blades that fail inspection would need to be replaced.

Southwest Airlines announced its own program for similar inspections of its 700 planes over the next month.

Im Mario Ritter.

Hai Do adapted this story for Learning English based on AP and other news reports. Mario Ritter was the editor.

Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page.

_______________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

debris n. the pieces that are left after something has been destroyed

blade n. one of the flat spinning parts that are used in some machines that push air, such as jet engines

fatigue n. weakness caused by stress in living or mechanical materials

occur v. happen
The Legislative Assembly (AL) has passed a law concerning the citys future taxi operations, stating that, in the future, only taxi companies can apply for concessions for taxi operators. The Secretary for Transport and Public Works, Raimundo do Rosario, said during his presentation of the bill, we all want taxi services to improve. I think we all have several opinions on the taxi services, such that the image of those services is bad. There are many complaints, regardless if they come from Macau residents or tourists.

Rosario explained that the bill mainly entails that only companies can bid for taxi operation concessions, and that the cars and the taxi drivers should have licenses.

It cannot be an individual [bidding for the taxi operation license]. We want to be better in taxi service supervision, declared the Secretary, who added that the bill also rules that GPS and voice recording equipment should be installed inside the taxis.

Lawmakers expressed concerns regarding the bill mostly relating to the fact that concessions will only be available for companies to bid, not for individuals.

Ip Sio Kai questioned the government as to whether it intends to encourage competition by introducing such a policy.

Zheng Anting stated that taxi drivers and the companies will be in a relationship of managing and being managed.

Another concern is that taxis will be requested to install voice-recording equipment.

Au Kam San pointed out the situation when a passenger [can] shout you [taxi driver] beat me while it was in fact the passenger who was harming the driver, in order to corrupt the voice recording evidence.

Angela Leong also noted that voices might be vague, [a video-recording] is probably more complete and clearer.

Agnes Lam, however, wondered whether the government would consider introducing app-based taxi hailing.

Mak Soi Kun asked whether the government should prevent taxis from working during typhoon No.8.

Rosario, when replying to the lawmakers, said that his departments have not reached a consensus. He further noted that society and the lawmakers have different opinions.

Regarding the regulation that suggests only companies can apply for taxi concessions, the Secretary remarked that there is not one single thing in the world with only good sides. He then noted that the relationship between the companies and the drivers is one of employer and employees.

He also said we dont encourage taxis to work during typhoon [No.8].

The Secretary also stated that we will not have a specific taxi law for app-based hailing taxis.

Replying to the lawmakers further questions, he noted that that the government will not list, within the law, the limitation on the number of taxi licenses for which each company can apply. He explained that the adoption of such a measure gives the government some flexibility when opening a public tender each time.

Leong Sun Iok wondered about the fairness of protecting drivers when there is a dispute between them and the passengers. He also asked whether the government would consider establishing a committee for the taxi drivers to file appeals.

First, we have never considered [establishing] the committee. We can discuss it, but during the proceedings [of the bills discussion] nobody mentioned that, said Rosario.

The Director of the Transport Bureau (DSAT), Lam Hin San, expressed his confidence in the effectiveness of voice-recording equipment in helping the law enforcement officers deciding what happens inside the taxis.

Another government representative noted that any taxi driver who intends to appeal to the government regarding a dispute, can write an appeal to the government within 15 days after the dispute took place. The government then will investigate the case.

Tax reduction should encourage use of public transportation

A tax reduction bill, aimed at owners whose vehicles were damaged during last years Typhoon Hato, has been passed through the Legislative Assembly (AL). The bill proposes a tax reduction on flooded or heavily damaged vehicles that have been traded in for new vehicles.

The calculation of the final amount will also take into consideration the number of years the damaged vehicle was in operation.

Each year of life will correspond to a depreciation rate of 10 percent per year after the first year of age up to a limit of 10 years.

Lawmaker Au Kam San noted that, obviously, its not necessary for the tax to be refunded only if the residents buy new cars.

Au shared the same opinion as Agnes Lam, who said the bill obviously stated that owners can only get the tax reduction if they buy a new car. Basically, this kind of tax reduction acts as a punishment because you have to buy a new car in order to get the tax reduction. In Macau, we can enjoy big tax benefits if we buy environmental friendly car.

The Secretary for Economy and Finance, Lionel Leong, in response to the lawmakers, reaffirmed that the tax reduction is absolutely not a compensation.

Following the responses of other governmental representatives, Agnes Lam asked why let them buy a car but not an electric motorbike?

Au Kam San then questioned why cant [people] drive a car? Why cant they use public transportation? If they buy an environmental friendly car, it is tax-free already. If you can encourage them to buy an environmentally friendly car, why not encourage them not to drive? Why not try using a tax-refund method to solve the problem?

Au hopes the government will further discuss the topic.

I reaffirm that the bill is a tax-reduction for those families whose cars were damaged during the typhoon, and who need to buy a new car. It is not a tax refund policy. Besides, I, personally, strongly support environmental protection. We hope that they will use public transport, said Lionel Leong.

According to the Transport Bureau (DSAT), a total of 6,521 vehicle registration numbers were canceled and are eligible related for the tax reduction, including 3,240 cars and 3,281 motorbikes, involving an estimated MOP147.7 million in tax reduction.

On the lawmakers agenda

BUS SAFETY AND BUS FARES Several lawmakers have urged the government to improve the citys public bus safety. Lawmakers including Chui Sai Peng, Angela Leong and Leong Sun Iok suggested conducting research on how to increase the supply of bus drivers, to allow present drivers more time to rest and maintain safe driving behaviors. Leong Sun Iok further suggested that the government urge bus companies to train drivers to improve their proficiency. Leong hopes that the government can improve public transportation services following the bus fare increase.

PAID PLASTIC BAGS Chan Hong wants the government to announce the legislative procedure regarding charging a fee when customers request plastic shopping bags. Chan hopes the government can complete the establishment of the related laws in 2019. In addition, she stated that the government should improve the publics environmental awareness through other means to lead the public towards using less plastic bags of their own initiative, which would reduce the use of plastic bags at the source. She also suggested that authorities establish supervisory regulations over plastic bag usage, such as through the introduction of punitive measures.

DRIVING LICENSES RECOGNITION Ng Kuok Cheong and Au Kam San criticized the government regarding the proposal to mutually recognize driving licenses between mainland China and Macau. Ng said that the government is suspected of ignoring the publics opinion, and is walking [in] the wrong direction in terms of regional cooperation. Au calls on the Chief Executive to cancel the authorization of the Secretary for Transport and Public Works to sign an agreement with mainland China concerning the proposal, and urged the government to conduct a public consultation on the topic, and to only engage in other discussions after the society reaches a consensus.
The company known for being behind Facebooks data leak scandal, Cambridge Analytica, was preparing to develop its own cryptocurrency, a process that had links to Macau in relation to fundraising through an initial coin offering, according to several reports from Reuters and the New York Times (NYT).

According to the former Cambridge Analytica employee Brittany Kaiser, quoted by the NYT, the digital coin would have helped people store online personal data and even sell it.

Documents obtained by the NYT also establish the relationship between the company and investors in Macau, namely in what concerns the creation of a so-called Dragon Coin, a cryptocurrency specifically targeting casino gamblers.

It was noted that several influential people in the gaming industry in Macau, support the coin, namely former triad boss Wan Kuok Koi, who is nicknamed Broken Tooth.

In the same documents obtained by the NYT through Kaiser, it is said that Cambridge Analytica had a contract with the Macau Dragon Group as a client, by which it would help to publicize and arrange potential investors for the USD500 million initial coin offering (ICO).

Such an ICO was also said to have been suspended when the Cambridge Analyticas CEO Alexander Nix was suspended last month when the Facebook data leak scandal became public knowledge.

During a press conference yesterday, a Monetary Authority of Macao (AMCM) representative called upon residents to be careful about any fraud that may exist relating to virtual currencies. In a statement issued by the authority, AMCM reminded the residents that virtual currencies are a virtual commodity, and that they are neither a legal currency nor a financial instrument. AMCM has already officially issued a notice to all banks and payment institutions to not participate in or provide, directly or indirectly, any financial services related to virtual currencies, including financial services where the virtual merchandise is adopted as the payment currency.

Separate reports have said that the Chinese technology company Lantai Digital Application Technology Co Ltd announced its launch of a cryptocurrency in an operation that would count the support of several of Macaus major VIP gambling promoters (junkets), with such a digital coin able to be used for transactions in local casinos.

Such a report had immediate response from the local junkets, who rushed to classify it as fake news, distancing themselves from the company. RM
The Chief Executive, Chui Sai On, is scheduled to visit the Kingdom of Cambodia and the Kingdom of Thailand from May 7 to 11. The visit aims to further leverage Macaus bridging functions in order to deepen cooperation between China and countries covered by the Belt and Road initiative, as well as advancing Macaus contributions to people-to-people bond under the initiative.

The Chief Executive will hold respective official meetings with officials of the two countries and meet with Chinese communities residing either in Cambodia or in Thailand.

The delegation will attend promotional activities in those countries organized by the Macau Government Tourism Office and the Macau Trade and Investment Promotion Institute.

According to a statement issued yesterday, the delegation will attend exchange sessions between Macau young people and young people in the two countries, as well as a forum on the development of traditional Chinese medicine.

Members of Macaus Executive Council, representatives of returned overseas Chinese communities in Macau and representatives of local youth associations have been invited to join the delegation.
The Portuguese School of Macau (EPM) is celebrating its twentieth anniversary with several events this week, including a show at the Cultural Center tomorrow. In the current school year, the EPM has tutored 577 students from 24 different nationalities. In an interview with the Times yesterday, the schools president Manuel Machado made a positive assessment of the schools role and prospects.

Macau Daily Times (MDT)  The Portuguese School of Macau (EPM) is celebrating its 20th anniversary. What is your assessment of the schools development?

Manuel Machado (MM)  The school obviously had good moments and not so good ones. It began with over 1,100 students and there was a sharp decline in that number during the initial years. Around six years ago that tendency started to revert and the school has had a growth of around 15 students every year. Currently we have 577 students. So, there was a fluctuation in the number of students that had to be accompanied by a fluctuation of the teachers and staff available. Otherwise, one of the major tasks of EPM was to have in Macau a school offering a Portuguese curriculum to the sons of Portuguese who resided here and wanted to continue their university studies in Portugal and elsewhere. The school has always highlighted the teaching of the Portuguese language, but adaptations have been made along the way. As the years progressed, things changed and a lot of Portuguese left Macau. Progressively, a new group of students from other nationalities and cultures entered the school. The school adapted and overall I make a positive assessment [of EPMs 20 years], given that the school is growing and has established itself in the MSAR. It is recognized and wanted by the different communities that live in this region.

MDT  In the next school year more students are expected and the school may not be able to accept all the applications for the first time because of its size. Theres also an increasing number of students who dont have a Portuguese background. How can EPM make sure that the quality of Portuguese language teaching is kept at a high standard? Is there a risk of disfigurement?

MM  The tendency [to have students without Portuguese background] has been felt for the past years. The students enrolled in the primary school have different sociolinguistic and cultural backgrounds. The school needs to pay close attention to that in order not to allow, as you said, the disfigurement of the school and its educational project. The school bases itself on the Portuguese curricula with adaptations [to Macau]. For example, last year, we received 60 students in the first year. From those 60, 20 didnt know Portuguese. Those 20 students were integrated in the three classes available and simultaneously two groups for the preparatory year were created. Those two groups have 14 hours of Portuguese per week. The aim is for them to acquire the linguistic tools needed to follow the [regular] classes. Sometimes this [the preparatory year] is not enough and if that occurs extra Portuguese language support is given in the following years.

MDT  Theres also the issue of the facilities, which are becoming insufficient

MM  Regarding facilities, we are close to our limit. We expect to have around 600 students next year and have managed to find two extra classrooms for the next school year after renovating existing classrooms. After the next school year, it will be very hard to increase the number of students. The facilities are not matching the students growth. Even if there are more facilities, we also cant take the risk of accepting more students and decreasing the teaching quality. We need to balance quality and quantity.

MDT  So, is there a risk of being unable to accept all the applicants in the future?

MM  Either that or resorting to external facilities, although that is not a solution that pleases me. It wouldnt be ideal and only in-extremis we would opt for it. But it is preferable to shutting our doors to students and parents who look for us.

MDT  There has been reinforcement in the means allocated to students with special educational needs. Are there more cases requiring that support?

MM  Over the years there have been more cases of students with special educational needs. Those students require specialized support. Around four years ago we started by having a specialized teacher full-time, who was assisted by other teachers working part-time. Last year we hired one more and another two this year. We currently have four [specialized] teachers.

MDT  There are claims that some schools in Macau tend not to accept students with special educational needs. Are you aware of that?

MM  I heard that but it would not be elegant to talk about colleagues from other schools. What I can say is that EPM has always been open to receiving students with diverse problems. What we faced over the years was incapacity to address many situations of that kind. Fortunately we are improving significantly now. [] Currently we have 45 students who were identified as cases with special educational needs. There are other situations arising along the year that require psychological support. We have two full time psychologists who support 111 students, although the number is not stable, because students may have temporary issues requiring short-term support.
President Donald Trump said that although hes looking ahead optimistically to a historic summit meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un he could still pull out if he feels its not going to be fruitful.

Trump said that CIA Director Mike Pompeo and Kim got along really well in their recent secret meeting, and he declared, Weve never been in a position like this to address worldwide concerns over North Koreas nuclear weapons.

But speaking alongside Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe yesterday [Macau time], after the allies met at Trumps Florida resort, he made clear that hed still be ready to pull the plug on what is being billed as an extraordinary meeting between the leaders of longtime adversaries.

If I think that if its a meeting that is not going to be fruitful were not going to go. If the meeting when Im there is not fruitful I will respectfully leave the meeting, Trump told a news conference. He also said that a U.S.-led maximum pressure campaign of tough economic sanctions on North Korea would continue until the isolated nation denuclearizes.

Abe echoed the sentiment.

Just because North Korea is responding to dialogue, there should be no reward. Maximum pressure should be maintained, he said.

Trump has said his summit with Kim, with whom he traded bitter insults and threats last year as North Korea conducted nuclear and missile tests, could take place by early June, although the venue has yet to be decided. It would be the first such leadership summit between the two nations after six decades of hostility following the Korean War.

Other than the threat posed to by North Koreas weapons of mass destruction, another issue overhanging the summit plans is the fate of three Americans detained there. Trump said that was under negotiation and there was a good chance of winning their release, but he wouldnt say whether that was a precondition for sitting down with Kim.

Pompeo raised the question of the three Americans in his meeting with Kim, a U.S. official said.

Trump also said he had promised Abe he would work hard for the return of Japanese nationals abducted by North Korea. Tokyo says at least a dozen Japanese said to have been taken in the 1970s and 1980s remain unaccounted for.

News of Pompeos trip to North Korea, which took place more than two weeks ago, emerged on Tuesday, as lawmakers weighed whether he should be confirmed to become secretary of state. Trump and Republican senators held up his highly unusual, secret mission as sign of Pompeos diplomatic ability. But the prospect of his confirmation hung in the balance as Democrats lined up against him. AP
Why are President Donald Trumps tariffs such a bad deal for the U.S. economy? Its not just because they might start a trade war. Its because of tax theory.

Now, most tax theory is incredibly boring. (Hopefully my former economics professors arent reading this column!)

One reason is because its about taxes, which are not the most interesting subject to begin with. But another reason is that tax theory often involves very complicated mathematics describing highly abstract concepts. Many theories claiming to yield the optimal tax are only optimal in a world that doesnt closely resemble the one in which we live. But the real world is so complicated  the federal tax code alone contains more than 70,000 pages  that beautiful theorems posited in economic papers are often next to useless in practice.

But still, there are some important insights to be gained from tax theory. One of these is the idea that intermediate goods shouldnt be taxed. Intermediate goods are things used in the production of other, more complicated things  steel for cars, transistors for computer chips, screens for mobile phones. In 1971, economists Peter Diamond and James Mirrlees realized that under certain conditions, it makes sense not to tax these things at all.

The reason is that taxing inputs causes companies to produce less than they otherwise would. Lower production means a smaller economic pie to divide up. Better, Diamond and Mirrlees concluded, to let companies make as much stuff as they can, and then to focus on dividing up that stuff among consumers.

Diamond and Mirrlees result holds perfectly true only in the idealized setting of an unrealistic economic model. But it provides powerful intuition that many countries have actually used to design their tax systems. Many countries, as well as the European Union, have value-added taxes, or VATs. These let companies deduct the cost of their intermediate goods when paying their taxes. As a result, a VAT only taxes the amount of value that ends up reaching the consumer.

The U.S. could choose to implement a VAT. Instead, under Trump, its doing almost the exact opposite. Most of Trumps tariffs fall directly on inputs that U.S. manufacturers need to make their products.

Chad Brown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics has the numbers. According to Browns calculations, most of the USD50 billion worth of Chinese products that Trump is threatening to impose tariffs on are things that U.S. producers use to make other things  either intermediate inputs used directly in production, or capital goods.

This is bad news for a lot of U.S. companies, although manufacturers will probably be hit the hardest. That would be another self-inflicted wound by an administration that was elected on promises to revive Made in America. Trumps earlier round of tariffs on steel and aluminum were probably a key factor behind a rise in the prices U.S. factories pay for those metals.

Predictably, a large number of U.S. businesses have applied for relief from Trumps metal tariffs. Granting exemptions helps keep U.S. manufacturers afloat, but also makes the tariffs themselves less effective. That just shows what a bad idea the tariffs are in the first place.

Diamond and Mirrlees theory may be just some abstract math on a page, but the insight is real and important  if you want to give American manufacturing a boost, dont use taxes to starve U.S. factories of the materials and equipment they need.

So what should Trump be doing instead? If he wants to start a trade war, he could at least focus his tariffs on consumer goods instead, such as televisions or phones. But a better idea would be to simply forget about tariffs, and promote U.S. exports instead.

Another good idea, taking a page from Diamond and Mirrlees book, would be to have a VAT in the U.S. VATs are a highly efficient form of taxation. They do tend to hit the poor harder than the rich, because theyre similar to consumption taxes, and poor people consume a higher percent of their income. But this can be solved by using the VAT to fund health care, housing subsidies and other services for poor Americans.

A VAT might also satisfy Trumps thirst for trade war. Trump seems to think VATs represent a kind of tariff on imported goods. They dont, and most VATs are neutral with respect to trade. But if the presidents desire to look tough on trade could be satisfied with an efficient form of taxation that doesnt actually hurt U.S. producers, so much the better. Noah Smith, Bloomberg
China has held live-fire exercises off its southeast coast, state media said, in an apparent warning to the democratic, self-ruled island of Taiwan against what Beijing deems as provocative remarks on independence.

The official Xinhua News Agency said yesterday an air unit of the Peoples Liberation Army ground forces held a live-fire exercise on Wednesday off Chinas southeast coast. The PLA said the exercise involved the coordination of various types of armed helicopters that detected targets on the water and attacked them.

The exercise ended at around 11 p.m. with the landing of the last helicopter, Xinhua said.

It was unclear if the exercises referred to earlier drills announced by China that were to take place in the Taiwan Strait. State broadcaster China Central Television reported Wednesday that the Taiwan Strait exercises targeted advocates of formal independence for Taiwan, saying in a headline on its website, Dont say you havent been warned!

Taiwans Defense Ministry spokesman, Chen Chung-chi, sought to downplay the drill, saying China was exaggerating the scale of the activity to create anxiety among Taiwanese. It is the Chinese Communist Party that has played this up with cheap verbal intimidation and saber rattling through the state media, hoping to create panic and unease, Chen said.

Chen described the drill as a regular artillery shooting exercise and said China was hyping it up to sound like a so-called military exercise in the Taiwan Strait.

Chinas Defense Ministry did not immediately respond to questions. The maritime safety authority in the coastal province of Fujian announced the one-day drill last week, saying only that it would start at 8 a.m. and end at midnight.

Last weeks announcement of the drill coincided with President Xi Jinpings attendance at what was the largest fleet review since the founding of the Peoples Republic of China in 1949. It comprised 48 ships, among them Chinas sole operating aircraft carrier, along with 76 helicopters, fighter jets and bombers, and more than 10,000 personnel. AP
The president of EPMs parents association (APEP), Valeria Koob, believes that the Portuguese school should impose a multi-hour regime for children to learn the Mandarin language.

According to Koob, the association has been claiming that Mandarin teachers should adopt a more practical teaching approach by taking students outside of the school as much as possible, in order to use the language in a real environment.

The teaching of the Chinese language is a complex question. In fact, it requires a completely different methodology from that used for the other languages, since Chinese learning is mostly memory-based, said Koob.

It has been two years that Koob has led the association. Interviewed by the Times, she recalled that APEP, along with EPM had achieved a number of goals, including the improvement of its canteen services and a higher degree of supervision and guided activities during the students break time.

In addition to that, since the school has been receiving more students with special needs, EPM has started investing more and more in specialized staff, she told the Times.

The increase in the number of students, especially students whose mother tongue is not Portuguese, is a clear sign that Macau society holds EPM and its educational project in high regard, Koob added.

Further, the association pledged that it will continue to develop its activities in the areas of environment, volunteering and Chinese language. LV
Qualcomm Inc.s latest proposal for its USD44 billion acquisition of NXP Semiconductors has difficulty resolving concerns of Chinese anti-monopoly regulators, a government spokesman yesterday.

The Commerce Ministry spokesmans comment was the first Chinese statement about the U.S. chipmakers proposed acquisition since a trade dispute blew up between Beijing and President Donald Trump over technology policy.

China is the final major government withholding approval of the deal. It would allow Qualcomm, which flourished by supplying chips to the mobile phone boom, to broaden its product range into other industries.

As for remedial measures already proposed by Qualcomm, the market test conducted by the investigating agency found Qualcomms plan has difficulty resolving the related market competition problems, said the spokesman, Gao Feng, at a regular ministry briefing.

Qualcomm, headquartered in San Diego, withdrew its proposal for the deal Monday and submitted a new plan this week, Gao said.

The spokesman gave no details of what Qualcomm proposed to satisfy Chinese competition concerns or why regulators found problems with it.

Gao didnt respond to a reporters question about whether the review was influenced by the dispute with Trump or Washingtons decision to penalize a Chinese tech company this week over sales to Iran and North Korea.

Trump has threatened to raise tariffs on up to $150 billion worth of Chinese telecom equipment and other goods in a dispute over complaints Beijing pressures foreign companies to hand over technology. China has announced its own $50 billion list of U.S. goods for possible retaliation and says it is ready to take other steps.

In a separate case, American authorities this week barred state-owned ZTE Corp., one of Chinas biggest technology companies, from exporting U.S. components. The Commerce Department said ZTE reneged on a pledge to discipline employees who were involved in violating U.S. controls on technology sales to Iran and North Korea and instead paid them bonuses. AP
The Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge (HKZMB) is due to open for traffic later this year and has been the talk of the town for quite some time, especially among local investors. There is no doubt that an infrastructural project of this magnitude will have an impact on the local economy and real estate market. The only question is How much impact it will actually have, and in which direction?

Taking a broader perspective, we can observe that given Macau economys reliance on the tourism sector, the completion of the HKZMB would mean easier and faster flow of tourists and personnel, naturally boosting the general economy.

From a more market- specific perspective, the upcoming HKZMB is likely to have an equalising effect on the 3 markets, essentially merging them to a degree and bringing them closer to a broad average in terms of capital values and rents. For example, we can expect incoming tenants from Hong Kong looking to escape the stifling rents over there, and outgoing tenants to Zhuhai attracted by larger living spaces and cheaper rents. In this regard, the effect on the Macau local market might not be as pronounced as what we can expect in Hong Kong or Zhuhai.

We are seeing high expectations from investors, anticipating a dramatic increase in values. But in reality, only the pre-sales section of the market has been active, while the secondary market has been quite stagnant. We would like to advise caution against over-optimism or rash speculation for investors.

In the long run, we expect the bridge to have a generally positive impact on the local market.

Juliet Risdon is a Director of JML Property and a property investor.

Having been established in 1994, JML Property offers investment property & homes. It specializes in managing properties for owners and investors, and providing attractive and comfortable homes for tenants.

www.JMLProperty.com

info@JMLProperty.com
Taiwans government said yesterday that recent Chinese military drills are aimed at intimidating the island and are a threat to regional peace and stability.

China is attempting to pressure and harass Taiwan and seek to raise tensions between the sides and in the region, the Cabinet-level Mainland Affairs Council said on its website.

Taiwans people are very clear about this and will not accept it. We are determined in our defense of our nations sovereignty and dignity and will absolutely not yield to military threats or inducements, the statement said.

Underscoring the heightened tensions between the rivals, Chinas Taiwan Affairs Office issued a new warning to Taipei yesterday against taking further steps toward formal independence.

Taiwan independence separatist activities pose the biggest actual threat to peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait, spokesman Ma Xiaoguang was quoted as saying. Any plots seeking to separate Taiwan from China are doomed to failure.

Ma was responding to a question about whether an increase in Chinese air force training flights around Taiwan was a response to comments from Taiwanese Premier William Lai in parliament that hes a Taiwanese independence worker, adding that Taiwan is a sovereign, independent nation. Ma offered no details.

China claims Taiwan as its own territory and says the two sides, which separated during the Chinese civil war in 1949, must eventually be united, by force if necessary.

The Taiwanese statement referred to Chinas live-fire exercises off its southeast coast on Wednesday, echoing earlier comments from the defense ministry that Beijing was playing up the limited-scope war games in hopes of intimidating Taiwan for political purposes.

Beijings hostility makes the hugest mockery of its assertion of a spiritual connection between people from the two sides, it said.

Chinese state media said the single-day drills off Chinas southeast coast featured an air unit of the Peoples Liberation Army ground forces. The PLA said the exercise involved the coordination of various types of armed helicopters that detected targets on the water and attacked them.

It was unclear if the exercises referred to earlier drills announced by China that were to take place in the Taiwan Strait. State broadcaster China Central Television reported that the Taiwan Strait exercises targeted advocates of formal independence for Taiwan, saying in a headline on its website, Dont say you havent been warned!

China severed ties with Taiwan almost two years ago, after independence-leaning President Tsai Ing-wen refused its demand to recognize the self-governing island democracy as a part of Chinese territory.

Chinese officials have denounced the recent passage of a U.S. law encouraging more high-level government contacts with Taiwan, saying that violates U.S. commitments not to restore formal exchanges severed when Washington switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979.

Ties have also been roiled by U.S. plans to provide Taiwan with submarine manufacturing technology and the appointment of hawkish U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton. AP
The Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO) and the Fujian Provincial Tourism Development Commission have collaborated to promote their destinations in Melbourne and Sydney from April 16 to 18.

The two tourism bodies updated a total of some 190 local tourism industry operators in Melbourne and Sydney on the tourism prospects in Fujian Province and Macau, encouraging them to tap into the market potential in promoting travel to both destinations in one trip.

While speaking at the occasion, MGTO director Helena de Senna Fernandes noted that the tourism resources of Fujian and Macau, together with Xiamen Airlines services from Melbourne and Sydney, could attract more Australians to experience both destinations during a single trip.

She added that Macau received close to 90 thousand visitors from Australia last year.

According to a statement issued by MGTO, the bureau met with leaders of overseas Chinese organizations in the two cities.

MGTO hosted banquets for about 40 leaders of overseas Chinese organizations and Chambers of Commerce in Melbourne and Sydney on April 16 and 17.

Providing the guests with an update on the latest tourism developments in Macau during the banquets, the bureau sought to widen the coverage of the promotion among overseas Chinese in both cities.

MGTO also set up a Taste of Macao pop up restaurant in Sydney.

For five days starting from April 18, the pop up restaurant will serve delicacy lovers with complimentary local signature delights to highlight the Macau Year of Gastronomy.

Yesterday, Fernandes and her team met with the Honorable George Souris (former New South Wales Minister for Tourism and Major Events), board member of the Australian Film Institute.

The Institute has significant and varied experience in presenting TV and film awards and staging awards ceremonies.

MGTO introduced the International Film Festival & Awards Macao and exchanged perspectives on organizing film festivals with the Institute.
Credit: University of Manchester

The less commonly prescribed opioid substitute buprenorphine may be safer than methadone for problem opioid users, especially if used during the first month of treatment, according to a study which includes University of Manchester researchers.

The University of Bristol led study, funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and published in the journal Addiction online today, analysed GP practice data for over 11,000 patients on opioid substitute treatment linked to deaths data.

It assessed the relative risk of death for the two treatments, compared to not being in treatment, over three time periods: in the first four weeks of starting treatment, during the rest of treatment, and in the first four weeks after treatment ended.

Roughly a third of patients receiving opioid substitute treatment were prescribed buprenorphine and two-thirds methadone. As previously shown, risk of death is higher at the beginning and immediately after the end of treatment, the basis for the argument that retaining patients in treatment for longer periods will save lives.

The new study shows that patients on buprenorphine had substantially lower rates of overdose death during treatment compared to those on methadone: four times lower in the first 4 weeks (0.3 percent compared with 1.24 percent) and almost twice as low during the rest of time on treatment (0.18 percent compared with 0.33 percent).

These differences remained even after adjusting for differences in patient and practice characteristics for those prescribed methadone or buprenorphine.

Patients on buprenorphine also had lower rates of all-cause mortality during and immediately after treatment  which may be because patients who are older and have other physical and mental health complications may do better on buprenorphine than methadone.

The study also confirmed that patients on buprenorphine do not stay in treatment for as long as patients on methadone. Since the benefits of treatment are greater the longer treatment lasts, this needs to be considered in relation to the choice of substitute drug.

The researchers undertook a modelling exercise to see what impact treatment duration might have at a population level. They concluded that, overall, treatment using buprenorphine alone was unlikely to reduce the risk of drug related poisoning deaths because the treatment periods are shorter than for methadone.

Professor John Macleod, joint lead author from the Centre for Academic Primary Care at the University of Bristol, said:

"Although this is a somewhat complicated picture, with lower rates of death for patients on buprenorphine offset at a population level by the shorter treatment durations, our findings clearly suggest that buprenorphine may be the safer treatment option. Because of the shorter treatment duration associated with its use, starting treatment with buprenorphine then giving patients the option to switch to methadone later could be the best approach.

"Internationally, there is no consensus about which medication to use. In the UK, the British Association for Psychopharmacology currently recommends methadone as the first-line treatment if there are no contraindications. We believe that future guidance should take these findings into account."

Professor Matthew Hickman, from the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit and Population Health Sciences at University of Bristol, and joint lead author of the study, said:

"Despite the record number of patients in treatment, drug related deaths continue to rise. Our research provides evidence to support a change in the way treatment is delivered that could save lives. We now need trials in the UK on how we combine different opioid substitution treatments alongside other behaviour change interventions to retain people in treatment long enough to reduce the number of drug related deaths in the population."

Explore further Methadone increases death risk in first four weeks of treatment for opioid dependence

More information: Matthew Hickman et al. The impact of buprenorphine and methadone on mortality: a primary care cohort study in the United Kingdom, Addiction (2018). Journal information: Addiction Matthew Hickman et al. The impact of buprenorphine and methadone on mortality: a primary care cohort study in the United Kingdom,(2018). DOI: 10.1111/add.14188
By now you are probably used to the probing questions your doctor asks during your annual checkup.

How have you been sleeping lately? Any increased stress at work? Problems at home? Have you engaged in any risky sexual activity?

Don't be surprised if, in the future, the questioning turns to guns.

With gun violence on the rise over the past few years and mass shootings happening more frequently, physicians are making a renewed push to treat the issue as a public health crisis. And part of that begins in your doctor's office.

Doctors, especially primary care physicians, are in a unique position to know some of the most private details of our lives, including many indicators that could suggest a higher risk of being a victim or perpetrator of gun violence.

The Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California Davis has launched a new tool kit for doctors and nurses that teaches them how to gently introduce the topic of guns into the conversation, with a special emphasis on spotting red flags that could indicate risks for suicide, domestic violence, homicide or child access to guns.

While physicians liken the strategy to previous campaigns that involved asking patients about seat belt use or smoking, gun rights advocates see it as intrusive and a way for doctors to leverage their status in society to ultimately reduce ownership of firearms.

The "What You Can Do" initiative was conceptualized following the Las Vegas massacre in October, when a lone gunman fired indiscriminately into a crowd of concertgoers from a hotel high-rise, killing 59 and wounding 422. It is the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.

Those who have studied mass shooters say many of themalthough not allshowed warning signs of such impending violence.

The program's founders acknowledge, however, that violence is much more likely to occur closer to home.

Nearly 23,000 people in the U.S. were killed in firearm suicides in 2016, accounting for 59 percent of all gun deaths that year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A 2017 study published by the American Academy of Pediatrics found nearly 1,300 children die from gunshot wounds each year, and about 6 percent are accidental shootings.

Dr. Kelly Motadel, a pediatrician and chief medical officer at Vista Community Clinic in North County, said the question of gun access in the home is already a common one in pediatricians' offices, but that the inquiry should become standard across all age groups.

"People don't think of their doctor as political. It allows us to be more of a neutral party and come at it from an 'I care about your health' issue rather than a gun control issue," Motadel said. She pointed to research that showed just a doctor mentioning a risk factor makes a patient more likely to reduce that risk factor.

"Even though there's a lot of doctor-bashing out there, most people still respect their doctor," she added.

The organizers stress the project is not about restricting people's rights to firearms, or politicizing the issue.

"Having a gun in the home increases the risk of violence and death for everyone in the home," said Rocco Pallin, a research data analyst at UC Davis and the project's director. "It's about the gun owner being responsible and understanding the risk of having that gun."

A Florida law in 2011 aimed to restrict doctors from asking about guns, but the "Docs vs. Glocks" law was overturned by a federal appeals court last year. As long as the doctor feels the question is relevant to the patient, then it is legal, the UC Davis program advises.

Doctors are advised in the guidelines to approach the gun conversation with patients respectfully and to realize that many gun owners already take safety very seriously. It also urges doctors to "keep in mind that firearm ownership can be reflective of longstanding beliefs and values."

Much of the advice to doctors revolves around being able to identify patients who might be at higher risk than others.

That can include someone with a history of violent behavior, domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse, or mental illness. Special attention should also be paid to demographic groups that include children for accidental shootings, middle-aged and older men for suicide and adolescent and young men for homicide.

The conversation with the patient should typically begin with asking if the patient owns or has access to a firearm and if anyone else might have access, according to the guidelines. The doctor should take steps to make the conversation specific to the patient's circumstances, relate to the patient's well-being, be educational and include follow-up in case conditions change over time.

Recommendations to the patient might include safe gun storage tips, firearms safety classes or how to properly dispose of an unwanted gun.

Doctors can jot down the patient's answers in the file, but are otherwise prohibited from sharing personal health information due to federal law. However, if the doctor uncovers information that suggests the patient or someone else is in imminent danger, then the doctor can take preventative measures that include contacting family, law enforcement or mental health providers.

Doctors can also suggest in times of crisis that guns be stored temporarily outside the home, such as with a police department or at a local gun range. In California, law enforcement or family membersnot doctorscan file a Gun Violence Restraining Order that prohibits certain people from owning guns, such as patients experiencing homicidal or suicidal intent.

The Annals of Internal Medicine is supporting the project and is urging colleagues to take the pledge to at least commit to talking about firearm safety with their at-risk patients. More than 1,000 physicians have signed up so far.

Some question, however, if it is realisticor fairto continue to expect more from doctors with increased patient loads and work requirements.

"I've administered health care facilities side by side with physicians for 35 years, and the amount of required information that we have put on them in the last decade is not sustainable long term," said Fran Butler-Cohen, CEO of Family Heath Centers of San Diego. "Until we address these societal issues more effectively through legislation and policy, it is absolutely unfair and unconscionable to continue to demand more and more of our medical professionals.

"They are not responsible for the nation's opioid epidemic, they are not responsible for obesity," she added, "and clearly cannot act in place of good, solid gun control legislation."

Gun rights advocates argue blanket questions about gun ownership cross an ethical line and exploit a position of power the doctor has over a patient.

Dr. Arthur Przebinda of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, a gun rights advocacy group, said that while safe gun storage is important, the message should not be coming from physicians. "Most doctors don't know jack diddly about guns," he said.

He said the major medical associations have shown a history of bias against gun ownership over the years, and the gun-screening questions appear to be a thinly veiled attempt to reduce gun ownership, period. Przebinda, the group's project director who works as a diagnostic-imaging specialist in the Los Angeles area, said he gets email on a nearly daily basis from patients around the country who complain about being badgered by their doctors about gun ownership.

"It's none of your damn business," he said. "If I come in to you with stomach pain, it has nothing to do with how many guns I have or where I keep them." The group says gun owners can politely refuse to discuss the issue with their doctors and also suggests other actions to take, including filing a complaint with the health care system or medical licensing board.

However, asking someone about access to guns might be appropriate in very specific circumstances, such as a patient exhibiting suicidal tendencies, he said.

The UC Davis project comes as the medical community is putting increasing pressure on legislators for funding for gun violence research.

"There is a science to all of this," said Dr. Garen Wintemute, director of UC Davis' Violence Prevention Research Program and a longtime researcher of firearm violence from a public health perspective. "It's something that can be investigated, understood and dealt with just the way other health problems are."

But even the developers of the "What You Can Do" initiative admit there is a lack of data when it comes to intervention strategies. The program was rolled out anyway.

"We don't have the data we need to say this is the best way to intervene in a clinical setting," Pallin said. "We can't really wait for that."

The CDC began to fund gun violence research in the late 1980s and early '90s when crime was at an all-time high in the U.S. But in 1996 in what is commonly referred to as the Dickey amendmentnamed after Rep. Jay Dickey, R-Ark. - Congress prohibited the use of federal funding to advocate or promote gun control. The rider came after lobbying by the National Rifle Association, which argued certain CDC-funded research was biased on the topic.

"There has never been a ban on research, but the CDC took the message and has not funded research since," Wintemute said.

The latest federal budget addresses the misconception of a ban on research, clarifying the CDC is allowed to study the topic. But Wintemute said many in the research community have written it off as "empty talk" since the budget did not allocate any funding toward research.

In the absence of federal research, nonprofits, government agencies, healthcare networks and schools have taken up the cause from a health perspective.

The latest is Kaiser Permanente, an integrated health system that serves 12 million patients, from Hawaii to Maryland. Recently it announced a $2 million initiative to study how health care practitioners can help prevent gun injuries.

"This is not about gun ownership, this is about science and this is about research to help us find solutions to prevent firearm injuries," said Dr. Bechara Choucair, chief community health officer for Kaiser Permanente who is co-chairing the effort's task force.

"We are planning to leave the policy debate to policymakers and focus on identifying evidence-based tools and evidence-based resources to prevent injures and improve our care delivery."

The task force will identify research priorities over the next few monthspossibilities include suicide prevention and intimate partner violence prevention. A call will then go out to Kaiser Permanente staff for project proposals.

Explore further Doctors urged to make public commitment to talk to patients about guns and gun safety

2018 The San Diego Union-Tribune

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Mouse cells with (left) or without (right) DOR protein (vesicle membrane indicated by orange stain). These models have allowed the discovery of the mechanism through which DOR protein regulates fat cells and thus the development of obesity. Credit: M. Romero, IRB Barcelona

Obesity is a world health problem. Excessive accumulation of fat tissue (adipose tissue) increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, hypertension, diabetes and some types of cancer. However, some obese individuals are less susceptible to these conditions. According to a recent study published by researchers at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) and CIBERDEM in Nature Cell Biology, deficiency in the protein DOR (also called TP53INP2) stimulates the generation of new adipose cells, which store fat, and leads to a less harmful kind of obesity.

In this study, which was led by Antonio Zorzano, IRB Barcelona researcher, full professor of the University of Barcelona, in collaboration with labs in Gotemburg (Sweden), Tarragona and Girona, the scientists observed that obese patients have low levels of DOR in their adipose tissue.

To further study the link between DOR and obesity, researchers in the Complex Metabolic Diseases and Mitochondria Lab, which headed the study, generated a DOR-deficient mouse model. This animal is characterised by marked obesity in the absence of metabolic complications such as glucose intolerance or inflammation. These features mimic the effect observed in the obese but metabolically healthy patients included in this study. These findings shed light on the mechanism that allows some individuals not to develop the diseases associated with obesity.

Number and volume of fat cells

The number and volume of cells in adipose tissue is particularly relevant with respect to the impact of obesity on health. In this regard, inflammation occurs when a cell increases excessively in size in order to store fat. This inflammation, in turn, leads to insulin resistance. In contrast, if the same amount of fat accumulates in a greater number of cells, the individual will be obese but will be susceptible to fewer associated medical conditions.

Current evidence indicates that, from 20 years of age onward, humans maintain a stable population of adipose cells. So if they lose or gain weight, what changes is the volume of these cells, not their number. However, the new function of DOR revealed in this study shows that a decrease in the levels of this protein in precursor cells programmed to become adipocytes can lead to an increase in the number of fat cells in adult life.

"The solution to obesity does not lie in using treatments to increase the number of adipose cells. Obesity must be prevented," says Zorzano. "But the study helps us to better understand the distinct forms of obesity in humans."

The laboratory is now working on an in-depth analysis of this mechanism to gain a complete understanding of the different types of obesity and to identify potential approaches to prevent and treat this condition.

As described in previous work, DOR is a protein that actively participates in the autophagy processes through which cells recycle damaged or unrequired components in order to ensure optimum function. "Previous studies suggested that the lack of autophagy-related proteins prevented the generation of adipose tissue. However, in the case of the protein DOR, we have observed an increase in the amount of fat accumulated," explains Montserrat Romero, IRB Barcelona researcher and first author of the article, which describes the mechanism through which DOR regulates the transformation of precursor cells into adipose cells.

Explore further Obesity and health problems: New research on a safeguard mechanism

More information: Montserrat Romero et al, TP53INP2 regulates adiposity by activating -catenin through autophagy-dependent sequestration of GSK3, Nature Cell Biology (2018). Journal information: Nature Cell Biology Montserrat Romero et al, TP53INP2 regulates adiposity by activating -catenin through autophagy-dependent sequestration of GSK3,(2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41556-018-0072-9
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Research published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine suggests that empathic, positive messages from doctors may be of small benefit to patients suffering from pain, and improve their satisfaction about the care received.

The study, which combined data from 28 clinical trials involving over 6,000 patients, adds weight to the argument that patient outcomes can be improved when doctors enhance how they express empathy and create positive expectations of benefit.

From the Universities of Oxford and Southampton in the UK, with the Netherlands Institute for Health Services Research and Lithuania's Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, the research team analysed a series of randomised clinical trials that looked at the effects of empathy or positive communication in healthcare consultations. These trials included data from consultations on a wide range of clinical conditions including pain, asthma, irritable bowel syndrome, osteoarthritis and recovery after surgery. The researchers also reviewed the effects of positive communication on quality-of-life and patient satisfaction, based on reports from patients in these trials.

The most significant benefits were seen when doctors communicated positive and reassuring messages to patients with the intention of improving a patient's expectations. In these studies, patients reported to be 5% to 20% more satisfied with their treatment compared to those who received standard care, and reported slightly improved quality-of-life.

In pain trials where enhanced empathy expressed by doctors was compared with usual care, patients reported on average an additional half-point reduction in pain on a ten-point visual scale. While this reduction suggests empathy has a small effect on pain, this falls short of the one to two-point reduction which would suggest this effect is clinically relevant. The researchers also did not make any direct comparisons with the effects of drug treatment for pain.

Lead author Dr Jeremy Howick, Director of Oxford University's Oxford Empathy Programme, said: "Doctors can do much more than prescribe drugs and other treatments to help patients suffering from mild to moderate pain. Based on the clinical trials we reviewed, the potential for these kinds of interventions to help many  perhaps most  patients in general practice appears to be promising. Whether patients need drugs or not, adding a dose of empathy may be likely to reduce their pain and lower their anxiety."

Urging caution due the limitations of their research, Dr Howick said "For many of the trials we looked at, the quality of the evidence was low and the trials were small, meaning that our conclusions could change with future research. Our study shows that empathy and positive verbal communication only provides a relatively small benefit to patients, and is unlikely to have a harmful effect, so we need to learn more about how to maximise this benefit and the cost-implications of this care. While larger, high-quality trials are now needed, this study marks an important step forward for this conceptually difficult field."

The research was funded by the British Medical Association.

Explore further Should doctors recommend acupuncture for pain?

More information: Jeremy Howick et al. Effects of empathic and positive communication in healthcare consultations: a systematic review and meta-analysis, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (2018). Journal information: Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine Jeremy Howick et al. Effects of empathic and positive communication in healthcare consultations: a systematic review and meta-analysis,(2018). DOI: 10.1177/0141076818769477
In a rare series of moves, Dutch authorities are investigating whether doctors may have committed crimes in five euthanasia cases, including the deaths of two women with advanced Alzheimer's disease.

In one of the Alzheimer's cases, which prosecutors began probing in September, a physician drugged the patient's coffee without her knowledge and then had the woman physically restrained while delivering the fatal injection. The ongoing criminal investigation is the first since the Netherlands made it legal for doctors to kill patients at their request in 2002.

Dutch prosecutors announced they were examining four other cases last month, including the death of another Alzheimer's patient who "lacked the capacity to express her own will," according to a statement from the prosecutor's office. A spokesperson said that specific criminal charges, if any, would be determined only after the investigations are finished. Several legal experts said that if doctors were found to have killed patients without their explicit request, they could potentially be charged with murder.

The investigations highlight the difficulties doctors face in handling euthanasia requests for those who later develop dementia. Mental decline can eventually make patients unable to understand the significance of their earlier demand to be killed, and as their brain changes, so can their personality and desires.

"If you made a living will when you were competent and asked for euthanasia, do we attach more weight to a decision you made when you were competent, or to your present situation where you're no longer yourself and are no longer asking to die?" said Johan Legemaate, a professor of health law at the University of Amsterdam.

The Netherlands is one of five countries that allow doctors to kill patients at their request, and one of two, along with Belgium, that grant the procedure for people with mental illness. For those with late-stage dementia, euthanasia is still possible if the person made a written demand specifying the conditions under which they want to be killed and if other criteria are met, namely if the doctor agrees the patient is suffering unbearably with no prospect of improvement.

Whether Dutch authorities prosecute the doctors in the two Alzheimer's cases being investigated will likely set a course for how the increasing numbers of people with dementia who seek euthanasia will be handled.

Since 2002, more than 55,000 patients have been lawfully killed by a doctor. About 6,500 cases were reported last year, of which 166 involved people with dementia. In the vast majority of these cases, the patients were still in the early stages of the disease and were competent to make a request for euthanasia.

The case investigators began scrutinizing in September involved a 74-year-old woman who had renewed her living will about a year before she died, according to a detailed report issued by a Dutch regional euthanasia review committee.

She wrote that she wanted to be euthanized "whenever I think the time is right." Later, the patient said several times in response to being asked if she wanted to die: "But not just now, it's not so bad yet!" according to the report.

The committee wrote that when the doctor surreptitiously slipped a sedative into the patient's coffee, she took away the patient's chance to physically protest her death. When the doctor began administering barbiturates to end the patient's life, the woman tried to get up and the doctor asked her family to hold her down.

The doctor said she was fulfilling a written request the patient made for euthanasia years earlier and that since the patient was not competent, nothing the woman said during her euthanasia procedure was relevant.

"Even if the patient had said at that moment: 'I don't want to die,' the physician would have continued," the committee wrote, citing the doctor's testimony. Given the clear signs the patient was struggling to protest her death, the committee said the doctor should have stopped.

"On the morning of the euthanasia, when her family was present, the patient was even making plans to go out to eat with them," the report said.

The examining judge will soon hear witnesses and receive expert reports before deciding whether to charge the doctor with a crime in the case.

Among the four remaining cases, one other suspicious euthanasia death is also being examined by the prosecutor's office in The Hague and three other cases are being investigated in the northern and eastern parts of the country.

The 2016 case has divided opinion even among those who support assisted dying.

"This case is appalling," said Dr. Boudewijn Chabot, a euthanasia advocate who was involved in a historic case at the Supreme Court that helped set the legal conditions for the procedure. He said the euthanasia of the Alzheimer's patient "goes beyond the law as we understand it."

Some physicians said it was problematic to kill people with late-stage dementia because it's hard to know what their wishes truly are.

Dr. Amanda Thompsell, chair of old-age psychiatry at Britain's Royal College of Psychiatrists, said it can be risky to assume how much a dementia patient is suffering mainly by observing them. "If the person says they don't want something, then we have to accept that," she said.

Other experts said that it can be ethical to act without patients' full understanding, such as when they are covertly given medicine, if it helps the patient or if it is consistent with what the patient wanted.

"You respect the patient's choice, in a situation where nothing else can be done to help," said Suzanne van de Vathorst, an associate professor of medical ethics and philosophy at Erasmus University in Rotterdam.

Ghislaine van Thiel, a medical ethicist at Utrecht University Medical School, said she would be surprised if Dutch prosecutors don't take the 2016 Alzheimer's case to trial.

"We are definitely crossing a line if we're overruling the wishes of incompetent patients to live, because a will to live is your basic, fundamental right," she said. "This is such a big discussion that we need the consideration of the courts to set standards on how the law views the rights of people with dementia and how we should consider their wishes."

Explore further Dutch prosecutors probe four euthanasia cases

 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Most of us don't have to give much thought to the mechanics of going to the bathroom.

Our bodies tell our brains when we have to go, and our brains tell our bodies when it's acceptable to do so.

But millions of people with incontinence have to cope numerous times a day with the reality that the brain-to-body messaging they once took for granted will never operate normally again.

In a small office building in Fort Lauderdale, inventor Peter H. Sayet says he's close to marketing a device that will enable incontinence sufferers to regain control of their urinary functions.

Sayet is president and CEO of Precision Medical Devices Inc., which he founded in 1998. In the past two decades, the company has secured nine patents and spent $5 million raised from about 200 investors through private-placement stock offerings to develop a Bluetooth-operated bionic sphincter controller, which he calls the Flow Control Device.

It's an implanted valve designed to fit around the urethra of a man or woman. The valve is opened and closed by a cable connected to a battery-operated controller inserted on the patient's side, under the skin. When it's time to urinate, the patientor in the case of an Alzheimer's sufferer, a caregiveruses a wireless fob or phone app to tell the controller to open and close the valve. Batteries are recharged wirelessly and must be replaced every five or six years.

Sayet said he first thought of the idea two decades ago, walking through a supermarket and coming upon a large display of adult diapers. "I thought, 'How many of those are filling up our landfills? There's got to be a better solution,' " he said.

In development for 20 years, the Flow Control Device has been successfully implanted in two dozen dogs and should be commercially available for dogs by year's end, Sayet said.

In addition to extending dogs' lives, the device's success with canines could pave the way for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to green-light human trials sometime next year, followedSayet and his investors hopeby approval of the device for human patients by 2020.

The surgery to implant the device should last no longer than 35 minutes and requires a single incision below the belt line, Sayet said. Cost of the procedure and device should be no more than $15,000, he said. It's not yet known whether the device would be covered by health insurance.

Sayet said the device has the potential to help 35 million to 40 million people with urinary incontinence. They include children with hereditary diseases, including spina bifida, a birth defect that occurs when the spine and spinal cord don't develop properly and can interfere with operation of the nerves that supply the bowel and bladder. Seventy-five percent of patients with spinal cord injuries suffer incontinence, as do paraplegics. Women often develop urinary incontinence because their pelvic nerves and muscles can be damaged during vaginal childbirth.

The device would also be a quantum leap, Sayet said, over the two most commonly implanted incontinence controllers currently on the market.

One is a urethra valve for males that a patient must control manually by squeezing a controller inserted in the scrotum. Sayet said that in addition to requiring two to three hours of surgery, a major problem with this valve is it cannot be implanted into Alzheimer's patients because they often lack the mental capacity to operate the controller. The Flow Control Device would overcome that hurdle because the patient's caregiver could operate the fob or the phone app after the patient is seated on the toilet, he said.

For women, the most common surgical optionthe transvaginal meshhas been beset with problems. It's a piece of synthetic material, or mesh, that creates a pelvic sling around the urethra and thickened muscle where the bladder connects to the urethra, to keep the urethra closed, particularly when coughing or sneezing.

Failure rates for the vaginal mesh have been unacceptably high, Sayet said. About one in 30 women have required removal or revisions of the mesh after experiencing problems that include erosion of the material into the vaginal tissue, Reuters reported. More than 50,000 women in the United States have joined class-action lawsuits against manufacturers of the devices.

Sayet's valve works for women and men in essentially the same manner, he said.

"We think ours will be the gold standard," he said.

After the urethral valve is on the market, he expects to develop further versions, including one with a larger valve to help patients who have had colostomies to reroute their intestines or colons to a port, called a stoma, in their abdomens. Colostomy patients currently have no control over their waste functions and must wear bags over their stomas that must be emptied multiple times a day.

Future devices could also help control of morbid obesity, Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), and erectile dysfunction, Sayet said.

Most of the prototype development and assembly takes place in contracted engineering labs, he said, and the dog prototypes were implanted by veterinary surgeons at the University of Miami and University of North Carolina.

Sayet said he has chosen to invest money raised from investors into research rather than waste it on expensive and showy laboratories and offices.

Sayet's work has the support of numerous urology specialists, including Dr. Angelo Gousse, a former tenured professor of urology at the UM's Miller School of Medicine, who now serves as the company's chief of surgery and member of its medical scientific board.

In late March, Sayet announced a strategic collaboration with the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville and its incontinence expert, Dr. Paul Pettit, to help advance the Flow Control Device to the clinical trials phase.

Mayo Clinic spokesman Kevin Punsky confirmed last week that Pettit and the clinic are collaborating with Precision Medical Devices, but said the collaboration is in the early stages and that "Dr. Pettit is not available for comment at this time."

One of Precision Medical Devices' earliest investors, Miami-based family practice physician Dr. Victor Krestow, said he hasn't lost any enthusiasm about the invention over the 20 years it has been in development.

Krestow, who said he has invested "well into six figures," calls the project "thrilling."

"I've been in private practice here in my medical building 48 years," he said. "And I see patients one at a time. This gives me an opportunity to help millions of people who suffer urinary incontinence."

He's even excited about the potential to extend the lives of dogs who will get the device. Incontinence, he noted, is one of the major reasons owners euthanize their dogs. Sayet said the implant and procedure should cost about $3,500 for dogs.

Krestow said he became aware of the need for a better solution when he watched his mother suffer from incontinence for 15 years before dying at 94.

"She had to wear (adult diapers). She couldn't leave the house. She couldn't go out with her friends or go to movies," he said.

People with incontinence are often too embarrassed to discuss their situations, even with their physicians, he said. When some have confided in him, Krestow said he tries to give them hope.

"I say, 'Hang in there. We will have a solution.' "

Explore further Not all vaginal implants are a problem and treating them the same puts many women at risk

2018 Sun Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.)

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
For a study at The Ohio State University, an experimental subject operates a hand tool while wearing an exoskeleton. Credit: Eric Weston, The Ohio State University.

You can wear an exoskeleton, but it won't turn you into a superhero.

That's the finding of a study in which researchers tested a commercially available exoskeletona mechanical arm attached to a harnessthat's typically worn by workers to help them carry heavy objects hands-free.

In the journal Applied Ergonomics, the researchers report that that the device relieved stress on the arms just as it was supposed tobut it increased stress on the back by more than 50 percent.

There are tradeoffs with all exoskeletons on the market today, because they inherently change the way we move, said William Marras, director of The Ohio State University Spine Research Institute and Honda Chair Professor of Integrated Systems Engineering at Ohio State.

"The simplest way to describe it is like dancing with a really bad partner," he said. "Someone is tugging and pulling on you in directions you're not expecting, and your body has to compensate for that. And the way you compensate is by recruiting different muscles to perform the task."

For the study, 12 volunteers used two different pneumatic tools, a torque wrench and an impact wrench, as they might in industry. They used the wrenches with and without the aid of the exoskeleton.

The torque wrench weighed about 10 pounds, while the impact wrench weighed 30 pounds. When participants wore the exoskeleton, the wrenches were supported by the mechanical arm, which transferred the weight to a vest-like harness. The participants then only had to grip the wrench and move it up or forward as they might to tighten bolts in a factory.

Over the course of a few hours, researchers measured the forces on the volunteers' back muscles and spine. They found that wearing the exoskeleton increased compressive spinal loads up to nearly 53 percent compared to not wearing it. Stress on different muscles in the torso increased anywhere from 56 percent to 120 percent while wearing it.

"This exoskeleton is meant to offload weight from your arms, so for your arms it's great," said Gregory Knapik, senior researcher at the institute. "The problem is, the weight of the tool, the weight of the mechanical arm and the weight of the vest you're wearingthat all goes to your back. At the end of the day, you're just trading one problem for a potentially even worse problem."

The volunteers didn't seem to notice the extra strain on their backs, but they did notice that they were uncomfortable, chiefly because of the stiff metal rods that lined the harness and prevented them from moving normally.

"You see people wearing this same exoskeleton all the timeworkers in industry, camera people at sporting eventsso you'd think they'd be more comfortable. But, no," said Knapik. "People hated it for the short time that they wore it. Every single person said they would never wear this if they didn't have to."

Given that the study participants had to wear the harness for only part of a day, the researchers expect that the stresses would be higher for someone who had to wear it for an entire work shift, day after day.

The manufacturer of this particular exoskeleton is aware that it can cause back fatigue. Like makers of similar products, it recommends that users undergo muscle conditioning to prevent injury while wearing it.

Passive exoskeletons, like the one tested in this study, contain braces and springs to help support areas of the body. Active exoskeletons, like those worn by Iron Man or Ripley in the movie Aliens, are just now starting to become a reality. They contain motors that aid movementalmost, Marras said, "like power steering for the body." He and Knapik will be testing the spinal loads caused by just such a powered exoskeleton this fall.

Explore further Ski-worthy exoskeleton set to enhance experience

More information: Eric B. Weston et al. Biomechanical evaluation of exoskeleton use on loading of the lumbar spine, Applied Ergonomics (2017). Eric B. Weston et al. Biomechanical evaluation of exoskeleton use on loading of the lumbar spine,(2017). DOI: 10.1016/j.apergo.2017.11.006
Sabrina Misra suffered from depression for most of her life, but last summer, it became almost too heavy to bear.

Despite years of therapy and many medications, Misra, 36, had become so despondent that she started planning her suicide. But then her psychiatrist introduced her to a new treatment with an unusual back story.

The treatment was ketamine, an anesthetic used to sedate both people and animals before surgery. It's also a notorious street drug, abused by clubgoers seeking a trancelike, hallucinatory high.

But in recent years, numerous studies have found that ketamine can be an effective and speedy treatment for people with depressionparticularly those who, like Misra, have found little relief from other medications.

"After the first couple of treatments it didn't seem to work, but after I hit my fourth one, everything started to change," said Misra, a therapist and college instructor who lives in Lisle, Ill. "I went from actively wanting to kill myself to being fine."

Though some researchers have found that ketamine can be a valuable antidepressant, no one has performed the large-scale clinical trials necessary to get U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval to use it a psychiatric medication.

Consequently, most insurance plans won't pay for it, leaving patients to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket for a series of intravenous infusions.

Some warn that questions remain about ketamine's long-term safety and effectiveness. Dr. James Murrough, a psychiatrist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, said people who misuse the drug have developed cognitive problems, and high doses have proved toxic in rats.

And because ketamine has a history of abuse, he said, doctors and patients must consider the threat of addiction.

"We think the risk is low, but it's probably not zero, particularly if it gets scaled up," he said. "There's excitement but also a justified caution."

Nonetheless, demand for the drug is so great that dozens of specialty clinics are popping up around the country. The doctors who run them say ketamine has helped most of their patients.

"It's much better than anything we've had before," said Dr. Abid Nazeer, the psychiatrist who treated Misra at his Oak Brook clinic, Advanced Psychiatric Solutions. "I've seen it work so quickly that one infusion gets rid of suicidal thoughts that had been there for 20 years."

Ketamine was created as an anesthetic, and doctors including veterinarians and battlefield medics embraced it for its fast-acting properties and relative safety. But because it produces strong out-of-body sensations in high doses, it became a club drug, potent enough to send hundreds of people to emergency rooms each year.

In the 1990s, researchers discovered another use for ketamine: A small dose, they found, limits the concentration of a neurotransmitter called glutamate in the brain, and with startling speed, lifts the mood of many depression sufferers who haven't been helped by medications like Prozac or Lexapro.

"Our standard antidepressants can take six to eight weeks to be effectiveketamine can take just one hour," said Dr. Carlos Zarate of the National Institute of Mental Health, whose studies in the 2000s accelerated interest in the drug.

Over the past few years, doctors have opened specialty clinics that offer ketamine to patients who have depression or, to a lesser extent, chronic pain. Though the FDA has not approved those uses, the agency allows doctors to dispense drugs for "off-label" purposes if they believe it is medically appropriate.

The basic regimen calls for the intravenous infusion of a small dose0.5 mg per kilogram of body weight, far less than someone would use to get highsix times over two weeks. After that, patients return every few weeks or months for booster doses.

Clinic operators say they screen clients to focus on those who have not improved with standard antidepressants.

"This is a last resort for those that are treatment-resistant," said Dr. June Lee of Lombard's Optimum Ketamine Center. "Most of the patients we've seen here have tried everything."

Zarate said research has shown ketamine to be effective for about 60 percent of people with treatment-resistant depression, though some local clinics say their results have been better.

"We've had about a 70 percent response rate, but it really works for them," said Dr. Vikas Patel, an emergency room physician who runs the Midwest Ketamine Center in Arlington Heights. "For the 30 percent it doesn't work for, there's no benefit at all. I would say there isn't a big in-between."

He charges $500 per infusion. Insurance typically won't cover ketamine treatments, though Patel said he expects that to change. A pharmaceutical company is seeking FDA approval for a nasal spray, he said, and other companies are testing their own versions.

But for now, the out-of-pocket cost limits the number of people who can afford the treatment. Misra said that while she put the infusions on her credit card, seeing them as a life-or-death investment, others aren't so fortunate.

"I have patients who are struggling right now, and they actually can't swing it," she said. "I think that's a horrible thing. No one should have to die because they can't pay for treatment."

Dominic Sisti, who directs the Scattergood Program for Applied Ethics of Behavioral Health Care at the University of Pennsylvania, co-wrote a paper three years ago warning about the possible risks of using ketamine for depression.

The research that has come out since then has persuaded him that it is appropriate for many people, he said, but he still believes doctors should share data on their results to further knowledge of the drug and improve the protocols for using it.

"In a sense, each patient they treat is an experiment of one," he said. "It would be really helpful if all these clinics got together and figured out a way to report those outcomes. Without those data, I worry that someone's going to get hurt."

2018 Chicago Tribune

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
The study found evidence suggesting an association between SIDS and exposure to airborne pollutants. Credit: University of Birmingham

A study led by the University of Birmingham suggests a possible association between exposure to certain pollutants and an increased risk of so-called 'cot death'.

The research, published in BMJ Open and carried out in collaboration with the University of Oulu in Finland and the Medical Research Council Unit The Gambia in Africa, examines the relationship between the effects of short-term variations in air pollution and the onset of cot death or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).

The study found evidence suggesting an association between SIDS and exposure to larger particulate matter (airborne pollutants) called PM10, as well as nitrous dioxide (NO2). Other pollutants were not found to be associated with SIDS. The researchers looked at levels of air pollution the day before a SIDS death and compared them to levels on a previous reference day. The study involved over 200 SIDS cases in the West Midlands, between 1996 and 2006.

The research found an increased risk for SIDS two days after exposure to NO2, while exposure to PM10 was shown to have an effect for up to five days after exposure.

Lead author Dr. Ian Litchfield, of the University of Birmingham's Institute of Applied Health Research, said: "Certain groups of the population are more vulnerable to ambient air pollution than others and children figure predominantly among them due to the fragility of their immune system and the ratio of their lung capacity to their size.

"Concern around the effects of air pollution continues to mount particularly within developing economies where it contributes to 3.3 million premature deaths worldwide per year, a figure estimated to double by 2050 if the issue remains unattended.

"However, government policies appear slow to react, for example, in the UK pledges to cease sales of diesel and petrol cars do not come into effect until 2040.

"Our study has highlighted that more research needs to be carried out to better understand the effects of air pollution on child health, while government policy needs to bring about change with increasing urgency."

In terms of what parents can do to reduce the effects of exposure to pollution on their child, the study's authors draw attention to advice that suggests staying indoors on days with higher levels of pollution, as well as cleaning systems for air in the home such as air purifiers, though these can be expensive.

Francine Bates, Chief Executive of The Lullaby Trust which funded the University of Birmingham-led study, said: "The findings of the study give some cause for concern and parents should be aware that exposure of their child to air pollution carries health implications, including a possible increase in the risk of SIDS.

"However, further research is needed to understand more about the link between air pollution and SIDS and what can be done to reduce exposure of young children to pollution.

"For now we would advise parents to follow safer sleep guidelines which are known to reduce the risk of SIDS such as sleeping their baby on their back on a firm, flat surface, in a clear cot or Moses basket and not exposing them to second hand cigarette smoke."

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More information: Is ambient air pollution associated with onset of sudden infant death syndrome? A case-crossover study in the UK. BMJ Open. DOI: 10.1136/bmjopen-2017-018341 Journal information: BMJ Open Is ambient air pollution associated with onset of sudden infant death syndrome? A case-crossover study in the UK.
Credit: Michigan Technological University

In a student-led study, one hour of mindfulness meditation shown to reduce anxiety and some cardiovascular risk markers.

It sounds like a late-night commercial: In just one hour you can reduce your anxiety levels and some heart health risk factors. But a recent study with 14 participants shows preliminary data that even a single session of meditation can have cardiovascular and psychological benefits for adults with mild to moderate anxiety.

John Durocher, assistant professor of biological sciences, is presenting the work of a team of Michigan Technological University researchers about mindfulness meditation and its ability to reduce anxiety at the 2018 Experimental Biology meeting April 21-25 in San Diego, which is attended by approximately 14,000 people.

In "Mindfulness Meditation Reduces Aortic Pulsatile Load and Anxiety in Mild to Moderately Anxious Adults," Durocher, along with fellow researchers Hannah Marti, a recent Michigan Tech graduate, Brigitte Morin, lecturer in biological science and Travis Wakeham, a graduate student, explains the finding that 60 minutes after meditating the 14 study participants showed lower resting heart rates and reduction in aortic pulsatile loadthe amount of change in blood pressure between diastole and systole of each heartbeat multiplied by heart rate. Additionally, shortly after meditating, and even one week later, the group reported anxiety levels were lower than pre-meditation levels.

"Even a single hour of meditation appears to reduce anxiety and some of the markers for cardiovascular risk," Durocher says.

While it's well-documented that meditation over the course of several weeks reduces anxiety, there have been few comprehensive research studies on the benefits of a single meditation session. Durocher's team wanted to understand the effect of acute mindfulness on cognition and the cardiovascular system to improve how anti-anxiety therapies and interventions are designed.

Studying the physiological effects of mindfulness meditation

Durocher said the study hinged on a research design proposed by recent graduate Hannah Marti '17. Marti, who graduated from Michigan Tech with a bachelor's degree in Biomedical Engineering, will begin medical school in July at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Marti designed the mindfulness study to include three sessions:

An orientation session during which researchers measured anxiety using the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI) and conducted cardiovascular testing by measuring heart rate variability, resting blood pressure and pulse wave analysis;

A meditation session that included repetition of the cardiovascular testing plus the mindfulness meditation20 minutes introductory meditation, 30 minutes body scan and 10 minutes self-guided meditationas well as repeating cardiovascular measurements immediately following meditation and 60 minutes after;

A post-meditation anxiety test one week later.

During a body scan, the participant is asked to focus intensely on one part of the body at a time, beginning with the toes. By focusing on individual parts of the body, a person can train his or her mind to pivot from detailed attention to a wider awareness from one moment to the next.

One participant in the study commented that following the session they were the least stressed they'd been in a decade.

Durocher says Marti was capable of designing such a study because of her experiences with research during her undergraduate studies at Michigan Tech and by securing support through two Pavlis Honors College and Portage Health Foundation internships.

"She had some experience during the first internship so she could propose her own study for the second one," he says. "I helped to make minor adjustments, but Hannah did much of this project on her own."
Demyelination by MS. The CD68 colored tissue shows several macrophages in the area of the lesion. Original scale 1:100. Credit: Marvin 101/Wikipedia

A Vanderbilt University Medical Center-led research team has shown that magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can detect changes in resting-state spinal cord function in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS).

This first application of these measures in patients living with MS, reported last week in the journal Brain, could lead to new ways to monitor the effectiveness of drug treatment and physical therapy in slowing or stopping the progression of this chronic and often debilitating disease.

The paper, in effect, has opened the scientific conversation about spinal cord function in disease, said Seth Smith, Ph.D., director of the Human Imaging Core in the Vanderbilt University Institute of Imaging Science (VUIIS) and the paper's senior author.

"It is hard to imagine, but non-invasive assessment of the spinal cord at rest in MS was thought to be challenging, if not impossible," Smith said. "Now we turn it over to the greater scientific community to make this grow into an impact that could change patients' lives."

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic, inflammatory and ultimately progressive disease that attacks the central nervous system including the brain, spinal cord and optic nerves. More than 400,000 people in the United States are affected. Symptoms include weakness, dizziness and numbness, vision problems and loss of muscle coordination.

"The single biggest problem with MS is that we don't know when it starts," Smith said. "It's hard to catch it at its earliest stages."

VUIIS colleagues including institute director John Gore, Ph.D., have pioneered MRI techniques for detecting resting-state "functional connectivity" among different networks of nerve cells in the spinal cord.

They applied a technique called BOLD contrast imaging, which detects signal fluctuations based on the magnetic properties of blood hemoglobin as it transports oxygen to the brain and spinal cord, to study the "resting" spinal cord, when the brain has not tasked it to move the legs, for example.

This has been a challenge because the spinal cord is tiny, only about a half-inch in diameter, and because adjacent movements by the lungs, chest muscles and blood pulsing through the carotid arteries in the neck can obscure spinal cord signals.

In 2014, a Vanderbilt team led by Gore, Smith and Robert Barry, Ph.D., showed for the first time that they could detect signals from interconnected neural networks in the spinal cords of in healthy volunteers using an ultra-high field (7 tesla) MRI scanner.

Barry, now at the Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, helped pioneer the acquisition and design the current study, which was led by Benjamin Conrad, a Neuroscience graduate student and the paper's first author.

The study showed that the 7-tesla technique could pick up slight differences in functional connectivity in the spinal cords of 22 patients with a relapsing-remitting form of MS compared to healthy controls. Differences were most pronounced in regions of patients' spinal cords that had visible lesions.

A lesion in the spinal cord presumably will cause some neurological damage. But this is the first time researchers have been able to noninvasively demonstrate that the presence of a lesion is correlated with altered neurological activity in the spinal cord.

These findings suggest that the technique might be used to determine whether medications, physical therapy or other interventions are preserving neurological function and thus slowing the course of the disease.

Few medical centers have access to a 7-tesla scanner. Conventional MRI scanners generate a magnetic field strength in the range of 3 tesla.

Recently Barry, Conrad and their coauthor, Satoshi Maki, MD, Ph.D., showed that it is possible to obtain high-quality measures of functional connectivity from the spinal cords of healthy volunteers using a 3-tesla scanner.

The Vanderbilt scientists are applying for a National Institutes of Health grant to do the same study at clinically relevant MRI field strengths in patients with MS, and recently won an NIH award to study spinal cord functional changes in patients with compressive myelopathy, compression of the spinal cord.

If the findings continue to hold up in larger and more diverse patient groups, "this technique could be deployed in a rural clinic in West Virginia just as easily as in an advanced medical center, and thus be able to reach a significantly larger population" Smith said.

It also could be useful in monitoring rehabilitation from spinal cord injuries or evaluating the functional effects of stem cell therapies for repairing nerves damaged by ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), Conrad added.

Explore further New finding may aid recovery from spinal cord injury

More information: Benjamin N Conrad et al. Multiple sclerosis lesions affect intrinsic functional connectivity of the spinal cord, Brain (2018). Journal information: Brain Benjamin N Conrad et al. Multiple sclerosis lesions affect intrinsic functional connectivity of the spinal cord,(2018). DOI: 10.1093/brain/awy083
When Surgeon General Jerome Adams issued an advisory calling for more people to carry naloxonenot just people at overdose risk, but also friends and familyexperts and advocates were almost giddy.

This is an "unequivocally positive" step forward, said Leo Beletsky, an associate professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University.

And not necessarily a surprise. Adams, who previously was Indiana's health commissioner, was recruited to be the nation's top doctor in part because of his work with then-Gov. Mike Pence, now the vice president. In Indiana, Adams pushed for harm-reduction approaches, which included expanded access to naloxone and the implementation of a needle exchange to combat the state's much-publicized HIV outbreak, which began in 2015 and was linked to injection drug use.

Others cautioned, though, that his have-naloxone-will-carry recommendation is at best limited in what it can achieve, in part because the drug is relatively expensive.

Kaiser Health News breaks down what the advisory means, experts' concerns and what policy approaches may be in the pipeline.

- Many public health advocates applaud the surgeon general's position.

Naloxone, which is a drug that can keep drug users alive by reversing opioid overdoses, is viewed by many as the cornerstone of the harm-reduction approach to the epidemic. Experts say people with addiction problems should carry it, and so should their family, friends and acquaintances.

"We want to put it more in reach," said Traci Green, an associate professor of emergency medicine and community health sciences at Boston University, who has extensively researched the opioid abuse crisis. "It could not have been a better endorsement."

Others, including Diane Goodman, who penned a recent Medscape commentary reflecting on the advisory, wonder whether this is a "rational" response to the scourge, since opioid addiction is one of many health problems people might encounter in everyday life and for which treatment options are still limited.

"I'm not sure it makes much more sense than any of us carrying a bottle of nitroglycerin to treat patients with end-stage angina," wrote Goodman, an acute-care nurse practitioner, referring to chest pain.

"What, exactly, are we offering to addicts once their condition has been reversed?" she asked, noting that without treatment and therapy programs that help wean people from addiction "the odds of survival for any length of time remain low, no matter how much reversal medication is kept nearby.Results would likely be limited by naloxone's price tag.

Take Baltimore, which has been hit particularly hard by the opioid epidemic. Its health department already has pushed for more people to carry naloxone.

But the drug's price is an issue, said Dr. Leana Wen, the city's health commissioner, and an emergency physician. She suggested that the federal government negotiate directly for a lower price, or give more money to organizations and agencies like hers so they can afford to maintain an adequate supply.

"Every day, people are calling us at the Baltimore City Health Department and requesting naloxone, and I have to tell them I can't afford for them to have it," Wen said.

The drug is available in generic form, which can be stored in a vial and injected via a needle, as well as in patented products, such as the nasal spray Narcan, sold by ADAPT Pharmaceuticals, and Kaleo's Evzio, a talking auto-injector.

Generic naloxone costs $20 to $40 per dose. Narcan, the nasal spray, costs $125 for a two-dose carton, according to ADAPT's website. A two-pack of Evzio costs close to $4,000, according to GoodRx.

Health departments and first responders qualify for a discounted rate of $75 per carton of Narcan. Kaleo has made Evzio coupons available to consumers, so that some will not have a copay, and it advertises a discount for federal and state agencies.

Skeptics point out that similar methods have been used to build brand loyalty and potentially make a particular product a household name. That's how Epi-Pen became synonymous with epinephrine for the treatment of anaphylactic shock.

"There's clearly some overlap" here between the pricing strategies used by naloxone manufacturers and Epi-Pen distributor Mylan, said Richard Evans, co-founder of SSR Health, which tracks the pharmaceutical industry.

But it's not a perfect comparison. The presence of low-cost generics changes the calculus, he said, as does the different level of demand.

- Nonprofit organizations and health care providers keenly feel the pressures of increasing demand and cost.

Experts say price breaks on naloxone are not sufficient to cover the costs on the ground.

"Sixty-four thousand people lost their lives (nationally in 2016) - that's someone every 12 minutes," said Justin Phillips, executive director of Overdose Lifeline, an Indianapolis-based nonprofit. "Ten free kits is not going to be enough."

Phillips said her organization relies on generic naloxone, which is the least expensive formulation. It's the only feasible option, using dedicated grant money the group received from the state attorney general's office as part of a program funded by a settlement with pharmaceutical companies.

But that money is almost dried up. "We need to be able to access naloxonewhich I'm told is pennies to makefor the pennies it cost to make it," Phillips said.

Phillips, who worked with Adams when he ran Indiana's health department, said she has discussed the need for naloxone funding with the surgeon general, but never its price.

- Pharmacies assess the hurdles of distribution.

Local pharmacies are key in this chain, but the overdose antidote is new territory for many pharmacists, said Randy Hitchens, the executive vice president of the Indiana Pharmacists Alliance. He said in 2015, when Adams began his push to get naloxone into the hands of drug users and their families, only one or two retail pharmacies carried it.

"This has always been an emergency room drug. Retail pharmacists typically were not used to dealing with (it)," Hitchens said. "A lot were probably saying, 'What in the devil is naloxone?'"

Today, he estimates 60 to 70 percent of Indiana's more than 1,100 retail pharmacies carry the drug. Walgreens, the pharmacy chain, has committed to stocking Narcan.

Access, though, is always subject to retail pressures.

"If pharmacies are not seeing a steady stream coming in asking for it, they won't be incentivized to carry it on their shelves," said Daniel Raymond, the deputy director of policy and planning for the Harm Reduction Coalition.

A patchwork of other decentralized sources for naloxone exist: syringe-exchange vans, county and state health departments, churches and community centers, all trying to find ways to get overdose medication into the hands of people who need it.

That supply stream "meets people where they are," Raymond said, but those little programs don't have the muscle to negotiate discounted prices.

"Individual health programs are trying to navigate the crisis on their own, but when you see ... growing demand and limited supply, it's a role for federal intervention," Raymond said.

He'd like to see the federal government step in to negotiate prices where smaller programs can't.

- The surgeon general's message is one part of Washington's broader response to the epidemic. But even as Congress crafts an opioid epidemic response package, it's not clear it will tackle these concerns.

In the House of Representatives' Energy and Commerce Committee, one bill being discussed would require all state Medicaid programs to cover at least one form of naloxone. Currently, not all state Medicaid programs do so.

A Senate bill would authorize $300 million annually to equip first responders with naloxone.

But critics say those approaches still don't address the underlying problems: cost and funding.

"You can either make naloxone available, at a much discounted price, or we need to have a lot more resources in order to purchase it," Wen said. "I don't care which one. My only concern is the health and well-being of our residents."

Explore further US surgeon general urges Americans to carry opioid antidote

2018 Kaiser Health News

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
A case brought by publisher Axel Springer against Adblock Plus has been thrown out of the German Supreme Court, Reuters reported.

Axel Springer was looking for a ban of the ad blocking application, which is marketed by Eyeo.

Other German media companies brought separate cases against Adblock Plus. Plaintiffs included ProSiebenSat.1 Media, RTL, and Spiegel Online.

The Axel Springer case was the first to reach the Supreme Court.

It argued that blocking online ads violated competition law. The operation of a white list which companies could pay to be on so that Adblock Plus allows their advertising through also violated Germanys competition laws, said Axel Springer.

The practice of blocking ads and then accepting payment to unblock those which comply with its acceptable ads policy has been likened to a protection racket.

Germany s Supreme Court disagreed, ruling that online ad blockers are legal and overturned a lower court ruling that operating a white list was tantamount to unfair competition.

Axel Springer said it would appeal to the Constitutional Court. It would use the grounds that ad blockers violate press freedom by disrupting online media and their financial viability.

Now read: Adblock Plus to show online adverts
The US, UK and France went into the UN Security Council session on Syria on Friday with a united front, accusing Russia of trying to bring the use of chemical weapons back into the mainstream, Rudaw reported.

Syria was invited to attend the session and Ambassador Bashar Jaafari attacked Syrias accusers, saying they are dragging the entire world once again towards the abyss of war and aggression.

He reiterated Damascus claim that the alleged Douma chemical weapon attack was fabricated by the White Helmets and said the group was instructed by Western intelligence.

If the US, UK, and France attack Syrias sovereignty, Jaafari said his country would defend itself. This is not a threat. This is a promise, he warned.
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YEREVAN.- I have said it many times, there were no personal motives behind the constitutional reforms. If they were, the international organizations would also be against, but all - from the Venice Commission to the Council of Europe - responded positively to the constitutional reforms of Armenia, Prime Minister of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan said during an interview with Shant TV, answering the question that the protests currently taking place in Armenia are personally against him.

"Speaking at the National Assembly of Armenia, I explained that at the beginning of the country's formation the presidential form of government was a necessity. People were more afraid of chaos than the volume of presidential powers. The changes made after that did not balance the branches of power," he said, adding that according to the new constitutional reforms, the main body of power is the National Assembly.

Regarding the "indispensability" of his candidacy, the Prime Minister noted that he is against flattery, but also negatively relates to those who unreasonably accuse people and distort their words. He did not rule out that there were other candidates for the post of Prime Minister of Armenia, but, he said, the political force decided to nominate him. And there was no compulsion. Serzh Sargsyan added that there is no violation of the law.

"My answer to those who act this way: if you do not like the results, get more votes and enjoy the power. For me, power is not pleasure, but they think it is pleasure, "he said.
YEREVAN.  Today the executive power is single, and this will bring a clarification in terms of making decisions, said ex-President, new Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan of Armenia, in an interview to a local TV company.

He noted this when asked whether there are projects which he could not implement as President, but he can as PM.

The press was writing that I pledged to implement the Iran-Armenia railway and [some] other projects, he noted, in particular.

In his words, however, a lot more money is needed to construct the Iran-Armenia railway than to build a highway, and therefore construction of the North-South Highway will be cheaper for the Armenian state, yet the result will be greater.

As for the nuclear power plant, yes, we must always have nuclear energy, said Sargsyan. But we also need to think about to what extent and how to develop that domain.

In his view, it is not as important to follow what has been said, as it is to act in the interests of the country.

We live in a world where there are wars and crises, noted the Armenian PM. [But] we were able to overcome wars and crises; the GDP [of Armenia] grew 2.1 times.

Peoples lives have improved; thats apparent. [But] I understand very well that now you have to say that, Then if peoples lives have improved [in Armenia], why is there 30-percent poverty in the republic? () poverty is an assessment, whereas the GDP is a sum of accurate numbers. () and poverty is not assessed by income, but by consumption; there is something to think about here.
Employees of the Russian Foreign Ministry are being evacuated from the building in the center of Moscow after an anonymous phone call alleging a threat of explosion, Sputnik reported.

"After an anonymous bomb threat in the building of Russian Foreign Ministry located at Smolenskaya-Sennaya st. 32/1, evacuation of all staff is under way," a source in Moscow emergency services reported. The source added that there was no immediate information on how many people were evacuated from the building.

According to several other sources, some 40 people were evacuated from the building. A Sputnik correspondent reported that emergency services and the law enforcement units are present at the site.

A source in Russian Foreign Ministry has confirmed the reports of the evacuation. "It appears that a report came in of a bomb threat at the first building," it said.
YEREVAN.  Police on Friday were able to open a street in Armenias capital city of Yerevan, and police officers with helmets formed a human chain with their shields.

Before that, however, police detained an activist, and they movedwith a tow truckthe cars that had blocked the street in protest.

My Step initiative leader, opposition Civil Contract Party member, and National Assembly (NA) Way Out (Yelk) Faction head Nikol Pashinyan arrived at the scene.

He and the demonstrators are trying to prevent the police two truck from removing the vehicles blocking this street.

Pashinyan on Thursday announced that on Friday, they will resume their protest action of total blockade of Yerevan streets. Also, he noted that they will close off subway stations, too, and called on everyone to either not go to work or to join them on Friday.

Nikol Pashinyan and his supporters are staging protests in Yerevan ever since April 13, and by marching, holding rallies, as well as blocking streets and squares. They protest against ex-President Serzh Sargsyan being elected Prime Minister of Armenia.

As a result of the clashes during these demonstrations, 46 peopleincluding Pashinyanwere injured, and police detained several dozen people, including minors.

In addition, a criminal case has been filed into the protesters bursting into the Public Radio of Armenia building and regarding an incident that occurred at an intersection in downtown Yerevan.

Ex-President Serzh Sargsyan was elected Prime Minister at Tuesdays NA special session, and by a vote of 77 for and 18 against.
YEREVAN.  As of Friday at 10am, capital city Yerevan police have detained 16 people, the Police of Armenia informed Armenian News-NEWS.am.

To note, 122 people were detained on Thursday, and eight of them were minors.

My Step initiative leader, opposition Civil Contract Party member, and National Assembly (NA) Way Out (Yelk) Faction head Nikol Pashinyan on Thursday announced that on Friday they will resume their protest action of total blockade of Yerevan streets. Also, he noted that they will close off subway stations, too, and called on everyone to either not go to work or to join them on Friday.

Nikol Pashinyan and his supporters are staging protests in Yerevan ever since April 13, and by marching, holding rallies, as well as blocking streets and squares. They protest against ex-President Serzh Sargsyan being elected Prime Minister of Armenia.

As a result of the clashes during these demonstrations, 46 peopleincluding Pashinyanwere injured, and police detained several dozen people, including minors.

In addition, a criminal case has been filed into the protesters bursting into the Public Radio of Armenia building and regarding an incident that occurred at an intersection in downtown Yerevan.

Ex-President Serzh Sargsyan was elected Prime Minister at Tuesdays NA special session, and by a vote of 77 for and 18 against.
YEREVAN.  The demonstratorsled by My Step initiative leader, opposition Civil Contract Party member, and National Assembly (NA) of Armenia Way Out (Yelk) Faction head Nikol Pashinyanhave marched and reached Davtashen District of capital city Yerevan.

Pashinyan told reporters that on April 24the anniversary of Armenian Genocide, they will march to the Armenian Genocide Memorial at Tsitsernakaberd Hill. But he noted that they will make a more specific decision on their actions for that day on April 23, and proceeding from the situation.

This is a network-wide battle; sometimes the [protesting] people themselves decide what to do, he added. If [PM] Serzh Sargsyan will be at Tsitsernakaberd on that day, I believe people will want to organize a face-to-face talk with him on that day. We will discuss that scenario; and if we see that this option has support, we will seriously consider it as well.

And when asked as to whether he sees himself as the Prime Minister of Armenia if Serzh Sargsyan resigns, Nikol Pashinyan responded that he cannot make such a statement, Because our main task is to successfully complete the velvet revolution.

A revolutionary committee will be established, he added. But the process itself is more important than the formation of an organizational body.

Nikol Pashinyan on Thursday announced that on Friday, they will resume their protest action of total blockade of Yerevan streets. Also, he noted that they will close off subway stations, too, and called on everyone to either not go to work or to join them on Friday.

Nikol Pashinyan and his supporters are staging protests in Yerevan ever since April 13, and by marching, holding rallies, as well as blocking streets and squares. They protest against ex-President Serzh Sargsyan being elected Prime Minister of Armenia.

As a result of the clashes during these demonstrations, 46 peopleincluding Pashinyanwere injured, and police detained several dozen people, including minors.

In addition, a criminal case has been filed into the protesters bursting into the Public Radio of Armenia building and regarding an incident that occurred at an intersection in downtown Yerevan.

Ex-President Serzh Sargsyan was elected Prime Minister at Tuesdays NA special session, and by a vote of 77 for and 18 against.
Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia, His Holiness Aram I will visit Armenia for a couple of hours on Friday.

Speaking at the airport before his arrival, Aram I said they are all concerned over the situation in Armenia.

Just as Armenias prosperity is our duty and pride, the pain and troubles of our people are ours as well. We naturally cannot stay indifferent to issues worrying our people. We cannot stay indifferent to the scenes and developments we see in the streets of Yerevan, he said.
YEREVAN.  A total of 23 people, among them the son of Nikol PashinyanMy Step initiative leader, opposition Civil Contract Party member, and National Assembly (NA) of Armenia Way Out (Yelk) Faction headon Friday were detained and taken to the central police department of capital city Yerevan.

Way Out Faction MP Edmon Marukyan, who arrived at this police station, informed about the aforesaid.

According to the police, eleven of these persons were detained for not obeying the police orders.

The remaining twelve people were detained within the framework of the criminal case, and they actually shall be questioned after documentation, Marukyan added. The attorneys noted that they will actually be given a witness status [in this criminal case].

Police officers, including those in civilian clothes, are detaining demonstrators, and, moreover, with non-police vehicles.

Nikol Pashinyan on Thursday announced that on Friday, they will resume their protest action of total blockade of Yerevan streets. Also, he noted that they will close off subway stations, too, and called on everyone to either not go to work or to join them on Friday.

Pashinyan and his supporters are staging protests in Yerevan ever since April 13, and by marching, holding rallies, as well as blocking streets and squares. They protest against ex-President Serzh Sargsyan being elected Prime Minister of Armenia.

As a result of the clashes during these demonstrations, 46 peopleincluding Pashinyanwere injured, and police detained several dozen people, including minors.

In addition, a criminal case has been filed into the protesters bursting into the Public Radio of Armenia building and regarding an incident that occurred at an intersection in downtown Yerevan.

Ex-President Serzh Sargsyan was elected Prime Minister at Tuesdays NA special session, and by a vote of 77 for and 18 against.
YEREVAN.  Demonstrators have blocked Davit Anhaght Street in Yerevan, the capital city of Armenia, for the past thirty minutes.

The Armenian News-NEWS.am reporter informed from the scene that the police are unable to remove the protesters from this road.

The protesters urge the drivers and police to join this demonstration.

Separately, demonstrators have closed off Azatutyun Avenue for the past several hours. Police, however, have detained some people from there.

There is tension between demonstrators and police in Yerevan, since Friday morning. Activists are attempting to block streets, including with cars, whereas the police try to open these streets.

In addition, police officers, including those in civilian clothes, are detaining demonstrators, and, moreover, with non-police vehicles.

A number of Yerevan streets and avenues, the Davtashen Bridge, Yeghvard Highway, and Yerevan-Abovyan motorway were closed off and then opened since the morning.

As of 11am, Yerevan police detained 52 people, including the son of Nikol PashinyanMy Step initiative leader, opposition Civil Contract Party member, and National Assembly (NA) of Armenia Way Out (Yelk) Faction headwho was later released.

Pashinyan on Thursday announced that on Friday, they will resume their protest action of total blockade of Yerevan streets. Also, he noted that they will close off subway stations, too, and called on everyone to either not go to work or to join them on Friday.

Nikol Pashinyan and his supporters are staging protests in Yerevan ever since April 13, and by marching, holding rallies, as well as blocking streets and squares. They protest against ex-President Serzh Sargsyan being elected Prime Minister of Armenia.

As a result of the clashes during these demonstrations, 46 peopleincluding Pashinyanwere injured, and police detained several dozen people, including minors.

In addition, a criminal case has been filed into the protesters bursting into the Public Radio of Armenia building and regarding an incident that occurred at an intersection in downtown Yerevan.

Ex-President Serzh Sargsyan was elected Prime Minister at Tuesdays NA special session, and by a vote of 77 for and 18 against.
YEREVAN.  International exhibitions contribute to raising public awareness about Armenia and Armenian tourism, head of state committee on tourism said during the opening of In Tour Expo and SportWay exhibitions in Yerevan.

Similar events help our citizens to better realize attractiveness of our country, Zarmine Zeytuntsyan said, adding that Karabakh is participating in In Tour Expo for the fifth consecutive year.

In his turn, Deputy Minister of Ecology Khachik Hakobyan presented prospects of ecotourism in the country.

Our nature is an important attraction for tourists who are visiting Armenia, he said. Hakobyan added that the government is implementing the ecotourism development policy. According to him, in 2017 about half a million tourists visited the protected areas.

Hakobyan said an information center for tourists will be opened in Yerevan in June. They also plan to introduce a single payment system, to carry out regular tours and to create camping zones.

In Tour Expo and SportWay are being held at the Yerevan Expo complex on April 20-22.

About 90 representatives of the sphere from Armenia, Karabakh, Russia, Greece, the Czech Republic, Iran, Egypt and other countries will take part in In Tour Expo.

Seminars on digital marketing, presentation of the hotel business online, as well as a number of presentations on innovations in the field of tourism will be held.

Among the keynote speakers are Armenian experts Mike Laziev, Armen Kalajyan, Anna Mazmanyan.

Armenian News-NEWS.am is an information sponsor of the exhibitions.
Los Angeles City Councilmember Paul Krekorian on Wednesday, led the City Councils official commemoration of the 103rd anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.

During this years remembrance, Los Angeles honored prominent Armenian American educators to highlight the important role that education plays in preserving the history of the genocide for future generations, Asbarez reported.

Among the honorees were LAUSD interim superintendent, Vivian Ekchian; renown historian and scholar of Armenian Studies, Richard Hovannisian; founder of Americas first Armenian school, Gabriel Injejikian; and the USC Shoah Foundation, which houses the largest compilation of testimony from Armenian Genocide survivors and witnesses.

The honorees have made important contributions to the Armenian American community and dedicated themselves to improving the education of young people.

While this is a time for us to mourn the unimaginable loss of our ancestors, its also an opportunity to honor and celebrate those who survived, and to reflect on the injustice and what that means to us as a human community, said Councilmember Krekorian, the first Armenian American to be elected to the Los Angeles City Council.

Krekorian continued: The lessons of the genocide continue to impact us today, but the best weapon against these atrocities is education. Thats why I am incredibly honored to recognize a group of visionary Armenian American educators who have not only led the way in preserving the history of the Armenian Genocide, but also spread greater awareness so that we may never repeat the past.
YEREVAN.  The demonstratorsled by My Step initiative leader, opposition Civil Contract Party member, and National Assembly (NA) of Armenia Way Out (Yelk) Faction head Nikol Pashinyanhave marched and reached the Great Bridge of Hrazdanwhich is more commonly known as Kievian Bridgein capital city Yerevan.

Three large trucks there had blocked the road to the bridge, and their drivers stated that the vehicles had broken down.

Pashinyan approached one of the truck drivers and embraced him, and these truck drivers also joined the march.

But the Deputy Police Chief of Yerevan, Valeri Osipyan, told these truck drivers that they were not doing a good thing.

There is tension between demonstrators and police in Yerevan, since Friday morning. Activists are attempting to block streets, including with cars, whereas the police try to open these streets.

In addition, police officers, including those in civilian clothes, are detaining demonstrators, and, moreover, with non-police vehicles.

A number of Yerevan streets and avenues, the Davtashen Bridge, Yeghvard Highway, and Yerevan-Abovyan motorway were closed off and then opened since the morning.

As of 1pm, Yerevan police detained 107 people, including Nikol Pashinyans son, who was later released.

Pashinyan on Thursday announced that on Friday, they will resume their protest action of total blockade of Yerevan streets. Also, he noted that they will close off subway stations, too, and called on everyone to either not go to work or to join them on Friday.

Nikol Pashinyan and his supporters are staging protests in Yerevan ever since April 13, and by marching, holding rallies, as well as blocking streets and squares. They protest against ex-President Serzh Sargsyan being elected Prime Minister of Armenia.

As a result of the clashes during these demonstrations, 46 peopleincluding Pashinyanwere injured, and police detained several dozen people, including minors.

In addition, a criminal case has been filed into the protesters bursting into the Public Radio of Armenia building and regarding an incident that occurred at an intersection in downtown Yerevan.

Ex-President Serzh Sargsyan was elected Prime Minister at Tuesdays NA special session, and by a vote of 77 for and 18 against.
YEREVAN.  At first the police on Friday had succeeded in opening Arshakunyats Avenue in Armenias capital city of Yerevan; but more demonstrators arrived there, and they have blocked this road yet again.

The police are standing in the middle of the avenue, in order not to enable the protesters to close off the other part of this road, too.

Additional police forces have arrived at the scene.

There is tension between demonstrators and police in Yerevan, since Friday morning. Activists are attempting to block streets, including with cars, whereas the police try to open these streets.

In addition, police officers, including those in civilian clothes, are detaining demonstrators, and, moreover, with non-police vehicles.

A number of Yerevan streets and avenues, the Davtashen Bridge, Yeghvard Highway, and Yerevan-Abovyan motorway were closed off and then opened since the morning.

As of 1pm, Yerevan police detained 107 people, including the son of Nikol PashinyanMy Step initiative leader, opposition Civil Contract Party member, and National Assembly (NA) of Armenia Way Out (Yelk) Faction headwho was later released.

Pashinyan on Thursday announced that on Friday, they will resume their protest action of total blockade of Yerevan streets. Also, he noted that they will close off subway stations, too, and called on everyone to either not go to work or to join them on Friday.

Nikol Pashinyan and his supporters are staging protests in Yerevan ever since April 13, and by marching, holding rallies, as well as blocking streets and squares. They protest against ex-President Serzh Sargsyan being elected Prime Minister of Armenia.

As a result of the clashes during these demonstrations, 46 peopleincluding Pashinyanwere injured, and police detained several dozen people, including minors.

In addition, a criminal case has been filed into the protesters bursting into the Public Radio of Armenia building and regarding an incident that occurred at an intersection in downtown Yerevan.

Ex-President Serzh Sargsyan was elected Prime Minister at Tuesdays NA special session, and by a vote of 77 for and 18 against.
iStock/Thinkstock(PARRISH, Ala.) -- A train full of "sewage sludge" from the New York City area has left a small Alabama town after sitting on the tracks for more than two months.



Residents of Parrish, Alabama, have complained about the smell, an infestation of flies, and concerns about declining property values since the waste has been sitting on the tracks, according to Alabama.com.



The company that delivers the waste to Alabama received a permit from the state in December 2016 to dispose of biosolids, also called "sewer sludge," from wastewater treatment plants in New York and New Jersey, according to local news reports. Since then, local communities and towns along the route to deliver the waste to the landfill filed complaints and lawsuits to keep the waste and the smell out of their towns, which left the train cars stuck outside Parrish for months while the issue was resolved.



Parrish is about 40 miles northwest of Birmingham and has a population of fewer than 1,000 people.



Parrish Mayor Heather Hall posted on Facebook that the last container was removed from the town on Tuesday afternoon. She wrote that the situation was unprecedented and there was no entity regulating the situation. She added that it took more than two months and state senators getting involved to resolve the issue.



"I will say this over and over... this material does not need to be in a populated area... period. It greatly diminishes the quality of life for those who live anywhere near it," she wrote in the Facebook post.



New York City has stopped using the facility in Alabama because of local concern, a spokesman for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection told Alabama.com. The department did not respond to ABC News' request for comment.

Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
YEREVAN.  About forty minutes ago, the demonstrators blocked two intersections in downtown Yerevan, the capital city of Armenia. They had brought city benches and garbage bins to close off the streets.

Even though police had brought a truck to remove these benches and waste bins, the keys of this truck had disappeared. Nonetheless, the police managed to remove this barrier and reopen the road.

Also, they were warning the drivers of the cars blocking their way, and by saying that they will remove their vehicles with a two truck.

These demonstrators are primarily the students of the nearby Yerevan Brusov State University of Languages and Social Sciences, and activists who have joined them.

Separately, police officers stopped a public transit vehicle at Azatutyun Avenue, took its passengers out, and started to forcibly put them in a bus, in order to take them to a police station.

The driver of this bus, however, refused to drive these detained persons to the police precinct. As a result, the police took the keys to this bus from his hands, and took these persons to the police station with public transit.

There is tension between demonstrators and police in Yerevan, since Friday morning. Activists are attempting to block streets, including with cars, whereas the police try to open these streets.

In addition, police officers, including those in civilian clothes, are detaining demonstrators, and, moreover, with non-police vehicles.

A number of Yerevan streets and avenues, the Davtashen Bridge, Yeghvard Highway, and Yerevan-Abovyan motorway were closed off and then opened since the morning.

As of 1pm, Yerevan police detained 107 people, including the son of Nikol PashinyanMy Step initiative leader, opposition Civil Contract Party member, and National Assembly (NA) Way Out (Yelk) Faction headwho was later released.

Pashinyan on Thursday announced that on Friday, they will resume their protest action of total blockade of Yerevan streets. Also, he noted that they will close off subway stations, too, and called on everyone to either not go to work or to join them on Friday.

Nikol Pashinyan and his supporters are staging protests in Yerevan ever since April 13, and by marching, holding rallies, as well as blocking streets and squares. They protest against ex-President Serzh Sargsyan being elected Prime Minister of Armenia.

As a result of the clashes during these demonstrations, 46 peopleincluding Pashinyanwere injured, and police detained several dozen people, including minors.

In addition, a criminal case has been filed into the protesters bursting into the Public Radio of Armenia building and regarding an incident that occurred at an intersection in downtown Yerevan.

Ex-President Serzh Sargsyan was elected Prime Minister at Tuesdays NA special session, and by a vote of 77 for and 18 against.
Belgian lawmakers issued a statement warning Azerbaijan against using Interpol for political persecution and intimidation.

We regret the fact that the Azerbaijani Authorities requested an international arrest warrant against the President of the European Armenian Federation for Justice and Democracy (EAFJD) Kaspar Karampetian, for visiting Nagorno Karabakh /Artsakh. EAFJD is a grassroots organization, which uses the tools of civic activism to raise awareness, they said in a statement.

Despite the fact that there is no relevant basis in international law that would prevent anyone from visiting Nagorno Karabakh, the Azerbaijani Authorities have been using various methods of intimidation and trying to criminalize visits.

There is no alternative to a peaceful settlement of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict. Imposing total isolation on the people of Nagorno Karabakh breaches their fundamental rights, enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and is not a constructive method of conflict settlement.

We are convinced that Interpol should not be used for political persecution or intimidation. We herewith emphasize that a sustainable conflict resolution can be achieved only through an honest dialogue between the sides, including with the people of Nagorno Karabakh/Artsakh.
YEREVAN.  Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan of Armenia on Friday hosted Karekin II Catholicos of All Armenians, and Catholicos Aram I of the Armenian Church Catholicosate of the Great House of Cilicia of the Armenian Apostolic Church.

The interlocutors reflected on the ongoing large-scale protests in the country and expressed their concerns by the respective current situation, press office of the government informed Armenian News-NEWS.am.

Considering it natural that there may be dissatisfaction, demands and concerns in any country, the catholicoi underscored the expressing of protest solely in civilized way, and by respecting the constitutional order and laws of the country.

Also, Karekin II and Aram I expressed their satisfaction and appreciation that the use of force, clashes, and conflicts have no place in this process.
On the eighth consecutive day of protests in Yerevan and other cities in Armenia, chair of the OSCE Parliamentary Assemblys human rights committee Ignacio Sanchez Amor called on all sides to engage in constructive dialogue.

I welcome the civic engagement of people turning out to exercise their right to freedom of expression through peaceful protest, said Sanchez Amor, the Chair of the OSCE PA's General Committee on Democracy, Human Rights and Humanitarian Questions.

This right must be respected by the authorities, and I take note of reports of instances of excessive use of force. At the same time, I remind that the right to peaceful protest does not enable demonstrators to force their way into buildings and disrupt proceedings. I call on all sides to exercise due restraint to ensure that all Armenians can peacefully express their opinions, and call for a prompt return to constructive dialogue. In this context, Freedom of the Press is of paramount importance and journalists should be protected against any form of violence.

Sanchez Amor served as Special Co-ordinator and leader of the short-term OSCE observer mission to the April 2017 parliamentary elections in Armenia.
Turkey continues to stubbornly refuse to acknowledge its blood-stained past and perpetrating the Armenian Genocide, Armenian representative at the Cyprus parliament Vartkes Mahdessian said addressing the House plenary.

Mahdessian thanked Cyprus which was the first European country to pass a parliamentary resolution recognizing the genocide in 1975, Cyprus Mail reported.

It is truly unthinkable that civilized states, who appear to be protectors of human rights and democracy, continue to yield to the pressure exerted by Turkey, taking advantage of its geostrategic position and purchasing power, which stops them from recognizing the Armenian Genocide, said Mahdessian.

He said the genocide was a tragedy that shocked the then civilized world and which created deep wounds like no other event in the long course of the Armenian nation.

As to why Turkey has so stubbornly refused to recognize the Armenian Genocide, while Germany has recognized the Holocaust of the Jews, Mahdessian said that the main reasons were the legal consequences of such a move and its impact on Turkish society.

Turkey is not willing to pay even one cent to the survivors of the Genocide and their offspring, since it would not be only for the Armenians, but also the Greeks, the Assyrians, and perhaps the Kurds, and the Cypriots, he concluded.
Home | News | General | Go and get your PVCs - Ebony state government declares April 20 public holiday

- The Ebonyi state government declares Friday, April 20 as work-free day

- The government says the declaration is to help civil servants get their PVCs

- The governor notes that he has the power to declare such work-free day as specified by the law

The government of Ebonyi state has declared Friday, April 20, work- free day to enable civil servants register and collect their Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs) in the ongoing continuous voter registration ahead of 2019.

The declaration was made by the secretary to state government, Hygenius Nwokwu, through a statement issued on Thursday, April 19, in Abakaliki.

The statement said Umahi declared the work-free day in exercise of powers conferred on him by the Public Holiday Act.

READ ALSO: 2019: PDP considering changing name, holds emergency meeting

He said the governor declared one day work-free day to avail all civil servants in the state opportunity to participate in the important exercise.

Pursuant to section 2, subsection 2 of the public holidays act, His Excellency, executive governor of Ebonyi has graciously declared Friday April 20, work-free day.

This is to enable public and civil servants to go home, register and obtain their PVCs in the ongoing voter registration exercise.

The governor is deeply concerned with the success of the registration in the state and is committed to ensuring that all eligible voters in the state register and collect their PVCs ahead of 2019 elections.

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We urge every eligible voter in the civil and public service of the state to explore this opportunity to go home, register and obtain their voter cards, Nwokwu said in the statement.

NAIJ.com earlier reported that the Rauf Aregbesola-led Osun state government recently declared Monday, April 16, as a public holiday to enable eligible voters take part in the Continuous Voters Registration (CVR) exercise.

The development was made public by the states commissioner for information and strategy, Adelani Baderinwa, in a statement released on Sunday, April 15.

Nigeria News: Aisha Buhari Backs President Husband | Naij.com TV

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Source: Naija.ng

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Home | News | General | Just in: Alleged notorious criminal arrested by Nigerian Army in Taraba state (photos)

The Nigerian Army has announced the arrest of one Bwesse H Tanimu, an alleged notorious criminal popularly known as Skin, in Taraba state as the efforts to rid some states in central part of the country continues to yield results.

Preliminary investigation revealed that the suspect with other members of his gang still at large are said to be responsible for various criminal activities within Takum and its environ.

The Nigerian Army wishes to assure the public of protection of lives and property at all times, a statement by Brigadier General Texas Chukwu, the director Army public relations, said.

READ ALSO: 2019: PDP considering changing name, holds emergency meeting

The suspect after his arrest. Credit: Nigerian Army

NAIJ.com earlier reported that the Nigerian Army announced it had finished plans to establish a military barracks in Jalingo, the Taraba state capital.

Major General Benjamin Ahanotu, the general officer commanding 3 division Jos, made this disclosure in his courtesy visit to Governor Darius Ishaku.

The suspect's identity card. Credit: Nigerian Army

NAIJ.com also reported that in line with the on going military exercise Ayem Akpatuma in Taraba state, five suspects were declared wanted in Taraba state.

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A statement by the director army public relations, Brigadier-General Texas Chukwu, the suspects were declared wanted for their alleged roles in the killings in Takum local government area in particular and Taraba state in general.

Source: Naija.ng

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Home | News | General | Officer killed as gunmen attack police station in Niger state

- The police in Niger state says its its divisional police station at Kutigi was attacked by around 3.50 am on Thursday, April 19

- Then commands spokesperson, ASP Muhammadu Abubakar, states that a seven-man committee led by ACP Abdullahi Tahir to probe the incident and bring the perpetrators to book

- Suspected armed robbers attack First Bank, kill police in Ekiti

The police command in Niger state on Thursday, April 19, said that a police sergeant, Jibril Abubakar, was killed and his rifle taken away when gunmen attacked its divisional police station at Kutigi in Lavun local government area of the state.

The commands public relations officer, ASP Muhammadu Abubakar, disclosed this while addressing newsmen at the command headquarters, The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports.

READ ALSO: Buhari never passed vote of no confidence in Nigerian youth - Presidency

He said that the gunmen stormed Kutigi police station around 3.50 am on Thursday and shot sporadically, but were repelled by the guards on duty.

He stated that the commissioner of police, Dibal Yakadi, had constituted a seven-man committee led by ACP Abdullahi Tahir to probe the incident and bring the perpetrators to book.

He said that the command promised a N500,000 reward to anyone with useful information that could lead to the arrest of the gunmen.

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The command solicited the support of residents for vital information to assist the command in apprehending bad elements in the state.

Meanwhile, a mobile police officer was, on Thursday, April 19, killed during a bank robbery at First Bank in Ifaki-Ekiti, Ekiti state.

The Punch reports that the robbers carted away an undisclosed amount of money before the arrival of security operatives.

NAIJ.com gathered that the incident which was made known in the pictures that surfaced online showed some residents gathered at the bank premises.

The corpse of the slain mobile police officer was said to have been evacuated to an undisclosed mortuary in the area.

Lagos Police Commissioner parades suspected criminals (Nigeria News) | NAIJ.com TV

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Home | News | General | 2019: Atiku urged to declare presidential ambition

BY JIMITOTA ONOYUME

WARRI  Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has been urged to formerly declare his intention to contest the 2019 presidential election. Atiku

Speaking at the inauguration ceremony of a group, Street 2 Street Initiative for Atiku, in Warri , Delta state, Director of the body in the state, Bar Kinioyo Esievo lauded the sterling qualities of Atiku, describing him as the most qualified to pilot the affairs of the country come 2019.

 We see him as a man with vision that can take Nigeria out of its economic woes. A man that can give us electricity, food, employment, more refineries. A man that can raise the bar for Nigerians.

A man that can stop the massacre by herdsmen, build more refineries and put an end to scarcity of fuel and give us a lower price. A man that can build on the foreign reserve and raise Naira to an enviable end. A man that can key into modern economic ideas to enhance our National development. A man with progressive and detective idea., he said.

On his part, national president of the body, Dr Wabara Emeka said the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, should work to produce Atiku as the partys presidential candidate next year.

We have to give him our ticket, because Nigerians have made up their minds,that come 2019 presidential election, Atiku is the Peoples choice. I urge the PDP to do the right thing and so that Nigerians will seal the deal with their PVCs come 2019.

In Atiku, we have found a renewed hope for teaming hungry Nigerians. In Waziri Adamawa,we have found hope for all our pothole riddled highways. In Atiku,hope is rekindled for high quality and affordable education for our children. In Atiku efficient and effective transport system is assured.

In Atiku,our focus will be on Nigerias human development because there lies the wealth of the nation. In Atiku, we have a man with human heart. Under Atikus presidency,we are assured that our fundamental human rights,will be respected as a people. In Atiku,hope2019, is a reality., he said.

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Home | News | General | Buhari, govs, Soyinka expected at IPI congress in Abuja

President Muhammadu Buhari, Nobel Laureate, Prof Wole Soyinka, and state governors are among those confirmed to attend the 2018 congress of the International Press Institute (IPI) scheduled for June.

From left, Presidential spokesman, Mallam Garba Shehu; Vanguard Publisher and Patron, International Press Institute, Mr. Sam Amuka; Acting President, Yemi Osinbajo; Minister of Information, Alhaji Lai Mohammed; and Patron, International Press Institute, Mallam Ismaila Isa Funtua when the Acting President received a delegation of the International Press Institute at the State House, Abuja, Wednesday. Behind the Acting President is Prince Nduka Obaigbena, ThisDay Publisher. Photo: Abayomi Adeshida. File Phots

The 2018 IPI congress will hold in June at the International Conference Centre, Abuja.

About 350 journalists from across the world are expected at the congress, which is being hosted in Nigeria for the first time.

Revealing the confirmation of attendance of high profile individuals, at a meeting of the 2018 IPI congress LOC, yesterday, the chairman, Mallam Kabiru Yusuf, said President Buhari would declare the congress open, while Prof Soyinka will deliver a keynote address.

Malam Yusuf, who is chairman of Daily Trust Media Limited, also revealed that efforts were being made to have international dignitaries, including some African leaders, in attendance at the world congress.

Outlining the programme of activities for the congress, Yusuf said there will be a welcome dinner on the first day of the congress, June 21 and a gala night on June 22, 2018.

MEETING: From left; Mr Tony Iredia, ex-DG of NTA; Mr Bayo Onanuga, MD of NAN; Mr Eric Osagie, MD of Sun newspaper, and Mallam Kabir Yusuf, Chairman of Daily Trust newspaper, during the meeting of Local Organising Committee of International Press Institute, IPI, Congress 2018 being hosted by Nigeria in June in Abuja, at The Sun Newspapers office. Photos by Kehinde Gbadamosi.

He said discussants at the congress would talk on topics relating to the challenges journalists are facing and proffering solutions to them.

He urged Nigerian journalists to be part of the programme, which would go a long way in exposing the country positively to the world.

Reiterating the gains of the congress, Spokesman of the 2018 IPI congress, Mr. Eric Osagie, who is the Managing Director/Editor-in Chief of The Sun Publishing Limited, said the congress was a rare opportunity for Nigeria to showcase its best.

It is also an opportunity to re-brand the country, by proving to the world that Nigeria is not as bad as it is painted. It is one of the biggest tools to draw attention to not just the potentials and greatness of Africas most populous nation, but to also demonstrate that Nigeria remains the leader in Africa, he said.

The publicity sub-committee of the 2018 IPI congress also pledged to continue the sensitisation of journalists and Nigerians, in general, on the forthcoming congress.

Briefing the meeting, its chairman, Dr. Tonnie Iredia, said members of the committee had travelled to Kwara and Rivers states to meet with stakeholders.

He revealed that the committee was making efforts to get the buy-in of governors, so that they would sponsor journalists in their ministries and information to attend the congress.

Iredia, who was Director General of the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), said the committee, in the coming weeks, will step up visitation to media houses to sensitise journalists.

He also revealed that the committee would come up with programmes and jingles to mobilise Nigerians for the coming world congress.

Present at the meeting were members of the IPI and media executives, including Secretary of the IPI, Mr. Raheem Adedoyin; Executive Secretary of the Newspaper Proprietors Association of Nigeria (NPAN), Mr. Feyi Smith; Managing Director of the News Agency of Nigeria, Mr. Bayo Onanuga and publisher of Blueprint Newspapers.

Others are General Manager/Editor-in-Chief of Vanguard Newspapers, Mr. Gbenga Adefaye; Chairman of Channels Television, Mr. John Momoh, who was represented by Manager, News, Mr. Ambrose Okoh and editors from The Sun, New Telegraph and Tribune, among others.

The IPI director, Barbara Trionfi, visited Nigeria in February to know how the LOC was preparing for the coming congress.

Trionfi, during the visit attended a meeting with IPI members/media stakeholders, in Abuja, following which she and Mallam Yusuf addressed a press conference.

The IPI director also paid a courtesy visit to the Minister of Information, Alhaji Lai Mohammed and the Nigeria Television Authority (NTA). She also visited Senate President, Bukola Saraki.

During the visit to Saraki, the Senate president called for a closer collaboration between the press and the parliament in the overall interest of democracy and better dividends for the people.

Saraki said he was excited that Nigeria is hosting this years edition of the world congress of the IPI and described the upcoming event as a great opportunity not only for the global press to have a better understanding of the country but to give us an opportunity to be able to interact more in the interest not only of understanding issues here in Nigeria, Africa and the global world because to some of us we really believe that the growth and stability of the world today depends on what happens in Africa and in Nigeria.He said when the world starts getting accurate information about what happens in Nigeria, I think the world will be a better place for it.

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Home | News | General | Oil hits $75, as Saudi seeks price hike

LondonOil prices rose, yesterday, to their highest since late 2014 as U.S. crude inventories declined after sources told the media top exporter, Saudi Arabia, is seeking to push oil prices higher.

A picture taken on September 16, 2015 shows workers trying to tie a pipe of the first refinery in Nigeria, which was built in 1965 in oil rich Port Harcourt, Rivers State. AFP PHOTO

Brent crude oil futures rallied as high as $74.44 a barrel, the strongest since November 27, 2014, the day that OPEC decided to pump as much as it could to defend market share.

Brent futures were at $74.35 per barrel at 0823 GMT, up 87 cents from their last close.

US West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures rose 71 cents to $69.18 a barrel. WTI had earlier hit 69.27 dollars , its best level since December 2, 2014.

Oil prices continued to climb on Thursday as a decline in US crude inventories and commentary from Saudi Arabia that it will be happy to see crude rise to $80 or even $100 helped boost prices, RBC said in a note.

The Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC, and other major producers, including Russia, started to withhold output in 2017 to rein in oversupply that had depressed prices since 2014.

OPEC and its partners will meet in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, today. OPEC will then meet on June 22 to review its oil production policy.

Since the start of the supply cuts, crude inventories have gradually declined from record levels toward long-term average levels.

Further supporting oil prices is an expectation that the U. S. will re-introduce sanctions against Iran, OPECs third-largest producer, which can result in further supply reductions from the Middle East. (Reuters/NAN)

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Home | News | General | Evans: PSC approves special promotion of 45 Police officers for gallantry

By Kingsley Omonobi

DCP Sani, now Commissioner of Police

ACPs Abba Kyari, Kolo, now Deputy Commissioners of Police

ABUJA  The Police Service Commission has approved special promotion of 45 police officers and acting appointments for another 13 officers who played major roles in the arrest of Chukwudubem Onwuamadike, aka, Evans, a notorious kidnapper and 21 members of his gang.

Evans

The Commission took the decisionThursday, at its 27th plenary meeting which began in Abuja on Tuesday, April 17, 2018, and presided over by the Chairman of the Commission, Dr. Mike Mbama Okiro, a retired Inspector General of Police.

The promotion and acting appointments were based on the performance of the officers in the arrest of the deadly gang who terrorized Nigerians.

The officers are of the Intelligence Response Team, IRT, Special Tactical Squad, STS and Technical Intelligence Unit under the direct supervision and coordination of the IGP Monitoring Unit at the Force Headquarters Abuja.

A statement signed by Ikechukwu Ani, head of Public Relations said: The promotion and acting appointments were also necessitated by the need to match rank with schedules of duty either being performed or to be performed by the officers and for their acts of gallantry and courage exhibited in the course of duty.

It quoted Dr. Okiro as saying that the new ranks would greatly motivate the Officers for improved performance.

The 45 officers promoted included DCP Habu A. Sani, the Head of the IGP Monitoring Unit, who however, has been directed to appear before the Commission tomorrow (today), Friday, April 20th 2018 for an interactive session in line with the Commissions policy for officers transiting to the rank of Commissioner.

Others are two Assistant Commissioners of Police to Deputy Commissioners, one Chief Superintendent of Police to Assistant Commissioner of Police, one Superintendent of Police to Chief Superintendent, 16 Assistant Superintendents of Police to Deputy Superintendent and twenty four Inspectors to Assistant Superintendents.

One Assistant Superintendent was appointed acting Deputy Superintendent while twelve Inspectors were also appointed acting Assistant Superintendents.

The acting appointments were approved for officers who were not due for promotion.

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Home | News | General | Court strikes out EFCCs suit against Patience Jonathan, six others

By Innocent Anaba

A Federal High Court, in Lagos, Thursday, struck out a suit by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, seeking to compel Patience Jonathan and six others to forfeit to the Federal Government, the sum of $5, 316. 66, domiciled in Skye Bank Plc.

Patience Jonathan

The court struck out the suit at the instance of the EFCC, which had applied to strike out the suit.

Other beneficiaries of the ruling are five companies, which had a total sum of N7, 418, 829, 290.94 billion and one Esther Oba, who is said to have $429, 381.87 million. The companies are: Finchley Top Homes Limited, AM-PM Global Network Limited, Aribawa Arura Reachout Foundation, and Pagmat Oil and Gas Limited and Mabel Resort Limited.

The monies were said to be kept in six different commercial banks.

Trial judge, Justice Mojisola Olatoregun, had sometime in December 2016, while granting EFCCs ex-parte application, ordered that the account be frozen pending the conclusion of investigation on the money, in a suit marked FHC/L/CS/1342/16, between Federal Republic of Nigeria and Skye Bank Plc, the companies listed above and Esther Oba.

The judge, had also ordered the EFCC to file an undertaking as to damages if it turned out that the order was not to have been made.

In urging the court to temporarily freeze the account, the EFCC through one of its investigators, Mr. Abdulahi Tukura, in an affidavit, told the court that the former first lady used different companies and individuals to acquire the money.

In the said affidavit, Tukura, had averred that Dame Patience Jonathans money in Skye Bank account number 2110001712 with current balance of $5, 842, 316. 66 billion, is reasonably suspected to be proceed of crime.

However, at the resumed hearing of the matter, lawyer to other respondents, except Skye Bank Plc, Mr. Ige Asemudara, told the court he was duly informed by the EFCC lawyer, Mr. Mohammed Idris, who was equally in court, that the anti-graft agency had signified to discontinued the suit, by filing a notice of discontinuance.

Asemudara therefore, urged the court to strike out the suit.

Asemudaras application was granted and Justice Olatoregun consequently struck out the suit.

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The trial judge, Justice Okon Abang, said on Thursday while delivering a ruling on an application seeking the release of Metuhs international passport to enable him travel abroad for medical treatment.

According to the judge, I am wondering, if the defendant is really sick as he claims, why did he not appeal the two earlier decisions of the court that refused to release his international passport.

I doubt that he is really ill as he wants the court to believe, if he is, he should have appealed the decisions of the court at the Court of Appeal.

The judge wondered why Metuh appealed decisions of the trial court that had nothing to do with his health but refused to appeal those that dealt directly with his health.

Abang held that it seemed there was a hidden agenda by Metuh to present the court as inhuman by filing the same application before the trial court a third time rather than going on appeal.

He said that he agreed with the arguments of the prosecution that filing the application for a third time was an unpardonable and reckless abuse of judicial processes.

The judge maintained that the defendants ought to know that where a trial court decided a matter, it could not be brought before it again under any guise.

He further said that since the prosecution closed its case in 2016, the defendant, rather than defending his case, had taken several steps to frustrate the trial.

The judge said that he could not sit on appeal over his own judgment having already refused an application for the release of Metuhs passport twice.

He added that contrary to the claim by Metuhs counsel, Mr Onyeachi Ikpeazu, (SAN), there were no new facts in the current application as the facts in it were the same as those in the last two applications.

The issues raised in this application have already been determined in the two previous rulings on the matter; there is nothing new in this application.

He held that on account of Metuhs conduct since the prosecution closed its case, he could not order the release of his passport and that he lacked jurisdiction to entertain the matter having decided it before.

He therefore dismissed the application for lacking in merit and adjourned the matter until April 20 for continuation of trial.

Metuh on March 14, for the third time, asked the court to release his international passport to enable him travel abroad for medical treatment.

One of his counsel, Mr Emeka Etiaba (SAN), told the court that his client did not appeal the two previous applications which were refused by the court but added that this was a new and different application.

Etiaba had told the court that the new application was premised on the grounds that Metuh had lost sensation in his legs adding that this never happened before.

NAN
Home | News | General | Biafra protesters storm Westminster as Buhari meets the Queen

*No amount of blackmail can stop BiafraIPOB

*Were not part of Buharis endorsement for 2019Ohanaeze

By Vincent Ujumadu & Johnbosco Agbakwuru

SOME Biafran protesters yesterday demonstrated at the Pall Mall Street, Westminster, United Kingdom, about 650 metres from Buckingham Palace, as President Muhammadu Buhari was meeting British Prime minister Theresa May, Queen Elizabeth II and other heads of state.

The protesters, among other things, requested the release of Nnamdi Kanu, the leader of Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB and a referendum on the fate of Biafra.

While the protest was ongoing, the president and other heads of states were being received by May, the British PM and Patricia Scotland, Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, at the official opening of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, CHOGM 2018.

No amount of blackmail can stop Biafra

The Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, yesterday also insisted that no amount of blackmail would stop it from achieving the Biafra Republic.

The leadership of IPOB was reacting to what it called the fabricated and fake statement credited to someone who claimed to be a traditional ruler of an autonomous community in Mbaise, Imo State, who described the ongoing IPOB Biafra project as a fraud.

The said traditional ruler was said to have made the statement in a national newspaper..

IPOB, in a statement, said the publication was an attempt to poison the minds of Biafrans and divert their attention from seeking their freedom from Nigeria.

IPOB media and publicity secretary, Comrade Emma Powerful said the alleged traditional ruler from Mbaise who was quoted in the publication does not exist.

He said: There is no traditional ruler or person of interest from Mbaise residing in Calabar who goes by the name quoted in the said story. This is another agent provocateur publication in the mold of the equally fake Okwudili the non-existent, phantom Biafra leader, designed to mislead the masses into thinking that certain Igbo traditional rulers are against the current IPOB- led agitation for Biafra independence. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, it is a black lie.

It is highly unethical for a national publication to facilitate the dissemination of what is in essence, a fake news, all in an effort to weaken IPOB or test the resolve of our global followership. The article was calculated and designed to impugn the integrity of the struggle for Biafra liberation championed by IPOB and led by Mazi Nnamdi Kanu.

Findings by IPOB intelligence unit and family members in and around the five communities that make up Mbaise have conclusively determined that nobody with the name of the said traditional ruler ever existed, talk less of being crowned a traditional ruler. Those behind this fabrication must know that Biafrans are highly intelligent people and internationally proven to be the most intelligent race in the black world. Therefore, these lies peddled by enemies of Biafra freedom will never hold water or gain any traction.

It is now very clear to all that IPOB remains the potent force it has always been, despite the horrors of Operation Python Dance and the illegal abduction of our leader, hence the concerted effort to degrade our movement through smear campaigns and outright lies. Nothing can stop IPOB.. Biafra must be restored.

Ohanaeze not part of Buharis endorsement for 2019

Meantime, the pan Igbo socio-cultural organisation, Ohanaeze Ndigbo has disassociated itself from the proposed endorsement of President Muhammadu Buhari for 2019 elections by some Igbo groups working under the umbrella of Ohanaeze.

Ohanaeze explained that endorsement for any candidate including Buhari will be after wide consultations.

But the group also said its position on the purported endorsement did not mean that it was against the candidacy of President Buhari in the forthcoming elections since he has the constitutional right for a second term.

Chairman of Ohanaeze, Federal Capital Territory, FCT, chapter, Abuja, Odozi Nwodozi in a statement in Abuja, yesterday, described those planning the purported endorsement as renegades from alleged disbanded Ohanaeze Ndigbo Youth Wing as well as the Women Wing.

The statement read: It has come to the knowledge of Ohanaeze Ndigbo FCT chapter that renegades from the disbanded Okechukwu Isiguzoro-led Ohanaeze Ndigbo Youth Wing and the Callista Adimachukwu Ohanaeze Ndigbo Women are presently in Abuja for a purported endorsement of President Muhammadu Buhari for the 2019 presidency.

This shameful exercise which is being coordinated by an Enugu-state born head of a federal government parastatal is the crystallization of the vituperations of these discredited groups on the leadership of Ohanaeze Ndigbo for the past one month.

It should be noted that while Ndigbo are not against the candidacy of President Muhammadu Buhari in the 2019 polls, since he has the constitutional right for a second term, endorsement for any candidate including Buhari will be after wide consultations.

However, it is important to let the public know that these characters engaging in the exercise are not qualified to do it as their mandates have since expired at the dissolution of their groups. And elections for both organs are scheduled for Friday 20th and Saturday 21st April 2018 in Enugu where new leadership will emerge.

For the Igbo persons in the present administration who have been financing and orchestrating the macabre dance of the disgraced youth and women leaders for the past two months, their desperation for relevance and display of grip of the Igbo socio-political structure should be guided, else they exhaust the little credence they have left in Igbo land.

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Home | News | General | Revival of Warri, Burutu ports top on my Senate agenda Omatsoguwa

By Emmanuel Aziken, Political Editor

All Progressives Congress, APC, senatorial aspirant in Delta South senatorial district, Mr. Evans Omatsoguwa, has called for unity among the three major ethnic groups in the senatorial district, promising to forge unity to revive the commercial and cultural potentials of the region.

He noted that the distrust in the area had eroded the principle of zoning of the senatorial seat, adding that he will revive trust among the three major ethnic groups in the district to ensure that the seat was again rotated among the Itsekiri, Isoko, Ijaw as it was before.

Our people should not be divided by the interest of a few who have sidelined the majority of us for their own good.

We grew up with a sense of unity that we are one and even where culture divided us, good neighbourliness that we saw kept us united as a people. Things were shared fairly and even the Senate seat was rotated fairly among the major ethnic groups.

I am committed to reaching an accord with all major ethnic stakeholders so that the principle of rotation will be revived in such a way that our people will not negatively feel it in terms of legislative ranking, Omatsoguwa said in the statement.

Promising to ensure the revival of the major ports in the region, he said: If elected by the people, it is my intention to ensure that the major ports in Delta South are revived as a way of boosting economic activities in the region. I will work to ensure that the Burutu Port comes to life as a major channel for the export of agricultural commodities while the Warri Port regains its pride of place as a major terminal for the import and export of all kinds of goods.

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Home | News | General | Biafra protesters storm Westminster as Buhari meets the Queen

SOME Biafran protesters yesterday demonstrated at the Pall Mall Street, Westminster, United Kingdom, about 650 metres from Buckingham Palace, as President Muhammadu Buhari was meeting British Prime minister Theresa May, Queen Elizabeth II and other heads of state.The protesters, among other things, requested the release of Nnamdi Kanu, the leader of Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB and a referendum on the fate of Biafra.

While the protest was ongoing, the president and other heads of states were being received by May, the British PM and Patricia Scotland, Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, at the official opening of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, CHOGM 2018.

No amount of blackmail can stop Biafra

The Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, yesterday also insisted that no amount of blackmail would stop it from achieving the Biafra Republic.

The leadership of IPOB was reacting to what it called the fabricated and fake statement credited to someone who claimed to be a traditional ruler of an autonomous community in Mbaise, Imo State, who described the ongoing IPOB Biafra project as a fraud.

The said traditional ruler was said to have made the statement in a national newspaper..

IPOB, in a statement, said the publication was an attempt to poison the minds of Biafrans and divert their attention from seeking their freedom from Nigeria.

IPOB media and publicity secretary, Comrade Emma Powerful said the alleged traditional ruler from Mbaise who was quoted in the publication does not exist.

He said: There is no traditional ruler or person of interest from Mbaise residing in Calabar who goes by the name quoted in the said story. This is another agent provocateur publication in the mold of the equally fake Okwudili the non-existent, phantom Biafra leader, designed to mislead the masses into thinking that certain Igbo traditional rulers are against the current IPOB- led agitation for Biafra independence. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, it is a black lie.

It is highly unethical for a national publication to facilitate the dissemination of what is in essence, a fake news, all in an effort to weaken IPOB or test the resolve of our global followership. The article was calculated and designed to impugn the integrity of the struggle for Biafra liberation championed by IPOB and led by Mazi Nnamdi Kanu.

Findings by IPOB intelligence unit and family members in and around the five communities that make up Mbaise have conclusively determined that nobody with the name of the said traditional ruler ever existed, talk less of being crowned a traditional ruler. Those behind this fabrication must know that Biafrans are highly intelligent people and internationally proven to be the most intelligent race in the black world. Therefore, these lies peddled by enemies of Biafra freedom will never hold water or gain any traction.

It is now very clear to all that IPOB remains the potent force it has always been, despite the horrors of Operation Python Dance and the illegal abduction of our leader, hence the concerted effort to degrade our movement through smear campaigns and outright lies. Nothing can stop IPOB.. Biafra must be restored.

Ohanaeze not part of Buharis endorsement for 2019

Meantime, the pan Igbo socio-cultural organisation, Ohanaeze Ndigbo has disassociated itself from the proposed endorsement of President Muhammadu Buhari for 2019 elections by some Igbo groups working under the umbrella of Ohanaeze.

Ohanaeze explained that endorsement for any candidate including Buhari will be after wide consultations.

But the group also said its position on the purported endorsement did not mean that it was against the candidacy of President Buhari in the forthcoming elections since he has the constitutional right for a second term.

Chairman of Ohanaeze, Federal Capital Territory, FCT, chapter, Abuja, Odozi Nwodozi in a statement in Abuja, yesterday, described those planning the purported endorsement as renegades from alleged disbanded Ohanaeze Ndigbo Youth Wing as well as the Women Wing.

The statement read: It has come to the knowledge of Ohanaeze Ndigbo FCT chapter that renegades from the disbanded Okechukwu Isiguzoro-led Ohanaeze Ndigbo Youth Wing and the Callista Adimachukwu Ohanaeze Ndigbo Women are presently in Abuja for a purported endorsement of President Muhammadu Buhari for the 2019 presidency.

This shameful exercise which is being coordinated by an Enugu-state born head of a federal government parastatal is the crystallization of the vituperations of these discredited groups on the leadership of Ohanaeze Ndigbo for the past one month.

It should be noted that while Ndigbo are not against the candidacy of President Muhammadu Buhari in the 2019 polls, since he has the constitutional right for a second term, endorsement for any candidate including Buhari will be after wide consultations.

However, it is important to let the public know that these characters engaging in the exercise are not qualified to do it as their mandates have since expired at the dissolution of their groups. And elections for both organs are scheduled for Friday 20th and Saturday 21st April 2018 in Enugu where new leadership will emerge.

For the Igbo persons in the present administration who have been financing and orchestrating the macabre dance of the disgraced youth and women leaders for the past two months, their desperation for relevance and display of grip of the Igbo socio-political structure should be guided, else they exhaust the little credence they have left in Igbo land.

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Home | News | General | 10 days after Offa robbery, suspected armed robbers attack bank, kill police in Ekiti

- Suspected armed robbers have attacked First Bank and killed a policeman in Ekiti state

- Armed robbers had last week attacked some banks and carted away undisclosed amount in Offa, Kwara state

- The corpse of the slain mobile police officer was said to have been evacuated to an undisclosed mortuary in the area

A mobile police officer was, on Thursday, April 19, killed during a bank robbery at First Bank in Ifaki-Ekiti, Ekiti state.

The Punch reports that the robbers carted away an undisclosed amount of money before the arrival of security operatives.

READ ALSO: Buhari never passed vote of no confidence in Nigerian youth - Presidency

NAIJ.com gathered that the incident which was made known in the pictures that surfaced online showed some residents gathered at the bank premises.

A First Bank in Ifaki-Ekiti after the armed robbers' attack

The corpse of the slain mobile police officer was said to have been evacuated to an undisclosed mortuary in the area.

Meanwhile, NAIJ.com had previously reported that the Chief Imam of Ijagbo, Muftau Jamiu, on Sunday, April 8, narrated how his brother, Alawunde Jamiu, died during the armed robbery experienced by some banks in Offa, Kwara state, on Thursday, April 5.

Residents lamenting after an armed robbers' attack on a First Bank in Ifaki-Ekiti

Recall that robbers, said to be numbering about 15, had attacked and robbed some banks, killed and injured scores of victims on Thursday, April 5.

Residents lamenting after an armed robbers' attack on a First Bank in Ifaki-Ekiti

Though the Kwara state commissioner of police, Lawan Ado, said 17 people comprising nine policemen and eight civilians died in the robbery incident, the operations commander, Vigilante Group of Nigeria, Offa chapter, Wasiu Adepoju, said the vigilantes counted about 50 dead bodies after the incident.

The affected banks are Union Bank, EcoBank, Guarantee Trust Bank, First Bank, Zenith Bank and Ibolo Micro Finance Bank.

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Robbers return firearms to Nigerian Police | Naij.com TV - Latest Crime News in Nigeria - on NAIJ.com TV

[embedded content]

Source: Naija.ng

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Home | News | General | Polish explorer takes Nissan LEAF across SSA in first EV expedition

By Theodore Opara

Renowned Polish explorer Arkady Pawel Fiedler, who in February, inaugurated the first ever Electric Vehicle (EV) expedition with the worlds most popular electric vehicle  Nissan LEAF car from Cape Town, South Africa via West Africa to Europe was received in Nigeria by officials of Stallion NMN and Nissan South Africa in Victoria Island, Lagos.

Fiedler drove alongside his companion, Albert Wojtowicz, an architect cum photographer in an entirely first generation electric Nissan LEAF car that is powered by a 30kwh battery with a range of 250 kilometres in a period of two months, covering 8,000 kilometres. The entire journey is meant to cover a total of 15,000 kilometres.Addressing local automobile media at the Stallion NMN showroom in Lagos, Fiedler said, apart from being the first ever electric vehicle expedition across the African continent, the trip aims to build awareness for electric mobility and new cleaner technologies in Africa, Poland and the world at large.The voyage, according to him, also seeks to change peoples perception of the world and human choices with particular recourse to the impact of transport on the environment, Fiedler said adding Care of the environment, home and family starts with us, with our subjective decisions and this journey is also proof that something apparently impossible can be achieved when given appropriate attitude and determination.

The 42 years old father of two said the choice of the electric Nissan LEAF model wasnt by impulse. When it came to considering which kind of electric car I would drive across Africa, we took into account several brands, featuring similar specifications but this particular model was favoured. It has been a proven model since 2010 and just in January 2018, the Nissan-Renault Alliance announced the delivery of the 300,000th LEAF car sold worldwide, he explained.Besides being the worlds first 100-percent electric, zero-emission car designed for the mass market, its advanced powertrain provides a totally new driving experience, with smooth, responsive acceleration,stable handling and quietness. Also reiterating that initiative was conceived over time, Arkady said the expedition was entirely his idea. I chose to drive in my own electric Nissan LEAF car bought in 2017 that wasnt in anyway modified to facilitate this expedition. The car is the standard specification you will find in many European cities, he said.

Fiedler described Africans as warm and hospitable and believes they will catch up with on-going technological transformation in Europe and America to also embrace electric mobility and new technology as soon as possible.If I can convince someone in Europe that I embarked on a long-haul trip by crossing this massive African continent with an electric vehicle, then it is possible more people will buy a car like this, he envisioned.

thrilled by the level of awareness in Africa, saying EVs arent entirely alien to most people in Africa. Majority of the people wanted to know why the car was silent, and doesnt use oil or water or emit Co2, just as several others asked how further the car could go after one full charge. Stallion NMN Head of Sales and Marketing Amit Sharma who received the duo of Arkady and Albert in Lagos said: We are proud of this initiative, being the first ever electric vehicle expedition across Africa, and as you all are aware, the Nissan tagline  Innovation that Excites has always kept the brand going  scoring so many firsts in its entire outings.Without mincing words, mobility is going electric already and Africa cant be an exception. We must therefore move along with the entire world as EVs becomes the mobility of the future. We at Stallion NMN cherish this milestone.

The Nissan LEAF is a pioneer of its kind, and being the worlds first 100-percent electric, zero-emission car designed for the mass market, it incorporates the latest IT systems, and is always connected to driving support functions for a secure and convenient ownership experience.Launched in December 2010 in Japan and the United States, the Nissan LEAF first made its debut in Europe and other markets in 2011. It has ever since continued to win numerous international accolades, including the prestigious 2011 European Car of the Year, 2011 World Car of the Year and 2011/12 Car-of- the-Year Japan awards among others.And with on-going provision of infrastructural facilities across the continent and persistent media hype; electric mobility is sure to become an attraction of auto buffs anytime soon, Sharma said.The explorers who are billed to proceed to the Republic of Benin in their schedule will also visit Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal, Mauritania, Morocco, before terminating in Poland.Arkady and Albert had earlier been in Namibia, Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, and Cameroon since leaving Cape Town South Africa in February.

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Home | News | General | Malnutrition ravages 22,000 children Benue IDPs camps

By Peter Duru

MAKURDINo fewer than 22,000 out of the 27,454 children currently taking refuge in the Internally Displaced Persons, IDPs, camps at Daudu, Guma local government area and Abagena in the outskirts of Makurdi have come down with malnutrition.

Vanguard findings indicated that majority of the children in the two camps could hardly have enough to eat even as they defecate in the open.

At the LGEA Primary School camp and the Shelter Camp, all in Daudu, the health personnel in charge of both camps, an Assistant Chief Nursing Officer and a Nurse/Midwife, disclosed that the over 10,871 children in both camps had come down with malnutrition.

All the children in our camps have become malnourished, the crisis has started taking its toll directly on the affected children. It is a challenge we are facing presently and it is obviously not good for growing children.

The reason for this development cannot be farfetched, they are not eating well. And the truth is that the Benue state government has been overwhelmed, the government is carrying a burden that two states put together cannot carry.

There is an urgent need for federal government and international intervention to help cater for these IDPs, who are close to 180,000 in eight locations across the state because the state government is already overwhelmed.

Findings at the Abagena camp, which houses over 16,583 children, also indicated that over 75 percent of the children were malnourished.

According to the health personnel at the camp, a Nursing Officer 1, one of the health challenges we have in this camp is malnutrition among the children

At the moment over 75 percent of the children in this camp are malnourished which not a good development is at all.

Though the state government and public-spirited individuals and organisations have been coming to make donations of food and non-food items to the victims, how far can such gestures go?

The resources of the state government are already overstretched because the state government provides the bulk of the needs of this people.

But for how long will this continue? Just take a look at the multitude in this camp alone. The federal government must do all within its powers to have these people return to their ancestral homes quickly before the situation gets out of hand.

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Home | News | General | Mace theft: Senate summons IGP, DSS boss over security breach

Moves to improve security, as Police recover stolen mace

Omo-Agege obtains court order to stop arrest by Police, DSS

By Emmanuel Aziken, Political Editor, Henry Umoru & Ikechukwu Nnochiri

ABUJAThe Senate, yesterday, summoned the Inspector-General of Police, Ibrahim Idris, and Director-General of the Department of State Services, DSS, Lawal Daura, to appear and brief it on investigations into the invasion of its hallowed chambers on Wednesday.

Deputy Inspector General of Police Operation, Joseph Habila returning Hijacked Senate Mace to National Assembly Clark , Sani Omolori while National Assembly DPO, Sulu-Gamabari looks on at National Assembly Abuja. Photo by Gbemiga Olamikan.

It also vowed that the culprits will not go unpunished.

The Senate resolution nonetheless, the man at the centre of the crisis, Senator Ovie Omo-Agege (APC, Delta Central) yesterday got an injunction to restrain the Police, DSS and the Attorney-General of the Federation, AGF, Abubakar Malami from arresting or detaining him.

Mace Theft: Court stops Police, DSS from arresting Omo-Agege

Meanwhile, an Abuja High Court sitting at Maitama, yesterday, restrained the Nigerian Police Force and the Department of State Service, DSS, from arresting Senator Ovie Omo-Agege over Wednesdays invasion of the Senate and theft of the Mace which is its symbol of authority, by thugs.

Chief Judge of the High Court, Justice Ishaq Bello, gave the order following an ex-parte motion the Senator who is representing Delta Central Senatorial District, filed through his team of lawyers.

Specifically, the court issued an order of interim injunction restraining the respondents, their agents and/or servants arresting and/or detaining the applicant either in their custody or any other law enforcement agency, or its servants, agents or privies or through any person working in concert with the respondent as its agents, by whatever means or however described pending the hearing and determination of the motion on notice filed in this suit.

An order of interim injunction restraining the respondents, their representatives, agents or privies, howsoever described from any attempt or threat to violate the applicants fundamental right to personal liberty and right to freedom of movement pending the hearing and determination of the motion on notice filed in this suit.

As well as An order of interim injunction restraining the respondents from taking any or further steps detrimental to the applicants aforementioned fundamental rights to the applicants rights in connection with the facts stated in this matter pending the hearing of the motion on notice filed in this suit.

The court held that the order will persist until a fundamental right enforcement suit that Omo-Agege filed before it is heard and determined.

Cited as Respondents in the suit were the Attorney-General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami, SAN, the Inspector-General of Police, Mr. Ibrahim Idris, the Commissioner of Police, FCT Command, Sadiq Bello, and the Director-General of DSS, Lawal Daura.

Justice Bello adjourned hearing on the substantive suit marked: FCT/HC/CV/1522/2018, which he transferred to Justice Usman Musale of the high court in Jabi, till May 7.

Senate bids to overhaul security at NASS

Meanwhile, the Senate yesterday resolved to overhaul its security apparatus to ensure that a repeat of the incident does not occur.

The Senate has also insisted on looking inward, just as it vowed not to leave any stone unturned as regards confronting security challenge in the National Assembly and the country at large.

As part of moves to address the security challenge, the Senate during a closed-door session that preceded yesterdays plenary session resolved to collaborate with the House of Representatives in addressing the security challenges.

Police return snatched Mace

Meanwhile, the police yesterday returned the mace that was stolen by thugs to the Senate authorities.

Deputy Inspector-General of Police, DIG (Operations) Mr. Habila Joseph returned the mace at exactly 11:55 a.m when senators were in the closed-door session.

He handed over the mace to the Clerk of the National Assembly, CNA, Alhaji Mohammed Sani-Omolori at the entrance of the main lobby of the National Assembly.

Senators close ranks with Reps

Following the Senate session yesterday, the Senate delegation led by the Deputy Chief Whip, Senator Francis Alimikhena, met with the House leadership towards forging a common consensus on the situation facing the National Assembly.

The Senate has also ordered the Inspector-General of Police, Ibrahim Idris and the Director-General of the Department of State Services ( DSS), Lawan Daura, to appear before it next week to brief it on how far it has gone with the investigations.

Vanguard also gathered that at the closed-door session, the Senators agreed that if the culprits were not arrested by next week , the legislative house will take a very strong position on outstanding issues it has with the executive branch of government.

Speaking yesterday after the closed-door session that preceded yesterdays plenary, Senator Ekweremadu holding fort in the absence of Senator Saraki said that both Idris and Lawal would explain to the upper legislative chamber, the thoroughness of their investigations on the ugly incident.

Desecration wont go unpunished  Ekweremadu

Ekweremadu meanwhile vowed yesterday that the desecration of the Senate chambers would not go unpunished.

In a speech he delivered to the Senate themed: The Affront on Our Laws and Institutions Must Not Go Unpunished he said: Yesterday, this legislative chamber, the nation, and the international community were treated to the theatre of the absurd when armed men invaded the chamber to assault our staff and cart away the mace, the symbol of authority of the Senate. It was a very sad testimony, a derogation, and total smear on our democracy and nation.

On behalf of the President of the Senate, His Excellency, Dr. Bukola Saraki, CON, I want to register deep appreciation to you, my colleagues for your understanding and maturity in the face of flagrant provocation. You showed yourselves as patriots and elder statesmen and women. I am indeed proud of you and salute your patriotism.

I want to also specially appreciate the leadership and members of the House of Representatives, the Management and staff of the National Assembly, especially our chamber staff for their gallantry. We appreciate Nigerians, the media, civil society, the political parties, and the international community for the outpouring of solidarity and concern. Ugly and provocative as the event of yesterday was, it soothes that the entire nation and the world stood together in total condemnation of the ugly drama, brigandage, and desecration of the National Assembly by those, who hold themselves above the laws and institutions of our land.

You would also recall that this hallowed chamber, supported by the House of Representatives, demanded that the Inspector-General of Police recover and return the stolen mace to the Senate within 24 hours. Concerned colleagues and Nigerians, who wanted to find out if the mace had been found, have inundated me with calls and messages since last night. Let me, therefore, formally confirm to you, my distinguished colleagues, that the mace has been recovered by the Police as we demanded here in this hallowed chamber.

Nevertheless, we believe that there should be consequence for bad behaviour. We swore to uphold the laws of the Federal Republic and the principles of democracy. It still beats the imagination of Nigerians and the civilised world that the attackers passed through the several security checks and barriers into the National Assembly and the inner recesses of this chamber and also escaped with the mace into the thin air despite the well-known fortified surroundings of this parliament.

Therefore, we hold that it will be a detour to the state of nature where life was lawless and brutish if what happened yesterday is allowed to go unpunished or swept under the carpet. It will never happen. We will get to the roots of the matter. We call on the Inspector-General of Police and Director-General of the State Security Service to ensure that all those, who plotted, aided, abated, and executed this dastardly affront on our democracy and belittled Nigeria before the international community must be brought to book to serve as a deterrent to others. We will be inviting them next week to brief us on the state of the investigations.

This incident has also brought to the fore the case many of us have always made for a decentralised police system. Ordinarily, a big institution like the National Assembly should have its own Police, apart from the Sergeants-at-Arms.

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Home | News | General | Army to reintegrate displaced residents in Borno

By Prince Osuagwu & Evelyn Usman

LAGOSChief of Army Staff, COAS, Lieutenant-General Tukur Buratai yesterday disclosed that the Nigerian Army would be moving its base to Borno State, as part of plan to reintegrate residents displaced by the Boko Haram terrorists, even as he insisted that the sect had totally lost its hold on the northern part of the country.

Chief of Army Staff Lieutenant General Tukur Buratai / AFP

Buratai spoke during a telephonic interview between him and the Acting Commander, United States Army, Africa, Brigadier-General Eugene Leboeuf, with participating journalists from Africa and beyond, at the U S Embassy in Victoria island, Lagos, to mark the end of the end of the 6th African Land Forces Summit, held in Abuja.

He said: This year, the whole of Nigerian Army is moving to northern Borno state as art of moves to reinstate those who fled because of Boko Haram. We will be with them in the next four five months.

The narrative is still same. We will still keep them (Boko Haram) hostage. Be rest assured the Nigerian army is still on ground and other components of the security agents are fully on ground. When you look at where we are coming from, where we are and where we are going to, you would know that Boko Haram has been degraded.

Boko Haram as a formidable force used to move around freely across the country. There reached Abuja, Lokoja, Sokoto, Kano, Kaduna , Jos, Bauchi and virtually across many parts of the country especially the northern and central parts. But since 2015, there was no major attack outside the northeast. Same was in 2017.. In this context you will agree with me that Boko Haram has been defeated. If you are in Maiduguri or any part of the North east, you will know Boko Haram has been defeated.

The arm drone according to him was used  especially within the Sabisa forest which was one of the strong hold of Boko Haram, the Shekau group most especially. It was used for force multiplier, most importantly, it provides us with intelligence to be able to take movement of arms. We also used them to move live bodies of troupes and taking the insurgents within that area, as well as improved the response time in the area.

On his part, Brig. General Leboeuf stated that the African land summit would go a long way to solving security challenges in the African region , adding that part of the discussions was based on intelligence gathering training on attacks and techniques of foreign invasions.

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Home | News | General | Royal rumble in TROMPCON

By Dayo Johnson, Regional Editor, South West

ALL is certainly not well within the Association of Traditional Rulers of Oil Mineral Producing Communities of Nigeria, TROMPCON.

Two traditional rulers in Ondo State are angling for the position of National Secretary of the association, a development that has slowed down activities in the oil- producing area.

The crisis in the state had made them to put on hold their quarterly national executive meeting in the last eight months as the office expected to call for a meeting was still in contention.

Oba Edema and Oba Ogbaro

A meeting that was expected to hold recently was abruptly cancelled for fear of the unknown from the warring parties.

Vanguard learned that the disagreement over who occupies the position in Ondo State had pitched the state chapter against the national body following alleged conspiracy on the part of the national executives to right the wrong by giving recognition to Oba Edema.

The national secretariat of the association had ceded the position of the association secretary to Ondo State at the national meeting held in Eket, Akwa Ibom State sometime in 2017.

While nine of the 13 traditional rulers in the association in the state met and unanimously voted in support of the Malokun of Atijere Kingdom, Oba Samuel Olumide Adeoye Edema after he was nominated by Olubo of Obenla, Oba A. K Ikuesan and seconded by Alaho of Odonla, Oba Elias Ikuomola, who is the national deputy chairman of the association, the aggrieved monarch, the Odoka of Obe Ogbaro, Oba Obafemi Ogbaro allegedly went behind to claim that he was the choice of the traditional rulers from the oil- producing areas of the state.

Findings showed that at the meeting held in the state by the Ondo monarchs before the national conference, the Obas unanimously agreed that Oba Edema should represent them as scribe of the association.

Confusion over choice

After confusion trailed the state representative at its conference in Eket, the national body through its chairman, the paramount ruler of Ibeno, Owong Effiong Archianga asked the Obas from Ondo State to go back home and put their house in order.

Consequently, the state chairman of TROMPCON, who is the Olugbo of Ugboland, Oba Frederick Obateru Akinruntan put the matter to rest by sending the name of Oba Edema as the choice of the Obas from the state.

Oba Akinruntan was out of the country when the first ballot where Oba Edema emerged as the choice of the state but his deputy supervised.

The other contestant, Oba Ogbaro had faulted the election held in the absence of the state chairman.

But on his return, another meeting was held in which Oba Akinruntan supervised and Oba Edema was again upheld. Oba Ogbaro was said to have been present at that meeting.

Ratification of nomination

Consequently, Oba Akinruntan in a letter to the National Chairman of TROMPCON ratified the nomination of Oba Edema as the National Secretary of TROMPCON.

He said: I write to bring to your notice that at the Ondo State chapter meeting of TROMPCON, the nomination of Oba Samuel Olumide Adeoye Edema, the Malokun of Atijere kingdom was upheld and reaffirmed as national secretary of TROMPCON.

It is important to state that from the onset, the meeting of the state chapter of TROMPCON, prior to the national conference at Eket, did not present Oba Obafemi Ogbaro, Odoka of Obe Ogbaro.

All members met on the unanimous decision of the choice of the nomination of Oba Edema to represent TROMPCON at the national level as national secretary for which I write for immediate ratification.

In accordance, we request that the above ratification for Oba Samuel Adeoye be implemented and we solicit your support in discharge of his duties.

Oba Akinruntan therefore called on the body to reverse the recognition of Ogbaro as the nominee of the monarchs from the state with immediate effect.

Oba Edema reacts

Reacting to the choice of Oba Edema by the state chapter of TROMPCON, Oba Ogbaro denied being an impostor and maintained that he was legally appointed to the position at the national conference attended by all stakeholders and has been acting in that capacity.

Oba Ogbaro said: I will not join issues with anybody. I am a peace-loving monarch. I contested for the position as a qualified person and got the mandate for two years in office. I have just spent seven months.

I have been canvassing for peace, harmony and integrity in the oil-producing communities. My advice is for traditional rulers in the area to embrace peace.

The position of TROMPCONs National Secretary was zoned to Ilaje Local Government Area with two constituencies of Ugbo and Mahin.

He added that only Ugbo Constituency was recognised as an oil and gas producing community in Ilaje Local Government Area with four traditional rulers, including the Olugbo of Ugbo, Alagho of Odo-Nla, Odoka of Obe-Ogbaro and Olugbo of Obe-Nla, as traditional rulers from the oil-producing communities.

The monarch recalled that in violation of the provision of Article 3 of the constitution of TROMPCON, some monarchs connived in an illegal meeting without the Olugbo, as the chairman of the association, in attendance to zone the position to Ilaje Local Government Area and nominated Oba Edema, the Molokun of Atijere, who is not from an oil-producing community.

However, Vanguard learned that all the Obas that met when Oba Edema was nominated to represent the state chapter, signed the letter of agreement with the exception of Oba Ogbaro.

Those that signed the nomination letter include the national deputy chairman, Oba Ikuomola Elias, state deputy chairman Oba Olatubosun Luyi, Oba Dele Raphael, Oba Kingdom. Oba Kalejaye, Oba A K Ikuesan, Oba Ajayi I Adeniyi, the publicity secretary, Oba M. A Olasehinde and the state treasurer, Oba Edema.

In a swift response, Oba Edema said he was duly nominated by nine Obas at the meeting held at the Palace of the Alagho of Odonla, in Igbokoda on August 21 2017 at 12 noon and the meeting was presided over by state Deputy chairman, Oba Olatubosun Luyi while TROMPCONs national deputy chairman, Oba Ikuomola Elias, who is from the state was also in attendance.

Oba Edema said that Oba Ogbaro was in attendance but nominated himself and after it was put to vote, all the Obas voted for him and he was announced at the meeting as the choice of the state chapter to represent it at the national level.

Monarchs deny division

Speaking on the division amongst the traditional rulers, the state Secretary of TROMPCON, who is the Olu of Igbokoda, Oba Afolabi Odidiomo denied any division but blamed Oba Ogbaro for the impunity and plan to impose himself on all the Obas in the oil producing communities in the state.

Oba Odidiomo stated that any other person who paraded himself as the nominee or representative of the traditional rulers for the position of the Secretary of TROMPCON aside Oba Edema, should be seen as an impostor and does not have the backing of the traditional rulers from Ondo state.

Meanwhile, the State chapter is contemplating dragging the national body to court to compel it to call for a meeting and also to stop Oba Ogbaro from parading himself as the national secretary of the association.

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Home | News | General | 2019: Nsukka at war over Reps Fourth Term bid

Speculations of a plan by Dr. Pat Asadu to seek a fourth term as the member representing Nsukka/Igbo-Eze South Federal Constituency in the House of Representatives have sharply divided his constituents.

By Chinenyeh Ozor

Asadu

Dr. Pat Asadu who is chairman of the House Committee on Ports, Harbours and waterways has represented the Constituency since 2007 on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, in Enugu state.

The situation is such that the people of the constituency are divided into different warring groups with some threatening to truncate his ambition on the grounds that he had served them for 12 years without commensurate results while others insisted that he remains their saviour.

In his party, the tension is so high that it has led to accusations and counter-accusations are being made even on posters pasted around the constituency.

Central to the issues around Asadus fourth term bid is that it seriously undermines the age-long zoning arrangement in the constituency.

The people of Nsukka and Igbo Eze South are bound in one federal constituency. Asadu who hails from Igbo-Eze South local government area has held the seat since 2007. The Nsukka people who are divided into Nsukka Central, East and West are thus clamouring that the seat should shift to Nsukka West (Ovogovo) for justice to be seen to have been done.

In 1999 to 2003, Nsukka Central produced the late Alex Eze; from 2003 to 2007, Nsukka East produced Charles Ugwuwhile. Nsukka West was yet to produce a MHR before the zoning shifted it to Igbo Eze South in 2007 which produced Dr. Asadu who has held the seat since then. The apparent fourth term bid by Asadu has apparently hit many constituents from Nsukka West on the wrong side leading to agitation against what they perceive as the marginalisation of their people and the demand for equity and fairness. Among the groups championing the agitation of the people are Ovogovo General Assembly; Ovogovo Forum, Ovogovo United for Gburugburu and Nsukka Unity Forum.

Before now, a group known as Ovogovo Young Professionals (OYP) had fired the first shot when it flayed the representation of Dr. Asadu.

The group in a statement signed by its National president, Hon. John Eze said: Dr. Pat Asadu has failed the constituency woefully; he has no business going back to the National Assembly.

We need a vibrant federal lawmaker that will attract federal presence to our area as well as touch the lives of the people of the constituency, and not bench warmers in the National Assembly. It could be recalled that in the 2015 general elections, Nollywood actor, Andy Okonkwo who has just declared his intention for the gubernatorial race in Enugu state under the APC and his brother, Peter Okonkwo, incumbent commissioner in the state jostled for the seat with Asadu, but the incumbent prevailed.

Findings by our correspondent showed that those interested in the race include: Chinedu Nwamba, member representing Nsukka-East Constituency in the Enugu State House of Assembly, a former member of the House of Representatives, Charles Ugwu, a serving commissioner in Enugu State, Barr. Peter Okonkwo, a former governorship aspirant in the last governorship election, Mr. Chidi Mark Obetta, an Enugu-based lawyer, Barr. Maximus Ugwuoke, among others.

The battle has already shifted to the social media where promoters of the Ovogovo agenda are slugging it out with loyalists of the incumbent lawmaker.

Asadu did not respond to enquiries by Vanguard on the unfolding development even though associates dismiss the agitation against his bid as one fired by bitterness. It is unthinkable for some persons to just come up and start telling bare-faced lies simply because they are interested in a position being occupied by someone else.

To set the records straight, it is pure fallacy for anyone to say that he has not sponsored any bill in the House. He has so far sponsored not less than nine bills and five motions, including a Bill for an Act to amend the River Basin Development Authority Act; A Bill to repeal the Nigeria Ports Authority Act; A Bill for the establishment of Forensic DNA Database in Nigeria; A Bill to establish the Federal College of Dental Technology and Therapy to provide for courses leading to the award of degrees, among others, an associate said on the condition of anonymity.

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Home | News | General | Physically challenged persons barricade Imo Govt House

By Chidi Nkwopara

OWERRIPhysically-challenged persons, yesterday, barricaded the entrance to the Government House, Owerri, to protest what they called high vehicle branding charges engineered by the state Ministry of Transport.

Some of the placards carried by the protesters read:  Stop this massive exploitation , We need fair treatment, Rochas, call your Transport Commissioner to order , Give us a fair option and We cant be slaves in our state.

The siege mounted by the aggrieved citizens, not only disrupted free movement of vehicles into Government House for hours but also paralyzed activities.

The peaceful protest almost turned violent, when the Commissioner for Transport, Mr. Las Okaforanyanwu, made an attempt to address the aggrieved protesters.

Addressing journalists, the spokesman of the group, Chief Ukeje Ikechukwu, accused the committee in charge of vehicle branding, of allegedly extorting huge sums of money from physically challenged bus drivers.

The committee collects N110,000 as branding fee for buses, but only give a receipt covering a paltry N20,000. The remaining N90,000 is not accounted for, Ikechukwu fumed.

Continuing, Chief Ikechukwu disclosed that 15 of their physically challenged members are now hospitalised, following the injuries they sustained, when we were attacked by governments task force, a few days ago.

According to the spokesman, 50 of our buses have been confiscated by the government task force set up by the Ministry of Transport.

The Commissioner, however, denied that illegal charges were being collected by the committee.

He explained that the reason for branding vehicles is to maintain sanity and reduce criminal activities in the state.

It was his considered opinion that with the biometric number and proper branding, a bus or taxi could be tracked to any place if any of them is linked to a crime.

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Home | News | General | In Rivers gunmen kill pregnant woman, rip her open, escape with unborn baby

By Davies Iheamnachor

PORT HARCOURTA pregnant teenagers womb was ripped opened by unidentified people, who took the unborn baby away and also killed three others on Wednesday.

gunmen

The killings have reportedly created panic and fear in Rumuoro village in Ogbakiri clan, Emohua Local Govern-ment Area of Rivers State.

The victims, as gathered, include Pastor Joseph Nheme, Mr. Kingsley Owhonda, Miss Queen Ada Amah and Miss Mini Elizabeth.

A community source, who preferred anonymity, disclosed that Pastor Nheme, who is from Igodos compound, was shot at the riverside while fishing with his son, Godknows Iheme, adding that Godknows narrowly escaped while his fathers corpse was taken away by the invaders.

The source said Owhonda, from Woknes compound, who also went for fishing, was abducted and taken to a bush, where he was tied to a tree and cut in pieces until he died.

The source further revealed that Amah, a pregnant teenager from Kpalikwu-Imohs compound in the same Rumuoro, was killed and the killers opened her womb and took away her unborn baby.

The sources also said that Miss Elizabeth from Igodos compound in the same village was captured alongside Queen Amah, noting that both of them had gone to the stream to fetch water in same Rumuoro River before the hoodlums struck, killed and buried Elizabeth.

Police story

Police Public Relations Officer of Rivers State Police Command, DSP Nnamdi Omoni, confirmed the invasion, adding that a fisherman lost his life in the incident.

Omoni stated that the fisherman, who lost his life, was hit by a stray bullet at the waterfront.

He added that the perpetrators have been identified as cultists from a neighbouring village in Ogbakiri, stressing that the killers invaded Rumuoro village, where they shot sporadically.

He said the Command has launched a manhunt to arrest the perpetrators of the act and prosecute them.

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Home | News | General | Nigerians in diaspora knock Senate over resolution on security chiefs

- Some Nigerians in diaspora has accused Senators of having ulterior motives in their recent call for the sack of service chiefs by the president

- The Nigerians in Diasporas Monitoring Group (NDMG) said there are plots by the Senate to separate President Muhammadu Buhari from his diligent appointees

- The group also said the call by the Senate could demoralise troops in the battle front and give Boko Haram terrorists an upper hand

Nigerians in the diaspora have condemned the Nigerian Senate over its call for the sack of all service chiefs.

These Nigerians under the aegis of Nigerians in Diasporas Monitoring Group (NDMG) said the call by Senators is a ploy to separate the President from his appointees who are diligent.

They also dismissed the state of insecurity on which the lawmakers predicated their call as a smokescreen.

Reacting in a statement issued on Thursday, April 19, by its secretary general Uchenna Okeke, the NDMG said security breaches that would have been insignificant in the past are now being highlighted for public attention owing to the dearth of more devastating news.

READ ALSO: Omo-Agege was out to confront Senate, Ekweremadus wisdom saved the day - Lawmaker gives more details on mace theft saga

Okeke warned that the disposition of the senators can demoralise troops in the battle front and give Boko Haram terrorists an upper hand.

He also said that the demand being made by the senators on President Muhammadu Buhari is politically motivated and an integral part of a planned manovuer for the 2019 general elections.

He said noted that the Senators do not have the capacity to assess the ongoing war against terrorism, and that hiring of experts is not enough to educate lawmakers on the enormity of what the military contend with in the theatre of war.

Okeke said: "The reality is that incidences that would have been insignificant in the past are now highlighted for public attention for lack of more devastating news; interpreting this as bad has the tendency to demoralize troops and hand the initiative to terrorists.

Coming from lawmakers, who are statutorily expected to use their position to promote peace and stability in the country, we find the demand disconcerting and worrisome.

READ ALSO: Buhari couldn't have derided all Nigerian youths -Presidency

This is especially so when information emanating from certain quarters confirm that the demand is politically motivated and an integral part of the 2019 General Elections manoeuvring.

We invite the Senators to take cognisance of their place as politicians who may not have the requisite competences to assess the counter-insurgency war; this is also not a field where consultants can bring the lawmakers up to speed since it takes those in the war theatre to fully appreciate the enormity of what the military contend with on a minute by minute basis," Okeke noted.

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NAIJ.com earlier reported that the Nigerian Senate had called for the sack of the nation's service chiefs by President Buhari.

The Senate in a motion raised by Senator Suleiman Asonya Adokwe, representing Nasarawa south constituency.

In his reaction, Senator Solomon Olamilekan Adeola, the senator representing Lagos west, said President Buhari needs new ideas from fresh minds to end frequent killings in the Nigeria.

Do churches need armed security guards? On NAIJ.com TV

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Source: Naija.ng

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Home | News | General | I'm doing my best to correct rot inherited from past leadership - NEMA DG tells lawmakers

- Lawmakers of the House of Representatives has said it was mandated to investigate corruption within the National Emergency Management Agency

- The ad-committee headed by Ali Isa said the only activities within the agency between January 2017 and now would be investigated

- Isa said the committee did not receive petition against the past DGs of the emergency agency

The House of Representatives has said that it has only been mandated to investigate alleged corrupt practices in within the National Emergency Management Agency from January 2017 till date.

The acting chairman of an ad-hoc committee raised by the House, Ali Isa said committee only had the mandate to investigate the activities in NEMA within the past 12 months when Mustapha Maihaja became the DG.

Speaking to journalists at the end of a resumed hearing on Thursday, April 19, Isa gave reasons the probe would not extend the tenure to the past DGs.

Ali said the committee did not receive petition against the past DGs of the emergency agency.

READ ALSO: Buhari couldn't have derided all Nigerian youths -Presidency

He said: "We are not aware of anything concerning the former DG. I have not received any petition concerning that. As far as I'm concerned, the committee's assignment that was given, was the investigations the House mandated that we should conduct from January 2017 to date, in a motion that was referred to the committee and there are specifications and referrer to that motion."

Isa also said that Yobe state had already testified against NEMA over the distribution of relief materials which were not distributed in the state.

He said more states from northeast presently ravaged by crisis and needed relief material would be appearing before the House committee on Tuesday, April 24.

READ ALSO: Get your umbrella ready - NiMet predicts the weather condition for Friday, April 20

He also debunked reports that the leadership of the House had ulterior motive in the ongoing investigation against the present NEMA DG.

Isa said: "We have no other interest , we have no business with any agency that wants to investigate anyone. During our investigations, nobody, including the DG mentioned the former DG that would warrant his invitation.

"Well, the investigation is still ongoing and we are not foreclosing that we will not invite him. Anybody that is named, if the committee could send invitations to higher officers , then there is nobody that cannot be invited. We rely on section 89 of the constitution that empowers us to invite anybody to appear before the committee," he added.

Maihaja had be come the director general of the agency in April last year.

While appearing before the committee, the DG said he inherited some rot in the agency and was doing his best to correct them.

He said the agency also complied to the Public Procurement Act in the awarding of contracts for the supply of N1.6 billion relief materials to flood victims in 16 states within the last one year.

Meanwhile, NAIJ.com earlier reported that a civil society group had raised concerns over alleged attempts by some officers of NEMA to undermine ongoing investigation by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission on the agency.

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The group, New Initiative for Credible Leadership (NICREL) said the officers who were sacked by the agency were using mercenaries to smear the image of the present NEMA DG.

NICREL said these mercenaries were going about their campaign of calumny using non-existent documents against Maihaja.

The EFCC stage a walk against corruption on NAIJ.com TV

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Source: Naija.ng

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Home | News | General | Panic, fear in Rivers community as cultists kill pregnant teenager, rip stomach open, escape with baby

- Persons said to be cultists attacked a village in Rivers state, killing four persons, including a pregnant teenager whose stomach was ripped open and baby taken away

- One of the victims was also a pastor who was reportedly abducted as he went fishing with his son, tied to a tree and cut in pieces until he died

- The Rivers State Police Command has confirmed the incident and launched a manhunt to apprehend and prosecute the killers

Unknown persons on Wednesday, April 18, killed a pregnant teenager, ripped her stomach open, and made away with the baby; three others were also killed during the incident, Vanguard reports.

The gruesome incident took place in Rumuoro village, Ogbakiri clan, Emohua local government area of Rivers state, and it has led to panic and fear in the community.

READ ALSO: Herdsmen crisis: Stop the killings - Soyinka charges Buhari

NAIJ.com learnt that the victims include Miss Queen Ada Amah, Miss Mini Elizabeth, Pastor Joseph Nheme, and Mr Kingsley Owhonda.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity, a community source reportedly disclosed that Pastor Nheme was shot at the riverside while fishing with his son, Godknows Iheme. The son reportedly narrowly escaped being killed by the invaders who took the fathers corpse away.

Detailing the mode of death further, the source disclosed that the pastor was abducted and taken to a bush where he was tied to a tree and cut in pieces until he died.

The same source disclosed that Queen Ada Amah, the pregnant teenager, was killed; after which, her stomach was opened by the killers, who took the baby away.

According to the source, the other female victim, Miss Mini Elizabeth, was captured along with Queen. She was killed and buried by the attackers. Both ladies had previously gone to fetch water together, before the killers struck.

The invasion was reportedly confirmed by the public relations officer of the Rivers State Police Command, DSP Nnamdi Omoni, who added that a fisherman had also lost his life after he was hit by a stray bullet at the waterfront.

He said the killers had been identified as cultists from a neighbouring village in Ogbakiri; and that they shot sporadically as they invaded the Rumuoro village.

Omoni disclosed that a manhunt had been launched to apprehend and prosecute the killers.

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Meanwhile, NAIJ.com previously reported that Governor Nyesom Wike of Rivers revealed how Don Wanny, the notorious cult leader who was killed for allegedly masterminding the death of about 19 people on New Years Day in the state, planned another attack before his death.

Wike spoke on Viewpoint, a programme on Rhythm FM in Port Harcourt, saying the cult leader planned a new attack before he was fished out by security agencies.

He also denied ever sponsoring Don Wanny as had been alleged by some people, just as he further denied ever buying a gun for anybody to carry out criminal activities or support him during elections.

Police parade over 50 suspected cultists in Lagos - on NAIJ.com TV:

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Home | News | General | Stop herdsmen killings by end of July - Soyinka sends tough message to Buhari

- Prof Wole Soyinka has called on Buhari to end the herdsmen crisis by the end of July; otherwise, he would have failed completely

- He noted that Nigerias food security could be jeopardized by the displacement of farmers who were the major victims of the herdsmen and Boko Haram attacks

- The Nobel laureate called for the transformation of instruments of war and destruction into instruments of production and creativity

Prof Wole Soyinka, renowned public figure and Nobel laureate, has stated that if the federal government fails to stop the rampaging killer herdsmen and return displaced persons to their homes by the end of July, President Muhammadu Buhari will become a total failure, Punch reports.

He made the comment during the inauguration of the 2018 OAU Ife Festival of Foods and Identity at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Osun state.

READ ALSO: Mace theft: Ekweremadu saved the day - Lawmaker

NAIJ.com gathers that Soyinka pointed out that it was farmers who were mostly victims of the herdsmen and Boko Haram attacks; and warned that Nigerias food security could be jeopardized by their displacement.

He stated: Our mission in life is to beat the sword into ploughshare. This means that machetes, hoes, the instruments of cultivation, planting, and creating sustenance we must fashion out of the instruments of destruction; we must overcome the instruments of destruction.

And my message to all those who are concerned is that between the launching of this logo and festival today and the outward manifestation of the festival itself (end of July), we should have seen signs that this battle between the sword and the ploughshare is reversed.

According to Soyinka, Nigerians would be given fulfillment as a people of culture, peace and harmony, if the instruments of war and destruction are transformed into instruments of production and creativity.

He said: Between the annunciation of this festival and the manifestation of the festival itself, we want to see from this government a reversal of a seeming triumph of the gun; and if that has not taken place, let us not lie to ourselves, it means we have no government.

If those who had been displaced, the farmers who have been displaced in their hundreds from various parts of this nation, especially the North, if those farmers have not been taken back and restored to their productive environment, then it means we have no government.

Let us all join hands to beat the sword, the guns into ploughshares.

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Meanwhile, NAIJ.com previously reported that Professor Wole Soyinka described the incessant attacks and killings by the killer herdsmen in many parts of Nigeria as a declaration of war on the country.

Soyinka who made this known in a statement released, also warned President Muhammadu Buhari against treating the case of the herdsmen lightly. He advised Buhari to avoid falling into the same trap former president Goodluck Jonathan fell into with the Boko Haram sect.

Time to take up arms against herdsmen attacks? - on NAIJ.com Street Gist:

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Source: Naija.ng

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Home | News | General | Nigerian youths deserve respect and recognition

Founder and convener of New Nigeria Movement and Vice President of Nigerian Young Professional Forum, Dr. Chima Anyaso has on behalf of Nigerian youths demanded an apology from President Muhammed Buhari coming on the heels of recent outburst of criticism by young Nigerians over comments alleged to have been made by the president at the commonwealth submit in London.

Cross Section of Participants on Location during the Film Training Workshop for Youths of Lagos State)

In a state issued in Lagos yesterday, Anyaso insisted that the president should retract the statement and apologies to young Nigerians who have labored without any support from government. He said that what Nigerian youths deserve is respect and recognition for their efforts in making sure Nigeria gains global recognition through sports, music, movies, technology and innovations.

He noted that because of the ingenuity of Nigerian youths around the world and within Nigeria, the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg thought it right to visit Nigeria in his most recent tour of the world to encourage Nigerian youths in technology and ICT.

According to him, that is one of the numerous testimonies to the fact that the Nigerian Youth has not failed

The statement read let us once again remind ourselves that the hope of a prosperous Nigeria rests on the shoulders of youths of this country. As someone who is committed to the course of youth empowerment and youths active involvement in politics, I am deeply pained by the comments credited to the President of the federal republic of Nigeria, President Mohammed Buhari, qualifying Nigerian Youths as lazy and illiterates. I doubt that this came from the president, but if the president did make this comment attributed to him, then it is indeed an unfortunate situation.

He went further as a youth leader and someone in contact with youths in Nigeria, I understand the pains, the hardship and challenges facing Nigerian youths. I therefore consider it unfair and indeed out rightly unfortunate that those whose responsibility it is to provide enabling environment for youths to thrive in business, those whose responsibility it is to build schools and implement policies that will ensure compulsory education for the citizenry have lost their sense of responsibility thereby shifting the blame to the very victims of mis governance. The vilification of the Nigerian Youth did not start today, but it has to stop

The statement went further I want to use this medium to remind Mr. president that his comment is a slap on the faces of young Nigerians who have against all odds distinguished themselves in their chosen fields, young Nigerians whose ingenuity is responsible for the explosive growth of small and medium scale enterprises providing millions of jobs to all Nigerians, the millions of Nigerians who have gone through untold hardships and struggles to see themselves through school because the government failed to provide free or affordable education for them.

However, I urge the youths not to be discouraged by these kinds of comments. Let us remain resilient, focused and committed to rebuilding our nation. A new Nigeria is possible.

Chima Anyaso, alongside other Nigerian young leaders recently led a delegation of young people to visit former president Olusegun Obasanjo, retired General Ibrahim Babangida and Former President Goodluck Jonathan to enlist the support of these past leaders to encourage the involvement of youths in active politics under the platform of NN19.

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Home | News | General | Herders/farmers clash: Arms merchants taking advantage of our porous boarders PRESCOM

By Chris Ochayi

ABUJAChairman, Presidential Committee on Small & Light Weapons, PRESCOM, Ambassador Emmanuel Imohe, has blamed the current strife between herders and farmers on unscrupulous arms merchants who are taking advantage of Nigerias porous borders to flood the nation with illicit weapons.

Imohe, who stated this at a two-day stakeholders dialogue on eradication of herders-farmers conflict in Nigeria in Abuja, noted that easy access to illicit weapons was responsible for the lingering herders/farmers clashes.

He said most of the weapons the herdsmen were using to launch attacks on several communities in some states in Nigeria got to them through these criminal syndicates.

He, however, regretted that in spite efforts to regulate proliferation of weapons in the region and elsewhere on the continent, several non-state actors, including herders and farmers, have continued to have access to small and light weapons, SALW, which have flooded communities in the country.

He said: The primary weapons of choice for the perpetrators of conflicts in our West African neighbourhood are the small arms and light weapons, SALW, which appear to be widespread and easily available.

The long, porous borders are enablers for miscreants who indulge in trans-border trafficking of these weapons across West Africa.

This is further compounded by the preponderance of local craft manufacturers and artisans whose skills in arms production have improved over the years.

In addition, there have been some leakages from official stockpiles not only in Nigeria but also in other ECOWAS member states and, indeed, across the globe as well.

Hence, in spite of the substantial efforts at regulating proliferation of weapons in the region and elsewhere in the African continent, several non-state actors, including herders and farmers have continued to have access to SALW and as such, our communities continue to be awash with weapons,

Easy access to illicit weapons is responsible, at least in part, for the heightened nature of insecurity in West Africa. The weapons are mostly coming in from outside the region, facilitated by the activities of criminal syndicates and unscrupulous arms merchants who take undue advantage of our porous borders and the inadequacy of our regulatory environment.

The result is that in country after country in our neighbourhood, once protagonists of conflict have access to deadly weapons, they become less interested in embracing other conflict resolution alternatives, but would rather seek to use such weapons to define their own space.

The invidious role that easy access to illicit weapons is playing in fuelling and accentuating varied security challenges in West Africa cannot therefore be over-estimated.

Regarding the subject matter of today, several factors have impacted this age-long system of animal husbandry. Historical, economic and ecological factors, as well as ethnic, religious and political dimensions have all impacted the nomadic and pastoral system of livestock production.

Climatic changes resulting in recurrent droughts and increased animal movement towards pasture and water, have all heightened the incidence of conflict in the country.

The limited enforcement of animal movement control, notably the 1978 land use Act, has resulted in conflicts between crop farmers and herders where grazing routes have been blocked and animals have ploughed through farms.

Conflicts have also arisen where cattle rustling incidents have been recorded. In recent times, such conflicts have led to deadly confrontations in communities, leading to casualties in terms of loss of human lives and the wanton destruction of property.

Another factor which has impacted on the environmental space for both Herders and Farmers is our increasing population, resulting in the increased need for arable lands for crop cultivation for food security and the need for nations to develop infrastructure.

These needs have resulted in the shrinking of farmlands and grazing routes thereby exacerbating the conflicts between crop farmers and livestock farmers.

It is as a result of the forgoing, and as well the future impact or threat of same that we, as Nigerians must seat together and talk to ourselves with open minds with a view to critically and constructively diagnosing this raging security threat in order to proffer enduring solutions for the consideration of our government.

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Home | News | General | New Lagos bus terminals modelled after intl terminals in Europe, America, says Lagos govt

By Theodore Opara

Lagos State government has explained that the new Ikeja Bus Terminal, Oshodi Transport Interchange under construction and 11 bus terminals being built in strategic locations in the state are modelled after modern international bus terminals in Europe and America.

According to the state government, the decision to build bus terminals with world-class facilities was to give about 12 million people using public transportation a sense of belonging, similar to the kind of treatment about 21,000 air passengers daily using all the nations airports get. The terminal was inaugurated on March 29 by President Muhammadu Buhari.The new bus terminals feature an array of amenities similar to those at airport terminals.The Ikeja Terminal has a sheltered walkway, 13 ticketing booths, an ATM gallery, a food court, a functional Intelligent Transportation System that will make routes and travel plan easier and commuters can relax comfortably while waiting for their buses to arrive.The terminal is provided with conveniences for both sexes and free Wi-Fi spoLagos bus terminalst for commuters.

Newly built Ikeja bus terminal

Other major points are the information centre, waiting area, loading bay, bus and taxi parks, concession shops, office for operator, control room and power house. The list of facilities at the terminal is endless. Its a marked transformation from the old Lagos bus stops which are usually dirty and unhealthy for commuters.During a tour of the Oshodi terminal, it was observed that the interchange has attained 70 per cent completion. It has capacity to serve 300,000 travellers.Briefing newsmen on the project, the Lagos State Commissioner for Transportation, Mr Ladi Lawanson, said the terminals were part of Governor Akinwunmi Ambodes gift to he 12 million masses of the state, using public transportation daily.He said the terminals would put an end to insecurity, unreliability and accidents associated with the current commercial bus transportation in the state.According to him, the construction of the new bus terminals was aimed at ensuring that more people embraced public transportation and will restore sanity to the roads.

We have Alapere Bus Shelter, Ilupeju Bus Depot, Yaba Bus Terminal, Anthony Bus Depot, Maryland Bus Terminal, Agege Bus Terminal, Ojota Bus Terminal, Oyingbo Bus Terminal, Tafawa Balewa Square Bus Terminal, among other proposed corridors. These facilities will provide over 3,000 jobs for youths and increase transport connections and intermodal connectivity in the state, he added.

Also reacting, the Commissioner for Information and Strategy, Mr. Kehinde Bamigbetan, said the idea is to cater for low and medium income residents who could not afford to fuel their own cars every day.He said the Ikeja Bus Terminal is a major transportation infrastructure constructed to improve efficiency, adding that 23 routes would be serviced from the terminal while the facility would be servicing 400,000 passengers daily as well as reduce traffic congestion and environmental pollution occasioned by the current street loading and dropping off of passengers.The Managing Director of Planet Project, Abiodun Otunola, said the Oshodi Transport Interchange, would have three terminals with terminal one serving the inter-city segment; two for the BRT buses from Oshodi to Abule Egba and other destinations such as Mile 2 and Okoko Maiko and terminal three would serve Lagos Island and Ikorodu-Ojota axis.He said all the three five-floor terminals would be connected with a skywalk.He said: In all, we estimate nothing less than 50 destinations to be served from Oshodi. And when this terminal is operational, our initial estimate is that in the first one year, the traffic would be about 300,000 going to about 500,000. Ultimately, in 10 years, we estimate that about one million would be able to use this facility at the end of the day.Its going to be a major hub and there is no major hub of this type in sub-Saharan Africa in terms of population, size, complexity and the number of destinations.

The Planet Project boss said the transport facility was original and unique to suit the needs of the city.The Managing Director, LAMATA, said the agency came up with project and engaged Planet Project for the construction, adding that the plan was to encourage more people to drop their cars and use public means of transportation in Lagos.

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Home | News | General | Ban on protests could fuel sectarian violence, BBOG warns FG

By Omeiza Ajayi

ABUJA The Bring Back Our Girls, BBOG, Movement has warned the Federal Government to desist from clamping down on voices of dissent, saying such action could force dissidents underground, thereby fuelling sectarian violence.

At a press conference, yesterday, in Abuja, the group said: On Friday, April 13, just a day to the 4th year commemoration, operatives of the Nigeria Police carted away our chairs from our usual meeting grounds in Abuja, Unity Fountain, for no just cause.

The park was also sealed. Our movement and others have been purportedly banned by the police from meeting.

Bring back our (Chibok) girls campaignersin Abuja

This stifling of citizens voices and closing of civic spaces is blatant lawlessness and an abuse. Rights to freedoms of association, peaceful assembly, thought and conscience are guaranteed by the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. The Nigeria police itself being a creation of the law cannot act above the law that created it.

Further to this, in October 2014 Justice Sunday Aladetoyinbo of High Court of the FCT, ruled that the police lack the powers to prevent protest by our movement. The court specifically ruled that, The right to freedom of assembly is the bone of democratic governance.

The Nigeria police cannot, therefore, re-enact through the backdoor Decrees 2 and 4 of the dark military era in stifling democratic voices.

The banning of other civic groups meeting peacefully at Unity Fountain creates room for a repeat of errors of the past. Nigeria cannot afford groups going underground. Nigeria cannot afford yet another sectarian crisis, they said in the prepared speech jointly signed by its leaders, Florence Ozor, Aisha Yesufu and Oby Ezekwesili.

Speaking further, the BBOG said: Having given the federal government 72 hours to rethink its totalitarian inclinations and descent to militarism by stifling civic voices, we have decided to return to our daily sit-outs beginning from this day.

Also, our movement shall be bringing forth a number of law suits to compel the federal to produce evidence to the claim that our #ChibokGirls are all alive; to compel the federal government to answer the 14 question we had raised following the abduction of our #DapchiGirls; and to provide reasons for living behind Leah Sharibu, and not accounting for the other five; the Nigeria police; the Inspector-General of Police, FCT Commissioner of Police as officers and in their personal capacities for willfully breaking the law with impunity. There have to be consequences for bad behaviour, they declared.

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Home | News | General | Herdsmen kill 4 in Plateau, as troops repel herders attack in Taraba

By Kingsley Omonobi & Marie-Therese Nanlong

JosFour persons were on Wednesday killed while fetching sand for construction at Jebbu-Miango village, Bassa Local Government Area of Plateau State, the State Police Public Relations Officer, Mathias Tyopev, confirmed.

Meanwhile, Ron/Kulere people of Bokkos Local Government Area, earlier displaced by herdsmen that overran their homes destroying over 1,000 houses, are seeking government assistance to return to their land for farming as the rains set in.

Herdsmen

Taraba clash with sodiers

Also, Nigerian Army said its troops of 101 Special Forces Battalion deployed in Exercise Ayem Akpatuma, while on patrol to Zamban village in Suntai Local Government Area of Taraba State, on Wednesday, April 18 repelled an attack by armed herdsmen.

According to Army authorities in a statement, one of the bandits was captured during the encounter.

It listed items recovered from the herdsmen to include one AK-47 rifle, one pump action rifle, three Dane guns, one round of 7.62mm special, 36 cartridges, three cutlasses, one jack knife, and one mobile phone, among others.

The captured bandit is presently undergoing interrogation; the public is once again reminded to report any suspicious movements in their areas to the security agency for prompt action, the statement signed by Brigadier General Texas Chukwu, Director Army Public Relations, said.

Plateau killings

Villagers said the Bassa victims, all male, were killed by herdsmen while they were loading sand into a tipper truck.

PPRO Tyopev, who confirmed the incident, said when they got the information, DPO of the Division at Bassa council mobilised his men to the scene and photographs of the deceased Adam Sunday, 38; Jatau Akus, 39; Chohu Awarhai and Marcus Mali, 22, of Jebbu-Miango villagewere taken and the bodies taken to Plateau State Specialist Hospital, Jos, for post-mortem examination.

Efforts are on to arrest the perpetrators. The outcome of the investigation will be made public very soon.

Concerned Ron/Kulere People, through their spokesman, Makut Macham, told newsmen in Jos that they had done enough wailing and lamentation without any action being taken and the people risk being hungry as they were unable to go back to the farms due to the herders activities.

According to him, since the evil attacks befell us on January 24 and March 8 in Daffo district, we realise that constantly wailing and pouring out lamentations will not do us much good.

The nations security chiefs, the chief law enforcers of the federation as well as the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, President Muhammadu Buhari, have to do more than merely defining the attacks.

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Home | News | General | Stolen Mace: Enugu Assembly demands change of security heads

By Chimaobi Nwaiwu & Chinedu Adonu

ENUGUENUGU State lawmakers have condemned the invasion of the Senate chambers Wednesday by thugs who took away the mace which is the symbol of authority of Nigerias legislative assembly.

Thugs going with the Mace Photo by Gbemiga Olamikan

Condemning the dastardly act, the House expressed view that the security heads and the service chiefs should be changed because of lax in security, not only in the Senate but the entire nation.

The legislators who were reacting to a motion of public importance brought before plenary by the member representing Ezeaugu Constituency, Hon. Chima Obieze and supported by four other members, urged the House to pass a resolution condemning the act. They also called on other Houses of Assembly in Nigeria to follow suit and condemn the act which was viewed as a slap on democracy.

The Speaker of the House, Hon. Edward Ubosi while thanking his colleagues for their contribution to the motion, said that what happened was a big disgrace to the nation and called on Mr. President to effect changes in the security chiefs on whom he passed vote of no confidence.

What happened is a disgrace to the nation. As far as I am concerned, the security heads are not performing. The president should try some other people, he averred and lamented that democracy seemed to be at variance with anarchy.

There is a serious war between democracy and anarchy in the land, he said.

While presenting the motion, Hon. Obieze had said:

Mr. Speaker, the ship of the state called Nigeria is heading towards the rock and if we, elected lawmakers as crusaders of democracy refuse to fight for our dear country, then Im afraid darker days may just be ahead of us.

Making her own contribution, Hon. Lydia Nkechi-Omeje Ogbu representing Nsukka West, likened what happened at the Senate and what is happening in Nigeria to a war situation.

I am highly concerned about what happened yesterday. I am a woman and we women and children suffer a lot when there is trouble in the land. We are at war. There are IDPs everywhere. People are killed in Taraba, Benue, Borno everyday.

 Since this government came to power, there has been lawlessness in the land. The service chiefs should not be concentrated in one section of the land, she said.

It has exposed high level of insecurity in Nigeria

Also reacting to the development, Bishop, Diocese on the Niger, Rt Rev. Owen Nwokolo yesterday described the invasion of senate chambers by thugs even in the face of tight security as a shame and embarrassment to the security agencies.

Bishop Nwokolo while speaking shortly after the Christian Council of Nigeria, CCN, Standing Committee meeting in Onitsha, said the incident raised a lot of questions to be answered by the security agencies and the Federal Government.

I have been to the National Assembly, what happened there raises a lot of questions for the security agencies and the Federal Government. The security in the National Assembly is very tight. Before you can pass through some doors, you must go through various screenings and frisking of your body.

The Inspector General of Police has a lot of questions to answer about the incident to know how such a thing should happen in the hallowed chambers of our great country. If hoodlums can enter our national assembly premises, it is a big shame on the security network of the country.

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Home | News | General | Robbers raid Ekiti bank, kill policeman

By Wole Mosadomi & Rotimi Ojomoyela

Ado-EkitiDaredevil robbers, yesterday evening, attacked a first generation bank in Ifaki-Ekiti, Ido/Osi Local Government Area of Ekiti State, killing a policeman, just as another police sergeant was killed in an invasion of a police station in Kutigi, Niger State.

An eyewitness in the bank attack in Ekiti disclosed that the robbers stormed the premises of the bank, around 4p.m., when the bank had already closed for business.

The witness said though the robbers could not gain entry into the bank, but riddled the front entrance of the bank with bullets and in the process killed a mobile policeman, who was on duty while his colleague sustained severe injuries.

The bandits also reportedly destroyed the banks Automated Teller Machine (ATM) gallery located outside the bank.

Social and economic activities were paralysed for about 30 minutes the robbery lasted as frightened residents scampered for safety. Vehicles disappeared from all major roads in the town as many of them turned back on learning about the robbery.

The eyewitness added : It was a terrible experience for us in Ifaki today, the neighbourhood where the bank is located became a war zone with endless gun shots fired by the robbers.

Although they didnt succeed in entering the bank, they killed one MOPOL (Mobile Policeman) and his colleague, who was also shot, was taken to the hospital.

They shattered the glasses used to decorate the front of the bank and they destroyed the ATM Point. Although the robbers had left but there is still panic in the town.

When called on phone for reaction, the Commissioner of Police, Mr. Abdullahi Chafe, who confirmed the incident, refused to give further details.

Chafe said: I cannot give you details on the incident now because we are in a meeting. We will give full details in due course.

In related development, one Sergeant Jibril Abubakar was killed when armed robbers invaded a police station in the home town of Inspector General of Police, Kutigi, Niger State.

It was gathered that the gunmen were said to have entered the town at 3:50 am shooting sporadically and made straight for the police division.

The State Police Command s Public Relation Officer, ASP Muhammad Dan-Inna Abubakar, confirmed the death of the Sergeant in the incident.

According to him, the gunmen arrived the town at about 3.50a.m. Wednesday and made straight to the Kutigi police station where they started shooting sporadically.

The gunmen were however repelled by the men on duty but unfortunately one Sergeant Jibril Abubakar lost his life during the gun duel, he remarked.

He said the Commissioner of Police Dibal Yakadi yesterday paid on the spot-assessment to the area and has placed N500, 0000 bounty on anyone who can come up with useful information that would led to arrest of the attackers.

He further explained that a seven-man investigation team headed by OC Special Anti-robbery Squad (SARS), SP Bako has been constituted to track down the assailants and bring them to book.

It would be recalled that two months ago, gunmen also invaded on a divisional police station in Lemu, Gbako local government area of the state which is just few kilometres to Kutigi, the latest attacked town.

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Shehu Sani, senator representing Kaduna central, has asked President Muhammadu Buhari to withdraw the controversial statement he made on Nigerian youth and tender an apology.

While speaking at the Commonwealth Business Forum in Westminster on Wednesday, Buhari said a lot of Nigerian youth have not been to school and they want everything free because Nigeria is an oil producing state.

More than 60 percent of the population is below 30, a lot of them havent been to school and they are claiming that Nigeria is an oil-producing country, therefore, they should sit and do nothing, and get housing, healthcare, education free, Buhari had said.

The statement angered many Nigerians, especially the youth, who took to social media platforms to express their displeasure.

Commenting on the development via his Facebook page, Sani said the president is human and prone to mistakes.

He urged Nigerians to forgive Buhari, rather than send him to the political guillotine.

The president should simply withdraw the statement on the youths and apologise; and tell them what he will do for them in addition to what he had done for them, Sani wrote.

The president spin doctors are trying to spray fragrances on the feces and lace the dung with olive oil, its absurd. The president is a human being, he can gaffe and should be forgiven and should not be sent to the political guillotine.

As for the youths, the challenge is to pick the baton and lead and stop holding the Alsatian Dogs of the political elite. The president echos the perception of the bourgeoisie power elites, the youth must rise against it.
Primate Babatunde Ayodele, the General Overseer of Inri Evangelical Church has reiterated his call for the Senate President, Bukola Saraki to run for President in 2019.

Ayodele said,  God has given him a revelation that Saraki will become Nigerias next President.

He said Saraki will put Nigeria on the path of progress should he contest the presidential election in 2019.

The clergyman spoke during the commissioning of a newly built 50,000 seat Temilaseyori mini-cathedral branch of the Inri Church in Badagry, Lagos State.

He also warned President Muhammadu Buhari to step down and renounce his decision to seek re-election.

According to Ayodele, Saraki should come out to contest. It is the word of God. Buhari Government is not in the hand of God any longer; his government cannot meet up the needs of the people, not even the problem of herdsmen in the country which his government cannot control.

He should step down so that he will not be disgraced like the former. Saraki will do it better and no matter what names people might be calling him, Saraki can move Nigeria forward come 2019.

In 2013 we told Jonathan that he cannot win, and we repeated it in 2014, but he refused and lost out. During the Liberia presidential election, I told George Weah that he should strategize to win.

He did and won. We sent similar message to Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya and he won. I said it also to Sierra Leonean presidential aspirant, Umara Samara, he ignored my message which I sent through delegates. He refused the steps I asked him to follow and after the election, the reverse was the case.

Ayodele had recently said there would be dire consequences if Saraki refuses to contest for presidency in 2019.
US President Donald Trump has accused the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) of keeping oil prices artificially very high.

In a tweet, Trump said the cartels pricing cycle will not be accepted as there is no scarcity of oil supply to warrant such high prices.

Looks like OPEC is at it again. With record amounts of Oil all over the place, including the fully loaded ships at sea, Oil prices are artificially Very High! No good and will not be accepted!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 20, 2018

But OPEC secretary general, Mohammad Barkindo, in a swift response, said the US oil and gas industry benefits from the cartels efforts to restore stability in the market.

He was speaking from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

We in OPEC pride ourselves as friends of the United States who have vested interest in their growth, development and prosperity, he said, adding that OPEC, non-OPEC deal has not only arrested the decline but rescued the oil industry from imminent collapse and is now on course to restore stability on a sustainable basis in the interest of producers, consumers and the global economy.

Oil prices recorded slight increase on Friday ahead of a meeting by members of the joint OPEC and non-OPEC ministerial monitoring committee (JMMC) meeting, same day.

As at Thursday, OPEC daily basket price stood at $70.96 a barrel, compared with $69.39 on Wednesday, according to calculations by the secretariat.

But West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude, rose to $68.53 a barrel on Friday, from $68.29 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange on Thursday.

Similarly, Brent crude, the global benchmark inched above the $73 mark on Friday, the highest since 2014.

Expectations are high that the OPEC and non-OPEC JMMC gathering will announce a specific timeline for further extension of its production cap agreement.

CNBC reports that Trumps agitation may be fueled by news that major oil producers may be targeting much higher oil prices.

Saudi Arabia, a key OPEC member, has conveyed desire to see crude prices at around $80 or even $100 a barrel.

This is partly due to the kingdoms planned initial public offering of Saudi Aramco, its state oil company.

Speaking in an interview with Bloomberg TV, Barkindo said geopolitical tensions in the Middle East (Iran) have brought back a premium to crude oil prices.

According to him, it wouldnt be in the interest of producers or consumers to see a price shock if Iran leaves the cartel based on US re-imposed sanctions.
Kemi Adeosun, minister of finance, says Nigeria does not need the World Bank to monitor its debt.

Speaking with journalists on the sidelines of the ongoing Spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank Group in Washington D.C, Adeosun said Nigeria has the Debt Management Office (DMO), various committees and 185 million citizens as monitors.

She was reacting to the World Banks comments on helping countries monitor their debt levels.

We dont need the World Bank if they want to come and help us, great but we dont need them, she said.

The minister added that current administration has no apologies for obtaining loans to shorten the recession that ended last year.

In 2016, Nigerias economy slipped into its worst recession in 29 years and the government deployed various debt instruments like Eurobonds, Savings bond and Sukuk to raise funds.

There were two options; one was cut back, lay people off and wait for oil prices to recover or be more aggressive, expand your budget, take on more debts and invest in infrastructure in hope that you will get growth going to develop more revenue, she said.

Weve expanded our budget, we pumped money into the economy, we made sure recession was not prolonged. We are now back into growth, we need to accelerate that growth and focus on revenue mobilization which in turn will reduce our debt pressures.

If we were still in recession, wed have far bigger problems. I think what people havent realised is how much work had to be done to make sure that that recession was as short as possible because that would have caused real pain for the people. We shortened it, we had to borrow to do so and we make no apologies for that.
Home | News | General | Zimbabwe parliament summons Mugabe over alleged $15billion diamonds corruption

A Zimbabwe parliament committee has summoned former president Robert Mugabe to give evidence on May 9 over diamond corruption costing billions of dollars, underlining his dramatic fall from power after 37 years of autocratic rule.

Mugabe, now 94, ruled Zimbabwe from 1980 until he was ousted last year when the military took over briefly and his once-loyal ZANU-PF party lawmakers turned against him.

We have set May 9 as the date on which he will give evidence, Temba Mliswa, the mines and energy parliament committee chairman, told the Associated Press (AP).

READ ALSO: Breaking: Police promote EFCC chairman Magu, 17 others

Mliswa added: We met today (Thursday, April 19) as a committee and resolved that we invite the former President Mr Mugabe to our committee to explain the disappearance of $15 billion worth of diamonds.

NAIJ.com gathered that the lawmakers plan to question Mugabe over his 2016 claim that the country had lost the $15 billion sum due to corruption and foreign exploitation in the diamond sector.

Meanwhile, NAIJ.com previously reported that the legislators had earlier resolved to summon Mugabe but did not mention the date the former president would be summoned until Thursday, April 19 when Mliswa announced May 9 as the date of summoning.

The lawmaker said: "He was the president, and we want to know where he was getting the $15bn figure."

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Former ministers, former police chiefs and heads of several government departments have already been summoned by the committee.

The EFCC stage a walk against corruption - on NAIJ.com TV

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Source: Naija.ng

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Home | News | General | You lied against Buhari on environmental pollution of your state - Rivers APC chides Governor Wike

- The APC in Rivers state says Wike exposed his incompetence by accusing the federal government over the black sooth ravaging Port Harcourt

- According to the party, Wike has never seen anything good in the federal government since the latter defeated the PDP in 2015

- The party commended the federal government for explaining that illegal bunkering and other activities are responsible for the black soot

The Rivers chapter of the All Progressives Congress (APC) has come hard on Governor Nyesom Wike describing as 'really bizarre' the latter's statement blaming the federal government for the black soot in parts of the state.

The APC said it was alarmed that Wike could say the government of Buhari was deliberately using any means (and in this case soot) to depopulate any part of the country.

Wike reportedly said this during the visit of a delegation of the United Nations (UN).

The party said by this act, Wike has exposed himself as an unpatriotic, despicable, ignorant character and unfit to occupy the exalted office of the governor of a high class State like Rivers state.

What can anyone say? Governor Nyesom Wike believes in extreme politics based on total lack of morality, dishonesty and naked lies. We will rather leave Governor Wike and his statement to Nigerians and posterity.

"Obviously, the statement is beyond comprehension by any rational mind," Chris Finebone, Rivers state APC spokesman said in a statement made available to NAIJ.com by Eze Chukwuemeka Eze, the media consultant to Davies Ibiamu Ikanya, the party's chairman on Friday, April 20.

READ ALSO: Buhari never passed vote of no confidence in Nigerian youth - Presidency

The party alleged that Wike has not ceased to use any forum to expose his unpatriotic mind and hatred for the APC-led federal government just because the party truncated the ambitious plot of his party - the PDP to continue to loot their common patrimony with impunity for the next fifty years.

According to the statement, "the truth is that under Governor Wike, everything in Rivers state is going from bad to the bizarre and this includes logical reasoning. The governor was simply being disingenuous and we are not surprised that he made such a mendacious statement.

Firstly, the issue of environment is on the residual list in the Nigerian constitution hence the inability of the Nigerian parliament to make its legislation on the environment binding on states and local governments.

"For example, despite the setting up of National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) by the federal government, states and local governments reserve the right to or not to set up State Emergency Management Agency (SEMA) and Local Government Emergency Management Agency (LEMA) respectively. For instance, Rivers state does not have SEMA and LEMA."

Concerning the soot ravaging Port Harcourt and environs, the APC said it would have made sense if the governor listed actions the state government had undertaken towards arresting the dangerous situation rather than claim that his administration had done the needful.

"What does Governor Wike precisely mean by doing the needful? He should specify what that means in clear times," the party said.

The party expressed gratitude to the federal government concerning its position on the causes of the black soot which it said was because of the activities of illegal oil refiners, bunkers and burning of tyres by most of the over 100 abattoirs operating in the state.

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"For sure I can tell you that that statement is mere facade to cover up the ineptitude of Governor Wike's government in tackling this challenge.

"The state government has done absolutely nothing in that regard," the statement said.

NAIJ.com earlier reported that the federal government said the soot, currently being experienced in Port Harcourt and its environs, was caused by activities of illegal oil refiners, bunkers and burning of tyres.

Peter Idabor, director general of the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA) disclosed this at the beginning of a Joint Activation and Drill Exercise in Port Harcourt, on Tuesday, April 17.

Lagos Police Commissioner parades suspected criminals (Nigeria News) | NAIJ.com TV

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Source: Naija.ng

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Home | News | General | President Buhari, Aisha hosted to a dinner by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace London (photos)

President Muhammadu Buhari and his wife, Aisha, attended the dinner hosted by Queen Elizabeth II for Heads of Government and Spouses at the Buckingham Palace London on Thursday, April 19.

NAIJ.com gathered that Britains Queen Elizabeth II, accompanied by Britains Prince Charles, Prince of Wales received Commonwealth Heads of Government and their spouses in the Blue Drawing Room, where the evening commenced with a drinks reception.

President Muhammadu Buhari and his wife as they arrive at The Queens Dinner during The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), at Buckingham Palace in London.

READ ALSO: 2019: Pro-Buhari group storms London to support president's re-election bid (photos)

First lady, Aisha Buhari, exchanging pleasantries with Queen Elizabeth II in London.

Prince Charles, The Queen, Prime minister Theresa May, and Patricia Scotland, SG of the Commonwealth at the dinner.

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President Buhari and his wife Aisha departing after the dinner.

NAIJ.com previously reported that a support group tagged Buhari Diaspora Support Organization visited President Muhammadu Buhari in London.

The president, receiving the group, assured Nigerians that his administration will do its best and ensure that the confidence people have in the All Progressives Congress (APC) led government will not be abused.

He said: We will do our best to justify your trust in us, and that confidence won't be abused.

Buhari to Contest for Presidency in 2019! NAIJ.com TV

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Home | News | General | Actress Toyin Abraham cautions BBNaija fans over cyber bullying

Following the ruckus caused by the ongoing BBNaija reality show, Toyin Abrahm has come out to address the issue.

This edition of Big Brother Naija, Double Wahala, has proven to be every bit of the name. From boy drama to cat fights to verbal attacks, the show has continued to keep viewers wanting more.

However, the fights may be happening in the BBNaija house but it certainly been carried out on social media by viewers and fans of the show. Everyday, insults and threats are hurled at opposing teams of the housemates.

Clearly disturbed by this, Nollywood actress, Toyin Abraham, has taken to Instagram to address the issue, urging people to desists from cyber-bullying as it is only a show that would soon end. She wrote on Instagram: "Hello everybody, it is very alarming and shocking that we are taking this big brother naija thingy far. The insults and the curses are getting way out of hand. This is just a game, we are all one.

READ ALSO: American teenager arrives prom dance in a coffin, stuns people on social media

Its not like the guys in the house are from another country. They are ours, we are one! By Monday, this will all be over, the housemates will go about living their lives what happens then?I see some of the insults in my comment section but I chose to ignore because I believe this will end soon. Choose whoever you want to support without insulting one another. It is exhausting. Stop with the negativity, stop imposing your choices on others. It is not a do or die affair. Let people breathe.

READ ALSO: Guru Maharaji will make heaven before Pastor Adeboye, others - RCCG member rants on social media

Recall Cee-C had caused quite a media outrage after her explosive verbal attack on fellow housemate, Tobi. This eventually led to her disqualification as Head of House and she was served a warning strike.

The video caused quite stir on social media as the teams for and against her all verbally attacked each other on the internet.

With just a few days to the grand finale of the show, just like Toyin who is for Team Tobi, several people have taken to social media to declare allegiance to their preferred teams and are vigorously voting.

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BBNaija 2018: Heres why you should vote for Miracle, Alex and Tobi on NAIJ.com TV

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Home | News | General | Imo will soon have a facelift  Tony Nwulu

By Chris Onuoha

Hon. Tony Nwulu is one of the emerging political leaders in Nigeria and a governorship aspirant in Imo State on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP.

He proved his mettle as an astute politician when he broke ethnic cleavages prevalent in Nigerian politics to win Isolo/Oshodi Federal House of Representatives seat in Lagos State. A native of Eziudo in Ezinihitte Mbaise LGA, Nwulu, 39, recently announced his intention to govern Imo State.

In this interview, he bared his views on his governorship ambition, his plans for Imo State and other issues of importance.

Why do you want to become Imo State Governor and what do you think that this present government has done wrong, that gives you great conviction you can do better?

I have carefully taken my time to study the situation in Imo State. And I have come to realize that some of the problems affecting the State are not insurmountable. These are man- made problems that can be solved. Problems that arose out of poorly thought out policies of the present government. The situation in Imo State at the moment is pathetic.

It is unacceptable. Governance is not all about knocking down peoples houses and demolishing markets thus inflicting pain on them. A government that inflicts pain and tears the people is not a peoples friendly government.

Nothing seems to be working in Imo State despite the alleged trillions of naira that have come into the State since Okorocha became Governor. I understand that the Okorocha government have received more money from the Federation Account than the Udenwa and Ohakim administrations yet what we have seen in Imo State is abject poverty, pain and misery for the people.

I wonder why Imolites should be hungry in the face of plenty. It is a pathetic situation that since this government came on board, it has been pain and misery for the people and this is what I want to correct. Is it not shameful and inhuman that pensioners in the State, our aged fathers and mothers are tossed like a coin by the State Government simply because they want their pensions be paid to them?

Look at the so called urban renewal programme. It has no human face. Most of the projects embarked on by this government are substandard. Flood has become a regular occurrence whenever it rains in Owerri.

This tells you that there is a distortion in the master plan of the city because this government never followed the master plan before embarking on what it called Urban Renewal. He may have opened up access roads but what are the quality of the roads and these projects? Who are the contractors handling these projects? There is no Due Process in this government.

Is not strange that Imo State has no Commissioner for Justice and Attorney General? Are we in a banana republic? How can a Commissioner be appointed without going through screening by the Imo State House of Assembly because she is a sister to the Governor? These are some of the things that make Imo State a laughing stock. And I can go on and on narrating them here. Many times I wonder where got it so wrong.

In the face of these shortcomings of the present government, what do you think you can do to change the situation?

A lot can be done. Ideas rule the world and there are a lot of ideas that can turn the State around. That is why I branded my campaign outfit Mezie Imo. Mezie Imo as the name implies is to make Imo State good for the benefit of all. We have a comprehensive programme aimed at restoring the years the locust has eaten.

There is a development plan we have conceptualized to change Imo State. You cannot talk of governance without placing emphasis on how to develop the State. We have done sector by sector analysis of the challenges facing Imo State and we at Mezie Imo have come up with practical and realizable solutions contained in the Development Plan.

From Agriculture to the Health sector, to human capacity development which is seriously lacking in the State, to infrastructure and many others we have a plan and soon I shall unveil them for the people to see. Already I have assembled the best brains available that will aid our efforts to get it right. I have interacted with a vast segment of Imolites, those who have excelled in various fields of human endeavour who have so much to offer but completely shut out because there is no window of opportunity for them to do so.

When I become Governor, Imo States best, both at home and in Diaspora will come in and repackage our State from the mess Okorocha has plunged it into. We should also have in mind that it is not going to be easy because the rot and level of decadence in the State is so much.

But like I said, I have come to repair Imo State and the people will be marveled by the time we correct this mess and place Imo State on the path of prosperity.

Hope is not lost yet and I remain confident that our dear State shall be salvaged from the clutches of despondency. We will approach the State House of Assembly with a Bill for the establishment of three Zonal Development Commissions for each of the three geo political zones in the State.

This will encourage the three zones to develop at a rapid pace. We want Imo State to quickly join the queue of the fastest developing States in the federation. We will open up the economy which has been public service driven for many years.

We will redirect the economy- make it private sector driven by attracting private investors. And for you to have investors there must be security, steady power supply and all that. We will go into partnership to have an Independent Power Plant to compliment what we get from the National Grid to boost electricity in the State. We have arable land.

Our people are hardworking and this is why Im dumbfounded when I hear our people are hungry and living in misery. Agriculture will get top priority. We will run a small government to cut cost. Imo State is hugely blessed. What we need is the right approach to governance and every other thing will fall in place.

You are an advocate of youth leadership with your initiative Not-too-young-to run. Would you rather say, Governor Okorocha isnt right by presenting his Son in-law to take over from him? And how do you asses Uche Nwosu as a contender?

I have nothing against him. It is his right to contest the way I am contesting as well. Uche Nwosu is above 40 and Im 39 years old. In other words, Im younger. Perhaps, Im the youngest Governorship aspirant in Imo State.

This is good for our democracy and for our State. If Okorocha says anyone not above 50 should take over from him and that youths should be encouraged to participate in governance, then I am the right person to succeed him because I m a core youth. I have done a lot to encourage youths participation in governance.

I initiated the Not Too Young To Run Bill in the House of Representatives which is awaiting presidential assent. It is being practiced in some States of the federation. It is my idea. And because I and well-meaning youths in the country believe that gone are the days youths are used as agents for election rigging and snatching of ballot boxes. Last month, I led some youths to the presidential Villa Abuja where we called on President Muhammadu Buhari to assent to the Bill.

And I am hopeful that soon the President will give his assent. We cannot continue the way we are going. We have seen the emergence of a 45 year old as President of Poland. Last week, a 34 old lady was appointed a Minister in Botswana. So you can see the trend and Imo State must join the queue. For Okorocha to choose his in law to succeed him is not ideal. We are not running a monarchical system of government in Imo State.

This is not a family business and besides it is not Okorocha that will decide for the people of Imo State who takes over from him. It will be the decision of the people and Im confident that the choice of the people will prevail. And I also believe Imo people have made up their mind on the type of Governor they want in 2019, certainly not an elongation of Okorochas tenure through the back door.

You are contesting a governorship position under PDP and your kinsman, Emeka Ihedioha has been there before you. Dont you think its a plan to cut short his ambition, noticing how vibrant and youth-friendly you have become?

How? Why would I do that? He is my elder brother and I respect him. Im in the race because Im convinced that its time for our people to get the best of governance. He is also in the contest. I have no ill feelings against him and I know he has none against me.

But I believe I possess the Midas touch to transform Imo State. I have the magic wand to take Imo State to the next level having taking a critical look at the situation in the State and developed a roadmap to tackle the myriad problems affecting it.

Governor Okorocha commented that Zoning is dead in Imo State. What is your take on the agitation of Owerri zone producing the next governor in the State?

Owerri zone do have the right to renew their agitation for the Governorship of the State. The last time the zone produced the State Governor was in 1993. That was a long time ago and it is natural that the zone strongly put up a strong demand this time around. What we lack is co- ordination and the right approach to actualize this mission.

Owerri zone has been plagued by lack of political leadership for some time and it is seriously affecting the political advancement of the zone. This is the major problem affecting the political direction of the zone and it is very unfortunate. Zoning is an issue that has generated so much heat and debate in the State. It may not be ideal to some people but its advantages outweigh its disadvantages.

For now it suits the political situation in the State. For our peculiar political situation, we need it. We need it to temper frayed nerves.

This is why it is strange that Okorocha could contemplate returning the Governorship to Orlu zone through his son in law when other zones such as Owerri zone has not produced the State Governor since the return of democracy in the country in 1999.

However, we need the best to take over from Okorocha. The ruins are so much and there is so much work to be done to make Imo people happy again. Soon I will come up with a Shadow Government that will begin now to dissect the problems affecting the State and hopefully when we get elected, we will hit the ground running.

It will be interesting to know how you emerged as House of Reps member in a State dominated by the APC (Lagos State)

It is Gods handwork. There is nothing I do without putting God first. I believe with him on your side there is nothing that is impossible. Well, I was accepted by the people of Isolo/Oshodi to represent them. They knew my antecedents and understood that Im credible and transparent and they voted for me. I won overwhelmingly.

I defeated three State Commissioners in their wards in addition to the State APC Chairman including the then incumbent House of Representative member in their wards too. I still maintain cordial relationship with them. I relate with people for what they are irrespective of political leanings. This tells you that I am a serious character. I do not discriminate.

I want the people of Imo State to assess the antecedents of those aspiring to govern them. I have proved myself to be credible and I think its time our people vote in a credible person like me as the next Governor of Imo State.

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Home | News | General | Clergyman urges Saraki to run for next President of Nigeria 2019

By Chris Onuoha

The General overseer of Inri Evangelical Church worldwide, Primate Babatunde Elijah Ayodele has called on the Nigerias Senate President, Senator Bukola Saraki to contest the 2019 Presidential Election in order to bring the nation to the part of progress.

The servant of God said that it does not matter what critics say about the Senate President, that God has given him a revelation saying Saraki will become Nigerias next President. He said Buhari should step down and should not contest the 2019 Presidential election.

Primate Ayodele made this remark recently during the dedication of a newly built 50,000 seat Temilaseyori mini-cathedral branch of the Inri Church in Badagry, Lagos State.

Primate Babatunde Elijah Ayodele addressing members and guest

Speaking, Saraki should come out to contest. It is the word of God. Buhari Government is not in the hand of God any longer; his government cannot meet up the needs of the people, not even the problem of herdsmen in the country which his government cannot control. He should step down so that he will not be disgraced like the former. Saraki will do it better and no matter what names people might be calling him, Saraki can move Nigeria forward come 2019.

In 2013 we told Jonathan that he cannot win, and we repeated it in 2014, but he refused and lost out. During the Liberia presidential election, I told George Weah that he should strategize to win. He did and won. We sent similar message to Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya and he won. I said it also to Sierra Leonean presidential aspirant, Umara Samara, he ignored my message which I sent through delegates. He refused the steps I asked him to follow and after the election, the reverse was the case.

He further disclosed that the church is moving forward and will soon embark on empowerment programmes that will benefit about 10,000 youths in Lagos State which will be extended to other states.

We are taking the church to a higher level. We are bringing about 10, 000 youths together in Lagos State who needs help, who need to be empowered and we are going to start that very soon. This is one of the plans among other things we have to advance the church. I will also use this opportunity to appeal to the public about the perception of churches like ours as fetish or spiritual church. In white garment church there is interpretation to every spiritual language. So we should stop criticizing white garment church, only God knows who is good, Ayodele said.

Primate Ayodele also urged Nigerians to wake up to reality and vote the right person in, as the new electioneering period is at hand. He openly showed interest in Senate President, Bukola Saraki as the next suitable person to run for Nigerian Presidential election, citing through a prophetic revelation that the current government of President Muhammadu Buhari has failed Nigerians.

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Senate President Dr. Bukola Saraki has on Friday denied an alleged publication from an Online media over his involvement in a N10 billion fraud scandal.

In a statement signed and sent to journalists on Friday by Yusuph Olaniyonu, Special Adviser on Media & Publicity to the President of the Senate, Saraki emphatically stated that he had nothing do with any payment, receipt or disbursement of any extra-budgetary funds.

Read the full statement below:

Response to False Publication from Online Platform

Again, our attention has been drawn to a publication by an online platform, which unethically alleges without any proof, reference, attribution or justification that the Senate President, Dr. Abubakar Bukola Saraki, was involved in receiving or sharing any unauthorized funds.

The article, entitled EXCLUSIVE: Minister Adeosun, Saraki, Dogara, Accountant General in N10 billion fraud scandal, in its style, substance, and deliberate spin struggles to connect the Senate President to the receipt and apportioning of funds which the publication describes as illegal.

In the absence of any doubt, the Senate President has nothing to do with any payment, receipt or disbursement of any extra-budgetary funds.

It is also important to state for the record that the Online article in question is pure and unmitigated false news. A simple check by this media would have revealed that all funds in the National Assembly are in the custody of the National Assembly Management, which is headed by the Clerk, and not its presiding officers.

Additionally, all contract awards are equally overseen by the National Assembly management, not the presiding officers.

We are aware that for some weeks now, this Online platform has had this story. However, they only contacted us on Wednesday, and the Clerk of the National Assembly, after a phone call from the Special Adviser on Media & Publicity to the Senate President, promised to give them all necessary explanation and documents on this issue.

However, it is obvious that in the bid to rope in Senator Saraki, the reporters of this Online media platform could not wait to see the Clerk and rushed to publish the story less than 24 hours after the clerk made the aforementioned promise  with outright falsehood.

We are surprised that without any proof whatsoever, this online platform was using expressions like: Senate President Bukola Saraki and Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, have just illegally received and shared; Saraki and Dogara submitted; and Investigations by this online media showed that at least 44 of the 82 contractors Messrs Saraki and Dogara These are highly defamatory and careless expressions.

It is expected, that the Editors of Premium Times will not be ignorant of the internal procurement and payment process in an organization like the National Assembly that they have covered and investigated for as long as they (the online media) has been in existence.

We consider this as part of the orchestrated campaign of calumny being waged against Dr. Saraki by some political elements using media platforms in which they have interests.

In this regard, for this careless and unwarranted assault on the person of the Senate President  after several previous warnings  the lawyers of the Senate President, Dr. Abubakar Bukola Saraki, will be initiating legal action on this particular matter.

Finally, we ask the public to disregard the Online media piece, and take it for what it is, and will continue to be: Fake News.

Signed: Yusuph Olaniyonu, Special Adviser on Media & Publicity to the President of the Senate.
Northern youths under the auspices of Arewa Youths Consultative Forum on Friday went hard on President Muhammadu Buhari over his recent remarks in London that a lot of young persons in the country prefer to sit without working, stressing that the criticism is an insult on all Nigerian youths.

The Arewa youths, who spoke through their national president, Yerima Shettima, in an exclusive chat with Dailypost said they have heard Buharis remarks at the Commonwealth Business Forum in London and are biding their time till 2019 to let the President know whether they are actually jobless and lazy.

Recall that presidential spokesman, Femi Adesina had accused mischievous persons of twisting the comment by his principal, who he quoted as saying, a lot of them (young Nigerians) have not been to school and they are claiming that Nigeria has been an oil producing country, therefore they should sit and do nothing and get housing, healthcare and education free.

But reacting, Yerima stated that Adesinas attempt at clarification does not make any difference, adding that since Buharis comment became public knowledge, he has been getting calls from youths across the north, expressing anger over the comment from the Nigerian leader.

He said it was bad enough that the president spoke in an international event where other nationalities were present, stressing that it was regrettable that the President would speak so of younger Nigerians who put their lives on the line to install the Buhari government.

From the moment that statement was out, there have been a lot of complaints and grumbles from various people from my place, and they kept calling. The complaints were too much that I was compelled to issue a statement.

Ordinarily, I wouldnt have said anything because I am not surprised to see that kind of statement because the government does not believe in the Nigerian youths from inception.

If you look at the arrangement, the appointment, and how the government relates with the youths of this country, you will see that they do not have respect for the Nigerian youths despite the contributions of the youths. Dont forget that the youths put their lives on the line to fight against the previous government but when it comes to sharing the goodies of government, the youths are nowhere to be found.

We are completely disappointed in Buhari and we will never make this mistake again, Yerima said.
Home | News | General | Breaking: Another Nigerian gets top UN appointment

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has appointed Nigerias Ms Bola Adesola, Chief Executive Officer and managing director of Standard Chartered Bank Nigeria, to serve as vice-chair of the Board of the UN Global Compact.

Also appointed with Adesola is Mr Paul Polman of the Netherlands, Chief Executive Officer of Unilever, to also serve as Vice-Chair of the Board of the UN body, the UN announced.

Global Compact is a voluntary initiative based on Chief Executive Officers commitments to implement universal sustainability principles and to take steps to support UN goals.

READ ALSO: Saraki distances self from N10bn fraud allegation

The secretary-general is pleased to confirm that Bola Adesola of Nigeria, chief executive officer and managing director of Standard Chartered Nigeria and Paul Polman of the Netherlands, chief executive officer of unilever, will serve as the two vice-chairs of the Board of the United Nations Global Compact, the worlds largest corporate sustainability initiative.

Ms Adesola and Mr. Polman succeed out-going United Nations Global Compact Board Vice-Chair, Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, former chairman of Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies and of Anglo American PLC.

The secretary-general extends his great appreciation to Sir Mark for serving in the position for the past 10 years and shepherding the United Nations Global Compact into a new era, the UN said.

Both Adesola and Polman had served on the Board of the United Nations Global Compact previously.

They would bring to the position a wealth of experience in the private sector, in the corporate sustainability space and specifically with the United Nations Global Compact itself.

Adesola had served as chief executive officer and managing director of Standard Chartered Bank Nigeria Ltd since 2011.

She has over 25 years of banking experience, including at First Bank of Nigeria and at Citibank.

Adesola holds degrees from Harvard Business School and Lagos Business School, as well as a law degree from the University of Buckingham.

Polman had served as chief executive officer of Unilever since 2009.

Prior to joining Unilever, he worked at Nestle S.A., and at Proctor and Gamble, where he spent 26 years.

Polman holds degrees from the University of Groningen and from the University of Cincinnati.

As Chair of the Board of the United Nations Global Compact, the Secretary-General looks forward to working closely with Ms Adesola and Mr Polman.

Along with United Nations Global Compact Executive Director, Lise Kingo, as they lead the United Nations Global Compact, the entry point for business within the broader United Nations system, the UN stated.

Meanwhile, NAIJ.com had reported that President Muhammadu Buhari said that many Nigerian youths laze about with the notion that the country is oil-rich.

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He said this at the commonwealth business forum in Westminster on Wednesday, April 18, the president said a lot of Nigerian youths have not been to school and expecting to get things free of charge.

President Buhari on 2019 presidential election: will you vote for him? | NAIJ.com TV:

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Home | News | General | Nigeria army announces surrender of 2 Boko Haram commanders, female leader and physician

- Two Boko Haram commanders and one of the physician have surrendered to the Nigerian Army

- The Theatre Commander, Operation Lafiya Dole, Maj.-Gen. Rogers Nicholas, said a woman leader of the insurgents group and three children also surrendered

- Nicholas also said that the military initiated contact with the insurgents to encourage them to surrender

Maj.-Gen. Rogers Nicholas, the Theatre Commander, Operation Lafiya Dole, said two Boko Haram commanders and the insurgents physician have surrendered to Nigerian Army.

He made the disclosure when he presented the surrendered insurgents in Maiduguri.

Nicholas said a woman leader of the insurgents group and three children also surrendered to the troops at Kumshe in Bama Local Government Area of Borno.

READ ALSO: Police promote EFCC chairman Magu, 17 others

He added that the insurgents voluntarily surrendered, noting that the move was acceptable under the Safe Corridor Scheme initiated by Federal Government to encourage the insurgents to lay down their arms.

The theatre commander explained that the military initiated contact with the insurgents to encourage them to surrender, adding that more insurgents had indicated their interest to lay down their arms.

He said: we had a contact group and two insurgents commanders, a local doctor and their women leader and their children surrendered to the troops.

We gave them clothes, food and med*cation and assured them of safety: we are not killing anybody.

Our duty is to protect lives and property, we call on the insurgents in the bush to come out, surrender and join the peace building process.

He pointed out that the surrendered insurgents would be engaged in deradicalisation, rehabilitation and skill acquisition training programme for possible integration into the society.

In their submission, Ali Musa, the insurgents physician, said he conducted surgical operations such as bullet extraction, appendix, treatment of wounded insurgents, ante natal and post-natal services in the camp.

Ali said he was indoctrinated and misled by the sect leaders, adding that the sect activities had damaged his life.

Umar Ibrahim, one of the insurgents commanders, said he surrendered voluntarily as he became fed up with the groups inhuman activities.

Ibrahim disclosed that hundreds of insurgents were willing to surrender to the troops but their leaders prevented them from doing so.

We were told that the army will kill us and feed on our flesh when we surrender. The sects leaders also planted landmines to stop us from coming to the troops.

Many insurgents are willing to surrender in view of the fact that we are against the destructive ideologies propagated by the sect.

We hardly feed, people are starving due to the lack of food in the camp. We want peace and we want to join in building peace in our country, we ask Nigerians to forgive us, he added.

Ibrahim called on other insurgents to surrender and commended the military for taking care of them.

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NAIJ.com previously reported that the Nigerian army shared pictures of high ranking Boko Haram terrorists killed by soldiers during aerial bombardment on their hideout.

The pictures were shared by army spokesperson, Brigadier General Sani Kukasheka Usman, on Saturday, September 9.

He wrote: "Please recall that in our release of Tuesday 4th September 2017, we informed you that some senior Boko Haram terrorists commanders were neutralized last week Friday, 1st September 2017, during aerial bombardment on their hideout.

Nigerian Air Force operations against Boko Haram on NAIJ.com TV.

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Home | News | General | Nigerian National Assembly is the most insecure I have seen in my life - Senator

- Senator Abu Ibrahim described the theft of National Assembly mace by thugs as a blessing in disguise

- Ibrahim said the theft will cause the Senate to look into the security of National Assembly

- The senator also described the Nigerian National Assembly as the most insecure assembly he has ever seen

Senator Abu Ibrahim (APC-Katsina South) has described the Wednesdays invasion of the Senate Chamber by hoodlums as a positive development.

NAN reports that ge stated this on Friday, April 20, while he fielded questions from State House correspondents in Abuja.

Some hoodlums had on Wednesday entered the Senate chamber during plenary, attacked some persons and made away with the mace.

The legislator, however, observed that the attack was a blessing in disguise as the incident had revealed the security lapse at the assembly.

READ ALSO: Saraki distances self from N10bn fraud allegation

He said: Obviously, what has happened is a concern to every Nigerian politician. But, at the same time, we have to accept in Nigeria or all over the world politics sometimes can create a situation of this kind of what happened.

But this has given us two opportunities; one, to look at the security of the National Assembly itself whereby I think Nigerian National Assembly is the most insecure assembly I have seen in my life.

Wherever I went to there was good security, you cant just go in, you cannot access, you cannot go to officers.

But now if you go to our offices, like my office yesterday there were over 50 people waiting for me and I didnt give anybody appointment.

So, this has probably influenced us in the leadership to sit down and critically examine the security of the National Assembly itself. So, it is a positive development.

He said the second `benefit of the Mace saga was that members of the senate became more united, and they renewed their pledge to abide by the constitution and rules of the national assembly.

According to the senator, the incident has also afforded the senators opportunity to ask themselves questions on what happened and why it happened.

He said: Secondly we sat at executive session as senators, we asked ourselves what happened and why. And we told ourselves the truth.

We even pin-pointed culprits in what led to this and we came out with a promise that everyone of us will support and abide by the provision of the constitution.

Our rules in the national assembly in the senate and obviously we accepted that we are all senators, the same rank, elected by our people and we have the same right and privileges.

Therefore, this is the second benefit if we can call it benefit of what has happened what we saw two days ago.

On the activities of the Buhari Support Group, Ibrahim disclosed that the group would be inaugurating its offices in Edo, Akwa Ibom and Cross River States on Monday.

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He added that the groups campaign buses would also be inaugurated at the same time.

Meanwhile, NAIJ.com earlier reported that the attack on the Senate and the abduction of the mace by hoodlums has been condemned by former vice president, Atiku Abubakar.

In tweets posted on his Twitter handle, @atiku, the former VP registered his shock and outrage, and described the incident as a dangerous precedent.

Should the Nigerian Senate be scrapped? - on NAIJ.com Street Gist:

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Home | News | General | Saraki reacts to N10bn fraud allegation

- Senate President Bukola Saraki has denied allegation that he was involved in a N10bn fraud

- Saraki stated that he had nothing do with any payment, receipt or disbursement of any extra-budgetary funds

Senate President Bukola Saraki, on Friday, April 20, has reacted to reports on some online media that he was involved in a N10billion fraud scandal.

Saraki, in a statement signed by his spokesperson, Yusuph Olaniyonu, stated that he had nothing do with any payment, receipt or disbursement of any extra-budgetary funds.

The statement read in full: "Again, our attention has been drawn to a publication by an online platform which unethically alleges without any proof, reference, attribution or justification that the Senate President, Dr. Abubakar Bukola Saraki, was involved in receiving or sharing any unauthorized funds.

READ ALSO: Federal government passionate about youth development  Minister

"The article, entitled EXCLUSIVE: Minister Adeosun, Saraki, Dogara, Accountant General in N10 billion fraud scandal, in its style, substance, and deliberate spin struggles to connect the Senate President to the receipt and apportioning of funds which the publication describes as illegal.

"In the absence of any doubt, the Senate President has nothing to do with any payment, receipt or disbursement of any extra-budgetary funds.

"It is also important to state for the record that the Online article in question is pure and unmitigated false news. A simple check by this media would have revealed that all funds in the National Assembly are in the custody of the National Assembly Management, which is headed by the Clerk, and not its presiding officers.

"Additionally, all contract awards are equally overseen by the National Assembly management, not the presiding officers. We are aware that for some weeks now, this Online platform has had this story.

"However, they only contacted us on Wednesday, and the Clerk of the National Assembly, after a phone call from the Special Adviser on Media & Publicity to the Senate President, promised to give them all necessary explanation and documents on this issue.

"However, it is obvious that in the bid to rope in Senator Saraki, the reporters of this Online media platform could not wait to see the Clerk and rushed to publish the story less than 24 hours after the clerk made the aforementioned promise  with outright falsehood.

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"We are surprised that without any proof whatsoever, this online platform was using expressions like: Senate President Bukola Saraki and Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, have just illegally received and shared; Saraki and Dogara submitted; and Investigations by this online media showed that at least 44 of the 82 contractors Messrs Saraki and Dogara These are highly defamatory and careless expressions.

"It is expected, that the Editors of Premium Times will not be ignorant of the internal procurement and payment process in an organization like the National Assembly that they have covered and investigated for as long as they (the online media) has been in existence.

"We consider this as part of the orchestrated campaign of calumny being waged against Dr. Saraki by some political elements using media platforms in which they have interests.

"In this regard, for this careless and unwarranted assault on the person of the Senate President  after several previous warnings  the lawyers of the Senate President, Dr. Abubakar Bukola Saraki, will be initiating legal action on this particular matter. Finally, we ask the public to disregard the Online media piece, and take it for what it is, and will continue to be: Fake News.

NAIJ.com earlier reported that Saraki has blamed the delay in the passage of the 2018 budget on 20 Senate sub-committees.

Saraki spoke on Thursday, April 12, at the plenary saying they were holding the country to ransom by refusing to submit their budget report.

The Senate president asked them to submit their report on Friday April 13, to the Senate Appropriation Committee.

Lets talk about salaries of Nigerian senators | NAIJ.com TV

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Home | News | General | 23-year-old Zambian pilot achieves his goal, flies his mom and dad for the first time (photos)

- A young man Kalenga Kamwendo has achieved his dreams of flying his parents

- The 23-year-old pilot celebrated his achievement after flying his parents for the first time

- Kamwendo also broke a record in 2015, when he became the youngest pilot in Zambia

Achieving a goal or a longtime dream ia one of the best feelings in the world. It is fulfilling to realise that a longtime dream has finally come true and we bet that was how excited this young pilot was after he finally achieved his goal.

A 23-year-old Zambian pilot has taken to social media to celebrate achieving his dream of flying his parents. The young man identified as Kalenga Kamwendo shared a tweet celebrating his the achievement of longtime dream.

The excited pilot noted that he just flew his parents for the first time, adding that it was a longtime dream of his. He said: "A dream realised, I've FINALLY flown my parents, great day! "

READ ALSO: From poor barefoot school boy to successful Doctor: How a man with only R2.50 got his PhD

NAIJ.com gathered that Kamwendo became the youngest pilot in Zambia at the age of 20 in 2015. The young man broke a record by achieving something that has never happened in Zambia.

He was hired as part of a Zambia's commitment to suppport youth and nutuire young local talent. Kamwendo was given a job on his 20th birthday in August 2015.

The young pilot was born in Kitwe. It was gathered that he became interested in avaition while he was in secondary school.

Kamwendo while talking about his first days as a pilot, stated that he was nervous and he was wearing his full uniform.

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He said: "I was nervous; I didnt even have the full uniform. I was flying to Kasama and had to be up at 4am. But thats all in the past now, there are tons of thrills, from something as simple as seeing a passenger happy, to the thrill of flying."

Top-4 Things That Could Only Happen In Nigeria - on NAIJ.com TV

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Home | News | General | President Buhari must apologise to the youths  Shehu Sani

Senator representing Kaduna Central, Senator Shehu Sani has urged President Buhari to apologize over his remarks about Nigerian Youths.

While answering a question at the Commonwealth Business Forum in London on Wednesday, President Buhari had cause to talk about Nigerian youths.

Mr Buhari had described the youths as illiterates who are lazy and want freebies with the notion that the nation is an oil producing country.

He had said:

We have a very young population; our population is estimated conservatively to be 180 million. More than 60 per cent of the population is below the age of 30. A lot of them have not been to school and they are claiming that Nigeria has been an oil producing country, therefore they should sit and do nothing and get housing, healthcare and education free. His comments sparked reactions from the countrys young population who lambasted the president over his comments on them. Defending Buhari, the Presidency, through the Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity, Femi Adesina, blamed statement twisters as those who manipulated the presidents comments about the youths. But reacting, Shehu Sani described Adesinas statement as absurd, noting that, The President spin doctors are trying to spray fragrances on the feces and lace the dung with olive oil. The lawmaker advised Mr Buhari to withdraw and tender an apology to the countrys young population. The President should simply withdraw the statement on the youths and apologize; and tell them what he will do for them in addition to what he had done for them, Sani said. He said if the president apologizes, he should be forgiven because he is a Human. Shehu Sani challenged the youths to pick the baton and lead and stop holding the Alsatian Dogs of the political elite. The President is a human being, he can gaffe and should be forgiven and should not be sent to the political guillotine. The President echos the perception of the bourgeoisie power elites,the youths must rise against it.

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Home | News | General | Three children raped, murdered at family weddings in India  Police

Three young girls have been raped and murdered at different wedding ceremonies in the South Asian country, India.

Police reports that there has been a growing rate of murder and sexual attacks on minors in the country.

Area police chief Ajay Bhadauria said a nine-year-old who was attending a function in Uttar Pradesh states Etah district was sexually assaulted and strangled by one of the cooks hired to prepare food.

Bhadauria said the accused drew the girl away from the function to an isolated place where he committed the crime.

He said that the girls body was found in the early hours of Friday and the accused had been arrested.

Medical tests to confirm the sexual assault were being conducted.

In a similar crime in the same district on Wednesday, a seven-year-old girl was taken away from a wedding by an inebriated staff member of the tent-decorators, raped and murdered, police said.

The India Police also said on Wednesday, an 11-year-old girl was raped and murdered at a wedding in Kabirdham district in the central state of Chhattisgarh.

Local police said the 25-year-old man, who was arrested, admitted to raping the girl and bashing her head with a stone to prevent her from telling on him.

The child rape-murders have been reported as the Indian government faces public anger over the recent cases of rape of young girls.

In Uttar Pradesh, a 16-year-old girl was allegedly gang-raped by a ruling party lawmaker, while an eight-year-old girl was gang-raped and murdered in the state of Jammu and Kashmir.

According to the government, there were more than 36,000 cases of rape, sexual assault and similar offences against children recorded in 2016.

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Home | News | General | Army urges displaced farmers to return home

- Farmers in Borno state have been urged to return home by the Nigerian army

- The army said this will enable the farmers cultivate their farmlands

- Theatre commander, Operation Lafiya Dole also reiterated armys commitment to end insurgency and restoration of peace in the northeast

Nigerian army on Friday, April 20, called on displaced farmers in Borno to return home to enable them cultivate their farmlands.

Maj.-Gen. Rogers Nicholas, the theatre commander, Operation Lafiya Dole, told newsmen in Maiduguri that the call was imperative to enable the displaced farmers participate in the upcoming cropping season.

Nicholas said the military command had adopted proactive security measures to protect farmers in the state.

READ ALSO: Another Nigerian gets top UN appointment

He added that: We would launch Operation Last Hold to dominate northern Borno and Lake Chad region.

It is designed to ensure security in liberated communities and protect farmers in their farmlands.

We will stay with them in the farms and protect them.

I call on Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in camps to return home and cultivate their lands.

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The theatre commander reiterated armys commitment to end insurgency and restoration of peace in the northeast.

Borno government statistics indicated that over 1.8 million displaced persons were taking shelter in camps and host communities in the state.

NAIJ.com had earlier reported that Maj.-Gen. Rogers Nicholas, the Theatre Commander, Operation Lafiya Dole, said two Boko Haram commanders and the insurgents physician have surrendered to Nigerian Army.

He made the disclosure when he presented the surrendered insurgents in Maiduguri. Nicholas said a woman leader of the insurgents group and three children also surrendered to the troops at Kumshe in Bama local government area of Borno.

Nigerian Air Force operations against Boko Haram on NAIJ.com TV.

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Home | News | General | Presidency urges Nigerians to be wary of fake Facebook account in Zahra Buharis name

- The Nigerian presidency has raised alarm over fake Facebook account in the name of President Muhammadu Buharis daughter

- Femi Adesina, the special adviser to the president on media and publicity, said that those behind the fake account sought to attract odium to the first family

- The presidential aide urged members of the public to be wary

The presidency on Friday, April 20, raised an alarm over a fake Facebook account in the name of President Muhammadu Buharis daughter, Zahra.

NAIJ.com gathered that the presidency in a statement by Femi Adesina, the special adviser to the president on media and publicity, stated that the fake account is conspicuously different from the authentic one.

Adesina further noted that the account did not belong to Zahra and urged members of the public to see through the intentions of those behind it.

READ ALSO: Saraki distances self from N10bn fraud allegation

Read the statement below:

"Merchants of mischief have taken their antics against the first family further by creating a fake Facebook account in the name of Zahra, President Muhammadu Buhari's daughter.

The fake account, conspicuously different from the authentic one, was used to post a message on April 17, 2018, at 9.07 a.m.

A picture of President Buhari, with snowflakes all over him, and being welcomed to a foreign country was used, alongside this message:

"Children of God, here is a 75 years old man walking in the snow without cardigan just to rescue the battered economic status of Nigeria and some of you senseless people feel he travels too much, as if he travels for partying or merry making.

"God bless Nigeria. Please share..."

The Presidency hereby repudiates the Facebook account, as it does not belong to Zahra. Members of the public are urged to be wary, and see through the intentions of those behind the fakery. They seek to attract odium to the first family, and also do not mean well for our country."

NAIJ.com previously reported that President Muhammadu Buhari and his wife, Aisha, attended the dinner hosted by Queen Elizabeth II for Heads of Government and Spouses at the Buckingham Palace London on Thursday, April 19.

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Britains Queen Elizabeth II, accompanied by Britains Prince Charles, Prince of Wales received Commonwealth Heads of Government and their spouses in the Blue Drawing Room, where the evening commenced with a drinks reception.

Buhari to Contest for Presidency in 2019! NAIJ.com TV

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Home | News | General | Vote of confidence for governor Ambode as legislative building is renamed after speaker Obasa

- Governor Akinwunmi Ambode receives commendation from the speaker of the Lagos state House of Assembly, Mudashitu Obasa

- Obasa promises contniuefd support for Ambode as he focuses on developing Lagos

- Obasa also commends the Agege council for honouring him

Governor Akinwunmi Ambode has received a vote of confidence from the speaker of the Lagos state House of Assembly, Mudashiru Obasa, who also was recently honoured with the renaming of a legislative building.

Speaker Obasa thanked Ambode for meeting the desired needs of the people of the state since his emergence as governor of Lagos. He also promised to continue to support the governor to make the state enviable.

I also want to thank Governor Akinwunmi Ambode for his commitment to the even development and growth of Lagos in general and Agege in particular. I'm assuring you all that we remain steadfast to the growth of this state, the speaker said at the event.

READ ALSO: Buhari never passed vote of no confidence in Nigerian youth - Presidency

The speaker also thanked the Agege local government for naming its legislative chamber after him with a promise that he would not disappoint his constituents.

I'm happy and elated and I'm equally surprised at this very great honour. Nobody informed me that this is what I'm coming. I thought it was only for the budget presentation but indeed this is a very pleasant surprise.

"We will not relent in our desire and commitment to the development and growth of the Agege community in particular and Lagos state in general, he said.

Speaking about the honour, the chairman of the council, Ganiyu Kola Egunjobi, said the decision was in appreciation of the speakers remarkable representation of the Agege community in the state Assembly.

"There's no doubt that Rt Hon Obasa has contributed immensely to the development and growth of this great community.

He has proven to be a role model for youths who want to achieve greater things in life. Rt Hon Obasa remains our symbol for his commitment, strong desire and resilience to the development and growth of this great community," Alhaji Egunjobi, who presented said as he also presented a budget to the legislative arm.

He started his public career as an elected councillor at this hallowed council chamber in 1999 and today he is the leading lawmaker in Lagos state. It's because he started at this hallowed chamber we are naming the legislative building after him.

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We are also unveiling his photograph while serving as a councillor here to serve as source of inspiration to young politicians that they can become great with commitment, loyalty, sense of purpose and perseverance, he said.

NAIJ.com earlier reported that Governor Akinwunmi Ambode on Tuesday, April 17, said that the government would immediately take over the ABAT truck terminal in the state and commence immediate repairs as part of a permanent solution to the perennial traffic challenges in Apapa axis majorly caused by breakdown of operations at the ports.

Lagos Police Commissioner parades suspected criminals (Nigeria News) | NAIJ.com TV

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Home | News | General | Former president of South Africa Jacob Zuma welcomes another child with 24-year-old lady (photo)

- Former president of South Africa Jacob Zuma has become a father again

- The 76-year-old man who is father to 22 children welcomed his newborn with a 24-year-old lady

- Jacob Zuma fathered his 22 children with at least 11 women and he is reported to be planning a marriage with another woman

Jacob Zuma, the former president of South Africa has welcomed a baby with a 24-year-old lady. The former president reportedly became a father again after the lady delivered at an hospital in Durban, South Africa, last week.

According to News24, Zuma who already fathered 22 children with at least 11 women became a father again at age 76. It was gathered that the former president had gone to the hospital on Thursday, April 12, to visit the mother and child.

News24 reported that the maternity ward of the hospital had been cleared off during Zuma's visit. An employee at the hospital said: "Yes he was here last week. I saw him with his security. I do not know why he came through."

76-year-old Jacob Zuma fathers a child with a 24-year-old Photo source: CNN/News24

READ ALSO: This teen takes his ageless mom to prom since she never attended her own

It was also reported that a relative of the ex-president had disclosed that Zuma was planning a wedding with a lady identified as NonKanyiso Chonco.

The relative identified as Ray Zuma had, however, refused to reveal if Chonco was the same woman who delivered ex-president Zuma's newborn baby.

He said: "I can't see why you are interested. When he was still the president, you [the media] were terrorising him, and now you are all of a sudden interested in him."

Ray Zuma also stated that the wedding date has not been set. He said: "No date has been set yet. Both families must come together to decide on the date. We are still in the pre-nuptial phases of the process."

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However, Jacob Zuma's son, Edward, while addressing the delivery news refused to give any confirmation. He said: "We are not going to respond, or entertain any of that nonsense."

The 76-year-old ex-president was in office from May 2009, to February 2018. He was succeeded by Cyril Ramaphosa.

Nigeria News: Aisha Buhari Backs President Husband | on - NAIJ.com TV

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Home | News | General | Buharis laziness claim on Nigerian youths: Onuesoke backs Atiku

A chieftain of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Delta State, Chief Sunny Onuesoke has supported former Vice President Alhaji Abubakars comment against President Muhammadu Buharis statement that Nigerian youths are lazy.

Onuesoke

Reacting to the President statement while addressing Nigerian youths in an empowerment programme organized by Onuesoke Foundation in Warri, Delta State said for Mr President to say that Nigerian youths are lazy and not want to work, it shows that there is probably a disconnect between him and the reality on ground.

He added that if not, how do one explain a scenario whereby an advert for vacancies in a company requiring just about 100 persons ends up receiving 10,000 applications.

Lets take the recent employment exercise conducted at the Nigeria Maritime University at Gbaramatu, Delta State, a location only accessible by boat going through the sea for about two hours, youths did not even consider much the risk but wanted to work no matter where and Mr President says they are lazy, he wondered.

Onuesoke noted that there maybe some lazy few but to use such to generalize will result to fallacy of composition, advising that leaders should be more connected to the reality on ground and not only listen to aides painting just the picture they would want to see.

The PDP leader observed that the country is so messed up that youths hustle daily on construction sites only to be paid peanuts at the end of the day, youths follow cars, do conductor, driver and hawk products so that they can earn a living, even putting their lives at risk.

He argued that for our sitting president to go international and condemn the youths of this country is totally unaccepted, wondering how many industries he has established since he became the president and the youths refused to work there.

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Home | News | General | Boko Haram: Nigerian army announces launch of "Operation LAST HOLD"

- The Nigerian Army has announced the launch of Operation LAST HOLD, a new operation to totally destroy Boko Haram

- The new operation is expected to last for 4 months and it will entail deployment of 6 additional manoeuvre brigades and other critical assets in Borno state

- Operation LAST HOLD will also ensure the destruction of Boko Haram terrorist camps and strong points in Lake Chad Basin

The Chief of Army Staff, Lt Gen Tukur Buratai on Friday, April 20, said the Nigerian Army would commence Operation LAST HOLD in northern Borno and parts of Lake Chad Basin to complete the decimation of the Boko Haram terrorists.

NAIJ.com gathered that Buratai who was represented by Major General David D Ahmadu, the chief of training and operations at a press briefing at the Army Headquarters, Abuja, said the operation would commence on the May 1 and end by August 31.

However, Ahmadu says the new operation would ensure the total destruction of Boko Haram terrorist camps and strong points in the Lake Chad Basin.

READ ALSO: Saraki distances self from N10bn fraud allegation

"The design is to deploy personnel and equipment to showcase the combat efficiency of the NA and thereafter conduct operations to totally destroy Boko Haram locations in the Lake Chad Basin," he said

Read the full statement below:

"You may recall that the Nigerian Army has been engaged in the conduct of counter insurgency operation tagged Operation LAFIYA DOLE in the North East region for some years with considerable successes.

However, the complex and adaptive nature of the Boko Haram insurgency has resulted in the dissident group still sometimes being engaged in abductions, attack on soft targets, Improvised Explosive Device attacks and bombings.

It has become expedient for the Nigerian Army to change operating tactics, techniques and procedure in the North East region. Accordingly, the Nigerian Army Day Celebration (NADCEL) 2018 will be commemorated with the conduct of an operation tagged Operation LAST HOLD in Northern Borno within the North East Theatre.

The design is to deploy personnel and equipment to showcase the combat efficiency of the NA and thereafter conduct operations to totally destroy Boko Haram locations in the Lake Chad Basin.

Operation LAST HOLD is expected to last for 4 months and it will entail deployment of 6 additional manoeuvre brigades and other critical assets in Borno state.

The operation is intended to facilitate the clearance of the Lake Chad waterways of sea weeds and other obstacles obstructing the movement of boats and people across the water channels. It will also ensure the destruction of Boko Haram Terrorist camps and strong points in the Lake Chad Basin.

The operation will also facilitate the rescue of hostages. The operational end-state of Operation LAST HOLD is the total defeat of the Boko Haram Terrorist Sect. Strategically, the conduct of Operation LAST HOLD will facilitate the restoration of fishing, farming and other economic activities in the Lake Chad Basin. Additionally, it will facilitate the relocation of Internally Displaced Persons from IDP camps to their communities.

Operation LAST HOLD is conceptualised to involve the conduct of population influence activities targeted to improve Civil-Military relations in the North East region. It is pertinent to note that Operation LAST HOLD is set to record remarkable achievements that would make the nation proud of the Nigerian Armys determination at sustaining its constitutional role of defending the territorial integrity of the nation as well as its commitment to aid the civil authority to bring about peace and security.

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In this regard, law abiding members of the public in Northern Borno State are enjoined not to panic as their safety and well-being have been deliberately factored in the operation.

The general public is requested to remain vigilant and be security conscious, as suspected insurgents may be fleeing from military operations in the North East and finding safe haven amidst our communities. The public is also reminded to report any suspicious activity or movement to the nearest military formation or other security agencies for prompt action."

NAIJ.com previously reported that troops deployed in Exercise Ayem Akpatuma in Taraba state in conjunction with personnel of the Nigeria Police on Saturday, March 31 arrested some criminal elements operating in Mayo Ndaga area of the state.

Items recovered from one of the suspects Amos Titus- 35, include sheets of zinc, bed and locally made pistol.

Other suspects Palat Jafainal- 20 and Kingsley Benson- 25 were also arrested and items recovered from them include generating set, sewing machine as well as sheets of zinc.

Benue IDPs: Education amidst crisis | NAIJ.com TV

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Home | News | General | NIRSAL: Boosting agricultural productivity through improved agric extension systems

By Nantim M. Joseph

The famed agricultural successes of the First Republic, symbolized by the groundnut pyramids in the north and the cocoa and palm plantations in the west and east were achieved on the back of robust policies and effective agricultural extension systems. But this second factor has not been given adequate emphasis in recent efforts to rejuvenate the sector.

This is one of the reasons why a once food sufficient and food exporting country has become one in which only 20 percent of the food consumed by its population is grown at home. The consequence of this is the current heavy dependence on imported food products to feed a teeming population which according to the World Bank, is expected to surpass the population of the United States which currently stands at 324,459,463, by 2050.

Many recommendations have been made to fix this existential economic challenge confronting Nigeria. However, the consensus is that Nigeria must hike its food production substantially to keep up with that population growth. These are the core concerns of the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan (ERGP) and the Agricultural Promotion Programme (APP) of the Buhari administration which are designed to tackle rising food imports and declining levels of national food self-sufficiency. In this connection, key challenges that undermine agricultural production include reliance on rain fed agriculture, smallholder land holding, and low productivity due to poor planting material, low fertilizer application, and a weak agricultural extension system amongst others.

Aliyu Abdulhameed, MD/CEO of the Nigeria Incentive-Based Risk Sharing System for Agriculture (NIRSAL), believes that establishing an effective modern agricultural extension service to support the ERGP and the APP is key to the revitalization of Nigerian agriculture. And this is the vision behind NIRSALs game changing Project Monitoring Reporting and Remediation Offices (PMRO) scheme launched in 2017.

He explains the thinking and focus of the scheme: The PMRO structure is very critical to our operations. Agriculture is a field business. The PMROs would act as our eyes to ensure that agricultural projects that we facilitate finance for are executed in line with agreed terms and also serve to extend the reach of our interventions.

Achieving this will not be easy. Previous efforts by successive administrations to repeat the agricultural extension feats of the 60s-70s and reduce the over-reliance on imports, have not been very successful. One challenge is that Federal and State governments still struggle with attracting investment to the sector, hence low agricultural budgets continue to hamper efforts to grow the sector significantly despite numerous colorfully advertised programs. The sector also struggles with outdated practices, inefficient technologies and weak monitoring.

For each of these challenges, NIRSAL has responded with a robust structure to tackle the negative effects sustainably and the PMRO scheme is the latest in the battle to boost agricultural productivity and food security. NIRSAL itself is a product of governments efforts to properly organize and fund the agricultural sector, reduce the risk of investing in the sector, while seeking areas of new funding for the sector to grow. With the coming of the PMROs, players in the sector can now expect to have at their disposal modern best practices in planting, processing, packaging and even in funding. As a result, inefficient technologies are systematically done away with while the sector benefits from the specialized monitoring the scheme brings with it.

The PMRO structure which already covers 225,000 farmers is set to boost the status of agriculture as a business and a sector capable of earning huge foreign exchange to add to the coffers of the national treasury.

To improve the chances for success, the PMRO scheme is fashioned to be a formidable ally to all stakeholders along the agricultural value chain chiefly the smallholder farmers and investors, providing robust all-round support for all parties.

Another strong feature of the scheme is a focus on capacity building anchored on Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) such as effective production, safe processing and sustainable post-production techniques, including equipping the smallholder farmers with the technical and business knowhow required to operate modern technologies and attract the requisite funding for projects as well as supervising funded projects.

The farmers work with the PMROs from conception to actualization of their projects, learning how to produce food products that meet global standards, through modern planting techniques and efficient use of farming resources such as fertilizers and pesticides. The PMROs will also assist them with business development, helping them attract the kind of funding required for their projects, from the right financial institutions.

On the other hand, the PMRO scheme will play the roles of liaison, eyes on ground and facilitator to the agricultural projects that it supports, including the those to which STANBIC IBTC and Union Bank have already collectively committed 20 billion Naira. In fact, Abdulhameed sees the PMRO scheme as a first line defense and security to ensure that projects that rigorously conceptualized and technically sound agricultural projects achieve their objectives.

As Abdulhameed noted when NIRSAL signed an MOU on a N10 billion agricultural finance scheme in November 2017, To ensure proper use of the loans and success of the projects, NIRSAL will leverage its Project Monitoring, Reporting and Remediation Offices (PMRO) located across the 36 states in the country. The PMROs will closely supervise projects to ensure proper use of the loans by beneficiaries.

With such investments already coming into the programme, the PMRO schemes multifaceted approach to agricultural extension systems places it at the epicenter or epicenters of agribusiness in Nigeria, as they operate from all 36 states including the Federal Capital Territory.

The investors/financial institutions, working hand in hand with the PMROs as part of NIRSALs risk management framework, for handling investments in agriculture, will serve as supervisor and monitor to ensure strict adherence to terms agreed with beneficiaries, and as a result reduce the risk of doing business in the sector.

Some of the risks include but are not limited to loan diversion. To help deal with this, the PMRO structure will complete NIRSALs institutional strategy of only providing inputs in lieu of cash to farmers by physically ensuring that they are rightly deployed and that timelines for projects are complied with. It is also a good thing that NIRSAL has empowered them with the technology tools for remote monitoring and reporting of events as they occur on the field for appropriate steps to be taken, when there is a need. The schemes close progress tracking feature also enables NIRSAL to identify risk events, take steps to mitigate them to avoid loss.

A critical part of the PMRO scheme is the leadership it has at state level, which enables it to effectively carry out this tracking and feedback system. Led by financial experts mostly from the private sector and senior level former directors from the public service. These PMRO Heads leverage their private sector experience and technical knowhow in agribusiness to play very vital roles at the points where they are most needed. These include providing technical support, mentorship, business advisory services such as writing business plans, financial management to agricultural players operating at the state levels.

Overall, the introduction of the PMRO structure into the Nigerian agricultural space by NIRSAL under the leadership of Abdulhameed is timely, necessary and commendable. It is a physical evidence of the institutional efforts by the risk-mitigating agency to win the confidence of commercial banks who see putting money into agriculture as a sinking it into a dark hole. Its nationwide presence and trained field staff, ability to monitor agricultural projects, track and report risk events, guide and support agricultural producers helps fill a worrying gap left by the extension services of old. The institutional role of enabling access to relevant information by grassroots agricultural players makes them highly relevant in governments efforts to increase farmer yield, boost productivity and reposition agriculture as the mainstay of the countrys economy. The management of NIRSAL deserves commendation and should be supported by stakeholders to ensure its sustainability and impact as a pillar of the Buhari administrations agricultural promotion policy.

Nantim T. Joseph is a public policy analyst

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Home | News | General | U.S. Commercial Service to support Nigerias growing digital economy

By Moses Nosike

The U.S. Commercial Service in Nigeria in collaboration with U.S. cyber-security company McAfee Incorporated, recently hosted a breakfast seminar in Lagos for cyber security experts and corporate end-users.

At the programme, the American computer security software company also announced the launch of its Enhanced Unified Defense Architecture designed to empower organizations to more effectively protect todays digital assets.

Commercial Attache, U.S. Diplomatic Mission to Nigeria, Ms. Jennifer Woods, explained that the programme aims to support Nigerias rapidly growing digital economy.

According to Woods, having effective and proven solution against growing cyberattacks is a critical aspect of any corporate IT infrastructure.

The U.S. Foreign Commercial Service is pleased to provide a unique opportunity for leaders of the Nigerian digital economy to hear first-hand from American computer security leaders about their cutting edge solutions for protecting corporate assets, Ms. Woods said.

In his remarks, McAfee Senior Territory Manager for Sub-Saharan Africa, Mr. Will OShea, noted that cyber-criminals continue to put individual and corporate end-users on the defensive.

To effectively counteract cyber-criminals, we have to abandon old security playbooks and become more collaborative in making cyber-security a priority, OShea added.

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Home | News | General | Senate mace saga reflects poor quality of representation  NLC

By Johnbosco Agbakwuru

Abuja  THE organized labour has condemned the invasion of the senate on Wednesday by suspected thugs during the plenary, saying that what happened was a reflection of poor quality of people representing the good masses.

NLC

A statement signed by the National President of Nigeria Labour Congress, NLC, Mr. Ayuba Wabba, in Abuja on Friday also condemned the porous security network in the National Assembly.

He said, The invasion of the hallowed chamber of the Senate on Wednesday by hoodlums and miscreants who carted away the mace and other paraphernalia of authority is a violation of the sanctity of the Senate and constitutes a threat to our democracy.

It represents a throw-back to those dark old days we are better off without. It is equally a sad commentary on the quality of representation. We therefore condemn it in its entirety. We similarly invite all who love Nigeria to rise and condemn this crude and sordid act or conduct.

The Senate, from the days of the Greeks and Romans from whom the world borrowed this concept of democracy, has always been a sacred arena for the nobility (in carriage, thought or mind), the best and the brightest, the gifted in oratory, a hatchery of the supremacy of ideas delivered in the most sublime and profound language in furtherance of the interest of fatherland.

As a house packed full of representatives from different parts of the Republic, there are bound to be differences (of opinion, tactics, strategy) and even conflicts but these are expected to be resolved in a dignified manner befitting of men and women of character and learning! It is for this reason, there are rules of engagement that every member is made to understand as a precondition to swearing in.

It is in consideration of this that we consider what has happened as a big anomaly.

We do also believe that the National Assembly Security apparatus should be called to question for laxity or compromise.

Whereas they have often distinguished themselves by keeping at bay constituents and peaceful protesters from the precincts of the National Assembly, these thugs seem to have walked on a laid red carpet.

Could these agencies have been acting alone? What is the degree of their complicity? Whichever way, we condemn this primitive conduct and demand sanctions. Let it never happen again. There are better methods no matter the issues.

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Home | News | General | 2019 Elections: We are not interested in coalitions, merger  APDA

By Luminous Jannamike

ABUJA  The Advanced Peoples Democratic Alliance (APDA) has said the Party will not enter into any pact with other political parties or groups ahead of the 2019 general elections.

Members of the Advanced Peoples Democratic Alliance Party (APDA)

The Partys National Chairman, Shittu Mohammed Kabir, made this known yesterday when he received a delegation of political youth groups from Imo state led by Chief Iheanacho Ezeakor, at the Partys national secretariat in Abuja.

Kabir, who maintained that the Partys nationalistic ideologies would never be compromised for selfish benefits, said blamed the economic hardships experienced in the country on the errors of the All Progressives Congress (APC), the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the champions of the third force movement.

His words: APDA is not going into any coalition ahead of the 2019 general elections. We cannot be seen compromising our nationalistic ideology.

We see Nigeria as one big family where the welfare of all citizens remains paramount. It is against that background that we cannot queue behind the PDP, the APC, or those promoting the Third Force movement.

These people brought the hardship in the country. Olu Falae as far back as the 1980s was part of the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) that ruined our agricultural sector.

I am a farmer. I grow beans but I cannot export to Europe because Nigerian beans are banned abroad. But, today, beans are brought into this country from Europe. Then, tell me, why did they sign us up to the World Trade Organisation in the first place?

Look at the oil from the South-South and South-East. How has these politicians advocating for coalitions and mergers used that crude oil to better the lives of the people in those areas?

So, our position is clear. We are not going into any alliance. However, we are open to all Nigerians who want to join us in the pursuit of our people-oriented ideology.

He further urged the youths to resist politicians who attempt to polarize the nation and heat-up the polity needlessly.

You should never allow our political leaders to continue in power by means of divide and rule antics. Rather, develop passion for people and work to achieve a better life for them. That way, you can successful take over helm of affairs of the nation from these old politicians, he said.

Earlier, leader of the delegation, Chief Iheanacho Ezeakor, said that the group had been mobilizing the youths across the country to awaken their political consciousness and make contributions towards nation-building.

Ezeakor said that one of the reasons for the visit was to spread the message of youth inclusion in governance; stressing that democracy without youth-participation loses its vibrancy.

He also said that there was also need for youths to build inter-ethnic bridges and cross-fertilise ideas on ameliorating the sufferings in the land and avoiding the mistakes of the past.

Today, we have been able to mobilise and motivate some young people across the country for a political renaissance because we realize that the reason older politicians looked down on the youths in political appointments and elective positions had to do with how the youths conducted themselves.

However, we are poised to changing that story. We will continue to be a voice for the youths and set laudable examples in our states, he said.

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Home | News | General | JOHESU Strike: We are fully prepared, patients have no cause for alarm  National Hospital, FSH

By Luminous Jannamike

ABUJA  The Management of the National Hospital Abuja has played down reports that some patients could not access needed medical services due to the on-going strike by health workers operating under the aegis of Joint Health Sector Union (JOHESU).

Speaking to Vanguard in Abuja, the National Hospital Spokesman, Dr. Tayo Haastruup, said measures were already in place to cushion the effects of manpower deficit experienced at the hospital.

JOHESU

He said: Notwithstanding the on-going strike, the hospital management has ensured that doctors, consultants and other specialists are around at all times to attend to patients who require attention.

We have motivated our staff members who are not on strike to make sure they get hold of the right end of their sticks and do so quite instructively and efficiently.

But I must reiterate that doctors are trained to examine patients and recommend drugs or therapy for treatment.

For cases that require drugs to be recommended, our doctors simply do so and the patients go to private pharmacies to purchase them. For those that require further medical tests, our doctors instruct patients to visit private laboratories for the tests and return with the results for the continuation of their treatment.

Out-patients and those on appointment are still been attended to the fullest capacities. So, activities are pretty normal. The only aspect we have not carried on as usual is the intake of new patients. We have deliberately reduced the number of patients we place on admission daily to enable us manage the various cases without compromising on quality of care.

Beyond that, we have every other thing under control. The public should not panic. Our services are still rendered as they should, he explained.

Similarly, the Head of a sensitive department at the Federal Staff Hospital (FSH) Jabi Abuja, who asked not to be named for fear of being attacked by the striking workers, told Vanguard that the hospital had already hired casual staff to take the places of those on strike albeit in the interim.

We have our casual staff already filling the lacuna created by those who are on strike. The health services we provide are still been maintained. However, we have reduced the number of in-patients we are admitting.

Excluding the reductions we have made, every other thing is going on smoothly, he said.

When our correspondent toured the family health and orthopaedic wards of the two hospitals, nothing unusual was observed among patients and their relatives. They seemed contented with the level of service they were receiving.

Meanwhile, vehicular and human traffic was heavy as usual within and outside the premises of the two hospitals.

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Home | World | Africa | Not yet Uhuru,Zim Diaspora protest

Wednesday - 18 April 2018 - Demonstrators gathered at the Zimbabwe Embassy in London to protest against the celebration of independence.

The demonstration organised by Zimbabwe Human Rights Organisation (ZHRO) attracted many Zimbabweans, some from as far as Newcastle and Scotland.

Despite the Military government's repeated insistence that -Zimbabwe is open for business - many in the diaspora believe that it has not reformed enough to attract investors.

ZHRO views Zimbabwe Independence as a milestone separated by two periods - the first is the independence from colonial rule of oppression and impoverishment and the 2nd independence era of freedom and prosperity - #Take2Zimbabwe.



Unlike the citizens of many other democratic countries, Zimbabweans are provided with everyday challenges including poverty, starvation, infectious diseases, and exploitation by the military junta.

Zimbabwe independence celebrations highlight the typical hourglass economy of the haves and have nots. Those who have links to the Zanu PF elite are in the upper compartment and bathe in obnoxious ill gotten wealth can celebrate independence. The middle class is almost nonexistent in Zimbabwe. The have nots in the lower compartment of the hourglass were demonstrating outside the Zimbabwe Embassy whilst inside the haves wined and dined with the British government representatives.

The British Government officials who attended the celebrations are either complicit or naive as it appears the electoral reforms demanded by all other nations have fallen on deaf ears.

Maybe they need to be reminded that the coup brought in a new dictator who is playing a 38 year old game. The motivation behind it being a bald faced capture of our natural resources for the cronies. The benefactors from this most recent newcomer in the musical chairs of African tyrants are the few who have invested heavily in their personal agendas during the 38 years of fake independence.

Yet the UK is perpetuating this military regime, fully aware of who and what they are without taking time to ponder the moral or ethical issues. The proceeds from our natural resources are going to continue to be appropriated to the few by the few. Now Zimbabweans can watch the already rich becoming grotesquely enriched until someone younger rises to provide a successful challenge.

Many of the demonstrators felt that there was no reason to celebrate when we have had 38 years of dictatorship, corruption, looting, partisanship, insults and deamining slogans, vote rigging and manipulation of election results, poverty, disappearances, and murders. When the country is currently grappling with cash shortages and health crises.

Whilst recognising our country's problems, Zimbabweans can be commended for having a spirit of improvisation and adaptation that allows us to cope with our many challenges, all the while, remaining hopeful.

Chiwenga has shown that he has no qualifications for the job and no gravitas. His reaction to the Nurses strike is nothing more than that of a head ruffian in a gang of thugs who can never win an election nor can he fare very well before the poor Zimbabweans court of public opinion. One thing is certain, if they do not allow free elections, he will be uprooted by another ruffian.

According to Fadzai Mahere, the government cannot fire the nurses before "notifying them of the alleged offence, giving them an opportunity to present their case, giving them the option of legal representation and then adjudicating the issue fairly".

A Vice President who dares to cary out appalling barracks action can not do so in an open society. He does not seem to have long term plans therefore he will have power for the time he is able to control the military.

Those who came out to demonstrate included: Roseline Mukucha, Sarah Bayisayi, Rashiwe Bayisayi, John Burke, Phillip Nhlanhla, Kingstone Jambawo, Edison Muchirenipi, Mary Muteyerwa, Ebson Chigwedere, Philip Mahlahla, Rosemary Mupunga, Bridget Mupotsa, Isaac Chavasarire, Thandiwe Ncube, Lynette Chivizhe, Stewart Pride Nyandoro, Junior Madzimure, Thenjiwe Ncube, Samantha Mudimu, Sibusisiwe Mapeto, Charity Ndebele, Tryness Ncube, Sibongile Bvungidzire, Molly Ngavaimbe, Sicelo Sibanda, Chegika Lifa Phiri, Hillary J Musarurwa, Mary Ndoro, Sindile Patience Ncube, Namatirai Angela Sithole, Tendayi Chinawara, Nehemia Musonza, Peter Sidindi, Morella Nhau, Martin Chinyanga, and Eletha Mpofu.

Thanks to Tryness Ncube for her donation of stationery.

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The death of MDC president Morgan Tsvangirai in February this year could not have come at a worse time as the country prepared for the crunch 2018 general elections.

The MDC Alliance had chosen him as their presidential candidate and his passing on created a yawning gap that could turn out to be a big problem for the coalition.

Within his own MDC party, Tsvangirai's death ignited a fierce succession debate that has engulfed the whole party which should instead be concentrating on its election campaign.

Since his death and even in his advanced illness, divisions rocked the biggest opposition party in the country, hence throwing spanners into an otherwise promising election contest.

The bitter rift between former MDC vice presidents Nelson Chamisa and Thokozani Khupe will spoil the MDC vote come elections.

And as other political parties campaign and prepare for the next poll, we have an MDC that is torn apart - taking turns to expel each other from party, Parliament and dragging each other to the courts.

Mind you, court processes never come cheap, they are so expensive as you have to hire legal teams to fight your cause, hence the MDC faction leaders are wasting the meagre resources they have at such a crucial time.

Apart from being expensive, court cases are exhaustive and take away one's precious time as you have to prepare legal arguments and attend court sessions.

It is sad this is happening now!

A united MDC could indeed give the ruling Zanu PF party a hiding but with the squabbles in the party, which can spill into elections, their chances are fast diminishing.

Time is not on the MDC side - for Chamisa or Khupe - and the sooner they find each other, the better because the cards are oddly placed on their tables.

It is always good to share power when you have it and the two leaders seem not to agree on this because they have to wrestle power from Zanu PF first.

The court cases may not end soon and just last week Bulawayo High Court judge Justice Francis Bere reserved judgment to Tuesday next week in a case in which acting MDC chairperson Morgen Komichi is suing Khupe and her allies over the use of the party's name and logo.

On the other hand, the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission has confirmed that Khupe has already registered with them her party, the MDC, for the 2018 elections. That's another problem that will require legal redress.

In another matter, Khupe has filed a Constitutional Court application challenging her expulsion from Parliament by the MDC. This is another case that will drag on as Khupe has also written to Parliament recalling Chamisa.

And while the MDC circus unfolds, its party members - who are the voters - are left confused and remain in the dark.

Khupe still claims she is the legitimate MDC acting president until the party's extraordinary congress this month that is set to choose "constitutionally" Tsvangirai's replacement.

In all this confusion, the biggest beneficiary is turning out to be the ruling Zanu PF which, although it has its own internal problems, seems to have an edge as it has a clear presidential candidate.

The MDC Alliance has to be alive to the fact that the late Tsvangirai was their point person, their coalition's face and members identified with him.

The MDC voter down in rural outposts had been used to Tsvangirai's image on the ballot paper - how much has the Alliance invested in shaping Chamisa and making his followers believe he is the point man?
Home | World | Africa | Chiwenga fail to issue termination letters to nurses

The Health Services Board (HSB), which is the appointing authority of practitioners in the public health system, has so far failed to issue termination letters to thousands of nurses relieved of their duties for downing tools.

In a statement, the Zimbabwe Nurses Association (Zina) said its members remain employed by the Board because none of them had been served with letters terminating their services as of close of business yesterday.

"We have engaged our employer, the Health Services Board, to confirm that it will not implement the directive issued by the Vice President, by no later than 1600 hours today (Thursday). Our employer is yet to respond to us," reads part of the statement.

"Further, as at the time of making this statement, none of our members have been served with letters terminating their services with the employer. They, accordingly therefore remain employed by the Health Services Board.

"As our grievances, which relate primarily to poor and dangerous working conditions remain unresolved and unaddressed - our position remains the same as the situation has not changed. We reiterated that we remain open to engagement with our employer to resolve our concerns in the interest of all our stakeholders," added Zina.

The HSB was created through an Act of Parliament, the Health Service Act [Chapter 15:16 No. 28/2004].

The Act provides for the establishment of the HSB, which became operational in June 2005 as per Statutory Instrument 88B of 2005.

Its functions, exercised in consultation with the minister of Health and Child Care, include appointing persons to offices, posts and grades; creating grades in the health service and fixing conditions of service for its members.

The HSB also supervises and monitors health policy planning and public health; inquiring into and dealing with complaints made by members of the health service; supervising, advising and monitoring the technical performance of hospital management boards and State-aided hospitals.

Because the board is still to serve its employees with letters terminating their contracts, the nurses, who vowed to continue with their job action yesterday, are unable to begin legal proceedings.

This comes amid indications that government is now seeking dialogue to end the hiatus created by the protracted job action.

Yesterday, scores of jobless nurses turned up at Parirenyatwa Hospital in a bid to fill the posts that have fallen vacant after the alleged firing of all striking nurses.

The desperate job seekers tried to get audience with the HSB before they were advised to fill in forms and submit them.

On Tuesday, Vice President Constantino Chiwenga announced the dismissal of an estimated 15 000 nurses who had downed tools in protest of low salaries and poor conditions of service.

Further, he instructed the HSB to speedily engage all unemployed but trained nurses in the country and to recall retired nursing staff into the service.

Chiwenga claimed the striking nurses had been given $17 million through the Health and Child Care ministry, but still did not call off the strike, adding the issue was political.

Accordingly, he said government will now use the funds to support the fresh recruitment drive, which is now in full swing.

The mass sackings on the eve of Zimbabwe's 38th Independence Day celebrations have been roundly condemned by the generality of the citizens.

In his Independence Day speech, President Emmerson Mnangagwa appeared to subtly contradict Chiwenga when he directed the ministry of Health to re-engage the fired striking nurses.

He also bizarrely rewarded non-striking nurses with benefits already agreed to by government under a $17,1 million package released this week.

This has now outraged observers and nurses alike who believe government has returned to its default mode of preferring divide and rule tactics over dialogue.

Itai Rusike, the executive director of the Community Working Group on Health (CWGH), yesterday said the action by government to reward those nurses who have not joined the strike smacks of the divide and rule tactics meant to further fragment the nurses and, possibly, instil fear to join any future industrial job action.

"We urge the nurses and health worker organisations to remain united, strengthen solidarity and support for each other as government will be keen to exploit any weakness and fragmentation to the detriment of the nurses and the health delivery system," Rusike told the Daily News.

The CWGH executive director is encouraging genuine dialogue between government and the nurses to avoid the unnecessary suffering, pain and deaths of innocent patients.

"We believe that the problems in the health sector cannot be solved through intimidation, threats and dismissals. We deplore the militant stance taken by the government and call for dialogue to be given a chance whilst putting patients first," said Rusike.

"The deployment of student nurses, unemployed nurses and those that had been retired will further put in danger the lives of patients as most of them will need refresher training courses to keep them abreast with the ever changing developments in the health sector. We do not need stop-gap measures but lasting solutions. Our public health delivery system is broken and non-functional and will need sober minds in order to fix it and make it functional again."

The strike action has affected several central hospitals, children's units, provincial hospitals and caused cessation of emergency lifesaving procedures throughout the country.

Labour unions said the dismissal of nurses will have a negative bearing on the welfare of people who have now been left at the mercy of inexperienced nurses and spent forces.

"The situation in hospitals is troubling," noted the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) president Peter Mutasa.

"Chiwenga and his team are responsible for all the deaths and suffering patients are going through. The purported and unlawful dismissal of nurses must be immediately rescinded and nurses' grievances should be resolved urgently," Mutasa said.

In a joint statement issued jointly by the Zimbabwe Association for Doctors for Human Rights (ZADHR) and the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights (ZLHR), the two organisations said they were appalled by government's arbitrary decision to dismiss all striking nurses from their positions at State-run hospitals.

"ZADHR and ZLHR condemn this dangerous and irresponsible response by the government as illogical and that it will have serious consequences on the welfare of people, who have been condemned to be attended to by some inexperienced and or retired nurses," they said.

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Home | World | Africa | Traffic cop implicates bosses in fake fines book scam

A theft-accused Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP) officer openly told a court that spot fines that he collected from motorists during highway patrols were pocketed by their bosses instead of going to State coffers.

William Katayi, 37, a sergeant, made the revelations during his appearance before Harare magistrate Joy Chikodzore.

He is jointly charged with 32-year-old Donation Dube.

In his defence, Katayi argued that the ZRP, which had been listed as complainant in the matter, had no right to drag him to court.

He claimed to have used illegal spot fine books and issued motorists with fake receipts because the money was meant for police bosses, who deployed them to the Highways to dupe people.

"The books that were used are not ZJ65 books as sanctioned by the law. They were illegal books that were printed by the police and the money that was collected does not belong to the police but the people who were fined illegally," Katayi said.

"The money was used by police superiors for their selfish gains. This money was collected fraudulently from motorists hence the police approached the court with dirty hands on this matter because they were stealing from the public," he argued.

"The books are not sanctioned by the law and the real owners of the money are the offenders not the police. The police have no locus standi."

The complainant is State represented by Cosmas Dowerowe, the officer in charge National Highway Patrol at Morris Depot and resides at Marlborough Camp Quarters.

Prosecutor Dora Moyo alleged that between April 6 and 27 last year Katayi and Dube were deployed to Westgate-Mabelreign area and issued with a ZRP National Traffic Admission of Guilty receipt book number 6116/17.

The book was supposed to be used for receipting fines from motorists and remit the money to Fines office at National Highway Patrol, Morris Depot in Harare.

The court heard that Dube issued tickets for traffic fines of $120 and converted $30 to personal use.

It was further alleged that between June 29, and July 21 the duo was deployed to conduct patrols along the Harare-Bindura Road.

They reportedly received $500 fines from motorists and were supposed to remit the money to the Finance Clerk Mashonaland Central but stole $40 and shared it between themselves.

The court heard that Dube also received $520 but connived with Katayi and shared $270 among themselves.

Katayi and Dube stole a total of $1 660 during the patrols and nothing was recovered.

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Home | World | Africa | Boris Johnson hosts Sibusiso Moyo for roundtable talks

In the margins of CHOGM Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson welcomed his Zimbabwean counterpart Foreign (and Trade) Minister Sibusiso Moyo to London for a roundtable with other international partners.

The historic meeting ushers in a new era in UK-Zimbabwe relations and symbolises Zimbabwe's commitment to engaging meaningfully with the international community.

The Foreign Secretary said: "President Mnangagwa has been in power for 150 days and while Zimbabwe has made impressive progress, there's still much to do.

"That's why Britain, the Commonwealth and the wider international community will do everything it can in supporting Zimbabwe on its path of reform.

"But we must remember democracies are not made in a day.

"July's election will be a bellwether for the direction of a new Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwe Government must deliver the free and fair elections the people of Zimbabwe deserve and which it has promised. The UK stands ready in friendship to support a Zimbabwe that fully embraces the rule of law, human rights and economic reform."

There is a great deal of interest in Zimbabwe applying to rejoin the Commonwealth after their election in July. Applying is a matter for the Zimbabwean people to decide. Zimbabwe would have to formally apply to the Commonwealth Secretariat and the final decision would then be for all Commonwealth members. However, the UK would strongly support Zimbabwe's re-entry and a new Zimbabwe that is committed to political and economic reform that works for all its people.

Today's meeting reinstated the commitment of the British government to the people of Zimbabwe. The UK currently provides 91m in bilateral UK aid to the people of Zimbabwe in 2017/18. This includes the further 5 million the Minister for Africa, Harriett Baldwin announced to support free and fair elections during her visit in February.

"Britain, the Commonwealth & the wider international community will do everything it can in supporting Zimbabwe on its path of reform."@BorisJohnson ushers in a new era in UK-Zimbabwe relations as he meets with Minister Sibusiso Moyo at #CHOGM2018. ???? https://t.co/2hkqz44Je4 pic.twitter.com/LLnrXsgkyL  Foreign Office ???????? (@foreignoffice) April 20, 2018

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: Africa
Sindri Thor Stefansson, the suspected architect behind Icelands Big Bitcoin Heist, has escaped an Iceland prison and reportedly fled for Sweden. Stefansson is one of a group of suspects in a crippling heist in which 600 computers worth millions of dollars and used for mining bitcoin and altcoins were stolen.

The theft, which local media called the Big Bitcoin Heist as it was the worst such heist to rock Iceland in the Nordic island nations low-crime history, unfolded when the bitcoin price and mining profits were at their peak in December and January.

Police Chief Gunnar Schram told local news outlet Visir that Stefansson did not manage the escape alone, saying: He had an accomplice. We are sure of that. Meanwhile, the police commissioner previously stated the Big Bitcoin Heist represented a grand theft on a scale unseen before.

Low-Security Prison

Stefansson was placed in the low-security prison a little over a week ago though he has been in custody since February. At the current prison, inmates are not restricted by fences and have access to amenities like Wi-Fi and phone service.

A professor at the University of Iceland told the LA Times that the unusual decision to keep a high-profile suspected criminal like Stefansson at a prison of this nature was rivaled only by his organized escape.

He fled through a window before taking the approximately 60-mile trek to Keflavik International Airport, where he used a stolen passport to board a passenger plane bound for Sweden and where security footage spotted him, according to reports.

The plane which he boarded, which was in flight by the time the prison guards realized he was gone, also reportedly carried Icelands Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdottir, who was on her way to Stockholm where she met with Indias Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Prime Ministers @narendramodi and @katrinjak reviewed the full range of India-Iceland relations during their meeting today. pic.twitter.com/kSOJL924KB  PMO India (@PMOIndia) April 17, 2018

While Stefansson has not yet been arrested, an international arrest warrant has been issued.

Story continues

Cold Case

Meanwhile, the stolen computers, graphics cards, power sources, motherboards and memory discs that comprised the bitcoin mining operation have yet to be recovered. A number of suspects tied to the bitcoin mining heist were arrested, but it remains an open case.

Iceland is a refuge for bitcoin miners because of its low-priced and generous power supply thats fueled by volcanoes in the island nation, not to mention the chilly Arctic temperatures that help to keep computers cool during the energy-intensive mining process.

Iceland boasts a population of 340,000 and dedicates more of its electricity supply to bitcoin mining than to households. It also has one of the lowest crime rates globally and is also where WikiLeaks was launched.

Featured image from Shutterstock.



The post Big Bitcoin Heist Suspect Escapes Prison in Iceland, Flees to Sweden appeared first on CCN.


a great post to settle in while eating dinner

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Good tell Bibi to fuck off

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Mte

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[new york times building]



me: [chanting] column, column-



james bennet: column, COLUMN



bari weiss: [yelling over the loudspeaker as she bangs on the keyboard] COLUMN, COLUMN, COLUMN pic.twitter.com/Qzr5RIMev8  Ashley Feinberg (@ashleyfeinberg) April 19, 2018



can't wait to see what Free Speech Crusader Bari Weiss churns out!!

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LMAO I was just going to comment about Bari. She is so predictable.

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Legitimately laughing. Thank you for cheering me on, Ashley!  Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) April 19, 2018



her reply screams "I'm definitely not mad online" lol

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Bari is a pos. Ashley is amazing.

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god she sucks so much

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so this particular slaughter of palestinians actually got to her?

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Fuck Netanyahu.

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good

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i can't find the comment from her rep at the source

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oops it was at another website https://www.jta.org/2018/04/19/news-opinion/genesis-prize-cancels-ceremony-2018-winner-natalie-portman-said-wont-visit-israel

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thank you!

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I can't believe the pic they used of her for this.

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ah, it came from the organization. i hope she makes a public statement and names these events.

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good on her!

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Okay I took this as her not feeling safe being there but she's doing it for political reasons.

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seems like it. and considering how obsessed Israel is with their public perception and how they acted over Lorde I do think with Natalie this will be a huge deal

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Definitely, the response from the foundation was very much on the offensive.

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Whoa

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Good

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Oh wow okay, didn't expect this.

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I love a messy celebrity gone good. Hope she keeps it up.

Next on her list: apologizing for comparing eating meat with rape.

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omg. i'm a vegetarian but i've had vegans come for me on twitter because they REALLY think veganism is a feminist issue because of the way female cows are inseminated. yes i know it's cruel and since it's "forced" it's technically rape but equating cows to humans is ridiiiiculous.

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I want a more human food processing or wtvr for the world but like the fuck kind of luxury does one live in to be able to call animal husbandry "rape".

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Whaaat?! I have never encountered those types of vegans but to be honest I don't play with twitter. I do have Vegan friends who declare themselves "eco-feminists" but they fight for causes I think are legit, like the treatment of women workers on rural areas, land reform, etc. It's a whole lifestyle too.



Btw, I wanna add that while Natalie hasn't apologized for the quote in specific I think she has shown a lot of growth lately so I doubt she would say something like that today. I like her.

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This is reminding me of an "animal rights is a feminist issue" article Everyday Feminism (lol) published a while back - the ensuing war that took place in their fb comments gave me palpitations.



Lots of people phrasing their points in the most OTT way possible: "Sorry, but REAL intersectional feminists don't pay for non-human women to get RAPED!"

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I know a vegan who compares herself to a civil rights activist, like she believes she believes she's the MLK of vegans smh.

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is a feminist issue, because climate change is a feminist issue. Veganisma feminist issue, because climate change is a feminist issue. A tiny summary.

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She's been pretty on point for the last few years honestly.

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that sucks



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You are my soul sister! Look at my comment below 

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I went to the Miami store and no one was there. Employees looked like they knew we werent there to buy shit but just say we went there lol

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I went to the store in NYC in 2016. Bought a pair of $28 ankle socks that said DASH on them because I felt guilty the group of 8 of us went to the store to just say we were there and left. The workers were rude, ignored us and when I went to checkout rolled their eyes like I was wasting their time.



Not surprised that store closed 4 months later.



Edited at 2018-04-20 08:32 pm (UTC)

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$28 for some socks?! Da fuck!?

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Literally the cheapest thing in the store. They had a DASH branded coffee cup for $34, so I just bought the socks.

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$28 for ONE PAIR of socks?! Are they good quality, at least?

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lmao 

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A+ gif

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What ???? I think I still have some L.A.M.B shoes I bought from there in like 2006

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Wow Kitson and Paris Hilton lol



Those were good times

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Oh man, my best friend in high school and I would always check out their website and send each other links of clothes we'd never be able to afford

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You know what, I miss 2006, Ill take it

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ahaha

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lmao missed opportunity

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So basically it didn't make any money any more

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yep it was a flop

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Are they really closing just bc they don't have the time/energy for it anymore? Damn I wish I were rich lol

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lmao no. i doubt they were actually particularly involved in it. it just flopped and they're trying to spin it.

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No i never shopped there and I never understood why ppl would line up outside the soho store to go in.

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But the real question is will they close them in the KK Hollywood game?

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"Did you ever shop there, ONTD?"



God no

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Flop store id never even dare to shop there. The only store that deserved vandalism for the trash they are tbqmfh

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they'll probably open kosmetics stores in their place

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lmao at the table in the picture that has 'k's for legs

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Screaming

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Even if you had the #focus groups tested and executives approving your next singles, things can go awry when they don't meet certain expectations whether it's artistic or chart-wise. Not to be confused with charity singles or stand-alone singles... actually it does get confusing because artists want to save face and deem these rejected lead singles as something else, commonly referred to as 'buzz' or 'promo' tracks.



Let's just consider any changes of plans as a sign from #god, including with the following pop songs.

There will also be a few honorable mentions of songs released around the same time but also did not make any cut.



7. Focus by Ariana Grande

Release

Cancellation

Appeared on any album format

6. Louboutins by Jennifer Lopez

Release

Cancellation

Appeared on any album format

Honorable mentions

5. Go Girl (ft. T-Pain) by Ciara

Release

Cancellation

Appeared on any album format

4. Player ft. Chr*s Brown by Tinashe

Release

Bubbling Under

Cancellation

Appeared on any album format

Honorable mentions

3. SuperLove by Charli XCX

Release

Cancellation

Appeared on any album format

2. Pretty Girls (ft. Iggy Azalea) by Britney Spears

Release

Cancellation

Appeared on any album format

1. FourFiveSeconds by Rihanna, Kanye West, Paul McCartney

Release

Cancellation

Appeared on any album format

Honorable mentions

Intended for:Replaced by: "Dangerous Woman": She teased the song on social media and on hertour, and slowly unveiled the single cover art following the release, showing a new look with platinum blonde hair. AG3 was initially calledwith the title track later appearing on: Although appearing in the top 10 of the Hot 100, the song received mixed reviews, and it probably did not measure up to the intended success for a lead single her label was looking for.? Yes, it got Japanese bonus track'd on DW.Intended for:Replaced by: "On the Floor": Like Ari, J.Lo decided for a change in look with alterego "Lola" (a la Sasha Fierce) with the " Who Is Lola? " teaser, featuring red lips and choppy bangs. The Lola alterego was abandoned after releasing "Fresh Out the Oven". She promoted next intended lead single "Louboutins" a few times on television, including the AMA's where she fell mid-performance but swiftly got back up.: Mixed reception from critics, did not even chart in the Hot 100, no airplay, and was completely scrapped before any music video was to be made? No: "Fresh Out the Oven", Brandy's original recording of the demo Intended for:Replaced by: "Never Ever": A demo version of the song leaked on the internet a month before its official release. It peaked at #78 in the US but #1 in Japan.: Overall just underperformed, and when the FR tracklisting came out, the song was not listed. It was later on deemed as a 'promo single'.? Yes, it got Japanese bonus track'd forIntended for:Replaced by: "No Drama": From her own words, it was the #label that hooked up the Chr*s Brown feature. It was announced as the official lead single for(I can't believe it's been three years, bless), and reached #3 on the USHot 100 Singles.: While Tinashe was just speaking ha truth, Chr*s Brown had to get stupid about the whole thing , so the song was just dropped.? No: "Party Favors", "Superlove" (which was the next intended lead and still did not appear on any album format)Intended for:Replaced by: "Boom Clap": The song was released and uploaded onto Soundcloud 5 months after, which was quite soon to already move onto another project. "Boom Clap" proved to be the next hit to be the actual lead single to focus on. Highkey the only song on this list deserving justice. #JusticeforSuperlove : As Wiki states, "it ultimately was not included on 2014's Sucker."? No, and it had its chance to be Japanese bonus track'd but was replaced with "Red Balloon."Intended for: 9th studio album/Replaced by: "Make Me": Iggy announced the collaboration would be on Britney's next album at the time, and that it was a true 'duet' because they sung the chorus together. I just wanna know why did Britney's hairstyle switch when they were on the car @ 2:43. It peaked at #29 on the Hot 100.: ?? I guess cause it flopped and no one was here for Eggs.? NoIntended for: 8th studio album/Replaced by: "Work": Kanye was initial executive producer of R8 and snatched this collab with Paul McCartney. It was a moderate success in Rih's standards and peaked at #4 on the Hot 100.: ?? Navy tell me about these singles lol.? No.: "Bitch Better Have My Money", "American Oxygen"
Five of the 7 suspects who were arrested in Tondo, Manila for drug pushing.

MANILA, Philippines  After one year of surveillance, seven drug pushers were arrested in a buy-bust operation led by Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) in Laong Nasa Street Tondo Manila on Thursday.

The suspects were identified as Virgilio and Carlo Magno, Jayson and Rosanna Odayat, Danilo Manansala and Jelly Ann Nedroda.

The operatives also arrested a 15-year old girl who allegedly works as a drug runner for the dealers.

Seized during the operations were 30 sachets of illegal drugs, .45 caliber gun, bullets and other drug paraphernalia.

Sinasabi na ito ay mga untouchable doon sa mga area na ito kasi nga dahil ang grupo nila ay mayroon na ring mga armas; may kapabilidad at saka kanilang tinutumba yung mga kalaban nila sa droga at saka yung mga hindi nakapag-remit sa kanila, said Manila police Station 7 commander PSupt. Jerry Corpuz.

(They say these people are untouchables in these areas because their group is armed and capable. They are known to kill rivals and members who cannot remit to them.)

The arrested drug suspects admitted to using and selling illegal drugs.

They are also included on the drug watchlist of the Manila police.

However, an associate of the suspects has managed to escape.

Currently, the police are investigating if the suspects are connected to a syndicate.

The suspects will face multiple charges while the arrested juvenile will be under the custody of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD).  UNTV News & Rescue

The post 7 drug suspects, 1 minor arrested in Tondo, Manila appeared first on UNTV News.
South African police on Friday fired rubber bullets at protesters after President Cyril Ramaphosa cut short a foreign trip to deal with violent riots over alleged government corruption and poor public services. Shops were looted, roads were blocked and vehicles set alight in North West province in unrest that posed an early challenge for Ramaphosa, who came to power in February. At least 23 people were arrested and one man was reported to have died in sporadic violence that erupted this week in Mahikeng, the provincial capital. Ramaphosa called for calm as he vowed to speedily resolve the cause of the unrest, following more than six hours of talks with local leaders in the city of Mahikeng after he cut short his trip to a Commonwealth summit in London. Violent protests are common in South Africa, but North West province has been a hotbed of unrest due to boiling frustration over lack of housing, health services and jobs. Police fired rubber bullets as protesters hid behind cardboard sheets, while roads were littered with burning tyres and bricks that had been thrown through the air. - 'Violence and anarchy' - At the end of the talks Ramaphosa appealed for an end to the unrest, promising a "speedy" resolution of the crisis. "...let us be calm, let us return to a position of normalcy as we address this matter and reach finality on it," he said in an address broadcast live from the city. He said he had been made to understand during the talks that the unrest had been sparked by concerns over the position of the provincial premier, corruption and governance. "These are matters that are serious enough" to warrant broad consultation in the party and the national government "on an urgent basis", he said. "We are going to act as speedily as possible to address each of the issues that have been raised," he added. The trigger for the unrest was reportedly the death on Tuesday of two patients at a health clinic that was closed due to a month-long dispute over health workers' salaries and contracts. Much of the anger has been directed at Supra Mahumapelo, the provincial premier, who is accused of involvement in graft scandals that have engulfed the ruling ANC (African National Congress) party. The border to neighbouring Botswana was closed due to the violence, while schools, shops, offices and government services across North West province were shut. Local residents said foreign-owned shops were the first to be targeted by looters. "Very poor people are in dire need. Those people looted foreigners' shops," local resident Leveticus Molosankwe, 43, told AFP. "They have taken advantage of the political situation as people plead for the removal of Mahumapelo. This has been simmering for months." Thapelo Galeboe, member of the local Communist Party branch, said the premier ruled "like an emperor" in the province. "The health system has completely collapsed. Hospitals are filthy. Families close to the premier have benefited in a very corrupt manner from tenders," he said. - New leadership - Ramaphosa, who took over as leader of the ruling ANC in December, replaced Jacob Zuma as national president earlier this year. Zuma's nine-year tenure saddled South Africa with weak growth, ballooning national debt, depressed investor confidence and record unemployment. The ANC forced Zuma from office in February largely due to his mounting legal challenges and multiple corruption scandals, and the party has distanced itself from its former leader. Ramaphosa has vowed to crack down on government corruption, which he has admitted is a serious problem, and improve South Africa's ability to attract foreign investment. Unemployment is at a record high of about 28 percent, with youth unemployment reaching over 50 percent in many areas. Zuma appeared in court earlier this month at a preliminary hearing on graft charges that he denies.
Six lean greyhounds in racing colors sprint wildly around a parched track in sun-baked central Florida. The grandstand at the Melbourne Greyhound Park can hold 2,000 people, but on this day, there are barely a dozen. "This is a little anti-climactic," admits John Niebler, the Melbourne park's operations director, motioning to the nearly deserted stands. It is no secret that greyhound racing is a dying pastime in this southeastern state. In the 1990s, Niebler said, a single race could take in $500,000 in bets. Today, that figure might be closer to $15. The races survive thanks to a 1931 law that legalized betting on dog and horse races. Under subsequent legislation, passed since the 1980s, all the original dog tracks must continue to offer live racing if they wish to operate other, often more popular, forms of gambling. "Doesn't make much sense, does it?" asked Christine Dorchak, president of GREY2K USA Worldwide, which calls itself the world's largest greyhound protection organization. Animal advocates consider the races cruel. "If you're looking for logic," she added, "you're not going to find it in the racing law." The Florida Greyhound Association (FGA), representing kennel operators, has so far managed to defend a law that is loved neither by animal lovers nor by some casinos, which must sustain the costly and controversial races if they want to keep their doors open. Florida's law does make sense, however, to kennel operators. Their winning greyhounds earn four to five percent of overall casino proceeds, even if no one sees them win, said FGA spokesman Jack Cory. But Dorchak, a lifetime animal lover who owns a greyhound, said the practice is cruel. "Thousands and thousands of dogs are basically being held hostage," she said. This week, Florida lawmakers approved a proposed constitutional amendment that, if passed, would phase out greyhound racing by 2020. It will be put to a referendum in November. The FGA vowed to go to court to block the measure. - Canine 'hostages' - Inside the Melbourne casino, clients play poker, try their luck at slot machines or bet on greyhound races broadcast on TV screens. But very few take the trouble to step outside to watch the real dogs tear around the track. "It's just fun," said 74-year-old Joanne Garrison, one of the few spectators in the nearly deserted grandstand. "It's a good way to spend an afternoon," said Garrison, who was planning to stay for eight races. But for each dog, the action is fleeting. The greyhounds, chomping excitedly at the bit when suited up to run, sprint around the track for 30 seconds -- then must return to their cages to wait two or three days for their next 30-second race. GREY2K says many animals have suffered from overdoses of stimulants. In one case last year, a dog died in the middle of a race. A cocaine derivative was later found in its blood. And the fleet animals can sustain grave injuries when they collide at speeds of up to 40 miles (70 kilometers) an hour. But Cory rejects the accusations of abuse, saying the kennel operators' livelihood depends on keeping their dogs healthy enough to win races. "The owner," Cory told AFP, "will not receive any money if his animals are not cared for, well fed, well exercised and well medicated." - Loss-maker for Florida - The Melbourne park is one of 12 greyhound racing tracks in Florida and one of 150 in the world. There are six tracks in other states, but 40 states have banned dog racing. For Florida, dog racing is a losing proposition, according to a 2013 report by the Spectrum Gaming Group, a consultancy specializing in legal gambling. It calculated that Florida loses $3.3 million a year from the dog races, since the cost of regulating them exceeds the revenues they produce. "People don't come out like they used to, despite our efforts," Melbourne park manager Jim O'Brien acknowledged to AFP. "We do all we can, but the consumers have lost interest." It costs the Melbourne casino $200,000 a year to keep the races going. But that allows it to continue offering other games of chance that generate profits of $7.8 million. That's why O'Brien favors a so-called "decoupling" move that would allow casinos to offer other forms of gambling without having to stage live competitions. Until November's vote on the referendum, O'Brien said: "Whether we have 10 or 10,000 people in the grandstand, we will put on a good show."
"Strike Back" will be striking back to TV with Malaysia set as its main shooting location

20 Apr  The seventh season of the American-British action adventure series, "Strike Back", is currently in its pre-production stage in Malaysia with shooting scheduled to begin later this month.

With the latest season concluded in early April last year, "Strike Back" will now be set in a different country than the last as their primary shooting location.

Reported by KFTV, the Left Bank Pictures and Cinemax's blockbuster action drama series will be heading to Pinewood Iskandar Malaysia Studios in Johor as its base for production.

Cast and storyline details have yet to be confirmed, but the series is scheduled for a five month shooting period within Malaysia.

"Strike Back" is based off the novel of the same title, written by former Special Air Service soldier, Chris Ryan.

The series follows the operations of Section 20, a secret squad of military experts from the British Defence Intelligence service that goes through extremely dangerous missions across the globe.

"Strike Back" has won two out of the six accolades it was nominated for, the first series in 2010 for the National Television Awards in Best Digital Choice and the UK Screen Association Conch Award for Best Audio on TV Drama of the Year in 2012.

Pinewood Malaysia previously hosted variety shows, "Asia's Got Talent" as well as "The Voice (SG/MY edition), last year.

It was also the filming base for the Netflix TV series, "Marco Polo".

(Photo Source: Strike Back's Facebook)
In a series of papers, Professor Loeb and Michael Hippke indicate that conventional rockets would have a hard time escaping from certain kinds of extra-solar planets. Credit: NASA/Tim Pyle

Since the beginning of the Space Age, humans have relied on chemical rockets to get into space. While this method is certainly effective, it is also very expensive and requires a considerable amount of resources. As we look to more efficient means of getting out into space, one has to wonder if similarly advanced species on other planets (where conditions would be different) would rely on similar methods.

Harvard Professor Abraham Loeb and Michael Hippke, an independent researcher affiliated with the Sonneberg Observatory, both addressed this question in two recentlyreleased papers. Whereas Prof. Loeb looks at the challenges extra-terrestrials would face launching rockets from Proxima b, Hippke considers whether aliens living on a Super-Earth would be able to get into space.

The papers, tiled "Interstellar Escape from Proxima b is Barely Possible with Chemical Rockets" and "Spaceflight from Super-Earths is difficult" recently appeared online, and were authored by Prof. Loeb and Hippke, respectively. Whereas Loeb addresses the challenges of chemical rockets escaping Proxima b, Hippke considers whether or not the same rockets would able to achieve escape velocity at all.

For the sake of his study, Loeb considered how we humans are fortunate enough to live on a planet that is well-suited for space launches. Essentially, if a rocket is to escape from the Earth's surface and reach space, it needs to achieve an escape velocity of 11.186 km/s (40,270 km/h; 25,020 mph). Similarly, the escape velocity needed to get away from the location of the Earth around the sun is about 42 km/s (151,200 km/h; 93,951 mph).

Artists impression of Proxima b, which was discovered using the Radial Velocity method. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

As Prof. Loeb told Universe Today via email:

"Chemical propulsion requires a fuel mass that grows exponentially with terminal speed. By a fortunate coincidence the escape speed from the orbit of the Earth around the sun is at the limit of attainable speed by chemical rockets. But the habitable zone around fainter stars is closer in, making it much more challenging for chemical rockets to escape from the deeper gravitational pit there."

As Loeb indicates in his essay, the escape speed scales as the square root of the stellar mass over the distance from the star, which implies that the escape speed from the habitable zone scales inversely with stellar mass to the power of one quarter. For planets like Earth, orbiting within the habitable zone of a G-type (yellow dwarf) star like our sun, this works out quite while.

Unfortunately, this does not work well for terrestrial planets that orbit lower-mass M-type (red dwarf) stars. These stars are the most common type in the universe, accounting for 75 percent of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy alone. In addition, recent exoplanet surveys have discovered a plethora of rocky planets orbiting red dwarf stars systems, with some scientists venturing that they are the most likely place to find potentially habitable rocky planets.

This infographic compares the orbit of the planet around Proxima Centauri (Proxima b) with the same region of the Solar System. Credit: Pale Red Dot

Using the nearest star to our own as an example (Proxima Centauri), Loeb explains how a rocket using chemical propellant would have a much harder time achieving escape velocity from a planet located within it's habitable zone.

"The nearest star to the sun, Proxima Centauri, is an example for a faint star with only 12 percent of the mass of the sun," he said. "A couple of years ago, it was discovered that this star has an Earth-size planet, Proxima b, in its habitable zone, which is 20 times closer than the separation of the Earth from the sun. At that location, the escape speed is 50 percent larger than from the orbit of the Earth around the sun. A civilization on Proxima b will find it difficult to escape from their location to interstellar space with chemical rockets."

Hippke's paper, on the other hand, begins by considering that Earth may in fact not be the most habitable type of planet in our universe. For instance, planets that are more massive than Earth would have higher surface gravity, which means they would be able to hold onto a thicker atmosphere, which would provide greater shielding against harmful cosmic rays and solar radiation.

In addition, a planet with higher gravity would have a flatter topography, resulting in archipelagos instead of continents and shallower oceans  an ideal situation where biodiversity is concerned. However, when it comes to rocket launches, increased surface gravity would also mean a higher escape velocity. As Hippke indicated in his study:

Artists impression of a Super-Earth, a class of planet that has many times the mass of Earth, but less than a Uranus or Neptune-sized planet. Credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech

"Rockets suffer from the Tsiolkovsky (1903) equation : if a rocket carries its own fuel, the ratio of total rocket mass versus final velocity is an exponential function, making high speeds (or heavy payloads) increasingly expensive."

For comparison, Hippke uses Kepler-20 b, a Super-Earth located 950 light years away that is 1.6 times Earth's radius and 9.7 times it mass. Whereas escape velocity from Earth is roughly 11 km/s, a rocket attempting to leave a Super-Earth similar to Kepler-20 b would need to achieve an escape velocity of ~27.1 km/s. As a result, a single-stage rocket on Kepler-20 b would have to burn 104 times as much fuel as a rocket on Earth to get into orbit.

To put it into perspective, Hippke considers specific payloads being launched from Earth. "To lift a more useful payload of 6.2 t as required for the James Webb Space Telescope on Kepler-20 b, the fuel mass would increase to 55,000 t, about the mass of the largest ocean battleships," he writes. "For a classical Apollo moon mission (45 t), the rocket would need to be considerably larger, ~400,000 t."

While Hippke's analysis concludes that chemical rockets would still allow for escape velocities on Super-Earths up to 10 Earth masses, the amount of propellant needed makes this method impractical. As Hippke pointed out, this could have a serious effect on an alien civilization's development.

Project Starshot, an initiative sponsored by the Breakthrough Foundation, is intended to be humanitys first interstellar voyage. Credit: breakthroughinitiatives.org

"I am surprised to see how close we as humans are to end up on a planet which is still reasonably lightweight to conduct space flight," he said. "Other civilizations, if they exist, might not be as lucky. On more massive planets, space flight would be exponentially more expensive. Such civilizations would not have satellite TV, a moon mission, or a Hubble Space Telescope. This should alter their way of development in certain ways we can now analyze in more detail."

Both of these papers present some clear implications when it comes to the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI). For starters, it means that civilizations on planets that orbit red dwarf stars or Super-Earths are less likely to be space-faring, which would make detecting them more difficult. It also indicates that when it comes to the kinds of propulsion humanity is familiar with, we may be in the minority.

"This above results imply that chemical propulsion has a limited utility, so it would make sense to search for signals associated with lightsails or nuclear engines, especially near dwarf stars," said Loeb. "But there are also interesting implications for the future of our own civilization."

"One consequence of the paper is for space colonization and SETI," added Hippke. "Civs from Super-Earths are much less likely to explore the stars. Instead, they would be (to some extent) "arrested" on their home planet, and e.g. make more use of lasers or radio telescopes for interstellar communication instead of sending probes or spaceships."

Artists concept of a bimodal nuclear rocket making the journey to the Moon, Mars, and other destinations in the Solar System. Credit: NASA

However, both Loeb and Hippke also note that extra-terrestrial civilizations could address these challenges by adopting other methods of propulsion. In the end, chemical propulsion may be something that few technologically advanced species would adopt because it is simply not practical for them. As Loeb explained:

"An advanced extraterrestrial civilization could use other propulsion methods, such as nuclear engines or lightsails which are not constrained by the same limitations as chemical propulsion and can reach speeds as high as a tenth of the speed of light. Our civilization is currently developing these alternative propulsion technologies but these efforts are still at their infancy."

One such example is Breakthrough Starshot, which is currently being developed by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation (of which Loeb is the chair of the Advisory Committee). This initiative aims to use a laser-driven lightsail to accelerate a nanocraft up to speeds of 20 percent the speed of light, which will allow it to travel to Proxima Centauri in just 20 years time.

Hippke similarly considers nuclear rockets as a viable possibility, since increased surface gravity would also mean that space elevators would be impractical. Loeb also indicated that the limitations imposed by planets around low mass stars could have repercussions for when humans try to colonize the known universe:

Artists impression of rocky exoplanets orbiting Gliese 832, a red dwarf star just 16 light-years from Earth. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser/N. Risinger (skysurvey.org).

"When the sun will heat up enough to boil all water off the face of the Earth, we could relocate to a new home by then. Some of the most desirable destinations would be systems of multiple planets around low mass stars, such as the nearby dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 which weighs 9 percent of a solar mass and hosts seven Earth-size planets. Once we get to the habitable zone of TRAPPIST-1, however, there would be no rush to escape. Such stars burn hydrogen so slowly that they could keep us warm for ten trillion years, about a thousand times longer than the lifetime of the sun."

But in the meantime, we can rest easy in the knowledge that we live on a habitable planet around a yellow dwarf star, which affords us not only life, but the ability to get out into space and explore. As always, when it comes to searching for signs of extra-terrestrial life in our universe, we humans are forced to take the "low hanging fruit approach".

Basically, the only planet we know of that supports life is Earth, and the only means of space exploration we know how to look for are the ones we ourselves have tried and tested. As a result, we are somewhat limited when it comes to looking for biosignatures (i.e. planets with liquid water, oxygen and nitrogen atmospheres, etc.) or technosignatures (i.e. radio transmissions, chemical rockets, etc.).

As our understanding of what conditions life can emerge under increases, and our own technology advances, we'll have more to be on the lookout for. And hopefully, despite the additional challenges it may be facing, extra-terrestrial life will be looking for us!

Professor Loeb's essay was also recently published in Scientific American.

Explore further The space weather forecast for Proxima Centauri B

More information: Spaceflight from Super-Earths is difficult Spaceflight from Super-Earths is difficult arxiv.org/abs/1804.04727 Interstellar Escape from Proxima b is Barely Possible with Chemical Rockets: arxiv.org/abs/1804.03698
Dr Louisa Campbell with the Summerston distance stone at The Hunterian Museum. Credit: University of Glasgow

University of Glasgow archaeologist using cutting edge technology on remnants of the Antonine Wall has shown parts of it were painted in bright colours.

Dr. Louisa Campbell's research, which has used x-ray and laser technology to analyse parts of the Roman Empire's most north-western frontier, showed it was painted with vibrant red and yellows.

Dr. Campbell, a postdoctoral fellow in Archaeology at the University, looked at pigments applied to Roman sculpture, with a focus on distance stones from the Antonine Wall.

She said these vibrant coloured stones were Roman propaganda against the indigenous local communities: "The public are accustomed to seeing these sculptures in bland greys, creams, white (for marble) and don't get the full impact that they would have had on the Roman and indigenous audiences 2000 years ago.

"These sculptures are propaganda tools used by Rome to demonstrate their power over these and other indigenous groups, it helps the Empire control their frontiers and it has different meanings to different audiences."

Dr. Campbell said that some of the colour sculptures tell stories of different Roman legions and their loyalty to the Emperor as well as their part in the construction of the Antonine Wall, one of Scotland's UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

She added: "The distance stones tell us how many feet were built by each legion and are dedicating their allegiance to the Emperor Antoninus Pius. These sculptures are unique to the Antonine Wall and the best preserved example of frontier statuary from any Roman border.

"They were embedded into prominent positions on the wall (probably crossing points at militarised forts) for full visual impact. The colours would have been a very powerful addition to bring these scenes to life and aid in the subjugation of the northern peoples."

Her projectPaints and Pigments In the Past (PPIP) is part funded by Historic Environment Scotland (HES)'s Archaeology Programme. The aim of the project is to identify the colours of paint pigments applied to the sculptures from the Wall and then to recreate an authentic palette of colours to allow them to be physical and digitally reconstructed.

Patricia Weeks, Antonine Wall Co-ordinator at HES, said: "We are delighted to have been able to fund Dr. Campbell's work and to see these exciting results emerge. Knowing how colour was used by the Romans to tell stories and create impact is a huge leap forward in understanding these sculptures.

"The information will now be used as part of our partnership 'Rediscovering the Antonine Wall' Heritage Lottery Fund bid to propose a recreated distance slab in full colour. We will also work on innovative digital methods of recreating the stones in colour that can be used for interpretation both out on the original find sites, and in the galleries at the Hunterian Museum."

The Summerston distance stone from the Antonine Wall, which was found near Bearsden, was one artefact successfully tested for pigment. Credit: The Hunterian

Most of the examples available were discovered between the 17th and 19th centuries, and are on display at the University's Hunterian Museum.

Dr. Campbell said: "Many contain exquisitely carved scenes of combat, religious practice and architecture. It is likely that the sculptures were originally painted for maximum impact. However over the course of time the paint has faded and only trace elements are left.

"It has been an incredibly exciting opportunity to work with the Hunterian collections and use cutting-edge scientific instruments to undertake non-destructive analysis of important cultural objects."

As well as The Hunterian, Dr. Campbell has also visit other collections for sampling, including the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, the Yorkshire Museum in York and the Great North Museum in Newcastle upon Tyne.

The Antonine Wall is a Roman Frontier built in the mid-2nd century AD which crosses Scotland between the Fourth and the Clyde.

Dr. Campbell has presented these initial conclusions at a talk this week in The Hunterian and will publish her full findings for peer review once completed.

Using non non-destructive in-situ analysis using pXRF (portable X-Ray Flourescence) and Raman Spectroscopic analysis, for the first time has been able to look at archaeological remnants that have been subjected to environmental process which have impacted the survival of viable samples. However, the work has confirmed polychromy on these sculptures and a restricted palette dominated by reds and yellows is evidenced.

There is a clear format to the application of pigments in the Roman Empire with specific colours expected to appear in certain contexts, eg reds in letters and Roman cloaks and military standards, different colours of red depicting spilled blood of indigenous captive warriors and ochres probably applied in layers to provide life-like skin tones, as evidenced on marble statuary.

There is even evidence for red on the beak of the Roman eagle which Dr. Campbell suggests symbolises the eagle feasting on the flesh of her enemies.

A base layer of gesso was applied to the stones in the first instance which was then painted onto, but conservation practices appear to have negatively impacted the survival of these exquisite sculptures.

This is innovative work that has not previously been attempted. It presented some challenges which have now been mitigated and the next phase of the research seeks to determine whether other stone statuary, including Pictish symbol stones and other early medieval sculpture was adorned in colour.

Explore further Roman Maryport excavation starts on site
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Silicon Valley may be the world's tech paradise, but it's a hiring nightmare for many local startups now forced to venture from Portland to Boise in search of talent.

Enormous salary expectationsdriven by the Bay Area's soaring cost of living and competition from well-paying giants such as Google and Facebookhave made it too expensive for a growing number of local startups to recruit employees here. Others say the workers they do have want to leave, frustrated by their inability to buy a home as the region grapples with a chronic housing shortage.

Now local startups increasingly are opening satellite operations in cheaper marketsno longer expecting all their employees to congregate in one Silicon Valley office for work, free food and ping-pong. It's a cultural shift shaking up the startup eco-system that has long been credited with powering Silicon Valley's iconic tech industry.

"As we've been looking to hire, we're running into the same issue that everyone else is running intoin that the Bay Area is broken," said Michael Dougherty, co-founder and CEO of San Mateo, Calif.-based advertising tech startup Jelli.

Jelli, founded in 2009, opened a satellite office last June in Boise, Idaho, where Dougherty says average salaries are about a third lower than the Bay Area. The startup has 10 people in the office so far and plans to add another 30 or 40.

"The community's cool," Dougherty said. "There's a lot of really great folks there."

As with many startups that operate satellite offices outside Silicon Valley, Jelli's 30 employees in San Mateo generally make more than their counterparts in Boise, Idaho. But the money goes farther in Boise.

The median home value in Boise is $236,200compared to $1.3 million in San Francisco, $1.1 million in San Jose and $755,600 in Oakland, according to Zillow.

San Francisco-based startup UrbanSitter, which runs an online platform for on-demand babysitters, recently started recruiting engineers in Portland, Oregon. About two years ago, one of their top engineers said he was moving to Portland because he wanted to a buy a home in the Bay Area and couldn't. Not wanting to lose him, the company let him work remotely from his new home. The next year, two more UrbanSitter engineers announced within a week of one another that they, too, were moving to Portland in search of cheaper real estate.

"We said, listen, maybe this is a huge opportunity for us," UrbanSitter co-founder CEO Lynn Perkins said. "Maybe we should open an office in Portland."

UrbanSitter now has four engineers in a WeWork space in Portlandabout a third of its engineering team. The company invested in Zoom video conferencing technology to bridge the 600-mile gap between the two offices and tries to share the fun events that have come to be synonymous with startup culture. Workers in Portland and San Francisco connect via video chat for lunches, happy hour drinks with online trivia games, and even the occasional in-office yoga session.

Those efforts help, but working in the satellite space isn't the same as being in the main office, said UrbanSitter lead engineer Travis Dobbs, who moved from the Bay Area to Portland in October.

"I would say there definitely is a small bit of longing," he said. "You feel like you're missing out a little bit on things that are happening in San Francisco."

Dobbs was fed up with renting a tiny, two-bedroom home in Berkeley with his wife, two kids and their dog. The family was so short on space that their son, now 1, slept in a room with Dobbs and his wife, and the dining room also served as the kids' playroom and an office. Shortly after moving to Portland, the family bought a five-bedroom house for just over $700,000. Now the kids each have their own room and a yard to play in.

Seeking talent outside the Bay Area is a major change, because Silicon Valley remains one of the world's premier tech talent pools, said Chris Nicholson, co-founder and CEO of open-source artificial intelligence startup Skymind. From the company's inception more than three years ago, Skymind's founders decided they weren't going to limit hiring to the San Francisco headquarters. Now about six of their 37 employees are in the Bay Area. They also have large engineering teams in Japan and the Ukraine and other workers scattered in Canada, Australia, Germany, India, Ohio, Tennessee and Los Angeles.

Nicholson says not paying everyone Silicon Valley wages is saving the company millions annuallya sum that can make or break a fledgling startup.

"It's a painful decision to make," he said, "but we did that to increase the likelihood of our survival as a company."

Remote working is becoming increasingly viable as Silicon Valley shifts its focus from hardwareand the silicon chips that gave the region its nameto software and app development, Nicholson said. Engineers can code from anywhere, and there's no shipping costs associated with transporting their code around the globe.

"Startups that decide to keep all their employees physically in one office in the Bay Area," Nicholson said, "by default become vehicles that transfer cash from venture capitalists to Bay Area landlords."

Toni Schneider, a partner at San Francisco-based venture capital firm True Ventures, said nearly every company his team invests in has some remote workersit's become a "best practice" for a Silicon Valley startup. Schneider is the former CEO of Automattic, the company behind the WordPress blogging website, which started 12 years ago with a mostly remote team of employees who worked from home. Over time, Schneider said, Automattic began attracting tech talent who lived in the Bay Area but wanted to leave, and those who wanted to stay in the Bay Area but ditch their nasty commutes.

"We never had a problem finding people," Schneider said, "whereas every single startup in San Francisco, we ask them what their biggest problem is, and it's always hiring. And that's directly related to the cost of living."

Explore further Startup aims to poach workers at tech bus stops

2018 The Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.)

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Greenpeace activists stage a protest in Rio de Janeiro against Total's planned oil exploration near a huge coral reef off the coast of Brazil

A Brazilian prosecutor warned of "ecocide" in recommending against a drilling license for French oil major Total close to a huge coral reef near the mouth of the Amazon River.

The prosecutor's office for Amapa state said "the only way to guarantee avoiding environmental damage to the area is to deny the license."

"Authorizing oil drilling activity without adequate studies violates the international obligations that Brazil has signed," the prosecutor's office said late Wednesday, warning of "large-scale environmental destruction that would amount to ecocide and a crime against humanity."

The recommendation was sent to the government environmental agency Ibama, which has 10 days to respond.

On Tuesday, environmental campaigners Greenpeace said that a previously discovered coral reef had been found to extend right into where Total plans to drill.

The enormous reef was found in 2016, but is only now said to overlap directly with Total's blocks, 75 miles (120 km) off the Brazilian coast, the group said.

The finding, made during a research expedition, invalidates Total's environmental impact assessment, which is based on the reefs being located at least five miles (eight kilometers) from drilling, Greenpeace said.

Contacted by AFP, Total declined to comment.

In 2013, Total joined BP and Brazil's Petrobras to buy the exploration blocks near the mouth of the Amazon. But they have yet to secure the go-ahead from Brazilian environmental authorities to start drilling.

In August, the regulator Ibama told Total it would have to provide additional information.

Explore further Greenpeace finds coral reef in Total's Amazon drilling area

 2018 AFP
Female cichlid fish switch to filial cannibalism after longer periods without eggs. Credit: Michael Bernkopf/Vetmeduni Vienna

Cannibalism, the eating of conspecifics, has a rational background in the animal kingdom. It may serve as a source of energy-rich nutrition or to increase reproductive success. Some species do not even spare their own brood. Researchers from the Vetmeduni Vienna have now been able to show the trigger of this peculiarity in African cichlids. When their eggs were taken away for a prolonged period, the females of a cichlid fish species ate both their own eggs and foreign eggs. They quickly switched between parental duties and ensuring their own energy supply. The study was published in Animal Behavior.

In the eyes of the human beholder, the consumption of one's own offspring is not a particularly nice act, and it is also often viewed as maladaptive, that is, an aberration. However, under some circumstances this behaviour can be a useful way of terminating parental care. When the costs of providing care are extremely high or the benefits of performing care are especially low, parents will sometimes eat their own young. This is called filial cannibalism. This behaviour enables them to cease to care while recouping lost energy.

Most studies examining the link between the cost/benefit ratio of care and filial cannibalism have focused on species with male-only care. In contrast, filial cannibalism in species with biparental caring systems, i.e. where both males and females care for the offspring, has been rarely studied. Researchers from the Konrad Lorenz Institute of Ethology wanted to examine the transition from cannibal to caring parent in biparental species. They conducted experiments with Neolamprologus caudopunctatus, a biparental species of cichlid fish endemic to Lake Tanganyika, where it occurs along the Zambian shores.

A long time without parental care duties turns cichlids into cannibals

They concluded that it is important for the fish to perceive a continuous presence of eggs in their breeding cavity to keep acting in "parental mode"  it did not matter whether the eggs or hatched young were their own or mixed with foreign brood. Cannibalism occurred when eggs were taken away for extended periods and then returned. The extent of cannibalism was dependent on the size and age of the brood. "Our theory was that longer phases of parental care keep the fish in "parenting mode". In this condition it actually did not matter whether they were caring for their own or foreign eggs," explains behavioural ecologist Filipa Cunha-Saraiva. This likely has to do with hormonal changes happening due to a loss of visual and tactile stimuli. Spawning pairs, on the other hand, never engaged in egg cannibalism, whereas non-spawning pairs immediately devoured foreign broods of eggs.

Female cichlids eat their offspring more often than males

The scientists were also surprised to learn that across all experiments cannibalism was mostly performed by the females. Female filial cannibalism is often associated with increased environmental stress or reduced food provisioning. "Males were even actively prevented by females attending brood cavities from entering the cavity. This way the females effectively had the power to decide whether to terminate or continue parental care," Cunha-Saraiva explains This study is among the first to show that both females and males devour their own young. These results expand the scientific understanding of cannibalism in biparental species.

Explore further Why do some fish eat their own eggs?

More information: Filipa Cunha-Saraiva et al. From cannibal to caregiver: tracking the transition in a cichlid fish, Animal Behaviour (2018). Journal information: Animal Behaviour , Animal Behavior Filipa Cunha-Saraiva et al. From cannibal to caregiver: tracking the transition in a cichlid fish,(2018). DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2018.03.003
The interior of the earth is an immense source of energy. Now Norwegian and Italian researchers go to the depths to pick it up. Credit: Thinkstock

Norwegian research scientists are contributing to the development of the world's hottest geothermal well in a non-volcanic area. The goal is to exploit the inexhaustible supply of heat from the interior of the Earth, and this calls for equipment that can withstand the most extreme conditions.

An international research team recently completed a three-year EU project called DESCRAMBLE (Drilling in dEep, Super-CRitical, AMbients of continentaL Europe). Together, the project team has drilled a test well in a geothermal field in Tuscany in Italy. The Italian company Enel Green Power, a global producer of green energy, is heading the project, with SINTEF as its research partner. Together they are attempting to harness the natural forces found three kilometres closer to the Earth's core.

The borehole is the world's hottest geothermal well in a non-volcanic area. Because terrestrial heat is encountered close to the surface in Italy, the country is rich in areas suitable for geothermal drilling  with searing temperatures reaching 500-600 degrees Celsius, resulting in supercritical water that the researchers are hoping to discover. And they have very good reasons. If they can succeed in exploiting the energy in this water, they can drill geothermal wells that are ten times as effective as those currently in operation. This has the potential to reduce costs dramatically and pave the way for a fantastic energy future based on purely natural resources. However, in its supercritical phase, the liquid is corrosive and attacks any drilling equipment that encounters it.

Supercritical energy bomb

"We are faced with a lot of big challenges, but we've come a long way," says Magnus Hjelstuen, Research Manager at SINTEF Harsh Environment Instrumentation.

The measuring equipment SINTEF has developed as part of this project is a so-called "wireline logging tool" that can measure downhole temperatures and pressures. Such measurements are crucial in the search for the extremely energy-rich supercritical water. Temperature and pressure data indicate when the drill bit has entered a zone containing such water, and the well's geothermal properties (both the maximum temperature and temperature changes caused by drilling) will tell us how much energy the well can produce.

Since electrical cables do not function at temperatures over 350C, SINTEF's measuring equipment is battery-powered. The temperature is logged deep in the borehole and is read off when the device returns to the surface.

In its supercritical phase, the liquid is corrosive and attacks any drilling equipment that encounters it.

This is no simple task. At two to three kilometres into the Earth's interior the temperature and pressure rise enormously. Something very special happens when the temperature reaches 374 degrees and the pressure is 218 times the air pressure at the surface. We encounter what we call supercritical water. This water is in a physical state that progresses from liquid into gas  and from there into a supercritical phase, in which it is neither.

It is this special form of water, as yet undiscovered, that the researchers are looking for. To reach the conditions that make it supercritical, the water must have a temperature of at least 374C, under pressures of 200 bar.

"A water column at room temperature must be taken to a depth of 2.2 kilometres below the surface to reach a pressure of 220 bar," Hjelstuen explains.

But when the temperature of the water rises, its density falls. This means that we must go even deeper to pass 220 bar and attain supercritical conditions. If the water is contaminated with gases and minerals, which is always the case in a geothermal well, the temperature must be higher still for the water to become supercritical.

Extreme equipment

SINTEF uses electronics and sensors with extreme capabilities. Some of the components are in common use, while others are still at the prototype stage. The challenge for the Norwegian researchers has been to combine the sensors and electronics, and then develop computer software that enables the components to function together.

"Our challenge has been to find a combination of existing components which can perform optimally within our limitations in terms of instrument length, weight and diameter  not least in view of the environment the equipment will encounter in the well," says Hjelstuen.

The instrument is 2.6 metres long weighs 50 kilograms, but has a diameter of only 76 millimetres.

"For example, we use a micro-controller which functions at temperatures up to 300C. This is only available as an early prototype (engineering sample). So we've been working closely with the manufacturer to get it to function the way we want it to," he adds.

Intense pressure and temperature

At present, the limiting temperature for electronics is around 250C, and this means that the range of components available is very restricted. The number of suitable batteries is also not large. For example, the most robust batteries on the market work at temperatures of only 70 to 200C and would explode if subjected to a temperature of 215 degrees. So making measuring equipment can be a challenging process.

"Since we begin drilling at normal surface conditions, the temperature on a winter's day may be as low as 0C to start with, rising to over 400C at the bottom of a well. Tackling such fluctuations makes enormous demands on the equipment. We've created a sort of "reverse Thermos flask" in which the inside temperature is kept below 210 degrees so as to reduce the strain on the equipment," says Hjelstuen.

The sensors are trialled and tested before being shipped to the field.

"At every stage an enormous amount of testing must be carried out in a way that as closely as possible simulates the environment our instruments will encounter in the well. Among other things we have used a furnace at Raufoss to test the technology at temperatures up to 450C.

Enormous potential

In the process of harnessing the energy in the supercritical water, the researchers have made good use of the Norwegian petroleum industry's experience in drilling deep oil wells. The exploitation of geothermal heat has much in common with oil recovery. Petroleum technologists are therefore included in the team. However, whereas we have for many decades succeeded in exploiting the potential found in petroleum resources, nobody has yet managed to harness supercritical water.

"If we can succeed in exploiting geothermal heat there will be enough of it to supply the entire population of the planet with energy for many generations. There are nuclear power plants where water that meets the conditions for supercritical water is fed through turbines, so we know that we can succeed in exploiting the energy in such water once we have managed to extract it."

In the project's deepest descent into the Earth, the research team carried out measurements at a depth of 2810 metres. Here the temperature reached 443.6C.

Explore further Engineers drill world's hottest well hoping for clean energy eruption
In this March 13, 2018, photo, the logo of Huawei is displayed at its headquarters in Shenzhen in southern China's Guangdong Province. As trade disputes simmer between the U.S. and China, Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei is being squeezed out of American markets and is shifting its expansion efforts toward Europe and Asia. (AP Photo/Dake Kang)

As trade disputes simmer, Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, the No. 3 smartphone brand, is shifting its growth efforts toward Europe and Asia in the face of mounting obstacles in the U.S. market.

Shenzhen-based Huawei, the world's largest maker of telecoms equipment, has long coveted access to the U.S. but recently laid off key American employees at its Washington D.C. office.

The U.S. has regularly stymied Huawei's efforts to enter the America, citing national security concerns. Huawei has failed to find a U.S. carrier to partner with for its smartphones, and the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday approved a draft order that could damage Huawei's existing business in network gear. The order cited Huawei and its Chinese rival ZTE by name.

That came after Huawei canceled a planned January announcement that a major U.S. carrier would sell its smartphones for the first time. The company gave no details but news reports said that partner was AT&T Inc. and scrapped the deal under government pressure.

Huawei's struggles in the United States are in contrast to its booming business in developing countries and growing presence in Europe, where it has been working on next-generation, or "5G," wireless standards. The company's profits rose 28.1 percent in 2017, boosted by strong enterprise and consumer sales and booming business overseas.

In this March 13, 2018, photo, Jim Xu, vice president of Sales and Marketing at Huawei, pauses while speaking to reporters at Huawei's headquarters in Shenzhen in southern China's Guangdong Province. As trade disputes simmer between the U.S. and China, Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei is being squeezed out of American markets and is shifting its expansion efforts toward Europe and Asia. (AP Photo/Dake Kang)

The recent setbacks have left Huawei's future in the U.S. uncertain. Huawei recently let go of several American employees in their Washington D.C. office, including William Plummer, who spearheaded efforts to convince the U.S. to allow Huawei in for nearly a decade. Though Huawei declined to comment on the layoffs, the news was first reported by the New York Times and independently confirmed by the Associated Press.

"There is no change to our business strategy in the US," said Huawei spokesman Joe Kelly. "Any changes to staffing size or structure are simply a reflection of standard business optimization."

Kelly said fears that Huawei's network equipment could be used to collect sensitive information reflected "baseless suspicion." Experts say the concerns could be valid, but suspect they're mainly a pretext for limiting competition and allowing U.S. suppliers to charge higher prices.

"What we've seen so far suggests that there's not a lot of concrete evidence that Huawei poses a national security threat," said Josephine Wolff, Professor of Cybersecurity Policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. "It leads a lot of people to believe that this is more about trying to protect the U.S. tech sector."

In this March 13, 2018, photo, a Huawei employee looks up as he walks toward the company's headquarters in Shenzhen in southern China's Guangdong Province. As trade disputes simmer, Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, the No. 3 smartphone brand, is shifting its growth efforts toward Europe and Asia in the face of mounting obstacles in the U.S. market. (AP Photo/Dake Kang)

American companies have long chafed under Chinese regulations that require them to operate through local partners and share technology with potential competitors in exchange for market access.

Foreign companies are increasingly alarmed by initiatives such as Beijing's long-range industry development plan, dubbed "Made in China 2025." It calls for creating global leaders in electric cars, robots, and other fields.

"That sense that China is cultivating national champions, and cultivating companies within its own borders at the expense of other companies, has a lot of U.S. companies concerned about how much their intellectual property rights will be safeguarded there," Wolff said.

Huawei and ZTE's burgeoning 5G research is seen as a particular threat, as its expanded transmitting capabilities are seen as crucial for a host of emerging technologies based on artificial intelligence - including self-driving vehicles, robots and other machines that transmit vast amounts of data in real time.

In this May 26, 2016, photo, a man walks past a Huawei logo during a launch event for the Huawei Matebook in Beijing. As trade disputes simmer, Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, the No. 3 smartphone brand, is shifting its growth efforts toward Europe and Asia in the face of mounting obstacles in the U.S. market. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

ZTE faces devastating threats to its business after the U.S. Commerce Department blocked the company from importing American components for seven years, accusing the smartphone maker of misleading U.S. regulators after it settled charges of violating sanctions against North Korea and Iran.

But unlike ZTE, efforts to impede Huawei in the U.S. likely won't stop its rapid expansion elsewhere.

Last month, Huawei's president of consumer handsets Kevin Ho said the company is pivoting to Europe and developing Asian markets. He called them priorities "No. 1" and "No. 2."

Huawei chose to unveil its latest flagship phone last month at the Grand Palais in Paris, while in Finland, the company employs more than 300 engineers developing cameras, audio algorithms, and 5G technology. Many used to work at Finnish rival Nokia.

In this May 26, 2016, photo, attendees walk past an electronic display during a launch event for the Huawei Matebook in Beijing. As trade disputes simmer, Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, the No. 3 smartphone brand, is shifting its growth efforts toward Europe and Asia in the face of mounting obstacles in the U.S. market. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

Apart from expanding its clout on UN bodies that coordinate cellular technology standards, early on Huawei joined forces with European companies to develop 5G standards. In February, it completed the world's first 5G test call in partnership with London-based Vodafone.

Still, while Chinese trade relations with Europe remain calm, Washington has been warning officials in Canada and Australia about Huawei, raising questions about the company's long-term global prospects.

"Huawei is perceived differently in Europe but that's definitely a risk for the company," said Thomas Husson, principal analyst at technology research firm Forrester. "Let's not forget Europeans can still try to push in favor of European-based solutions from Nokia or Ericsson."

In this May 26, 2016, photo, attendees stand near a pillar with the Huawei logo during a launch event for the Huawei Matebook in Beijing. As trade disputes simmer, Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, the No. 3 smartphone brand, is shifting its growth efforts toward Europe and Asia in the face of mounting obstacles in the U.S. market. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

Explore further China's Huawei says to keep investing in US despite setback

 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Credit: Bill Selak Source: Flickr

Maths performance of disadvantaged pupils in England ranks in the lower half of developed countries, new analysis by UCL Institute of Education and the Education Policy Institute (EPI) reveals.

The report shows that England's disadvantaged pupils lag behind several other Western nations including Estonia, Canada, the Netherlands and Ireland, achieving around a third of a grade lower (on average).

Disadvantaged pupils in Asian nations of Macao, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan are even further ahead  with England performing around half a grade lower in maths.

Toby Greany, co-author of the report and Professor of Leadership and Innovation at UCL Institute of Education (IOE) said:

"It is clear that the ways in which education systems are designed and operate can make a real difference to equity as well as outcomes. Interestingly, only a subset of the higher performing countries around the world are strong in both respects.

"The English system does have several strengths, but the report also highlights areas that arguably require more focus, including how to minimise the impact of selection and ability grouping and how to enhance school engagement with families and wider services for the most vulnerable children."

England is marked by a long tail of underperformance amongst its disadvantaged pupils. Just 1 in 10 disadvantaged pupils in England achieve a high score in GCSE maths of grade 7 to 9 (A-A* under the old grading system).

The attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers in England is equivalent to one whole GCSE grade. On this measure of educational disadvantage, England ranks in the bottom half of developed nations, standing 27th out of 44 nations.

The report converts the latest results from the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) into GCSE grades, allowing for a direct comparison of pupil performance with England.

The report did show England's performance in reading is better than in maths. Disadvantaged pupils in England scored an average grade of 4.0 (a GCSE pass grade) and rank in the top half of developed nations  standing 17th out of the 44 nations.

Other leading Western nations such as Canada, Finland, Estonia, Norway and Ireland, all rank higher than England.

Additionally, all UK home nations have smaller disadvantage gaps than England. Wales scores considerably better than England on the disadvantage gap in reading (0.64)  ranking an impressive second place  only behind Macao  out of 44 OECD developed nations.

However, this could be because overall performance (amongst all pupils in the study) is, on average, poorer than in England. Northern Ireland and Scotland, with gaps of around two-thirds of a GCSE grade (0.66 and 0.68 respectively), also fare better than England on this measure.

The research finds that high performance and greater equity in educational opportunities and outcomes are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Countries which achieve both tend to have policies which avoid selection by ability and segregation between schools. They also tend to have a significant focus on attracting, supporting and retaining high quality teachers.

Commenting on the new report, Natalie Perera, report co-author and Executive Director of the Education Policy Institute (EPI), said:

"This report provides a reality-check on educational equality in England. While the gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers has narrowed slightly in recent years, in maths poorer pupils in England remain a full GCSE grade behind  a gap that is considerably greater than in some other Western countries. There is also much work to do with the overall performance of disadvantaged pupils in England, with only 1 in 10 achieving the very top grades in GCSEs.

"Although establishing England as a leading nation for supporting disadvantaged pupils remains a huge challenge, there are several countries which have seen success on both levels of equity, and performance. If we wish to improve on these measures and ensure our school system works for pupils of all backgrounds, learning from the experiences of these nations is essential."

More information: Educational disadvantage: how does England compare? Educational disadvantage: how does England compare? epi.org.uk/publications-and-re  age-england-compare/
Jorge Andrade, adaptive management coordinator at Terra Peninsular, holds a San Quintin kangaroo rat in the field. Credit: Sula Vanderplank, San Diego Natural History Museum

Researchers from the San Diego Natural History Museum (The Nat) and the non-profit organization Terra Peninsular A.C. have rediscovered the San Quintin kangaroo rat (Dipodomys gravipes) in Baja California; the Museum is partnering with the organization and local authorities on a conservation plan for the species.

The San Quintin kangaroo rat was last seen in 1986, and was listed as endangered by the Mexican government in 1994. It was held as an example of modern extinction due to agricultural conversion. In the past few decades, San Quintin, which lies 118 miles south of Ensenada, has become a major agricultural hub, converting huge areas of native habitat into fields and hot houses for tomatoes and strawberries.

Despite active searches and monitoring over the years, there had been no sign of the animal until this past summer, when Museum Mammalogist Scott Tremor and Research Associate Sula Vanderplank were in the field conducting routine monitoring of small mammal communities. Having read the field notes of the person who had seen it decades ago, they were aware of its former occurrence in the area, but were amazed to find four individuals by using traditional field techniques and live traps.

This animal is about 5 inches in length with a tufted tail. It is an herbivore that lives in arid lowlands and gets its name from its large, powerful hind feet that propel the animal in large bounds (like a kangaroo). It is larger than other kangaroo rats in the region, and is feistier than its relatives.

"Not only is this discovery a perfect example of the importance of good old-fashioned natural history field work, but we have the opportunity to develop a conservation plan based on our findings," said Tremor. "The ability to take our research and turn it into tangible conservation efforts is thrilling. It is a commitment to preserving the uniqueness of the Baja California Peninsula."

The discovery will be highlighted in an article by Tremor, Vanderplank, and Dr. Eric Mellink of the Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education of Ensenada, Baja California (CICESE) in the scientific journal Bulletin of the Southern California Academy of Sciences.

Video clip of a San Quintin kangaroo rat at rest. Credit: Sula Vanderplank, San Diego Natural History Museum

Since the initial discovery, the San Quinton kangaroo rat has been found to also persist inside the Valle Tranquilo Nature Reserve just south of San Quintin, which is owned and managed by the local non-profit organization Terra Peninsular A.C. This reserve is recognized as an area voluntarily destined for conservation by the National Commission of Natural Protected Areas (CONANP) and will protect the future of the species into perpetuity.

The Nat will work with Terra Peninsular and Dr. Exequiel Ezcurra, director of the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States (UC MEXUS), on a conservation plan for the small mammal communities of the area, with an emphasis on the San Quintin kangaroo rat.

"Terra Peninsular has been monitoring the nature reserves looking for this species. You can't imagine how happy we are to find out that after all these efforts and with the help of The Nat we can be part of this rediscovery and continue working on its protection," said Jorge Andrade, adaptive manager coordinator at Terra Peninsular, who has also been involved in the project. "It's very gratifying for us to think that the San Quintin kangaroo rat persists in the area to some extent, thanks to the efforts of the staff, board members, and associated researchers of our organization."

This plan, which is made possible with critical support from The JiJi Foundation Fund at the International Community Foundation, will be developed cooperatively with a working group created by Terra Peninsular and composed of local authorities, academic institutions and staff members. It will be written in both English and Spanish, will include restoration strategies, habitat improvements, molecular analysis of population health, land protection strategies and outreach and educational materials, and will identify key concerns for the future of the species.

The Museum's research department, the Biodiversity Research Center of the Californias, conducts field explorations and engages in collections-based research to document and conserve our region's natural history and biodiversity. This is the third mammal that was thought to be extinct that museum staff have rediscovered in the Baja California Peninsula in the recent past: others include the high elevation California vole (Microtus californicus huperuthrus) and the round-tail ground squirrel (Xerospermophilus tereticaudus apricus).

"These rediscoveries speak to hope and resilience in a changing world," said Vanderplank, who is also a science advisor at Terra Peninsular. "We are learning so much about this animal and its ecology, and we're delighted to know that it is permanently protected in the Valle Tranquilo Nature Reserve."

Explore further Most primitive kangaroo ancestor rediscovered after 30 years in obscurity

Provided by San Diego Natural History Museum
Credit: Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Who is making sure the world meets its energy needs while minimizing risks to the planet? Your first guess might not be the world's largest petroleum company. But during a sabbatical research project with Saudi Aramco, WPI professor Nancy Burnhaman avowed environmentalistlearned that, in fact, the company uses methods such as nanotechnology to extract resources with the least possible disruption of the environment.

"Before I learned much about oil companies, I thought of them as a typical environmentalist does," says Burnham, who has previously consulted with Saudi Aramco. Saudi Aramco is the state-owned oil company of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and a fully integrated, global petroleum and chemicals enterprise.

"It's true, oil companies have a lot of wealth. But they also bring us a valuable resource we've come to depend on, and most have made investments in renewable energy. They know, for the company's future, they have to start investing in renewables," she says.

During her sabbatical, Burnham, associate professor of physics and biomedical engineering, worked with the company's nanotechnology research center in Boston. The research focused on how to make oil extraction more efficient.

"It turns out, when you put an oil well down, the oil is not sitting there waiting for you. It doesn't all gush right out, like you see on television," she says. About 1025 percent of the available oil comes up by itself. The next 2025 percent is more difficult to extract, and the remaining 5070 percent is harder still, depending on the geology of the site, she explains.

Oil companies could leave the rest of the oil in place and move on to another field to take out the easier first 2550 percent. But that option is inefficient and short-sighted, Burnham explains. First, it requires a great amount of infrastructure to remove half the oil; it's inefficient and costly to pull up stakes and move to another site, leaving available oil behind. Also, "Many of the safety issues with oil extraction are associated with ground level spills. So the fewer oil wells we need, the lower the risk [of a spill] should be," Burnham adds.

Moreover, even a very optimistic timeline for the U.S. to go completely renewable is 30 years, and renewables are not a steady source of energy, she points out. In order to heat homes, power cars, and make products, oil companies can't afford to leave oil behind.

The solution is to coax the remaining oil out of the ground using tools and technology.

"Oil fields are very complicated, with many layers of rock. You can't just jump in a magic spaceship and fly down to see where it is. You need tools to help estimate where it is," Burnham says.

One technique takes advantage of having multiple wells in one field. Extracting from one well causes the oil below ground to flow a bit. By shooting engineered nanoparticles into the one well, you can monitor surrounding wells and in several weeks detect where the particles are emerging. This tells the engineers which way the oil is diffusing, which points to where future wells should be to get the rest of oil out, Burnham says.

Another challenge is that oil particles tend to stick to each other and other rock walls, making them hard to extract. That stickiness, plus the fluid's make-up of oil, brine, and water, make it chemically difficult for the particles to diffuse easily from one well to the next. Burnham and her Aramco colleague Shannon Eichmann have published a paper on how, through nanotechnology, engineers could modify the chemistry so the particles tend not to stick to the rock walls and migrate more easily to the next well.

Burnham's work has resulted in two papers, a manuscript under review, and three invited talks. She says her sabbatical gave her a new appreciation for rocks as nanostructures and taught her how to help people understand that oil companies could be thought of more broadly as energy companies.

"I really learned a lot. It was refreshing because the work was so different and I saw how things I know can be applied to a completely different field," she says.

Outgoing director of sustainability John Orr acknowledges that as green energy sources and technologies ramp up, it is important to make fossil fuel extraction as environmentally benign as possible.

"On campus and globally, opinions range widely regarding our extraction and use of petroleum products," Orr says. "Fortunately, a large and growing portion of the population recognizes the importance of moving to clean and renewable sources of energy as rapidly as possible. In the meantime, we must work to minimize the environmental harm of the production and use our carbon-based energy sources.

"Professor Burnham's research is an example of the scientific and technological work that is occurring at WPI to improve the balance between current societal benefits and long-term global sustainability," he says.

Burnham's experience gave her insight into the differences between industry and academia.

"Interacting with students, I can now say I have some experience in industry and can better advise students about their careers," she says. In fact, through her association with Saudi Aramco, she was able to recommend a WPI grad student for a job there. The student was subsequently hired, a result from her sabbatical that she finds very rewarding.
An artist's rendering of the twin Mars Cube One (MarCO) spacecraft as they fly through deep space. The MarCOs will be the first CubeSatsa kind of modular, mini-satelliteattempting to fly to another planet. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Many of NASA's most iconic spacecraft towered over the engineers who built them: think Voyagers 1 and 2, Cassini or Galileoall large machines that could measure up to a school bus.

But in the past two decades, mini-satellites called CubeSats have made space accessible to a new generation. These briefcase-sized boxes are more focused in their abilities and have a fraction of the massand costof some past titans of space.

In May, engineers will be watching closely as NASA launches its first pair of CubeSats designed for deep space. The twin spacecraft are called Mars Cube One, or MarCO, and were built at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Both MarCO spacecraft will be hitching a ride on the same rocket launching InSight, NASA's next robotic lander headed for Mars. The MarCOs are intended to follow InSight on its cruise through space; if they survive the journey, each is equipped with a folding high-gain antenna to relay data about InSight as it enters the Martian atmosphere and lands.

The MarCOs won't produce any science of their own, and aren't required for InSight to send its data back home (the lander will rely on NASA's Mars orbiters for that, in addition to communicating directly with antennas on Earth). But the twins will be a crucial first test of CubeSat technology beyond Earth orbit, demonstrating how they could be used to further explore the solar system.

Engineer Joel Steinkraus uses sunlight to test the solar arrays on one of the Mars Cube One (MarCO) spacecraft at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Credit: Jet Propulsion Laboratory

"These are our scouts," said Andy Klesh of JPL, MarCO's chief engineer. "CubeSats haven't had to survive the intense radiation of a trip to deep space before, or use propulsion to point their way towards Mars. We hope to blaze that trail."

The official names of these two scouts are "MarCO-A" and "MarCO-B." But to the team that built them, they're "Wall-E" and "Eva"nicknames based on Pixar characters. Both MarCOs use a compressed gas commonly found in fire extinguishers to push themselves through space, the same way Wall-E did in his 2008 film.

Survival is far from guaranteed. As the saying goes: space is hard. The first challenge will be switching on. The MarCO batteries were last checked in March by Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems of Irvine, California, which inserted each CubeSat into a special dispenser that will propel it into space. Those batteries will be used to deploy each CubeSat's solar arrays, with the hope that enough power will be left over to turn on their radios. If power is too low, the MarCO team may hear silence until each spacecraft is more fully charged.

Joel Steinkraus, MarCO lead mechanical engineer from JPL, makes an adjustment on the CubeSat prior to integration in a deployment box as seen inside the cleanroom lab at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo on Monday, March 12. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Tyvak/Cal Poly SLO

If both MarCOs make the journey, they'll test a method of communications relay that could act as a "black box" for future Mars landings, helping engineers understand the difficult process of getting spacecraft to safely touch down on the Red Planet. Mars landings are notoriously hard to stick.

The MarCOs could also prove that CubeSats are ready to go beyond Earth. CubeSats were first developed to teach university students about satellites. Today, they're a major commercial technology, providing data on everything from shipping routes to environmental changes.

NASA scientists are eager to explore the solar system using CubeSats. JPL even has its own CubeSat clean room, where several flight projects have been built, including the MarCOs. For young engineers, the thrill is building something that could potentially reach Mars in just a matter of years rather than a decade.

One of the MarCO CubeSats inside a cleanroom at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, before being placed into its deployment box. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Tyvak/Cal Poly SLO

"We're a small team, so everyone gets experience working on multiple parts of the spacecraft," Klesh said. "You learn everything about building, testing and flying along the way. We're inventing every day at this point."

The MarCOs were built by JPL, which manages InSight and MarCO for NASA. They were funded by both JPL and NASA's Science Mission Directorate. A number of commercial suppliers provided unique technologies for the MarCOs. A full list, along with more information about the spacecraft, can be found here.

NASA's Mars Cube One, or MarCO, is heading to deep space to test a first-of-its-kind technology demonstration: near-real-time communication between Earth and Mars using CubeSats. Credit: Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Explore further NASA prepares for first interplanetary CubeSats on agency's next mission to Mars
Smartphones have forever changed our lives. They also have forever changed the experience of the all-important high school ritual of going to the prom.

And it doesn't stop with those epic promposals.

There is the flurry of texts to organize dinner. Perhaps calling an Uber. A FaceTime chat with the parents (who are probably tracking their prom-goer's location by GPS). And then, of course, the social media: Instagram stories, Facebook updates, Snaps, tweets.

In this era, documenting the prom has perhaps become as important for teens as the prom itself. But being buried in your smartphone instead of rocking out on the dance flooris it becoming too much? Are high schoolers so focused on what to post on Snapchat they're not enjoying the moment?

With events like prom, the intense focus on the phone can mean missing chances to socialize in person. Michael Krefft, a 17-year-old senior who attends high school in Chicago, said while at prom, he noticed students focused more on getting Snaps or other pictures instead of soaking up the scene.

"I think we're more worried about getting it on our Snapchat and having others see what we're doing for the simple fact of not necessarily showing off, but showing that 'Hey I'm here doing fun things and I want to kind of brag about it," said Krefft.

At St. Francis High School in Mountain View, Calif., smartphones are a no-no at school dances. The one exception is prom. At the school's junior prom last weekend, students were allowed to use their smartphones to take pictures but any students spotted sitting down using their smartphones were asked to put them away.

"We explain to the kids that socializing is a big deal," said Margaret Miller, dean of students at St. Francis. "We want you to socialize, but we want you to be present to each other."

Ana Homayoun, a school consultant and author of the book Social Media Wellness: Helping Tweens and Teens Thrive in an Unbalanced Digital World, said in many social situations, teens' smartphones can act as a shield.

"They pull it out when they're waiting rather than having that uncomfortable silence or that moment of anticipation before somebody starts a conversation or they think of something to say," said Homayoun.

There's no argument that smartphone has changed how today's teens interact. With social media, hanging with friends goes beyond school grounds, extending to nearly all hours of the day and night.

As a result, critics have raised concerns whether smartphones are ultimately good for teens' mental health. Last year, researchers from San Diego State and Florida State universities found nearly half of teens who spent five or more hours in front of screens daily experienced thoughts of suicide or prolonged periods of hopelessness or sadness.

Kaia Opalinski, a 17-year-old junior from Delaware, said she spent her prom having fun with friends, only using her phone to take pictures or talk with family. "There is a certain place and time to use a phone," said Opalinski. "When I'm in the company of others, especially my friends, I tend to stay off and enjoy what's going on."

Nic Nash, an 18-year-old senior who attends high school in Little Rock, Ark., feels the same way about using his phone. He said he'll answer a text or take a Snap, but would rather spend time hanging out with friends during prom.

"When I'm with people, I like to interact with them, build memories with them," said Nash. "Nothing is more valuable than personal connections."

Prom can become a high-anxiety experience for teens, said Homayoun, and parents should have more compassion for teens having new experiences with the layer of documenting it online. "We haven't really given them the guidance and tools they need to start reflecting and making good, intentional, behavioral choices," said Homayoun.

Homayoun also advises teens to "figure out your why" when deciding whether it's worth using your smartphone. "There is a difference between capturing a moment versus just spending the entire time taking different poses because it prevents you from actually interacting."

At the same time, smartphones and online technology are a key way teens communicate. "If we didn't have our phones, we wouldn't have been able to capture the moment in the way that our generation does," said Nash.

For Opalinski, smartphone use is all about balance. 'It's okay to pull it out sometimes but not consistently."

Meanwhile, as prom season heats up, brace yourselves for the parade of selfies from the big dance.

Explore further Poll: Black teens most active on social media apps

2018 USA Today

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
The rapid growth of adventure tourism has created opportunities in New Zealand, but the well-being of tourist guides is often overlooked.

Yet guide behaviour plays a critical role in tourist satisfaction, and knowing how adventure tourism impacts the psychological well-being of its guides is vital to developing sustainable industry practices.

University of Otago Business School Tourism researcher Dr. Susan Houge Mackenzie says there is little research on guide-to-guide and guide-to-employer relationships, for example, because guide-to-client interactions and client experiences tend to receive the most attention from industry and researchers.

Dr. Houge Mackenzie's research into stress and employee experiences in tourism management overseas show demanding lifestyles, high-pressure work environments, and intensive co-worker interactions can have negative effects.

In particular this can affect interpersonal relationships, work-related anxiety, burnout and turnover of the adventure worker.

The emotional demands of service work stem from factors including training processes; interactions with clients, other guides and managers; safety management issues; environmental hazards and employment uncertainty due to seasonal demand or immigration issues.

Guides often experienced fear and anxiety, contrary to clients' 'heroic expectations' of fearless leaders. However, while client interactions and environmental hazards could cause anxiety, they could equally also generate intense excitement and enjoyment that supported well-being.

Other factors that influenced how guides experienced their work include confidence in personal skills; trust and personal relationships with co-guides; familiarity with their equipment; knowledge of the natural environment; physical fatigue; guide-to-client ratios; client characteristics; trip logistics; and the matching of challenges with their skills levels while training and guiding.

Dr. Houge Mackenzie says these findings are highly relevant now as tour guiding evolves from simply delivering facts and navigating destinations for clients, towards 'co-created' tours where guides facilitate meaningful intragroup or intrapersonal experiences.

That means guides have considerable influence on tourists' experiences, depending on how they 'broker' physical access and personal encounters. Understanding factors that benefit or detract from co-created tours and brokering may therefore optimise both guide and client experiences.

Dr. Houge Mackenzie is hoping to expand this research to focus on well-being in New Zealand destinations for guides, host communities and tourists. She is particularly interested in motivations and emotional experiences, including perceptions of risk and fear, and implications for guide and client well-being and safety.

About the research

Dr. Houge Mackenzie has studied stress and emotions resulting from guiding work and employer-guide interactions in several global adventure tourism destinations.

She was one of the first to analyse the emotional experience of team guiding in an adventure setting, by looking at a river guiding. This study analysed critical incidents from longitudinal information captured during a 10-year span of white-water river guiding in the northern and southern hemispheres.

She also evaluated physical access, encounters, understanding, and empathy on one of the world's most popular guided adventure tours: the Inca Trail in Peru.

Each of these four domains posed an opportunity for guides to create unique and meaningful tourism experiences, extending beyond more standardised, passive delivery of information to tourists.

The main message of these diverse studies is the need to reconceptualise tourism as a vehicle for individual growth and social well-being for both suppliers and consumers, rather than simply a means of economic growth.

"Thinking about tourism from this well-being perspective opens up a much broader range of strategies for sustainable tourism management.

"This research also encourages us to seriously consider the well-being of people and communities that provide tourism experiences alongside the tourist experience.

"Well-being research has the potential to inform the emerging field of positive tourism and assist with sustainable destination planning and strategies for employee, host community and tourist experiences."

Explore further Philippine tourist island scrambles as shutdown looms
Credit: ktsdesign, Shutterstock

Single-molecule magnets (SMMs) have been attracting a lot of attention recently. This is because of the increased demand for faster, longer-lasting and lower-energy IT systems, and the need for higher data storage capacity.

Partially supported by the EU-funded project PhotoSMM, researchers have introduced a novel design for SMMs which could lead to information storage on a nanometric scale. Their findings were published recently in the Angewandte Chemie journal. SMMs are a type of complex compound that can retain magnetic information at low temperatures. As explained by Dr Lucie Norel, one of the researchers in the team, "because of the prominent use of magnetisation-based information storage technologies in our daily life, SMM which are able to interconvert between two states with opposite magnetisation directions receive a great deal of attention."

Summarising the project objectives on CORDIS, she added: "The potential is huge for SMM systems that would demonstrate magnetic field and light-driven changes in both their optical and magnetic properties because they could reproduce on a single molecule the same type of magneto-optical effects which are used for some current data storage technologies."

Limitations of SMM

Computer hard discs are made up of magnetic material which records digital signals. The smaller the tiny magnets, the more information they can store. Even though hard disk drives are now measured in thousands of gigabytes rather than tens, there's still a need for developing new means of data storage that are dense and energy efficient. For example, in 2017 a group of researchers at IBM demonstrated the world's smallest magnetic memory storage device built around a single atom, as presented in the 'IEEE Spectrum' magazine. It's also possible to design molecules with customised magnetic properties which could have applications in quantum computing, thanks to the synthetic chemistry techniques developed by scientists working on SMMs.

However, moving these technologies out of the lab and into the mainstream remains a challenge because they don't yet work at ambient temperatures and require expensive methods for cooling. For instance, single atoms and SMMs could be cooled with liquid helium at a temperature of -269 C. In addition, the most powerful molecule magnets are mostly unstable in the presence of air and water, so scientists have been focusing on raising the temperature at which magnetic memory effect can be observed.

The SMMs designed by researchers from the Rennes Institute of Chemical Sciences, in collaboration with a team at the University of California, Berkeley, have the ability to be manipulated in the presence of air. This is important for their potential use in the magnetic storage of information, according to the team. In the authors' own words: "The first dysprosium complexes with a terminal fluoride ligand are obtained as air-stable compounds."

Dysprosium (Dy) is a chemical element of the lanthanide group of elements. In the Angewandte Chemie journal article, they conclude: "we have presented the first DyIII complexes bearing a terminal fluoride ligand and explored the influence of this highly electrostatic metalligand interaction on the electronic structure."

The PhotoSMM (Single Molecule Magnets light-switching with photochromic ligands) project will demonstrate that a light input can induce a modification of the magnetic and optical properties of monometallic or bimetallic SMMs.

Explore further Major leap towards data storage at the molecular level

More information: Lucie Norel et al. A Terminal Fluoride Ligand Generates Axial Magnetic Anisotropy in Dysprosium Complexes, Angewandte Chemie International Edition (2017). Journal information: Angewandte Chemie , Angewandte Chemie International Edition Lucie Norel et al. A Terminal Fluoride Ligand Generates Axial Magnetic Anisotropy in Dysprosium Complexes,(2017). DOI: 10.1002/anie.201712139
Scientists have identified a unique molecular binding mechanism that helps keep non-mammalian creatures in sub-zero temperatures from freezing. Antifreeze glycoproteins (AFGPs), produced by polar fishes, inhibit ice growth to prevent their bodies from freezing. This ice binding mechanism, which scientists knew was soft and flexible, remained a mystery until now. Using molecular simulations, scientists identified the details of this binding mechanism.

Their results were published in early April in the Journal of the American Chemical Society as a cover article.

"On the Earth, there are extremely severe environments, [including] the polar region," said Kenji Mochizuki, an assistant professor at the Institute for Fiber Engineering at Shinshu University in Japan and first author on the paper. "Most organisms cannot survive there, but some have adapted to these conditions by using the clever strategy of the inhibition of ice growth by antifreeze glycoproteins."

Polar fish, for example, exist in water that is about two degrees below freezing. They produce AFGPs with sugars attached, which stops the natural inclination of smaller ice crystals to bind into larger ice crystals. The problem with imaging these AFGPS and their attached sugars is that they do not have a specific three-dimensional shape, unlike other antifreeze proteins (AFPs). Without rigidity, it's difficult to image the protein to elucidate its structure and function.

Prior to the study by Mochizuki and his team, scientists didn't understand how the antifreeze glycoprotein interacted with the ice or how it differed from regular antifreeze proteins.

"Antifreeze proteins are rigid molecules and have well-defined, three-dimensional structures," Mochizuki said. "On the other hand, antifreeze glycoproteins are soft and flexible molecules, so they cannot be crystallized."

Flexible molecules tend not to bind well to ice, but scientists already knew antifreeze glycoproteins actually inhibited ice recrystallization better than typical antifreeze proteins, although they didn't know why, according to Mochizuki. In collaboration with the department of chemistry at the University of Utah, Mochizuki used molecular simulations to model antifreeze glycoproteins and examined how they interacted with the ice.

"We thought that the flexible feature of antifreeze glycoproteins might yield a unique binding manner," Mochizuki said. "We found that antifreeze glycoproteins show various binding conformations... and walk on ice surfaces until they come across a step of ice."

Mochizuki examined AFGP8, the shortest protein in the AFGP family. Mochizuki found that AFGP8 is segregated to hydrophilic and hydrophobic groups, the latter of which adsorbs to the ice surfacemeaning it stays as thin film over the ice. The adsorption of AFGP8 to the flat surface of ice weak, though, so AFGP8 moves across the ice surface until it selectively binds to the growth points of ice. Mochizuki dubbed this movement "walking."

"Their motion of wandering on [the] ice surface and finding a step is significantly different from the binding behavior of antifreeze proteins," Mochizuki said.

The finding has potential future applications for better preserving food and biological tissue under extreme temperatures. Mochizuki will continue to study AFPs and AFGPs to elucidate their mechanisms more precisely and hopefully design artificial proteins orpolymers which exhibit stronger antifreeze activities.

Explore further Antifreeze to improve aeroplanes, ice cream and organ transplants

More information: Kenji Mochizuki et al, Antifreeze Glycoproteins Bind Reversibly to Ice via Hydrophobic Groups, Journal of the American Chemical Society (2018). Journal information: Journal of the American Chemical Society Kenji Mochizuki et al, Antifreeze Glycoproteins Bind Reversibly to Ice via Hydrophobic Groups,(2018). DOI: 10.1021/jacs.7b13630

Provided by Shinshu University
Of the 123 people detained by police in Yerevan today as of 6pm, 85 have been released, after receiving summonses, and the other 38 face various criminal charges.

This information was released by Police Public Affairs Unit Director Edgar Janoyan.

Photo: Hakob Poghosyan

Note to Readers - After the National Assembly elected Serzh Sargsyan prime minister on April 17, Yelk Alliance MP Nikol Pashinyan, who spearheaded the Im Kayl (My Step) movement to prevent Sargsyans election, declared a Velvet Revolution to be carried out on a rotating basis. Protesters will briefly occupy government buildings, urging civil servants inside to join them. The intent is to disrupt the normal flow of life in downtown Yerevan, blocking traffic on major streets, and then hold evening rallies in Republic Square. Today marks the sixth day of civil disobedience in Yerevan.
A view of BELLA, the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator. Credit: Roy Kaltschmidt/Berkeley Lab

A new study calls for the U.S. to step up its laser R&D efforts to better compete with major overseas efforts to build large, high-power laser systems, and notes progress and milestones at the Department of Energy's Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) Center and other sites.

An investment in this so-called "second laser revolution" promises to open up a range of applications, from machining to medicine to particle acceleration, according to the December report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, which offers independent analysis to government agencies and policymakers.

The 280-page report, "Opportunities in Intense Ultrafast Lasers: Reaching for the Brightest Light ", recommends increased coordination and collaboration by government labs and agencies, universities, and industry to build up U.S. laser facilities and capabilities.

It also recommends that the DOE lead the creation of a national strategy to develop and operate large-scale national laboratory-based laser projects, midscale projects that could potentially be hosted at universities, and a laser tech-transfer program connecting industry, academia, and national labs.

The committee that prepared the report visited Berkeley Lab and other Northern California national labs, including SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The committee also visited the Extreme Light Infrastructure Beamlines laser facility site that is underway in the Czech Republic, and the Laboratory for Laser Energetics of the University of Rochester in New York.

At the DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), BELLA scientists are working to develop laser-based acceleration techniques that could lead to more compact particle accelerators for high-energy physics and drivers for high-energy light sources; also, the report notes, "laser expertise and utilization" that had been concentrated at other laboratories "is now broadening with plans for utilization of lasers at (Berkeley Lab)" and elsewhere.

BELLA has made progress in demonstrating the rapid acceleration of electrons using separate stages of laser-based acceleration by forming and heating plasmas in which a powerful wave is created for electrons to "surf" on.

"There's a lot of work that's been done already, and Berkeley Lab has been a key developer for the vision of where things need to go," said Wim Leemans, director of the BELLA Center and the Lab's Accelerator Technology & Applied Physics Division.

This map shows the location of petawatt-class lasers worldwide, and the concentration of petawatt (PW) capacity in Europe, Asia, and the US A petawatt is 1 quadrillion watts. Credit: J.L. Collier and The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

Berkeley Lab was home to a pioneering experiment)in 2004 that showed laser plasma acceleration can produce relatively narrow energy spread beams - reported in the so-called "Dream Beam" issue of the journal Nature - and in 2006 used a similar laser-driven acceleration technique to accelerate electrons to a then-record energy of 1 billion electron volts, or GeV. That achievement was followed in 2014 by a 4.2 GeV beam, using the powerful new laser that is at the heart of the BELLA Center and will be key to its ongoing campaign for 10 GeV. In 1996, Berkeley Lab also logged the first demonstration of X-ray pulses lasting just quadrillionths of a second with a technique known as "inverse Compton scattering," the report notes.

K-BELLA: combining speed and power

"What industry is seeing is the push toward higher-average-power lasers and ultrafast lasers, and it's starting to impact machining and industrial applications," Leemans said. "That's really good news for us." In laser lingo, average power relates to how much total power the laser puts out over time, counting the pulses and the "off time" between pulses, while the peak power is that of an individual pulse.

A rapid-fire rate of high-power pulses gives a laser higher average power and can potentially be applied to a wider range of uses. The National Academies report recommends that U.S. scientific stakeholders should work to define the technical specifications in laser performance goals, such as targets for peak power, repetition rate, length of pulses, and the wavelength of laser light.

In 2012 the BELLA Center's laser set a record by delivering a petawatt (quadrillion watts) of power packed into pulses that measured 40 quadrillionths of a second in length and came at a rate of one per second.

A new goal is to up this pulse rate to 1,000 per second, or a kilohertz, for a next-gen upgrade dubbed K-BELLA. Producing pulse rates of up to 10,000 or 100,000 per second could make this machine relevant for a new type of laser-based particle accelerator.

"There are lots of applications for a k-BELLA-style laser," Leemans said. The vision is for k-BELLA to be a collaborative research facility that would be open to scientists from outside the Lab, he said, which also syncs with the recommendations in the report to foster a more cooperative environment for laser science and scientists. Forging and maintaining connections to other world-class laser centers is also key for the U.S. laser program, the report notes.

Another upgrade that may be useful to the U.S. laser program is the addition of a second beamline at BELLA, Leemans said. A second beamline could enable exotic collisions between a beam of light and an electron beam, or between two beams of light.

Laser-produced beams of light elements, and laser-produced low-energy electron beams, could also be pursued at BELLA to develop the biomedical basis for new types of medical treatments that better target cancers, for example. "We look forward to enhancing our own laser capabilities at Berkeley Lab while working with our partners to strengthen the nation's laser R&D efforts," said James Symons, associate laboratory director for physical sciences. "Higher average power lasers will be essential for all practical applications of laser plasma accelerators."

Explore further BELLA laser achieves world record power at one pulse per second
Dam reservoir in Syria. Credit: Olli Varis

In May 2018, South Africa's Cape Town may become the first city in the world to fully shut off its water.

The taps running dry for almost four million people would be a drastic consequence of population growth, uncontrolled water consumption and drought in recent years. Residents would have to collect their small daily water allowances from distribution points.

And, if you believe the forecasts, there's much worse to come. Climate change and population growth will make water shortages more common all over the world.

Estimates say that by 2040, half of the global population will live in regions with severe water shortages.

Water is becoming blue gold. It already is like that in many countries. According to Unesco, Saudi Arabia already uses 25% of the oil and gas it produces to power desalination facilities that turn seawater into potable water. The cost and the amount of emissions are enormous.

Water is a matter of life and death. One half of the world's hospital beds are taken by people who have fallen ill because of unclean drinking water. Water shortages drive people from their homes and lead to conflicts.

So why is it so difficult to solve the water crisis?

The issue of water relates to everything

If visitors from outer space were to examine the Earth, they might be surprised to hear that our blue planet suffers from water shortages. But the vast majority of the fluid that covers our ball of dirt is seawater, which isn't much use to us. Only three percent is freshwater, which can be drunk and used to irrigate crops.

Even this small percentage would be plenty for humanity if it were evenly distributed across the different regions, if the distribution network functioned effectively and reliably in all places, if rain fell on the fields in appropriate amounts and at the right times, if water were consumed sustainably without polluting reservoirs, and if efforts were also being taken to curb climate change, which makes droughts and storms worse.

That's a lot of ifs. The water question is difficult because it does not involve a single problem, which could be solved by, for example, adopting one new technology.

Instead, it consists of a bunch of different challenges associated with, among other things, population growth, climate conditions, ecosystem health, industrial and agricultural resource utilisation as well as sanitation and hygiene.

Many of the world's major development trends also involve the issue of water. China's eagerness to purchase land in Africa is partly driven by the goal of outsourcing food production as well as land and water use beyond its national boundaries. Control of limited water resources is also one way to prop up power structures.

Water is a key question in urban growth as well.

The world's growing population is flocking into cities, and this will lead to chaos unless functioning water and waste management processes are put in place. The construction of proper infrastructure calls for both capital and political will.

A chance to achieve real results

There's been no shortage of motivation, says Olli Varis, Professor of Water Resource Management at Aalto University, about his work.

Varis is an internationally recognised expert in the sustainable utilisation of water resources and other global water issues. For decades, he has engaged in practice-oriented research work especially in and around the Mekong River Basin in Southeast Asia.

Currently, Varis is taking part in, among other things, Aalto University's New Global project, which seeks to identify innovations that could tackle the world's major challenges.

His motivation is explained not only by the issue's importance, but also by the possibility of achieving real results.

Xiamen, China. Credit: Olli Varis

"In East and Southeast Asia, you get the feeling that your work brings added value and benefits. Societies have the capacity and also a burning desire to receive new knowledge. For a researcher, it is motivating to have someone listen to what you have to say," Varis says.

In Southeast Asia, it is quite evident that water shortages are about more than just a concrete sparsity of water. The floods that afflict low-lying areas also lead to crises when polluted water mixes with cleaner water resources or when torrential downpours wash the fields of their nutrients.

It is easy to also see how big a role water plays in economic growth and urban development when examining East and Southeast Asia.

"Societies differ quite markedly from one another in their exposure to problems. The biggest problem for the rapidly developing Asian countries is, in my opinion, how to not ruin their environment when economic growth is rapid and population densities preposterous," Varis says.

Research data aids administration

One way to solve water crises is to generate research data. Large data banks on, for example, the behaviour, water quality and agricultural connections of the Mekong River as well as its impact on urban water supply have had a tangible positive impact on decision-making in various countries and areas.

Scientific knowledge, such as the modelling of a river's behaviour, can help prevent crises. The adverse effects of floods can be reduced with flood warning systems. Disputes regarding water use are easier to resolve when researched facts can be brought to the negotiation table.

Water flows without regard for national borders. The Mekong meanders through the territories of six countries. The more populations grow and urbanisation progresses, the harder the strain and use pressure on the world's water systems. Whether a country is located at the headwaters or downstream of a river can easily become an issue of crucial importance.

"China and Laos are building lots of dams and hydropower in the upper reaches of the Mekong, which makes the countries lying downstream unhappy. And disputes are not limited to just the national level. Farmers in all countries can take one side and resist dams, while urban dwellers and industries that need affordable electricity will consider the building of dams quite desirable," Varis says to describe the complexity of disputes.

Water wars and diplomacy

Some threat projections are dotted with water wars. If water shortages get worse, it may be that people will be ready to take up arms and violently compete for vital resources.

Simmering disputes are ever-present. Right now, at least twenty conflicts that relate to the utilisation of water resources are ongoing around the world. Egypt is quarrelling with Ethiopia about a major dam project on the Nile, while a couple of years ago India shut down trade crossing the Nepalese border partially because of reasons associated with water resource utilisation.

For this, we need water diplomacy, says Senior Water Adviser Antti Rautavaara from the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.

Water diplomacy has been practised around the world for ages. Finns have been actively involved in peace mediation and the negotiation of UN transboundary water treaties.

Antti Rautavaara's work includes advising the various departments of the Foreign Ministry about water issues and providing support for Finnish foreign affairs from the perspective of water supply. His remit is expansive. International water disputes, building lavatories in poor villages and water shortages caused by natural phenomena are some of the varied topics he deals with.

"Sometimes it makes most sense to prevent crises in collaboration with NGOs, sometimes through research cooperation and at other times by playing to role of mediator in a foreign policy question," Rautavaara says.

The Ministry for Foreign Affairs is also responsible for Finland's development cooperation, which involves solving issues like water supply in the world's poorer regions.

"Just over the last year and a half, we have provided a water supply for 1.3 million people and latrines for more than five million. This is about more than just comfort, as it enables hundreds of thousands of young children to survive instead of getting killed by diseases caused by poor hygiene," Rautavaara points out.

Solar-powered desalination

The taps being turned off in Cape Town gives rise to the question: where can we find more water now?

Bangkok, Thailand. Credit: Olli Varis

Espoo-based Solar Water Solutions is ready to provide one possible solution. The company has cooperated with Aalto University's Department of Energy Technology to develop water purification technology. Drought-stricken South Africa is one target for the firm while it seeks out initial business opportunities. CEO Antti Pohjola says that the devices manufactured by the company are the world's first to make seawater potable using only solar power.

There's lots of interest in solar power elsewhere, too, but it is difficult to create the steady pressure required for the treatment process with it, which is why the large desalination plants in the Middle East, for example, still burn fossil fuels.

At its Espoo facility, Solar Water Solutions manufactures smaller treatment devices suitable for producing 1250 cubic metres of water per day. The company makes larger, container-type devices that can supply drinking water for a village, school or hotel, for example, while its smaller consumer products can, among other things, be used to make potable water in the archipelago.

Even flood water can be purified

Water technology is a hot sector, but most solutions are still small-scale and suitable for limited use. However, Antti Pohjola believes that there will be plenty of demand for small-scale water production as well as ancillary and backup water supply systems.

"In Africa especially, water supply is to a very large extent based on distributed solutions," he says.

Solar Water Solutions utilises a method called reverse osmosis. Put simply, the water passes through membranes that contain holes large enough to allow water molecules to pass, but which impurities like bacteria and salt cannot penetrate.

The same technique can be used to, for example, make well water or dirty flood water drinkable.

The growth prospects are so promising that the company is interested in recruiting students graduating from, for example, Aalto University into its production and international sales functions.

Their innovation is attracting interest in the Middle East as well. The company was one of three finalists in a United Arab Emirates design competition, which sought solutions for seawater desalination.

Price is a major obstacle for the proliferation of the company's wares. Smaller consumer products cost about 3,000, but the larger devices can go as high as 100,000.

Pohjola says that, over 15 years, the price of a water litre produced with one of their large devices comes to just 0.1 cent, so the investment pays for itself. However, many parties in the developing countries cannot access sufficient funding, and as NGOs, for example, typically operate with very tight budgets, the company is also developing a leasing option.

Food choices matter

Should you take shorter showers? We here in Finland have plenty of water, so a lot of people wonder how any water crisis could affect them.

Professor Olli Varis says how the Finns splash about with their water is of no consequence to the world's water situation as long as we take care of our own water supply. It is, of course, important to use hot water sparingly to conserve energy.

By contrast, we contribute quite clearly to the global water shortage as consumers of food and goods. A significant portion of our water consumption takes place outside of Finland, out of our own sight.

Everything that is produced for us has a water footprint. When you drink a cup of coffee, you're effectively also gulping down a 150 litres of water used to produce the coffee beans. Meat production consumes many times more water than plant cultivation, while rice is wasteful when compared to potatoes.

Food waste also involves squandering water on a massive scale. Agriculture accounts for 70% of freshwater consumption, and a third of the food produced winds up as wastage on fields, in storage, transport, shops or households. In Africa, agriculture is often inefficient, while in the West, waste mostly happens at the other end of the chain.

Estimates say that eliminating half of the world's food waste by 2030 would provide food for more than a billion people, thus making the utilisation of precious water much more efficient. This provides food for thought, as the numbers match the projected growth in the global population over the same period.

Explore further Researchers pilot system using electrodialysis to produce safe drinking water
"This was an extremely nasty campaign of politically motivated cyber terrorism," judge Charles Haddon-Cave said at the sentencing of kane Gamble at London's Old Bailey criminal court for accessing email accounts of US intelligence officials

A British teenager who accessed the email accounts of top US intelligence and security officials including the head of the CIA was sentenced to two years in prison on Friday.

Kane Gamble, 18, founder of Crackas With Attitude, will serve his sentence in a youth detention facility.

"This was an extremely nasty campaign of politically motivated cyber terrorism," judge Charles Haddon-Cave said at the sentencing at London's Old Bailey criminal court.

"The victims would have felt seriously violated," Haddon-Cave said, adding that Gamble had "revelled" in the attacks.

Gamble was accompanied by his mother in court.

He was 15 and 16 when, from his bedroom in Coalville, central England, he managed to impersonate his targets to get passwords and gain highly sensitive information.

He impersonated then Central Intelligence Agency chief John Brennan in calls to the telecom companies Verizon and AOL.

Several sensitive documents were reportedly obtained from Brennan's private email inbox and Gamble managed to get information about military and intelligence operations in Iran and Afghanistan.

"It also seems he was able to successfully access Mr Brennan's iCloud account," prosecutor John Lloyd-Jone said earlier.

Gamble called AOL and initiated a password reset, and took control of the iPad of Brennan's wife.

Gamble also targeted then US secretary of homeland security Jeh Johnson and made calls to his phone number.

He left Johnson's wife a voicemail saying "Am I scaring you?" and managed to get a message to appear on the family television saying: "I own you".

Other targets included then US president Barack Obama's deputy national security adviser Avril Haines, his senior science and technology adviser John Holdren, and FBI special agent Amy Hess.

Gamble gained extensive unauthorised access to the US Department of Justice network and was able to access court case files, including on the Deepwater oil spill.

The British teenager gave some of the material he managed to access to WikiLeaks and boasted that he had a list of all Homeland Security employees.

Gamble was arrested at his home on February 9 last year at the request of the FBI.

He claimed he was motivated to act out of support for the Palestinians, and due to the United States "killing innocent civilians", the prosecutor said.

Explore further UK teen pleads guilty to hacking CIA chief's computer

 2018 AFP
" " Roasting coffee beans definitely affects their flavor, but where the beans are harvested has a huge influence on taste, as well. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Let's get this out of the way first: The coffee beans that we use to caffeinate ourselves actually come from seeds tucked inside the cherry fruit (yes fruit) that grow on coffee trees. And like a lot of fruiting trees, coffee trees can be rather fickle in where  and how well  they thrive.

While there are up to 100 known species of coffee plants and trees in the coffee genus (Coffea) around the world, the Arabica coffee tree (Coffea arabica) is by far the most popular in the coffee market, taking up 60 to 70 percent of the share. Robusta (Coffea canephora or Coffea robusta) takes up most of the rest, though with twice the caffeine as Arabica, its taste is known to offend.

More than likely, Arabica is what's in your morning cup. It's also among the most sensitive to climate, elevation and disease. It grows best in the so-called Coffee Belt  also referred to as the Bean Belt. (More about that in a moment.)

First, some specifics on Arabica:

The Arabica tree needs a somewhat particular mix of hot and cool weather to grow its best beans: a temperature range between 59 to 75 degrees Fahrenheit (15 to 23 degrees Celsius), with ideal temperatures between 64 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit (17 to 21 degrees Celsius).

It needs lots of rain (but not too much): between roughly 59 and 98 inches (1.5 and 2.5 meters) of annual rainfall, with a roughly three-month dry season to coincide with harvesting, processing and drying of beans.

It flourishes in higher elevations (but not too high): Arabica grows between 1,800 feet (548 meters) to upwards of 8,500 feet (2,590 meters) above sea level, with the sweet spot somewhere above 5,000 feet (1,524 meters).

Elevation is key to creating a flavorful coffee  hot-and-cold climes produce beans that are smaller, denser and pack more flavor that coffee aficionados (and regular Joes) appreciate.

To explain why, Jordan Chambers, a wholesale educator for Chicago coffee seller Intelligentsia Coffee, uses the 2004 movie "Sideways," which is set in California wine country, as an example. Chambers espouses the benefits of the region's unique climate on the grape.

"When [Paul Giamatti's character] talks about Pinot Noir, he says it's a fighter and it takes extra effort and work, and that's why he enjoys that in the cup," Chambers explains. "The same thing happens with higher-elevation coffee."

Bill Nigut, a green coffee buyer for Intelligentsia, adds: "When the coffee tree is at a higher elevation, it's closer to the sun so it's exposed to more UV rays during the day. A lot of people think that those UV rays help with flavor development."

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Earth's Bean Belt

While coffee was discovered in Ethiopia over a millennium ago, thanks to human intervention and commercialization it now grows around the world, thriving in the specific conditions we mentioned above.

But that brings us to the so-called Coffee Belt  or Bean Belt  where virtually all of the world's commercial coffee is grown. It circles the planet between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn  the most northerly and southerly circles of latitude on Earth where the sun shines directly overhead. The equator is the dividing line between them.

In that belt, we find 29 coffee-growing countries:

In Africa it includes the nations of Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, Tanzania and Zambia. In Asia the Coffee Belt encompasses India, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Vietnam and Yemen. North, Central and South America comprise of many nations, including Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Hawaii, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru and Venezuela. Those countries in the Bean Belt provide us with the estimated 2.25 billion cups of Joe every day around the world.

Brazil is the world's largest coffee producer, by a long shot, taking up about a third of the world market. One reason: It's a big country in the Coffee Belt, with a coffee-friendly geography and climate. About 10,000 square miles (25,899 square kilometers) of Brazil are covered by coffee plantations  an area about the size of the state of Maryland.

" " The Coffee Belt falls between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn and includes 29 coffee-growing countries in Africa, Asia and North, Central and South America. HowStuffWorks

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The Belt's Best Coffee

Despite being the largest coffee producer, Brazil doesn't necessarily produce the "best" coffee. So what does? "The No. 1 thing that will mess up coffee is at origin," Chambers says. For instance, coffee cherries ripen at different times, even those on the same tree.

"It takes a pretty specific expertise to know when [cherries] are at maximum ripeness," Nigut says. "There's a lot of work that goes on at the farms over just picking them at the right time."

The picked cherries then go through varying processes that separate the cherry from the two seeds (beans) inside, and the beans are then washed and dried for up to two weeks before being packed into jute bags and sent to consumers for roasting, brewing and drinking. Harvesting, production and roasting also positively and negatively affect flavor.

All of these things go into creating what amounts to the many tastes, notes, hints and impressions of the coffees that come from the Coffee Belt. The Specialty Coffee Association even created an infographic wheel of the dozens of flavors one might encounter when drinking a cup of coffee.

"The three things we look for in coffee are bitterness, acidity and sweetness," Nigut says. "Any good coffee that you're drinking is going to have some balance of those three things."

Both Chambers and Nigut are partial to African coffees. Because of altitude and climate, the coffees from there are more dynamic, Chambers says. "They're going to be super complex. You'll have more flavor thoughts and ideas when you're drinking it than if you're drinking coffee from South America.

"Some of the coffees in South America," Chambers adds, "... taste like a chocolate-covered cherry when they're really, really good. There's not a lot of that tart acidity that you can get in a lot of African coffees. When you get into Central America coffees, they're just pretty nutty. There's not a lot of acidity to them because they're lower elevation."

Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Vietnam, Thailand and other Far East producers often cultivate robusta. Chambers is not a fan of this bean. "Go lick your car tire. That's what it tastes like," he says.

If he had to choose one cup of coffee, Chambers likes the beans from the Yirgacheffe region of Ethiopia. Nigut is partial to the areas around Mt. Kenya, in the East African country, where he travels for work.

"It's really high altitude," he says, "and there's volcanic soil that's really good for development."

Now That's Special According to the Specialty Coffee Association, the retail value of the U.S. coffee market in 2015 was estimated to be $48 billion, with specialty coffees comprising 55 percent of the market share.
By John Geddie

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Singapore is very vulnerable to an escalation of a trade dispute between the world's two major economies, the United States and China, the city-state's prime minister said in an opinion piece published by the Washington Post.

In his article titled 'Nobody wants a trade war', Lee Hsien Loong said that even wide-ranging trade initiatives such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership would not compensate for the damage caused by a trade war for most countries in the Asia-Pacific region.

"Singapore is a global hub that connects the economies of the United States and Asia. We are a small, open economy with trade flows more than three times our GDP," Lee said.

"A trade war between the two largest economies in the world will have a big, negative impact on Singapore."

In the latest escalation in a widening trade row, this week the United States said it had banned American companies from selling parts to Chinese telecom equipment maker ZTE for seven years.

China announced hefty anti-dumping tariffs on imports of U.S. sorghum and measures on synthetic rubber imports from the United States, European Union and Singapore.

While Singapore last week tightened its monetary policy for the first time in six-years, saying its economy was expected to continue growing steadily, it also acknowledged risks from the trade dispute.

Aside from the economic impact, Lee said strained ties between the superpowers would make it harder for them to cooperate on other "pressing issues" such as North Korea's nuclear weapons programme, security and climate change.

"Ultimately, what is at stake is war and peace, and the security and stability of the world," Lee said.

(Reporting by John Geddie; Editing by Robert Birsel)
MANILA, Philippines  Thirty-one Filipino fishermen, on board Barko ng Republika ng Pilipinas (BRP) Lapu-Lapu of the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) arrived in Davao City on Friday after being detained in Indonesia.

The Indonesian Navy turned over the Filipino repatriates on April 13, three days after the conduct of boarder patrol exercises (Corpat Philindo 18) in Indonesia.

They were detained in Indonesia for illegal entry, fishing and overstaying.

Fifteen of them hail from General Santos City; seven from Zamboanga City; four from Davao; 2 from Saranggani province while the rest are from Tawi-Tawi.

According to Special Assistant to the President (SAP) Christopher Bong Go, the government will address the matter at the ASEAN meeting to speed up the process of repatriation for the remaining 46 Filipino fishermen detained in Indonesia.

The secretary added that the president wants to establish an office that will prioritize the concerns and needs of fishermen to prevent similar incidents from happening again.

Meanwhile, repatriated Randy Capricho, 31 from General Santos City was grateful to see his wife and 8-month old child.

Capricho was detained in Indonesia for six months after his transfer to the immigration.

Mahirap kami masyado, Maam, dahil kami sa preso kumain lang kami ng kangkong, he said.

(It was difficult for us Maam, because all we ate in prison was watercress.)

The repatriates received cash assistance and food packs from the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), assorted vegetable seeds from Department of Agriculture (DA) and some fishing gadgets from BFAR.

After DWSD accomplished several documents needed, the repatriates may return to their families today. Marisol Montano | UNTV News & Rescue

The post 31 Filipino fishermen detained in Indonesia return home appeared first on UNTV News.
American teenager who was abandoned as a baby in China issues appeal to find birth parents

An 18-year-old American woman who was abandoned as a baby in China has issued an appeal to find her birth parents, a news website reported.

The woman, who was referred to only by her first name Erika, was found abandoned outside Hengyang Social Welfare Institute in central Chinas Henan province when she was just two months old, Thepaper.cn reported.

She told the news portal she had first visited Hengyang two years ago to find her parents but drew a blank that time.

Now she is once again trying to find her biological parents, hoping to reach them online through a video she posted, called Looking for her parents who left her at the gate of the Hengyang Social Welfare Institute.

Chinese woman donates her eyes in dying wish to see long-lost son again

She said she was making a final effort before she begins her studies at George Washington University in Washington later this year.

Erika, whose Chinese name was Yang Bing, was born in October 1999, but was abandoned by her parents two months later.

She spent nine months in the Hengyang Social Welfare Institute before being adopted in August 2000 by a single mother in Indiana.

When I was very young my American mother told me I was adopted and she wasnt my biological mother, but I was ignorant and didnt know what it meant, she said.

But, by the age of 16, Erika said she had started to question why she was not in China and where her birth parents were, the report stated. That year she decided to visit China.

Mentally ill Chinese man lost for a year reunited with family thanks to facial recognition technology

I am very supportive of her, and was not surprised she wanted to go, her mother Roberta, who has since adopted another, now 12-year-old, girl from South America, was quoted as saying.

In late 2016, the duo travelled to China for one week in search of Erikas parents, to no avail.

She has since returned twice in as many years to learn Chinese, but has still not found her biological parents.

Story continues

A similar video was also posted online on Wednesday by 11 girls, aged between 12 and 21, from the US, Britain, Canada and the Netherlands, who are looking for their birth parents in southern Chinas Hunan province.

This article American teenager who was abandoned as a baby in China issues appeal to find birth parents first appeared on South China Morning Post

For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2018.
A group of amorous couples and accused sex workers were publicly whipped for breaking Islamic law in Indonesia's Aceh Friday, just a week after the province pledged to move the widely condemned practice indoors. More than a thousand people, including dozens of tourists from neighbouring Malaysia, jeered and screamed abuse at the group of three men and five women as they were flogged on a stage outside a mosque in the capital Banda Aceh. Some snapped pictures as a hooded figure rained down lashes from a rattan cane on their backs, with each getting between 11 and 22 strokes. The couples were whipped for showing affection in public, while two of the women were suspected sex workers, officials said. Aceh is the only province in the world's most populous Muslim-majority country that imposes Islamic law. Flogging is a common punishment for a range of offences -- from gambling, to drinking alcohol to having gay sex or relations outside of marriage. The conservative region on the northern tip of Sumatra island passed a regulation a week ago that would see criminals whipped only behind prison walls. It was not clear when the new rule would come into effect. The move was in response to a wave of international criticism over the practice, which has included flogging members of the vulnerable LGBT community and, in some cases, non-Muslims. Non-Muslims can usually choose whether or not to be punished under religious law and sometimes opt for a painful flogging to avoid a long court process and jail term. Rights groups have derided the punishment as cruel and last year Indonesia's President Joko Widodo called for an end to public whippings in Aceh. Around 98 percent of the province's five million residents are Muslims, subject to religious law, including the public whippings which came into practice around 2005. Under the new rules, caning cannot be recorded anymore and only journalists and adults can witness the punishment inside prisons. Children have often been present at public canings. Some conservative groups are protesting against the end of public whippings, saying it has a strong deterrent effect on crime. "Today's flogging is evidence that (the government) and our people are still committed to implementing Islamic law," said Banda Aceh's deputy mayor Zainal Arifin. "This is not only about physical punishment for violators, but also to set an example for members of the public who witness the flogging directly or watch it on social media." However, Arifin insisted the latest whippings were not an act of defiance against fresh rules set by the province. "We understand that the regulation has not yet come into effect and the prison is not yet ready to (host floggings) so that is why we are still doing it (in public)," he said. "Until the new regulation is officially in place we will carry on as usual."
Tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets of Armenia over the last week to protest what they say is a power-grab by the ex-president after he moved to become prime minister. Here are profiles of the veteran politician Serzh Sarkisian and opposition leader Nikol Pashinyan: - Sarkisian: balance abroad, corruption at home - A shrewd former military officer, Sarkisian has led Armenia since 2008 but has held high posts in the South Caucasus country ever since 1991, when the country became independent following the collapse of the USSR. The 63 year-old began his political career when war erupted in the late 1980s with neighbouring Azerbaijan over his native Nagorno-Karabakh region, a conflict that is now frozen but technically unresolved. He headed the mountainous region's self-defence forces between 1989 and 1993 and has since played a key role in negotiations over the area. Sarkisian is in part putting forward his experience in regulating the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute as a reason for him to remain in power. In foreign policy, Sarkisian has remained a close ally of Armenia's former master Russia but has also been able to maintain relatively warm relations with the European Union. "He has been able to keep Armenia's age-old balance between the West, Europe and Russia which is unprecedented in the post-Soviet space," said sociologist Gevorg Pogosyan. At home, however, corruption in the police and judiciary as well as poverty has left an increasing number of Armenians dissatisfied with Sarkisian's rule. "People took to the streets because of poverty, unemployment, corruption and because nothing is changing," Tatuk Hakobyan said. All of Armenia's parliamentary and presidential elections under his rule have been accompanied by opposition-led protests. "There is huge discontent in society," sociologist Pogosyan told AFP. "He has infringed on the tradition that exists in our country: all previous presidents have left power on time, he promised he would too." - Pashinyan: from fugitive to leader - A fortnight ago, few in Armenia would have believed that opposition leader Nikol Pashinyan could bring tens of thousands of people out onto the streets of Yerevan and other cities, paralysing traffic and disrupting businesses. Before these protests, Pashinyan was most closely associated with the tragic events of 2008, when 10 people died in clashes between police and supporters of Sarkisian's opponent in a presidential election. He directed street demonstrations at that time and was put on a wanted list following the deaths. The father-of-four went into hiding but in 2009 turned himself in, though was released in 2011 under a prisoner amnesty. A former journalist, the 43-year-old later set up the Civil Contract party, which entered parliament last year as part of the opposition coalition Way Out. With his fiery rhetoric and penchant for asking awkward questions, Pashinyan has proved a thorn in the side of Sarkisian's ruling Republican Party. After being injured along with dozens of others at a protest on Monday, he has appeared at subsequent demonstrations with a bandaged arm and bruises under his eyes. "Pashinyan differs from the majority of opposition figures in that he is daring, he's not afraid, he's creative, he's got a quick wit and stamina," Pogosyan said. It is these characteristics which make Pashinyan appealing to young Armenians who grew up after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Pogosyan added, though older generations have also turned out for the street protests. "People go to him because they are confident he's not going to make secret deals with those in power, he won't betray the movement," Pogosyan told AFP. Analyst Aleksandr Iskandaryan said the opposition in the country had been crushed and Pogosyan was its sole figurehead. "He has managed to personify (this movement)...Today the opposition in Armenia is him," Iskandaryan told AFP.
Two members of staff at a military-style training school treating rebellious children in eastern China have been detained after a teenage boy suffocated to death, according to a newspaper report.

The staff were detained by police on Tuesday after the 13-year-old boy died during a row at the Shandong Yabo Education Training School in Jinan, Shandong province, the Beijing Youth Daily reported.

The members of staff, whose full names were not given, were subduing the boy after an argument broke out on Monday about the management of students, police were quoted as saying.

The local authorities had already ordered the school to suspend its operation before the incident as they found it was involved in illegal internet addiction treatment, police said.

Chinese teenager dies at illegal gaming addiction treatment camp

No details were given of how the child died, but a former student at the school told the Beijing Youth Daily it was common for teaching staff to beat students and cover their mouths with wet towels to suffocate them.

Calls made to the school by the South China Morning Post on Friday were unanswered.

The school promotes itself on its website as a comprehensive education institution qualified to counsel rebellious children and train problematic youth.

The boarding school recruits students aged between 10 to 28 with problems ranging from aggressive tendencies to suffering from depression, according to the website.

It charged 5,600 yuan (US$890) to 6,800 yuan a month for students and the training lasts for six months at least, it said.

The 23-year-old former student who spoke of abuse at the school told the Beijing newspaper that his parents let its staff forcibly take him from his home in January 2016 and he was not allowed to contact his family during his training.

Chinas boot camp for fat kids helps tackle its big obesity problem

He was let out after six months because his parents could no longer afford the tuition fees, according to the report.

Story continues

Gaming and internet addiction camps have spread across China despite many fatal incidents.

In the most recent reported case, an 18-year-old died from multiple injuries at an internet addiction treatment camp in Anhui province last August.

The Chinese government released a draft law in January last year to ban electric shock, coercion and other physical punishment to treat teenagers internet addiction.

The legislation is now undergoing public consultation.

This article Chinese boy suffocated at rebellious children boot camp first appeared on South China Morning Post

For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2018.
(Corrects to Australia, Japan second attendance in exercises)

MANILA (Reuters) - Australian and Japanese troops are joining for the second time annual U.S.-Philippine military exercises involving thousands of troops, as the two-week drills move towards becoming multilateral war games.

The Philippines and the United States have for more than 30 editions been holding bilateral "Balikatan" (shoulder-to-shoulder) drills to test the readiness of their militaries to respond to threats that include natural disasters and militant extremist attacks.

The United States embassy in Manila said in a statement on Thursday that Australia and Japan, two U.S. allies countries with strategic partnerships with the Philippines, would again be included in the exercises at multiple locations on the main island of Luzon, starting on May 7.

Britain has also been invited to observe training for the mitigation of post-disaster suffering.

They will focus on mutual defence, counter-terrorism, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief that can also "provide assistance in the event of crises that endanger public health and safety".

Soldiers from United States, Australia, Japan and the Philippines have already been renovating schools in four provinces north of Manila as well as providing medical and dental services in poor rural areas, the embassy said.

Philippine military spokeswoman Liezl Vidallon said the four countries would exchange and share information and conduct live- fire training.

The exercises were scaled back last year in response to President Rodrigo Duterte's disdain for the U.S.-Philippine defence alliance.

He has made no secret of his grudge against the United States and believes a U.S. military presence of any kind in the Philippines puts his country at risk of being dragged into conflict, especially with China, as it beefs-up its maritime defences.

The volatile leader has showered praise upon Russia and China and invited their warships to come to the Philippines for exercises too.

(Reporting by Manuel Mogato; Editing by Martin Petty)
President Rodrigo Roa Duterte, in his speech during the Philippine National Police (PNP) Change of Command Ceremony at Camp BGen. Rafael Crame in Quezon City on April 19, 2018, reassures the entire police force that his administration will continue to enhance their capabilities, modernize their equipment, promote their welfare and take care of their families. ACE MORANDANTE/PRESIDENTIAL PHOTO

President Rodrigo Duterte is set to attend the 32nd Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit in Singapore next week.

Singapore is this years ASEAN chair led by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.

The event, which will be held from April 25 -28, will bring together leaders of the ASEAN member states to discuss various regional and international issues.  UNTV News & Rescue

The post Duterte to attend 32nd ASEAN Summit in Singapore appeared first on UNTV News.
Elderly Chinese paid for destroying their own coffins to be burned as fuel

Hundreds of elderly villagers in southeast China have agreed to smash their own coffins to be burned to generate power as part of a government initiative, according to news sites.

They were paid compensation for destroying their coffins and agreeing to be cremated rather than buried in a government push for eco-friendly funeral practices, reported Jiangnan City Daily.

Within five days, about 400 villagers in Shangrao county in Jiangxi province volunteered to use excavators to smash their own coffins under the watch of local officials last Sunday, it stated.

The newspaper site reported that 400 caskets were crushed, while the Global Times reported 500.

Analysts are raving about this one industry in China that has no overcapacity problem

The residents were each given 1,000 yuan (US$159) in compensation for volunteering their coffin, which can cost up to 5,000 yuan (US$796) to make, according to the Global Times. Some, however, were said to have been forced to part with their burial caskets, it stated.

As they did so, a sign was displayed that read Chinese dream.

Wu Zongxi, 80, the first to give up his coffin, said he wanted to do something worthwhile for the community, reported Jiangnan City Daily.

Chinas largest funeral service provider reports surge in business amid ageing population

Cremation helps the environment and conservation of land, he was quoted as saying. Us older generation have to set an example and educate the younger generation to change their customs.

Local authorities said the coffin wood would be burned to generate power, in line with the central governments initiative to phase out resource-heavy burials and promote more eco-friendly funerals such as cremation.

Chinese police arrest suspected serial grave robber

In parts of China people prepare their coffin years in advance and can be competitive about their cost. Some believe their bodies should be kept intact after death.

My coffin was made 27 years ago, a woman surnamed Gong was quoted as saying in the Global Times. I was reluctant at first. But my children convinced me that cremation is better.

This article Elderly Chinese paid for destroying their own coffins to be burned as fuel first appeared on South China Morning Post

For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2018.
Pang Yeow Biah, pleaded guilty in the State Courts to 10 charges of fraudulently obtaining $8,302.05 in GST tourist refunds. (PHOTO: Getty Images)

A former Singapore Customs officer was sentenced on Friday (20 April) to 15 months and four weeks of jail and a penalty of $24,906.15 for fraudulently obtaining Goods and Service Tax (GST) tourist refunds.

Pang Yeow Biah, 61, pleaded guilty in the State Courts to 10 charges of fraudulently obtaining $8,302.05 in GST tourist refunds. She also pleaded guilty to three counts of transferring the benefits of criminal conduct for using some of the funds to offset her credit card expenses. Another 33 similar charges were stood down.

At the time of the offences between 2012 and 2014, Pang was a Singapore Customs officer at the GST Refund Inspection Counter at Changi Airport. She was tasked with processing GST refund claims by tourists leaving Singapore.

Pang would reject some of the tourists claims and retain the supporting documents. She would then take the details of the rejected GST refund claims and electronically process the GST refunds into her own credit cards or credit cards that were under her control.

She processed the claims at the airport through self-help kiosks, through her own computer, or through the computers of colleagues who left them unattended.

The offences were discovered when the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore detected suspicious GST refund claims approved by Singapore Customs officers.

Pang claimed a total of $16,015.86 through the fraudulent refunds.

The prosecution sought a jail term of at least 15 months saying that Pang used various computer terminals and the self-help kiosks in order to disguise the fraudulent activity. The offences were also committed over a span of two years.

Pang has since made full restitution.

She has also asked to defer serving her sentence until 18 May.

Anyone convicted of wilful intent to obtain fraudulent GST refunds shall be required to pay a penalty of up to three times the amount of refund wrongfully obtained, and a fine not exceeding $10,000, and/or imprisonment of up to seven years.

Story continues

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Queen Elizabeth II hosted a dinner yesterday evening [Photo: PA]

Jacinda Ardern, the pregnant prime minister of New Zealand, has caught the worlds attention by wearing a traditional Maori cloak to Buckingham Palace.

During this weeks Commonwealth heads of government meeting, Ardern was swathed in a Kahu huruhuru, a Maori cloak studded with feathers.

Mark Sykes, guardian of Maori special collections at the national museum of New Zealand Te Papa, told the Guardian that traditionally, the piece is bestowed on chiefs and dignitaries to covey power, prestige and respect.

Which is why Arderns choice of clothing was a big moment for Maori people, and for women, around the world.

Praise of Arderns clothing has been circulating on Twitter as fans discuss why the moment is significant to them.

Head of government, pregnant, unmarried, wearing a Maori cloak of power, putting care for her people in the center of her message. #oldboysclub and warmongers your days are numbered. #respect @jacindaardern #womenleaders @jagodamarinic https://t.co/O4PwCDo6Yf  judith bogner (@judithbogner) April 20, 2018

To a number of people, Ardern  who is heavily pregnant  wearing the piece signifies a changeup of gender roles as a female world leader wearing a cloak that symbolises power.

Who is Jacinda Ardern?

Ardern has been New Zealands prime minister since October 2017, the countrys youngest in 150 years as she was 37 when she took office.

Shes known for openly discussing mental health, including her own struggles with anxiety, and is a big supporter of womens rights and LGBTQ issues.

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For example, shes strongly defended the right of New Zealand women to keep their plans to start a family from their employers.

Regardless of your politicial leanings, you've got to take a minute and appreciate everything this photo represents; Especially around all of us being free from toxic gender roles, and empowered to go with our hearts. pic.twitter.com/JM38tEWMaT  Suzy Cate-O (@CateOwen) April 19, 2018

Shortly after being elected to lead the Labour party, Arden was asked repeatedly if she had plans to have children by local media.

When asked if it was okay for a prime minister to take maternity leave by Mark Richardson, a host of the AM Show, she replied that it is totally unacceptable in 2017 to say that women should have to answer that question in the workplace. It is unacceptable, it is unacceptable.

Which, like her decision to wear a Kahu huruhuru yesterday, has gained her plenty of fans.

Follow us on Instagram and Facebook for non-stop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day. For Twitter updates, follow @YahooStyleUK.

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Shares in Japanese drug maker Takeda dropped Friday after a potential rival in its bid to take over Ireland's Shire Pharmaceuticals said it was no longer considering making an offer. Analysts had raised the prospect of a bidding war between Takeda and Botox-maker Allergan after the global pharma giant said it was also considering making a bid for Shire. But in a statement late Thursday, Allergan announced it now "does not intend to make an offer for Shire." Takeda was trading down as much as 3.98 percent on Tokyo trade on Friday morning. Around 0100 GMT it was down 2.04 percent at 4,990 yen. On Thursday, the Japanese firm said "discussions between the parties regarding a potential offer are ongoing," after Shire rejected a new bid valued at around $60 billion. Takeda's cash-and-shares offer valued Shire at 42 billion ($60 billion, 48 billion euros) and was pitched at the equivalent of 46.50 per share. Shire, which is based in Dublin but listed in London, said in a statement that it had rejected three takeover approaches from Takeda because they all "significantly undervalued the company, its growth prospects and pipeline". But it added that its advisers have entered a dialogue with Takeda to discuss "whether a further, more attractive, proposal may be forthcoming". The deal would represent Takeda's biggest-ever takeover, according to Japanese media. Led by Frenchman Christophe Weber, the Japanese firm has been actively looking overseas for acquisitions. In 2011 it took over Swiss rival Nycomed for 9.6 billion euros (then $13.6 billion). However, some analysts are concerned that a takeover bid of this magnitude could put too much pressure on Takeda's own finances.
An Armenian court has sustained the suit brought by the Special Investigative Service investigator on the arrest of Tigran Mazmanyan, a civil activist.

Mazmanyan was sentenced to a two-month imprisonment.

The information was provided to Hetq by Mazmanyan's attorney Robert Revazyan.



Mazmanyan was arrested on the morning of April 17 on suspicion of committing the acts envisaged by Article 225  2 of the Criminal Code and Article 225, that is, implementation of mass disorder, accompanied with violence, pogroms, arson, destruction or damage to property, using fire-arms, explosives or explosive devices, or an armed resistance to the representative of the authorities, as well as the organization and conduct of rallies in violation of the procedure established by law.



However, Mazmanyan was charged only under Article 225  2. The activist's accusation concerns the April 14 entry into the Public Radio building.

Demonstrations against Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan started in Yerevan on April 13.

On April 14, Nikol Pashinyan, who's spearheading the protests, and a group of citizens entered the Public Radio of Armenia building. They repeatedly suggested that the radio directors allow them to broadcast live, but the latter responded that there was no such opportunity at the moment and offered to broadcast later. During the events, the Public Radio's door was broken. A criminal case has been initiated over the incident.



Mazmanyan's attorney, Robert Revazyan, told Hetq that he did not deny that Tigran Mazmanyan was in the Public Radio building, but, according to the lawyer, the activist did not commit any unlawful acts. According to Revazyan, the incidents in general fall under the characterization of mass disorder, but even under such a qualification, the law defines specific actions that can be attributed to a person under Article 225, Part 2 of the Criminal Code.



In particular, the second part of Article 225 of the Criminal Code is defined as follows: Immediate implementation of actions defined by part one of the Article, that is mass disorder, accompanied with violence, pogroms, arson, destruction or damage to property, using fire-arms, explosives or explosive devices, or an armed resistance to the representative of the authorities. In other words, the investigating authority must present proof that Mazmanyan has committed any or all of the abovementioned acts.

Photo from Tigran Mazmanyans Facebook page
A Malaysian jet carrying 139 people that aborted its takeoff and skidded into mud forced Kathmandu airport to shut down for more than 12 hours causing flight chaos Friday after the latest near miss on the city's notoriously dangerous runway. Nobody was hurt in the incident but hundreds of passengers had flights out of the Nepalese capital cancelled and all incoming flights were diverted after the Malindo Airlines Boeing 737 went off the runway late Thursday. The jet was speeding down the Tribhuvan International Airport runway when the pilots detected a problem and aborted takeoff, airport spokesman Prem Nath Thakur said. The jet skidded into grass and came to a halt in mud about 100 feet (30 metres) from the runway at the airport which had a major crash last month. "All aboard are safe," Thakur said, adding that the cause of the cockpit alert was not immediately known. Nepal's only international airport reopened again just before midday Friday after the jet was "removed without any damage," Thakur added. More than 100 people were needed to move the jet, its tyres stuck in grass that had been turned into a soggy morass by recent rainfall. Tow tractors pulled the jet out of the mud up ramps set up in front of the tyres. - Delayed expansion - American traveller Sarah Ann Loreth, heading to Doha before returning to her home in Boston, spent hours on her delayed jet after the emergency. "We were supposed to take off on Thursday but couldn't because of the Malaysia flight," she told AFP. "Around 2:00 am the flight attendant informed us the other flight had slipped off the runway and was stuck in the mud and could not be moved. "They deplaned us around 2:30 am and it was pure chaos. We went back to the terminal and they had our bags laid out behind the counter and we just went behind and grabbed them." Cars eventually took the passengers to hotels to wait for a reorganised flight, Loreth said. The Himalayan nation has some of the world's most remote and tricky runways, flanked by snow-capped peaks with approaches that pose a challenge even for accomplished pilots. Its only international airport struggles with surges in passengers and flights, and faces constant congestion and air traffic. "Delayed expansion of the airport has made things difficult. If we had the infrastructure, other flights would not be disrupted and we could have removed the aircraft more quickly," said Sanjeev Gautam, chief of Nepal's civil aviation authority. The incident came one month after the crash of a US-Bangla Airways plane at Kathmandu airport, which killed 51 people. In March 2015, a Turkish Airlines jet skidded off the runway as it landed, forcing Tribhuvan Airport to close for four days. Nepal has a poor air safety record. Accidents are common and Nepal-based airlines are banned from flying in European Union airspace.
Wu Yuxia might not be the richest woman in China, but she could well be one of the kindest.

For more than three decades, the 60-year-old from Dangui in southwestern Sichuan province has provided round-the-clock care to her severely disabled neighbour, Liu Siqiang, the news website Thecover.cn reported.

Liu, now 56, lost his mother at the age of six and his father at 10. While still a teenager he contracted a disease that left him blind and deaf, and although he came from a large family, he was left alone when his older brother died and his three sisters got married and moved away, the report said.

Realising Liu needed someone to care for him, Wu took him under her wing.

How kindness and swift action of strangers saved life of sick Chinese girl

We were poor at the time, but his house nearby was just a few mud rooms, she was quoted as saying.

For about 20 years, Wu cared for Liu in his own home, but about 10 years ago, she and her husband built a small extension to their own humble property so he could move in with them.

It was fate, she said.

At that time, Wu was also caring for her own three children and two of their grandparents. Her husband was the family bread-winner, but after he died she was forced to shoulder that burden, too.

The report said she worked four or five days a month as a labourer to earn a little extra cash to cover her and Lius living costs.

The widow was quoted as saying that although she has not had a decent nights sleep for years, or had the chance to visit her relatives who live in other parts of the country, she does not regret a thing.

She said she even switched bedrooms so she could closer to Liu when he needed her.

I get up every night at 2am and 5am to help him go to the toilet and give him water, she said.

Kindly policeman tutors left-behind girl in China

The authorities in Dangui acknowledged Wus work last year and agreed to pay her a subsidy for looking after Liu, so she no longer has to work.

Story continues

The towns mayor, Ding Ruizan, was quoted as saying that if Wu ever became incapable of looking after Liu, the government would find someone else to take over.

While it may not be the same as the care Wu has given Liu for the past 30 years, we will guarantee him a decent life, he said.

This article Chinese widow cares for disabled neighbour for over three decades first appeared on South China Morning Post

For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2018.
Puwersa ng Bayaning Atleta Partylist Rep. Jericho Nograles, the solon who called out Grab Philippines for its PHP2 per minute charge, lauded the Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board (LTFRB) for ordering the suspension of the charge imposed by the transport network service.

Nograles though is still calling on the agency to have Grab refund the amount collected from the PHP2 per minute charge which supposedly amounts to an estimated PHP3.24 billion since June 2017.

We thank the LTFRB for the suspension of the PHP2 per minute charges that were clearly not approved by the Board and were kept secret from the operators, drivers, and riders, said Nograles. I hope that refund for these hidden charges will be ordered soon as well, and that the drivers are spared from paying this refund as they played no part in reprogramming the Grab algorithm to include these secret charges.

Nograles added that he would be the first to file a complaint of large scale estafa against the company if it tries to demand the refund from its drivers.

In an earlier press conference though prior to the LTFRBs issuance of the order suspending Grab from collecting the PHP2 per minute charge, Grab Philippines Country Head Brian Cu said that if the agency indeed asks the company to issue a refund, it will not collect the amount from the drivers despite the fee being collected for them.

We are ready to comply with the LTFRB and their regulations, said Cu. Well wait for the order. Well see what happens.

The post Solon Lauds LTFRBs Suspension of Grabs PHP2 Per Minute Charge appeared first on Carmudi Philippines.
An inclusive culture ensures better financial performance, innovation, getting and retaining resources, and improved customer relationships

A business that is inclusive or sustainable provides benefits to those belonging to the low-income communities. These business models contribute towards poverty-reduction by including the low-income groups in the business as consumers or producers.

While the number of Inclusive Business (IB) Models are on the rise in South Asia, very few countries in Southeast Asia have built better enabling inclusive ecosystem in partnerships between investors, businesses, and the government.

Inclusive Business Model in Southeast Asia

Even though South Asia is leading in profitable and innovative IB models, Southeast Asia is currently leaning more towards CSR and social enterprise. However, the knowledge and investment for contribution to an IB model is increasing across sectors.

The Numbers Game

According to Welcome Economic Forum Inclusive Growth & Development repor:



These rankings are from 1 to 7, with 1 being the worst and 7 being the best

According to these ratings, Malaysia leads among the reported Southeast Asian countries, but it still falls a little behind Lithuania, with a top score of 4.8, among emerging countries.

It is evident from these numbers, that Southeast Asian countries still have a long way to go as far as inclusive development is concerned. There have been improvements, and there is a lot of potential for the future as well.

Factors for Implementation

The major factors responsible for implementation of an Inclusive Business Model are:

Committing

Identifying

Inclusion, and

Evaluation.

This is the basic guideline that businesses in Southeast Asia need to work along for making the economic environment more inclusive.

Source: Intech

Failure in Southeast Asia & Reasons

Some typical and some unique problems associated with a standard Inclusive Business model are applicable in the case of Southeast Asian countries.

Story continues

Problems like high cost of last mile distribution, unfamiliar behaviour pattern of the poor, an informal market, investment risks, and affordability & distribution barrier, are some of the typical problems that exist in South Asian countries.

Also read: Social entrepreneurship is key to sustainable and inclusive growth in Asia

Additionally, in Southeast Asian countries, factors like high risk aversion, absence of leading-an-innovation culture, and CSR activities by private sectors to care for the poor are expected to be delivered by the government. The inspiring career story of Mrs. Shobhika Puri gives an insight to how women in the freelance community get typically stereotyped.

It is because of these factors, implementation of an Inclusive Business Model in the Southeast Asian countries is being more challenging than in other regions.

The Need for an Inclusive Business Model in Southeast Asia

An inclusive business allows cooperation between the government and the private sector for the improvement of lives and economic growth. Even today, a large fraction of the total ASEAN population falls under the category of poor. This creates a great opportunity for companies in Southeast Asia, with an inclusive business model.

With an inclusive business, contributions can be made towards a sustainable economic growth by providing affordable good and services, and income opportunities to low-income groups. This business model goes above and beyond the traditional approach of CSR activities, through integration of the poor in the business. This integration may be done in the form of suppliers, distributors, retailers, and consumers.

The opportunity window and the potential of benefits, both the factors make it necessary for Southeast Asian countries to make their businesses inclusive today.

Conclusion

Companies that promote an inclusive culture perform better than those who dont. Such companies also become equipped to meet the needs of an ever-increasing and diverse customer base. An inclusive culture ensures better financial performance, innovation, getting and retaining resources, and improved customer relationships.

All Southeast Asian countries need to, and have the potential to do more in the case of making their businesses inclusive.

An increasing access to financial resources, information, and financial incentives are the initiatives the Southeast Asian countries must take to promote Inclusive Business investments in the economic environment and avail the long-term benefits that come with it.

Currently, inclusive business companies have made the highest impact on the agribusiness sector in the Southeast Asian countries.

-

Editors note: e27 publishes relevant guest contributions from the community. Share your honest opinions and expert knowledge by submitting your content here.

Featured Image Copyright: alexbrylov / 123RF Stock Photo

The post Southeast Asian businesses need to be more inclusive appeared first on e27.
Long Live Southbank presents 426: The Southbank Show  a group art show with all funds raised from sales going towards renovating the currently closed portion of the Undercroft. The show opened on Wednesday night and will be running until the 29th of this month, so go check it out at Stolen Space while you can and maybe buy something safe in the knowledge that your money is going to a good cause. In the meantime, scroll down for the full press release and a few examples of the artwork on display!

Long Live Southbank (LLSB) announce the launch of 426: The Southbank Show, a major group art show featuring the talent of skateboarders and creatives from around the world, aiming to raise funds to restore Londons iconic skate spot. Hosted at StolenSpace Gallery in Londons East End and running from the 18th till the 29th of April 2018, the collection of over 70 pieces of work is set to be one of the most quintessential skateboarding art shows to date.

Its not often an art show so inextricably linked to place. 35 artists who have a connection to Southbank skate spot on Londons River Thames have contributed over 70 pieces of work to a definitive show which will display an eclectic range of mediums from the creative pool of skateboarding from across the globe.

Jack Pearce

426 refers to lost sections of Southbank long since hidden away from its skateboarding roots. Since approaching Southbank Centre in 2015, Long Live Southbank have created a unique opportunity to breath new life into the hallowed ground of Londons skateboarding mecca.

The show title also references the high art meets popular culture television programme series The South Bank Show, presented by Melvyn Bragg. Although the skate space on the South Bank has been an ever present feature in the local landscape for decades, its natural creative and artistic flair has been overlooked by the shows producers.

James Jarvis

The premise behind 426: The Southbank Show is to expose this juxtaposition of the arts and display work by creatives who are directly part of the counterculture; not by those professing to do so. Long Live Southbank have fused the two middle words to create The Southbank Show in a move to delete the imposed art divide created by the art elite and as a reference to the notion of art having to be either classical or outsider or high-end or low-end.

Chet Childress

Over the past 6 months Long Live Southbank have curated artists from the world of skateboarding and beyond, with work on show spanning multiple mediums and formats and including many specially made pieces. From Blondey McCoys UV printed mirrors and Haroshis sculptures using recycled skateboard decks to the playful illustrations of James Jarvis and the work of street artist Shepard Fairey; the art of skateboarding is as multi-layered as skateboarding itself  426: The Southbank Show gives a chance to glimpse into this often subversive world.

Southbank has been a landmark in the skate scene since 1973 and exists as the oldest continually skated spot in the world, frequented by people locally and from across the UK and around the globe. Now working together with Southbank Centre, LLSB hope to raise 790,000 to restore the undercroft spaces and permanently reopen them in 2018 for the first time in 14 years.

Matt Bromley

With many of the artworks on show available to buy to help raise the money needed for the restoration, it is hoped a significant amount of funds will be raised from sales. Many of the contributing artists in the pan-generational line up have their roots in Southbank, having gone on to create artworks that are equally as unique as the space itself.

Curated by Matt Nelmes and Paul Richards of LLSB, Nelmes, a local Southbank skater said;

Southbank is an incredibly special place when you consider how rare it is in our modern world, especially Central London. People from every background meet there, exchange ideas, paint and of course skate. In a sense its a bit like The Factory, just a lot colder and instead of Edie Sedgwick weve got Jeremy Jones.

Mark Gonzales

Contributing artists Nick Jensen, Arran Gregory, Domas Glatkauskas, Gregory Conroy, Blondey McCoy and Jeremy Jones have a deep connection with Southbank and the undercroft community, and have established successful art careers in their own right. 426: The Southbank Show will display Southbank locals work alongside some of the most legendary artists in the world of skateboarding including Ed Templeton.

There are also new artworks by legendary artists which have never been seen before including Canadian illustrator Andrew Pommiers Hard to Explain depicting his characteristic figures in situ at Southbank. Pioneer of modern street skateboarding, Mark Gonzales, has created some watercolours especially for the show and several other rare and limited edition works will be available.

426: The Southbank Show runs for two weeks from the 18th April at StolenSpace Gallery, 17 Osborn Street, London E1 6TD. And yes, LLSB can confirm there will be skateboards.
MICHAEL WEISSENSTEIN | ANDREA RODRIGUEZ

Havana, Cuba.- Raul Castro said Thursday that he expected 57-year-old Miguel Mario Diaz-Canel Bermudez to serve two five-year terms as president and eventually take Castros place as head of the Communist Party, potentially dominating Cuban politics until 2031.

It was the first time Castro has laid out a clear vision for the nations power structure after his retirement or death, a vision in which Diaz-Canel is Castros true successor as total leader of Cuba.

Castro left the presidency Thursday after 12 years in office when the National Assembly approved Diaz-Canels nomination as the candidate for the top government position. Diaz-Canel told the nation that Castro, 86, would remain the countrys ultimate authority as head of the Communist Party.

Speaking after Diaz-Canel, Castro said he expected the younger man to become first secretary of the party after Castro retires from the position in 2021. From that point on, I will be just another soldier defending this revolution, Castro said.

He said Cuba was, as always, prepared to negotiate with the United States but unwilling to cede to any of Washingtons demands for internal change.
Danica Kirka

INTERNATIONAL.- Facebook is enhancing privacy safeguards for users around the world as it complies with new European rules designed to make it easier for consumers to give and withdraw consent for the use of their data. Facebook is introducing the new policies this week in Europe, but eventually everyone on the social network will be asked to decide whether they want to enable features like facial recognition and some types of targeted advertising, the company said in a blog post.

"Everyone - no matter where they live - will be asked to review important information about how Facebook uses data and make choices about their privacy on Facebook," the company said in a blog post. "We'll begin by rolling these choices out in Europe this week".

The Facebook logo is displayed on an iPad. A propaganda expert who has studied Cambridge Analytica says the company helped president Donald Trumps.

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El logo de Facebook se muestra en un iPad. Un experto en propaganda que ha estudiado Cambridge Analytica dice que la compania ayudo al presidente Donald Trump.

The announcement comes as Facebook struggles with the fallout from revelations that a data analytics firm misused personal information from as many as 87 million Facebook accounts to help Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.

The European Union next month will begin enforcing its new General Data Protection Regulation, which explicitly applies to any company that uses the data of EU residents, no matter where it is based. The privacy law is the latest attempt by EU regulators to rein in mostly American tech giants who they blame for avoiding tax, stifling competition and encroaching on digital privacy rights.

The EU says the rules are the most important change in data privacy regulation in a generation as it tries to catch up with technological advances since 1995, when the last comprehensive rules were approved.
Gatopoulos | L. Cook

ATHENS, Greece.- Greek officials say the government will respect a landmark court decision against a European Union policy that allowed authorities to force refugees and migrants to stay on the Greek islands where they first arrived even after they had applied for asylum.

The country's highest administrative court, the Council of State, ruled that migrants reaching the Greek islands who apply for asylum will be allowed to travel to the mainland while their applications are being processed. The ruling takes effect immediately. Yiannis Balafas, a deputy migration minister, said the decision is not retroactive but would "create a new situation" for migrants who arrive after the ruling.

"I don't think the 2016 agreement will collapse because of this ruling".

Under a 2016 agreement between Turkey and the European Union, migrants who traveled to Greek islands off the Turkish coast were restricted in where they could go after that.

"For sure, this ruling will create a new situation that concerns those who arrive from now on and we will see how it will be addressed," Balafas told Sto Kokkino radio. "I don't think the 2016 agreement will collapse because of this ruling." Asylum applications are currently being received on five Greek islands, Lesbos, Chios, Samos, Leros and Kos.
The Associated Press

INTERNATIONAL.- Raul Castro is stepping down from Cuba's presidency, but he isn't giving up power. The 86-year-old former guerrilla remains head of Cuba's Communist Party, a position that leaves him with broad authority  including much oversight of the man who is replacing him as president.

He is expected to hold the position until 2021. Raul Castro's official title will remain first secretary of the Communist Party, heading the elite 17-member Political Bureau and the broader Central Committee.

Since committee members are elected from lists approved by the leadership, there is no real opposition, though members do debate important issues.

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Cuba's single-party system gives the Communist Party a role vastly more important than in any multi-party country, and it's often hard to tell where the party stops and government begins.

Senior government and party positions often overlap. The constitution defines the party as "the superior guiding force of society and the state," directing it to organize society toward the construction of socialism.

In practice, party officials oversee or work with government authorities on every level, including the military. While the new president is legally commander in chief, Raul's influence is imbued throughout the institution that he led as defense minister for nearly half a century.

The party runs vast organizations that coordinate activities for nearly every Cuban child and student. Workers are part of the Communist Party labor union. Every major newspaper and magazine is run by the party.
Michael Balsamo

INTERNACIONAL.- The largest manufacturer of bump stocks, which allow semi-automatic weapons to fire rapidly like automatic firearms, announced Wednesday that it will stop taking orders and shut down its website next month.

The announcement comes about a month after President Donald Trump said his administration would ban bump stocks, which he said turn legal weapons into illegal machines.

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The devices became a focal point of the national gun control debate when they were used in October when a man carried out the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

About a dozen bump stocks were found among the weapons used by Stephen Paddock when he unleashed a hail of bullets from his high-rise Las Vegas hotel suite, killing 58 people and leaving more than 800 others injured.

Slide Fire Solutions, which is based in Moran, Texas, posted a message on its website saying the company will stop taking orders at midnight on May 20. The company provided no other details and did not say why it was shutting down.
Nikol Pashinyan, the Yelk Alliance MP whos declared a velvet revolution to oust recently elected Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan, is today calling for the blockade of all major roadways in Armenia.

Pashinyan recently posted the news on his Facebook page, suggesting the use of freight trucks, buses and farming equipment.

Earlier today, police detained a number of protesters, including Reject Serzh initiative member Davit Sanasaryan, when they attempted to block Amiryan Street.

Note to readers - After the National Assembly elected Serzh Sargsyan prime minister on April 17, Yelk Alliance MP Nikol Pashinyan, who spearheaded the Im Kayl (My Step) movement to prevent Sargsyans election, declared a Velvet Revolution to be carried out on a rotating basis. Protesters will briefly occupy government buildings, urging civil servants inside to join them. The intent is to disrupt the normal flow of life in downtown Yerevan, blocking traffic on major streets, and then hold evening rallies in Republic Square. Today marks the eighth day of civil disobedience in Yerevan.
Jill Colvin |Darlene Superville

KEY WEST, Florida.- President Donald Trump said he received a great education during an anti-drug trafficking briefing Thursday that underscored the need for the wall he has promised to build along the U.S.- Mexico border to help stop drug smuggling.

Drugs are flowing into our country, Trump said in the Florida Keys. We need border protection.

We need the wall. We have to have the wall. The president traveled from Palm Beach, where he is spending the week, to the tourist haven of Key West for the update from the Joint Interagency Task Force South.

The agency is responsible for monitoring drug trafficking by sea, by air and online. Last year, it helped disrupt a record 283 metric tons of cocaine and detained nearly 900 suspected members of drug trafficking organization.
The Associated Press

Beirut, Lebanon | April 18

Assailants opened fire at a U.N. security team visiting the site of a suspected chemical weapons attack in Syria, an official said Wednesday, forcing it to retreat to its base and further delaying a fact-finding mission by outside experts to examine the claims.

Gunmen shot at the U.N. team in Douma on Tuesday and detonated an explosive, leading it to return to Damascus, said the head of the international chemical weapons watchdog, Ahmet Uzumcu.

Gunmen shot at the U.N. team in Douma on Tuesday and detonated an explosive, leading it to return to Damascus, said the head of the international chemical weapons watchdog, Ahmet Uzumcu. He did not identify the assailants.

Inspectors from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons have been waiting since Saturday to visit Douma, the site of the alleged April 7 attack. They were initially blocked by the Syrian government and its ally, Russia, on Monday. Then on Tuesday, the advance security team from the U.N. came under fire, compounding the delays. The OPCW inspectors have not yet been able to visit the site, and Uzumcu did not say when they would deploy.

The United Nations said more security measures were needed before the inspectors could go in. There is still a lot of volatility in the area, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said, adding that the U.N. security team needed to make at least another visit before the fact-finding mission could go ahead.
In an April 20 Goods, Christina Cauterucci misstated the call sign of the presidential helicopter. Its Marine One, not Marine Force One.

In an April 19 Brow Beat, Lena Wilson misstated when Paranormal Activity was released. It was in 2007, not 2002.

In an April 19 Politics, Jim Newell misstated the number of votes Beto ORourke received in the Texas Democratic primary for U.S. Senate. He received just over 641,000 votes, not 6.4 million.

In an April 17 Better Life Lab, Elizabeth Shackney misstated that AmeriCorps was founded in 1965. AmeriCorps was founded in 1993. It incorporated VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), a volunteer organization started in 1965, at that time.

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In an April 17 Brow Beat, Lena Wilson misidentified Carl Kasell as a game-show host. He did not host, but he was a judge and scorekeeper on the show Wait Wait  Dont Tell Me.

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In an April 17 Brow Beat, Lena Wilson misstated that Jeff Bridges would play Atticus Finch in Aaron Sorkins To Kill a Mockingbird adaptation for Broadway. Jeff Daniels has been cast in the role.

In an April 17 Food, Lena Wilson misspelled Sampson Dolly-Kings first name.

In an April 17 Future Tense, Dillon Roseen misspelled Endgame CEO Nathaniel Ficks first name.

In an April 17 Jurisprudence, Simone Weichselbaum misidentified the Justice Department entity that warned cities against withholding cooperation from immigration authorities. It was the Office of Justice Programs, not the inspector general.

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In an April 17 Slatest, Ben Mathis-Lilley misspelled Game of Thrones character Jaime Lannisters first name.

In an April 17 Slatest, Molly Olmstead misstated that Oklahoma legislators passed a $500 increase in funding for schools. They increased school funding by $500 million.

In an April 16 Metropolis, Thomas J. Campanella misstated that all but one woman involved in Retake Roma were foreigners. Co-founder Paola Carra is also Italian.

Slate strives to correct all errors of fact. If youve seen an error in our pages, let us know at corrections@slate.com. General comments should be posted in our Comments sections associated with each article.
Donald Trump is not happy about the price of oil.

Looks like OPEC is at it again. With record amounts of Oil all over the place, including the fully loaded ships at sea, Oil prices are artificially Very High! No good and will not be accepted!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 20, 2018

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The presidents garbled construction has opened him up to a bit of mockery for this tweet. Read casually, he seems to be suggesting that Saudi Arabia and the rest of OPEC have pushed up prices by increasing the supply of oil, which would make zero sense. But thats unfair. Trumps spleen venting is, for once, directionally accurate, and may even be a canny geopolitical move. (It feels weird writing that. Does it feel weird reading it?)

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Global oil prices are up roughly 46 percent over the past year thanks in large part to a historic agreement OPECs members struck with Russia in late 2016 to restrict production, with the hope of draining a worldwide glut of crude that had caused the market to crash. There are other reasons why oil has recovered: Venezuelas economic and political turmoil has led its production to collapse; the U.S. economy is humming. But by all accounts, Russias supply cuts have worked just as intended. This week the countries met at a joint technical panel and concluded that they had nearly hit their goal of reducing the worlds oil stocks.

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How does that square with Trumps tweet? When the president says there are record amounts of oil all over the place, Im guessing he just means that the world has plenty of crude that could be drilled (thank fracking for that), and he is ticked that OPEC has managed to keep prices up. As always, interpreting Trumps telegraphic outbursts is an imprecise art, but the most generous read here is that the president understands this issue correctly.

Even if Trumps grasp of oil economics is flimsier than Im giving him credit for, his tweet may still be a deft move. The deal between OPEC and Russia is slated to last through the end of this year, and the countries are gathering in June to decide a path going forward. Reports surfaced this week that Saudi Arabia, OPECs key member, may want to push oil prices up to $100 per barrel in the futureits around $73 todayin order to fix its budget, make the coming IPO of its state oil company more attractive, and fund various ambitious projects. It is unclear how serious the Saudis are about this, or if OPEC and Russia are even capable of such a thingif prices keep rising, American drillers in North Dakota and Texas might ramp up production enough to bring them back down. But by tweeting his displeasure, Trump is signaling that he wont simply stand by and watch the Saudis and their compatriots toy with the market.

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Its not entirely clear what Trump would do. The U.S. could try to directly bring down the cost of crude by tapping its strategic oil reserve, but that seems unlikely outside of a true emergency. More likely, he could try to exert some sort of political pressure on the Saudis, maybe by threatening to yank some sort of military support. But either way, hes giving OPECs most important member a reason to think twice about trying anything rash with the oil market, and traders took his tweet seriously enough that prices dropped a bit this morning.

Its worth noting here that more expensive oil might not be such a terrible thing for the U.S. these days. While higher gas prices arent great for consumers, investment by drillers looking to capitalize on rising crude values has given the economy a big boost lately. As a bonus, making fuel more expensive might reduce consumption a bit, which is ideal if you are hoping to avoid frying the planet. Still, Trump clearly senses that pricey oil would be dangerous for him politically, and all things considered, his tweet is a reasonably smart way to start heading off the problem.
For the past four months, California state Sen. Scott Wiener has been on a quest to strip his staunchly left-wing hometown of its power to maintain single-family residential neighborhoods. His Senate Bill 827 would have required California cities to permit midrise-apartment constructionbuildings rising up to 45 or 55 feetaround train stations and busy bus stops. It was a radical attempt to subvert local control in the interest of creating more homes and would have opened up neighborhoods in San Diego, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area to row houses and small apartment buildings. Transit-rich San Francisco, where Wiener, a first-term legislator, previously sat on the board of supervisors, would have been almost entirely rezoned to accommodate a residential scale about half that of a typical Parisian street.

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Opposed by virtually every Californian in a position of power, Wieners bill failed in a Sacramento committee on Tuesday. This had been widely anticipated; what Wiener and his co-sponsor Nancy Skinner, representing the East Bay, proposed was nothing less than to upend the entire framework for the past century of American racial politics and wealth building. But by forcing politicians and organizations to lay down their cards on restrictive residential zoning, SB 827 has neatly cataloged views over local control, affordability, transportation, and the environment in ways that observers sometimes had to project for themselves. It was, Berkeley-based housing activist Randy Shaw wrote, the biggest public debate ever held in California over urban housing policy. That debate has revealed hypocrisies alongside genuine concerns, and its collective effect has been both to defeat the bill and to increase the chances something like it could become law in the near future.

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No interest group was more exposed by the saga of SB 827 than Californias environmental movement. Except for Malthusian tree-huggers who actively seek to reduce the states population growthCalifornia is full!virtually every environmentalist agrees that the place to build new housing is along transit lines. The opposite is currently happening: Barriers to building homes in cities have exiled development to the urban frontier, where subdivisions swallow up natural land far from the eyes of moneyed activists.

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The national Sierra Club opposed SB 827 for the tenuous reason that its a pre-emption bill that tells cities what to do, like red-state bills that override progressive municipal goals. That analogy does not check out, since both Wiener and Skinner are big-city representatives trying to solve a big-city problem. It makes even less sense because the Sierra Club has supported eco-friendly pre-emption bills in the past. At the state level, Sierra Club California argued that allowing more infill development would push more residents to the exurban fringe. What?

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Whatever success eco-conscious homeowner groups have had in maintaining backyards on the Westside of Los Angeles has been counteracted by development spilling into the far reaches of the Inland Empire. Partly as a result of this statewide trend, the average commute in San Francisco and San Jose has grown four times faster than the U.S. average since 2005, while billion-dollar investments in urban mass transit systems have failed to increase ridership. Californias greenhouse gas emissions come largely from transportation, and per capita emissions are higher in less dense, more car-dependent areas like Marin County than in comparatively built-up San Francisco.

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Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin called SB 827 a declaration of war against our neighborhoods.

The second-least convincing argument against SB 827 came from self-proclaimed mass transit advocates, including some environmentalists who argued that linking density to transit provision would encourage wealthy homeowners to throw trains and buses out of their neighborhoods. The risk of this is real, though Wiener has put forth three compelling counterarguments. First, transportation policy is often regional and thus slightly insulated from local NIMBYism. Second, caving to extremist overreaction before the fact is a recipe for never getting anywhere. (Many projected opponents have already spiked transit expansion.) Third, current land use is severely limiting the utility of the heavy, light, and commuter rail systems to which Californians have already committed billions.

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The third-least convincing argument comes from homeowners, who were predictably outraged. SB 827 earned unanimous condemnation from the Los Angeles City Council, in part because of its anticipated effect on the citys many low-slung neighborhoods. This bill is still too blunt for our single-family-home areas, a spokesperson for Mayor Eric Garcetti, who opposed the bill, said in February. Councilmember Paul Koretz said the bill would destroy Los Angeles. Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin called it a declaration of war against our neighborhoods. Others simply lied about the bills effects. San Francisco supervisor Jane Kim wrote on Monday that SB 827 would allow unlimited luxury condo high-rises.

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Here, things get tricky. While SB 827 would not have sent Los Angeles tumbling into the Pacific Ocean, it would have allowed for five-story apartment buildings in parts of the city currently zoned only for single-family homes. (An L.A. Times analysis identified 190,000 eligible single-family parcels in the city proper, which is only a fraction of the urban area.) Its hard to say what the effect would be on these neighborhoods, because nothing like SB 827 has ever happened before. Wealthy neighborhoods would have mushroomed midlevel residential construction, generating new businesses and sidewalk trafficthough probably not with the same fervor that accompanies single-corridor rezonings. Some property values would have risen, and some would have fallen. Municipal finance recalibration might be nextas Lisa Schweitzer has written, Proposition 13, the 1978 referendum freezing the states property taxes, has given cities little way to benefit from new apartments. Renters (who make up a majority in many California cities) would have unprecedented freedom to live where they want.

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Finally, though the zoning SB 827 aimed to undo was developed and deployed to enforce racial segregation, tenants and their advocatesincluding many people of colorwere almost uniformly opposed, arguing that the bill would accelerate gentrification and displacement in underprivileged communities. Dozens of like-minded organizations in Los Angeles argued the bill would actually worsen the affordable-housing crisis by creating incentives for developers to demolish low-rent housing.

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Wiener did address those issuesbut not until late February. At that point, he inserted language deferring to localities on demolition ordinances and affordability requirements. But the perception had already been established that the bill, which had been endorsed by Californias major tech companies and other business interests, was of the top-down planning style that had long ago (and for good reason) been discredited in Americas black and Latino neighborhoods.

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By the time a group of national fair-housing experts joined 22 California planning professors in endorsing the legislation on April 5, it was too late. SB 827 alone cannot solve the problem of racial residential segregation, but it is a major step in the right direction, by overcoming the most pernicious force that maintains racial and economic segregation, restrictive and exclusionary land use policies, the fair-housing group wrote. While segregation across Californias metropolitan regions is paradoxically exacerbated by displacement from historically segregated and disinvested neighborhoods, this is occurring even in the absence of new development. Open development would make California fairer and more diverse, they wrote. Finally, on April 12, the Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California, which represents more than 750 affordable housing developers, announced its support.

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California is basically one enormous gentrifying neighborhood.

This discrepancy between activists, politicians, and tenants on the one hand and builders and experts on the other is partly explained by the way the bill evolved. Had the fair-housing community been on board from the start, Wiener might have managed to cement the link between the largely white YIMBY movement and the largely minority fair-housing movement that preceded it by 50 years. After all, it was upwardly mobile black families who started the fight against exclusionary zoning in the suburbs. Situating his bill in the fair-housing tradition would have helped Wiener gain support in places like Los Angeles.

Of course, California cities are in a very different place now than in 1968. Gentrification and displacement have flipped the significance of zoning laws in high-cost cities. Walls intended to confine now promise security. Local control is now seen as empowering communities of color, though their neighborhoods bear the brunt of new development because the system ultimately grants white neighborhoods more power still. The bottleneck in housing supply is so tight that its accurate to equate new construction with luxury housing. But breaking down zoning in the states all-but-gated suburbs, where SB 827 would have the most dramatic effect, is not a mission that YIMBYs invented.

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The difference in perspective between experts, including builders, and residents isnt just a matter of how tenant protections were tacked on, though, or how times have changed. For every person of limited income who has managed to remain in a transit-rich neighborhood of Los Angeles, Oakland, or San Francisco, the status quo is just barely working. Who can blame them for resisting a proposal that has been widely identified as a policy earthquake, when the situation seems so precarious? For them, things can get worse.

From a birds-eye perspective, though, its not clear that things can get much worse. Consider the Bay Area, where the nurse in San Jose flies into work from Idaho and where families living in cars dump their feces into storm drains across the street from the future Chan-Zuckerberg School, a philanthropic endeavor of the Facebook founder and his wife thats a five-minute drive from the companys global headquarters. In the past five years, the Bay Area has added 373,000 jobs and built only 58,000 units of housing. California homes cost 2 times the U.S. average, and higher still in the coastal metros that SB 827 would address. The California Legislative Analysts Office estimated in 2015 that the states major metro areas between 1980 and 2010 built barely half the number of housing units needed to keep price growth in line with the U.S. average. Hundreds of thousands of low-income households have left the state over the past decade, replaced by high-earning new arrivals. California is basically one enormous gentrifying neighborhood. What does worse look like?

The good news, if there is any, is that the crisis has created a constituency: Just 54 percent of California households own their homes, the third-lowest rate in the nation. If any state were positioned to pass a state law for renters, this is it.
DJ and producer Tim Bergling, better known by his stage name Avicii, died Friday afternoon at age 28. His representative issued the following statement:

It is with profound sorrow that we announce the loss of Tim Bergling, also known as Avicii. He was found dead in Muscat, Oman this Friday afternoon local time, April 20th. The family is devastated and we ask everyone to please respect their need for privacy in this difficult time. No further statements will be given.

The Swedish artist stopped performing live in 2016 due to health problems. He had been suffering from acute pancreatitis and other issues related to excessive drinking for several years, and had his gallbladder and appendix removed in 2014.
This article is published through a partnership with New York Medias Strategist. The partnership is designed to surface the most useful, expert recommendations for things to buy across the vast e-commerce landscape. We update links when possible, but note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change. Every editorial product is independently selected by New York Media. If you buy something through our links, Slate and New York Media may earn an affiliate commission.

For our primer on wine books, we consulted a group of sommeliers that includes Aldo Sohm, wine director of three-Michelin-starred Le Bernardin and the face of Aldo Sohm Wine Bar; Belinda Chang, James Beard Award-winning sommelier; Victoria James, beverage director at Cote; Ashley Santoro, regional beverage director at the Standard; Alexis Schwartz, sales representative at Brooklyn-based wine importer Zev Rovine Selections; and Carla Rza Betts, co-founder of An Approach to Relaxation.

Each of these experts sent us a list of books, from their most-referenced wine encyclopedias to the books they give as gifts to fellow wine lovers, and we only included titles that were recommended by two or more of the sommeliers. Not all of these are wine books for beginners, and some are admittedly on the more-expensive side. But whether your goal is to build a working library of the best wine books that includes some canonical titles, or to just learn a little bit more about pet-nat and natural wines so you can order wine in a restaurant more confidently, this sommelier-approved list will be a good starting point.

If You Only Read One Wine Book

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Jon Bonne is a wine writer with a few books under his belt, along with a still-running column for the San Francisco Chronicle. His most-recent title, The New Wine Rules, has quickly become a favorite; his writing was cited by four of the six sommeliers with whom I spoke. This is a small little book, this is not technical, says Santoro. Its like a Zen little wine reference book. Sohm agrees, and loves the way that Bonne empowers readers. Wine is always so filled with rules and intimidations and people feeling insecure. He actually breaks it down just beautifully. He gives people a certain security and lifts all these myths. And since it was published in 2017, it provides a good snapshot of how people drink today; Schwartz describes Bonne as of-the-moment now, and looking at things in a nice way.

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BUY: The New Wine Rules: A Genuinely Helpful Guide to Everything You Need to Know

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Best Travel Memoir About Wine

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Kermit Lynch was one of the first major importers of great French wine into the States, Betts explains, and his tales of grand feasts, cold cellar tastings, and navigating the world of the wine merchant are a lovely treat. Its a good read for those interested in the history of importing wine and seeing how the market has changed over the last several decades. The wines that hes talking about, youre like, Oh, yeah, of course Ive heard of those wines. But he is struggling to sell them, says James. But even if youre clueless about which wines are from where, its just a fun read, about a hippie-turnedwine importer from Berkeley, California, and a memoir that three of our somms think of as reenergizing. I sometimes reference that book because its motivating, and it inspires you to kind of think about the things that initially got you into wine, says Santoro. Thats one of my top 10, for sure.

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BUY: Adventures on the Wine Route: A Wine Buyers Tour of France

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Best Wine Reference Books

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The Oxford Companion to Wine, by Jancis Robinson, isnt for beginners. Its so packed with information, its really hard for people to digest, especially when youre going to complex areas, explains Sohm. But for him, and three of the other sommeliers, its considered a classic title. This is the holy grail, says Sohm, a go-to reference for many working somms and wine experts.

Schwartz will take out her copy if theres a term or a process or a place that I need to refresh myself on, Ill open it and read about it, like an encyclopedia. Betts calls it, A fantastic reference point, regardless of your wine knowledge. Schwartz, however, does recommend getting the newest edition, because theyre much more inclusive and they incorporate certain producers that I actually like to drink or talk about, including more information on biodynamic and natural wines.

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BUY: The Oxford Companion to Wine (Oxford Companions)

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If theres a place that youre going or you want a more geographic overview, Robinsons The World Atlas of Wine, written with Hugh Johnson, is recommended by two of our experts. Its especially handy if youre a visual learner who loves maps, like Betts. This book with its very detailed regional maps and easygoing voice felt like I was being led comfortably down a potentially overwhelming path. Its still technical, since it does cover such a huge amount of producer information by region, notes Santoro, but its not dry. I think its definitely for someone thats starting out their sommelier journey or takes wine classes now that are a little bit more fun and arent super professional, but they want to know a little bit more about the things they already love, she explains.

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BUY: The World Atlas of Wine, 7th Edition

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Best Gift Book for Wine Lovers

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Thats my signature gift, for a housewarming or for anyone I know, says Chang, and though shes the only sommelier to recommend this specific title, both Sohm and Betts lauded Jay McInerneys work as a wine writer. This workbook is designed to help you think a bit more carefully about what wines youre drinking and what you like to drink, alongside answers from famous oenophiles who have been asked to think about the same questions. So this book has Graydon Carters favorite wine, my favorite wine, among others, says Chang, and then it has pages to fill in. I know a lot of people will buy a Moleskine wine journal or a beautiful Smythson wine journal and never use it. But I think this is one that people actually use because its beautiful, theres stuff to read, and then filling in the pages is really satisfying and fun.

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BUY: Wine Questionnaire (Classics)

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Best Book for Aspiring Sommeliers

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Before the documentary SOMM provided an insider look at world of sommeliers, there was Rajat Parr and Jordan Mackays Secrets of the Sommeliers, and according to Santoro, it kind of changed the culture and inspired a new generation of younger sommeliers. I knew that what I wanted to do before reading that book, says Santoro, but this title helped her to understand, I can actually make a living from being a somm, and I dont have to be 50 years old and wearing a tuxedo and just drinking Bordeaux. Sohm also cites it as giving a lot of insight into how people in the industry think, it gives opinion from very famous wine directors and gives also side notes with practical examples about some of the common questions he and other sommeliers have to answer daily during service.

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BUY: Secrets of the Sommeliers: How to Think and Drink Like the Worlds Top Wine Professionals

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Best Book About Champagne

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This James Beard Awardwinning title came out in 2017, and its already becoming the must-have, classic title on Champagne. This one is never leaving my side, says Chang, and Sohm agrees. Its filled with maps, its filled with history about how bottles were made, and its really, really an absolute world-class book right now. Sohm also calls the author Peter Liem arguably one of the best connoisseurs of Champagne. The photographs, by Andrea Gentl, are also stunning, says Chang. Champagne is already, inherently romantic and celebratory and mystical to us all, but I think she really captured it through the photography. And the book touched my soul, not to sound cheesy. But it really did.

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Best Books About Food and Wine

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To me, I think the big problem with a lot of wine books is that they dont involve food, and that, to me, is the silliest thing ever, because wine exists because of food, says James. She cites Richard Olney as one of the best food writers who also writes well about wine because he concentrates on regions and recipes and the wines that go with them. And when you understand the food, I think you understand the flavors in the wine and the region, as well. Santoro thinks The French Menu is a good place to start in Olneys work for an overview of regions; James also likes Lulus Provencal Table, which focuses on a single family-owned vineyard in the South of France.

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BUY: The French Menu Cookbook: The Food and Wine of France

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BUY: Lulus Provencal Table

$28, Amazon

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Its not a wine book. I think that book changes how you live, says Chang. It teaches you the joys of the table and how wine is a part of the joys of the table and how life happens with the joys of the table if youre living elegantly and beautifully and bravely, so for me, it is a wine-drinking book. Schwartz agrees. Wine should be a part of food, and I think far too often, wine books or the way we talk about wine, it just becomes too detached from those experiences, and author M.F.K. Fisher brings it back to its original joy.

BUY: The Art of Eating: 50th Anniversary Edition

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Best Essay Collection About Wine

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Betts recommends anything by Jay McInerney for when you want to indulge in wine-world gossip, vivid social commentary, and a luxurious helping of joie de vivre from a man with a great palate and a wild party side. Sohm particularly likes The Juice, which features a chapter about his relationship with chef Eric Ripert. I would give this to someone who just wants to read a little bit about wine but doesnt want to go into depth, he says, adding, Sometimes, if you study all day long, you need to back off a bit and read something entertaining, and this is something that refreshes you a little bit and makes you smile.

BUY: The Juice: Vinous Veritas

$13, Amazon

Best Book for the Person Who Knows Everything There Is to Know About Wine

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Ten years ago, when I started out in wine, everyone was like, I want Chardonnay or Tempranillo or Cabernet. But now, everyones like, What is amaro? says Santoro, and though this book isnt about wine, its a good read if youre trying to stay ahead of trends. If youre a beverage professional, this is another obscure category of beverages that people often forget about, notes James. And theres so much history there and so many interesting cocktails and recipes you can dive into.

BUY: Amaro: The Spirited World of Bittersweet, Herbal Liqueurs, With Cocktails, Recipes, and Formulas

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Though she is wealthy and famous, anti-cyberbullying activist Melania Trump is just like any one of us: When she puts on her pants, she does it one leg at a time. Jackets, however, are a different story. To the first lady, sleeves are useless. Arms are best glued to the torso under the body of a coat, not maneuvered into tubes to be flailed about or, heaven forbid, used.

Trump has spent her three years in the public eye demonstrating how to wear a coat without surrendering to the sleeve. When theres a nip in the air, she takes her outerwear directly from hanger to shoulders, restricting her movements so it doesnt slide off. The effect is similar to that of a mannequin: a perfectly formed vehicle for other peoples creations, with limited mobility and agency. You can see why the wife of our president Donald Trump might favor the look.

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This week, Trump posted on social media a photo of herself gazing at a wall of pills at an opioid-related memorial. The sleeves of her pink overcoat hung like dead fish from her shoulders, with no arms to shape them or hands to give them a natural end. Her unclothed arm, meanwhile, reached out from within to touch the wall. The optical effect made her look inhuman, with the wrong number of limbs attached at all the wrong angles.

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A post shared by First Lady Melania Trump (@flotus) on Apr 16, 2018 at 11:10am PDT

The sleeved-but-sleeveless approach to jackets is a favorite among people who attend various fashion weeks. Former Teen Vogue editor Elaine Welteroth often drapes one particular leather jacket over her shoulders, and sometimes this denim one, and occasionally a peacoat. Adult Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, who is known for her flashy outerwear, loves to keep her sleeves flapping freely by her sides. For this rarefied community, it seems like no-sleeves might be a practical way to preserve a garment that costs thousands of dollars: Sleeves with no arms in them wont get stretched-out outer elbows or wrinkled inner ones. In 2012, the Guardian called the style shoulder-robing; the year after, BuzzFeed published a mini-explainer. Apparently, the article said, everyone wants to wear their most stylish new coats to September fashion shows, but the weather is too hot for winter wear. Draping a heavy coat over the shoulders lets the arms (and, crucially, the armpits) breathe.

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This is a surprisingly commonsense explanation for an inherently anti-utilitarian act. An untethered jacket is one stiff breeze or enthusiastic wave away from ending up on the floor, requiring the wearer to forever marshal one cubic inch of brainspace toward the effort of keeping the thing on. But people fancy enough to leave their arms out of their sleeves are never subjected to the elements, e.g. stiff breezes, and if they defile their ensembles by waving, they would hardly do so enthusiastically, you are probably saying. Fair, but when it comes to Trump, youre wrong! Waving and walking through breezes are two of the first ladys primary job responsibilities. See her brave the weather at tarmacs, outdoor podia, and tourist hotspots below.

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Yes, perhaps Trump was too warm in some of these places to fully inhabit a coat she very much wanted to wear. But I suspect the image of a woman too important to have to move her arms for anything appealed to her more than a well-regulated body temperature. Impractical fashion carries with it the implication that one can outsource all practical labor. When Trump leaves her arms out of her sleeves, shes telling us she doesnt have to perform any of the daily manual tasks the rest of us do: She will never reach for anything in a cabinet, stoop to pick anything off the ground, hold open any doors, pour any glasses of water, lift her arms to fix her hair, or fish a credit card out of a purse. If she did, her coat would slip right off.

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With Trumps coat in position, she projects a kind of diminutive female frailtyunable to exert physical effort, confined to a set of spatial boundaries by a thin piece of cloth. A person wearing a coat without its sleeves doesnt bundle up in it; she hugs it around her shoulders, a demure gesture that suggests her lover has just wrapped her inside. Its crossing her ankles, but for her arms.

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Washington Post fashion columnist Robin Givhan called 2017 the year of the sleeve for Trump, who often appeared in public with blousy, fur-trimmed, or otherwise embellished sleeves on her dresses. This did not apply to her coats, whose sleeves she rarely employed, but it may help explain them. A fancy dress sleeve could easily be compromised by a narrow coat sleeve. It could get wrinkled, snagged or de-puffed while making its way through; wearing a coat like a cape preserves the sleeves underneath. Stiff or otherwise immobile dress sleeves could also make getting into and out of a coat an ungainly experience, something Trump might not want the cameras to capture.

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But the best explanation for Trumps sleeveless styling came in February, when she and Donald boarded Marine One on their way to Ohio.* The president tried to grab her hand, but only got a hold of her sleeve, then made an awkward show of moving to her other side. In this scenario, Trumps empty sleeve functioned as a safety buffer. When your arms arent where theyre supposed to be, its a lot harder for other people to find them.

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Kris Kobach is not having a good year. In January, the Kansas secretary of states voter-fraud commission disbanded in an effort to duck multiple lawsuits. In March, his claims of widespread noncitizen voting were torn apart in open court, reducing his defining crusade to a punchline. And on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson held Kobach in contempt of court, holding that hed flouted an order requiring him to register voters who could not show proof of citizenship. Robinsons 25-page decision doesnt just conclude that Kobach broke the law. It also lays out, in painstaking detail, just how inept his lawbreaking was.

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The saga that led to Wednesdays contempt order began in May 2016, when Robinson issued a preliminary injunction blocking Kansas proof-of-citizenship law. That measure, which Kobach helped to pass, required Kansans to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship, like a passport or birth certificate, when registering to vote. The American Civil Liberties Union argued that this rule violates the National Voter Registration Act, and Robinson agreed. By the time she froze the law, more than 17,000 Kansans had tried to register to vote at the Department of Motor Vehicles without proof of citizenship. The state had put these voters on a suspense list. Robinson ordered Kobach to register these suspended voters and treat them the same way as other qualified registrants.

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In September 2016, the ACLU presented evidence that Kansas had failed to add these 17,000 suspended voters to the official registration list. Instead, the state had compelled them to use provisional ballots and issued misleading notices implying they might not be registered to vote. The ACLU filed a motion for contempt, and Robinson directed Kobach to appear in person to explain why he should not be held in contempt of court. The day before that hearing, Kobach agreed to send a notice to these voters declaring that they are deemed registered and qualified to vote. Robinson ordered Kobach to follow through on this promise and to revise language on the secretary of states website and at the DMV suggesting that Kansans with no proof of citizenship could not vote.

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Finally, Robinson made it clear to Kobach that her preliminary injunction required him to send voter registration postcards to the 17,000 Kansans in limbo. (Voters typically receive these postcards, which provide their information and polling place, several weeks after they register.) In November, the ACLU discovered that Kansas had not sent these postcards. Kobachs lawyer Sue Becker told the ACLUs attorneys that the postcards were unnecessary because the state sent court ordered notices instead. The ACLU also found that Kansas had not fixed its County Election Manual, which was publicly available on the secretary of states website. The manual, which Kansas election officials rely upon, still claimed that all new voters had to provide proof of citizenship. Becker informed the ACLU that the secretary of state refused to alter this inaccurate language. The ACLU filed another motion for contempt.

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Thats where things went off the rails. During the federal trial over Kobachs proof-of-citizenship law earlier this year, Robinson asked Bryan Caskey, Kansas director of elections, whether the state had sent standard postcards to the suspended voters confirming their registration. Caskey would not answer the question directly. Robinson also asked whether the information that Kansas sent to these voters was at least in the same universe of information that other voters received. Caskey replied that no, it is not the same information.

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Yet just days later, at the contempt hearing, Caskey changed his story, claiming hed refreshed his memory by checking his calendar. He now asserted that he had told county election officials to send the standard postcards to the suspended voters. Becker also backtracked at the contempt hearing. After telling the ACLU for months that the secretary of state was not obligated to send standard postcards to suspended voters, Kobachs lawyer now claimed he had sent these postcards.

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In the contempt order she issued this week, Robinson wrote, the Court does not find Mr. Caskeys testimony to be credible. It strains credulity to believe that Mr. Caskey, after months of denying that the Courts orders required him to send standard postcards to covered registrants, remembered a few days before the show cause hearing that he had in fact orally instructed the counties to send them. She criticized Caskeys eleventh hour recollection as inconsistent and evasive and noted that he offered no further proof to corroborate it.

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Robinson then turned to Kobach, the defendant in the case. [T]he Court is troubled, she wrote, by [Kobachs] failure to take responsibility for violating this Courts orders, and for failing to ensure compliance. Not only did Kobach fail to send the required postcards; he also refused to update the online election manual until weeks before the trial, making what the judge termed nonsensical objections. And rather than follow the courts orders, Kobach deflected blame for his failure to comply onto county officials, and onto his own staff, some of whom are not licensed attorneys. Because it was Kobachs duty to ensure compliance with the court orders, Robinson concluded, it is he who should bear the burden of sanctions for the lengthy delay in compliance.

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Given the extent of Kobachs misconduct, Robinson let him off lightly, ordering him to pay the attorneys fees the ACLU incurred in drafting and defending its contempt request. Notably, she also wrote that Kobachs history of noncompliance and disrespect for the Courts decisions may require more specific, verifiable directives when she issues her final ruling in the case, which is expected in the next few months.

Robinsons decision lays bare Kobachs piteous attempt to cover up his misconducthow he threw his staff under the bus instead of taking responsibility for his own actions (and inaction). Before Wednesdays ruling came down, Kobach declared that Nothing makes my day like a fight with the ACLU. Thats a strange way to talk about an organization that has repeatedly humiliated you in public. Then again, not much of what Kobach says makes any kind of sense.
The memos drafted by former FBI Director James Comey about his interactions with President Trump, just posted by the Associated Press on Thursday night, contain some strange and illuminating tidbits about conversations Trump had with other world leaders in the early days of his presidency.

As Comey has discussed widely in the run-up to the release of his memoir, he says in the memos that Trump was fixated on the infamous claim about urinating prostitutes in the Steele dossier, or the golden showers thing, as the president apparently called it. In a Feb. 8, 2017, memo, Comey says that Trump claimed during a conversation at the White House that he hadnt even stayed overnight in Moscow during the Miss Universe trip where the event allegedly took place, but also added that Russian President Vladimir Putin had told him We have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world. 

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Comey notes that Trump didnt mention when Putin had told him this, but Putin had made public comments about the beauty of Russian prostitutes that January. The two leaders had conducted their first official conversation just 11 days earlier. Perhaps the two leaders also discussed beautiful hookers then, or perhaps Trump was merely referring to Putins public statements and Comey misunderstood.

The president also had some choice words for his former national security advisor. In a memo from Jan. 28, the day of the Putin call, Comey writes that Trump said he had serious reservations about Mike Flynns judgment. The president told a story from British Prime Minister Theresa Mays first visit to the White House, earlier that week. Comey writes:

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Apparently, as the President was toasting PM May, he was explaining that she had been the first to call him after his inauguration and Flynn interrupted to say that [redacted] had called (first, apparently). It was then that the President learned of [redacted] call and he confronted Flynn about it (not clear whether that was in the moment or after the lunch with PM May). Flynn said the return call was scheduled for Saturday, which prompted a heated reply from the President that six days was not an appropriate period of time to return a call from the [redacted] of a country like [redacted.] (This isnt [redacted] we are talking about.)

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Trump spoke to several world leaders on the Saturday that the return call was apparently scheduled, including Putin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Francois Hollande, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

In the final memo, dated April 11, 2017, Comey notes that during a phone call, Trump began to talk about Egypt and its leader, saying Obama didnt like the guy, and mentioned the recent Coptic church bombings by ISIS in the country. According to Comey, Trump also said that three Americans had been killed by an Egyptian soldier and the Egyptian leader had raised it with him. As Comey pointed out to Trump, it was actually a Jordanian soldier who had killed three U.S. troops.
3:16pm

Protesters have blocked the Koryun-Teryan and Mashtots-Teryan intersections. Many drivers have parked their cars horizontally in the streets and are honking their horns in support of the protesters.

3:00pm

Several hundred youngsters are marching along Khorenatsi Street. Reject Serzh initiative members Armen Grigoryan and Davit Sanasaryan are at the head of the march. They are calling on citizens to attend this evenings rally at Republic Square scheduled for 7.

2:57pm

Protest marchers have reached Mashtots Avenue and are spilling over into the street from the crowded sidewalks. Shouting join us, they are calling on passersby to attend this evenings rally at Republic Square.

2:20pm

Traffic is now flowing on Arshakunyats Avenue after truncheon-wielding police arrived on the scene. The protesters raised their arms in the air, to show the peaceful nature of the protest.

A group of protesters marched down Garegin Njdeh Street and joined a larger crowd gathered on Arshakunyats Avenue. Police in riot-gear are blocking activists from entering the street.

Hundreds of protesters marching down Tigran Metz Avenue joined those on Arshakunyats Avenue, blocking two-way traffic on the major artery.

1:57pm

A group of students from Erebuni State Medical College have blocked Titogradyan Street, which affords access to the school.

After drivers reprimanded them for closing the street leading to the hospital, the students made their way to the Erebuni Reserve-Museum.

Unidentified individuals in cars, who were following the students along Ayvazovsky Street, exited the vehicles and attacked the students.

1:55pm

Students from the Brusov State University of Languages and Social Sciences in Yerevan blocked the nearby Saryan-Tumanyan intersection.

1:50pm

Activists have succeeded in blocking a section of Arshakunyats Street in Yerevan for some time now. Police have arrived on the scene, and the activists have locked arms to resist any attempt to disperse them.

1:20pm

Police have removed trash bins from the Saryan-Tumanyan intersection. One student activist, Arayik Gharibyan, was detained by police. One the police left, activists moved in and again closed the section of Saryan Street near Brusov State University.

1:15pm

Police are detaining people who were trying to block the intersection of Koryun and Teryan Streets in Yerevan

12:31pm

A large group of protesters, marching up Mashtots Avenue, have turned on Amiryan Street, and are now headed for Saryan Street. Students from the Institute of Cinema and Theater, shouting school strike have joined them.

12:30pm

Police detained scores of people at the Mashtots-Isahakyan intersection who were trying to stage a protest action at the Fine Arts Academy.

Top photo: University student Arayik Gharibyan

Note to readers - After the National Assembly elected Serzh Sargsyan prime minister on April 17, Yelk Alliance MP Nikol Pashinyan, who spearheaded the Im Kayl (My Step) movement to prevent Sargsyans election, declared a Velvet Revolution to be carried out on a rotating basis. Protesters will briefly occupy government buildings, urging civil servants inside to join them. The intent is to disrupt the normal flow of life in downtown Yerevan, blocking traffic on major streets, and then hold evening rallies in Republic Square. Today marks the eighth day of civil disobedience in Yerevan.

By Gagik Aghbalyan, Diana Ghazaryan, Amalia Margaryan, Ani Gevorgyan
GOLDBERG: Hes of a type that Ive recognized in the past as one not suited to stand up to the rigors of jail life. And dont forget, hes under pressure not just from his own personality, but from his family. They dont see Michael as taking pressure or a fall for somebody else. And if the government requires a certain kind of cooperation, or gives out a hint as to what could be necessary, the record has shown 

BURNETT: So you think hes of weak character, basically?

GOLDBERG: I do think so. I think in many ways, and its difficult to say this, prison has a racial overtone. And a person like Michael doesnt see himself walking down Broadway while people are clamoring, youre going to be my wife. And so hes under pressure from his family to try to figure out what it would take to bring the government aboard as his sponsor.

BURNETT: So youre saying Michael Cohen, it sounds like you believe, did do something wrong, that there could be something criminal herehe wouldnt be worried about jail otherwise. But you dont think that he would have the goods on the presidenthe would simply say what they wanted to hear to get out of his own prison [sentence], which you believe he very fairly could have deserved?

GOLDBERG: I dont say that the government has importuned to say certain things that are not true, but a witness in Michaels position is able to glean what it would take to get a letter of cooperation from the government and thereby avoid a lengthy prison term.
In 2013, when Montana State Sen. Matt Rosendale was running in the Republican primary for the states at-large House seat, he released a campaign ad in which he shot what was, in his words, a government drone with a rifle. The stunt earned him a slew of national media attention, as ads with gun stunts typically do. But for those of us with an appreciation for mid-Atlantic accents, shooting the government drone wasnt the story. It was the way that he said drone, or his own last name, with an elaborate EH-o sound for the long o. The pronunciation was unmistakably Maryland, as if a pit beef restaurant manager from Dundalk had kidnapped the actual guy who was running for Congress in Montana and taken his place. What was the most Maryland-sounding person alive doing here, running for Congress in Big Sky country?

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Rosendale left his native Maryland, where he was a real estate developer, in 2002, but he took the accent with him. Since losing that 2014 congressional primary to Ryan Zinke, who is now Secretary of the Interior, Rosendale has served as Montanas Senate majority leader and, currently serves as its state auditor.

He is also the favorite in this years Republican primary for the U.S. Senate, a high-stakes race to take on incumbent Democratic Sen. Jon Tester in November. He has the endorsements of conservative Sens. Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Ted Cruz, as well as conservative organizations like the Club for Growth and Freedomworks. Breitbart loves him, and the limited polling suggests hes comfortably ahead of his three primary opponents.

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But Rosendales YouTube offerings this time around appear to be much different. The government drone ad from five years ago has been pulleddont worry, you can still watch it hereand most of the videos on his page now stand out for their lack of a certain, central element to most introductory campaign ads: the candidates voice.

Here is his first ad from last year, for example, in which we hear that Matt Rosendale means business not from Rosendale himself, but from a gruff third-party narrator.

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You would think that living in a state for 16 years would be enough to shake off attacks of opportunism or carpetbagging. But his accent wont allow him to. His opponents in both the primary and the general are using the accent to otherize Rosendale.

At a candidate forum Wednesday in Missoula, Mont., The Washington Post reports, former Billings judge Russ Fagg laid into the most well-funded candidate in the race, state Auditor Matt Rosendale, calling him a Maryland transplant who came to the state only to run for office.

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Now, former Billings judge Russ Fagg may not be able to topple Rosendale in the primary, but he does bless the attacks that the state Democratic Party is already using against the man theyve dubbed Maryland Matt. The Montana Democratic Party has made a web video of Maryland Matt, replete with crab imagery. Within it is footage from an old pro-Zinke ad, which shows an animated crab shuffling across a map from Maryland to Montana.

Maryland values arent Montana values, it reads.

As a native Marylander, I agree. Maryland values are far more wholesome. It is a shame that some in this country see Maryland Matt as an epithet, when any Matt out there should feel honored to earn such a sobriquet. If Rosendale wants to be the next Montana senator, he shouldnt hide from his beautiful voice. He should seek to settle Montana as a colony of Maryland, much as Cecil Calvert settled Maryland as a colonial refuge for Catholics. You cant hide who you are. Run with it.
This invitation, to a Poverty Party, asked guests to come to the home of D.W. Tripp in Athens, Pennsylvania, in February 1896. Held at the tail end of the Gilded Age, this POVErTY SOSHUL promised yellocutin, speakin peaces and singin songs, and a prize for the most disreast lookin man individual, also ths woman what look ekally as bad. The proceeds of the party would go to the erecshun of a noo Universalist Meetin House. This invitation, sent at a time of great income inequality, when the suffering of immigrants in cities and black Americans in the post-Reconstruction South was particularly acute, shows how some people in the middle and upper classes of the Gilded Age regarded the poor they lived alongside.

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From the dialect used on the invitations, to the plain food served at the event, a poverty party established social distance between the celebrants and the lower classes whose shoes they were stepping into for a night. Mush and milk was served in tin cups with tin spoons, Mrs. Herbert B. Linscott wrote of one poverty party in her 1905 book Bright Ideas for Entertaining, adding a parentheticalborrowed for the partyto make sure you know that she doesnt expect her readers to actually own tinware. A 1907 book on entertaining by Ellye Howell Glover recommended that a poverty party should offer corn meal mush in crockery bowls, served with a bountiful supply of cream and sugar, brown and white bread sandwiches, apple and pumpkin pies, coffee in tin cups, doughnuts, and cookieson a table set with no tablecloth, and decorated only with paper napkins and flowers.

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These occasions allowed rich and middle-class people to dress down and enjoy it. Linscotts suggested invitation included rules for party garb: Every womin what kums must ware a Poverty dress and apern, er something ekelly erpropriate, an leave her poodle dorg to hum. (I know, this stuff is hard to read. But these invitations are such interesting ephemeral examples of the Gilded Ages passion for the use of humorous, colorful dialect in literature; I must include it.)

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At fundraisers, like the one Tripp threw, hosts imposed fines on those who came dressed with excessive fanciness. The Chester Methodist Episcopal Church of Chester, New York, in an invitation for a poverty party in 1900, announced that men would be fined for coming with oiled hair or wacksed mustash, sigars in pocket, or if they were karrying a kane. Women would be fined for wearing a wool dress, a hat with flours or fethers, or a boka (bouquet).

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Design historian Beverly Gordon hypothesizes that dressing down, as people did at poverty parties, must have brought on the same kind of titillating feeling that was activated by putting on an exotic or otherwise risque outfit. Gordon adds that males were more likely to agree to come in costume to a tramp, poverty, or rag party than they were to most other types; they seem to have been more comfortable appearing as raggedy than as picturesque.

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By 1900, the magazine of the St. Louis Republic thought the theme was already passe: Nearly everyone knows about poverty parties and tacky parties where the guests are arrayed in the most absurd old clothes they can find. But a party at the home of one Estelle Brauckmanna surprise planned by some of Miss Brauckmanns friends to celebrate her return from a six months absence in the Eastwas different.

The magazine singled out this particular poverty party because the guests spoke to each other in delightful Irish brogue, the very accents of which make one good-humored and kindly. Talking like an Irish person seemed to assuage peoples inhibitions and anxieties: There were no wall flowers; nobody was jealous because some other man was talking to his girl. There was a smile on every face.

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Brauckmanns party had aftereffects for the lives of actual poor people: Maids of different nationalities are in great demand of the households of those who attended the party, and the young ladies and gentlemen of those families are studying character dialect with the same assiduousness that French, Spanish, and German are studied by those who contemplate foreign trips, the Republic wrote. One wonders what these maids must have thought of their young employers sudden interest.

This report of the loose and fun atmosphere at Estelle Brauckmanns welcoming-home party highlights the most disturbing aspect of the Gilded Ages poverty parties. Well-to-do guests enjoying the social release of dressing down and speaking in dialect demonstrated what has to have been a core belief of theirs: that people in poverty, free of the constraints of polite society, were having more fun.

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The practice of poverty parties was not without its contemporary critics. In her Good Times for Girls, a 1920 book of activities for teenagers published a few decades after the parties first became popular, author Mary Eliza Moxcey cautioned: It will be wise to use this [poverty party concept] only as a preliminary to some real service that will alleviate poverty.  Care must be taken that the guests are not made to feel that poverty is something to be played at and taken lightly.  there should be outlet provided for the sympathy aroused for those who have been deprived of what should be theirs.

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The poverty party has had an afterlife, thanks to Southern sororities and fraternities. Historian Anthony James essay about fraternities and traditionalism at Southern universities in the post-WWII era, when GI Bill enrollment changed the socio-economic makeup of the student body, argues that at universities like Alabama and Ole Miss, poverty parties and unemployment parties reinforced notions of Greek privilege. Poverty parties thrown by these richer undergrads of the 40s and 50s retained some of the characteristics of their early-20th-century forebearsprospective dates to the 1950 Ole Miss Kappa Sigma poverty party received invitations on old brown paper bags, and at an 1947 unemployment party at that university, guests stood in a bread line to get hot chocolate and doughnuts.

Nor has the tradition completely died out. Sara Bir, blogging on HuffPost, found a mention of a poverty party in an anthology of ideas for parties published in 1973 by the sorority Beta Sigma Phi. As recently as 2015, according to one blogger, a fraternity at the University of Missouri held a Poverty Party, with guests wearing clothes from Goodwill and posting Instagrams: Just a couple of kids living the double-wide dream.

Thanks to historian and curator Mitch Fraas, who recently shared the D.W. Tripp and Chester Methodist Episcopal Church invitations on Facebook.
In an interview with Vice News that aired Thursday night, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced that he would be introducing a bill to decriminalize marijuana. If smoking marijuana doesnt hurt anybody else, why shouldnt we allow people to do it and not make it criminal? he asked.

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As he explained in the interview and on Twitter, the bill would allow states to set their own policies on marijuana without federal intervention beyond preventing the flow of marijuana to states that havent yet legalized it. The bill would also fund research on THC and, in Schumers words, inject real dollars into minority and women-owned businesses to ensure those disproportionately affected by marijuana criminalization can benefit from this new economy. I recognize that time after time when these sweeping changes occur, the little guys lose while the big guys continue to profit, he tweeted. We saw this with big tobacco and we could see it with marijuana as well.

This is a significant milestone for the legalization movement, as Schumer is the highest-ranking elected official yet in Washington to put forward pro-pot legislation. The move also effectively nudges the Democratic caucus toward openly supporting legalization.

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A number of Senate Democrats have been working the issue for a while now, though. Last spring, Sen. Ron Wyden introduced a package of legislation that would legalize marijuana at the federal level and impose an excise tax akin to those levied on alcohol and tobacco. One bill in the package would also allow for the expungement of marijuana offenses from the criminal records of those convicted in states where marijuana was legal or those convicted for possessing an ounce or less of pot. Criminal justice reforms are the focus of Sen. Cory Bookers Marijuana Justice Act, introduced in August. His bill, endorsed by Sens. Bernie Sanders on Thursday and Kirsten Gillibrand in February, would legalize marijuana at the federal level, expunge all federal marijuana-related offenses from criminal records, grant convicts currently imprisoned for those offenses the right to petition for re-sentencing, and cut federal prison and law enforcement funding from states that havent legalized marijuana and disproportionately arrest or incarcerate the poor and minorities over pot. Bookers bill also sets aside $500 million a year in grants for job training, ex-convict re-entry programs, libraries, youth centers, and other services and programs within communities heavily impacted by the war on drugs.

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In the interview, Schumer said he supported efforts by Booker and others to pass marijuana-related criminal justice reforms, but that those proposals were on a separate track from federal decriminalization:

Theres two paths here. One path is decriminalization of marijuana at the federal level. Thats what were introducing. Theres another path thats already being pursued, in a bipartisan way, by people like Senator Booker and Senator [Dick] Durbin, which is criminal justice reform, which I also support, but thats a separate track dealing with people who have been unfairly punished.

Of course, theres no inherent and obvious policy reason why decriminalization and justice reform proposals should be considered two distinct paths for those who support both, as Schumer says he does. In fact, Schumer could have tacked his provisions onto Bookers far larger bill rather than introducing them in separate legislation. The goal of the new bill may, then, be to provide a vehicle for federal decriminalization that can be promoted and passed without the assumed political freight of the kinds of reforms Booker and, to a far lesser extent, Wyden have drafted. Schumers ensured that a separate debate will eventually be had on what people imprisoned over pot and their communities deserve.

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Its unclear how much sense this makes as political strategy. A CBS poll released Friday found that 59 percent of Americans now support pot legalization, in line with a February Fox News poll that found 59 percent support among registered voters and close to an October Gallup poll that put support at 64 percent among Americans. But the numbers in favor of criminal justice reform broadly speaking are generally as high or higher. A poll conducted last April by the Koch Instituteone of several right-wing groups that have taken an interest in reform over the past few yearsfound that 64 percent of voters believe that too many people are imprisoned for nonviolent offenses, generally speaking. An October poll by the ACLU found that over 70 percent of Americans believe the criminal justice system should be oriented towards rehabilitation. This suggests theres probably broad support for re-sentencing and record expungement in generallittle risk would probably lie in tying them to decriminalization in comprehensive legislation.

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The question of whether the federal government should spend heavily in largely minority communities affected by decades of repressive drug policy, as Booker proposes, is likely more politically fraught. But turning marijuana legalization into an issue politically salient enough for those who casually agree to come to the polls and cast votes over itan issue politically salient enough that passing a bill or bills is assuredwill require Democrats to make a clear and strident moral case, to and about minority communities in particular, on the failures of the War on Drugs and the urgency of righting the wrongs it has inflicted. That messaging wont take as well if it seems like theyve made justice reform a separate question or an afterthought.
This piece was originally published on Just Security, an online forum for analysis of U.S. national security law and policy.

Next week, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument on the travel ban, and the public will gain insight into whether the justices appear inclined to defer to the administrations asserted national security justifications for the ban. Regardless of the ultimate decision in this case, the court should take note of the breakdown of internal norms and legal processes within the executive branch that have led to a series of legally unworkable orders in the administrations first yearas well as the presidents long public record of animus against the minority groups affected by those policiesand adjust its level of deference accordingly.

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Courts ordinarily defer to the judgments of the executive branch in areas of national security and foreign policy, and rightly so. That deference arises in partbut not entirelyfrom our structure of government. Deference also arises in large part from the understanding that the executive brings significant expertise through the various national security agencies, a synthesis of professional knowledge and experience that courts do not possess. Any deference granted to the executive should therefore be substantially lessened when it becomes clear that the presidents decision was either not based on expertise or was the product of only nominally bringing expertise to bear to support a decision the president had already made.

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To be sure, the court will not want to issue an opinion undercutting the long record of deference to the executives national security judgments. On the unusual facts of the travel ban case, the court need not upset its traditional deference doctrines and should show skepticism for the executive branchs actions. The Constitution does notand cannotrequire that presidential judgments, no matter how quixotic and devoid of the usual underpinnings of good governance, prevail.

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In a February article in the Yale Law Journal Forum, we detailed the ways in which intra-executive legal processes had broken down in the Trump administrations first year and how those failures have played out in the courts. The initial travel ban, issued only a week into the presidents term, is the archetypal example of this phenomenon. On Jan. 27, 2017, President Trump issued an executive order titled Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States, or EO-1. EO-1 suspended the entry of all noncitizens from seven countries with predominantly Muslim populations and directed the secretary of state to prioritize refugees claiming religious-based persecution provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individuals country of nationality.

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EO-1 unleashed chaos within the government and across the country. Neither the White House nor the Department of Justice appear to have asked career lawyers within the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, or any other agency to review EO-1 before it was issued. According to media reports, John Kelly, then the secretary of homeland security, was being briefed on the order via telephone as the president was signing the order on television. Upon learning of the order, the State Department immediately stopped conducting visa interviews of, and processing visa applications from, citizens of any of the seven banned countries, and 60,000 to 100,000 visas were revoked. Meanwhile, nationals of the countries listed in EO-1 arriving in the United States were detained for hours as public interest attorneys across the country raced to the airports to represent them. Thousands protested at the airports and outside courthouses. Several lawsuits followed, with multiple courts issuing nationwide injunctions against enforcement of the executive order. The DHS inspector general has since confirmed that federal agents openly ignored court orders amid the widespread confusion of EO-1s rollout.

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On its face, EO-1 contained clear errors that any form of proper legal vetting would have caught. First, its effective date was not forward-dated, a standard policy feature designed to allow agencies time to prepare for the changes in protocol and to avoid precisely the type of chaos that ensued in the nations airports. Second, EO-1 appeared to ban legal permanent residents, or green-card holders, who had already passed a rigorous vetting process and been granted the right of permanent residence in the United States. This error was so glaring that White House Counsel Donald McGahn soon after published a memorandum clarifying that the order would no longer apply to legal permanent residents. The courts summarily rejected the McGahn memo, noting that the White House counsel cannot amend an executive order.

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In addition to correcting these obvious errors, executive branch lawyers should have also understood the necessity of establishing a record of nondiscriminatory policy justifications for EO-1, which would have then countered President Trumps long record of public statements supporting a Muslim ban. During his campaign, Trump repeatedly called for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States and noted that [p]eople were so upset when I used the word Muslim, so he was instead talking territory instead of Muslim. Upon signing EO-1, President Trump announced, This is the Protection of the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States. We all know what that means. With that public record of animus, executive-branch lawyers bore an additional burden to ensure the executive order was reviewed by the relevant agencies and produced compelling, nondiscriminatory justifications that could be offered to improve that troubling record. But the Trump administration showed no interest in running the sort of bureaucratic process that would have been necessary to produce such a record (if it is possible to do so).

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Instead, the government chose not to offer any viable justification in support of EO-1 to convince the courts that the order was motivated by anything other than President Trumps well-documented desire to ban Muslims as a group from entering the United States in violation of the Establishment Clause. As the district courts noted, the extensive record of public statements advocating a Muslim ban and the absence of any articulated connection between the scope of the ban and particular national security threats made a convincing case that the order was motivated by discriminatory animus.

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Soon after the courts enjoined the ban, the administration abandoned its arguments in defense of EO-1. On March 6, 2017, President Trump issued the re-written EO-2, which he called a watered down, politically correct version of the initial ban. When that, too, was enjoined by the district and appellate courts, Trump proclaimed, I wasnt thrilled, but the lawyers all said, Oh, lets tailor it. . I think we ought to go back to the first one and go all the way, which is what I wanted to do in the first place.  EO-2 then expired by its own terms before the Supreme Court could review it. On Sept. 24, President Trump issued EO-3, adding two non-Muslim countries to the list of banned countries, and failed to explain how the eight countries whose citizens it banned were selected. As a group of former national security officials note in their amicus brief, the administration has taken the unusual step of not offering even a single sworn declaration explaining the motivation or national security reasons underpinning the policy.

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The Supreme Court will soon decide whether EO-3 successfully cured the taint of discriminatory animus that clung to EO-1 and EO-2. By all accounts, EO-2 and EO-3 appear to have gone through at least some review by the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Legal Adviser to the State Department, and the resulting orders lack the glaring errors of their predecessor. But the obvious flaws of EO-1 and the process that produced it mean that the court should be highly skeptical of EO-3. The court will have to wrestle with how much to defer to a president who has created this record of chaos and animus.

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Whats more, the court should approach this caseand, in particular, the decision of how much to defer to the presidentwith the mounting evidence of the administrations broader record of chaotic decision-making processes in mind. Consider a short list of examples: the ban on transgender military service, which was announced by tweet, with a national security justification that directly contradicted military findings at the time; a sanctuary-city policy that was issued hastily and also underpinned by a national security justification directly contradicted by the Department of Homeland Securitys public safety assessments; and a rescission of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in the fact of what one federal judge described as the presidents incendiary and extremely volatile statements regarding Latinos.

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To date, courts across the country have been skeptical of the Trump administrations attempts to defend policies and executive orders issued without proper legal vetting, using legal justifications that are fatally undermined by credible findings or the presidents own statements to the contrary. Regardless of how the Supreme Court ultimately rules, it should make clearat oral argument and in its opinionthat this heightened skepticism is warranted. Judges are correctly inclined to defer to the presidents judgments in the national security arena in no small measure because of the understanding that a full array of experts at the National Security Council, the State Department, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and other agencies is available, and where needed, involved in providing him with legal advice, intelligence, diplomatic information, and policy development to formulate the best policy. When a president decides to change a policy without involving that extensive apparatus or invokes the executive apparatus only to create an aura of regularity to decisions the president has already made, the courts simply should not reflexively defer to the presidents judgment. Withholding deference in a case like the travel ban can help ensure the administration abides by the necessary procedures in the future and that courts can then comfortably provide deference where and when it is deserved.

More from Just Security:

If Mattis Meant to Assert Self-Defense for the Syria Strike, He Was Wrong

The Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution: A Readers Guide
Update, April 20, 2018, at 8:15 p.m.: This post advanced the theory that Fox News might have mischaracterized the number of memos James Comey gave professor Daniel Richman. According to subsequent reporting in the Wall Street Journal along with Slates own reporting, Fox News reporting appears to be correct.

Original post: On Thursday, the Department of Justice handed James Comeys contemporaneous memos of his conversations with President Donald Trump over to Congress. They were immediately revealed to the press.

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Among other highlights, the documents showed:

 Comeys Senate testimony, the story in his book, and the interviews hes given during his publicity tour describing the details of conversations he had with Trump hew incredibly closely to what he wrote at the time of the conversations themselves.

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 During a previously unreported Feb. 8, 2017, conversation with Trumpwhich had been recorded in a classified memothe president allegedly said to him that Vladimir Putin had personally told Trump, We have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world. This statement was allegedly made in front of former chief of staff Reince Priebus.

 According to that classified memo: Prior to that conversation, Priebus met Comey in his office and allegedly asked him if they were having a private conversation. He then asked him: Do you have a FISA order on Mike Flynn? Priebus, it should be noted, was seeking information about a criminal probe that would be useful to any of Flynns potential confederates.

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None of this actually seems to be good for Trump. Which is why its so odd, as Business Insiders Josh Barro noted on Twitter, that House Republicans had gone to such enormous lengths to pressure Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to reveal the memos:

I'm a little confused why House Republicans were so eager to have these memos out.  Josh Barro (@jbarro) April 20, 2018

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Some House Republicans had gone so far as to threaten Rosenstein with impeachment if he didnt release the memos. (His reason for not wanting to do so seems to have been a legitimate desire not to break long-standing protocol by revealing the details of an ongoing investigation.)

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Ultimately, there were only two substantive things that Republicans could seem to affirmatively point to from the memos, which were highlighted in a joint press release from Republican chairmen of the three relevant House committees. First was the fact that Comey never explicitly said in the memos: Trump obstructed my investigation. This is not something Comey ever claimed to have written, nor is it actually evidence of anything. Second, the press release argued that the cloud Trump wanted to clear up was a cloud surrounding the pee tape and not the Russia investigation itself. That interpretation is debatable, but again doesnt seem like a particularly positive bombshell that would bolster Trump.

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Again, the question remains: Why would they want to reveal the Trump told Comey about Putins personal hooker recommendation and Reince Priebus privately sought investigatory details about Mike Flynn stories in order to get those two tidbits out?

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One ungenerous theory would be that they wanted the details of the investigation revealed to potential witnesses in special counsel Robert Muellers probesuch as Priebus and the president himselfin order to help protect these witnesses from lying to investigators. I dont believe this is the reason. Given that Priebus has already been interviewed and that Trumps legal team has indicated in recent days that he wont submit to an interview, this wouldnt actually seem to accomplish much.

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Theres a second theory, though, that I believe makes much more sense.

Since the start of the yearbut particularly since the start of the book tourRepublicans have suggested that the memos Comey had leaked were actually classified documents and that he had perjured himself about this in Senate testimony. This was the only actual substantive lie that White House press secretary Sarah Sanders was able to point to last week when she was asked to justify the Republican campaign calling him a liar. Even the media has reported that officials have determined that Comey leaked four memosat least four that we know aboutwith classified information, Sanders said. (This gets a bunch of alleged facts wrong, but see below to understand what Sanders likely was trying to say.)

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On Wednesday, 11 Republican congressmen went so far as to refer a case to the Justice Department, alleging that Comey had leaked these classified documents and then lied about it to Congress.

The letter said:

In light of the fact that four of the seven memos [documenting conversations with Trump] were classified, it would appear that former Director Comey leaked classified information when sharing these memos with Professor [Daniel] Richman. Accordingly, we refer James Comey to DOJ for potential violation(s) of: 18 USC 641, 18 USC 793, and 18 USC 1924 (a).

What was the basis for saying Comey had leaked four memossome of them classified in a way that would make such leaks illegalto Richman? The criminal referral cited a letter from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley that was released in January.

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According to press reports, Professor Daniel Richman of Columbia Law School stated that Mr. Comey provided him four of the seven memoranda and encouraged him to detail [Comeys] memos to the press. If its true that Professor Richman had four of the seven memos, then in light of the fact that four of the seven memos the Committee reviewed are classified, it would appear that at least one memo the former FBI director gave Professor Richman contained classified information. Professor Richman later read a portion of one of the memos to a New York Times reporter.

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Where did Grassley get the notion that Richman said Comey gave him four memos, indicating at least one was classified? Grassleys letter cited a July 10 Fox News report titled Comey Memos Reportedly Had Classified Info; Trump Says That Is so illegal.  In it, Richman is quoted as saying this:

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No memos were given to the press, and no memos were classified at the time I received them, Richman told Fox News, explaining that the substance of one memo was given to the press but not the physical document. That was not classified at the time, and remains unclassified, he said. Richman told Fox News he received four memos from Comey, all of which were not marked.

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(Update, Friday April 20, 8:15 p.m.: The following theory about Fox News reporting appears to be incorrect.) Notice how Richman explicitly said none of the memos he received were classified and that they remained unclassified? And notice how that portion was in quotes. Now, notice how the part about Richman receiving four memos was not in quotes, but rather Fox News description of what it says the organization was told?

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Now: In the documents released on Thursday, there were two memos with the header UNCLASSIFIED // FOUOU on them, both of which overlap with what had been reported in the New York Times and in Comeys testimony. The number of pages in those two unclassified documents: four. (There was also a third single-page, one-paragraph document that was also marked unclassified, a March 1, 2017, email.)

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I reached out to Richman on Thursday to ask him if those four unclassified pages were what he had receivedand all that he had receivedfrom Comey, but had not heard a response as of publication time.

This all ultimately seems to explain why House Republicans were so eager to get these memos into the public. It seems as though they thought the memos would prove Comey had illegally leaked classified information and lied about it. It seems as though they were basing this entirely on a bit of contradictoryand likely inaccurateFox News reporting. And it seems that this contradictory, likely inaccurate reporting was done by Fox News to help validate this Donald Trump tweet, which was sent two days after Comeys Senate testimony:

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James Comey leaked CLASSIFIED INFORMATION to the media. That is so illegal!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 10, 2017

Finally, it seems that the memos released prove the exact opposite: The apparently leaked documents were never and still arent classified.

Ultimately, this is likely why on Thursday night we learned that Putin was allegedly discussing Russian hookers with Trump, that the president appears to have been obsessed with the pee tape to a previously undisclosed degree, and apparently had his chief of staff ask the FBI director if Mike Flynn was being bugged.

In the likely event that there are more rakes out there in this investigation, House Republicans should think very carefully about where they step next.
Starbucks announced Tuesday that it would close more than 8,000 company-owned stores on May 29 to conduct racial bias training in response to a video that went viral last week showing two black men being arrested in a Philadelphia store for trespassing. The men had asked to use the restroom, but upon being told it was only available to paying customers, instead decided to wait in the cafe for their meeting with a representative from a real estate firm. The manager thought that they were causing a disturbance and called the police.

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In response to the public outrage and calls for a boycott of the coffee chain, CEO Kevin Johnson apologized and promised to take action. Closing our stores for racial bias training is just one step in a journey that requires dedication from every level of our company and partnerships in our local communities, he said in a press release.

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Starbucks is planning to put its nearly 175,000 employees through training on implicit bias, which refers to the idea that people unconsciously stereotype others based on race, gender, and other identifiers. The concept has gained purchase in mainstream understandings of race relations, thanks in part to the popularity of the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a tool developed at Harvard that measures these biases by having subjects make associations under time pressure. For example, one version of the test has participants quickly match images of Asian people, European people, and monuments to descriptors like Foreign and American.

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Its a window into how your life experiences have made these connections for you, says Howard Ross, a founding partner of the Cook Ross diversity and inclusion consulting firm that has previously worked with Starbucks. He warns, however, that employees should not use it as a report card for the soul, but rather as a tool to understand how biases work in the mind. My experience has been that its more effective to use [IAT] after some foundational training.

The corporate sector began implementing implicit bias trainings in earnest in 2013. The sessions usually involve employees recognizing the unconscious stereotypes they may harbor, and then discussing how those biases influence their behavior at work and ways to counteract them. For example, an expert may encourage employees to slow down before taking action in certain situations, since implicit bias tends to rear its head when people make split-second decisions.

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Johnson has been praised for taking decisive action in response to the incident, and the press release names some formidable figures who will be guiding the initiative, including former Attorney General Eric Holder and Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. And beyond the PR value and ethical concerns, ensuring that employees understand how racial biases influence social interactions is crucial to Starbucks business model.

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Yet, some academics suggest that it might actually have made more sense for the company to investigate the problem and test out solutions first, instead of charging headfirst into mandatory trainings.

Alexandra Kalev, an associate professor of sociology at Tel Aviv University who studies corporate diversity efforts, said that a knee-jerk one-size-fits-all solution wont have a sustainable impact on a company of this size. Each of the branches is different, in different states and cities. That [arrest] incident doesnt represent all the diversity, inclusion, and discrimination problems in other branches, she said, adding that what would be more effective to first have task forces visit different locations for assessments. They need to understand the problem first and then tailor the solutions accordingly.

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Indeed, its unclear how exactly Starbucks is going about developing its training, especially in such a short amount of time. If they are serious, I cant imagine them coming up with this [training] in five weeks, says Brian Nosek, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, who helped to found the nonprofit organization Project Implicit that promotes the IAT. When organizations of Starbucks size want to implement race bias education, they usually pilot the program with a smaller group of people and make modifications based on the results of the initial run before implementing it more broadly. This process typically takes months.

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Even then, Nosek points out that there isnt a lot of evidence that the most programs make a lasting impact on behaviors. I have been studying this since 1996, and I still have implicit bias, says Nosek. We can be sure that training by itself is not going to get rid of implicit bias.

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In fact, Tony Greenwals, one of the IATs creators who also helped found Project Implicit, expressed skepticism about Starbucks training in a comment to The Stranger:

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I asked one of the creators of the Implicit Association Test if Starbucks should use it in their anti bias training His response was VERY surprising. https://t.co/dm7hupHTjN pic.twitter.com/doQyHStZBJ  Katie Herzog (@kittypurrzog) April 18, 2018

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In an email to Slate, Nosek wrote, I agree. It is a pretty succinct summary of the evidence.

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Nosek referred to work by Kalev and Harvard sociology professor Frank Dobbin, who reviewed data on diversity efforts from more than 800 U.S. companies and interviewed hundreds of employees. They ultimately found that the positive effects of diversity training often dont last beyond two days, and may actually entrench biases due to backlash. When companies get in hot water over bias, their initial reaction is often to do some kind of training because its something you can outsource and its relatively easy to do and has good optics, says Dobbin. The studies that look out six months to a year tend to be equally likely to show increased bias after the training as they are to show decreased bias.

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Dobbins and Kalev did find, though, that companies can have better success decreasing bias by making sure their workforces are integrated so that people of different racial groups are regularly in contact with one another. We know that what works best is for workers to be put side by side with people from other groups as have the work together collaboratively as equals, says Dobbin. That seems to be the best way to change stereotypes in peoples heads because it causes people not to lump all members of a group together, but to start to individuate.

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Racial minorities account for 40 percent of Starbucks overall workforce and 18 percent of its executive team.

Ross says theres a risk of overgeneralizing when simply looking into whether trainings are effective: Its a little bit like saying, Do you like restaurants? Are you talking about the Four Seasons or McDonalds or the local diner? Theres some training that we know is very effective, and theres some training thats not very effective at all. Particularly, training that pits people against each other often reduces empathy. Simply telling people about bias, without encouraging them to conceive of it on an emotional level and to set up actionable plans, is also ineffective.

Kelly Capatosto, a senior research associate at Ohio State Universitys Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity who often conducts trainings herself, also acknowledges that one-day seminars typically wont change attitudes without a broader systemic change. In the case of Starbucks, she suggested that what may be more effective than just a training is to work with participants to revise a chains hospitality policies so that the lesson becomes actionable. Capatosto said, [Implicit bias training] has to be met with institutional and structural reform to be effective.
This piece originally appeared in the New America Weekly.

Facebook has a genocide problem, the New Republic proclaimed in March. Months after nearly 700,000 Rohingya Muslims were driven from their homes in Myanmar, the potential role of the social media platform in instigating violence against them has come under scrutiny, fueled at least partly by swirling controversy over Facebooks bad behavior elsewhere.

At a blockbuster Senate hearing last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was questioned about his platforms role in inciting the possible genocide in Myanmar. U.N. human rights investigators have said that Facebook substantively contributed to the level of acrimony and dissension and conflict in the country. Even one of Facebooks top executives has said that he and his colleagues lose some sleep over the real-world harm their platform has caused in this context.

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To an extent, this thinking makes sense. Facebook has outsize influence in Myanmar, where its user base has exploded in recent years, and it exists as the principal internet gateway for many people there. This rapid shift has allowed for increased connectivity and openness in what was previously one of the most repressive countries on Earth. But it has also had a dark side: Facebook has become one of the principal venues for the spread of hate speech targeting the Rohingya and other Muslims.

And yet, even in this context, the notion that Facebook is responsible for what a top U.N. official last year called a textbook example of ethnic cleansing may be a bridge too far. Looking at the evidence, theres reason to believe that while Facebooks impact in Myanmar has been significant and often problematic, the broad claims implicating it in instigating the specific atrocities of the greatest international concern ultimately present a distorted picture of the dynamics and drivers of the persecution that the Rohingya in Myanmar face.

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For one, the narrative that Facebook spurred atrocities against the Rohingya buys into the false notion that recent events in Rakhine state were principally communal violence. Even Mark Zuckerberg fell into this trap. In an interview earlier this month, he cited steps the company allegedly took to stop sensational messages aimed at inciting violence between religious communities. However, the most recentand most brutalactions against the Rohingya, which began in late August, werent spontaneous pogroms. Instead, they were a calibrated military campaign.

Facebook was an additional venue through which vicious slander spread, not the source of public animosity.

Indeed, evidence of participation by some local Buddhists notwithstanding, it was Myanmar security forces that planned and executed what they called clearance operations, which killed at least 6,700 Rohingya and drove hundreds of thousands more from their homes. Moreover, the most serious atrocities were far removed from the majority of those sharing hateful messages on Facebook, in areas of Rakhine state where the Rohingya accounted for as much as 91 percent of the population prior to the mass expulsion. Rather than being the responsibility of those whipped up by fake news, this brutality was principally the product of directives and careful planning by a military operating in the absence of civilian oversight.

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Moreover, campaigns of this nature arent new in Myanmar, where the military has a consistent track record of committing atrocities against ethnic minorities, dating back long before Facebookor even the internetwas widely available. Violent attacks against the Rohingya, in particular, have been a feature of Myanmar politics for decades.

In 1978, for instance, a Myanmar military campaign drove more than 200,000 Rohingya across the border into Bangladesh. And almost a decade and a half later, in 1991, nearly 250,000 Rohingya were forced to flee Rakhine state during a similar offensive. Both campaigns were characterized by the kind of widespread killing, torture, and rape that defined 2017s violence, and both occurred long before the advent of Facebook. The Rohingya have also been systematically excluded from Myanmar society for years and vilified in domestic media, which was, until the beginning of this decade, entirely offline.

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Of course, in recent years, Facebook has certainly been a venue for the spread of hate speech. But vicious, propagandistic invective has echoed equally loudly from traditional media in Myanmar. Rhetoric demonizing the Rohingya as Bengali terrorists appeared frequently in state and private outlets as the clearance operations proceeded. In 2016, the state-backed Global New Light of Myanmar newspaper even published an article with a veiled reference to the Rohingya as detestable human fleas. Even without Facebook, hateful messages would still have reached millionsperhaps just as quickly and effectivelybreeding a climate of hostility toward the Rohingya and reinforcing public support for military actions against them.

In other contexts, including in the United States, a key problem that Facebook has presented is a propensity to enable dangerous fake news and fringe views to go viral. Regrettably, in Myanmar, the problem isnt that Facebook is enabling fringe views to reach the mainstream, but that mainstream views themselves are already deeply racist and exclusionary. Moreover, the authorities are often the ones peddling misinformation.

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None of this excuses Facebooks failures in Myanmar. The social media giant was undoubtedly a platform for the spread of hate speech, and such invective demonstrably contributed to public sentiment that downplayed, excused, and even praised brutal military action against the Rohingya. In addition, there were steps that Facebook could have taken to address these specific concerns. As a group of Myanmar civil society organizations highlighted in an open letter to Zuckerberg, Facebooks approach constituted the very opposite of effective moderation, failing to speedily address concerning posts, engage local stakeholders, or provide necessary transparency.

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Even so, these failures werent the key drivers of the main violence in Rakhine state, and insinuating as much plays into the dangerous narrative that Myanmars current problem is too much democracy, when the problem isand has always beenthe opposite: a lack of democratic accountability. Facebook was an additional venue through which vicious slander spread, not the source of public animosity toward the Rohingya. It was decades of authoritarian propagandathe vast majority of it offlinethat created the narratives and conditions for this sentiment to grow and fester. And it was ultimately the Myanmar militaryoperating outside the constraints of public opinionthat carried out the atrocities themselves.

There are things Facebook can do to improve, but taking such steps wont address the fundamental drivers of persecution and violence against the Rohingya. Broader political and social changes are required for that. Unfortunately for Myanmar, such changes dont appear to be coming any time soon.
When Democrats and Republicans in Congress agree on something, it usually involves symbolic acts of patriotism or minimally decent acts of disaster relief. Add to that list: giving Mark Zuckerberg the third degreeand insisting that his company face some kind of consequence for the Cambridge Analytica scandal and how cavalierly it has often treated its users data. I think it is time to ask whether Facebook may have moved too fast and broken too many things, Rep. Greg Walden, a Republican from Oregon, said last Wednesday as he opened up a House committee hearing with Zuckerberg. I dont want to vote to have to regulate Facebook, but by God I will, said Sen. John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, during a Senate joint committee hearing the day before the Houses. Democrats sounded even more gung-ho about cracking down on the company. This incident demonstrates yet again that our laws are not working, said Rep. Frank Pallone, a Democrat from New Jersey. Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, a Democrat from Illinois, laid it out plainly while dressing down the 33-year-old CEO: This is proof to me that self-regulation simply does not work.

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If the status quo isnt good enoughand if consumers and lawmakers agree that Facebooks raft of recent new initiatives to better protect user privacy has arrived far too latethen what will work? There has never been a more opportune time to rethink how the law treats Facebook and its peers, companies that exchange the free use of their services for access to their visitors data, which they monetize in various ways. A year and a half of bad press has certainly sucked some wind from the social networks capacious sails. Just in the four weeks since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, the companys market capitalization has lost more than $100 billion from its February peak as journalists and politicians have scrutinized its treatment of user data and reiterated uncomfortable questions about its role facilitating a Russian-backed disinformation effort aimed at the 2016 campaign. Even before the latest drama (and the #DeleteFacebook campaign it inspired), bad omens were beginning to crop up for Facebook. In January, for example, the company reported its sharpest drop in user growth ever. And yet the conventional wisdom that emerged from last weeks hearings was that Congress was unlikely to pass anything that would require significant new protections for users of social media platforms. At best, it could pull an existing bill from the shelf that would regulate the important-but-relatively-minuscule realm of online political advertisements. Once the glare of the hearing-room lights faded away, it seemed, Facebook would once again be left to regulate itself.

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The reasons why are mostly obvious: Though he tripped on a few probing queries, Zuckerberg generally managed to parry the vague, off-topic, and often repetitive questions of lawmakers who were either unable or unwilling to reckon in a sophisticated manner with the ways Facebook has changed the world. Theres the Republican control of Congress and Washingtons current deregulatory flavor, something Facebook seized upon last week when it courted conservative groups to push back against any new, wide-ranging privacy rules. Theres the fact that Facebook users generally like, or at least dont dislike, a service that has become central to maintaining the connections in their lives despite the many pitfalls of its business model. Finally, there is Silicon Valleys long-standing imperviousness to broad federal oversight, a symptom of its economic vitality as well as its political affinity with the party more likely to regulate itDemocrats. But theres another reason Congress may never force Facebook to do better by its users: The people most equipped to propose a way to regulate large internet platforms and then fight for itdigital privacy advocates and activistshave been jarringly quiet.

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The people most equipped to propose a way to regulate large internet platforms and then fight for it have been jarringly quiet.

When lawmakers rein in large companies, it takes the help of forces than can shout down the voices of corporate lobbyists and their ideological allies. When the Federal Communications Commission voted to protect network neutrality and prevent internet providers from slowing down and throttling access to websites in 2015 (before the current FCC reversed the decision), it was with support of the nearly 4 million Americans who had been rallied to urge the FCC to improve on its original plan. And in 2012, outrage over two relatively arcane online intellectual property billsthe Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA)reached such high volumes that the number of elected officials who opposed the pieces of legislation ballooned from 31 to 101 after a single day of action; the bills eventually died. There is no similar effort now to protect Facebook users privacy.

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Without organized constituent pressure, lawmakers are far more likely do nothing or create legislation favoring the very corporations that need regulating in the first place. Its the difference between a bill that staff is driving versus a bill that constituents are driving, said Alvaro Bedoya, a law professor at Georgetown and former staffer for ex-Minnesota Sen. Al Franken who has also served as chief counsel for the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law. It is critical as a staffer to be able to point to organizations and communities and say, If I make that change, the AARP is going to blow up at me or If I make that change, anti-stalking groups are going to be mad at me,  he said. If lawmakers are going to piss off lobbyists and the donors they represent, they need to know that if they dont act, someone on the other side will be pissed off, too.

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In Facebooks case, this isnt hypothetical: Lawmakers are not hearing from the groups that focus on internet privacy and appear to be at a bit of a loss on how to proceed with legislation. The conspicuous silence of the tech-oriented civil-society groups has been really telling, one congressional staffer told me, adding that a grass-roots campaign to capitalize on the immense public interest in these issues could help catalyze a push for comprehensive data-protection legislation in the vein of the General Data Protection Rule, or GDPR, the wide-ranging European Union regulation going into effect May 25 that will significantly change the ways companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter operate in those countries.

Lawmakers are not hearing from the groups that focus on internet privacy and appear to be at a bit of a loss on how to proceed with legislation.

Who is missing from this conversation? Start with prominent digital privacy advocacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (where I used to work), the Center for Democracy and Technology, and the Open Technology Institute (where I once interned) at New America, which have long lobbied against government surveillance like the kind exposed by the Edward Snowden leaks several years ago. I asked each of them if they have campaigns related to Facebook, or have proposals for any kind of legislation that would address the ways Facebook and other companies surveil and monetize your every move. Not one doesthe most theyve done is write blog posts and started initial conversations. And Fight for the Future, a powerful and fierce grass-roots group that championed the winning fight to pass net neutrality protections in 2014, only just launched an online petition and set of broad demands that puts the onus on tech companies to reform themselves. Compare this level of engagement with these issues to the media, which has treated the weeks since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke as a public referendum on Facebooks entire business model, or the growing outcry from academics who have long studied and warned of the deleterious effects of broad corporate data collection. But this is clearly not enough. If the people whose job it is to care about digital privacy cant be bothered to push for laws to regulate how Facebook treats the data we give it, why should Congress?

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The summer before I moved to California in 2013 to work at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Guardian published the first story about the unfathomable scale of the National Security Agencys mass surveillance. It was the first of many revelations based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden that blanketed the news for the next year. Days after that first story ran, EFF, along with a broad coalition of 86 advocacy organizations, signed on to a petition, StopWatching.Us, demanding an end to the government data collection. By the end of June, a half-million concerned individuals had signed on, too.

The movement gained momentum as news stories about the NSAs PRISM program and other activities continued to trickle out, eventually culminating in a march that October in Washington, D.C., where thousands from across the country rallied to demand that lawmakers rein in the governments spying on individuals. (I helped organize participation from Philadelphia, where I was based at the time.) The next big action was in February, when another broad coalition of advocacy organizations came together for a day of mass action via a website, TheDayWeFightBack.org, built to funnel constituent calls to members of Congress. In one day the coalition was able to generate more than 89,000 phone calls to 535 congressional offices, flooding their phone lines. In the end we didnt achieve any kind of legislative change, but we did channel public outrage over NSA surveillance into a focused movementone that remains in place to push back against unconstitutional governmental intrusions into individuals privacy.

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Privacy advocates know how to build coalitions and campaigns. They know how to make demands, and they know how to hatch an action agenda fast. Theyre quick to do it when the issue is government invasion of privacy. But it didnt happen over the March weekend that the Cambridge Analytica news broke, even though the story showed that a network with more than 2 billion users is a whole lot more permeable than most ever imagined. Nor was there a public list of demands ready in advance of Zuckerbergs congressional hearings, where lawmakers were so in need of guidance that some of them asked the CEO how he would like to see his company regulated. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican, even asked Zuckerberg, Would you submit to us some proposed regulations? Zuckerberg replied, Yes.

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When I asked about their plans for campaigns demanding that elected officials take action to limit corporate data collection now, the advocates I talked to either said theyre not ready or theyre not planning on doing anything. Yeah, theres no campaign coming up that I know of, said Gennie Gebhart, a researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the premier digital rights and tech policy advocacy nonprofits in the U.S. This is a group that has been suing the NSA over its digital surveillance efforts for at least a decadeafter whistleblower Mark Klein went to its offices in 2005 with all kinds of proof that the agency had been siphoning up the communications of people that pass through AT&Ts fiber-optic cables. EFF is among the most respected expert organizations and advocacy outlets on user privacy in the world both because its been doing it for so long and because of its careful adherence to facts, a rare trait among activist groups.

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Perhaps institutional caution is the reason for their slowness to act here, but it may also come down to something philosophical. Gebhart told me, EFF is not giving pressure to legislate because there has been a knee-jerk reaction in some of the conversation of, How will we legislate Facebook? What will we slap on them? And I think maybe the better tack to take is to take a couple steps back first and ask, What privacy protections do we need that we are missing, and second, What rules or other mechanics are available to get those privacy protections that perhaps we havent been using?  Gebhart pointed me to a blog post with ideas about how EFF thinks people can have their privacy protected by social media platforms, but said theres no standing plan now for what to ask of Congress. Rather, the organization is leaning toward specific user controls that Facebook should implement, like ways the platform can improve transparency and assure that data has been deleted when requested. EFF also warns of the dangers of how poorly worded regulation could go awry.

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Likewise, at the Center for Democracy and Technology, Vice President for Policy Chris Calabrese told me that its just too soon to know which direction to take. Advocacy organizations dont move on the dime, Calabrese said. If you started the year saying were going to push for a baseline privacy bill or commercial privacy legislation, thered be skepticism about it, he continued, saying that a broader public interest in limiting corporate data collection reached a boiling point very quickly. But the Cambridge Analytica story isnt actually new: It broke years ago in a 2015 Guardian report about how Sen. Ted Cruzs presidential campaign was using Facebook data wrongfully obtained from tens of millions of users. Advocacy groups have had plenty of time to figure out their positions on the kind of corporate surveillance that powers the big technology platforms. They couldve been prepared for public interest to peak. They werent.

Broad corporate surveillance and data collection isnt new, and in fact, its what powers much of the government surveillance these groups have long railed against.

That might be because theyre waiting for ideas to appear rather than crafting ideas themselves. Open Technology Institute Director Kevin Bankston wrote in an email that he cant speak to hypothetical regulation,  adding that the institute does generally support the idea of privacy legislation. Bankston also warned that not all legislation proposed is good, pointing to the Obama administrations draft Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, which had so many industry concessions that the advocacy community couldnt support it. He said that right now various members of Congress are interested in different solutions and OTI finds encouraging a proliferation of such ideas both big and small is more of a priority for us than prematurely picking a particular horse to back. (The Open Technology Institutes parent foundation, New America, is a partner with Slate and Arizona State University on Future Tense, the magazines section about the societal implications of new technology.)

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Its hard to tell what is more striking: that these groups wouldnt want to lead the way on whatever regulation emerges, or that they seem completely unprepared (or unwilling) to do so. Broad corporate surveillance and data collection isnt new, and in fact, its what powers much of the government surveillance these groups have long railed against. Facebook has been around for 14 years. Google, even longer. How could digital privacy advocacy organizations not already have strong proposals for what lawmakers need to do to ensure corporations arent sucking up inappropriate amounts of data? The longtime focus of privacy advocates on government surveillance, not corporate surveillance, is one explanation. That probably has to do with the founding principles behind a lot of internet advocacy, which has its origins in libertarian and anti-regulation philosophies. As a result, a lot of complaints from privacy advocates over the years have focused on how government surveillance is harmful to our constitutional rights and less on how they might be harmful to our communities.

Its also hard to overlook the fact that a lot of privacy advocacy groups in the U.S. get funding from the same tech companies that would ostensibly be affected by government regulation of consumer data collection. EFF, for example, took in about $822,000 from Google, including donations from employees that are matched by the company, in fiscal 2017. CDT collected about $590,000 in donations and support from Google in 2016 and received $250,000 from Facebook last year. As for OTI, Googles former CEO Eric Schmidt co-founded and has been a significant donor to New America for years. He and his wifes philanthropic foundation committed to $4 million in funding New America from 2016 to 2021. All of these groups maintain complete independence from their donors.

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This isnt to say that there havent been moves to fight overly broad corporate surveillance by advocacy groups. The American Civil Liberties Union, which is a part of Fight for the Futures new campaign, specifically called out Facebook for the way it let developers scrape horrendous amounts of data back in 2009 with a campaign and a Facebook quiz to demonstrate how porous the privacy protections are. But whats happening now is an unusual occurrence. This could be a moment to build a broad coalition of all kinds of groups concerned by the industry of online data collection. Right now, its not.

Even before I left the world of internet-freedom advocacy, I disagreed with its emphasis on constitutional abstractions over real-world harm to communities, and its a tension that I think helps explain why the major internet-privacy groups are so silent about Facebooks mess now.

The argument against government surveillance is generally premised on the idea that Americans have a right to privacy upon which the government has infringed. Its true that if someone is listening to what youre saying, you might not say everything you would say otherwise. Under surveillance, free speech is chilled. Americans are also constitutionally protected against unreasonable search and seizurebut as with many rights, not everyones are equally respected in practice. Stop-and-frisk policies disproportionally target people of color, as do police who look for possible immigration arrests by pulling over brown people with broken taillights. Police have secretly bugged New York City mosques. If you need food stamps, the government no longer gives out little books of actual stamps, but rather tracks everything you buy with an EBT carda level of surveillance over what you eat that only applies to the poor.

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Thats the problem with so much of the fight for online privacy: It wants to protect rights that not everyone gets to enjoy. By focusing so much of its activism over the years on harms to the Constitution instead of harms to communities, the movement hasnt always made the room necessary for the kind of storytelling and coalition-building that could interest a broader swath of Americansand maybe propel Congress to act. The advocacy around StopWatching.Us, in response to the Snowden leaks, was framed around protecting privacy rights. But what if youve never really had any?

This emphasis on constitutional infringement has its roots in the founding libertarian philosophy of early U.S. internet activism. One of the movements guiding treatises, the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace by EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow, centers on protecting the internet from government intrusions. This isnt to say that groups like EFF, OTI, and others havent in recent years made efforts to expand their outreach and messaging to communities harmed by government surveillance: They have, and its been a refreshing extension of their work. This comes in addition to an important legal history at digital civil liberties organizations of defending marginalized and vulnerable communities in court against the governments harmful spying. (Also, some justice-focused organizations have joined the fight against government surveillance and are working to steer the focus to how digital surveillance can facilitate discriminatory profiling.)

Still, there havent been huge wins in the movement to reform mass surveillance by the government. The NSA hasnt started collecting less data, nor are there signs that the Drug Enforcement Agency nor the Department of Homeland Security have, either. President Obama actually broadened the federal governments digital surveillance machine right before he left the White House. None of this is to say that the work fighting government surveillance should slow down, or that these organizations should entirely alter their focusunlawful spying by the feds and local law enforcement is harmful, and working to rein it in is critically important work. But corporate data collection feeds into government surveillanceand it hits people in real ways, too.

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I dont know if a different emphasis would have led to more success for digital-privacy advocates, but I do wonder: If these groups had focused more on protecting communities and their needs from the beginning, would they have been more likely to notice that people are not only harmed by government data collection but by corporate data collection, as well?

If these groups had focused more on protecting communities and their needs from the beginning, would they have been more likely to notice that people are not only harmed by government data collection but by corporate data collection, as well?

This isnt just one big issue, but many small ones. Large internet companies could work with the AARP to push for the government to curb data brokers, who often target the elderly and convince them to disclose private information, as Alvaro Bedoya suggested to me. They could pay attention to how mortgage brokers have used targeted ads, as they did before the global financial crisis, to peddle subprime loans. Back then, financial companies were combining online-behavior data with location and demographic information in order to deduce a persons race, something they could in theory still do today using Facebook. Groups that work to help survivors of domestic abuse and advocates for immigrant rights could be engaged in this conversationsince all kinds of surveillance-tech companies use data obtained from across the internet to make software used by law enforcement, or even stalkers, to track online behavior data to surveil people. It wasnt until September that Facebook and Google stopped letting advertisers target people based on racist and bigoted search terms like How to burn Jews and threesome rape and black people ruin neighborhoods. Regulating data collection isnt only about protecting peoples rightsits about protecting peoples lives.

With all eyes on Facebook, theres good legislation that failed to gain traction in the past that is worth revisiting now. There was the data broker bill from 2015, which would have given consumers more control over the data that companies hold on them and force more corporate accountability. There was also the geolocation privacy bill from 2011 that was meant to give consumers more control about location data thats collected on them. There was a bill about cybersecurity and privacy for drivers, an issue thats going to become more important as more cars come equipped with advanced computer systems and as more companies continue to invest in a self-driving future. These piecemeal approaches to privacy might even make more sense than any large bill like the EUs regulations, since an omnibus approach could get watered down or contain industry loopholes that undermine the bills purpose.

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The onus shouldnt just be on advocates to take advantage of users and politicians current outrage and attempt to more thoroughly regulate companies like Facebook and Google. We should also expect lawmakers to see when theres a problem and act on it themselves. But advocacy organizations and professional activists play a critical role, and when they work together to rev up the public, they can give the specter of regulation corporeal form. This might mean organizing a day to flood Congress with phone calls. Or booking congressional staffers time with visit after visit from constituents. Or simply putting peoples stories first, like the many accounts of people being stalked online by hate groups that got their personal information from data brokers. How many people responded to a Facebook ad for a harmful product, like a subprime loan, hypertargeted to their demographic? When advocates start to ask how online surveillance has concretely affected peoples lives, the results may be surprisingand energizing.

Moments like the one were in dont come often. While advocacy groups who deeply understand the intricacies of online data-collection wait and see what happens with privacy regulation, the news environment is going to move on. Theyll miss their chance. Maybe thats what they want.
Slovak conductor with world record dies

He conducted choirs for the longest time in the world.

Conductor of local ensemble Zvon, Viliam Karmazin, died at the age of 95. In the Guinness Book of Records, he holds the position of conductor with the longest career. He started to conduct in 1936 in his hometown of Leopoldov and held a baton in his hand for 76 years.

Besides conducting, he also worked as a teacher at several schools. He and his ensemble represented Slovak art in many countries of Europe. He conducted his last concert one day before his 90th birthday, 22nd September of 2012 in Sered.

Miroslav Lajcak, Minister of Foreign Affairs, awarded him with a plaque four years ago for spreading the good name of Slovakia and presenting a high quality of Slovak culture abroad.

20. Apr 2018 at 7:25 | Compiled by Spectator staff
If you eat animal flesh, you should not be squeamish about slaughtering your dinner.

Crabs are among natures more amusing creatures, with their flat little faces and damn-you expressions; the club-like pincers for catching food, and the tiny arms that ferry each morsel to the mouth; their embarrassed scuttle when on land, and their leg-waving despair when overturned.

On the Pacific coast of Canada and the northern US, countless Dungeness crabs are caught every year by casual fishermen. Anyone can buy a half-moon trap (a hinged metal frame with string netting), find some frozen chicken to use as bait, and head down to a dock to try his luck.

Its a low-tech way to secure a meal, and as much as I doubted wed catch one on our first day of trapping, sure enough, three casts and thirty minutes later, we had ourselves a Dungeness that was big enough (15 centimetres) to take home and eat.

Which put me in a quandary, because to me  the newcomer to British Columbia  fell the task of butchering the critter, and I cant abide killing any living thing besides mosquitoes, wasps, leeches and the like.

20. Apr 2018 at 8:23 | Tom Nicholson
I have never seen a France like this

Unlike the populists Macron offers a positive vision of where politics and Europe can go.

Agree or not with what French President Emmanuel Macron's vision for reforming the European Union, it is hard not to be impressed with his ambition. Amid trending Euroscepticism, Macron makes being pro-EU feel cool again.

On Tuesday he addressed the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

If you dont like the European Parliament, you should have run in other elections, he said by way of mocking Euroskeptic MEPs on hand. The speech, at Macrons insistence, came as part of the parliamentary debate, not as a separate formal address  because he is not afraid to confront people he disagrees with.

Macron also addressed what, though often ignored, has to be the single biggest factor damaging the EUs reputation: that politicians everywhere, including Europhiles, tend to attribute all their countrys problems to Brussels while taking credit for anything that succeeds.

20. Apr 2018 at 18:55 | Benjamin Cunningham
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4 hours ago

Johnson eyes post-COVID economy as UK Conservatives meet

LONDON (AP)  British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he was ready to take bold decisions to rebuild the economy after the coronavirus pandemic as his Conservative Party meets Sunday for its first annual conference since 2019. The Tory conference opens Sunday in the northwestern city of Manchester as a shortage of truck drivers to delivery fuel across Britain continues to cause empty pumps and long lines at many gas stations.

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Swedish-born producer and DJ known as Avicii has been found dead in Oman, The Independent has learned.

The musician - born Tim Bergling - was 28.

Avicii's publicist Diana Baron confirmed the news in a statement that the DJ was in Muscat, Oman when he passed away.

In a statement, his rep said: "It is with profound sorrow that we announce the loss of Tim Bergling, also known as Avicii.

"He was found dead in Muscat, Oman this Friday afternoon local time, April 20th.

"The family is devastated and we ask everyone to please respect their need for privacy in this difficult time.

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Seeks to impose definitive anti-dumping duty on imports of Glassware, originating in, or exported from Peoples Republic of China and Indonesia.

GOVERNMENT OF INDIA

MINISTRY OF FINANCE

(DEPARTMENT OF REVENUE)

Notification No. 22/2018-Customs (ADD)

New Delhi, the 18th April, 2018

G.S.R. (E)- Whereas in the matter of Glassware (hereinafter referred to as the subject goods) falling under sub-heading 7013 of the First Schedule to the Customs Tariff Act, 1975 (51 of 1975) (hereinafter referred to as the Customs Tariff Act), originating in and exported from Peoples Republic of China and Indonesia (hereinafter referred to as the subject countries), and imported into India, the designated authority in its final findings published in the Gazette of India, Extraordinary, Part I, Section 1, vide notification number 14/45/2016-DGAD, dated the 5th March, 2018, has come to the conclusion that

(a) The product under consideration has been exported to India from subject countries below their normal values except the subject goods produced by M/s Shandong Fulong Glass Technology Co.;

(b) The domestic industry has suffered material injury; and

(c) Material injury has been caused by the dumped imports of subject goods from the subject countries except the subject goods produced by M/s Shandong Fulong Glass Technology Co;

And, whereas, the designated authority has recommended imposition of definitive antidumping duty on the imports of subject goods, originating in or exported from the subject countries and imported into India, in order to remove injury to the domestic industry;

Now, therefore, in exercise of the powers conferred by sub-sections (1) and (5) of section 9A of the Customs Tariff Act, read with rules 18 and 20 of the Customs Tariff (Identification, Assessment and Collection of Anti-dumping Duty on Dumped Articles and for Determination of Injury) Rules, 1995, the Central Government, after considering the aforesaid final findings of the designated authority, hereby imposes definitive anti-dumping duty on the subject goods, the description of which is specified in column (3) of the Table below, falling under sub-heading of the First Schedule to the Customs Tariff Act as specified in the corresponding entry in column (2), originating in the country as specified in the corresponding entry in column (4), exported from the country as specified in the corresponding entry in column (5), produced by the producers as specified in the corresponding entry in column (6), exported by the exporters as specified in the corresponding entry in column (7), and imported into India, an anti-dumping duty as the difference between the amount indicated in column (8) and per unit landed value of the subject goods, provided that the per unit landed value is less than the value indicated in column (8) and as per unit of measurement as specified in the corresponding entry in column (9), of the said Table, namely :-

Table

SL No Sub-

Heading Description of

Goods Country of origin Country of export Producer Exporter Amount (in US dollar) Unit 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 7013 All types of Soda-lime Glassware for Table, Kitchen, Toilet, Office or Indoor Decoration purposes China PR China PR Anhui Xinmin Glass Co. Anhui Xinmin Glass Co. 955.27 MT 2 7013 All types of Soda-lime Glassware for Table, Kitchen, Toilet, Office or Indoor Decoration purposes China PR China PR Anhui Kangtai Glassware Technology Co. Anhui Kangtai Glassware Technology Co. 955.27 MT 3 7013 All types of Soda-lime Glassware for Table, Kitchen, Toilet, Office or Indoor Decoration purposes China PR China PR Shandong Fulong Glass Technology Co. Shandong Fulong Glass Technology Co Not Appli-cable MT 4 7013 All types of Soda-lime Glassware for Table, Kitchen, Toilet, Office or Indoor Decoration purposes China PR China PR Shandong Fulong Glass Technology Co Qingdao Gemmy Imp & Exp Co. Not Appli-cable MT 5 7013 All types of Soda-lime Glassware for Table, Kitchen, Toilet, Office or Indoor Decoration purposes China PR China PR Anhui Deli Household Glass Co. Anhui Deli Household Glass Co. 955.27 MT 6 7013 All types of Soda-lime Glassware for Table, Kitchen, Toilet, Office or Indoor Decoration purposes China PR China PR Others Others 955.27 MT 7 7013 All types of Soda-lime Glassware for Table, Kitchen, Toilet, Office or Indoor Decoration purposes China PR Any country other than those subject to Anti dumping Duty Any Any 955.27 MT 8 701 All types of Soda-lime Glassware for Table, Kitchen, Toilet, Office or Indoor Decoration purposes Any countryother than thosesubject to Anti dumping Duty China PR Any Any 955.27 MT 9 7013 All types of Soda-lime Glassware for Table, Kitchen, Toilet, Office or Indoor Decoration purposes Indonesia Indonesia Any Any 955.27 MT 10 7013 All types of Soda-lime Glassware for Table, Kitchen, Toilet, Office or Indoor Decoration purposes Indonesia Any country other than those subject to Anti dumping Duty Any Any 955.27 MT 11 7013 All types of Soda-lime Glassware for Table, Kitchen, Toilet, Office or Indoorpurposes Any countryother than thosesubject to Anti dumpingng Duty Indonesia Any Any 955.27 MT

2. The anti-dumping duty imposed shall be effective for a period of five years (unless revoked, superseded or amended earlier) from the date of publication of this notification in the Official Gazette and shall be payable in Indian currency.

Explanation.  For the purposes of this notification, 

(i) Landed value of imports shall be the assessable value as determined by the Customs under the Customs Act, 1962 and includes all duties of customs except duties under sections 3, 3A, 8B, 9 and 9A of the Customs Tariff Act, 1975.

(ii) Rate of exchange applicable for the purposes of calculation of such anti-dumping duty shall be the rate which is specified in the notification of the Government of India, in the Ministry of Finance (Department of Revenue), issued from time to time, in exercise of the powers conferred by section 14 of the Customs Act, 1962 (52 of 1962), and the relevant date for the determination of the rate of exchange shall be the date of presentation of the bill of entry under section 46 of the said Act.

[F.No.354/76/2018-TRU]

(Mohit Tewari)

Under Secretary to the Government of India
A unit of Germanys Talanx AG is seeking to raise its stake in Vietnamese insurer PVI Holdings to 49 percent, PetroVietnam said on Friday, as the state-run oil and gas group seeks to divest from the insurance company.

PetroVietnam is seeking to sell the stake to unlisted HDI Global SE, it said in a statement, following a meeting between Talanx AG Deputy Chairman Christian Hinsch and Vietnams Deputy Prime Minister Vuong Dinh Hue in Hanoi on Thursday.

PetroVietnam currently has a 35 percent stake in PVI Holdings, while HDI Global holds 47 percent.

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Reading and driving rarely go hand-in-hand, but the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Transport is not letting that discourage it from putting its full-throttled support behind Vietnam Book Day on April 21.

The department, in collaboration with the municipal traffic management center, is moving at full speed to make sure its Book Bus, Knowledge Bus Stop,' and Electronic Information Display are ready for the event on the Ho Chi minh City Book Street in District 1.

The book bus, carrying the "A journey of knowledge and future" slogan, will serve as a small-scale library, furnished shelves, tables, and chairs for readers looking to relax in a quiet space.

The six meter long, 1.5 meter wide bus was designed as a scale model of the citys Bus No. 8, which runs between District 8 and Thu Duc University Village  a route familiar to many local college students.

Employees prepare books for the 'Book Bus' at the Book Street in Ho Chi Minh City on April 18, 2018. Photo: Tuoi Tre

Visitors to the Ho Chi Minh City Book Street can also take a seat on the wooden benches at the Knowledge Bus Stop, another mini-library whose roof is designed to look like a page from a book.

The electronic information display will provide free Wi-Fi for people to look up book information, activities ongoing at the book street, and local bus routes.

The transport department said the device is the first of its kind to be installed in Ho Chi Minh City and is in conjunction with its project to apply technology to bus stops throughout the city.

Besides the introduction of the book bus,' the transport department is scheduled to sign a memorandum of understanding on the development of reading culture with the managers of the Ho Chi Minh City Book Street.

Workers install the "Knowledge Bus Stop" at the Book Street in Ho Chi Minh City on April 18, 2018. Photo: Tuoi Tre

First observed in 2014, Vietnam Book Day is meant to encourage reading culture among local residents.

This years celebrations at the Ho Chi Minh City Book Street, from April 20 to 24, will feature activities ranging from an awards ceremony for the Family Bookcases contest to book donations and information sessions on topics such as effective reading.
Myanmar State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi praised Vietnams investment projects in her home country during her talks with Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc in Hanoi on Thursday.

The meeting was held within the framework of Suu Kyis April 19-20 visit to Vietnam.

During the conversation, the two leaders agreed to seek for new methods of cooperation to reach bilateral trade of US$1 billion.

Vietnams investment projects in Myanmar are highly evaluated as they have contributed significantly to the sustainable development of the country and the improvement of the local living standards, the guest said.

Myanmarese authorities will establish suitable trade and investment policies to create a favorable investment environment for businesses from foreign countries, including Vietnam, she added.

The two leaders witness the signing of important documents after their talks on April 19, 2018. Photo: Tuoi Tre

Vietnam is the seventh-biggest investor in Myanmar with 70 projects worth nearly $2 billion.

State Counselor Suu Kyi and PM Phuc consented on expanding the two nations cooperation to such fields as training, military medicine, search and rescue, and sports.

A defense policy dialogue at at deputy-ministerial level between Vietnam and Myanmar is expected to be organized this year, according to the two leaders.

They added that negotiation will also be carried out to establish a collaboration mechanism in crime fighting, and agreements in extradition and transfer of sentenced persons.

PM Nguyen Xuan Phuc talks with State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi. Photo: Tuoi Tre

The host and guest expressed their wish to further uphold ties in other important fields, including finance, telecommunications, energy, agro-forestry-fisheries, and people-to-people exchange.

Both countries will also work closely together at forums such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the United Nations.

They highlighted the importance of maintaining peace and stability in the region, as well as maritime and aviation freedom in the East Vietnam Sea.

Following the talks, the leaders witnessed the signing of memoranda of understanding on cooperation in telecommunications and information technology.

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Check out the news you should not miss today, April 20:

Politics

-- The presence of two Chinese military aircraft in Vietnam's Truong Sa (Spratlys) is illegal, Le Thi Thu Hang, spokesperson of the Vietnamese foreign ministry, told reporters at a regular press conference in Hanoi on Thursday.

-- Myanmar State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi on Thursday began her two-day official visit to Vietnam at the invitation of Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, aiming to strengthen bilateral ties and tighten bilateral partnership between the two countries.

Society

-- Le Phan Trong Nhan, who was in a coma after a fire that killed 13 people at the Carina Plaza apartment complex in Ho Chi Minh City in March, was discharged from hospital after nearly a month of treatment on Wednesday. Nhans wife, child and brother-in-law died in the fire.

-- Police in the southern province of Dong Nai have slapped a VND3.5 billion (US$153,475) fine on Chin Well Fasteners (Vietnam) Co. Ltd. for the illegal burial of 1,600 tons of waste, and requested the company to fix the problem.

-- Vietnam is among the top five countries with the biggest plastic waste volume thrown into the ocean, with 1.8 billion metric tons per year, environmentalists said at the Earth Day: Fish or plastic  Whats your lunch made of? seminar held by the Consulate General of the United States in Ho Chi Minh City on Thursday.

-- Two local men in the north-central province of Quang Binh were on Thursday sentenced to 36 months behind bars for killing four langurs with rifles.

Education

-- Dr. Nguyen Thi Hiep, a researcher and lecturer in biomedical engineering at the International University under the Vietnam National University - Ho Chi Minh City, has received the 2018 L'Oreal-UNESCO For Women in Science International Awards for her work on a bio-glue which can boost wound healing.
Farmers in a north-central Vietnamese province have been asked to pay a meadow-using fee for their cattle to graze in local fields, and an upfront deposit purportedly meant to ensure the animals will not destroy nearby crops.

Minh Anh, an agriculture cooperative located in Thieu Duong Commune, Thanh Hoa Province, sets the meadow-using fee at VND100,000 (US$4.4) per cow or water buffalo per year, whereas the deposit ranges from VND300,000 ($13) to VND500,000 ($22), depending on the size of the herd.

Those who refuse to pay the fees would be forbidden from letting their cattle graze in or around local fields, farmers said, adding that they have strongly protested against the charges, but all efforts went in vain.

Duong Dinh Minh, the cooperative director, confirmed the collection of the two fees to Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper.

Minh said the second fee was collected as a refundable deposit, as farmers would get their money back at the end of every year if they manage to prevent their cattle from destroying local crops.

Water buffaloes graze in the fields in Thanh Hoa Province, Vietnam. Photo: Tuoi Tre

The charge was put in place in December 2017, after several farmers had carelessly allowed their cattle to roam fields, usually causing damage to the crops.

The director underlined that the deposit collection was backed by members of the cooperative, and had been paid willingly.

However, Nguyen Anh Tuan, deputy chairman of Thieu Duong Commune, told Tuoi Tre that it is against the law for the cooperative to levy those fees on farmers.

The Thieu Duong administration has required the cooperative to apologize to and give the money back to the locals within next week.

Higher-level officials are working with the cooperative and Thieu Duong authorities to strictly punish people involved in the case.

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A Vietnamese student is dead and another was injured after a teacher hit them while backing up a car inside a schoolyard.

The tragic accident happened at around 10:00 am at the Van Ho Elementary School in Van Ho District, Son La Province on Thursday when 39-year-old Nguyen Thi Huong ran over the two first-graders, Song A Ninh and Tran Tuan Anh, according to a statement from local police chief Pham Van Truc.

Huong was reversing the car inside the school campus when she crashed into the students, killing Ninh. Anh survived the accident with a broken arm and leg, Truc said.

Anh is currently being treated at a local hospital.

A police investigation revealed that Huong does not have a drivers license and the car belongs to Vi Van Duong, 42, another teacher at the school.

Competent authorities carry out an investigation at the school. Photo: Tuoi Tre

Duong was sitting in the car next to Huong during the incident.

Duong took the blame at first, but we later discovered that Huong was actually the one behind the wheel, Truc said, adding that the woman had admitted to her actions during a working session with officers.

Local authorities have offered support worth VND2 million (US$88) to Ninhs family and VND1 million ($44) for Anh, according to Pham Thanh Hai, head of the Education and Training Office in Van Ho District.

Police are continuing their investigation and will impose suitable punishments on those responsible, Hai stated.

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Massive amounts of waste and harmful substances were unearthed at a former landfill on Wednesday, the same site owned and used by a foreign business punished in 2016 for illegal dumping in southern Vietnam.

Police in Dong Nai Province discovered solid and liquid waste and chemicals while inspecting a location previously used by Chin Well Fasteners to illegally bury waste in Dong Nais Nhon Trach District.

Chin Well Fasteners is an industrial manufacturer specializing in screws, nuts, bolts, and other fastening products.

Authorities collected samples at the scene for further examination.

Regulators performed the check in order to assess the enterprises efforts in dealing with the consequences of their previously using the premises as a landfill.

In July 2016, Chin Well Fasteners was found to be discharging wastewater via two pipes, one of them channeling raw waste.

Nearly 1,600 tonnes of untreated underground waste was found at four locations on its land.

It paid VND3.5 billion ($154,000) in fines for the misstep.

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Create NSW, ABC iview and the Western Sydney-based creative hub Information & Cultural Exchange (I.C.E.) have partnered to search for up to three teams of filmmakers for a series of comedy shorts to premiere on ABC iview.

They are seeking pitches that will deliver youth-focused and digital-first comedies across a mix of sub-genres (comedy/drama, sketch etc), which showcase talent and stories from NSW (with at least one key creative from Western Sydney).

Create NSW Director for Sector Investment Sophia Zachariou said, This is a great opportunity to up-skill Western Sydney creatives with production experience and create new industry relationships through our partners at ABC, I.C.E. and beyond.

NSW is home to an excellent pool of screen talent and were committed to building this capacity further, this time with a focus on increasing the opportunities and exposure for Western Sydney screen practitioners and on expanding the diversity of the people and projects we fund.

ABC Head of Comedy Rick Kalowski added, The ABC prides itself on reflecting Australian diversity through innovative storytelling, and this I.C.E. initiative is an exciting means to uncover more of these stories for Australian audiences. I am extremely excited to work alongside our partners to develop these projects with Western Sydney creatives.

Up to three NSW-based teams will receive up to $75,000 per project, with projects needing to span four to six five-minute episodes each, deliverable by the end of December 2018. Projects must appeal to a youth audience, from teams that include at least one key creative from Western Sydney.

Once selected, teams will have access to the professional development services of representatives from Create NSW and I.C.E., plus an ABC Commissioning Editor to guide the projects and build relationships with the broadcaster.

Details of a briefing and Q&A session for interested potential applicants to be held at I.C.E. will be announced via Create NSW shortly.

I.C.E. Executive Director John Kirkman said, Western Sydney is a rich source of stories that reflect the reality of a cultural diverse contemporary Australia. I.C.E. is pleased to support this initiative and promote the new stories and storytellers from our region.

Applications are now open and close midnight Sunday 17 June 2018.
James Marsden is heading to Australia to promote the second season of Westworld.

He will visit Sydney from April 30 to May 1 for media opportunities.

Westworld returns to Showcase at 11am Monday.

The internationally-renowned actor has enjoyed a hugely successful career spanning over 25 years, with credits including The Notebook, Superman Returns, Hairspray, Enchanted, 27 Dresses, Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, The Best of Me, The Butler, Bachelorette and X-Men, where he played the character of Cyclops across the entire X-Men franchise.

Marsdens latest role sees him play lead character and mysterious android host Teddy in the Emmy-nomated television series Westworld  a handsome transient with a quick draw and a dark past, who longs for a simpler life. He joins an exceptional cast including Evan Rachel Wood, Ed Harris and Thandie Newton.

Set in the not-too-distant future, Westworld is a futuristic adventure park modelled after Americas Wild West and populated by human-like android hosts. Paying guests immerse themselves in the Westworld universe, where every detail and scenario have been planned, scripted and executed by a team of brilliant scientists and programmers working in close proximity to the park. However, a group of the android hosts soon begin to deviate from their programmers carefully planned scripts, in a disturbing pattern of abnormal behaviour.
A judge has rejected a bid by the Daily Telegraph that would have seen the Sydney Theatre Company become another defendant in the defamation case involving Geoffrey Rush.

The Telegraph sought to bring a cross-claim against the theatre company which Rushs lawyers described as a fishing expedition and delaying tactics.

Today Justice Michael Wigney rejected the application, saying the cross-claim was very weak and tenuous, and the idea of suing a source was unusual.

It would not be unfair to say, in all the circumstances, that while Nationwide News and Mr Moran were quick to publish, they have been slow to defend, Mr Wigney said.

Moreover, there are reasonable grounds to suspect that the real reason for Nationwide and Mr Morans zealous, if not desperate, pursuit of the amendments is to justify a further subpoena to the STC in the hope that documents produced  might provide what has been to date proved to be an elusive defence of justification.

Rush is suing Nationwide News and journalist Jonathon Moran over stories published in November & December, alleging he behaved inappropriately with a colleague during a 2015 production of King Lear. The front page story was published as King Leer.

Lawyers have claimed Rush has remained virtually housebound, barely eating and believes his worth to the theatre and film industry is now irreparably damaged.

He denies all allegations. A trial date has been fixed for September.

Source: ABC
TVs love affair with makeovers is usually confined to people and properties, and occasionally restaurants.

Sevens new 7 part series The Mentor broadens the field with small businesses in real estate, salons, fashion, retail and more. Mark Bouris, best known for 4 seasons of The Celebrity Apprentice (+ 1 of The Apprentice) now fronts a new format on a new network.

Never one to do things by halves, Bouris even pitched his own format to Seven producing a showreel. Sometimes in business you have to back yourself.

The first episode centres around family-owned Moreton Bay real estate company Ubiquitous (it turns out the name was chosen after 26 year old daughter Stephanie heard it on Sunrise). But mum Sharon, Dad Erich and brother Curtis are struggling. They lost millions in the global financial market and now struggle to crack a sale from their home office.

Even worse, they bicker over organisational duties (sometimes in front of clients) and their website has over the top videos starring frustrated performer Stephanie.

Mark (no longer referred to as Mr. Bouris) doesnt like what he sees when he arrives, instantly identifying a lack of leadership as underpinning their problem. There are 4 loose stages to his 5 day quick fix: a Pressure Test in which he views them in action through cameras; The Experts, in which experienced professionals provide advice (doesnt that make them the mentor?); The Deal, a boardroom assessment and ultimatum; and Launch, a public rebranding event.

Im not going to sugar coat it. Im here to tell you the real shit, Bouris tells Sharon & her family.

Amongst the Ubiquitous family, daughter Stephanie provides all the drama. She blindly believes she is companys best asset, with overt claims and an inability to accept criticism. Mum Sharon is torn between her experience and love for her daughter to shine. Alas dad and brother provide very little to the company and even less as TV talent.

Bouris test-drives the company name with the locals on the street, brings in a Ray White superstar and successfully gets to the heart of what is holding the family back. With his tough love approach Bouris is again the straight shooter he was in Celebrity Apprentice -TV can thank Donald Trump and Gordon Ramsay for perfecting such. Thankfully the show is not all about pushing brand Bouris, with enough scenes that capture family tension. But there is an affiliated business network website which no doubt is another chance for Bouris Inc. to profit.

The production values here give this a grass-roots feel and I felt it somewhat ironic that with some TV mentoring (Mark Burnett anyone?) it might tick a few more boxes that would better suit a primetime audience. The Mentor is not a bad little show -at least it comes without the abuse that is associated with some profile shows of late- but Im not entirely sold on whether it stands up as primetime fare.

And why didnt Mr. Bouris tell the ladies not to work barefoot on the job?

The Mentor airs 9pm Monday on Seven.
FASCISM is a fascinating ideology, it grew on the back of social and economic problems but are the conditions that allow such an ideology to thrive ingrained into western culture and politics? In a series of articles, I hope answer such a question. This is a subject that I have been researching pretty intensely for the last year or so and will continue to do so until I reach a potential conclusion.

Where to begin has been the problem along with the length of each article. This is why I am planning a long series of short articles on the question itself.

First off, I shall begin with the origins of the man who spearheaded the first successful Fascist movement, Benito Mussolini.

Benito Mussolini: The man of the people

He described himself as the man of the people but his upbringing shows that he is far from such a description. His father was a local blacksmith and a part-time Socialist journalist and his mother was a teacher, they were very well off. From a young age he was surrounded by politics because his father would spend a lot of time talking about politics. Unsurprisingly, he was a bully at school and his teachers couldnt control his aggressive behaviour. However, he was intelligent and worked as a schoolmaster for a short period. Upon leaving Italy from Switzerland after becoming disillusioned by teaching, he gained a reputation for being intelligent and uncompromising with an uncommon presence, he was also noted for his rhetorical talents.

After eventually returning to Italy, he became a notable journalist and was imprisoned multiple times because of violent behaviour. He founded his own newspaper, La Lotta di Classe (The Class Struggle) and through this became the editor of the official Socialist newspaper, Avanti! (Forward!). Using powerful anti-imperialist, anti-nationalist and anti-militarist rhetoric, he quickly doubled the newspapers circulation.

However, his ideological approach soon changed, he was originally furiously against Italys intervention in WWI but soon changed his mind because of Karl Marxs aphorism that social revolution usually follows war and as a consequence he was kicked out of the Socialist Party.

It was in 1915 that he joined the military and served Italy on the front lines and reaching the rank of Corporal, he was eventually wounded and discharged from military service.

Upon returning from the military, he was a convinced and ardent anti-Socialist and in 1918 believed that Italy needed a dictator to guide them through the economic and political crisis that was engulfing the country. Just year later around 200 people gathered in an office in the Piazza San Seplcro in Milan to discuss the establishment of a new movement within Italian politics. The new force was named the fasci di combattimento or fighting bands.

The group of fighters were bound together as close as those secured by the symbols of ancient Roman authority, the fasces of the lictors, the fasces derives from the Latin word fascis, which means bundle. The fasces were carried by the lictors, or attendants and characterised as an axe head projecting from a bundle of elm or birch rods which were tied together with a red strap; this was the symbol of penal power.

This signalled the birth of the Fascist movement in Italy in 1919.

Next article will be about his Fascist movements rise from the shadows to power, focusing on the movement as whole to better understand the reason behind their popularity.
This week, it was easy to forget about Brexit. The airstrikes in Syria, along with the appalling treatment of the Windrush generation rightly dominated the front pages. However, Teresa May's Brexit troubles have been simmering in the background all the while. In the past few days, the government lost two crucial Brexit-related votes, and these defeats were capped on Friday by the EU's rejection of May's latest proposal for the Irish Border. Yes, it's been a bad week for Brexiteers.

House of Lords Brexit defeat

On Wednesday, the House Of Lords carried an amendment to the EU withdrawal bill by 123 votes in one of the largest votes on record.

According to the Guardian, former Conservative ministers backed the amendment which commits the government to declare its action in relation to the customs union. Shadow Brexit secretary, Keir Starmer, told the Guardian that support for staying in a customs union of some kind was growing: There is a growing view, I think a majority view in parliament now, that it is in our national interest and economic interest to stay in a customs union with the EU. Weve got a huge manufacturing sector in the UK that needs to be protected,

In response, Michael Gove acknowledged that the government would need the support of ministers to push its Brexit plans through. However speaking on BBC 4 Radia, he reiterated that leaving the customs union would have significant benefits:"...being able to sign our own free trade deals is a compelling and persuasive one and I know when that case is put to the Commons that it will rally Conservative MPs and others behind it.

In the same interview, he vowed not to allow this vote to derail Brexit.

House of Commons Brexit defeat

In the House of Commons, Conservative rebels voted against Teresa May's EU withdrawal bill. They backed an amendment regarding the parliament's right to vote on the Brexit deal, thus inflicting a major blow to the prime minister's flagship EU withdrawal bill. Amendment seven had initially been tabled by Dominic Grieve and was later also backed by MP, Heidi Allen, the former business minister, Anna Soubry, and by Nicky Morgan, the former education secretary.

After a lengthy debate, the vote was carried by 309 votes to 305, marking Teresa May's first-ever Brexit defeat in the House of Commons. The amendment limits the power of ministers to make Brexit-related legislative changes without the approval of parliament. The narrow victory illustrates the deep divisions, not just among Tory MPs, but also within the Labour Party.

According to the Guardian, the Tory whip failed, while Jeremy Corbyn is reported to have phoned a number of his own MPs, urging them to support Grieve's amendment. Speaking to the Guardian, one MP said this defeat "has broken the damn. It will be much, much easier to do it again. Rebelling once gives you a taste for it."

EU rejects latest Irish border proposals

According to a Daily Telegraph report, the EU has rejected the UK government's latest proposals on avoiding a hard border with Ireland. A Daily Telegraph's source was briefed on the meeting and was told that none of the proposals would work. During this week's meeting between the UK's lead Brexit negotiator and senior EU officials, the prime minister's Irish border proposal faced "systematic and forensic annihilation".

Sources told the Daily Telegraph that "it was a detailed and forensic rebuttal. It was made clear that none of the UKs customs options will work. None of them." In reaction, a spokesperson for the British government said that it would continue "intensive work programme to engage".

Technological solutions are believed to have been among the proposals, along with a close economic relationship with the Republic of Ireland that would render customs checks unnecessary. The third option would see Northern Ireland remain in the customs union, with the border effectively running down the Irish Sea. However, the prime minister previously vehemently rejected this option.

According to the Telegraph, Teresa May's proposal for a "customs partnership" was also rejected because the EU believes it to be unimplementable and far too costly.
On Friday 25 May, Ireland will go to a referendum on their strict abortion laws, also known as the 8th Amendment.

The referendum date was announced by Irish Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy on Wednesday 28 March through his Twitter account with a photo of him signing the order of the referendum date.

Ive just signed the order for polling day on the referendum on repealing the 8th amendment to the constitution and allowing the Oireachtas to legislate in this area - polling will take place on Friday the 25th of May. pic.twitter.com/vfMAHkalIB  Eoghan Murphy (@MurphyEoghan) 28 Mart 2018

What is the 8th Amendment?

8th Amendment - officially known as article 40.3.3 - is the Irish law that gives pregnant women and unborn fetuses equal rights to live, thus banning the termination of a pregnancy.

The amendment was legalized in 1983, creating a complete ban on abortion.

This complete ban had deathly consequences, such as the death of Savita Halappanavar (31) in 2012 whose requests for an abortion were denied even though she was going through a miscarriage. The discussions regarding the 8th Amendment was fired up after her death, the topic trending in multiple social media platforms and eventually getting discussed in the parliament, which initiated the change.

The first change to this amendment was made in 2013 when the complete ban was lifted for some exceptions. This alteration allowed terminations only in cases where the pregnancy endangered the mother's life. The abortion ban is still active in any other cases, including, but not limited to cases of sexual assault or incest, or abnormalities of the unborn fetus.This regulation is still active in Ireland today.

Currently, the termination of a pregnancy that doesn't endanger the mother's life is illegal and the maximum penalty for it is 14 years in prison.

The proposition of the new regulation allows unrestricted termination within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. It also allows abortion after 12 weeks in cases of fatal foetal abnormalities and other emergencies.

Updates on campaigns and polls

Ever since the referendum date was officially announced, there have been many statements made regarding both sides.

The Roman Catholic Bishop of Derry, Donal McKeown encouraged people to vote Retain. He stated that he supported Church of Ireland's declaration that "unrestricted access to abortion in the first twelve weeks of pregnancy, or indeed at any stage, is not an ethical position we can accept." There have been pro-life marches and campaigns supporting Retain.

Repeal side also had marches and campaigns since March. Pro-choice posters were shared on many social media platforms and became trending in some of them. One of the pro-choice supporters, designer Richard Malone, took a more creative path on spreading the Repeal message, as he wrote them on a window at London's Oxford Street.

Irish designer Richard Malone has taken over a window at Selfridges and is covering it in Repeal messages pic.twitter.com/bVYzIas1Ql  Ana Kinsella (@anakinsella) 17 Nisan 2018

According to an opinion poll executed on 1000 adults by Red C for the Sunday Business Post, 56 percent of the people are in favor of repealing the 8th Amendment from the constitution while 26 percent support retaining the law and 18 percent remain undecided. Out of all the people participating in the opinion poll, 59 percent of the women and 54 percent of the men were in favor of repeal. The final results of the referendum will be clear on Friday 25 May.
Armen Sarkissian, who was chosen by Armenia's parliament as the country's new president, attends a parliamentary session in Yerevan, Armenia March 2, 2018. REUTERS/Vahram Baghdasaryan/Photolure

Thomson Reuters

YEREVAN (Reuters) - Armenian President Armen Sarkissian on Thursday called for dialogue, as thousands continued to protest on the streets against the appointment of the new prime minister, who was president for 10 years before switching jobs this month.

Parliament on Tuesday voted to allow ex-president Serzh Sarksyan to become premier in the former Soviet republic, despite weeks of angry rallies against such a move.

"I'm confident that the only solution is a dialogue and mutual respect," Sarkissian said in a statement.

"As a leader of the country, I'm calling on the sides to hold a dialogue in order to find the best solution in the current situation."

Thousands of opposition activists marched in the center of Yerevan on Thursday, waving national flags and chanting: "Make a stand, say no to Serzh".

They blocked entrances to government buildings and staged sit-ins. In the evening about 15,000 protesters were massed in the main square.

Police detained more than 120 activists.

Sarksyan was president from 2008 until April 9 and demonstrators said he was switching jobs but clinging to power.

Under a revised constitution approved by referendum in 2015, the prime minister will hold most power while the presidency becomes largely ceremonial.

Sarksyan's ally Sarkissian was sworn in as president last week after being elected by parliament. Sarksyan said in March, while still president, he would become prime minister to allow him to share the benefit of his experience.

Armenia seceded from the Soviet Union in 1991 but remains dependent on Russia for aid and investment. Many Armenians accuse the government of corruption and mishandling an economy that has struggled to overcome the legacy of central planning.

(Reporting by Hasmik Mkrtchyan; writing by Margarita Antidze; editing by Andrew Roche)

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SANTIAGO (Reuters) - Chile's Foreign Ministry said on Friday that Chile was willing to host the next meeting between the government of Colombia and rebel group ELN, after Ecuador earlier this week pulled support for the talks.

The sometimes-fraught, 14-month-old peace talks between Colombia and the ELN, a leftist rebel group founded in 1964 by radical Catholic priests, were re-started in Quito last month.

But violence by Colombian armed groups in Ecuador, including the recent kidnapping and killing of two journalists by former members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), prompted Ecuador's President Lenin Moreno to suspend its role as a guarantor country, an observer who guarantees the process is conducted objectively.

Chile's Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it was willing to serve as the new venue in order to help Colombia reach a resolution to the conflict "as quickly as possible."

Chile, together with Brazil, Cuba, Norway and Venezuela, are also guarantor countries for the talks.

(Reporting by Dave Sherwood; Editing by Leslie Adler and Cynthia Osterman)

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* Congo will get deal once debt sustainable - IMF

* Congo hit hard by low oil prices

* Talks with IMF have dragged on since last year (Recasts with IMF statement)

By Joe Bavier

ABIDJAN, April 20 (Reuters) - The IMF will propose a financial arrangement to Congo Republic once the central African country has completed work needed to make its debt sustainable, the fund said on Friday, contradicting a claim by Congo that the deal was already done.

Congo said on Friday it had fulfilled the criteria for a deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and had reached an agreement on a three-year programme aimed at turning around its debt-crippled economy.

"The authorities and the IMF mission have reached broad understandings on a program that could be supported by the IMF under a financial arrangement," an IMF spokesman said in response to emailed questions.

"The Republic of Congo ... (is) working to restore debt sustainability and ensure full program financing. Once this work is completed, IMF Management will be prepared to propose the arrangement," he added.

Like other Central African oil producing countries, Congo has been hit by low crude prices. While several neighbours, including Chad and Gabon, have secured bailouts from the IMF, talks with Congo have dragged on since last year.

The delay is largely due to the IMF's call for the government to restructure its debt, which stood at $9.14 billion, or around 110 percent of GDP, by the end of July - a level the Fund says is unsustainable.

"Republic of Congo congratulates itself for having met all of the criteria to be eligible for financing of its economic and financial programme by the IMF and its international partners," Congo had earlier said.

It said the programme, which still required IMF board approval, aimed to restore sustainable and inclusive economic growth and support a "stable microeconomic environment compatible with the viability of the public debt".

The statement did not give the expected size of the IMF package, but it said that conclusion of the programme would unlock an additional 135 million euros ($166 million) from France.

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The IMF said in a statement on Thursday that it expected Congo to continue implementing its strategy to restore debt sustainability and would propose a programme to the board "once compliance with all relevant IMF policies has been established".

Congolese authorities are in talks with creditors, including trading houses Trafigura and Glencore (Frankfurt: 8GC.F - news) from whom it borrowing $2 billion.

The bulk of its external debt, however, is owed to Chinese entities. ($1 = 0.8129 euros) (Additional reporting by Tim Cocks in Dakar Editing by Tim Cocks and Gareth Jones)
Tesla CEO Elon Musk says his workers should not be afraid to walk away from unproductive, overlong meetings (Ben Macmahon/AAP Image via AP)

Billionaire Tesla boss Elon Musk has a stark message to boost business: walk out of poor meetings.

The charismatic leader of the electric vehicle revolution says staff should be encouraged to vote with their feet if meetings are unproductive.

In an email to workers, Musk says: It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time.

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The communication, obtained by website electrek, was sent as his company struggles to boost production targets for its Model 3 car.

He offers seven top tips for workers to get more out of their day:

Large meetings  Musk says excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time. Limit how often you hold meetings. Meeting frequency should drop rapidly once the urgent matter is resolved. Dont be afraid to walk out of a meeting or quit a business calling as soon as it is obvious you arent adding value. The use of acronyms or nonsense words for objects, software or processes at Tesla only inhibits communication. We dont want people to have to memorize a glossary just to function at Tesla. If its better to bypass a chain of command to get the job done, then do it, he urges. Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere. On a similar theme, Musk rails against poor communication between departments. If, in order to get something done between depts, an individual contributor has to talk to their manager, who talks to a director, who talks to a VP, who talks to another VP, who talks to a director, who talks to a manager, who talks to someone doing the actual work, then super dumb things will happen. Rules are there to be challenged. Use your common sense, he argues, so if a company rule is obviously ridiculous, then that rule should change.

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Production of Teslas Model 3 has been hit by delays (REUTERS/Joe White)

Although valued in the tens of billions, Tesla has yet to turn a profit. Production issues have dogged the flagship $35,000 Model 3 and Musk has taken the decision to temporarily halt production at plants in California for upgrades aimed at increasing output from 2,000 to 6,000 cars per week by the end of June.

He tweeted last week that pushing automation at his company at the expense of human expertise was a mistake.

Yes, excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake. To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated.  Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 13, 2018

Musk also said he was well aware critics were pointing to the fact Tesla had yet to turn a profit.

Therefore, he said, there would be a renewed focus on saving money. To that end, the email says, the finance team will be combing through every detail of every expenditure to ensure it is delivering value for money.

He also took aim at Teslas contractors  likened to be a Russian nesting doll of layer upon layer of contractor, sub-contractor and so on.

This means a lot of middle-managers adding cost but not doing anything obviously useful, he said.

There is a very wide range of contractor performance, from excellent to worse than a drunken sloth.





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Contractors have been given a week, he said, to prove their excellence or their relationship with Tesla will be over on Monday.

Musk has good reason to push Tesla on to the next level. His pay is linked to performance in such a way that unless the company grows tenfold to $650 billion over the next decade, he wont receive a penny.

Should it reach certain performance targets, however, he is set to pocket $55bn.
Michael Gove said the UK is the most welcoming country in the EU ( PA WIRE/PA IMAGES)

Michael Goves claim that the UK is the most migrant friendly country in the EU have been disputed following the publication of new figures on asylum applications.

The Environment Secretary insisted the government has a positive, welcoming, liberal, forward-looking approach to immigration in response to criticism over the Windrush scandal.

He said: Something very striking was reported by the European Union, actually, a little earlier this year, which is that of all the countries in the EU, Britain is the country with the warmest attitude to migration from outside the EU.

Were the most immigration-friendly country in the EU.

But figures published by the EUs statistics authority today show the UK took in fewer asylum seekers per capita last year than more than a dozen EU countries.

Green MEP Caroline Lucas said they showed Mr Goves boasting didnt reflect reality.

The Eurostat figures showed the UK granted asylum to granted asylum to 15,645 people in 2017, mostly from Eritrea, Iran and Afghanistan.

In total numbers, that put the UK behind only Germany, France, Italy, Austria and Sweden  although each of those countries accepted double the number of people than the UK and Germany took over 300,000 more.

But the UK trailed 13 EU countries when it came to the number of asylum seekers accepted per head of population.

The UK granted asylum to 240 people per million of population last year.

That was less than Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, France, Italy, Cyprus, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Austria, Finland and Sweden.

The starkest example of this could be seen in the numbers of Syrian asylum seekers accepted.

The UK took in 845, while Luxembourg, with a population of a little over half a million, accepted 450.

Hitting back at Mr Gove in light of the figures, Ms Lucas said: It really does take some brass neck for Tory ministers to be touring the broadcast studios declaring Britain the most liberal EU country on immigration when they accept far fewer asylum seekers than many other European countries.

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Compared to other leading nations like Germany, Sweden and Austria, Britain is lagging far behind when it comes to granting asylum seekers the right to remain in Britain.

We should be doing less boasting about our migration attitudes and reflecting on the cruelty of the policies in place which lock out those in need and threaten those with a right to be here with deportation.




FILE PHOTO: Janos Lazar, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's chief of staff talks during a news conference in Budapest, Hungary, March 8, 2018. REUTERS/Bernadett Szabo

Thomson Reuters

BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's chief of staff Janos Lazar will not seek a role in the new government to be formed by May, news website index.hu cited Lazar as saying on Friday in an interview with a regional radio station.

Lazar, a top aide to Orban, who was in charge of European Union development funds as well as the expansion of Hungary's Paks nuclear power plant, said he was planning to return to his native Hodmezovasarhely in southern Hungary.

Orban told public radio earlier that he was planning to reshuffle some positions in the upper echelons of his cabinet, although the government structure would remain largely intact.

(Reporting by Gergely Szakacs and Krisztina Than)

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FILE PHOTO: Iran's national flags are seen on a square in Tehran February 10, 2012, a day before the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution. REUTERS/Morteza Nikoubazl/File Photo

Thomson Reuters

ANKARA (Reuters) - Iran warned the United States on Thursday over "unpleasant" consequences of pulling out of a multinational nuclear deal, Iranian state TV reported.

"Iran has several options if the United States leaves the nuclear deal. Tehran's reaction to America's withdrawal of the deal will be unpleasant," TV quoted Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif as saying upon his arrival in New York.

(Writing by Parisa Hafezi, editing by G Crosse)

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The Irish border near Newry, Co Down (Press Association)

Theresa Mays plan to avoid a hard border in Ireland after Brexit has been roundly rejected by EU negotiators  fuelling calls for the UK to remain part of a customs union.

The Prime Ministers top Brexit adviser, Olly Robbins, met with EU officials in Brussels on Wednesday to try and make progress with the most difficult issue in negotiations.

But an EU official has told the Telegraph that the British proposals  set out by Mrs May in her Mansion House speech  were subject to a systematic and forensic annihilation.

It was a detailed and forensic rebuttal, said the source briefed on the meeting.

It was made clear that none of the UKs customs options will work. None of them.

A spokesman for Theresa May said the government didnt recognise the account of the meeting given to the Telegraph.

He said: We are confident that in the coming months, if all sides work together productively, we can achieve a solution to the Ireland/Northern Ireland border that works for everyone involved.

But Lib Dem Brexit spokesman Tom Brake said the report showed the only solution was always going to be a hard border or the customs union.

The development has put further pressure on the Prime Ministers plan to leave the customs union as it meets resistance in both houses of Parliament.

The government was defeated over the issue in the Lords on Wednesday when peers voted to instruct ministers to consider remaining part of the customs union.

Now a cross-party group of MPs  including Conservative Nicky Morgan  have called a vote on the issue in the Commons next week.

Mrs May has said remaining part of a customs union would betray the vote of the British people and not be compatible with a meaningful independent trade policy.

Olly Robbins (left) meets with Brexit Secretary David Davis (Getty)

But the EUs outright rejection of the two tailored solutions she set out in her Mansion House speech could yet force her into a climb down.

Mrs Mays suggestion of a customs partnership, which would see the UK collect duties for goods bound for Europe on behalf of the EU, was ruled out by Brussels on three grounds, the Telegraph reported.

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The EU would not countenance allowing a country outside of its supervision and IT systems to levy duties, said it would place the burden of collecting tariffs on business and said that implementing the system on the EU side of the Channel would be too expensive.

Mrs Mays second proposal for a highly streamlined customs arrangement based on a trusted trader scheme and technological solutions, which included specific provisions for Northern Ireland, was also rejected.

Lord Macpherson, the former top official at the Treasury, said the EUs position was predictable because of the backstop solution in the Withdrawal Agreement.

EU's position on Irish border so predictable. UK sold pass by conceding "backstop" in December, inviting EU to hold us to it. #badbusiness  Nick Macpherson (@nickmacpherson2) April 19, 2018

The deal done between the UK and EU in December states that Northern Ireland will remain part of the customs union if there is no other solution to avoiding a hard border.

In response to the latest set back, Mrs May is to chair weekly meetings of the governments Brexit negotiators to try and find new solution ahead of the next EU leaders summit in ten weeks time.

EU chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier said today that a quarter of Brexit issues, including the Irish border, are yet to be resolved.

There are always difficulties, and risks of a failure, Mr Barnier told French TV.

The importance of the Irish border issue for the whole Brexit deal was reiterated by EU Council President Donald Tusk this week.

The UKs decision on Brexit has caused the problem, and the UK will have to help solve it, he told the European Parliament as Brexit negotiators met on Wednesday.

Without a solution, there will be no withdrawal agreement and no transition.




(This April 19 story is refiled to clarify description of northern European markets with looser cross-border regulations.)

By Brenna Hughes Neghaiwi and Angelika Gruber

ZURICH (Reuters) - UBS <UBSG.S> will centralise its European cross-border wealth management business and run it out of Switzerland from June, the latest step within a series of reshuffles since merging its flagship business under one global unit this year.

The world's largest wealth manager will handle cross-border business for western Europe out of two regional units to help adapt the offshore business to differing regulations, according to an internal memo seen by Reuters.

"The separation between Europe International North and South allows us to take strategic decisions based on market access regulations, which are tighter in southern Europe than in the north," the bank's new head of wealth management for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Christine Novakovic, said in the memo sent on Thursday.

Many wealthy European clients seek to book money not only in their home country but also through additional accounts booked in Switzerland, the world's largest centre for offshore wealth.

In some countries, foreign bankers may travel to court new clients or make visits to existing customers on their home turf.

But countries such as Italy, Spain and France impose tighter restrictions than several important northern European markets against cross-border visits and marketing, meaning banks focus more on attracting offshore clients from these countries who already have a Swiss bank account.

Novakovic will directly oversee the southern unit --including Italy, Iberia, France and the Benelux -- on an interim basis, while Sonia Goessi will lead the northern unit, consisting of cross-border business from Germany, Austria, Britain, the Nordics and Netherlands.

The bank will reintegrate its business for so-called affluent clients -- private banking customers with under 2 million Swiss francs (1.49 million pounds) managed by the bank -- into the same organisational structure as its high net worth clients, in order to help boost business as their assets grow.

(Editing by Michael Shields)
By Omar Mohammed

NAIROBI (Reuters) - Vodacom Tanzania is focusing on growing its data business, mobile payments system and cloud services to stay on top of the East African nation's competitive telecoms market, the head of the company said on Friday.

Investment in these areas will ensure the company retains first mover advantage, managing director Ian Ferrao told Reuters.

Vodacom <VODA.TZ> controls 32 percent of the country's 40 million mobile subscribers, ahead of companies including Tigo Tanzania, a subsidiary of Sweden's Millicom <MICsdb.ST>, and a local unit of India's Bharti Airtel <BRTI.NS>.

In 2016 Vodacom launched a payments system enabling its 8 million mobile money subscribers to make payments to more than 10,000 merchants, from small shops to restaurants.

"I'd like to see this get to 100,000 merchants in the next couple of years, so that everywhere you go you can pay using M-Pesa," Ferrao said.

A little more than half of Tanzania's total mobile subscribers have mobile money accounts, national regulator data shows, suggesting room for growth.

"If you just look at China, where 90 percent of payments today are made through a mobile phone using various apps, it has completely transformed the Chinese economy," Ferrao said.

"I think Tanzania can be the leading country across Africa driving this mobile payments strategy."

Another growth area is data, he said. More than 50 percent of the country's mobile phone users are accessing the internet using their phones, according to the regulator.

Vodacom allocated about three quarters of the 600 billion Tanzanian shillings ($263.4 million) it spent on network infrastructure over the past three years on expanding mobile broadband services, he said.

It is subsidising devices on its network so that consumers can buy cheaper smartphones, he said, because the issue keeping many people from accessing the internet is the cost of smartphones.

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The government could help to address this issue by reducing the tax on imported phones, he added.

Regulatory uncertainty and taxes on mobile operators that Ferrao said are among the highest in Africa are creating barriers to more investment, he said. Close to 40 percent of the company's revenue goes on taxes, directly or indirectly.

"That (high) taxation just brings a barrier to unlocking the levels of investments that are required to be growing next-generation networks."

Ferrao is leaving Vodacom in June after leading the company through a $213 million initial public offering last year.

Vodacom's IPO was in compliance with a government directive for mobile companies to list a minimum 25 percent stake on the local stock exchange. It is the only company to have complied.

Vodacom has also begun offering cloud technology to businesses.

(Reporting by Omar Mohammed; Editing by Maggie Fick and David Goodman)
The Austrian doctor who first identified Asperger syndrome was an active proponent of the Nazi regime and its euthanasia program, a historian has revealed in a new study.

In 1938, Hans Asperger first documented the symptoms of what he described as autistic psychopaths, several years before Leo Kanner published his pioneering paper on autism. Asperger then published a comprehensive study on what would come to be known as Asperger syndrome. As a result, he is hailed as a trailblazer of pediatrics and child psychiatry.

During his career, Asperger earned a reputation as principled opponent to the Nazi regime and as a clinician who protected his patients from so-called "race hygiene" measures such as euthanasia, according to Dr. Herwig Czech, a historian at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria. Asperger died in 1980, having worked as a doctor for over 30 years after the Third Reich collapsed, and was named the chair of pediatrics at the University of Vienna. During his acceptance speech, he claimed the Gestapo wanted to arrest him for refusing to hand over children to the Nazis.

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However, by studying previously unseen documents from state archives, including Asperger's personal files and clinical assessments he wrote of patients, Dr. Czech concluded that Asperger was in fact heavily involved in rolling out Third Reich policy.

GettyImages-3311197

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Asperger publicly legitimized race hygiene policies including forced sterilizations and, on several occasions, actively cooperated with the child euthanasia program, Dr Czech wrote in his eight-year study published in the journal Molecular Autism. Asperger referred children to what Dr. Czech described as Viennas notorious Am Spiegelgrund euthanasia clinic.

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Dr. Czech noted that the language Asperger used to diagnose his patients was often remarkably harsh when compared with the notes of other staff members at Spiegelgrund.

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Although he was not a member of the Nazi party, Asperger joined affiliated organizations, and was given career promotionsabove Jewish colleaguesin exchange for his loyalty to the regime.

In one case documented in the study, a three-year-old patient with the brain inflammation disease encephalitis died of pneumonia three months after being admitted to Spiegelgrund. Asperger sent her to the institution believing she was a an unbearable burden to her mother.

A preserved piece of Herta Schreiber's brain was found in Asperger's clinic in the 1990s and was buried in 2002, according to Dr. Czech.

There was no evidence that Asperger singled those with the condition that later bore his name out for euthanasia.

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The editors of Molecular Autism praised Dr Czech for his meticulous research."

"The degree of Aspergers involvement in the targeting of Viennas most vulnerable children has remained an open and vexing question in autism research for a long time, they told The Guardian.

Addressing the arguably problematic use of Aspergers surname, they highlighted that Dr Lora Wing, who coined the term in 1981, and the broader autism community were unaware of Aspergers close alliance with, and support of, the Nazi program of compulsory sterilization and euthanasia.

Carol Povey, director at the UK's Center of Autism for the National Autistic Society, said in a statement the organization expects the findings to spark a "big conversation" among autistic people and their family members, particularly those who identity with the term "Asperger."

Autism affects everyone differently and people often have their own way of talking about autism. We will be listening closely to the response to this news so we can continue to make sure the language we use to describe autism reflects the preferences of autistic people and their families."

She added: Obviously no-one with a diagnosis of Asperger syndrome should feel in any way tainted by this very troubling history.

This article was first written by Newsweek

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How long can you hold your breath underwater? Thirty seconds? A few minutes? Its said the average person can last about two minutes before they come spluttering back up for air.

The freediving Bajau people of Southeast Asia, however, are not your average people. Scientists have discovered the group of sea nomads may have developed genetic adaptations that allow them to free dive to depths of up to 230 ft. Bajau members report lasting up to thirteen minutes underwater in a single dive. This incredible skill, the researchers think, could be down to their swollen spleens. The research was published Thursday in the journal Cell.

4_20_Bauju diver

Melissa Ilardo

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For more than 1,000 years the Bajau have lived off of the seas in Southeast Asia. Now, they collect food deep in the waters around Indonesia with just a set of weights, a pair of wooden goggles and a spear.

Researcher Melissa Ilardo from the University of Copenhagen travelled to Jaya Bakti, Indonesia, to try and work out exactly how the Bajau people had developed their skills. She suspected it had something to do with the spleen, a weird organ that piggybacks on the side of the stomach. The spleen is a key part of the human diving response: various mechanisms that kick into action when the body is submerged in cold water. The heart slows, the blood vessels shrink and the spleen contractsall to help the body survive oxygen deprivation.

Theres not a lot of information out there about human spleens in terms of physiology and genetics, Ilardo said in an emailed statement, but we know that deep diving seals, like the Weddell seal, have disproportionately large spleens. I thought that if selection acted on the seals to give them larger spleens, it could potentially do the same in humans.

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Ilardo performed ultrasound scans on members of the Bajau group and collected genetic samples. She also tested members of the neigboroung Saluan people who live on land. The spleens of the Bajau, her research team discovered, were on average 50 percent larger than those of the Saluan. Even non-diving Bajau people had enlarged spleens, showing this wasn't just an acquired response to diving, but something deeper.

4_20_Bajau Diver_02

Melissa Ilardo

Genetic analysis found a gene called PDE10A hiding in the Bajau people's samples. PDE10A is believed to control levels of thyroid hormone T4. Its been shown in mice that thyroid hormones and spleen size are connected," Ilardo explained. "If you genetically alter mice to have an absence of the thyroid hormone T4, their spleen size is drastically reduced, but this effect is actually reversible with an injection of T4.

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Genetic adaptions to diving have never been tracked in humans before, she added. The results could have implications for scientist's approach to acute hypoxiaa sudden depletion of oxygen from the body's tissueexplained Ilardo's academic supervisor Rasmus Nielsen of the University of Copenhagen and the University of California, Berkeley, in the statement. Its a hypoxia experiment that nature has made for us and allows us to study humans in a way that we cant in a laboratory.

This study is a wonderful example of the value of studying these small populations living under extreme conditions, added Eske Willerslev, Ilardo's other supervisor and a professor at the University of Copenhagen and the Univeristy of Cambridge. "A lot of them are threatened and this is not just a loss culturally and linguistically, but for genetics, medicine, and sciences in general. Theres still a lot of information to be gathered from these understudied populations.

This article was first written by Newsweek

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By Susanna Twidale

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's Drax plans to cut the cost of the electricity it generates from biomass by a third over the next 10 years to reduce its reliance on subsidies, its CEO told Reuters.

Drax, which generates about 6 percent of Britain's electricity, has converted three of its previously coal-fired units to using biomass wood pellets, often made from compressed sawdust. A fourth unit conversion will be complete by the end of the year.

The biomass units qualify for renewable subsidies from the government. These were worth about 730 million pounds last year but are set to end in 2027.

"We have a cost of delivering energy from biomass that is about 75 pounds per megawatt-hour (MWh) and we are looking to drive that down to around 50 pounds over the course of the next 10 years," Chief Executive Will Gardiner said.

Wholesale electricity prices in Britain are currently about 50 pounds/MWh.

Gardiner said the company was looking at ways to upgrade turbines to obtain more power from each pellet, as well as reducing the cost of the pellets it produces.

Britain wants to end coal-fired power generation by 2025 and Gardiner said Drax could close its existing coal units earlier than that deadline.

However, plans to replace the coal with gas-fired plants will depend on their ability to generate extra revenue from the government's capacity auctions, which pay plant owners to make back-up power available at short notice.

The last auction, held in February, cleared at a record low of 8.40 pounds per kilowatt per year, well below the level needed to spur investment in large gas plants, Gardiner said.

"As long as one of these auction clears high enough in the next two to four years, then gas plants will be able to be built before the coal comes offline," he said.

One of the biggest winners at the auction were interconnectors, links that transport power between Britain and Europe, which secured a record 10 percent of the total capacity.

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Gardiner said the auctions should focus more on securing new sources of domestic generation.

"If it's colder, or the power prices are higher in Europe than they are in the UK, then the power flows from us (Britain) to them (Europe), as it did when the Beast from the East hit," he said.

Research complied by Imperial College London for Drax's Electric Insights report series showed that Britain exported electricity to France during the February cold snap, despite higher than usual domestic demand, because prices were higher across the Channel.

($1 = 0.7116 pounds)

(Reporting by Susanna Twidale; Editing by David Goodman)
(Reuters) - A former Liberian warlord known as "Jungle Jabbah" was sentenced to 30 years in prison on Thursday for gaining U.S. asylum by lying about his role in the civil war in his homeland and atrocities he committed, U.S. prosecutors said on Thursday.

Mohammed Jabbateh, 51, who has lived in East Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, since the late 1990s, was found guilty in October on two counts of fraud in immigration documents and two counts of perjury.

During the height of Liberias first civil war from 1992 to 1995, Jabbateh, while serving as commander of a warring group, either personally committed or ordered acts such as rapes, ritual cannibalism, mutilation, murder and the use of child soldiers, according to prosecutors.

An attorney for Jabbateh, Greg Pagano of Philadelphia, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

While applying for asylum in December 1998, and then for permanent legal residency later on, Jabbateh was not truthful about his membership in the group known as the United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy (ULIMO), and later ULIMO-K, rebel groups that battled for control of Liberia, prosecutors said.

Two dozen witnesses, including 17 Liberian victims, testified in the trial. According to testimony, in one instance Jabbateh ordered that the heart of a captive be cooked and fed to his fighters. In another, fighters under his command murdered a villager, removed his heart and ordered the town chiefs wife to cook it. Jabbateh later had the town chief himself murdered and ordered his widow to cook her husbands heart.

During Jabbateh's trial Pagano said Jabbateh had been framed by accusers who were desperate to blame anyone they could for atrocities committed during the civil war.

These are tall tales of enemies settling old scores  not because they had personal experiences with him but because of what group hes identified with, Pagano said at the trial, according to a posting on his website. There is no greater motive than revenge.

The case was investigated by special agents of Homeland Security Investigations, an arm of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

(Reporting by Andrew Hay; Editing by Tom Brown)
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerbergs recent testimony to congress highlights one of the key issues of our time  data acquisition by digital corporations and its lack of regulation. The kernel of the issue is in this exchange:

Senator Orrin Hatch: How do you sustain a business model in which users dont pay for your service? Zuckerberg: Senator, we run ads.

So  ha ha. Lets laugh at the old guy who doesnt know how Facebook makes money. The exchange spawned memes that compared Zuckerberg going to congress with people doing tech support for their grandparents.

But this question and its answer expose a conceptual disconnect between the old world and the new. Senator Orrin Hatch asks, quite innocently, if youre providing a service, how can you do that for free? The answer is, Facebook is not just in the business of providing you with a service. It is also in the business of farming your data.

Your life for sale

Media theorist and writer Douglas Rushkoff was among the first to point this out back in 2011. With Facebook you are the product, not the customer.

Facebooks customers are advertisers and it has built a platform that is designed to help advertisers target customers  forensically. This is not confined to the data you enter into Facebook either. It also includes the data you tread into Facebook when you arrive. The purchases youve made, the searches youve conducted.

In a sense, that is all that Cambridge Analytica did. They used Facebook to target specific users with content in exactly the way the platform was designed. It wasnt selling a bag with lots of cool pockets though. It was selling Trump and Brexit.

It is only now, when we are finally looking at the manipulation of culture rather than purchasing choices, that we are beginning to question the ethical ambiguity of this model. The model where you and your data are the product.

Regulation is the next step

No wonder Zuckerberg looked like a deer caught in the headlights in front of congress, even if the questioning is inept and toothless. This is the beginning of a process. A process that could end with transformative, stringent regulation of his business practice or, at the very least, a fight between Facebook and governments over that regulation.

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But theres a problem with this. Its not just Facebook. With any service that you use online that is free  including all Google services (Docs, Gmail, Search) all social media services (Snapchat, WhatsApp, Twitter) and even Hotmail  your data is the product. Once we start to pull on this thread, once old folks like Senator Orrin Hatch begin to realise just how deeply embedded data harvesting, retargeting, cookie sharing and other ethically ambiguous practices are in digital marketing, where will that take us?

Of course, there will inevitably be discussion of regulation. But who will be responsible for that? In which nation states will the crimes be deemed to have taken place? And will these corporations respect or accept this regulation when it is formulated?

We are talking about the most powerful corporations on the face of the Earth. Alphabet, Microsoft, Facebook  even Amazon which uses data for personalisation and targeting  are all in the world top ten by market value.

Notice that although Zuckerberg has testified before congress, Cambridge Analytica is located in the UK. He deems himself so above UK law and its institutions that he has refused to testify to a UK parliamentary select committee  three times. As inevitable as the discussion of regulation is, very little may actually be done.

Facebook may tighten up its privacy controls and user interface. Google will sigh with relief, because it wasnt them this time, and youll continue to download those apps. Apps that suck up your location data, your Facebook profile and then match you to events that youll enjoy in your area based on smoke and mirrors.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Conversation

Karl Hodge 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.
BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's chief of staff Janos Lazar will not seek a role in the new government to be formed by May, news website index.hu cited Lazar as saying on Friday in an interview with a regional radio station.

Lazar, a top aide to Orban, who was in charge of European Union development funds as well as the expansion of Hungary's Paks nuclear power plant, said he was planning to return to his native Hodmezovasarhely in southern Hungary.

Orban told public radio earlier that he was planning to reshuffle some positions in the upper echelons of his cabinet, although the government structure would remain largely intact.

(Reporting by Gergely Szakacs and Krisztina Than)
The German city of Trier is offering commemorative zero euro notes to celebrate the upcoming 200th birthday of Karl Marx, its most famous son.

But may not have gone down well with the author of The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapitalwho died in 1883. Not only do they have to be bought in a store, but they cost three euros ($3.71).

The city in south-west German is selling the bill as part of a number of planned events and celebrations ahead of Marxs 200th birthday on May 5.

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The note, which are authorized by the European Central Bank despite just being souvenirs and labelled so, have proven to be so popular that the first batch of 5,000 quickly sold out, forcing the city to order another 20,000 to cope with demand in the weeks running up to Marxs birthday.

The souvenir plays on Marxs criticism of capitalism and of course the zero euro note fits perfectly with Marx as a motif, said Norbert Kaethler, managing director of Triers tourism office, told Reuters.

Karl marx

Tourist-Info Trier

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The zero euro bills will be sold at the citys Porta Nigra, a Roman gate in the city which is one of its most famous landmarks.

Marx spent the first 17 years of his life living in Trier before going on to predict that socialism will one day overthrow capitalism. Despite being one of the most influential writers and philosophers in history, Marx spent several years of his life living in poverty.

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REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay

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Trier has also started selling other bits of memorabilia to commentate what would have been Marxs birthday, including yellow Marxist rubber ducks. The city has also temporary changed the green and red traffic lights to images of Marx and a new stature of him will be unveiled on May 5.

The 4.4 meter, three-ton bronze statue, created by Chinese artist Wu Weishan, was a gift from the Chinese government.

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REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay

This article was first written by Newsweek

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By Chris Scicluna and Stephen Grey

VALLETTA (Reuters) - Three men accused of the murder of an anti-corruption journalist six months ago must stay in prison until their trial, a Maltese magistrate ruled on Thursday.

Brothers Alfred Degiorgio and George Degiorgio and Vince Muscat were arrested in early December, after a car bomb killed Daphne Caruana Galizia as she drove out of her home on Oct. 16.

They have pleaded not guilty, and their lawyers argued they should be freed until a date for their trial is set. The court rejected the request, citing the seriousness of the crime, protection of public order and a risk that the accused might commit other crimes.

The decision came as a group of local and international media groups, including Reuters, began following up stories covered by Caruana Galizia, in an initiative called the Daphne Project.

On Thursday, Maltese Economy Minister Chris Cardona denied he met one of the murder suspects in a bar in Siggiewi, in the south of Malta. Some of the Project journalists reported such a meeting, citing a secret recording of a witness at the bar and another anonymous source. Reuters did not report the allegations and has not verified those claims.

In a statement to Reuters, Cardona had said he did not recall talking to any of the three suspects. On Thursday, when asked by the Times of Malta if he had ever been at the bar while any of the accused men were there, Cardona said no.

Opposition leader Adrian Delia, speaking in parliament on Wednesday, said the claims against the minister were harmful to Malta and he needed to explain himself.

Cardona had been a frequent target of Caruana Galizia, and he had sued her after she accused him of visiting a brothel while on official business abroad. He has denied the accusation.

(Editing by Larry King)
Samantha Sally and her late husband, Moussa Elhassani. (Photo: via Facebook)

A mother of four from Indiana is sharing how she became involved with ISIS  and why she and her children are now being held in a Syrian-Kurdish jail.

Samantha Sally spoke to CNN about how her romantic second marriage to Moroccan-born husband Moussa Elhassani resulted in an unexpected move to Syria in 2014. Once there, Elhassani became violent and joined ISIS as a sniper.

Before he would spoil me, the 32-year-old American said. We were very much in love. The romance never left. As soon as we came here, it changed. I was a dog. I didnt have any choice. He was extremely violent. And there was nothing I could do about it. Nothing.

The couple moved to Syria along with their daughter and Sallys son from her first marriage. Sally, who first met Elhassani while they both worked at a delivery company in Elkhart, Ind., says that they originally planned to temporarily move to Elhassanis native Morocco. First, however, they traveled to Hong Kong to transfer their money, followed by a vacation in Turkey.

It was their arrival in Turkey, near the border with Syria, where Elhassani revealed his intention to join ISIS. Although Sally opposed the plan, she feared that leaving Elhassani would separate her from her daughter.

To stay there with my son or watch my daughter leave with my husband  I had to make a decision, she told CNN.

Maybe I would never have seen my daughter again ever, and how can I live the rest of my life like that?

The family ended up settling in Raqqa, Syria, where Sally gave birth to two more children. In addition to Elhassanis violent behavior, she was subjected to abuse from ISIS leaders, including a three-month stretch in jail while she was pregnant. Sally says that she was tortured, sexually abused, and put in solitary confinement while being accused of espionage on behalf of the U.S.

Their home life eventually included the purchase of three Yazidi slaves  two teenage females and one young boy  captured by ISIS. Both girls were raped by Elhassani, though Sally defends having them stay in her home.

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No one will ever know what it is like to watch their husband rape a 14-year-old girl, she said. Ever. And then she comes to you  me  after crying and I hold her and tell her its going to be OK. Everything is going to be fine, just be patient.

I would never apologize for bringing those girls to my house, she added. They had me and I had them. And we knew that if we were just patient, we would stick together. You understand? In any other situation, they would be locked in a bedroom and fed tea every day. And the situation I was in with them, we cooked together, we cleaned together. Drank coffee together. Slept in the same room together. I was like their mother.

Her eldest son, Matthew, was also taken advantage of and was made to appear in videos on behalf of the terrorist group. Sallys objection to his participation resulted in a beating and two broken ribs.

Things changed when Elhassani was killed in a drone strike in 2017. Sally and her family eventually left Raqqa and were detained soon after. They remain in custody and wait for U.S. officials determine whether her affiliation with ISIS merits jail time.

Sally, meanwhile, is hopeful that she and her four children are able to return to the U.S.

I will do anything to get my kids back where they belong, she said. If I have to spend 15 years in prison, its better than anything here.

Me and my kids, we talk about wanting to eat McDonalds, she continued. We want to live a normal life again.

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North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (Rex)

North Korea could be close to a new Chernobyl-type disaster which could threaten 100 million lives, a new report has warned.

Safety shortcuts and poor maintenance are increasing concerns that the secretive regime is putting millions across Asia in mortal danger, says the study by Russias Oleg Shcheka, a professor of physics and chemistry.

Pyongyangs desperate desire for nuclear energy is fuelling fears that another major accident similar to the one in Ukraine in 1986.

The country is apparently beset by power supplies and looking for alternative sources of energy.

Progress is being made on a 100 megawatt-thermal Experimental Light Water Reactor (ELWR) at the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Centre, it is reported.

Professor Shchekas report warns that North Koreas nuclear power stations were largely based on those of Russia, which in many cases trained its scientists.

Many reactors in the country are therefore likely to be similar to the Soviet RBMK-1000, the same model which malfunctioned so spectacularly in a region of the Ukraine 65 miles north of Kiev in 1986, Shcheka told North Korea watchdog, 38 North.



The abandoned Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine (Rex)

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Such a simple design feature, together with the desire to crank up more power to generate electricity, inevitably leads to an increased risk of disasters associated with human errors as well as imperfect operation and protection systems, said Shcheka.

The most tragic example is the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986, when the plants staff, running the reactor in an experimental mode, made gross errors while manipulating the graphite moderators of neutrons.

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The concern is that the North Koreans may attempt to launch nuclear power plants with substandard and poorly tested reactors.

The warning comes just a week before the 32nd anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, arguably the worlds best-known nuclear disaster.

US President Donald Trump is set to meet the North Korean leader later this year for a summit on the countrys nuclear ambitions (Rex)

The claim comes as North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is set to meet US president Donald Trump at a summit which will focus on Pyongyangs nuclear programme.

North Korea is ready for complete denuclearisation, South Korean leaders have claimed.

The summit, a time and place has yet to be announced, comes after a war-of-words between Pyongyang and Washington.

President Trump has called his counterpart little rocket man.

However, it was recently revealed that CIA director Mike Pompeo has made a secret trip to meet Kim Jong-un in North Korea.
By Tim Cocks and Ange Aboa

DUEKOUE, Ivory Coast (Reuters) - Faced with the prospect of losing all its forests, Ivory Coast has partnered with chocolate makers to try to halt the spread of cocoa plantations in protected national parks and reserves.

Ivory Coast, the world's biggest cocoa producer, and major chocolate companies from Mars to Hershey to Barry Callebaut pledged last year to eliminate the production and sourcing of cocoa from protected forests.

Stamping out deforestation in the cocoa supply chain is just one of the commitments made by the world's chocolate makers to make the industry more sustainable, along with finding ways to end child labor and boost farmers' incomes.

If deforestation continues unabated, Ivory Coast risks losing all its forest cover by 2034, environmental campaigners say https://forest500.org/rankings/jurisdictions/ivory-coast. The country's rapidly disappearing forests are home to Western chimpanzees, classified as critically endangered since 2016, forest elephants and the rare pygmy hippopotamus.

Yet plans to end deforestation, a major threat to the long-term sustainability of the cocoa industry, face major hurdles.

Ivory Coast estimates 40 percent its cocoa comes from protected areas, providing livelihoods for hundreds of thousands of farmers and their families.

Ethical certification schemes and Ivory Coast's laws have failed so far to stop forests being replaced by plantations while eco-friendly farming alternatives are typically difficult and costly to implement on a large scale.

WHAT'S THE ISSUE?

Ivory Coast's forests have been cut down to make way for agricultural products such as cocoa, palm oil and rubber for decades since the country's independence from France in 1960.

The decimation of its national parks and forests since the turn of the century, however, has shocked researchers and led to the agreement http://www.worldcocoafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/CDI-Framework_English.pdf to end deforestation, which was signed at the U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP23) in November.

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A study https://tropicalconservationscience.mongabay.com/content/v8/tcs_v8i1_95-113_Bitty.pdf published in the journal Tropical Conservation Science in 2015 concluded that three-quarters of the land in five national parks and 18 forest reserves in Ivory Coast had been transformed for cocoa production.

In a 2017 Mighty Earth investigation http://www.mightyearth.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/chocolates_dark_secret_english_web.pdf, the director of Ivory Coast's Forest Reserve protection agency (Sodefor) estimated that 40 percent of the country's cocoa came from protected areas.

Almost half the 34,000-hectare Mont Peko National Park had been converted to cocoa by 2015, data from the environmental campaign group seen by Reuters shows. Marahoue National Park had lost 40 percent of its forest by the same year.

HOW DID IT HAPPEN?

One contributing factor was the outbreak of civil war in Ivory Coast in 2002. The country was split for a decade between a rebel-held north and government-controlled south, with the forest regions in the west home to several armed groups.

Many park rangers and forest officials abandoned their posts, allowing warlords to move in and parcel off fertile forest land ideal for cocoa production to locals and immigrants alike, accelerating the deforestation.

Despite an end to the war in 2011, many of the lucrative fiefdoms carved out by former rebels remain in place.

Attractive world cocoa prices also encouraged farmers to move deeper into protected forests, helping Ivory Coast consolidate its position as the world's biggest cocoa grower ahead of neighboring Ghana.

HOW WILL THE AGREEMENT WORK?

The deforestation agreement was signed by Ivory Coast and Ghana along with 24 trading firms and chocolate makers, including Ferrero, Nestle, Lindt, Mondelez, Ritter Sport, Olam, Cargill.

A number of chocolate makers have committed separately to ensuring none of the beans they buy come from deforested areas by 2030.

The details of the plan have yet to be worked out but cocoa exporters are pinning hopes on global positioning system (GPS) mapping and relationships with cooperatives producing beans under certified schemes such as the Rainforest Alliance.

The idea is to trace all cocoa back to the farm where it was produced to prevent beans grown illegally in national parks and protected forests getting into the chocolate supply chain.

"We believe cooperatives are the best driver," said Lionel Soulard, Africa director for Cargill, the region's top exporter.

"It starts with ... GPS mapping the farmers, then making sure we can trace where (the cocoa) comes from and how we can prove it comes from there," he told Reuters in an interview in Ivory Coast's main city of Abidjan in February.

Ivory Coast's government is due to publish up-to-date maps on forest cover and land use for different forests, along with data on cocoa farmers and communities that depend on the forests, by the end of the year.

The government has committed to beefing up surveillance of its forest reserves and applying sanctions for any new infringements by the middle of the year at the latest.

Ivory Coast is also coming up with a plan to restore its national forests and develop models for sustainable agro-forestry, a model that aims to restore forest cover while also allowing cocoa production to continue in protected areas.

"It's a lot of work," said Jean Claude Koya, a specialist on sustainable development for Ivory Coast's government. "Some of these forests are so degraded there's nothing we can do ... but some can still be saved."

WHAT ARE THE PROBLEMS?

To halt deforestation, Ivory Coast may be forced to kick out hundreds of thousands of farmers out of forests and find alternative livelihoods for them. To prove the provenance of all cocoa, every smallholder's farm would need to be mapped and every cocoa bean tracked from farm to port.

But tracing where cocoa comes from is tricky and the supply chain is prone to manipulation. Reports by Mighty Earth and others have shown that cocoa farmed in national parks still ends being sold by cooperatives to large cocoa traders.

Certification schemes such as Rainforest Alliance are meant to ensure cocoa sold under the brand has not come from illegal farming in protected forests, but sustainability experts acknowledge the schemes are not foolproof.

In Duekoue, a town in west Ivory Coast surrounded by cocoa farms and thick bush, members of three cooperatives told Reuters that it was common for beans grown in protected forests to be mixed with cocoa from farms considered sustainable.

"There are weaknesses in the system. Companies may think they're buying certified cocoa but there's some jiggery-pokery going on," Edward Millard, Rainforest Alliance director for Africa and South Asia, told Reuters. "You do the best you can, but there are risks in any system of verification."

Attempts by the government to crack down on illegal cocoa farming since a second civil war in 2011 defused the country's political crisis have also foundered, partly because of inertia and corruption.

In the past, Ivorian authorities tended to respond to encroachment on protected areas by sending agents to forcibly remove farmers and destroy their crops.

Park authorities evicted thousands of illegal cocoa farmers from Mont Peko https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ivorycoast-forests-cocoa/ivory-coast-evicts-thousands-of-cocoa-farmers-to-save-forests-idUSKCN11C0IB in 2016, destroying cocoa trees and settlements. But no alternative livelihoods were on offer and many cocoa farmers returned afterwards.

Farmers interviewed by Reuters in the Scio reserve said agents from Sodefor often came to remove them from the forest, but always ended up accepting bribes instead to let them stay.

Ivory Coast's Minister of Water and Forests Alain-Richard Donwahi declined a Reuters interview. A ministry spokeswoman did not respond to emailed questions.

ALTERNATIVES?

Cargill's head of cocoa sustainability Taco Terheijden thinks kicking farmers out of forests is undesirable unless alternative livelihoods can be found.

"If hundreds of thousands of farmers are to be expelled, I would not want to be responsible for ... a social disaster," he said. "If we expel them out of their own source of cocoa, we need to make sure there's an alternative available."

Last year, the Ivorian government began drafting plans to legalize cocoa plantations in some forests and reserves, creating so-called protected agroforests where new trees are planted while farmers continue to grow cocoa.

Under this model, trees are threaded through crops, helping shade cocoa plants while also doing less harm to biodiversity and keeping the soil fertile for longer.

This strategy could help Ivory Coast curb deforestation without evicting farmers or slashing cocoa output, which provides more than half the country's export revenue.

But Ivory Coast's aim to roll out agro-forestry on 2 million hectares of protected reserves is likely to prove costly and neither the government nor the cocoa industry have yet committed to footing the bill.

"Rolling out agro-forestry in 6 million hectares, wow that's expensive," said Etelle Higonnet of conservation watchdog Mighty Earth, referring to the amount of land devoted to cocoa in West Africa as a whole. "You can't ask farmers to foot the bill. The companies have to stump up".

(Additional reporting by Ana Ionova in London; editing by David Clarke)

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TRIPOLI (Reuters) - Rockets hit Libya's main airport and damaged a plane as it was waiting to take off early on Thursday, a security force said, underscoring fragile security.

One rocket hit an Airbus 320 of state-run Libyan Airlines, and others struck the arrivals hall at Tripoli's Mitiga airport at around 2 a.m.(0000 GMT), but no one was injured, a spokesman for the Special Deterrence Force (Rada) said.

Photos circulating on social media showed a tear in the tarmac and holes in the wing and body of the plane.

Tripoli has been controlled by a patchwork of armed groups since a 2011 uprising that toppled long-time leader Muammar Gaddafi and splintered the country.

Armed groups fighting for territory and power have regularly attacked the city's transport hubs - undermining the government's efforts to persuade diplomatic missions to return to the capital.

There have been rival governments in Tripoli and the east since 2014, when most diplomatic missions evacuated to neighbouring Tunisia.

Airlines have struggled to maintain services and keep the oil-producing country connected to the outside world as attacks damage their planes.

Mitiga is the only operating airport in Tripoli. Fighting in 2014 put the main international airport out of service.

Rada, a security group aligned to Libya's internationally recognised government that controls the airport, said the rockets were fired by men loyal to a militia leader known as Bashir "the Cow" Khalfalla, a group it has clashed with before and which it blames for regular nighttime shelling of Mitiga.

Italy and Turkey reopened their embassies in Tripoli last year. U.N. envoy Ghassan Salame is now based in the city, where he held a series of meetings on Thursday and attended an art exhibition with Prime Minister Fayez Seraj in the evening. French Ambassador Brigitte Curmi was also in the capital, holding talks with Libyan officials.

When asked whether elections would be held this year, Salame said after meeting Foreign Minister Mohamed Taher Siyala: "Sure. We promised this the U.N. Security Council." He did not elaborate.

The United Nations launched a new round of talks in September in Tunis between the rival factions to prepare for elections in 2018, but divisions have so far prevented any accord.

(Reporting by Tripoli newsroom; writing by Ulf Laessing and Aidan Lewis; editing by Andrew Heavens and Cynthia Osterman)
About 120,000 students descended on the Chilean capital of Santiago on Thursday, April 19, in protest over changes to education laws which they fear could allow for-profit companies to control universities.

The uploader of this video said it showed scenes near the University of Santiago.

The demonstration was part of a nationwide education protest organised by La Confederacion de Estudiantes de Chile, according to the Santiago Times. The action was sparked by a ruling from Chiles constitutional court that overturned a law which had barred for-profit companies from controlling universities. Credit: wash0_trih via Storyful
By Joe Brock

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Zambia's opposition leader Hakainde Hichelema accused President Edgar Lungu's government on Thursday of political killings, rights abuses and rampant corruption, calling on South Africa to intervene to restore calm.

Hichilema, who spent four months in jail last year on a treason charge, said regional allies needed to apply pressure on Lungu or risk Zambia descending into the economic disarray seen in neighboring Zimbabwe under former President Robert Mugabe.

Zambia, Africa's second largest copper producer, has been criticized by rights groups for an increase in political arrests under Lungu and concerns about corruption following reports of billions of dollars in undisclosed borrowing.

Lungu denies there is a government corruption problem or that police are used to stifle dissent.

"I am asking the region to open its eyes to a brutal regime and to do all it can to restore the rule of law, or the world will be looking at the next Zimbabwe," Hichilema said in an interview in Johannesburg.

"It is in South Africa's interest as the regional powerhouse to act now or it will suffer from economic collapse of its neighbor and mass migration over its border."

South Africa is the commercial gateway to the region and has powerful influence over its neighbors.

Pretoria intervened to bring together a unity government in Zimbabwe after scores were killed in post-election violence in 2008 and swiftly brought an end to an attempted coup in Lesotho in 2014.

Zambia is due to hold elections in 2021 but Hichilema said it was impossible to hold a free and fair vote in the current environment because Lungu controlled the electoral commission.

Rights groups and diplomats have not reported a crackdown on dissent on the scale described by Hichilema.

"It is much, much worse than the world thinks," he said.

Hichilema, an economist and businessman widely known as HH, was arrested in April last year and charged with treason after his convoy failed to make way for Lungu's motorcade.

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He was released in August after state prosecutors dropped the charges.

Former South African President Jacob Zuma did not publicly call for Hichilema's release, drawing criticism from South African opposition parties who said Zuma was failing to uphold regional democracy.

Hichilema said he had more faith in new South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, a successful businessman who came to power in February after Zuma was forced out by his own party.

"We've been greatly encouraged by what we've seen in South Africa and we now want it to have a positive impact regionally."

(Reporting by Joe Brock; Editing by Catherine Evans)

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FILE PHOTO: The towers of the European Court of Justice are seen in Luxembourg, January 26, 2017. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir/File Photo

By Alastair Macdonald

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The fallout from Brexit is starting to come before the European Union's top judges, in cases whose variety the head of the EU Court of Justice said defied the imagination.

"There are already Brexit cases pending," ECJ President Koen Lenaerts told a news conference. They range from trademark cases to the extradition of a criminal, he said, added: "fact is stranger than fiction."

Lenaerts noted that he has been predicting a variety of Brexit cases since Britain voted in 2016 to leave.

Some people campaigning to stop Britain's exit next March have tried to bring national cases that oblige the Luxembourg-based ECJ to interpret the hitherto unused Article 50 of the EU treaty in a way that would challenge the British government's view that the article means Brexit cannot be stopped.

No court has so far referred such a case to the EU judges. But Lenaerts mentioned at least two Brexit-related cases before them.

In one, a Spanish court asked whether an EU trademark could be enforced after March 2019 if it was based on British trademark protection. In the second, an Irish court wondered whether it could send a criminal to Britain to serve a sentence that would extend beyond Brexit.

A third case, more directly related to complaints by Brexit opponents, concerns British citizens in The Netherlands, who asked a Dutch court to assure them of residence rights after Britain left the EU. Lenaerts said the Dutch court agreed to seek ECJ input but was holding off pending a local appeal.

Lenaerts acknowledged that any ECJ decision which overturned British parliamentary legislation would be particularly controversial, because Britain, unusually in Europe, has little national tradition of courts ruling laws unconstitutional.

But he also noted that Britain had been a full participant in the EU legal system and remained so. It was still bringing new requests for rulings on EU law, he said, "as if before it's too late".

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He also accused Brexit Secretary David Davis, a campaigner against EU membership, of double standards because as a backbench lawmaker he had sponsored an appeal to the ECJ in 2016 to oppose his own government's policy on data protection.

Further illustrating the diversity of issues raised by Brexit that is challenging the EU's legal machinery, the head of the EU's lower General Court said his tribunal was reviewing a request by a group of people asking for EU leaders' decision to launch Brexit negotiations to be annulled.

And, added General Court President Marc Jaeger, the EU Intellectual Property Office was looking at a request from one enterprising business to trademark the brand "Brexit".

(Reporting by Alastair Macdonald; @macdonaldrtr; editing by Larry King)
Students across the United States walked out of class to protest against gun violence on Friday, April 20, the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting.

Students were to walk out at 10am and hold a moment of silence for 13 minutes  a minute for each victim of the shooting.

A similar walkout event was held in March, one month after the Parkland shooting, to protest gun violence.

At James Madison Memorial High School in Madison, Wisconsin, students created a memorial with the names of those who were killed by gun violence in the first week of 2018, as shown in this video. The names of the Columbine victims also were included in the memorial. Students laid flowers at the memorial and a moment of silence was held for 13 minutes during the walkout. Credit: _sophieguthier via Storyful
Exploration and development company ECR Minerals has acquired 100% ownership of the Creswick gold project in central Victoria, Australia, via its wholly owned subsidiary Mercator Gold.

Hosted within the Dimocks main shale, which extends over a 15km trend from the mining centre of Ballarat to the south, ECR considers the project to be highly prospective for gold mineralisation

The Creswick exploration licence, which is set to expire on 28 December 2021, was transferred to ECR from its previous holder with no consideration made by either ECR or MGA.

Dimocks, the source of much of Victoria's alluvial and deep lead gold, has been estimated to have had historical alluvial production levels of up to 2.5m ounces from the Creswick/Berry lead system, and up to 11m ounces in the Ballarat area as a whole.

ECR highlighted that only two holes had previously been drilled to test the DMS within the Creswick licence, both in the 1990s, with the results of which including an intercept of 2 metres at 12.28 grams per tonne of gold.

Craig Brown, ECR's chief executive, said, "We are pleased to add another highly prospective licence to MGA's portfolio in Victoria, especially for no acquisition cost. The mines in and around Ballarat have been immensely productive in the past, and gold mining continues in the town today. With this in mind, we look forward to commencing field activities at the Creswick project."

As of 0920 BST, shares had climbed 9.89% to 0.94p.
Shore Capital said it took note of improved recent trading at Tesco implicit in the latest Kantar data from Ireland, but said the time had not yet come to invest.

After years of challenging trading conditions on the Emerald Isle, good work on price and proposition had evolved from better volumes into positive sales momentum and greater market share.

"Ireland may have lost a lot of its margin lustre for Tesco but it remains an important market where profit progress would be welcome," the broker said.

Yet investors' skepticism regarding the potential from the "surprise" Booker merger, current leverage - especially the perceived drag from its pension responsibilities - and the more cautious sentiment towards the market leader since Amazon.com's decision to acquire Whole Food Markets were weighing on the shares, the broker told clients.

So while there was potential to be more positive on Tesco 'down the line', there was no need to jump into the shares in order to front-run a more favourable valuation in fiscal year 2020.

As well, the latter assumed successful execution of the business plan, a material reduction in leverage and no regulatory risk from the Booker transaction, Shore Capital said.

"So, the good news from the provinces of Ireland does not lead us to adjust our stance on Tesco's shares, which remains HOLD, noting firmer downside support but not enough upward oomph yet for aforementioned reasons."
In the draft of their World Development Report for 2019, World Bank group has proposed reducing minimum wages and granting employers more power to hire and fire as part of new measures to deregulate the labour market and fight against increased automation.

The report centers around how the labour market is changing at a rapid pace due to developing technologies that take the place of workers, arguing that replacing humans with machines lowers costs.

The report suggests that a good way to go about offsetting those new technologies is to reform labour market regulations, thus making the job market more flexible and hence resilient. Among the measures that were needed they recommended reducing the minimum wage, while at the same criticising weak social protection systems, which they said forced the minimum wage to become a living wage, thus putting pressure on companies.

But above all they stressed that high minimum wages generate more costs and therefore reduce levels of employment.

Hence their proposal to more closely tie wages to productivity, as is the case for those who are self-employed.

More controversially, they proposed enhancing companies' ability to hire and fire staff.

Finally, they recommended reducing severance payments, another "burdensome" legal requirement for firms.

A World Bank spokesman said: "To stimulate debate and draw attention to critical issues, the report will present a range of ideas for how governments can create the conditions for workers to benefit from huge shifts in technology, demographics, urbanisation and other factors.

"To end poverty and boost shared prosperity, its vital that we consider new initiatives to meet the disruption that will surely come from these structural changes. We encourage and look forward to comments and an evidence-driven discussion on this important topic."
European Union officials are set to reject a solution proposed by the UK to solve the Irish border problem post-Brexit.

Although an official proposal hasnt been made, the UK believes that the EUs "backstop" solution to maintain Northern Ireland within the single market and the customs union, in order to facilitate trade and avoid a hard border, should also apply to the rest of the UK.

The European Commission is against this plan because if the special status offered to Northern Ireland were to apply to the rest of the country, it would mean the UK can access the privileges of being inside the customs union and single market without being tied to its obligations.

One possible final solution would be for Theresa May to backtrack on one of her main pledges, instead remaining in the customs union after Brexit, with all its privileges and obligations.

A cross-party group of MPs wants to force a vote in the House of Commons next week to remain within the customs union, thus avoiding the risk of a hard border in Ireland.

The Irish question is posing to be one of the hardest issues to solve in the EU and UK negotiations, with Westminster having yet to propose a solution that the EU will accept.

Britain's former ambassador to the EU, Sir Ivan Rogers said the possibility of the UK finding a technological solution to solve the Irish issue is "a fantasy island unicorn model" for Europe.

A Government spokesman said on Wednesday: "We have been clear that we will protect Northern Ireland's place in the UK internal market.

"That commitment was set out in December's Joint Report which also includes our guarantee of avoiding a hard border between Northern Ireland and Ireland.

"As the PM's letter to Donald Tusk said, we have made our position on aspects of the draft Commission Protocol clear. We have agreed that the areas covered in the draft must reflect those that meet our shared commitments. And we are continuing an intensive work programme to engage on all the scenarios set out in the Joint Report."
The video of the two African Americans arrested at a Starbucks last week drew plenty of backlash and criticism. In the wake of the controversy, the company released a statement on Tuesday confirming the closing of 8,000 stores on May 29 for Racial-Bias Education training.

According to the press release, the training will transpire at all Starbucks company-owned stores. In addition, it will apply to approximately 175,000 U.S partners.

The whole premise of holding this mandatory training is to provide all Starbucks employees with racial-bias education and to prevent discrimination from repeating itself at their store locations moving forward.

Starbucks CEO accepts responsibility for the company's mistake

Starbuck's CEO, Kevin R. Johnson released a statement following the incident. He characterized the situation as a "reprehensible outcome". As reported by the New York Times, Johnson upon learning about what had happened, pledged to investigate and make any necessary changes to their own practices.

The successful coffee franchise released a detailed statement about what management was going to proceed to do.

In the company news release, it explains that Johnson had spent a few days in Philadelphia and listened to the community. It was basically to ascertain the situation and find out what exactly went wrong. He added that closing the stores for this training is an initial step to preventing future occurrences and offers a solution to the problem.

The footage of the two men arrested was viewed more than eight million times. The gentlemen were supposed to meet a friend and walked into a Starbucks location. They sat down without ordering a drink. Afterward, one of the men asked to use the bathroom and was denied because they had not purchased anything.

The manager called the police.

The police officers arrived and interrogated the two men. They were later arrested and escorted from the premises. Subsequently, protests followed once the incident became known to the public following the video going viral.

The Starbucks incident reveals everyday complexities in Rittenhouse Square

The viewing of the video was just the tip of the iceberg.

As it turns out, the arrest led to protests both in and around the cafe. A Times report headlined "Starbucks Arrests, Outrageous to Some, Are Everyday Life for Others," confirms that the video not only depicts the disgraceful treatment of these two individuals, but it also shows the frustrating reality of everyday life.

As a result, the employee who called the police is no longer employed by the company, a Starbucks spokesperson alluded.
As the Donald Trump administration moves forward, critics of the president have not held back in holding his feet to the fire. In response, Sarah Huckabee Sanders has done her best to defend the commander in chief, but it doesn't always go over well.

Much of the chattering class said @POTUS would lose the election, but he won; said hed hurt the economy, but its booming; said tax cuts would fail, but they passed, creating more jobs & higher wages; and said hed weaken America, but our military is now stronger than ever  Sarah Sanders (@PressSec) March 21, 2018

Sanders on Trump

Ever since Donald Trump kicked off his campaign for president he's been met with an onslaught of criticism.

That backlash has only increased in the year that he's been in office, which has added fuel to the fire in the feud between the mainstream news media and the Trump administration. In recent days, Trump has been dealing with the latest news regarding the Russian investigation, the scandal over his alleged affair with adult film star Stormy Daniels, as well as his controversial call to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

With the pressure mounting, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders decided to take to her Twitter account to push back against the so-called "Chattering Class" and praise Donald Trump for the work he's done as president. "Much of the chattering class said POTUS would lose the election, but he won; said hed hurt the economy, but its booming," Sanders tweeted.

"Said tax cuts would fail, but they passed, creating more jobs & higher wages; and said hed weaken America, but our military is now stronger than ever," she concluded. Not long after she sent out her tweet, Sanders was met with a reality check from the opposition.

Sanders' reality check

Following Sarah Huckabee Sanders' latest social media praise of Donald Trump, the press secretary was taken to task by critics.

"He lost by 3 million votes. He stole the election through the electoral college with the help of CamAnalytica. Not our President," one tweet read.

Said hed normalize bigotry, he has.



Said hed disrespect women, he does.



Said hed give tax breaks to the rich and lip service to the middle class, he did.



Said hed turn the White House into a reality show, he has.  Bishop Talbert Swan (@TalbertSwan) March 21, 2018

Sarah Sanders wouldnt understand that.... she doesnt have any of the qualities you just mentioned... much like her boss. @POTUS @realDonaldTrump  Darlene Kelly (@Larue1262) March 21, 2018

He lost by 3 million votes. He stole the election through the electoral college with the help of @CamAnalytica



Not our President.  Tuna (@2naOnWhite) March 21, 2018

"Said he wouldnt repeal Obamacare, he didnt.

Said hed racially divided America, he did. Said he was unqualified for the office of POTUS, he is. Said hed bring shame to the nation and defile the office, he has. Said hed appoint unqualified sycophants like you, he has," Bishop Talbert Swan tweeted out. "Hes the worst and the worlds laughs at us," a Twitter user wrote.

He has weakened America! Domestically and abroad!  George Fayner (@georgefayner) March 21, 2018

Hes the worst and the worlds laughs at us.  Jen Wells (@jwellsie) March 21, 2018

"Doesn't matter. Character, integrity, truth. That's what matters, and it has no price," a social media user tweeted back.

"He has weakened America! Domestically and abroad!" a follow-up tweet went on to read. As the negative reaction continued to pour in, the rift between those who support and those who oppose Donald Trump moved forward.
As Congress gets set to vote on a bipartisan spending bill, Donald Trump is thrilled with the idea of getting funding for his border wall. In a late-night tweet, the president decided to brag while taking a shot at the Democratic Party in the process.

Got $1.6 Billion to start Wall on Southern Border, rest will be forthcoming. Most importantly, got $700 Billion to rebuild our Military, $716 Billion next year...most ever. Had to waste money on Dem giveaways in order to take care of military pay increase and new equipment.  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 22, 2018

Trump on spending bill

Since Donald Trump was sworn into office back in January 2017, the political divide in Washington has only grown by the day.

The tension appeared to reach a fever pitch earlier this year when Democrats and Republicans were unable to come to an agreement on spending which led to a short-term government shutdown. Despite this, both sides have appeared to find enough common ground to keep the government open. As reported by The Hill on March 21, the House of Representatives is set to vote and likely pass a $1.3 trillion budget on Thursday afternoon.

Democrats refused to take care of DACA. Would have been so easy, but they just didnt care. I had to fight for Military and start of Wall.  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 22, 2018

In response to the news, Donald Trump decided to send out a pair of tweets on Wednesday night bragging about what he was able to get in the deal, while calling out the Democrats for not giving him the rest of what he wanted.

"Got $1.6 Billion to start Wall on Southern Border, rest will be forthcoming. Most importantly, got $700 Billion to rebuild our Military, $716 Billion next year...most ever," Trump tweeted out. "Had to waste money on Dem giveaways in order to take care of military pay increase and new equipment," he added.

#BREAKING: House set to vote on massive spending bill on Thursday afternoon https://t.co/SZ0iLII2Nk pic.twitter.com/pE1JkUZv2g  The Hill (@thehill) March 22, 2018

In a follow-up tweet just minutes later, Donald Trump doubled down on his attack on the Democratic Party.

"Democrats refused to take care of DACA. Would have been so easy, but they just didnt care," Trump wrote, while adding, "I had to fight for Military and start of Wall."

Instant backlash

As expected, those who oppose Donald Trump didn't waste anytime hitting back at his tweet. "And how much of that $1.6 billion is Mexico paying for?

Thought so!" one tweet read.

1.6 billion is going to build how many miles of the wall exactly?



This bill sucks.  Mike (@Fuctupmind) March 22, 2018

Why isn't Mexico paying for your dumbass wall? LIAR!  Evelyn (@EvdelC85) March 22, 2018

and how much of that $1.6 billion is Mexico paying for? Thought so! #Liar  Darius Freamon (@dfreamon) March 22, 2018

"Why isn't Mexico paying for your dumba** wall? LIAR!" a Twitter user wrote. "1.6 billion is going to build how many miles of the wall exactly? This bill s*cks," another tweet added. "You literally dont know whats in this Omnibus do you? Working on your 3rd government shutdown there dude," a follow-up tweet noted.

So what is the deficit at now about $5 TRILLION??? We know....you LOVE debt...you are the KING of debt...no one loves debt more than you. But America is NOT your failed casinos to play with............  NEVER Trump (@__NeverTrump__) March 22, 2018

Use the money to help homeless vets you piece of garbage. Think about others not talk.  Josef Eshet (@Joeeshet) March 22, 2018

You literally dont know whats in this Omnibus do you? Working on your 3rd government shutdown there dude...  David Dennison (Black version) (@Jewmetrious256) March 22, 2018

"Use the money to help homeless vets you piece of garbage.

Think about others not talk," a social media user stated. "So what is the deficit at now about $5 TRILLION??? We know....you LOVE debt...you are the KING of debt...no one loves debt more than you. But America is NOT your failed casinos to play with," another tweet read.
Puerto Rico and blackouts appear to have become inseparable. Hurricane Maria struck the island last September and forced the people into the dark ages. The situation has not yet returned to normal but, suddenly, it has faced another bout of darkness. The last time it was because of the weather, this time it is attributed to humans.

ABC News reports that the root cause of the trouble was the removal of a tower by an excavator. The work was being done by a contractor and the grid collapsed when the machine tried to remove a recently collapsed electrical tower.

That resulted in the blackout as explained by the authorities of Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority PREPA.

Line of action

The latest blackout has affected the whole of Puerto Rico as confirmed by PREPA. San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz has tweeted that the situation after Hurricane Maria of 20 September has returned. According to officials, the island was gradually returning to normalcy with over 90 percent of lines restored but the sudden accident has taken a heavy toll with power availability dropping to less than five percent.

The priority right now is to restore power to emergency services like hospitals, airports, water treatment plants, banks, and business. It will take at least 24 to 36 hours for full restoration of power, and the contractor has assured that its staff will work 24/7 to bring the situation back to normal.

The future scenario

The electric grid in the island is outdated and Hurricane Maria has brought out the condition of the equipment. Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossello wants PREPA to change the contractor that is responsible for the latest blackout. He wants more efficient setups to ensure that there is no disruption in the supply of electricity to the consumers.

Six months after the island was devastated by the hurricane, Gov. Rossello indicated that repairs to the existing grid have been undertaken but the final result will not be as strong as the one that was in place before the storm struck. He has also admitted that it will take at least five years to build a more robust grid.

It is high time that the administration of the island tries to identify an alternative to electricity.

Solar power is one of the solutions and some companies have already shown an interest in this area. This form of energy will do away with diesel generators that lead to global warming and can be used in all walks of life from hospitals, schools, and houses to street lighting.
china has been gnashing its teeth since 1949 when the Kuomintang party led by Chiang Kai Shek after being defeated by Mao Tse Tung, escaped to Formosa. Despite periodical threats, the Chinese have been unable to invade Taiwan for the last 70 years and they never had the military capability to carry out an invasion. The biggest deterrence was the American 7th Fleet and military power.

The present Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, is favorably inclined towards an independent state. Twenty countries, most of them small and inconsequential recognize Taipeh.

To deter any attempt at an announcement of independence, the Chinese have carried out live war drills in the Taiwan Strait. The NY Times has reported the exercises with the aircraft carrier group were held with an idea to intimidate Taipeh.

War games

The war exercises were held when the Formosa president was away on an official visit to Swaziland. President Xi has threatened to use the military option if Taiwan declares independence. China has also reminded the USA of its acceptance of a one-China policy.

Beijing is getting increasingly jittery after changes in US policy with the advent of Trump. The new administration has allowed the latest stealth submarine technology to be sold to Taiwan and Trump has changed the laws by allowing officials to visit Taiwan as well as US warships to dock at Taiwanese ports.

These decisions have incensed China and they had been issuing dire warnings. China has said it will never accept anything less than complete integration of Taiwan with China. Liu Jieyi, the director of Chinas Taiwan Affairs Office, said this week, that the exercises were planned with Taiwan in mind.

Reality

The Taiwan Strait was witness to Chinese war games.

Chinese navy warships, airforce fighters, and Chinese marines took part. The island is separated from China by the Taiwan Strait a 90-mile sea channel. It's not a great distance but China doesn't have the military capability to launch an amphibious invasion. Taiwan has built up a strong military with US support and in the event of an invasion, the US is duty bound to support it.

Future

The Taiwan president does not favor a one-China policy and its anybody's guess that at some stage they may declare independence. This will only be on the back of US support and with Trump as the president, anything can happen. President Xi is angry but at present, his hands are tied as China does not have the military capability to take on the USA. China is building its military feverishly to match the USA but president Xi must keep in mind the reality and the well-known adage "if wishes were horses beggars would ride."
Following the much-anticipated James Comey interview on Sunday night, the White House quickly came to a consensus on how to respond. After a rough back and forth interview on CNN, Kellyanne Conway decided to continue her thoughts on Twitter.

Kellyanne Conway on James Comey breaking FBI protocol in speaking about the Clinton investigation: "All Jim Comey had to do was keep his mouth shut. He's incapable of it as we see" pic.twitter.com/s3QJqWB1Jh  New Day (@NewDay) April 16, 2018

Conway on Comey

After James Comey was fired as head of the FBI last May, many wondered when and if the former director would speak out.

When it was announced that Comey would be releasing a new book, all eyes were set on what details and information would be revealed. As excerpts of the book "A Higher Truth" were given to the media, it quickly triggered a rage within Donald Trump, who then vented his frustrations on Twitter, with the president referring to Comey as a "leaker," a "liar," and a "slimeball." On Sunday night, Comey's interview with ABC's "20/20" was broadcasted, with the former FBI director saying Trump was "morally unfit to be president."

(Full interview in the video above)

These issues were discussed during a heated April 16 edition of "New Day" on CNN with Presidential Counsel Kellyanne Conway joining host Chris Cuomo.

When asked about Donald Trump's thoughts on the James Comey interview, Conway responded, "The President thinks that Jim Comey is engaging in revisionist history." After Cuomo pushed Conway on the Russian investigation, Conway started to lose her cool.

"The President thinks that Jim Comey is engaging in revisionist history," says Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Donald Trump https://t.co/l6P0946Udr pic.twitter.com/T4zbXbFC36  New Day (@NewDay) April 16, 2018

"All Jim Comey had to do was keep his mouth shut.

He's incapable of it as we see," she said. The two then spared over Trump's reaction, with Chris Cuomo noting, "he's going down to Florida to push his tax cuts. He could just ignore all of this." Conway wasn't pleased and sarcastically responded "oh, Comey can just say what he wants?" while adding, "Dont just throw out sound bytes to go viral without letting me finish the sentence."

Conway tweetstorm

After her interview with Chris Cuomo and several others on Monday morning, Kellyanne Conway continued her defense of Donald Trump in regards to the James Comey interview by going to her personal Twitter account.

"This misleading headline should include an eye roll and question mark," Conway wrote, while attaching an ABC News article with a headline claiming he she attacked Comey for swinging the election. "Point I made on 3 shows is that we are supposed to believe THIS guy swung an election? I don't think so," she wrote.

This misleading headline should include an eye roll and question mark. Point I made on 3 shows is that we are supposed to believe THIS guy swung an election? I don't think so. Kellyanne Conway slams Comey: 'This guy swung an election' - ABC News https://t.co/f0GdDE6Tvd  Kellyanne Conway (@KellyannePolls) April 16, 2018

As I said dozens of time, Hillary, not Comey, is why Hillary lost.



BEFORE Oct 28/Comey letter:



- she struggled to get 50% polls in states Pres Obama carried twice



- majority said she wasn't honest/trustworthy



-Trump better candidate/message/connector https://t.co/gUQpaRshr3  Kellyanne Conway (@KellyannePolls) April 16, 2018

In a follow up tweet, Kellyanne Conway responded to a tweet by Chris Cuomo where the CNN host agreed that she was being sarcastic about James Comey having swung the election.

"As I said dozens of time, Hillary, not Comey, is why Hillary lost," she wrote. "BEFORE Oct 28/Comey letter: - she struggled to get 50% polls in states Pres Obama carried twice - majority said she wasn't honest/trustworthy -Trump better candidate/message/connector," Conway concluded.
Judge Kimba Wood is the sitting judge presiding over the Michael Cohen case. Michael Cohen is the personal lawyer for Donald Trump. His offices were raided last week as part of the Mueller investigation into Russian collusion by the Trump campaign.

They were in court last week arguing about attorney-client privilege. Michael Cohen was arguing about the use of the material confiscated from his office. He claimed to have privilege over the material.

Instead of Michael Cohen winning, the judge decided to announce the names of his other clients violating judicial standards according to the National Review website.

She also was a nomination of Bill Clinton for Attorney General while he was president. Another conflict was that the attorney on the other side represented CNN and the New York Times.

Who is Kimba Woods?

Kimba Woods is a district court judge for the United States. She has been in that position since 1988. She has presided over several high profile cases during her tenure as judge. One of those cases was in 2010 where 10 Russian spies pleaded guilty to being illegal foreign agents, according to the website for Time Magazine.

She is held in high regard. In fact, she was nominated by Bill Clinton for Attorney General in 1993. She was not Clinton's first pick due to irregularities with the first nominee.

She ended having to withdraw her name as nominee later though.

The first nominee was found to have employed illegal immigrants to work without paying the proper taxes. Kimba Wood also employed an illegal immigrant to be her nanny. The difference was that she paid the taxes for her nanny. She withdrew her name as Time magazine claimed it was awful deja vu. She did not do anything illegal but the circumstances were too similar to proceed with her nomination.

This relationship between Kimba Wood and Bill Clinton

Obviously, there could be bias against Cohen because of Bill Clinton's nomination for Attorney General. Hillary Clinton, the wife of Bill Clinton, has blamed the Russian collusion on her loss to Donald Trump in the last presidential election.

When she announced the clients of the Michael Cohen this violated longstanding, judicially endorsed standards against identifying uncharged persons in legal proceedings attendant to criminal investigations, according to the National Review website.

Sean Hannity is a well known television analyst for Fox Network. He was not accused of any wrongdoing in this case and it was irrelevant to the proceedings.

Another questionable aspect of this case is that it is still under Grand Jury. Grand Jury proceeding are usually held in private. This proceeding for some reason was open to the public. There is no reason for these proceedings to be public.

This leads to the fact that the lawyer opposing Michael Cohen also represented CNN and the New York Times. CNN is the rival of Fox News. Hannity is a host of a show on the Fox News Network. His ratings are higher than any reporter on CNN. The lawyer representing CNN persuaded the judge to publicly announce Michael Cohen's other clients.

How convenient for CNN.

Conflicts of interest

Kimba Wood should excuse herself from this case. She obviously has a conflict of interest. She had interacted with Bill Clinton and impressed him enough to be nominated for Attorney General.

She should have realized the relationship between the opposing lawyer and his relationship with CNN. Sean Hannity is a well known conservative from Fox News. Her releasing his name would bring into question anything he had to say about Michael Cohen on his broadcast.

CNN wasted no time in mentioning the conflict of interest. The problem with them yelling conflict of interest is that they did not mention their own. They should have stated that the lawyer arguing the case had represented them in the past.

This incident violated judicial standards. It also looks like CNN took advantage of it to ensure they could discredit their competitor. The problem is they failed to mention their own conflict. Another example of fake news and accusing one network of wrongdoing while CNN themselves was just as guilty.

Kimba Wood should be reprimanded for lack of judicial prudence if not relieved of her duties as an United States District judge. CNN should apologize to Sean Hannity and the Fox News Network. The network should also be investigated as to whether they influenced the decision of the judge.

News networks should work on reporting the news. The reason for good ratings is creating a product that people want to watch. CNN is literally creating the news and Kimba Wood helped in this endeavor by not following the rules of the law.
On Thursday night, the Department of Justice provided Congress memos put together by former FBI Director James Comey detailing a previous meeting he had with Donald Trump. In response, the president was quick to lash out on Twitter.

James Comey Memos just out and show clearly that there was NO COLLUSION and NO OBSTRUCTION. Also, he leaked classified information. WOW! Will the Witch Hunt continue?  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 20, 2018

Trump on Comey memo

It was just this past May when James Comey was fired by Donald Trump as head of the FBI.

Comey had been in the political cross-hairs of both liberals and conservative dating back to the 2016 presidential election. While Democrats were initially critical of Comey for having brought up Hillary Clinton's email controversy just weekend before Election Day, the former FBI director has recently been getting heat from those on the political right, with Trump referring to him as a "leaker," a "liar," and a "slimeball." After Congress obtained memos drafted by Comey detailing a dinner meeting he had with Trump back in January 2017, it was only a matter of time before the president gave his thoughts.

Breaking News: James Comey's memos have been released. They provide an intimate look at his dealings with President Trump in his last months on duty. https://t.co/yCRDGRArlU  The New York Times (@nytimes) April 20, 2018

Among other things, the memos in question appear to confirm a conversation between Donald Trump and James Comey where the president expressed concern about the now infamous "pee tape," as well as is push for the former FBI director to pledge his loyalty.

"James Comey memos just out and show clearly that there was NO COLLUSION and NO OBSTRUCTION," Trump tweeted. "Also, he leaked classified information. WOW! Will the Witch Hunt continue?" he wondered. Within minutes of his tweet, the president was met with an onslaught of criticism.

Twitter on Comey memos

Following Donald Trump's reaction to the release of the James Comey memos, those who oppose the president took time to hit back.

"Uh huh. Hey, when did Vladimir Putin tell you about how beautiful the hookers are in Russia? What the hell were you talking about when that came up?" one tweet asked with sarcasm.

Uh huh.



Hey, when did Vladimir Putin tell you about how beautiful the hookers are in Russia?



What the hell were you talking about when that came up?  Gary M. Sarli (@GMSarli) April 20, 2018

What a FRAUD you are ...you arranged for the release so @DevinNunes could leak them. We will see what Mueller says about collusion. Memo shows you are pathological narcissist  RD (@demichieipgh) April 20, 2018

Are we reading the same memos? What about when you asked Comey to let Flynn go?  Renato Mariotti (@renato_mariotti) April 20, 2018

"You're going to prison, right along with Sean Hannity and Michael Cohen and Rudy G.

Enjoy your new theme song," a Twitter user posted, while attaching a link to the theme song for the show "Cops." "The Mueller investigation will continue. As will the investigation underway against Cohen. You could make it all go away, though... by resigning now, before things get really rough," an additional tweet added.

Comey's memos prove that he is a very honest man. He did NOT leak classified information. You can't con everyone, just your base. But I'm confident they'll see the truth one day!  CrazyWorld911 (@CrazyWorld911) April 20, 2018

Just a little obstruction of justice, nothing big  G.A. Wolfe (@Gorilla_Wolfe) April 20, 2018

The Mueller investigation will continue. As will the investigation underway against Cohen.



You could make it all go away, though... by resigning now, before things get really rough.  KE (@Kim585) April 20, 2018

"Just a little obstruction of justice, nothing big," a social media user tweeted.

"Comey's memos prove that he is a very honest man. He did NOT leak classified information. You can't con everyone, just your base. But I'm confident they'll see the truth one day!" a follow-up tweet read.
Dr. Drew attempted to encourage Ryan Edwards to seek treatment post-rehab during last night's episode of the "Teen Mom OG" season 8A reunion. Unfortunately, Edwards appeared to be completely uninterested in pursuing a recovery plan for his future and his wife, Mackenzie Standifer, was more concerned with talking down to the doctor than her husband's drug struggles.

In a clip from "Teen Mom OG" shared on April 17, Standifer touted her holier than thou attitude as she attempted to suggest that Dr. Drew had suggested two opposing points of action to her husband, Edwards, who spent time in rehab in 2017 but hasn't seemed to be proactive about his recovery in the months since.

Unfortunately for Standifer, the doctor quickly put her in her place after she attempted to discredit him on stage.

"Mackenzie are you ready to listen to me?" he asked as she attempted to ramble on, mimicking something he had previously said.

Mackenzie Standifer thinks she knows better than the doctor

When Dr. Drew began to make his statements clear, Mackenzie Standifer looked shocked and asked him, "Excuse me?" She then looked disgusted and turned to her husband who quickly told her to "just relax." She then gave a bit of a laugh before telling her husband she would not relax. Meanwhile, the doctor continued to try and have a decent conversation with her.

As Standifer continued to huff and puff as she wiggled around in her chair, the doctor and reunion host pointed out that taking the drug Methodone under doctor supervision was much different than using the drug at leisure.

He then pointed out that if Edwards was unwilling to be treated for his drug addiction, he should be on medication management.

While the doctor continued to give his medical advice, Mackenzie Standifer downplayed what he was saying and gave a few smirks here and there. Edwards' mom, Jen Edwards, then stepped in and claimed her son was on medication.

As for why Edwards is refusing a drug test for Maci Bookout, that remains unclear.

Ryan Edwards was recently arrested

Shortly after he and his family traveled to New York City to appear on the "Teen Mom OG" reunion, the longtime reality star was taken into custody in Chattanooga, Tennessee due to a past heroin arrest. During a recent season of the show, Edwards admitted to using heroin and spending $10,000 weekly on his habit. Although Edwards entered rehab last May, it is unclear whether or not he's stayed sober.
The summit meeting between US President Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, is still very much in the cards but the venue is yet to be finalized. The latest information is that it could be in the city of Ulaanbaatar, in Mongolia, which is a neutral country. The reason for this is that Kim will travel in his own plane which is an IL-62, but it is not geared up to undertake long-distance flights. Daily Mail UK reports that the private jet of Russian origin might have to stop for refueling if it has to reach far-off destinations.

Hence, his planners want to have a venue that will be nearer home within a 2,000-mile radius of Pyongyang.

Is it a panic situation?

In the opinion of experts, the Russian built IL-62 is supposed to have a factory specified range of 10,000 kilometers or 6,215 miles. Therefore, the argument of a short range is untenable. It seems North Korea has other aircraft, also of Russian origin, in its inventory, like the Tupolev Tu-204, that have a range of up to 3,600 miles. Obviously, there are other factors at work before Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump can meet for the summit. The revised location could be the city of Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia. This city is not new to summits  it has hosted a number of talks between Japanese officials and the North Korean government.

It seems in the month of March, Mongolia's former president, Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj, had extended invitations to both Trump and Kim to come to the capital. According to the US authorities, the much-awaited summit could happen within the next six weeks.

What will be the outcome

The first known foreign trip of Kim Jong-un, after taking over the reins, was his visit to Beijing to meet Xi Jinping.

Kim had used a train for the journey. Donald Trump had also visited Beijing in November to a great reception. However, the China-US relations have changed in the intervening period and a summit there is ruled out. The US president has dropped hints about a few probable venues. There are five locations, but none of them are in the United States.

He has indicated that the meeting could be in late May or early June and has kept his fingers crossed about the outcome. The main agenda will be denuclearization of North Korea, but both the leaders are unpredictable and they must agree to an amicable settlement.

North Korea has devoted decades of its energies to building nuclear weapons and is believed to have a large arsenal. It has tested them on a regular basis and has proved to the world that it has become a force to reckon with. The question is  can Donald Trump drive a hard enough bargain to blunt the cutting edges of Pyongyang.
China on Friday defended Pakistan against Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modis remark that Islamabad was a terror export factory, saying the country must be supported in the fight against terrorism.

Beijing also hinted the issue of terrorism will be on the agenda of discussion at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) when the eight-member block, joined by India and Pakistan last year, holds its annual meeting at Chinese city Qingdao in June.

At an event in London on Thursday, Modi said India will not tolerate those who export terror.

When someone has put a terror export factory in place, attacks my people, has no power to fight a war so attempts to attack behind the back in such a case Modi knows to how to give a reply in the same language, the Indian leader had said in an obvious reference to Pakistan.

Asked about Modis remark, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said: Terrorism is an enemy faced by all. The international community should work together to combat terrorism.

Terrorism is an enemy faced by all. The international community should work together to combat terrorism. The international community should also support the efforts of Pakistan in fighting terrorism and cooperate with it, Hua added.

China always comes to the rescue of its all-weather ally Pakistan when it is pilloried for sheltering terrorists. Beijing has invested over $50 billion in various infrastructure projects under its ambitious Belt and Road programme.

Asked if the issue of terrorism will be discussed at the Foreign Ministers meet of the SCO, Hua said: As for the Foreign Ministers meeting on terrorism, I believe it is a purpose of the SCO to promote relevant cooperation in the field.

Indias External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj will arrive in Beijing on Saturday and attend the foreign ministerial-level meeting of the SCO on Monday.

However, Hua said the security issues will be the agenda of the main SCO meet in June, which will be attended by Modi.

Security has been a priority of the SCO since its inception. So the upcoming Prime Ministers SCO meeting will see participants exchanging views on the relevant issues. All participants will uphold the SCO spirit to take forward the development of SCO, Hua said.
US President Donald Trump has said hed bring up Japans sensitive abductees issue when he meets North Korea top leader Kim Jong-un in an upcoming historic meeting.

I suspect Trump will raise the subject if there is a meeting. Of course, his priority will be the three American hostages held by North Korea, Xinhua news agency reported quoting Douglas Paal, Vice President for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

There have also been reports from North Korea that the regime believes the abductees question has been settled, so expectations for concrete results are low even though emotions still run high, said Paal.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe concluded his two-day working visit to the US on Wednesday. During a meeting with Trump, Abe scored a major win when Trump promised hed bring up the issue during the upcoming historic meeting with Kim.

The issue has been ongoing for some 40 years.

Trump should raise the issue of Japanese abductees with Kim, but in the context of a broader, lasting peace in the region, said Troy Stangarone, senior director at the Korea Economic Institute, a Washington-based non-profit policy research institution.

While the focus of the upcoming talks will be denuclearisation, if there is to be a sustainable peace in the region afterwards, North Korea will need to resolve issues such as the abductees in addition to denuclearising, Stangarone told Xinhua.

Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Darrell West said that it would not be difficult for North Korea to address the abductees issue.

It should be easy for North Korea to address the abductees issue. So I would anticipate progress there, he said.
Irans Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said on Friday that Tehran has a variety of countermeasures if Washington decides to pull out of the 2015 landmark nuclear deal.

Iran has a wide range of options both inside and outside of the JCPOA (the nuclear deal) and surely the reaction from Tehran and the international community will be unpleasant for the Americans, Zarif told reporters upon arrival in New York.

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is an international agreement reached on July 14, 2015 between Iran and six world powers  China, France, Russia, Britain, the US and Germany, plus the European Union.

Zarif travelled to New York to attend a UN General Assembly meeting over peacekeeping, Xinhua news agency reported.

If the European countries want to preserve the deal, they have to make it sustainable for Iran. They (the Europeans) need to impose pressure on the US  and encourage it to implement what it undertook under the deal, Zarif said.

The efforts to renegotiate the nuke deal will not get a positive answer from Iran which would make no concessions, the Iranian minister added.

US President Donald Trump has repeatedly lashed out at the nuclear pact in which the West promised to relieve sanctions on Tehran in exchange for a halt in Irans efforts to develop a nuclear weapon.

Trump demands the elimination of clauses for some of the restrictions the US places on Iran from the nuclear deal, stronger inspection rules and limitation to Irans development of long-range missiles.

But Iran says it will neither tolerate anything beyond its commitment to the nuclear deal nor accept changes to the agreement. Iran has threatened to withdraw from the deal if it cannot receive economic benefits.
Qatar announced approval of a draft law on regulating the ownership and use of properties by foreigners, media reports said on Thursday.

The decision was announced during the cabinet meeting chaired by Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Nasser Al Thani.

The draft law said that non-Qataris might own and use properties under specific conditions, Xinhua reported.

The law applies to land space, buildings and residential units, in addition to the detachment units in residential complexes.

Last August, Qatar granted visa-free entry to citizens of 80 countries, to be the most open country in the Gulf region.

The Qatari government has undertaken several key measures and has moved quickly to establish other sources of imports to overcome the economic blockade imposed by its Gulf neighbours.

Last June, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt severed diplomatic ties, and closed off air, sea, and land routes with Qatar, over the latters alleged support of terrorism.

Qatar has consistently denied the charges.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa had to cut short his attendance at the Commonwealth summit in London to deal with violent protests at home, his office said.

Clashes have taken place in North West province where protesters are demanding jobs, housing and an end to corruption. Shops have been looted, roads barricaded and vehicles set alight, a BBC report said.

Neighbouring Botswana said it had closed exit points along its shared border with North West province.

To pay attention to the situation in the North West, the President has decided to cut short his participation in the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in London, an official statement said.

Ramaphosa has called for calm and ordered police to exercise restraint. South African media said officers used tear gas to disperse protesters who had set alight a bus, stoned vehicles and blocked roads with burning tyres.

Protests began in the North West province on Wednesday as demonstrators demanded the resignation of provincial Premier Supra Mahumapelo  a member of Ramaphosas governing African National Congress (ANC).

The President was scheduled to hold meetings with ANC leaders in the provincial capital Mahikeng on Friday, the BBC report quoted his office as saying.

Mahikeng has been at the centre of the latest disturbances  dubbed service delivery protests  and streets were reported to be deserted on Thursday after bouts of looting and clashes with police.

Nine people have been arrested since Wednesday, South Africas Timeslive reported citing police spokesperson Adele Myburgh.

Mahumapelos office has denounced the protests as an attempt to discredit him.

(It is) an anti-Supra Mahumapelo political campaign which seeks to intimidate residents of Mahikeng spokesman Brian Setswambung said, according to Timeslive.

Ramaphosa, who took office in February, has sought to encourage investment in South Africa during his visit to Britain to help kick-start the economy. He said his government was determined to tackle corruption

South Africas faltering economy has been a priority for Ramaphosa since he took over from former President Jacob Zuma, the BBc said.

Growth had been weak and unemployment painfully high as Zumas leadership was dogged by years of corruption allegations.
Pakistan on Thursday confirmed that the US will impose restrictions on the movement of the countrys diplomats and consular staff in Washington from May 1.

Comments from Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Faisal came a day after the US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Thomas Shannon said in Washington on Tuesday that the US will place curbs on Pakistani diplomatic because Islamabad had already imposed similar restrictions on US diplomats in Pakistan.

Regarding travel restrictions on Pakistani diplomats in Washington, yes, we have received official communication regarding certain measures that the US intends to implement from May 1, 2018, Xinhua quoted the Pakistani spokesman as saying.

The issue is primarily of reciprocity. Both sides are in touch and we are hopeful that the matter will be resolved. We have nothing more to add to this at the moment, Faisal said at his weekly briefing in Islamabad.

A US embassy spokesman in Islamabad evaded comments on his countrys restrictions on Pakistani diplomats but confirmed Pakistans restrictions.

Yes, there are longstanding restrictions on movement of diplomats, including Americans, in Pakistan, the spokesperson said.

Pakistan and the US reportedly took tit-for-tat actions after a US embassy vehicle driven by Defense and Air Attache of the US embassy in Islamabad, which killed a Pakistani motorcyclist in capital Islamabad on April 7.

A police report informed the investigators that the US diplomat had violated signals on the 7th Avenue-Margalla Road junction.

The Foreign Ministry spokesman said that the government awaits the outcome of preliminary investigations from Islamabad Police, based on which further actions would be initiated against the US diplomat.

He (diplomat) will be treated under Pakistans Diplomatic and Consular Privileges Act 1972, which gives effect to the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations 1961 and Vienna Convention on Consular Relations 1963, Faisal said when he was asked about a petition in the Islamabad High Court, seeking ban on the diplomat from leaving Pakistan.
COMMENTARY

3 steps to understanding your customer and fueling innovation

How do we truly begin the process of innovating the government? Its an age-old question that seems to have no definitive answer.

For a small to mid-size government contractor, when youre dealing with an entity as large as the federal government thats been doing what they do for decades on end, it can feel almost impossible that you could effectively break through with innovation.

However, according to the most recent U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) data, the federal government reached its small business federal contracting goal for the fourth consecutive year, awarding 24 percent in federal contract dollars to small businesses totaling $99.96 billion, an increase of over $9 billion from the previous year.

Small and medium sized businesses should feel empowered by this trend and work to understand what the government needs.

With an agencys inability to sit down with each individual contract team to hold a tailored discussion around their specific challenges or pressures, it becomes exponentially more important for any contractor to independently take the steps necessary to become a better partner to the government.

After my time at NASA and now having transitioned to private industry, Ive figured out a couple of focuses that can help with easing the government-contractor relationship.

EMPHASIZE INNOVATION

Government agencies are often torn by the fact that they want to modernize, but the logistics of doing so often prove difficult.

Contractors need to understand that the government is constantly torn between the evil they know-- older contracting partners theyve worked with for years-- and the evil they dont know-- new and innovative solutions that would be procured through a brand new contract.

What can a contractor take away from this fact? An emphasis on innovation.

Whether its during a discussion in a quarterly meeting or inside RFP development, the government needs to come away understanding why a companys solution and body of work is truly new and different. It cant just marginally move the needle, it needs to generate massive returns that will make an agency feel like the results will be worth the cost of time and finances it will take to transition to something brand new.

Its easier for the government to take the path of least resistance if the alternative doesnt make more than a small splash.

PROVE YOUR AGILITY AND FLEXIBILITY

Another dilemma that the government faces in their pursuit of innovation is the fact that once theyve made the decision to incorporate a new team, theres a delay or stoppage in short term progress.

With a flattened budget, a contract team doesnt have the time or financial allowance to do research as part of the contract, as this will often draw resources away from other work.

Contractors need to ensure that they can get up to speed quickly without hindering their agency partner. A partner thats self-motivated to do external reading, research, or learning about a particular challenge provides much more value to a government-contractor relationship than simply waiting for someone to hopefully provide you with that information.

ALIGN YOUR MISSIONS

According to a recent Government Business Council survey, many agencies lack a mission-focused strategy. The survey shares that 1 in 3 respondents feel that their agencys IT contractors lack an understanding of organization mission objectives. This is also likely results in the governments difficulties in identifying new solutions to mission challenges.

As a contractor, it is your job to make sure that missions are aligned so that you and your government partner are working towards a long-term goal that positively affects both parties. Without a shared mission, its highly possible that miscommunication will occur and innovation will be prevented.

As a small business contractor, working with the government can seem daunting. However, following these suggestions will increase your chances for success.
Cenovus Energy Inc., together with its subsidiaries, develops, produces, and markets crude oil, natural gas liquids, and natural gas in Canada, the United States and the Asia Pacific region. The company operates through Oil Sands, Conventional, and Refining and Marketing segments. The Oil Sands segment develops and produces bitumen in northeast Alberta. Its bitumen assets include Foster Creek, Christina Lake, and Narrows Lake, as well as other projects in the early stages of development. The Conventional segment holds assets primarily located in Elmworth-Wapiti, Kaybob-Edson, and Clearwater operating areas of British Columbia and Alberta, as well as various interests in natural gas processing facilities. The Refining and Marketing segment transports and sells crude oil, natural gas, and NGLs. This segment owns a 50% ownership in Wood River and Borger refineries located in the United States; and owns and operates a crude-by-rail terminal in Alberta. Cenovus Energy Inc. was founded in 2009 and is headquartered in Calgary, Canada.

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The following companies are subsidiares of Sysco: 2234829 Alberta ULC, 2234842 Alberta ULC, A. M. Briggs Inc., A.M. Briggs, Almacen Fiscal Frionet Caldera S.A., Almacen Fiscal Frionet Limon S.A., Appert's Foodservice, Arnotts (Fruit) Limited, Asian Foods, Bahamas Food Holdings Limited, Bahamas Food Services Limited, Brake Bros, Brake Bros Foodservice Ireland Limited, Brake Bros. Foodservice Limited, Brake Bros. Holding I Limited, Brake Bros. Ltd., Brakes Foodservice NI Limited, Buchy Food Service, Buckhead Beef Co., Buckhead Meat & Seafood of Houston Inc., Buckhead Meat Company, Buckhead Meat Midwest Inc., Buckhead Meat of Dallas Inc., Buckhead Meat of Denver Inc., Buckhead Meat of San Antonio LP, Buzztable Inc., CAKE Corporation, Central Seafood Co., Christys Wine & Spirits Limited, Clafra Aktiebolag, Colorado Boxed Beef Co - Specialty meat-cutting division, Corporacion Frionet Sociedad Anonima, Crossgar Foodservice, Crossgar Foodservice Limited, Crown I Enterprises Inc., Cucina Acquisitions (UK) Limited, Cucina Finance (UK) Limited, Cucina French Holdings Limited, Cucina Fresh Finance Limited, Cucina Fresh Investments Limited, Cucina Lux Investments Limited, Curleys Quality Foods Limited (Third Party), Davigel Belgilux S.A., Davigel Espana S.A., Desert Meats & Provisions, Distagro, Doerle Food Service, Doughtie's Foods Inc., Dust Bowl City LLC, Eko Fagel Fisk o mittemellan AB, Enclave Insurance Company, Enclave Parkway Association Inc., Enclave Properties LLC, European Imports, European Imports Inc., Figg Inc., Freedman Meats, Freedman Meats Inc., Freedman-KB Inc., Fresh Direct (UK) Limited, Fresh Direct Group Limited, Fresh Direct Limited, Fresh Holdings Limited, FreshPoint, FreshPoint Arizona Inc., FreshPoint Atlanta Inc., FreshPoint California Inc., FreshPoint Central California Inc., FreshPoint Central Florida Inc., FreshPoint Connecticut LLC, FreshPoint Dallas Inc., FreshPoint Denver Inc., FreshPoint Hawaii LLC, FreshPoint Inc., FreshPoint Las Vegas Inc., FreshPoint North Carolina Inc., FreshPoint North Florida Inc., FreshPoint Oklahoma City LLC, FreshPoint Pompano Real Estate LLC, FreshPoint Puerto Rico LLC, FreshPoint San Francisco Inc., FreshPoint South Florida Inc., FreshPoint South Texas Inc., FreshPoint Southern California Inc., FreshPoint Tomato LLC, FreshPoint Vancouver Ltd., Freshfayre Limited, Fruktservice i Helsingborg AB, GHS Classic Drinks Limited, Gilchrist & Soames Inc., Gilchrist & Soames UK Limited, Guest Packaging LLC, Guest Supply, Guest Supply Asia Limited, Guest Supply Singapore Pte. Ltd., International Food Group, Isakssons Frukt & Gront AB, J & M Wholesale Meats, J. Kings Food Service Professionals, J. Kings Food Service Professionals Inc., Kent Frozen Foods, Les Ateliers Du Gout, Liquid Assets Limited, M&J Seafood Holdings Limited, M&J Seafood Limited, Manchester Mills LLC, Mayca Autoservicio S.A., Mayca Distribuidores S.A., Menigo Foodservice AB, Mitshim Etatu Supply LP, Newport Meat Company, Newport Meat Northern California Inc., Newport Meat Pacific Northwest Inc., Newport Meat Southern California Inc., Newport Meat of Nevada Inc., North Star Holding Corporation, North Star Seafood, North Star Seafood Acquisition Corporation, North Star Seafood LLC, PFS de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Palisades Ranch Inc., Pallas Foods, Pallas Foods Farm Fresh Unlimited Company, Pallas Foods Unlimited Company, Pauleys Produce Limited, Promotora del Servicios S.A. de C.V., Restaurangakdemien AB, Restaurant of Tomorrow Inc., Rohan Viandes Elaboration SAS, SMS Bermuda Holdings, SMS GPC International Limited, SMS GPC International Resources Limited, SMS Global Holdings S.a.r.l., SMS International Resources Ireland Unlimited Company, SMS Lux Holdings LLC, SOTF LLC, SYY Netherlands C.V., SYY Panama S. de R.L., Serca Foodservice, Servicestyckarna I Johannes AB, Servicios Ameriserve S.A. de C.V., Shenzhen Guest Supply Trading Co. Limited, Societe Civile Immobiliere (SCI) Bianchi Montegut, Societe Civile Immobiliere (SCI) De Boiseau, Societe Civile Immobiliere (SCI) De Garcelles, Societe Civile Immobiliere (SCI) J.D. Lanjouan, Societe Civile Immobiliere (SCI) Le Dauphin, Specialty Meat Holdings LLC, Stockflag Limited, Stockholms Fiskauktion AB, Supplies on the Fly, Sysco Albany LLC, Sysco Asian Foods Inc., Sysco Atlanta LLC, Sysco Autoservicio S.A., Sysco Baltimore LLC, Sysco Baraboo LLC, Sysco Bermuda Partners L.P., Sysco Boston LLC, Sysco Canada Holdings S.a.r.l., Sysco Canada Inc., Sysco Central Alabama LLC, Sysco Central California Inc., Sysco Central Florida Inc., Sysco Central Illinois Inc., Sysco Central Pennsylvania LLC, Sysco Charlotte LLC, Sysco Chicago Inc., Sysco Cincinnati LLC, Sysco Cleveland Inc., Sysco Columbia LLC, Sysco Connecticut LLC, Sysco Corporation, Sysco Corporation Director's Deferred Compensation Plan Trust, Sysco Corporation Employee's 401(k) Plan Trust, Sysco Corporation Executive Deferred Compensation Plan Trust, Sysco Corporation Good Government Committee Inc., Sysco Corporation Retirement Trust, Sysco Corporation Supplemental Executive Retirement Trust, Sysco Corporation Supplemental Unemployment Benefits Plan Trust, Sysco Detroit LLC, Sysco Disaster Relief Foundation Inc., Sysco EI VI S. s.r.l., Sysco EU II S.a.r.l., Sysco EU III S.a.r.l., Sysco EU IV Capital Unlimited Company, Sysco EU IV S. s.r.l.., Sysco EU V S. s.r.l., Sysco Eastern Maryland LLC, Sysco Eastern Wisconsin LLC, Sysco Foundation Inc., Sysco France Holding SAS, Sysco France SAS, Sysco George Town II LLC, Sysco George Town Limited S. s.r.l.., Sysco Global Finance LLC, Sysco Global Finance LLP, Sysco Global Holdings B.V., Sysco Global Resources LLC, Sysco Global Services LLC, Sysco Grand Cayman Company, Sysco Grand Cayman II Company, Sysco Grand Cayman III Company, Sysco Grand Rapids LLC, Sysco Guernsey Limited, Sysco Guest Supply Canada Inc., Sysco Guest Supply Europe Goods Wholesalers LLC, Sysco Guest Supply Europe Limited, Sysco Guest Supply LLC, Sysco Gulf Coast LLC, Sysco Hampton Roads Inc., Sysco Hawaii Inc., Sysco Holdings II LLC, Sysco Holdings LLC, Sysco Indianapolis LLC, Sysco International Food Group Inc., Sysco International Inc., Sysco Iowa Inc., Sysco Jackson LLC, Sysco Jacksonville Inc., Sysco Kansas City Inc., Sysco Knoxville LLC, Sysco Labs Europe Limited, Sysco Labs Pvt. Ltd., Sysco Leasing LLC, Sysco Lincoln Inc., Sysco Lincoln Transportation Company Inc., Sysco Long Island LLC, Sysco Los Angeles Inc., Sysco Louisville Inc., Sysco Memphis LLC, Sysco Merchandising and Supply Chain Services Canada Inc., Sysco Merchandising and Supply Chain Services Inc., Sysco Metro New York LLC, Sysco Minnesota Inc., Sysco Montana Inc., Sysco Nashville LLC, Sysco Netherlands Partners LLC, Sysco North Central Florida Inc., Sysco North Dakota Inc., Sysco Northern New England Inc., Sysco Philadelphia LLC, Sysco Pittsburgh LLC, Sysco Portland Inc., Sysco Raleigh LLC, Sysco Resources Services LLC, Sysco Riverside Inc., Sysco Sacramento Inc., Sysco San Diego Inc., Sysco San Francisco Inc., Sysco Seattle Inc., Sysco South Florida Inc., Sysco Southeast Florida LLC, Sysco Spain Holdings SLU, Sysco Spokane Inc., Sysco St. Louis LLC, Sysco Syracuse LLC, Sysco Technologies Cayman Ltd., Sysco Technologies LLC, Sysco UK Holdings Limited, Sysco UK Limited, Sysco UK Partners LLP, Sysco USA I Inc., Sysco USA II LLC, Sysco USA III LLC, Sysco Ventura Inc., Sysco Ventures Inc., Sysco Virginia LLC, Sysco West Coast Florida Inc., Sysco Western Minnesota Inc., The SYGMA Network Inc., Upsys, Victua SAS, Walker Foods Inc., Waugh Foods, and Wild Harvest Limited.
The following companies are subsidiares of NRG Energy: 3279405 Nova Scotia Company, 3283764 Nova Scotia Company, 7549709 Canada Inc., 7644868 Canada Inc., 7711565 Canada Inc., AC Solar Holdings LLC, Ace Energy Inc., Agua Caliente Borrower 1 LLC, Agua Caliente Solar Holdings LLC, Agua Caliente Solar LLC, Allied Home Warranty GP LLC, Allied Warranty LLC, Arthur Kill Gas Turbines LLC, Arthur Kill Power LLC, Astoria Gas Turbine Power LLC, Bayou Cove Peaking Power LLC, Beheer-en Beleggingsmaatschappij Plogema B.V., Berrians I Gas Turbine Power LLC, BidURenergy Inc., Big Cajun I Peaking Power LLC, Bluewater Wind Delaware LLC, Bluewater Wind Maryland LLC, Bluewater Wind New Jersey Energy LLC, Boquillas Wind LLC, Cabrillo Power I LLC, Cabrillo Power II LLC, Camino Energy LLC, Carbon Management Solutions LLC, Carlsbad Energy Center LLC, Carlsbad Energy Holdings LLC, Chester Energy LLC, Chickahominy River Energy Corp., Cirro Energy Services Inc., Cirro Group Inc., Citizens Power Holdings One LLC, Commonwealth Atlantic Power LLC, Connecticut Jet Power LLC, Cottonwood Development LLC, Cottonwood Energy Company LP, Cottonwood Generating Partners I LLC, Cottonwood Generating Partners II LLC, Cottonwood Generating Partners III LLC, Cottonwood Technology Partners LP, Delaware Power Development LLC, Devon Power LLC, Doga Enerji Uretim Sanayi ve Ticaret Limited Sirketi, Doga Isi Satis Hizmetleri Ticaret Limited Sirketi, Doga Isletme ve Bakim Ticaret Limited Sirketi, Dunkirk Gas Corporation, Dunkirk Power LLC, EHI Development Fund LLC, EME Eastern Holdings LLC, EVgo Services LLC, Eastern Sierra Energy Company LLC, Ecokap Power LLC, El Segundo Energy Center II LLC, El Segundo Power II LLC, El Segundo Power LLC, Elkhorn Ridge Wind II LLC, Energy Alternatives Wholesale LLC, Energy Choice Solutions LLC, Energy Curtailment Specialists, Energy Plus Holdings LLC, Energy Plus Natural Gas LLC, Energy Protection Insurance Company, Everything Energy LLC, Forward Home Security LLC, GCP Funding Company LLC, GenOn Energy, Geostellar Inc., Gladstone Power Station Joint Venture, Goal Zero, Goal Zero Europe GmbH, Goal Zero LLC, Granite II Holding LLC, Granite Power Partners II L.P., Green Mountain Energy, Green Mountain Energy Company, Green Mountain Energy Sun Club, Gregory Partners LLC, Gregory Power Partners LLC, Hanover Energy Company, Huntley IGCC LLC, Huntley Power LLC, Independence Energy Alliance LLC, Independence Energy Group LLC, Independence Energy Natural Gas LLC, Indian River Operations Inc., Indian River Power LLC, Intellastar LLC, Ivanpah Master Holdings LLC, Ivanpah Project I Holdings LLC, Ivanpah Project II Holdings LLC, Ivanpah Project III Holdings LLC, James River Power LLC, Kaufman Cogen LP, LSP-Nelson Energy LLC, Long Beach Generation LLC, Long Beach Peakers LLC, Long Beach Power LLC, Louisiana Generating LLC, MEC Esenyurt B.V., MEC San Pascual B.V., Maplekey UK Finance Limited, Maplekey UK Limited, Meriden Gas Turbines LLC, Middletown Power LLC, 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Devon Operations Inc., NRG Dispatch Services LLC, NRG Distributed Energy Resources Holdings LLC, NRG Distributed Generation PR LLC, NRG Dunkirk Operations Inc., NRG ECOKAP Holdings LLC, NRG ESA Joint Development LLC, NRG El Segundo Operations Inc., NRG Energy Center Eagles LLC, NRG Energy Center Oxnard LLC, NRG Energy Fuel LLC, NRG Energy Fuel Services LLC, NRG Energy Gas & Wind Holdings Inc., NRG Energy Holdings II Inc., NRG Energy Holdings Inc., NRG Energy Inc., NRG Energy Labor Services LLC, NRG Energy Petroleum LLC, NRG Energy Services Group LLC, NRG Energy Services International Inc., NRG Energy Services LLC, NRG Equipment Company LLC, NRG Fuel Cell CA1 LLC, NRG Fuel Resources LLC, NRG Fuel Transportation LLC, NRG GTL Holdings LLC, NRG Gas Development Company LLC, NRG Generation Holdings Inc., NRG Gladstone Operating Services Pty Ltd, NRG Granite Acquisition LLC, NRG Greenco LLC, NRG HQ DG LLC, NRG Holding Leasing Vehicle 7 LLC, NRG Home & Business Solutions LLC, NRG Home Services LLC, NRG Home Solutions LLC, NRG Home Solutions Product LLC, NRG Homer City Services LLC, NRG Huntley Operations Inc., NRG Identity Protect LLC, NRG Ilion LP LLC, NRG Ilion Limited Partnership, NRG Independence Solar LLC, NRG International LLC, NRG Kaufman LLC, NRG Latin America Inc., NRG Lease Co LLC, NRG Lease Development LLC, NRG Limestone 3 LLC, NRG Maintenance Services LLC, NRG Mesquite LLC, NRG Mextrans Inc., NRG MidAtlantic Affiliate Services Inc., NRG MidCon Development LLC, NRG Middletown Operations Inc., NRG Middletown Repowering LLC, NRG Midwest Holdings LLC, NRG Midwest II LLC, NRG Montville Operations Inc., NRG NE Development LLC, NRG Nelson Turbines LLC, NRG New Roads Holdings LLC, NRG NewGen LLC, NRG North Central Operations Inc., NRG Northeast Affiliate Services Inc., NRG Norwalk Harbor Operations Inc., NRG Ohio Pipeline Company LLC, NRG Operating Services Inc., NRG Oswego Harbor Power Operations Inc., NRG Oxbow Holdings LLC, NRG PacGen Inc., NRG Peaker Finance Company LLC, NRG Portable Power LLC, NRG Potrero Development LLC, NRG Power Marketing LLC, NRG Procurement Company LLC, NRG Project Company LLC, NRG Reliability Solutions LLC, NRG Renter's Protection LLC, NRG Repowering Holdings LLC, NRG Residential Solar Solutions LLC, NRG Residential Solar Solutions Leasing II LLC, NRG Retail LLC, NRG Retail Northeast LLC, NRG Rockford Acquisition LLC, NRG Rockford Equipment II LLC, NRG Rockford Equipment LLC, NRG Saguaro Operations Inc., NRG Security LLC, NRG Services Corporation, NRG Sherbino LLC, NRG SimplySmart Solutions LLC, NRG Solar Arrowhead LLC, NRG Solar CVSR Holdings 2 LLC, NRG Solar Dandan LLC, NRG Solar Guam LLC, NRG Solar Ivanpah LLC, NRG Solar Ring LLC, NRG Solar SC Stadium LLC, NRG Solar Sunrise LLC, NRG South Central Affiliate Services Inc., NRG South Central Generating LLC, NRG South Central Operations Inc., NRG South Texas LP, NRG Sterlington Power LLC, NRG Storage Fabrication & Delivery LLC, NRG Storage on Demand NY LLC, NRG SunCap Leasing I LLC, NRG Telogia Power LLC, NRG Texas C&I Supply LLC, NRG Texas Gregory LLC, NRG Texas Holding Inc., NRG Texas LLC, NRG Texas Power LLC, NRG Texas Retail LLC, NRG Trading Advisors LLC, NRG Transmission Holdings LLC, NRG ULC Parent Inc., NRG Victoria I Pty Ltd, NRG Warranty Services LLC, NRG West Coast LLC, NRG Western Affiliate Services Inc., NRG Wind Development Company LLC, NRG Wind Force LLC, NRG Wind LLC, NRG dGen Advisory Services LLC, NRGenerating German Holdings GmbH, NRGenerating International B.V., NRGenerating Luxembourg (No. 1) S.a.r.l., NRGenerating Luxembourg (No. 2) S.a.r.l., New Genco GP LLC, New Jersey Power Development LLC, Norwalk Power LLC, O'Brien Cogeneration Inc. II, ONSITE Energy Inc., One Block Off The Grid Inc., Oswego Harbor Power LLC, Pacific Generation Company, Petra Nova CCS I LLC, Petra Nova Holdings LLC, Petra Nova LLC, Petra Nova Parish Holdings LLC, Petra Nova Power I LLC, Pure Energies Group, Pure Energies Group ULC, Pure Energies Installation Inc., Pure Energies Solar Services Inc., Pure Group Inc., RDI Consulting LLC, RERH Holdings LLC, Reliant Charitable Foundation, Reliant Energy, Reliant Energy Northeast LLC, Reliant Energy Power Supply LLC, Reliant Energy Retail Holdings LLC, Reliant Energy Retail Services LLC, Restoration Design LLC, Roof Diagnostics Solar Holdings LLC, Roof Diagnostics Solar and Electric LLC, Roof Diagnostics Solar and Electric of NY LLC, Saguaro Power Company a Limited Partnership, Saguaro Power LLC, San Gabriel Energy LLC, San Joaquin Energy LLC, San Juan Energy LLC, San Pascual Cogeneration Company International B.V., Sherbino I Wind Farm LLC, Solar Partners I LLC, Solar Partners II LLC, Solar Partners VIII LLC, Solar Power Partners, Solar Pure Energies ULC, Somerset Operations Inc., Somerset Power LLC, South Texas Wind LLC, Station A LLC, Sunrise Power Company LLC, Sunshine State Power (No. 2) B.V., Sunshine State Power B.V., TCV Pipeline LLC, Tacoma Energy Recovery Company, Taloga Wind II LLC, Texas Coastal Ventures LLC, Texas Genco GP LLC, Texas Genco Holdings, Texas Genco Holdings Inc., Texas Genco LP LLC, Texas Genco Services LP, US Retailers LLC, Valle Del Sol Energy LLC, Vienna Operations Inc., Vienna Power LLC, WCP (Generation) Holdings LLC, Watson Cogeneration Company, West Coast Power LLC, XOOM Alberta Holdings LLC, XOOM British Columbia Holdings LLC, XOOM Energy BC ULC, XOOM Energy California LLC, XOOM Energy Canada ULC, XOOM Energy Connecticut LLC, XOOM Energy Delaware LLC, XOOM Energy Georgia LLC, XOOM Energy Global Holdings LLC, XOOM Energy Illinois LLC, XOOM Energy Indiana LLC, XOOM Energy Kentucky LLC, XOOM Energy LLC, XOOM Energy Maine LLC, XOOM Energy Maryland LLC, XOOM Energy Massachusetts LLC, XOOM Energy Michigan LLC, XOOM Energy New Hampshire LLC, XOOM Energy New Jersey LLC, XOOM Energy New York LLC, XOOM Energy ONT ULC, XOOM Energy Ohio LLC, XOOM Energy Pennsylvania LLC, XOOM Energy Rhode Island LLC, XOOM Energy Texas LLC, XOOM Energy Virginia LLC, XOOM Energy Washington D.C. LLC, XOOM Ontario Holdings LLC, XOOM Solar LLC, and eV2g LLC.
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A few weeks ago, late in the morning, my cell phone rings. Its a good friend, so frantic he skips all pleasantries and launches into his many questions about the breast of veal I made last summer: Did I saute shiitake mushrooms or porcini? Broccoli rabe or regular broccoli? Did I roll the flattened veal narrower side to wider, or wider to narrow  and can he get away with looping string around it since he doesnt know how to tie it?

What I wanted to know was why he wasnt at work at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday. Because, he tells me, hes having three guests over for a dinner party, and as he puts it, You know how people are.

Well, actually, no, that isnt how they are. Its how we fear they are.

Thanks to popular television shows like Top Chef, The Great British Bake Off and Beat Bobby Flay that turn stoves into battle stations, too many home cooks of every age suddenly imagine the friends seated 'round their dining table morphing into the scorekeeper chefs on Food Network. Entertaining at home is a lot less fun if you see it as ending in a trial by hungry jury, whether that jury includes your new son-in-law or old friends who are visiting on their cross-country tour.

So please, turn off the TV, put down the remote and take a few tips from someone who has been a caterer, New York food critic and hospitality consultant for over 30 years  someone who never wants to be on the receiving end of a phone conversation like the one above again. These suggestions will make your life easier and more fun, whether youve cooked for company your entire adult life or are just getting started in the kitchen.

1. Ground yourself

Before we get to meal planning, know that no one comes to your home because they need a Michelin-star meal. Thats why God made chefs like Eric Ripert, Bobby Flay and Lidia Bastianich. Your guests come to your house to be with you and enjoy your company. So trust me when I give you these ground rules:
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Imagine going to withdraw funds from your savings account only to discover that the balance has mysteriously dwindled from $10,000 to $1,000. You are devastated by the loss and dont understand how the bank allowed this to happen.



The bank managers are confused, too. There was nothing even remotely suspicious about the transaction. All the necessary safeguards  such as a password, a personal identification number (PIN) and account number  were correct. The withdrawal was completed without incident.

That scenario is an example of the fastest growing type of identity fraud: Account takeover. In this scam, criminals use stolen account numbers, passwords, PINs and Social Security numbers to access existing bank, brokerage, credit card or e-commerce accounts. Once they have wormed their way in, crooks drain bank accounts or go on shopping sprees. That purloined information also can be employed to create new banking or credit card accounts in your name.

Losses from account takeovers hit $5.1 billion last year, a 120 percent increase over 2016, according to Javelin Strategy & Research, an advisory firm specializing in digital finance. General-purpose credit cards and checking and savings accounts are the most frequent targets for account takeover, according to Javelin, with 1.2 million victims in each of the three categories in 2017 alone.

Its costly for consumers to recover from account takeovers, with victims spending an average of 16 hours and $290 to resolve the issue, according to Javelin. Account takeovers are on the rise because they are very lucrative and very easy to execute, says Brian Lapidus, practice leader of the identity theft and breach notification group at global risk mitigation firm Kroll. Most of what is needed is for sale on the dark web.

Dossiers of consumer information routinely change hands among criminals, and the data they have harvested goes beyond bank account and Social Security number. They also may know details such as your birthday, mothers maiden name and alma mater  snippets that people often use for their passwords and answers to security questions. That fuller picture of you makes it easier for criminals to assume your identity.

The data scoop

Those personal details are amassed through a variety of sources. Some come via major data security breaches, such as those that occurred at Equifax and Hyatt Hotels last year. Millions of Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, birthdays and addresses were stolen. Spyware and malware insinuated onto individual computers can record the user names and passwords people use to bank, shop or pay bills online. Phony emails designed to look like they came from banks or stores, or phishing, can trick people into disclosing sensitive material. People also unwittingly hand over their most personal data to scammers who call posing as representatives of banks, companies or government agencies.

Criminal sophistication isnt solely responsible for the rise in account takeovers. Banks and brokerage houses don't always inform consumers of unusual activity on their accounts. Customers should set up alerts to notify them about withdrawals over an established amount, low balances and other account activity that might be signs of fraud, says Nessa Feddis, senior vice president and deputy chief of consumer protection at the American Bankers Association.

But a lack of red flags can make it difficult to know a crime has been committed. In account takeovers, it can be hard for banks to figure out who they are dealing with, says Al Pascual, Javelins senior vice president, research director and head of fraud and security. Its hard for consumers to prove they werent the one who withdrew the money.

Federal regulations require banks to reimburse customers for funds withdrawn without their approval, though they must report the theft as soon as they notice the problem. The bank has 10 business days to give consumers a provisional credit and between 45 and 90 days to conduct an investigation, according to Feddis.

Exercise caution

She added that consumers should be especially careful about disclosing PINs and passwords to family members, friends or employees. If you give a friend your PIN so he or she can withdraw $100 and the individual takes out $1,000, for example, that counts as an authorized transaction and the bank is not responsible for the loss.

Additionally, victims should quickly file a police report about the theft. Local law enforcement may not be the appropriate agency to investigate the crime, but financial institutions often expect victims to submit a report as part of the fraud-resolution process.

And if you are using the password and PIN for the compromised account to access other accounts, change them immediately.

AARPs Fraud Watch Network can provide more tips and advice on how to protect your privacy and avoid becoming a victim of a scam.
After falling behind 28-0 to UMary, Wolves comeback falls short

In what became an unfortunate trap game for the surging Wolves (3-2), an invigorated UMary offense pounced on a measly start from Northern State.
A former U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer assigned to the Santa Teresa border crossing pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice Thursday in federal court in Las Cruces.

Christopher M. Holbrook in his plea agreement admitted to falsifying a use-of-force report according to a news release from the U.S. Department of Justice.

Hollbrook claimed a man he detained March 23, 2015 at the Santa Teresa port of entry fell when he resisted being taken into custody.

In the plea agreement Holbrook admitted he intentionally swept the mans legs out from under him causing the individual to fall and hit his head.

Law enforcement officers are accorded tremendous power to enforce the law and ensure justice. Preventing the abuse of this authority is necessary to protect the rights of our citizens and to maintain public trust in law enforcement agencies, said U.S. Attorney John C. Anderson of the District of New Mexico in a statement from the U.S. Department of Justice Thursday.

The 34-year-old former CBP officer faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. A sentencing date has not been scheduled yet.
In less than two years, thieves stole more than 1,000 guns in Albuquerque either by taking them from a vehicle, or stealing a vehicle with a firearm left inside.

The police released the information this week and asked the public to be careful and secure their weapons.

The vast majority of gun owners are responsible and understand safety is always the top priority, APD Commander Joe Burke said in a statement. But the responsibilities extend to keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, or even others who are not trained to use them. That means locking up guns  in your home and in your vehicle. Dont leave unsecured guns in your vehicle  in your own driveway, nor in a parking lot when youre shopping for groceries, or going to the gym.

From July 2016 through March 2018, there were 1,035 cases where firearms were taken from vehicles. In 882 cases, the guns were stolen from a vehicle. There were also 153 cases where guns left in cars that were stolen, according to police statistics. There could have been multiple firearms taken during each one of the cases, so its not clear how many guns have actually gone missing after people left them in their vehicle.

Its not clear how many of the guns police recovered.

Gilbert Gallegos, a police spokesman, said those numbers include cases where guns were taken from police officers. That occasionally happens, a 2017 Journal report found that in a two-month period in late 2016 into 2017, officers had weapons stolen from them five times.

The northeast area command, which covers much of the city north of Interstate 40 between Eubank and Interstate 25, had the most stolen guns cases. Guns were stolen from cars 320 times during the time frame. The southeast area command, which stretches southeast from the Big I, had 197 cases in the nearly two-year period.

APDs request for people to secure their firearms comes at a time when the district attorney is trying to create a task force and is calling for changes to state laws to try to stop gun violence in Albuquerque.

District Attorney Raul Torrez recently convened a task force of local, state and federal law enforcement agencies with one of the goals being to address gun violence in Albuquerque. He restructured his office to create a gun unit that will focus on targeting repeat criminals with firearms charges, and in some cases try to have the cases prosecuted in federal court.
New Mexico has 31 public colleges and universities, and 21 governing boards to go with them  a setup that has prompted many around the state to question its efficiency.

It has also apparently made the state something of a national curiosity.

This is a novel arrangement; I think we can go ahead and admit that, Mike Krause, executive director of the Tennessee Higher Education Commission, said of New Mexico. From outside the state, I think we are intrigued by it.

Krause  whose own state has just eight higher education governing boards, including one overseeing all community colleges  is among a dozen higher education officials and national experts who spoke Thursday at the New Mexico Higher Education Departments Governance Summit.

Secretary Barbara Damron convened the summit in Albuquerque to expand the ongoing dialogue about possible changes to New Mexicos structure. A statewide committee Damron organized last year to study potential governance alternatives ultimately recommended maintaining the existing structure, a result she said did not satisfy lawmakers or the governor. In opening the summit Thursday, Damron said the discussions and feedback it generates will inform a governance recommendation she plans to make to the legislature and Gov. Susana Martinez in the coming months.

Many summit speakers noted that governance structures vary tremendously across states and that a perfect model has not revealed itself.

David Tandberg, vice president of policy research and strategic initiatives for the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, said he recommends states do what New Mexico is doing now  take stock of its own system, demographics and culture, and make decisions that best suit it.

While youll never have a unanimous decision  were not going to skip out of this room singing Pollyanna; theres going to be disagreement  accomplishing some shared vision and as much agreement around your approach as possible is probably the best recipe for success you can have in approaching governance, he said.

Keynote speaker Jamie Merisotis, president and CEO of the higher education-focused Lumina Foundation, offered several pieces of advice as New Mexico continues to evaluate, and potentially modify, its system. Most important, he said, is recognizing and accounting for the modern student population. More than 40 percent of full-time students today are over 25, he said. Forty percent of students work at least 20 hours per week, while 13 percent of students attend school exclusively online.

You need to make sure this states higher education system is designed first, foremost and always to serve todays students. You must keep their needs  not the needs of the institutions or the employers or state policy makers or anyone else  at the center and top of the agenda, he said.
The New Mexico Public Education Department is launching a three-year training initiative for 10 high schools in the state.

The schools chosen by PED are: West Mesa, Belen, Bernalillo, Cuba, Espanola Valley, Rocinante, Miyamura, Gilbert L Sena Charter, Health Leadership and Las Montanas Charter high schools.

West Mesa and Health Leadership are in the Albuquerque Public Schools district.

PED picked the schools, which were identified for Comprehensive Support and Improvement or CSI, to be the first to partake in the inaugural New Mexico High School Redesign Network.

Secretary-designate Christopher Ruszkowski said the program aims to help the schools move out of CSI, a category for low-performing schools.

One of the main goals of the redesign network is to help raise graduation rates, as the schools rates are below 67 percent.

The network plans to redesign curricula and target professional development for teachers, while helping the schools with restructuring efforts. It also will focus on student career plans.

PED wrote in a news release that if the schools sign up, they must commit to meeting all of the networks principles and practices.

The state has put aside $4 million in federal funds for the schools over the next three years, according to PED.

The network is a powerful opportunity to re-imagine our students high school experience to meet the demands of the 21st century economy, Ruszkowski wrote in a statement. It is also a central component of our State Plan under the Every Student Succeeds Act, which is considered one of the most promising in the nation. As we have witnessed graduation rates on the rise, we have identified best practices that should be scaled statewide, especially in our high schools that have historically struggled.

The New Mexico High School Redesign Network will launch next month.

PED is partnering with Johns Hopkins Universitys School of Education Cross-State High School Redesign Collaborative and with schools across the state.
WASHINGTON  New Mexicos U.S. senators this week endorsed a bill that could dramatically reshape the U.S. health care system by allowing all Americans to enroll in the Medicare program traditionally designed for use by the elderly.

The legislation co-sponsored by Sens. Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich, both New Mexico Democrats, would also allow employers to purchase Medicare for their employees. The bill is one of several introduced in the current Congress to expand coverage beyond that provided for under the Affordable Care Act.

The so-called Medicare for All legislation has virtually no chance of becoming law in the current Congress as Republicans who oppose the idea control both the House and Senate. But it indicates growing support among national Democrats for moving toward a single-payer health care system.

The bills primary sponsors are Sens. Chris Murphy, D-Conn, and Jeff Merkley, D-Ore. A news release from Udall and Heinrich said the bill would be self-sustaining and fully paid for by premiums.

Under the proposal, Medicare Part E would be offered on all state and federal exchanges, and people could use existing subsidies under the Affordable Care Act to help pay for it. Employers could opt in to Medicare Part E rather than private insurance to provide employees health care that supporters describe as affordable and reliable.

Heinrich, who is running for a second term this year, said the bill would expand a health care system that has proven to work for millions of Americans.

New Mexicans across the political spectrum recognize just how well the Medicare program delivers quality health care results at a reasonable cost, Heinrich said. This legislation would allow individuals and employers to buy more affordable, quality health care coverage through Medicare, and is a critical step to expanding coverage and providing more health care options for New Mexicans.

This legislation is a great first step towards our goal of universal coverage and lower health care costs, giving all New Mexicans and Americans the ability to purchase a new affordable, comprehensive Medicare plan, Udall said in a statement.

In September, Udall and Heinrich signed on to similar legislation sponsored by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
As a retired city manager I know that New Mexicos municipalities can always use more revenue for important needs. A big source of that funding is the taxes and royalties assessed on oil and gas development. Then why is the Trump administration pushing a proposal that will  by its own assessment  mean more waste and less revenue for New Mexico?

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has released a proposal to gut oil and gas methane waste rules that will allow for the waste of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars and cost Americans over $1 billion in wasted natural gas and pollution. This rule will leave New Mexico families less funding for our schools and communities, wasted energy, and more smog pollution threatening the health of our children and seniors. Its a bad deal. Thats probably why 74 percent of New Mexicans opposed this rollback, according to a recent Colorado College Poll.

New Mexicans should be worried that the states polluted air is a threat to their health. According to the American Lung Association, seven counties with 60 percent of New Mexicos population must endure Code Orange days whereby children and adults with asthma should stay inside. But why would Eddy and San Juan counties experience nearly as many orange days on smog as Bernalillo County that has lots of people and cars?

Theres a clue in the 2014 NASA satellite that discovered that a giant methane hot-spot the size of Delaware was suspended over New Mexicos San Juan Basin,which is one of the most productive gas fields in North America. Natural gas is composed almost entirely of methane, which explains why a series of studies have confirmed that the hot-spot is tied to natural gas production. Unfortunately, the industry, together with its allies in the state government, have denied the connection.

While methane itself, which is leaked, vented and flared out of oil and gas facilities, does not cause harm to ones health, it is the pollutants that are emitted along with the methane that are the key components to smog. Smog, or ground-level ozone, can cause coughing, wheezing and throat irritation as well as asthma. The BLMs federal methane rules would have started to protect against the health impacts related to oil and gas waste, but last month the Trump administration proposed rules that entirely gut those on the books. And whats more, it is proposing to do this without a single public hearing.

We have until April 23 to comment and ask the administration to hold hearings and to keep these important protections in place. In fact you can visit cutmethane.com to comment.

As the federal government rolls back the rules limiting methane pollution, we will be left with the state to regulate pollution from oil and gas wells.

Consequently, I find Gov. Susana Martinezs recent proposal to promulgate some of the nations weakest oil and gas air-quality standards to be very troublesome. The proposal lags behind the policies of other southwestern states such as Utah and Colorado. A letter from 23 organizations said it best: On its way out the door, the Martinez administration is attempting to ram through a gift to the oil and gas industry  the weakest air protections in the nation.

I hope well see new leadership in the state that will take stopping oil and gas waste and pollution seriously. We are going to need it to help continue to fight these wrong-headed Trump administration policies that put taxpayers and our air in the back seat.

Thousands of New Mexicans, including dozens of elected officials from across the state, have time and again stood up for rules on methane that would protect our health, our lands and our communities. Its long past time for Washington and Santa Fe to listen to this call.
WASHINGTON  With all due respect, I dont get confused.

These eight words from Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, will go down as among the most powerful indictments of the rancid governing culture President Trump has fostered. They may also shed light on one of the great mysteries of the moment: Why is it that Trump regularly backs off when it comes to confronting Vladimir Putin and Russia?

The matter-of-factness of Haleys comment made it all the more acidic. She was pushing back against efforts by White House staffers to toss her overboard after she had declared, firmly and unequivocally, that the United States intended to impose fresh sanctions on Russia in response to the use of chemical weapons by the regime of Moscows Syrian ally, Bashar Assad.

You will see that Russian sanctions will be coming down, she said Sunday on CBS Face the Nation.

Haley was very specific. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, she asserted, will be announcing those on Monday, if he hasnt already, and they will go directly to any sort of companies that were dealing with equipment related to Assad and chemical weapons use.

Her comments seemed fully consistent with the goal of the missile attacks on Syrian facilities involved in chemical warfare that Trump proudly touted as a signal of his toughness and resolve. There were no indications that Haley was freelancing and she was not initially contradicted by the White House.

But one man watching her was very unhappy about what he saw. It turned out that Trump, who has said over and over that he longs for better relations with Putin, either changed his mind on new sanctions or was not privy to his own administrations policy.

On Monday, the president put out word that there would be no new sanctions for now. This sent the cover-story specialists he employs at the White House scurrying to undercut Haley. Most of them did their hatchet work anonymously. One of them said condescendingly that Haley had made an error that needs to be mopped up.

Perhaps because he is not yet accustomed to this White Houses stab-in-the-back culture, Larry Kudlow, Trumps chief economic adviser, jabbed in the front and on the record, telling CNN that Haley got ahead of the curve. For good measure, he said that there might have been some momentary confusion.

This is what brought Haley to insist that her own confusion was not the problem. She was simultaneously rebuking the Trumpian modus operandi and, as The Washington Posts Aaron Blake pointed out, sending a substantive message: that Trump and/or the White House did change their minds  that their increasingly tough posture on Russia has at least momentarily been arrested.

Trumps repeated flinching on Russian policy feeds suspicions as to why the Kremlin worked to get him elected, which we know they did, and whether Russias intelligence services have information to use against him, which is yet to be established.

There is strange justice in the fact that Trumps behavior played straight into former FBI Director James Comeys blanket-the-media book tour. Consider this statement by Comey to USA Today: Theres a non-zero possibility that the Russians have some, some sway over him that is rooted in his personal experience, and I dont know whether thats the business about the activity in a Moscow hotel room or finances or something else.

Until non-zero becomes zero  or 100 percent  there is an obligation on the part of the media and government investigators to figure out what in the world is going on here.

Kudlow, by the way, violated another Trump norm. In a never-apologize world, he graciously admitted to The New York Times that he was totally wrong. You wonder what Trump made of his act of contrition.

You also wonder what lesson Haley will take from joining the ranks of Trump servants who have been undercut from the top. Since her job involves being one of the leading articulators of American policy to the world, the president has now rendered her assignment meaningless, impossible or perhaps both.

And with those busy and nameless White House chatterers leaking word that Trump is uneasy with her ambition  God forbid that anyone in this I alone can fix it government should think about advancing her own career  her fate may not be entirely in her own hands.

Haley would be better off leaving this listing ship on her own terms even as the rest of us ponder why its captain seems incapable of steering a steady course.

Dionnes columns, including those not published in the Journal, can be read at abqjournal.com/opinion  look for the syndicated columnist link. Copyright, Washington Post Writers Group; e-mail: ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne.
Copyright  2018 Albuquerque Journal

SANTA FE  A writer and professor who is among the women alleging sexual harassment and inappropriate conduct by famed author Sherman Alexie disputes the account of a Santa Fe college official about how her complaints against Alexie were handled by the school.

Alexie, one of the countrys most famous Native American writers, has served as faculty mentor and consultant for the Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Allegations against Alexie were made public in March by Elissa Washuta, now on the English faculty at Ohio State University, in reports by National Public Radio and KUOW, a Seattle-based member station.

Washuta described an incident she says happened in January 2015 when she and Alexie were staying in Santa Fe for work with Institute of American Indian Arts. She said Alexie sent her a photo of his hotel room bed with condoms on a table next to the bed.

Washuta said Alexie later accused her of plagiarizing an essay and that she was worried about what he would do to her career. She left the IAIA program after he made the accusation.

In an interview with the Journal two weeks ago, Jon Davis, director of the MFA program at IAIA, said he had not heard about Washutas harassment allegations before the public radio news reports in March and thought the only issue between the two was Alexies plagiarism accusation.

Washuta had previously declined to comment to the Journal. But she said in an email Friday that she told Davis in an April 2017 phone call, just before she resigned and took the job with Ohio State, about the photos Alexie had sent her two years previously. During that call, she says, she also discussed Alexies accusation of plagiarism against her, which she described as false.

Asked for a response to Washutas comments to the Journal, Davis said Friday he doesnt remember her telling him about offensive photos or his telling her he had heard rumors about Alexie.

I dont recall that, no, he said, reiterating that the first time he heard about Washutas allegations was from the NPR reports.

In the email, Washuta stated: He told me he was concerned about the sending of photos, asked me who else knew about it (I told him I had warned one of our students), and said he had heard vague rumors about Alexie, but hears unsubstantiated rumors about lots of people.

Washuta added that she told Davis she didnt want to file a complaint or speak out at that time because she feared retaliation and possible effects on her future employment.

Her email also states that Davis told her he would consult other colleagues and faculty mentors on how to handle the situation, which to her knowledge didnt occur.

I attempted to handle this internally but no action was taken, she wrote.

Alexie response

In February, Alexie  who has won two National Book Awards for his novels and wrote the script for the acclaimed movie Smoke Signals  issued a statement about allegations against him.

There are women telling the truth about my behavior and I have no recollection of physically or verbally threatening anybody or their careers, he said. That would be completely out of character.

I have made poor decisions and I am working hard to become a healthier man who makes healthier decisions.

IAIA recently dropped Alexies name from what had been the schools Sherman Alexie Scholarship, now the MFA Alumni Scholarship, funded by a third party. Alexie formerly picked the winner, but thats now done by a faculty panel.

IAIAs Davis said Friday he does remember Washuta calling him about Alexies accusations of plagiarism. That is what he intended to consult colleagues about because he didnt feel fit to adjudicate the plagiarism claims legitimacy, Davis said.

He said Washuta didnt mention sexual harassment in her resignation from IAIA.

In her Friday email, Washuta wrote: I have no desire to harm this wonderful MFA program in any way, but I object to (Jon) Daviss account of my actions.

Washuta also stated she has not heard from the IAIAs officer on Title IX, the federal act that bans gender discrimination in education. IAIA spokesperson Eric Davis told the Journal previously that the schools Title IX officer had reached out to Washuta after her allegations emerged.

Eric Davis said Friday that a Title IX email was sent to Washuta on March 8. He said he could not provide a copy of the email because Title IX documents are confidential.

Attempts by the Journal to reach Alexie directly and through his literary agent for comment have been unsuccessful. In his February statement, he said, Over the years, I have done things that have harmed other people, including those I love most deeply. To those whom I have hurt, I genuinely apologize. I am so sorry.

But a majority of his statement criticized one of his first public accusers, author and essayist Litsa Dremousis, who encouraged others to come forward. He said he rejects her accusations, insinuations and outright falsehoods.
As the city of Santa Fe contemplates the monuments, markers and community events that recognize its history and the people who helped shape it, city leaders are considering placing a new sculpture honoring two Native American heroes in the courtyard of the citys convention center.

A resolution to accept the donation of sculpture of Catua and Omtua  runners from Tesuque Pueblo who served as messengers at the outset of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680  was passed by the citys Arts Commission on Monday and the Parks and Recreation Advisory Commission on Tuesday, in a process heading toward City Council consideration on May 9.

While donated by Tesuque Pueblo, the sculpture is the work of Pojoaque artist George Rivera, whose statue of Santa Fe Medal of Honor recipient Sgt. Leroy Petry stands in front of City Hall, next door to the Santa Fe Community Convention Center.

A fiscal impact report lists $46,000 in costs to the city for landscaping and installation to be paid for out of the Art in Public Places fund.

The courtyard of the convention center is already dedicated to Catua and Omtua, who were sent from Tesuque to spread word of the revolt to other pueblos, but were captured and executed by the Spanish. A plaque in the courtyard recognizes their role in what has been called the First American Revolution.

This courtyard rests on the ancient settlement of Oga Poegeh, the ancestral home of Taytsugeh Oweengeh, reads the plaque, using the traditional name of the Tesuque people in their native Tewa language. Today, Taytsugeh Oweengeh and the city of Santa Fe continue to share history and to celebrate the cultural richness of New Mexico.

Construction of the convention center was delayed years ago after remnants of the settlement, along with human bones, were discovered while digging. The city sought and received permission from the pueblo to proceed with the project after the remains were removed.

Co-sponsored by City Councilors Signe Lindell and Renee Villarreal, the resolution supporting acceptance of the sculptures skirts recent controversies that have surrounded Santa Fes monuments and historical public events. Instead, it acknowledges a 400-year shared history between the Villa de Santa Fe and the Pueblo of Tesuque.

I support the recognition of Catua and Omtua because it contextualizes our complex history in northern New Mexico and Santa Fe, Villarreal wrote in an email to the Journal. It also is a symbolic way to acknowledge and provide a more inclusive and accurate representation of our historical narrative.

Through recent history, some people have created a Native-Hispano binary or paradigm of our culture and history, when actually we have a shared history because of our mixed heritage and familial ties.

No one version of history

Last August, after a white supremacist rally against the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Va., turned violent, then-Mayor Gonzales called for an inventory of the historic monuments and markers on City of Santa Fe property, as well as events in town commemorating historic events or people.

He said he believed Santa Fe could become a leader in racial healing and transformation toward a more unified city and by addressing the controversies head-on we can heal and grow stronger.

The timing was just a few weeks before the controversial staging of the Entrada  a re-enactment of the Spanish resettlement of Santa Fe in 1692, 12 years after the Pueblo Revolt, thats performed each year on the Plaza during the Fiesta de Santa Fe in September.

Native American groups have protested the event, calling it a whitewashing of history and the celebration of one cultures repression of another. Fiesta and Entrada organizers say the event celebrates the coming together of two cultures.

Santa Fe police were out in force during last years Entrada, whose starting time was changed at the last minute in a failed effort to stem the protests, at which eight people were arrested. All charges were later dropped.

The inventory called for by Mayor Gonzales identified nearly 60 monuments, markers, sculptures, murals and plaques. Among them were the Cross of the Martyrs overlooking downtown that recognizes 21 Franciscan priests and others killed during the pueblo uprising, and a statue in Cathedral Park of Don Diego de Vargas, who led the Spanish resettlement after the revolt and who is the lead character in the Entrada pageant.

Newly elected Mayor Alan Webber, like Gonzales, believes Santa Fe can still set an example for the nation on matters reconciling history and racial healing. He has made plans to visit Riveras studio to see first-hand the ongoing work on the sculptures of Catua and Omtua.

My perception is that there is no one version of history that is right, he said in an interview Wednesday. What we have are multiple lived experiences from different parts of our community and each part of our community has a completely legitimate historical experience.

If we want to separate Santa Fe from whats happening around the United States in general, rather than treating it as an adversarial clash, we should endeavor to use it as an opportunity for the development of a unique curriculum of the history of our region and our state that the rest of the United States can benefit from and learn from.

Elena Ortiz, an Ohkay Owingeh tribal member and Santa Fe resident, has helped organize the Entrada protests. She said the sculptures of the two Tesuque runners is a great idea, but, Why are they hiding them in the courtyard of the convention center when we have statues of (Santa Fe founder Pedro de) Peralta and de Vargas out and about? Why not put them on or close to the Plaza?

According to Councilor Villarreal, placing the sculptures in the courtyard of the convention center came at the request of Tesuque Pueblo.

It has to end

Rivera, the artist, said he was asked by former Tesuque Gov. Mark Mitchell to create the artwork of Catua and Omtua. This has been a few years in the making, said Rivera, a former governor of Pojoaque Pueblo. Its going to be a really cool image.

Rivera previously created a sculpture of another famous Native American runner, Billy Mills, the Oglala Lakota runner who won a gold medal at the 1964 Olympic games in the 10,000-meter run. I think when they saw the Billy Mills in such a large scale, they thought (sculptures of Catua and Omtua) would really turn out good, Rivera said. He said he hoped to have the sculptures completed by August.

Native activist Ortiz said the city still has to do much more to heal centuries-old wounds. It can start by abolishing the Entrada, she said.

Various parties, including Archbishop John Wester and pueblo leaders, have been in talks about what to do about the Entrada. But no changes for the September event, which has a heavy religious theme, have been announced.

The city is going to have to deal with the Entrada, said Ortiz. (The protests) arent going away. Putting up statutes (of the Tesuque runners) is fabulous, but it doesnt exempt the city of Santa Fe from addressing the racism and celebration of genocide that occurs every year. It has to end.
Copyright  2018 Albuquerque Journal

Leslee Richards, owner of Liebers Luggage in Albuquerque, learned this week that her company and the Bank of Albuquerque had been targeted nearly a decade ago in what authorities allege was an international, multi-million dollar cybercrime conspiracy involving one of the most wanted cybercriminals in the world.

Named as a defendant in the case is Evgeniy Mikhaylovich Bogachev of Russia, who went by the online nickname lucky12345, and is still wanted by the FBI. Also mentioned are several alleged co-conspirators from Russia, Ukraine and the United Kingdom.

Richards recalls being contacted in 2009 by a representative from Bank of Albuquerque who told her that the Liebers account had been compromised. She said the bank told her it would compensate her for the amount that they had been unable to recover, about $9,000.

But Richards said it wasnt until a Journal reporter sent her an affidavit from an FBI agent this week that she realized that what happened to Liebers may have been part of something larger.

When I read it, I thought, Holy cow,  said Richards.

According to the affidavit, part of a 2014 criminal complaint filed in federal court in Nebraska, the FBI believes hackers remotely installed malicious software on a computer at Liebers on Sept. 18, 2009.

Information stolen from that computer by the software was then used to transfer funds from Liebers account with Bank of Albuquerque to accounts owned by the hackers, according to the FBI.

The affidavit states that Liebers was one of thousands of businesses around the country targeted at that time by the same group of individuals; there is no mention of any other New Mexico-based business.

A spokesman for Bank of Albuquerques parent organization, BOK Financial, said the total amount stolen from Liebers had been about $57,000, though all but the $9,000 was eventually recovered. He said no other customers had been affected, and that the FBI did not tell the bank at the time that the issue was part of a broader investigation.

The FBI did not respond to a request for an interview about the case.

The court filings describe the events as part of a long-running conspiracy to employ widespread computer intrusions, malicious software, and fraud to steal millions of dollars from numerous bank accounts in the United States and elsewhere.

Bank of Albuquerque is one of 12 U.S. financial institutions named as selected victims in the affidavit, which does not describe any underlying relationship between the institutions other than that they all used third-party systems to conduct certain types of transactions.

According to an FBI poster, Bogachev remains at large and is wanted for his alleged involvement with malicious software known as Zeus  the software used to target Liebers, as per to court documents  and GameOver Zeus. The latter is believed to be responsible for more than one million computer infections and financial losses of more than $100 million, according to the FBI, which is offering a reward of up to $3 million for information leading to Bogachevs arrest.

In December 2016, President Barack Obama authorized sanctions against Russia for interference in the presidential election that year. Included in the order was a designation by the U.S. Treasury Department against Bogachev for criminal cyber-activities, though the order made no connection between Bogachev and election interference.

The BOK Financial spokesman said much has changed at the Bank of Albuquerque and its other banking divisions since 2009. The company now requires that clients who initiate wires and other types of transactions use software that monitors malicious software. The organization has also added internal software that highlights suspicious transactions in a customers history, which are then flagged and investigated.

As for Richards, she said she has no information about what it was about Liebers of Albuquerque that could have made it a ripe target for an alleged international conspiracy.

Why they came to us, I have no idea, said Richards.
Southwest pilot Tammie Jo Shults applauded by hometown

Tara Melton

Alamogordo Daily News, N.M.

TULAROSA  The Southwest Airlines pilot being hailed a hero for landing a Boeing 737 after an engine blew is one of the Tularosa Basins very own, Tammie Jo Shults, nee Bonnell.

Shults father, Rusty Bonnell, was a farmer and raised his family on a ranch in Otero County. Shults graduated from Tularosa High School in 1979 and was very active in several school groups including National Honor Society, Student Council, FFA and cheerleading.

She was a great person and has always been very kind, said Joyce Roulston, nee King, who was Shults childhood friend and classmate. She was very humble, even as a teenager.

Classmate Alynn Hooper agreed saying Shults was always a very nice person and very involved in extracurricular activities.

In the book Military Fly Moms, by Linda Maloney, Shults said it was during her childhood while she watched air shows and aircraft fly out of Holloman Air Force Base that she fell in love with flying.

Shults is quoted on the fighter plane blog F-16.net saying she tried to attend an aviation career day at high school and was told they did not accept girls. Shults went onto state that she decided to enroll at MidAmerica Nazarene University, in Olathe, Kansas, because it had a good pre-med program and she was interested in veterinary medicine but her desire to fly didnt waver.

In 1983, Shults graduated from MidAmerica Nazarene University with degrees in biology and agribusiness, Carol Best, a university spokeswoman told The Kansas City Star.

After college, Shults was turned down by the Air Force but accepted by the Navy for its aviation officer candidate school.

During her time in the military, Shults became one of the first female fighter pilots in the history of the Navy and one of the first women to fly F-18s. She landed her fighter plane on boats at 150 mph and eventually became an instructor. Although she wasnt allowed to fly in combat, she did fly as an aggressor pilot. After a successful career, she resigned her commission in 1993, according to the Associated Press.

She met her husband, Dean Shults, while she was in the Navy and the two became pilots for Southwest Airlines. Together the couple have two children, Sydney and Marshall, and live in Texas.

On Tuesday, Shults was flying 150 passengers from LaGuardia Airport to Dallas-Love Field on Flight 1380 when her plane lost one of its two engines. During the ordeal, an aircraft window was shattered and Jennifer Riordan, of Albuquerque, died after being partially sucked out of the window, according to the Associated Press.

The AP reported, Shults maintained a cool, calm demeanor as she communicated with air traffic control about the emergency, as can be heard through the released audio recording. Shults and crew brought the plane on a steep descent to an emergency landing in Philadelphia.

It wasnt surprising to Roulston that Shults was so collected during the emergency landing.

No, not at all (surprised), Roulston said. I was surprised because I havent heard from her in 40 years but not surprised at the integrity, bravery and how courageous she was through the whole thing. Shes always been one of those people that was steady and always took everything in stride.

Tularosa Mayor Margaret Trujillo said the Village of Tularosa is extremely proud of Shults and is working to put together a proclamation to honor her.

To think someone from our little village could perform such a heroic act, Trujillo said. You know, were always hoping that our kids stay in our little town but I think this was divine intervention that this young lady got out of here and went on to do bigger things. Its got to be divine intervention that she was where she needed to be.



2018 Alamogordo Daily News (Alamogordo, N.M.)

Visit the Alamogordo Daily News (Alamogordo, N.M.) at www.alamogordonews.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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Most of the students who took to the streets in protest of gun violence Friday have never known a world before the Columbine High School shooting massacre in 1999.

Nineteen years later, students across the state rallied for school safety on the anniversary of the killings  a third protest in a series of national movements on gun violence.

The New Mexico events included walkouts, hundreds of students protesting outside the state Capitol and a number of in-school demonstrations, attended by students and teachers.

A group of roughly 80 Jefferson Middle School students decided to take their protest off campus, marching east on Lomas Boulevard from their school to Bataan Memorial Park.

They are more concerned about our safety walking to a public park but not about our safety in the school, said organizer Ayla Taylor.

The 14-year-old felt it was important to leave school to send a louder message, saying when the middle schoolers participated in a rally on campus last month, nothing changed.

Fridays march, supervised with teachers and parents walking beside kids, included a brief history on the origin of walkouts, speeches, demands for gun law reform and a moment of silence for school shooting victims.

Principal Anthony Fairley said the school isnt planning on reprimanding protesters and Friday will be treated as an unexcused absence. Therefore, the school isnt required to allow kids to redo missed assignments, but its up to individual teachers to decide whether they will allow it.

The principal noted the school only had make-up PARCC testing for the day, meaning absences didnt affect the whole testing process. He did say i-ready, a different common core test, was underway, but he didnt know to what extent the walkout affected those.

Organizer Lorenzo Gradi, 14, said he understands gun control is a complex issue, but ultimately the protests goal wasnt to ban guns. Its to increase public awareness and advocate for tougher legislation.

Its time Congress realizes we are going to be able to vote in five years and they can no longer be complacent, said eighth-grader Kaya Perce.

Roundhouse rally

Grabbing Congress attention was also the goal of hundreds of Santa Fe students who turned out at the state Capitol on Friday.

At a rally held on the east side of the Roundhouse, several students gave speeches, read poems and one even recited a rap, saying the NRA is in our way to make positive change.

Acacia Burnham of the New Mexico School for the Arts, a state charter school in Santa Fe, urged a crowd of more than 300 kids not to be complacent, but to make sure their voices were heard.

Dont let this fizzle out before the next school shooting happens, she said.

A spokesman for Santa Fe Public Schools said there were no actual walkouts at its schools, but approximately 100 SFPS students, about 40 of them with the Student Wellness Action Team, attended. The other students attending were mostly from private schools or charter schools.

Tables were set up outside the Roundhouse where students could write letters to state and federal elected officials or register to vote.

New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence, Earth Care and Fight for Our Lives groups from Albuquerque and Santa Fe also had a hand in organizing the event.

In all, organizers said about 450 people attended the Santa Fe event, which started with a student-led panel discussion that included House Speaker Brian Egolf, Senate Majority Leader Peter Wirth, state Rep. Linda Trujillo, State Police Chief Pete Kassetas and others.

Day of action

And some students walked-in campus instead, a movement dubbed the Day of Action.

Day of Action also urged the end of gun violence, but participants opted to rally outside school hours, tie orange ribbons on fences for school safety awareness and walk into class together in solidarity.

The sun had only been up a half hour Friday morning before teachers and students gathered at Highland High Schools Day of Action in southeast Albuquerque, carrying signs protesting gun violence.

A group of approximately 20  made up primarily of teachers  gathered to demand school safety reform and spread awareness, part of the walk-in movement that took place at schools across Albuquerque Public Schools.

Other schools that participated included Double Eagle Elementary School, Bandelier Elementary, Lew Wallace Elementary School and Kennedy Middle School, according to the Albuquerque Teachers Federation. At Lew Wallace, hundreds of kids from kindergarten to fifth grade participated in decorating the bars outside their school with the orange ribbons.

Across the country, other forms of activism including protests and walkouts were planned for National School Walkout day.

The Columbine anniversary walkouts follow two other protests last month advocating for school safety reform.

On March 14, students across New Mexico walked out of class for 17 minutes  one minute for each victim of a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas in Parkland, Fla.

And on March 24, thousands in Albuquerque marched in the streets of the Old Town area for the nationwide gun violence protest March for Our Lives.

While students in the state expressed their discontent differently Friday, one bright yellow sign held aloft clearly stated the unified message: No more gun violence. No more.

Journal staff writer T. S. Last in Santa Fe contributed to this report.
Once again, they filed out of class. In a new wave of school walkouts, they raised their voices against gun violence. But this time, they were looking to turn outrage into action.

Many of the students who joined demonstrations across the country Friday turned their attention to upcoming elections as they pressed for tougher gun laws and politicians who will enact them. Scores of rallies turned into voter registration drives. Students took the stage to issue an ultimatum to their lawmakers.

We want to show that were not scared. We want to stop mass shootings and we want gun control, said Binayak Pandey, 16, who rallied with dozens of students outside Georgias Capitol in Atlanta. The people who can give us that will stay in office, and the people who cant give us that will be out of office.

All told, tens of thousands of students left class Friday for protests that spread from coast to coast. They filed out at 10 a.m. to gather for a moment of silence honoring the victims of gun violence. Some headed to nearby rallies. Others stayed at school to discuss gun control and register their peers to vote.

Organizers said an estimated 150,000 students protested Friday at more than 2,700 walkouts, including at least one in each state, as they sought to sustain a wave of youth activism that drove a larger round of walkouts on March 14. Activists behind that earlier protest estimated it drew nearly 1 million students.

HeadCount, a nonprofit group that registers voters at music events, said 700 people had signed up to vote through its website during the past week. Thats up from just 10 people in the same period last year. Spokesman Aaron Ghitelman credited the uptick to walkout organizers who steered teens to the groups website.

Fridays action was planned by a Connecticut teenager, Lane Murdock, after a gunman stormed Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on Feb. 14, leaving 17 people dead. It was meant to coincide with the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting in Littleton, Colorado.

The focus on the November elections reflects a shift after activists gained little immediate traction in Washington  and prospects for their influence remain uncertain. Congress has shown little inclination to tighten gun laws, and President Donald Trump backed away from his initial support for raising the minimum age to buy some guns.

Among those who helped orchestrate the walkout  and the voter registration push  was the progressive group Indivisible, which formed after the 2016 election to oppose Trumps policies.

In cities across the country, it was common to see crowds of students clad in orange  the color used by hunters to signal dont shoot  rallying outside their schools or at public parks.

Several hundred gathered at New York Citys Washington Square Park, chanting The NRA has got to go! and Enough is enough. A large group in Washington marched from the White House to the Capitol building to rally for gun control.

Nate Fenerty was among dozens of students who left class to rally in Richmond, Virginia. He registered to vote for the first time at tables set up by students at the protest and said he wants Congress to approve mandatory background checks for gun buyers.

How many more times are we going to stand in memoriam for another school shooting before our policymakers to actually do something? said Fenerty, who carried a sign saying Am I Next?

Virginia students had expected 10,000 people at the Richmond rally, but only about 300 showed up. Still, those who turned up said they werent discouraged.

Shortly before the walkouts, news spread that there had been another shooting at a Florida school. Authorities say one student shot another in the ankle at Forest High School in Ocala early Friday. A suspect was taken into custody. Activists said it underscored the urgency of their work.

Student David Hogg, a Parkland survivor who has emerged as a leading activist, took to social media nearly every day this week urging students to register. On Thursday he made the motivation clear on Twitter: The only way to make politicians listen to us is by voting in ones that will, he said.

Hogg was among about 50 students who walked out of Stoneman Douglas on Friday after administrators threatened protesters with unexcused absences.

Craig Smith and Terry McGary, both 17-year-old juniors, said they walked out because they want to show respect for the Columbine victims.

It was a guilt trip to make us not walk out, McGary said about the threat.

The walkouts drew counter-protesters in some areas, including about 30 at a rally outside New Hampshires statehouse. In Kansas, about 200 gun-rights supporters held their own demonstration outside the statehouse. Many carried signs and flags, and some brought holstered handguns.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a Republican candidate for governor, addressed the crowd and later criticized the walkout movement.

Instead of walking out of class, why dont you stay in class and spend that half hour studying the Second Amendment? You might learn something, Kobach said later.

Some students in Colorado participated in the walkouts but not at Columbine, which has closed on April 20 ever since the 1999 shooting that left 15 people dead. Some Columbine students attended a vigil with Parkland survivors on Thursday night, but on Friday, their school called on them to attend a day of service.

Principal Scott Christy said in a letter to other schools in his district that April has long been a time to respectfully remember our loss, and also support efforts to make our communities a better place.

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Binkley can be reached on Twitter at @cbinkley

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Binkley reported from Boston. Associated Press writers Terry Spencer in Parkland, Florida; Verena Dobnik in New York City; Denise Lavoie in Richmond, Virginia; Jeff Martin in Atlanta; and Mitchell Willetts in Topeka, Kansas, contributed to this report.
Representatives of the Turquoise Museum on Friday announced plans to relocate from its longtime Old Town location to the former Gertrude Zachary Castle.

The museum owners will lease approximately 8,500 square feet of space at the castle, which is at 400 SW Second St. SW, said Jacob Lowry, the museums executive director.

Lowry said the museum will nearly double its current square footage by moving to the castle, and be able to accommodate more visitors. The business, which is now located at 2107 Central Ave NW, will close May 31 and the Lowrys hope to stage a grand opening at the castle in August.

The Turquoise Museum celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, and our family had been searching for the perfect location for the future of the Museum, said Lowry. The minute we walked into the castle, we knew it would be the perfect home for our world-class turquoise collection, our library and our educational initiatives.

The museum owners will also operate a gift shop at the new location, as well as a cafe and flower shop in an adjacent building, where Gertrude Zachary Antiques used to operate.

The new home of the museum is the former residence of the late Gertrude Zachary, a longtime New Mexican businesswoman and friend of the Lowry family.

The addition of this international visitor attraction continues the ongoing revitalization of downtown Albuquerque and is a win for everyone, said Emily Howard, vice president of marketing, communications and tourism for Visit Albuquerque. The prestigious nature of the museum and its unique new location strengthens the catalogue of the citys wealth of world-class museums and cultural centers and will increase Albuquerques reputation of being known as a city rich in arts and culture.

Said Lowry, We have to cap attendance now to 4,000 visitors a year. With the new space, we are hoping to accommodate about 20,000 visitors. The admission charge will be $20 for general admission.
POINT PLEASANT BEACH, N.J.  On the anniversary of the largest marine oil spill in the petroleum industry, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed a bill Friday prohibiting oil and natural gas drilling in state waters, as well as preventing infrastructure like pipelines that could support drilling in more distant federal waters.

It is one of numerous coastal states using state-level laws to try to thwart President Donald Trumps proposal to allow drilling in federal waters more than 3 miles offshore along most of Americas coastline.

The Democratic governor noted the anniversary of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, warning that a similar catastrophe could happen anywhere.

These are not theoretical, abstract potentials, he said on the boardwalk in Point Pleasant Beach, one of the states most popular summer family resorts. They happen, and they happen with an alarming frequency.

States including New Jersey, New York, California, South Carolina and Rhode Island have introduced similar bills, Washington state is considering one, and Maryland introduced a bill imposing liability on anyone who causes a spill.

When Trump called for the drilling plan in January, the reaction from New Jersey and our sister coastal states was a quick and unequivocal No!  he said.

New Jersey and other states used a simple theory to try to thwart Trumps drilling plan: Although they have no control over federal waters beyond 3 miles from shore, they do control what happens in the 3 miles closest to the land. By banning drilling there, as well as prohibiting supporting infrastructure like pipelines or docks in state waters, I dont see how they can get around it, said Rep. Frank Pallone Jr., a Democrat representing a Jersey shore district.

Republican Congressman Chris Smith, who also represents part of the shore, agreed.

If you dont have the infrastructure going out to the federal line, how do you do it? he asked. Theres now a law making this almost impossible.

The tactics have gotten the attention of the Trump administration. At a forum earlier this month in New Jersey on offshore wind, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said states opposed to the drilling plan have a lot of leverage against it by enacting state-level bans.

Zinke noted a lot of opposition to the drilling plan among environmentalists and coastal states, but did not signal a retreat from the proposal, which is supported by the energy industry and voters who favor cheaper, more abundant oil and gas.

The American Petroleum Institute says states ought to welcome offshore drilling for the revenue it can produce. Offshore energy production in the Atlantic Ocean alone could support 265,000 jobs and generate $22 billion a year within 20 years, according to the groups estimate.

Cindy Zipf, executive director of Clean Ocean Action, said the hundreds of millions of gallons of oil spilled in the gulf eight years ago caused staggering environmental and economic damage.

This disaster was a wake-up call, and should have moved us away from ocean drilling, she said.

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Follow Wayne Parry at http://twitter.com/WayneParryAC
A kangaroo was stoned to death in a Chinese zoo  apparently for the same reason that a brown bear was once crushed to death by Russian videographers, and a shark in Florida was dragged behind a motorboat like a kite.

That is, to gratify a human.

The kangaroo  a 12-year-old female whose name is not known  was not hopping enough to amuse spectators at the Fuzhou Zoo in February, The New York Times reported, quoting Chinese media.

So someone picked up a rock. Or it might have been a brick or slab of concrete, Agence France-Presse wrote. In any case, it wasnt unusual for visitors to this zoo in southeast China to provoke the animals with projectiles.

Some adults see the kangaroos sleeping and then pick up rocks to throw at them, a zookeeper told the Haixia Metropolis News, as reported by the Times. Employees tried to dissuade the crowd, the worker said, but after we cleared the display area of rocks, they went to find them elsewhere.

By the time zookeepers rescued the kangaroo from the crowd, AFP reported, her foot was nearly severed.

Details of the attack were first made public this week, when Chinese television stations broadcast images of the kangaroo lying battered in its enclosure, and then hooked to an intravenous drip, on which she survived for several days before succumbing to internal bleeding.

One of the stones had ruptured the animals kidney, veterinarians discovered after the autopsy, the Australian Broadcasting Corp. wrote.

Had the attacks ended then, they might be no more sadistic than any other to occur at a Chinese zoo, which AFP reports are lightly regulated and therefore especially prone to abuse. Last summer, for example, investors involved in a dispute with a zoo in Jiangsu province released a donkey into the tiger pen, with predictable results.

But the Fuzhou stonings didnt end with that death. Just a few weeks later, the agency wrote, visitors attacked and injured a five-year-old kangaroo for similar reasons. It survived.

In nearly every media interview, zoo workers stressed that its against the rules to bludgeon the animal, but people keep doing it anyway. Having apparently given up on the prospect of voluntary civility, AFP wrote, the zoo now plans to install more security cameras.

The zoo also plans to stuff and display the dead kangaroo  as a sort of memorial to whatever it might now symbolize.
Sen. Martin Heinrich, a Democrat seeking reelection to a second term, just tweeted his support for marijuana legalization.

Its time to legalize marijuana, the senator tweeted.

The senators new policy position comes on April 20  or 4/20  which has become known as an unofficial national holiday for marijuana enthusiasts.

The New Mexico Democratic Party formally endorsed legalization in March. A week ago, Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller signed a bill decriminalizing marijuana possession. New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, a former prosecutor, is staunchly opposed to legalized weed. And heres a pretty good summation of where Congress stands on the issue.

In a 2014 interview with me, Heinrich advocated a wait-and-see approach to making pot legal, saying the federal government should wait to see what happened in Washington and Colorado, which had recently legalized the herb.

Heinrich acknowledged in the interview that pot is less dangerous than cocaine, methamphetamine or other hard drugs.

But Im also cautious about where were going, and before people jump forward and assume they have all the answers on this stuff it would be smart to look at the states that are starting down this road, and to take some time and look at what works and what does not, he said at the time. I think we need to be cautious.

It seems that the experiments in Washington and Colorado, where tax revenues have skyrocketed, have at least in part helped Heinrich make up his mind on the issue.
Southwest Airlines Capt. Tammie Jo Shults personifies a dying breed.

The icy calm Navy veteran, who told air traffic control we have part of the aircraft missing, so were going to need to slow down a bit while her plane limped along with an exploded engine and a blown-out window, comes from the last big generation of military-trained pilots.

The pipeline that brought Shults and fellow fighter pilot/media obsession Chesley Sully Sullenberger into the cockpit of commercial airlines is drying up.

Thanks to rising commercial demand and changes in how the military recruits and retains its pilots, a third of private-sector U.S. pilots have military backgrounds. Thats down from more than 80 percent in the 1960s.

Shults and Sully joined the military when it was still the dominant career path for aspiring pilots. Shults was one of the Navys first female fighter pilots and flew the F/A-18 Hornet before leaving in 1993. Sullenberger flew the Air Forces F-4 Phantom II before leaving for Pacific Southwest Airlines in 1980.

Veterans like Shults and Sully are becoming increasingly rare in commercial aviation, and their numbers are set to fall further. Pilots with experience in the Air Force, Navy or Army skew far older than their civilian-trained counterparts, and thus will be hitting 65  the mandatory retirement age for commercial pilots  sooner and in larger numbers.

Military pilots often spend their 20s and sometimes 30s in the service, but theyre underrepresented even in the 35-50 age ranges.

Shults is 56. Sullenberger was 57 when US Airways Flight 1549 splashed down between New York City and New Jersey after losing power in both engines. Hes now 67.

  

Military pilots were the lifeblood of the airline industry as it grew, along with Americans appetite for travel, in the postwar era.

The military was considered the primary method of gaining flight experience for a later career at the airlines, said Louis Smith, president of FAPA.aero, a pilot-focused career consultancy.

Airlines preferred military pilots for many of the same reasons as today.

The services recruit the best prospects they can find, and vet them with care  which makes a pilots extensive background checks far easier for their future employers. The militarys rigorous training weeds out all but the most promising candidates  of more than 90 recruits in Smiths class, fewer than 50 made it through.

And, on top of it all, military pilots get hands-on experience and additional training  often above and beyond whats required of their civilian counterparts.

Taken together, that amounted to a major subsidy for major carriers, Smith said.

It costs $11 million to train a fighter pilot on the latest hardware, Air Force Lt. Gen. Gina Grosso, deputy chief of staff for manpower and personnel services, said last year. The number would be somewhat lower for other classes of pilot and other military services.

  

The military has grown increasingly reluctant to let these million-dollar investments walk off into the private sector after a few years.

In the late 1960s, Air Force pilots were required to serve four years after getting their pilots wings. That number is now 10 years, and the military has tried to get pilots to stay even longer through aggressive bonuses as high as $455,000 for an extra 13-year commitment.

The change has drastically reduced turnover and the number of new pilots being trained: One pilot serving 10 years now does the work of 2.5 pilots serving four each.

It also deters some aspiring pilots who saw a four-year commitment as a viable alternative to flight school but werent willing to commit to 10 years of flying, after a year or more of training.

Now most pilots are choosing a civilian education even though flight-time requirements for commercial co-pilots have climbed from 250 to 1,500 hours. It can cost as much as $300,000 to attend a private, four-year aviation university, Smith said. But the returns are immediate  entry-level co-pilots earn $30,000 to $50,000 a year, and veterans at major carriers can earn $300,000 or more.

The private sector still wants military-trained pilots, and theyve moved to accommodate longer military service periods. Carriers that in the 1970s refused to hire anyone older than 29 will now hire pilots of any age, Smith said.

That means military pilots can accept their hefty retention bonuses, serve a full 20 years in the military and secure their pension, then move on to the private sector and put in another 25 before retirement.

  

An annual average of about 2,400 trained pilots a year left the military between fiscal years 2001 and 2012, according to the Government Accountability Office.

That isnt enough to fill commercial cockpits. Big airlines hired about 5,000 pilots last year, to say nothing of regional carriers and freight operations.

Smiths surveys show that Delta Air Lines, where veterans made up 98 percent of incoming pilots just 20 years ago, now gets less than half its new hires from the armed services.

At the same time, the Air Force is facing its own pilot shortage. Numbers obtained by The Post show that, despite their generous bonus system, 21 percent of Air Force fighter-pilot positions stood vacant in 2016.

The dynamics that drove the industrys shift from a haven for ex-military pilots to one dominated by civilians will only accelerate.

Because, on top of everything else, the onrushing wave of forced retirements will necessitate more new hires, and there will be fewer veterans available to fill them.

This generation of fighter pilots-turned commercial heroes are on their way out, and there wont be many coming in to replace them. Sullenberger hit the mandatory retirement age a couple years ago, and Shults, too, will pass age 65 and be forced to retire in less than a decade.
The total music industry revenues grew from Rs 570.7 crore in 2016 to Rs 725.6 crore in 2017. This increase in revenue by Rs 154.9 crore is the largest since 2011, according to IFPI data. The revenues from music streaming grew at a rate of 37.26 per cent and revenues from digital music now amounts to over 91 per cent of the Indian recorded music industry revenue. There were two primary factors driving this positive growth in digital music consumption: increased data consumption in the advent of cheaper data rates and greater smartphone penetration.

The digital revenue alone in 2017 was Rs 665.6 crore, which is greater than the combined industry revenue of Rs 570.7 crore in 2016 by almost Rs 95 crore.

Shridhar Subramaniam, President, Sony Music and Chairman, IMI, is optimistic about the state of the industry and says, Last years figures were phenomenal and we were expecting the market to do well this year as well, but a 27 per cent growth in 2017 has exceeded our forecasts. Going into 2018, our aim is to make music even more accessible, affordable and unlimited. To sustain this growth the industry will start laying the groundwork for a subscription eco-system .

The upward trend in adoption of music streaming services has certainly helped digitalise the recording industry, but is not yet steering consumers away from consuming music from pirated websites. Stream-ripping remains a major threat to the music industry in India. According to a 2017 study by IPSOS for IMI, 94 per cent of the 900 surveyed music consumers in India admitted to using some form of piracy to access music.

Blaise Fernandes, President and CEO, IMI, said, Our story in the past two years has been one of success as evident from an exponential growth in revenue. Were glad that digital music is claiming a larger part of the pie in line with the global trends. Various initiatives undertaken by the government like Digital India , Bharat Net, Cipams #lettalkIP programme will enable the Indian music industry is to out-perform most evolved recorded music industries in the digital domain and climb up in rankings in the coming years.

There has also been a small shift from ownership to access and downloads to subscription in the last two years. With international players like Amazon Music entering the market this year, the industry stakeholders plan to steer consumers towards affordable subscription plans to deliver unlimited high-quality content.

While the 2017 figures may paint a pretty picture, the Indian music industry is still greatly impacted by digital piracy and value gap, pointed out Vikram Mehra, Managing Director of Saregama. We must work together in curbing piracy through a multi-pronged approach, involving various stakeholders at the state and central level. We must also empower the rights holders to allow them control of the usage of their works in the digital domain and protect their right to fair remuneration. Thats the only way for us to ensure continued double digital growth in the coming years.

To Read More Visit Here.
Its that day of the year. A day to celebrate the extraordinary natural wonders that surround us. This Earth Day, on April 22 , tune in to Sony BBC Earth and witness nature at its best. The channel will premiere the iconic series Earths Natural Wonders from 11 am with breath-taking visuals from the remotest parts of the planet, to awe-inspiring stories of people who inhabit them. Sony BBC Earth stands for celebrating the wonders of this beautiful planet Earth. What better day to showcase the series that reveals the dramatic tales of people who thrive in the most spectacular places on Earth. From Mount Everest, to the Amazon rain forests, the show beautifully depicts the triumph stories of people who have adapted to live in locations where nature is at its most powerful, spectacular and brutal self. Block your calendar on April 22 and celebrate our planet in all its glory, only on Sony BBC Earth #FeelAlive.
Signs supporting and opposing the Aiken County Public School District's $90 million bond referendum are popping up in yards and along roads.

Registered voters can vote for or against the referendum at a special election May 1. If approved, money from the referendum would pay for additions and added security at four existing schools and would help build a new elementary and middle school between Graniteville and North Augusta.

Signs supporting the referendum reference the website yes4ourfuture.com. According to the site's Facebook page, "'Yes 4 Our Future' is a grassroots campaign made up of parents, grandparents, business owners and community members working together to promote safe, modern schools for Aiken County students. All promotional materials for this education initiative have been paid for by private donations.

The signs opposing the referendum reference the website WeThePeopleAikenCARE.org.

+2 Polling locations set for May 1 school bond referendum Voters will determine whether the Aiken County Public School District can move forward with 

According to the group's Facebook page at Vote NO & NO Aiken County, We the People Aiken CARE is a political organization whose story is Setting good financial examples for the children of Aiken County by resisting the Aiken County School's wasteful proposal. And fighting for real progress and economic growth for the poor and middle class by mobilizing voters to go to the polls on May 1, 2018, and Vote NO on the proposed $90 million general obligation bond! Paid for by We The People Aiken Citizens Acting for Responsible Education (WTPA-CARE).

If voters approve the bond referendum May 1, taxes for Aiken County property owners would go up for the next 20 years.

School district officials have estimated that taxes would increase $20 a year for property owners who pay the 4 percent tax rate and $30 a year for property owners who pay the 6 percent tax rate.

If approved, the referendum would help pay for six construction and expansion projects as follows:

 Renovation and expansion at Midland Valley High School in Graniteville, which is at 110 percent capacity, at a cost of $20 million

 Renovation and expansion at Millbrook Elementary in Aiken to provide better security at a cost of $11 million

 Renovation and expansion at Belvedere Elementary, which is at 101 percent capacity, at a cost of $12 million

 Renovation and expansion at Hammond Hill Elementary in North Augusta, which is at 104 percent capacity, at a cost of $15 million

 Construction of a new elementary school and middle school on donated land between Graniteville and North Augusta at a cost of $32 million.

The polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. May 1 for voting. The list of polling locations is at the Aiken Standard site.

Voters can cast absentee ballots from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday-Friday at the Aiken County Government Center at 1930 University Parkway in Aiken. The last day to vote absentee is April 30.

Security, overcrowding are topics at Aiken County school bond referendum meeting GRANITEVILLE  Parents of students at Midland Valley High and a retired educator from the Mi
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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency believes there are several additional hurdles the U.S. Department of Energy has to clear before it can fully move forward with its plan to dilute-and-dispose 34 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium, according to a letter obtained by the Aiken Standard.

Addressing those concerns  some related to the National Environmental Policy Act and some related to separate studies Congress might request  could take "many years," according to the letter.

The letter states EPA involvement in this specific dilute-and-dispose case is "premature."

The letter, written by EPA Office of Radiation and Indoor Air Director Jonathan Edwards, is a response to questions posed by Rick Lee, chairman of the S.C. Governor's Nuclear Advisory Council.

S.C. governor, attorney general recommend audit of MOX to Energy Department S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster and Attorney General Alan Wilson are interested in a third-party audit of the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility a

Lee submitted his dilute-and-dispose questions, which can also be read as challenges, in a Feb. 22 letter directed to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. A day later, S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster sent a letter to U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette questioning the merits of dilute-and-dispose.

The governor's council is a nine-member panel, including state Sen. Tom Young, R-Aiken, that informs the governor on all things nuclear.

Dilute-and-dispose is a process that involves mixing plutonium with inert material for burial elsewhere, in this case the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.

WIPP, an underground repository that resembles a mine, was designed to primarily store transuranic waste, which includes clothing, tools and other items contaminated while processing spent nuclear fuel or nuclear weapons.

The need to dispose of 34 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium  enough to make thousands of nuclear weapons  is the result of a 2000s-era nuclear nonproliferation pact with Russia.

Dilute-and-dispose has become the path of choice for DOE after the department decided the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, an approximately 70-percent complete complex under construction at the Savannah River Site, became too costly and too drawn out.

MOX, now billions over budget, was initially expected to be complete in 2016. The nonproliferation facility, upon completion, would turn weapons-grade plutonium into fuel for commercial nuclear reactors.

MOX was the go-to facility to process the 34 metric tons of plutonium; however, in recent budget requests, DOE determined that was no longer the case, instead favoring the dilute-and-dispose method.

On Wednesday, Lee said he sent the letter to the EPA administrator to get answers after a DOE management and acquisitions executive presented plans to kill MOX at an S.C. Governor's Nuclear Advisory Council meeting.

"He had made certain assertions about what they could and couldn't do," Lee said.

Lee's letter suggests dilute-and-dispose, which U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry has described as cheaper and more efficient than MOX, may run into legal trouble.

WIPP was not cleared to hold the amount of plutonium DOE wants to put there, there's unaddressed transportation and security issues related to plutonium disposal at WIPP, and the DOE has not conducted the necessary environmental analyses to do so, Lee's letter asserts, among other things.

The EPA response notes Congress has not made a final decision to use dilute-and-dispose for the 34 metric tons of plutonium.

Before MOX can be abandoned, the DOE must provide Congress a lifecycle cost analysis of both dilute-and-dispose and MOX, according to 2018 federal spending language. The costs of dilute-and-dispose will have to halve that of MOX to secure full pursuit.

Lee, on Wednesday, said he is "not aware" of any "cost comparison numbers at this point."

"It's a real dilemma," Lee said, later adding: "There's a lot of questions."
With the election of moderate President Hassan Rouhani in 2013, there were not only campaign promises of reversing the countrys brain drain  otherwise known as the flight of human capital  but also action was taken within the Cabinet to demonstrate this promise. The hiring of Kaveh Madani from the United Kingdom to return to his country of birth to serve as deputy head of Irans Department of Environment was one such action.

The 36-year-old scientist, who is about the same age as the Islamic Revolution, would in the eyes of many serve as a test on whether or not both the administration and the deep state would allow young, educated Iranians to return and work.

However, the arrest of Madani and his recent exit from Iran has brought this discussion out in the open with various reactions, mostly critical. In a since deleted tweet, Abdollah Ramenzanzadeh, a senior Reformist who served as government spokesman under former Reformist president Mohammad Khatami, wrote, The top student on state exams or the Oxford graduate are no use to this country. The tweet also referenced Mohammad Reza Jalaeipour, who was also recently arrested after having returned to Iran. Reformist Iranian parliament member Mahmoud Sadeghi, who was one of the first individuals to break the news about Madanis departure from Iran, tweeted, This is a lesson for Iranian elites outside of the country. Hafez Hakami tweeted, This is not the story of just one person.  Im sorry for the thousands of others who will decide not to return after this.

On April 18, Madani tweeted his letter of resignation, describing his strange ordeal. Its been seven months. With the invitation of the head of the Department of Environment, after being away 14 years, to serve my country and its honorable people I returned to my homeland, the letter began. He continued that he had hoped to play a small role in addressing the many environmental problems in Iran.

Madani wrote that from the beginning of his return, his private account information and hardware (presumably electronics) were accessed and his rights were violated without any type of judicial process. He wrote that the invasion of privacy and investigations into his personal matters not only continued, but that it soon began to impact his family members and those he worked with. Attached to the letter of resignation was Madanis comment, Brokenhearted but hopeful, I promise that just like before with love, I will stand next to the proud people of Iran and take steps to solve the water and environmental problems of my country.

Madani did not say which institution was responsible for the harassment but referred indirectly to the concerned, which is a moniker for groups of conservatives opposed to the policies of Rouhanis initiatives for both the nuclear deal and connecting Iran to Western countries economically and culturally. The organization behind Madanis arrest and the arrest of a number of other environmentalists in recent months is likely the actions of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Intelligence Organization, which has been under fire in recent days for its expanding role in the country.

During a speech marking Army Day, Rouhani took a swipe at the IRGCs increasing role in the various facets of Iranian life, which has led to accusations of corruption; he compared it with the army. The army, which understands politics well, has not become involved in political games and has acted upon [the] imams orders well, said Rouhani regarding the founder of the Islamic Republic of Irans comments about the military not entering politics. In an indirect comment at the IRGC, Rouhani added, Today there is no corruption by the commanders of the army; this is [because] of the purity and sincerity of the army.

After Rouhanis comments, the IRGC released a statement April 19 that  although not addressing Rouhani directly by name  defended its actions of the last four decades. The statement also referred to Khomeinis comments  this time in their favor  saying that it was Khomeini who said, If there was no IRGC, there would be no country. The IRGC statement also accused some of "intentionally or unintentionally uniting as one voice with the enemy to attack the IRGC.
Knesset member Ayman Odeh, the chair of the Arab Joint List party, recalls childhood memories of Israels Independence Day in the Mount Carmel neighborhood in his hometown of Haifa. His parents used to say, "This is not our day" and "We are staying home." So we simply sat at home, he told Al-Monitor on April 20, the morning after Israels 70th Independence Day celebrations. "I also remember the personal sadness in my family, of the uncles uprooted from their homes in 1948, who would return there on that day, cry and mourn their tragedy, the loss of their homeland, of the lands and the lives they had. In our city of Haifa, there were 70,000 Arabs; only 2,000 were left after 1948. Hundreds of villages were destroyed. This is what is known as a national tragedy.

This gap between the joyous outpouring of the Jews celebrating their statehood and the personal tragedy of the Arabs is encapsulated in Nakba Day, marking the catastrophe of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Over the past two decades, Israeli Arabs have been holding events expressing broad political awareness and a collective national memory.

The first Nakba Day was marked in 1998 when the State of Israel celebrated its 50th year of independence. The annual commemoration is perceived as an act of defiance on the very day the Jewish majority celebrates its freedom. This year, too, on Israels 70th birthday, the Nakba Day events only merited a mention on the margins of the news by most media outlets.

While Palestinians in the West Bank mark Nakba Day on May 15, some Israeli Arabs commemorate the day on Independence Day alongside Israeli celebrations.

During the daylong, countrywide Independence Day festivities, fireworks and aerobatics on April 19, Odeh was busy touring the villages of the uprooted  once the homes of hundreds of thousands of Arabs suddenly displaced by the 1948 War of Independence  among them, the village of Al-Birwa in the western Galilee, the birthplace of national Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Odeh wound up his day at the March of Return in the Mediterranean coast town of Atlit, along with 20,000 other participants, mostly Israeli Arabs.

Theres no doubt [Palestinians are] a stubborn people determined to have [their] tragedy recognized, and they will never give up. This is the deepest thing. This is our DNA, Odeh summed up his experience of the Atlit event. It takes years to process such a national trauma and to see it in a broader context than the personal one. Theres one line by Mahmoud Darwish, "Move away so that you can be seen, and its exactly like that.

In the days leading up to the states 70th anniversary, Odeh penned two pained, harsh articles in Haaretz and The New York Times, in which he sought to explain why Israeli Independence Day is a national and personal tragedy for the Arab citizens. I Cannot Be Partner to Your Joy was the Hebrew-language headline of Odehs Haaretz piece. Your Independence Day also marks 70 years of our catastrophe, and even as you deny the Nakba, it is alive and kicking in our memory, our awareness and even in our daily lives, he wrote.

There was something powerful, cutting and thought provoking in his words for the celebrating Jewish majority, all the more so because they were neither defiant nor aggressive. They reflected painful facts. Odeh does not negate Israels independence, but explains that while one can argue about politics, about who started that [1948] war and who was justified, one cannot argue with the fact that it was a national catastrophe and it is even immoral to argue about it. Honing his point, Odeh added, This is an unparalleled situation, with a majority celebrating on the same day the minority views as its tragedy.

Odeh is undoubtedly referring to two annual events occurring back to back, which are so special for Israeli Jews and which they mark automatically: Remembrance Day for the countrys fallen soldiers  which occurred April 17 this year  and Independence Day. The blaring sirens calling for moments of silence in memory of the fallen are an annual source of tension in mixed Jewish-Arab towns. So is the singing at official events of the national anthem, Hatikvah, with its lyrics replete with Jewish and Zionist themes and with which one-fifth of the states population cannot identify.

Odeh is right in seeking empathy and recognition of his peoples catastrophe as a basic desire unrelated to banal political arguments. The classic Israeli argument goes like this: 'They [the Arabs] refused to accept the Partition Resolution [the 1947 UN decision dividing Palestine into Jewish and Arab states]. They started it. War broke out because of them, so who cares about anything else, Odeh explained. One can argue a lot about politics or about whether the Arab leadership played or did not play a role in the war and its consequences, but you have a catastrophe and there is no argument about that. It is immoral to argue about it.

Knesset member Odeh tries to convey a message that the duty he has to mark the Nakba rather than rejoicing on Independence Day is not only elementary and natural. More so, it is also a moral imperative of values for Israels Arab society. As far as he is concerned, it does not come at the expense of the Jews and is not supposed to detract from their happiness, as long as they also manage to see its other side.

I am aware of the fact that this is a very sensitive issue, he told Al-Monitor. If I oppose the crimes carried out in conjunction with its establishment, that does not mean that I oppose the state. I want a state alongside a state; I want a Palestinian state and official recognition of the historic injustice committed against us. In my view, a state that wants to take a moral and wise step should recognize our national injustice and think how to build joint citizenship here.

Odeh envisions two steps paving the way to normalizing relations between Jews and Arabs and between the state and its Arab citizens: The establishment of a Palestinian state  because this is the only remaining people without self-determination  and official recognition by the State of Israel of the historic injustice. I think the fact that I am perceived as a provocateur, as though Im the problem, is immoral. Until such a time, Independence Day will not be a happy day for me; it will always be Nakba Day. When the State of Israel recognizes the historic injustice, I will be happy to have a day of joint citizenship for all of us that would express a desire for co-existence and a true and loving commitment to building a government of Arabs and Jews here.
ASYUT, Egypt  As the sun sets in the village of al-Nawawara, most men either head to a cafe or sit in front of their houses to smoke shisha. Women gather in groups to chat, while chewing on what they call qatrouna, better known in Egypt as madgha or "chewing tobacco."

Al-Nawawara, which is 150 kilometers (93 miles) south of Asyut and situated along the Nile, is a large village with red brick houses. Upon entering the village, a cafe where men smoke shisha and play dominos stands out.

At the house of Atiyat Nour, a 55-year-old housewife, two guests sit on a small carpet and sip tea, while Nour holds on to a small bag, with the words duty-free tobacco in Arabic written on it. She empties the content of the bag into a bowl and grinds it for 10 minutes, until it becomes soft and brown.

"We call this qatrouna, although the name differs depending on the region, she told Al-Monitor. It is a mix of tobacco leaves and tar sold in the small shops in the village. A package of 40 grams [1.4 ounces] costs only 1 Egyptian pound [$0.05]. Once you grind it well, it becomes soft and chewable.

Nour then distributes some to the women sitting next to her and puts what is left in a container, which she then places in her right pocket. The three women put small pieces of the mixture on their fingers, and then chew the substance between their gums and lips for 10 minutes. They spit out what is left.

Naguibe Mohamad, one of the women, said, Women in our village and the surrounding villages have gotten used to chewing qatrouna as a type of popular relaxant. I inherited this habit from my grandmother, and chewing qatrouna puts me in a better mood.

She explained that the ingredients are bought from small shops in the villages in Upper Egypt. Qatrouna is popular among older women and uneducated girls in the villages in the north of Upper Egypt. Most of them, she said, carry a packet in the front pocket of their traditional long and loose-fitting coat, the jilbab.

Many women use qatrouna as medication, believing that it cures headaches, toothaches and pain in general. Mohamad noted that she chews qatrouna daily to avoid muscular pain and headaches.

However, according to Youhanna Bichay, a general doctor in the city of Bandari in Asyut governorate, qatrouna itself is to be blamed for the headaches. He told Al-Monitor that he sees many women in his clinic who suffer from stomach cramps and digestive problems, and that he tries to warn them of the risks caused by the habit of tobacco chewing.

Noting that qatrouna contains four times more nicotine and tar than regular cigarettes, Bichay claims that the long-term habit of chewing qatrouna increases the risk of cancer. He also calls qatrouna "highly addictive," explaining that many people who use qatrouna regularly find it difficult to quit.

[The habit of] chewing qatrouna is spreading in many villages in Asyut and south Minya. It has even reached Sohag and Qena governorates, he said, noting that Abu Tig Factory, a tobacco factory in Asyut, sells this combination of tar and tobacco at low prices, which many women can afford.

Many men  as well as women  take it as a relaxant and analgesic to treat headaches and pain. It is dangerous due to the combination of nicotine and tar, he said. Unfortunately, there are no statistics on the fatalities due to qatrouna-related diseases.

According to statistics published on May 30, 2017, by the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics, 20.2% of over 15-year-olds are smokers. Families who smoke tobacco spend an average of 3,968 Egyptian pounds ($225) per year. But the statistics do not indicate the number of victims of tobacco-related diseases. Tobacco Atlas, an annual publication and its website that seeks to create awareness of the harmful effects of smoking, states that 957 men and 218 women die from tobacco-related diseases every week in Egypt, according to 2016 figures.

But for most of the women chewing qatrouna, the habit is associated with socializing and pleasure, not disease and fatality. Khayriya, a housewife from the village, told Al-Monitor, Men gather around and smoke hashish and opium on happy occasions, while women chew qatrouna in the house and sing and chat.
Allegations of chemical warfare in Douma and strikes by the United States, Britain and France to punish Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime have actually loaded new burdens on Turkeys already-ambiguous position in Syria. With the evacuation of opposition forces from areas reoccupied by the Syrian army, the areas Turkey had taken control of with Operation Euphrates Shield  its offensive against the Islamic State and the Kurdistan Workers Party in Syria  have become jihadi reserves. For some reason, Ankara doesnt seem to be too perturbed by this situation, which poses serious risks to Turkey.

Since March 9, about 70,000 Syrians  including fighters and their families  have evacuated from eastern Ghouta to al-Bab, Azaz and the Jarablus triangle under Turkeys control, and the Idlib area, which is under the observation of Turkish troops.

Evacuations from eastern Ghouta were first made under agreements reached with jihadi groups Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and Ahrar al-Sham and opposition group Faylaq al-Rahman; they peaked with the departure from Douma of Jaish al-Islam's 48,000 people, which included 8,000 fighters.

According to a UN report, of those evacuated from eastern Ghouta, 48,222 went to Idlib and 7,395 went to Jarablus. The Syrian Human Rights Observatory says about 67,000 people moved northward from Zamalka, Arbin, Jobar, Harasta and Douma. Those who evacuated north in buses from eastern Ghouta were settled in tent cities, mosques, schools or unfinished buildings. Turkish humanitarian associations announced they are preparing tent cities around Idlib. Members of Jaish al-Islam and their families are staying at a camp in Jarablus.

Over the past year and a half, tens of thousands of fighters who were evacuated from Aleppo, Homs, Hama, rural Damascus and the Lebanon-Syria border were settled in different parts of Idlib. Settlements of these jihadi groups  either in pockets of land under Turkey's full control or influence  are viewed by some as a Taliban/al-Qaeda "emirate" in the making along the Turkish border. Some observers say Turkeys border provinces are becoming Turkeys Peshawar (Pakistan).

So what was Turkey planning to do with these groups? After Turkey's two major military operations in northern Syria, some groups were organized under the name Syrian National Army and attached as a militia to the Turkish army.

But so far, nobody has really addressed a very touchy question: Turkey is managing the situation with its military operations, but when Assad's army moves to recover these areas, where will the tens of thousands of fighters go? The Turkish government, when asked to hand over control of Afrin to Assad's government, retorted that Ankara will be the one to decide when to leave Afrin and to whom it will cede control. Turkey said that there's no need to worry about these groups because it controls them.

Does Ankara see these outfits as temporary elements that facilitate Turkeys presence in the field? Or is it thinking that Turkey could remobilize these outfits to fight the Syrian regime if conditions so require? Or will Turkey pull the plug on these outfits after consolidating its partnerships with Iran and Russia? Has Turkey learned from the experiences of other countries that survived similar situations? The ambiguity of the jihadis' potential massing on Turkeys border continues as Ankara vacillates, but a new risk is emerging from the evacuation of eastern Ghouta. Tensions among rival jihadi groups in the north could escalate as new outfits arrive. That in itself would be a major headache for Turkey.

Many of the groups evacuated from eastern Ghouta were already fighting each other. In several clashes after 2016, Faylaq al-Rahman and HTS jointly fought Jaish al-Islam, which controlled the sole corridor with access to eastern Ghouta. Meanwhile, Faylaq al-Rahman and Ahrar al-Sham occasionally clash, too, even though Qatar supports both financially. Now, the Idlib branches of Ahrar al-Sham and HTS are fighting each other in Idlib. To challenge HTS, which is the dominating force there, groups led by Ahrar al-Sham, Nureddin Zengi Brigade and Shuqur al-Sham united to form the Syrian Freedom Front. Clashes between this new group and HTS at Maarat al-Numan, Jabal al-Zawiya and Hon Seyhun have reached unprecedented levels.

The most unwanted organization in Idlib is Jaish al-Islam, which is having serious issues with other outfits that are allegedly linked to Saudi Arabia. The tension was perceptible when hard bargaining was going on to decide who would be settled in which areas around Idlib. As a remedy, Turkey was persuaded during the bargaining to allow Jarablus to be used as an alternative destination. Elements of Ahrar al-Sham, Faylaq al-Rahman and HTS didn't encounter any problems in the Operation Euphrates Shield area controlled by Turkey, but Turkish soldiers seized the light weapons that Jaish al-Islam militants had been allowed to carry after Russian mediation.

As Jaish al-Islam has no presence in the north, there was some speculation that it might move to the south where its allies are present, but it was instead goaded toward the Turkish border. A social media message from Jaish al-Islam listed three issues between it and Turkey: Jaish al-Islam has its origins in the Salafist school  an ultraconservative branch of Sunni Islam generally denounced in Turkey; the group refuses to submit to the control of any other force, including Turkey; and it poses a threat to the Assad regime's allies, Russia and Iran.

Although Ahrar al-Sham and HTS are violently challenged by Jaish al-Islam, they also have Salafism in their ideological roots; the conflict is actually over Saudi Wahhabism. Although Jaish al-Islam political leader Mohammed Alloush resides in Istanbul, he is not seen as controlled by Turkey because of his connections to Saudi Arabia. Alloush attracted notice when he declared that his group will not be a party to conflicts in Idlib.

A logical analysis of the situation tells us that evacuating new fighters to Idlib simply means reinforcing armed groups already there in their rivalry for power. Although the standing of HTS and Faylaq al-Rahman are generally known, it's not clear which position Faylaq al-Rahman will adopt, because at eastern Ghouta it cooperated with HTS. Will it do the same in Idlib?

They may even opt for a practical way out and enlist with the Syrian National Army that Turkey has formed.

Turkey continues to embrace all jihadi groups and considers itself a fair, just sponsor. Turkey even tries to convert them to moderation. But radical elements generally prefer to remain independent when they are pushed toward moderation.

This is an endless game Turkey is playing with the radicals, and Turkey seems to be enjoying it.
Congress has revived threats to sanction Turkey over the detention of North Carolina Pastor Andrew Brunson, as well as other US citizens and Turkish staff members of US diplomatic missions that it believes are being held as political pawns.

Sens. James Lankford, R-Okla., and Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., declared in a joint statement April 19 that they would pursue targeted sanctions against Turkish officials in the foreign affairs spending bill for fiscal year 2019. Their statement noted that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has continued to violate the trust between our two nations by holding Pastor Brunson and other innocent Americans behind bars on fabricated charges.  Turkish officials who participate in the detainment of any innocent American citizen should face international consequences, and the actions against Pastor Brunson, in particular, qualify as hostage-taking.

Piling on the pressure, a bipartisan group of 66 senators in a letter to Erdogan called the mix of terrorism and espionage charges brought against Brunson an absurd collection of anonymous accusations, flights of fantasy and random character assassination. That a Turkish court should accept such an indictment as the basis for prosecution, they wrote, removes any shred of doubt that Andrew Brunson, like other American citizens, as well as Turkish employees of the US government detained under the state of emergency, is being used as a political pawn by elements of the Turkish government bent on destroying the longstanding partnership between two great nations.

The letter further states that the Donald Trump administration had been patient in the hope that justice would be done  in other words, that Brunson would be freed after his first courtroom hearing on Monday. But the presiding judge ordered Brunson back to prison, saying his trial would resume on May 7. The 50-year-old broke down in tears as he protested his innocence.

The senators wrote that they now have concluded that other measures will be necessary to ensure that the government of Turkey respects the right of law-abiding citizens and employees of the United States to travel to, reside in and work in Turkey without fear of persecution.

The letter comes amid growing administration pushback against Turkey, a critical NATO ally, over its increasingly aggressive behavior at home and beyond its borders.

Earlier this week, Trump tweeted about Turkey for the first time, saying Brunson was being persecuted in Turkey for no reason and that he should be allowed to come home. Vice President Mike Pence chimed in with a tweet of his own. Spoke to Pastor Brunsons wife this week. Assured her of our prayers & @POTUS and I are monitoring his trial in Turkey  Its time the Turkish govt release him.

Turkeys flirtation with Russia is also drawing Washingtons ire. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Wess Mitchell told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on April 18, Turkey lately has increased its engagement with Russia and Iran.  The ease with which Turkey brokered arrangements with the Russian military to facilitate the launch of its Operation Olive Branch in Afrin District  arrangements to which America was not privy  is gravely concerning.

Mitchell was referring to Turkeys January offensive against the Syrian Kurdish Peoples Protection Units (YPG). The group, labeled terrorists by Ankara because of its links to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) rebels inside Turkey, is the United States top ally against the Islamic State in Syria.

Mitchell warned, Ankara should be mindful of the risks in making strategic concessions to Moscow in order to achieve its tactical objectives in Syria. Moreover, he said, Ankaras plans to purchase the Russian S-400 missile system could potentially lead to sanctions  and adversely impact Turkeys participation in the F-35 [fighter jet] program.

The State Departments annual country-by-country report on human rights, which was made public today, contained exceptionally harsh language regarding Turkey. It catalogs a spike in torture  and in some cases, deaths  of detainees, inhumane prison conditions, stifling of free expression, jailing of journalists and credible allegations that the government contributed to civilian deaths in the connections with violent clashes between security forces and the PKK.

Until recently, the State Departments Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs was Ankaras fiercest ally on multiple fronts. It has been lobbying the White House to scotch the Pentagons partnership with the YPG. It persuaded Congress to excise sanctions language from this years appropriations bill that would have sanctioned Turkish officials responsible for unlawful arrests of US citizens. State Department officials argued time was needed to persuade Turkey to let Brunson and others go.

The State Department may have believed it had a deal, but the prosecutors choice of the May 7 date for a second hearing has reinforced suspicions that Brunsons fate is closely linked to that of a high-profile Turkish detainee in the United States. Mehmet Hakan Atilla, the former deputy chief executive of state-owned Halkbank, is facing up to 15 years in prison for his alleged role in violating US sanctions against Iran. A US judge postponed Atillas sentencing to May 7, and in a further twist, delayed it again to May 16.

Ankara's bigger worry is the size and terms of the fine the US Treasury will likely slap on Halkbank for sanctions-busting. Turkish officials warn that if the fine is "disproportionately high" and ends up coming out of Turkish taxpayers pockets, this will sink relations to new lows.

The initial sanctions language crafted by Lankford and Shaheen last year would have only been travel bans. A well-informed source told Al-Monitor on strict condition of anonymity, As most sanctions go, there was broad waiver authority for national security purposes  and when [the State Department] spoke to the senators, they agreed to withdraw the language from the appropriations bill because [Andrew Brunsons wife] Norine Brunson felt it best.

Besides, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was also opposed. Now, with Brunson and others still behind bars and Tillerson gone, the State Department  at Mitchells prodding  is toughening its stance, the source said.

The text of the new sanctions language that will be reinserted in the appropriations bill has not been finalized yet, but the aim is to push for the highest level in terms of Turkish officials who would be targeted by the proposed sanctions.

Chances of the sanctions language appearing in the next funding cycle are very high, the source predicted. Moreover, none of this precludes the use of sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Act against Turkish officials for human rights abuses or corruption. There will be annual lists. This is a very broad authority. If human rights groups want anyone added to the list, they have to build the legal case and give it to Congress to submit to the administration. Its terrible, but this is the first time the Hill stopped listening to State on Turkey. This is a good time to push, the source added. What Erdogan has been doing is shocking. And [the State Department] is shocked. They dont know what to do. And theyve been beaten [by senators] into submission.

With Turkey entering a new election cycle following the announcement of snap polls on June 24, its rather unlikely Erdogan will care. More likely, he will brush aside senators calls to free Brunson and whip up further anti-Western feelings so as to woo nationalist voters instead.

Yet should Mike Pompeo be confirmed as the new secretary of state, Washington may grow even less accommodating. Pompeo, a former Republican congressman from Kansas, served as a deacon and taught Sunday school at the Eastminster Presbyterian Church in Wichita, which is part of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church that Brunson belongs to.
President Donald Trumps announcement of a US-led strike on suspected Syrian chemical weapons sites last week signaled a changing of the guard in the war-torn country. As missiles struck three Syrian facilities, the US commander-in-chief said he would seek to hand off more responsibility in the yearslong conflict to Arab partners.

As the dust cleared from more than 100 American, French and British precision-guided missiles, The Wall Street Journal reported that national security adviser John Bolton soon got on the phone with top Egyptian officials to ask for Cairo to contribute troops to the US-led effort to defeat the Islamic State (IS) in Syrias northeast.

We have asked our partners to take greater responsibility for securing their home region, including contributing large amounts of money for the resources, equipment and all of the anti-[IS] efforts, Trump said. Increased engagement from our friends, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Egypt and others can ensure that Iran does not profit from the eradication of [IS].

The White House has asked those Arab nations to contribute funds and troops to stabilize Syria after 2,000 US troops leave the country. But Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates remain embroiled in Yemen, and Egypts weak commitment to the terror fight has frustrated the United States despite $1.3 billion in annual military grants.

Dating back to the Barack Obama administration, experts say the Pentagon has struggled to get Egypts armed forces to deal with a lingering terrorist threat despite repeated high-level visits to the country and efforts to realign military doctrine to fight Islamist insurgents.

The Trump administration has continued Obama-era policy to get Egypt to focus on expelling Islamist insurgents that exploited the countrys power vacuum to gain a foothold in the Sinai Desert by limiting expensive defense purchases. In September, the Pentagon hosted a scaled-down version of Operation Bright Star, a bilateral military exercise that had been suspended since 2013, reshaping the 10-day mission to focus on dealing with terror.

What the Egyptians would like to do is kill their way out of the problem, said Kenneth Pollack, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank. Humanity has learned time and again that you cannot kill your way out of a terrorist or insurgency problem.

Ever since the Obama administration lifted suspended deliveries of large-scale military systems on Cairo in 2015, handed down after violence against Muslim Brotherhood protesters, Egyptian military officials have pressed their American counterparts for high-value military technology such as surveillance drones, former US officials told Al-Monitor. Meanwhile, Egyptian officers have mostly rejected repeated efforts to apply counterinsurgency tactics that were first popularized by Gen. David Petraeus during the Iraq troop surge of 2007 and focused on minimizing civilian casualties and building local communities, citing equipment shortages.

The former American officials said Egyptian troops did well with disarming improvised explosive devices but struggled at basic military tasks such as firing munitions at stationary targets and conducting patrols. Meanwhile, Egyptian officials continued to accuse the United States of withholding lethal gadgets they insisted could quickly quash the Sinai threat.

They believed that we had technology that didnt exist, that was out of a sci-fi novel, Andrew Miller, a former National Security Council director for Egypt, told Al-Monitor. Some technology that if they got their hands on it would change the situation on the ground," Miller said.

Despite the resumption of US-led exercises and Boltons reported call with Cairo last week, military ties with Egypt under Trump appear to be backsliding. Last year, then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reprogrammed nearly $96 in military and economic aid and withheld another $195 million in Foreign Military Financing (FMF) after Sisi failed to meet human rights thresholds outlined by Congress and passed a harsh nongovernmental organization law over US opposition.

Lawmakers have also added language to the foreign operations funding bill for next year that calls for a probe into Egypts longstanding ties with North Korea.

At the same time, the terrorist threat in Sinai has become increasingly challenging, with gunmen killing 305 mosque-goers in November in the deadliest attack ever on Egyptian soil. Since then, The New York Times reported in February that Sisi had approved more than 100 Israeli airstrikes in the desert province.

In recent years, Congress has also probed the viability of the Egyptians as partners on human rights grounds. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., as far back as 2015 called into question whether the Pentagon could legally supply units that had committed extrajudicial killings in Sinai with the guns it would need to succeed on the ground in Syria. The State Departments annual country-by-country human rights report, released April 20, said an Egyptian drone strike in Rafah killed 10 civilians in January and an artillery shell that exploded on a crowded home later that month killed eight people.

The [Department of Defense's] perspective was that the priority placed on human rights made the problem more difficult, Miller said. With or without that scratchiness, the Egyptians were a difficult partner.
In socially conservative Gaza, women have been leading the Great Return March movement, uniting all Palestinians.

Gaza Strip  On one side of the fence, dozens of Israeli soldiers lay positioned behind sand dunes, tracking the Palestinian demonstrators through the crosshairs of their snipers.

On the other side, young women, with keffiyeh scarves covering half their faces to avoid tear gas suffocation, stand in front of the young protesting men, providing cover.

Women are less likely to be shot at, said 26-year-old Taghreed al-Barawi on April 13, while attending the third consecutive Friday protests in Gaza near the Israeli border with her younger sister and a group of friends.

We live in a male-dominated society and womens participation in protests can be a strange scene for some people in Gaza. However, this time men somehow were more accepting and encouraging. It seems like they finally realised that were all part of this and women should be present, Barawi said.

But being female is no guarantee for protection.

Some 1,600 protesters, including 160 women, have been wounded and more than 30 have been killed by Israeli snipers since the Great Return March movement began on March 30, marked as Land Day for Palestinians.

Even though Barawi inadvertently choked on tear gas numerous times and felt like she was about to faint, the thought of quitting the protest didnt cross her mind.

I had this feeling of strange courage, or I dont know what to call it  its as if the nearer I got to the border, the stronger my desire was to move forward. Maybe it was the urge to come closer to our home and visit it [territories that Israel took over in 1948].

Personally, Im also inspired and intrigued by Ahed Tamimi and her bravery standing up to the Israeli army, Barawi said.

The Great Return March is a non-violent, grassroots movement that calls for the right of return of Palestinian refugees to their homes, as per the UN Resolution 194, from which they were expelled in 1948 when the state of Israel was created.

Thousands have been participating in the mass sit-in, with dozens of tents erected along the border with Israel. Each tent is labelled with the name of the town that the family was expelled from in 1948. Its the largest mass protest Gaza has seen since the first Intifada.

The Palestinian territory with nearly two million population can only be accessed via Egypt and Israel but an Israeli-Egyptian blockade has been suffocating the Strip for 11 years. Living conditions have deteriorated over the years and unemployment wavers around 43 percent. Residents say they have reached a breaking point.

Palestinians have been protesting along Gazas border every Friday afternoon for years, but what is noticeably different this time is that a large number of women and girls have been actively participating on a scale not seen before.

And thats why this Fridays protests have been labelled the Womens March of Gaza.

Palestinian women gather near the Israel-Gaza border during a tent city protest demanding the right to return to their homeland, east of Gaza City [Mohammed Salem/Reuters]

My duty and responsibility

Among those wounded and killed by Israeli snipers so far have not just been demonstrators, but journalists and medics too.

Razan al-Najjar is a 20-year-old volunteer nurse who has been working 12-hour shifts every day since the march started to aid those wounded.

Najjar herself has been hurt. She has fainted twice due to gas inhalation, while on April 13 she broke her wrist after falling while running to attend to a wounded protester.

Many urged her to take the ambulance to the hospital, but Najjar kept working.

The Israeli army does intend to shoot as many as they can. Its crazy and Id be ashamed if I was not there for my people, Najjar said.

Its my duty and responsibility to be there and aid those injured.

Some of the injuries Najjar and her colleagues treat are ghastly  many of the hurt protesters arrive with large, gaping wounds, their flesh fully exposed due to the use of explosive bullets. Many of them have had their legs amputated.

Take care of my mother and my brothers Razan, a young man told Najjar, she recalled, as he set out into the field to take part in the protest. He was shot dead later that day by an Israeli sniper.

It breaks my heart that some of the young men who were injured or killed made their wills in front of me, Najjar told Al Jazeera. Some even gave me their accessories [as gifts] before they died.

One photograph that has gone viral shows 16-year-old Hind Abu Ola running away from the border fence with four young men rushing behind her, linking hands to form a human chain to protect her from flying bullets.

The teenager had seen that the young men had been suffocating and losing consciousness due to the large amount of tear gas dropped near the border fence.

Armed with onions and a bottle of perfume in her bag, she then ran towards them and helped revive them.

At that time, they found themselves under fire from Israeli snipers, so all five of them started sprinted back.

The Womens Committee of the march later honoured Abu Ola, who has become a symbol of womens resistance.

  # ..              #__     . pic.twitter.com/UkbDjRzGzh     (@PalinfoAr) April 2, 2018

Barawi, the protester, explained that the active participation of women has helped in uniting Palestinians and strengthening the movement.

I think thats something Hamas and Fatah realised and touched on in the march. Theres no difference between a Hamas martyr and a Fatah martyr. The Palestinian woman will grieve both equally. This march was great because it brought that to peoples attention. I saw no flags but Palestines, Barawi said.

I loved the sense of unity we all felt when both young men and women helped each other.

The womens participation also caught the attention of Israeli army spokesman Avichay Adraee who advised Palestinian women on Twitter that it was best for them to stay at home.

Translation: The good woman is the honourable woman, who takes care of her home and her children, and serves as a good example to them. However, the deprived woman who lacks honour does not take care of these things, acts wildly against her feminine nature, and cares not for how she is seen in society.

A womans beauty is in her feminity and her weapon is her brain. So where are these traits in the vandals personality?

Palestinian women bake bread during a tent city protest at Israel-Gaza border, in the southern Gaza Strip [Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters]





Women leaders more likely to achieve goals

Palestinian women have many times in the past led successful non-violent resistance against the Israeli occupation.

Studies have shown that movements that welcome women into leadership positions are more likely to achieve their goals due to their use of non-violent tactics, which typically lead to more peaceful and democratic societies.

Iktimal Hamad, head of the Womens Committee grinds some wheat in one of the tents in Gaza near the Israeli border. [Courtesy of Womens Committee of Great Return March]

The Palestinian woman is an integral pillar of the national movement and community. Shes the big-hearted patient, struggling mother, big sister and little daughter, said Hamad, the head of the Womens Committee of the march.

Womens presence at the march sends a clear message to the world that our protest is non-violent and peaceful. The Palestinian woman is a struggling woman but also a leading one, especially when its a national duty.

For the April 20 protests, the womens committee will be organising cultural and awareness programmes. Elderly women will be telling their tales of the Nakba  the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948  to the youngest and making traditional Palestinian food, while the youth will be performing the traditional dabke dance.

This will plant a lot of seeds of awareness among younger generations of women, Hamad said.

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Rana Shubair has been bringing her children regularly to the protest so they can learn about their historical homeland. Just a few kilometres away, on the other side of Israels fenced border lie villages, many of which were destroyed during the Nakba and now stand abandoned.

Upon learning that most of historical Palestine now belongs to Israel, her friends child asked: Why dont we tell the police? Shubair recounted.

I think that what this child proposed is what we, as Palestinians, are seeking  and that is to hold Israel accountable and to demand the application of UN resolution 194 on the Right to Return, Shubair said.

As a Palestinian, I belong to all of Palestine and I have the right to visit any Palestinian city. I want to be part of this protest to bring about the change I ardently believe in.

Anas Jnena reported from the Gaza Strip. Mersiha Gadzo reported and wrote from Doha.








It has been a long time coming, but finally spring warmth has surged into Western Europe. Only a week ago it snowed in Spain, then widespread rain held temperatures in single figures.

Now, a circulating wind field around an area of low pressure to the west of Portugal is encouraging a warm, southerly breeze. The effect is to transport warmth northwards. That, combined with a strong spring sun shining through clear skies has lifted temperatures rapidly.

London hasnt seen an April day this warm since 1949. Belgium reported the second hottest April day since 1833. Western Germany found 29 degrees Celsius and the Netherlands hit 30C. These figures, for Trier and Scheveningen repectively, are at least 15C above average and, subject to confirmation, could be a new record.
There have been no rivers of blood in Britain, but Enoch Powell and his racist thinking still find acceptance.

It has been 50 years since British shadow defence secretary Enoch Powell gave his rivers of blood speech on April 20, 1968. To mark the half-centenary, the BBC broadcast his speech for the first time in full, on the radio.

The decision caused outrage from those who would rather the speech, and its popularity at the time, was forgotten.

Some 74 percent of Britons in the aftermath of Powells rhetoric agreed with him  that black immigration was likely to cause violence on our streets in the not too distant future, or as he put it  In this country in 15 or 20 years time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.

A few days later, a group of white youths descended on the christening party of a Caribbean family, slashing the face of the babys grandfather. They chanted Powell and Why dont you go back to your own country!

Fifty years later, the UK finds itself amid another immigration scandal in which the children of Caribbean labourers invited to help rebuild the British economy after World War II are threatened with deportation. Has Britain really changed in this half a century?

Support for Powell from the left and right

Although lauded at the time for speaking the truths of the common man, Powell was also accused of inventing some of the anecdotes he used in his speeches.

Journalist Clem Jones, editor of a prominent evening newspaper, was first to notice the trend when he researched a white constituent who had allegedly complained to Powell about being the only white person on her street. Powell had used the white constituent as an anecdote in his speech.

Jones sent journalists to find this woman. They searched the electoral register and knocked on doors.

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Jones eventually concluded that the woman Powell used to legitimise his views simply did not exist. A similar story had emerged when Jones looked into another anti-immigration speech Powell gave some weeks earlier in a nearby town, Walsall. It was established that similar complaints were being sent by far-right National Front members.

Likewise, MI5 later investigated a march of 500 dockers supporting Powell through London and discovered that it too had been orchestrated by fascists.

Powells symbiotic relationship with the far right cannot account for all of the support he received though. It does not explain why left-wing trade unions also came out in his support, or how the left-wing Labour government then introduced the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, ending a welcome period for members of former colonies. What Powell was saying clearly resonated with millions, if not tens of millions.

Unexpected public figures leapt to his defence. Eric Clapton, the famed guitarist, expressed support for Powell on stage in 1976 and asked foreigners to leave.

The staunch socialist leader of the Labour Party, Michael Foot, called him an outstanding personality and described his sacking as tragic. Powell had proposed a ministry of repatriation to co-ordinate voluntary repatriations, although the idea never got implemented.

In July 1969, the Guardian was critical of Powells tone and spurious statistics, but nevertheless asked, could the unfortunate concentration of coloured communities in a few areas of the country be altered more by voluntary repatriation than by a practical policy of dispersal?

What Powell had tapped into was a reservoir of discontent felt by the public about high levels of immigration. What he decided to do, rather than calm fears, was incite people to violence.

Powells persistent popularity

Powell was no prophet. There were no rivers of blood, despite immigration to Britain continuing. There was, however, Brexit, secured partly thanks to a rigorous anti-immigration campaign.

There have also been outrageous immigration policies that Powell would have approved of, including a nastily named hostile environment policy towards migrants ordered by Theresa May, which have led, among other things, to the Windrush scandal currently rocking British society.

This scandal came as no surprise. There remains a deeply concerning and open strain of Powell revivalism on the British right.

In 2012, senior Conservative minister Iain Duncan Smith wrote a foreword to a new collection of essays that mixed very mild scolding with admiration of Powell. He called the rivers of blood speech injudicious use of inflammatory language and claimed that Powell was not racist. Young Conservatives, too, are palpably, albeit privately, obsessed with how Powell was right should no longer be a slogan for the far right alone.

Half a century has passed since Britain heard Powells words  and one question remains: He wasnt right, so why did both the Conservatives and Labour seem to agree with him?

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance.
Last Saturday, when the United States, the UK and France launched strikes on three chemical facilities in Syria, the move was met with disapproval in some quarters. The pre-announced spectacle blew up three buildings and took no lives, but some pronounced it a dangerous escalation. Some spoke of its illegality. All complained about its disregard for the OPCW investigation.

The action, which lasted less than an hour, was an escalation only if everything that preceded it was normal. By this reckoning, Syria has now returned to its status quo of genocide by the Assad regime.

The action was illegal only if by legality we mean approval by the UN Security Council. But the Security Council is not a neutral adjudicating authority like a court. Its decisions are constrained by the interests of its permanent members. To say an action is legal, in this case, would be to say: Vladimir Putin approved.

What then of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) investigation?

This depends on what answer is being sought. Because the OPCWs remit does not include apportioning blame. Untrammelled access for the OPCW would have merely proved what was already known: that a chemical attack took place. It would not have resolved the manufactured controversy over who was responsible (manufactured, because there is only one party in Syria with the means, intention and history of deploying chemical weapons by air).

But had the OPCW confirmed Syrian leader Bashar al-Assads responsibility, what consequences should have followed?

Last year, after the Khan Sheikhoun chemical attack, the UN did respond to the calls for an investigation by creating the UN-OPCW Joint Investigation Mechanism (JIM) with the authority to identify perpetrators. But once the JIM concluded that al-Assad was responsible for the attack, Russia revoked its authority. And the fact that the UN confirmed the regimes responsibility for the attack didnt provoke any calls for accountability from the crowd currently insisting on the sanctity of the legal process.

All calls for more investigation sputter into platitudes about a negotiated settlement or UN authorised action (which, is another way of saying never, since Putin is unlikely to grant western powers the authority to act against his interests).

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Fetishising a dubious legal process thus becomes a temporising measure that grants the perpetrators of mass crime impunity against the palpable illegality of using chemical weapons. That the case is not made in good faith is obvious from the analogy that often accompanies it.

Should we be trusting the same governments and agencies that lied to us about Iraqs weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)?

Is Syria like Iraq?

Considering the ubiquity of the Iraq analogy, it would seem that the old cliche that generals are always fighting the last war also applies to their critics. Syria is Iraq only if facile juxtapositions replace substantive comparisons. Beyond the fact that both countries have been led by Baathist regimes that brought immense misery upon their people, there is no concrete detail in which Syria and Iraq are similar.

In 2003, Iraq was invaded even though there was no imminent humanitarian catastrophe demanding action; in Syria, the regime has been on a rampage since 2011, yet only on two occasions has it been subjected to limited and rather ineffective military strikes on humanitarian grounds.

Where in Iraq, the US and Britain had used false pretexts for action, in Syria real and frequent violations have only twice shaken the west out of inaction. Where in Iraq, the alleged possession of WMDs was deemed sufficient grounds for an invasion, their confirmed use in Syria has only belatedly occasioned a response, largely symbolic, lacking shock or awe.

The analogy also seems ignorant of the knowns and unknowns in the case against Iraq. In 2003, despite intense US pressure, international bodies like the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) and OPCW declined to endorse the administrations case against Iraq. In Syria, the regime hasnt denied its possession of chemical weapons and the UN has confirmed their use on at least 34 occasions.

The deep state argument

But what of the claim that a deep state is trying to mislead us into war, as it did in Iraq?

In 2002, the CIA resisted administration pressure to provide a defensible rationale for invading Iraq. Then Vice President Dick Cheney had to personally visit the CIAs headquarters in Langley several times to pressure analysts to produce an assessment favourable to the administrations case. But, in spite of the bullying, the deep state (including the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, the Department of Energy and the State Department) delivered their combined judgment in a caveat-laden National Intelligence Estimate that would only confirm that if left unchecked, Iraq may develop nuclear weapons in a decade.

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The Bush administration recognised the inadequacy of the assessment and, in the end, had to rely on two ad hoc operations based in the Pentagon to produce its own politicised intelligence, outside the recalcitrant channels of the deep state. French, German and British intelligence also failed to oblige Bush (leading the UKs then-PM Tony Blair to produce his own politicised dodgy dossier).

In Syria, by contrast, US, British, and French intelligence agencies have been unanimous in delivering confident judgments on the regimes responsibility for the chemical attack. These judgments have been corroborated by Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), journalistic investigations, witness testimonies, human rights organisations, and, of course, the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria (which confirmed at least 34 instances of the regimes use of chemical weapons even before Douma).

The case for Iraq never came close to achieving this kind of consensus.

The Halabja massacre

There is, however, an Iraq analogy that is relevant to Syria: It is not 2003, but 1988, when, during Saddam Husseins military campaign in the north, nearly 5,000 civilians were killed in a chemical attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja.

The attack followed the towns capture by the Iranian army, and Iraq immediately blamed it on Iran as a false flag operation. US intelligence, which at the time was allied to the Iraqi regime, amplified the claim. But in an ironic twist, once Hussein fell out of western favour after annexing Kuwait, anti-imperialists (including, sadly, the late Edward Said) felt obliged to use the false flag theory to absolve Hussein in their misguided attempt to forestall an intervention.

Therein lies the lesson: Facile contrarianism is an intellectual dead end that contributes to moral atrophy and reactionary politics. We live in a time of great danger and, due to its scope and consequences, Syria may become the defining conflict of this century.

We can differ on our views about the best course for achieving peace, but we must not allow our conclusions to determine which facts we acknowledge and which we dont. Let us certainly not distort or bend the truth to satisfy our preconceptions. In these times of universal deceit, it must become a moral duty for all citizens to confront misuses of language and history.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance.
The South African president returned home a day early after violent clashes broke out in North West province.

Cyril Ramaphosa has cut short his trip to the Commonwealth summit in the UK by a day to address violent demonstrations at home.

The South African president called for calm and asked law enforcement to exercise maximum restraint in a statement issued on Thursday amid clashes in North West province.

Protests broke out on Wednesday in the provinces capital Mahikeng, with residents demanding the resignation of local premier Supra Mahumapelo of the ruling African National Congress party (ANC) and the restoration of health services.

They are the first big demonstrations since Ramaphosa took office two months ago.

Many people you talk to say they are frustrated and they want the president to effect changes to help improve their livelihood Catherine Soi, Al Jazeera correspondent

Local media reported buses and cars were set on fire and shops had been looted.

All school, clinics and the hospital have been shut down. Protesters have blocked the roads with rocks in Danville, police spokesperson Adele Myburgh told South African news site News24.

On Thursday, one man was killed in a car chase between police and protesters, TimesLive reported. The South African news site said police confirmed the death but claimed they had nothing to do with it.

Sixteen people have reportedly been arrested for public violence since the protests broke out.

Residents took to the streets after it was reported on Sunday that state-owned arms company Denel had bent the rules to give a 1.1 million south african rand ($92,000) bursary to Mahumapelos son. Denel said the award was given in compliance with Denels policy.

High unemployment

National broadcaster eNCA said the protests had been sparked by the death of two locals who could not get help at a clinic due to a go-slow strike that has been in force for weeks.

The office of Mahumapelo has called for an end to the protests.

[It is] an anti-Supra Mahumalepo political campaign which seeks to intimidate residents of Mahikeng, TimesLive quoted his spokesperson Brian Setswambung as saying.

Reporting from Johannesburg, Al Jazeeras Catherine Soi said many of the issues faced by residents of North West province were felt throughout the country.

The economy of the country is struggling, the unemployment rate is extremely high, she said.

South Africa is synonymous to protests, weve seen students in the last years protesting saying fees have to drop, weve seen minors protesting asking for a better job environment.

Many people you talk to say they are frustrated and they want the president to effect changes to help improve their livelihood.

Neighbouring Botswana reportedly closed entry points leading to Mahikeng on Thursday.

Ramaphosa is set to visit North West province on Friday.
Ostritz, Germany  Nearly 1,000 neo-Nazis and other far-right sympathisers are expected to fill the sleepy German town of Ostritz this weekend, as a similar number of anti-fascists are set to counter the far-right gatherings with a rally and festival of their own.

Located just across the bridge from Poland, the town will host the Shield and Sword (SS) festival on Friday and Saturday. The neo-Nazi gathering is organised by the ultra-nationalist National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD).

Anti-fascists from Germany and Poland are expected to join a rally and music concert under the slogan Rechts Rockt Nicht! (The right does not rock), just metres away from the festivals venue. At the same time, the towns main square will host the Ostritz Peace Festival in protest against the far right.

Friday marks the 129th anniversary of German Nazi leader Adolf Hitlers birthday, celebrated by the far right.

According to local media, about 1,000 police officers from across Saxony and other regions will be deployed to Ostritz, a town with less than 2,500 inhabitants.

Many streets will be closed off, and police will control the roads leading into town.

The Shield and Sword festival will take place at the Neisseblick Hotel, a property of Hans-Peter Fischer, a German entrepreneur closely connected with the far right. Political speeches, right-wing music concerts, MMA shows and a tattoo convention are among the events attractions, which will be accompanied by stalls with products made by right-wing labels.

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Thorsten Heise, the festivals organiser and regional head of the NPD party in Thuringia, and Udo Voight, current member of the European Parliament from the NPD, both known for their ultranationalist views, are scheduled to attend.

Although public propagating of fascism in Germany is illegal, event organisers have taken advantage of the freedom of assembly rule guaranteed by the German constitution, which grants everyone the right to express their views.

Such an assembly, however, has to be non-violent and open to the public, even if it is hosted on private property.

According to Lars Geiges, a political scientist from the Research and Documentation Center for Political and Religious Extremism at the University of Gottingen, the organisers were required to submit their speeches to the authorities in advance.

If the conditions are violated or if the police identify other unconstitutional behaviour  such as denying the Holocaust or showing the Hitler greeting  the meeting can be ended, Geiges told Al Jazeera.

Not welcome here

The event sparked strong opposition from anti-fascist forces. Forty German mayors signed a declaration on April 6 protesting the gathering.

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Those who question human rights and those opposed to democracy and pluralism are not welcome here, the statement read.

In response to criticism, Shield and Sword festival organisers published a letter on the events website addressing Ostritz residents. The letter blamed the authorities for wrongly spending the taxpayers money on the Peace Festival instead of, for example, renovating the war memorial.

They also assured the public that the city would remain safe during the festival.

Ostritz will be the safest place in Saxony this weekend, free from theft or burglaries, the statement read. Further, the organisers invited all residents to attend the event free of charge.

According to Sascha Elser from the Rechts Rockt Nicht! initiative and an organiser of the anti-fascist rally, the choice of Ostritz as the festivals location was not accidental.

Ostritz is located at the border with Lower Silesia, a region which was justly and rightfully bestowed to the Polish people after 1945. To the present day, the Shield & Sword organisers describe the region as being under interim Polish administration,' Elser told Al Jazeera. Clearly, they want it back.

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Despite the irredentist views of the NPD, as well as the presence of openly anti-Polish bands in the concerts lineup, Polish far-right groups have joined the organisation of the festival. A similar event that was planned in Wroclaw, Poland, was cancelled to allow Polish allies to join the German gathering.

But the event reveals more about the nature of contemporary German far right, analysts say.

With the rise to prominence of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which received 12.6 percent of the vote in recent federal elections, the NPD has increasingly fallen into irrelevance.

As a result, the extreme right in Germany is no longer based on parties, but much more on movements and subcultures, Geiges explained.

Events such as the Shield and Sword festival allow the far right to recruit new members, network and survive.

Music offers an entertaining programme, in a way as a framework in which ideologies can be transferred. In addition to that, and not to be neglected, the events bring in some good money, he added.
New data shows at least 70 people were killed last year as land conflicts in countrys Amazon intensified.

Sao Paulo  Data released this week by Brazil rural violence watchdog Comissao Pastoral da Terra (CPT) showed there had been at least 70 killings related to land and resource conflicts in 2017, the bloodiest year on record since 2003.

During April and May 2017, nine small farmers were killed by hooded gunmen, an indigenous tribe was attacked with guns and knives, and 10 agricultural workers were shot dead by police during clashes on a squatted farm.

Historic problems, such as land grabbing, armed militias in the countryside and massacres have increased, CPT national coordinator Paulo Cesar Moreira told Al Jazeera.

The data comes nearly 22 years after the Eldorado dos Carajas massacre in the Amazon state of Para when 19 landless farmers were shot and killed by military police.

Land conflict killings spiked suddenly in 2015 when Brazil plunged into political and economic crisis, and the violence has grown steadily since, with most of the killings taking place in the Amazon states.

In their 2016 Defenders of the Earth report, NGO Global Witness noted: the ruthless scramble for the Amazons natural wealth makes Brazil, once again, the worlds deadliest country in terms of sheer numbers killed.

Policies incentivise violence

Brazils President Michel Temer, who took power in 2016 in a controversial impeachment process, is allied to a powerful conservative agricultural caucus that holds around two-fifths of seats in the lower house.

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The block has pressured to give amnesty to land grabbers, roll back indigenous and forest protections and loosen the definition of slave labour.

Temer has not spoken out on the spike in rural killings.

Marcio Astrini, policy coordinator for Greenpeace Brazil, said these measures gave unscrupulous farmers, loggers and land grabbers a heightened sense of impunity.

What we are seeing now is the direct result of policies that incentivise violence in the countryside, he said.

Astrini said that for the past four decades, organised crime groups have operated in Brazils Amazon, plundering natural resources like precious timber and have grown so powerful they elect their own candidates.

Indigenous leaders say Temers government is working to roll back protections in parts of the Amazon [File: Apu Gomes/AFP]

According to CPT, the number of killings is likely even higher, given that an investigation into a reported massacre of uncontacted Indigenous tribesmen in a remote part of the Amazon last year has not been concluded by authorities and that many other killings go unregistered or unreported.

Land ownership in Brazil is among the worlds most concentrated, which experts say is a main driver of conflicts as powerful groups look to expand, and traditional communities are left to resist.

Impunity is also a major factor, according to analysts and watchdog groups.

Between 1985 and 2017, CPT recorded 1,904 killings in rural conflicts, whereas only 113 people were tried in court.

We will continue to fight for our communities

There are few signs of any respite in the violence.

Last weekend, it was reported that Nazildo dos Santos Brito, leader of a Quilombo community formed by descendants of runaway slaves, had been killed in Para state. His body was found on Sunday.

[Nazildo Parate

was on the list of prized people to kill. I am on the list too. But the fight continues, we will continue denouncing, fighting for our communities.]

Nazildo, 33, was involved in a long-running dispute with a local palm oil company that he had denounced for local environmental damage, after which had received death threats, Amazonia Real news agency reported. Police have launched an investigation, but no one has been charged.

He was on the list of prized people to kill, Parate Tembe, a local Indigenous leader and friend who campaigned with Nazildo told Al Jazeera.

I am on the list too, he said.

But the fight continues, we will continue denouncing, fighting for our communities.

In March, community leader of the group Association of Caboclos, Indigenas and Quilombolas of Amazonia, Paulo Sergio Almeida Nascimento, 47, was killed in Para state. He was a very visible figure in a campaign denouncing a Norwegian-owned alumina refinery that was found to have leaked residue, polluting local rivers.

We have total conviction that he was killed over his work, said Ismael Moraes, a lawyer working on behalf of Nascimentos group.
US officials have stated that they want to challenge Iranian influence in Syria, but how likely is a confrontation?

Tensions between Iran and the United States over Syria are at the highest they have been since the countrys civil war started in 2011.

While Tehran and Washington have repeatedly voiced indignation about the others presence in Syria, they have not reached the point of a military confrontation so far.

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While the US has targeted fighters loyal to President Bashar al-Assad who have threatened its Kurdish allies and airbases, it has not directly attacked Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps officers, who command both pro-Assad militias and are embedded with Syrian military units.

Similarly, while Iran has warned the US against intervening in Syria, it has not instructed the groups under its sway to target American forces.

In recent months, however, questions arose as to whether the US will continue its policy of non-confrontation with Iran in Syria.

In March, US President Donald Trump appointed John Bolton, a trenchant critic of Iran, as his new national security adviser.

A George W. Bush-era relic, best known as an advocate of the Iraq war, Bolton has reportedly lobbied Trump for a more aggressive posture on Iran.

The US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, also fuelled concern about escalation when she said that preventing Irans entrenchment in Syria was one of the Trump administrations top priorities.

Irans main regional rival, Israel, is said to have informed US intelligence officials before targeting Iranian positions in Syria, a sign of increasing cooperation between the two, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Militias backed by Iran for their part have vowed to target the US presence in Syria.

What we are currently seeing is the most serious attempt by hawkish and conservative advisers to get the US directly involved in the Syrian war, an attempt that echoes Israeli concerns about US withdrawal plans from Syria, said Joe Macaron of the Arab Center Washington, DC, further explaining that the aggressive position is not universally accepted.

Trump himself and the Pentagon are resisting this temptation, Israel will most probably continue in the foreseeable future to fight its own battles against Iran.

Testing the boundaries

Despite the ratcheting up of threats, the idea of an all-out conflict between Tehran and Washington has little appeal to either, according to Scott Lucas, a professor of international politics at the University of Birmingham.

Theres no appetite on either side to deliberately look for a wider conflict because then your costs outweigh your benefits, he told Al Jazeera.

You have to put in so many resources and have the problem of not knowing how far this will go, Lucas added.

Instead, he said both Iran and the US seemed set to continue with a policy of pushing the envelope.

Theres always the possibility of low-level conflict through people seeing how far they can go, but so far that hasnt escalated into a wider military conflict, he explained, giving the example of US attacks on Iranian-backed militias when they encroached on a US-controlled airbase near the Jordanian border in May 2017.

According to Lucas, while the US and Iran do not want war with each other at this moment in time, this does not mean they are not looking for other ways to negate each others influence in Syria.

He pointed to both countries having influence over effective fighting forces; Iran through its militias and the US through the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

Lucas added Washington could also pressurise Iran to limit its role in Syria through sanctions, while Tehran could seek exploitation of Syrian natural resources to counter any US punitive measures.

Waiting out the US

In the seven years since the start of the Syrian conflict, Iran has established deep roots within the country by commanding militias that count fighters in the tens of thousands.

The US has established influence in the countrys north, where the SDF rule, and in the south along the Jordanian border.

But the US public opinion has turned overwhelmingly against continued military intervention in Middle Eastern countries.

For some in Iran, there is a belief that the price of the US presence in Middle Eastern states cannot be sustained by Washington.

Iran believes that a continued presence of American occupation forces in Syria is costly, said Professor Mohammad Marandi of the University of Tehran.

It angers Syrians, it makes the US vulnerable and ultimately it is not sustainable.
Documents obtained by US daily show Republican fundraiser drafted plan in hopes of getting payoffs from China and UAE.

Elliott Broidy, a top fundraiser for President Donald Trump, explored plans to get Chinese dissident Guo Wengui expelled from the US in hopes of receiving payoffs from China and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), documents obtained by the New York Times appear to show.

According to a report published on Friday in the US newspaper, Broidy proposed working with George Nader, the adviser to Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, to use their combined influence in the White House and Abu Dhabi for personal gain.

Broidy allegedly sent a proposal for the three-way deal to Nader in May 2017, 20 pages of emails from Broidys account reportedly show.

In the plan, as outlined by the newspaper, Nader would try to sway Mohammed bin Zayed to ask the US to hand over Guo.

The grounds for the extradition request would reportedly be a business dispute between the billionaire Chinese dissident and the UAE.

Broidy, for his part, would use his influence in the White House to try to persuade the administration to comply with the UAEs request.

UAE investment funds

Broidy wrote that the UAE could then hand Guo over to China in exchange for them paying off Guos $3bn debt to UAE investment funds, according to the New York Times report.

In the draft email, Broidy reportedly wrote that China would agree to pay Nader and himself.

Abu Dhabi would pay as well, the New York Times quoted the email as stating.

A source familiar with the case allegedly told the New York Times that Broidy had not sent the email but did approach Nader in general terms about the proposal.

It is unclear if Broidys plan has had any results. Guo Wengui is currently still in New York.





Broidy has denied the allegations, telling the New York Times in a statement that I have never had a strategy or plan regarding Mr Guo nor was there any compensation given or even discussed. And, to be clear, at no time was I told by George Nader or anyone that anyone from UAE had any interest whatsoever in Mr Guo.

The New York Times said it received the trove of emails from an anonymous group critical of his [Broidys] advocacy of foreign policies in the Middle East.

Broidys lawyers in March filed a lawsuit charging the government of Qatar of hacking his emails. Qatar has denied the accusations.

Broidy has previously been accused of using his political capital to attempt to get former State Secretary Rex Tillerson fired for not supporting the UAE-backed blockade of Qatar.

Nader has been described as a shadowy figure who travels extensively throughout the Middle East, reportedly serving as a means for backchannel communications between the US government, Israel and its sworn enemies  Syria, Iran and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah.
IMF warns of economic downturn

The IMF warns that risky financial assets and stock markets have surged once again and could crash with devastating consequences.
A group of Iranians has filed a lawsuit demanding court intervention after the US government denied the refugee applications of roughly 90 refugees waiting in Austria.

The Iranians are seeking refugee status in the US through the unique Lautenberg-Specter programme, which is meant to protect vulnerable groups such as religious minorities.

The programme began with the Lautenberg Amendment, passed in 1989, which allowed Jewish people from the former Soviet Union to apply for refugee status. In 2004, the Specter Amendment expanded the programme to Iranian nationals from minority religious groups.

The Lautenberg-Specter programme requires a US resident to apply on behalf of the Iranian citzen, who then goes through a screening process. If they pass, the applicant then travels to Austria to continue the process of gaining refugee status.

But in February, about 90 applicants who had already travelled through the programme received notices of denial that stated only that they were being denied as a matter of discretion, according to a press release from the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP).

Some of the Iranians had been waiting over a year, the release said.

Cruelly whipped away

The Iranians are represented by IRAP and the law firm of Latham & Watkins LLP.

Mariko Hirose, IRAPs litigation director, said in the statement the US government extended a helping hand to these Iranian  religious minorities only to cruelly whip it away for no discernible reason at all.

One of the plaintiffs in the case, identified as Jane Doe #5, said in court filings that the blanket denial had terrible impact on her family.

[B]ecause we had initially anticipated our stay in Austria to last only three to six months, we have run out of savings and are in dire financial straits, she said.

Belinda Lee, a partner with Latham & Watkins LLP, said their clients long to be reunited as families and free from the risk of deportation back to Iran, where they would be at an even greater risk of persecution.

Religious freedom

Critics of Iran claim the country favours the rights of its Muslim majority, while disadvantaging its many religious minorities, such as Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and followers of the Bahai faith.

Others, however, highlight that Iran guarantees religious minorities such as Jews representation in its parliament.

President Hassan Rouhani pledged after he was elected in 2013 to work for the total freedom of Iranians in their personal lives.

In todays world, having access to information and the right of free dialogue and the right to think freely is the right of all people, including the people of Iran, Rouhani told NBC News at the time.

The administration of US President Donald Trump has taken a hardline stance on Iran. The Trump administration has also initiated policies some have called Islamophobic, including his executive order to ban immigration from some predominately-Muslim nations, including Iran.

The Trump team justified the orders, popularly called Muslim bans, by citing national security concerns.

Daniel Mark, the chairman of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, an independent government commission, said in a statement that national security must remain a priority for all US government policies Yet we also must make timely security assessments in keeping with the intent of the Lautenberg Amendment to keep refugee applicants safe.

According to court documents, Jane Doe #5, waiting in Vienna, said she hopes the situation is soon resolved: I am anxious to travel to the US and be reunited with my in-laws.
LA fitness fired staff and apologised after two black men were told to leave despite having memberships.

A US fitness company has fired three of its staff after two black men accused them of racial profiling.

Videos of the men being kicked out of a New Jersey gym garnered more than 4m combined views after they were uploaded on Monday by Tshyrad Oates.

You kicked me out the gym for no reason, Oatess unnamed friend can be heard saying in one of the clips.

Ive been a member here for at least eight years. Youve got the cops here, youve got the police here.

Oates himself had joined his friend on a four-day guest pass.

In a statement issued on Wednesday, LA Fitness said it had apologised to the gym member.

Regrettably, our staff unnecessarily escalated the situation and called the police rather than work through it, it said.

#BoycottStarbucks

The controversy comes on the heels of an incident at a Philadelphia branch of coffee chain Starbucks. Donte Robinson and Rashon Nelson were arrested last week while they were waiting for a business meeting.

The arrest of the two men led to days of protests and the hashtag #BoycottStarbucks going viral on Twitter.

Starbucks issued an apology and vowed to close down more than 8,000 stores for one day in May for racial bias training for their staff.

Speaking out on Good Morning America on Thursday, Robinson, 23, said: I want to make sure this situation doesnt happen again.

What I want is for a young man or young men not to be traumatised by this; and instead, motivated and inspired.

@Starbucks The police were called because these men hadnt ordered anything. They were waiting for a friend to show up, who did as they were taken out in handcuffs for doing nothing. All the other white ppl are wondering why its never happened to us when we do the same thing. pic.twitter.com/0U4Pzs55Ci  Melissa DePino (@missydepino) April 12, 2018

Other US companies have recently been under fire for racial profiling.

In February, restaurant chain Applebees apologised to two women who were accused of ordering food and leaving without paying at a Missouri branch a day prior.

After being mocked, humiliated, and embarrassed, we were asked to pay for our food, leave, and not come back, Alexis Brison said in a Facebook post.

And in March, Pancake restaurant IHOP drew criticism when a manager at a location in Maine asked a group of black teens to pay for their meals upfront.

IHOP too issued an apology, saying they have zero tolerance for actions that are or allude to discrimination of any type.
Lane Murdock says she dreamed up Fridays walkout because she was tired of government inaction over gun violence.

New York City  As news broke that a gunman had killed 17 people at a Florida high school last February, then 15-year-old Lane Murdock decided that she was tired of government inaction in the face of gun violence.

That same day, she created an online petition calling for students to protest by walking out of their schools on April 20, the 19th anniversary of the Columbine massacre, in which two students killed 12 of their classmates and a teacher before committing suicide.

The majority of teenagers have no right to vote, leaving our voice unheard, Murdock wrote on the petition website change.org at the time. As the future of America, it is time for teenagers to speak their minds and put their frustration into action.

Murdock did not anticipate how popular her call would be.

In the two months since the Parkland shooting, the petition blossomed into a national organisation, National School Walkout, and prompted more than 2,500 student groups to organise their own April 20 walkouts throughout the US.

Thousands of students, teachers and their supporters are set to walk out of the classroom on Friday to protest against gun violence.

Murdock, now 16, joins other prominent youth leaders in a movement for reform that has galvanised both sides of the US gun control debate.

Goodnight everyone. Tomorrow we all make history with #NationalSchoolWalkout.

Get some rest and if you wish to donate to support the movement do so here: https://t.co/W7y9jXy4mf pic.twitter.com/WWInfNQdqd  L Maxine Murdock  (@lanemurdock2002) April 20, 2018

Murdock, who lives in Ridgefield, Connecticut, chose a school walkout in emulation of international student protests of the 1960s.

She said she felt that a walkout could mobilise US students still too young to vote.

When youre a student and you dont have voting power  since youre a minor, the power you do have is your attendance in school, Murdock told Al Jazeera. So if we own that, we can use it for an activity or a movement we care about.

Murdocks protest follows the national school walkout that took place on March 14, one month after the Parkland attack. Students, teachers and their supporters also held worldwide March for Our Lives rallies on March 24.

The walkouts and rallies have also been paralleled with calls for boycotting companies that do business with the NRA, as well as organising town halls to hold politicians responsible. Thousands of young people who will be voting age by Novembers elections have also registered to vote in recent weeks.

Students and others chant at a rally calling for more gun control three days after the shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida [File: Jonathan Drake/Reuters]

The calls since the Parkland attack have echoed those made by young people of colour for years, who point out they have faced gun violence their entire lives.

Columbine still resonates

Murdock scheduled the protest for the anniversary of the mass shooting at Columbine High School  an event that occurred three years before she was born  to highlight how something that once horrified Americans now feels commonplace.

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Growing up in a post-Columbine world, her first reaction to the Parkland shooting was numb shock. She organised the walkout to jolt herself out of a habit of desensitisation and resignation towards gun deaths  a habit that she also sees in national political leaders.

Her petitions viral success proves that the youth of America are willing to speak out, Murdock said. The fact that we have had the success weve had shows that this generation is not willing to back down.

Stephen Cohen, a survivor of the Columbine attack who now works as a reporter in Seattle, also contrasted US reactions to the 1999 attack and todays steady drumbeat of mass shootings.

For students at Parklands Stoneman Douglas High School, the fact that there was a school shooting at their school was a shock to them, I am positive it was, Cohen told Al Jazeera.

But in a way, it also wasnt, because they have been seeing headlines like this forever, he said.

Columbine, the reason it still resonates with the country is that for a large group of people the idea of having a shooting in a well-to-do suburb in a high school was just sort of alien.

Cohen spent the summer of 1999 on an impromptu musical tour, performing a song he wrote with his brother and raising money for Columbine victims. The idea to perform came from adults in Cohens community, who were themselves coping with the aftermath of the attack, he said. While he believes that most of these adults were well intentioned, being thrust into the national spotlight so soon after a major trauma made recovery even more difficult.

Cohen urged survivors of more recent attacks to do whatever they feel is necessary to heal  whether that means activism or not  and to remember that help is available.

While the community response to Columbine had strong religious overtones, the present student-led movement seems driven by frustration with political paralysis, Cohen said.

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While they may have people working with them, students are taking a leadership role in this movement, he added.

These are kids who have never known a world where school shootings didnt happen in their country. They were raised with this stuff. Columbine, it was a different world. We were shocked into this realisation that these kinds of things can happen.

These kids arent shocked. Theyre angry and theyre frustrated, and theyre using that anger and frustration and grief to try and make some changes in the world for the better.
Nepal government to ban vehicles older than 20 years

This is part of an effort to control air pollution in the country.
Watchdog alleges that burglars broke into house of editor of critical report on state of human rights in Pakistan.

Activists have raised concern over the security of rights workers in Pakistan following a burglary-style raid on the house of the editor of an annual report on the countrys state of human rights.

The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) said in a statement that two armed men broke into the house of Maryam Hasan in Lahore on Thursday, just days after the release of the critical report she had edited.

The men took away her laptop, two hard drives and two mobile phones, as well as some jewellery and cash, HRCP said in a statement on Friday.

The non-profit rights group added that the burglars told Hasan that they had also come the previous day, but left since she was not home at the time.

According to HRCP, the alleged perpetrators questioned Hasan about her profession and intimidated her in a roundabout manner.

HRCP suspects that the two suave raiders were no ordinary thieves and calls on the government of Punjab to apprehend the culprits and establish their identity,  the statement read.

IA Rahman, HRCP spokesman, said it is clearly evident that the thieves wanted to intimidate Hasan.

Their purpose was not just to commit burglary, Rahman told Al Jazeera in a phone interview from Lahore.

Even from the things that they took, it shows that they had some other motive.

Ordinary thieves are not interested in laptops and hard drives, he added. The reports were all in there.

Rahman said he could not confirm if a police report had been filed on the matter as yet.

Grim report

In its report, which was published on Monday, HRCP highlighted the grim markers of the state of human rights in the country in 2017.

In its yearly review, HRCP questioned Pakistans commitment to protecting human rights in the country, despite being elected to the United Nations Human Rights Council for the 2018-2020 term.

The watchdog reported an increase in enforced disappearances, blasphemy-related violence and attacks on religious minorities in the past year.

It shows the vulnerability of each and every human rights worker and organisation and the rapid pace at which the space for such work is shrinking in the country. Reema Omer, lawyer

Mehdi Hasan, HRCP chairperson, blamed Pakistans weak government for not having an effective hold on the society.

He said that most human rights violations that occur in Pakistan are committed by the government institutions.

So, you cant solve the problem, because the government itself is responsible for those violations, he told Al Jazeera in a phone interview from Lahore.

HRCP was established in 1987, with the aim of monitoring human rights violations and addressing them through lobbying, court interventions and public campaigns.

Silencing voices

Human rights lawyers and legal experts expressed shock and alarm at the alleged raid.

Haider Imtiaz, a lawyer based in the capital, Islamabad, said the incident signalled a change of status in the country.

Its deeply shocking because this now represents a bleak time, he told Al Jazeera in a phone interview, describing it as an attempt to silence those who are critical of the state.

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Reema Omer, international legal adviser at Pakistan International Commission of Jurists, said that in recent months there seemed to be an increased clampdown on activists in the country.

On a number of occasions, state agents have subjected human rights defenders exercising their right to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly to excessive force and even prosecution under Pakistans anti-terrorism laws, she told Al Jazeera.

Others have been threatened, assaulted, forcibly disappeared, or even killed.

If HRCP and its staff are no longer secure, it shows the vulnerability of each and every human rights worker and organisation and the rapid pace at which the space for such work is shrinking in the country, Omer added.





In its statement, HRCP said that it will hold the provincial authorities responsible for any attempt by state or non-state actors to harass any persons associated with its organisation.

We have called upon our government to investigate this and find out who the perpetrators are, Rahman told Al Jazeera.

Both Imtiaz and Omer urged a fair, credible and independent investigation to show the real motives and perpetrators behind the alleged attack.

The problem is we dont have proper investigations taking place, especially where organisations or individuals are being intimidated or harassed, said Imtiaz.

They (organisations) are pointing towards unknown sources, which obviously point to certain institutions in the country and therefore, there is always a lot of speculation about it.

Follow Saba Aziz on Twitter: @saba_aziz
Protests in Senegal against proposed electoral law changes

That government says the reforms are needed to simplify the election process and reduce state costs and subsidies allocated for campaigns.
A final embassy relocation decision rests with Romanian President Iohannis, who said he had not been consulted.

The Romanian government has approved a memorandum to move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, the leader of Romanias ruling Social Democrats said.

If confirmed, the move would put Romania among the first countries to take this step after the United States. US President Donald Trump recognised Jerusalem as Israels capital last December and announced the upcoming move of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Trumps decision infuriated Arab allies and dismayed Palestinians who see the East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.

According to Romanian law, President Klaus Iohannis has the final say on the relocation before it is confirmed. Iohannis said he was not consulted, while the Romanian government and foreign ministry did not immediately confirm the information.





Yesterday, the government adopted a memorandum deciding to start the procedure to effectively move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Social Democrat leader and lower house speaker Liviu Dragnea told private television station Antena3 late on Thursday.

Dragnea keeps a tight grip on his party and is seen as effectively in charge of the cabinet.

Not consulted

President Iohannis said in a statement on Friday that he had not been informed or consulted about the decision and urged all government and political actors to show responsibility and discernment regarding major foreign policy decisions that have strategic effects, including on national security.

Such a decision must be taken only after consulting and securing the approval of all foreign policy and national security institutions, with a final decision belonging to the president, according to the constitution.

On Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that at least half a dozen countries were considering moving their embassies to Jerusalem. The US embassy is due to relocate on May 14.

Our gesture has a huge symbolic value  for Israel, a state with an unbelievably large influence in the world and with which we have had a special relationship for many years, Social Democrat leader Dragnea said.

Moving the embassy to Jerusalem can and I believe will bring short, medium and long-term benefits for Romania, and we must use this huge chance and opportunity.
Tributes pour in as award-winning artist and producer is found dead in Muscat, Oman.

World-famous musician and DJ Tim Berling, better known by his stage name Avicii, has died at the age of 28 in Omans capital, Muscat, according to his publicist.

The award-winning Swedish artist and producer was found dead on Friday afternoon, his publicist Diana Baron said in a statement, without giving any further details.

It is with profound sorrow that we announce the loss of Tim Bergling, also known as Avicii, she said.

The family is devastated and we ask everyone to please respect their need for privacy in this difficult time, she added.

Winner of multiple music awards and recipient of two Grammy nominees over the course of a 12-year career, Avicii gained fame with his energetic performances and top charts like Wake Me Up, Hey Brother and Levels.

His debut album, True, was released in 2013, followed by Stories two years later. A third offering was due to come out.

The Stockholm-native collaborated with many high-profile artists and groups, including Madonna, Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, Jon Bon Jovi and Robbie Williams.

He stopped touring in August 2016, citing health reasons. His last performance was in Ibiza, Spain.

After news of his death broke out, fans and fellow musicians paid tribute to the Swedish star on social media.

Oh my god truly devastated for Avicii very very sad news way to young  what a talent he was. rest in peace x  Liam (@LiamPayne) April 20, 2018

https://twitter.com/CalvinHarris/status/987385354175959041?ref_src=twsrc^tfw

https://twitter.com/charlieputh/status/987387678353010689?ref_src=twsrc^tfw
Special envoy issues appeal during visit to Moscow as inspectors wait for access to suspected gas attack site in Syria.

The UN special envoy for Syria has said tensions need to calm down between the major global powers in order to restart diplomatic efforts to end the conflict in Syria.

Staffan de Mistura made the comments after holding talks on Friday with Sergey Lavrov, Russias foreign minister, in Moscow.

De Mistura said that chemical weapons inspectors in Douma, Syria, should do their job as quickly as possible and without any interference.

We need a political de-escalation, not only a military de-escalation, and I think that would be possible with further discussions, he said.

De Mistura said he was pleased to hear that there is a strong commitment from Russia to the political process.

The meeting in Moscow follows a difficult and tense week between the US and Russia after the US and allies launched air strikes in the early hours of April 14, hitting three targets in Syria associated with its chemical weapons programme.

Russian denial

The attacks were described as retaliation for a suspected chemical attack in Douma, a town in Eastern Ghouta, on April 7 that killed at least 70 people.

Syria and its ally Russian have denied using toxic gas in the assault on Douma.

Al Jazeeras Rory Challands, reporting from Moscow on Friday, said it might be difficult for diplomatic efforts to occur under the current circumstances.





Its been a long time since Geneva last made any significant progress, and we now have a situation where we have credible accounts of chemical weapons being used in Syria, he said.

We have geopolitical tension levels pretty high at the moment between the US and Russia. And we also have a situation in Syria where Russia, the US, Turkey and Iran are all vying for territorial spheres of influence.

Getting all of these different factions around the table working towards a long-term settlement for Syria looks as hard now as it has ever been.

For his part, Lavrov, speaking at a joint press conference in Moscow with his Austrian counterpart on Friday, said Russia would not accept attempts at dividing Syria and creating a permanent presence of foreign forces in the country.

There is Resolution 2254 of the UN Security Council, under which Syria should be united and undivided and the political process should enable Syrians to define their fate without foreign interference, Lavrov said.

All our steps are aimed at achieving this result.

Gains by government

Lavrovs comments came as inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) were reportedly still waiting to visit the site of the suspected gas attack in Douma after arriving in Syria nearly a week ago.

Russia has denied US accusations that it is trying to delay the international inspectors arrival at the site, which is now controlled by Syrian government forces.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is in his strongest position since the start of the war seven years ago.





Government forces have been steadily regaining more territory from the opposition.

On Thursday rebels surrendered their arms and abandoned the town of Dumayr, northeast of Damascus, after agreeing to be moved to rebel-held territories in northern Syria under an evacuation deal.

The remaining rebel factions in nearby eastern Qalamoun have also agreed to surrender without a fight under threat of military action by Syrian government forces.

The enclave is a strategic location for the Syrian government as it lies along the main highway between Damascus and Baghdad.

Al Jazeeras Zeina Khodr, reporting from Beirut in neighbouring Lebanon, said Syrian government forces have been using the threat of military action to bring about a surrender by rebel groups.

The government is using this tactic as well with rebels in the northern countryside of Homs, telling them that you can face what the rebels of Eastern Ghouta faced if you dont agree to lay down your arms, she said.

A ceasefire is in place and negotiations are set to continue on Sunday.
On March 9, 2010, Democratic Party speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said, "We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it." Pelosi's infamous words referred to the 2,300-page Affordable Care Act, now more commonly known as "Obamacare."

Democratic leadership, anticipating voter backlash, rushed to cram their controversial health care bill through Congress before the 2010 midterm election. Democrats were in such a hurry to send the bill to President Barack Obama, they didn't have time to read it.

Obama signed his "legacy bill" on March 23, 2010. Eight months later, Democrats paid a steep price at the polls. The Tea Party shockwave that resulted is the biggest turnover election since the Great Depression. Republicans gained 63 seats in the House of Representatives, six in the Senate, and 680 in state legislative races.

Before the historic 2010 election, the Democrats held a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and control of the House. Since 2010, Democrats have remained the minority party in the House, and in 2014, they lost control of the Senate. Two years later, voters put Republican Donald Trump in the White House. After witnessing firsthand the Obamacare fiasco, voters elected Trump to "drain the swamp."

The passage of Obamacare was a case study in D.C. swamp culture. First, Democrats crafted the legislation behind closed doors with ample lobbyist input and special-interest involvement. Second, Democrats did not read the bill before voting on it. Third (and most importantly), Democrats passed Obamacare in a hasty and disingenuous manner.

So have Republicans learned from the Obamacare debacle? Is the swamp being drained? Unfortunately, no.

The congressional Republicans' $1.3-trillion omnibus spending bill epitomizes the very worst of D.C. swamp culture. The bill heaps another massive amount of debt on America's credit card, presumably to be paid by future generations. The national debt now exceeds $21 trillion, and there's no reason to believe that better, saner days lie ahead. Despite congressional Republicans' campaign promises to rein in spending, $1-trillion deficits are projected to return by 2022 according to the Congressional Budget Office.

The Tea Party wave that thrust Republicans into power eight years ago was based on a simple notion: the U.S. government spending binge must end to avoid economic Armageddon. Apparently, the more things change, the more things stay the same in the D.C. swamp.

In a cruel twist of irony, on March 23, 2018 (exactly eight years to the day after Obamacare was signed into law), President Donald Trump signed a 2,232-page omnibus spending bill.

Republicans claim that because they have only 51 votes in the Senate, they must increase spending to gain Democrats' support. This false premise serves only to justify Republicans' fiscal irresponsibility and unwillingness to drain the swamp.

The bloated, pork-filled omnibus bill is a complete rebuke of the Republicans' purported values of limited government and fiscal restraint. The GOP has abandoned its position as fiscal hawks. Republicans are now complicit with Democrats in burdening future generations with today's wanton spending.

By passing the omnibus bill, Republicans managed to repeat all three mistakes that led to the demise of Democrats after they gambled on Obamacare. First, Republicans crafted the bill behind closed doors and filled it with goodies to "buy votes." Second, there's absolutely no way legislators read the bill in full before they voted on it. Third, Republican leadership pressed the omnibus bill even though it violated the GOP's core beliefs and campaign promises made to voters.

One of the big differences between those on the political left and those on the right is that Democrats tend to be outcome-oriented and Republicans generally are principle-oriented. This does not mean that Democrats lack principles; it simply means they more likely utilize "ends justify the means" reasoning.

In 2010, 2014, and 2016, GOP voters rushed to the polls because they vehemently opposed the blatant "ends justify the means" nature of Obamacare. To make matters worse, Democrats lost credibility with voters after Obama's oft-repeated promise, "If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan," was crowned "Lie of the Year" in 2013.

The $64,000 question is, will the voters who put the GOP in power to thwart Obama's agenda and drain the swamp turn their ire on congressional Republicans for passing the omnibus spending legislation and failing to repeal (and replace) Obamacare?

The 2018 midterm elections will be the first bellwether of the Trump era. The GOP has a tall task in November: can the party restore voters' confidence that the party truly stands for limited government and fiscal sanity after the omnibus betrayal? We'll find out soon enough.

Chris Talgo (CTalgo@heartland.org) is an editorial assistant at The Heartland Institute and writer for Heartland's American Exceptionalism website. Lennie Jarratt (LJarratt@heartland.org) is a project manager for The Heartland Institute.
If President Trump could hand-select his 2020 Democratic opponent, he could do no better than former Obama attorney general Eric Holder, the only Cabinet official held in contempt of Congress for withholding documents in the Fast and Furious gun-running scandal. He is the poster child for the Deep State corruption that festered under Obama and the politicization of both the DOJ and FBI.

The former A.G., who is arguably responsible for the homicide of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry, murdered by guns Holder and Obama funneled to Mexican drug lords, is in fact considering such a bid:

Former Attorney General Eric Holder let the cat out of the bag Tuesday night during a visit to the very friendly confines of MSNBC, acknowledging he is "thinking" about a 2020 presidential run to challenge President Donald Trump. MSNBC host Chris Hayes threw out the possibility of Holder running for the White House, hoping his guest would bite and he did just that  whether this was rehearsed beforehand or not is up to you to decide. "I'm not sure I'll get the most honest answer from you," Hayes said to Holder, before turning to MSNBC contributor Matt Miller, who was Holder's spokesperson in office. "Is he running for president. Is Eric Holder running?" he asked. Miller joked about wanting to know if he will have to quit his job and move to Iowa, prompting Holder to reply if Miller "will promise to be my press secretary, I might consider it." "You are considering it," Hayes asked. "I'm thinking about it, but I am focusing on the work I'm doing with the National Democratic Redistricting Committee trying to deal with gerrymandering," Holder said.

Run, Eric, run. Go ahead; make our day. Rumors of a Holder bid were not diminished by the news that he is headed for New Hampshire to attend an event considered a must for presidential contenders:

Speculation about a potential presidential run for former Attorney General Eric Holder has heated up after he announced he would speak at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics' annual "Politics & Eggs," an event that many former candidates once attended. A press release from Holder's officer announced Wednesday that on June 1, the Obama administration official would be the featured guest speaker at the annual breakfast event. According to the press release, "the Politics & Eggs series is a forum for presidential candidates, political leaders, and other political analysts and commentators as they visit New Hampshire, home of the nation's first presidential primaries."

We could once again witness the spectacle of a progressive liberal, this time the A.G. of the most opaque administration in history, invoking racism to criticism of his policies and documented criminality, a role he filled well in defense of President Obama:

In an interview with the New York Times published over the weekend, Holder accused those who want to know who authorized the Fast and Furious gun-running operation of being racially motivated. The 60 congressmen, two senators, two sitting governors, and all the major presidential candidates who have openly called for Holder's resignation are not concerned in his view about how two U.S. agents and hundreds of Mexicans got killed with U.S. guns. No, according to Holder, they are motivated by the color of Holder's and President Obama's skin[.] ... "This is a way to get at the president because of the way I can be identified with him," Holder said, according to the Times. "Both due to the nature of our relationship and, you know, the fact that we're both African-American."

It was once said that politics is the last refuge of scoundrels. Obama and Holder changed that to charges of racism. But playing the race card doesn't cover up their crimes. President Barack Hussein Obama and then-attorney general Eric Holder conceived and ran a gun-running operation called Fast and Furious that resulted in the deaths of U.S. agents Jaime Zapata and Brian Terry. ATF special agent John Dodson attempted to spread the truth on the Obama administration's effort to supply Mexican drug lords with semiautomatic weapons:

ATF Special Agent John Dodson is a national hero who in 2011 blew the whistle on Operation Fast and Furious, the Obama administration's gun-running operation to Mexico. Testifying before Congress, he disclosed that his supervisors had authorized the flow of semiautomatic weapons into Mexico instead of interdicting them, weapons that found their way into the hands of Mexican drug cartels with deadly results. Dodson has put his intimate Fast and Furious knowledge into a book titled "The Unarmed Truth." It provides the first inside account of how the Obama administration permitted and helped sell some 2,000 guns to Mexican drug cartels, guns used in the murder of two federal agents and hundreds of Mexican citizens[.] ... The operation was exposed when Brian was killed in December 2010 by an illegal immigrant [sic] working for the Sinaloa Cartel near Nogales, Ariz., just 10 miles from Mexico. Two Fast and Furious weapons were found at the murder scene. Two such weapons also were used to murder Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Jaime Zapata in Mexico on Feb. 15, 2011[. They c]ame from suspects who were under ATF watch but not arrested at the time[.] ... "Allowing loads of weapons that we knew to be destined for criminals, this was the plan. It was so mandated," Dodson, then attached to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives' (ATF) Phoenix office, testified before Rep. Darrell Issa's House Government Reform and Oversight Committee on June 15, 2011. "Rather than conduct enforcement actions, we took notes, we recorded observations, we tracked movements of these individuals for a short time after their purchases, but nothing more," Dodson testified. "Knowing all the while, just days after these purchases, the guns that we saw these individuals buy would begin turning up at crime scenes in the United States and Mexico, we still did nothing."

Democrats did their best to hide the truth about Fast and Furious, with A.G. Holder, the only Cabinet member ever to be held in contempt of Congress, arguably lying to Congress about his knowledge and involvement and repeatedly saying he "didn't get the memo." American citizens and Mexican nationals to this day are in jeopardy from criminals using weapons the Obama administration funneled to them. As Fox News reported about Mexican drug kingpin "El Chapo":

A .50-caliber rifle found at Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman's hideout in Mexico was funneled through the gun-smuggling investigation known as Fast and Furious, sources confirmed Tuesday to Fox News. A .50-caliber is a massive rifle that can stop a car or, as it was intended, take down a helicopter[.] ... Federal law enforcement sources told Fox News that 'El Chapo' would put his guardsmen on hilltops to be on guard for Mexican police helicopters that would fly through valleys conducting raids. The sole purpose of the guardsmen would be to shoot down those helicopters, sources said.

As for Holder's claim that he wasn't in the loop, the paper trail indicated otherwise:

Somewhere, Scooter Libby must be scratching his head. He was indicted and convicted simply because his recall of when a meeting occurred differed from others. He didn't lie about a gun-running operation that led to the deaths of two American agents and at least 200 Mexicans. But Attorney General Eric Holder did, according to memos obtained by CBS News and Fox News. They show Holder lied to Congress on May 2, 2011, when he was asked about when he knew about the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives' Fast and Furious gun-running operation. He told House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa he was "not sure of the exact date, but I probably learned about Fast and Furious over the last few weeks." Holder learned of the operation as early as July 2010 in a memo from the director of the National Drug Intelligence Center informing him of an operation run by the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force out of the Phoenix ATF office, under which "straw purchasers are responsible for the purchase of 1,500 firearms that were then supplied to Mexican drug cartels."

So Eric Holder knew about Fast and Furious months before Brian Terry's murder. He not only knew about it, but even bragged about it to Mexican officials during a trip to Mexico:

A 2-year-old video shows a high Justice official saying "the president has directed us," including the attorney general, to speed up Project Gunrunner and the offshoot that got a border agent killed[.] ... The video shows Deputy Attorney General David Ogden, who would resign nine months later after less than a year's service, telling reporters at a Department of Justice briefing of major policy initiatives to fight the Mexican drug cartels. "The president has directed us to take action to fight these cartels," Ogden begins, "and Attorney General Holder and I are taking several new and aggressive steps as part of the administration's comprehensive plan." At the president's direction, Ogden said, the administration's plan included DOJ's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives "increasing its efforts by adding 37 new employees in three new offices, using $10 million in Recovery Act funds and redeploying 100 personnel to the Southwest border in the next 45 days to fortify its Project Gunrunner," of which Operation Fast and Furious would be a part. As we have noted, Attorney General Eric Holder himself gave a speech to Mexican authorities in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on April 2, 2009, taking credit for Gunrunner as well as Fast and Furious for himself and the Obama administration. Holder told the audience: "Last week, our administration launched a major new effort to break the backs of the cartels. My department is committing 100 new ATF personnel to the Southwest border in the next 100 days to supplement our ongoing Project Gunrunner."

Fast and Furious wasn't the only stain on Eric Holder's record. As deputy A.G. under Janet Reno, Eric Holder played a key role in the forced return at gunpoint to Cuba of young Elian Gonzalez, a far cry from how he and other progressive liberals say alien children fleeing oppression should be treated:

Eric Holder made a very emotional plea the other day when he announced the Obama administration program "Justice AmeriCorps," intended to provide emergency legal representation to the tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors flooding across our open southern border from Central America. "How we treat those in need, particularly young people who must appear in immigration proceedings, many of whom are fleeing violence, persecution, abuse or trafficking  goes to the core of who we are as a nation," the attorney general said, explaining a program to provide 100 lawyers and paralegals for minors brought here by drug cartels and other human traffickers. How we treated Cuban waif Elian Gonzalez, who had survived a perilous raft journey that killed his mother to flee the communist tyranny of Fidel Castro's Cuba, speaks volumes about the hypocrisy of Democrats and Holder, who applauded and engineered the forcible return of Elian at gunpoint to Cuba[.] ... It was then-Deputy Attorney General Holder who invented the "legal" cover for federal agents to forcibly enter the home of Elian Gonzalez's legal custodians, American citizens all, so he could be returned to the warm embrace of Castro in communist Cuba.

Holder was also involved in Bill Clinton's pardon of international criminal Marc Rich, pleading ignorance about Rich's past, just as he pleaded in the Fast and Furious investigation that he "didn't get the memo":

After Eric Holder was involved in the pardoning of international fugitive Marc Rich, he confessed to not doing a thorough check of Rich's history and background. When he criticized Arizona's immigration law, SB1070, he admitted to not even reading the law. Now, with dead bodies and illegal weapons piled up high in Fast and Furious, Holder says he didn't read the memos[.] ... "I do not and cannot read them from cover to cover," Holder said in a letter to Republican Reps. Issa and Lamar Smith and Sen. Chuck Grassley and Democrat Reps. Elijah Cummings and John Conyers and Sen. Patrick Leahy. We assume Holder reads the morning paper and has heard of the 40 assault weapons illegally purchased under the Phoenix ATF's Fast and Furious operation that somehow wound up in the home of Sinaloa cartel enforcer Torres "the Jaguar" Marrufo. If he has, we suspect his reaction might have been akin to that of another famous sitcom character, Steve Urkel: "Did I do that?" This is no sitcom, but rather a major tragedy  and a major crime. Marrufo is the enforcer for Sinaloa Cartel chieftain Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed at the hands of an illegal immigrant working for the Sinaloa cartel just 10 miles from the Mexico border near Nogales, Ariz.

Run, Eric, run. Your campaign would be an opportunity to hold you and the president you served responsible for the lies about Fast and Furious, the withholding of documents under the guise of "executive privilege," something even extended to Holder's wife, and the entire cover-up of why Brian Terry had to die.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor's Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.
On April 13, 2018 the inspector general of the DOJ released a report (which can be found in full here) concerning former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe. Much of the analysis and commentary this report has received has been muddled and unclear, while other, quite shocking, matters the report brings up have been ignored or have not received their due attention. Perhaps this should not be surprising, as the FBI is not an ordinary organization, easily subject to analysis.

Indeed, the FBI is supposed to operate as a black box. It simply does not divulge whether or not a person is being investigated for a crime. That does make sense. After all, merely being investigated does not mean that one is guilty. Yet certainly such disclosure could cause great damage to a person's life. And disclosure could impede the investigation.

Imagine, then, having the power to lift the veil.

Sometimes lifting the veil is exactly what needs to be done. The "Most Wanted" list would certainly be a good example. One is, let us say, hunting a fugitive or looking for evidence, and one wants the public's help. This obviously helps the investigation itself.

There is another time the veil may be lifted: when it is in the public interest. Note that the applicable rule merely allows the disclosure to be made; perhaps there should be a duty to disclose. (This exception is described in Section 3.4 of the FBI Policy on Media Relations, which can be found in the I.G. Report, II B.)

At any rate, what did McCabe do? Did he merely disclose something he should not have? The inspector general's report concludes, albeit in other words, that McCabe organized a secret and undocumented leak to the press, strove to keep it secret, and lied about it.

What prompted McCabe to organize the leak? (Fox's Catherine Herridge gets it wrong; 1:55). In early October 2016, the Washington Post reported that McCabe ordered agents investigating the Clinton Foundation to "stand down." Obviously, such negative coverage would have displeased McCabe.

But the matter was exacerbated by the fact that McCabe had earlier received a call from a senior DOJ official who criticized McCabe for the exact opposite of what was alleged in the WaPo article. The DOJ official criticized McCabe, in regard to that same Clinton Foundation investigation, for not (!) having the FBI stand down! So, publicly McCabe was being pilloried for standing down, and privately for not standing down. It is reasonable to suppose that McCabe wanted to clear his name.

Now, none of this should have been happening. The FBI, in accordance with existing regulations, should have informed the American people during the nominating process that there were criminal investigations underway concerning the Clinton Foundation and Mrs. Clinton's disclosure and mishandling of national secrets. How in any sane, half-fair world the American people would not have an overriding, paramount interest in knowing this is beyond the beyond. None of this madness would have ensued.

We are, however, living in the world of beyond the beyond.

Let us return to the blow-by-blow. McCabe knew, as the inspector general's report states, that Comey had recently been asked while testifying before Congress whether there was an investigation into the Clinton Foundation. Comey had refused to acknowledge that there was one. And as the inspector's report points out, McCabe knew that Comey would not go along with a disclosure to the public of the usual, public, accountable, and reviewable sort.

(That is because, as Comey recently related, his decisions concerning the Clinton investigation were influenced by his wish not to delegitimize Clinton's election as president, which he assumed would happen. This is weird as heck: there is a fevered desire not to delegitimize Clinton, the target of a criminal espionage case and whose foundation is the target of another, but in contrast, there is a fevered desire to delegitimize the presidency of Donald Trump, who, to this date, as Special Counsel Robert Mueller has reportedly affirmed, is not the target of any criminal investigation.)

Not being able to go the usual, public, documented, and accountable route, McCabe was undeterred. He organized a secret leak, undocumented and unreviewable, through two underlings at headquarters.

The leaked information appeared in an anonymously sourced article in the Washington Post on Sunday, October 30, 2016. Describing McCabe's conversation with the senior DOJ official, it depicted McCabe as having defended the ongoing FBI investigation into the Clinton Foundation. This contradicted the earlier "stand down" story and presented McCabe in a good light. As the inspector's report notes, it also necessarily revealed that indeed, there was such an investigation.

On that same Sunday, according to the inspector general's report, McCabe did something remarkable. McCabe called, separately, the head of the FBI's New York City office and his counterpart in D.C. to berate them as if they or their offices were responsible for the leak McCabe had just engineered.

It is clear from the phone calls to the New York and Washington FBI field office leadership alone that McCabe had planned and desired to keep the fact that he had leaked the information secret.

This is amazing in that McCabe knew that certain FBI personnel at headquarters were officially investigating leaks, including his. How had he planned to keep the charade going? Eventually, he admitted to those agents that he was the source of the disclosure. The inspector's report quotes one of them as saying to McCabe that "you understand" that they had put:

... long nights and weekends working on this, trying to find out who amongst your ranks of trusted people would, would do something like that. And he kind of just looked down, kind of nodded, and said, yeah, I'm sorry. (IG Report, III B 17)

But because McCabe had not acted alone, instead using two FBI officials to contact the reporter, those two officials also knew that McCabe was the source of the leak. Therefore, the question arises as to why he had such great faith that these underlings would keep his secret. Had there indeed been a cabal? More than a cabal  a conspiracy? The inspector general's report is silent on this question; indeed, it does not raise it.

McCabe's main defense is fascinating, in a way. It reveals something about how the FBI's black box should have its lid opened. McCabe has argued that he, as deputy director, had the authority to lift the lid  that is to say, to make disclosures. The applicable regulation on its face could be said to support this contention (I.G. Report, II B).

But by leaking?

Fidelity. Bravery. Integrity.

In other words, for McCabe's argument to have merit, it would be unobjectionable for the top people at the FBI to organize secret, undocumented, unreviewable leaks. Surreptitious disclosures.

No way. Not in America.

The FBI "must always stand" for Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity, words constituting the FBI's motto.

One could argue in support of integrity from a moral standpoint. If surreptitious but (secretly) authorized, it must be lied about to those who investigate real leaks. But an insistence on integrity is also requisite from many practical viewpoints.

For instance, people who cooperate with the FBI have to trust it. Leaking does not enhance the image of professionalism necessary for informants who rely upon the FBI's professionalism and secrecy when they risk their lives and livelihoods to cooperate. Leaks are also demoralizing for the rank and file. One could go on and on. Surreptitious disclosure can never be in the interest of the FBI. One who leaks has no integrity.

Yet we have seen that McCabe and Comey were more than comfortable with leaking.

What is the opposite of integrity? Perfidy. Untrustworthiness.

Every day seems to bring new revelations of lack of integrity on the part of the top people at the DOJ and the FBI. As this is being written, a headline reads, "Documents Show 'Concerning Level of Coordination' between FBI, DOJ in Clinton Email Probe"  coordination that was effectively hidden from Congress and that, among other things, limited the scope of the investigation.

One could say it is the Deep State run amok. But it does not seem that way. It seems to be business as usual. The left is casually, routinely, unconsciously, and cabalistically coddled and protected, whereas the right gets the book thrown at it. How it all came to this is another story.

But at the very least, a great advantage the cabal enjoyed due to its ability to masquerade as mere duty-bound, objective officials of integrity has forever been blown away. Let us hope this presents a window of opportunity and that we take advantage of it.

The author is a former law school dean and former FBI agent, awarded the National Intelligence Medal of Achievement (NIMA). You may follow him on Twitter at @tadasklimas1.
Unsurprisingly, Starbucks has confirmed what I've always suspected. It's a company run by mostly affluent whites, and mostly Democrats, who apologize guiltily for their privileged white affluence so that the other affluent privileged white Democrats with whom they socialize will commend them for apologizing for their privileged white affluence. It's the white affluent Democrat version of a pity party.

In the wake of last week's arrest of two black men at a Philadelphia Starbucks, the DMIC (the Democrat Media Industrial Complex) was once again gifted the "white man preying upon innocent black men" narrative. This one will never lose its addictive, bloody, raw red meat appeal to Democrats, who believe that whites and police conspire on a daily basis to keep blacks manacled in slavery and oppression.

In my upcoming first book, 10 Warning Signs Your Child Is Becoming a Democrat, I write about the impossibility for Democrats to view any situation uncolored by race, gender, religion, ethnicity, or any trait that always falls into lifestyle choice (religion) or unchosen accident (race, gender, etc.). Lifestyle choices and unchosen traits aren't skills.

What's race got to do with it?

The very first question I asked myself was this: self, will there be any evidence, even a scintilla, that the Starbucks manager's decision to call the police on the black men was racially motivated? At the time of the writing of this article, no such evidence has been presented. Did the manager, who called 911 on the men because they took a seat in the cafe and didn't order food or drinks, overreact? Sure, and the overreaction is more funny than nefarious. The black men said they were waiting for a friend, and perhaps they were. That didn't make the manager racist; it made her zealously zealous, and even though published reports have stated that she left the company on her own volition, I have no doubt that Starbucks forced her out. Who gives a hoot about your employees, right?

There's also something else here. For Democrats, everything and anything is a "right." It's ironic that people who believe that everything is a right are oh, so quick to infringe upon rights with which they disagree. It's the adage from Orwell's Animal Farm: all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. Democrats have transferred their unconstitutional "everything is a right" tyranny to businesses of all sizes. (My favorite example of this is the Colorado baker, Jack Phillips, who, in 2016, refused to make a cake for a what two men were calling a wedding. The Supreme Court is expected to make a ruling in the next few months.)

Yes, public accommodation laws give black men and white men and men who think they're women the right to enter the cafe. But there is (or, at least, should be) a give and take; a business, conversely, does have the right to make its own reasonable demands (no shoes: no service, restrooms for customers only, no soliciting, etc.). If I'm asked to leave a place of business because I've not paid for anything, that's called (gasp!) "the real world," "real life," "adult life," or any other descriptor anathema to Democrats. What it's not is an infringement upon one's 14th Amendment right to equal protection.

The issue is never the issue

A handful of scenarios are at work here:

1. Since Starbucks is run by mostly affluent whites, led by former CEO and current chairman and affluent white Democrat big bucks campaign contributor Howard Schultz, the Seattle-based corporation is fueling the fire of America's white Democrat problem.

2. Police in Philadelphia arrested the black men because of their skin color. If true, why are police in a city run only by Democrat mayors and 90 percent Democrat city councils for the last 20,000 consecutive days doing that?

3. The manager made a hasty and overactive decision, which all of us are guilty of from time to time (unless one's a Democrat  in whose case, all the time). Does that mean the manager spends her spare time burning crosses in the front yards of black families' homes and Sieg-Heiling her fellow bazooka-carrying, Christian occultist Mein Kampf-reading Aryan nation book club members? Doubtful.

4. The manager was a raging racist-holic Starbucks manager, which, according to Democrat logic, means all Starbucks managers are raging racist-holics.

I suspect that number three is the most likely scenario. Furthermore, is there any information as to whether the manager followed her employer's guidelines for such a situation? Does Starbucks even have guidelines for such a situation? And if so, did affluent privileged white people write them?

Democrats cannibalize their own

Starbucks has long fancied itself as an activist company; in 2016, it opened a cafe in Ferguson, Missouri, the scene of where Officer Darren Wilson justifiably shot and killed Michael Brown (this incident is where the "hands up, don't shoot" lie was begotten). The Ferguson store fulfilled a promise Starbucks had made to invest in 15 communities the company identified as "under-served."

After last year's Charlottesville, Va. encounter between neo-Nazis and masked, mostly white Democrat fascists who call themselves "Antifa," Schultz lamented violence against non-whites but must have had a free trade espresso-induced brain fart when he forgot that violence is also committed against, um, whites.

Democrats, not Republicans, are the party of white gazillionaires; this is one of the great DMIC cover-ups. Democrats turning on Starbucks, which has had accusations of racism leveled against it in the past, is a classic example of cannibalization, which isn't surprising. Self-victimization is the new celebrity status and is a pillar of what the Democratic Party is selling  namely, European Union-style collectivist socialism. When a voting base has so many competing victim factions, a kind of Lord of the Flies inevitably occurs (and those who stay home on Election Day are voting Democrat, FYI).

And speaking of flies, I would give anything to be a fly on the wall for one of the "racial bias trainings" Starbucks will conduct in each of its 8,000 stores May 29. On that day, 175,000 workers will overdose on the cult of diversity, the virtues of inclusion (very important to microwaving egg sandwiches for customers), and how whites (even the nice ones!) perpetuate and cultivate systemic racism (no black coffee jokes, please).

Starbucks dropped all charges against the black men. Not that I know, but I'm sure getting arrested is a pain. Was their arrest "unfair"? Fairness oftentimes lies in the eye of the beholder, and life isn't always fair. Unfairness isn't necessarily the same as injustice.

The men will perhaps be marketed by Democrats and the DMIC as modern-day Rosa Parkses (it's OK if the sexes don't match; Democrats believe in "gender fluidity"). Their imminent big payday, I'm sure, will total seven figures  which will be just enough for two overpriced Venti flat white mocha Frappucino macchiatos.

Rich Logis is host of The Rich Logis Show at TheRichLogisShow.com and author of the upcoming book 10 Warning Signs Your Child Is Becoming a Democrat. He can be found on Twitter at @RichLogis.
Cuba once was among the most prosperous nations in the Western Hemisphere, before Fidel Castro overthrew its government in 1959 and replaced capitalism with a communist dictatorship that turned this beautiful Caribbean island poor, with an average monthly salary equivalent to $31 today. Fidel died in 2016 at age 90.

The Castro dynasty ends this week when Fidel's younger brother, former head of the secret police Raul Castro, retires after ten years as Cuban president. (He will remain head of the Communist Party.) His handpicked successor is reported to be Miguel Diaz Canel, who turns 58 this week, a committed communist whose past is almost unknown to the press.

This is the way most revolutionary dictatorships have slid into the dustbin of history. The charismatic founder holds his new government together by invoking the self-sacrifice the rebels shared during the revolution. When this leader passes, sometimes a family relative with his last name takes over, but soon it devolves to a battle to the death among top lieutenants  such as Stalin versus Trotsky  fighting to seize power.

Charismatic competitors for public applause, such as Che Guevara and Leon Trotsky, are killed or sent abroad to die. After them, only the uncharismatic third-generation Yes-Men survivors such as Nikita Khrushchev and Diaz Canel are left to take charge.

Cuba's new dictator faces difficult challenges. His island survives mostly through free oil from the communist dictatorship of Venezuela, also a sinking, basket-case economy kept in power by more than 14,000-strong Cuban secret police. If it collapses, Cuba quickly may do likewise.



Havana: Photo by Pedro Szekely.

A United States embargo of sorts remains in place, but Cuba has always been able to trade with Canada, Latin America, and Europe. Its problem is that it has repeatedly failed to pay for goods and thus has terrible credit with many nations.

Castro also bet his slave island's future by making it a colony of the communist Soviet empire, which failed and died before he did. The new dictator may offer Cuba as a colony of China rather than free the enslaved Cuban people.

I remember being in Cuba in late 1977, doing a piece for the Los Angeles Times. Cuba long ago was Spain's administrative center in the New World, populated mostly by business-savvy Spaniards from Barcelona. Cuba's population is white and black, from African slaves imported to do the labor. But it is not brown; Spain exterminated the American Indians who lived there. I quickly noticed that everyone with real power whom I met with in the Marxist society was white.

I remember being taken to a Potemkin school shown to foreigners, where children studied half of each day and then spent the other half burning their hands on acid by assembling batteries at an adjacent factory  a throwback to child labor that liberal journalists never questioned. The school's principal was black, the only non-white I met in even a symbolic position of power. The liberal media has also ignored that white-skinned Fidel Castro had overthrown a mulatto socialist Cuban President, Fulgencio Batista.

Then as now, ordinary Cubans could not enter resort hotels. I remember the panic on the face of a Communist Eastern European apparatchik who began chatting with me in the hotel pool; then, when he realized I was American, he tried frantically to get away from me before anyone noticed.

"We used to watch I Love Lucy, too," said my Cuban Communist Party guide, "but we saw it differently." How many Americans knew that when Desi sang "Babalu," he was invoking a deity from the Santeria voodoo religion that African slaves had brought to Cuba?

My guide proudly boasted that Cuba's flag was based on the red, white, and blue tricolor of the French Revolution. Was he aware, I asked, that the American Revolution came first, and that French revolutionaries might have modeled their flag colors on America's? He was surprised at this idea that he never had been taught.

At the time, I was also an editor at Skeptic Magazine, which presented opposing views on issues. "This is foolish and a waste of energy," my guide said. "In Cuba, the Party decides the proper view of all issues." Under the Castros, only one party was permitted.

I expected constant communist propaganda, and it came as no surprise that my hotel radio had only push buttons, not a knob that might let listeners tune into Miami stations 90 miles away. It surprised me that in Havana, they aired the Cuban refugee musicians Miami Sound Machine  but only under the name "MSM," and never playing certain of their songs such as Cuba Libre, "Free Cuba."

As to propaganda, it was back then a revelation to see almost no political signs or billboards. Coming from a culture of capitalist choice and competition, I, like other Americans, was accustomed to seeing the brand name Coca-Cola 140 times a day. After a week in Cuba, I began feeling decompression from a lack of advertising.

The reality was that communist values were imposed on every Cuban every day  largely by the absence of competing views. It was the leftist dream of political correctness we see today on college campuses, where no other views are permitted to be discussed at all. What's the definition of a "diverse" university faculty in America today? A black Marxist, a transsexual Marxist, a Latino Marxist, a lesbian Marxist, an Islamic Marxist...

And just to make sure, a Cuban government watcher lived on each city block who reported any non-compliant or non-conformist speech or behavior.

I loved embarrassing my guide by asking why he always locked his car wherever he parked in this workers' paradise...which he did because the only source of spare parts to repair a car was to steal them from another car, most of which were American-made.

Why, I asked him, did cigarettes for Cuban domestic consumption carry health warnings...but not cigarettes made for export? Why was Cuba's economy based on things that harmed people, such as tobacco and sugar?

Cuba was easily adapted to Marxism, he said, because these major agricultural industries were already "collectivized" into huge estates. Communism, as Marx said, could be summed up in one sentence: abolish private property.

The richest capitalist plantation-owners built six mansions for themselves. Fidel Castro expropriated all six for his own personal use. That is equality under Marxism, as the Yugoslav Tito official Milovan Djilas explained in his 1957 book The New Class.

The Castros then created a slave island where no freedom of speech or the press was permitted, and non-conformity could get one assigned to work for the rest of his lifetime in the sugarcane fields for 10 Cuban Pesos (around $3.20) a month. Such workers risked deadly skin cancer, but Cuban hospitals were available to all who could afford the bribes, and the patients were expected to bring light bulbs and bedding. Gays were often beaten, imprisoned, or killed.

How many left-of-center American politicians helped the Castros?

John F. Kennedy withdrew promised air support, leaving Cuban freedom fighters to be killed or captured at the Bay of Pigs (Playa Giron). Bill and Hillary Clinton violated the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child by sending commandos to snatch Elian Gonzalez so the boy could be returned to Castro as a trophy after his mother died bringing him across shark-filled waters to the United States.

Barack Obama ended wet-foot/dry-foot asylum for Cubans reaching the U.S. as refugees from Communism; escaping Cubans who were caught got sent back to the Castros. Cubans who are American citizens understand the evils of Communism and tend to vote Republican, unlike the millions of Democrat-voting Latinos from south of our border whom Obama allowed to flood illegally into the U.S.

Others, like retiring Republican Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, visited Cuba in a servile effort to make trade deals with the Castros, thereby helping to keep their sinking dictatorship afloat.

Under the Castros, young Cuban men and women routinely survived by selling their bodies to European tourists. Cubans could be hired by foreign companies, but their wages would be collected by the government in hefty foreign currency payments to the Cuban government, which then paid the workers a pittance in Cuban pesos.

We need to remember why so many Cubans risked their lives by fleeing from the Castros to find economic and personal freedom. A post-Castro Cuba may find a communist dictatorship difficult to sustain after its historic failures and the Marxist murder of 100 million people worldwide, on a planet where no sane person believes in its utopian dreams anymore.

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.
When news broke of Mike Pompeo's secret Easter trip to Pyongyang to meet with Kim Jong-un, I figured that his confirmation as secretary of state, which would require at least one Senate Democrat vote because of Rand Paul's opposition and John McCain's inability to vote due to illness, was now likely. Yesterday, Senator Heidi Heitkamp, who faces the voters of North Dakota in November, announced her vote.

Jordain Carney writes in The Hill:

Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) said Thursday that she will support President Trump's nomination of CIA Director Mike Pompeo as secretary of State, virtually guaranteeing he will win confirmation. Heitkamp, who faces a difficult reelection race this fall in a state Trump won by double-digits, becomes the first Senate Democrat to announce her support for Pompeo. "The role of the State Department is to support our diplomatic missions to avoid conflict, support American interests, and stand up for our allies, and having a leadership team in place is essential to carrying out those jobs," she said in a statement.

As Carney notes, Pompeo may need one more Democrat senator's support:

It's possible Pompeo could lose another GOP vote. Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) said Thursday that he remains undecided on Pompeo, but he did support him to be CIA director last year.

Flake is retiring from the Senate and could relish the spoiler role. But there are other endangered red-state Democrat senators who are prospects to vote for confirmation. They are caught between the wishes of their voters and the wrath of the progressive pressure groups:

Nicole Brener-Schmitz, the political director for NARAL Pro-Choice America, said the group was "very disappointed." "A vote in favor of Mike Pompeo is simply irreconcilable with being a true champion for women and girls," she added. MoveOn also sent its supporters an email urging them to tell Heitkamp to reconsider her decision and "stop Pompeo in order to stop a war."

That much heralded blue wave in November may not be such a sure thing. Red-state Democrat senators are caught in a vise between their voters and progressive Democrat special interest groups.
U.S., U.K., and French forces launched air strikes targeting sites associated with Syria's chemical weapons capabilities, a reprisal for a chemical attack that killed at least 43 civilians and injured hundreds more.

The decision to strike was aimed at cutting off the production and use of chemical weapons in the country.

The assault was twice the size of a strike Mr. Trump ordered last year against a Syrian military airfield and hit two more targets.

European Union countries, Canada, Australia, members of the Arab union, and Gulf countries have fully supported the air strike. But among the few countries who condemned this attack, there was Iran, whose mullah dictators warned that there would be "consequences" for the region.

Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, said coordinated air strikes on Syria by the United States, France, and Britain on Saturday were a crime that would bring no benefit.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry has also lashed out at the Western states that conducted the joint massive missile strike on targets in Syria and warned of "regional consequences."

Iranian president Hassan Rouhani has said the U.S.-led attack against Syria would lead to the destruction of the Middle Eastern countries.

The bluster and heated rhetoric about "the region" were about par for the mullahs. But the mullahs probably realize that it was really a strike against Iranian capacities in the region.

This strike was the result of one basic problem: that Iran came to Syrian dictator Bashar Assad's aid, sending fighters and an organized airlift of militia fighters from a number of countries to bolster Mr. Assad's military and to prepare for retaliation after a chemical attack.

The U.S., U.K., and French air strikes also escalated the internal situation in Iran to further destabilize the Iranian regime, uniting the different factions of society in Iran.

According to the leading opposition group to the regime, the National Council of Resistance in Iran:

On April 17, 2018, thousands of people in the city of Kazerun demonstrated for the second day running in the city's main square. The merchants refused to open their shops. The protesters were chanting, "Our enemy is right here, but they keep saying it is America," "No fear, we are all together," "the movement will continue until we obtain our rights," "The protests, in which women played an active role, led to clashes with the security forces as the protesters tried to enter the Governor's Office.

In another development, on April 16, the families of those detained during the April demonstrations in Ahvaz staged a protest outside the governor's office and the office of the Majlis deputy from the city. The security forces attempted to disperse the crowd through intimidation. During the protests by the people of Ahvaz and other cities in Khuzestan Province, hundreds of people, including 11- to 15-year-old children, were arrested, and their fate is unknown.

On Sunday, April 15, 2018, in addition to the strikes of merchants and shopkeepers in the cities of Baneh and Javanrood, protests by deprived and oppressed people continued in various cities:

At midnight of Sunday, April 15, 2018, suppressive forces attacked houses of Khorasgan people in Isfahan in order to prevent the spread of protests and demonstrations by farmers and others, and arrested a number of farmers and youths in the city.

Throughout the day and night, repressive forces had an intense presence around Varzaneh, in an effort to intensify the atmosphere of fear and intimidation. The anti-riot mercenaries also moved toward the city in twenty cars and four buses to stop the demonstrations of the people.

On Saturday, in spite of repressive measures in Isfahan, farmers gathered at the Khourasgan Square and Abazar Ave. They chanted: "Imprisoned farmers should be freed; farmer dies, but does not accept humiliation; we are the women and men of battle, we will get back our right to water."

To end this, we could conclude that the U.S., U.K., and French air strikes had an impact on the region and especially on the internal situation in Iran.

Hassan Mahmoudi is a human rights advocate, specializing in political and economic issues relating to Iran and the Middle East.
Here's my take on all the breathless reporting by various news outlets that Andrew McCabe has been referred for criminal prosecution. It will never happen.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions will never allow any criminal prosecution against a member of the FBI or the DOJ, or other Clinton-affiliated people or organizations, to go forward.

The reason: All these people have been on the "side of the angels" for their entire lives. Any situation where they are faced with the loss of everything they have worked for, not to mention the distinct possibility of prison, will convince each one that the better part of valor is to turn "state's witness" and sing like a canary on anyone else involved in the corruption. "If I go, I am taking others with me." Anything to save their own skins.

Contemplating being labeled a "felon" by someone they have spent their entire careers prosecuting and looking upon as less than their moral equivalent is something unimaginable to each of them. This must never be allowed to happen. There is just too much at stake.

Given this reality, the powers that be cannot take the chance that ultimately, something like this will go all the way to the top: to the front steps of Barack Hussein Obama.

Additionally, even with the proven stupidity of the average voter, such revelations might negatively impact the vote for Democrats in future elections, affecting the ongoing effort to remove Donald Trump from office and consolidate the Progressive grab for power. This too must never be allowed to happen.

Lots of smoke, lots of talking, lots of speculating, lots of delay and deny. This is nothing but kabuki theater to the nth degree. We will be subjected to unending "bombshell" reports and pundits' prognostications, but ultimately, the American people will be shown the futility of believing in equal justice under the law.
The most cynical, manipulative, Machiavellian  and dangerous  liberal in the nation has outdone himself once again.

New York governor Andrew Cuomo has issued a pardon potentially affecting some 35,000 felons on parole, enabling them to vote  presumably for him  in his bid for a third term this November. The pardon will also apply to future felons on parole (although the governor reserves the right to exclude individuals on a case-by-case basis).

In New York, parole is considered part of a convict's sentence, which is not entirely served until parole is completed. Current state law restores voting rights only upon completion of parole, and the State Senate  technically controlled by the Republicans with the assistance of one turncoat Democrat  would not change the law to allow parolees to vote.

In his typical dictatorial and demagogic style, Cuomo stated that he refused to "take no for an answer" and issued the pardon.

Cuomo cynically and insincerely claimed that his pardon was an act of racial justice, contending that blacks are unfairly disenfranchised by criminal convictions and that the Fifteenth Amendment (ratified by Republicans in 1870 to grant voting rights to freed slaves) justified his actions. Cuomo announced his pardon in conjunction with Al Sharpton, a principal actor in the 1987 Tawana Brawley rape hoax.

The real reason for Cuomo's pardon is that Cynthia Nixon, the openly lesbian Sex and the City actress, is running against Cuomo on his political left, championing the legalization of marijuana as a cornerstone of her campaign. Cuomo's poll numbers have already taken a hit since Nixon announced her candidacy. He is almost certain to lose the not insignificant gay, queer, lesbian, transgendered, and hipster vote in New York City to Nixon  so his scheme is to replace those votes with the votes of convicted black felons.

Cuomo is rather selective regarding which constitutional amendments he wishes to champion. While pretending to be solicitous of the Fifteenth Amendment rights of black felons, he tramples on the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding taxpayers who have never committed a felony. New York, which already has the most drastic gun laws in the history of the U.S., just added ten misdemeanors  including trespassing  to a list of misdemeanors that ban someone from having a gun for life.

Cuomo's pardon specifically excludes restoring the gun rights of felons on parole.

Voters in the rest of the nation should expect that Cuomo will win re-election this fall and then run for president in 2020 on a platform that will be so radically and unapologetically left-wing that he will make Barack Obama look like a John Bircher by comparison.
Paul Manafort is going to jail. He made millions of dollars working as a consultant to a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party and didn't pay a dime in federal taxes. In fact, he sought to hide his money through an elaborate shell game of dummy corporations.

But there has always been a question about why special counsel Robert Mueller was so interested in him. He is not being charged with any crime related to "Russian collusion" with the Trump campaign. For that matter, no one charged in the Muller probe so far is being accused of collusion with Russians to swing the election.

Manafort sought to squash his indictment by claiming in a civil suit that Mueller did not have the authority to investigate his money-laundering and tax evasion. His defense team claims that Mueller's powers to investigate went only as far as looking into matters directly related to Russian collusion.

But yesterday, the Department of Justice revealed for the first time the reason for Mueller's intense interest in Manafort. They believe he acted as a "back channel" from the campaign to Russian leaders, thus facilitating the collusion.

Bloomberg:

"He had long-standing ties to Russia-backed politicians," Dreeben told Jackson. "Did they provide back channels to Russia? Investigators will naturally look at those things." Prosecutors hadn't previously used such explicit language to describe their suspicions about Manafort. In a previous court filing, Mueller also cited business ties between Manafort and the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Any investigation of links between Russia and the Trump campaign "would naturally cover ties that a former Trump campaign manager had to Russian-associated political operatives, Russian-backed politicians, and Russian oligarchs," prosecutors said in an April 2 filing. "It would also naturally look into any interactions they may have had before and during the campaign to plumb motives and opportunities to coordinate and to expose possible channels for surreptitious communications," prosecutors wrote. "And prosecutors would naturally follow the money trail from Manafort's Ukrainian consulting activities. Because investigation of those matters was authorized, so was prosecution." At Thursday's hearing, Downing argued that he was challenging whether Mueller "had the jurisdiction and the authority to conduct the investigation." He focused on Mueller's release of a memo dated Aug. 2, 2017, and signed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, that spelled out the reasons for pursuing Manafort. Heavy redactions in the public version make it hard to tell all of the reasons.

This appears to be the crux of Muller's case for collusion: that Trump's campaign chairman knew a lot of Russians in and out of government and had the opportunity to direct some sort of collusion with Moscow.

But would collusion with the Kremlin be the only reason Manafort would look to establish back channels between the Trump campaign and Moscow? Of course not. The Trump campaign no doubt had several back channels to other countries. This is not only legal. It makes good sense. Establishing personal lines of communication with other important nations would prove to be invaluable for any new president taking office

Does anyone doubt that the campaign of a former secretary of state would have had back channels to any number of countries, including Russia?

Context is also important. Before Russians were accused of interfering in our presidential election, Democrats, especially, were eager to establish good relations with Putin. Barack Obama won an election in 2012 mocking Mitt Romney, who said in a debate that Russia is our number-one enemy: "The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back," said the president.

Four years later, that statement had gone down the memory hole along with the Democrats' enthusiasm for Russia.

I guess Mueller had the authority to investigate Manafort's ties to Russians. But his dot-connecting is flawed. Unless he gets specific proof that Manafort's contacts in Russia were to facilitate communication with the Trump campaign in order to collude to hand him the election, Mueller will have nothing.

And that's been the big story of this entire investigation.
Kurt Schlichter long has been warning progressives that they're going to hate living under the new rules they proclaim when trying to suppress their political enemies. Now the entire "sanctuary city" and "sanctuary state" movement, intended to protect illegal aliens from deportation by ICE when they are released from custody, has been mocked by a conservative country in Illinois.

Douglas Ernst reports in the Washington Times:

An overwhelming majority of board members in Effingham County, Illinois, decided to "flip the script" this week and declare itself a "sanctuary" for gun owners. Effingham County State's Attorney Bryan Kibler and board member David Campbell called a barrage of gun-control bills working their way through the Illinois House and Senate a clear signal that it's time to "take a stand." The men joined "Fox & Friends First" on Thursday to discuss a new Second Amendment resolution that passed along an 8-1 vote. We "decided it's time for someone to take a hard stand," Mr. Campbell told the network.

The resolution reads: "If the Government of the State of Illinois shall infringe upon the inalienable rights granted by the Second Amendment, Effingham County shall become a 'sanctuary county' for all firearms."

Now that nullification  the doctrine that localities can ignore laws they don't like, which triggered the Civil War  is being embraced by progs, they had better take another look at the 2016 election map by county:
Debkafile reports on April 17 that Iranian Guard troops are massing in four Syrian air bases near Israel in an apparent preparation for a major attack from UAVs and perhaps by armed thrusts over the Syrian border. President Trump wants to withdraw from Syria and is hoping to do so with only symbolic strikes. However, Iran is using its Syrian ally to threaten major attacks against Israeli population centers. Hezb'allah may attack from Lebanon, while Hamas may stage raids in the south.

Iran believes that it can now use Syria as a staging base, and while the U.S. wants to wind down the Syrian civil war, it appears that Putin has positioned himself as a deciding factor. Putin now has an alliance with Turkey and Iran, and the large Egyptian army is hoping to stay out.

This is the largest major war threat today. Trump is making major progress with North Korea, which shares advanced weapons with Iran. The U.S. does not want to be drawn more deeply into Syria, and its proposal for an Arab peacekeeping force is in trouble. Iran has the only expressed motivation at attack Israel, which has been running decapitation strikes against Iranian Revolutionary guard troops in Syria.

Israel has little territorial depth against attack and must therefore strike fast and with overwhelming force. Israeli news outlets have been raising the idea of a multi-front war.

With Putin in Iran and Syria, the United States is caught in a bind. High-level talks with Iran and Russia may be needed to avert major war, which would give Putin unprecedented power in the region. The question is whether Putin wants peace, or whether he wants trouble to create pressure on the U.S.

This is a high-risk worry about major war. Israel is worried about war because it can sustain a war for only a short time. During that time, Israel may take the initiative and destroy invading forces and foreign bases. The lack of defensive depth in Israel should also worry the world, because Israel will feel compelled to use nuclear weapons as soon as its population centers are attacked. Its back will be against the wall, from the Israelis' viewpoint, and they will do anything to prevent a second Holocaust.
April 20, 2018, marks the 50th anniversary of the significant speech about harmful immigration by the late, great Enoch Powell, M.P.

The speech warned of excessive immigration into the U.K. by non-white people. Their numbers would make Anglo-Saxons a minority in their own country. Non-white people would be unassimilable. Social disruption would ensue.

A pejorative label ("rivers of blood") was given to the speech by leftists to misrepresent it. The takeoff point for the misrepresentation appears almost at the end of the speech. Powell said, "As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see 'the River Tiber foaming with much blood'." The quoted words come from the Aeneid. Powell was learned in the classics.

The quotation has "river" (singular). The pejorative label uses "rivers" (plural). The aim of the pejorative label is to impute falsely, to Powell, advocacy of violence to prevent immigration of non-white people.

Far from advocacy of violence, Powell expressed obvious truths about immigration into the U.K. He expressed sadness at the coming of deplorable societal conditions, which were wholly preventable.

The truth of immigration is obvious. Substitute "Muslims" for "non-white people," and "Europe" for "U.K." Muslims, not Anglo-Saxons and other native people of Europe, cause crime waves in France, Germany, Sweden, the U.K., and elsewhere. Muslims established and maintain no-go zones, beat their wives, and mutilate their daughters. They, not Anglo-Saxons and other native people of Europe, are Jew-haters of the Nazi sort.

Would that Enoch Powell's prescient warning had been heeded.

The writer is a lawyer in Hong Kong. Comments are welcome. Contact the writer at krugerwork@yahoo.com.
Samsung Electronics is interested in acquiring Nokias digital health division thats been under a corporate review due to suspect performance for over a month now, French outlet Le Monde reports, citing sources familiar with the matter. The development comes shortly after several other local insiders claimed the unit that largely consists of former French tech company Withings acquired by Nokia in 2016 may also be purchased by Nest, Googles smart home subsidiary. Besides Nest and Samsung, at least two other firms have expressed some formal degree of interest in acquiring the struggling business, as per the same report. Sources remain adamant that the Finnish tech giant prefers selling its wearable arm to a European entity as it perceives digital health applications to be closely related to artificial intelligence and related solutions, a segment thats currently giving trouble to the tech sector on the Old Continent which is struggling to keep up with its colleagues from Asia and North America.

Nokia acquired Withings for 170 million ($208.5 million) in 2016 but is extremely unlikely to find a buyer willing to pay that much for the unit now, especially if it remains adamant to not entertain bids from outside of the European Union, the same report indicates. For Nest, a theoretical purchase of Nokia Health would signal a major diversification effort, whereas Samsung is already present in the digital health segment, though its currently unclear whether its interested in the unit because it wants to boost its existing wearables such as the Gear S and Gear Fit lineups, create entirely new products and services, or pursue both ideas simultaneously.

Likewise, the latest report doesnt clarify whether Nokia already communicated its supposed unwillingness to sell the digital health unit to a non-European entity to its foreign suitors. With 5G being yet to start truly setting its global roots and Nokia already committing significant resources to the next-generation wireless technology while still waiting for returns on those investments, the company is keen on cutting costs in order to avoid taking significant debt in the near term, as per recent reports, and as indicated by the firms recent financial disclosures. The tech giant is now understood to be drafting a license-based strategy that would see it remain in the digital health segment in name only, much like it currently has a presence in the smartphone market even though its HMD Global that largely designs, markets, and sells all new Nokia-branded Android handsets.
Fans of VR in or around Orange County may want to mark their calendars regarding a unique VR experience called ALIEN: DESCENT, which opens at The Outlets at Orange on April 26. Thats according to a new announcement from Pure Imagination Studios and FoxNext Destinations, which partnered on the project. As the name implies, the experience centers around the same universe as the ALIEN movie franchise. In fact, participants will be tasked with traveling to a Weyland-Yutani mining outpost as a squad of Colonial Marines to investigate a distress signal. In true franchise fashion, that will mean confronting the threat presented by baddies from the movies, including Xenomorphs and face-huggers. It will also mean rescuing and quarantining survivors from the facility.

The experience itself utilizes two 2-player arenas and a new VR technology developed by Pure Imagination Studios. The tech is completely wireless and doesnt require a PC backpack, which allows participants from each part of a four-participant squad to move around freely. In turn, that should allow for a completely immersive experience for those who choose to participate. As mentioned above, this is not only the first use of Pure Imagination Studios new technology. It will also only be available at the Orange County mall, Outlets at Orange, as of this writing. Squads are comprised of four players and tickets are set to sell for $22. There are no details yet on how long the experience will remain available or whether it will be brought to other locales. However, time slot details have been supplied via the official experience website and sign-up for ticket booking is available there as well. On Monday through Friday, the tickets can be purchased for hours between 10 in the morning and 9 at night. Weekend times run an hour later, while Sundays see the experience close an hour earlier.

Of course, there are a few additional restrictions with consideration for the nature of this particular VR experience. Participants need to be at least 10 years old and 4-feet tall. Adult sign-off is required for those under 17. A waiver also needs to be signed, with participation discouraged for those with health problems or who are pregnant. Moreover, casual attire is recommended and no flip-flops or high-heels are permitted. Although it runs every day of the week, the slots are bound to fill up fast at the abovementioned cost, with only two participants allowed to take part in each group. So its probably a good idea to book early via the button below.
According to a new rumor that surfaced in Taiwan, the HTC U12 Plus will hit the market in late May, early June. Now, the HTC U12 Plus is allegedly the companys upcoming flagship handset, as the company is rumored to skip the HTC U12 branding for one reason or the other. None of that info has been confirmed thus far, but several rumors hinted that it will happen. The phone is expected to become official in the second half of May, and if the source is to be believed, a 128GB storage variant of the device will cost NT$23,990 ($846). Chances are that HTC plans to host a press conference in May to globally announce this smartphone, after which the phone will be announced in Taiwan. Taiwan is HTCs homeland, so the device will probably launch in Taiwan first, while other markets will follow soon after.

If rumors are to be believed, the HTC U12 Plus will sport a 6-inch QHD+ OLED display, along with 6GB of RAM and 64GB or 128GB of storage, depending on which variant you opt to purchase. Qualcomms Snapdragon 845 64-bit octa-core processor will fuel the HTC U12 Plus, and the device is expected to include a battery larger than 3,000mAh (capacity). A dual camera setup is expected on the back of the HTC U12 Plus, and a fingerprint scanner will probably be included on the back of the device as well, unless HTC opts to go for an in-display fingerprint scanner for the HTC U12 Plus, anything is possible at this point. The device is also expected to include a stereo set of speakers, while it will also be IP-certified for water and dust resistance. The phone will sport thin bezels, and it is actually expected to resemble its predecessor, the HTC U11 Plus, as far as the design is concerned, so its possible that it will be made out of metal and glass just like the HTC U11 Plus.

We did not see any plausible HTC U12 Plus leaks thus far, even though the phone did pop up in a number of concept designs. We are expecting to see a ton of HTC U12 Plus leaks and rumors in the coming weeks, so hopefully more info about the phone will surface soon.
Huawei has been looking to make in-roads into the US for quite a few years now, but keep getting turned away. This year, Huawei lost out on contracts with AT&T and Verizon, and now Best Buy is discontinuing sales of its products. A real blow to Huawei. But Huawei isnt staying complacent, instead it is looking to continue growing in Europe. Another market where Huawei isnt that large, and does have plenty of room to grow.

Huaweis annual analyst summit in Shenzhen happened this week, and the companys vice president of consumer business groups handsets strategy, Changzhu Li, stated that the US had locked the door on Huawei. When asked about why so many companies are looking to enter the US, Li stated its huge, its the perfect market for all the smartphone vendors. Li continued by stating that thats why, in the past years, we have invested a lot of effort to communicate with operators, distributors and partners. I think this effort will go on, but some factors we cant control. The US hasnt been to kind to Huawei, but with the Trump Administration, Huawei has been getting further pushed out of the market. President Trump isnt just targeting Huawei though, he also signed an executive order that blocked Broadcom from purchasing Qualcomm earlier this year.

Focusing on Europe is key for Huawei. The company already holds around 15 to 20-percent market share on the continent. Li also said at the analyst summit that Italy and Spain are big growth areas for the company, and Huawei already ships more smartphones than Apple  Huawei is the third largest smartphone maker in the world right now. Li said about Europe that the recognition from this market is very important for us. This is because it is a high-end market considering the GDP, considering the culture. Huawei announced the P20 lineup of smartphones in Paris last month, which is a favorite of the companys CEO, Richard Yu. Yu is a big fan of Paris, which is why the event was held there. But thats not the entire reason behind launching the P20 in Paris. Its also to help Huawei boost its presence in Europe and pick up more customers.
Two Nokia-branded smartphones believed to be part of the upcoming Nokia X lineup have been certified by Chinese agency 3C, suggesting theyre on course to be launched in the Far Eastern country. The two devices bear the model numbers TA-1099 and TA-1109 and are listed as 4G LTE-capable. The Chinese arm of HMD Global filed for the certifications, with the local regulator issuing them several days back. Not much information could be extracted from the provided screenshot of the listing except for their included battery chargers. A 10W (5V/2A) charger is said be included with both devices and doesnt support any form of fast charging, suggesting the duo will be introduced as part of the entry-level segment.

A couple of digital posters teasing the Nokia X series were spotted in China earlier this week, suggesting the new product family will be officially introduced on Friday, April 27. Not much is known about the handset lineup itself, though the handsets are likely to run Android. HMD already revived a few older Nokia devices by giving them a modern look with updated hardware, and the leaked Nokia X could also be a 2018 edition of the Nokia X launched in 2014. That particular handset was also an entry-level device running a custom implementation of Android.

The Nokia 1 is currently the cheapest Android-powered smartphone offered by HMD Global, with the device itself launching as part of Googles Android Go program. If the Nokia X is another low-end offering from the Finnish company, theres a chance it also launches with that streamlined, lightweight version of Android, though that may not be the case given how its apparently targeting China where most consumers arent used to anything resembling a vanilla Android experience. Besides China, India is another likely candidate for receiving the Nokia X, with the South Asian country being one of HMDs top targets due to the local popularity of the Nokia brand dating back to the last decade, as well as the still large demand for competitively priced handsets among Indian consumers.
Ossia, Inc. and Molex, Inc. quietly announced on April 11 that the two companies would be launching a joint effort to create a new generation of Ossias Cota antennas. For those that may not be aware, Cota is a wireless charging platform that delivers power at a distance to compatible devices within a given range. Its designed to work in conjunction with a wide range of electronics, wearables, and the IoT, in general. Unlike many other wireless charging solutions on the market, the platform doesnt require charging pads and the receivers are small enough to be put inside of almost any device. As part of the new partnership, Molex will be gaining further influence in the company via more shareholdings  although it already holds a seat as an Ossia Board Observer.

However, while the details of the deal are not specifically outlined, Ossia obviously stands to gain from the new partnership as well. Molex will be responsible for acting as the premier supplier of components for the duration and will be delivering in terms of expertise. The company has extensive experience with product development, materials, and manufacturing. That should play well into the underlying goal of the team-up. The generally stated goal is to improve on the current Ossia technologies so that the next versions will be more commercially viable. Specifically, the two companies hope to build something that will be attractive to other manufacturers in order to help spread the technology across more applications. Since devices that feature Cota can already be activated, managed, and monitored via the Cota Cloud platform, this shouldnt be too massive of an undertaking.

With that said, there will be and already is a fair amount of competition in the market for wireless charging systems that work beyond the charging pad or stand. Cota currently has the advantage of being able to feasibly provide charge and power to low-power devices at a much greater distance than most of those. However, as the IoT itself continues to grow alongside a need for new power solutions that dont require wires or battery swaps, that could change. In the meantime, no timeline has been provided for the duration of the partnership or when new antenna designs could be revealed. Regardless, this new partnership should signal the beginning of a new period of innovation and the results should be interesting.
Images have now cropped up online of what appears to be a Youth edition of Vivos recently released Vivo V9. Shared to SlashLeaks, the images themselves are labeled as showing a dummy device, which means that they are of a non-functioning prototype, meant only to show off the design. Oddly enough, however, there hasnt previously been any mention that such a device was even in the works. Bearing that in mind, its probably a good idea to take the news with a bit of skepticism  at least until Vivo announces something or further leaks happen.

Looking beyond that, theres not much that could be determined about the device itself from the images. They show a handset that has an edge-to-edge display with a prominent notch along the top housing the forward facing camera, speaker, and sensors. The bezels surrounding that are nearly non-existent and it appears to have a slight curve toward the edges. The dummy display shows that this is a FullView display, so its likely configured in the now common 18:9 screen ratio. There are no visible buttons or volume rockers along either edge of the device. Rolling to the rear of the device, that panel seems to be made of an easily smudged glass or plastic. Since the Vivo V9 features a metal unibody design and this is presumably a more affordable variation, thats most likely some form of polycarbonate. In the center, the company branding is visible below a fingerprint scanner. The top left-hand corner features a vertically aligned dual-camera array with a single LED flash below.

The overall design here is, in fact, very similar to the original Vivo V9. However, there isnt much chance that it would ship with the same internals as that flagship-like handset. Whats more, its really impossible to guess at what this smartphone might ship with even if Vivo is working on such a device. That other mobile is driven by an octa-core Snapdragon 626, backed up by 4GB of RAM and 64GB of expandable storage. Power is provided by a 3,260mAh battery pack. It wouldnt be unusual for the specs found in the Youth variation to drop further toward the affordable end of the Android phone spectrum from there.
Samsung has obtained at least one more patent for an Electronic Device Having Flexible Display, but this one may be a bit different than those previously applied for. Thats because this particular patent, filed with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) under publication number 20180103132, covers more than just another smartphone. In fact, it seems to apply to a device that could work as a smartphone, tablet, or wearable. Whats more, its designed around a device that seems to suggest its use could extend far beyond any of those use cases. Samsung describes the device as a single device that includes a large flexible display comprised of three bodies. The first and third of those are much thicker than the center portion, allowing for rotation and folding.

Breaking down what that means by examining the associated diagrams and design images, this appears to be for a transformable smartphone. When closed, the device would look and function like a fairly standard smartphone. When extended or unfolded, that display would extend to form what is effectively a very long Samsung smartphone with the thicker portions acting as handholds. That could serve a number of functions. Not least of all, it would provide a place for the users hands to interact with whats on the display, while not covering the display. However, it would also form a much larger display for navigation and other dashboard uses when mounted in a vehicle. Samsung takes that segmentation further by showing how the layout could be used to fold the device into something akin to a desk clock. Using a similar fold, the device would also be wearable as a smartwatch. Taking things further still, the final diagrams from Samsung show the flexible screen tech being used in a tablet form, which can fold into and out of a smartphone-like device.

The patent in question was published on April 12, after having been filed near the middle of 2017. So it bears mention that it may or may not ever actually see use by the company and its probably best not to get ones hopes up. Having said that, this is one of those more rare patents that could equate to something revolutionary if its implemented in the way its been portrayed.
Android smartphones equipped with 3D cameras capable of advanced depth sensing are now unlikely to be commercialized before the second half of the year even though first such offerings were initially expected to hit the market by the end of the current quarter, according to DigiTimes Research. 3D sensing technology providers are said to still be struggling with delivering comprehensive solutions and are having particularly significant issues with joining the hardware part of the 3D camera equation with relevant software, as per the same report. The only company that still has a small chance of releasing a depth-sensing Android smartphone in the near future is Xiaomi, insiders suggest, with rumors of the upcoming Mi 7 being equipped with such a technology already being widespread, yet latest reports also indicate the Chinese firm pushed back the release of its flagship to Q3 2018, possibly due to the aforementioned implementation issues.

Apple popularized mobile 3D cameras with the iPhone X last fall as its newest iOS device is equipped with a module capable of delivering accurate face tracking and swift biometric authentication, though the technology came at the expense of a display notch, a polarizing design cue among smartphone enthusiasts. Samsung is presently said to be working on a mobile depth-sensing platform that can be integrated into handsets without resorting to such a cutout but the solution isnt likely to be ready for mass production before early 2019 and should hence debut with the Galaxy S10 and Galaxy S10 Plus. Huawei is also keen on commercializing a similar offering with the Mate 20 phablet lineup planned to be released in October, as per recent reports.

Neither Samsung nor Huawei  by far the worlds largest Android phone vendors  are interested in implementing the currently most advanced 3D technology into their flagship models, with the platform in question being jointly developed by Qualcomm, Truly Opto-electronics, and Himax. The solution itself is limited to Qualcomms Snapdragon 845, a high-end chip meant to power handsets in the premium segment of the market, yet both Samsung and Huawei have their own semiconductor units dedicated to creating proprietary chips for such products. While most of Samsungs Android flagships sold in North America, Mexico, and China were still equipped with Qualcomm-made chips and will continue to feature such hardware, thats primarily because Qualcomms patents make using Exynos chips in certain markets more expensive for Samsung than simply licensing Snapdragon-branded hardware but the South Korean company rarely uses their full feature sets. Thats possibly why the Snapdragon 845 models of the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 Plus dont have Quick Charge 4.0 support even though the chip itself allows for it and is also why Samsung is unlikely to ever utilize Qualcomms 3D imaging technology.
US carrier Verizon offers a basic suite of parental controls for customers in the form of FamilyBase, and that suite is now being overhauled with more features and rebranded as Smart Family. Starting on April 19, Smart Family will be rolling out with a wider feature set and an app thats been redesigned to be more appealing and easier to use. The suite allows users to check up on kids activities with their phones, set screen time limits and content filters, and even remotely turn mobile data on and off. The premium option even allows you to track kids locations by harnessing their phones location data. The normal package will run customers $4.99 per month, while the premium option is $9.99.

The apps main screen shows a map view with names of family members at the top of the screen, if youre in the premium package. Otherwise, the map view is gone, but the overview is otherwise the same. Alerts when kids come and go in and out of a designated area are also limited to the premium package. In any case, tapping on a name will bring that person up in the overview, showing their battery life, and giving you the option to go into the various management menus for that person. In those menus, you can put limits on screen time, monitor what apps they install, and set content filters based on categories. You could, for example, turn off games for a chronic procrastinator while enabling violence in the filter for a young history student whose studies involve researching why swords were swung or guns were fired and what happened when they were put away.

Verizon is a member of the Family Online Safety Institute, which helped to inform the companys development of its new Smart Family system. The carrier also hosts a podcast called Up To Speed, where the CEO of FOSI recently laid out a few tips for parents in the digital age. Verizons solution is fairly similar in function to Googles Family Link, albeit a bit more comprehensive and self-contained. All things considered, Verizons new Smart Family system is one of the better all-in-one parental control solutions on the mobile market right now.
ZTE on Friday issued its first statement regarding the Commerce Departments decision to ban the company from purchasing American hardware and software over the next seven years, not accounting for its initial comment which only acknowledged the measure was issued earlier this week. The Chinese original equipment manufacturer said the federal agencys denial order is unacceptable and not fair in light of the fact that the transgressions its meant to punish were identified and reported by ZTE itself for the sake of transparency and its continuous commitment to cooperate with Washington. The tech giant also said its prepared to exercise all of its legal options in order to protect itself from an unjust order that threatens its very existence, i.e. is effectively preventing it from purchasing components such as Qualcomms chips and licensing software like Googles Android, the firmware backbone of all ZTE-made smartphones.

The most severe penalty ZTE could have received over the latest incident related to its Iran imports has also been issued without any investigation into the matter being concluded and with complete disregard for the progress made by the Chinese firm in regards to its efforts to educate its employees on importing practices through a program that was backed with $50 million in 2017 alone and will receive even larger investments this year, the company said, adding that it already hired an independent U.S. law firm meant to probe the new issues and has taken actions against the employees that it believes were responsible for the latest ordeal. The problem in question stems from the fact that ZTE violated its 2017 settlement meant to put an end to its dispute with Washington over certain imports to Iran, a country under U.S. trade sanctions. In the spring of 2017, ZTE pleaded guilty to a conspiracy to violate those sanctions, having agreed to an $890 million fine and laid off four veteran executives involved in its forbidden imports of U.S. products into the Asian country.

As part of the same settlement, ZTE vowed to discipline 35 other employees partially responsible for the violations by either reprimanding them or withholding their bonuses but failed to do so for reasons that remain unknown. The U.S. Commerce Department also accused the company of lying in its correspondence with the agency but hasnt elaborated on the matter and neither has ZTE, save for claiming the miscommunication has been discovered internally, i.e. asserting that it wasnt caught lying but self-reported unspecified communication ommissions or errors to Washington. The ordeal is presently fueling a wave of patriotism in China and may result in the Far Eastern countrys semiconductor industry receiving major investments moving forward, with Beijing now seemingly being adamant to end its reliance on U.S. chips in the future. In 2017 alone, Chinese companies imported some $11 billion worth of semiconductor technologies from American companies, according to multiple industry trackers.
MADRIDAccording to Spains Guardia Civil, approximately 1.9 million was spent on the alleged crime of misuse of public funds in the organization of the 1 October referendum. However the sums in the 10-page report do not add up. The Spanish police force now admits that there are at least two errors, to which must be added expenditure which previous reports mistakenly attributed to the referendum. Anyone adding up the figures will fail to get the same result, since it depends on what figures are taken as a reference.

This morning, the far-right political party Vox, who are acting as plaintiffs in the charges of rebellion, announced the decision by Supreme Court judge Pablo Llarena to lift reporting restrictions on the separate charges of embezzlement. They announced to great fanfare that the figure of misappropriated funds, which originally stood at 1,602,001.57 when the judge announced the charges at the end of March, had risen to 1,915,067.22. In other words, an increase of over 300,000. It is the result of the separate investigations Llarena ordered at the time to try to provide more support for the charges of embezzlement, which only occupies one page in his conclusions and that are currently being called into question in Germany.

However, adding up the items listed in the report, one does not reach the same figure announced by Vox. The main problem is that, in the section dealing with Diplocat (1), the Guardia Civil makes two mistakes by adding alleged expenses that hadnt been examined up until now. The figure that was spoken about at the time and which appears in the judges preliminary statement was for 119,700 that had supposedly been misused. The report now includes a payment undertaking of 47,365 for the end of November 2017, without specifying what it was intended for. The report claims that the Supreme Court was unaware of its existence up until now. Nevertheless, the Guardia Civil adds the figures up wrongly, and instead of 167,065, which is the sum of the two amounts, they state a total of 177,065.

A total of 25,287 more by mistake

The erroneous 10,000 inflates the amount of public money that Diplocat a consortium which was disbanded on the orders of the Spanish government allegedly spent on the referendum and, by extension, the total sum of misappropriated funds according to the Guardia Civil. This is not the only error, however. The police have a tendency to inflate the figures and, in the case of Diplocat, they have included an additional 25,287 that is unaccounted for elsewhere. The remaining 15,287 came from public funds that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, headed by Raul Romeva, presumably paid to international observers. The Guardia Civil was critical of the fact that it has been unable to obtain more details, specifically in terms of the number of observers, "due to Diplocat's refusal to provide information" and in spite of several police searches.

The report does list the amount spent on flights, hotels and expenses, however. Nevertheless, the total is incorrect once again. Supposedly 18,835.76 was spent on flights, 2,416 on hotels and 3,180.10 plus 872 on other expenses. This adds up to 25.303.86, but according to the Guardia Civil it amounts to 40,591.22.

Cross-referencing figures

Aside from the blunders in adding up the figures, the Guardia Civil admits to factual errors in the report which Judge Llarena used to charge Carles Puigdemonts entire government with the crime of misappropriation of public funds. It is worth noting that the report is a summary of the information which has been collected and all parties have been issued an accompanying DVD with data that theoretically supports the information and the new figures.

The Guardia Civils report states that a previous report they sent to the Supreme Court declared that 40.227,78 had been spent on computer equipment for the call centre located at the CTTI [the Catalan governments ICT centre], but they have since discovered that the Catalan authorities spent the money on purchasing computer hardware from Fujitsu and that determining whether it was used on the referendum will require further investigation.

Total = 1,932,757, or 1,907,470 if it is added up right

Adding up all the official figures presented by the Guardia Civil would give a total 1,932,757.42 allegedly misused. However, if the incorrect sums are subtracted, the final figure would stand at 1,907,470. Where do the extra 300,000 come from of the total that Llarena sees as destined for 1 October? The bulk of it comes from the alleged purchase of ballot papers from two companies, one in Igualada that was subject to a police search, and another in Bigues i Riells. However, they admit they are unable to obtain more details, since no judge is currently handling the case, as the original judge declined to pursue it due to the involvement of a French company. The Guardia Civil has also released figures that are subject to reporting restrictions in Barcelonas Court of Instruction number 13, mainly relating to Unipost, prompting their legal teams to lodge a complaint.

The new figures are basically 61,879 which according to the Guardia Civil was paid to Omnium Cultural in the form of subsidies that went to pay for posters, and 17,690.20 that Junts per Sis parliamentary group spent on the presentation of the referendum at the National Theatre of Catalonia, which was later searched by the Guardia Civil.

_________

Translators notes:

(1) The now-defunct Diplocat was the Public Diplomacy Council of Catalonia.
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Two corporate-law specialist law firms have acted on the Krispy Kreme Doughnut Corporations acquisition of the Krispy Kreme Australia and New Zealand franchise business.

Arnold Bloch Leibler (ABL) advised the Winston-Salem, North Carolina-based parent company, which has acquired the business save for the South Australian franchise, which is owned and operated independently by the Peregrine Corporation. McCullough Robertson acted for the founding shareholders of the Krispy Kreme Australia and New Zealand franchise business.

Financial details of the deal remain confidential.
Kleinsteuber will partner with Goodwins European Chair, the firms London, Paris, Frankfurt and Hong Kong Chairs, and Chief Officers across all of the firms non-U.S. operations, including finance, IT, HR, office administration and marketing, and all associated day-to-day functions.

Clyde & Co promotes 12 to partner

Twelve lawyers have made partner in the latest promotions round at Clyde & Co.

Insurance takes the largest number of new partners with 6, but corporate, employment, real estate, and marine, all gained. The firms total number of global partners now exceeds 400 across 50 offices.

In Asia Pacific, Thomas Choo becomes a partner in the corporate/employment team in Singapore.

Equity partners gender pay gap revealed in new poll

The gender pay gap in law firms equity partners worldwide has been revealed in a new survey of stand-out lawyers.

The poll asked those named as Acritas Stars, who are nominated by in-house counsel, several questions including some relating to their compensation.

The mean average pay for male partners was 27% higher than for female equity partners among 828 Acritas Stars. The median gap was lower at 19%.

It is astonishing to see such a large gender pay gap at equity partner level, commented Lisa Hart Shepherd, CEO at Acritas. For women that have achieved equity partner status, they should be facing a more equal playing field but clearly this is not the case.
PHEV

CVT

The nameplate comes courtesy of a recent trademark filing with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, given code 1B. What that means is  intent to use . Set to replace the Crosstrek Hybrid that was canceled in 2016, the newcomer could get to use the E-Four system from Toyota instead of Symmetrical All-Wheel-Drive.Offered in applications such as the Japan-spec Prius, E-Four is an all-wheel-drive system that comprises of three electric motors (one driving the rear axle) and an internal combustion engine. In regard to the internal combustion part of the Subaru, chief technical officer Takeshi Tachimori let it slip that a  longitudinal Subaru engine  would do the trick. Considering that the Crosstrek comes as standard with the 152-horsepower four-cylinder, theres little in the way of surprise, right?In regard to shifting gears, there will be no such thing in the Subaru PHEV. In order to make the drivetrain work as intended, the Lineartronicwill make way for an e-CVT (electronically controlled planetary-type continuously variable transmission) of Toyota origin, the same system found in the Prius and Prius Prime.Range isnt of the essence here, more so if you bear in mind the Prius Prime is capable of covering 25 miles on electric power. The Japanese automaker decided to get help from Toyota for the PHEV to comply with Californias Zero Emission Vehicle regulation. The credits amassed over the years are scarcer with each passing day, which is why Subaru came up with this plug-in hybrid compromise.On the subject of getting greener, Subaru will drop turbo diesel engines by the end of the fiscal year 2020. Come 2021, the automaker will introduce a series of all-electric vehicles
EV

SUV

The iX3 will arrive at dealers during 2020, and BMW wants us to know that its coming. At this years edition of Auto China, the motor show will see the debut of the Concept iX3. As you would expect, its a preview of the real deal. And for the time being, the teaser video attached below is all we have on the design of the electrified concept.Compared to the kidney grilles that beautify the i3, i8 , and iPerformance range of plug-in hybrid vehicles, the BMW Concept iX3 embraces a more aggressive design. Curiously enough, the mesh-style grille motif appears to allow air to enter the engine bay. And thats funny because theres no internal combustion going on there.In keeping with how Tesla, Jaguar, Audi, and Mercedes-Benz roll in regard to electric SUVs, the iX3 will be offered with a dual-motor configuration. In addition to all-wheel-drive surefootedness, an electric motor for each of the two axles translates to BMW-like performance in a straight line as well. With a bit of luck, the iX3 could hit 100 km/h (62 mph) quicker than the X3 M40i. The hottest X3 of the moment does it in 4.8 seconds, though that status will soon go over to the X3 M and its S58 twin-turbo I6.After the MINIand iX3, BMW is set to launch the  fifth-generation electric drivetrain  in 2021. The goal is to deliver 700 kilometers (435 miles) of driving range per charge, and the goal does seem possible provided that the car is relatively light and the driving style is more orthodox than that of an old lady going to Sunday church.The technological flagship known as iNext could be the first application of the fifth-generation electric drivetrain. In addition to the Vision Next 100 Concept , the iNext family is anticipated to welcome anconcept in the second half of the year.If electric vehicles arent your thing, BMW has got you covered with the X3 iPerformance plug-in hybrid SUV
SUV

Infiniti is no exception. Taking advantage of the fact that starting April 25 the Beijing Auto Show opens its doors, the carmaker announced that for the next five years it plans to launch locally no less than five different models.The assault of Japanese models will be led by the QX50 , which will be presented in Asia for the first time next week. Production of the crossover model is to begin at the companys manufacturing facility in Dalian soon, in preparation for a market release later this year.Aside for the QX50 SUV, Infiniti says it will launch over the next years four new vehicles in China, including electric cars. The goal of the company is to triple its sales in the country, together with partner Dongfeng Motor.Last year, the Japanese sold a total of 48,408 vehicles in China, a number which represents an increase of only 16 percent compared the previous year.As part of our roadmap to electrify our portfolio, we anticipate that by 2025, more than 50% of new Infiniti vehicles sold globally and in China will be electrified, said Roland Krueger, Infiniti president.Infiniti is pursuing localization in China for China, expanding our network footprint and introducing new technologies, such as our worlds first variable compression engine and vehicle electrification, such as e-POWER.Separately, Infiniti will bring to the Beijing Auto Show the Q Inspiration concept car, a model which the carmaker says previews the new form language for saloons.First shown in Detroit at the beginning of this year, the Infiniti Inspiration is an electric autonomous vehicle, capable of seating four passengers.
The 640 hp Lambo might have set a 6:52 Nurburgring production car lap record and lost the accolade to Porsche (the 911 GT2 RS blitzed the track in 6:47 ), but the circuit sprinting job of the Performante is far from over.And the most recent feat that highlights this comes from Magny-Cours, with the Lamborghini Huracan Performante having set a lap time for the short Club version of the track.Manhandled by Motorsport Magazine, the V10 wielder managed to get round the circuit in 1'17"17. This allowed the Italian exotic to top the magazine's charts and the piece of footage documenting the adventure will let you check out the times of the machines left behind by the Lamborghini.The video also allows us to notice how facile it is for a trained driver (let's keep this particle in mind, shall we?) to extract the performance. The only downside here is that certain aficionados would've enjoyed a more tail-happy behavior, but this is another story for another time.Now, you might wonder why the Huracan Performante didn't beat the McLaren 675 Longtail by a heftier margin (a victory is still a victory, but the question can't be ignored).Well, the answer has to do with the rather tight nature of the Club track. This keeps the speedometer of the machine on a leash, which means that the Raging Bull doesn't get to make all that much use of its active aero.In fact, the said question has already poped in the comments section of the YouTube video, with the magazine behind the stunt telling us to wait for the full track lap time. And we can't wait to see how the natural aspiration wonder performs on that course.
According to Bloomberg , citing associate administrator William Gerstenmaier, NASA will however award the first contract for the station in early 2019, for the creation of power and propulsion elements. Further contracts, including for the habitation elements, would follow.The agency official says the station should be up and running no later than 2025, with the first launch of components towards the Moon scheduled for 2022. The pieces of the space puzzle would leave Earth on NASAs new Space Launch System , and assembly is to be done on site.NASA plans the Gateway to be comprised of power and propulsion elements, as well as habitation, logistics and airlock capabilities.For the power and propulsion elements, NASA selected last year five companies to conduct feasibility studies: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Orbital ATK, Sierra Nevada Corporation, and Space Systems.The space station should become habitable beginning 2023, with a yet unspecified number of crew members to take 30 to 60 days tours on the station. While there, they are to perform deep space exploration activities as well as something NASA calls commercial activities.To keep the desired rotation of crews in check, as well as to supply it, NASA will have to perform launches at very close intervals. That means SpaceX and other private contractors will likely be brought onboard, just as they are now supplying the International Space Station orbiting Earth.The Gateway is to act as a platform which would allow Lunar landings, the launch of spacecraft towards Mars and scientific research.The Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway will give us a strategic presence in cislunar space. It will drive our activity with commercial and international partners and help us explore the Moon and its resources, said William Gerstenmaier in February, when the project was announced."We will ultimately translate that experience into human missions to Mars.
This is one of the test cars for the Paint to Sample 911 GT2 RS lineup, with the thing being dressed in Midnight Blue. We're looking at an understated color that mixes brilliantly with the aero-dictated aggressive exterior of the 700 hp Neunelfer.Weissach Package, magnesium wheels finished in White Gold Metallic and plenty of red details that adorn both the exterior and the cabin of this 911 - there are plenty of details that ensure this German missile receives the attention it deserves.Nevertheless, the license plate of the machine is just as enticing as its spec, with this talking about the Nurburgring chronograph number of the GT2 RS.Keep in mind that the 6:47 lap of the Porsche means this is still the holder of the Green Hell production car record, even though there are multiple machines that might grab that title this year.And the list of competitors includes the Lamborghini Aventador SVJ , with this 800 hp (expected output) Miura Jota tribute potentially out to bring the Nordschleife accolade back to Sant'Agata Bolognese (the GT2 RS grabbed the record from the 6:52 Huracan Performante, remember?).Then again, we musn't ignore the 800 hp McLaren Senna - while its GTR racecar version, which some expect to sit extremely close to the 6m mark, hasn't received a road conversion so far, the "standard" car should be able to set an amazing Ring lap time.Returning to the 2019 Porsche 911 GT3 RS and its 6:56 Green Hell performance, here's a comparison that also involves the Ring blitz performed by the GT2 RS.
The Neunelfer and the Beast of the Green Hell (this is the official nickname of the GT R) met during the Spring Event held on an airfield in Weeze, Germany.Unfortunately, the velocity gathering didn't include any timing equipment. Then again, when it came to this battle, that wasn't an issue, since there was a clear winner.And while we won't drop too many details, since we'd risk ruing the giggles delivered by the video, we can tell you that one of the beasts took off later than the other, but this didn't seem to influence the outcome of the race.We'll start with the power-to-weight ratio, a battle that favors the Benz, but just slightly - the GT R comes with 3 kg per hp, while the GT3 RS burdens each of its horses with 3.1 kilos.Then again, the twin-turbo 4.0-liter motor of the GT R demolishes the naturally aspirated flat-six of the GT3 RS in the torque battle, since we're talking about 700 vs 460 Nm. And we must also mention that both machines come with double-clutch trannies.Now, if we are to look at the quarter-mile numbers registered during the multiple tests performed with these two velocity heroes, we'll notice their best times are extremely close.As such, the Porscha needs 11.1 seconds to play the 1,320 feet game, while the Affalterbach brute can complete the task 0.1 seconds quicker. So, if you happen to enjoy betting, now would be an ideal time to choose your favorite horse.
The compact seven-seater scene continues to be a hotly-contested segment it seems. From tiny crossovers, to sleek MPVs, automakers are cashing in on this booming segment. Suzuki's answer to this conundrum? The all-new 2018 Suzuki Ertiga.

Officially making its world debut at the 2018 Indonesia International Motor Show (IIMS), the new Ertiga bears a new face, along with new and updated technologies. With it, Suzuki is determined to keep a foothold on this segment that is populated by such competitors like the Honda Mobilio, Toyota Avanza and Mitsubishi Xpander.

Much like the new-generation Swift (from which it is based on), the 2018 Ertiga ditches its rounded curves for a more angular, more upmarket appearance. No longer does the MPV resemble the hatchback as Suzuki gave this all-new model a unique face.

Sweeping projector headlights along with a bigger, more distinct chrome grill, dominate the front fascia of the new MPV. Also bearing noticeable revisions are the front bumper, foglights and foglight bezels. Newly-designed 15-inch alloy wheels, as well as eye-catching L-shaped taillights, are also seen on the all-new Ertiga.

In terms of exterior dimensions, the 2018 Ertiga measures 4395mm long, 1735mm wide, 1690mm tall and has a 2740mm wheelbase. Compared to the outgoing model, the all-new model is 130mm longer, 40mm wider, and 5mm taller. Wheelbase remains the same as before, however.

To further distinguish itself from the Swift, Suzuki gave the new Ertiga its own dashboard and cabin design. High-end models will come with a free-floating touchscreen infotainment system along with heaps of faux wood trim on the dashboard, center console, flat-bottomed steering wheel and door panels. Like the current offering, the 2018 Ertiga continues to come with a pre-dominantly beige interior which has become one of its well-known features.

Other features present inside the Ertiga include a four-speaker sound system, tilt-adjustable steering rack, seat height adjuster for the driver, refreshed instrument cluster design and three 12V power outlets. Like the current generation model, the second row seat can be split folded 60:40 while the third row can be folded 50:50.

Under the hood is a new 1.5-liter four-cylinder engine dubbed the K15B. It displaces 1462cc and benefits from variable valve timing (VVT) and multi-point injection (MPI). The result is 105 PS at 6000 rpm along with 138 Nm of torque at 4400 rpm. Despite being based off the new-generation Swift, the 2018 Ertiga is only available with either a four-speed automatic and a five-speed manual gearbox.

As it sits on the same platform as the Swift called 'Heartect', Suzuki claimed the 2018 Ertiga is more rigid and lighter than before. Plus, the MPV will deliver better cornering, stopping and overall driving performance.

Additional features and amenities available in the 2018 Ertiga include the following: power-folding side mirrors, rear parking sensors, keyless smart entry with engine start-stop button, electronic stability program (ESP), anti-lock brakes (ABS) with electronic brakeforce distribution (EBD), ISOFIX child seat anchors and dual SRS airbags.

There is no word yet as to when Suzuki Philippines will bring in the all-new Ertiga.
With almost 20 percent of the global fleet of Pilatus aircraft operating in the Southwest United States, Cutter Aviation has been appointed an Authorized Pilatus Sales and Service Center for the area. Pilatus says the region is base to about 300 of its aircraft. Cutter Aviation will work within the Pilatus network to provide sales and service for the PC-12 NG and PC-24 Super Versatile Jet in the Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Colorado region.

Cutter says it is equipped to have a strong support network for the Pilatus Aircraft market with locations across the five states. Pilatus says it is committed to the dealership sales and service model and feels it provides the highest level of local and personal service to their customers.

Phoenix Sky Harbor-headquartered Cutter will cover all Pilatus PC-12 and PC-24 sales and service in the Southwestern United States. Current operators and new clients have multiple new options to take their aircraft with Cutters service centers located in Phoenix, Arizona, and both Addison and San Antonio, Texas. Markus Bucher, CEO of Pilatus, and Will Cutter, president and CEO of Cutter Aviation, formally signed the Pilatus Center Agreement earlier this month at the Phoenix facility.
Former Manhattan agency directors turned Brooklyn hands-on designers Anton and Irene joined us at Awwwards Conference Berlin to talk about their project with Ikea One Shared House 2030 and making research playful. Here they discuss the difference between design in the U.S and Europe, if the role of the designer has changed, when NOT to experiment, and moving towards designing "off screen" projects.

Clients are afraid to experiment because if the drop-off rate is 2% that could mean millions of dollars lost so that's not in their interest, other clients don't care about that, you always have to understand as a designer, what is the goal of the client.

Subscribe now - watch the hottest digital design talks and interviews from Awwwards, on our official YouTube Channel.
Former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe is looking to sue for defamation, wrongful termination and other possible civil claims, his lawyer told reporters Friday.

What to watch: McCabes lawyer, Michael Bromwich, also said his client told then-FBI Director James Comey that he was pushing back on stories about the Hillary Clinton investigation  which would mean he didnt lack candor. They are seeking ways to release emails and phone call transcripts between McCabe and Comey to shed light on the issue.

Timing: Bromwich said McCabe's legal team has yet to work out a timeframe for when they plan to file the suits, but the team "want[s] these to be solid. Well file when were ready."

Bromwich also accused McCabe's opponents, including President Trump, of "continuing slander":

Weve never seen anything like this before. It does damage not only to Andy McCabe individually but also to the FBI as an institution.

The intrigue: Bromwich said that McCabe was "upset and disappointed" by some of the things former FBI Director James Comey has said about him. But he added they are not suggesting that Comey is "making things up or lying."

"Nobodys memory is perfect, people are fallible," Bromwich said when asked about the differences between McCabe and Comey's stories. "McCabe has a clear recollection, Comey does not."

Bromwich added that his team hasn't managed to find any witnesses to corroborate McCabe's version of the story, but said they also haven't had the necessary time to do so.

One big thing: Bromwich announced the launch of the Andrew McCabe Legal Defense Fund. Its three trustees are looking at transferring the $550,000 that was raised via a GoFundMe campaign over to the more formal legal fund.

Bromwich's bottom line: He believes that if the case against McCabe is evaluated on the merits and facts "there will be a decision not to prosecute on any charges whatsoever," again emphasizing the low standard for a referral from the OIG's office.
57,000 teachers across Arizona have voted to walkout of their classrooms for the first-ever statewide strike for school funding, which will take place starting April 26, the AP reports.

What they're protesting: More money. Arizona Governor Doug Ducey proposed a plan on Sunday that claimed to raise teacher salaries by 20% by the year 2020, but teachers felt a majority of their demands, including better school funding, were not sufficiently met. Oklahoma, Kentucky, West Virginia and Colorado have also staged teacher protests.
Greenland has self-rule, but formally remains part of the Kingdom of Denmark. Some of its 56,000 residents want full independence, but the country needs Denmarks cash.

What to watch: China, as you may have heard, also has cash, and it wants access to the Arctics potentially vast reserves of oil, gas, metals, and minerals. China is also interested in new sea lanes created by melting ice, for reasons both commercial and strategic.

Greenland has access to the Arctic, but it needs infrastructure. It has no roads connecting the countrys 17 towns and just one international airport. China, as you may have heard, likes to invest in construction of infrastructure in other countries.

but it needs infrastructure. It has no roads connecting the countrys 17 towns and just one international airport. China, as you may have heard, likes to invest in construction of infrastructure in other countries. As international competition for Arctic resources heats up, lot of governmentsparticularly Arctic Council members the United States, Canada, Russia, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland and (especially) Denmarkare watching closely to see what Greenlands government does next.

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This week China formally inaugurated its new Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE) to replace the Ministry of Environmental Protection. The MEE consolidates regulatory functions that were spread over seven or eight different ministries and administrations.

Why it matters: The fragmentation of regulatory authority is a major reason China has struggled to combat the severe environmental degradation that has attended its rapid economic rise. The consolidation, part of a larger government reorganization announced in March, aims to address that deficiency by making the Chinese government more coherent and effective.

The MEE will have authority over all types of pollution: surface and underground, urban and rural, onshore and offshore. It will also take over the responsibility for carbon dioxide emissions and have direct oversight of local authorities.

Yes, but: Despite its more centralized authority, the MEE will still have to contend with a broader political environment characterized by comparatively weak laws and inadequate legal institutions.

In the past, when dealing with repeated airpocalypses and severe soil and water contamination, regulators have often had to rely on higher authorities under President Xi Jinping to bring local officials into line. These authorities direct repeated and heavy-handed inspections and have punished thousands for their failures to fulfill their environmental responsibilities, thereby elevating the clout of the environmental regulators.

What's next: The MEE will apply this heightened clout to its broader scope of responsibilities. Though it will be a few months before the organizational revamp takes full effect, the regulator's augmentation already marks a milestone for environmental protection in China.

Dali L. Yang is the William C. Reavis Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and a senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
Iran unveiled its latest ballistic missile Friday and said it tested it today, Reuters reports. State television carried footage of the test. Iran said it is capable of carrying multiple warheads, of flying 2,000 km is capable of hitting parts of the Middle East, including Israel, a key American ally, per the AP.

The Trump effect: This is a challenge to Trump, since Trump signed a bill imposing penalties on those involved in Tehran's ballistic missile program last month. (The U.S. has said Tehran's tests violate a UN resolution endorsing the Iran nuclear deal.)

Iran's defense minister said "we will certainly not be the least affected by any threats and we won't ask anyone's permission" about its missile program.

Context:

Trump said this week he has "decided" whether to exit the Iran nuclear deal, but wouldn't reveal the decision.

Iranian president Hassan Rouhani said earlier this week if Trump follows through on his threats to nix the nuclear deal, America would pay "such a high cost."

The Trump administration re-approved sanctions waivers for Iran as part of the nuclear deal last week. The deadline to re-certify the deal as a whole is coming mid-October.

Go deeper: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Iran may be honoring technical aspects of the deal
1 big thing: Trump and Kim's summit of surprises

Mike Pompeo's secret visit to Pyongyang is the latest in a series of dramatic events in the run-up to the summit between President Trump and Kim Jong-un. Its almost certainly not the last.

Surprise #1: Trump accepts Kims invitation

Trump stunned just about everyone on March 8 with his immediate acceptance of Kim's invitation to meet.

Between the lines: The news shocked the Japanese, as did the fact that South Korean officials announced the news from the White House.

Surprise #2: Kim rolls into Beijing

The Chinese had also been surprised by the news. 17 days later, an armored train arrived in Beijing and, after it departed, the Chinese confirmed that Kim Jong-un had been on board.

Between the lines: The Trump administration appeared "caught off guard" by Kims visit to Beijing, "though not terribly surprised by the outcome, Chris Johnson, a former top CIA China analyst now at CSIS tells Axios. Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said Chinese officials briefed

Surprise #3: CIA chief heads to Pyongyang

The Washington Post reported Tuesday that the CIA Director and Secretary of State-designate was dispatched to Pyongyang on Easter weekend to meet with Kim. The news was leaked to bolster Pompeos standing ahead of his confirmation battle, Politico reports and Axios Jonathan Swan has confirmed.

Johnson says Pompeos visit was likely motivated by the need "to verify at a very high level that denuclearization was on the table.

According to Jim Walsh, an international security expert at MIT who has taken part in previous negotiations with North Korea, each side would have gotten some idea of what the other side wants, without tipping their hands on negotiations.

Between the lines:

Its not the first time the U.S. has done this, says Yuki Tatsumi, a former Japanese diplomat now at the Stimson Center, noting that Henry Kissinger, for example, made secret trips to China during the Nixon administration.

This time was different, though, as most steps in this process have been. You can have a secret meeting, but if its a secret meeting you dont talk about it afterwards, Walsh says.

The White House and State Department wouldnt say whether there was any coordination with Tokyo or Seoul ahead of Pompeos trip. The news certainly didnt reach some diplomats in D.C., who were sent scrambling by the news.

If there was any coordination, Tatsumi says, it was probably with South Korean intelligence. As for the Chinese, Johnson says, I would highly doubt they were consulted, but I'm sure they were informed," by the North Koreans, probably shortly before Pompeos arrival.

The big picture: "Part of this is normal, but we've got a wacky situation here," Walsh says. When it comes time to present a "final package," he adds, "surprises won't fly."
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has announced the country will stop conducting nuclear tests and launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles starting April 21, and shut down a nuclear test site in the north side of the country, through a broadcast on the state news agency KCNA reports, and President Trump announced in a tweet, later adding quotes from the message.

A tweet previously embedded here has been deleted or was tweeted from an account that has been suspended or deleted.

The details: Kim Jong-un explained, [t]he nuclear test site has done its job, via a statement broadcasted by North Koreas state media, per the New York Times. The statement added the country plans to shut down a nuclear test site in the countrys northern side to guarantee transparency in suspending nuclear tests.

What it means: This confirms North Korea is not only open to freezing nuclear weapons tests, as it has said before, but that it is planning on doing it. It leaves denuclearization on the table and will, in theory, prevent escalation and proliferation.
The State Department dropped almost all uses of the term "occupation" from its latest annual report on the human rights situation in Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Between the lines: This is a significant change, because the public language used by the State Department usually communicates a policy. The U.N., the E.U., Russia, China and almost all the countries in the world see the Israeli control of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights since 1967 as "military occupation." But Israel doesn't, and now the U.S. might not see it that way either.

What's new: In previous years, the headline of the report was: "Human rights practices in Israel and the occupied territories." The headline of today's report: "Human rights practices in Israel, Golan Heights, West Bank and Gaza."

The term was nearly eliminated from the report, too. In last year's report, the word "occupation" appeared 43 times. In this year's report, it appears only six times.

Behind the scenes: The main U.S. official pushing for this change was David Friedman, the U.S. ambassador to Israel. In December 2017, The Forward reported that Friedman asked the State Department to stop using the word occupation when referring to Israels presence in the West Bank. According to the Forward, Friedman suggested using the term "West Bank" instead of the term "the occupied territories."

A State Department official told me the report "is retitled to refer to commonly used geographic names and is in line with our practices generally. We also believe it's clearer and more useful for readers looking for information on human rights in those specific areas. The term may not be found as frequently but still there."

The official added: "Our policy on "occupation" has not changed."

The bottom line: This move will probably further infuriate the Palestinians and deepen the crisis between the U.S. and the Palestinian Authority over Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
Critics of the upcoming U.S. summit with North Korea have voiced concerns that Kim Jong-un will never agree to denuclearization or that, if he does, he will renege. Those dubious of hardliners like John Bolton suspect talks are a charade and a prelude to war. These fears are real, but so is the potential for success.

The big picture: Though both the U.S. and North Korea could well adopt poison pills the other would not accept, the two countries do in fact have common ground. The policy community should focus on developing a diplomatic strategy rather than heralding the summit's inevitable failure.

Both countries agree on the premise: denuclearization, applied equally to North and South Korea. Such has been the explicit goal since the joint statement of the six-party talks between Russia, China, Japan, the U.S. and South and North Korea in 2005, and it should remain so today.

Denuclearization would mean that neither North nor South Korea would have nuclear weapons (foreign or domestic) or weapons-grade material. Furthermore, nuclear-weapons states, including the U.S. and China, would commit not to use nuclear weapons in a first strike against either Korea. Once the North verifiably eliminates its nuclear capability, permanent inspection procedures would apply equally throughout the peninsula.

Any agreement would also have to address North Korean and regional security. Here again, the 2005 joint statement provides a blueprint, with stipulations for a formal end to the Korean War, establishment of diplomatic relations and sequenced reduction of economic sanctions.

The bottom line: These issues cannot all be resolved at the summit, but it should be possible to agree on basic principles that allow negotiators to work out the details in subsequent meetings and move closer to achieving peace on the peninsula.

Morton H. Halperin is a senior adviser at the Open Society Foundations and a former Director of Policy Planning at the Department of State.
Mohammed Haydar Zammar, a Syrian-born German extremist who is believed to have links to the 9/11 attacks, is being questioned by the Syrian Democratic Forces, NBC reported Wednesday, citing an AFP report, and CNN confirmed on Thursday.

Why it matters: Per CNN, Zammar "is believed to have recruited some of the perpetrators" for the 9/11 attacks. Zammar was "a well-known figure in the Muslim community (and to German and U.S. intelligence agencies by the late 1990s)," the 9/11 Commission Report stated, according to NBC. Pentagon spokesman Eric Pahon told CNN that Zammar "was captured more than a month ago by SDF partners as part of their ongoing operations to defeat ISIS inside Syria."
While U.S.-led strikes on chemical weapon facilities in Syria over the weekend marked a rare direct confrontation with the Assad regime, the U.S. and its allies have conducted more than 14,000 strikes inside Syria since January, 2015.

Expand chart Data: Operation Inherent Resolve. Get the data; Chart: Andrew Witherspoon/Axios

The bigger picture: The vast majority of strikes charted above targeted ISIS, with the big spike in mid-2017 coming during the coalition's campaign to re-take Raqqa. But Micah Zenko, foreign policy and national security analyst at Chatham House, told Axios strikes in Yemen and Somalia have also spiked since President Trump took office: "Basically, Trump expanded U.S. military presence and/or airstrikes in every combat theater he inherited from Obama."
The U.S. is considering using emergency powers to curb Chinese tech investments, and a new report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission shows the government "is dangerously vulnerable to Chinese espionage or cyberattack because of its dependence on electronics and software made in China."

Why it matters: Tensions with China over technology are only going to deepen. If you rely on China for your supply chain, have you finished your contingency plans in the event of massive disruption?

The big picture: These trade wars can have unintended consequences, as Axios' Dan Primack writes in his Pro Rata newsletter this morning. He points out the current format of the CFIUS bill "could prevent U.S. investment funds from investing in sensitive U.S. tech companies (think semiconductors, cybersecurity, etc.), so long as those funds have Chinese limited partners."

And, from the other side, the NYT says if China boycott's U.S. goods, it could backfire on them.

Meanwhile, Axios' Steve LeVine writes that the U.S. is experiencing a revival of Japan syndrome, circa late 1970s. That's when "Made in Japan" abruptly stopped being a source of mirth, Americans began to snap up Toyotas and Nissans in big numbers, and Detroit sank into a profit-and-jobs bloodbath.
The two heads of the Armenian Apostolic Church voices their concerns in connection with continuing anti-government demonstrations in Yerevan when they met with Prime Minister Serzh Sarkisian on Friday.

According to Sarkisians press office, Catholicos of All Armenians Garegin II and the Lebanon-based Catholicos Aram I appreciated the fact that there have been no serious violent clashes between protesters and security forces so far.

Aram, who is the number two figure in the church hierarchy, said the daily protests against Sarkisian disrupting traffic in the capital are hurting Armenia.

After all, it will take months to overcome the consequences of these demonstrations and damage caused in the course of them, he said. The country could be damaged. We must tell the demonstrators that this is our common fatherland and all of us are its children.

In this regard, Aram hailed Sarkisians offers of dialogue made to the protest leader, Nikol Pashinian. Armenias government and opposition should discuss all contentious issues at the negotiating table, not on the street, he said.

Garegin also called for national consolidation and unity but stopped short of explicitly criticizing the protesters, according his remarks publicized by Sarkisians office. We are praying for this situation to gradually calm down and return to normal, he told the premier.

In a televised interview aired on Thursday, Sarkisian criticized the protests against his decision to stay in power, as prime minister, after serving out his final presidential term on April 9.When there is no logic in peoples actions its very difficult to understand how events will develop, he told the Shant TV channel.

Unfortunately, we once went down that bitter path, he said, apparently referring to the March 2008 violent unrest in Yerevan which preceded the start of his presidency. He said his government will do everything to avoid a repeat of that scenario.

The premier also said: We will never opt to restrict rights under any circumstances.
By Mark Roe

A decade after the global financial crisis, policymakers worldwide are still assessing how best to prevent bank failures from tanking the economy again. Two recent publications  one from the US Department of the Treasury, and another by Federal Reserve economists  provide an indication of where we are.

The US Treasury report examined whether to replace the 2010 Dodd-Frank Acts regulator-led process for resolving failed mega-banks  the Orderly Liquidation Authority (OLA)  with a solely court-based mechanism. The Treasurys study was undertaken under instructions from President Donald Trump, who was responding to pressure from several Republican congressional leaders  such as Representative Jeb Hensarling of Texas, the chair of the House Financial Services Committee  who advocate replacing regulators with courts.

Ultimately, while the Treasury extolled the virtues of basic bankruptcy for failed banks, it rejected repealing regulators powers to lead bank restructurings. Hensarling expressed deep disappointment with the Treasurys conclusion, and he and his colleagues continue to insist that Dodd-Frank is an example of inappropriate government meddling that raises the risks of taxpayer-funded bailouts.

But, as the Treasury recognized, eliminating the regulators is a problematic proposition. Restructuring banks in a crisis requires planning, familiarity with the banks strengths and weaknesses, knowledge of how best to time the bankruptcy in a volatile economy, and a capacity to coordinate with foreign regulators. The courts cannot fulfill these tasks, especially not in the time currently allotted for a bank bankruptcy  a 48-hour weekend  without regulators prior planning and immediate advice, as well as international coordination.

Moreover, if multiple mega-banks sank simultaneously, bankruptcy courts could not manage the economy-wide crisis that would follow. They lack the training to devise a nationwide recovery plan. And they are in no position to coordinate proceedings with foreign regulators.

Given all of this, eliminating regulator-led restructuring would amount to a big step backward. So the Treasurys report is good news, especially because, without Treasury support, the House of Representatives may well stop pushing for this change.

Yet the second recent publication  by several Fed economists  suggests that there is work to be done. That reports main conclusion is that restructuring planning is not yet reflected in the markets pricing of bank bonds.

After the crisis, studies by International Monetary Fund staff and others concluded that banks needed much more loss-absorbing equity. In 2009, only five cents of every dollar of funding for many major banks came from equity; the rest was debt (deposits, overnight loans, and long-term loans). So if the bank lost six cents in its operations per dollar of debt, some creditor could not be fully paid. Seeking to avoid losses, many creditors would rush to cash out, putting pressure on the entire banking system and potentially triggering a run.

According to the IMF study, most banks could have weathered the crisis effectively if 15 cents of every dollar of funding had come from equity. Yet banks still hold only eight or nine cents per dollar of funding in equity, despite regulators pushed for an increase , and the biggest banks have called for reducing even this suboptimal ratio.

Regulators and bankers have sought a middle ground to boost safety. In addition to the eight cents of equity they are holding, banks are now aiming to hold another eight cents per dollar of debt that could be turned into equity in the course of a weekend. In such a scenario, a damaged bank could absorb more losses and remain in operation, diminishing creditors incentive to run.

But there is a potential hitch. Under the current plan, certain creditors are designated in advance to absorb a failed banks losses once the equity is wiped out. Those creditors debts are thus riskier, and should be more expensive to the bank than the debt that is not designated to be turned into equity. Yet the Fed economists conclude that, in the market, this is not the case. Why?

The first possibility is rather optimistic: financial markets dont think there could be another financial crisis during the life of the existing debt. But could markets really believe that there is zero chance of a crisis in the next decade? The risks of, say, a trade war or a fiscal crisis (when the projected trillion-dollar deficits are reached) are real, apparent, and priced by volatile stock markets.

Another more neutral possibility is that markets arent pricing the different types of debt differently because they do not understand that the plan involves hitting some creditors hard and keeping others safe. But this is also unlikely, because the plan has been well publicized in financial circles, and ratings agencies like Moodys count the loss-absorbing debt as riskier than banks regular debt.

The third explanation is more ominous. Maybe financial markets understand the plans, but dont (yet) find them credible. Weekend restructuring of mega-banks has never been tried, and commentators still see potential hurdles to overcome. Maybe knowledgeable investors assume that, ultimately, banks and the government will not treat the designated loss-absorbing creditors any differently than others. Either everyone will go down, or everyone will get bailed out.

If this is the reason, it is disappointing, given how much work has gone into developing both the regulatory-led and the court-led restructuring mechanisms.

Copyright: Project Syndicate: Is the financial sector safe enough yet?

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By Laman Ismayilova

A press conference devoted to the 2nd IMAGINE Euro Tolerance Festival has been held in Baku on April 19.

At the beginning of the event, a video was shown about the 1st IMAGINE Euro Tolerance Festival, and a new logo of the festival was presented to the participants.

"We want the IMAGINE European Festival of Tolerance to become a good tradition, so that when they say "IMAGINE" in Baku, everyone imagined that this is a festival," EU ambassador to Azerbaijan Kestutis Jankauskas said.

The Ambassador of Poland to Azerbaijan Marek Tsalka noted the importance of holding this festival, stressing that the festival will contribute to the development and strengthening of relations between Azerbaijan and the EU countries.

Musa Akhundov, Park Cinema marketing director, said that the films will be screened at Park Cinema Flame Towers in Baku. The films will be also shown in ASAN Hyat Complex in Guba on May 14. Entrance to the films screenings is free.

CINEX representative Maria Ibrahimova said that this year DokuBaku International Documentary Film Festival will be also held in Baku.

Further, Director of ASAN Eadio Emin Musevi told about the radio program "Avropadasan", which is broadcasted by the radio station he directed.

Baku will host the 2nd IMAGINE Euro Tolerance Festival on May 2-17.

The festival is timed to the 70th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights which coincided with 10th anniversary of Delegation of the European Union to Azerbaijan.

The festival will be held with the participation of the embassies of the EU member states accredited in Azerbaijan, as well as the Embassies of Switzerland, Norway, Brazil, Costa Rica, Israel, Peru, Moldova, Mexico, USA, Argentina in Azerbaijan.

The second IMAGINE festival will feature a dense calendar of events: musical performances, master classes, a theatre exhibition, film screenings, debates and discussions with internationally acclaimed film directors and musicians, who will join the festival.

Notably, the first IMAGINE Euro Tolerance Festival was held in Baku last October.

A number of well-known film directors, musicians and other artists and performers took part at the festival.

DokuBaku International Documentary Film Festival brings a selection of distinguished non-fiction and documentary films from all around the world to Azerbaijani audiences.

The main theme of this first editions festival was Testing Reality where various new approaches to social and cultural matters were explored.

Some 20 European documentary films on the theme of tolerance and diversity were presented as part of the festival.

Media partners of the event are Azernews.az, Trend.az, Day.az, Milli.az.

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Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova

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By Laman Ismayilova

Azerbaijan Carpet Museum will host the next event within "History of one exhibit" on April 21.

During the next event, visitors will acquaint with the history of traditional Shebeke art, Trend Life reported.

Famous shebeke master "Huseyn Hajimustafazade, will clearly demonstrate the process of its creation.

Shebeke are stained glass windows made by national Azerbaijani masters, without glue.

The Palace of Sheki Khans can be considered as the most striking example of shebeke art. This majestic Royal Palace of Sheki Khans, built in the 18th century without a single nail with luxurious wall paintings and openwork windows, is rightly called the pearl of Azerbaijani architecture.

Shebeke fills walls and window openings of halls and rooms in the Palace of Sheki Khans.

Stained-glass windows of central halls and side rooms open on the facade. These stained glass windows are the special feature in the palaces architecture.

Another region popular with having an architecture rich in shebeke is Nakhchivan.

The Khan Palace in Nakhchivan, Jameh in Ordubad as well as a number of other monuments in the Autonomous Republic, as magnificent examples of this art.

In recent years, shebeke samples have been widely used in the doors and windows of the restored monuments.

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Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova

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By Trend

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict should be resolved only through negotiations and compromises, said Armenian Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan in an interview with the Shant TV channel while answering the question that the next generation has an unresolved Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and, possibly, new generations with new approaches will find its solution.

Sargsyan said "I'm not inclined to think that we leave the issue to the next generation". "The fact that I am the prime minister today is also connected with this: the negotiation process must continue, we will not change our positions", he said.

Sargsyan said that the way of peace is to come to an agreement. "And it is necessary to take into account opinions of both sides to reach agreement", he added.

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.

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By Trend

The information spread by the Armenian media about Steven Seagals visit to Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh is untrue, the actor posted on Instagram.

"The information that is being distributed by the media about my visit to Armenia is not true. I've been asked many times to visit Armenia, but I never agreed to! I also never agreed to visit Nagorno Karabakh region, since I fully support the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan, he said.

Armenian media earlier reported that on April 22, Seagal, allegedly at the personal invitation of the Hollywood producer of Armenian origin Stepan Martirosyan, will pay a visit to Armenia and on April 24 pay tribute to the memory of the victims of the so-called "Armenian genocide". It was reported that the actor will also visit Nagorno-Karabakh.

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By Trend

A group of 50 servicemen of the Azerbaijani Armed Forces returned from Afghanistan to Baku in accordance with the rotation plan, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said in a message April 19.

The group was serving in Afghanistan within NATO-led non-combat Resolute Support Mission, according to the message.

The peacekeeping contingent of the Azerbaijani Armed Forces has been serving in Afghanistan since Nov. 20, 2002.

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By Rashid Shirinov

Russia and Azerbaijan are linked by strategic partnership relations, Maria Zakharova, Spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, said in a briefing on April 19.

"Russian-Azerbaijani relations are based on the principles of equality, good-neighborliness, centuries-old traditions of friendship, a common history, culture and intertwined fates of millions of people," she said.

Zakharova noted that extremely intensive, mutually beneficial, and at the same time warm, trustworthy contacts are maintained at the level of the heads of states, governments, relevant ministries, departments, representatives of science and civil society.

"In 2017 alone, our presidents met four times. Very close contacts were formed through the parliamentary line. A very strong interregional cooperation has been formed," Zakharova said.

She added that 17 federal subjects of Russia presently have agreements on trade, economic, scientific, technical and cultural cooperation with Azerbaijan. The spokeswoman further noted that enterprises and companies from 70 Russian regions carry out export-import operations with Azerbaijan.

"The situation in the trade and economic sphere is improving. In 2017, the bilateral trade turnover increased by 28.58 percent compared to 2016 and amounted to $2.6 billion," she said, adding that the investment cooperation is gaining momentum. "More than 600 joint Russian-Azerbaijani companies, including about 200 companies with 100-percent Russian capital, operate in the Azerbaijani market."

Zakharova also mentioned that Russia's direct investment in Azerbaijan is about $1.5 billion.

The spokeswoman noted a serious mutual interest in implementing large-scale bilateral projects in energy, transport, innovative technologies, agriculture and other spheres.

"The bilateral cooperation in the humanitarian sphere remains an unchanged priority. We are satisfied with the dynamics of cooperation in the field of education. An average of 11,000-15,000 students from Azerbaijan have been studying in Russia in recent years both at the state's expense and on a commercial basis," Zakharova said.

She added that the branches of Moscow State University and the First Moscow State Medical University are successfully operating in Baku, while the issue of opening branches of several other leading Russian universities in Azerbaijan is under consideration. The spokeswoman further noted that the two countries have agreed on resuming the practice of holding mutual years of culture, which have already proved successful.

"I cannot but mention a special event scheduled for May 10 in Baku. This is the opening of a joint Russian-Azerbaijani historical and documentary exhibition dedicated to the personality and role of Heydar Aliyev," Zakharova said.

She noted that the exhibition will be dedicated to the 95th birth anniversary of the outstanding statesman, who played a decisive role in the formation of independent Azerbaijan and laid the foundation for the strategic partnership policy with Russia.

"Such a return to the origins of our relations is very symbolic. This is a reminder of the colossal joint work aimed to strengthen and develop the friendship between our countries and peoples, which was and is carried out by the leaders of the two states and which is viewed by Russia as one of foreign policy priorities," Zakharova mentioned.

The spokeswoman added that Ilham Aliyev's recent confident victory in the presidential election in Azerbaijan is an important guarantee for continuation of this trend.

Last year, Azerbaijan and Russia marked the 25th anniversary of establishment of diplomatic relations. Presently, 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.

Moreover, Russia, as a co-chair of the OSCE Minsk Group, is making much efforts aimed at the early settlement of the long-standing Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. The Russian Foreign Ministry has many times noted that assistance in the settlement of the conflict is one of the country's priorities.

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Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov

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By Sara Israfilbayova

Azerbaijan has every opportunity to hold Expo 2025 and it will be another opportunity to show Azerbaijans potential.

Deputy Secretary General of the Bureau International des Expositions (BIE) Dimitri Kerkentzes stressed at a press conference on the visit of the BIE appraisal mission to Baku on April 19.

During the stay in Azerbaijan, we witnessed that this is a project of national importance for Azerbaijan, he noted, adding that they were impressed by the enthusiasm with which the possibility of holding Expo 2025 is regarded here.

Addressing the event Azerbaijans Finance Minister Samir Sharifov said that the countrys expenditures on holding the Expo 2025 will amount to 120 million euros a year in case Bakus candidacy as the host city for the Expo is approved, further adding that the total cost of preparation of the exhibition site during seven years will amount to 765 million euros.

Speaking about the importance of this event for Azerbaijan, Sharifov noted that holding the Expo will contribute to development of both Baku and the country as a whole.

Holding the Expo 2025 will open up new opportunities for the development of the business environment, tourism, and the economy as a whole, Sharifov concluded.

The BIE mission arrived in Azerbaijan on April 16 to assess the countrys application for Expo 2025.

During the three-day visit, the mission members familiarized with the possible territory for holding the Expo, held a number of meetings, including with representatives of the government, parliament and entrepreneurs.

The conclusion of the mission will be discussed in the Executive Committee of BIE in May, after which recommendations based on the compliance of each project with the requirements of BIE will be presented to the General Assembly of the Bureau.

Russias Yekaterinburg and Japans Osaka are also bidding to host the EXPO 2025.

The voting will be held and the host city of Expo 2025 will be announced in November.

The BIE is the intergovernmental organization created in 1928 and started its activity in 1931. Its mission is to guarantee the quality of Expos and protect the rights of their organizers and participants.

Over 50 Expos have been organized under the auspices of the BIE and their success attracts new Member States each year. Today, 170 countries are members of the BIE.

Currently, 4 main types of Expos are organized under its auspices: World Expos, Specialized Expos, Horticultural Expos and the Triennale di Milano.

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By Rashid Shirinov

Azerbaijan is an important country for the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly and the organization attaches great importance to cooperation with it, a representative of the OSCE PA said at a regular meeting of the OSCE Permanent Council, according to a message from Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry.

During the meeting, the Permanent Mission of Azerbaijan to the OSCE read a statement in connection with the presidential election held in the country on April 11. The statement notes that the election in Azerbaijan was held in free, democratic, fair and transparent conditions, with high voter turnout of 74.3 percent, which is an indicator of voters' confidence in the electoral process.

It was noted that the official results of the election coincide with the exit-poll data, as well as the polls conducted before and on the election day by influential international organizations, which indicates that the results of the election reflect the will and opinion of the Azerbaijani people.

Despite this, as noted in the statement of the permanent mission, the observation mission, consisting of representatives of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, issued a pre-prepared report based on subjective, prejudiced claims and an unfair position, which is very regrettable.

"Numerous contradictory and unfounded claims in this report, in general, cast doubt on the objectivity and professionalism of the mission," the statement says.

Speaking at the meeting, representatives of the U.S., European Union, Kazakhstan, Russia, Georgia, Turkey, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan shared their thoughts on the presidential elections in Azerbaijan and reaffirmed their determination to further develop cooperation with the newly elected President and Azerbaijani people.

Eight candidates were registered for the presidential election on April 11, six of which were nominated by political parties, one candidate was a self-nominee and another candidate was nominated by an initiative group. As a result of the election, the incumbent President, Chairman of the New Azerbaijan Party Ilham Aliyev garnered over 86 percent of votes.

As many as 5,426 permanent polling stations and 215 temporary polling stations in 125 constituencies operated in Azerbaijan on the voting day. The presidential election was observed by 894 international observers, including 61 organizations and 59 countries, as well as by 58,175 local observers.

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Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov

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By Kamila Aliyeva

India, which hosted the founding summit of the International Solar Alliance (ISA) in March 2018, invited Azerbaijan to join the Alliance as a partner country. Although Azerbaijan is not located between the two tropics, it enjoys a large amount of sunlight.

This was stated at the meeting of Indian Ambassador to Azerbaijan Sanjay Rana with Energy Minister Parviz Shahbazov.

The idea of creating an International Solar Alliance was presented in the end of 2015 at the Paris climate conference, which ended with a new global agreement to combat global warming. The Alliance united more than 120 countries located along the equator. Its purpose is the joint development of solar energy, combining financial and technological efforts in this area.

The meeting was held to discuss issues of cooperation in the fields of energy and renewable energy.

The Ambassador noted that India was satisfied with the participation of the Indian oil company ONGC Videsh Ltd. in production sharing for the block of Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli, and that Indian companies are interested in participation in upstream and downstream projects in the energy and petrochemical industries.

Shahbazov invited Indian companies to participate in projects for renewable energy, in particular to invest in production of wind and solar energy in Azerbaijan, and added that the Azerbaijani government had prepared a new procedure to facilitate the participation of local and foreign investors in this field.

In recent years, the development of renewable energy sources in Azerbaijan, the largest South Caucasus state on the Caspian shore, has been in the focus of attention.

The energy rich country generates power through hydroelectric, wind and solar power plants, as well as biogas installations. Currently, the capacity of Azerbaijans electricity system exceeds 12,000 megawatt. The total potential of renewable energy sources exceeds 25,300 megawatt. A major part of the countrys capacity in this area accounts for solar energy, while its potential is estimated at 5,000 megawatts.

Two new solar power plants are planned to be commissioned in Azerbaijan in the near future, Nizami Asgarov, chief technologist of Azerbaijans Azguntex company, told Trend earlier. Presently, solar power plants in Azerbaijan operate in the cities of Gobustan and Samukh, the Baku settlements of Pirallahi and Surakhani, he noted.

Today, the country is able to fully meet its own energy needs, and seeks to supply power to the European market. Azerbaijan was able to build a strong power system in less than 20 years, conducting reconstruction and renovation of old generating capacities and creating new ones.

In January 2013, Azerbaijan announced the plan to raise investments in alternative energy by over $7 billion by 2020, and increase total renewable capacity to 2,000 MW or 20 percent of the nations overall power needs.

To export surplus electricity, Azerbaijan eyes several major projects, including the Energy Bridge Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey, which will allow Azerbaijan to export to Europe about 700 MW of electricity a year.

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Kamila Aliyeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Kami_Aliyeva

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By Trend

Up to 20 April 2018, Azerbaijans Southern Gas Corridor CJSC has invested over $9 billion as part of financing its share in the projects, Trend learned from the CJSC.

The total funding needs in 2014-2020 required for the financing of the companys participating interests in the projects is $11.5 billion, said the company.

Up to 20 April 2018 Southern Gas Corridor CJSC has invested over $9 billion (78.1 percent) of the total of $11.5 billion (total funding needs in 2014-2020) required for the financing of its participating interests in the projects, said the company.

The Southern Gas Corridor is one of the priority projects for the EU and provides for the transportation of 10 billion cubic meters of Azerbaijani gas from the Caspian region through Georgia and Turkey to Europe.

At an initial stage, the gas to be produced as part of the 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 the Shah Deniz Stage 2, the gas will be exported to Turkey and European markets by expanding the South Caucasus Pipeline and the construction of Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP) and Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP).

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By Sara Israfilbayova

The level of implementation of the agreement to limit oil production by OPEC and non-OPEC countries in March was a record.

Saudi Arabian Energy Minister Khalid A. Al-Falih stressed that however, the task of the parties to the deal is to further reduce oil production.

He went on to say that it is necessary to remove even more surpluses of oil from the market.

Meanwhile, Russian energy Minister Alexander Novak said that OPEC+ may consider lowering quotas to reduce oil production in June, according to TASS.

"We will see for two months how the situation develops, and in June, when we meet (on June 22 in Vienna), we will evaluate it. The agreement is in force until the end of the year, and in June we can consider the issue of reducing the quotas during this time. There are currently no solutions," he said.

The Minister added that he expects that surplus of oil reserves will disappear from the market in the coming months, he told reporters on Friday.

"We are definitely going to extend the cooperation between the OPEC and non-OPEC countries, and the format - a deal or a different format, we will discuss at the June meeting," Novak said. "We are determined to continue cooperation, this could be monitoring the situation in the format of meetings twice a year," he added.

At the same time, surplus of oil reserves decreased to 12 mln barrels, Novak told reporters. "At the end of March the surplus amounted to 12 mln barrels," he said. "In three months, the decline was almost 90 mln barrels, which is a very good indicator," the minister added.

OPEC and non-OPEC producers reached an agreement in December 2016 to curtail oil output jointly and ease a global glut after more than two years of low prices. OPEC agreed to slash the output by 1.2 million barrels per day from January 1.

Non-OPEC oil producers such as Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Brunei, Equatorial Guinea, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Mexico, Oman, Russia, Sudan, and South Sudan agreed to reduce output by 558,000 barrels per day starting from January 1, 2017.

OPEC and its partners decided to extend its production cuts till the end of 2018 in Vienna on November 30, as the oil cartel and its allies step up their attempt to end a three-year supply glut that has savaged crude prices and the global energy industry.

The agreement on the reduction of oil production between 24 countries has been in effect since January 2017 and has already been extended twice. According to the terms, the participants should reduce production by 1.8 mln barrels per day (against October 2016, taken as the base level). Currently the agreement is valid until the end of 2018.

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By Kamila Aliyeva

Tajikistan continues to increase production of cement and expand export of this construction material. The country increased cement exports by almost 2.5 times over the past year.

Meanwhile, in the first quarter of this year 322,000 tons of Tajik cement was supplied to the markets of neighboring countries. In January-March 2017, this figure stood at the level of 133,000 tons.

Tajikistan's cement plants produced 774,000 tons of cement in the first three months of this year, the Tajik Ministry of Industry and New Technologies said. This shows an increase of 348,000 tons compared to the same period of last year.

Taking into account the implementation of new infrastructure projects, construction of residential houses, as well as an increase in the volume of imports to neighboring countries, it is planned to increase production of this product even further

The main importers of Tajik cement are Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. As many as 172,000 tons of cement was delivered to Uzbekistan. The volume of exports to Afghanistan amounted to more than 131,000, while 19,000 tons of cement was exported to Kyrgyzstan during the first quarter of 2018.

Deliveries to Uzbekistan increased by 162,000 tons (16.3 times growth), to Kyrgyzstan - by 16,800 tons (6 times), and to Afghanistan - on the contrary, decreased by 10,600 tons (8.8 percent).

The main producers of cement in the first quarter of this year were joint Tajik-Chinese Chung Tsai Mohir Cement (33 percent of the total volume) and Huaxin Guyer cement companies (27 percent) located in Khatlon region.

In 2017, 3.1 million tons of cement was produced in the country, more than 1 million of which was exported to Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. The bulk of exports falls on Afghanistan.

At the same time, most of this product is being realized inside the republic and used for the construction of hydraulic structures, roads and bridges, houses and other infrastructure.

At present there are about thirteen cement production enterprises in the country whose capacity allows producing over 4 million tons of cement per year. However, only five cement enterprises are engaged in export. Currently, cement of brands 400, 500 and 600 is produced in Tajikistan.

Earlier, it was reported that the internal needs of the republic in cement are estimated at 3-3.5 million tons per year. The cement deficit in the country is covered by imports from Pakistan and Iran.

Tajikistan started deliveries of cement to neighboring countries in 2015. Then, only 500 tons of this construction material was exported. In the current year, the republic not only increased exports, but for the first time completely abandoned the import of cement.

Over the past eight years, China has helped Tajikistan to increase cement production by almost ten times through investing in the introduction of new facilities.

At the same time, these achievements are of concern to Tajik environmentalists, who believe that an increase in the number of cement plants causes irreparable harm to the environment and the health of the countrys inhabitants.

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Kamila Aliyeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Kami_Aliyeva

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By Kamila Aliyeva

The lower house of Tajik parliament ratified the financial document on the rehabilitation of the Nurek hydro power plant (HPP) on April 19, Tajik media outlets reported.

The loan agreement for the project provides for the allocation of a soft loan to the republic in the amount of $60 million by the Asian Bank for Infrastructure Investments

The modernization of the Nurek HPP in Tajikistan, which will be carried out in two phases, will require 10 years and $700 million.

The cost of the first phase of the project is $350 million and these funds are allocated by international financial institutions.

In particular, the International Development Association (World Bank) allocated $225 million, the Asian Bank for Infrastructure Investments (ABIA) - $60 million. About $57 million of the total amount are grant funds. The implementation period for the first phase of the project is 5 years.

The government of Tajikistan has attracted and spent 79 million for the modernization of the HPP, or, more precisely, for the reconstruction of the open switchgears (500-kV and 200-kV). However, other parts of the hydro power plant also need reconstruction, including hydroelectric generators.

In 2009, the turbine was modernized at Unit 3, which allowed increasing the generator's capacity from 150 MW to 335 MW. In 2013, the wheel was replaced and the turbines of the Unit 8 were modernized.

The capacity of the Nurek hydropower plant in Tajikistan, after its modernization, will reach 3,300 MW, or increase by 10 percent, according to the Ministry of Energy and Water Resources.

The Nurek HPP is the country and Central Asias largest hydropower facility providing over 70 percent of the total generation in Tajikistan. It is part of the Vakhsh cascade of hydropower plants. The plants installed capacity is 3,000 MW (eight 335 MW units and one 320 MW unit). It was commissioned in 1972; the latest unit was commissioned in 1979. At present, the plant is operating at 77 percent of its design capacity because of obsolete equipment and lack of maintenance. Therefore, the maximum capacity of the Nurek HPP in recent years has not exceeded 2,220 MW.

The storage volume of the reservoir is 10.5 cu km (the effective storage is 4.5 cu km); its surface area is 98 sq km and length about 70 km. The dam has 300 m in height (the worlds highest dam of this type until 2013). The average output exceeded 10,223 million kWh a year between 2014 and 2016.

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Kamila Aliyeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Kami_Aliyeva

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By Kamila Aliyeva

Italy is one of the most active trade partners of Kazakhstan and the two countries aim to further develop cooperation in a number of areas.

The meeting of Kazakh Prime Minister Bakytzhan Sagintayev and Italian Ambassador to Kazakhstan Pasquale D'Avino was held on April 20.

They discussed issues of bilateral cooperation and expansion of partnership between Kazakhstan and Italy in various spheres of trade, economic, cultural and humanitarian development, energy, civil aviation, tourism, transport and logistics, according to the press service of the head of government.

Prospective directions of new investment projects in the field of agriculture, engineering, light industry, construction industry, mining and metallurgical industry were considered.

Sagintayev congratulated the Ambassador with the appointment and wished successes and achievements on the post.

It is noted that Italy is among the top three trade partners of Kazakhstan (the share in the total commodity turnover of Kazakhstan is 15.9 percent, after Russia and China), the first among the EU countries in terms of foreign trade, and also one of the largest investors in Kazakhstan's economy.

Today 228 joint ventures with participation of Italy operate in Kazakhstan. Investment projects in such industries as engineering, light industry, construction industry, mining and metallurgical industry are successfully implemented.

The trade turnover in 2017 amounted to $9.615 billion (exports - $8.669 billion, imports - $946 million), which is 16 percent more compared to 2016.

In January-February this year, the trade turnover was $1.824 billion (exports - $1.699 billion, imports - $125 million), which is 25 percent more than in the same period of 2017. In 2005-2017, the volume of direct Italian investments in the economy of Kazakhstan amounted to $5.76 billion.

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Kamila Aliyeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Kami_Aliyeva

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By Sara Israfilbayova

Tourism in Azerbaijan is developing rapidly, and to support the flow of foreign visitors, comprehensive activities are carried out. Thanks to the activities, the number of tourists in Azerbaijan keeps increasing.

One of such steps can be set an agreement on cooperation between Azerbaijani and Chinese tourist companies with the support of the National Tourism Propaganda Bureau under the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Azerbaijan.

The companies, specializing in health tourism are eager to attract 2,000 more tourists per year on the basis of this agreement.

The Chinese experts, who investigate local market, stress that their citizens will mostly like Naftalan.

Tour packages will cover 12 days and during this period, Chinese people will visit Baku and Naftalan.

The National Tourism Propaganda Bureau considers the Chinese market to be one of the priority for attracting tourists. Since last year, the tourism potential of Azerbaijan has been more actively promoted in this country.

In general in 2017, 2.7 million tourists visited Azerbaijan, which is 20 percent more than the indicator of 2016, 10,250 of which were Chinese citizens.

Besides tourism, trade and economic contacts occupy a significant place in bilateral relations between China and Azerbaijan. The process of interaction between the two countries was marked by constant tendencies of expansion and strengthening of cooperation.

The cooperation between China and Azerbaijan strongly contributes to the realization of the Great Silk road program.

The Great Silk Road is a general name of a caravan road, which has been the main two-way trading bridge of East and West since the 3rd century BC up to now. The Great Silk Road starts in Japan and China stretches up to Europe cutting through India, Afghanistan, Iran, Central Asia, Caucasus, Asia Minor, Northern Africa including connecting Indian Ocean, Chinese sea, Japanese sea, Red sea, Caspian sea, Black sea, Azov sea and Mediterranean sea.

The trade turnover between Azerbaijan and China amounted to $1.2 billion in 2017.

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By Rashid Shirinov

Azerbaijan ranked 10th out of 130 countries in the ranking of the most popular destinations for Islamic tourism, says the annual report 2018 Global Muslim Travel Index compiled by the Crescent Rating agency.

The experts indicated that Malaysia (among Islamic countries) and Singapore (among non-Islamic countries) were the most popular destinations for Muslim tourists in 2018 so far. Meanwhile, Turkey became the 4th and Kazakhstan is shown the 5th in the ranking.

The annual Global Muslim Travel Index assesses various factors influencing the relax of Muslims. These are obtaining a visa, access to praying, opportunity of safe traveling, accessibility and quality of halal products, conditions of residence in hotels, etc.

The experts forecast that by 2020 the number of Muslims traveling abroad for tourism will increase to 156 million people, and the market of Muslim tourism will amount to $200 billion.

Azerbaijan has lately become the most favorite place for travel of many Muslim tourists. The majority of them are from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Iraq. The growing interest to the country has several reasons, such as short distance to Azerbaijan, opening of more direct flights, beautiful nature of the country, halal foods in restaurants, etc.

As for the tourism infrastructure, today Azerbaijan can accommodate about 40,000 tourists in its 575 hotels, which include a series of luxury ones  Excelsior, Hilton, Four Seasons, Fairmont, JW Marriott  as well as several budget hotels for cost-conscious travelers. Moreover, some 25 hostels and 92 apartments for tourists operate in Baku.

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Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov

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Raport Biezacy nr 1/2018

Pursuant to Article 29.3 of the Rules of the Warsaw Stock Exchange, Krka, tovarna zdravil, d.d., Novo mesto presents the report on compliance with the detailed principles of the "Best Practice for GPW Listed Companies 2016"





Disclosure Policy, Investor Communications



I.Z.1.1. basic corporate documents, in particular the companys articles of

association;



I.Z.1.2. the full names of the members of its management board and supervisory

board and the professional CVs of the members of these bodies including

information on the fulfilment of the criteria of independence by members

of the supervisory board;



I.Z.1.3. a chart showing the division of duties and responsibilities among members

of the management board drawn up according to principle II.Z.1;

The Company does not apply this principle.

Although the Management Board has adopted an internal division of liabilities in order to organize work more efficiently, that does not represent a formal division of liabilities. Hence, no chart showing the division of duties is available on the website. All Board members, except the Worker Director, have the same responsibilities towards representing the Company.



I.Z.1.4. the current structure of shareholders indicating those shareholders that

hold at least 5% of the total vote in the company according to information

provided to the company by shareholders under the applicable legislation;



I.Z.1.5. current and periodic reports, prospectuses and information memoranda

with annexes, published by the company at least in the last 5 years;



I.Z.1.6. information on the dates of corporate events leading to the acquisition or

limitation of rights of a shareholder, information on the dates of publication

of financial reports and other events relevant to investors, within a

timeframe enabling investors to make investment decisions;



I.Z.1.7. information materials published by the company concerning the companys

strategy and its financial results;



I.Z.1.8. selected financial data of the company for the last 5 years of business in a

format enabling the recipient to process such data;



I.Z.1.9. information about the planned dividend and the dividend paid out by the

company in the last 5 financial years, including the dividend record date,

the dividend payment date and the dividend amount, in aggregate and per

share;



I.Z.1.10. financial projections, if the company has decided to publish them,

published at least in the last 5 years, including information about the

degree of their implementation;



I.Z.1.11. information about the content of the companys internal rule of changing

the company authorised to audit financial statements or information about

the absence of such rule;

The Company does not apply this principle.

The proposal to the Annual General Meeting is based on auditors references, their knowledge of the industry, quality of the audit team, and price. The Slovenian legislation and market practice, however, do not provide for any provisions which would require the rules on selecting auditors to be disclosed, thus the Company discloses them only at Annual General Meetings if needed.



I.Z.1.12. a statement on compliance with the corporate governance principles

contained in the last published annual report;



I.Z.1.13. a statement on the companys compliance with the corporate governance

recommendations and principles contained herein, consistent with the

information that the company should report under the applicable

legislation;



I.Z.1.14. materials provided to the general meeting, including assessments, reports

and positions referred to in principle II.Z.10, tabled to the general

meeting by the supervisory board;



I.Z.1.15. information about the companys diversity policy applicable to the

companys governing bodies and key managers; the description should

cover the following elements of the diversity policy: gender, education,

age, professional experience, and specify the goals of the diversity policy

and its implementation in the reporting period; where the company has

not drafted and implemented a diversity policy, it should publish the

explanation of its decision on its website;

The Company does not apply this principle.

The Companys diversity policy is not specifically disclosed on the website. It is, however, disclosed in the Annual Report and is part of the public Corporate Governance Policy, which includes a commitment to prevent discrimination. According to the Policy, all Krka employees must have equal opportunities, regardless of gender, race, colour, age, medical condition or disability, religious, political or any other beliefs, trade union stewardship, national or social origin, family status, financial condition, sexual orientation, or other personal particulars. The company has not yet adopted any independent policies to govern additionally the management and supervisory body structures in terms of gender, age, level of education, or other personal particulars.



I.Z.1.16. information about the planned transmission of a general meeting, not

later than 7 days before the date of the general meeting;

The Company does not apply this principle.

Not applicable due to non-compliance with IV.R.2.



I.Z.1.17. justification of draft resolutions of the general meeting concerning issues

and determinations which are relevant to or may give rise to doubts of

shareholders, within a timeframe enabling participants of the general

meeting to review them and pass the resolution with adequate

understanding;



I.Z.1.18. information about the reasons for cancellation of a general meeting,

change of its date or agenda, and information about breaks in a general

meeting and the grounds of those breaks;



I.Z.1.19. shareholders questions asked to the management board pursuant to

Article 428  1 or  6 of the Commercial Companies Code together with

answers of the management board to those questions, or a detailed

explanation of the reasons why no answer is provided, pursuant to

principle IV.Z.13;

The Company does not apply this principle.

Although Krka does not publish all shareholders' questions it does have a frequently-asked-questions section on its website to address common questions.



I.Z.1.20. an audio or video recording of a general meeting;

The Company does not apply this principle.

The Company uses many modern technologies to communicate with the investor community. However, the Company does not provide an audio or video recording of the General Meeting. The reason is that the General Meeting is considered to be a working meeting of shareholders that is not public. The Company does, however, release a public statement immediately after the General Meeting.



I.Z.1.21. contact details of the companys investor relations officers including the

full name and e-mail address or telephone number.

The Company does not apply this principle.

The Company does have an investor relations e-mail and telephone number available on the web page. Three professionals within the company answer investor questions. Full names of the professionals and their contact details, however, are not published.



I.Z.2. A company whose shares participate in the exchange index WIG20 or mWIG40

should ensure that its website is also available in English, at least to the extent

described in principle I.Z.1. This principle should also be followed by companies not

participating in these indices if so required by the structure of their shareholders or

the nature and scope of their activity





Management Board, Supervisory Board



II.Z.1. The internal division of responsibilities for individual areas of the companys

activity among management board members should be clear and transparent, and

a chart describing that division should be available on the companys website.

The Company does not apply this principle.

Please refer to comment under I.Z.1.3.



II.Z.2. A companys management board members may sit on the management board or

supervisory board of companies other than members of its group subject to the

approval of the supervisory board.



II.Z.3. At least two members of the supervisory board should meet the criteria of being

independent referred to in principle II.Z.4.



II.Z.4. Annex II to the European Commission Recommendation of 15 February 2005 on

the role of non-executive or supervisory directors of listed companies and on the committees of the (supervisory) board applies to the independence criteria of supervisory board members.

Irrespective of the provisions of point 1(b) of the said Annex, a person who is an employee of the company or its subsidiary or affiliate or has entered into a similar agreement with any of them cannot be deemed to meet the independence criteria. In addition, a relationship with a shareholder precluding the independence of a

member of the supervisory board as understood in this principle is an actual and significant relationship with any shareholder who holds at least 5% of the total vote in the company.

Comments of the Company on the mode of application of the principle.

All Supervisory Board members fulfil independence criteria of the Slovenian Directors' Association.



II.Z.5. Each supervisory board member should provide the other members of the

supervisory board as well as the companys management board with a statement of meeting the independence criteria referred to in principle II.Z.4.



II.Z.6. The supervisory board should identify any relationships or circumstances which

may affect a supervisory board members fulfilment of the independence criteria.

An assessment of supervisory board members fulfilment of the independence

criteria should be presented by the supervisory board according to principle

II.Z.10.2.



II.Z.7. Annex I to the Commission Recommendation referred to in principle II.Z.4 applies

to the tasks and the operation of the committees of the Supervisory Board. Where

the functions of the audit committee are performed by the supervisory board, the

foregoing should apply accordingly.



II.Z.8. The chair of the audit committee should meet the independence criteria referred

to in principle II.Z.4.

Comments of the Company on the mode of application of the principle.

The Chair of Audit Committee meets independence criteria.



II.Z.9. To enable the supervisory board to perform its duties, the companys management board should give the supervisory board access to information on matters concerning the company.



II.Z.10.1. an assessment of the companys standing including an assessment of the internal control, risk management and compliance systems and the internal audit function; such assessment should cover all significant controls, in particular financial reporting and operational controls;



II.Z.10.2. a report on the activity of the supervisory board containing at least the following information:

- full names of the members of the supervisory board and its

committees;

- supervisory board members fulfilment of the independence

criteria;

- number of meetings of the supervisory board and its committees

in the reporting period;

- self-assessment of the supervisory board;

II.Z.10.3. an assessment of the companys compliance with the disclosure obligations concerning compliance with the corporate governance principles defined in the Exchange Rules and the regulations on current and periodic reports published by issuers of securities;II.Z.10.4. an assessment of the rationality of the companys policy referred to in

recommendation I.R.2 or information about the absence of such policy.



II.Z.11. The supervisory board should review and issue opinions on matters to be decided

in resolutions of the general meeting.





Internal Systems and Functions



III.Z.1. The companys management board is responsible for the implementation and

maintenance of efficient internal control, risk management and compliance

systems and internal audit function.



III.Z.2. Subject to principle III.Z.3, persons responsible for risk management, internal

audit and compliance should report directly to the president or other member of the management board and should be allowed to report directly to the

supervisory board or the audit committee.



III.Z.3. The independence rules defined in generally accepted international standards of the professional internal audit practice apply to the person heading the internal audit function and other persons responsible for such tasks.



III.Z.4. The person responsible for internal audit (if the function is separated in the

company) and the management board should report to the supervisory board at

least once per year with their assessment of the efficiency of the systems and

functions referred to in principle III.Z.1 and table a relevant report.



III.Z.5. The supervisory board should monitor the efficiency of the systems and functions

referred to in principle III.Z.1 among others on the basis of reports provided

periodically by the persons responsible for the functions and the companys management board, and make an annual assessment of the efficiency of such

systems and functions according to principle II.Z.10.1. Where the company has an audit committee, it should monitor the efficiency of the systems and functions referred to in principle III.Z.1, which however does not release the supervisory board from the annual assessment of the efficiency of such systems and functions.



III.Z.6. Where the company has no separate internal audit function in its organisation, the audit committee (or the supervisory board if it performs the functions of the audit committee) should review on an annual basis whether such function needs to be separated.





General Meeting, Shareholder Relations



IV.Z.1. Companies should set the place and date of a general meeting so as to enable

the participation of the highest possible number of shareholders.



IV.Z.2. If justified by the structure of shareholders, companies should ensure publicly available real-time broadcasts of general meetings.

Zasada nie ma zastosowania.

Not applicable due to non-compliance with IV.R.2.



IV.Z.3. Presence of representatives of the media should be allowed at general meetings.

The Company does not apply this principle.

The general practice of Slovenian companies and of the Company is that only shareholders attend Annual General Meetings. Thus, the representatives of the media have been present as shareholders of the Company.



IV.Z.4. If the management board becomes aware a general meeting being convened

pursuant to Article 399  2  4 of the Commercial Companies Code, the

management board should immediately take steps which it is required to take in

order to organise and conduct the general meeting. The foregoing applies also

where a general meeting is convened under authority granted by the registration

court according to Article 400  3 of the Commercial Companies Code.



IV.Z.5. The rules of general meetings and the method of conducting the meeting and

adopting resolutions must not restrict the participation of shareholders in general meetings and the exercising of their rights. Amendments of the rules of the general meeting should take effect at the earliest as of the next general meeting.



IV.Z.6. Companies should strive to ensure that the cancellation of a general meeting,

change of its date or break in its proceedings do not prevent or limit the exercising of the shareholders rights to participate in the general meeting.



IV.Z.7. A break in the proceedings of the general meeting may only take place in special

cases, defined at each time in the justification of the resolution announcing the break, drafted on the basis of reasons provided by the shareholder requesting the break.



IV.Z.8. A resolution of the general meeting announcing a break should clearly set the date and time when the proceedings recommence, and such date and time must not be a barrier for most shareholders, including minority shareholders, to participate in the continuation of the proceedings.



IV.Z.9. Companies should strive to ensure that draft resolutions of the general meeting

contain a justification, if it helps shareholders to pass a resolution with adequate

understanding. If a matter is put on the agenda of the general meeting at the

request of a shareholder or shareholders, the management board or the chair of the general meeting should request presentation of the justification of the proposed

resolution. In important matters and matters which may give rise to any doubt of shareholders, the company should provide a justification, unless it otherwise provides the shareholders with information necessary to pass a resolution with adequate understanding.



IV.Z.10. Any exercise of the rights of shareholders or the way in which they exercise their rights must not hinder the proper functioning of the governing bodies of the company.



IV.Z.11. Members of the management board and the supervisory board should participate

in a general meeting as necessary to answer questions asked at the general

meeting.



IV.Z.12. The management board should present to participants of an ordinary general

meeting the financial results of the company and other relevant information

contained in the financial statements to be approved by the general meeting.



IV.Z.13. If a shareholder request information about the company, the management board

of the company should provide an answer to the shareholders request within 30

days or inform the shareholder of its refusal to provide such information where the management board has made such decision pursuant to Article 428  2 or  3 of the Commercial Companies Code



IV.Z.14. Resolutions of the general meeting should allow for a sufficient period of time between decisions causing specific corporate events and the date of determination of the rights of shareholders pursuant to such events.



IV.Z.15. A resolution of the general meeting concerning an issue of shares with subscription rights should specify the issue price or the mechanism of setting the price or authorise the competent governing body to set the price prior to the subscription right record date within the timeframe necessary for investors to make decisions.



IV.Z.16. The dividend record date and the dividend payment date should be set so as to

ensure that the period between them is not longer than 15 business days. A

longer period between these dates requires a justification.



IV.Z.17. A resolution of the general meeting concerning a conditional dividend payment

may only contain such conditions whose potential fulfilment takes place before

the dividend record date.



IV.Z.18. A resolution of the general meeting to split the nominal value of shares should

not set the new nominal value of the shares below PLN 0.50, which could result in a very low unit market value of the shares, and which could consequently pose

a threat to the correct and reliable valuation of the company listed on the

Exchange.





Conflict of Interest, Related Party Transactions



V.Z.1. No shareholder should have preference over other shareholders in transactions

concluded by the company with shareholders or their related parties.



V.Z.2. Members of the management board or the supervisory board should notify the

management board or the supervisory board, respectively, of any conflict of

interest which has arisen or may arise, and should refrain from voting on a

resolution on the issue which may give rise to such a conflict of interest in their

case.



V.Z.3. Members of the management board or the supervisory board must not accept any

benefits which might affect their impartiality and objectivism in making decisions or reflect unfavourably on the assessment of the independence of their opinions or judgements.



V.Z.4. Where a member of the management board or the supervisory board concludes

that a decision of the management board or the supervisory board, respectively, is in conflict with the interest of the company, he or she may request that the

minutes of the management board or the supervisory board meeting show his or

her position.



V.Z.5. Before the company concludes a significant agreement with a shareholder who holds at least 5% of the total vote in the company or with a related party, the management board should request the supervisory boards approval of the transaction. Before giving its approval, the supervisory board should evaluate the impact of the transaction on the interest of the company. The foregoing does not

apply to typical transactions and transactions at arms-length made as part of the companys operations between the company and members of its group. If the decision concerning the companys significant agreement with a related party is made by the general meeting, the company should give all shareholders access to information necessary to assess the impact of the transaction on the interest of the company before the decision is made.



V.Z.6. In its internal regulations, the company should define the criteria and

circumstances under which a conflict of interest may arise in the company, as well as the rules of conduct where a conflict of interest has arisen or may arise. The companys internal regulations should among others provide for ways to prevent, identify and resolve conflicts of interest, as well as rules of excluding members of

the management board or the supervisory board from participation in reviewing

matters subject to a conflict of interest which has arisen or may arise.





Remuneration



VI.Z.1. Incentive schemes should be constructed in a way necessary among others to tie

the level of remuneration of members of the companys management board and

key managers to the actual long-term financial standing of the company and long-term shareholder value creation as well as the companys stability.



VI.Z.2. To tie the remuneration of members of the management board and key managers

to the companys long-term business and financial goals, the period between the

allocation of options or other instruments linked to the companys shares under the incentive scheme and their exercisability should be no less than two years.

Zasada nie ma zastosowania.

The Company does not have options incentive scheme.



VI.Z.3. The remuneration of members of the supervisory board should not be linked to

options or other derivatives or any other variable components, and neither should

it be linked to the companys results.



VI.Z.4. In this activity report, the company should report on the remuneration policy

including at least the following:

1) general information about the companys remuneration system;

2) information about the conditions and amounts of remuneration of each management board member broken down by fixed and variable remuneration components, including the key parameters of setting the variable remuneration components and the terms of payment of severance allowances and other amounts due on termination of employment, contract or other similar legal relationship, separately for the company and each member of its group;

3) information about non-financial remuneration components due to each management board member and key manager;

4) significant amendments of the remuneration policy in the last financial year or information about their absence;

5) assessment of the implementation of the remuneration policy in terms of achievement of its goals, in particular long-term shareholder value creation

and the companys stability.

Comments of the Company on the mode of application of the principle.The remuneration policy is disclosed in the Annual Report for 2017.

Wiecej na: http://biznes.pap.pl/pl/reports/ebi/all,0,0,0,1

kom ebi zdz
The Houston Police Department is ramping up security this weekend as dignitaries make their way to Houston to attend services for the late former first lady Barbara Bush.

HPD Chief Art Acevedo held a news conference Thursday about the city's security measures, and confirmed that notable attendees will include first lady Melania Trump, former president and first lady Barack and Michelle Obama and former president and first lady Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Former President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn Carter are not expected to attend for medical reasons. President Donald Trump also is not expected to show.

READ ALSO: Family, friends, leaders remember Barbara Bush

Acevedo said he has received word that additional dignitaries will be in be attendance, but their names had not been made public as of Thursday.

Houston authorities also are expecting a substantial crowd of Texans to converge on Houston to attend services honoring Bush and her legacy.

The Houston Police Department is enlisting the help of several agencies to ensure the events run smoothly. The FBI, the Secret Service, the Texas Department of Public Safety, in addition to a few other local agencies will assist HPD.

Safety measures this weekend will be tight, Acevedo said.

"Treat this like you're going through TSA," he said.

Before attendees can take part in Bush's viewing, authorities must screen them at Second Baptist Church located at 6400 Woodway Drive.

Acevedo said no big bags nor weapons will be allowed.

Because of that, travel along Woodway Drive between Chimney Rock Road and the West 610 Loop will have limited access. Only residents and business owners will be allowed beyond the road closures.

Buses at the church will take people to St. Martin's Episcopal Church for the viewing and back.

Acevedo said foot traffic to St. Martin's Episcopal Church will not be permitted for the public viewing nor for the funeral. Authorities also said that photography will not be allowed in the church.

Acevedo added that no drones will not be allowed anywhere near the churches nor services.

This story is developing. Check back for updates.

john.harden@chron.com

Twitter.com/jdharden
EFFINGHAM COUNTY - While the state legislature threatens more gun control measures for Illinois, Effingham County's council has decided to stand in resistance, based on the U.S. Constitution.

If the Government of the State of Illinois shall infringe upon the inalienable rights granted by the Second Amendment, Effingham County shall become a sanctuary county for all firearms," a resolution passed 8 to 1 Monday night says.
Oakland, Calif.-based Highland Health was fined by California state $39,187 for several quality-related incidents, CBS SF Bay Area reports.

Here's what you should know.

1. The hospital allegedly failed to:

Control the climate in its decontamination room

Present evidence that it cleaned its decontamination room or sterilization room

Pre-clean soiled surgical instruments after use

Clean closed containers for sterilizing equipment

Follow infection control standards

2. The hospital allegedly also failed to implement a comprehensive quality assurance and safety program for endoscopy procedures.

3. Highland Health is an affiliate of Oakland-based Alameda Health System.

4. Alameda Health System issued a statement saying, "Alameda Health System is aware of the California Department of Public Healths 2017 deficiency report and has addressed the findings. Patient health and safety are our top priority and as such, AHS took immediate action upon becoming aware of the issues CDPH presented. AHS has since taken the necessary steps to rectify the issues identified in the report."
Charlotte, N.C.-based Carolina Digestive Health Associates is notifying patients that a former employee stole their personal data.

Here are six insights.

1. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department informed CDHA Jan. 10 that a CDHA employee had stolen patients' personal information. CDHA fired the employee involved.

2. A police warrant said detectives found pictures of patients' Social Security numbers, birthdays and names on the employee's phone, WSOC-TV reported. The warrant also said the employee gave about 100 people's information to fraud suspects.

3. The police asked CDHA to hold off on notifying affected patients while they investigated the breach and the employee involved.

4. CDHA is conducting its own investigation to identify any other inappropriately accessed patient records and what information the breached records contained.

5. CDHA is notifying affected patients by mail and offering free identity protection services to potentially impacted patients "out of an abundance of caution."

6. CDHA said it "takes the security of all patient information very seriously and is taking steps to prevent a similar event from occurring in the future, including restricting employee access to patients' sensitive information, and increasing the monitoring and auditing of access to patient records. CDHA deeply regrets any inconvenience or concern this incident may cause."

CDHA could not be reached for comment as of publication.
The following hospital and health system credit rating and outlook changes and affirmations took place in the last week, beginning with the most recent.

1. Fitch affirms 'A+' rating on North Colorado Medical Center

Fitch Ratings affirmed its "A+" rating on Greeley-based North Colorado Medical Center.

2. Fitch upgrades Sky Lakes Medical Center to 'A'

Fitch Ratings upgraded Klamath Falls, Ore.-based Sky Lakes Medical Center's series 2012 and series 2016 revenue bonds to "A" from "A-."

3. Fitch downgrades MetroHealth's rating to 'BB'

Fitch Ratings downgraded Cleveland-based MetroHealth's series 2009B and series 2017 revenue bonds to "BB" from "BBB-," affecting more than $1 billion of debt.

4. Fitch affirms 'AA-' rating on St. Clair Hospital

Fitch Ratings affirmed its "AA-" rating on Pittsburgh-based St. Clair Hospital's series 2012 revenue bonds, affecting $17.9 million of debt.

5. Moody's revises University of Chicago Medical Center's outlook to negative

Moody's Investors Service affirmed its "Aa3" rating on University of Chicago Medical Center, and also revised its outlook to negative from stable.

6. Moody's affirms Oregon Health & Science University's 'Aa3' rating

Moody's Investors Service affirmed its "Aa3" rating on Portland-based Oregon Health & Science University's revenue bonds, affecting $708 million of rated debt.

7. Moody's downgrades Lincoln County Public Hospital District to 'A3'

Moody's Investors Service downgraded the issuer rating on Davenport, Wash.-based Lincoln County Public Hospital District No. 3 to "A3" from "A2."

8. Moody's affirms 'Baa1' on Palmetto Health

Moody's Investors Service affirmed its "Baa1" rating on Columbia, S.C.-based Palmetto Health's series 2005 bonds, affecting $180 million of debt.

9. Moody's revises Greenville Health System's outlook to negative

Moody's Investors Service affirmed its "A1" rating on Greenville (S.C.) Health System's bond ratings, affecting $490 million of debt.

10. Moody's affirms 'A2' rating on Kettering Health Network

Moody's Investors Service affirmed its "A2" rating on Dayton, Ohio-based Kettering Health Network's revenue bond rating, affecting $644 million of debt.

11. Fitch assigns 'AA-' rating to Hackensack Meridian Health

Fitch Ratings assigned its "AA-" rating to Edison, N.J.-based Hackensack Meridian Health's proposed $300 million series 2018 bonds.
An elderly woman in California received a $792 bill after nursing home staff put her in an ambulance during an emergency evacuation for a dam break, reports Fox40.

Ninety-three-year-old Mildred Cole was rehabbing a leg injury at Yuba City, Calif.-based Fountains Nursing Facility in February 2017, when officials ordered more than 180,000 people in the area to evacuate over issues with the city's Oroville Dam.

Nursing home staff placed Ms. Cole into an ambulance, which transported her 47 miles to Sacramento. Ms. Cole received the $792 bill from the ambulance service, American Medical Response, in November, according to her granddaughter and caretaker Heather Terpelle. Ms. Terpelle contacted AMR, thinking the charge was a mistake, but they assured her it was not.

Medicare classified the ambulance ride as disaster relief, but would not cover the charges. When Ms. Terpelle called CMS to discuss the bill, a Medicare representative told her she could've been charged up to $2,500 since it was not a medical emergency.

"It seemed pretty clear to me that they had codes for special circumstances like an emergency evacuation," Ms. Terpelle told Fox40. "I just assumed that the situation was an emergency. I mean, it's not like she could've called an Uber or something."

Ms. Terpelle filed a direct appeal with Medicare to refute the charge this week.
Here are 14 recent news updates on health IT companies.

1. Weymouth, Mass.-based Brewster Ambulance Service plans to bring Amazon Alexa to its ambulances to provide medical information assistance.

2. Avizia, a telehealth company focused on systemwide services, and Aligned Telehealth, an onsite and telehealth behavioral healthcare services provider, recently entered into a partnership.

3. KLAS Research highlighted eight vendors as "A-list" in an April report, including Carestream, Epic and HealthCatalyst.

4. An Illinois state board determined April 17 there is evidence of a conflict of interest regarding an EHR implementation contract between Epic and Chicago-based University of Illinois Hospitals.

5. VenueNext, a company focused on improving guest experience at venues worldwide, joined Epic's App Orchard, the company announced April 17.

6. Veritas Capital will use $850 million in loans to back its $1.05 billion acquisition of General Electric's value-based care assets.

7. The U.S. Navy recently conducted its first telemedicine consultations from a hospital ship at sea using technology developed by GlobalMed.

8. Greenway Health plans to hire 104 new employees and invest $1.8 million to expand its West Shore, Fla.-based headquarters, helped by nearly $520,000 state and local incentives.

9. Livongo Health, a digital health company targeting patients with chronic conditions, raised $105 million in a funding round led by General Catalyst and Kinnevik, the company confirmed April 11.

10. MDLive selected Michael Farrell to serve as senior vice president and general manager of its hospitals and health systems business, the telehealth company confirmed April 17.

11. Memphis, Tenn.-based St. Jude Children's Research Hospital launched St. Jude Cloud, an online data-sharing platform for pediatric cancer researchers, through a partnership with Microsoft and DNAnexus April 12.

12. Netsmart launched a cloud-based EHR geared toward home health and senior living communities, the EHR solutions and services provider confirmed April 9.

13. Nest, an Alphabet smart home subsidiary that's being rolled back into Google, is reportedly interested in purchasing Nokia's digital health division.

14. Oracle Health Sciences launched a service to enable researchers to collect patient data from apps, sensors and wearables for use in clinical trials, Oracle announced April 10.
KLAS Research released a report in April on health IT vendors in the community hospital market segment.

For the report, the health IT research firm interviewed roughly 400 C-suite executives, directors and clinical leaders from community hospitals with 200 beds or fewer about their experiences with EMRs and revenue cycle management systems. As part of the report, KLAS Research analyzed 139 EMR purchasing decisions that were either completed or in the process of being completed within the past 12 months.

Here's how seven popular EMR vendors stacked up, based on which software respondents were looking to replace and which they were considering for implementation.
HHS Secretary Alex Azar named James Parker senior adviser to the agency's secretary for health reform and director of the office of health reform.

Here are four notes on the appointment.



1. In his new role at HHS, Mr. Parker will oversee the agency's efforts to address the availability and cost issues surrounding health insurance.

2. He most recently was CEO of MDwise, a $1.4 billion Indiana Medicaid managed care organization covering 300,000-plus members.



3. Mr. Parker also oversaw the development of a provider-sponsored health plan and population health programs at Indianapolis-based Indiana University Health.



4. He also spent two decades with Anthem. Mr. Parker served in a number of senior leadership roles at the insurer during his tenure, and was tasked with improving quality and health insurance affordability.



More articles on leadership:

Broward Health appoints replacement for indicted former board chairman: 4 points

The 2 key competitive drivers for health systems today

Survey results are in: 5 partnership planning insights from industry executives


The healthcare system is transitioning toward value-based care, which includes a movement to perform surgical procedures in the most appropriate clinical and economic setting. Due to several innovations in the healthcare space, surgeons are able to perform higher acuity procedures, such as total joint and spine surgery in outpatient surgery centers. As a result, hospitals are refining their ambulatory strategy.

At the Becker's Hospital Review 9th Annual Meeting in Chicago, April 11, Regent Surgical Health Chief Development Officer Thomas Crossen and President of National Medical Billing Services Lisa Rock participated in a panel discussion moderated by Becker's Healthcare Assistant Managing Editor Megan Wood on joint venture ASCs.



Hospitals have the opportunity to partner with independent surgeons in the community to form joint venture surgery centers, or acquire ownership in existing ASCs. In some markets, hospitals are converting outpatient departments into ASCs. While HOPDs have been a popular strategy in the past because they command a higher reimbursement rate, payers are demanding a low-cost setting and physician groups are looking for hospital partnerships. If the hospitals don't take the opportunity now to form a joint venture ASC today, these physicians could partner with a competing hospital system or open the ASC themselves.

"I think many hospitals are going through the decision tree, so in a few years they stand to lose some revenue, but over five years or a decade they would stand to lose all these physicians all together and they are choosing to bite the bullet today rather than in the future," said Mr. Crossen. Regent is working with two systems in the Midwest to convert HOPDs to ASCs as they move toward value-based care.

"These systems think HOPDs are dying on the vine so to speak; they don't think they'll be viable in the next five years so they're choosing to convert their HOPDs to ASCs for that reason," Mr. Crossen said.

He recommended ASCs do their due diligence before partnering with a hospital to ensure the hospital can execute this joint venture and the individuals they're working with can move forward with the deal. Hospitals should also expect a drop in reimbursement rates after converting an HOPD to an ASC.

"Once there is a change in ownership those contracts are at risk. If you have a regional or national footprint, you can't just assume you'll achieve those rates across the board or that the HOPD rates will translate to the ASC. At a minimum you're probably looking at about a 20 to 40 percent drop from HOPD to ASC realistically," said Lisa Rock.

There are benefits for hospitals despite the rate decrease for outpatient procedures. With many deals, Regent aims to bring in physicians that aren't currently performing cases at the hospital for an incremental volume increase. As a result of stronger alignment with these physicians, they may also begin bringing inpatient cases to the hospital. The ASC can also be attractive to self-insured employer groups, which make up 65 percent of the market today and demand value-based care.

"When you are talking about employer groups, or when third-party administrators are talking to employer groups, they want surgery centers and lower cost setting choices available for their employees and we're even seeing incentives by employers to use lower cost settings such as waiving copays and waiving deductibles to go to a preferred payer for a particular surgery. That is also an advantage that the ASC brings to the table," said Ms. Rock.
Bend, Ore.-based St. Charles Health System saw improved finances in 2017, allowing the health system to end a 5 percent pay cut it implemented for salaried employees, according to The Bulletin.

In 2017, the health system's revenues exceeded expenses by $82.6 million, and its overall operating margin dropped to 3.2 percent from 5.2 percent the year prior.

"We started out the year knowing we had some challenges and there were a lot of headwinds," St. Charles Health System CFO and Senior Vice President Jenn Welander told The Bulletin. "The countermeasures helped reset the organization  and the early indicators are saying the reset that we did was appropriate and put us on the right path."

To increase cost savings, the health system implemented a 5 percent pay cut for employees who made above a certain salary threshold for six months. However, after examining the institution's 2017 financials, officials ended the pay cut four months early.

A nine-month pay cut for executives remains in place, according to the report.

To access The Bulletin report, click here.


Nevertheless, Hogg isnt the organizer but merely a convenient spokesman (shill) for a small group of professional organizers who are funded by liberal action committees. They have collected a large group of potential supporters, whom through social media, are then urged to write a list of targets in support of a cause or to gather in a protest. Their messaging is relentless in order to urge people act on their behalf, much like you get bombarded with requests once you have contributed to a political candidate or party.

David Hogg is behaving as a demagogue willing to demonize his opponents. In a personal feud with Laura Ingraham of Fox News, he published a list of 12 companies which constitute her main sponsors, urging his supporters to write. That much is well documented. However, the dark web of professional supporters is hard to identify, as the same internet companies which filter conservative thought protect the activists as well. Nevertheless, David Hogg has become a darling of the liberal media and leads a flash mob on social media. He has raised a virtual army against anyone who opposes him. Might they be described as Brown Shirts?

On Tuesday, April 17 Hogg called on investors to boycott BlackRock Inc. and The Vanguard Group, the nations two largest investment-management companies, over their holdings in gun companies.

[BlackRock] and [Vanguard] are two of the biggest investors in gun manufacturers; if you use them, feel free to let them know, Hogg said Tuesday in a series of tweets, with the hashtags #BoycottVanguard and #BoycottBlackRock.

When Hogg calls for a boycott of gun manufacturers, it is the shadowy group of professional organizers who get the message out. Within hours, companies receive thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of messages threatening a boycott if they dont comply. The volume is overwhelming and often convincing. In the old days it took hundreds of volunteers to collect 10,000 signatures on a petition. Now it takes a few clicks on a keyboard.

David Hogg and other activists from the #NeverAgain movement also helped to lead Town Hall for Our Lives project, which consisted of a series of forums across the country seeking to get lawmakers to push for stronger gun-control measures. The Never Again movement is a radical organization that describes itself as a progressive grassroots network of local groups seeking to resist the Trump agenda. More than 100 town halls were scheduled during the time Congress was on recess through April 8 (April 9th for the House). It was Hogg's hope that activists would hold politicians accountable for accepting money from the National Rifle Association and the gun lobby, though he encouraged all constituents to attend  not just advocates of gun control, but those who have opinions about school safety or mental health policy.

Hogg and his supporters wish to silence Ingraham, as well as Sean Hannity.

When Laura Ingraham called out Parkland high school shooting survivor David Hogg in March for whining about college applications, liberals became unhinged.

After whining about four declination letters from schools, Ingraham called him out, more or less giving him a wake-up call about life, stating his situation was totally predictable given acceptance rates.

Hogg followed by going to social media to pressure Ingrahams advertisers to pull their ads from her show. A company which might get a few hundred emails, which suddenly multiplies in condemnation, are often tricked into believing that they are facing a movement. Following are the top 12 of Laura Ingraham targeted advertisers:

1. @sleepnumber

2. @ATT

3. Nutrish

4. @Allstate & @esurance

5. @Bayer

6. @RocketMortgage Mortgage

7. @LibertyMutual

8. @Arbys

9. @TripAdvisor

10. @Nestle

11. @hulu

12. @Wayfair

Todays progressive world being what it is, several liberal groups jumped on the bandwagon to put pressure on advertisers. Within days, advertisers had their ads pulled from her show. Because conservatives turned out in mass to support Ingraham, after a scheduled vacation, Ingraham returned to a significant rating increase and has seemingly become a conservative hero. Here viewership since the Hogg incident has reportedly gone up by 20 percent.

Not unexpectedly, siblings David Hogg and Lauren Hogg have now signed a deal on April 18, 2018 with Random House for a book to be published in June. Their book, #NeverAgain, is described as a statement of generational purpose, and a moving portrait of the birth of a new movement. The book will explore their efforts taking on some of the most powerful forces in Washington and beyond and will detail their commitment to new legislation aiming to prevent future tragedies.

What will it take to expose this dark group of conspirators? It is far more of a threat to our republic than pointy hoods and gun-toting bikers.
The Service Employees International Union Healthcare Minnesota filed new charges against Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic Health System, alleging the system retaliated against employees at its Albert Lea (Minn.) Campus following a one-day strike, according to the Albert Lea Tribune.

Here are seven things to know.

1. The new charges  filed April 17 with the National Labor Relations Board  specifically allege Mayo "took retaliatory action against Albert Lea employees who spoke out [about] the strike immediately after workers returned to work," according to the report, which cites the charges. Additionally, the union said "Mayo has refused to engage with the union about ongoing concerns from longtime employees  via the legal grievance process  and is not allowing the union their legally protected communications within the hospital."

2. The most recent allegations come after the National Labor Relations Board in March scheduled a hearing for July 30 regarding the union's previous allegations that Mayo violated federal labor law when it banned workers from returning to work following the strike. On Dec. 19, 79 SEIU Healthcare Minnesota members, including certified nursing assistants, housekeepers, sterile processing technicians and utilities and materials workers, went on strike. The day after the strike, union members unsuccessfully tried to return to work.

3. Mayo previously said it repeatedly told SEIU leaders and members it would bring in replacement workers if a strike took place. Since a seven-day employment commitment is required for those replacement workers, the striking Mayo employees were told they could not return to their jobs until Dec. 26.

4. Mayo told Becker's Hospital Review via statement it became aware of the union's most recent allegations after notification from local media outlets, but has not received a copy of the complaint. The system said this "suggests to us that SEIU is more concerned with making headlines than they are with trying to make progress at the bargaining table. Although filing of unfair labor practice charges is a common union tactic, it is nevertheless disappointing considering we have negotiations with SEIU scheduled for next week."

5. Since it has not received the complaint, Mayo said it is not able to speak about the allegations. However, the system did reiterate its position with respect to negotiations.

"Mayo Clinic Health System remains firmly committed to the negotiations process," Mayo's statement reads. "Talks have always focused on finding an agreement that provides the same benefits on the same terms offered to other employees throughout Mayo Clinic and Mayo Clinic Health System. Our benefit proposals have been accepted by 24 of our 26 union groups, leaving only the two SEIU groups in Albert Lea demanding something different."

6. Longtime Albert Lea hospital utilities employee Dave Larson said in a union news release the union seeks "good jobs and quality healthcare for our families," but that hospital officials still "push their demands that would undermine our jobs and take away healthcare."

7. Negotiations between both parties are expected to continue next week.

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The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on April 18 upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit seeking to force Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare to reimburse Hispanic women for travel and medical expenses allegedly incurred as a result of a kickback scheme.

Here are six things to know about the lawsuit.

1. In June 2015, Tenet disclosed it was the subject of a criminal investigation by the Department of Justice. The investigation, which dated back to 2012, arose out of a civil lawsuit filed under the qui tam, or whistle-blower, provisions of the False Claims Act. The suit alleged four Tenet hospitals paid illegal kickbacks to Clinica de la Mama in Norcross, Ga., for referring undocumented pregnant women, who were eligible for emergency Medicaid coverage, to the hospitals to deliver their babies. Clinica offered prenatal care and ancillary services to predominantly uninsured and indigent Hispanic women.

2. Tenet reached an agreement with the federal government to resolve the criminal investigation and civil litigation in October 2016. Tenet agreed to pay approximately $514 million, plus related fees and expenses, to resolve the allegations.

3. In December 2016, a patient who was referred by Clinica to a Tenet hospital to deliver her babies sued Tenet. The patient, who is referred to in legal documents as "S.B.," claims Clinica advised her to enroll in an emergency Medicaid program in 2006, and then assigned her to an obstetrician. Clinica allegedly told S.B. she had to deliver her baby at Atlanta Medical Center, which Tenet owned at the time, to ensure Medicaid covered her prenatal and delivery costs. She delivered her baby at Atlanta Medical Center and incurred expenses that exceeded her Medicaid coverage.

4. In 2009, S.B. returned to Clinica after she conceived twins. She was insured, but Clinica allegedly advised her to enroll in the emergency Medicaid program because her insurance would not cover the cost of her high-risk pregnancy. According to the lawsuit, Clinica referred S.B. to a physician who told her she was required to deliver her twins at Atlanta Medical Center. S.B. once again incurred expenses that exceeded her Medicaid coverage. In 2010, she learned her private insurance would have covered her prenatal care and the delivery of her twins.

5. Tenet asked the district court to dismiss S.B.'s original lawsuit, and she then filed an amended complaint that included several claims against Tenet, including fraud, negligent misrepresentation, breach of contract and unjust enrichment. She filed the lawsuit on behalf of herself and other Hispanic women who incurred expenses as a result of the kickback arrangement.

6. Tenet filed a motion to dismiss S.B.'s amended complaint, which the district court granted. On April 18, the appellate court upheld the dismissal, holding that the lawsuit failed to state a claim for negligent misrepresentation, breach of contract and fraud, and that the unjust enrichment claims were untimely.

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The U.S. Court of Federal Claims granted class-action status for a health insurer's lawsuit against the U.S. government over its decision to end cost-sharing reduction payments, which helped insurers subsidize the cost of coverage for low-income Americans.

The 18-page opinion and order addresses a lawsuit filed by Common Ground Healthcare Cooperative, an insurer based in Brookfield, Wis. Common Ground's lawsuit claims insurers are entitled to CSRs under the ACA.



President Donald Trump's administration ceased the CSR payments to health insurers Oct. 12. The ACA established CSR payments to lower out-of-pocket expenses for Americans with household incomes between 100 percent and 250 percent of the poverty line.



In ceasing payment for CSRs, the attorney general concluded Congress didn't appropriate funds for the program. However, since insurers still needed to reduce out-of-pocket expenses like coinsurance and deductibles for lower-income Americans, some insurers raised premiums for health plans sold on the exchanges to offset the loss of CSRs.

While the class-action status is an incremental part of the lawsuit, the designation is a big win for insurers. If insurers prevail with their lawsuit, the federal government would owe billions of dollars in CSR payments, despite the fact many insurers have mitigated their loss of CSR payments through higher premiums.



Nicholas Bagley, a law professor at Ann Arbor-based University of Michigan, tweeted April 19 that "the class-certification decision will surely be appealed, and the court's tentative conclusion about mitigation will be revisited. So it's not the end of the road. But it's safe to say that insurers had a very good day in court."



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Cigna will phase out 50 positions at an office in Hooksett, N.H., WMUR 9 reports.

The job cuts will affect Cigna employees in the insurer's professional credentialing department. The company is encouraging affected employees to apply for other jobs within the company. It is also providing a severance package to employees who can't find a job within Cigna.



Cigna anticipates it will take about six months to phase out all 50 positions, according to the report.



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Albuquerque-based New Mexico Heart Institute, one of the state's largest cardiology practices, terminated its contract with Presbyterian Health Plan  a move that will affect about 3,000 patients, the Albuquerque Journal reports.

New Mexico Heart Institute initiated the termination, which takes effect July 12. The institute's COO, Trena Chagnon, said it ended the agreement to "provide the highest quality of care and more efficient treatment" for its patients. She added, "But in the future, we hope there comes a time when we will be able to serve our Presbyterian patients again."

As a result of the contract termination, the roughly 3,000 affected patients will have to pay more out of pocket to access their New Mexico Heart Institute physicians and services.



Presbyterian Healthcare Service's CMO and clinical transformation officer Jason Mitchell, MD, told the Albuquerque Journal the health plan "appreciate[s] the care [NMHI has] provided our members." The plan will begin calling affected members to help them choose another in-network provider, he added.



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California regulators fined Modesto, Calif.-based Memorial Medical Center $71,000 for a medication error that resulted in a patient death in 2016, reports The Modesto Bee.

In November 2016, a woman suffering from confusion and kidney failure was accidentally administered 25 times the usual does of a blood thinner. The woman died the next morning from internal bleeding.

An investigation into the incident by the California Department of Health revealed the dialysis patient was admitted to the hospital with blood clots in her arm and the hospital was attempting to rid the blood clots with the drug heparin. A nurse premixed a bag of heparin and saline with 25,000 units of heparin in 250 milliliters of saline, thinking the physician would administer a portion of it. However, the physician gave the patient the entire bag.

The woman was transferred to the intensive care unit immediately, but efforts to revive her failed.

The state penalized Memorial Medical Center for not following policies and protocols while administering medications.

Memorial Medical Center officials told The Modesto Bee that the hospital reported the incident to the state health department and submitted a plan of correction to prevent future mistakes.

"We are committed to the safety of all of our patients and to continuous process improvement," a hospital statement read, according to The Modesto Bee.
Inside the guts of city mice dwell potentially harmful germs  and in New York City, 23 percent of mice tested positive for at least one antimicrobial-resistant gene, according to a study published in mBio.

In the largest survey of microorganisms living in city mice, the researchers trapped over 400 of the rodents across four of New York City's boroughs and identified number of genes in these animals that give germs resistance to antibiotic drugs. The majority of the study's mice resided in trash compactor rooms in apartment building basements.

"This doesn't tell us that these mice are directly responsible for infecting humans," study author W. Ian Lipkin, MD, director of New York City-based Columbia University's Center for Infection and Immunity, told The Washington Post. "But they have the potential to do so."

Based on the mice's fecal matter and anal swab samples, the study found 37 percent of the mice contained at least one bacterial pathogen, including Clostridium difficile, salmonella and Escherichia coli. About 1 in 4 of the mice (23 percent) tested positive for at least one antimicrobial-resistant gene.

The researchers anticipate similar bacteria in mice residing in other urban areas. "I would suspect that if you looked in Washington, D.C., or Boston or Toronto, you'd have similar findings," Dr. Lipkin said.

Hospitals have long reported drug-resistant germs, where antibiotics are routinely administered and surviving bacteria are more likely to thrive. "The drugs that we have been using successfully since the 1940s have been losing their potency," Dr. Lipkin said.

Mice are especially important animals to study when considering their close contact with human living spaces, according to Dr. Lipkin.

Dr. Lipkin said he hoped the study helped highlight the significant of rodent control in public health efforts. "This is something that people need to take seriously."
A new article published in Spine examines the applications of robotics for minimally invasive spine procedures.

Here are five key trends.

1. Robotic technology in spine surgery can improve accuracy and procedure consistency, which is valuable for patient safety and workflow efficiency. They can also enable more surgeons to perform minimally invasive techniques because of the surgical precision.

2. Robotic platforms have the potential to reduce surgical morbidity because they could create workspace boundaries and reduce tremor, as well as potentially perform better at a distance, according to the article. "It is no longer a question of whether robotics has a role in spine surgery, but rather how and when," wrote Srinivas Prasad, MD, a neurosurgeon at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.

3. The applications for robots are changing, and Dr. Prasad sees the biggest value coming from procedure-specific robotic solutions. "Developing solutions for only part of a surgery requires that surgeons do the procedure the way they always do, but bring a fairly expensive robot into the field for only part of the case. It is difficult to enjoy efficiency or morbidity improvements sufficient to justify the cost or workflow changes, although there is a marketing benefit to this model," he said.

4. In spine, robotics could evolve similarly to the introduction of robotics in laparoscopic procedures. Initially, the da Vinici platform didn't catch on because surgeons could perform laparoscopic procedures without the expensive robot; but the technology did bend the learning curve for surgeons to perform procedures such as laparoscopic prostatectomies and minimally invasive procedures.

5. Spine robots can level the playing field for surgeons to perform less invasive or more effective procedures. "No doubt, success in establishing a secure early foothold will fuel continued evolution in this exciting space," said Dr. Prasad.
With the upcoming roll out of the Bundled Payments for Care Improvement Advanced model, the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons has concerns.

Here are five things to know.

1. AAOS's main concern is the precedence of Comprehensive Care for Joint Replacement over BPCI Advanced for lower extremity joint replacement episodes. This will cause fewer independent physicians to participate in the BPCI Advanced model.

2. After reviewing data from physician group partners, AAOS physicians performing LEJR cases at CJR hospitals did not lower costs. In fact, the physician group partners reduced costs by $12.6 million performing the surgeries independently.

3. The second concern is the impact of the decision to take total knee arthroplasty out of the Medicare Inpatient Only list. The group notes various hospitals are sending TKA patients to outpatient as a default, a clear contradiction to CMS' stated positions.

4. AAOS worries hospitals will begin to immediately send TKA patients to outpatient centers even when they are not candidates for outpatient surgery.

An AAOS statement read, "Wrongly defaulting TKA cases to the outpatient setting is especially concerning for surgeons and patients in Medicare Advantage plans across the country. The Academy has heard from several surgeons across teaching hospitals, community hospitals, and urban and rural hospitals that Medicare Advantage plans are denying claims for TKA procedures not performed in the outpatient setting."

5. BPCI Advanced is a voluntary payment model designed to test bundled payments for 32 clinical episodes. It is expected to go into effect Oct. 1 and run through Dec. 31.
Newly elected American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons President David A. Halsey, MD, gave his first address at the AAOS Annual Meeting March 6 to March 8 in New Orleans.

Dr. Halsey discussed the current climate in orthopedic surgery and the rapid expansion of technology. He also hinted at new strategies the organization plans to lay out and challenges he is preparing to overcome.

Here are five takeaways from Dr. Halsey's address.

1. When sharing his thoughts on upcoming challenges, Dr. Halsey said, "I believe the orthopaedic professional society of today, and tomorrow, must respond to member demands more effectively and more efficiently in order to deliver the optimal member value. Our board of directors and council and committee leaders must bring an appropriate mix of diverse orthopedic practice experiences and competencies to make the best decisions for our members given the resources we have."

2. Dr. Halsey went on to discuss the different agreements AAOS entered into over the years. "Unfortunately, some of these collaborations have been less successful, leading to a breakdown in credibility," he said. Dr. Halsey went on to state the society will seek to establish a revamped culture grounded on engagement.

3. There was also elaboration on how members can interact with one another. "When you enroll your practice and patients in a centralized family of integrated registries, your data will serve as many masters," Dr. Halsey said. He went on to discuss the continued advancements of the societies central database.

4. He moved the conversation toward advocacy through research and quality. He stressed patient-centered principles and using the best available evidence when making clinical decisions.

5. He wrapped up his address with three thoughts:

 "Remember to listen to your patients, really listen for they are your most valuable education resource."

 "Take a risk and let your voice be heard through service in various assemblies and boards, wherever you are in your career."

 "Lean in and become engaged in your state orthopaedic society, for truly all politics is local."
Six spine surgeons weigh in on what they believe will stay the same in healthcare over the next decade.

Ask Spine Surgeons is a weekly series of questions posed to spine surgeons around the country about clinical, business and policy issues affecting spine care. We invite all spine surgeon and specialist responses.

Next week's question: What are some key trends in pain management for spine surgeons to note?

Please send responses to Anuja Vaidya at avaidya@beckershealthcare.com by Wednesday, April 25, at 5 p.m. CST.

Question: What will remain the same in the healthcare industry in the next 5 to 10 years?

Christian Zimmerman, MD. Spinal Neurosurgeon at Saint Alphonsus Medical Group and SAHS Neuroscience Institute (Boise, Idaho): To better answer this question, an overlapping retrospective/prospective approach may suffice. Five years ago, the ill effects of legislation were taking a foothold, with higher premiums and lower reimbursements punctuating the delivery of healthcare. Current insurance oversights and regulations tether patient care and sadly, I see no loosening of these restrictions; the reason being, the cost containment strategies transcribed by insurers is proportional to care delivery and treatment approvals, especially in complete spinal practices. The premise and realities of DRG bundling is more prevalent in all surgical specialties and will continue in the foreseeable future.

Prospectively, the predetermined Medicare model of surgical treatments and reimbursement (as adopted by Massachusetts and Maryland) will also become more widespread and accepted as individual states clamor to control their burgeoning Medicaid populations.

Brian R. Gantwerker, MD. Founder of the Craniospinal Center of Los Angeles: Confusion. Without a doubt patients will not understand their rights, how to obtain answers regarding their coverage or how to appeal decisions made. The system will remain opaque.

Payam Farjoodi, MD. Orthopedic Spine Surgeon at Spine Health Center at MemorialCare Orange Coast Medical Center (Fountain Valley, Calif.): Patients! As our population is aging, the degenerative conditions which we mostly commonly treat will continue to need our services. What resources we have and how those resources get allocated to treat these patients will evolve.

Vladimir Sinkov, MD. Spine Surgeon at New Hampshire Orthopaedic Center (Nashua): The drive towards newer technologies and innovative treatments will continue. This will result in more effective and less invasive treatments. The financial pressures will drive those new technologies to also be cost effective.

Alden Milam, MD. Spine Surgeon at OrthoCarolina (Charlotte, N.C.): Doctor-patient relationships.

Medhat Mikhael, MD. Pain Management Specialist and Medical Director of the Non-operative Program at the Spine Health Center at MemorialCare Orange Coast Medical Center (Fountain Valley, Calif.): The monopoly of the insurance companies, and the continuation of limiting access to therapy until the market presents major competition.
Toronto neurosurgeon Mohammed Shamji, MD, will stand trial April 1, 2019, according to CBC News.

Dr. Shamji allegedly killed his wife Elana Fric-Shamji, MD. He is charged with first degree murder and committing an indignity to human remains.

Dr. Fric-Shamji's body was found in a suitcase on the side of a road in North Toronto, Canada. The day after her body was found, police arrested Dr. Shamji. Police discovered she died of strangulation and blunt force trauma.

Dr. Shamji will be back in court May 30. At the time, the court will address procedural motions in his case.

Prior to his arrest, Dr. Shamji served as a neurosurgeon at Toronto Western Hospital and University of Toronto. Dr. Fric-Shamji was a family physician at Scarborough and Rouge Hospital in Ontario, Canada.
Neurosurgeon Ali Rezai, MD, who leads the West Virginia University Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute in Morgantown, was honored at an investiture ceremony April 16. The institute researches ways to tackle the opioid crisis and use technology to treat chronic pain and Alzheimer's disease, the Pittsburgh Business Times reports.

Here are three things to know.

1. Dr. Rezai was hired to lead the institute in 2017. Dr. Rezai is also the executive chair and vice president of WVU Medicine Neurosciences, as well as WVU School of Medicine associate dean and John D. Rockefeller IV tenured professor of neurosciences. He has been involved with five start-ups over the course of his career.

2. WVU also hired about 225 physicians and other key personnel in the past 18 months, as it opens new programs. The university plans to build a new children's tower at its Morgantown campus.

3. A building currently under renovation will house the West Virginia University Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute.

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Susan Williams, MD, joined the CHI Mercy Health board of directors in Roseburg, Ore., News Radio 1240 KQEN reports.

Dr. Williams is a board-certified orthopedic surgeon at Roseburg, Ore.-based Umpqua Orthopedics. She specializes in spine surgery, shoulder and knee arthroscopy, fracture care and joint replacement and is interested in the Ponseti Method of clubfoot casting.

She received her medical degree from the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio. Dr. Williams underwent spine fellowship training at Sinai Hospital of Baltimore with an emphasis on degenerative conditions of the spine.

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Staying innovative is a constant struggle in the spine and orthopedic industries. Companies must also strategize on different future partnerships.

In an interview with Becker's Spine Review, Solvay's Global Marketing Manager Dane Waund explained how the company forms relationships with other manufactures and elaborated on the development of all-polymer devices.

Question: What inspired Solvay to develop an all-polymer total knee replacement system?

Dane Waund: We have been traditionally using the material Zeniva PEEK. We've supported this material for spine and extremities, but it hasn't been introduced in a total knee replacement system. Each year at the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons and North American Spine Society annual meetings, Solvay tries to partner with smaller companies who are making innovative strides in their fields. We hope through these partnerships, we as a larger company are able to offer other companies insight, resources and visibility within the industry.

This year we chose to partner with Okani, an innovative Asian orthopedic specialist company, with whom we have worked successfully in the past. Okani's Chief Technology Officer, who trained at Harvard Medical School, was inspired to design an all PEEK knee system. These systems can be very expensive and time consuming to develop; however, Solvay understood the benefits of the PEEK material, and Okani provided the vision for an all polymer knee. Therefore, it was an easy decision to work with Okani on its latest project. As we move forward, Okani is conducting more extensive clinical trials and research to gather insights and evidence on the clinical use of their PEEK knee replacement system while also gathering input from patients.

Q: What are the benefits to using polymers over traditional metal materials?

DW: Okani presented five posters and two papers at this year's Orthopedic Research Society (ORS) meeting. One highlighted industry standard testing showing PEEK performance as superior over traditional metal materials in terms of wear performance. Wear is the main factor driving the need for traditional knee products to eventually be replaced or revised. Okani are confident that the service life of a PEEK based all polymer knee will survive past the 15 to 20-year average life span of traditional existing implants. Second, metal is a lot more rigid and stiff than the bone itself. Okani's data supports that this difference causes loosening, which is the main reason a joint is replaced prematurely in its service life. PEEK's inherent properties are similar to those of the bone allowing for more stability. Third, there are a number of complex steps required to produce a cobalt chrome or titanium knee implant, which makes them costly. Okani and Solvay are validating a mass production model, enabled by Zeniva PEEK, and its feasibility. In the Chinese market, reducing implant cost would enable care to be delivered to patients in areas currently underserved. Finally, mass produced, polymer-based implants have the potential to reduce the number of infections caused during replacement procedures.

Q: What can customers expect from Solvay in 2018?

DW: Currently we are seeing a trend toward orthopedic and spine procedures being performed in ambulatory surgery centers. One of our current collaborations involves instrument sets used in cervical spine procedures for ASCs. We are expecting physicians to begin adopting these cervical spine kits within the upcoming year. The idea is to provide the center with sterile instrumentation for single use. This not only reduces sterilization costs, but also does not take up the amount of space and not add the complexity sterilization equipment requires. For the patient, there is always the risk for infection, and under current regulations the cost to treat these infections is borne by the care provider. By using a pre-sterilized single use instrument that can easily be safely discarded, the ASCs are making a choice which potentially benefits both the patient and the center.
Three men, including two students were arrested today by the cyber department of Madhya Pradesh police for involving in circulation of child pornography in an international WhatsApp group. The group, 'Kids Oly Sex', reportedly has members from nearly 28 countries, including Nepal, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Sri Lanka.

24-year-old electrical engineer Makrand Salunke and 45-year-old utensil trader Omkar Singh Rathore were arrested. Reportedly, a class 12 student was also detained by the police. According to the police, the group was administrated in Kuwait.
DUP MP Sammy Wilson has accused the Irish Government of "blatant hypocrisy" over changes to the labelling of beers sold in the Republic.

The East Antrim representative claimed the regulations will hit the sale of craft beers made on this side of the border.

The Public Health (Alcohol) Bill is before the Dail for debate and would introduce changes such as minimum pricing and health warnings on labels.

Mr Wilson said: "For companies who have small sales in the Republic the cost to setting up labelling machines for small runs of different labels will mean they will be priced out of an already competitive market.

"This is obviously the intention of the regulation and is another example of the underhand tactics used by the Irish Government to restrict trade while waving the flag for the European single market."

The Bill would bring a requirement for labels to feature mandatory warnings to inform the public of the link between alcohol and cancer and the danger of alcohol consumption during pregnancy.

Labels must also give details of an Ireland-specific website, established and maintained by the Health Service Executive, to provide public health information.

The warning labels have to take up at least a third of the dedicated labelling space of all alcohol products sold.

Last week Hospitality Ulster, the industry body for the licensed trade, said producers had expressed concerns over the impact of the legislation on their ability to export across the border.

The organisation said there were now around 40 microbrewers and craft distillers in production which would be affected by the legislation and hit with a "significant financial burden on their businesses by creating new barriers to trade on the island of Ireland".

Hospitality Ulster chief executive Colin Neill said: The Republic of Ireland is the key export market for the majority of Northern Ireland's alcohol producers.

"If the Irish Government introduces this particular element of its planned legislation, it would represent a significant impediment to the growth of those businesses, including a number of craft distillers."
A new BBC drama with an all-star cast has begun shooting in Northern Ireland.

Mrs Wilson stars award-winning actress Ruth Wilson (36), from hit show Luther, and is based on the memoirs of her real-life grandmother. The three-part drama is set between 1940s and 1960s London.

The series follows Alison Wilson, who thinks she is happily married until her husband - novelist Alexander Wilson - dies, and a woman turns up on her doorstep claiming that she is the real Mrs Wilson.

Alison is determined to prove the validity of her own marriage, but is instead led into a world of disturbing secrets.

Alexander Wilson was a writer, spy and secret service officer who served in the First World War before moving to India to teach as a professor of English literature, where he began writing spy novels. He passed away in 1963.

Mrs Wilson also stars Iain Glen from Game Of Thrones and Delicious as Alexander, as well as Keeley Hawes, star of The Durrells and Line of Duty, Anupam Kher, from Silver Linings Playbook, and Harry Potter actress Fiona Shaw.

Commenting on her new role, Ruth Wilson said: "I am so excited to bring to the small screen the extraordinary lives of my grandparents. Theirs is a moving story."

Written by Anna Symon and directed by Richard Laxton, the production began shooting this week in Northern Ireland and London.

Richard Williams, chief executive of Northern Ireland Screen, said: "We are delighted to welcome the cast and crew of Mrs Wilson to Northern Ireland and to continue our successful partnership agreement with the BBC, which sees the continued investment in developing an internationally competitive screen industry here.

"Mrs Wilson is set to follow in the footsteps of other incredible dramas such as Line Of Duty, The Fall and, most recently, Come Home.

"This is another strong vote of confidence in our local TV industry and further cements Northern Ireland's reputation as a world-class production location. We wish the entire team all the best for their shoot."

Lucy Richer, executive producer for the BBC, added: "Anna Symon's scripts, based on the remarkable story of Ruth Wilson's grandparents, are full of twists and turns.

"It is a story of breath-taking secrets and love against the odds, and I can't wait to see it brought to life for BBC One by such a fascinating cast, led by Ruth."

Mrs Wilson will air on the BBC, as well as PBS's Masterpiece programming in the US.
Emilia Clarke is offering one lucky Game of Thrones fan - plus a friend - the chance to 'bend the knee in Belfast' during a visit to the top secret set.

The actress, who plays Daenerys Targaryen in the hit fantasy series, revealed the prize on Thursday as part of a competition in support of The Royal College of Nursing Foundation.

The ultimate Game of Thrones prize includes a visit to the Belfast set, where they are currently filming the final series, plus lunch with Clarke, as well as flights and an overnight stay at a luxury Belfast hotel.

To promote the competition by Omaze.com, Clarke released a hilarious video in which she attempts to give viewers a sneak peek around the Titanic Studios, only to be shut down at every turn by producers and Jon Snow himself, actor Kit Harington.

One hilarious moment also reveals Clarke is not quite over her obsession with Jason Momoa, aka Khal Drogo.

Granted, most Northern Ireland Game of Thrones fans only live up the road from the set but it's definitely worth entering.

For more information, visit www.omaze.com/gameofthrones.
Marco Pierre White has his first taste of soda and potato bread at his restaurant at the Park Avenue Hotel, Belfast where he was signing copies of his new book

Marco Pierre White has said Hollywood stars Russell Crowe and Michael Fassbender will play him in a movie inspired by his autobiography, The Devil in the Kitchen.

The celebrity chef was speaking on a whistle-stop visit to Belfast yesterday.

Marco, who opened The Steakhouse Bar and Grill at Park Avenue Hotel in east Belfast in 2015, said: "Ridley Scott approached me and bought the rights of my autobiography. Russell Crowe will play the third Marco and Michael Fassbender has been announced as the middle Marco," he said.

He said his twice to three-time-yearly visit to Northern Ireland was about "refining" the establishment.

"I always think how can we refine and improve things," he said. "We've added new things to the menu, which we are always changing. We have added snails and asparagus, things that are in season."
The future is still uncertain regarding Brexit, Northern Ireland and the border

The DUP has accused the EU of bully-boy tactics over reports its negotiators have comprehensively rejected all British proposals for avoiding a hard border in Ireland.

Friday's Daily Telegraph reported senior EU diplomatic sources saying Theresa Mays plan for avoiding a hard border was subjected to a systematic and forensic annihilation this week at a meeting between EU officials and Olly Robbins, the UKs lead Brexit negotiator.

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Reacting to the story, DUP MEP Diane Dodds said: The latest Brussels bully-boy tactics are a new low in the Brexit process. Following on from Donald Tusks intervention earlier this week, it is clear that the EUs capacity for compromise and creativity is severely lacking.

At a critical time for negotiations, there is a need for cool heads and practical minds. Differences should be thrashed out at the negotiating table, not through press headlines.

"Any implied threat by Michel Barnier to suspend trade talks again is counterproductive. This shows scant regard not just for communities in Northern Ireland but for German car manufacturers and French farmers who rely on Great Britain as their primary market.

"The EU, including Dublin, have a joint responsibility alongside our UK Government to identify workable options to bridge gaps."

Expand Close Map of the Irish border which has nearly 300 crossings (PA Graphics) Press Association Images / Facebook

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SDLP Colum Eastwood called on the British Government to settle the Irish Border issue with the EU and allow Northern Ireland to remain in the customs union and the single market.

It is now crystal clear that the British Government need to get their heads out of the sand, he said.

Theresa May can no longer try to ride both horses  on one hand reiterating her so-called commitment to no border in Ireland and on the other hand propose no workable solutions to prevent a border here.

The British Government must now move to the only sensible, credible and practical solution for preventing a hard border in Ireland and that is to retain full alignment with the customs union and the single market.
A Cessna light aircraft similar to the one which crashed

One of the first people to arrive at the scene of a light aircraft crash in Co Antrim that claimed two lives said he experienced a "terrible feeling of helplessness" as he realised there was nothing he could do to save those in the burning wreckage.

Police confirmed that two people died in the crash, which occurred shortly after noon near rural Ballyhill Lane in Crumlin.

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It is understood the pilot had taken off from Newtownards airfield accompanied by an aerial photographer.

Last night the PSNI said it was "not in a position to confirm the identity of the deceased at this time".

Superintendent Emma Bond said that emergency services had received a report of a downed plane shortly after 12.30pm.

The air ambulance was tasked to the scene, and the Ambulance Service implemented its major incident protocol, dispatching one rapid response paramedic, three emergency ambulance crews and four officers.

The major incident was stood down at 12.49pm and no patients were taken from the scene.

The Fire and Rescue Service also attended.

Grandfather Roy Divers (66) said he had rushed to the scene after witnessing the plane go down near his home.

"I looked out through the living room window and I noticed the plane just over the top of the big trees on the horizon - it just went down, and I knew it had crashed," he said.

"There was no immediate explosion so I went upstairs to my bedroom window and I saw smoke rising. I tried phoning the emergency services but I couldn't get through, so I went to the field and I saw that the plane was on fire.

"The plane was lying on the edge of the field, it may have clipped the hedges or low trees on the way down.

"When you see that you automatically think that you can pull someone out of the plane.

"I only saw one person at the time.

"There was no way you could get to them, and they were obviously dead.

"I think that person must have died before the plane went on fire, probably on impact.

"You knew that there was nothing you could do for them. There was no access to water to try to put the fire out or anything like that.

"It's a terrible feeling of helplessness, standing there knowing there's nothing you can do about it.

"I only saw the other person once the fire brigade had put the fire out; the flames had obscured that person.

"Then the emergency services came, and that was it.

"It wasn't a nice scene. You know it's somebody's loved one lying there and there's nothing you can do about it.

"There was absolutely nothing anyone could have done."

He declined an offer by the Ambulance Service to be taken to hospital, and said his only concern was for the families of those who died.

"There's two people, they were expecting to get home and now their families are going to get bad news. It makes you realise how precious life is, and how quickly you can lose it," he said.

"It makes you appreciate what you've got."

Another neighbour, who was also among the first to arrive on the scene, said the small red and white aircraft, a Cessna, had "exploded" in front of her.

"It was surreal. It was circling for about 10 to 15 minutes, but there was nothing to indicate it was in trouble," she said.

"My neighbour saw the crash and came running for me and we ran over.

"I called 999 and told them there was a plane crash. The plane exploded in front of us.

"I don't think they would have suffered; they would have died on impact.

"There was no way to save them or help them."

The shocked neighbour said she believed the pilot had deliberately steered the plane away from nearby properties.

"The pilot missed the houses - they have done what they could to miss the houses," she said.

"My deepest sympathies go out to their families.

"It's just dreadful. We don't have the impact the families will have, it's nothing compared to what they're going through. All you can do is pray for the family members, my heart goes out to them."

Ballyhill Lane resident JJ McKee (19), whose family home is near the crash site, revealed that he had heard a "loud engine" noise, but initially thought that emergency services were responding to a traffic accident.

"I was on my way into Belfast when I Iooked out the window and saw all the cars and people in jackets," recalled the Belfast Met student.

"I thought it must have been a car accident.

"This is a very quiet area. It's just so unexpected, it's kind of surreal. Very sad."

The nearby Belfast International Airport, Belfast City Airport and an airfield in Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh, confirmed that the flight was not connected to them.

Belfast International said the plane was not operating out of it, or heading towards it to land.

It said: "It crashed in the vicinity of Loanends, two to three miles from the airport."

Newtownards Airport, where the Ulster Flying Club is based, said it would make no comment.

Supt Bond said the Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) will examine the scene to determine the cause of the tragedy.

"We expect the scene to be held for some time as enquiries are carried out," she added.

"Cordons have been placed in the area surrounding the aircraft to maintain the integrity of the scene as the investigation continues. I would ask that the cordons are respected by all and directions from officers at the scene are heeded."

Politicians expressed their shock at the crash.

Lagan Valley SDLP MLA Pat Catney said: "My thoughts and prayers are with everyone involved in the ongoing incident at Nutts Corner following a crash. Thinking of all of those involved at this difficult time."

South Antrim DUP MP Paul Girvan said he was "deeply saddened".

"My thoughts, prayers and deep condolences go out the family of those involved in the crash," he said.

"I am very much shocked that this has happened considering the very high safety standards that are involved in air travel.

"At this point the causes of the crash are unknown and an investigation by the Air Accidents Investigation Branch will be carried out.

"I would encourage the public not to visit the area as they may disturb the scene where evidence is being collected. It is of the utmost importance that the AAIB be given every opportunity to carry out their investigation."

South Antrim Alliance MLA David Ford described the crash as "shocking and sad".

"I want to pass on my condolences to the loved ones of the victims of this crash at what must be a terrible time," he said.

"I also wish to thank those emergency services who attended the scene, as well as members of the public who were there and did what they could to help."

South Antrim Sinn Fein MLA Declan Kearney said he was "saddened" at the loss of life.

He said: "Whatever the cause of the crash, it appears that those on board tried their best to land the aircraft safely, and away from populated areas.

"Whilst this succeeded in avoiding wide-scale casualties, a safe landing regrettably proved impossible and those on board were tragically killed in the subsequent crash.

"I want to extend my sincere condolences to the families of those killed, and also commend those local people for their quick response and their efforts to assist in such harrowing circumstances."
Flowers on the Ballysillan Road in north Belfast where a women in her 30s was hit and killed by a car involved in a pursuit with police. A 39-year-old man has been charged with a number of offences including causing death by dangerous driving. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye

Flowers on the Ballysillan Road in north Belfast where a women in her 30s was hit and killed by a car involved in a pursuit with police. A 39-year-old man has been charged with a number of offences including causing death by dangerous driving. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye

Flowers on the Ballysillan Road in north Belfast where a women in her 30s was hit and killed by a car involved in a pursuit with police. A 39-year-old man has been charged with a number of offences including causing death by dangerous driving. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye

Flowers on the Ballysillan Road in north Belfast where a women in her 30s was hit and killed by a car involved in a pursuit with police. A 39-year-old man has been charged with a number of offences including causing death by dangerous driving. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye

Flowers on the Ballysillan Road in north Belfast where a women in her 30s was hit and killed by a car involved in a pursuit with police. A 39-year-old man has been charged with a number of offences including causing death by dangerous driving. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye

Police at the scene of the crash on the Ballysillan Road in north Belfast yesterday

Lisa Gow, the young mother of two who died on the Ballysillan Road when she was hit in an accident involving a stolen car on Thursday. A 39 year-old man was charged to appear at Belfast Magistrates Court.

Flowers on the Ballysillan Road in north Belfast where Lisa Gow died. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye

A man accused of killing a young mother in a stolen car in north Belfast has made full admissions, a court heard today.

Martin Nelson also told police of his remorse and sorrow over the victim being knocked down after officers pursued the Audi A4 he was said to be driving.

The 39-year-old faces a series of charges linked the crash which claimed the life of Lisa Gow on the Ballysillan Road on Thursday morning.

Floral tributes have been left at the scene of the tragedy.

Nelson, with an address at Ardoyne Road in the city, is accused of causing death by dangerous driving, failing to stop for police, driving while disqualified and without insurance.

He is further charged with burglary, aggravated vehicle theft, and taking and driving a motor vehicle away.

A judge at Belfast Magistrates' Court was told Nelson would not be appearing in the dock as planned.

"He has refused to come up from the cells," defence solicitor Pearse MacDermott confirmed.

As the hearing went ahead in his absence, a detective sergeant confirmed he could connect Nelson to the alleged offences.

A Police Ombudsman investigation has been launched into the circumstances surrounding the incident.

Expand Close Lisa Gow, the young mother of two who died on the Ballysillan Road when she was hit in an accident involving a stolen car on Thursday. A 39 year-old man was charged to appear at Belfast Magistrates Court. Photopress Belfast / Facebook

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Whatsapp Lisa Gow, the young mother of two who died on the Ballysillan Road when she was hit in an accident involving a stolen car on Thursday. A 39 year-old man was charged to appear at Belfast Magistrates Court.

The car involved in the fatal collision had been stolen from a house on the Cavehill Road earlier that morning.

It is understood keys to the vehicle were taken during a burglary three days earlier.

Police said they located the Audi A4 after deploying the PSNI helicopter as part of a search operation.

The vehicle was followed onto the Antrim Road before other trained officers deployed a stinger device in a bid to bring it to a controlled stop.

But when the stolen car failed to come to a halt police on the ground ended their pursuit amid concerns at the dangerous manner in which it was being driven, according to a PSNI statement.

It then headed onto the Ballysillan Road, colliding with another vehicle before striking and killing the female pedestrian.

She has been named locally as Ms Gow, a woman in her thirties with two young children.

During the hearing Mr MacDermott did not contest his client being connected to the charges.

But he told the court: "During interview Mr Nelson made full admissions and accepted his role in the incident, and during interviews he expressed remorse and sorrow to the victim's family."

No application for bail was mounted in the accused's absence.

Instead, District Judge Fiona Bagnall ordered him to be remanded in custody to appear again by video-link on May 18.
Stephen Nolan said the recent boycott campaign had no bearing on public support.

An apparent Twitter frenzy calling for the boycott of the BBC's Stephen Nolan show came to no more than a storm in a tea cup - with the presenter saying it had no bearing on his listener figures - suggesting it may have indeed had the opposite effect.

The "Boycott Nolan campaign" sprung up earlier this year during the political talks with a daily deluge of tweets extolling incredulity at the topics discussed on that day's programme while calling for all and sundry to boycott it.

The campaign involved wild accusations of Mr Nolan being divisive, causing not only the collapse of the Stormont institutions but also that he himself was blocking political agreement.

Sinn Fein was accused of orchestrating the campaign - a claim the party denied.

This concern was articulated by Queen's University academic Professor Brian M Walker, who tackled Nolan directly about it on air.

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On Friday Stephen Nolan was discussing the subject of abuse on social networks after DUP MLAs Carla Lockhart and Arlene Foster were subjected to a spate of hateful comments on Twitter after posting a selfie.

The loyalist blogger Jamie Bryson raised the case of the recent boycott against Mr Nolan. He claimed a number of parties engaged in the campaign and whipped up a frenzy on social media encouraging trolling with a number of politicians "more than happy to engage" and attack Mr Nolan's integrity as a journalist.

"The bottom line is this," Mr Nolan said.

"When you have got over, what is it, 300,000 people across a week listening to the Nolan Show if someone wants to..."

"Well it didn't work, the boycott didn't work," interjected Mr Bryson laughing.

Mr Nolan continued: "I noticed during that boycott campaign that we had more calls, or as many calls certainly as ever before.

"I noticed some of the people that were openly tweeting about the 'boycott Nolan' campaign were talking everyday about what we had on air.

"All I would say when you have that volume of support and buy in from the public... for 300,000 - what is that nearly a fifth of the people of Northern Ireland hearing the Nolan show across a week - work away, it ain't going to work."
A group of 16 US Congressmen has written to the UK Government to express concern over the "lack of progress" on legacy issues in Northern Ireland.

It comes just days after former US President Bill Clinton made an emotional plea to "save the peace" during his visit to Belfast to accept the Freedom of the City.

The letter, addressed to the British Ambassador to the US Kim Darroch, raises concerns over the "ongoing absence of adequate resources for coroners' investigations" into Troubles-related deaths, and the work of the Historical Investigations Unit.

The authors say they are "concerned by a proposal in Westminster for a statute of limitations for British military personnel".

Last month a High Court judge compelled authorities in Belfast and London to reconsider funds for legacy inquests.

Sinn Fein vice-president Michelle O'Neill said: "I welcome this important initiative by the US representatives and thank them for their continued support for the Irish peace process and the families of the victims."
Life peer Lord Kilclooney was charged with failing to comply with a remedial notice to cut hedges at his Mullinure home.

John Taylor (80), a former Ulster Unionist politician who has served at every level of politics and is now a cross bench peer, did not attend Armagh Magistrates Court as he is out of the jurisdiction, the court heard.

In a prosecution brought by Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon Council under the High Hedges Act 2011, Lord Kilclooney is charged with failing to comply with a notice sent in January to take action within a month, at his home on the Portadown Road.

Mr Rooney, appearing on behalf of A&L Goodbody Solicitors who the council has instructed, told the court theres been progress made and that defence solicitors Blair & Hanna have asked for the case to be adjourned to the next departmental hearing day.

Its a high hedges case and theres been progress in that the hedges are being reduced so its hoped that the matter wont trouble the court, said Mr Rooney.

District Judge Paul Copeland said he would put the case back to May 18 and the prosecution can inform the court as to the future of this prosecution in that theres been some remedial approach by the defendant.

Failing that it will proceed as either a plea or a date to be fixed for hearing, added the judge.
Police at the scene of the Tynedale attack.

A 35-year-old man has been arrested by detectives investigating the attempted murder of a man in north Belfast.

A number of shots were fired at a man who was out walking in the Ballysillan/Tyndale Drive area just after 8pm on Tuesday April 10.

A further shot was fired as the gunman ran from the scene. The victim was not injured in the incident.

Members of the UDA were thought to have been involved.

Police investigating the incident arrested a man and conducted a number of searches in the north Belfast area on Thursday and Friday.

A quantity of suspected drugs were also seized during the searches.

The arrested man was subsequently released on police bail pending further enquiries.

Detective Sergeant Moffett said: I am appealing to anyone who saw any suspicious cars or activity in the area around the time of the shooting to get in touch with us.

"I would particularly like to hear from anyone who saw a tall male in his 30s or 40s in the area, who was dressed in a dark coat with his hood up and carrying a bag. We believe that he left the area in a car."

Detectives at Musgrave Police Station can be contacted on 101, quoting reference 1172 16/04/2018.
The so-called Hooded Men at a press conference in Belfast following the rejection of their case by the European Court of Human Rights

Newly unearthed documents point to a potential conspiracy around British Government ministers allegedly authorising the torture of the so-called Hooded Men, the Court of Appeal has heard.

Senior judges were also told one of the group was forced to stand against a wall for 30 hours amid treatment amounting to criminal assaults during internment in Northern Ireland 47 years ago.

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The PSNI is challenging a previous ruling that its decision to end preliminary inquiries into the deep interrogation methods deployed against the 14 men was seriously flawed and should be quashed.

Lawyers for the Chief Constable claim no fresh evidence has emerged which would trigger a legal obligation to continue inquiries and seek the prosecution of anyone who perpetrated offences.

Five techniques were said to have been used against the men while they were held without trial: being hooded and made to stand in a stress position against a wall and beaten if they fell; forced to listen to constant loud static noise; and deprived of sleep, food and water.

Counsel for the daughter of Sean McKenna, one of the Hooded Men who died four years after his detention, countered that an unearthed memo from a former British minister should compel further investigation.

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In 1977 Merlyn Rees, then Home Secretary, sent a letter to Prime Minister James Callaghan setting out his views on procedures deployed against the men, the court heard.

In the memo he states it was his belief that "the decision to use methods of torture in Northern Ireland in 1971/72 was taken by ministers - in particular Lord Carrington, then Secretary of State for Defence".

The document, uncovered from the National Archives in London, featured in an RTE documentary in 2014 and led to questions being raised at the Northern Ireland Policing Board.

Karen Quinlivan QC argued that the Rees memo is significant and publicly unavailable in the 1970s - triggering the investigative obligation.

She said: "There's certainly material which raises, credibly and plausibly, an allegation that there was specific ministerial authorisation of the five techniques, and therefore there's evidence of a conspiracy which should be investigated."

Surviving members of the Hooded Men brought the original proceedings against the Chief Constable, Secretary of State and the Department of Justice after allegations of ministerial involvement emerged in a 2014 television documentary.

They argue the authorities have failed to comply with duties under the European Convention on Human Rights to properly probe and order a full inquiry into what happened to them while interned at British Army facilities in Ballykelly, Co Derry.

Amid claims the men's treatment was sanctioned by the State, the court heard former British Prime Minister Edward Heath was involved in the decision making process.

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Whatsapp A number of the surviving Hooded Men outside Buswell's Hotel in Dublin ahead of an Amnesty International press conference

Stormont's Prime Minister at the time, Brian Faulkner, was also personally briefed on the deployment of the techniques, according to their case.

RUC Special Branch officers were said to have been taught the methods by soldiers but sought assurances of immunity from prosecution before carrying them out.

Lawyers representing the Chief Constable and the Government insist Mr Rees later modified his assessment of the Hooded Men's treatment from torture to deep interrogation.

One of the challenges has been brought by Mary McKenna on behalf of her school caretaker father, whose death in 1975 she believes is linked to what he endured during internment.

"The reality is that two of the five techniques at the very minimum involve criminal assaults," her barrister told the three appeal judges.

"Wall-standing, in the case of Mr McKenna for a period of 30 hours over the course of his detention, that's recognised as unlawful."

Ms Quinlivan further contended: "In the 1970s it was not apparent to anyone that there was authorisation by British ministers, as opposed to Mr Faulkner, of specific use of the five techniques.

"In fact, the opposite was being stated repeatedly - that ministers didn't have a full grasp of what was going on."

The appeal continues.
Shopworkers hold a protest at Belfast City Hall over proposed longer Sunday trading hours which the city council are debating. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye

A much-anticipated decision on whether or not to extend Sunday trading hours in Belfast has been deferred for one week.

Councillors, trade union representatives and other stakeholders had gathered at a meeting of Belfast City Councils Strategic Policy and Resources Committee on Friday morning and a vote was expected to be held on the issue.

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Following representations from trade union Usdaw, Retail NI and others, however, Sinn Fein councillor Deirdre Hargey proposed the decision be deferred one week to allow parties to obtain more information on the matter.

Other committee members agreed and the proposals were set aside to be considered at a later date.

Prior to the meeting getting underway at City Hall, members of the trade union Usdaw gathered outside to protest against extending the hours.

Inside the building, Usdaw Divisional Officer Michael Aylward made his case to councillors that they should give retail workers a break and vote against the proposals.

Im disappointed that this issue is back on the agenda, Mr Aylward said to the committee.

"Just see this through the eyes of a shop worker. These are real people with real jobs, who have real issues and family concerns.

They need the respite from the hustle and bustle of retail. The retail sector is so volatile these days, it needs stability. Lets give retail workers a break. They have families - this is about giving time back to families who work in retail.

Retail NI boss Glyn Roberts warned that, if BCC votes in favour of extending Sunday trading hours, other councils could follow suit.

This would set a dangerous precedent that will unravel. Other councils are looking at this issue and the way this committee votes on this, he said.

Lets be clear. This is about whether or not you are going to stand up for independent retailers.

Arguing in favour of the proposals was Hospitality Ulster Chief Executive Colin Neil, who said extending Sunday trading hours would be an opportunity to maximise tourism in Belfast and surrounding towns.

Gerry Lennon of Visit Belfast said a vote in favour would help Belfast achieve its tourism goals, as retail is an important part of creating a vibrant city.

Fridays discussion followed one committee vote and two public consultations on the issue in the last 12 months.

Combining the two consultations there is a slight majority (52.8%) in favour of extending Sunday trading hours for large shops in the Belfast district.

First time round, the proposals were rejected by the SDLP , Sinn Fein and the DUP.

Several councillors said they needed to see more concrete figures and statistics on the merits of extending Sunday trading hours.

On Friday, councillor Hargey said her party needed more time to consider issues relating to workers rights and a possible charter insuring such rights would be protected in the event of the trading hours extension.

DUP Councillor Lee Reynolds said his party couldnt be asked to consider a charter for workers when they were provided with no details of it.

There is not one single piece of information that provides any basis for us to change our decision from the last vote, he said.
Plastic straws should be banned in Northern Ireland because of the environmental damage they cause, an MLA has said (Kirsty O'Connor/PA)

Plastic straws should be banned in Northern Ireland because of the environmental damage they cause, an MLA has said.

It comes as the Prime Minister unveiled plans to stop the sale of straws, drinks stirrers and cotton buds in England.

Theresa May said plastic waste was "one of the greatest environmental challenges facing the world" and the UK was taking a lead in tackling the problem.

A consultation on banning the disposable plastic products will launch later this year in an effort to cut the amount of waste that ends up in rivers and oceans.

Mrs May urged Commonwealth leaders gathered in London to follow the UK's example in tackling the problem.

Sinn Fein MLA Cathal Boylan said we should follow that lead, adding: "Plastic is a pollutant. It ends up in the ocean, entangling and endangering aquatic life.

"It finds its way into our food chain and water supply, threatening human health.

"And when it breaks down it releases toxins which contribute to global warming.

"One practical step we can take is to reduce the use of plastic straws.

"A straw may only be used for 20 minutes but it will last as waste for over 200 years."

Around 8.5 billion plastic straws are thrown away each year, potentially contributing to the over 150 million tonnes of plastic in the oceans.

The environmental catastrophe - highlighted by the BBC's Blue Planet II series - sees one million birds and over 100,000 sea mammals die every year from eating and getting tangled in plastic waste.

Subject to the consultation, which Environment Secretary Michael Gove will launch later this year, the Government is prepared to ban the sale of plastic straws, stirrers and cotton buds in England.

Officials will work with industry to develop alternatives and ensure there is sufficient time to adapt, and will also propose excluding plastic straws used for medical reasons.

A recent survey found the majority of litter found on Northern Ireland's beaches was plastic.

Last year an average of 437 items of rubbish were found per 100m of beach here.

Some 82% of this was made of plastic, according to the 2017 Marine Litter Report, published by green charity Keep Northern Ireland Beautiful.
The search for the body of a man abducted and killed by the IRA has been called off after more than a month.

A fresh bid to recover the remains of Joe Lynskey, a former Cistercian monk who later joined the Provisional IRA, was launched in March by the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims' Remains (ICLVR) after it reviewed evidence gathered while successfully recovering the remains of Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee.

Mr Lynskey was kidnapped in west Belfast in August 1972, and is included in the group of 16 people kidnapped a secretly buried by republican paramilitaries in the 1970s and 1980s known collectively as the 'Disappeared'.

The search had been taking place in Oristown, Co Meath.

The remains of Mr Wright and Mr McKee were successfully recovered during earlier searches at nearby Coghalstown in 2015.

Besides Joe Lynskey, the remains of Columba McVeigh and Robert Nairac are yet to be recovered.

Senior investigator with the ICLVR Jon Hill said: "Its always deeply disappointing when a search is unsuccessful. The information we were working from was given in good faith and warranted further investigation.

"Unfortunately that has not produced the result that we all hoped for. The thoughts of the team working on the search are with the Lynskey family and in particular Maria, Joes niece, who visited the site on the first day of the search and has closely followed the process since then."

Mr Hill went on to say the "simple fact" was the search team required more information, and appealed for the public to come forward.

"I cannot stress strongly enough that all information coming to the ICLVR is treated in the strictest confidence," he said.

"There is a cast iron guarantee, enshrined in international legislation that the information we receive and the identity of those providing it will never be revealed to anyone else.

"All we want to do is to return the remains of their loved one to the family."
Shopworkers hold a protest at Belfast City Hall over proposed longer Sunday trading hours which the city council are debating. Picture by Jonathan Porter/PressEye

Shopworkers held at protest at Belfast City Hall on Friday morning ahead of a meeting in which councillor's will debate extending Sunday trading hours.

Members of the trade union Usdaw (Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers) gathered to protest against extending the hours.

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Belfast City Council's Strategic Policy and Resources Committee considered designating Belfast a "holiday resort", which would allow large shops to extend their trading hours on 18 Sundays each year.

The matter was deferred for a week to allow parties to gather more information.

Usdaw and Retail NI have already sent a joint letter to council stating the extension would be "detrimental to retail workers, their families, independent retailers and the wider community".

The proposals were previously rejected by the SDLP, Sinn Fein and the DUP.

Leader of the protest Mike Aylward, Usdaw Divisional officer said the majority of people were against extending trading hours.

"Belfast City Council ran this consultation again, only a year after the last one, because they want to see whether attitudes have changed towards their proposal. The answer is yes, attitudes have changed with more than double the responses and a majority opposed to extended Sunday trading.

"We do not believe longer Sunday trading hours is the answer and we have made it clear that we were more than willing to work alongside Belfast City Council and other interested parties to explore options that would deliver a real and meaningful boost to the weekend economy of Belfast. That is a reasonable and measured response.

"Our members remain absolutely opposed to extended Sunday trading. The current Sunday trading arrangements are a fair compromise, which has worked well for over 20 years, and gives everyone a little bit of what they want.

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"Retailers can trade, customers can shop, staff can work; whilst Sunday remains a special day, different to other days, and shopworkers can spend some time with their family."
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said the Irish government would support a Papal visit to Northern Ireland.

Pope Francis will travel to Dublin in August for the World Meeting of Families, but it is thought a visit north is unlikely.

Mr Varadkar told the Dail that he has written to church authorities in support of a visit to Northern Ireland and also suggested a meeting with victims of clerical abuse.

Responding to questions from TDs, Mr Varadkar said: I am very much aware that this is a pastoral visit and I dont think it is the role of the Government to tell Pope Francis what he should or shouldnt do or who he should or shouldnt meet.

We certainly have said we would like to facilitate a possible visit to Northern Ireland, that we would suggest it would be appropriate to meet with some of the victims and survivors of clerical abuse or abuse by state authorities and church authorities.

We have also expressed our view as a Government that family should be respected and seen in their diversity and that there are families of all different shapes and forms.

He added: Whether that is children being brought up by grandparents, whether its same sex couples with children, whether its one-parent families.

We have expressed our view as a state that that is how we see the family and that view has been put across to the church authorities, but we fully respect the separation between Church and State and that religious freedom applies to this as well.

When the Papal visit to Dublin was first confirmed in March  the first since 1979 when Pope John Paul ll spent three days in Ireland  the Holy See did not include Northern Ireland on the planned schedule. Meanwhile, Archbishop Eamon Martin has said the church will remain firm in its opposition to gay marriage ahead of the papal visit. He said the Catholic view of marriage was one of a faithful, loving relationship between a man and a woman.

Archbishop Martin said the Popes visit was a privileged opportunity for the church to engage with the public.

It begins with our conviction that, among the many types of family that are out there, the Catholic Churchs vision of the uniqueness of a faithful and exclusive union between a married man and a woman and their children is not simply for the privacy of our homes and churches, he said.
The Irish Government has urged Britain to give more thought to resolving outstanding Brexit issues.

Dublins objectives have remained the same for months, Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney added, and ministers are still firm.

The Irish border is one of the most vexed issues facing EU/UK negotiations in Brussels.

The Irish Government's position has not changed, it is rock solidForeign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney

Mr Coveney said protecting the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement, ensuring cooperation between Northern Ireland and the Republic works and preventing any physical border infrastructure were commitments already agreed between the sides.

Mr Coveney told Irish broadcaster RTE: The Irish Governments position has not changed, it is rock solid.

Little agreement has yet been reached on the detail of measures to avoid a hard frontier with checks on goods and services.

Unionists have opposed any solution which would create differences between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, and Prime Minister Theresa May is reliant on Democratic Unionist support in key Westminster votes.

Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said a backstop, meaning Northern Ireland continued to follow EU rules relating to North-South issues and the all-island economy, was now part of the overall agreement between Britain and the EU.

Mr Coveney said transforming the commitments already given into a legal text was challenging and a work in progress.

There will be setbacks and there will be arguments and difficulties, but these negotiations are moving forward and what we see today in the British media is a reflection of the fact that I think there is more thought needed, particularly on the British side in terms of solving some of these issues.

Some of the papers that they have published last summer, while they have some interesting things in them, clearly are not going to solve all of the problems that they are committed to solving.

Mr Varadkar has said it was up to the UK to propose a solution on the Irish border question if it rejected that put forward by European leaders.
The UK could face a choice between staying in the Customs Union or accepting a hard border in Ireland (Victoria Jones/PA)

Downing Street has insisted Britain is sticking by its proposals for keeping the Irish border open after Brexit, amid reports that they have been rejected by Brussels.

A Number 10 spokesman said the UK does not recognise claims that the plans were subjected to a systematic and forensic annihilation by EU officials at a meeting this week with Britains lead negotiator Olly Robbins.

The Daily Telegraph quoted unnamed EU diplomatic sources as saying that the Brussels officials delivered a detailed and forensic rebuttal, making clear that none of the UK customs options will work  none of them.

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It came as Britains former ambassador to the EU, Sir Ivan Rogers said UK hopes of finding a technological solution to the border issue were regarded as a fantasy island unicorn model in European capitals.

But Downing Street said the UK will continue to negotiate on the basis of the two proposals set out in a position paper last summer, which envisage either a close economic relationship which would make customs checks unnecessary or technological solutions to render them near-frictionless.

The Downing Street spokesman said: We are confident that in the coming months, if all sides work together productively, we can achieve a solution to the Ireland/Northern Ireland border that works for everyone involved.

He said Number 10 was not aware of suggestions that chief EU negotiator Michel Barnier had put trade talks on hold while the Irish issue took centre stage.

That, candidly ... is still viewed as a bit of a fantasy island unicorn modelSir Ivan Rogers, on EU views of UK plans for the Irish border

A joint report on the UKs withdrawal agreed in December by Mrs May and European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker included both British proposals, along with a third backstop option which would keep Northern Ireland in the Customs Union.

But a version published by the EU in February and agreed by the EU27 last month contained only the backstop, effectively drawing a customs border down the Irish Sea, which a furious Mrs May said no British prime minister could ever agree.

Mr Barnier said on Friday that substantial parts of the withdrawal deal  including a solution for the Irish border  remain to be agreed by the autumn.

And he told France2 TV: I say as the Unions negotiator that there are still difficulties, still a risk of failure.

On 25% of the text, we dont have agreement. If there is no agreement, there is no orderly withdrawal, there is a disorderly withdrawal and there is no transition.

Restating his position that the integrity of the single market and the freedom of movement are non-negotiable, Mr Barnier switched from French to English when asked if the UK could obtain a single market a la carte deal, replying: No way.

The developments put pressure on Mrs May ahead over a vote in the Commons next week on keeping the UK in the European Customs Union, just days after she was defeated on the issue in the Lords.

If the UK position is rejected by Brussels, the Government could be faced with a choice between remaining in the Customs Union or accepting a hard border in Ireland.

On Wednesday, European Council president Donald Tusk warned that there will be no withdrawal agreement and no transition without a solution on Ireland.

According to the Telegraph, Mr Robbins was also warned that Brussels needs full compliance with EU rules on goods and agricultural products in the whole of the UK  not just Northern Ireland  if customs barriers are to be avoided.

A Government spokesman said: We have been clear that we will protect Northern Irelands place in the UK internal market.

That commitment was set out in Decembers Joint Report which also includes our guarantee of avoiding a hard border between Northern Ireland and Ireland.

We are continuing an intensive work programme to engage on all the scenarios set out in the Joint Report.

EU's position on Irish border so predictable. UK sold pass by conceding "backstop" in December, inviting EU to hold us to it. #badbusiness  Nick Macpherson (@nickmacpherson2) April 19, 2018

Responding to the Telegraph report, former Treasury permanent secretary Lord Macpherson tweeted: EUs position on Irish border so predictable. UK sold pass by conceding backstop in December, inviting EU to hold us to it. #badbusiness.

Speaking at the Policy Exchange think tank in London, Sir Ivan said the economic solution was not regarded as a runner on the other side of the Channel, because of Mrs Mays insistence on leaving the single market and customs union.

And he added: The Brits are therefore focused above all on Option B  the technological solution. That, candidly, from everything Ive heard from various places is still viewed as a bit of a fantasy island unicorn model.

The Irish and Brussels in particular  but I think backed, as far as I can see, by Berlin and Paris  have said the only solution to this is the so-called backstop Option C, which is what the Commission put in print and got the toxic reaction both from the DUP and the Prime Minister.
World leaders have agreed to the Prince of Wales becoming the next leader of the Commonwealth after the Queen, according to sources.

Commonwealth presidents and prime ministers have decided Charles will succeed the Queen and lead the global institution that has a combined population of 2.4 billion.

The Queen made a personal appeal to world leaders on Thursday to choose her son for the role.

Today in Windsor representatives and Heads of Government from around the Commonwealth are meeting to discuss issues of common interest at the end of the #CHOGM2018 week. pic.twitter.com/9Vb9ZlAPL4  The Royal Family (@RoyalFamily) April 20, 2018

During the opening of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting she told them it was her sincere wish that the family of nations would one day decide the prince should carry on the Commonwealth work started by her father King George VI.

The leaders came to their decision during discussions held at their retreat, at Windsor Castle, where informal talks are held without aides or advisers present.

Lloyd Dorfman, chairman of the Princes Trust and Princes Trust International, welcomed the news that Charles is to become the next head of the Commonwealth.

Expand Close Prime Minister Theresa May and Commonwealth Secretary-General Patricia Scotland walk with Sierra Leones President Julius Maada Bio as they arrive to hold talks at Windsor Castle (Andrew Matthews/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook

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He said: At present, seven of the nine countries where we run programmes are in the Commonwealth including Australia, Barbados, Canada and India, so we are already supporting thousands of young people in Commonwealth countries.

I have seen the prince operating with his charities at close quarters. His vision and efforts are making a big difference and changing lives.

As head of the Commonwealth, the prince will be able to amplify this work and bring to the table his extensive experience, wisdom and passion.
The president of Ghana has claimed the Queen is winding down her Commonwealth duties hours after she said it was her sincere wish the Prince of Wales succeeded her as the institutions head.

Nana Akufo-Addos comment was made as he proposed a toast in honour of the Queen during a Buckingham Palace banquet that followed the opening of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM).

During the opening ceremony the Queen launched the two-day summit but also lobbied the prime ministers and presidents from the Commonwealths member states to choose Charles as their next head in future years.

Ghanas president told the dinner guests, who included world leaders, Theresa May, Charles, the Duke of Cambridge and Prince Harry: Weve been made to understand shell be winding down her duties as head of the Commonwealth.

My toast thus takes on an added significance, for it falls upon me to express the depth of our collective regret that she will no longer automatically be present at our proceedings.

The organisation will undoubtedly be the poorer for it we shall miss her inspiring presence, her calm.

It is not thought the Queen is planning to relinquish her involvement with the family of nations, an important institution that she famously pledged to serve, when aged 21 in 1947, for the rest of her life.

But it has been widely assumed that the Queen, who celebrates her 92nd birthday on Saturday, is probably presiding over her last CHOGM in person as she has not taken a long-haul flight for a number of years and the venue for the biennial summit moves around the globe, with the UK only hosting it three times in the last 32 years.

Buckingham Palace has emphasised during CHOGM week how the Queen is as active as ever in Commonwealth projects and its people.

The monarch also recently appeared in a television documentary with Sir David Attenborough, promoting the forest conservation project known as the Queens Commonwealth Canopy.

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Earlier during the CHOGM opening ceremony, the Queen publicly endorsed Charles as the next head of the Commonwealth.

She told the 46 heads of government  and six foreign ministers  gathered at the palace: It is my sincere wish that the Commonwealth will continue to offer stability and continuity for future generations, and will decide that one day the Prince of Wales should carry on the important work started by my father in 1949.

The Queen has been head of the Commonwealth since coming to the throne in 1952, but the position is not automatically held by the British monarch.

Speaking about her wishes is likely to end years of speculation about who will take over as head of the institution her father King George VI first led in the aftermath of the Second World War.

The leaders are due to discuss the issue of Commonwealth succession on Friday at their retreat at Windsor Castle, which will also see leaders debate topics ranging from a blue charter on ocean conservation to cyber security and trade.

The Prime Ministers official spokesman said: The Government supports the Prince of Wales as the next head of the Commonwealth.

Mrs Mays spokesman added. He has been a proud supporter of the Commonwealth for more than four decades and has spoken passionately about the organisations unique diversity.
Russian ambassador to the UK Alexander Vladimirovich Yakovenko speaking at a news conference at the Russian Embassy in London (Kirsty O'Connor/PA)

Russias ambassador to the UK has suggested that Sergei and Yulia Skripal may have been injected by British authorities with nerve agent produced at Porton Down.

Alexander Yakovenko repeated Russias demands to see the former spy and his daughter, claiming that the UKs failure to grant access meant the case should now be seen as an abduction of two Russian citizens.

The comments came in a press conference at which Mr Yakovenko accused Britain of lying not only over the Skripal case, but also about the chemical weapons attack in Syria and alleged Russian cyber attacks on the UK.

They represent the latest in a series of widely-varying and sometimes contradictory explanations produced by Moscow for the events in Salisbury, which have been dismissed by the Foreign Office as an attempt to distract attention from the UKs conclusion that Russia is very likely to be responsible for poisoning the Skripals.

A report by experts at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons this week confirmed the UKs analysis that the attack on the Skripals in Salisbury on March 4 was conducted with the nerve agent Novichok.

But Mr Yakovenko said that details of the OPCW report gave Russian experts cause for concern.

The OPCW reported that the Novichok contained in blood samples from the victims showed little sign of decomposition, even though the agent would normally be expected to react with naturally-occurring chemicals inside the body, he said.

This is strange, given that 18 days passed between the poisoning and the arrival of the OPCW in the UK, said Mr Yakovenko.

It might mean that the chemical was intentionally injected just before the blood samples were taken.

The fact that the OPCW found the sample of Novichok to be of high purity suggested that it was synthesised in a laboratory rather than an industrial plant, he said.

And he claimed that the speed with which the chemical was identified after the attack suggested the UK already had its own samples.

Referring to the Governments defence research establishment at Porton Down, he said: We know what kind of laboratory is only 10 miles from Salisbury.

Russian ambassador @Amb_Yakovenko giving Moscows view on events in Syria and Salisbury. pic.twitter.com/2JgvlSRD4H  David Hughes (@DavidHughesPA) April 20, 2018

Mr Yakovenko challenged the independence of the OPCW investigation, saying that it had been arranged on a bilateral basis with the UK rather than under the standard practices set out in the Chemical Weapons Convention.

The work of the OPCW experts was conducted under the control of the British side, he said.

Pressure on them cant be ruled out.

They checked only the sites designated by the UK beforehand and they looked only for the substance identified by the UK.

The format chosen cannot guarantee impartiality and the comprehensive nature of the verification.

Russia would not take the reports conclusions at face value unless it was given full access to the victims and to the materials gathered in the investigation, he said.

Mr Yakovenko said Russia was acting in accordance with international law in wanting to speak to its citizen Yulia Skripal, who is now said to have left hospital and be recovering.

He added: We want to see that she is in good shape and good health. She can tell us herself that she doesnt want our help.

He repeated allegations that the decontamination operations under way in Salisbury amounted to an attempt by the UK authorities to destroy evidence relating to the attack.
Families have lost a High Court challenge against the Governments two-child rule for payment of tax credits and universal credit.

A judge in London ruled on Friday that the policy was compatible with human rights laws.

But campaigners welcomed Mr Justice Ouseleys declaration that a provision in regulations relating to cared for children was unlawful.

The Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) said he had accepted its claim that the exception to the rule in the case of cared for children was perverse because it was only available where the cared for child was the third or subsequent child.

We do not agree with the judges findings on the various human rights arguments and will look to appeal this case furtherChild Poverty Action Group solicitor Carla Clarke

Commenting on the ruling, the charity said the judges finding meant that all children looked after by family members claiming tax credits or universal credit will not be taken into account for the purposes of the two-child limit.

CPAGs solicitor, Carla Clarke, said: This is an important in-road into a flagship welfare reform policy.

The irrationality of limiting the exception for children cared for in kinship arrangements to third or subsequent children has been raised on numerous occasions by various bodies, yet rather than accepting such legitimate criticisms and removing the restriction, it has required taking the DWP (Department for Work and Pensions) to court for the unlawfulness to be properly recognised.

The group said it intended to appeal against Mr Justice Ouseleys decision to dismiss its wider challenge to the lawfulness of the two-child rule as breaching fundamental human rights to private and family life and to non-discrimination.

Our statement on today's judgment in our case challenging the two-child limit: https://t.co/OfYMhOhCiK  Child Poverty Action Group (@CPAGUK) April 20, 2018

Ms Clarke said: This is a policy which is not simply about what level of benefits predominantly working families are entitled to.

Rather, it is a policy which necessarily encroaches upon very personal and intimate decisions about family size and planning and treats some children as less deserving of a benefit intended to meet their basic needs purely because of their birth order.

We do not agree with the judges findings on the various human rights arguments and will look to appeal this case further.

In his lengthy written ruling, Mr Justice Ouseley said the case concerned the introduction of a limit to the number of children in respect of whom child tax credit and its replacement, universal credit, is payable.

That limit  subject to a few exceptions  is two, he said, hence the change is dubbed the two child rule or the policy which is how the defendants described the legislation.

The judge said the claimants comprise three families in different circumstances, all in receipt of child tax credit, each with a third or subsequent child born on or after April 6 2017, for whom no child tax credit is now available.

During the hearing of the action in February, James Eadie QC, for the Government, pointed to the Governments aims for the legislation as being to ensure that welfare spending was sustainable, fair to the taxpayer whilst protecting the most vulnerable.

It was to ensure that people in receipt of benefits should face the same choices as those who supported themselves solely through work and to ensure that the system created incentives to work and to make progress and work as the best route out of poverty.

Although the defendants in the proceedings were Government ministers, said the judge, this case is very largely about primary legislation and therefore about decisions made in Parliament.

Mr Justice Ouseley announced that  subject to his decision on the issue of the cared for child provision  he had found that the two-child provision is compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights.

A Government spokesman said: We welcome that the court agrees overall that this policy is lawful.

We value and recognise the important role of people who look after children who would otherwise be in care. Thats why we will be fully reviewing the judgment and considering our next steps with regards to non-parental carers.

The Bishop of Manchester, David Walker, said: We are pleased today the High Court has recognised that the two-child limit is in part unlawful and that kinship carers will now get the support they need.

But this needs to be extended to all families.

We will continue to oppose this policy because of the hardship it will cause to children and the damage to family life.

The Governments decision to reduce the deficit at the expense of childrens well-being is wholly unacceptable, whatever its legal status. We urge the Government to urgently reconsider this policy in light of the moral, as well as legal, case against it.
Privacy rights advocates have said the findings raise serious questions about the usefulness of such audits in light of the Cambridge Analytica scandal (Dominic Lipinski/PA)

An audit of Facebooks privacy practices for the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) found no problems, even though the company knew at the time that a data-mining firm had improperly obtained private data from millions of users.

Facebook agreed to outside audits every two years as part of a 2011 settlement with the FTC over its privacy practices.

It is not clear from the report whether the company informed PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), which performed the audit, of the Cambridge Analytica data grab that would put Facebook in the crosshairs of US congress.

The heavily redacted audit by PricewaterhouseCoopers is available on the FTCs website. It covers the period February 12 2015 to February 11 2017.

PwC declined to comment, but Facebook said that keeping data secure is a priority.

We remain strongly committed to protecting peoples information, said Rob Sherman, Facebooks deputy chief privacy officer, in a statement.

We appreciate the opportunity to answer questions the FTC may have.

The fact that PwC found no issues raised red flags for privacy advocates over the usefulness of such audits.

Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the non-profit digital rights group Centre for Digital Democracy, said: The FTC failed to protect the public.

Instead of conducting its own review to enforce one of its most important decisions  the consent decree  it looked the other way, which allowed Facebook to engage in serious misconduct.

Mr Chester said the audit shows that the FTC cannot be relied on to really protect consumers.

The 2011 consent decree bound Facebook to a 20-year privacy commitment.

Any violations of that pact could cost the company a lot of money. In his congressional testimony last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared uninformed about key details of the agreement, saying he did not remember if it carried a financial penalty.

Any violations of the 2011 agreement could subject Facebook to fines of 41,484 dollars (29,268) per violation per user per day. To put that in context, Facebook could theoretically owe eight billion dollars (5.6 billion) for one single day violation affecting all of its American users, or about half of the profit that the company booked for all of last year.

The agreement requires that Facebook users give affirmative express consent any time that data they have not made public is shared with a third party.

Cambridge Analytica accessed information from so many users (the firm puts the number at 30 million, although Facebook has said 87 million) because it was able to access the data of peoples friends, and not just people who explicitly permitted access when they took a personality quiz.

While Facebook did have controls in place that allowed people to restrict such access, they are found buried in the sites settings and are difficult to find.

Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat from Nevada, said during last weeks hearing that in her view, these requirements were not met, because user consent should not have been buried in privacy settings.

PwC disagreed. Its report states: In our opinion, Facebooks privacy controls were operating with sufficient effectiveness to provide reasonable assurance to protect the privacy of covered information and that the controls have so operated throughout the Reporting Period, in all material respects for the two years ended February 11 2017.

Facebook is also under a separate investigation by the FTC because of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The agency is looking at whether Facebook has engaged in unfair acts that cause substantial injury to consumers.
The case of British cybersecurity expert once heralded as a hero for stopping the WannaCry worldwide computer virus has been delayed.

The move came to allow his lawyers more time to prepare arguments on why a judge should suppress statements he made after his arrest for allegedly creating software to steal banking passwords.

Marcus Hutchins, 23, pleaded not guilty after his arrest last year in Las Vegas before he boarded a flight home to England.

US prosecutors say Hutchins created and distributed malware known as Kronos and made incriminating statements to FBI agents after his arrest and in two phone callsfrom jail.

Federal prosecutors publicly revealed details of those phone calls for the first time in court filings on Wednesday night, and provided Hutchins defence with new transcripts of the conversations.

Hutchins lawyer, Brian Klein, told a federal magistrate judge that prosecutors intended to present those calls in court on Thursday to make assertions about what he said and the significance of those conversations.

The hearing was rescheduled for May 16.

Hutchins August arrest came as a shock, as four months earlier, he was lauded as a cybercrime-fighting hero for finding a kill switch to slow the outbreak of the WannaCry virus, which crippled computers worldwide, encrypting files and making them inaccessible unless people paid a ransom.
Bill Cosbys lawyers have lost another bid to cut his sex assault retrial short.

Judge Steven ONeill rejected a defence motion that he acquit Cosby and send jurors home.

The defence asked the judge to clear the 80-year-old comedian after prosecutors rested their case on Thursday afternoon.

Cosbys lawyers say prosecutors have not proved charges he drugged and molested a woman at his Philadelphia mansion more than a dozen years ago.

Cosby has said his sexual encounter with the woman was consensual.

The defence also says there is no evidence to prove the alleged assault happened within the 12-year statute of limitations.

Prosecutors say the accuser and Cosby have both said the encounter was in 2004.

Prosecutors point out Cosby was arrested in 2015, just before the deadline to charge him.
Former FBI director James Comey detailed a number of meetings with the US president (AP)

US president Donald Trump told former FBI director James Comey that he had serious concerns about the judgment of a top adviser, asked about the possibility of jailing journalists and described a boast from Vladimir Putin about Russian prostitutes, according to Mr Comeys notes.

The 15 pages of documents contain new details about a series of interactions with Mr Trump that Mr Comey found so unnerving that he chose to document them in writing.

Those seven encounters in the weeks and months before Mr Comey was sacked in May 2017 include a Trump Tower discussion about allegations involving Mr Trump and prostitutes in Moscow; a White House dinner at which Mr Comey said Mr Trump asked him for his loyalty; and a private Oval Office discussion where the ex-FBI head said the president asked him to end an investigation into Michael Flynn, the former White House national security adviser.

The documents had been eagerly anticipated since their existence was first revealed last year, especially since Mr Comeys interactions with Mr Trump are a critical part of special counsel Robert Muellers investigation into whether the president sought to obstruct justice.

Late on Thursday night, Mr Trump tweeted that the memos show clearly that there was NO COLLUSION and NO OBSTRUCTION.

The president also accused Mr Comey of leaking classified information. The memos obtained by the Associated Press were unclassified, though some portions were blacked out as classified.

Details from Mr Comeys memos reported in news stories last year appear to come from the unclassified portions.

In explaining the purpose of creating the memos, which have been provided to Mr Mueller, Mr Comey has said he knew there might come a day when I would need a record of what had happened to defend not only himself but the FBI as well.

Expand Close Copies of the memos written by James Comey (Susan Walsh/AP) AP/PA Images / Facebook

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The memos cover the first three months of the Trump administration, a period of upheaval marked by staff turnover, a cascade of damaging headlines and revelations of an FBI investigation into potential ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The documents reflect Mr Trumps uneasiness about that investigation, though not always in ways that Mr Comey seemed to anticipate.

In a February 2017 conversation, for instance, Mr Trump told Mr Comey how Vladimir Putin told him, we have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world even as the president adamantly, and repeatedly, distanced himself from a salacious allegation concerning him and prostitutes in Moscow, according to one memo.

In another memo, Mr Comey recounts how Mr Trump at a private White House dinner pointed his fingers at his head and complained that Mr Flynn, his embattled national security adviser, has serious judgment issues. The president blamed Mr Flynn for failing to alert him promptly to a congratulatory call from a world leader, causing a delay for Mr Trump in returning a message to an official whose name is redacted in the documents.

By that point, the FBI had already interviewed Mr Flynn about his contacts with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, and the Justice Department had already warned White House officials that they were concerned Mr Flynn was vulnerable to blackmail.

Mr Flynn was fired on February 13 2017, after White House officials said he had misled them about his Russian contacts during the transition period by saying that he had not discussed sanctions.

Expand Close Mr Trump told the former FBI chief that one salacious allegation concerning an incident at a Moscow hotel was 'nonsense' (AP) AP/PA Images / Facebook

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The memos also show Trumps continued distress at a dossier of allegations  compiled by an ex-British spy whose work was funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign  examining potential ties between him and his aides and the Kremlin. Mr Comey writes how Mr Trump repeatedly denied to him having been involved in an encounter with Russian prostitutes in a Moscow hotel.

The President said the hookers thing is nonsense, Mr Comey writes, noting that Mr Trump then related the conversation with Mr Putin about the most beautiful hookers. Mr Comey said Mr Trump did not say when Mr Putin had made the comment.

The documents also include the presidents musings about pursuing leakers and imprisoning journalists. They also provide insight into Mr Comeys personal and professional opinions. He judges the administrations travel ban to be legally valid, and he takes a swipe at former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, calling her predecessor, Eric Holder, smarter and more sophisticated and smoother.

The memos were provided to Congress as House Republicans escalated criticism of the US Justice Department, threatening to subpoena the documents and questioning officials.

Mr Comey is on a publicity tour to promote his new book, A Higher Loyalty. He revealed last year that he had written the memos after conversations with Mr Trump.
Two Florida deputies have been killed after shots were fired through the window of a restaurant, authorities said.

Gilchrist County Sheriff Bobby Schultz said during a news conference that Sergeant Noel Ramirez and Deputy Taylor Lindsey were killed on Thursday afternoon in Trenton.

Mr Schultz said the deputies were getting food at the Ace China restaurant when the shooter walked up to the building and fired at them through a window.

Fellow deputies responding to the scene found the shooter dead outside the business.

Sergeant Noel Ramirez. Deputy Sheriff Taylor Lindsey.



Our heroes. Killed in the line of duty today, April 19th, at the Ace China in Trenton.



We'll continue to serve you. For them.  Gilchrist Co Sheriff (@GCSOFlorida) April 20, 2018

Mr Schultz would not say how the suspect died, adding that state law enforcement officials were investigating.

Authorities said there was no apparent motive for the shooting.

Mr Schultz called the officers the best of the best.

The shooters name was not immediately released.

Trenton is in northern Florida, about 35 miles west of Gainesville.
Russias foreign minister has said the US sought out and respected Moscows positions in Syria when it launched its air strikes last week.

Sergey Lavrov noted that despite the escalating tensions between Moscow and Washington, the US made sure it did not harm any Russian personnel and positions during the strikes against the regime of President Bashar Assad following a suspected chemical attack on the town of Douma.

We told them where our red lines were, including the geographical red lines, Mr Lavrov told Russian state television. The results have shown that they havent crossed those lines.

Moscow had warned the US before the strike that it could hit back if the US actions jeopardise Russian servicemen in Syria, and the allies gave Russia an advance warning to make sure no Russians were in the line of fire.

Mr Lavrov also revealed that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin discussed the possibility of visiting each others country when the US president rang up Russian counterpart last month to congratulate him on his re-election.

Mr Lavrov said that Mr Trump indicated he could make a reciprocal trip to Russia if Mr Putin were able to accept his invitation to the White House.

Previously, both the White House and the Kremlin had only revealed that Mr Trump had invited Mr Putin to the White House during the same call on March 20.

Mr Lavrov said the Trump administration has not followed up on the offer and Russia has urged the US to discuss specifics about such a meeting.

He added that Russian officials dont want to be too obtrusive, but dont want to be impolite.

President Putin is ready for such a meeting, Mr Lavrov said.

Moscows hopes for better ties with Washington under Mr Trump have withered amid the ongoing investigations into the alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Russia-US relations have sunk to post-Cold War lows over the Ukrainian crisis, the war in Syria and the allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election.

In recent weeks, tensions have risen further over the March poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter, which Britain has blamed on Russia.

The US, Britain and other Western allies responded by expelling over 150 Russian diplomats, and Moscow, which has fervently denied the British accusations, responded in kind.

Further stoking tensions was the purported chemical attack in Douma on April 7. That prompted the US, Britain and France to launch a missile strike on Syria. Russia condemned the strike on its ally as an act of aggression.

The Pentagon said that all 105 missiles fired at three Syrian chemical facilities reached their targets, while the Russian military said Syrian air defences downed 71 out of 103 US missiles.

Mr Lavrov, who said Russia will soon offer evidence to back up its claims, added that Moscow may reconsider a pledge it gave a decade ago not to provide Syria with sophisticated long-range S-300 missiles in light of the strikes.

We no longer have such moral obligations, Mr Lavrov said.

Asked about the danger of a Russia-US military clash, Mr Lavrov voiced hope that military leaders realise that any actions that could provoke a direct clash between the Russian and the US militaries are unacceptable.
Sen Tammy Duckworth arrives at the Capitol with her new daughter, Maile (J Scott Applewhite/AP)

Tiny Maile Pearl made Senate history on Thursday without making a sound.

The tightly wrapped 10-day-old baby, brought to the well of the chamber by her mother, Sen Tammy Duckworth, became the first newborn to appear there just one day after the Senate approved a new rule permitting it.

Its about time, the Illinois Democrat and Iraq War veteran told reporters on the way in to vote.

I may have to vote today, so Mailes outfit is prepped. I made sure she has a jacket so she doesnt violate the Senate floor dress code (which requires blazers). Im not sure what the policy is on duckling onesies, but I think were ready pic.twitter.com/SsNHEuSVnY  Tammy Duckworth (@SenDuckworth) April 19, 2018

The rule had passed without objection  but there had been plenty of grumbling about babies threatening the Senates cherished decorum.

But when it actually happened, even stern Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell appeared to beam. In fact, he left a Senate vote open to allow Ms Duckworth time to get there.

Thank you very much, Ms Duckworth said to the Kentucky Republican. The double amputee, in a wheelchair with Maile in her lap, was on the floor for less than three minutes before they took off.

Like newborns, the Senate can be unpredictable.

The first sign that the two would meet on Thursday was a tweet by Ms Duckworth that she might vote on the nomination of Rep James Bridenstine to run Nasa.

May have to vote today. Mailes outfit is prepped, she tweeted, with a photo of baby clothes.

Made sure she has a jacket so she doesnt violate the Senate floor dress code requiring blazers. Not sure what the policy is on duckling onesies but I think were ready.

Family-friendly workplace policies arent just a womens issue, they are a common-sense economic issue  Tammy Duckworth (@SenDuckworth) April 18, 2018

The idea was for Ms Duckworth to vote only if she was needed to break a tie. Vice President Mike Pence arrived for the same reason. In the end, it was unnecessary and Mr Bridenstine was confirmed.

Ms Duckworth cast a thumbs-down anyway, before her colleagues descended to coo over the wee baby.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer inquired about the well-being of Mailes sister and wished them a safe trip home.
Tucked away in a corner of the ancient graveyard on the Shankill is a neglected tomb that links our city to the titanic struggle to abolish slavery in the United States - a struggle that culminated in the tragedy of the Civil War.

This forgotten grave contains the remains of the Reverend Isaac Nelson. Few people know that this Presbyterian preacher and scholar was probably Belfast's most vehement opponent of American slavery. Indeed, when the famous freed slave Frederick Douglass came to the north of Ireland in 1845, Nelson shared a platform with him.

Nelson's name retained recognition in Belfast because of the beautiful Nelson Memorial Church, standing a few yards away from his grave on the Shankill Road. But that church's congregation dwindled in the 21st century and it was recently closed.

Good work is still undertaken in the building, where David Boyd's Beat Initiative is bringing community arts to the district. But there is probably now even less public memory of this man who challenged his fellow citizens to rise up against one of history's most grim injustices.

For Nelson, the fight against slavery wasn't just an option for the local community, it was an imperative. And there was a good reason.

Many people in the still largely Protestant town of Belfast had very close ties with Scotland - as they do now. Presbyterians had close links with the Free Church, a denomination that had been newly established there due to a split with the Church of Scotland. Yet the Free Church was beginning to receive money from wealthy donors in the United States, many of whom were slave-owners.

Nelson was incensed, as a Presbyterian clergyman and Belfast citizen. He asked how a so-called 'Free Church' could be so wrong as to tolerate a system which took away the freedom of others on grounds of their race. He was one of the most active members of the Belfast Anti-Slavery Society, which supported the abolitionist cause.

It was a cause with a pedigree. Mary Ann McCracken was still around and active. She and her brother had been prominent citizens of an 18th-century town which contained merchants intent on making money from the slave trade, but also a radical humanitarian culture that opposed it deeply.

The Anti-Slavery Society's opportunity for speaking out was greatly enhanced in 1845 with the arrival of Douglass. Frederick Douglass was about to embark on a highly successful tour of Britain and had just completed a momentous speaking tour of southern Ireland, where he and the Irish politician Daniel O'Connell had found common cause.

In Belfast, Douglass spoke on several occasions to audiences made up of those who had crammed into Protestant churches and meeting-houses to hear him. There was good support from a number of businessmen and politicians, including the Co Down landlord, avid Chartist and MP for Rochdale, William Sharman Crawford.

Douglass was unsparing in his condemnation of Christians who condoned slavery and especially those who had the temerity to support, advocate and benefit from it. He called on the Free Church to "send back the blood-stained money".

And when Isaac Nelson joined Douglass on a platform in Bangor he recounted with satisfaction that a certain Presbyterian man, recently returned from the USA as a vocal advocate of slavery, had been locked out of the annual General Assembly of the Church for his iniquitous views. "We will have no fellowship with slave-holders," Nelson said.

Later, he would utter one of his most memorable phrases on the subject, proclaiming that it was shameful to see Christian leaders "holding the Bible in one hand and a slave-chain in the other".

But it was a series of events in following decades that started Nelson's eclipse from public memory. In 1859, an Evangelical Revival broke out in Ulster and it was soon seen as a signature event in local Protestant identity. Its fame would continue down through the years and the Revered Ian Paisley would write a book which praised it.

However, for Nelson the Revival was a shameful event. The inspiration for its highly emotional religious services had been explicitly drawn from the revivalism of the United States, a land of religious enthusiasm, where four million enslaved Africans lived and where professed Christians owned most of these slaves. The revivalist who turned a blind eye to this massive irony was in his opinion a "traitor to the Gospel".

Nelson's book, The Year of Delusion, was an attack on those who had fomented the revival, including senior figures in the Presbyterian church.

Nelson was wrong to assume that all supporters of revivals, here or in America, were pro-slavery. And he was surely wrong to see the Ulster Revival as fully inauthentic. Many lives were changed for the better in 1859. And, indeed, there was an anti-slavery body inside the Free Church, which he and Douglass had berated.

However, Nelson was soon seen only as a misguided maverick who had become an opponent of the true faith. This was despite his continued Evangelical orthodoxy.

Nelson's reputation was further blackened on the Shankill Road, where his wealthy father's home, called Sugarfield, was based. He became convinced of the need for a restored parliament for Ireland and eventually arrived at Westminster as the Home Rule MP for Mayo.

Although his sister had sufficient wealth to build a church in his memory on the Shankill Road after his demise - and to create a tomb for him in the local graveyard - the memory of Nelson's moral crusade was forgotten as was the visit to Belfast of Frederick Douglass.

Tomorrow, there will be a chance to make amends, no matter how his notorious outspokenness may be viewed, or his final choices in Irish politics.

The cultural activists Reclaim the Enlightenment have picked up on the Nelson story and, indeed, the bigger narrative of Belfast, Ireland and slavery, then and now. So, at Shankill Library, from 9.30am to 2pm, they are hosting a themed series of talks.

I will talk briefly about Nelson, then there will be three other lectures. The author Nini Rogers will discuss slavery and anti-slavery in 18th-century Belfast, Professor Christine Kinealy will describe Douglass' visit to the city and Aidan McQuade will talk about the terrible blight of enslavement in today's world. Aidan has been heavily involved with the anti-slavery cause across the globe for many years.

Visits will be made to the former Nelson Memorial Church and to his tomb, where a musical tribute will be paid to all those from our city who have opposed and who still oppose slavery. Guests are very welcome, although it would be helpful if those who read this article and wish to come could leave a message at reclaimtheenlightenment@gmail.com.

This event is a chance to think about the relevance of these issues for today and about our own potential for compromising our values in a world that is still unjust in so many ways.

Philip Orr is a writer, historian and community activist. Ireland and Slavery: Then and Now, Shankill Library, Shankill Road, Belfast, tomorrow, 9.30am-2pm
Acting U.S. Secretary of State John Sullivan announces the release of the 2017 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices in Washington, April 20, 2018.

In releasing its latest annual report on human rights conditions worldwide, the U.S. State Department on Friday criticized South and Southeast Asian governments for abuses ranging from extrajudicial killings to placing limits on citizens rights to free speech.

The departments 2017 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices specifically cited Bangladesh, India and the Philippines for extrajudicial killings. It targeted Indonesia for arbitrary or unlawful killings by government security forces, and blamed Malaysia for degrading treatment by security officials that led to death in some cases.

The report also noted a sharp rise in extrajudicial killings in the Philippines tied to President Rodrigo Dutertes war on drugs. The state department published its report on the same day Duterte spokesman Harry Roque, in a rebuke of a critical statement from the European Parliament, denied that the Philippine government had engaged in extrajudicial killings of drug suspects.

The government investigated a limited number of reported human rights abuses, including abuses by its own forces, paramilitaries, and insurgent and terrorist groups, the report stated. Concerns about police impunity increased significantly following the sharp increase in police killings.

President Duterte publicly rejected criticism of police killings, but he said authorities would investigate any actions taken outside the rule of law.

The report did not blame Thailand for any killings, but cited the kingdom for excessive use of force by its security officials.

The United States releases its human rights report annually to promote and defend the nations founding principle that each person is endowed with inalienable rights, Acting Secretary of State John J. Sullivan said.

States that restrict freedoms of expression and peaceful assembly; that allow and commit violence against members of religious, ethnic, and other minority groups; or that undermine the fundamental dignity of persons are morally reprehensible and undermine our interests, Sullivan wrote in the preface to the report.

Civil liberties violations

Bangladesh, the report noted, restricts civil liberties including freedom of speech, press, and the activities of nongovernmental organizations. It said there was a lack of freedom to participate in the political process and discrimination based on gender, religious affiliation, sexual orientation and gender identity due to a lack of accountability.

In recent years in Bangladesh, secular bloggers, writers and publishers have been killed in attacks by religious extremists. In one attack, U.S.-Bangladeshi citizen and secular writer Avijit Roy was killed and his wife seriously injured by machete-wielding assailants as they left a major book fair in Dhaka in February 2015.

Bangladeshs neighbor, India, was blamed in the report for violence and discrimination based on religious affiliation, sexual orientation, and caste or tribe, due to a similar lack of accountability.

In January, police arrested 300 for protesting the killing of a member of the low-caste Dalit community.

In its section on Indonesia, the report highlighted blasphemy, defamation and decency laws that limited freedom of expression in 2017. The country also criminalizes same-sex sexual activities at the local level and violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex persons, the report said.

In January, police in Indonesias Aceh province arrested 12 transgender people, cut off their hair, took them to a police station and ordered them to roll around on the ground, run and chant loudly, witnesses said.

The report went on to criticize Malaysia for arbitrary arrests and detention of government critics, as well as limiting freedoms of expression including of the press.

Earlier this month, the Malaysian parliament passed a bill to punish people who spread fake news, despite complaints from the opposition that it would be used to go after critics of Prime Minister Najib Razak in the run-up to the May 9 general election.

In Thailand, the State Department pointed to how the military government had issued decrees last year limiting freedom of speech, assembly and the press.

In January, seven Thai pro-democracy activists were charged with sedition and violating the countrys strict public gathering law by leading about 100 people in a protest calling for elections later this year.
Pedestrians pass a Tagalog sign bearing one of the 10 Commandments, Thou shalt not kill, in Dagupan, Philippines, in September 2016.

Philippine officials shot back at the European Parliament on Friday, telling the EUs legislative body to stop interfering with their countrys domestic affairs after it issued a strongly worded statement that questioned President Rodrigo Dutertes war on drugs.

Presidential spokesman Harry Roque reiterated that the Duterte administration did not engage in extrajudicial killings and he challenged human rights groups to produce the bodies of the thousands of victims they said they had documented.

We of course find it unfortunate that members of the European Parliament once again interfered with the affairs of the Philippines state, rehashing issues and baseless claims that have been explained adequately by the Philippine government in official statements, Roque said.

The Philippine National Police said the number of alleged drug dealers and addicts killed had reached at least 4,043 since Duterte became president in 2016. But Human Rights Watch and other groups said the figure could actually be higher than 12,000, with many of the deaths blamed on vigilantes who support police efforts.

We of course challenge them. Where is the data, where is the evidence that 12,000 have been killed, Roque said. Impunity doesnt have a place in our society and we continue to follow due process and hold officers accountable for their actions.

In a resolution on Thursday, the European Unions parliament urged Manila to end the killings it said were being carried out on the pretext of the drug war. The legislature also said it was alarmed with what it described as the Philippine police forces penchant to falsify evidence to justify the killings.

The European Parliament also called for the immediate release of Leila de Lima, a Philippine senator who has been the leading critic of Dutertes drug war. She was arrested last year on what she claimed were trumped up charges of profiting from the drug trade.

The justice secretary who had jailed her was recently forced to quit after a drug trafficker who was among the accusers of de Lima was cleared of charges.

On Friday, Roque said de Limas arrest was a matter for the courts to decide, noting that the countrys highest court had already said that the information against the senator was with basis and should continue.

Our justice system works here in the Philippines, and cannot be influenced by politics, Roque said. We hope that whatever is the norm in Europe, will also be observed here in the Philippines. The executive branch does not influence the judiciary.

The parliamentary resolution also asked the European Commission and the External Action Service to initiate procedural steps which could lead to the temporary withdrawal of GSP-plus for the Philippines. The GSP, or General Scheme of Preferences, offers tax incentives to developing countries.

This was not the first time that the Philippines and European Union clashed over the drug war. In May 2017, Duterte said his government would no longer accept EU aid because he said it came with conditions to improve human rights and the rule of law.

Foreign Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano said the parliament had crossed a red line with its recent statement, which also criticized the government for including Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, the U.N.s special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous people, on its list of terrorist communists.

Roque, an international rights lawyer before joining the government, said Corpuz would be given a chance to be heard.

She should submit evidence that she is not a terrorist and we would let the courts decide, Roque said.

Roque said the Philippines and Europe had mechanisms for constructive discussions where sensitive issues such as this could be discussed.

Additionally, Roque said he found it odd that the parliamentary resolution also came at a time when the EU has given us financial assistance in the ongoing war against drugs.

We thus call on the members of the European Parliament to exercise prudence in issuing resolutions, he said. We understand a number of whom we have close ties with the local political opposition who tried to distort realities that we have a working democracy, where people now enjoy peace and order.
Moncks Corner, SC (29461)

Today

Cloudy skies. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 79F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Partly cloudy skies early will give way to cloudy skies late. Low near 65F. Winds light and variable.
The partners are focusing on a qualitative point-of-care test for G6PD deficiency in order to support the necessary use of the primaquine drugs.

Non-profit organisation PATH (Programme for Appropriate Technology in Health) has signed an agreement with UK-based diagnostics firm Mologic to accelerate the development of a new rapid diagnostic test (RDT) for glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD) deficiency.

The test is intended to expand the existing diagnostic options required to help in treating malarial infection, as well as eliminating its causative organism, Plasmodium vivax. Vivax is difficult to eliminate as it can be dormant in the liver and re-emerge, leading to disease relapse. It can also become contagious through mosquitoes.

The partners are focusing on a qualitative point-of-care test for G6PD deficiency in order to support the necessary use of the primaquine drugs.

The Mologic RDT is optimised for use in environmental conditions that are typical to malaria-endemic countries, meaning it can be employed at community level, where the disease is common.

Furthermore, results delivered by this simple and affordable test can be easily interpreted by users.

The first product variant is set to be marketed next year, with PATH supporting commercialisation and key regulatory approval activities being carried out by Mologic.
By Martinne Geller

Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch consumer goods giant, reported first-quarter sales figures that met expectations, helped mainly by increases in the volume of products sold, and maintained its full-year outlook.

The maker of Dove soap and Ben & Jerrys ice cream also expressed confidence that shareholders will support its decision to change its corporate structure and have its main headquarters in the Netherlands.

Meanwhile, Procter & Gamble, the worlds largest consumer goods maker, narrowly beat quarterly earnings expectations, saying shrinking retailer inventories and higher commodities and transportation costs squeezed margins.

It also said it was buying Mercks consumer health business for about 3.4bn, which includes vitamin brands such as Seven Seas.

Unilever chief financial officer Graeme Pitkethly said that even though a small proportion of UK shareholders might be affected if Unilever shares were no longer in the Ftse-100 index, most shareholders understand the reasoning for the decision and are supportive.

Unilevers London-listed shares fell by over 2%.

Unilever undertook a deep review of its business and structure last year after fending off an unwanted $143bn (115.5bn) takeover offer from Kraft-Heinz.

The decision to sell its struggling spreads business also came from that review.

In light of the proceeds from the sale of spreads to private equity firm KKR, Unilever announced a new share buyback programme, for up to 6bn worth of stock, to start next month.

It also reported underlying sales growth of 3.4%, meeting an analysts consensus supplied by the company. Excluding the spreads business, underlying sales rose 3.7%.

Almost all of Unilevers sales growth came from selling more products, with only a 0.1% boost from higher pricing.

This may concern the market, as a recent rise in oil prices and costs for transportation could eat into margins if not passed on to customers.

Consumer packaged goods companies are all under pressure to boost performance, as sales have slowed due to changing consumer tastes and shopping habits and a slew of upstart rivals.

Reported turnover fell 5.2% to 12.6bn, hurt by currency exchange rates. Analysts were expecting 12.84bn. The company stood by its forecast for 2018 sales growth of 3% to 5%.

Swiss food group Nestle confirmed its full-year guidance after organic sales growth accelerated to 2.8% in the first quarter of 2018, helped by improving volumes.

Reuters
By Ann O'Loughlin

A Belfast student who claimed she should be entitled to vote in the Eighth Amendment repeal referendum because of her Irish citizenship has lost her application to bring a High Court challenge over the matter.

Roisin Morelli (aged 26), who is studying for a Masters in Translational Medicine at Queens University, wanted to bring a judicial review claiming a refusal to grant her a vote was contrary to the Constitution, the Belfast Agreement and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

Mr Justice Charles Meenan today rejected her application saying the case she made "falls well short of being arguable".

He also rejected a separate judicial review application from journalist Michael Fisher, who worked for RTE for 28 years and lives in Monaghan, seeking to be given a postal vote because he would be out of the country for a pre-planned family visit on May 25, the day of the referendum.

The judge said his case also fell well short of being arguable.

Mr Justice Meenan said he would make no order as to costs, which means both sides pay their own costs.

This was because these were different from other cases where an applicant has a material or financial interest in the litigation. There was also the fact that applications such as these are normally brought on an ex-parte (one side only represented) basis and there would be no issue as to costs if it was refused, but because of the nature of this case the State was put on notice, he said.

In his judgment, Mr Justice Meenan said to meet the "arguability test" (to be permitted to bring judicial review), an applicant has to point to a provision of the Constitution, statute or legal authority that, on a reasonable interpretation, would support the case being made.

It was clearly not open to the Oireachtas to extend the franchise for elections and referenda beyond what is provided for in the Constitution, he said.

The wording of Article 47.3 (on referenda) was clear in that there is a direct link between voting in Dail elections and referenda. The 1992 Electoral Act, which arises from the constitutional provision, requires a voter to be normally resident in the Republic.

Ms Morelli's argument that a law could be passed to divide up Northern Ireland into various constituencies would be impermissible under Article 3 (will of the nation for a united Ireland through consent), he said.

The problem raised by the requirement to have constituencies becomes even more acute when one considers Irish citizens living in the rest of the EU and elsewhere, he said.

In relation to the Belfast Agreement, the judge said there are no provisions in it concerning voting entitlements. Ms Morelli cannot make a case under that agreement, he said.

In relation to her claim of breach of right to freedom of expression under Article 10 of the ECHR, and in relation to her claim under Article 3 Protocol 1 (right to free and fair elections), the judge was satisfied she had no case under these provisions.

He concluded that if Ms Morelli is to be entitled to vote in any future referendum, assuming she does not become resident in any constituency here in the interim, then this would require an amendment to Article 47.3 of the Constitution.

In relation to Mr Fisher's case, the judge said he was going to England on May 25 for a short holiday and will be babysitting for his daughter who is going to a wedding.

It was open to Mr Fisher to rearrange his holiday or his flights to enable him to get to his polling station and his affidavit was silent on this, the judge said.

The Supreme Court had already decided in the case of a woman suffering from Multiple Sclerosis, who wanted a postal vote because she was unable to leave her home, that she was not entitled to such a vote.

The principles in that case equally applied here, Mr Justice Meenan said. The absence of any statutory provision to make postal voting available to people such as Mr Fisher, who will be out of the country on holidays, is not contrary to the Constitution, he said. He also did not have a case for breach of Article 10 of the ECHR, the judge said.
Update 3.10pm: The Government has urged Britain to give more thought to resolving outstanding Brexit issues.

Dublin's objectives have remained the same for months, Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney added, and ministers are still firm.

The border is one of the most vexed issues facing EU/UK negotiations in Brussels.

Mr Coveney said protecting the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement, ensuring cooperation between Northern Ireland and the Republic works and preventing any physical border infrastructure were commitments already agreed between the sides.

Mr Coveney told RTE: "The Irish Government's position has not changed, it is rock solid."

Little agreement has yet been reached on the detail of measures to avoid a hard frontier with checks on goods and services.

Unionists have opposed any solution which would create differences between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, and British prime minister Theresa May is reliant on Democratic Unionist support in key Westminster votes.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said a backstop, meaning Northern Ireland continued to follow EU rules relating to North-South issues and the all-island economy, was now part of the overall agreement between Britain and the EU.

Mr Coveney said transforming the commitments already given into a legal text was challenging and a work in progress.

There will be setbacks and there will be arguments and difficulties, but these negotiations are moving forward and what we see today in the British media is a reflection of the fact that I think there is more thought needed, particularly on the British side in terms of solving some of these issues.

"Some of the papers that they have published last summer, while they have some interesting things in them, clearly are not going to solve all of the problems that they are committed to solving."

Mr Varadkar has said it was up to the UK to propose a solution on the Irish border question if it rejected that put forward by European leaders.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and British prime minister Theresa May.

Update 1.10pm: UK say they are 'sticking' to border plan amid reports of EU rejection of proposals

Downing Street has insisted Britain is sticking by its proposals for keeping the Irish border open after Brexit, amid reports that they have been rejected by Brussels.

A Number 10 spokesman said the UK does not recognise claims that the plans were subjected to a "systematic and forensic annihilation" by EU officials at a meeting this week with Britain's lead negotiator Olly Robbins.

The Daily Telegraph quoted unnamed EU diplomatic sources as saying that the Brussels officials delivered "a detailed and forensic rebuttal", making clear that "none of the UK customs options will work - none of them".

It came as Britain's former ambassador to the EU, Sir Ivan Rogers said UK hopes of finding a technological solution to the border issue were regarded as "a fantasy island unicorn model" in European capitals.

But Downing Street said the UK will continue to negotiate on the basis of the two proposals set out in a position paper last summer, which envisage either a close economic relationship which would make customs checks unnecessary or technological solutions to render them near-frictionless.

The Downing Street spokesman said: "We are confident that in the coming months, if all sides work together productively, we can achieve a solution to the Ireland/Northern Ireland border that works for everyone involved."

He said Number 10 was "not aware" of suggestions that chief EU negotiator Michel Barnier had put trade talks on hold while the Irish issue took centre stage.

A joint report on the UK's withdrawal agreed in December by Mrs May and European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker included both British proposals, along with a third "backstop" option which would keep Northern Ireland in the Customs Union.

But a version published by the EU in February and agreed by the EU27 last month contained only the "backstop", effectively drawing a customs border down the Irish Sea, which a furious Mrs May said "no British prime minister could ever agree".

Mr Barnier said on Friday that substantial parts of the withdrawal deal - including a solution for the Irish border - remain to be agreed by the autumn.

And he told France2 TV: "I say as the Union's negotiator that there are still difficulties, still a risk of failure.

"On 25% of the text, we don't have agreement. If there is no agreement, there is no orderly withdrawal, there is a disorderly withdrawal and there is no transition."

Restating his position that the integrity of the single market and the freedom of movement are "non-negotiable", Mr Barnier switched from French to English when asked if the UK could obtain a "single market a la carte" deal, replying: "No way."

The developments put pressure on Mrs May ahead over a vote in the Commons next week on keeping the UK in the European Customs Union, just days after she was defeated on the issue in the Lords.

If the UK position is rejected by Brussels, the Government could be faced with a choice between remaining in the Customs Union or accepting a hard border in Ireland.

On Wednesday, European Council president Donald Tusk warned that there will be "no withdrawal agreement and no transition" without a solution on Ireland.

According to the Telegraph, Mr Robbins was also warned that Brussels needs "full compliance" with EU rules on goods and agricultural products in the whole of the UK - not just Northern Ireland - if customs barriers are to be avoided.

A Government spokesman said: "We have been clear that we will protect Northern Ireland's place in the UK internal market.

"That commitment was set out in December's Joint Report which also includes our guarantee of avoiding a hard border between Northern Ireland and Ireland.

"We are continuing an intensive work programme to engage on all the scenarios set out in the Joint Report."

Responding to the Telegraph report, former Treasury permanent secretary Lord Macpherson tweeted: "EU's position on Irish border so predictable. UK sold pass by conceding 'backstop' in December, inviting EU to hold us to it. #badbusiness".

Speaking at the Policy Exchange think tank in London, Sir Ivan said the economic solution was not regarded as "a runner" on the other side of the Channel, because of Mrs May's insistence on leaving the single market and customs union.

And he added: "The Brits are therefore focused above all on Option B - the technological solution. That, candidly, from everything I've heard from various places is still viewed as a bit of a fantasy island unicorn model.

"The Irish and Brussels in particular - but I think backed, as far as I can see, by Berlin and Paris - have said the only solution to this is the so-called backstop Option C, which is what the Commission put in print and got the toxic reaction both from the DUP and the Prime Minister."

Earlier: Brussels rejects UK's 'fantasy island unicorn model' on Irish border after Brexit - report

earlier Fresh doubts have been raised over Theresa May's hopes for a deal for the UK on future relations with Europe, after reports that her proposals for the Irish border have been comprehensively rejected in Brussels.

One report of a meeting this week between Britain's lead negotiator Olly Robbins and senior EU officials suggested that the British Prime Minister's plans for avoiding a hard border with the Republic of Ireland were subjected to "a systematic and forensic annihilation".

The Daily Telegraph quoted unnamed EU diplomatic sources as saying that the Brussels officials delivered "a detailed and forensic rebuttal", making clear that "none of the UK customs options will work - none of them".

The report came as Britain's former ambassador to the EU, Ivan Rogers said that UK hopes of finding a technological solution to the border issue were regarded as "a fantasy island unicorn model" in European capitals.

A UK Government spokesman insisted that Britain was "continuing an intensive work programme to engage" on all the scenarios set out in the Joint Report agreed in December by Mrs May and European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker.

The agreement included three options for the Irish border, with the British backing a close economic relationship which would make customs checks unnecessary or technological solutions to render them near-frictionless.

But a version published by the EU in February contained only the third "backstop" option, effectively drawing a customs border down the Irish Sea, which a furious Mrs May said "no British Prime Minister could ever agree".

The report puts pressure on Mrs May ahead over a vote in the Commons next week on keeping the UK in the European Customs Union, just days after she was defeated on the issue in the Lords.

If the UK position is rejected by Brussels, the British Government could be faced with a choice between remaining in the Customs Union or accepting a hard border in Ireland.

On Wednesday, European Council president Donald Tusk warned that there will be "no withdrawal agreement and no transition" without a solution on Ireland.

According to the Telegraph, Mr Robbins was also warned that Brussels needs "full compliance" with EU rules on goods and agricultural products in the whole of the UK - not just Northern Ireland - if customs barriers are to be avoided.

A British Government spokesman said: "We have been clear that we will protect Northern Ireland's place in the UK internal market.

"That commitment was set out in December's Joint Report which also includes our guarantee of avoiding a hard border between Northern Ireland and Ireland.

"As the PM's letter to Donald Tusk said, we have made our position on aspects of the draft Commission Protocol clear.

"We have agreed that the areas covered in the draft must reflect those that meet our shared commitments.

"And we are continuing an intensive work programme to engage on all the scenarios set out in the Joint Report."

Responding to the Telegraph report, Britain's former Treasury permanent secretary Lord Macpherson tweeted: "EU's position on Irish border so predictable. UK sold pass by conceding 'backstop' in December, inviting EU to hold us to it. #badbusiness".

EU's position on Irish border so predictable. UK sold pass by conceding "backstop" in December, inviting EU to hold us to it. #badbusiness  Nick Macpherson (@nickmacpherson2) April 19, 2018

Speaking at the Policy Exchange think tank in London, Sir Ivan said that the economic solution was not regarded as "a runner" on the other side of the Channel, because of Mrs May's insistence on leaving the single market and customs union.

And he added: "The Brits are therefore focused above all on Option B - the technological solution. That, candidly, from everything I've heard from various places is still viewed as a bit of a fantasy island unicorn model.

"The Irish and Brussels in particular - but I think backed, as far as I can see, by Berlin and Paris - have said the only solution to this is the so-called backstop Option C, which is what the Commission put in print and got the toxic reaction both from the DUP and the Prime Minister."

Meanwhile, The Times reported frustration within the Cabinet over delays in drawing up the British Government's plans for immigration after Brexit.

British Home Secretary Amber Rudd told MPs last month that the immigration bill would not be introduced until early next year.

But the paper quoted one unnamed source as saying Ms Rudd seemed to think she could "take as long as she likes", and said an unnamed "ally" of Work and Pensions Secretary Esther McVey had said: "We're eager to get on with it".
A man has been airlifted from the top of Blarney Castle in Co. Cork during a dramatic rescue operation in the past hour.

An Irish Coast Guard helicopter winched the man from the ramparts following his collapse.
Eoin English

The controversial afternoon car ban on Cork's main street has been suspended until August 9.

It follows a unanimous vote by city councillors during a special meeting of Cork City Council called this evening to discuss the St Patrick's St afternoon car ban which has been at the centre of controversy for the last three weeks.

The restrictions are lifted with immediate effect. It means cars and trucks will be allowed drive through the street right through the day as they did prior to March 27, when the restrictions were introduced.

A package of parking incentives introduced last week will also remain in place for the time being.

Lord Mayor Cllr Tony Fitzgerald said the creation of priority bus corridors on the street last month had created difficulties, and the council wanted to respond proactively.

He proposed a resolution that would see councillors reaffirm their support for the Cork City Centre Movement Strategy (CCMS) which the council adopted in 2013.

He said members have listened carefully to the concerns expressed by city centre traders on the impacts of the introduction of the priority bus corridors.

Lord Mayor Cllr Tony Fitzgerald.

The resolution, seconded by FF Cllr Sean Martin, proposed a, 'pause in the programme' until August 9 to allow for a comprehensive promotional campaign for the city centre, which will be undertaken in conjunction with the business community, and a significant engagement to increase awareness of the CCMS and its role in addressing pressing traffic congestion issues and the viable functioning of the city and its centre into the future.

Introduced on March 27, the 3-6.30pm daily car ban created a time-regulated bus lane on the city's main street.

Designed to improve bus timetable reliability and travel times, there were initial signs that it was working. But traders said it has decimated afternoon trade.

Some 200 city traders united in calls this week for the car ban to be scrapped.

About 40 traders were in the public galleries for tonight's meeting.

After 3 weeks of controversy, the St Patricks St afternoon car ban has been paused (suspended) following a unanimous vote by #corkcc this evening #Cork pic.twitter.com/aoHD1RO84f  Eoin English (@EoinBearla) April 20, 2018

Cork Business Association chief executive, Lawrence Owens, welcomed the decision.

He said his members accepted that it was difficult decision for council, but he said it was the right decision.

He said he hoped to convert the energy which was used over the last three weeks to oppose the car ban into something hugely positive for the city.

Cork Chamber President, Bill O'Connell, said he hopes the decision will provide the necessary space for sensible discussion to take place ahead of an agreed recommencement.

Cork Chamber President, Bill O'Connell.

"There is a need for reflection on the lessons learned and for better-quality engagement and communication," he said.

"We see more and more companies putting their trust in the City Centre.

"Offices and hotels are springing up on the back of private investors who have chosen our city on a global map as the right place to invest their money and to create new high value jobs.

These companies are and will be increasingly a key driver of our City centre economy, of everything from retail and hospitality to professional services.

"One thing is clear, as we grow significantly in population and job numbers over the next 20 years we need to substantially improve our public transport offering.

We will have 5,000 more people working and spending in the city centre over the next couple of years and they cannot all drive to work, highlighting the importance of a successful Movement Strategy.

"We are hugely positive about Cork today.

"Our members from every corner of the Cork economy reported 91% business confidence in our Q1 2018 Quarterly Economic Bulletin being published this week. It is essential that we progress a rapid transport corridor in Cork, if is to grow and thrive from now until 2040.

Foreign Affairs Minister and Cork South Central TD, Simon Coveney, described the decision as a "realistic and sensible" response to traders' concerns.

Simon Coveney.

But he said it doesn't mean that City Hall should give up on trying to reduce the impact of cars in the city centre from an environmental perspective, but also in terms of improving the quality of the civic space in the city centre.

City officials, councillors, and traders all want the same thing - a vibrant city centre, he said.

"Everybody is working towards that. We need to take a step back, accept that there are really serious concerns for traders because of what's happened over the last three weeks and maybe have a rethink in terms of how we can come back again to this issue with perhaps a bit more preparation the next time."
Tenants facing eviction from a Cork apartment complex say they will fight on, even if a Residential Tenancies Board decision goes against them.

More than 20 households in Leeside Apartments have been given notice to quit by the new owners 'Lugus Capital', who want to refurbish the building.
By Ann O'Loughlin

A Garda who went on sick leave due to alleged bullying and racial abuse has won a High Court challenge against a decision by the Garda Commissioner to reclassify his illness.

In his judgement, Mr Justice Paul Coffey said he was satisfied to quash a decision deeming that Garda Deming Gao was suffering from an ordinary illness and not from an injury on duty.

Garda Gao, a Chinese native who is a naturalised Irish citizen, has been a Garda since 2008.

He has been stationed at Dun Laoghaire and Shankill Garda Stations, in Co Dublin but went out on in November 2016 following a verbal attack by a Garda colleague.

He has since returned to work.

He had complained he had been bullied by other Gardai for some time. After complaining about this to his superiors he claimed he was avoided, shunned, isolated and branded a rat by other Gardai.

Represented by Mark Harty SC the court heard that following the November 2016 incident the Garda was deemed unfit for work due to stress by his doctor, and was assessed by the Garda Occupational Health Service.

His injury was initially classified as "an injury on duty."

In May 2017 he was informed by his employer his injury status had been changed to "ordinary illness" and backdated to the time he went out sick.

He was told the initial classification was issued in error. No other reason or explanation has been given to Garda Gao for the reclassification, he claimed.

Following the reclassification, the Commissioner sought the repayment of monies allegedly overpaid to Garda Gao, which he claimed caused him and his family to suffer financially.

Garda Gao claimed the decision was wrong and sought High Court orders against the Commissioner including one quashing the decision to reclassify his injury.

Lawyers for the commissioner opposed the action on grounds including no decision could be made on the classification of the Garda's illness until an investigation into his bullying complaints had been completed.

The Commissioner also argued the decision was the rectification of an error and was a reiteration of the fact Garda Gao's sickness absence classification must await the completion of the bullying investigation.

It was also argued the decisions complained of were fully and properly explained to the Garda.

In his judgment, Mr Justice Coffey, who noted the Garda who verbally abused Garda Gao had been disciplined, quashed the decision to reclassify the illness.

While the Garda Commissioner is entitled to rectify a mistake no reason or explanation for making the error was given by the employer to Garda Gao.

Such a failure is contrary to basic fairness because if permitted it allows a decision maker to revoke a decision and thereby circumvent judicial scrutiny regardless of the consequences for those affected, the Judge said.

In this case, the Judge added the failure to give reasons for the reclassification of the Garda's injury status had further deprived him of a true understanding of his position and denied him the clarity he is entitled to.

He was satisfied that a failure by the commissioner to describe or explain "the error" amounts to a failure to comply with the constitutional requirement of fair procedures and principals of natural justice.

The matter will return before the court for final orders in two weeks.
A man who raped and sexually abused a young boy after working his way into the child's family home has been jailed for six years.

The 31-year-old, who cannot be named to protect the identity of his now 18-year-old victim, pleaded guilty at the Central Criminal Court to four charges of oral rape and four of sexual assault on dates between July 2011 and March 2012 at the victim's family home in South West Ireland. He has 57 previous convictions but has never been charged with a sexual crime.

The court heard the abuse started when the boy was just 11 years old.

Today, Mr Justice Michael White sentenced the man to nine years in prison with the final three years suspended for that period.

Mr Justice White noted that the man seemed to have been quite immature for his age but couldn't say definitively whether he had ingratiated himself into the boy's family to groom the child.

He said it was disgraceful to have supplied the boy of such a young age with alcohol and added that he hoped the victim has overcome the huge impact this had had on his life.

The court heard earlier that the offences came to light after the boy confided in a friend when they were both in a care home. The girl convinced him to go to the authorities and he ultimately made a statement to gardai in August 2015.

At that time the victim had been identified as a child at risk having previously attempted suicide. He had gone to the care home voluntarily due to addiction to both drugs and alcohol, which he said the man had introduced him to when they first met.

The 18-year-old stated in his victim impact report that at the time of the abuse he was looking for an adult male figure and the man befriended him. He worked his way into our family home, he said.

He described himself as feeling confused and vulnerable at the time and said he kept running away from home. He said the man gave him drugs and alcohol and he used these to hide what he was going through.

I lost my young adult life, and my belief in myself, the teenager continued before he described his behaviour at the time as a cry for help.

He said he now was glad he looked for assistance and thanked the gardai and his mother for supporting him.

I hope I can begin my life now, the victim concluded in his statement.

A local garda told Dara Hayes BL, prosecuting, that the boy texted the man in 2015 telling him he was going to expose him.

The man claimed he didn't know what the teenager was on about but when the victim replied you know what you did to me, he offered him cannabis to keep quiet.

Brendan Grehan SC, defending, told Mr Justice White that the defendant had engaged with the probation service who concluded in a report that he would need support and supervision when he was eventually released from custody.

Counsel pointed out that his client suggested to his probation officer that he found the company of younger people easier than dealing with adult company. He said the man was willing to comply with any conditions that the judge may wish to impose.

The garda agreed with Mr Grehan that his client never used any force on the child nor was there ever a threat of violence.

He accepted that the man is autistic and has been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. He further accepted that the man admitted that he hung around with a lot of young people.

The boy met the man after he became friends with the boy's older brother. The man got the teenagers alcohol and cigarettes and often bought the boy clothes.

The man began to call to the child's family home and made himself helpful to the mother, fixing things around the house and bringing her older sons to matches and training sessions.

He later moved into their home which was when the abuse began. It involved the accused and the boy masturbating each other and the man making the child perform oral sex on him.

The victim later told gardai that the man abused him anytime they were on their own, telling officers when he got the chance to do something he would. He said he was too young to understand what was going on and confirmed that the man never threatened him or used violence on him.

In March 2012, the child's mother asked the man to leave the home after his older brother told her the accused had been buying drink for them. She later told gardai that she never witnessed anything inappropriate.

The garda told Mr Hayes that around this time the victim had been getting into trouble, missing school, smoking and drinking. He then went to live in the care home.

The man was arrested in October 2016 and made admissions. He said they had messed around after watching pornography together. He admitted that they masturbated each other and that he put a portion of his penis in the boy's mouth.

The man told gardai he had been regretting the abuse for ages.

It has been haunting me. He said he had been waking up every night with guilt.

He said at the time of the abuse I wasn't thinking but said that he now felt really bad and accepted his behaviour was inappropriate.
By Anne Lucey

A Killarney family have written to the Queen asking for her help in light of concerns that guests may not be able to get to their daughter's wedding.

Proud mum Jeanne Brits revealed today how her daughter Cele's wedding is taking place just 20 minutes away from the royal wedding between Meghan Markle and Prince Harry at St Geroges Chapel, Windsor.

Not only that but 'lucky' Cele - a theatre nurse in London - was left absolutely dumbstruck when she discovered her wedding is scheduled for exactly the same time as the royal ceremony - 12 noon on May 19.

This means the route to Cele's wedding in Burnham, Berkshire, will now be permit only and will be lined by up to 100,000 people for her big day.

The Brits moved to Killarney from South Africa in 2001 and 22-year old Cele did all of her schooling in Co. Kerry, first at Holy Cross Primary School in Killarney town, and afterwards secondary school at the Intermediate School in Killorglin.

Three of her Celes bridesmaids are school friends from Kerry and will be travelling to the wedding .

Cele and her English boyfriend Lawrence Mason from Notingham got engaged in September and settled on the date, time and venue almost straight away, to begin planning their big day.

Then in November the engagement of Harry and Megan was announced, with the likelihood of a Spring wedding.

We wondered what day they would pick. And when they announced it, we were absolutely dumb-struck, Medical receptionist Jeanne told Deirdre Walsh on the afternoon programme Talkabout on Radio Kerry .

After the programme, Jeanne explained that the logistics have now become a huge worry after her husband Stephan Brits, an architect working in Tralee, was advised by police in the UK at least some of the party will need permits as they will be using the same route as the royal couple.

100,000 people are expected to line the route and some roads will be closed.

Jeanne is to do the flowers and the cake at the venue is the Tudor Barn in Burnham, where an outdoor religious ceremony is planned.

Normally they expected to have been able to set up on Friday before the Saturday wedding, but now have been told by their wedding planner they will have to get up at the crack of dawn and be at the Tudor Barn hours before hand.

Some 77 guests, most of them from Kerry will attend.

Its great fun but its a huge worry too, Jeanne said.

Yesterday they wrote to the Queen, wishing the royal couple well while outlining their concerns and hoping for help and advice.
Update 5.45pm: A 38-year-old man has been remanded in custody after being charged with the murder of a Romanian man in Co Dublin.

Dad of one Ioan Artene Bob was found with serious injuries last Friday in Sean Walsh Park in Tallaght.

He later died in hospital.

38-year-old Feri Anghel of no fixed address, but originally from Romania, has been charged with his murder and is due back in court again next week.

Update - 11.29am: Man charged with murder of Romanian man in Tallaght

A man has appeared in court charged with the murder of a Romanian man in Tallaght, Dublin.

Feri Anghel, aged 38, of no fixed address, appeared before Tallaght District Court this morning charged with his murder.

Det. Sgt Shay Palmer told the Judge he replied no when he was cautioned and charged at Tallaght garda station just before half past midnight.

As he is facing a murder charge, bail can only be sought in the High Court.

The 38-year-old, who was dressed in a dark hoody and tracksuit bottoms, did not speak for the brief hearing and had a Romanian interpreter.

He has been remanded in custody to appear in court again next week.

7.49am: Man due in court in connection with Romanian man's death in Tallaght

A man is due in court this morning in connection with the death of a Romanian man in Dublin.

Ioan Artene Bob was found with serious injuries in Sean Walsh Park in Tallaght last Friday morning.

The 49-year-old, who had been working in the construction industry, died later in hospital.

A 38-year-old man arrested on Wednesday in connection with his death is due before Tallaght District Court this morning.
By Ann O'Loughlin

A van driver who claimed he hurt his back when a mattress he was delivering was lifted by a gust of wind in to the air and carried him for twelve feet before he was thrown to the ground has been awarded a total of 380,000 by the High Court.

Declan Homan hurt his back when he was delivering the mattress to an apartment on the last of 16 deliveries that day when he was  caught by a gust of wind.

Mr Justice Kevin Cross said he accepted Mr Homan has not been able to work since the accident almost seven years ago but he assumed he will be able to do some work in the future.

The judge noted the 54 year old had, since the accident, been able to go on foreign holidays including, Florida, Spain, Corfu, and Tenerife and other holidays financed by his wife.

Mr Homan was not asked about his pain on the flights to these destinations but neither did he volunteer the flights caused him particular pain."

The judge said he must conclude according to the medical evidence that Mr Homan has chronic pain but on most occasions his pain is in the range of three out of ten and though chronic is not usually severe. The judge also accepted Mr Homan's pain does flare up from time to time to a severe level.

He said Mr Homan was not making the case he has suffered catastrophic injuries but that he has longstanding pain.

When giving evidence the judge said Mr Homan was clearly in pain which could be seen from his facial expression and he would shift to stand from time to time and sit down again.

The injuries the judge said must be classed in a moderately severe category . The total award with loss of earnings included was 430,000 but the judge deducted illness related social welfare payments made to date bringing the total final award to 380,000.

The costs of the five day hearing were also awarded to Mr Homan.

Declan Homan (54), Island Lodge, Walsh Island, Co Offaly had sued Etmar Ltd, with offices at Glen Easton Point, Leixlip, Co Kildare as a result of the accident on December 13, 2011. The court heard one of Mr Homans brother is a director of Etmar.

He claimed he fell from a height of five feet about twelve feet away from the truck and he alleged he was obliged to unload the mattress without adequate training. Etmar denied all the claims and contended the incident was an Act of God.

Mr Justice Cross said he did not accept Etmar was in any sense negligent in requiring Mr Homan to work on the day of the accident which was a windy day.

Etmar, he said he did not have a duty to be watching the weather at all times and given the sudden nature of the gust no reasonable system would have resulted in a prohibition of Mr Homan doing the task.

Mr Justice Cross said he had come to the conclusion the accident occurred because of Etmar's breach of statutory duty and negligence and its failure to assess any risks as well as a failure to train Mr Homan and to warn him of the hazards especially from a height and in particular the failure of Etmar to train him to turn the mattress at right angles after exiting on to the truck tailgate.

The judge added: "That the particular gust of wind was unpredictable does not result in a successful defence of Acts of God on behalf of Etmar."

Mr Justice Cross said if Etmar's allegation of gross exaggeration in relation to his injuries had been accepted by the court it could have resulted in the entirety of Mr Homan's case being dismissed.

He said a party ought not hurl serious allegations of bad faith when they knew or ought to have known these allegations were not supported by the expert they intended to call to give evidence.

A stay in the event of an appeal was granted provided 175,000 was paid immediately to Mr Homan.
By Conor Kane

The death has occurred of Mary Phelan, who spent more than 22 years of her life searching for her missing sister Jo Jo Dullard.

Mrs Phelan died at her home in Cuffesgrange, Co Kilkenny, after a short illness, and didnt live to see closure or justice in the case of Jo Jo, whose disappearance in 1995 at the age of 21 shocked the nation.

Jo Jo Dullard was last seen in Moone in Co Kildare on the night of November 9, 1995. She had been in Dublin but missed the last bus home to Callan and instead hitched a lift to Naas and another to Moone.

She rang a friend from a phonebox and said that a car had pulled up, but was never heard from again.

A major search was mounted for her in the days, weeks and months that followed, but no trace of her was ever found.

Her sister Mary Phelan said several times in recent years that the gardai had information about a chief suspect in the case, but that it was not pursued.

Mrs Phelan campaigned vigorously for information during the intervening years, bringing her case to the Government and meeting people including Bertie Ahern, Hilary Clinton during a visit to America, and officers from the FBI who were expert in missing persons cases.

Martin and his wife Mary Phelan, sister of missing person Jo Jo Dullard, organiser of the Memorial to the Missing sculpture. Photo: Frank Peters.

She was instrumental in moves to establish Operation Trace, set up by garda management in 1998 to investigate the disappearances of six young women in Leinster over a five-year period.

Family friend and local TD John McGuinness, who helped Mrs Phelan with her campaign, described her on Friday as an extraordinary woman who was determined to do as much as she can for Jo Jo.

The 67-year-old spent some time in St Lukes Hospital in Kilkenny recently and was moved to Castlecomer District Hospital before asking to be brought home to die.

She was a great character, but she never got closure, John McGuinness said.

Up to the end, she wasnt talking about her death or her illness, she was talking about Jo Jo Dullard. She was an amazing woman.

Her brother, Tom, died suddenly in 2001 at the age of 55 and she was also predeceased by a grandson, Darragh.

She is survived by her husband Martin, son Melvin, daughter Imelda, and surviving sisters Nora and Kathleen.

Mrs Phelans remains will lie in repose at Molloys funeral home, Callan, on Sunday evening from 5.30pm and her funeral Mass will be on Monday morning at 11am in the Church of the Holy Cross, Cuffesgrange, followed by burial in the adjoining graveyard.
By Gordon Deegan

The agency that regulates Irish Water paid out 238,885 in bonus payments to staff in 2016 in spite of losses more than doubling at the regulator.

According to the 2016 annual report just published by the Commission for Energy Regulation (CER), the bonus payments to staff in 2016 follow bonus payments of 342,656 in 2015.

In 2014, 297,720 was paid out in bonuses and this followed 273,798 paid out in 2013.

Over the past eight years, the CER - since renamed the Commission for Regulation of Utilities (CRU) - has paid out almost 2.1m in bonuses to staff in a scheme that has approval from the Dept of Public Expenditure and Reform along with the Dept of Communications, Climate Change and Environment.

Numbers employed by the energy regulator increased from 86 to 90 in 2016 and staff costs reduced from 6.5m to 6.36m.

The annual report shows that the CER decreased its bonus payments to workers as revenues declined by 14.4% from 16.34m to 14.9m.

The chief factor behind the drop in revenues was license income dropping from 15.8m to 14.2m.

The CER's expenditure totalled 16.2m and this resulted in losses more than doubling going from 535,000 to 1.295m.

The CER is responsible for setting prices for semi-state companies, such as Bord Gais and Irish Water.

The annual report states that one of its key achievements during 2016 was delivering savings of 165m for customers through a review of Irish Water costs.

The report states that it drove efficiencies at Irish Water by requiring the utility to reduce operational costs by 20% between 2015 and 2018 while delivering better outcomes for customers.

The performance-related pay model was introduced when the regulator was established in 1999 and does not apply to senior management.

The performance-related pay element is reserved for lower grades and has strict criteria and is not guaranteed.

Referring to the bonus pay model previously, CER stated that its staff are specialist and highly marketable and retention of expertise can be supported by such a pay model.

CER's costs are not paid for directly by the taxpayer, but were funded by a levy on "industry participants.

Consultancy and legal fees incurred by the CER decreased going from 7.1m to 6.6m that included legal fees reducing from 981,000 to 515,000.

Six employees at the regulator enjoyed salaries in excess of 100,000 last year.
US president Donald Trump indicated he could make a reciprocal trip to Russia if Vladimir Putin was able to accept his invitation to the White House, officials in Moscow said.

Russia's foreign minister Sergey Lavrov told Russian state television that Mr Trump mentioned the possibility of travelling to Russia when he called his Russian counterpart Mr Putin on March 20 to congratulate him on his re-election.
A "controlling" husband who murdered his wife and two children in the former home of John Lennon has been jailed for a minimum of 31 years.

Sami Salem, 30, had claimed diminished responsibility for the killings but was found guilty of murdering wife Arena Saeed, 30, daughter Shadia, seven, and son Rami, four, following a trial at Liverpool Crown Court.

The court heard he suffocated his wife and drowned his two children in the bath at their flat on Falkner Street in Liverpool - which is a regular stop for Beatles fans on sightseeing tours of the city.

Residents were forced to evacuate their homes on May 30 last year after engineers were called following reports of the smell of petrol and gas.

When relatives gained access to the family's home they found the three victims lying on the bed, with Salem almost unconscious at the foot of the bed.

The property was home to a flat owned by Beatles manager Brian Epstein in the 1960s, where Lennon and his first wife Cynthia lived shortly after they married.

At his sentencing hearing today, the court heard Salem, who was surrounded in the dock by four workers from high security psychiatric hospital Ashworth, was a paranoid schizophrenic.

Mr Justice Holgate said there was evidence he was controlling and possessive towards his wife, who he married in Yemen in 2009.

Mrs Saeed was said to have asked for a divorce earlier in May last year.

The judge said: "He sought to control her movements outside the flat and whom she met.

"He controlled her access to the internet and use of a mobile phone. This affected her ability to communicate with her family in Yemen.

"She spoke little or no English, the family were not part of the Yemeni community in Liverpool and she must have felt isolated."

Sami Salem jailed for minimum 31 years for the murder of his wife and 2 children in a Liverpool flat. His wife Arena,30 and his daughter Shadia,7, were suffocated. His son Rami, 4, was drowned in a bath. The court accepted that Salem was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. pic.twitter.com/23XsFBBlOy  BBC North West (@BBCNWT) April 20, 2018

The court heard Salem began to experience hallucinations and paranoid beliefs towards the end of 2016.

He saw a doctor in the week before the murders but was thought to have responded to medication.

Benjamin Myers QC, defending, said: "This is not a murder, or murders, that takes place against a background of someone who had conventional clarity of view."

Salem, wearing a black suit and tie with a white shirt, showed no reaction as he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

He told doctors he ate food and watched television after killing his wife and children before going to a petrol station and buying 25 litres of petrol, which he spread around the flat and over the legs of the children.

He took an overdose of medication he had been prescribed and when emergency services arrived at the property at 7.30pm they found the switches on the gas cooker had been taped so they remained open.

After the killings, Salem said he had not heard voices or experienced hallucinations at the time but described feeling "something weird".

The court heard the family of Mrs Saeed said she was "known for her kindness".

Mr Justice Holgate said: "She is described as 'a pioneer in doing good for all' and an ideal mother.

Her two children were loved by everyone who knew them.

The family is heartbroken and has suffered enormously."

- PA
There is a "possibility" that Russia has tampered with evidence of an alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, the trigger for US, UK and French air strikes in Syria, the British ambassador to the UN said.

Karen Pierce said all the facts had not yet been established after the April 7 attack and said Russia and Syria should allow inspectors to visit the site.

The visit to the area by inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has been put on hold after a team came under small arms fire and returned to Damascus earlier this week.

Ms Pierce, speaking to the Associated Press, said: "We do look to the Russians and the Syrians to uphold the promises they made to the Security Council last week that the inspectors would be allowed in, that they would be escorted, that they would be safe and that they could have free access."

She said the investigators should be allowed to visit the site "expeditiously", adding "it's incumbent upon them (Russia and Syria) more than ever to allow the team in, to escort it, to make sure it's safe, and to make sure it can do its work."

When asked if she was concerned Russia had tampered with evidence of the attack which is believed to have killed 75, Ms Pierce said: "It has to be a possibility. It has to be, and one could construe... that was responsible for the delay.

"But I stress, we don't yet have the facts, we are waiting for the UN report."

Russia has said chemical weapons were not used in Douma, in an attack which the United States, United Kingdom and France say was carried out by the regime of Bashar Assad.

In response to the attack, four of the UK's Royal Air Force Tornado GR4s joined co-ordinated missile strikes, launching Storm Shadow missiles at a base 15 miles west of Homs.

Speaking last weekend, British Prime Minister Theresa May said there was "no practicable alternative" than to use force to deter the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime.

She added: "This is not about intervening in a civil war. It is not about regime change."

Asked about the strikes and whether they "burnished" Mr Assad's image, Ms Pierce said: "I think it's exposed him as a suspected war criminal who gasses and attacks and bombs his own people with illegal weapons.

"I don't think it burnished his image at all."
The Trump administration has lashed out at China, Iran, Russia and North Korea for being "forces of instability" because of human rights abuses.

In its annual global human rights reports, the State Department singled out the four countries for serious rights violations, including restricting freedoms of speech and assembly and allowing or committing violence against religious, ethnic and other minority groups.

It said that countries that undermine the fundamental dignity of people are "morally reprehensible" and harm US interests.

"The governments of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, for example, violate the human rights of those within their borders on a daily basis and are forces of instability as a result," acting Secretary of State John Sullivan said in an introduction to the reports.

He said the US aims to lead by example and promotes good governance, anti-corruption efforts and the rule of law.

In addition to harshly criticising those countries, the reports, which cover 2017 and are the first entirely produced by the Trump administration, replace sections on "reproductive rights" with one titled "coercion in population control".

The shift underscores the Trump administration's anti-abortion position that has already manifested itself in changed funding for international health programmes and has been criticised by women's health advocates.

Traditional US adversaries are hit hardest in the report. The entries for China, Iran, Russia and North Korea outline a litany of abuses blamed on their governments, which are also accused of failing to hold human rights violators accountable for their actions:

China

The report said Beijing is responsible for arbitrary detentions, executions without due process and coerced confessions of prisoners as well as forced disappearances and "significant restrictions" on freedom of speech, press, assembly, association, religion, and movement.

In the "coercion in population control" section, the report says that China enforces "a coercive birth-limitation policy that in some cases included sterilisation or abortions. In its first year in office, the Trump administration, as previous Republican administrations have done, pulled funding from the UN Population Fund, largely because of its work in China. The fund denies that it promotes abortion.

"China continues to spread the worst features of its authoritarian system," Mr Sullivan said.

Iran

The theocratic Shiite government in Iran is responsible for executing "a high number" of prisoners for crimes that do not merit the death penalty, the report said, along with torture, jailing of dissidents, severe curbs on journalists, gay people and religious minorities.

It also accused Iran of taking few steps to investigate, prosecute or punish any officials who committed the abuses, citing a widespread pattern of impunity for offenders.

In addition, it said that through its support for Syrian President Bashar Assad's government and Iraqi Shia militias, Iran "materially contributed" to rights abuses in Syria and Iraq.

Russia

Moscow was lambasted in the report for allowing a "climate of impunity" for human rights abuses and doing little to punish officials who violate basic rights.

The report laments Russia's "authoritarian political system dominated by President Vladimir Putin," in contrast with Mr Trump's reluctance to criticise Mr Putin or the Kremlin directly.

The list of alleged transgressions by Russia is long.

The report alleged that Russia allows "systematic" torture that sometimes leads to death, along with extrajudicial killings of gay people in Chechnya, which prompted US sanctions late last year under a human rights law.

Russia's "lack of judicial independence," crackdowns on journalists and political dissidents, and censorship on the internet and of foreign organisations was also sharply criticized.

Vladimir Putin.

North Korea

Ahead of an anticipated historic meeting in the coming weeks between Mr Trump and leader Kim Jong Un, the report accused North Korea of "egregious human rights violations" in nearly all of the categories included in the report.

Forced labour, torture, coerced abortion and arbitrary arrests are all noted in the report, which also criticises North Korea for extrajudicial killings, rigid controls over citizens' private lives and the use of political prison camps.

The report says that "impunity" for those offences continues to be a problem in North Korea.

- PA
The government has proposed increasing the highest-penalty criminal offences under the Corporations Act to 10 years for individuals and the greater of a $945,000 fine or three times the benefits gained. Financial services companies would face maximum fines of $210 million, with their annual turnover stripped by 10 per cent under the proposed penalty laws. The Treasurer denied that he had launched the policies because of revelations this week at the royal commission that wealth manager AMP misled ASIC on at least 20 occasions and that Commonwealth Bank had charged fees to customers who had died. This is not something that has just happened,Mr Morrison said. We have been working on this over a very long time. We did not enter into it lightly." Treasurer Scott Morrison said the reforms had come out of the governments long-running capability review into the ASIC. Credit:Justin McManus Mr Morrison said the reforms had come out of the governments long-running capability review into the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC).

Over the year to June 2017, ASIC completed 10 criminal cases and started another five. Six people received custodial sentences during the 2017 financial year. Financial Services Minister Kelly ODwyer said the reforms were about giving ASIC a bigger tool kit to tackle corporate misconduct and the government had appointed a new deputy chairman responsible for enforcement to ASIC. We are cleaning up the system Bill Shorten ignored, she said. Under the reforms, the Turnbull government will expand the range of breaches subject to civil penalties, increase the maximum civil penalty amounts that can be imposed by the courts and see penalties increase for the most serious criminal offences. Kelly O'Dwyer says the proposal will bring Australia's penalties into closer alignment with leading international jurisdictions. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Ms O'Dwyer said the reforms would protect Australian consumers and ensure those who did the wrong thing would receive the appropriate punishment. "These reforms represent the most significant increases to the maximum civil penalties, in some instances for more than 20 years," Ms O'Dwyer said in a statement on Friday. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said work on toughening the penalties had been going on for some time, and the government was "getting on with the job" of financial reform. "We've strengthened ASIC, we've introduced one tranche of stronger financial regulation legislation after another to protect consumers," Mr Turnbull told reporters in London, where he is attending CHOGM. "All of that work will be informed by the work of the royal commission and we'll look forward to the completion of that inquiry."

Task force recommendations The proposed changes are in response to the ASIC enforcement review task force, which was established in 2016 by the government in response to the Murray Financial System Inquiry. The government will agree or agree-in-principle to all 50 task force recommendations and will implement 30 of them. This includes increasing the maximum penalty for 19 of some of the most serious offences to 10 years' imprisonment for individuals and 45,000 penalty units or $9.45 million for corporations. These offences include knowingly providing defective disclosure documents to consumers, offering securities without appropriate disclosure and corporate fraud offences, which all currently carry a five-year jail term.

A further 43 offences will be subject to increases in jail terms. 'Credible deterrent' This includes people who continue to manage corporations after being disqualified, who will now be jailed for five years instead of one, and those who provide false or misleading information to ASIC will face five years' jail time instead of two. "They bring Australia's penalties into closer alignment with leading international jurisdictions, and ensure our penalties are a credible deterrent to unacceptable misconduct," Ms O'Dwyer said. The task force recommended applying a civil penalty to several breaches with the government proposing to apply a civil penalty to 48 contraventions.
For the second time in 18 months, India has a shortage of cash. And like last time, economists say, it's primarily the government's fault.

Empty ATMs and bank restrictions on withdrawals have been reported in eight states this week, and some bank managers said the cash crunch has been building for months.

ATMs across India are running out of cash. Credit:AP

The government says the cash problem was caused by an unusual spurt in demand and will be eased within days. But if it persists, the shortage poses a political threat to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose administration has been hit in recent weeks from a series of stumbles. Most recently, he was criticised for his long silence over the horrific gang rape and murder of an 8-year-old Muslim girl that police say was committed by a group of Hindu men to terrorize the Muslim population.

On Monday, Sampath Kumar Lohati drove his scooter around Warangal, a city in the south Indian state of Telangana, for more than 4 hours trying to withdraw money.
A suite of new laws promoted as ramping up penalties for financial misconduct will be effective only if the regulator takes a more muscular approach to enforcement, an adviser to the federal government says.

The federal government will increase the maximum prison time for the most serious financial crimes to 10 years for individuals and up to $210 million for companies.

Treasurer Scott Morrison and Minister for Financial Services Kelly ODwyer announcing the government's response to the ASIC enforcement review. Credit:Justin McManus

The government is also considering increasing the civil penalty for breaches of corporations laws to $1.05 million for individuals and $10.5 million for companies, and giving ASIC the power to direct companies to pay compensation.

The new laws were part of the governments response to a taskforce report into the enforcement capabilities of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) released by Treasurer Scott Morrison and Financial Services Minister Kelly ODwyer on Friday.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull updated the "rather old" standards of ministerial conduct. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen ACSI, which collated publicly available documents, found that 116 ASX200 codes of conduct had not been reviewed in two years or were undated, while another 15 were at least five years old. It prompted ACSI chief executive Louise Davidson to express doubts about "how committed companies are to implementing" their codes of conduct. "Our research suggests that many companies adopt a set and forget mentality and dont regularly review their code of conduct," she says. Code zero

"If your code of conduct is out of date, that immediately says to me that you don't think it's important," says Monash Business School's Peter Holland, an expert in human resources and employee relations, who has looked closely at recent issues surrounding codes of conduct. Workplace lawyer Christie Toy, from Shine Lawyers, says many of her clients remember reading their employer's code of conduct once when they started their job, if at all. And they wouldn't know where to look to find it again. "You might have an employee, someone who is being harassed at work, not knowing where to go and where to find the policy - if it even exists," Toy says. Some companies appeared to view their code of conduct as a shield to protect themselves from legal liability for poor behaviour by employees, she says, than for setting standards of good behaviour. The perils of an outdated code of conduct were made clear in February, when Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull scrambled to update the standards governing ministerial conduct following news of Barnaby Joyce's affair with a staffer. The ministerial standards, first developed by John Howard, were "truly deficient" and "rather old", Turnbull said, suggesting they had not kept pace with modern workplace standards. The new code bans sex between ministers and their staff. Responses to Turnbull's new code at the time were mixed. But Holland says this is exactly how not to go about developing a code of conduct. For a start, employees and other stakeholders should be involved in the process, he says. A good code of conduct should be robust to challenge, but the so-called "bonking ban" provokes more questions, Holland says - including how it could be enforced.

"It's reactive, it's written on the run and you can drive a truck through the logic of it," he says. So how to tell when an organisation's code of conduct is more reputational fig-leaf than a serious and sincere attempt to shape good culture? Loading Ed John, executive director of governance, engagement and policy at ACSI, says the group expects companies to go "beyond boilerplate"; the Australian Security Exchange's corporate governance guidelines say a code "must be, and be seen to be, a meaningful statement of [the company's] core values", reinforced by proper training and "proportionate disciplinary action if it is breached". The ASX recommends codes cover issues including the handling of facilitation payments and bribes, potential or real conflicts of interest, and, crucially, where employee whistleblowers should go to report unlawful or unethical behaviour.
While data centre leader NextDC this week embarked on a $170 million land grab to expand its footprint in three capital cities, a new rival believes leasing sites makes more financial sense.

The Data Exchange Network, which listed on the ASX on April 10 after a $16 million capital raising, argues that inner-city sites have become too hard to find and that the cost of ownership results in a drag on returns.

We dont build buildings and we dont want to own them, CEO Peter Christie said.

We are good tenants because we take long leases and pay good rent. Data centre operators are really I.T. service providers, not a real estate play.
Atelier Wagner is no stranger to reworking churches, having renovated and extended several, including the Ormond Anglican Church and St. Michaels in North Carlton.

This latest church, located in Pitt Street, Eltham, off Main Road, is one of the oldest in Melbourne.

Atelier Wagner's renovation to St. Margaret's. Credit:Trevor Mein

Designed by architect Nathaniel Billings, the heritage-listed church, circa 1861, is surrounded by a copse of eucalypts and established European trees.

People are taken back when they first see the church, given this area is now quite built up, says architect David Wagner, who worked closely with his life and business partner Jacqui Wagner.
Super funds remain reluctant to back shareholder motions calling for more transparency from Australian companies on climate change risks, despite supporting similar proposals targeting companies in the US, research suggests.

And the research, produced by NGO Market Forces, argues that super funds are also lagging on their own standards of transparency, with many making only limited disclosures about how they voted at company meetings - and some not revealing this information at all.

Australian funds backed a motion targeting Occidental Petroleum, but many declined to support votes against local companies. Credit:Bloomberg

Market Forces examined the proxy voting records of Australia's 50 biggest super funds to track how they voted on 53 climate change-related shareholder resolutions at company AGMs in Australia and the US.

Such resolutions, which are common in the US and have become more frequently used in Australia, often call on companies to disclose more information about how climate change may impact their operations, and the steps they are taking to respond to its risks. Company boards usually recommend shareholders vote against the resolutions.
There isn't one client who is not under a doctors care, Alex says. People have suffered massive pyschological stress. Since the three-part investigation, hundreds of taxpayers have contacted Fairfax Media with further evidence of questionable ATO treatment. They reveal: the tax office has sent threatening letters to taxpayers claiming they had not provided their tax file number when that was not the case; that small businesses are facing demands for immediate payment of "overdue" GST when they are not in arrears; and that the ATO has itself asked for patience as it has battled to make payments it owes on workers' superannuation.

These problems follow the joint investigation's revelation of heavy-handed tactics including the widespread freezing of people's bank accounts, inadequate compensation and lack of recourse when the tax office makes mistakes. The investigation prompted an immediate Treasury review from Revenue and Financial Services Minister Kelly O'Dwyer who said she was "deeply concerned" about the allegations raised. Opposition Leader Bill Shorten has signalled he might go further and call for a parliamentary inquiry when Parliament resumes next month. Bankruptcy worries But that's little comfort for Alex and the other victims of an unscrupulous tax agent. The victims are not being treated as a group scenario, Alex says, but on an individual basis. It's a tactic he suspects the ATO is using to try and recover more money.

Some individuals have settled and may have paid in order to do so. Some are still negotiating and Alex says they are being pressured by the ATO to sell property, or take out loans to pay the arrears, some of which date back years and come with penalties. Others are seeking external legal advice on whether they can get compensation. "But everyone has to pay," Alex says. "Theres people that will just go bankrupt." Alexs business revenue has dropped 90 per cent because he has been too stressed to work. He is now trying to get mediation with the ATO to resolve the dispute. "The ATO rang me and asked me if Id sell my property," he says.

"The ATO would have earned far more money from me had I been able to [keep normally running] my business. I'm absolutely traumatised." Tax barrister Graeme Halperin says it is worrying that the ATO has no mechanism in place to deal with taxpayers left out of pocket by a crooked tax agent even if the agent gets deregistered and jailed. Barrister Graeme Halperin. Credit:Eddie Jim "If that trust and faith breaks down, and the taxpayer suffers financially as a result of being cheated or disadvantaged by an unscrupulous tax agent, the ATO makes no allowance," he says. "[The small business] cops it in the neck. They are a double victim, and pay twice over."

The ATO confirmed to The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age that when people have been unwittingly dudded by their adviser, the ATO will still pursue the taxpayer for the money. "We will always work with affected taxpayers to correct their past tax returns, and get their tax affairs in order," an ATO spokeswoman said. "While affected taxpayers will usually need to repay any tax owing with interest, we generally reduce or eliminate penalties for those who work with us to correct their returns." Tax file number unknown The ATO's hardline approach can be especially confronting when it mistakenly accuses taxpayers of failing to meet their obligations.

Nurse Susan Jarnason is one of the flood of victims to come forward following the joint investigation claiming to have received a shock demand from the ATO as the result of an error. Susan Jarnason is another taxpayer who has had issues with the ATO. Credit:Jessica Hromas She was one of an unknown number of taxpayers to receive a strongly worded form letter directing them to provide a correct Tax File Number (TFN) or face having the top tax rate applied to her wages. The letter says the TFN provided by Ms Jarnason did not match the ATO's record and that "unless you fix this within 14 days your payer will have to deduct tax at the top rate".

Ms Jarnason says her TFN, which the ATO uses to track every working Australian, has not changed in 25 years. When she rang the ATO to tell them that, she says the person on the phone "explained [it] away by saying, 'oh yes, a bunch of wrong letters were sent out you can disregard that'." "It was quite a threatening letter," she says. "It made me lose confidence in them." The ATO spokeswoman says the letters were sent as part of the establishment of a new payroll reporting system for employers with more than 19 staff. The ATO stopped sending the letters when it realised it could solve "discrepancies" in another way but didn't say how many had been sent.

There are other concerns about whether the tax office's systems are as robust as they should be. One taxpayer in the property industry who faced a GST obligation received a letter titled: "Pay your debt or be referred to a collection agency". One recipient of just such a letter, who wished to remain anonymous, said he found the letter "intimidating" as it was the first correspondence he had received from the agency. "It incorrectly states that I have an overdue tax debt, that interest is accruing, and that legal action will soon be commenced, when in fact the due date for the tax was still two weeks away," he says.

The ATO spokeswoman defended the approach saying that letters and other approaches, such as mobile phone text messages, were an efficient way to prompt action. "We dont write letters to intimidate people," she says. "Debt recovery actions do not start until after the debt falls due." The ATO did not divulge how many such letters it sends. Superannuation mess The cases have come to light as the ATO has itself had issues making payments it owes due to system problems.

The ATO operates a clearing house for small business where it collects superannuation and then distributes it to hundreds of thousands of employees. But in recent weeks the system has frozen meaning payments for 19,000 workers were delayed - some by almost three weeks. The ATO wrote to businesses in mid-April advising them of the issue saying it was working to process the backlog. It also stated it would not punish employers who had issues paying superannuation on time due to the glitch.

A small retailer using the service, who wished to remain anonymous, said hundreds of dollars worth of super payments had not been paid to his employees' super funds several weeks after he paid the money to the ATO. "So it is three weeks where money should have been in their super accounts but it has not been, and so any interest they were going to earn on their super, they have not earned." He said he contacted the ATO and it expects the issue to be resolved by week's end, but until it is fixed the system will not allow processing of any other new transactions. "The system only allows for one payment to be outstanding at any time," he said. "I have spoken to the ATO two times [this month] and they they say, 'yeah, yeah we know, itll be fixed - the care factor was zero."

The ATO says 95 per cent of the affected payments were passed to the employees within 20 days and the remainder of the payments would be paid by Friday. "A number of payments were delayed, and the ATO has sought to address this as a matter of priority." The Inspector-General of Taxation Ali Noroozi thinks the ATO makes mistakes in about 5 per cent, or one in 20 cases - a claim the ATO has disputed. The issues surrounding the ATO's treatment of smaller taxpayers has prompted calls for greater scrutiny. The ATO has resisted this push, saying greater scrutiny is unnecessary. Kate Carnell wants greater powers to investigate small business complaints against the ATO. Credit:Louis Douvis
Last Friday night in St Kilda, Brian Henry Hooper played bass guitar in a benefit concert organised by friends and fellow musicians to raise funds as he battled cancer.

On Friday morning, April 20, Hooper died. He was 55.

Hooper was being cared for in recent weeks at Melbournes Peter MacCallum Hospital, until Brians ship peacefully sailed this morning, according to a statement from his family.

Brian Hooper has died a week after his final performance

Hooper arrived on stage in a wheel chair prior to an emotional performance at St Kilda's Prince of Wales just a week ago. He briefly left hospital on the night to perform with the Beasts of Bourbon, who he played bass guitar with since joining the band in the early 1990's.
The Swedish-born producer and DJ known as Avicii has been found dead in Muscat, Oman.

Publicist Diana Baron said in a statement that the 28-year-old DJ, born Tim Bergling, was found dead.

"It is with profound sorrow that we announce the loss of Tim Bergling, also known as Avicii," the statement said.

"He was found dead in Muscat, Oman this Friday afternoon local time, April 20th. The family is devastated and we ask everyone to please respect their need for privacy in this difficult time. No further statements will be given."
Watch: My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman

Netflix

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai with David Letterman.

David Letterman, for many decades the doyen of US late-night television hosts, first entered my radar  and the collective consciousness of many Australian millennials  by way of a 2007 interview with Paris Hilton. The socialite was ostensibly on his show to promote her new perfume line, but Letterman was clearly uninterested. Within a minute, he was quizzing her about her jail time for a driving-related offence. His audacity was glorious.

If Letterman's acerbic tongue endeared him to audiences, his warmth and charm did so to his guests (those he respected, at least). In 2015, when he retired after 33 years as host of the Late Show, a bevy of comedic luminaries appeared on the final episodes, including Jerry Seinfeld, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Chris Rock. Bill Murray popped out of a cake. Letterman was also saluted by Barack Obama, George Clooney and Tina Fey, all of whom are interviewed in his new show, My Next Guest Needs No Introduction.
Few Australian designers blur the line between art and fashion as beautifully as Anna Plunkett and Luke Sales, who founded their Sydney-based label Romance Was Born in 2005, fresh out of fashion school. In a new book, the duo explain the inspiration behind some of their more fantastical creations.

Cate Blanchett in the Blanket Dress from 2009's "Doilies and Pearls, Oysters and Shells" collection. Credit:Getty Images

"Doilies and Pearls, Oysters and Shells": spring/summer 2009 collection

Anna Plunkett: This was our most ambitious show. We created everything, including crocheted King Neptune beards and handdyed lace eyebrows that we then pearled by hand. We wanted to do a tribute show to our grandmothers having a tea party underwater.

Luke is always saying to me, "You're a grandma, Anna." And it's true. I love the outfits of older women and how they put colour combinations together.
There are fears of an increase in blood-borne viruses after reports that all of the ACT's needle and syringe vending machines have been either consistently empty or not functional over the past few months.

According to one Canberra man, who asked not to be named, the six machines  which form part of the territory's needle and syringe program  have been largely out of action for months.

Needle and syringe vending machines have been out of order for months. Credit:Michael Clayton-Jones

"While needles can be obtained at most pharmacies, not-functional users generally aren't welcome and functional users would rather maintain their veneer of conformity," he said.

"As you can imagine, there are some 'less discerning' of this exclusive clique who have taken to retrieving discarded sharps and sharing the same needles."
After 12 years of being locked up (apparently no one could find the key), in 2000, staff finally decided it was time to crack open the secret safe. Amid much anticipation, while a locksmith picked the lock, a small number of select OPH staff gathered around to see what it might contain. Secret documents? Not quite. It was an anti-climax as the safe only contained two boxes  one containing a pile of Christmas decorations and the other, somewhat ironically, full of red tape. Mystery monikers A pigeon hole labelled "precious and gorgeous". Politicians aren't immune to being called names, some being labelled with less endearing monikers than others.

For example, Wilson "Iron Bar" Tuckey (member 1980-2010) was so-named after being convicted of assault after striking a man with a length of steel cable while a publican in Western Australia in 1967. And how could you forget Kim "Bomber" Beazley, so-named after his boyish enthusiasm for military hardware. Two people who worked in OPH who probably thought their nicknames would remain secret to the public were Bob Hawke's two official drivers from the mid-1980s. However, if you look closely above the leather bench waiting area where the drivers sat when on call, you'll notice a pigeon hole still marked with a typed sticker divulging their nicknames  "Precious" and "Gorgeous". Oh, how cute. I'm yet to unearth the drivers' real names. If they are still in Canberra, I'd love to hear from them, anonymity not assured. Hidden hidey hole Tim the Yowie Man inspects a trap door at Old Parliament House.

One politician better known for his nickname than his real name was Jack McEwen (PM, 1967) who was coined "Black Jack" by Robert Menzies (PM 1939-41 and 1949-66) for his dark and sombre personality. To avoid his political adversaries, especially his arch rival William McMahon (PM, 1971-72), "Black Jack", when deputy prime minister, apparently took matters into his own hands and arranged for a secret door to be installed into a cupboard where he could hide. According to political lore, if "Black Jack" didn't want to see someone, he would simply ask his staff to report, "Sorry he's not in the office" and then he'd surreptitiously sneak into the bolthole which also had a hidden exit into Kings Hall. The bolthole is still there (but access from his old office is now bricked in) and is now used by maintenance staff to store cleaning products. Press pranks Apart from the politicians, OPH's other main occupants were the press who worked in poky offices on the building's roof.

Always in search of a scoop, the press developed their own hidey holes from where to spy on politicians. During renovations undertaken post-1988 that involved the removal of some of the press offices located on the roof, a false cavity was found in the ceiling of the leader of the opposition's office. Inside the hiding hole, a small table with legs sawn off, a couple of chairs and a number of broken audio cassettes were also discovered. Some believe it may have been used by the press (or others?) to covertly listen in to the deliberations in the office. The office, last used by John Howard, is located in the corridor behind the House of Representatives Chamber and is open to the public. Cabinet capers The Cabinet Room.

Not surprisingly, another room allegedly bugged through the ceiling was the Cabinet Room, a sound-proof stronghold where decisions of the highest level were made. On an overnight investigation of the building in 2007, several ghost investigators fled from this room's inner sanctum after being spooked by lights from an unknown source. Were they the ghosts of politicians past, or maybe the spirits of jilted journos still trying to get that scoop? Interestingly, the corridor outside the office is to this day avoided by some security guards, who in the dead of the night, hear the sound of phantom shuffling feet on the carpet. Loo leaks Some members of the press had less technical, but just as innovative, ways to discover government secrets, such as journalist Alan Reid who apparently would conceal himself in in the toilet block adjacent to the Cabinet Room, waiting for ministers to answer a call of nature.

Long-time doyen of the Press Gallery, Laurie Oakes, wrote in The Herald Sun in 2007, "Reid  would settle himself in a cubicle, lift his legs up out of sight, and sit there for hours listening and making notes". Talk about politics being a dirty business. Top-secret tunnels Contrary to popular folklore, there are no secret tunnels beneath OPH linking it to The Lodge, the PMs official residence. A possible source for this myth is that OPH did have a system of tunnels of sorts  not for people but for documents. There was a network of lamson tubes within OPH, including one tube that led three kilometres away to the Government Printing Office in Kingston.

The tubes enabled the rapid carriage of documents, including Hansard, with either compressed air or suction/vacuum.You can still see the tube stations at the entrance to both the chambers. Curious cartouche If you stand in the centre of the grand Kings Hall and look towards the main entrance, just above the top of the stairwell there's a blank cartouche, with six tassels at the centre of the clerestory windows. It's appearance, which this column reported in 2011 vaguely resembles a freemason's apron, has led to speculation that the building's architect, John Smith Murdoch, a member of the Masonic order, included the feature as a lasting symbol of his key role in the development of the building. However, plans for the building held by the National Archives of Australia indicate that Murdoch's original design allowed for the coat of arms of Australia to be etched into this cartouche, and was to overlook a giant map of Australia at the other end of the hall. This could explain the six tassels (representing the six states).

However, a late change in plans resulted in the map being replaced with a statue of King George V. Some believe that it would have been inappropriate for the coat of arms to be "looking down" on the statue of our ruling monarch and so the cartouche was never completed. Burning bureaucrat Politicians and the press aren't the only people whose work took them inside the hallowed halls of OPH. Senior public servants were often called upon to sit in on meetings or clarify advice provided. One career bureaucrat who spent many hours in OPH was Treasury Official David Borthwick. Borthwick, now retired, especially remembers one late-night meeting in the mid-1980s where he plucked up enough courage to interrupt Expenditure Review Committee deliberations chaired by Bob Hawke, prime minister at the time. "I could see that they were going to make what I thought was a wrong decision based on incorrect information," he recalls. "So I decided to speak up." As Borthwick spoke, he saw Paul Keating, the then treasurer, "gripping the edge of the table and his knuckles going very white".

Borthwick recalls, "At that stage I started breaking out in perspiration and not looking at him. About 15 minutes later Keating asked to see me outside. "Keating got me in the corridor and my back was against the wall, pressed against this water heater and he stood about half a metre from me and let fly with his typically colourful Keating language," says Borthwick. "Keating knew what was being decided was wrong, but he was setting a trap to spring on his colleagues and I'd prematurely sprung it." Talk about getting "into hot water". Fact File Top-Secret Tour: If you want to discover more secrets of Old Parliament House, join one of my After Dark Tours. Launching on Thursday April 26 as part of the Canberra & Region Heritage Festival and then monthly until September. $59pp, bookings essential: www.moadoph.gov.au/events/top-secret-tour/

Did You Know? When prime minister Malcolm Fraser apparently requested bullet-proof screens be removed from the windows of his office so he could open the windows (which overlook a public road and carpark) to let in more fresh air. How times have changed. Got a tip? If you have a closely-guarded secret about this Canberra landmark and want to get it off your chest, please let me know. timtheyowieman@bigpond.com or write c/- The Canberra Times, 9 Pirie St, Fyshwick. Heritage Festival: For information on dozens of other engaging events on during the annual festival which runs until April 29, see: www.environment.act.gov.au/heritage WHERE IN THE REGION? Where in the region is this elephant?

Clue: This town is just as well known for its historic "wind" mill as for its out-of-place elephant. Degree of difficulty: Easy - Medium Last week: Where in Canberra THIS week. Photo: John M. Chapuis Tim the Yowie Man April 14, 2018 Credit:Tim the Yowie Man Congratulations to Alice Scott of Wamboin who was the first reader to correctly identify last week's photo, sent in by John M. Chapuis as the old pay phone area at the small retail complex just off Fraser Road, at the Royal Military College, Duntroon.
David Edgerton, a serial entrepreneur who helped turn a South Florida hamburger franchise into Burger King but who came to regret selling the company before it became a whopping fast-food empire, has died at a hospital in Miami. He was 90.

The cause was complications from surgery after a fall, said his friend and financial manager, Betty Amos Righetti.

David Edgerton, right, with his Burger King partner, James W. McLamore, in the 1960s beside a company plane. Credit:NEW YORK TIMES

Edgerton and his business partner, James McLamore, started their burger company in 1954, one year before Ray Kroc opened his first McDonald's franchise in the Chicago suburbs. Burger King now has more than 16,000 restaurants in 100 countries around the world  about half as many locations as McDonald's, the world's largest burger chain. According to a report by the research firm Technomic, it's the fifth-biggest restaurant brand in the United States, with an estimated $9.3 billion in sales.

Burger King's success can be traced in part to innovations by Edgerton, who oversaw the company's operations in its early years while McLamore, who called himself "the second-best burger salesman in the United States", handled its business side. The duo ran the company together until 1967, when they netted millions of dollars on what had begun as a small, quick-serve outpost near the Miami airport.
The man who killed promising Brisbane water polo player Cole Miller in a one-punch attack that shocked Brisbane has again been charged with a violent offence while behind bars.

Armstrong Renata, 24, was in October sentenced to seven years in jail for the cowardly attack on the much smaller 18-year-old, a month after pleading guilty to assaulting or obstructing two prison guards.

Cole Miller died after a one-punch attack in Brisbane's Fortitude Valley on January 3, 2016.

Now the New Zealand national is facing another assault charge, stemming from a violent brawl at Maryborough Correctional Centre on April 2, which saw the jail sent into lockdown for at least two days.

Fairfax Media can reveal Renata, who has since been moved to Brisbane Correctional Centre, was one of four prisoners charged with alleged assaults on staff.
The body of an experienced gyrocopter pilot has been recovered after the wreckage of his aircraft was found in central Queensland on Friday.

The 77-year-old Farnborough man, Tim Pettitt, was found dead in his aircraft after a teenage boy spotted the wreckage in bushland near Baffle Creek, north of Bundaberg.

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Mr Pettitt's wife, Judie, said she watched him take off for the first time on Wednesday, and said that was a special moment for her.

"If he had to go, that's what he would have wanted to do," Mrs Pettitt told Ten News.
A man aged in his 50s has died after a backyard explosion north of Brisbane on Friday evening.

A Queensland Police Service spokesman described the incident as an "industrial accident" after emergency services were called to the residence on Warner Road in Warner just after 5.30pm.

The man was "trying to separate hydrogen from water" when the explosion occurred, police said.

Paramedics, fire crews and police attended the scene but there was little they could do, with the man being declared dead at the scene.

A crime scene was not declared because the death was being treated as non-suspicious.
There is another growing pressure on magistrates. A section of the public believe they are "soft", dont reflect community standards and are out of touch with reality. In the past six months, two magistrates have taken their own lives. Stephen Myall, magistrate, died on March 14, 2018. Such is the stress that Chief Magistrate Peter Lauritsen has ordered all his colleagues to take four counselling days a year to try and manage stress loads. He also wants the government to appoint more magistrates. Ms Popovic, who has been a magistrate for nearly 30 years, tells us she has 27 matters listed before her but the number will grow and change as the day begins. You jump on the bench and are thrown the files. You have to make quick decisions knowing they have a real impact on peoples lives. The frustration for magistrates, she says, is the endless delays and the inability of many to prepare for their day in court. It is difficult to get parties here for the final decision. I want people who attend to understand that it is less stressful to have their matter dealt with than to keep delaying.

We enter her court at 9.38 am to sit at the bench. The handful of people  a police prosecutor in uniform, four members of the public and a few interested parties  all rise. In the next few hours the audience below changes moment by moment  at one point there are 31 people  all wanting their matters heard. The accused appear via video link from prison, brought up from holding cells to sit in the dock, in the body of the court if on bail, or simply dont bother to turn up at all. The first matter listed is immediately set aside as the defence lawyer is missing in action. It becomes a common thread  frantic activity followed by inaction. As cases are delayed, Ms Popovic's clerk produces more paperwork relating to fresh matters added to todays list. It looks like back orders in an overworked restaurant kitchen. At one point Ms Popovic sees six police in court waiting to give evidence. She wants overnight remand hearings dealt with quickly so police who worked night shifts can be released. Deputy Chief Magistrate Jelena Popovic looks at the accused's file while journalist John Silvester looks like a hanging judge. Credit:Chris Hopkins

Her frustration is evident when some cases cant be heard because the prison vans havent turned up. This means Legal Aid lawyers will have to talk to their clients and then make immediate submissions. Equally the prosecutors have little preparation time. They are under enormous pressure, she says. There are video links from prisons to save time. One involves a young female inmate, well groomed and not someone who appears beaten down by life. She is clear-eyed, polite, refers to the magistrate as "Your Honour" and says please and thank you with a schoolgirl's sing-song voice. It is a growing problem, middle-class young women who see some glamour in ice and end up trophy girlfriends for gangsters, Ms Popovic says. Hearing she was to be jailed, one such woman protested: But Im from Elwood. About to hold court: magistrate Jelena Popovic. Credit:Chris Hopkins There is the homeless shoplifter caught with razor blades, perfume, yoghurt, prawns and fish. His lawyer says his client has a promise of steady accommodation that will take him off the street but it will lapse if he is not there to take the offer in two days. Ms Popovic sentences him to two days' prison, as much to keep him off the streets in the meantime.

One accused fails to appear despite a reminder from his Legal Aid lawyer and Ms Popovic cancels his bail and issues an arrest warrant. This means police have to find him to serve the order. If the average time to complete the action is four hours, then police use up 30,000 operational shifts a year finding people they have already arrested. A young African man is brought in. He turned 18 a few days earlier and looks downcast and over-awed, having spent the previous night in adult prison charged with possessing a small quantity of cannabis found when he was searched at Southern Cross Station. As Ms Popovic reads the file she becomes visibly annoyed. She apologises to the man and releases him immediately. She has since launched an inquiry into why he was imprisoned on what was a non custodial offence not brought before a court earlier. Later she says: Did you see him? He was shattered. She says no one is jailed these days for a tiny amount of cannabis and wants to know why he was treated differently. Next up is a 21-year-old who is no stranger to courts, although clearly none the wiser. Out of prison for just a few weeks he steals a van and is found passed-out on ice, with the motor running, his foot on the brake and the gear still engaged in drive. On his lap is a giant machete.

It takes Ms Popovic less than three minutes to sentence him to a further two months, telling him he had to decide what do you love more, your daughter or ice?. He mumbles the right words, then says thank you Miss before being sent back to jail. His chances of rehabilitation (at least this time around) are slim. You suspect that on the outside if he sees the light it will be a flashing blue one. A man accused of arson is fast-tracked because he is creating a disturbance in the cells. He tells Ms Popovic he has stomach cancer, was recently in a coma, was to be charged with something he didnt do and that he helped the fire brigade extinguish the blaze. He is in tears as his lawyer approaches, and is taken to be assessed by a mental health expert stationed at the court. Sometimes it is more than just a matter of crime and punishment. Next is a bail application for a slick-looking young man charged with a six-figure fraud, whose level of self-assurance contrasts with the previous occupants of the dock.

His father gives him a wink just before a policeman gives evidence detailing the allegations. Next the accuseds girlfriend heads to the witness box to testify on how stable he is but remains surprisingly vague about his internet-driven business that involves direct sales, although no one seems to know what he sells. From our vantage point we can see Ms Popovic typing on the courts antiquated computer system  granting bail but inserting strict conditions, including daily reporting to the police. But she decides to let this slickster swing in the breeze a little  to let him know bail was no certainty. She tells him he has delusions of grandeur and had concealed details of where he lived. She then makes him stand and explain the nature and obligations of bail, warning him his father will lose his $40,000 surety if he fails. Thats not going to happen maam, he says suddenly, looking suitably chastened. There is a break for lunch. And then it all begins again. Day after day, week after week and year after year.
You'd think so, but they define their responsibilities differently. Abbott, Joyce and the populist right of the Coalition serve different gods. By exuberantly rejecting rational, centrist, practical policy they gratify the political cravings of a small but devoted band of angry rejectionists - they call them their base. The "base" is just as hostile to Malcolm Turnbull as Abbott and Joyce themselves. It's more important to them to destroy Turnbull than it is to retain government. Barnaby Joyce and Tony Abbott in Parliament in August 2017. Credit:Andrew Meares And Abbott and Joyce are depending on the "base" to restore them to relevance, to salve their wounded egos and perhaps one day even return them to high office.

It worked brilliantly for them last time. Recall that Australia was on the very cusp of achieving a rational, bipartisan energy and climate change policy in 2009. John Howard and Kevin Rudd had both committed to an emissions trading scheme before the 2007 election. Opposition leader Turnbull was negotiating with prime minister Kevin Rudd on the detail when Joyce and Abbott decided to sabotage the process by starting an insurrection. The upshot? Abbott became Liberal leader and later prime minister. Joyce eventually became Nationals leader and deputy prime minister. The destruction of a sensible national policy was their pathway to great power. We've now had a decade of political posturing and parlour games on energy and climate change, and what has this achieved? The price of electricity has soared. The lights have started going out on hot days in some states. And global warming is advancing relentlessly. The economy has lost competitiveness needlessly. The people have suffered an assault on their living standards pointlessly.

And as Australia goes through an endless summer with bushfires in April, the slow death of the Great Barrier Reef is just one of nature's grim rebuttals of the ideologues and conmen who, even now, try to tell us that climate change is not real. For the rest of Australia, for everyone from BHP to the Clean Energy Council, the National Energy Guarantee is a sign of hope for an Australian return to rationality. For Abbott and Joyce and a handful of hangers-on, it's a target. It's not that Abbott and Joyce are solely responsible for Australia's dismal decade of energy and climate policy. Labor and the Greens have been complicit, too, at key moments. But it's the two deposed Coalition leaders who are today the biggest source of potential disruption as Turnbull and Frydenberg try to bring the National Energy Guarantee to completion.

Frydenberg can't say so, of course. He has to mollify and manage them and try to keep them quiescent. Asked at his Friday press conference whether his planned national energy guarantee had the support of the so-called Monash Group, the ginger group of Coalition pro-coal recalcitrants, Frydenberg showed great tact: "The Monash Forum are valued colleagues who have signed up, and I respect their views and engage regularly with them," he said. Frydenberg has been one of the leaders of the campaign to have the great Australian World War I strategist General Sir John Monash promoted posthumously to the rank of field marshal. Monash was a brilliant innovator and an ardent technologist, pioneering the concrete span arch in his career as an engineer and the all-arms attack in his service at the battlefront, combining tanks and artillery and aircraft and infantry to devastating effect at a time when the British still hankered for horse-mounted cavalry charges. It must pain Frydenberg terribly to have his hero's name hijacked in the service of a reactionary rump who hanker for coal-fired power in an era of rapid renewable advances. It certainly pains Monash's descendants, who rejected the misappropriation of the name for what they pointedly called "horse and buggy" technology. Yet Frydenberg soldiered on, telling reporters: "I don't think we should be demonising coal. I think we should be saying that coal is a critical part of our energy system, but when it comes to our future energy mix, it will have an all-of-the-above approach - coal, gas and an increasing role for renewables."

He made the point that Australia still has 20 coal-fired power stations, with an average life of 27 years: "So while they may not live forever, there is a lot of life left in them." He emphasised that the new policy was to be "technology neutral", not favouring one power source over another. Anyone despairing that Australia will ever manage to meet its Paris Accord commitments to cut carbon emissions can, however, rejoice. While the so-called Monash Forum has been promoting the idea of federal intervention to build a nationally owned and operated coal-fired power plant, investors across the country have committed to big new solar and wind ventures. In an illuminating survey result published this week, energy market analyst Green Energy Markets found that Australian investors have already matched and exceeded Australia's Paris target for the electricity sector. The Paris target was for Australia to cut its total carbon emissions by between 26 per cent and 28 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030. That would require 9271 megawatts of new renewable capacity to be built, according to modelling by Frontier Economics for the Energy Security Board.

But this week the Green Energy Markets' project-tracking database concluded that projects already built, under way or subject to tender would add 9691 megawatts of renewable energy. In other words, Australia's electricity sector has already beaten its anticipated target 12 years ahead of time. And contrary to the huffings of the energy reactionaries, "all the extra renewables will push the wholesale price of electricity down", according to Green Energy Markets director Tristan Edis. On days when the wind blows, says Edis, "wind farms are bidding power into the system at zero" dollars. Because they are already guaranteed a set price by the retailers they sell to, they simply need to produce power without regard to the prevailing wholesale price. "How the hell are they going to be pushing up electricity prices when they're selling it into the wholesale market at zero" dollars? So the good news is that Australian renewable energy projects have powered ahead. The bad news is that this means, having met the needs of the federal government's renewable energy target, the price of energy certificates will soon plummet. There will be soon be no incentive to build any more renewable energy. The renewable energy industry says that their firms will be "walking off a cliff". "What are your options to meet the Paris targets now," asks Edis. Paris requires a cut to emissions across the economy, not just from the power sector. "You can't just reduce electricity sector emissions by 26 per cent because you're not reducing across the rest of the economy."

Despite Frydenberg's assurances to the contrary, the market doesn't believe that the government is doing enough in other sectors, like transport, to achieve the goals. This is where the states and territories come in. Several - notably Queensland, Victoria and the ACT - have much more ambitious carbon emissions cuts in mind. These states went into Friday's ministers' meeting wary that Frydenberg's National Energy Guarantee was a Monash Forum-type trap to somehow bind them from more ambitious cuts to emissions. They left the meeting saying that they had been assured. They therefore agreed to move the guarantee to its next phase, detailed design. Asked about this by reporters, Frydenberg said that the states "can go and knock their socks off" with bigger renewable energy targets, so long as they met the reliability rules for producing dispatchable power. "This is Australia's best chance", Frydenberg pleaded, truthfully, "to deliver cheaper, cleaner and more reliable energy." The higher the stakes for the policy's success, the greater the incentive for Abbott, Joyce and the other reactionaries to ruin it.
London: Queen Elizabeth has been granted her wish to see Prince Charles endorsed as the next head of the Commonwealth but the royal family has been sent a signal that it cannot assume it will always fill the post.

The Commonwealths political leaders reached the agreement after months of speculation over moves to separate the role from the British monarchy because so many of the member nations do not recognise the Queen as their head of state.

Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Charles arrive for the formal opening of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in the ballroom at Buckingham Palace in London on Thursday. Credit:AP

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull spoke during the private debate at Windsor Castle to suggest the formal head of the Commonwealth would always be the British monarch, a view backed by others.

The final decision stopped short of that approach, however, and named Prince Charles as the next head without saying this would be the model adopted in the future.
The Department of Human Services will chase nearly $1 billion in unpaid debts, including some established through its "robo-debt" system, by threatening to charge interest to thousands of former Centrelink clients unless they enter repayment plans.

Minister overseeing the department, Michael Keenan, said on Friday Centrelink had already started targeting 170,000 people no longer on welfare but who had established debts that remained unpaid despite government attempts to contact them.

Social services advocates fear the impact of the new program, saying Human Services had a poor track record of making sure people were aware a debt had accrued against them.

A small amount of the debts have been established through the Coalition's controversial "robo-debt" system, a feature that has added to scepticism over the program.

Australian Council of Social Service chief executive Cassandra Goldie said it feared Centrelink was still getting debts wrong through the automation of its debt calculation process.
Washington: US President Donald Trump and his allies have hit a new level of anxiety after the raid on his personal attorney's office, fearful of deeper exposure for Trump, his inner circle and his adult children - and more than concerned that they don't know exactly what is in those records and electronic devices seized last week.

There is also some worry that Michael Cohen, the self-described legal fixer who helped make bad stories go away and took a leading role in Trump Organisation projects in foreign outposts, may strike a deal with prosecutors out of concern about his own prospects.

"I think it's a huge minefield for Donald Trump and the Trump Organisation," said trial attorney Joseph Cammarata, who represented Paula Jones in her sexual harassment suit against president Bill Clinton. "I think this is on its own track and this train is coming down the track with brute force."

The wild legal show continued to play out on Monday, at a court hearing in New York before a federal judge who is considering what to do with the material that the FBI seized from Cohen. The scene was punctuated by dramatic entrances and revelations.
Latest News Average mortgage records $80,000 increase over the year The highest average mortgages can be found in NSW and Victoria

NAB announces major change to broker strategy Big Four bank to streamline broker distribution model, creates new head of broker experience role

The divisional head at Jims Financial Services has said the future for brokers in Australia is really bright.

The group is currently on a recruitment drive for brokers to join them in New South Wales and Queensland.

Despite the recent scrutiny over the industry Tony Gale is confident that with the right philosophies and attitude to customer service brokers will continue to be important.

Jims Financial Services is just one of over 50 divisions under the Jims Group brand. Other services range from real estate and pool care to computer services and dog grooming.

The finance side of the group covers home loans, vehicle finance and small business equipment finance.

Gale said it is this kind of diversity that sets them apart from other franchise models. Jims Financial Services is also the preferred provider for all types of finance to every other franchise under the Jims Group.

Gale said, I think that the future for brokers in Australia is really bright. I think as banks become much larger conglomerates, brokers are becoming a far more important part of the publics life. We tell our franchisees they need to be like the old bank manager was. Play that role, fixing peoples lives the same way the old bank manager did.

We feel that thats where were heading and in terms of rolling that out across Australia as a philosophy, that is the direction we want to head in.

Were really a one stop shop. I know thats a common term, but our whole approach is to have one customer and look after all of their financial needs.

Talking about the use of FinTech and competing with groups who are relying more and more on technology, Gale said the approach at Jims was more customer focused.

He added, I think there is a possibility the whole apply online situation will become an important part of how applications are managed and handled, but I dont think you can replace good old fashioned communication between two people sitting down and talking through a persons personal financial situation.

Computers just dont have the ability or the empathy required to do that. Thats our approach. The Jims brand really resonates with middle class Australia. Every day were talking to people that really do need a lot of help with their financial situation and thats our role, to help educate customers.

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Call it a wood-be disaster.

Landmarking the iconic Coney Island Riegelmann Boardwalk would be pointless if the designation didnt protect the 2.5-mile promenades creaky wooden planks from being replaced with recycled plastic or concrete, complained preservationists at an April 17 public hearing with the city Landmarks Preservation Commission.

One preservationist said locals feared the landmarks agency would allow the Parks Department to rip up the walkways beloved boards in favor of cheaper materials once the Boardwalk was landmarked.

We want the Boardwalk to be a boardwalk  not a cement road, not a plastic promenade, a real boardwalk, made of real boards  of wood  just as it always was and should be, said Christabel Gough, secretary of the Society for the Architecture of the City.

Everyone who has asked for the Boardwalk to be protected wants it to be protected from regrettable, wrongful decisions from the Parks Department.

Gough joined four other preservation advocates plus Councilman Mark Treyger (DConey Island) and a rep for Councilman Chaim Deutsch (DSheepshead Bay) at the hearing on the distant isle of Manhattan, all of whom emphasized their support for landmarking the Boardwalk ahead of the commissions May 15 vote on whether or not to calendar it, the first formal step in the designation process.

The agency recommended the Boardwalk for scenic landmark status, which would protect its existence as a landscape and the general parameters of its physical presence  including its length and width, according to a spokeswoman  but not the wooden surface itself, parts of which have already been replaced with concrete and recycled plastic beginning in 2009.

But one local said officials at the Parks Department  which has jurisdiction over the Boardwalk  are more akin to developers than preservationists, because they prefer the $126-per-square-foot concrete to the $144-per-square-foot wood, which he argued destroys the character of the Boardwalk.

The material of the Boardwalk  its wooden nature  is absolutely central to its identity and its use and its experience by those who have used it for generations, said Andrew Sillen, who lives in Midwood. The wood is an integral part of the Boardwalk, and its under threat. We are concerned that the Parks Department does not take these things under account.

Another local who has helped lead the years-long fight to protect the wood said that the idea that the city could rip up the Boardwalks planks after landmarking the structure constituted a perverse construction of the notion of preservation.

The designation can only hold meaning if it comes with the inherent protection of the Boardwalk as what it has always been and should be conserved as: a unique pedestrian entity with wooden boards, said Rob Burstein, head of the Coney-Brighton Boardwalk Alliance. Anything less would be to deny the unique character of this Boardwalk, and thus void the designation.

Reps from the Historic Districts Council and the New York Landmarks Conservancy also testified to their concerns over the future of the material of the Boardwalk. Councilman Treyger said he was emphatically in favor of the designation, saying that it would allow locals more oversight if and when the city wanted to change its material structure, and adding that landmark status would also protect it if it were washed away by hurricanes or superstorms such as 2012s Sandy.

Designating the Riegelmann Boardwalk as a scenic landmark affords additional protections for substantial changes to this icon in New York City and American history, he said. With the increasing threat of climate change, landmarking the Boardwalk will help ensure it exists in perpetuity.

A rep for Councilman Deutsch said the pols office would be happy to inform the Parks Department where it could find sustainable hardwood sources in Central and South America.

But if the landmarks agency granted the Boardwalk scenic landmark status, it would only act in an advisory capacity in regulating and maintaining the Boardwalk, with the 11-member city Public Design Commission having final say in maintenance and material matters.
The dispute between Finnish telecom firm Nokia and the Income Tax Department - one of the biggest involving a multinational company - has finally been settled. According to The Economic Times, India and Finland have reached an accord on the dispute under the Mutual Agreement Procedure (MAP), clearing the way for the sale of Nokia's Chennai plant, which has been shuttered since November 2014.

"Resolution has been reached... Nokia has agreed to make provisional tax payment," income tax department officials told the daily, adding that the resolution covers disputes pertaining to Nokia India as well as Nokia Corp. In a similar vein, a Nokia spokesperson yesterday said "We are hopeful on resolving the issue relatively soon in cooperation with the authorities in India". The company reportedly made a tax payment of Rs 1,600 crore to the government in March.

What was the case again?

In March 2013, the Income Tax Department had issued a tax demand of around Rs 2,500 crore on Nokia India over royalty payments made to its parent company in Finland since 2006. The claim related to Nokia's import of software from its head office in Finland. Nokia India showed the payments made for the software as 'purchase transactions', not 'royalty payments', and hence said that the payment was made without keeping back any withholding tax but the government begged to differ.

The India-Finland Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement set a 10 per cent rate for royalties, which was what the taxman was demanding. The report added that the tax claim was Rs 1,600 crore after rectification.

In tandem, at Nokia India's request, Finland initiated the MAP process under the DTAA in 2013. According to the daily, the company had also sought to initiate arbitration under the Bilateral Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement in 2014, but did not pursue it after the Indian government's response through the MAP avenue - the all-new government under Narendra Modi had been advocating the use of MAP for solving cross-border tax disputes instead of arbitration. Under MAP, settling a case with the other government essentially means closing all pending proceedings related to a tax matter. The discussions on MAP eventually bore fruit and the deal was sealed over the past two-three months.

The report added that a Rs 10,000 crore tax raised on Nokia Corp. for the same transaction on the grounds that it had a permanent establishment in the country was not found sustainable and got dropped.

What about the shuttered factory?

With the curtains coming down on the tax dispute, things are also looking up for the shuttered Chennai factory, located in Sriperumbudur. Nokia chief executive Rajeev Suri hinted as much to the daily last week, saying, "We will be able to find a solution to the tax situation between the two governments - Finland and India - and then that will open the way of seeing if we can we can do something on the factory as well."

When software giant Microsoft acquired Nokia's mobile devices business for about $7.5 billion in 2014, it kept the Sriperumbudur factory out of this deal due to the asset freeze imposed by the Income Tax Department. In March 2014, the Tamil Nadu government also served a Rs 2,400 crore sales tax bill to Nokia, saying the firm sold products from the Chennai plant in the domestic market instead of shipping them overseas. Nokia eventually suspended all operations from November 1, 2014.

At its peak, the factory was the world's largest mobile phone plant, employing 6,600 people (permanent employees) and producing more than 15 million phones a month. A report of Indian Cellular Association claimed that mobile phone export from India crashed by 70 per cent to Rs 2,450 crore in 2014, down from Rs 11,850 crore in 2013, due to production getting affected at this plant. The uncertainty had eventually led Nokia to shift production to a new factory in Vietnam.

But things might change soon. According to Suri, the company hopes to make some announcements during its first-quarter results, due to be disclosed on April 26. The daily adds that Foxconn Technology, which bought some machinery from this plant a few months ago after Nokia managed to get permission from the authorities to work around the asset freeze, is now in advanced stage of talks with the Tamil Nadu government to resolve the tax issue in order to take over the plant.

With PTI inputs
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) saw its market capitalisation swell to Rs 6,52,082.92 crore after posting higher than expected March quarter results. The Bengaluru-headquartered firm registered an increase of Rs 41,300.92 crore in its market valuation after its stocks rose on the back of positive quarterly results.

TCS reported a 4.4 per cent increase in its net profit at Rs 6,904 crore during the quarter that ended on March 31. Moreover, the company said that it expects to manage a double-digit growth during FY19. Following this, TCS stock soared 7.2 per cent during the day to reach a 52-week high of Rs 3421.25 on BSE after opening at Rs 3,250. The stock jumped 6.76 per cent before settling down at Rs 3,406.40.

Even on NSE, TCS shares climbed to Rs 3,402.45 level, up by 6.62 per cent. The stock became the biggest gainer on both Sensex and Nifty. Talking about equity volume, 7.72 lakh TCS shares were traded in BSE, whereas more than 92 lakh shares of the company were traded during the day.

The Tata group flagship, which contributes around 85 per cent of the group's profit, reported a revenue growth of 8.2 per cent at Rs 32,075 crore for the three months to March. In dollar terms, the company had its highest revenue growth in 14 quarters at 11.7 per cent.

"To some extent (it has been) a sobering year that it is both a time of optimism as well as the fact that the year has actually been lower (on revenue growth) than in the recent past," TCS MD and CEO Rajesh Gopinathan said.

The Indian tech major has given a 120 per cent payout of the target variable pay for its employees after estimate defying Q4 results. The company has also announced a salary hike of two to six per cent depending on the geography.

It also announced a 1:1 bonus of shares and a dividend of Rs 29 a share, taking the total payout to shareholders at Rs 50 for the year. It has given out close to Rs 26,000 crore to the shareholders in dividends and bonuses in the year.
It's tough to conclude the resolution process in at least half of the 12 big loan defaulters within the 270 days time frame allowed under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC). Jaypee Infratech, Essar Steel and Bhushan Power & Steel have faced litigations, while Alok Industries, ABG Shipyard and Amtek Auto are likely to go through a second round of bidding or end up in liquidation. Outside the first 12 cases, the AV Birla group and Dalmias are fighting to takeover Binani Cement.

Electrosteel Steels

It became the first of the 12 large loan defaulters to exit bankruptcy. The Kolkata bench of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) on Tuesday cleared Vedanta's Rs 5,320 crore resolution plan for Electrosteel, which is setting up a 2.5 million tonne steel plant near Bokaro. It owes Rs13,395 crore to lenders. The NCLT approved resolution plan entails over 50 per cent haircut for lenders.



ABG Shipyard

It is going to see second round of bidding after the resolution professional declared the only bid of UK-based Liberty House as ineligible under Section 29(A) of the IBC because the company is yet to clear $3 million overdue to Exim Bank. However, the deadline for the completion of the resolution process will expire on April 28. Liberty House is believed to have offered Rs 5,200 crore for the beleaguered shipyard, which owes lenders Rs 18,539 crore.



Amtek Auto

Liberty House has emerged as the highest bidder for Amtek Auto and the deal value is expected to be around Rs 4,500 crore. Amtek has submitted its resolution plan for approval with the Chandigarh bench of the NCLT. However, the banks led by State Bank of India (SBI) is expected to ask the resolution professional of Amtek Auto to review the eligibility of Liberty House since it's yet to pay overdue to Exim Bank.

Jyoti Structures

The lenders have chosen a clutch of high networth individuals led by Sharad Sanghi, the chief of Netmagic Solutions, to revive the bankrupt EPC (engineering, procurement and construction) company Jyoti Structures. They were the sole bidder, offering just about Rs 3000 crore to lenders over a period of 15 years while infusing equity capital in the range of Rs 150 to Rs 170 crore. The lenders will have to take a huge 80 per cent haircut.

Essar Steel

Ahmedabad bench of NCLT said that the second round of bids for bankrupt Essar Steel was invalid and asked committee of creditors and the resolution professional to relook at both the bids of ArcelorMittal and Numetal from the first round. Both the bidders had approached the tribunal against the second round of bidding. The resolution professional had disqualified ArcelorMittal since they had stake in another bankrupt company, Uttam Galva. Numetal was a consortium formed by Russian bank VTB and a trust controlled by the estranged promoter of Essar Steel, Rewant Ruia. In the second round, Anil Agarwal's Vedanta Resources has also submitted a resolution plan. The sources say that the sale of Essar Steel will be delayed because of repeated litigations.

Jaypee Infratech

For beleaguered Jaypee Infratech, the resolution plan was submitted by multiple bidders, including Sudhir Valia of Suraksha Asset Reconstruction Company and Adani Group. The offers range between Rs 7,000 crore and Rs 8,000 crore. However, Jaiprakash Associates, the promoter company of Jaypee Infra, approached Supreme Court complaining that the company was undervalued and the original valuation would come to around Rs 16,000 crore. Besides, it submitted another resolution plan. The apex court said that Jaiprakash Associates was at liberty to submit a representation to the "competent authority". Jaypee group is now devising a strategy to move the NCLT with its bid.



Bhushan Steel

Tata Steel emerged as the highest bidder of the company, with a Rs 36,000 crore resolution plan and 12 per cent equity offering to lenders. It may acquire three-fourths of Bhushan Steel's share capital by an equity infusion in it.

Monnet Ispat and Energy

The consortium led by Sajjan Jindal-promoted JSW Steel and AION Capital has received the letter of intent for acquiring the stressed asset of Monnet Ispat and Energy. They were the only bidder. The media reported that JSW-AION submitted a Rs 3,750 crore bid for the steelmaker.

Alok Industries

Lenders have rejected the joint bid by Reliance Industries and JM Financial Asset Reconstruction Company for Alok. The firm owes around Rs 29,912 crore to lenders and the liquidation value is said to be around Rs 4,500 crore.

Bhushan Power and Steel

It is likely to go to second round of bidding as the offers received in the first round were lower than the expectation of the lenders. The company, which owes more than Rs 47,000 crore to its bankers, received bids from Tata Steel, JSW Steel and Liberty House, but only the first two were qualified. Liberty House had approached the tribunal for not considering its resolution plan. Earlier reports said that Tata Steel is the highest bidder with Rs 24,500 crore offer.

Lanco Infratech

It has received seven bids, including from Ingen Capital group, I Square Capital, Asia Advisors, Metro Asset Services, Penn Energy, Than Solar Power and Solar Land. The resolution professional had earlier invited bids for individual assets in power and infrastructure, but extended the deadline to March 2018 after tepid response. The company has a debt of more than Rs 45,000 crore.

Another defaulter Era Infra has not yet been admitted in the NCLT. Outside the 12 cases, Binani Cement had got highest bid from Dalmia Bharat-led consortium. But UltraTech Cement of AV Birla group came up with an out-of-court offer. UltraTech on Thursday urged the Kolkata Bench of NCLT to either reject the offer made by Dalmia Bharat and accept its revised bid or pass an interim order asking the lender's committee to reconsider the offers made by both the companies.
Days after Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, chief Mohan Bhagwat's remark that national carrier Air India should remain with an Indian after disinvestment, the government is already making conciliatory sounds. In an exclusive conversation with Business Today, Civil Aviation minister Suresh Prabhu said, "Air India disinvestment has not been handled at the ministry so far. We will definitely be interested in making sure that Air India remains in Indian hands only. Not more than 49 per cent will go to foreigners."

Informed sources also told Business Today that top RSS functionaries have also briefed other ministers and Prabhu's deputy about exactly what the ideological parent wants. The employee unions - including RSS affiliate Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh, or BMS - opposed the disinvestment but neither RSS nor its economic think tank Swadeshi Jagran Manch, or SJM, dissented. SJM only opposed the 'strategic sale' mode -- it prefers equity sales through the stock market.

If the government pushes to ensure Indian ownership, it will be difficult to ensure the disinvestment of the ailing carrier. The government has bundled a 76 per cent stake in Air India (international operations) and Air India Express (low cost carrier) with 50 per cent of its stake in Air India Sats Airport Services (AISATS). There is hardly any Indian company interested in taking this deal. Foreign players such as International Airlines Group or IAG (owners of British Airways), Singapore Airlines, Lufthansa, Etihad, along with a few funds including IFC, Warburg Pincus and GIC, had shown interest. They would require local partners to clinch the deal. Some foreign players are already backing out. The IAG denied any interest, calling it a risk at this stage.

Domestic players are wary too. The country's largest airline Indigo recently pulled out as it was not keen to take over the domestic operations of Air India. Indigo, already has a 40 per cent share in the domestic market. Acquiring Air India would give it an additional 14 per cent share but the deal could come under the lens of the Competition Commission of India or CCI. "Quite simply, we are interested in the airline operations of Air India. And more specifically, we are focused narrowly on Air India's international operations and Air India Express," IndiGo founder Rahul Bhatia had said earlier.

The compulsion of taking over 50 per cent of AISATS is keeping Jet Airways away. Meanwhile, players like Spicejet or GoAir might not have the balancesheet to support the purchase. The Tata Group, which has interests in Vistara and Air Asia's India operations, opted out because of three conditions --merger with existing airline, job security of existing staff and ownership of debt. In a recent report, SBI Caps valued Air India at $2.5 billion.

The government has stipulated that bidders must have a minimum net worth of Rs 5,000 crore and should have positive profit after tax in at least three of the immediately preceding five financial years. Along with these, there are two other key riders : the successful bidder would be required to stay invested in the airline for at least three years and there will be a government nominee on the board.

Technically, most Indian airlines will be eligible but arranging funds - not only to buy the airline but to run it as well - will be a big challenge. The airlines with stronger balance-sheets like Indigo, or those with strong sponsor support like Vistara, appear better placed to take over Air India. "Technically, any corporation with financial abilities can participate in the deal but globally airline business runs on very thin margins and requires immense expertise," says Dhiraj Mathur of PwC India chapter. The last day for expression of interest, or EoI, is May 14.

The RSS chief's comments may make it harder to push through the disinvestment of Air India. It may now only happen after 2o19 general elections, suggests BJP MP Subramaniam Swamy.
It was announced today that Irish Life Group Limited has reached an agreement to acquire a strategic shareholding in Invesco Limited, Irelands largest Irish-owned independent financial consultancy. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Invesco specialises in employee benefit consultancy and private wealth management. Based in Sandyford, Dublin and Lapps Quay, Cork, Invesco employs 125 people and has 4.8 billion in assets under administration.

Invesco will continue to operate as an independent consultancy firm under its existing brand and with the same senior leadership team. In line with other recent advisory business acquisitions by Great-West Lifeco, Irish Lifes parent company, the acquired business will be run as an independent entity within the group. Given current growth plans, no job losses are expected on completion of the transaction.

The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of 2018, subject to regulatory approvals.

Commenting on the investment, Managing Director at Invesco, Des McGarry said, "This is an exciting development for Invesco, and one which presents great opportunities for the business. As part of our growth ambitions, we have been exploring options to bring the firm to the next level as a leading independent consultancy."

Chief Executive of Irish Life Group, David Harney added, "We are delighted to have this opportunity to make a strategic investment in Invesco, a company with a strong track record of providing expert advisory and consultancy services to the Irish pensions and investment market. This new strategic investment means that Invesco will be backed by the strength of Great-West Lifeco as it continues to successfully execute its growth plans."

Source: www.businessworld.ie
Ireland's government will use its majority shareholding to vote down Allied Irish Banks' (AIB) plans to introduce a deferred share plan for senior executives that the bank says would mitigate the risks it faces in retaining key staff.

AIB fears it may lose staff to international banks that are moving operations to Dublin as a result of Brexit, and do not fall under the cap on executive pay and ban on bonuses that Dublin introduced during its banking crisis a decade ago.

While Irish Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe acknowledged the restrictions could act as a barrier to the retention of some staff and launched a review of banking remuneration policy, he said the current policy remained appropriate.

"AIB have expressed concerns publicly in relation to the need to retain staff and compensate them accordingly... I don't believe that is currently a risk," Donohoe told reporters.

"It is a fact that those banks (entering the Irish market) will not be subject to this policy, that is why what I believe is appropriate is to look at how this matter can be dealt with in the future, conscious of the fact that the context of Irish banking is going to change."

AIB welcomed the government's decision to launch the review and said it looked forward to its swift conclusion. Donohoe said the review would likely take place by the end of the year.

The bank last month proposed the plan that would be worth as much as 100% of salary and vest only if the state was able to sell more of its 71% holding. However it required formal approval from Donohoe at a shareholder meeting next week.

Donohoe said he would also abstain in a Bank of Ireland vote on Friday seeking approval to engage with shareholders on a future incentive scheme that could kick in a soon as 2019. The state owns a 14% holding in the bank.

As well as banning bonuses and capping bankers' pay at 500,000 euros, the then government also passed a law in 2011 to introduce a so-called 'super tax' of 89% on any banking remuneration over 20,000 euros.

Donohoe said the super tax could only be altered with the support of parliament, where he is currently part of a minority government.

Ireland pumped a total of 64 billion euros into its banks during the crisis, which, at almost 40% of annual economic output, was the most expensive rescue in the euro zone.

It still holds a majority share in two of the three remaining domestically-owned lenders 10 years later. (Reuters)

Source: www.businessworld.ie
Modified On Apr 20, 2018 08:22 PM By Saransh

The road tax charged on vehicles in India varies from state to state. Some states charge it based on the cost, while some others charge it based on the engine capacity

Automobiles is one of those unfortunate categories that is still not completely under the GST laws of India. As a result, the road tax on cars varies from state to state. If youre out to buy a vehicle in our country and happen to live right on the border of a state, youd probably know that very well. Its not just the road tax that varies from state to state, but also the parameters to calculate it.

While some states like Karnataka, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Telangana charge road tax based on a vehicles ex-showroom cost, states like Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu take a vehicles weight as a parameter for the same. And then there are some other states like Kerala and West Bengal that resort to engine capacity for determining the tax. So even if a car is available at same ex-showroom prices in different states, its on-road costs will differ.

Related: Maximum Speed Limit On City Roads Increased In India: 70kmph For Cars Now

Until now, there was no sign of a unified tax structure for cars. However, in a bid to reform the road taxation structure in our country, a Group of Transport Ministers (GoM) has proposed uniform road tax on cars across India. Heres what they have proposed.

The GoM has recommended that motor vehicle taxes should be charged by all the states on the basis of the invoice price of the vehicle and should have uniform rates as well. Reportedly, the change has been proposed keeping in mind the problems faced by service class individuals (both in the government and private sector) who need to transfer their vehicles from one state to another, as they relocate.

How does this affect you? Well, it should concern you if you plan to relocate. At present, if your car has been registered in one state and you move to another (for an extended period of time), you are required to transfer your vehicle into that state. In simple words, if you have moved to a state where road tax is higher than the state in which you got your car registered, you have to pay the differential.

If road tax becomes uniform, there will be no need to re-register a car in another state. Since a car can be registered based on a rent agreement as a proof of address, a lot of people also follow the practice of registering a car in states that charge lower taxes. If road tax becomes uniform, then this malpractice can also be curbed.

Will it also affect car prices? This proposal, if accepted, will affect the prices of the cars. So, for a state like Karnataka, where current taxation is high, prices could go down. On the other hand, in some states like Kerala, West Bengal, the prices might as well go up since the current taxes in these states arent as high as some of the others.

While we think the proposed change is a step forward in the right direction, considering the fact that it will not only curb some malpractices, it will also make the cumbersome process of transferring a vehicle from state to state easy. However, we also think that instead of charging taxes by the invoice amount, the government should consider charging road tax based on tailpipe emissions.

Also Read: No Road Tax For Electric Vehicles In Goa
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.
Movies play a significant role in our society and we always try to imitate actors at every part of our life. While we impersonate characters on the screen right from our childhood, there are many folks who usually think of a career in this glamour industry. Due to the glamour factor, many youngsters pay special attention to this field and wish to pursue a professional career in it.

Out of 24 crafts in film-making, undeniably, actors take the highest degree of respect because of the on-screen presence. Many of us believe that expressing an emotion is a God-gifted one, but this is a myth. If you want to see yourself as a professional actor, you can hone your skills in acting at some of the institutes in India. Here are the top 10 institutes where you can shape yourself as an actor.
Ministry of Defence, Ordnance Factory Board has released an employment notification calling out for aspirants to apply for the post of Apprentices in various fields. Those interested can check out the eligibility, salary scale, how to apply and the complete details of the government job here. Selected candidates can earn up to INR 4983 as stipend. The last date to apply for the government job is May 11, 2018.

Bank Jobs 2018 For Various Posts: Apply Now!

Defence Recruitment 2018 Vacancy Details

CRITERIA DETAILS Name Of The Post Apprentices Organisation Ordnance Factory Board Educational Qualification Degree or diploma from an AICTE recognised institute Age Limit Not mentioned Salary Scale INR 2758 to INR 4983 Job Location Madhya Pradesh Industry Defence Experience Not required Application Start Date Apr 20, 2018 Application End Date May 11, 2018 Detailed Advertisement http://www.davp.nic.in/WriteReadData/ADS/eng_10201_6_1819b.pdf

Also Read: UPSC Recruitment 2018 For Various Posts: Apply Before May 3, 2018!

How To Apply For Ordnance Factory Board Recruitment 2018

In order to apply for Ordnance Factory Board Recruitment 2018, follow these steps:

1. Enter the following details on a neat A4 sheet:

Name

Father's Name

Present Postal Address

Permanent Address

Date Of Birth

Qualification

CGPA

Category

Mobile Number

Email ID

Aadhaar Number

2. Attach two passport size photos of yours at the top corner of the application. Also attach your community certificates if applicable.

3. Superscribe on the envelope the name of the post that you want to apply for and send it to:

The Sr. General Manager, Ordnance Factory Khamaria, Jabalpur (M.p.) 482005
Gujarat Public Service Commission has released an employment notification calling out for aspirants to apply for the post of Clinical Psychologist. Those interested can check out the eligibility, salary scale, how to apply and the complete details of the government job here. Selected candidates can earn up to INR 45000. The last date to apply for the government job is May 2, 2018.

Tamil Nadu MRB Recruitment 2018 For 73 Medical Officers

Gujarat Public Service Commission Recruitment 2018 Vacancy Details

CRITERIA DETAILS Name Of The Post Clinical Psychologist Organisation Gujarat Public Service Commission Educational Qualification MPhil in clinical psychology Maximum Age Limit 34 years Skills Required Clinical judgement Salary Scale INR 45000 Job Location Gujarat Industry Civil services Experience Desirable Application Start Date Apr 16, 2018 Application End Date May 2, 2018

Also Read: Kolkata Port Trust Recruitment 2018 For Nurses

How To Apply For Gujarat Public Service Commission Recruitment 2018

In order to apply for Gujarat Public Service Commission Recruitment 2018, follow these steps:

Step 1: Log on to the Gujarat Public Service Commission official website.

Step 2: From the drop-down list, select GPSC.

Step 3: The list of advertisements will be displayed on the screen.

Step 4: Go to page 2 and click Apply against Clinical Psychologist.

Step 5: The advertisement page will be displayed on the screen.

Step 6: Click Apply Now.

Step 7: Click the New Registration button.

Step 8: The instructions to register will be displayed on the screen. Read them carefully and click the I Agree button.

Step 9: Fill your details in the registration form.

Step 10: Upload your photo and signature.

Step 11: Click Save and follow the subsequent pages to complete the registration.
American International Group has solidified its post-Brexit strategy for Europe, with plans to establish two separate corporate entities to give clients greater certainty about the continuity of coverage.

AIG previously announced earlier this year that it would launch a corporate entity in Luxembourg to address challenges created when the United Kingdom leaves the European Union beginning in 2019. A second AIG operation will be established in the United Kingdom, to replace its existing corporate entity there, according to the new announcement. Both moves will give clients the certainty of uninterrupted UK and European insurance coverage, AIG said.

We set a number of guiding principles from the very start as to how AIG would address Brexit. First among these was minimizing disruption to clients, Anthony Baldwin, chief executive of AIG Europe Ltd., said in prepared remarks. The great advantage of the restructuring route we have chosen is that it will give clients certainty that whatever the other unknowns of Brexit for their businesses, their European insurance coverage has been Brexit-proofed.

As far as the details of these changes, AIG said that all EU business will be shifted to both new corporate entities (American International Group UK Ltd. in the UK and AIG Europe SA in Luxembourg) before the UK leaves the European Union. Theyll start operating Dec. 1, 2018.

Plans call for transferring AIG Europe Ltd.s existing insurance business to the new UK and European companies, and its existing carrier, AIG Europe Ltd., will be blended into the new EU company. AIGs EU arm will have branches across the European Economic Area and in Switzerland.

AIG said it has been actively preparing to be Brexit resilient since 2015, when the referendum became likely. The insurer also touts its leadership position in the industry with its Brexit restructuring plans.

Source: AIG
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Doctors of the Church

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12 Rules for Life: A Book I Wanted to Like - John Horvat II

John Horvat II

Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos is a book I wanted to like. I wanted so much to favor someone who proposes rules in our times of unrestraint. I see so clearly the need for an antidote to chaos. The fact that his book is on the top of many bestseller lists only made my desire greater. My expectations were high. I wanted to like this book. But I didn't.

I will admit that the book has valid advice. Some might consider the book engaging and folksy. People like stories that illustrate points and the book is full of them. There are abundant Christian references. I was impressed by some commonsensical observations about childrearing and discipline drawing from his experience as both a parent and psychologist. So many things he said seemed to make sense.

And yet, he failed to convince me. I became uneasy about the many favorable references to Freud, Jung and Nietzsche. There was too much Heidegger and no Saint Thomas Aquinas. There were too many strange formulations about Being (with a capital B) and yin-yang dualism. It was hard to pin him down on how he stands on Christ, truth  or even God.

A Modern Thinker Against Postmodernism

It took a while to figure the book out. But then it clicked.

Dr. Peterson is a modern thinker. He lives in the swirling existential world of thought patterns, narratives and archetypes. He is quite open about this. The book is full of passages that show how life is explained by personal and collective experiences. Everything is about Being with a capital B  whatever that means. He sees life as a Taoist interplay of order and chaos. He defends a Freudian, Darwinian world made in their image and likeness where his rules seem to make sense.

These rules even seem attractive because the Canadian professor's message is directed against postmodernism and "cultural Marxism," which challenge both his existential world and our own. Thus, he speaks with great passion and even brilliance against a politically correct world gone mad.

For this reason, many have praised the tell-it-like-it-is Dr. Peterson as a forceful voice in defense of order and even conservatism.

Part of the Process Not the Opposition

However, it is one thing to rage against the madness; it is quite another to change the world. And this is where the book falls seriously short.

Jordan Peterson

We cannot return to a Freudian, Darwinian world to find rules for life. That world is part of the problem. Indeed, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung and Darwin (all favorably cited in 12 Rules for Life) are responsible for the more mystical side of our modernity. They banished the supernatural order from society and enthroned a naturalism that sought to explain all spiritual things based on experience and evolved thought patterns. The existential obsession with Being with a capital B and other such concepts sought to replace God and morals. Nietzsche's famous declaration that God is dead also attempted to decree the death of dogmatic certainty.

Postmodernism is the next step in the process of the West's intellectual and moral decay. Just as modernity undermined the Church's supernatural order, so postmodernity denies the naturalistic positions defended by these modern thinkers. Hence, the politically correct denial of reality that Dr. Peterson attacks so well has its origins in much of the thinking he professes.

Thus, the rules are based on faulty and uninspiring premises that are depressingly post-Christian.

We are told, for example, that our Biblical texts are not the inspired Word of God but merely allegorical narratives "coding our observations of our own drama" and embedded in shared stories.

Dr. Peterson continues: "The Biblical narrative of Paradise and the Fall is one such story, fabricated by our collective imagination, working over the centuries. It provides a profound account of the nature of Being, and points the way to a mode of conceptionalization and action well-matched to that nature."

Indeed, even the notion of a personal God is part of a fiction. "Our ancestors acted out a drama, a fiction: they personified the force that governs fate as a spirit that can be bargained with, traded with, as if it were another human being. And the amazing thing is that it worked" (emphasis his).

Dr. Peterson's abundant Christian references and citations are all made in this context, mixed with similar references to other religious "stories." Religion is not about man's relationship with God but it "is instead about proper behavior" (emphasis his).

Rules in Esoteric Trappings

Thus, the substrata of the 12 Rules for Life I tried to like is based on this existential framework of reality. The rules themselves are experience-based directives, not moral imperatives. We are asked to derive inspiration from rules like number one which says: Stand up straight with your shoulders back. Rule 5 says: Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. And what are we to make of Rule 11, which says: Do not bother children when they are skateboarding or rule 12: Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street?

Even the advice found in these rules, which seems so practical, is enveloped in esoteric trappings. After telling his stories, Dr. Peterson inevitably enters into notions of Being with a capital B or other existential jargon highlighting the plight of the individual in an unfathomable universe without certainties. He invites us, for example, to have faith, which he calls an "irrational commitment to the essential goodness of Being."

The bottom line is that "we must each adopt as much responsibility as possible" and thus "we can and must reduce the suffering that poisons the world."

Such advice may feel good, but it is hardly an antidote to the chaos that is devouring the world.

A Missing Link with the One True God

Missing is the link to the one True God Who desires our salvation. This is the problem with the 12 Rules for Life book I tried to like. There is no link. We are on our own and can expect no help from beyond.

Our fallen nature is not a shared story but a tragic reality for which we need concrete and supernatural help from Heaven to help us fight the chaos that threatens to overwhelm us.

Dr. Peterson and those who rave over his rules seem oblivious to the means of sanctification and salvation that the Church extends to us for this purpose. The power of prayer is immense to those who confide in God. The sacramental life nourishes and strengthens us in our daily journey. The grace of God allows us to do that which mere nature cannot do. These are truly antidotes to chaos.

What is needed is not abstract Being with a capital B but a personal, infinite, eternal, and transcendent God with a capital G.

Jordan Peterson: An Antidote to the Dissolution of the West - Scott Ventureyra

Scott Ventureyra For the past year and a half, Professor Jordan Peterson has become an unlikely hero to millions and a fierce critic of the radical left's ideological agenda. Peterson's impact cannot be overstated. His book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, has topped many sales charts including Amazon in the anglosphere (despite a deliberate exclusion from the New York Times bestsellers list). He has over a million subscribers on YouTube and close to 600K followers on Twitter. Through such a wide reach, he is literally rescuing a generation of young men who have been emasculated by a decadent society hostile to male virtues. Western societal elites are strangely bent on denigrating them and subverting the traditional sociobiological roles of both males and females. Women are feeling the brunt of this as well since they, for the most part, desire strong, faithful, and competent men with which to build a family. Given the aftermath of the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, there have been unprecedented rates of sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies, widespread abortion, absentee fathers (including those pushed aside), broken homes, and acrimonious custody battles. Due in large measure to these trends and the feminist ideology that justifies them, distrust between men and women is at unacceptably high levels.

In Canada, Peterson has been in a dogfight against the destructive effects of identity politics that stifles free speech. He has opposed the compelled use of made-up gender-neutral pronouns advocated by Bill c-16, which became federal law last June. I have dealt with this issue at length in two articles, which can be found here and here. The destruction of the traditional family has made it harder to resist threats to common law rights and that loss of liberty has put the future of Western civilization at risk.

A Christian Ally

12 Rules for Life is geared at offering a cure to these great malaises of modernity. Unlike, his first book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, which stands as a very dense academic treatise of various complex subjects, 12 Rules for Life is a more accessible read. Peterson demonstrates over 20 years of experience as a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology. He aims to help people transcend their pain and suffering through bearing the burden of life by taking up their own "cross," as he states:

How could the world be freed from the terrible dilemma of conflict, on the one hand, and psychological and social dissolution, on the other? The answer was this: through the elevation and development of the individual, and through the willingness of everyone to shoulder the burden of Being and to take the heroic path.

He offers sound and motivating advice to help avoid many of life's common pitfalls such as addiction, depression, lack of meaning, resentment, etc. Overall, the book is a strong refutation of the nihilistic tendencies found in our contemporary culture. It is also offers an accurate outlook on the harsh realities of existence while simultaneously offering a viable path forward to combat evil and suffering. His emphasis on personal responsibility over instant gratification answers a deep need for meaning in every human heart that too often is left unsatisfied.

The book's 12 rules are not mean't to offer an in-depth theological reflection, nor an erudite exegesis of biblical texts, but rather, practical advice through the lens of a clinical psychologist who is extremely well equipped to provide antidotes to both individual and collective pathologies. It is not surprising, therefore, that a practitioner of a modern discipline would employ modern philosophical language. For example, when Peterson uses the term "Being" he does so in a Heideggerian sense. In brief, Being encompasses the totality of human experience  what we experience at the individual level and in relation to others. It refers to the phenomenological experience of reality or what philosopher David Chalmers has dubbed "the theater of experience" (with all five senses). Our capacity to exercise free will in the world allows us to experience Being, to know reality.

One of the strengths of Peterson's book lies in his use of Carl Jung's archetypal psychology to interpret biblical texts. This is done in a masterful way that has captivated the secular mind. Nonreligious truth seekers are increasingly willing to learn about the wisdom contained in sacred scripture due to Peterson's ability to package his message in a non-threatening way. Because of the way he uses scripture, nonbelievers are rethinking their secular views and are returning to the Church. Peterson is a friend of Christian belief, not an enemy. He is doing more for Christ than many Christian ministers, theologians, and philosophers (I can attest to this first hand). But don't take my word for it. One of the greatest Christian apologists of our time (in my humble opinion) has stated recently on his podcast about his discussion with Peterson that he didn't have to evangelize because Peterson was doing a good job preaching the Gospel!

Another reason why Peterson is an ally to Catholics is his opposition to the postmodernist and neo-Marxist infiltration of Catholic institutions. The "philosophies" of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Jean-Francois Lyotard have penetrated deeply into the psyche of both Catholic philosophy and theology. The influence is made unabashedly explicit. The associated Frankfurt School and critical theory are taught at reputable Catholic universities. Peterson's public challenge to cultural Marxism makes him an ally to Catholic theology and a critic of theological dissenters.

It is undeniably true that Peterson's tendency to focus on God as an abstraction of the collective unconscious, rather than a God who affects our personal lives is inadequate because it does not convey the whole Christian message. Having said that, Peterson is refreshing in how seriously he takes Christian texts and the role they played in the formation of Western civilization. He has chastised atheists like Sam Harris who believe we can develop our own morality without reference to God. In other words, Peterson acknowledges that we cannot design our morality because right moral conduct is built into the structure of "Being." In theological language, morality that works conforms to the natural law. Furthermore, without the transcendent there is no grounding for objective morality and what is left is relativistic and subjective. Apologist Frank Turek has critiqued this atheist delusion in his book Stealing from God: Why Atheists Need God to Make Their Case.

Confronting Evil with Good  a Mode of Transcendence

The section "Vengeance or Transformation" in chapter 6 is the most powerful passage of the book. Peterson's deep reflection here suggests that he is moving toward "the way, the truth and the life." It is here that Peterson confronts evil in its most radical manifestations. He also understands that if evil exists, so must goodness. Implicitly he recognizes that there is a way of discerning between the two. Despite showing much openness, for the time being he is hesitant to identify a metaphysical source for goodness. Nevertheless, he did tweet a link to Gary Habermas's "minimal facts" concerning the death and resurrection of Christ. By recommending the work of someone who specializes in the historical evidence for the resurrection, Peterson appears willing to consider the historicity of the gospels.

Peterson juxtaposes those who repay evil with evil from those who transcend this vicious cycle. For the former, he draws on the example of a brutal rapist and serial killer, Carl Panzram, who brutalized his victims to compensate for the suffering he endured due to the malevolence of others. His crimes were a desecration of the image of God, not only in himself but in other humans he wrought his vengeance upon. Ultimately, writes Peterson, they are an attack on God. In this category you can take your pick of other serial killers, mass murderers, and ruthless demagogues who have inflicted unspeakable suffering and injustice on others. Because nihilistic materialism denies both good and evil, it inevitably leads to unrestrained suffering. Peterson appeals to Nietzsche as a prophetic voice who foresaw the totalitarian mass murder of the twentieth century due to modern man's "murder" of God.

Peterson contrasts Panzram's evil with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's personal transformation. Solzhenitsyn suffered at the hands of both Hitler and Stalin. He had been imprisoned in 1945 for distributing anti-Soviet propaganda. During his time within the gulags he had the opportunity to reflect deeply upon his life. Solzhenitsyn endured tremendous amounts of psychological, physical, and spiritual torment. But, instead of allowing his resentfulness and bitterness to consume him, as it did Panzram, he underwent a radical transformation. He took inventory of the things he had done wrong and found ways to repair the failures of his past life. Inspired by this experience, he wrote the 3-volume Gulag Archipelago that served as an intellectual death knell to the pernicious ideology of communism.

This intense introspection into the deep and terrifying caverns of our own moral consciousness, is where the fundamental message of his book lies: we must turn our own personal suffering into goodness so as to transform the world beginning with ourselves. In other words, stop complaining and bear your cross. In line with this is the notion that, if we take seriously Christ's words from the Sermon on the Mount, we would begin to usher in God's Kingdom today (Matt. 5:43-48).

Peterson: The Well-Tempered Antidote to Modern Chaos

Despite my significant disagreements with Peterson, which are laid out here and here, his book offers a message that we surely need in our desperate times. I recommend it to anyone who dares embark on the adventure of regenerating themselves through first acknowledging and then confronting the true evil that lurks in their hearts. In order to transcend our broken selves, we must let parts of ourselves die, to bring order out of chaos, as Peterson states:

In the Christian tradition, Christ is identified with the Logos. The Logos is the Word of God. That Word transformed chaos into order at the beginning of time. In His human form, Christ sacrificed Himself voluntarily to truth, to the good, to God. In consequence, He died and was reborn. The Word that produces order from Chaos sacrifices everything, even itself to God. That single sentence, wise beyond comprehension, sums up Christianity. Every bit of learning is a little death. Every bit of new information challenges a pervious conception, forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as something better. Sometimes such deaths virtually destroy us.

There is an interesting similarity with Peterson's antidote to chaos (restoration of order) and the late philosopher and literary critic, Rene Girard's mimetic theory. In this theory, Girard argues that the best way to transcend chaos, groupthink (ideological possession), violence, and evil is through Christ's words and ultimate salvific act through the cross. Girard, like Peterson, was a skeptic and a great admirer of Dostoyevsky. His conversion was influenced by reading Dostoyevsky and had consequently become a committed Catholic. Whether Peterson will follow suit remains to be seen. But, whether he acknowledges it or not, the ultimate antidote to chaos lies with the One who relies on no-one; the only One capable of restoring the most hardened of hearts. We must surrender ourselves to the one uncreated Being, who gives being and potentiality to all of creation, without which there would be no order, no chaos, but pure nothingness.

In February of 2017 in Ottawa, I had the privilege of meeting Dr. Peterson. I had mentioned to him that I was working on an article that began as a conference paper where I pit him (defender of truth) against Jacques Derrida (wishful mortician of the absolute). He asked me to send it to him. One thing that struck me about Peterson, aside from his intellectual capacities and his ability to captivate audiences, was his patience and his humility. He is doing his part to rescue a troubled civilization; will we do ours? Peterson has flung down the gauntlet; who is willing to take up his challenge?
Export of clinker from Pakistan on the rise

20 April 2018

The Pakistan cement industry experts predict a greater clinker export potential for export since excess capacities in China have been curtailed substantially over environmental concerns, while demand from Bangladesh and other countries are also growing. India and Vietnam as well as east Africa (and particularly Uganda and Tanzania) remain viable export destinations for Pakistani cement producers, said Irfan Chawala, finance director and CFO at Lucky Cement Ltd and Irfan Amanullah, general manager of Attock Cement Pakistan Ltd during a seminar by a local research house.



Pakistan has recently resumed export of clinker and a further cargo of 48,660t of clinker, laden by a foreign vessel, sailed from Pakistan International Bulk Terminal on 9 April 2018. Pakistan has a total clinker production capacity of 47.08Mta.



In the next 10-15 years, India may become a blue chip market for Pakistan cements as its reserves of limestone are dwindling fast. Moreover, inter-state Indian tax issue and logistics make it difficult for various states to buy cements from each other, therefore allowing them to prefer importing cement from Pakistan. Low transportation costs also make India an attractive market for Pakistani exports.



Recently, Lucky Cement and Attock Cement have exported clinker from the south zone and looked into exporting Pakistani clinker. Attock Cement recently inked a deal for the export of approximately 150,000t of clinker at US$34/t FOB, Karachi.





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Tajikistan increases cement exports to Uzbekistan

20 April 2018

Cement exports from Tajikistan to Uzbekistan increased by 162,000t in the last year, Exports to Kyrgyzstan were up by 16,800t, but exports to Afghanistan fell by 10,600t (8.8 per cent) in 2017.



The main producers of cement in the first quarter of 2018 were the Tajik-Chinese Chung Tsai Mohir Cement and Huaxin Guyar cement companies in Khatlon region.



The cement plants of Tajikistan over the first three months (January-March 2018) produced 774,000t of cement, the Ministry of Industry and New Technologies of Tajikistan said.

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The Peruvian cement market expanded 2% in March

ICR Newsroom By 20 April 2018

Perus cement consumption rose 1.9 per cent YoY to 816,000t and one per cent MoM from 824,000t in February 2018, according to the national cement association, Asocem.



Cement producers delivered a total of 791,000t of cement to the domestic and export markets, up two per cent YoY and 4.7 per cent MoM. In February total dispatches reached 756,000t. Domestic deliveries rose 2.6 per cent YoY to 767,000t and 4.3 per cent MoM from 735,000t in February 2018.



Cement production in March increased 4.2 per cent YoY to 821,000t. When compared with the previous month, output went up 9.3 per cent from 751,000t. Clinker production slipped by 1.5 per cent to 609,000t when compared with March 2017 but increased by eight per cent MoM from 564,000t.



Exports of cement fell 9.3 per cent YoY to 24,000t but increased from 20,000t the previous month. Clinker exports saw an eight per cent improvement MoM from 88,000t to 96,000t in March 2018.



Cement imports dropped to 49,000t in March 2018, some 8.3 per cent below the March 2017 total and a 44.6 per cent decrease from the 88,000t that entered Peru the previous month. Cement imports originated largely in Vietnam, which accounts for 82 per cent of total imports, followed by China (14 per cent) and Mexico (two per cent). Clinker imports were mainly received from South Korea, which had a 77 per cent share in the clinker import volume. Japan imported an additional 14 per cent while Vietnam accounted for nine per cent of the total.



First-quarter 2018

In the first three months of 2018, domestic cement consumption edged up 2.8 per cent YoY to 2.5Mt from 2.443Mt in 1Q17. Of this total 200,000t were imported.



Cement imports have increased 10.7 per cent YoY to 200,000t YoY while cement imports have jumped 65.3 per cent YoY to 219,000t.



Cement exports fell 5.1 per cent YoY to 74,000t from 78,000t but clinker exports saw a considerable hike from 21,000t in 1Q17 to 252,000t in 1Q18.

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Ever wonder which members of the animal kingdom are most likely to kill you?

Sure, you probably know that running into a great white shark while youre surfing is a special kind of dangerous and stepping on a rattlesnake during your evening constitutional could result in a quick and painful death. But what about those animals you never knew were dangerous?

Most animals dont hunt humans on purpose (except for rare cases of animals who are also serial killers). But if provoked, certain species are likely to lash out and kill people. Some may not even know theyre murdering anyone. Ahead, check out the deadliest animals on the planet, ranked.

15. Sharks  6 deaths per year

While shark attacks are well publicized, theyre not as common as the media might lead you to believe. In 2014, there were only three shark attacks worldwide, and it 2017, that number was five. Shark attacks resulting in minor or major injuries are far more common than fatalities.

Next: Wolves



14. Wolves  10 deaths per year

Disney movies feature far more wolf attacks than youll find in the real world. One study found that human encroachment on protected areas is part of the reason for an increased number of wolf attacks over the last 50 years.

Next: Lions



13. Lions  22+ deaths per year

People getting killed by lions varies from year to year, but the rough average is right around 22. Most deaths caused by lions occur in Tanzania. They peak during harvest time in areas where there isnt very much prey.

Next: Elephants



12. Elephants  500 deaths per year

People kill more elephants than vice versa, but they are still responsible for the deaths of about 500 humans annually. Elephants are vegetarians but can become territorial, especially as farmers start encroaching on their habitats. An adult elephant stands as much as 13 feet tall and can weigh 6 tons.

Next: Hippopotamuses



11. Hippopotamuses  500 deaths per year

They dont look like cold-blooded killers. Still, hippos are extremely territorial, and they were once considered the deadliest animal in Africa. They can kill by charging and trampling humans or even tipping over boats on purpose.

Next: Tapeworms



10. Tapeworms  700 deaths per year

Ever hear the phrase small but deadly? Tapeworms are parasites that may cause an infection called neurocysticercosis, which kills around 700 people per year. Adult tapeworms can live up to 30 years in your digestive tract.

Next: Crocodiles



9. Crocodiles  1,000 deaths per year

Never smile at this murderous reptile, which is responsible for causing the most human deaths in Africa. Its believed that crocodiles have been attacking and killing people for the last 400 million years.

Next: Ascaris roundworms



8. Ascaris roundworms  4,500 deaths per year

This type of roundworm can cause an infection called aschariasis which kills about 4,500 people per year by attacking the small intestine. This disease affects children more than adults.

Next: Tsetse flies



7. Tsetse flies  10,000 deaths per year

Like many other tiny killers on the list, this fly murders by transmitting a parasitic infection known as sleeping sickness. It can cause headaches, fever, joint pain, and itchiness, but left untreated it can lead to neurological problems and even death. However, the number of deaths has been decreasing and is expected to continue going down.

Next: Assassin bugs



6. Assassin bugs  12,000 deaths per year

With a name like assassin bug, its no wonder theyre one of the top killers in the animal kingdom. Also known as the kissing bug, this little guy carries Chagas disease, a parasitic infection that can easily kill a human. Their name comes from their unique tendency to bite people on the face.

Next: Freshwater snails



5. Freshwater snails  20,000 deaths per year

These slimy crawlers carry a disease called schistosomiasis, which causes intense abdominal pain and bloody stool and urine. Millions contract the disease annually but only a small percentage of those succumb to it.

Next: Dogs

4. Dogs  35,000 deaths per year

Dogs  or more precisely, rabid dogs  are one of the deadliest animals on the planet. You can get medical treatment if you believe that youve been bitten by a rabid dog (or any other rabid animal), but you need to act quickly. Once you start experiencing symptoms of rabies, its too late to get the antidote.

About 40% of all rabid dog bite victims are under 15, and most occur in poor rural communities in Asia and Africa.

Next: Snakes



3. Snakes  100,000 deaths per year

United States-based snake bite incidents are on the rise. They wont all kill you, but some will, and snakes are the third most deadly animal in the world. Between 7,000 and 8,000 people in the United States get bitten every year, and about five of them die.

Next: Humans



2. Humans  437,000 deaths per year

The second biggest threat to humans? Other humans.

The global homicide rate in 2016 was 385,000, an increase of about 8,000 from the previous year. The five countries with the highest violent death rates include Syria, El Salvador, Venezuela, Honduras, and Afghanistan.

Next: Mosquitoes



1. Mosquitoes  750,000 deaths per year

Theyre so much more than just pesky guests at a picnic  mosquitoes are the No. 1 most murderous animal on Earth.

Like other insects on the list, mosquitoes kill by carrying a host of deadly diseases. More than half of all mosquito-related deaths can be attributed to malaria, and most of these cases originate in sub-Saharan Africa. Dengue fever is another mosquito-borne killer that is common in children in Asian and Latin American countries.

Read more: These Shocking True Stories of Man-Hunting Serial Killer Animals Will Haunt Your Nightmares

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Some countries love the United States, while others hate it. Many factors, including American ideas about democracy and the policies of President Donald Trump, influence global opinions about America. Most countries see things they like and things they dislike happening in the U.S. But people in some nations think that the good far outweighs the bad  and gives them plenty of reasons to like America.

Below, check out the countries that love America the most, according to a recent report by the Pew Research Center.

15. Peru

Favorability rating: 51%

Much of the Peruvian public has a positive view of America, with 51% of Peruvians giving the United States a favorable rating, according to the Pew Research Center. Most Americans probably dont know much about Peru. (That may or may not include Donald Trump, who recently canceled a trip there, citing concerns about Syria.) But many point to Peru as an exciting vacation destination, worth familiarizing yourself with for the delicious dining, the historic cities and ruins, the rich indigenous cultures, and the gorgeous beaches.

Next: People in this country know a lot about the United States.

14. South Africa

Favorability rating: 53%

Next on the list is South Africa, where 53% of respondents have a favorable view of the United States. Matador Network reports that the United States dominates media in South Africa (and in many other countries, too), so many South Africans know a lot about the United States. But thats not necessarily true of Americans, who often know very little about South Africa. Most Americans, for instance, may not know that the United States could learn something from South Africa and its racial struggles.

Next: American pop culture may contribute to this nations favorable view of the U.S.

13. Kenya

Favorability rating: 54%

In Kenya, 54% of survey respondents gave the United States a favorable rating. The Huffington Post notes that American initiatives on AIDS relief, tourism from the United States, and the influence of American pop culture have all contributed to Kenyans positive opinions on the U.S. Additionally, The Conversation notes that in Kenya and elsewhere on the African continent, the United States has undertaken a growing array of projects on agriculture, energy, trade, and security.

Next: This country is cooperating with the U.S. military.

12. Senegal

Favorability rating: 55%

Next on the list? Senegal, where 55% of respondents had a positive view of the United States. Many Americans associate Senegal with a relatively new defense cooperation agreement. The small West African nation agreed to cooperate with the U.S. military should it need to deploy in the event of a security or humanitarian crisis. Vice reports, The US government says that the agreement sets conditions for access and use of facilities. In reality, its also a way to export to this majority-Muslim nation the methods and terrorism-fighting ways of the US security establishment.

Next: This nation looks to the United States for protection.

11. Japan

Favorability rating: 57%

In Japan, 57% of survey respondents said that they have a positive view of the United States. However, the Pew Research Center has reported that American favorability in Japan has been on the decline, with more and more Japanese citizens naming American power and influence as a potential threat to Japan. Nonetheless, people in Japan respect the personal freedoms of Americans, and many believe that the United States would use military force to stand with them in conflicts with China or North Korea.

Next: Donald Trump has a few things in common with the president of this country.

10. Tanzania

Favorability rating: 57%

Tanzania makes the top 10 of countries that love America the most, with 57% of survey respondents expressing a positive view of the United States. Donald Trump famously mispronounced the name of the east African nation while on the campaign trail, but Trump might do well to pay attention. Tanzanias president has been compared to Americas, if for no reason other than for his love of firing employees on television.

Next: This country objected to a comment Donald Trump made.

9. Ghana

Favorability rating: 59%

Ghana is next on the list, with 59% of the population expressing favorable views of the United States. As you might expect, one of Donald Trumps most infamous comments angered citizens in Ghana. The Washington Post reports that after Trump characterized African nations, as well as Haiti and El Salvador, as shithole countries, the president of Ghana called Trumps language extremely unfortunate. Nana Akufo-Addo also said that Ghana isnt a shithole country. Additionally, a Pew poll from 2015 found that 89% of the country had a favorable view of the United States  a far cry from the 59% cited by the same poll conducted in 2017.

Next: People in this country have a positive view of the United States despite some minor differences.

8. Italy

Favorability rating: 61%

Italy also lands among the ranks of the countries that love America the most. Though fewer Italians look favorably upon the United States than did several years earlier, in 2014, according to the Pew Research Center, the fact remains that more than half of the Italian public regards the United States favorably. Despite finding a few things perplexing about Americans  ranging from the clothes we wear on vacation to the foods we pass off as Italian  Italy still has a positive opinion of the United States.

Next: This country may not completely understand the American political system. But citizens still like the U.S.

7. Hungary

Favorability rating: 63%

In Hungary, 63% of survey respondents had a favorable view of the United States. The Chicago Tribune characterizes Hungary as one of the countries where Donald Trumps presidency could improve relations between the two nations. While Hungarians dont completely understand American institutions  thinking that a change in presidents could automatically change U.S. policies across the civil service, for instance  Hungary seems optimistic about America.

Next: This country likes the United States, and remains an important partner.

6. Nigeria

Favorability rating: 69%

Next on the list is Nigeria. There, 69% of the population has a favorable opinion of America. The Hill characterizes Nigeria as an important political and economic partner for the United States. Nigeria has become the worlds fourth largest democracy. It has a population of nearly 200 million people. Plus, it runs a trade surplus and imports more than $5.5 billion U.S.-originated goods each year. And its also home to the Nollywood film industry, which as The Hill notes, has cultural and social influence across Africa.

Next: This nation particularly likes Americas Republican presidents.

5. Poland

Favorability rating: 73%

Poland numbers among the top five countries that love America the most. There, 73% of survey respondents gave the United States a favorable rating. CNN reports that Polands affinity for the United States  and for its Republican presidents, specifically  is rooted in Reagans actions to counter the USSR and truly blossomed when his successor, George H.W. Bush, helped orchestrate a soft landing for the country as it left the Soviet bloc. Scholars have characterized Poland as one of the most pro-American countries in the world.

Next: This nation numbers among the countries that love America the most, despite differing attitudes toward North Korea.

4. South Korea

Favorability rating: 75%

South Korea also numbers among the countries that love America the most, with 75% of survey respondents expressing positive views of the United States. The New York Times notes that the United States and South Korea have remained allies for seven decades. South Koreans still like the United States, but developments in North Korea are straining the relationship between Washington and Seoul. While South Korea insists that the crisis with Pyongyang be resolved peacefully, Donald Trump has taken a different tack.

Next: This country consistently loves America.

3. Philippines

Favorability rating: 78%

The Philippines lands in the top three of the countries that love America the most. In the Philippines, 78% of survey respondents expressed positive views of the United States. NPR reports that despite a rocky relationship between Manila and Washington under Barack Obama, the American-Filipino relationship is so resilient that it bounces back right away regardless of personalities and issues.

Next: This nation has a very positive view of America.

2. Israel

Favorability rating: 81%

Next on the list? Israel, which lands in second place overall among the countries that love America the most. Vox reports that during the first decades of Israels existence, the United States wasnt particularly friendly with the young nation. But the U.S. came to regard Israel as a buffer against Soviet influence in the Middle East. And since the Cold War, the two countries have shared interests  and bonded because the American public sympathizes far more with Israel than with Palestine.

Next: This is the country that loves America the very most.

1. Vietnam

Favorability rating: 84%

As for the country that loves America the very most? Vietnam, where 84% of survey respondents gave the United States a favorable rating. Interestingly enough, Politico characterizes Vietnam as one of the few countries in the world where both Donald Trump and the United States as a whole remain popular. The publication learned that the relationship between the U.S. and Vietnam has entered a new phase as shared strategic and economic interests eclipse memories of the Vietnam War, and media coverage of the U.S. remains positive in Vietnam.

Read more: The Most Beautiful Country in the World Has Been Revealed

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John Piper Offers 4 Suggestions for Those Struggling to Forgive, Reveals 'Real Sign' of Forgiveness Christian Post Contributor | 19 April, 2018 by Leah MarieAnn Klett

Reformed theologian John Piper offered four suggestions for those struggling to forgive others, warning that the physical and emotional pain stemming from hurt can easily morph into "selfishness, bitterness and resentment."

Piper addressed the issue of forgiveness on his desiringGod.org podcast when a listener, identified Emily, said she was unsure of whether she'd truly forgiven her husband for a distasteful comment due to "lingering pain from the offense."

The Bethlehem College & Seminary Chancellor began by explaining that the battle for holiness both in marriage and other relationships centers on the struggle to avoid sinning in response to being sinned against.

"What makes this battle so peculiar is that in the very moment when we may be sinning against someone, we have strong feelings of self-justification because of how we've been sinned against," he said. "Some of the feelings that we have may be warranted, even justified; some of the hurt or the indignation may be justified."

Christians, however, must "navigate the complexities of both being genuinely wronged and yet dealing with our sinful responses to being wronged," Piper said.

"[My] responsibility before God is not the behaviors of my wife but my responses to those behaviors," he said. "It seems to me that the overwhelming challenge of the New Testament to all of us is to not return evil for evil."

We all hurt, disappoint, and frustrate each other every day in some degree, the pastor contended. Thus, the "great challenge" in the Christian life is to be so deeply and joyfully content in our fellowship with Jesus that we are not "drained by the disappointments of our relationships."

Still, there can be both physical and emotional pain that lingers after the act of forgiveness, the pastor said  and this is not necessarily sinful or a sign of unforgiveness.

"However, we all know that both physical pain and especially emotional pain can morph in an instant into resentment and anger and bitterness," he said. " That morphing can be so subtle that it's hard to know when it's happened."

To combat this, Piper offered four brief suggestions for keeping pain and sorrow from turning into sinful, unforgiving resentment.

First, Piper encouraged believers to "consciously take any sins of being wronged" and hand them over to God, who is "able to settle accounts more justly and wisely than we can."

Read more about forgiveness on The Christian Post.
The Pastor and the Persecuted Christians Christian Post Contributor | 19 April, 2018 by Keith Wiebe

Many Christians, especially those living under the severe religious restrictions experienced by 75 percent of the world's population, are being persecuted today because of their faith in Jesus Christ. Yet, most pastors are strangely silent about the suffering of their brothers and sisters in Christ.

Therefore, it was a bit unusual when a layman opened a morning worship service by praying for persecuted Christians around the world. It is unfortunately not the norm for these brothers and sisters in Christ to be remembered in prayer in an American worship service. Yet it also seemed appropriate. As the service progressed, it became apparent that it is not unusual for this local church to be sensitive to the plight of the persecuted Christians. The pastor, in his pastoral prayer, also prayed for these believers. He was setting the example for his church by bringing the needs of persecuted Christians before the throne of grace.

The American Pastors Network is part of a coalition of individuals and organizations who are highlighting this critical need. It is appropriate for APN to join this effort because the ministry focus of APN is on the pastor. Research done by George Barna of the American Culture & Faith Institute shows that people in our churches are hungry for their pastors to shine the light of God's Word on issues confronting our national and global culture.

That same research indicates that most pastors are reluctant, for a variety of reasons, to proclaim the part of the "whole counsel of God" that includes those issues. These persecuted Christians are a part of uspart of the family of God. Their burden should be our burden. They must be remembered. Pastors must model and lead the church family in joining in deep suffering of our brothers and sisters.

We know from Scripture that the grievous wound of this persecution to the body of Christ is nothing new. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were thrown into the fiery furnace because they refused to worship the image of the King Nebuchadnezzar. Daniel was offered as a meal to the lions for the same reason. Jeremiah was beaten by Pashsur and put in stocks for being a faithful messenger for God. Later he was thrown into a cistern for the same infraction. Thirty men, using improvised ropes of sheets, were required to lift him from the mud in which he was mired.

Likewise, the book of Acts records numerous times when Christians were persecuted for boldly living out their faith in Christ. One entire chapter, Acts 7, is devoted to Stephen's brilliant defense of his faith and subsequent martyrdom. Hebrews 11 extols heroes of faith who were tortured and refused to accept relief by recanting their faith and presents a horrific picture of their persecution. "They were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword: they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented" (Hebrews 11:37).

How many pastors, who have preached stirring messages about the faith of Abraham, Joseph and Joshua, have really drilled down on the horrific descriptions of these other unnamed heroes of the faith? In some ways, the exercise of their faith was fraught with even greater danger and personal cost than that of those who are named.

We are, of course, aware of these accounts of the persecution of God's people throughout Scripture. But, are we as aware of the continued widespread persecution of Christians today?

Read more about Christian persecution on The Christian Post.
Times annual list of the worlds one hundred most influential people has been published.

Forty-five women are on the list, more than ever before. As the magazine notes, one of them is New Zealands new prime minister, the youngest female head of government on the planet. A wide variety of ethnicities and nationalities are represented as well.

It is encouraging to see this cultural icon honor our national commitment to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness for all people. The news reminds us each day that while we have come a long way, we have a long way to go.

Starbucks, the Olympics, and two universities

Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson appeared on ABCs Good Morning Americayesterday. After they were arrested for trespassing last week at a Philadelphia Starbucks, their story made national news. On Monday, Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson apologized to the men. The store employee who called 911 is no longer with the company.

Starbucks plans to close its 8,000 company-owned stores in the US for an afternoon in May to teach workers about racial bias. The training will be provided to about 175,000 employees.

In another story making headlines, Olympic gold medalist McKayla Maroney has told Dateline that the USA Gymnastics team doctor used food to manipulate her. She said she was molested by him hundreds of times.

Earlier this week, Syracuse University suspended an engineering fraternity. According to the universitys chancellor, footage surfaced of members speaking and acting in ways that are extremely racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, sexist and hostile to people with disabilities.

Last week, a fraternity at California Polytechnic State University was sanctioned by its national organization after students dressed as gang members, including one in blackface. The universitys dean of students stated that racism and hate are unwelcome here, in any form.

Where we agree with our culture

As I noted this past Tuesday, our cultural forefathers in the Greco-Roman world separated the spiritual from the secular and did their religious duty so the gods would give them what they wanted.

Weve added to their syncretism the postmodern claim that all truth is personal and subjective. The Bible has become a diary of religious experience, considered by many to be no more authoritative than any other book.

Consequently, most of the moral commitments embraced by our culture are clearly contrary to biblical truth. From abortion to same-sex marriage to gender confusion to euthanasia, its obvious that our society is on a descending road into spiritual and ethical darkness.

One value embraced in America today does align with biblical truth: our shared commitment to equality for women and ethnic minorities. Christians should be just as outraged as secular Americans by stories of sexual assault and discrimination. We should be just as angered as secular citizens by stories of racial prejudice.

But even here, our motives are quite different.

Why we disagree with our culture

As noted, American culture has embraced an ethos of tolerance, claiming that all truth claims are equally valued and relevant. Thus, all races and genders are equally valued. Tragically, this truth claim has been extended to validate marriage regardless of gender and the rights of women to the exclusion of the rights of the preborn.

By contrast, Christians embrace an ethos built on the sanctity of all life. We know that all people, regardless of race or gender, are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-27). Now there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28).

Our commitment to the sanctity of life leads us to embrace racial and gender equality. But it also leads us to defend life from conception to natural death and to defend marriage and gender identity as intended by our Creator.

Reflecting heaven on earth

Heres one practical consequence of this commitment: churches and Christian organizations should set the standard for including women and racial minorities in our communities and ministries.

Acts 13 names five leaders of the church at Antioch. The first, Barnabas, was a wealthy Jew from Cyprus. The second was Simeon who was called Niger; niger is Latin for black, indicating that he likely came from Africa. So did the third person named Lucius of Cyrene. The fourth, Manean a lifelong friend of Herod the tetrarch, was closely identified with the son of Herod the Great. The fifth, Saul, was a former Pharisee from Tarsus.

Can you imagine a more diverse group?

In addition, the first witnesses to the resurrection were women (Luke 24:1-10). The first European convert to Christianity was a woman (Acts 16:14-15). Among the leaders of early Christianity were Phoebe (Romans 16:1-2), Priscilla (v. 3), and Junia (v. 7).

In heaven, we will gather with people from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages (Revelation 7:9). What will you do to help your congregation on earth reflect your congregation in heaven?

Photo courtesy: Thinkstock/SlPhotography

Publication date: April 20, 2018

For more from the Denison Forum on Truth and Culture, please visit www.denisonforum.org.

Do you want to live a life in whole-hearted pursuit of loving God and others?

Read today's First15 at www.first15.org.
Two years ago, the heroic actions of some Kenyan Muslims brought their majority-Christian nation together. The Oscar-nominated film depiction of that heroism may do so againif many people watch.

Watu Wote is a fictional retelling of real-life horror. In December 2015, al-Shabaab terrorists stormed a bus headed toward the border with Somalia and demanded Christian passengers separate for targeted execution. Muslim passengers responded, If you want to kill us, then kill us. There are no Christians here. The Christian women were given hijabs to wear, while the Christian men were hidden behind bags.

They knew the danger. One year earlier in a similar bus attack, Muslim militants killed 28 Christians who failed to correctly say the Islamic creed.

Filmed on location in Swahili and Somali, the 22-minute film was nominated for the Live Action Short Film category at the 90th Academy Awards.

The film captures an issue close to Kenyan hearts, that apart from religious differences, we are all Kenyan, said Timothy Ranji, bishop of the Anglican diocese of Mt. Kenya South. The downside is that it will be watched by very few Kenyans.

Access to film is limited in Kenya. The nation ranks 77th worldwide in terms of cinemas per capita, according to UN data. Radio is a far more effective means of communication in the East African nation, Ranji said.

And some, like William Black, may choose not to watch it. The movie tells a good story, Im sure, said the American Orthodox missionary and professor at St. Pauls University in Limuru, Kenya. But it hits too close to home.

Black believes that terrorists want to push Kenya to the tipping point. The narrow focus ...

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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.
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After a recent column on "fake news," someone sent me an email, accusing me of propagating fake news by saying the Bible had anything to do with the founding of America.

The email stated the common charge that the Constitution was the product of men of the Enlightenment, with Masonic influence as well.

Unfortunately, this reader, like so many others, fails to understand the historical truth that the Bible played a unique role in helping to create the U.S. Constitution.

The Biblical concept of covenants gave rise to the Puritan-type covenants. The Pilgrims began the process in the Mayflower Compact of 1620, which was done "in the name of God," in which they declared their purpose was "for the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith," as they formed "a civil body politic."

After this Compact, there came about a hundred or so Bible-inspired covenants, frames of government, and articles in America, leading all the way to the U.S. Constitution in 1787.

One of these Puritan documents was the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut of 1639, which says they started their colony for the "liberty and purity of the gospel of our Lord Jesus." The Fundamental Orders was the first complete constitution written on American soil and is believed by historians to have impacted the U. S. Constitution. This is why Connecticut calls itself "the Constitution State."

The U. S. Constitution itself says that it was done "in the year of our Lord"---meaning Jesus. But also it was done in the 12th year of independence. The Constitution is predicated on the Declaration of Independence---our national birth certificate, which mentions God four times.

Was all this the product of men of the Enlightenment?

The late Michael Novak of the American Enterprise Institute made a great point about the Enlightenment. It was not monolithic, and there were really two types of Enlightenment thinkers: those that were solidly within the Judeo-Christian tradition (e.g., Montesquieu, John Locke, Sir William Blackstone) and those not (e.g., David Hume, Voltaire, Diderot).

America's founders quoted heavily from the Bible, Montesquieu, Blackstone, and Locke---in that order.

In his The Spirit of Laws, Baron Montesquieu wrote: "We shall see that we owe to Christianity, in government, a certain political law, and in war a certain law of nationsbenefits which human nature can never sufficiently acknowledge."

Sir William Blackstone, who has often been quoted by the Supreme Court, said that the laws of nature were written by God and were supplemented by the Holy Scriptures. He wrote: "This law of nature being...dictated by God Himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries, and at all times. No human laws are of any validity if contrary to this."

John Locke penned: "The Bible is one of the greatest blessings bestowed by God on the children of men." I used to have a Sunday school teacher, Dr. Greg Forster, who earned his Ph.D. at Yale studying Locke and became a Christian because of Locke's classic book, The Reasonableness of Christianity.

Although not all framers of the Declaration and Constitution were orthodox Christians, about 95 percent of the founding fathers were active members of Trinitarian Christian churches. To many of them, the Christian faith was central in their lives:

In his "Circular to the States" (1783), George Washington said that America could never hope to be a happy nation unless we learned to imitate Jesus, "the divine author of our blessed religion."

In his Inaugural Address (1797), John Adams calls "a decent respect for Christianity among the best recommendations for the public service."

Thomas Jefferson said that Jesus is the reason we can have religious freedom. To force people to believe in religious views they don't share are a departure from Him, "the holy author of our religion." Jefferson wrote this in his Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1777, adopted 1786).

James Madison, a key leader in the creation of the Constitution, wrote that our obligations to God come before those to the state: "Before any man can be considered as a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe."

As to the Masonic charge, I view it as an anachronistic charge. The Masons in America did not become anti-Christian until the 1830s and thereafter, long after the time of the framing of our founding documents.

God and the Bible are greater than anyone or any country. But I think we do a disservice to our history to discount the incredibly positive role the Scriptures played in helping to shape this nation.

In the email that prompted this column, I was accused of being a "Christian constitutionalist." Guilty as charged.

Jerry Newcombe, D.Min., is an on-air host/senior producer for D. James Kennedy Ministries. He has written/co-written 28 books, e.g., The Unstoppable Jesus Christ, Doubting Thomas (w/ Mark Beliles, on Jefferson), and What If Jesus Had Never Been Born? (w/ D. James Kennedy) & the bestseller, George Washington's Sacred Fire (w/ Peter Lillback) djkm.org @newcombejerry www.jerrynewcombe.com
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Two weeks ago, we warned you about the implications of California's "Must Stay Gay Bill" (see here and here). Now others are sounding the alarm about the full weight of this onerous bill, which could literally mean the banning of certain religious books. If we don't stop this, what's coming next?

On April 17, David French noted that this bill "would actually  among other things  ban the sale of books expressing orthodox Christian beliefs about sexual morality.

"Yes, ban the sale of books.

"Assembly Bill 2943 would make it an 'unlawful business practice' to engage in 'a transaction intended to result or that results in the sale or lease of goods or services to any consumer' that advertise, offer to engage in, or do engage in 'sexual orientation change efforts with an individual.'"

In other words, it would be illegal for a bookstore to sell my book, Can You Be Gay and Christian? And that would apply all the more if the book was sold to someone with unwanted same-sex attraction. Yes, it would be illegal. Against the law. Punishable by the law.

With no hyperbole (really, with some understatement), French wrote: "This is extraordinarily radical."

You say, "But no one in their right mind would consider voting for such a bill. That's totally insane."

Well, think again.

An April 19 headline on the California Policy Council website announced, "Assembly votes to violate the 1st Amendment."

Yes, "AB 2943 bans books, conferences, counseling advocating Muslim, Jewish, and Christian views on gender and sexual orientation."

As the story explains, "The California Assembly approved a bill today 50-18 that tells churches and other[s] with traditional beliefs about gender and sexual orientation that advocating for their views could get them sued. AB 2943, declares 'advertising, offering to engage in, or engaging in sexual orientation change efforts with an individual' is illegal under state's consumer fraud law."

And note the carefully the vote in the Assembly: 50 to 18 in favor of the bill. Talk about insane!

As many have made clear in the weeks leading up to this vote, the bill is wide-ranging in its scope and intention, which is why I dubbed it the "Must Stay Gay Bill." (It could also rightly be called the "Must Stay Gender Confused" bill, but that is not as pithy as description. Either way, the bill is a nightmare.)

To be totally candid, part of me wants to say to California and the nation, "Go ahead. Pass your radical bills. Outlaw our most fundamental freedoms. Consign struggling people to their struggles. Muzzle our religious rights. Go ahead and do your thing, and we'll watch the whole country crumble."

Perhaps then the church (and other people of conscience) will wake up. Perhaps then they'll understand why we've been warning for years that those who came out of the closet want to put us in the closet. Perhaps then they'll see the utter intolerance of the radical left.

But at what cost? At what price to our kids and grandkids? At what expense to the very fabric of our country? Some things leave irreparable damage in their wake.

So, while one part of me says, "Go ahead and ignore our warnings," another part of me says, "Don't let it come to that! It's not too late to stand and act. It's not to late to debunk the myth that homosexuality is innate and immutable. It's not to late to expose the lies that there is no such thing as ex-gay (or ex-trans). It's not too late to get the truth out to the world."

Yes, it's not too late  but it is getting later by the second. The window is closing rapidly.

Of course, I already hear the mockers who say, "You're a nutcase! You're a religious fanatic! No one is going to burn your silly books!"

I remind these mockers of four things.

First, these same mockers once said to me, "No one wants to put you in the closet." A few years later, they changed their mantra to, "Bigots like you belong in the closet!"

Second, these same mockers rejoiced when Kim Davis was put in jail, saying she got what she deserved.

Third, these same mockers have likened Christian conservatives to ISIS and the Taliban and Al-Qaeda and the Nazis, holding signs saying that we should be thrown to the lions.

Fourth, and most tellingly, these same mockers think this new California bill is a great thing.

California and the nation, it's time to wake up! You ignore this bill at your own peril.
Burma frees two pastors who were jailed after helping journalists cover military air strikes

The Burmese government has released two Baptist pastors who were jailed last year after they allegedly assisted journalists in covering the devastation caused by military air strikes in Northern Shan State.

Dumdaw Nawng Latt, 65, and his nephew, Langjaw Gam Seng, 35, were released on Tuesday as part of the nation's annual tradition of granting amnesty to prisoners on the first day of the Myanmar New Year.

According to the Associated Press, the government, under newly elected President Win Myint, granted amnesty to a total of 8,490 Myanmar citizens and 51 foreigners.

Nawng Latt was sentenced in October 2017 to four years and three months in prison, while Gam Seng was sentenced to two years and three months.

The two pastors had been accused of having links with the ethnic armed group Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), as well as spying for the organization.

However, critics believe they were arrested for speaking to the media about the air raids and helping local journalists cover the devastation of the bombings.

The two men reportedly led the journalists to the St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church, which was destroyed in an air strike in November 2016.

Burmese army prosecutor Maj. Kyaw Zin Htun reportedly brought legal charges against the two pastors after reporters released photos and news articles about the attack on the church. Military officials reportedly told journalists to delete the images of the damaged building.

Nawng Latt and Gam Seng, who serve as pastors in the Kachin Baptist Convention, were summoned to an army base in northeastern Burma on Christmas Eve 2016 to assist with the release of detained civilians, but were not seen after that time. The police only confirmed that they were in custody a month after their arrest.

Pastor Zau Ra, secretary of the Kachin Baptist Convention in Mong Maung town, said that the two pastors were in good health and that the family came to greet them upon their release.

"They were freed around 4 p.m. yesterday, and they are on their way back home," Zau Ra told Morning Star News.

"We are happy that they were freed, but they spent one year and five months in prison. It is not good for them, their family and even for the convention. They were arrested for being suspicious and sentenced into prison. It was a waste of time, and it was not fair," he added.

Zau Ra urged the authorities to ensure that similar arrests would not take place in the future. "This would harm relationship and trust-building between the government and civilians," he contended.
Chilean cardinal calls for Bishop Barros to resign over sex abuse crisis

The head of the Chilean Catholic Church said on Thursday that Bishop Juan Barros, accused of covering up clerical sex abuse in the country, should resign.

It comes just over a week after Pope Francis, who had previously defended Barros, admitted 'grave mistakes' in his handling of Chile's abuse crisis.

Cardinal Ricardo Ezzati told press that Barros, who allegedly covered up abuse of minors by his mentor Fr Fernando Karadima, should 'without a doubt' resign. However he said he would not judge 'whether or not [Barros] had covered up' abuse.

Barros did not immediately respond to request for comment by Reuters. The statement marks the first time the Chilean Catholic Church has explicitly called for Barros to resign, though it had previously called for a 'drastic solution' to the abuse crisis.

Earlier this month Pope Francis admitted he had made 'grave mistakes' in his handling of Chile's long-running abuse scandal. In a landmark letter to Chilean bishops, the pontiff wrote: '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.'

The case surrounding Barros dominated coverage of the pontiff's January visit to Chile and Peru. Francis had first defended Barros and said he had been slandered. After severe criticism however, he appointed one of the Vatican's most trusted sexual abuse investigators, Archbishop Charles Scicluna, to visit the South American country and meet with abuse victims and clergy there.

The pope's landmark letter came after reading Scicluna's 2,300-page report on the crisis, which included the testimony of 64 individuals and that he said caused him 'pain and shame' to read.

His letter added: 'I apologise 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].'

Cardinal Ezzati said that neither he nor the Chilean Church had deceived Pope Francis. He called on abusers to come forward. 'Those who have committed errors should recognise them, regret and repair them,' he said.

Additional reporting by Reuters
'I try to be optimistic, but it is difficult': The real story of what life is like for Christians in Iraq

In order to understand the plight of Christians in modern-day Iraq, it is important to go back not just to 2014, when Islamic State forced on them a brutal choice between dying, converting or fleeing the northern city of Mosul, but further: to the 2003 US-led invasion of the country.

For unfashionable though it was to point out at the time amid the western drum-beat for war, the Ba'athist regime of Saddam Hussein, for all its horrific faults, was relatively secular as well as stable, and as a demonstration of this Saddam's deputy, Tariq Aziz, was himself a Christian.

Indeed, some warned at the time that war would only result in a greater, not a diminished, threat from terrorists following on from the wholly unrelated atrocities in New York of September 11, 2001.

Nonetheless, with the threat of war looming in the months leading up to the invasion of March 2003, Christians were as fearful as everyone else in the country, of an attack from Saddam on 'his own people' as well as the western invaders.

'William', an NGO worker with a partner organisation of the Christian charity Open Doors whose name has been concealed for security reasons, first visited Iraq in 2000 and settled there at the end of 2002.

Of Iraq, which is ranked 8th on the Open Doors World Watch List, William tells Christian Today: 'We very much liked the country, the people, the environment.' But, he adds: 'We had to prepare as everyone else for the possible gas attack at that time. The expectation was that Saddam would attack with gas.' William still believes that Saddam had the elusive weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and that, 'war from the Kurdish perspective was 100 per cent a must. They all agreed with it. Discussion about WMDs not being found was irrelevant but we were saying they were there.'

He says it is 'partly true' that the Saddam regime was 'fine for Christians' and points out that before Saddam, back in the early 1970s, there were 1.5-2 million Christians. There were some half a million in 2003  more than a million Christians left under Saddam  and now, of course, there are a mere 200,000.

We will come to the tragic events of recent years, but first, William points out that 'under Saddam churches were destroyed and closed; as long as you kept your mouth shut that was OK but Saddam was throwing Christians out of villages as well'.

Nonetheless, 'it was not a good time for Christians after the war', he says. 'There was a relatively peaceful time for a few years, then the insurgency started.' It was in 2006-2007 that extremists 'came to the forefront'.

Christians were not only attacked in 2014, but also before, William says. He recalls 50 Christians being 'butchered' in Baghdad in 2011.

'After 2007, that's when Christians began being randomly killed, kidnapped, tortured, ransomed and so on. Even in Mosul it became a very dangerous place for Christians.' Christians were already beginning to leave Mosul  where, for example, estate agents were being threatened if they sold houses to Christians  for Kurdish towns.

But it was of course in 2014 when some 80,000 Christian refugees fled Mosul and the Nineveh Plain under threat of forced conversion or execution but remain inside Iraq in the Kurdish capital of Irbil.

William recalls the major landmark in the terrorisation of Christians in Iraq. 'ISIS came first to Mosul, took over the city and said initially that Christians were allowed to stay as long as they paid Islamic tax and kept quiet. But then at some stage that turned around and they gave a deadline to convert to Islam, be killed or leave  so that's when Christians left Mosul,' he says.

By August 2014 the whole region was under control of ISIS.

'Over that time and even now, we found many more Christians than were initially thought to be missing, who were killed and many more women were kidnapped by ISIS.

'Even 3 or 4 weeks ago they found a mass grave of about 40 Christian women and children. We still think 50 or 60 missing women now are being used as sex slaves.'

And this, despite widespread reports last year that Islamic State had been defeated in Iraq. This is 'definitely' not the case, says William.

'The battle has been won, but not the war' he says, adding that at least four 'even more gruesome' Islamist splinter groups have emerged to fill the vacuum left by Islamic State, with an estimated 2,500 fighters 'from an ISIS background' still present. 'They are attacking around Kirkuk, they attack the Iraqi army around checkpoints at roads. Some of them are hiding in the mountains around Kirkuk  they are still there.'

William says that even last year's non-binding Kurdish referendum, in which around 93 per cent voted in favour of independence, has brought trouble of its own.

'Baghdad interpreted it as the Kurds declaring independence. This was not true. [But] the response by Baghdad was to boycott the Kurdish region...[and] retake a lot of territory. And the worst thing for us is that they closed the international airports [at Sulaymaniyah and Irbil]. So now the only way out is through Turkey by road  from October until April 1  they have only just opened the airport. We are now able to fly again but Baghdad is introducing Iraqi visa control in the north: now the concern is that Baghdad is going to introduce a stricter visa regime. Baghdad also started to control the Kurdish banks so it is very difficult to get money into the country. They have started to control international help, aid  and this is especially difficult for Christians.

'At the moment it seems reasonably quiet  likely because of elections happening in May next month  but the concern is that they will turn the screws on Kurdistan.'

And what of the reality for Christians on the ground today?

'Initially, they wanted to go back to Nineveh plains but now the Nineveh area has also become a battleground between Baghdad and the Kurdish region; Kurds have been pushed out because Baghdad moved Shia militia in  [and] Christians feel threatened by the Shia.'

Some 8,000 familes have gone back to Christian towns from the Nineveh plains. Families are also going back to Irbil because they don't feel safe, don't feel supported, are worried about the Shia, [and there is a] lack of support from Baghdad.

Their basic needs are not being met. 'It's OK to live in a town for a couple of weeks or a few months without electricity or water but eventually they say enough is enough and they go back to a town with water and electricity. If they do as they are told, and go back to the Nineveh plains, 'they may lose salaries as teachers, medical personnel, anyone in government employment'. William points out that some 70 per cent of Iraqis are in some form of government employment, after all, in what he describes as this 'old socialist state'.

He goes on: 'Christians are being pushed back to an area where there is nothing. It is very difficult to live in a street where your neighbours houses have been burned out and you are living by yourself. It is not a stable situation  there are Muslim villages all around. People are not feeling safe.

'Christian politicians are pushing for an international security force for the interim period until they have their own security forces trained. They don't feel safe with the Muslims living around the Christian towns.'

One of those is Qaraqosh, where according to reports Christians are slowly returning. And yet, says William: 'I went in [to Qarakosh] three or four times and on three or four occasions they picked up ISIS people on the street in front of my eyes  you can imagine if you are living in a town like that, you don't feel safe.'

However, in Qaraqosh around 800 families and homes have been supported by Open Doors' partner organisations, and of the more than 8,000 families that have returned to the north, 5,000 have gone back to Qaraqosh, William says, while 1,100 have gone back to the second largest Christian town after Qaraqosh, Bartella.

But 'people don't trust that ISIS has disappeared. There are sleeper cells. People don't feel that it is safe and secure.'

Finally, asked what are his hopes for the future, William is rueful.

'I like to be optimistic,' he says, 'but it is very difficult.'

This is partly, at least, because so many Christians still want to get out of Iraq. 'When half of the church leaders want to emigrate  only half of the church leaders are pushing for the Christians to go back to the church villages  it is hard. We really want to support them to go back; anything we can do to support the Christians to go back to the towns.

'One week it is positive, then something happens.'

William took a flight out of Irbil a few weeks ago, and he says he spotted '10 to 15 families, clearly emigrating. Emigration just continues. You only have to have one incident and the emigration happens again.'

Ironically, William says that 'a little bit on the positive side [is that] Christians familes are coming back from Germany to Iraq  because they say there is more ISIS in Germany than in Iraq  but this is only a couple of families.

Groups like Open Doors and their partners are 'supporting people to go back and helping them in their needs so there will be a strong group of Christians that really want to settle back,' he says.

'I really want to be positive. But...if we listen to the local church leaders, the big concern than in five years time there may be no Christians left at all.'

Iraq is number eight on the Open Doors World Watch List 2018.
Philippines bishops slam 'unspeakable violence' of 'despotic' state after nun's arrest

Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte has revealed he ordered an investigation into an Australian nun for 'disorderly conduct', in a move against what he called 'undesirable' foreigners. The country's bishops have in turn hit out at Duterte's 'despotic government' and condemned 'unspeakable violence' being committed against religious institutions.

Sister Patricia Fox, 71, was taken from her house and detained this week at Manila's immigration bureau for nearly 24 hours before being released on Tuesday. The nun, who coordinates the Catholic community Notre Dame de Sion, has been part of rallies urging the release of political prisoners and advocating for human rights and protection for the poor, but has denied active politicking.

Duterte said on Wednesday: 'I ordered her to be investigated, not deported at once, not arrested, but to invite her to an investigation for a disorderly conduct.'

He accused Fox of 'a violation of sovereignty' and said: 'You insult me under the cloak of being a Catholic priest, and you are a foreigner. Who are you?'

He added: 'You do not have that right to criticise us. Do not insult my country. We never did that to Australia. We never did that to [a] European country. Why don't you criticise your own government, the way you handle the refugees, hungry and dying and you turn them back to the open sea?' Australia has been criticised for its treatment of refugees, with hundreds of asylum seekers stranded at the country's controversial off-shore detention centre on Papua New Guinea.

Duterte said he had the right to deport or refuse entry to an 'undesirable alien'.

On Thursday the Ecumenical Bishops' Forum, the largest cross-denominational coalition in the Philippines, said the detention of Fox was 'the most recent blow against church workers and religious institutions', according to UCA News.

The joint statement expressed 'outrage at this evil-doing' by the Philippines government, describing 'perilous times' for the church in the country and condemning 'unspeakable violence' committed against Christians.

The statement added: 'The persecution of church people does not only reveal the sword of a despotic government that seeks to suppress the church's role as a moral compass of society. It is a demonstration of [the Duterte] administration's noxious attempts to criminalise legitimate dissent.'

Clerics in the country have long spoken out against Duterte's hard-line 'war on drugs' that has caused a 'reign of terror' amongst the nation's poor, according to Catholic bishops. Thousands of suspected drug dealers and users have been killed since Duterte launched what critics have called an illegal crusade against narcotics in 2016.

The bishops' statement implored Christians 'to boldly resist state violence and political oppression, and continue to stand up for and work in solidarity with the poor, deprived and oppressed'.

Additional reporting by Reuters
Samsung Galaxy Note 9 release date, specs rumors update: No in-display fingerprint scanning technology

A few months after the release of the Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+ smartphones, the reports are already in regarding the South Korean tech giant's next-generation Galaxy Note phablet. Per the latest rumors, the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 is set to launch later in 2018, although the public should be ready to get disappointed as one of the highly speculated premium features of the handset is no longer expected to arrive.

Initial reports concerning the Galaxy Note 9 have suggested that the phablet will be the first handset from Samsung to boast an in-display fingerprint reader. Some users have been complaining about the odd position of the fingerprint reader at the rear side of the Samsung phones, particularly beside the camera lens. Having the scanner embedded right under the front screen panel would be the best solution to this problem, but unfortunately, such technology may not be ready in time to be introduced in the Galaxy Note 9.

South Korean online publication The Investor has recently tipped that the timing is not yet right for the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 to get an in-display fingerprint scanner. If anything, Samsung is more likely to finish developing the technology right before the launch of its 2019 flagship smartphones.

It is now expected that next year's Samsung Galaxy S10 could pack with an optical biometric reader instead. Supporting this report is KGI Securities' industry analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who predicted earlier than the mass production of the components for an in-display reader will happen after the Galaxy Note 9 launch.

In other news, the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 is rumored to get an earlier unveiling date as the mass production of the phablet's OLED panel will begin in late April. Releasing the Galaxy Note 9 in the market ahead of the usual schedule can be seen as a marketing strategy, given that the device will go head-on against Apple's upcoming iPhone X successor. With this, the Galaxy Note 9 is now expected to be announced in early July.
Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 release date, specs news update: Benchmark listing reveals 10-inch tablet, Qualcomm Snapdragon 835

Samsung is about to unveil the next iteration of its premium Galaxy Tab S line in the coming months. A benchmark listing for an upcoming Samsung tablet has been spotted online, which reveals that the Galaxy Tab S4 is likely to sport a 10.5-inch display. Moreover, the device is shown to use Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835 chipset, which is not what some people were expecting.

GFXBench posted a benchmark result listing for a new Samsung tablet, which is set to hit the market later this year. People were quick to assume that this unnamed device is none other than the Samsung Galaxy Tab S4, basing on the model number specified in the benchmark listing.

The suspected Galaxy Tab S4 device is listed with model number SM-T835, which seems to follow the model numbers of the Galaxy Tab S2 and S3, SM-T815 and SM-T825.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 is believed to have a slighlty bigger size than its predecessor with a 10.5-inch display. The screen panel can deliver up to 1,600x2,560 pixel resolution.

As for the under-the-hood specs of the tablet, the Galaxy Tab S4 will be powered by an Adreno 540 GPU, while there are no specific details given about the device's mobile processor. However, Tech Radar noted that the Adreno 540 graphics chip usually came with a Snapdragon 835 processor in last year's high-end gizmos.

With this, the Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 is suggested to feature a Snapdragon 835 chipset, which is an improvement over the Galaxy Tab S3 that used a Snapdragon 821 processor.

That news might disappoint some, who expected the Galaxy Tab S4 to be powered by the latest Snapdragon 845, the same chipset featured in the Galaxy S9 and S9+ smartphones.

Other specs details for the Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 include 4GB of RAM and 64 GB internal storage. The tablet will also sport a 2MP rear camera and 8MP front-facing camera. The Tab S4 is expected to run the latest Android 8.0 Oreo version out of the box.
Syrian priest who ministers in ravaged Aleppo: 'It's God mercy that I stayed'

A priest in Aleppo has told of how he has chosen to stay in the Syria city that suffered massive destruction in the country's civil war in order to minister to the people there.

Greek Orthodox priest Ghassan Ward is supported by the charity Open Doors, which supports persecuted Christians. He has lost friends and family in the war but believes he is called to stay.

He told Open Doors: 'My bishop was kidnapped in April 2013, my church was destroyed and my house was bombed. My two sons left the country, my wife died of cancer and I lost two of my close family members because of the bombings.'

His church is serving 1,700 families, providing food supplies, fuel, clothes and school supplies.

He said: 'Many of my parish were rich before, now they are poor. They have no work, no income and all the savings are spent during the years of war. The role of the church is not only having the services  we welcome the people and we try to help solve their problems. God gave us the love.

'It's not easy to do this, many of our young generation are out of Syria or are in the army. The needs of the people are very big; we're trying to meet their needs. It's God mercy that I stayed, that we stayed.'

The churches in Aleppo are working together to support displaced families who have been left with nothing. There is a team of around 60 volunteers and 12 employees who keep track of who receives help and help with distribution, with more drafted in when they are needed.

Among those receiving help is Rezk (70) who was displaced from his village in the Latakia area in 2012 because of heavy fighting. He and his wife fled to Aleppo, and are also supported by Ghassan's church.

He said: 'Thanks to God, my wife and I survived. We live from my retirement salary of about 60 dollars, plus the help we get [from the church]. We went through very hard times here in Aleppo, especially when the city was besieged. At that time we only had one meal a day, one day rice, the other spaghetti.'

Ghassan said: 'We help also non-Christians. They are our neighbours, we live with them, and we cannot neglect a person who is hungry. When we give them a loaf of bread, the love of Christ is written on it.'

Open Doors has launched a crisis appeal as the crisis in Syria escalates, providing food aid for thousands of families in Syria every month alongside long-term project including rebuilding homes, creating jobs and providing trauma care. Syria is number 15 on the Open Doors 2018 World Watch List.
The 'greatest miracle': Israel at 70

To me the resurrection of the State of Israel in 1948, 2,000 years after her forced demise at the hands of the Romans and subsequent occupations by Christians and Muslims (culminating in the British occupation from 1922-47) is the greatest miracle the world has known.

It's greater than the invention of the wheel, the discovery of penicillin, the lives of the Buddha and Jesus, the words of Shakespeare, Robert Browning, George Eliot, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, the music of Bach and Mozart and anything the 20th and 21st centuries have to had to offer.

If you are sceptical, as many will be, just compare the progress of Pakistan, founded in the same year  how are Christians faring in Pakistan and how are Christians faring in Israel?

Today, April 20, is Iyyar 5 in the Jewish calendar. Today Israel is 70 years old. She was founded on this date 70 years ago, which coincided with May 14, 1948. But this date has a special resonance for Jews. April 20 was the birthdate of Hitler. Israel's 70th birthday celebrations are a fitting response to his attempted extermination of our people. It is also my English birthday. I am not much younger than the State.

I would like to quote from the book whose publication in February last year led to my association with this website.

In that book, an eyewitness account is given of the effect Ben Gurion's Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel had on the young man who would become the greatest rabbi of recent times, Chief Rabbi Shear Yashuv Cohen of Israel's third city, Haifa.

Having been smuggled into the Old City of Jerusalem during the War of Liberation against the British in 1947-8, Shear Yashuv, aged 20, describes how he managed to hear on the radio the Declaration of Independence by David Ben Gurion on Friday, 5th Iyyar 5708 (14th May 1948).

'At about 4 pm I was part of a small unit operating a most primitive mortar in the German Courtyard of the Batei Machse complex, facing Bet Rothschild. That very moment, a special session of the Emergency People's Council had been hastily convened in the auditorium of the Tel Aviv Museum. David Ben Gurion, his gravelly tones thundering with emotion, was reading out the declaration of the establishment of Medinat Israel. Courtesy of the defence forces, we were able to hear this live historic broadcast on the radio. It was completely quiet in the Jewish Quarter except for the sounds we could make out of the shots being fired by Arab marksmen, which were blending in with the dramatic words of Ben Gurion:

"Eretz Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and national identity was formed. Here they achieved independence and created a culture of national and universal significance. Here they wrote and gave the Bible to the world."

'Ben Gurion continued reading the entire text with great solemnity. Then we he reached the words: "By virtue of the natural and historic right of Am Israel, the Jewish people...we hereby proclaim the establishment of the Jewish State in Eretz Israel (The Land of Israel), to be called Medinat Israel (the State of Israel)": tears of joy streamed down our cheeks.'

But it is what happened next which was truly remarkable.

'As soon as the battle started, a proclamation was issued by the senior rabbis of the Jewish Quarter of the Old City... Two ultra-Orthodox rabbis worked together at this seminal moment with our commanding officers and the heads of the local residents of the Jewish Quarter. Together, they summoned the community to join them at nightfall for a thanksgiving prayer service in the Yohanan ben Zakkai Synagogue. This site was like a natural shelter, as it was below street level. Moreover, according to ancient tradition the shofar of Elijah the Prophet was thought to be buried here.

'When night fell, the battle abated. The Arabs...temporarily abated their onslaught. I was therefore able to enter the underground Ben Zakkai Synagogue complex for a short time in full battle gear. The candelabra were all lit with oil, shining a special light throughout. In all four synagogues of the complex could be heard emotional and joyous prayers and songs for the occasion. Among them we sang of the great scholar Bar Yochai girding himself with strength and fighting the battle of Torah. Psalms were also recited for the victory of our fighters and the salvation of the besieged city.

'The prayers and songs intensified my belief and faith, as well as my will for victory. The possibility that Jerusalem, our courageous stronghold, might fall, did not enter my head. I was sure we would be able to hold our own, or even win outright.

'The climax came after we recited the Amidah, the Shemonei Esrei, when one of the rabbis...banged on the table. At this point, at the behest of the senior rabbis present, the chazzan [cantor] started to recite the Hallel prayer together with the blessings as is the practice on the 1st night of Pesach. On this all the rabbis were of one mind. Everyone joined in reciting the Hallel prayer, praising the great miracle of the re-establishment of Medinat Israel as a sovereign country after 2,000 years of Galut (enforced diaspora). We gave thanks to the Holy One, Blessed be He, for this great miracle which He had performed for Am Israel, his very own people. For we were confident (in the words of Psalm 94:14) "that the Lord will never abandon His people, nor will He ever forsake His inheritance".'

And so it has proved over 70 years of numerous wars, including the ongoing battles against the State of Israel to revile the one who was rejected which has now become the cornerstone of the world.

This festival of Israel's independence has become part of the general synagogue liturgy, with a haggadah (emulating the Pesach narrative) and its own prayer book.

As it says on the Seder night: 'Why is this night different from all other nights?' we can truly ask ourselves 'Why is this State different from all other States?'

After 70 years of existence Israel's population has increased tenfold from 650,000 to more than 6.5 million (thus replacing those who were exterminated by Hitler and his allies in the Shoah). Today, the Jewish population of Israel comprises 42 per cent of the world's Jewish population of 14.5 million. This is an increase of 26 per cent since 1948, when two thirds of Europe's Jews had been exterminated by Hitler and his allies.

But we are still 2 million short of the 16.6 million Jews who were alive in 1939.

If present trends continue, more and more Jews will leave Europe and by 2025 the population of Israel will surpass 10 million, still a tiny country by the world's standards, but certainly not to be ignored.

Dr Irene Lancaster is a Jewish academic, author and translator who has established university courses on Jewish history, Jewish studies and the Hebrew Bible.
Vietnamese pastor imprisoned for faith says his suffering was a 'gift from God'

A Vietnamese pastor who was jailed for his faith has related the intense abuse he experienced in jail, but said that his imprisonment was a 'gift' from God.

Evangelical pastor Nguyen Cong Chinh was charged in 2011 with 'undermining national solidarity' for violating a preaching ban through his ministry in Vietnam's Central Highlands. Chinh had also been an outspoken critic of the government and an advocate for persecuted believers.

He was sentenced to 11 years imprisonment but was released six years early last July, after pressure from the international community, on the condition that he and his family left Vietnam. Now residing in the US, Chinh attended the 20th anniversary meetings of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), where he described his incarceration.

He told Catholic News Agency on Wednesday, through his translator: 'Even though I suffered physical suffering and pain, I felt in my soul happiness.'

He said he saw the experience as 'God's gift to me. It was like what Jesus Christ went through, the same suffering that his disciples experienced, and now I'm going through the same experience. That is how the good news comes out.'

Chinh told the summit that the state persecution had extended far beyond his individual case. 'In Vietnam's prisons, prisoners of conscience fare worse than common criminals,' he said. 'They are subjected to several measures such as solitary confinement, impurity in water, lack of food, no access to medical care, denied access to their families and are prohibited from other activities with other inmates.

'Since 2000, 127 prisoners of conscience have died from torture or contamination of food or water. Most victims [are] Christians from the southern islands, Hmong Christians from the northwestern region and Buddhists from [the] southwestern region in Vietnam.'

He told the Christian Post: 'The wardens did a lot of beating to the point that many of the prisoners of conscience became ill, injured, handicapped and some of them died.

'They used fists and they also used batons. They beat me on the head, my chest, my leg and arms. I still have injury, a scar on my head.' He also described being locked in tight confinement and having shards of glass put in his food.

Chinh's family had also suffered. Months before his release his wife Tran Thi Hong had been beaten and interrogated for her involvement with the international community supporting her husband.

Chinh told the summit that 'the United States must increase diplomatic pressure and use [country of particular concern] designations and sanctions to pressure Hanoi to release all prisoners of conscience'.

USCIRF has also been advocating on behalf of Andrew Brunson, the US missionary imprisoned in Turkey since 2016. Brunson faces his next hearing in the country on May 7.
Live like a Rockefeller  Pablo Picassos Pomme

Jonathan Rendell, Deputy Chairman of Christies Americas and overall curator of The Collection of Peggy and David Rockefeller global tour, reflects on an extraordinary few months  and on a painting that gives him goosebumps

Not too many people can say that theyve worked on the greatest sale of all time, so I realise Im very privileged, says Jonathan Rendell, Deputy Chairman of Christie's Americas, with a smile. Hes talking, of course, about The Collection of Peggy and David Rockefeller, which is to be offered in New York in May. Rendell describes his own role as storyteller  travelling the world, talking to press, talking to clients, all in the name of raising an awareness and appreciation of the collection. In recent weeks Rendell has made every stop of an extensive, global pre-sale tour, visiting Hong Kong, London, Paris and Berlin, where highlight works have been displayed at Christies galleries. Has any one piece from the collection attracted peoples attention more than the others? The truth is, he replies, people have reacted positively to everything, which is entirely to be expected when you consider that Peggy and David went to great lengths, and took great time to ensure they were always buying the best a given artist produced.

And in the case of an artist like Monet we have a number of different examples of his best  from 1877s Impressionistic Exterieur de la gare Saint-Lazare, effet de soleil (above), a painting of the Paris train station St Lazare, to Nympheas en fleur, one of his water lily canvases from 40 years later. Other legendary Christies sales Rendell has worked on include The Collection of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge in 2009, and The Collection of Elizabeth Taylor in 2011. The former, which achieved more than $400 million, holds the record for the most valuable collection ever offered at auction. Its a record Rendell fully expects to be beaten in May: Given the sheer number of masterpieces in The Collection of Peggy and David Rockefeller, were talking north of $500 million, and thats probably a conservative estimate. All estate proceeds from the sales, of course, will benefit selected charities that Peggy and David supported in their lifetime.

Its a piece that takes you straight into the history of art. A gift from Picasso to Gertrude Stein, the woman whod made his career. It doesnt get much better than that

Rendell says he has lost track of the number of hands hes shaken at various viewings. What hell never forget, though, is the level of visitors engagement with the art. There was extraordinary interest in Hong Kong, for instance. As a sign of the growing importance to Christies of an Asian client base, we actually announced the sale there. Yet the buzz in London was remarkable too, with 2,500 people walking through the door on one Saturday afternoon. Clearly the Rockefeller name is one that means a lot across the whole world. As the auctioneers ready themselves and New York gears up for the sales (8-10 May), Rendells work is almost done. He says hes looking forward to a nice rest with his new puppy after an experience that he describes as extraordinary. He wont be drawn on which work from the collection hed most like to have on his own walls, given the chance  but Picassos Pomme would be on his shortlist.

Jonathan Rendell with Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Pomme, 1914. 5 x 7 in (13.5 x 17.7 cm). Estimate: $1,000,000-1,500,000. This lot is offered in The Collection of David and Peggy Rockefeller: 19th & 20th Century Art, Evening Sale on 8 May at Christies in New York  Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2018

The backdrop to its creation was the fall-out between two of the most significant art collectors in history: the brother-and-sister duo, Gertrude and Leo Stein. Having left their native California for Paris at the turn of the 20th century, they supported the fledgling careers of many artists we now consider greats: Picasso and Matisse, most notably. When sibling relations became strained, however, and Leo moved out of the shared apartment on Rue de Fleurus, there was dispute over who got to keep a still-life painting of five apples by Cezanne. In the end, Gertrude (very reluctantly) relented and, as a consolation, Picasso gave her Pomme as a Christmas present in 1914: a watercolour of an apple hed painted specifically for her. It was accompanied by a note saying, I paint you one apple, and it will be as fine as all of Cezannes.

The inscription from Picasso to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas on the reverse of the painting  Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2018
Alaska Airlines is the third major airline, after United and Delta, to start getting tough on passengers who want to bring "emotional support" animals into the cabin.

Alaska said that customers who buy tickets starting May 1 and want to bring "emotional support or psychiatric service animals" on the plane with them will have to provide documents attesting to the animal's health and good behavior and produce a signed document from a doctor or mental health professional at least 48 hours before departure.

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The company noted that the new policy does not affect "traditional service animals" like seeing-eye dogs for the blind.

Starting April 30, Alaska said, the three required documents will be available on its website; passengers can fill them out and email or fax them back to gain approval for their animals.

The animal health advisory form notes that emotional support animals' owners must travel with "a veterinary-issued health certificate," and that by signing the animal behavior form, the owner "accepts all liability for any injuries or damage to property."

Ray Prentice, the airline's director of customer advocacy, said the number of emotional support animals on Alaska's flights has increased dramatically in recent years, and now totals about 150 a day.

While most of them don't cause problems, he said, "over the last few years, we have observed a steady increase in incidents from animals who haven't been adequately trained to behave in a busy airport setting or on a plane, which has prompted us to strengthen our policy." The airline has seen "a number of recent incidents where the inappropriate behavior of emotional support animals has impacted and even injured our employees, other guests and service animals," Prentice said.

Does this spell the end of the whole "emotional support" animal brouhaha? Is the increased documentation enough to stop the abuse? Please leave your thoughts in the comments.

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Chris McGinnis is the founder of TravelSkills.com. The author is solely responsible for the content above, and it is used here by permission. You can reach Chris at chris@travelskills.com or on Twitter @cjmcginnis.
A couple allegedly tortured and murdered a 70-year-old Vietnam War veteran in Hanford, Calif. in an attempt to gain access to his financial information, police say.

Kenneth Coyle, a retired contractor for Naval Air Station Lemoore first met Stacie Mendoza, one of the accused murderers, in a Hanford restaurant where she worked as a waitress, according to the Hanford Police Department.

The two became friends, but police believe Mendoza was secretly using the friendship to gain access to Coyle's financial information, Hanford Police Captain Karl Anderson said during a press conference Monday.

"We think she manipulated that relationship to gain his trust and defraud him of money," Anderson said. "As this relationship grew, we know that Ms. Mendoza started getting access to his bank account information and started getting money from him."

Police say that on April 5, Mendoza and her husband Jose went to Coyle's house and tortured the veteran in an attempt to get him to reveal more financial information.

"They restrained him on a bed and beat him to get access to his bank account information, passwords and other account information," Anderson said. After the suspected torture, Coyle died of "blunt force trauma and suffocation."

A few days later, the Mendozas and their three children allegedly drove to nearby Madera County and burned Coyle's body.

"We know the children were taken to where the body was burned and watched the body burn," Anderson said.

Police say that the Mendozas then returned to Coyle's house to steal more of his items last week, but were spotted by property management employees. The Mendozas reportedly told the employees that Coyle had been hurt and was recovering at a care home in Northern California.

Suspicious of the Mendozas' story, the employees called police, who were able to track Coyle's cell phone to the family's home in Fresno.

Police later apprehended the couple at a Denny's near Los Angeles International Airport. Jose Mendoza had Coyle's credit card and a plane ticket to his native El Salvador in his possession at the time of his arrest.

The Mendozas are being held without bail, and their children are in the custody of Child Protective Services.
Sheldon Theragood did not have much time to think, to assess the dangers of the rising waters of Buffalo Bayou as the rains from Hurricane Harvey made the waterway swell in its banks.

He and fellow Houston Police Department officers made several attempts to rescue a trapped homeless man. They brought ropes, tubes and a four-wheeler to U.S. 59, where the man was stuck under a bridge, but the current was too swift to navigate.

The water was up to my chest, Theragood said. We tried everything, and nothing worked.

The officers, however, refused to give up. They were the only hope for the man who had fallen asleep under U.S. 59 at Runnels, not knowing that Harvey would turn his safe haven into a trap.

Theragood asked one of the officers to hold onto him with a rope, and he started walking into the water with Officer David Rose. Together, they got a rope to the man, and Theragood was able to pull him to shore.

It was one of the scariest moments in Theragoods career, he said. And a wave of relief rushed over him, when he brought the man to safety.

In February, Theragood and Rose were honored with a Life Saving Award from HPD for their efforts. But being a hero is an everyday role for Theragood. The 35-year old member of HPDS mental health division serves on the homeless outreach team.

Captain Bill Staney, commander of the mental health division, said Theragood is an integral part of the group. Hes always willing to work whatever hours are necessary, Staney said. Hes very resourceful, and hes very warm. His caring is apparent.

Born and raised in Houston, Theragood received a bachelors in communications from Texas Southern University and a masters in counseling from Prairie View A&M University. When not at work, hes busy running the nonprofit he created, TheraGood Deeds.

The organization, founded in 2010, provides mentoring to area youth. Theragood leads children in doing good deeds around the city, like feeding the homeless and visiting nursing homes.

houstonheroes@chron.com
Neil Bush shed a tear or two as the first guests trickled into the 2018 "A Celebration of Reading" author's luncheon on Thursday.

Together, he and wife Maria Bush chair the annual fundraiser benefiting the Barbara Bush Houston Literacy Foundation established by his mother and former first lady, Barbara Bush.

In past years, his mother walked into the River Oaks home of hosts Terri and John Havens to pose for photos alongside her husband and Neil Bush's father, former President George H.W. Bush.

This time, after Barbara Bush's passing on Tuesday, Neil Bush instructed his wife to give him a little kick if he became too emotional.

Initial tears aside, much of Thursday's midday gathering was business as usual.

"It's what Mrs. Bush would have wanted," said Trish Morille, a longtime foundation supporter. "The show must go on."

So on it went.

Jackson Hicks' catering team passed the usual canapes, chilled lemonade and iced tea, or wine from the Havens' California vineyard, Cal-A-Vie.

John Havens gave tours of a 200-year old French chapel in the couple's backyard. Patrons including Cathy and Joe Cleary took poolside photos with honored authors Jim Gaffigan, Gov. John Kasich, Christina "C.K." Kerley, Christina Millard and Clive Cussler.

"I made a point to look for my pearls," Terri Havens said - in a multi-strand necklace and pearl-accented heels - of the former first lady's signature accessory.

Then later, when Neil Bush rose to address the crowd, waterworks started again.

"Mom slipped away with dad holding her hand, surrounded by family," he shared, choking up at the memory.

"But," Neil Bush added as lunch was served. "My daughter, Lauren Bush Lauren, gave birth to a son this morning and our newest daughter, Sarahbeth 'S.B.' Bush, who married my son last month is here with us."

Applause erupted, and the program resumed.

Pecan-crusted chicken and strawberry shortcake, Barbara Bush's favorite dessert, were served as authors Kasich, Kerley, Cussler, Millard and Gaffigan each shared a short anecdote.

"I can't tell you how many people I brag to, 'Do you know Barbara Bush likes my book?'" Millard said.

"Is that flag real?" Gaffigan asked of the Havens' framed artwork behind the stage.

John Havens confirmed that the 13-star relic was authentic before inviting the crowd to tour his "Astros arcade" downstairs in the converted garage.

Terri Havens distributed bottles of Cal-A-Vie's cabernet sauvignon, another luncheon tradition, as Neil Bush shouted instructions for the main event, "A Celebration of Reading" at the Hobby Center later that evening, to guests en route to the valet.

And per his mother's instruction, the show went on.
Four Valero contractors were treated for minor injuries after a fire at the company's refinery in Texas City on Thursday, but investigators are still working to determine what caused an explosion that sent a plume of black smoke into the sky and polluted the air with several hazardous contaminants.

Valero said in a statement Friday that the fire occurred on the depropanizer tower, which removes propane from intermediate streams for gasoline production.

Another employee was evaluated as a precaution and showed no health issues, returning to work on Friday.

The explosion happened around 4:50 p.m. Thursday, and Texas City residents were asked to shelter in place for about an hour as a precautionary measure. The fire was contained around 6:30 p.m. Thursday.

In the statement, company spokeswoman Lillian Riojas said that "Valero community air monitoring by a third party continues," and that there had been some elevated levels of particulate matter related to the smoke on Thursday night.

"We continue to cooperate with appropriate regulatory agencies and key stakeholder groups," Riojas said.

Tom Munoz, the emergency manager for Texas City, said that once officials get that information from Valero, they can start putting together an after-action report.

"I know Valero is still doing their investigation," Munoz said. "I really can't comment on what they're doing right now until probably next week when they get together and start figuring out answers to our questions.

Munoz added that the city "feels comfortable" about air quality in the area at this time.

"There was really no concern because of the way that the conditions were  the wind conditions  and the [hydrocarbon] product itself," he said.

But an air quality report issued by the Texas Commission for Environmental Quality indicated that the fire at Valero released several unauthorized contaminants into the air, some of which can cause serious respiratory issues, including an estimated 11,925 pounds of particulate matter and 13,714 pounds of carbon monoxide. Emissions from the fire also went well above federal limits for hydrogen sulfide (estimated 200 pounds released), oxides of nitrogen (389 pounds released), and sulfur dioxide (18,453 pounds released).

Elena Craft, an Austin-based senior heath scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund said in a statement that the Valero explosion was a reminder that the Environmental Protection Agency's new policy "of letting oil and gas companies police themselves is hazardous for American families." The Hill reported on Friday that the EPA planned to roll out a new policy that will focus on offering more flexibility to oil and gas companies that choose to self-audit their emissions and report any failures to meet EPA's regulations.

"We see over and over again that facilities like Valero have repeat violations," Craft said in her statement. "This latest explosion in Texas City is a reminder of the health risks that exist for those who live near industrial plants. It's time that EPA once again put protecting families first."

Environmental experts cautioned that companies like Valero have a history of under-reporting unauthorized emissions. In September, the EPA found that Valero Energy "significantly underestimated" the amount of cancer-causing benzene and other volatile compounds that leaked from its Houston refinery during Hurricane Harvey.

There is also significant skepticism among environmentalists about the Texas Commission for Environmental Quality's enforcement ability. The Environmental Integrity Project and Environment Texas issued a report in July 2017 that found that the state is letting polluters off the hook, foregoing penalties in about 97 percent of incidents.

The TCEQ issued a statement on Friday that the Valero plant in Texas City was given the "all clear" at around 7:30 p.m. and that an investigation is ongoing.

"TCEQ and Valero continue to communicate regarding air monitoring data collected during and after the event," said Andrea Morrow, a spokeswoman for TCEQ.

Bakeyah Nelson, executive director of Air Alliance Houston, said that better transparency is crucial after incidents like this in which residents are in close proximity to an industrial accident. Texas City has a population of more than 48,000.

"In these types of scenarios where you have people living so close by to multiple hazards, it's particularly important for them to have that information as well as first responders so that they know how to better protect themselves," Nelson said.

The EPA is also conducting an investigation of the cause of the explosion. The agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The refinery has no chemical safety violations from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in the last five years. It was penalized for two serious violations related to ladder safety in 2016. Since acquiring the refinery in 1997, Valero has invested more than $750 million in expansions and upgrades, according to the company.

Nick Powell covers Galveston County for the Chronicle. Follow him on Twitter and send him tips at nick.powell@chron.com
Jacob Ford/MBI

The world's largest energy services company, Schlumberger, posted growing profits and revenues from last year as its chief executive touted the need for more global oil and gas investments to meet future demand needs.

Schlumberger's $525 million net profit in the first quarter grew 88 percent from $279 million in the first quarter last year. The company's $7.8 billion in revenues jumped 14 percent from a year ago.


President Donald Trump slammed OPEC for inflating oil prices after the cartel showed a willingness to further tighten crude markets.

"Looks like OPEC is at it again," Trump said on Twitter, not long after energy ministers finished their meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. "Oil prices are artificially Very High! No good and will not be accepted!"

The president's ire followed a stream of bullish signals from a meeting of oil producers in Saudi Arabia, chiefly from the kingdom's Energy Minister Khalid Al-Falih. The crude glut that's weighed on prices for three years has almost been wiped out by OPEC's production cuts, but instead of celebrating victory the group is finding reasons to keep going and drive fuel inventories even lower.

The purpose of the shift in OPEC's target was clear: There's capacity for prices to rise even further beyond their current three-year high, Al-Falih said.

"We have seen prices significantly higher in the past, twice as much as where we are today" and the global economy has the ability to absorb costlier crude, the Saudi minister said.

International oil prices have surged to almost $75 a barrel and U.S. gasoline is the highest in almost three years. Yet OPEC's choke-hold on its own production is only getting tighter. Saudi Arabia is said to desire crude closer to $80.

Accusation Denied

The closest U.S. allies within the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries rejected Trump's accusation. Prices aren't artificially high, said United Arab Emirates Oil Minister Suhail Al Mazrouei. Saudi Arabia's Al-Falih echoed that view.

"We are doing our role to correct the market," Al Mazrouei said. "There are many things affecting the market, not just supply and demand," including geopolitics that are beyond OPEC's control, he said.

Russia, Saudi Arabia's most important ally in the production cuts, gave its backing to continuing the cuts until their end-2018 expiry. There's no obligation to stop just because the pact's initial goal -- stockpiles in industrialized nations back in line with the five-year average -- is at hand, said Energy Minister Alexander Novak.

Helping Texas

Novak also rejected Trump's accusation, while also arguing the group's production cuts have helped U.S. producers to boost output. "The deal helped to restore the industry of Texas," he said in an interview with Bloomberg television.

Soaring U.S. shale production has been a nagging concern for OPEC and its allies, but the group's key players appear to be more fixated on the immediate benefits of high crude prices. Saudi Arabia needs to cover weighty domestic spending and attract investors to a partial sale of its state oil company, Aramco. Russia is relishing its new role as a major Middle East power broker, while also enjoying bigger financial gains than anyone from the accord.

"Russia is keeping all options open and Saudi Arabia is talking about a 2019 extension," UBS Group AG analyst Giovanni Staunovo said by email.

Going Deeper

Novak wouldn't rule out some easing of the production cuts this year, but said it would depend entirely on the situation in the market. For now, the group is cutting ever deeper, and Saudi Arabia's Al-Falih chided nations that haven't been implementing their fair share of the curbs at the opening session of the Jeddah talks. Iraq and Kazakhstan have pledged to improve their compliance, according to the closing statement from the meeting.

Overall, OPEC and its allies cut 49 percent deeper than the agreed 1.8 million barrels a day in March, according to the statement. That's the biggest reduction ever and the seventh month the group has surpassed its target, Novak said.

Much of those additional reductions weren't intentional, according to the International Energy Agency. An economic crisis and " chronic mismanagement" dragged Venezuela's output to a multi-decade low, while Angola lost production from aging fields. Others were temporary, such as field maintenance in Algeria. The involuntary cuts may keep getting deeper if Trump reimposes sanctions on Iran next month.

Ministers seemed to embrace the notion of a significantly tighter oil market. Saudi Arabia in particular gave a strong indication that higher prices wouldn't be a bad thing. Every year the world needs to develop new daily production capacity of about 4 million to 5 million barrels and invest hundreds of billions of dollars, but that's not happening right now, Al-Falih said.
While early voting begins Monday April 23 for two bond referendums called by Humble and New Caney ISDs, resident can cast their votes for a replacement to U.S. Rep. Ted Poe beginning May 14.

Humble ISD bond election

Humble ISD will start early voting on the $575 million bond on April 23.

Money from the bond will be used to build a new middle and elementary school, rebuild Kingwood Middle School and Lakeland Elementary School, add a second transportation center, expand the districts police station, add new technology and security projects as well as renovations and repairs to other campuses.

Election day is May 5.

For more information, visit the Humble ISD website.

New Caney ISD bond election

Four educational facilities-related projects were chosen for New Caney ISDs 2018 bond. They include a comprehensive high school No. 3, the replacement of Keefer Crossing Middle School, replacing Porter Elementary School and adding 360 seats via an addition to Woodridge Forest Middle School.

The high school  which is located just south of Kingwood Medical Center  has a projected opening date of Aug. 2022. Eventually, the high school plans for a capacity of 2,250 students. However, the school would open with only 1,350 seats.

Crenshaw, Roberts vie to replace Poe

Kevin Roberts already overcame a $6 million onslaught from self-funding multimillionaire Kathaleen Wall to keep his hopes of winning a seat in Congress alive.

Now the Republicans challenge is beating retired Navy SEAL Dan Crenshaw, a dark horse candidate who emerged from the primary election with surprising momentum.

Roberts, 51, said hes not intimidated as the May 22 runoff approaches in the GOP primary battle to replace U.S. Rep. Ted Poe in Congress and will stick to his strategy.

We will continue to run our race, said Roberts, a businessman who was elected to the state Legislature in 2016. All I can do is focus on our campaign and work to get our core message out  Experience matters.

But Crenshaw isnt about to give an inch on that front either.

Crenshaw, 33, has never held office but said hes more than ready to put his nearly 10 years in the Navy up against Roberts political experience. Crenshaw said his time in the military taught him leadership skills, which he said are at the core of being a good public servant.

Crenshaw said that experience gives him an edge over Roberts on foreign policy and national security issues. Crenshaw served in South Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2012, while on his third tour of duty in Afghanistan, a roadside bomb nearly killed him. He lost his right eye and medically retired from the Navy in 2016.

Crenshaw said as global issues arise, hell have an understanding that cant be matched by Roberts.

I think it gives me a nuanced understanding, Crenshaw said.

Flood control

Roberts thinks his longer track record in the Houston area and his understanding of politics put him in a better position than Crenshaw to deliver on flood mitigation issues, a critical issue after Hurricane Harvey.

Roberts said hes been working on flood control issues like dredging the San Jacinto River and Cypress Creek and has lived through the flooding that the region has endured.

Roberts was raised in Amarillo but has lived in Houston for about 17 years. Crenshaw returned to the Houston area after 10 years in the military and attending college in Massachusetts.

I am dealing with these issues every day since Harvey, Roberts said.

Crenshaw emphasizes flood control as a key issue, too. He recently added a section on his website addressing the topic and has made it a key part of his talking points at forums and events.

Roberts, who manages the business side of the Lanier Law Firm, said he has a better track record working on those issues and will be better positioned in Congress to work on getting fixes for the regions flooding woes.

I will fight every day to make sure we receive the help we need to recover and build the infrastructure we need to prevent this kind of tragedy from ever happening again, Roberts said.

Key endorsements

In early voting and absentee ballots for the March 6 primary, Roberts dominated. He had 38 percent of that vote going into Election Day  best among the nine candidates running in the race. With just under 21 percent of the early vote, Crenshaw was sitting deep in third place behind Wall.

On Election Day, however, an army of Crenshaw supporters drove a get-out-the-vote effort that pushed Crenshaw into second place  and into the runoff.

Youve got to connect with people and get them out to vote, Crenshaw said.

Crenshaws success has landed him some key national endorsements. U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a rising star in conservative politics, endorsed Crenshaw last week, joining U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions of Dallas, national radio host Hugh Hewitt and astronaut Buzz Aldrin.

Dans a true-grit warrior, and thats exactly what we need in Congress right now, Cotton said.

Roberts has focused on more local endorsements, which he says show his deep ties to the community. Hes won support from Harris County Judge Ed Emmett and Harris County Commissioner Jack Cagle.

He is thoughtful and makes decisions based on facts, Emmett said in his endorsement. I look forward to Kevin being in Congress to help us with flood control projects that are so desperately needed.

Additional reporting by Kaila Contreras and Melanie Feuk

jeremy.wallace@chron.com
Stationed police car lights flashed some four blocks away from the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, venue of the 2018 "A Celebration of Reading."

The Barbara Bush Houston Literacy Foundation's marquee event is always a hot ticket; in past years, J.J. Watt and former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton have each made surprise appearances.

And despite Thursday evening's top-notch lineup of esteemed authors - Jim Gaffigan, Candace Millard, Clive Cussley, Christine "C.K." Kerley and Governor John Kasich - much of the activity downtown surrounded the passing of Barbara Bush, former first lady and local literacy champion.

Inside on Zilkha Stage, VIP patrons paid their respects the Barbara Bush way: in navy blue, pearls and with plenty of laughter.

Trish Morille and Dr. Julie Baker Finck, BBHLF president, exchanged photos of unexpected memorials from across the country. While in Portland, Oreg., Morille snagged a Barbara Bush donut from a local bakery. And someone texted Finck the snapshot of a Plano billboard with the former first lady smiling in her signature pearls.

Last December, during the "A Celebration of Reading" Author Announcement Party hosted at Sue and Lester Smith's home, Barbara Bush gifted Sue a three-strand, oversize pearl necklace from her personal collection. En route to Sarofim Hall for the program, Sue proudly gestured to the precious trinket as camera bulbs flashed around her.

More than 1,900 filled seated for the 24th annual fundraiser, which by night's end, raised more than $2.4 million including a $150,000 surprise donation from the McIngvale family.

"Neil asked me to fill in for his mother, and to keep things upbeat," former Secretary of State James A. Baker said in his opening remarks. "I said I would try to fill her shoes, but I wouldn't wear the pearls."

Next, Ashley Bush spoke of her grandmother's love of gossip. "In fact, she told me about my engagement before my fiance did."

Finck shared her Barbara Bush-given nickname, the "Boss."

"Coming from the 'Enforcer,'" Finck said, acknowledging Barbara Bush's own moniker. "It's quite a compliment."

Sarahbeth Bush, who recently married Pierce Bush in Colorado, followed to introduce the first author, Millard, after sharing her own anecdote. "'Ganny' taught all of her children and grandchildren that it's OK to be strong, but it's also OK to cry - which is one of the reasons I fell in love with her grandson."

Millard discussed the common denominator shared by the subjects of her three biographies on Theodore Roosevelt, James A. Garfield and Winston Churchill: voracious reading.

Later, Cussler revealed that his biggest regret was never having met Barbara Bush in person.

After Kerley's high-tech, TED Talk-style presentation, Kasich and Gaffigan closed the show with hilarious personal stories from their respective youths.

"Mrs. Bush always worried that the program wouldn't be funny enough," Finck shared earlier in the day. However lengthy - "I have no idea how long I've been up here," Gaffigan admitted mid-speech - there was no shortage of laughs.

Dr. Russell Levinson, the former president and first lady's pastor for the past decade who will preside over the official funeral service at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, ended the evening on a poignant note. On Barbara Bush's final day, he read aloud Psalms 1-48 and the first two chapters of "Little Women," anointed her head with oil and prayed with the family as she slipped away. A neighborhood-wide power outage occurred during her last hour; when the lights flipped back on, she was gone.

Mary Sarah, "The Voice" reality-TV contestant, performed "The Climb" before joining Victoria White, Marquist Taylor and the 35-member Houston Gospel Choir for a powerful rendition of "Amazing Grace."

Afterward, top-level supporters dined onstage or in the Grand Lobby with the authors and announcers.

Festivities ended as they always do, with a good-natured, albeit competitive book swap of the best-selling titles placed in each swag bag - just like Barbara Bush would have wanted.
PRAIRIE VIEW--The applause was thunderous and the cheers loud as Ruth Simmons strolled to the stage Friday in Panther Stadium to be sworn in as the eighth president at Prairie View A&M University.

Purple and gold spotlights shone on the 72-year-old as she reflected on her journey from a young child growing up in Fifth Ward to one who has been lauded for her professional and academic achievements.

"I believe in a way that my path to Prairie View was written in the heavens," Simmons said choking up during her inauguration speech. "For how else can I explain the improbable way I came to this task? How can I turn away from doing for other young people what was done for me?"

The university community gathered to celebrate the inauguration of a woman from a small town in East Texas, who has served as an inspiration to others and made history as the first African-American president at an Ivy League institution.

Students, faculty and other guests praised the new president during their speeches, describing her as an advocate for students and a thoughtful leader.

Simmons grew up in Grapeland, Texas, the youngest of 12 children and the daughter of a sharecropper and a maid. To honor her parents, she announced to thunderous applause that she would be starting a $100,000 scholarship in their names, which would be matched by John Sharp, chancellor for the Texas A&M University System. Simmons will continue to donate $20,000 annually to the fund to support four students each year.

"My mother and father, though they lived most of their lives at the poverty level, raised 12 children to adulthood. They kept us safe at a dangerous time," said Simmons. "They taught us how to live with dignity and purpose. They insisted on showing others the basic respect that they were never accorded. Without their sacrifice and their teaching, I could not have been here today."

'Honorable service'

The ceremony included speeches from U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston, and the Rev. Dr. Michael Eric Dyson.

Dyson, an opinion writer at the New York Times and professor at Georgetown University, praised Simmons' character and lead the crowd in prayer.

"We're grateful for her genius. We're grateful for her honorable service," said Dyson, "a woman from the lowest dregs of society to emerge as one of the greatest figures in the history of this country."

Many who spoke reflected on Simmons' full circle journey that led her back to Houston and Prairie View A&M University.

Simmons' family moved to the Fifth Ward from Grapeland when she was 7 years old. She went on to graduate from Phillis Wheatley High School, earn an undergraduate degree from Dillard University, a historically black college in New Orleans, and later a doctoral degree in romance languages and literatures from Harvard University.

She made history as the first African-American president at the all-woman's Smith College, and then served as president of Brown University from 2001 until 2012, making her the first African-American president at an Ivy League institution.

Simmons came out of retirement to serve as the university's interim president last summer. She was announced as the sole finalist for the job in October.

During Jackson Lee's remarks, she noted Simmons' beginnings at Wheatley High School and praised her for pushing through adversity to achieve her dreams.

"Prairie View A&M, you're going to have a massive journey with this wonderful educator and woman who understands that nothing is broken if human beings can strive," Jackson Lee said. " I give tribute to you Dr. Simmons because you capture Sojourner Truth when she said 'ain't I a woman?' "

'Ruth the Truth'

Before Simmons gave her inauguration address, her close friend Walter Massey, chancellor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, described how Simmons' honesty has been lauded. Her courage to tell the truth created an initiative to acknowledge and study Brown University's historical relationship to slavery, he said.

"While diplomatic, Ruth tells you what she believes whether you like it or not," said Massey. "She takes on tough issues forthrightly."

Student body President Kendric Jones echoed Massey's sentiments as he lead others in shouting the nickname Prairie View's students have given her: "Ruth the Truth" roared throughout the stadium.

"Throughout my term, she has been a mentor to me always seeming to know when to give advice and when I truly needed it," Jones said. "Ruth is the truth and it brings the student body joy that she will be leading the university into that extended legacy of greatness."

Simmons seemed relaxed throughout the ceremony, dancing along to the music sung by the university's choir and played by the band. When Sharp, the A&M University System chancellor, put the presidential medallion over Simmons' head, she jokingly told him to not mess up her hair.

Despite the humor, Simmons became emotional when she reflected on her own journey as a small-town girl who has achieved.

"I couldn't have known the path my life would take," Simmons said. "Through persistent hard work, education and the help of so many educators, I learned about the rich possibilities of human endeavors."

Brooke A. Lewis writes for the Houston Chronicle. She can be reached at brooke.lewis@chron.com
A Tennessee man who used to wash the windows of a children's hospital dressed as Spiderman has been sentenced to 105 years in prison for producing child porn.

Jarratt A. Turner, 36, of Nashville, was sentenced Monday for "multiple instances of production of child pornography and transportation of child pornography," said U.S. Attorney Don Cochran for the Middle District of Tennessee in a news release.

According to court records, Turner befriended two different families who had young children, including a toddler boy and an infant girl, and offered to babysit them. One of the ways Turner found these children was by washing windows at Vanderbilt Children's Hospital in Nashville while dressed as the Marvel superhero, the U.S. District Attorney's Office wrote in a news release.

READ MORE: Houston neighborhoods with the most registered sex offenders

"Between October 2014 and May 2015, Turner took sexually explicit images and videos of the toddler girl on 10 different occasions and of the infant boy on six different occasions, while in his basement apartment in Nashville," the U.S. District Attorney's Office wrote in a news release. "The sexually explicit material included depictions of himself sexually molesting the two very young children, who were between the ages of 12 and 31 months during this period."

Turner then uploaded the images to the internet using public Wi-Fi in order to avoid detection, the attorney's office added.

Turner was charged on June 1, 2015, with 16 counts of production of child pornography and transportation of child pornography. He pleaded guilty to all counts of the indictment on March 20, 2017.

Fernando Alfonso III is a digital reporter at Chron.com. Follow him on Twitter at @fernalfonso.
A welder at a northwest Harris County drilling company was airlifted Thursday afternoon after a small explosion, authorities said.

The man, in his 60s, was welding inside Global Drilling Support International in the 9800 block of Windmill Park Lane, near Fallbrook Drive and North Beltway 8, when the explosion happened around 1:20 p.m.

FACTORY CLOSING: Former Maxwell House coffee plant in Houston's East End to close

Authorities rushed to the business and called for LifeFlight to transport him to Memorial Hermann in the Texas Medical Center.

He was taken in critical yet stable condition, according to the Harris County Sheriff's Office.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is expected to investigate.

Global Drilling Support International, in part, manufactures machines for drilling companies, according to its website.

Jay R. Jordan is a breaking news reporter at Chron.com. Follow him on Twitter at @JayRJordan.
A total of 32 students in Montgomery County are now better prepared to continue their college education thanks to the Rotary Club of East Montgomery County's Project Connections.

Project Connections is a partnership program between the Rotary Club and Lone Star College to help provide assistance to students wishing to further their education. The Rotary Club provides the money for scholarships while Lone Star College provides financial aid information.

"We raise the funds from the spelling bee, which was held a few weeks earlier," said Rotary Club spokesperson Rose Austin.

The spelling bee was held in February at the East Montgomery County Improvement District building with both students and adults competing in teams of three.

"The Rotary Club provides scholarships to two students from the four high schools in our community and service area," said Austin.

The students, from New Caney, Porter, Splendora and Caney Creek high schools, each received $250 to put toward their college.

Project Connections presented a total amount of $8,000 in scholarships at an event on April 16 at the East Montgomery County Improvement District's facility in New Caney.

To be eligible for a scholarship, senior students first completed financial aid sessions with Lone Star College. Once finished, these students were entered into a drawing for the scholarships.

The Rotary Club's Project Connections has served students in the club's service area for the past 15 years. According to Austin, this project is a blessing to students who need a helping hand with their education.

"Many of these students could not attend college otherwise," she said.

Austin says an estimated 150 students have participated in Project Connections.
Hundreds of Fort Bend ISD high students left their classrooms Thursday as part of student-led walkout demonstrations held in memory of students who lost their lives to mass shootings in schools. Groups of students stood together for 20 minutes to symbolize their unity with students from around the country who hope to draw attention to the issue of gun violence.

Austin High School students posted a message on social media about the walkout: "We, students of Fort Bend ISD stand in solidarity with the students of Parkland Florida."

Travis high School students posted a similar social media message: "Travis High School students commemorate the lives impacted from school shootings nationwide, while dedicating a moment of silence to the individuals who had fallen and could not get back up."

Students from Clements, Dulles, Ridge Point, High Tower, Austin, Travis and Elkins High School were allowed to participate in the 20-minute demonstration by administrators as long as the walkout didn't last more than 20 minutes and occurred on campus. In a a letter to parents, administrators wrote: "Fort Bend ISD believes the student voice, and as part of the FBISD profile of a graduate encourages the development of leadership and citizenship which includes advocacy for themselves and others. With that said, it is also important that any campus demonstration remain organized, peaceful and non-disruptive, as safety is always the upmost concern."

The walkouts were organized as part of a nationwide student-led walkout planned Friday to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the Columbine High School shootings to honor victims of gun violence and to encourage students to vote, organizers said.

Accordin to Fort Bend ISD spokesperson Amanda Bubela, school officials saw the demonstrations as learning opportunities.

"In last couple of months, our campus principals have continued to work with students to ensure that students have been able to play an active role in voicing their opinions while also maintaining a safe learning environment," Bubela said via email. "Campus administrators had the autonomy to work with their own students if students indicated they wanted to organize events, but there were also parameters that were outlined so that parents and students were aware of the potential consequences and response should a demonstration occur."

Since Fort Bend ISD had a previously planned student holiday on Friday, walkout demonstrations were held Thursday.
Ten days after it began, the hunger strike at a Huntsville prison is "essentially" over, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

Though Wynne Unit prisoners reported that as many as 50 inmates participated in the strike at one point, only one was still refusing food as of Friday morning, prison spokesman Jeremy Desel confirmed.

The decision not to eat came on the heels of a lockdown in one wing of the prison, which officials said stemmed from an uptick in disciplinary infractions, including feces-throwing, contraband and assaults on staff and other inmates.

From the outset, prisoners and advocates have offered a different narrative from prison officials.

In a letter home, one of the hunger-striking inmates alleged that the March 23 lockdown began not as the result of disciplinary infractions but in retaliation for an alleged beating at the hands of an officer.

READ MORE: Inmate families, advocates say hunger strike larger than reported

And though Desel said the strike peaked at 22 participants before dwindling, prisoners reported more than twice that.

The ordeal began last month after a norovirus outbreak put the unit on medical restriction. With no janitors to clean up the hallways, inmates began tossing newspapers and bags full of feces into common areas, according to prison officials.

Later, once the unit went on lockdown, one prisoner allegedly threw feces at an officer.

Since then, prisoner advocates have alleged that the feces actually came from an inmate's colostomy bag after he was unable to get medical help from staff. Desel said he had "not heard that."

At least one of the hunger-strikers was transferred to a different unit, though it's not clear how many others may have been as well.

For prisoner advocates like Jennifer Erschabek of the Texas Inmate Families Association, the incident raises other concerns.

"The prison system definitely needs some independent oversight so that when abuses and cover-ups occur we have someone everyone can trust to get to the truth of what is really going on behind prison walls," she said late Friday. "There just needs to be more transparency."
A fight between brothers at a south Houston home ended in a shooting that sent one to the hospital and the other to jail, police said.

One brother called 911 about 8:30 p.m. Thursday and told authorities he shot his sibling inside a the home in the 1200 block of Bayswater Drive, near Almeda-Genoa Road and the South Freeway, police said. Both brothers are in their 50s.
Television actress Allison Mack and NXIVM founder Keith Raniere have been indicted on federal charges of sex trafficking and conspiracy to commit forced labor for their alleged roles in a secret sex-slave club in which women were also branded with the pair's initials.

The Times Union first reported last week that Mack, 35, was identified in FBI records filed in support of a recent search warrant application as an alleged co-conspirator with Raniere in his efforts to coerce women into joining the secret club.

Federal prosecutors said Mack was arrested in New York City early Friday. She was arraigned by a U.S. magistrate judge late Friday afternoon and ordered held in custody of U.S. marshals pending a bail hearing scheduled for Monday in Brooklyn. Raniere has been held in custody without bond since his arrest last month and will be arraigned on the indictment at a later date, they said.

The indictment, which was filed Thursday and unsealed on Friday, charges both Raniere and Mack with multiple counts of sex trafficking, conspiracy to commit sex trafficking and conspiracy to commit forced labor. They each face a potential minimum sentence of 15 years in prison if convicted.

FBI 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.

"Allison Mack recruited women to join what was purported to be a female mentorship group that was, in fact, created and led by Keith Raniere, said U.S. Attorney Richard P. Donoghue of the Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn. The victims were then exploited, both sexually and for their labor, to the defendants benefit. This office and our law enforcement partners are committed to prosecuting predators who victimize others through sex trafficking and forced labor.

Mack, an actress who is best known for her role in the television series "Smallville," which ended in 2011, had initially been listed in a federal criminal complaint as Raniere's unidentified co-conspirator.

According to people familiar with NXIVM, Mack joined the organization about a decade ago, around the same time several other young actresses were pulled into its ranks, including Nicki Clyne, Grace Park and Kristin Kreuk, who recruited Mack. Kreuk left NXIVM several years ago  before the slave-sex club was allegedly formed by Raniere  and has denounced the practices made public recently.

Mack was with Raniere in Mexico when he was taken into custody on March 25 by Mexican federal police officers, who arrested Raniere at the request of U.S. law enforcement authorities.

Raniere, whose organization has been described by experts as a cult, was arrested at a luxury villa in Puerto Vallarta.

The federal complaint alleges that Raniere 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.

In the federal criminal complaint filed last month against Raniere, prosecutors said a Halfmoon residence known as the Library was where Raniere, 57, repeatedly had sex with an unidentified actress in her 30s.

That townhouse on Hale Drive, which was searched by the FBI on March 27, 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.

The state Health Department initially brushed off the allegations that women in the secret club were being branded by a doctor, Danielle Roberts, whose license to practice medicine in New York remains intact. After reports about the branding became public, the stage agency reopened its examination of the allegations against Roberts, who two women said used a cauterizing tool to brand multiple participants in the secret women's group.

According to information referenced in a complaint filed with the state by Sarah Edmondson of Vancouver, at least 20 women associated with NXIVM were lured into the club and required to provide "collateral."

Edmondson and another woman involved with NXIVM told the Times Union that they were brought into the club and subsequently branded by Roberts, who then gave them special bandages and advice on helping the wounds heal.

Edmondson said she was told it would be a "tattoo" and that the symbol was a Latin symbol for "the elements." She learned weeks later that the brand was actually the initials of Raniere and Mack, whom Edmondson's complaint identified as having "started" the secret women's group with Raniere.

State Health Department officials last year said they were researching what regulations there may be, if any, governing human branding. In July, they had dismissed Edmondson's complaint, saying the allegations "did not occur with the doctor-patient relationship and should be reported to law enforcement."

Edmondson said she also contacted State Police, but an investigator told her there was no criminal conduct because the women agreed to be branded.

The U.S. attorney's office in Brooklyn opened its investigation last fall.

Federal search warrant records that were unsealed two weeks ago in response to a request by the Times Union said Raniere has received financial support 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 also 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, Raniere had not flown out of the country since 2015, when he visited the heiress' private island in Fiji," according to the FBI.

In Mexico, authorities said, Raniere got rid of 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 search warrant records indicate there are other federal crimes 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.

Note: An earlier version of this story gave an incorrect year for the end of the series "Smallville."
Sections of Woodway Drive and Sage Road in west Houston will be closed to the public due to first lady Barbara Bush's funeral, starting on Friday and continuing until Saturday afternoon.

Woodway Drive will be closed from Pine Shadows Drive to Post Oak Lane, according to the Houston Police Department. Only residents and business owners operating in the area are able to pass through the road closures.

Part of Sage Road northbound also will be closed, from Longmont Drive to Post Oak. Residents and business owners are the only people allowed access to those restricted areas.

VIPs CONFIRMED: Former presidents, first ladies to attend services

Bush's funeral is being held at St. Martin's Episcopal Church at 717 Sage, which is hosting a public repose for the public from noon to midnight Friday. Those who wish to pay their respects will be screened at Second Baptist Church at 6400 Woodway.

Travel on Woodway between Chimney Rock and the West Loop will be closed. HPD is warning people to expect heavy traffic delays due to closed roads. In order to avoid traffic congestion, police are asking people to find alternate routes.

The FBI, the Secret Service, the Texas Department of Public Safety and other agencies will assist HPD with security.

FIRST LADY THOUGHTS: Family, friends, leaders remember Barbara Bush

Large bags and backpacks are not permitted in St. Martin's. Photography inside the church also is not allowed. Weapons of any kind will not be allowed in the church.

Buses will transport people to St. Martin's and back to Second Baptist Church, according to HPD. St. Martin's will close at midnight but lines will close at Second Baptist before midnight based on the number of people in line.

The former first lady's funeral on Saturday will be a private service and by invitation only.

Will Axford is a digital reporter for Chron.com and HoustonChronicle.com. Follow him on Twitter.
A deputy who shot and killed an unarmed man last month following a confrontation in north Houston was fired late Friday by Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez.

The deputy, Cameron Brewer, was terminated for failing to follow the departments use of force policy when he shot and killed Danny Ray Thomas, 34, on March 22, sheriff officials confirmed. The officer was equipped with a Taser, but did not choose to use the electronic stunning device to try and subdue Thomas.

The fatal shot, fired about 20 seconds after Brewer ordered Thomas to get on the ground, can be heard on a recording of the confrontation. The officers dashboard camera did not capture video of the shooting, and his recently issued body camera was charging in the car when the shooting occurred.

Brewer had stopped his patrol unit to investigate an altercation at the intersection of Greens Road and Imperial Valley between Thomas and a passing motorist. Gonzalez has said Thomas was foaming at the mouth, and the video showed him walking in traffic with his pants down around his ankles.

When Thomas ignored Brewers commands to stop and continued walking toward him, Brewer fired a single gunshot that fatally wounded Thomas, who was unarmed.

Earlier this month, Thomass relatives sued the department, and Houston Police Department homicide detectives are still conducting a criminal investigation. The case is expected to be presented to a county grand jury for review.

Attorneys Ben Crump and Bob Hilliard, who are representing the slain man's family, lauded the sheriff's decision to remove Brewer from the force.

"The acknowledgment that this officer violated use of force policy when he killed a non-threatening innocent man who was mentally ill and who was committing no crime will enrage a Harris County jury," the lawyers said Saturday in a statement.

"Perhaps a jury's verdict will cause the sheriff's department to focus on training, supervision and monitoring its officers. The color of your skin and state of your mental health should not be factors in whether you live or die in an interaction with police."

The termination came after a thorough internal affairs investigation found Brewer did not adhere to the departments use-of-force policy, according to a news release detailing the termination. The policy calls for the use of force to be avoided if reasonably possible.

The brave men and women of the Harris County Sheriffs Office are called upon to make life or death decisions on a daily basis and we take that responsibility very seriously, Gonzalez said, in the release. We hold the communitys trust as sacred, and we will continue to support our deputies with clear policies and the valuable training they need to protect the lives of all our residents.

The Harris County Deputies Organization criticized Gonzalezs actions, even as civil rights groups including the Houston chapter of the NAACP and the Texas Organizing project praised his decision.

The disciplinary actions comes less than a month since the fatal shooting, after Gonzalez had earlier pledged a swift internal investigation into his deputys actions.

Brewer, a six-year law enforcement veteran, has worked at the sheriffs office since mid-2016. Previously, he had worked at the Precinct 4 Constables Office and for several school district police departments, according to state police licensing records.

The shooting outraged local civil rights activists and thrust Houston back into a national debate over police shootings of African-American men even as local law enforcement officials have touted efforts to reduce lethal incidents and increase transparency.

The shooting victim, Thomas, and the deputy are both African-Americans.

Reached by phone, Thomas sister, Markeeta Thomas-Smith, declined to comment.

Attorneys from the Harris County Deputies Organization defended Brewer and said they would be appealing his firing.

Sheriff Gonzalez has second guessed Deputy Brewers split-second decision, a union attorney said in a press statement. We do not agree with the decision of Sheriff Gonzalez to terminate Deputy Brewer.

Civil rights activists  some of whom have sharply criticized Harris County law enforcement in the past  said they were encouraged by Gonzalezs decision.

Tarsha Jackson, with the Texas Organizing Project, called the termination a step in the right direction.

Just knowing an officer has been terminated and hes being held accountable, this gives the community hope that eventually these type of incidents will cease, she said. This is evidence there is an administration that is willing to hold police accountable.

James Douglas, president of the Houston chapter of the NAACP, said he was proud of the sheriff.

Im not shocked, he said. I think it was the right thing to do  When law enforcement does what its supposed to do, we should recognize it.

Keri Blakinger contributed to this story.
Chanting for gun-law reform and reduced firearm violence, an estimated 2,000-plus students marched to City Hall Friday morning as part of nationwide school walkouts.

The Houston Youth Walkout, believed to be the largest local out-of-class gathering to mark the April 20 protests, attracted students from across the region for a 1.2-mile march. They joined thousands of students from Greater Houston who demonstrated at their schools Friday morning, advocating for changes to gun laws and honoring victims of gun violence.

"To see so many students from different high schools come together brought tears to my eyes," said Elena Margolin, a march organizer and senior at Houston ISD's High School For The Performing And Visual Arts. "We realize we're all in it together and all fighting for the same cause."

READ ALSO: Aldine ISD picks Lufkin leader for superintendent position

School districts across the area prepared for demonstrations Friday, with many campus principals coordinating plans with students. They sought to balance free-speech rights with student safety and orderly continuation of classes.

Several demonstrations remained indoors, with students leading assemblies or rallies in gymnasiums, while others stayed confined to school grounds.

In recent days, students and campus principals across the region have been coordinating walkout events, as school districts try to minmize disruptions and safety concerns associated with walkouts. Several districts said they had empowered principals to allow events on campus grounds, encouraging them to speak with student organizers in advance.

READ ALSO: HISD trustees clear path for quicker approval of charter partnerships

"We're looking forward to some of the unique programs and ways our students have come up with to let their voices be heard," said Nicole Ray, a spokeswoman for Cypress-Fairbanks ISD. "Our biggest concern is safety. We have 117,000 students, so we wouldn't have the ability to protect that many students walking out at the same time."

Fort Bend ISD schools were out Friday, but held demonstrations Thursday, which district leaders called learning opportunities.

"In last couple of months, our campus principals have continued to work with students to ensure that students have been able to play an active role in voicing their opinions while also maintaining a safe learning environment," district spokeswoman Amanda Bubela said via email. "Campus administrators had the autonomy to work with their own students if students indicated they wanted to organize events, but there were also parameters that were outlined so that parents and students were aware of the potential consequences and response should a demonstration occur."

On social media, students throughout the region  from Aldine to Pearland to Cypress  posted photos and videos of on-campus protests.

AN HSPVA STUDENT WRITES: Why Houston students like us are walking out

Austin High School students posted a message on social media about the walkout: "We, students of Fort Bend ISD stand in solidarity with the students of Parkland Florida."

Travis high School students posted a similar social media message: "Travis High School students commemorate the lives impacted from school shootings nationwide, while dedicating a moment of silence to the individuals who had fallen and could not get back up."

Students chose April 20 as a day of demonstrations to mark the anniversary of the 1999 Columbine High School shooting.
Drivers on the North Freeway miraculously avoided critical injuries after an 18-wheeler crashed across the highway Friday morning and went up in flames, blocking traffic on the major route for more than seven hours.

The crash sent the driver to the hospital with a broken hip and caused a complete closure of I-45 North near Mount Houston before rush hour as crews worked to clear up the charred truck and mounds of trash that spilled out of the truck onto the freeway, officials with the Houston Police Department and Texas Department of Transportation Houston District said.

The driver crashed during an attempt to avoid a four-vehicle pile-up in front of him. His injuries are not life-threatening, HPD spokesman John Cannon said. No other injuries were reported.

"Hes really lucky to be alive," Ivan Berdecia, who identified himself as the driver's brother, told KPRC. "You can see the truck and how it is right now, so hes lucky."

All lanes on both sides of the roadway had reopened by 12:23 p.m., according to Houston TranStar.

Eight vehicles, including the 18-wheeler, were involved in three separate wrecks linked to the fiery crash.

The first crash happened around 5:10 a.m., when a green pickup truck became disabled with a flat tire in a moving lane of traffic on the inbound freeway, Cannon said.

Another car hit the pickup truck, causing two more cars to pile up behind it. No one was injured in that crash, Cannon said.

The second crash happened around 5:15 a.m. The driver of the 18-wheeler, which was traveling inbound near West Road, swerved to avoid the pile-up but still hit the last car, Cannon said.

The 18-wheeler driver then lost control and rolled over, with part of the truck going over a concrete barrier into the HOV lane, Cannon said. The truck caught fire and became fully engulfed in flames.

It appears that the driver managed to get out of the truck on his own, and he was then taken to the hospital, Cannon said.

READ ALSO: Severe weather possible north of Houston on Saturday

A third accident occurred when two cars slowed down to avoid the big rig crash, Cannon said. A black Dodge Magnum struck those two cars, and no one was injured.

The driver of the Dodge was detained and was possibly intoxicated at the time of the wreck, Cannon said. No charges have been filed.

Traffic cameras showed a dramatic scene, with flames bursting high into the air and heavy plumes of smoke lingering in the area as the fire was being extinguished.

The southbound freeway was closed for more than seven hours.

READ ALSO: Man in critical condition in suspected drunken driving crash

The trash in the truck was still smoldering in the hours after the crash and had to be removed before the truck could be turned upright, said Danny Perez, spokesman of the Texas Department of Transportation Houston District.
SAN ANTONIO - A man is dead after police say he was shot by his own mother Wednesday night on the North Side.

San Antonio Police Department Sgt. Barry Smith said the man, 31, was fatally shot at about 9:15 p.m. in the 7000 block of Valley Trails.
Congressional candidate Dan Crenshaw hasn't completed a required political ethics document, leaving voters unable to see how the former Navy SEAL makes a living and what investments he might have that could create potential conflicts of interests if he wins a seat in the U.S. House.

All candidates for Congress are required to submit detailed financial disclosures once they've raised or spent at least $5,000. Crenshaw accomplished that at the end of 2017.

Crenshaw is running for the 2nd Congressional District in Harris County. The district runs from west Houston, north to the Montgomery County line and ropes around to the east to pick up Humble, Atascocita and Kingwood.

He is in a GOP primary runoff on May 22 against fellow Republican Kevin Roberts. Roberts filed his financial disclosure in December. He reported having an annual income of over $470,000 from the Lanier Law Firm in Houston, where Roberts is the CEO and runs the business side of the firm. Roberts is not an attorney.

Crenshaw, 35, said the missed paperwork was an oversight.

"It has recently come to my attention that my personal financial disclosure form was not submitted," Crenshaw said after being asked about the missing form by the Houston Chronicle.

"It had been completed, and I believed it had been filed. It was not, and I accept responsibility. The campaign's former Treasurer on record with the (Federal Election Commission) did not file the disclosure form and he is no longer with the campaign," he said.

Crenshaw installed a new treasurer for his campaign on April 3, designating Sue Walden to replace Andrew Freeman, according to papers filed with the FEC. In March, the FEC flagged Crenshaw's campaign for a series of mistakes in his campaign finance reports, including discrepancies in reported totals for money raised and spent in his campaign since the start of the year and for failing to report employers for several donors to the campaign.

Crenshaw has reported raising just under $400,000 for his campaign. Roberts has raised more than $877,000.

The candidates are battling to replace U.S. Rep. Ted Poe, an Atascocita Republican who announced his retirement last year. The winner of the May 22 runoff will face Democrat Todd Litton, the director of an education nonprofit. Litton won the Democratic Primary handily over four other Democrats on March 6.

RELATED: Jabs flying between Kevin Roberts and Dan Crenshaw in congressional race

Crenshaw is the only Republican candidate for Congress in a runoff who has not filed the required personal financial disclosure forms with the U.S. House. There are 11 other Republican candidate running for Congress statewide, all of whom have filed the forms. Those forms are required to be filed 30 days before the original primary election back March 6.

Candidates and officeholders who are more than 30 days late are assessed a $200 fee, according to House Ethics Committee guidelines.

Jeremy Wallace writes about state politics and government for the Chronicle. Follow him on Twitter at @JeremySWallace.
Grant Wood (1891-1942) was the least likely of overnight sensations. In 1930, he was an unknown, middle-aged interior decorator and painter living in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, when his submission to the Art Institute of Chicagos annual juried art show won a bronze medal and $300. Wood was delighted. He hired a press agentduring the Depression, you could hire someone to do anything on the cheapand within days, American Gothic appeared on the front page of the arts section of the Chicago Evening Post. The papers art critic called it the biggest kick of the show and truly American. Soon reproduced in hundreds of publications, American Gothic joined Whistlers portrait of his mother as one of the best-known American paintings.

American Gothic and Other Fables, the Whitney Museum of American Arts survey of Woods career is a surprising, gratifying, and essential show, which includes the famed image. Wood pieced together enough education as a young man to design and sell jewelry and silverware, paint murals for schools and businesses, and teach art. In the 1920s, he went to Europe four times. We dont know much about his travels except that he went to Paris, Belgium, Germany, and Italy, didnt socialize with American avant-garde artists, and developed Latin Quarter manners that offended people when he came homebut come home he always did. Even after American Gothic, and after Time called him chief philosopher and greatest teacher of representational U.S. art, he stayed in Cedar Rapids, taught at the University of Iowa, and lunched at a local diner each day. He was self-sufficient and frugal. He was never poor. He built his own house and furniture. Sometimes he lived with his mother and sister. He was briefly married. Until he died, he occupied a peculiarly American niche: an eccentric local arts celebrity, a strange and familiar presence, most likely gay, never feared, one of us, but what I would call a pet outsider. He saw things others didnt, felt free to express what many wouldnt, found merit in what snobs derided, and noticed qualities some took for granted.

Along with fellow Midwesterners Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry, Wood was an anchor figure in a national art movement called Regionalism. They claimed to disdain foreign, notably French, influence; celebrated American values like decency, stoicism, and independence; promoted local training; and professed that good art neednt come only from New York. Wood thought that one criterion of good art was scrutability; that everyone could, with effort, understand it.

What does American Gothic mean? Wood initially said that the picture was about the architecture. Its true that the picture started with the house. Wood thought an Iowa facade style descended from French cathedrals was pretentious. He added the figures after he decided on the house as a subject. He sometimes said that he depicted a married couple, sometimes a father and daughter. The easily recognizable models were his sister, Nan, and his dentist. He later said that he invested the figures with fanaticism and bad taste but that they were basically good and solid people. He looked for severely straight-laced characters who would reflect the houses exterior. He certainly succeeded. Lots of Cedar Rapids residents thought that the painting mocked Iowans for their piety and austerity. Is it about repression? Incest? Hopelessness or melancholy? Mourning? Critics have offered these and other interpretations over the years, but the work doesnt provide a simple answer.

The shows curator, Barbara Haskell, decided to display American Gothic without fanfare, beside other paintingsmostly single-figure works that arent portraits but storytelling types. Wood said that the painting begins with Mencken, referring to H.L. Menckens relentless condemnation of culture in the Bible Belt, a term he coined. Carl Van Vechtens 1924 satirical novel, The Tattooed Countess, was set in a fictionalized Cedar Rapids, once his hometown. Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, and Sherwood Anderson were among the legion of writers who skewered the Midwest as a wasteland drained of sophisticated feeling, on the one hand, and a swamp of barely repressed weirdness, on the other. The less you know of small-town life, the more compelling such mean-spirited generalizations seem. Woods take is kinder and gentler, as were Booth Tarkingtons and Willa Cathers, but we need his other work to understand why.

In American Gothic, Wood parodies people everyone who has lived in a small town knowsand few really like. Theyre tight asses, so much so that theyre funny, as Mark Twain is often funny. Plaid Sweater, from 1931, is another imaginary portrait. The subject is hearty, wholesome, purposeful, reliable, and also dapper. We can see the admirable man in the boy. Victorian Survival, also from 1931, is lovely. Stereotype and satire can quickly elide into adoration. The modern phone by the womans side isnt a parody; it can only imitate her. It cant supplant her dignity and, as the title suggests, her durability. She also offers a new take on the elegance of the basic black dress.

Wood was a skeptic. Big ideas made him wary. Daughters of Revolution is a delicious picture in this respect. It depicts three old ladies standing in front of Leutzes iconic Washington Crossing the Delaware. Theyre smug and prim. Their big ideathat descent from Revolutionary War figures confers special wisdom, refinement, and statureis a joke, but its only a poke in the ribs. The painting is beautifully designed, with soothing ripples and patterns. The women are self-important but also serious and direct. Theyre ever so soft and yielding, as are most grandmothers; theyre not evil. Even revolutions need keepers of standards.

By the late 1930s, some linked Regionalism with yahooism, then isolationalism, and later fascism. At the University of Iowa, Wood quarreled with colleagues over teaching methods. The battle became politically freighted but sounds tiresome and juvenile today. In 1941, the new department chairman tried to fire Wood, insinuating that he was a communazi because he produced art that appealed to a broad public. This populism, it was feared, invested an artist with the power to rile people for the wrong reasons, and it took away from specialists the keys to the locked door of meaning and judgments of quality.

A parallel school of regional artists worked in New England and included Norman Rockwell and Grandma Moses, along with writers like Robert Frost. American Gothic in 1930 and Thornton Wilders Our Town, which opened in 1938, bookend the 1930s, and have a certain amount in common. Wilder was a visionary while Wood was quirky and idiosyncratic but both works are enigmatic, small-town tales. Both seek in modest things the real, the timeless, and the essential. One artist found them in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the other in Grovers Corners, New Hampshire.

The Whitney catalogue includes a fascinating biographical chapter that gives Wood an articulate, subtle voice as he bobs and weaves when critics try to pry meaning from him. Wood got buried in both scholarship and the marketplace until Wanda Corn resurrected him in her 1983 retrospective. Knowing Woods story is useful in appreciating his work, which otherwise can feel isolated from his wry personality.

Painting after 1945, led by Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Franz Kline, and others, emphasized abstraction and emanated from New York, leaving no room for figures like Wood. A telling story: while Woods detractors were trying to fire him at the University of Iowa, the painter and his supporters were trying to jettison the young H.W. Janson, a junior professor in the art history department. Jansons crime: promoting Picasso as the ages leading art genius. Jansons earliest book, published in 1962, featured as many Picassos as it did Michelangelos, and virtually ignores American art. Wood, of course, thought Picasso was a charlatan, as did Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins, among others. Janson would later become famous, though, for his ubiquitous Western art tomes, printed by the millions and used in most introductory college art history surveys. Wood might have had the last word.

All pictures courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art
The chair of Save the Children International has stood down from his role following the launch of a Charity Commission investigation into safeguarding, saying that change is needed.

Sir Alan Parker announced yesterday that he would be stepping down from the board of Save the Children International. His term was due to end in December this year.

His resignation follows an investigation launched into Save the Children UK about its handling of serious allegations of misconduct and harassment by senior staff members, where he was formerly chair. In his letter of resignation, Parker wrote that given the complex mix of challenges the organisation is facing it is his view that change is needed.

Meanwhile, the Charity Commission has called for information on Save the Children UK for its inquiry into misconduct and harassment allegations.

In his letter of resignation, he referred to the harassment cases involving two former staff members, Brendon Cox, widow of murdered MP Jo Cox, and Justin Forsyth, former chief executive of Save the Children UK. At the time of these incidences, Parker was chair of Save the Children UK.

In his letter of resignation sent to his Save the Children colleagues, Parker wrote: In Save the Children UK we dealt with some unacceptable workplace behaviour, involving harassment, in our head office in Farringdon in 2012 and 2015. The process around Brendan Cox involved a disciplinary panel, including trustees and an independent QC. The processes around Justin Forsyth were handled by HR and senior trustees, and were reviewed by an independent law firm. These issues are now subject to further review by the Charity Commission. This is an important review and I will work with them to assist in any way I can.

Parker, who has been part of the for the Save the Children movement for ten years, wrote: Today I am announcing my resignation from the boards of the Save the Children Association and Save the Children International. Given the complex mix of challenges the organisation and the sector is facing, it is my view that a change is needed. I have therefore taken the decision to step down as chair and will do everything I can to support a smooth succession.

Parker had been facing calls to resign since the incidents came to light. Former employee Alexia Pepper de Caires, who is now co-leader of the Womens Equality Party in Hackney, has been leading these calls.

Pernille Lopez, a trustee of Save the Children International board, said: We would like to thank Alan for his immense contribution to Save the Children over the past ten years. Under his leadership, we have grown and modernised our organisation, and are now better able to support children living in terrible situations around the world. His vision and commitment will be missed.

Helle Thorning-Schmidt, chief executive of Save the Children International, said: I would like to thank Alan for the decade of service he has given to Save the Children. We are deeply grateful for the time and dedication he has invested in our important cause. On a personal note, I have enjoyed working with Alan and we have benefited hugely from his extensive knowledge and energy.

As a trustee and now as chair, Alan has worked tirelessly to help us grow to an organisation that works in over 120 countries to reach 50 million children every year. Building on this strong foundation, we will continue to fight for a world where every last child can survive, learn and be protected.

Call for information

The Charity Commission has published dedicated email addresses for its investigation into Save the Children UK.

The Commission said it would like to hear from anyone with information which is relevant to the inquiry including misconduct allegations, complaints or incidents involving the charity. The dedicated email address for anyone wishing to contact or submit evidence to the inquiry is [email protected].

The regulator said that the inquiry is confined to the issues of safeguarding in the context of misconduct and harassment of the charitys staff; it is not examining safeguarding in the context of the charitys programme delivery for beneficiaries.
Novelist and editor Stephanie Feldman was at work when she first learned that her identity had been stolen. Except in her case, it wasnt a Social Security number or banking information the culprit was afterit was her livelihood. With nothing but a Twitter login and a headshot swiped from Stephanies professional website, an anonymous figure had launched an effective impersonation campaign, painting Stephaniequite falselyas a misandrist in support of white genocide. Feminist to do list: abort all white male babies, Stephanies avatar tweeted, unleashing a torrent of hateful messages and direct threats in the real Stephanies direction. But her attacker didnt stop there: Next, they contacted the university where Stephanie adjuncts in a bid to get her fired. Then they went after her publisher.

In the weeks and months following her attack, Stephanie was forced to field comments and messages that at turns caused her to fear for her safety, take breaks from social media, and censor what she published online. Still, she knew that to withdraw from online discourse altogether would be professional suicide.

ICYMI: Photographer behind graphic Charlottesville image recounts near-death experience

I cant quit social media, because otherwise how do I do all this? Stephanie says, genuinely perplexed. Thats how I connect to other writers. Thats how I promote my book. Even so, shes been too scared to tweet out the book cover for her forthcoming anthology, Who Will Speak for America?, for fear that her contributing writers will become targets of similar online harassment campaigns.

Unfortunately, Stephanies case is far from unique. Many writers today, like Stephanie, rely on social media to promote their work and make connections in the industry. Presence on social media has become a professional imperative. Book publishers pressure their authors to maintain an active social media presence ahead of book releases. Freelance journalists, in a constant hustle to secure work, are often forced to rest on the laurels of their Googleability. But online abuse can force writers to disappear from online communities or refrain from publishing altogether, with serious personal and professional consequences. A new study from PEN America finds evidence of a chilling effect taking hold in our online communities.

Writers like Lindy West, Roxane Gay, and Jessica Valenti have been sounding alarm bells about online harassment for years now. Yet, inconsistent responses from social media companies, an outdated yet prevailing attitude that online abuse is not a real life problem, and the ongoing amplification of hate against marginalized communities have allowed online harassment thrive. Meanwhile, victims have been left to hack their way through the hate jungle largely on their own, trying to ensure their voices are still heard and their reputations remain intact. Its exhausting work, particularly for freelancers, emerging writers, and queer writers and writers of color, who may lack institutional support.

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With the help of several partner organizations working on behalf of journalists, playwrights, poets, authors, and screenwriters, PEN America surveyed more than 230 writers and journalists in the fall of 2017 on how online abuse affected their work and presence online. The survey specifically sought out writers and journalists who had been previously harassed. For the purposes of this survey, online harassment was defined to include the following behaviors, carried out in an online setting: the repetitive posting of inflammatory or hateful comments [trolling]; cyberstalking; physical threats; the publishing of sexually explicit images without consent [revenge porn]; and the public posting of private information [doxing].

Victims have been left to hack their way through the hate jungle largely on their own

A full two-thirds of survey respondents reported experiencing severe reactions to online harassment, including refraining from publishing their work, permanently deleting their social media accounts, and/or fearing for their safety or the safety of their loved ones. More than one-third of survey respondents reported avoiding certain topics in their writing due to online harassment, while 16 percent reported permanently deleting a social media account. Thirty-seven percent felt that online harassment had damaged their reputations. Another 62 percent reported that online abuse had taken a toll on their personal lives or their health.

Today, PEN America is releasing its Online Harassment Field Manual to help writers and journalists respond to episodes of online harassment. Though the survey respondents skewed older and whiter than we expected (a result that does not reflect the general reality of how online harassment breaks down demographically), the results of this survey are nonetheless alarming from a free expression perspective.

ICYMI: A pretty bad typo in the LA Times

The numbers reported above would be troubling coming from any community of internet users. But applied to writers and journalists, evidence of a chilling effect deserves a serious conversation between writing communities, technology companies, and advocacy groups about where we go from here. How can technology companies effectively and transparently reduce abuse on their platforms? What recourse do victims have when tech platforms remain unresponsive to their cries for help? How can publishers and newsrooms support their writers during episodes of harassmentincluding their freelancers? What happens when one persons so-called free speech impinges on anothers?

These questions are not new, nor are there obvious solutions. In the Field Manual, weve made every effort to provide some answers. Sourced from research as well as conversations with writers, journalists, editors, mental health professionals, university faculty, online harassment experts, and cyber security experts, our digital Field Manual offers tactics and resources to targets of online harassment, their allies, and their employers, including:

Step-by-step guides for enhancing individual cybersecurity and preventing doxing

Ideas for establishing supportive cyber communities to deploy during episodes of online harassment

Information about wellness and self-care, including crisis support and tips from a formerly harassed psychologist

Guidelines for talking to professional contacts and loved ones about online harassment

Guidelines for allies and witnesses interested in intervening in online harassment

Best practices for news organizations and publishers to improve institutional support during episodes of online abuse

Information about possible legal recourse for online harassment and pro bono legal resources for writers without legal representation

Firsthand accounts of online harassment from a diverse group of writers

In our conversations with writers and journalists, an appalling number of them expressed how alone, isolated, and helpless they felt during episodes of online harassment. It is our hope that this Field Manual will offer solidarity to such writers and empower them to take steps to protect themselves and even fight back against online abuse. Most of all, we hope that, distributed far and wide, this Field Manual has the power to help prevent writers voices from being silenced in the face of online hate.



ICYMI: Fox News issues statement in response to Hannity controversy

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

Laura Macomber is the Journalism and Press Freedom Project Manager at PEN America. Her work focuses on the impact of hate speech and online harassment on writers and journalists, and on the development of approaches to curb the spread of fraudulent news and promote the importance of a free press.
Nearly two weeks ago, Hungarys far-right governing party, Fidesz, won a crushing victory in national elections, further strengthening Prime Minister Viktor Orbans tight grip on power. Orban has gradually eroded Hungarys independent press since he took office in 2010. His latest win is all but a death knell.

Orban accelerated a longstanding anti-media campaign a few years back, going on TV to encourage key allies to buy or begin news outlets. In late 2016, then Austrian-owned company Mediaworks shuttered the countrys largest opposition daily, then sold its remaining properties to government-friendly owners. Since this months election, other critical voices have fallen silent. When the English-language Budapest Beacon closed last week, its managing editor lamented that pro-Orban consolidation has made it impossible to source reliable information in Hungary. The countrys last remaining opposition daily, Magyar Nemzet, and Lanchid radio station also both shut down after their owner Lajos Simicskaa tycoon who fell out with Orban in 2015decided he would no longer finance them.

ICYMI: Dead stories and the small fees for killing them

Speaking with NPRs Mary Louise Kelly, former Magyar Nemzet reporter Flora Garamvolgyi blamed the governments monopoly on advertising for squeezing them out. What happened is obviously a personal tragedy because I lost my job, she added. But people have been made to consume racist, xenophobic, anti-immigration propaganda all over the news, like, daily. So its a much bigger issue than just a newspaper shutting down.

Orbans recent election campaign was predicated on extreme rhetoric on immigration, intertwined with relentless attacks on Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros. Soros is a worldwide lightning rod for fringe anti-Semitic conspiracy theorizing, but in Hungary, attacking him has a more mainstream resonance. Escalating a familiar smear campaign, pro-Orban paper Figyelo last week published a list of more than 200 pro-Soros speculators, including staffers with Amnesty International and other NGOs, and investigative journalists like Andras Petho.

Day 4 after #hungaryelections. Gvt-friendly weekly publishes list of "George Soros people" in Hungary, including me and my colleagues at @direkt36 pic.twitter.com/vh14u33Dih  andras petho (@andraspe) April 12, 2018

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Orban has launched a full-court press against his countrys media, chipping away at independent ownership, publicly attacking critical journalists, and channeling his agenda through friendly outletswhistleblowers at the state-funded MTVA network told The Guardian last week that editors parrot nativist propaganda dictated by the government. Hungary is a European Union country, and so, at least in theory, is tied to minimum standards of democracy and press freedom. And yet EU leaders have too often been timid in holding Orban to account. They should nowalong with the international community at largerally urgently to save Hungarys free press. Theres a chance theyre already too late.

Below, more on the crisis gripping Hungarian journalism:

Meet the puppetmaster: Before the election, Politicos Lili Bayer and Joanna Plucinska profiled Orban media fixer Antal Rogan. (The piece also contains a useful graphic mapping Orbans personal ties to major media owners.)

Would you like the guards to escort you out of the room?: In a short film and accompanying first-person essay, Al Jazeeras Dan Nolan digs into Orbans war on the press, and describes the threat he felt when he questioned it.

More-than-creeping authoritarianism: The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project calls for the international community to support Hungarian journalism, denouncing an attempt to intimidate independent voices [that] mimics similar attacks by other fascist or extreme governments who have created lists of enemies of the state.

Some international context: You can read Reporters Without Borderss Hungary fact file here . In 2017, it ranked 71st out of 180 countries worldwide for press freedom.

Other notable stories:

CJRs Brendan Fitzgerald reports that local media in Charlottesville, Virginia, failed to contextualize coverage of an online survey to change two Confederacy-linked local park names. Anyone with internet accessfrom local residents to Confederate apologists and white supremacists around the countryhad a chance to choose what names they desired for [the] parks, Fitzgerald writes. With few exceptions, it was impossible to tell who had voted for what name, and where those votes might have come from.

David Peckers American Media Inc., the parent company of The National Enquirer , hasnt experienced a Trump Bump. Despite its relentlessly sycophantic coverage of the president, The Wall Street Journal s Lukas I. Alpert reports , its weighed down by ballooning debt, falling revenue and shrinking newsstand sales. Relatedly, AMI freed former Playboy model Karen McDougal from a contract that had prevented her from talking openly about her alleged affair with Trump.

The latest Time 100 list of influential people is out. Sean Hannity is listed under leaders, as are Today show hosts Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb . Freshly minted Pulitzer winners Jodi Kantor, Megan Twohey, and Ronan Farrow are now also Time icons for their work exposing Harvey Weinstein and others. And Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos is a titan, which likely wont please our Time  obsessed titan-in-chief.

For The Hollywood Reporter , Glynnis MacNicol takes on a fraught topic in journalism: the burgeoning generational gap in newsrooms. While some dismiss them as the woke vanguard of creeping political correctness, the new generation of media leaders, few familiar to anyone older than 40, bring with them differing views on transparency, egalitarianism and social justiceand are far more outspoken about their beliefs, MacNicol writes.

Under-pressure Trump lawyer Michael Cohen withdrew his lawsuit against BuzzFeed, which he says defamed him when it published the infamous Steele dossier on Trumps alleged Russia ties last year. Cohen stands by the allegation, but is dropping the suit because of last weeks FBI raid on his premises, according to his attorney.

Yesterday was a good day all round at BuzzFeed, whose UK investigative team may have solicited one of the all-time great government PR quotes . When it asked British tax authorities if theyd refused to investigate a telecoms firm because it donated money to the governing Conservative party, a senior spokesperson replied, This is the United Kingdom for Gods sake, not some third world banana republic where the organs of state are in hock to some sort of kleptocracy. The authorities changed their tune after verifying BuzzFeeds evidence, calling it regrettable.

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Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, and The Nation, among other outlets. He writes CJRs newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.
AFTER 21 YEARS at The Denver Post, Jason Blevins, the papers one-man mountain bureau, is now pitching stories as an independent journalist without the assurances of a full-time paycheck.

In the past three weeks or a month I have been schooled in the realities of freelance, and its a hard gig, says Blevins, who covered the outdoors for the Post. For Blevinsone of about 30 casualties in a recent wave of layoffs that crashed through the Posts newsroomthere are health-insurance issues to navigate and a family to support. Blevins, sick of working for what he called the Posts black-souled owners, volunteered to leave the paper:

After 21 years, I'm leaving @DenverPost  I can't work for black-souled owners like Alden's Heath Freeman who reward loyalty to a vital craft by hurling shit at dedicated journalists. I'm Sad/Angry/Scared. Ready to work for anyone w common sense, decency & respect #NewsMatters  Jason Blevins (@jasonblevins) March 22, 2018

It quickly became clear to him why some newly unemployed journalists might bolt the industry altogether for a more lucrative, stable job in content marketing or public relations.

The Post layoffs gave way to national coverage of that papers hedge-fund owner, Alden Global Capitalan effort encouraged by the Posts own editorial pages. Less attention has been paid to the circumstances of individual journalists pushed out of the Post who hope to continue reporting.

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Now, the Economic Hardship Reporting Projecta journalism organization focused on income inequality housed at the Washington, DC-based Institute for Policy Studieswants to help those journalists sustain their work. Alissa Quart, executive editor of the project, tells CJR that her organization is setting up a $10,000 fund specifically for ex-Denver Post journalists who recently lost their jobs.

ICYMI: Program lifts aspiring writers from poverty, infuses media with fresh voices

Founded by Barbara Ehrenreich, author of the 2001 book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, the project supports independent journalists whose livelihoods have been imperiled by an upended media industry. Since 2012, the nonprofit has commissioned stories about income inequality and helped financially troubled journalists place pieces in magazines or newspapers like The Guardian and The New York Times.

The latest fund dedicated to former Denver Post journalists is something of a public statement, according to Quart. Weve been sort of focused like a laser [on] supporting staff that are being laid off when theres a bad actor involved like Alden Global Capital, she says. Last fall, when billionaire Joe Ricketts shut down local news sites Gothamist and DNAinfo after staff voted to unionize, EHRP offered a $5,000 grant to writers displaced from the sites.

Im sticking with journalism. Ive been piecing together stories here and there just trying to fill in the hole. But at the same time, its a real challenge.

Quart likens the EHRP effort to literary social work. The $10,000 will fund up to eight ex-Post journalists to produce feature-length stories about economic hardship and income inequality. Each writer will be paid by the nonprofit project and again by the publication that ultimately runs the resulting story. They can also suggest outlets that might be interested or help place them.

The reporting does not necessarily need to focus on Denver or Colorado, but the project is interested in parts of the countryrural Colorado, saythat arent frequently covered by reporters on the coasts. Journalists for EHRPs On the Ground rural reporting project cover communities in Montana, Iowa, and Oklahoma, and their work is cross-published at The Guardian and in local news outlets. Work from the Denver Post fund could potentially be part of that.

Last year, EHRP writers placed a total 118 pieces57 articles, eight films, 13 photo essays, and other multimedia reportsacross a variety of publications. According to Quart, EHRP stories tend to be kind of immersive features that are news centered, but they have strong characters and theyre very writerly and are 2,000 words. She adds, We like animations and cartoons, so were sort of open to other forms as well. The group also tries to culture jam, attempting to place stories about inequality in food or real estate magazines whose readers might not typically encounter such reportage within their pages. Earlier this year, Curbed published a first-person reported piece by Joseph Williams, commissioned through EHRP, about being evicted.

Blevins decision to leave the Post, rather than being laid off, doesnt interfere with his eligibility for support, says EHRP managing director David Wallis. Its not the letter of the law, Wallis says about grant eligibility. Its the spirit of the law.

Blevins hadnt yet heard about the EHRP grant for Denver Post castaways when he spoke with CJR, but the idea is something he says he would consider. Hes still living in the mountains in Eagle County, Colorado, one of the most expensive places in the country for health insurance, hustling to find homes for his work. Blevins says he had one of the best jobs in journalism at the Post, and wouldnt have quit if not for the Posts owners.

Im sticking with journalism, he says. Ive been piecing together stories here and therecolumns, magazine articlesjust trying to fill in the hole. But at the same time, its a real challenge.

ICYMI: Meet the journalist tracking Digital First Medias hedge-fund owner

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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 [email protected] .
DAN BELLOWS IS JUST A GUY in Iowa who loves a good puzzle. He enjoys crosswords and riddles, and even likes to hide his kids Christmas presents and leave them clues for finding them. But the puzzle thats occupying most of his time recently is the one facing local journalism: how to make money.

In early 2017, Bellows, who is the maintenance manager for the Telegraph Herald in Dubuque, Iowa, took his family to Florida on vacation. While there, they visited an escape room. Bellows was hooked.

When Bellows returned to Iowa, he told Tom Woodward, CEO of Woodward Communications, which owns the paper, that they should start an escape room in an empty company-owned building. The crazy thing is, Woodward listened.

ICYMI: Iowa high schoolers power statewide investigations

The Telegraph Herald is 97-percent employee owned. And according to Steve Fisher, publisher of the paper, the company has a culture of employee-led innovation. Many of the papers money-making schemes started as ideas from employeessuch as their self-published local history books and their popular video series on sports, More than the Score.

This independent-minded culture dates back to the early days of the newspaper. The Telegraph Herald is a direct descendant of the Dubuque Visitor, which was founded in 1836 and was the first newspaper published west of the Mississippi. After a series of mergers, the Dubuque Visitor became the Dubuque Express and Herald in 1854at which point its stubborn independence began in earnest.

Bellows idea for an escape room, while a little oddball, fits with the history and culture of the Telegraph Herald

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The first Dubuque Express and Herald editor, Dennis Mahoney, was a noted partisan crank who wrote scathing attacks on President Lincoln, accusing him of perpetuating an unconstitutional war and for violating states rights by promoting abolition. In August of 1862, Mahony was arrested by orders of the Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and his writ of habeas corpus was suspended by Lincoln. He was released from prison that November after swearing allegiance to the federal government. Lincoln wasnt the only one annoyed by Mahoney. In 1874, his own paper described Mahoney as a proverbial liar [who] gripes like Satan with the bellyache at the idea of telling the truth, and who would forswear himself into Satans friendly embrace in two minutes to satisfy a grudge.

In 1901, the paper merged with the local Telegraph and become the Telegraph Herald. And despite Mahoneys legacy with the paperor, perhaps, because of itthe Telegraph Herald has always taken innovative approaches to making money. The newspaper was the first to issue a state directory of professional men and farmers and, in 1937, began a foods of the nation cooking school.

Bellows idea for an escape room, while a little oddball, fits with the history and culture of the paper. And because of that history, Woodward listened and encouraged Bellows to draw up a business plan. So in spring of 2017, Bellows and Fisher began investigating what it would mean for a newspaper to own an escape room.

ESCAPE ROOMS ORIGINATED in Japan; the first, according to a recent New York Times story, opened in Kyoto more than a decade ago. According to Room Escape Artist, a site that tracks escape rooms, there were 22 escape rooms in the US as of 2014. Today, there are approximately 2,300 across the country. Most of those escape rooms, including Escape Room Dubuque, run as independent businesses. With little overhead, and with tickets priced between $20 and $30, its easy for companies to start turning a profit within the first couple months.

Bellows and Fisher and a team from the Telegraph Herald took a road trip around the country, visiting escape rooms in Tennessee and Georgia. Their favorite escape room, Water Landing, was in nearby Madison, Wisconsin. Water Landing simulates an emergency aircraft landing in the ocean. Participants are smugglers in the cargo area of the airplane. The challenge is to open the escape hatch before time is up.

Bellows, Fisher and the rest of the team brought their lessons back to Dubuque. Implementation took about six months, from idea to opening day. Escape Room Dubuque launched in November 2017, and began turning a profit after the first month.

I dont know, Bellows shrugged, with genuine honesty, when I asked him about his puzzle-making process. We just sit down and do it.

The Telegraph Herald escape rooms are housed in a long, low commercial building on the west side of town. The other half of the building is an abandoned LEBEDA Mattress Factory store; across the parking lot is a Jimmy Johns sandwich shop. Bellows says the location was chosen for its proximity to nearby Kennedy Mall and Highway 20. Inside, the waiting room is clean and well-decorated in a furniture store aestheticsoft tan walls, blue couches, wiry metal clocks. Theres also a gallery wall with pictures of skulls, clocks, and an antique key.

The rooms are themed Casino Heist, Race to Treasure, and Motel Mystery. In Motel Mystery, participants have to comb through the room looking for clues to solve the murder of a traveling salesman. Bellows says he once saw a man count out all the prop coffee filters in the room and then insist to his group that the number of coffee filters was significant. It wasnt. And isnt. But Bellows keeps the coffee filters there, and loves to watch from the observation room and laugh when people flip through them counting.

Escape room owners can order kits to develop their rooms. But Bellows and Escape Room Dubuque Manager Renee Pregler wanted to bootstrap it, and came up with every room, every clue, and every concept. Lisa Spira, an editor of the Escape Room Artist site, told the CJR that, while its hard to put a number on it, most people/companies come up with their own room concepts. Its the overwhelming majority.

Pregler and Bellows are autodidacts, and it never occurred to them that they couldnt do it themselves. The pair is still finessing their designs, and plan to swap out the least popular room, Casino Heist, for a new room very soon. I dont know, Bellows shrugged, with genuine honesty, when I asked him about his puzzle-making process. We just sit down and do it.

Escape Room Dubuque has hosted a lot of corporate groups who come through on team-building exercises. Bellows says he can tell right away if a group will be successful based on how they operate. A group that just listens to one person will fail every time, he explains. But a group with a lot of different leaders who work together, they always succeed.

Its a midwestern ethicjack of all tradesthat keeps the Telegraph Herald alive. Local newspapers are uniquely suited to try new things, says Fisher, because they have deep roots within their local community and have so much of the talent and know-how in place.

ACCORDING TO FISHER, the Telegraph Herald is running Escape Rooms Dubuque as a purely profit-driven venture. The business is separate from the other newspaper endeavors as far as branding and management; everything is completely run by Bellows and Pregler.

The Telegraph Herald isnt the first small newspaper to branch out into incongruous endeavors (or, as Fisher calls it, a diversified portfolio). Calkins Media, which owned newspapers in Pennsylvania, Florida, and New Jersey, began its own real estate company before selling its papers; the parent company of the Cedar Rapids Gazette owns an emergency vehicle manufacturer; and in 2012 The Washington Post bought a majority stake in Celtic Healthcare, an in-home health care and hospice provider. Given those businesses, an escape room doesnt seem like such a gamble.

But staying alive and competitive in the fluid mosaic of the media landscape is a challenge that the Telegraph Herald grapples with daily. Fisher notes that while the paper is doing well, Woodward Communications is always looking for ways to expand their empire. In the past year, the company has launched new live events and special publications.

Not every venture is a success. Fisher admits that their recent Boys with Toys and Made in the Midwest trade shows didnt really take off. And then there was the wine walk, kind of like a bar crawl, that got hampered by local liquor laws. Fisher thinks theyll try that one again.

Its a midwestern ethicjack of all tradesthat keeps the Telegraph Herald alive, even as media companies across the nation struggle. Its an ethos of adaptation, ingenuity, and flexibility. Local newspapers are uniquely suited to try new things, says Fisher, because they have deep roots within their local community and have so much of the talent and know-how in place. We look local first, explains Fisher. The reason were able to do these things is because we already have the human resources department. We already have the accounting department. Some of these administrative functions are already in play. Theres also thrift: Fisher explained that Escape Room Dubuque was possible in part because they got a lot of the materials for a good deal.

As far as plans for the future go, Woodward Communications isnt planning anything quite like an escape room. Right now, as Fisher tells it, they are looking at products and services that their subscriber base might need or want. Fisher declined to be more specific, but wouldnt rule anything out.

At the start of the 2017, Fisher wasnt worried about how well an escape room might perform in Dubuque. Because it wasnt even in our head then, he says. And when you think about when it got in our head, and how fast we took it to market, thats kind of what I mean.

For now, Bellows and Pregler will continue to use Escape Room Dubuque to help solve the puzzle of profit. I asked Bellows if watching people solve his puzzles gives him hope for the survival of the news media and humans, but he just silently shook his head.

ICYMI: Read CJRs 2017 Local News issue here

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Lyz Lenz is a writer based in Iowa. Her writing has appeared in Pacific Standard, Marie Claire, Jezebel, and the Washington Post. Follow her on Twitter @lyzl.
Being on an airplane more than six miles in the air when an engine blows up and sends shrapnel through a window is an experience so scary that aviation lawyers say its not just the family of the woman killed on a Southwest Airlines Co. flight this week who could have a case.

All of the passengers here, and the crew, will likely have claims, said Robert Clifford, founder of Chicago-based Clifford Law Offices, whos been involved in every domestic commercial aviation disaster since the 1970s. Even if these people were not physically injured, he said, many, many of them will experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

The people who were sending videos to their families, saying, These are my last words to you, which is something that did occur in this incident, that kind of person will live with that for the rest of their life, he said. The plane was carrying 149 people, including 5 crew.

Days after a jet engine exploded about 32,500 feet over Pennsylvania 20 minutes into a flight, federal and corporate inspectors are examining what happened. The National Transportation Safety Board said it will take at least a year to pinpoint what caused the engine failure that led to the first fatality on a U.S.-registered airline in more than nine years.

Immediate Needs

In the meantime, several experts with knowledge of commercial airline disasters said that Southwest will likely lead the charge to work with passengers and their families.

In cases of serious injury or death, an airline will usually advance funds to help passengers with immediate needs. George Hamlin, a transportation consultant based in Fairfax, Va., who has worked with airlines and commercial aviation suppliers, said that although hes not sure non-physical injury would be covered under that scenario, Southwests reputation suggests the company will go to some lengths to appease people who were on the flight.

Still, that may not preclude litigation down the road, though the precedent for liability based on emotional trauma or non-serious injuries is ambiguous.

Clifford is particularly attuned to what forced Flight 1380 to abort its route to Dallas and land instead in Philadelphia. He was lead counsel for survivors of a DC-10 that crashed in Sioux City, Iowa, in July 1989. One hundred twelve people died and 184 survived.

Uncontained engine failures, in which parts of the engine burst through the protective casing called a cowling, have a special history for me in my work, he said.

Engine Components

Technical experts from Boeing Co., which makes the 737 jetliner involved in the incident, and engine maker CFM International, a venture of General Electric Co. and Frances Safran SA, are gathering clues about what caused the accident.

Southwest workers, Clifford said, cannot sue their employer. They would, however, have standing to sue General Electric or the manufacturer of any faulty component of the engine. GE, Boeing and Southwest will probably pool funding for settlements and sort out reimbursements later, according to Clifford.

Every commercial plane in the sky is insured for anywhere from $1.85 billion to $2.1 billion. Each company involved has its own insurance coverage, he said.

All of those insurance interests have already gotten together, Clifford said, and somebodys on point for dealing with these cases.

A spokesman for Boeing declined to comment. Representatives of Southwest and General Electric didnt immediately respond to requests for comment sent outside regular business hours.

Early Shock

At Wisner Law Firm in Geneva, Illinois, clients who are parties in litigation related to an American Airlines Group Inc. engine that exploded on a Chicago runway in 2016 have been calling to ask how Tuesdays incident might affect their case, according to Alexandra Wisner, a partner at the firm.

The clients are saying, Thats exactly what we were afraid would happen, that this would happen in-flight, and thats why we were all so fearful of our lives, she said.

People are typically still in shock during the first few days after such an event, Wisner said. Sometimes, theyre not aware that they could have a claim. They think, Well, I didnt have some kind of big injury, she said, so they dont realize that any remedy is available.

Under domestic law, Wisner said, there is an argument that there is a contemporaneous injury here, a physical one. It can range from things like the inhalation of smoke, to having turbulence  being jerked around in the plane. Depending on how exactly the evacuation went, if people were being knocked into each other  it really depends on the facts of the case.

Wisner has represented passengers in a number of incidents that have included in-flight turbulence or an emergency evacuation. Southwest, she said, might already be reaching out to passengers, asking if theyre all right and whether they needed any sort of treatment.

On international flights, the Montreal Convention governs liability, so any passengers who were on one leg of an international trip would be covered by those standards. But with international tickets, fright alone hasnt traditionally been a recoverable claim, according to one experienced aviation lawyer who asked not to be identified because of potential involvement in future litigation.

If you have an airline that dropped 30,000 feet and all the engines went off, you couldnt recover for the fright unless you were physically injured, he said.

There are examples of what not to do, according to Wisner. In the days after the American Airlines incident on the Chicago tarmac, she said American offered her clients frequent-flier points and vouchers.

They were actually insulted by it, she said, because they felt thats not going to compensate them for the horror that they went through on that day.

Copyright 2021 Bloomberg.
Before a U.S. farm voluntarily recalled 207 million eggs, government inspectors found rodents scurrying in manure pits, equipment that was coated with grime and food debris, and outside a swarm of large flying insects too numerous to count.

Unsanitary conditions were found during multiple inspections of a Rose Acre Farms facility in Hyde County, North Carolina, that allowed for the proliferation and spread of filth and pathogens throughout the facility that could cause the contamination of egg processing equipment and eggs, according to a report from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration detailing inspections. A review of the farms pest control records flagged an ongoing rodent infestation, with rodents, dead carcasses and baby mice observed, along with workers who werent following proper sanitary practices.

The farm voluntarily recalled the eggs earlier last week after more than 20 consumers became ill from a suspected salmonella poisoning. The recall is the largest of eggs in the U.S. since 2010, when more than 550 million were recalled from two Iowa farms, according to the website Food Safety News.

The FDAs inspection report is based on raw observations and in some cases lack proper context, Gene Grabowski, an outside spokesman for Rose Acre Farms, said in an email. The company is preparing a formal response to the report and until then, we would urge everyone to wait until all the facts are presented before rushing to judgment.

Debris and Grime

Throughout a March 28 review, federal inspectors observed condensation dripping from the ceiling, pipes and down walls onto production equipment and pooling on floors, the FDA said. Employees were found in violation of proper sanitary procedures, and a steel wool scrubber used to clean debris off equipment was stored on a cart in a dustpan that had a pool of water floating with debris and grime.

On one visit, inspectors saw at least 25 flying insects in the egg processing facility landing on food, food production equipment and contact surfaces, according to the report.

The company voluntarily recalled the eggs after an investigation of illnesses on the East Coast triggered an inspection of the facility. The recall is equivalent to about 90 days of output at the farm, which produces 2.3 million eggs a day.

Copyright 2021 Bloomberg.
The Houston-area flood control district has estimated needing $155 million to study and fix damaged infrastructure after Hurricane Harvey.

Workers this week are assessing the storms destruction to the Harris County Flood Control Districts 2,500 miles (4,023 kilometers) of bayous, creeks and drainage ditches, the Houston Chronicle reported . The surveys began earlier this month after the Commissioners Court voted to spend $12.5 million to study the damage.

View from FEMAs Urban Search and Rescue Virginia Task Force Two (VA-TF2) searching neigborhoods inside Houston for survivors after flooding caused by Hurricane Harvey

The district estimated there are 1,200 individual damage sites throughout the county. Sites include several areas along Hunting Bayou where Harvey stormwater destabilized the bank by washing away dirt. Trash and vegetation along the Halls Bayou have created blockages were water used to flow freely.

Damage can restrict bayous or pipes from effectively holding or conveying runoff during heavy storms, which can negatively affect nearby bridges and utility lines.

Local officials want to finance the majority of repairs through federal grants, said Matthew Zeve, the districts director of operations. No grants have been secured, but the district is starting work that could be reimbursed, he said.

Repairs could begin later this year and complete in 2019, according to the district.

Zeve said the district is always working on repairs to the network, including before Harvey hit in August.

You have 2,500 miles of channels, Zeve said. I think its not realistic to expect everything to be fixed.

Grant money is typically more accessible immediately after disasters, but it often requires help from local governments.

Harris County could see grants covering around $97 million of the $155 million in estimated repairs. Commissioners are considering a proposed more than $1 billion bond referendum.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
David Copperfield testified Wednesday that he didnt know until he was sued that a British tourist claimed to have been seriously injured while taking part in an illusion during a performance on the Las Vegas Strip in 2013.

Although Copperfield said it might be his fault if an audience volunteer who was participating in an illusion got hurt, the celebrated magician didnt acknowledge responsibility for injuries Gavin Cox claims to have suffered when he fell.

It depends on what happened. If I did something wrong, it would be my fault, Copperfield said during questioning by Coxs lawyer, Benedict Morelli.

Your defense in this case is  if they participate and someone gets hurt, its their fault, not yours. Is that accurate? Morelli asked. Yes or no?

ts not a simple yes-or-no answer, Copperfield responded in a barely audible voice.

Morelli contends that before Cox fell, the group of audience volunteers participating in the illusion was hustled through an alley coated with what he called construction dust. The people were taking part in a signature illusion that appeared to make them vanish onstage and appear a few moments later in the back of the theater.

Copperfield said he didnt know whether there as a powdery residue near a trash bin in an MGM Grand alley. He said he passed through the same outdoor alley alone while performing another illusion about 10 minutes earlier, and didnt notice any debris.

If in fact there was construction dust, could that be your fault if someone fell and got hurt? Morelli asked.

Copperfield responded that he couldnt answer a hypothetical question before proceedings ended for the day.

The 61-year-old performer is due to return to the witness stand next Tuesday for more testimony in Clark County District Court.

Cox, a resident of Kent, England, claims lasting brain and body injuries and more than $400,000 in medical expenses. He and his wife, Minh-Hahn Cox, are seeking unspecified damages in their lawsuit, which also names as defendants the MGM Grand, show producer Backstage Employment and Referral, and construction firm Team Construction Management.

Copperfields lawyers lost pretrial bids to close proceedings to the public to avoid disclosing performance secrets, although Judge Mark Denton has said some portions of Copperfields testimony might still be conducted behind closed doors.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Student-Created Platform To Transform Course Planning

April 20, 2018

An app created by and for Carnegie Mellon University students is set to streamline course planning across the university.

Stellic, the planning and advising platform created by CMU Qatar alumni, is rolling out to the Pittsburgh campus community this month in time for undergraduate students' fall registration.

"This is a Carnegie Mellon success story," University Registrar John Papinchak said. "Stellic began as a student project in 2015 to fulfill a university need to help improve course planning, advising and scheduling. It grew into a venture startup and now is a released product that Carnegie Mellon University and other institutions are using."

Students currently find courses through an online portal and use a variety of methods to track their course requirements, including an online static degree requirement tool, spreadsheets or even paper notes. They share this information periodically with advisers. Stellic brings this process into one platform where students can drag and drop available courses to plan their schedules per semester and map out degree plans. Advisers can then use the interactive tool to review students' plans, share notes and identify students who are at risk of delaying graduation or dropping out.

With those plans mapped out in the online tool, the meeting time advisers and students currently spend reviewing requirements can be focused on discussing a students' academic goals and career path. The university also expects it will better anticipate and meet demand for course offerings thanks to those long-term plans.

Mark Stehlik, assistant dean for outreach in CMU's School of Computer Science, advised Stellic co-founders Sabih Bin Wasi, Rukhsar Neyaz Khan and Jiyda Moussa while they were still students at the Doha campus. He said the team and their work is a true example of what CMU's program in Qatar has achieved.

"Stellic came from an innate sense of entrepreneurship on their side, but also a clear need not only from the CMU side, but also more universally across colleges and universities," said Stehlik, the platform's namesake and board member. "Colleges now closely pay attention to student retention and to graduation rates. This is a tool that can help facilitate improving those metrics."

Bin Wasi saw the need for the tool after experiencing first-hand the shortcomings of building a four-year schedule on paper. He said what course planning software existed at the time lacked an element of student experience.

"We wanted to introduce that student-driven, unified platform with a modern interface to higher education," Wasi said.

As CMU's academic advising software was out of date, Stehlik helped the team realize that their project could be broadened to benefit the advisers and administrators who guide the course plans of hundreds of students. With the help of Stehlik and other CMU faculty, the team created a prototype and piloted it at the CMU-Q campus, where students gave it positive reviews.

"Every single factor that made Stellic useful or valuable has a definite contribution from CMU," Bin Wasi said. "The only credit we can take as a team is that we didn't hesitate in approaching them. We just took initiative, and all of these champions of ours in Carnegie Mellon helped us complete that initiative."

Following graduation, the team launched the company with seed money from the Qatar Science and Technology Park in Doha and spent six months at the Alchemist Accelerator, a business incubator in Silicon Valley. Since then, the company has been growing its client base. In addition to CMU, Tufts University, Northwestern University in Qatar and Elon University have signed contracts with the company for the course-planning platform. Bin Wasi said about a dozen other schools are in the process of signing contracts.

Jamie Brandon, senior systems analyst in the University Registrar's office at CMU, said Stellic's team was very receptive to feedback from university advisors as it modified the platform to meet CMU's needs. It also has been rewarding to see the alumni's work in action.

"They're extremely innovative and forward thinking. The application itself is trailblazing because there is nothing else like it available," said Brandon, project manager for Stellic's integration. "There are a lot of audit applications and degree planning applications, but none of them have the same functionality as Stellic."

CMU's academic advisers also are looking forward to using Stellic.

Stephanie Murray, director and academic adviser of CMU's BXA Intercollege Degree Programs, said Stellic is a great fit for CMU because it was built by people who know the university's culture from the inside.

"They understand the ways in which CMU is unique, and they used that understanding to build a system that matches our already established procedures and expectations," Murray said. "They really are the best example of what CMU innovation can produce."
, the world's manufacturing powerhouse, is moving toward a more value-add economy and there's one major industry where the country could dominate both as a maker and consumer: health care.

That's because China rocketed into its position as the world's second-largest economy in a matter of decades under a strict one-child policy, contributing to a rapidly aging society with rising medical needs.

According to health-care information company IQVIA, China was the world's second-largest national pharmaceutical market in 2017  worth $122.6 billion. It was also the biggest emerging market for pharmaceuticals with growth tipped to reach $145 billion to $175 billion by 2022.

"The development of China's healthcare industry is still in its infancy, evidenced by its low healthcare expenditure as a percentage of GDP ... and a smaller proportion of its population aged 60 and over," DBS analysts Mark Kong and Chris Gao said in a recent note. "That implies plenty of room to grow because as the population ages, the demand for medicines will increase."

There's still scope for growth, experts said, even though the Chinese pharmaceutical market's compound annual growth rate from 2013 to 2017 was 9.4 percent.

For comparison, the world's largest health-care consumer, the , splashed $466.6 billion in 2017 and spent $84.8 billion in the same year.
A television news report showing pictures of President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at a railway station in Seoul on March 9, 2018.

As the White House and Pyongyang prepare for a historic summit, one of the biggest logistical sticking points is location.

President Donald Trump and North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un are expected to sit down face to face in May or June to discuss the rogue state's nuclear weapons program in what will be the first meeting between sitting U.S. and North Korean leaders. Where the landmark encounter takes place is a crucial component of the summit, strategists told CNBC.

"These are two parties that both value symbolism and optics, and I cannot imagine any one of them will give in easily and cede ground on the location issue," said Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein, associate scholar at Foreign Policy Research Institute, a Philadelphia-based think tank.

Mike Pompeo, Trump's pick for secretary of state, and Kim reportedly spent the most time on this issue during their recent meeting, which is "very telling for how much it matters," Silberstein continued.

Trump, this week, said there were five places being considered, but didn't provide any further details.

"The meeting location will be the result of compromise, carefully chosen so as not to provide propaganda fodder for either side," said Miha Hribernik, senior Asia analyst at global risk consultancy Verisk Maplecroft. "The end result will likely be a venue in a third country without a direct security stake on the Korean Peninsula."

Here are a few potential locations for the high-stakes negotiations:
A company called MedMen is opening its first Manhattan medical marijuana dispensary Friday in the heart of one of the poshest shopping districts in the U.S. The polished retail space on Fifth Avenue sits just blocks from Bryant Park, right across the street from Lord & Taylor. Even for the marijuana retailer, which claimed in February that its value tops $1 billion, Fifth Avenue in Manhattan represents some seriously pricey real estate. Especially since New York has very little to offer MadMen right now  the state's registry of medical cardholders is a fraction of the size of California's. But MedMen looks at the investment as buying front-row seats to recreational marijuana legalization in New York City. "I am so excited about the state of New York, there has been a lot of chatter nationally lately about legalizing marijuana, there has been a lot of chatter here in the state of New York about legalizing marijuana," CEO Adam Bierman said. "This is impossible unless the laws allow us to do what we do." MedMen's first Manhattan location, at 433 Fifth Ave., certainly doesn't look like a typical dispensary. The overall aesthetic recalls an Apple Store, even complete with red-clad "geniuses" and iPads everywhere. Conspicuously lacking the jars of sticky, green bud that dot MedMen dispensaries out west, MedMen New York only sells tinctures, gel caps, and vaporizer pens  all color coded, sorted by potency and labeled with neutral names like "Calm" and "Harmony." There's no Maui Wowie here. A casual windowshopper, unfamiliar with New York state law, which prohibits sale and consumption of marijuana in plant form, might not even know the place sold marijuana.

Photos of MedMen's new medical dispensary on 5th Avenue in New York City. CNBC

That's no accident. MedMen's real goal is to normalize marijuana and target a broader demographic of customer. "Everyday we go to work and we know what we are doing, we are mainstreaming marijuana  we get everything we want if we can mainstream marijuana," Bierman said. "We get social change, we make the world a better place, we make our business a better business, you know, everybody wins." Instead of stoner culture's pizza and Cheetos, MedMen offers champagne and avocado toast  in fact, that's exactly what the company served to investors and politicians who attended the store's preopening party on Wednesday. Among those who attended Wednesday were Sen. Diane Savino, who sponsored the bill legalizing medical marijuana in New York state; NYC Public Advocate Letitia James, who has become an outspoken advocate for legalization; as well as Manhattan Bureau President Gale Brewer. Full legalization was the hot topic at the party. "We cannot ignore marijuana in New York," Savino said. "We are going to have to figure out a way to accelerate the time frame...because, if not, New Yorkers will vote with their feet. They are going to drive to New Jersey, they will go to Massachusetts. They will jeopardize our medical program, and we cannot afford to lose the revenue in New York." Bierman and MedMen cofounder Andrew Modlin are paying Fifth Avenue dollars to bet that legalization happens sooner rather than later. Today, New York state offers a relatively tiny market for medical marijuana. The state registry lists just over 50,000 card-holding medical marijuana patients. By comparison, in MedMen's home state of California, there are about 1.2 million registered medical users, according to Marijuana Policy Project. That's not to mention the recreational market that's been growing since California legalized adult use Jan. 1. From a short-term revenue perspective, the choice makes little sense  especially when considering real estate pricing. Commercial rentals near MedMen's Manhattan location, run about $500 to $1,000 per square foot, according to Faith Consolo, a retail broker at Douglas Elliman. MedMen's store includes about 2,000 square feet, according to the company.

Photos of MedMen's new medical dispensary on 5th Avenue in New York City. CNBC
Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs have been lobbying federal regulators to protect at least some virtual currencies from being categorized as securities, a designation that would carry significantly more oversight.

The venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz helped assemble a group of investors and lawyers that met with the Securities and Exchange Commission in late March. They also proposed a "safe harbor" for some virtual currencies, according to a copy of the proposal reviewed by The New York Times and three people briefed on the effort who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity because the proceedings were confidential.

Regulators have indicated in private meetings that they are considering whether virtual currencies  including Ether, the second most widely used digital token  should be categorized as a security, according to three people who have been in the meetings. That designation could cause a significant drop in the value of Ether.

"It's a 'come to the lord' moment," said Richard Levin, a lawyer at the firm Polsinelli who works with companies in the space. "We are seeing a watershed moment in which many firms in the digital asset community who may have been ignorant of the law  or poorly informed  are now coming to terms with the fact that they are subject to regulators."

More from the New York Times

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Virtual Currency Offerings May Hit a New Peak with Telegram Coin Sale

Russia and Venezuela's Plan to Sidestep Sanctions: Virtual Currencies

The group led by Andreessen Horowitz called themselves the "Venture Capital Working Group," according to the proposal, dated March 26.

The group included the two largest venture capital firms in the virtual currency industry, Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures. It also included lawyers from Cooley, Perkins Coie, and McDermott Will & Emery, the people involved in the effort said.

The group met with the S.E.C. in Washington on March 28 to present their idea for a safe harbor that would allow some tokens to be categorized as "utility tokens" rather than securities. An S.E.C. spokesman declined to comment on the meeting.

Thousands of virtual currencies have been created through so-called initial coin offerings in which entrepreneurs sold digital tokens to raise money for their projects. The tokens are generally intended to serve as internal payment methods in software that the entrepreneurs are building.

Over the past year, entrepreneurs have raised more than $6 billion through initial coin offerings. These coins mostly trade on unregulated virtual currency exchanges. Many entrepreneurs have said that because their tokens have a utility, as a payment method, they should not be considered investment contracts or securities.

But Jay Clayton, the chairman of the S.E.C., has said in recent months that he believes almost every token issued through an initial coin offering should be registered as a security  almost none are today.

The S.E.C. has sent subpoenas to dozens of people and companies in the virtual currency industry asking for information about how various digital tokens were issued and marketed to investors.

When investments are securities, they generally need to have paperwork filed with regulators and can only be traded on regulated exchanges, like those where stocks and commodities are bought and sold. No regulated securities exchanges offer virtual currency trading.

Most investors assume that Bitcoin is safe from being categorized as a security because it was not originally issued through an initial coin offering or central organization. New Bitcoins are distributed on a daily basis to computers helping to maintain the network. Some large virtual currencies, like Litecoin and Monero, have similar designs.

But Ethereum, the virtual currency network that houses the Ether virtual currency, did raise money by selling Ether tokens to investors through what was then called a pre-sale and is now often called an initial coin offering. The Ethereum Foundation took in Bitcoin that were worth around $18 million at the time. Ether are now distributed in a manner similar to that of Bitcoin.

The group pulled together by Andreessen Horowitz said in its proposal that Ether "has become so decentralized it should not be deemed a security."

The proposal suggests that digital tokens should generally be exempt from securities laws if they achieve "full decentralization" or "full functionality." It adds that full decentralization could occur under several conditions, including "when the token creator no longer has control of the network based on its ability to make unilateral changes to the functionality of the tokens."

The proposal says a token is fully functional when it can be used for its intended purpose on a computer network and is not just useful as a speculative investment, which is the case with many tokens today.

The group notes that these definitions are only suggestions, but the "proposed safe harbor has been vetted by, and has the support of, many of the key players in the industry."

People briefed on the meeting said that regulators did not immediately embrace the safe harbor proposal.

Many entrepreneurs and law firms have been creating new ways for virtual currency projects to issue their tokens as securities and some exchanges have talked about getting registered as official securities exchanges.

It is still unclear what will happen to tokens that did not register as securities but are later categorized as securities.
1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), the investment firm owned by Malaysia's government that's connected to money laundering probes in at least six countries, has not been contacted by any international investigators, according to the head of the company.

"The company has not been contacted by the DOJ," CEO Arul Kanda Kandasamy told CNBC's "Street Signs" on Friday, referring to the U.S. Justice Department. "While we remain open and we've expressed our willingness to cooperate, at this point in time, none of those international authorities have contacted 1MDB."

The Justice Department's criminal division, which handles money laundering cases, had not yet responded by publication time when CNBC requested comment on Arul Kanda's assertion.

Explosive claims in 2015 that Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak received millions in his personal bank account from 1MDB's coffers have resulted in investigations spanning the U.S., Switzerland, Singapore and others.

Najib  who was cleared of any criminality by Malaysia's attorney general  and 1MDB have both denied any wrongdoing.
Presidential hopeful Andrew Yang is going to give someone $12,000 in an effort to make it to the White House.

Yang, 43, is running for President in 2020 as a Democrat and his platform is centered on the idea of universal basic income (UBI), or cash handouts distributed irrespective of employment status.

To demonstrate the effectiveness of a universal basic income, Yang announced Thursday will select one New Hampshire resident to give $1,000 a month for a year starting in 2019, according to a written statement from the campaign.

Yang is paying the $12,000 for the demonstration personally, he tells CNBC Make It.

New Hampshire is the first state in the country to hold a presidential primary, and so becomes a focal point for campaigns.

Yang calls his idea for a UBI payment the Freedom Dividend. He says if he is elected president, the government will give every American citizen ages 18 to 64 $1,000 a month.

The rumors are true -- @AndrewYangVFA is going to personally fund a Universal Basic Income of $1,000/mo for other Americans. First recipient will be in New Hampshire.

On Wednesday, Yang will travel to Concord, New Hampshire both to meet with voters and talk about his plan to give one resident a check on the first of every month.

Anyone can nominate New Hampshire residents who are American citizens to win the payment via Andrew Yang's Presidential campaign website.

Nominations must be submitted by 11:59 p.m. September 1. Finalists will be selected by October 1 and will be asked to share their stories on Yang'S presidential campaign website and social media accounts.

The public will vote for who should receive the payment, the Yang presidential campaign website says. The winner will be announced in December.

Of course, one person's experience with cash handouts is not sufficiently representative of what might happen if millions of eligible citizens were given money.

I'm running for President on a platform of Universal Basic Income and evolution to the next stage of capitalism

"Trying to enlist other UBI champions to make many more awards," Yang tells CNBC Make It via email. "Wish I had more money to give."

According to Yang's platform, a VAT tax, or value-added tax, could pay for a nationwide universal basic income. Yang has estimated a 10 percent VAT tax would raise between $700 and $800 billion in the United States. (For a detailed explanation of where he gets that figure, see here.)

Prior to running for president, Yang was the CEO of the test-prep education company Manhattan GMAT, which industry leader Kaplan bought in 2009. Also, in 2011, he launched Venture for America, a New York City-headquartered organization that trains entrepreneurs in a two-year fellowship program.

Yang is a longshot for getting to the White House, but he is not alone in talking about universal basic income.

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes is a public advocate for the idea of cash payments and the initiative he co-founded, the Economic Security Project, is funding a pilot program of universal basic income in Stockton, Calif. For the program, 100 residents of Stockton will receive $500 a month for a year and a half. The payments will be distributed by early 2019, according to the SEED website.

See also:
Better-than-expected data and improving public finances mean there could be an opportunity for ratings agency Fitch to take a more positive view on the United Kingdom.

James McCormack, global head of sovereigns at Fitch Ratings, hinted to CNBC's Joumanna Bercetche that the agency could change the U.K's credit rating as government borrowing returned to pre-2008 financial crisis levels this year.

"From a public finance perspective, things have been improving more quickly than we thought," he said. "There's some scope for a more positive view of the U.K."

He added that the U.K economy didn't perform "as bad as anticipated" in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote and said that Fitch's assessment wasn't all related to Brexit.

Speaking at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund's Spring Meeting 2018 in Washington, McCormack said: "Growth numbers have been better, but not great." Sterling soared to its highest level Tuesday since the U.K.'s vote to leave the EU in June 2016.

McCormack said that threats of a trade war between the U.S. and China "has to get a lot worse" before making an impact on the overall growth of the global economy.

Also at Spring Meetings 2018, IMF Deputy Managing Director Tao Zhang told CNBC's Bercetche that clouds could be looming on the horizon for the global economy.

Zhang said there are currently three big challenges facing the global economy: tensions on the trade front, fiscal and financial risk, and the ongoing struggle to attain inclusive growth.
British regulators have concluded efforts of Barclays chief executive Jes Staley to unmask a whistleblower at the bank represented a breach of individual conduct and proposed he pay an undisclosed fine, the bank said on Friday.

Barclays said the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) "are not alleging that he acted with a lack of integrity or that he lacks fitness and propriety to continue to perform his role as Group Chief Executive Officer."

The FCA and PRA will not take enforcement action against Barclays, the bank said.

The bank will, however, be required to report to the FCA and PRA on certain aspects of their whistleblowing programs.

"Barclays management continues to have unanimous confidence in Staley and continues to recomment his re-election as a director at the Barclays annual general meeting on May 1," Barclays said a statement on Friday.
Every year on 4/20, the unofficial marijuana holiday, tens of thousands of people converge upon Hippie Hill in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park to smoke marijuana. This year, what used to be an act of defiance against laws banning the use of cannabis has turned into an act of jubilation. Bianca Haynes drove four hours from Bakersfield to mark the first 4/20 since California legalized recreational marijuana use. "We're going to be here all day. We're going to listen to music, vibe out, eat some good food, take a lot of pictures, and make a lot of memories," she said. But while users are happy, there are signs the new freedom isn't paying off as well as expected for businesses. Dispensaries across the Bay Area are courting customers with giveaways, raffles, live music and food trucks. But many dispensary owners are still waiting to see whether the economic prospects of legalization of recreational cannabis will be fully realized. Consumers spent an estimated $339 million on marijuana products in the first two months of legal recreational marijuana sales in California, according to a report from cannabis data firm BDS Analytics. If sales continue at the same pace, that would be 11.5 percent lower than state estimates.

A large marijuana joint is lit at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Marcio Jose Sanchez, File | AP

State officials contend that their estimates baked in an expectation that sales will ramp as more businesses get licensed for recreational use. The state will come out with updated numbers next month. Still, some dispensary owners argue that there are real hurdles to a truly free market. "The restrictions and the rules and regulations that the state put forth are very, very stringent, so some dispensaries are still in this limbo area," said A.G. Melendez, director of operations at The Green Door dispensary in San Francisco. Taxes are another issue. The high taxes on weed have led to prices increasing as much as 30 percent for some customers. "The high taxes have translated to high prices for legal marijuana and that drives customers back to the unregulated market," said Sean Luse, COO at Berkeley Patients Group, the nation's oldest continuously operating dispensary. Weedmaps, a company known as the "Yelp" of cannabis, works with both licensed and unlicensed companies. It reports that 85 percent of California's cities and counties still ban marijuana sales. Despite state laws, local jurisdictions can still prohibit weed sales. The company's president and general counsel, Chris Beals, said limited access is another factor sending consumers to the unregulated market, which he said accounts for as much as 90 percent of California's cannabis market.

A marijuana user smokes marijuana during a 420 Day celebration on 'Hippie Hill' in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, California. April 20th has become a de facto holiday for marijuana advocates, with large gatherings and 'smoke outs' in many parts of the United States. Getty Images
China has long pushed the development of top-end semiconductors as a key strategic objective.

Now, as a trade war with the United States looms, a government decision to accelerate the development of the domestic chip industry underlines how far those goals have fallen short.

Senior Chinese officials are increasingly concerned about stalling efforts to improve domestic chip design, seen as critical after a series of failed outbound deals, according to two industry insiders familiar with the matter.

Closing the quality gap with U.S. chipmakers has become a matter of urgency in Beijing.

Senior government officials met this week to discuss how to speed up chip development in light of brewing trade tensions with the United States, Reuters reported on Thursday.

China has made chip development a key plank of its Made in China 2025 drive to bolster its strength in technology against more developed rivals in the United States, Japan, and Europe. The government wants local chips to make up at least 40 percent of China's semiconductor needs by the middle of the next decade.

However, Chinese chipmakers are struggling to hit key targets, industry insiders say.

Domestic chipmakers have been stymied by the blocking of a series of chip-related deals overseas, and are having trouble attracting talent and overcoming technical hurdles in developing higher-end domestic chips.

A Chinese deal for the U.S. semiconductor testing company Xcerra was shot down by a U.S. national security panel in February, while the $1.3 billion acquisition of the U.S. chipmaker Lattice Semiconductor was blocked last year.

"There was earlier a belief that the technology would be easier to develop, or that it could be acquired from overseas," said a supplier to one of China's top state-backed integrated circuit chip firms. "Now we're seeing that it's not the case."

"The projects are efficient and there is a lot of funding support," the person added, but "there are more problems to solve than they initially thought."

These delays came into sharp relief this week after the United States imposed a seven-year ban on sales by American companies to the Chinese phone maker ZTE Corp  a move that threatens to cut off its supply chain.

ZTE, which relies heavily on U.S. chips, said on Friday the ban was unfair and threatened its survival.

Interviews with half a dozen China chip suppliers, business groups, investors, and analysts suggest that despite heavy investment and rhetoric, China is behind schedule in developing high-end chips, or integrated circuits. China has made more progress on lower-end chips, people said.

"The reason why chip technology has experienced such limited progress despite years of advocacy is that the Chinese system has not yet formed a key driving force for it," China's Global Times newspaper said in an editorial on Friday.

The country's leaders, rattled by the trade frictions with the United States and the ZTE case, are now looking to double down on investment into research and development of domestically-designed chips, the two people said.

The state-backed National Integrated Circuit Investment Fund will step up spending on domestic chip design versus other areas such as financing overseas deals, the people added.

The "Big Fund", which closed a new round of funding worth an estimated $32 billion last month, will dedicate around a quarter of the new funds to integrated circuit design, they added.

One design challenge faced by Chinese companies is catching up in a short timeframe with rivals who have been developing increasingly complex technology for decades.

China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the National Integrated Circuit Investment Fund did not respond to faxed requests for comment on Friday.

U.S. regulators have cracked down on acquisitions of overseas semiconductor assets by Chinese state-backed companies - an effort spanning the Obama and Trump administrations  over fears that Beijing's state-subsidized efforts would undermine U.S. supremacy in semiconductor technology.

China says the aggressive policy is needed to reduce dependence on foreign-made chips. China imported $227 billion worth of integrated circuits in 2016, more than for imports of crude oil, iron ore, and primary plastics combined.

These chips go into smartphones, computers and other electronic devices, as well as high-end industrial and military products.

Beijing is now seeking to relieve pressure on priority chip products by cutting corporate taxes for up to five years, officials said this month. Companies are also spending heavily to tap foreign resources as well as engineers from overseas competitors, analysts say.

"It's not uncommon for engineers to get a salary that is five times what they are paid in Korea or Taiwan if they work in China," said a Korean chip engineer who now works in China with the domestic semiconductor industry.

"The bonuses are large" and if you can recruit others "there are very big incentives," the person said. He declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Jeter Teo, Taipei-based research director at the tech analytics consultancy Trendforce, said China was aggressively looking to attract talent, though still had less than half the 700,000 semiconductor experts it needed to really compete.

While China has managed to attract many experts in the semiconductor field, analysts say, others are deterred by clauses in some contracts limiting job mobility and the challenges of moving families to China.

"There is no doubt companies will catch up eventually," the Chinese chip supplier source said, referring to Chinese firms.

But "they must develop at double the speed of overseas companies, otherwise they will always be a generation behind," the source said.
Below is the transcript of an exclusive interview with CNBC's Joumanna Bercetche and Eurogroup President, Mario Centeno.

JB: There's some big challenges coming up for Eurozone integration in the next couple of months - we've got a key meeting coming up in June. Major two challenges are going to be the completion of the Eurozone banking union project and also the transformation of the so-called bailout funds the European Monetary Fund. The first question I want to ask you is do you see a willingness on the part of all members of the Eurozone to actually proceed with this project?

MC: I'm sure that all members understand the importance of completing the reform institutional setting. Everyone around the table is engaged in the discussion then you may say that there are different perspectives on these specific issues but we all understand the importance of using these what I refer to as a unique window of opportunity both because of the economic results and the political cycle that we are now entering until the European elections to complete the decisive task of reforming the Eurozone.

JB: Can you actually see the Eurozone moving towards a risk sharing model euro-wide?

MC: We already agreed that risk sharing and risk reduction need to go hand in hand. We have been implementing many, many measures, radical measures on the risk reduction side and we've been successful at doing that. So now we need to evaluate where we stand. This was already considered in 2016 to be to be done and take the next mile and put together measures that cope with production and risk sharing.

JB: And of course it will take time and there will be a certain amount of sequencing that needs to happen before these measures come into place. We just heard from Mr. Scholz who said that European reform is a number one priority for the German government but then equally it's the same Merkel has said that it can't just come at any price. So in terms of sequencing where do you think we start and what measures do you think we can expect to see over the next 12 to 18 months that would really solidify some of the discussions?

MC: We need to understand that we are doing this because everyone believes that it is good for everybody for every country to be better equipped to face the future to face the cycle the change that we eventually have at some point in the future so we need to be better equipped. In that sense we are all net winners of the decisions we are about to take. And this is the spirit. This is also to say that each country, each government each Minister of Finance has to invest some political capital on this because we firmly believe that it is important. In June we have to decide on a more detailed roadmap and certainly as you were referring to this will be a sequencing process, a phased process step by step taking measures that need to take a very comprehensive set of instruments to achieve these goals. I think we can prioritize finalizing the banking union the backstop facility for a single resolution fund taking care of what is making a more robust European stability mechanism so that crisis management in Europe can be improved in the future. But then looking at longer term issues like institutional design and fiscal issues at this stage the goal is to define better define the road map and get into specific timing for the whole process.

JB: And of course be better equipped for the next time a crisis or recession actually hits the Eurozone. But I want to ask you also about some exogenous challenges and one of the big themes that has come up here is that of the trade war rhetoric between the United States and the rest of the world. And I just wonder on a Eurogroup level how concerned you are whether this has really been built into your discussions and possibly whether or not you're thinking about some form of retaliation against the U.S. if they go down this route?

MC: We've been experiencing a very good period in terms of economic outcomes in Europe. This is certainly the result of the decisions we made in the last five, six years to respond to the crisis. And Europe is a very open economy. The European, euro area is one of the most open economies in the world more open from among the largest economies in the world. And this is very important for us to keep. If there is one thing that economists agree and there are not that many things that you can take economists to agree upon, free trade and the benefits of free trade is one such thing. We want to preserve the multilateral cooperation that we achieve that WTO. And this is very important for Europe. Of course we do know that there are decisions that are against raising barriers tariffs and protectionism. Europe is aware that for example the decisions with Europe now temporarily we told by the U.S. administration. We think it's very important to continue cooperation so that these can be made permanent and we can continue in a multilateral view to deepen our economic integration to develop world trade. This is certainly for the benefit of everybody.

JB: Now one other big decision that needs to be taken in the next few months is that of Greece and there are reports that there's going to be a meeting between Eurozone finance ministers at the IMF tomorrow to discuss some elements regarding the Greek program. I just wonder whether or not the divides between the two sides regarding debt relief has finally been bridged?

MC: We are in a good position to finalize the program with Greece. The Greek authorities have done an amazing job implementing prior actions and achieving targets within the program. This takes us to say that the Greek economy is out of the woods. We think a successful exit is within perfect reach in August. There are a few issues on the table data that relates with the debt relief measures and those for the medium and the long term we are working with all the institutions to reach an agreement on that. And my sense is that indeed we are much closer to close the gaps than we were before. And there is again I mentioned before the political investment in the capital, political capital into these and both parties are very much committed to reaching an agreement.

JB: And of course the IMF has emphasized the importance of achieving the primary surplus. And if you look at their updated forecast for Greece they're pretty much in line with the European Commission. So you have to think that at least as far as primary surplus is concerned the bridges is divided, the bridges has been covered. And therefore many people are now expecting the next step to be that debt relief.

MC: Everyone is interested in Greece being able to stand on its own feet and be able to exit successful from the program and have market access and that new economic model that has been constructed in the last years to succeed. So technical issues I think are pretty much settled. We now have to enter into the political dimension. It's very, very important for the Greek society to take full ownership of the process. And the key ingredient for success, and now I can take also the mirror image of the Portuguese example is for these processes to be able to be confirmed across political and economic cycles. And I think that Greece will be able to do to achieve this.

JB: Do you still see a role for the IMF and Greece in the future?

MC: There is there is a specific program for that. We think if there are conditions and we think we are working to create those conditions that the IMF can continue associated with the Greek developments in the future. But it is very, very important and this is the political message that we have to keep pushing to is to Greek society, the Greek authorities to take this sense of ownership into the measures that are needed in the future to guarantee that Greece is in a sustainable growth path. Combined with also fiscal policy that guarantees market access and financing conditions, good financing conditions for the Greek economy. This is the most important issue.

JB: I want to ask you something that's a little bit close to home for you actually it is for you that the Portuguese turnaround story is a very successful story. When you think of countries within the Eurozone who managed to turn their prospects around but there was a lot of scepticism when the government was being formed a couple of years ago because it was a minority government and people didn't believe that a minority government could actually have an impactful effect on the economy. We're seeing a rather similar situation in Italy today because there really isn't a government and when a government will be formed it will eventually be a minority government. So my question to you is what guidance can easily take from the Portuguese template to apply it to their own economy so that we can start seeing growth levels pick up in Italy as well.

MC: Recently we tend to be quite a little bit anxious about the results of the elections in Europe if you go back you see the Dutch the French the Germans the Austria. Every time there are elections in Europe people, commentators and politicians start to fuss a little bit about it. So its better, it's very good if we can take a more long perspective on these issues and understand that the government's solutions that were the result of these electoral processes confirm in each of these cases the European project, the European dimension and certainly with a very strong degree of idiosyncratic policies that is naturally in Europe. The Portuguese case is precisely the same, the same thing. We were able to commit to targets - we actually the government prepared itself very well to go into office and implement a policy that starting with the financial sector stabilization and completing these with a very rigorous and determined fiscal trajectory that finally was able to put our debt to GDP ratio on reducing pass, this was the result of this preparation and the commitment with the goals of Portugal in the European context. This is the main thing that I can take out of the Portuguese example to other examples in Europe. Italy is certainly one such example. We face similar challenges within of course different contexts. I think we need to be confident that whatever solution comes out of the democratic process that is initiated by an election in this case in Italy will fulfil this main and common goals of all of us in Europe. With a common share sense of possibilities, because we do share a common currency, we are benefiting all European countries of the good economic situation of Europe. And this will also make certainly easier to find solutions around trade.
Boulder and San Miguel counties in Colorado are suing ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy for their effects on the environment and their negative contributions to climate change.

Up until this point climate change lawsuits have been limited to coastal cities worried about sea level rise. However, these Colorado cities say they are feeling the negative effects of climate change, too, namely when it comes to snow loss.

"These impacts have already harmed Plaintiffs' property and impacted the health, safety and welfare [of] their residents. The damages will only multiply as climate change worsens," the lawsuit reads.

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Humans have caused mammals to shrink

The lawsuit claims "that fossil fuel combustion was causing a dramatic rise in the concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere," which causes "significant temperature changes" and "dramatic climatic changes." Because of the increase in temperature, there is dwindling snowpack in the state, which is vital for Colorado's agriculture, water supply and $5 billion ski industry.

The snowpack in the southern Colorado mountains was less than 50 percent of normal this month, InsideClimate News reported . The rise in temperature increases the risk of wildfires, extreme summertime heat and droughts. The dwindling snow also raises concerns about water flow to the Colorado river.

In the lawsuit, the Colorado plaintiffs claim Exxon and the Canadian oil sands company Suncor "substantially contributed to and exacerbated the impacts of human-caused climate change, thereby substantially contributing to Plaintiffs' injuries."

The counties also claim the companies violated the Colorado Consumer Protection Act , claiming the companies engaged in "deceptive trade practices."

The lawsuit's goal is not to stop or regulate the production of fossil fuels in Colorado. The plaintiffs are asking the companies "help remediate the nuisance caused by their intentional, reckless and negligent conduct, specifically by paying their share of the Plaintiffs' abatement costs."

These include costs related to damages from wildfires, flood control efforts, healthcare expenses and loss of land value.

"The costs should be shared by the Suncor and Exxon defendants because they knowingly and substantially contributed to the climate crisis by producing, promoting and selling a substantial portion of the fossil fuels that are causing and exacerbating climate change, while concealing and misrepresenting the dangers associated with their intended use," the lawsuit states.

Suncor Energy did not respond to a request for comment from Bloomberg. However, Exxon spokesman Scott Silvestri told Bloomberg reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a global concern that requires worldwide cooperation.

"Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a global issue and requires global participation and actions," Silvestri said. "Lawsuits like this  filed by trial attorneys against an industry that provides products we all rely upon to power the economy and enable our domestic life  simply do not do that."
General Electric CEO John Flannery should be recognized for progress in turning around the global conglomerate, which had a rocky 2017 and saw its shares cut in half over the past 12 months, CNBC's Jim Cramer said Friday.

"They stopped using GE accounting and started using American accounting," said Cramer, who has previously expressed regret about investing in the company. GE adopted new accounting standards earlier this year.

"They look like other companies' accounting now, which is a delight," Cramer added. "Congratulations to John Flannery for adopting American accounting,.

GE's stock rose more than 6 percent midmorning Friday after the company reported first-quarter earnings of 16 cents per share, 5 cents above what analysts polled by Thomson Reuters were expecting. The company also reported that total revenue rose 7 percent to $28.66 billion in the first quarter and reaffirmed its financial outlook for the year.

The "Mad Money" host was particularly impressed with the industrial conglomerate's strong performance in its aviation business, which saw double-digit profit growth. "Aviation is just so powerful that it is lifting all boats," Cramer told "Squawk on the Street."

Flannery, who previously was president and CEO of the GE Healthcare unit, unveiled a plan that the company would be "more focused," when he took over the helm the entire company after his predecessor, Jeff Immelt, retired last year.

Immelt, who served in various other leadership roles at GE, came under fire by critics for poor leadership decisions as CEO that left GE cash-strapped. On his way out the door, Immelt found himself defending the company's practice of having an empty business jet follow his corporate plane on several trips around the world.

"Flannery needs to be rewarded," Cramer said. "I've called him out when he's wrong. When he's done something good, you can't continue to say that he was wrong."

Cramer  whose charitable trust no longer owns the stock  said last year, "GE is one of the biggest mistakes of my career." When speculation about the company's dividend cut and some sort of restructuring were circulating in October, Cramer had said, "Rarely have I felt this stupid," while questioning what investors should do with the stock.
Ten years ago, then-businessman Donald Trump criticized U.S. leaders for not calling on OPEC, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, to lower oil prices.

"Oil that's close to 100, going to be over 100 and nobody in this country calls and says get that goddamn oil price down," Trump said in a 2008 interview with CNBC's Jim Cramer.

Fast forward 10 years, and now-president Trump is at it again, slamming OPEC on Friday via Twitter for keeping oil prices artificially high.

"Looks like OPEC is at it again," the president wrote. "With record amounts of Oil all over the place, including the fully loaded ships at sea, Oil prices are artificially Very High! No good and will not be accepted!"

But Cramer, host of CNBC's "Mad Money," saw one big problem with the president's view of the oil markets.

If Trump calls OPEC, "there'll be no one at the other end of the line who matters, because it's not OPEC that's behind the rally. It's the oil market itself," Cramer said on Friday. "The OPEC that exists today? It's a shadow of its former self. ... You see, OPEC no longer controls the price of oil."

U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude oil prices hovered around $68 a barrel on Friday, taking a hit from the president's tweet and recovering into day-end.

Cramer suggested Trump reach out to Schlumberger CEO Paal Kibsgaard instead. As CEO of the world's biggest oil services company, Kibsgaard has his finger on the pulse of the oil markets.

Kibsgaard told investors and analysts on his company's Friday post-earnings conference call that key OPEC countries like Angola, Indonesia and Venezuela were seeing production declines while Libya and Nigeria were producing at full capacity.

At the same time, non-OPEC nations like Mexico and Norway haven't been spending enough to keep prices low, while the United States, a major oil power since 2008, is constrained by issues of limited infrastructure and other "bottlenecks," Cramer said, still relaying Kibsgaard's outlook.

"So who could the president call? Saudi Arabia," the "Mad Money" host said. "The Saudis actually do have the spare capacity needed because they kept investing during the whole downturn. You can make that case right now, that the Saudis and a non-OPEC producer, Russia, are indeed keeping prices higher than they should be by holding back oil from the market."

While he acknowledged that Russian officials probably wouldn't do the United States' bidding, Cramer saw potential in Saudi Arabia. Trump could make the argument that if the Saudis want to preserve friendly relations with the United States, they must produce more oil, he said.

But if the world's economies continue to expand, even Saudi Arabia wouldn't be able to keep oil prices down alone, Cramer warned.

Moreover, if oil prices remain high as the United States fixes its bottlenecks and makes a concerted shift to alternative energy sources, prices will fall on their own, the "Mad Money" host said.

"The president is a total fossil fuel true believer, but if he were to become a bigger fan, say, of renewables, you could envision a world where we could make ourselves independent even of Saudi Arabia," he said. "But we aren't there yet."

"Yep, the world has changed rapidly since that video," Cramer continued. "Renewables and the shale revolution here in America have managed to lower the price of oil far more than we ever thought possible. The Saudis could lower it still more right now, at least for the moment. But OPEC? Sorry, that illegal cartel['s] been busted. The president can call them, but nobody's home."
The Democratic Party on Friday sued President Donald Trump's presidential campaign, the Russian government and the Wikileaks group, claiming a broad illegal conspiracy to help Trump win the 2016 election.

The multimillion-dollar lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court says that "In the Trump campaign, Russia found a willing and active partner in this effort" to mount "a brazen attack on American Democracy," which included Russian infiltration of the Democratic Party computer network.

The Trump campaign, according to the lawsuit, "gleefully welcomed Russia's help."

The suit says that "preexisting relationships with Russia and Russian oligarchs" with Trump and Trump associates "provided fertile ground for [the] Russia-Trump conspiracy."

The common purpose of the scheme, according to the Democratic National Committee, was to "bolster Trump and denigrate the Democratic Party nominee," Hillary Clinton, while boosting the candidacy of Trump, "whose policies would benefit the Kremlin."

Tom Perez, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said the party's suit "is not partisan, it's patriotic."

"If the occupant of the Oval Office won't protect our democracy, Democrats will. It is our obligation to the American people," Perez said.

He called the alleged conspiracy "an act of unprecedented treachery: the campaign of a nominee for President of the United States in league with a hostile foreign power to bolster its own chance to win the presidency."

The DNC in 1972 had sued President Richard Nixon's election committee in connection with the break-in at the party's headquarters in the Watergate building in Washington by burglars connected to the committee. The Nixon campaign settled that suit for $750,000 on the same day that Nixon resigned in disgrace in August 1974 as a result of his efforts to cover-up White House ties to the Watergate burglars.

The White House had no immediate comment on the new DNC lawsuit.

In a statement issued Friday afternoon, the Trump campaign called the lawsuit "frivolous," and a "last-ditch effort to substantiate the baseless Russian collusion allegations by the nearly-bankrupt Democratic Party."

"This civil lawsuit is completely without merit and will be dismissed in due time," the campaign said.

The named defendants in the lawsuit include Trump's son Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law Jared Kushner, former campaign chief Paul Manafort and campaign official Richard Gates, and Trump ally Roger Stone.

Also named is the Russian Federation, the general staff of the Russian armed forces, a Russian intelligence services hacker known as Guccifer 2.0., Wikileaks and its leader Julian Assange, and 10 unidentified people.

The suit says Russia is not entitled to sovereign immunity from the action, because the claims stem from Russia's "trespass on to the DNC's private [computer] servers" to steal information.

The DNC said that while it would be impossible "to fully repair the harm caused by the defendants, the DNC has filed this civil complaint ... to hold the defendants accountable for their misconduct and to ensure transparency."

The suit says that the Trump campaign solicited Russia's illegal assistance and maintained secret communications with people linked to the Russian government, including a spy agency tasked with attacking the DNC.

The suit goes on to say that Russian agents trespassed into the DNC's computer network and other electronic accounts, "collected trade secrets and other private data" and then sent that information to Wikileaks, a private group well-known for publishing secret documents.

The founder of Wikileaks, Assange, "shared the defendants' common goal of damaging the Democratic party in advance of the election," according to the suit.

Russia, using Wikileaks, would disseminate information stolen from the Democrats "at times when it would best suit the Trump campaign," the suit said.

The lawsuit noted that as the stolen DNC information was released publicly, "Trump openly praised the illegal disseminations and encouraged Russia to continue violations of U.S. law through its ongoing hacking campaign."

Perez, the DNC chairman, in a prepared statement, said, the Russian government notified the Trump campaign in advance that it had stolen Democratic emails and other information about plans by the party that Russia sought to support Trump's candidacy.

"Rather than reporting Russia's offer to meddle in a U.S. election, the Trump campaign welcomed Russia's help," Perez said. "Trump's closest political adviser, Roger Stone, also appeared to have advance knowledge of specific plans by WikiLeaks to disseminate some of this information."

The suit's claims open with the words: "No one is above the law."

"In the run-up to the 2016 election, Russia mounted a brazen attack on American Democracy. The opening salvo was an attack on the DNC, carried out on American soil."

"In 2015 and 2016, Russian intelligence services hacked into the DNC's computers, penetrated its phone systems and exfiltrated tens of thousands of documents and emails," the suit says.

"Russia then used this stolen information to advance its own interests: destabilizing the U.S. political environment, denigrating Democratic presidential nominee, and supporting the campaign of Donald J. Trump ... whose policies would benefit the Kremlin," the suit charges.

The suit alleges conspiracy, computer fraud and abuse, misappropriation of trade secrets, trespass and other violations of the law.

The full Trump response to the lawsuit is here:

Trump Campaign Responds to Frivolous DNC Lawsuit NEW YORK, NY  Today, the Democratic National Committee filed a wide-ranging, partisan civil lawsuit in federal court against the Trump Campaign, WikiLeaks, and the Russian Government. In response, Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. notes that this frivolous lawsuit is a last-ditch effort to substantiate the baseless Russian collusion allegations by a nearly-bankrupt Democratic Party still trying to counter the will of the people in the 2016 presidential election. This civil lawsuit is completely without merit and will be dismissed in due time. "This is a sham lawsuit about a bogus Russian collusion claim filed by a desperate, dysfunctional, and nearly insolvent Democratic Party," said Brad Parscale, Campaign Manager of Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. "With the Democrats' conspiracy theories against the President's campaign evaporating as quickly as the failing DNC's fundraising, they've sunk to a new low to raise money, especially among small donors who have abandoned them. There is a great deal the American public wants to know about the corruption of the Democrats, their collusion to influence the 2016 presidential election, and their role in prompting a scam investigation of the Trump Campaign. While this lawsuit is frivolous and will be dismissed, if the case goes forward, the DNC has created an opportunity for us to take aggressive discovery into their claims of 'damages' and uncover their acts of corruption for the American people," he concluded. If this lawsuit proceeds, the Trump Campaign will be prepared to leverage the discovery process and explore the DNC's now-secret records about the actual corruption they perpetrated to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Everything will be on the table, including:  How the DNC contributed to the fake dossier, using Fusion GPS along with the Clinton Campaign as the basis for the launch of a phony investigation.  Why the FBI was never allowed access to the DNC servers in the course of their investigation into the Clinton e-mail scandal.  How the DNC conspired to hand Hillary Clinton the nomination over Bernie Sanders.  How officials at the highest levels of the DNC colluded with the news media to influence the outcome of the DNC nomination.  Management decisions by Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Donna Brazile, Tom Perez, and John Podesta; their e-mails, personnel decisions, budgets, opposition research, and more.

 Additional reporting by CNBC's Kevin Breuninger.

Read the DNC's lawsuit here.
Former Governor of Massachusetts Bill Weld says it makes a lot of sense for Republicans, like President Donald Trump, to support de-scheduling marijuana.

"I would think it's excellent politics for President Trump. He did say during the campaign in 2016, adult recreation, full adult legalization, is a states' rights issue  and that goes down very well with Republicans," Weld said on CNBC's "Fast Money."

"Including this former Republican," Weld added, chuckling.

The former Republican governor of Massachusetts-turned Libertarian has made his newfound feelings about marijuana well-known, since announcing last week he would join former House Speaker John Boehner on the board of medical marijuana company, Acreage Holdings.

"There's almost no logical argument against" de-scheduling marijuana, he said on Friday, adding that problems like banking would resolve themselves if marijuana's scheduling  or level of regulation  were reduced.

Furthermore, Weld not only thinks marijuana would fit well into Trump's political agenda, he thinks the president might be leaning toward loosening regulations already. To demonstrate, he referenced an upcoming hearing on de-scheduling marijuana, requested by the Trump administration, as well as Trump's recent comments to Senator Gardner of Colorado.

"President Trump talked with Cory Gardner, Republican Senator from Colorado...and said, 'No, no, I'm going to take care of the rub between the Feds and the states. If it's legal in Colorado, we'll make sure you don't get prosecuted for that,'" Weld said.

"That's the President of the United States talking, so that's pretty high cotton," he added.

As for full legalization, Weld didn't seem opposed, but he said he thinks it is "still years away for all 50 states."
OPEC kingpin Saudi Arabia warned oil traders on Friday that a dramatic upswing in crude futures was little reason to become complacent.

Speaking to reporters in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the kingdom's Energy Minister, Khalid al-Falih, told CNBC's Steve Sedgwick: "We have to be patient. We shouldn't jump the gun, we shouldn't be complacent and listen to some of the noise such as 'mission accomplished'. I think we still have work ahead of us."

OPEC, Russia and several other allied producers have spearheaded an ongoing effort to try to clear a global supply overhang and prop up prices. The agreement, which came into effect in January 2017, has already been extended through until the end of this year  with producers scheduled to meet in June to review policy.

The initial target of the supply-cutting deal was to reduce industrialized nations' oil inventories back to their five-year average. Nonetheless, with several major global producers honing in on achieving their original aim, there is little indication from the world's top exporter that it wishes to wind down the supply cuts.

OPEC and its partners meet in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia on Friday, with the 14-member oil cartel then set to reconvene on June 22 to review to its oil production policy.
SHENZHEN, China  Chinese tech company Huawei wants to change the way people talk to their artificially intelligent voice assistants. The firm plans to make those conversations more emotionally interactive, according to senior executives.

Voice-powered virtual assistants currently serve a functional role, by giving information  "What's the weather like?"  or completing small tasks like turning on a playlist. Huawei wants to take that a step further and create a voice companion to fulfill some of its users' emotional needs.

"We want to provide emotional interactions," Felix Zhang, vice president of software engineering at Huawei's consumer business group, told CNBC at the company's annual global analyst summit in Shenzhen, China.

Huawei launched a voice assistant for the Chinese market in 2013 and said it's looking to release an emotion-based AI software in the near future. The company says it has 110 million users of its voice assistance on a daily basis in China.

"We think that, in the future, all our end users wish [that] they can interact with the system in the emotional mode," Zhang added. "This is the direction we see in the long run."

Other tech companies are also experimenting with AI to serve their users; that includes Amazon's Alexa, Samsung's Bixby, Apple's Siri, and Microsoft's task-driven Cortana and it's social chatbot Xiaoice that's designed for the Chinese market.

The idea that a program can detect a user's mood and respond accordingly is defined as "emotion AI." The technology is being looked at to create a more personalized user experience, according to research company Gartner.

In a January article, the research firm explained that emotion AIs are not yet widespread. Voice-controlled virtual assistants provide a natural outlet for this technology to gain traction due to the popularity of such applications, according to Gartner. Those virtual assistants have the ability to process commands and questions at the moment, but lack the contextual information needed to understand and respond to a user's emotional state, the company said.

"Adding emotion-sensing capabilities will enable [virtual personal assistants] to analyze data points from facial expressions, voice intonation and behavioral patterns," Gartner said.

The type of program that Huawei has in mind will attempt to keep a conversation going for as long as possible so that a user does not feel alone, according to James Lu, director of AI product management at Huawei's consumer business group.

To do that, "the first step is [to] give your assistant a high IQ," he said, adding that the next step will be to give it a high EQ  emotional quotient.

If the idea of your smartphone turning into an emotional companion sounds like something out of a science fiction movie, it's not far off. In fact, Huawei executives talked about the sci-fi film "Her" as an inspiration.

The movie's protagonist falls in love with his artificial voice assistant, Samantha, which learns and adapts to his emotional needs.

"Samantha is a dream for all the engineers," Zhang said referring to the fictional character's software capabilities. "Like in the movie, you can even get rid of your girlfriend. This is quite emotional service providing."

But for it to be effective, the software must be accurate, he added. For example, if a user is angry and the voice assistant plays very strong music, it could make the person feel even worse.

Zhang predicted that users will soon no longer need to touch their smartphones to use them  the idea is that most of the functions on the devices can be accessed using voice command.
Ericsson beat quarterly profit expectations on Friday as savings started to kick in, fueling hopes for a recovery at the struggling mobile equipment maker and sending its shares up 15 percent.

The Swedish company, which is restructuring and has replaced much of its top management, has struggled with falling spending on networks by telecoms operators and weak emerging markets demand.

Its first-quarter loss shrank to 0.3 billion crowns ($35.6 million) from a 11.3 billion loss a year earlier and beat a mean forecast for a 2.4 billion loss in a Reuters poll of analysts.

The company cut its workforce by more than 3,000 jobs during the quarter, part of reductions that have eliminated 18,000 jobs since last July, it said.

Ericsson said factors behind the improvement included cost reductions, a continued ramp-up of its 5G-ready radio system product platform and good progress in addressing poorly performing customer contracts in managed services.

"Our efforts to improve efficiency in service delivery and common costs are starting to pay off," Chief Executive Borje Ekholm said in a statement.
Euro zone reform needs to be done well rather than quickly, Dutch finance minister Wopke Hoekstra told CNBC on Thursday, despite calls from France to speed-up the integration process.

The Netherlands is one of the most conservative countries when it comes to euro zone reform. Generally speaking, euro countries that are in a healthier financial position are adverse to measures calling for further integration, fearing that they might have to intervene, diverting their taxpayers' money into struggling euro economies.

France has been the most vocal euro member pushing for further reforms and integration. But for the Dutch, moving too quickly could be risky.

"We are very much committed to the European Union and the euro and we would like to see a number of improvements and changes and reforms on these important topics, such as the banking union," Hoekstra told CNBC's Joumanna Bercetche at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund's Spring Meetings 2018 in Washington.

"But at the same time, it's much more important we do this in a right way and in a right form than doing it quickly," he added.
The FAA said the "emergency" order was based on a service bulletin, also issued Friday from the engine's manufacturer, CFM International, that called for more stringent testing of the CFM56-7B engine and an investigation into the deadly engine failure on Southwest Flight 1380, the airline regulator said.

It was the first accident-related passenger death on a U.S. airline since 2009 and the first passenger fatality due to an accident or incident in Southwest's history.

One passenger was killed after she was partially sucked through a window that was blown open in the blast when a fan blade on one of the Boeing 737's engines broke loose as the plane was flying above 30,000 feet. The plane, which was headed from New York to Dallas, made an emergency landing in Philadelphia.

The Federal Aviation Administration on Friday ordered airlines to inspect the fan blades of some engines of the same type that exploded on a Southwest Airlines flight earlier this week.

Under the FAA's order some engines will have to be inspected within 20 days.

The engine type is one of the most commonly used around the world. Friday's order will affect some 352 engines in the U.S. and 681 worldwide, said the FAA, citing the manufacturer's estimate.

"We are issuing this [airworthiness directive] because we evaluated all the relevant information and determined the unsafe condition described previously is likely to exist or develop in other products of the same type design," said the FAA's notice.

CFM International, a joint venture of General Electric and France's Safran Aircraft Engines, said engine inspectors can examine the engine while it is still on the wing using an ultrasonic probe. Tiny cracks in the engine's fan blades may not be visible to the naked eye. That test takes about four hours per engine, CFM said.

CFM recommends ultrasonic inspections within the next 20 days to fan blades of CFM56-7B engines with more than 30,000 cycles, or uses, since new. Also, it recommends inspections by the end of August for fan blades with 20,000 cycles and inspections to all other fan blades when they reach 20,000 cycles.

After the first inspection, operators are recommended to repeat the inspection every 3,000 cycles, which typically represents about two years in airline service.

Southwest said its existing maintenance program "meets or exceeds all the requirements" in the FAA order.

Not all airlines will be subject to the order because it is based on the number of cycles of the engines. For example, a spokesman for American Airlines said its 737-800s that use the engines in the order haven't been used enough times to be subject to the order.

The FAA announced:

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued an Emergency Airworthiness Directive (EAD) that requires operators to inspect fan blades on certain CFM56-7B engines within 20 days. The directive is based on a CFM International Service Bulletin issued today and on information gathered from the investigation of Tuesday's Southwest Airlines engine failure. The inspection requirement applies to CFM56-7B engines. Specifically, engines with more than 30,000 total cycles from new must undergo inspections within 20 days. The EAD becomes effective upon publication. The engine manufacturer estimates today's corrective action affects 352 engines in the U.S. and 681 engines worldwide.

This story is developing. Please check back for updates.
Chris Hughes went from living in a small town in North Carolina to attending Harvard on a scholarship. During his freshman year, Hughes met Mark Zuckerberg.

His life changed forever.

Hughes became a co-founder of Facebook with Zuckerberg and made "half a billion dollars for three years of work," according to a February 2018 LinkedIn post by Hughes.

It does not go unnoticed by Hughes, how crazy that is.

"You know, the only thing we can call it is a lucky break," Hughes says of his wealth  $430 million as of December 2016, according to Forbes  on a recent episode of Kara Swisher's Recode Decode podcast.

"I grew up in a little town, Hickory, North Carolina. It's at the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains  I grew up there, my mom was a public school teacher, dad was a traveling paper salesman, but then I got a scholarship to go to a fancy boarding school, Phillips Andover, up in Massachusetts," Hughes says.

"It was there where I lost the accent and then later got a scholarship to go to Harvard and met Mark Zuckerberg, freshman year. We ended up roommates sophomore year, started Facebook in February of 2004, the rocket ship took off and my life changed pretty dramatically," he explains.

Friends  if you're intrigued, consider reading #FairShot and thinking through the idea. If you're skeptical, please read the book and throw your critiques my way. Let's make the American Dream a possibility for everyone.

Though Zuckerberg famously dropped out of Harvard to pursue Facebook, Hughes graduated. In 2007, Hughes left Facebook to work for then-Senator Barack Obama's first presidential campaign.

More than a decade later, Hughes has become an advocate for universal basic income, a cash payment distributed to everyone irrespective of employment status. He wrote a book promoting the idea, "Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn," which was published in February 2018.

"I ended up wanting to write the book in order to partially tell my story and be clear that the financial reward that I got from three years' worth of work at Facebook was entirely disproportionate to the time and effort put in," says Hayes.

"I might be extreme but I don't think my case is actually that unusual. A small group of people are getting very, very wealthy while everybody else is struggling to make ends meets," Hughes continues.

Zuckerberg also admitted the inequity of his own wealth in his Harvard commencement speech delivered in May.

"Let's face it. There is something wrong with our system when I can leave here and make billions of dollars in 10 years while millions of students can't afford to pay off their loans, let alone start a business," Zuckerberg said in his commencement address.
The central banker expected to be the next head of the New York Fed doesn't think much of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

"Cryptocurrency doesn't pass the basic test of what a currency should be," John Williams, currently the head of the San Francisco Fed but the nominee for the top slot in New York, said during a speech Friday.

A currency should be "basically something with a store of value," he said, adding that currencies need to be "elastic" to be able to support varying economic and financial conditions.

"The setup or institutional arrangement around bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, first of all they have problems with fraud, problems with money laundering, terror financing. There's a lot of problems there," Williams added.

Williams spoke as bitcoin was enjoying a nice rally Friday. But the price has been strikingly volatile, peaking near $20,000 in 2017 before tumbling this year and last trading around $8,500.

As he has spent most of his career in central banking, Williams acknowledged he is "very biased" when it comes to the crypto issue. Williams likely will take the New York Fed reins when current President William Dudley leaves in June.

"The idea of the supply of currency and thinking about currency really belongs more in the sphere of government and central banks," he said. "My view is it's really more of a promise of technology."

WATCH: Nobel laureate Robert Shiller weighs in on the bitcoin craze.
Oil prices probably won't rise much beyond recent highs near $75 a barrel, according to Minister Mohammed bin Hamad Al Rumhi of Oman.

The forecast from the world's longest-serving oil minister comes amid reports that top oil exporter Saudi Arabia would like international benchmark prices to rise into a range between $80 and $100.

Some traders say that is feeding speculation that the Saudis could use their influence over other oil producers to block any changes to a production-cutting deal among two dozen nations even as the agreement's goal is within sight and oil prices rise to more than three-year highs.

Those reports may have percolated all the way up to the White House. On Friday, President Donald Trump complained on Twitter that OPEC is keeping oil prices artificially high.

Donald Trump tweet

But Minister Mohammed bin Hamad Al Rumhi of Oman said it's premature to start talking about oil returning to $100 a barrel.



"I think $65 to $75 is more realistic numbers for the rest of the year, but there are so many factors that can change that," he told CNBC on Thursday.

Rumhi made his comments as several ministers gathered in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia to assess compliance with the output caps.

Saudi Arabian officials have reportedly told industry sources they prefer an oil price above $80 a barrel. That price would support the stock market debut for the kingdom's oil giant Saudi Aramco and other state-funded programs, sources told Reuters and Bloomberg.

However, Rumhi stressed that there is no consensus among the 24 participating nations about the optimal price.



"In my opinion, where we are is not too bad and we can live with it. That's $65 to $75, give or take, for the foreseeable future," he said.



Still, Rumhi said the production-cutting deal has not yet achieved its aim of balancing the market.

Oman is one of several nations that partnered with the 14-member OPEC cartel and Russia at the start of 2017 to remove 1.8 million barrels a day from the market. Their official goal is to drive down stockpiles in developed nations to their five-year average.



Inventories fell to just 30 million barrels above that level in February, according to the International Energy Agency. The IEA said this month that OPEC may have achieved its goal by now.



"I don't think the mission is accomplished," Rumhi said. "It's a work in progress. We have made progress, but I don't think that the job is finished."

Rumhi said he is focused on the balance between supply and demand, and he does not believe the oil market has swung into undersupply. In his view, it is balanced or near balanced at best, and may still be oversupplied.

Saudi Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih also stressed on Friday that it's too soon to declare mission accomplished. Asked about Trump's tweet, Falih said the market should determine the price of oil.

OPEC meets in June to discuss potential adjustments to the agreement.
General Electric is in discussions to sell its rail business to Wabtec, according to multiple reports Friday.

Shares of Wabtec rose more than 6 percent in trading Friday.

The industrial conglomerate's transportation business is valued at about $7 billion, with GE examining multiple ways to offload the division. CEO John Flannery has been looking to sell or spin-off more than $20 billion in assets since October. The conglomerate most recently announced plans for private equity firm Veritas Capital to acquire a GE health-care unit for $1.05 billion in cash.

Wabtec  an acronymization of Westinghouse Air Brake Technologies Corporation  is a manufacturer of locomotives, freight cars and other rail-related products. The company is based in Wilmerding, Pennsylvania.

General Electric and Wabtec did not immediately respond to CNBC requests for comment.

GE stock was up over 5 percent, rising earlier in the day when the company reported better than expected first quarter earnings.

This is breaking news. Please check back for updates.
General Electric met with the Department of Justice last month to discuss the ongoing investigation into its now defunct WMC mortgage business, the company revealed during its earnings report Friday.

The industrial conglomerate set aside $1.5 billion of reserves for a potential legal settlement in connection with alleged subprime mortgage violations under GE Capital in 2006 and 2007.

"In March we had settlement discussions following the DOJ's assertion that WMC and GE Capital violated FIRREA," GE Chief Financial Officer Jamie Miller said on a conference call with investors, referring to the federal law on loans.

The Justice Department opened an investigation in late 2015 regarding WMC, which was a GE Capital subsidiary, and its alleged violation of the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act.

GE, which sold WMC in 2007, has said the warning about potential DOJ action includes the outcomes from investigations of other financial firms. Miller reiterated that GE's newly raised reserve is based on those discussions with the Justice Department, as well as a "review of settlements by other banks."
In exchange, parents would have to agree to delay their Social Security benefits.

Details of the proposal are still thin, but it would permit new parents to tap into a portion of their Social Security benefits to pay for 12 weeks of leave from work.

Alvarez | Getty Images

Some Republicans are considering legislation that would allow people to borrow from their future Social Security benefits to pay for time off from work after they have a baby.

A new analysis by The Urban Institute, a policy research group, finds that such a law could risk sending Americans into retirement with less money. "This plan seemed too good to be true, and it probably is," said Richard Johnson, director of the program on retirement policy at the Urban Institute. The details of the paid leave proposal are still thin, but it would allow new parents to take an early withdrawal from their Social Security benefits to pay for 12 weeks off from work after they've had a baby. In exchange, they'd have to agree to defer the collection of Social Security payments later in their life.

This plan seemed too good to be true, and it probably is. Richard Johnson director of the program on retirement policy at the Urban Institute

The Independent Women's Forum, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., first suggested the paid leave proposal in January. It has since garnered the attention of at least three Republican senators  Joni Ernst of Iowa, Mike Lee of Utah and Marco Rubio of Florida. "Paid family leave is a vital issue for every young American family," wrote Conn Carroll, Sen. Lee's communication director, in an email. "He is currently working with Senators Rubio and Ernst on turning Independent Women's Forum's policy idea into actual legislation." The White House did not respond to a request for comment about whether it supports the proposal.

The Urban Institute's analysis found that taking a loan from your Social Security when you're younger could set you back decades later. Parents who took one 12-week paid leave would have to delay their Social Security checks by around 20 to 25 weeks, the Urban Institute calculated. Such a wait would reduce a person's lifetime Social Security benefits by 3 percent, according to the group's estimate. That's because Social Security would not be able to recoup its loans from roughly one-quarter of new parents, because they either died before retirement age, received disability insurance or didn't work enough to qualify for the benefits, the institute calculated. And that gap would result in additional costs for other participants. Those who had more than one child and opted for additional paid leave would see their funds for old age shrink even more. Four 12-week paid leaves, for example, would slash a parent's Social Security payments by about 10 percent, the Urban Institute found.

Thanasis Zovoilis | Getty Images

Others feel the trade-off is worth it. This voluntary paid leave system would deliver an important benefit to parents without disrupting businesses or burdening taxpayers, said Carrie Lukas, president of the Independent Women's Forum. "This approach is about reforming our entitlement system to make it more flexible and modern and responsive to the needs of workers today," Lukas said. "It's a way to help people by rationalizing the safety net to give people access when they need it most, rather than expanding government yet again." Another concern some opponents have is that it may encourage other proposals to tap Social Security for non-retirement needs. Indeed, another bill recently introduced would offer student debt relief to people who agree to wait longer to collect their Social Security benefits. "It's like you're borrowing against your IRA to pay for a mortgage," said Kathleen Romig, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. "Leakage is already a big problem with 401(k)s and IRAs." "We don't have a headache with Social Security," she added. "Why add it?"

Leakage is already a big problem with 401(k)s and IRAs. We don't have a headache with Social Security. Why add it? Kathleen Romig senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
Signs and flowers by the fence surrounding Stoneman Douglas High School. On February 14, 2018, a former school Stoneman Douglas student Nikolas Cruz entered the school at 2.30pm and proceeded to kill 3 teachers and 14 school children in a 7 minute shooting spree.

Washington answered the Parkland school shooting massacre with a political popgun. Beyond minor changes to existing background checks, President Donald Trump and Congress have mostly made noise.

Even that has quieted since youthful protesters went home last month. The recovery of firearms-maker stock prices to beyond pre-Parkland levels reflects the capital's fleeting Trump-era attention span  no match for the entrenched power of the NRA.

But that doesn't mean nothing is changing. Adopting the strategy Republicans used to block President Barack Obama in red America, gun safety advocates are pursuing incremental steps in Democratic-leaning areas of the country.

"In the immediate future, the states are where the action's going to be," said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety. The organization founded by billionaire ex-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg points to a series of recent advances.

Vermont has required background checks on all gun sales. Maryland legislators passed a "red flag" bill keeping guns from those deemed dangerous.

Rhode Island's governor signed an executive order for the same purpose. Oregon enacted a bill making it harder for stalkers and domestic abusers to buy and possess guns.

A bipartisan group of legislators in Minnesota is seeking tougher gun purchase background checks. Massachusetts, New Jersey and Vermont have all outlawed the "bump stocks" that turn semi-automatic weapons into machine guns.

What all those states have in common: They voted Democratic in the 2016 presidential election. Everytown and its gun safety allies are leveraging their political contours just as red state Republicans worked around a Democratic White House to challenge regulation and the expansion of Medicaid in the Obama era.

There has been some movement even in states Trump won in 2016. Florida  ground zero for the Parkland massacre  passed a red flag law and raised the age for rifle purchases to 21. Outgoing Gov. Rick Scott, courting swing voters in his close race for the Senate this fall, signed it over NRA opposition.

Kansas legislators passed a bill to bar those convicted of domestic violence from owning guns. The Pennsylvania Senate took a similar step.

Those signs of movement reflect a broad shift in national opinion. A Washington Post/ABC News Poll out Friday shows that Americans, by 57 percent to 34 percent, consider new laws to prevent gun violence a higher priority than protecting gun ownership. A 62 percent majority supports banning the sale of assault weapons, and 85 percent support red flag laws, the poll found.

Yet gun safety activists concede their inability to push those and other measures through the GOP-controlled Congress this year. They have focused their federal efforts on galvanizing voters for this fall's midterm elections.

Everytown has teamed up with liberal billionaire Tom Steyer's NextGen America and the organization of wounded ex-congresswoman Gabby Giffords on a national voter registration drive. Their goal is harnessing the youthful energy of what Feinblatt calls "the mass shooting generation," which has organized school walkouts and protests in Washington and across the country.

(One such walkout is scheduled for Friday, the 19th anniversary of the Columbine school massacre.)

It remains uncertain how much that energy can do to lift notoriously low voter-turnout rates among young people, especially in midterm elections. And even a Democratic-controlled Congress would struggle to move gun control legislation anytime given opposition from a Republican president as well as Democrats representing more conservative rural areas.

Bloomberg's billions, however, give Everytown the luxury of patience.

"If you are gutsy on this issue, we support you," Feinblatt said. "This is not a sprint."
President Donald Trump told James Comey that former national security advisor Michael Flynn had "serious judgment issues." This is among the new details that emerged from memos written by the fired former FBI director about his conversations with the president. Comey wrote the memos before Trump fired him last May. The redacted memos, released to Congress by the Justice Department, were leaked to the media Thursday night. House Republican committee leaders had requested the memos and considered issuing subpoenas against Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein if he did not comply. The release included seven memos spanning 15 pages of notes Comey says were written almost immediately after his exchanges with Trump. The memos appear to corroborate Comey's other stated recollections of his time with the president, both in congressional testimony and in his newly released memoir. Here are some of the biggest takeaways from the memos.

New debate over Trump's Russia 'cloud'

In his written testimony ahead of a congressional cross-examination last year, Comey said Trump had called the Russia probe a "cloud" over his administration. In a statement about the release of Comey's memos, Reps. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., and Devin Nunes, R-Calif., said: "The memos also made clear the 'cloud' President Trump wanted lifted was not the Russian interference in the 2016 election cloud, rather it was the salacious, unsubstantiated allegations related to personal conduct leveled in the dossier." According to Comey's memos, Trump used the language in a March 30 phone call: "He then said he was trying to run the country and the cloud of this Russia business was making that difficult. He said he thinks he would have won the health care vote but for the cloud. He then went on at great length, explaining that he has nothing to do with Russia ... was not involved with hookers in Russia ... is bringing a lawsuit against [author of dossier alleging Trump-Russia collusion] Christopher Steele." The memo goes on to say that Trump asked what Comey "could do to lift the cloud." In Comey's memo from March 30, Trump also mentions the "cloud," saying "he was trying to make deals for the country, the cloud was hurting him ... and he hoped I could find a way to get out that he wasn't being investigated." But while the contents of the dossier are mentioned in the exchange, it is not clear that Trump's "cloud" solely includes the bombshell dossier produced by intelligence firm Fusion GPS, which makes salacious accusations about Trump and Russia.

Trump said Flynn 'has serious judgment issues'

During a dinner with Trump at the White House in January 2017, a Comey memo says, the president said "he has serious reservations" about the judgment of his first national security advisor, Michael Flynn. Trump then recounted an instance in which he told British Prime Minister Theresa May that she was the first world leader to call him after his inauguration: "...and Flynn interrupted to say that [REDACTED] had called (first, apparently). It was then that the president learned of [REDACTED] call and he confronted Flynn about it. ... Flynn said the return call was scheduled for Saturday, which prompted a heated reply from the president that six days was not an appropriate period of time to return a call from the [REDACTED] of a country like [REDACTED]. ... In telling the story, the president pointed his fingers at his head and said "the guy has serious judgment issues." Still, Trump later told Comey: "I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go." The Associated Press reported Friday that the caller whose name is blacked-out in the memo was Russian President Vladimir Putin, citing two people familiar with the call. Flynn was later fired, which the White House said was because he misled Vice President Mike Pence about contacts with Russian officials. Flynn later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about those contacts. But before Flynn's ouster, then-chief of staff Reince Priebus asked Comey in February 2017 if the FBI ordered surveillance against Flynn through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, according to the memo. The request is significant, as only suspected foreign agents can be monitored through the law. Comey's answer was redacted in the public release.

Trump suggested jailing reporters to stop leaks

In a February memo, Comey told Trump he was "eager to find leakers and would like to nail one to the door as a message." As part of the search for leakers in the FBI, Comey expressed "the value of putting a head on a pike as a message." Trump's suggestion was that "it may involve putting reporters in jail." "'They spend a couple days in jail, make a new friend, and they are ready to talk,'" Comey recalled Trump saying. Comey then wrote "I laughed as I walked to the door Reince Priebus had opened." Earlier in the conversation, Comey wrote that Trump cited Judith Miller, a New York Times reporter who served time in prison for refusing to divulge a source she had used for a story about who outed a woman as a CIA agent during the Bush 43 administration. Trump said "that we need to go after the reporters, and referred to the fact that 10 or 15 years ago we put them in jail to find out what they know, and it worked." Comey added that Trump mentioned Miller by name. Miller's source was later revealed to be Lewis "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney. Coincidentally, Trump pardoned Libby last week.

Trump's lingering fixations
Janice Bryant Howroyd is a multimillionaire entrepreneur and philanthropist. As the CEO and founder of the largest woman-owned workforce management company, ACT-1 Group, and the first black woman to own a billion-dollar business, she's charted her own course through the business world. Her company, which generates $1.1 billion in net sales, has made her one of the richest self-made women in America, with a net worth that Forbes puts at $420 million. Here's how she did it.

Photo courtesy of Janice Bryant Howroyd

"Making lots from nothing"

In 1978, Howroyd started ACT-1 Group at the front office of a rug shop in Beverly Hills, California with a $900 loan from her mother. "I wanted a really classy address, but I didn't have really classy funds, so I borrowed $900 from my mom," she tells CNBC Make It. "That gave me about $1,500 to start my business." She used the money to buy the necessary startup equipment she needed to get her company off the ground. "I thought I was Judy Jetson when I got my fax machine," she says. "My business literally started with my fax machine, my phone and my contacts." With very little entrepreneurial experience, Howroyd says she relied on early lessons from her parents to help her grow her company. "So many of the business practices that I use still in my company today were practices that I learned from my mom," she says. Growing up in Tarboro, North Carolina as one of 11 children, Howroyd says her parents taught her the benefits of being innovative with few resources. She attended segregated schools until the 11th grade and says she often learned from textbooks that were missing pages of information. One time, as she complained about her lack of resources, she says her dad challenged her to continue to be better. "He wouldn't accept it," she said. "He said, 'You're smart enough to figure out what's missing.'" Her mom took matters a step further, and told Howroyd that once she figured out the missing information, she needed to write it down, tape it in the book and leave it for the next person behind her. "She taught us many of the principles of making lots from nothing," she says. "And I think those things that she did and the way she worked with us really taught me so much about not only how to build my business, but how to sustain and innovate across the platforms that I work in today."

Photo courtesy of Janice Bryant Howroyd

Globalization vs. "glocalization"

In the beginning, ACT-1 Group was a full-time placement company based out of California. Now, 40 years later, the business has expanded to offer full-time and temporary job placement options to more than 17,000 clients in 19 countries, including the United States, Canada, Denmark, Brazil and the United Kingdom. The company has more than 2,800 employees. According to Howroyd, ACT-1 Group provides services to its clients via a number of different platforms including its technology and management solutions company AgileOne, its staffing company AppleOne and its background checks and screening company A-Check. "When you collect those organizations together, you've got the ACT-1 Group," she says. While the company started with just a fax machine and phone, Howroyd knew that in order to succeed she had to keep up with technology. In 1995, her company became one of the first staffing agencies on the World Wide Web with the launch of appleone.com. During this time period, her company also continued to see yearly revenue growth, due to the increased demand for tech workers. Today, the company is one of the largest staffing firms in the world. Howroyd credits much of her success to tapping into the $429 billion global staffing market. In 1989, she opened up her first office outside of the United States in Ontario, Canada. She says the key to making her company a success was understanding the difference between globalization and "glocalization." "Globalization requires all of the regulatory, financial and infrastructure you need in order to expand the business across different geographies," she says. "Glocalization is what happens at the local point, like understanding the immediate cultural needs and how to fit that under a much larger business initiative that a company may have hired you to achieve for them." Outside of expanding business operations beyond the U.S., Howroyd says that another key to her company's success is making the applicant the center of attention when servicing its clients. "When we're working with companies to identify talent, that means that every person who's looking for a job is the focus of our attention," she says. "We're acting as agents for them, if you will. That's a bit different from what many companies in our industry have performed. It's certainly been a dynamic piece for how I think we have been able to grow." As a mom of two, Howroyd says her family has also taken interest in making sure ACT-1 Group continues to be a success. Her son Brett is president of AppleOne, and her daughter Kay is in charge of the company's online branding.

Photo courtesy of Janice Bryant Howroyd

Keeping the millennial spirit alive
Jeff Sessions told White House lawyer Don McGahn that he might step down as attorney general if Rod Rosenstein is fired, The Washington Post reported Friday citing people familiar with the conversation.

The Post said the attorney general spoke with McGahn last weekend after his deputy, Rosenstein, signed off on the FBI's April 9 raid of Michael Cohen's office and residence. President Donald Trump called the raid and investigation of Cohen, his personal lawyer, a "disgraceful situation" and "a total witch hunt."

Rosenstein oversees the investigation into Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election.

The Post said Sessions asked McGahn for information on a meeting between Rosenstein and the president. A source told the Post that Sessions said he was relieved to hear that the meeting was "largely cordial."

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.

Read the full report in The Washington Post.
A federal judge in California on Friday postponed ruling on a request by President Donald Trump and his lawyer Michael Cohen to put on hold a lawsuit filed again them by porn star Stormy Daniels.

Judge S. James Otero said he will give Cohen until next Wednesday to file a declaration that he will refuse to answer questions in Daniels' suit because of his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

The judge could rule on the request to put the Daniels case on hold after that.

Cohen is seeking to stay Daniels' suit for up to 90 days because he is facing a federal criminal investigation by prosecutors in New York. Daniels' attorney opposes the delay.

Cohen whose office and home were raided April 9 by FBI agents, wants to avoid making statements in Daniels case that could potentially be used against him in the criminal case, according to Cohen's own attorneys.

Daniels's suit seeks to be released from a non-disclosure agreement she signed barring her from publicly discussing an affair she claims she had with Trump in 2006.

She also claims that Cohen, who paid her $130,000 for the agreement, recently defamed her by implying she is lying.

The potential that Cohen could soon be indicted in New York case was raised several times by his lawyer and Otero at a hearing on the requested delay in Daniels' case in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.
The Justice Department has reached out to all four major U.S. wireless carriers as part of an antitrust investigation, a person close to the situation told CNBC.

The source said that the department sent letters to AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint in February requesting information.

The person also said the Justice Department previously examined this matter in 2016, but ended up dropping the investigation. A source said that Apple filed a complaint, which was one factor behind the 2016 probe.

The antitrust division is looking into whether or not carriers colluded in stifling technology that allows customers to switch providers without having to change out their SIM card.

Earlier, The New York Times reported that AT&T and Verizon were being investigated. The newspaper also reported that the Justice Department has demanded information from GSMA, a mobile communications industry group.

Sources told the Times that the investigation was opened five months ago following complaints from one device maker and one wireless carrier.

GSMA, AT&T, Sprint and the Justice Department's antitrust division declined to comment to CNBC. T-Mobile did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.
In fact, the process was so frustrating for entrepreneur Matt Horwitz that he decided to quit his job as a web designer to build LLC University , a tutorial site that helps others through the process. He makes money off the national site by linking to recommended services. Since 2010, he's built step-by-step guides for the approval process, which can be more confusing in certain states compared to others.

Filing the paperwork and learning what forms are necessary for approval can be seem daunting if don't know where to begin or if you're just starting your first businesses with limited resources .

One of the first steps is registering your business a separate entity, like a limited liability company. There are obvious advantages to doing so, such as protecting against personal financial liabilities should anything with the business go wrong. There can also be tax advantages with an LLC , or it can be a stepping stone before moving to incorporate .

Getting a business off the ground is hard work. But it's only part of the battle. There are some legal hoops to jump through too.

"It took me six months to create a course for Pennsylvania, it took me three months to create [ the course for] Florida, and at that point I knew I wanted to go national," he says.

Luckily, despite the differences in costs and protocol across state lines, the best practices are generally maintained. Here's what Horwitz recommends it will take to get it done right, which took one New York-based CNBC Make It reporter as little as an hour and a half to complete.

1. LLC Name Search

Your LLC name will have to be unique. Search your desired LLC name on your state's Secretary of State website to make sure it's not already taken. The name generally should end with an allowable designator. In New York, for example, that means ending with "LLC," "L.L.C." or "Limited Liability Company."

2. Registered Agent

A registered agent is a person or company who agrees to receive legal mail, like a subpoena or complaint, on behalf of your LLC. While you could technically serve as your own registered agent and use your own address, it increases your odds of getting spam mail and other unsolicited messages. That's part of the reason why online filers like LegalZoom and incFile offer the service for a charge. In New York, things are different. By default, the Secretary of State is the Registered Agent for all companies (unless you choose otherwise).

3. Articles of Organization

This is the document that officially forms your LLC with the state. It can go by other names in certain states, such as Certificate of Organization or Certificate of Formation, but is always filed with the office of the Secretary of State. In New York, it costs $200, which is higher than the $135 average LLC filing fee across the US, according to Horwitz. The form can generally be can filed online for instant approval or mailed for approval in a couple of weeks.

4. Operating Agreement

An LLC Operating Agreement is where you will list the owners (called "members") of your LLC, as well as how much of the business they own. It's possible to have just one member with total ownership, or you can have multiple members and split the ownership any way you'd like.

5. Employer Identification Number

Part of the reason people file for an LLC in the first place is to set up an independent entity that's separate from their personal finances. Key to this is the EIN, or Employer Identification Number (also referred to as a Federal Tax ID Number). It is assigned by the IRS after your LLC is approved. The number is used to identify your LLC for reporting purposes with the IRS. In just minutes, an LLC approved at the state level can receive an EIN online from the IRS for free.

6. Opening a business bank account

To open a bank account for your LLC, you'll need your Articles of Organization (or similar document), the LLC's EIN, and generally two forms of identification. It's a crucial step that is necessary to fully finish the process of creating a separate financial entity for your business. Operating an LLC with a personal bank account all but defeats its purpose, according to Horwitz.

7. File Annual/Biennial Reports

Most states will have an annual report requirement that essentially requires keeping your LLC's contact information up to date with the Secretary of State. Some states, like New York, have a biennial requirement that costs $9 to file every two years by the end of your LLC's anniversary month.

Completing these steps would normally complete the process of forming an LLC. Certain states, however, have more hoops to jump through. New York, Arizona and Nebraska, for example, all have laws that pre-date the internet requiring LLCs to publish notices in local newspapers. Notifying the public with newspaper ads in New York for six weeks, as required by state law, can cost over $1,000 in more expensive counties, according to Horwitz, or more than five times the cost to file the LLC in the first place.

After all that, you've successfully formed a legal LLC. If you're ever unsure about any of the steps in your state, consider calling the respective office of secretary or seek help from an attorney.

Want more entrepreneurship inspiration? Watch new episodes of "Staten Island Hustle," Wednesdays at 10P ET/PT on CNBC.

Don't miss: I just started a business with less than $1,000 and I have no idea what I'm doing
Navy Capital founder Sean Stiefel says for the burgeoning marijuana industry, the profit isn't in the plant  it's in the end product.

"We're talking about vapes, oils, edibles, topicals, sprays -- all of that stuff is coming, and as science catches up to marijuana, you'll see more and more of those end products," Stiefel said on CNBC's "Closing Bell."

Stiefel founded New York-based investment firm Navy Capital in 2014. In 2017, the firm launched Navy Capital Green Fund, which invests in public equities in the global legal cannabis industry.

In Denver, where recreational marijuana has been legal since 2014, Stiefel said sales of the cannabis plant don't dominate the market, so much as products derived from the plant. And that's where the big money is.

"Look on the other side of it, the cosmetics and some of the more luxury items -- you can't keep them on the shelves," he said.

As for the future of the burgeoning industry, Stiefel thinks marijuana will look a lot more like the alcohol industry than big tobacco, but will likely share traits with both.

Insofar as the alcohol industry has distinctive branding, different product lines and product-based margins, the marijuana industry could be quite similar. And while Steifel does not consider cannabis purely a commodity, like tobacco, he does hope the cost of the actual plant will decline considerably.

"We actually would like for the price of raw marijuana to come down, because we are believers that the margin, like alcohol, is going to be captured in the end product," Steifel said. "You don't necessarily know the price of grain or potatoes going in the vodka or beer, but you know the price of the beer, and there's tremendous margins to be captured when you make products for the end user."

In the short-term, however, Steifel anticipates Canada's impending nationwide legalization will drive marijuana prices way up.
Former U.S. President Barack Obama stands next to his newly unveiled portrait during a ceremony at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, on February 12, 2018 in Washington, DC. The portraits were commissioned by the Gallery, for Kehinde Wiley to create President Obama's portrait, and Amy Sherald that of Michelle Obama.

Just two months after artist Kehinde Wiley's official portraits of former U.S. President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama's debuted at the Smithsonian Institute's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., Wiley has earned a spot as one of Time's Most Influential People of 2018. "Historically, portraiture has always been about saying yes to things that we want to celebrate, but I think also the commissioned portrait has often times been about a society saying, 'Who are the people we collectively want to honor?' and particularly with the presidential portrait, this is the highest aspect of that tradition," Wiley told Time in a recent interview. "It's been  I can't tell you  an extraordinary honor to be able to participate in that." This year, the Obamas made history not only as the country's first African-American presidential couple featured in the gallery but also for selecting the first African-American painters to receive a presidential portrait commission from the museum.

"My hands were shaking when I was making this portrait because this is the real thing, this is it. Showtime. There's going to be young kids who want to feel that they are capable of participating in art and participate in this conversation. How do you compare that to anything? This is extraordinary," Wiley told Time. Barack Obama selected Wiley, a New York-based portraitist for his painting, while Michelle Obama selected Baltimore-based artist Amy Sherald. "Thanks to Kehinde and Amy, generations of Americans  and young people from all around the world  will visit the National Portrait Gallery and see this country through a new lens," Obama said in an Instagram post after the portrait unveiling. "They'll walk out of that museum with a better sense of the America we all love. Clear-eyed. Big-hearted. Inclusive and optimistic. And I hope they'll walk out more empowered to go and change their worlds. " Wiley's portrait of Obama features the former president wearing a black suit, sitting on a wooden chair surrounded by flowers and green foliage.

"What I was always struck by whenever I saw [Wiley's] portraits was the degree to which they challenged our conventional views of power and privilege," Obama said at the portrait unveiling.

"The ability to be the first African-American painter to paint the first African-American president of the United States is absolutely overwhelming. It doesn't get any better than that," Wiley said. Here are five things you may not know about Wiley.

Obama and Wiley share a similar upbringing

Preparing Obama for the portrait required Wiley to shoot thousands of images, Wiley told the Guardian in 2017. As a result of the time-intensive process, Obama said he thinks "it's safe to say Kehinde and I bonded." Obama also realized how much he and Wiley had in common. "Both of us had American mothers who raised us with extraordinary love and support. Both of us had African fathers who had been absent from our lives and in some ways, our journeys involved searching for them and figuring out what that meant," Obama said at the portrait unveiling.

"I ended up writing about that journey and channeling it into the work that I did because I cannot paint," Obama jokingly added. "I'm sure that Kehinde's journey reflected some of those feelings in his art." Wiley, 40, grew up in South Central, Los Angeles during the 1980s. Wiley explained on his website that art was his escape from the violence that occurred in the neighborhood. "I was humbled by this invitation, but I was also inspired by Barack Obama's personal story, that sense in which he and I both do have that echo of single parents, African fathers, that search for the father," Wiley said.

The White House has previously recognized Wiley's work

As a result of using his art to "promote cultural diplomacy," Wiley was awarded the U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts in 2015, according to the department's Art in Embassies program.

Former Secretary of State John Kerry presented Wiley with the biannual award, which allows American artists to showcase their work at U.S. embassies across the world.

Wiley has also served as a juror for the White House Historical Association's "This Art is Your Art" national student competition.

Wiley has wanted to paint Obama since 2008

Months before Obama was elected as U.S. president in November 2008, Wiley shared his interest in painting the politician. "I'd love, love, love to do his official presidential portrait. I'm actively campaigning," Wiley told Time Out New York magazine in July of 2008. Leading up to Obama's reelection in 2012, Wiley told BBC he thought "it would be really interesting to paint Obama." "The reality of Barack Obama being the president of the United States  quite possibly the most powerful nation in the world  means that the image of power is completely new for an entire generation of not only black American kids, but every population group in this nation," Wiley told BBC. "Now there are children who are four or five who would have known only a black man at the seat of power in this nation. It's an important social message," he said. Wiley told the New York Times he was sworn to secrecy by the National Portrait Gallery, but said, "I'm excited about it: It's going to be amazing." "It's going to be, like, boom!" he added.

Wiley has painted portraits of Michael Jackson, Notorious B.I.G. and other famous figures...

For VH1's 2005 annual Hip Hop Honors event, the network commissioned Wiley to create portraits of hip hop leaders, including Ice T, Notorious B.I.G. and Grandmaster Flash, according to the National Portrait Gallery. Select portraits were shown in the Smithsonian exhibit "Recognize!"

This photo shows Equestrian Portrait of King Philip II, 2009,(L) featuring the late king of pop Michael Jackson, by artist Kehinde Wiley on display December 6, 2009 at the Ar Juan Castro | Getty Images

In the summer of 2008, the now deceased Michael Jackson asked Wiley to paint a portrait of him. "He saw one of my works at the Brooklyn Museum, a very large equestrian portrait of a young black man in the pose of Napoleon crossing the Alps. He said to his crew: 'I need to meet that artist,'" Wiley told the Guardian. "At first, I didn't believe it. Eventually, a mutual friend said: 'Will you please answer the f--king phone?' And so we set something up." The result was a portrait of Jackson atop a horse titled, "Equestrian Portrait of King Philip II (Michael Jackson)" created in 2009. Jackson did not get to see the painting, which sold for $175,000 at an auction.



...but his favorite subjects include everyday people

As an alternative to the gang-ridden streets of South Central in the 1980s, Wiley's mother sent him to art school as an 11-year-old. Wiley then completed his undergraduate studies at the Art Institute of San Francisco. His art style began to take its current form while getting his MFA at Yale University. There, he f on the topics of identity, gender and sexuality as well as painting as a political act. Wiley's portrait subjects are usually "urban, black and brown men" he randomly selects on the streets of wherever his projects take him. Through his portraiture, Wiley depicts these otherwise unknown people as "heroic, powerful, majestic" figures commonly found in classical European paintings of noblemen, royalty and aristocrats. Obama said he was struck by "the way [Wiley] would take extraordinary care, precision and vision in recognizing the beauty, grace and dignity of people who are so often invisible in our lives and put them on a grand stage." "In my small way, that's part of what I believe politics should be about. It's not simply celebrating the high and the mighty and expecting that the country unfolds from the top-down, but rather that it comes from the bottom-up " Obama added.



Former US President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama stand before their portraits and respective artists, Kehinde Wiley (L) and Amy Sherald (R), after an unveiling at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, February 12, 2018. Saul Loeb | Getty Images

Instead of giving Obama a similar, elaborate treatment to his other portrait subjects, Wiley humanized the former president by depicting him seated in a wooden chair. "When you look at this painting, there is, sure, an amazingly handsome man seated," Wiley said. "But there's also botanicals that are going on there that nod towards his personal story." The painting features the chrysanthemum, the flower of Obama's hometown in Chicago, Illinois, as well as flowers that represent Obama's heritage by way of Kenya and Hawaii. The portrait will live in the National Portrait Gallery's "America's Presidents" exhibition, the country's only complete collection of presidential portraits outside the White House. "In a very symbolic way what I'm doing is charting his path on Earth through those plants that sort of weave their way. There is a fight going on between he and the foreground and then the plants that are sort of trying to announce themselves underneath his feet," Wiley said. "Who gets to be the star of the show? The story or the man who inhabits that story? It's all chance-driven."

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Apple's iPhone sales in the June quarter will significantly disappoint versus Wall Street expectations, according to Morgan Stanley.

But the firm says any drop in the stock from poor results will be a great buying opportunity.

Morgan Stanley lowered its June quarter iPhone unit estimate to 34 million from 40.5 million versus the nearly 43 million average forecast.

"We expect Apple to report an in-line March quarter, but are cautious into earnings on May 1 due to our belief that June quarter consensus estimates need to be revised lower," analyst Katy Huberty wrote Friday in a note to clients entitled "Cautious Into The Print; Buy Any Post-Earnings Dip."



"Additionally, with expectations for a step up in capital returns at least partially embedded in valuation  Apple's capital return announcement could amount to a 'sell the news' type of event, especially if forward estimates are revised materially downward."

The company's stock closed down 4.1 percent Friday.

Huberty cited her poor checks with Apple's iPhone suppliers and weaker-than-expected data from China for her estimate reduction. She noted Apple's smartphone activation share fell in China so far this year through March.

Despite her negative iPhone forecast the analyst reiterated her overweight rating on the company's shares, saying investors should add to Apple positions in any post-earnings stock decline.

"We would be buyers on any weakness following the print given 1) the Services story remains intact, (leading to a stronger and more consistent source of EPS growth and margin expansion), 2) estimate revisions are approaching trough (we already assume no device revenue growth next three years), and 3) buybacks remain a source of downside protection."

Huberty lowered her price target to $200 from $203 for the company's stock, representing 16 percent upside from Thursday's close.

On Thursday Bank of America Merrill Lynch and J.P. Morgan warned their clients that iPhone sales may come in below expectations after key Apple chip partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) lowered its sale guidance. TSMC cited "weak demand" in the smartphone industry for its reduced forecast.



TMSC is the world's largest semiconductor foundry and manufactures chips for Apple and its component suppliers.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un visits the Command of the Strategic Force of the Korean People's Army (KPA) in an unknown location in North Korea in this undated photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on August 15, 2017.

South Korean officials no longer have to use a bullhorn to communicate messages to their reclusive neighbor to the North.

A direct phone line was installed and tested Friday, connecting South Korea's Blue House, the official residence and office of President Moon Jae-in, and the North's State Affairs Commission, where leader Kim Jong Un's power is consolidated.

"The call quality was very good and we felt like we got a call from our next-door neighbor," South Korea's director for the Government Situation Room, Youn Kun-young, told reporters after the four-minute call.

The hotline also reportedly features a screen for video chats as well as a fax system.

The move signals a reduction in tensions on the Korean peninsula ahead of next week's face-to-face summit, the first since 2007, between the leaders of North Korea and South Korea.

Notably, the April 27 meeting is set to take place in the South Korean village of Panmunjom, which would make Kim the first North Korean leader to cross the 38th parallel since the Korean War.

"This direct line between ROK and DPRK senior leaders greatly reduces any chance of miscommunication that might lead to unnecessarily provocative actions," retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, a senior defense fellow for Defense Priorities, told CNBC.

Davis, who served as an advisor to the Second Republic of Korea Army during his military career, noted that the meeting between the two Koreas sets a groundwork for a potential meeting between President Donald Trump and Kim.
Eight years ago, on April 20, 2010, BP's exploratory well located just 41 miles off the coast of Louisiana, blew out. The explosion killed 11 people, pumped 210 million gallons of oil into the waters off Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, and contaminated over 1,100 miles of coastal marshes and beaches.

It took 87 days to finally cap the well that we all saw on underwater cameras pumping seemingly endless amounts of crude oil into the Gulf the entire time. It was, as it has since been named, a disaster.

In deeply painful and long-lasting ways, the Deepwater Horizon spill showed the industry and the whole country the risks inherent in drilling, just days before the annual Earth Day celebration. Now, less than a decade later, the Trump administration is suggesting we expand the oil industry's access to pristine waters from coast to coast, including opening the Atlantic Ocean to offshore drilling.

Worse still, the administration is proposing this offshore drilling free-for-all while also calling for the repeal of the few offshore drilling safety rules that were put in place in response to Deepwater Horizon.

As a veteran of the oil industry, the first woman to supervise offshore drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, and a South Carolinian, I cannot help but be baffled by this decision.
Crude futures came under pressure on Friday but recovered from a sharp drop after President Donald Trump suggested in a tweet that OPEC is keeping oil prices artificially high.

@RealDonald Trump: Looks like OPEC is at it again. With record amounts of Oil all over the place, including the fully loaded ships at sea, Oil prices are artificially Very High! No good and will not be accepted!

U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude oil prices were up 9 cents at $68.38 a barrel, after dropping as low as $67.50 after Trump's tweet.

International benchmark was at $74.07, up 29 cents at 2:29 p.m. ET, off a session low of $72.83.

Both benchmarks hit more than three-year highs this week, as falling U.S. crude stockpiles, geopolitical tension and concerns about supply disruptions in key oil-producing nations supported the market.

It was not immediately clear what sparked Trump's OPEC tweet, but Reuters reported earlier this week that Saudi Arabia would like oil prices to rise above $80 a barrel in order to support the stock market debut of the kingdom's oil giant Saudi Aramco.

That has stirred speculation that the Saudis could lobby against altering a production-cutting deal among two dozen oil producers, even as it nears its goal of shrinking oil stockpiles in developed nations to their five-year average.

"There's not much" Trump can do about the oil policy "except for talking about it," Daniel Yergin, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and vice chair of IHS Markit, told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Friday.

The agreement has helped boost prices from 12-year lows around $26 a barrel struck in 2016. The prolonged oil price rout heaped pressure on nations like Saudi Arabia that depend on oil revenues and sparked a wave of bankruptcies and layoffs across the American oil industry.
Semiconductor stocks like Nvidia, Applied Materials and Micron were synonymous with stellar gains last year amid strong demand and the cryptocurrency frenzy. Lately, it seems like the tide has turned for the once-high-flying names, and some market watchers are forecasting further downside.



The entire space was slammed on Thursday, posting its largest single-day drop since December 2016. The SMH, an ETF tracking semiconductors, fell 4.5 percent as its top holdings got crushed. This action comes amid a broader concern around the technology sector's valuation.



Mark Tepper, president and CEO at Strategic Wealth Partners, gives the group an underweight position. After the huge run-up for chipmakers, he found the valuation unattractive.



"We definitely feel it's time to dump the chip names that are heavily dependent on the high-end smart phones, especially with Taiwan [Semiconductor], when 21 percent of your revenue comes from one source, being Apple," Tepper said Thursday on CNBC's "Trading Nation."



"The global M&A frenzy from last year, along with all the bitcoin hype, really pushed these stocks into the stratosphere, to the point [of] five-year earnings growth forecasts of 25 percent. That's just a really tough hurdle to overcome," he said, citing less demand for Apple's iPhone, which would theoretically threaten semi stocks' performance.



"You can see that with Apple, their strategy has changed to include a more balanced mix of revenue, where they're getting more from services, so I think there's obviously ... a changing landscape," he said.



Others are less negative, though still cautious. Gina Sanchez, CEO of Chantico Global, said that while there's slowed growth in the space, Thursday's decline was likely a one-off event.



"Clearly, we're probably slowing, but there still is significant demand there," she said. "Part of what's driving [Thursday's move lower] really has to do with an inventory drawdown, which is Apple's decision to pull all the inventory" from one type of Taiwan Semiconductor chip to prepare to use a different chip.



"That has nothing to do with the demand; that was basically over-ordering. They're now drawing down that inventory and getting ready for another cycle," Sanchez said, adding that while some of the meteoric semiconductor rise was over-hyped, demand related to artificial intelligence will still likely remain.
In the chase for more return with less risk, one market watcher went yield hunting on the . Gina Sanchez, CEO of Chantico Global, found one worth a buy and another to avoid.

Speaking on CNBC's "Trading Nation" on Thursday, Sanchez vetted Macy's, Phillip Morris, Verizon and Exxon Mobil, four S&P 500 stocks with some of the highest yields. The key to success when yield hunting, she says, is to pay attention to the fundamentals underpinning a company's ability to maintain its dividend.

"Of all of those, I think Exxon Mobil probably has the best chances for sustainability over the long run of that dividend," said Sanchez. "Exxon Mobil is coming out of a lull."

The oil company is expected to post 18 percent profit growth in its March-ended quarter, benefiting from tax code changes and improving crude prices. Earnings this year are forecast to climb to $4.73 a share, Exxon's best annual performance since 2014 before the worst of the oil slump.

Expected gains in crude prices through to the end of the decade should continue to support Exxon, said Sanchez. U.S. oil prices have recovered to nearly $70 since hitting a low of $26.05 in February 2016. Prices are now trading at their highest levels since the end of 2014.

Exxon Mobil has a dividend yield of 3.9 percent. Its payout ratio, the level of profit it redistributes to shareholders, is above average at 66.5 percent. The S&P 500 has a payout ratio of 36.3 percent.

Looking to the worst of the high-yielding stocks in the S&P 500, Sanchez says Macy's is at the bottom of the pile.

"The retail sector has been really in a bad place and Macy's, in particular," said Sanchez. "Their balance sheet doesn't look nearly as good."

Sales and earnings growth in the U.S. retail sector is expected to plateau through 2020, according to FactSet estimates. Revenue in 2018 is expected to climb 9 percent, but drop to 5 percent and 3.8 percent growth in 2019 and 2020, respectively. Macy's sales are expected to come in flat in fiscal 2019 and 2020.

Macy's has a comparatively high dividend yield at 5 percent compared with 1.9 percent on the S&P 500. It has a payout ratio of 30 percent.

Mark Tepper, president of Strategic Wealth Partners, says when hunting for dividend picks, it's better to identify potential than payout.

"We are not particularly fond of high-yielders especially in a rising rate environment where they tend to underperform," Tepper told "Trading Nation" on Thursday. "But we do like the dividend growers which are those companies with the lower payout ratios that still maintain the ability to keep some earnings to grow their stock price and grow dividends down the road."

To help identify those with potential, Tepper says to isolate stocks at the sweet spot  a dividend yield above the S&P 500 and a payout ratio below it. Exxon Mobil, Tepper's pick of the bunch, does not meet those conditions as its payout ratio is above the index.
Russia stands ready to retaliate against the latest round of U.S. sanctions, the country's Finance Minister Anton Siluanov told CNBC.

The U.S. slapped sanctions on several Russian oligarchs, businesses and agencies thought to have ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this month. It prompted a dramatic market sell-off in Moscow, with investors seen dumping Russian assets amid elevated concerns over the country's economic position.

Speaking late Thursday on the sidelines of the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) spring meeting in Washington, Siluanov told CNBC: "We are not in favor of sanction-swapping. Nevertheless, our MPs (members of parliament) have drafted legislation that would allow us to introduce certain restrictions, both on exported goods and on goods imported into the country."

"Still, I would reiterate, any sanctions have a negative effect on the state of economies  I very much hope that these sanctions processes do not develop any further. We need to talk, we need to find agreements, we need to look for ways out in order to solve problems not by imposing sanctions but through political agreements," he added.
"To continue with the metaphor: we have brought the temperature down but we have not seen a full recovery yet," he added.

"Undoubtedly, the situation is much better than it was three months, half a year or a year ago, but the patient has not yet fully recovered," Novak told CNBC's Steve Sedgwick in Jeddah.

Novak acknowledged that their agreement has worked, but there's still more to be done.

The agreement was initially brought forward to boost oil prices after years of stalled levels. Oil producing countries are set to meet in June to review the deal.

The supply-cutting deal led by OPEC has not yet completed its mission to rebalance the oil market, Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak told CNBC Friday.

OPEC, Russia and several other allied producers have spearheaded an ongoing effort to try to clear a global supply overhang and prop up prices. The agreement, which came into effect in January 2017, has already been extended through until the end of this year.

When asked if Russia and other oil suppliers in the deal might jump off before the expected end-date, Novak repeated that such a decision would need more market data.

"I cannot at the moment give you a precise answer because we do not have the full idea how the market is going to perform in the forthcoming months. We need to carry on monitoring the situation," Novak said.

"I cannot tell unequivocally: yes or no, this would be too blunt," he said. "We keep our options open in order to be able to take a more balanced decision based on more accurate data over a longer-term period."

Earlier on Friday, the Saudi Arabian Energy Minister, Khalid al-Falih, told CNBC that it's not mission accomplished yet for the oil producers.

"We have to be patient. We shouldn't jump the gun, we shouldn't be complacent and listen to some of the noise such as 'mission accomplished.' I think we still have work ahead of us," he said.

The next key date is June, when ministers reconvene to asses the path forward for the oil deal.

-- CNBC's Sam Meredith contributed to this report.


A Russian oil billionaire has been ordered by the High Court to transfer a 350m (US$491 million) luxury superyacht to his ex-wife in the latest twist in one of Britain's biggest divorce battles.

The 377-foot Luna, docked in Dubai, is the second-largest expedition yacht in the world, and comes with two helipads, nine decks, a swimming pool and a mini-submarine. It was built for Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch, but sold to Farkhad Akhmedov, an Azeri-born billionaire, in 2014.

Mr Akhmedov's name was included in the so-called 'Kremlin report', a list of 220 Russian politicians and businessmen close to President Vladimir Putin issued by the US Treasury in January. He built up his wealth through Northgas, the Russian energy group, before selling his shares in the company for $1.37bn in 2012.

The billionaire met his wife, Tatiana, while she was studying in Moscow and the couple married and moved to London in 1993. Their marriage ended in 2014 and he was ordered to pay her a divorce settlement of 453.5m  about 41.5 per cent of their 1bn fortune  in December 2016.

Since then, Ms Akhmedov has been involved in litigation around the world to try to enforce the ruling and recover assets belonging to her former husband. The High Court was told earlier this year that he has yet to give her any money.

On Thursday, the High Court in London issued further court orders in favour of Ms Akhmedov. It ruled that Mr Akhmedov "had taken numerous elaborate steps to conceal his wealth".

Mr Justice Haddon-Cave ruled that Mr Akhmedov "is acting with real impropriety and deliberately seeking to evade his legal obligations" to his former wife and was "concealing his assets in a web of offshore companies".

He ordered that Luna, which has a capital value of 350m, and which is now "effectively impounded" in Port Rashid, Dubai, should be transferred to her name. The High Court ruling will be taken to the Dubai court, which will decide on implementation of the orders.

When Withers, the law firm representing Ms Akhmedov, discovered in October last year that the yacht had sailed into Dubai for maintenance, it obtained an injunction from a Dubai court against the corporate entities which owned the vessel.

In March, Ms Akhmedov applied to the High Court in London asking to take control of the yacht, arguing that the Liechtenstein and Panamanian entities that owned it were controlled by her former husband and were being used by him to avoid paying the settlement.

Her legal team said in a statement it was pleased at the ruling.

Mr Akhmedov said in a statement that the High Court ruling "lacks any legal validity" in Dubai. He claimed it would have no bearing on a separate appeal about the yacht going through the Dubai courts next month.

More from the Financial Times:

How the Brexit vote is changing the EU

Italy's drift; Merkel's resolve; and Spain's riches

Rudy Giuliani joins Trump team in Russia probe
The Russian energy minister said that sanctions imposed on his country are economic competition measures that impact negatively on its relations with certain countries.

Prices of oil and metals have leaped following U.S. sanctions on Russia, which has raised investor fears over the availability of supply.

Alexander Novak, the Russian energy minister, told CNBC's Steve Sedgwick in Jeddah Friday that every fresh sanction had an adverse effect.

"We can see non-economic measures of competition. Unfortunately, such tools are being used with an increased frequency and they represent a huge risk," he said on the sidelines of the OPEC and non-OPEC members meeting in Jeddah.

Oil prices have been rising over the past few months and on Thursday hit their highest levels since November 2014.
Spain joined several other countries in voicing its opposition against rising trade tariffs and other protectionist attitudes.

Speaking to CNBC Thursday, Roman Escolano, the recently appointed finance minister of Spain, said that Madrid is not enjoying some decisions that are destabilizing global free trade.

"Protectionism is a historical mistake," Escolano told CNBC's Joumanna Bercetche at the sidelines of the World Bank/IMF spring meetings.

"We do not like the talk about protectionism, we don't like the action," Escolano said.

His comments come after tensions over global trade rose in the aftermath of President Donald Trump's decision to increase duties on metals in early March. Since then, there has been additional tariffs also imposed on China, sparking fears of a global trade war. Such concerns have translated into financial markets.
Futures were lower this morning following Thursday's mild declines. However, the Dow, S&P 500 and Nasdaq remain on pace for a second straight positive week. The Dow has fallen for the past two sessions, its first back-to-back losses of this month. (CNBC)



* Cramer Remix: The trade war with China has shifted to tech (CNBC)

Dow component General Electric (GE) rose 3 percent in premarket after it reported first-quarter earnings 16 cents per share, 5 cents above what Wall Street was expecting. The company also reaffirmed its financial outlook for the year. (CNBC)

Apple (AAPL) shares continued lower in the premarket after losing nearly 3 percent on Thursday on what a disappointing forecast from a key chipmaking partner portends for iPhone sales. Other chip stocks also declined Thursday. (CNBC)



* (CNBC)

Oil prices were under pressure after President Donald Trump tweeted this morning that OPEC is keeping oil prices "artificially very high" and that "will not be accepted." U.S. crude hit its highest level since November 2014. (CNBC)

Three Fed speakers are on the calendar for today, highlighted by CNBC's Steve Liesman interviewing Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari at 2:15 p.m. ET. Chicago Fed President Charles Evans and San Francisco Fed President John Williams also have public appearances. Of the three, only Williams is a voting member of the FOMC for 2018. (CNBC)
Check out the companies making headlines before the bell:

General Electric  GE beat estimates with adjusted quarterly profit of 16 cents per share, 5 cents a share above estimates, with revenue also beating forecasts. CEO John Flannery said GE is seeing signs of progress in its performance, with aviation, health care, and transportation all growing. Flannery does say that conditions in the power industry are still challenging.

Honeywell  The industrial conglomerate beat forecasts by 5 cents a share, with adjusted quarterly profit of $1.95 per share, with revenue also beating Street projections. Honeywell was helped by increasing aerospace sales, and it also raised its full-year forecast.

Regions Financial  The regional bank earned 35 cents per share for the first quarter, 4 cents a share above estimates, aided by growth in loans and net interest income.

Wells Fargo  Wells Fargo is close to a settlement of as much as $1 billion over its risk management practices, according to multiple sources. The news was first reported by the New York Times Thursday afternoon.

Mattel  Mattel named board member and former Google executive Ynon Kreiz as its new chief executive officer. He replaces Margaret Georgiadis at the helm of the toy maker after just 14 months, amid a slump in sales for Mattel's best-known products like Barbie and Hot Wheels.

Skechers  Skechers reported quarterly profit of 75 cents per share, 1 cent a share above estimates. The shoe retailer's revenue was also above forecasts, however it issued weaker-than-expected guidance for the current quarter, based on an expected shift in shipments to the second half of 2018.

E*Trade Financial  E*Trade beat estimates by 10 cents a share, with quarterly profit of 88 cents per share. The online brokerage firm's revenue beating estimates, as well. E*Trade also saw record daily average trading revenue as volume jumped.

Alibaba  Alibaba bought China-based microchip maker Hangzhou C-Sky Microsystems, in a move to deepen its involvement in the "internet of things" market.

Barclays  Chief Executive Officer Jes Staley will be fined by British regulators, according to the bank. The fine stems from an attempt to find out the identity of a whistleblower. However, the bank said Staley will remain as CEO.

Lockheed Martin  Lockheed will offer Japan a hybrid version of its F-22 Raptor and F-35 lightning stealth aircraft, according to sources quoted by Reuters. The F-22 Raptor is currently banned from being exported.

Facebook  Facebook has been given one week by Indonesian regulators to provide more information on the misuse of personal data by the country's users. Indonesia has about 115 million Facebook users.

Shire  Japanese drugmaker Takeda continues talks to buy the British company after Shire rejected a $63 billion bid. Following reports that it was considering a rival bid, Allergan said it was no longer considering a Shire bid.

Pinnacle Foods  Activist investor Jana Partners has taken a 9.1 percent stake in the maker of packaged foods. Pinnacle said it was aware of the Jana stake and would be engaging in talks with Jana.

Macerich  Macerich was upgraded to "outperform" from "market perform" at BMO Capital, which sees stronger fundamentals for the shopping center REIT this year and next as well as the possibility that the company could be bought.

Darden Restaurants  Darden was upgraded to "outperform" from "market perform" at Bernstein, which also raised its price target on the restaurant operator to $105 per share from $99.
French writer and centenarian Jean Anglade poses at his retirement home in Clermont-Ferrand on March 17, 2015 on the eve of his 100th birthday.

The rich are optimistic that they're going to live a long life. Of 5,000 wealthy investors recently surveyed by UBS Wealth Management, each of whom had at least $1 million in investable assets, 53 percent said they were confident they would reach 100. "This is considerably higher than the 80-year life expectancy in most developed countries," reports the Guardian. "The idea of living a century was once confined to science fiction," states a report titled "The century club." "But no longer. For the world's wealthy, living a 100-year life is not an outcome they consider a mere possibility. It's one they expect." The high net-worth individuals spanned ten different countries and their outlooks varied based on where they were from. In Germany, for instance, which provides residents with some of the world's best health care, 76 percent of the participants said they expected to become centenarians whereas, in the U.S., only 30 percent were so confident.

UBS Investor Watch: The century club, 2Q 2018 More than 90 percent of the investors said the their wealth enabled them to live a healthier life, the survey found, and nearly the same number of the investors agreed that health is more important than their fortune. Around half were concerned about rising health care costs and, at 69 percent, Americans were most likely to say that health care is their biggest financial concern. "I don't want to become financially drained and be a burden to my family," said one 66-year-old American. Many also expressed concern about having less wealth to pass on to their family if they lived that long.

UBS Investor Watch: The century club, 2Q 2018 Overall, 77 percent agreed that working as long as possible is good for your health, though only 52 percent of the wealthy Americans agreed with that sentiment. Research on that front is mixed. Some studies have shown that retiring early can actually lengthen your life, because work can be stressful and retiring can free you up to exercise and invest more in your health. But work can also help you stay physically active and mentally sharp. Experts recommend that, if you do retire, you find other ways to remain engaged, such as through volunteering.

UBS Investor Watch: The century club, 2Q 2018 Those expecting to make it to 100 seem to be planning accordingly: "Nine in ten investors are taking steps in response to increasing life expectancy, such as adjusting spending habits and financial plans, and allocating their wealth to long-term investments," the report states. And the investors who expected to make it to 100 were the most likely to make those financial changes. Those from the U.S. and the U.K. were the least likely.

Making it to 100 may be far-fetched
Donald Trump Getty Images

President Donald Trump's broadside against foreign oil producers on Friday took investors by surprise and included some notable inaccuracies about the state of the oil market. On Friday, Trump aimed his social media firepower at OPEC, tweeting that the 14-member producer group is keeping crude prices "artificially high." @realDonaldTrump: Looks like OPEC is at it again. With record amounts of Oil all over the place, including the fully loaded ships at sea, Oil prices are artificially Very High! No good and will not be accepted! There's a lot to evaluate in that statement, so CNBC broke it down and checked the president's facts.

"Looks like OPEC is at it again": What is OPEC doing and why?

OPEC worked out a deal with Russia and several other nations at the end of 2016 to remove 1.8 million barrels a day from the market. The two dozen oil-producing countries agreed to limit their production to clear a glut of crude that sent prices from more than $100 a barrel in 2014 to about $26 in 2016. Saudi Arabia, OPEC's largest producer, actually refused to take action at first, arguing that the glut was caused by a flood of new U.S. oil production. The Saudis instead bet that U.S. drillers with high production costs would be forced to cut output, and that would drain the oversupply. Instead, American drillers cut costs, kept pumping and oil prices continued to fall. That heaped pressure on nations and U.S. states that depend on oil revenue, bankrupted about 200 American energy companies and wiped out hundreds of thousands of jobs. After prices bottomed in 2016, OPEC worked out the deal with Russia and began limiting its output in January 2017. The producers have since extended the agreement to run through the end of this year.

Are there really "record amounts of Oil all over the place"?

Yes and no, but mostly no. While U.S. oil output has recently risen to all-time highs above 10 million barrels a day, many of the world's biggest oil producers are purposely limiting their production and pumping below record levels. OPEC's output caps have also shrunk the amount of oil sitting in storage around the world. The group's goal is to whittle down stockpiles in developed countries to the five-year average. Those inventories stood at just 30 million barrels above that level in February, the International Energy Agency said last week. These stockpiles peaked in 2016 and have since fallen.

What about "the fully loaded ships at sea"?

Trump could have meant several things when he said this, but this part of the tweet is misleading. Oil shipped by sea is actually down 48 million barrels from a peak at the start of the year, according to data from tanker-tracking firm ClipperData. The amount of crude loaded on ships around the globe averaged 50 million barrels a day last month, down from a record 52 million barrels a day last July. While U.S. exports have recently hit highs above 2 million barrels a day, top oil exporter Saudi Arabia has cut its shipments to help balance the market. Traders also store oil in floating tankers, but here too, those levels are down 25 percent from their high in the middle of 2017. "Storage at sea has dropped, which is what you would expect because the market is in backwardation, which disincentivizes storage, be it onshore or offshore," said Matt Smith, director of commodity research at ClipperData

So are oil prices "artificially Very High"?

That's up for debate. Trump's accusation may have been fueled by recent reports that Saudi Arabia would like oil prices to rise to $80 to $100 a barrel. Those higher prices would support the planned stock market debut of the kingdom's energy giant, Saudi Aramco, industry sources who spoke to Saudi officials told Reuters and Bloomberg. Some analysts are doubtful that's official Saudi policy, but the reports have fueled speculation that the Saudis will lobby against winding down the production deal even if that's what's best for the market. That could cause prices to spike as the world's appetite for oil outstrips supply. But if Trump is criticizing the OPEC deal itself, that would make him something of an outlier. The market generally sees the agreement as a necessary measure that stopped a devastating price crash. OPEC is viewed less as a manipulator and more of a manager. It's worth noting that Trump and his polices are at least partially responsible for oil prices hitting their highest levels in more than three years in recent weeks. His decision to launch air strikes in Syria this month contributed to geopolitical tension in the Middle East. His threat to restore sanctions on Iran next month has also raised fears about supply disruptions from OPEC's third biggest producer.

Is OPEC's price support "No good"?

That depends on who you ask. Oil-producing nations and energy companies surely welcome higher oil prices, which have stabilized their finances and returned many drillers to profit after years of pain. But the rebound means higher prices at the pump. A gallon of regular gasoline is currently fetching an average $2.75 at U.S. filling stations, up from $2.42 a year ago, according to AAA. However, there's an argument to be made that the best thing for both consumers and producers is stability. Sky-high oil prices hurt consumers and ultimately shrink demand for fuel, while super low prices discourage energy companies from making investments in future production, which can lead to undersupply and price spikes.

OPEC's action "will not be accepted": What can Trump do?
President Donald Trump fumed at former national security adviser Michael Flynn over a delayed return call to Russian President Vladimir Putin. That's what two people familiar with the call told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

Trump's displeasure with Flynn was revealed late Thursday in memos written by former FBI Director James Comey detailing his conversations with Trump. The identity of the foreign leader, with whom Trump spoke on Jan. 28, 2017, was blacked out in the copies of the memos sent to Capitol Hill on Thursday and obtained by the AP.

Comey recounts how Trump at a private White House dinner pointed his fingers at his head and complained that Flynn "has serious judgment issues" over failing to promptly alert him to Putin's call shortly after his inauguration.
It may sound like he's taunting the oil cartel of the 1970s that sent gasoline prices soaring. But, in fact, he is inserting himself into the oil market at a complicated time, just ahead of that May 12 deadline when he has to decide whether to extend Iran's nuclear deal.

As U.S. oil prices flirt with a near four-year high, Trump fired off a tweet Friday morning saying oil prices are "artificially Very High" and that will "not be accepted." That sent crude futures lower, with U.S. oil futures trading slightly down on the day.

President Donald Trump's tweet on Friday slapping OPEC about high oil prices comes just weeks before he has to make a big decision on Iran that could send oil prices even higher.

If Trump ends the deal, the U.S. would sanction Iranian oil.

"Some may interpret this as a pre-May 12 Iran decision message," said Daniel Yergin, vice chairman of IHS Markit. Yergin said if the U.S. reinstates Iranian sanctions, it would not have the impact it did in 2012, when the U.S., then with allies, sanctioned Iran. But it could remove several hundred thousand barrels from the market.

The appointment of John Bolton, as Trump's new national security advisor, raised speculation that the president could be convinced to withdraw from that agreement.

U.S. allies are opposed to the U.S. exiting the deal, which bans Iran's nuclear program in exchange for the removal of stiff sanctions that severely limited its ability to sell oil. French President Emmanuel Macron is scheduled to visit the U.S. next week, and he is expected to encourage Trump to remain in the deal.

"He sees the oil price going up. He knows it's not good for his approval rating. It's not good for the economy. Sentiment is the first thing to take a hit when gasoline hits $3 a gallon," said John Kilduff of Again Capital.

Gasoline prices have been jumping, and are up 20 cents in the past month. Prices could be at four-year highs this summer, reaching $3 a gallon or more across a good chunk of the country. Analysts say any serious refining outages could send gasoline prices spiking.

But Trump's tweet could have interesting ramifications. It was aimed at a more complicated group than the Organization for Petroleum Exporting Countries of 40 years ago that was seen as a price manipulator and the bane of former President Jimmy Carter when it cut supplies to the U.S. in the 1970s.

OPEC was nearly written off two years ago as oil prices cratered. But the cartel created an alliance with Russia and other non-OPEC producers. Together, Russia and Saudi Arabia lead this alliance and have managed to keep supply from the market, bringing a massive global oil glut into balance in 16 months even as U.S. production has surged to record levels.

Both Russia and Saudi Arabia would like to continue their partnership beyond the expiration of their production deal this year, and were meeting in Saudi Arabia Friday while Trump was tweeting.

When asked about the tweet, Saudi Arabia Energy Minister Khalid Al-Falih said: "Markets should determine price."

Helima Croft, head of global commodities strategy at RBC, said Trump is now signaling concern about the oil market, and that has spurred speculation that he could take oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

"I can understand Trump's anxietyHe's in a position to be concerned about higher gasoline prices," said Croft. "He is a wild card. We just don't know what he's going to do. The Bolton appointment would signal if we took him at his word, we're out of the deal but could flip at the last minute based on North Korea considerations. If he flips, it's a stay of execution but the [Iran deal] is only getting a stay of execution."

Trump is expected to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jung Un to discuss North Korea's nuclear program in June, and he could put off a decision on Iran until the next deadline in September.

Yergin said the SPR is supposed to be tapped for emergencies, and U.S. oil production and supplies are strong. "The SPR is supposed to deal with physical shortages, not managing the market," he said.

Trump has put himself right in the center of the debate about whether global supply is coming into balance and whether rising prices are justified. The U.S. added to the geopolitical premium when Trump decided to retaliate against Syria's chemical attack on its citizens.

A news report this week suggesting Saudi Arabia would not mind seeing prices in the $80 to $100 a barrel range helped send prices even higher, but analysts say $100 is unlikely without a sudden loss of significant supply, since it would dampen demand and ultimately send prices lower.

There is also the factor of growing U.S. production, which has jumped to a record 10.5 million barrels a day. Some shale drillers can produce oil at $20 to $30 a barrel, and higher prices could bring much more oil to market.

Scott Sheffield, the chairman of Pioneer Natural Resources, told an energy conference at Columbia University on Thursday that oil should be in the $55 to $65 per barrel range. "I don't think it does anyone any good to talk about $100 crude," he said.

In addition to Iran, Trump could also make a decision following Venezuela's elections to sanction its oil sector, another move that could send oil prices higher. Venezuelan production has been dropping rapidly, as its operations deteriorate and staff leave, and that reduced output has also been helping to balance the oil market.

The U.S. and other countries have expressed concern that the May 20 elections in the country will be an unfair effort to consolidate President Nicolas Maduro's power.

Trump's tweet also took aim at a key ally of the U.S. and longtime adversary of Iran  Saudi Arabia. Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, known as MBS, is trying to move the country away from its dependence on oil, and he just spent several weeks in the U.S. courting U.S. investors and considering investments.

"He had Mohammed Bin Salman in the oval office with a poster board of weapons and was making a lot of asks financially. This is a question for Trump, does he want Saudi Arabia to buy those weapons? Does he want the Saudis to invest in U.S. infrastructure?" Croft said.

Trump's first state visit was to Saudi Arabia and he is viewed as having a close relationship with MBS and his father King Salman. Croft said the U.S.'s closest Gulf allies, Saudi and the United Arab Emirates, are both the face of the new OPEC.

"If he's really concerned about OPEC policy, he should pick up the phone and call Mohammed Bin Salman," she said.
Macerich Chairman and CEO Art Coppola speaks at the Milken Institute State of the State conference in Los Angeles.

Macerich's chairman and CEO, Art Coppola, is set to retire at the end of this year, having led the company for 25 years, and the news is fueling the idea that more deal activity could be looming in the retail real estate industry.

Already this year, international mall owner Westfield was acquired by Europe's biggest property firm, Unibail-Rodamco. Brookfield Property Partners meanwhile is moving forward with its plans to buy U.S. mall owner GGP.

The entire sector, even top-tier mall owner Simon Property Group, has been the victim of a "retail apocalypse" narrative, where large chains like Bon-Ton, Sears Holdings and J.C. Penney are trimming their store counts across the U.S. and leaving vacant boxes behind. Mall owners, in turn, have been tasked to bring in more experiential tenants, food and far less apparel.

"While we are raising our M&A probability [for Macerich], a sale / deal is far from certain and there remains a long laundry list of questions and unknowns," Mizuho Securities analyst Haendel St. Juste wrote in a note to clients. Timing, pricing and further management changes (in addition to Coppola) would be the key topics for discussion, he said.

The Santa Monica, California-based real estate investment trust faces pressure on multiple fronts.

Activist hedge fund Starboard Value built a position in Macerich and nominated directors to challenge its board, Reuters reported earlier this month. Third Point, another activist fund, disclosed a stake in Macerich last November. And Land & Buildings Investment Management, an activist hedge fund focused on real estate, also owns shares of Macerich.

"We do not know if Mr. Coppola's retirement was planned ... but in any case, Mr. Coppola not standing for re-election may have been a by-product of Starboard's reported goal to seek aggressive Board refreshment as a path to maximize shareholder value," Wells Fargo analyst Jeff Donnelly said.

BMO Capital Markets analyst Jeremy Metz added "the impending departure clears a significant roadblock here."

Many industry experts haven't forgotten when Simon offered to buy its smaller rival Macerich in 2015. Eventually the merger talks fell apart when the two couldn't decide on a purchase price.

Still, Macerich is known among its peers in the space to have higher-trafficked locations and popular, digitally native brands replacing antiquated shops.

"I am especially excited to see Macerich's centers becoming America's new town squares and downtowns and Macerich emerge as a leader in developing digitally native vertically integrated brands, the fastest growing digital commerce channel that exists today," Coppola said Thursday in a statement.

The longtime chairman and CEO added he won't stand for re-election as a director at Macerich's annual shareholders meeting. The REIT's board meanwhile has commenced a search process led by independent directors to find a new CEO.

Macerich shares have fallen 13 percent from a year ago.
An employee with medicinal marijuana plants in the flowering room at Tweed INC. in Smith Falls, Ontario, on December 5, 2016.

Northern Michigan University is offering a degree that may catch the eye of marijuana enthusiasts: medicinal plant chemistry. And apparently it pays. "All of our graduates are going to be qualified to be analysts in a lab setting," Brandon Canfield, the associate professor of analytical chemistry who started the program, tells CNBC Make It. That could lead to a position that pays $70,000 right out of school, he adds. But first students actually have to graduate. According to one of the program's earliest participants, Northern Michigan sophomore Alex Roth, who has 400-level classes like Biostatics and Gas and Liquid Chromatography to get through, that's not as simple as it sounds. "When they hear what my major is, there are a lot of people who say, 'Wow, cool, dude. You're going to get a degree growing marijuana,'" Roth tells the Detroit Free Press. "It's not an easy degree at all."

The program doesn't just focus on horticulture. It combines courses on chemistry, biology, marketing and financial management. In fact, students won't even be growing marijuana, Canfield says, though that is the first question everyone asks him. There are a couple specific tracks offered within the major. One has a bio-analytical focus. Those students could go on to graduate programs, says Canfield, and they will be strong job candidates because they will have completed an independent study. The other track is for aspiring entrepreneurs. For those students, it's not clear what the future might hold. To offer an example of what they could do, Canfield suggests they might open a growing operation with a lab in-house. "We have a small sample set of students right now, so we're not sure where the greater interest is going to be," he says, "but some students are very enthusiastic about the business track."
"The Denial Order will not only severely impact the survival and development of ZTE, but will also cause damages to all partners of ZTE including a large number of U.S. companies," ZTE said in a statement on Friday.

It uses components from Qualcomm and software from Google for example in its smartphones.

Earlier this week, the Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) imposed what's known as a denial of export privileges against ZTE. This means that U.S. firms cannot provide components or software to the Chinese giant.

China's ZTE said Friday that a U.S. ban on exports to the technology firm could threaten its survival and adversely affect American companies.

New ZTE Blade V9 at ZTE stand during the Mobile World Congress Day 2 on February 27, 2018 in Barcelona, Spain.

"In any case, ZTE will not give up its efforts to resolve the issue through communication, and we are also determined, if necessary, to take judicial measures to protect the legal rights and interests of our company, our employees and our shareholders, and to fulfill obligations and take responsibilities to our global customers, end users, partners and suppliers."

In 2017, ZTE admitted to illegally shipping telecoms equipment to Iran and North Korea and agreed to pay $1.19 billion in penalties. But the U.S. said that in 2016 while the investigation was ongoing, ZTE made "false statements" to the BIS in regards to reprimanding employees involved.

At a press briefing in its Shenzhen headquarters, Chairman Yin Yimin admitted to wrongdoing but said the punishment didn't fit the crime.

"Such sanctions could put the company immediately into a coma," he said. "We resolutely oppose such an unfair, unreasonable punishment, and especially the act of politicizing trade issues."

ZTE said however that it has taken measures against employees who may have been responsible for the incident. It also said that it has introduced compliance training and in 2017 alone, spent over $50 million in an export control compliance program.

"It is unacceptable that BIS insists on unfairly imposing the most severe penalty on ZTE even before the completion of investigation of facts, ignoring the continuous diligent work of ZTE and the progress we have made on export compliance," the company said.

The ZTE episode risks escalating the trade spat between the U.S. and China. Both countries have threatened each other with billions of dollars of tariffs but technology has been a particular area of contention.

People in China have been shaken up by the case and a potential trade war with the U.S.

"From this, I learned how big a gap there is between China and the U.S. in tech development," a social media user by the name of Applemai said.

Another user called GuYueJunChi said: "Only when you have high-tech can you have a say."

Huawei, the world's third-largest smartphone player by market share, recently had a deal with AT&T to sell its flagship device in the U.S. fall through. Top U.S. intelligence chiefs then warned people not to buy Huawei phones. Huawei's consumer business chief told CNBC in February that its rivals were worried that the Chinese firm was getting too strong and playing politics to keep it out of the U.S. market.
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Stop me if you've heard this one: Google has a new plan for fixing its mess of messaging apps and bringing clarity, consistency, and order to an area that's been chaotic for far too long.

As reported in a novel-length story by The Verge last night, Google is "pausing" all work and investments in Allo  the standalone chat service announced with great fanfare in 2016  and moving the entire Allo team over to Android Messages, the company's current default SMS app for Android devices.

Android Messages, though, won't just be about basic SMS anymore; it'll soon include an expanded form of RCS, or Rich Communication Services  a newer standard that's kind of like a next-gen version of SMS (and that requires carrier support in order to work).

We've been hearing about Google's plans to embrace RCS for quite a while now. The problem is that because of the nature of the protocol, it's up to carriers to get on board with it  so progress has been slow-going. But now, Google is supposedly ready to roll out a broader system of RCS support in Android Messages, which will be known as (drumroll, please...) "Chat."

It'll be up to each carrier as to if and when the switch gets flipped and the richer "Chat"-oriented messaging capabilities come online for its network. Google thinks a lot of carriers will be ready sometime in the next year. Or maybe two. It'll probably vary a bit from one region to the next. Oh, and the next-gen messaging stuff will work only when everyone involved in the conversation has said support enabled. Otherwise, the system will fall back to regular ol' SMS.

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You know what? Forget all that mumbo-jumbo. I can sum this whole thing up for you in three simple points:

Allo is essentially being abandoned, as expected Google is doubling down on Android Messages and RCS, as expected Everyone's going to continue being confused, as expected

But wait...

Here's the really crazy thing about this whole switcheroo: Remember when Google Talk (a.k.a. "Gchat") was the interoperable cross-platform messaging standard with a massive built-in userbase? It was preinstalled on every Android device, present in the sidebar of every Gmail inbox, and running on countless computers via its official desktop app or its integration with numerous other popular messaging programs.

Then one day, Google combined Talk with a service that seamlessly integrated its messaging functionality with regular SMS. It was called Hangouts, and it was touted as "Google's big fix for its messaging mess." You could exchange rich messages with other Hangouts users and send SMS messages to anyone else, all within one convenient app that worked pretty much everywhere. Heck, there was even an exclusive write-up revealing the details of the strategy at The Verge!

So, to recap: Google had an interoperable cross-platform message standard. It had a huge amount of users on board. It had a way to combine that messaging standard with SMS to create a single unified messaging app that'd do it all on Android and beyond.

Is it just me, or is that almost exactly what Google is trying to achieve right now? It's almost like, I don't know: Maybe the company should have focused on making Hangouts a really good unified product instead of changing directions a thousand times and turning its messaging strategy into a modern-day Abbott and Costello routine.

To put it all together now...

So, let's see: At this point, we've got the carrier-dependent Android Messages/"Chat" combo in the works  well, at least for some phones. I forgot to mention: Not all Android devices will ship with Android Messages. But some of the manufacturers that use their own proprietary alternatives, like Samsung, will still support "Chat" in some form within their own messaging apps. That certainly won't confuse anyone.

We've got Hangouts, which is hanging on by a thread and still kinda-sorta exists for consumers. For anyone keeping track, we're now into month 13 of its ongoing transition into being a two-pronged enterprise product called Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet. (Those apps also now exist alongside the regular old Hangouts app, which absolutely isn't befuddling.)

We've got Allo, which is a standalone chat service that continues to exist for the moment, despite by all signs now being on life support  and also Duo, a standalone video chat service launched alongside Allo that seems to be chugging along.

There's Google Voice, which seemed to be on life support itself until a sudden renewed commitment to it came up out of nowhere last year.

Then there's whatever the hell the chat service in the sidebar of Gmail is called these days. I'm pretty sure it's still technically Hangouts at this point, but most people know it as "Gchat" or "Google Chat" (and I don't think anyone  outside of Google or within  fully understands what the long-term plan is for that space).

And don't even get me started on Project Fi and how that fits in with all of this.

But hey, fixing a mess of this caliber has to start somewhere  right? Maybe this will be the step that actually leads to simplification and a sensible messaging strategy for a company that by all counts should be winning the mobile messaging race. Maybe. But after more overlapping messaging apps and more convoluted strategies than any sane person can possibly remember at this point, it's getting hard to have faith that any new effort will be the one that sticks (especially when said effort has so many asterisks and unknowns attached).

Now, who wants to place a bet on when the next big pivot will begin?

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[Android Intelligence videos at Computerworld]
States and the federal government are increasing their scrutiny of cryptocurrencies in an attempt to bring more transparency to a market where buyers and sellers are anonymous and regulatory oversight is light.

Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ether, LiteCoin, and Ripple skyrocketed in value last year as investors sought to get in on what many see as the future of global currency  one that for trade and commerce knows no borders. Bitcoin generated massive hype among investors as its value surged more than 1,900% to nearly $20,000 last year, before tumbling back down below $11,000.

Today, it's valued around $8,500.

Earlier this week, New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman launched a fact-finding inquiry into the practices and policies of cryptocurrency exchanges  the online platforms where cryptocurrencies are bought and sold.

Cryptocurrencies are created on blockchain distributed ledgers, peer-to-peer (P2P) electronic networks that are also used to dispense payments for all kinds of ecommerce. Those open P2P networks operate with no central authority, such as banks or governments. And the marketplace can be highly speculative and volatile.

"Currently, as it stands, cryptocurrencies are not really regulated and I am not seeing that change any time soon," said Marco Peereboom, new systems development lead at Decred, an open-source, blockchain-based cryptocurrency similar to Bitcoin.

"The real fear is that government will try to turn cryptocurrencies into what cryptocurrencies were designed to resist, but crypto is a global technology and no amount of regulation can stomp it out," Peereboom added.

Paul Brody, global innovation leader for blockchain technology at Ernst & Young, said thoughtful regulation could create more trustworthy ways of doing business through cryptocurrencies and P2P blockchain networks.

"Setting aside who wants what, the underlying blockchain technology is amazing and will have a huge positive impact. But it won't get there unless individual investors and companies have confidence in the system," Brody said. "No corporate CFO or sensible investor wants to park their money or do transactions in a system that isn't audited and where they could unwittingly find themselves facilitating illegal activity."

The technology that underpins cryptocurrencies, blockchain, can be open or run as permissioned networks where transcations can take place between pre-approved parties, such as companies in a supply chain.

Forrester Research Blockchain isn't a single technology. Rather it's an architecture that allows disparate users to make transactions and then creates an unchangeable record of those transactions.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency exchanges operate on open blockchain ledgers or networks, where anyone can transact anonymously with no central authority.

As part of a broader effort to protect cryptocurrency investors and consumers, Schneiderman's office launched the Virtual Markets Integrity Initiative and sent letters to 13 major virtual currency trading platforms requesting key information on their operations, internal controls and safeguards to protect customer assets.

The move, Schneiderman's office explained in a statement, hopes to increase transparency and accountability for the exchanges retail investors use to trade virtual currency, and seeks to better inform enforcement agencies, investors and consumers.

"With cryptocurrency on the rise, consumers in New York and across the country have a right to transparency and accountability when they invest their money. Yet too often, consumers don't have the basic facts they need to assess the fairness, integrity, and security of these trading platforms," Schneiderman said.

Initial coin offerings (ICO), a crowdfunding mechanism for companies similar to initial public offerings, raise vast amounts of capital from the sale of crypto tokens that in some cases offer no returns. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has increased its oversight of ICOs, arresting those involved in alleged money-raising scams.

Unlike stocks, which represent shares of a company, cryptocurrencies can have no intrinsic value in that there is no equity attached to them; they can also be repositories for sensitive personal information about investors and are tied to vast sums of real or government-issued fiat currency paid out for them, Schneiderman's office said.

Maersk A new blockchain-based, distributed electronic ledger could save the shipping industry billions of dollars a year by replacing a current EDI and paper-based system for tracking cargo and attaining approval from customs and port authorities.

Since 2014, hackers and thieves have stolen about $1.4 billion from cryptocurrency investors, according to a Wall Street Journal report. This year alone, hacks of two cryptocurrency exchange cost investors $700 million.

"ICOs in the USA are in deep trouble and something is going to give. At some point, companies or groups that performed ICOs are going to have a reckoning and have to deal with federal law," Peereboom said. "The real tragedy is the conflation of cryptocurrencies with ICOs. These things are not the same and inherently cannot and should not be regulated the same way."

Unlike cryptocurrencies, which are treated as assets by the IRS, and are virtually unregulated, ICOs are by definition securities because they pass the Howey test  precedence set by a Supreme Court Case that's used by the SEC to determine whether a financial transaction qualifies as an investment contract and thus is a security.

In response to government pressure, some companies have switched to calling their ICOs, initial security offerings (ISO), Peereboom said. That indicates they understand the regulatory implications and have registered their crowdfunding efforts with the proper government agencies.

Conversely, Peereboom said, cryptocurrencies are treated as assets by the IRS. "These are well-trodden paths and there really is no value in additional regulations," he argued.

The A.G.'s questionnaires ask the platforms for information in six major areas, including (1) Ownership and Control, (2) Basic Operation and Fees, (3) Trading Policies and Procedures, (4) Outages and Other Suspensions of Trading, (5) Internal Controls, and (6) Privacy and Money Laundering. The questionnaires also ask that platforms describe their approach to combating suspicious trading and market manipulation; their policies on the operation of bots; their limitations on the use of and access to non-public trading information; and the safeguards they have in place to protect customer funds from theft, fraud and other risks.

"The Attorney General's office will analyze the responses, compare them across platforms, and at the conclusion of this process, present what it learned to the public," the A.G.'s office stated.

Some countries have come down hard on ICOs and cryptocurrency exchanges. Last year, China banned ICOs and more generally has been cracking down on cryptocurrency exchanges and bitcoin mining, the process by which computers solve complex mathematical equations in order to generate bitcoin; it's an intensely energy-consuming process, especially when whole datacenters are dedicated to the process.

Regulations can have a "chilling effect" on business and individual investors who play by the rules, Peereboom said, which can push exchanges to a friendlier locale to continue business.

China's clampdown, however, led many of the exchanges to find new methods to operate using open-source blockchain to create exchanges hosted through cloud services such as Amazon Web Services.

Also on the horizon are so called DEXs, or Decentralized EXchanges, that will work much as Blockchain does, Peereboom said, thus making it impossible to shut down.

"These DEXs are going to enable two individuals to pseudo anonymously exchange crypto tokens without risk and without middlemen," he said. "The USA is a business friendly place and I dont believe heavy handed regulations will happen. Ultimately, the USA wants the jobs and tax revenues it can extract from this new technology."

Brody agreed.

"Reasonable regulations that protect investors, for example by ensuring accountability and effective disclosure requirements, can actually grow the market size by increasing investor confidence," he said.
Henry Newman is Director of Open Europe.

Earlier this week, the Government was heavily defeated in the Lords on an amendment which tries to push the UK towards forming a post-Brexit customs union with the EU. The amendment may be reversed but, with a hung Parliament deeply divided on this issue, the possibility of a customs union is not going away. Its the subject of a Commons backbench debate next Thursday. And an amendment to the Trade Bill threatens to tie the Governments hands even more starkly than the Lords amendment. The Government may be forced ultimately to concede this point. Yet doing so would hardly resolve the issue  and would raise profound questions around the long-term sustainability of any deal arranged with the EU.

Lets imagine that the Prime Minister is forced to seek a customs union. Such an arrangement would mean the UK allowing the EU to sell access to our markets without our control. It would have no incentive to do anything to protect our interests in its trade policy, putting our exporters at potential competitive disadvantage.

This new customs union would mean that the UK could not alter any tariffs covered by the agreement. There would be limited ability for the UK to sign new free trade agreements or to deepen existing ones. We would lose the ability to offer potential partners lower tariffs on goods, in return for the better services access that suits the UK economy. Liam Fox would largely be out of a job.

The entire argument around the Customs Union is rather odd. Even those European states closest to the EU, such as Switzerland and Norway, do not have a customs union with it. When I quizzed an EFTA-state foreign minister about why that country wasnt in such a customs union, I was met with incomprehension. So when the EUs Brexit lead, Michel Barnier, talks of the British decision to leave the Customs Union hes being disingenuous. Only the city-state of Monaco and some British territories are outside the EU and in the EUs Customs Union. Leaving the EU means leaving the Customs Union.

A very few states  of which Turkey is the only large example  have a partial customs union with the EU. But that arrangement is rather unsatisfactory, and was dismissed as unsuitable for the UK by Labours Brexit lead, Keir Starmer, only yesterday. Labour want the UK to have a customs union, but of the mythical sort where the UK retains a say over EU trade agreements. A serious say just isnt on offer to non-members: even members dont always get a veto. Labours position is clever politics but bad policy. Cake having and eating anyone?

Theres also quite a lot of confusion here. Angry tweeters complain that the Commonwealth or Anglosphere cannot replace European trade. However, while leaving the Customs Union will come with costs, trade with the EU will not cease. Others insist that a customs union is the only way to solve the Irish border problem. But the queues of lorries at the Turkish-EU frontier shows that such a union wouldnt resolve the need for checks. Of course the UK and EU should agree to smooth any customs checks on trade. In our Nothing to Declare paper, Open Europe set out a host of ways both sides can do just that. But if you look around the world at close countries which trade intensively together, such as Australia and New Zealand, or Canada and the USA, theyre not in a customs union.

Despite all this, the chances of the Prime Ministers hand being forced are increasing. Ironically, as acceptance slowly grows that the UK is leaving the EU, the fight is shifting from whether we leave towards how we leave. Various parliamentarians, pundits and campaigners are determined to soften Brexit. Of course, there are some sound economic arguments for remaining in a customs union but its also a political aim  a customs union, however unfavourable to the UK, is symbolic of a softer Brexit.

We often hear how the referendum question didnt address membership of the Customs Union. At one level thats true. Yet, during the campaign, both sides endlessly debated the benefits of free trade deals outside the EU. That whole argument was premised on leaving the Customs Union. And Vote Leave emphatically rejected a Turkish arrangement post-Brexit.

Its not just some parliamentarians, however, who are keen to keep a customs union on the table. The EU side is as well. Barnier has recently shifted the goalposts  making it clear that the UK could re-think its redlines on a Customs Union at any point, even after Article 50 and during the transition. In so doing, the Commission waded straight in to a domestic political issue.

Why does the EU want the UK to stay in a customs union? At one level its about minimising disruption for trade. But theres also a deeper  rarely articulated  desire to limit the options for Britain outside the EU. As one EU diplomat put it to me, the big concern for Brussels is the UK making a serious success of Brexit. Binding the UK close will make that harder.

If the UK does end up in a customs union, I cant see it lasting long. And this is the danger for both sides with any UK-EU deal that isnt seen as fair or that isnt politically sustainable. Can we really imagine post-Brexit, ministers and MPs rejecting the offer of Justin Trudeau to deepen a trade deal with Canada, of the American administration to create a trade deal, perhaps with strong provisions on services, with the worlds biggest economy, or to sign new arrangements with Australia and New Zealand? I cant see it.

A position where the Government was forced to stay in a customs union would therefore mean a high degree of uncertainty around the future UK-EU relationship. It might well happen that the Government loses a vote on an amendment in the Commons. My guess is that the Prime Minister would survive such a defeat. But, as of April next year, the UK will be a third country  outside the EU. The negotiations will be ongoing, but I think the political arguments will begin to shift away from how close we can keep things the same as if we were members, towards what comes next. What would stop the Conservatives fighting a future election with a clear manifesto commitment to leave the Customs Union?
Iain Dale: As I prepared for my Question Time debut, I heard that Diane Abbott had pulled out. Was it something I said?

Iain Dale is Presenter of LBC Drive, Managing Director of Biteback Publishing, a columnist and broadcaster and a former Conservative Parliamentary candidate.

Back in 2006, John Reid, then Home Secretary, described his own department as not fit for purpose. Twelve years on, very little seems to have changed.

Even after eight years of Tory occupation, six of which were controlled by Theresa May, it is still the department which is most likely to embarrass the whole government. And so it was this week over the so-called Windrush children.

Its tempting to blame incompetent and cack-handed civil servants for this situation and, to an extent, this is justified. However it is spun, though, in the end the buck has to stop with politicians  who cant say they werent warned. Jeremy Corbyn even raised the issue in PMQs as recently as March 14.

Didnt someone bother to check what was going on? I know several Tory MPs who say they had also warned that something wasnt right, but that no-one picked up the ball. Amber Rudd has always had a reputation as a safe pair of hands. Caroline Nokes made an impressive start in her job with a very feisty interview with Sarah Smith on the Daily and Sunday Politics, but both these ministers are now on probation. If they dont sort out this situation, and ensure that the Windrush children are treated properly and with respect, they will suffer the political consequences.

          

None the less, and as if most of us didnt know so before, the last seven days have surely proved why Jeremy Corbyn would make a disastrous Prime Minister.

As May pointed out in the Commons, he would effectively give Russia a veto over our foreign policy. Even a dolt can see that if you commit to going through the United Nations in every aspect of your foreign policy, you then give the Russian Government a de facto veto.

Corbyn denies he is a pacifist, yet has never been able to give a single example of where he thought military action was ever justified. Id have more respect for him if he just came out and declared that he was a pacifist, after all. At least thats an intellectually sustainable position. Sort of.

         

The pound reached the dizzy heights of $1.43 this week and EUR 1.16  the highest since the EU referendum. Just so you know, seeing as so many people seem to think it is still 20 per cdent lower than it was before.

         

There are only 13 days to go until polling day in the local elections. Not that youd know it. I havent seen any local activity at all, either where I live in Kent or in London.

Maybe its different elsewhere, but I doubt it. The consensus seems to be that the Conservatives are in for a drubbing in London, including the possibility of losing control of every single council they control already, including Westminster, Wandsworth, Kensington & Chelsea and Barnet.

However, all is not bleak. Academics seem to think that there might be some Tory gains in the Midlands. I wonder how many of us remember the local elections of 1990, when the Conservatives had a terrible night, but Ken Baker, then Party Chairman, appeared the next morning with his characteristic beaming smile outside Conservative Central Office declaring the night had been a triumph!since against all odds his party had retained control of Wandsworth and Westminster. Amazingly, he got away with it (though admittedly Margaret Thatcher resigned six months or so later). I can see Brandon Lewis learning from history

         

Ive been trying to think of a more queasy sight than Emmanuel Macron trying to nose his way as far up Donald Trumps arse as he can possibly get. And Ive succeeded: Justin Trudeau dressing him and his family in Indian clothes during their visit to the country.

Sick-making. Trudeau and Macron are two peas from the same political pod. Ghastly show-offs  but with little to show off beyond Colgate smiles, and an ability to virtue-signal.

         

On Tuesday, I interviewed Neville Lawrence. Sunday will mark the 25th anniversary of his son Stephens murder. He told me that his rediscovered religious beliefs have given him the ability to forgive his sons killers. He also admitted that he previously wanted revenge and was full of anger for a very long time. Who wouldnt be?

But then he realised that anger was destructive. He also said he would meet his sons killers if they wanted to see him. I will admit that I was nervous about doing this interview, but had no need to be. Dr Lawrence is one of those people with an inner calmness and serenity that is so impressive: you just want to listen rather than interrupt with another question. I will be thinking of him and his family on Sunday.

         

I made my debut on Question Time last night. As Im writing this a few hours before the programme: let me tell you if I had a brick in my arse, Id be excreting it. Ive done Any Questions quite a few times, but never Question Time. Its always rankled in a way, but I have to say I am immensely looking forward to it. My only sorrow is that Diane Abbott has pulled out. Was it something I might have said?
The London boroughs after the 1968 local elections. Conservative gains are marked in light blue.

Lewis Baston is author of Reggie: The Life of Reginald Maudling and several books about British general elections. He is a consultant on politics, elections and constituencies.

Governments nearly always experience periods of unpopularity in the middle of their terms of office. Policies fail, ministers quarrel, the economy gets into difficulties.

Local elections at such times tend to produce losses for the government party, as government supporters are grumpy and want to cast a protest vote, or demoralised and fail to turn out, while the oppositions voters are determined to make their point and are joined by disgruntled swing voters.

Even relatively mild cases of mid-term blues like 1985 or 2003 can cause sharp reverses in local elections, but the most severe cases are awe-inspiring. This year  although one can anticipate London being sticky territory for the Conservatives  is unlikely to be up there with the elections that took place 25 years ago in 1993 or 50 years ago in 1968.

The Wilson government was already having a torrid time in by-elections and local elections before the devaluation of sterling in November 1967. As well as the humiliating policy reverse itself, devaluation had to be accompanied by further unpopular measures like spending cuts and tax increases.

There are some similarities to May 1993, which saw the Conservatives routed, reduced to control over a single county council (Buckinghamshire) in similar circumstances following the devaluation of September 1992, a harsh budget, and Norman Lamont being criticised for the rather Wilsonian offence of appearing to be flippant in the face of policy failure  for pound in your pocket read singing in the bath.

The weeks leading up to the 1968 local elections were turbulent by any standards. The post-devaluation budget introduced by Roy Jenkins in March was eye-wateringly austere, and policies that had been cherished by Labour in 1964, such as free prescriptions and raising the school leaving age, bit the dust in this budget or in another round of cuts announced in January.

The disillusionment was savage, with Labour losing Dudley in a by-election on a swing of over 21 per cent at the end of March.

The international financial markets were in febrile condition, with a massive gold rush in March leading to a hurriedly proclaimed emergency bank holiday in Britain to stop trading in gold and shares. America was in turmoil after the assassination of Martin Luther King on 4 April. On 3 May student protests kicked off at Nanterre and les evenements began in Paris.

The biggest British political event in the background of the local elections was Enoch Powells Rivers of Blood speech in Birmingham on 20 April, a piece of oratory that even now retains its power to shock. As I wrote elsewhere in 2014, there is something disturbing about the clipped, precise voice of Enoch Powell dabbling in racist urban legends and vocalising a constituents fear that in 15 or 20 years time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man  a man as careful about words as Powell must have been aware of the violent archetype of the slave turned master.

The speech earned him instant dismissal from the Shadow Cabinet, where colleagues were already irritated by his tendency to roam freely across their policy areas and some like Iain Macleod, Reginald Maudling, and Quintin Hogg were if anything even more incandescent about his demagogue act than the furious Heath.

But the temperature on race kept rising, with demonstrations in Powells support in several working class areas and a susurrus of Enoch Was Right talk among the middle classes. British passport holders of Asian origin were arriving in increasing numbers from Kenya. The front bench and the government had tried to maintain a consensus approach to the Race Discrimination Bill that was making its way through Parliament, but this exposed both parties to the populist opposition of Powell. As Richard Crossman recorded in his diary on 7 May:

They all think that Powell is different, not the two official party organisations. This is enormously helpful to us but on the other hand it also widens the gap between Westminster and the public outside. Ordinary people feel that the Establishment and the two party machines are working together, disregarding public demand and fixing everything in defiance of the will of the people. Thats what irritates them and makes them reach out for Powell as a leader.

The populism, conspiracy theorising and mystical nationalism of Powell  a renegade member of the political establishment himself  found their echo at a time when neither of the main parties were confident of themselves, and when the national and international background was frightening and turbulent to many people.

The Tories reached levels in opinion polls that have only been seen since at Blairs highest tide (a few years after the 1993 local elections), their traditional support kept on board by Heaths repudiation of Powell whilst the Powellite surge had no other outlet. The Conservatives were badly split on race and Powell, but the energies that Powell had summoned up worked in their favour and demoralised the already despondent Labour forces even further in May 1968.

By polling day everyone expected a good evenings results for the Tories, but what happened went hugely beyond that. The Conservative victories in the local elections were florid, almost unbelievable in scale. Labour did not win a single ward in Birmingham  the Tories won 36 out of 39 wards, the other three going Liberal. The Conservatives won everything in Leicester, and gained control of Sheffield for the first and only time since the early 1930s.

The effect was concentrated in London because all the seats were up at once and the boroughs had last been fought in May 1964, when Labour were doing well  the comparison was with 1965 in most of the country. The Conservatives went up from 688 borough councillors elected in 1964 to 1,438 elected in 1968  a net gain of 750. The number of Conservative-controlled boroughs rose from 9 to 28, with only the most working class dockland boroughs resisting the tide despite the Powellite public demonstrations.

Conservative gains in some individual boroughs were mind-boggling: in Waltham Forest the Conservatives won 3 seats in 1964 and 44 seats in 1968, and the Islington Tories went up from zero to 47 seats and a huge majority. Hackney, Camden, Lambeth all became Tory councils.

But it was essentially a negative landslide, a reaction against the Wilson government aggravated by differential turnout. There was little sign of positive enthusiasm for the Conservatives, their policies, or their leaders in 1968, but in two party politics it was the only vehicle available in England to give Wilson a kicking (it is worth noting that in Scotland the SNP shared the spoils). The disillusion that produced the extreme results in 1968 led to the low-turnout election surprise in 1970 and the confrontational politics of the next few years.

As sometimes happens with local election disasters, the Prime Ministers enemies had a plot ready for the night of the results. Cecil King, newspaper proprietor and member of the Court of the Bank of England, made his move, using the Daily Mirror to say ENOUGH IS ENOUGH to Wilson. King resigned from the Bank, alleging that reserves figures had been falsified and called for a National Government in some sort of constitutional coup.

Like most other local election based plots such as the one in 2009, the King coup fell flat and Wilson was able to channel Stanley Baldwin  an increasingly comfortable role model  and dismiss the efforts of over-mighty newspaper proprietors. Wilsons favourite response to plots was: I know whats going on Im going on! Wilson may have been a bit paranoid, but there really were people out to get him and the chicanery of 1968 heightened his suspicions.

Of the Conservative councillors elected in London in May 1968, 15 served in the House of Commons at the time or later. The most famous is John Major, one of the three unlikely winners in the Lambeth ward of Ferndale in 1968  he was unusual in having won a ward that was normally solid Labour while most of the other future MPs stood in marginal or Tory wards. Two other 1968 winners served in Majors Cabinets  Peter Brooke and Sir George Young.

Another Tory winner in 1968 was John Strafford, a frequent commentator in these parts. For the story of what happened next, and how the unlikely Tory winners of 1968 used their single non-renewable term of power, well meet again next month. In the meantime, if readers have personal reminiscences of being councillors in unusual places in 1968-71 please feel free to get in touch.

The MPs:

Robert Atkins (Haringey); Vivian Bendall (Croydon); Sir Cyril Black (Merton) was already MP for Wimbledon at the time of the election; Rhodes Boyson (Waltham Forest); Peter Brooke (Camden); Den Dover (Barnet), Geoffrey Finsberg (Camden); Archie Hamilton (Kensington & Chelsea); Michael Latham (Westminster); Spencer Le Marchant (Westminster); John Major (Lambeth); Michael Morris (Islington); Michael Neubert (Bromley); Tim Raison (Richmond); Sir George Young (Lambeth). My apologies if I have left anyone out.

Four future Labour MPs were elected too  John Cartwright (Greenwich); Arthur Latham (Havering); Michael OHalloran (Islington); Michael Ward (Havering).
When consumers feel like time is running out, they may be more pressured to take action

A new study conducted by researchers from the University of Central Florida looked at some of the best ways to communicate the urgency of climate change to consumers.

They learned that putting a deadline on things is likely to inspire people to act. When the severity of the situation is heightened, more people are willing to take action.

Communication scholars often propose portraying climate change in more proximate terms could play an important role in engaging audie...
SOUTH GLENGARRY, Ontario  The annual Raisin River Canoe Race, which was scheduled for this Sunday, April 15, has been postponed for one week.

We have considered the latest forecasts which call for the likelihood of a high impact storm consisting of snow, ice pellets, and freezing rain all weekend. These conditions would be very unpleasant for paddlers, spectators, volunteers and volunteer safety crews, South Glengarry Fire tweeted from a statement from the Raisin Region Conservatin Authority on Friday, April 13. We are also concerned about participant and spectator safety. Those who have pre-registered online will be given the option of a deferral for next week, a refund, or they may elect an alternate paddler for their entry. We will be contacting people by email directly, reads a follow-up tweet.

When first making the announcement, the South Glengarry Fire Department said that the race will happen on Sunday, April 22 regardless of the weather conditions.

The weather forecast for Sunday, April 15 according to The Weather Network is -2 with snow and a chance of freezing rain.
Every single day without fail, a historic photo of Cornwall or a surrounding county is posted on my public Facebook page. However, on Saturday, April 14, no pictures were posted, only words.

On June 1, 2017, I submitted a petition to the Canadian government asking them to recognize April 14 of every year as Poor House Commemoration Day in Canada. I had 120 days to gather, at minimum, 500 signatures of support. In total, 648 signatures were received. On November 8, 2017, the petition was presented and tabled in the House of Commons by local MP Guy Lauzon. On January 29, 2018, I was informed of the governments response: The Government of Canada does not have any current plans to officially designate the aforementioned date [as Poor House Commemoration Day in Canada.]

On April 14, I wanted to remember and celebrate each and every Canadian Citizen and Immigrant that lived or died in an Asylum, a House of Refuge facility, or a Poor House on Canadian soil. Many of these people were buried in unmarked graves, with no family living to surround them and celebrate their lives. Some of the female inmates were shunned by their families for being pregnant and unmarried. Many of these people were just too poor, and could not afford any means to get by. Many inmates were crippled, unable to work or fend for themselves, and some of them suffered from mental illnesses.

By April 14, 1937, Canadians and Immigrants who suffered from mental illnesses were entirely stripped of their property, managing their economic affairs, and their ability to reproduce. Not only had they lost their belongings, the right to own properties, but they were stripped of their right to have children. By April 14, they lost control of everything, including control over their own body.

On April 14, 1937, the Act respecting the Mentally Incompetent Persons and their Estates was passed in Alberta. This Act marked a growing intrusion of the state into the lives of those they deemed mentally incompetent or unfit. Canadian citizens in an asylum were no longer capable of managing their economic affairs. The government stripped these people of their own property. Nine years prior to this act, the government of Alberta stripped their citizens of the ability to reproduce. On March 21, 1928, the Legislative Assembly of Alberta passed the Sexual Sterilization Act. This legislation authorized sexual sterilization to individuals living in designated state institutions (Asylums) deemed to have undesirable traits. The impact of the Sexual Sterilization Act was substantial. Under this Act, over 4,800 people were sterilized. More than 2,800 persons were sterilized under its two amendments in 1937 and 1942.

Although you are reading this a few days after the fact, I hope you will take time to remember Canadian citizens that lived in Asylums, a Houses of Refuge, and Poor Houses. I remembered them, I know you will remember them, and one day, Canada will remember them too. Poor House Commemoration Day is not an official day in Canada yet.
Crystal Cruises announced that President and CEO Tom Wolber will host the lines annual Presidents Cruise aboard Crystal Serenity this July.

The Vineyards and Vistas voyage sets sail on July 29, 2018 from London to Monte Carlo on a 14-day journey and will feature special events and activities hosted by Wolber and his wife, Sharon.

On the interactive voyage, guests can attend a presentation by Wolber on what is on the horizon for Crystal, special receptions and dinners throughout the sailing, as well as a hosted shore excursion in Barcelona, Spain.

The Presidents Cruise is a Crystal tradition I very much look forward to, as it is one of the best opportunities for me to connect with guests who have long loved the brand, as well as those who may be sailing with us for the first time, Wolber said. To be able to spend such quality time with Crystals best ambassadors  our guests  while sailing such a beautiful part of the world is a treat.

The two-week itinerary sails the coast of France with two overnights in Bordeaux and one night each in Lisbon and Barcelona.
Carnival Corporation announced several key senior executive appointments and promotions to serve multiple brands and business units globally.

Mr. Anthony (Tony) Kaufman has been promoted to executive vice president, professional services and chief financial officer for four business units of Carnival Corporation  Princess Cruises, Holland America Line, Seabourn and Carnival Australia. In his new role, Kaufman will oversee the financial planning and reporting, financial analysis, accounting and tax strategy for this group. Kaufman now reports to Stein Kruse, chief executive officer of these business units. Previously, Kaufman served as executive vice president, international operations for Carnival plc's Princess Cruises brand, leading the line's Asia, Australia, United Kingdom and Europe business operations.

Throughout his 25-year career at Princess Cruises, Kaufman has held various roles including senior vice president of commercial affairs, which was a broad commercial role that included responsibility for onboard revenue and worldwide shore operations, as well as commercial transactions such as shipbuilding contracts, ship sales, and charters. He has also served as general counsel of the former P&O Princess Cruises plc and has held various other roles in legal and business affairs since joining the company in 1993.

Kaufman succeeds Tim Howie, executive vice president professional services and chief financial officer, who retired earlier this year after more than 10 years with the company.

Ms. Kelly Clark, senior vice president and chief ethics officer for Princess Cruises, Holland America Line, Seabourn and Carnival Australia, has assumed oversight of the legal department as general counsel. Clark previously served as a senior vice president overseeing fleet operations compliance and also served previously as general counsel to Holland America Line and Seabourn, where she oversaw the development of an award-winning compliance program. Clark succeeds Mona Ehrenreich, senior vice president and general counsel who retired earlier this year after nearly 25 years of service to the company.

"It's my privilege to announce the promotions of Kelly and Tony to these strategic senior roles and I'm confident their leadership, intellect and integrity will create a lasting effect for the brands, our employees and colleagues," said Stein Kruse, chief executive officer of Princess Cruises, Holland America Line, Seabourn and Carnival Australia. "These executive appointments are also the catalyst for additional promotions demonstrating the outstanding capabilities and leadership within the ranks of our company," added Kruse.

Ms. Deanna Austin, who has been with the company for 30 years, has been promoted to chief commercial officer for Princess Cruises. In addition to her current accountability leading global deployment and revenue management, Austin has overall responsibility for the commercial operations for the Princess Cruises brand in 12 international offices, as well as international sales through Princess Cruises' general sales agents around the world. Austin will continue to report to Jan Swartz, group president, Princess Cruises and Carnival Australia.

"Deanna is one of the brightest minds in commercial management and deployment planning in the cruise industry and this promotion positions Princess to benefit from her three decades of experience and leadership globally," said Jan Swartz, group president for Princess Cruises and Carnival Australia.

Ms. Natalya Leahy has been promoted to senior vice president and chief financial officer for Holland America Line and Seabourn. She will report to Kaufman. Leahy most recently served as vice president and CFO based in Seattle.

Mr. Simeon Waldron has been promoted to senior vice president and chief financial officer for Princess Cruises and Carnival Australia, reporting to Kaufman and based in Santa Clarita, Calif. Waldron most recently served as vice president and CFO of these business units.

Mr. Stuart Allison has been promoted to senior vice president, Asia-Pacific Planning and Operations, for the Princess Cruises brand, reporting to Austin. In this new role, his accountability expands to include direct responsibility for Carnival plc's China, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore business. With the company for nearly 20 years, Allison was previously vice president of Princess Cruises' successful Australia and New Zealand business based in Sydney, where he will remain. He will retain revenue and operations oversight for the Australia and New Zealand business.

Mr. Neil Rippon has been promoted to vice president, domestics, Europe, and exotics product management for Princess Cruises. Adding to his current responsibilities, Rippon is now accountable for Europe and exotics revenue and Derek Krause, director, Europe and exotics product management, will report to him. Tony Roberts, vice president, UK and Europe, based in the UK, will report to Austin and partner with Rippon on achieving the brand's European revenue and sourcing plans. Rippon, as well as Trey Hickey in International Sales, will report to Austin.

Ms. Lorna Warren has joined Princess Cruises as vice president, guest services where she will lead the shipboard guest services and operations functionincluding front desk, housekeeping operations, customer service, charters and groups, and the onboard quality assurance program. Warren will also support guest operations' strategic efforts for recruitment, career progression, training, and development of the seagoing staff in close partnership with the global human resources team. Warren brings to Princess Cruises more than 17 years of experience in the cruise industry.

Ms. Shelley Wise has been promoted to vice president integrated marketing (North America) for Princess Cruises accountable for brand marketing, advertising, consumer insights and analytics, creative services and direct marketing. She has been with the company for 10 years and continues to report to Gordon Ho, senior vice president, global marketing and North America sales.
Private-equity firm Olympus Partners closed this week on the sale of the worlds largest Pizza Hut franchisee in a deal worth more than $1 billion, according to sources familiar with the transaction.

Olympus officials confirmed that they had sold Overland Park, Kan.-based NPC International, which is also a national Wendys franchisee, to a private buyer, but declined to identify the latter party. Olympus had bought NPC for approximately $755 million in December 2011.

Under Olympus ownership, NPC became a Wendys franchisee. Now accounting for 386 stores for the burger chain, it operates as the largest Wendys franchisee in the country, according to Olympus officials.

During the same span, NPC acquired and built a total of about 100 Pizza Hut stores, bringing to 1,144 its number of establishments for the business.

In addition to ranking as the No. 1 Pizza Hut franchisee worldwide, NPC comprises the seventh-largest restaurant-unit operator in the U.S., according to its website. It employs about 36,500.

We achieved in the business the objectives we wanted to achieve, Olympus founder and managing partner Rob Morris said in an interview. We were delighted to have built the Wendys franchise from scratch into the sizable enterprise it has become and to have maintained the Pizza Hut brand, despite the pressures on cheese and other commodity prices over the past several years.

Olympus bought NPC with its fifth fund, worth $1.5 billion and raised in 2007.

That fund is reaching the end of its life, and we have to provide the liquidity we had promised to investors, Morris said of the timing of the NPC sale.

In recent months, Olympus has announced the sale of several of the other companies it acquired through the fifth fund.

Last December, the firm said it would sell Kennett Square, Pa.-based Phoenix Services, which provides outsourced slag handling, metal reclamation and other services to steel mill customers.

The transaction would be worth between $600 million and $700 million. Olympus had acquired a majority stake in Phoenix in 2009, when it was worth about $100 million.

Last November, Olympus agreed to sell Stamford event-hospitality firm Centerplate to French catering-services giant Sodexo for $675 million. Five years before, it had bought Centerplate for about $570 million.

Last September, Olympus closed on the $605 million sale of Columbia, S.C.-based pharmaceutical firm Ritedose Corp., after buying it eight years earlier for about $150 million.

Olympus still owns two firms bought through the fifth fund: protective-packaging manufacturer Pregis and Siffron, whose specialties include merchandising, loss prevention and custom display.

Last December, Olympus launched its seventh fund, which is worth a company record of approximately $3 billion.

About 97 percent of the investments for the seventh fund came from about 40 organizations that had contributed to the firms previous fund. Olympus has raised a total of more than $8.5 billion for its seven institutional funds since its founding in 1988.

Olympus fund sizes have grown significantly since the launch in 1988 of the first fund, which totaled about $100 million. It raised $758 million for its fourth pool, $1.5 billion for the fifth and $2.3 billion for the sixth.

The firm now owns 11 companies. Its investments have spanned companies in industries including logistics, health care, financial services and consumer goods.

Since it started investing in 1990, Olympus has posted a 30 percent gross internal rate of return. Losses account for only 3 percent of $4 billion in controlling investments, according to data provided by the firm.

Olympus ranked as a top-15 performer among U.S. funds, according to a 2016 report from alternative assets data and intelligence firm Preqin.

The firm has operated in Stamford since 1990. It is based in the Metro Center complex, at 1 Station Place, across the street from the downtown Metro-North train station.

pschott@scni.com; 203-964-2236; Twitter: @paulschott
November 11 is Veterans Day, and while Connecticut hosts a number of events to honor those who served, it turns out it's not a great state for them to live.

A recent study by financial site WalletHub analyzed each state and Washington DC to find the best and worst states for military retirees; Connecticut is number 46 out of 51.

Click through the slideshow to see the best and worst states for military retirees. Visit WalletHub for the full report.

The site looked at data ranging from veterans per capita to number of VA health facilities to job opportunities for veterans. One of Connecticut's lowest ranks is in the category of VA health facilities; the state is 47 out of 51 for number of VA health facilities per number of veterans.

RELATED: Veterans Day deals 2017

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While retirement in general is a hot subject and important for all Americans, veterans in particular have a lot riding on these years as they retire at a much earlier age than most civilians. The average age of military retirement is about 45.

RELATED: Veterans Day by the numbers

RELATED: Most, least patriotic states

Ironically, the worst state for military retirees is our nation's capitol, Washington DC. But the best state is its next door neighbor Virginia.

Veterans Day originated as "Armistice Day" on Nov. 11, 1919, the first anniversary marking the end of World War I.

According to the U.S. Census, Congress passed a resolution in 1926 for an annual observance, and Nov. 11 became a national holiday beginning in 1938. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed legislation in 1954 to change the name to Veterans Day as a way to honor those who served in all American wars.
Connecticut Water Service, Inc., will continue with its merger with San Jose Water Group, despite a proposal from Eversource Energy earlier this month.

Connecticut Water, headquartered in Clinton, said Thursday in a news release, it received Eversources non-binding, unsolicited proposal and the companys board of directors unanimously decided to decline it.

Eversource announced Thursday that it sent a proposal to Connecticut Water to acquire its outstanding shares for $63.50 per share in cash. Shareholders would also have the option to receive the equivalent shares in Eversource in lieu of a monetary payment.

We believe that our proposal represents a unique opportunity to deliver significant and immediate value to Connecticut Waters shareholders, customers, employees and local communities, said Jim Judge, Eversource chairman, president and chief executive officer.

Connecticut Waters board of directors reviewed Eversources proposal and unanimously decided it is not a superior proposal or reasonably likely to lead to a superior proposal as defined by Connecticut Waters merger agreement with SJW Group, the news release said.

After declining Eversources proposal, Connecticut Water will continue its agreement with San Jose Water Group.

In an announcement on March 15, Connecticut Water and San Jose Water Group announced that the board of directors for each unanimously approved an agreement to combine through a merger of equals.

Connecticut Water shareholders will received 1.1375 shares of SJW Group common stock for each share of Connecticut Water common stock they own, the equivalent of $63.70 per share, the news release said.

We also believe our merger with SJW Group provides important benefits for customers, employees and communities that would be hard to replicate in a combination involving contiguous and overlapping territories, as was contemplated in the unsolicited Eversource acquisition proposal, said Carol Wallace, chairman of Connecticut Waters board of directors.

The merger between Connecticut Water and the San Jose Water Group is expected to close by the end of 2018.
BRIDGEPORT - A local man was sentenced Friday to five years in prison for sending three pounds of PCP to the Fairfield headquarters of Save the Children.

It was a lot of drugs and the location where you sent them was bizarre, Superior Court Judge Robert Devlin mused in sentencing Giraud Dickson to 15 years, suspended after he serves five years in prison and followed by five years probation.

Asked by the judge if he had anything to say for himself, Dickson answered no.

The 34-year-old Remington Street resident previously pleaded guilty to possession of narcotics with intent to sell.

Dickson had been working for a courier service used by Save the Children.

Police said that in February they were called to Save the Children's world headquarters on Kings Highway for a suspicious package. Employees told police they had received a parcel in the mail addressed to the organization. When mail room employees opened the package they found a large quantity of white powder in a vacuum-sealed container.

The Fire Department dispatched its hazardous materials unit, which determined it to be three pounds of Phencyclidine, also known as PCP or angel dust, a powerful hallucinogen.

Police said they traced the return address on the package to a consignment shop in San Diego.

Mail room employees told officers that Dickson had stopped into the mail room several times over the course of a few days apparently looking for something.

Police said they set up a sting operation, planting an empty box identical to the one that was delivered in the mail room.

They said they saw Dickson walk into the mail room, and after looking around, grab the planted box and leave with it hidden under his clothing. He was then taken into custody.

Police said Dickson claimed he had picked the box up accidentally.
Contributed Photo / Ansonia Police Department / Contributed Photo

ANSONIA  A man that fled to California after cops seized devices with child pornography on them has returned to Connecticut and surrendered to police, Lt. Patrick Lynch said.

Aaron Bresky, 36, of Huntington Beach, California, was arrested Tuesday and charged with illegal possession of child pornography.
HARTFORD  Connecticut State Police are looking for any information related to a fatal pedestrian crash on the I-91.

Police responded to a crash on the I-91 near exit 35 in Windsor just before 7 p.m. on Thursday, according to a statement from state police.
WASHINGTON  Sen. Richard Blumenthal said he was generally encouraged by responses to key questions on VA privatization offered by President Trumps nominee for the Department of Veterans Affairs, Rear Adm. Ronny Jackson.

In a meeting Thursday at Blumenthals Capitol Hill office, Jackson agreed with the senators call for greater investments in filling the 30,000 or so medical vacancies within the Department of Veterans Affairs, as well as maintenance and renovation to VA facilities and hospitals like the one in West Haven.

I am somewhat assured he shares my view that privatization would betray our trust and obligation to our veterans, said Blumenthal, D-Conn. The senator is a member of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, which holds a confirmation hearing next week on Jackson, who serves as Trumps White House physician.

Like most Democrats and many Republicans on Capitol Hill, Blumenthal is a sworn enemy of efforts to outsource VA medical services to non-VA doctors and hospitals.

But the privatization movement is popular among conservatives including the billionaire Koch brothers, who have underwritten an organization  Concerned Veterans for America  that advocates expanded privatization as a solution to cases of VA ineptitude, including the scandal that tarred VAs Phoenix hospital in 2014.

When a system isnt working well, its not just wasting taxpayer money; its hurting our warfighters, said Dan Caldwell, CVA executive director, in the Washington Post.

CVAs argument has found a sympathetic ear inside the Trump administration, even from the president himself. Former VA Secretary David Shulkins opposition to expanded privatization was among the many factors leading to his dismissal.

VA allows a measure of privatization in the form of a program called VA Choice, which permits veterans to get care from private doctors at government expense if they live over 40 miles from a VA facility, or if they suffer from a malady the VA cannot treat.

The issues are crucial in Connecticut, which is home to about 192,000 veterans. The VA in Connecticut completes about 40,000 appointments a month with the West Haven facility  the states only full-service VA hospital  accounting for about half of those.

The VA also operates a medical center in Newington, and seven primary-care clinics in locations including Danbury and Stamford.

The bipartisan budget deal reached in February included $4 billion for VA facility repair and renovation, some of which Blumenthal wants to channel to needed work in Newington and West Haven.

Theres a hidden agenda here on other side, essentially to starve the VA and say look, theyre failing our vets, we need to privatize, said Blumenthal. I was generally encouraged (by Jackson) but I want to hear what he says on the record, specifically in response to questions that test his commitment.

For Jackson, 50, a Texas native and 23-year Navy veteran who served in combat hospitals in Iraq, the confirmation hearing scheduled for April 25 is crucial. Like presidential nominees in other arenas, he will have to walk a tightrope between saying what the White House wants to hear and what senators who hold the keys to confirmation want to hear.

Jacksons lack of any administrative experience may prove to be a stumbling block to leading a sprawling $185 billion agency with 375,000 employees and a long history of mismanagement.

Apart from the privatization issue, Blumenthal praised Jackson as an extraordinarily able and distinguished doctor, and an excellent military officer with an exemplary record.

His lack of managerial experience is not a deal breaker, Blumenthal said. But it is a factor.

dan@hearstdc.com
A magician never reveals his secrets. Well, not unless a court mandates it.

David Copperfield, 61, is currently in the midst of a civil jury trial in Las Vegas' Clark County District Court that began on Friday, following a negligence lawsuit filed against the illusionist by 58-year-old British chef Gavin Cox.

Cox attended one of Copperfield's shows at the MGM Grand Las Vegas on Nov. 12, 2013. The show concluded with one of the magician's signature tricks, "Lucky #13."

Copperfield chose 13 random audience members to participate in the illusion. Cox was one of the 13 - but things quickly went downhill, and Cox claimed that he emerged from the trick injured.

The trick, which Copperfield has performed for at least a decade, is a simple vanishing act. He brings 13 unwitting participants on a platform on stage. Then, giant curtains are flung over it, completely obscuring the baker's dozen of audience members. Copperfield banters for a few minutes before pulling the curtains and revealing the 13 have disappeared.

But the big reveal comes when Copperfield points to the back of the room and tells the audience to turn around. Standing there are the missing participants.

Of course, the participants aren't magically transported from one place to another.

Cox claimed in his lawsuit that he was injured during the trick, which would force its mechanics to be exposed in the courtroom. Copperfield's lawyers argued that disclosing how the trick works to the public would financially hurt Copperfield, who is worth about $800 million, according to Forbes.

"It's not just tricks," Copperfield said in 2013. "Secrets and lots of hard work go into this."

The judge disagreed, pointing out that the thousands of people who have already participated in the illusion know how it works. (Copperfield has performed the trick with more than 55,000 different participants without any other incidents, his lawyers said, according to NBC.)

Chris Kenner, the show's executive producer, explained the trick in court on Tuesday.

After the curtains obscure the participants, flashlight-carrying stagehands guide them off the stage and through dark, hidden passageways that wind around various parts of the resort. At one point, the participants exit and then reenter the building. Eventually, they reenter the theater through the back.

Cox said the passageways were filled with dust and debris, as they snaked through parts of the resort that were under construction.

Cox fell during the dash and was taken to a hospital with a dislocated shoulder. He claimed that he later began to suffer chronic pain, and doctors found a lesion on his brain. He said his medical bills totaled more than $400,000, NBC reported.

"There was a duty by the defendants to provide a safe environment to the audience participants," his attorney Benedict Morelli said in opening statements on Friday.

MGM, which is also a defendant in the suit, claimed the passageways were clear.

"Mr. Cox did not slip, he tripped," the resort's attorney Jerry Popovich told jurors.

The trial is ongoing.

Cox isn't the only person who has been injured during one of Copperfield's illusions. One of the magician's employees was hospitalized for an injury that occurred during an illusion in which Copperfield appears to walk through the blades of a spinning fan, only to turn to smoke. The assistant's arm broke after it was caught in the fan.

"This is a trick David has done over 3,000 times. This was a freak accident," Kenner told People at the time. "People are always saying that it's magic and it isn't dangerous. This goes to show you that it is."
April is Financial Literacy Month.

Its also National Credit Union Youth Month.

And National Financial Capability Month.

The idea that credit unions can directly counsel and educate members on their personal finances has taken on organizational heft. According to NAFCU, approximately 36% of the 5,689 federally insured U.S. credit unions offered financial counseling and education to members in 2016, and more than 20% offered financial literacy workshops last year.

One notable approach to celebrating financial education this year comes from Philadelphia Federal Credit Union($1.1B, Philadelphia, PA), whose #StopMoneyShamingcampaign encourages locals, including students at Temple University, to use that hashtag to share a money confession and help ease the stigma around talking about financial problems.
NCUA headquarters

The NCUA is currently considering whether to appeal the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbias recent decision to strike down provisions of the agencys field-of-membership (FOM) rule related to rural districts and combined statistical areas. NAFCU continues to support the underlying legality of the NCUAs FOM rule.

The consideration was noted in the NCUAs notice filed with the court Thursday outlining how it will implement the recent decision.

The notice indicates NCUA has instructed credit unions to not accept any new members who would only be eligible under the vacated portions of the FOM rule. However, credit unions can continue to serve existing members who would have been ruled ineligible by the courts decision, so long as they became members by April 4.

The NCUA argued that if the courts decision meant credit unions could no longer serve existing members, it would punish individuals and entities who did nothing wrong and who were not parties in this litigation. The agency cited the Federal Credit Union Acts once a member, always a member provision and previous practice in its reasoning.
For Subscribers Local leaders largely silent about district attorney situation

With the exception of one Somerset attorney, locals have been silent about whether DA Jeff Thomas should step down as his court hearings approach.
After decades of neglect, Prime Minister Narendra Modis visit to Sweden this week has finally underscored that relationship with the Nordic states is an important part of rapidly evolving Indian foreign policy priorities. This was not only the first visit of an Indian Prime Minister to Sweden in 30 years but also an attempt to reach out to the wider Nordic region with the first India-Nordic summit which saw India interacting with the Prime Ministers of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden on a single platform.

Changing scenario

New Delhis focus, for far too long, has been on traditional Western powers, with the US on one side and major European powers like the UK, France and Germany on the other. The result was a complete neglect of advanced Nordic nations with whom India shares some significant political and economic complementarities and which rank highest in various human developments indices. The Bofors scandal too cast its own shadow on relations with Sweden in particular, with reluctance on the part of India to move beyond past troubles. On the other hand, the Nordic states too were absorbed in trying to manage their European identities in multiple ways and India was not really on their radar.

But with the changing global context in which states like China and Russia are busy remoulding the rules of global governance to their advantage and with India standing out as an economic powerhouse with strong democratic credentials, the discourse in the Nordic states too has undergone a dramatic shift. A strong partnership with India is seen as not only desirable but also imperative of changing global realities.

Modi with PMs Katrin Jakobsdottir (Iceland), Lars Lokke Rasmussen (Denmark), Prime Minister Stefan Lofven (Sweden), Juha Sipila (Finland) and Erna Solberg (Norway) at Nordic-Indian Summit in Stockholm, Sweden. [Photo: Reuters]

Modis visit to Sweden, therefore, comes at an appropriate time and Indias outreach to the wider Nordic region with the first India-Nordic summit is most welcome. In Sweden, Modi galvanised top Swedish firms to invest in India, underlining the importance of strong bilateral business relations for the people of the two countries. Sweden has been a strong supporter of Indias Make in India campaign with the Swedish Prime Minister leading a big delegation to the Mumbai summit in 2016.

India and Sweden are working on reviving their traditionally strong defence ties in light of the latters interest in proposing the Saab Groups Gripen-E single-engine jet fighter for the Indian Air Force and with a Request for Information having been issued earlier this month to Stockholm. India and Sweden have decided to set up a common task force on cyber security and are working towards finalising a bilateral agreement on exchange and mutual protection of classified information for cooperation in the defence area as well as encouraging private sector stakeholders to develop supply chains for small- and medium-sized enterprises with major defence and aerospace original equipment manufacturers.

The highlight of Modis visit to Sweden was the signing of the Joint Innovation Partnership pact and adoption of the Joint Action Plan. The Joint Innovation Partnership is aimed at embedding the wider relationship in a larger innovation ecosystem in order to initiate a multi-stakeholder Innovation Partnership for a Sustainable Future, underpinning the mutual commitment to drive prosperity and growth and address societal challenges such as climate change and sustainable development through innovation.

Global order

The Swedish government will be providing more than $59 million (Rs 387 crore) for innovation cooperation with India in the field of smart cities and sustainability, two key priorities of New Delhi. With the Joint Action Plan, meanwhile, the two nations will try to enhance cooperation in key areas of renewable energy, womens skills development and empowerment, space and science, and health and life sciences.

Issues such as trade, growth, global security, smart cities, renewable energy and climate change were also on the agenda of Indias broader engagement with the Nordic countries. The first India-Nordic summit reaffirmed the commitment of both sides to work towards supporting free trade as a catalyst for achieving inclusive growth and realising the Sustainable Development Goals at a time when major economic powers are becoming protectionist and tariff wars are becoming the new normal. Being the beneficiaries of the rule-based global order, it is important for India and the Nordic states to raise their voice against the challenges emanating from some emerging and some extant powers towards the multilateral normative order.

New priorities

In this context, India received key support from the Nordic countries for its membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and a seat at the UN Security Council as a permanent member. The NSG support from the Nordic states is particularly significant because there was a time when these states had adopted a strong moralistic approach on Indias nuclear programme. Today, there is a recognition and acceptance of Indias credentials as a responsible nuclear actor despite not being a formal member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Both China and the US under Donald Trump are challenging the global institutional framework in multiple ways and it is important for the liberal democratic states to stand up for the sanctity of that order by enhancing engagements.

As India redefines its foreign policy priorities in Europe and as a changing Europe comes to terms with a rising India, Modis engagement with the Nordic states has managed to showcase the potential that exists in this partnership with a much neglected part of the world.

(Courtesy of Mail Today)

Also read: Why the Nokia 6, 7 Plus and 8 Sirocco work for India
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Limited, CP Newco 1 Limited, CP Newco2 Limited, CP Newco3 Limited, CP Propco 1 Limited, CP Propco 2 Limited, CP Topco Limited, CPIA Canada Holdings, CPIA England 2008 Limited Partnership, CPIA England 2009 Limited Partnership, CPIA England No.2 Limited Partnership, CPIA Investments No.1 Limited, CPIA Investments No.2 Limited, CRE Diversified Holdings LLC, CREW Tahoe Holdings LLC, CREW Tahoe LLC, Calthorpe Investments Limited, Capton Investments Limited, Carnegie Holdings Limited, Central Platte Valley Management LLC, Chapelcrest Investments Limited, Charles Schwab Europe, Claudas Investments Limited, Claudas Investments Two Limited, Clydesdale Financial Services Limited, Cobalt Investments Limited, Compania Regional del Sur S.A., Compania Sudamerica S.A., Condor No.1 Limited Partnership, Cornwall Homes Loans Limited, Crescent Crown Land Holding SPV LLC, Crescent Legacy LLC, Crescent Plaza Residential L.P., Crescent Plaza Residential LLC, Crescent Plaza Residential LP LLC, Crescent Real 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L.L.L.P., East West Resort Development VII LLC, Equity Limited Partnership, Equity Value Investments No.1 Limited, Equity Value Investments No.2 Limited, Erimon Home Loans Ireland Limited, Expobank, FIRSTPLUS Financial Group Limited, Finpart Nominees Limited, First Assurance, Foltus Investments Limited, Full House Holdings Limited, Gallen Investments Limited, Global Dynasty Natural Resource Private, Globe Nominees Limited, Gracechurch Services Corporation, Grays Station LLC, Grupo Financiero Barclays Mexico S.A. de C.V., Hawkins Funding Limited, Heraldglen Limited, Holding Stuttgarter Strae GmbH, Hurley Investments No.1 Limited, Imalivest Mineral Resources LP, Investors In Infrastructure Limited, J.V. 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Grieg Nominees Limited, RVH Limited, RVT CLO Investments LLP, Razzoli Investments Limited, Real Estate Participation Management Limited, Real Estate Participation Services Limited, Relative Value Holdings LLC, Relative Value Investments UK Limited, Relative Value Trading Limited, Roder Investments No. 1 Limited, Roder Investments No. 2 Limited, Ruthenium Investments Limited, SPM GP Limited, Securitized Asset Backed Receivables LLC, Servicios Barclays S.A. de C.V., Societe Civile Immobiliere 31 Avenue de la Costa, Solution Personal Finance Limited, Southern Peaks Mining LP, Standard Life Aberdeen, Surety Trust Limited, Surrey Funding Corporation, Sussex Purchasing Corporation, Sutton Funding LLC, Swan Lane Investments Limited, TPLL LLC, TPProperty LLC, Tahoe Club Company LLC, Tahoe Club Employee Company, The Logic Group Enterprises Limited, The Logic Group Holdings Limited, Third Energy Holdings Limited, US Real Estate Holdings No. 2 Limited, US Real Estate Holdings No.1 Limited, US Real Estate Holdings No.3 Limited, US Secured Investments LLC, Union Center LLC, United Counties Bank, Verain Investments LLC, Walbrook Group Ltd, Wedd Jefferson (Nominees) Limited, Wessex Investments Limited, Westferry Investments Limited, Wilmington Riverfront Receivables LLC, Woolwich Homes Limited, Woolwich Plan Managers Limited, Woolwich Qualifying Employee Share, Woolwich Surveying Services Limited, Woori BC Pegasus Securitization Specialty Co. Limited, and Zeban Nominees Limited.
The following companies are subsidiares of Siemens Aktiengesellschaft: AIMSUN LIMITED, Abacus Medicine, Acrorad Co. Ltd., Acuson, Advanced Airfoil Components LLC, Adwen France SAS, Adwen GmbH, Adwen Offshore S. L., Adwen UK Limited, Agilion Apps, Aimsun Inc., Aimsun Pte Ltd, Aimsun Pty Ltd, Aimsun S. L., Aimsun SARL, Airport Munich Logistics and Services GmbH, Alpha Verteilertechnik GmbH, American Electronic Components, Anantapur Wind Farms Private Limited, Arabia Electric Ltd. (Equipment), Argon Networks, Artadi S. 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Ltd., International Wind Farm Development I Limited, International Wind Farm Development II Limited, International Wind Farm Development IV Limited, International Wind Farm Development VII Limited, International Wind Farm Developments II S. L., International Wind Farm Developments IX S. L., Invensys Rail, Iriel Industria e Comercio de Sistemas Electricos Ltda., J. R. B. Engineering Pty Ltd, J2 Innovations Inc., J2 Innovative Concepts Europe SRL, Jaguari Energetica S. A., Jalore Wind Park Private Limited, Jamkhandi Renewable Private Limited, Jilin Gamesa Wind Co. Ltd., KACO NEW ENERGY AFRICA (PTY) LTD, KACO NEW ENERGY CANADA INC., KACO New Energy Inc., KACO New Enerji Limited Sirketi, KACO new energy GmbH, KACO new energy Italia S. r. l., KACO new energy SARL, KDAG Beteiligungen GmbH, Kadapa Wind Farms Private Limited, Kanigiri Renewable Private Limited, Kod Renewable Private Limited, Kollapur Renewable Private Limited, KompTime GmbH, Koncar-Energetski Transformatori d. o. o., Koppal Renewable Private Limited, Kurnool Wind Farms Private Limited, Kutch Renewable Private Limited, Kyros 52 Aktiengesellschaft, Kyros 54 GmbH, Kyros 58 GmbH, Kyros 60 GmbH, Kyros 61 GmbH, Kyros 62 GmbH, Kyros 63 GmbH, LIGHTWORKS SOFTWARE LIMITED, LIMITED LIABILITY COMPANY SIEMENS ELEKTROPRIVOD, LMS International, Lightwork Design Limited, Limited Liability Company Siemens Technologies, Linacre Investments (Pty) Ltd., Lincas Electro Vertriebsgesellschaft mbH, Lindom Vindenergi AB, Lingbo SPW AB, MG P&S France SAS, MRX Rail Services UK Limited, MRX Technologies Group, MRX Technologies Limited, MWB (Shanghai) Co Ltd., Mannesmann Corporation, Maski Renewable Energy Private Limited, Materials Solutions, Materials Solutions Holdings Limited, Materials Solutions Limited, Mathak Wind Farms Private Limited, Mendix, Mendix Technology B. V., Mendix Technology Limited, Mentor, Mentor Graphics (Canada) ULC, Mentor Graphics (Deutschland) GmbH, Mentor Graphics (Espana) SL, Mentor Graphics (Finland) OY, Mentor Graphics (France) SARL, Mentor Graphics (Holdings) Unlimited Company, Mentor Graphics (India) Private Limited, Mentor Graphics (Ireland) Limited, Mentor Graphics (Israel) Limited, Mentor Graphics (Korea) LLC, Mentor Graphics (Netherlands) B. V., Mentor Graphics (Sales and Services) Private Limited, Mentor Graphics (Scandinavia) AB, Mentor Graphics (Schweiz) AG, Mentor Graphics (Shanghai) Electronic Technology Co. Ltd., Mentor Graphics (UK) Limited, Mentor Graphics Asia Pte Ltd, Mentor Graphics Corporation, Mentor Graphics Development (France) SAS, Mentor Graphics Development Crolles SARL, Mentor Graphics Development Services (Israel) Ltd., Mentor Graphics Development Services CJSC, Mentor Graphics Development Services Limited, Mentor Graphics Egypt Company (A Limited Liability Company  Private Free Zone), Mentor Graphics Global Holdings LLC, Mentor Graphics Japan Co. Ltd., Mentor Graphics Magyarorszag Kft., Mentor Graphics Morocco SARL, Mentor Graphics Pakistan Development (Private) Limited, Mentor Graphics Polska Sp. z o. o., Mentor Graphics Romania SRL, Mentor Graphics Technology (Shenzhen) Co. Ltd., Mentor Graphics Torino S. R. L., Mentor Graphics Tunisia SARL, Meta Systems SARL, Minicare B. V., MultiMechanics, Munipolis GmbH, Myrio, NEO New Oncology GmbH, Nandikeshwar Renewable Energy Private Limited, Neelagund Renewable Private Limited, Nellore Renewable Private Limited, Next47 Fund 2019 L. P., Next47 Fund 2020 L. P., Next47 GmbH, Next47 Inc., Next47 Mid-Tier GP 2019 L. P., Next47 Mid-Tier GP 2020 L. P., Next47 Services GmbH, Nimbic Chile S. p. A., Nimbus Technologies LLC, Nirlooti Renewable Private Limited, OEZ Slovakia, OEZ s. r. o., OOO Legion II, OOO Siemens, OOO Siemens Gas Turbine Technologies, OOO Siemens Industry Software, OOO Siemens Transformers, OPTIO Grundstucks-Vermietungsgesellschaft mbH & Co. Objekt Tubingen KG, Omnetric B. V., Omnetric Corp., Omnetric GmbH, Osmanabad Renewable Private Limited, P. E. T.NET Houston LLC, P. T. Siemens Indonesia, PETNET Indiana LLC, PETNET Radiopharmaceutical Solutions Pvt. Ltd., PETNET Solutions Cleveland LLC, PETNET Solutions Inc., PETNET Solutions SAS, PT Dresser-Rand Services Indonesia, PT SAMUDIA BAHTERA, PT Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy, PT Siemens Mobility Indonesia, PT. Siemens Industrial Power, Pace Global Energy Services, Parco Eolico Banzy S. r. l., Parco Eolico Manca Vennarda S. r. l., Parque Eolico Dos Picos S. L. U., Partikeltherapiezentrum Kiel Holding GmbH i. L., Pocahontas Prairie Holdings LLC, Pocahontas Prairie Wind LLC, Polarion AG, Pollux III B. V., Poovani Wind Farms Private Limited, Poseidon Group, Powerplant Performance Improvement Ltd., Preactor International Limited, Preactor Software India Private Limited, Process Systems Enterprise, Project Ventures Butendiek Holding GmbH, Project Ventures Rail Investments I Limited, Projektbau-Arena-Berlin GmbH, R & S Restaurant Services GmbH, REMECH Systemtechnik GmbH, RISICOM Ruckversicherung AG, RSR Power Private Limited, Rajgarh Windpark Private Limited, Rangareddy Renewable Private Limited, Rayachoty Renewable Private Limited, Robicon Corporation, Roos Holding B. V., RuggedCom, Russelectric Inc., SANTALPUR RENEWABLE POWER PRIVATE LIMITED, SAT Systemy automatizacnej techniky spol. s. r. o., SBS Pension Funding (Scotland) Limited Partnership, SD (Middle East) LLC, SIEMENS (AUSTRIA) PROIECT SPITAL COLTEA SRL, SIEMENS ENGINES R & D S. A. U., SIEMENS ENGINES SA, SIEMENS GAMESA RENEWABLE ENERGY (PTY) LTD, SIEMENS GAMESA RENEWABLE ENERGY AS, SIEMENS GAMESA RENEWABLE ENERGY INSTALLATION & MAINTENANCE COMPANIA LIMITADA, SIEMENS GAMESA RENEWABLE ENERGY PROJECTS PRIVATE LIMITED, SIEMENS GAMESA RENEWABLE ENERGY S. R. L., SIEMENS GAMESA RENEWABLE ENERGY SWEDEN AB, SIEMENS GAMESA RENEWABLE ENERJI ANONIM SIRKETI, SIEMENS GAMESA YENILENEBILIR ENERJI IC VE DIS TICARET LIMITED SIRKETI, SIEMENS HEALTHCARE S. L. U., SIEMENS HEALTHCARE UNIPESSOAL LDA, SIEMENS INDUSTRY SOFTWARE SA (PTY) LTD, SIEMENS MOBILITY S. L. U., SIEMENS MOBILITY UNIPESSOAL LDA, SIEMENS RAIL AUTOMATION PTY. LTD., SILLIT Grundstucks-Verwaltungsgesellschaft mbH, SIM 2. Grundstucks-GmbH & Co. KG, SIMAR Nordost Grundstucks-GmbH, SIMAR Nordwest Grundstucks-GmbH, SIMAR Ost Grundstucks-GmbH, SIMAR Sud Grundstucks-GmbH, SIMAR West Grundstucks-GmbH, SIMEA SIBIU S. R. L., SIMOS Real Estate GmbH, SIPRIN s. r. o., SMI Holding LLC, SYKATEC Systeme, Samateq FZ LLC, Samtech SA, Sankanur Renewable Energy Private Limited, Saunshi Renewable Energy Private Limited, Sellafirth Renewable Energy Park Limited, Shivamogga Renewable Energy Private Limited, Shuangpai Majiang Wuxingling Wind Power Co. Ltd, Siemens (N. Z.) Limited, Siemens A / S, Siemens A. E., Siemens AB, Siemens AS, Siemens Aktiengesellschaft Osterreich, Siemens Bangladesh Ltd., Siemens Bank GmbH, Siemens Beteiligungen Europa GmbH, Siemens Beteiligungen Inland GmbH, Siemens Beteiligungen Management GmbH, Siemens Beteiligungen USA GmbH, Siemens Beteiligungsverwaltung GmbH & Co. OHG, Siemens Building Technologies (Tianjin) Ltd., Siemens Business Information Consulting Co. Ltd, Siemens Campus Erlangen Grundstucks-GmbH & Co. KG, Siemens Campus Erlangen Objekt 1 GmbH & Co. KG, Siemens Campus Erlangen Objekt 2 GmbH & Co. KG, Siemens Campus Erlangen Objekt 3 GmbH & Co. KG, Siemens Campus Erlangen Objekt 4 GmbH & Co. KG, Siemens Campus Erlangen Objekt 5 GmbH & Co. KG, Siemens Campus Erlangen Objekt 6 GmbH & Co. KG, Siemens Campus Erlangen Objekt 7 GmbH & Co. KG, Siemens Campus Erlangen Objektmanagement GmbH, Siemens Campus Erlangen Verwaltungs-GmbH, Siemens Canada Limited, Siemens Capital Company LLC, Siemens Capital Middle East Ltd, Siemens Circuit Protection Systems Ltd., Siemens Compressor Systems GmbH, Siemens Computational Science (Shanghai) Co. Ltd, Siemens Concentrated Solar Power Ltd., Siemens Corporation, Siemens Credit Warehouse Inc., Siemens D-R Holding B. V., Siemens D-R Holding II B. V., Siemens D-R Holding III B. V., Siemens Demag Delaval Turbomachinery Inc., Siemens Digital Logistics GmbH, Siemens Digital Logistics Sp. z o. o., Siemens EOOD, Siemens Eco-City Innovation Technologies (Tianjin) Co. Ltd., Siemens Electric Machines s. r. o., Siemens Electrical & Electronic Services K. S. C. C., Siemens Electrical Apparatus Ltd., Siemens Electrical Drives (Shanghai) Ltd., Siemens Electrical Drives Ltd., Siemens Electrical LLC, Siemens Employee Share Ownership Trust, Siemens Energy Inc., Siemens Factoring Private Limited, Siemens Factory Automation Engineering Ltd., Siemens Field Staffing Inc., Siemens Finance & Leasing GmbH, Siemens Finance B. V., Siemens Finance Sp. z o. o., Siemens Finance and Leasing LLC, Siemens Finance and Leasing Ltd., Siemens Financial Inc., Siemens Financial Ltd., Siemens Financial Services AB, Siemens Financial Services GmbH, Siemens Financial Services Holdings Ltd., Siemens Financial Services Inc., Siemens Financial Services Ltd., Siemens Financial Services Private Limited, Siemens Financial Services SAS, Siemens Financieringsmaatschappij N. V., Siemens Finansal Kiralama A. S., Siemens Fonds Invest GmbH, Siemens France Holding SAS, Siemens Gamesa Energia Renovavel Ltda., Siemens Gamesa Energy Tajdidpazir SSK, Siemens Gamesa Megujulo Energia Hungary Kft, Siemens Gamesa Renevable Energy Limited Liability Company, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy (Private) Limited, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy (Thailand) Co. Ltd., Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy 9REN S. L., Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy A / S, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy AB, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy AE, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Apac S. L., Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Australia Pty Ltd, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy B. V., Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy B9 Limited, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy BVBA, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Belgium BVBA, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Blades SARL AU, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Canada ULC, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Chile SpA, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy EOOD, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Egypt LLC, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Engineering Centre Private Limited, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Eolica S. L., Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Europa S. L., Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy France SAS, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy GmbH, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy GmbH & Co. KG, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Greece E. P. E., Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Iberica S. L., Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Inc., Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Innovation & Technology S. L., Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy International Wind Services S. A., Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Invest S. A., Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Ireland Limited, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Italia S. r. l., Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Italy S. P. A., Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Japan K. K., Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Kft., Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy LLC, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Lanka (Private) Limited, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Latam S. L., Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Limited, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Ltd, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Management GmbH, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Morocco SARL, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy New Zealand Limited, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Offshore Wind Limited, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Oy, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy PA LLC, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Poland Sp. z o. o., Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Pty Ltd, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Romania S. R. L., Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy S. A., Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy S. A. C., Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy S. A. S., Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy SARL, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Singapore Private Limited, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Sp. z o. o., Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Technology (China) Co. Ltd., Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy UK Limited, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Wind Farms S. A., Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Wind Farms S. R. L., Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Wind Limited, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Wind S. R. L., Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy Wind SARL, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy d. o. o., Siemens Gamesa Renewable Engergy S. A., Siemens Gamesa Renewable Power Private Limited, Siemens Gamesa Turkey Yenilenebilir Enerji Limited Sirketi, Siemens Gas & Power (Pty) Ltd, Siemens Gas & Power A / S, Siemens Gas Turbine Components (Jiangsu) Co. Ltd., Siemens Gas Turbine Technologies Holding B. V., Siemens Gas and Power EOOD, Siemens Gas and Power Enerji Anonim Sirketi, Siemens Gas and Power GmbH, Siemens Gas and Power GmbH & Co. KG, Siemens Gas and Power Holding B. V., Siemens Gas and Power Kft., Siemens Gas and Power LLC, Siemens Gas and Power Limited, Siemens Gas and Power Management GmbH, Siemens Gas and Power Pte. Ltd., Siemens Gas and Power Real Estate GmbH & Co. KG, Siemens Gas and Power Real Estate Management GmbH, Siemens Gas and Power S. A. S., Siemens Gas and Power S. de R.L. de C.V., Siemens Gas and Power S. r. l., Siemens Gas and Power SRL, Siemens Gas and Power Sdn. Bhd., Siemens Gas and Power Servicios S. de R. L. de C. V., Siemens Gas and Power Sp. z o. o., Siemens Gas and Power d. o. o., Siemens Gas and Power d. o. o. Beograd, Siemens Gas and Power s. r. o., Siemens Gebaudemanagement & -Services G. m. b. H., Siemens Generation Services Company, Siemens Gesa Renewable Energy Mexico S. de R. L. de C. V., Siemens Gesa Renewable Energy S. A. de C. V., Siemens Gesa Renewables Energy Services S. de R. L. de C. V., Siemens Global Innovation Partners Management GmbH, Siemens Government Technologies Inc., Siemens HealthCare Ltd., Siemens Healthcare (Private) Limited, Siemens Healthcare A / S, Siemens Healthcare AB, Siemens Healthcare AG, Siemens Healthcare AS, Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics GmbH, Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics Inc., Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics K. K., Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics Ltd., Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics Manufacturing Limited, Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics Manufacturing Ltd, Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics Manufacturing Ltd., Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics Products GmbH, Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics Products Ltd, Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics S. A., Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics S. de R. L. de C. V., Siemens Healthcare Diagnosticos Ltda., Siemens Healthcare EOOD, Siemens Healthcare Employee Share Ownership Trust, Siemens Healthcare Equipos Medicos Sociedad por Acciones, Siemens Healthcare FZ LLC, Siemens Healthcare GmbH, Siemens Healthcare Inc., Siemens Healthcare Industrial and Commercial Societe Anonyme, Siemens Healthcare K. K., Siemens Healthcare Kft., Siemens Healthcare L.L. C., Siemens Healthcare Laboratory LLC, Siemens Healthcare Limited, Siemens Healthcare Limited Liability Company, Siemens Healthcare Limited Liability Partnership, Siemens Healthcare Logistics LLC, Siemens Healthcare Medical Solutions Limited, Siemens Healthcare NV, Siemens Healthcare Nederland B. V., Siemens Healthcare Oy, Siemens Healthcare Private Limited, Siemens Healthcare Proprietary Limited, Siemens Healthcare Pte. Ltd., Siemens Healthcare Pty. Ltd., Siemens Healthcare S. A., Siemens Healthcare S. A. C., Siemens Healthcare S. A. E., Siemens Healthcare S. A. S., Siemens Healthcare S. r. l., Siemens Healthcare SARL, Siemens Healthcare SAS, Siemens Healthcare Saglik Anonim Sirketi, Siemens Healthcare Sdn. Bhd., Siemens Healthcare Servicios S. de R. L. de C. V., Siemens Healthcare Sociedad Anonima, Siemens Healthcare Sp. z o. o., Siemens Healthcare d. o. o., Siemens Healthcare d. o. o. Beograd, Siemens Healthcare s. r. o., Siemens Healthineers AG, Siemens Healthineers Beteiligungen GmbH & Co. KG, Siemens Healthineers Beteiligungen Verwaltungs-GmbH, Siemens Healthineers Diagnostics (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Siemens Healthineers Holding III B. V., Siemens Healthineers Ltd., Siemens Heat Transfer Technology B. V., Siemens Heat Transfer Technology Corp., Siemens High Voltage Circuit Breaker Co. Ltd., Siemens High Voltage Switchgear Co. Ltd., Siemens Holding S. L., Siemens Holdings plc, Siemens IT Services S. A., Siemens Immobilien GmbH & Co. KG, Siemens Immobilien Management GmbH, Siemens Inc., Siemens Industrial Automation Products Ltd., Siemens Industrial Israel Ltd., Siemens Industrial S. A., Siemens Industrial Turbomachinery (Huludao) Co. Ltd., Siemens Industrial Turbomachinery AB, Siemens Industrial Turbomachinery Ltd., Siemens Industriepark Karlsruhe GmbH & Co. KG, Siemens Industry Inc., Siemens Industry Software (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Siemens Industry Software (India) Private Limited, Siemens Industry Software (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Siemens Industry Software (TW) Co. Ltd., Siemens Industry Software A / S, Siemens Industry Software AB, Siemens Industry Software B. V., Siemens Industry Software Computational Dynamics India Pvt. Ltd., Siemens Industry Software Computational Dynamics Limited, Siemens Industry Software GmbH, Siemens Industry Software Holding II B. V., Siemens Industry Software Limited, Siemens Industry Software Ltd., Siemens Industry Software Ltda., Siemens Industry Software NV, Siemens Industry Software Pte. Ltd., Siemens Industry Software Pty Ltd, Siemens Industry Software S. A. de C.V., Siemens Industry Software S. L., Siemens Industry Software S. r. l., Siemens Industry Software SAS, Siemens Industry Software Sdn. Bhd., Siemens Industry Software Simulation and Test Limited, Siemens Industry Software Sp. z o. o., Siemens Industry Software ULC, Siemens Industry Software and Services B. V., Siemens Industry Software s. r. o., Siemens Infraestrutura e Industria Ltda., Siemens Inmobiliaria S. A. de C. V., Siemens Insulation Center GmbH & Co. KG, Siemens Insulation Center Verwaltungs-GmbH, Siemens International Holding B. V., Siemens International Trading Ltd., Siemens Investment Consulting Co. Ltd., Siemens Israel Ltd., Siemens Israel Projects Ltd., Siemens K. K., Siemens Konzernbeteiligungen GmbH, Siemens L. L. C., Siemens LLC, Siemens Lease Services SAS, Siemens Limited, Siemens Liquidity One, Siemens Logistics AG, Siemens Logistics Automation Systems (Beijing) Co. Ltd, Siemens Logistics Automation Systems Ltd., Siemens Logistics GmbH, Siemens Logistics India Private Limited, Siemens Logistics LLC, Siemens Logistics Limited, Siemens Logistics Ltd., Siemens Logistics PTE. LTD., Siemens Logistics S. L. Unipersonal, Siemens Logistics S. de R. L. de C. V., Siemens Logistics S. r. l., Siemens Logistics SAS, Siemens Ltd., Siemens Ltd. Seoul, Siemens Ltda., Siemens Malaysia Sdn. Bhd., Siemens Manufacturing and Engineering Centre Ltd., Siemens Medical Solutions Diagnostics Holding I B. V., Siemens Medical Solutions Health Services Corporation, Siemens Medical Solutions Health Services GmbH, Siemens Medical Solutions USA Inc., Siemens Medicina d. o. o., Siemens Medium Voltage Switching Technologies (Wuxi) Ltd., Siemens Metals Technologies Vermogensverwaltungs GmbH, Siemens Middle East Holding GmbH & Co. KG, Siemens Middle East Limited, Siemens Middle East Management GmbH, Siemens Mobility (Pty) Ltd, Siemens Mobility A / S, Siemens Mobility AB, Siemens Mobility AG, Siemens Mobility AS, Siemens Mobility B. V., Siemens Mobility EOOD, Siemens Mobility Egypt LLC, Siemens Mobility Electrification Equipment (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Siemens Mobility Equipment (China) Co. Ltd, Siemens Mobility GmbH, Siemens Mobility Holding B. V., Siemens Mobility Holding SARL, Siemens Mobility Inc, Siemens Mobility Kft., Siemens Mobility LLC, Siemens Mobility Limited, Siemens Mobility Ltd., Siemens Mobility Oy, Siemens Mobility Pte. Ltd., Siemens Mobility Pty Ltd, Siemens Mobility Rail Equipment (Tianjin) Ltd., Siemens Mobility Rail and Road Transportation Solutions Societe Anonyme, Siemens Mobility Real Estate GmbH & Co. KG, Siemens Mobility Real Estate Management GmbH, Siemens Mobility S. A., Siemens Mobility S. A. / N.V, Siemens Mobility S. A. C., Siemens Mobility S. A. R. L., Siemens Mobility S. A. S., Siemens Mobility S. de R. L. de C. V., Siemens Mobility S. p. A., Siemens Mobility S. r. l., Siemens Mobility SAS, Siemens Mobility Saudi Ltd, Siemens Mobility Sdn. Bhd., Siemens Mobility Solucoes de Mobilidade Ltda., Siemens Mobility Sp. z o. o., Siemens Mobility Technologies (Beijing) Co. Ltd, Siemens Mobility Ulasim Sistemleri Anonim Sirketi, Siemens Mobility d. o. o., Siemens Mobility d. o. o. Cerovac, Siemens Mobility s. r. o., Siemens Molecular Imaging Inc., Siemens Nederland N. V., Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme GmbH, Siemens Numerical Control Ltd., Siemens OfficeCenter Frankfurt GmbH & Co. KG, Siemens OfficeCenter Verwaltungs GmbH, Siemens Oil & Gas Equipment Limited, Siemens Osakeyhtio, Siemens PLM Software Computational Dynamics K. K., Siemens Pakistan Engineering Co. Ltd., Siemens Participacoes Ltda., Siemens Pension Funding (General) Limited, Siemens Pension Funding Limited, Siemens Personaldienstleistungen GmbH, Siemens Plant Operations Tahaddart SARL, Siemens Postal, Siemens Postal Parcel & Airport Logistics Limited, Siemens Postal Parcel & Airport Logistics Unipessoal Lda, Siemens Power Automation Ltd., Siemens Power Control GmbH, Siemens Power Generation Service Company Ltd., Siemens Power Holding AG, Siemens Power Operations Inc., Siemens Power Plant Automation Ltd., Siemens Private Finance Versicherungsvermittlungsgesellschaft mbH, Siemens Product Lifecycle Management Software Inc., Siemens Project Ventures GmbH, Siemens Proprietary Limited, Siemens Pte. Ltd., Siemens Public Inc., Siemens Rail Automation C. A., Siemens Rail Automation Limited, Siemens Rail Automation Pvt. Ltd., Siemens Rail Automation S. A. U., Siemens Rail Systems Project Holdings Limited, Siemens Rail Systems Project Limited, Siemens Real Estate GmbH & Co. KG, Siemens Real Estate Management GmbH, Siemens Renting S. A., Siemens S. A., Siemens S. A. / N. V., Siemens S. A. C., Siemens S. A. de C. V., Siemens S. R. L., Siemens S. p. A., Siemens SARL, Siemens SAS, Siemens Sanayi ve Ticaret Anonim Sirketi, Siemens Schweiz AG, Siemens Sensors & Communication Ltd., Siemens Servicios S. A. de C. V., Siemens Shanghai Medical Equipment Ltd., Siemens Shenzhen Magnetic Resonance Ltd., Siemens Sherkate Sahami (Khass), Siemens Signalling Co. Ltd., Siemens Soluciones Tecnologicas S. A., Siemens Sp. z o. o., Siemens Spa, Siemens Spezial-Investmentaktiengesellschaft mit TGV, Siemens Standard Motors Ltd., Siemens Surge Arresters Ltd., Siemens Switchgear Ltd., Siemens TOO, Siemens Tanzania Ltd. i. L., Siemens Technologies S. A. E., Siemens Technology Accelerator GmbH, Siemens Technology Development Co. Ltd. of Beijing, Siemens Technology and Services Private Limited, Siemens Technopark Mulheim GmbH & Co. KG, Siemens Technopark Nurnberg GmbH & Co. KG, Siemens Technopark Nurnberg Verwaltungs GmbH, Siemens Traction Gears GmbH, Siemens Trademark GmbH & Co. KG, Siemens Trademark Management GmbH, Siemens Transformer (Guangzhou) Co. Ltd., Siemens Transformer (Jinan) Co. Ltd, Siemens Transformer (Wuhan) Company Ltd., Siemens Transformers Canada Inc., Siemens Transformers S. r. l., Siemens Transmission & Distribution Limited, Siemens Treasury GmbH, Siemens USA Holdings Inc., Siemens Uruguay S. A., Siemens Venture Capital Co. Ltd., Siemens Venture Capital Fund 1 GmbH, Siemens W. L. L., Siemens Wind Power, Siemens Wind Power Employee Share Ownership Trust, Siemens Wind Power Energia Eolica Ltda., Siemens Wind Power SpA, Siemens Wiring Accessories Shandong Ltd., Siemens X-Ray Vacuum Technology Ltd., Siemens Zrt., Siemens d. d., Siemens d. o. o., Siemens d. o. o. Beograd, Siemens plc, Siemens s. r. o., Siemens-Fonds C-1, Siemens-Fonds Pension Captive, Siemens-Fonds S-7, Siemens-Fonds S-8, Siemens-Healthcare Cia. Ltda., Siemensstadt Grundstucks-GmbH & Co. KG, Siemensstadt Management GmbH, Sindhanur Renewable Energy Private Limited, Sistemas Energeticos Arganoso S. L. Unipersonal, Sistemas Energeticos Arinaga S. A. Unipersonal, Sistemas Energeticos Balazote S. A. Unipersonal, Sistemas Energeticos Boyal S. L., Sistemas Energeticos Cabanelas S. A. Unipersonal, Sistemas Energeticos Cabezo Negro S. A. Unipersonal, Sistemas Energeticos Carril S. L. Unipersonal, Sistemas Energeticos Cuerda Gitana S. A. Unipersonal, Sistemas Energeticos Cuntis S. A. Unipersonal, Sistemas Energeticos El Valle S. L., Sistemas Energeticos Finca San Juan S. L. U., Sistemas Energeticos Fonseca S. A. Unipersonal, Sistemas Energeticos Jaralon S. A. Unipersonal, Sistemas Energeticos La Camara S. L., Sistemas Energeticos La Plana S. A., Sistemas Energeticos Ladera Negra S. A. Unipersonal, Sistemas Energeticos Loma del Reposo S. L. Unipersonal, Sistemas Energeticos Loma del Viento S. A. Unipersonal, Sistemas Energeticos Mansilla S. L., Sistemas Energeticos Monte Genaro S. L. U., Sistemas Energeticos Serra de Lourenza S. A. Unipersonal, Sistemas Energeticos Sierra de Las Estancias S. A. Unipersonal, Sistemas Energeticos Sierra de Valdefuentes S. L. U., Sistemas Energeticos Tablero Tabordo S. L., Sistemas Energeticos Tomillo S. A. Unipersonal, Sistemas Energeticos de Tarifa S. L. Unipersonal, Sistemas Energeticos del Sur S. A., Smardzewo Windfarm Sp. z o. o., Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Bonboillon SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Bouclans SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Broyes SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Cernon SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Chaintrix-Bierges SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Champsevraine SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Chepniers SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Clamanges SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Coupetz SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Dampierre Prudemanche SAS, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Germainville SAS, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Guerfand SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Landresse SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Longueville-sur-Aube SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Mailly-le-Camp SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Mantoche SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Margny SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Moulins du Puits SAS, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Orge et Ornain SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Plancy lAbbaye SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Pouilly-sur-Vingeanne SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Pringy SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Romigny SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Saint Amand SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Saint Bon SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Saint Loup de Saintonge SAS, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Saint-Lumier en Champagne SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Sambourg SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Savoisy SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Sceaux SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Sommesous SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Songy SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Soude SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Source de Seves SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Souvans SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Trepot SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Vaudrey SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de Vernierfontaine SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de la Brie des Etangs SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de la Loye SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien de la Tete des Boucs SARL, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien du Vireaux SAS, Societe dExploitation du Parc Eolien dOrchamps SARL, Solel Solar Systems, Solido Design Automation, Steiermarkische Medizinarchiv GesmbH, SureGrid, Synchrony Inc., SMobility Employee Stock Ownership Trust, TASS International B. V., TASS International Co. Ltd., TASS International Holding B. V., TFM International S. A. i. L., Tass International, Telecomunicacion Electronica y Conmutacion S. A., The Preactor Group, The Preactor Group Limited, Thoothukudi Renewable Energy Private Limited, Tirupur Renewable Energy Private Limited, Trench Austria GmbH, Trench Electric Holding, Trench France SAS, Trench Germany GmbH, Trench High Voltage Products Ltd., Trench Italia S. r. l., Trench Limited, Tuljapur Wind Farms Private Limited, UGS Corp, UGS Israeli Holdings (Israel) Ltd., Ujazd Sp. z o. o., UltraSoC Technologies, Umrani Renewable Private Limited, Uppal Renewable Private Limited, VA TECH (UK) Ltd., VA TECH International Argentina SA, VA TECH T & D Co. Ltd., VA TECH T & D UK Ltd., VIBECO  Virtual Buildings Ecosystem Oy, VMZ Berlin Betreibergesellschaft mbH, VRcontext International, VVK Versicherungs-Vermittlungs- und Verkehrs-Kontor GmbH, VVK Versicherungsvermittlungs- und Verkehrskontor GmbH, Vempalli Renewable Energy Private Limited, Viralipatti Renewable Private Limited, VistaScape, Vistagy, Weiss Spindeltechnologie GmbH, Wheelabrator Air Pollution Control (Canada) Inc., Wheelabrator Air Pollution Control Inc., Wind Portfolio Memberco LLC, Windfarm 33 GmbH, Windfarm 35 GmbH, Windfarm 40 GmbH, Windfarm 41 GmbH, Windfarm Gro Halow GmbH, Windfarm Ringstedt II GmbH, Windkraft Trinwillershagen Entwicklungsgesellschaft mbH, Yangtze Delta Manufacturing Co. Ltd., Yongzhou Shuangpai Daguping Wind Power Co. Ltd., Zalki Renewable Private Limited, Zeleni Holding GmbH, Zeleni Real Estate GmbH&Co. KG, eMeter, eMeter Corporation, eShip4u, eos.uptrade GmbH, evosoft GmbH, evosoft Hungary Szamitastechnikai Kft., next47 Fund 2018 L. P., next47 Mid-Tier GP 2018 L. P., and next47 TTGP L. L. C..
Imperial Oil Limited explores for, produces, and sells crude oil and natural gas in Canada. It operates through three segments: Upstream, Downstream, and Chemical. The Upstream segment explores for and produces crude oil, natural gas, synthetic oil, and bitumen. As of December 31, 2020, this segment had 138 million oil-equivalent barrels of proved undeveloped reserves. The Downstream segment is involved in the transportation and refining of crude oil, as well as blending, distribution, and marketing of refined products. It also transports crude oil to refineries by contracted pipelines, common carrier pipelines, and rail; maintains a distribution system to move petroleum products to market by pipeline, tanker, rail, and road transport; and owns and operates fuel terminals, natural gas liquids, and products pipelines in Alberta, Manitoba, and Ontario. In addition, this segment markets and supplies petroleum products to motoring public through approximately 2,400 Esso and Mobil-branded sites. Further, it sells petroleum products, including fuel, asphalt, and lubricants for industrial and transportation customers, independent marketers, and resellers, as well as other refiners serving the agriculture, residential heating, and commercial markets through branded fuel and lubricant resellers. The Chemical segment manufactures and markets various petrochemicals and polyethylene, such as benzene, aromatic, and aliphatic solvents; plasticizer intermediates; and polyethylene resins. The company was incorporation in 1880 and is headquartered in Calgary, Canada. Imperial Oil Limited is a subsidiary of Exxon Mobil Corporation.

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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. Ltd., Bureau van Dijk Electronic Publishing S.A. de C.V., Bureau van Dijk Electronic Publishing Unipessoal Lda., Bureau van Dijk Electroniq Publishing S.A. (Pty) Ltd, Bureau van Dijk Publicaciones Electronicas S.A., Bureau van Dijk Publicacao Eletronica Ltda., DVBS Inc., Equilibrium (Chile) Holding SpA, Ethical Investment Research Services (EIRIS) Limited, Fermat International SA, Four Twenty Seven, Four Twenty Seven France SAS, Four Twenty Seven Inc., GGYAXIS Inc., Gilliland Gold Young Consulting Inc., ICRA Lanka Limited, ICRA Limited, ICRA Nepal Limited, ICRA Online Limited, KIS Pricing Inc., Korea Investors Service, Korea Investors Service Inc., Lewtan Technologies Inc., MIS Asset Holdings Inc., MIS Quality Management Corp., MIS Support Center Private Limited, MIS Support Services CR Sociedad de Responsabilidad Ltda., Midroog Ltd., Moody's (China) Limited, Moody's (Japan) K.K., Moody's (UK) Limited, Moody's America Latina Ltda., Moody's Analytics (DIFC) Limited, Moody's Analytics (India) Private Limited, Moody's Analytics (Malaysia) Sdn.Bhd., Moody's Analytics (Thailand) Co. Ltd., Moody's Analytics Australia Pty. Ltd., Moody's Analytics Canada Inc., Moody's Analytics Czech Republic s.r.o., Moody's Analytics Deutschland GmbH, Moody's Analytics Global Education (Canada) Inc., Moody's Analytics Holdings (UK) Limited, Moody's Analytics Hong Kong Ltd., Moody's Analytics International Licensing Gmbh, Moody's Analytics Ireland Limited, Moody's Analytics Japan K.K., Moody's Analytics Knowledge Services (Jersey) Limited, Moody's Analytics Knowledge Services (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., Moody's Analytics Knowledge Services Holdings (Mauritius) Limited, Moody's Analytics Knowledge Services Research (Mauritius) Limited, Moody's Analytics Korea Co. Ltd, Moody's Analytics SAS, Moody's Analytics Singapore Pte Ltd., Moody's Analytics Technical Services (Hong Kong) Ltd., Moody's Analytics Technical Services (UK) Limited, Moody's Analytics UK Limited, Moody's Analytics do Brazil Solucoes para Gerenciamento de Risco de Credito Ltda, Moody's Asia Pacific Limited, Moody's Asia-Pacific Group (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., Moody's Canada Inc., Moody's Canada LP, Moody's China (B.V.I.) Limited, Moody's Company Holdings (BVI) I Limited, Moody's Company Hong Kong Limited, Moody's Credit Ratings (China) Limited, Moody's Deutschland GmbH, Moody's EMEA Financing (Cyprus) Limited, Moody's EMEA Holdings Limited, Moody's Eastern Europe LLC, Moody's Equilibrium I (BVI) Holding Corporation, Moody's Equilibrium II (BVI) Holding Corporation, Moody's Finance (BVI) Limited, Moody's Financing (BVI) Limited, Moody's Financing (Cyprus) Limited, Moody's France SAS, Moody's Group (BVI) Limited, Moody's Group (Holdings) Unlimited, Moody's Group Australia Pty Ltd, Moody's Group Cyprus Limited, Moody's Group Deutschland GmbH, Moody's Group Finance Limited, Moody's Group France SAS, Moody's Group Holdings (BVI) Limited, Moody's Group Japan G.K., Moody's Group NL B.V., Moody's Group UK Limited, Moody's Holdings (B.V.I.) Limited, Moody's Holdings Limited, Moody's Holdings NL B.V., Moody's Indonesia (B.V.I) Limited, Moody's Information Consulting (Shenzhen) Co. Ltd., Moody's International (UK) Limited, Moody's International Holdings (Cyprus) Limited, Moody's Investment Company India Private Limited, Moody's Investors Service (BVI) Limited, Moody's Investors Service (Beijing) Ltd., Moody's Investors Service (Korea) Inc., Moody's Investors Service (Nordics) AB, Moody's Investors Service Cyprus Limited, Moody's Investors Service EMEA Limited, Moody's Investors Service Espana S.A., Moody's Investors Service Hong Kong Limited, Moody's Investors Service India Private Limited, Moody's Investors Service Limited, Moody's Investors Service Middle East Limited, Moody's Investors Service Pty Limited, Moody's Investors Service Singapore Pte. Ltd., Moody's Investors Service South Africa (Pty) Limited, Moody's Israel Holdings Inc., Moody's Italia S.r.l., Moody's Latin America Agente de Calificacion de Riesgo S.A., Moody's Latin America Holding Corp., Moody's Lithuania UAB, Moody's Local PA Calificadora de Riesgo S.A., Moody's Local PE Clasificadora de Riesgo S.A, Moody's Mauritius Holdings Limited, Moody's Risk Assessments Limited, Moody's SF Japan K.K., Moody's Shared Services India Private Limited, Moody's Shared Services UK Limited, Moody's Singapore Pte Ltd, Moody's South Africa (B.V.I.) Ltd., Moody's de Mexico S.A. de C.V. I.C.V, Moodys Advisors Inc., Moodys Analytics Inc., Moodys Analytics Knowledge Services Solutions (US) Inc., Moodys Analytics Solutions LLC, Moodys Assurance Company Inc., Moodys Assureco Inc., Moodys Capital Markets Research Inc., Moodys Group Holdings Inc., Moodys Holdings LLC, Moodys International LLC, Moodys Investors Service Inc., Moodys Overseas Holdings Inc., Moodys Risk Assessments Holdings LLC, Moodys Risk Assessments Inc., Moodys Shared Services Inc., Nile 1 Limited, Nile 2 Limited, Nile 3 Limited, Nile 4 Limited, Nile 5 Limited, Omega Performance, Omega Performance Corp./S.C.C. A Rendement Omega, Omega Performance Corporation, Omega Performance Corporation Pty. Limited, Omega Performance NZ Limited, Omega Performance Pte. Ltd., PT ICRA Indonesia, Pragati Development Consulting Services Limited, RBA International, Reis, Reis Inc., Reis Services LLC, Risk First (Holdings) Limited, Risk First (IP) Limited, Risk First Enterprise Limited, Risk First Group Limited, Risk First Inc., Risk First Limited, Risk First Management Services Limited, Skyval Holdings LLP, Skyval Limited, The Moodys Foundation, Vigeo, Vigeo Belgium NV, Vigeo Eiris, Vigeo Eiris Canada Inc., Vigeo Eiris Chile SpA, Vigeo Eiris Hong Kong Limited, Vigeo Eiris USA LLC, Vigeo Group, Vigeo Italia S.r.l, Yellow Maple Holding B.V., Yellow Maple I B.V., Yellow Maple II B.V., and Zephus Ltd..
Wall Street analysts have given RAIT Financial 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 RAIT Financial Trust wasn't one of them. MarketBeat thinks these five companies may be even better buys.

View MarketBeat's top stock picks here.
Sanchez Energy Corporation, an independent exploration and production company, focuses on the acquisition and development of U.S. onshore unconventional oil and natural gas resources. It engages in the horizontal development of resources from the Eagle Ford Shale in South Texas. It also holds an undeveloped acreage position in the Tuscaloosa Marine Shale (TMS) in Mississippi and Louisiana. As of December 31, 2017, the company had assembled approximately 285,000 net acres in the Eagle Ford Shale; and owned approximately 37,000 net acres in the TMS. Sanchez Energy Corporation was founded in 2011 and is headquartered in Houston, Texas.

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Container tracking system launched as pilot project

Two container trucks fitted with an electronic cargo tracking system (ECTS) left Kolkata port for Birgunj, Nepal on Wednesday, heralding the launch of the device that provides real time location information of the vehicle. The Nepal-bound trucks are carrying goods imported from third countries.
Bank of America Corp. is a bank and financial holding company, which engages in the provision of banking and nonbank financial services. It operates through the following segments: Consumer Banking, Global Wealth and Investment Management, Global Banking, Global Markets, and All Other. The Consumer Banking segment offers credit, banking, and investment products and services to consumers and small businesses. The Global Wealth and Investment Management provides client experience through a network of financial advisors focused on to meet their needs through a full set of investment management, brokerage, banking, and retirement products. The Global Banking segment deals with lending-related products and services, integrated working capital management and treasury solutions to clients, and underwriting and advisory services. The Global Markets segment includes sales and trading services, as well as research, to institutional clients across fixed-income, credit, currency, commodity, and equity businesses. The All Other segment consists of asset and liability management activities, equity investments, non-core mortgage loans and servicing activities, the net impact of periodic revisions

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The following companies are subsidiares of The Travelers Companies: 10762962 Canada Inc., 350 Market Street LLC, 8527512 Canada Inc., Aetna Life and Casualty Co, American Equity Insurance Company, American Equity Specialty Insurance Company, Aprilgrange Limited, Arch Street North LLC, Auto Hartford Investments LLC, Bayhill Restaurant II Associates, Camperdown Corporation, Constitution State Services LLC, Discover Property & Casualty Insurance Company, Discover Specialty Insurance Company, F&G UK Underwriters Limited, Farmington Casualty Company, Fidelity and Guaranty Insurance Company, Fidelity and Guaranty Insurance Underwriters Inc., First Floridian Auto and Home Insurance Company, Gulf Underwriters Insurance Company, IHP Capital Partners Fund VIII L.P., Northbrook Holdings Inc., Northfield Insurance Company, Northland Casualty Company, Northland Insurance Company, Phoenix UK Investments LLC, SPC Insurance Agency Inc., Select Insurance Company, Simply Business Holdings Inc., Simply Business Inc., St. Paul Fire and Marine Insurance Company, St. Paul Guardian Insurance Company, St. Paul Mercury Insurance Company, St. Paul Protective Insurance Company, St. Paul Surplus Lines Insurance Company, Standard Fire Properties LLC, Standard Fire UK Investments LLC, TCI Global Services Inc., TPC Investments Inc., TPC U.K. Investments LLC, The Automobile Insurance Company of Hartford Connecticut, The Charter Oak Fire Insurance Company, The Dominion of Canada General Insurance Company, The Family Business Institute LLC, The Phoenix Insurance Company, The St. Paul Companies Inc., The Standard Fire Insurance Company, The Travelers Casualty Company, The Travelers Home and Marine Insurance Company, The Travelers Indemnity Company, The Travelers Indemnity Company of America, The Travelers Indemnity Company of Connecticut, The Travelers Lloyds Insurance Company, TravCo Insurance Company, Travelers (Bermuda) Limited, Travelers Brazil Acquisition LLC, Travelers Brazil Holding LLC, Travelers Casualty Company of Connecticut, Travelers Casualty Insurance Company of America, Travelers Casualty UK Investments LLC, Travelers Casualty and Surety Company, Travelers Casualty and Surety Company of America, Travelers Casualty and Surety Company of Europe Limited, Travelers Commercial Casualty Company, Travelers Commercial Insurance Company, Travelers Constitution State Insurance Company, Travelers Distribution Alliance Inc., Travelers Excess and Surplus Lines Company, Travelers Global Inc., Travelers Indemnity U.K. Investments LLC, Travelers Insurance Company Limited, Travelers Insurance Company of Canada, Travelers Insurance Designated Activity Company, Travelers Insurance Group Holdings Inc., Travelers Lloyds of Texas Insurance Company, Travelers London Limited, Travelers MGA Inc., Travelers Management Limited, Travelers Marine LLC, Travelers Participacoes em Seguros Brasil S.A., Travelers Personal Insurance Company, Travelers Personal Security Insurance Company, Travelers Property Casualty Company of America, Travelers Property Casualty Corp., Travelers Property Casualty Insurance Company, Travelers Seguros Brasil S.A., Travelers Syndicate Management Limited, Travelers Texas MGA Inc., Travelers Underwriting Agency Limited, Ultramar Travel Management, United States Fidelity and Guaranty Company, Xbridge Limited, Zensurance Brokers Inc., and Zensurance Inc..
UBM plc organizes business-to-business events worldwide. The company offers face-to-face interaction in the form of exhibitions, tradeshows, conferences, and other live events. It also provides Website sponsorships and banner advertising services, as well as online directory and data products; and publishes magazines and trade press to specialist markets. In addition, the company offers data and broadcasting services. It serves advanced manufacturing and technology, brand licensing, business services and infrastructure, fashion and jewelry, food and agriculture, leisure and hospitality, lifestyle, pharma and healthcare, transport and logistics, and other sectors. The company was formerly known as United Business Media Limited and changed its name to UBM plc in May 2011. UBM plc was founded in 1843 and is headquartered in London, the United Kingdom.

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Court rejects writ against Parajuli

The Supreme Court on Thursday annulled the writ petition on contempt of court order against former chief justice Gopal Parajuli.A joint bench of Acting Chief Justice Dipak Raj Joshi and Justice Tej Bahadur KC has endorsed the decision of the Supreme Courts administration not to register the writ against Parajuli.
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.

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Deutsche Lufthansa AG operates as an aviation company in Germany and internationally. The company's Network Airlines segment offers passenger services through a route network of 273 destinations in 86 countries. Its Eurowings segment provides passenger services through a route network of more than 210 destinations in 60 countries. The company's Logistics Business segment offers transport services for various cargoes, including living animals, valuable cargo, post and dangerous goods, and temperature-sensitive goods serving approximately 300 destinations in 100 countries. Its Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul Services (MRO) segment provides maintenance, repair, and overhaul services for civilian commercial aircraft serving original equipment manufacturers and aircraft leasing companies, operators of VIP jets, and airlines, as well as develops and manufactures cabin and digital products. The company's Catering Business segment engages in-flight sales and entertainment, in-flight service equipment, and the associated logistics services, as well as consulting services; and operates airport lounges. As of December 31, 2020, it had a fleet of 757 aircraft. Deutsche Lufthansa AG was founded in 1926 and is headquartered in Cologne, Germany.

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CPN men threaten mayor for refusing extortion demand

A municipal mayor in Sarlahi district says he is being threatened by the cadres of the Netra Bikram Chand-led Communist Party of Nepal (CPN) because he refused to give in to their extortion demand.
In China, FM Gyawali outlines five areas of cooperation

Foreign Minister Pradeep Gyawali has said Nepal counts on Chinese support and cooperation for realising its national development aspirations.
Amish Raj Mulmi is a columnist for the Post, and the author of All Roads Lead North: Nepals Turn to China.
Fortis Healthcare said it has received a non-binding expression of interest from KKR-backed Radiant Life Care, making it the fifth bidder for the beleaguered firm.

New Delhi: Fortis Healthcare said it has received a non-binding expression of interest from KKR-backed Radiant Life Care, making it the fifth bidder for the beleaguered firm.

Radiant Life Care has offered to acquire at least 26 per cent stake in Fortis Healthcare (FHL) at Rs 126 per share, excluding its diagnostic business SRL.

"The company has received an unsolicited non-binding expression of interest from Radiant Life Care Pvt Ltd with a proposal for making investment and/or re-structuring the company subject to certain conditions as mentioned in the offer letter," Fortis said in a regulatory filing late last night.

To fulfil immediate cash requirement, Radiant Life Care said it is prepared to purchase FHL's interest in FMRI, Gurugram, and Fortis Shalimar Bagh in New Delhi.

"Our offer is demerger of hospital businesses from Fortis Healthcare into "NewCo", excluding Fortis' stake in SRL. All cash open offer to shareholders of NewCo at price of Rs 165 per share, adjusted for per share value of FHL's shareholding in SRL, that is Rs 39. Net value of Rs 126 per share of the NewCo," Radiant Life Care said.

"The aforesaid per share value of SRL is arrived at assuming equity value of 100 per cent of SRL at Rs 3,600 crore," it added.

Radiant Life Care said its offer is subject to Radiant being able to acquire 26 per cent of more shares of the NewCo via open offer.

"In case Radiant is unable to acquire 26 per cent or more shares of NewCo through open offer, the NewCo shall do preferential allotment at Rs 126 per share to Radiant to enable 26 per cent stake in NewCo," it added.

Radiant Life Care said it will fund and underwrite the acquisition of healthcare assets of RHT Health Trust via rights issue. Yesterday, Fortis Healthcare board approved evaluation of only binding offers and formed an expert committee to evaluate the proposals and make a final recommendation by April 26.

In a separate filing, FHL said the advisory committee constituted to oversee the evaluation process and function as an advisor to the board shall be lead by Deepak Kapoor, Former Chairman and CEO of Price Waterhouse Coopers, India, and constitute of Renuka Ramnath, former MD & CEO of ICICI Venture, and Lalit Bhasin, President, Society of Indian Law Firms & Managing Partner, Bhasin & Co., as its members.

Malaysia's IHH Healthcare Bhd, Manipal Health Enterprises, Burmans and Munjals (jointly) and Chinese firm Fosun Health Holdings are already in the race for buying Fortis.

The troubled healthcare chain had received binding offers from Manipal/TPG consortium, and Munjal and Burman family offices. It had also received non-binding expression of interests from Malaysia's IHH Healthcare Berhad and Chinese firm Fosun Health Holdings.

The Manipal/TPG-led consortium had raised their offer for Fortis last week to Rs 155 per share by valuing the hospital business higher at Rs 6,061 crore from Rs 5,003 crore in its initial offer on March 27.

On the other hand, Hero Enterprise Investment Office and Burman Family Office made improved offer yesterday by willing to invest Rs 1,500 crore directly at a valuation of Rs 161.6 per share from the earlier Rs 1,250 crore.

Malaysia's IHH Healthcare, which had last week offered to acquire stake in the Indian firm at Rs 160 per share, also upped the ante by proposing to infuse Rs 4,000 crore through a preferential allotment of equity shares at a price not exceeding its offer share price.

Fortis Healthcare had also received an unsolicited non-binding expression of interest from Fosun Health Holdings, an arm of Fosun International, with a proposal of primary infusion at a price up to Rs 156 per share up to a total investment of USD 350 million (over Rs 2,295 crore).

In order to evaluate the binding offers, the advisory committee will, after due evaluation and post taking into account the independent view of Standard Chartered Bank, make a final recommendation to the board by April 26.
NC CWC meeting postponed till April 22

The Central Working Committee (CWC) meeting of the Nepali Congress (NC) summoned for Friday has been postponed till April 22.
Centre has invited 'expression of interest' to sell a 76 per cent stake and management control in the airline.

New Delhi: The RSS-affiliated Swadeshi Jagran Manch on Thursday opposed Air India's disinvestment in the "current form" and said the government should monetise the national carrier's assets for repayment of debt rather than selling its stake.

Swadeshi Jagran Manch (SJM) co-convener Ashwani Mahajan said Air India has operating profits, but is running into losses due to its debts.

"So rather than selling its stake in the national carrier, the government can reduce its (the carrier's) debt by selling off its land," he told PTI.

His remarks assume significance as they come days after RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat had categorically said that Air India should not be sold to a foreign buyer.

The Centre has invited 'expression of interest' to sell a 76 per cent stake and management control in the airline.

Mahajan said that the SJM is "opposed" to disinvestment of the national carrier in its "current form", asserting that the airline can be made profitable by repaying its debt.

He blamed the Congress for the sorry state of the airline and alleged that during the UPA's tenure, the profitable routes of the Air India were given to other airlines.

"Rather than selling stake in the company, the government should make the airline profitable and then if required explore the option of raising money from the markets by issuing its shares," Mahajan said.

The Indian government owns 100 per cent equity of Air India. The airline was founded in the 1930s and is commonly known for its Maharajah mascot.

The government has injected more than Rs 23,000 crore since 2012 to bail out the airline.
According to sources, in April 2017, RBI sought out the government to print Rs 100 crore worth of Rs 2,000 notes, which the finance ministry declined.

New Delhi: While experts are postulating new theories and customers still facing dry ATMs, the cash chaos seems to have stemmed from a government decision. Last year it decided to stop printing of Rs 2,000 currency notes and forgot to revisit it. Sources said the government must have thought of phasing out Rs 2,000 banknotes at that time.

While the government has blamed low circulation of Rs 2,000 notes on possible hoarding, it has not acknowledged its own role in the crisis, said a banker.

Another banker remarked that the problem was waiting to happen. In India, the demand for low-value cash is always high as its an informal economy with a large base of lower and middle income groups, he said and added, if not replenished with fresh high value notes in time, the crisis would happen.

According to sources, in April 2017, RBI sought out the government to print Rs 100 crore worth of Rs 2,000 notes, which the finance ministry declined. The status quo remains till date, they added.

On Thursday, a finance ministry source said the government tried to replace Rs 2,000 currency notes with Rs 500 bank notes, and there seems to be some issues here. It must have happened that not enough Rs 500 notes were printed, which could have matched the requirement of Rs 2,000 bills.

However, there could be multiple reasons for the situation like logistical issues, elections, they said. According to another report, there has been a sharp decline in the supply of Rs 2,000 notes to the currency chests.

It flies in the face of the fact that there are no elections in Telagana or other states but for Karnataka.

According to an RBI report, the share of newly introduced Rs 2,000 notes in the total value of currency in circulation was 50.2 per cent at the end of March 2017. In terms of numbers, it was 3,285 million pieces.

According to a newspaper report, RBI stopped supplying these notes from July 2017. Similarly, the value of currency in bank chests also declined sharply.

To meet the unusual currency demand, the government, according to DEA secretary SC Garg, has decided to increase printing of Rs 500 notes by five times. But he didnt speak on printing or increasing the printing of Rs 2,000 notes.

There is no need for supplying Rs 2,000 notes as its in oversupply. The total worth of Rs 2,000 notes in the system is Rs 7 lakh crore, which is huge and the supply of Rs 2,000 note beyond this is not required. Besides, lower denominations notes are in oversupply, he had said.

A banker said it appears that this is exactly what may have happened. According to an RBI report, the share of newly introduced Rs 2,000 notes in total value of currency in circulation was 50.2 per cent at the end of March 2017. In terms of numbers, it was 3,285 million pieces.

According to another report, there has been a sharp decline in supply of Rs 2,000 notes to bank chests.

Meanwhile, Neeraj Vyas, DMD (chief operating officer), SBI, said, of the 40,000 ATMs owned by SBI, 32,000 have been recalibrated and are disbursing the new Rs 200 notes.

Dhananjay Sinha, head Institutional Research at Emkay Global Financial

Services, said, We have studied all election years right from 1998 till date and didnt find any evidence of currency demand rising during election time. Also there is no clear official guidance to RBI to restrain printing of notes. We feel after demonetisation, the pace at which the value of notes that were getting replenished was slow and that could be one of the reasons that led to the recent cash crunch.

Since November 2016 when demonetisation happened, if you observe these 15 months of remonetisation, we saw that nearly half the time, RBI was printing Rs 2,000 notes. Only in the second half it printed lower denomination notes of Rs 500, Rs 200, Rs 50 or so. Prior to demonetisation, the rate at which the currency outstanding was growing was 12-15 per cent. After remonetisation up to March the currency outstanding has touched Rs 18 lakh crore which is what we were prior to demonetisation. But if you take into account the organic demand for the currency assuming a growth of 7-8 per cent then there is shortfall in the order of demand of Rs 1.30-Rs 1.40 lakh crore. It is likely that the RBI will need to print more notes and the cash gap will persist for some more time, added Sinha.
A high-level panel constituted by the government to work out a roadmap for 5G rollout held its third meeting.

New Delhi: A high-level panel constituted by the government to work out a roadmap for 5G rollout held its third meeting , and is now working on drafting interim reports on the proposed 5G blueprint, a source said.

The forum, chaired by Telecom Secretary, will hold its next meeting in mid-June, a government source familiar with the development said.

"The third meeting of the 5G Forum was held yesterday and the interim reports can be expected shortly. The next meeting is likely to be held on June 14," the source said.

The source pointed out that multiple sub groups had been formed to look at various aspects of 5G, including app layers, large-scale trials for 5G and technology standards among others.

The advent of 5G is seen as the next technological frontier, and India is positioning itself as a globally synchronised player in the design, development and manufacturing of 5G-based technology, products and application.

Accordingly, the government constituted a high-level committee last year comprising secretaries of the Telecom Department, IT and Electronics Ministry and Science and Technology Department to work out the vision, mission and goals for India's 5G ambitions, and to evaluate roadmap and action plan for the same.

Telecom Secretary, Aruna Sundararajan had earlier said that India wants to be a frontrunner in adopting 5G technology and will prepare the roadmap for it by June this year.

She had also called upon industry, academia and startups to do their bit to help India take a lead in the 5th-generation wireless system which enables higher-speed mobile broadband, mission-critical services and massive Internet of Things (IoT) deployment.
India has pressed the BRICS nations to set up an independent rating agency of the five-member group. (Photo: PTI)

New Delhi: India has pressed the BRICS nations to set up an independent rating agency of the five-member group.

The first meeting of the BRICS Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors was held on the sidelines of the IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings yesterday.

Representing India in the meeting of the 5 nation bloc, Economic Affairs Secretary Subhash Chandra Garg sought the support of the Presidency in building consensus amongst the BRICS membership on the BRICS Rating Agency proposal.

"He requested the Presidency to receive and take forward the report to be submitted by expert group set up under the aegis of BRICS Business Council to study the feasibility of the BRICS Rating Agency," the finance ministry said in statement.

India had first mooted the idea of having such an agency for the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) grouping to can solve impediments for the emerging market economies posed by the present credit rating agency market that is dominated by S&P, Moody's and Fitch.

These three western rating agencies hold over 90 per cent of the sovereign ratings market.

The other issues discussed during the meeting related to enhancing the project pipelines of New Development Bank (NDB) evenly across member countries, expansion of NDB's membership.

The BRICS countries have already set up New Development Bank, which became operational in 2015, to meet funding requirements of the members

It also deliberated on the proposal of the South African Presidency for setting up a working group on illicit financial flows and a BRICS Task Force on Public Private Partnership.

Issues related to BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) as well as BRICS Bond Fund were also discussed, the ministry said.

In his interventions, Garg emphasised that India has been a constructive participant to the discussions on NDB's membership expansion.

He expressed that a more careful and cautious approach on the value and addition/ benefits new member will bring to the Bank would be desirable rather than setting deadlines which are practically difficult to achieve.

On the issue of expansion of NDB's project pipeline across member nations evenly, Garg said the objective has to be balanced with member country's requirement for infrastructure financing.

Garg also suggested that since NDB already has a project preparation fund hence a separate similar preparation fund for PPP will not be desirable.
Khaled al-Falih said on Friday the global market has the capacity to absorb higher oil prices.

Jeddah: Saudi Energy Minister Khaled al-Faleh said on Friday the global market has the capacity to absorb higher oil prices, after crude hit the highest level in more than three years.

"I have not seen any impact on demand with current prices. We have seen prices significantly higher in the past -- twice as much as where we are today," Faleh told reporters ahead of an oil producers' meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

"Energy intensity as you know has declined significantly ... this reduced energy intensity and higher productivity globally of energy input leads me to think that there is the capacity to absorb higher prices," Faleh said.

Faleh insisted the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) does not have a price target for oil.

"We never have a price target ... Prices are determined by the market," said Faleh who warned against the danger of price fluctuations, saying that "volatility is our enemy."

Speaking at the same meeting of OPEC and non-OPEC oil producers, United Arab Emirates Energy Minister Suhail al-Mazrouei said his main concern was stability. "We don't have a target price, our target is market stability," Mazrouei said.

OPEC producers and non-OPEC countries struck a deal in 2016 to trim production by 1.8 million barrels per day to reduce a global glut of oil. The deal, which is due to run out at the end of this year, has succeeded in boosting oil prices above USD 70 a barrel from below USD 30 a barrel in early 2016.

The recovery has also been fuelled by geopolitical tensions, US President Donald Trump's threat to reimpose nuclear-related sanctions on Iran and production problems in Venezuela, Nigeria and Libya.

Benefitting from the higher prices, US oil producers have ramped up drilling, pushing domestic output to a record 10.5 million barrels a day last week, according to data from the US Energy Information Administration.

The United States had already eclipsed Saudi Arabia as the world's second largest crude producer with the OPEC kingpin pumping just under 10 million bpd while meeting its agreed production cuts.
Senior bureaucrat Suresh Kumar is likely to be the new acting chairman and managing director of the world's largest coal miner CIL.

New Delhi: Senior bureaucrat Suresh Kumar is likely to be the new acting chairman and managing director of the world's largest coal miner CIL.

He will replace Gopal Singh who was given the additional charge as CMD of the maharatna firm in September last year. Singh heads Central Coalfields Ltd, an arm of state-owned Coal India Ltd (CIL). Kumar is the additional secretary in the coal ministry.

"The Appointments Committee of the Cabinet has approved that Suresh Kumar, Additional Secretary, Ministry of coal may be entrusted with the additional charge of the post of Chairman-cum-Managing Director (CMD) Coal India Ltd (CIL) till the appointment of a regular incumbent to the post or until further orders, whichever is earlier," a source said.

Singh had in September last year succeeded Sutirtha Bhattacharya who had retired from the post of Coal India CMD on August 31, 2017. Responding to a question on appointment of full-time Chairman of Coal India Coal Secretary Susheel Kumar had recently told PTI that, "The process of approval (of full-time Chairman of Coal India) is on...I am not aware of the time lines."

The government last year began the hunt for a full-time CMD of CIL and invited applications from professionals from PSUs as well as the private sector. While inviting applications through an advertisement, the government had said "the applicants may submit their applications to the Ministry of Coal".

Government head-hunter PESB has earlier suggested that the Centre may choose an appropriate course of action for selection of CMD for Coal India as it did not find any of the six candidates interviewed as fit for the top post. Coal India accounts for over 80 per cent of domestic coal production.
Mumbai: Varun Dhawan starrer October has been the talking point among Bollywood fanatics currently.

For many, the movie has touched them at a personal level, but the storyline seems to be a copy of a Marathi film.

A filmmaker/editor Hemal Tridevi has noticed that the movie has been picked up from a Marathi film Aarti.

She wrote a letter on behalf of the director Sarika Mene, who made Aarti from the true story of her brother Sunny. Read it here:

Sarika herself shared the post and the link to her Marathi film Aartis trailer which is a glimpse of the bond between Varun Dhawan and Banita Sandhu in October.

Directed by Shoojit Sircar, 'October' released on 13th April and is having a strong word-of-mouth response.
The US Health Department has banned the trendy goat yoga classes in New York due to safety fears, the Daily Mail reported.

The 45-minute class is a normal yoga class only with goats around and about. The class called NY Goat Yoga was supposed to be the city's first offshoot of this type of yoga.

However, the plan had to be canned after health officials told the organizers that certain animals were banned from city building and that included goats.

"The Health Department worked closely with the NY Goat Yoga, but because we prohibit direct contact with certain animals we were unable to process their application and issue a permit," a spokesman is quoted as saying by the Daily Mail.

Goat Yoga has become a huge craze across North America. One animal sanctuary in Oregon hosts such classes is the Farm Animal Rescue and Rehoming Movement (FARRM) Animal Sanctuary in Canada.
In this file photo taken on April 16, 2018 a worker hand-paints a commemorative mug, with a message celebrating the forthcoming wedding of Britain's Prince Harry and his US fiance Meghan Markle, at the Emma Bridgewater factory in Stoke-on-Trent, central England. (Photo: AFP)

LONDON: A British pottery is producing royal wedding mugs emblazoned with the description of Prince Harry and U.S. actress Meghan Markle as game changers, free spirits, big hearts and well-suited.

Harry, Queen Elizabeths grandson, and Markle, who stars in the U.S. legal drama Suits, tie the knot in Windsor, west of London on May 19.

At the Emma Bridgewater ceramics factory in Stoke-on-Trent, central England, a city famed for its pottery, workers are busy hand-making and decorating thousands of the commemorative mugs.

Sitting under rows of bunting made out of Union Jack flags hanging from the ceiling, around 60 workers use traditional techniques to hand-decorate the clay moulds. Behind them, fresh out of the kiln, a sea of red and blue Harry and Meghan mugs fill the shelves below a portrait of Queen Elizabeth.

The brand has been operating for over 30 years and has been making commemorative ware since it opened in 1985. It produced mugs for Queen Elizabeths diamond jubilee and the wedding of Harrys older brother Prince William and his wife Kate, as well other big dates on the royal calendar.In Staffordshire weve got a long tradition of celebrating national events, and what better than a royal wedding, Emma Bridgewater, brand founder and designer of the mugs, told Reuters.

Royal themed pottery made in Staffordshire can be traced back to the time of Charles II, and we are thrilled to see celebration through pottery continuing in 2018 with Harry and Meghan, she said.
She was named after the goddess of the ancestral temple in her home, but then, Durga Malathis family had no idea that their little girl was awaiting a future where she would be branded with blasphemy, for insulting divinity and hurting religious sentiments. Two cartoons were all that took her to shoot to notoriety, or fame, as decided by the perspectives.

A week ago, when the world was shaken by the news of the week-long torture and gang rape of an eight-year-old girl in a temple in Kathua, like everyone with a conscience, Durga too couldnt sleep. The next day, she took to her canvas to vent out the anger and agony and uploaded it on Facebook. The day that followed, she put up another one. A friend shared it. And the war began.

It was an organised attack. It started as death threats and then changed to rape threats and verbal abuse... all kind of abuses in every language, says Durga, from her Pattambi home where she is being watched over by police for the past few days.

The first cartoon was of a trishul, one of the arms a blood-smeared male genitalia; the second work had a girl tied to a penis sporting a sacred thread that serves as a mast to a saffron flag. Bhakts sprung into action, brandishing their invisible weapons, calling her names, threatening with rape, abusing whoever commented in support and shared the post.

Anyone who supported or shared it was targeted; the Muslim girls were attacked the most. Their morphed photos were being circulated and many of them were forced to take down the post, says the Chemistry lecturer-turned-artist, who, though shaken after the episodes, is glad that her students stood by her throughout the ordeal.

It is painful to see my students bearing the brunt for supporting me. But I dont regret what I expressed and will never apologise, stresses Durga, adding, Penises doing such cruelty to a little girl isnt wrong, but me drawing it is. Funny, isnt it?

She knows that it isnt religion but politics that is in charge. None of these people who unleash the attack are believers of god. If thats the case, they would be regretting or at least be fearful of god while threatening to rape and murder another person, Durga says, adding that she is not an atheist. I believe in humanity, love the positive ambience of a place of worship and I would never oppose a religious practitioner. I do strongly feel that faith is good as they help people feel hopeful.

The accusation regarding offensive portrayal of religious symbols is something she can ignore as a manipulated argument. Expressing that it is painful for an artist to explain her art work and what it intended, Durga points out, The imagery was that the communalists, who are Brahmins, used god as a weapon to rape a child. Instead of a trishul, they now use their genitalia to express their politics of hatred and violate a person. Asking me to depict the symbols of other religions in my art works is no different from people exhorting another rape as revenge to this crime. I am sure that I havent hurt any sentiment that wasn't affected when a child was tortured to death in a sacred spot.

Durga admits that she is not a trained artist, but someone driven by passion. Her first viral art work was that of Gauri Lankesh, the journalist who was murdered in Bengaluru last year. And now these.

At home, her mother Sarojini and brother Nithin are worried about the comments and the media reports on various cases filed against Durga. For the first two days, they could see people watching their house and occasionally, someone passing the home would spit aloud. But none of them crossed the gate till Thursday night, when stones were pelted at their house, damaging the vehicle parked in the front. Durga wants to go out, but her mother is still scared. Not because she thinks that her daughter drew something wrong. She is very religious, so much that no painting can hurt her sentiments, she laughs. Many close friends, out of affection, have asked her to take down the post. But I cant do it. I do not regret my acts, she stresses.

What Durga demands is justice. I still remind myself that I live in a democratic country. And if I dont get justice, I will have to believe that democracy is one big lie.

These incidents, for her, are a realisation of what fascism actually is. Durga says, If this is my experience, what must the girl and her family have gone through? What must be the crores of people reeling under religious polarisation and divisive politics facing? What are religious sentiments when a little girl is tortured and gang raped in a place of worship? Some questions have no answers.
Police arrest Deepak Manange

A police team deployed by the Metropolitan Police Range, Kathmandu, arrested Rajib Gurung aka Deepak Manange on Thursday.
The deceased, Koteshwara Rao, 21, a resident of Kengeri was hacked to death by friends, who had asked him to come near Sunkadakatte bridge. (Representational Image)

Bengaluru: The Kamakshipalya police on Thursday arrested two people in connection with the killing of a 21-year-old man in broad daylight near Sunkadakatte Bridge on April 12.

The accused have been identified as Sharath Kumar S alias Suresh, 22, resident of Kamalanagar and Vijay L alias Vini, 24, a resident of Shivanahalli, Rajajinagar.

The deceased, Koteshwara Rao, 21, a resident of Kengeri was hacked to death by friends, who had asked him to come near Sunkadakatte bridge.

According to the police, the incident happened around 7.30 am.

The accused, Suresh, Krishna, Vijay and their five friends called Koteshwara at 4 am and told him to come to Thotada Raste near Sunkadakatte bridge.

When the victim came to the spot with his friends, the accused attacked Koteshwara and his friends with lethal weapons.

Koteshwara died on spot while two of his friends got injured and later hospitalized.

The victim's brother, Dhareshwar, had lodged a case against the accused. Based on the complaint, a special squad was formed under the guidance of Parameshwar Hedge, A.C.P, Vijayanagar Division.

A senior police official said Suresh and Koteshwara often used to fight over financial issues related to their business.

They are now on the lookout for the other accused.

2 held for murder of 19-year-old

Two people were arrested for murdering a 19-year-old youth, nearly a week ago, after he refused to part with his mobile phone and wallet in Byatarayanapura police station limits.

According to the police the incident took place at around 11 pm on April 12, near Nayandahalli metro station.

The accused have been identified as Saddam Hussein, 20, and Mohammad Shafi, 19, both residents of Gangondanahalli.

The deceased, Rahul, a resident of Mallathahalli, was employed at a cinema theatre.

According to the police, when Rahul was returning home from work the two accused accosted him and demanded his mobile and wallet.

When he resisted, he was stabbed on his chest and stomach and the culprits fled.

The police said the two accused were involved in many robberies in the city.

The Byatarayanapura police had registered a case and formed a special team to nab the accused.

The two were arrested on Thursday.
Speaking to Deccan Chronicle, a senior ACB officer said, The accused judge and family owned 18 tolas of gold ornaments, stored in SBI Alwal branch locker which has now been sealed. (Representational Image)

Hyderabad: Sleuths of the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) have recovered gold weighing 18 tolas from accused additional metropolitan sessions judge S. Radhakrishna Murthys personal bank locker. To further their investigation, the ACB has also written to six banks seeking statements of money transactions made by the accused judge. Judge S. Radhakrishna Murthy has been booked by the ACB in a criminal misconduct case.

Speaking to Deccan Chronicle, a senior ACB officer said, The accused judge and family owned 18 tolas of gold ornaments, stored in SBI Alwal branch locker which has now been sealed. Officials of the ACB have written to the Andhra Bank, SBI, HDFC, ICICI Bank, Deccan Grameena Bank for transaction statements, as six bank account numbers were recovered from the Alwal residence of the accused judge.

The money transactions and major deposits (if any) especially during the cash for bail scam timeframe will be investigated, the official said.

Following directions of the High Court, the sleuths of ACB registered a bribery case against Justice Murthy for demanding kickbacks of Rs 7.5 lakh from an accused Marupaka Dattu, an MTech student, who was booked in a Narcotics Drugs and Psychotropic Substance Act case in 2017. Dattus mother had sold her gold jewellery to arrange the bribe amount.

Judge Murthy was also caught indulging in corrupt practices with two other advocates Mr K. Srinivasa Rao and Mr G. Satish Kumar, in the granting of bail and passing judgments. The ACB has appealed to the special ACB court for the custody of the other two accused K. Srinivasa Rao and G. Satish Kumar. ACB is also investigating allegations of disproportionate assets in this case.

The corrupt practises of of Justice Radhakrishna Murthy surfaced when a complaint was filed by advocate T. Srinagar Rao on behalf of his client, Marupaka Dattu. In the complaint, the advocate said, I had filed three bail applications for the accused Marupaka Dattu and these bail applications were passed on to the courts of I additional metropolitan sessions judge, Nampally. Dattu was already in custody for 51 days. On all three occasions without allowing me to make a submission, the judge dismissed all the bail applications. Dattus cousin learnt from sources that the chances of getting bail were nil unless the judge was paid a bribe.

The sleuths of ACB on Friday registered a case under the Prevention of Corruption Act against the judge and the other two accused.
Gujarat High Court on Friday acquitted former BJP Maya Kodnani in the 2002 Narodia Patiya case. (Photo: PTI | File)

Ahmedabad: The Gujarat High Court on Friday acquitted former minister and BJP leader Maya Kodnani in the 2002 Naroda Patiya case for which she was handed a 28-year prison sentence by a trial court.

The High Court upheld the conviction of the other high-profile accused in the case, Bajrang Dal's Babu Bajrangi.

The court acquitted Maya Kodnani after giving her the benefit of doubt. The bench said charges against Kodnani could not be established.

The High Court also acquitted 16 others who were convicted by a special court in Naroda Patiya case earlier. Conviction of 12 was upheld while verdict on two others is awaited. One of the accused is dead.

A division bench of justices Harsha Devani and A S Supehiya had reserved the order in August 2017 after hearing concluded.

Earlier, a special court for Special Investigation Team (SIT) cases had sentenced 32 people, including former BJP minister Maya Kodnani, to life imprisonment in August 2012. Babu Bajrangi was sentenced to imprisonment till death.

The SIT court had given seven accused enhanced life imprisonment of 21 years, which they will serve after undergoing 10 years' imprisonment under IPC section 326 (causing grievous hurt).

The remaining accused, of the total 32, were given simple life imprisonment of 14 years.

The trial court had acquitted 29 accused for want of evidence.

While the convicts challenged the lower court's order in the High Court, the SIT appealed against the acquittal of 29 people.

Ninety seven people, mainly women and children, were killed at Naroda Patia, a day after the Godhra carnage.

The Naroda Patiya riots was one of the worst massacres which followed the Godhra train burning on February 27, 2002, in which 59 kar sevaks were killed.

The Special Investigation Team probing Naroda Patiya had argued that a day after the riots, Maya Kodnani was seen inciting mobs at the spot by witnesses. The tirla court held she organised the mass killings.

Kodnani, who has been out on bail since 2014, is also an accused in the riots next door to Naroday Patiya  Naroda Gram  on the same day, February 28, 2002. Eleven Muslims were killed in Naroda Gram.

BJP President Amit Shah had testified as a defence witness last September, and said he saw Kodnani in Assembly on the day of the riots and then at the Shola Civil Hospital where bodies of those killed in Godhra had been brought. Kodnani is a gynaecologist.

In 2002, when the riots took place, Kodnani was a BJP leader. She was made a Cabinet minister by then Chief Minister Narendra Modi in 2007. She held the portfolio of Minister for Women and Child Development till 2009 when she was arrested. She got bail in 2014.
Chennai: The State Human Rights Commission has directed former DSP, an inspector and two SIs of Anti-Land Grabbing Special Cell, Salem, to pay a compensation of Rs 5 lakh to a 71-year old woman on charge of harassing and arresting her on a false case.

The cops, colluding with land grabbers, assaulted the woman and her 85-year-old husband in 2012. In the petition, Vasantha of Nungambakkam

submitted that she had dispute with her step nephews Jaganathan and Raghunathan of Sentharapatti over their ancestral property in Kondayampalli in Salem district. A civil suit filed by her has been pending before subordinate judge, Atthur.

Jaganathan and Raghunathan regularly engaged in quarrel with the aged couple. A case was registered against them in Thammpatti police station. In August 2011, Mohan Kumar, DSP, Raju, inspector, Thangaraj, SI and Bagyalakshmi, SI of Anti-Land Grabbing Special Cell, Salem, summoned Dharmalingam for an inquiry and after discussing with the couple the cops directed them to seek remedy in the civil court.

In the night of April 5, 2012, the cops rushed to their native Kondayampalli and dragged Vasantha out of her house to the police station for an enquiry. They abused her and her husband. The cops assaulted her after tying her hands with a rope. After obtaining her signatures on blank papers, the cops arrested her on false case and remanded her to prison.

In their reply, the cops denied the allegations. Jaganathan gave a complaint before the Anti-Land Grabbing Special Cell, Salem against Vasanth and others stating that the couple grabbed 23 acres of land belonged to him and his brother Raghunathan. They performed their duties as per law and not violated their human rights.

judge D Jayachandran said the cops registered a FIR on a false complaint, which was forged with the help of the police. The arrest and remand was illegal. The cops tortured Dharmalingam without considering his age. Directing the cops to pay a compensation of Rs 5 lakh, the judge recommended the government to initiate departmental action against them and criminal proceeding against them.
Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu has decided to stage a one-day protest on behalf of the five crore people of the state to safeguard their interest. (Photo: ANI | Twitter)

Vijayawada: Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu began his day-long hunger strike on Friday, protesting against the Centres non-cooperation with the state.

The Telugu Desam Party (TDP) chief, who turns 68 today, had previously, while announcing his intention to observe the day-long fast last week, said, "April 20 is my birthday. On that day, I will observe a fast from morning to evening on the state's problems and the Centre's policy. I will register my protest against the Centre on this.

Also Read: Andhra special status: Chandrababu Naidu to be on hunger strike on birthday, April 20

People from all walks of life were seen congregating at the Indira Gandhi Municipal Corporation (IGMC) stadium in Vijayawada to be a part of the Chief Minister's Dharma Porata Deeksha (fight for justice), a 12-hour fast taken up demanding justice for Andhra Pradesh, which has been denied Special category Status, as promised during state bifurcation.

Instead of spending time with his family on his birthday, Chandrababu Naidu, was seen walking into IGMC stadium to sit on the fast at 7am. The TDP supremo has decided to stage a one-day protest on behalf of the five crore people of the state to safeguard their interest.

After offering floral tribute to Mahatma Gandhi, Portion Sriramulu, Jyothi Rao Phule, he came on to the dais. He was blessed by priests from Tirumala temple, Kanaka Durga temple along with elders from Islam, Christian, Buddhist, Sikh and Jain communities.

Chandrababu Naidu sat silently looking at the crowd which included leaders and activists of his party, members from different organisations, students, employees and women, who had come to support his Deeksha demanding implementation of the provisions in Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act. They could be seen marching past the dais holding placards with slogans demanding justice for Andhra Pradesh.

Elaborate arrangements have been made at IGMC Stadium in Vijayawada, the venue of the day-long hunger strike.

According to reports, at least 200 peoples representatives from Krishna and Guntur districts are expected to join Naidu in observing the fast from 7 am to 7 pm.

All other TDP lawmakers and leaders will observe the fast in their respective constituencies at that time.
People from all walks of life were seen congregating at the Indira Gandhi Municipal Corporation (IGMC) stadium in Vijayawada to be a part of the Chief Minister's Dharma Porata Deeksha (fight for justice). (Photo: ANI/Twitter)

Vijayawada: Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu on Friday evening broke his one-day hunger strike, which he was observing against the 'Centre's non-cooperation with the state'.

Terming the fast as a historic one, Naidu said all kinds of unions and organisations came and expressed their solidarity in his fight for special status for Andhra Pradesh.

Naidu said he will continue to fight for justice and will not compromise on the state's interests.

He also accused the Centre of dividing the state on unscientific basis and said that it was now the Government's resposibility to fulfill the promises made to the people.

Lashing out at the government at the Centre, Naidu said, "NDA-BJP cannot play politics day in and day out, it is not good for nation".

In a strong message to the Centre, the CM said, "You cannot isolate people and wound their sentiments, it is a dangerous trend for national integrity".

Reiterating his claim that Prime Minister Modi was trying to repeat in Andhra Pradesh what he has done in Tamil Nadu, Naidu said, "Centre wants to take AP into their hold, similar to what they did with Tamil Nadu".

He also accused the BJP of resorting to using Jagan Mohan Reddy and YSR Congress Party against the Telugu Desam Party (TDP).

"I will not let that happen. Center is colluding with YSRCP, as they are afraid that we will not bow in front of them," Naidu said after ending his day-long fast.

The TDP chief, who turns 68 on Friday, had previously, while announcing his intention to observe the day-long fast, last week, said, "April 20 is my birthday. On that day, I will observe a fast from morning to evening on the state's problems and the Centre's policy. I will register my protest against the Centre on this.

People from all walks of life were seen congregating at the Indira Gandhi Municipal Corporation (IGMC) stadium in Vijayawada to be a part of the Chief Minister's Dharma Porata Deeksha (fight for justice), a 12-hour fast taken up demanding justice for Andhra Pradesh, which has been denied Special category Status, as promised during state bifurcation.

According to reports, at least 200 peoples representatives from Krishna and Guntur districts were expected to join Naidu in observing the fast from 7 am to 7 pm.
Kolkata: In a major blow to the Mamata Banerjee government and the West Bengal State Election Commission (WBSEC), the Panchayat elections have been postponed as the Calcutta High Court on Friday junked the three phase rural polls' schedule on May 1, 3 and 5 with the counting of votes on May 8.

In the afternoon, Justice Subrata Talukdar ordered that fresh dates have to be declared by the state poll panel in consultation with the state government after observing that it would not be possible to start the rural polls on May 1.

He also cancelled the WBSEC's notification on April 10 when the state poll panel overnight withdrew its own order extending the deadline for one day for filing of nominations by the candidates.

The judge earlier had put a stay on the order of withdrawal.

In its order of 35 pages the single bench, which had reserved its verdict till Friday afternoon following a hearing of all sides, also directed the state poll panel to issue fresh dates for filing of nominations by the candidates.

In addition, Justice Talukdar advised the WBSEC to add one day extra to the timeframe for filing of nomination.

The Trinamool, as a ruling party, its goverment and the state poll panel earlier challenged the single bench's stay on the state poll panel's flip-flop on the extension of the deadline for filing nominations. They claimed that the court could not interfere once the poll schedule is announced. But the single rejected the pleas.

Emphatic over the verdict BJP lawyer Pratap Banerjee said, "Today's verdict is historic. The judiciary took a bold step. It upheld the rule of law when the democracy is at the stake in West Bengal. We welcome the verdict. It is not only the victory of the BJP but also of the common people who love democracy. We now want to see what steps the state poll panel will take."

State Congress president Adhir Chowdhury claimed, "The judge upheld our complaint that the Trinamool Congress government plotted a conspiracy to prevent the common people from participating in the elections. He directed the state poll panel to ensure that common people can cast their votes. We are indebted to him. It is a moral defeat of the Trinamool. The state poll panel is one of the constitutional bodies. Its failure has been exposed following the verdict."

Devastated by the defeat, Trinamool MP Kalyan Banerjee however claimed, "The court did not grant the opposition parties' demand for the deployment of the central para-military forces. It also rejected the opposition parties' ploy to postpone the rural polls."
Tamil Nadu BJP leader said S. VE. Shekher Venkataraman, 'Uneducated stupid ugly beings... largely in Tamil Nadu media. This woman is no exception.' (Facebook Screengrab | S. VE. Shekher Venkataraman)

Chennai: Days after Tamil Nadu Governor patted the cheek of a woman journalist, creating an uproar in media, a BJP leader from the state has sparked another outrage by saying that the Governor should "wash his hands with phenyl" for touching her.

BJP leader from Tamil Nadu, S. VE. Shekher Venkataraman, an actor and playwright, shared a post on Facebook that belittles the woman journalist who had objected to the Governor patting her cheek on Tuesday.

Governor Banwarilal Purohit apologised to journalist Lakshmi Subramanian for the gesture, widely perceived as offensive.

Read: TN Governor apologises to woman journalist for pat on cheek

The outrageous, and now deleted post by the leader said the journalist's aim was to "defame the governor and Prime Minister Narendra Modi".

The post further went on to say that recent complaints show they (journalists) can't become reporters or anchors without sleeping with big shots...Uneducated stupid ugly beings... largely in Tamil Nadu media. This woman is no exception.

Chennai journalists will hold protest at Tamil Nadu BJP headquarters against S. VE. Shekhar and BJP's national secretary H Raja, who is also accused of making comments in bad taste against journalists.

The BJP leaders post further targeted the media for raising questions on a sex-for-degrees scam, in which a college professor is accused of pressuring her students to sleep with officials for better marks and money.

The professor had claimed links with the governor, which he emphatically denied at a press conference on Tuesday. When journalist Lakshmi Subramanian asked him a question at that press meet, he didn't reply but patted her cheek.

The post shared by S. VE. Shekhar said, "More than universities, sex abuse is rampant in the media. It's these people who question the Governor."

However, S. VE. Shekher issued a statement over his derogatory post and said, "I had posted it without reading the message. It was removed immediately after my friend pointed it out. If I had hurt anyone, it was not on purpose and I extend my heartfelt apology."

Defending his party leader, BJP's KT Raghavan said, "He has now deleted the post end of the matter. It is a good gesture from his side we must appreciate it. Party won't advocate these types of things."

The Governor's apology to the journalist had come with a bizarre justification.

"I considered (your) question to be a good one. Therefore, as an act of appreciation for the question that you had posed, I gave a pat on your cheek considering you to be like my granddaughter," he wrote. Not quite buying into the "grandfatherly pat" claim, Ms Subramanian said she accepted his apology, even though she was not convinced.

Also Read: TN Governor pats woman journalist on cheek, without consent, sparks uproar

Earlier, she had tweeted angrily: "Washed my face several times. Still not able to get rid of it. So agitated and angered Mr Governor Banwarilal Purohit."
Chennai: A 17-year-old boy became the centre of attraction in Commissioner of Police office at Chennai on Thursday, as the top cop invited and lauded him for his brave action that put a chain snatcher behind bars.

N. Suryakumar (17) of Tirumangalam chased a chain-snatcher named Janakiraman in Anna Nagar. On Tuesday evening, Janakiraman was visiting Dr Amudha (50), a gynaecologist, at her clinic in Anna Nagar pretending to be a patient seeking doctors advice. But he allegedly snatched her 10 sovereign gold chain and fled the spot, the police said.

But the young Surya, a tailors son, had other ideas in his mind. On seeing the snatcher fleeing the spot, Suryakumar chased him and threw some punches on Janakiramans face before handing him over to the police. The CCTV cameras elaborately captured the whole scene.

After coming to know about the bravery of the teen, city police commissioner A.K. Viswanathan invited the boy to his office and commended him for his bravery. Additional Commissioner (South) M.C. Sarangan, Additional Commissioner (North) H.M. Jayaram and Joint Commissioner (East) T S Anbu also lauded the boy.

I did not think much while chasing the snatcher. I sought help from others, but all of them stood reluctant, Surya told mediapersons. He also said the accused collapsed after punched the snatcher on his face and head.

Viswanathan also urged people to not to hesitate to help in such cases. Police will not harass people who help others in need and their identity will not be revealed against their will, the commissioner said.

Narayanan, a tailor and Suryas father, said his son had dropped out of school in class 8 and started working as an AC mechanic. Surya is a brave boy and he would not hesitate to question wrong, the proud father said. Meanwhile, Dr Amudha and her husband Arumugam visited Suryas house.
Bhawanipatna (Odisha): A minor Dalit girl was allegedly abducted and raped by one of her distant relatives at Dumerpadar in Kalahandi district, police said on Friday.

According to the First Information Report (FIR) lodged by the victim's parents, the class 6 student had gone to her uncles house at Dumerapadar to attend a family function on April 17.

While returning home around 8 pm, she was kidnapped by Muna Naik (35) who forcibly took her to his house. The girl was kept in confinement and raped by the accused for two days. The girl was released on Thursday night, SP M Sambit Sampad said.

The accused Muna Naik (35), a father of three children, of the same village was arrested.

Police has registered a case under Section 342, 363, 376 (2) (i) and POCSO Act. The DSP (crime against women wing) will investigate the case.

Meanwhile, both the victim and the accused have been sent for medical examination.

This is also the sixth instance when a minor girl was raped in Odisha during the past one week.

While, a class 3 girl student of Bachaka village under Biswanathpur police station of Kalahandi district was allegedly raped on Wednesday, another girl faced similar assault by an auto driver in Mayurbhanj district the same day.

Earlier, rapes of three similar cases of minor girl were reported from Nilagiri, Soro and Khaira in Balasore district.
Karl Moor/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) -- Federal prosecutors in Washington have been asked by the Justice Departments inspector general to determine whether the FBIs former deputy director, Andrew McCabe, should be charged for allegedly lacking candor on multiple occasions with internal investigators and with then-FBI director James Comey, according to a source familiar with the matter.



In a report made public by lawmakers last week, Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded that McCabe repeatedly misled investigators looking into how sensitive investigative information ended up on in a national newspaper in the weeks before the 2016 presidential election.



Horowitzs office then referred the matter to the U.S. Attorneys office in Washington, indicating Horowitz believes McCabe committed a federal crime with his actions. Its unclear exactly when the referral was made.



McCabe has become a frequent target of criticism from President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers, who allege that McCabe's time at the top of the FBI was emblematic of political bias in the FBI's law enforcement work.



McCabe's lawyers issued a statement Thursday afternoon saying they're confident no charges would be filed.



"We were advised of the referral within the past few weeks. Although we believe the referral is unjustified, the standard for an IG referral is very low. We have already met with staff members from the U.S. Attorneys Office. We are confident that, unless there is inappropriate pressure from high levels of the Administration, the U.S. Attorneys Office will conclude that it should decline to prosecute, the statement said.



In October 2016, the Wall Street Journal published an article that questioned whether McCabe was hampering the federal probe of the Clinton Foundation.



Ahead of the story's publication, McCabe authorized an FBI spokesman and FBI attorney to speak with the newspaper about the probe and his own efforts to keep it moving forward, including the contents of a phone call months earlier about the matter with a senior Justice Department official, the report released Friday said.



Among the purposes of the disclosure was to rebut a narrative that had been developing  that questioned McCabes impartiality in overseeing FBI investigations involving former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, according to the report.



Meanwhile, McCabe, first head of the FBI field office in New York and then in Washington, told the inspector generals office that after the Wall Street Journal report was published, they each received calls from McCabe admonishing them for leaks contained in the article, the report said. At no time did McCabe disclose to either of them that McCabe had authorized [an FBI attorney] to disclose information  to the WSJ reporter.



The day after the articles publication, McCabe spoke face-to-face with Comey, who expressed concern about information contained in the news article, according to the inspector general's report. According to what McCabe later told the internal investigator, he informed Comey that he had authorized the FBI spokesman and FBI attorney to disclose details about his previous phone call with a senior Justice Department official. Comey disputed that version telling investigators he was very concerned that the article included sensitive FBI information, and that McCabe definitely did not tell me that he authorized the disclosure, according to the report.



Asked on CNN Thursday afternoon how he felt about McCabe lying to him and other investigators, according to the report, Comey answered: "Conflicted. I like him very much as a person but sometimes even good people do things they shouldn't do," Comey said.



Saying "I'm not the judge in the case," Comey added, "I think it's accountability mechanisms working and they should work because it's not acceptable in the FBI, the Justice Department for people to lack candor. Its something we take really seriously."



Thursday evening Trump tweeted, "James Comey just threw Andrew McCabe under the bus. Inspector Generals Report on McCabe is a disaster for both of them! Getting a little (lot) of their own medicine?"



The inspector general began investigating McCabe in August 2017, after the FBIs Inspection Division told the inspector generals office that the deputy director may have lacked candor when questioned about his role in disclosing sensitive information to a reporter.



In its report released Friday, the inspector generals office said McCabe lacked candor in July 2017 when he told investigators  under oath  that he was not aware of [the FBI attorney] having been authorized to speak to reporters around October 30, and he lacked candor again four months later when he acknowledged authorizing the disclosure but stated that he told Comey on October 31, 2016, that he had authorized the disclosure to the WSJ.



Representatives for McCabe noted that two business days after speaking with investigators in July 2017, McCabe contacted the inspector generals office and corrected his prior statements.



Mr. McCabe thought further about his discussion with the OIG investigators and realized that he needed to correct the record, they said in a factsheet distributed to reported.



Nevertheless, the inspector general also concluded that McCabe lacked candor in May 2017 when interviewed by officials from the FBIs Inspection Division. He told them he had not authorized the disclosure to the Wall Street Journal and did not know who did, the report said.



The representatives for McCabe said the inspector generals account of Mr. McCabes interactions with the  investigators is incomplete and misleading.



Mr. McCabe never deliberately misled Inspection Division (INSD) investigators, the factsheet said. [W]hen Mr. McCabe turned back to the draft statement they prepared for him several months later, he declined to sign it and instead contacted INSD to correct the inaccurate facts about his relationship to the WSJ article.



Beyond the accuracy of McCabes statements to investigators, the inspector generals report released Friday also took sharp issue with McCabes move to authorize the media disclosure in the first place.



[W]e concluded that McCabes decision to confirm the existence of the [Clinton Foundation] Investigation through an anonymously sourced quote, recounting the content of a phone call with a senior Department official in a manner designed to advance his personal interests at the expense of Department leadership, was clearly not within the public interest exception, the report said.



We therefore concluded that McCabes disclosure of the existence of an ongoing investigation in this manner violated the FBIs and the Departments media policy and constituted misconduct.



But representatives for McCabe said he had full authority to authorize sharing information with the media as deputy director.



Their interaction with the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) was not done in secret: it took place over the course of several days and others knew of it, including Director Comey. It was done to protect the institutional reputation of the FBI as a non-political and professional investigative agency, and therefore was squarely within the public interest exception to the FBIs prohibition on sharing sensitive material, a factsheet from McCabes representatives said.



In 2015, while McCabe was head of the FBI's Washington Field Office, his wife ran for state senate in Virginia as a Democrat. She lost the election in November 2015, and three months later McCabe became deputy director, giving him an oversight role in the investigation of Clinton's use of a private email server as secretary of state. After the Wall Street Journal story was published in October 2016, McCabe recused himself from the Clinton matter.



McCabe first joined the FBI in 1996, investigating organized crime cases in New York. Over the next several years, he shifted his focus to rooting out international terrorists, and in 2012 he became the head of the FBI's counterterrorism division at headquarters in Washington.



In October 2013, McCabe took over the FBI's entire national security branch, and the next year he moved to become the assistant director in charge of the FBI's Washington Field Office.



McCabe stepped down as deputy director in January, and he was fired by Sessions in May.



The rush to judgment  and the rush to terminate Mr. McCabe  were unprecedented, unseemly, and cruel, Michael Bromwich, an attorney for McCabe, said in a statement. His treatment was far more harsh and far less fair than he deserved, and his reward for the loyalty he showed to his country over the course of his career was a truncated form of administrative due process, including the lack of any right to appeal outside the Department of Justice.



The U.S. attorneys office and a spokesman for the inspector general declined to comment for this article.





Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
Rare Royal Bengal Tiger found dead in Chitwan

A rare Royal Bengal Tiger was found dead in Ratnanagar-based Panchakanya Community Forest in Chitwan on Thursday.
Reacting to the development, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said the the policy will make discoms directly accountable to the people. (Photo: File)

New Delhi: In a good news for Delhi residents, Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal on Thursday approved the Kejriwal government's proposal mandating an hourly compensation of Rs 100 to consumers in case of unscheduled power cuts.

The proposal to compensate consumers for unscheduled outages by power discoms in the national capital was approved by Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal a few days ago and was sent for the L-G's approval.

"Approved proposal for issue of policy directions regarding payment of compensation to consumers in case of power failure," Baijal tweeted.

Reacting to the development, Kejriwal said the the policy will make discoms directly accountable to the people.

"This is a revolutionary and a v(ery) innovative policy of Delhi govt which will make DISCOMS directly accountable to people (sic)," Kejriwal tweeted.

As per the proposed policy, power discoms will have to pay their consumers for unscheduled power cuts, after first hour, at an hourly rate of Rs 100.

With the LG's approval, Delhi will become the first city in the country to have a policy to compensate consumers for unscheduled outages.

Under the policy, discoms will be exempt from paying penalty in the first hour of an unscheduled power cut. For the next hour, consumers will be paid Rs 50, after which compensation will be paid at a rate of Rs 100 per hour. The first hour exemption from penalty will be available once a day for the discoms.

There are three private power discoms -- BSES companies BYPL and BRPL, and the Tata Power Delhi Distribution Limited (TPDDL) -- that supply power to the city, barring areas under the New Delhi Municipal Council and the Delhi Cantonment.

The compensation earned by the consumers will be adjusted against their monthly power bill. The three power distribution companies have a total of around 55 lakh registered consumers in the national capital.

In case, the compensation is not paid by the discoms, the consumers can lodge a complaint with the Delhi Electricity Regulatory Authority (DERC). The amount of compensation in such cases will be Rs 5,000 or five times of the compensation payable, whichever is higher, a government official said.

The affected consumers will be required to file a "no current" complaint through SMS, e-mail, telephone, mobile apps or official websites of discoms, giving their particulars such as name, consumer account (CA) number, mobile number.

The discoms will attend to the complaint and send a confirmation message to consumers with the date and time of restoration, the official said.

The official said that after the permissible time limit ends, the respective compensation amount will be automatically credited to the CA number without any manual intervention and a message sent to the consumer.
At the time of his death, Judge BH Loya was hearing the high-profile Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case. (Photo: File)

Latur: The brother of Special CBI judge BH Loya on Thursday expressed his disappointment over the Supreme Court's dismissal of petitions seeking an independent probe into Loya's death.

"We have nothing to say... Whatever has happened, has happened. What can we do now?" Srinivas Loya was quoted as saying by IANS.

He said when the Supreme Court has not heeded big lawyers like Prashant Bhushan "then what is our standing before them... We are very small people".

"The best is we will not say anything in the matter now. How will it help? We can do nothing further... It's futile," Srinivas told IANS.

Earlier on Thursday, the apex court ruled that Loya's death was due to natural causes, and observed that the petitioners tried to scandalise the judiciary.

"These petitions are scandalous and amount to criminal contempt," the court said adding, "We can't doubt the statements of the judicial officers who were with Judge Loya."

"Attempt of the petitioners was to malign the judiciary," SC said while dismissing petitions seeking independent probe into Judge BH Loya's death case.

Also Read: No probe into Judge BH Loya death case, SC says pleas 'scandalous'

A three-judge bench, headed by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra and comprising Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud, pronounced its verdict after hearing a clutch of petitions.

At the time of his death, Judge BH Loya was hearing the high-profile Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case.

Medical records show Judge BH Loya died of cardiac arrest in Nagpur on December 1, 2014 when he had gone to attend the wedding of a colleague's daughter.

In the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case, BJP President Amit Shah along with Rajasthan Home Minister Gulabchand Kataria, Rajasthan-based businessman Vimal Patni, former Gujarat police chief P C Pande, Additional Director General of Police Geeta Johri and Gujarat police officers Abhay Chudasama and N K Amin have already been discharged.

(With agency inputs)
The drill took off from Air Force Station Chabua in Assam to Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose International Airport in Kolkata and further on to Command Hospital at Alipore by road. (Photo: DC)

Kolkata: The Eastern Air Command (EAC) of the Indian Air Force conducted a large-scale mass casualty air evacuation drill covering two states - Assam and West Bengal - as part of the ongoing military exercise Gagan Shakti late on Thursday night.

The drill took off from Air Force Station Chabua in Assam to Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose International (NSCBI) Airport in Kolkata and further on to Command Hospital at Alipore by road.

Chief public relation officer (Eastern Command) Wing Commander SS Birdi said, "Nearly 45 bedridden patients arrived at Kolkata by two Antonov-32 aircrafts that landed in the middle of the night. With the medical teams already waiting, the patients were offloaded and after preliminary procedures, swiftly transferred to the ambulances. The ambulances moved in a convoy to the Command Hospital through a Green Corridor which had been prepared in coordination with the Kolkata Police."

EAC principal medical officer Air Vice Marshal RC Das said that such an exercise serves as a practice for the air warriors. They get to prepare for a real-time war situation or natural calamities like an earthquake where the road link is wrecked and transportation by other modes become non-functional.

The air route then remains the sole means of support and evacuation.

Wing Commander Birdi added, "The distance of 25 km from the NSCBI Airport to Command Hospital, Alipore was covered in 40 minutes and the exercise went through as planned. Various high ranking officers of the IAF monitored the drill to ensure flawless conduct of the exercise. With this demonstration, the IAF has proven its flexibility and quick response in carrying out mass casualty evacuations. This capability could also be utilised by the IAF in case of humanitarian and disaster relief operations near the incident locations by landing on select roads or designated highways."

He underlined that the IAF has been a lifeline in the North Eastern region, providing much-needed materials and prompt relief not only during natural calamities but also to areas with inadequate road connectivity.

The IAF has been instrumental in providing flood and earthquake relief at all times. During 2017 alone, it had flown 259 sorties and transported 175 tonnes of relief material.
The Supreme Court refused to pass any order gagging the media, saying it would not do this without hearing the Attorney General. (Photo: File)

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Friday termed as very unfortunate the public statements, including those made by lawmakers, on impeachment of judges.

"We are all very disturbed about it," a bench comprising Justices AK Sikri and Ashok Bhushan said after the counsel appearing for the petitioner raised the issue of politicians making public statements on impeachment of judges.

The apex court asked Attorney General KK Venugopal to assist it to deal with the plea, which has also sought a gag on the media from reporting such statements.

The development assumes significance as it comes on a day when the Congress and other opposition parties handed over a notice to initiate impeachment proceedings against Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra to Vice President and Rajya Sabha chairman Venkaiah Naidu.

Read: Oppn meets RS chairman, gives notice for CJI Dipak Misra's impeachment

The move comes a day after the apex court ruling in the CBI Judge BH Loya case.

Also Read: No probe into Judge BH Loya death case, SC says pleas 'scandalous'

However, during Friday's hearing, no reference of CJI was made during brief arguments.

The apex court, while asking the top law officer of the country to assist it in the matter, posted the case for hearing on May 7.

It, however, refused to pass any order gagging the media, saying it would not do this without hearing the Attorney General.
The opposition parties will also discuss the idea of having a broader consensus on how to defeat the BJP in the upcoming Assembly and Lok Sabha elections. (Photo: File | PTI)

New Delhi: The leaders of opposition parties will meet on Friday in Leader of Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad's chamber in parliament and are likely to discuss the issue of the Supreme Court verdict rejecting multiple pleas for an independent probe into the death of special CBI judge B H Loya, sources said.

The issue of moving an impeachment motion against Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra is also likely to be discussed in Friday's meeting, in the wake of the Judge Loya case judgement.

Also Read: No probe into Judge BH Loya death case, SC says pleas 'scandalous'

The Opposition has been working on bringing various parties on board for a larger consensus on bringing the impeachment motion against the CJI.

While the Left parties, the NCP and the Congress are on board for moving the impeachment motion, some parties that have already signed the petition have backed out.

During the meeting convened by Ghulam Nabi Azad, the sources say, the opposition parties will also discuss the idea of having a broader consensus on how to defeat the BJP in the upcoming Assembly and Lok Sabha elections.
Midhun Khosh, a final year student of the Nehru Engineering College at Pambady in Kerala's Palakkad district, was attempting a saddle sore challenge. (Facebook Screengrab/ Midhun Khosh M S)

Palakkad: A 21-year-old engineering student from Kerala, who was attempting an extreme two-wheeler riding challenge, was killed on Wednesday when his motorcycle rammed into a lorry near Chitradurga on the Bengaluru-Pune National Highway.

Midhun Khosh, a final year student of the Nehru Engineering College at Pambady in Kerala's Palakkad district, was attempting what is known as a saddle sore challenge, where the aim is to ride a two-wheeler for around 1,500 kilometres within a span of 22 hours.

The engineering student was killed immediately when his 250cc Honda CBR 250R Repsol Edition motorcycle slammed into a lorry that was ahead of him and had braked suddenly, police in Karnataka said, adding a case of rash and negligent driving has been registered against the lorry driver.

The accident took place at 4 am.

"Kerala police, quoting information provided by Midhun's family, said he had a craze for speed bike riding and was participating in the Saddle Sore challenge that required riders to cover around 1,500 km in 22 hours," news agency Press Trust of India quoted the police as saying.

The saddle sore challenge is conducted by a US-based organisation called Iron butt Association.

Midhun had left for the challenge on Tuesday evening, telling his mother that he was going to neighbouring Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu, police said.

"Police found a sketch of the route map of his planned trip -- Palakkad-Bengaluru-Pune -- from his home in nearby Ottapalam and some jottings on the risks involved, equipment needed for emergency and eatables such as chocolates to be carried," police said.

(With inputs from PTI)
Attempts to reunite Geeta with her family proved futile as none of the families that had come to claim Geeta as their own could establish the claim. (Photo: File/AFP)

New Delhi: External affairs minister Sushma Swaraj, who is known for helping distressed Indians across the world, is now playing a role of a matchmaker. The Union Minister is reportedly looking for a groom for Geeta, the hearing and speech impaired girl who was brought to India from Pakistan after accidentally landing in that country when she was a child.

According to a report in Hindustan Times, an official at Swarajs office, who is not authorised to talk to the media said, Sushma Swaraj, after a meeting with Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan in October 2017, had announced plans for Geetas marriage. On April 8, civil society members took a prospective speech- and hearing impaired groom with them to meet Sushma Swaraj and Geeta, at Swarajs residence in Delhi.

However, Geeta rejected the proposal. Swaraj maam then asked them to widen their search and bring more prospective grooms to choose from, assuring her total support for the cause, the official added.

After Geeta was brought back to India, several attempts were made to reunite her with her family. However, the efforts proved futile as none of the families that had come to claim Geeta as their own could establish the claim.

Gyanendra Purohit, convener of an NGO Anand Service Society and a social activist, who is involved in the search for Geeta's long-lost parents, said In a recent meeting with civil society members who helped Geeta to come back to India, Swaraj had invited applications through Facebook and also announced Geetas biodata in the Parichay Sammelan (introductory meeting) for speech- and hearing-impaired people.

Purohit has put up a post on the Facebook page Reunite Geeta, a deaf girl, with her family', which was originally created to search for Geeta's parents, on April 10. The advertisement said they were looking for a "good and smart deaf boy", age above 25 years, for "India's daughter Geeta". It also made it clear that it is Geeta who would decide on the proposals, and the Union government would take further steps.

So far they have received 25 biodatas of potential grooms, and they include an Army officer, an astrologer, novelist, engineers and farmers, among others.

We have shortlisted 15 suitable matches by asking them in detail why they were interested in marrying Geeta. These matches are going to be screened by Swarajs PA (personal assistant) and then Geeta will see whether she likes the chosen guy or not and then Swaraj will have the final say, said Purohit.

According to Purohit, the groom is being promised a house and a government job.

He also added that some of the prospective grooms were rejected when they said they wanted to marry Geeta in the hope of getting a government job.

Geetas tutor Monica Punjabi said, The purpose of this process is to give her a family, to give a space to her to live her life in her own way and to make her feel happy. We are doing our best to get the best man for the marriage.

Geeta was found alone aboard the Samjhauta Express at Lahore when she was seven or eight years old. It is surmised that she accidentally boarded the train somewhere in India. Karachi-based Edhi Foundation took care of her while she lived in Pakistan. She returned to India in 2015.

(With inputs from PTI)
Since January, several opposition parties have been pushing for impeachment of Justice Dipak Misra. (Photo: File | PTI)

New Delhi: The Opposition parties on Friday met Vice President and Rajya Sabha Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu and handed over a notice seeking the impeachment of Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra. Over 60 MPs belonging to seven political parties have signed the notice.

Lawmakers from Congress, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI-M), Communist Party of India (CPI), Samajwadi Party (SP), Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and Muslim League have signed the notice.

Earlier on Friday, opposition parties held a key meeting convened by the Leader of Opposition Ghulam Nabi Azad in parliament to discuss the political situation and decide on the course of action over an impeachment motion against the Chief Justice of India.

Since January, several opposition parties have been pushing for impeachment of Justice Dipak Misra. The idea was proposed by the Left Front, days after four senior most judges of the Supreme Court went public with the allegation that the Chief Justice was abusing his position as "master of the roster" and sensitive cases were being allocated to junior judges.

Special CBI Judge BH Loyas death case, which was initially handed to a judge low in the Supreme Court hierarchy, was one of the cases the judges pointed at.

The Congress, on Thursday, expressed its disappointment over SCs verdict dismissing pleas seeking an independent probe into the death of special CBI Judge BH Loya.

The Congress called the verdict a "sad letter day in India's history" and claimed that "there are still questions before those who believe in the judiciary".
This is the second time in four months that International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde has asked Prime Minister Modi to improve the conditions for women in the country. (Photo: File | AFP)

New Delhi: As pressure mounts over the government to take swift action in recent rape cases, including that of Kathua and Unnao, which have triggered nationwide outrage, International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Christine Lagarde on Thursday hoped that Prime Minister Narendra Modi would pay more attention towards the security of women in India.

The IMF managing director also termed the Kathua rape incident, where an eight-year-old girl was kidnapped, drugged and held for several days while she was raped repeatedly and then murdered, as revolting.

"What has happened (in India) is just revolting. I would hope that the Indian authorities, starting with Prime Minister Modi pay more attention because it is needed for the women of India," Lagarde said.

This is the second time in four months that Lagarde has asked Prime Minister Modi to improve the conditions for women in the country. At the World Economic Forum, which held in Davos in January, Lagarde said she had told PM Modi that his speech did not mention much about the women in India.

When I was last in Davos after Prime Minister Modis speech, I did tell him that he had not mentioned the women of India enough. And its not just a question of talking about them, IMF chief said.

However, she quickly clarified that this was her personal position and not that of the IMF.

"By the way this is not an IMF official position. It is my position," news agency Press Trust of India quoted Lagarde as saying.

Lagardes latest reminder to Indian authorities to take care of the women of the country comes at a time when three rape incidents  Kathua, Unnao and Surat  have sparked anger among people.

The apparent silence that PM Modi and senior leaders maintained following the incidents added to the outrage.

However, the Prime Minister did break his silence and make a fleeting reference over the incidents and promised justice to countrys daughter at an event last week but many activists insist that he needs to speak, and do more.

Read: Our daughters will definitely get justice: PM amid anger over rape cases

Also, during his trip to Sweden and UK, PM Modi while addressing the Indian diaspora in London said such incidents should not be politicised as a rape is a rape.

Also Read: We ask daughters where they are going, must ask sons too: PM Modi on rape cases

The anger among NRIs over the incidents back home was evident when hundreds of protesters greeted him with placards 'Modi go home' when he arrived in London for bilateral talks with British PM Theresa May and the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.

Also Read: Modi go back: Protesters in UK shout slogans as PM signs 1 billion pounds deal

(With inputs from PTI)
The prime properties in Mumbai's Nagpada belonged to Dawood but his mother and sister, both dead, had taken possession of them. (Photo: File)

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Friday directed the Central Government to seize properties of underworld don Dawood Ibrahim in Mumbai.

A bench headed by Justice RK Agrawal dismissed the plea filed by Dawood Ibrahims sister Haseena Parker and his mother Amina Bi Kaskar against attachment of their properties by the government, saying they belong to the fugitive underworld don.

The prime properties in Mumbai's Nagpada belonged to Dawood but his mother and sister, both dead, had taken possession of them.

In 1988, the government sealed the properties under a law that allows the takeover of properties of smugglers, foreign exchange manipulators and their relatives.

Dawood's mother and sister had challenged the takeover, which were initiated after the 1993 serial blasts in Mumbai in which 257 were killed. Dawood had fled the country and the departments concerned sought to seize properties belonging to the fugitive don.

Amina Bi Kaskar and Hasina Parkar had moved the apex court after the tribunal and the Delhi High Court dismissed their challenge to the takeover order in July 1998.

In November 2012 Supreme Court ordered status quo in the case.

The government had claimed that several opportunities were given to Amina and Hasina to show legal sources of income to acquire the properties but no valid document was filed.

The two women reportedly had seven residential properties in their names - two in Amina Bi's name and five in Hasina Parkar's name. The properties, worth crores, were allegedly acquired with Dawood's illegal wealth.

In November 2017, three south Mumbai properties belonging to the fugitive don were auctioned for Rs 11.58 crore. The properties were put on auction by the ministry of finance, under the Smugglers and Foreign Exchange Manipulators (Forfeiture of Property) Act. The three properties were the Hotel Raunaq Afroz, also known as Delhi Zaika, Shabnam Guest House and six rooms in Damarwala building.

Dawood Ibrahim is the mastermind of the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts. He is listed as a global terrorist by the UN Security Council's IS and al-Qaida Sanctions Committee.

India's assertion that he has been sheltered by Pakistan was confirmed recently when the latest list of terror organisations and terrorists released by the UN Security Council included Dawood Ibrahim and his Karachi address.
The CBI has registered three cases against Kuldeep Singh Sengar in regard to the crime he allegedly committed in 2017. (Photo: File/PTI)

Lucknow: The Yogi Adityanath government has withdrawn security personnel assigned to Uttar Pradesh BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar, who was arrested by the CBI in connection with the alleged rape of 17-year-old girl from Unnao district.

The lawmaker had the 'Y' category security cover, which entitled him to 11 security men, including commandos and police personnel.

The CBI, which is probing the Unnao rape case, has registered three cases against Sengar in regard to the crime he allegedly committed in 2017.

Read: Unnao rape: Accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar sent to 7-day CBI custody

The Uttar Pradesh police had charged him under sections 363 (kidnapping), 366 (abduction of woman), 376 (rape), 506 (criminal intimidation) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, and handed over the case to the CBI.

A special CBI court on Monday recorded statement of the alleged victim. The in-camera statement was recorded under section 164 of the Code of Criminal Procedure.

Last week, the probe agency also made a second arrest in the Unnao rape case. It took into custody Shashi Singh, the woman who allegedly took the victim to Sengar on the day of crime.

Also Read: Second arrest in Unnao rape case: CBI nabs woman who lured victim to MLA

(With inputs from ANI)
A delegation comprising 10 different Muslim organisations led by AIMIM president and Hyderabad MP Asaduddin Owaisi comes out of Raj Bhavan after submitting a memorandum to AP and TS Governor E.S.L. Narasimhan on Thursday. (Photo:DC)

Hyderabad: A delegation of Muslim religious scholars, led by the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen chief Asaduddin Owaisi, on Thursday met Governor E.S.L. Narasimhan at the Raj Bhavan here.

The meet was to convey the despair over the verdict of the Macca Masjid blast case. Coming out of the Raj Bhavan after the meet, Mr Asaduddin Owaisi said, We met the Governor to not only convey our sense of despair and sadness to the Centre but also requested to appeal for a re-trial or appeal in the higher courts of law against this verdict that let the terrorists go free.

He added that the whole prosecution was compromised and was conducted by an inexperienced lawyer who had never conducted murder trial before. Its a proof that NIA was acting at the behest of the BJP government. Five persons, including Swami Aseemanand, who were charged by the National Investigation Agency were acquitted in the case.

Mr Asaduddin Owaisi also expressed dismay over the acquittal of all the accused in the Vatoli case in Adilabad where six members of a family were burned to death in 2008. We also asked the Governor to take up the case to the government, he said.

Recalling the police firing after the Macca Masjid bomb blast resulting in the killing of five persons, Mr Asaduddin Owaisi said the government had constituted the Justice (retd) Bhaskar Rao Commission to probe the police firing. It has been almost eight years. The commission submitted its report but till date, neither the report has been made public nor has it been tabled in the Assembly. We urged the Governor to ensure the report is made public, he said.

The Hyderabad MP staged a stir in the public meeting when he said that all those involved in terror attacks these days were illegitimate children of Nathuram Godse.

Terrorism has become a new religion itself. All those who carried out bomb blasts in Macca Masjid, Ajmer Shareef and Samjhauta express are illegitimate children of Nathuram Godse, Mr Asaduddin Owaisi said.
In a recent report, the Centre for Global Development made a surprising and somewhat startling observation. Looking at the data from several recent studies, they noted that even the very best international development programmes to reduce global poverty could only produce outcomes that were 40 times less successful than the income gain people in poor countries experienced when their citizens were provided greater labour mobility. In simple non-economist terms, it means that visas work faster and better to reduce global poverty by a lot than even the very best international development programmes.

The visa, then, with the promise of mobility that it holds, is one of the few single things that has the greatest capacity to eliminate global poverty than anything else in the world. What is true, however, is not always popular, and this is certainly true of the visa solution. While this may be true, the extent of the discrepancy between the effectiveness of international aid programmes versus work visas is quite alarming. A study published in Science magazine reveals how intensive and highly targeted programmes directed at poor countries were successful at reducing poverty even if they were far more expensive to implement and produce. Even so, the mood of the announcement was triumphant; pricey as it may be, their study had found that international aid could work. The fact that work visas and access to labour markets work better was never mentioned.

The omission is not surprising. As another study has noted, the infrastructure of aid depends on hierarchies in which Western experts imported into impoverished environments diagnose how and what poor countries must do to escape persistent poverty.

Behind all of this, there is a hierarchy at work and it always involves donor countries and their experts being at the top. This is even more visible in public presentations of development work at this or that conference; in one example, noted in the report, an organiser had to fight to ensure that at least one Arabic speaker be included in a panel on international development in the Middle East and the North African region.

Its not just panels and experts that are the problem; it is also the impact of these interventions on local populations. Take, for instance, the issue of capacity building, a term of art deployed when aid is handed out in poor communities but little improvement is seen in their metrics.

At this point, capacity building enters to save the day, that is, to introduce skills, such as financial management, entrepreneurship, etc that would hypothetically enable better results and prove the development programmes effective after all. Few of these capacity-building programmes actually deliver the promised, improved results.

The reason is simple. Contrary to the assumption that aid grants exist solely to eliminate global poverty in the worlds most wanting populations, the international aid system is also a moral hierarchy. The aid grantors are at the top; they have the most and know the best, but in addition to all that they are also morally superior, willing to grant assistance with little expectation in return. They are the worlds altruists, whose purity of purpose lends them the authority that no others possess. They can pretend that they are doing good while expecting nothing at all in return.

When this moral aspect of international aid and aid giving in general is noted, the international aid system can be recast not as a means of actually helping the poor but rather a means via which a moral hierarchy is created and maintained  the worlds wealthy, also the worlds noblest, inhabiting its summit, and the wanting at the bottom.

Seen against this, the purpose of development programmes may not actually be to reduce poverty or eliminate it but rather to enable the continued existence of this moral hierarchy. Permitting some programme of labour mobility would dismantle this structure, whose moral currency permits the West to justify wars, trade restrictions and so much else that enable the maintenance of Western dominance. Research shows that an individuals own desire to change his or her circumstances is the best predictor of success in escaping poverty, but is often ignored.

Even while virtual platforms of communication enable organisation and discussion across national and continental boundaries and time zones, Western countries continue to rely on the archaic premises that borders are real, racial and religious difference are threats and the basis on which opportunities are distributed. It is not the lack of capacity or initiative among farmers in sub-Saharan Africa or shepherds in Ethiopia, then, that explain the persistence of global poverty, it is the inability of these people to travel freely to work where the jobs are.

By arrangement with Dawn
Stressing his disadvantaged background and his early days as a tea seller, Mr Modi seemed to bond with a gathering that was eating out of his hand in a lengthy session in which he didnt say anything new. (Photo: Twitter | ANI)

The irony is inescapable that Indias Prime Minister is more at home in front of an NRI audience than with fellow citizens in New Delhi or Chennai. In his comfort zone while speaking before those who can understand Hindi, Mr Modi held forth in an impressive fashion speaking on issues he usually skirts in India and which he addressed only when national outrage built up over the beastly rapes of young girls demanding a response from him. In his well-attended Town Hall meeting at a historic venue in London, the PM made a belated attempt to justify his earlier silence in India over the rapes, making the valid point that different governments cant be compared on the metrics of incidence. Stressing his disadvantaged background and his early days as a tea seller, Mr Modi seemed to bond with a gathering that was eating out of his hand in a lengthy session in which he didnt say anything new.

Its a sign of changing times that Mr Modi should be greeted by protesters in London too, including those from minorities like Sikhs and Muslims who brought up their sense of insecurity. Not having shown any inclination to meet the media or the electorate which voted his party into power, Mr Modi fielded questions at Westminster and spoke at length on issues ranging from education for youth, jobs for the young and medicines for the elderly in Modicare, which he said reaches at least half the Indian population. It appears he has cultivated a certain dissonance from hot issues that are being stridently debated across India, except at election meetings where his rhetoric can be sharp, if divisive. He did acknowledge in London, though, that there is criticism against him, out of which he says he makes stairs on which he climbs, metaphorically of course.

Theres no reason to doubt the genuine warmth in ties with the old colonial masters who face post-Brexit challenges and need friends and allies in a setting that has changed dramatically after the referendum. With a billion-dollar Indian investment on the anvil , that may save thousands of UK jobs, Mr Modi was a hit with PM Theresa May. For the first time, India also criticised Russia, albeit indirectly, in a reference to the appalling nerve agent attack in the joint statement with Britain regarding the suspected killing by Russian agents on foreign soil.

That was the one notable thing in an otherwise friendly bilateral that was part of the good optics of Mr Modis UK trip. The bonhomie again shows how Indias diplomacy has had a smooth sail away from South Asia in the past four years. Domestic issues in India may not have been addressed as assiduously. Indias market size, as much as Chinas, tends to lend it importance abroad, in which Prime Minister Modi revels.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket transporting the Tess satellite lifts off from launch complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Fla.(Photo: AP)

NASAs Tess spacecraft embarked Wednesday on a quest to find new worlds around neighbouring stars that could support life. Tess rode a SpaceX Falcon rocket through the evening sky, aiming for an orbit stretching all the way to the moon.

The satellite  the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or Tess  will scan almost the entire sky for at least two years, staring at the closest, brightest stars in an effort to find and identify any planets around them. Hundreds of thousands of stars will be scrutinised, with the expectation that thousands of exoplanets  planets outside our own solar system  will be revealed right in our cosmic backyard.

Rocky and icy planets, hot gas giants and, possibly, water worlds. Super-Earths between the sizes of Earth and Neptune. Maybe even an Earth twin. The sky will become more beautiful, will become more awesome knowing there are planets orbiting the stars we see twinkling at night, said NASAs top science administrator, Thomas Zurbuchen.

Discoveries by Tess and other missions, he noted, will bring us closer to answering questions that have lingered for thousands of years. Does life exist beyond Earth? If so, is it microbial or more advanced?

But Tess wont look for life. Its not designed for that. Rather, it will scout for planets of all sorts, but especially those in the so-called Goldilocks or habitable zone of a star: an orbit where temperatures are neither too cold nor too hot, but just right for life-nourishing water.

The most promising candidates will be studied by bigger, more powerful observatories of the future, including NASAs James Webb Space Telescope, due to launch in another few years as the heir to Hubble. These telescopes will scour the planets atmospheres for any of the ingredients of life: water vapour, oxygen, methane, carbon dioxide.

Tess will tell us where to look at and when to look, said the missions chief scientist, George Ricker of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Tess is the successor to NASAs Kepler Space Telescope, on its last legs after discovering a few thousand exoplanets over the past nine years.

Astronomers anticipate more than doubling Keplers confirmed planetary count of more than 2,600, once Tess four wide-view cameras begin scientific observations in early summer. Unlike Tess, Kepler could only scour a sliver of the sky.

The total exoplanet census currently stands at more than 3,700 confirmed, with another 4,500 on the not-yet-verified list. Thats a lot considering the first one popped up barely two decades ago.

Until about 25 years ago, the only known planets were in our own solar system, noted NASAs director of astrophysics, Paul Hertz.

While Kepler has focused on stars thousands of light-years away, Tess will concentrate on our stellar neighbours, dozens or hundreds of light-years away. Most of Tess targets will be cool, common red dwarf stars, thought to be rich breeding grounds for planets.

To find the planets, Tess will use the same transit method employed by Kepler, watching for regular, fleeting dips in stellar brightness that would indicate a planet passing in front of its star. Thats the best astronomers can do for now.

By sticking to stars closer to home, it will be easier for Webb and other massive telescopes planned for space and Earth to sniff out possible signs of life in the atmosphere. It also will be more feasible for robotic explorers to set sail for these new worlds in the decades and centuries ahead.

For such a large undertaking, Tess is surprisingly compact and its mission relatively inexpensive at $337 million.

Smaller than a stacked washer-dryer, the 5-foot-tall, 4-foot-wide, 800-pound spacecraft (1.5-meters by 1.2-meters and 362 kilograms) is bound for an elongated orbit of Earth, with the far end skirting the orbit of the moon.

Tess should come within a few thousand miles of the lunar surface on May 17. The moons gravity will help get the satellite in the right orbit and keep it there. The cameras  equipped with wide-angle lenses a mere 4 inches across (10 centimetres)  will be off during the lunar flyby.

No moon selfie, said Robert Lockwood of Orbital ATK, which built Tess.

Tess team members revelled in Wednesdays smooth, photogenic flight through clear skies, and NASA officials were delighted to clear the way for a May 5 launch of the Mars lander, InSight, from California.

SpaceX employees had another reason to celebrate: The first-stage booster rocket landed on an ocean platform following lift-off, to be recycled for a future NASA mission.

It was incredible, it was so emotional, said MIT researcher Natalia Guerrero. I cant wait to get started on collecting data.

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Walter Moody, 83-year-old man convicted of murdering a US judge and an attorney. (Photo: AP)

Washington: Alabama has executed Walter Moody, an 83-year-old man convicted of murdering a US judge and an attorney with pipe bombs, officials said.

Moody is the oldest person to be executed in the United States since the country reinstated capital punishment in the 1970s, replacing John Nixon, who was put to death at age 77 in 2005, according to data from the Death Penalty Information Centre.

"Walter Leroy Moody has been executed for the 1989 murder of Federal Judge Robert Vance," Alabama Governor Kay Ivey's office said in a statement.

"He was also convicted of a similar pipe bomb death of a Georgia attorney," according to a statement from the state's attorney general, Steve Marshall.

Vance was killed and his wife injured when a bomb exploded at their home in Birmingham, Alabama, in December 1989.

Lawyer Robert Robinson was killed in the same way two days later in Savannah, Georgia. He had represented a black rights association.

Other parcel bombs were found in the offices of the Atlanta appeals court of which Vance was a member and in the offices of the NAACP black rights association in Jacksonville, Florida.

A group called Americans for a Competent Federal Judicial System claimed the attacks.

It threatened more in retaliation for the rape and murder of white woman Julie Love by two black men in Atlanta in 1988.

Moody, who bore a grudge against the judicial system after his conviction for possessing explosives, was arrested for the bombings in 1990 and sentenced to death for Vance's murder in 1997.
The web portal reported that the UK officials have arranged for a replacement flag to be put up at the Parliament Square. (Photo: ANI | Twitter)

United Kingdom: British foreign office has apologised for India's national flag-burning incident, which took place at London's Parliament Square on Wednesday.

A group of Pakistan backed pro-Khalistani and Kashmiri protesters, in the presence of London Metropolitan Police, pulled down the tricolor from a pole at London's Parliament Square and replaced it with a flag representing PoK and Khalistan.

The incident took place when Prime Minister Narendra Modi was addressing the Indian community at Westminster on Wednesday.

"While people have the right to hold peaceful protests, we are disappointed with the action taken by a small minority in Parliament Square and contacted High Commissioner Yashvardhan Kumar Sinha as soon as we were made aware," according to Foreign and Commonwealth Office's statement, reported by asianlite.com.

The web portal also reported that the UK officials have arranged for a replacement flag to be put up at the Parliament Square.

The foreign office also mentioned that Prime Minister Modi's visit "has strengthened our relationship with India and we look forward to working even more closely together on a number of important areas."

The Indian Journalist Association has also taken note of the incident and called for a strong action against the wrongdoers.
London: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday had a series of bilateral meetings, including discussions with his Bangladesh counterpart Sheikh Hasina and Seychelles President Danny Faure on the sidelines of the multilateral Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting here.

The Ministry of External Affairs later said the two leaders discussed the developmental cooperation between India and Bangladesh, and also ways to implement decisions taken during earlier meetings between the two prime ministers.

Modi also met Seychelles President Faure and discussed cooperation in areas of trade and investment and other bilateral issues, he said.

The bilateral talks between Faure and Modi assumes significance after Seychelles ordered an inquiry into the leak of a highly classified agreement signed with India to develop infrastructure on Assumption Island, which lies southwest of the mainland of Mahe.

The opposition in Seychelles has decided not to ratify the pact because of Assumption's relative proximity to Aldabra atoll. Officials had earlier indicated that no meeting has been requested or scheduled with Pakistan Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and later confirmed there was no interaction between the two.

The pull-aside meetings included an interaction with Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, Gambian President Adama Barrow, Fiji PM Frank Bainimarama, St Lucia PM Allen Chastanet and PM of Solomon Islands, Rick Houenipwela.
'We are investigating to find out why he killed his ex-wife,' police said. (Photo: Representational)

Phnom Penh: A Cambodian man murdered his ex-wife and then jumped off a bridge in a suicide that he broadcast live on Facebook, police said on Friday, in the first such case reported in the country.

Facebook is the social media platform of choice for Cambodians. Nearly a third of the countrys 15.8 million people are Facebook users and the network is a major source of information, particularly for young people.

Ra Chhay Rath, 21, killed his former wife at a school on Thursday then went to the nearby Tsubasa bridge, in Kandal province, and jumped into the Mekong river. Only the suicide was broadcast, police said.

It has never happened before. It was the first case, police spokesman Kirth Chantharith told Reuters, referring to the broadcast of the suicide.

We are investigating to find out why he killed his ex-wife.

Police said the mans body had not been found.

Reuters was able to access videos of the suicide on Friday shared by Facebook users. It was not immediately clear whether anyone had reported the video or asked for it to be taken down.

A spokesman for Facebook later said the company was deeply saddened by this tragedy and that it had removed the video.

We dont allow the promotion of violence or suicide on Facebook and have removed the video, the spokesman said in an email to Reuters.

We want people to have a safe experience on Facebook and we work with organisations around the world to provide assistance for people in distress.

In 2017, Facebook said it would expand its pattern recognition software after successful tests in the United States to detect users with suicidal intent.

Facebook has been embroiled in a number of content moderation controversies over recent years.

It has also been accused by human rights advocates of not doing enough to weed out hate messages while it faces questions in several countries about data privacy.
The Australian Broadcasting Corp cited one official saying the exchanges with the Chinese navy were polite but 'robust'. (Photo: Representational | File)

Beijing/Melbourne: Chinese and Australian naval vessels had an "encounter" in the South China Sea this week, and China acted professionally and lawfully, its defence ministry said, rejecting reports China challenged Australian warships.

The Australian Defence Department confirmed three ships had recently travelled to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam but declined to comment on "operational details related to ships transiting the South China Sea".

The Australian Broadcasting Corp cited one official saying the exchanges with the Chinese navy were polite but "robust".

China's Defence Ministry said in a statement the reports in Australian media "did not accord with the facts".

"The Chinese side's ships used professional language to communicate with the Australian side, and their operations were lawful, in compliance, professional and safe," it said.

The "encounter" happened on Sunday, it said.

China recently completed extensive military exercises in the South China Sea, where its claims are hotly disputed by Vietnam as well as the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei. Taiwan also lays claim to most of the sea.

Earlier, Australia's Defence Department said in a statement emailed to Reuters that its forces had "maintained a robust programme of international engagement with countries in and around the South China Sea for decades".

"As they have done for many decades, Australian vessels and aircraft will continue to exercise rights under international law to freedom of navigation and over-flight, including in the South China Sea," the Defence Department said.

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, in London for a Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting, declined to confirm the interaction between the Australian warships and the Chinese military, Fairfax media reported.

"No problem"

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a daily news briefing China's consistent position was to support and actively safeguard the right of all countries to have freedom of navigation and over-flight in the South China Sea, in accordance with international law.

"If Australia is referring to freedom of navigation in accordance with international laws, there is no problem whatsoever," Hua said in Beijing.

"But if Australia has other motives, we hope it can see the trend in the South China Sea is stable and improving, and work together with China and other neighbouring countries for the peace and stability of the region."

China's construction of islands and military facilities in the South China Sea, through which some USD 3 trillion in trade passes annually, has sparked concern it is seeking to restrict free movement and extend its strategic reach.

The United States has conducted "freedom of navigation patrols" through the South China Sea, stoking tension with China which says it will protect its sovereignty.

Australia is a staunch US ally.

Its navy ships Anzac, Toowoomba and Success are on a three-month deployment in Southeast Asia, which will involve exercises with a number of countries in the region, the Australian Defence Department said in a statement on April 17.

The Toowoomba sailed to Vietnam from Malaysia, while the other two Australian warships went through the South China Sea from Subic Bay in the Philippines.
The woman, who has been married to a Frenchman since 2010, appealed the April 2017 decision, calling it an 'abuse of power'. (Photo: AFP | Representational)

Paris: France's highest administrative court has upheld a decision to deny a French passport to an Algerian Muslim who refused to shake hands with officials during her citizenship ceremony, according to a ruling seen by AFP Thursday.

The woman argued that her "religious beliefs" prevented her from shaking hands with a senior official presiding over the citizenship ceremony in the southeastern Isere region in June 2016, as well as with a local politician.

The government said her behaviour showed she was "not assimilated into the French community" -- one of the reasons it can invoke under the civil code to oppose citizenship for the spouse of a French national.

The woman, who has been married to a Frenchman since 2010, appealed the April 2017 decision, calling it an "abuse of power".

But the Council of State, the court of last appeal in such matters, ruled the government "had not improperly applied" the law.
Former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir Omar Abdullah on Friday termed his "heckling" by some Kashmiri-Americans at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) as a "tamasha".

Soon after a video, in which he was called a "criminal" and an "Indian agent" following his speech at UC Berkeley, went viral, Omar tweeted, "I had a great session at @UCBerkeley & dont let anyone tell you otherwise. FOUR hecklers (in an audience of 150+) who waited till the event concluded to make YouTube videos of themselves can't take away from an excellent Q&A session there (sic)."

In the video, a few Kashmiri-Americans are seen confronting Abdullah as he was leaving after the speech.

The protesters threatened to take him to the International Criminal Court and accused him of playing "dirty politics".

In his next tweet, Abdullah said that he was looking forward to the organisers of the event uploading the video of the entire session so that people would know the "substantial stuff" before the "short tamasha".

"And lastly Ive never claimed to be universally loved or even liked so if 4 people in such a large audience make their dislike known its really not such a big deal at all. At least no one threw eggs or a shaving foam pie at me," he added.
A 31-year-old woman from Punjab's Hoshiarpur district, who went on a pilgrimage to Pakistan on April 12 ahead of Baisakhi festival as part of a delegation, has reportedly converted to Islam and married a Pakistan national based in Lahore.

The woman Kiran Bala, a widow, has three children and was staying with her parents-in-law in Punjab.

Her husband died in 2013. Kiran's father-in-law, Tarsem Singh, on Thursday added a new twist to the entire episode while expressing fear that his daughter-in-law may have fallen into the hands of Pakistan's ISI.

He claimed that she was forced to convert to Islam.

The woman was a part of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) delegation that left for Pakistan on April 12.

She went missing for four days in Pakistan. Now, she has applied for an extension of her visa in Pakistan, claiming a threat to her life in India, media reports said.

Kiran's Pakistan visa will expire on April 21.

According to reports, the woman converted to Islam from Darul-Aloom Jamia Naeemia in Lahore on April 16.

Later, the marriage was solemnised with one Muhammed Azam, a resident of Lahore. She now has a new name  Amna Bibi.

Hundreds of Indian Sikh pilgrims had gone to Pakistan on the occasion of Baisakhi on April 13 to visit historical Sikh shrines, including Panja Sahib Gurdwara near Lahore and Nankana Sahib Sikh shrine, which is the birthplace of Sikhism founder Guru Nanak Dev.

The pilgrimage to Pakistan has seen controversies over the week with officials of Pakistani agencies denying permission to Indian embassy officials based in Pakistan to meet the visiting delegation.

The family said they have not been contacted officially by the SGPC or any authority to authenticate the information pouring out of media reports.
Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said, that a win for Congress in the 2018 Karnataka polls, will be a stepping stone for not only the party but would result in the revival of national politics.

The victory for the Congress in the Karnataka Assembly polls is not only in the interest of the party. Congress and like-minded parties will bounce back at the Centre in the 2019 polls if we win in 2018, he said.

He was participating in an interaction with media persons at the Mysuru District Journalists Association (MDJA) here, on Friday.

Contest from Badami

Siddaramaiah said he will take a decision on Saturday morning, on contesting from Badami in Bagalkot district after a discussion with AICC president Rahul Gandhi.

He said, he never wanted to contest from Badami, but MLAs and other leaders from Bagalkot and Vijayapur districts have been pressuring him to contest from the crucial constituency. It is believed that strategically, Siddaramaiah contesting in Badami, would mean strengthening the Congress in the North Karnataka region.

The party high command also wanted me to contest from Badami (besides Chamundeshwari). The demand stands. I will take a call tomorrow morning, the CM said.

He expressed his displeasure, when a comparison was drawn between him and B Y Vijayendra, son of former chief minister B S Yeddyurappa. The question was How do you justify your contest from Badami, where you are an outsider, when you describe Vijayendra, who is contesting from your present constituency of Varuna, as one (outsider)?

Challenge to Shah

Siddaramaiah challenged BJP national president Amit Shah to declare that the latter is not a Jain.

BJP leaders, who do not have a development agenda for the polls, are making baseless allegations. Taking a cue from my Ahinda success, they have started calling me Ahindu. Shah, who calls me A hindu is not a Hindu at all. He is a Jain. Let him declare himself not a Jain, Siddaramaiah dared.

I am more Hindu than those who claim to be guardians of Hindus. My Hinduism is based on humanity. If the BJP leaders had humanity, during the clash in Dakshina Kannada, Muslim youths would not be killed. When they visited the house of the Hindu victim, they should have visited the house of the Muslim victim also, he said.

Who said JD(S) is secular?

Pointing out that leaders of both the BJP and JD(S) have been targeting him, he said, Yeddyurappa had stopped speaking out against former chief minister H D Kumaraswamy, and the latter against Yeddyurappa.

There is a hidden agenda among the opposition parties. While the BJP is under the illusion that it will form the next government in Karnataka, JD(S) wishes a hung Assembly. Who said S in the JD(S) stands for secular? If JD(S) was secular, why did it join hands with communal BJP to form the government in 2006? the CM asked.
SALT LAKE CITY  Utah State University announced Wednesday that the school's president had removed Stacy Sturgeon from her position as Title IX coordinator in response to an investigation that found gender discrimination and sexual misconduct went unchecked for years in the schools music department, according to Tim Vitale, a spokesman for the university.

The move comes nearly two weeks after the school released the findings of an independent investigative report which reflected interviews with 60 witnesses and hundreds of pages of documents. The report stated that between 1994 and 2012, students or parents complained of a series of incidents involving sexual harassment by four members of the music department faculty.

In conjunction with the report's release, USU President Noelle Cockett announced changes to the piano program faculty and said that the office that oversees harassment and sexual misconduct complaints would be reorganized.

In an email to faculty and staff on Wednesday, Cockett said there are more changes ahead including the hiring of a prevention specialist and other additional staff.

These changes will help us more effectively prevent future sexual misconduct and discrimination, thereby enhancing the safety of our campus, Cockett wrote in the email.

Prior to the independent investigation into the music department, Utah State was already under fire for its handling of Title IX complaints. Title IX is a federal law that tries to protect students at universities from sex-based discrimination.

Last January, the Department of Justice began investigating how Utah State responds to reports of sexual assault after three students, not associated with the music department, were charged or convicted of high profile sexual assaults, alleged to have occurred between 2013 and 2015.

In addition to the inquiry at Utah State, federal officials are currently conducting investigations into the handling of sexual misconduct allegations at 337 colleges across the country, including University of Utah, Brigham Young University, and Utah Valley University, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Cocketts email stated that Scott Bodily will fill the coordinator role temporarily, while the university searches for a permanent replacement. Bodily served as a detective with the Logan Police Department for seven years, where he coordinated police investigations of rape, homicide and child abuse.

In March 2017, Bodily began working as a specialist for the USU Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Office.

Vitale added that during the transition of leadership the university will contract with outside counsel to assist with Title IX investigations.

The monthlong investigation, which took place between February and March, resulted in an 18-page partially redacted report which found that for decades the piano program at USU discriminated against women. The report also said that little was done to address sexual misconduct. The report recommended that professor Gary Amano, former head of the piano program, be dismissed from the university, and that professor Dennis Hirst be removed from serving as the interim head of the program. Amano submitted a letter announcing his retirement April 2, and a few days later, on April 6, Cockett announced Hirst had been removed from his position as interim head of the piano program.

Unfortunately, until mid-2017, the universitys music department and Title IX office did little to address the problem despite repeated opportunities to confront professor Amano and respond to complaints, the report stated.

The report was clear that many aspects of leadership at the university fell short, Vitale told the Deseret News Wednesday. President Cockett has made it clear that she is looking closely at the report and not backing away from it.

Camille Jensen Weber, a current senior in the USU piano program filed a Title IX report against Amano in the Spring of 2017, alleging that Amano lost his temper and made personal, demeaning insults toward her after she asked for help preparing for a test.

Weber, 24, said she liked the way the Title IX office, and Sturgeon, treated her at the time of her complaint and felt she was taken seriously. "I felt like they were doing a good job," Hansen said. But Hansen never received a report of the university's conclusions, nor was she notified of how her complaint was handled, she said. Before the start of the new school year, she got an email from Amano saying he was going on sabbatical.

Webers classmate Lexie Hansen, 21, also a senior in the piano program, said she filed a Title IX report against Amano, alleging unfair treatment and public humiliation, and talked to Sturgeon about her experience around the same time Weber did. Hansen said that when she requested a copy of her own written complaint from the Title IX office the following year in 2018, the office would not send it to her. According to Hansen, the office incorrectly filed her report as a witness account rather than as a first-hand complaint.

They told me they filed me as a witness to Camilles situation. But thats not true. I filed my own complaint, said Hansen. My file is magically gone.

Weber and Hansen said they saw Amano's dismissal as an appropriate resolution to their reports.

Whitney McPhie Griffith, who filed a Title IX complaint in 2009 after she was allegedly raped by a piano instructor, told the Deseret News that Sturgeon did not record her testimony accurately. My experiences with her were never positive ones, Griffith said of Sturgeon.

Multiple attempts to reach Sturgeon Wednesday were not successful. Vitale would not confirm whether Sturgeon was fired or voluntarily stepped down, nor would he clarify whether she is still employed at the university in another capacity. Currently, the school's website lists Sturgeon's job title as Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Specialist and shows that Bodily is the Interim Title IX coordinator.

Vitale said, There is still much work to do.

When you receive a report that is as explicit in its criticism and then its recommendations as the one that we received, you cant help but sit up a little straighter and internalize it, and then say how do we move forward as an institution? he said.
SALT LAKE CITY  Chris Mautz and Darin Piccoli, owners of the popular downtown music venue the State Room, are opening a new venue in Salt Lake City.

The announcement was made Thursday morning via a press release. The new venue, called the Commonwealth Room, is located at 195 W. Commonwealth Ave. (2100 South) and seats approximately 700. The State Room, by contrast, seats 299.

Chris and I have been developing the idea of a larger music venue over the last few years, Piccoli said in the press release. From the first time we walked into this space, the old Rock/K2 Church, we felt we had found a venue that could deliver the vibe we seek when it comes to the concertgoers as well as artist experience.

The Commonwealth Rooms opening night  a free event featuring the Portland, Oregon, band Sepiatonic  is scheduled for May 5. According to the bands Facebook page, Sepiatonic is a vaudeville-style belly dance, burlesque and musical project.

We are humbled by the connections we have made with patrons of the State Room and are often overwhelmed by the musical memories that have been shared, Mautz said in the press release. Being able to expand with the Commonwealth Room would not have been possible without the incredible support of the community.

The Commonwealth Room also announced its lineup of shows through September. Heres whos playing:

May 5: Sepiatonic

May 9: Reckless Kelly

May 12: The Young Dubliners

June 8: Junior Brown

June 26: The Milk Carton Kids

July 13: Karl Densons Tiny Universe

July 21: James McMurtry

Aug. 12: Robert Earl Keen

Aug. 13: Punch Brothers

Sept. 5: Midge Ure and Paul Young

Sept. 7: Josh Ritter and The Royal City Band

Sept. 14: Marcus King Band

Sept. 15: Houndmouth

Sept. 27: Graham Nash

Tickets for all shows go on sale Friday, April 20, at 12 p.m. via Ticketfly. For more information, visit thecommonwealthroom.com and facebook.com/commonwealthSLC. The Commonwealth Room can also be found on Instagram and Twitter at CommonwealthSLC.
BENGALURU, India  Clad in bright clothing showcasing the energy and beauty of this nation, Indian Latter-day Saints line up, hours before a scheduled meeting with President Russell M. Nelson on Thursday.

Collectively they speak of two things: The leader of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the temple he recently announced for their nation.

Weeks earlier, in the closing moments of general conference, President Nelson said the LDS Church would build seven new temples  including one in Bengaluru.

But it almost wasnt so.

Our plans were to announce six new temples at conference time, said President Nelson. The Lord told me on the eve of conference: Announce a temple in India.  That was the Lord's doing.

The new temple is proof of how much the Lord thinks about members here and loves them, said Robert William, an Area Seventy in India.

President Nelsons visit to India  the fifth stop on his world ministry tour  marks a return to the nation and people he learned to love 52 years ago. In Bengaluru, he conducted meetings with members and full-time missionaries and also viewed possible temple sites.

Global Missionary Tour

Follow the Deseret News as we chronicle President Russel M. Nelson's travels through seven countries around the world.As part of the nearly-two-week trip, President Nelson also visited England, Jerusalem, Kenya, and Zimbabwe. After leaving India, President Nelson  accompanied by his wife, Sister Wendy Nelson, and Elder Jeffrey R. Holland and his wife, Sister Patricia Holland  plans to visit Thailand on Friday and Hong Kong on Saturday.

An intense nation

Standing on a street corner within walking distance of the LDS churchs member meeting in Bengaluru, visitors view three Hindu temples, two Christian churches, and a Muslim mosque. Motorcycles, auto jeepnees and cars maneuver the street to the constant sound of honking horns. Locals milk cows, then sell the liquid by the cup, along with chickens, produce and spices. The pungent smell of fresh meat lingers.

There is no running water in this neighborhood, home to thousands, yet across the street a high-rise complex houses the nations wealthiest residents.

In India it rains with sweat and insects and floods  and that is just before 10 a.m., Elder Holland told missionaries in the churchs India Bengaluru Mission.

A country of deep spirituality, dense populations, spicy food, and bright colors, Indias residents are used to intensity.

They are not wimpy people, said Sister Nelson. They know the riggors. When they receive the gospel of Jesus Christ, they hold fast to that.

First visit

It has been 52 years since President Nelson first visited India in 1966 to participate in the Fifth World Congress of Cardiology in New Dehli. A young stake president and experienced cardiac surgeon, he met with other world-class doctors and shared information. He returned to the country to teach and cooperate on patients.

In 1992, he returned again, this time as an LDS apostle. I felt something special here, he said. They love God, and I love them.

The city, now 12 million strong, has grown exponentially, in the last half century, he said.

This place and the intense energy here  as well as other stops on the tour  have invigorated President Nelson, said his wife.

He is doing so well, she said of the trips long hours, flights, and his addresses to multiple congregations, adding I just watch him getting happier and younger as the trip goes on."

Since January the man that I greet at the end of that day is different, just a little bit different, than the man I said goodbye to in the morning, said Sister Nelson of President Nelson.

But on this trip, meeting with congregations across the world, the difference was jaw-dropping, she said. The man at the pulpit spoke with profound clarity, boldness and focus.

I watch him even become younger at the pulpit, she said. I said to him, Do you realize that you shed about 20 years there. That was just amazing. I saw him 63, 73, never 93, Sister Nelson said. I watch the Lord move upon him in a most remarkable way.

Worldwide ministry

The first missionaries arrived in India in 1851. But the church did not organize a first mission in the country, the India Bengaluru Mission, until 1993, more than 140 years later. The first meetinghouse was dedicated in 2002, and the first stake was created in 2012.

Elder Randy D. Funk, a General Authority Seventy and former mission president in India, said watching the church and its members grow in strength and beauty in India has been a choice experience.

When he arrived in south India eight years ago, two districts in the area had just been divided into five smaller districts. Today, there are three strong stakes and three strong districts in south India, with a fourth stake in New Delhi.

Elder Holland first came to India as the churchs Commissioner of Education in 1977. I was here to a district conference three years ago. At that time I thought, This district is as strong as any district I have been in. It is bound to be a stake, surely we will have a temple, Elder Holland recalled. We had that stake, and now we have a temple.

It is wonderful to see the church being born in a sense before your eyes.

Elder Holland said the growth in India is just beginning. You cant imagine what is going to happen in India, he said. Your loftiest dreams  will be painfully shortsighted.

Elder William said the announcement of the temple in India "is by far the most exciting thing that has happened."

"This is their dream come true. Most of the membership are trying to digest this announcement. Now they do not have to travel to a foreign country with visa and other issues taunting them. They will now see their own children getting married in their own temple.

A temple

Gideion Piabhudas is a second-generation member in India. The temple announcement left him "speechless." When he could talk, he made himself a promise. He would do whatever he could to help build the temple in India.

Sister Monica Yadav, a LDS missionary from India, said she never thought in her lifetime she would see a prophet or have a temple in her country.

It makes us fly, she said. It is like we are so close to heaven.

Many in India have suffered much to go to the temple, taking time from work, managing finances and dealing with customs in foreign countries. Now those days are behind members in India, she said.

In addition, the temple will bring her family a special blessing.

Yadav began her mission in February 2017; her grandmother died three months later in May. Now I can do my grandmothers temple work, she said.

Elder ManshrichanaKya Gollapalli, also a missionary from India, attended LDS Primary as a youth with his Mormon uncle. He knew the words to I am a Child of God, before he was 8.

When his uncle moved away, a former church associate  who was then serving as a missionary  sought Gollapalli out, and he was baptized at age 13. His mother and younger brother followed. Now he is sure the temple will motivate his father to investigate the church.

Indias future

Experts predict that India  home to 17 percent of the worlds population  will soon be the worlds most populous nation with 1.35 billion people, including some of the worlds most poor.

President Nelson said church leaders worry about members in every country.

Our approach is to take the poverty out of the people, not the people out of the poverty, he said. As we teach them that God loves them and as they keep his commandments, they will have joy in their life and they will be liberated from the bondage, not only of sin but of deprivation. The gospel of Jesus Christ has only one purpose, really.

"Bottom line: That is to make life better for people. That is what we are going to do.

Elder Holland said the gospel energizes its members. We have seen it all over the world and we see it in India. We have seen it in the generation of the church here.  We dont try to attack the social or cultural issues so much as we bless the people and they rise above it.

Elder Holland said President Nelson hasnt stopped smiling since he announced the temple for India.

As the Church grows in various part of the world, temple building is essential, said President Nelson. It was a thrill for me to receive the real impression that I should announce that there will be a temple here in India. This will bless not only the people of India but in neighboring nations.

In a way, he said, it is easier for us to build a temple, than it is for us to build a people who are ready for the ordinances and covenants of the temple. It is going to take you a while to get ready.

With a temple in India, members will have to give up contention, learn to love one another even better than we already do, we will have to keep the commandments, we will have to be honest, we will have to be fair, we will have to be covenant-keeping people.

President Nelson told the congregation he is looking forward to returning to India to participate in the temples dedication. I am 93 years old, he said. You have better hurry.

That will be a happy day, he concluded. That will be the only day that will be even happier for me than today.

Correction: In an earlier version of this story, Gideion Piabhudas's first name was incorrectly spelled Gidean.
SALT LAKE CITY  While many today recall the global historic impact of World War II, the effect of the "War to End All Wars" is seemingly less evident in current society despite its status as the initial worldwide conflict of the 20th century.

On Thursday, the Utah State Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution paid tribute to those Americans who served in the First World War in recognition of the sacrifice so many people made in service of their country.

"It's very important to remember our veterans and the fallen," said Brenda Reeder, Utah regent for the Daughters of the American Revolution. "When we look back at our past, we can change the future."

The organization hosted a wreath-laying ceremony at the WWI Memorial located in Memory Grove Park in Salt Lake City. The event was part of the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution efforts to highlight the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles as a national commemorative event, she said.

"When we review what has happened in the past, that can reflect upon our future and maybe we can make different decisions in how we view war," she added. "We should communicate and negotiate and not have wars that we send our young men (and women) off to fight. Diplomacy is definitely a better choice."

The organization includes more than 185,000 members in approximately 3,000 chapters across the country and numerous foreign countries, she noted. The organization strives to promote historic preservation, education and patriotism via commemorative events, scholarships and educational initiatives, citizenship programs, service to veterans, meaningful community service, she said.

Regarding the ceremony, she said all Utahns should be aware of and appreciate the sacrifice so many local families have made in support of national freedom.

"We had thousands of men from Utah  10,000 men  go (to WWI) and not all of them came back," Reeder said. "We need to remember them and we need to honor them."

For James Sheppard, commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 7442 and who served in Vietnam, the WWI commemoration event was a reminder of the sacrifice so many men and women have made fighting in every conflict since the "Great War."

"We should remember everyone who served in the military because ... all of us had a purpose to go to another country to keep that (enemy) from coming here to take over (the United States)," he said. "It's great to have a remembrance of all vets, especially World War I and World War II because those were the first (global) wars. But at the same time, it's a precedent for all wars throughout the ages  all vets should be remembered."

VFW Post 7442 member Roy Petersen, who served in Desert Storm and Desert Shield, said every soldier, sailor, airmen and Marine should always be commemorated for their service, particularly those who lost their lives in battle.

"It really hits home when you lose one of (your) brothers and sisters of the same (military branch) you were in," he said. "If people had more respect for us, that would be nice (and appreciated)."

Eugene, Oregon, native Jared Bullock watched the ceremony with his wife and two daughters. He said his love of country and gratitude for the service of the nation's military are the reasons his family attended the event.

"We're proud of the soldiers who fought and died for our country," he said. "So every chance we get to honor them, we will do that."
SALT LAKE CITY  Utah students plan to walk out of school Friday and meet at the Utah Capitol to honor the victims of the April 20, 1999, Columbine High School massacre and to call on elected officials to enact common sense gun reforms, a student organizer said Thursday.

Some 2,000 to 3,000 students are expected to take part in the Utah School Walkout, which will be a day of action, said student organizer Riley Arnold, a Skyline High School student.

The rally at the Capitol will include a panel discussion by state lawmakers and voter registration.

"We're just really hoping that the Legislature will listen to us and take into account our voices," she said.

Specifically, Utah youths want policymakers to adopt "common sense gun reforms" like enhanced background checks, increasing waiting periods for gun purchases, raising age requirements for purchases, as well as restricting the sale of bump stocks and high-capacity magazines  "Not necessarily taking away all guns or anything like that," Arnold said.

The legislative panel that includes Democratic Reps. Angela Romero, Patrice Arent, Carol Spackman Moss, Joel Briscoe and Brian King is scheduled to address the students, she said.

Amber Willis, clinical director of James Mason Centers for Recovery, is also scheduled to speak.

Friday's events include school walkouts at 10 a.m., the rally at the Utah Capitol at 1:30 p.m., a "die in" for 6 minutes and 20 seconds "to represent the time it took for the Parkland, Florida, school shooting to occur," followed by the panel discussion by state lawmakers and candidates, according to the event's website.

Arnold said the Capitol rally is intended to focus on action, such as raising issues and suggested solutions with elected officials and encouraging students to vote.

One primary goal is to raise awareness about gun policy and school safety.

"I think students shouldn't have to go to school in fear for their lives. This is becoming an epidemic. We're seeing it more and more. Us, as a society, have become immune to seeing children dying. We need to acknowledge this is a problem and we need to work to fix this," Arnold said.

Friday's events are student-led and organized, she said.

"I just want people to know we're not political puppets. We're not crisis actors. We're here on our own accord. Everything we've done, we're doing it completely by ourselves. We're not influenced by political parties or corporations. We're doing this, literally, to fight for our lives," Arnold said.

Arnold, a high school freshman, is one of several student organizers from across the Salt Lake Valley. Although she is involved in social causes, she said she never imagined that she would become so intensely involved in the youth-led movement to change the nation's gun policies.

It has meant working late many nights and "lots of meetings with the principal to get me excused from school. At least it's not missing school just to miss it. All my teachers know that," she said.
Gocher is the CEO of the Dolma Impact Fund and Hon Professor of Sustainable Business at The University of Nottingham.
VATICAN CITY  The tables have turned under Pope Francis. And a new type of Catholic has formed: the conservative dissenter.

In the past, conservatives prided themselves on loyalty to the pope and being in lockstep with all papal teachings, while progressives called for limits to papal power.

The devotees of tradition used to argue that liberals who complained about papal infallibility or centralization were backsliders who really needed to get with the program.

So while the John Paul II and Benedict XVI papacies had liberal theologians arguing that popes should govern more collaboratively, traditionalist critics of the current pope have become reluctant to accept papal teaching (in its contents and forms) only with Francis, said Villanova University theology professor Massimo Faggioli.

In the recently published book To Change the Church, Ross Douthat compares Francis to President Trump, arguing the pope is seeking to push through changes without thinking about the consequences.

The story could end with Francis as its hero, the New York Times columnist writes. But to choose a path that might have only two destinations  hero or heretic  is an act of great and dangerous presumption, even for a pope. Especially for a pope.

The desire for a pope to govern in an autocratic way as long as it suits ones agenda points to a much bigger debate about how much authority Catholic teaching gives to the man known as the Successor of St. Peter.

I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven, Jesus tells Peter, who Catholics see as the first pope, in Matthew 16:19. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

That gives the pope a pretty free rein.

At the same time, there are safeguards around papal power. Catholic tradition makes clear that pontiffs must govern the church with the bishops  a principle known as collegiality  while papal infallibility is strictly defined.

Constraining papal power has been on the mind of Cardinal Raymond Burke, a respected canon lawyer and leading light for traditional Catholics.

On April 7, he gave a long speech titled The limits of papal authority in the doctrine of the Church to a gathering in Rome largely made up of Francis critics. The cardinal has threatened to publicly correct the pope over a footnote in his 2016 apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia, that envisions a way for some divorced and remarried Catholics to receive Communion.

Any expression of doctrine or practice that is not in conformity with divine revelation, contained in the sacred scriptures and in the tradition of the church, cannot be an authentic exercise of the apostolic or Petrine ministry and must be rejected by the faithful, the cardinal said.

Quoting a church lawyer from the 12th century, the 69-year-old prelate said that while no mortal being should have the audacity to reprimand a pope on account of his faults, a pontiff must be called out if he has deviated from the faith.

There are even times, Burke added, citing a historian of the late medieval period, when a pope must, as a duty, be disobeyed.

Francis, on the other hand, has talked about the importance of receiving criticism. Four days after the cardinals speech, the 81-year-old Argentine pontiff offered one of the most dramatic Im sorry statements ever seen by a pope, over his mishandling of the Chilean sexual abuse scandal. The Catholic news site Crux described what Francis did as institutionalizing the tradition of personal papal apologies.

Admitting mistakes is one of the ways Francis is reforming the papacy, moving it away from a monarchical model  where popes could never be wrong  to a servant leader approach. Hes also argued its not the popes job to settle all doctrinal, moral or pastoral issues.

This infuriates his critics. Burke and his followers believe a pope must give clear-cut doctrine and they are deeply worried about Francis happiness with ambiguity.

But the problem for the cardinals argument is who decides when a pope has erred. This has been a matter of debate inside the church for centuries and at times has led to bitter disputes.

Competing claims to the papal throne after the 14th-century Avignon Papacy, when seven successive popes resided in France, were resolved by the church agreeing that decisions by councils had greater power than that of a pope. Later it was decided the best way to guarantee unity was a strong papacy and it was the First Vatican Council (1869-70) that made the famous declaration of papal infallibility (which is only valid in matters of faith and morals). The Second Vatican Council of 1962-65 sought to balance papal authority with a collegial system of governance and thats something Francis is trying to maintain.

Faggioli says the tradition of the Catholic Church in defining papal authority is conservative, in the sense of being cautious.

The extremist interpretations of papal primacy and infallibility have been rejected both by Vatican I and the post-Vatican I Church, he said. It is healthy that Catholics see limits in papal powers.

One thing is certain, criticism of Francis is not going away. On Saturday (April 21), the Cathedral Basilica of Sts. Peter and Paul in Philadelphia will host Burke for a conference titled Matrimony: Rediscovering its Truth.

The decision to host the cardinal is significant given that the archbishop of Philadelphia, Charles Chaput, leads the United States bishops committee on laity, marriage, family life and youth, which has a remit to implement the teachings in Amoris Laetitia.

The Archdiocese of Philadelphia did not respond to requests for comment about Burkes attendance at the cathedral event or whether this meant the archbishop was endorsing the cardinals position.

For his part, Chaput has issued guidelines to his archdiocese on Amoris Laetitia stressing that remarried Catholics can only receive Communion if they are living as brother and sister, and he recently described Douthats book as an intelligent and absorbing work.

And while his cathedral is hosting a cardinal who is threatening to correct the pope, the archbishop steered clear of a conference on Francis papacy that took place near Philadelphia at Villanova University on April 12-15 and brought together some of Francis closest confidants and advisers. The pope himself met with the universitys president and trustees in the Vatican while the Villanova conference was in full swing.

Finding themselves criticizing a pope may, in the long run, see conservatives end up with a more nuanced and balanced view of papal authority. In the meantime, liberal Catholics could offer them a simple message: Welcome to the club.
SALT LAKE CITY  Thanks in large part to a multimillion dollar seed gift from a titan of Utah biotech, an 80-year-old building on the University of Utah campus that once housed relics from our prehistoric past is now a launch pad for the science innovations of the future.

Gary and Ann Crocker committed $10 million some eight years ago to begin the process of revamping the circa-1935 George Thomas Building on Presidents Circle  the longtime home of the Utah Museum of Natural History  into a gleaming new collaborative science facility.

On Friday morning, the official ribbon cutting will be held for the $55 million Gary and Ann Crocker Science Center. The extensively renovated building features modern and flexible classroom space, laboratories, a unique biotech commercial incubator center and world-class equipment. It was designed to be a platform for advancement in science research, education and commerce across multiple disciplines at the school.

In addition to the Crockers' donation, $34 million in state funding and additional private donations helped get the project completed.

Research efforts at the center will draw from all four departments of the U.'s College of Science, which include biology, chemistry, mathematics, physics and astronomy. College of Science Dean Henry White said the new facility will have a positive, and elevating, impact on students, researchers and science entrepreneurs at the U.

"This modern science hub is ready to serve new generations of students, faculty and staff at the University of Utah," White said. "We are extremely grateful for Gary and Ann's pioneering support for this building to become a world-class science education and research center on campus."

World-class is a term that could also be applied to Crocker's long list of accomplishments in the world of biotech  going back even before that term was coined  to the '70s when he was a student at the Harvard Business School. As a married parent, Crocker needed to work as well as go to school, and he found a job as a sales rep for a medical supply company that sold blood pressure monitoring equipment.

What began is a simple economic necessity ended up being revelatory.

"I took a job as a medical device salesman, working part-time and out hitting 20 to 25 Boston-area hospitals," Crocker said. "I fell in love with the industry and the intersection of science, biology and medicine."

After completing his Master of Business Administration studies, Crocker went on to work for Baxter International, at that time and still today, one of the world's largest medical device and health care products companies. But the urge to innovate was powerful, and Crocker became his own boss in 1982 with the launch of Research Medical, a company specializing in cardiac catheters used for open-heart surgical procedures.

The devices were wildly successful, and while continuing to run Research Medical Crocker launched another business with his friend Dr. Dinesh Patel that pioneered new methods for transdermal hormone delivery. That company, Theratech, also found great success.

Both companies sold to global medical companies in the '90s, Research Medical for $250 million and Theratech for $340 million, and Crocker used his proceeds to launch Crocker Ventures, a company dedicated to providing seed-stage funding to life sciences ventures.

Crocker Ventures has backed numerous biotech endeavors, and Crocker is leads the boards for two of the biggest, Cottonwood Heights-based Nexus Spine, which specializes in advanced spinal implants, and Merrimack Pharmaceuticals, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Merrimack is a research lab focused on a precision-medicine approach to cancer treatments. The company, founded by researchers from Harvard and MIT in 2000, has already brought one major drug to market, which it sold for $530 million in 2009. Merrimack President and CEO Dr. Richard Peters said Crocker's enthusiasm for, and committment to, the fight against cancer was an inspiration.

"He's incredibly positive and passionate in a genuine fashion  it's deep in his DNA," Peters said. "He is also someone who is solution-oriented. He does not agonize over the problem, Gary very quickly pivots to potentials and solutions."

Peters also noted Crocker's record of achievements in the realm of life science research and business reflects a rare gift.

"Building a succesful business in this industry is incredibly difficult," Peters said. "Being able to do it multiple times is a reflection of Gary's acumen, intelligence and resilience."

Crocker also helped found BioUtah, a nonprofit life sciences industry association working to build innovation and advance the industry's ecosystem.

BioUtah President and CEO Kelly Slone said biotech is growing faster than any other business category in Utah, including the much vaunted high-tech sector, and said Crocker is a titan in the industry.

"Gary is truly one of Utah's life science pioneers," Slone said. "He's not only launched numerous very successful businesses, but has helped seed a lot of the companies that have contributed so much to building the rich environment in Utah for pharmaceuticals, medical devices, research and more."

Slone noted Crocker and his wife have also been about giving back to the community in ways that extend far beyond his business influence.

Crocker has served on the College of Science advisory board for nearly two decades, funded housing for science honors students with the Crocker Science House, launched and funded a scholarship program for science student internships, aimed at connecting students with jobs in the life science industry and, now, leveraged the completion of the Crocker Science Center with the anchor donation.

Slone said the launch of the center could not be more timely for the burgeoning industry in Utah.

"Some of our greatest needs in this arena are to grow private capital and talent development and recruitment," Slone said. "The Crocker Center is poised to make great contributions in both these areas."

Crocker himself sees, as one of the most signficant outcomes of the center, the positive impacts that will accompany the legion of life science students and researchers that will find opportunities for knowledge, discovery and the advancement of science in the new facility.

"You have to make STEM investment real or you really don't have an economic pathway forward," Crocker said. "Utah is now a player on the national stage because we've got the capacity to actually generate STEM educated students. Ten thousand students will be going through this building each year  and multiply that by the next century, perhaps, that the facility is in service."

"It is a humbling and exciting prospect."
SALT LAKE CITY  State authorities will soon be taking an uncharted path in their approaches to regulating CBD oil, growth of industrial hemp, and state-directed cultivation of full-strength marijuana, thanks to a busy legislative session addressing those issues.

But the details on how that policy makeover will be implemented are still undefined, which is why the Department of Agriculture & Food met Thursday with business owners, farmers and patient advocates to hear their input before the agency's rule-making process begins in earnest.

Department leaders met for more than four hours total to hear from those groups, hosting three different meetings with several dozen attendees each.

Hemp growing

A law permitting the commercial production and sale of hemp by licensees who agree to a pilot research program, which passed the state legislature easily this year, attracted multiple comments Thursday from those who said they hope the Department of Agriculture doesn't place minimums on how large a hemp plot must be to qualify for a license.

"Competition is good for all of us," Cheri Penrose, who is herself interested in getting into the industry, told a panel of Department of Agriculture staff at the state office building on the Capitol campus. "That's why you want the little guys to be able to grow it."

David Schenk, who runs a CBD oil extraction company based in Colorado, said he had concerns about whether there could be unsuitably sweeping consequences for any hemp-growing farm found to have any batch of the plant that tests positive for more than 0.3 percent of THC, marijuana's active ingredient.

The new law states that "the department may seize and destroy hemp plants ... that contain a concentration of 0.3 percent (THC) or greater by weight."

"Are you going to wipe out crops?" Schenk asked, saying that large quantities of hemp have sometimes been destroyed in Colorado.

Destroying wide swaths of hemp based on a bad test result is worrisome, he said, because THC levels in the plant can "vary throughout the year" before the hemp is commercially processed.

Though hemp is related to the marijuana plant it is considerably different chemically, with extremely low levels of THC. It can be used in making clothing, rope, paper, non-psychoactive CBD oil and several other products.

Scott Ericson, deputy commissioner of the department, briefly cautioned those in attendance that "there is very little if any chance the (hemp growing) rules will be in place for growing season."

CBD oil regulations

Another bill passed this year gives the Department of Agriculture the authority to require the makers of CBD oil products to register them with the state. Promoters of the measure have said it will help the state ensure that the advertised contents of such products are in fact what manufacturers claim.

The law will also have the state seek a federal waiver allowing Utah doctors to recommend CBD oil sold through a pharmacy.

Public comments offered Thursday centered around exactly how tightly CBD oil makers should be supervised and regulated.

"The public deserves safe and legal access to CBD," but the industry as a whole "has sadly shown it cannot self-regulate," said Peter Grant, president of Endo-C, an organization that provides patients with CBD as part of longitudinal research allowed under Utah law.

Grant cited information the Utah Poison Control Center that dozens of people reported falling ill starting late last year after using products which were sold to them as natural CBD oil but instead contained synthetic compounds.

Grant said Endo-C is in favor of requiring all CBD oil labeling to include information about the product's contents, dosage recommendations, and warnings about any present allergens or pesticides.

Manufacturers should also be required to detail to the state where they obtained their materials and where they processed their products, he said, and CBD oil not up to the department's safety standards should be "removed from shelves."

However, several people also implored the department to err on the side of treading lightly with CBD oil regulations where possible, contending the new law has some patients worried that the product they have relied on heavily could be altered or become inaccessible altogether.

One of those commenters was Nibley resident Pete Riggs, whose wife, Jody Muir, says CBD oil changed her life by mitigating the symptoms of several of her health problems.

"(Regulation) needs to be there, but it needs to be light on the touch," Riggs said.

Marijuana cultivation

The Department of Agriculture will also be tasked with overseeing the cultivation of full-strength marijuana via a third party, thanks to a bill that passed this year despite heavy opposition in the House of Representatives. Supporters of the measure say it will promote faster and improved research in Utah into marijuana's medical effects.

The cultivated marijuana is also expected to be used for terminally ill patients who were given access to medical cannabis under a separate bill passed earlier this year.

Mark Newman, a Farmington resident who travels out of state to get marijuana-based medical help for serious migraines, beseeched department officials to establish more than one Utah medical marijuana dispensary for terminally ill patients so that they don't have to make a lengthy trip to obtain it.

"Who wants to drive from Blanding to Salt Lake?" he asked the panel.

Some also petitioned the panel to look into ways to import marijuana for the terminally ill in order to speed up access for them before the first batches of the plant grown in Utah become available.

Melissa Ure, senior policy analyst for the Department of Agriculture, told the Deseret News the agency can publish draft rules concerning the new laws beginning in early May, though it will likely take longer.

Ure said after the draft rules are published, the department will hold a public comment period of at least 30 days, during which time an additional two public hearings will be held on each new created rule.

Some of the new laws passed may lead to more than one new rule from the agency, Ure said.
PROVO  Brigham Young University's Army ROTC program can now say it's one of the best in the country after an impressive performance at a prestigious international military skills competition last weekend.

BYU's team of 11 cadets, all members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, including some returned LDS missionaries, finished 10th out of 64 teams from across the world at the Sandhurst Military Skills Competition at historic West Point, New York, April 13-14.

Spencer Allen, BYU's ROTC Ranger Challenge team captain and a senior from Lindon, Utah, said the 64 teams represent the most fit and capable individuals in each perspective military organization.

"By doing as well as we did, we proved that BYU Army ROTC produces some of the most elite warriors and leaders in the world, making us more capable tools in the hands of God to shape the future of our community, nation and world," Allen said.

The Sandhurst competition is designed to test physical fitness, leadership, tactical proficiency and other military skills. During the two-day event, cadets earned points for transporting heavy equipment, showcasing medical skills, along with rifle and pistol marksmanship. They also ran an obstacle course and used a boat on a lake to navigate an attack mission, among other events.

Lt. Col. Forrest "Chip" Cook, a professor of military science and commander of BYU's ROTC, praised his cadets for their preparation, training and stamina. Their goal going in was to finish in the top 10, and they achieved that against more than 700 other cadets, Cook said.

"It was probably the most physically challenging thing I have witnessed in my 20 years in the Army. Just to finish was an incredible feat," he said. "To finish in 10th place was pretty incredible considering a very competitive field. We're pretty happy."

The U.S. Air Force Academy won the event, followed by the Royal Military Academy of Canada, Sandhurst Red (United Kingdom), the University of North Georgia and West Point (USCC) Gold.

The BYU cadets qualified for the Sandhurst competition by winning a regional Ranger Challenge title and 5th Brigade Ranger Challenge competition in 2017. For Allen, the highlight of the competition was seeing teamwork and heart displayed by BYU's men and women.

"Each individual inspired me with his or her grit, determination and skill," Allen said. "It was incredibly rewarding to see them perform at that level with that much heart."
Two panels vying for ECAN leadership

Educational Consultancies Association of Nepal (ECAN), an umbrella body of over 300 education consultancies, has geared up for its general convention where two panels are vying for the leadership for next two years.


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Facebook on Sunday confirmed that its Messenger and Lite apps for Android smartphones routinely collect call and text histories.

The call and text history logging are opt-in features for people using Messenger or Facebook Lite on Android devices, the company said in a post.

The feature is designed to help users stay connected, and it improves the Facebook experience, according to the company.

The Messenger feature can be turned off at any time through the app's settings. In Facebook Lite, the feature can be deactivated by turning off the Continuous Contacts Upload setting.

When those adjustments are made to the programs, all previously shared call and text history is deleted, Facebook said.

The feature does not collect the content of calls or text messages, Facebook addes, assuring users that their information is stored securely and that it is not sold to third parties.

Surprised Users

While the collecting of call and text information has been going on for years -- it was introduced into Messenger in 2015 -- discovery of the feature surprised some users and raised many hackles.

Downloaded my facebook data as a ZIP file



Somehow it has my entire call history with my partner's mum pic.twitter.com/CIRUguf4vD  Dylan McKay (@dylanmckaynz) March 21, 2018

A Twitter user with the handle "Learn Somali" noticed tracking only in connection with a visit to Somalia.

Thanks for sharing the info, I have looked at mine, and my calls/messages were "tracked" only when I visited Somalia for a month, it started and ended that specific period. Did you travel to a place were FB knows no one will catch them snooping. :). Shocking is the new Normal.  Learn Somali (@learnsomali_com) March 25, 2018

McKay responded that he'd never left New Zealand.

Facebook recorded all of her phone's contacts, calls and texts from 2015 to 2016, tweeted Natalie Schluter, an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen.

I downloaded my data and FB has a record of ALL contacts/calls/texts ON ANY MEDIUM from my phone 2015-2016.

NB. I've never imported any contacts to FB. No FB app on my phone. I do have Messenger (but the upload contacts option is and always has been DESELECTED). https://t.co/hUKDG7pr7F  Natalie Schluter (@natschluter) March 25, 2018

Author Emma Kennedy also was surprised by what she found when she downloaded the trove of data Facebook had on her.

I've just looked at the data files I requested from Facebook and they had every single phone number in my contacts. They had every single social event I went to, a list of all my friends (and their birthdays) and a list of every text I've sent.  Emma Kennedy (@EmmaKennedy) March 25, 2018

Opaque Transparency

While it appears that Facebook believes it has been up front with what its Messenger and Lite apps do, not everyone agrees.

Facebook wasn't sufficiently transparent about what it was doing with its apps if even developers and tech-oriented users were surprised, observed Joseph W. Jerome, policy counsel for the Center for Democracy & Technology.

"Part of the challenge is that well-designed transparency is really hard," he told TechNewsWorld. "As the law understands it, Facebook did get users to opt in to this feature," he said, "but 'Turn On' is bolded and the default choice for users."

The "Not Now" choice for turning off the feature is grayed out, so it looks like it's not an available option.

Thin Excuse

"Technically, Facebook is accurate that users opted in to this, but in the age of Russian meddling and Cambridge Analytica, it's no excuse in users' minds," said Karen North, director of the digital social media program at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

"Even the opt-in excuse is a thin one, given how the opt-in was phrased," she told TechNewsWorld. "It was misleading."

However, it's likely that Facebook's intentions were not sinister, North added.

"They do it to curate an experience that will engage us," she said, "and to target us, sell ads and make money."

Facebook offers controls for users concerned about their privacy, but using them can be an adventure.

"You might as well quit your job and spend all your time trying to stay on top of the privacy changes that Mark Zuckerberg makes," quipped John Carroll, a mass communications professor at Boston University.

"Facebook is notorious for turning their privacy settings into a moving target," he told TechNewsWorld. "It's a monumental task to constantly monitor your privacy settings, not only on Facebook, but all over the Web."

FTC Opens Probe

The phone-scraping revelations broke as full-page Facebook ads ran in several Sunday papers in the United Kingdom and United States, apologizing for having allowed Cambridge Analytica to use the personal data of some 50 million users for political purposes.

"This was a breach of trust, and I'm sorry we didn't do more at the time," CEO Zuckerberg says in the ad. "We're now taking steps to ensure this doesn't happen again."

Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission added more pressure on Monday.

"The FTC takes very seriously recent press reports raising substantial concerns about the privacy practices of Facebook," said Tom Pahl, acting director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection. "Today, the FTC is confirming that it has an open non-public investigation into these practices."

Facebook ran afoul of the FTC in 2011 over sharing and publicizing members' information after assuring them they could keep it private. It settled that case with the commission.

"This is more evidence that the FTC should have enforced its consent orders," Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told TechNewsWorld. "Users can't be expected to monitor every change in a company's business practices."

John P. Mello Jr. has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2003. His areas of focus include cybersecurity, IT issues, privacy, e-commerce, social media, artificial intelligence, big data and consumer electronics. He has written and edited for numerous publications, including the Boston Business Journal, the Boston Phoenix, Megapixel.Net and Government Security News. Email John.


The Interior Department has launched the process of holding lease sales for oil and gas drilling in the 1.6-million-acre coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

Despite decades of fierce resistance from Democrats and conservation groups, pro-drilling Republicans were able to realize their goal of opening the refuge after quietly including the measure in last year's Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

A notice published Friday in the Federal Register starts the 60-day public scoping period to assist in the preparation of an environmental impact statement for the leasing program.

The sale targets the 1002 area on the Prudhoe Bay in Northern Alaska, which has an estimated 12 billion barrels of recoverable crude. The area is described by the Sierra Club as "the biological heart" of the Arctic Refugehome to polar bears, caribou, migratory birds and other speciesas well as vital lands and wildlife for the subsistence way of life of the Gwich'in Nation.

Environmental groups condemned the plan, calling it "shameful" that it would be published just before the eighth anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history.

"The Trump administration's reckless dash to expedite drilling and destroy the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will only hasten a trip to the courthouse," Jamie Rappaport Clark, president of Defenders of Wildlife, said in a statement. "We will not stand by and watch them desecrate this fragile landscape."

In a statement, Assistant Interior Secretary Joe Balash called the drilling plan "an important facet for meeting our nation's energy demands and achieving energy dominance."

"This scoping process begins the first step in developing a responsible path forward. I look forward to personally visiting the communities most affected by this process and hearing their concerns," Balash added.

Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, who has long fought to open the refuge, said in a joint statement with other Alaskan lawmakers that drilling would "help ensure the energy and economic security of our nation."

In February, President Trump spoke about his indifference on the matter until an oil industry friend told him that past presidents, including conservative icon Ronald Reagan, couldn't get drilling done. He then directed lawmakers to put the provision in the tax bill.

"I never appreciated ANWR so much," Trump said during a speech at a Republican retreat in West Virginia. "A friend of mine called up who is in that world and in that business. He said, 'Is it true that you're thinking about ANWR?' I said 'Yeah, I think we're going to get it but you know ' He said, 'Are you kidding? That's the biggest thing by itself. Ronald Reagan and every president has wanted to get ANWR approved.' And after that I said 'Oh, make sure that is in the bill. It was amazing how that had an impact."

He made similar remarks a month later at the National Republican Congressional Committee dinner.

The purpose of the public scoping process is to assist the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in identifying relevant issues that will influence the scope of the environmental impact statement and guide its development. It may also inform post-lease activities, including seismic and drilling exploration, development, and transportation of oil and gas in and from the coastal plain.

The bureau has invited the public to provide comments on scoping issues and will hold public scoping meetings in Anchorage, Arctic Village, Fairbanks, Kaktovik and Utqiagvik at times and locations to be announced in local media, newspapers and on the BLM website.

Comments will be accepted through June 19, 2018, and can be sent by any of the following methods:

Website: www.blm.gov/alaska/coastal-plain-eis

Email: [email protected]

Mail: Attn: Coastal Plain Oil and Gas Leasing Program EIS

222 West 7th Avenue, Stop #13

Anchorage, Alaska 99513
The scandal-plagued head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says he's not sure whether "human activity ... is a primary contributor to the global warming that we see." The president has moved to pull the U.S. out of the landmark Paris climate agreement. And climate-science deniers and skeptics control Congress.

But that still leaves environmental advocates with one branch of government: the judiciary.

Greens are trying to use the courts to establish accountability for the damages associated with global climate change; a couple of new lawsuits and one important court ruling from just the last week show that the strategy has real promise.

On Tuesday, the city of Boulder, Colorado, along with Boulder County and San Miguel County filed a lawsuit in state court against ExxonMobil and Suncor (Canada's largest oil firm), seeking to recover some of the costs associated with climate change impacts. The lawsuit says the Colorado communities are already bearing the costs of climate-change-related problems such as extreme rainstorms and flooding, more frequent and intense wildfires, and a declining snowpack. Big oil companies, the lawsuit contends, contributed to those impacts.

"By hiding what they knew about, and affirmatively misrepresenting the dangers of unabated fossil fuel use, the Defendants protected fossil fuel demand and obstructed the changes needed to prevent or at least minimize the impacts of climate change," according to the lawsuit.

The case is just the latest attempt to try to hold the major carbon polluters responsible for climate change impacts. Eight California cities and counties are suing a range of fossil fuel companiesExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP and Peabody Coal, among othersfor the costs of preparing for sea level rise. Last month, a federal judge in San Francisco who is handling four of those cases held an unprecedented climate tutorial that forced the major carbon polluters to admit in court that they accept the basic science of human-driven climate change. In January, New York City filed a similar case against the five largest publicly traded oil companies.

The Colorado case is a departure from earlier lawsuits, however; it doesn't, for obvious reasons, focus on sea level rise. "These communities felt it was important to highlight the fact that climate change impacts are being felt everywhere, including far from the oceans," Marco Simons, the general counsel at EarthRights International, which helped write the Colorado complaint, told Sierra. "This case shows that communities across the country are waking up to the reality, both the impacts they are facing from climate change and the responsibility of the fossil fuel industry to help pay for those injuries."

The new Colorado case is also significant in that it opens up yet another legal arena in which the oil companies must play defense.

The announcement of the Colorado lawsuit came just four days after the Massachusetts Supreme Court delivered a major setback to ExxonMobil in another climate-change-related case. Massachusetts's attorney general, Maura Healey, is investigating whether ExxonMobil may have violated the state's consumer protection law by misleading its customers and investors about the impacts of climate change. In a 32-page opinion, the state's highest court ruled that the case can move forward and that Healey has the authority to force ExxonMobil to deliver internal company documents. The justices appeared to go out of their way to highlight the high stakes involved in the case, writing, "The Attorney General's investigation concerns climate change caused by manmade greenhouse gas emissionsa distinctly modern threat that grows more serious with time, and the effects of which are already being felt in Massachusetts."

The state supreme court ruling comes about a month after a federal court made a similar ruling against ExxonMobil's attempts to beat back the Healey investigation and a parallel investigation by New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman into whether the oil giant might have misled investors about the risks of climate change. In that ruling, a U.S. district court judge slammed ExxonMobil's argument that it is the target of a conspiracy as "implausible."

The California, Colorado, and New York City lawsuits, along with the two attorneys general investigations, are all focused on holding corporations liable for some of the damage caused by climate change. Meanwhile, some other climate-related cases are seeking to hold governments accountable for fueling global warming.

On Monday, eight Florida youths ages 10 to 19 filed a lawsuit against the state government and Governor Rick Scott, who has been cagey about whether he accepts the basic science of climate change. The lawsuit alleges that by contributing to greenhouse gas emissions, the state's actions have violated the young plaintiffs' constitutional rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. In their complaint, the eight young people charge that, "the Defendants know that Plaintiffs are living under climatic conditions that create an unreasonable risk of harm but have not responded reasonably to this urgent crisis, and instead have affirmatively acted to exacerbate the climate crisis."

The lawsuit was brought by Our Children's Trust, which has sought to use a legal theory called the public trust doctrine to push similar cases in a total of nine states, including Washington, Oregon, Maine and North Carolina. Our Children's Trust is also behind the landmark case targeting the federal government for exacerbating global warming. The 21 young plaintiffs in that case cleared a major procedural hurdle in March when a federal appeals court denied the government's effort to dismiss the case. Just last week, a federal magistrate in Oregon set a trial date for that lawsuit: Arguments will begin Oct. 29 at the federal courthouse in Eugene.

Julia Olson, the lead attorney in that case, has promised that Juliana v. United States will be "the trial of the century."

It's a good line. But given the increasing flood of climate liability cases, it looks like there's stiff competition for that honor.

Reposted with permission from our media associate SIERRA Magazine.
Planet Earth is at a crisis point. Researchers say we have to begin reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 2020 if we want to meet the temperature goals outlined in the Paris agreement and avoid catastrophic climate change.

The work to be done can seem overwhelming. A survey published this week found that only 6 percent of Americans think we will succeed in reducing global warming.

But Earth Day weekend is no time to give up! History has shown that when human beings come together to face environmental challenges, we are capable of making the planet a healthier, happier place for humans and non-humans alike.

Here are five environmental victories to inspire you this Earth Day.

1. The First Earth Day Creates a Movement

Before the first Earth Day in 1970, polluted rivers in the U.S. sometimes caught fire, and industry polluted the air without worrying about consequences. Then Sen. Gaylord Nelson decided to launch a "national teach-in on the environment," drawing on the tactics of the anti-war movement to unite different struggles against pollution, oil spills and wilderness depletion under a single green umbrella. Twenty million Americans participated in the first Earth Day and it led to major legislative victories, such as the formation of the U.S.Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, which set out to make all U.S. rivers swimmable and fishable again, and insured they would no longer be flammable.

As hard as it might be to believe in today's political climate, that first Earth Day was a bi-partisan affair. Nelson reached out to Republican Congressman Pete McCloskey to act as the day's co-chair, in a model of the kind of bipartisan collaboration we need to tackle today's environmental challenges.



2. The U.S. Saves Its Symbol

One of the factors that raised environmental consciousness in the U.S. in the decade leading up to the first Earth Day was the 1962 publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. In the book, Carson explained how the widely-used pesticide DDT entered the food chain, killing many more insects than targeted and harming the birds who feasted on the insects, including bald eagles.



According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), a year after Carson's book was published, there were only 487 nesting pairs left in the country. But the U.S. acted to save its national bird. In 1972, the nascent EPA banned DDT, and, in 1978, the species was listed as endangered, five years after the passage of the Endangered Species Act. In 2007, the FWS announced that the bald eagle had entirely recovered.

3. International Collaboration Closes the Ozone Hole

As insurmountable as global climate change seems at times, there is precedent for nations coming together to solve an environmental problem. When a hole in the ozone layer, which protects the Earth from the ultraviolet rays that cause skin cancer and harm plants, was discovered in the 1980s, nations came together and finalized the Montreal Protocol in 1987.

The protocol banned ozone-depleting products such as chlorofluorocarbons that were used in refrigerants and aerosol sprays. And it worked. A 2018 NASA study found that the reduction in ozone-depleting chemicals had resulted in 20 percent less ozone depletion since 2005.



4. The Green Belt Movement Plants More Than 50 Million Trees

Prof. Wangari Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for her role in founding the Green Belt Movement. Fredrick Onyango

In the 1970s, Prof. Wangari Maathai listened to the complaints of women in rural Kenya who told her that they had to walk further for fuel, their local streams were drying, and their food supply was more precarious. Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in 1972 to encourage them to plant trees in order to improve the soil, store rainwater, and provide fuel and food. Tree planting led to grassroots activism as the women realized the deterioration of their land was also the result of government policies. Overall, the movement has planted more than 51 million trees since its founding.



5. Maori Win 140-Year-Old Environmental Court Case

In 2017, New Zealand's parliament granted the Whanganui River, called Te Awa Tupua by the Maori, the legal rights of a person, something the local Maori had petitioned for since 1873. The move honored the persistence of indigenous activists, who are often on the forefront of struggles to protect the environment, and signals that settler governments might finally be willing to learn from a worldview that places fewer separations between human beings and the planet. The legislation included money for compensation and for improving the river's health, and paved the way for Mount Taranaki to be offered similar legal status later that year.


Climate change poses a key risk to low-lying Florida. When Climate Central ranked the 25 U.S. coastal cities that would be most vulnerable to coastal flooding in 2050 due to sea level rise projections, 20 of them were in the Sunshine State.

But Florida Governor Rick Scott has a history of sticking his head in the disappearing sand. In 2015, reports surfaced that his government had banned the Florida Department of Environmental Protection from even using the words "climate change" in reports. Though he denies those charges, he also denies climate change. When asked to comment on it, he famously replied, "I'm not a scientist."

Now, the group with the most to lose from his inaction are forcing him to act.

On Monday, eight young Florida residents sued the state government to force it to implement a research-based "climate recovery plan," the Miami Herald reported.

The plaintiffs range in age from 10 to 20 and are part of a growing trend of groups heading to the courts to either force action on or receive damages for the impacts of climate change.

In fact, the young people are represented by Our Children's Trust, the non-profit behind a similar case brought by 21 young people against the federal government, claiming it violated their rights by basing the national energy plan on fossil fuels that cause the climate to change in ways that will imperil their futures. The federal case received an Oct. 29 trial date earlier this month. The youngest plaintiff in the Florida case, 10-year-old Levi Draheim, is also named in the federal suit.

One of the Florida plaintiffs, University of Miami marine science student Delaney Reynolds, reached out to Our Children's Trust, inspired by their federal case, and signed up to join the Florida case they were already planning.

"Gov. Scott says he's not a scientist. Well, neither are most of the people that are forced to take action because the state is failing us," Reynolds told the Miami Herald.

Our Children's Trust also has similar cases pending in Alaska, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon and Washington.

But the fact that Florida has to be sued into action is especially counter-intuitive. According to the Miami Herald, Miami Beach has already spent $125 million keeping flood water out of its streets, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates streets in Miami could flood every day as early as 2070.

Florida doctors have also observed that climate change is already impacting the health of their patients.

The suit reprimands Scott's government both for failing to reduce the state's carbon dioxide emissions and for failing to act to protect the coasts.

But Scott's spokesperson McKinley Lewis denied those charges. "The Governor signed one of the largest environmental protection budgets in Florida's history last monthinvesting $4 billion into Florida's environment. The Governor is focused on real solutions to protect our environmentnot political theater or a lawsuit orchestrated by a group based in Eugene, Oregon," he told the Miami Herald in a statement.

Senior Our Children's Trust attorney Andrea Rodgers expects the case to go to trial by the end of 2018.
By Kitty Block

Iceland seems to be the most confused of nations when it comes to whales. On the one hand it attracts international tourists from all over the world to go out and see whales as part of their encounters with Iceland's many natural wonders. On the other hand it kills whales for profit, with some portion of the kill even being fed to some of the same tourists in restaurants and cafes.

The whaling company Hvalur hf, whose name means "Whale, Inc." in Icelandic, announced Tuesday it would resume its killing of endangered fin whales after a two-year hiatus. The Icelandic government will allow Hvalur to kill 161 fin whales, as well as allow it to use 20 percent of its self-allocated and unused quota from last year, which means up to 191 whales could be killed. And all of this killing will happen in defiance of the International Whaling Commission's global moratorium on commercial whaling.

Iceland's decision will rightly cause outrage all over the world, and the country's government should really know better.

Hvalur is a 70-year-old killing enterprise, owned by a wealthy citizen with outsized influence in the Land of Fire and Ice. And Hvalur is the principal reason why this otherwise ecologically responsible nation continues to support an ecologically irresponsible practice.

The fin whale, our planet's second largest animal after the blue whale, is classified as a globally endangered species. During its last hunt, in 2015, Hvalur killed 155 of them. Then the company took two years off apparently because of a declining market for whale meat in Japan. The commercial whaling industry in Iceland also hunts minke whales in defiance of the moratorium.

Iceland's greenlighting of Hvalur's actions is especially disappointing and surprising in light of the fact that the U.S. has undertaken a rigorous review process of Iceland's whaling activities and certified Iceland under the Pelly Amendment, a legal provision that includes potential economic sanctions against nations that are compromising marine conservation goals. The U.S. imposed sanctions under this process for Iceland's participation in the trade of whale meat and products.

Whales face multiple threats in today's oceans from pollution, climate change, entanglements in fish nets and ship strike. The global moratorium is needed more than ever, and it's a shame that Iceland would bow to the will of one man and one company.

Iceland returned to the International Whaling Commission in 2002 with a reservation to the commercial moratorium, a claim 19 member nations objected to at the time. Controversially, Iceland was allowed to vote on its own readmission. At the time, many IWC governments strongly objected because the country, bound by the moratorium to which it had agreed in 1982, had quit and rejoined but then opted out of the single most important conservation measure of the treaty. Countries do not normally quit simply because they don't like the conservation measures to which they have agreed. You're either in or you're out.

Iceland is one of just three nations that conduct and otherwise encourage commercial whaling in defiance of the IWC's global moratorium, with Norway and Japan being the other two. Japan's whaling fleet recently returned to port with a kill total of 333 minke whales taken in its months-long hunt in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary in Antarctic waters. Shinzo Abe, Japan's prime minister, is an unabashed supporter of whaling. The leader likes to invoke cultural arguments even in defense of a rapacious whaling industry that is fundamentally commercial and not genuinely rooted in Japanese tradition.

In this respect, Iceland, Japan and Norway are in the same boat, as nations deeply unmoored from world opinion and sensitivity toward the plight of the whales as a matter of shared feeling and concern. Their continued whaling stands in the way of the urgent work of saving whales from looming threats that require the concerted energy and constructive action of a united global community.

Kitty Block is acting president and CEO of The Humane Society of the United States and president of Humane Society International.


In March, a diver's video of masses of plastic floating off the Indonesian coast went viral. But that plastic often reaches the ocean through the country's rivers, clogging them to such an extent that Indonesia had to call in the army, the BBC reported Thursday.

The BBC spent time on the ground in Bandung, Indonesia's third largest city, and observed a concentration of bottles, plastic bags and styrofoam packaging so large it looked like an iceberg.

Reporters watched the army attempt to clear the river by riding a barge and removing debris with nets, but as they cleared, more trash would flow from upstream.

The soldiers filmed by the BBC had intended to load the plastic they collected onto trucks, but the trucks never arrived, so the soldiers used a digger to push it further downstream, where it would swamp the cleanup efforts of others.

"My current enemy is not a combat enemy, what I am fighting very hard now is rubbish, it is our biggest enemy," army Sergeant Sugito told the BBC.

West Java Environmental Protection Agency head Dr. Anang Sudarna, who petitioned the president to send in the army, said their efforts had made a difference, but there is still much more work to do.

"The result is a little bit improved ... but I am angry, I am sad, I am trying to think how best to solve this ... the most difficult thing is the people's attitude and the political will," Sudarna told t1he BBC.

Indonesia is one of five Asian countries that accounts for 60 percent of the plastic entering the world's oceans, a 2015 study found. Another 2017 study found that 86 percent of the plastic currently flushed through the world's rivers came from Asian countries, including Indonesia. The huge quantities of plastic pollution are the result of economic growth and increased quality of life in these countries, which have meant that waste collection has not kept pace with changing consumption patterns.

In Indonesia, plastic packaging has begun to replace traditional, biodegradable food storage devices like banana leaves, the BBC reported. Further, there is a local culture of disposing of waste in ditches and streams, which cannot support the quantities of plastic waste now being discarded.

Sugito said he wanted to encourage Indonesians to see plastic as a resource, and not just something to throw away.

"[P]lastic cartons and drinking bottles can be separated from the other rubbish and sold," he told the BBC.

To encourage this mindset, officials have set up "eco-villages" in Bandung where residents can trade in different kinds of plastic containers for cash.

While the problem is still overwhelming, the army's involvement illustrates an observation from Radboud University environmental science professor Ad Ragas that Indonesian authorities had begun to take plastic pollution much more seriously in the past two years.

He partly credited social media posts of clogged rivers for raising awareness and inspiring action.

"They immediately see that 'this is what my river look likes now and I'm doing that because I'm throwing all this plastic away' so they get feedback much quicker than they used to," he told the BBC.

The BBC's report arrives just in time for Earth Day, which is taking on the problem of plastic pollution this year. If the push is successful, Indonesia's rivers would finally have the freedom to flow again.
(Photo:  Peter Kenny)World Council of Churches General Secretary Rev. Olav Fykse Tveit addresses a press conference at the United Nations in Geneva on Dec. 12, 2016.

The World Council of Churches has welcomed recent initiatives to establish meaningful and constructive dialogue between the United States of America and North Korea.

The WCC on April 20 cited reports of Central Intelligence Director Mike Pompeo's meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un.

"it is apparent that a new openness to constructive engagement has for the time being replaced the dangerously escalating rhetoric between the two nations, said WCC general secretary Rev. Olav Fykse Tveit.

"This is a very positive sign and important foundation for the planned US-North Korean summit at the beginning of June or end of May," he said.

He said the WCC especially welcomes the expressed support given by President Donald Trump for the two Koreas to discuss the end of the war during their own summit meeting."

The WCC and its partners in both South and North Korea have repeatedly and consistently called for a peace treaty to replace the Armistice Agreement of 1953.

There is a need to definitively conclude the suspended state of war on the Korean Peninsula and to enable the current challenges to peaceful coexistence in the region to be addressed more clearly and pragmatically.

"We are gratified and encouraged that the possibility and utility of this long-overdue step is finally being recognized by the most important parties to this tragic unresolved conflict, which has poisoned relations in the region for so long," said Tveit.

The WCC invited all Christians and people of good will around the world to support all efforts to ease tensions, to sustain hope and to promote peaceful coexistence on the Korean peninsula.
A second national student walkout is planned for Fridayon the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School massacreto call attention to gun violence, press legislators to pass stricter gun measures, and promote political participation.

But whether the protestthe third major demonstration against gun violence since the Valentines Day shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. , left 17 deadwill prompt large numbers of students to walk out of class is unclear. The first walkout , on March 14, coincided with the one-month anniversary of the Stoneman Douglas shooting.

More than 2,500 events are listed in nearly every state on the National School Walkout s website, including in Arizona, Nevada, Texas, and Washington state. Organizers are calling for students to leave their classrooms at 10 a.m. in each time zone, andunlike the previous walkoutto not return to school.

Students at Germantown Friends School, a Quaker school in Philadelphia, for example, plan to leave class at 10 a.m. and later hold a 45-minute die-in at Philadelphia City Hall.

At East High School in Des Moines, Iowa, students will give speeches outside of their school, before heading to the statehouse to speak with legislators about gun violence, according to the Associated Press.

How is this walkout different from the one that took place March 14?

Organizers are asking students to leave class at 10 a.m. and observe a period of silence for victims of gun violence.

Heres where it gets a bit tricky. During the March 14 walkout, organizers asked students to stay out of class for 17 minutesa minute for each life cut short in Parkland in the Valentines Day massacre.

This time around, the organizers are asking students to stay out of school for the rest of the school day, which could lead more students to face disciplinary consequences.

Who is behind the April 20 walkout?

It all started with a Change.org petition, set up soon after the Parkland shootings by Lane Murdock, a 16-year-old sophomore at Ridgefield High School in Ridgefield, Conn., who wanted to do something to protest gun violence.

She and three other students from her school have been the main planners of the walkouts: Grant Yaun, a junior, and Paul Kim and Max Cumming, who are both seniors.

Murdock, when she heard about Parkland, said news of the shooting did not jolt her at first. But she wanted to do something.

She chose a walkout as the form of protest because she was aware of how walkouts were used effectively in university protests in the 1960s and in apartheid South Africa, she said.

I kind of started asking myself what could I do and what could other students do who dont have voting power, she said. And that was walking out. Your attendance in school is what you have. And so, I thought, why dont we use that?

The National School Walkoutwhich became the official name of the April 20 protestis not affiliated with gun-control groups like Everytown for Gun Safety, though that advocacy group has been promoting it.

Indivisible, an organizing group formed to push back against President Donald Trumps agenda and promote progressive policies, has also been promoting the event widely. And the National Education Associationthe largest teachers unionhas asked its members to wear orange.

The best-known student activists from ParklandDavid Hogg among themhave been promoting the walkouts on social media.

What do organizers want?

Their demands are similar to those of the previous student-led actions on gun violence, including a ban on assault rifles, along with high-capacity magazines and bump stocks, as well as universal background checks for gun buyers.

They also want states to get rid of shoot first or stand your ground laws, which played a role in the 2012 shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla. They are also calling for an end to the transfers of military-grade weapons to local police departments.

Murdocks group is also asking that students demand that political candidates return donations from the National Rifle Association, register to vote, and put pressure on their state legislatures to past stricter gun measures.

Murdock said she and her fellow organizers are being careful not to call for measures that could disproportionately impact and criminalize students of color and minors.

For us, our main priority is maybe elevating the voices that arent making the headlines, the gun violence that isnt making the headlines, she said. And thats a really important point of action for us: making sure that this whole, entire diverse generation is being represented.

What are school administrators doing in response this time around?

There was a steady drum beat of media attention before the March 14 walkout, so many district administrators and principals worked with students to plan events on and off campusfrom open mics to voter-registration drives. In a few cases, school leaders disciplined students for participating and, in at least one case in Schuylerville, N.Y., reportedly blocked the doorway so no one could enter or leave the school building.

Administrators seem to have taken a wait-and-see approach until this week. Some districts that openly sent guidance to help parents and students plan for the previous walkout are asking students to stay in school for this one.

In New York City, where Mayor Bill de Blasio supported students who participated in the walkout on March 14, newly installed Superintendent Richard Carranza is urging students not to participate . And the district has said that students will be marked absent if they are not in school. (Last time around, students were not marked as absent if they left for the walkout but returned to class afterward.)

You dont have to be out of school all day to make your voices known, Carranza said at a town hall meeting, according to Chalkbeat New York. Youve already made your voices known.

He encouraged students to have discussions in their school buildings.

Scott Christy, the principal of Columbine High School, said in a letter that the school will participate in a day of servicepart of a tradition at the school to mark the anniversary of the 1999 shooting. Christy encouraged others to do the same. (Columbine High School will be closed on Friday.)

Murdock said the Columbine communitys call for a day of service is not incompatible with what she and her fellow organizers are asking students to do. Many of the students who are participating in the walkout plan to engage in community-building exercises, including voter-registration drives, she said.

What has been the public response so far?

Even in her Ridgefield school district, Murdock said the response has not been unconditional support. There have been fliers posted on campus saying that students should not walk out, and that students who participate will receive an unexcused absence, the minimum penalty, she said.

While many of his fellow Parkland students have become the most prominent activists for stricter gun measures, Kyle Kashuv, a 16-year-old junior, has emerged as an outspoken defender of the 2nd Amendment .

I am working on having 4 prominent speakers, one every 15 minutes, go live on Facebook at 10:00 AM-11:00 AM on Friday, to discuss ways to save lives without infringing on 2A and the importance of mental health and not bullying. Stay tuned! #WalkUpNotOut #WalkUp https://t.co/gVuBikLgrU  Kyle Kashuv (@KyleKashuv) April 15, 2018

Kashuv has met with President Trump, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, and Republican members of Congress about passing legislation to keep schools safe, including the STOP School Violence Act, which includes, among other things, money for districts to beef up school security.

Kashuv is planning to host a Facebook Live Friday with 2nd Amendment supporters. He also plans to talk about why mental health should be part of the conversation on school safety.

Can students sustain this movement?

While theres been a noticeable drop in media coverage since the March for Our Lives on March 24 , students remain committed, Murdock said.

Momentum is something organizers in every social movement worry about, but Murdock said she feels confident. The fact that students have now planned three major events around gun violence in less than two months is proof of their dedication to the cause, she said. Whether youth activists can marshal that energy while tending to the more common demands of teenage lifefinal exams, prom, and graduationsremains to be seen.

The students have stayed constant, and thats what matters because they are the ones who are really advocating for change, she said.

The National School Walkout has started a chapter program as a way to keep the momentum going. The aim is to have a chapter in every state that can share resources and the work they are doing locally.

The chapter program is also a way to ensure that students who are affected by gun violence in their daily lives are at the table and are heard, she said.

Theres tons of gun violence that happens that doesnt make the news, and its just as important, she said. And for us, its really important as a movement to make sure that we are being intersectional and we are displaying equity because thats the future of America. Were the most diverse generation that has ever lived in America and we should act and display it that way because, frankly, our generation is tired of any marginalization.
Cement mixer, tiles and scaffolding stolen from building site



A Belle Electric Cement Mixer was among the items stolen

An investigation us underway following a theft at a building site in the north of the Island.

A Belle Electric Cement Mixer, 20 lengths of scaffolding and a quantity of Spanish slates and ridge tiles were taken from the site on Andreas Road.

The theft occurred between 5pm on Tuesday and 6.30pm the following day.

Officers at Ramsey Police Station want to hear from anyone who can help their investigation.
Abortion Bill debate to continue in House of Keys next week

The House of Keys will continue to discuss the Abortion Reform Bill at next week's sitting.

MHKs have been working through the consideration of clauses stage of the bill since February.

The House will continue to debate access zones, which prohibit protesting and harassment in areas around facilities offering abortion services.

Members will also consider a new clause regarding the duty of medical professionals following a termination.

The Bill will allow more pregnant women on the Isle of Man to obtain abortions without having to travel to the UK.
2018-04-20

Maeci

China: Italy-Liangjiang bilateral investment promotion desk opened

A bilateral investment promotion desk between Italy and the new area of Liangjiang in the municipality of Chongqing, was recently open. The help-desk is fruit of the collaboration between Chongqing Liangjiang and the Italian Chamber of Commerce in China, with the support of the Italian Consulate General. The inauguration ceremony was held less than one year after the signing by the Undersecretary for Economic Development, Ivan Scalfarotto, on 4 August 2017, of the Memorandum of Understanding with Chongqing Liangjiang to set up the help-desk.

The Chongqing Liangjiang area is the only national developing and foreign trade area in inland China and the third area to be approved by the Council of State after the Pudong New Area di Shanghai and the Binhai New Area in Tianjin. The area plays a key role in Chinas most relevant development programmes as it is at the crossroads between different economic areas (the West Triangle Economic Zone, the Yangtze River Economic Belt and the South-West macro-region) and a cornerstone of the Belt and Road Initiative.

The aims of the agreement include identifying industrial and commercial projects involving companies of Italy and of the Chongqing Liangjiang area, promoting bilateral investment opportunities through targeted actions to enhance mutual knowledge, facilitating matchmaking activities and workshops between companies operating in the same sector, and supporting negotiations to obtain preferential treatment clauses and easy terms for the establishment of Italian companies in the Chongqing Liangjiang area. The list of the areas of greatest interest includes the following sectors; automotive, energy, environmental protection, machinery, electronics and services, logistics, aviation and aerospace, cloud computing and e-commerce.

Angola: Cremonini Group makes an investment in Angola co-funded by CDP

The Cremonini Group launched a project to build a food production and logistics centre (CNA, Centro Nacional Agro-alimentar) in Luanda, with the potential of expanding it at sub-continental level. The large facility will have a surface area of 192,000 sq km in the municipality of Kilamba, in the surroundings of Luanda, and will be the reception centre for incoming Angolan agricultural and livestock products where they will be processed, packaged, stocked and distributed to supermarkets, shops, restaurants, hotels, public agencies and sold directly in a cash and carry outlet.

The investment is estimated to amount to 150-200 million euros, expandable in future years depending on the success obtained by the initiative. The launching event was preceded by the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding at the Ministry of Agriculture at the presence of Minister Nhunga. The MoU establishing the CNA was signed by Inalca Angola and Pecuang (Angolan livestock breeders), which established Peckinalca. The MoU was also signed by Cassa Depositi e Prestiti (CDP), in the person of the Chief Business Officer, Antonella Baldino
2018-04-20

Maeci

Cuba: T.O.MA. Group signs contract to build a hotel in Trinidad

The 12th edition of the Construction Fair, Cubas major construction show with 200 exhibitors from 26 Countries this year, was held in Havana from 3 to 6 April.

On the sidelines of the Fair, representatives of the T.O.MA. Group signed a contract worth approximately 60 million dollars for the construction of a hotel in Trinidad to be managed by Spanish hotel chain Melia. The Italian company successfully finalised the negotiations for the adjudication of the construction of two tourist facilities to be built in the tourist resort on the southern coast of the Island, in an international economic association with Cubas Dinvai.

The construction sector confirms to be strategic for Cuba as it aims to introduce new state-of-the-art technologies into the Country. This sector is at the top of the Cartera de oportunidades, a document that is presented every year concomitantly with the Construction Fair and is the handbook for attracting foreign investments. The best opportunities for Italian companies can be found in the development of tourism infrastructure and in rehabilitating their architectural heritage.
A new microchip technology capable of optically transferring data could solve a severe bottleneck in current devices by speeding data transfer and reducing energy consumption by orders of magnitude, according to an article published in the April 19, 2018 issue of Nature.

Researchers from Boston University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California Berkeley and University of Colorado Boulder have developed a method to fabricate silicon chips that can communicate with light and are no more expensive than current chip technology. The result is the culmination of a several-year-long project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency that was a close collaboration between teams led by Associate Professor Vladimir Stojanovic of UC Berkeley, Professor Rajeev Ram of MIT, and Assistant Professor Milos Popovic from Boston University and previously CU Boulder. They collaborated with a semiconductor manufacturing research team at the Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE) of the State University of New York at Albany.

The electrical signaling bottleneck between current microelectronic chips has left light communication as one of the only options left for further technological progress. The traditional method of data transfer-electrical wires-has a limit on how fast and how far it can transfer data. It also uses a lot of power and generates heat. With the relentless demand for higher performance and lower power in electronics, these limits have been reached. But with this new development, that bottleneck can be solved.

"Instead of a single wire carrying 10 to 100 gigabits per second, you can have a single optical fiber carrying 10 to 20 terabits per second--so about a thousand times more in the same footprint," says Popovic.

"If you replace a wire with an optical fiber, there are two ways you win," he says. "First, with light, you can send data at much higher frequencies without significant loss of energy as there is with copper wiring. Second, with optics, you can use many different colors of light in one fiber and each one can carry a data channel. The fibers can also be packed more closely together than copper wires can without crosstalk."

In the past, progress to integrate a photonic capability onto state-of-the-art chips that are used in computers and smartphones was hindered by a manufacturing roadblock. Modern processors are enabled by highly developed industrial semiconductor manufacturing processes capable of stamping out a billion transistors that work together on one chip. But these manufacturing processes are finely tuned and designing an approach to include optical devices on chips while keeping the current electrical capabilities intact proved difficult.

The first major success in overcoming this roadblock was in 2015 when the same group of researchers published another paper in Nature that solved this problem, but did so in a limited commercially relevant setting. The paper demonstrated the world's first microprocessor with a photonic data transfer capability and the approach to manufacturing it without changing the original manufacturing process-a concept the researchers have termed a zero-change technology. Ayar Labs, Inc., a startup that Ram, Popovic and Stojanovic co-founded, has recently partnered with major semiconductor industry manufacturer GlobalFoundries to commercialize this technology.

However, this previous approach was applicable to a small fraction of state-of-the-art microelectronic chips that did not include the most prevalent kind, which use a starting material referred to as bulk silicon.

In the new paper, the researchers present a manufacturing solution applicable to even the most commercially widespread chips based on bulk silicon, by introducing a set of new material layers in the photonic processing portion of the silicon chip. They demonstrate that this change allows optical communication with no negative impact on electronics. By working with state-of-the-art semiconductor manufacturing researchers at CNSE Albany to develop this solution, the scientists ensured that any process that was developed could be seamlessly inserted into current industry-level manufacturing.

"By carefully investigating and optimizing the properties of the additional material layers for photonic devices, we managed to demonstrate state-of-the-art system-level performance in terms of bandwidth density and energy consumption while starting from a much less expensive process compared to competing technologies," says Fabio Pavanello, a former postdoctoral associate from Popovic's research group who is a co-first author of the paper with both Amir Atabaki, a research scientist at MIT, and Sajjad Moazeni, a graduate student at UC Berkeley. "It took a major collaboration over several years by our three groups across different disciplines to achieve this result," adds Atabaki.

The new platform, which brings photonics to state-of-the-art bulk silicon microelectronic chips, promises faster and more energy efficient communication that could vastly improve computing and mobile devices. Applications beyond traditional data communication include accelerating the training of deep-learning artificial neural networks used in image and speech recognition tasks, and low-cost infrared LIDAR sensors for self-driving cars, smartphone face identification and augmented reality technology. In addition, optically enabled microchips could enable new types of data security and hardware authentication, more powerful chips for mobile devices operating on 5th generation (5G) wireless networks, and components for quantum information processing and computing.

"For the most advanced current state-of-the-art and future semiconductor manufacturing technologies with electronic transistor dimensions below 20nm, there is no other way to integrate photonics than this approach.", concluded Vladimir Stojanovic, whose team led some of the work, "All of the material layers used to form transistors become too thin to support photonics, so the additional layers are needed."

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High-resolution photos available by request.
Madrid, Spain: The vast majority of measles cases in Europe were reported in unvaccinated patients, and children younger than two years old were at a higher risk of dying from measles than older patients, according to research presented at the 28th European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) [1].

Presenting author Dr Emmanuel Robesyn of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) in Stockholm said they analysed data to support European states in reaching the recommended 95% two-dose vaccination coverage. It also set out to determine any possible differences between society's youngest individuals and older populations when infected with the disease.

The study examined all 37,365 measles cases reported to the ECDC from 1 January 2013 through 31 December 2017. The researchers found 81% of all reported cases were patients who were not vaccinated. Most cases were in Italy, Romania, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, with each reporting more than 5% of the cases. These countries also had the most cases that had not been connected with importation of the disease.

The study also noted that 33% of the patients were hospitalised and 11% had pneumonia. Most cases, 81%, involved those who were two years old and older. Of the remaining 19% share, 9% were one year old and 10% younger than one year.

The rate at which patients died from the disease highlighted the impact measles had on the very youngest populations. ECDC's analysis showed that one in 1,000 measles patients died, and of those, the greatest fatality was seen in the youngest cases. Cases in one-year-olds were six times more likely to die compared with cases of patients who were two years old or older. Cases in infants younger than one year were seven times more likely to die.

The findings are based on ECDC data collected in the most recent years in the EU/EEA, which can benefit communication efforts to tackle resurgence of measles in Europe.

The World Health Organization has set goals for the elimination of measles and rubella. One of the main actions to achieve those goals is to maintain high rates of sustained immunizations.

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Abstract no: O0060, How does the outcome of measles cases under one year of age differ from that of older cases, EU/EEA 2013 - 2017; session People, microorganisms and the environment 09:45 - 10:45, Saturday, 21 April 2018, Hall K

[1] The European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) is the annual meeting of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID). This year it will take place from 21 - 24 April 2018 in Madrid, Spain. At the world's largest congress combining the fields of infectious diseases and clinical microbiology, researchers will present more than 3,000 regular and late-breaking abstracts with the latest findings and recommendations, which are set to help improve diagnosis, prevention and treatment of infection-related diseases. The congress offers almost 200 sessions, including keynote lectures, symposia, oral sessions, educational workshops and meet-the-expert session. ECCMID expects approximately 13,000 participants from more than 100 countries.

About ESCMID

The European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID) is a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of infectious diseases in Europe and beyond. The society promotes and supports research, education, training and good medical practice in infection-related disciplines with a special focus on antimicrobial resistance to build capacity throughout the world. http://www.escmid.org

Contact

Chantal Britt

ESCMID Communications Manager

ESCMID Executive Office

P.O. Box 214, CH-4010 Basel

Phone +41 61 508 01 57

Mobile +41 76 588 08 24

Email chantal.britt@escmid.org

http://www.escmid.org

Tara Giroud

ECCMID Communications Assistant

Mobile +41 78 705 79 85

Email taragiroud@gmail.com
Madrid, Spain: Researchers developed a new colour-coded visual tool called Infection Risk Scan, or IRIS, which is set to make it easier for healthcare workers to measure in which areas a hospital complies with guidelines and where it needs to implement measures to improve infection control and the use antimicrobial therapies, according to research presented at the 28th European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) [1].

Dr Ina Willemsen, presenting author, and her team of researchers looked at several variables in care and compared them to local quality standards and data. These variables included hand hygiene, environmental contamination, healthcare workers' personal hygiene, appropriate use of antibiotics and any transmission of antibiotic-resistant gram-negative bacteria, such as Klebsiella spp. or Escherichia coli (E. coli). From this, the risk factors were displayed as an image that shows patient-related risks and any factors that can be controlled by healthcare workers.

"Infection control needs user-friendly standardized instruments to measure the compliance to guidelines and to implement improvement actions," Willemsen said.

"The IRIS method provides a multifactorial tool ensuring transparency in the infection control practices and outcomes. Repeated use of the IRIS makes it possible to monitor outcome and offers opportunities for targeted adjustment where needed. This results in a plan-do-check-act (PDCA) quality cycle in infection control."

Over three years, Willemsen's team conducted four consecutive IRIS in five wards of a Dutch hospital. All wards improved hand hygiene compliance, increasing to 68% overall from 43%. Environmental contamination, which was evaluated using adenosine triphosphate measurements, improved but could not be sustained. Personal hygiene was already good and was sustained over the observation period. The appropriate use of antibiotics did not improve despite researchers having identified clear places for improvement, however no changes were implemented. And finally, researchers noted only one instance of drug resistant bacteria transmission involving two patients.

In the next two years, IRIS will be implemented in nine hospitals and 40 nursing homes in the Dutch/Belgium border area. In addition to this research, Willemsen also explored whether this model could be useful in comparing the quality of infection control programmes between hospitals and between hospitals in different health systems. To that end they compared IRIS results from a hospital in the Netherlands and one in the United States.

The same variables were used to determine the levels of infection control and antimicrobial use as described above. Willemsen's team compared the US results with the Dutch guidelines and vice versa.

The hospitals varied greatly in their approach to antimicrobial therapy. Narrow-spectrum antimicrobials are used in the Netherlands whereas in the United States, guidelines call for broad-spectrum antimicrobials. There was also a large difference in environmental contamination levels, with the higher levels being found in the Dutch hospital. Personal hygiene practices differ as well, for instance, national guidelines forbid the wearing of jewellery in the Dutch hospital.

Willemsen said: "The standards and guidelines in the two hospitals showed substantial differences, which makes it impossible to compare the level of quality of infection control and antimicrobial use in the two hospitals in different countries with different national guidelines. More evidence-based standardization of guidelines around the globe is needed to allow international comparisons of the standard of care."

Willemsen will present this research in an oral session on Saturday and as a paper poster on Sunday. Last month she published a paper about IRIS in the journal Antimicrobial Resistance & Infection Control.

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Abstract no: O0173, The implementation of the infection risk scan (IRIS) in a Dutch hospital, resulting in standardization, transparency and substantial improvement; session Interventions in infection control: What works? 13:30 - 15:30, Saturday, 21 April 2018, Hall J

Paper poster no: p1019, Infection Risk Scan (IRIS) performed in a Dutch and US hospital: standardization of guidelines and practices is needed to compare the quality of infection control programmes; session Infection control strategies: 13:30 - 14:30, Sunday, 22 April 2018, Paper poster area

The infection risk scan (IRIS): standardization and transparency in infection control and antimicrobial use; Antimicrob Resist Infect Control. 2018; 7: 38.

Published online 2018 Mar 9. doi: 10.1186/s13756-018-0319-z

[1] The European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) is the annual meeting of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID). This year it will take place from 21 - 24 April 2018 in Madrid, Spain. At the world's largest congress combining the fields of infectious diseases and clinical microbiology, researchers will present more than 3,000 regular and late-breaking abstracts with the latest findings and recommendations, which are set to help improve diagnosis, prevention and treatment of infection-related diseases. The congress offers almost 200 sessions, including keynote lectures, symposia, oral sessions, educational workshops and meet-the-expert session. ECCMID expects approximately 13,000 participants from more than 100 countries.

About ESCMID

The European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID) is a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of infectious diseases in Europe and beyond. The society promotes and supports research, education, training and good medical practice in infection-related disciplines with a special focus on antimicrobial resistance to build capacity throughout the world. http://www.escmid.org

Contact

Chantal Britt

ESCMID Communications Manager

ESCMID Executive Office

P.O. Box 214, CH-4010 Basel

Phone +41 61 508 01 57

Mobile +41 76 588 08 24

Email chantal.britt@escmid.org

http://www.escmid.org

Tara Giroud

ECCMID Communications Assistant

Mobile +41 78 705 79 85

Email taragiroud@gmail.com
Madrid, Spain: West Nile virus (WNV), which is transmitted via mosquito bites, reemerged and spread to new territories of Greece in 2017 following a two-year hiatus in reported human cases, according to findings presented at the 28th European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) [1].

During this reemergence, in the summer and early autumn of 2017, researchers diagnosed 45 cases from blood samples and cerebral spinal fluid from 180 patients who had symptoms and signs that probably indicated WNV. Prof. Athanassios Tsakris, who is head of the Microbiology Department at the University of Athens Medical School, and his team of researchers analysed the reemergence and presented the findings.

The researchers diagnosed 26 patients, or 57.8% of the new cases, with WNV neuroinvasive disease. They characterized the remaining 19 patients, or 42.2%, with WNV fever. The age of patients diagnosed with the neuroinvasive disease ranged from 15 to 91, with a median age of 63. Elderly patients with underlying diseases were particularly affected. Of the five patients who died (19.2% of those with neuroinvasive disease), all were older than 70.

All new cases emerged from southern Greece and most were reported in regions that had not been affected before. Of the 45 confirmed cases, 40 were in new territories: 37 in Argos and three in Corinthia prefecture. One case was reported in Crete and the remaining four were reported from previously affected prefectures of northwestern Peloponnese. Researchers analysed geographical data of the areas affected by the virus and concluded that Greece's landscape, such as natural and constructed wetlands, seem to influence the transmission and rate of new cases.

Prof. Tsakris says: "The reemergence of WNV after a two-year hiatus of reported human cases and its subsequent geographic expansion in newly affected areas demonstrates that Greece provides the appropriate ecological and climatic conditions for WNV circulation. The virus has been established in Greece and disease transmission may continue in the future."

"Epidemiological surveillance, intensive mosquito management programmes and public education about personal protective measures are crucial to prevent WNV transmission, especially among susceptible population groups," Tsakris said.

"The risk of WNV transmission is complex and multifactorial; it concerns the virus, the vectors, the animal reservoirs, the environmental conditions and human behaviour. Preventing or reducing of WNV transmission depends on successful controlling vector's abundance or interruption of human-vector contact. Also, targeted WNV surveillance within mosquito populations may contribute to the well-timed detection of the virus prior to its emergence in equine species or human populations", Prof. Tsakris emphasizes.

WNV is transmitted to humans via infected mosquito bites. The transmission period is typically between mid-summer and early autumn when mosquitos are most active. Most people infected with WNV have no symptoms, but 20% develop West Nile fever, a flu-like illness that causes fever and body aches. Less than 1% of infections progress to diseases with sever neurological manifestations, such as aseptic meningitis, encephalitis and acute flaccid paralysis.

Prof. Tsakris explains that the dramatic decline in cases in the previous two years may be result of the mosquito management strategy, i.e. the timely and proper use of effective larvicides, which has shrunk the populations of adult mosquitoes, and the preventive measures taken by the community to limit their exposure to WNV. Still, WNV continued to circulate in Greek territories as it was demonstrated by serological testing of birds in 2015, he adds.

"Additionally, the development of immune response against WNV may have reduced human cases by depleting the susceptible human population. It is also possible that WNV caused infections that were asymptomatic, as occurs in approx. 80% of cases, or that remained undetected including neuro-invasive cases", Tsakris says. "Of course, climatic conditions cannot be excluded since virus replication rate within mosquitoes, as well as vector competence and population dynamic, are mainly weather dependent."

The first outbreak of WNV in Greece was recorded in 2010 and was considered to be the largest epidemic in Europe since the 1996 outbreak in Romania. Most outbreaks in western Europe have been caused by WNV Lineage 1. In eastern Europe, however, Lineage 2, which emerged in Hungary in 2004, has been responsible for human and bird mortality, particularly in Greece.

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Paper poster no: P0550, Reemergence of West Nile Virus infections in humans in Southern Greece, July to September 2017; session Dengue, Chik and other reemerging and emerging viruses, 15:30 - 16:30, Saturday, 21 April 2018, Paper Poster Area

[1] The European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) is the annual meeting of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID). This year it will take place from 21-24 April 2018 in Madrid, Spain. At the world's largest congress combining the fields of infectious diseases and clinical microbiology, researchers will present more than 3,000 regular and late-breaking abstracts with the latest findings and recommendations, which are set to help improve diagnosis, prevention and treatment of infection-related diseases. The congress offers almost 200 sessions, including keynote lectures, symposia, oral sessions, educational workshops and meet-the-expert session. ECCMID expects approximately 13,000 participants from more than 100 countries.

About ESCMID

The European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID) is a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of infectious diseases in Europe and beyond. The society promotes and supports research, education, training and good medical practice in infection-related disciplines with a special focus on antimicrobial resistance to build capacity throughout the world. http://www.escmid.org

Contact

Chantal Britt

ESCMID Communications Manager

ESCMID Executive Office

P.O. Box 214, CH-4010 Basel

Phone +41 61 508 01 57

Mobile +41 76 588 08 24

Email chantal.britt@escmid.org

http://www.escmid.org

Tara Giroud

ECCMID Communications Assistant

Mobile +41 78 705 79 85

Email taragiroud@gmail.com
In a recent study published in Science, researchers at ICFO - The Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona, Spain, along with other members of the Graphene Flagship, reached the ultimate level of light confinement. They have been able to confine light down to a space one atom, the smallest possible. This will pave the way to ultra-small optical switches, detectors and sensors.

Light can function as an ultra-fast communication channel, for example between different sections of a computer chip, but it can also be used for ultra-sensitive sensors or on-chip nanoscale lasers. There is currently much research into how to further shrink devices that control and guide light.

New techniques searching for ways to confine light into extremely tiny spaces, much smaller than current ones, have been on the rise. Researchers had previously found that metals can compress light below the wavelength-scale (diffraction limit), but more confinement would always come at the cost of more energy loss. This fundamental issue has now been overcome.

"Graphene keeps surprising us: nobody thought that confining light to the one-atom limit would be possible. It will open a completely new set of applications, such as optical communications and sensing at a scale below one nanometer," said ICREA Professor Frank Koppens at ICFO - The Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona, Spain, who led the research.

This team of researchers including those from ICFO (Spain), University of Minho (Portugal) and MIT (USA) used stacks of two-dimensional materials, called heterostructures, to build up a new nano-optical device. They took a graphene monolayer (which acts as a semi-metal), and stacked onto it a hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) monolayer (an insulator), and on top of this deposited an array of metallic rods. They used graphene because it can guide light in the form of plasmons, which are oscillations of the electrons, interacting strongly with light.

"At first we were looking for a new way to excite graphene plasmons. On the way, we found that the confinement was stronger than before and the additional losses minimal. So we decided to go to the one atom limit with surprising results," said David Alcaraz Iranzo, the lead author from ICFO.

By sending infra-red light through their devices, the researchers observed how the plasmons propagated in between the metal and the graphene. To reach the smallest space conceivable, they decided to reduce the gap between the metal and graphene as much as possible to see if the confinement of light remained efficient, i.e. without additional energy losses. Strikingly, they saw that even when a monolayer of hBN was used as a spacer, the plasmons were still excited, and could propagate freely while being confined to a channel of just one atom thick. They managed to switch this plasmon propagation on and off, simply by applying an electrical voltage, demonstrating the control of light guided in channels smaller than one nanometer.

This enables new opto-electronic devices that are just one nanometer thick, such as ultra-small optical switches, detectors and sensors. Due to the paradigm shift in optical field confinement, extreme light-matter interactions can now be explored that were not accessible before. The atom-scale toolbox of two-dimensional materials has now also proven applicable for many types of new devices where both light and electrons can be controlled even down to the scale of a nanometer.

Professor Andrea C. Ferrari, Science and Technology Officer of the Graphene Flagship, and Chair of its Management Panel, added "While the flagship is driving the development of novel applications, in particular in the field of photonics and optoelectronics, we do not lose sight of fundamental research. The impressive results reported in this paper are a testimony to the relevance for cutting edge science of the Flagship work. Having reached the ultimate limit of light confinement could lead to new devices with unprecedented small dimensions."

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Reference:

Probing the Ultimate Plasmon Confinement Limits with a van der Waals heterostructure

David Alcaraz Iranzo, Sebastien Nanot, Eduardo J. C. Dias, Itai Epstein, Cheng Peng, Dmitri K. Efetov, Mark B. Lundeberg, Romain Parret, Johann Osmond, Jin-Yong Hong, Jing Kong, Dirk R. Englund, Nuno M. R. Peres, Frank H.L. Koppens

Science, DOI 10.1126/science.aar8438 (2018)
Hans Peter Dimai, Professor of Medicine and Endocrinology at the Medical University of Graz, Austria, has been named the winner of the prestigious IOF President's Award.

The Award was presented by IOF President Cyrus Cooper at the opening of the World Congress on Osteoporosis, Osteoarthritis and Musculoskeletal Diseases. Professor Cooper stated: "We are very pleased to present this Award to Hans Peter Dimai, a distinguished leader in the osteoporosis and bone field who has made longstanding contributions to IOF and IOF's international programmes, most notably the IOF-ISCD Osteoporosis Essentials training course. As a member of IOF's scientific committee and through his dedication to advancing healthcare professional education within Austria and in the German-speaking countries, he has contributed significantly to the IOF mission to foster education and training in the musculoskeletal field."

Hans Peter Dimai is Professor of Medicine and Endocrinology at the Medical University of Graz, Austria, Department of Internal Medicine, Division of Endocrinology and Metabolism. Following medical school in Austria and a 3-year internship at the University Hospital of Graz, he also attended the Vienna University of Economics and Business where he received a degree in Hospital Management. In 1995, he received the prestigious Erwin Schrodinger Scholarship which gave him the opportunity to deepen his knowledge and skills in biomedical research at the Loma Linda University and Jerry L. Pettis Memorial VA Medical Center in California. During this time, he was involved in numerous bone specific research projects, most of which focused on the evaluation of genetically determined differences in the phenotype, such as osteoclast precursors, in two inbred strains of mice who differed substantially in their bone mineral density and their bone volume. Upon his return to Austria, he received his specialist degrees and, in 2000, his Professorship.

As an elected member of the IOF Committee of Scientific Advisors, Prof. Dimai has been actively involved in numerous IOF activities. In 2003 he organized and ran the first IOF/ISCD International Bone Densitometry Certificate Course in Austria, with many other courses following since. Today, Prof. Dimai is part of the international speaker's faculty of the Osteoporosis Essentials Course which is organized worldwide by IOF and ISCD. In addition, he is a Member of the European, Middle Eastern and African Regional Panel of the International Society of Clinical Densitometry (ISCD). Prof. Dimai is on the Editorial Board of Osteoporosis International and Archives in Osteoporosis, among other journals dedicated to bone and mineral metabolism. He is also Section Editor of the journal Safety in Health. Since 2008, he has been Austrian delegate to, and active member of, the DVO, the umbrella society of German speaking osteologic societies. In addition, he has been the Austrian representative in the DVO's osteoporosis guidelines development group as well as a leading member of the osteoporosis guidelines group of the Main Association of Austrian Social Security Institutions since 2005.

From 2012 to 2016, Prof. Dimai held the position of the Vice Rector for Studies and Teaching at the Medical University of Graz. As well as establishing a uniform medical school admission test to these universities, he led the establishment of a fourth public medical university in Austria, for which, in 2016, he was awarded one of Austria's highest and most prestigious governmental decorations: the Golden Medal of Merits of Upper Austria. Prof. Dimai is former president of the Austrian Society of Bone and Mineral Research, and former congress president of "Osteologie 2016", the largest annual congress in the German speaking countries related to the bone field. He has authored more than 300 publications, many of them published in highly ranked journals including the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). His main areas of interest include metabolic bone diseases, particularly osteoporosis and its epidemiology, diagnosis, treatment and economic impact. Currently, he is clinical consortium partner of PoCOsteo (Point-of-care in-office device for identifying individuals at high risk of Osteoporosis and Osteoporotic Fracture), an EU funded HORIZON 2020 project which is supported by IOF.

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World Congress on Osteoporosis, Osteoarthritis & Musculoskeletal Diseases (WCO-IOF-ESCEO Krakow 2018)

Held jointly by IOF and ESCEO, the Congress takes place in Krakow, Poland, from April 19-22, 2018. WCO-IOF-ESCEO is the world's largest annual forum for the presentation of clinical research and new advances in the prevention and management of musculoskeletal disorders, including sarcopenia and frailty. For complete information visit http://www.wco-iof-esceo.org #OsteoCongress

About IOF

The International Osteoporosis Foundation (IOF) is the world's largest nongovernmental organization dedicated to the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of osteoporosis and related musculoskeletal diseases. IOF members, including committees of scientific researchers as well as 240 patient, medical and research societies in 99 locations, work together to make fracture prevention and healthy mobility a worldwide heath care priority. http://www.iofbonehealth.org http://www.facebook.com/ @iofbonehealth

About ESCEO

The European Society for Clinical and Economic Aspects of Osteoporosis, Osteoarthritis and Musculoskeletal Diseases (ESCEO) is a non-profit organization, dedicated to a close interaction between clinical scientists dealing with rheumatic disorders, pharmaceutical industry developing new compounds in this field, regulators responsible for the registration of such drugs and health policy makers, to integrate the management of osteoporosis and osteoarthritis within the comprehensive perspective of health resources utilization. The objective of ESCEO is to provide practitioners with the latest clinical and economic information, allowing them to organize their daily practice, in an evidence-based medicine perspective, with a cost-conscious perception. http://www.esceo.org
The esteemed founding Director-General and Chief Scientific Officer of EMRI in Iran is recognized for his longstanding commitment to IOF and dedication to osteoporosis research, education and awareness

The CNS Medal honours an individual who has made important and outstanding contributions to the International Osteoporosis Foundation (IOF) Committee of National Societies (CNS) through active participation in IOF activities and by expanding IOF's message and outreach at the national level.

The 2018 CNS Medal has been awarded today to Professor Bagher Larijani, at a ceremony held at the World Congress on Osteoporosis, Osteoarthritis and Musculoskeletal Diseases in Krakow, Poland. Professor Larijani is founding Director-General and Chief Scientific Officer of the Endocrinology and Metabolism Research Institute (EMRI), a long-time, active CNS member society and the key Iranian organization in the field which carries out basic, clinical and translational research, healthcare professional education, and public awareness activities across the country.

In presenting the Award, CNS Chairman Professor Jean-Yves Reginster commended Professor Larijani and EMRI, an IOF member society. He stated: "It is a great honour to extend this prestigious Award to Professor Larijani, who is a distinguished and internationally recognized researcher as well as a dedicated advocate for osteoporosis patients in Iran. Thanks to his leadership, EMRI has carried out extensive educational outreach and national research, increased public and health professional knowledge of osteoporosis, and taken important steps forward in quantifying the burden of the disease in the country. We are also continually impressed with EMRI's exemplary campaigns on World Osteoporosis Day, which reinforce the outreach of IOF's key annual global awareness initiative."

Professor Bagher Larijani trained as an endocrinologist at Tehran University of Medical Sciences and obtained a fellowship distinction at the American College of Endocrinology. He is the founding Director-General and Chief Scientific Officer of the Endocrinology and Metabolism Research Institute (EMRI) and simultaneously holds several high-ranking governmental positions. He has served as the Chancellor of Tehran University of Medical Sciences, the oldest and most prestigious medical school in Iran, and has held the position of the Chairman of the Policy-making Council at the Ministry of Health and Medical Education. Besides his national-scale leadership roles, Professor Larijani, is currently also a practicing endocrinologist, has been involved in many research projects in different capacities, and has authored numerous journal articles and books in the fields of endocrinology, osteoporosis, medical ethics, and other related areas. His work has attained more than 16000 citations and the H-index of 62 recorded by Google Scholar in 2018.

Internationally, he has contributed to several global-scale research and policy-making conventions and assemblies such as Lancet Commission on Obesity and has been involved in different projects of the International Osteoporosis Foundation, World Health Organization and other global health-related organizations in different capacities. It is noteworthy that during the past two decades, his main interest at the Endocrinology and Metabolism Research Institute has been promoting translational medicine in Iran and bridging the gap between basic and clinical research in diabetes, osteoporosis, and other non-communicable diseases. Recently, in the capacity of Deputy Chair of the National Supreme Committee for Prevention and Control of Non-Communicable Diseases, Professor Larijani has made significant contributions to the design and development of national-scale multi-sectoral policies aimed at controlling the rampant nation-wide increase in the burden of non-communicable diseases, predicted to affect the nation dramatically in the future.

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About the Committee of National Societies (CNS)

The CNS, comprising 240 patient and medical societies, is IOF's core membership committee. As a group it forms the world's largest single network of national patient and medical organizations dedicated to osteoporosis and musculoskeletal disorders. CNS societies are led by dedicated individuals who are deeply committed to raising public awareness and improving patient care at the national level. Their grassroots efforts in implementing IOF information campaigns locally have helped spread key prevention messages around the world. Contact an IOF member society

World Congress on Osteoporosis, Osteoarthritis & Musculoskeletal Diseases (WCO-IOF-ESCEO Krakow 2018)

Held jointly by IOF and ESCEO, the Congress takes place in Krakow, Poland, from April 19-22, 2018. WCO-IOF-ESCEO is the world's largest annual forum for the presentation of clinical research and new advances in the prevention and management of musculoskeletal disorders, including sarcopenia and frailty. For complete information visit http://www.wco-iof-esceo.org #OsteoCongress

About IOF

The International Osteoporosis Foundation (IOF) is the world's largest nongovernmental organization dedicated to the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of osteoporosis and related musculoskeletal diseases. IOF members, including committees of scientific researchers as well as 240 patient, medical and research societies in 99 locations, work together to make fracture prevention and healthy mobility a worldwide heath care priority. http://www.iofbonehealth.org http://www.facebook.com/ @iofbonehealth

About ESCEO

The European Society for Clinical and Economic Aspects of Osteoporosis, Osteoarthritis and Musculoskeletal Diseases (ESCEO) is a non-profit organization, dedicated to a close interaction between clinical scientists dealing with rheumatic disorders, pharmaceutical industry developing new compounds in this field, regulators responsible for the registration of such drugs and health policy makers, to integrate the management of osteoporosis and osteoarthritis within the comprehensive perspective of health resources utilization. The objective of ESCEO is to provide practitioners with the latest clinical and economic information, allowing them to organize their daily practice, in an evidence-based medicine perspective, with a cost-conscious perception. http://www.esceo.org
It sounds like a late-night commercial: In just one hour you can reduce your anxiety levels and some heart health risk factors. But a recent study with 14 participants shows preliminary data that even a single session of meditation can have cardiovascular and psychological benefits for adults with mild to moderate anxiety.

John Durocher, assistant professor of biological sciences, is presenting the work of a team of Michigan Technological University researchers about mindfulness meditation and its ability to reduce anxiety at the 2018 Experimental Biology meeting April 21-25 in San Diego, which is attended by approximately 14,000 people.

In "Mindfulness Meditation Reduces Aortic Pulsatile Load and Anxiety in Mild to Moderately Anxious Adults," Durocher, along with fellow researchers Hannah Marti, a recent Michigan Tech graduate, Brigitte Morin, lecturer in biological science, and Travis Wakeham, a graduate student, explains the finding that 60 minutes after meditating the 14 study participants showed lower resting heart rates and reduction in aortic pulsatile load--the amount of change in blood pressure between diastole and systole of each heartbeat multiplied by heart rate. Additionally, shortly after meditating, and even one week later, the group reported anxiety levels were lower than pre-meditation levels.

"Even a single hour of meditation appears to reduce anxiety and some of the markers for cardiovascular risk," Durocher says.

While it's well-documented that meditation over the course of several weeks reduces anxiety, there have been few comprehensive research studies on the benefits of a single meditation session. Durocher's team wanted to understand the effect of acute mindfulness on cognition and the cardiovascular system to improve how anti-anxiety therapies and interventions are designed.

Studying the physiological effects of mindfulness meditation

Durocher said the study hinged on a research design proposed by recent graduate Hannah Marti '17. Marti, who graduated from Michigan Tech with a bachelor's degree in Biomedical Engineering, will begin medical school in July at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Marti designed the mindfulness study to include three sessions:

An orientation session during which researchers measured anxiety using the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI) and conducted cardiovascular testing by measuring heart rate variability, resting blood pressure and pulse wave analysis;

A meditation session that included repetition of the cardiovascular testing plus the mindfulness meditation--20 minutes introductory meditation, 30 minutes body scan and 10 minutes self-guided meditation--as well as repeating cardiovascular measurements immediately following meditation and 60 minutes after;

A post-meditation anxiety test one week later.

During a body scan, the participant is asked to focus intensely on one part of the body at a time, beginning with the toes. By focusing on individual parts of the body, a person can train his or her mind to pivot from detailed attention to a wider awareness from one moment to the next.

"The point of a body scan is that if you can focus on one single part of your body, just your big toe, it can make it much easier for you to deal with something stressful in your life. You can learn to focus on one part of it rather than stressing about everything else in your life," Marti says.

One participant in the study commented that following the session they were the least stressed they'd been in a decade.

Durocher says Marti was capable of designing such a study because of her experiences with research during her undergraduate studies at Michigan Tech and by securing support through two Pavlis Honors College and Portage Health Foundation internships.

"She had some experience during the first internship so she could propose her own study for the second one," he says. "I helped to make minor adjustments, but Hannah did much of this project on her own."

New avenues of research in the health sciences at Michigan Tech

The single session mindfulness meditation study and the NIH-funded study to come (see sidebar), are excellent examples of the emphasis on student participation in research at Michigan's northern-most public university.

"In Michigan Tech's health science research programs, I want our students to get hands-on experience that they can carry into their futures, gaining experiences to advance their educational careers or their professional careers," Durocher says. "When they go for an interview, they have something real to talk about, there's substance."

Marti says this has been her experience.

"I had so much to talk about in my medical school interviews," she says. "I didn't have to say 'I just helped the professor do this,' because with Dr. Durocher's help, I was able to do most of the research myself."

Case in point, Durocher notes that nearly 20 former students who participated in laboratory research with him have gone on to physical therapy programs, medical school or to pursue a research doctorate.

And just as important, after students move on to the next chapter of their lives, there remains the legacy of their involvement in research: research designs are used in future projects and upcoming students will carry the research forward.

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Patients with a rare medical condition can receive life-saving treatment at the touch of a button thanks to a new device developed by scientists.

Researchers at Newcastle University, UK, have devised a way for patients and healthcare professionals to access web-based emergency clinical management information for Addison's disease.

The chronic disorder means the body fails to produce the stress hormone, cortisol. It can be life-threatening if a patient suffers adrenal crisis and is not urgently given an injection of hydrocortisone.

If the patient develops an illness, undergoes surgery, or stops taking their medication, they can develop adrenal crisis due to insufficient levels of the stress hormone.

A team of experts have now developed a Quick Response (QR) code which may be carried by patients and scanned to access vital medical support.

Vital patient information

The QR code is printed on bracelets and plastic cards and, when scanned using a smartphone, links to the Addison's Disease Information System (ADIS), which provides comprehensive clinical management advice specific to the patient.

Information displayed by the ADIS includes emergency treatment the patient may require, a letter from a medical consultant and advice about preparation for surgery.

A study, published today in BMJ Innovations, shows that the use of QR codes allows patients in a serious condition to receive better emergency care by giving a healthcare professional immediate access to treatment protocols.

Dr Jolanta Weaver, Senior Lecturer at the Institute of Cellular Medicine, Newcastle University, is lead author of the study that involves experts from the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Gateshead.

She said: "Rare medical conditions are prone to poor management in non-specialist units as, by definition, their presentation is uncommon.

"Some healthcare professionals do not feel they have the appropriate knowledge or confidence to manage these cases and they may need more support from information systems such as ADIS.

"Our ADIS uses a web app running on a smart device, linked to a QR code. It is accessible at all times and shareable with healthcare professionals, patients, their carers, or when required in an emergency by bystanders.

"The system offers immediate access to clinical guidance, which we hope will prevent unnecessary deaths linked to Addison's disease."

Improving condition's management

Experts became interested in improving the management of Addison's disease and developing the ADIS after hearing about the preventable deaths of a number of patients due to adrenal crisis.

Hydrocortisone maintains health by helping control blood pressure and glucose levels and manage the body's response to stress. The disease is treated by daily tablets of a 'synthetic' cortisol.

For the study, 54 healthcare professionals - doctors, nurses, paramedics and dentists - were asked for their experience in managing adrenal crisis and their professional views of the ADIS.

Findings revealed that 37% of healthcare professionals have never seen and 59% have never managed an adrenal crisis.

The survey showed that there is a clinical need to improve the acute management of adrenal crisis. Healthcare professionals expressed a preference for QR code-linked information and as many as 96% of those who took part in the study thought that the ADIS would be helpful in an acute setting.

Dr Kilimangalan Narayanan, Consultant Physician and Head of Service Medicine, at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Gateshead, welcomed the use of the ADIS.

He said: "Dr Weaver's work has highlighted an important area of patient safety relevant to patients who have cortisol deficiency.

"Her team's work has formed the basis for subsequent further improvements in care by introducing a system of 'alerts' within the patient record on our hospital patient management system."

Quick Response codes

QR codes are free and can easily be generated and printed using free web-based software. Although they have been used for labeling medicines, and patients, to prevent wrong site surgery, their use to access clinical management information is a new development.

Dr Andrew Colman, a computer scientist, physician and research associate at Newcastle University, developed and implemented the ADIS.

He said: "I was motivated to develop this computer system to improve the care of patients with Addison's disease when I heard Dr Weaver give a lecture to medical staff about the condition.

"Dr Weaver explained that recently in the country two patients with Addison's disease had died unnecessarily due to poor clinical management and I wanted to find a way to help prevent this happening again.

"Many healthcare professionals lack the experience and knowledge of treating such rare conditions and the ADIS enables them to access life-saving information in a critical situation."

Patient's story

Pauline Copeland is the first to receive a QR-code bracelet linking to her Addison's Disease Information System.

The grandmother-of-eight was diagnosed with the condition almost 40 years ago and has suffered critical situations where medics have not known what to do when she has had an adrenal crisis.

The 67-year-old, of Pity Me, County Durham, said: "Addison's disease can be a life or death situation. If I become acutely ill I need to be treated straight away - not in a few hours or tomorrow, but immediately.

"As my illness is rare, medical staff do not always know how best to treat me and this can be a worry as they need to understand the importance of my condition and how to treat an adrenal crisis.

"The QR-code will give me confidence to know that professional healthcare staff, or anybody else using the ADIS, will be given access to medical information on adrenal crisis immediately so that I am given appropriate care."

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Reference

Use of Quick Response (QR) coded bracelets and cards for the improvement of cortisol deficiency / Addison's disease management; an audit of quality of care of the management of steroid deficiency in acute illness

Andrew Colman, Jack Sellick, Jolanta Weaver

BMJ Innovations. Doi: 10.1136/bmjinnov-2017-000226
Nature endowed the human with an unique protective system, the immunity. It is capable to protect the body from different external and internal effects. However, disorders of the immune system lead to various diseases from allergy and type I diabetes to more dangerous autoimmune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis. Unfortunately, such diseases are diagnosed only when the symptoms are clearly demonstrated. Researchers of Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University (SPbPU) within the framework of the Project 5-100 developed a unique method of immune diseases diagnosing before the symptoms appear.

Scientists around the world are engaged in research on the immune response, how the body reacts to the invasion of foreign bacteria, microorganisms and viruses. Scientists of Polytechnics University proposed a laser-correlation spectroscopic technique (also called dynamic light scattering) for studying the immune response in body fluids, for example, in saliva. It is known that saliva contains the same immune proteins as blood. Moreover, it is much easier and cheaper in comparison with blood analysis.

The proposed method is to analyze the scattered light obtained by laser illumination of human's biological fluid (saliva or blood). The laser beam is focused on the sample. The proteins in the liquid scatter the light, which is registered by the detector. By analyzing the change in the intensity of scattered light in time, it is possible to determine the size of the particles floating in the liquid. The particle size changes during the activation of immunity, the proteins are binding and become larger. In addition, the size composition of biological fluids in different people can vary. It depends on the certain diseases in the organism. Thus, it is possible to determine whether the human body reacts to infections properly and to diagnose the diseases.

Due to this method, it is also possible to test medical drugs not on a human, but on his biological fluids. This approach becomes purely individual. At the same time, it is impossible to perform the analysis of each person's immunity individually, without unambiguous doctor's testimony, because most of the biochemical methods are complex and expensive.

"We offer a cheap and effective method of diagnosing the diseases without any indication. We need a laser, a receiver and a program for data analysis. In the course of routine clinical examination, saliva can be tested so that the patient can learn more about the disease before the symptoms appear. This method will increase the chances of recovery," - says Elina Nepomnyashchaya, an engineer of the scientific group at the Institute of Physics, Nanotechnology and Telecommunications SPbPU.

Such studies of the dynamics of the activation of immune proteins using optical methods have not yet been carried out, thus the research remains to be done. The current task is to create a detailed study of the reactions of donors with various pathologies. Scientists of Polytechnic University carry out this research in close cooperation with medical institutions, interested in the implementation of the cheap diagnostic method of immune diseases, primarily autoimmune diseases and diabetes mellitus.

Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University is participating in Project 5-100 aimed at improving the competitiveness of the leading universities of the Russian Federation among the world's leading research and education centers. As part of this Academic Excellence Initiative, multidisciplinary scientific research, world class technology and knowledge are created.

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Researchers have exposed weak spots in a fungal pathogen that wrecks crops by comparing it with a genetically similar fungus that yields mycoprotein for human consumption

Genetic differences between two very similar fungi, one that led to Quorn, the proprietary meat substitute, and another that ranks among the world's most damaging crop pathogens, have exposed the significant features that dictate the pair's very different lifestyles.

While the manufacturer of Quorn cultivates strains of Fusarium venenatum via fermentation into a mycoprotein dough for human consumption, farmers try to fight off Fusarium graminearum as this pervasive fungal pathogen invades multiple crops and threatens global food security.

Researchers have now pinpointed several significant differences between the fungal pair that seem to turn F. graminearum nasty, features that promise targets for controlling disease. The findings, by a team from Rothamsted Research, are reported today in the journal, BMC Genomics.

The team discovered, for instance, that F. venenatum does not contain some clusters of genes that produce subsidiary compounds, or secondary metabolites, which are produced by F. graminearum during successful wheat infection.

"Using improved computer software, we have enhanced gene predictions and secondary metabolite gene cluster predictions in both species to a level not found in most other filamentous fungal species," says Robert King, the team's lead bioinformatician at Rothamsted.

Emphasising the importance of the findings, King notes: "All this improved data is immediately available in the public domain via ENSEMBL [a genome database]. In the medium term, it should be possible to achieve a resilient control strategy for this globally important, cereal-infecting pathogen."

The team also confirmed differences in mating strategies, notably that the pathogenic fungus can mate with itself, which influences gene transfer between generations and genome repair mechanisms, whereas the Quorn fungus would need to find a mate.

And they found that key areas in chromosomes, the centromeric regions, are 25% smaller in the benign fungus, for reasons unknown but that offer "an excellent starting point for follow-up investigations", notes Kim Hammond-Kosack, a molecular plant pathologist at Rothamsted and leader of the research team.

"This is an important and fascinating piece of work that shows the many differences between F. venenatum and the plant pathogen F. graminearum at a number of different levels," says Rob Johnson, Science Manager and Fermentation Specialist at Quorn Foods.

"Despite the close relationship revealed by the sequencing," continues Johnson, "the differences in lifestyle are written deep into the genomes of these fungi, with the saprophytic F. venenatum showing a range of genes devoted to breakdown of organic matter, whereas the F. graminearum contains unique genes for secondary metabolites and more devoted to its pathogenic nature."

Johnson adds: "The confirmation of the non-pathogenic nature of the species used to make Quorn and understanding of the genetics revealed by these data will make this paper one that Quorn will return to many times as we improve our process and grow our business."

In separate research, also funded at Rothamsted by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the team has been unravelling the pan-genome of F. graminearum, a reference genome that includes the genetic make-up of the pathogen and also those of its various strains.

"We can now immediately identify which of the newly predicted secondary metabolite gene clusters and small secreted protein effector sequences are found in all pathogenic strains of F. graminearum," says Hammond-Kosack.

"These sequences then become the targets for a far narrower set of follow-up gene function studies in F. graminearum by reverse genetic experimentation to pinpoint the genes essential for the disease-causing abilities of this pathogen."

Hammond-Kosack concludes: "Starting from the fundamental new knowledge gained from these studies, a sustainable discover and disease control pipeline has begun to be created."

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NOTES TO EDITORS

Publication:

King et al., 2018, BMC Genomics: Inter-genome comparison of the Quorn fungus Fusarium venenatum and the closely related plant infecting pathogen Fusarium graminearum

DOI: 10.1186/s12864-018-4612-2

Rothamsted Research contacts:

Kim Hammond-Kosack, Molecular Plant Pathologist

Tel: +44 (0) 1582 938 240

E-mail: kim.hammond-kosack@rothamsted.ac.uk

Robert King, Bioinformatician

Tel: +44 (0) 1582 938 335

E-mail: robert.king@rothamsted.ac.uk

Susan Watts, Head of Communications

Tel: +44 (0) 1582 938 109

Mob: +44 (0) 7964 832 719

E-mail: susan.watts@rothamsted.ac.uk

About Rothamsted Research

Rothamsted Research is the longest-running agricultural research institute in the world. We work from gene to field with a proud history of ground-breaking discoveries, from crop treatment to crop protection, from statistical interpretation to soils management. Our founders, in 1843, were the pioneers of modern agriculture, and we are known for our imaginative science and our collaborative influence on fresh thinking and farming practices.

Through independent science and innovation, we make significant contributions to improving agri-food systems in the UK and internationally. In terms of the institute's economic contribution, the cumulative impact of our work in the UK was calculated to exceed 3000 million a year in 2015 (Rothamsted Research and the Value of Excellence: A synthesis of the available evidence, by Sean Rickard). Our strength lies in our systems approach, which combines science and strategic research, interdisciplinary teams and partnerships.

Rothamsted is also home to three unique resources. These National Capabilities are open to researchers from all over the world: The Long-Term Experiments, Rothamsted Insect Survey and the North Wyke Farm Platform.

We are strategically funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), with additional support from other national and international funding streams, and from industry. We are also supported by the Lawes Agricultural Trust (LAT). For more information, visit https://www.rothamsted.ac.uk/; Twitter @Rothamsted

About BBSRC

The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council is part of UK Research and Innovation, a non-departmental public body funded by a grant-in-aid from the UK government.

BBSRC invests in world-class bioscience research and training on behalf of the UK public. Our aim is to further scientific knowledge, to promote economic growth, wealth and job creation and to improve quality of life in the UK and beyond.

Funded by government, BBSRC invested 469 million in world-class bioscience in 2016-17. We support research and training in universities and strategically funded institutes. BBSRC research and the people we fund are helping society to meet major challenges, including food security, green energy and healthier, longer lives. Our investments underpin important UK economic sectors, such as farming, food, industrial biotechnology and pharmaceuticals.

More information about BBSRC, our science and our impact.

More information about BBSRC strategically funded institutes

About LAT

The Lawes Agricultural Trust, established in 1889 by Sir John Bennet Lawes, supports Rothamsted Research's national and international agricultural science through the provision of land, facilities and funding. LAT, a charitable trust, owns the estates at Harpenden and Broom's Barn, including many of the buildings used by Rothamsted Research. LAT provides an annual research grant to the Director, accommodation for nearly 200 people, and support for fellowships for young scientists from developing countries. LAT also makes capital grants to help modernise facilities at Rothamsted, or invests in new buildings.
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has been associated with military activities for as long as wars have been fought - but this disorder was only named in the 1980s. A new Yale paper published April 16, 2018 in Chronic Stress documents a different kind of war - a war of words - that has been fought over the name of the disorder, and may have slowed clinical and scientific progress on the disorder.

The study looked back through 14 million newspaper articles between 1900-2016, and found trauma-related symptoms such as flashbacks, trouble sleeping, and severe anxiety were called different names after World War I, World War II, Vietnam, and the Gulf War. Terms such as shell shock, war neurosis, and battle fatigue were used to describe symptoms that many soldiers experienced after returning home from war.

The Yale-led research team used a complex computer coding program to comb through the archives of the New York Times, Reuters, and Associated Press, and found that as each war came and went, a new term was used to describe the disorder now referred to as PTSD. They argue that the lack clear terminology may have slowed professional understanding, knowledge, and research into PTSD.

"Each (military) conflict basically had its own new name for what were really the same group of symptoms," said Adam Chekroud, PhD, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and the paper's first author. "For us, this was an opportunity to dig into the data, and to quantify this phenomenon."

The paper revealed that PTSD symptoms were known as shell shock during World War I, and irritable heart or soldier's heart during World War II. The term gross stress reaction was introduced in the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1952, but was omitted in a second edition in 1968 during the Vietnam War.

It wasn't until 1980, with the publication of the manual's third edition, that the term PTSD was introduced to describe military trauma and non-war related factors, such as sexual abuse. "PTSD has existed forever," Chekroud said. "It's just a question of what we've been calling it."

Chadi Abdallah, MD, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Yale and the editor of Chronic Stress, said the history of disjointed terminology resulted in a 60-year delay in understanding traumatic symptoms experienced by veterans and others.

"Society finally recognized that many people were suffering from the same symptoms," he said. "(The study) provides objective measures to how society has reacted to this invisible wound of war."

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John H. Krystal, MD, Robert L. McNeil, Jr. Professor of Neuroscience at Yale and Chair of the Yale Department of Psychiatry, was senior author of the study
Electron-transfer is a common phenomenon in nature and plays important roles in biology, energy, materials, catalysis and other fields. Intermetallic electron-transfer not only changes the valence states and electron configurations of the participant metal ions but also switches the coupling interactions between them. Therefore, the control of electron-transfer provides an efficient way to tune the magnetic, electric and optical properties of materials. Typical examples showing external stimuli tuned intermetallic electron-transfer behaviors are cyanide-bridged complexes. The modulation of electron-transfer behavior is realized mainly based on solution reaction. It is a direct method to regulate the redox potential and electron-transfer behavior of metal centers via chemical modification, such as ligand substitution, anion and solvent exchange in solution reaction. However, it is a formidable challenge in the solid state to reversibly control different electron-transfer behaviors and realize the coupling and synergy between the multi-functional properties under external stimuli.

Tao Liu's group from the Dalian University of Technology has been committed to the construction and multi-functional research of light-induced electron-transfer compounds over a long term. Recently, they achieved the coupling and synergy between magnetic, polar, fluorescence and thermal expansion properties via electron rearrangement induced variation in energy transfer, charge distribution and bond distance, providing a new method to read magnetic state through light, electric and mechanical signal. Some related works were published in Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2017, 56, 7663-7668; Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2017, 56, 13052-13055; Chem. Sci. 2018, 9, 617-622; Chem. Sci. 2018, 9, 2892-2897.

Recently, they adopted an ancillary ligand with an extended p-conjugation system to prepare a tetranuclear {Fe2Co2} compound. Three crystalline phases with different electron-transfer behaviors were obtained via successive solid transformations from solvated 1* 2CH3OH* 4H2O, to desolvated 1, and its polymorph 1a through subsequent desolvation and vapor induction. 1* 2CH3OH* 4H2O possesses the {FeIILS(-CN)CoIIILS} (LS = low spin) state at room temperature, which undergoes a thermally-induced reversible electron-transfer in mother liquor (see Movie 1). Furthermore, 1* 2CH3OH* 4H2O undergoes a desolvated process upon heating in air and then generates 1 (see Movie 2). 1 showes the {FeIIILS(-CN)CoIIHS} (HS = high spin) state at room temprature. No thermally-induced electron-transfer behavior was observed in 1. Polymorph 1a possesses the {FeIILS(-CN)CoIIILS} state at 298 K. It showed reversible intermetallic electron-transfer between {FeIILSCoIIILS} and {FeIIILSCoIIHS} states upon thermal treatment or alternative irradiation with 808 and 532 nm lasers at cryogenic temperatures, which realize the rapidly reversible control of electron-transfer and rearrangement. Structure-magnetic property relationship indicates that the enhancement of intermolecular * * *  interactions between ligands around cobalt centers induces the changes of coordination spheres and strength of ligand field, which can tune the redox potential of cobalt centers and finally result in different electron-transfer behaviors. Moreover, the distances of - interactions can be modulated in a continuous range of 3.3-3.8 A. The enhancement of intermolecular * * *  interactions in the process of desolvation and structural rearrangement provides an important driving force for the successive solid transformations. This work indicates that the introduction of * * *  interactions not only provides a strategy to manipulate successive solid transformations with different electronic states but also offers an access to construct switchable multifunctional materials displaying stimuli-induced dynamic changes functions in the future.

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This work was partly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (91422302, 21421005 and 21322103), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, China.

See the article: Manipulation of successive crystalline transformations to control electron transfer and switchable functions

Chengqi Jiao, Wenjing Jiang, Yinshan Meng, Wen Wen, Liang Zhao, Junli Wang, Jixiang Hu, Gagik G Gurzadyan, Chunying Duan, and Tao Liu* National Science Review, nwy033,https://doi.org/10.1093/nsr/nwy033

The National Science Review is the first comprehensive scholarly journal released in English in China that is aimed at linking the country's rapidly advancing community of scientists with the global frontiers of science and technology. The journal also aims to shine a worldwide spotlight on scientific research advances across China.
A multidisciplinary team of scientists share recent advancements in innovative in-vitro cancer biology methods for screening drug-like molecules in cancer tissue relevant models in a new report published online ahead-of-print at SLAS Discovery. Entitled "Advanced Development of Primary Pancreatic Organoid Tumor Models for High-Throughput Phenotypic Drug Screening," the report can be accessed for free.

The authors -- Senior Scientific Directors Timothy Spicer and Louis Scampavia and Post-Doctoral Associate Shurong Hou at Scripps Florida in collaboration with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Greiner Bio-One, Nano3D Biosciences, Inc., University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute -- illustrate how a magnetic nanoparticle assembly approach is used to increase throughput dramatically while reducing costs. This technology combines specialized high-density microtiter plates formulated with an ultra-low attachment surface along with gold nanoparticles (nanoshuttles), which are used to label cancer cells in-vitro. Once labeled, a magnetic driver quickly pulls the cells into a 3D spheroid or organoid structure. This 3D structure is retained and drug-like molecules can then be added, affording the ability to ascertain their efficacy.

With the advent of cost-effective and high-throughput 3D tissue culture, the importance of developing this technology using patient-derived cancer cells is to ensure a more disease and physiologically relevant point of comparison to 2D monolayer testing, thereby validating the hypothesis of 3D relevance as a predictor of possible patient outcomes. This allows researchers to step closer to identifying patient-specific therapies and points in the direction of rapid 3D testing of patient-derived cancer cells against FDA-approved drugs, which may be both affordable and amenable for a precision medicine approach to provide timely and critical feedback to physicians.

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Advanced Development of Primary Pancreatic Organoid Tumor Models for High-Throughput Phenotypic Drug Screening can be accessed for free at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177%2F2472555218766842. For more information about SLAS and its journals, visit http://www.slas.org/journals.

A PDF of this article is available to credentialed media outlets upon request. Contact nhallock@slas.org.

About our Society and Journals

SLAS (Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening) is an international community of nearly 20,000 professionals and students dedicated to life sciences discovery and technology. The SLAS mission is to bring together researchers in academia, industry and government to advance life sciences discovery and technology via education, knowledge exchange and global community building.

SLAS DISCOVERY: 2016 Impact Factor 2.444. Editor-in-Chief Robert M. Campbell, Ph.D., Eli Lilly and Company, Indianapolis, IN (USA). SLAS Discovery (Advancing Life Sciences R&D) was previously published (1996-2016) as the Journal of Biomolecular Screening (JBS).

SLAS TECHNOLOGY: 2016 Impact Factor 2.850. Editor-in-Chief Edward Kai-Hua Chow, Ph.D., National University of Singapore (Singapore). SLAS Technology (Translating Life Sciences Innovation) was previously published (1996-2016) as the Journal of Laboratory Automation (JALA).

Follow SLAS on Twitter at @SLAS_Org.

Follow SLAS on Facebook at SocietyforLaboratoryAutomationandScreening.

Follow SLAS on YouTube at SLASvideo.

Follow SLAS Americas on LinkedIn at Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS Americas).

Follow SLAS Europe on LinkedIn at Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening Europe (SLAS Europe).
National Institutes of Health grant bolsters SD research to find a treatment or cure

County health experts expect a 36 percent jump in dementia patients by 2030

Economic impact of disease to soar as region's senior population swells

County-led Alzheimer's Project ramps up multi-front attack on deadly epidemic

San Diego, Calif., April 20, 2018 - San Diego's fight to end Alzheimer's disease got a big boost today amid signs that the deadly illness and other forms of dementia are taking an escalating toll on the region.

A coalition of brain scientists and civic leaders, including Mayor Kevin Faulconer and county Supervisors Dianne Jacob and Kristin Gaspar, announced that the federal government has awarded a $1.3 million grant to Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute to advance the local search for a cure.

The funding comes as the county released two studies showing the widening impact of dementia on San Diego families, hospitals and health care economy.

By 2030, the number of local residents 55 and older with dementia is expected to increase 36 percent - from more than 84,000 today to 115,000, according to one of the studies.

"Alzheimer's disease is taking a brutal and growing toll on San Diegans and we must step up the fight to end this epidemic," said Supervisor Jacob. "The grant is a milestone and a huge vote of confidence in our efforts, but we face a tough road ahead as our senior population soars."

Today's news grow out of the work of The Alzheimer's Project, a county-led initiative that has gained national recognition, and its spinoff, Collaboration4Cure. C4C has brought together the region's top research institutions with Alzheimer's San Diego to expand the drive to find a treatment or cure.

"Alzheimer's disease personally affects tens of thousands of residents, families and caregivers in San Diego every day, which is why this grant is so significant," San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer said. "This funding is critical to advancing research and providing programs that will support people as they overcome this debilitating disease. It is going to help turn San Diego's culture of scientific collaboration into a cure."

Sanford Burnham Prebys (SBP) announced that a team of scientists has been awarded a three-year National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant to identify prototype drugs with the long-term goal of developing a disease-modifying treatment for Alzheimer's disease.

The $1.3 million grant stems from a collaborative effort between Drs. Huaxi Xu, Michael Jackson and Eduard Sergienko, who have been working for the past two years on research funded by C4C and a grant from Stuart and Karen Tanz. The studies focus on a gene called TREM2, mutations of which are known to correlate with a significantly increased risk of developing late-onset Alzheimer's.

With this NIH grant, the SBP team plans to identify prototype drugs that can bind to and modulate the activity of TREM2. The identified chemical compounds will be tested in cellular systems, to provide insight into the biology of TREM2 and its role in late-onset Alzheimer's and to advance the long-term goal of developing a disease-modifying treatment.

"Alzheimer's disease represents a huge unmet patient need," said Kristiina Vuori, M.D., Ph.D., president of Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute. "There are no known cures and no disease modifying therapies -- yet. We are committed to help change that."

Participating with Sanford Burnham Prebys in C4C are The Salk Institute, The Scripps Research Institute, J. Craig Venter Institute and the University of California, San Diego.

In 2015, San Diego philanthropist Darlene Shiley provided the seed money to start the research incubator and remains its lead donor. Those wishing to contribute can go to alzsd.org/c4c.

The county's Health and Human Services Agency produced the two studies released today. While Alzheimer's is the sixth-leading cause of death in the United States, it is the third-leading cause in San Diego County.

One of the reports, "The Economic Burden of Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias in San Diego County," says the lifetime cost of care for local residents with the dementia exceeds $38 billion. That figure is expected to balloon to more than $52 billion by 2030.

The second study, "Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias in San Diego County," estimates that the number of family members and other caregivers needed to help San Diegans with dementia will grow to nearly 300,000 by 2030 from 214,000 today.

"We see the devastation caused by Alzheimer's every single day - from the person who was recently diagnosed and doesn't know where to turn, to exhausted family caregivers in need of guidance and everyone in between," said Eugenia Welch, president and CEO of Alzheimer's San Diego. "Alzheimer's San Diego will be here working tirelessly for local families impacted by dementia until the day a cure is found. Thanks to C4C, we're closer to that day than ever before."

Supervisor Jacob spearheaded the creation of The Alzheimer's Project in 2014, with the backing of the county Board of Supervisors.

Since its launch, the project has created the region's first standards for the diagnosis and management of dementia and boosted training for nurses and others who will work with patients.

It has joined with the Sheriff's Department to tighten the safety net for seniors at risk of wandering and created a pilot program to help those with dementia who find themselves in emergency situations.

Project leaders are also working to expand respite care options for caregivers.

"I am so proud of those in our community who put in countless hours of their time to care for someone with Alzheimer's or dementia," said Kristin Gaspar, chairwoman of the county Board of Supervisors. "This disease has a profound impact on our families, our healthcare system, and our entire community. These funds will ensure we move closer to finding a cure and improve the lives of everyone touched by Alzheimer's and other dementias."

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Today, almost two thirds of deaths in Switzerland are not unexpected. How does the cultural context specific to each linguistic region influence end-of-life decisions? Researchers from the universities of Zurich (UZH) and Geneva (UNIGE) noticed significant differences between regions. However, these differences are not always more important than those observed between these regions and the countries with which they share the same language. These results, published in the journal BMC Medicine, are important to help ground debates on end of life decisions on facts, and highlight the need for everyone to reflect on what it means to die a dignified death.

Questions related to end of life decisions are often the subject of heated debates, in Switzerland as elsewhere. But what are the realities faced by physicians, patients and their families? Through several studies, the National Research Programme End of Life (NRP 67), funded by the SNSF, aims to better understand the medical and social issues at stake. "Our project was part of this national programme: we wanted to examine how the cultural differences inherent to a multilingual country like ours influenced end-of-life decisions, in spite of a common federal legislative framework", explains Samia Hurst, Director of the Institute for History, Ethics and Humanities at the Faculty of Medicine of the UNIGE and co-investigator in the project Medical end-of-life decisions: prevalence and trends in Switzerland.

To better understand the reality of the end of life, the researchers sent an anonymous questionnaire to nearly 9,000 physicians who had signed one or more death certificates - 4,998 in German-speaking Switzerland, 2,965 in French-speaking Switzerland and 1,000 in Ticino, for a response rate ranging from nearly 52% in French-speaking Switzerland to over 63% for German-speaking doctors. Matthias Bopp of the Institute for Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Prevention at the University of Zurich emphasizes:

"The considerable response rate strongly suggests that the participating physicians appreciated our efforts to ensure the strictest anonymity of the respondents."

When facing death, the Swiss are different

In more than three-quarters of cases, and in all regions, deaths were preceded by one or more end-of-life decisions, mainly decisions to withhold or withdraw life-sustaining treatment (70.0% in German-speaking Switzerland, 59.8% in French-speaking Switzerland and 57.4% in Italian-speaking Switzerland). The use of assisted suicide remained marginal, with about 1.5% of all expected deaths in French and German-speaking Switzerland, and no case reported in Italian-speaking Switzerland. The Swiss legislative framework authorizes assisted suicide, in which persons willing to die are given a lethal drug dose they have to take themselves. Active euthanasia, in which another person administers the deadly drug, is on the contrary prohibited. The involvement of patients in the decision-making process was significantly lower in Ticino as in the rest of the country. "A result that cannot be explained by objective clinical differences, and which does not fail to question us", says Matthias Bopp. To interpret these differences, the authors assume, when it comes to making such decisions, a more family-based approach in Ticino than in other parts of Switzerland - notably French-speaking Switzerland.

Similar studies have been conducted in Italy and France, allowing international comparison on a linguistic basis. Samia Hurst: "If we don't die the same way in all regions of our country, our approaches are still more similar in relation to each other than that of our neighbours. In some respects, French-speaking Switzerland thus resembles German-speaking Switzerland more than it resembles France, which is in line with the increased role of patient autonomy in Switzerland. Nevertheless, the differences observed between our regions are similar to the differences noted between our neighbours, thus also suggesting cultural specificities associated with the language regions." Unfortunately, neither Germany nor Austria have ever carried out such a study, an important limiting factor in this transnational analysis.

Promoting advance directives

More and more people in Switzerland are aware of the possibility of drafting advance directives detailing their end-of-life choices. However, few of us do write them. "End-of-life decisions are frequent; it is therefore important for each of us to reflect on what our priorities will be at that time. What do we hope for? What do we fear? Finally, when choices must be made, what is most important to us? Furthermore, people to should, if possible, have this discussion with a trusted health professional. It allow them not to not be alone, but it will also help them to understand correctly the medical and technical aspects of their decisions as well as their consequences", the authors stress. To this end, specific health insurance mechanisms could be put in place to encourage physicians to take all the necessary time for this dialogue.

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From AI and machine learning to CCTV and big data - computer scientists at the University of East Anglia are part of an international effort to make the fishing industry more sustainable.

They are part of a new 5 million EU-funded project to revolutionise the fishing industry, which employs over 24,000 people in the UK and contributes around 1.4 billion to our economy.

It is hoped that pioneering technology will contribute to making the industry more environmentally friendly, sustainable and profitable.

The 'SMARTFISH-H2020' project, co-ordinated by SINTEF Ocean in Norway, draws on research from the brightest minds at universities in Norway, Denmark, Turkey, France and Spain, along with research institutes and industry partners across Europe. Other UK partners include Marine Scotland, The Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (CEFAS), and Safetynet Technologies Limited.

The project aims to develop, test and roll out a suite of high-tech systems that optimise efficiency and reduce the ecological impact of fishing on the marine environment. The pioneering new technology will also improve automatic data collection and provide evidence of fishing regulation compliance.

The team at UEA's School of Computing Sciences will focus on developing image technology such as on-board CCTV and smartphone apps to automatically quantify the fish catch. It is hoped that this information will not only benefit fishermen, but also academic research and policy makers.

The developments will assist commercial fishers throughout Europe in making informed decisions during pre-catch, catch, and post-catch phases of the fishing process.

Project leader Dr Mackiewicz, from UEA's School of Computing Sciences, said: "In recent years we have experienced extraordinary advances in camera technology, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Machines have become capable of performing certain vision tasks, such as image classification and object recognition, in real time and with high accuracy.

"We will develop advanced image processing and machine learning software which can be used to analyse fish catch images from on-board CCTV and handheld devices such as smartphones.

"It will help those in the fishing industry make informed decisions and lead to better economic efficiency, as well as reduce unintended fish mortality. It will also help provide new data about fish stocks and automatically collect catch data to ensure compliance with fisheries management regulations."

"The new innovative technologies we are developing in the project will improve catch efficiency for the fishers, as well as the fish compositions in the catches in fisheries across the EU," said Project Coordinator Bent Herrmann, from Sintef Ocean. "This again will lead to improved economic efficiency in the industry and for the individual fishers, all the while unintended fish mortality is reduced, so that there is less unnecessary fishing pressure and ecosystem damage".

Prof Gerard Parr, head of UEA's School of Computing Sciences, said: "We're very pleased to be at the forefront of research and innovation to assist the fishing industry. This a very timely project linked to the sustainability of the fishing industry in the UK and across Europe.

"It is also recognition of the internationally-leading scientific expertise available at our School of Computing Sciences here at UEA," he added.

The SMARTFISH-H2020 (Innovative Technologies for Sustainable Fisheries in Europe) is coordinated by SINTEF Ocean in Norway, which aims to develop technological solutions to an efficient, compliant and environmentally sustainable fishing sector. The project will receive funding from the EU's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme over four years.

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DETROIT - Pai-Yen Chen, Ph.D., assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Wayne State University's College of Engineering, recently received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award, the organization's most prestigious accolade for up-and-coming researchers in science and engineering.

Chen is the recipient of a five-year, $500,000 grant for his project, "Integrated Research and Education on Self-Activated, Transparent Harmonics-Based Wireless Sensing Systems Using Graphene Bioelectronics."

The microsensors in wearable health-monitoring devices are inexpensive, low maintenance and battery-free, but their performance is often hindered by electromagnetic interference. Chen's research examines the use of a graphene-based bioelectronics circuit in a harmonic sensor to reduce noise and create a more energy-efficient wireless system.

Among the health care applications for this technology is a sensor for contact lenses that can monitor ocular health and improve eye care. The features of Chen's system -- transparency, lightweight, flexibility and biocompatibility - lend themselves well to such medical uses. "If successful, the compact and transparent graphene harmonic biosensor can be integrated on the soft contact lens to sensitively detect targeted pathogen bacteria, infectious agents, diseases or metabolic changes of interest and wirelessly transmit data without any power source or sophisticated circuit," said Chen. "With further development, the proposed wireless biosensors can have broad impacts in health care monitoring."

NSF CAREER awards emphasize the integration of research and education, so Chen plans to incorporate his work into new courses and outreach activities at Wayne State University, targeting under-represented groups and K-12 students through programs such as ReBUILDetroit, Richard Barber Interdisciplinary Research Program and WSU's STEM Days.

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Chen joined the Wayne State University College of Engineering faculty in 2014. He leads a research group dedicated to developing next-generation wireless microsensors and integrated systems based on innovative electromagnetics, materials and circuit technologies. Chen has authored more than 70 journal papers and 70 conference papers, holds nine U.S. patents, and co-edited a book and six book chapters. He has a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. Last year Chen received the SPIE Rising Researcher award, the IEEE Sensors Council Young Professional (Early Career) Award, the IEEE Senior Member, the URSI Young Scientist Award, and the NSF ECCS award (#1711409).

The NSF award number for this grant is 1752123.

Wayne State University is one of the nation's pre-eminent public research institutions in an urban setting. Through its multidisciplinary approach to research and education, and its ongoing collaboration with government, industry and other institutions, the university seeks to enhance economic growth and improve the quality of life in the city of Detroit, the state of Michigan and throughout the world. For more information about research at Wayne State University, visit http://www.research.wayne.edu.
DETROIT -- Communities attempt to learn from experiencing disasters such as Hurricane Harvey, but often those lessons do not lead to policy changes that could reduce future risks.

With the help of a $55,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, Kristin O'Donovan, Ph.D., assistant professor of political science in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Wayne State University, will explore the limits on policy learning about disaster mitigation after a community has experienced a disaster. O'Donovan will also seek to understand why one community may be more vulnerable to a disaster than its neighbor.

According to O'Donovan, local governments often attempt to engage in learning about how to reduce future disaster risks, but find it difficult to see change enacted. Her project will aim to identify the constraints on and proponents of policy learning after disasters.

Hurricane Harvey, which hit Texas in August 2017, presents a unique case for understanding the limits on policy learning because of the range of communities it affected in southeast Texas. O'Donovan and her team will collect data through interviews with local government officials -- mayors, emergency managers and city planners-- in communities affected by Hurricane Harvey.

"How local governments consider information and make decisions about future disaster risk is critical to understanding vulnerability," said O'Donovan. "This research is exciting because it will shed new light on why some communities may be more vulnerable to a disaster than others. What we learn has the potential to help communities bounce back more easily after disasters. "

Research will focus on the types of sources a community looks to for information, whether the information received is credible and whether local government officials tend to be myopic in their approaches.

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The project, Constraints on Policy Learning After Disaster, was funded by NSF's Rapid Response Research grant program. The award number is 1763218.

Wayne State University is one of the nation's pre-eminent public research institutions in an urban setting. Through its multidisciplinary approach to research and education, and its ongoing collaboration with government, industry and other institutions, the university seeks to enhance economic growth and improve the quality of life in the city of Detroit, the state of Michigan and throughout the world. For more information about research at Wayne State University, visit http://www.research.wayne.edu.
this news is not available
Cultural factors play a large role when it comes to how Switzerlands linguistic regions make end of life decisions, a study has found.

Almost two thirds of deaths in Switzerland are not unexpected, through illness or failing health, a statement released on Friday by the universities of Geneva and Zurich said. The study looked at how cultural backgrounds in a multilingual country like Switzerland  which nevertheless has a common legislative framework  affects difficult end of life decisions.

Researchers found that there were significant differences between regions, but that these differences were often less than with the neighbouring country with which the linguistic region shared a border.

The results came from an anonymous questionnaire sent to nearly 9,000 doctors who had signed one or more death certificates. The study, published in the journal BMC Medicine, is part of a wider National Research Programme End of Life.

Assisted suicide: low uptake

Deaths were preceded by one or more end of life decisions in more than three-quarters of cases and these were mainly to withhold or withdraw life-sustaining treatment (70% German-speaking Switzerland, 59.8% French-speaking, 57.4% Italian-speaking), the universities said.

The use of assisted suicide remained marginal, with around 1.5% of expected deaths in this way in the German and French-speaking parts and no recorded cases in the Italian-speaking part.

Assisted suicide, in which a person is given a deadly drug to administer themselves, is legal in Switzerland. Active euthanasia, in which another person administers the drug, is not.

The involvement of patients in the decision-making process in end of life choices were significantly lower in Italian-speaking Ticino, the authors said. They assume here that there is a more family-based approach in Ticino than in other parts of Switzerland, especially in French-speaking Switzerland.

International comparison

Similar studies have been conducted in neighbouring Italy and France, the statement noted.

If we dont die the same way in all regions of our country, our approaches are still more similar in relation to each other than that of our neighbours, said Samia Hurst, director of the Institute for History, Ethics and Humanities at the Faculty of Medicine at Geneva University and co-investigator in the project: Medical end-of-life decisions: prevalence and trends in Switzerland.

In some respects, French-speaking Switzerland thus resembles German-speaking Switzerland more than it resembles France, which is in line with the increased role of patient autonomy in Switzerland. Nevertheless, the differences observed between our regions are similar to the differences noted between our neighbours, thus also suggesting cultural specificities associated with the language regions.

There is as yet no comparable study for Germany or Austria, Hurst said.
An employee of the German migration agency is under investigation over suspicions that she may have granted asylum to 1,200 migrants in exchange for money or gifts in kind.

Investigators have opened a probe into organised abuse of the asylum procedure as well as for corruption or bribery, a spokeswoman for the Bremen prosecution service, Claudia Kueck, told AFP.

To what extent was money or invitations involved is what the investigations are seeking to clarify, she said, adding that the probe has been ongoing for several months.

The suspected employee is the director of the migration agencys regional office in Bremen, Kueck said.

Besides her, three lawyers, an interpreter and an intermediary, are targeted in the probe.

Investigators had raided eight sites including the lawyers practice in Bremen and Lower Saxony on Wednesday and Thursday.

The asylum agency director is suspected of having collaborated with the three lawyers who sent her files of asylum seekers from across Germany.

Asylum was allegedly agreed even though the applicants may not have always fulfilled criteria, said German media reports.

German media said the suspect may have been given at least invitations to restaurants in exchange for favourable treatment of the files.

Germanys migration agency has come under fire over what critics have described as chaotic handling of the asylum seeking process.

The arrival of more than a million asylum seekers since 2015 has put the service under intense pressure, forcing it to more than double its staff from 3,000 to 7,300 to handle the sudden influx.
German police have detained a Porsche manager in a probe into the diesel emissions cheating scandal that the luxury car brand's parent company Volkswagen has struggled to shed.

Porsche chief Oliver Blume informed the workforce that the prosecutor of Stuttgart has taken a manager into custody, a spokesman for Porsche told AFP on Friday.

Porsche did not name the suspect, but Germanys top-selling newspaper Bild and economic weekly Wirtschaftswoche reported that the man being held is Joerg Kerner, an engineer in charge of Porsches engine division who was working at Audi when the diesel scandal broke in 2015.

Prosecutors, who also did not identify the suspect, said he had been remanded in custody because of risk of flight and that a probe had been opened against him since July last year.

The manager was on the way to work when he received a call from a family member that his home was being raided by police, Bild reported.

He turned around and raced home but his sudden change in destination made investigators think he was attempting to flee, prompting them to take him into custody, Bild reported without citing its sources.

Confirmation of the arrest came two days after German police raided offices of Porsche and Audi as part of a fraud probe against three individuals  two top Porsche executives and a former employee of the luxury carmaker.

The three unnamed individuals are under investigation for suspected fraud and false advertising stemming from the manipulation of exhaust treatment in Porsches diesel vehicles.

Both high-end carmakers are owned by Volkswagen, which admitted in 2015 to using cheating software designed to dupe pollution tests in some 11 million diesel cars worldwide, mainly in its own-brand VW cars but also in those made by Audi, Porsche, Skoda and Seat.

 New CEO 

In his letter to Porsche employees, Blume also stressed that Porsche neither develops nor produces diesel engines or associated software.

He added therefore that Porsche was not aware of any illegal software installed in the brands vehicles.

Engines of Porsches diesel vehicles such as the Cayenne are made by Audi.

The raids were the first time Porsches offices have been targeted over the diesel emissions cheating controversy, while Audi has already been searched three times over the past year, most recently in February.

A spokeswoman for the Munich prosecutors office told DPA news agency that Wednesdays searches at Audi had nothing to do with a separate probe into Audis role in the diesel scam.

Porsches latest woes came a week after the Volkswagen group replaced its CEO  former Porsche boss Matthias Mueller  in a new bid to turn the page on the dieselgate scandal.

Mueller, who led Porsche between 2010 and 2015, took the helm of the VW group in the turbulent days after the scandal broke.

But he too came into prosecutors sights as the group plunged into a sea of legal challenges at home and abroad that have already cost the auto giant over 25 billion euros ($31 billion) in fines, buybacks and compensation.

Stuttgart prosecutors said last year they were investigating Mueller over market manipulation, suspecting he failed to share information about the diesel scandal quickly enough with shareholders.

Last Friday, Mueller was replaced as chief executive by VW brand chief Herbert Diess, who has vowed to steer the company out of the crisis by pushing on with much-needed reforms and continuing a shift towards electric cars and sustainable mobility.

The dieselgate saga has cast a pall over Germanys vaunted car industry, with suspicions of emissions manipulation spreading to other carmakers.

Luxury carmaker BMW and Mercedes-owned Daimler have both had their offices raided by investigators searching for evidence of possible cheating.

BMW recalled some 12,000 cars in February after admitting they contained software that allowed the engines to release more harmful emissions on the road than in the lab  but insisted the software was installed by mistake.

dar-hmn/boc
With US-China frictions hanging over its annual meeting, the International Monetary Fund on Thursday warned governments to avoid harming trade and investment, which have been key drivers of the global economic recovery.

IMF chief Christine Lagarde said escalating trade tensions could reverberate through the world economy, undermining confidence and choking off investment, urging the resolution of the disputes through dialogue.

Investment and trade are two key engines that are finally picking up. We dont want to damage that, she said at a press briefing to open the spring meetings of the IMF and World Bank.

In its latest World Economic Outlook this week, the IMF listed the trade tensions as a key downside risk to the otherwise encouraging global recovery and warned they could harm the poorest the most through rising prices.

The outlook cites growing trade volumes and solid investment as driving the uptick in global growth to 3.9 percent this year and next.

US President Donald Trump last month imposed steep tariffs on steel and aluminum imports and threatened to impose more on tens of billions of dollars in Chinese imports, prompting Beijing to slap duties on US goods like pork and sorghum and to threaten even more sensitive US exports like soybeans.

Finance officials from member governments will discuss the trade disputes this week during the Washington meetings, which end Saturday.

Lagarde said the disputes threatened to cause damage beyond the two countries involved, due to the interconnected nature of global supply chains.

While she acknowledged the actual impact on growth is not very substantial when you measure in terms of GDP, she said the dispute could erode business confidence very quickly because of the uncertainty, which would make businesses reluctant to invest.

International cooperation has served us so well and delivered more progress for more people than at any time in history, but is now being questioned, Lagarde said.

 Steer clear of protectionism 

While she welcomed bilateral discussions between Washington and Beijing, she said disagreements should be resolved in a multilateral forum and every country should address its own trade barriers.

Lagarde again urged countries to steer clear of all protectionism, saying that unilateral trade restrictions have not proven helpful.

Instead, countries should work together to resolve disagreements without using exceptional measures.

EU Economic Affairs Commissioner Pierre Moscovici expressed optimism that US officials were coming around on resolving the trade issues.

My feeling is that, little by little, the consciousness of the damage a trade war could do will be apparent and dialogue will resume, he told AFP on the sidelines of the meeting.

I hope that these IMF meetings will be marked by this spirit. On the American side, it seems to me that the climate is more receptive to the idea that protectionism is not the answer.

Europe was also hit by the steel and aluminum tariffs but the US suspended the duties on imports from the EU, Canada, Mexico and four other countries, leaving China as the primary target.

German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz met with US Vice President Mike Pence and Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow at the White House, and afterwards told reporters that all sides are really working on finding a good solution.

I am convinced that its a good thing there are so many talks and that this is the basis for seeing a reasonable development in the end.

Speaking later to a small group of reporters, Lagarde said the IMF has a role to play as mediator and as a peaceful and technical forum for dialogue.

I think that if we can help facilitate a dialogue, productive exchanges going to solutions, it would avoid a trade war, she said.

She praised the trade reforms recently offered by Chinas President Xi Jinping  including lower tariffs on US cars, reducing investment restrictions and protections for intellectual property  which she said were going in right direction.

But it will be the implementation that matters, she said.
The air strikes unleashed in Syria by Western allies in mid-April were a violation of international law, jurists at the German parliament said in a report Friday.

The use of military force against a state, as a sanction against the violation of an international convention by this state, is an infringement of the prohibition of the use of violence in international law, said the Bundestag experts in a reply to a question filed by the far-left Die Linke party.

The Bundestag experts referred in particular to the United Nations declaration from their 1970 general assembly which stresses the duty of States to refrain in their international relations from military, political, economic or any other form of coercion aimed against the political independence or territorial integrity of any State.

The UN Security Council had also rejected armed retaliation, calling it incompatible with the objectives and the principles of the United Nations.

The legal motive put forward by Britain, which joined in the air strikes alongside the United States and France, was also not convincing, said the Bundestag experts.

London said it was both right and legal to launch strikes to alleviate humanitarian suffering.

But the experts said there were questions over whether the military attacks are really appropriate to prevent further suffering in Syria.

On April 14, the United States, France and Britain fired missiles meant as a response to what the trio of nations said was evidence Damascus had used chemical weapons a week earlier.

Purported footage of victims foaming at the mouth after the April 7 attack sparked an outcry and prompted the West to launch its biggest military action yet against Assads regime.

But the military action was carried out without the approval of the UN Security Council, where Assads ally Russia has a permanent seat and veto.

Germany did not join in the air strikes but Chancellor Angela Merkel called the military action necessary and appropriate.
Frenchman Mehdi Nemmouche was ordered Thursday to stand trial in Brussels for allegedly killing four people at a Jewish museum four years ago in a jihadist attack, his lawyer said.

Judges decided there was enough evidence to try Nemmouche, 33, and alleged accomplice Nacer Bendrer, who is also French, in the Belgian capital for the attack in 2014, lawyer Henri Laquay told AFP.

He did not name a date but the trial is expected to begin later this year or early next year.

The judges decided there was not enough evidence to put Mounir Attalah, a third Frenchman linked to the attack, on trial.

On May 24, 2014 a gunman armed with an assault rifle opened fire in the entrance hall of the museum in the centre of the Belgian capital, killing two Israeli tourists, a French volunteer and a Belgian museum receptionist.

Six days later Nemmouche was arrested in the southern French port city of Marseille when getting off a bus from Brussels.

Nemmouche had returned from Syria where he had been fighting with Islamist extremists.

Nacer Bendrer was formally charged as an accomplice in the attack in February 2015 in Brussels, two months after his arrest near Marseille in possession of various weapons.

These included a Kalachnikov assault rifle like the one used at the Jewish museum.

Nemmouche has been linked to Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the ringleader of the November 13, 2015 Paris gun and bombing attacks that killed 130 people and wounded hundreds of others.

Abaaoud died in a police shootout near the French capital days after the massacre.

The Paris attacks were allegedly plotted in Brussels by the same cell that carried out the suicide bombings in the Belgian capitals airport and a metro train station on March 22, 2016, killing 32 people.

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks and the Brussels 2016 attacks.
Donald Trump lashed out Friday after memos of his meetings with the FBI's then chief James Comey depicted the president as obsessed with the Russia probe and a smutty video allegedly showing him with two prostitutes.

But the memos were just the latest twist in a week of awful headlines for Trump: from the release of a bestselling book in which Comey labels him morally unfit, to a courtroom circus featuring his embattled personal lawyer and a porn star who alleges a tryst with Trump.

Trumps legal and personal woes  and wall-to-wall Comey book interviews  overshadowed his summit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, at which the president confirmed CIA chief Mike Pompeo had met Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang to lay the groundwork for an upcoming summit with Trump himself.

As the week drew to a close, the flurry of developments on the North Korean front were once again eclipsed by the Comey memos  which depict Trump pressuring the FBI chief over the probe into his campaigns links to Russia before firing him, and could bolster potential obstruction of justice allegations.

James Comey Memos just out and show clearly that there was NO COLLUSION and NO OBSTRUCTION. Also, he leaked classified information. WOW! Will the Witch Hunt continue? Trump tweeted Friday in response to the documents.

And to top it off, on Friday the Democratic Party filed a lawsuit in New York alleging the Trump campaign, the Russian government and WikiLeaks conspired to skew the 2016 presidential election toward the Republican.

We must prevent future attacks on our democracy, and thats exactly what were doing today, said Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez.

If the occupant of the Oval Office wont protect our democracy, Democrats will. 

 Personal lawyer raided 

Trumps legal problems reach back to the beginning of his presidency, but have multiplied.

Two weeks ago FBI agents raided the New York residences and offices of his longtime personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, seizing files that could bare Trumps past business dealings and expose more about his relationships with several women in the 2000s, when he was married.

One of them, the porn actress Stormy Daniels, whom Cohen paid $130,000 to keep quiet about an alleged affair with Trump in 2006, showed up to much publicity at the first hearing over the Cohen raid.

Days later she went on the hit show The View where she said she was threatened not to talk about her Trump affair.

Daniels and Trump are now locked in dueling lawsuits that serve to keep the alleged tryst in the headlines.

Separately, Trump is battling a lawsuit that alleges he is breaking anti-corruption clauses in the US Constitution by profiting from the use of his namesake Washington hotel by foreign dignitaries.

Most ominous of all, Trump is under pressure from Special Counsel Robert Muellers investigation into links between his campaign and Russia, a probe that is also examining possible obstruction by the president.

That investigation has numerous top aides and possibly family members of Trump in its sights. In recent weeks, according to reports, Trump has considered firing both Mueller and the Justice Departments number two, Rod Rosenstein, whom Trump himself appointed a year ago.

In a tweet late on Friday night, Trump wrote: James Comey illegally leaked classified documents to the press in order to generate a Special Council? Therefore, the Special Council was established based on an illegal act? Really, does everybody know what that means?

It is not the first time Trump has misspelled the word counsel.

 Comey book 

Trump and the Republicans have sought to undermine Muellers probe by discrediting him and his team as biased and corrupt.

But Comeys new book, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership, has deflected questions back to the president. Comey likens Trump to a Mafia boss who demands absolute loyalty, and lacks any moral foundation.

This president is unethical, and untethered to truth and institutional values, he writes.

His leadership is transactional, ego driven and about personal loyalty.

The book, and the memos released by Congress, add support to allegations Trump wanted to suppress the Russia probe and fired Comey because of it.

 Trump expands legal team 

The strain on the White House is clear. On Thursday Trump added three new attorneys, including former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and two white collar criminal defense specialists.

According to Axios, the Trump team is still seeking to add more firepower to the legal team, and is pitching for Emmet Flood, who represented former president Bill Clinton is his fight against impeachment in 1998-99.

While Trump doesnt yet face any personal charges, both Democrats and Republicans in Congress have warned him he could face impeachment if he fires Mueller.
More than half of the world's children are threatened by conflict, poverty or sexual discrimination, Save the Children said in a report published on Wednesday.

Entitled Many Faces of Exclusion, the study ranked 175 countries in terms of the threat of child labour, exclusion from education, child marriage and early pregnancy.

It found that 1.2 billion children worldwide were at risk from at least one of the three main threats.

Eight of the 10 countries which ranked worst for children were in west and central Africa, with the greatest threat level in Niger.

By contrast, Singapore and Slovenia were classed as the countries with the lowest incidence of such problems.

More than half the worlds children start their lives held back because they are a girl, because they are poor or because they are growing up in a war zone, said Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the charitys chief executive.

Governments can and must do more to give every child the best possible start in life, she added.

The fact that countries with similar levels of income deliver such different outcomes for children shows that policy, funding and political commitment make a critical difference.

The report said more than one billion children live in countries hit by poverty and 240 million in countries affected by conflict and fragility.

More than 575 million girls live in countries where gender bias is a serious issue, it found.

Some 20 countries, including South Sudan, Somalia, Yemen and Afghanistan, account for 153 million children living under all three threats of child labour, exclusion from education and child marriage.
A judge has ruled that terminally ill British toddler Alfie Evans will not be allowed to go to Rome for further treatment but can go home, following a court appeal by his family on Tuesday.

Judge Anthony Hayden told a High Court hearing in Manchester, northwest England, that the long-running case had now reached its final chapter as he turned down a bid to take the 23-month-old to Italy to continue medical treatment.

Pope Francis had issued an appeal on Twitter Monday that the parents desire to seek new forms of treatment may be granted for the boy, who suffers from a rare degenerative neurological condition.

Italy has previously said it was granting citizenship to the toddler.

But Hayden rejected the move and claims by his parents that Evans was significantly better since doctors first withdrew life support on Monday.

The judge said the best they could hope for was to explore the options of removing the boy from intensive care either to a ward, a hospice or his home.

Hayden had on Monday rejected another appeal by the parents, Tom Evans and Kate James, for a delay in order to give them time to present a new challenge.

The ruling allowed doctors at Alder Hey Childrens Hospital in Liverpool, northwest England, to withdraw treatment.

The boys father told reporters on Tuesday that the doctors had withdrawn life support on Monday but his son was still alive.

The Bambino Gesu (Baby Jesus) paediatric hospital in Rome, which is administered by the Vatican, has said a specially-equipped plane from the Italian defence ministry is on standby to fly to Britain to pick up the boy if he is released.

Evans met Pope Francis in the Vatican last Wednesday after several statements of support made by the pope.

Moved by the prayers and immense solidarity shown little Alfie Evans, I renew my appeal that the suffering of his parents may be heard and that their desire to seek new forms of treatment may be granted, the pope said on Twitter.

At an audience last week, he told attendees in reference to the case: I want to reiterate and strongly confirm that the only master of life, from the beginning to its natural end, is God, and our duty is to do everything to protect life.

Hundreds of people have protested outside the Liverpool hospital in support of the fathers plea for the boy to be discharged.

On Monday, a large group of protesters attempted to storm the entrance before being blocked by police.
The Commonwealth is staging its two-day, biennial summit in London, which closes on Friday.

Here is a factbox on the group, which comprises around a third of the worlds population and a fifth of its landmass and is made up mainly of former British colonies.

 Overview 

Full name: Commonwealth of Nations

Member states: 53

Head of the Commonwealth: Queen Elizabeth II (1952-)

Secretary-General: Patricia Scotland (2016-)

Population: 2.4 billion

Area: 30 million square kilometres

Foundation of modern Commonwealth: 1949

Headquarters: Marlborough House, London

Focus: Development, democracy, climate change

 Key moments 

1926: Balfour Declaration. Declares the UK and the dominions as equal in status as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations.

1931: Statute of Westminster. Established legislative independence for the dominions and set the basis for the relationship between Commonwealth realms and the crown.

1949: London Declaration. Birth of the modern Commonwealth. Allowed republics as members, to allow independent Indias continued membership. British dropped from title.

1971: First Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Singapore.

1991: Harare Declaration. Sets out Commonwealths core values.

 Population, area, GDP 

Drawn from: Africa (19), Caribbean and Americas (13), Pacific (11), Asia (7), Europe (3).

Biggest country by population: India (1.25 billion)

Smallest country by population: Tuvalu (10,000)

Biggest country by area: Canada (9,984,670 square kilometres)

Smallest country by area: Nauru (21 sq km)

Biggest GDP: UK, India, Canada, Australia, Nigeria.

Smallest GDP: Tuvalu, Kiribati, Tonga, Dominica, St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

 Membership 

Criteria: Historic association with existing member; compliance with Commonwealth principles; commitment to democracy, rule of law and good governance.

Members in 1949: Australia, Canada, Ceylon, India, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, United Kingdom.

Latest first-time members: Rwanda (2009), Mozambique (1995) Cameroon (1995), Namibia (1990), Brunei (1984).

Countries which left and rejoined: South Africa (1961-1994), Pakistan (1972-1989), Fiji (1987-1997), The Gambia (2013-2018).

Countries which left and never returned: Ireland (1949), Zimbabwe (2003) and the Maldives (2016).

 Main Commonwealth events 

Summit: The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, CHOGM, is held every two years.

Commonwealth Games: The Olympics-style multi-sport event is held every four years.

 Commonwealth in 2018 

CHOGM held in London, April 19-20. Main agenda points: ocean governance charter, trade and investment agenda, tackling cyber crime.

Commonwealth Games held in Gold Coast, Australia, April 4-15. Australia topped the medals table ahead of England, India, Canada and New Zealand.
The great Permian Basin land rush is over.

With the top acreage gobbled up, few companies are staking new claims. Instead, the industry is entering a new phase of consolidation that will likely drive small and mid-size firms from the West Texas shale play as energy companies buy up competitors to expand holdings in the worlds hottest oil-producing region, analysts said.

Since the bottom of the last oil bust in early 2016, wildcatters, private equity investors, independents and oil majors have flocked to the West Texas shale play, driving up land prices to as high as $60,000 an acre and leaving more production companies with land holdings there than drilling rigs. That has set the stage for a wave mergers and acquisitions.

Its kill or be killed, said Ethan Bellamy, an energy analyst at Robert W. Baird & Co. The Permian Basin is the Beverly Hills of oil, so its no surprise that M&A is heating up foremost in that marquis region.

Midland deals

The latest example is the biggest U.S. oil and gas deal in six years, one that will combine two oil and gas producers focused exclusively on the Permian. Concho Resources of Midland said last month that it will pay $8 billion to buy RSP Permian of Dallas, primarily to pick up 100,000 net acres contiguous to Conchos Permian holdings.

Putting together large blocks of land has become particularly important as horizontal drilling, which cuts across shale formations to tap multiple reservoirs, has become state-of-the-art. Concho Chief Executive Tim Leach said in a recent call with analysts that the acquisition would allow his company to drill more and longer wells from a single location, reducing expenses on oilfield services such as rigs, hydraulic fracturing crews, water, sand and chemicals.

Its not getting bigger just for the sake of getting big, Leach told analysts. There will be a preference going forward for larger, blockier sets of assets.

That preference is part of the drive for greater efficiency and lower production costs by oil and gas companies in an era of rising, but relatively low prices. The biggest players in the Permian, including large independents such as Occidental Petroleum of Houston and Pioneer Natural Resources of Dallas and oil majors such as Exxon Mobil and Chevron, are following factory models as they exploit the shale play, drilling wells closer together as consistently and similarly as possible to maximize production.

As with manufacturing, the key to success is scale, that is producing at volumes that lower the cost of individual units. And in the Permian, analysts said, scale means more land and more consolidations.

John Freeman, an analyst at the financial services firm Raymond James, said he expects the number of producers in the West Texas oil field to potentially fall by half in the next five years. Youre going to have dramatically fewer companies operating in the Permian, Freeman said.

Numbers game

The Permian land rush peaked in the first quarter of 2017 with nearly $18 billion in Permian deals - primarily acreage sales. Those deals fell off sharply in the second half of last year to less than $4 billion in final six months of 2017, according to the research firm IHS Markit.

Permian deals rebounded to $10 billion in the first three months of this year, according to IHS Markit, but that was nearly all the result of Concho Resources purchase of RSP Permian, signaling the shift from acreage sales to mergers and acquisitions.

In many ways, the shift is driven by numbers. More than 500 exploration and productions companies have holdings in the Permian while there are fewer than 450 rigs operating in the oil field. In other words, there arent enough rigs, fracking crews and money to go around, analysts said, making consolidation inevitable.

It wont necessarily come quickly, however. A lot of smaller companies may feel undervalued by Wall Street and be reluctant to sell, Freeman said. And large investors may push companies to spend conservatively and devote money to shareholder payouts, rather than acquisitions.

But Pavel Molchanov, another Raymond James analyst, said that the prolific Permian is perhaps the only U.S. oil field that could inspire investors to support spending more and growing faster.

The Permian remains very hot - to state the obvious, Molchanov said, and the industry appetite for consolidation is certainly real.

Likely acquisition targets, analysts said, would be pure play companies focused exclusively on the Permian. Freeman said they could include companies such as Laredo Energy of Houston, Parsley Energy of Austin, Callon Petroleum of Mississippi and Denver-based players such as QEP Resources, Jagged Peak Energy and Centennial Resource Development

Private equity companies, meanwhile, are working to flip their oil and gas holdings for big profits and move onto to other regions where they think they can find oil and reserves at better values.

The big players

Concho, Occidental, Pioneer, Exxon Mobil and Chevron could all be looking to add to their holdings, as could EOG Resources and Anadarko Petroleum, both of Houston, and Diamondback Energy of Midland, according to analysts. Exxon, which plans to triple its Permian production by 2025, last year made one of the last big acreage buys in the Permian when it paid $6.6 billion for the holdings of the Bass Family of Fort Worth.

In the near term, analysts said, the most frequent deals in the Permian will be land swaps among the top players as they try to add contiguous holdings and build their blocks of land. And as they move ahead and begin mass production, the character of the Permian, where wildcatters have long roamed and small companies once could hit it big, will change.
Hundreds of students at schools across San Antonio are expected to walk out of class Friday morning as part of a nationally organized protest of gun violence.

The walkouts will add to demonstrations held by students across the country in the wake of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, which sparked widespread student activism calling for greater safety and gun control measures.

Only a couple of schools in the San Antonio area have seen such protests since the Feb. 14 massacre. Most Texas schools were on Spring Break on March 14, when students in other states commemorated its one-month anniversary.

Friday will mark the first nationally coordinated effort that falls on a school day here. The April 20 National School Walkout date was selected to commemorate the anniversary of the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado.

While school districts in San Antonio have varied in their approaches to addressing student protests, all seem to have avoided a decision to respond with hard-line disciplinary measures such as suspension.

Two weeks before the March walkouts, San Antonio Independent School District said students planning protests or other events related to school safety were working with principals to hold peaceful assemblies on campus grounds. Any student leaving campus would receive an unexcused absence.

Related: Andrew White: 'I call BS' on Gov. Abbott regarding guns, urges special session

We respect and support the right of our students to advocate for causes that are important to them, said Leslie Price, SAISD spokeswoman, in a prepared statement.

That policy will remain in place Friday, Price said. Some schools are planning moments of silence or indoor assemblies, while students at other schools will rally on campus lawns.

Northside and North East ISDs, Bexar Countys two largest school districts, have said they will assign unexcused absences to students who walk out of class.

Aubrey Chancellor, spokeswoman for NEISD, said the district is trying to keep consequences to a minimum for students who decide to participate in a demonstration during school hours.

If they want to go, we are not stopping them, she said. We are just trying to make sure they stay safe, whichever choice they decide.

Barry Perez, spokesman for Northside, said the district plans to discourage students from leaving class and to redirect them to other activities. Classrooms have had discussions regarding the walkout and other political issues that arose from the Florida shooting, including some students who wrote letters to elected representatives, he said.

Were not going to obviously physically stop any child from participating in a walkout if they so choose to do that, Perez said. What we have done and tried to do proactively is to provide students an opportunity so they can participate in structured, safe discussions and other activities in the classroom, to help persuade them to do those structured things as opposed to a walkout.

Read more: A University Hospital surgeon hopes to unite people for a gun violence discussion

Perez added that the district will not tolerate students protesting loudly in hallways or disrupting classes in any way.

In March, about a dozen students left class at Brandeis High School for more than an hour to protest gun violence and call for gun control reform. The students were not disciplined for the demonstration.

Also last month, a crowd of about 100 students at Canyon High School in New Braunfels held their own rally outside the school to call for more stringent gun laws.

Lauren Caruba is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of her stories here. | lcaruba@express-news.net | @LaurenCaruba
Juanito M. Garza /San Antonio Express-News

The University of Texas at San Antonio is one of five UT System universities entering a new partnership that will connect their colleges of education with failing public schools in the state.

The systems announcement of the new Turnaround Partnership with the Texas Education Agency on Thursday aligns with what UTSA President Taylor Eighmy has been voicing since his appointment to the university last fall: a need for further collaboration between his university and local school districts.
Fair Oaks Ranch has settled a lawsuit it filed against the owner of the parcel just outside the city where plans for a large subdivision  The Reserve at Fair Oaks Ranch  sparked a wave of local political activism in 2014.

R.W. Pfeiffer Properties, the defendant in the suit filed in March 2016, was accused of breaching the terms of a pact with the city that outlined how its 345-acre parcel off Ammann Road would be developed, including a provision for the completed subdivision to be served by city water.

The citys lawsuit cited Pfeiffers opposition to its parcel being included in an expanded municipal water utility service area for which the city sought approval from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

As a direct, proximate and foreseeable consequence of defendants breach, plaintiff city cannot comply with the development agreement, said the citys suit.

A Pfeiffer counter claim asserted that the citys refusal in 2014 to annex its property violated the terms of the binding agreement struck in November 2013.

Annexation was a material provision of the contractual agreement between the parties and this breach terminated any obligation on the part of the defendant to perform, say Pfeiffer pleadings in the case filed in Bexar County district court.

Calling the negotiated resolution a win-win for both sides, City Manager Tobin Maples said Wednesday that it provides Pfeiffer with flexibility on what goes at the site, while clearing the way for the city to expand its water service area there.

If Pfeiffer Properties prefers not to adhere to the originally proposed high density subdivision served by city water, the settlement says it can instead build up to 85 homes  the maximum allowed there under Kendall County development guidelines  that are served by individual water wells.

Im happy to settle, Russell W. Pfeiffer said this week. He declined comment on which development path he may follow.

Mayor Garry Manitzas applauded the settlement in a statement issued after the April 5 council meeting where it was authorized, saying lengthy court proceedings had been avoided.

Each party will pay their own legal costs, he said in a news release announcing the deal.

Trio Residential Developers of Austin, whod led negotiations with the city on the development agreement, dropped out of the project after facing stiff public opposition, led by a newly formed grassroots group called Save Fair Oaks Ranch.

Its members decried the large subdivision proposed in the development agreement as a burden on city streets and services and a threat to the local quality of life.

The group, whose organizers included Manitzas and current Councilman Steve Hartpence, successfully lobbied in 2014 against annexation of the Pfeiffer parcel.

Campaigning as agents of change in 2015, Hartpence and Manitzas were elected to the council. In 2016, Manitzas defeated incumbent Mayor Cheryl Landman. He faces Wesley Pieper in the May 5 mayoral election.

Zeke MacCormack is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of his stories here. | zeke@express-news.net | @zekemac
As Rick Trevino, a Bernie Sanders diehard who eked into the 23rd Congressional District Democratic primary runoff against Gina Ortiz Jones, chatted with a potential supporter during a Saturday block-walking visit in western Bexar County, he caught a CNN chyron flashing across the muted living room TV: Syrias Assad Remains Defiant After Airstrike.

I just cant help but look at the TV and talk about the strikes in Syria, said Trevino, a former high school teacher. And all that money we spend doing these things, I think we should be spending here to make the roads better.

Jones, a former Air Force intelligence officer who received 41.6 percent of the vote in the March primary to Trevinos 17.4 percent, views such remarks as an oversimplification. And she says its a false equivalence when Trevino associates her with Republican U.S. Rep. Will Hurd, a former CIA agent, as if anyone with an intelligence background has to think one way.

In Military City, U.S.A., we also see the importance of the militarys contributions to our local economy, from our restaurants to our school districts, Jones said. Anyone who refuses to recognize that is not prepared to represent our community in Congress.

Read more: National Democrats putting weight behind Jones in Congressional District 23

The sharp contrast in views is particularly notable in the 23rd District. Though largely rural in scope, stretching from San Antonio to El Paso, it has an unusually large concentration of active and retired military members and contractors. It contains a substantial cybersecurity industry, a major National Security Agency facility and the headquarters of the 24th Air Force, which specializes in cyberwarfare.

Hurd narrowly won the district  twice  unseating Democrat Pete Gallego in 2014 and then defeating him again in 2016. In his 2016 ads, Hurd played up his career as an authority on national security and cybersecurity, two things that spoke to his constituency.

While Trevino has expressed deep skepticism about the U.S. military industry over concerns about its morals and economic motives, Jones  who previously served in the Pentagons Defense Intelligence Agency  has appeared more receptive to the industry.

I am proud to have served our country in uniform, and the men and women I served with are among our nations best. They have earned our respect, Jones said. Service members and their families make sacrifices for this country every day and its disappointing when folks forget that.

She has distanced herself from Hurd on national security matters at times during the campaign, including when she said it was disturbing that Hurd voted in January to release the memo authored by Rep. Devin Nunes, R-California, that alleged the FBI abused its power while investigating the Trump campaigns ties to Russia.

Jones expanded on her differences with Hurd in an interview, saying the incumbent Republicans votes and record of silence are contrary to and have not at all contributed to national security. Of Trevinos statement, Jones said: Its an accusation not based in any fact.

Read more: Democrats hoping to knock off GOP incumbents with veterans

Trevino later explained he associated Jones with Hurd during an April 2 forum on Texas Public Radios The Source because of his uncertainty over her positions on foreign policy engagements like the Yemeni civil war and Syrian President Bashar al-Assads suspected poison gas attack on his own people.

The Democratic Party had taken what Trevino saw as an overly hawkish stance on Syria, and Trevino lumped Jones in with the mainstream party views because he hadnt heard her articulate otherwise. Trevino also indicated hes concerned Jones would favor intelligence matters over domestic issues, which Trevino sees as more important to the district.

Trevinos political ideology has been driven in large part by the Iraq War, which started in 2003  the same year he graduated from high school. He deeply opposes many aspects of American militarism because he believes the military essentially has been used as a vehicle for serving economic interests, while the U.S. has been the main purveyors of instability in the Middle East.

Any action in the Middle East needs to be vetted by Congress. Right now, we have an era of executive supremacy, Trevino said. The U.S. should not bomb the Assad regime or get more involved in that region.  Its interesting that the high school teacher is the one bringing it up, not the one who has a background in that area.

Jones said she supports the notion of committing resources (overseas) only when we necessarily have to, though she wasnt as anti-intervention as Trevino. She also voiced the idea of investing in the State Department to help the U.S. stay out of wars in the first place.

Having served in Iraq, I fully know, and all of us know from recent memory, we need to ask pressing questions about our vital interests in Yemen, and what does the day after look like in Yemen and the region (at) large? Jones said. And what were seeing, as Saudi Arabia and Iran are battling it out through several proxy wars in the region, the region is suffering because of that.

Some consider Jones the favorite in the May 22 runoff after she more than doubled Trevinos vote share. Jones also reported raising about $708,000 in the first three months of the year, moving her past the $1 million mark for the campaign. Hurd took in about $621,000, though he maintained a large cash-on-hand edge.

Trevino last had about $3,900 on hand, though he estimated he had raised about $10,000 during the recent period, for which he had yet to file.

Meanwhile, Jones has begun taking applications for a summer field fellowship, with an application deadline of May 15, one day after runoff early voting begins. In public forums, Jones often has contrasted her positions with those of Hurd, not Trevino.

Trevino has taken issue with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committees (DCCC) placement of Jones on its Red to Blue program, which aids candidates with campaign resources and strategic guidance.

I do think the DCCC entering the race early before the people have gotten a chance to voice their opinion, says a lot about Washington and says a lot about the current state of our democracy, Trevino said. I think they are looking ahead to November. I think they think this runoff is an annoyance.

Asked if she had turned her attention to November, Jones compromised in her response.

This is a competitive race, Jones said as she drove from Clint, a town of about 1,000 residents near El Paso, to Alpine. Were not assuming anything away, (but) we are also frankly looking to make sure that if were successful, we can immediately hit the ground running for November. So I think we can do both.

Jasper Scherer is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of his stories here. | jscherer@express-news.net | @jaspscherer
House Speaker Joe Straus on Thursday endorsed Steve Allison in the runoff for the Republican nomination in his north Bexar County district.

Straus, who announced in October he was not seeking re-election, called Allison the one candidate in this race who has proved himself ready to serve in the Texas House.

Allison faces Matt Beebe, Straus two-time primary opponent, in a May 22 runoff.

Steve is a man of strong character and sound judgment, and I have no doubt that he will be an effective voice for our community, Straus said in a statement.

Allison, a business attorney who recently served on the VIA board, has also served as president of the Alamo Heights School Board. He said he was proud to draw Straus support.

This area has supported Joe strongly, and he has supported us strongly. Joe did an excellent job and his work has benefited our area greatly, Allison said in a statement.

Beebe finished first in the six-way March 6 primary, drawing 29.6 percent to Allisons 26.3. Beebe drew 37.1 and 38.8 percent of the vote against Straus during unsuccessful primary challenges in 2012 and 2014, respectively.

Beebe said he had not been counting on Straus support and, mentioning his March 6 first-place finish, predicted a win in May.

Whether its his views on the 2nd Amendment, his unwillingness to enable parents to have meaningful options for their childrens education, or his refusal to pledge support for the Republican caucus choice for House speaker, voters are increasingly realizing Steve Allison is out of touch with their values, Beebe said in a statement.

Unlike Allison, Beebe supports the so-called bathroom bill, which Straus opposed in the last legislative session.

Attorney Marc Whyte, who finished fifth with 12.3 percent, also has endorsed Allison. Whyte and Allison generally received their strongest support in the same areas of the district, particularly around Alamo Heights, Terrell Hills and Olmos Park.

The district covers those three cities on the southern end and stretches north almost to the JW Marriott San Antonio Hill Country Resort & Spa.

Straus has represented District 121 since 2005 and was elected speaker of the Texas House in 2009.

Allison or Beebe will face Democratic nominee Celina D. Montoya in November.

Jasper Scherer is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of his stories here. | jscherer@express-news.net | @jaspscherer
Ted Cruz and Beto ORourke both want the same thing.

No, Cruz doesnt line up with ORourke on the need for universal health care, cost-free higher education and criminal justice reform.

For his part, ORourke doesnt share Cruzs ardor for corporate tax cuts and a coast-to-coast border wall.

And they certainly dont wish for the same outcome in their U.S. Senate race, which finds Cruz, the Republican incumbent, staring down a challenge from ORourke, a Democratic congressman from El Paso.

But both men want ORourke to be perceived as a serious threat.

After all, the big enemy for Cruz in this campaign is complacency, the sense among his fellow Republicans that his re-election will be as automatic as every other post-1994 statewide race for the GOP. The big enemy for ORourke is hopelessness, the chronic affliction that infects Texas Democrats as soon as the leaves start falling from the trees in even-numbered years.

Thats why the Wednesday release of a Quinnipiac University poll showing ORourke only three points behind Cruz (47-44) served both candidates interests. Cruz wants his supporters to be jarred out of complacency; to run scared. ORourke wants to be taken seriously, to persuade reticent voters that his candidacy is worth their emotional (and financial) investment.

More politics: Cruz delivers populist campaign message in San Antonio amid O'Rourke claims of his absence

One side is fighting overconfidence, the other is trying to muster up more confidence.

Those potential Beto backers have, to quote an old Bob Dylan song, been burned before and they know the score. They saw Tony Sanchez hyped as the Great Latino Hope in 2002 and Wendy Davis promoted as someone who could electrify women voters in 2014. Sanchez lost his gubernatorial bid by 18 percent, Davis lost hers by 20.

After we get past the standard-issue caveats about the Quinnipiac poll  e.g., its only one poll; were still six-and-a-half months away from election day; the poll sampled registered, not likely voters  theres plenty of good news here for ORourke.

The most promising nugget, paradoxically enough, involves the extent to which ORourke is still an unknown quantity.

While 90 percent of poll respondents said they know enough about Cruz to have an opinion about him, more than half (53 percent) said they hadnt heard enough about ORourke to know what to make of him.

Thats a huge name-recognition gap in Cruzs favor. On the one hand, you could look at these numbers and conclude that all of ORourkes celebrated road-tripping across red and blue counties in this state hasnt yet made him a known quantity. And thats a worrisome sign for his team.

On the other hand, this poll tells us ORourke is essentially in a dead heat with an incumbent and, unlike that incumbent, has big potential for growth. Most Texas voters have made up their minds about Cruz and theyre pretty divided about him, according to the poll, with a 46-44 favorable/unfavorable ratio. By contrast, nearly two-thirds of voters who are familiar with ORourke like him.

Also, while Cruz registered an 86-percent favorable rating among Republicans, theres been a palpable softening in the enthusiasm for him in this state since he launched his failed 2016 campaign for president.

Texas Republicans who previously saw Cruz as an uncompromising conservative rebel have seen him go from trashing Donald Trump (in 2016) as a pathological liar, utterly amoral, a serial philanderer and a narcissist at a level I dont think this countrys ever seen, to gushing about him (in the latest issue of Time magazine) as a flash-bang grenade thrown into Washington by the forgotten men and women of America.

Related: Cruz relying on brand to fend off lesser-known O'Rourke

Either he was faking his moral outrage then, or hes faking his obsequiousness now. Either way, his credibility took a hit.

In the Quinnipiac poll, ORourke has a 16-point edge among voters between the ages of 18 and 34. For all of his painstaking efforts to flip GOP voters in small, rural counties, ORourkes prospects will hinge on his ability to get young Democratic leaners to shed their cynicism about the voting process.

At times, Cruz has enjoyed mocking the idea of a 2018 Democratic wave, taking particular delight in ORourkes subpar primary performance (less than 62 percent of the vote against two obscure opponents) last month. All the same, he wants his fellow Republicans to be worried.

The left is going to show up, he said at the GOPs Lincoln Reagan dinner in February. They will crawl over broken glass in November to vote.

ORourke hopes Cruz is right.

@gilgamesh470

Gilbert Garcia is a San Antonio Express-News columnist. Read more of his stories here. | ggarcia@express-news.net | @gilgamesh470
BRIDGEPORT  Rev. Anthony Bennett of Mount Aery Baptist Church has been a vocal advocate for police reforms in Connecticuts largest city.

And yet the pastor was one of the community leaders left out of the loop when the consultant for Mayor Joe Ganims national police chief search made a two day visit to research what residents want in their top cop.

Its an important position, Bennett said in an interview Wednesday. And particularly in this time, climate and culture, the way theyve gone about it does not foster any additional trust.

Bennett is hardly alone in his criticism that the search has failed to engage a broad enough swath of the community. Rosa Correa, an Hispanic activist who had a chance to meet with the headhunter at the Cuban Club, found the process lacking.

Correa said a mayoral aide issued the invites to the club gathering, and around 15 people attended.

Why are we having these closed meetings? Correa said Wednesday. I prefer to be in an open forum. I learn from other people.

Randi Frank, a former Connecticut resident living in Kentucky, is the consultant tasked with delivering a handful of finalists to Ganim in the coming weeks for the mayor to select for a five year contract. Her hiring was announced March 20.

Acting Police Chief Armando A.J. Perez, a close ally of the mayors whom Ganim promoted two years ago to the interim job, intends to submit his application, leading to some speculation that the search is just a show.

Despite the mayors office insisting that everybodys opinion matters and making Franks email public  randi@randifrank.com, her face-to-face encounters so far have been very limited.

Another chance

In town April 5 and 6, Frank met with Perez to talk about what being chief entails; with a dozen City Council members; with the mayoral-appointed police commission; in the mayors conference room with Working for a Better Bridgeport, a select group of community leaders Ganim has previously convened; and with the gathering at the Cuban Club, where Perez is a member.

If they were serious about it they would have scheduled (meetings) in various parts of the city, Bennett said. A broad community gathering, well-publicized in each section.

NAACP President George Mintz, who has also met with Perez over police matters and reforms, was also not contacted about Franks availability.

I dont think they like our ideas, Mintz said Wednesday. I dont think that the mayors interested in what we have to say.

Rev. Carl McCluster of Shiloh Baptist Church has been part of Working for a Better Bridgeport. But McCluster said he opted out of the meeting in the mayors conference room with Frank because it was a hurriedly organized and private.

There has to be a transparent process and clearly announced process of meeting with community people, McCluster said Wednesday. If you want certain answers, you talk to certain people. If you want the truth, you talk to everybody.

Reached by phone Thursday, Frank said she had just made arrangements to return to Bridgeport in early May. Frank said the mayors office would be setting up appointments, likely some in the afternoon and some in the evening.

Theyre in charge, Frank added. I will go wherever they need me.

Rowena White, Ganims communications director, said the details were still being determined. White added, I do know this is open to representatives of different community groups throughout the city to have a voice. I think some werent aware or missed it, so we want to make sure everybody has the opportunity to meet with her.

Callie Heilmann, founder of civic group Bridgeport Generation Now, has been corresponding with Frank via email. Generation Now has been critical of Perez, his department and the police commission.

Heilmann was pleased Friday to learn Frank would be back, and willing to give City Hall the benefit-of-the-doubt that Generation Now and other groups were not intentionally left out previously.

If she comes back and doesnt meet with everyone who wants to meet with her, then I will say somethings up, Heilmann said.

This is America

Cuban Club President Raul Laffitte, also the public schools transportation director, said Franks appearance at that venue in early April resulted from a much larger community event the club hosted a few months ago about Perezs future.

The city charter requires a search before hiring a permanent police chief. Ganim has been under growing pressure from Perezs supporters and critics to move forward with the national hunt.

There were about 82 people there. We had Hispanics, Afro-Americans, a few Anglos there, too, Laffitte said. I decided it was time to ask Joe Ganim what is the process (and) are you going to start the process or not? ... I spoke to A.J. and he said, I want the process to start. I want to compete.

Laffitte said an aide with the mayors office subsequently reached out and asked if Frank could appear at the club.

Most (members) would like to see A.J. get the job, Laffitte admitted. When Joe Ganim appointed him interim police chief, we did have a celebration  over 300 people. Laffitte said he and Perez have been involved in the club since their families immigrated from Cuba in the 1960s.

Correa, who said she loves Perez as a person and knows how hard he works, added he would want the search to be a thorough and competitive one.

Reached for this story, Perez said, If its up to me she (Frank) can meet with whoever she wants. ... This is America. This is what makes this country great.
Greenwich students had an opportunity to get free music lessons at the Greenwich Alliance for Educations Tuning In To Music event at Western Middle School in Greenwich on Tuesday.

Members of the Greenwich Symphony taught group lessons to kids in grades four through 12. Students learned three songs and put on a performance for parents and teachers at the end.
NEW CANAAN  Republican candidates for governor took a page out of their national counterparts playbook when they addressed education for the first time in a debate.

The majority of the nine candidates on stage at a public middle school advocated school choice, though they never explicitly used the phrase voucher system.

Families who are in low-performing schools should have the opportunity to take that money that they have in the (state) education savings account and go to the school that they choose to go to, said state Rep. Prasad Srinivasan, a Glastonbury physician.

Former U.S. Comptroller Dave Walker, of Bridgeport, said hed like to see school districts consolidate duplicated resources to re-allocate funding and offer more school choice.

We have to provide more choice, we have to provide more options, Walker said. Not everybody is bound for college, not every college degree is equal. We have tremendous needs in regards to the trades and technical areas ... We need to put that money to better use it to educate our kids and give them more opportunity.

The businessmen in the group advocated school choice as well.

As a business person, I understand the importance of choice, of markets and of financial incentives, said David Stemerman, a hedge-fund millionaire from Greenwich.

Westport businessman Steve Obsitnik said he would use his experience as a CEO to gather a team of education experts to solve the problem.

As a CEO, I dont know all the answers, but we bring teams together, he said. We do have choice in this state. Its called moving. The injustice are people who cant afford to move and are stuck in systems that arent getting what they need. Funding is key, school choice is key.

Albanian-born Fairfield lawyer Peter Lumaj blamed Democrats and the teachers union for the states achievement gap.

The Republicans should have the backbone to go to the cities and point out their failure to turn this around, he said. What that means is you give the kids, the parents, the choice of taking their kids from a failing school to a non-failing school within the district so that their kid can succeed. Does it mean competition? Yes. Does it mean some public schools collapse and close down? Yes.

Tim Herbst, the son of public educators in Trumbull where he previously served as first selectman, stayed away from the topic of school choice.

You dont close the achievement gap just by focusing on when school starts and when school ends, he said. It takes a community effort. You close that achievement gap working around the clock with parents and teachers and school officials and community leaders. Its about investing in after school programs to keep these kids off the street, its about keeping them engaged. Its to make sure our urban teachers and educators have the resources they need to make sure theyre teaching in a safe environment. Its not just about money, but its also about accountability.

Shelton Mayor Mark Lauretti said the state should focus on improving parent-student-teacher relationships, how money is allocated to schools and student safety in inner-city schools. He also criticized the State Board of Education for eliminating the industrial arts program across the state.

Unless we make the schools safer and the streets in the inner cities safer, were not going to get the results that we want because kids are intimidated on their way to school, Lauretti said. And its a fact. Because when the inner cities are running like the wild west, its a big distraction for kids.

Stamford CFO and father of four Mike Handler called for public-private partnerships to develop curriculum and talent pipelines for companies in the state, like Stamford-based NBC Sports. He also said the state should focus more on early childhood education.

The truth is we are putting way too much emphasis on the last four years of a students education than we are on the first four years of a students education, Handler said. I cant think of anything thats more sad than sending a five year old to kindergarten thats not ready for kindergarten.

kkrasselt@hearstmediact.com; 203-842-2563; @kaitlynkrasselt
As the nation says goodbye to former first lady Barbara Bush, a champion of literacy and family, we look back at some of the times she and George H.W. Bush, the 41st president, were in Connecticut. President Bush was the son of Connecticut Sen. Prescott Bush and spent his childhood in Greenwich. Bush also attended Yale University in New Haven. Barbara herself was raised in Rye, N.Y. She met George Bush in 1941 at a Christmas dance at the Round Hill Country Club in Greenwich.

The first President Bush came to Ansonia in August of 1992 and The New York Times reported the following: President Bush came to this depressed one-time manufacturing center this afternoon, said thanks for a great send-off to the thousands of people who had waited hours in a sweltering stadium, and promptly left, the blades of his helicopter flattening the ball field grass in a moment of Presidential pomp. It was the biggest thing to happen to Ansonia in a long time, yet it hardly seemed enough for the many people who have lost jobs here and have not been able to find new ones.
STAMFORD  Police say a woman who was pulled over for a cellphone violation was found with a cache of fraudulent checks and other documents in her car.

Police said the arrest may be connected to the recent surge of mail stolen from local U.S. Postal boxes.

Rolanda Clarke, 21, who recently moved to Glenbrook Road from the Bronx, N.Y., was charged Friday with nine counts of conspiracy to commit second-degree forgery. Clarke, who has a pending New York state grand larceny charge for being in possession of forged instruments, was released after posting $50,000 bond.

"It's very early in the process, but the car was recently used for her relocation to Stamford and the origin of the items seized is not entirely clear, defense attorney Lindy Urso said. We also believe there may have been some irregularities with the initial search of the vehicle, which we will investigate as the case moves forward."

According to Clarkes three-page arrest affidavit, she was pulled over driving a white BMW on North State Street at Elm Street on Wednesday for a cellphone violation. Police determined she had a suspended New York license and took inventory of the car before it was towed.

The officer noticed numerous checks, mail and bank statements with different names and addresses scattered on the backseat and in the back of the vehicle, the affidavit said. Police took note of the items because of a recent bulletin by the U.S. Postal Service about an increase in mailbox thefts.

Electronic crimes investigator Michael Stempien examined the vehicle and found multiple checks, some that looked like payroll checks, others looked like personal checks in other peoples names.

In the backseat of the vehicle were two large garbage bags full of paperwork that was spilling out into the back of the vehicle, Stempien said in the arrest affidavit.

Stempien said he noticed some of the paperwork spilling out of the bags included tax documents not belonging to Clarke, the affidavit said.

Nine payroll checks found in plain view in the backseat were determined to be fake and not valid, the affidavit said. A fake California identification was found with Clarkes picture on it, according to the affidavit.

Clarke said she did not steal mail and was moving from New York, so they threw all those bags in her car, she told police, according to the affidavit.

Clarke is due back in court May 25.

jnickerson@stamfordadvocate.com
The Scottish Government has announced an extension to the application period under the Scottish Upland Sheep Support Scheme (SUSSS).

The scheme, worth around 6 million, is designed to assist active hill farmers and crofters through a payment coupled to the number of ewe hoggs they keep as breeding replacements for their flocks.

The extension will provide greater flexibility, and will reflect the poor weather and the difficulties that farmers and crofters have in trying to gather hill sheep at that time of year.

Due to the poor weather last year, the 2017 scheme application period was temporarily extended. The announcement by Scottish Government makes that extension permanent.

The SUSSS application period will now run from 1 September to 30 November (previously 1 September to 16 October) and the retention period will be from 1 December to 31 March the following calendar year (previously 17 October to 31 March).

'More effective'

Chairman of NFU Scotlands Less Favoured Areas committee, Robert MacDonald, who farms at Grantown on Spey, said the new rules will now make the scheme more effective, giving people time to access hill ground.

The previous application window meant that some had to rush to gather eligible animals and, for some, this gathering would have overlapped with the stag stalking season, Mr MacDonald said.

The Union and our LFA Committee has been consistent in its calls for changes to SUSSS. Given the importance of this support package to hill farmers and crofters, its vital that the scheme performs effectively for those who are eligible.

Last year we saw the welcome temporary change to deadlines by the Scottish Government due to the weather, and this gave people time to gather eligible animals.

Mr MacDonald added: The problems with the weather in 2017 were exceptional but, by no means, a one-off and its therefore welcome to see the Scottish Government make these changes permanent going forward.
French MPs have voted to ban vegan and vegetarian products from using terms enjoyed by their meat counterparts, such as 'sausage' and 'steak'.

The new law has been brought into force in France and will be enforced with a 300,000 fine.

The law was proposed by MP Jean-Baptiste Moreau, who argued that products such as soya steaks, vegan sausages and other vegetarian alternatives were misleading for consumers.

"It is important to combat false claims. Our products must be designated correctly: the terms of #cheese or #steak will be reserved for products of animal origin," tweeted Jean-Baptiste Moreau, a member of President Emmanuel Macron's political movement La Republique En Marche.

The measure was approved by French MPs on Thursday (19 April).

The US state of Missouri is also reportedly contemplating a ban on meat-related words in the sale of meat substitutes.

Last year, the EU's Court of Justice ruled that plant based products cannot use the word 'milk'.

The court said that plant based products cannot, in principle, be marketed with designations such as milk, cream, butter, cheese or yoghurt, which are reserved by EU law for animal products.
A UK farming union will add its voice to those calling for the European Commission to postpone negotiations with the Mercosur Bloc on beef.

Next Monday (23 April), all European farming unions and associations will meet to discuss issues of vital importance to the beef sector.

This will include the on-going negotiations between the Commission and the Mercosur Latin American nations  Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay.

UK farmers have frequently blasted the trade talks between the EU and Mercosur, who say that the South American countries do not come close to matching the food safety, animal welfare or environmental standards which farmers comply with in the UK and across Europe.

NFU Scotland will join those calling for the negotiations to be dropped until there is further clarity on the impact of Brexit on the beef trade.

The union hopes for cast-iron guarantees on production standards to be given.

A recent report by the European Commission cast doubt on the ability of Brazilian authorities to ensure that exported meat products meet European Union requirements.

European farmers have also cited previous criminal activity in Brazil as demonstrating the weaknesses in food production regulation in the region.

Blindly negotiate

Speaking ahead of the trip to Brussels, NFU Scotland Livestock Committee Chairman Charlie Adam and a beef producer from Aberdeenshire, said the Brexit negotiations are already causing great uncertainty over the future stability of the market for food produced the UK and Europe.

The actions of the Commission in continuing to blindly negotiate with the Mercosur trading bloc is extremely concerning, Mr Adam said.

Not only has the European Commission continued to negotiate but reports have also stated that the Commission has increased the tariff free beef quota being offered to the South American industry to seal any deal.

Mr Adam said the actions by the EU has been reckless and damaging. He said British farmers produce to high traceability, environmental and sanitary standards.

Its essential that the Commission and European member states protect our standards by keeping our borders closed to South American produce that isnt covered by our comprehensive regulations and where there is no guarantee our standards can be met, Mr Adam added.

That is an approach we believe our consumers wholly endorse. The message must be clear in Brussels and London that our most important market will continue to be those in our neighbouring countries and that the best way to protect our standards post-Brexit is through close trade links such as a customs union.
A prominent Northern Irish politician has called for a unified Brexit position as agricultural disruption could occur between Northern Ireland, the rest of the UK and the Republic of Ireland.

Former SDLP leader and Minister for Social Development, Margaret Ritchie, has urged agriculture leaders to come together on a unified position on the future of agriculture post-Brexit.

The former MP and MLA for South Down, previously a prominent member of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee at Westminster, convened a meeting of senior agriculture leaders.

The leaders, from across the whole sector, met in Armagh this week to discuss how the industry can present a clear and unified message ahead of the next phase of Brexit negotiations in the absence of a Northern Ireland Executive.

Irish Government Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Michael Creed TD, also attended the event to listen to the concerns of the industry and outline the Irish Governments position.

Although agriculture is already devolved to Northern Ireland, the UK Government has committed to devolving the expenditure associated with agricultural subsidy whilst guaranteeing current level to 2024.

Potential differences in subsidy and trading arrangements that may arise as a result of Brexit risks disrupting the two key market frameworks for Northern Ireland - the rest of the UK and the Republic for Ireland.

This could result in the industry in Northern Ireland being less competitive with its counterparts in the Republic of Ireland or the rest of the UK.

Stalled progress

A number of meetings have already taken place between the Northern Ireland Civil Service and senior leaders to take forward ideas, but progress has been stalled by the lack of an Executive and devolved Ministers.

In light of the lack of progress, Margaret Ritchie has urged leaders to take their ideas straight to the UK Government, the Irish Government and the European Union Commission.

Speaking after the event in Armagh, Margaret Ritchie said: The agriculture industry in Northern Ireland is the pillar of our economy, and it stands to be the most heavily impacted by Brexit due to the important ties with the markets and regulatory systems of both the Republic of Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom.

I was delighted to convene such a wide an influential group of interests from across the sector, and look forward to the conversation developing.

Ms Ritchie added: One thing is clear - for Northern Ireland to have its voice heard in this crucial phase of Brexit negotiations, it needs to speak now with a clear vision for the future. Failure to do so will pose clear risks for the industry.

'Significant challenges'

Michael Creed TD, Irish Government Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine said Brexit poses "significant challenges" for the entirety of the agricultural sector across the island of Ireland.

Inter-relationships between the sectors north and south of the border mean that we need to work together towards a solution which minimises risk and maximises opportunity, Mr Creed said.

The importance of the agri-food sector to the all-island economy, together with the extensive and highly integrated nature of the trade in both directions North and South, magnifies the potential impact of a no deal Brexit.

That is why we want the EU-UK negotiations to work, and to ensure that a hard border on the island of Ireland can be avoided while also ensuring that we have as close as possible a trading relationship with the UK in the future.
Fuel crisis: Farmers urged to be vigilant for diesel thieves

Farmers have been urged to be vigilant for thieves seeking to steal diesel as the current fuel crisis continues to impact the country. Th...
Aamir Khan Initiates 'Jalmitras'

Speaking at a college in Pune, Founder of Paani Foundation, Aamir Khan appealed to students and all urban citizens to become Jalmitras' and join this effort against drought. Aamir Khan shared on his Instagram a picture from Pune and urged students via his social media as well to join Shramdaan. The actor sought permission from the Founder and President of Symbiosis S.B. Mujumdar to stick a poster on notice board so that majority of people join the cause.

Aamir Khan Tweeted About Paani Foundation

Aamir Khan shared a picture on Twitter urging people to join the initiative saying, "Come join us on 1st May. Love, a.". The actor also tagged other celebrities like Sachin Tendulkar, Amitabh Bachchan, Alia Bhatt, Ranveer Singh, Rajkummar Rao, Swara Bhasker, Richa Chadha, Abhishek Bachchan amongst other. Talking about the same he said, "I have tagged a lot of celebrities in my tweets, the idea is that the information should reach a larger number of people".

Paani Foundation Provides Unique Opportunity

On Maharashtra day i.e. May 1st this year, Aamir Khan's Paani Foundation will be providing a unique opportunity for people to come out in large number and work shoulder-to-shoulder with villagers for a few hours. By signing up on the link jalmitra.paanifoundation.in, people from cities can register to work in villages with villagers on 1st May which is Maharashtra Day. The last date for registration for 1st May Mahashramdaan is midnight on 25th April.

People Signing Up In Big Numbers

Past three weeks already witnessed over 1 lakh people signing up for the cause. If you do not have to time to travel to a village on 1st May you could also contribute by donating money towards machine work for creating watershed management structures, and by volunteering to help the villagers with certain tasks. Just visit www.paanifoundation.in and all your questions will be answered.
Milind Soman's Epic Post Says It All

The actor posted this picture with Ankita and captioned it as, "#focus on the good  #BetterHabits4BetterLife #surroundedbylove.

When Ankita Took To Instagram To Clear The Air

Earlier a user had posted, "Don't know why sick people spread rumours of your breakup on Facebook. Love you both," to which Ankita Konwar replied, "Mind is devil's workshop, ignore them." She also added, "The best thing to spend on your relationship is time, conversation, understanding and honesty."

Wedding On The Cards?

A few days back, there were reports that Milind and Ankita are likely to tie the knot this month in a private ceremony in Alibaug. Though we are yet to hear any official word from the couple on the same.

Love At First Sight

In one of his previous interviews with Quint, Milind recalled his first meeting with Ankita. He shared, "I met her in a nightclub in Chennai. I never go to nightclubs. It was a rare occurrence that I was there... this was quite coincidental or meant to be. I was dancing with someone else and suddenly I saw her and I was like, Oh my god! Who is that?!' I gave her my number and I said if she wanted she could call me and then she called me the next day and we started seeing each other... 2014 February. She was working in AirAsia at that time. She has just resigned, because she is moving to Bombay and Air Asia doesn't have a base in Bombay."

The Lovebirds Don't Care A Damn About Getting Trolled

Milind and Ankita often find themselves being subjected to unsavoury comments on social media due to their age difference. But Milind is least bothered. He was quoted as saying, "I don't really bother about it all. The people who talk about it don't really know us, so it's actually amusing."
Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum was one among the Malayalam movies that fetched praises at the recently announced 65th National Film Awards. The movie also went on to bag some of the major awards.

Dileesh Pothen's Thondimuthalum Driksakshiyum was jointly produced by Sandip Senan and Aneesh Thomas under the banner Urvasi Theatres. Now, the banner has announced their next projet in Malayalam and the movie is worth waiting for.

Reportedly, the next film of Urvasi Theatres will be jointly produced by B Rakesh as well along with the banner Universal Cinemas. The upcoming film has been titled as Dakini and the movie will be directed by Rahul Riji Nair, whose debut film Ottamuri Velicham was selected as the Best Film in this year's Kerala State Film Awards.

Dakini features a long list of actors in prominent roles and the movie has looked promising straightaway. Suraj Venjaramoodu, Chemban Vinod Jose, Alencier Ley, Indrans etc., are a part of the cast list. Importantly, the film also features actresses Balussery Sarasa and Sreelatha Sreedharan, who had created a huge impact with their performances in the most recent hit Sudani From Nigeria. Pauly Valsan and Sethulakshmi are also a part of the cast list. With such a promising cast of highly talented actors, the audiences can definitely hope for a quality project.

Reportedly, the shoot of the film will commence by the month of July 2018. The makers are planning to release the film in this year itself. Vijay Babu's Friday Films is also a part of the project as the banner will be bring the film to the theatres.
Naamkaran To Go Off Air On May 18

Although the show has managed to get decent ratings recently, looks like now the channel have decided to shut down the show! The last date of the show going off air is said to be May 18. But the cast is yet to be informed about the final date of telecast.

Naamkaran Last Telecast Date Revealed

A source associated with the show was quoted by TOI as saying, "Speculations have been rife that the show will end soon for some time now but now we have a date."

The Makers Do Not Want To Drag The Plot

"While we have managed to sustain the ratings for long, it's time to end it on a high rather than dragging the narrative. We plan to wrap up the shoot by the end of this month. While there is no clarity on the last telecast, we're told May 18 (2018) could be it."

Zain Isnt Aware Of Exact Reason For The Show Going Off Air

When Zain was asked about the show going off air, he remained unaware of the reason. He told the leading daily, "I'm not sure about the exact reason but we, too, have been hearing that a lot of shows will be axed."

Channel Is Planning To Revamp

"The channel is planning to revamp. Since we're not leading the slot, they've decided to take the show off air. However, I'm happy that the audience liked the show and the feedback, especially for my character, has been encouraging."

Zain Thanks Fans For Their Love & Support

He further added, "Besides, I also feel that it's better to end a show when it's still doing well. I want to thank my fans for their immense support and love."

Many Shows Might Go Off Air

It has to be recalled that the channel is planning to revamp and many shows are going off air. We had reported that along with Naamkaran, a few other shows like Ishqbaaz and Ikyawann, too might go off air. There were also reports that the channel might replace one of these shows with Yeh Hai Mohabbatein spin-off, Yeh Hai Chahate.
Story

Bharat Ram (Mahesh Babu), returns from London to pay homage to his deceased father, Raghav Raju (R. Sarathkumar). He is then asked to take over the Chief Minister's mantle by Varadaraju (Prakash Raj), party head and friend of Raghav Raju.

Bharat realizes that there are a series of things disoriented in the state of Andhra Pradhesh and hence, decides to streamline all of them. Bharat falls in love with Vasumathi (Kiara Advani) which turns mutual at some point. Political cloud force them to part ways and a string of certain hurdles encounter the young minister during his journey.

Upside & Downside

Upside

Mahesh Babu's Charisma

Tinge of Romance

Story Line & Execution by Siva

Songs and Background Music

Art Direction & Production Values

Downside

Lack of Comedy Elements

Second Half Narration

Placement of Vasumathi Song

Performances

Mahesh Babu is undoubtedly the priced asset of the movie. He is slick, stylish and commanding as the uber cool chief minister. His intensity and base voice steals thunder and it's a total feast time for Babu's fans.

Kiara is ravishing and compliments Mahesh totally onscreen. She could be the next heroine to be in demand in the town.

Prakash Raj as the party leader is terrific and commands immense screen presence. R. Sarathkumar as Bharat's father appears and vanishes in a jiffy.

Ravishankar is visible for not more than 4-5 scenes, but he impresses in all of them. Posani Krishna Murali is at his usual best.

Rest of the cast has rendered justice to their roles.

Technical Aspects

Art Direction is one of the major highlights of the flick. Suresh Selvarajan deserves equal applause in parallel with the director for creating the latter's vision into reality. The assembly set erected by him and his team is just breath taking as even the real assembly might look pale in front this imitation.

Cinematography by Ravi Chandran and Tirru, throughout the flick, runs as one's eyes and not as camera. The swift changing of lighting and colour tone, especially between the serious part of the subject and during lighter vein is commendable.

When the run time of a certain movie is exceedingly high, editing plays a pivotal role and the job has to be accurate to avoid boredom. Sreekar's editing is top notch which suffices the requirement. Sequences zip past one after the other with swift cuts without the audiences undergo feel any lag throughout the movie.

Devi Sri Prasad is probably in his honeymoon phase. All that he touched has turned into gold and Bharat Ane Nenu is no exception. Background Music is emotional, intense and generates goosebumps and songs are already chartbusters, which are ruling the roost. Vacchadayyo Saami and Bharat Ane Nenu theme song stand out, both as an audio and with its visuals as well.

Koratala Siva, who is known to blend emotion, message and social concerne at right proportions in his movies, has comeback with the same formula this time around as well. Siva's writing is immaculate and he seems to have mastered the art of gauging the pulse of the audience. However, the second part of the movie dips in momentum as compared to the initial half.

His focus and concentration on burning issues such as education, traffic rules and development of rural areas are commendable and the same has been captured to perfection.
Delhi HC on Friday issued notice to Essar-Loop promoters on a CBI plea challenging a trial court judgment that acquitted them in 2G spectrum allocation case

New Delhi: The Delhi High Court on Friday issued notice to the Essar-Loop promoters on a CBI plea challenging a trial court judgment that acquitted them in the 2G spectrum allocation case.

Justice SP Garg issued notice to Essar promoters Anshuman Ruia and Ravi Ruia, Essar Group Director Vikash Saraf, Loop Telecom promoters Kiran Khaitan and her husband IP Khaitan and three companies and listed the matter for further hearing on 25 May.

The Central Bureau of Investigation told the court that the trial court had failed to appreciate the evidence on record which proved that the accused had hatched a conspiracy to cheat the Department of Telecom (DoT) for obtaining spectrum licence.

The agency also said that the special judge -- dealing exclusively with the 2G cases -- failed to appreciate law in proper perspective.

"The evidence on record clearly establishes the offence committed by the accused persons," the plea said.

"The falsity of representation was known not only to (Essar Group Director - Strategy and Planning) Saraf but to all accused persons and it was made with a dishonest intention to deliberately conceal the true ownership and control of the applicant company (Loop Telecom Ltd) and to induce the DoT to issue letters of intent, enter into licence agreements and eventually allocate spectrum to the company," the plea said.

The various adverse observations made by the judge were "highly unwarranted", unjustified and in any case, deserved to be expunged, it said.

On 21 December, 2017, the special judge acquitted Essar promoters Anshuman Ruia and Ravi Ruia, Saraf, Khaitan and her husband IP Khaitan. The court also let off three companies - Loop Telecom Pvt Ltd, Loop Mobile India Ltd and Essar Tele Holding.

The CBI filed its third charge sheet on 12 December, 2011, including the names of Essar promoters, Loop promoters and Saraf, and companies -- Loop Telecom Pvt Ltd, Loop Mobile India Ltd and Essar Tele Holding - and recognised them as accused.

The investigating agency had alleged that they had cheated the DoT by using Loop Telecom as a "front" to secure 2G licences in 2008 in violation of Clause 8 of the Unified Access Service License (UASL) Guidelines.
The government has 'received lot of queries from airlines and non-airlines' for proposed divestment of Air India

New Delhi: Private equity (PE) and venture capital (VC) funds with adequate net worth and capability can bid for Air India (AI) through its strategic divestment programme, a senior government official said on Thursday.

According to Department of Investment and Public Asset Management (DIPAM) Secretary Neeraj Gupta, the Central government was "not looking only for an airline to takeover Air India".

"We have given a small carve out for airlines on how domestic airlines will be treated in terms of eligibility in a consortium but otherwise anybody who has net worth and funds can bid for Air India," Gupta said at industry body Assocham's 'Annual India Investment Conference'.

"In all these disinvestment exercises also, we have kept them technically neutral, finance is the main criteria and your capability to takeover and run such an asset in financial terms is the main criteria."

Gupta also said that the government had "received lot of queries from airlines and non-airlines" for proposed divestment of the national carrier.

"... If you see the expression of interest being invited in these cases, the only criteria is net worth," he said.

The Central government has invited "Expression of Interest" to off-load 76 percent stake and management control of the airline.

On March 28, the government issued the Preliminary Information Memorandum (PIM) for a strategic divestment of Air India, along with the airline's shares in AIXL (Air India Express) and AISATS (Air India SATS Airport Services).

The Central Government owns 100 per cent equity of Air India. In turn, the airline has a cent percent stake in Air India Express, while it holds 50 percent stake in the joint venture AISATS.

Accordingly, it has been planned to divest 76 percent government stake in Air India, 100 percent in AIXL and 50 percent in AISATS.
Currency supply to ATMs and branches has improved but cash crunch still persists in the system which would be normalised soon, bank officials said on Friday

New Delhi: Currency supply to ATMs and branches has improved but cash crunch still persists in the system which would be normalised soon, bank officials said on Friday.

The officials said that banks are keeping a close vigil on money supply to ATMs on daily basis to ensure that customers do not face any problem.

Currency shortage, however, still persists in the system, a banker said on the condition of anonymity.

"With allowance of free-of-charge withdrawals from our PoS terminals across the country, the bank has given an additional option to customers to withdraw money. We hope the short supply of currency at ATMs will be normalised soon," an official of the State Bank of India said.

In poll-bound Karnataka, a Canara Bank official said the situation has improved in the state in the last two-three days.

"We are better than any other bank (in cash dispensation from ATMs), our position has been good in the last 2-3 days and there has been a very good improvement. We hope the situation to be normalised by this week itself.

"Even though the shortage is there, but the cash supplies to ATMs have improved across our network in the states as well as other affected areas," the official said.

Another Canara Bank official highlighted that even as Rs 2,000 currency notes are being supplied to the system, a major portion of that is not getting back into the banking channel through deposits.

An official of state-owned Bank of India said it is keeping a strict vigil if money intended to be dispatched to its ATMs is reaching the destination or being diverted to ATMs of private banks.

"We are keeping a track whether the handler is supplying the cash meant for our ATMs or is being routed to some other bank ATMs, specially to private lenders," the official said.

Punjab National Bank said cash supply to its ATMs has reached normalcy.

An official of a big private sector bank on the condition of anonymity said that cash shortage is there in the system, however, the bank has requested the Reserve Bank for more supplies.

The finance ministry and the RBI had swung into action this week after several states such as Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Bihar had flagged currency shortage at ATMs and bank branches.

While RBI denied any cash shortage in the system except for few geographies, it asked its four mint presses to ramp up printing of notes.

SBI Chairman Rajnish Kumar on Thursday expressed hope that the problem would likely to be resolved by Friday.

"It is not a uniform cash crunch problem. It is there in geographies like Telangana and Bihar. We are hoping that the problem will be resolved by tomorrow because cash is in transition and it is reaching these states by today evening," Kumar had said.

Besides, SBI also allowed people in smaller towns to withdraw up to Rs 2,000 and Rs 1,000 a day from its PoS machines at retail outlets free of charge to ease cash crunch from across its 4.78 lakh point of sale (PoS) machines across the country.
Radiant, the fifth suitor, proposed a demerger of the hospital from Fortis Healthcare (FHL) into a new company, excluding FHLs stake in Indian diagnostics chain SRL Ltd.

Mumbai: The takeover battle for Indias Fortis Healthcare Ltd intensified after KKR-backed Radiant Life Care Private Ltd entered the fray on Thursday with an offer to buy more than a quarter of the cash-strapped companys hospital business. In its non-binding offer, Radiant has proposed to make an investment and/or re-structure Fortis Healthcare, Fortis said in a statement.

Radiant is interested in participating as a strategic investor in Fortis, it said in a letter to the hospital operator.

Radiant, the fifth suitor, proposed a demerger of the hospital from Fortis Healthcare (FHL) into a new company, excluding FHLs stake in Indian diagnostics chain SRL Ltd.

The all-cash offer to shareholders of the proposed new company will be at a net value of 126 rupees per share, Radiant said. The offer values Fortis at 165 rupees per share, or 85.58 billion rupees ($1.30 billion), including the SRL stake.

The offer is contingent on, among others, Radiant being able to buy 26 percent or more shares of the proposed new company, it added.

Fortis Healthcare said earlier it would set up an advisory committee to evaluate binding offers from suitors lining up to buy the company or take a stake.

KKR & Co owns a 49 percent stake in Radiant with its $200 million investment in 2017, Radiant said.
India and Finland have reportedly reached an agreement on the high profile tax case involving Nokia India as well as Nokia Corp.

India and Finland have reportedly reached an agreement on a high profile tax case involving Nokia India and parent Nokia Corp, which clears the way for sale of the Finnish company's manufacturing plant in Chennai.

According to a report in The Economic Times, the counties have settled the dispute under the Mutual Agreement Procedure (MAP) that essentially closes all pending proceedings related to a tax matter.

Resolution has been reached. Nokia has agreed to make provisional tax payment, a senior income tax department official was quoted as saying by the newspaper.

Nokia's assets in India, including its Chennai plant had been frozen over the unresolved tax case.

With the dispute behind it, the firm can now offload those assets. The firm has permission from the income tax authorities, and the Madras and Delhi high courts to sell the Chennai plant. A potential buyer could be Taiwanese contract manufacturer Foxconn, understood to have expressed its interest in taking over the mobile phone manufacturing plant.

Nokia currently employs 6,300 people in Finland and around 102,800 globally.

In March, Finland's government investment arm Solidium acquired a 3.3 percent stake in Nokia at about 844 million euros ($1.04 billion), to strengthen Finnish influence over the telecom network gear maker.

Nokia ruled the global mobile phone market a decade ago and was a dominant economic engine for Finland, contributing four percent of its GDP and 20 percent of the nation's exports. Nokia's collapse was a major reason for Finland's decade of stagnation from which it is only just recovering.

With inputs from agencies
PFRDA takes various initiatives from time to time in order to simplify and improve the operational issues in National Pension System (NPS), like new functionality development under NPS architecture, simplification of account opening, withdrawal and grievance management

New Delhi: Pension fund regulator PFRDA has made bank account details and mobile number mandatory for subscribers of national pension scheme (NPS), the finance ministry said on Friday.

Further, in compliance with the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) guidelines, the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA) has also made Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) and Central Registry of Securitization Asset Reconstruction and Security Interest (CERSAI) mandatory for new and existing subscribers.

PFRDA takes various initiatives from time to time in order to simplify and improve the operational issues in National Pension System (NPS), like new functionality development under NPS architecture, simplification of account opening, withdrawal and grievance management.

"It has been decided by the authority to make bank account details and mobile number mandatory to provide ease of operation for the benefit of subscribers and make the process of exit from NPS hassle-free," the ministry said in a statement.

The requirements have been made mandatory in the new common subscriber registration form (CSRF) that are required to be filled in by the new subscribers.

The existing subscribers have been provided the facility to submit online FATCA Self-Certification in their login (www.cra-nsdl.com or https://enps.karvy.com/Login/Login ), the ministry said.

"It is to be ensured by the subscribers to fill the mandatory fields correctly and not leave them blank in order to avoid rejection of their forms," it added.
By Greg Roumeliotis, Ben Martin and Ben Hirschler NEW YORK/LONDON (Reuters) - London-listed rare disease drug maker Shire Plc said on Thursday it had rejected a $63 billion cash-and-stock acquisition offer by Japan's Takeda Pharmaceutical Co, even as their talks continued, while Allergan Plc dropped its rival bid. Botox-maker Allergan confirmed on Thursday it was considering an offer for Shire after Reuters reported on its interest, sending its shares down 7 percent. Later on Thursday, Allergan CEO Brent Saunders decided to drop his pursuit of Shire after receiving pushback from some of his shareholders, who were concerned about the company overstretching its resources, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not be identified discussing confidential talks

By Greg Roumeliotis, Ben Martin and Ben Hirschler

NEW YORK/LONDON (Reuters) - London-listed rare disease drug maker Shire Plc said on Thursday it had rejected a $63 billion cash-and-stock acquisition offer by Japan's Takeda Pharmaceutical Co, even as their talks continued, while Allergan Plc dropped its rival bid.

Botox-maker Allergan confirmed on Thursday it was considering an offer for Shire after Reuters reported on its interest, sending its shares down 7 percent.

Later on Thursday, Allergan CEO Brent Saunders decided to drop his pursuit of Shire after receiving pushback from some of his shareholders, who were concerned about the company overstretching its resources, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not be identified discussing confidential talks.

Dublin-based Allergan, which has a market capitalisation of $52 billion, had a debt pile of $30 billion as of the end of December, the legacy of a string of acquisitions.

Allergan's exploration of a bid for Shire was part of its wider strategic review, Allergan said in a statement. This review is currently unlikely to lead either to a major acquisition or a breakup of the company, one of the sources said.

Reuters also first reported on Thursday that Takeda had made a cash-and-stock offer of 46.50 pounds ($66.20) a share for Shire. This prompted both companies to confirm the move and announce that Shire had rejected it, although their negotiations are continuing.

Buying would be the largest ever overseas acquisition by a Japanese company and propel Takeda, led by Frenchman Christophe Weber, into the top ranks of global drugmakers.

It would be Weber's boldest move by far, significantly boosting Takeda's position in rare diseases, gastrointestinal disorders and neuroscience, where Shire is a leader in drugs to treat hyperactivity.

But it would be a big financial stretch since Shire, with a market value of more than 34 billion pounds ($48.3 billion), is worth a lot more than Japan's biggest drugmaker.

An acquisition of Shire would have given Allergan heft in the coveted rare diseases space at a time when Saunders is seeking to cement its status as a purveyor of innovative drugs. Saunders' plans to sell Allergan to Pfizer for $160 billion were scuppered two years ago after the U.S. Treasury changed the rules on corporate tax inversions.

Saunders "was a huge deal guy and everyone was kind of waiting for the next big deal," said Kevin Kedra, an analyst with Gabelli & Co, which holds shares of both Allergan and Shire.

If there was to be a big share component to a deal it would have to come before a vote of shareholders, he noted. "Shareholders seem to be voting this morning," Kedra said.

Takeda said it would remain disciplined in its approach and intended to maintain its dividend policy and investment grade credit rating, adding that: "Discussions between the parties regarding a potential offer are ongoing."

The drugs industry has seen a surge in deal-making this year as large players look for promising assets to improve their pipelines but a Takeda-Shire transaction would be by far the biggest.

MORE CASH WANTED

Shire confirmed it had received three conditional proposals from Takeda but said they significantly undervalued the company's growth prospects and drugs in development.

The latest 46.50 pounds offer was made on April 12 and comprised 17.75 pounds in cash, which would be paid in U.S. dollars, and 28.75 pounds worth of new Takeda shares. Shire said that valued it at approximately 44 billion pounds ($62.6 billion), based on total issued and to be issued share capital.

The two earlier cash-and-share offers were worth 44 and 45.50 pounds per share, respectively.

Under UK takeover rules, Takeda has until April 25 to make a firm offer or walk away, after it said last month it was considering a bid.

Based on Takeda's market capitalisation, Shire shareholders would end up owning approximately 51 percent of the enlarged group, Shire noted.

Bernstein analyst Wimal Kapadia said Shire was likely to be pushing for a larger cash component in current talks but Takeda was already stretched, suggesting the chances of a deal being consummated were still "reasonably risky."

Shire has been under pressure in the past 12 months, with its shares down by a third before Takeda's interest was made public, due to greater competition from generic drugs and debts from its $32 billion acquisition of Baxalta in 2016.

Shire said in January it would run its attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) business, which consists mainly of its blockbuster drug Vyvanse, separately and possibly seek a separate listing.

Earlier this week it struck a deal to sell its cancer drugs for $2.4 billion to unlisted French group Servier.

($1 = 0.7024 pound)

(Additional reporting by Paul Sandle, Carl O'Donnell and Bill Berkrot; editing by Jane Merriman and Bill Trott)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
UltraTech apprehends that it was not declared as the H1 bidder in view of the penalty imposed by the Competition Commission of India.

Kolkata/New Delhi: Aditya Birla group firm UltraTech Cement on Thursday told the Kolkata bench of NCLT that the process followed by the Resolution Professional and the Committee of Creditors while evaluating the bids for Binani Cement was "fraudulent".

Appearing on behalf of UltraTech Cement, senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi questioned the process followed by the Committee of Creditors (CoC) of Binani Cement led by Bank of Baroda in selecting rival Dalmia Bharat Group as the highest bidder. He submitted that UltraTech apprehends that it was not declared as the H1 bidder in view of the penalty imposed by the Competition Commission of India.

On February 27, 2018, CoC informed that UltraTech is the H2 bidder.

According to him, UltraTech was not given an opportunity to explain its case that the penalty imposed by CCI was subsequently removed and that it should have therefore been regarded as H1.

UltraTech on Thursday concluded its argument before the NCLT and hearing would continue today.

The Kolkata bench of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) is hearing the matter regarding sale of Binani Cement by the CoC to recover dues of Rs 7,000 crore.

The CoC has approved Rs 6,500 crore bid by Rajputana Properties, a subsidiary of rival Dalmia Bharat group. However, later Binani Industries, which holds 98.4 per cent share in Binani Cement approached UltraTech and following which the Aditya Birla group entered into an agreement to buy its stake at Rs 7,200 crore, which was Rs 700 crore more than Dalmia Bharat's offer.

Earlier, both NCLT and NCLAT had suggested the parties to go for out-of-court settlement in the matter. However, the CoC did not agreed to the UltraTech's offer and the matter came up hearing again before NCLT, which is a final authority to approve the Resolution Plan.
In a major relief for Lieutenant Colonel Prasad Shrikant Purohit, the Supreme Court, on Friday, ruled that Purohit can challenge the charges registered against him under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) before the trial commences, according to media reports.

In a major relief for Lieutenant-Colonel Prasad Shrikant Purohit, the Supreme Court, on Friday, ruled that Purohit can challenge the charges registered against him under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) before the trial commences, according to media reports.

The court was hearing Purohit's petition challenging the prosecution sanction for his trial under the UAPA. Purohit, a former Indian Army officer, is accused of involvement in the 2008 Malegaon bomb blast case.

According to CNN-News18, the Bombay High Court in December 2017 had said that Purohit could challenge the validity of the charges only at the stage of trial, allowing for the former Indian Army officer to be sent for trial under the UAPA charges.

The apex court, however, clarified that the trial court, before framing charges, at the time of framing charges, must examine whether Purohit should be tried under the UAPA or not. This allows for the possibility that Purohit may be able to avoid being tried under the UAPA charges.

Senior advocate Harish Salve, appearing for Purohit, told the Supreme Court that while granting bail to the former Indian Army officer last year, the court had observed that the National Investigation Agency (NIA) did not have sufficient evidence against Purohit to justify the terror charges, CNN-News18 reported.

Agreeing with Salve, the apex court arrived at its decision to allow Purohit to challenge the charges before the trial begins.

The Supreme Court in January had sought the Maharashtra government's response on Purohit's plea.

In the plea, Purohit had challenged the proceedings against him under the UAPA by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) court in the absence of valid sanction from the competent authority.

Seeking a response from the Maharashtra government, the bench of Justice RK Agrawal and Justice Abhay Manohar Sapre had declined to interfere with the trial court's proceedings in the matter.

Earlier, the Bombay High Court had dismissed Purohit's plea.

The trial court in its 27 December 2017 order, while discharging Purohit of the offences under the MCOC Act and the offences punishable under certain provisions of the UAPA, had decided to proceed against him under other provisions of the UAPA.

Purohit, however, has contended that proceedings against him are in the absence of valid sanction from the competent authorities, and are thus a miscarriage of justice and bad in law.

Section 45(1) and (2) of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967 say that no court will take cognizance of any offence without the previous sanction of the central government or any officer authorised by the central government in its behalf.

The offences for which prior sanction is required under said provisions include being a member of an unlawful association, punishment for terrorist activities and offence relating to membership of a terrorist organisation or supporting it.

Seven people were killed in a bomb blast on 29 September 2008, at Malegaon, a communally sensitive textile town in Nashik district of north Maharashtra.

Although the case initially made headlines as the first case of saffron terrorism, it remained in public discourse also because of military's role in the matter after Purohit's arrest.

With inputs from IANS
The Supreme Court will hear a petition by Lieutenant Colonel Prasad Shrikant Purohit challenging prosecution sanction for his trial under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) on Friday, according to reports. Purohit, a former Indian Army officer, is an accused in the 2008 Malegaon bomb blast case

The Supreme Court on Friday will hear a petition by Lieutenant Colonel Prasad Shrikant Purohit challenging the prosecution sanction for his trial under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), according to media reports. Purohit, a former Indian Army officer, is accused of involvement in the 2008 Malegaon bomb blast case.

#BREAKING  Supreme Court to hear LT Col Purohits plea challenging the sanction of prosecution under provisions of the UAPA pic.twitter.com/m3BgM4u0rd  News18 (@CNNnews18) April 20, 2018

The Supreme Court in January had sought the Maharashtra government's response on Purohit's plea.

In the plea, Purohit challenged the proceedings against him under the UAPA by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) court in the absence of valid sanction from the competent authority.

Seeking a response from the Maharashtra government, the bench of Justice RK Agrawal and Justice Abhay Manohar Sapre had declined to interfere with the trial court's proceedings in the matter.

Earlier, the Bombay High Court had dismissed Purohit's plea.

The trial court in its 27 December, 2017, order, while discharging Purohit of the offences under the MCOC Act and the offences punishable under certain provisions of the UAPA, had decided to proceed against him under other provisions of the UAPA.

Purohit has contended that proceedings against him are in the absence of valid sanction from the competent authorities, and are thus a miscarriage of justice and bad in law.

Seven people were killed in a bomb blast on 29 September, 2008, at Malegaon, a communally sensitive textile town in Nashik district of north Maharashtra.

Although the case initially made headlines as the first case of saffron terrorism, it remained in public discourse also because of military's role in the matter after Purohit's arrest.

With inputs from IANS
Further, he discussed the reasonable expectation of privacy with respect to the data collected under the Aadhaar Act.

Editor's Note: This copy was published on 20 April, 2018. It is being republished in light of the Supreme Court's verdict on the constitutionality of Aadhaar likely being pronounced tomorrow.

On Day 31 of the Aadhaar hearings, senior counsel Rakesh Dwivedi continued his arguments on behalf of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). He argued extensively on the issue of balancing of fundamental rights, arguing that this balance is a symbol of justice. Further, he discussed the reasonable expectation of privacy with respect to the data collected under the Aadhaar Act.

Amartya Sen on un-freedom

Dwivedi commenced his arguments for the day by quoting Amartya Sen, Development requires the removal of major sources of un-freedom, poverty as well as tyranny. The Bench, here, observed that liberating people from un-freedom or poverty was at one end of the spectrum, and privacy at the other. Aadhaar, they said, is only a means of identification, and thus the only caveat is that there should be no exclusion.

Here, the counsel repeated his argument that the advantage of Aadhaar was that it made the provider of benefits come face to face with the beneficiaries. The Bench, here, observed that this may not be the best model, since the individual should not be a supplicant and instead the State has a duty to provide him with benefits.

Aadhaar and the protection of human rights

The counsel then cited the Statement of Objects of the Protection of Human Rights Act, 1993, which sets up the National Human Rights Commission and State Human Rights Commission for the protection of human rights. India being a signatory to many related international treaties on this was also cited. Next, he argued that various judgments of the Supreme Court, which discuss economic and social welfare had led to the enactment of the Aadhaar Act.

Balancing fundamental rights in view of public interest

He then turned to various landmark judgments which dealt with the need to balance the various fundamental rights. The case of Subramaniam Swamy v. Union of India on criminal defamation was discussed. The discussion was on the balancing of the right to freedom of speech against the right to reputation. Next, X vs. Hospital Z was cited, where an HIV patients right to marry and right to privacy has to be balanced against his fiances right to know. These cases laid down the test to be applied to balance in case of a conflict under Article 21: the test is of the larger public interest and the balance that would, in certain circumstances, advance public morality.

Two types of conflict for balancing rights

Along these lines, several case laws were cited, including G.Sundarrajan v. Union of India on the set up a nuclear power plant, Asha Ranjan v. State of Bihar, which discussed balancing of rights in relation the respondents right to a fair trial, and other cases. Two types of conflicts were drawn out, that between two individuals with respect to the same fundamental right, and that between two separate rights under the same fundamental right, for a single individual.

Further, it was argued that Section 7 of the Aadhaar Act covers the human rights of the people of the country. The Court, it was urged, must act as a sentinel to ensure that the right to privacy is balanced with all other rights under Article 21 that Aadhaar covers. It was argued that balance is a symbol of justice, and there shouldnt be extremes with the rights in question. Instead, both should exist. Further, the case of Indu Devi v. the State of Bihar was cited, where a womans right to choose to have an abortion was dealt with against her right to life.

Further, the counsel argued that privacy was a small price to pay for ensuring life itself, along with other rights under Article 21 of the Constitution.

Reasonable expectation of privacy

Next, the counsel turned to the reasonable expectation of privacy, quoting from the Puttaswamy judgment on the matter. Further, a distinction was drawn between the types of information dealt with under the Aadhaar Act for demographic information, optional demographic information (mobile numbers and e-mail), core biometric information, and biometric information such as photographs. He argued that most data collected by Aadhaar was basic data that was available everywhere. The Bench, here, observed that caste, religion, etc. were excluded from the ambit of the Aadhaar Act.

He argued that the reasonable expectation of privacy varies from one set of data to the other, for instance, it will be lower with respect to demographic information and photographs, since such information is already publicly available.

Public apprehensions with Aadhaar data misuse

The counsel further argued that the only concern was the real and general apprehension of the public with respect to Aadhaar. The Bench here observed that the question was of using the data in a manner and for purposes which are unauthorised and against the individual. Further, it was observed that some of the fears of the public were misconceived.

The arguments will continue on 24 April 2018.

Sources of arguments include live-tweeting of the case by Prasanna S and SFLC.in and Written Submissions of the counsel.

You can read our complete coverage of the Aadhaar Supreme Court case below

Why SC needs to look into technical evidence of Aadhaars surveillance capabilities

Lack of governmental ownership of CIDRs source code can have serious consequences

Will State give citizens rights only if they agree to be tracked forever, asks lawyer Shyam Divan

Coalition for Aadhaar: A collective of private companies wants to ensure that Aadhaar ID and related services continue to be offered

Petitioners argue on centralisation of data and challenge Aadhaars claims on savings

Petitioners argue for a voluntary ID card system that does not collect user data

Petitioners argue that receipt of govt benefits cannot be at the cost of compromising fundamental rights

Aadhaar is architecturally unconstitutional, argue the petitioners

Petitioners argue that Aadhaar violates dignity by objectifying and depersonalizing an individual

Petitioners seek compensation for starvation deaths and extension of March 31st deadline

Section 7 exception in Supreme Courts interim order greatly affects peoples constitutional rights

Entire Aadhaar project is beyond the stated objectives of Aadhaar Act, argue petitioners

Petitioners conclude their arguments on 'the number of the beast' Aadhaar, highlighting various issues

Aadhaar hearing: Political liberties cannot be foregone for economic and social justice, states the Bench

Aadhaar hearing: UIDAIs presentation discusses Aadhaar enrolment, updation and authentication processes in detail

Aadhaar hearing: Supreme Court expresses concerns with data breaches, Aadhaar security and profiling

Aadhaar hearing: Petitioners question UIDAI on verification of residency requirement, de-duplication rejections and authentication failures

Aadhaar hearing: Attorney General argues that pervasive collection of fingerprints meets proportionality requirements

Aadhaar hearing: Bench criticises the argument that Aadhaar can prevent bank frauds and terrorists from acquiring mobile numbers

Aadhaar hearing: Additional Solicitor General argues Aadhaar-PAN linkage enables deduplication, prevents fraud and widens the tax base

Aadhaar hearing: Not necessary to prove least possible invasion of privacy, argues Additional Solicitor General

Aadhaar hearing: Counsel argues that Aadhaar is more secure than a data protection law, SC disagrees

Aadhaar hearing: Supreme Court questions why both the right to privacy and right to food cannot be secured under the Constitution

The author is a lawyer and author specialising in technology laws. She is also a certified information privacy professional.
Actor-turned-BJP politician S Ve Shekher has stoked a controversy with his derogatory remarks about the media and in particular against women scribes.

Chennai: Actor-turned-BJP politician S Ve Shekher has stoked a controversy with his derogatory remarks about the media and in particular against women scribes, drawing the ire of journalists. His shared Facebook post, reportedly put out on Thursday but later found removed, makes insinuations against the media and women journalists in light of the 'patgate' row involving Tamil Nadu Governor Banwarilal Purohit.

Shekher's shared post also had some caustic references to the woman scribe whose cheek the governor patted. These drew instant condemnation, with a number of individual journalists lashing out at his post. The Chennai Union of Journalists criticised Shekher for the post, with many journalists also taking to Twitter and Facebook to condemn him.

The 78-year-old governor had patted on the cheek of a woman journalist earlier this week during the conclusion of a press meet in Chennai, apparently to diplomatically avoid queries posed by her. The incident had triggered a furore with political parties, including the opposition party Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), calling for his removal as Tamil Nadu governor.

Purohit had later apologised to the woman scribe. She accepted his apology but doubted his contention behind the act.

With inputs from PTI
Public response to their birth anniversaries on 14 April and 2 October shows Ambedkar today influences the hearts, and thoughts, and actions, of far more Indians than Gandhi does

Two birth anniversaries of two great leaders that evoke contrary responses: It is a veritable carnival around the country on 14 April, the birth anniversary of Dr BR Ambedkar. This year, too, an estimated 10,000 people thronged the streets to Parliament, the gates of which were opened for people to pay homage to Ambedkars statue installed there. Music played at full blast, stalls supplied free food, vendors did brisk business selling Ambedkar mementos.

By contrast, the celebration on 2 October, the birth anniversary of MK Gandhi, is forgetfully staid  politicians make a beeline for the Gandhi memorial at Delhis Rajghat. There is an officious ring to the celebration, not least because it lacks the popular fervour of 14 April.

It would seem Ambedkar, in death, has not only trumped Gandhi on the popularity chart, but also Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose. Yet the Ambedkarites have signaled out Gandhi to lock him and Ambedkar in a posthumous competition, a competition that has become increasingly unequal with time.

There are reasons why they have chosen to pit Ambedkar against Gandhi. It was he who turned the national struggle into a mass movement, drawing into the Congress tent the Scheduled Castes. They flocked to Gandhi because he argued that caste and untouchability did not have the sanction of Hindu scriptures, which recognised only varna or the four-fold division of society based on the ancestral calling of each. Caste was an outcome of the varna system gone askew. From Gandhis perspective, untouchability could be rooted out by cleansing Hinduism of the dubious practices that had crept into it.

Ambedkar pooh-poohed Gandhis formulation. Varna was another name of caste as the division of labour was based on the hereditary calling of each social group. It constituted the very foundation of the structure of caste. Ambedkar, therefore, argued that it was impossible to reorganise Hindu society on the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity without repudiating the divine authority of scriptures which sanctified varna and caste.

Their divergent views came to a head after the British government granted the separate electorate to the Depressed Classes on 16 August 1932. It had Ambedkars support; Gandhi was vehemently opposed to it because it would divide the Hindus. In protest, he went on a fast unto death on 20 September 1932. Four days later, Ambedkar caved in, agreeing to abide by the Poona Pact, which abrogated the separate electorate. In return, the Depressed Classes were granted reserved seats far higher in number than the legislators they would have elected under the separate electorate.

The Poona Pact symbolised Gandhis triumph over Ambedkar. Thereafter, the Congress went in for the kill in the 1937 elections. It fielded the reputed Scheduled Caste bowler, Palwankar Baloo, against Ambedkar, who was contesting from a reserved seat in Bombay. On Indias unofficial tour of England in 1911, Baloo had bagged as many as 114 wickets, a feat that instantaneously turned him into a Depressed Classes hero.

Fielding Baloo was akin to cutting Ambedkar deep. In his magisterial A Corner Of A Foreign Field: The Indian History of a British sport, author Ramachandra Guha points out that it was Ambedkar who had delivered the welcome speech in a reception that Bombays Depressed Classes had organised for Baloo on his return from England. Baloo was also among the two who represented Ambedkar in the negotiations to stitch up the Poona Pact.

Undoubtedly, the Congress wanted to teach a lesson to the emerging leader who had the temerity to lock horns with Gandhi. For one, as Guha writes, the list of candidates for Bombay was vetted by the Congress strongman, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. Launching a vicious campaign, the Congress depicted Ambedkar as one who drew support from anti-nationals and reactionary forces and stood against freedom. It is hard to tell whether Gandhi endorsed his partys defeat Ambedkar mission  but he did not seem to have opposed it either.

Ambedkar polled just 2120 votes more than Baloo to emerge victorious, made possible because the third candidate, a labour leader, spirited away nearly 10,000 votes. The Congress had its revenge in the 1946 elections  Ambedkar was defeated. Gandhis party did not seem interested in sending Ambedkar to the Constituent Assembly.

In fact, Ambedkar was elected to the Constituent Assembly from the Bengal province, courtesy Jogendra Nath Mandal, a Dalit leader and Pakistans first law minister. Ambedkar was then inducted as chairman of the drafting committee of the Constitution, a role he acquitted with such aplomb that his stature was enhanced beyond his community. It would seem Gandhi did not oppose Ambedkars induction as chairman.

But Ambedkar resigned from the Nehru ministry over the Hindu Code Bill in 1951. In the general election of 1952, the Congress pitted against Ambedkar his personal assistant of many years, Narayan Sadoba Kajrolkar. It split the Scheduled Castes, for Kajrolkar, like Baloo, belonged to the Chamar caste. Ambedkar lost by 15,000 votes, and failed to win a Lok Sabha by-election two years later.

This historical memory has prompted the Ambedkarites to pit their icon against that of the Congress and the nation  Gandhi. On the face of it, the crowds that Ambedkars birth anniversary draws testify that, as far as winning over the Dalits goes, his vision has been proved right, not Gandhis. The most eloquent symbol of it is that Dalits no longer use the Gandhian term Harijan (children of God) to describe themselves, discerning in it a humiliatingly patronising undertone.

From this perspective then, Gandhi, in death, has been deserted by Dalits, whose marginalisation he struggled to overcome within the framework of revitalised Hinduism. Ambedkar has triumphed because his vision not only encapsulates the lived experience of the social conflict that Dalits encounter, but also because the story of his rise to eminence from his humble origin symbolises their aspirations.

Let alone Dalits, what is incomprehensible is that Gandhis mass support has continued to shrink. Caste, after all, was just an aspect of Gandhis politics. He spearheaded the struggle for freedom, championed nonviolence, tried to forge an amicable Hindu-Muslim relationship, and provided a blueprint of economic development that was remarkably different from the Western paradigm. There should have been an enduring romance for Gandhi, as is the case with Ambedkar. Alas, Gandhi seems to bewitch only academicians, evident from tomes written on him.

It is possible that decades after Indias Independence, we take for granted the freedom that Gandhi crafted for us at such a low price. It is even possible to argue that Gandhi has been tamed and turned into a symbol of the state and the political class. Not for nothing then, Prime Minister Narendra Modi chose 2 October 2014 to launch the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. Given the declining regard for the political class, Gandhi might just have suffered by association.

No less a reason is the steady decline of the Congress, which has taken down Gandhi with itself. As also perhaps the cult of Nehru-Gandhi that Indira Gandhi fashioned, leaving the Congress with little resolve to reinvent Gandhian ideas in the modern context.

But there are also structural reasons. Regardless of the academicians debate, Gandhi was appropriated by the privileged upper castes for furthering their own interests. It included not just the industrialists, but also the landed class. Swami Sahajanand, Bihars foremost peasant leader, suggests in his memoir that Gandhi turned his gaze away from the exploitative ways of zamindars. Perhaps the need of the time was to build the widest possible social coalition to challenge the British Empire.

If the upper castes misused Gandhi and his popularity for their selfish ends, their veritable en bloc migration to the Sangh Parivar since 1990, as also of some sections of the OBCs, has reduced him to being a leader who was proud of his religion and unabashedly practiced it. Forgotten in this appropriation is Gandhis penchant to reinterpret Hinduism, his quest for social reform. His inclusion in the Sanghs pantheon threatens to turn him into a caricature.

Then there is the growing middle class which finds Gandhis economic blueprint quirky, best to laugh at; and Gandhis principle of ahimsa a threat to their masculinity, a surreptitious project to turn them effeminate, one reason why Nathuram Godse pumped bullets into him. Masculine assertion also frames the increasingly fraught relationship between Hindus and Muslims, which has inevitably eaten into the Gandhian plank of composite nationalism.

It is hard to square up to the fact that the name of Gandhi, at a popular level, is recited as a lament, as a dirge, after every incident of communal violence. To the streets people go chanting, in Hindi, these words, Gandhi we are ashamed, your killers are still alive.

Indeed, we should be ashamed because Gandhi conceived ahimsa as the weapon of the strong. It signifies a persons willingness to court death for a cause he or she believes in, accepting lathis and bullets without retaliating. The Gandhian ideals were perhaps irretrievably buried the day the Sabaramati Ashram  Gandhis very own creation  closed its gates during the Gujarat riots. It should have been, as the late reformer Asghar Ali Engineer wrote, the principal sanctuary for victims fleeing the murderous marauders.

In an interview to this writer two years ago, political psychologist Ashis Nandy predicted that the catastrophe of climate change, largely because of the unbridled exploitation of nature, would see the rise of hundred varieties of Gandhi. Some hope that! Until then, it wont be wrong to say that Ambedkar today influences the hearts, and thoughts, and actions, of far more Indians than Gandhi does, a fact highlighted by the public responses to 2 October and 14 April every year.
The army busted a terror hideout and recovered arms and ammunition, and Hizbul donations books in Jammu and Kashmir's Doda district, raising concern of presence of the terror outfit in the hills of the Jammu region

Jammu: The army on Thursday busted a terror hideout and recovered arms and ammunition, including two AK rifles, 289 rounds of ammunition, and Hizbul Mujahideen donation books in Doda district, raising concern of presence of the terror outfit in the hills of the Jammu region, an officer said.

Acting on intelligence inputs, the army and the police launched a search operation in the Majmi area of Dessa in the district on Thursday morning, the army officer said.

The joint party cordoned off the area and carried out meticulous searches during which they located a natural hideout of terrorists in a cave containing a huge cache of weapons and ammunition, he added.

One AK-47, one AK-56, five magazine of AK 47/56, one under barrel grenade launcher (UBGL), two UBGL grenades, 289 rounds of 7.62 mm ammunition of AK 47/56 and Hizbul Mujahideen's donation receipt book and papers (in Urdu language) were recovered, he said.

This is the first time such huge recovery has been made particularly of Hizbul Mujahideen donation books and other material aimed to raise funds in the hills of Jammu region and increase the foot-prints of terror outfit in the hills of the region, he said.

He said the recovery has dealt a severe blow to the nefarious designs aimed at reviving terrorism in the area. The army will continue its operations to keep Doda district safe and free from terrorists as well as their support infrastructure, he said.
With the Kashmir Valley enveloped by rising violence, the Indian Army on Friday said it would prioritise bringing radicalised youth into the mainstream.

New Delhi: With the Kashmir Valley enveloped by rising violence, the Indian Army on Friday said it would prioritise bringing radicalised youth into the mainstream through a "collective approach" and convince militants to "shun violence and gun culture".

The issue of conducting de-radicalising exercises along with counter-terror operations in the Kashmir Valley was discussed during the ongoing biannual Army Commanders' Conference that began on Monday amid reports that Islamic State ideology was moulding new-age militants in the state.

"It was felt that priority must be accorded towards ushering peace by conducting counter-terrorist operations that minimise collateral damage. Radicalised youth must be brought into the mainstream by carrying out de-radicalisation and collective approach that focuses on convincing the youth to shun violence and gun culture," Director General Staff Duties Lt. Gen. AK Sharma told reporters.

Lt. Gen. Sharma, who earlier headed Nagrota-based 16 Corps in Jammu, didn't explain what kind of exercise the Army would employ to de-radicalise Kashmiri youth who appear to be getting influenced by Islamic State ideology amid heightened violence in the Valley.

Staring at yet another possible hot summer with hundreds of militants and many civilians already killed in the first three-and-a-half months of this year, dozens of youths in Kashmir have reportedly joined three prominent militant groups: Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, Lashkar-e-Taiba and a resurgent Jaish-e-Mohammad.

These groups have been historically linked to Pakistan and largely favour a merger of Jammu and Kashmir with Pakistan.

But new-age militants, including those from Ansar Ghazwat ul Hind of former Hizb commander Zakir Musa, have openly favoured pan-Islamism over nationalist goals, seeking "martyrdom or imposition of sharia" and declared jihad against not only India but "apostate" Pakistan too.

Though there is no concrete data available to prove the Islamic State's physical presence in Kashmir, its online propaganda and the way it is influencing young Kashmiris indicate that the global terror group may have Kashmir ambitions at the very least.

Top Army commanders during the six-day conference that ends on Saturday also discussed the current situation along the borders with China and Pakistan, particularly "along the Line of Control, the increase in ceasefire violations and the adequacy of the response mechanisms", said Lt. Gen. Sharma

"The apex commanders confabulated on the prevalent situation in the Valley and reviewed the recent developments affecting modus operandi of the operations of the armed forced deployed in the region," he said, referring to the trend of civilians rushing to shootout sites to hurl stones at security forces in a bid to help militants escape.

The senior commanders, he said, also deliberated at length on the prevailing situation along the northern borders.

"During the conference, considerable time was spent on re-prioritising the existing requirements to ensure that the resources allocated for force modernization and capacity building were utilized optimally with the budgetary allocation. The discussions also dwelt upon increasing the content of indigenization in force modernization."

On the last day of the conference, the commanders would deliberate on matters pertaining "exclusively to military operations", he said.
Ruling AIADMK said it would hold state-wide public meetings on the Cauvery issue between 25 and 29 April to urge the Centre to implement the Supreme Court verdict to ensure water for irrigation in the Delta districts

Chennai: Ruling AIADMK on Friday said it would hold state-wide public meetings on the Cauvery issue between 25 and 29 April to urge the Centre to implement the Supreme Court verdict to ensure water for irrigation in the Delta districts.

The "massive" public meetings would be held in Cauvery Delta districts of Tamil Nadu and top leaders, including Chief Minister K Palaniswamy and Deputy Chief Minister O Panneerselvam will address them.

The move to further mount pressure over the Centre by the ruling AIADMK comes following a "Cauvery Rights Retrieval Rally" held by arch rival DMK and its friendly parties between 7 and 12 April covering the same Cauvery delta region.

Panneerselvam and Palaniswamy, party coordinator and co-coordinator respectively, in a party release here appealed to AIADMK functionaries, workers and the general public to take part in the mega rallies.

The AIADMK, which staged a state-wide fast on 3 April, seeking constitution of the Cauvery Management Board (CMB) and to condemn the Centre on the issue said: "the massive public meetings will be held to urge the Centre to implement the Supreme Court verdict."

It said implementation of the verdict was imperative to release water for irrigation to delta districts from the Mettur reservoir on 12 June.

On 3 April, ending the day-long fast, chief minister Palaniswamy had said, "We will fight, get justice and win."

The hunger strike by '15 lakh' party cadres was reflective of the aspirations of the people and farmers on the issue, he had said.

Facing a high pitch campaign and relentless attack from DMK and other opposition parties on the Cauvery issue for its alleged inaction, AIADMK said Palaniswamy will address a grand public rally on 28 April at Tiruvarur in the heart of the Cauvery delta region.

On the same day, Lok Sabha Deputy Speaker and party's propaganda secretary M Thambidurai will address a rally at Karur.

Deputy Chief Minister and party coordinator O Panneerselvam will address a similar meeting on 25 April at Nagapattinam district.

State Ministers, including Food Minister R Kamaraj, Local Administration Minister SP Velumani, Fisheries Minister D Jayakumar will take part in the rallies, the AIADMK said.

The AIADMK rallies also come against the backdrop of the DMK-led opposition parties' proposed human chain demonstrations in all 32 districts of Tamil Nadu on 23 April to urge the Centre to immediately set up the CMB.
Centre told SC it has started the process to amend the POCSO Act, to ensure maximum punishment of death penalty in child rape cases between ages of 0-12.

Amid growing anger over rising incidents of child rape cases, the Centre, in a letter submitted to the Supreme Court on Friday, said that it has started the process to amend the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO Act), 2012, to ensure maximum punishment of death penalty in child rape cases where the victim is under 12 years of age.

The Centre submitted its report while responding to a PIL, ANI reported. The next hearing is scheduled for 27 April.

The Act was framed to protect children from offences of sexual abuse, sexual harassment and pornography and to provide a child-friendly system for the trial of these offences.

The move comes amid rising tensions over the rape and murder of an eight-year-old in Jammu and Kashmir's Kathua district and the alleged rape of a minor in Unnao by a BJP MLA.

There is a rising national consensus for exemplary punishment for the culprits in both the cases.

Last week, Union minister for Women and Child Development, Maneka Gandhi, had said that her ministry will bring an amendment in the POCSO Act. Her statement came after Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Mehbooba Mufti had assured that her government would bring a "new law" on the same lines to punish the culprits.

Introduction of death penalty as punishment for rape of minors between age of 0-12 years is under "active consideration", Central Govt tells #SupremeCourt. #POCSO Act's amendment is being mulled. @utkarsh_aanand pic.twitter.com/XK8iJ5E3Og  News18 Courtroom (@News18Courtroom) April 20, 2018

"The ministry intends to bring an amendment in POCSO Act asking for death penalty for rape on children below 12 years of age," Maneka had said in a video message. "I am deeply disturbed by the rape case in Kathua and all the recent rape cases."
The Chennai police opposed the plea by farmers' leader P Ayyakkannu fearing the anti-social element may exploit the agitation and create law and order problem.

Chennai: The city police on Thursday opposed a farmers' plea to the Madras High Court for permission to stage a 90-day fast at the Marina Beach in Chennai to press for expeditious setting up of the Cauvery Management Board to implement the apex court judgement on the rive water distribution among the riparian states.

The Chennai police opposed the plea by farmers' leader P Ayyakkannu fearing the anti-social element may exploit the agitation and create law and order problem.

They also pointed out to the court that Marina was not in the list of places, designated for staging agitations.

Ayyakannu, who had led a prolonged agitation in New Delhi last year pressing for farmers' issues, has sought permission to observed a "hunger strike" at the Marina for 90 continuous days, demanding constitution of the Cauvery Management Board.

The group led by Ayyakannu earlier had staged bizarre protests, demonstrating with human skulls outside the prime minister's residence and stripping and drinking urine during their agitation in Delhi.

The counter to Ayyakannu's petition, filed by the Greater Chennai police commissioner, said if the fast was allowed, the possibility of anti-social groups taking part in the stir and creating law and order problem could not be ruled out.

It also said permission to go on a fast for 90 days cannot be granted as it was humanly impossible, physically incompatible and may have serious repercussions.

The counter said all political parties, including the DMK and the AIADMK, were given permission for only one day to stage any demonstration, that too from morning to evening.

The places for conducting agitations has already been earmarked, it said listing the locations, including Valluvar Kottam and the state Guest House in Chennai.

Various political parties have staged protests over the Cauvery Management Board issue in Tamil Nadu in the past few weeks.
On Friday, 71 members of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha came together to put forth an impeachment motion against Chief Justice Dipak Misra

On Friday, 71 members of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha held a meeting to discuss a proposed impeachment motion against Chief Justice Dipak Misra. After holding a meeting with Rajya Sabha chairperson M Venkaiah Naidu, members of the Congress including Kapil Sibal and Ghulam Nabi Azad held a press conference to discuss the rationale for their impeachment motion.

The following is the full text of the statement signed by MPs belonging to seven Opposition parties:

We wish this day had never come. In the framework of our constitutional fabric the judiciary holds a very special place. Its independence is a constitutional imperative without which democracy will flounder. It must guard and protect itself from external interference and must be above suspicion. This is why judges must uphold the highest standards of integrity. They must also be tested by the same standards. In the scheme of things within the judicial setup, the office of the Chief Justice is an exalted position. He is one among equals on the judicial side but has vast powers on the administrative side.

Since Chief Justice Dipak Misra was appointed to this high office, there have been situations when questions have been raised about the manner in which he has dealt with certain cases and taken certain administrative decisions. There have been internal rumblings resulting in open discord amongst judges in the Supreme Court. This manifested itself when four senior-most judges held a press conference on 12 January, 2018 where they publicly expressed their disquiet about the manner in which the Chief Justice was exercising his powers. In this context, they circulated a letter to the press that they had addressed to the Chief Justice. In the letter, one of the concerns expressed by the judges was about attempts to unsettle through a judicial order the Memorandurn of Procedure which stood settled. The judges stated that for some time, the administration of the Supreme Court has not been in order and many things which are less than desirable have been happening. They said that time and again, as senior members of the Court holding a responsibility to this country, they tried to collectively persuade the Chief Justice that certain things are not in order and that he must take remedial measures. They lamented that their efforts had failed and all four of them were convinced that unless the institution is preserved, democracy will not survive in this country. When asked, they expressed dissatisfaction at the manner in which Late Judge Loya's case was being dealt with at the time.

We were hoping that the anguish of the judges as reflected in their statements to the press would be addressed by the Chief Justice and the Chief Justice in response would set his house in order. More than three months have passed. Nothing has changed.

Recent communications of two senior judges to the Chief Justice reveal that the Chief Justice has not asserted the independence of the judiciary in the face of interference by the executive.

When the judges of the Supreme Court themselves believe that the judiciary's independence is under threat and democracy in peril, alluding to the functioning of the office of the Chief Justice of India, should the nation stand still and do nothing? Should the people of this country allow the institution to diminish and not protect it both from within and without? That is what we were confronted with when contemplating action to ensure the independence of the institution that protects the rights of citizens and is the arbiter of the fate of the democracy we cherish. The choice was not easy because either way, the repercussions are serious.

The Constitution allows only one recourse to remedy the situation. Since there is no other way to protect the institution except to move an impeachment motion, we, members of the Rajya Sabha, do so with a heavy heart.

We took upon ourselves to move the impeachment motion in the background set out above but on the basis of charges of acts of misbehaviour that are set out in the impeachment motion. We do not wish to repeat those charges here in detail. We only wish to state that any one occupying the office of the Chief Justice of India must be judged on the basis of the highest standards of integrity. The charges as stated suggest conduct unbecoming of a person holding the office of the Chief Justice of India. The first charge relates to the conspiracy to pay illegal gratification by persons in relation to the Prasad Education Trust case and the manner in which the case was dealt with by the Chief Justice.

It is on record that the CBI has registered an FIR. There are several recorded conversations between middlemen including a retired judge of the Orissa High Court excerpts of transcripts of which are set out in the articles of charge. References to the Chief Justice by innuendo in these conversations are evident. The denial of permission to the CBI to register an FIR against Justice Narayan Shukla of the Allahabad High Court, when the CBI shared incriminating information with the Chief Justice was itself an act of misbehaviour. All this requires a thorough investigation.

The second char, relates to the Chief Justice having dealt on the administrative as well as on the judicial side with a writ petition which sought an investigation into the matter of Prasad Education Trust, in which he too was likely to fall within the scope of investigation. The practice in the Supreme Court is that when the Chief Justice is in a Constitution Bench, and matters are to be listed, requests for listing are made before the first puisne judge. This is an age-old practice. On 9 November, 2017, when a writ petition was mentioned before Justice Chelameswar at 10.30 am since the Chief Justice was sitting in a Constitution Bench, the same was directed to be listed later the same day. When the matter was taken up, a note dated 6 November, 2017 was placed before the judges hearing the matter by an official of the Registry. This is the basis of the third charge alleging that the note of 6 November brought to the attention of Justice Chelameswar on 9 November as the matter was taken up was antedated. The charge, of antedating is by all accounts a very serious charge.

The fourth charge relates to the Chief Justice having acquired land when he was an advocate by giving an affidavit which was found to be false. Further, despite the orders of the ADM cancelling the allotment in 1985, the Chief Justice surrendered the land only in 2012 after he was elevated to the Supreme Court.

The fifth charge relates to the abuse of exercise of power by the Chief Justice in choosing to send sensitive matters to particular benches by misusing his authority as Master of the Roster with the likely intent to influence the outcome.

As representatives of the people, we are entitled to hold the Chief Justice accountable just as we are accountable to the people. The majesty of the law is more important than the majesty of any office.

We hope that a thorough enquiry will be held so that truth alone triumphs. Democracy can thrive only when our judiciary stands firm, independent of the executive, and discharges its constitutional functions honestly, fearlessly and with an even hand.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley reacted to this move on Facebook, accusing the Congress and 'its friends' of using impeachment as a political tool

Seven Opposition parties led by the Congress on Friday met Rajya Sabha Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu and submitted an impeachment motion for the removal of Chief Justice of India, Dipak Misra.

"We have moved an impeachment motion for removal of CJI Dipak Misra under five listed grounds," Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad told a press conference after meeting the vice-president.

He said while submitting the motion, the Opposition party leaders did not discuss its merits but just requested that "this is our motion and the number required is sufficient under the Constitution". He said that 71 MPs from seven political parties had signed the impeachment motion but as seven have retired, the number is now 64.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley reacted to this move on Facebook, accusing the Congress and "its friends" of using impeachment as a political tool. He claimed that the impeachment motion was a "revenge petition" after the "falsehood" of the Congress has been established in the judge Loya death case.

Read the full text of Arun Jaitley's reaction to the Opposition's impeachment motion and the judge Loya case here:

Yesterday I read the 114-page judgement in the Judge Loya death case authored by Justice DY Chandrachud on behalf of the three Judge Bench of the Supreme Court. A reading of the judgement exposes every fact of the conspiracy to generate falsehood as propaganda in the public and political space.

Never ever so blatantly in the past have national political parties, a few retired judges and some senior lawyers so closely identified themselves with the generation of falsehood that they almost come out as conspirators. A detailed analysis of the facts and the role played by some groups is necessary since I suspect such attempts will also be made in the future.

Alleged Role of Amit Shah in the Sohrabuddin Case

Amit Shah had no role in Sohrabuddin Case. It was an alleged encounter executed by some central agencies through the State Police. I had written a detailed letter on September 27, 2013 to the then Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh giving out all these facts in detail. The primary piece of evidence sought to be introduced to link Amit Shah with the encounter was that of two persons  Ramanbhai Patel and Dasrathbhai Patel, both noted land grabbers, who had given evidence against Amit Shah. Both claimed that they had gone to Amit Shahs office to meet him to have a Preventive Detention Order under PASA passed against them, withdrawn. He had demanded Rs.75 lakhs from them, which was paid on certain specific dates through one Ajay Patel in instalments. In the course of this meeting, Amit Shah had made some casual statement on why Sohrabuddin had to be killed.

The alleged evidence was so false is evident from the fact that the visitors register showed the two never visited Amit Shah ever. Secondly, there was never a PASA order against either of the two Patels. Thirdly, some of the dates on which the instalments of Rs.75 lakhs were allegedly paid by Patel were dates on which Ajay Patels passport shows that he was not in India. On this flimsy evidence any court would have discharged Amit Shah. While granting him bail, the Gujarat High Court had commented that this was actually a case of no prosecutable evidence. It did not matter to Amit Shah as to which Judge heard this flimsy charge against him. Amit Shah was discharged in the case. Some individuals challenged the discharge order before the Mumbai High Court and the Supreme Court. The challenge was rejected. Many of those who raked up the Judge Loya death case were associated against Amit Shah in the Sohrabuddin case.

The Caravan Magazines Fake News

Judge Loya, as the Supreme Court judgement establishes, had a chest pain in the early hours of 1st December, 2014 at Ravi Bhawan, Nagpur. Two other District Judges were with him. They had telephoned two other colleagues from judiciary and thus the four District Judge level officers took Judge Loya to hospital in their car where an ECG was conducted, preliminary treatment was given and the case was referred to a specialized cardiology hospital. By the time he reached the cardiology hospital, probably the condition worsened and he passed away. Efforts were made for revival but the same unfortunately failed.

During the period of his cardiac problem, only four District Judges, the doctors and the medical staff of the two hospitals had access to him. Four High Court Judges arrived at the second hospital, which recommended a post mortem which was conducted by a third hospital and the same indicated a death because of cardiac issues. His body was then accompanied by two Magistrates to his home town. After perusing the statement of all concerned persons and Judge Loyas family members, who accepted the natural causes of the death, the Supreme Court came to a finding that this conclusively was a death because of natural reasons and there was no suspicious circumstance. The Caravan Magazine stories and investigations are a textbook example of fake news. It was not gossip or rumour mongering but a deliberately generated fake news where falsehood was manufactured to generate a massive public controversy.

The Institution Disruptors

Most courts in India have a set of crusading lawyers who pick-up causes in public interest and pursue them. That is perfectly acceptable. But over the last few years one has witnessed the evolution of these public interest crusaders graduating into Institution Disruptors. They pick-up even false causes and pursue the falsehood with a sense of deep commitment, indulge in intimidating advocacy, are shrill with their opposing colleagues, are rude and impolite with the judges. They firmly believe that every falsehood that they propound must be accepted as the gospel truth. They have found two strong allies. A section of the media gives them publicity. Simultaneously, we have witnessed the devolution of the Congress from a mainstream party now taking fringe positions. The Party through its lawyers or otherwise, is too willing to identify with these Institution Disruptors and thus intimidation of courts has become the new form of advocacy. A divided court is finding itself helpless to respond to these intimidatory tactics. The judgement indicates that intidimatory tactics were used as an alternative to one sided set of facts in the case. The Institution Disruptors have now become spokespersons of the Judge Loya death case falsehood.

The Impeachment Weapon

The impeachment of a Judge of the Supreme Court is to be done only in the case of either his incapacity or on proven misconduct. The Congress Party and its friends have started using impeachment as a political tool. Impeachment is a process by which you remove the holder of office in order to protect the dignity of an office. The power of impeachment under our Constitution is a part of an inter-institutional accountability. Both Houses of Parliament as political houses have been conferred the judicial power of impeachment. Thus a judicial power is exercised by a political house. Each Member has to act as a Judge. He has to independently review the facts and the evidence. Decisions cannot be on party lines or dictated by Whip. The power is exercised in case of proven misconduct. Trivialising the use of that power is a dangerous event. It is not difficult to collect fifty signatures of Rajya Sabha or hundred signatures of Lok Sabha members even on frivolous issues. To use the power as intimidatory tactics when neither you have a case of proven misconduct or the numbers on your side, is a serious threat to judicial independence. My preliminary reaction to the impeachment motion filed today is clear. It is a revenge petition after the falsehood of the Congress Party has been established in the Justice Loya death case. It is an attempt to intimidate a Judge and send a message to other Judges, that if you dont agree with us, fifty MPs are enough for a revenge action. The charges read out are issues those which have been settled by judicial orders or by precedent. Some issues are stale, trivial and have nothing to do with judicial functions.

A Divided Court

If intimidatory tactics of Institution Disruptors and impeachment motion are threats to judicial independence, the single greatest threat is the divided court itself. Now that the conspiracy of falsehood of the Judge Loya death case stands conclusively established, a few thoughts come to my mind. The four judges of the Supreme Court who held the controversial Press Conference, are all experienced judges and in my view men of high integrity. Had they checked up the facts of Judge Loya case before commenting on it, even though only on a listing issue? Should anyone at all be commenting on a pending case because many comments created an environment of prejudice and even added credibility to utter falsehood as they did in the present case? Is the impeachment motion filed today a direct result of the press conference? Does this impeachment set a precedent that political parties in India will use impeachment as an instrument to intimidate judges hearing controversial matters?

What has happened today is a price the Indian judiciary has to pay for misadventures of many. There is no better time for judicial statesmanship and political foresight.

The entire text has been taken exactly as posted on the Arun Jaitley's official Facebook page and has not been edited by Firstpost for style or content.
Congress and some other Opposition parties met on Friday with a proposed impeachment motion against Chief Justice of India (CJI) up for discussion.

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PTI reports that over 60 MPs belonging to seven political parties have signed the notice for impeachment proceedings against CJI. Congress, NCP, CPM, CPI, SP, BSP and Muslim League are among parties that signed the notice.

"We have moved a motion for impeachment of the Chief Justice of India under five listed grounds of misbehaviour. We have sought his removal," Azad said.

"We, on behalf of seven parties which have signed the motion, and also on behalf of the ones who have not signed the motion, met the Rajya Sabha Chairman at his residence at noon," said Ghulam Nabi Azad.

"We were hoping that the anguish of the judges would be addressed by the Chief Justice and that he would set his house in order. More than 3 months have passed, nothing has changed. The Chief Justice has not asserted the independence of the judiciary in the face of pressure by the executive," Sibal added.

"In their letter, the judges stated that administration of the court has not been proper. They said that time and again, they tried to collectively persuade the Chief Justice that certain things are not in order. They lamented that their efforts had failed and all four of them were convinced that unless the institution is preserved, democracy will not survive," said Sibal.

"There are questions about the ways in which he has dealt with certain cases. There have been internal rumblings about these issues," said Kapil Sibal. "Four senior judges publicly expressed their disquiet about the CJI's manner of exercising his powers," he added.

Chief Justice has not asserted the independence of the judiciary: Kapil Sibal

"We only wish to state that anyone occupying the office of Chief Justice of India must be judged on the basis of highest standards of integrity. The first charge relates to the conspiracy to pay illegal gratifications," Sibal said.

"The choice was not easy. The Constitution allows only one recourse. Because there was no other option apart from an impeachment motion, we moved this motion with a heavy heart," said Kapil Sibal.

"There are various taped conversations with the CBI in which a retired Orissa High Court judge is talking about some deals with other people. This conversation also mentions the CJI...this ia a very serious issue," said Kapil Sibal.

"These rumours are absolutely false. Remember, this is a very serious issue. We intentionally did not involve Dr Manmohan Singh because he has been the prime minister," said Kapil Sibal.

Here is the statement issued by the seven Opposition parties on the impeachment motion against CJI:

Seven Opposition parties have come together to set in motion the House proceedings to impeach the Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra. Seventy one MPs from seven political parties had signed the impeachment motion but as seven have retired, the number is now 64. The impeachment motion needs to be supported by at least 50 Members of Parliaments.

"I am not party to or privy with discussions that have taken place between different parties and for me to reflect specifically on whether the grounds are justified would be unfair," Khurshid told reporters. His statement was being seen as a tacit way of underlining the seriousness of the matter to his own party colleagues, as he chose to stay away from the impeachment notice initiated by Congress and supported by 6 other political parties.

"To use the power as intimidatory tactics when neither you have a case of proven misconduct or the numbers on your side, is a serious threat to judicial independence. My preliminary reaction to the impeachment motion filed today is clear. It is a revenge petition after the falsehood of the Congress Party has been established in the Justice Loya death case," Jaitley wrote.

Finance Minister and senior lawyer, Arun Jaitley expressed his views on the judge Loya death case verdict by the Supreme Court and the Opposition's move to impeach the sitting CJI in the form of an article on Facebook. The finance minister opined that the Congress party is using the "impeachment as a political tool" and he called it a 'revenge petition.'

Reacting to the impeachment motion proceedings initiated by seven Opposition parties, the Supreme court has expressed its concern on the issue. The apex court has reportedly sought assistance from Attorney General KK Venugopal asking his opinion on whether media should be stopped from discussing the impeachment motion.

"It all comes down to a majoritarian government, Nariman said, adding, when you have a majoritarian government, these things happen. When you dont have a majoritarian government, then people are more careful," he said.

Justice Fali Nariman, speaking to The Indian Express , conceded that the fact that other senior judges felt that CJI was not being fair in allocation of cases was a very grave problem. However, he said that the spritit of collegiality should be preserved. He also said that the government will "not be that foolish" to not appoint Justice Ranjan Gogoi as CJI, who is next in line, in terms of seniority.

Judiciary in disorder: It all comes down to a majoritarian govt, says Justice Fali Nariman

What are the 5 Reasons cited by Opposition to move impeachment motion

They said if the Upper House chairman did not find merit in the notice for the impeachment, the decision could call for a judicial review. "The chairman's decision is open to being challenged. It is bound to go for a judicial review," said a Congress leader.

As the Congress awaits the decision of Rajya Sabha Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu on an impeachment notice moved by it and other parties against Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, it is considering moving the Supreme Court if the petition is rejected, party leaders said.

"It is only a convention, though there is no legal or constitutional bar (on this)," the leader said.

The Congress was also trying to build up "moral pressure" on the Chief Justice of India in the hope that he would step aside from judicial duty if an impeachment motion was moved against him. Judges who faced impeachment had earlier stepped aside from judicial work and the Chief Justice should do the same, a party leader said.

Congress attempts on building up moral pressure on CJI to step aside from judicial duties

According to the provisions in the handbook for Rajya Sabha members, no advance publicity should be given to any notice to be taken up in the House till it is admitted by the chairman. "A notice for raising a matter in the House should not be given publicity by any member or other person until it has been admitted by the Chairman and circulated by members. A member should not raise the issue of a notice given by him and pending consideration of the Chairman," according to Rule 2.2 of Parliamentary Customs and Conventions in the handbook.

An official in Parliament stressed that making public the contents of a notice before it was admitted violated Parliamentary rules. This assumes significance in the wake of the seven opposition parties, led by the Congress, initiating an unprecedented step last week for the impeachment of CJI Misra by moving a notice levelling several charges against him.

Vice-President M Venkaiah Naidu on Monday rejected the Congress-led notice to impeach the Chief Justice of India, Dipak Misra.

According to sources, Naidu wanted to clear the mess before the Supreme Court reconvened on Monday so that Chief Justice Dipak Misra faced no embarassment, reported News18.

Vice-President wants to clear the mess before SC convenes, says sources

This is the first time ever that an impeachment notice has been filed against a sitting CJI

2) No proof to back five allegations were true: Reports said that another reason the motion was rejected is that there was no proof available to back the five allegations levelled against CJI Dipak Misra.

1) Violation of Rajya Sabha guidelines by Opposition parties: While reviewing the notice, the Rajya Sabha officials had mentioned that making public the contents of a notice before it is admitted by the chair is in violation of parliamentary rules. According to the provisions in the handbook for Rajya Sabha members, no advance publicity should be given to any notice to be taken up in the House till it is admitted by the chairman.

"The chairman's decision is open to being challenged. It is bound to go for a judicial review," the report quoted a Congress leader as saying.

The Congress party earlier had said that it would consider moving the Supreme Court if the notice of CJI impeachment was rejected, PTI had reported. Party leaders had said that if the Rajya Sabha chairman did not find merit in the notice, the decision would call for a judicial review.

Tweeting shortly after Vice-President Venkaiah Naidu rejected the Congress-led Opposition, party leader Abhishek Manu Singhvi said: "Expectedly, Sh Naidu rejected impment motion. Unexpectedly, he did so within one day of returning from outstn. Hopefully, the alacrity was not intended to render infructuous calls for CJI to stop Admn work."

As per a copy of the order rejecting Opposition's CJI impeachment notice, Rajya Sabha chairman Venkaiah Naidu said that the allegations "seriously" undermine the judiciary's independence. "Charges made on suspicion and assumption. Allegations seriously undermine the independence of the judiciary. None of the five allegations in the notice were tenable or admissable," he reportedly said.

"RS Chairman cant decide on merits in absence of quasi judicial or administrative power (M.Krishna Swamis case). If all charges were to be proved before inquiry as RS Chairman suggests, Constitution & Judges (Inquiry) Act will have no relevance. Dont muzzle Constitution," Surjewala said.

He also said Naidu's decision exposed Leader of Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley's "naked prejudice" by calling it a revenge petition. "Within hours of 64 MPs submitting the impeachment motion, Leader of Rajya Sabha(FM) had expressed naked prejudice by calling it a revenge petition virtually dictating the verdict to Rajya Sabha Chairman on that day. Has Revenge Petition now become Rescue Order?" he tweeted.

Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala said Venkaiah Naidu can't adjudge the motion as he as no merits to decide on the merits of the motion. "RS Chairman cant adjudge the motion, for he has no mandate to decide the merits of the motion," he tweeted, adding, "This is truly a fight between forces Rejecting Democracy & voices Rescuing Democracy."

"It is within the powers of Rajya Sabha chairman Venkaiah Naidu to reject the order. This was politically motivated and they (Congress) wanted to malign the judiciary," Additional Solicitor General of India Satya Pal Singh told CNN-News18.

Speaking at the 'Save the Constituition' campaign in Delhi, Congress chief Rahul Gandhi said: "The Supreme Court is being muzzled and crushed. People have lost faith in the judiciary." Follow the LIVE updates on Rahul Gandhi's speech here.

'Supreme Court is being muzzled, and crushed': Rahul Gandhi at 'Save The Constitution' rally

"When you have a man like the chief justice of the Supreme Court, it (impeachment notice) has to have something that is far more important than just saying he did not do this or that. The vice president has the statutory authority and he has rightly rejected the notice," Nariman told a TV channel. He said this move by the Opposition led by the Congress was only to demean the institution of the Supreme Court and it was not about Justice Misra. - PTI

Eminent jurist Fali S Nariman Monday said the issues raised in the impeachment notice against CJI Dipak Misra were not of "sufficient gravity and rightly rejected" by Vice-President M Venkaiah Naidu. Nariman said Naidu, the chairman of the Rajya Sabha, was the only statutory authority to take the decision on the notice.

CPM general secretary Sitaram Yechury expressed his disappointment and said Venkaiah Naidu's move to reject the CJI impeachment notice was a wrong one. "This was a wrong move by chairman of Rajya Sabha. This motion was not given proper attention. Something else is behind this. Independence of judiciary is in danger," he said.

"Within hours of 64 MPs submitting the impeachment motion, Leader of Rajya Sabha (FM) had expressed naked prejudice by calling it a revenge petition virtually dictating the verdict to Rajya Sabha Chairman on that day. Has Revenge Petition now become Rescue Order?, Randeep Surjewala said.

The Congress party will move Supreme Court for a judicial review of the Rajya Sabha Chairmans order rejecting the impeachment motion against CJI Dipak Misra. Meanwhile, the party questioned how could the vice president decide such a matter within hours.

Lashing out at Congress president Rahul Gandhi after his 'save Constitution protests', BJP's Sambit Patra said that the Congress party does not trust army, Supreme Court, Election Committee, EVMs, or even RBI.

Reacting to Naidu's order rejecting the impeachment notice against the CJI moved by 64 MPs, the former Attorney General of India said that the RS chairman has "applied his mind" after consulting legal experts on the issue.

Eminent jurist Soli Sorabjee today said the Congress-led opposition had no chance to succeed in the Supreme Court against Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu's decision rejecting impeachment notice against Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra.

Congress leader and eminent lawyer Kapil Sibal addressed a press conference to respond to theobjections raised by Venkaiah Naidu in his order rejecting the impeachment motion against the Chief Justice of India.

Sibal, in a press conference, said that it is their "privilege to move the motion" and the vice president in his capacity as chairman of Rajya Sabha cannot boot this privilege.

Kapil Sibal, in his press conference, said that the law lays down the procedure in case the motion to impeach a Supreme Court judge. The Chairman of the Rajya Sabha must consult an emminent jurist, a judge of the high court and the Chief Justice of India. In this case, the judges of the collegium must have been consulted as the CJI himslef was under scrutiny. Hence, the decision to rehect the motion is illegal, Sibal said.

Kapil Sibal said that Venkaiah Naidu decided the matter within hours of returning to India after a foreign visit. He said that such momentous issues must be given their due diligence and attention. It is a hasty decision as by this, the government appears to be in a tearing hurry to block the attempts at an enquiry.

Sibal said that the onus of proving the charges was not on the MPs, it was on the judicial committee formed after the motion was admitted.

Congress further argued that the Rajya Sabha Chairman's order rejecting the motion of impeachment was unprecedented. He said that presenting a motion was the MP's privilege. He said that Naidu wrote in his order that the Opposition's charges are not proven, however, by rejecting the notice they ensured that an enquiry does not happen.

Venkaiah Naidu's decision unprecedented as no Speaker has rejected such momentous motion at preliminary stage

Congress leader Kapil Sibal said that the Congress party will ensure that there is no involvement of Chief Justice of India in the hearing, or listing, of their review petition.

Will ensure CJI Dipak Misra has nothing to do with review petition against Venkaiah Naidu's order

BJP spokesperson Meenakshi Lekhi held a counter press conference to rebut Kapil Sibal's charges. She said that the language of the notice signed by Opposition MPs in itself suggests that the MPs were themselves not sure of their charges.

However, the Opposition seems to be relying on words like prima facie, apparently etc. There are not enough documentary or even circumstantial evidence to support their claims.

Lekhi said that in Hindi the impeachment is called Mahabhiyog prastav, which literally means that the abhiyog (charges or allegations) in this case must have a much more stronger grounding than in other cases.

Congress leader, senior advocate Kapil Sibal has said that he will not appear in the court of Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dipak Misra till the latter retires. I will not appear in the Chief Justice's court from tomorrow onwards... till he retires, because that is consistent with the highest standards of my profession, said Sibal.

"This instance has set a bad precedence, which is not good for democracy," he told PTI here, adding that Naidu should have followed proper procedures before rejecting the notice.

Former Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee said today Rajya Sabha Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu acted in a "hurried manner" while rejecting the impeachment notice against Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra.

Senior advocate and Congress Rajya Sabha lawmaker Kapil Sibal, who is at the forefront and spearheading the campaign to impeach the present CJI, however, had put up a spirited defence in favour of Justice Ramaswami in Lok Sabha.

It is interesting to note that all the previous three impeachment motions have been moved when Congress was in power at the Centre. The higher judiciary was in for the shock in 1993 for the first time in independent India when impeachment proceedings were initiated in Parliament against Supreme Court judge V Ramaswami on charges of corruption following the report of the inquiry commission.

The Congress, which spearheaded an unprecedented move to impeach the Chief Justice of India on Friday, had in fact opposed such proceedings initiated 25 years ago when it was in power.

 Senior Congress leader and former law minister Salman Khurshid said today he was not kept in the loop on the impeachment notice against CJI Dipak Misra, and refrained from commenting on Rajya Sabha Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu's decision to reject it.

"Concerned parties will have to examine the grounds on which the motion has been rejected by the Vice President. We will have to consult among us, especially who moved the motion," Raja said.

CPI leader D Raja, part of the opposition led by Congress which moved the impeachment motion against the Chief Justice of India, today said the concerned parties would have to examine the grounds on which the notice has been rejected by Rajya Sabha Chairman Venkaiah Naidu.

On why DMK MPs did not sign the notice, she said that her party does not believe in bringing the judiciary under question. We hope that there will be discussion and further dialogues between the judges so that they can come to a compromise. This is the last resort for every citizen. That's why party decided not to sign it, she added.

DMK MP Kanimozhi has said that the government rejecting the impeachment notice was expected. What do you expect the government to do? They do not encourage anybody who tries to question them, she said.

Monday's proceedings started 13 to 14 minutes late instead of the normal 10.30 a.m. The electronic display board showed that none of the court had assembled, giving rise to speculation in the Chief Justice's court which was packed to capacity.

Well before Monday's proceedings commenced, news had already reached the Supreme Court that Rajya Sabha Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu had rejected the move by 64 Rajya Sabha members seeking the impeachment of the Chief Justice.

Unruffled by the move seeking his removal by 64 MPs, Chief Justice Dipak Misra on Monday presided over Supreme Court number 1 - although there were some anxious moments initially. Chief Justice Misra dealt with the cases in his usual ease.

Congress leader, senior advocate Kapil Sibal has said that he will not appear in the court of Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dipak Misra till the latter retires. I will not appear in the Chief Justice's court from tomorrow onwards... till he retires, because that is consistent with the highest standards of my profession, said Sibal.

"This instance has set a bad precedence, which is not good for democracy," he told PTI here, adding that Naidu should have followed proper procedures before rejecting the notice.

Former Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee said today Rajya Sabha Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu acted in a "hurried manner" while rejecting the impeachment notice against Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra.

Mr Kapil Sibal would like us to believe that Venkaiah Naidu is obligated by law to admit the motion & necessarily constitute an inquiry committee of 3 members- This stage is not direct- It is subject to Chairman RS admitting the motion after due consultation 3/n pic.twitter.com/56J5cz3chL

So in the clip you saw Kapil Sibal says no judge can be guilty merely because 50 MPs sign a motion! How does that standard change today I beg to ask?? The charges against CJI Misra date back to days before he was a SC judge! Did UPA make him a judge despite those?? JaiHind 6/6 pic.twitter.com/zXtaTFETFc

Senior advocate and Congress Rajya Sabha lawmaker Kapil Sibal, who is at the forefront and spearheading the campaign to impeach the present CJI, however, had put up a spirited defence in favour of Justice Ramaswami in Lok Sabha.

It is interesting to note that all the previous three impeachment motions have been moved when Congress was in power at the Centre. The higher judiciary was in for the shock in 1993 for the first time in independent India when impeachment proceedings were initiated in Parliament against Supreme Court judge V Ramaswami on charges of corruption following the report of the inquiry commission.

The Congress, which spearheaded an unprecedented move to impeach the Chief Justice of India on Friday, had in fact opposed such proceedings initiated 25 years ago when it was in power.

 Senior Congress leader and former law minister Salman Khurshid said today he was not kept in the loop on the impeachment notice against CJI Dipak Misra, and refrained from commenting on Rajya Sabha Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu's decision to reject it.

"Concerned parties will have to examine the grounds on which the motion has been rejected by the Vice President. We will have to consult among us, especially who moved the motion," Raja said.

CPI leader D Raja, part of the opposition led by Congress which moved the impeachment motion against the Chief Justice of India, today said the concerned parties would have to examine the grounds on which the notice has been rejected by Rajya Sabha Chairman Venkaiah Naidu.

On why DMK MPs did not sign the notice, she said that her party does not believe in bringing the judiciary under question. We hope that there will be discussion and further dialogues between the judges so that they can come to a compromise. This is the last resort for every citizen. That's why party decided not to sign it, she added.

DMK MP Kanimozhi has said that the government rejecting the impeachment notice was expected. What do you expect the government to do? They do not encourage anybody who tries to question them, she said.

Monday's proceedings started 13 to 14 minutes late instead of the normal 10.30 a.m. The electronic display board showed that none of the court had assembled, giving rise to speculation in the Chief Justice's court which was packed to capacity.

Well before Monday's proceedings commenced, news had already reached the Supreme Court that Rajya Sabha Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu had rejected the move by 64 Rajya Sabha members seeking the impeachment of the Chief Justice.

Unruffled by the move seeking his removal by 64 MPs, Chief Justice Dipak Misra on Monday presided over Supreme Court number 1 - although there were some anxious moments initially. Chief Justice Misra dealt with the cases in his usual ease.

Latest updates: Finance Minister and senior advocate Arun Jaitley slammed the Congress party for moving the impeachment motion. Terming it a 'political tool' and 'intimidatory tactic', Jaitley said that this was Congress' 'revenge petition after the Supreme Court judgement on judge Loya case exposed the 'falsehood' being spread by the party.

The Congress itself seems to be divided on the issue of the impeachment motion against the CJI. Salman Khurshid said that he was not a part of the impeachment motion notice because he said that the procedure of the judiciary needs to be respected.

Kapil Sibal said that the Opposition parties did not have any option apart from filing an impeachment notice. He said that the Chief Justice had not asserted the independence of the judiciary.

Ghulam Nabi Azad, in a press conference, said that Opposition parties had moved impeachment motion under five grounds of misbehaviour.

Over 60 MPs belonging to seven political parties have signed the notice for impeachment proceedings against CJI.

According to CNN-News18, five Opposition leaders had turned for the meeting against the Chief Justice of India. They are expected to address a press conference at 1 pm.

Congress and some other Opposition parties met on Friday with a proposed impeachment motion against Chief Justice of India (CJI) up for discussion.

Senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad had called the meeting which comes days after the party had said that option of moving an impeachment motion against Chief Justice Dipak Misra was still open.

Congress leaders had said that the issues raised by four Supreme Court judges have not been addressed yet by the CJI.

They had said the party was concerned about the independence of judiciary and people must protect the institution from "gross interferences by the government."

During the Budget Session that concluded earlier in April, the Congress had initiated a move 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.

With inputs from agencies
Reuters

Consumer activists and technology experts are advising consumers to hold off on buying Android handsets from Chinas ZTE until the company clarifies whether U.S. sanctions against the company prevent it from providing operating system updates for its devices.

The U.S. Commerce Department on Monday banned U.S. companies from providing components, software and other technology to ZTE, saying it was punishing the company for violating the terms of a settlement agreement.

ZTE Corp responded by suspending trading of its shares on Chinese stock markets and delaying an earnings release. But it has provided no guidance to consumers on how the ban will affect its ability to provide updates to the Android operating system from Alphabet Incs Google unit.

Sources with two mobile carriers told Reuters on Wednesday that ZTE had yet to advise them as to whether it will be able to keep delivering such updates, which patch security vulnerabilities, add new functionality and improve battery life.

ZTE did not respond to requests for comment and Google declined comment when asked if the order means it can no longer provide Android updates.

Jamie Court, president of Los Angeles-based advocacy group Consumer Watchdog, called on ZTE, Google and carriers to tell consumers how the ban will impact their ability to service the Chinese companys phones.

They certainly shouldnt be selling new phones if they arent sure they can update them, Court said.

ZTE phones were available for sale on Thursday through websites of major U.S. carriers and retailers including AT&T Inc, Sprint Corp, Verizon Communications Inc, Best Buy Co Inc and Walmart Inc.

Verizon and Sprint declined to comment. AT&T, Best Buy and Walmart did not respond to requests for comment. Some technology analysts advised consumers not to buy the phones until it is clear whether they can be updated.

Sufficient uncertainty exists that it would not be prudent to buy a ZTE phone, said John Jackson, a consumer technology analyst with market research firm IDC.

Roger Entner, an analyst with Recon Analytics, said he expects U.S. carriers and retailers will sell out current ZTE inventories, then stop selling the Chinese companys handsets.

ZTE smartphones should still function if they do not get future Android updates, but users will not be able add new features or install patches to protect the devices against newly discovered security threats, according to Entner.

People are stuck, Entner said. Some frustrated customers turned to support forums on Reddit and ZTEs website with questions on warranties, repairs and future security patches that went unanswered.

I wonder how long we will have to wait to get an actual statement from ZTE, one user wrote Monday on ZTEs website. I doubt at this stage they are going to find anyway through this ban.

Canadian privacy advocate Michael Geist said that ZTE and the U.S. government should figure out a way to tweak the order so that it does not undermine the security of millions of people using the companys phones by preventing them from accessing security updates.

Its consumers who will ultimately pay the price if their phones are vulnerable, Geist said.
Justices SC Dharamadhikari and Bharati Dangre rapped the CBI and CID of Maharashtra Police for their failure to apprehend the culprits in the murder of Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare

Even though five years have passed since anti-superstition crusader and rationalist Narendra Dabholkar was shot dead during a morning walk on 20 August 2013, the Central Bureau of Investigation appears to have failed to find any conclusive evidence or the whereabouts of the accused in the case.

The same appears to be true in the case of Communist leader Govind Pansare, who was shot at in Kolhapur in 2015, as well with the Special Investigation Team of Maharashtra Police's Criminal Investigations Department appointed to investigate the murder conceding before the Bombay High Court that there was little hope now of achieving anything substantial from any further field probe.

"Field probe including raids at possible hiding places will not lead to anything anymore. Our only hope is scientific probe and evidence from call detail records, forensics etc," said senior advocate Ashok Mundargi, counsel for the state government and the SIT.

Additional Solicitor General Anil Singh, representing the CBI probing Dabholkar's killing, echoed the same view.

The lawyers view irked the bench of Justices SC Dharamadhikari and Bharati Dangre, which rapped the two investigation agencies for their failure to apprehend the culprits in the two cases. The bench was hearing pleas by the kin of Dabholkar and Pansare. The two justices had sought a court-monitored probe into the killings.

"How do we then take the case to its logical conclusion?" the bench asked.

"Can we allow for the case to reach a dead-end when similar crimes are on the rise?" it asked.

The bench said while it was not critical so far of the ongoing probes by the two agencies, it could not allow them to leave everything to the mere hope that the absconding accused persons in the two cases, tired of hiding or fearing threat to their lives, would turn themselves in one day.

"Why don't you take steps to completely strangulate the organisational backing that the accused persons must be receiving?" the bench asked.

It also directed the agencies to seek the help of expert interrogators in the case.

The bench warned that if the agencies failed to make any progress by the next date of hearing, it would be constrained to summon the senior officials concerned.

Amid a nation-wide outrage over the Kathua rape-cum-murder and the Unnao rape cases, the bench observed that India's image today has taken a beating with a growing perception abroad that it's a country of crimes and rapes and the liberal and secular people are not safe here.

It also said that the rest of the world was now hesitant to engage with India over educational or cultural issues.

"It is unfortunate that today, the image of the country is such that those living abroad feel only crimes and rapes happen in India.

"Anywhere we go (outside of India), we have to answer a barrage of questions. People are under the impression that liberal, open-minded and secular people cannot be safe in India and that they are bound to be attacked. The image of India is suffering due to the acts of a few people," the bench said.

"No international body wants to be a part of our educational and cultural projects. Investors show interest at first but pull back later on. We are very sorry to see this. Do we (India) want to live in a cocoon?" the bench asked.

"No institution in the country, including the judiciary, is spared from this," it said.

The high court had last year observed that the killings of Dabholkar and Pansare were "well planned" and the perpetrators had an organisational backup.

With inputs from PTI
The handling of Kathua and Unnao rape cases shows how scared the police is to act. The shameful part is that some of them have even abetted the crimes.

The incidents of rape at Jammu and Kashmir's Kathua and Uttar Pradesh's Unnao district are extremely revulsive and call for exemplary punishment for perpetrators. Ideally, our collective anger  manifested in candlelight protests, rallies, gory writings and heated debates  should have rested once the culprits were arrested and an investigation began in right earnest. But it hasn't.

The protests continue, though they serve only the limited purpose of forcing the police to register an FIR and file a chargesheet in the court. But, who cares, so long their campaign fulfils their sinister agenda, which is to tear apart social cohesiveness, communalise the situation, inflame passions and give anti-social elements a free hand to destroy properties and human lives.

We can never get rid of such crimes, given an excess of liberty, an absence of fear of the law, hamstrung police and a sharp breakdown in moral values. Rape did not stop with Nirbhaya nor it will end with Kathua and Unnao. The victims will soon be forgotten, and we will wait for another day, holding candle lights and placards in hand, when sexual vultures attack another girl elsewhere in the country.

Even a death sentence, that we have been demanding so passionately, is not going to deter the predators. The only way forward is to free the police from its political shackles and make courts more determined to conduct a speedy trial and dispense deterrent punishment.

This, of course, is better said than done. That is why we choose the easiest option; agitate, condemn and allege. For Kashmiri separatists, the Kathua incident was an excuse to pelt stones and attack security forces. For communist interlocuters, it was perpetrated to cleanse India of Muslims. Their propaganda could not be more mischievous. And, for 49 retired civil servants, it was an opportunity to betray their intellectual arrogance, which only so-called liberals and seculars could understand.

In a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, they spoke of Indians facing 'moments of existential crisis' and 'crisis of ethical order' and concluded that both rape cases were the outcome of 'a culture of majoritarian belligerence and aggression prompted by the Sangh Parivar'.

They apparently believe that rightists and the RSS produce rapists and motivation to commit rape is provided by Hindutwa, as defined by the BJP. Nothing can be more diabolical. With their professional background, they should have known that rapists have no caste, religion or political affiliation. They are simply criminals. The damage, however, is done as the Bombay High Court would like us to believe. India is today perceived abroad as a country of crimes and rapes.

Not long ago, several of us in uniform brooked no political interference. We neither turned rapes into spectacles nor subjected parents to relentless reminders about how their daughters were violated. We treated such cases as heinous crimes, whether inflicted by family elders, friends, social pests and politicians and acted ruthlessly. Courts also walked the distance with us, without fear or favour.

I recall a conversation with a Muslim sessions judge. He told me that my job was to convince him that a girl was raped. His job would be to fill the gaps in the evidence and convict the guilty. His judgments were always upheld by higher courts. This was the level of confidence in each other's professional integrity.

The handling of Kathua and Unnao rape cases shows how scared the police is to act. The shameful part is that some of them have even abetted the crime. Politicians have actually broken their spine, leaving them to crawl.

A few of them still have their backbones but have suffered heavily in terms of a thriving career and a settled life. The majority, therefore, finds it foolish to swim against the tide. In fact, they welcome public outcry and interference from politicians, activists and journalists for it helps to run away from taking responsibility.

Police stations are ever eager to let the cases be transferred to the crime branch and the SIT. And, senior police officers find it safer to hand over the case to the CBI. Agitators do not realise that they are making police stations defunct, which actually is the fulcrum of criminal investigation and will any day do a better job than any other investigating agency because of their knowledge of the area and its people. I recall we would fight tooth and nail if there was any hint of involving the state CID, forget about handing the case to the CBI.

It is beyond the police to prevent the mushrooming of rapists. Surveillance  electronic or manual  can at best reduce numbers but they will still be very high. Prevention should best be left to sociologists, economists, psychologists, educationists and family to handle. The real need is for insulating police from political control.

The same set of officers will do a miracle. The recommendations of the National Police Commission of 1977 can be a good guide to move in this direction. But will the Centre and the states ever let this instrument of raw power slip away? No, not in anyone's lifetime.

The author is former special secretary, R&AW
Union minister Ram Vilas Paswan on Thursday said all hostels having at least two-third of students belonging to Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes (OBC) in Bihar will get 15 kg of grains at BPL rates.

Patna: Union minister Ram Vilas Paswan on Thursday said all hostels having at least two-third of students belonging to Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes (OBC) in Bihar will get 15 kg of grains at BPL rates.

The OBC students would include the OBCs among the minorities, the Union food and public distribution minister said in Patna.

The scheme would be extended to other states also.

"This is a historic decision. I have written letters to all the chief ministers asking them to send the list of beneficiaries," Paswan said.

The Bihar chief minister had demanded allocation of grains at BPL rate for these categories on BR Ambedkar's birth anniversary on 14 April at a function in Patna.
The unabated smuggling of fake Indian currency notes and attacks on BSF personnel by cross-border criminals are some of the issues that will be discussed at a high-level meeting of the chiefs of India and Bangladesh's frontier forces in Dhaka

New Delhi: The unabated smuggling of fake Indian currency notes and attacks on BSF personnel by cross-border criminals are some of the issues that will be discussed at a high-level meeting of the chiefs of India and Bangladesh's frontier forces in Dhaka next week.

A 10-member Border Security Force (BSF) delegation, led by Director General KK Sharma, will travel to the Bangladesh capital for the meeting at the headquarters of their counterpart, Border Guard Bangladesh, from 23 to 27 April.

The BGB team will be led by its DG Major General Abul Hossain.

Officials said the BSF will take up the issue of the continuous inflow of fake Indian currency notes (FICN) from across the border and the attacks on its personnel by criminals based in Bangladesh.

They said that FICN with a face value of about Rs 13.66 lakh has been seized along the border up to March this year.

FICN with face value of more than Rs 68.96 lakh were confiscated last year.

Also, two BSF men were killed and 122 injured in criminal attacks on this frontier last year. 109 personnel were injured in 2016, the officials said.

"These issues are a big concern for India and for the overall security situation on the India-Bangladesh international border. The talks will aim at finding better solutions to reduce and stop these instances," a senior officer said.

The Indian side, which will have officials from the Ministry of External Affairs, the Home Ministry and the anti-narcotics department, will also raise issues related to cattle smuggling, illegal migration and human trafficking, upkeep of border pillars and others along this IB, they said.

The BGB is expected to raise the matter of their nationals being killed or injured in BSF firing at the border and the illegal transport of drugs into their territory from the Indian side.

The two forces will also discuss the progress of a "crime free zone" created recently along the border in West Bengal, with the efforts of the BSF and the BGB.

This upcoming bi-annual DG-level talks will be the 46th such dialogue between the two sides. The last time the two forces met was in October, 2017 in Delhi.

India shares a 4,096-km-long border with Bangladesh.
The discrepancy between the numbers of villages electrified and the actual rural households that receive electricity could be attributed to the definition of 'electrification of a village.'

Yatendra Singh, pradhan (headman) of Shravan village in Agra, said that life without electricity is very hard. "It gives us a feeling that we are living in some forest. For every small thing, to get a mobile phone charged, to get a solar lamp charged or to get anything done one has to travel to another village."

Shravan is one of the 18,452 villages that prime minister Narendra Modi had, in his 2015 Independence Day speech, promised to electrify in 1,000 days, ie by May 2018.

Out of the 18,452 villages chosen for electrification, the government claimed that 15,183 villages had been connected to the grid by December 2017. But, crores of households continue to live in the dark.

As per the government's rural electrification website, Grameen Vidyutikaran, only 1,301 villages have 100 percent household connectivity. This means that just 0.21 percent of India's 600,000 villages are completely electrified. Worse, if we look at the quality of that power  its availability over the day and voltage supplied  a more realistic picture would come forward. The government has now set a new March 2019 deadline for electrification of all households.

The discrepancy between the numbers of villages electrified and the rural households that actually receive electricity could be attributed to the definition of "electrification of a village." According to the current rural electrification policy, a village is declared electrified if 10 percent of its households have electric power.

Several detailed studies, including a research carried out by Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) in September 2015, have revealed that while India claims that 99.8 percent of its villages have been electrified, several thousand households continue to live in the dark.

"While they are chasing village electrification as an interim goal, they have already laid out the goal to electrify each household in the country by March 2019, as part of Saubhagya scheme," Abhishek Jain, a senior programme lead at CEEW and a co-author of the report, said.

"But, as our study shows, even providing connection to every household will not be sufficient, and we need to move towards multi-dimensional definition and measurement of electricity access. Their 24x7-power-for-all objective tries to move in that direction," he explained.

Debajit Palit, a senior fellow and associate director, TERI felt that with the launch of a household-level electrification scheme, the relevance of the goal of village electrification is over.

"In the current situation, India has achieved more-or-less cent percent census village electrification, though all hamlets of census villages may not have been electrified. So, there is no relevance of the definition of village electrification in the current situation," he said.

He said that the definition should go beyond factors such as providing household connections and be defined on the provision of reliable and affordable electricity 24x7 for all households in the country.

"Unless we set benchmarks or define 'Power for All', there will be no way to monitor/track whether India is achieving it. We need to know which province or DISCOMs (power-distribution company) is actually achieving what level of electricity access," he added.

The CEEW's report also surveyed people's preferences about energy sources, priorities in use, related decision making and associated policies. The researchers found that 66 percent households prioritised household electrification over street lighting and community use.

Jain said the government must also consider what people value while designing and implementing policy. "People value duration of supply, it's affordability and quality. People value electrification of not only their houses but their community places (including schools, primary health centre, sub-centre) and their streets. All these issues should be factored in," he said.

So, are the government's claims on the reach of rural electrification overestimated?

Replying to the questions in Rajya Sabha, minister of state for power, RK Singh claimed that as of 15 January 2018, there are a total of 18.10 crore rural households in the country of which 14.16 crore households (78.2 percent) have been electrified and 3.94 crore households are un-electrified.

But can the government's claims be verified? The government has admitted that the respective state governments and DISCOMs provide the information regarding electrification of villages. Has this data been authenticated by a ground survey?

"The annual growth rate of households since the census in 2011 may not have been taken into consideration to estimate the current state wise total households. There is variation in total households data in villages. There could be a wide difference between what the DISCOMs are reporting and what it should be as per the Census 2011 and the subsequent growth. This is creating confusion and raising doubt about the actual number and percentage of unelectrified households in the country. Furthermore, whether households with solar home systems or mini grid connection are counted as electrified or not is also not clear," Palit said.

He adds, "In several villages, only the main habitation has been electrified and the hamlet(s) do not have electric poles and lines, but it is shown as if the whole village has been electrified. DISCOMs have to be pushed to carry out a robust ground survey to back the data and their claims."

But that would be little consolation in India's dark heartland. Back in Shravan, village pradhan Singh rues that boys of the village are not getting married as no one wants to give their daughter to a village where there is no power.

The last marriage that was solemnised in the village, he remembers, was some 12 years ago and even that family has moved out of the village. "There are hardly any children in the village. The families have shifted to other villages and now the situation is getting worse. The village may be deserted in the years to come," he said.

Prathamesh Mulye is a Mumbai-based freelance writer and a member of 101Reporters.com, a pan-India network of grassroots reporters.


A BCI team met representatives of BAJ who refuted allegations that lawyer of Kathua rape victim was prevented from appearing in court by fellow advocates.

Jammu: A Bar Council of India (BCI) team today met the representatives of the Bar Association of Jammu (BAJ) who refuted allegations that the lawyer of the Kathua rape and murder victim was prevented from appearing in court by fellow advocates.

The Supreme Court had directed the BCI team to visit Jammu and submit its report over the conduct of lawyers after taking serious note of advocates obstructing the judicial process in the Kathua gangrape and murder case. Initiating a case on its own accord, the apex court had said such impeding of the process of law "affects the delivery of justice".

The BCI team, headed by former chief Justice Tarun Agarwal, today met the lawyers of BAJ who strongly batted for a CBI probe to ensure justice for the minor victim and categorically stated they have no faith in the Crime Branch probe. "A full house meeting took place in presence of the Bar Council. We have put forth our point of view. They wanted some clarifications, which we clarified," BAJ President B S Salathia told reporters in Jammu.

Salathia said that the BCI panel raised the allegation that BAJ members had prevented Deepika Rajawat, the counsel of the victim, from appearing in court. "As far as the allegations of victims' lawyer Deepika Rajawat are concerned, we have shown them (BCI) the certified copies of the orders in the writ petition that she had appeared in the case and her attendance has been marked by the court," he said. Salathia said the entire Jammu lawyers fraternity batted for CBI probe. "In the jam-packed house, over one thousand lawyers raised their hands and said that they do not trust the probe by the Crime Branch and demanded a fair, impartial investigation by a credible organization. A CBI probe should be ordered and this probe will definitely give justice to the girl and punishment to the culprits involved in this heinous crime," he said.

He claimed the allegation that Rajawat was stopped from appearing was "false" and a "mischievous tactic" by her "to attract media attention". "The case was listed twice during the period on April 9 and 11 in the high court in which she had appeared on the behalf of the victim's family on both the occasions and her attendance has been marked by the court," he said.

Salathia said that Rajawat had only filed a writ petition in the high court and was not representing the victim in the trial court. "She is not the lawyer of the victim. She has not appeared in Kathua court where the trial of the case began this week. The government has already appointed two public prosecutors for that case," he said.

He said that neither he nor any member of the Bar had stopped her from appearing in the court or threatened her. "No one has done any such things nor can we think about such heinous behaviour. Our girls are practising in this court and to even think like that is bad", Salathia said on Rajawat's allegation that she was threatened with rape by the lawyers.

He alleged it was a "conspiracy" to defame him, the Bar and Jammu society "by floating lies in media and social media". He said that Bar will bring the truth before the entire country.

Salathia claimed his remarks during the protests related to Kathua case were wrongly projected by media. "It is a conspiracy against us and we will fight it out from the court to the roads, from Supreme Court to the bye-lanes and will fight it in entire J-K and we will prove that they are lying," he added. He said that Bar Council was given a "representation with a detailed account of entire happenings over the issue". "We are thankful to that they listened to our point of view with patience. We have hope that truth will win," he said, and appealed that issue should not be politicised as "it can set the state afire through communal polarization".

The BCI team yesterday visited Rasana and met the agitating people of the area, who are demanding a CBI probe into the incident. A strike call had been given by the Kathua and the Jammu and Kashmir Bar Associations in connection with the case. The Bar Association of Jammu had on 13 April said that it was extending its strike till 17 April against the "growing illegal presence of Rohingyas and Bangladeshi nationals," while alleging that its agitation for a CBI probe into the Kathua rape-cum-murder case was wrongly being portrayed as "communal".

The BCI panel also met the lawyers in Kathua, who were alleged to have prevented the Crime Branch team from submitting the charge sheet in the case on 9 April. The minor girl had disappeared from near her home in the forests next to Rasana village in Kathua, on 10 January. Her body was found in the same area a week later.

The Crime Branch of police which probed the case and filed a main charge sheet against seven persons and a separate charge sheet against a juvenile in a court in Kathua district earlier this week.

The charge sheet revealed chilling details about how the girl was allegedly kidnapped, drugged, raped inside a place of worship before being killed.

Jammu has been on tenterhooks since the brutal incident. The bar associations have been opposing the action against the accused, alleging that the minority Dogras were being targeted.

The Jammu High Court Bar Association on Thursday told the Supreme Court that it did not support lawyers' protest in connection with the Kathua gangrape and murder case.
The NIA on Friday filed a charge sheet against Syed Shahid Yusuf, son of Hizbul Mujahideen chief Syed Salahuddin, in a 2011 terror funding case

New Delhi: The NIA on Friday filed a charge sheet against Syed Shahid Yusuf, son of Hizbul Mujahideen chief Syed Salahuddin, in a 2011 terror funding case.

District judge Poonam Bamba posted the matter for considering the charge sheet on 4 May.

The 42-year-old Yusuf, who was posted as an agricultural assistant in central Kashmir's Budgam, was arrested by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) on 24 October last year.

Yusuf's bail plea was dismissed by the trial court on 7 March. He is in judicial custody.

The NIA had earlier alleged that the accused was linked with banned terrorist organisations such as Hizbul Mujahideen.

It had said the case was registered on the basis of information that funds from Pakistan were sent to Jammu and Kashmir via Delhi through hawala channels to spread terrorism.

The NIA had in 2011 arrested a number of persons, including Ghulam Mohd Bhat, with Rs 21.2 lakh, alleging that Yusuf was "one of the several Indian contacts of Bhat" who had been in touch with him for receiving money transfer codes.

It had alleged that Yusuf's involvement was found in collecting funds from a terrorist outfit in Saudi Arabia as well as from other accused on directions of his father Mohd Yousuf Shah alias Syed Salahuddin, self-styled supreme commander of the Hizbul Mujahideen.

Syed Salahuddin was declared a Specially Designated Global Terrorist by the US Department of State in June last year.

The NIA has claimed that Yousuf has received about Rs 4.5 lakh so far through eight international wire transfers.

It had also registered two other cases related to terror funding  one in November 2011 and the other in May 2017. It had filed a charge sheet against 10 people including Salahuddin in the April 2011 case.

In the recent case, the NIA arrested various people, including some close relatives and aides of separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani.
The team, headed by former chief justice Tarun Agarwal, also visited Rasana and met the agitating people of the area, who are demanding a CBI probe into the incident.

Jammu: A five-member team of the Bar Council of India arrived in Jammu on Thursday and met lawyers in Kathua, who had held protests in connection with the rape and killing of an eight-year-old girl.

The team, headed by former chief justice Tarun Agarwal, also visited Rasana and met the agitating people of the area, who are demanding a CBI probe into the incident.

The Supreme Court had directed a team of the BCI to visit Jammu and submit its report over the conduct of lawyers from high court bar association and other local associations by 24 April.

A strike call had been given by the Kathua and the Jammu and Kashmir bar associations in connection with the case.

The Bar Association of Jammu had on 13 April said that it was extending its strike till 17 April against the "growing illegal presence of Rohingyas and Bangladeshi nationals," while alleging that its agitation for a CBI probe into the Kathua rape-cum-murder case was wrongly being portrayed as "communal".

The panel on Thursday met the lawyers in Kathua, who were alleged to have prevented the Crime Branch team from submitting the charge sheet in the case on 9 April, sources said.

The lawyers said that they had not prevented the Crime Branch team from submitting it but they only held protests, they said.

The team will visit bar association of the Jammu and Kashmir High Court and the lawyers would put forth their views on the strike.
What is the scientific evidence against the eight accused held in the brutal Kathua rape and murder case which has shook the entire country?

Editor's note: This piece contains graphic details. Reader's discretion advised.

Jammu: What is the scientific evidence against the eight accused held in the brutal Kathua rape and murder case which has shook the entire country? Thousands have held protest march and held candlelight vigils in different parts of India while students in the Kashmir Valley have clashed with security forces to demand swift justice for the eight-year-old Bakarwal girl.

The crime branch of the Jammu and Kashmir police has gathered four types of evidence against the accused which will be presented during the trial of the case, which began last week in Kathua.

1) Corroborative Evidence: This is based on the statements made by the eight accused before the investigators and it has been confirmed through the sequence of events that led to the horrifying tragedy during which the eight-year-old girl was abducted, starved, drugged, gang-raped and finally murdered. According to the police, the accused have confirmed their involvement in the crime.

2) Technical Evidence: The technical evidence against the accused includes their location when the crime took place. The evidence is based on identifying their location using their mobile phones, calls made by the accused to each other during the time the girl was abducted and murdered, the trial of money that was allegedly paid by Sanji Ram, the main conspirator, to bribe the police officials into destroying the evidence and other evidences. This will be presented by an expert before the court.

"The Call Detail Records have established that the individual and common locations of all the accused in and around the scene of crime on crucial dates of occurrence. The CDR revealed that Deepak was in constant touch with Surinder Kumar, also SPO in Police Station Hiranagar from the date of kidnapping of the victim," a crime branch officer told Firstpost.

3) Material Evidence: This is the evidence recovered from the site of the crime in the form of clothes of the victim, mobile phones of the accused, their bank details, blood-stained wooden sticks and other recoveries made by expert investigators while the crime branch was investigating the case. The police has also sealed the temple where the heinous crime took place. Some material evidence has also been recovered from the houses of the culprits to make it a watertight case.

4) Medical Tests: A medical board in Kathua, according to Crime Branch officials, has confirmed that the girl was gang-raped before she was killed. Initially, the first medical report prepared by a local doctor had said that there were no injuries but they had found sperms on her. A board of doctors at Kathua hospital later revealed it was a gang-rape, according to sources. Later, the investigations found that the victim was raped by "more than one accused." According to the report, the victim was not given food and was injected with sedatives and her cause of death was by asphyxiation which led to cardio-pulmonary arrest.

The postmortem of the girl was carried out on 17 January, 2018 by a team of doctors at District Hospital Kathua who also confirmed that she was first raped and then murdered.

One of the accused Sub-Inspector Anand Dutta, according to police, did not collect even the blood sample of the victim from the board of doctors who conducted autopsy of victim at District Hospital Kathua. He was initially leading investigation in the case.

"The forensic lab people told us there was nothing on the dress of the victim. There was absolutely nothing. And there were photographs taken when the dead body was found on spot. It had mud on it. But in Forensic Science Laboratory the same dress was found clean as if it was dry-cleaned," Inspector General, Crime Branch, Syed Afhad-ul-Mujtaba, told Firstpost.

"The evidence was sent from Jammu to Delhi for forensic tests later due to the absence of advanced forensic technology in Jammu and Kashmir to a Forensic Science Laboratory, run by the home department of the Delhi government," he added.

The potency test of the juvenile, Vishal Jasgotra and Pravesh Kumar, was conducted by a medical officer and the report came out positive, conforming the duo were capable of performing sexual intercourse. The medical experts also sought the re-examination of Deepak Khajuria, the SPO, for the potency test, which is likely to be done after getting court permission. "The medical tests were initially done in Kathua during the course of investigation initially," IGP of the Crime Branch said.

The investigating agency also recovered various items including strands of hair from the temple and the nearby forest where the body was dumped by the accused. They were sent to New Delhi for DNA profiling. The FSL reports confirm one of the hair stands recovered from Devisthan matched with the DNA profile of the eight-year-old, indicating that the victim was kept in captivity at Devisthan.

"In the course of investigation, the SIT members along with FSL experts again visited the scene of occurrence and tried to reconstruct the scene of crime. The 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/resealed by Executive Magistrate. The sealed packets containing the exhibits collected in the course of investigation were sent to FSL for analysis and report... which confirmed that the victim was kept in captivity at Devisthan which is exclusively manned by accused Sanji Ram to the exclusion of any other person of the area," the chargesheet submitted by the Crime Branch noted.

Similarly, the FSL report of hair strands recovered matched with the DNA profile of the juvenile.

Interestingly, while the FSL Srinagar claimed that they could not frame any report on the samples as Anand Dutta and Tilak Raj had "destroyed the evidence" by washing the clothes of the victim, FSL Delhi confirmed presence of blood stains on the salwar-kameez of the victim which matched the DNA profile of the victim. "DNA profiling also established presence of victims blood on the vaginal smears," it said.

A crime branch officer said the postmortem report of the victim confirmed that hymen of the deceased "was not found intact", "lacerations on vulva of the vagina were also observed," besides blood stained discharge was found inside vagina of the deceased". "In this case all types of evidence were collected, debated and thoroughly examined. We have tried to not leave any stone unturned before zeroing on a suspect. That is the reason Sanji Ram was arrested so late. All evidence suggested his involvement from day one," the officer told Firstpost.
The Gujarat High Court acquitted Maya Kodnani of all charges, following witnesses turning hostile, judges recusing themselves, and the SIT choosing not to seek an enhancement of Kodnani's sentence

Maya Kodnani, a doctor by profession and a strong BJP leader from the Naroda Patiya area, was initially convicted in the 2002 riots case by a trial court in which over 90 persons were murdered. She was sentenced to 28 years in prison by the trial court which also called her the chief instigator in the case. The Gujarat High Court, however, acquitted her of all charges. The acquittal came following witnesses turning hostile, judges recusing themselves, and the Special Investigation Team (SIT) choosing not to seek an enhancement of Kodnani's sentence, saying it didn't have the necessary sanction to do so from the state government.

As reported by The Economic Times, this was the first case probed and prosecuted by the SIT in which it didn't demand the death penalty for the accused. In fact, the report added, the SIT ddin't even seen an enhancement of the 28-year sentencing given to Kodnani, saying it didn't have the state government's sanction for the same.

In 2012, the SIT court held that the riots "wouldn't have spread at Naroda Patiya at such a large scale" had Kodnani not been involved and had she not abetted the violence, holding her as "one of the kingpins" of the riot. "She (Kodnani) has played a role of instigating the Hindu mobs, thereby abetting the commission of offences by the co-conspirators. She has abetted formation of unlawful assembly to execute the conspiracy," the court had said.

Apart from Kodnani, 30 others were also convicted by the court. Appeals were filed by all of them against the trial court's order. After the appeals were filed, however, six judges recused themselves from hearing the case, as reported in The Economic Times article. It added that Justice RR Tripathi decided to expedite the hearing of Kodnani's appeal despite resistance from the SIT and the victims.

Tripathi also delinked this from the other appeals, which meant the issue went to the Supreme Court, which stayed proceedings for a while, before resuming after Tripathi's retirement.

As reported by News18, the Naroda Patiya massacre was considered the single largest case of mass murder during the 2002 Gujarat riots, accounting for the largest number of deaths in a single event.

Kodnani, a BJP leader at the time the riots took place, was made minister for woman and child development by then Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi after the riots ended, a report on NDTV said. It added that a number of high court judges, including justices Akil Kureshi, MR Shah, KS Jhaveri, GB Shah, Sonia Gokani and RH Shukla, recused themselves from the case during the hearing on appeals.

Amit Shah's testimony

In September last year, BJP president Amit Shah testified before the court that he saw Maya Kodnani in the Gujarat Assembly on 28 February, 2002, first at 8.30 am and then again at 11 am. The Gujarat Assembly is located in Gandhinagar, and Shah's testimony was to be the alibi Kodnani needed  that she couldn't have been at Naroda Patiya on the day of the riots.

"I, Amit Anilchandra Shah, 53, national president of BJP, was a member of Sarkhej Assembly constituency. On 28 February, 2002, at around 7.30-7.45 am, I left for the Assembly, where a condolence for the victims of Godhra carnage was held at around 8.30 am, where I saw Mayaben Kodnani," he told the court, as reported by The Indian Express on 19 September.

Interestingly enough, however, the trial court had earlier debunked the same alibi. "This court is of the opinion that Gandhinagar and Ahmedabad are twin cities, hardly at a distance of 30km from each other. Therefore, if the accused was relieved at 8.40 am, it is not difficult for her to reach at Naroda Patiya site after 9 am," the court has observed.

"In the record of this case, the witnesses have stated that all the disturbances were started and in fact reached its peak after the arrival of Kodnani. It stands proved beyond all reasonable doubt that she was present and has participated in the crime on that day," the court had further held.

With inputs from agencies
Maya Kodnani's acquittal says a lot about our justice system though. In 2012, a trial court had called her the mastermind of the Naroda Patiya massacre.

For Hindutva fans, this is turning out to be a week from heaven, something each of them would have prayed for.

First, Aseemanand was acquitted of all charges in the Mecca Masjid blast case. Then, the Supreme Court disallowed an independent probe in the judge Loya case. And now, Maya Kodnani, till yesterday considered mastermind of the Naroda Patiya massacre of nearly 100 Muslims during the 2002 Gujarat riots. The stars must be really aligned in favour of Hindutva and Salman Khan, who has also had a similar run, fans. And, as far as the BJPs detractors go, they perhaps need to get their horoscopes checked.

In Kodnani's case, you really cant argue with a court. The legal system depends on witnesses and evidence. It works on the principle of innocent till proven guilty. To convict an accused, it needs a watertight case with incontrovertible evidence and reliable witnesses. Kodnani seems to have been acquitted because facts did not support the allegations against her.

Her acquittal says a lot about our justice system though. In 2012, a trial court had called her the mastermind of the Naroda Patiya massacre. The verdict was based on 11 eyewitness statements that confirmed her presence at the sight of the massacre.

The trial court observed: "Accused 37 (Kodnani) has been proved to be the kingpin of the entire communal riot and one of the principal conspirators who has actively instigated the rioters and has abetted them to form unlawful assembly to execute the conspiracy hatched under her leadership with other co-conspirators."

The life sentence awarded to her was primarily based on investigations by a special team constituted by the Supreme Court to look into the massacre. The SIT told the court that Kodnani reached the spot where a large mob had assembled to avenge the killing of kar sevaks at Godhara. She was accused of making inflammatory speeches and inciting the crowd to go on a murderous spree. Eleven eyewitnesses claimed to have seen her getting off her car and address the crowd. The SIT had also produced Kodnanis phone records to back its findings.

"Dr Maya Kodnani, the MLA of the said area, after completing the mourn meeting in the Vidhan Sabha came near Noorani Masjid and as per the evidence on record she made some speech and said "Kill Muslims, destroy the property of Muslims", the SIT had said in its chargesheet.

But all this, as the high court says, could not be proven. Kodnani was already out of the jail on medical grounds, citing tuberculosis, irritable bowel syndrome and a variety of ailments. Today, the mastermind of yesterday is a free bird.

One factor that may have swung the case in her favour could be BJP president Amit Shahs testimony. Appearing as a witness for the defence, he had told the high court in September 2017 that Kodnani was in the Gujarat Assembly on the day of the massacre. "Maya Kodnani was not present in Naroda Gam, she was inside the state assembly at 8:30 am. From 9:30 am to 9:45 am I was at the Civil Hospital and I met Maya Kodnani there," he had said. Shahs testimony corroborated Kodnanis version of her days movement.

When a judgment of such contradictions is pronounced, the first question to ask is obviously is, who got it wrong, and why? How did the SIT file a case based on eyewitness account that led to her conviction by a special court for 28 years in jail but were later found unreliable? How did the special court decide she was not just an accomplice but the mastermind when the evidence, as the high court says, was flimsy? Or, did something change drastically between 2012 and 2017the judgment was reserved by the Gujarat High Court in that yearto turn the case on its head? Whatever be the reason, this case that has swung from one end to another doesnt inspire much confidence in our investigation agencies and courts. At some levelwhere and how is for the Supreme Court to decide in case the government appeals against Kodnanis acquittalthey entire criminal investigation and justice system has huge flaws.
Narendra Modi has opted the path of participatory democracy so that the people at large and the government work hand in hand to realise the new India dream.

As school kids, everyone was told that patience is a virtue and impatience was symptomatic of anxiety, which would lead to frustration and trouble. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has other ideas. He thinks that the age-old sayings like "Sabra Ka phal meetha hota hai..daal roti khao prabhu ke goon gao" will not make new India achieve what and where it wants to be, in the league of superpowers and most advanced nations.

For him, impatience, "ye dil mange more" should be the mantra for India's future growth story. Rising aspirations make people more demanding and drive individuals, institutions and the government to perform. Modi takes that as a positive thing to have happened to India, for it leads to an optimism and embracing a work hard philosophy in all spheres of life including faster and greater delivery of infrastructure projects.

Responding to a question at Bharat Ki Baat Sabke Saath at Westminster in London on bebas versus besabra (helpless versus impatient) India, Modi said, "Kal tak (Bharat) bebas tha, aaj tej badlav ke liye besabra hai." The change and growth story has to be accompanied by self-belief and self-confidence on standing on its own and the ability to take action against an enemy nation which commits cowardly act of terrorism.

The surgical strike against Pakistan in response to terror attacks in Uri fits into that context in terms of a changed regime at the Centre, changed belief and changed aspiration.

The message for Pakistan was louder and clearer than ever: Toh ye Modi hai, who ussi bhasa me jawab dena janta hai.terror export karne wale ko pata hona chahiye ki aab Hindustan badal chukka hai. The prime minister went at length to explain how and why he decided to have a surgical strike and how he waited to inform Pakistan first through official channels before letting the people within and outside India know about the surgical strike.

By asserting aggressively about future consequences with an actual military operation across the Line of Control, Modi distinguished himself from his own party predecessor Atal Bihari Vajpayee who in the aftermath of 13 December 2001 terror attack on Parliament had thundered aar-paar ki ladai against Pakistan, even ordering Operation Parakram, a full-scale military mobilisation on the borders. Vajpayee then changed his stance adding the word "agar" (if) in his statement claiming that he had actually said agar ladai hogi toh aar-paar ki ladai hogi. In the aftermath of 26 November 2008 Mumbai terror attack, the Manmohan Singh government vacillated between saying "all options open" to decrying war.

By referring to his standalone visit to Israel and de-hyphenate Israel and Palestine, Modi sought to convey that he was strong in his intent and purposes and that he had the guts to follow an independent path which his predecessors at the prime minister's office didn't tread. "In the last 70 years, no Indian prime minister went to Israel, who was stopping you? If an Indian prime minister has to go to Israel, he will go to Isreal, if he has to go to Palestine he makes a separate visit to Palestine." It was interesting that he referred to all the Islamic countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, UAE while talking about foreign policy and his visit to Israel.

Four years in the government and only a year to go before he goes to the people seeking a fresh mandate, more so with elections in five important states to be held this year, Modi didnt seem to be afraid of the burden of expectations that weighed on him and his government. He didnt mind admitting that there are massive expectations from him and in the same vein he talked about his constant endeavours to improve and deliver. That again was linked to his Besabra Bharat theme.

"Even if three sons are there in a family, people would ask for delivery from the son who they think can deliver. Jo karega ussi se toh kahegaand therefore people expect so much from me. They think I can deliver. There was a time when people would be happy with a small incremental change but now their expectations and aspirations have changed," Modi said.

Though he listed several of his achievements in the last four years through an audio-visual presentation, the prime minister reminded his audience including those who watched him live on television that he is a normal human being and vulnerable to mistakes like anyone else. Modi sought to clarify that the mistakes if any won't emanate out of any malintent.

From the one-and-half hour Bharat Ki Baat Sabke Saath session that Modi had in London it can be safely assumed that the prime minister knew his limitations and that he might not have delivered up to the level expectations that people had from him. This knowledge prepares him to decide as to how he is going to pitch himself and his party for the 2019 elections. He knows that delivery from the government could be limited and in four years he couldnt possibly have transformed the country as some people thought he would. The prime minister thus has opted the path of participatory democracy so that the people at large and the government work hand in hand to realise the new India dream. Modi also gave an impression that in the next election the poorer section of society will be by his side. Patience would be needed here for impatient India to know if that would turn out to be be the biggest political story in 2019.
Maya Kodnanis acquittal follows a familiar pattern that raises serious doubts about Indias criminal justice system and exposes its inability to deal with crimes of collective nature.

Maya Kodnani, a BJP leader who was the MLA from Naroda when this locality on the outskirts of Ahmedabad witnessed one of the most gruesome episodes during the Gujarat riots of 2002, was acquitted by the Gujarat High Court on Friday. Her acquittal in the Naroda Patiya massacre case is only a sequel to a series of such exonerations of those named in collective crimes.

The Supreme Court-appointed special investigation team (SIT) is believed to have meticulously collected evidence and arraigned Kodnani, Babu Bajrangi and 59 others in the killing of 97 persons, mostly children and women. Though the SIT court had convicted 32 persons, including Kodnani and Babu Bajrangi, it set free 29 others for want of evidence. The high court has now largely upheld the SIT courts decision on acquittal but modified the sentence on Bajrangi and pronounced acquittal of Kodnani  again for want of evidence.

Kodnanis acquittal follows a familiar pattern that raises serious doubts about Indias criminal justice system and exposes its inability to deal with crimes of collective nature. More recently, the courts have acquitted the upper-caste accused arraigned for perpetrating the killings of lower-caste people in Bihar. Though the state government has promised to take the issue to higher courts, justice for the victims appears to be an illusion rather than reality.

Let us take some more examples to bring home the stark reality that stares us on the issue of collective violence. In May 1987 Uttar Pradeshs provincial armed constabulary (PAC), an armed force of the state police, was accused of killing 72 Muslims in Maliana and 42 in Hashmipura of Meerut. In Hashimpura, able-bodied Muslim youth were rounded up by armed police and brought to the Hindon canal in the adjacent Ghaziabad and shot at in cold blood.

That was the time when Bir Bahadur Singh was the Uttar Pradesh chief minister. The events made screaming headlines at that time. But more than three decades later, none of the accused has been punished yet. In the Hashimpura case, all the accused were let off recently while the Maliana case has been dragging endlessly in the court. In the meantime, many witnesses to the crime have died and testimonies stand diluted because of the time lapse.

Now take the case of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhi, Kanpur and Bokaro where thousands were killed following the assassination of prime minister Indira Gandhi. The Rajiv Gandhi government appointed a judicial commission headed by justice Ranganath Mishra. His report substantially watered down the culpability of many Congress party leaders ranging from HKL Bhagat, Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar to Kamal Nath whose names initially figured in one of the worst cases of collective violence India had witnessed since Independence.

The Mishra commission and the subsequent criminal inquiry by the police could hardly pin the blame on culprits in Kanpur and Bokaro where all the accused (most of them were known to people) were let off for want of evidence. In Kanpur, even officials who were accused of promoting violence could not be brought to book.

Similarly in Bihar, the most infamous killings of Muslims in Bhagalpur in 1989known as the Bhagalpur casecould make progress and show a semblance of justice only after 2005 when Nitish Kumar became chief minister and formed a commission. Till then, Lalu Prasad, who ironically used to project himself as a messiah of the minorities, refused to take any step as most of the accused belonged to his caste, Yadav. While driving down the roads in central Patna, one still finds a large accommodation occupied for relief operations for those victims. In 30 years time, the criminal justice system miserably failed to deliver justice to those who have lost their kith and kin in communal violence.

There are many such instances which prove the abject inadequacy of the criminal justice system in dealing with the cases related to collective violence. Kodnanis acquittal is a continuum of that failure. Irrespective of the political denomination of the government, the inability of the states institutions to bring culprits to book and hold them accountable for their misdeeds is quite evident across the country. No doubt, Kodnanis exoneration read with the acquittal of the accused in various such cases like the Mecca Masjid blasts in Hyderabad reaffirms our worst fears, that "more the things change, more they remain the same".
The Gujarat High Court is likely to pronounce its verdict on appeals in the 2002 Naroda Patiya riot case on Friday.

The Gujarat High Court is likely to pronounce its verdict on a batch of appeals moved by 32 convicts including former BJP minister Maya Kodnani, who were sentenced to life for their role in the 2002 Naroda Patiya riot case on Friday.

Ninety-seven people from the Muslim community were massacred in the Naroda Patiya riot on 28 February 2002, in one of the worst incidents to follow the Godhra train burning incident of 27 February, 2002, in which 59 kar sevaks were killed.

A division bench of Justices Harsha Devani and AS Supehiya had reserved the order last August after the hearing concluded in 11 appeal petitions including four by Supreme Court appointed-Special Investigation Team (SIT).

In August 2012, a special court for SIT cases had sentenced 32 people, including Kodnani, to life imprisonment. Kodnani was sentenced to 28 years of imprisonment. Another high-profile accused, former Bajrang Dal leader Babubhai Patel aka Babu Bajrangi, was given life imprisonment till death with a condition of remission.

Seven accused were given enhanced life imprisonment of 21 years, which they will serve after undergoing 10 years' imprisonment under IPC section 326 (causing grievous hurt).

The remaining accused were given simple life imprisonment (14 years). The trial court also acquitted 29 other accused for want of evidence.

While all the convicts challenged the lower court's order in the Gujarat High Court, according to The Indian Express, the SIT has filed petitions seeking stricter punishment for three convicts including Bajrangi. The SIT has challenged that there should not be remission for Bajrangi.

The Supreme Court appointed SIT has also appealed against seven accused, who were acquitted by the special court, including Ramila Rathod and her younger sister Gita. "While their brother Mukesh Rathod, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2012 is among the 32 convicts who have appealed against their conviction, their father Ratilal Rathod alias Bhavani, also an accused in the case, died during the trial," the report said.

Apart from the SIT, the victims of riots had also filed petitions against the acquittal of the 29 accused, the report added. The Gujarat High Court is expected to deliver its judgment in all these appeals.

During the course of the hearing, the high court judges had visited the site of the incident in Naroda Patiya area to understand its topography.

Kodnani is currently out on bail. The trial court had held that she was the mastermind of the violence in the Naroda area. A number of high court judges including Justices Akil Kureshi, MR Shah, KS Jhaveri, GB Shah, Sonia Gokani and RH Shukla recused themselves from the case during the hearing on appeals.

With inputs from PTI
The Gujarat High Court on Friday upheld the conviction of Bajrang Dal leader Babu Bajrangi in the Naroda Patiya riots case.

The Gujarat High Court on Friday upheld the conviction of Bajrang Dal leader Babu Bajrangi in the Naroda Patiya riots case while acquitting BJP leader Maya Kodnani. The high court found Bajrangi guilty of criminal conspiracy (IPC section 120B) along with two other convicts  Prakash Rathod and Suresh Jhala.

The court said that the prosecution had been able to establish a conspiracy implicating Babu Bajrangi, News18 reported.

Ninety-seven people from the Muslim community were massacred in Ahmedabad's Naroda Patiya area on 28 February, 2002, in what was one of the worst incidents of rioting following the Godhra train burning incident of 27 February, 2002, in which 59 karsevaks were killed.

In August 2012, a special court for SIT cases had sentenced 32 people, including Kodnani, to life imprisonment. Kodnani was sentenced to 28 years in prison, while Babu Bajrangi was given life imprisonment till death with a condition of remission.

Seven accused were given enhanced life imprisonment of 21 years, which they will serve after undergoing 10 years' imprisonment under Section 326 (causing grievous hurt) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).

The remaining accused were given simple life imprisonment (14 years). The trial court also acquitted 29 other accused for want of evidence.

While all the convicts challenged the lower court's order in the Gujarat High Court, according to The Indian Express, the SIT filed petitions seeking stricter punishment for three convicts including Bajrangi. The SIT challenged that there should not be remission for Bajrangi.

With inputs from agencies
An official of the Manipur government claimed that efforts were on to break the deadlock for restarting the survey in Jiribam but did not specify any timeframe for the resumption of the operation.

State-owned Oil India Limited (OIL) has abandoned the seismic survey in Manipur for assessing the hydrocarbon deposits after sub-contractors associated with the work were abducted by a rebel group.

A press release issued by OIL cited only "resistance" from the locals as the reason behind the decision to call off the survey at Jiribam located 216 km south west of state capital Imphal. The survey was being carried out by Mumbai based Asian Oilfields on contract from OIL.

The statement came hours after its chairman cum managing director Utpal Bora held a meeting with Chief Minister N Biren Singh and highly placed officials at Imphal where the issue about the abductions had also cropped up.

Confirming the incident, Manipur Police DGP LM Khaute told Firstpost, "They (hostages) have been released. Police deployment has been increased in the region and we have told the oil companies to be in touch with us."

It is reliably learnt that two labour sub-contractors tasked to organise daily wagers for the survey were waylaid and taken to remote destinations by a "splinter" group of Naga rebels in separate incidents, interned for some days and then released. Informed sources claimed that the rebel group was also paid ransom for securing their release.

All this and the constant local opposition were enough for both OIL and Asian Oilfields to call it quits until security was strengthened and local groups taken into confidence. The meeting prompted quick action with more security personnel deployed in Jiribam and efforts to pacify village chiefs and local leaders.

Opposition to exploration

The resistance against seismic survey in Manipur was triggered in 2010 after the Netherlands based Jubilant Oil and Gas Private Limited received the licence for exploration in two oil blocks across Jiribam, Tamenglong and Churachandpur totalling around 4,000 sq km. The contracts were awarded under the eighth round of New Exploration Licensing Policy (NELP) of the government but the firm stopped work only two years later following protests from the locals.

Local bodies and civil society organisations were upset as they were not informed by the government about its decisions to allow seismic survey in the state and the global promotions held in major cities like London, Houston, Calgary and Perth inviting bids for oil companies. The deeds for the exploration licenses were also signed in 2010 without the knowledge of these groups.

The stalemate seemed to be broken last year when OIL employed Asian Oilfield to acquire seismic data in the state following a government proposal called the National Seismic Programme (NSP), a flagship programme under the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas. The NSP aims to undertake a fresh appraisal in all sedimentary basins across India, especially where no or scanty data are available for a better understanding of the hydrocarbon potential of the country. Under this programme, OIL was assigned to carry out 870 km line seismic survey in Manipur out of which only 4.5 km could be achieved during the last field season.

Resumption of operation

An official of the Manipur government claimed that efforts were on to break the deadlock for restarting the survey in Jiribam but did not specify any timeframe for the resumption of the operation.

Asian Oilfield is however optimistic that the survey would commence very soon. Director of the firm Rohit Agarwal who was part of the delegation to meet the chief minister on 29 March informed that negotiations were on with the village chairman in Jiribam for removal of doubts about the operation.

"We have made it clear that our job is to survey which does not mean extraction of oil deposits. Our crew have not been withdrawn from Jiribam. If everything goes according to plan, then we will resume our operation around 20 April for six weeks till the onset of the monsoon," he said.

The governments focus on Manipur is understandable given the presumption about huge deposits of hydrocarbon in the border state. Media reports quoted the latest annual report of Jubilant Oil and Gas Private Limited as saying that two blocks in the state have prospective oil resources ranging from 380 billion cubic feet to 1.43 trillion cubic feet.

The protests in Manipur against seismic survey are indicative of the apprehensive among sections of the indigenous populace in the North East on jumbo projects and mining of natural resources. There is a long history of such episodes earlier: in Meghalaya, protestors stalled the extraction of uranium in Domiasiat some years ago; the fate of the 2,000 MW Lower Subansiri hydel project in Arunachal Pradesh is hanging fire after large-scale protests broke out at Dhemaji in Assam. And in Nagaland as well, Oil and Natural Gas Corporation was forced to stop all operations in 1994 at Changpang following threats from rebel groups.

The author is a senior journalist in Guwahati and author of Rendezvous With Rebels: Journey to Meet Indias Most Wanted Men.
An impeachment motion seeking for the impeachment of CJI Dipak Misra was filed on Friday. Here is the law on removal of a Supreme Court judge from office.

On Friday, an impeachment motion was submitted to the Vice-President of India calling for the impeachment of Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra. This article will briefly explain the circumstances in which a judge may be impeached and the process for the same.

Judges of the High Courts and Supreme Court of India serve in accordance with their mandate under the Constitution. Although the warrant confirming their appointment is issued by the President of India, they do not serve at the pleasure of the President. Therefore, the President may not dismiss a judge.

A judge of the Supreme Court may, however, be dismissed from office under a procedure prescribed by the Constitution. Article 124 (4) and Article 124 (5) of the Constitution speak of the way a judge of the Supreme Court may be impeached. The provisions state as follows:

"(4) A Judge of the Supreme Court shall not be removed from his office except by an order of the President passed after an address by each House of Parliament

supported by a majority of the total membership of that House and by a majority of not less than two thirds of the members of that House present and voting has been presented to the President in the same session for such removal on the ground of proved misbehaviour or incapacity.

(5) Parliament may by law regulate the procedure for the presentation of an address and for the investigation and proof of the misbehaviour or incapacity of a Judge under clause (4)"

Accordingly, to impeach a judge, there needs to be consent of two-thirds of the members of each House of Parliament. This can happen after the "misbehaviour" of a judge has been proved in accordance with the law laid down by Parliament in this regard.

The Parliament has made a law for the purposes of implementing Article 124 (4). This is known as the Judges (Inquiry) Act, 1968.

Section 3(1) of the Act states:

"(1) If notice is given of a motion for presenting an address to the President praying for the removal of a Judge signed,-

(a) in the case of a notice given in the House of the People, by not less than one hundred members of that House;

(b) in the case of a notice given in the Council of States, by not less than fifty members of that Council; then, the Speaker or, as the case may be, the Chairman may, after consulting such persons, if any, as he thinks fit and after considering such materials, if any, as may be available to him , either admit the motion or admit the same."

If 50 members of the Rajya Sabha, as has happened on Friday, give a notice of the impeachment motion to the Vice President of India, who is the ex-offico Chairman of that House, the process of impeachment shall commence.

Section 3(2) of the Act then requires that a committee be constituted by the Chairman of the Rajya Sabha to investigate into the matter. This Committee must comprise of three members as follows:

"(a) one shall be chosen from among the Chief Justices and other Judges of the Supreme Court;

(b) one shall be chosen from among the Chief Justices of the High Courts; and

(c) one shall be a person who is, in the opinion of the Speaker or , as the case may be, the Chairman, a distinguished jurist:"

So, the committee must be one where there is a judge of the Supreme Court, a Chief Justice of a High Court and a distinguished jurist. The committee shall be selected and constituted by the Chairman of the Rajya Sabha in this case, as the motion has been tabled in the Rajya Sabha. It is for this committee to draw up the definite charges against the judge concerned. The judge will be permitted to file a written statement in defence (as per Sections 3(3) and 3(4) of the Act) and under Section 3(9) of the Act, the government may, at the request of the Chairman, appoint an advocate to conduct the case against the judge.

The Committee under Section 3 has all the powers of a civil court and may receive evidence and summon witnesses, along with ancillary powers.

Section 4 of the Act requires that the report of the Committee now be placed before the Rajya Sabha. If the committee finds the judge not guilty, then under Section 6(1) of the Act, no steps will be taken. If the committee finds the judge guilty, then the motion of impeachment, along with the report of the committee will be taken up for consideration.

Then, the motion must be adopted by both Houses in accordance with Article 124(4) of the Constitution before a judge can be impeached.

In effect, there should ideally be a procedure that is close to a full trial before the Rajya Sabha, with the members of the Rajya Sabha acting as jurors and finally by a two-thirds vote convicting a judge of misbehaviour. This conviction is subject to confirmation by the Lok Sabha. Only if the Lok Sabha confirms the decision can the judge be removed from office.
The Supreme Court bench was annoyed as it asked the advocate, who had alleged that FIRs were not lodged by the police in rape cases involving powerful people like ministers, MPs or MLAs, what his locus standi was vis-a-vis the Unnao rape case

New Delhi: "Do you have any relative who has been raped", an annoyed Supreme Court asked a lawyer on Friday.

The top court bench was annoyed as it asked the advocate, who had alleged that FIRs were not lodged by the police in rape cases involving powerful people like ministers, MPs or MLAs, what his locus standi was vis-a-vis the Unnao rape case.

It questioned the locus of the advocate in filing the PIL, wondering how public interest litigation can be filed in criminal cases.

A bench of Justices SA Bobde and L Nageswara Rao asked advocate ML Sharma how he was aggrieved with the Unnao rape case and how was he connected to the case.

"The Allahabad High Court has already passed some orders in the case. Mr Sharma, you are not an aggrieved person in the case. There cannot be a PIL in a criminal case," the bench observed.

Sharma alleged that in several rape cases involving former ministers or MLAs, no FIR was lodged by the police, wherever powerful people were involved.

"Who are you in these rapes cases? Don't be generic. Is any relative of a victim of rape before us for remedy? Do you have any relative who has been raped," Justice Bobde asked the lawyer.

An uneasy calm prevailed among the lawyers in the courtroom after the bench's remarks.

When Sharma persisted with his arguments, the bench dismissed his petition saying it cannot be entertained.

The apex court had on 11 April agreed to hear a plea for a CBI probe into the Unnao gangrape case allegedly involving a BJP lawmaker from Uttar Pradesh.

Sharma's plea has also alleged that the rape victim's father was tortured and killed in the police custody at the behest of the "ruling party" in the state. He also sought the court's direction for a CBI probe into a case of kidnapping and rape of a minor girl last July allegedly involving a BJP legislator.

Alleging that the complaint had not named the legislator "under political pressure" and the state police would not carry out a "fair investigation under compulsion", it said the matter should be handed over to the CBI for an independent investigation.

The public interest petition had also sought protection and compensation to the victims' kin, as was provided in the Nirbhaya gangrape case.
The day the Supreme Court dismissed petitions seeking an SIT probe into the death of judge BH Loya, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) asked its MPs to attack Congress president Rahul Gandhi demanding an apology from him by holding press conferences and on social media platforms

New Delhi: The day the Supreme Court dismissed petitions seeking an SIT probe into the death of judge BH Loya, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) asked its MPs to attack Congress president Rahul Gandhi demanding an apology from him by holding press conferences and on social media platforms.

A letter issued by the BJP parliamentary party on Thursday also provided written material for all party MPs asking them to run a campaign against Rahul and the Congress for defaming party President Amit Shah in their respective constituencies.

A bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra, Justice AM Khanwilkar and Justice DY Chandrachud, on Thursday, dismissed the PIL seeking an SIT probe into the death of judge Loya in 2014 in Maharashtra's Nagpur.

Loya was heading the trial court that was holding a trial in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh alleged fake shootout case in which Amit Shah is an accused.

"Every MP should give byte to local TV channels, issue a press statement and hold press conference asking Rahul Gandhi to apologise for defaming Amit Shah," the letter issued with a sign of BJP's parliamentary secretary Balasubrahmanyam Kamarsu read.

The party also asked the MPs to use all the social media platforms, including Twitter and WhatsApp, or SMS to campaign over the issue.

"Retweet the tweets by central BJP leaders and use local languages," the letter read.

Congress Spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala posted the letter on his twitter account, saying the effort was to stop an enquiry into the case.

"Lameduck efforts by a vile BJP to stop an enquiry into Judge Loya death reaches its zenith as copycats are regimented to toe the fascist line!," Surjewala said in a tweet.

He said: "So much for democratic functioning where power to think, speak and tweet is held captive by self anointed shenanigans of free speech!!!"

A political slugfest erupted on Thursday after the court's verdict with the BJP accusing Rahul Gandhi as the "invisible hand" behind the pleas for "character assassination" of Amit Shah.

Gandhi had attacked Shah, saying truth has its own way of catching up with people like him.
A Sikh woman from Punjab's Hoshiarpur district who went to Pakistan on a pilgrimage has reportedly embraced Islam and married a Lahore-based Pakistani man.

Chandigarh: A Sikh woman from Punjab's Hoshiarpur district who went to Pakistan on a pilgrimage has reportedly embraced Islam and married a Lahore-based Pakistani man, according to her family which alleged that she may have fallen into the hands of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence and forced to convert and remarry.

The family of the woman, Kiran Bala (31) said on Thursday that they had no official communication from any quarter about her well-being and current status. The family is based in a village in Garhshankar sub-division of Punjab's Hoshiarpur district.

The woman left for Pakistan on the pilgrimage as part of the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) delegation on 12 April and reportedly went missing on 16 April. She went to Pakistan on her Indian passport with a Pakistani visa valid till 21 April.

Reports reaching her family in Punjab indicated that the woman embraced Islam at Darul-Aloom Jamia Naeemia in Lahore on 16 April and later had a "nikah" (marriage) with Pakistani national Muhammed Azam.

Her elderly father-in-law, Tarsem Singh, alleged that his daughter-in-law could have fallen into the hands of the ISI and may have been forced to convert and remarry.

However, what is curious is that in her application for extension of the Pakistan visa, her name was mentioned as Amna Bibi while the signature was done as Amina.

She applied for extension of the visa, citing "threats of assassination" to her life in India, before Pakistan's foreign affairs ministry, according to a report in the Pakistani media.

Another report in the news daily also posted pictures of the woman and her visa extension application on its website.

"I had dropped my daughter-in-law with SGPC officials in Amritsar on 10 April for the pilgrimage in Pakistan. The 'jatha' is expected to return on 21 April.

"I cannot believe what has happened. No one has contacted us officially from the SGPC and the foreign ministry. I want my daughter-in-law to be returned safely," Singh, a Sikh religious preacher in his village, told the media.

He alleged that Kiran Bala could be in touch with the Pakistani man (whom she reportedly married) through Facebook as she was using social media frequently on her mobile phone in the past one month.

Around 1,700 Indian pilgrims had gone to Pakistan to visit Sikh shrines, including Panja Sahib Gurdwara near Lahore and Nankana Sahib  the birthplace of Sikhism founder Guru Nanak Dev, on the occasion of Baisakhi on 13 April.

Kiran Bala, a widow, is a mother of three and was living with her children and in-laws at their village. Her husband passed away in 2013.

The visit of the Indian pilgrims to Pakistan has been mired in controversies in the past one week with Pakistani agencies and officials denying permission to Indian Embassy officials to meet the visiting delegation members.

India strongly took up the matter with Pakistan earlier this week. Posters of Khalistan, a separate Sikh homeland, were also put up at the places where the Indian delegation was visiting.
The Supreme Court on Friday dismissed a plea by fugitive don Dawood Ibrahim's mother Ameena Bi Kaskar and sister Haseena Parkar challenging the attachment of their properties in Mumbai by the government.

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Friday dismissed a plea by fugitive don Dawood Ibrahim's mother Ameena Bi Kaskar and sister Haseena Parkar challenging the attachment of their properties in Mumbai by the government.

A bench of justices RK Agrawal and AM Sapre dismissed the plea, saying the properties belonged to Dawood Ibrahim.

His mother Amina Bi and sister Hasina Parker's (both dead now) had challenged the attachment order of their residential properties in Mumbai.

They had a total of seven residential properties in their names. Of these, two are in the mother's name and five are in the sister's name. The properties worth crores of rupees have allegedly been acquired with Dawood Ibrahim's ill-gotten wealth.

The two women had approached the apex court challenging the order of the Delhi High Court, which had turned down their plea against the order for seizure of their properties in Mumbai under the Smugglers And Foreign Exchange Manipulators Forfeiture Of Property Act (SAFEMA).

The Act provides for forfeiture of "illegally acquired properties" of smugglers and foreign exchange manipulators and their relatives.

The petitioners had pleaded that they were not duly served forfeiture notices and so the subsequent proceedings to attach their properties at Nagpada in south Mumbai were illegal and they should be given a fresh opportunity to challenge the forfeiture notices.
Ahmedabad Crime Branch arrested three persons on Friday in connection with the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in Surat, earlier this month.

A technical surveillance team of the Ahmedabad Crime Branch arrested three persons on Friday in connection with the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in Surat, earlier this month. Police also seized a vehicle that might have been used to dump the victim's body, sources said.

While the prime accused, identified as Amar Singh who worked as a construction labourer in Surat, was arrested from Gangapur in Rajasthan, two of his associates were arrested from Surat city. All three are from Rajasthan, police said.

A case against unidentified persons under the Protection Of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act was registered after the mutilated body of an unidentified minor was recovered from beside the Hazira-Mumbai highway a few days ago.

Autopsy reports had suggested that the victim was confined for several days and tortured before being brutally raped and killed. The report showed 86 injuries on her body, including her private parts.

Police had launched a massive search operation for the accused and were working to determine the identity of the victim.

Earlier this week, a couple from Andhra Pradesh contacted the police, claiming the victim was their daughter and provided them with a photograph of their missing child.

Police said the photograph shows a tattoo on the girl's hand but the body recovered does not have any such markings. A DNA-test has been conducted to ascertain the truth.

But the arrests have shed new light on the victim's identity. Police said that an examination of CCTV footages and primary investigation suggest that the victim lived with her mother, who also worked as a construction labourer in Surat.

Police sources said the three accused were identified after closely examining CCTV footage and call records from all mobile towers in the area.

Though the arrests mark an important development in the case, police investigations are on to ascertain the identity and location of the victim's mother.

Sources said the victim continued to live with the three accused persons after her mother went missing. Police are to trying to locate the victim's mother for further leads.

"The primary accused was arrested from Rajasthan and two of his associates have been arrested from Surat city," police said, adding that a vehicle that was allegedly used to dump the victim's body on the highway has also been seized. The motive behind the heinous crime is yet to be established.

The author is a member of The NewsCart, a Bengaluru-based media startup.
As the movement drew more crowd, with nearly 1,000 people participating in the protest programme led by Maliwal on Friday, her fast has become ground for much politicking and a rallying point for anti-BJP voices.

Even as the Delhi Chief Minister appealed to Swati Maliwal, chairman of Delhi Commission for Women (DCW) to end her fast, she decided to stick to her demand of death penalty for rape convicts within six months and continue the strike. Maliwal was on the eighth day of her strike on Friday.

Addressing the media at Samta Sthal in Delhi, Maliwal said, "My demand for capital punishment for rapists within six months is yet to be met. I will not end the fast until it is met. It is not just my battle, but the battle of every Indian woman."

The chief minister's appeal to Maliwal to end the fast came after the Centre submitted a letter to the Supreme Court of India agreeing to change the laws to incorporate capital punishment for persons convicted of raping girls below 12 years of age.

Congratulations @SwatiJaiHind U shud now end the fast. We all shud now work towards effective implementation of these laws and keep working towards rest of the demands. https://t.co/Ph9X3PQomg  Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) April 20, 2018

In its letter, the Centre told the apex court that it has started the process to amend the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO Act), 2012, to ensure maximum punishment of death penalty in child rape cases where the victim is under 12 years of age.

But Maliwal told the media that her demand to get justice for rape victims within six months is yet to be fulfilled.

"We have seen that many promises made in affidavits submitted in the court of law remain unfulfilled by the government. We have no fast track courts for speedy delivery of justice to women. If the government is committed to provide justice it should constitute fast track courts," Maliwal said.

Maliwal's physical strength has deteriorated steeply over the past week and today she could hardly managed to speak. "She is unable to walk properly. She is using a wheel chair to move about," said one of her aides. But Maliwal claimed that she is still physically strong enough to continue the fast.

"Today doctors have conducted blood tests and have found that I am perfectly fine. All the parameters of my health are normal," she said.

Maliwal sat on a hunger strike in response to the brutal rape and murder of an eight year old girl at Kathua in Jammu and the rape of a minor by a BJP MLA and his aides in Unnao. Demanding speedy justice to rape victims she said, "If the government can ban currency notes overnight why can't the prime minister take some strict measures ensuring safety for women."

As the movement drew more crowd, with nearly 1,000 people participating in the protest programme led by Maliwal on Friday, her fast has become ground for much politicking and a rallying point for anti-BJP voices.

Politicians from anti-Modi groups and parties continue to visit her and express their support to her cause. On the fourth day of her fast, sidelined BJP leaders Yashwant Sinha and Shatrughan Sinha visited and expressed solidarity with her.

On Friday, Ali Anwar from Sharad Yadav's faction of JD(U) visited Maliwal and suggested that a nation has to get ready for a greater fight against the BJP.

"A single rape case is seen as a blot on the nation's pride. But presently we can see a series of such cases taking place across India. The government has maintained silence over these issues. I think that there is no point in keeping much expectations from them. We need to get ready for a decisive political battle with BJP," he said.

Congress leader Tehseen Poonawala said that if the law of death penalty for rapists is accepted and enforced then the BJP will have a hard time protecting many of it's leaders. South Indian actress Rajashri Ponnappa also paid a visit to Maliwal and expressed solidarity with her.
Actor-turned-BJP politician S Ve Shekher on Friday tendered an apology, saying he had forwarded a friend's post 'without reading' the content.

Chennai: With his shared Facebook post against the media and women scribes drawing the ire of journalists, actor-turned-BJP politician S Ve Shekher today tendered an apology, saying he had forwarded a friend's post "without reading" the content. The message was forwarded "without reading the content, by mistake... was unintentional", he said. "When it was pointed out by a friend that the content was abusive, it was removed immediately," he said in a statement.

Shekher courted a controversy when he shared the derogatory post against the media, especially women journalists, drawing criticism from various quarters. The Facebook post was reportedly shared on Thursday but was found removed later. It makes insinuations against the media and women journalists in light of the "patgate" row involving Tamil Nadu Governor Banwarilal Purohit.

The 78-year-old governor had patted on the cheek of a woman journalist earlier this week during the conclusion of a press meet in Chennai, apparently to diplomatically avoid queries posed by her. The incident had triggered a furore with political parties, including the opposition party Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), calling for his removal as Tamil Nadu governor. Purohit later apologised to the woman scribe.

Shekher's shared post also had some caustic references to the woman scribe whose cheek the governor patted. These drew instant condemnation, with a number of journalists lashing out at his post, which was found removed later. In his statement, the actor-politician said he does not endorse the views expressed in the post he shared.

The Chennai Union of Journalists denounced Shekher over the post, with many journalists taking to Twitter and Facebook to express their anger. "I come from a family that respects women and women journalists. If I had hurt anyone in the very few minutes of (sharing) that post... it was not on purpose and (I express) my heartfelt apologies," he said.

Shekher, however, said he was "surprised" to find some people circulated the screenshots of the post without finding them offensive. Meanwhile, some persons have also filed a police complaint against Shekher.
Police have arrested two more persons for their alleged involvement in the violence in Morena during the 2 April Bharat Bandh, an officer said.

Morena: Police have arrested two more persons for their alleged involvement in the violence in Morena during the 2 April Bharat Bandh, an officer said.

With the arrest of the duo, the total number of those arrested from Morena district in connection with the violence has gone up to 100, police said.

"The two accused, identified as Neeraj Chandolia (28) and Jai Kumar (32), were arrested on Thursday based on a tip-off," city Kotwali police station in-charge Yogendra Yadav said.

"Both the accused had absconded after indulging in violent acts that led to the death of one person in Morena. They were identified based on the CCTV footage," he added.

They were carrying a reward of Rs 10,000 each on their heads, Yadav said.

Gwalior, Bhind and Morena districts in Madhya Pradesh witnessed massive violence during the bandh, organised by Dalit groups to protest a recent Supreme Court order that allegedly diluted certain provisions of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.

Eight persons died in the violence in Madhya Pradesh. While four persons lost their lives in Gwalior, three others died in Bhind and one in Morena.
A major cover-up operation seems to be afoot to put the blame of the death of the Unnao rape survivor's father on the doctors of Unnao District Hospital.

Editor's note: This is the third in a three-part series of ground reports from Unnao and nearby villages. These articles will examine the culture of fear and repression that is pervasive in the region, and which is typified by the rape of the 17-year-old girl in June 2017.

A major cover-up operation seems to be afoot to put the blame of the death of the Unnao rape survivor's father on the doctors of the Uma Dixit Unnao District Hospital. The rape survivor's father died in Unnao District Hospital on the morning of 9 April at 3:40 am.

He was brought to the hospital on the night of 8 April at 9:30 pm in a serious condition, suffering multiple abrasions on his back, buttocks and thighs, perforation of the colon, peritonitis and septicaemia.

But, it is the doctor fraternity who is bearing the onus of responsibility for his death, with the state authorities suspending two senior doctors and ordering an enquiry against another three, without giving them an opportunity to present their point of view.

Sixty-year-old Dr DK Diwedi, chief medical superintendent of the hospital, is in no mood to shoulder the blame for his death.

"I was on leave from 1-4 April and rejoined the hospital on 5 April. The man was brought to the hospital on 3 April during my absence. The hospital records show that he was taken to the emergency with several abrasions on his back, buttocks, thighs arms and shoulders. During the period he was being attended to, I understand that CMO Dr Ved Chaudhary kept ringing up the doctors, demanding he be given a discharge,"

"The call records should be sent for. They will confirm what I am saying," alleges Dr Diwedi, who is one of the doctors suspended.

Dr Prashant Upadhaya was on duty at that time. He felt that given the nature of the man's injuries, he should have remained in the hospital for further treatment. But because of alleged pressure being put on the doctors, Dr Upadhaya made a note on the patient's file that this line of treatment should be continued by the jail doctors. The girl's father was then discharged and taken to the Unnao jail, located five kilometres from the hospital.

When this question of his release was put to other doctors in the hospital, they also confirmed that this notation by Dr Upadhaya was available in the hospital records. The CBI team that visited Unnao on Tuesday (17 April) has also taken a photocopy of this notation.

Interestingly, a team of two doctors, Dr Alok Pandey and Dr SN Gupta visited the Unnao jail hospital on 6 April, where they treated fourteen patients. But Singh was not shown to these doctors. Doctors from the district hospital visit the jail on a regular basis. It is curious, the doctors at the district hospital ask, why he was not brought for a checkup before the two doctors visiting the jail.

On 7 April, the survivor's father, Singh was once again brought to the hospital at around 11 am. This time, he was not escorted by a police guard but had the jail pharmacist Ram Kumar as his escort. He was attended to by Dr Pande and Dr Gupta. He was then taken for an ultrasound.

According to the radiologist, Dr SK Johrie: "I went through his medical reports before doing his ultrasound. His blood and urine were normal as has been shown in the tests that had been conducted. He walked to the clinic by himself without any assistance. The time then was around 1 pm."

Recalling the series of events, Johrie said: "I asked him if he had any pain in his stomach or difficulty passing stool and he said it was all normal. When an ultrasound is conducted, we do look at the gallbladder and the entire region and he said he was fine. If his intestine was indeed perforated, there would have been some indications."

"The question is what happened between the time of his discharge at 2 pm on 7 April and 9:30 pm on 8 April, when he was brought back to the district hospital with perforation of the intestine and 19 abrasions on his back? It is for the jail authorities and for the jail police to give an answer as to what happened in that period of 36 hours?" Dr Johrie asked.

The CMO, Dr Chaudhary, agrees that the rape survivor's father was brought back to the hospital in a serious condition. ` "The man complained of stomach ache and vomiting. He also said he had not had had bowel movements for two days. His younger brother, Mahesh Singh, knew that his brother's situation was not good because he rang me up and told me that he was complaining of a pain in his stomach,"

"He was suffering from multiple problems and died six to seven hours after being admitted to the hospital. Since his condition was not good, the doctor on duty should have referred him to Kanpur Medical College," Chaudhary said.

"Following his death, a post-mortem was conducted which confirmed that he was suffering from a perforated intestine. There could have been a small perforation which did show up in the ultrasound," the CMO added.

When asked if he had phoned the doctors to ensure an early release from the hospital on 4 April, as has been alleged by them, Choudhary replied, "The responsibility for the discharge is on the doctor on duty. If the patient is dying, he should not have released him. I was not present on the spot."

When this same question was put to the radiologist Dr SK Johrie, he replied, "We are not so strong. We follow the directives given by the CMO. All those injuries occurred in jail. It is a clear case of death in judicial custody."

Dr Diwedi further confirmed that the Unnao jail, as is true of all jails, has its own team of doctors and its own jail police force. When he was asked to show a copy of Singh's medical records, including his ultrasound, Dr Diwedi replied, "They are all with the jail authorities. We do not keep them in the hospital."

When asked why not, Dr Diwedi replied, "This is the practice here. If we ask for them, they will send them to the hospital."

When the CMO was asked why the medical records of a jailed inmate were not kept in the hospital, he feigned ignorance.

"They should have been with the hospital," he said. Dr Chaudhary denied he had acted under pressure from the district magistrate or other senior authorities but there is no doubt that his intervention for an early release, as alleged by Dr Diwedi, must have been at the instance of a powerful lobby working in the favour of the Unnao rape accused, MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar.

Suspension of a doctor means they are on half salary and have to report to the authorities in Lucknow. Apart from Dr Diwedi, Dr Upadhaya has been suspended. Regarding the departmental enquiry, the CMO confirmed that it is conducted by an IAS officer and has not started yet. It is obvious that the enquiry will start only once the CBI completes its enquiry.

The CMO clarified, "The orders for an enquiry have been given by the state directorate. The Allahabad High Court is also monitoring this case."

Meanwhile, the rape survivor appeared before the CBI special magistrate Sapna Tripathi to give her statement under CrPc section 164. According to CBI sources, her statement ran into six pages. Tripathi's team was in Unnao on Tuesday to crosscheck the minor's statement.

In her complaints against the Bangarmau BJP MLA, she alleged a woman from her village Shashi Singh had taken her to his house around 8 pm. Shashi had taken her to the MLA's house to put in a word at her behest, so she could get a job, but the latter confined her inside his house in Makhi and sexually assaulted her.

Apart from this case, the CBI is also investigating a second FIR stating that she had been abducted by three youth in her village at 10 pm on 11 June, 2017.

While the Makhi police failed to register an FIR after the girl went missing, the boys were arrested and jailed under IPC sections 363 and 366 on 21 June, 2017.

The other two FIRs were lodged on 3 April, 2018, after the girl's father was attacked by Sengar's brother Atul and his four accomplices because he refused to withdraw the FIR against the BJP MLA.

The rape of this 17-year old has created an uproar throughout the country and was made all the more poignant because of the brutal methods used to silence her father.

A video of the father with lesions and bruises across his body surfaced subsequently, testifying to the terror tactics that local politicians employ to silence those who dare cross swords with them.

Click here to read Part I  Survivor says she's haunted by father's death; mother fears family can never go home

Click here to read Part II  Fear and loathing grips Makhi as families of survivor, accused trade charges
A top US admiral has warned Congress against imposing any sanctions on countries like India and Indonesia for purchasing defence equipment from Russia.

Washington: A top US admiral has warned Congress against imposing any sanctions on countries like India and Indonesia for purchasing defence equipment from Russia, saying any such move would pose a concern for America's defence ties in the Indo-Pacific and increase its partner's dependence on Moscow.

Admiral Philip S Davidson, the nominee for the US Pacific Command Commander (PACOM), told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday during his confirmation that India's military had long relied on the former Soviet Union and then Russia to follow with some of its technology and training.

"We have to break down that historical background to a certain extent, break down is not the correct work but be willing to work with that so that we can move forward with India," Davidson said.

The top Pentagon Admiral warned Congress that imposing any sanctions on India according to Countering Americas Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) for its purchase of significant defence equipment from Russia would have an adverse impact on the relationship.

The CAATSA includes sanctions against countries that engage in significant transactions with the Russian defence and intelligence sectors.

India could face sanctions for purchasing high value military defence items, in particular state-of-the-art S-400 missile defence system, from Russia under the act.

"It is a fundamental priority for the United States and PACOM to continually develop our alliances and partnerships so that all nations benefit from an environment that safeguards security, stability, prosperity, and peace for the entire region," Davidson said.

He said Russia's operations and engagements throughout the Indo-Pacific continue to rise, "both to advance their own strategic interests and to undermine US interests".

"Russia also sees economic opportunities to build markets for energy exports and arms sales in the region," he said.

"CAATSA sanctions pose a concern for our defense relationships in the Indo-Pacific with countries such as India, Vietnam, and Indonesia. If the US decides to sanction these partner nations for their purchases of Russian equipment, this decision may hinder the growth of each developing partnership and increase each partner's dependence on Russia," Davidson warned.

He also underscored the need to establish a foundation in a military-to-military relationship with India.

"It's important to get to establish a foundation in a military to military relationship," Davidson said.

"I think the historic opportunity for the United States going forward is probably with India and that would be a relationship that I intend to work on with great energy," he said.
The US, India and Japan intend to work together on high-standard projects in the Indo-Pacific region 'that make economic sense' amidst China's 'predatory' economic behaviour, according to a senior Trump administration diplomat

Washington: The US, India and Japan intend to work together on high-standard projects in the Indo-Pacific region "that make economic sense" amidst China's "predatory" economic behaviour, according to a senior Trump administration diplomat.

Initiated by Japan, and supported by the US and India, the three countries are working on projects that can provide an alternative to what the former Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson described as the "predatory" economics of China, the US Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for South and Central Asian Affairs Alice Wells said.

This approach was opposed to the "predatory" economic behaviour of China that's creating a burden on countries in the region, she told PTI.

"We intend to work together and with partner nations in support of high-standard projects that make economic sense, that genuinely benefit the recipient countries, and that can attract private capital so as to lift nations up rather than weigh them down in unsustainable debt," she said.

Wells, who has been heading the South and Central Asia Bureau of the State Department since 26 June, 2017 in the absence of a full-fledged assistant secretary of state, recently returned from New Delhi where she participated in a trilateral dialogue involving the US, India and Japan.

"As then-secretary Tillerson noted, countries should not have to take on unsustainable debt in order to build the sorts of crucial infrastructure they need to develop their economies," she said while refraining from naming the projects that the three countries are working together on for the region.

The top US official said that the three countries shared the commitment to the principles of sustainable growth, transparency, the rule of law, and a legal and regulatory environment.

"The Indo-Pacific strategy recognises that there are both substantial challenges and opportunities in the region and that our partners and allies in the region share our vital interest in upholding the rules-based order," she said.

The recent US-India-Japan Trilateral Dialogue was a good example of this approach, Wells said.

"We addressed efforts to enhance cooperation on regional connectivity and infrastructure, and discussed maritime issues as well as serious security threats such as the DPRK (North Korea) and non-proliferation," Wells said.

The US and India are working bilaterally, and in cooperation with other like-minded partners like Japan and Australia, to advance their shared vision for the Indo-Pacific, she said.

"India is one of our lead security partners in the Indo-Pacific region and a Major Defence Partner  a status unique to India," Wells said.

"We will continue to work toward stronger strategic ties and a more integrated defence trade relationship that will enhance India's leadership role in the Indo-Pacific region," she said.

Wells said the US' bilateral defence cooperation with India had grown "significantly" in recent years.

"The defence sales to India have grown from virtually zero to over $15 billion in the last decade," she said, adding that the Trump administration was committed to working with India to offer the best platforms and technologies available.
According to the officials, other than the security cover, the guard outside his official residence has also been taken back.

The Uttar Pradesh government on Thursday withdrew the 'Y' category security cover provided to Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar, who is one of the accused in the Unnao rape case, an official said.

As per India Today, the state government made the decision to aid the CBI in its investigation in the Unnao rape case. The move comes seven days after Sengar was arrested by the CBI.

According to the officials, other than the security cover, the guard outside his official residence has also been taken back.

The Bangarmau legislator from Unnao district enjoyed 'Y' category security cover, which allowed him protection by a head constable, three constables and three bodyguards from the state police.

On 14 April, Sengar was sent to CBI custody for seven days for his alleged involvement in the rape of a minor in Unnao last year. The CBI had arrested Sengar on 13 April for the assault, murder and rape after an Allahabad High Court order. Sengar was grilled by the investigation agency for close to 15 hours.

His arrest had come only after the Allahabad High Court rapped the investigation agency. "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 had said in its order.

The probe agency has asked to file a status report by 2 May.

Sengar, his brother Atul and the others are charged with murder and assault of the rape survivor's father, apart from facing charges of gang-raping a minor under the stringent POCSO (Protection of Children from Sexual Offences) Act.

In February, the girl's family moved court seeking to include the MLA's name in the rape case. After this move, the victim's father was booked by the police under the Arms Act on 3 April this year and put in jail on 5 April.

Alleging inaction and coercion from powerful people, the victim attempted self-immolation in front of the chief minister's house on 8 April and the next day, her father died in jail with post-mortem report suggesting serious injuries on his body.

Faced with the embarrassment of its own MLA being involved in the case, the state government had referred the matter to the Centre on Friday for a CBI probe  a day before Allahabad High Court was to pronounce its order.

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had recently said that 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.

"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 chief minister had said.

Sengar, a four-term MLA, enjoys immense clout cutting across party lines in the rural areas around Unnao district, a semi-urban area about 70 km from Lucknow.

With inputs from agencies
A day after an Uttar Pradesh minister heaped praise on Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo Mayawati and then retracted it, another Cabinet member embarrassed the Yogi Adityanath government by accusing it of betraying backward class students

Lucknow: A day after an Uttar Pradesh minister heaped praise on Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) supremo Mayawati and then retracted it, another Cabinet member embarrassed the Yogi Adityanath government by accusing it of betraying backward class students.

"I am ready to quit the government any time, if I am asked to do so," Suheldev Bhartiya Samaj Party (SBSP) leader and Uttar Pradesh backward class welfare minister Om Prakash Rajbhar told PTI on Thursday.

The BJP ally complained that the students were not getting the scholarships meant for them.

"There is a lot of hue and cry in the entire state over scholarships and fee reimbursement of backward class students, he said.

This is injustice against them. The state government is betraying them. Of the 26 lakh backward class students, around 11 lakh have not benefitted till now," the minister said.

Rajbhar had recently kept the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on tenterhooks over his support for a candidate in the Rajya Sabha polls.

Asked whether his SBSP will continue its alliance with BJP till 2019, Rajbhar said, "We have formed an alliance till 2024. If BJP says it does not need us, I will immediately return my ministerial post. If raising voice for the backwards is wrong, then BJP can immediately snap ties with us," he added.

He said a state government order issued on 16 April allowed scheduled caste, minority and general category students who could not apply for scholarships, or if there were some discrepancies in their cases, to do so online up to 15 May.

No such initiative has been taken for backward class students," he said.

The minister said when he discussed this with Yogi Adityanath, he was told more money was allotted in this year's budget for scholarships, compared to the previous Samajwadi Party government.I don't know what was done earlier. I want scholarships for 100 percent of backward class students, the minister said.

He said he had also talked about this with BJP president Amit Shah.

The government order smacked of stepmotherly treatment, but the backward class leaders in BJP do not have the guts to speak in front of the chief minister, the minister said.

A government is run with the support of everyone, but this is not done here," he added.

He also levelled allegations over the appointments to the state's selection board for teachers.

"Why were the relatives of Union ministers Nitin Gadkari and Rajnath Singh and deputy chief minister Dinesh Sharma and Uttar Pradesh BJP president Mahendra Nath Pandey given places on the board?

In the recent Rajya Sabha elections, Rajbhar had threatened not to support BJP's extra candidate from Uttar Pradesh. He was mollified by Amit Shah who promised to come down to Lucknow and have a detailed talk with him in the presence of the chief minister.

Rajbhar, whose party has four MLAs in the 403-member Assembly, then agreed to vote for the BJP nominee. Shah recently visited the state capital and met Rajbhar, but he still sounded disgruntled.
The TDP president will be staging the protest in Vijayawada on his 68th birthday to pressurise the Central government to fulfill all commitments made at the time of bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh in 2014.

Andhra Pradesh chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu launched a day-long fast on his birthday on Friday to protest against the "indifferent" attitude of the Narendra Modi-led Central government and its refusal to grant special category status to the state.

Currently going on in Vijayawada, the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) president's fast is an attempt to pressurise the Central government to fulfill all commitments made at the time of bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh in 2014. Naidu, who turned 68 on Friday will fast till 7 pm, reports said.

Live from Dharma Porata Deeksha https://t.co/VBcGHOa7Bc  N Chandrababu Naidu (@ncbn) April 20, 2018

Addressing the Telugu Desam Party coordination committee meeting in Vijayawada on Monday, Naidu had asked 13 ministers to lead the protest in each district.

The remaining nine ministers will be joining the chief minister in Vijayawada. "All MLAs and in-charges of 175 Assembly segments should organise mass hunger-strike in their respective constituencies in solidarity with my fast," the TDP chief had said.

He had also directed party leaders to organise bicycle rallies in all constituencies from 21 April to highlight his government's "victories". Public meetings should be held in all constituency headquarters, he had said.

The move is seen as a step to wrest initiative from Opposition YSR Congress, whose MPs quit from their posts on the special category status issue, according to The New Indian Express.

The chief minister also wrote an open letter asking the people of Andhra Pradesh to support the "satyagraha", reported The Times of India. He urged people from the state including those who have moved abroad, to participate in the day-long Dharma Porata Deeksha (fight for justice) and express gratitude for the motherland.

Naidu made his announcement to fast on 14 April. It came close on the heels of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's day-long hunger strike on 12 April to protest the disruption of the Parliament. "Is it not the Central government which is responsible for the Parliament not functioning smoothly?" Naidu had asked.

The second half of the Budget Session of the Parliament was washed out due to protests by various parties including the TDP, which sought to move a no-confidence motion against the government after pulling out of BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA).

Naidu's decision to sit on fast came amid ongoing protests by various political parties in the state against the Centre for not fulfilling its promises.

At a meeting in Guntur district on 14 April, Naidu said there would be no compromise on the state's rights.

He also announced that a massive public meeting would be organized at Tirupati on 30 April with the slogan "save the state from betrayal and conspiracy", recalling that it was in the same temple that four years ago, Modi, as the prime ministerial candidate, had promised special status but did not fulfill it after coming to power.

Lashing out both at BJP and the opposition parties YSR Congress and Congress, Naidu also appealed to the people to ensure the victory of TDP in all 25 Lok Sabha seats in the state in 2019.

He recalled that the TDP played a key role in government formation at the Centre in the past. "We played a key role in the National Front, United Front and the NDA-I," he said.

The chief minister was speaking at a meeting at Sakhamuru in Guntur district after unveiling the model of Dr BR Ambedkar memorial park, proposed to be built at a cost of Rs 100 crore on 20 acres. Naidu said that the 125-feet tall statue of Ambedkar will come up in the proposed park, which will also have a research centre. He vowed to complete the project in 18 months.

With inputs from agencies
Congress, Opposition's CJI impeachment motion is a doomed-to-fail process undertaken in a bid to grab headlines, that is bound to end up in embarrassment.

Despite a clear rift within the Congress party and lack of unanimity outside  among the members of the Opposition parties  in signing a motion for the removal of Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dipak Misra, the Congress and other Opposition parties are hell-bent on embarrassing themselves by going on an overdrive on the issue.

After the fallout of the Justice Loya case, the Opposition parties have sharpened their claws and teeth to pounce upon the CJI, in order to impeach him.

Before casting aspersions on the government and the Supreme Court by initiating a doomed-to-fail process in a bid to grab headlines to achieve its objective of undermining any judgment that the CJI may give  as happened in the Justice Loya case or might happen in the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid case  the Congress should have first put its own house in order.

Internal rift

While the Congress along with the Opposition parties has managed to get the signatures of 71 Rajya Sabha members to move a motion on the removal of the CJI, there has been an apparent rift within the party.

A section of the Congress party, that includes former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, senior Congress leaders and former Cabinet ministers P Chidambaram and Salman Khurshid, is clearly not in favour of the move. The dissenting voice within the party is loud and clear.

According to sources, the issue of removal of the CJI was delayed as Singh, along with a section of Congress MPs  who are also lawyers  was not in favour of the 'impeachment of the CJI', as they believed that it would adversely affect the honour of the Supreme Court.

"It is the decision of the party to move an impeachment motion against the CJI. So, I won't comment on this decision. However, Dr Singh and a couple of MPs who are also in the legal profession were not in favour of this move. The issue had been discussed within the party. Singh is not a signatory to this motion," a former Congress Rajya Sabha MP told Firstpost, on condition of anonymity.

Another senior Congress leader, Khurshid, who's strongly against the move, reportedly said: "The honour of the judiciary cant be compromised. The judiciary is well equipped to handle everything. Everyone may not agree with the judiciary."

He also added that the opinion was his personal and he was not a party to CJI's impeachment decision. "The irony is that I'm an officer (lawyer) of the court and I respect it. It (impeachment move) is the party's decision."

Meeting of the Opposition

Congress and other Opposition parties met on Friday morning to decide on the strategy of CJI's impeachment. The meeting was attended by the MPs belonging to Congress, NCP, Samajwadi Party (SP), Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and the Left. It was decided to meet the chairman of Rajya Sabha M Venkaiah Naidu and submit a notice of impeachment motion, as the opposition has the requisite numbers to do so.

For an impeachment motion or a motion to remove the CJI, it should have the signature of at least 50 members in Rajya Sabha. In this case, the opposition, in fact, has 71 signatures (including seven members who have retired).

Lack of unanimity

The move has divided not just the Congress but also the ranks of the Opposition. Last month, the Rajya Sabha members of the Opposition parties discreetly initiated a signature campaign to a move a motion for the removal of the CJI. The backdrop was a presser called by four senior judges of the SC.

In an unprecedented move in January this year, Justice J Chelameswar, the second senior-most judge in the Supreme Court, along with Justices Ranjan Gogoi, Madan Lokur and Kurian Joseph held a press conference, and wrote to the CJI that some important cases were "assigned by the Chief Justice of this court selectively to benches of their preference without rational basis".

The allegation against the CJI is that he compromised with the independence of the SC. However, despite meeting on Friday, the TMC  a major force in the Opposition block  stayed away from signing the notice. According to sources, DMK also didn't sign the motion.

"I'm not an official spokesperson to comment. But what I can say is that we were a part of Friday morning's meeting. Our MPs didn't sign," a TMC office-bearer told Firstpost.

This also raises a question  on which side is TMC after all? Though the TMC supremo and West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee had met UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi during her recent visit to Delhi, the TMC MPs stayed away from signing the motion related to impeachment  which is crucial for the Congress.

A source in the Parliament claimed, "It's at the behest of the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) that the TMC stayed away from signing. The BJD is not backing this move against the CJI."

Congress' stand

After Friday's meeting, senior Congress leaders Kapil Sibal and Ghulam Nabi Azad held a press conference in the national capital to tell their side of the story, more so to justify why the former prime minister had stayed away from signing the notice.

While denying that Singh wasn't against the motion and justifying why a few other leaders didn't sign the notice, Sibal said, "It's absolutely false that Dr Singh refused to sign the impeachment motion. We didn't involve him intentionally as he's an ex-prime minister."

They justified the absence of Chidambaram and others by saying, "They aren't included as they are having cases in SC and high court."

"We're one on this issue. It's the official stand of the Congress. We have got 71 signatures. He's (Singh) a former prime minister so we won't bring him in this issue," added Azad.

Now what?

The seven Opposition parties led by the Congress have submitted a notice for the removal of the CJI. But, whether it'll materialise or not is highly debatable.

Constitutional expert SK Sharma said, "It's a tedious and long-drawn procedure, and may take more than a year. The Opposition needs to secure a two-thirds majority to get the motion passed, which is not possible in their case. They simply don't have the numbers. It's more a political gimmick and aimed at creating noise. No matter how hard they try, they won't be able to do it."

We have had instances in the past when a motion for removal of judges didn't succeed. The motion for removal of SC justice V Ramaswami, Calcutta High Court justice Soumitra Sen, Chief Justice of Sikkim High Court PD Dinakaran, Justice JB Pardiwala of Gujarat High Court and Justice Nagarjuna Reddy of the High Court of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana  all failed to materialise.

Right now, the Opposition has submitted the notice and the ball is in the court of the Rajya Sabha chairperson, who has to take the decision on whether to accept it or not.

The Rajya Sabha chairperson is a quasi-judicial officer. He has the power either to accept or reject it. Only time will tell whether he accepts it or not, and even if he does so, this motion will be just another example  as in the court of law, where the process of fighting most cases itself becomes a punishment.
What is most dangerous is that post Monday's hartal a sustained polarisation effort has commenced over social media with the so called torchbearers of both the communities.

Hartals (strikes) are not new to Kerala. But when a call for hartal over social media evokes an unprecedented response wreaking havoc across five districts of the state, leading to large scale violence in certain pockets that are dominated by one particular community, it certainly rings alarm bells for the state's law enforcing agency.

The Kerala Police are however not mincing their words this time round. The state police chief who is otherwise tight-lipped over sensitive issues has spoken out loud and clear.

"There has certainly been an attempt to inflame communal passions through the social media which had resulted in this hartal. We have enough evidence to believe that the aim was to create a communal riot like situation in the state. We cannot let this happen in Kerala at any cost and it will be dealt with an iron hand," said Lokanath Behera, Director General of Police, Kerala.

Even when the police chief claims that he would take all steps to not let a communal riot burst out in the state, what happened in certain pockets in Kerala on Monday was nothing short of it as the police clearly failed to preempt such a scenario.

Tanur, a little town in Muslim dominated Malappuram was the worst hit as rioters vandalised shops, stoned vehicles and burned tyres on the national highway.

Pictures of young men, with their faces half covered, stoning the policemen prompted people to draw similarities between Kerala's hartal and the protests witnessed in Kashmir valley.

North Kerala was on the boil like never before but with no one to take the blame for it. Perhaps for the first time in the state, there was a hartal without anyone to own the responsibility.

But the underlying narrative was all too evident. The brutal crime committed at Kathua on the eight year old had taken a completely communal colour. It was Hindu vs Muslim.

After the fire burned out, the state police had little doubts that the Popular Front of India (PFI) and its political arm the Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI), both Islamist separatist groups had ignited it.

"We have credible evidence to believe that the PFI and SDPI workers are the ones who led the violence at many places. There may have been others also involved. A lot of youth who had no political allegiance have also been arrested. But the whole thing was managed by these hardline groups. Once we track the origin of the message we will get to the bottom of it. A proxy server seems to have been used to spread the message around," a senior official who is investigating Monday's incidents told Firstpost.

According to the numbers released by the police 265 PFI/SDPI activists have been booked for rioting out of a total 951 who had been arrested till mid-week.

But what is baffling even for the police is another statistics. Out of the rest of 686 arrests made, 270 people swear allegiance with the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML), 125 are CPM activists, 60 are Congress workers and around 235 have no direct political leanings.

Hameed Chennamangaloor, a sociologist and a political critic based out of north Kerala, explains this strange mix of protesters: "See we always thought that workers from other parties lose their cadre to the hardline groups. But this incident pan-Kerala actually shows that such hardline Islamist elements have successfully infiltrated the rank and file of major political parties in Kerala. They are forming sub groups inside these political parties, which will then take forward their radical ideology inside these mainstream political parties. It is a terribly dangerous slope that we are slipping off from."

Chennamangaloor says that this trend can only be arrested if mainstream political parties come forward to reject the radical outlook in strong terms. But with electoral ambitions in sight, hardly anyone would take that step.

Definite PFI imprints

To make more sense of the turn of events FirstPost talked to the top brass of the PFI and SDPI in Kerala.

While they are outright denying any such official call given for a hartal, both the organisations have not only shied away from condemning Monday's violence but are also, in spirit, supportive of everything that happened on the hartal day.

Naseeruddin Elamaram is the state president of the PFI in Kerala. Speaking to Firstpost from Kozhikode he puts across his own arguments defending the violence.

"What happened on Monday was a display of the anger of genuine people to the misrule of the Modi government in the last four years. Kathua rape is only the tipping point. See what all inhuman acts have happened in the last few years. Killing in the name of cow, love jihad, how can people tolerate all this? They will surely react. These protests were only a reflection of the existing situation," Elamaram told Firstpost.

When asked about the violence his cadre allegedly unleashed on the streets, Elamaram had a more bizarre take.

"Has there been any hartal in Kerala which has not seen violence? All political parties have unleashed violence before, why single this out? Just because the slogans were against the RSS?" asks Elamaram.

However his next argument is perhaps a definite give-away on the real ownership of Monday's violence.

When asked more on the anti-Hindu tenor of the hartals, Elamarum counters, "How is anti-RSS sloganeering anti-Hindu? Definitely this was an anti-RSS hartal, no doubt in that. Not a single slogan was against any community. I can vouch for it and unlike the news being spread, no Hindu establishment was attacked in the hartal."

The conviction in Elamarum's voice as he explains the exact nature of protests and defends them, further raises questions if PFI indeed planned, fanned, and tacitly supported the hartal. But PFI president's claim of the hartal being just an anti-RSS affair falls flat because as per eye witness accounts in many places small establishments owned by Hindus were singled out and attacked, something which even the Muslim League agrees to.

For instance in Tanur alone, the sloganeering was not only brazenly communal but bakeries and other shops belonging to Hindu community were attacked in particular, which the SDPI now claims is collateral damage of the protest.

"Calling the hartal anti-Hindu is only an attempt to colour it communal. This was a mass protest by youngsters who are very emotional, so naturally it became violent. Now the police have even arrested youngsters who have shared the hartal messages on Facebook and WhatsApp which is wrong. We will soon protest against it," claims Abdul Majeed Faizi, state president of the SDPI.

The SDPI may have its own narrative but ground reports from across all five districts in north Kerala, along with some pockets in the southern part, say that the tone of the hartal was highly communal, putting an entire community in the dock for the Kathua crime. Perhaps, this is why the DGP himself called it an attempt to create a communal riot.

Polarisation was the aim

Social observers say that it is a well concerted effort by extremist elements to divide the society among Hindus and Muslims and then fish in the troubled waters for their respective gains.

"It is beyond a doubt that this was indeed an attempt to hijack a sensitive issue like the rape of this young Muslim girl and create a narrative of Hindu vs Muslim so that certain separatist organisations can pursue their radical ambitions. What is alarming is that at every place the attack was targeted at one community," says CR Neelakandan, political commentator and convenor of Aam Admi Party in Kerala.

What is most dangerous is that post Monday's hartal the so called torchbearers of both the communities have started a sustained polarisation effort over social media. Groups across Facebook and WhatsApp have been spewing communal venom like never before, further drawing a line in an already divided society in Kerala.

"This so called self proclaimed hartal has immensely helped in dividing Kerala communally in the last few days. Especially in the post hartal period, it's the Hindu groups that are now hitting back. By doing such a violent hartal, these Muslim fringe groups have literally played into the hands of the Hindu fringe groups. Now it's a competition between the two, which could once again spill on to the streets," KM Shajahan, noted social activist and left ideologue told Firstpost.

Shajahan says that such polarisation could also get reflected in the electoral process in the near future. A consolidation of the Hindu vote bank in favour of the BJP could very well be a major fallout of such meaningless communal aggression.

Many believe that it could also be the reason the RSS failed to retort to the violence unleashed on Monday. A victim card in run up to the Chengannur by-polls could also help the BJP and the Sangh Parivar is well aware of it, which explains their silence.

CPM's soft stand on terror

The CPM goes soft against such radical elements, is an allegation that has been doing the rounds ever since the Pinarayi Vijayan government came to power in 2016.

But political pundits say that it is only a reflection of the red party's policy degeneration in terms of joining hands with anyone as long as it brings electoral gains.

"It was the Left which had been acting as a vanguard against communalism in Kerala for decades. From there the Left has succumbed to the whims and fancies of the communal forces, not only the Islamist but also the majority Hindutva forces. Apart from a few noises what has it done against fringe radical preachers like Sasikala teacher? Even the Opposition to RSS supremo Mohan Bhagwat's flag hoisting ceremony was just a farce. So if the secular fabric of Kerala is lost tomorrow, the Left has a huge share of blame to take," Shajahan says.

Not only the political party, the Left intelligentsia too had been contributing heavily to the growth of Islamist separatism in the state.

"If you want to arrest communalism you need to condemn it outright. Instead, many of the Left writers and intelligentsia are acting as advocates for minority separatism to grow. They attend their seminars, programmes and end up legitimising their radical ideology which is not what Left parties and their ideologues should be doing," Chennamangaloor ads.

While the CPM continues to be in denial about their cadre crossing the fence, the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) is a terribly worried lot.

That a party that had always took an anti-communal stand even in the period around Babri Masjid demolition in 1992, is now fading away to irrelevance and a lot of its cadre are opting for the more radical SDPI or Welfare party is also a matter of grave concern.

"The league is seeing this as a very dangerous development in Kerala. It is a trend that needs to be countered and we will be calling a meetings soon to address the issue," says KPA Majeed, General Secretary, IUML.

The BJP has meanwhile approached the National Investigating Agency to look into Monday's violence and take necessary action.

If sources are to be believed the central government too is shocked at the turn of events in Kerala. The urgent flying down of IB chief Rajeev Jain to meet the Kerala police chief is also an indication of ruffled feathers in New Delhi.
The Congress and some of its allies have initiated an impeachment motion against CJI Dipak Misra. Past events indicate that this was indeed a 'revenge petition.'

The Congress and some of its allied parties in the Opposition have on Friday initiated an impeachment motion against Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra. This has come within 24 hours of the verdict in the judge Loya case, in which a three-judge bench headed by CJI Misra dismissed pleas seeking a probe into the judge's death, and also severely criticised the petitioners. The Congress wants people to think that this is a mere coincidence.

Assuming that this was indeed a coincidence, let us consider other "coincidences" leading up to the Congress' campaign for the impeachment of the CJI and its act of gathering signatures of 64 Rajya Sabha MPs and presenting them before the Chairman of the Upper House.

Senior Congress leader and Rajya Sabha MP Kapil Sibal has appeared as the counsel of the Sunni Waqf Board in the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid case before a bench headed by CJI Misra. Sibal had demanded that the case be heard by a five-judge bench or a seven-judge bench, but not the current one. On 5 December 2017, this demand was rejected by the court. Sibal had then said, "I do believe that any decision in this case will have very serious ramifications and the appeals should be referred to a five or seven judge constitution bench. Do not say 'no, no, no'. Please hear the matter keeping in mind the ramifications...please fix the matter in July 2019 and we assure that we will not seek any adjournments... justice should not only be done, it should be seen to be done."

Dushyant Dave, another senior advocate representing one of the parties, questioned the "hurry" in hearing the appeals, and pointed out that the issue of the Ram Temple was a part of the BJP manifesto. The bench headed by CJI Misra rejected this contention and fixed the next date of hearing in the case.

In effect, Sibal and Dave were making a political argument before the apex court, asking the judges to refrain from hearing the case before the Lok Sabha election.

It is an interesting coincidence that Sibal led the Congress' efforts in initiating an impeachment motion against Chief Justice Misra. Sibal has also been the party's most outspoken leader on the judge Loya case. He had even interrupted Rahul Gandhi while the Congress president was briefing the media after petitioning President Ram Nath Kovind. The party approached the President even as the issue was pending before the Supreme Court.

Dushyant Dave, who had questioned the hurry of the court in deciding the Ayodhya dispute, was the counsel for the petitioner in the judge Loya case. In the latter case, he often had heated exchanges with the bench.

The following 'coincidence' is the most interesting one. On 15 January, four senior-most judges of the Supreme Court after the CJI  Justices J Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B Lokur and Kurian Joseph  addressed a press conference on a working day. They took on the Chief Justice and questioned the allocation of the judge Loya case to a "junior" judge Justice Arun Mishra.

At the press conference, Justice Chelameswar was asked, "According to you, what are the remedies now? Do you want the Chief Justice to be impeached?" He responded by saying, We are not saying anything, let the nation decide. On the same afternoon, Justice Chelameswar had met Communist Party of India leader and Rajya Sabha MP D Raja. The political clamour for the Chief Justices impeachment started afterwards.

Now, consider the constitutional provisions for the impeachment of a judge of the High Courts or the Supreme Court. If one goes beyond the headline-generating potential of the issue, it is a question worth asking as to whether the Congress' attempt to initiate an impeachment motion has even the remotest chance of succeeding.

Impeachment proceedings have never been initiated against the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Also, no Supreme Court judge has even been impeached.

Article 124 (4) of the Constitution says Judge of the Supreme Court shall not be removed from his office except by an order of the President passed after an address by each House of Parliament supported by a majority of the total membership of that House and by a majority of not less than two-thirds of the members of that House present and voting has been presented to the President in the same session for such removal on the ground of proved misbehavior or incapacity.

The provision related to proven misbehaviour or incapacity is the most important part of the procedure for impeachment. There is no other ground on the basis of which impeachment proceedings can be taken up by either House of Parliament. The question is whether the case of Chief Justice Misra can be said to be one of "proven misbehaviour or incapacity." Perhaps the Congress is trying to convey a message, something on the lines of what US President George Bush had famously said, Either you are with us or with the enemy."

The Congress chose to file a petition before the Rajya Sabha Chairman and not in the Lok Sabha, because in the Lower House, the Congress along with all its allies have less then 100 MPs between them. In Rajya Sabha too, its numbers are dwindling with each biennial election. However, the party still managed to secure the signatures of 64 sitting members. In any case, it does not have the numbers (two-thirds of the members of the House) to get the motion passed in the Upper House. In the Lok Sabha as well, the Congress and its allies constitute a small minority.

The Congress' attempt may fail at two levels. Firstly, the petition may fail to convince the Chairman of the Upper House M Venkaiah Naidu, who may simply reject the motion. If the Chairman does admit it, the allegations have to pass the scrutiny of a three-member committee, comprising of a senior judge of the Supreme Court, a Chief Justice of a High Court and a distinguished jurist.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley is right when he says, "It is a revenge petition after the falsehood of the Congress Party has been established in the Justice Loya death case. It is an attempt to intimidate a judge and send a message to other judges, that if you dont agree with us, fifty MPs are enough for revenge action."
Congress and some other Opposition parties are likely to meet on Friday with proposed impeachment motion against Chief Justice of India expected to come up for discussion.

New Delhi: Congress and some other Opposition parties are likely to meet on Friday with proposed impeachment motion against Chief Justice of India (CJI) expected to come up for discussion, sources said.

Senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad has called the meeting which comes days after the party had said that option of moving an impeachment motion against Chief Justice Dipak Misra was still open.

The Opposition parties expected to attend the meeting include the Samajwadi Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party, the Rashtriya Janta Dal, the Communist Party of India and the Nationalist Congress Party.

Congress leaders have said that the issues raised by four Supreme Court judges have not been addressed yet by the CJI.

They have said the party was concerned about the independence of judiciary and people must protect the institution from "gross interferences by the government."

During the Budget Session that concluded earlier in April, the Congress had initiated a move 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.
The critical issue in the intense debate centred around whether the CPM should join hands with 'all secular, democratic forces', including the Congress, to fight the BJP

Hyderabad: The serious differences at the CPM meet in Hyderabad over whether or not to involve the Congress to take on the BJP may finally be resolved, with the top leadership deciding to omit a critical phrase "no understanding" from the official draft political resolution.

The resolution, once finalised, would chalk out the political-tactical line of the CPM for the next three years

The critical issue in the intense debate centred around whether the CPM should join hands with "all secular, democratic forces", including the Congress, to fight the BJP.

At a politburo meeting this evening after two days of debate on the draft resolution, top leaders discussed the demands put forth by several delegates regarding voting by secret ballot on the document.

The leadership instead chose a middle path by deciding to amend official draft by omitting the crucial phrase "no understanding" with the Congress, which was a victory of sorts of the "minority view" held by General Secretary Sitaram Yechury.

The official draft, backed by Prakash Karat, had said that the party should unite all secular democratic forces "without having an understanding or electoral alliance with the Congress party".

But in the amended document, it is now written that the party can unite secular democratic forces "without having a political alliance with the Congress party", thus keeping the doors open for an electoral understanding.

"There can be an understanding with all secular Opposition parties including the Congress in Parliament on agreed issues. Outside Parliament, we should cooperate with all secular Opposition forces for a broad mobilisation of people against communalism.

"We should foster joint actions of class and mass organisations in such a manner that can draw in the masses following the Congress and other bourgeoise parties," the latest version of the crucial political document says.

Earlier, Karat had said it was not the party's practice to disallow someone from taking responsibility even if he or she holds a minority view, in an apparent indication towards speculations regarding removal of Yechury in case his minority view on the draft political resolution gets defeated at the ongoing party congress.

"In our party, there is always a majority and minority view. In all our political discussions, it is a normal thing to have divergent views. It is not a new thing. Once different views are expressed and it is collectively decided by a vote, then it becomes a collective opinion of the party," Karat had told a press conference on the sidelines of the congress.

Replying to questions, he said: "In our party, everybody has the right to express their views in the right forum. Some minority view person cannot take responsibility... ..that is not our practice."

Regarding the demand for a secret ballot being raised by several delegates opposing the official draft political resolution, Karat said though this was an unprecedented demand, it has never been practised in the party congress.

"There is no instance for voting on a resolution by secret ballot so far in our party congress.It has never happened. It is not our practice. We never had this practice but this is the highest decision-making body. Let us see what our delegates say about this", he had said.

On the second day of discussions on the draft political resolution, several more delegates supported the demand for a secret ballot. Some of them also submitted this in writing.

On Thursday, the demand for a secret ballot was raised by a delegate from Maharashtra, who referred to the recent massive farmers' agitation there and said that the CPM's peasants wing, All India Kisan Sabha, was able to unite the farmers, cutting across political lines.

Toeing Yechury's "minority line", he had said if the party differentiated between secular parties, then the BJP would take the opportunity away. His views gained support from delegates from several states during the debate both on Thursday and Friday.

The critical issue in it centres around whether the CPM should join hands with "all secular, democratic forces", including the Congress, to take on the BJP.

While the Karat faction has been against any understanding with the Congress, the Yechury faction has favoured joining hands with all secular parties to fight the BJP in the changed scenario, especially after the recent ouster of the CPM-led Left Front from Tripura as well as the victory of a united Opposition in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in the recent Lok Sabha bye-elections.
In a scathing attack on the Siddaramaiah government, HD Deve Gowda on Friday described it as the 'most corrupt' administration the state has ever seen.

Bengaluru: In a scathing attack on the Siddaramaiah government, former prime minister HD Deve Gowda on Friday described it as the "most corrupt" administration the state has ever seen.

People would teach a lesson to the chief minister whose intention was to "finish off" JDS, he said.

The JDS supremo claimed that Siddaramaiah was "staring" at defeat in his own constituency of Chamundeshwari in Mysuru in the 12 May assembly polls.

Gowda, in an interview to PTI, dismissed speculation that the polls might throw up a hung assembly.

He maintained that JDS' alliance with Mayawati's BSP and Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekhar Rao had only brightened the JDS' electoral prospects.

"If Siddaramaiah has to contest from a particular constituency, he has to nurture it. He did not. He just began paying visits to Chamundeshwari for the last three months. This will not work. Defeat is staring at Siddaramaiah's face," Gowda said.

Gowda said people vote for leaders who keep society together and do not divide as Siddaramaiah had done by proposing a separate religious minority tag for Lingayats and Veerashaiva Lingayats.

He claimed Siddaramaiah's attempts to contest from two constituencies had created a negative perception about him.

"Siddaramaiah's attempts to contest also from Badami constituency, have created a public perception that the Chief Minister is not confident of winning Chamundeshwari seat...Our candidate, G T Deve Gowda, is a formidable candidate. He will defeat him," he said.

The Congress has announced that Siddaramaiah would contest from Chamundeshwari, amid reports that he is still keeping the option open to contest from Badami in north Karnataka, which is perceived to be a safer seat.

Reports suggest Siddaramaiah would face a tough battle in Chamundeshwari, with JDS going all out to scuttle his chances.

"People also will teach a lesson to Siddaramaiah, whose intention is to finish off JDS, which nurtured him in his political career earlier," said Gowda for whom the chief minister, formerly a JDS leader, has become a bitter rival.

To a query on Siddaramaiah's five-year rule, Gowda said "it is the most corrupt government the state had."

"I do not want to list the number of corruption charges against his government. There are many. People know," he said.

To a query, Gowda said he was not expecting a hung assembly.

"There are certain things which have brightened the prospects of JDS, like our association with Mayawati's BSP, KCR's party and Assaduddin Owaisi. We are working hard, and there is no question of a hung assembly," he said.

People would vote for JDS as they have seen the "misrule" of Congress and BJP in the last ten years, Gowda said. He said people were wise enough to vote for clean candidates, unlike some candidates fielded by the BJP and Congress who were facing graft charges.

"The end result will be different. People understand the misrule of Congress and BJP for the last ten years. Just look at the candidates they have fielded... People are wise. Will they vote for such candidates?" he said.

Asked if the Lingayat controversy would benefit the Congress, Gowda said it is a wrong calculation because the community is very "well-inclined" in politics and would not like to lose its political clout.

"However, it is very difficult to assess whom Lingayats would vote for."

On allegations he is soft on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Gowda said he would not attack him needlessly. "I do not want attack anybody needlessly..whatever may be Modi and Amit Shah's strategy to win elections," he said. Gowda said he would not criticise the prime minister, unless he traded charges against him.

"Why should I scratch my head and pounce on them," he said.

On Rahul Gandhi's dubbing JDS as "Team B" of BJP, Gowda said he was not going to use harsh words against him because "he is still young".

"Some people try to mislead him .... he should not get tempted over such things...he is still young. I am not going to use any harsh words against him," he added.

To another question, Gowda said he was least bothered about Congress and BJP perceiving JDS as an irrelevant party. "Let them have the impression that my party is an irrelevant party in this election. Let them have it till May 15 (counting of votes). I am least bothered," he said.

Gowda said he is ready to give tickets to disgruntled leaders belonging to Congress or BJP, who have been ignored by their parties, after considering their chances of winning.
The counting of votes began for the Jharkhand Municipal Elections 2018. The results will be declared on Friday.

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It is the first time that the elections for the post of the mayor and deputy mayor are taking place on a party basis in Ranchi. All the key parties in the area have fielded their candidates for the two posts.

Polls being held on party basis for Ranchi mayor, deputy mayor for the first time

The counting of votes for the seven municipal bodies and 31 nagar parishads began at 8 am and the results are set to be out by afternoon.

All the key parties in the area, including BJP, Congress, Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) and All Jharkhand Students Union (AJSU), have fielded their candidates for the post of Ranchi mayor and deputy mayor.

Candidates from BJP, Congress, JMM, AJSU in fray for posts of Ranchi mayor and deputy mayor

According to reports, several Congress supporters are protesting to demand recounting of votes in Chirkunda nagar parishad in Dhanbad. BJP candidate has already won the chairmans post.

A Jharkhand Mukti Morcha candidate is leading for the post of Ranchi mayor, which was held by BJP.

The BJP candidates, Reena Kumari and Chandicharan, won the elections for chairman, deputy chairman posts in Jamtara nagar panchayat. Meanwhile, BJP candidate Lokesh Kushwaha wins deputy chairman's post in Sahebganj's Barharwah nagar panchayat, reports News18 Hindi.

After the fourth round of counting, Jharkhand Mukti Morcha's Varsha Ghadi is leading for the mayoral post. BJP's Sanjeev Vijayvargiya is, however, leading for the deputy mayor post.

After six rounds of counting, BJP candidate Sanjeev Vijayavarfiya is leading by over 26,000 votes on deputy mayor post in Ranchi Municipal Corporation, reports Zee News.

AJSU's Raj Kumar Mehta has bagged the post of chairman of Domchanch Nagar Panchayat. BJP's Sandhya Rani Sardar won the Chakulia Nagar Panchayat chairman's post, reports News18 Hindi.

BJP's Meenakshi Patnaik won the post of Sarayakela Nagar Panchayat chairman, while the party's Arjun Pahan won the post of chairman of Chinti nagar panchayat.

BJP's Partho Dutta's won the deputy chairman post at Rajmahal nagar panchayat BJP's Shyamal Das bagged chairman's seat in Barharwah nagar panchayat of Sahebganj.

BJP candidate Vinod Srivastava has bagged the mayor post of Adityapur Municipal Corporation, reports Financial Express.

BJP has won 4 out of 5 mayoral seats in the Jharkhand municipal election. BJP is leading in eight of the 18 seats in nagar parishads polls, reports The Indian Express.

BJP candidate Asha Larka, who was the outgoing mayor, emerged as the winner with a margin of over one lakh votes, reports Zee News.

After her victory, BJP's Asha Lakra said that improving Ranchi would be a priority in her new term as the mayor. "The work that was not done during the previous tenure, they will be completed," News18 Hindi quoted her as saying.

Asha Lakra eyes improving Ranchi in her new term as mayor

The BJP candidates, Reena Kumari and Chandicharan, won the elections for chairman, deputy chairman posts in Jamtara nagar panchayat. Meanwhile, BJP candidate Lokesh Kushwaha wins deputy chairman's post in Sahebganj's Barharwah nagar panchayat, reports News18 Hindi.

After the fourth round of counting, Jharkhand Mukti Morcha's Varsha Ghadi is leading for the mayoral post. BJP's Sanjeev Vijayvargiya is, however, leading for the deputy mayor post.

After six rounds of counting, BJP candidate Sanjeev Vijayavarfiya is leading by over 26,000 votes on deputy mayor post in Ranchi Municipal Corporation, reports Zee News.

AJSU's Raj Kumar Mehta has bagged the post of chairman of Domchanch Nagar Panchayat. BJP's Sandhya Rani Sardar won the Chakulia Nagar Panchayat chairman's post, reports News18 Hindi.

BJP's Meenakshi Patnaik won the post of Sarayakela Nagar Panchayat chairman, while the party's Arjun Pahan won the post of chairman of Chinti nagar panchayat.

BJP's Partho Dutta's won the deputy chairman post at Rajmahal nagar panchayat BJP's Shyamal Das bagged chairman's seat in Barharwah nagar panchayat of Sahebganj.

BJP candidate Vinod Srivastava has bagged the mayor post of Adityapur Municipal Corporation, reports Financial Express.

BJP has won 4 out of 5 mayoral seats in the Jharkhand municipal election. BJP is leading in eight of the 18 seats in nagar parishads polls, reports The Indian Express.

BJP candidate Asha Larka, who was the outgoing mayor, emerged as the winner with a margin of over one lakh votes, reports Zee News.

After her victory, BJP's Asha Lakra said that improving Ranchi would be a priority in her new term as the mayor. "The work that was not done during the previous tenure, they will be completed," News18 Hindi quoted her as saying.

Asha Lakra eyes improving Ranchi in her new term as mayor

Jharkhand municipal election 2018 results LIVE updates: BJP candidate Asha Larka, who was the outgoing mayor in Ranchi, emerged as the winner in the city's municipal polls. AJSU's Raj Kumar Mehta has bagged the post of chairman of Domchanch Nagar Panchayat, while BJP candidate Vinod Srivastava has bagged the mayor post of Adityapur Municipal Corporation.

The Jharkhand Mukti Morcha is leading for the mayoral post in Ranchi. The BJP has won the mayor and deputy mayor posts in Hazaribagh Municipal Corporation, while it has been trailing for the mayor post in Ranchi. According to reports, several Congress supporters are protesting to demand recounting of votes in Chirkunda nagar parishad polls in Dhanbad.

The results of the Jharkhand Municipal Elections 2018 will be declared on Friday. The counting of votes for the seven municipal bodies and 31 Nagar Parishads began at 8 am and the results are set to be out by afternoon.

A total of 52.23 percent voting was recorded on Monday for seven municipal bodies and 31 Nagar Parishads in Jharkhand, an election official said.

Jharkhand state election commissioner NN Pandey said the polling was by and large peaceful and was held between 7 am and 5 pm amid tight security.

At a few places, there were reports of malfunctioning of Electronic Voting Machines.

The voting percentage for the Ranchi Municipal Corporation was 49.3 percent, compared to only 34.13 percent last time.

The higher turnout of voters was due to the fact that elections were held on party lines for the first time in the state.

The Bharatiya Janata Party, the Congress, the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha and others have fielded candidates for the posts of mayor and deputy mayor.
Karnataka CM Siddaramaiah has once again said that party leadership only will decide his candidature from Badami seat and he will abide by their decision.

Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah has once again said that the party leadership will decide his candidature from the Badami seat and he will abide by its decision. Speaking to ANI, the chief minister said: "Whatever the party leadership says, I will abide by it".

His remarks have only added to the suspense over whether he will opt to contest from a second constituency in the upcoming Assembly polls. Siddaramaiah's reported wish to contest from two seats is said to have met with stiff Opposition from veteran party leaders Mallikarjuna Kharge and Veerappa Moily after which it was decided to field Devraj Patil. But Patil's candidature has now been put on hold.

But this move had led to internal squabbling within the local unit of the party with many including sitting MLA Chimmanakatti opposed to it. Chimmanakatti has said if the chief minister is not contesting, he should be the candidate.

On Thursday, Siddaramaiah was campaigning in Varuna, the constituency he is currently contesting from, when people from Badami stopped his car by the roadside. Besides giving positive assurances to them, he came out with his most assertive declaration yet when supporters of Patil stopped his vehicle to say, We welcome you to Badami, you must come to it. But if you dont , please give the B form to Devraj Patil. The chief minister responded with, Naane bartheeni (I will myself come), you leave.

According to the Deccan Chronicle report, Siddaramaiah had met with All India Congress Committee (AICC) general secretary KC Venugopal, Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee (KPCC) chief, Dr G Parameshwar, and others at a private hotel in Mysuru late on Wednesday night and told reporters on Thursday morning that he still doesn't know what decision the party high-command will take. However, when he was asked about when there would be clarity on the candidate for Badami, he said a decision would be taken by 23 or 24 April.

Badami with a strong Kuruba presence, the community to which Siddaramaiah belongs, was seen as the second safe option for the chief minister as reports have suggested that the battle in Chamundeshwari will not be an easy one for him.

At the press conference on Friday, Siddaramaiah attacked Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) chief Amit Shah for the latter's remarks on his religion. "Amit Shah said I am not a Hindu, but Amit Shah himself is not a Hindu, he is a Jain. He might believe in Hindutva but let him come out and say he is a Hindu and not a Jain", he told ANI. He also said that Congress will not enter into an alliance for the Karnataka polls. "We are not going to enter into an alliance with any party. We are a secular party", Siddaramaiah remarked. But when a reporter asked him that Janata Dal (Secular) is also secular he rebutted by saying "Who told you JD(S) is a secular party?"
Sanjay Patil, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and the party's MLA from Karnataka's Belagavi constituency, has been booked by the police for a 'hate speech' he allegedly made while addressing his constituency.

Sanjay Patil, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and the party's MLA from Karnataka's Belagavi constituency, has been booked by the police for a "hate speech" he allegedly made while addressing his constituency.

A video of the hate speech, where Patil is heard saying the upcoming Assembly election in the state will be about Hindus and Muslims, went viral on social media earlier this week. However, it is not known when and where the speech was made.

"This election is not about road, drainage or drinking water. This election is about Hindu and Muslim religions," he was heard saying in the video, amid loud cheers by a crowd of his supporters.

"Keeping a hand on my chest, I say loudly, 'This is Bharat, this is the country of Hindus, and this is the country where (Lord) Ram was born.' We are prepared to do anything to construct Ram Temple in Ayodhya," Patil purportedly said in the footage.

With the crowd lapping up every word he was saying, he added that the Congress favoured constructing a mosque in Ayodhya instead of a Ram Temple. "(Those) who want to construct Babri Masjid, who want to celebrate Tipu Sultan's jayanti, let them vote for Congress," he said.

"If you want Shivaji Maharaj, if you want Sambhaji Maharaj, if you want those who offer pooja at Lakshmi temple, you will have to vote for BJP," he added.

Belagavi (formerly known as Belgaum) is on the Karnataka-Maharashtra border, and is a communally sensitive area with a significant presence of Muslims and Marathi-speaking Hindus. Karnataka will have one-phase election on 12 May, and results will be announced on 15 May.

Patil, the sitting MLA, is pitted against Laxmi Hebbalkar, the Karnataka Mahila Congress chief.

The BJP is yet to make a public statement about the incident, but media reports said the Congress is likely to seek Patil's disqualification for the remarks. A report on India Today said the Congress lodged a complaint with the Election Commission, which is probing the issue further.

With inputs from PTI
The ruling Congress party's richest nominee for the ensuing state Legislative Assembly polls DK Shivakumar has declared assets worth over Rs 700 crore, as per the poll affidavit.

Bengaluru: The ruling Congress party's richest nominee for the ensuing state Legislative Assembly polls DK Shivakumar has declared combined assets worth over Rs 700 crore, as per the poll affidavit filed on Thursday.

According to the nomination papers filed at the Kanakapura Assembly segment in Ramanagara district, about 55 kilometre from Bengaluru, Shivakumar, 55, declared his income and assets and that of his wife, Usha's, to be Rs 730 crore.

The state's energy minister's income and assets have nearly tripled since the 2013 Assembly elections, when he had declared assets valued at Rs 251 crore.

Through the affidavit, Shivakumar declared cash and bank deposits worth Rs 95 crore, immovable assets including commercial buildings and land valued at over Rs 635.8 crore and gold, diamonds and silver valued at over Rs 1.5 crore, among other assets.

In addition, he also disclosed the assets and income of his daughter Aisshwarya to be over Rs 100 crore.

The Congress leader was raided by the Income Tax Department in August, 2017 for alleged tax evasion.

Over 100 IT sleuths had raided Shivakumar's aides and kin at over 60 locations in the state, and in Delhi and Chennai, and seized several documents and cash.

A special court in March granted Shivakumar conditional bail after the IT Department had found the minister allegedly destroying evidence in three tax evasion cases.
Visibly upset on media's repeated questions about him contesting from the segment in north Karnataka, Siddaramaiah, who has been fielded from Chamundeshwari constituency in Mysuru, said, he was the chief minister and not the high command.

Bengaluru: Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah on Thursday said the Congress high command would decide on his contesting from Badami, adding to the suspense over whether he would opt for a second constituency in the Assembly polls.

Visibly upset on media's repeated questions about him contesting from the segment in north Karnataka, Siddaramaiah, who has been fielded from Chamundeshwari constituency in Mysuru, said, he was the chief minister and not the high command.

"High command will decide on Badami," Siddaramaiah told reporters at Mysuru, where he is camping since Monday for campaigning in Chamundeshwari and Varuna, constituencies from where he and his son Yathindra respectively are the candidates.

Asked if he would contest from two constituencies, opting for Badami too, he said "(I'll do) whatever high command decides..."

To another question, the chief minister said there should be clarity on Badami constituency by 23 or 24 April.

"I'm not the high command, I'm the chief minister of the state. I don't know what directions they (high command) will give, will have to see.."

Asking the media not to repeat questions on the issue, he said, "The people there are not confused, the Badami people are very clear. Only you (media) have confusion."

Siddaramaiah has said he was still under pressure to contest from Badami, fuelling speculation again whether he would opt for an alternative or a second constituency.

Not acceding to Siddaramaiah's reported wish to contest from two seats, Chamundeshwari and Badami, the Congress in its list of candidates for 218 seats announced on 15 April, had named Devraj Patil as its nominee from Badami.

But issuing of B-form (required to be filed by a political party mentioning name of its approved candidate) to Patil has been put on hold.

Siddaramaiah's reported wish to contest from two seats is said to have met with stiff opposition from veteran party leaders Mallikarjuna Kharge and Veerappa Moily after which it was decided to field Patil.

Fielding Patil has led to internal squabbling within the local unit of the party with many including sitting MLA Chimmanakatti opposed to it.

Chimmanakatti has said if chief minister is not contesting, he should be the candidate.

Badami with strong Kuruba presence, the community to which Siddaramaiah belongs, was seen as second safe option for the chief minister as reports have suggested that the battle in Chamundeshwari will not be an easy one for him.

Siddaramaiah has won five times and tasted defeat twice at Chamundeshwari, from where he has been announced as the candidate.

He has been representing Varuna constituency in Mysuru since 2008, which has now been allotted to his son Yathindra.
A doctor who preferred politics and began a rapid rise through the ranks of the BJP, Maya Kodnani's political career will perhaps not survive the conviction in the Naroda Patiya case.

Editor's Note: This copy was originally published on 30 August 2012, when Maya Kodnani was convicted for her involvement in the Naroda Patiya case. The Gujarat High Court acquitted Kodnani of all charges on Friday, while upholding the conviction of Bajrang Dal leader Babu Bajrangi. This piece is being republished in light of recent developments.

A gynaecologist who was always more keen on politics than on her medical practice, Maya Kodnani's fall from being a poster girl for the RSS in the state after being implicated in the 2002 Naroda Patiya massacre has been rapid and had finally ended in tears on 29 August 2012.

Kodnani achieved infamy when she became the first woman and sitting MLA to be convicted for her involvement in the 2002 massacre in the Naroda Patiya area of Ahmedabad in which 97 people were killed in broad daylight.

An Indian Express report speaks about how Kodnani, the daughter of a staunch RSS worker who immigrated to India due to Partition, studied in a Gujarati medium school and joined the Rashtriya Sevika Samiti before entering Baroda Medical College where she became a doctor.

Kodnani had set up a maternity hospital in Kubernagar in Naroda, but then quickly began her political ascent with victories in the Ahmedabad civic elections in 1995 and by 1998 she had become an MLA.

In 2002 during the communal riots that engulfed Ahmedabad following the burning of the Sabarmati Express at Godhra, Kodnani was accused of instigating the rioters, firing a pistol and even distributing arms that she had transported to Naroda in her car.

However, the minister denied the claims and said she had been attending the State Assembly at the time was caught out by statements of witnesses and mobile phone records that showed she was in Naroda at the time of the violent riot.

Dildar Umrav Saiyed, a witness said that he was working at his garage, testified in court that he had seen the BJP leader distribute a bundle of sharp weapons. He said was offered money not to testify against the rising leader and even faced attacks

"I was offered lakhs of rupees but I refused, Dildar was quoted as saying in a Telegraph report.

It wasn't hard to see why. Kodnani's star was on the rise after the riots. Mentored by none less than party patriarch LK Advani, she won the 2002 elections that followed the brutal riots by a thumping majority and by 2007 had been elevated to MoS for women and child development.

However, in 2009 when the Supreme Court appointed SIT summoned her for questioning in the case she refused to appear before them and was declared an absconder. After hiding, ironically accompanied by her police guard, Kodnani finally surrendered and resigned from the ministerial post.

She was then arrested but later released on bail by the high court. And with it came to an end the fiery oratory.

"I believe what happened in 2002 riots was wrong and I have sympathy for the victims, whether they are Muslims or Hindus," she was quoted as saying in an interview while in relative political wilderness.

"I regularly attend the court hearings from morning till the end of the proceedings. Then I come to my clinic to attend patients and people who expect help from me," she said.

However, as the verdict approached, the doctor remained largely absent from the maternity nursing home, choosing to instead spend more time in the state Assembly and appearing for the court hearings.

When the verdict was announced, Kodnani was asked by the court if she had anything to say, she said the charges against her were politically motivated. She and her husband, who is also a doctor, were in tears when she was convicted. Kodnani's lawyers have opposed the prosecution's plea for capital punishment on the grounds that her husband was not in good health and her son was studying abroad.

And as the court sentenced her to 28 years in jail, it perhaps also spelt the death of the political career of the fiery orator, who will spend a long time in prison cell.
Reuters

Just weeks before Malaysia goes to the polls, automated accounts known as bots are flooding Twitter with tens of thousands of pro-government and anti-opposition messages, according to a review of the tweets by Reuters and a US digital media research institute.

Asked about the matter, San Francisco-based Twitter Inc said it was focused on identifying and suspending accounts that violate its spam policies.

We continue to fight hard to tackle any malicious automation on our platform as well as spam accounts, it said, without giving specific details.

A source close to the matter said the company had suspended 500 accounts involved in the messages on the Malaysian election since they involved spam or malicious automation.

Twitter bots, accounts which can post, like or resend tweets automatically, are not illegal in Malaysia and seem to be having minimal impact on its election campaign. But they have come under global scrutiny amid probes into Russian meddling in the 2016 US elections using social media platforms.

Ahmad Maslan, the information technology bureau chairman of Prime Minister Najib Razaks United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), said he did not know who was behind the bot activity and that it was not his team.

The governments communications and multimedia minister Salleh Said Keruak did not respond to calls or text messages seeking comment.

A researcher at the Digital Forensic Research (DFR) Lab of the Washington-based Atlantic Council think tank said over 17,000 bots tweeted content related to the Malaysian election over the last week.

Nine of the top 10 most active bot accounts containing anti-opposition hashtags and pro-government messages had Russian-sounding names and used the Cyrillic script, said Donara Barojan, a research associate at DFR.

The prevalence of bots with Cyrillic screen names does not suggest that Russian social media users are meddling in the Malaysian elections, but does indicate that whoever is behind the campaign purchased some bots created by Russian-speaking bot herders, she said.

Reuters was unable to establish where the tweets originated or which firm or individual may be behind the bot accounts.

Malaysia will hold a general election on 9 May with Najibs Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition, which is dominated by UMNO, locked in a tough battle with former premier Mahathir Mohamad and his opposition alliance.

SAY NO

The tweets included visuals illustrating Malaysian government policies and questioning the oppositions promises. Some tweets had photos of BN supporters carrying party flags and I love PM signs.

The tweets also include hashtags: either BNs campaign slogans or anti-opposition phrases or both. The hashtags that express disapproval of the opposition coalition Pakatan Harapan (PH) include #SayNoToPH and #KalahkanPakatan, which means Defeat Pakatan in Malay.

Two of the anti-opposition hashtags - #SayNoToPH and #KalahkanPakatan - were used around 44,100 times by 17,600 users during April 12-20 and 98 percent of the users appear to be bots, according to Barojan.

Many of the graphics attached to the tweets credited UMNOs information technology department and some provided details of social media pages of BN-linked accounts. There was no evidence that these accounts are behind the automated tweets.

Syed Saddiq Syed Abdul Rahman, a youth leader in the opposition alliance, accused the BN coalition of being behind the bot campaign but added that the impact from the bot activity was miniscule. He did not elaborate.

Twitter is not as popular in Malaysia as Facebook, although a lot of political discourse appears on the platform.

Automated tweets of this scale are meant to generate traffic around the content they post, and get human users to participate, but that has not happened yet in Malaysia, according to DFR Lab.

Twitter and Facebook are under scrutiny in the United States where lawmakers suspect their platforms were used as part of an alleged Russian effort to sway the 2016 US presidential election in favour of Donald Trump. The Kremlin has denied the accusations.

The Times reported last year that Russian Twitter accounts posted almost 45,000 messages about Brexit in the 48 hours around the 2016 referendum in Britain, and that many of the messages appear to have come from bots or cyborg accounts. Russia has denied meddling in Brexit.
Kshitij Pujari

Quite clearly Android has many options for online messaging and chatting. The keyword here is 'online'. Traditional SMS and MMS services have gone on a downward slope ever since WhatsApp made its move and now with such a variety of options for users, it is clear that no one is going back to using those services. However, Google is looking to change that.

As per a report by The Verge, the Mountain View-based search engine giant has proposed to adopt a technology which will replace SMS. This new technology has been named as 'Chat' and it will be based on a standard called the Universal Profile for Rich Communication Services". Google has plans of making the default messaging service on your smartphone called 'Messages' to be as good as the current messaging services.

Apple users have always had the luxury of using iMessage, which was a streamlined messaging service built exclusively for iOS users. Google despite its multiple chat/messenger avatars over the years, has never quite been able to reciprocate an iMessage like experience for Android.

Now it would seem that Google is convincing carriers around the world to do it for them. To that end, Google has reportedly 'paused' work on its latest messaging app 'Allo' and is now focusing solely on 'Chat'.

How will this new SMS alternative work? Well, according to the report, 'Chat' will work on a new standard which will replace SMS and will be automatically activated in the current SMS app on Android called Messages.

The advantage to using 'Chat' is that you would be getting many of the same features as you have on an online messaging service like WhatsApp. These features include full-resolution images and video, indicator when the other person is typing and read receipts. The basic Messages app will remain the same. Only that it will now have the above-mentioned features as well.

One big ommision though is the lack of end to end encryption on these messages. In an age of Telegram, WhatsApp and Signal, that seems out of sync. But unlike these apps, Chat will be working in conjunction with carriers  so in a way like SMS, although with rich communication services (RCS) activated. RCS basically lets you communicate via pictures, stickers, and other rich multimedia, as long as the handsets and carriers support RCS.

However, we need to remember that the service will not be owned by Google. In other words, the service will not be called Google Chat. It will simply be called as 'Chat' and as mentioned earlier it will be 'carrier-based' service. As such, unlike SMS or MMS, Chat will use your data plan instead of your SMS plan and therefore small data charges will be applied if you don't have an active data pack.

So what happens when you text someone who isn't on Android or doesn't have Chat enabled? As per the report, your message will be sent as a standard SMS.

Will iOS get the 'Chat' feature? No one knows as of now.

Currently what we do know, as per the report is that most Android users will get this feature, though the timing will depend on your carrier.

Though this seems like a nice upgrade to the Messages app, the journey to 'Chat' has been tumultuous for Google. A brief history of its many chat apps should actually clear that up.

Google first introduced its messaging services back in 2005 in the form of Google Talk. The chat app became really popular and Google decided to include it in the Android OS alongside the standard SMS app. However, when iPhone implemented push notifications in 2009 apps like WhatsApp became very popular even on Android and soon left Google Talk behind.

Instead of solving the problem, Google tried to rip off Facebook in its Google Plus app in 2011. The app had Huddle for text and Hangout for video. But the onset of iMessage and Facebook Messenger again steamrolled over Google due to their simple interface as compared to Google Plus.

Google's solution was to combine all apps into one in the form of Hangouts and for some time it did work out fine. But Google failed to properly update the app on a timely basis and soon it lost all its traction while WhatsApp and iMessage became hugely popular. Not giving up, Google launched yet another app for messaging called Allo and another app for video chat called Duo while turning Hangouts into a kind of Slack-like app.

While Duo has picked up in the public eye, Allo and Hangouts are nearly obsolete. So will Google's push for more features on the standard 'Messages' app turn into one of its usual messaging related failure?

Only time will tell.
Reuters

German lawmakers will question a senior Facebook Inc manager about data privacy in the wake of revelations that the personal information of millions of users wrongly ended up in the hands of political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.

Lawmakers in the Bundestag lower house of parliament will grill Joel Kaplan, Facebooks vice president for global public policy, during a closed-door session on Friday morning.

The meeting mirrors the appearance of Facebooks Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg before a U.S. Congressional joint hearing on April 10-11 over the scandal engulfing the worlds largest social network.

The 87 million Facebook users affected included nearly three million Europeans and Zuckerberg is also under pressure from EU lawmakers to come to Europe to shed light on the data breach.

Facebook needs to show more openness and transparency when dealing with user data, said Nadine Schoen, deputy leader of Chancellor Angela Merkels conservative bloc in the Bundestag.

She said Facebook needed to do more than just pay lip service and it remained to be seen how serious the company was about really improving user rights.

It is not enough to exchange the gray T-shirt and jeans for suit and tie, she said in reference to Zuckerbergs appearance in the U.S. Congress. The senior lawmaker said that Facebook so far was giving the impression that it only wanted to save its business model.

For example, the company is already rowing back in the supposedly world-wide announced implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation, Schoen warned, referring to privacy rules that will enter force in the European Union next month.

We no longer need excuses, but facts, she said. German Justice Minister Katarina Barley last month summoned executives of the firm, including European public affairs chief Richard Allan.

Misuse of data by Facebook means it will in future be bound by stricter regulations and the threat of tougher penalties for further privacy violations, Barley said after the meeting.
Reuters

Indonesia has given Facebook a week to provide more information on how personal data of about one million of its citizens was misused and on the steps the company is taking to prevent such breaches, the countrys communications ministry said.

More than 115 million Indonesians use Facebook and authorities in the Southeast Asian country have been pressing the firm to explain how personal data was harvested by political consultancy Cambridge Analytica via a personality quiz.

A Facebook official apologized to Indonesian members of parliament this week at a public hearing, where the company said that 1,096,666 people in the country may have had their data shared, or 1.26 percent of the global total.

In a statement released on Thursday evening, the ministry said it had sent a letter to Facebook Ireland Ltd, the companys main international business unit, in response to an April 10 letter from the companys head of data protection.

The ministry had asked for more details and documents on any misuse of data, including whether data had been shared with other third parties such as CubeYou and Aggregate IQ.

Facebook has said it was suspending Canadian political consultancy AggregateIQ from its platform after reports the firm may have improperly had access to the personal data of Facebook users.

According to CNBC, Facebook was also suspending data analytics firm CubeYou to investigate how it was collecting information through quizzes.

The Indonesian communications ministry was also seeking confirmation on technical measures to limit data access in Facebook and more information on an audit the social media company was doing on sharing.

The statement said Facebook would have to meet the requests within seven days of the letter that was sent on Thursday. Facebook did not immediately provide comment on Friday.

Earlier this week, Facebook said in a statement that it was committed to improving the way we protect peoples information, and to providing a safe and secure experience for the more than 115 million Indonesians on Facebook.

It said it was working hard to tackle past abuse, prevent future abuse and give people more prominent privacy controls and was committed to providing regular updates to Indonesians, their representatives, the authorities and the media.

The company is also facing investigations in other countries, such as the Philippines, the United States and Australia, in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data breach scandal.
Sheldon Pinto

Xiaomi said it would evaluate the possibility of a Mi Wallet in India, but has no plans for it right now.

With so many cost conscious smartphones on sale in such large numbers, it would indeed seem like Xiaomi is shying away from Samsung, to introduce their own digital wallet service or payment app in one of their most important markets outside of China.

Samsung has Samsung Pay and while Apple has yet to introduce Apple Pay for its users, it begs the question, as to why a smartphone brand as popular as Xiaomi does not have its own wallet or payment service out yet.

At a recent briefing, Xiaomi global vice president and managing director of Xiaomi India, Manu Kumar Jain commented that the company currently runs quite a few internet services in India including its TV service along with its music services but in China there are a lot more.

"As for a digital wallet, it is something that we have to evaluate. We have no plans to get into it right now, but we have to evaluate before we launch any such services in India," he said.

" If the market is good enough, we would be happy to get into it," said Jain commenting on how internet services are the core product offerings by Xiaomi.

The difference between launching these services in China and India is to do with Xiaomi's user base.

When Xiaomi launched its services in China, it did so with a really large user base.

Xiaomi's strategy when it comes to selling products is to get users hooked on to its hardware, (smartphones, TVs, etc) and offer users internet services to pick from.

At the moment, Xiaomi's user base in India is still a fraction of its user base in China.
tech2 News Staff

Apple last month announced an all-new iPad refresh for 2018 with a few iterational updates to the previous edition, but with an emphasis on its use as an educational device.

Apple had also set the price of the new iPad for Indian markets on the same day, stating that the base 32 GB Wi-Fi-only model will cost Rs 28,000, while the version with both Wi-Fi and Cellular support will cost Rs 38,600.

One of the notable additions to the new iPad is support for the Apple Pencil which will be sold separately for Rs 7,600. The 2018 iPad will be available for sale in India through Flipkart and across Apple Authorised Resellers present across the country.

Apple's new iPad is very similar to the current models and comes with the same 9.7-inch display of the previous one with the usual, thick bezels. Also included in the package is a Touch ID sensor, the usual buttons and both an HD FaceTime camera and an 8 MP rear-facing camera. The tablet will be available in silver, Space Gray and a new Gold finish and also comes with LTE support and an Apple A10 Fusion chip.

Apple at the event last month also revealed a cheaper, third-party stylus made in collaboration with Logitech that is priced at $49 in the US. We have not heard anything about the stylus being made available in India, but if it does make its way here, it would offer a better value proposition than the Apple Pencil.
Reuters

A US ban on sales of American components to ZTE Corp has unleashed a patriotic backlash in Chinas cyberspace, highlighting the growing tension between the worlds two largest economies.

The United States this week imposed a ban on American companies selling parts and software to ZTE for seven years, saying it had broken a settlement agreement with repeated false statements, a move that threatens to cut off the Chinese firms supply chain.

Sympathy for ZTE has swept Chinese social media while most domestic newspapers have chosen to put the lions share of the blame for the telecom equipment makers troubles on Chinas heavy reliance on foreign semiconductors.

The US action comes at a time when the two countries have threatened each other with tens of billions of dollars in tariffs in recent weeks, fanning worries of a full-blown trade war.

In one widely circulated photograph online, an unidentified restaurant erected a banner with patriotic slogans calling for solidarity and offering ZTE employees free meals. If it were not because of ZTEs strength and ability to represent China, it would not have been punished like this, the banner said.

A photograph purportedly showing ZTEs 76-year-old founder Hou Weigui with senior executives at a mainland airport about to catch a flight to the United States also prompted a torrent of messages of support.

Trying so hard, bearing so much, all to fight for Chinas interest - how touching! said one popular comment that played on a comparison with a late Qing dynasty official, Li Hongzhang, a chief negotiator in the first Sino-Japanese war.

The state-run Global Times said in an article this week that the move against ZTE was a strong push for China to strengthen its domestic chip industry. Chinas semiconductor-related imports from the United States in 2017 came to $11 billion.

Nineteen stocks related to semiconductors listed on the mainland rose by their daily limit on 18 April.

Separately, a company source said on 19 April that ZTEs chief compliance and the chief legal officer was removed from his posts more than a month before the Chinese telecom equipment maker was slapped with US sanctions this week.

Citing an internal memo dated 8 March, the source said Cheng Gang, ZTEs chief compliance and chief legal officer, was removed from his posts more than a month ago, although that the memo did not give a reason for the action.

It was not clear if Cheng was still with the company, according to the source, who declined to be identified as the information in the memo was confidential. Cheng did not respond to an email and a LinkedIn message seeking comment. Reuters was unable to obtain a phone number for Cheng. ZTE did not respond to calls and emails seeking comment.

News of the memo was first reported by the South China Morning Post. Chinas second telecoms equipment maker admitted in March 2017 to illegally shipping US technologies to banned countries including Iran and paid a record $890 million fine to settle the case.

As part of the agreement, Shenzhen-based ZTE promised to dismiss four senior employees and discipline 35 others by either reducing their bonuses or reprimanding them, but had failed to fully carry out those actions, US government officials told Reuters this week.

The ban could be catastrophic for ZTE, the fourth-largest smartphone vendor in the United States, as it is estimated to rely on US firms for nearly a third of crucial components such as chips in its products. ZTE has delayed its earnings results, originally scheduled for Thursday, saying it needs time to assess the impact of the U.S. sanctions. Its shares in Shenzhen and Hong Kong remain suspended.
Reuters

Chinas ZTE Corp said on Friday that a US ban on the sale of parts and software to the company was unfair and threatens its survival, and vowed to safeguard its interests through all legal means.

The United States this week imposed a ban on sales by American companies to ZTE for seven years, saying the Chinese company had broken a settlement agreement with repeated false statements  a move that threatens to cut off its supply chain.

It is unacceptable that BIS insists on unfairly imposing the most severe penalty on ZTE even before the completion ofthe investigation of facts, ZTE said in its first response since the ban was announced, referring to the US Commerce Departments Bureau of Industry and Security.

The Denial Order will not only severely impact the survival and development of ZTE, but will also cause damages to all partners of ZTE including a large number of US companies, ZTE said in a statement.

ZTE said it regards compliance as the cornerstone of its strategy, adding it invested $50 million in export control compliance projects in 2017 and plans to invest more this year.

A senior US Commerce Department official told Reuters earlier this week that it is unlikely to lift the ban.

Were going to have to see how this unfolds. But there is no provision currently for that to occur, the official said, who declined to be identified due to the sensitivity of the matter.

The Commerce Department has an appeals process for companies to try to get off the list, but it is unclear whether that would be available to ZTE because the case had been previously subject to a settlement, according to people familiar with the matter.

Even so, ZTE would have little recourse in the near term because appeals would have to be approved by the BIS, the same agency that issued the ban.

Companies must submit appeals to a committee that would issue a ruling within 30 days, according to the agencys website.

ZTE said it will not give up efforts to solve problems through communication, and it is determined to take judicial measures to protect the legal rights and interests of the company.

A state-backed Chinese trade body said the ZTE case represented a milestone for China Inc and highlighted compliance risks its corporate sector is facing.

It urged the Chinese government to speed up implementation of national guidelines on corporate oversight, and go through informal channels and seek leniency with US Congress members to resolve the ZTE case.

Trade War

The ban has ratcheted up tensions between China and the United States at a time when they have already threatened each other with tens of billions of dollars in tariffs, fanning worries of a full-blown trade war.

In China, there has been a patriotic backlash with an outpouring of support for ZTE on social media and most domestic newspapers have chosen to put the lions share of the blame for ZTEs troubles on the countrys heavy reliance on foreign semiconductors.

ZTE chairman Yin Yimin told domestic media on Friday at its Shenzhen headquarters that the firm would increase research and development as relying on oneself is better than relying on others, state media Xinhua reported.

E-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd said on Friday it had acquired a Chinese chipmaker that it said underlines its commitment to driving the development of the chip industry.

Meanwhile, the US government is considering using an emergency law to restrict Chinese investments in sensitive US technologies, a senior Treasury official said on Thursday.

Trade in ZTE shares has been suspended since Tuesday. As of Mondays close, they were worth some $19 billion.
An Afghan official says a roadside bomb has killed five people in eastern Nangarhar province.

Kabul: An Afghan official says a roadside bomb has killed five people in eastern Nangarhar province.

Attaullah Khogyani, spokesman for the provincial governor, says the explosion struck a vehicle in the Aska Mina district on Friday, killing the five and also wounding 14 civilians.

He says women and children are among the victims.

No one immediately took responsibility for the bombing but Khogyani blamed the Taliban, saying they regularly plant roadside bombs targeting Afghan officials and security forces.

Afghanistan has the highest number of mine victims in the world, which along with other roadside bombs kill or wound scores of civilians.

Earlier this month, the UN mission in Afghanistan said the country's civilian death toll in the first three months of this year was a staggering 763 people.
A Malaysian jet carrying 139 people aborted its take-off and skidded into the mud at Kathmandu airport on Thursday, shutting operations for more than 12 hours until the plane was moved

Kathmandu: A Malaysian jet carrying 139 people aborted its take-off and skidded into the mud at Kathmandu airport on Thursday, shutting operations for more than 12 hours until the plane was moved.

Nobody was hurt in the incident, but hundreds of passengers had flights cancelled and all incoming flights were diverted after the Malindo Airlines Boeing 737 went off the runway. The jet was speeding down the Tribhuvan International Airport runway when the pilots detected a problem and aborted take-off, airport spokesman Prem Nath Thakur said.

The jet skidded into the grass and came to a halt in mud about 100 feet (30 metres) from the runway. "All aboard are safe," Thakur said, adding that the cause of the problem was not immediately known.

Nepal's only international airport reopened again just before noon on Friday after the jet was "removed without any damage", Thakur added.

American traveller Sarah Ann Loreth, heading to Doha before returning to her home in Boston, spent hours on her jet after the emergency. "We were supposed to take-off on Thursday but couldn't because of the Malaysia flight," she told AFP. "At around 2:00 am, the flight attendant informed us the other flight had slipped off the runway and was stuck in the mud and could not be moved."

"They deplaned us around 2:30 am and it was pure chaos. We went back to the terminal and they had our bags laid out behind the counter and we just went behind and grabbed them," she said. Cars eventually took the passengers to hotels to wait for a reorganised flight, Loreth added.

The incident came a month after the crash of a US-Bangla Airways plane at Kathmandu airport, which killed 51 people. In March 2015, a Turkish Airlines jet skidded off the runway as it landed, forcing Tribhuvan Airport to close for four days.

The Himalayan nation has some of the world's most remote and tricky runways, flanked by snow-capped peaks with approaches that pose a challenge even for accomplished pilots.

Nepal has a poor air safety record. Accidents are common and Nepal-based airlines are banned from flying in European Union airspace.
Washington: Alabama, on Thursday, executed Walter Moody, an 83-year-old man convicted of murdering a US judge and an attorney with pipe bombs, officials said.

Moody is the oldest person to be executed in the United States since the country reinstated capital punishment in the 1970s, replacing John Nixon, who was put to death at age 77 in 2005, according to data from the Death Penalty Information Center.

"Walter Leroy Moody has been executed for the 1989 murder of Federal Judge Robert Vance," Alabama Governor Kay Ivey's office said in a statement.

"He was also convicted of a similar pipe bomb death of a Georgia attorney," according to a statement from the state's attorney general, Steve Marshall.

Vance was killed and his wife injured when a bomb exploded at their home in Birmingham, Alabama, in December 1989.

Lawyer Robert Robinson was killed in the same way two days later in Savannah, Georgia. He had represented a black rights association.

Other parcel bombs were found in the offices of the Atlanta appeals court of which Vance was a member and in the offices of the NAACP black rights association in Jacksonville, Florida.

A group called Americans for a Competent Federal Judicial System claimed the attacks. It threatened more in retaliation for the rape and murder of white woman Julie Love by two black men in Atlanta in 1988.

Moody, who bore a grudge against the judicial system after his conviction for possessing explosives, was arrested for the bombings in 1990 and sentenced to death for Vance's murder in 1997.
By Ian Simpson and Lisa Baertlein (Reuters) - A week after their arrests at a Starbucks Corp cafe in Philadelphia sparked protests and calls for boycotts of the coffee chain, the two black men involved broke their silence and said they wanted the incident to change U.S. racial attitudes. The men, Donte Robinson and Rashon Nelson, sat down with ABC's 'Good Morning America' as scrutiny of the popular chain and U.S

By Ian Simpson and Lisa Baertlein

(Reuters) - A week after their arrests at a Starbucks Corp cafe in Philadelphia sparked protests and calls for boycotts of the coffee chain, the two black men involved broke their silence and said they wanted the incident to change U.S. racial attitudes.

The men, Donte Robinson and Rashon Nelson, sat down with ABC's "Good Morning America" as scrutiny of the popular chain and U.S. police tactics widen.

The arrests have been a "stepping stone to really stand up and show your greatness and that you are not judged by the colour of your skin," Nelson said.

A video of the incident, filmed by an onlooker, has been viewed almost 11 million times. Their arrests sparked protests and a decision by Starbucks to close more than 8,000 stores on May 29 for employee racial-tolerance training.

The incident put Starbucks, which prides itself on diversity and inclusiveness, at the centre of a social media storm after the cafe manager called police on Nelson and Robinson, who had not made a purchase and were waiting to meet a friend.

The manager, who is no longer with the company, called police within two minutes of the pair's arrival, according to the men's account of the incident. They were released without charges.

"It didn't really hit me what was going on, that this was real, until I'm being double-locked with my hands behind my back," Robinson said.

Police Commissioner Richard Ross, who came under sharp criticism for the incident and his defence of the officers, apologised to Robinson and Nelson and said he had made the situation worse.

Ross told a news conference he had been unaware that Starbucks' policy was to allow people to remain in its cafes without making a purchase. Police will draft a policy to deal with similar situations, he said.

The men's attorney, Stewart Cohen, said they are in mediation with Starbucks.

The arrests in Philadelphia have also prompted comments from relatives of a man in Milwaukee who was shot to death four years ago after employees at a Starbucks twice called police to report a man sleeping in a nearby park. While Starbucks referred to the calls as wellness checks, an officer shot the man, who was black, to death.

Then-Chief Executive Howard Schultz met with the man's family in 2015 and apologised in a private meeting, said Nate Hamilton, the brother of victim Dontre Hamilton, who spoke to media this week after the Philadelphia arrests.

"I'm happy it didn't turn out the same way," Hamilton told Reuters. "Starbucks, they talk a good game," he said of Schultz's plans. "Is it going to be put into action?"

(Reporting by Ian Simpson in Washington and Lisa Baertlein in Los Angeles; Editing by Dan Grebler and Lisa Shumaker)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
Prince Charles was approved as the successor to Queen Elizabeth as head of the Commonwealth at a meeting of the groups heads of government in Windsor on Friday, Sky News reported

London: Prince Charles was approved as the successor to Queen Elizabeth as head of the Commonwealth at a meeting of the groups heads of government in Windsor on Friday, Sky News reported citing unnamed sources.

There have been calls for the role to be rotated around the 53 member-states, most of which are former British territories, but in recent days the queen, the British government and other leaders have backed Charles.

The Commonwealth Secretariat, which carries out the organisations day-to-day work, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Prime Minister Theresa Mays office did not comment on the report.

The succession issue was due to be discussed at the final day of the meeting when leaders travelled 20 miles outside London for private meetings at the Queen's Windsor Castle home.

The Commonwealth evolved out of the British empire in the mid-20th century, and the queen has been its head since her reign began in 1952. Charles had long been expected to take on the role even though it is not strictly hereditary.

This weeks Commonwealth summit has seen thousands of delegates from across the globe descend on London, debating issues such as the environment, womens rights and trade. It ends later on Friday when May is due to speak.

Britain has sought to use its hosting of the event as a chance to reinvigorate the loose alliance of countries, which have a combined population of 2.4 billion people, eyeing increased trade and global influence as it prepares to leave the European Union.

But the summit has been overshadowed by the embarrassing treatment of Caribbean migrants who came to Britain after World War II to help rebuild the country but have been caught up in a tightening of immigration rules.

The biennial meeting, taking place in Britain for the first time in 20 years, could be the last attended by the 91-year-old queen as she cuts back on some of her official duties. The next summit is due to be held in Malaysia in 2020.
China on Friday defended Pakistan against Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's remark that Islamabad was a 'terror export factory'

Beijing: China on Friday defended Pakistan against Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's remark that Islamabad was a "terror export factory", saying the country must be supported in the fight against "terrorism".

Beijing also hinted the issue of terrorism will be on the agenda of discussion at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) when the eight-member block, joined by India and Pakistan last year, holds its annual meeting at Chinese city Qingdao in June.

At an event in London on Thursday, Modi said India will not tolerate those who export terror.

"When someone has put a terror export factory in place, attacks my people, has no power to fight a war so attempts to attack behind the back in such a case Modi knows to how to give a reply in the same language," the Indian leader had said in an obvious reference to Pakistan.

Asked about Modi's remark, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said: "Terrorism is an enemy faced by all. The international community should work together to combat terrorism."

"Terrorism is an enemy faced by all. The international community should work together to combat terrorism. The international community should also support the efforts of Pakistan in fighting terrorism and cooperate with it," Hua added.

China always comes to the rescue of its "all-weather ally" Pakistan when it is pilloried for sheltering terrorists. Beijing has invested over $50 billion in various infrastructure projects under its ambitious Belt and Road programme.

Asked if the issue of terrorism will be discussed at the Foreign Ministers' meet of the SCO, Hua said: "As for the Foreign Ministers' meeting on terrorism, I believe it is a purpose of the SCO to promote relevant cooperation in the field."

India's External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj will arrive in Beijing on Saturday and attend the foreign ministerial-level meeting of the SCO on Monday.

However, Hua said the security issues will be the agenda of the main SCO meet in June, which will be attended by Modi.

"Security has been a priority of the SCO since its inception. So the upcoming Prime Minister's SCO meeting will see participants exchanging views on the relevant issues. All participants will uphold the SCO spirit to take forward the development of SCO," Hua said.
Chinese and Australian naval vessels had an 'encounter' in the South China Sea this week, and China acted professionally and lawfully, its defence ministry said, rejecting reports China challenged Australian warships.

Beijing/Melbourne: Chinese and Australian naval vessels had an "encounter" in the South China Sea this week, and China acted professionally and lawfully, its defence ministry said, rejecting reports China challenged Australian warships.

The Australian Defence Department confirmed three ships had recently travelled to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam but declined to comment on "operational details related to ships transiting the South China Sea".

The Australian Broadcasting Corp cited one official saying the exchanges with the Chinese navy were polite but "robust".

China's defence ministry said in a statement the reports in Australian media "did not accord with the facts".

"The Chinese side's ships used professional language to communicate with the Australian side, and their operations were lawful, in compliance, professional and safe," it said.

The "encounter" happened on Sunday, it said.

China recently completed extensive military exercises in the South China Sea, where its claims are hotly disputed by Vietnam as well as the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei. Taiwan also lays claim to most of the sea.

Earlier, Australias Defence Department said in a statement emailed to Reuters that its forces had "maintained a robust programme of international engagement with countries in and around the South China Sea for decades".

"As they have done for many decades, Australian vessels and aircraft will continue to exercise rights under international law to freedom of navigation and overflight, including in the South China Sea," the defence department said.

Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, in London for a Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting, declined to confirm the interaction between the Australian warships and the Chinese military, Fairfax media reported.

'No problem'

Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a daily news briefing Chinas consistent position was to support and actively safeguard the right of all countries to have freedom of navigation and overflight in the South China Sea, in accordance with international law.

"If Australia is referring to freedom of navigation in accordance with international laws, there is no problem whatsoever," Hua said in Beijing.

"But if Australia has other motives, we hope it can see the trend in the South China Sea is stable and improving, and work together with China and other neighbouring countries for the peace and stability of the region."

China's construction of islands and military facilities in the South China Sea, through which some $3 trillion in trade passes annually, has sparked concern it is seeking to restrict free movement and extend its strategic reach.

The United States has conducted "freedom of navigation patrols" through the South China Sea, stoking tension with China which says it will protect its sovereignty.

Australia is a staunch US ally.

Its navy ships Anzac, Toowoomba and Success are on a three-month deployment in Southeast Asia, which will involve exercises with a number of countries in the region, the Australian Defence Department said in a statement on 17 April.

The Toowoomba sailed to Vietnam from Malaysia, while the other two Australian warships went through the South China Sea from Subic Bay in the Philippines.
By Robert Muller PRAGUE (Reuters) - Leaders of the centre-left Czech Social Democratic Party have agreed to return to talks with Prime Minister Andrej Babis's ANO party on forming a new government, they said on Friday. The Czech Republic has lacked a fully-fledged government since an election in October gave the centrist ANO movement a victory which fell short of an overall majority in the lower house of parliament. A one-party ANO minority cabinet lost a confidence vote in January and has ruled in a caretaker capacity since

By Robert Muller

PRAGUE (Reuters) - Leaders of the centre-left Czech Social Democratic Party have agreed to return to talks with Prime Minister Andrej Babis's ANO party on forming a new government, they said on Friday.

The Czech Republic has lacked a fully-fledged government since an election in October gave the centrist ANO movement a victory which fell short of an overall majority in the lower house of parliament.

A one-party ANO minority cabinet lost a confidence vote in January and has ruled in a caretaker capacity since.

Most parties have refused to form a cabinet with ANO if Babis, the party's billionaire founder, remains as prime minister.

They cite conflicts of interest stemming from his business activities and police charges that he broke rules to qualify for a 2 million-euro European Union subsidy a decade ago. He denies any wrongdoing.

The Social Democrats (CSSD), who led the previous government with ANO but were trounced by the coalition partner in the election, walked away from previous talks with Babis earlier this month.

Babis has since conceded a key CSSD demand, the right to nominate the interior minister, and offered four other portfolios in the 15-member cabinet to bring the party back to the table, Social Democrat leader Jan Hamacek said.

The Social Democrats say that the interior minister position is necessary to guarantee Babis's party cannot interfere with investigation of the alleged fraud case.

Hamacek said the party leadership supported the decision with 14 to 5, with 7 abstentions, signalling unease about any deal, which would also have to win support in a party referendum.

"It was not an easy decision to make," Hamacek told reporters. "Restarting talks of course does not mean that we are entering the government."

He said the party wanted to prevent an alternative scenario of ANO seeking support from the Communists and the far-right, anti-NATO and anti-EU SPD party.

"Rejecting to negotiate would open the door to a government that would lean on the extremist SPD party and let's not have any illusions about what such arrangement would do to the Czech republic's reputation," Hamacek said.

ANTI-NATO

Still, a government of ANO and the Social Democrats would have only 93 votes in the 200-seat lower house, and the plan is to rely on support from 15 votes held by the Communist party in the initial vote of confidence.

It would be the first time the anti-NATO and pro-Russian party had enjoyed any share of power since the end of its one-party rule in 1989. But its strength has otherwise been in decline and its election results last year were its worst in the post-communist era.

The party has said it would pressure the government to change its foreign policy, for example by trying to reduce participation in foreign military missions without a United Nations mandate.

Babis has shown willingness to work with fringe parties but has insisted he will not alter the course of the EU and NATO member country's foreign policy.

(Writing by Jan Lopatka; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
A large-scale evacuation is to take place in Berlin on Friday to allow experts to defuse a World War II bomb, police said.

Berlin: A large-scale evacuation is to take place in Berlin on Friday to allow experts to defuse a World War II bomb, police said.

The area to be cleared includes Berlin Hauptbahnhof  the central railway station, an army hospital, the economy and transport ministries and the embassies of Indonesia and Uzbekistan, the BBC quoted the German police as saying.

Rail company Deutsche Bahn and other transport operators have warned of large-scale disruption for trains, trams and buses in the area.

The police say there is no immediate danger from the 500 kg British bomb, which was found on Heidestrasse last Wednesday. The operation to defuse the device will take place around midday, the BBC said.

The buildings will be cleared from 9 am in an 800 metre radius from the construction site where the bomb was discovered.

Flights to and from Tegel airport  about 7 km away  will not be affected, authorities said on Thursday, although planes coming in to land will avoid flying over the site.

Thousands of unexploded bombs from the 1939-45 war are found every year.

Tegel, which is Berlin's busiest airport, was briefly closed in August 2017 after the discovery of a Russian World War II bomb. In September, patients at hospitals in Frankfurt were evacuated to allow the controlled explosion of another huge wartime bomb.
Activists gathered in London for a protest denouncing homophobia and calling for the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Commonwealth countries.

London: Activists gathered in London on Thursday for a protest denouncing homophobia and calling for the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Commonwealth countries.

Images captured by an epa photojournalist on the ground showed members and supporters of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community holding placards outside of Commonwealth House as part of an action condemning homophobia, Efe reported.

"Homophobia is neo-colonialism, stop it," and "Abolish colonial sodomy laws in the Commonwealth" were among the messages scrawled across the placards.

The majority of countries in the Commonwealth still criminalize sexual acts between same-sex consenting adults.

United Kingdom's Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has said he will broach the topic of gay rights during the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, which was taking place in London from Monday to Friday.
Modi also interacted with President of Kiribati Taneti Maamau, Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda Gaston Browne and Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago Keith C Rowley.

London: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday had a series of bilateral meetings, including discussions with his Bangladesh counterpart Sheikh Hasina and Seychelles president Danny Faure on the sidelines of the multilateral Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in London.

"Neighbourhood first! Connecting with a neighbour and a close friend, PM Narendra Modi and Prime Minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina had a productive exchange of views on various issues of bilateral interest on the sidelines of CHOGM 2018," Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Raveesh Kumar tweeted.

Neighbourhood first! Connecting with a neighbour and a close friend, PM @narendramodi and Prime Minister of Bangladesh Mrs. Sheikh Hasina had a productive exchange of views on various issues of bilateral interest on the sidelines of #CHOGM18. pic.twitter.com/xbQcBxPtCs  Raveesh Kumar (@MEAIndia) April 19, 2018

This marked their first meeting since the Bangladeshi leader's visit to New Delhi last year and ahead of her proposed visit to India in the coming months.

The Ministry of External Affairs later said the two leaders discussed the developmental cooperation between India and Bangladesh, and also ways to implement decisions taken during earlier meetings between the two prime ministers.

Modi also met Seychelles president Faure and discussed cooperation in areas of trade and investment and other bilateral issues, he said.

The bilateral talks between Faure and Modi assumes significance after Seychelles ordered an inquiry into the leak of a highly classified agreement signed with India to develop infrastructure on Assumption Island, which lies southwest of the mainland of Mahe.

The opposition in Seychelles has decided not to ratify the pact because of Assumption's relative proximity to Aldabra atoll, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that is home to the world's largest population of giant tortoises.

Cementing close friendship with Mauritius, Modi met his Mauritius counterpart Pravind Kumar Jugnauth and talked about cooperation in trade and investment, maritime cooperation and people-to-people ties.

The "pull-aside meetings" with world leaders included an interaction with Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, Gambian president Adama Barrow, Fiji prime minister Frank Bainimarama, St Lucia prime minister Allen Chastanet and Prime Minister of Solomon Islands, Rick Houenipwela.

Modi also interacted with President of Kiribati Taneti Maamau, Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda Gaston Browne and Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago Keith C Rowley.

Some of the other world leaders expected to have one-on-one deliberations with Modi during the summit include South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, Cyprus president Nicos Anastasiades, and Jamaican prime minister Andrew Michael Holness.

"The summit offers ample opportunity for leaders to interact in meeting rooms for bilateral discussions on matters of mutual interest as well as cooperation over Commonwealth issues," a senior official said.

Officials had earlier indicated that no meeting has been requested or scheduled with Pakistan prime minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and later confirmed there was no interaction between the two.

The bilateral talks took place as the formal heads of government meeting got underway in London Thursday, following a formal launch by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace.

Prime Minister Modi was scheduled to address the second plenary meeting of the heads of government during the closed-door executive session of CHOGM.

At the launch of the CHOGM executive session at Lancaster House open to the media, British prime minister Theresa May said: "The great strength of the Commonwealth is that all our members have equal status, an equal voice, and an equal right to make that voice heard. So, as we tackle these challenges, I want to hear from everyone, and everyone will have chance to speak.

"We face many challenges in the world today. But the Commonwealth is a unique organisation and, at this summit, we have an opportunity to deliver lasting change that benefits all of our 2.4 billion people."

Later in the evening, the 91-year-old monarch will host a dinner for all 53 heads of government at the palace.

"I had not been able to visit the last summit and this time, it was an honour that Prince Charles came personally to India last year to invite me for it. The Queen herself wrote a personal letter to me, a matter of great pride for India," Modi had said during his "Bharat Ki Baat, Sabke Saath" diaspora event in London on Wednesday evening.

An Indian prime minister is attending CHOGM, held every two years, after a hiatus of nearly a decade, having skipped CHOGMs in Perth, Colombo and Malta since 2009. The Indian government has said that this symbolises the country's wider efforts to step up its role across global forums.

The executive session of the summit on Thursday will be followed by a retreat at Windsor Castle on Friday, when the leaders get together in an informal setting without any pre-set agenda or being accompanied by their usual coterie of civil servants and advisers.

The summit concludes on Friday, when leaders will issue their communique and a leaders' statement after their retreat.

CHOGM takes place every two years in different Commonwealth countries, with the next host country also to be announced at the end of this summit.

Following the retreat, Modi will head back to India after a brief stop for his meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin.
Media in Britain scrutinised India's possible role in post-Brexit bilateral free trade deal and the two countries signing off on series of commercial agreements worth up to  1 billion ($1.42 billion). Officials in the Theresa May government also said that the investments would create or safeguard 5,750 British jobs.

A lot happened on Narendra Modi's second visit to the United Kingdom in less than three years  the prime minister addressed the Indian diaspora in a well-attended and well-managed Bharat ki Baat, angry protesters outside British Parliament demonstrating against Modi's visit and a possible post-Brexit bilateral free trade deal with Britain. While the Indian media focussed on prime minister's Bharat ki Baat address, which was moderated by CBFC chairman Prasoon Joshi, the British media's spotlight was on the trade deals that the two countries signed.

Under fire back home for the BJP-led government's inability to act on time against the rape cases reported from Jammu's Kathua and Uttar Pradesh's Unnao, Modi (in his Bharat ki Baat address) attempted to allay fears of many that the government was not supporting rapists or was averse to criticism. "When a child is raped, what could be worse? Is that the time to compare to metrics versus the earlier governments? When a girl comes home late, all parents are worried. When a boy goes out and comes home late, why don't we ask him where he was? We must make our men accountable. Look...I have lived the life of a poor man, I don't need to learn about it from a book and I know how tough that life is. Nothing is more important to me than to make our country safer, cleaner....", Modi told a massive crowd assembled for his 'Bharat ki Baat' address in London's Westminster Central Hall on Wednesday night.

The Indian media dubbed Modi's Wednesday interaction with the Indian diaspora as the prime minister's way of paving the path for the upcoming 2019 Lok Sabha election and also Karnataka Assembly election scheduled for 12 May. British media, however, scrutinised India's possible role in post-Brexit bilateral free trade deal and the two countries signing off on series of commercial agreements worth up to 1 billion ($1.42 billion). Officials in the Theresa May government also said that the investments would create or safeguard 5,750 British jobs.

The Guardian noted that the deal with UK might not be as lucrative as the India-European Union (EU) trade deal as Modi's priority was a free trade deal with the EU. Unless the UK makes "major concessions" on Indian skilled labour, the chances of Britain securing a trade deal with India "superior" to that of the Indian-EU deal is wishful thinking, the London-based newspaper noted.

Prime Minister Theresa May, who is hoping to secure a free trade agreement with India after Brexit said: "Our trade partnership is showing how we can remove barriers to increase trade between our two countries." Total trade in goods and services between Britain and India was 18 billion in 2017. Modi also said that there will be no dilution in the importance of the UK to India post-Brexit. "Britain will be just as important to India after it leaves the EU as it is now," Modi reportedly said.

That Modi became the first prime minister in just under a decade to attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) of 2018, justified the lavish treatment of the prime minister by his counterpart and the British Royal family. The last CHOGM attended by India was by former prime minister Manmohan Singh at Port of Spain in 2009. "The 2011 edition in Perth was boycotted by Manmohan (Singh) on account of Australia's reversal of the decision to export uranium to India. New Delhi also gave the 2013 event in Colombo a miss after taking note of the charges of massive human rights violations against Tamils by Sri Lanka. In 2015, Modi sent External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj to Malta in his stead," a Firstpost article noted.

After decades of sidelining the Commonwealth as a relic of their imperial past, many in Britain are now promoting the group of ex-colonies as a ready-made market for what they hope to be the country's buccaneering global business spirit after the exit from the EU. International trade secretary Liam Fox cast the Commonwealth as a more natural fit for Britain than the centralised EU. Ever since the Brexit vote campaign, they referred to the "old friends" in the Commonwealth, some of whom still have Queen Elizabeth II as their sovereign, use English as their official language, and share a cultural and sporting heritage.

"As we leave the United Kingdom leaves the European Union, we have the opportunity to reinvigorate our Commonwealth partnerships and usher in a new era, harnessing the movement of expertise, talent, goods and capital between our nations, in a way that we have not done for a generation or more," Fox was quoted as saying by The Associated Press. Apart from trade deals, especially at a time when Britian is looking at former colonies for help, the media in Britain also focussed on protests against the May government which has come under intense scrutiny over its treatment of Commonwealth citizens in the Windrush scandal.

The plight of legal residents wrongly identified as living in Britain illegally has erupted as the country hosts leaders from the 53-nation Commonwealth of the U.K. and its former colonies. May met with Caribbean leaders and envoys Tuesday, and told them "we are genuinely sorry for any anxiety that has been caused." People who came to Britain after World War II are known as the "Windrush generation," after the ship Empire Windrush, which carried hundreds of Caribbean immigrants to Britain in 1948.

Most British newspapers carried straight reports on the protests held against the Indian prime minister's three-day UK visit and largely refrained from reporting anything sensational.

The Guardian, however, published an oped that said, "Lets hold him to account for the horrific rapes committed in the name of Hindu nationalism." The article, titled "India is a republic of fear" said, "It is Hindutva, the ideology of the BJP and of the family of rightwing Hindu organisations it belongs to, which is today attempting to profoundly transform India into a monolithic Hindu nation from which minorities and dissidents are forcibly excluded." Citing examples of several incidents of hate crimes and crimes against women reported in India, the article said, "These developments are not a matter of uncontrollable religious hatred but a systematic move towards a fascistic Hindu state, led by a modern neoliberal party, which has its share of billionaires and hedge fund managers."

The article, quite harshly-worded, at one point alleges that Hindutva leader and RSS ideologue Vinayak Damodar Savarkar justified rape of Muslim women. The Guardian article further connects Savarkar's alleged "writings" and commented that these views "legitimised the rapes and murders of Muslim women in Gujarat in 2002, and the recent Kathua child-rape case."
North Korea has expressed its commitment to complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula and has not attached conditions, South Koreas president said on Thursday, but Washington remains wary and has vowed to maintain maximum pressure on Pyongyang

Seoul/Washington: North Korea has expressed its commitment to complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula and has not attached conditions, South Koreas president said on Thursday, but Washington remains wary and has vowed to maintain maximum pressure on Pyongyang.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in said agreements about denuclearisation, establishing a peace regime and normalisation of relations between the Koreas and the United States should not be difficult to reach through a North-South summit next week, and a later summit planned between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and US president Donald Trump.

I dont think denuclearisation has different meanings for South and North Korea. The North is expressing a will for a complete denuclearisation, Moon said during a lunch with chief executives of Korean media companies.

They have not attached any conditions that the US cannot accept, such as the withdrawal of American troops from South Korea. All they are talking about is the end of hostile policies against North Korea, followed by a guarantee of security.

CIA Director Mike Pompeo met Kim this month to discuss a proposed summit with Trump and reported that the North Korean leader was not demanding the withdrawal of all US forces as a precondition for the meeting, a US official briefed on Pompeos trip told Reuters.

However, the official, who did not want to be identified, said that while Kim was open to negotiating denuclearisation, the term remained undefined and potentially deceptive, given the need for a timetable and an inspection regime.

North Korea has defended its nuclear and missile programmes in the face of worldwide condemnation and sanctions as a necessary deterrent against perceived US hostility.

It has said over the years that it could consider giving up its nuclear arsenal if the United States removed its troops from South Korea and withdrew its so-called nuclear umbrella of deterrence from South Korea and Japan.

On Wednesday, Trump, who says he plans to meet Kim in late May or early June for an unprecedented summit to try to persuade him to give up his nuclear weapons, reaffirmed the unwavering US commitment to maintain that umbrella.

In a joint statement after talks with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Trump said the US commitment to defend Japan through the full range of US military capabilities was unwavering.

They reiterated their commitment to the permanent and verifiable denuclearisation of North Korea and the need for Pyongyang to abandon all of its weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs, while vowing stepped up sanctions enforcement.

The United States stations 28,500 troops in South Korea, a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War, which ended in a truce, not a peace treaty. Trump complained in his election campaign about the cost of keeping those in Korea but his administration has given no indication of any plan to withdraw them.

South Korea announced on Wednesday it is considering how to change a decades-old armistice with North Korea into a peace agreement as it prepares for the North-South summit this month.

Moon said he saw the possibility of a peace agreement, or even international aid for North Koreas economy, if it denuclearises.

But, he also said the inter-Korean summit had a lot of constraints, in that the Koreas could not make progress separate from the North Korea-United States summit, and could not reach an agreement that transcends international sanctions.

So first, the South-North Korean summit must make a good beginning, and the dialogue between the two Koreas likely must continue after we see the results of the North Korea-United States summit, Moon said.

Trump said on Wednesday that Pompeo formed a good relationship with Kim when he met him in Pyongyang and the US president said he hoped the summit would be successful. But, Trump warned he would call it off if he did not think it would produce results.

Trump told a joint news conference with Abe that his campaign of maximum pressure on North Korea would continue until Pyongyang gave up its nuclear weapons.

In Geneva on Thursday, US Disarmament Ambassador Robert Wood told a news conference North Korea must show that it is serious about getting rid of its nuclear weapons programme and take concrete steps, adding, Weve got a long way to go.

Chinas foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a regular press briefing in Beijing that China supported ending the state of war on the Korean peninsula.

China supports ending the war state on the peninsula at an early date, she said. As a party involved in the peninsula issue, China is willing to play an active role.

Ahead of next weeks summit, Seoul and Pyongyang will also complete the instalment of a telephone hotline between the two leaders on Friday, directly connecting the Souths presidential Blue House and the Norths State Affairs Commission, the Souths presidential spokesman said.

Six top South Korean officials will accompany Moon to the summit, including his chief of staff, spy chief, national security adviser and unification, defence and foreign ministers, the spokesman said.

North Korea, meanwhile, will hold a plenary meeting of its ruling partys central committee on Friday, state media KCNA said on Thursday.

The meeting was convened to discuss and decide policy issues of a new stage to meet the demands of the current important historic period, KCNA said.
UK govt has tendered apology on after Indian authorities complained that Indian flag in Parliament Square was pulled down, torn and stamped on by protesters

The United Kingdom government has tendered an apology on Thursday after Indian authorities complained that protesters pulled down, tore and stamped on the Indian flag outside the Parliament Square. The protesters were demonstrating against Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit.

A few protests against atrocities in India turned violent after the tricolour was torn down from one of the official flagpoles set up for all 53 Commonwealth countries. "We have expressed our concerns with the British authorities and they have apologised for the incident. We have been warning against some of these elements out to make trouble and they have assured us of action. The Indian flag has now been replaced," a senior Indian official associated with the prime minister's visit said.

"Protests and demonstrations are part and parcel of any democratic society as long as they remain peaceful. There are now concerns that some of the more aggressive elements hijacked the tone of the protests", the official added.

The Metropolitan Police had issued a statement saying that "Police is investigating the incident in Parliament Square where the Indian flag was pulled down at 15.00 (UK time) on Wednesday, 18 April. The flag has been replaced. There have been no arrests. Enquiries continue."

A UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) spokesperson said, "While people have the right to hold peaceful protests, we are disappointed with the action taken by a small minority in Parliament Square and contacted high commissioner Yashvardhan Kumar Sinha as soon as we were made aware. "The visit to the UK by Prime Minister Modi has strengthened our relationship with India and we look forward to working even more closely together on a number of important areas."

A senior broadcast journalist from one of the leading Indian media channels covering the protests was caught in a violent scrum with some of the more aggressive pro-Khalistani protesters and Scotland Yard officers on duty had to step-in to the rescue. The group is planning to file a complaint with the Metropolitan Police on the incident.

Ashis Ray, president of the Indian Journalists Association (IJA) raised the issue of attacks on journalists with Scotland Yard and the foreign office and called on the police to book the assailants. He said in a statement: Reports of intimidation against and manhandling of a few of our members by political protesters in central London on 18 April have been brought to our notice. IJAs constitution obliges the organisation to defend the right of our members to freely discharge their professional duties. Therefore, IJA strongly condemns the threats and violence faced by concerned members from anti-India demonstrators. We also call upon the British police to bring to book wrongdoers upon receiving any complaint on the matter from our members.

The pro-Khalistani demonstrators from Sikh Federation UK and demonstrators from the so-called "Minorities Against Modi" group, led by Pakistani-origin peer Lord Ahmed, were among nearly 500 protesters who descended upon Parliament Square. These included groups led by some Kashmiri separatist groups and at one point, some of them had surrounded the Mahatma Gandhi statue at the square with their banners and flags.

On the other side, the anti-Modi protesters from Caste Watch UK and South Asia Solidarity group waved banners such as 'Modi, you have blood on your hands' and 'Modi Not Welcome'.

"Hindu nationalism must be curtailed to avert India sliding towards wholesale dictatorship threatening democratic fabric, rule of law and the unity of India," a Caste Watch UK spokesperson said.

They were joined by other protestors carrying images the eight-year-old rape victim from Kathua in Jammu and Kashmir, and Gauri Lankesh, the Indian journalist who was shot at her doorstep last year. The group also included representatives of several Indian women's groups in the UK, wearing white as part of their silent protest against atrocities that are taking place in India. "I am Hindustan, I am ashamed," read their placards alongside banners such as 'Beti Bachao' and 'Politics minus rape'.

While the protests were on in Parliament Square and Downing Street, British prime minister Theresa May did not respond inside Parliament to a ruling party MP who asked her to condemn messages by anti-India groups against Modi on customised vans moving around central London.

According to Hindustan Times, Conservative Party MP Bob Blackman asked May: Will my right hon. friend take the opportunity to condemn absolutely the mobile billboards that are going around London attacking our good friend Prime Minister Modi, and will she congratulate and thank the 1.7 million members of the Indian diaspora on their contribution to the work of this country? May did not mention the anti-Modi billboards, but said: "India is indeed a good friend of the UK, and the Indian diaspora here in the UK plays an enormous role and makes an enormous contribution to our society and our economy. She added, "When I spoke to Prime Minister Modi, we discussed how we can encourage and increase the links and development between our two countries."

Afzal Khan, Labour MP from Manchester, mentioned the protests and asked her: This week, the UK becomes the chair of the Commonwealth. Many of us will have walked past demonstrations outside Parliament on the issue of Kashmir, and I understand that the prime minister will be presented with a petition. The stalemate in the bilateral talks between India and Pakistan has failed to deliver any solution to this major nuclear flashpoint. How will she use the UKs new position to boldly pursue peace and human rights violations in Jammu and Kashmir?

May reiterated Londons stance on the issue: I am sure that it is a matter of concern not only to him but to a number of his constituents. We continue to take the view that the best resolution of this issue is for India and Pakistan themselves to come together and resolve the matter. That will be the way to resolve it that will actually ensure the sustainability of a resolution.

With inputs from PTI
Swazilands King Mswati III, Africas last absolute monarch, said on Thursday he was officially renaming the country as the Kingdom of eSwatini.

Mbabane: Swazilands King Mswati III, Africas last absolute monarch, said on Thursday he was officially renaming the country as the Kingdom of eSwatini. He announced the change to eSwatini, meaning land of the Swazis, in the local Swati language at Golden Jubilee celebrations of the 50th anniversary of Swazi independence and of his 50th birthday.

The king has referred to the Kingdom of eSwatini several times in recent years - in an address to the United Nation (UN) General Assembly in 2017 and at African Union and other international conferences.

Addressing a large gathering in a stadium in the second city of Manzini, 40 kilometres (25 miles) east of the capital Mbabane, the king said Swaziland was reverting to the original name it had before being colonised by the British. The impoverished southern African nation  a member of the Commonwealth  gained independence from Britain in 1968. I would like to announce that from today onwards, our country will be known as the Kingdom of eSwatini, the king said. He said the name Swaziland had caused confusion. Whenever we go abroad, people refer to us as Switzerland, the king said.

The king, who wore a red and black military uniform and rode in an open car into the stadium, said he wanted his country to have a name people could identify with. Most of the kings subjects eke out a living in agriculture, often cultivating sugar. There is widespread poverty in a country with the worlds highest HIV/AIDS rate.

Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen attended the event while on a visit to a country which is one of the few to maintain diplomatic ties with Taiwan rather than Beijing. It is Tsais first trip to Africa since assuming the presidency in 2016.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The leader of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee said on Thursday the committee would vote on a bill to protect Robert Mueller, the special counsel appointed to investigate Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election, despite objections by the chamber's Republican leadership

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The leader of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee said on Thursday the committee would vote on a bill to protect Robert Mueller, the special counsel appointed to investigate Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election, despite objections by the chamber's Republican leadership.

Senator Chuck Grassley, the Judiciary Committee's Republican chairman, said he was keeping his word to the bill's backers that the panel would take up the measure if they reached a bipartisan compromise, which they had.

The committee will consider the legislation next week.

U.S. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell had told Fox News on Tuesday that he would not allow a vote on the measure in the full Senate.

"Obviously the views of the majority leader are important to consider, but they do not govern what happens here in the Judiciary Committee," Grassley said at a committee meeting.

The legislation was co-authored by Republican Senators Thom Tillis and Lindsey Graham and Democrats Chris Coons and Cory Booker. The bill would make it harder for President Donald Trump to fire Mueller, or for any president to fire any special counsel, by allowing Mueller to seek a judicial review if he were to be dismissed.

(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Bernadette Baum)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
US envoy Sam Brownback called for the release of journalists jailed in Myanmar while covering the plight of ethnic Rohingya Muslims forced to flee a military crackdown

Dhaka: US envoy Sam Brownback called for the release of journalists jailed in Myanmar while covering the plight of ethnic Rohingya Muslims forced to flee a military crackdown.

Brownback spoke in Bangladesh, where he was on a mission to see at first hand the plight of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya crammed into refugee camps in the Cox's Bazar region bordering Myanmar.

"The journalists who are in jail in Myanmar should be released," Brownback, ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, told a news conference in Dhaka, without naming any individuals or their employers.

The US is among several governments pressing for the release of two Reuters journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who have been held in Myanmar since December.

A court is deliberating over whether they will be charged under the colonial-era Official Secrets Act for possessing secret government papers  an offence that carries a maximum penalty of 14 years in prison.

Aside from the US administration, Canada, Britain and several other European countries, as well as top UN and EU officials have called for the journalists' release.

On 11 April, a Myanmar judge rejected a defence request to dismiss the case against the two reporters for lack of evidence. The judge said he wanted to hear eight remaining prosecution witnesses out of the 25 listed, according to defence lawyer Khin Maung Zaw.

Brownback praised the media's work covering events since the Rohingya crisis began in August, and said journalists should be allowed to move freely in Myanmar and the region to report on developments.

Brownback described the campaign against the Rohingya as "ethnic cleansing against a Muslim minority". Myanmar rejects that description, saying its action was a legitimate counter-insurgency operation in response to a series of militant attacks on security posts and an army camp in its northwestern Rakhine state.

Earlier this month, however, seven Myanmar soldiers were sentenced to 10 years "with hard labour in a remote area" for participating in a massacre of 10 Rohingya Muslim men in Rakhine last September, the army said.

According to UN officials, nearly 700,000 Rohingya have fled into Bangladesh from Rakhine. Asked about possible US measures against Myanmar over the crisis, Brownback told the news conference. "We will continue to investigate to get a clear picture."

He added that several members of the US Congress and vice-president Mike Pence had expressed deep concern to him. Myanmar reported on Saturday the first return to Rakhine state of a refugee Rohingya family from Bangladesh. The Bangladeshi government and the United Nations refugee agency said they had no knowledge of any such repatriation.
The White House on Thursday denied that secretary of defence James Mattis had advised US president Donald Trump against striking Syria before seeking Congress sanction

Washington: The White House on Thursday denied that secretary of defence James Mattis had advised US president Donald Trump against striking Syria before seeking Congress sanction.

"Reports that Secretary Mattis urged the president to seek congressional approval before last week's strikes in Syria are categorically false," a statement from White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said.

"As Secretary Mattis explained to Congress in Wednesday's all-member briefs, the president appropriately ordered the strikes under his constitutional authorities," the statement said.

The response came after the US media cited military and administration sources as saying that Mattis had urged Trump to seek Congressional approval before punishing Syria for alleged use of chemical weapons, Xinhua reported.

Trump, who was said to be eager to back up his fiery tweets against the Syrian government, then reportedly overruled Mattis.

The US, in coordination with the UK and France, fired a barrage of missiles against three targets in Syria that it alleged contained, manufactured or researched chemical weapons.

The attack was carried out without sanction from the United Nations Security Council in accordance with the UN charter, nor was it based on any findings from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, a UN watchdog tasked to investigate alleged uses of chemical weapons in Syria.

The US, with its allies, said they have obtained evidence to support their claim, but has not yet released any of the evidence.

The attack came one year after US forces took out a Syrian government military airfield, which it said supported chemical attacks.
2018 vs 2016 6.7 Diesel?

Looking for opinions from those who tow with Ford F250 Super Duty diesels. I have a 2016 that I absolutely love and it is a pleasure to tow with. However, it has a gremlin in the EGR emissions system and has been in the shop 5 times for a grand total of 50+ days over the past year. It's in the shop again now, going on 4 weeks this time, and they aren't even certain they can fix the problem. They've already replaced warped exhaust valves and now they are replacing both head assemblies, in full, due to the issue. It keeps happening, no matter what they do. It starts with my exhaust filter not cleaning properly, overloading, and then it goes into the high heat "drive until clean" mode. When it does that, it lasts 30-45 minutes and immediately develops a violent shaking and vibration at highway speeds. after. They found out the high heat is warping the exhaust valves and causing some bad engine shaking. This is the 3rd or 4th time trying to repair this one issue. At this point, they are talking about lemon law or just putting me in a new replacement vehicle. I specifically bought the 2016 as a leftover because I really liked the older body style and the steel body versus the new aluminum body. But, over time, the new body has grown on me and I'm liking the way they look. if I get a brand new truck with 18000 less miles, new tires, brakes and 2 model years newer for no cost, I can't really argue about that. So, on to my question:.

For those that have the 2017 or 2018, what are your thoughts on the quality of the truck and the towing capability and stability versus the prior models? The new truck is lighter with the aluminum body, and it's 3 or 4 inches taller, so I worry about stability while pulling my travel trailer. This is my daily driver, and I honestly bought the diesel to pull my 32' camper through the mountains with ease. I also wanted a diesel to last, hoping to drive this thing for years. I love the 250 over the F150 I had before. I just want the problems to go away and my truck to stay out of the shop. I'm trying to decide whether to keep trying to let them repair it, or allow them to replace it with the new body style. No doubt I'd be getting a newer, fancier truck that looks more like an F-150 than a super duty. The new body style is growing on me, but just want to know what those think who have either owned both, or at least own the new version. If you had a choice of keeping your 2016 steel body truck, or going with the new 2018, money aside (because it will cost me nothing, or very little), which would you choose? Thanks in advance for any opinions and feedback.
Curio Collection by Hilton Arrives in Japan with Picturesque Mountain Village Resort

Kyukaruizawa Kikyo offers travelers ability to rejuvenate and recharge in an ideal location to experience the history-rich destination

April 20, 2018 // Franchising.com // TOKYO and MCLEAN, Va. - Hilton (NYSE: HLT) today announced the opening of its first Curio Collection by Hilton hotel in Japan, and third in Asia Pacific, Kyukaruizawa Kikyo. Located in the scenic and historic destination of Karuizawa in Nagano prefecture, the mountain village hotel features 50 spacious guestrooms elegantly designed as havens for rejuvenation, and amenities such as a wellness spa, public bath, sauna, fitness center and an elegantly designed wedding chapel set in a beautiful courtyard. The hotel will be managed by Tokyo Stay Service Co. Ltd. under a franchise agreement between Hilton and Tokyu Land Corporation.

Having recently celebrated the opening of our 50th Curio Collection hotel, we are excited to introduce the brand to Japan as we continue to expand our portfolio of handpicked, distinctive hotels and resorts around the world, said Mark Nogal, global head, Curio Collection by Hilton. Japan is a key market for us, and we are confident that tourism will continue to flourish in the country as travelers explore beyond popular urban areas like Tokyo and Osaka. Karuizawa, known for its rich foliage and ski slopes, is the perfect location for a Curio Collection hotel, offering travelers the authentic experience they crave.

Guests can also look forward to memorable dining experiences at French restaurant SONORITE, which brings together the best of Shinshu (Naganos traditional name) produce and French cuisine techniques. Helmed by Chef Ryu Nakanishi, who has extensive experience at Michelin-starred restaurants in Lyon, France and Ginza, Tokyo, the restaurant offers guests classic dishes with modern elements, enhanced by a unique combination of regional ingredients.

I am honored to serve as the first general manager of Japans first Curio Collection by Hilton hotel. Together with my team, we look forward to welcoming our first guests to Kyukaruizawa Kikyo, and showing them the light and warmth of hospitality as they recharge and rejuvenate amid the hotels tranquil surroundings and Karuizawas bountiful nature said Yoshiaki Sugiki, general manager, Kyukaruizawa Kikyo, Curio Collection by Hilton.

The hotel, which is approximately 15 minutes by foot from the JR Karuizawa train station, is also a short walk from historic Karuizawa, a popular tourist destination because of its relaxed atmosphere and beautiful scenery.

Kyukaruizawa Kikyo, Curio Collection by Hilton is also part of Hilton Honors, the award-winning guest-loyalty program for Hilton's 14 distinct hotel brands. Members who book directly 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, free standard Wi-Fi and access to the Hilton Honors mobile app.

For more information or to make reservations, travelers may visit the hotels website on www.kyukaruizawakikyo.curiocollection.com. More information on recent and upcoming Curio Collection by Hilton openings is available at news.curio.com/openings.

SOURCE Curio Collection by Hilton

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Kinderdance A Top Childrens Franchise Awards A Franchise In Miami Florida

April 20, 2018 // Franchising.com // Roanoke, VA - Kinderdance International Inc, a top childrens franchise focusing on developmental dance, gymnastics, yoga and fitness programs for young children, continues to grow and expand their brand by awarding a Gold level franchise to Randolph Revan. Mr. Revans team of certified teachers are instructing Kinderdance programs to children in the Miami Florida Area.

Randy was born in Antigua but relocated to New York City at a young age and later to Florida. He is a natural salesman, entrepreneur, and businessman, managing and growing multiple businesses throughout his life including; retail stores, car dealerships, trucking companies, child cares and a background screening company. Randy says after doing my research on different childrens franchise organizations, my desire to be part of a leader in childrens developmental dance and movement led me to Kinderdance a top childrens franchise. The solid corporate support, increasing demand for quality dance and movement programs really stood out to me. With a passion for dance, movement programs, kids fitness and the love for working with children, Randy and his team will enjoy enriching the lives of children in the Miami Florida area.

We are excited about Randy joining our franchise family and look forward to seeing his business grow in the Miami area says Kinderdance Vice President of Franchise Development, Karen Maltese.

Kinderdance, established in 1979 is a worldwide recognized dance, gymnastics and fitness program for children ages two to twelve. Their 142 Franchisees currently teach to thousands children weekly at thousands of locations in the US and around the world.

The Kinderdance programs are all original worldwide dance, motor development, gymnastics, and fitness programs that combine academic readiness skills that are specifically designed for children ages 15 months to 12 years old. What makes Kinderdance unique is that all of our programs incorporate educational concepts in a developmentally designed curriculum that teaches to the total child. We place special emphasis on building self-confidence and self-esteem in young children.

The company offers their educational movement programs on site to child-care centers, recreational centers, churches, fitness centers, corporate child care, community centers, military bases, public and private schools and many other viable locations.

For more information on Kinderdance please contact Richard Maltese at 1-800-554-2334 or visit their website at www.kinderdance.com.

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The points for the Kentucky Derby are in. That means no more Derby points will be awarded from now until May 5. Online bookie agents must ready themselves for the biggest day in horse racing.

The May 5 Kentucky Derby could garner more action in some online racebooks then all other races during the year combined.

(Find out how you can get up to 35% cash back credited to your account too!)

Heres what bookies must know about the Derby points standings.

Wont Have the Most Points 1. The Favorite for the DerbyHave the Most Points

Sounds crazy but the favorite for the Kentucky Derby wont enter the gate with the most Derby points.

In fact, the favorite to win the Run for the Roses is ninth on the Kentucky Derby Point Standings.

Justify has 100 Derby points. He might go off as an 8/5 chalk to win the Derby on May 5. Hell definitely be the favorite.

Magnum Moon has 150 points. Good Magic has 134 points. Audible has 110, Noble Indy 110, Vino Rosso 107, Bolt dOro 104, and Enticed 103. Mendelssohn is tied with Justify. He too has 100 points.

2. Todd Pletcher trains 4 horses in the Top 10 Kentucky Derby Point Standings

Trainer Todd Pletcher, who won the Derby last year with Always Dreaming, has 4 horses in the Top 10 on the Kentucky Derby Point Standings.

Those 4 horses are:

1. Magnum Moon, who won the Arkansas Derby.

2. Audible, who won the Florida Derby.

3. Noble Indy, who won the Louisiana Derby.

4. Vino Rosso, who took home the Wood Memorial.

Of Pletchers 4 Derby contender, Magnum Moon and Audible are the most well-regarded Magnum Moon is at around 4 to 1 odds in most future books. Audible is around a 6.5 to 1 choice in the futures.

3. Gronkowski wont show up on the Derby Point Standings

.but he will run in the Kentucky Derby

Only the horses in the Top 20 on the Kentucky Derby Point Standings can enter the Derby starting gate.

Well, thats usually how it works. However, Gronkowski won the Burradon Stakes. He received an invitation to run in the 2018 Kentucky Derby.

4. Set max betting limits on all horses on the Kentucky Derby Point Standingsand Gronk

Online bookie agents should set max betting limits on all horses on the Kentucky Derby Point Standings.

That includes Combatant, who might not even run, Snapper Sinclair, and every other horse offering odds to win the Run for the Roses.

Setting max betting limits is the only way to ensure you dont take a huge hit. At his current 5/2 betting odds, Justify pays back $350 for every $100 wagered.

5. Successful racebooks will offer the most tracks & horse profiles to their bettors

Online bookie agents should have access to the most tracks to ensure the garner the most wagers in the racebooks while bettors are excited for the Triple Crown Races.

PayPerHead.com offers 70+ horse tracks to keep horse players betting 365 days a year. They also offer 12 customizable pre-set horse profiles. Online bookies can offer a unique betting experience to all their clients.

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Find out the 3 steps online bookie agents must take in order to get 35% Cash Back Credited To Their Racebook Account.

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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.
What is Google Home?

Until now you have seen and used Google Assistant only in Android smartphones. It is time you experience it in an audio product. Google Home is a smart audio speaker backed by Google Assistant, which has been around for a while and has shown its abilities in giving our lives a bit of smart makeover. You can ask Google Home to do things like play music, read the news, inform about weather and traffic, nearby hotels, movies, etc. It can also tell you a joke and play nursery rhymes for your kids.

Front mounted Microphone button

Google Home does that with the help of an always listening microphone that awaits your voice commands. You can start by saying, "Ok Google" or "Hey Google." You have to remember these two commands if you want Google Home to show its smarter side. Amazon Echo, on the other hand, can be called by just saying Alexa'. If you don't want Google Home to hear you, per se, at night, or when kids are around, you can simply press the microphone button at front and mute the microphones. Press it again, and Google Home starts listening to your voice commands.

Minimal design and yes it does look like a vase

Google follows a clean and simplistic design language in all of its products, be its Android software iterations or hardware products. This is also seen in the Google Home and Google Home Mini. Google Home has a minimal design that might fail to please hard-core techies and would just look like a small vase to many. However, it's aesthetically very clean and easily blends with almost every kind of interior. In India, Google Home comes with a standard Gray fabric base with a high-quality White plastic main body. The speaker is rather small and can be easily repositioned anywhere in the house. The design of Google Home looks much better than the rival Amazon Echo.

The build quality is solid and the finishing is premium. However, unlike a range of non-smart speakers priced under Rs.10,000 that come with some sort of IP rating to offer water-dust protection, Google Home is not water and dust protected. This is a compromise you have to make for its smart features. And it's not like you are going to take Google Home on a raft or on a trek. You won't find any power source there and this thing needs to be plugged into a power source all the time.

Touch capacitive buttons and eye-catchy LED light ring

The matte finish surface houses all the controls on the top surface, which are hidden in plain sight as they follow a touch capacitive layout. And oh boy! Fire up the speaker and just see the Google logo colored lights, which is a sight for anyone when you say Ok Google! You will also find two microphones placed on either side of the top surface, the eye-catchy LED lights and the pause/play touch capacitive button.

While you can ask Google Home to reduce the volume levels via voice commands, you can also use the LED lights ring on top to manually control it. Simply swipe your fingers in clockwise and counterclockwise to increase or decrease the volume levels. The change in volume levels is indicated by the lights.

Continues Power Supply is a bummer

For me, the biggest letdown is the fact that Google Home always needs to be plugged in. As it's constantly monitoring the sounds in a room and is waiting to respond to your commands, you need to provide it continues power supply. The cord needs to be plugged into the port placed at the bottom of the Google Home.

I would love to take Google Home outdoors, but it's just not possible for now. We might see a smart audio speaker in future from Google or Amazon with a built-in battery, but for now, you have to use it within the limits of your home. Or, you can look for some swappable battery-powered base that allows you to free Google Home from the bundled power cable. One option can be the Loft battery pack; however, it's not available in the Indian market at present.

How smart is Google's smart audio product?

Google Home is as smart as Google Assistant. However, when we talk about Google Home, the intelligence is based on the speaker's ability to hear and recognize your voice to address your queries. I often start my day by asking Google Home about weather, news and traffic information and it delivers satisfactory results for most of the times. I wish it could also provide me information about pollutant levels in my surroundings, but it simply apologizes and says, I am not sure how to help'. Even though it has my location information saved. It's also weird that Google Home fails to provide a list of movies playing in a particular theater, per se PVR around me. The list just couldn't come out ever from the Google Home even though it says here's the movie list.

Moreover, Google Home is also not very consistent and often asks for the second round of instruction when there's ambient noise in surroundings. Sometimes, you just have to reach out to touch capacitive button to pause the playing audio or to reduce the volume levels as it just couldn't hear you. I think Google Home just love its audio playback too much that it simply ignores your instructions. In short, it behaves like a roommate you want to kick out. But then it always reminds me to pick stuff in everyday routine and can also set an alarm for me. You can't make a direct call by just asking Google Home to do it. In future, we might get this feature with an update. Actually, Google Home is yet to receive most of Google's services which will indeed turn it into a Smart Hub' for a connected home ecosystem.

Experience the power of connected home

Google Home can also connect to a host of other devices to make your home a bit extra smarter. The list of devices includes- Google Chromecast, a multitude of Bluetooth speakers, and IOT enabled household devices. To test this feature, Google also bundled the Philips Hue lamp in the packaging, which did show us what Google Home is capable of.

Once you set up the smart bulb, you can switch on/off the lamp with just your voice commands. Moreover, you can also increase/decrease the light intensity of the Philips Hue bulb by just asking Google Home to do it, which is bliss. With a Chromecast device, you can simply ask Google Home to stream a particular episode of a season from your favorite series, or a video on YouTube on the TV in your living room.

Audio Performance

Ok, Google! Enough about the whole smart speaker story, let's talk about your audio performance. Google Home is powered by two small but powerful drivers and passive radiators. These make up for a good audio signature where you can experience loud audio and booming bass. Sometimes I wondered how a speaker this small is producing such a loud audio, which is indeed a good thing as the speaker can easily fill a living room. I have kept Google Home in a room with dimensions- 11 feet x 17 feet and the audio is more than enough to fill the entire room.

The mids and highs are not very well pronounced and lack clarity. But you won't find any trouble if you tune in a lot of pop and Bollywood tracks.

If I have to summarize Google Home audio performance in one line, I would say that you just can't expect Google Home to replace your home music system. But then, your home music system can't feature Google Home's intelligence, and in short is dumb. Overall, Google Home is a smart and capable audio device that gets most of the things right.

Verdict

Google Home is a glimpse into the future of connected smart home ecosystems. Priced at Rs. 9,999 and at Rs. 4,499 for the Home Mini, these are excellent devices for technology enthusiasts who seek more than just music from their audio device. Hard-core audiophiles should look for other options in the market, but if you want to experience what AI can do, Google Home is an excellent buy. You might feel disappointed when Google Home will sometimes just not recognize your voice and fail to deliver expected results, but it's only going to get smarter over time. Spend some extra bucks and buy IoT enabled smart devices to experience the full potential of Google Home.
Facebook wants a share in hardware; building its own processor News oi-Vishal Kawadkar Facebook isn't done conquering just the online sector.

Facebook is building a new team to develop its own semiconductors if the new job listings and sources that spoke to Bloomberg are to believed. The company would go head to head with other major players such as Apple and Google who recently invested in producing their own chips.

According to the job listing, Facebook is looking for a manager to create an "end-to-end SoC/ASIC, firmware, and driver development organization." That role will look after the team responsible for hardware, AI software or servers, Bloomberg noted. Facebook AI researcher Yann LeCun tweeted about a different role creating chips for AI. By jumping into the processor manufacturing, the company could be looking to gain some share in the hardware market as well.

The company is also said to have delayed the launch of its smart speakers which were slated for a launch at Facebook's F8 developer conference in May following the data scandal.

Bloomberg report noted that "now may be the wrong time" to expect users to trust the company by placing an always-listening device in their homes, considering the ongoing data scandal. In August, Bloomberg reported few details of the smart speakers. They are said to feature a video-focused device codenamed Aloha which will possibly be called Portal. The device is expected to come with 15-inch touchscreens manufactured by LG. It will also have a standalone speaker that would be priced lower than the former.

In August, Bloomberg reported few details of the smart speakers. They are said to feature a video-focused device codenamed Aloha which will possibly be called Portal. The device is expected to come with 15-inch touchscreens manufactured by LG. It will also have a standalone speaker that would be priced lower than the former. Both devices will reportedly use a voice assistant developed by Facebook, just like Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri.

How to Quickly Compress Large Video Files via VLC - GIZBOT

These smart speakers were planned to see the light of day in May, according to the report, but Facebook now wants have a 'deeper review' of how it is going to collect user data before unveiling the devices to the public. Few other reports say Aloha or Portal will offer more social networking functions. The company seems to have signed deals with Sony and Universal Music, which may add more features to the smart speakers.

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Motorola continues retail expansion in India with 50 more in AP News oi-Priyanka According to GFK data, approximately 2L smartphones are sold in Andhra Pradesh per month. 27 percent of the total smartphones sold in the South are in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.

Motorola India today announced 50 new 'Moto Hubs' across top 12 cities namely Vijayawada, Guntur, Visakhapatnam, Tirupati, Anantapur, Kadapa, Chittoor, Nellore, Ongole, Eluru, Rajahmundry, Kakinada to further strengthen their retail presence in the southern market.

B V Mallikarjuna Rao, Regional Sales Lead, Motorola Mobility India said, "We as a brand have always focused on re-designing customer experiences by providing better platforms to bring our products closer to our customers. All the previously opened Moto Hubs across the country have been a great success and we are positive that the people of Andhra Pradesh will reciprocate the same with equal or more enthusiasm."

As part of the strategy to consolidate its retail presence across the country, Motorola advanced its retail presence in Telangana with the opening of 50 new Moto Hubs across top 8 cities.

It also announced its entry in Madhya Pradesh with the opening of 60 Moto Hubs across Bhopal, Indore, and Jabalpur this month. Furthermore, Motorola also advanced its retail footprint in the southern market by announcing 100 Moto Hubs across Tamil Nadu with 50 Moto Hubs in Chennai and 100 new 'Moto Hubs' in Karnataka across top 8 cities out of which 50 will be in Bengaluru.

Furthermore, the company announced the opening of 50 new Moto Hubs in Mumbai and 25 Moto Hub stores in Kolkata respectively. Motorola commenced the year 2018, with the opening of 50 new Moto Hubs in New Delhi.

According to GFK data, approximately 2L smartphones are sold in Andhra Pradesh per month. 27 percent of the total smartphones sold in the South are in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, making them key focus markets for us in the region.

To recall, Motorola has also collaborated with Poorvika Mobiles across 43 cities in Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry, and Karnataka and with Big C and Lot Mobile stores across 55 cities in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana to provide retail access to consumers.

Moto Hub is a key destination that provides easy access and availability of all Motorola products including moto e4, moto e4 plus, moto c, moto c plus, moto g families including moto g5s plus, moto g5s, moto g5 plus and moto g5 as well as moto z franchise and moto mods along with accessories like on-ear and in-ear headphones, moto shells and covers.

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Xiaomi Mi 7 launch delayed due to 3D Facial Recognition Issues News oi-Karan Xiaomi Mi 7 was expected to be launch in the first half of the year along with a 3D sensing technology on it. But, the launch has been delayed due to some issues in 3D Facial Recognition.

A new report has been published today which claims that the first Android smartphone with 3D facial recognition feature will not appear before the third quarter of 2018.

According to the report there is an issue with the 3D sensing vendors who were holding back the Android manufacturers from including a 3D facial mapping technology on their phone, which is similar to the process of TrueDrepth camera on Apple's expensive iPhone X. With the help of 3D mapping technology Apple users can grow their hair, wear a hat, or put makeup to completely change their looks and still be recognized by their iPhone X.

The report claims that there is a problem with the technology of the software and hardware working technology of 3D sensing modules. The most practised module is made by the joint venture by Qualcomm, Himax Technologies and Truly Opto-electronics.

The feature will only work with Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 mobile platform. However, Samsung and Huawei will prefer their own Exynos and Kirin chipsets respectively. Both Samsung and Huawei will not be among the first Android device manufacturers to offer an Android smartphone coming equipped with the 3D sensing technology. The report also suggests that Samsung will not offer such feature until 2019.

Apple was the first smartphone manufacturer in the market who come up with the true-depth camera technology. Last year Apple introduced the iPhone X with a notch on its OLED display, which gathered a lot of praises. Later on, other brands like Huawei, Vivo and Oppo also came up with their notch design.

The reason behind the iPhone X notch was its advanced 3D facial recognition feature, which includes several sensors like the infrared camera, flood illuminator, proximity sensor, ambient light sensor, front camera and dot projector. The top-notch also houses components like microphone and speakers.

So far there is not even a single Android smartphone which is launched with the 3D face mapping feature like the iPhone X. However, the Xiaomi Mi 7 is speculated to arrive with the 3D sensing feature, which will make it the first Android phone with advanced facial identification feature.

The unannounced Xiaomi Mi 7 was expected to come with the latest Snapdragon 845 processor. It's expected that the smartphone will launch in the first half of the year along with a 3D sensing technology on it.

But today's report indicates that the phone has to wait a little longer, and the launch has been delayed to the third quarter, because of the poor results of the facial recognition system. The Xiaomi Mi 7 might be the first Android smartphone to feature a 3D sensing facial recognition technology.

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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
2018 Isuzu D-Max, MU-X pricing* D-Max 4x2 SX single cab chassis $28,600 4x2 SX single cab chassis (a) $31,900 4x2 SX crew cab chassis (a) $37,500 4x2 SX space cab ute (a) $36,300 4x2 SX crew cab ute (a) $38,700 4x2 LS-U crew cab ute (a) $44,100 4x2 LS-T crew cab ute (a) $46,900 4x4 EX single cab chassis $35,000 4x4 SX single cab chassis $38,200 4x4 SX single cab chassis (a) $40,300 4x4 SX space cab ute $41,000 4x4 SX space cab ute (a) $43,100 4x4 SX crew cab chassis $43,400 4x4 SX crew cab chassis (a) $45,500 4x4 SX crew cab ute $44,600 4x4 SX crew cab ute (a) $46,700 4x4 LS-M crew cab ute $46,900 4x4 LS-M crew cab ute (a) $49,000 4x4 LS-U space cab ute $46,600 4x4 LS-U space cab ute (a) $48,700 4x4 LS-U crew cab ute $48,800 4x4 LS-U crew cab ute (a) $50,900 4x4 LS-T crew cab ute (a) $54,700 MU-X 4x2 LS-M (a) $42,900 4x2 LS-U (a) $45,200 4x2 LS-T (a) $48,900 4x4 LS-M (a) $50,200 4x4 LS-U $52,400 4x4 LS-U (a) $52,500 4x4 LS-T (a) $56,200

The Road to Recovery podcast series

ISUZU Ute Australia (IUA) hopes its refreshed D-Max pick-up and MU-X large SUV can spur the Japanese manufacturer to its tenth consecutive year of double-digit sales growth since IUA was launched in Australia in 2008.After 25,804 sales with 10.4 per cent annual growth in 2017, Isuzu has started 2018 with 5928 sales in the first quarter, a year-on-year jump of 31.9 per cent that can partly be attributed to supply constraints in the first quarter of 2017.IUA managing director Hiro Kuramoto told GoAuto it would be a challenge for the company to sustain its prodigious growth.Last year we had some supply issues in the first three months of the year, so if you compare with last year, we have 30 per cent (growth), but actually we did very good  too good  last year, so we have to go over 10 per cent compared to last year, so its getting harder, he said.Imagine if you get double-digit growth for nine years  its hard.Mr Kuramoto said he believed the MU-X could retain its 2017 title of Australias most popular ute-based SUV, but given the competitiveness of the large SUV segment, he was hesitant to say if it could climb higher than sixth place in the overall large SUV segment, where it finished last year.In the first quarter of 2018, it has climbed to fifth place, above the Mitsubishi Pajero Sport and below the Mazda CX-9.Last year, the D-Max overtook the Nissan Navara for fifth place in the pick-up segment, and in 2018 it remains in fifth place, with the Navara leapfrogging the D-Max, and the Holden Colorado falling to sixth place, down from fourth.Using feedback from customers and critics, IUA has given the D-Max and MU-X a light model year update, including permanently introducing the top-spec LS-T to both model lines and tweaking the leaf-spring rear suspension on certain D-Max variants.SX, LS-U and LS-T dual-cab variants will become the first leaf-sprung utes in Australia to employ a new three-leaf set-up that replaces the old five-leaf springs. Isuzu says the new set-up improves ride comfort.Already offered on some pick-ups in other international markets, the three-leaf suspension employs stronger and lighter materials, even allowing for a payload capacity increase of 100kg.Gross vehicle mass (GVM) has been upgraded across the D-Max range to 2950kg for 4x2 variants and 3050kg for all-paw versions.Other D-Max variants continue to employ the old five-leaf springs, while the MU-X rides on coil rear suspension.The newly permanent top-spec D-Max LS-T had a number of upmarket flourishes that set it aside from its more utilitarian counterparts.If the LS-T name is familiar, it is because Isuzu has previously offered the LS-Terrain as a special edition, and while previous versions were based on the LS-U and had extra bells and whistles added at the dealership, the new LS-T comes straight out of Isuzus Thailand factory.Previous LS-Terrains were offered only with the 4x4 drivetrain, but the new version will also be offered as a rear-drive 4x2.Offered solely with the six-speed automatic transmission, the D-Max LS-T checks in at $46,900 plus on-roads for the 4x2, and $54,700 for the 4x4  $500 dearer than the old version.LS-Ts seats are upholstered with perforated leather on body contact areas, and with polyurethane leatherette elsewhere. All other variants come with cloth seats.The LS-T also gains 18-inch wheels, passive entry and start, and roof rails.LS-T and LS-U benefit from leatherette on the dash, glovebox and armrest, plus gloss black trim on the air vents and window switches. Door handles are finished in chrome.Also at the behest of customer feedback, all MU-X variants and all D-Max versions bar the SX gain two new 2.1-amp USB points on the dash and rear console for faster phone charging.The D-Maxs colour palette has been expanded to include three new hues  Magnetic Red mica, Cobalt Blue mica and Graphite Grey metallic, while the MU-X gains just the Magnetic Red colour.Minor price rises have been applied to both ranges, with D-Max prices up between $100 and $800, depending on the variant, while every MU-X variant has increased $100.The D-Max range now opens from $28,600 for the 4x2 SX single-cab chassis manual, with the 4x4 LS-T the priciest.The MU-X kicks off with the 4x2 LS-M auto from $42,990, while the 4x4 LS-T is the most expensive vehicle in the Isuzu range at $56,200.Given that the D-Max and MU-X are popular choices for customers looking to tow a large load, all models bar the rear-drive D-Max SX single-cab manual now come with trailer sway control, which uses the vehicles electronic stability control to detect and mitigate unwanted trailer sway.A rear bumper and reversing camera are also now standard across the range except for cab-chassis models, where both features remain optional.Following feedback that 10,000km service intervals were too short, the intervals have been extended to 12 months/15,000km, while the five-year/50,000km capped price service intervals have been increased to five years/75,000km.Overall cost for the first five capped-price services totals $209  an average of $418 a service.The range-wide five-year/130,000km warranty and five-year roadside assist remains unchanged.Isuzus update line-up goes on sale on May 1.*Excludes on-road costs
GREENWICH  Hundreds of students walked out of Greenwich High School on Friday  the 19th anniversary of the deadly shooting rampage at Columbine High School  to protest gun violence.

About 400 students filed out of the building beginning at 10 a.m., carrying signs and chanting. They walked around the building and re-entered at 10:20 a.m. A group of about a dozen students staged a smaller, silent protest all day at the campus.

An anti-gun violence event was held in-house at Greenwich High School on March 14 without a public demonstration. But the event on Friday morning was loud and public. The events on both days were among hundreds of demonstrations held by students across the nation after a deadly mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla.

Rene Jameson, a senior, said she is distressed by the debate over gun control and felt direct action was necessary. I think its ridiculous that theyre thinking of arming teachers, said Jameson, who led the students in chants.

We needed to do this protest, Jameson said. Civil disobedience should not be convenient, staged. I really feel proud of our generation doing this.

Jameson said her generation has something to contribute on the national stage. Just because were kids doesnt mean we dont understand these bigger issues, she said.

Several teachers and school security staff watched as the march unfolded, and there was no effort to stop the walkout. A few Greenwich police units were in the area while the students marched.

Gigi Imperatore said the anniversary of the Columbine shooting in the Denver suburbs, where 12 students and one teacher were killed by two students, had a grim significance for young people.

Its been 19 years since we had the biggest mass casualty shooting, at Columbine, and weve had hundreds since then. And Newtown. Its been 20 years, and its still going on. We need change, said Imperatore, who is a junior.

One student yelled out his support for the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms, during the event.

Kate Piotrowski, who is a senior, said school shootings are a fact of life for her generation, which grew up doing safety-drills involving active shooter scenarios.

Students think this is important  we want safety, Piotrowski said. And we want to show support for all the students who have been affected by gun violence.

While the walkout at Greenwich High School ended at about 10:20, some students continued to stage a silent vigil outside the building after the march ended. Those students said they were told they will receive a one-day disciplinary action. They will be required to be in detention all day and kept out of classroom activities Monday as a result.

One of those protesters, Gracie McCooe, said she felt compelled to take the extra step in demonstrating, as she has a very strong personal involvement in the issue of gun violence. It didnt seem enough to just miss two blocks (of school time). I grew up afraid of going to school, and I dont want other students to go through that, she said.

Tyler Egan added, Its important to make that extra point  and to express solidarity.

The students reacted with stoic calm to the punishment they were facing. They said they were told to return to class or face disciplinary action.

Greenwich High School Headmaster Chris Winters sent out the following statement about the Friday demonstration:

Teachers were informed yesterday that in the event that students wanted to walk out of school they would do the following:

1) We will not stop students from walking out of the building.

2) We will not alter our schedule. Teachers should teach classes, take attendance, and hold students accountable for work as on any normal day.

3) Teachers should not communicate to students that they can miss their class to participate in a walkout. If students ask permission, tell them that they are free to make their own choice, but that as the teacher, you are taking attendance and proceeding with your lesson as planned.

In the end, a few hundred students. They held signs, chanted, and marched around the building and into the Student Center. As soon as we asked them to stop, they did. The students were very cooperative and respectful.

Most of the seniors were out of Greenwich High on Friday as part of a traditional skip day.

Across the country, thousands of students participated in walkout demonstration, which began at 10 a.m. Students used social media to coordinate the event at multiple locations.

rmarchant@greenwichtime.com
Sony took the wraps off its Xperia XZ2 Premium this week, and that means its predecessor is getting cheaper. The XZ Premium from last year can now be purchased for just $524.99. That's a whopping $275 less than the phone's initial price in the US, namely $799.99.

The XZ Premium got its first price cut after only two months of availability, but even if you count from that $699.99 level, you're still getting $175 off with this deal.

Previously, we've seen the XZ Premium going for $585 and $550, but never as low as $524.99. If you want a handset with a 4K screen and don't mind the huge bezels, it should serve you very well. Note that only the Luminous Chrome color version is discounted this steeply. If you choose to go for it, you're getting an unlocked device that you can use on GSM/LTE carriers such as AT&T, T-Mobile, all of their prepaid brands, and any MVNOs using their networks.

Source | Via
Last year Microsoft finally confirmed that Windows Phone is dead, but even after that point it still sold some such devices through its official online store. Not anymore, though.

Today there are zero Windows Phones in stock at the Microsoft Store, and we assume the company isn't going to replenish those stocks. So it's yet another good opportunity to bid farewell to Microsoft's Windows Phone experiment, now that you can't even purchase the HP Elite x3 for $299, alcatel Idol 4s for $99.99, or the Idol 4s with VR goggles in a bundle for $169.

We assume it took this long for the stocks to be depleted because in spite of the severe price cuts not a lot of people were buying these. Obviously though, physical Microsoft Stores might still have some Windows Phones in stock if you're feeling adventurous. And there are always third party distributors, that may be sitting on a bunch of unsold handsets running what was once said to become 'the third option' for smartphones, alongside Android and iOS.

Source
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Korean Movie | 2017

 Historical

Directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk ()

Written by Hwang Dong-hyuk ()

139min | Release date in South Korea: 2017/10/03

Link

Started filming : 2016/11/21

Synopsis

The movie depicts the conflict between Choi Myung-kil and Kim Sang-heon while they fled to the South Castle (Namhansanseong) during the Second Manchu invasion of Korea. Choi Myung-kil is a representative figure of the Juhwapa faction who insisted on maintaining friendly relations with Qing Dynasty in order to protect the people in Joseon. Kim Sang-heon is a representative figure of the pro-Ming Dynasty faction, Cheokhwapa.

Source
By Vasia Orion | Published on 2018/04/19

Being overly emotional and idealistic as a judge may not be the wisest approach, but that certainly means little to Park-Cha Oh-reum, the character Go Ara will be portraying for "Miss Hammurabi". We have new stills of the character on the clock and off, as well as some more information on her approach and personality.

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"Miss Hammurabi" is a drama about three judges. Idealistic junior judge, Park-Cha Oh-reum (Go Ara) dreams of a court which is firm against those strong and soft against those weak. For elite judge Im Ba-reun (Kim Myung-soo), principles and rules trump good intentions, while chief judge Han Se-sang (Sung Dong-il) is a realist who understands the weight of the world.

Go Ara's judge is someone who turns the court upside down, and who won't tolerate injustice. Oh-reum has a bright and positive demeanor, which charms those around her. As a judge, she is someone who always tries to keep the voice of the people heard, and to share their pain, creating a humane trial environment.

The actress has made a few comments on her role and work here, stating "I am working on this while concentrating on my ability to sympathize with the case". She added "Having grown up knowing the struggles of the socially vulnerable, Oh-reum dreams of a court which acts like medicine for people whose pain she sympathizes with. She considers every incident as important as if it were her own. So the current focus is on concentration and sympathy for immersion in the cases. I am excited to meet viewers with the character of a judge. I would appreciate you looking forward to some fun episodes stemming from this smart and bold character's sense of justice".

That sounds like someone with her heart in the right place, but her head potentially clouded by it. I'm interested in seeing what type of a person she will be, and what lessons she may learn as she develops. With writer Moon Yoo-suk's own experience as a judge, we should get quite the insightful perspective. I know Go Ara is very much not liked by some, but I've been okay with what I have seen of her so far, and I hope she can do well as Oh-reum.

"Miss Hammurabi" will be following "Welcome to Waikiki" starting May 21st on jTBC.

Written by: Orion from 'Orion's Ramblings'

Sources (1)
Published on 2018/04/20 | Source

Added episode 15 captures for the Korean drama "Queen of Mystery Season 2" (2018)

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Directed by Choi Yoon-seok-II, Yoo Yeong-eun-I

Written by Lee Seong-min-II

Network : KBS

With Choi Kang-hee, Kwon Sang-woo, Lee Da-hee, Park Byung-eun, Kim Hyun-sook, Kim Won-hae,...

16 episodes - Wed, Thu 22:00

Synopsis

"Queen of Mystery" tells the story of a prosecutor's wife who's always dreamed of being a detective. After actually solving a case, she ends up in an unlikely crime-fighting duo with a young police captain.

Broadcast starting date in Korea : 2018/02/28

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Havre Police Department

Officers made an arrest Thursday at 2:23 p.m. on Second Street after a report of suspicious activity. No further details were given.



Sade Rochelle Stearns of Harlem, 20, was arrested on a Justice or City court warrant Thursday at 2:52 p.m. on 11th Street after a caller reported they would like to speak to an officer about their rights as a roommate.



Officers investigated a report of possible elder abuse Thursday at 7:40 p.m. on 11th Street.



Evelyn Frances Foursouls of Havre, 35, was arrested on charges of endangering the welfare of children, two counts, and obstructing a peace officer or other public servant Thursday at 10:24 p.m. on First Street Northwest after a man reported he needed to get inside an apartment.



Officers made two arrests today at 12:47 a.m. on Fourth Avenue after calls of a couple fighting in an upstairs apartment. No further details were given.



Officers made two arrests today at 1:52 a.m. on 13th Street after a call was made from the hospital about needing assistance. No further details were given.

Hill County Sheriff's Office

Mindy Leigh Gravelle, listed as homeless, 37, was arrested on a Justice or City court warrant Thursday at 9:21 a.m. at Hill County Detention Center.



Deputies investigated a reported theft Thursday at 3:10 p.m. at a Havre area business.



Deputies investigated a theft Thursday at 4:05 p.m. at a U.S. Highway 2 West business.



Charnez Layne Denny of Box Elder, 20, was arrested on Justice or City court warrant Thursday at 5:36 p.m. at the Hill County Detention Center.



Adrian Joe Cochran of Harlem, 42, was arrested on a Justice or City court warrant Thursday at 7:29 p.m. after being transported from Blaine County to the detention center.



Teresa Angel Jiron of Havre, 23, was arrested on charges of obstructing a peace officer or other public servant, resisting arrest, and assault on a peace or judicial officer on Fifth Avenue Friday at 3:10 a.m. after a caller reported a woman was standing on top of her broken down car in the middle of the street and yelling. Deputies responded to this call on request from the police department.

Havre Fire Department

Emergency medical personnel responded to one call Thursday.

Havre Animal Shelter

This morning the shelter held four medium-hair cats whose sex is listed as unknown, five medium-hair male cats, one medium-hair female cat, and one female short-hair cat.



The shelter held this morning an 11-month-old male Australian shepherd, a 1-year-old female dachshund-Labrador retriever cross, a 4-year-old female German shepherd-Labrador retriever cross, a 1-year-old male pit bull terrier, a 5-week-old female husky-shepherd mix, a 1-year-2-month-old male Labrador retriever-Boston terrier cross, a 5-year-1-month-old female Australian shepherd and 5-year-old male Husky.
Volunteer Karen Bender serves a child food Thursday afternoon at Feed My Sheep Community Soup Kitchen in Havre. The soup kitchen, Havre Food Bank and Salvation Army are honoring volunteers next Tuesday with a dinner and event starting at 6 p.m. in St. Jude Parish Center.

The Salvation Army-Havre Service Center, Feed My Sheep Community Soup Kitchen and Havre Food Bank will be coming together to honor and show appreciation for their volunteers and the community businesses that support them.

Tuesday at 6 p.m., in St. Jude Parish Center, these three service organizations will hold their Annual Dinner and Volunteer Appreciation. The dinner is free and everyone in the community is invited to join.

The dinner is planned to correspond with National Volunteer Week which runs from April 15 to 21.

The Salvation Army-Havre Service Center is an organization that hel...
J.P. Weigand walks toward dry land after having to evacuate from his house due to rising water Thursday in Chinook. The water was high enough that is was nearing his front door. "It's just not stopping." During his walk Weigand said that water at times came up to his waist.

Floodwater continues to rise in the Milk River, although official reporting stations show that the worst may be over - for now - in some locations, but where it will stop downstream still is unknown.

A National Weather Service gauge reported the Milk River near Harlem was at 24.18 feet at 9:30 this morning - up about an eighth-of-an-inch from 8:30 a.m.. The record flood level is 25.7 feet.

Blaine County Public Information Officer Mark Weber said this morning the river is still rising, though its rise has slowed in Chinook, and officials don't known when and how high it will crest.

"We'r...
Winners in the SkillsUSA conference competition in Quiz Bowl - High School, Gold, Team I, Charlo High School; Silver, Team H, North Star High School; Bronze, Team D, Winnett High School; pose for a photograph.

Jim Potter

Montana State University-Northern hosted the 2018 SkillsUSA Montana State Leadership and Skills Conference, with several local competitors, listed below, earning awards.

The event began Monday morning, April 9, and concluded with an awards ceremony Wednesday, April 11. During that time, 300 students came from 29 Montana high schools and two colleges to participate in 34 different competitions. This is the 46th year Northern has hosted the SkillsUSA competition, formerly known as the Vocational Industrial Clubs of America or VICA.

This year's conference gave away just more than $100,000 dollars in scholarships to the winning contestants. Northern, UTI, Helena College and City College Montana State University Billings provided those scholarships.

Several industry representation in Montana helped run and judge the hands-on competitions such as diesel, automotive, welding, carpentry and photography. Competitions also tested leadership skills including a job interview, a job skill demonstration, extemporaneous speaking and more.

Local winners in this year's competitions are:

Automotive Service Technology - College/Postsecondary

Silver - Anton Poleman, MSU-Northern, Havre

Diesel Equipment Technology - College/Postsecondary

Gold - Cole Rhodes, MSU-Northern, Havre

Silver - Seth Hawkins, MSU-Northern, Havre

Bronze - Luke Henke, MSU-Northern, Havre

Technical Computer Applications - High School

Gold - Dylan Miller, North Star High School, Rudyard

Silver - Pedersen Garret, North Star High School, Rudyard

Bronze - Hayden Massar, North Star High School, Rudyard

Welding Sculpture - High School

Gold - Nicholas Tanner, Havre High School

Silver - Dawson Kinsella, Havre High School

Extemporaneous Speaking - High School

Silver - Jewel Wicks, North Star High School, Rudyard

Bronze - Aubrey Welch, North Star High School, Rudyard

Prepared Speech - High School

Silver - Hayden Massar, North Star High School, Rudyard

Opening and Closing Ceremonies - High School

Silver - Team B, North Star High School, Rudyard

Power Equipment Technology - High School

Silver - Garrett Parsons, Havre High School

Quiz Bowl - High School

Silver - Team H, North Star High School, Rudyard

Job Interview - High School

Photo courtesy Jim Potter Winners in the SkillsUSA conference competition in Chapter Business Procedure - High School, Gold, Team A, Billings Career Center; Silver, Team B, North Star High School; Bronze, Team C, North Star High School, pose for a photograph.

Gold - Aubrey Welch, North Star High School, Rudyard

Silver - Peytan King, North Star High School, Rudyard

Bronze - Hali Kapperud, North Star High School, Rudyard

Chapter Business Procedure - High School

Silver - Team B North Star High School, Rudyard

Bronze - Team C North Star High School - Rudyard

--

The 2018 Montana SkillsUSA Wrapup Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3afre6Akak

For more information about Montana SkillsUSA: https://sites.google.com/a/skillsusamontana.org/skillsusa -montana/home/.
Democratic candidate for the U.S. House Kathleen Williams, center talks to Linda Webster and Brian Lilletvedt at Triple Dog Brewing Co. Thursday during a campaign stop in Havre.

Democratic candidate for the U.S House of Representatives Kathleen Williams talked with voters at Triple Dog Brewing Co. Thursday, part of her eight- day Opportunity tour across Montana.

She said in an interview that in the past three days the tour has taken her from Opportunity to Anaconda, Chouteau, Browning, Cut Bank and Shelby.

Today she will have meetings with Bear Paw Development Corp. Executive Director and Montana Senate candidate Paul Tuss and Montana State University-Northern Provost Neil Mosey. She will hold a meet and greet at the Our Saviour's Lutheran Church on Rocky Boy...
Montanans expect a lot out of their elected officials, as well they should. Without regard to political party, they expect us to work together when we can and explain our differences with honesty when we cannot. They expect us to spend less time on spats in Helena, and more time on getting to work and strengthening our communities. More than anything, Montanans expect their elected officials to talk straight and be honest.

Unfortunately for all Montanans, some Republicans in Montana are starting to act a lot like Republicans in Washington D.C.

There is an old saying that goes, If you...
We perhaps agree that we will continue to use some form of energy for industry, home heating and lighting and transportation. We need energy to continue to live a lifestyle similar to what we have now.

We will continue to eat. Food production will need to continue on a commercial basis to produce enough food for there to be opportunity for every citizen in the USA to consume adequate nutrients.

We can agree that open spaces are important for many reasons, wildlife habitat, recreations and solitude and agriculture production.

We may or may not agree how we as a country get to each of those objectives. Shelter, heat, food 

Yet we may agree more than we anticipate.

We may agree that using new technology to produce cleaner energy or to clean the energy we use is good.

We may agree that we need to develop and use environmentally friendly food production methods. That we should promote land friendly animal production agriculture. That we also need to develop and build environmentally, worker friendly, humane animal slaughter and processing facilities for meat production.

Just as we see improving in mining development using the modern and environmentally friendly technology available to protect the water, viewscape and so on at the Black Butte Copper Project located by White Sulfur. We should strive for that sort of cutting edge, environmentally minded development. Just as we can see land that has been reclaimed from coal mining at Colstrip being grazed by cattle and crops of sainfoin being grown for forage, we should continue to strive for that sort of reclamation of ground.

With meat processing, Madison Food Park proposes to use the newest technology to conserve, purify and reuse water, to reduce if not eliminate odor with covered storage tanks and a bio-digester to change solid waste into usable and sellable by-products and biogas which to supply energy for the plant. The most up to date automated meat processing and technology using digital imagery to direct the cutting of meat in many areas improving worker safety and reducing risk. Madison Food Park plans to offer career paths with college courses for employees to improve their career opportunities and advance in the company. MFP will encourage clean waste management at the livestock production end of the system and help the livestock producer with feedback on how to improve animal nutrition, health and growth for maximum efficiency and quality beef.

Does this not sound like the very technology and food production system we would like to support for the future? Why are we in agriculture so quiet?



Maggie Nutter, rancher and former president of the Marias River Livestock Association

Sweetgrass
Its a pretty sure sign Im in a crabby mood when I read the headline Homeowner finds naked intruder in her tub, eating Cheetos, and my brain says Meh, whatever.

The story seems to have all the elements I would normally find appealing: the suspense of a break-in, the mystery of the man who supposedly told the female intruder to intrude, the surprise of finding her naked, the absurdity of her lounging in the tub rather than ransacking the house and the confusion of the intruder having brought her own cooler full of food, including the Cheetos which were  for crying out loud  only half eaten and left abandoned on the toilet next to the tub.

This. Is. Awesome. Normally. This week, I didnt want to talk about it. My laugh factory was closed due to a strike.

I blame spring cleaning. For that matter, I blame regular cleaning.

Theres just too much scrubbing and wiping and shuffling stuff around trying to find a place for it and dirty dishes because we eat at home and dirty floors because of mud and dirty furniture and bedding because the cat keeps running in from the great muddy-silty outdoors and jumping up on the couch then running back to the bedroom to finishing cleaning his paws on my bedding. The dog had to be bathed and clipped.

Probably close to eight months worth of dirt, gravel, dried mud clumps, hair, food, receipts, a few forgot we stashed it there construction purchases and a variety of other lifes detritus had to be cleaned out of the pickup. The pickup was at a new level of dirty.

Im not selling my pickup, but, based on what I found, never buy a vehicle from someone who has a fuzzy dog, has long hair and has someone in the family who shall remain nameless, but who eats in the vehicle and has named that gap between the seat and the console the fry hole.

At this point, I think the only way we could get the pickup dirtier is if I started hauling hay in the cab rather than the box and the cat took up smoking and long drives in the country for a hobby.

Life has to be about more than just cleaning. Thats a primal directive, isnt it? The key to happiness? And pretty much how I live life. Doesnt that make cleaning against my moral code?

No wonder Ive been so dispirited.

I read last night that a badger dug its way into a tunnel at the historic Craignethan Castle in Scotland and that part of the castle had to be shut down because the badger was very angry. And then HuffPo reported that its not clear what the animal did to leave the impression that it was very angry then shared castle manager Historic Scotlands twitter post of a color drawing of a large herd of cartoon badgers doing jumping jacks in a field of green.

That should have been funny.

At the very least I should have been amazed to learn that apparently the badger is Scotlands largest wild carnivore. What?! Whatever.

I surfed the internet.

I found lots of news, photos and videos about people in north-central Montana who are getting flooded and roads getting washed out.

Life could be worse for me, I decided. I shouldnt be so ungrateful of the gifts I am given, right?

And this Reuters article was the next gift: While huge public debate in the U.S. centers around whether or not sex ed should even be mentioned in American schools, in Norway, Reuters reported, high school graduates celebrate the end of their K-12 careers with a variety of activities that almost all involve alcohol, nudity and sex. Most of it in public.

In fact, Reuters said, Norways former minister of transportation Terje Moe Gustavsen who now runs the Public Roads Administration, issued a statement titled No to sex on roundabouts saying that everyone understands that being in and around roundabouts is a traffic hazard. Sex on roundabouts.

He also warned them to stay dressed on bridges. Bridges.

If I understand Gustavsen correctly, the problem isnt that the 18- and 19-year-olds are having an extended drunken, nude, sex party in public, its that drivers can get too much of a surprise and completely forget that they are driving, thus causing an accident.

This logic. Is. Awesome.

I do not condone or approve of this behavior, Im just doing my part to laugh for those who have a good reason right now not to.



No, its the fumes at [email protected]/.
A man who denies trying to murder his partner by stuffing underwear in her mouth and hitting her with a hammer "exploded" because he believed his partner, the mother of his child, was poisoning his food, a court heard yesterday.

During garda interviews the accused man, Tomas Gajowniczek (37), told gardai to take a blood sample from him to find out what was in his system.

Mr Gajowniczek was interviewed at Pearse Street Garda Station on June 16, 2016.

Detective Garda Nathan McKenna told prosecuting counsel Paul Burns SC that during his third and fourth interviews the accused man told gardai that he was feeling much better, having earlier felt as though he was on drugs - he was sweating and unable to think clearly, he told them.

He accused Alicja Kalinowska (30) of drugging him and their baby by putting something in their food and drink.

"She was poisoning me and now I have exploded," he told gardai, before asking them to take a blood sample.

Garda Colm Reynolds told defence counsel Ronan Munro SC that gardai did not take a sample and that he did not think at the time that it was relevant to their investigation.

Insanity

The trial continues in front of Justice Patrick McCarthy and a jury of six men and six women at the Central Criminal Court.

Consultant psychiatrist at the Central Mental Hospital, Dr Conor O'Neill, told the trial that Mr Gajowniczek was suffering from a mental illness.

Dr O'Neill said the accused man's illness made him unable to refrain from his actions and he therefore qualifies for the special verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity.

Mr Gajowniczek, of The Ice Rink Apartments, Dolphin's Barn, Dublin 8, has pleaded not guilty to the attempted murder of Ms Kalinowska at their home on June 16, 2016.

He also pleaded not guilty to intentionally or recklessly causing serious harm to Ms Kalinowska on the same date at the same location.

Dr O'Neill told Mr Munro that the accused has a delusional disorder, which is a mental illness as defined by the Criminal Law (Insanity) Act. He said Mr Gajowniczek believed that his partner was trying to drug or poison him and his baby when he is alleged to have assaulted her. This belief, the doctor said, was delusionary.

Mr Munro said that the prosecution will say that his client was not suffering from a mental illness but was smoking hash.

Dr O'Neill said he considered that but a year after Mr Gajowniczek was admitted to a drug-free unit of Cloverhill Prison he was showing the same symptoms.

He said he would expect symptoms to diminish over such a time without drugs.

He also excluded the possibility that the accused was "making it up", saying such a ruse would have taken many months of planning.
A chef threw a kitchen knife at a co-worker and kicked him a number of times during an argument in the "heated atmosphere of a busy kitchen". (stock photo)

A chef threw a kitchen knife at a co-worker and kicked him a number of times during an argument in the "heated atmosphere of a busy kitchen".

Ahmed Bem Aicha (47) was left without a conviction after he made a donation to charity.

He also lost his job as a result of the assault.

It had been alleged the men had thrown racial insults at each other.

Judge John Lindsay struck out the charge after Aicha donated 600 to Barretstown.

The defendant, of Ballymanus, Castlepollard, Co Westmeath, had admitted before Tallaght District Court to assaulting a co-worker at Marlay Nursing Home, Kellystown Road, Rathfarnham, on January 25, 2017.

Sergeant Eithne Madden previously said that Aicha had thrown a knife at the victim as he left the kitchen, narrowly missing him.

Kicked

Sgt Madden said the victim was also kicked in the chest and head area a number of times.

The garda said the victim suffered some bruising but did not require medical attention.

The court heard Aicha had never been in trouble before.

Defence lawyer Stephen Montgomery said the defendant, who was originally from Tunisia, had trained as a chef, and had worked in a number of top hotels and restaurants in Ireland.

Mr Montgomery said that the assault took place "in the heated environment" of a busy kitchen and there had been "racial slurs" from both parties.

The court heard that Aicha was very sorry for his behaviour, and had written a letter of apology.

Judge Lindsay had ordered Aicha to pay 400 compensation to the victim, but gardai said the victim had left the country.

Judge Lindsay struck out the charge after Aicha donated 600 to Barretstown.
A Dublin man allegedly caught with a semi-automatic shotgun has been further remanded on bail pending directions on the charge from the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP). Stock photo: PA Archive

A Dublin man allegedly caught with a semi-automatic shotgun has been further remanded on bail pending directions on the charge from the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP).

Edward O'Keeffe (37) was charged after his home was searched by detectives from the Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau.

Judge David McHugh adjourned the case to a date in May for the DPP's directions.

The accused, of Huntstown Drive, Mulhuddart, appeared before Blanchardstown District Court charged with the unlawful possession of a Fabarm Ellegi semi-automatic firearm.

Agreement

The alleged incident took place at his home on December 4, 2017.

As part of his bail conditions, Mr O'Keeffe was previously ordered to sign on daily at his local garda station and provide a mobile number to gardai.

Defence solicitor Simon Fleming said there was an agreement with gardai that the sign on condition could be deleted.

The court heard the DPP's directions remained outstanding, and Mr Fleming said there was consent to a six-week adjournment.

The accused has not yet indicated a plea.
Saoirse Ronan could be shooting for Oscar glory again next year as her upcoming biopic Mary Queen of Scots has been rescheduled for release right before awards season.

The Carlow actress (23) has the lead role in the biopic of the tragic Scottish queen.

Originally slated to hit screens in November, movie bosses have pushed back the film's release date to December 7, according to film industry bible Deadline.

The first weekend of December is prime time for the release of films hoping to be considered for Oscars.

The Shape of Water and Black Swan, both previous nominees for the Best Picture award, were released during that week, while actress Natalie Portman also scooped the Best Actress award for her role in the latter.

Power

Saoirse plays the title role of Mary Stuart, who reigned over Scotland from 1542 to 1567.

She stars alongside fellow Oscar nominee Margot Robbie, who plays her cousin and long-time rival Queen Elizabeth I.

Determined to rule as more than a figurehead, Mary tries to assert her power over the English throne.

The film also stars former Doctor Who actor David Tennant, who plays cleric John Knox, and Dunkirk actor Jack Lowden, who plays Lord Darnley, Mary's second husband.

It is another lead role for Saoirse and many will undoubtedly be hoping it gives her another Oscar nomination.

She has already been nominated three times, with her most recent being at this year's ceremony for her lauded performance in Lady Bird.

Although she lost out on the award to Frances McDormand, she did receive a Golden Globe for her efforts.

She was previously nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Atonement in 2008 and for Best Actress in 2016 for her lead role in Brooklyn.

Having recently starred in On Chesil Beach, her other upcoming project is drama film, The Seagull.
Murders and drug shipments are being organised from behind bars as violent gangs with access to mobile phones brazenly continue to run their operations from inside jail, according to the Prison Officers' Association (POA).

Meanwhile, increasingly exposed and under-resourced prison officers are getting injured trying to separate inmates who cannot be allowed to mix with each other on safety grounds, it has been said.

"It's well known that hits have been ordered from inside prison on mobile phones," said POA general secretary John Clinton at its annual conference in Kilkenny yesterday.

"They can get up to anything that they want to to control their empire from inside prison."

Influence

Mr Clinton added that murder was a risk within prisons too.

"If one gang wants to get at another and see that the person they want is in prison, the fact that they are in prison won't stop them from getting at that person," he said.

"They will do everything they can to get at them.

"Irish gangs work on a global basis, they've huge resources, huge finances and they can have great influence within the prison system.

"So when they're caught by the gardai and imprisoned, they don't go away, they reform within the prison system and then they operate as they do on the outside."

Another development causing major concern to the POA is what it sees as an increasing number of attacks on female prison officers.

"Attacks on female officers happen much more than before," said POA deputy general secretary Jim Mitchell.

"In days gone by, we never encountered anything like that level of assaults on them.

"It was always an unwritten rule that female officers weren't touched, but prisoners seem to have set that rule aside now."

Outlining different attacks in the past year, he said in the last year there was a sexual assault on a female prison officer in the Midlands, and another attack on a female officer in Mountjoy where the back of her hair was grabbed and she was "smashed off a wall".

"In another instance a prisoner self harmed and threw blood over an officer, and that blood went into the officer's nose and mouth and she is currently out receiving therapy for it," Mr Mitchell added.

Addressing the concerns raised by the POA, the Irish Prison Service's director general Michael Donnellan said he did not believe female officers were being targeted specifically.

"I have no experience of that. I mean we have, unfortunately, very few female officers percentage wise. Today in our prisons it's less than 30pc," he said.

"Women prison officers bring a huge addition to our service and so I don't think there's a specific targeting of women prison officers."

Mr Mitchell called on Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan to place all violent gang prisoners in the high-security Portlaoise Prison.

Control

"It's the only prison in the State equipped to deal with them. These gangs must be controlled or we will lose control of our prisons," he said.

However, the proposal was rejected by Mr Donnellan.

"We have to keep them separated because we need to disrupt their activity, we need to disrupt their communication, and all the evidence internationally is if we put them all together that ends badly," he said.

"Our policy has been for the last number of years to disrupt the gang structure, place them in several prisons around our estate, particularly in two or three, but we are intending to use Portlaoise more in the second half of the year for the more serious people."
Thomas McLoughlin enjoyed the social aspect of his crime. Photo: Colin O'Riordan

A senior citizen who sold illegal tobacco products and wine from his Dublin home was trying to supplement his pension, a court has heard.

Thomas McLoughlin (68) also enjoyed the "social aspect" of people calling to his house.

Judge David McHugh sentenced McLoughlin to four months in prison.

The defendant, of Mellowes Court, Finglas, admitted before Blanchardstown District Court to having 27 boxes of wine, 33 packs of cigarettes and 47 packs of tobacco on which the tax had not been paid.

The value of the products was around 3,000.

Garda Paul McDonnell said gardai obtained a search warrant and searched the defendant's home on August 24, 2016, and found the products.

Gda McDonnell said McLoughlin co-operated with gardai and made admissions.

Suspicious

The court heard gardai were alerted because there were lots of people coming and going from the property but "it looked more suspicious than it was".

The court heard McLoughlin had four previous convictions, including one for a similar offence, for which he received a suspended sentence.

Defence solicitor Simon Fleming said that McLoughlin was receiving a quantity of untaxed goods and selling them to people in the Finglas area.

Mr Fleming said the defendant, a pensioner, was trying to make money to augment his pension, but it was as much a social outlet as anything else.

He said that McLoughlin had worked all his life until about 10 years ago, when he developed problems with his knees and he needed to have them replaced.

He had already had two hip replacements, Mr Fleming said.

He asked the judge not to send McLoughlin, a father-of-five, to jail.

Imposing a four-month sentence, Judge McHugh said the defendant had previously received the benefit of a suspended sentence.

McLoughlin immediately appealed the sentence.
A woman who died following a late-stage abortion procedure was discharged from the clinic despite vomiting and swaying so much she looked "drunk", an inquest has heard.

Aisha Chithira (31) travelled to England from Ireland to have a termination at a Marie Stopes clinic in Ealing, west London, on January 21, 2012.

She suffered a tear to her uterus during the "blind" procedure performed under anaesthetic, as a surgeon struggled to remove a 22-week-old foetus from a womb that had not fully dilated, West London Coroner's Court heard.

Afterwards she vomited in a stairwell and complained of feeling unwell to her husband, but was helped into a taxi to a cousin's home in Slough by staff at the clinic. They had told her she could not stay overnight.

Pressured

One of the nurses denied they had pressured her to leave because they wanted to go home.

Corinne Slingo, representing Marie Stopes, said: "The taxi driver says he saw his passenger walking out of the building. He was quite shocked, she didn't seem with it at all. She looked like she was drunk."

Reading from a statement, she added: "The nurse got her in a hug and she said 'don't do that, you will break my bones'."

Mrs Chithira's husband Ryan said he received a call from her at around 7.30pm as he cared for their daughter in Ireland.

"Aisha told me she had finished having the procedure and was going to get a taxi back to Slough," his statement said.

"She just said 'I cannot speak, I'm feeling too weak to speak' and then she ended the call.

"I kept ringing her but there was no reply, Aisha didn't ring back or reply to my texts - I thought at first she had arrived in Slough and just wanted to rest."

The mother had suffered catastrophic internal bleeding and died the same night.

Dr Adedayo Adedeji, who performed the procedure, and nurses Gemma Pullen and Margaret Miller were charged with manslaughter by gross negligence and a health and safety breach but the case was dropped in 2016.

Ms Pullen told the hearing Mrs Chithira had been to the toilet where she passed blood with her urine - which was "consistent with a late-stage termination" - and had "thrown herself" on the floor.

Her blood pressure gave a normal reading once she was taken back to the ward.

"Come to about eight o'clock and Aisha is the only one left on the ward and the taxi had been ordered for her. Margaret came and discussed with her that she couldn't stay overnight, which is what she was asking for," the nurse continued.

"We took her to the top of the stairs and she was sick."

They led her back to the ward, where she stayed for another 20 to 30 minutes and her vital signs were checked, Ms Pullen said.

"Then she stood up and said 'I'm ready to go now'. At that time I thought she was quite anxious."

As she climbed into the taxi, "she said she was feeling hot", the nurse continued. She had also been hyperventilating.

Pressed by Ms Slingo on the taxi driver's description of the swaying patient, she said: "That doesn't sound right to me. She was walking unaided, she wasn't swaying, she was walking normally."

On the comments allegedly made by Mrs Chithira, she said: "I'm saying that didn't happen."

Ms Slingo asked: "The point when you placed her in the taxi, did you have, as a nurse, any additional concerns?"

"No, if I did I wouldn't have sent her," the nurse replied.

Dr Adedeji said staff had noticed the tear during surgery but it had not been bleeding at the time.

Mrs Chithira, who was from Malawi but settled in Ireland, had a history of non-cancerous growths around the womb called fibroids which made the procedure more complex.

She had decided to have an abortion after miscarrying twins and then having her baby delivered by C-section, making her worry that childbirth was too much of a risk.

Acting senior coroner for west London, Dr Sean Cummings, is expected to continue hearing the case today.
Legacy of a lynching: State panel, victim's relatives revisit slaying

"Everyone has to be open and vulnerable to be honest about how their history affects how they respond to situations today," says NAACP leader.
It was in early February that I met the late artist Ram Kumar at his home in Delhis Bharti Artist Colony for an interview. Little did I know then that this would be among the nonagenarians last interviews and that he would have passed away before it was published. At his age  Kumar would have turned 94 this September  death is not unexpected. But with his passing away on April 14, an era ended in Indian art, an era that had also seen the genius of MF Husain, SH Raza and Francis Newton Souza.

It was a quiet house I walked into that February day, a quiet that was perhaps reflective of the calm of its occupant. The renowned painter sat in the drawing room, unshaven, a handkerchief clutched in one hand, a walking stick resting nearby to his left. The famed Delhi winter was on its way out. But the artist was doubly guarded against the chill by the electric heater that radiated warmth into the room and the zipped-up cardigan that he wore. The perfect host, he pressed sweets and mathri on me as I sat down.

The once world-traveller was now house bound: I have stopped going out, he said. But his art still kept him busy and he would paint, he said, for five-six hours every day. This dedication was one of the traits that fellow artist Krishen Khanna found so remarkable about Ram Kumar. He never wasted time and painted regularly, said Khanna. He had a vision, which few have. He was very truthful to himself. I wish I could paint like him.

Yet, art had come late to Kumar. A contemporary of artists like Satish Gujral, he had a Masters in economics and had worked at a bank. He also wrote and published short stories in Hindi before devoting himself to art. When the art increased, I stopped writing, he told me, when I asked him about his writing.

An untitled work from 2015 that melds different elements of nature, as if they interact internally. (@ Vadehra Art Gallery)

In the beginning, he learned under artist Sarada Ukil, before going on to Paris to study art under Andre Lhote and Fernand Leger in 1950-51. He had no contacts or money and the two years that he spent in Paris were a struggle. Fame and prosperity would eventually come to him, but during his student days in the French capital, he would, he remembered, often go hungry  living on bread and vegetables because meat was so expensive. I had no energy. My stomach protruded, but the hunger remained, he recalled.

The tempting fragrance wafting out of a pastry shop on his way to the university made him change his route since he couldnt afford such delicacies. Cheap food  priced at about Rs 5 - was available to the regular students in one part of the university, but you had to have a pass to avail of the facility  something I didnt have. It was far from my quarters. But sometimes I managed to get in if they werent checking the permit card, or tell them I had left the card at home by mistake, he said.

Most days though, he did his own cooking. I had a nice French landlady and she told me I could pay her whatever I could afford for the rooms. I gave her Rs 25 a month, said the artist, who gave Hindi lessons for Rs 20-25 to make some money. He was asked to stay on after he completed his studies, but he chose to return.

He would, however, revisit Europe in later years and also travel to USA and Japan, among other places. Within India, the one place that influenced him deeply as an artist was Banaras. It was from here that his work in abstracts started. MF Husain told me that we should go to a new place to sketch, remembered Kumar. We went together and stayed in the house of Shripat Rai, Munshi Premchands writer son. I returned after a week but Husain stayed on. Later Shripat too became a painter, he added. Both Kumar and Husain had been associated with the Mumbai-based Progressive Artists Group and Husain was among Kumars personal list of artists whose work he appreciated. Picasso, Husain and Raza. Husain saab had talent, while Raza got stuck to the bindu [the dot is a recurring motif in Razas works], reflected the artist when I asked about his favourites.

For himself, he couldnt pick the moment or even year when he can be said to have arrived on the art scene. It was a gradual process, he mused. At first my paintings sold for ~3,000. Later, slowly, they went up to ~ 3,500, said the artist, who received numerous awards and felicitations in his lifetime, including two Lalit Kala Akademi awards (in 1956 and 58), an award at the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1961, the Madhya Pradesh governments Kalidas Samman in 1986, the Padma Shri in 1972 and the Padma Bhushan in 2010.

An untitled work from 2015, one of Ram Kumars abstract landscapes, done in his own inimitable style. (@ Vadehra Art Gallery)

He gave few interviews. Reticent by nature, he chose to live quietly with his art and his reading  the artist especially enjoyed going through the works of Nobel laureates. When I went to journalist Sham Lals house after his death, I was asked to choose something for myself from his books. I chose a book by Tennessee Williams, Kumar said when I asked him about authors he liked. He forged deep bonds with his contemporaries and was well-liked in both the artistic and literary circles. One of these associates had been Sham Lal, who, in a monograph he had published on the artist in 1958, had described Ram Kumar as someone who had no slogans and no poses to strike, a man who hated to put on a mask.

Perhaps his disinterest in social acceptance and labels helped him give himself fully to his art. As Shruti Parthasarathy, head of archives at the Delhi Art Gallery (DAG), who will be publishing a book on Kumar, notes, He was an important Modernist, significant for a kind of art. He painted what he wanted, was always unique and depicted what he saw. His abstraction started in Varanasi, an influence that lasted very long. He had always been an important painter and remained all through true to his vision. He did not want or look for easy answers. His journey was largely within. He was authentic and very true to himself.

An artists contribution to society, Kumar believed, is to show a different world, apart from religion and politics. It was to the creation of this world that he bent his efforts. His death is no doubt an irreparable loss to the world of art, but the artist leaves behind a rich creative legacy that will continue to provide future generations the promise of an alternate reality and the release from a world that can often be too harsh or disturbing.
They were used to say, I love you, Were married or, Hes gone. Chiselled out of buffalo horn, wood, or metal. Covered in bird motifs, lions, flowers, fish and rhinos.

There are 1,500 tribal combs in Niranjan Mahawars collection. All handmade, all once used by a tribal man or woman somewhere in Gujarat, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Karnataka or Chhattisgarh. The smallest is the size of a finger, the largest, the size of your palm. And each one tells a story.

The tribes made combs from whatever was available, says Mahawar, 81, a retired businessman, an art collector and author of Bastar Bronzes: Tribal Religion and Art. In the cultivated plains of Bastar, the Murias used tin as decoration, and aluminium to make hairpins. But in the same state, the Dhurwas living in the dense Sal forests could only use its leaves and fibre to weave modest, two-sided combs.

Several tribes would also craft two-sided wooden combs and hairpins. (Sanchit Khanna/HT PHOTO)

Combs are part of myth and history. In West Bengal, they are still used as ritual objects and are part of puja offerings to the goddesses, says Nabakumar Duary, a Kolkata-based anthropologist with the Anthropological Survey of India, who specialises in tribal art and craft.

They hint at a communitys grooming standards too, he adds. In Jharkhand, many tribal groups used compact wooden combs with thin spikes very close together. This shows that they were using combs for delousing, which suggests they were particular about hygiene.

SYMBOLS OF LOVE, LUCK

Among the Murias, a Gond tribe of the Bastar region, unmarried boys would make ornate wooden combs and present them to their favourite girls. The girls would flaunt each piece they received in their hair until the day of marriage. Once married, they would preserve the one gifted by their husband and return the rest.

Among the Kukis  a hill tribe from Manipur  men wear long hair fixed in a knot with wooden combs that they treasure. Losing your comb is considered unlucky. During wedding ceremonies, the priest presents a comb to the couple. Its considered a sacred object. They preserve this comb for the rest of their life, Duary says. Only man and wife may use the same comb, states British scholar LA Waddell, in his book, The Tribes of the Brahmaputra Valley (originally published in 1900). When a man dies, his comb is buried with him, and his relatives break their combs and go about with dishevelled hair for days.

This picture from the archive of Pandit Ravishankar Shukla University shows hairpins made of aluminium used by Murias, a Gond tribe from Bastar. (Photo courtesy: Pandit Ravishankar Shukla University, Sanchit Khanna/HT PHOTO )

The finger-sized combs in Mahawars collection were used by Bhil tribals to curl moustaches and tame beards. They kept them tucked in their turbans, he says.

The Gwarias of Ajmer in Rajasthan carved a peacock and a mango into the comb presented to a bride on her wedding day, as symbols of fertility.

Over the past few decades, plastic alternatives have flooded the market. So its rare to find a tribe still making such combs, Mahawar says.

FULL CIRCLE

Mahawar began collecting combs in the early 1960s, soon after he moved from Madhya Pradesh to Chhattisgarhs Bastar region to set up a rice mill.

He had graduated in economics, but a keen interest in art led him to explore the bronze sculptures made here using the lost-wax technique. Thats when he discovered the tribal combs.

Over the next four decades, he travelled across the region studying tribes and their art, and also slowly adding to his growing collection of combs. His findings  including some of the rarest combs he came across  were published by Abhinav Publications in 2011, as Bastar Bronzes.

Apart from combs, Niranjan Mahawars collection also includes bronze sculptures, traditional masks and paintings. (Sanchit Khanna/HT PHOTO)

About 150 combs from Mahawars collection will also soon move into a museum being built for his collection at the Pandit Ravishankar Shukla University in Raipur. In a few months, a 5,000-sq-ft hall will hold bronze sculptures, traditional masks, paintings and combs.

Mr Mahawars collection is rich in meaning and symbolism, says Arun Kumar, professor of prehistoric archaeology and paleoanthropology at the University. Its important to preserve these rare artefacts.
The film Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety (SKTKS) has left everyone stunned with its performance at the box-office. The story based on bromance versus romance almost catapulted the entire cast to a new height in stardom.

After completing 50 days of a successful run recently, and garnering collections of more than 110 crores, we hear, the film is going to be released in China as well. A source tells us that with Hindi films, including Hindi Medium (2017) and Bajrangi Bhaijaan (2015), finding much acceptance there [in another country], the makers of SKTKS have been toying with the idea.

When contacted, producer Bhushan Kumar, confirmed, Yes, for Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety, we have been getting demand from China. It will be dubbed and subtitled, because thats the concept there., before revealing an interesting detail: We are also looking at some of our films in which China has shown an interest to remake. So, we will make an announcement, once thats finalised.

Director Luv Ranjan tells us, China is a very complicated market, and it takes a lot of time to release a film there. My film just released in India. We have been trying to release it there [China], because who wouldnt want to? Its a big market.

Interact with the author on Twitter/ @RishabhSuri02
As Prince Harry and Meghan Markle prepare to say I do, we wouldnt blame you if you got carried away in all the frenzy surrounding the royal wedding. After all, their relationship is unique, and promises to usher in a new era of royalty. Ahead of their big to-do in Windsor, heres a few books to take a deeper dive into the excitement.

MEGHAN: A HOLLYWOOD PRINCESS

Celebrity biographer Andrew Mortons latest book, from Grand Central Publishing, stretches back to Meghans valley upbringing in Los Angeles, the breakup of her parents, her 2013 divorce and her struggles in Hollywood. Tidbits were released early to select media, including this from Meghan friend Ninaki Priddy: She was always fascinated by the royal family. She wants to be Princess Diana 2.0.

Meghans friend has gone on record to say that the actor was always fascinated by the royal family. (Reuters)

Oh, and Markle rehearsed drinking tea before meeting her princes grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II. She learned to crook her finger as she held the cup and saucer. Morton, who wrote Diana: Her True Story and a slew of other royal biographies, also recently took on the story of Wallis Simpson, in Wallis in Love, about the woman whose affair with King Edward VIII led to his abdication.

PRINCE HARRY: THE INSIDE STORY

Duncan Larcombe, a former royal watcher for The Sun in London, recently updated this book from HarperCollins to include more Meghan details. He takes us through the princes unrulier days as he struggled with the death of his mother, Princess Diana, and how he turned it all around through his military service, counselling and work on the Invictus Games. Larcombe told People magazine that Harry desperately wanted to get married and be happy. He sees his brother has found that. The fact that Meghan arrived when she did completes it for Harry.

The book Pince Harry: The Inside Story was updated to include details of Prince Harrys relationship with Markle. (Reuters)

AMERICAN PRINCESS: THE LOVE STORY OF MEGHAN MARKLE AND PRINCE HARRY

This William Morrow Paperbacks offering by Leslie Carroll takes a juicy tone for the sexy ginger and his American princess ahead of their taboo-busting union. Carrolls exploration of their relationship covers a look back through centuries of Britains rule-breaking royal marriages and those love matches that were never allowed to reach the altar.

Meghan is 36 years old, the same age as Harrys mother when she died in 1997. (AFP file)

Noting that Meghan is 36, the same age as Harrys mother when she died in 1997, Carroll ends with the birds-and-bees talk Diana doled out when Harry was 8 and William was 10. Carroll writes: A blushing Harry fled the room. ... Diana told her sons, whether or not your bride is royal, if she is the person you truly love, then thats all that matters.

HARRY: LIFE, LOSS AND LOVE

Royal expert Katie Nicholl, in this book from Hachette Books, focuses in part on Harrys relationship with close family, including the queen. She covers his frequent visits to one of his favourite places, Botswana, and details his past relationships while chronicling his romance with Meghan.

Royal expert Katie Nicholls book offers some delicious details about Harry and Meghans courtship. (AFP file)

Nicholl offers some delicious details about their courtship. Meghan was so at home at Nottingham Cottage that she had a wardrobe of clothes in Harrys closet and added several more suitcases of belongings. She brought in fresh flowers, organic cookbooks and her favorite Le Labo Santal 26 scented candles to transform his bachelor decor. Meghan loved making extravagant dinners for Harry, and the two loved watching The Crown on Netflix, according to Nicholl.

MISCELLANEOUS

Harry and Meghan: A Love Story Coloring Book, 30 illustrations ready to go. Got a royal house museum going? The pictures are perforated for display once youre finished.

Harry and Meghan Paper Dolls, from Dover Publications. Put Harry in his swim trunks and Meghan in the jeans and white button-down boy shirt she donned for the Invictus Games.

Harry and Meghan 2018, a paperback planner for the year with the couple on the cover against a royal blue background. Motivational quotes included to carry you through the post-wedding hangover.

Follow @htlifeandstyle for more
Less than a month ago, conservationists across the globe bid a solemn farewell to Sudan  the worlds last male northern white rhinoceros. His death marks the potential end of yet another beautiful species, and stands testament to one more example of our collective callousness and cruelty. Imagine surviving for over 50 million years  braving ice ages and prehistoric giants  only to meet your end at the hands of organized human greed?

Planet Earth is replete with disasters of mans own making. From aggressive climate change to the reckless use of natural resources, we are on the fast track to end the world as we know it. At 7.6 billion, Earths population is fast outgrowing its home, and causing irreparable harm in the process.

But, is all hope lost? Renowned American anthropologist, professor, environmentalist, and author Dr. Margaret Mead once said: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed, its the only thing that ever has. History has shown that even at our worst, consolidated and individual efforts have managed to break through the status quo  revive barren lands, eradicate illnesses, and even reverse a few near-extinctions.

Interestingly, Dr. Mead also happened to inaugurate the worlds first ever Earth Day at the UN on April 22, 1970  established to increase public awareness of the worlds environmental problems. With her words in mind, lets celebrate some of our own committed citizens who have made it their mission to tackle some of the biggest crises of our times.

Greenway Stoves: Technology for cleaner air

Indoor air can be up to 10 times more polluted than the air outside. This is particularly true for several rural households in India, where cooking with solid fuels is widely prevalent. Toxic fumes from these stoves are responsible for stunting, lung and respiratory problems, and developmental issues in infants, besides raising carbon emissions to dangerous levels. Greenway Grameen Infra, founded by Ankit Mathur and Neha Juneja with Shoeb Kazi, is a social enterprise that aims to solve this hazardous problem. Started in 2011, the company builds and sells modern stoves that can replace traditional chulhas and deliver over 65% savings in fuels and up to 70% smoke reduction. Designed with patented air regulation technology, Greenway Stoves minimize the impact of toxic fumes indoors and benefit personal health as well as the environment. Already in use by over 550,000 Indians, the stoves potentially offer several households an alternative and cleaner way to live.

Mumbai Roti bank: No food shall be wasted

Initially started by Mumbais iconic dabbawallas, Roti Bank was a glaringly simple solution to the twin problems of hunger and waste. Supported by former city police chief D. Sivanandan and businessman Nitin Khanapurkar, the Mumbai Roti Bank initiative uses GPS-enabled vans to collect leftover food from weddings, restaurants, events, banquets, and households across the city daily to be distributed in areas that house the needy. Anyone can contribute excess food by calling a 24-hour helpline, and leaving the details of the pick-up. In a country where an estimated 20 crore go hungry daily, such initiatives are an essential way to provide some relief to our least underprivileged members.

Banyan Nation: A better kind of plastic

Every year, Earth Day chooses a different area of focus: in 2018, its plastic. More specifically, the irreversible pollution caused to our oceans, wildlife, and environment due to this non-degradable but ubiquitous material that has all but taken over the planet. Hyderbad-based startup Banyan Nation found a unique and essential solution to our over-dependence on plastic. Through their proprietary cleaning technology, Banyan Nation converts post-consumer and industrial plastic waste into high-quality recycled granules  which can then be reused by manufacturers. Not only does this effectively cut down more plastic from being introduced to the environment, but also helps in managing non-biodegradable urban waste and cutting down inefficiencies in the supply chain. Founded by Mani Vajipey and Raj Madangopal in 2013, the company has successfully partnered with major brands like LOreal and Tata Motors, both of which now use Better Plastic in their product packaging and manufacturing.

Its not hard to find inspiration even in the darkest of times. Today, more than ever, we need every last human being to be inspired to do their bit, or at the very least, support those who are doing good work. For over a century now, National Geographic has told stories that have led people to care for our planet. This Earth Day, National Geographic and Farhan Akhtar are looking for stories that will help us build a better tomorrow.

Its time to put the spotlight back on Earth. If you have an idea that can change our planet for the better log on to lightscameraearth.com and participate for a chance to have National Geographic make your idea into a film.
Jim ONeill, the former Goldman Sachs chief economist who coined the term BRICS, will become chair of the Chatham House think tank, adding another role to an already extensive resume.

ONeill, 61, will replace Stuart Popham after the annual general meeting in July 2018, the institute said in a statement on Thursday. Hes best known for his 2001 creation of the BRIC investing strategy, which singled out Brazil, Russia, India and China as a group of increasingly influential emerging markets.

Announcing the appointment, Chatham House director Robin Niblett described him as one of the worlds most perceptive analysts and thinkers about the global economy.

Many of the structures and principles that have supported global growth and buttressed peace are under threat, Niblet said. We are fortunate that an individual of Jims caliber will help guide the institute during this period of profound change.

In addition to Goldman, where he was chairman of its asset management division from 2010 to 2013, ONeill was previously commercial secretary to the UK Treasury and chair of the City Growth Commission, set up to advise on devolution of power to cities.

A member of the House of Lords -- the upper house of Parliament -- with the title Lord ONeill of Gatley, hes also an honorary professor of economics at Manchester University. He was raised near the city in northern England and is a lifelong fan of Manchester United.
India has pressed the BRICS nations to set up an independent rating agency of the five-member group.

The first meeting of the BRICS finance ministers and central bank governors was held on the sidelines of the IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings on Thursday.

Representing India in the meeting of the 5 nation bloc, Economic Affairs secretary Subhash Chandra Garg sought the support of the Presidency in building consensus amongst the BRICS membership on the BRICS Rating Agency proposal.

He requested the Presidency to receive and take forward the report to be submitted by expert group set up under the aegis of BRICS Business Council to study the feasibility of the BRICS Rating Agency, the finance ministry said in statement.

India had first mooted the idea of having such an agency for the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) grouping, which could solve impediments for the emerging market economies posed by the present credit rating agency market dominated by S&P, Moodys and Fitch.

These three western rating agencies hold over 90% of the sovereign ratings market. The other issues discussed during the meeting related to enhancing the project pipelines of New Development Bank (NDB) evenly across member countries, expansion of NDBs membership.

The BRICS countries have already set up New Development Bank, which became operational in 2015, to meet funding requirements of the members

It also deliberated on the proposal of the South African Presidency for setting up a working group on illicit financial flows and a BRICS Task Force on Public Private Partnership.

Issues related to BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) as well as BRICS Bond Fund were also discussed, the ministry said.

In his interventions, Garg emphasised that India has been a constructive participant to the discussions on NDBs membership expansion.

He expressed that a more careful and cautious approach on the value and addition/ benefits new member will bring to the Bank would be desirable rather than setting deadlines which are practically difficult to achieve.

On the issue of expansion of NDBs project pipeline across member nations evenly, Garg said the objective has to be balanced with member countrys requirement for infrastructure financing.

Garg also suggested that since NDB already has a project preparation fund hence a separate similar preparation fund for PPP will not be desirable.
Oil fell in New York after US President Donald Trump criticized OPEC and said crude prices are artificially Very High.

The comments came as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and allies including Russia showed willingness to further tighten oil markets and boost prices.

Looks like OPEC is at it again, Trump said on Twitter. Oil prices are artificially Very High! No good and will not be accepted!

Looks like OPEC is at it again. With record amounts of Oil all over the place, including the fully loaded ships at sea, Oil prices are artificially Very High! No good and will not be accepted!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 20, 2018

Oil ministers from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates pushed back on the charge, saying theres no such thing as artificial prices and that current market levels reflect geopolitics. Crude has rallied in recent weeks as output cuts from OPEC and its allies were compounded by heightened geopolitical risks, including the possibility of renewed US sanctions on Iran.

Trumps decision on Iran in a few weeks time is going to play as much a part as what hes accusing OPEC of doing, said Ole Hansen, head of commodity strategy at Saxo Bank A/S. This is not just OPEC doing what theyre supposed to be doing; we shouldnt take our eye off the ball that the market is rallying on geopolitical risks.

| Read: OPEC, Russia want to continue output curbs on oil to boost investment

Meeting in Jeddah, a committee of OPEC and other oil producers found high levels of compliance with the production curbs. Still, theres capacity for prices to rise beyond this weeks three-year high, according to Saudi Energy Minister Khalid Al-Falih, who said cooperation between producers would continue into 2019.

Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak said the output deal has stimulated US oil production and helped restore the industry of Texas.

West Texas Intermediate crude for May delivery erased gains to trade 0.6% lower at $67.90 a barrel as of 8.28 a.m. in New York. That contract expires on Friday. The more active June contract fell 0.9% to $67.72 a barrel.

Brent crude for June delivery fell about 69 cents at the time of the tweet, before trading down 0.7% at $73.29 a barrel. Both benchmarks are still set for weekly gains.

President Trump said in his tweet that there are record amounts of oil all over the place, including the fully loaded ships at sea. The comments come in the same week that US oil inventories fell below their five-year average for the first time since 2014.

Ninety-eight percent of what politicians say about oil should just be disregarded immediately and this falls in there, said Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy & Economic Research in Winchester, Massachusetts.

Twitter has emerged as a preferred medium of communication for Trump, allowing him to directly reach his 51 million followers and countless more through news coverage. On April 2, Amazon.com Inc. shares dropped after Trump said the companys deliveries cost the postal service and drive retailers out of business.

--With assistance from Dan Kraut and Paul Burkhardt
The oil stockpile surplus thats weighed on prices for three years is all but gone, but instead of celebrating victory some of the worlds largest producers are finding reasons to continue cutting output.

OPEC and Russias historic agreement has achieved impressive results, wiping out 97% of the targeted inventory surplus. Still, the curbs should continue because another important goal -- boosting investment in oil and gas production -- remains far out of reach, said Saudi energy minister Khalid Al-Falih. Theres nothing to fear from prices rising even further from their current three-year high, he said.

His most important ally, Russian counterpart Alexander Novak, agreed theres no obligation to stop just because the pacts initial goal -- stockpiles back in line with the five-year average -- is at hand.

We have our targets, but theres no strict formula under which we would decide: Well, weve reached zero, so we are done, Novak told reporters at the opening session of the groups meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia on Friday.

Crude has surged to a three-year high and the glut that triggered the deepest oil-industry downturn in a generation is all but gone. Yet OPECs choke-hold on its own production is only getting tighter. As oil ministers gathered in the Saudi city that neighbors Mecca for the meeting of the Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee, the $80 a barrel the kingdom desires was inching closer.

Energy ministers didnt make any new recommendations or adjust their targets in Jeddah, according to people familiar with the matter. Still, they did give a strong signal of their intentions after more than a year of production cuts and rising prices. Based on recent market data, they would have some justification in declaring victory and phasing out their supply deal, but all indications were that theyll keep on going at least until the end of 2018.

While soaring US shale production remains a nagging concern, the key players appear to be more fixated on the immediate benefits of high crude prices. Saudi Arabia needs to cover weighty domestic spending and attract investors to a partial sale of its state oil company, Aramco. Russia is relishing its new role as a major Middle East power broker, while also enjoying bigger financial gains than anyone from the accord.

Russia is keeping all options open and Saudi Arabia is talking about a 2019 extension, UBS Group AG analyst Giovanni Staunovo said by email. Status quo for the time being is still the best choice, although the outcome of the groups next meeting in June will depend on inventory and production levels.

Russian Minister Novak wouldnt rule out some easing of the production cuts this year, but said it would depend entirely on the situation in the market. For now, the group is cutting ever deeper, and Saudi Arabias Al-Falih chided nations that havent been implementing their fair share of the curbs at the opening session of the Jeddah talks.

Overall, OPEC and its allies cut 45% to 49% deeper than the agreed 1.8 million barrels a day in March, ministers said. Thats the biggest reduction ever and compares with 38% over-compliance in February.

Much of those additional reductions werent intentional, according to the International Energy Agency. An economic crisis and chronic mismanagement dragged Venezuelas output to a multi-decade low, while Angola lost production from aging fields. Others were temporary, such as field maintenance in Algeria. The cuts may keep getting deeper amid a growing likelihood that US President Donald Trump will reimpose sanctions on Iran.

Yet, for all the signs of a significantly tighter market, ministers signalled the cuts would continue. Saudi Minister Al-Falih in particular gave a strong indication that he thought higher prices wouldnt be a bad thing. Every year the world needs to develop new daily production capacity of about 4 million to 5 million barrels, but thats not happening right now, he said.

There is the capacity for higher prices without hurting demand, Al-Falih said. We have seen prices significantly higher in the past, twice as much as where we are today and the global economy has the capacity to absorb them.

--With assistance from Grant Smith and Alex Longley
The most powerful moment in the Nirbhaya protests against the gang rape of a 23-year-old medical professional in Delhi came three years later thanks to her mother, Asha Devi. We were at a citizens rally to commemorate her daughter. When the time came for me to speak I argued that a country that still needed to push women behind a veil of namelessness and facelessness was never going to stop the stigmatisation of rape victims and survivors. Asha Devi rose to react; she took the microphone from me and said: My daughters name is Jyoti Singh. I am proud to name her. The audience burst into applause.

Yet, here we are in 2018 arguing over whether a little girl raped and murdered in Kathua in the most unspeakable act of brutalisation should be known by her own name. The Delhi High Court thinks otherwise; it has penalised media organisations that named the child, and reminded journalists that a six-month prison sentence can be the punishment meted out.

Isnt it time to challenge this law -- and what it says, unwittingly, about sexual violence?

By using grandiose adjectives like Nirbhaya (fearless), we foist an abstract , and artificial, greatness on victims of abuse and assault that may address our collective guilt and anger, but fails to humanise what the individual goes through. It reduces a womans account to yesterdays headline, or worse still, a shrivelled-up statistic. Not only does this deny women the right to record their own stories, but it also stands in the way of raising public outrage against such violence. You can say 34,000 rape cases were registered in India in 2016. You can point out that on average, five rapes were reported every day in 2017 in Delhi alone -- and it is all important and meaningful data. But if you want to shake the conscience of the nation none of these dry numbers are as effective or moving as an individual sharing her experience in her own words; or a single photo of a once-smiling child who had eyes full of hope, now lying abandoned in a forest after her head was hit with a stone to make sure she was dead. Yes, when it comes to children, I understand the laws intent, as well as that of the court: children do need extra layers of protection especially since our society is cruel and unforgiving in how we mock victims and survivors instead of perpetrators. But isnt that attitude precisely what we need to start changing?

In the Kathua case, the national media (save some exceptions) is already shamefully late in responding to this heinous crime  and reporting that the accused were defended by law makers who used our flag as a cover for bigotry and misogyny. If millions of Indians are apoplectic today, there are two reasons for it: the gut-wrenching details in the chargesheet submitted by the police and the image of a little shepherd girl who had taken her ponies to graze, when she was abducted and forcibly drugged. Without that photograph and a name, we may not have even been talking about her today. She is dead now and her parents have chosen to take her name in all their interviews. Why should the country remember her as a mere statistic or data point? Why doesnt this child have a right to be remembered as she was? Why must her identity be erased by the law?

Of course, it should entirely depend on the victim , or in the case of murder, her family, to take a decision on whether they want to reveal or cloak her identity. And the media has to respect the red line drawn by them. But I think the fight for equality is incomplete without also assuring women and the parents of children who are abused, that there is no shame in what has happened to them; the shame must be entirely of the abusive and violent men.

Let us not forget India owes the now-mandatory sexual harassment guidelines to a Dalit woman called Bhanwari Devi who was gang raped for trying to stop the child marriage of an infant. She never hid her identity. She is a hero.

Lets take a leaf from her book and re-examine or at least modify this paternalistic law. My problem with it is that it reinforces the hush-hush element to our conversation about sexual violence. It subliminally signals that silence or discreet whispers is the way to talk about rape. No, Your Lordships. We women want to shout about sexual abuse. Rape is not a blot on us; its the blot on the men who do this and are protected by our political and legal systems.

Barkha Dutt is an award-winning journalist and author

The views expressed are personal
When we allowed our anger to spill over into the streets following the December 2012 gang-rape of a physiotherapy student, we didnt ask about her religion. We didnt put labels on our fellow protesters ideology. And we certainly didnt entertain any of the usual questions about what she was wearing and why she was out after dark.

Our collective anger resulted in a new law and while we believed that mindset change would take longer, we trusted that it would inevitably follow.

Yet, how far weve descended in six years became clear as news of the premeditated gang-rape, torture and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua began to gain traction.

At more or less the same time, another rape, also of a minor girl was making headlines in Unnao, Uttar Pradesh, the state presided over by a man who swore to unleash anti-Romeo squads to curb sexual harassment.

In Surat we have learned about the body of a child found with over 80 injury marks on her body -- raped and tortured for days before being strangled to death. In Kulgam, Kashmir, news is trickling in of yet another minor girl being drugged, raped and sold for sex. In Nagaon, Assam, an 11-year-old was gang-raped and then burnt alive.

In the long course of a brief fortnight, there is the realization that rape and its attendant brutality is now an everyday crime, grotesquely ordinary in its routine-ness, recounted in almost dull, pornographic detail. This is the India we now accept.

But Kathua tells us something more. It tells us that a crime as awful as rape can even be debated. It exposes the deeply polarized fault-lines that were absent in 2012.

One side is out on the streets protesting from Delhi to Kochi, agitating, organizing, venting.

The other side functions as rape apologists, not bothering to conceal its support for rapists and rape culture.

Where in the civilized world do you have marches in favour of those accused of rape? In Kathua, the two BJP MLAs who attended a Hindu Ekta Manch rally in favour of the rapists have, finally, resigned (why they were spared the ignominy of a sacking beats me). The Kathua Bar Associations brazen obstruction, without any consequence, of police officials trying to file a charge sheet in the office of the chief judicial magistrate is almost as disgusting as the contents of the charge sheet.

How do we explain the fact that we no longer speak in one voice to condemn an outrageous crime? Do we really need to append our conversations with a but and a whatabout?

Does it take days for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to issue a statement with all the usual platitudes about justice for Indias daughters?

How do we understand Rahul Gandhi taking his own time to finally descend to India Gate with his candles and his belated outrage?

When Bollywood actors post selfies expressing their outrage, we question their motives, why one of them was wearing make-up? This is our discourse? And then a male journalist tweets: When your cup size dwarfs your IQ. This is our understanding of womens dignity and self-assertion?

The past two weeks have been a sombre and depressing lesson to the women of India. It tells us what priority politicians accord to us, it shows us how our bodies  yes even of our children -- are so easily dispensable, it confirms rape culture has seeped into the very soil of our nation.

It shows the absence of leadership and the decline of basic decency. I fear for my daughters, and yours.

@NamitaBhandare writes on social issues

The views expressed are personal
Pilgrims will have to shell out more to go to Kedarnath in Uttarakhands Rudraprayag district through palanquin (doli), sling-carrier (kandi), and mule rides.

Rates of palanquin and sling-carrier rides have been revised by the district panchayat, and that of mule rides by the administration. The portal of the shrine will open on April 29.

The panchayat decides the rates of palanquin and sling-carrier rides, as the locals livelihood opportunities are linked to religious tourism.

The rates are similar to that of last year except for two tours. A ride on a palanquin, which is carried by four porters, from Gaurikund to Kedarnath and back with a night stay will cost Rs 9550 for 75 kg weight, and Rs 10050 for 90 kg. One-day ride to the shrine and back will cost Rs 7950 for 75 kg and Rs 8450 for 90 kg. The rate is hiked by 10% compared to last years.

The rates are revised only if the pilgrims want the porters to make a night stay at Kedarnath. Remaining rates are the same as last year, Rudraprayag district magistrate Mangesh Gildiyal said.

Rates for the trek route are almost equal to that of a chopper ride. For a 16-km trek between Gaurikund and Kedarnath, the rates are between Rs 4550-10050, maximum in case of a two-way journey and night stay. A one-way chopper service from the nearest helipad Tiryuginarayn -- about 27 km from Kedarnath  cost Rs 6500 last year. A chopper fly from Guptkashi helipad cost Rs 7500.

The chopper rates will be revised this year after the Uttarakhand Civil Aviation Development Authority (UCADA) completes the tender process for aviation services in the region.

The administration gets Rs 150-280 as arrangement tax and rest is given to the porters. The 6-7 months of religious tourism supports several families that do not have anything to do in the remaining months, said JP Arya, additional chief officer, district panchayat.

In 2017, the administration collected nearly Rs 16 lakh as arrangement tax, which means over 10,000 people took palanquin and sling rides to the shrine.

We undergo physical strain to take pilgrims to the shrine. We deserve more than the current rates. Choppers cannot be compared with us. They use machines and we use our stamina, Rajendra Rawat, a porter of Guptkashi, said over the phone.

The rates of mule ride have also been increased. Mule rides from Sonprayag to Kedarnath will be available at Rs 2500 per person, which was Rs 1800 last year. From Gaurikund to Kedarnath, the charge will be Rs 2300, which was Rs 1500 last year.
Uttarakhands 116 villages are backward on parameters of health, sanitation, electricity, drinking water and basic infrastructure, according to a survey conducted by the union panchayati raj ministry.

Haridwar district topped the list with 54 backward villages, followed by Udham Singh Nagar 21 and Nainital has 18. Pithoragarh that shares border with Nepal and China surprisingly has one village labelled as backward.

Uttar Pradesh has the highest number of 3,387 backward villages in the survey that covered the entire country.

Kumaon commissioner Rajeev Rautela said some villages may have been labelled as backward, but work was being done constantly on to provide basic amenities and infrastructure.

The Gram Swaraj scheme aims to uplift villages and increase basic amenities and income of the people. The effects of this scheme would be visible in the coming time and villages would be front runners in development, he said.

Social activist Chandra Shekhar Kargeti said backwardness of villages in Nainital was due to remote conditions.

Officers do not go to ground and villages are devoid of schemes due to corruption and red-tapism. We would have to first root out corruption at the lowest levels so as to bring these villages out of the clutches of backwardness and mere extending government schemes would not works, he said.
In a major accident on NH-24 in Ghaziabad, six people were feared dead after a SUV lost control near Vijay Nagar in Ghaziabad on Friday night.

According to police, one man, four women and a child were among those killed.

Over a dozen people were travelling in the Tata Sumo SUV and were headed from Rudrapur in Uttarakhand to Khoda in Ghaziabad for a wedding. The driver stopped near Hotel Green, adjacent to the highway. According to ANI, the vehicle fell into a gorge when the group resumed their journey.

When the driver started the onward journey to Khoda, he lost balance of the vehicle and it fell down nearly 10-15 feet from the highway. Several passengers were injured while six people lost their lives. We have rushed the injured to the hospital. We are yet to identify the six dead, said Manisha Singh, circle officer (city I).

According to police, the passengers made a brief stopover at Vijay Nagar and were going towards Khoda when the SUV fell off the highway.
The Janpath street market in the heart of Delhi is a shoppers delight. But amid its vibrancy and variety, theres one lane that stands out. Its perhaps the most colourful, most beautiful  the Gujarati lane, adjacent to the Freemasons Hall.

What strikes a visitor? Besides the colourful display of handicraft products like bed linen, stoles, purses, bags and more, its the polyglotism of the Gujarati and Rajasthani vendors. Since the street is a favourite among foreigners visiting the area, the vendors here have mastered striking a conversation in English, French, Spanish, German and many more languages, at least enough to make a sale.

These polyglots, most of whom havent attended school or a foreign language diploma, have learnt it all on the job.

Ajit, who helps the owner of a shop, says the streets have taught him more than a school ever could. The proud young man is fluent in Hindi, but switches to English when a foreigner visits. English toh almost sabhi foreigners ko aati hai, par agar koi French ya Spanish bolne waala aa jaaye to usse baat karne mein bhi ab problem nahi hoti. Kuch 15 saal se yeh job kar rahe hain, bahot kuchh seekhne ko mil gaya hai yahan (I can also talk in French and Spanish now having spent 15 years working in this lane), he says.

Sagar, a seller from the Gujarati Lane poses next to his shop. (Shivam Saxena/HT Photo)

Almost every vendor in this street knows more than two languages (some up to seven) and this promises them a great sale day. Sagar, another seller in the market for almost 20 years now, has also acquired French and Spanish besides English. Sab humne yahin seekha hai ya toh doosron se ya foreign customers se. Poori bhasha to nahi bol paate, par sale ke liye jitni zaroori hai, utni to humein aati hai (Ive learnt whatever little I could to make a sale, either from other sellers or foreigners), he says.

Explaining how it helps to attract a potential foreign buyer, he adds, Agar Spain walon ko Spanish mein bolo Quieres comprar matlab do you want to buy, toh unka dhyan zaroor idhar ata hai. At least they stop at the shop.

Meet multilingual hand-drum seller Mohd Shabar. (Shivam Saxena/HT Photo)

Abha, a middle-aged woman selling bed linen and trinkets, doesnt look like much of a talker, but she knows how to call out to potential customers, especially those who will shell out dollars. She has learnt English, French, Spanish and German by befriending customers. Jo baahar se aate hain, unse baat karna accha lagta hai. Koi friendly ladies aati hai to unki bhasha mein kuchh seekh lete hain. Unki bhasha mein baat karna unhe bhi easy lagta hai. Koi Germany se hai toh ussey pooch lete hain ki German mei iss baat ko kaise kahenge ki ye top quality bedsheet hai (I like chatting with foreigners. They also find it easier to talk in their language. I ask them to teach me how to say that my product is of great quality), she says.

But, the real gem of the market is a dholak seller, Mohd Shabar. He sells stuff on the go, and is fluent in Hindi and English, but can greet you and ask, You want to buy in seven international languages. Otherwise shy, he excitedly flaunts his self-learnt French with Vous voulez acheter? Where did the learning come from? Paapi pet ke liye kiya (Its all to earn my daily bread), he says, now eyeing another potential customer.

You want to buy? French: Vous voulez acheter? German: Du willst kaufen? Italian: Vuoi comprare? Spanish: Quieres comprar? Russian: Ty khochesh kupit? Arabic: turid an tashtari? Chinese: Xiang goumai?

Hello! How are you? French: Salut comment ca va German: Hallo, wie geht es dir Italian: Ciao, come stai Spanish: Hola como estas Russian: Privet kak dela Arabic: Marhabaan kayf halik Chinese: Ni hao! Ni hao ma
In what could be a good news for the college applicants of 2018-19 academic session, starting July 2018, there will be no counselling for any of the courses, this year.

Unlike last year, when applicants of all the streams, be it sciences, arts or commerce had to be present for the counselling to deposit their documents, this year, the entire admission process, starting from buying a prospectus, has been made online.

Rakesh Kumar Popli, director higher education, said, We will release the college admission schedule in a day or two but this year, students will not have to physically come for the counselling.

He added, We have taken help of software, created by Society for Promotion of IT in Chandigarh (SPIC) for the convenience of the students and parents.

Students can submit forms by mid-June

Meanwhile, Anita Kaushal, principal of Post Graduate Government College for Girls, Sector 11, who is the chairperson of the college admission committee, said, The admission process will begin from July 9 and prospectuses will be made available from the first week of June and students can submit their forms online by mid June.

She added, We have included sciences comprising BSc and all other subjects under BSc, computer sciences, masters programme in computers, commerce and then arts will also be online from the new session. The admission dates will be shared in two days.

Kaushal also stated that the word counselling will remain there in the prospectus and it will mean the day, when students will come to pay their fee. Rest everything will be handled online, she added.

At present GGDSD College, Sector 32, has a facility of online admission, where a student does not have to visit the campus with documents on the day of admission. At SD college, the fee deposition process is also online.

The UT higher education department had drafted a plan to introduce online admissions in city's 11 colleges.

PU faced difficulties to go online last year

In 2017, Panjab University, had also started their online admissions but faced difficulties in implementing it. Despite introducing cloud-based online system, the university had to ask students to submit hard copies of forms and the documents. The system was criticised by the student bodies, stating that there was no point of introducing an online system when students are asked to handover the hard copies of their application forms and documents.
The CLAT 2018 admit card release was postponed on Friday due to some technical reasons, says a notice on the CLAT 2018 website. The National University of Advanced Legal Studies, Kochi, will now release the admit card/hall ticket for CLAT 2018 exam on April 26.

The entrance test will be held on May 13 between 3pm and 5pm.

CLAT 2018 admit card download: Candidates can download their admit cards after release from the CLAT 2018 official website at clat.ac.in by logging into their account. They should take a print-out of the admit card/hall ticket and carry the same to the examination centre. Read the instructions on the admit card carefully and carry all the requisite documents to the examination hall.

The exam is held to select candidates for admissions to 19 national law universities (NLUs) undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes.

CLAT is an all India common entrance examination conducted on rotational basis by 19 National Law Universities (NLUs) for admissions to their UG and PG degree programmes. This year, NUALS Kochi is the organising university.
Being a doctor is not the only option to pursue a career in medicine as most people believe. There are numerous options available in the healthcare sector. One of such option is that of medical laboratory technology.

Why medical laboratory technology?

The medical treatment starts only after the diagnosis of the disease and diagnose, doctors need various kinds of analysis through tests. On the basis of the outcome of these tests, they treat and give advice for prevention. This is where the crucial role of medical laboratory technology or clinical laboratory science comes in picture.

The medical laboratory technicians are the ones who collect blood samples and perform the various diagnostic tests by analysing body fluids like blood, saliva and urine, tissues, microorganism screening, chemical analyses, cell counts of human body etc.

Medical laboratory technicians also play an important role in collecting the information needed, sampling, testing, reporting and documentation of these investigations. They determine the presence, extent or absence of disease and provide data needed to evaluate the effectiveness of treatment.

Skills required

A qualified medical lab technician needs to be extremely precise and disciplined in their work. They should be proficient in managing delicate laboratory equipment and responsive materials. According to the College Board, a medical lab technology job requires its practitioners to be logical and precise, with a curiosity in medicine, science and technology. In an increasingly computerised industry, a medical lab technologist should be capable of using computers and digital equipment and comfortable with understanding new technologies.

Career overview

As a medical lab technician, one does regular laboratory testing manually with the help of high-end equipment. Technicians collect samples, organise specimens and operate machines that mechanically analyse samples. They also organise standard solutions which engage measuring and mixing the correct amount of diverse chemicals for use in the lab.

Career prospects

Career as a medical lab technician offers you the chance to have an important impact on enduring care, without actually interacting with patients. One can also work as a freelancer as well as a phlebotomist and earn well.

With the relevant skills, a candidate can find employment in a hospital, minor emergency centres, private laboratory, blood donor centres, health care centre or clinics. You can aspire to become a technologist in due time and work experience.

Medical lab technicians can also find jobs in research facilities, crime laboratories, universities, pharmaceutical companies and military. Lab technicians are constantly in demand in hospitals, speciality hospitals, laboratories etc.

You could grow to become:

* Laboratory manager/consultant/supervisor

* Laboratory information system analyst/consultant

* Hospital outreach coordinator

Medical technicians are also required in an industry such as pharmaceutical for a position in product development, promotion, sales, quality promise, environmental health and insurance, amongst others.

Eligibility

The eligibility needed for a diploma in medical laboratory technology (DMLT) is Class 12 or equivalent examination from a recognised board. The duration of the course is mainly two years. There are also other certificate courses for lab technicians which needs Class 12 as the eligibility.

Courses are offered by various institutes, colleges, universities as well as hospitals. The hospitals or the medical labs are usually affiliated with a college or university. On the job training along with the classroom sessions plays a vital role in providing the practical exposure as well as hands-on experience related to this sector.

For those who want to pursue Bachelor of Medical Laboratory Technology (BMLT), the eligibility is Class 12 or equivalent with science subjects or pre-university vocational course from a recognised board with laboratory technology as a vocational subject. BMLT is a three-year programme.

Remunerations

Medical lab technology is a productive and challenging field. The initial salary package for a medical lab technician ranges from Rs 10,000 to Rs 20,000 per month in hospitals and in clinics. One can also earn well as a freelancer. The pay packages gradually increase with years of experience.

(Khan is the founder and director of Council of Education and Development Programmes Skill Institute, Mumbai. Views expressed here are personal.)
The Kerala University of Health Sciences (KUHS) has declared results of third year Bachelor of Pharmacy (B.Pharm) supplementary examination, and second year Pharm D supplementary examination (both held in January). Students can check the results on the Universitys official website: kuhs.ac.in.

Heres how to check the result:

* Log on to kuhs.ac.in

* Click on examination tab

* Click on exam results tab

* Click on Pharmacy

* Click on the examination result link you want to check

* Click on result

* Enter your registration number and tick the I am not a robot box

* Click on submit and check your result
A crime branch team of the Gurugram police, specially assigned to nab cab gangs involved in robbing commuters after offering them rides at key intersections on Delhi Gurgaon Expressway, nabbed four criminals involved in 11 such incidents.

The gang of four targeted commuters at Iffco Chowk, Shankar Chowk and busy junctions in Delhi and Faridabad. The crime branch team came across the gang while investigating an incident that happened on March 31 at Iffco Chowk in which the accused had robbed a commuter of his money, purse containing bank cards and his mobile phone.

The accused were identified as Ajay Mishra (29), Rakesh Singh (22), Vikas Kumar (22), Ajit Kumar alias Pintu. All the four men were staying in Bapunagar area of Faridabad and used to work as daily wage labourers at different places, the police said.

They also kept a low profile to ensure their crimes arent detected, the police said.

Police said that the accused had hired a Honda Civic to carry out their criminal activities. The sleuths are likely to question the owner of the vehicle in this connection.

All the four had hired a Honda Civic and moved around in the evening at busy traffic junctions along the Delhi Gurgaon Expressway. They would offer lift to commuters and after overpowering them, rob them of their valuables, mobile phones and cash and dump them in secluded areas, Rajiv Kumar, ACP, City, Gurugram police, said.

The crime branch team, led by inspector Jaivir Singh, recovered a white Honda Civic from the accused. We had spoken to several victims and visited every crime scene and this gave us a general idea of their modus operandi and the vehicle used. On April 19, we received specific information regarding the presence of these men during the late hours at Atul Kataria Chowk. The stretch was barricaded and the accused were arrested while they were scouting for victims, Singh said.

Read I Gurugram: Gang of four robbers who lured buyers with cheap cars busted

The accused have confessed to their involvement in 11 such robberies in Gurgaon, Delhi and Faridabad, the police said.

ACP Kumar said that the accused will be questioned during the remand and preliminary investigation has revealed that they were active since the last two months. They seemed to have entered the crime world recently and were out to make fast buck so that they could live comfortably, Kumar said.

Voicing concern over a spurt in such incidents, he said that an awareness drive would be launched in the city to make commuters aware of the dangers posed by unregistered cab drivers.
Alzheimers Disease may begin far earlier than we thought. A study has found that living in cities with high air pollution puts children younger than even one-year-old at risk for Alzheimers.

Researchers led by Lilian Calderon-Garciduenas, a professor in the department of biomedical and pharmaceutical sciences at the University of Montana, examined the autopsies of 203 residents of Mexico City and published their findings in Environmental Research. The respondents age ranged from 11 months to 40 years. Medical News Today defines Alzheimers disease as a neurological disorder in which the death of brain cells causes memory loss and cognitive decline.

The researchers specifically looked at levels of two abnormal proteins associated with Alzheimers Disease  hyperphosphorylated tau and beta amyloid. Many of the bodies displayed heightened levels of these two proteins in the brain, even in children less than a year old. Evidence of early signs of Alzheimers disease was found in 99.5% of the subjects examined.

These results stress how important it is to reduce air pollution, Calderon-Garciduenas told Newsweek in an interview. While some disease risk factors are not modifiable, such as genetic disposition, air pollution is.

Air pollution control has to be prioritized, Calderon-Garciduenas said, adding, Pollution is serious (and) chronic, people are exposed from conception to death.

The study theorised that exposure to air pollution may be behind these heightened abnormal protein levels in young brains. Children exposed to cleaner air performed better in various categories, including cognitive performance, said Dr Calderon-Garciduenas.

Calderon-Garciduenas, who also collaborates with Universidad del Valle de Mexico, compared children by age, gender, socioeconomic status, the IQ of their mother, nutrition and education.

While this study cannot prove that air pollution directly leads to brain damage, it adds to an increasing pool of research that suggests a correlation.

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Robert Downey Jr has perfected the art of evading questions about Iron Mans fate in Avengers: Infinity War. The actor, who first played the character 10 years ago in Iron Man, has responded to rumours of Tony Starks impending demise with everything from non-answers to talking about a different topic altogether. But at the recently held press junket in Singapore, Downey Jr told NDTV that Marvel hasnt even told him how the movie ends.

Marvel hasnt even told me what the end of this movie is, he said, before launching into the same answer he gave everyone who asked this question at the Singapore red carpet, I have been seeing fans queue up from 10 in the morning - I really appreciate that. If I was walking the red carpet and if they were not around, I would cry.

But Downey Jrs statement confirms something that directors Joe & Anthony Russo had said earlier. To avoid spoilers from leaking out, theyd made sure that actors would not be given complete scripts. Multiple versions of pivotal scenes were shot, as well as multiple endings.

Actors from left, Tom Holland, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr., Tom Hiddleston pose for the media during a promotional event for the latest Avengers: Infinity War movie. (AP)

Said executive producer Trinh Tran, We dont give anyone the full script. They just get their part of the script.

She added, Some days the actors dont even know what they are shooting, they are told on the set what they will shoot that day. Out of all the Marvel movies, this is one of the biggest kept secret films. We went in being very protective.

The Russos recently shared a letter addressed to the fans in which they informed them that to ensure their experience watching the film isnt spoiled, the film would not be shown in its entirety until the Los Angeles premiere. The press would only be shown certain segments of the film, keeping important plot points a secret.

Avengers: Infinity War stars Robert Downey Jr, Josh Brolin, Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner (?), Samuel L Jackson, Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, Don Cheadle, Anthony Mackie, Sebastian Stan, Paul Bettany, Elizabeth Olsen, Tom Holland, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Rudd (?) and Tom Hiddleston.

Check out our full coverage of Avengers: Infinity War here

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The Congress and six other opposition parties on Friday submitted notice of an impeachment motion for the removal of Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dipak Misra on five grounds of misbehaviour, the first time in the history of India that such a motion has been initiated against the countrys top judge.

Leaders of the opposition parties, led by Ghulam Nabi Azad of the Congress, met Vice President and Rajya Sabha chairman M Venkaiah Naidu and handed over the notice signed by 71 members of the Upper House.

While seven members have retired since the time they signed the notice -- it has been in the works for several weeks -- it still has 64 signatories. The removal motion can be moved even when Parliament is not in session, and requires the signature of 50 Rajya Sabha MPs or 100 Lok Sabha members.

Besides the Congress, those who signed the notice include members of the Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party, Communist Party of India-Marxist, Communist Party of India, Nationalist Congress Party and the Indian Union Muslim League. Nominated member KTS Tulsi also signed the motion.

No CJI has ever been impeached in India, and any decision on the notice by the Opposition parties against justice Misra is likely to be taken by Naidu following consultations with legal experts. The removal has been sought under provisions of the Constitution dealing with the appointment and removal of Supreme Court judges..

A message left at the office of the CJI seeking his comment on the opposition parties move elicited no response.

We wish this day had never come. As representatives of the people, we are entitled to hold the Chief Justice accountable, just as we are accountable to the people. The majesty of the law is more important than the majesty of any office, senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal told reporters after submitting the notice.

The move came a day after a Supreme Court bench, headed by the CJI, rejected public interest litigation for a probe into death of Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) special court judge BH Loya, who was hearing the Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case in which present BJP president Amit Shah was named and then discharged.

The impeachment motion has nothing to do with the Supreme Court verdict on Judge Loya. In fact, we had sought an appointment with the Rajya Sabha chairperson a week ago, Azad clarified.

The five charges levelled against the CJI in the notice include conspiracy to pay illegal gratification in the Prasad Education Trust case and denial of permission to proceed against a retired high court judge in the same matter.

The Prasad Education Trust case surfaced last year when the CBI arrested a retired judge of the Orissa high court and five others in a bribery case. A petition for an independent inquiry into the case was admitted by a bench headed by justice J. Chelameswar and it passed an order to set up a constitution bench of five senior most judges of the Supreme Court to hear the petition. CJI Misra set up a five -judge bench to hear the order; the bench annulled the order.

Another charge listed by the opposition parties pertains to a piece of land which the CJI had acquired as an advocate by giving a false affidavit. The opposition also alleged that sensitive cases were assigned to handpicked judges.

Some of these allegations were also raised by four top Supreme Court judges at a news conference on January 12 this year.

We were hoping that the anguish of the judges as reflected in their statements would be addressed by the Chief Justice and that he will set his house in order. More than three months have passed. Nothing has changed, Sibal claimed.

The Congress leader asked whether the nation should stand still and do nothing when the SC judges themselves, alluding to the functioning of the CJI, believe that the judiciarys independence is under threat and democracy is in peril

The choice was not easy because either way, the repercussions are serious. The Constitution allows only one recourse to remedy the situation. Since there is no other way to protect the institution except to move an impeachment motion, we, members of the Rajya Sabha, do so with a heavy heart, he said.

The Rajya Sabha chairperson will now ascertain whether the case made out in the notice merits moving such a motion. He can either accept the notice or reject it. In case he finds merit, he may form a three-member committee to look into the charges. If it concludes that there is a case, the House will take it up for discussion and a vote.

Separately on Friday, the Supreme Court described the events leading to the notice of impeachment against the CI as unfortunate and sought attorney general KK Venugopals assistance on a public interest litigation that sought a gag order on Parliamentarians and media from discussing in public impeachment proceedings against Supreme Court and high court judges.

A bench of justices AK Sikri and Ashok Bhushan refused to issue any restraint order without hearing the top law officer. Let him (AG) come and give his views and then we will take a call, the bench told senior counsel Meenakshi Arora, who on behalf of the petitioner, non-government organisation In Pursuit of Justice, urged the bench to stop the media from carrying reports on the impeachment proceedings against Misra. It fixed May 7 to hear the matter again.

We are very disturbed about what has been happening...it is very unfortunate (as to) what is happening, Justice A.K. Sikri said at the outset of the hearing.

The petition said that the act of publicly brandishing their intention of mustering support of various political groups to initiate removal proceedings results in scandalising the courts and which is calculated to bring the courts of law into disrepute and to lower its authority and further to interfere with the due course of justice and the lawful process of the courts. Needless to say that scurrilous abuse of a judge or court or attacks on the personal character of a judge is punishable contempt.
Night comes early to the cramped bylanes in the old city of Jammu. The bustling street corners start looking deserted by 9.30 pm and even the ubiquitous monkeys, who trail every weary pilgrim during the day, appear to retire to the shadows. But all that changed last month.

Now, groups of men hang around in shop corners trying to catch snatches of the nightly television news shows, immersed in conversation about the latest video they received over WhatsApp or what they had heard in chatter outside the court, or the bus stand, or through a relative in Delhi. Everyone is an expert, everyone has the latest scoop or an incisive analysis or at least, the most impassioned argument. The topic, though, remains the same: The gang rape and murder of an eight-year-old tribal Muslim girl.

The case, which has come to be known colloquially as the Kathua kand, has driven a virtual wedge between Jammu and Kashmir and incensed many dominant Hindu communities, especially the Dogras, who nurse a sense of neglect at the hands of a Muslim-majority state and are particularly stung by what they see is a betrayal by the national press and political parties. But simmering under the surface are decades-old grievances and creeping polarisation that have been fanned by stagnant economic growth and fast-changing migration patterns.

The temple where it is alleged the crime took place in Rasana, 55 km from Jammu town (Nitin Kanotra / HT )

The anger

Outside the 19th century Raghunath Temple, the second-holiest shrine in the region after Vaishno Devi, groups of young men and women amble about on Thursday, tired from a rally that has just got over. This is a question of Jammus honour, says one man to loud cheers.

The rally, which snaked its way through the old city, its numbers swelling at every crossing, was led by controversial Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Chowdhury Lal Singh who has become the face of the protests roiling Jammu. He has been demanding a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) inquiry in the case and has expressed distrust of a state police probe that has named eight Hindu men, including a priest, as the accused. We will not let Jammu be discriminated against, thunders the former forest minister. Behind him, a young girls voice pierces through the din, mouthing the familiar Hum Kya Chahte (What do we want) slogan made popular on the streets of Kashmir. But the roar from the crowd is not azaadi (independence), but CBI inquiry.

This demand has become a lightning rod across the Jammu region, from the traditional old town to the newer settlements across the Tawi river, and from the flat valleys and millet fields of the Samba district to the glitzy malls in newer Jammu.

Whats the problem with a CBI inquiry? Does that make us rape supporters? Jammu has always opened the doors for refugees. But dubbing us as pro-rape, as the media and others have done, is not good. Youre pushing us to the wall, says KB Jandial, a former IAS officer and Dogra who resides in the city.

The sentiment strikes a chord. Two kilometres outside Rasana village, where the rape allegedly occurred, groups of women and men have been sitting on a dharna on the national highway to Jammu for almost a month. Many of them say they were driven out of their villages because of harassment by state forces. Many of us lived in fear, says Santosh Devi, a resident.

All of them back the demand for a CBI probe. We are not extremists, we dont support rape. But we will not let them malign Hindus, says Kant Kumar, a member of the Hindu Ekta Manch, a loose collection of local village chiefs that believes the accused are innocent. Kumar, himself a former Congress leader, is sitting next to Shanti Swarup Sharma, a former block president of the National Conference and a third leader with BJP links, Bhagmal Khajuria. It seems unlikely that a Dogra can rape in a temple. Even if the charge sheet is true, people wont believe if the state police say it. CBI is a must, argues major general (retired) Goverdhan Jamwal. Others echo him  that even if Hindus are guilty, no one will believe that the Srinagar-based government isnt targeting them.

Kumar and his colleagues have hit the news this month for opposing the state police probe and demanding a CBI inquiry that many allege is a mere delaying tactic. But what meets the eye is often not the reality of inter-community dynamics.

Most Dogras of Jammu talk of the Gurjars as their brothers and a fellow community they share the province with, but privately stress of how the tribals were allowed to graze on our land. It is this sentiment, possibly, that led to widespread resentment and anger when the administration decided in February to not evict tribals from government land without prior permission. Many Dogra Rajput and Brahmins protested, saying the minority Hindus were being discriminated against, yet again. Indeed, one of the demands of the controversial Jammu strike, called by the high court bar association, was revoking this decision.

Many Hindus in Jammu also claim that Gujjars are rich and illegally buying land and settlements to encircle the old town, notwithstanding the fact that the tribal community is impoverished with more than half below the poverty line, and many of the settlements are scraggy heaps of bricks on the edges of town, next to the flood-prone river bank.

In this atmosphere where the Jammu Hindus see themselves as an aggrieved minority surrounded by what many of them call mini Pakistan, all protesters call for justice but are angry about the priest being named, and question every contention of the probe  where was the family, how could the temple be deserted, the allegations against members of the state police team, and the demonstrations of innocence of the accused. Their questions are different but the conclusion common: That Hindus are being targeted as part of a Kashmiri conspiracy and that no matter how heinous the crime is, a priest and his family can never be involved. The atmosphere is taking a communal angle now, says Deepika Rajawat, who is fighting for the victims in the case.

The reason

Bitterness between the two main regions of the state is old but has mounted in Jammu over recent fears of an eroding Hindu majority and an economic downturn reflected in a lack of job opportunities for the youth, who feel resentful at the boom witnessed in other parts of India. Add to this the hurt emanating from a sense of being wronged by India and you have the concoction for a tinderbox.

Author and researcher Javaid Rahi, who belongs to the same Gujjar-Bakerwal tribes as the victim, thinks the main issue is about land. A majority of Jammu is pro-Gujjar but there is an increase in the number of Hindu fanatics. Earlier they used to say Kashmiris are settling here and trying to engineer demographic change and now it is against Gujjars.

Gujjar-Bakerwals, classified as a scheduled tribe in the state, travel through treacherous mountain passes from Kashmir to Jammu every winter and go back as temperatures rise in the plains during the summer. Most of them rear animals, live in straw and mud tents outside villages and are intimately tied to the local communities in Jammu through milk production and shared culture. They say they are ill-treated in Kashmir, where Gujjar is often used as an expletive. But the delicate balance might be fraying. Jammu today has a larger population of Muslims, especially around the fringes of the city but this has made many Hindu communities start talking about Muslims taking over.

The tensions spilled on to the streets during the 2008 Amarnath land agitation, a terror attack on the Sunjuwan military base in February and en masse settling of Rohingya refugees over the past year. Today, many Rohingyas continue to live in penury in housing next to the highway and mostly work as domestic workers or construction labourers but that has done little to ease perceptions.

We now find people in different dress and cap all the time. They have been given ration cards, included in revenue records. Hindus are disappearing. What was done in Kashmir is now being done here, says Shailendra Aima of Panun Kashmir, an organisation of Kashmiri Pandits.

The government officially denies all charges and experts say there is a simpler explanation. Across India, most communities are settling down. And because Jammu is the economic and educational hub of the state, people come here. There is no change in proportional population across the state. But the optics are such that Jammu feels discriminated, explains Ellora Puri, an assistant professor of political science at Jammu University.

To be sure, the charge of demographic change cuts both ways  as exemplified by the massacre of Jammu Muslims during 1947 that killed half-a-million people. As a result of these massacres and consequent migration, the Muslim population was reduced to 7 per cent according to the 1961 census. So the phenomenon of radicalisation in Jammu is old and it was there when Kashmir as a whole was preoccupied with protecting its non-Muslim population, explains Sheikh Showkat Hussain, associate professor at the Central University of Kashmir. Jammu also has fewer seats than Kashmir. It has never had a chief minister from the region, adding to a sense of political isolation. Moreover, after producing legendary generals for centuries, many Dogras say there is a leadership vacuum.

The other thorn is economic. Jammu and Kashmir has few large-scale industries and one of the lowest per-capita Gross Domestic Product in the country. It has failed to keep pace with the burgeoning aspirations of a growing young population. RL Bhat, a professor of economics at the Central University of Jammu, explains that the primary employer continues to be the government, which has reached saturation point. Moreover, state government data from 2015-2016 shows that Jammus share of tax revenues outstrips that of the valley 3:1. Some reasons are obvious: the long-running insurgency in the valley and months of bitter cold. But this creates inter-regional tension, says Bhat.

Indeed, accusations of favouritism to Kashmir in jobs and government openings is as popular in Jammu as is its famed rajma-chawal. There is no question of any discrimination. It is just a wrong perception perpetuated by some with vested interests, says Naeem Akhtar, a Kashmir government spokesperson.

But this has done little to assuage the outrage of a community with a long history of military service but fast-eroding cultural artifacts, exemplified in the crumbling forts and temples of Jammu, fuelling a deep sense of identity crisis. We built this state but our issues are nowhere to be seen. The youth dont speak the local language. We are a warrior race, we didnt write down our history, and our script is almost dead. How long will we tolerate this? asks Manu Khajuria, an activist.

The present

Many Dogra community leaders deny that the current crisis is communal but those among the Muslim population are not convinced. Talib Hussain, a former Jammu University student and a Gujjar leader, says the protests are politically instigated to terrorise the Muslim community. He also denies all charges of demographic change, saying land is not an issue with tribals, who will not stay in one place even if they are economically well-off. They have tried to brand us criminals and anti Hindus to please the fundamentalist voter, he says, calling for the implementation of the Forest Rights Act to safeguard the interests of the tribals. Others see in the protests a continuation of the politics of the mainland. As you find in the entire country, hate speeches have increased. People try to communalise issue to secure votes. This atmosphere has percolated into the state, feels Masud Chowdhury, a former additional director general of police in Jammu.

The protests have evoked strong reactions in Kashmir too. I have a strong feeling that the rape and murder has put the divide between people there and here out in open. Primarily it is a Hindu-Muslim divide but it manifests itself in a Jammu- Kashmir divide, says Toyeba Pandit, 28, of Baramulla district. Another Kashmiri student in Jammu, who wished to remain anonymous, offered the 1992 Kunan-Poshpora rapes, allegedly by the Indian army, as an example of how rapes have been used politically in the state. Many Kashmiris dont trust the CBI after its probe in the 2009 Shopian rape case.

Caste plays its role too, especially in the Hindu-dominated Jammu region, where Dalits continue to face ritual abuse and obstruction in accessing public spaces, water and even burial sites. Hiranagar, the assembly constituency where the crime occurred, is a reserved constituency. Wherever the upper castes dominate, they use the Dalits against the Muslims. But we have friendly relations with the tribals, we support them, says RC Kalsotra, state president of the All India Confederation of SC,ST, OBC organisations.

There is deep anger coursing through Jammu today. Dogras feel decades of military service have gone in vain, its heroes forgotten and its name maligned. They seethe at the insinuations made about supporting rapists  pointing out here, girls are worshipped. We cannot even think of such a thing done to our kanjak ( girl goddess), says an upset Khajuria. Muslims feel that hostility against them is rising, aided by political parties. But the way out of this crisis might also come from within Jammu itself, and its plural nature. As Puri says, a glimpse into an average classroom in the university would reveal students from every corner of the state. Jammu has been liberal and broad-minded, always opening doors for the displaced, says Jandial. Chowdhury agrees. We have full faith in our neighbours and members of the Hindu community. The majority are not communal. This gives me hope.
India and China are expected to take their first steps to revive military-to-military ties after the 2017 Doklam stand-off with both the Indian Army and the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) opening up select military colleges for training each others officers on a reciprocal basis, according to officials familiar with the matter.

A decision to this effect is expected to be taken when defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman meets her Chinese counterpart Wei Fenghe in Beijing on April 24. Sitharaman will be on a two-day trip to China for a ministerial meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO)l next week.

The revival of military-to-military follows a positive meeting between national security advisor Ajit Doval and Chinas top diplomat Yang Jiechi in Shanghai last week. Yang is a member of Politburo of the Communist Party of China and is currently director of the newly formed Central Foreign Affairs Commission. He is said to directly report to Chinas paramount leader Xi Jinping.

According to top South Block officials, both Doval and Yang were of the opinion that India and China needed to cooperate to make the 21st century an Asian one. With the two interlocutors sharing a close personal chemistry, it was agreed that the atmosphere of confrontation must give way to cooperation in all spheres. Doval had gone to Shanghai to do the spadework for the much anticipated summit between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Xi meeting before the SCO summit in June.

While Indian armed forces are in favour of exercising with their Chinese counterparts and want a hotline between the military operation wings in New Delhi and Beijing, the Modi government is prepared to wait for a decision on these by the Xi regime. As a first step, India will open the doors of the National Defence College to PLA officers for military courses with the Chinese expected to reciprocate in Beijings National Defence University.

China watchers say that with the US talking to North Korea directly without any help from either China or Japan and Russia leaning on China for support in the Syrian theatre, the rapidly changing geopolitical equation is pushing New Delhi and Beijing towards cooperation.

Deng Xiaoping told Rajiv Gandhi in 1982 that 21st century will be Asian century only if India and China combine to make it so. Indias message to China is that it cannot make it to the forefront without the support and cooperation of New Delhi, said a senior official on condition of anonymity.
One of the victims of sexual abuse at Rohtaks Apna Ghar orphanage was conferred national bravery award in 2013. She was among those three girls who escaped from shelter home and contacted National Commission for Protection of Child rights (NCPCR) before they raided the premises and exposed the scandal on May 2012.

The special CBI court on Thursday convicted 9 of the 10 accused, including Apna ghar owner Jaswanti Devi, and fixed April 24 for the sentence.

Now married, the victim could not be contacted. However, former NCPCR member Vinod Kumar Tikoo, who played a vital role in raiding Apna Ghar and was in touch with her during this entire episode shared her exemplary feet.

Former NCPCR member Vinod Kumar Tikoo said the trial took six years to complete, which was too long a period for victims involved in this racket.

Recounting her story, Tikoo said that she was tired of facing sexual assault on herself and other girls in the shelter home.

One day, she stole Rs 500 from the purse of Apna Ghar owner Jaswanti Devi and fled to Delhi with two other inmates. She first contacted the Delhi child welfare committee (CWC) and then the matter reached the commission.

Tikoo said that she was aware about the existence of CWC in Delhi since she visited there in her tender age as an orphan. Her brother too lived here with her in shelter home and she spoke to me about physical and sexual torture to him also, he added. Tikoo said that it was her daring call to escape from there that exposed physical, psychological and sexual abuse of children at the centre.

He said she was conferred Geeta Chopra Award, considered among most prestigious national bravery awards.

Role of policemen not probed well

Tikoo told HT that investigative agencies involved in the probe, be it CBI or the state police, did not probe involvement of policemen linked with the main accused. Tikoo said that when he along with others raided the premsies of Apna Ghar on the night of May 9 in 2012, a sub-inspector who was in-charge of area police station was sitting with Jaswanti Devi in her office. He had no business sitting there in orphanage. I immediately asked Rohtak SP to mark inquiry against him but I was surprised that no policeman or none of those linked with Jaswanti Devi were made accused in this case, he said

Justice delayed in justice denied

Tikoo said the trial took six years to complete, which was too long a period for victims involved in this racket. The cases in which children are victim should conclude in not more than six months so that they dont undergo ordeal during legal process.
Calcutta high court on Friday extended the deadline for submission of nominations in the Bengal panchayat polls by a day, which will be decided by the state election commission in consultation with the state government.

Since there has to be a gap of 21 days between the last date of nomination and the first day of polling, the dates of voting are likely to change if the courts order is not challenged.

Bengal was set to vote on May 1, 3 and 5.

Its a historic verdict. The court has come forward to help the democratic process that is in peril in Bengal. It is a victory for the people who did not get any help from the police to file nomination, said Pratap Banerjee, general secretary of the Bengal unit of BJP.

Trinamool advocate Kalyan Banerjee, however, said the court did not allow the BJP plea to remove the election commissioner and deploy central forces.

Congress welcomed the court order, but said it does not mean the end of violence.

A new date will be announced and a new chapter violence will be unleashed by the ruling party, said state Congress president Adhir Chowdhury.

The ruling comes as a relief for opposition parties that have alleged violence by the Trinamool Congress since nominations started on April 2. They claimed that supporters of the ruling party tried to prevent their candidates from filing nominations. At least six persons were killed in poll-related clashes.

The rural polls are crucial as they will provide the only pan-Bengal indicator of the popularity of political parties before the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. The Trinamool Congress, 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.

The past 10 days have seen intense legal wrangling with the BJP and the Trinamool Congress moving Calcutta high court and Supreme Court over the question of nomination deadline.

On the night of April 9, the state election commission issued a notification extending the filing of nomination by a day (till 3 pm on April 10). But barely 12 hours later, state election commissioner AK Singh issued another notification withdrawing the extension order. He cited two letters  one by the state government and the other by Trinamool Congress vice-president Kalyan Banerjee  that pointed out legal infirmities in the previous notification.

The BJP immediately moved the apex court that ordered the matters be heard by the Calcutta high court on April 12. At the high court, Justice Subrata Talukdar suspended all processes of the Bengal rural polls till April 16.

The matter since then has moved to a division bench of the high court, which shifted the case back to the single-judge bench of Justice Talukdar.

The CPM had also moved the Supreme Court on April 11 with an appeal to postpone the panchayat elections till the question of the filing of nominations by opposition candidates was settled.
Andhra Pradesh chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu began his day-long hunger strike in Vijayawada on Friday to demand special status for the state.

Coinciding with his birthday, the Dharma Porata Deeksha (Struggle for Justice) against the alleged injustice meted out to the state by the NDA government at the Centre started at 7 am and will end at 7 pm.

The Telugu Desam Party (TDP) presidents fast comes in the wake of the day-long fast observed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on April 12 in protest against the recent logjam of the budget session of Parliament allegedly caused by the Opposition parties.

Naidu has chosen sprawling grounds in front of in Indira Gandhi Stadium for his protest. Nearly a lakh people are expected to join Naidu.

Apart from the chief minister, all his cabinet colleagues, MPs, MLAs and MLCs and other party functionaries would take part in the fasting.

Naidu said he would not celebrate his birthday on Friday to protest the betrayal of faith by the Prime Minister and demand the implementation of the promises made in the AP Reorganisation Act.

When Telangana was carved out of Andhra Pradesh, the then-Congress government at the Centre had promised to extend special status to the residual state of Andhra Pradesh for a period of five years as a result of the loss of revenue going to Hyderabad, which would remain as Telangana capital.

However, the current Modi government has cited a technical problem  the 14th Finance Commission did away with the special category status  but has said that it was ready to grant the monetary equivalent of a special category status to the state.

The other day, the Prime Minister took up one-day fast to protest against stalling of Parliament, though he was responsible for the logjam. But I am going to take up the fast for the rights of the state and there is no compromise on the same, he said.

I appeal to all sections of people to support me in my struggle for justice. There should be debate across the country on the injustice meted out to the state, he said.

Besides Naidu, party leaders will observe fast in their respective districts.
China on Friday defended Pakistan following Prime Minister Narendra Modis remarks that the country is a terror export factory but indicated terrorism will be on the agenda when Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) members meet in Beijing next week.

The Chinese foreign ministry said the world community should support Pakistans counter-terror efforts but noted that security is a priority for the SCO and relevant topics will be discussed when members of the bloc, including India and Pakistan, meet next week.

External affairs minister Sushma Swaraj and defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman are flying to Beijing over the weekend to participate in separate meetings of the SCO foreign and defence ministers ahead of the groupings summit in coastal Qingdao city in June, which will be attended by Modi.

Asked about Modis comments, foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said: Terrorism is an enemy faced by all. The international community should work together to combat terrorism. The international community should also support the efforts of Pakistan in fighting terrorism and cooperate with it.

In response to another question on whether terrorism will be on the agenda at next weeks meeting, she said, As for the foreign ministers meeting on terrorism, I believe it is a purpose of the SCO to promote relevant cooperation in the field.

Hua added, Security has been a priority of the SCO since its inception. So the upcoming Prime Ministers SCO meeting will see participants exchanging views on the relevant issues. All participants will uphold the SCO spirit to take forward the development of SCO.

During an interaction with the Indian diaspora in London this week, Modi referred to Pakistan as a terror export factory and said New Delhis 2016 surgical strikes along the Line of Control were aimed at sending a clear message to Islamabad.

We believe in peace. But we will not tolerate those who like to export terror. We will give strong answers and in the language they understand. Terrorism will never be accepted, Modi added.

During her stay in Beijing, Swaraj is expected to interact with the foreign ministers of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Pakistan. India and Pakistan were admitted to the China-led bloc last year.

At a SCO-related meeting in the Russian city of Sochi in December  when India participated as a full-member for the first time  Swaraj had said terror cannot and should not be associated with any religion. She had urged the world community to enhance cooperation to combat terror, which is a crime against the entire humanity.
After weeks of quiet preparation and intense public speculation, the Congress and at least four other opposition parties have intensified discussions and may move a motion in the Rajya Sabha for the removal of Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, according to four leaders involved in the move.

The Congress Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad has also sought a meeting with Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu, the chairperson of the Rajya Sabha, on Friday. The opposition, one of the four leaders said on condition of anonymity, has collected 67 signatures of RS members for the motion which it may submit to Naidu.

The opposition parties move follows a Supreme Court order on Thursday that no further probe is needed in the death of special CBI court judge BH Loya.

Loya, who was presiding over the Sohrabuddin Shah encounter case in which BJP president Amit Shah was one of those named, died of a heart attack in Nagpur in December 2014. Shah was discharged from the case soon after.

The Congress termed the decision a sad letter day in Indian judicial history. The BJP said the apex courts ruling was a vindication of its stand that petitions seeking an independent probe into Loyas death were part of a hatchet job targeting Shah.

Azad has first convened a meeting of opposition leaders at 11 am on Friday. Communist Party of India (Marxist) general secretary Sitaram Yechury, in Hyderabad for his party congress, said Azad had called him on Thursday morning and told him about a meeting of the opposition parties on the issue of removal of CJI.

He asked if anyone of us can be present at the meeting. Its unlikely we can send anyone. We, however have signed the notice and are backing the move, said Yechury, who was among the prime initiators of the move to push the motion.

RS MP and Communist Party of India (CPI) leader D Raja confirmed the meeting. Azads office has called us for a meeting. We will discuss a range of issues, he said.

Azads meeting with Naidu is scheduled after this. The office of the vice president confirmed a meeting had been sought and time given for noon on Friday, exactly an hour after the opposition meeting.

A Congress leader, also one of the four cited in the first instance, confirmed that the deliberations are for the purpose of taking forward the motion for the removal of the CJI. When asked whether this will be taken forward, a Rashtriya Janata Dal MP (also one of the four) said, Your information is correct. Our Congress friends have indicated to us that this will be submitted on Friday.

The Left parties (both CPM and CPI), Nationalist Congress Party and the Rashtriya Janata Dal are on board the attempt to move the motion, he added. The Trinamool Congress, a key opposition party, has however not signed the motion, said a party leader who asked not to be identified.

The removal motion can be moved even when Parliament is not in session, and requires the signature of 50 Rajya Sabha MPs. HT had reported on April 3 that Congress had already got the signatures of 65 MPs but was waiting for a broader political consensus to be reached before moving it.

Once the motion is moved, the Chair of the House may or may not admit it. If it is admitted, a three member committee is set up to enquire into charges. If it concludes that there is enough reason to remove the CJI, the House in which the motion was first moved takes it up for discussion and a vote. Once it is passed with a special majority (two-thirds of the members present and voting) in the house, it goes to the second house. If it is passed in both houses, then the address is presented to the President for the removal of the judge, who then passed an order in this regard.

There has been a clear division within the Congress on the issue.

One section believed that the motion was necessary in the wake of the comments made by four Supreme Court judges at an unprecedented press conference in January about the Chief Justices exercise of power as master of the roster and it would serve as a deterrent. Another section argued that moving such a motion may portray the Congress as anti-judiciary and would yield little since they did not have the numbers to see it through in any case.

With the Loya judgement, the arguments of the pro-motion faction within the party got greater weight, said a Congress leader.

CJI Misra retires in October.

(With inputs from Moushumi Das Gupta)
The Congress and six other opposition parties on Friday in an unprecedented decision moved a notice for the removal of Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, accusing him of misbehaviour and misusing authority.

The opposition parties handed over the notice with the signatures of 71 members of the Rajya Sabha to vice-president and Rajya Sabha chairperson M Venkaiah Naidu.

Naidu will decide whether there is any merit or ground for moving such a motion. He may form a committee to look into it in case he thinks it fit or else he can reject the motion.

No Chief Justice has ever been removed in India.

Heres what the Congress and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party said:

Kapil Sibal

The Congress leader said that the notice for the Chief Justices removal has been moved with a heavy heart as Justice Misra had not asserted the independence of the judiciary in the face of interference by the executive.

We wish this day had never come, Sibal said during a press conference.

As representatives of the people, we are entitled to hold the Chief Justice accountable, just as we are accountable to the people. The majesty of the law is more important than the majesty of any office, he said.

We hope that a thorough enquiry will be held so that truth alone triumphs. Democracy can thrive only when our judiciary stands firm, independent of the executive, and discharges its constitutional functions honestly, fearless, and with an even hand, Sibal added.

Ghulam Nabi Azad

We have moved a motion for the removal of Chief Justice of India under five grounds of misbehaviour, the leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha said.

... While submitting the motion to the Rajya Sabha chairman, we requested him we have the number required for the motion to be entertained ... I am sure that the minimum requirement for the motion to be entertained has been met and sure that chairman will take action, Nabi was quoted as saying by television news channel NDTV.

Salman Khurshid

The senior Congress leader, however, seemed to disagree with his party colleagues.

I hope not and believe not impeachment is too serious a matter to be played with on the grounds of disagreement with any judgment or with any point of view of the court. I am not a party to the discussions that have taken place between the parties therefore for me to say whether the grounds are justified or not would be unfair, Khurshid was quoted as saying by News18.com.

Arun Jaitley

The Union finance minister said the Congress party and its friends have started using impeachment as a political tool in a long post on Facebook.

It is not difficult to collect fifty signatures of Rajya Sabha or hundred signatures of Lok Sabha members even on frivolous issues. To use the power as intimidatory tactics when neither you have a case of proven misconduct or the numbers on your side, is a serious threat to judicial independence, Jaitley said.

My preliminary reaction to the impeachment motion filed today is clear. It is a revenge petition after the falsehood of the Congress Party has been established in the Justice Loya death case. It is an attempt to intimidate a Judge and send a message to other Judges, that if you dont agree with us, fifty MPs are enough for a revenge action, he added.

The charges read out are issues those which have been settled by judicial orders or by precedent. Some issues are stale, trivial and have nothing to do with judicial functions.

SC on public debates over impeachments

The Supreme Court said the public discussions and statements, including those made by lawmakers, on the impeachment of judges were unfortunate while hearing a petition filed by a Pune-based lawyers organisation, which has also sought a gag on the media from reporting such statements.

We are all very disturbed about it, a bench comprising justice AK Sikri and justice Ashok Bhushan said.

The top court asked attorney general KK Venugopal to assist it in dealing with the plea and posted the case for hearing on May 7.

(with inputs from PTI)
The Communist Party of India (Marxist) amended its tactical line on Friday to allow an understanding with the Congress ahead of the 2019 general elections and quelled a rift in the party.

The CPI(M), however, will not have a political alliance with the Congress, the largest opposition party. The middle path on the tactical line was arrived at after a politburo meeting on Friday.

Factions associated with general secretary Sitaram Yechury and Prakash Karat had been trading charges against each other over the political-tactical line at the 22nd Party Congress in Hyderabad.

The final version of the political-tactical line replaced the phrase without any understanding or electoral alliance with the Congress and added without political alliance with the Congress.

Read | CPI(M) draft report highlights lack of cohesion among top leaders

As the two factions have come to an understanding, party insiders said that Sitaram Yechury is set to get another term as general secretary as his demands have been met.

Speaking at the party Congress, Yechury had insisted that he was not seeking permission for an electoral alliance with the Congress.

There is no dispute over an electoral alliance with the Congress. There is no dispute in the priority that the BJP should be defeated. Each one of us knows that our priority is to get rid of the BJP-RSS government. The only difference is on how to achieve this target, he had said at a press conference earlier this week.

Karat too had tried to show flexibility, saying that the political-tactical line and the 2019 Lok Sabha elections should not be mixed up.
A series of Dalit-Muslim conferences over the past couple of months in states such as Maharashtra, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh and Telangana has rekindled hopes among their leaders of forging a joint social justice movement in the run-up to the 2019 general election.

The Mahmood Madani-led faction of the Jamiat Ulama-e-Hind, a prominent Muslim organisation, which led these conferences, said the purpose was to forge long-term social alliances. The All India Majlis-e-Mushawarat (AIMMM), whose members include those from the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB), have also attended these conferences.

Four major Dalit-Muslim conferences have been held so far on the theme Mulk Do Rahe Par (the country is on divergent paths): in Delhi on February 22, in Lucknow on March 10, in Bengaluru on March 8 and in Hyderabad on March 21.

Smaller, local-level, Dalit-Muslim associations by participation in each others rallies and events are taking place throughout Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh. Both are suppressed and deprived communities. We have long felt that the two must stand together for each others rights, Madani said.

In Saharanpur, home to the influential Islamic seminary Darul Uloom Deoband, young Muslims are joining the Bhim Sena, a Dalit group, Madani said.

The Delhi meeting was attended by 170 Muslim and Dalit representatives. They include Prakash Ambedkar, grandson of Dalit icon BR Ambedkar; Kancha Ilaiah of the Maulana Azad Urdu University, Ashok Bharti of the National Confederation of Dalit Organisations; BN Tejavath of the All India Scheduled Tribe Federation; and Shivarudra Mahaswamigalu of the Shree Belimatha Mahasamsthana. There has to be a basis for people to come together. The basis is the social oppression being faced by Dalits and Muslims at the hands of communal forces, said Ambedkar, adding that the larger struggle should also be about the economic situation. Muslims have traditionally voted for the Congress, which also believes in Vedic persecution of Dalits. They should make it very clear they will vote for any new alternative that can take on communal forces, Ambedkar said.

Organisations representing scheduled castes, who make up 16.6% of the population, have been restive in recent months.

Incidents such as the Bhima Koregaon clashes near Pune on January 1 involving Dalits and upper caste groups and the March 20 Supreme Court judgement banning automatic arrests and registration of cases under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act of 1989, have exacerbated social tensions. This is not a political alliance yet, but a social alliance. If needed we could also help each other politically, said Bharti of the National Confederation of Dalit Organisations.

How to stand against communal forces togetherhow to ensure Dalits are not utilised against Muslims in riotsthat is our main agenda, said Maulana Nadeem Siddiqui, a Jamiat leader from Maharashtra, who says he has been holding discussions with Prakash Ambedkar every week.
The Uttar Pradesh government has withdrawn the security cover of ruling Bharatiya Janata Party legislator Kuldeep Singh Sengar, who is accused of raping a teenage girl in Unnao last year, a top official said on Friday.

Principal secretary (home) Arvind Kumar said Sengars Y-category security was revoked soon after an April 12 FIR of rape and kidnapping against the lawmaker, who is in the custody of the Central Bureau of Investigation.

Four policemen deployed at Sengars Makhi residence in Unnao and three police gunners accompanying him have been withdrawn from his service, sources told HT.

The development comes after the BJP-led governments in the state and the Centre faced criticism over the handling of the Unnao rape case, which has sent shock waves across the country.

The alleged crime grabbed headlines after the rape survivor held protests outside chief minister Yogi Adityanaths Lucknow residence and tried self-immolation.

On April 3, the girls father was allegedly thrashed by the accused MLAs brother, Atul Singh Sengar, for refusing to withdraw the rape complaint and was arrested the same day. On April 9, he died in a hospital.

The police too faced criticism for allegedly botching up the initial probe under Sengars influence
The Gujarat high court is likely to pronounce its verdict on appeals in the 2002 Naroda Patiya riot case on Friday.

A division bench of justices Harsha Devani and A S Supehiya had reserved the order last August after the hearing concluded.

In August 2012, a special court for SIT cases had sentenced 32 people, including former BJP minister Maya Kodnani, to life imprisonment.

Kodnani was sentenced to 28 years of imprisonment. Another high-profile accused, former Bajrang Dal leader Babu Bajrangi, was given life imprisonment till death.

Seven accused were given enhanced life imprisonment of 21 years, which they will serve after undergoing 10 years imprisonment under IPC section 326 (causing grievous hurt).

Remaining accused were given simple life imprisonment (14 years).

The trial court also acquitted 29 other accused for want of evidence.

While the convicts challenged the lower courts order in the high court, the Special Investigation Team (SIT) appealed against the acquittal of 29 people.

During the course of hearing, the high court judges had visited the site of the incident in Naroda Patiya area in Ahmedabad -- where 97 people from the Muslim community had been killed -- to understand its topography.

Naroda Patiya riot is one of the worst incidents which followed the Godhra train burning incident of February 27, 2002, in which 59 kar sevaks were killed.

Kodnani is currently out on bail. The trial court had held that she was the mastermind of the violence in Naroda area.

A number of high court judges including justices Akil Kureshi, M R Shah, KS Jhaveri, G B Shah, Sonia Gokani and R H Shukla recused themselves from the case during the hearing on appeals.
Three persons, including the main perpetrator, involved in the rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl in Surat have been arrested, the Gujarat government said on Friday.

Minister of State for Home Pradeepsinh Jadeja told the media here that Gujarat Police arrested the key perpetrator from a village in Ganganagar district of Rajasthan, who will be brought to Gujarat.

Earlier in the day, Chief Minister Vijay Rupani said that Surat Police had arrested three persons in the case. All accused are believed to be originally from Rajasthan.

Police had found the body of the girl with over 86 injuries dumped in the bushes near Jeeav Road in Pandesara area of Surat on April 6. An autopsy revealed that she was brutally raped and tortured for days before her murder.

A case of rape was registered under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act.

The minister said that over 400 personnel of Surat police and Ahmedabad Crime Branch worked on the case.

Police analysed the mobile data and CCTV footage from a 3-km radius of the spot from where the body was found. The case was finally cracked after police zeroed in on CCTV footage of a black car moving suspiciously in the area.

Earlier, police suspected that the girl hailed from either Odisha, West Bengal or Jharkhand. An Andhra Pradesh man had come forward to claim the girl was his daughter. Surat police even carried out a DNA test to verify his claim.

On April 9, a womans decomposed body was found lying a few km from the spot where the girl was found dead. We believe she is the girls mother. We will carry out a DNA test, Jadeja said.

We will appoint a special public prosecutor to pursue the case in a fast-track court, Jadeja said.
Senior Indian Army commanders on Friday discussed the increase in ceasefire violations along the Line of Control, the volatile situation in Kashmir Valley, and the challenges faced by security forces, particularly along the borders with China and Pakistan.

During the Army Commanders Conference, which began on Monday and will conclude on Saturday, they also discussed the radicalisation of youth in the Valley, a senior Army official said.

The official said considerable time was devoted to repriortising existing requirements to ensure that resources allocated for force modernisation and capacity building were optimally utilised within the budgetary allocation.

The Army commanders will on Saturday discuss matters related exclusively to military operations.

Last month, the Army told a parliamentary panel it was reeling under a severe fund crunch and struggling to even make emergency procurements when there was a real possibility of a two-front war and both China as well as Pakistan were carrying out rapid modernisation of their defence forces.

Discussions were also held on increasing indigenisation in force modernisation.

The deliberations appraised the current situation along the LoC, the increase in the CFVs (ceasefire violations) and the adequacy of the response mechanisms, the Army official said.

The commanders discussed the situation in the Valley and also reviewed the developments affecting the modus operandi of the operations of the armed forces deployed in the region.

Security forces have faced stiff opposition from Valley residents - who have resorted to stone pelting - while carrying out operations in the Valley.

It was also felt that priority must be accorded towards ushering peace, by conducting counter-terrorist operations that minimise collateral damage, the official said.

The radicalised youth must be brought into the mainstream by carrying out de-radicalisation and collective approach that focuses on convincing the youth to shun violence and gun culture, he added.

The commanders also deliberated on the prevailing situation along the northern borders, capacity building steps, including infrastructure development.

A major focus of the conference was on bolstering the Armys overall operational preparedness along the nearly 4,000-km-long border with China.

Indian and Chinese troops were locked in a 73-day standoff in Doklam in the Sikkim sector last year after the Indian side stopped the construction of a road in the disputed area by the Chinese Army. The faceoff ended on August 28.

The official said the Army commanders also deliberated upon cyber-security and security of military establishments.
An accused in the gangrape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Jammu and Kashmirs Kathua that sparked widespread protests has failed in his first-semester college examination, an official at the Chaudhary Charan Singh University in Meerut said on Friday.

An office superintendent with the university Arshad, who uses one name, said Vishal Jangotra scored zero and two marks respectively in two theory papers of BSc agriculture course conducted on January 12 and 15, during the time when the eight-year-old girl was gangraped and murdered in Kathua.

Arshad could not confirm the name of the two papers but said their subject codes were 192 and 193. The university announced the examination results on Thursday, he said.

Another university official, who did not want to be named, said Jangotra secured 284 marks in the 11 papers of BSc (agriculture) exams, which were conducted between January 9 and 30.

Jangotra has claimed that he was appearing for his exams when the Kathua gangrape and murder took place.

The crime branch of Jammu and Kashmir police, however, has said in its chargesheet that Jangotra was present in Kathua during the exams. It also said that Jangotra, the son of the main accused Sanji Ram, sent a proxy candidate to appear for the exams.

Police said the girl from the Bakarwal tribe, a nomadic community of Muslim cattle grazers, was abducted while grazing her familys horses near her home in Rasana village of Kathua district on January 10. She was held captive in a temple, sedated and raped repeatedly for a week before being bludgeoned to death. Her body was found on January 17.

Sanji Ram, a retired revenue department official, planned the crimes against her, said the chargesheet, to create fear among her community and get them to leave Rasana.

Arshad said Jangotras answer sheets were duly checked before they were handed over to the special investigation team (SIT) of the Jammu and Kashmir police, which visited the university on March 23 to collect them as evidence in the case.

The probe team also seized Jangotras answer sheets, admit card, attendance sheet and other documents to ascertain his presence in the exams.

Jangotra is a BSc first year student at Akansha College in Meerapur town of Muzaffarnagar district which is affiliated to CCS University. He appeared for the exams at KK Jain Degree College in Khatauli in the same district.

Sanji Ram, Jangotra and six other people, including two special police officers (SPOs), a head constable, a sub-inspector and a minor, have been arrested in the Kathua gangrape and murder case. All of them have pleaded not guilty.

CCS University has also constituted a three-member committee to look into the claims of the police that Jangotra used a proxy to appear for the exams.
A 21-year-old engineering student from Kerala has been killed in a road accident in Karnataka while taking part in a two-wheeler ride challenge, police said on Thursday.

Mithun, a final year student of a local college in Pambady in this district, was riding his bike when he met with the accident near Chitradurga on the Bengaluru-Pune National Highway at 4am on Wednesday, police said in Palakkad.

He was killed on the spot after his two-wheeler rammed into a lorry going ahead of him when its driver applied sudden brake, police in Karnataka said.

Kerala police, quoting information provided by Mithuns family, said he had a craze for speed bike riding and was participating in the Saddle Sore challenge that required riders to cover around 1,500 km in 22 hours.

The challenge is conducted by a US-based organisation.

Mithun had embarked on the journey on Tuesday evening telling his mother that he was going to neighbouring Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu, police said. Police found a sketch of the route map of his planned trip -- Palakkad-Bengaluru-Pune -- from his home in nearby Ottapalam and some jottings on the risks involved, equipment needed for emergency and eatables such as chocolates to be carried.

 A case of rash and negligent driving has been registered against the lorry driver, police said.
At a time when the Kathua and Unnao rape cases have led to nationwide protests and outcry demanding justice to the victims and safety for the women in the country, the Kotkhai rape and murder case that shook the hill state ten months back and created a political furore is still struggling for a breakthrough.

Countrys premier investigating agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), that recently claimed to have arrested one of the key suspect in the case is still grappling to gather more clues.

What led to the delay?

With the recent arrest of one local lumberjack, the Central agency once again seems to have fasten it's probe in the Kotkhai rape and murder case that has been progressing at a sluggish pace. CBI teams are now once again searching for more clues in the forest of Bankufur  just close to Hilaila village where the body of the minor girl was found on July 6, last year.

Timeline July 4, 2017: Gudiya (name changed) goes missing in the Halaila area of Kotkhai July 6: Her body found in Halaila forests July 9: Police constitute SIT under IG (south) S Zahur Zaidi July 13: Police claim breakthrough, arrests six July 19: Suraj, one of the accused arrested by the SIT, dies in police custody July 22: CBI takes over investigation August 29: CBI arrests IG Zaidi, seven other cops in custodial death case March 28, 2018: HC summons CBI director April 14: CBI arrests key suspect in rape and murder case

Usually, those cases are handed over to CBI in which the local agencies falter on the evidences. This happened in this case as well. Lots of evidences were either destroyed by the locals or by the cops. There were no hot trails to follow so we have to link up the case gradually, CBI spokesman Abhishek Dayal said.

CBI focused more on custodial death

However, when the probe was handed over to CBI it focused more on the custodial death of Suraj, one of the six arrested in the case. A special investigation team (SIT) headed by then inspector general (IG) southern range S Zahur Zaidi was setup to probe the case.

On July 12, the SIT had arrested six men and announced the case has been solved. This led to a violent protest by locals saying the real culprits have not been arrested forcing the state government to order a CBI probe. However, before the CBI could start the investigation, an accused Suraj (a Nepalese) died in the police custody, triggering more violent protests.

On August 29, CBI arrested IG Zaidi and seven other cops in the custodial death case and in the same case then Shimla SP DW Negi was arrested on September 16. CBI had also submitted a charge sheet against all the accused in the custodial death case.

In December last year, the CBI had announced a reward of Rs 10 lakh for providing credible information about the accused.

What it has been done so far?

After questioning more than 500 people and drawing 150 blood samples, the probe agency has arrested a local lumberjack who is said to be hailing from Bharabhangal region of Kangra district, while his identity has been kept secret.

The Kangra man, which CBI claims is the key suspect in the case, was produced in the court and later shifted to CBI headquarters in Delhi. It is learnt that the probe agency has convinced the court that it has enough forensic evidence against the man who was also present in the forest area at the time when the minors body was found .

Meanwhile, CBI has also collected the voice samples of all the arrested cops in the case. CBI teams have now again started questioning locals and are searching in the forest where the body of the girl was found. We cannot reveal the identity of the person, said a CBI official requesting anonymity.

Barring the arrest of cops in the custodial death case, CBI so far has not been able to make any headway.

People still not convinced with CBI

Meanwhile, a large section of people is still not convinced with CBIs action.  It seems that agency is still groping in the dark. The arrest does not seem to be very convincing. The agency should at least come out with truth now its been more than nine months, said former Shimla mayor and CPI(M) leader Sanjay Chuauhan.
Polls are round the corner in West Bengal and 46-year-old Asaduddin Sadique is busy campaigning. But its not for any party or himself, rather, against the very culture of poll violence that has come to define politics in the state.

As ruling Trinamool Congress workers clash with opponents from CPI(M), BJP and Congress ahead of the panchayat polls, the father of three visits villages in Beldanga in Murshidabad district every day, distributing leaflets he printed himself, urging people to eschew strong arm tactics, bombs and arms.

Sometimes, he has his elder daughter, Sabiha Sabnam, a class 9 student, to accompany him, other times, his youngest son, Sultan Abid, a class 2 student, joins them.

I am campaigning for polls without violence. If you hear reports of violence in any area, dont go to the booths, for a life is more valuable that a vote, Sadique persuades as news spreads of widespread violence during nomination filing.

A photograph shows Asaduddin Sadique with his late wife, Nurjahan Bibi, and two daughters.

Five years ago, during the panchayat elections, Sadique lost his wife Nurjahan Bibi (30). She was standing in queue at the polling station in Dighirpara Primary School when a bomb came flying and exploded near her.

She died in the blast but saved her son Sultan Abid. Showing a picture of a crying Sultan in his dead mothers lap, Sadique recalls the July 22, 2013 incident, his eyes moist.

It happened in front of his eyes. My wife was killed by CPI(M)-backed goons. We happen to be supporters of the Congress, he said, explaining that despite filing a complaint, trial is yet to start.

I sought justice of the murder of my wife from the election commission, state government, police administration, human rights commission and the political parties, but the murderers are roaming free, he said.

Block development officer of Beldanga I, Subhrangshu Mondal has promised support.

We have heard about his wifes case. I have asked him to give me copies of all the related documents so that we can have a look and take it forward, said Mondal.

But more than retribution, Sadique wants to highlight the misery that poll violence has brought upon his family.

I have taken up the campaign to create awareness against poll violence, he said.

Sadique now carries 25 banners and more than 3,000 leaflets, printed at a cost of more than Rs 5,000. A picture of his wifes body and another of his son on her lap adorn the posters he and his children distribute.

Asaduddin Sadique with his children at home in Beldanga in Murshidabad district. (HT PHOTO)

The 46-year-old also has not voted in the elections since his wifes death  Lok Sabha (2014) or assembly (2016). But he stressed he is not telling people not to cast their votes. I am only telling them to stay safe during election. Not to indulge in any violence.

As for him voting, he says, If I find polls have become peaceful, I shall vote.

The untimely death of my wife has ruined my family. I dont get enough time to spend with my children, he rued, describing how his younger daughter Rupaiya Mahajabin stays with her maternal uncle while the elder one, Sabiha does most of the cooking at home.

I help her after I return home. My son Abid is deprived of the love of his mother, he said.

Sahiba also finds the going difficult. I was in class 4 when my mother was killed. I havent even got the benefits of the girl welfare project in the state, she rues, showing her fingers which burn from grinding chillies.

Will the parties or workers heed to Sadique? Will people stay away from voting where there are chances of violence? Only time will tell, but Sadique will continue his campaign for peace during elections, with his mother-less children in tow.
The Gujarat high court on Friday acquitted former BJP minister Maya Kodnani and upheld the conviction of Bajrang Dal leader Babu Bajrangi in the 2002 Naroda Patiya riots case, in which 97 people were killed.

Eleven witnesses gave different statements on Maya Kodnanis presence at the location, there were contradictions, said special public prosecutor Prashant Desai.

The killings in the Ahmedabad locality was one of the worst attacks of the 2002 post-Godhra riots.

On February 28 that year, 97 people from the Muslim community  mostly migrants from Karnataka and Maharashtra  were slaughtered by a mob of Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal supporters. The locality with nearly 800 houses was set on fire.

In August 2012, a special court for SIT cases had sentenced 32 people, including Kodnani, to life imprisonment. Kodnani, the Naroda MLA at the time, was handed a 28-year jail term.

The trial court had held that she was the mastermind of the violence in Naroda area.

Another high-profile accused, former Bajrang Dal leader Babu Bajrangi, was given life imprisonment till death.

Seven accused were given enhanced life imprisonment of 21 years, which they will serve after undergoing 10 years imprisonment under IPC section 326 (causing grievous hurt).

The remaining accused were given simple life imprisonment (14 years).

The trial court also acquitted 29 other accused for want of evidence.
Bhopal

An additional district and sessions judge who protested in front of the Madhya Pradesh high court building in Jabalpur last year for being transferred four times in 15 months has been retired from service.

The states principal secretary (law and legal affairs), AM Saxena, issued a letter to Rajendra Kumar Shrivas on Wednesday stating that the full court meeting of the Madhya Pradesh high court on March 17, 2018 recommended retirement of your services in public interest.

The letter also stated the government agreed with the high courts recommendation and decided to retire you from your service.

Shrivas said he would fight against this decision. I will go to Delhi and meet the President of India to seek his intervention. I am an honest judge. There are no corruption charges against me, and I have never faced a departmental inquiry. It is an act of vindictiveness by the judges for exposing their nepotism, he said on Thursday.

In August last year, Shrivas sat on a fast in front of the high court against the transfer policy of judges of the lower judiciary and his frequent transfers. His last transfer was from Jabalpur to Neemuch. This was the first time a judge had chosen this form of protest in Madhya Pradesh.

After the first day of his protest fast, prohibitory orders were issued and he had to call off his agitation.

He joined his office in Neemuch on August 8, and was suspended the same day for his protest fast.

Later, Shrivas undertook a 715-km cycle yatra from Neemuch to Jabalpur to highlight his transfers. During this cycle ride, while passing through Bhopal, he alleged that there was nepotism in the transfer policy. I might lose my job, but I will continue to fight. I will not resign. Let them terminate me, he had said.
Elected international working president of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) last week, Alok Kumar says the organisation remains committed to the campaign for the construction of a Ram temple at the disputed site in Ayodhya . A former functionary of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and former deputy speaker of the Delhi assembly, Kumar, who is also a Supreme Court lawyer, said in an interview with Smriti Kak Ramachandran that the VHP will also focus on eradication of caste fault lines. Excerpts:

What will be the focus areas of the VHP under the new leadership?

There will be a continuity of the vision that was started in 1964. Right now, the top agenda is samajik samarasta (social harmony)... The second concern is the family system. We are worried to see rising tensions in families. Nuclear families are growing and divorce petitions are alarmingly increasing. We will revive Hindu values in families for better coherence. The third is social service . We will focus more on activities for the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes (SCs and STs) in rural areas. And the Ram temple is a matter of faith for us.

Since former VHP working president Pravin Togadia has accused the Centre of failing to construct the temple, a change in leadership indicates political expediency.

The VHP is assertively clear on this: that a grand temple has to be constructed where Lord Rama was born. It will be built using the bricks that have been consecrated and sent from villages across the country and from pillars made there (Ayodhya)... The work will be done by the committee that is spearheading the movement.

Togadia alleged he was thrown out because he kept asking the government to fulfil its promise.

He contested an election and his candidate (Raghava Reddy) lost. There is no such thing as being thrown out, he resigned.. I do not have to comment on his new found realisations.

Has the leadership reached out to him?

There are no misgivings; let some time pass. It may become possible to talk.

In West Bengal and Kerala, the VHP has been raising the issue of communal polarisation, but these allegations have been rebutted.

If somebody creates a Muslim vote bank, they are responsible for building a counter-vote bank. These communalised vote banks are harmful to the county... (WB chief minister) Mamata Banerjee was acting very one-sided... When there were riots by Muslims, she penalised Hindus. She is guilty of creating communal tension in WB... In Kerala, there is a sordid gamewhenever the communists come to power, the rate of murders increases. We are satisfied that it has become a national issue and we hope communists will abate the violence there.

The RSS, of which VHP is an affiliate, is accused of stoking communal conflicts. SC and ST communities are upset with the current dispensation, which is also part of the Sangh Parivar. How will you address their concerns?

I believe we have to move beyond tokenism  eating together, worshipping some SC girls on Ashtami day or sharing meals... For this we need to ensure three things. First, financial democracy  where SC/ST communities are strengthened to start their own industries and businesses.

Second, we need educational democracy, where they have avenues for better learning . Third is social democracy, where the dignity of each individual is respected irrespective of caste. I also believe we have to take stock of whether all sections, including SCs and STs are included in all decision-making bodies.

What do you make of the anger among these communities against the government?

I dont know if it is a Dalit versus government issue. The anger was against the Supreme Court judgment on the SC/ST Act (which banned automatic arrests and registration of cases), but the government has already filed a review petition and the Prime Minister has said that if needed, they will amend the law.

Do you think the government has failed to effectively convey this?

There may be some confusion in some sections. But if you ask me about our stand on reservation, we clearly and emphatically say it should continue... If you ask me whether the Constitution should be reviewed, I will say no... Despite these assertions, there are attempts to create confusion. So the VHP will campaign to clear the air.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not meet his Pakistani counterpart Shahid Khaqan Abbasi at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in London on Thursday and no such meeting is planned for Friday, the external affairs ministry said.

Prior to the prime ministers visit, the MEA had said last week that Modi was unlikely to have bilateral talks with the Pakistani premier at the summit.

No meeting took place with the Pakistani prime minister. There is no plan to have any (meeting), MEA spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said in response to a question.

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 Sharifs granddaughters 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.
From now on, mango produced only within the Konkan region of Maharashtra will be called Hapus (also known as Alp- honso mango), which is conside- red a superior variety of the fruit, with great demand worldwide. The districts included at Sindhudurg, Ratnagiri and Raigad. The decision was taken by the Geographical Indications (GI) registrar in Mumbai, while hearing a petition filed by mango traders and agricultural research institutes from Konkan on Thursday.

A GI tag gives a regional identity to a product. It is a name that corresponds to products from a particular region. Only producers in that particular area can use the GI tagged name for their produce. It is done under the Geographical Indications of Goods (Registration and Protection) Act. Other popular products that have been GI tagged in India earlier include Darjeeling tea, Chanderi sarees, Coorg oranges.

The registry of GI, Mumbai, rejected individual applications filed by four producers of Alphonso mangoes in Konkan to patent their produce as Hapus. The petitioners included Dapoli university, Kokan Hapus Udpadak Sangh, Ratnagiri Hapus Udpadak Sangh, and Devgargh Hapus Udpadak Sangh.

After hearing the applications, the Controller General of Patents, Design and Trade Marks, Om Prakash Gupta then suggested instead of GI tagging separate names, all mangoes from Konkan will get the Hapus tag. It will be formally given after applicants submit a fresh application.

Gupta, who is also registrar of GI, on Thursday said, The word Hapus cannot be GI tagged under separate names. It then becomes generic and loses its purpose of patent. I suggested the petitioners at the hearing to GI tag Hapus from the geographical western coast of Maharashtra, that will be Konkan Maharashtra. They have filed their applications again with this correction.

Gupta also suggested that if any region within Konkan wants to give their produce an exclusive name, they can pe-fix or suffix the names of their region to the tag  for example, Devgad Hapus, Ratnagiri Hapus, Kokan Hapus. The mangoes from Devgad are popular in Mumbai.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday joined other heads of government for the leaders retreat at Windsor Castle, which will conclude the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in the UK.

The closed-door meetings comprise the informal segment of CHOGM, where the leaders meet without any pre-set agenda and without the presence of their close aides.

At the retreat  unique to the Commonwealth  heads meet privately to discuss collaboration on global and Commonwealth priorities. They will also consider reform and renewal of the Commonwealth, a Commonwealth statement said.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa will be absent from the group of 53 heads of government as he had to rush back to Cape Town after violent clashed broke out in the country.

The issue of succession is expected to be the dominant at the retreat at the grand Waterloo Chamber of the Castle, one of the homes of Queen Elizabeth II  the Head of the Commonwealth.

She expressed her sincere wish that her son and heir Prince Charles step into her shoes in her opening address for CHOGM on Thursday and a general consensus seems to be building around the 69-year-old royal.

India has no objection to Prince Charles as the next Head because he has worked hard for the institution. However, we are also clear that there should be no institutionalisation of the post, a senior Indian official said.

The 91-year-old monarch, who has ruled out long-haul travel, is unlikely to attend any future Commonwealth summits in far flung member-countries and is keen to pass on the baton to the 69-year-old Prince of Wales.

It is my sincere wish that the Commonwealth will continue to offer stability and continuity for future generations  and will decide that one day the Prince of Wales will carry on the important work started by my father (King George VI) in 1949, she had in her speech at Buckingham Palace.

The Commonwealth is one of the worlds oldest political association of states, with its roots in the British Empire when some countries were ruled directly or indirectly by Britain. Independent countries from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Pacific have joined The Commonwealth over the years, with the last two members to join  Rwanda and Mozambique  having no historical ties to the Empire.

Some experts have argued that the end of the Queens term as Head of the organisation is an opportunity for the non-hereditary post to be passed on to a non-royal in order to distance the group from its colonial past. Others, however, claim that it is the royal family that holds the grouping together.

It is to the incredible credit of the Queen and the royal family that it [Commonwealth] still exists, because without them it wouldnt, claims Lord Marland, chairman of the Commonwealth Enterprise and Investment Council (CWEIC), the business arm of the institution.

The decision on a new Head will be up to the presidents and prime ministers representing the 53 member-countries as they gather for the retreat and, if there is an agreement, it will then be formally announced by Commonwealth Secretary-General Patricia Scotland.

However, the leaders may not be able to arrive at a decision on the matter today, in which case it will roll over to the next CHOGM.

The retreat will mark an end to the week-long summit in Britain, which started on Monday with forums on the theme of business, women, youth and civil society. The formal executive session of the heads of government meeting, themed around Towards a Common Future, concluded last evening.

Prime Minister Modi addressed the second plenary of the executive session, during which he reiterated Indias focus on small island developing nations of the organisation and delivering demand-driven, rather than donor-driven assistance to the organisations smaller member states.

The overall objective of the Prime Ministers participation at this CHOGM in 2018 signals our stepped up engagement with the Commonwealth. It conveys Indias desire to see Commonwealth increase focus on developing country priorities, an MEA spokesperson said.

At the end of the retreat today, leaders will issue their joint communique and a leaders statement. CHOGM takes place every two years in different Commonwealth countries, with the next host country also to be announced at the end of this summit.

Modi is scheduled to fly out to Germany at the end of the retreat for a brief bilateral meeting with Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin before he leaves for India. The meeting was added to the PMs Europe schedule, which included Sweden and the UK, on the request of the German Chancellor, officials said.
The Supreme Court on Friday sought attorney general KK Venugopals assistance on a plea seeking a gag order against the media on the impeachment process supposed to be initiated against Chief Justice Dipak Misra in Parliament.

A bench headed by Justice AK Sikri said it would not restrain the media before hearing the AG and declined to pass any order. Opposition parties are planning to move an impeachment motion against CJI Misra following allegations against him by the seniormost judges of the Supreme Court.

Senior advocate Meenakshi Arora, appearing for NGO In Pursuit of Justice told the bench that the law commission has already given a report suggesting restrain order against the media on the issue.

There is also a constitutional provision restraining media from writing on impeachment as it will affect the judge to discharge his judicial function, she added.

Judges have to act fearless, the advocate said, adding that politicians have been speaking on the issue and the media is reporting which affects the functioning of the judiciary.

Referring to the statements of politicians against judiciary member, Justice Sikri said: It is unfortunate. We are all disturbed over what is happening. Legislators are also supposed to follow rules.

The court posted the matter for hearing on May 7.
An engineering graduate from south Kashmirs Shopian district who reportedly cleared the written test of the National Defence Academy (NDA) may have joined militant ranks, a senior police officer said on Friday.

As per available reports, Abid Nazir of Paddarpora village has joined the Hizbul Mujahideen. His family says he holds a B Tech degree from a college outside the state and has cleared the NDA written test. We are looking into the case, and the details are being ascertained, the officer said on the condition of anonymity.

Police sources say Nazir, in his early 20s, studied engineering at a college in Punjab. He had gone missing from his home a few days ago.

On April 18, a photograph of the engineering graduate brandishing an assault rifle appeared on the social media. The accompanying caption claimed that he had joined the Hizbul Mujahideen under the code name Abu Bakr Bhai.

Of late, it has almost become the norm for young men in the Valley to announce their entry into militant outfits through social media by releasing photographs that show them brandishing weapons in fatigues.

Nazirs case comes on the heels of a soldier  23-year-old Idrees Sultan Mir of the Jammu and Kashmir Light Infantry unit  joining the Hizbul Mujahideen on April 15. He also hailed from Shopian.

Shopian district has been restive this year, marked by the death of security personnel, militants and civilians in several encounters.
Opening centres to treat drug-resistant (DR) tuberculosis could soon be made mandatory for medical colleges applying for recognition. The Union health ministry has written to the Medical Council of India (MCI), proposing to make it a prerequisite for the recognition of a medical college in the country.

An estimated 1,47,000 people suffer from multi-drug resistant (MDR) TB in India, and there are many who are infected but not diagnosed or on treatment and run the risk of infecting others.

The move is aimed at ensuring that patients suffering from drug-resistant TB have access to a facility nearby and correct diagnosis is made and appropriate treatment is started in time, which is a part of the governments End TB by 2025 strategy.

In a letter to the MCI last month, health secretary Preeti Sudan requested the MCI to incorporate the obligatory requirement of establishing DR-TB centre for treatment initiation of DR-TB patients as per revised national TB control programme guidelines at each medical college for recognition of medical college.

India, with 27.9 lakh tuberculosis cases, 4.23 lakh disease-related deaths, and an average of 211 new infections diagnosed per 100,000 people, has the highest number of tuberculosis patients across the globe. There are currently 147 MDR-TB treatment centres, and with the addition of this new clause the ministry hopes to create enough centres for treatment to be readily accessible as MDR TB requires a different and more extensive treatment regimen.

As part of its End TB strategy, the health ministry is formulating several innovative interventions, with special focus on drug-resistant TB. These include making use of its 4.5 lakh Directly Observed Treatment, Short-Course (DOTS) providers for advocacy and active case finding.

The ministry will also start mapping slums to identify TB cases and put positive ones on treatment.

States have also been asked to identify two blocks in each district to make it TB-free within a year, as a part of its disease elimination strategy. The Centre will also rank districts on disease prevalence to get an exact idea of disease distribution.

A concrete project implementation plan should be ready by the end of April or mid-May.

Our target is to eliminate TB by 2025, so we have to act now. The system is already in place, but we need to make it more structured to be able to achieve the target, said Sanjeeva Kumar, additional secretary (health).
Facing the acute shortage of Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers, three months after taking over reigns chief minister Jai Ram Thakur-led government has written to the department of personnel seeking repatriation of its half a dozen officers on the central deputation.

There is shortage of IAS officer we have made a request to the central government. Certainly the work is getting affected, said chief secretary Vineet Chawdhry. Himachal has total cadre strength of 147 IAS and as many as 32 of them are on different deputations with the central government.

The department of personnel and training has enhanced the tenure of central deputation to seven years that forced the Himachal government to write to the Centre for sending back its officials.

The state government has been feeling the pinch of the bureaucratic crunch since long. Previous state government led by Virbhadra Singh had also written to the Centre and sent letters to different state governments for deputing IAS officers in the cadre post in the state.

Of the remaining cadre strength, around 15 IAS officials have been posted as sub-divisional magistrates in different subdivisions. The DoPT is yet to approve the request to enhance the states cadre strength from 147 to 155. The government has recalled six IAS officials of Himachal cadre, including Manoj Kumar who is currently posted as chief vigilance officer with the Delhi development authority, Kondru Sanjay Murthy who is posted as joint secretary with information and broadcasting ministry, Kamlesh Kumar Pant who is posted as chief vigilance officer with National Highway Authority of India, Rajneesh who is posted as joint secretary commerce and industries, earlier he was the private Secretary to the President of India (Pranab Mukherjee), Subhasheesh Panda who is currently posted as director with the food and public distribution department, and Amitabh Awasthi who is posted as deputy director (administration) PGIMER, Chandigarh.

However, it has been learnt that the majority of officers on the central deputation are not willing to return back from their assignment midway.

In Himachal Pradesh secretariat, many senior bureaucrats are holding more than two departments.

Additional chief secretary Tarun Kapoor has three departments, additional chief secretary Anil Khachi has the charge of the public works department and financial commissioner (Appeals), he is also the chairman of Himachal Pradesh Sales Tax Tribunal at Dharamshala, besides being the principal resident commissioner, New Delhi.

Principal Secretary RD Dhiman has charge of power, personnel and cooperation department. While chief ministers principal secretary- additional chief secretary (ACS) Manisha Nanda has charge of environment science and technology, information and public relations, tourism and civil aviation departments, besides this Nanda is also the chairperson of the State Pollution Control Board.
External affairs minister Sushma Swaraj is playing matchmaker for Geeta, the hearing- and speech- impaired woman who was brought to India in 2015 after having stayed in Pakistan for almost 15 years.

Geeta had drifted to Pakistan when she was a child and was under the care of the Edhi Foundation, a Pakistani charity. Since her return to India, efforts to reunite her with her family have proved futile. Several families had come to claim Geeta as their own, but she did not recognise any of them.

Sushma Swaraj, after a meeting with Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan in October 2017, had announced plans for Geetas marriage. On April 8, civil society members took a prospective speech- and hearing impaired groom with them to meet Sushma Swaraj and Geeta, at Swarajs residence in Delhi, an official at Swarajs office, who is not authorised to talk to the media, said.

Geeta rejected the proposal. Swaraj maam then asked them to widen their search and bring more prospective grooms to choose from, assuring her total support for the cause.

Geeta, who is known by only one name, apparently entered the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore on a train from India. She was found by the police and sent to a state-run shelter, then moved from one shelter to another  because she often tried to escape and quarrelled with staff  before she arrived at the Karachi-based Edhi Foundation.

In a recent meeting with civil society members who helped Geeta to come back to India, Swaraj had invited applications through Facebook and also announced Geetas biodata in the Parichay Sammelan (introductory meeting) for speech- and hearing-impaired people, said Gyanendra Purohit, convener of non-governmental organisation Anand Service Society, who is coordinating the match-making efforts.

So far they have received 25 biodatas of potential grooms , and they include an army officer, an astrologer, novelist, engineers and farmers, among others.

We have shortlisted 15 suitable matches by asking them in detail why they were interested in marrying Geeta. These matches are going to be screened by Swarajs PA (personal assistant) and then Geeta will see whether she likes the chosen guy or not and then Swaraj will have the final say, said Purohit.

A spokesperson for the ministry of external affairs, who is in London for the Commonwealth meetings, said he was not aware of developments.

The groom is being promised a house and a government job, according to Purohit, who added: Some of the prospective grooms were rejected when they said they wanted to marry Geeta in the hope of getting a government job.

Geetas tutor Monica Punjabi said, The purpose of this process is to give her a family, to give a space to her to live her life in her own way and to make her feel happy. We are doing our best to get the best man for the marriage.
A day before Sameera Jahagirdar was wheeled in for her surgery at the Mahatma Gandhi Medical College and Research Institute (MGMCRI) in Puducherry, where she has been an anaesthetist since 2006, she finally wore a churidar kurta to work. On November 4, 2016, Jahagirdar sat on the other side of the desk, not as a doctor, but as a client. Not in a shirt and pant, but in a bright blue kurta, a white dupatta draped over her shoulder. It was wonderful. I was so happy telling my colleagues that I will be undergoing surgery tomorrow.

Jahagirdar, who turns 40 this month, is one of several people who has undergone Gender Affirmative (GA) surgery at this Puducherry hospital, which is run by a charitable trust and has a well-regarded teaching institute attached to it. Since 2010, thirunangais  the local transgender women community  have attended the transgender clinic that was started out of the department of Dermatology, Venereology and Leprology (DVL). Four years later, the hospital began to offer GA surgeries, alternatively known as Sex Reassignment Surgery (SRS), which helps align the body to the gender that a person identifies with. Two years ago, the hospital brought out an SRS Protocol, which was devised by Jahagirdar herself  she was the first to be operated under it.

Jahagirdar consulted community activists, administrative officials and legal experts, and studied the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) Standards of Care document, which offers a detailed understanding of surgical and non-surgical health interventions for transgender persons.

The WPATH is an international not-for-profit group that promotes an understanding of gender dysphoria  the discomfort or distress that is caused by a discrepancy between a persons gender identity and their sex assigned at birth (and associated sex characteristics). Gender dysphoria is listed in the diagnostic statistical manual of mental disorders, which is followed by mental health professionals the world over. The process of transitioning  or changing ones gender  itself is not uniform. It could involve hormone therapy, and/or different kinds of surgery, which are based on an individuals needs. It could also involve non-surgical interventions, such as laser treatment for hair removal, or chest binding. Generally, it is acceptable practice for surgeons and endocrinologists to ask for a psychiatric diagnosis of gender dysphoria if their client wishes to seek surgical and medical treatment for transitioning.

But dysphoria is not a sign of someone being inherently disordered  worldwide, experts are now considering changing the term to gender incongruence.

Jahagirdar recalls feeling the incongruence from the time she was a child, realising that she was not a girl only when she saw a cousin, who was a girl, bathing. However, it was only in her 30s that Jahagirdar opted for hormone therapy  shots of estrogen and progesterone  that feminise the appearance.

In 2016, she decided to undergo surgery. SRS is not a simple one-time surgery. It requires all medical professionals involved to be non-judgmental, post-operative care, and proper pain alleviation. So it cant involve just one surgeon, but all the professionals who are necessary to make the process possible have to be on board, says Jahagirdar.

First step

She stitched together a Gender Care Team, which comprises a dermatologist, a psychiatrist, two general surgeons, an obstetrician, an anaesthesiologist (Jahagirdar herself), a legal expert, a community representative, Sheetal (who only goes by one name, and is the nayak or head of the thirunangai groups in Puducherry), and the deputy medical superintendent of the institute Dr Swati Pawar.

The team is missing an endocrinologist. The protocol offers a five-step process: self-identification as transgender, psychiatric assessment, counselling by surgeons, psychiatric certification, and clearance by the anaesthetic department. It also provides prototypes of the legal documents necessary, such as a notarised affidavit confirming change of gender and a consent and waiver of liability form.

Since Jahagirdars surgery, 70 more have been conducted on thirunangais from Tamil Nadu, kinnars from Chhattisgarh and Bihar, and hijras from Maharashtra. Whats common to these clients is that all were assigned male at birth. Thus, these surgeries are referred to as Male to Female, or MTF, surgeries. Till date, the hospital has conducted only three mastectomies (breast tissue removal), but no hysterectomies (removal of uterus), or phalloplasty (construction of phallus) surgeries  all of which are part of Female to Male, or FTM surgical procedures.

HT met a group of seven thirunangis, associated with the local community-based organisation Sahodaran Community Oriented Health Development Society headed by Sheetal, all of whom had undergone surgeries at the MGMCRI in the past two years. Its a bit of a bore. But its good for us, laughed Bawadharini, a 27-year-old Puducherry local, referring to the number of visits to the psychiatrist and surgeon that the protocol has instituted. She added that she was unwilling to do the surgery before this because she was not sure if it was safe. The protocol offers a sense of protection, she said.

The protocol, which applies to both FTM and MTF surgeries, was submitted to the institutes ethics committee in August 2017. Dr Seetesh Ghosh, the gynaecologist in the gender care team said that he will not conduct any hysterectomy till the committee validates the protocol. I need immunity: its not that only the surgeon is responsible. The institution is responsible too.

Improving quality of life

For a doctor to conduct a hysterectomy on an apparently healthy female body of reproductive age requires a shift in perspective: Not all persons assigned female gender at birth are women.

If an adult transman approaches a doctor to conduct a hysterectomy, the decision does not need to be validated by parent, doctor or society.

A recent survey among transgender women found that GA surgery was an important factor in improving the quality of life. The study, conducted by urologists of the University Hospital at Essen, Germany, found that over three-fourth of the respondents experience strong, positive life satisfaction following the surgery.

While similar research has not been undertaken in India, a study that aims to map the discrimination that transgender persons face at the hands of healthcare providers in India is currently underway.

Kolkata-based not-for-profit Civilian Welfare Foundation (CWF), in collaboration with United Nations Global Youth Empowerment, began a project titled Health is Wealth in September 2017.

The study, which reaches out to 50 transpersons across the country, is part of this project, and is expected to be completed by July.

WHAT SHOULD NATIONAL GUIDELINES ON GENDER AFFIRMATION DO? Recognise and distinguish between intersex variations and transgender identities. See both as gender, body diversity. Not pathology Guarantee barrierfree, non-discriminatory, free access to healthcare, one of which is Gender Affirmative (GA) surgery Offer protocol for GA surgery, specifying that the adult does not require parental or societal approval Recognise the full spectrum of gendersex identity. The choice of procedures to be undertaken should be made by the individual distinguish between intersex variations and transgender identities. See both as gender, body diversity. Not pathologyaccess to healthcare, one of which is Gender Affirmative (GA) surgeryfor GA surgery, specifying that the adult does not require parental or societal approvalfull spectrum of gendersex identity. The choice of procedures to be undertaken should be made by the individual Prevent medically unnecessary procedures of sex assignment done on infants and children that necessarily do not entail their consent Follow the WPATH guidelines in terms of psychiatric assessment for gender dysphoria, taking into account contextual specifics Protect the client from medical negligence, ignorance or discriminatory attitude of healthcare providers De-link welfare entitlements from surgical status of transgender persons, because not every transgender person undergoes surgery unnecessary procedures of sex assignment done on infants and children that necessarily do not entail their consentWPATH guidelines in terms of psychiatric assessment for gender dysphoria, taking into account contextual specificsclient from medical negligence, ignorance or discriminatory attitude of healthcare providersentitlements from surgical status of transgender persons, because not every transgender person undergoes surgery

In the absence of any detailed national-level guideline on transgender health  an Indian Council of Medical Research task force was set up some years ago to create such a document, but emails to the medical body on the status of this remain unanswered  such empirical data would help dispel untruths and misconceptions that circulate among healthcare providers and policy-makers. Since current medical curriculum does not address transgender healthcare either, a guideline that mandates non-discrimination and situates surgical intervention within a broader scheme of healthcare provisions, is a must.

A 2014 report tabled by the expert committee of the ministry of social justice and empowerment emphasized the need to develop trans-friendly policies/guidelines to ensure barrier-free access to healthcare. Subsequently, the last seen draft of the Transgender (Protection of Rights) Bill 2016 promises to bring out a health manual in accordance with WPATH guidelines. But the bill, which is yet to come up in Parliament for discussion, has not laid down a timeline. The National Health Policy document released last year, also states that research on transgender health will be promoted. The ICMR did not respond to a query on whether any new research has been initiated on this subject.

Community efforts

In the past decade, a growing community of transgender persons and activists, and healthcare professionals have created guidelines for gender affirmative care in line with global best practices.

In 2011, a UNAIDS India-constituted working group prepared an interim national guideline on sex reassignment surgeries for Male-to-Female transgender people in India  the report was submitted to the National Aids Control Organisation.

In 2014, Dr Anindya Kumar Ray, a psychiatrist, helped formulate a protocol for the RG Kar government hospital in Kolkata, with the help of community-led organisations. Ray, who is now posted at the Malda Medical College, explained that the protocol was for Gender Transition Related Health Services, with provisions for psychological, medical/hormonal and surgical services. The team would have been multi-disciplinary, and the client would have availed of only those aspects of gender care that they chose. It never took off.

Last January, Sappho for Equality, a West Bengal-based organisation that works with lesbians, bisexual women and transgender men came out with a Good practice guide to gender affirmative care. There was no standard protocol being followed. There was a complete lack of information, and a lot of insensitivity on the part of the medical fraternity, explains Dr Ranjita Biswas, who compiled the document with a colleague with contributions from doctors across disciplines and persons from the transgender community. We visited the Directorate of Medical Education who told us that it would be difficult to make the guideline part of the curriculum since medical students already have to deal with a huge syllabus, said Biswas, a psychiatrist.

Community members in Karnataka were a tad luckier with state officials. Last September, a national meet was held in Bengaluru on the socio-medical status of transgender persons in India, with particular emphasis on SRS.

The consultation was organised by the National Institute of Medical Health and Neuro-Sciences and transgender rights organisations Ondede and Swatantra. It brought state government officials together with medical and legal experts, community members and activists and made them commit to developing standards of care.

Protocol needed

Anush Datta, a 35-year-old transman born and brought up in rural West Bengal, underwent a breast reduction surgery in 2015. He spent ?70,000, and doesnt even have a bill (or a discharge certificate) to show for it. I have no evidence that I underwent a surgery. The secrecy with which this whole thing was conducted put me at a great disadvantage.

Dattas disadvantage was compounded by the fact that there were no binding guidelines on the doctors he consulted. As a result, he was not asked for a certification of gender dysphoria from a psychiatrist. His prescription slip was never returned to him. He was given no post-operative care, either.

The prohibitive costs make the procedures accessible to only those who have the privilege of affording them. For those who cant, the only remaining options are private, unmonitored set-ups with no accountability. Regular monitoring and redressal mechanisms have to be established to stem this, said the working group of Sampoorna, a network of trans and intersex Indians across the globe.

Today, Dattas story is more norm than exception, which makes MCMGRIs efforts to institute a protocol for themselves all the more significant.
Karnataka holds assembly elections on May 12, and a couple is using their wedding to invite people to vote. Literally.

Siddappa Doddachikkannanavar, an activist and an Indian Railways employee , and Jyothi, a BCom graduate, are set to tie the knot on April 27.

Their wedding card flaunts the national emblem and says SJMRG27042018 - a combination of the wedding date and the initials of Jyothi, who is from Ranebennur, and Doddachikkannanavar, who hails from Hangal, according to a report in the Bangalore Mirror.

The couple printed around 1,200 cards with messages highlighting the importance of voting and blood donation. The second page of the card details the wedding venue and names of family members with their contact details. A message that reads, Your vote is valuable finds a prominent place.

The invite also emphasises on the importance of exercising the franchise with clear conscience.

Doddachikkannanavar gave the wedding invitation to Haveri deputy commissioner Dr Venkatesh and superintendent of police Dr K Parashurama.

We have been working towards promoting Kannada language in Goa. Being the state president of Kannada Srujanasheela Balaga, we do visit Kannada schools and distribute Kannada books. I also enjoy writing limericks. I wanted to do something unique for my wedding to promote Kannada, Bangalore Mirror quotes Doddachikkannanavar as saying. When I discussed the same with my friend Karibasappa Gondi, a constable, he suggested that we should do something to encourage voting keeping in mind the Assembly elections.

The couple took the district collector for permission to print their wedding cards, according to EenaduIndia.
With the first notice of a motion for the removal of the Chief Justice of India being initiated in Parliament, the question that arises is whether the CJI, who is master of the roster, should withdraw from judicial work. Although there is no precedent, some directions can be gleaned from the case involving justice V Ramaswami 1991.

In justice Ramaswamis case, a notice of a motion for his removal was brought in the Lok Sabha in 1991. Once it was admitted, he was requested by the then CJI to withdraw himself from judicial work till the three-member inquiry committee finished looking into the charges against him.

Justice Ramaswami recused himself from judicial work till the probe was on, but resumed sitting on the bench again only to go on leave when the actual removal motion was debated in Lok Sabha. Despite the failure of the motion in Parliament, he attended to work only in his chamber until he retired a few months later, according to senior advocate Sanjay Hegde.

But that was after the motion was accepted. In this case, the Vice President has to decide whether to do so or not. If it is accepted, though, former CJI RM Lodha says it will be tough for the CJI to function independently.

This is an unprecedented event. The Constitution and the Judges Inquiry Act does not say that he should stop exercising his judicial or administrative function. However, it will become difficult for the CJI to function, with the impeachment sword hanging over his head. It will be difficult for him to exercise his power independently, he added.

While senior advocate Rajeev Dhawan believes there is nothing that bars the CJI form continuing to discharge his duty as the leader of the top court for now, things may change.

Nothing stops the CJI from carrying out his judicial and administrative work until a committee is appointed to probe into the motion and charges are drawn up. Right now, its just a (notice of a) motion. There are no charges, although incidents are mentioned. The question that will arise is that since the CJI now cannot nominate a judge for the committee, who will be the judge concerned to do the same, said Dhawan.

If the motion is admitted, it will be looked into a three-member team, of which one will be a judge of the SC, usually selected by the CJI.
Rajasthan Scheduled Caste Commission vice-chairman Vikesh Kholia has urged the state government to withdraw cases registered against people of schedule castes and tribes during the Bharat Bandh on April 2.

The nationwide bandh was called by Dalit organisations protesting the Supreme Courts ruling that, they allege, dilutes the SC/ST (prevention of atrocities) Act. A person died in police firing in Alwar district and many were injured. Over a thousand protesters were arrested in the state.

In a letter to chief minister Vasundhara Raje on April 19, Kholia said representatives of SCs from districts told the commission that people from various communities created nuisance during the bandh, but police registered most of the cases against Dalits, which seems unjustified.

Registering a case against a dead person or cases against a person at two places raises suspicion, he said.

Cases are registered against innocent people who were protesting in a peaceful manner. Even now cases are being lodged in districts, such as Jaisalmer, where nothing happened. I have met the director general of police and he has assured to examine the issue.

Kholia urged the CM to withdraw the cases to maintain faith of the SCs and STs in the government.
A group of men allegedly attacked the house of artist Durga Malathi in Keralas Palakkad on Thursday night for drawing the picture of the eight-year-old girl gang-raped and murdered in Jammu and Kashmirs Kathua, police said on Friday.

We have registered a case and identified some of the assailants, a senior police officer from Palakkad district said. The window panes of Malathis house were broken and a vehicle parked on the porch were damaged in the alleged attack.

Malathi said in a post on Facebook that a group of people reached her house around midnight and started stoning her house. They threatened me with dire consequences if I draw more pictures and paintings depicting the plight of the victim. They said my drawings and paintings hurt their sentiments. But they cant stifle me like this, she said.

Kerala, like other states, has also witnessed massive protests over the Kathua gang rape and murder case as many organisations led candle light protests throughout the state and several artists joined them by exhibiting their works depicting the girl.

The girl from the Bakarwal tribe, a nomadic community of Muslim cattle grazers, was abducted while grazing her familys horses near her home in Rasana village of Kathua district in January. According to the chargesheet, she was held captive in a temple, sedated and raped repeatedly for a week before being bludgeoned to death.

A retired revenue department official planned the crimes against her, says the chargesheet filed by the crime branch of Jammu and Kashmir police, to create fear among her community and get them to leave Rasana.
People protesting against the Kathua and Unnao sexual assault cases blocked railway tracks as well as the National Highway-6 for over four hours in West Bengal on Friday, delaying trains and inconveniencing lakhs of commuters.

The blockades along the South Eastern Railway section held up several local trains, besides long-distance ones such as the Purulia-Howrah Express, Howrah-Mumbai (Duranta) Express, Mumbai-Howrah Mail and Falaknuma Express, at various stations between Howrah and Kharagpur.

The agitation went on from 7.30 am to 11.48 hours. Two pairs of local trains were initially cancelled, and two others were rescheduled. More trains could be cancelled or rescheduled, a spokesperson of the South Eastern Railway said.

The protesters, however, were not done. They again blocked the national highway at Uluberia, located 43 km from Kolkata, around 2 pm. The second phase of the agitation lasted for about 45 minutes before police persuaded them to disperse.

The Howrah police superintendent was unavailable for comment.

The National Highway-6  which connects Kolkata and Mumbai  handles a bulk of the road traffic from West Bengal to the states of Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra.

The agitation was reportedly held by a few minority groups, although no banners attributing it to specific organisations were seen at the protest sites. An official said on the condition of anonymity that representatives of the South Eastern Railway tried placating the agitators, but refrained from using force in view of the sensitive issue.

Many places across the country witnessed widespread protests against the rape-cum-murder of an eight-year-old girl allegedly by right-wing activists in Jammus Kathua, and the alleged sexual assault of a teenager by a BJP legislator in Uttar Pradeshs Unnao, over the last few days. Although protests were taken out in Bengal too  with sympathisers wearing black armbands and holding candlelight vigils  no disruptive activity was reported until now.
A 20-year-old girl student of Dr Shakuntala Mishra University ended her life by hanging herself from the ceiling fan of her hostel room, on the university campus, in Lucknows Para area on Thursday evening, police said.

They said the reason behind the girl taking the extreme step was not know.

After coming to know about the girls death, hundreds of students of the varsity gathered outside the administrative office and alleged foul play in the death.

The girl named Parul hailed from Deoria and was pursuing B Ed part I from the university.

Police said the body had been sent for post-mortem examination, adding that the girls family had been informed.

Further investigations are on, they said.
With reports of crime against women and even children hogging newspaper headlines practically every day, mothers in the city are worried about the safety of their daughters. They feel right parenting and allowing an open dialogue at home can prepare children to perceive the threat and also to fight it back in times of need.

During a forum at Hindustan Times office on Thursday, mothers gave a number of suggestions to help create a better and safer environment for their daughters.

 Mothers have a major role to play as compared to fathers. Its OK that school will teach good and bad touch and other things to the children but at the same time mothers should also be vigilant about the surroundings of daughters. They should also keep track of children while they are on their way to school as this is the time when they are surrounded by strangers and are more vulnerable. Shalie Malik , assistant professor

Shalie Malik, assistant professor in Lucknow university and mother of an eight-year -ld said, As a working mother, it is my duty to spare a good amount of time for my daughter. I may do wonders as a professional but I would fail if I dont do justice to my duties as a mother.

Emphasising on sparing time for children, Malik suggested that parents should build such a bond of trust with their children so that the children dont hesitate in sharing their problems with them.

Simran Sahni, an entrepreneur and mother of teenage children, emphasised on open discussions. She said, We dont just need to limit our teachings and discussions to children. Such issues need to be discussed openly in the family and with friends as well if we wish to bring about a change.

Talking about the debate of what to wear and what not to wear, Simran said, We need to teach our children and also understand what to do where. We also need to teach them that life is not a bed of roses and they should be prepared to face the harsh realities .

She also focused on teaching children to be courageous.

We need to be expressive. Sex should no longer be a white elephant in the room. We need to be more open to the children and should make them aware of the world. Classes on good and bad touch and sex education should also be made mandatory in government schools. Besides, there is need to strengthen the laws.-Charmaine Beecham, director St.Teresas schools, colleges

Ministhy S, a bureaucrat and mother of two daughters, suggested changes in the system. She said, There should be continuous training programmes at all levels to build sensitivity in officials. During promotions, the sensitivity of the officials should also be taken into consideration. Only this can propel them to work for the weakest of the weak.

She said, We should not hesitate to tell our boys that if they watch porn or think dirty about other girls, there may be someone thinking in a similar way about their sister. Thats how sensitisation should begin from home.

The panellists lamented about the negative role of mothers in several cases of sexual abuse. A number of cases have highlighted that when the girl complained of sexual abuse by a near and dear one in the initial stage, they were suppressed by their mothers.

Aashrita Dass, principal of La Martiniere Girls College and mother of a daughter emphasised on the need to make women financially independent. Only if the mothers are financially independent can they take a bold step. An independent women would not be afraid to stand by her girl and fight for her rights.

The panellists also emphasised on strong implementation of laws in the country to check crimes against women. Amrita Chakraborty, lawyer and activist said, Law cannot prevent crimes. It is only remedial, compensative and punitive machinery. We have to break the taboo of victim shaming and silencing. Speedy, affordable and child -friendly redressal system and exemplary punishments would definitely bring about some positive changes. Unless and until financial, moral and educational prosperity reaches every strata of our society we wont be able to protect our children from crimes and injustices.

Charmine Beecham emphasised on the effective implementation of the POCSO Act that is meant to check sexual crimes against minors.

Fatima Rizvi, faculty, department of English and Modern European Languages, Lucknow University, focussed on giving lessons of morality to people in power. She said, There have been so many cases where people in power try to protect the misdeeds of their children. This needs to be checked.

Anshu Bhatnagar, a social worker, suggested that women judges be appointed and only fast track courts should be allowed to deal with cases of crimes against women.

Aarti Kumar, who works for mother and infant health, suggested, We teach our girls modesty. We need to teach them courage.

SUGGESTIONS

Ensure time-bound judgements

Strengthen victim and witness protection schemes. Also make victim compensation scheme stronger. Ensuring time-bound judgements in cases of sexual abuse can also help

Use Aadhar to debar offender from all govt facilities

Track and debar offender from all government facilities in cases of sexual abuse. The Aadhar card can be used to translate this decision into practice, as done in some countries with the help of UID. Even if the offender goes for a job the status child sexual abuser pops up with the employer

Speed up trial

Quick trial of cases in time-bound manner can build confidence among victims to speak up and lodge complaint

Offer support to victims

Empower the victims and encourage them. Offer legal and financial support to victims, particularly if they are poor. This shall empower them to fight until justice is delivered

Have counsellors at court for child victims

Counsellors at court for the child victim will also help build confidence. Hearing should be in an environment so that victims do not feel they are offenders. Ensure proper distance between victim and offenders. Some countries have victim protection and witness protection schemes

Give harsh punishments as deterrents

People should know that if you rape you get the worst penalty. The system of punishment should be such that quick decision and harsh punishments make people abstain from committing heinous crimes

Ostracise offenders

The society should also ostracize offenders and make children aware about such crimes. Not just girls but also the boys be asked about their late arrival at home. Need to create family values with kindness, gender equality and education. Parents should be open about problems. Law alone cannot solve the issue as the breeding ground is in the society.

Be more courageous and more vocal about crime against women. I think men are taking advantage of the situation as women often hide the crime and remain quiet . Its time to be courageous and create an environment in which our children do not fear in sharing things with the parents. While working I have came across many cases in rural pockets where the mothers often prefer not to raise an alarm. I think the time has come when we should be more courageous and vocal.-Aarti Kumar, activist mother and child health

Make girls plucky

Need to raise girls to be courageous to speak up and share and encourage values and courage among children. Half of the problem will be solved if a woman stands for another woman

SMS system in govt schools

Use of technology has to come handy within society. Schools SMS system about attendance, which is a fruitful tool to register activities of students, should be used simultaneously at private and government schools. Government can ensure such service sends information to the parents without discrimination.

Counsellors in schools

Counsellor be appointed in schools who at times can explain law, habit and the consequences of wrong doings in such a manner that children are groomed to be good citizens. At school level, activities that help develop students as compassionate citizen be carried out not as formality under subjects such as SUPW or moral science. They should be modulated to benefit the future generation

Educate the masses

Government should have more ambassadors to educate the masses. Gender sensitivity, good touch, bad touch etc should also be taught
Bharat Ane Nenu

Cast: Mahesh Babu, Kiara Advani, Prakash Raj

Director: Koratala Siva

Rating: 3/5

Bharat Ane Nenu combines the twin passions of India  cinema and politics. Mahesh Babus Bharat is the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, a position that was thrust upon him. An educated man who was brought up in London, politics was not what he had in mind as a career option. However, now that he is here, he intends to do a good job, change the way his state works and make his word count. The premise of an honest, development-oriented man deciding to enter the world of politics harks back to Tamil film, Mudhalvan, and its Hindi remake, Nayak.

Bharat, like the lead actors of the other films, changes the way things work in his state. Bureaucracy is his first target. He dreams of a ideal state where people follow rules and regulations, where education is a not-for-profit initiative, and government officers reach office on time.

But most important, he believes his words stand for something. He holds his oath of office in utmost regard. Unlike his politician brethren for whom it is yet another promise to be broken, he believes if he is not true to it, he will lose the light inside him. His conviction makes him an enemy to watch out for, even for his own party members.

The film has added depth as it also deals with nepotism in politics, politicking based on caste and the red-tape which plagues government procedures. We, as the governed, get to live vicariously as we see a CM who goes to work as soon he takes office and makes that day count for something.

Dialogues are the star of this entertaining political drama. For instance, Bharat analyses top officials talents and interest areas and transfers them to appropriate team. The leader of the party, played by Prakash Raj, comes to Bharat to tell him to hold off on certain positions as it has to be discussed further. To this Bharat says, There is nothing more to discuss, I have taken the decision after careful consideration. When partys opinion is spoken about, Bharat simply states, Why does their opinion matter? These are government officials.

The film also adopts from real-life situations, for instance the 2016 decision in Bengaluru to drastically hike penalties for traffic violations finds a play here. He has us believing for those few moments that change is possible, with the right leader.

An actor like Mahesh Babu who is restrained on screen and doesnt believe in loud performances is the perfect pick for the role. The hard-hitting dialogues, when delivered in his trademark subtle style, pack an added punch.

Bharat Ane Nenu manages something that Spyder couldnt for Mahesh Babu. In Bharat Ane Nenu, Mahesh Babu has the best of what commercial cinema has to offer  a strong subject, a tight film and a role he can chew on.

Cinematographer Ravi K Chandrans technique of slow motion pans adds more power to Mahesh Babus character on screen. Devi Sri Prasads music, especially the title song has added value to the film, at certain places even induces goosebumps.

Kiara Advani has made a strong debut with her performance as Vasumathi opposite Mahesh Babu in this entertaining political drama. The film hits all the right chords and gives the audience much-needed catharsis.

The author tweets as @Priyanka_S_MCC

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Mumbai crime branch officials arrested two persons who along with their associate allegedly confined a Chembur-based doctor in his nursing home and extorted Rs11 lakh by threatening to expose him in the media for doing sex determination test at his clinic, which is illegal in India. Police said one of the accused runs a local newspaper in the Chembur area.

The arrested accused have been identified as Vivek Joshi, 25, a resident of Ghatlagoan in Chembur and Bipin Pandey, 19, who lives in Vashinaka area in Chembur. Joshi, who is the editor of a local newspaper, seems to be the mastermind of the racket, police said. One accused, Dheeraj Deshmukh, is wanted in the case.

According to police, the complainant, doctor Vijay Kedare along his wife, doctor Sarita, runs a nursing home at Basveshwar chowk in Chembur. Joshi along with Deshmukh entered the nursing home around 3pm on Tuesday and started inquiring about Kedare, who was at home. They asked hospital staff to contact Kedari and asked him to come to the nursing home soon. When the doctor arrived, the duo confined him along with his hospital staff in Kedares cabin and took their mobile phones, a crime branch officer said.

The accused allegedly threatened the doctor that they would defame him in the media about doing sex determination test at his clinic. The accused then demanded Rs15 lakh from the doctor as settlement and agreed to accept Rs11 lakh.

The accused took Rs2.5 lakh in cash and a signed cheque for Rs8.5 lakh from Kedare, police said. The victim then approached the Chembur police and a case was registered on Thursday under sections 342 (punishment for wrongful confinement), 384 (punishment for extortion) 506 (criminal intimidation) and 34 (for common intention) of the Indian Penal code against the accused, the official said.

Officials of unit 6 of crime branch started conducting a parallel inquiry and nabbed Joshi and Pandey in the Chembur area on Thursday. Police said that the duo confessed to the crime during interrogation. The accused were handed over to the Chembur police station for further investigation, a crime branch official said.
The state plans to file a special leave petition in the Supreme Court (SC) against the Bombay high courts (HC) order that set aside Maharashtra governor Ch Vidyasagar Raos sanction to prosecute former chief minister Ashok Chavan in the Adarsh society scam.

Chavan, the current state Congress chief, had to step down as the CM in November 2010 for allegedly approving additional FSI for Adarsh society in exchange for two flats for his relatives.

The legal department has approved the draft of the petition and is awaiting chief minister Devendra Fadnavis nod to proceed. The petition may be submitted in the SC next week, according to an official from the law and judiciary department.

Chavan said, Ahead of the elections, this is a political move to harass me. As the honourable high court has already said there is no new element added while demanding the prosecution, I think the state leadership is acting on the directives from their bosses in Delhi.

Meanwhile, CBI has already filed a petition in the Supreme Court, opposing Chavans plea demanding the FIR against him be quashed. The HC had set aside the sanction. The reversal was on the basis of a report by a probe commission headed by retired judge JA Patil. While the government said the Patil commission had indicted Chavan, the court said a report under the Commission of Inquiry Act, 1952 had no evidentiary value in civil or criminal courts. It was only recommendatory in nature. We are now challenging this in the Supreme Court. The draft for the SLP has been finalised and is expected to be filed in the next few days, said an official, on the condition that he would not be named.

In 2013, Raos predecessor K Sankaranarayanan refused to allow Chavans prosecution. After the BJP government came to power in the state in 2014, Rao became the governor. In February 2016, Rao sanctioned Chavans prosecution. In its order on December 22 last year, the HC quashed the nod, on the grounds that CBI failed to give fresh evidence and the presented material could not be converted into credible evidence against Chavan.

Another official said, The draft of the SLP has been approved by the law and judiciary department after which the general administration department has sent it to the chief secretary for further process.

According to a BJP functionary, the SLP is a political move to keep the Congress and its state chief under pressure in the run-up to the general elections likely to be held late this year or early next year.
In a bid to improve technical education in Maharashtra, the state directorate of technical education (DTE) has asked universities to adopt the model curriculum for undergraduate engineering courses prepared by All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE).

The model engineering curriculum has been prepared based on the recommendations of 11 subject committees, set up by AICTE for engineering and technical institutes, excluding the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and National Institutes of Technology (NITs).

The new curriculum puts emphasis on practical knowledge and laboratory work, with the credit requirements for theory reduced from 220 to 160 in order to allow for other components.

In a letter to vice-chancellors of all universities in the state, Abhay Wagh, director, technical education, requested to initiate the formalities leading to the implementation of the curriculum in their respective universities and their affiliated colleges from the academic year 2018-19.

In the last few years, the standard of technical education has been deteriorating. In such a scenario, DTE has decided to put emphasis on quality improvement, said an official from the directorate.

In a first, the directorate has also formed a core advisory committee, which consists of educationists and representatives of industry, to advice engineering institutes and administrators on various aspects of the engineering programme. The panel, led by AD Shahane, vice president, Larson and Toubro, Mumbai, has been tasked with improving quality of education to enhance the employability of students and promote entrepreneurship.

In February, DTE held a workshop in the city for representatives from of all engineering colleges in the city to address issues and challenges in enhancing the quality of technical education.

Engineering colleges in the city are, however, divided on the effectiveness of the new model curriculum.

Braj Mishra, principal, Thakur College of Engineering and Technology, believes that the model curriculum will result in more employment opportunities for the students. The curriculum provides more time for internships and industry-oriented activities. The internships may lead to employment.

Mishra added that the decision of adopting the curriculum will have to be taken by the university boards of studies, but the directorate also has a role to play.

The curriculum has a mere 10% variable component, which is not sufficient. There cannot be a uniform syllabus for different parts of the country, said principal of an engineering college in suburbs, requesting anonymity. He also said the DTE is merely trying to make its presence felt.

Let universities do their jobs, he said.
Plate & Pint RATING: *** WHERE: 106, Dhun Abad, Bhulabai Desai Road, Kemps Corner WHEN: 8.30 am to 11.30 pm COST: Rs 1,500 for two without alcohol CALL: 2368-3655

A long, brightly lit, wood-panelled corridor opens up to a warren of rooms. To the left is an alcove with a bread counter and a pastry display. On the right is a softly lit, bar-like area with a high table and chairs, and booths. One wall has a huge TV screen. Past the pastry counter is the main dining area with large glass windows that look out on to bright green plastic foliage.

Plate & Pint is a cosy space combining old-world charm and casualness in a way only an old South Mumbai building can. And though its in one of the toniest parts of the city, this isnt your usual south Mumbai cafe/bistro. The food is unfashionably straightforward. While other restaurateurs vie to introduce new ingredients, flavours and concepts theres almost nothing unfamiliar or bold on this menu.

The peri peri fish fingers were crispy and piquant, coated in a lovely thick crust. (Aalok Soni / HT Photo)

From the starters, we try the peri peri fish  fish fingers coated in a lovely thick crust, crispy and piquant. Our fears that the Indian Chinese-style chicken chilli tacos would be fiercely pungent turn out to be unfounded. The filling that occasionally spills out of the mini tacos is on the sweeter side with just a hint of chilli.

For the most part, the cafe attracts families and young couples, though at some point a bunch of garrulous young boys make their presence felt. They are joined soon after by a bunch of equally garrulous young girls. Theyve just finished their exams, my companion tells me, recognising one of the boys from her sons class. It noisy for a while as they linger over their desserts, but once they exit the quiet hum of conversation returns.

The tenderloin burger was hearty, juicy and meaty, though the bread was a little dry. (Aalok Soni / HT Photo)

By this time our mains arrive; its a relief to find someone still doing a tenderloin burger and were quite happy with it. The meat is well done, as most Indians prefer, but the bread is a little dry. Nonetheless, its still juicy and meaty and is big enough to appease a ravenous teen.

Our pumpkin and goat cheese risotto, however, is sent back mostly untouched. The problem is not that its overcooked, but that its too sweet. Theres not enough cheese to provide a salty balance or even herbs like sage to add a touch of astringency.

The pumpkin and goat cheese risotto wasnt just overcooked, it was overtly sweet. (Aalok Soni / HT Photo)

And this is where they do two things right. Chef-partner Monaz Irani comes out immediately to find out why we didnt like the risotto, and we arent billed for it either.

Our meal ends on a happier note. The molten Belgian chocolate fondant with a light crust that opens up to a centre of thick, dark, slightly bitter chocolate is perfect. The bowl is licked clean.

The molten Belgian chocolate fondant, with a light crust that opens up to a centre of thick, dark, slightly bitter chocolate, is a must-try. (Aalok Soni / HT Photo)

Plate & Pint is the ideal neighbourhood cafe; its not a place to make the effort to travel to but if youre close by, its good enough for a quick coffee, dessert or sandwich.

(HT pays for all meals and reviews anonymously)
A 36-year-old diamond merchant from Surat was abducted at gunpoint in Juhu on Wednesday. The prime accused knew the victim and had been asking him for a loan, which the victim had refused to give.

On April 16, Ravikumar Jayantilal Tummar came to Mumbai on a work trip. He made plans to meet two friends on Wednesday afternoon, at a hotel in Juhu. During this meeting, Tummar received calls from Satya Shinde, who is described in the police complaint as the owner of a playing card club in Borivali. Shinde asked Tummar for a loan, but Tummar said no. According to the police, Shinde has been wanting a loan from Tummar for a long time and Tummar has denied him repeatedly.

When Tummar was leaving the hotel, he found Shinde waiting for him in the lobby. With Shinde was his driver and a friend, Raju Rupam, whom Tummar recognised. Shinde again asked for money. When Tummar refused him, Shinde made a gesture to the driver, who took out a pistol from under his shirt and handed it to Shinde. Pointing the pistol to Tummars stomach, Shinde forced Tummar to walk out of the hotel and into Shindes SUV.

The diamond merchant has told the police that Shinde took him to a godown (owned by Shinde) in Kulup Wadi, in Borivali. There he was held at gunpoint and assaulted by Shinde, Rupam and the driver. After he agreed to pay Rs one crore, the accused took his watch and jewellery.

Finally, Tummar was forced to strip and dance for his assailants, who videoed him. He was told that if he complained to the police, this video would be made public. Then, Tummar was allowed to leave.

Undeterred by his kidnappers threats, Tummar went to the police and registered a First Information Report (FIR). Shinde has been arrested and the police are searching for Rupam and the driver.

The FIR was registered under sections 342 (wrongful confinement), 364 (A) (kidnapping for ransom, etc.), 386 (extortion by putting a person in fear of death or grievous hurt), 394 (voluntarily causing hurt in committing robbery), 506 (2), 504 (intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of the peace), 34 (common intention) of the Indian Penal Code , and relevant sections of the Arms Act and Information and Technology Act.
A passenger travelling from Riyadh to Kozhikode in Kerala was arrested at the Mumbai airports T2 on Monday for trying to smuggle 960 grams of gold worth Rs27.33 lakh. The accused, Shajeer K, had concealed the gold in his trouser belt.

Around 7.50am, when the passenger was being frisked during pre-embarkation , the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) official on duty, Prashant Kumar, noticed an unusual padding in the passengers belt. He was asked to take off the belt.

On checking his waist belt, we found a yellow colour material that appeared to be gold powder blended with highly concentrated gel, wrapped in a plastic sheet, said a CISF official.

Shajeer had arrived from Riyadh at 6.55am via the Jet Airways flight 9W 523, and was to fly from Mumbai at 8.40 am via the Jet Konnect flight S2 421.

Airport customs were informed about the substance and they confirmed the presence of gold.

The passenger was handed over to the Air Intelligence Unit (AIU) of airport customs for legal action. The AIU has also been given possession of the gold to be further investigated.

Initially, the presence of gold could not be ascertained and it was suspected to be a drug. However, AIU confirmed the presence of gold powder in the gel, said an official.

K N Tripathy, deputy inspector general, CISF, Mumbai airport, said, Friskers are equipped with hand held metal detectors to detect metallic parts in the body. Due to presence of belt buckle around the waist, there is a possibility of overlooking other metal item. Our security personnel used the detector but also conducted a pat down search.

Smugglers have now begun to smuggle gold in dust form, as gold dust is difficult to trace by using hand-held detectors and scanners.

There have been at least ten cases of gold dust smuggling at Mumbai airport in the recent past, said AIU officials.
In March, Nazrul Shaikh (name changed to protect identity) was picked up by the Navi Mumbai unit of the Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS). It didnt come as a surprise to Shaikh, who works as a labourer and lives in the outskirts of Mumbai. Although he blends in the crowd and has made his home in India, Shaikh is a Bangladeshi.

Between January and April of 2018, 29 Bangladeshis have been arrested by the ATS for staying illegally in Maharashtra. Of these, three are suspected of having connections to the Islamic extremist organization Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT), which is believed to be responsible for the deaths of five prominent bloggers in Bangladesh. Colloquially known as Ansar Bangla, ABT is inspired by al Qaeda and banned in Bangladesh.

There are suspicions that ABT has set up sleeper cells in India. In August 2017, the Uttar Pradesh ATS arrested Abdullah al-Mamon, a member of ABT, in Muzzaffarnagar. He told the ATS that his job was to organize fake identification documents, like Aadhar, for ABT members when they came across the border.

Closer home in Maharashtra, the hunt for ABT operatives has taken ATS to different parts of Pune, Panvel, Kharghar, Ambarnath, Raigad and Mumbai. At least five of the 29 Bangladeshi nationals arrested in 2018 are believed to have ties to ABT. There are other suspects who have not been arrested, but are under surveillance.

Its difficult to identify these terror suspects because not only do they blend in easily with Indians in different parts of the country, but they also have paperwork, like Aadhar and ration cards, which effectively makes them Indian citizens.

A Kolkata-based agent who helps Bangladeshis illegally migrate to India told Hindustan Times that most of these middlemen are originally from across the border, having come to India a few decades ago. They carry legitimate Aadhar cards and other identification documents, even passports, but maintain ties with Bangladesh.

The business of helping people go back and forth is a profitable one. The stream is steady and according to him, most Bangladeshi migrants would try to go home once a year, ensuring regular income for middlemen. Each migrant is charged somewhere between Rs500-Rs1,000 at villages adjoining the border in Assam by the Border Security Force personnel, claimed the agent. The total cost of crossing the border can be anywhere between Rs5,000 and Rs8,000.

The experienced ones have a setting with the security forces patrolling the border, said the agent. He said most crossings take place at night. Some parts of the India-Bangladesh border have electrified fences and if the stationed officers are cooperative, these will be switched off at particular times to let illegal migrants leave one country and enter another.

Migrants either enter from Murshidabad, a district close to the Bangladesh border in West Bengal, or from the creek in Assam, the agent told HT. Border forces from both the sides help the migrants who pay the amount to their agents. We make money by doing illegal activity but there is something which even bothers us, that is exploitation of women who cross the border by the people who have the authoritative power.

On Indian soil, the Bangladeshis will be handed over to another agent  with good contacts in the railway  who takes the group to Howrah railway station. Once the group gets on the train, they meet another agent who has a valid identification card as all the reserved tickets are on that ID. They are then handed over to the agents at their destination, mostly Delhi and Mumbai, who eventually get work for them, said the agent.

Its a well-oiled process, made smooth by the collusion of border security forces on both sides and middlemen. In 2016, the Union minister of state for home affairs said there were approximately two crore illegal Bangladeshi migrants in India. Officials are tight-lipped about what kind of threat ABT actually poses in India but from the crackdown on illegal migrants in Maharashtra, it is clear that the ATS isnt taking ABT lightly.

Caught in the crosshairs of investigators and middlemen are poor people like Shaikh, who technically should be deported to Bangladesh but are now rooted in India. Shaikh is in his mid-thirties and has lived in Mumbai for more than 15 years now. Hes married to an Indian and has four children. He came to India as a child when his family crossed the porous border to make a new life for themselves in West Bengal and has only been back once. I crossed the border 10 years ago by paying Rs3,000 for one side to an old woman who had her farms on both sides of the border, he said.

Like many of the labourers who were rounded up, Shaikh was let go after interrogation, when the ATS was convinced he knew nothing about the ABT. They had, however, kept his phone. He didnt mind. They can keep his phone so long as he can go back to the 10x10 feet shanty outside Mumbai that he calls home.
The sessions court on Thursday asked the prosecution in the Khwaja Yunus custodial death case to resume the trial, observing that the plea to declare four cops as accused would be kept in abeyance till the apex courts final verdict.

On Wednesday, the sessions court heard the arguments of a plea, filed by public prosecutor Dhiraj Mirajkar, to make police officers Praful Bhosale, Hemant Desai, Rajaram Vhanmane and Ashok Khot stand trial. The plea was opposed by the officers lawyer, Subhash Jha, who contended that though the officers were named in the case, the sanction to prosecute them had been rejected by the state government. Further, he added that even the Bombay high court (HC) had accepted the states decision.

Jha pointed out that the petition filed Yunuss mother in the high court, challenging the refusal of prosecution sanction to several officers by the state, had been rejected. Yunuss mother then moved the petition to the Supreme Court.

The chief public prosecutor Lata Chheda said that while the subject is pending before the apex court, it should be kept in abeyance. She alleged that the plea was filed without the consultation of the state government.

The court, however, rejected the contention observing that Mirajkar was appointed by the state government and hence, was very much within his right to move a plea.

It further added that Mirajkar had been representing the state at the time when the application was filed. After hearing both sides, the court observed that as the matter is being dealt with by the apex court, the plea here would be kept in abeyance till its verdict.

The court, meanwhile, asked the prosecution to resume the trial and examine further witnesses in the case from the next month.
Two men involved in 11 house break-ins in the city were arrested on Tuesday and recovered valuables worth Rs5.85 lakh from them.

The Ghatkopar police arrested the accused, Anand Sakpal, 20, and Ajay Deokar, 22, who were inspired after watching the movie Oye Lucky Lucky Oye based on super chor Davinder Singh, alias, Bunty Chor. Bunty was involved in more than 500 theft cases across the country.

The police recovered jewellery and two high-end digital cameras from the residence of the accused, worth Rs5.85 lakh.

The duo gained entry to buildings through the refuge areas built in high rises. They entered through bathrooms and kitchens after descending from the pipes, said Akhilesh Singh, deputy commissioner of police, zone 7.

Investigations revealed that the duo was involved in theft in areas such as Ghatkopar, Matunga, BKC, Borivli, Versova and Goregaon.

The modus operandi was to ring bells 10 to 12 times and wait to check if the flat had any occupants. If no one responded, they would enter the flat to steal valuables, said Singh. Police said the duo wore expensive clothes and shoes and no security guard doubted their intentions. They would sell the jewellery and spend the money at bars and holiday in Goa.

It was this lifestyle which caught the attention of a source who tipped off the Ghatkopar police. They were watched for some time after which they were detained. They confessed during the interrogation. The duo said they wanted to imitate Bunty who shot to fame because of his crime capers and then the movie Oye Lucky Lucky Oye which was based on his life. They were frequent movie goers and have watched the film more than 10 times, said Venkat Patil, senior inspector, Ghatkopar police station. He said they are investigating if the accused have committed more burglaries.

The duo has been doing this since two years. They were planning more burglaries now since most families are out during summer vacations.
The Navi Mumbai police will use dredgers to excavate underwater debris where metallic objects had been spotted by magnetometer scanners during the search for assistant police inspector Ashwini Bidres body parts in the Vasai creek. The police said the key accused, Abhay Kurundkar, had dumped a sack containing her body parts in the creek after killing her in April 2016.

According to the police, finding Bidres remains is crucial to nail the accused.

Bidre, 37, was allegedly murdered by senior inspector Abhay Kurundkar, 52, and his three accomplices on April 11, 2016. While some parts of her body were thrown into the creek on the day itself, some others were thrown the next day of the murder.

Earlier last week, magnetometers used by surveyors from Ocean Science and Surveying Pvt Ltd, a Belapur-based firm, had identified nine spots where the sack was suspected to have been dumped. Magnetometers, used to detect metals, were especially used in the backdrop of findings that the accused had tied 25kg of metallic weight to the sack before dumping it into the creek.

A senior official from the Navi Mumbai police told HT on Friday that though the week-long search operation to find the sack was called off earlier this week, the process of checking the objects identified by the magnetometers would continue. Since the spots are full of metallic debris, the police will use dredgers to excavate the underwater debris. It is difficult for divers to check each and every object minutely as it requires remaining underwater for long. Instead, we will bring the debris to the coast with the help of dredgers so that their scanning becomes easy, the senior official said.

The search for Bidres body in the creek had started in the first week of March after the Navi Mumbai police managed to identify the spot, where the sack was allegedly dumped, following the disclosures made by one accused in the case. Divers from the Indian Navy and the India Coast Guard (ICG) had conducted extensive search for four days, but to no avail. It was suspected that the sack is either stuck deeper in the sludge or has been swept away by currents.

The Navi Mumbai police then consulted oceanographers who said that the sack could have travelled to a maximum of 200-250 metres, from the place where it had been dumped, in the past two years. It was then decided to launch the expensive search by roping in a private firm at an approximate cost of Rs1.35 lakh a day. The second phase search aided by gradiometers that continued for a week had yielded no results either. The third phase resumed last week in which advanced magnetometers, which are used by the Israeli army, were utilised. The magnetometers had sensed underwater metallic debris.

Meanwhile, the official said that the police have started scouting for firms using more advanced underwater survey equipment. Moreover, opinion is also being sought from experts of IIT-Bombay.
In a scathing attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Shiv Sena on Friday said that the capital of India should be shifted outside the country, so that the PM makes statements on important issues.

An editorial in the Sena mouthpiece Saamana, the party said that PM Modi becomes a mauni baba when he is in India but speaks up on critical issues on his foreign visits.

Modi, who is currently in London, had spoken about the brutal rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Jammu and Kashmirs Kathua at an interaction with audience there. He (Modi) doesnt feel the need to speak in India. He then goes on a foreign visit and speaks about the issues and incidents that happen in the country. When he was in Sweden he spoke about the happenings within the country. Then later in London, he gave a message to Indians. This means that if we want to see our Prime Minister speak about the developments in the country, then the capital of India needs to be shifted to London, New York, Tokyo, Paris, or Germany. If that is not possible, they should erect a huge film set to make New Delhi seem like a foreign country, the editorial said.

The Marathi daily also said that former prime minister Manmohan Singh was correct recalling the advice given to him by Modi. Earlier this week, Singh had criticised Modi, pointing out that while in Opposition the latter had taunted him for being Maun Mohan Singh but now there was a need for his successor to follow his own advice and speak about important issues in the country.
The Oshiwara police on Wednesday arrested a 27-year-old man, Kishore Chaganbhai Naiya, for allegedly fixing a skimmer and micro-camera at an ATM kiosk in Oshiwara.

While withdrawing money from the ATM on Sunday evening, Afzan Shaikh spotted a blue instrument on the card reader.

Suspecting something amiss, he called the bank, who then informed the local police.

The skimmer was attached to copy data of all customers who insert their cards in the ATM while the micro-camera was placed near the keypad to keep track of the four-digit PIN, said an officer.

The police then asked the bank for the footage of CCTV cameras at the ATM kiosk and found the suspect who was seen tampering with the ATM.

Based on tip-offs, they traced and arrested Naiya from his home at Anand nagar in Jogeshwari.

The Oshiwara police have recovered 520 magnetic cards and a skimmer-making machine from his home. The accused was going to use the stolen data to clone these cards. The cards could be used to withdraw money using the PIN codes, said the officer.

The police have seized Rs1.39 lakh . They said Naiya bought the card reader and ATM original skimmer from China through online portals.

To ensure he does not leave a trace behind he used to target only those ATMs where there were no security guards. Furthermore he used to remove the skimmer and micro camera in half an hours time.

The police are now checking how Naiya, a Class 12 dropout, learned to make skimmers at home.

Naiya was arrested in 2013 in another cyber fraud using a skimmer. He is out on bail in that case. He was also arrested in connection with a theft in Gujarat in 2011.

An officer said the police are probing if the accused made more skimmers and gave it to his aides.

Subhash Khanvilkar, senior inspector, Oshiwara police station, said, The probe is in its nascent stage. We have got his custody till April 23. We are probing the case.
The anti-terrorism squad (ATS) busted two illegal telephone exchanges in Thane and Mumbra on Thursday and arrested a 28-year-old man.

The man along with his brother, natives of Azamgarh in Uttar Pradeh, is accused of running a fake telecommunication junction in Thane. As per the preliminary inquiry, the racket has led to a loss of Rs58 crore to the national exchequer, said an ATS official. Officials said that they were probing if the accused had any terror links.

The accused was produced in the court and remanded in custody till April 24. The ATS is on the lookout to nab more suspects and has formed several teams. The arrested man came to Mumbai a few years ago and had been living in Thane with his brother since then.

On the basis of reliable inputs, the ATS accompanied by officials from department of telecommunications (prosecution) raided the accuseds residence in Azad Nagar at Thane. It found 139 SIM cards, a laptop, five SIM boxes and machines for call transforming (illegal international gateways) and three routers. The arrested man confessed to have been running the telephone exchange along with his brother, said the ATS official.

He also spilled beans on another illegal exchange run by his associates in Mumbra. The ATS raided the Mumbra house and seized five illegal international gateways, SIM boxes, 95 SIM cards, three routers and one laptop, said the official.

A case has been registered at Kalachowki police under Sections 4, 20 and 25 of the Indian Telegraph Act, Section 3 and 6 of Indian Wireless and Telegraph Act, and Section 420 (cheating) and 34 (common intention) of the Indian Penal Code.

The police have learnt that the accused had been running illegal telephone exchanges for the past one-and-a-half years. They used to route international VoIP calls through local mobile numbers. They would illegally convert a VoIP call from abroad into a voice one through illegal international gateway, said another ATS official. The ATS has seized total property worth Rs2.48 lakh. As per the preliminary verification by department of telecommunication officials the total loss of revenue to the national exchequer is around Rs. 58 crores, said ATS official.
The Mankhurd police have registered the mysterious death of an 11-year-old boy, whose body was found close to his residence in Mandala earlier this month, as a murder case. The body was found by a sweeper on the morning of April 2. However, the cause of death has still not been determined.

The victim, Jeet, lived in a slum area with his parents Ramvilas, 62, and Bacchidevi, 40, and sister, Sangeetadevi, 18. He was last seen participating in a Hanuman Jayanti procession. His family had lodged a missing persons complaint, before the body was found.

We do not have any enmity with anyone and my son was healthy. He was operated for tonsils a year back at a good hospital and there was no ailment, said Ramvilas. The place where the body was found has a few shanties in the vicinity and it is difficult to believe that there are no witnesses.

I want a thorough investigation and the killers should be nabbed, said Bacchidevi.

He left the house to participate in the procession but never returned. No one has come forward to give us any leads about the murder, said Sangeetadevi.

The local police and the crime branch have questioned several people, including close family members, but they have received no leads yet. The post-mortem has been conducted, but doctors have reserved their opinion. They will come to a conclusion only after a chemical analysis.

We are investigating the case keeping in mind all the angles, said Shahji Umap, deputy commissioner of police, zone 6.

There were no grievous injuries or signs of strangulation on the boys body, said the police. Doctors have said that nail marks cannot be treated as the cause of death. No internal injuries or sexual assault was detected in the autopsy.

We have investigated all theories, right from personal enmity to family disputes, but there has been no breakthrough, said a police officer privy to the investigation.

Jeet was a witness in a case of sodomy committed against a minor, and had stated that he was not seen anything in the court. We even investigated the links to the case and his death, but to no avail.

The police are now awaiting the chemical analysis, which may shed new light on the case.
The body of a 16-year-old boy was recovered from Greater Noida on Friday, four days after he went missing from his Ghaziabad residence under suspicious circumstances.

Police said they found the body on the basis of information procured from two suspects, one of whom is a minor.

Ayush Sharma, a Class 9 student at the St Francis School in Indirapuram, had gone missing from the vicinity of his Vaishali Sector-2A residence on April 16. An FIR was lodged against unidentified persons at the Indirapuram police station the next day.

An investigation revealed that the two suspects had allegedly called up the boy on his mobile phone at 1:37 pm on the day of his disappearance. They were brought in for questioning on Friday.

According to what the police told us, the suspects met my son at a culvert near our residence and asked him to get some money from me. When he declined, they offered him a cold drink laced with sedative, said Pramod Sharma, the victims father.

The duo then allegedly took him on a motorcycle to Greater Noida, where his body was eventually found. Police said my son had sustained serious head injuries. We still dont know what transpired, or why my son was murdered. We have identified the body, said Sharma.

Police said the two suspects disclosed the location of Ayushs body after questioning. It seems as if a blunt stone-like object was used to inflict the injuries on the boys body, which was recovered around 2 pm on Friday, said Shavez Khan, station house officer of the Ecotech-III police station in Greater Noida.

While the boys parents said they were unaware of any link between him and the two suspects, the police think otherwise. They called him on his mobile phone on the day of the incident, and asked him to get some money from his father. When he refused to do so, they took him to Greater Noida  from where the body was eventually recovered, Indirapuram circle officer Dharmendra Chauhan told HT.

Chauhan said they will know more about the incident after the two suspects are further questioned in this regard.
A 21-year-old man was found bludgeoned to death while he was sleeping on the roof of his house in Pooja Colony area of Loni town, Ghaziabad, early Friday.

Although Shehnaz Khan, the mother of the victim, Ashfaq, has lodged an FIR against unidentified persons, the police said Ashfaqs father Abdul Rahim, who was also sleeping beside him, is the prime suspect.

The police said Ashfaq and his father went to sleep on the roof of their house on Thursday night while his mother and other family members were sleeping on the ground floor.

According to the police, the murder took place around 4am on Friday. The family found him dead on his charpoy.

Ashfaq had severe injuries on the head, the kind that has been inflicted by a blunt object. He was attacked in his sleep and died of blood loss. An FIR was filed by his mother against unidentified persons. However, we suspect his father, a fruit vendor, to be the perpetrator. Ashfaq had a dispute with his father over a 25 square yard plot, AK Maurya, superintendent of police (rural), said.

The police said Abdul Rahim had constructed a house on one portion of the land and the remaining 25 square yards were sold to someone. Ashfaq objected to this and was demanding his share of the property.

He allegedly used to beat up his father. The entire family was upset with his behaviour. However, we are probing all angles, Maurya said.

Police sources said Ashfaq was fond of body-building and would daily spend a hefty amount on fruits, milk and other items and his family was not in a position to afford this expenditure.

According to the police, Shehnaz filed a complaint of murder against unidentified persons at the Tronica City police station on Friday. She stated that while her husband got up around 4am and was getting ready to go to the wholesale fruit market when he saw Ashfaq lying dead.

Police have called Abdul Rahim for questioning. Officials said they are probing all angles behind the incident.
The Yamuna Expressway Industrial Development Authority (Yeida) is set to give a detailed presentation about the new greenfield Noida international airport project in Jewar to the ministry of civil aviation on April 23 to obtain an in-principle approval.

The authority is hopeful that the steering committee, which will assess the detailed project report of this ambitious project, will give its in-principle nod, paving way for further progress on the project.

The steering committee consists of members from the ministries of civil aviation and defence and the Airports Authority of India, among others.

The steering committee may give an in-principle approval on April 23 itself if it is satisfied with the technical preparedness. Once we have the approval, we will start the process of selecting a private agency that will develop the project, Shailendra Bhatia, officer on special duty, Yeida, said.

Yeida is busy preparing the presentation. On April 3, Yeida had given a detailed presentation about the overall progress of the project. Satisfied with the progress, the ministry of civil aviation had asked the authority to seek an in-principle approval.

We applied for the in-principle approval recently. Now after assessing our presentation, the ministry is likely to give the approval, Bhatia said.

The ministry of civil aviation on June 24, 2017, had given its approval to build an international airport in Jewar. In December 2017, Yeida hired international agency PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) for preparing the techno-economic feasibility report (TEFR) of the project proposed in Jewar, along the 165km Yamuna Expressway that connects Greater Noida with Agra. The PwC submitted its TEFR report on April 15.

On Saturday, we will prepare a detailed presentation with the help of PwC , Bhatia said.

The airport will be developed on a public-private partnership (PPP) model and Yeida has already made arrangements for the funds required for land acquisition.

Once we get the in-principle approval, we will start preparing the bid document under which a private agency will be selected for developing the airport. The bid document will be prepared by PwC. We hope that we will issue a tender to hire the agency in June, Bhatia said.

The airport project is estimated to Rs 15,000 crore to Rs 20,000 crore. On the whole, the project requires 5,000 hectares of land. In 2001, then UP chief minister Rajnath Singh had proposed the greenfield Taj International Airport and Aviation Hub (TIH) in Jewar. However, the project could not materialise till date. But, now, officials hope that April 23 will the day when the project finally starts taking shape.
Police arrested three men on Thursday from Sector 18 for stealing motorcycles from Delhi-NCR. They have also recovered five bikes from their possession.

According to police, the three accused, Satendra, Raj Kumar and Raju, were arrested during routine checking around 8.30pm on Thursday.

There was a checkpoint set up near the HDFC bank crossing in Sector 18. The three, who were riding a motorcycle, were stopped during routine checking. When questioned, they tried to turn back and flee from the area, Manish Kumar Saxena, station house officer, Sector 20 police station, said.

He added that the three were apprehended by a police team at the spot.

Police have also recovered five motorcycles, one scooter and two countrymade pistols from the possession of the accused. When questioned, the accused revealed the location of the stolen motorcycles. They had been hidden in a shanty near Sector 18, the SHO said.

According to police, the accused have been involved in petty crimes for a while. The three had been involved in vehicle thefts and other petty crimes for some time now. They operated together and were not part of any gang, Saxena said.

He added that one of the accused, Satendra, a resident of Geeta Colony, Delhi, had multiple cases registered against him. Until now, we know of at least 14 cases against Satendra. Almost eight to 10 cases had been registered at the Geeta Colony police station. We are in the process of gathering more information about his criminal history, the SHO said.

Raj Kumar was also a resident of Geeta Colony while Raju was from Shahdara, Delhi, police said.

Police said during interrogation, the accused admitted to stealing motorcycles from Delhi-NCR. We are now trying to gather more information about their operation, Saxena said.

An FIR was registered against the three at Sector 20 police station under sections 411 (dishonestly receiving stolen property) and 414 (assistance in concealment of stolen property) of the Indian Penal Code and Section 3/25 of the Arms Act. They were sent to jail after being produced in the court.
If the criminal law as a whole is the Cinderella of jurisprudence, then the law of sentencing is Cinderellas illegitimate baby, said British criminologist Nigel Walker. Sentencing is an instrument of social defence as well as re-socialisation of the criminal. It seems our judges pay no heed to Gandhis view of hate the sin not the sinner. Lalu Prasads recent non-concurrent sentences for the same set of offences in the fodder scam not only go against the reformative theory of punishment but are in clear violation of decisions of the Supreme Court.

Bollywood actor Salman Khan has been given five years imprisonment in the blackbuck poaching case. Was it just desert for him? Has he paid the price of his stardom? Should his social works been taken into account? Is sentencing an art or a science?

The Wildlife Protection Act,1972, provides a minimum of one year and maximum of six years imprisonment for the offence committed by Khan. In a country where people were given the death penalty to satisfy the collective conscience of the community, critics have questioned Khans harsh sentence due to overwhelming public support for him and spontaneous celebrations organised by his fans on the grant of bail.

Sentencing is the least understood area of the criminal justice system in India and is certainly not a mechanical or mathematical function.

We have an indeterminate sentencing policy under which law provides maximum punishments and in some exceptional cases even minimum punishments. A mid-point sentence is generally to be given under what is called the tariff system. In Khans case thus sentence should not have been more than three years.

Surprisingly, unlike western countries, we neither have a sentencing Act nor any statutory guidelines for the judges. In sentencing functions, judges make an attempt to juggle objects of various sizes while walking a tightrope which is being shaken at both ends. The judge has to balance the interest of the accused, his/her family, the victim and his/her family and the society at large. Balancing being the central concern of sentencing, it is called an art or intuition.

There has to be a counter-balance between the goals of sentencing, i.e. retribution, deterrence and reformation. Retributive theory which has long been rejected was revived by Andrew von Hirsch with concept of just desert ie the notion of deserved punishment. In ideal terms justice can never be retributive. Just desert should thus mean nothing more than principle of proportionality. The absurd demand for a mandatory death sentence in cases of child rapes shows that we as a nation have no idea about the penology as the intensity of punishment has no deterrent effect. Lately our judges have been showing more inclination towards retribution and deterrence rather than reformation and rehabilitation. Liberalism faces a threat here as well.

Deterrence is nothing more than fiction. The problem with the theory of general deterrence is that it justifies passing of harsher sentences against the convict so that others in future get deterred. This is a superficial appeal. The utility of general deterrence has not been proved in any authentic scientific study. It is the certainty not the intensity of punishment which may have some (if at all) deterrent value.

Since Indian jails are described as universities of criminality, no graduate from such universities is likely to become a better human being after serving his/her term. In fact the best prison reform would be to close down prisons.

Personal mitigation is a globally recognised principle and includes admission of guilt by the accused, assisting criminal justice system, voluntary payment of compensation to the victim or his/her family, contribution to society etc. Reportedly Khan does lot of social work and gives lakhs of rupees in charity.

Equality demands that the elite too should not be unfairly treated. The court should not punish harshly anyone just because he is a celebrity, such as Salman Khan, or a political leader, such as Lalu Prasad.

The denunciation and rebuke faced by Khan already had the desired effect. His image had got a beating and except for his diehard fans, he is no more their idol. In fact, for such criminals even shorter terms of imprisonment involve much greater deprivation and pain.

Faizan Mustafa is vice-chancellor, NALSAR University of Law

The views expressed are personal
A local court has framed charges against a deputy superintendent of police (DSP) and two assistant sub-inspectors (ASIs) for corruption, extortion, false information and criminal conspiracy in a 2015 false rape case. The trial will begin on May 16. DSP Desh Bandhu is currently posted at Haryana Police headquarters, while ASI Raj Pal is posted in Sector-25 crime branch, Panchkula, and ASI Ramesh was recently shifted from Panchkula police lines to Yamunanagar.

What is the matter

On May 22, 2015, the Chandimandir police station booked an Ambala resident, Pranveer Saini for rape on the complaint of a local resident, Rajni. But later the complaint was found false. Investigators determined that the complainant, the DSP and the ASIs implicated Pranveer to extort money from him and his family.

The probe found that ASI Ramesh, the then in-charge of Ramgarh police post, and ASI Raj Pal, in conspiracy with other accused, had demanded Rs 40 lakh for themselves and the then Panchkula DSP Desh Bandhu.

Trio claim innocence During arguments on framing of charges, the counsel representing the two ASIs claimed that there was no material evidence to prove charges of corruption and extortion against them. The duo even claimed of having been exonerated in the internal findings. Similarly, DSP Bandhus counsel Abhishek Rana pleaded that his client was falsely implicated, and he had no concern with the demand of money by the co-accused. Even Rajni and her kin claimed that the police had termed her complaint false, even as her medical was conducted and also a statement was recorded before a magistrate under Section 164 of the Criminal Procedure Code

After initial FIR, three separate challans were filed in the extortion case. The first one was filed on September 9, 2015, against Rajni and her kin Hasim Ansari. Second challan, dated November 9, 2015, was filed against both ASIs and Rajnis acquaintances Nasim Ansari and Salim Ansari, besides Subodh Pruthi and Ashwani Sahni, who were linked with the police.

Finally, DSP Bandhu was charged under various sections of the of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and Prevention of Corruption (PC) Act on November 22, 2015.

Charges framed

Hearing the matter on April 13, the court of additional sessions judge Narender Shaura in his order stated that on the perusal of phone transcripts, the inquiry reached to the conclusion that a false rape case was lodged by Rajni and an amount was demanded on behalf of DSP Desh Bandhu, who was the then supervisory officer of Chandimandir police station, where the rape case was initially registered.

The court further ruled that the argument of the police officials that they were exonerated in the departmental enquiry did not hold ground.

The court is of the view that there is prima facie evidence against them for framing of charge for commission of offences punishable under Sections 7, 8 and 12 of the Prevention of Corruption Act, and also for commission of offences punishable under Section 389 (extortion) read with Section 120B (criminal conspiracy), read the order.

Other accused, including Rajni, are charged with wrong information (Section 182), cheating by personation (Section 419), forgery (Section 468) and criminal conspiracy (Section 120-B) of the IPC.
Kiran Bala, the Sikh woman from Garhshankar town in Punjabs Hoshiarpur district who embraced Islam and married a Muslim man while on a pilgrimage to Pakistan, had dropped hints that she may not be coming back, said her family, in hindsight, on Friday. Also, as reporters contacted her on the phone and asked if she wants to talk to her children, she said she has no connection with them  Mere koi bachche nahin (I have no children), she said  and hung up.

The 31-year-old woman, now named Amna Bibi, was married to a mechanic, Narinder Singh, who died in a road accident in 2013, and has left behind her two sons aged 6 and 8 and a 13-year-old daughter, with whom she lived at her in-laws home here. She was on an April 12-21 pilgrim visa as part of a jatha (group), but went missing and later re-emerged after she had converted and married on April 16 and filed an application for visa extension to the Pakistani government citing threat of assassination if forced to return.

Said her sister-in-law Gisty (who goes by one name): Before leaving for Amritsar from where she had to join the jatha, Kiran gave Rs 50 each to her three kids and my daughter as shagun which she had never done before. She even dressed up as if she was going for a wedding. She further said that Kiran would sometimes share secrets with her but she never let me know about her intentions.

Kirans eldest daughter said that before leaving for Pakistan Kiran had asked her to take care of her younger siblings and obey the grandparents. Mummy has taken away all her jewellery, cash and clothes. She told me that my silver anklets were in the almirah, but today, when I checked, those were also missing, she said, asking for her name not to be printed.

Used FB, Bigo Live a lot

I knew that she was in contact with someone on social media, but she told me that the guy lives in Dubai. She even claimed to have received Rs 14,500 in her bank account from him, Gisty said, adding that Kiran was active on Facebook as well as Bigo Live, a video-based social network. She would remain glued to the phone day in and day out. She did not listen to anyone, not even her children, said her late husbands mother, Krishan Kaur.

The mother-in-law said Kiran had converted from Hinduism to Sikhism for her love marriage with Narinder. After his death, she left for Delhi to stay with her parents but, upon our insistence, came back after five months, she added. HT tried to contact Kirans paternal family over the phone but they did not respond to calls. They have already given up on her. Before leaving for Pakistan, she went to see her ailing father in a Delhi hospital, said Krishan Kaur.

Kids fear taunts

Even now, if we want her back it is only for the children. They repeatedly ask me when their mother will come back, Krishan Kaur sobbed, claiming that the family tried to persuade her against going to Pakistan alone. Kirans daughter is embarrassed about her mothers conversion and remarriage, according to the family. She does not want to go to school. She says people will taunt her, said Gisty.

The father-in-law, who is a granthi at a local gurdwara, said she had called him up from Lahore several times but never talked to her kids. I kept defending her despite her ways, only due to the children, he said. The family also showed Aadhaar cards and ration cards to prove that Kiran is indeed the childrens mother.

Although we do not vouch for her integrity, we suspect that she might have been misled. We hope she has not fallen into the wrong hands. We are ready to forgive and accept her, said Krishan Kaur, referring to the familys theory that she is being used by Pakistans spy agencies.

Meanwhile, all elected and co-opted SGPC members of Hoshiarpur, Mahilpur and Garhshankar denied having recommended visa for Kiran. Surinder Singh Bhulewal Rathan, Jung Bahadur Singh, Ranjit Kaur and Charanjit Singh said they did not receive any application for the Baisakhi pilgrimage. Tarsem merely said he had submitted the application before SGPC officials at a gurdwara in Hoshiarpur. She had gone as part of a 700-strong group.
Rajinikanth starrer Kaala was expected to hit the screen on April 27, and the film was cleared by the Censor Board as well. However, the 48-day long strike in the Tamil film industry forced the Tamil Nadu Film Producers Council to come up with a new release chart, and as per this, Kaala is now slotted for a June 7 release.

Dhanush took to Twitter to announce the new release date. He wrote, Happy to announce that Superstars #kaala will release on June 7th in all languages worldwide. #makewayfortheking #thalaivar.

Kaala is about a don who lives in the slums of Dharavi in Mumbai and stands up for people of the lower economic class. The film features Eashwari Rao as Rajinikanths wife in the film while Nana Patekar will be seen in a negative role. The teaser of Kaala was released on social media in March, and it immediately created a buzz around the film.

Pa Ranjith, known for making a comment on political situations, is likely to make some statements one more time.

The music for the film is composed by Santhosh Narayanan and it is produced by Dhanush under his banner Wunderbar Films and Lyca Productions.The movie also stars Huma Qurreshi, Pankaj Tripathi and Samuthirakani in pivotal roles.

Rajinikanth, who announced that he would be entering politics also awaits the release of Shankar directorial 2.0, which has been delayed thrice so far.

Follow @htshowbiz for more

ott:10:ht-entertainment_listing-desktop
Australias prime minister said the Australian navy has a perfect right to traverse the South China Sea after a media report on Friday that the Chinese navy had challenged three Australian warships in the hotly contested waterway.

The Chinese challenged two Australian frigates and an oil replenishment ship this month as the Australian ships were sailing to Vietnam, Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported, citing anonymous defence officials.

It is not clear what took place during the encounter while China was conducting its largest ever naval exercises in the region. Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull did not comment on the specific incident when questioned by reporters in London.

We maintain and practice the right of freedom of navigation and overflight throughout the world and, in this context, were talking about naval vessels on the worlds oceans, including the South China Sea, as is our perfect right in accordance with international law, Turnbull said.

The defence department said it did not provide operational details related to ships transiting the South China Sea.

But the department confirmed the three warships had arrived in Ho Chi Minh City on Thursday. They are making a three-day goodwill visit to Vietnam.

China claims virtually the entire South China Sea and has built several islands to bolster its position in the waterway where other governments have competing claims and which is one of the worlds busiest sea lanes.

Australia has resisted pressure from the United States, its most important defence ally, in challenging the Chinese territorial zones, which are not recognised by international law.

Adm. Harry Harris, the commander of US forces in the Pacific, has invited Australia to mount joint naval patrols in the South China Sea and has described China as a disruptive transnational force. President Donald Trump has nominated the outspoken critic of China as the next US ambassador to Australia.
A Cambodian man murdered his ex-wife and then jumped off a bridge in a suicide that he broadcast live on Facebook, police said on Friday, in the first such case reported in the country.

Facebook is the social media platform of choice for Cambodians. Nearly a third of the countrys 15.8 million people are Facebook users and the network is a major source of information, particularly for young people.

Ra Chhay Rath, 21, killed his former wife at a school on Thursday then went to the nearby Tsubasa bridge, in Kandal province, and jumped into the Mekong river. Only the suicide was broadcast, police said.

It has never happened before. It was the first case, police spokesman Kirth Chantharith told Reuters, referring to the broadcast of the suicide.

We are investigating to find out why he killed his ex-wife.

Police said the mans body had not been found.

Reuters was able to access videos of the suicide on Friday shared by Facebook users. It was not immediately clear whether anyone had reported the video or asked for it to be taken down.

A spokesman for Facebook later said the company was deeply saddened by this tragedy and that it had removed the video.

We dont allow the promotion of violence or suicide on Facebook and have removed the video, the spokesman said in an email to Reuters.

We want people to have a safe experience on Facebook and we work with organisations around the world to provide assistance for people in distress.

Last year, Facebook said it would expand its pattern recognition software after successful tests in the United States to detect users with suicidal intent.

Facebook has been embroiled in a number of content moderation controversies over recent years.

It has also been accused by human rights advocates of not doing enough to weed out hate messages while it faces questions in several countries about data privacy.
A Zimbabwean parliamentary committee is summoning former leader Robert Mugabe to explain past comments on alleged diamond looting  the first time a public institution has called him to account for such claims made during his 37-year rule.

Mugabe, who resigned in November following a military intervention and extraordinary public demonstrations, has said $15 billion worth of diamonds were looted from fields in the countrys east. He later said he had no basis for that figure and spoke off the top of his head.

But parliamentary committee chairman Temba Mliswa told The Associated Press that the 94-year-old still should appear on May 9 to explain his comments. The Parliament will dispatch an official letter for Mugabe to appear very soon, Mliswa said.

It was not clear whether Mugabe, who has lived quietly in the capital since his resignation, will agree to show up.

The allegations of diamond looting have been a source of anger in the once-prosperous southern African country whose economy collapsed under Mugabes long rule. Non-governmental organisations such as Global Witness have accused government and security agencies of both looting and human rights abuses.

Zimbabwe security agencies, including the military and police, were involved in the mining in partnership with Chinese firms until the government cancelled all diamond mining licenses in the region in 2016, making way for a monopoly by a government-owned firm.

The parliamentary committee also has asked former vice president Joice Mujuru to provide evidence. Former and serving top police officers, government officials and mining executives already have appeared before the committee.
Indonesias deeply conservative Aceh province on Friday caned several unmarried couples for showing affection in public and two women for prostitution before an enthusiastic audience of hundreds.

The canings were possibly the last to be done before large crowds in Aceh after the provinces governor announced earlier this month that the punishments would be moved indoors.

The caning last year of two men for gay sex before a baying mob drew attention to Acehs increasingly harsh implementation of Sharia law and a wave of condemnation.

The women accused of prostitution were caned 11 times each. One of the women held up her hand after the fifth lash, signalling the pain was too intense. She was given a drink and the strokes resumed despite her evident discomfort.

An Indonesian woman is publicly caned in Banda Aceh, Aceh province, Indonesia. (Reuters Photo)

The six young people accused of flirtatious behaviour received between 11 and 22 strokes. Sharia police wanted to convict them of adultery, which wouldve resulted in a greater number of lashes, but lacked enough witnesses.

Some residents of Aceh, the only province in Muslim-majority Indonesia to impose Sharia law, are opposed to having the canings performed inside prisons. About a thousand people protested outside the Banda Aceh mayors office on Thursday. They say hiding the canings will reduce the deterrent effect.

Historically, Aceh, located at the tip of the island of Sumatra, was the first region of the Indonesian archipelago to adopt Islam after contacts with Arab traders from as early as the 8th century. Its implementation of Sharia law was a concession made by the central government in 2001 as part of efforts to end a decades-long war for independence.

Human Rights Watch has dismissed the change to indoor whipping as cosmetic and called for Aceh to abolish caning and the laws that allow it. It says caning remains a form of torture whether it is done in public or not.
India on Friday expressed deep anguish at the Indian flag being pulled down, torn and stamped on during protests on Wednesday and said it expects the UK government to take action, including legal measures, against those responsible.

Britain officially apologised on Thursday for the incident that prompted a strong protest from the Indian high commission. It occurred in Parliament Square as Prime Minister Narendra Modi was engaged in bilateral talks and an address to the Indian diaspora before the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.

External affairs ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said: We are deeply anguished over the incident involving our national flag. The UK has regretted the incident at the highest level. The flag was replaced soon after it was brought to the notice of authorities.

We expect action, including legal action, not only against those responsible on the ground but also those behind the act.

Campaign group Sikh Federation (UK), which was part of the anti-India protests on Wednesday, said India had over-reacted to the incident.

The UK Foreign Office said in a statement: While people have the right to hold peaceful protests, we are disappointed with the action taken by a small minority in Parliament Square and contacted high commissioner Yashvardhan Kumar Sinha as soon as we were made aware.

The visit to the UK by Prime Minister Modi has strengthened our relationship with India and we look forward to working even more closely together on a number of important areas.

Bhai Amrik Singh, chair of the Sikh Federation (UK), said: The impromptu removal of the Indian flag by protesters in Parliament Square...towards the end of the demonstration was intended to make a political point against the policies of the Narendra Modi-led Indian government.

A complaint has been filed with Scotland Yard by broadcast journalist Loveena Tandon, who said she faced intimidation and worse from the protestors in Parliament Square. The Indian Journalists Association condemned the violence and threats faced by journalists.

Tandon, who has video footage of her intimidation, said in a statement: The incident took place on the day the Indian Prime Minister, Mr Narendra Modi, was having bilateral talks with Prime Minister Theresa May's government In London ahead of the start of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting 2018.

I was covering the events on the day, interacting with the huge turnout of people who came to support Mr Modi and some even to protest. The historic Parliament Square in London was shining, with 53 colourful flags of nations of the Commonwealth. It was just after 2 pm when there was unusual noise just under the Indian flag post.

To my shock, the protesters, while raising anti-India slogans, brought the Indian flag down, tore it with scissors until it was completely destroyed. It happened within minutes and there are videos, now viral, demonstrating the same. Despite a huge presence of policemen, no one managed to stop them through this undemocratic act.

I reached out to one group asking why they did that and what their demand was. I was polite. Within seconds, I was pushed, abused and intimidated. A gentlemen nearby had to rescue me and eventually the police came to lead me to safety.

Tandon said she was issuing the statement as a journalist and a woman. She said the unparliamentary words used against her while she was doing her job with sincerity was unacceptable. Instead of taking the opportunity to talk to her about their demands, the protesters had turned against her, she said.

A gentleman who came to my rescue later told me that while escorting me out he was kicked twice. I kept telling the protesters I am sorry- you cannot speak to me like this. But they continued to abuse me and anyone who tried to help, she added.

She further said, I am also deeply concerned with regard to security at this venue in the heart of London. It is well known to all that this demonstration could have turned dangerous. How could the organisers allow a group to bring down the flag of a country without permission from anyone or without dignity and defile it, is a wonder. I have covered events all over the world and I would never have believed that this could happen in London.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) on Friday condemned a "burglary-style raid" on the house of its consultant, Maryam Hasan, who edited the recently released annual report on the state of human rights in Pakistan.

In a statement, HRCP stated the house of Hasan, who lives alone in Lahore, was raided on Thursday night during a burglary that lasted for more than an hour. The two burglars took away Hasans laptop, phones, two hard disc drives, jewellery and some cash.

"They told Hasan, who lives alone, that they had also come the day before, but not committed burglary since she had not been at home," the statement said. "They questioned Hasan about her professional engagements and intimidated her in a roundabout manner" before leaving.

"HRCP suspects that the two suave raiders were no ordinary thieves and calls on the government of Punjab to apprehend the culprits and establish their identity. HRCP will hold the provincial authorities responsible for any attempt by state or non-state actors to harass any persons associated with the commission," the statement added.

Established in 1987, the HRCP is an NGO monitoring human rights violations across Pakistan and seeking remedies through public campaigns, lobbying and intervention in courts.

Released last week, its damning report titled State of Human Rights in 2017 highlighted an increase in enforced disappearances and targeted violence against soft targets, and raised the issue of curbs on freedoms of expression and association. It also appreciated the legal progress in other aspects of human rights in Pakistan.

The report said 313 cases of missing persons received by an official commission remained unresolved and that 2017 was a troubling year for journalists and bloggers. Journalists and bloggers continue to sustain threats, attacks and abductions and the blasphemy law serves to coerce people into silence, the report said.
Two Palestinians were shot dead by Israeli forces in the northern Gaza Strip on Friday, medical sources said, as demonstrations entered their fourth week along the Gaza-Israel border.

Ashraf al-Qudra, spokesman for the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza, said Ahmad Abu Aqel, 25, died of bullet wounds sustained east of Jabaliya. The Israeli army said it was looking into the incident.

Another man killed in the north of the Gaza Strip was identified as Ahmad Rashad Al-Athamneh, 24.

Security sources in Gaza said Abu Aqel was standing near a group of people setting fire to tyres near the border with Israel.

These two death brings the number of Gazans killed by Israeli forces in demonstrations and clashes since March 30 to 36, according to Gazas health ministry.

Thousands of Gazans were gathered on Friday at various locations along the border in the blockaded enclave, calling for Palestinian refugees to be able to return to their former lands in what is now Israel.

Hundreds were clashing with Israeli forces, an AFP correspondent said.

Israel has pledged to stop damage to the fence, infiltrations and attacks, and alleges there have been attempts at all three.

It accuses Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, with whom it has fought three wars since 2008, of using the protests as cover to carry out violence.

(The story has not been modified from its original version, only the headline has been changed)
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and heads of 52 other countries agreed on Friday that Britains Prince Charles will succeed Queen Elizabeth as the head of the Commonwealth, an issue that has generated much debate in recent times.

The queen, who turns 92 on Saturday, has been the head since the death of her father, King George VI, in 1952. On Wednesday, she expressed her sincere wish that Prince Charles succeed her to ensure stability and continuity of the group.

Given Prince Charles interest in the group over the years and support from the leaders, agreement on his appointment was a certainty.

The Leaders Statement at the conclusion of the Commonwealth Heads Of Government Meeting said: We recognise the role of The Queen in championing the Commonwealth and its peoples. The next Head of the Commonwealth shall be His Royal Highness Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales.

The queens expression of her wish and Prime Minister Theresa Mays remarks thanking her for her contribution over the decades reflected a carefully choreographed move to appoint Prince Charles with the agreement of the leaders of the 53 countries.

Leaders such as Labours Jeremy Corbyn had wanted the head of the Commonwealth not to be confined to the British royal family, but to be rotated among the countries by agreement.

Given Indias influence, New Delhis agreement was crucial. Former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehrus support to the queen was key to her appointment as the head of Commonwealth.

Prince Charles met Modi in New Delhi last November to personally invite him to the CHOGM. He carried a letter from the queen that was described by officials as very warm and personal.

Mays remarks to the queen on Wednesday were significant: Over many years you have been the Commonwealth's most steadfast and fervent champion. You have been true to the deepest values of the Commonwealth  that the voice of the smallest member country is worth precisely as much as that of the largest; that the wealthiest and the most vulnerable stand shoulder to shoulder.

You have seen us through some of our most serious challenges. And we commit to sustaining this Commonwealth, which you have so carefully nurtured. For your service, for your dedication, for your constancy  we thank you.
Thousands of students walked out of classes across the United States on Friday, marking the 19th anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School with a show of unity aimed at pressuring politicians to enact tighter gun restrictions.

Students from more than 2,600 schools and institutions were expected to leave their classes at 10:00 a.m. local time, organizers said. Many wore orange, a colour that has come to represent the movement against gun violence, as they observed a 13-second silence in honour of those killed at Columbine.

Waving placards with slogans including No more gun violence and I should be worried about grades, not guns, they walked out of school in cities including New York, Detroit and Washington.

Outside the White House, scores of young protesters sat in silence while they listened to the names of gun violence victims read aloud.

Its an issue thats been in this country for a long time, said Ayanna Rhodes, 14, who walked out of Washington International School. (The Columbine killings) happened like 20 years ago, and we are still getting mass shootings in schools.

Students from Fiorello H. Laguardia High School march out of their school in support of a National School Walkout in the Manhattan borough of New York City, New York, US, April 20, 2018. (REUTERS)

On April 20, 1999, two Columbine seniors rampaged through their school, killing 12 of their classmates and a teacher before committing suicide. Since then, mass shootings have occurred with shocking frequency across the United States.

In the latest gun violence to hit a high school, one person was wounded and a suspect was in custody after a shooting on Friday morning at Forest High School in Marion County, Florida, police said.

The second deadliest public school shooting in US history took place in Parkland, Florida, on Feb. 14, leaving 17 dead. The shooting set off a national student movement calling for an end to gun violence and tighter gun restrictions.

Carlos Rodriguez, a 17-year-old junior from Parklands Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, was in Columbine for the anniversary, and said he found a sense of solidarity.

Thats the only thing thats keeping us Douglas students alive right now: the distraction of fighting for our rights and advocating for our lives, Rodriguez told Reuters. Its the one thing keeping us hopeful, its the one thing keeping us from not being able to sleep at night.

Another Parkland survivor, Cameron Kasky, praised Fridays demonstrators. Keep marching forward and NEVER settle for less, Kasky wrote on Twitter.

Youths take part in a National School Walkout anti-gun march in New York City, New York, US, April 20, 2018. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid (REUTERS)

The walkouts, speeches and drive to sign up voters were aimed at pressuring US politicians to enact tighter restrictions on gun sales in the run-up to Novembers midterm congressional elections.

After walking out of class and observing the 13-second silence, it was up to students how to demonstrate. Suggestions from national organizers included marches to the offices of local lawmakers, speeches, and voter registration activities.

On Thursday, Colorado gun control activists rallied near Columbine High School, calling for an end to gun violence.

Columbine has not held classes on April 20 since the massacre, a district spokeswoman said, so there would be no walkout at the school. Students were encouraged to take part in community service.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas teachers demonstrate in front of the school on Friday, April 20, 2018 in Parkland, Fla. (AP)

The latest national rally came more than a month after tens of thousands of students from some 3,000 schools participated in the #ENOUGH National School Walkout to demand that lawmakers seek tighter gun control regulations.

It also followed March For Our Lives rallies in cities across the United States on March 24 that were some of the biggest US youth demonstrations in decades, with hundreds of thousands of young Americans and their supporters taking to the streets to demand tighter gun laws.

Dudley Brown, president of the Colorado-based National Association for Gun Rights, said the gun-control movement seeks to have the government take away rights.

The main objective of these students is to ban firearms completely, and confiscate the firearms of law-abiding Americans, Brown said. We will oppose them at every step.
The US Senate on Thursday narrowly confirmed President Donald Trumps pick to head the space agency NASA, over objections from Democrats who warned he lacked a technical background.

Jim Bridenstine, a congressman from Oklahoma, US Navy veteran and former pilot, was confirmed on a 50-49 vote, and will become the 13th administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration seven months after Trump named him to lead the agency.

Bridenstine, 42, has expressed an interest in returning humans back to the moon, spoken of closer ties between NASA and the commercial space industry, and has voiced skepticism about human-caused climate change.

He was a strong supporter of Trump during the 2016 presidential race.

Senate Democrat Bill Nelson, a former astronaut from Florida, was unenthusiastic in his welcome for Bridenstine.

The @NASA administrator should be a consummate space professional -- not a politician, Nelson tweeted.

He or she must also be a leader who has the ability to bring us together on a shared vision for future space exploration.

NASAs previous full-time administrator, former astronaut Charles Bolden, resigned in January 2017.

The confirmation came as Trump complained in a tweet that Democrats are slow walking all of my nominations.

His pick for Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, is expected to be voted on next week.
Appointment

20 April 2018

Liaison Capitol Hill, a Joie de Vivre Hotel, announces today the appointment of hospitality expert Joy J. Kosmela as Director of Sales & Marketing. In this role, Joy will be responsible for the direction and leadership of the hotel's sales and marketing efforts, including the repositioning of the hotel internally and in the marketplace.

Kosmela joins Liaison Capitol Hill with over 20 years of experience working in the hospitality industry for well-respected hotels and brands including Hilton Hotels, Fairmont Washington, DC, Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants and The Fairfax Embassy Row. Prior to accepting her new position with Liaison, Kosmela was the Regional Director of Sales & Marketing for Pyramid Hotel Group where she supported global sales programs and top-line revenue strategies.

A graduate of Hunter College, City University of New York, Kosmela holds a Bachelor of Arts in German as well as an Associate Degree in Spanish, French & German for Business and Tourism from The Barbados Community College. She is fluent in English and German and is proficient in Spanish and French. Kosmela currently resides in Washington, DC.
Appointment

20 April 2018

The St. Regis New York is delighted to announce the appointment of Mark Arnao as Executive Chef. Boasting extensive knowledge of the culinary hospitality industry, Chef Arnao brings a wealth of experience to his new role at the beloved flagship property where he will oversee the culinary direction for the hotel, including its Astor Court restaurant and the famed King Cole Bar.

Chef Arnao's interest in the culinary arts began at the age of nine when he visited a local Italian restaurant in his hometown of Philadelphia. He was taken under the wing of its executive chef, where he developed a deep appreciation for the culinary industry. Chef Arnao's professional career started in 1993 at the Sheraton Philadelphia Society Hill, where he created seasonal menus and learned the intricacies of each station within the kitchen. Chef Arnao then moved to The Ritz-Carlton, Philadelphia where he led the team and implemented new service standards. Chef Arnao most recently served as Executive Chef of The Ritz-Carlton New York, Central Park followed by the Westchester Country Club. In his new role, Chef Arnao will oversee the culinary operations at the hotel and elevate the dining experience for guests and locals alike.
Supplier News

20 April 2018

Guest Intelligence experts ReviewPro have announced their integration with protel hotelsoftware GmbH. Building on their existing partnership, the companies' full integration allows a seamless connection for common clients, enabling a two-way flow of guest data and providing deeper insights into the guest experience.

The API integration means that common clients can now automatically pass relevant guest details from their PMS system to ReviewPro so they can create and distribute customized in-stay or post-stay guest satisfaction surveys. Once the feedback is collected by ReviewPro, it is then synchronized to enrich the guest profile in protel. This makes it easier for hoteliers to both segment guest data and to drill down on analytics, creating opportunities for better informed operational decisions and more targeted marketing campaigns.

RJ Friedlander, CEO of ReviewPro commented, "This integration offers a fantastic opportunity for our common clients to take guest experience management to the next level. The possibility to analyze guest feedback based on data such as room number or type provides hotels with an unprecedented level of detail to prioritize improvements, increase guest satisfaction, and boost hotel revenue."

"From our perspective, ReviewPro is a company that is truly in-sync with what we are working hard to achieve here at protel. With this commitment to our continued partnership, a fully integrated, efficient and vendor-neutral technology solution for all clients has moved one important step closer. The in-depth nature of the ReviewPro tool plus our combined dedication to on-going development ensures that we continuously deliver excellence. This collaboration not only immediately empowers our clients to drive their businesses and revenue today but also serves to expand the capabilities of our system, going forward" said Jeremy Armes, VP Marketing, protel.

ABOUT PROTEL

protel offers technology and service solutions specifically and exclusively for the hospitality industry. The consistent focus on the needs of a single industry makes us one of the most experienced and successful providers of advanced property management systems (PMS). Whatever the requirements, whether installed on-site, web-based in the Cloud, or as a hybrid solution, our flexible and scalable software solutions cover the full industry spectrum, from small independent hotels to multinational hotel chains.

Founded in 1994, protel hotelsoftware GmbH operates under the leadership of managing partners Ingo Dignas and Manfred Osthues. With headquarters located in Dortmund, Germany, branch offices in Berlin, Vienna, Austria, and Atlanta, USA, plus a dense network of partner companies working in close cooperation, protel enjoys a worldwide presence. In over 93 countries, hotels and hotel management schools around the world attest to protel's high- level expertise and reliability, a third of them using protel Cloud Solutions.

Further information: www.protel.net
Opinion Article

20 April 2018

The neologism brandjacking was coined over a decade ago, by astutely combining the words branding and hijacking. In our industry, when we talk about brandjacking, we usually refer to all those activities whose lowest common denominator is the exploitation of another company brand's equity, such as the creation of fake social network profiles or mirror-websites. The most frequent use of brandjacking is, however, is the one that goes under the name of Affiliate Brand Bidding. This mischievous tactic consists in investing in search engines advertising campaigns and bidding on terms that are related targeted company. Ever googled your hotel's name and found Booking.com, Expedia, trivago and TripAdvisor before your official website? Well, that's ABB.

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So how do we deal with this in our Revenue Management strategy?

Take a look at the Google Search for this hotel below. Whos is first? Is this what we want as hotels?

HOTELS: CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD?

According to a recent study by MarkMonitor, the economic damage of Affiliate Brand Bidding in travel is estimated to be around 2.2 Billion USD because, while in almost any other industry companies are prevented from using this questionable strategy by the legitimate trademark owners, it is (unfortunately) common practice in our business. Online Goliaths such as Booking.com and Expedia, in fact, are not particularly worried about systematically hijacking hotels' brands by redirecting traffic to their websites. Because of the almost-non-existent bargaining power that hoteliers have towards their distribution channels, in fact, it is no surprise that one of the many clauses of Booking.com contacts gives the famous OTA (and its subsidiaries) complete freedom to bid on the name of your property. Did you know that?

HOW CAN HOTELS PROTECT THEMSELVES

Renegotiating contractual clauses with OTAs and other distributors, therefore, would obviously the best way to go, even though it is, unfortunately, the most impervious. Another, more expensive but less complicated, solution is to bid on your hotel brand, using your official website as the landing page for the traffic generated by these campaigns (technically, this practice is known as brand protection).

A third, less known but extremely effective, method is to file a complaint with Google for trademark infringement. Let's take a closer look.

YOU JUST GOT LITT UP!

The prerequisite for submitting this complaint is to apply for a trade mark with the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) based in Alicante, Spain at this link: https://euipo.europa.eu/ohimportal/en/web/guest/apply-now

The type of mark hotels should apply for is the word mark. This step is extremely important, because figurative marks (logos) are not taken into consideration by Google's trademarks infringement team. The EUIPO website provides a simple step by step application form, where hotels can create and submit their application in less than ten minutes. It is crucial to know, anyhow, that one in five applications is opposed. So if you are concerned about conflicting trademarks, seeking legal advice is highly suggested. The mark is valid for ten years and it has a cost of 850,00 , that should be paid in advance. A short video tutorial can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdXjcoi0I58

IT'S TIME TO COMPLAIN!

Only when the trademark is registered one can finally file the complaint with Google at this link: https://services.google.com/inquiry/aw_tmcomplaint?hl=en

The complaint can be filed by the trademark owner or by third parties (consulting agencies, lawyers, advertising companies, etc.). In the latter case, the trademark owner must send written authorization to [email protected] , confirming that the third party is authorized to act on his/her behalf.

WHAT YOU CAN ACHIEVE

What next? Unfortunately, in recent years the legislative attitude towards Google advertisers has become more and more permissive. Just up until a few years ago, in fact, it was possible to ask for trademark protection at keyword level but, since 2010, it is no longer possible to prevent an OTA (or a review site, or a metasearch engine, etc.) from bidding on trademarked keywords. But not all hope is lost, on the contrary! Hotels can still protect their brands at Ad level: yes, OTAs can appear when a user searches for the hotel brand, but they can not use the hotel brand in the ad text (even though it may still appear in the display URL).

For ad campaigns targeting the EU and EFTA (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland) regions, the policy for trademarks in ad text applies, while no protection is possible for ad campaigns targeting Australia, New Zealand, US, Canada, UK, and Ireland. In these countries, in fact, AdWords advertising campaigns can include the hotel trademark in the ad text, hence the inutility to register one's trademark worldwide.

NOT ONLY GOOGLE: THE OTHER SEARCH ENGINES

What about other search engines? Bing has a similar approach and hotels can file a complaint through its online form here: https://advertise.bingads.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/policies/trademark-misuse

Yandex, the main Russian search engine, is unfortunately much more permissive, asserting that Russian laws are "designed to encourage competition and freedom of economic activities".

Completely different is the approach of Baidu: in order to advertise on the Chinese search engine, in fact, one needs a special authorization issued by the People's Republic of China.

THE QUALITY SCORE

So, is it really worth applying for a trademark? Yes, it is. By preventing the use of one's trademark in the ad, in fact, OTAs quality score in Google Adwords drops, forcing Booking.com et similia to bid more just to keep the same position on the SERPs or, if the quality score gets too low, preventing them to show the ad tout court. Google quality score, in fact, ranges from 1 to 10 and is an estimate of the quality of the ads and of the landing pages triggered by that specific keyword. A high-quality score indicates that Google believes that the ad (and its landing page) is relevant and useful to the end user and vice-versa.

CONCLUSIONS

Applying for a trademark is, especially if combined with a solid SEA strategy, the most effective way to regain control of one's brand. And, according to Benjamin Sebagh, Technical Director at Creative Hackers, "Your Brand is your more precious asset". And you don't want it to end up on the wrong hands. Do you?

I think it is time Hotel marketing and revenue managers take charge of this issue. Trust me your web production goes up more than 10% if you control this well .... So nothing should be stopping you ...

Cheers,

Patrick Landman

P.S. for more tips, check out Hotel Marketing Plan
Performance

20 April 2018

The Canadian hotel industry has been flushed with news of mergers and acquisitions in recent years, while many of the major hotel companies have, and continue to, announce new brands within their portfolio, all designed to fit the needs of the ever-evolving hotel consumer.

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Horwath HTL Canada have prepared the latest Market Report in order to provide a comprehensive snapshot of the hotels brands operating within the Canadian hospitality landscape. With over two-thirds of the hotel inventory being made up of hotels consisting of less than 50 rooms, it is not surprising that branded hotels make up only 26% of the Canadian hotel inventory. However, in terms of guestrooms, these hotels accounts for more than half of the national volume of available guestrooms.

This report will provide an overview of Canadian hotel brands, including a distribution of brands by chain scale, by province and by key city as well as an indication of the key performance indicators by chain scale over the past five years.

Click here to download our report
Performance

20 April 2018

HENDERSONVILLE, Tennessee -- The U.S. hotel industry reported record-breaking performance during the first quarter of 2018, according to data from STR.



Compared with Q1 2017:

Occupancy: +0.9% to 61.6%

Average daily rate (ADR): +2.5% to US$127.37

Revenue per available room (RevPAR): +3.5% to US$78.46

"The absolute levels for each of the three key performance metrics were the highest STRhas ever benchmarked for a Q1," said Bobby Bowers, STR's senior VP of operations. "Supply (more than 460 million room nights available) and demand (more than 285 million room nights sold) also reached record levels for a Q1, but demand grew at a much higher rate (+3.0% vs. +2.0%)."

Among the Top 25 Markets, Super Bowl LII host, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota-Wisconsin, saw the quarter's largest increases in ADR (+18.6% to US$128.27) and RevPAR (+23.8% to US$77.88).

Other double-digit RevPAR increases were reported in Miami/Hialeah, Florida (+16.6% to US$216.42); Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-New Jersey (+13.5% to US$79.80); andOrlando, Florida (+10.7% to US$120.17).

Philadelphia's RevPAR growth was primarily driven by the quarter's highest increase in occupancy (+9.1% to 64.9%).

Miami posted the highest absolute values across the three key performance metrics: occupancy (85.3%), ADR (US$253.66) and RevPAR (US$216.42).

"Healthy ADR growth pushed RevPAR growth slightly ahead of first-quarter expectations," Bowers said. "As we've noted, overall numbers were lifted by the residual performance impact in hurricane-affected markets in Texas and Florida, but at the same time, the industry overcame a few tough calendar comparisons like the (presidential) inauguration and Women's March in D.C. last year as well as the Easter shift from April."

Affected by the tough-to-match comparison from January 2017, Washington, D.C.-Maryland-Virginia, reported the quarter's steepest decline in RevPAR (-11.0% to US$96.05), due primarily to the largest drop in ADR (-9.4% to US$150.27).

Seattle, Washington, experienced the largest decline in occupancy (-3.8% to 68.7%).
Performance

20 April 2018

HENDERSONVILLE, Tennessee -- The U.S. hotel industry reported positive year-over-year results in the three key performance metrics during the week of 8-14 April 2018, according to data from STR.



In comparison with the week of 9-15 April 2017, the industry recorded the following:

Occupancy: +6.1% to 68.1%

Average daily rate (ADR): +5.8% to US$130.57

Revenue per available room (RevPAR): +12.2% to US$88.95

STR analysts note performance growth was boosted by a favorable comparison with the week of Easter in 2017.

Among the Top 25 Markets, New Orleans, Louisiana, reported the largest increases in all three key performance metrics: occupancy (+26.1% to 85.0%), ADR (+36.8% to US$180.63) and RevPAR (+72.6% to US$153.48).

Chicago, Illinois, posted the second-largest increases in ADR (+23.8% to US$149.12) and RevPAR (+47.3% to US$110.22).

Denver, Colorado, experienced the second-highest rise in occupancy (+23.4% to 74.1%), resulting in the third-largest lift in RevPAR (+42.6% to US$96.04).

Overall, 15 of the Top 25 Markets reported double-digit growth in RevPAR.

Norfolk/Virginia Beach, Virginia, saw the steepest declines in occupancy (-14.2% to 64.6%) and RevPAR (-21.2% to US$60.77). ADR in the market fell 8.1% to US$94.02.

Miami/Hialeah, Florida, reported the largest drop in ADR (-9.5% to US$211.89).

Orlando, Florida, experienced the only other double-digit decrease in occupancy (-12.3% to 79.2%).
Performance

20 April 2018

Hong Kong sets Q1 occupancy record

sets Q1 occupancy record Maldives sees strong demand with significant boost from European tourists

sees strong demand with significant boost from European tourists Vietnam performance remains strong even with significant supply increases

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LONDON  Hotels in the Asia Pacific region registered growth across the three key performance metrics during Q1 2018, according to data from STR.

U.S. dollar constant currency, Q1 2018 vs. Q1 2017

Asia Pacific

Occupancy: +1.5% to 69.0%

Average daily rate (ADR): +3.0% to US$112.48

Revenue per available room (RevPAR): +4.5% to US$77.59

Local currency, Q1 2018 vs. Q1 2017

Hong Kong

Occupancy: +3.8% to 90.1%

Average daily rate (ADR): +10.7% to HKD1,482.02

Revenue per available room (RevPAR): +14.9% to HKD1,335.10

This was the first Q1 in STR's Hong Kong database with occupancy above 90%. According to STR analysts, performance momentum from 2017 extended into the first months of 2018 with strong demand, especially from Mainland China, generating more near-capacity occupancy nights and higher ADR premiums. Data from the Hong Kong Tourism Board showed a 9.9% increase in visitor arrivals during the first two months of 2018. Visitors from Mainland China accounted for 13.6% growth compared with the same two months in 2017.

Maldives

Occupancy: +7.6% to 76.7%

Average daily rate (ADR): +1.6% to MVR12,569.93

Revenue per available room (RevPAR): +9.4% to MVR9,637.91

The absolute occupancy level was the highest for a Q1 in Maldives since 2014 thanks to the highest Q1 demand increase in the country (+10.6%) since 2010. According to the Ministry of Tourism, tourist arrivals to Maldives increased 17.0% from Q1 2017. Europeans represented the largest share of arrivals (56.8%) and most growth (+23.2%) compared with other world regions.

Vietnam

Occupancy: +5.9% to 75.7%

Average daily rate (ADR): +5.5% to VND2,917,007.93

Revenue per available room (RevPAR): +11.7% to VND2,208,814.66

Even with healthy supply growth (+4.3%), the absolute occupancy level was the highest for a Q1 in Vietnam since 2007. STR analysts cite strong tourism and foreign investment as reasons behind the hotel performance and inventory growth in the country. As of STR's March Pipeline Report, Vietnam ranked third in the Asia Pacific region among countries with the most rooms in construction (20,633 rooms in 59 hotels). Strong demand has helped hoteliers maintain their pricing power during this time of supply growth.
Adrien Broner has been involved in a beef with Tekashi 6ix9ine this week and, as each side takes turns bashing the other on social media, Broner's fight with Jessie Vargas nears. Whether or not he will be embroiled in a street brawl with Tekashi before that is yet to be seen as they are both in the same city but one person that appears to have Broner's support is 50 Cent. Creating an interesting triangular dynamic, Fif was spotted with 6ix9ine last month, co-signing him as the King of New York. With his latest video, 50 is not taking sides in the 6ix9ine-Broner feud as he seems to fervently support both.

Yelling at the TV like any true middle-aged man watching sports, Fiddy chimed in while Adrien Broner addressed his upcoming fight. As Broner claims everybody is against him and throws around "bitch ass n---a" accusations, 50 yelled at AB that he is finally understanding things. Echoing Broner's "Shut that soft ass shit up" comment, the rapper and entertainer says he's betting his money on AB in the fight. 6ix9ine notably is betting a cool $300K against Adrien for the Saturday duel, with AB matching the bet by already preparing a check with Tekashi's name on it.

Captioning his post, "AB got me hype right now, this gonna be a good fight this weekend," it's clear who 50's favorite is. Who do you think has the upper hand this Saturday? Will Jessie Vargas or Adrien Broner come out on top?
Not too long ago Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson labeled himself "the big, brown, bald, tattooed Oprah." He gave himself this name after discussing how much he loves buying people cars - but only if they don't ask for it. He's now following up on his title by continuing to give back to those who show him love, in the case of Minnesota high-schooler Katie Kelzenberg.

Katie tweeted a video of her dressed in Dwayne's most famous outfit asking him to her prom that's taking place on May 5th. She showed off her Rock merchandise and even drew up a sign asking, "Dwayne will you 'Rock' it at prom with me." After a few days had passed and Katie still hadn't heard back from the actor, she understandably may have thought he missed the message. Luckily for her, Dwayne was working on a grand plan that.

The Baywatch actor posted a video to Instagram explaining what he had been up to since she shared her prom request. "Unfortunately, Ill be shooting during that time in Hawaii, BUT I was so impressed by this young ladys charm and confidence to even ask me (ladies always get shy in front of me) that I had to do something special," he captioned the clip. "I decided to rent out an entire theater (capacity 232 seats) in her town so Katie and her closest 232 friends and family can enjoy a special screening of RAMPAGE. And all the free popcorn, candy and soda high school kids can consume! Youre moneys no good Katie... everything is on Uncle DJ."

Dwayne even shared Katie's reaction when she heard Dwayne's message on her school intercom this morning, check it out below.
Iggy Azalea is definitely one of the artists that gets the most heat. Whether it's for her songs, music videos, the question of how she "makes money" or most notably, accusing her of cultural appropriation. It's the last point that she talks about most for her feature with GQ Magazine. The whole privilege thing is a rough conversation, she tells the publication.

I understand that in America there is institutionalized racism and there is privilege that comes with the color of your skin. That's real. I grew up in a situation that didn't involve any privilege and I worked really hard," she explains. "A lot of my childhood is overlooked. People assume they know my life because Australia is a nice beautiful country. It's tough because I want you to acknowledge my work and [to understand] that this wasn't easy but I also don't want to detract from or trivialize any people of colors' position because that's legitimate.

The 27-year-old, born Amethyst Kelly, explains how she dropped out of school at 16 to be homeschooled after repeated bullying. She began cleaning hotel rooms with her mom having grown up dirt poor.

"I don't wanna say that everyone's feelings about racial privilege are invalid cause I was poor. But how do we have a conversation where I'm not discrediting either scenario?"

On the topic of pressing issues in the country she now calls home, Iggy explains how protests such as Black Lives Matter are "one of those damned if you do damned if you don't things."

I've tried not to be too political because I am an immigrant. I'm on a visa. I'm not trying to go to a protest where they're arresting celebrities and making an example of them because I'll get deported. she says. I don't think you'll ever see me at a march. I should show that I support those things but I'm not a political activist. I don't wanna bring the complications of the world into my arena. I understand why people criticize that because I have a voice in hip-hop. I make 'black' music. I don't want people to think it's not something I care about. I want to make music for girls in the gym.

Read her full interview here.
Every year, hip-hop heads everywhere argue endlessly over who will be included in the XXL Freshman List, a collection of the hottest up-and-coming rappers at the moment.

One of the potential nominees this year is Rich Brian, a rapper hailing originally from Indonesia, who managed to work his way into a successful rap career in the States through a mix of ironic rap and genuinely good songwriting ability. His debut album, Amen, hit number 18 on the Billboard 200 chart, so he has a legitimate claim to a spot on the Freshman List.

In a radio interview with Big Boy, Brian was asked to rate his fellow freshman competitors on an extremely simple metric: they're either a "fire" emoji, or a "poop" emoji.

Brian was apprehensive about some of these ratings, but in general was very generous with his fire emojis. YBN Nahmir, Trippie Redd, and Matt Ox all got fire emojis, as did Tay K (because Brian didn't want to die). Poop emojis were handed out more sparingly with Lil Xan getting fire and poop ratings (for disrespecting Tupac), similarly with Blockboy JB (Brian hadn't listened to enough of his music to make an opinion). Only Bhad Bhabie and Tekashi 6ix9ine were given full on poop ratings.

While Brian didn't elaborate for Bhabie, he said that Tekashi gets a poop only because he talks too much smack, and it might get him in trouble one day. Though, now Brian might have his own trouble if Tekashi hears about this.

Watch all of Rich Brian's ratings in the video down below.
RiFF RaFF decision to drop a full length on 4/20 should come as no surprise to people who have followed him through thick and thin. Tomorrow he will be dropping Alcoholic Alligator which will include 12 original songs, and two remixes of previously enjoyed material. RaFF just capped off the Neon Black tour presented by Four Loko with his performance in Greely, Colorado.



The Young Chop produced "Posin Taking Pictures" is the first official leak from the project. It serves as a steely reminder of the early trap sound of 808s and eerie wavering notes, made famous by Lex Luger, arguably Young Chop's inspiration in the drill movement. The record also features RaFF's frequent collaborator and friend Young Hu$tle. Together they rap about diamond clarity and fan interaction as if they were causally linked. RaFF's main operative is not to bemuse you, but to perform a light public service during leisure hours.



Quotable Lyrics:



I'm Posin' Takin' Pictures

I'm 'posed to be the richest

Diamonds from a distance

Diamonds from Pacifics

Don't make me be specific

Diamonds are delicious

Diamonds super vicious

Diamonds super stupid

Red Rubies smell like cupid



-RaFF
Likely one of the most anticipated debuts of this year will be Trippie Redd's first studio album. His stock has been steadily growing over the last year and he is now viewed as a bonafide star among the younger class of rappers. His versatility appears to know no bounds with the Canton product showing off impressive range when he sings, flowing well as a rapper and even experimenting with punk elements in his music. Taking off where the late Lil Peep left off, Trippie Redd is definitely not the same but he offers a similar emotional quality to his music that many have shown to enjoy.

Previewing a brand new track on Instagram was Trippie, playing a snippet of a track titled "A Love Letter Written Backwards." Trippie sings on the track, tapping into his soul as he croons, "I'm trying to keep it together." Although his caption is concerning as he claims he does not feel loved, there are millions of people around the world bumping Trippie's music who are excited about his debut album. Luckily for them, they may not have to exactly wait a long time as, according to the post, Trippie is in full-on "album mode."

Teasing fans to the extent of their patience with previews on a weekly basis, anticipation is high for his album. We will continue to keep an eye on any updates pertaining to the work.
The former Maxwell House factory, one of the worlds largest coffee manufacturing plants, will close this summer as changing consumer tastes crowd out traditional coffee makers.

The current owner, Atlantic Coffee Solutions, is going out of business, ceasing production of regular, decaf and instant coffee at its massive plant east of downtown. The Houston-based coffee maker will start laying off its 279 employees on June 12, according to a company letter sent last week to the Texas Workforce Commission.

An Atlantic Coffee spokeswoman on Thursday confirmed the impending closure, citing economic reasons.

The coffee industry has changed dramatically in recent years and low-cost products from other countries have created substantial economic challenges for the company, spokeswoman Nancy Sims said in a statement. This decision was made after considering multiple options.

The plant closure underscores the rise of the so-called third wave of coffee, a consumer movement toward higher quality, artisanal coffee. After the the first wave of Folgers and Maxwell House and the second wave of Peets and Starbucks, the rise of premium craft coffee is upending traditional manufacturers like Atlantic Coffee, which specializes in decaffeinated and instant coffees.

More Americans, particularly young adults, are drinking gourmet coffees, such as frozen, cold brews and nitrogen-infused varieties. Single-cup brews, or coffee from a pod, also continues to grow exponentially with a third of U.S. households now owning a Keurig-type brewer, says the National Coffee Association, which has tracked national coffee consumption for nearly 70 years.

On the other hand, decaf and instant coffee flavors are going out of favor in the U.S., said Leo Lombardini, the director of Texas A&M Universitys Center for Coffee Research and Education. The academic toured Atlantic Coffees facilities three years ago.

Decaf is no longer a priority because millennials, they want the caffeine to stay energized, Lombardini said. For coffee purists and experts, instant coffee is definitely a no-no. If youre a real connoisseur, you dont want that.

Rick Alleman with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 455, which represents about 225 workers at Atlantic Coffee, said the coffee maker had been struggling for years to retain and expand its business amid changing consumer tastes.

The factory, once owned by General Foods and later Kraft Foods, at one point employed 600 workers, he said.

They had been losing businesses and contracts, Alleman said. The new coffee drinkers in the world dont drink their kind of coffee anymore.

The union is now working their members to negotiate severance packages with the company, Alleman said. Atlantic said it is working closely with its customers to transition them to new coffee suppliers.

Its unclear what will happen to the former Maxwell House plant after Atlantic Coffee closes its doors. The 1-million-square-foot facility, which sits on 18 acres at 3900 Harrisburg Blvd., has long been an East End landmark.

Ford built the original brick and concrete building in 1913 for its Model T assembly plant. In 1946, Maxwell House, owned by General Foods and later Kraft Foods, moved in and started making the coffee known for its slogan, Good to the last drop. In 1988, the coffee maker added a 16-story tower adorned with a large neon sign bearing the company name and signature coffee cup.

Maximus Coffee acquired the plant in 2006, and removed the Maxwell House sign shortly thereafter. In 2014, the company was rebranded to Atlantic Coffee Solutions after a labor strike the year before.

Atlantic Coffee Solutions is currently wholly owned by Texas-based Ecom Atlantic, an affiliate of Switzerland-based Ecom Agroindustrial, one of the largest coffee merchants and millers in the world.

Laura Murillo, president and CEO of the Houston Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, grew up in the East End and remembers the scent of coffee wafting over that side of town for decades. Many in the neighborhood worked at the coffee factory, as well as the nearby Mrs. Bairds bakery and the Oak Farms dairy plant, she said.

It was a community hub that is going to be missed, Murillo said. You wanted them to stay there brewing their coffee forever. Its a new day for the area.

Murillo said she was curious what will replace the coffee factorys large footprint. The neighborhood, she said, would welcome another factory to replace the jobs lost, as well as redevelopment projects that could bring a grocery store, other retail and more affordable homes to the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood just off downtown.

I think there are a lot of needs in the area as development comes in and theres a resurgence of interest in the area, Murillo said. Certainly, there is a market here.
The plane is ready to depart as crew members run through the inventory one final time: Fuel? Check. Passengers? Check. Food?

A well-fed traveler is a happy traveler, a sentiment understood by the United Airlines employees tasked with preparing, packaging and delivering that food. Now theyre seeking something already granted to 80 percent of United employees.

They want union representation.

The plane cannot go without food, United employee Ellen Bryan-Hill said. It needs a pilot and food. And were the ones working harder in the kitchen and making less money.

Bryan-Hill, who earns $11.15 an hour, has worked at United for 13 years. Her union counterparts employed as ramp workers or customer service agents, by comparison, make $30.47 an hour after 10 years with the company.

The catering employees seek wages of at least $12 an hour, and they want to join the Unite Here union. They began collecting signatures to authorize a nationwide election in January, with more than 2,000 employees across the country showing their support. Management has pushed back.

Signs appeared in the cafeteria, saying travel privileges arent guaranteed should contract negotiations begin. Flat-screen TVs appeared, airing an anti-union video.

The airline counters that it pays competitive wages based on the work group and type of work performed by employees. Pertaining to signs in the catering workplace, the company said its providing basic facts regarding union representation so employees can make an informed decision.

In a statement, United said it is committed to treating all of our employees fairly, providing them with competitive compensation and industry leading benefits and privileges and creating a safe, supportive work environment, whether or not they are represented by a union.

Bryan-Hill and other catering workers took to the streets outside of Bush Intercontinental Airport on Thursday to protest their wages and working conditions. They turned Home Depot buckets into drums, chanting Hey hey, ho ho, union bustings got to go. They waved signs saying United Airlines doesnt care about Houston as trucks honked and fire trucks blared sirens.

Other United unions were there, too. Sarah Monderoy Garcia, with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers Local Lodge 811, was encouraging the catering workers. She recalled the multiple attempts it took for ramp workers to join a union. Its worth the effort, she told the protesters.

Companies have the right to communicate their stance on unions, said Alfonso Kennard Jr., managing shareholder at Kennard Law who represents employees in labor and employment matters. He formerly represented the management side and said benefits arent typically lost when employees join a union.

Very rarely does a company go backward and eliminate benefits employees already had, he said.

And the employers have an advantage during this timeframe, he said. They can spread their message in the workplace and during work time. The union, on the other hand, has to host meetings outside the workplace.

Any company or any entity is going to take efforts to prevent their work force from becoming unionized, Kennard said. Once a work force is unionized, it takes a lot of power away from the company, from everyday decisions on discipline to negotiating pay structures and benefits.

Bryan-Hill would like to receive full-length breaks. Because United is focused on improving on-time flight performance, she said, catering workers often have their breaks cut short. Safety is another concern, she said, recalling that she once broke her foot when a cart toppled over.

But her biggest grievance is pay. Last year, her salary was raised to $10.88, up from $10.87. She received a larger raise this year, but its still not enough to cover her $800-a-month apartment and general living expenses. She sells clothes from a catalog and Nacatamales, the Nicaraguan version of tamales, to augment her income.

For me to survive, I need to do something on the side, she said.

Extra money would have been especially helpful last year, when Bryan-Hill went through a divorce and then took on 5 feet of water during Hurricane Harvey. United Airlines provided her some money to help rebuild, but higher wages would have helped with the ongoing recovery.

She and her colleagues are waiting for the National Mediation Board to set a date when the roughly 2,700 United catering workers nationwide, including 800 in Houston, will vote to decide if they want to join the union.

But this has been delayed. United Airlines said the mediation board is investigating potential fraud and misrepresentation by Unite Here when soliciting the union authorization cards.

We believe the unions allegations against United Airlines and its management are baseless and we look forward to hearing the results of the National Mediation Boards investigation, the company said. United Airlines respects our employees rights to decide whether they want to be represented by a union without pressure, coercion or other unlawful interference.

Unite Here disputed allegations that catering employees misrepresented themselves.

The union recently brought catering workers to a City Council meeting, asking officials to pressure United into offering better wages when negotiating upcoming projects. One woman, in particular, caught the attention of Mayor Sylvester Turner. He expressed shock upon learning she earned $11.07 after 29 years with the company.

I have a problem with that, OK? he said during the meeting. I have a big problem with that. United can do better, and United should do better. And United will do better.

andrea.rumbaugh@chron.com

twitter.com/andrearumbaugh
SUGAR LAND  Most engineers would be thrilled if one of their creations changed how an entire industry works, but M.S. Kalsi is restless because hes only done it twice.

This year the Indian immigrant, who earned his doctorate in engineering from the University of Houston, will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the company that bears his name. But hes far from finished advancing technologies that most people take for granted: valves and seals.

Americans learned the importance of valves when one malfunctioned at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in 1979, triggering a partial meltdown and the release of radioactive gases. Kalsi, who had launched Kalsi Engineering six months earlier as a nuclear energy contractor, had just the right technology to solve the problem, which existed at all U.S. power plants.

Each and every one of the U.S nuclear plants without exception has been a client, Kalsi said. Weve done work for them over the years to help them improve their reliability and performance. And so thats a pretty significant market.

RELATED: After 61 years in business, Welcome Wilson Sr. sets the standard

Utilities have begun to shut down reactors, though, and only one new plant is under construction. Kalsi is supplying valve technology software to new reactors in China, Korea and around the world. He keeps a supercomputer in the office to run simulations to ensure the valves wont fail.

We have a software that predicts how the valves will behave under conditions that one hopes will never happen, accident conditions, he said. We always keep our computational capabilities pretty much near the state of the art.

The Electric Power Research Institute commissioned Kalsi Engineering to develop methodology and write a document about the reliability of motor-operated butterfly valves. The price tag for a single copy is $300,000.

A majority of Kalsi Engineerings revenues, though, come from a patented rotary shaft seal that he developed in 1986.

The goal was to have down-hole tools last longer under the most severe conditions, Kalsi said. So that they can go to previously untapped reservoirs that were left because they could not economically tap into them.

Kalsi, 72, discovered that if you make the round seals from rubber, plastic or elastomer and mold a wave along the edge, they will create a hydroplaning effect that improves lubrication and extends the life of the seal, and therefore the equipment.

Before Kalsi developed his rings, the industry used metal seals that cost $1,600 each and wore out in 25 hours. Kalsi Seals last 250 hours and run between $40 and $600, depending on the size, material and application. There are over 250,000 models used on almost every oil and gas drilling rig.

Kalsis team continues to develop new valves and seals from different materials with different patterns for new applications, registering 50 patents.

Very meager showing, Kalsi told me while touring the office building he designed in Sugar Land. One thing that we dont like to do is try to patent something for the sake of getting a patent, you know. We want to make sure its going to be an innovation that addresses an industry problem and will have a potential commercial success.

The companys longevity, though, comes from shrewd management. When the price of oil collapsed and work on nuclear reactors slowed, the firms revenues dropped 70 percent, Kalsi said. The company also had to slash prices to help customers and maintain market share.

We were able to cut costs not by laying people off but being smarter, reassigning responsibilities, he said. We dont need to make color copies every time. Just small things make a big difference. And each one of us by being aware of the fact that, really, we cannot spend the money without being very conscious about the benefit.

Revenues have bounced back to about 75 percent of 2014 levels, he said, enough to generate profits. The firm is still innovating, still writing scholarly reports and sharing engineering insights.

RELATED: Want to survive the oil bust? Use conservative business principles

Kalsis success is in many ways typical for Houston, where one out of four people were born outside the United States. He came to study at the University of Houston in 1967, worked for an oil field services company and then started his own shop, with engineers from Taiwan, Egypt and a West Texan whose father was a farmworker. Each was seeking the American dream.

Flags of the home countries of every employee and customer hang over the large testing lab, mimicking the main hall of the United Nations. Houstons excellent universities, international businesses and friendliness to immigrants underlie the companys contributions to nuclear safety and efficiency in the oil and gas industry.

Most people dont realize how small things like valves and seals make energy production safer and cheaper. We drive by industrial parks and dont think about the groundbreaking work there. We dont recognize how much immigration and public education improve our countrys businesses.

Maybe we should.

Chris Tomlinson is the Chronicles business columnist. chris.tomlinson@chron.com twitter.com/cltomlinson
The light of dawn filled the dense cloud forest of Ecuadors Mindo Valley where Swainsons thrushes flitted silently through the understory. The birds then perched, stock still, on the leaf-littered ground and twigs cloaked by the drapery of leaves.

That was six weeks ago and 2,500-miles from where the thrushes have recently arrived at Houston Audubon Societys densely wooded bird sanctuaries in High Island near the Gulf Coast in Chambers County.

If you were to travel from Houston to High Island, you would traverse about 83 miles by car at speeds of around 70 mph along Interstate 10 and Texas 124. It would take about 90 minutes to make the trip.

The thrushes made the journey from Ecuador, flying more than 130 miles a day with stops along the way for rest and food. They either travel across the Gulf or take a circuitous land route along the coast to safe harbor at High Island. The trip probably took the birds a couple of weeks, maybe longer depending on weather.

What an incomprehensible odyssey for thrushes that are no bigger than the northern cardinals in our backyards. Yet High Island is just another rest stop as they travel on between 2,000 to 3,000 miles to breeding grounds in Maine and Newfoundland.

More Information Neotropical migratory songbirds Warblers, thrushes and orioles usually migrate at night to avoid daytime predators like hawks and so they can navigate by the stars. Many die from fatigue, stormy weather and collisions with obstacles, such as wind energy turbines and lighted communication towers or high-rise office buildings. Where to see them: Houston Audubon Society's High Island bird sanctuaries Texas Ornithological Society's Sanctuary, located 4-miles west of Sabine Pass off Texas 87 Lafitte's Cove Nature Preserve in Galveston Gulf Coast Bird Observatory's Neotropical Bird Sanctuary at Quintana See More Collapse

Swainsons thrushes blend into the forest understory with their olive-brown backs and white bellies. They have dark spotting on fawn-colored breasts, with a fawn hue washing over their faces. Their eyes are outlined in white.

The thrushes give themselves away with an upwardly spiraling flutelike song and a quick, sharp-toned call note that sounds like the word squirt.

But why do Swainsons thrushes  and other neotropical songbirds like warblers and orioles  endure physically taxing pilgrimages year after year? And how do they find their way?

We have clues.

Birds undergo migratory restlessness, driven by hormonal changes that compel them to head northward to their breeding grounds.

They navigate by the stars, land masses and magnetic fields to follow ancient routes embedded in their genes.

Going to North American breeding grounds benefits birds due to less competition for space and food than in the tropics. Also, there are hours of daylight to raise chicks.

Clues aside, bird migration remains one of natures great mysteries that occurs right before our eyes. We live along a major migratory route.

Email Gary Clark at texasbirder@comcast.net
The day before the planned Houston Youth Walkout, when high school students will march to protest gun violence in schools, visual art students at the High School for Performing and Visual Arts display their work in the school's gallery as part of their senior show.

The pieces range from highly stylized graffiti on walls to visually jarring projections of geometric images and expressive paintings of African-American youth. Scattered throughout the exhibit are unsettling paintings depicting guns and violence, proclaiming "Enough!"

In the corner of the room, strung unmistakably on the wall, is a striking banner reading "Houston Youth Walkout" with an image of a hand tightly grasping a pencil. This same image is mirrored on the shirts of the student organizers of the walkout, two classrooms over, in their last meeting before the march.

The student organizers, from high schools across HISD, are gathered around a table, distinctive in their flaming orange shirts and unwavering, determined expressions. With one hand balancing generous slices of pizza in their napkins, and another poised on their computers  cluttered with tabs of state representatives' phone numbers, speech lineups, permits and emails  the students launch themselves into the last stages of organizing the march.

On April 20, the anniversary of the Columbine school shooting, students from schools across the HISD district will meet at Wiley Park and march to City Hall. There, students will call to reform gun laws to prevent school shootings. Students will give speeches, perform musical and art pieces and call for legislators to take action against gun violence in schools.

VOICES HEARD: Houston-area students, schools ready for walkouts to protest gun violence

The recent shooting in Parkland jarred students in HISD to take action and participate in the nationwide movement for stricter gun reform. Rather than being silenced by these tragedies and by politicians' and legislators' apathetic, platitudinous responses to them, these students will fight to reclaim their right to a secure education.

Chloe Evered, a sophomore at HSPVA and one of the organizers of the walkout, vocalized students' mindsets: "I don't want living in constant fear to become routine in our schools, nor do I want anyone to feel like nothing can be done to stop it. We are not powerless. We need to act."

Within a week of the Parkland shooting, students from several high schools in Houston convened and discussed the role they could play in the fight for students' safety in schools. They quickly reached a consensus. A walkout, specifically in the state of Texas where gun laws are more lax, was necessary.

Maha Rahman

This last meeting of the organizers of the walkout is crucial in ensuring its success.

First, formalities are addressed: Have we supplied the water bottles to schools? Yes, all 1,000 of them. Buttons? On their way.

Are the police still coming on horses? Hopefully.

The organizers then address another critical aspect of the march: a united front of students and a common goal. The goal of the march is simple: Advocate for gun reform so that shootings like those at Parkland, Columbine and too many other schools are not repeated. The march is expected to be packed. More than 1,500 students from eight high schools, including HSPVA, Bellaire, Carnegie and the Houston Academy for International Studies plan to attend. With so many students participating, messaging is important. Students have been directed to read the FAQs on the Houston Youth Walkout's website so that they can understand the common goal of the march and are prepared to answer media questions.

The planning of such a large-scale protest was a heavy task. First, student leaders worked to ensure that the walkout was legal and that participants would be protected from punishment for marching. HSPVA students Sophie Cardenas and Paolo Martinez quickly secured a permit to hold the rally at City Hall and contacted school administrators across HISD to ensure students would not be penalized.

The organizers were meticulously thorough about this key aspect of planning. Martinez, an active student organizer and leader of the march, contacted all the HISD lawyers to ensure that the march was not considered a school event and that students were free to walk out, not under the jurisdiction of their schools. Martinez scoured through the multitude of legal documents sent to him to find a single clause protecting this right of the students. Texas State and District representatives were contacted to record their stances on gun laws and gun reform.

NOT AGAIN: Another school shooting. Thoughts and prayers are not enough.

In organizing the event, student leaders made it a priority to keep students at the forefront of the movement. Most of the speakers will be students. Organizers contacted several schools and compiled a diverse group of student performances ranging from speeches on their own reasons for walking out to performance art to poetry readings.

To make sure that students can advocate successfully for gun reform, the organizers researched gun laws in Texas and the history of production of assault rifles. A constitution detailing the Houston Youth Walkout's agenda was drafted and made accessible to all HISD students. An easily comprehensible term bank on gun and assault rifle terminology was created so that students could be grounded in their discourse and advocacy for gun reform.

With so many high school students expected to walkout, transportation and safety are crucial. Specific routes to Wiley Park where schools could meet up along the way were found and circulated, charter buses were rented, carpooling organized and private car rental services were provided as an option for students. The organizers from Bellaire High School, including Jacob Tate, encouraged the more than one hundred students from their school participating to download the Metro app and add money to their account so students could safely reach the march by bus. Alternatively, they gathered a very large bag of quarters.

Maha Rahman

Student activism will not stop with the walkout. The message of the walkout will be carried with us, displayed in our writing, our conversations and our art. The walkout has drafted specific, concrete objectives on gun reform that the student movement against gun violence will advocate for. Reforms such as implementing a mandatory three-day waiting period, raising the age required to purchase a rife to 21 and banning modifications such as bump stocks are some of the crucial changes to legislation that students will continue pushing for.

Zoe Nanson, a student organizer from Carnegie states, "No one person can change the minds of the entire U.S. government and convince them to help protect our schools. But if there's even one thing, no matter how big or small, that I can do to ensure that my friends and family and teachers and peers have a chance of feeling safe and comfortable when they enter their classrooms, I feel like it's my duty to speak out."

The students involved in the Houston Youth Walkout are a force to contend with. As high school students, they have organized a mass student protest, are equipped with legal terminology and are adept at contacting state and legal representatives to push for action. This organization is not going away anytime soon. The Houston Youth Walkout group plans to expand their means of addressing the issue of gun violence and aims to set a model for other student organizations to follow in galvanizing for safer schools.

As Tate puts it, "Today is about recognizing the problem; tomorrow is about making change."

Maha Rahman is a student at HSPVA.

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They had shown the immigration officer their proof  the eight years of Facebook photos, their 5-year-old sons birth certificate, the letters from relatives and friends affirming their commitment  and now they were so close, Karah de Oliveira thought, so nearly a normal couple.

Thirteen years after her husband was ordered deported back to his native Brazil, the official recognition of their marriage would bring him within a few signatures of being able to call himself an American. With legal papers, they could buy a house and get a bank loan. He could board a plane. They could take their son to Disney World.

Then the officer reappeared.

Ive got some good news and some bad news, he said. The good news is, Im going to approve your application. Clearly, your marriage is real. The bad news is, ICE is here, and they want to speak with you.

ICE was Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency charged with arresting and deporting unauthorized immigrants  including, for the moment, Fabiano de Oliveira. In a back room of the immigration office in Lawrence, Massachusetts, two agents were waiting with handcuffs. Her husband was apologizing, saying he was sorry for putting her through all of this.

Karah de Oliveira kissed him goodbye. Ill do whatever I can to get you out, she said.

For decades, marriage to a U.S. citizen has been a virtual guarantee of legal residency, the main hurdle being proof that the relationship is legitimate. But with the Trump administration in fierce pursuit of unauthorized immigrants across the country, many who were ordered deported years ago are finding that jobs, home and family are no longer a defense  not even for those who have married Americans.

As the Trump administration arrests thousands of immigrants with no criminal history and reshapes the prospects of even legal immigrants  an overdue corrective, officials say, to the lenient policies of the past  many who have lived without papers for years are urgently seeking legal status by way of a parent, adult child or spouse who is already a citizen or permanent resident.

In a growing number of cases, however, immigrants with old deportation orders that were never enforced are getting the go-ahead after an interview by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that handles residency and citizenship, only to be arrested by ICE.

Its like playing dice in Las Vegas or something, said William Joyce, a former immigration judge who now practices immigration law in Boston. Its not 100 percent, but youre playing with fire if you go to that interview. You can walk in, but you wont be walking out.

Fabiano de Oliveira and his wife had been dating for eight years, ever since Karah de Oliveiras sister introduced them and they started working next door to each other  he at a pizza place, she at a Dunkin Donuts. They had a son three years later, but he waited until 2016 to marry Karah de Oliveira, a Massachusetts native, partly because he did not want her family to think he was angling for a green card.

After the wedding, all the things they could not do while he lacked legal status became obvious: Not being able to go on their honeymoon, because he could not fly. Not being able to get a joint credit card. Not being able to get car insurance.

He got caught because he was trying to do the right thing, Karah de Oliveira said of her husbands arrest on Jan. 9. It was like a setup.

It took a month for her husband to be released. Because she did not know what else to say when their son asked, Karah de Oliveira told him that his father was working out of town.

Like many of the immigrants detained this way, Fabiano de Oliveira, a house painter, had no criminal history. To the Trump administration, the other thing they had in common was more germane: a legal but, until now, unenforced obligation to leave the country that had stuck to them for years, even as they pieced together lives and families in the United States.

In the later years of the Obama administration, the government mostly left people without criminal records alone, focusing instead on immigrants who had only recently arrived or had been convicted of serious crimes.

But the Trump administration emphasizes that everyone living here illegally is fair game for deportation, a policy that has bumped up immigration arrests by more than 40 percent since the beginning of 2017. Those who were ordered out of the country years ago are especially easy marks for an agency with limited resources for enforcement  especially if they walk straight into an immigration office.

ICE agents who once allowed many unauthorized immigrants to stay in the country as long as they checked in regularly have, over the past year, begun arresting many of those same immigrants at their once-routine ICE appointments. Unlike people who have had no prior contact with the immigration system, those who have already received orders of deportation have few, if any, protections against swift deportation.

Most who have been arrested under the Trump administrations policies had scant prospects of ever achieving legal status, whether through marriage to a citizen or another route.

People like Fabiano de Oliveira, on the other hand, were well on their way.

Getting a green card through spouses and relatives had become far easier in recent years for those who were living in the country illegally. Until 2013, undocumented applicants had to leave the country and wait out the application process from abroad, in some cases for as long as a decade, before returning with green cards.

Then the Obama administration created a waiver to abbreviate the process. Hurdles remained: Applicants still had to undergo vetting and security checks, for example, and prove that being deported would cause an American citizen  a spouse, for example  significant hardship. But once an immigration officer certified that their marriages were real, those with old deportation orders could ask an immigration judge to lift them so they could move on with their applications.

Now, however, it is risky simply to show up for an interview.

For many individuals, its sort of this Sophies choice of remaining in the shadows, without formal immigration status, or hazarding arrest, said Genia Blaser, a staff attorney at the Immigrant Defense Project, a New York-based group that has been fielding calls from immigrants concerned about the new policies.

One such case made national headlines in the fall, when a Mexican man from the Denver area who had tried to obtain a green card through his daughter, a senior at Yale, was arrested at his residency interview. Despite a national campaign to get him released, the man, Melecio Andazola Morales, was deported in December.

On Feb. 8, immigration agents in San Francisco went a step further, arresting a Sudanese man at his interview for asylum, where he was supposed to be given a chance to explain why he feared returning to his home country. He had overstayed his visa, according to his lawyer, but had no criminal history or deportation order.

Immigration lawyers in New England, in particular, say there has been an unmistakable swell in the number of clients arrested at marriage interviews over the past few months. In the past, they said, USCIS officers had routinely alerted their counterparts at ICE to marriage applicants with old deportation orders, but only since President Donald Trump took office had immigration agents begun to arrest those people at interviews. (A few such cases had occurred under the Bush administration as well, they said.)

Several lawyers said that they could no longer in good conscience encourage their clients to go to their marriage interviews, even if staying away would mean throttling a process that had already swallowed up months, if not years, and perhaps thousands of dollars in legal and application fees.

So you end up with a situation where, all right, you dont go to the interview, you dont get the petition approved, so theres no way forward, said Joyce, who said at least five clients of his firm had been arrested in the middle of applying for a marriage-based green card over the last year, including two who were later deported.

An ICE spokesman, John Mohan, said that ICE has always worked with other government agencies to gather information for enforcement purposes.

ICE does not exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement, he said. Any individual determined to be in violation of U.S. immigration laws may be subject to arrest, detention and removal from the United States.

Some remain undeterred. Leandro Arriaga, 43, had been warned by his lawyer that he might be detained at his marriage interview because he had been ordered deported years ago. But he decided to go anyway, determined to get legal papers. Without them, You cant do nothing, you cant go to college, you cant do things in your own name, Arriaga said. I said, I dont want to be illegal anymore. Ive got to do something.'

Arriaga had arrived illegally from the Dominican Republic in 2001, settling in the Boston area. He married a citizen, had three children, divorced, married another citizen and had another child, building a good business buying and fixing up old properties along the way.

After talking it over with his wife, Katherine, he decided to take a chance on the marriage interview, which was scheduled for March 2017 at the immigration office in Lawrence, Massachusetts. An immigration officer certified his marriage, clearing him to move to the next step toward legalization. But before he could leave the office, he was detained, along with four other marriage applicants who were interviewing that morning, at least two of whom also had their petitions approved that morning.

It took until the end of May for him to get out of detention  more than two months of legal motions, court hearings and negotiations. The government ultimately released him with an ankle monitor, leaving Arriaga free to continue pursuing his application for a green card.

Nearly a year later, though he was still chasing paperwork, he did not regret having walked into the immigration office. I really think that I did the right thing, he said.

Many people, though, are heeding their lawyers advice and postponing any application for legalization  even those who are likely to be deemed eligible. The risks are too great.

Natalia and Junior Roveda, who have been together seven years, managed to make it through their marriage interview last year in Massachusetts without incident. Junior Roveda had come to the United States illegally from Brazil in 2005 and evaded a subsequent deportation order. He was moving into the next stage of the legalization process when he was arrested outside their apartment in the town of Framingham. In November, he was deported to Brazil, where he is now living with his parents.

Since then, his marble and granite business has gone dormant. Natalia Roveda, 25, gave up their apartment, sold the furniture and started working 20 extra hours a week at her job as an aesthetician and makeup artist to help support him in Brazil. When she can, she makes the long journey to visit him.

Still, Junior Roveda is pursuing his green card from abroad. Their lawyers have told them it could take up to a year, and Roveda fears being stuck there, away from his wife and his faltering business, for much longer.

It is not fair, he said. I was already approved and everything.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times
The Senate on Thursday narrowly confirmed Rep. Jim Bridenstine, R-Okla., as NASA administrator, despite deep concerns from Democrats that he lacks the scientific and management expertise to lead the space agency.

The vote to install the three-term lawmaker was 50-49. President Donald Trump had initially tapped Bridenstine for the post last year, but his nomination stalled amid Democratic criticisms, as well as some reticence from Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who said Thursday that NASA should be led by a professional with a background in space.

But Rubio ultimately sided with all other Republicans to confirm Bridenstine as the NASA chief in spite of his hesitations, arguing that Trump deserves to have his team in place across the administration.

"I was not enthused about the nomination. Nothing personal about Mr. Bridenstine. NASA is an organization that needs to be led by a space professional," Rubio said before the confirmation vote Thursday afternoon. But "my view of it is, and it has been the tradition of the Senate for the entire distance of the republic, that we give great deference to the president on choosing qualifications."

Bridenstine's confirmation comes at a critical time for the agency, which is preparing to return to the moon, and to restore human spaceflight from United States soil, a capability that was lost when the space shuttle program was retired in 2011.

The space agency has gone without a permanent leader for 15 months, since Charles Bolden resigned as Trump took office. During that time, Robert Lightfoot, a NASA veteran, has been running the agency. But he recently announced he was retiring from the agency at the end of this month.

Bridenstine is a former naval aviator who ran the Tulsa Air and Space Museum before coming to Congress in 2013. An avid supporter of space exploration, he sponsored the American Space Renaissance Act, a wide-ranging bill that touched on national security, how best to deal with debris in space, and how to regulate the commercial space industry.

Earlier this week, Vice President Mike Pence praised Bridenstine as a "a great champion of the men and women at NASA and a great champion of the president's vision for NASA, and for American leadership in space."

But Democrats seized on Bridenstine's lack of scientific expertise, as well as his comments on climate change, to make their case that Bridenstine was unfit to lead the agency. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., who led the Democrats' opposition to the congressman, also argued that the NASA administrator should be a professional, rather than a politician.

"James Bridenstine is a climate denier with no scientific background who has made a career out of ignoring science," Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, said Thursday. "Now, I also don't have a scientific background. But I defer to scientists. I rely on the scientific consensus. And the scientific consensus is not what Mr. Bridenstine says."

A procedural vote on Wednesday to advance Bridenstine's confirmation almost failed as Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., sided with Democrats to block him, only to switch his vote after some time had passed. Senate Republican leaders said Flake wanted to speak with Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state nominee, about travel restrictions to Cuba before he could commit to advancing Bridenstine's nomination.

Had Flake remained a "no" on that vote, it would have caused significant complications as Pence, who as the president of the Senate is the official tiebreaker, was in Florida to attend Trump's summit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

As Flake remained a holdout, Pence called the Arizona senator, who said he wanted to discuss lifting travel restrictions to Cuba with the secretary of state candidate, according to a person familiar with the discussions. Flake had assured the White House last week that he was a yes vote for Bridenstine's confirmation, so when he voted no on cloture - ending debate ahead of the vote - it took the White House by surprise, according to the person, who requested anonymity to discuss private conversations.

Flake said Thursday that he has since spoken with Pompeo, who faces his own confirmation vote in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Monday, but declined to elaborate on their conversation.
Students and education leaders across Greater Houston are preparing for mass campus demonstrations Friday to protest gun violence, part of a national day of activism and remembrance following February's school shooting in Florida.

Tens of thousands of local students are expected to engage in on-campus demonstrations throughout the region, leaving class to participate in anti-violence rallies, letter-writing campaigns and assemblies devoted to victims of gun violence. At the same time, local campus and district leaders are expected to carry out plans designed to balance free-speech rights, student safety and teachers' ability to continue classes.
There are no rules for how to be a first lady.

For some, such as Bess Truman, the role meant attending luncheons and teas, smiling, dressing the part. For others, such as Lady Bird Johnson, it offered a platform to lobby for policy change  advocating, in Johnsons case, for protection of the environment.

Barbara Bush fell somewhere in between, neither demure figurehead nor vigorous activist. Her priority remained the success of her husbands career. Yet no one doubted her independent intellect and strength.

In this middle ground, Bush found a balance among the varied expectations of others  and herself. Hers was the life she chose, a reflection of her upbringing, her times, her opinions. And she excelled.

She is someone who thrived as the wife of a politician, said Nancy Beck Young, a history professor at the University of Houston. She did well in the work.

George Herbert Walker Bushs wife did not markedly change the role of first lady. But as historians and White House scholars see it, she played a significant part in demonstrating one way a presidents spouse can succeed, on the campaign stump, as a national symbol, in her role as mother, grandmother and wife.

BUSH REMEMBERED: 'You have been a wonderful role model to everyone'

Rare is the argument that Barbara Bush instigated change in the face of adversity. Few are the people who hurry to define her as a feminist who vastly advanced the cause of women. But she did find a clear purpose in literacy  with which no one could argue  and she suggested a woman could one day serve in the office of president.

The position, of course, is what the first lady makes of it. Bush pushed boundaries, carefully. She stayed within confines of what she believed America wanted. The country noticed.

Her husband lost his bid for re-election and left office in 1993. Four months before, she had a favorable Gallup rating of 69 percent.

An everyday American

Arriving on the heels of Nancy Reagan, Bush seemed suddenly relatable, even average. Bush had been second lady during Ronald Reagans two terms. She saw Nancy Reagan judged for the fancy clothes she wore over her small frame, viewed as leftover effects from her time spent acting in Hollywood.

She watched as Americans lashed out when they believed Reagan was overstepping her bounds in advising the president. They ridiculed Reagan over rumors that she consulted with an astrologer on her husbands schedule. They took her to task for prompting her husband with an answer to a question while posing for photos. (She vehemently denied it, saying she had been talking to herself.)

Bush, by contrast, positioned herself as an everyday American wife  a quality that would echo in Michelle Obama.

Bush joked about wearing a triple strand of fake pearls to cover the wrinkles in her neck. Obama was praised for wearing clothes from J. Crew. Everyone saw both women as devoted to their families.

Bush made fun of herself.

She was a moderating figure, Young said, and that, in and of itself, is important.

AUTHOR LUNCH: A wedding, a birth and a funeral. Bush family reflects during author lunch

Hillary Clinton, assuming the office of first lady after Bush, took the position in an opposite direction. While Bush denied being a political player, offering her opinions behind the scenes, Clinton, a lawyer like her husband, embraced the title as a chance to influence legislation.

You get two for the price of one, her husband said during his campaign.

Clinton as first lady took on the task of reforming health care. She moved into an office in the West Wing.

I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, she said, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life.

Emerging spokeswoman

Among more recent first ladies, Bush rates high among those who historians believe could have accomplished more, according to a 2014 poll conducted by Siena College Research Institute and C-SPAN. Still, she ranked in the top third overall  coming it at 11 of 39 in that same poll  when considered in ten total categories such as integrity, leadership and courage.

Don Levy, director of the institute, predicts that Bushs rank will rise as history revisits her life.

She was someone who became more beloved as the years went on, he said. She was not a vain person. She was a selfless person who we grew to appreciate more and more for clearly speaking her mind.

Eleanor Roosevelt, known for her advocacy of civil and human rights, consistently ranks best in the poll, getting the top marks in categories such as leadership, accomplishments and courage.

She traveled across the country as first lady, helping all she could in light of her husbands polio diagnosis, and became an appointee to the United Nations General Assembly after her husbands death from a stroke. In 1933, she was the first First Lady to hold a press conference, to which she invited only female reporters, according to her presidential library biography.

Laura Bush, along with her mother-in-law, was considered among first ladies who could have done more in office. Bush took up the cause of literacy, as well as education. But like Barbara Bush, her role in policy was limited, at least as presented to the public.

Other wives of presidents were also known for their firsts: Lou Henry Hoover, wife of Herbert Hoover, spoke first on the radio. Jackie Kennedy hired the first press secretary to help her in the role. Pat Nixon was first to earn a graduate degree.

Martha Washington, of course, was the first First Lady, paving the way in understanding the demands of the role and figuring out how to meet them. She wrote of a feeling of loneliness in her first years in the position, according to a National First Ladies Library biography.

Barbara Bush perhaps was not a woman of firsts. But she understood both what kind of first lady she wanted to be and what Americans expected of her. She embodied a good wife, said Stacy Cordery, bibliographer at the National First Ladies Library in Ohio. She spoke honestly yet carefully.

She struck that effective sweet spot, as Cordery put it, between supporting and overshadowing her husband. She helped to humanize him.

Theres not much of a gap between expectations and reality of Barbara Bush, Cordery said. She was candid, but she was also really aware that she was the trailing spouse and he was the elected official.

Myra Gutin, who has written a book on Bush, categorizes her as an emerging spokeswoman, who made a contribution that was larger than just entertaining guests.

She was very careful about what she did, Gutin said. She only got involved in a couple of scrapes where she really shot from the hip, but they were few and far between.

A strong spine

Born in 1925, Bush fit the context of the era in which she grew up. She dropped out of college. She married young and raised five children. She did not pursue an independent career.

Among first ladies who came both before and after her, some chose to appear in a purely social light, attending meals with dignitaries and decorating the White House.

Melania Trump, for her part, is considered to be filling the role largely ceremonially. She makes headlines for her designer clothing. She has publicly said that she would work to fight bullying. As allegations arose about her husbands mistreatment of women, she remained silent.

As the Bushes rose in power, the definition of women in society changed radically, observed Sean Theriault, a professor at the University of Texas. Bush came to represent the traditional understanding of a womans role. She pushed against that in small ways, with her wit and strong will, with an aim always to help  never to hurt  her husbands career.

She certainly presented a compelling picture and face for the traditional way that we view women in society, Theriault said.

Still, Theriault noted, she had a strong spine.

Bushs journals, for now, remain private. Young, for one, expects they will one day reveal her to have been a politically astute partner to her husband.

I have a feeling we will meet an entirely different Barbara Bush, Young said.

Pieces of evidence exist. Bush was said to keep note cards on people they met. Her choice of literacy as her cause proved infallible. It was a low-cost initiative. It added to her image as a national grandmother. Everyone could agree that reading was good for society.

When Bush died, of course, the script was flipped. Now it was her husband of 73 years, George Herbert Walker, at her side.
Emily Scott wore her pearl necklace Thursday.

It felt appropriate to wear a shiny strand of elegance to honor Barbara Bush's memory.

I was like, One must wear one's pearls, she said.

The former first lady, who died Tuesday at 92, may have been known in part for her ever-present string of pearls. But Scott said Bushs legacy stretches far beyond her signature look.

Standing in the Barbara Bush Literacy Plaza outside the Houston Public Library, Scott  an archivist for the library's Houston Metropolitan Research Center  spoke about Bushs main focus and lasting legacy: her work to promote literacy.

I'm sure librarians all over the country are a little sad, Scott said. We have lost a big advocate.

All day, admirers arrived at public events to honor Bush, the wife and mother of American presidents who became a beloved figure in the nations fourth-largest city.

More Information Viewing and funeral information Barbara Bush will lie in repose noon-midnight Friday at St. Martin's Church, 717 Sage Road. The public is invited, but parking is not available at the church. Parking is at Second Baptist Church, 6400 Woodway Drive; the lot opens at 10 a.m. and Metro shuttles will start running at 11:30 a.m. No one is allowed to drive or walk up to St. Martin's. Large purses and bags are not permitted. Find more information at barbarapbush.com. See More Collapse

On Friday, Bush will lie in repose for public viewing at St. Martins Church. At a private funeral Saturday, well-wishers will include first lady Melania Trump, former President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama and former President Bill Clinton and first lady Hillary Clinton.

President Donald Trump hailed Barbara Bush as a titan in American life, but the White House said he would not attend Saturdays funeral to avoid disruptions due to added security, and out of respect for the Bush Family and friends attending the service. Trump sharply criticized members of the Bush family during the 2016 presidential campaign, and Barbara Bush had remarked that she didnt know how women can vote for Trump.

Houston police officials were ramping up security for the Bush service and funeral and were expecting a large crowd to converge on Houston. Police said they had enlisted the help of other law enforcement agencies and cautioned that security would be tight. Treat this like youre going through TSA, Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo advised those going to the viewing or funeral service.

Those seeking to attend the viewing must pass through security at Second Baptist Church located at 6400 Woodway Drive. Acevedo said no big bags nor weapons will be allowed. Also, travel along Woodway Drive between Chimney Rock Road and the West 610 Loop will have limited access. Only residents and business owners will be allowed beyond the road closures.

Thursday was the first chance for regular folks to show appreciation for Bush, who felt like a neighbor to many Houstonians. After they left the White House, President George H.W. Bush and Barbara Bush routinely made appearances around town. Local residents might be seated at a nearby table at a restaurant, bump into the Bushes at an Astros game or spot the couple at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo.

All day, people trickled through the Barbara Bush plaza downtown, which the city designated as a place for all offerings of flowers, Teddy bears or personal notes. Most people chose to write notes using notebooks and poster boards provided by the library.

You have been a wonderful role model to everyone, said one note.

Your strength and courage is an inspiration to all American women, said another.

Many of the notes were personal and funny. Delusionally, one woman wrote, I (once) thought I would start a pearl business called Royal Barbara's Pearls.

One woman recalled sitting a couple rows behind the Bushes at the annual rodeo.

Your youngest son was being recognized, her note said. Like any mother, you were proud and took several pictures with your iPad."

Thursday evening, as downtowns office buildings emptied out, more than 300 people clustered in front of Houston City Hall for a citywide celebration of Bushs life.

Many wore blue, Bushs signature color. Others wore thick stands of real and fake pearls in homage to Barbara Bush.

Dawn Carlos isnt typically the pearl-wearing type, but the Alief ISD physical education teacher wore a thin stand of faux pearls she had borrowed from her spouse, Karen Massie. She said she was inspired by Bushs public service and dedication to literacy.

Carolyn Trahan draped fake beads around the necks of her 3-year-old daughter, Royalyn Moore, 2-year-old niece Adealynn Meredith and 1-year-old nephew Donteal Meredith.

Trahan said she knew little about Bush before this week. She was stunned to learn of the first ladys charitable work and local prominence.

Ive learned how beautiful she is, Trahan said. No one has had a bad word to say about her.

Linda Lorelle, a former KPRC anchor who emceed the ceremony, read a letter written by former President George H.W. Bush, whose health kept him from attending. He said Wednesday that the many tributes and warm stories about his wife have lifted his spirits.

Barbara would be so moved you came out to honor her tonight, George Bush wrote. Barbara and I have been in love with Houston since we moved here in 1959. Nowhere are peoples hearts more generous than here, something we saw after Hurricane Harvey.

He added that the city had given them one final gift before she died  the Astros World Series title.

As golden rays of sun peeked through the branches of an oak tree, the Houston Childrens Chorus sang, We all have a purpose and a special place to serve.

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said he thought Bush was smiling down from above at the crowd that had gathered to celebrate her.

Shes not smiling because she thinks she deserves the honor, Turner said, but because this audience represents the people of Houston she loved so much: people of all ages, races and from all across the globe.

A few blocks away, hundreds of people filled the Hobby Center for A Celebration of Reading, the annual dinner-and-author event that benefits the Barbara Bush Houston Literacy Foundation. Barbara Bush usually attended this program, so her absence left a hole in the gathering.

The program guide still listed her under the galas Welcome Remarks section, and the back page quoted what had become the mission of the late first ladys life: If you help a person to read, then their opportunities in life will be endless.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich, author of a book on bridging the partisan divide in American politics, was among those honored at this years gala. As he rode into Houston this week, he said, he was struck by all the flags flown at half-mast "in honor of this great lady. And not just this great lady, but the legacy of the Bushes."

"To some degree today," he continued, "this country is more healed than it's been because of her life and her death and the courage of Barbara Bush."

At an authors luncheon earlier in the day, son Neil Bush shed a tear as the first guests trickled in. He and his wife, Maria Bush, now chair the annual fundraiser. Neil Bush said he had instructed his wife to give him a little kick if he became too emotional.

But he choked up when he described what happened Tuesday. Mom slipped away with dad holding her hand, surrounded by family, he said.

Initial tears aside, much of Thursday's midday gathering was business as usual.

It's what Mrs. Bush would have wanted, said Trish Morille, a longtime foundation supporter. The show must go on.

Guests were served strawberry shortcake, Barbara Bushs favorite dessert.

Thursday afternoon, in the Barbara Bush Literacy Plaza, Sammie Rahimi talked about how Bush used her influence for good  visiting libraries, talking to children and promoting reading across the country.

Rahimi, an administrative aide at the public library, never met Bush in person. But, like so many other Houstonians, she admired the first lady's candid humor and frankness and talked about Bush like an old friend.

Said Rahimi, I just loved her.

John D. Harden, Robert Downen and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

alyson.ward@chron.com

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A Pearland man tried to hire a hitman to kill an ex-girlfriend and three other Houston residents, prosecutors said Thursday in announcing his arrest.

Rajesh Bakshi, 54, was charged with four counts of solicitation of capital murder and is accused of trying to pay a professional killer to shoot a woman he had once dated, along with her boyfriend and parents, the Harris County District Attorneys Office said, in a news release detailing the case.

Authorities arrested Bakshi on Tuesday, after he allegedly paid an undercover Houston police officer a $1,500 down payment to perform the contract killing, according to the DAs office.

This operation saved lives in a very sensitive situation, District Attorney Kim Ogg said. Imagine how bad this could have been had it not been uncovered before it got to a real hitman.

Bakshi had harassed the woman for months and been violent with her, according to the DAs office.

Bakshi appeared in a court hearing Thursday afternoon dressed in dark pants and a short-sleeved, light-blue button down shirt. He stood impassively as lawyers laid out the charges against him, detailing how Bakshi allegedly made a $1,500 down payment and provided photos of each person he wanted killed.

He asked the undercover officer to sprinkle cocaine on the victims' bodies, prosecutors said. In the hearing, prosecutors explained that Bakshi went over schedules and patterns of life of the people he wanted killed, gave suggestions of how and where they might be killed, and asked for photographs of the victims once the act was completed.

Bakshi had nearly $13,000 more in cash available to him when he was arrested.

A public defender said Bakshi is an Indian immigrant, who works at a Dixie Corner Store and lives in Pearland with relatives. He has a 14-year-old son and twin daughters, court officials said. Bakshi remains in jail, with bail set at $150,000 for each count.

If convicted, Bakshi could spend the rest of his life in prison. Court records show he is being represented by a public defender, who was not immediately available to speak Friday afternoon.

St. John Barned-Smith covers public safety and major breaking news for the Houston Chronicle. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook. Send tips to st.john.smith@chron.com.
So, its 4/20 once again  April 20, the unofficial weed celebration day  and the use of marijuana is now a far cry from just a few teens in California meeting up under the bleachers to smoke a joint. In many states, its now just as common as beer thirty or it being 5 Oclock somewhere. We have to face the fact that, for many Americans, the most dangerous thing about weed is getting caught with it. But we can change that - yes, even here in Texas.

Legalization has many benefits for Texans whether they are marijuana users or not. It will bring in tax revenue, eliminate a dangerous black market, reduce opioid misuse and roll back a racist criminal justice system.

RELATED: Legalizing marijuana is Democrats' key to 2018 elections

EDITORIAL: Drug laws need to change, but Congress fails to act

And, importantly for the politicians out there, people want it. A recent Texas Tribune Poll showed eighty-three percent of Texans overall favor either legalization or decriminalization of marijuana use. Thirty-four percent favor legalization for medical use, and the remaining fifty-three percent favor further legalization for recreational use, as well.

The original propaganda about cannabis, which was largely based in bigotry, no longer holds sway. Weve come a long way with marijuana reform since the days of Harry J. Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, who kick-started the prohibition of cannabis in the 1930s with racist propaganda about African Americans. He appealed to white America by claiming that African American citizens who used marijuana were darkies [who] think theyre as good as white men, and made atrocious statements such as, The primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effects on degenerate races.

EDITORIAL: Texas' opposition to medical marijuana is unwarranted

In the decades since, our law enforcement resources have been spent enforcing marijuana prohibition rather than productively serving society in a meaningful way and protecting citizens from something that could actually cause harm.

The prohibition of marijuana started with despicable commentary by a man who represented the worst of our government. By ending that prohibition, we can lead our nation into one of the most progressive times since the civil rights movement.

Things are already starting to change.

Just this month, former Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner, who was once unalterably opposed to use of marijuana, recently joined the board at Acreage Holdings, an investment company in the cannabis industry that operates in 11 states.

President Donald Trump has also agreed to protect state marijuana laws from federal interference.

While legalization could raise tax revenue for schools, teachers, veteran programs, and others, thats not the only reason to pass such a law.

RELATED: Federal marijuana policy is bad for business, bad science and makes for bad law

Legalization of adult use of marijuana, both medically and recreationally, would close a door on a black market that would continue to sell indiscriminately, including to teenagers. Thats one major reason why mere decriminalization isnt enough.

This distinction between teen and adult is very important and should be to any parent and lawmaker regardless of whether one supports marijuana use or not. We can all agree that teen and youth use of marijuana is a bad idea unless a doctor believes it is necessary. Like alcohol or tobacco, marijuana should only be available for use by responsible adults.

EDITORIAL: The nation's top lawman has it wrong

But contrary to the rhetoric pushed by anti-marijuana groups, legal marijuana states actually have seen a significant drop in teen use. In Colorado, marijuana use among teens is down to levels last seen in 2005.

In addition to reducing teen use of marijuana, legalization would provide a safer alternative to other, more dangerous drugs.

Major studies increasingly show that opioid deaths are slowing down significantly in states that have a legal and well-regulated marijuana market.

One of the studies published by Dr. Hefei Wen and Dr. Jason M. Hockenberry showed findings of opioid prescriptions being reduced by 5.88 percent when medical marijuana laws passed, and 6.38 percent after legalization. Given the findings, they determined that medical and adult-use marijuana laws can potentially lower opioid prescriptions for Medicaid enrollees who are at a high risk for chronic pain, opioid use disorder and opioid overdose.

Substances like alcohol, tobacco, and legal prescription drugs have a combined death toll of approximately 522,000 each year in the U.S. alone.

If alcohol and tobacco are legal, marijuana should be as well. Marijuana is rarely  if ever  responsible for a fatal overdose or death of any kind.

If an adult can come home from a long day at work, drink a few beers and smoke a few cigarettes legally and responsibly, then an adult should have that same freedom with respect to marijuana.

Because, after all the policy arguments about taxes, criminal justice, regulated markets and safety, thats what marijuana legalization is really about  freedom.

McAllister is the founder of Texans for Marijuana Reform (@freetheweedtex).
But I don't want to send the wrong expectation that anytime soon, we are going to make changes. Then the pressure [to boost productivity] will be lost. We need to keep up with this thrust."

Changes should also not be made too hastily.

"Our priority in the coming years must be to continue to develop Singaporeans' capabilities and, at the same time, having a well-calibrated inflow of foreign manpower that can complement our people, finance minister Heng Swee Keat said in an interview with local media.

Because if you can get a cheap worker, why will I bother to automate? Therefore, you never learn to automate, and you never need to operate in a different way.

He added that Singapore needs to maintain the well-calibrated policy in order to send a very strong signal that productivity improvement is going to be key.
No woman from a conservative Indian family likes to talk about it, but the V-card plays a pretty important role in their getting married to the man of their parents' dreams.

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Men, on the other hand are taught to expect their wives to be virgins before marriage, irrespective their own sexcapades.

This short film by Purani Dili Talkies addresses this conundrum in a lucid and homely manner -- through a normal discussion between a husband and wife who are just sitting across from each other on the dinner table.

From the wife reminding the husband to bring pears when he steps out of the house next time, the discussion moves on to his brother Chota's hunt for a wife, in the old-fashioned arranged-marriage manner. That's when the issue of virginity pops up, because despite the numerous girlfriends he "takes out on his bikes", he still wants a wife who's a virgin.

The husband, looking calmly into his phone matter-of-factedly tells her that his family was breaking the proposal because the girl wasn't a virgin. And he knew that for a fact, because his brother had asked her that question himself.

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"I still get men who complain to me saying that the wife did not bleed on the first night and hence, they suspect that she's not a virgin. The truth is that the presence of the hymen which ruptures (resulting in the bleeding) is not a sure shot sign of virginity. Some women are born without it, there there are those for whom it is so elastic that it never ruptures; while for some it is so fragile that a slightly intense activity may have ruptured it without them even realising it. It is just not possible to figure out whether a girl is a virgin or not by just examining her except if she's been through a pregnancy or if she simply admits it," sexologist Dr Rajan Bhonsle said.

"But how does that matter," says the outraged wife in the video. "Chotu's courting god know how many women and you're worrying about that girl's virginity? The fact that she answered his question honestly, shows that she has a good character, in fact," the wife adds.

But the good news is that virginity for women, especially in big cities, has ceased to become a tabooed subject, with men and women expressing their emotions, desires and love in a more open and mature fashion.

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Actress Sophie Choudry told The Times of India, "Most people in metropolitan cities do not expect their partners to be virgins anymore because India has gone through a dramatic change in the past 10 years. India is no longer the closed society it was. The modern young Indian woman is working, independent and makes her own choices in life. It's a change the Indian man has adapted to."

"Nonetheless, we cannot ignore that there is tremendous pressure on girls from smaller cities and more conservative families that virginity does still play a major factor when it comes to their marriage," Choudry added.

In the video, to explain the matter to her husband in a language he can understand, the wife says saucily, "We've had a good marriage for so many years now? Did you know for a fact that I was a virgin?"

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European Parliament approves EU-Mauritius fisheries agreement

April 20,2018 | Source: FIS Worldnews

The plenary session of the European Parliament approved the fisheries agreement between the European Union and Mauritius, which will be valid for four years and benefits 85 EU vessels. The agreement was signed in April last year and allows access to waters of the Republic of Mauritius to 22 Spanish tuna seiners, 16 French and 2 Italian tuna seiners as well as 12 Spanish surface longliners, 29 French and 4 Portuguese longliners.



In addition, it allows access to a maximum of 20 supply vessels to assist fishing vessels. In return, the EU will pay Mauritius EUR 2.3 million for the period between 2017 and 2021 (EUR 575,000 per year). From this economic contribution, EUR 220,000 per year correspond to the fishing of 4,000 tonnes of product, EUR 220.00 per year will be destined to the development of the fishing sector of Mauritius and EUR 135,000 per year will be for the development of the maritime policy and the ocean economy of the African country. The EU and Mauritius signed their first bilateral fisheries agreement in 1989. The last renewal came into force in 2014 and expired in January 2017.

Theme(s): Fishing Craft, Gear and Fishing Methods, Freshwater ecosystems and threats, Landing Centres, Others, Post Harvest Technology and Trade, Communities and Organisations, Fisheries Development and Aquaculture, Coastal Ecosystems and Threats, Fisheries Resources.
Do you have PCOS? Here are 5 tips you can use to get pregnant
Imagine you were being sued by a billion-dollar company. You'd probably be a little freaked out.

But when I reached out to the guys behind a small Australian burger chain called Down N' Out, which has only two restaurants and is being sued for trademark infringement by the exponentially larger American burger chain, In-N-Out, I heard a different reaction.

"Why would we be worried? Hah," co-founder Ben Kagan emailed me. He declined to talk more about the lawsuit, but he did want to be sure I knew something else: "[W]e're about to open 10 more stores across Australia."

Hmmm, I thought. Good for them. But I was surprised, and I had a sense something else was going on.

Down N' Out was described when it opened as "an Australian tribute to the classic In-N-Out burger"--an unauthorized one, apparently. Of course, one person's tribute is another person's trademark infringement, and I understood why In-N-Out would want to to enforce its trademarks everywhere.

I stared at Kagan's email signature as I pondered his reaction. It didn't say "co-founder." (I got that from LinkedIn.) Instead it said he was the "creative director" for Hashtag Burgers, which owns Down N' Out, which means he's handling marketing and social media.

And that's when it suddenly occurred to me. Almost no matter what happens with this lawsuit, it's actually a brilliant win-win situation for both the giant In-N-Out and the tiny Down N' Out--before they even set foot in court. Here's why.

In-N-Out

We'll look at this from both perspectives: What In-N-Out gains, and what Down N' Out gains--and why neither company really risks losing much of anything.

First, In-N-Out. It's actually not that big a chain: only 329 locations, last time I checked. Unfortunately from my perspective, the company is famously parochial--meaning they're iconic and much-loved where they have stores, like in California, but they basically refuse to expand elsewhere. Heck, I'd love if they'd open just one in New York City.

But even though the odds are long that they'd ever open permanent restaurants in Australia, they also want to prevent anyone else from putting together a blatant rip-off of their brand in a foreign country. And since intellectual property law is largely defined by individual countries, they have to make a continual effort to find ways to defend their mark in every country they care about.

One way they've been doing this? Setting up "pop-up" burger shops for a day or so at a time, as they've done in Sydney and Melbourne, along with Japan, China, and England. And maybe by finding companies like Down N' Out to file trademark suits against.

There's no doubt that Down N' Out is inspired by In-N-Out, but from looking at the menus and social-media accounts of the two companies, I don't think anyone who walked into the Australian chain would really think they were at the American company--any more than somebody who went to Outback Steakhouse in the U.S. might actually think they'd somehow wound up in Australia.

But, "the more robust an enforcement program a mark owner has, the more likely it is that third parties will stay away," says Marc P. Misthal of the New York law firm Gottlieb, Rackman & Reisman, which handles trademark issues in the U.S. and overseas.

I asked In-N-Out for comment on all of this strategy but haven't heard back. Still, all of this means the U.S. burger chain might not even really have to win in court against Down N' Out to succeed at its larger goal: demonstrating from a legal perspective that they're aggressive in protecting their name and other trademarks, which makes the marks themselves stronger.

Down N' Out

To understand why Down N' Out is potentially thrilled by the idea of being sued, you need to learn just a little bit about the company's history and take a look at the Down N' Out Instagram feed.

"Hashtag Burgers started as an events company," Kagan told me in another email. Among its events: pop-up burger restaurants for other brands.

"After seeing how much success we could bring other people and after learning a little bit more about the backend of the restaurant industry, we realised we could pull it off ourselves," he writes. "As a result, we launched Down N' Out in 2016."

And man, those burgers. They're on social media, and they're insane. I can't imagine who'd even be able to eat some of them. Take this one, devoted to the 10th anniversary of the last episode of The Sopranos, that includes two Wagyu beef patties, fried gabagool, deep fried ravioli, meatballs, garlic aioli, and Parmesan and American cheese.

Also, as much as I love In-N-Out--I do--I've never seen anything like this burger at In-N-Out. So let's assume this small Australian burger chain is pretty confident that an Australian court is never going to find that they've been ripping off In-N-Out.
In a massive study by the Hay Group, a global management consulting firm, researchers analyzed data from over 5 million employees across the world to make comparisons across different generations.

Surprisingly, they found that generational differences have more to do with stages of development in employees rather than their generational makeup -- those commonly-held beliefs and stereotypes about each generation.

In other words, the differences between Millennials versus Boomers versus Generation X better reflect changes in perceptions and expectations due to their age and career stage, rather than generational thinking or values.

This includes their preferences for how they're managed and led, and what the work environment has to offer. So that begs the question: What does each generation want from their bosses? Turns out, much of the same things.

In the end, people of any generation that call themselves "human beings" really want to follow those they can respect, admire, and trust. There are certain, transcending characteristics in next generation leaders that apply to all generations.

1. Next generation leaders embrace diversity.

In an age of racial tension and discrimination, next generation leaders will embrace diversity; welcome differing opinions, ideas, and expressions; and create an open environment that promotes mutual understanding, where people come together for a greater good. They encourage an open and psychologically safe environment where people can talk openly about their specific needs, desires, interests, ideas, strengths, and talents where everyone feels valued.

2. Next generation leaders adapt their styles to each individual.

Think about it. Do you, as a leader, define your employees' needs by gender or age? And do employees, when hired, expressing wanting a work environment that's based on age preferences? What next generation leaders do to engage and motivate their teams in the best way possible is to build their own self-awareness and draw on a range of different leadership styles to adapt to the person and situation.

3. Next generation leaders take their employees' pulse regularly.

One surefire way to discourage employees is to treat them like they're invisible. To keep them engaged, great leaders talk about their work -- a lot. In one report published by PeopleFluent in 2015, half of all Millennials surveyed prefer monthly and even more frequent performance reviews (only 9.8 percent surveyed prefer the annual version). The same goes for leaders open to receive regular and ongoing feedback from their employees to ensure their work is meaningful, the environment is safe, and obstacles are removed from their path. Companies like Officevibe and TINYpulse make a living from this approach, providing "always on" pulse surveys to drive culture, engagement, and performance.

4. Next generation leaders leverage the power of the praise.

"I don't like compliments," said no human being, ever. Managers have to get into the habit of praising and complimenting their people for their good qualities and work. The companies in Gallup's study with the highest engagement levels use recognition and praise as a powerful motivator to get their commitment. They found that employees who receive it on a regular basis increase their individual productivity, receive higher loyalty and satisfaction scores from customers, and are more likely to stay with their organization. Being recognized in front of their peers or the organization has special worth because everyone can then see the value that an employee is bringing. According to Gallup, praise should be given once per week.

5. Next generation leaders provide leadership advancement.

Research has proven that Millennials, in particular, are very much interested in leadership positions and rapid career advancement. In one massive joint study conducted by Universum, INSEAD Emerging Markets Institute, and the HEAD Foundation, nearly 70 percent of Millennials across the globe say achieving a managerial or leadership role in their careers is important. Key point here: They value the opportunity to influence the organization for which they work.

6. Next generation leaders share their leadership.

To truly build employee loyalty, the best leaders allow their most valued workers to have a seat at the table to make decisions and exercise influence over things that matter in the business. At your company, think of decisions over key projects, strategy, mission, or hiring, in which key individual contributors can get involved and provide input. Take a cue from the global insurance company Acuity, rated one of the 100 Best Companies to Work For in Fortune magazine. It drives loyalty by regularly letting its employees (a large portion of them Millennials) decide to which charity organizations Acuity will donate its millions.

A way forward
Josh Kesselman remembers the moment he fell in love with rolling papers. He was 5 years old, walking around his native Manhattan with his father, who smoked rolled cigarettes. The old man took a leaf of rice paper from a small booklet, lit it, and tossed it in the air.

"That beautiful piece of paper vanished," says Kesselman, now 47 and the founder of Raw, one of the most popular rolling paper brands in the U.S. "It was like seeing an angel disappear."

Kesselman has been chasing that magic his whole adult life. About 15 years ago, after an early career in retail that included a brief arrest, a motorcycle breakdown, and a spiritual awakening on a Canadian fishing trip, Kesselman took a chance on a Spanish factory to make "vegan" rolling papers. His product is now sold in every U.S. state across thousands of convenience stores, smoke shops, and cannabis dispensaries. His Phoenix company employs 2,000 workers, with offices in the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

What makes Raw's all-natural papers special is that they are made out of minimally processed organic hemp fibers that don't contain chemical whiteners, like most other papers. Kesselman's papers are light brown in color and considered vegan because they don't contain dye (some dye is made with lactose) and the gum line is a plant-based adhesive (some papers still use animal-based gum).

Raw was originally made for connoisseurs who wanted paper that wouldn't alter the flavor of whatever was being smoked--tobacco, legal herbs, or marijuana. Today, the company has a broad but cult-like following, with hip-hop star Wiz Khalifa even dedicating a song to the brand, aptly titled "Raw."

"Everyone wants to smoke the best," says Kesselman. "It's like how people don't want to eat Wonder Bread anymore--they want to eat all-natural, ancient grains."

Kesselman wouldn't disclose Raw's revenue, but according to Flowhub, which tracks purchases at legal cannabis dispensaries, the company has about 30 percent of the market in at least six states, including California, Colorado, and Oregon. In second place, with about 16 percent, is Zig-Zag, owned by the public company Turning Point.

At Medicine Man, one of Colorado's oldest dispensaries, Sally Vander Veer, co-founder and president of the dispensary chain, says customers clearly prefer it. "Raw is our best-selling paper," she says.

Arm-Long Joints, Cows, and Salmon

After graduating from the University of Florida in 1993, Kesselman started a small smoke shop named Knuckleheads, which imported specialty rolling papers from Europe and sold pipes, bongs, and smoking accessories. He scrapped together $500 to rent the storefront in Gainesville and slept in a shed behind his friend's house to make ends meet. But in 1996, he says, he had the misfortune of selling a bong to a young woman whose father worked for the U.S. government. Days later, the feds raided the shop and arrested Kesselman. He was forced to shut down the business, charged with a felony for selling drug paraphernalia, and placed under house arrest for a few months.

Later that year, he moved to Arizona and---undeterred--decided to start over. He launched HBI, a smoke-shop supply distribution company (though this time, he didn't sell bongs). He doubled down on rolling papers. By 1997, the business was clocking in new accounts each week.

Around that time, he was introduced to the owner of an old rolling paper factory in Spain's Alcoy region, who was looking for an exclusive customer to helped create and sell new products. Kesselman signed on, and began manufacturing two new paper brands: Juicy Jays, which were flavored papers, and Elements, which resembled the rice papers his dad used.

Kesselman then decided to make an even bigger bet, on vegan rolling papers. The move was a highly personal one for him, based on his own lifestyle. As he tells it, back in 1993, when he was riding his motorcycle in Florida, he broke down next to a cow pasture. He started speaking to the cows in jest, and a baby cow and its mother starting mooing. That night at dinner, Kesselman ordered a burger and blood pooled on the plate. He quit eating meat. (He continued eating fish.)

A month later, while on a fishing trip in Canada, he caught a coho salmon. As he pulled it out of the water, its red scales shimmered in the sun. "I could see God in that f---ing fish," he says. As he was about to kill it, "she looks at me with acceptance, thinking, 'OK. I'm going to die now,'" he says.

Kesselman waded into the Fraser River and let the fish go. After that, he decided, everything he consumed would be vegan, including rolling papers.

In 2004, Kesselman searched for a supplier who could sell him natural and unbleached fiber, which would be considered vegan. He could only find one, and there was a catch: He had to place an order for at least $1 million. "I hedged my whole business," Kesselman says, and scraped up enough to place the initial order. "My best friend told me I was an idiot to put 'vegan' on the package. But it worked out."

Stick to Shoes

Raw became the first vegan rolling papers on the market, almost instantly winning a loyal following. To this day, the brand's popularity owes a lot to Kesselman's over-the-top public personality.

You can watch Kesselman on Instagram ride in private jets or hotbox his "vegan" Ferrari--the seats are microfiber instead of leather--with arm-size joints. (He also documents his more serious work in Ethiopia, where he has donated about $2 million to build clean water wells.) Although Raw isn't specifically marketed for cannabis, after scrolling through his social media pages, you get the wink and nod.

Kesselman says he plans to continue the ride, uninterrupted, for years to come. While research firms like BDS Analytics predict that new cannabis users are trending toward vapes and edibles, Raw is not going smokeless.
OpenAI, a nonprofit research lab started by Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk released the salary details of it's employees--and they are striking. The organization's top researcher was paid more than $1.9 million in 2016, and another leading researcher who was only recruited in March was paid $800,000 that year, according to a recent article in the New York Times.

Salaries for top A.I. researchers have skyrocketed because there is high demand for the skills--thousands of companies want to work with the technology--and few people have them. So even researchers at a nonprofit can make big money.

It likely has more to do with competition than interest in the field itself, however. The Times points out that both of the researchers employed by OpenAI used to work at Google. At DeepMind, a Google-owned A.I. lab in London, $138 million was spent on the salaries of 400 employees, translating to $345,000 per employee including researchers and other staff, the Times reports.
Netflix will reportedly begin purchasing movie theatres - to help it get ahead in the race for Academy Awards.

The streaming giant has aimed to land an Oscar nod since the release of its first original feature in 2015, Beasts of No Nation.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Netflix is allegedly contemplating the acquisition of cinemas in Los Angeles and New York to help them during awards season.

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Netflix's movies would likely get an extra push from being exposed to audiences in theatres.

The report claims that Netflix executives originally wanted to buy Los Angeles' Landmark Theatres, co-owned by Mark Cuban.

Landmark Theatres is known for luring in awards voters by screening "first-run" movies, documentaries and international movies during Academy Awards season.

However this claim has been disputed by sources close to Netflix saying that the company isn't planning to purchase Landmark's theatres.

"Netflix wants to establish itself as a critical exhibition source on both coasts," a source told the Times. "For awards consideration they need to be able to release pictures on screens in major markets."

Netflix's current business model is a "day-and-date" strategy, which releases films nominated for awards on the platform the same day they open in theatres.

Movies like Beasts of No Nation, Okja, The Meyerowitz Stories and Mudbound have followed suit.

Since the films are instantly available on Netflix, sometimes the platform's content doesn't get enough attention through word of mouth.

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It's likely that a move like this will help their awards chances, but it's understood that Netflix says that the move is for consumer-choice purposes.

Netflix's potential next move comes after the company removed its movies from the 2018 Cannes Film Festival after a disagreement about theatrical release dates.

While The Times maintains that there's been no Netflix cinema deal yet, executives seem to be interested in pursuing this strategy down the line.

The Independent has reached out to Netflix for comment, but has not yet gotten a response.
Its spring and the UK is experiencing a heat wave which can only mean one thing: Rose all day.

From frose cocktails to gummy sweets, chocolate and even alcoholic ice-lollies, there are so many delicious new ways to enjoy the pink tipple.

But for traditionalists in search of a good old-fashioned bottle, knowing which one to choose in a category teeming with enticing options can be baffling.

Whats the best region to buy from, how do you know youre getting a decent bottle, and how much should you be spending?

According to Adrian Smith, The Independents wine and spirits expert and official brand ambassador for Vivino, you can spend anywhere between 7-35, however the sweet spot sits at around 12-15.

When it comes to the amount youre looking to spend, there are a few factors Id take into consideration. If youre looking to keep the costs down, it is possible to find some decent rose around the 7-10 mark, Smith said.

But for me, I feel the best value/quality split sits at around 12-15. Thats not to say there arent some beautiful roses that sit outside that price bracket, with the likes of Domaine Ott producing some sensationally rich and textured rose wine at around 27-35, dependent on the retailer.

Its also important to pay attention to which area the wine comes from depending on your tastes.

If you like your rose dry, pale and not whacking you round the face with fruit, then Cotes de Provence is always a safe bet, Helena Nicklin, head of content for Winerist told The Independent.

If you like it full and fruity, candy-cane style however, then an inexpensive Californian white Zinfandel will do that job for you. One to try, though it can be pricey, is a Tavel from the Rhone Valley in France.

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

These are usually almost red, a bit grippy and all about savoury spice and wild strawberry. Its also fantastic with barbecued meat.

And when it comes to serving rose, Smith says the bottle should be as chilled as possible.

In this weather? Nice and cold, but not freezing. You want to get those beautiful fruity aromas, so dont leave it in the freezer too long in an attempt to cool it down quicker, he explains.

Id say bang it in the fridge for about 45 minutes before pouring and youll find the sweet spot. If youve got an ice bucket, keep that on hand, if not, just make sure its kept chilled in the fridge.

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Whatever method you choose though, Smith insists that you should never add ice cubes to your glass as it dilutes the flavour.

No one wants watered down rose, he says.

There is undoubtedly a lot of rose out there but to help you narrow it down Smith has revealed some of his top choices for both value and quality, including a few that come with bubbles  the ideal tipple for a sizzling afternoon or evening.

Best Rose Wines

Mirabeau Pure - 13.99 from Waitrose

Mirabeau Etoile - 16 from Sainsburys

Clos Mireille Domaine Ott - 26.21 from Vinatis

The Exquisite Collection Cotes de Provence Rose  6.69 from Aldi

Fontaine Du Clos Certitude Rose - 9.67 from Wanderlust Wines

Cantine San Marzano Tramari Rose di Primitivo - 11 from Vivino

Chateau de Campuget 1753 Syrah - Vermentino Rose - 14 from Vivino

Villa Wolf Pinot Noir Rose 2016 - 11 from Vivino

Best Sparkling Rose Wines

Mirabeau La Folie Rose (Provence, France) - 13.99 from Waitrose

Laurent Perrier Rose Brut (Champagne, France) - 60 from Sainsburys

Wiston Estate Rose Brut 2014 (Sussex, England) - 35.95 from Wiston Estate

Meinklang Frizzante Pinot Noir Rose 2016 (Burgenland, Austria) - 11.99 from Vivino

Marksman Ridge Rose Brut (Sussex, England) - 26 from M&S

Deutz Rose Brut (Champagne, France) - 47.50 from Ocado

Ruinart Rose Brut (Champagne, France) - 48.53 from Master of Malt

Raventos I Blanc Cava de Nit Rosado 2015 (Cava, Spain) - 19.80 from Vivino
The exploitation of companies like Amazon, Facebook and Instagram has caused a $1.5 trillion boom in cyber crime, according to new research.

The study by Dr Michael McGuire, senior lecturer in criminology at the University of Surrey, explored methods by which a new breed of opportunistic criminals are using major technology platforms for drug dealing, money laundering, human trafficking and even terrorism.

What is astounding is just how much cyber criminals are profiting from these platforms, Dr McGuire told The Independent. Its an incredibly lucrative economy  $1.5 trillion is actually a pretty conservative estimate.

Gadget and tech news: In pictures Show all 25 1 /25 Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gun-toting humanoid robot sent into space Russia has launched a humanoid robot into space on a rocket bound for the International Space Station (ISS). The robot Fedor will spend 10 days aboard the ISS practising skills such as using tools to fix issues onboard. Russia's deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin has previously shared videos of Fedor handling and shooting guns at a firing range with deadly accuracy. Dmitry Rogozin/Twitter Gadget and tech news: In pictures Google turns 21 Google celebrates its 21st birthday on September 27. The The search engine was founded in September 1998 by two PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in their dormitories at Californias Stanford University. 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The $2000 folding phone has been found to break easily with review copies being recalled after backlash PA Gadget and tech news: In pictures Charging mat non-starter Apple has cancelled its AirPower wireless charging mat, which was slated as a way to charge numerous apple products at once AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures "Super league" India shoots down satellite India has claimed status as part of a "super league" of nations after shooting down a live satellite in a test of new missile technology EPA Gadget and tech news: In pictures 5G incoming 5G wireless internet is expected to launch in 2019, with the potential to reach speeds of 50mb/s Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Uber halts driverless testing after death Uber has halted testing of driverless vehicles after a woman was killed by one of their cars in Tempe, Arizona. March 19 2018 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie 'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway resembling the giant panda is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway, resembling a giant panda, is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A concept car by Trumpchi from GAC Group is shown at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A Mirai fuel cell vehicle by Toyota is displayed at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A visitor tries a Nissan VR experience at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A man looks at an exhibit entitled 'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A new Israeli Da-Vinci unmanned aerial vehicle manufactured by Elbit Systems is displayed during the 4th International conference on Home Land Security and Cyber in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv Getty

The research follows revelations that UK data firm Cambridge Analytica collected personal information from 87 million people after an online quiz was used to take advantage of Facebooks data and security settings.

According to Dr McGuire, Cambridge Analytica is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the manipulation of social media firms and other technology companies.

Its more of a question of which platforms arent being misused, Dr McGuire said. AirBnb and Uber are being used to move money around, Instagram has become a hotbed for illicit drug dealing, while eBay and Amazon are being used to peddle counterfeit goods and bypass local tax laws.

The study refers to this new model of cyber crime as platform criminality, explaining how large criminal organisations are profiting from this burgeoning cyber economy.

The $1.5 trillion profits obtained through these platforms are equivalent to the GDP of Russia, the study notes.

The findings of Dr McGuires research provide shocking insight into just how widespread and profitable cyber crime has become, said Gregory Webb, the CEO of Bromium, the cyber security firm that commissioned the study.

The platform criminality model is productising malware and making cyber crime as easy as shopping online We cant solve this problem using old thinking or outmoded technology. Its time for new approaches.

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The companies involved are yet to be approached with the studys findings, though Dr McGuire hopes his research will bring their attention to the issue.

Approaching these companies is the next step, Dr McGuire said. A lot of them are aware of the issue but its operating at such a scale that its difficult to see what they will do about it.

They need to come down from their pedestals and engage with criminology experts in order to have meaningful dialogues that will lead to meaningful results.

Dr McGuire is set to present the findings of the study at the RSA Conference in San Francisco on Friday, 20 April.
As a native New Yorker, 27-year-old Bri Rogers was intrigued to discover more about her ancestry and how her family made its way to the Big Apple.

New York City is a multicultural metropolis with a population that speaks more than 200 languages, so Ms Rogers knew that she could potentially find out lots of interesting facts by delving into her familys past.

Ive always been curious about my roots, knowing that my ancestors came from many different places to seek freedom and opportunities here, she told The Independent.

Bri Rogers has plans to become a professional genealogist after delving into her family's past (Bri Rogers)

With a father from Brooklyn and a mother born in Puerto Rico, Ms Rogers was positive that results from an AncestryDNA test would uncover familial connections with Ireland and Spain.

However, she wasnt expecting the diverse array of results that she received.

Taking an AncestryDNA test involves sending off a sample of your saliva to be analysed.

AncestryDNA uses the sample to estimate your biological connection with more than 350 regions from around the world.

Bri Rogers is a native New Yorker with a father from Brooklyn and a mother from Puerto Rico (Bri Rogers)

After six to eight weeks your detailed AncestryDNA results will then become available in your profile on the site.

Ms Rogers' results unveiled that she was indeed part-Irish, with 26 per cent of her DNA makeup attributed to that area, in addition to various parts of Europe.

However, her European Jewish and Native American background took her largely by surprise.

Ms Rogers was informed that she was eight per cent European Jewish and seven per cent Native American, two ethnicities that she hadnt expected in the slightest.

The 27-year-old was shocked to discover that she had both European Jewish and Native American heritage (Bri Rogers)

This newfound knowledge of her heritage inspired her to travel the world, venturing to Puerto Rico, Ireland, Poland and France.

My ancestry results is the compass to my ancestral past, she said.

After taking this test, I felt a closer connection with myself and my family, and most importantly the ancestors who faced hardships and overcame obstacles in their lives.

The feeling of connecting and belonging is what makes these experiences exciting, and when you know you have an ancestral connection to a certain place, it makes the journey even more meaningful.

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Stumbling upon her Jewish connection has inspired Ms Rogers to venture to Lithuania this summer, where she has a distant cousin waiting to meet her for the very first time.

After an individual has taken an AncestryDNA test, the company will then search across its network of AncestryDNA members to determine whether anyone else around the world shares your DNA and could turn out to be a relative that you had no idea existed.

Ms Rogers has felt so inspired by her ancestry journey that she's decided to embark on a fascinating career path.

The discoveries that Ive made on my ancestry journey have fuelled my passion to become a professional genealogist, she said.

After taking an AncestryDNA test, Ms Rogers decided to travel to Puerto Rico, Ireland, Poland and France (Bri Rogers)

I want to be able to share this exciting feeling with others. Recently, I helped a client make a family tree and use their DNA results to find a half-sibling and unknown family in England.

Ms Rogers is currently studying for a graduate degree in history at Harvard University and has plans to complete a certificate in genealogical studies this summer at Boston University.

Her experiences travelling abroad have had a profound impact on her life.

I have learned so much travelling to these countries and meeting new people, exploring historical sites, trying staple foods and learning new languages," she said.

The budding genealogist has plans to visit Lithuania this summer to visit a distant Jewish cousin (Bri Rogers)

She had a particularly special moment while in Florence, as she became aware of her Italian heritage while enjoying an espresso and pastry for breakfast.

These experiences offered me a chance to learn more about my ancestral past and the importance of preserving my family history in writing for generations to come," she stated.

The adventure hasnt finished quite yet, as Ms Rogers has plans to visit Portugal, Spain and Greece in the near future.

The possibilities are endless, she said.

Where in the world will your DNA take you? Click here to buy AncestryDNA
HSBC faced protests at its annual general meeting on Friday from activists highlighting the banks investments in companies which supply Israel with weapons.

Campaign groups War on Want and the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign protested outside the shareholder event in Westminster, demanding that the UKs largest lender divests from arms companies including Boeing, BAE Systems and Elbit Systems.

They say the defence companies have sold arms used for violence against Palestinians, including extrajudicial executions, attacks on unarmed protesters and house demolitions.

According to War on Wants research, HSBC holds 831m worth of shares in, and is involved in syndicated loans worth at least 19.3bn to, companies that sell weapons and military equipment to the Israeli government.

One of the companies HSBC holds shares in, Elbit Systems, produces cannons to fire cluster munitions which Israel ordered as recently as August 2017, according to Haaretz. Because of concern over the risks to civilians from cluster munitions, they are banned by an international treaty, signed by the UK, but not by Israel.

Ryvka Barnard, senior campaigner on militarism and security at War on Want, said: HSBC holds millions of pounds worth of shares in companies like BAE Systems, Boeing, and Elbit Systems, whose weapons are used in Israeli military attacks on Palestinian civilians.

As long as HSBC maintains business with companies arming Israel, its role in the oppression of Palestinians will continue to raise alarm and generate protest.

In response to a question raised at Friday's AGM, HSBC chairman Mark Tucker said: We strongly support the application of international human rights principles to business and we emphatically don't take positions on political issues.

"Since 2000... we have progressively withdrawn from the defence equipment sector and we do not provide financial services to customers who solely or primarily manufacturer or sell weapons."

The protest comes on the same day that campaigners hailed a victory against HSBC and its backing of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline between Canada and the US.

The bank said on Thursday that it will no longer provide project finance for new tar sands projects including the construction of any pipelines for the oil, which produces more greenhouse gas emissions than traditional fossil fuel sources.

HSBC also announced that it would stop providing financing for new coal-fired power plants as part of its efforts to support a transition to a low-carbon economy.

Paddy McCully, Rainforest Action Network climate and energy program director, described HSBCs new policy as a mixed bag.

That Europes number one banker of tar sands is distancing itself from the sector is encouraging, he said.

HSBCs prohibition on direct finance for tar sands mines and pipelines is the latest signal that the financial sector is gradually losing its appetite for these risky projects and provides further evidence that there is no long term future for tar sands oil.

However, he said the policy left a loophole which would allow HSBC to fund new coal-fired power already in pre-construction development in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Vietnam.

The Independent has contacted HSBC, Boeing, BAE System and Elbit Systems for comment but none of the companies had responded at the time of publication.
A man who doused a student and her cousin with acid in a vicious attack has been jailed for 16 years.

Resham Khan had been celebrating her 21st birthday with Jameel Mukhtar when they were targeted in Beckton, East London, on 21 June last year.

Police said John Tomlin approached the vehicle and squirted acid at the pair through a passenger window after starting an argument with Mr Mukhtar on the pavement.

Ms Khan began screaming as the liquid started to burn and her cousin tried to drive away, but was blocked by parked vehicles.

As he tried pull out into the road and escape, Tomlin ran around the car and threw more acid onto Mr Mukhtar through his window.

CCTV shows Tomlin trying to continue the attack by running alongside the car until he could not keep up, in full view of shoppers in the busy street.

He then fled after Mr Mukhtar, who was temporarily blinded, mounted the pavement and crashed a short distance away.

The 37-year-old previously told The Independent he remembered the liquid feeling cold, and then starting to burn, melting through his skin, clothes and shoes.

Jameel Muhktar, 37, in hospital following an acid attack on 21 June

He dragged Ms Khan out of the passenger seat, stripping off her burning clothes and banging on the doors of nearby homes for water to wash off the burning liquid.

Witnesses described disturbing scenes as clothes melted off the victims, with the acid strong enough to burn through the seats and dashboard of Mr Mukhtars car.

A member of the public took both victims to hospital in his car but the time they received treatment they had suffered life-changing injuries and needed significant surgery and skin grafts.

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Tomlin, 26, was identified by witnesses and arrested weeks later when he handed himself into police following a manhunt, having slept rough to evade officers.

He pleaded guilty to causing grievous bodily harm with intent and inflicting grievous bodily harm at Snaresbrook Crown Court, where he was jailed on Friday.

Tomlin was sentenced to 16 years' imprisonment for each offence, to run concurrently, for each offence with an additional four-year extended licence where he will be monitored.

The judge also ordered that he serve at minimum of two thirds of the sentence before being released.

Judge Sheelagh Canavan described the assault as somewhat random and told Tomlin that no sentence could give back to the victims what he took from them.

"The court can only hope that in time and with help they can begin to put the consequences of your unprovoked attack behind them - it is undoubtedly a life's work, she added.

Damage to Jameel Mukhtar's car following an acid attack by John Tomlin on 21 June 2017 (CPS)

"It is becoming all too common an occurrence on our streets that members of the public are pouring water over people who have had acid thrown over them, as if this is some sort of fashionable assault that is being carried out."

Tomlin, of Colman Road in Canning Town, told police that he was "hearing voices in my head".

He has been diagnosed as emotionally unstable with a personality disorder and has a number of previous convictions, including violent offences, robbery, burglaries and theft, the court heard.

Both victims are still being treated for extensive burns to their faces and bodies, while suffering permanent scars, depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts.

Mr Mukhtar suffered third-degree burns and injuries to his eye and ear. Following the sentencing, he branded Tomlin an animal and coward.

The sentence isn't long enough, my life has finished, I'm in continuous pain, I can't sleep and I can't eat, Mr Mukhtar said.

Something needs to be done about acid attacks, I don't feel this was a strong enough sentence. This will carry on now.

He should have been given life, he should have done the whole of his life in prison.

If this was in America he could have been given the death penalty, that's what he deserves.

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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. 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

Ms Khan, a student at Manchester Metropolitan University and aspiring model, suffered burns to her face, shoulder and legs and damage to her eyes.

Speaking outside court, she thanked all the medical staff and police who have helped her, adding: I hope to push through and get on as if it never happened.

Detective Sergeant Dion Brown, of the Metropolitan Police, said: This was a vicious attack, which has left two victims with substantial injuries that will stay with them for life. Both victims still require treatment for the burns they suffered that day and my thoughts are with them as they continue their recovery.

Tests showed that Tomlin used a strong substance equivalent to hydrochloric acid, with the horrific attack coming amid a spate of robberies using acid that drove a government crackdown on sales and new laws.

"Acid attacks can inflict terrible, disfiguring injuries and cause excruciating pain - those who cause such injuries can expect severe consequences when they are brought to justice, DS Brown said.

"That is why the sentence today reflects the extreme seriousness of this crime.

Helen Taylor, of the Crown Prosecution Service, said the weight of evidence left Tomlin with no choice but to admit his crime.

This was an appalling attack that left the victims with physical and psychological scars, she added.

The sentence imposed today will serve to protect the public and I want to thank the victims for helping the prosecution to secure this outcome.

This case serves as a warning of the harm acid can cause and that those who use it as a weapon can face significant prison sentences."

Additional reporting by PA
A 41 year-old woman was followed into a lift and repeatedly stabbed in the chest and stomach in north London as a surge in knife crime continues.

The victim was left in a serious condition in hospital after being attacked by a man at a block of flats in Hoxton on Thursday afternoon.

Detectives believe the suspect may have been hanging around the area of Wimbourne Court in the days leading up to the stabbing.

Appealing for witnesses and information, Detective Sergeant Barry Hart said: "We have established that the woman was stabbed in the lift of a block of flats by a male suspect.

"It is possible that this male suspect has been hanging around the block - Wimbourne Court, off Wimbourne Street and Shaftesbury Street in Hoxton - both immediately before and in the days leading up to the stabbing.

"We need to hear from anyone who has seen a suspicious male in and around Wimbourne Court, as well as anyone with information that may assist the investigation."

The woman's injuries are not believed to be life-threatening.

Knife crime in England and Wales is at its highest since comparable figures began in 2011 and London generally accounts for just over a third of all knife offences.

The latest available statistics, for the year to September 2017, show 37,443 offences involving a knife or sharp instrument, a 21 per cent increase on the previous year.

So far this year 37 people have been stabbed to death in London and latest victim was 18 year-old Sami Sidhom, who was stabbed to death in Forest Gate on Monday.

Last year around 80 people - not including the terror attacks at London Bridge and Westminster - were stabbed to death in the capital.

Concern over rising knife crime led to the government setting up a Serious Violence Task Force earlier this month.

No arrests have yet been made in relation to the Hoxton stabbing.

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

Anyone with information about the attack is asked to call detectives at Hackney CID on 020 7275 3410 or via 101.
Toxic levels of the nerve agent used to attack Sergei Skripal and his daughter could still be present at "hot spots" around Salisbury, government scientists believe.

A small amount of the deadly novichok substance is thought to have been used in liquid form to target the former Russian agent, 66, and Yulia, 33.

Work is to begin decontaminating nine locations across the city where experts think the substance could still be present, in a multi million-pound operation which could take months to complete.

Officials from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), joined local council, police and health representatives to update residents on the clean-up process at a public meeting on Thursday evening.

Asked whether the chemical remains at the same "lethal" level as the day it was put on Mr Skripal's door, Defra's chief scientific adviser Ian Boyd said: "We have to make an assumption that in certain circumstances there will be relatively high concentrations, probably in very, very specific locations, which could be at levels that could be toxic to individuals.

"That's an assumption, it's also one we've tested in some circumstances and we do know that there are hot spots like that around, so we have to make those assumptions that some of the hot spots we've still got to find.

"But those hot spots will still be in the locations we are talking about.

 Salisbury nerve agent attack: Sergei Skripal and daughter were poisoned with novichok on their front door

"In these locations, there may well be higher concentrations that we still have to find, but we already know there are some high concentrations within those locations."

The meeting was held as work began to replace police cordons around the Maltings area in the city centre, the nearby Zizzi restaurant and the Mill pub with more robust hoardings.

Residents were told the Bourne Hill building, housing Salisbury's police station as well as Wiltshire council's offices will close for up to eight weeks from Friday.

The decontamination work will focus on the evidence room and two lockers inside the station, which were sealed off after the March 4 attack.

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

Deputy Chief Constable Paul Mills, from Wiltshire Police, said it would be "business as usual" as operations move to other sites in and around the city.

Other areas earmarked for chemical cleaning include two ambulance stations, a car compound and the home of poisoned police officer Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey.

Mr Skripal's home, which is still part of the police investigation, will be the last to be decontaminated.

PA
The Queen has lobbied world leaders on behalf of the Prince of Wales suggesting they one day choose Charles to succeed her as head of the Commonwealth.

The Queen's public endorsement of her son is an unprecedented move and came as she officially opened a major Commonwealth summit attended by presidents and prime ministers from across the globe.

Speaking about her wishes is likely to end years of speculation about who will take over as head of the institution her father King George VI first led in the aftermath of the Second World War.

The leaders are due to discuss the issue of Commonwealth succession during the two-day Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (Chogm), which will also see leaders debate topics ranging from a blue charter on ocean conservation to cyber security and trade.

With Charles and other senior royals sat in front of her in Buckingham Palace's ballroom, the Queen told the delegates who included Prime Minister Theresa May: "It remains a great pleasure and honour to serve you as Head of the Commonwealth and to observe, with pride and satisfaction, that this is a flourishing network.

"It is my sincere wish that the Commonwealth will continue to offer stability and continuity for future generations, and will decide that one day the Prince of Wales should carry on the important work started by my father in 1949.

"By continuing to treasure and reinvigorate our associations and activities, I believe we will secure a safer, more prosperous and sustainable world for those who follow us: a world where the Commonwealth's generosity of spirit can bring its gentle touch of healing and hope to all."

The prime minister of Malta Dr Joseph Muscat, outgoing chair-in-office of the Commonwealth, also backed Charles as head of the Commonwealth, seeming to confirm the prince's future role was a certainty.

"We are equally elated by the vigour with which His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales actively participates in Commonwealth affairs and puts a strong Commonwealth dimension in his various national and global ventures," Dr Muscat said in a speech at the ceremony.

"We are certain that, when he will be called upon to do so, he will provide solid and passionate leadership for our Commonwealth."

It has been widely assumed that the Queen, who celebrates her 92nd birthday on Saturday, is probably presiding over her last Chogm in person as she has not taken a long-haul flight for a number of years and the venue for the biennial summit moves around the globe, with the UK only hosting it three times in the last 32 years.

The Queen has been head of the Commonwealth since coming to the throne in 1952, but the position is not automatically held by the British monarch.

Downing Street said on Monday that a decision on whether the prince should succeed his mother as Commonwealth head was expected from the presidents and prime ministers on Friday, and reports have stated the mood is Charles will get their backing.

With the UK leaving the European Union the Commonwealth - a collection of former states that were once part of the British Empire - is likely to become increasingly important in terms of trade opportunities for Britain.

Charles has been highlighting his affinity with the Commonwealth in recent years and in his words of welcome to the leaders said: "For my part, the Commonwealth has been a fundamental feature of my life for as long as I can remember, beginning with my first visit to Malta when I was just five years old."

He went on to mention Commonwealth "giants" he had met and talked to like Kenneth Kaunda, the first president of Zambia, and Canada's former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, whose son Justin Trudeau now holds the post and was among the guests.

The prince added: "On the foundations they laid, the modern Commonwealth has a vital role to play in building bridges between our countries, fairer societies within them and a more secure world around them."

Later Dr Keith Mitchell, the prime minister of Grenada, said he had "no difficulty" with Charles taking over as head of the Commonwealth.

He told the BBC: "It would be good news, the Queen herself does very well and certainly we have been fortunate to have her leadership of stable leadership over this period.

"But having the Prince of Wales would certainly not be an unhelpful act at this point in time."

The Prime Minister's official spokesman said: "The Government supports the Prince of Wales as the next head of the Commonwealth."

Ms May's spokesman added. "He has been a proud supporter of the Commonwealth for more than four decades and has spoken passionately about the organisation's unique diversity.

"Succession is a matter for the Commonwealth as a whole to determine. Any discussion that did take place would take place at the leaders' retreat at Windsor Castle on Friday. Decisions in the Commonwealth are made by consensus."

PA
A prostate cancer patient promised he would get the treatment he needs by the prime minister in the midst of the Windrush scandal has said he is still uncertain about whether he will be offered help.

Albert Thompson - not his real name - was told he had to pay 54,000 to have radiotherapy if he could not prove he was in the country legally, despite having lived in the UK for 44 years.

Theresa May assured MPs he would be "be receiving the treatment he needs" when his case was raised by Jeremy Corbyn at Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday.

But Mr Thompson says he still has no clarity about his treatment, having received only a brief phone call from the Royal Marsden Hospital, in west London, on Wednesday night.

"The Prime Minister said I would get treatment, so I presume it is true, but I won't believe it until I get the go-ahead for the treatment," he told The Guardian.

Mr Thompson's case has been widely publicised despite the fact he is not technically part of the so-called "Windrush generation" because he arrived in the UK after the Immigration Act came into force.

His lawyer Jeremy Bloom described Mr Thompson's treatment as "grossly unfair", saying: "Nothing that the hospital have said since the PM's announcement has clarified whether or when he will be receiving the radiotherapy treatment that he requires."

A Royal Marsden hospital spokesman told the paper: "Mr Thompson's cancer specialist is arranging for Mr Thompson to come into the clinic for the next stage of his NHS treatment."

PA
Commonwealth leaders have approved Prince Charles to take over from the Queen as the next head of the organisation, sources say.

The decision was made by the 53 leaders on a retreat at Windsor Castle, but will not be confirmed until a press conference later today.

The backing for the Prince of Wales appeared inevitable from the moment that the 91-year-old Queen made a personal request for her son to succeed her, on Thursday.

However, some have opposed it, arguing the role is not hereditary and it would be better to rotate it between countries in the Commonwealth.

On Thursday, Prince Charles himself made an informal pitch to take over the leadership, making clear his commitment to the organisation. For my part, the Commonwealth has been a fundamental feature of my life for as long as I can remember, he told the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM).

And Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, had said he agreed very much with the Queens wishes.

The Queen had told the leaders: It is my sincere wish that the Commonwealth will continue to offer stability and continuity for future generations  and will decide that one day the Prince of Wales will carry on the important work started by my father in 1949.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 29 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 UK news in pictures 10 August 2021 Students react after they receive their A-Level results at the Ark Academy, in London Reuters

Theresa May confirmed the decision to appoint Prince Charles as head of the Commonwealth.

Speaking at a press conference to mark the end of CHOGM, she said: "Today we have agreed that the next head of the Commonwealth shall be His Royal Highness Prince Charles, The Prince of Wales.

"His Royal Highness has been a proud supporter of the Commonwealth for more than four decades and has spoken passionately about the organisations unique diversity, and it is fitting that, one day, he will continue the work of his mother, Her Majesty The Queen."

Asked if there were dissenting voices when the decision was made, the prime minister said: "No. The view was unanimous that Prince Charles should be next head of the Commonwealth."

Meanwhile, Boris Johnson threw Britains weight behind a future attempt by Zimbabwe to rejoin the Commonwealth, following the end of Robert Mugabes rule.

The foreign secretary said that Julys elections were a bellwether for the African nation following Mr Mugabes replacement by Emmerson Mnangagwa in November.

After meeting Zimbabwes foreign minister Sibusiso Moyo in London, Mr Johnson said Zimbabwe would need to undertake political and economic reform following decades of one-party rule.
Problems experienced by members of the Windrush generation as a result of the hostile immigration policy are likely to have been an unforeseen consequence, according to the former director-general of immigration enforcement at the Home Office.

The remarks come amid escalating pressure on Theresa May and Amber Rudd, the home secretary, over the governments handling of the Windrush scandal, with stories flooding in of individuals from that generation being denied basic services and threatened with deportation.

David Wood, the former director general of Home Office immigration enforcement between 2013 and 2014, also told BBCs Radio 4 Today programme that is was very unlikely members of the Windrush generation would have been deported due to safeguards.

Asked whether he considered how the immigration policies being introduced at the time would impact these people, he replied: I suspect that is clearly an unforeseen consequence of the policy. Just to put it into context I think the Windrush people when they arrived were told to register in the UK. Some of them for lots of reasons probably didnt.

Its those who didnt register initially and who havent registered since and who havent applied for a passport  so they are probably a small number. I suspect they were an unforeseen consequence, Im not sure.

But Mr Woods comments are likely to be met with scepticism after The Independent revealed that Ms May, the then-home secretary, ignored repeated warnings from her department over potential discrimination and hardship caused by the hostile environment policies aimed at illegal immigrants.

Four years ago, an internal impact assessment found that plans to demand immigration documents from tenants could make it harder for foreign nationals to find homes, and provoke discrimination.

In a second warning in 2015, while Ms May was still the home secretary, her department assessed how the new Immigration Bill could deny migrants housing and driving licences or see their bank accounts frozen.

Some non-UK born older people may have additional difficulties in providing original documentation, the document said. Some may have had their immigration records destroyed. Some will have originally come into the country under old legislation but may have difficulty in evidencing this.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures 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 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

Pressed on why the consequences on the Windrush generation were unforeseen, Mr Wood continued: I guess in a system where there are millions and millions of records, theres probably tens of thousands of checks everyday that go through those systems, there are sometimes problems.

There are safeguards in the system so this is regrettable, its very poor this has happened. Its very, very unlikely that one of these Windrush individuals would have been deported from the UK on the basis of these policies.

 'They were going to send me back to Jamaica. Ive never been to Jamaica': Son of Windrush immigrant threatened with deportation

Also appearing on the Today programme the former Liberal Democrat minister during the coalition, David Laws, said the hostile immigration for immigrants was introduced in 2012 after a cavalier pledge at the 2010 election to cut migrant numbers in response to fears surrounding a surge in Ukip support.

There was real worry among Lib Dems in the coalition, as well as some Tories, about several immigration proposals, including that landlords carry out checks on their tenants, he said.

Laws, who was Cabinet Office minister from 2012 until losing his Yeovil seat at the 2015 election, said: Immigration control has been a big priority for the Conservative Party, David Cameron and Theresa May, going into the 2010 election.

Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Show all 15 1 /15 Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK The ex-troopship 'Empire Windrush' arriving at Tilbury Docks from Jamaica, with 482 Jamaicans on board, emigrating to Britain. Getty Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Jamaican immigrants being welcomed by RAF officials from the Colonial Office after the ex-troopship 'Empire Windrush' landed them at Tilbury. PA Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Alford Gardner who arrived in Britain in 1948 on the first Windrush ship to dock in Tilbury, Essex, speaking at his home in Leeds PA Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Alford Gardner in Leeds shortly after he arrived in Britain in 1948 on the first Windrush ship to dock in Tilbury, Essex PA Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Gardner was 22 years old when he boarded the ship in Kingston, Jamaica, with his brother Gladstone before they and hundreds of Caribbean migrants called on to rebuild post-war Britain disembarked the ship in Tilbury Docks PA Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Alford Gardner (right), during his RAF service in 1947 PA Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK The son of Ruth Williams, a Windrush-generation immigrant, wants to the leave the country after threats of deportation. According to his mother, Mr Haynes applied for British citizenship in 2016 but was rejected, despite Ms Williams having lived in the UK almost permanently since arriving from St Vincent and the Grenadines in 1959. Ruth Williams, 75, said she felt "betrayed" by Britain after the Home Office twice turned down applications for her 35-year-old son, Mozi Haynes, to remain in the country. Ms Williams is understood to have cancer and said she relies heavily on her son for support. PA Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK The British liner 'Empire Windrush' at port in 1954. Getty Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Ruth Williams, 75, with her British passport. "I feel betrayed and a second class citizen in my own country," she said. "This makes me so sad and the Home Office must show some compassion. "I am unwell and almost 75, I live on my own and I need my son to stay here. I need my family around me and I cant face being alone. He has applied to the Home Office and been refused twice." PA Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK From the top, hopeful Jamaican boxers Charles Smith, Ten Ansel, Essi Reid, John Hazel, Boy Solas and manager Mortimer Martin arrive at Tilbury on the Empire Windrush in the hope of finding work in Britain. Getty Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Jamaicans reading a newspaper whilst on board the ex-troopship 'Empire Windrush' bound for Tilbury docks in Essex. Getty Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK After half a century in Britain, Anthony Bryan decided it was time to go abroad. But the decision set off a nightmare that saw him lose his job, detained twice and almost deported to Jamaica. AFP/Getty Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Jamaica-born Anthony Bryan poses outside his home in Edmonton, north London. Now 60 and a grandfather, Bryan thought the issue could be resolved swiftly, as he legally moved to Britain with his family as part of the Windrush generation of Caribbean migrants after World War II. In 1948, the ship Windrush brought the first group of migrants from the West Indies to help rebuild post-war Britain, and many others followed from around the Commonwealth. A 1971 law gave them indefinite leave to remain, but many never formalised their status, often because they were children who came over on their parents' passports and then never applied for their own. AFP/Getty Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Three Jamaican immigrants (left to right) John Hazel, a 21-year-old boxer, Harold Wilmot, 32, and John Richards, a 22-year-old carpenter, arriving at Tilbury on board the ex-troopship 'Empire Windrush', smartly dressed in zoot suits and trilby hats. Getty Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Newly arrived Jamaican immigrants on board the 'Empire Windrush' at Tilbury in 1948. Getty

They had made this rather cavalier pledge to reduce net immigration into the low tens of thousands without really having policies to deliver on that.

Then, of course, the political context in 2012 and 2013 was a rising Ukip vote in the polls, which David Cameron was very worried about in terms of the impact on Conservative support.

As of 3pm on Thursday, the Home Office was looking into 232 cases as a result of calls to a helpline set up earlier this week after the Windrush furore erupted.

Many of these cases are people with questions or concerns which may well turn out not to need any action taking, others do not need our help in gathering evidence to confirm their status, a spokesperson said.

It was also revealed that the first four people whose cases have gone through the dedicated team of officials have been given permanent status.
Senior MPs have joined forces to probe the growing threat posed by Russia, amid fears over the risk of cyber attacks and disinformation from the Kremlin.

As revealed by The Independent last month, heads of several powerful Commons committees will form a cross-party group to look into "Russian malign influence", including the flow of dirty money into the UK, fake news and security matters.

Tensions with Moscow have deepened since the recent US-led airstrikes in Syria against the Russia-backed regime, promoting UK and US intelligence agencies to issue an unprecedented joint alert on the threat of "malicious cyber activity" by Russian state-sponsored hackers.

Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Tom Tugendhat will lead the new "Russia Co-ordinating Group", along with Labour's Home Affairs Committee head Yvette Cooper, Treasury Committee boss Nicky Morgan, and the heads of intelligence, defence, DCMS and national security bodies.

Mr Tugendhat said: As unease about Russian malign influence grows, it is essential that we understand the extent of Putins activity. Parliament is well-placed to do this.

"House of Commons committees routinely hold evidence sessions in a bid to draw out information and deliver reports rooted in evidence and scrutiny. But as committees tend to operate separately, they may not have the full picture  seeing the symptoms rather than the cause."

He added: This is a crucial time for UK-Russia relations. In areas of intelligence and security, interference in elections, disinformation as well as our co-existence post Brexit, it will be easier to respond to any aggression from an informed standpoint."

The move was prompted by overlap between the Treasury and Foreign Affairs Committees, which have already launched probes into money laundering by criminal gangs and corrupt billionaires in the UK, in the wake of the furore over the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury.

London is regarded by some a desirable place to hide 'suspicious wealth' and transparency campaigners have identified 4.4bn worth of UK property from corrupt proceeds.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 30 September 2021 The centrepiece One Thousand Springs by Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota is seen ahead of the beginning of the Japan Festival, a celebration of the countrys plants, art and culture running from 2-31 October, at Kew Gardens in London PA 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

More than a fifth of those properties were bought by Russians, according to Transparency International.

The US has introduced a wave of economic sanctions against Russian business figures with links to Vladimir Putin, while Britain and other allies have also taken steps to expel diplomats, resulting in tit-for-tat actions by Moscow.

Earlier this week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said relations between Moscow and the West were worse than at the time of the Cold War following the incidents in Syria and Salisbury.

Toxic levels of the military nerve agent, novichok, used to attack the Skripals could still be present in hotspots around Salisbury, according to government scientists.
Ruth Davidson, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, has been named in Time magazines 100 most influential people of 2018.

Described as refreshing and as a pioneer in a profile written by historian Niall Ferguson, she is tipped as a possible future prime minister.

The partys resurrection  it won 31 seats in the Scottish Parliament in 2016 and 29 per cent of the Scottish vote in last years UK general election  owes much to the refreshing, rambunctious style of Ruth Davidson, it says.

An opponent of both Scottish independence and Brexit, Davidson stands out as a proponent of same-sex marriage. Indeed, she and partner Jen Wilson are currently planning their wedding.

It adds: Could she be a future British prime minister, succeeding the beleaguered Theresa May? I love London, she has said. No plans to move there myself, but great to visit. Many voters south of the border would love her to reconsider.

The list was split into pioneers, leaders, titans, artists and icons. Ms Davidson, MSP for Edinburgh Central, was selected as a pioneer.

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

Ruths extremely honoured to be included on such a list, a spokesman for the Scottish Conservatives told the BBC. And while shes flattered to receive an accolade from across the Atlantic, her full focus remains on her job here in Scotland.

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan was the only other British politician to make the list, which also includes Prince Harry, Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie, and Meghan Markle.
Members of the Windrush generation wrongly hit by the scandal of the immigration crackdown will receive compensation, Theresa May has announced.

The payments  which No 10 says will go further than the simple reimbursement of costs incurred  will resolve the anxiety and problems they have suffered, the prime minister said.

More than 280 people have so far contacted a Home Office helpline for members of the Windrush generation with concerns about their migration status, prompting speculation the bill could run to millions.

Closing the Commonwealth summit, Ms May acknowledged the scandal that has overshadowed the event  caused by her own tough immigration rules, critics say.

Referring to her meetings with fellow Commonwealth leaders, she said: I gave an absolute commitment that the United Kingdom government would do whatever it takes  including, where appropriate, payment of compensation  to resolve the anxiety and problems which some of the Windrush generation have suffered.

These people are British, they are part of us they helped to build Britain and we are all the stronger for their contributions.

The row began when it emerged that some Windrush immigrants  who moved to the UK between 1940s to 1970s  had lost their jobs, been refused medical care or been threatened with deportation as they did not have the right documentation.

Downing Street said the payments would go beyond reimbursement of any legal fees run up in trying to prove a right to remain in the UK to recognise the pain inflicted by the debacle. Further details will be announced next week.

It means the prime ministers comments go further than her apology in the Commons on Wednesday, in which she said only: There will be no cost to them; nobody will be out of pocket as a result.

 Theresa May apologises to Caribbean diplomats following Windrush deportations

The Grenadian prime minister, Keith Mitchell, called for serious compensation for people affected and said there was no question that Ms May should do more to help.

Speaking to reporters afterwards, he said: Clearly its something which is vibrating strongly in the Caribbean region as a whole.

Many of our people came here and helped to build Britain, under conditions that were set for them. For me, its very unfair for them to be treated in the way they have been treated.

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 word compensation came out today  that was highly significant, extremely important. Its not just, Im sorry.

People lost a lot, people suffered a lot of pain, and they must be given an opportunity to correct this  some serious compensation.

If not the person, if theyve gone, then the families who have suffered too.

Ms Mays pledge, at the close of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, came after more examples emerged of long-standing UK residents barred from returning to the country.

Gretel Gocan, 81, told Channel 5 she had been stuck in Jamaica since 2010, unable to return to her south London home after taking a holiday to visit family.

Former NHS nurse Icilda Williams, who moved back to Jamaica in 1996 after 34 years in Bradford, said her annual visits to the UK to see her children had been halted since 2014 after she was denied a visa.

Jeremy Corbyn demanded Ms May go further by apologising for the hostile environment policy she introduced, requiring suspected illegal immigrants to prove their right to be in the UK before receiving services.

Shes the one that ordered the vans to go around telling immigrants to go home, said Mr Corbyn. Shes the one that created that nasty atmosphere.

Whats happening is something quite disgusting. People that have given their lives to this country, to our health service, to our education system, our transport system are suddenly being told to go home.

Mr Corbyn dismissed claims from Ms Mays former adviser, Nick Timothy, that the then home secretary had opposed the deployment of vans telling illegal immigrants to go home, which he said was imposed when she was away on holiday.
One student has been injured and a teenager is in police custody after a shooting at a Florida high school, as students prepare to rally across the country to protest gun violence.

Swat teams were called in to Forest High School after a shooting on Friday morning, when police say a lone gunman opened fire on the Ocala, Florida school. A 17-year-old student suffered non-life-threatening injuries, according to Marion County Sheriff Billy Woods. A 19-year-old suspect, who was not a current student, is in police custody.

Hundreds of state, local, and federal officers responded to the shooting, Mr Woods said. The sheriff's department warned citizens to stay away from the area and told parents to pick up their children in an alternate location.

Recommended At least 86 teenagers dead since the Parkland shooting

According to police, the Forest High resource officer heard a loud "bang" at 8:39 am local time. The officer responded to the noise within three minutes, finding the victim and engaging with the shooter. The shooter was taken into custody without resistance.

Mr Woods said the shooting was intentional, but would not say how the suspect got into the school or if he knew the victim.

"Although we have come to a safe conclusion, it is still an investigation," Mr Woods told reporters at a press conference. "And there's a lot of details that we dont know."

Florida Governor Rick Scott said he had been briefed on the shooting, and offered the county any help necessary.

Students walk out of US schools to protest gun violence Show all 10 1 /10 Students walk out of US schools to protest gun violence Students walk out of US schools to protest gun violence Young people march from the White House to Capitol Hill while participating in the national school walkout over gun violence. EPA Students walk out of US schools to protest gun violence Thousands of local students march down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House to the US Capitol during a nationwide student walkout for gun control. AFP/Getty Students walk out of US schools to protest gun violence A student has the words,'don't shoot,' written on her hands as she joins with other students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School after walking out of their school to honor the memories of 17 students and teachers that were killed. Getty Students walk out of US schools to protest gun violence Students take part in a walkout at General McLane High School. AP Students walk out of US schools to protest gun violence Students from Harvest Collegiate High School stand in Washington Square Park in New York to take part in a national walkout to protest gun violence. AFP/Getty Students walk out of US schools to protest gun violence Students rally in front of the White House in Washington after walking out of school to protest gun violence in the biggest demonstration yet of the student activism that has emerged in response to last month's massacre of 17 people at Florida's Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. AP Students walk out of US schools to protest gun violence Airport High School juniors Tony LaFata, 16, left, and Noah Doederlein, 17, stands for a moment of silence during a walkout at General McLane High School. AP Students walk out of US schools to protest gun violence Young people rally on the West Front of the US Capitol to participate in the national school walkout over gun violence, in Washington. EPA Students walk out of US schools to protest gun violence Students from Passaic High School hold photos of some of the 17 victims killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. AP Students walk out of US schools to protest gun violence Students join hands as they take part in a student walkout in Lafayette. AP

The news came as thousands of students around the country prepared to walk out of class to commemorate the 19th anniversary of the Columbine school shooting.

It also came just over two months after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where 14 students and three staff members were killed.

Walkouts were cancelled across the Marion County School District in the wake of the shooting, school board member Nancy Stacy told CNN.

 Survivor of Florida school shooting speaks at State Capitol rally

Friday's walkouts were planned by Lane Murdock, a high school student from Connecticut who said she was "horrified" by the lack of action after the Parkland shooting. Students from more than 2,500 schools were expected to participate in the walkouts, which participants hoped would spur action on gun control legislation.

Students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas and other schools have planned several demonstrations in the wake of the Parkland shooting, meeting with Florida state lawmakers and even President Donald Trump.

Stoneman Douglas students organised a March For Our Lives in Washington, DC last month, which brought out more than 200,000 to protest gun violence in America.

There have been an average of 10 school shootings per year in the nearly two decades since Columbine, according to data compiled by the Washington Post.

At the press conference on Friday, Mr Woods expressed his frustration with the state of affairs.

"Its a shame what society has come to, and that we even have to be here on a school campus," he said. "Society has changed since I was a kid; since I was in school."

He added: "Im angry, Im sad, and I want to do something."
A woman suspected of killing her husband in Minnesota and a woman in Florida has been captured at a South Texas resort.

Lois Riess, 56, was arrested by two federal deputy marshals at a South Padre Island restaurant, the US Marshals Service said in a statement. South Padre Island is a beach resort community 27 miles from the crossing into Mexico.

Ms Riess had been on the run since at least late March when her husband, 54-year-old David Riess, was found fatally shot at their home in Blooming Prairie, Minnesota.

Recommended Police hunt grandmother after her husband and her lookalike are killed

She became the subject of a nationwide hunt.

She had been seen on 23 March at a shop and casino in northern Iowa. Authorities released video showing Ms Riess approaching the store cashier, buying a sandwich and asking for directions south of the state. The shop is next to a casino where authorities say Ms Riess spent the day gambling before stopping at the petrol station.

David Riesss business partner called authorities to ask them to check on him on 23 March. They said no one at work had seen him in more than two weeks. Authorities later found his body inside his home peppered with multiple gunshots.

They were not able to determine how long he had been dead and could not find his wife.

They learned Ms Riess may have been at the casino in Iowa, but she was nowhere to be seen when they looked for her there.

It is believed she travelled to Florida, where investigators allege she killed 59-year-old Pamela Hutchinson of Bradenton, a small city in west Florida.

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

Authorities were called to an area of Fort Myers Beach on 9 April and found Hutchinson dead, with gunshot wounds.

Investigators believe Ms Riess used the same gun that killed her husband to fatally shoot Hutchinson. They believe she killed Hutchinson to assume her identity.

Surveillance video showed Ms Riess smiling and talking with Hutchinson on 5 April at a brewery in Fort Myers Beach. Authorities said she may have targeted Hutchinson because the two women looked alike.

Hutchinson had moved to Florida last year from Virginia Beach, Virginia.

AP
A man has been charged with the murder of his 21-year-old girlfriend whose shot and stabbed body was found stuffed in a suitcase.

Quentin Neal, 27, admitted to stabbing 21-year-old Shannon Mani, a student and aspiring dentist who was five months pregnant at the time of her death, police in the US city of Milwaukee alleged.

He has been charged with first degree intentional homicide, first degree intentional homicide of an unborn child and possession of a firearm by a felon.

Ms Mani was reported missing by her family last Friday after she failed to pick her younger brother up from school and did not show up at the cosmetics shop where she worked.

Mr Neal seemed uneasy and said he would not go along when asked by the police about Manis whereabouts, a police complaint stated.

It also alleged that he changed his story  initially saying to police that he had texted her on 13 April but hadnt received a response, before saying that she had sent him a photo that day.

Investigators later discovered a conversation between the pair on that morning which saw him ask if she was still visiting his home and her reply that she was almost there.

A police search of Mr Neals home two days later found blood in the basement.

Defendant Quentin Neal

Mr Neal claimed that he had last seen Mani on the afternoon of 12 April, but when approached about the blood he admitted that she had been at his home on the 13, the police complaint said.

He claimed that there had been an argument, and also that he had shown Ms Mani a gun that he had bought for protection.

He claimed that Ms Mani took the gun and a knife from the kitchen, then tried to pull the trigger, but it failed go off because of the safety.

According to the complaint, Mr Neal said that he then shot her twice in the head, causing her to fall down the stairs into the basement. She then came at him at which point he took the knife and stabbed her in the head and neck.

Mr Neal allegedly then led officers to a storage locker he had rented, where they found Manis body in a suitcase with a bag over her head.

She was bound at the wrists and ankles with duct tape, and duct tape had also been used to cover her eyes. The suitcase also contained bloody towels, duct tape, a knife handle, and a knife blade, police alleged

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

Mr Neal told police that they could find Ms Manis phone in a pond and her purse in a gas station bin.

Ms Mani was hoping to become a dentist and as well as working in the cosmetics shop, she worked with special needs children.

She was like my little sister, so its really hard, her friend, Christina Hic told Fox6. She was wonderful. I dont...she wouldnt hurt a fly, so I dont know why this happened to her. She wanted to change the world. She wanted to. Sorry. She just had so many dreams she didnt get to accomplish, she said.
The man chosen by Donald Trump to be the new head of Nasa is a climate change denier who has made a career out of ignoring science and might disregard scientific advice about the safety of launching astronauts into space, US senators have warned.

Giving Tea Party congressman James Bridenstine the final say on whether to launch a manned space mission would, it was claimed, be terrifying.

But Mr Bridenstine was still confirmed in the job this week in a vote that split 50-49 along party lines  in contrast to the unanimous senatorial approval granted to all 12 previous Nasa leaders.

Recommended Every mention of global warming deleted from White House website

The confirmation of Mr Trumps nominee came despite Mr Bridenstine telling Congress in 2013 that global temperatures stopped rising ten years ago. Global temperature changes  when they exist  correlate with sun output and ocean cycles.

Not only did this statement rely on debunked claims of a global warming hiatus, it also flatly contradicted the first sentence of the Nasa website page explaining the causes of climate change: Most climate scientists agree the main cause of the current global warming trend is human expansion of the greenhouse effect.

During a November confirmation hearing Mr Bridenstine softened his position slightly to accept that global warming is still happening and human activity absolutely is a contributor to the climate change that we are currently seeing.

But the Oklahoma congressman still refused to accept that humans were the primary drivers of climate change, instead saying: It's gonna depend on a whole lot of factors. We're still learning more about that every day. In some years you could say absolutely. In other years during sun cycles and other things there are other contributing factors that would maybe have more than an impact."

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

This again contradicted the website of Nasa, the organisation which Mr Bridenstine now leads, which states: The intergovernmental panel on climate change, a group of 1,300 independent scientific experts from countries all over the world, concluded [that] industrial activities have raised atmospheric carbon dioxide levels from 280 parts per million to 400 parts per million in the last 150 years.

The panel also concluded there's a better than 95 per cent probability that human-produced greenhouse gases have caused much of the observed increase in Earth's temperatures over the past 50 years.

Mr Bridenstines apparent disagreement with the overwhelming scientific consensus prompted Brian Schatz to warn his fellow senators voting on whether to approve the congressmans appointment: Jim Bridenstine is a climate denier with no scientific background who has made a career out of ignoring science.

And that is terrifying.

This [Nasa administrator job] is about whether you are going to rely on people who actually know things, or rely on your own politics and your own ideology. When you have final launch authority you better rely on science.

If something goes wrong people could die.

The Hawaii senator was backed by Bill Nelson, the Democrat from Nasas home state of Florida, who said that the administrator who had the final decision on the lives of astronauts needed to be a scientifically competent, consummate space professional, not a politician.

Mr Nelson, a former astronaut, said: From an understanding of Nasas history, and having lived through some of its darkest moments, I think what is not right for Nasa is an administrator who is not [adequately] prepared to be the last in line to make that fateful decision on go or not go for launch.

In his 2013 speech, Mr Bridenstine demanded an apology from then president Barack Obama for the gross misallocation of research funds towards climate change, suggesting the money would be better spent on studying extreme weather forecasting and warning systems.

His appointment also comes amid concerns about the Trump administrations apparent removal of references to global warming in official documents and websites, and its alleged block on government officials speaking about scientific research.

Mr Nelson alluded to both Mr Bridenstines speech and the Trump administrations record when he warned: Given Nasas mission to study the Earth, congressman Bridenstines past statements on climate change are troubling to say the least, particularly in this administration, where words like science-based and climate-change are being scrubbed from government documents, and where some scientists have been restricted from speaking publicly about scientific findings.

Nasa needs a strong leader who understands the critical importance of studying the Earth, and is willing to put his job on the line to protect Nasa scientists.

Congressman Bridenstines record suggests that he will do otherwise.

Mr Bridenstine is a former Navy pilot with combat experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, who is also the executive director of the Tulsa Air and Space Museum.

Mr Bridenstine, who has also spoken out against gay marriage, has a triple major in economics, psychology and business from Rice University and a Masters of Business Administration from Cornell, but no formal academic qualifications in science subjects.

In November he responded to suggestions that government scientists now feared being punished for speaking publicly about their climate change work, by promising: I will not punish them. Im not going to reassign anybody based on that, because that would be punishment.
At least 50 members of a migrant caravan that has been travelling through Central America and Mexico has reached the US border and are seeking asylum.

The group, which at one point reached a peak of 1,500 people from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, had prompted US President Donald Trump to call in the National Guard troops from Arizona and Texas in order to secure the border and continues on with plans to build a 2,000-mile border wall.

The group dwindled as word of Mr Trumps threats spread and Mexican authorities separated those who were legally allowed to stay in Mexico from those who were not. Though some of the migrants have been granted entry, "there have already been cases of people being illegally turned away by border officials when trying to request asylum at the U.S. border," a spokesperson for Pueblo Sin Fronteras, an immigrant rights group, told Newsweek.

More migrants are expected at the border near Tijuana, Mexico, soon as well. Since yesterday, some began to cross into the United States to turn themselves in from Tijuana and request asylum. We understand more...will do the same, Jose Maria Garcia, director of migrant assistance organisation Juventud 2000, told Reuters.

Per US Citizenship and Immigration Services, asylum seekers must "demonstrate [they] have suffered persecution or fear that they will suffer persecution due to" five factors: race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. The majority of migrants in the caravan are fleeing some of the world's most violent areas in terms of gang violence, murders per capita, and drug cartel control. They have up to one year to apply for the status after they arrive in the US. The process can take up to 180 days and involves being fingerprinted and government officers running a check on all the claims being made in the application.

 US border patrol guards kick over water left for migrants near Mexico border

Mr Trumps comments about the caravan have followed the tone of his other policies on immigration. Earlier this month the president ditched prepared remarks at a speech in West Virginia to say that women in the caravan are [being] raped at levels that nobody has ever seen before, despite there being almost no evidence on which to base the claim.

And remember my opening remarks at Trump Tower when I opened. Everybody said, 'Oh, he was so tough.' And I used the word 'rape.' And yesterday it came out where, this journey coming up, women are raped at levels that nobody has ever seen before. They don't want to mention that, he said.

People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Show all 16 1 /16 People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Demonstrators march during the "Day Without Immigrants" protest in Chicago, Illinois, February 16, 2017. Theopolis Waters/Reuters People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Demonstrators march during the "Day Without Immigrants" protest in Washington, DC, U.S., February 16, 2017. Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. The crowd, which grew to well over a thousand participants, marched from the Austin City Hall to the Texas State Capital. Across the country hundreds of restaurants and eateries are closing for the day to protest President Trump's immigration policies and to highlight the contributions of immigrants to U.S. business and life. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants AUSTIN, TX - FEBRUARY 16: Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Demonstrators march during the "Day Without Immigrants" protest in Chicago, Illinois, February 16, 2017. Theopolis Waters/Reuters People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Demonstrators march during the "Day Without Immigrants" protest in Chicago, Illinois, February 16, 2017. Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. The crowd, which grew to well over a thousand participants, marched from the Austin City Hall to the Texas State Capital. Across the country hundreds of restaurants and eateries are closing for the day to protest President Trump's immigration policies and to highlight the contributions of immigrants to U.S. business and life. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. The crowd, which grew to well over a thousand participants marched from the Austin City Hall to the Texas State Capital. Across the country hundreds of restaurants and eateries are closing for the day to protest President Trump's immigration policies and to highlight the contributions of immigrants to U.S. business and life. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants High school student Kathia Suarez holds up a sign as she protests with others outside the Grayson County courthouse in downtown Sherman, Texas, Thursday, Feb. 16, 2017. LM Otero/AP People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants High school senior Vicky Sosa holds a sign outside the Grayson County courthouse in downtown Sherman, Texas, Thursday, Feb. 16, 2017. In an action called "A Day Without Immigrants," immigrants across the country are expected to stay home from school, work and close businesses to show how critical they are to the U.S. economy and way of life. LM Otero/AP

While the distinct absence of evidence for the suggestion does not rule out the possibility that there are incidents of rape taking place within the caravan, Mr Trumps claim that there were reports that came out yesterday does not check out in a survey of media reports.

His comments in West Virginia also highlighted sanctuary cities, which he said are "the worst", adding that "its basically a city to protect a lot of people that are bad people. Really bad. Cities like Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago have vowed to protect the confidential information of undocumented immigrants and not assist federal authorities with rounding them up. Instead, local police focus on combatting criminal and violent activities.

Other matters on immigration the administration has pushed of late include praising construction of the roughly 2,000-mile US-Mexico border wall and ending the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (Daca) programme seemingly over a political fit with Congressional Democrats. The decision to end the programme has left 800,000 people brought to the US illegally when they were minors in a legal limbo. They had been allowed to stay, study, and even work while paying taxes through Daca.
Stalwart Donald Trump ally Rudy Giuliani is joining the presidents legal team.

A statement from Mr Trumps attorney Jay Sekulow announcing the decision quoted Mr Trump as saying Rudy is great.

He has been my friend for a long time and wants to get this matter quickly resolved for the good of the country, the president was quoted as saying.

Mr Giuliani matches the preferences of a president who places a premium on loyalty. The former prosecutor, New York City mayor and Republican presidential candidate was a leading surrogate for Mr Trump during the presidential campaign, warming up crowds with chants of Lock Her Up!

In an interview with the Washington Post, Mr Giuliani said he hoped to negotiate an end to special counsel Robert Muellers investigation of Russian interference in the presidential campaign and potential linkages to the Trump campaign. Mr Trump has assailed the probe as an unjustified witch hunt.

The addition of Mr Giuliani, along with former federal prosecutors Jane Serene Raskin and Marty Raskin, bolsters Mr Trumps diminished legal team at a critical moment.

The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Show all 17 1 /17 The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Paul Manafort Mr Manafort is a Republican strategist and former Trump campaign manager. He resigned from that post over questions about his extensive lobbying overseas, including in Ukraine where he represented pro-Russian interests. Mr Manafort turned himself in at FBI headquarters to special counsel Robert Muellers team on Oct 30, 2017, after he was indicted under seal on charges that include conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading US Foreign Agents Registration Act statements, false statements, and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts. Getty The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Rick Gates Mr Gates joined the Trump team in spring 2016, and served as a top aide until he left to work at the Republican National Committee after the departure of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. Mr Gates' had previously worked on several presidential campaigns, on international political campaigns in Europe and Africa, and had 15 years of political or financial experience with multinational firms, according to his bio. Mr Gates was indicted alongside Mr Manafort by special counsel Robert Mueller's team on charges that include conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading US Foreign Agents Registration Act statements, false statements, and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts. AP The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation George Papadopoulos George Papadopoulos was a former foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign, having joined around March 2016. Mr Papadopoulos plead guilty to federal charges for lying to the FBI as a part of a cooperation agreement with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. Mr Papadopoulos claimed in an interview with the FBI that he had made contacts with Russian sources before joining the Trump campaign, but he actually began working with them after joining the team. Mr Papadopoulos allegedly took a meeting with a professor in London who reportedly told him that Russians had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. The professor also allegedly introduced Mr Papadopoulos to a Russian who was said to have close ties to officials at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Mr Papadopoulos also allegedly was in contact with a woman whom he incorrectly described in one email to others in the campaign as the "niece" to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Twitter The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Donald Trump Jr The President's eldest son met with a Russian lawyer - Natalia Veselnitskaya - on 9 June 2016 at Trump Tower in New York. He said in an initial statement that the meeting was about Russia halting adoptions of its children by US citizens. Then, he said it was regarding the Magnitsky Act, a US law blacklisting Russian human rights abusers. In a final statement, Mr Trump Jr released a chain of emails that revealed he took the meeting in hopes of getting information Ms Veselnitskaya had about Hillary Clinton's alleged financial ties to Russia. He and the President called it standard "opposition research" in the course of campaigning and that no information came from the meeting. The meeting was set up by an intermediary, Rob Goldstone. Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort were also at the same meeting. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Jared Kushner Mr Kushner is President Donald Trump's son-in-law and a key adviser to the White House. He met with a Russian banker appointed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in December. Mr Kushner has said he did so in his role as an adviser to Mr Trump while the bank says he did so as a private developer. Mr Kushner has also volunteered to testify in the Senate about his role helping to arrange meetings between Trump advisers and Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Rob Goldstone Former tabloid journalist and now music publicist Rob Goldstone is a contact of the Trump family through the previously Trump-owned 2013 Miss Universe pageant, which took place in Moscow. In June 2016, he wrote to Donald Trump Jr offering a meeting with a Russian lawyer, Natalya Veselnitskaya, who had information about Hillary Clinton. Mr Goldstone was the intermediary for Russian pop star Emin Agalaraov and his father, real estate magnate Aras, who played a role in putting on the 2013 pageant. In an email chain released by Mr Trump Jr, Mr Goldstone seemed to indicate Russian government's support of Donald Trump's campaign. AP images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Aras and Emin Agalarov Aras Agalarov (R) is a wealthy Moscow-based real estate magnate and son Emin (L) is a pop star. Both played a role in putting on the previously Trump-owned 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. They allegedly had information about Hillary Clinton and offered that information to the Trump campaign through a lawyer with whom they had worked with, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and music publicist Rob Goldstone. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Natalia Veselnitskaya Natalia Veselnitskaya is a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin. She has worked on real estate issues and reportedly counted the FSB as a client in the past. She has ties to a Trump family connection, real estate magnate Aras Agalarov, who had helped set up the Trump-owned 2013 Miss Universe pageant which took place in Moscow. Ms Veselnitskaya met with Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort in Trump Tower on 9 June 2016 but denies the allegation that she went there promising information on Hillary Clinton's alleged financial ties to Russia. She contends that the meeting was about the US adoptions of Russian children being stopped by Moscow as a reaction to the Magnitsky Act, a US law blacklisting Russian human rights abusers. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Mike Flynn Mr Flynn was named as Trump's national security adviser but was forced to resign from his post for inappropriate communication with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. He had misrepresented a conversation he had with Mr Kislyak to Vice President Mike Pence, telling him wrongly that he had not discussed sanctions with the Russian. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Sergey Kislyak Mr Kislyak, the former longtime Russian ambassador to the US, is at the centre of the web said to connect President Donald Trump's campaign with Russia. Reuters The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Roger Stone Mr Stone is a former Trump adviser who worked on the political campaigns of Richard Nixon, George HW Bush, and Ronald Reagan. Mr Stone claimed repeatedly in the final months of the campaign that he had backchannel communications with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and that he knew the group was going to dump damaging documents to the campaign of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton - which did happen. Mr Stone also had contacts with the hacker Guccier 2.0 on Twitter, who claimed to have hacked the DNC and is linked to Russian intelligence services. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Jeff Sessions The US attorney general was forced to recuse himself from the Trump-Russia investigation after it was learned that he had lied about meeting with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Carter Page Mr Page is a former advisor to the Trump campaign and has a background working as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch. Mr Page met with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak during the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Mr Page had invested in oil companies connected to Russia and had admitted that US Russia sanctions had hurt his bottom line. Reuters The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Jeffrey "JD" Gorden Mr Gordon met with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak during the 2016 Republian National Convention to discuss how the US and Russia could work together to combat Islamist extremism should then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump win the election. The meeting came days before a massive leak of DNC emails that has been connected to Russia. Creative Commons The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation James Comey Mr Comey was fired from his post as head of the FBI by President Donald Trump. The timing of Mr Comey's firing raised questions around whether or not the FBI's investigation into the Trump campaign may have played a role in the decision. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Preet Bharara Mr Bahara refused, alongside 46 other US district attorney's across the country, to resign once President Donald Trump took office after previous assurances from Mr Trump that he would keep his job. Mr Bahara had been heading up several investigations including one into one of President Donald Trump's favorite cable television channels Fox News. Several investigations would lead back to that district, too, including those into Mr Trump's campaign ties to Russia, and Mr Trump's assertion that Trump Tower was wiretapped on orders from his predecessor. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Sally Yates Ms Yates, a former Deputy Attorney General, was running the Justice Department while President Donald Trump's pick for attorney general awaited confirmation. Ms Yates was later fired by Mr Trump from her temporary post over her refusal to implement Mr Trump's first travel ban. She had also warned the White House about potential ties former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to Russia after discovering those ties during the FBI's investigation into the Trump campaign's connections to Russia. Getty Images

Mr Muellers investigation, having already produced indictments of multiple former Trump campaign aides, is building towards a potential interview with the president himself. Acting on a referral from Mr Muellers team, the FBI earlier this month raided the home and office of Mr Trumps longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen.

 Donald Trump rages over search of his lawyer Michael Cohen's office, describing it as a 'break-in'

Those developments have paralleled turmoil within Mr Trumps legal team, with former lead attorney John Down resigning last month and the president reportedly struggling to secure more legal representation.

Multiple prominent attorneys have declined to join, and attorneys Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing reversed their initial commitment to come on board, citing conflicts of interest.


The Trump administration has taken the first step towards an aggressive effort to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge - one of the countrys most pristine and environmentally sensitive areas.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), a division of the Department of Interior, issued a notice of intent to begin an environmental impact analysis of how oil exploration and the heavy infrastructure required to support it would alter a landscape where plants and animals thrive.

The BLM said an official notice of the analysis, known as scoping, will be published in the Federal Register on Friday, kicking off a 60-day comment period set to end in mid-June. In addition to allowing comments to be submitted online, five locations have been selected to engage Alaskans directly in Anchorage, Arctic Village, Fairbanks, Kaktovik and Utqiagvik. The administration wants to issue leases to the oil and gas industry as soon as next year.

It is the first time an administration has initiated an oil and gas leasing programme in the refuge since 1980, when Congress identified the regions Coastal Plain section as an important area for energy resources.

The notice came just before the eighth anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon explosion that killed 11 people and spilled nearly five million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, leading to the deaths of an untold number of marine animals and birds.

Developing our resources on the Coastal Plain is an important facet for meeting our nations energy demands and achieving energy dominance, said Joe Balash, assistant secretary for Land and Minerals Management at the Department of Interior, echoing part of president Donald Trumps campaign message. This scoping process begins the first step in developing a responsible path forward. I look forward to personally visiting the communities most affected by this process and hearing their concerns.

Alaska has pushed for oil and gas development in the region for decades, even as conservation groups have fiercely fought against it. Several Republican politicians in Alaskas congressional delegation issued a statement in favour of the administrations action.

We appreciate the department following the law, planning multiple public meetings with Alaskans, and moving forward on this important programme to help ensure the energy and economic security of our nation, said the statement from senator Lisa Murkowski, who chairs the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, senator Dan Sullivan and Republican Don Young.

The Gwichin Nation of Alaskan Natives said in a statement that the Department of Interior was rushing to develop oil at the expense of human rights in an area they rely on for hunting and fishing. Porcupine caribou the Gwichin have hunted for centuries use the plain to birth and nurse their young. Studies have shown that while much of the herd will graze near infrastructure, pregnant and nursing mothers shun it.

The Porcupine caribou migrate to the plain yearly for its nutritious grasses, trade winds that blow away bloodsucking insects and views that allow them to see approaching predators from afar.

The administration has made my people a target, said Bernadette Dementieff, executive director of the Gwichin Steering Committee. We will not stand down. We will fight to protect the porcupine caribou herd ... every step of the way.

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

Conservation organisations denounced the proposal to drill and the fast pace of the environmental analysis that will pave the way.

By pushing for a lease sale next year, the administration is admitting that they have no intention of seriously evaluating the negative impacts of oil development on wildlife and these wild lands, which science tells us are significant, said Jamie Williams, president of the Wilderness Society.

Ms Williams said her organisation remains opposed to opening the Arctic Refuge Coastal Plain to drilling. She added, Americans should be outraged at what is being done to the crown jewel of their National Wildlife Refuge System.

The Washington Post
A Hindu priest has carried a Dalit  formerly known as an "untouchable"  man into an Indian temples inner sanctum, a move that might once have proved highly controversial in a country traditionally divided down strict caste lines.

The priest, CS Rangarajan, has been widely praised after he carried Aditya Parasri on his shoulders to propagate equality among all sections of society and show that everyone is equal in the eyes of God.

Dalit, which translates as broken in Sanskrit, is a collective term for the lowest castes in a conservative Hindu hierarchy that has seen them face discrimination and segregation from the "higher" castes.

Despite laws to protect them and reserve roles for them in politics and industry, Dalits still face exploitation, violence and unequal access to education and job opportunities.

Mr Rangarajan is the head priest of Chilkur Balaji temple in Hyderabad. He said his act was inspired by a discussion he had at a conference that raised the issue of lower caste communities being denied entry to temples.

He said he told students about a well-known legend in which a priest carried a Dalit devotee into a temple. When they expressed scepticism that a Hindu priest would do such a thing, he decided to do it himself.

 Inside Story - How to address Dalits plight?

"There is a lot of discrimination against Dalits but this stems from society, not from religious scriptures," Mr Aditya told the BBC.

"I hope others do the same - it doesn't mean everyone should literally carry a Dalit man on their shoulders. But they must welcome Dalits into temples and to participate in rituals," he added.

Mr Rangarajan said other priests told him they would now do the same in their own temples .

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

It comes just weeks after members from the Dalit community protested a Supreme Court ruling that bars immediate arrest of individuals accused of discriminating against them.

Last month, the Supreme Court ruled that arrests under a law meant to speed action on complaints of violence against Dalits required prior sanction from officials, and barred the immediate arrest of those accused in such complaints.
A volcano in southern Japan has erupted for the first time in 250 years, blasting clouds of smoke and rocks into the sky.

Authorities have established a no-go zone around Mount Io, a 1,298m (4,258ft) high volcano on the island of Kyushu which last erupted in 1768.

Explosions briefly subsided on Friday, but officials cautioned residents in nearby towns against falling volcanic rocks and ash.

Japans Metrological Agency expanded a no-go zone which was previously just around the volcanos crater to the entire mountain.

TV footage showed grayish smoke jetting from several spots on the side of the mountain in the Kirishima range, in a rural area about 985km (616 miles) from Tokyo.

The warning level for Mount Io was raised from 2 to 3 on Japans 5-level scale, with the Japans Meteorological Agency warning volcanic rocks could be hurled as far as 2km (1.2 miles).

Authorities have established a no-go zone around Mount Io (Kyodo/via REUTERS)

Mount Io has become the latest in a series of eruptions in Japan this year, which have killed one person.

In January, a member of the military was killed and 11 people injured, some critically, when the Kusatsu-Shirane volcano rained rocks down on skiers at a resort in central Japan.

Two months later, Shinmoedake  a volcano featured in the 1967 James Bond film You Only Live Twice, which sits in the same Kirishima range as Mount Io  shot smoke and ash thousands of metres into the sky.

Japan sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire with 110 active volcanoes and it monitors 47 of them around the clock.

In September 2014, 63 people were killed on Mount Ontake, the worst volcanic death toll in Japan for nearly 90 years.
Thousands of people are to be evacuated from a busy district of Berlin after an unexploded World War Two bomb was found close to the citys central rail station.

An army hospital, government departments and blocks of flats were among the buildings being cleared on Friday morning to allow experts to diffuse the British explosive.

Police said there 500kg (1,100lb) bomb posed no immediate danger but the operation was expected to cause transport chaos in the German capital.

Recommended London City Airport closed and all flights axed after WWII bomb found

The 800-metre (2,625 ft) exclusion zone includes Berlin Hauptbahnhof, the citys main train station, as well as the German finance and transport ministries, foreign embassies, and a museum.

Residents and workers have been told to leave or keep clear of the area from 9am local time (7am GMT). An estimated 10,000 people have been affected, with shelters set up for those forced to leave their homes.

Deactivation of the bomb, unearthed at a building site in Heidestrasse, is scheduled to begin at 11.30am but it is not known how long it will take.

It depends on how long the evacuation takes and of course the condition of the bomb, police spokesman Martin Halweg told the Tagesspiegel newspaper.

Transport operators have warned of large-scale disruption to rains, trams and buses.

Berlins Tegel airport had warned passengers that flights would be significantly limited during the operation, but later said it had arrived at a plan with air traffic controllers to avoid cancellations.

Planes coming in to land at Tegel, which is about 4.5 miles (7km) from Hauptbahnhof, have been told to avoid flying over the area where the bomb was found.

Thousands of live bombs and munitions are still discovered in Germany every year, more than seven decades after the end of the war.
Natalie Portman has been criticised by the Israeli government over her decision not to attend a prestigious awards ceremony in the country.

Recent events in Israel have been extremely distressing to her and she does not feel comfortable participating in any public events in Israel, the Oscar-winning actors representative said as she pulled out of the Genesis Prize ceremony.

She could not in good conscience move forward with it, they added, although did not mention which recent events had upset the Black Swan star.

However, the deaths of a number of protesters and Palestinian journalist Yaser Murtaja at demonstrations on the Gaza-Israel border earlier this month sparked global criticism.

Awarded for outstanding achievement by individuals who have attained excellence and international renown in their chosen professional fields [who] embody the character of the Jewish people, Portman, who was born in Jerusalem and holds dual Israeli and US citizenship, was named as the winner of the 2018 Genesis award in November.

The accolade comes with $2m (1.42m) worth of prize money this year and has previously been awarded to actor Michael Douglas and violinist Itzhak Perlman.

The Genesis Prize Foundation has said it will cancel its prize ceremony in June in the wake of her refusal to attend.

The organisers said they feared that Ms Portmans decision will cause our philanthropic initiative to be politicised, something we have worked hard for the past five years to avoid.

Israels minister of culture and sport Miri Regev said that she was saddened to hear that Natalie Portman has fallen as a ripe fruit in the hands of BDS supporters, linking her act with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.

She added: Natalie, a Jewish actress who was born in Israel, now joins those who refers [sic] to the success and wonder of the rebirth of Israel as A Tale of Darkness and Darkness.

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

He was referring to Portmans 2015 directorial feature debut, A Tale of Love and Darkness, which was an adaptation of the autobiographical novel by Israeli author Amos Oz, filmed in Jerusalem.

Rachel Azaria, a member of the centrist Kulanu party that is part of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahus governing coalition, said Portmans cancellation should serve as a warning light to Israel.

Shes speaking for many in US Jewry, especially the young generation. Losing them might be too high a price, Ms Azaria tweeted.

Others also took to social media to criticise the star for choosing not to travel to her country of birth, while others lamented the fact her statement coincided with the tail end of Israels 70th Independence Day.

PACBI, the academic and cultural arm of the BDS movement  a Nobel Peace Prize-nominated pro-Palestinian activist group that endeavours to cut global ties with Israel  praised Portmans move.

After decades of egregious human rights violations against Palestinians, Israels recent massacre of peaceful protesters in Gaza has made its brand so toxic that even well-known Israeli-American cultural figures, like Natalie Portman, now refuse to blatantly whitewash, or art-wash, Israeli crimes and apartheid policies, it said in a statement.

Portman, who lived in Jerusalem until she was three and emigrated to the US, is greatly loved by the Israeli public but she has been opposed to Mr Netanyahu.

She took part in an online campaign to support a change of government during the 2015 Israeli election and said she was shocked at Mr Netanyahus re-election.
Syria has returned the prestigious Legion dhonneur that was presented to President Bashar al-Assad, by France, saying he would not wear the award of a slave country to the US.

It comes just days after French President Emmanuel Macron begun the formal process of stripping the honour from his Syrian counterpart.

France joined the US and UK in launching airstrikes at chemical weapons facilities in government-held Syria last week following the alleged use by Damascus of poison gas on citizens in a rebel-held enclave outside the capital.

The Syrian government and Russia, its primary backer, deny such an attack ever occurred.

Established in 1802 by Napoleon Bonaparte, the award is the highest French order of merit for military and civil merits. The order is divided into five degrees of increasing distinction and Mr Assad was decorated with the highest class of the award, the grand-croix, in 2001 after he took power following the death of his father.

Although it was presented to him by former French President Jacques Chirac in 2001 it only became public knowledge years later when the Syrian embassy in France mentioned it to an author writing a book on the award.

 Corbyn leads debate into Parliament vote on Syria strikes: 'The government is attempting to overturn a democratic advance'

"It is no honour for President Assad to wear a decoration attributed by a slave country and follower of the United States that supports terrorists," Syria's foreign ministry said in a statement

A separate statement on the Syrian presidency's Facebook page added Mr Assad was "not honoured" to carry a medal for a country "supporting terrorist groups in Syria, and assaulting a United Nations member state in flagrant breach of the most basic norms and principles of international law".

The cross was returned to Paris via the Romanian embassy in Damascus.

Syrian president Bashar al-Assad is greeted by former French president Jacques Chirac in 2001 (Getty Images)

Mr Macron is attempting to return to the original spirit of the honour by reducing the number of crosses awarded annually, and to ensure they are based on merit. Around 3,000 people a year currently receive the award.
Think eating in Paris is expensive? You might be doing it all wrong. Although restaurants can charge sky-high prices and even cafes can be obscenely expensive, theres no need to risk a 20 croque monsieur. Here are 10 of the best places in town that will feed you for under 10.

The menu at The Hood Paris was created by Khanh-Ly Hyunh, a chef who won MasterChef France (The Hood)

The Hood Paris is a young, hip cafe that does food and coffee really well. Its motto is The Hood is yours, meaning that its a place where you can freely come as you are. The food menu was created by Khanh-Ly Huynh, a talented French-Vietnamese chef who won MasterChef France in 2015, and  I stress again  the coffee is excellent.

The baristas are genuinely friendly, the playlists are on point, the iced lattes (yes, they do iced lattes) are the best in Paris, and there is a killer food menu with Vietnamese banh mi sandwiches (with egg, pork, chicken, or tofu) for only 7. Vegetables are pickled in-house and the homemade sriracha sauce is something else.

Good Asian food can be hard to come by in Paris, but Jixiaos Buns is one of the best. Its standout dish is its crispy pan fried buns filled with meat and broth. Four buns cost just 6 (try the pork and corn); you even get a tiny straw to slurp up the broth.

Also on the menu are noodle dishes starting at 7. This is a takeaway window joint, but there are a few seats outside where you can enjoy your buns hot and fresh from the pan.

Marinara pizzas at Pizza Popolare are just 4 (Joann Pai)

Ask Parisians where to get pizza, and theyll most likely point to a Big Mamma Group location. With six locations in the city, Big Mamma is probably the most popular pizza chain in town  though the fact that each location has a different menu and ambience makes it feel less like a chain.

Pizza Popolare is extra special thanks to the marinara pizza that costs just 4 and is delicious. All of the locations are very popular so expect a wait if you dont want to line up before opening.

Chef Eyal Shanis original Miznon restaurant is in Tel Aviv, but for his second outpost he chose Paris. Again, its hard to get in but the food is worth the wait.

The steak and egg pita is only 9.50 and the famous roasted cauliflower head just 6.50. Everything is fresh and there is also free tea if you eat in.

Filakia serves a souvlaki of the month as well as a vegetarian option (Lauret Ophelie)

Filakia does souvlaki really well. This Greek restaurant describes itself as serving up gourmet street food  which is not far wrong. The filling souvlakis cost 8 and come packed with meat and vegetables. For regulars, theres a souvlaki of the month as well as a vegetarian option.

If youre looking for something sweet, they do a great take on loukoumades, a Greek doughnut, for 4.

Theres no shortage of crepe places in Paris (good and bad, lets be honest) but French Waffle is a good bet for two reasons: its really good, really fast, and everything on the menu is under 10.

The galettes (savoury crepes) start at 7, with sweet ones at 2.50. As the name suggests, it does waffles too  from 4.

Everything on the menu at Trois Fois plus de Piment has a no spice option (Trois Fois plus de Piment) (Trois Fois Plus De Piment)

Spicy food in Paris is a rarity, though theres always Sichuan cuisine. But no worries if you dont like spice  Trois Fois plus de Piment also offers everything on its menu with a no spice option (just ask for 0 star). The most popular dish is the noodles with pork without soup, which costs 10.80.

For something a little lighter, there are dumplings (what the French call ravioli)  with five pieces for 5.20. Youll often find a huge line outside the restaurant but it moves fast.

CheZaline, in the 11th arrondissement, is the best place for Jambon Beurre (JI of Sugarsheet) (JI of Sugarshee)

One of the most eaten foods in France is the jambon beurre  a baguette with butter and ham. CheZaline, in the bustling 11th arrondissement, is the best place to get your fix.

Its baguettes are sourced from the chichi Maison Landemaine and the ham used is the preservative-free Prince de Paris. Sandwiches range from 5 to 8.50. Note that theyre closed on weekends though.

Everything at Burgers & Fries is made in-house at two locations in the city (Eileen W. Cho)

Dont roll your eyes  Burger & Fries is hands down the best burger in Paris and a whole meal here costs less than 10. Substitute regular chips for ultimate fries, which comes with melted cheese, grilled onions, and a side of the famous house sauce.

Everything is made in-house, and with a location in Saint Denis and a second in Saint-Germain-des-Pres, its never too far away.

Ramen, rice bowls and rain wings are the order of the day at Ippudo (Eileen W. Cho)

Ippudo is best known its ramen but has plenty of delicious food for under 10. All three Parisian locations offer rice bowls for 8. There are also hirata buns  soft steamed buns filled with a meat of your choice for 4.

Try the Rajin Wings, found only at their Saint-Germain location  delicious wings in a sweet yet savoury soy sauce glaze for 7.
The baleful unintended consequences of Theresa Mays hostile environment regime for migrants continue to flow, and in the most dismal of ways. Now, it seems, even public health is being threatened by the links between NHS treatment and migration status introduced by Ms May when she was home secretary.

The idea that she and her advisers hatched was that making it more difficult, if not impossible, to see a doctor would deter migration. That seems to have worked out well in the sense that even some migrants who are in Britain legally are so nervous about seeking attention that they avoid the NHS under any circumstances.

The upshot is that many migrants are allowing themselves to become so ill that when they have no choice but to see a doctor, the NHS has to spend even more to deal with them than would have been the case had this conditionality not been introduced.

If that were not enough, those with infectious or communicable illnesses, including HIV, have put the wider public at risk, in a quite unnecessary way, and with potentially the most lethal of results.

Thus has the hostile environment regime failed. It was devised, implemented and defended by Theresa May as home secretary, and retained under her successor, Amber Rudd, despite Ms Rudds attempts to add a veneer of humanity to an inhumane set of rules. Ms May ignored warnings from officials about her policies. As prime minister Ms May has the opportunity and the power to do away with this failed approach; yet, stubborn and inflexible as ever, she shows little sign of doing so.

It has been a spectacularly damaging policy too, and often counterproductive. Linking rented accommodation to migration status simply encouraged rogue landlords to exploit immigrant workers in overcrowded and unsafe dwellings. Linking jobs to migration status, similarly, pushed migrant workers into the twilight zone beyond the law, where the minimum wage, health and safety regulations and fair treatment are unheard of.

As we have seen so often in recent years, desperate migrants fleeing civil war or persecution are not deterred by Ms Mays bureaucratic obstacles, just as they have not been deterred by the squalid conditions around the Channel ports and the life and death gambles they take with people smugglers to cross the Sahara, the Mediterranean and the English Channel. Those really are hostile environments, and they have not prevented illegal immigration.

In the second year of her rocky and weak premiership  and it does feel an awful lot longer than the 21 months she has spent as Britains sort of leader  there is a shameful lack of progress on addressing what she called the burring injustices in British society when she took office. The position of Britains Bame communities  the Windrush generation and others  has hardly been strengthened by their being threatened with deportation.

Earlier this week, under some pressure, the prime minister apologised to Caribbean premiers who were in London for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. Her apology covered the Windrush generation and the humiliations and damage they have suffered from the hostile environment policy, but she offered the apology only after she had initially refused even to meet the leaders.

She scored a debating point against Jeremy Corbyn at Prime Ministers Questions over when the decision to destroy the landing cards of early migrants had been taken  it appears under a Labour government. With the Syria and the Skripal stories dominating the news for much of the time, Ms May has escaped the sort of scrutiny and criticism that she might otherwise have been subjected to.

Still, too many of the questions about the hostile environment regime and its effects on blameless people remain unanswered. Moreover, she has not yet been held properly accountable for the misery it has caused, nor, from the other point of view, its ineffectiveness in controlling migration. After all, even with Ms Mays nasty little policy in place she and the Home Office have consistently missed its (self-imposed and unrealistic) migration targets.

The verdict is clear. Ms May created a mess at the Home Office that has followed her to Downing Street. The effects of the policy will continue to reverberate through society for as long as it remains in place. It is time to ditch it, and for the prime minister to admit that it was her fault. Its not her style but, to borrow a fashionable phrase, it would be the right thing to do.
During the bombing of Baghdad in January 1991 I went with other journalists on a government-organised trip to what they claimed was the remains of a baby milk plant at Abu Ghraib which the US had just destroyed, saying that it was really a biological warfare facility. Walking around the wreckage, I found a smashed-up desk with letters showing that the plant had indeed been producing infant formula milk powder. It had not been very successful in doing so, since much of the correspondence was about its financial and production problems and how they might best be resolved. It did not seem likely that the Iraqi government could have fabricated this evidence, though it was conceivable that in some part of the plant, which I did see, they might have been manufacturing biological weapons (BW).

I was visiting a lot of bombed-out buildings at the beginning of the US-led air campaign and I did not at first realise that the Abu Ghraib baby milk factory would become such an issue. I was more impressed at the time by the sight of a Cruise missile passing quite slowly overhead looking like a large black torpedo. But, within hours of leaving Abu Ghraib, the true purpose of the plant there had become a topic of furious controversy. The CNN correspondent Peter Arnett, who was on the trip, had reported that whatever else it did, it [the plant] produced infant formula. He saw a lot of powdered milk and, contrary to the Pentagon claim that the place was guarded like a fortress, we could only see one guard at the gate. Arnett did not deny the US government version that the place was a BW plant, but he did not confirm it either. He simply reported that it looked innocent enough from what we could see.

Even such mild dissent from the official US version of the bombing turned out to be unacceptable, producing an explosion of rage in Washington. Colin Powell, the US chief of staff, expressed certainty that the Abu Ghraib plant had manufactured BW. The US air force claimed that it had multiple sources of information proving the same thing.

Syria bombings: US, UK and French military air strikes wreckage Show all 13 1 /13 Syria bombings: US, UK and French military air strikes wreckage Syria bombings: US, UK and French military air strikes wreckage The wreckage of the Scientific Studies and Research Centre in the Barzeh district, north of Damascus, which was targeted by the US, UK and France air strikes. AFP/Getty Syria bombings: US, UK and French military air strikes wreckage A Syrian soldier films the damage of the Syrian Scientific Research Center surrounded by papers and rubble. AP Syria bombings: US, UK and French military air strikes wreckage Firefighrers extinguish smoke that rises from the damage. The Pentagon says none of the missiles filed by the U.S. and its allies was deflected by Syrian air defenses, rebutting claims by the Russian and Syrian governments. AP Syria bombings: US, UK and French military air strikes wreckage The wreckage of part of the Scientific Studies and Research Centre compound . AFP/Getty Syria bombings: US, UK and French military air strikes wreckage Part of a building collapsing, surrounded by the wreckage. AFP/Getty Syria bombings: US, UK and French military air strikes wreckage Further damaged to the Scientific Studies and Research Centre compound. AFP/Getty Syria bombings: US, UK and French military air strikes wreckage Lt. Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, the director of the Joint Staff at the Pentagon, also says there also is no indication that Russian air defense systems were employed early Saturday in Syria. AP Syria bombings: US, UK and French military air strikes wreckage A Syrian soldier sprays water on the wreckage. AFP/Getty Syria bombings: US, UK and French military air strikes wreckage Syrian state news agency SANA reported several missiles hit a research centre in Barzeh, north of Damascus, "destroying a building that included scientific labs and a training centre". AFP/Getty Syria bombings: US, UK and French military air strikes wreckage A Syrian soldier films the damage. AP Syria bombings: US, UK and French military air strikes wreckage Damage to the Scientific Research Center building that was hit by the strikes. EPA Syria bombings: US, UK and French military air strikes wreckage The Scientific Studies and Research Centre was one of the targeted buildings by the US, UK and France. AFP/Getty Syria bombings: US, UK and French military air strikes wreckage Further damage to the centre. EPA

Arnett was vilified as an Iraqi government stooge by the US government. This is not a case of taking on the media, said the White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater. Its a case of correcting a public disclosure that is erroneous, that is false, that hurts our government, and that plays into the hands of Saddam Hussein. US news outlets, none of which had correspondents in Baghdad, vigorously toed the official line. Newsweek derided Iraqs ham-handed attempt to depict a bombed-out biological weapons plant near Baghdad as a baby-formula factory.

It took years for the official version of the bombing to fall apart. Even though I had been in the plant soon after it was destroyed, I could not prove that it did not produce biological weapons, though it seemed to me highly unlikely. Media interest waned rapidly: the best study I could find about how the destruction of the milk factory was spun by official PR is a piece by Mark Crispin Miller, from which the quotes above are taken, published in 2003.

Proof came slowly, long after public interest had waned. A Congressional report in 1993 on US intelligence successes and failures in the Gulf War revealed the shaky reasoning behind the US air force decision to bomb the site. It turned out that mottled camouflage had been used on the roofs of two known BW facilities. The report said: at the same time, the same camouflage scheme was applied to the roof of the milk plant. This was enough for the US Air Force to list it as a target. Confident official claims about multiple sources of intelligence turned out to be untrue. One has to burrow deep into an unclassified CIA paper on Iraqs BW programme, to find a sentence admitting that another plant, which was the real centre of Saddam Husseins BW effort, was unknown to the US-led coalition and therefore was not attacked during the war, unlike the Abu Ghurayb (sic) Infant Formula Plant (the Baby Milk Factory) that the Coalition destroyed by bombing in the mistaken belief that it was a key BW facility.

The story of the Abu Ghraib baby milk factory is worth retelling because it underlines  in the wake of the US, British and French air strikes on alleged Syrian BW sites on 14 April  the need for permanent scepticism towards claims by governments that they know what is happening on the ground in Syria or anywhere else.

 Corbyn leads debate into Parliament vote on Syria strikes: 'The government is attempting to overturn a democratic advance'

But government duplicity is scarcely new and denunciations of it may obscure an even greater danger. Look again at the attack on Peter Arnetts story by the White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater who was wrong  and Arnett was right  in saying that it contained a disclosure that is erroneous, that is false. But he adds correctly that it was a disclosure that hurts our government and plays into the hands of Saddam Hussein.

So it was in a minor way and this brings us to a toxic attitude towards those who question the official version of events increasingly common in Britain and the US. It is overwhelming freedom of speech in Hungary and Poland and has already triumphed in Turkey and Egypt. In all cases, opinions diverging from those of the powers-that-be are branded as disloyal and unpatriotic and false facts are being spread by useful idiots, to use two ghastly cliches much in use. Marginalisation of dissenting is followed by its criminalisation: Turkey once had a flourishing free press but now any criticism of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan or words or actions of which he disapproves can be labelled as terrorism and punished accordingly.

There is much tut-tutting in Britain by the commentariat about the spread of authoritarianism in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, but less so about the growing limitation on what can be freely expressed at home. Increasingly, anything less than full endorsement of the government line about the poisoning of the Skripals in Salisbury or the suspected gas attack on civilians in Douma in Syria is characterised as support for Putin or Assad.

A telling instance of this new authoritarianism is the denunciations of a party of Christian clergy and peers who have been visiting Syria to meet church dignitaries and government officials. This is an understandable mission for concerned British Christians because Christians in Syria can do with all the solidarity they can get as they are forced to flee or are kidnapped or murdered by Isis, al-Qaeda or the Muslim Brotherhood. Like many Syrians, they see their choice as not being between good and bad but between bad and worse. They generally prefer survival under Assad to likely extinction under his enemies.

Visiting embattled members of the depleted Christian community in Syria is a good thing to do. And, yes, it could be said that the presence of British Christians in Damascus is very marginally helpful to Assad, in much the same way that Peter Arnetts truthful report on the baby milk in Abu Ghraib must have pleased Saddam Hussein. The Foreign Office said the Christians visit was not helpful but then helping the British state should not be their prime concern.

None of the arguments currently being used in Britain and the US to smear those sceptical of the governmental and media consensus are new. The Bolsheviks used to denounce people who said or did things they did not like as objectively being fascists or counter-revolutionaries. When those being denounced, often only a preliminary to being shot, replied that they were no such thing, the Bolsheviks would reply: tell us who supports you and we will tell you who you are. In other words, the only thing that matters is what side you are on.
When UK civil servants drew up plans for this weeks summit of Commonwealth leaders in London and Windsor, their themes included a fairer future, promoting the principles enshrined in the Commonwealth charter of democracy, good governance, human rights and the rule of law. Oh dear.

What was supposed to the biggest and best international conference held in Britain turned into a presentational disaster. Worse still, one created by Theresa May.

The heart-rending stories of people in the Windrush generation invited to the UK in the 1950s and 1960s, who have lost jobs and NHS treatment and faced deportation, can be traced back to the hostile environment strategy May pursued as Home Secretary. True, it was aimed at illegal immigrants. But it created a presumption that people were here wrongly unless they could prove otherwise, so those with every right to stay were scandalously treated as illegals.

It is no use ministers blaming civil servants. As Margaret Thatcher said: Advisers advise and ministers decide. Lucy Moreton, general secretary of the ISU union representing immigration staff and a former chief immigration officer at Heathrow airport, said it was deeply unfair to blame officials acting on instructions from their political masters. She told BBC Radio 4s Today programme that officials discretion to take an educated and sensible view in individual cases was removed after May sacked Brodie Clark as head of the UK Border Force in 2011 for relaxing passport checks to ease airport queues. (Clark claimed he was made a scapegoat.)

Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Show all 15 1 /15 Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK The ex-troopship 'Empire Windrush' arriving at Tilbury Docks from Jamaica, with 482 Jamaicans on board, emigrating to Britain. Getty Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Jamaican immigrants being welcomed by RAF officials from the Colonial Office after the ex-troopship 'Empire Windrush' landed them at Tilbury. PA Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Alford Gardner who arrived in Britain in 1948 on the first Windrush ship to dock in Tilbury, Essex, speaking at his home in Leeds PA Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Alford Gardner in Leeds shortly after he arrived in Britain in 1948 on the first Windrush ship to dock in Tilbury, Essex PA Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Gardner was 22 years old when he boarded the ship in Kingston, Jamaica, with his brother Gladstone before they and hundreds of Caribbean migrants called on to rebuild post-war Britain disembarked the ship in Tilbury Docks PA Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Alford Gardner (right), during his RAF service in 1947 PA Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK The son of Ruth Williams, a Windrush-generation immigrant, wants to the leave the country after threats of deportation. According to his mother, Mr Haynes applied for British citizenship in 2016 but was rejected, despite Ms Williams having lived in the UK almost permanently since arriving from St Vincent and the Grenadines in 1959. Ruth Williams, 75, said she felt "betrayed" by Britain after the Home Office twice turned down applications for her 35-year-old son, Mozi Haynes, to remain in the country. Ms Williams is understood to have cancer and said she relies heavily on her son for support. PA Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK The British liner 'Empire Windrush' at port in 1954. Getty Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Ruth Williams, 75, with her British passport. "I feel betrayed and a second class citizen in my own country," she said. "This makes me so sad and the Home Office must show some compassion. "I am unwell and almost 75, I live on my own and I need my son to stay here. I need my family around me and I cant face being alone. He has applied to the Home Office and been refused twice." PA Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK From the top, hopeful Jamaican boxers Charles Smith, Ten Ansel, Essi Reid, John Hazel, Boy Solas and manager Mortimer Martin arrive at Tilbury on the Empire Windrush in the hope of finding work in Britain. Getty Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Jamaicans reading a newspaper whilst on board the ex-troopship 'Empire Windrush' bound for Tilbury docks in Essex. Getty Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK After half a century in Britain, Anthony Bryan decided it was time to go abroad. But the decision set off a nightmare that saw him lose his job, detained twice and almost deported to Jamaica. AFP/Getty Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Jamaica-born Anthony Bryan poses outside his home in Edmonton, north London. Now 60 and a grandfather, Bryan thought the issue could be resolved swiftly, as he legally moved to Britain with his family as part of the Windrush generation of Caribbean migrants after World War II. In 1948, the ship Windrush brought the first group of migrants from the West Indies to help rebuild post-war Britain, and many others followed from around the Commonwealth. A 1971 law gave them indefinite leave to remain, but many never formalised their status, often because they were children who came over on their parents' passports and then never applied for their own. AFP/Getty Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Three Jamaican immigrants (left to right) John Hazel, a 21-year-old boxer, Harold Wilmot, 32, and John Richards, a 22-year-old carpenter, arriving at Tilbury on board the ex-troopship 'Empire Windrush', smartly dressed in zoot suits and trilby hats. Getty Windrush generation: threat of deportation from UK Newly arrived Jamaican immigrants on board the 'Empire Windrush' at Tilbury in 1948. Getty

Mays approach was also a result of the target to reduce net migration below 100,000 a year, a figure the Conservatives plucked out of thin air in 2010. It meant the Home Office scrabbled around for every device to chip away at the numbers  even though the Tories Liberal Democrat coalition partners warned them the target was unachievable. While removing illegals would not help meet the target, the climate meant those entitled to be in the UK were caught in the net because of the colour of their skin. Im not saying it was deliberately racist. But it was an unintended consequence of Mays strategy. How ironic, coming from the politician who admitted in 2002 that the Tories were seen as the nasty party.

The Windrush scandal, which shames the UK, may yet have a silver lining. It could strengthen the hand of ministers, led by Amber Rudd, the home secretary, trying to steer the Tories towards a more liberal immigration policy. She is warming to the idea of issuing an annual report on migration, which has been proposed by the Home Affairs Select Committee as a way to build consensus, tackle myths and spell out the cost and benefits of immigration at local and national level.

Rudd will likely win her battle to remove overseas students from the migration figures; May is isolated in her own cabinet on that. The same is true of the discredited target, which should now be killed off once and for all.

Rudd wants business to continue to have access to EU migrants after Brexit, while Eurosceptic ministers will oppose preferential access for the EU. But even they are striking a more positive tone. Michael Gove declared that Britain now has the most liberal attitude towards migration of any European country. (I think he forgot Germany, which has accepted an estimated 600,000 Syrian refugees to Britains 10,500.) Boris Johnson said that one of the myths of the referendum decision was that it was about slashing immigration. (I must have imagined those Leave campaign warnings about 5.2 million people arriving in the UK from Turkey and Balkan states when they joined the EU.)

 'They were going to send me back to Jamaica. Ive never been to Jamaica': Son of Windrush immigrant threatened with deportation

While we should welcome a change of heart by the Tories on immigration, it is not coming for entirely altruistic reasons. It is dawning on them that they will struggle to win an election as their elderly supporters literally die out if they fail to appeal to a younger generation more relaxed about immigration.

Appropriately, such a warning has just been delivered by Tory peer Lord Cooper of Windrush  the Cotswolds river which provided the name for the Empire Windrush, the ship which brought the first group of Caribbean migrants to the UK 70 years ago. Since the Brexit referendum the Conservative Party has too often looked at sounded like an English Nationalist movement, he wrote in a report for the British Future think tank marking todays 50th anniversary of Enoch Powells rivers of blood speech.

Cooper, who co-founded the pollster Populus and was David Camerons director of strategy in Downing Street, pointed out that the Tories lost ground among non-white voters last year for the second election running. The party holds only one seat with a BAME population of more than 30 per cent; by the next election, there will be more than 120 such constituencies. Unless something changes, before long there just wont be enough white voters for the Conservative Party to be able to win, he said.

Of course, the Windrush scandal will only make perceptions of the Tories even worse. If they do not adopt a more sensible immigration policy, they will pay a very heavy price.
More than 50pc of German households bought a Kerrygold product last year, making it one of the top 10 fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) in Germany.

The Irish butter brand, which is owned and promoted by Ornua, was also a hit in the US, where it recorded double digit growth.

Last year was Ornua Deutschlands most successful year to date with double-digit sales volume growth year-on-year. Kerrygold Butter volumes grew by more than 6pc, further increasing its well-established No. 1 brand position, the latest figures from Ornua's annual report show.

Kerrygold Extra volumes grew by more than 30pc and extended the market-leading position it gained in 2016. Kerrygold Cheese volumes grew by 15pc and the product range was extended with the introduction of three new varieties of shredded cheese.

Ornua is a dairy co-operative which markets and sells dairy products on behalf of its members; Irelands dairy processors and, in turn, the Irish dairy farmer.

Read Also Shopkeepers in one US state face prison if they sell Kerrygold butter

Last year Ornua Foods in the US saw the Kerrygold brand continued to perform well in the butter and specialty cheese categories, achieving 21pc year-on-year volume growth A fully-integrated, TV-led Kerrygold marketing campaign reached a 50pc awareness level amongst mainstream US consumers.

Kerrygold Irish Cream Liqueur is now available in over 5,000 retail accounts.

Kerrygold in the UK

Sales of both the Pilgrims Choice and Kerrygold brands in the UK grew in 2017. Pilgrims Choice gained market share and further strengthened its position as the No. 2 cheddar brand in the UK.

Kerrygold gained market share through the growth of its core range, which is now the No. 3 block butter brand in the UK.

Ornua is Irelands largest exporter of Irish dairy products, exporting to c.110 countries worldwide.

Read Also Why the world loves Irish Butter - exports surged 60pc last year

In March, Ornua announced record revenues of 2.1bn for 2017, an 18pc increase year-on-year.

Operating profit at the group, which is funded by 33 dairy co-ops, was 35m, up almost a third on the 2016 performance, according to the groups financial results published today. Meanwhile profit before tax increased by 84pc to 29.1m.

The performance was driven on the back of a record year for Kerrygold in Germany and the US, were the brand recorded double-digit volume growth in each market.

During the year, the group expanded its German production facility, with total investment in the facility now standing at 60m, while in North America, Ornua reported a record year for its ingredients division.
Cutting energy costs by 40pc on farms is "absolutely realistic" by following some simple steps and using readily available products, according to a Teagasc researcher.

John Upton, a researcher at Teagasc Moorepark, said the benefits were really evident in cases where a dairy farm is being set up on a 'greenfield' site.

"If the farm is set up with energy efficiency in mind at the beginning, it doesn't cost anything extra to do it.

"Those savings are cumulative every year thereafter and with the supports that are available through TAMS and Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland grants, there is really no excuse not to do it," he told the IFA Smart Farming seminar in Portlaoise.

Dr Upton warned electricity-related CO2 emissions from the dairy sector may hit 182,000 tonnes, with predictions the sector would produce 8.8 billion litres by 2020 unless strategies are put in place to tackle this.

Thomas Ryan, the IFA Smart Farming programme manager, said there was opportunities for farmers to save 5,000 in costs by tackling areas such as energy usage, soil fertility, water usage, grassland production and machinery usage.

Savings

He pointed out 8,700 in savings had been identified on average on the 38 farms taking part in their programme.

Dr Upton pointed out electricity related costs were a major issue with the estimated cost around 5 per tonne of milk, which varies from 2 up to 10 depending on the farm.

"So there are large gains to be made for farmers that are on the higher end of that scale," he said, adding it was a combination of efficiencies in all the areas from milk cooling to the water pump.

"Milk cooling is really always the largest energy consumer at 31pc of the total," he said.

It takes around 42kWh of electricity to produce 1,000 litres or one tonne of milk. "So to put that in context that is about how much you would use if you put on a one bar electric heater for two days straight," said Dr Upton. He said there is scope for reducing electricity usage by 40pc by implementing energy efficient technologies such as on-demand heating of water, variable speed drive technologies and plate cooling. He said there was a further 20pc reduction possible though renewable technologies.

Dr Upton said robotic milking can potentially double the energy costs of a farm. "We really need to tackle this issue before it gets ahead of us and energy costs spiral out of control," he said.

Longford dairy farmer Andrew McHugh said the programme had shown he could make savings of around 9,000 on his farm through issues such as improving grassland management and reseeding.

It also helped identify difficulties with his water pressure.

"My troughs weren't filling quick enough and cows milk yield was being impacted and I didn't even realise it," he said, adding that fixing the submersible pump pressure also solved an issue he was having with his milk cooling.
Shannon Airport today cut its grass early to help farmers with fodder shortages.

The harvesting of up to 1,000 silage bales began today at Shannon Airport in a fodder crisis intervention that IFA President Joe Healy described as a godsend.

Contractors rolled onto the 400 acre Shannon Airport site shortly after 10a.m. to begin three days of harvesting that will see in the region of 1,000 bales delivered to farmers across western counties in crisis due to fodder shortages arising from one of the hardest winters in living memory.

The first loads began to depart the airport on articulated lorries from midday to a number of regional locations for distribution, with some more locally based farmers arriving directly at the airport to collect bales for their own and neighbours animals.

The airports grass husbandry programme is not due to see any grass inside the airport perimeter cut until later in the summer, but in light of the shortages, the airport is offering to bring it forward to support local farmers.

Five years ago, in late April, farmers received 1,600 bales of silage from the airport in what was then the most severe fodder crisis in living memory.

Said Airport Operations Director Niall Maloney: Farmers were in difficulty back then and, having seen just how important our intervention was, we have been watching the situation closely over the past few weeks and will be making the same offer to farmers representatives again when we meet them.

We are a community airport and were delighted then to do what we could and the farmers were hugely appreciative. It was a critical intervention for many local farmers and so well received that other airports followed our lead and we hope they will do so again this time also, he said.

The Operations Director said that the situation may not yet be as bad as 2013 but many farmers are in dire circumstances.

A lot could happen in a week if the weather improves and we get more growth but as of now, many farmers are experiencing major problems. Weve seen a lot of fodder imported over the past week as a result, the introduction of emergency government supports and we are willing to play our part also
Bank of Ireland chief executive Francesca McDonagh says customers have accepted 130m in compensation and repayments so far in relation to the tracker mortgage scandal.

The issue was the first question raised from the floor of the banks sparsely attended annual general meeting in UCD in Dublin today.

It is newly installed ceo Francesca McDonaghs first shareholder meeting, and the last for outgoing chairman Archie Kane.

In response to a shareholder question, Ms McDonagh said understanding the tracker issue had been a key issue for her since taking up the role last October.

She said 9,300 customers had been directly impacted by the issue, including 3,200 whod suffered relatively small issues around the rates they were charged on home loans.

A bigger cohort of 6,000 customers had a right to a tracker deal but were not properly offered such deals. Most affected customers have been contacted and offered compensation, Ms McDonagh said.

Read More

As of last week we had contacted 97pc of all those affected, she said.

The bank took a provision of 170m in 2017 to cover the costs of compensation and redress, she said.

So far, the bank has made offers of 130m so far to those affected, and most customers have accepted, Francesca McDonagh said.

Long-time Bank of Ireland shareholder Charles Lysaght said shareholders should be provided with a detailed, and written, account of how the tracker scandal had developed within Bank of Ireland and said it was a blow to the lenders integrity.
DUBLIN-Headquartered Shire has rejected a takeover offer of about 48.4bn from Takeda Pharmaceutical Co, the Japanese drugmaker has said.

Takeda made a cash and stock offer of 46.50 pounds (53.49) a share in a bid intended to give Japan's biggest drugmaker a broader global reach. It is seeking new assets in gastrointestinal diseases and nervous-system ailments, and key treatments in the late stages of testing.

"Discussions between the parties regarding a potential offer are ongoing," Takeda said. "Takeda and its board reiterate that it will remain disciplined with respect to the terms of any such offer." The offer is a 51pc premium to Shire's closing price on March 27, the day before Takeda confirmed its interest. Shares of Massachusetts-based Shire surged as much as 12pc in London, where its listed.

"We think that Takeda's recently expressed interest in Shire may flush out other potential bidders, most likely among the US pharma heavyweights including Pfizer, Amgen and AbbVie," analysts at United First Partners said in a note.

Takeda's offer, made on April 12, comes amid a flurry of transactions in the pharmaceutical sector, marked by GlaxoSmithKline's $13bn agreement last month to buy out Novartis AG's stake in the two companies' consumer-health joint venture.

Just this week, Merck agreed to sell its over-the-counter unit to Procter &Gamble for $4.2bn, Sanofi said it would sell its European generic-drug business to Advent International and Shire agreed to sell its cancer unit to France's Servier for $2.4bn.

Takeda has ramped up its takeover ambitions under CEO Christophe Weber, as it seeks growth overseas amid patent expirations and a shrinking domestic population. (Bloomberg)
Dublin Airport's dominance of Irish aviation became even more concentrated in 2017, as the capital took a bigger share of a growing market.

Overall, 34.4 million passengers passed through the main Irish airports last year, a 5.2pc increase in passenger numbers year-on-year.

An overwhelming majority, 29.4 million passengers, passed through Dublin Airport - a 6pc increase on the previous year, according to information from the Central Statistics Office (CSO).

As is to be expected from the passenger numbers, the majority of flights handled by Irish airports were also handled by Dublin Airport, with the airport accounting for 83.4pc of the 254,000 plus flights that were handled by Ireland's main airports last year.

And the traffic numbers at the capital's airport, which according to a spokesperson for Dublin Airport, facilitates 117,300 jobs and contributes 8.3bn annually to the national economy, are set to continue with the launch of 14 new routes this summer.

Among the new airlines joining Dublin Airport's list of airline customers are Cathay Pacific, Croatia Airlines, Hainan Airlines and Icelandair.

Already in 2018 more than six million passengers have travelled through Dublin Airport in the first three months of this year, representing a 4pc increase, or an extra 248,500 passengers, compared to the same period last year, the airport said.

Increases in passenger numbers last year were also reported in a number of other Irish airports, including Cork, Donegal, and Kerry.

However, with the announcement from Norwegian earlier this month that it is scaling back its transatlantic routes from Cork, whether Cork Airport can continue to build on the 3.4pc increase in passenger numbers that it achieved last year remains to be seen.

While Norwegian may be scaling back in Cork, the airline, which has been subject to speculation regarding a possible takeover from Aer Lingus owner IAG, is expanding its operations from Dublin Airport.

Dublin is now set to have 21 weekly services by Norwegian, while Cork will see its only US route, Providence/Boston, suspended from October to March.

The passenger number statistics from the CSO do not offer good news to every Irish airport, with a number of them recording a decline in numbers last year, when compared to 2016.

Among those that recorded a drop in passengers were Shannon Airport, where numbers were down 4.5pc, and Connemara, and Inishmore airports.

Looking at where people are travelling to, the UK's Heathrow and Gatwick were the most popular routes for passengers from Dublin in 2017, according to the CSO.

For Cork, Heathrow and Stansted were the most popular routes, while the top route for Shannon was Heathrow - all of which emphasises Ireland's close connection to our nearest neighbour as Brexit looms.

The second most popular country for passengers travelling on international flights was Spain, while outside of Europe, the US was the most popular country for passengers at Irish airports in 2017.

Along with increasing passenger numbers, the main airports in Ireland also handled increasing amounts of freight last year.

They handled a total of 163,956 tonnes of freight, the vast majority (94.1pc) of which was international freight.

This represents an increase of 11.7pc when compared with 2016, according to the CSO numbers.

Again, the bulk of the freight, both arriving and departing Ireland, was handled by Dublin Airport.
Karen O'Connor, general manager service delivery, Datapac; and Eric Maloney, a BSc student of Information Technology Management at IT Carlow

Irish tech firm Datapac is making strides in closing the IT skills gap between Ireland's education sector and our tech industry.

The Wexford-based firm is launching a new initiative for transition year students to take part in work placement at the firm.

Datapac, one of Ireland's largest IT providers, has invested 1.5m in this student programme since its launch in 2004.

The programme is open to both graduate and undergraduate students, but now is facilitating applications from TY teenagers.

IT Management student at IT Carlow Eric Maloney was the 150th student to be recruited as part of Datapacs programme.

"Its given me a much deeper understanding of what its like to work in this fast-paced industry, and learn about real-world situations and customer interactions. Its given me a much clearer vision of the career I want to pursue," he said of the work experience.

The work placement programme is now being rolled out into secondary schools close to Datapacs main offices in Dublin and Enniscorthy.

"We believe its vital that young people are encouraged towards STEM careers, which can offer so many exciting opportunities and rewards for people from all backgrounds," Karen OConnor, general manager service delivery, Datapac, said.

"Encouraging students to consider working in the tech sector was one of the primary reasons for launching our work placement initiative which we continue to invest significantly in."

Last year, Datapac became HP's first Irish partner to scoop the company's Partner of the Year award for UK and Ireland.
Sky has reported strong quarterly results in a boon to shareholders anticipating a bidding war between Fox and Comcast for the UK pay-TV broadcaster.

Thanks to shows like 'Game of Thrones', Sky added 38,000 new customers in the three months ended March 31. Nine-month like-for-like revenue rose 5pc to 10.1bn (14.3bn). "No matter what happens to the ownership over the next few months, we all feel that Sky's a business in a strong position," said CEO Jeremy Darroch.

Sky's shares rose 0.6pc to 13.16 at 8.15am in London, a 5.3pc premium to Comcast's proposed offer. (Bloomberg)
This week Adrian sits down with the Emmy award-winning Boston tycoon who is the last man standing in Irelands controversial National Broadband Plan  Enet chairman David McCourt.

Joined by Sunday Independent deputy editor Fearghal OConnor, they discuss politics, Donald Trump, Angelina Jolie and the prospects for rural Ireland.
Patricia DuChene spoke on a panel at Dublin Tech Summit at the Convention Centre about crafting company culture  the summits Women in Tech initiative is a major part of this years event

Many firms pay lip service to establishing a balanced gender ratio in the workplace, but not all would adhere to the recruitment policies put in place by Wrike.

The US online software company, founded in 2007, was selected for Deloitte's Technology Fast 500 in 2017 for the third consecutive year.

A hub in Dublin in 2015 was established as part of Wrike's ambitious expansion in Europe - and Patricia DuChene has built the team here from the ground up, with the help of the IDA.

Originally director of international sales, Ms DuChene is now EMEA general manager, and pushing for better gender equality in the tech industry has always been a key focus.

Wrike's 'Women of Wrike' initiative (WoW), a programme that she heads up, includes mentorship and training sessions to help support women in the industry.

"We have seen membership in WoW grow dramatically globally; it has been great to see some of the newer hires get re-engaged," she said.

"We've held unconscious-bias training, created more awareness, and then there is our hiring policy. We ensure that a male and female candidate make it to final round for every role.

"This focuses our recruitment team to search for a wider pool of talent so that we find the right person for the job.

"It's tough to maintain your male/female ratio as you grow your office, but we've actually been able to increase our female ratio from 40p to 44pc. And our leadership team in Dublin is now 45pc female."

Wrike's headcount in Dublin has grown to 60 people, with plans to increase that employee base to at least 80 by the end of the year. "We are running out of office space which is the ever-present problem for growing startups here.

"We've been in this space for about a year and a half and we're already looking for a new home," said Patricia.

Wrike hopes to sign the deal for a new office by this summer for their new office and has its eyes on a city centre site that can accommodate 150-200.

"We started as a very customer-facing office so we had the sales and customer success teams but then we branched out into marketing, analytics, HR, all the functions you need to run a company we are building in EMEA; it's effectively EMEA's Wrike," said Ms DuChene.

Creating a company culture is vital when growing a firm from scratch, especially when it is expanding rapidly.

Ms DuChene spoke on a panel at Dublin Tech Summit about crafting company culture in this environment.

"You have to acknowledge where you are as a company in your maturity cycle; smaller teams and smaller companies can't pull out all the initiatives that the bigger teams can," she said. "We have it clearly thought out what our core values are. Then you can mature your processes as your company matures."
When I arrive at Anne Doyle's four-storey Georgian house in the centre of Dublin, the former newsreader announces that she's "cranky" and has been all day. To say that this is disconcerting is something of an understatement - as anyone who has ever met her will testify, the former RTE newsreader exudes an ice-cool, almost regal presence that strongly suggests she doesn't suffer fools. And that's when she's in a good mood.

Happily, Anne ends up being extremely welcoming, funny and gracious - and I even end up disappointed not to see the "wicked tongue" that she professes to have.

Anne retired on December 25, 2011, a month before she turned 60, and exactly 32 years to the day after her first bulletin. True to form, there was no gushing display of emotion as she took her leave. "And that's the news this Christmas night, from all of us, take care, and from me, it's been a pleasure," she said, warmly. "Good fortune, goodbye."

"I was very happy to retire," she tells me today. "In an ideal world, I would probably have liked to go earlier, but you have to stay with RTE until you are 60 to get a pension. It wasn't as strange as it should have been at first, as obviously you lose part of the structure of your day, but I rationally presumed it would be fine and it was. It could have been awful, but it just felt right for me.

"I used to go in to work around 2pm, so I always had the mornings to myself, and I'd finish at 9.30pm so I was a creature of the night. My job wasn't glamorous or exciting like people presumed it was, but it was a good, satisfying job and generally speaking, I did the best I could, and I'm content with that."

When she left, Cillian de Paor, who was then MD of RTE News and Current Affairs, said that Anne's on-screen professionalism made her a favourite with audiences. "We know her for other things," he added. "For her wit, her lively personality, her legendary loyalty to friends, her meticulousness and her formidable skills in argument."

Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close Returning to our screens: Anne Doyle at home in Leeson Street. Photo: Tony Gavin Enjoying retirement: Anne Doyle in her home at Leeson Street, Dublin. Photo: Tony Gavin. Happy together: Anne Doyle and her partner Dan McGrattan have been together for over a decade. Anne Doyle in 1979 Anne Doyle with former RTE colleague Aengus McGrianna, who she gave away at his 2014 wedding Anne Doyle pictured at the Futura Fashion Fair at the RDS in the 1980s Anne Doyle in her four-storey Georgian house. Photo: Tony Gavin / Facebook

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Whatsapp Returning to our screens: Anne Doyle at home in Leeson Street. Photo: Tony Gavin

In tandem with Anne's long career, many changes took place out in Montrose, both in broadcasting and technological advances under the watch of many different management regimes. Would it be safe to assume that Anne, who at one point was the staff representative on the RTE Authority, deployed those "formidable skills in argument" at various junctures of such changes?

"I would always fight my corner," she nods. "If I was to be critical of myself, maybe I was a bit overly-confrontational as I have a wicked tongue sometimes and can get myself into trouble. Sometimes I was a bit silly and bristled a little too much, as we all have to get used to change. When things settle, you think, 'What was I so annoyed about?' And while I wouldn't have a problem apologising if I was really wrong or did something stupid or impulsive, coming to that realisation is the tricky bit. If it dawns on you 10 years later that you were a bit harsh with someone, there's really no point in saying sorry. But with a bit of luck, the enemy is long gone anyway."

Anne says that RTE was good to her and she made great friends there - indeed, she gave former colleague Aengus MacGrianna away at his wedding to Terry Gill in 2014. She speaks very warmly of the organisation, and says that she strongly believes in public service broadcasting.

"Overall I found it a good place to work, but in later years, it did get to be too much of a treadmill," she admits. "I did a lot of radio, so I was just reading headlines every half an hour, so by the time it came to the nine o'clock news, I was ready to go home. News reading can be a bit lonely and isolated as you are usually a solo flier, but it was always interesting and gave me an opportunity to do something worthwhile."

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These days, Anne (63) describes herself as a "very boring person" who reads a lot, keeps a nature diary, and enjoys the company of her friends and a bit of craic.

Originally from Wexford, she grew up a couple of miles outside Ferns as the youngest of John and Lizzie Doyle's seven children. She was a bit of a tomboy as a child - there were 11 years and five brothers between herself and her sister Eilis. As a result, she didn't grow up shy of the opposite sex.

"I've always had an understanding of the weaker sex," she jokes. "My five brothers regularly had friends over, so I was used to men. I was brave as a child, much braver than I am now, and I got away with a lot being the youngest. I was quite independent, and my mother was very good and sensible - she took a chance with letting me do things that she didn't approve of because she knew she couldn't lock me up."

Anne's father was a quiet man who worked as a farm labourer on other people's farms, and like her mum, he left school at 12 or 13 to go to work. "Daddy was a man from the past," she says. "He was a ploughman but never learned to drive, and the industrial revolution kind of passed us by. He didn't get to have an education, but I think he would have enjoyed an opportunity for intellectual development.

Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close Anne Doyle with former RTE colleague Aengus McGrianna, who she gave away at his 2014 wedding Enjoying retirement: Anne Doyle in her home at Leeson Street, Dublin. Photo: Tony Gavin. Happy together: Anne Doyle and her partner Dan McGrattan have been together for over a decade. Returning to our screens: Anne Doyle at home in Leeson Street. Photo: Tony Gavin Anne Doyle in 1979 Anne Doyle pictured at the Futura Fashion Fair at the RDS in the 1980s Anne Doyle in her four-storey Georgian house. Photo: Tony Gavin / Facebook

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Whatsapp Anne Doyle with former RTE colleague Aengus McGrianna, who she gave away at his 2014 wedding

"My father was old-fashioned, but my mother, who was 11 years younger, was more modern and a real free spirit. She was fabulous and great craic, and was unusual-looking as she was really sallow with almost blue-black hair. She was very lucky, as she seemed to have the gift of happiness."

While her parents were happily married, interestingly six out of seven of the Doyle children didn't marry. Why does she think that's the case? "We were really happy when we were children, so I wonder if that made it hard?" she muses. "Our mother never focused on the marriage and children side of things, because all she cared about was that we got a good job and were independent. She would have loved to be a solicitor, but she had seven children and little choice.

"I don't think I ever really wanted to get married," she adds. "Maybe when I was in the first flush of some love affair, I might have thought about it but I never followed anything through. It just didn't figure on my agenda. I wasn't against it, but I also didn't have positive inclination towards it, and if you don't, then you are probably as well leaving those things alone."

Even so, Anne's stance might be considered somewhat unusual as she has been in a relationship with restaurateur Dan McGrattan for around 12 years, and had several serious relationships before that, one lasting almost 20 years. Her much-publicised, six-month relationship with former minister Jim McDaid caused a bit of a stir in 1998 as he was a married man. "I don't regret anything," she said afterwards. "There were no lighthouses to guide us."

Today, she lives with McGrattan, whom she describes as "a lovely man". They don't spend a huge amount of time together, however, as Dan is busy putting in long hours running his bar and restaurant, McGrattan's, on Fitzwilliam Lane. Anne, who doesn't drive and used to take a taxi (paid by herself) to RTE every day, will often wander over to have dinner with him in the evening.

"Our paths don't cross hugely, which can be lonely at times, but in some ways, it suits me," she says. "I know it works for some people, but I couldn't imagine a life where you do everything together as I'm too set in my ways. Dan is a very nice, practical man, and he's very smart. While I don't agree with him on everything, he never gives a stupid opinion, and I may even think later on reflection that he might even have had a point.

"I wouldn't be too difficult to live with - maybe I'm a bit cranky at times, but I don't set out to be difficult. Life amuses me really, and I have a sharp tongue and find my own little quirky things that amuse me. I'm happy and I enjoy life."

Anne says that while she isn't particularly romantic, she is not against it. Dan isn't romantic either, but he would be known to buy a bunch of flowers and to mark special occasions. "He might leave a few bob in the house for me to buy myself something," she deadpans. "Now that's what I call romance."

Anne's one married sibling is her brother Tom, who lives in Cork with his wife Pat. Anne loves her two nieces, and four grandnephews.

Would she have liked to have had children herself? "I never really had a wish to have children, sure I'm a child myself," she laughs. "I never had a plan that I would be married with kids by a certain point. It just wasn't in my head, and looking back, it isn't a regret. My eldest niece, Clare, is very like my mother and Martha is probably more like the Doyle side. They're tiny little girls and very pretty."

Anne's connection to her family and their heritage is one of the reasons why she was delighted to take part in Ireland's Rising, a new four-part series for RTE One. It sees Ryan Tubridy, Jim McGuinness, Fiona Shaw and Anne return to their ancestral home to explore its connections with 1916. For Anne, filming took place in Wexford, where one of the most significant Risings outside of Dublin took place in Enniscorthy.

Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close Anne Doyle in her four-storey Georgian house. Photo: Tony Gavin Enjoying retirement: Anne Doyle in her home at Leeson Street, Dublin. Photo: Tony Gavin. Happy together: Anne Doyle and her partner Dan McGrattan have been together for over a decade. Returning to our screens: Anne Doyle at home in Leeson Street. Photo: Tony Gavin Anne Doyle in 1979 Anne Doyle with former RTE colleague Aengus McGrianna, who she gave away at his 2014 wedding Anne Doyle pictured at the Futura Fashion Fair at the RDS in the 1980s / Facebook

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Whatsapp Anne Doyle in her four-storey Georgian house. Photo: Tony Gavin

Her own family were farm labourers in 1916, and her grandfather John was 35 at that time. For the TV series, she visited the farm he worked on to find out more about his daily life, and spent time at Ballinahallen Woods to gain an insight into what it might have felt like for the Ferns Volunteers, who waited there as confusion reigned as to whether the Rising was going ahead or not.

"I think it's a lovely programme," she says. "It was a really interesting and moving experience for me, and it was emotional as Wexford is still very much my home place. I have been gone 46 years, but my roots go very deep there."

Anne went to Ferns National School and then boarded at Loreto Abbey in Gorey on a county council sponsorship. It was "OK" and, while she didn't have a bad experience or find the regime difficult, she would much preferred to have stayed at home. There was no coming home at weekends back then, despite being only 10 miles away, and as she points out: "Really, once you leave home for school, you're gone."

"I never dreamed of telling my parents I didn't want to go because it was just the way things were in those days," she says. "You were getting a shot at something they never got, so you weren't going to screw it up for them. Depending on when Easter fell, you could have 13 weeks at one go without going home. We were allowed to have a visit at weekends, but the roads of Ireland were useless back then so many girls didn't have a lot of visits. Luckily my sister Eilis was great, and she would have ferried in my mum or my aunt to see me."

Straight after her Leaving Cert in 1969, a 17-year-old Anne came to Dublin to study English and History at UCD. Her sister was a national school teacher, but Anne didn't want to go that route. She managed to play for time by convincing her mum she could do an arts degree and then a HDip to become a secondary school teacher - that way she wouldn't have to learn sewing and singing, which her mother knew weren't exactly her strengths.

"My plan was to avoid work as far as possible," she says. "The big thing was that if you got the call to be a teacher, you took it, but I knew I wasn't cut out for it because I wasn't great with children."

Anne was booked in to stay at a kind of hostel for young people run by the nuns for the first year, but she ended up being "fecked out" after Christmas. She moved into a bedsit in a student house in Harold's Cross, where she had a ball.

"I was always coming in late and maybe I was a bit cheeky, but I can't exactly remember," she says of her eviction. "It wasn't forceful, but they suggested that I would be better off living elsewhere. Thank God they didn't tell my parents though, and there were loads of students living in the house and we had a great time. It wasn't continual assessment in those days, so you could just cram at the end to pass. I don't recommend that as an education, but it gave me a hell of a good time. I had a boyfriend who was very good and knew how to study where I hadn't got a clue, so really I got my exams thanks to him. We crammed together and luckily I had a good short-term memory."

After she completed her degree and HDip, Anne went to work in a library, and then got a job in the Department of Foreign Affairs for four years. She was doing a very mundane job to do with the upkeep of Irish embassies around the world when she applied for an advertised newsreader position in RTE aged 26. After several auditions she got the job, but found going into news cold with no broadcasting experience difficult. "It was a 'be careful what you wish for' situation, because I was thinking, 'How the hell am I going to do this?'" she says. "Everyone else there was long-established and knew what they were doing."

Now out the other end of a successful career that spanned three decades, retirement is clearly suiting Anne. Getting older doesn't bother her, either, as she says that not everyone gets the privilege of growing old. Indeed, Anne's beloved mum died suddenly aged 64 the year after she joined RTE. Her father had passed away three years earlier, in 1975. Her sister Eilis died of cancer aged 48 in 1989, and her eldest brother John of the same illness in 2000 - both deaths deeply affected Anne.

Now, only herself, Phil, Pat, Joe and Tom remain. "Even with this new show, I found myself saying, 'Eilis or John would have known that,' and you actually forget for a second that they're not around to ask," she says. "My sister didn't drink or smoke and had a healthy lifestyle, so I protect myself by not living too cleanly!"

I wonder would she reconsider both the clean living and the retired status in favour of a high profile job - perhaps one in Aras an Uachtarain? "The current President is very well settled, and I would say there will be lots of aspirants there," she says plainly. "To be honest, at this stage I wouldn't really run for anything, and that's not because I think it's only for the young and the rest of us should lie down and die.

"I was asked to be an ambassador for UNICEF recently, so I'm looking forward to working and travelling with them. I'm not trying to sound like a do-gooder, but being retired does give you time to give back. I have been lucky, as a lot of people born in my time in a similar background wouldn't have got the breaks I got, and without the breaks, you get nothing. Everything I got was more down to that than native wit or cunning."

Photographs by Tony Gavin

The four-part 'Ireland's Rising', begins on RTE One on November 29 at 8.30pm
Paul Whitington reviews this week's big releases...

The Cured (16, 95mins) ***

What would an Irish zombie look like? Would they be chattier than the other undead and wink winningly before sinking their teeth into your throat? David Freynes The Cured confronts these burning questions as we witness a zombie outbreak in Dublin. Or rather, the aftermath of an outbreak, because Freynes film cleverly begins as the country is recovering from a crisis that turned half the population into bloodthirsty shufflers.

An antidote has cured some of these predators, but no one knows quite what to do with them. A compromise arrangement has allowed some of the cured to return to normal life under supervision, but Conor (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) is not satisfied and mounts a terror campaign. His friend Senan (Sam Keeley) is haunted by the part that he played in his brothers death and cant bring himself to tell his sister-in-law Abbie (Ellen Page).

Freynes film is full of good ideas shot in and around north central Dublin. It just about gets away with evoking a zombie plague on a small budget and Vaughan-Lawlor lends the movie a certain Shakespearean grandeur, playing a man whose thwarted sense of entitlement is toxic to all around him.

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The Leisure Seeker (15A, 112mins) ***

I didnt believe a word of Paolo Vizris The Leisure Seeker, but it was oddly watchable. This, in large part, is due to the casting of Donald Sutherland and Helen Mirren as John and Ella Spencer, an elderly couple with various ghastly health problems who decide to run away from their worries. Their escape vehicle is ridiculously romantic, a 1970s Winnebago which billows out ominous fumes but somehow manages to carry the couple south from Massachusetts to Key West in Florida, and the holy grail of the Hemingway house.

John is a retired English professor and bores unsuspecting diner waitresses to death with impromptu lectures on Hemingways merits  he has Alzheimers. Ella finds his condition tough to deal with, but has problems of her own, namely a terminal cancer.

Its hard to sentimentalise something as nasty as Alzheimers, but The Leisure Seeker certainly gives it a try and only the wily acting of Mirren and Sutherland save this anodyne production from artistic oblivion.

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Let the Sunshine In (15A, 95mins) ****

In her recent film work, Juliette Binoche has radiated a jaded but intense sensuality, and never more so than in Let the Sunshine In, Claire Deniss wordy, intriguing drama inspired by the works of Roland Barthes. Binoche is Isabelle, a middle-aged artist whose otherwise free spirit is thwarted by a restless search for true love. Her deep need for connection is not satisfied by passionate trysts with an odious banker, a dithering actor and a working class disco dancer.

As befits a Barthes character, Isabelle ruins everything by talking: language constantly gets in the way of emotional intimacy, and her insistence on the existence of a pure love seems childish and naive. But her incessant railings against the imperfections of human relations are magnificent in their impotence.

Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts (No Cert, IFI, 93mins) ***

Finally, a word about Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts, a bizarre and stylised Indonesian film thats part spaghetti western, part feminist revenge fantasy. On a lonely farm, a strong, silent woman called Marlina (Marsha Timothy) is mourning the passing of her husband when a man with a machete arrives.

This ugly hoodlum demands food, before calmly informing Marlina that hell shortly be joined by his gang, and that she will be raped. With nowhere to run, she hits on the bright idea of poisoning the chicken soup. Im not sure quite what to think about this strange, deadpan, gory saga, which is gorgeously composed and photographed and also singularly unpleasant. But if its an accurate representation of the status of women in Indonesia, no wonder Mouly Suryas film is so angry.
Its often forgotten that the Nazi jackboot did tread on one small part of Britain. Between 1940 and 1945, the Channel Islands were occupied by the Wehrmacht, who governed with their usual winning charm.

Thousands of islanders were deported, many to concentration camps, slave labour was common and rationing relentlessly severe.

Things must have been grim for the inhabitants of Jersey, Guernsey, Sark and the smaller islands, but in this thin but likeably old-fashioned film, solace is found in literature.

Based on a bestselling novel, Mike Newells gentle, meandering drama stars Lily James as Juliet Ashton, a young London writer whos made a name for herself with a humorous column about life during wartime. Its 1946, her columns have been published as a book and shes trudging around Britain wearily promoting it when she receives an intriguing letter from Guernsey.

Its from one Dawsey Adams (Michiel Huisman), a total stranger who by chance came across a copy of Charles Lambs Essays of Elia signed by Juliet, and wants to find out more about the 19th century prose stylist.

Charmed by the odd coincidence of a book she once owned finding its way to the middle of the English Channel, Juliet sends back several of Lambs other essay collections, together with a warm letter. Dawsey replies and tells her about the book club hes a member of.

He describes his fellow members as though theyre characters out of Dickens: Eben Ramsey (Tom Courtenay), the local postmaster, a good-natured gossip; Isola Pribby (Katherine Parkinson), an earthy eccentric; Amelia Maugery (Penelope Wilton), a no-nonsense matriarch; and Elizabeth McKenna (Jessica Brown Findlay), a young firebrand and patriot.

This motley crew defied the German curfew to meet each week and furiously debate the merits of the Brontes and Jane Austen, seasoning their rows with homemade gin and inedible potato peel pie.

Back in gloomy, Luftwaffe-battered London, Juliet is enchanted and decides to travel to Guernsey to give a reading to the group. But that visit will be more problematic than she imagined and a frosty welcome is a prelude to a slow unravelling of the Literary Societys experiences under German occupation.

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Elizabeth is missing and though Dawsey acts as a father to her four-year-old daughter, the truth is rather more complicated. Meanwhile, a spark worthy of an Austen novel is flaring between Dawsey and Juliet, who has just become engaged to a dashing and impetuous American. Trouble is brewing then, but Juliet is engrossed by the story of the Guernsey Literary Society and is beginning to feel right at home on the idyllic island.

This is soft focus stuff, a fuzzy film with all the wartime edges knocked off that seems to belong to a more innocent movie-going age.But Newells film putters a little too sedately towards its denouement and doesnt always manage to make its uniformly cuddly characters seem credible.

The Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society might know a thing or two about making a feast from scraps, but seem less sure-footed when it comes to matters bookish.

Isola Pribby sighs into her sloe gin and wonders when my Heathcliff is going to come along, but a close reading of Wuthering Heights would have told her that Cathy Earnshaws lover was a stalker, a lunatic and quite probably a psychopath.

This endemic intellectual flabbiness is no doubt primarily the fault of the source material, but Newells film is not without a certain retro charm.

Lily James, who may or may not have the making of a film star, is well cast as the recessive, restless and endlessly curious Juliet, and its always a pleasure to watch Tom Courtenay in action: he has a way of bringing more to a part than is written down in the script.

But I would have liked to have seen more of Jessica Brown Findlay, a charismatic actress whos frustratingly pushed to the perimeters of this harmless, watchable film.

(12A, 123mins) ***

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Films coming soon...

The Avengers: Infinity War (Robert Downey Jr, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Chris Evans, Benedict Cumberbatch); The Delinquent Season (Cillian Murphy, Andrew Scott); Beast (Jessie Buckley, Geraldine James); The Wound (Nakhane Toure).
Antoinette Cunningham has become the first female full-time official of a Garda representative group.

The current president of the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors has now been appointed its deputy general secretary.

She will step down shortly as president to take up the full time position at the association's headquarters in Phibsboro, Dublin, after being selected following a competition and interviews.

From Knocklong, Co Limerick, Ms Cunningham joined the Garda 26 years ago and has worked as a training sergeant at the Garda College in Templemore, Co Tipperary, for the past decade.

She holds a master's degree in adult training and learning.

She will now be seconded from the Garda force to carry out her new job.

As president, she led her members to the brink of unprecedented strike action over pay and conditions in late 2016 before the issues were sorted out at talks.

An interim president will be appointed to fill the gap until a successor is appointed at the AGSI annual conference next March.
A 15-year-old boy was arrested by gardai after he threatened to blow up his school and "slit throats" of other students in the name of terror group Isil.

The boy, who attends a school in south Dublin, made two manic 999 phone calls to emergency services at lunchtime yesterday.

"In the 999 calls, he claimed he was going to blow up the school, that he was armed with a knife and he was going to slit throats in the school," a senior source told the Irish Independent.

"He claimed he was working on behalf of terror organisation Isil, which was obviously a course of major concern."

The emergency calls led to a massive Garda alert as armed officers from Sundrive Road garda station arrested the suspect at the school at 1.40pm yesterday.

This was just 10 minutes after gardai had been alerted to the shocking phone calls to emergency services.

"Officers in that locality have an excellent relationship with the school and that is what enabled the situation to be resolved so quickly," a senior source said.

"This meant that the school never had to go into lockdown or anything like that and the situation was resolved in a very quick manner. In fact, most people in the school would have been unaware about what unfolded there at lunchtime."

Detectives arrested the boy and brought him to Sundrive Road garda station, where he was being questioned last night in the presence of his mother.

His mobile phone has been seized and officers searched his Dublin 8 home last night, where they trawled through his bedroom in the search for other devices and information linking him to Isil.

However, it is understood that gardai do not believe the male teenager has any links to the terror group and may be suffering from psychological issues. It is understood the boy and his mother are fully co-operating with the investigation.

The teen is being questioned for making threatening phone calls and is expected to be diverted to a Garda Juvenile Diversion Programme if he is deemed suitable for it.

It is not known what action the south Dublin school will take against the teenager who was not previously known to gardai. The boy was not armed when he was arrested by detectives who quickly brought him away from the large school.

Isil, known as Islamic State, is considered the world's most extreme terror organisation and has been known to recruit teenagers as young as 15 across Europe.
The chief scout of Scouting Ireland has stepped aside amid the ongoing controversy over the handling of a rape allegation against another scout leader.

Christy McCann, who was voted back into the position last weekend, has stepped aside while an independent investigation takes place.

Concerns have been raised about Scouting Ireland's handling of a complaint of rape in 2016 against one of its senior officials.

A female scout leader had claimed she was raped seven years previously.

The alleged male offender was suspended during the investigation but was reinstated last year after the DPP decided not to proceed with the case.

State funding of nearly 1m a year is to be withheld until concerns surrounding governance issues are resolved.

In the Dail yesterday, Ms Katherine Zappone confirmed Mr McCann's decision to step aside. "I have been informed that the chief scout will be stepping aside from this evening, pending the completion of the independent investigation and the treasurer will serve as acting chair of the board in his absence," she said.
The identity of a blogger who made allegedly defamatory posts will be kept secret after a Ugandan lawyer lost his appeal.

The Court of Appeal said Fred Muwema's right to also bring defamation proceedings against a blogger who goes under the pseudonym TVO (Tom Voltaire Okwalinga) was outweighed by the risk to life or bodily integrity from the Ugandan authorities if his identity is disclosed.

Mr Muwema says he was defamed in a number of posts by TVO. He brought defamation proceedings and sought orders to have the posts taken down by Facebook Ireland, because it provides the social media service to all users outside of the US and Canada.

The posts were removed, and Mr Muwema also wanted the identity of TVO so that he could join him in the defamation proceedings against Facebook, which denies his claims.

Facebook opposed revealing his identity without a court order.

It argued there was evidence to show that if it was disclosed he would be exposed to arrest and ill-treatment at the hands of the Ugandan authorities.

TVO has posted material critical of the Ugandan government, which also wants to know his identity.

In the High Court last year, Mr Justice Donald Binchy refused to order identity disclosure, saying the threat to TVO was sufficiently serious that Mr Muwema's right to a good name had to take second place to TVO's right to life and bodily integrity.

Facebook had provided evidence from award-winning Ugandan human rights lawyer, Nicholas Opiyo, who said a man called Shaka Robert had been subjected to abuse of his rights by the Ugandan authorities for his online activism.

Mr Muwema said the High Court placed too much weight on the "hearsay affidavit evidence" of Mr Opiyo and of Facebook's own lawyer in Ireland, Jack Gilbert, and on an Amnesty International report.

But in his decision on behalf of the three-judge Court of Appeal, Mr Justice Michael Peart said he would not interfere with the High Court decision.
A YOUTH charged with the murder of a Japanese man in a stabbing in Dundalk in January has been further remanded in custody in his absence.

Mohamed Morei, 18, was remanded in custody on Jan. 4 after being charged with the murder of 24-year-old Yosuke Sasaki. He was unable to attend the seven subsequent hearings and could not appear at his eighth scheduled hearing at Cloverhill District Court.

The defendant has been receiving ongoing medical care in the Central Mental Hospital (CMH) in Dundrum where he could remain for several months.

Judge Victor Blake further remanded him in custody in his absence and adjourned the case for two weeks until May 3 next.

Mr Sasaki, from Ebina, west of Tokyo, was fatally stabbed on Avenue Road shortly before 9am on Jan. 3 last.

He had worked at National Pen, a call centre in Dundalk, Co. Louth and had lived in Ireland for the past year.

Following his death, an Irish man was injured when he was stabbed a short time later at a nearby location. At 9.40am, gardai received a report that another local man had been injured in an attack at Seatown Place.

Mr Morei was initially remanded in custody by Dundalk District Court on Jan. 4 after he was charged with the murder of Mr Sasaki.

At that hearing, Garda Inspector Martin Beggy said the youth's nationality had not yet been undetermined.

If he seeks bail this application will have to be made in the High Court, because he is facing a murder charge.
A HOMELESS man charged with the murder of a Romanian man last week in a park in Tallaght, is a serious flight risk, a court heard.

At Tallaght District Court on Friday, Judge Patricia McNamara remanded Feri Anghel (38) in custody to appear before Cloverhill District Court next Friday, April 27.

Anghel, of no fixed abode, is charged with murdering Ioan Artene Bob at Sean Walsh Park, Tallaght, on April 13, 2018.

Mr Bob (49) died in Tallaght Hospital on Friday (April 13) after he was found seriously injured but alive in Sean Walsh Park just before 8am that day by a passerby.

The emergency services were alerted. He was treated by paramedics before being taken to Tallaght Hospital.

Mr Bob had lived in Ireland for the last three years.

He worked in construction and had a partner and a son aged eight in Romania.

Anghel appeared in custody before Judge McNamara. The Romanian national who has short black hair and a prominent black beard, wore a black hoodie.

Sergeant Shay Palmer told the court that he arrested Anghel at 10.16pm on Thursday night in Tallaght Garda Station.

He said that at 12.20am on Friday morning Anghel was charged by Sergeant Brian Norton with the new charge.

He said Anghel replied no to the charge.

Sgt. Palmer added that as Anghel was charged with murder, bail was not available in the District Court.

Anghels solicitor, RIchard Young, told Judge McNamara that his client could provide an address.

Sgt. Palmer said that he was not satisfied with the address.

He added: I believe he is a serious flight risk given the nature of the charge

Judge McNamara remanded Anghel in custody to appear before Cloverhill District Court next Friday, April 27.
A chicken processing firm has been ordered to pay 17,000 to a woman it unfairly dismissed while she was off sick after suffering a miscarriage.

In the case, it is alleged that a female payroll employee at Western Brand Group Ltd told 37-year old Bulgarian, Aneta Petrova, that she was "sick for too long" when dismissing her on December 29, 2015.

This was 12 days after Ms Petrova was diagnosed with having a ectopic pregnancy.

The night before, she was brought by ambulance to the emergency department at Mayo University Hospital after fainting at her home.

On December 21, a medical certificate was delivered to Ms Petrova's employer, the Western Brand Group Ltd's offices in Ballyhaunis, Co Mayo, conirming she had suffered a miscarriage.

Eight days later, Ms Petrova said she was sacked summarily over the phone after an employee at the firm's payroll office told her she was "sick for too long", she was suspended and her P45 would be sent to her.

Ms Petrova - who holds a masters degree in European Law - worked on the firm's chicken fillet line at its Ballyhaunis plant.

Apologised

Before the Labour Court, the group pleaded that it didn't realise that Ms Petrova was pregnant or had suffered a miscarriage at the time of dismissal and that her medical certs confirming the miscarriage were not seen by payroll before the call was made to dismiss her.

The company stated that after finding that Ms Petrova suffered a miscarriage, it subsequently apologised to her and said that she could re-apply for her job when she returned to full health.

Ms Petrova was suing for unfair dismissal and in its ruling the Labour Court found that the Western Brand Group Ltd was aware that Ms Petrova's illness related to her pregnancy and miscarriage at the time of dismissal.

The Western Brand Group was appealing an earlier Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) Adjudication Officer ruling which found that Ms Petrova was unfairly dismissed and awarded her 12,000.

The Labour Court ruling has now upheld the unfair dismissal ruling and increased the level of compensation to 17,000.
Warm tributes have been paid to child psychologist David Carey who passed away after a battle with cancer.

Dr Carey had been a panelist of the Sean Moncrieff show for the past decade, contributing to the weekly parenting slot. He was also a contributor to the Irish Independent.

Moncrieff broke the news of Dr Carey's passing on his show today.

I do have a bit of bad news to share with you for the last four or five months weve had various people filling in for David, very well it should be said, but weve had a lot of people texting in wondering where David was," he said.

"David had been struggling with ill health. He was given a diagnosis of cancer some months back."

Moncrieff's voice cracked with emotion as announced that he learned yesterday that Dr Carey had passed away.

"We are really, really devastated," he said. For me anyway, he's somebody I've known for 10 years and we've had a conversation for 10 years.

"He could be a bit of a grump and that's why I loved him."

He added: Next Wednesday were not going to do parenting well play an extended interview that we did with David some years back.

Fans of Dr Carey's flooded Twitter with tributes to the much-loved child psychologist following the news.

One of our most beloved contributors, David Carey, has passed away.



I first met him when I was working on @SeanMoncrieff a few years ago and he was one of the nicest humans you could hope to meet. He said 'hello, how are you?' in a sing-song way each Wednesday.  Jess Kelly (@jesskellynt) April 20, 2018

I often annoyed David Carey with silly parenting questions as he sat in the reception @NewstalkFM. Always gracious, he listened and imparted his unique wisdom. So sad he hear of his passing. RIP  Jonathan Healy (@jonathanhealy) April 20, 2018

@SeanMoncrieff very sad to hear of David Carey's passing. He seemed like such a good man and a rock of sense. He'll be missed.  Leah (@GreenNotCabbage) April 20, 2018

Genuinely devastated to hear that David Carey has died. His parenting slot on @SeanMoncrieff was the soundtrack to my trips to and from the hospital with my wife pre-the birth of our son. Constantly saying to ourselves 'oh, must remember that advice'  Steve O'Rourke (@steveohrourke) April 20, 2018

@SeanMoncrieff Well, safe to say I am truly gutted at the news of David Carey's death. Listening to him on the parenting slot was a highlight of my week, such a warm and wise man, he will be so very missed, not least by you Sean and your team. X  Liz McGauley (@lizzer72) April 20, 2018

So sad to hear of David Careys passing. Got to meet him in person once, & he more than lived up to all my high expectations.

Im not a parent, but I loved the Parenting Slot: the importance of kindness seemed his theme. An excellent legacy. RIP.@SeanMoncrieff  Camille Loftus (@CamilleLoftus) April 20, 2018

Oh that is sad. Parenting expert David Carey from @SeanMoncrieff show has died. I always enjoyed his wisdom & humour. He will be missed.  Eleanor Fitzsimons (@EleanorFitz) April 20, 2018

So very sorry to hear of David Carey's death @SeanMoncrieff . His parenting slot was unmissable even for those of us with grown up kids. RIP. @NewstalkFM  Sinead Ryan (@sinead_ryan) April 20, 2018

I am so sorry to hear about the passing of the psychologist David Carey. He was fascinating, engaging and incredibly warm. I loved listening to his parenting advice, and he had a great understanding of the work of teachers too. Condolences to all who loved him. @SeanMoncrieff  Ciara Reilly (@PrimEdTeacher) April 20, 2018

I'm very sad to hear about the passing of Dr David Carey. Always loved his slot and learnt a lot over the years. My possible future children will be very grateful I tuned in. RIP David @SeanMoncrieff  Kevin (@Shepnosis) April 20, 2018

@SeanMoncrieff I don't have children. Maybe; hopefully I will in the future. I made sure to listen when David Carey was on your show. It was much more than a parenting slot. I can't define it but unexpetedly I feel such loss. I can't imagine the loss felt by those close to him.  James Mackenzie (@MackenzieThe3rd) April 20, 2018
There is more bad news today for the patients and doctors who believe the limited cardiac services for patients in the south east will cost lives.

A long-promised national review of cardiac care, including cath labs which can provide vital emergency treatments to widen and unblock arteries, only got underway in January.

It will take about another 18 months to finish the report - so it will be that long before any major decisions are taken on the call to provide 24/7 cath lab services in University Hospital Waterford and extend its use beyond Monday to Friday office hours, the Irish Independent has learned.

Tragic deaths like those of Thomas Power and Una McDermott, who were unlucky enough to suffer a heart attack on a Sunday when the Waterford cath lab is closed, were predicted by doctors in the hospital after a bombshell report in 2016 turned down the appeal to open a second cath lab.

The Department of Health-commissioned report by Niall Herity said it was not merited on clinical grounds. Over 95pc of the work done in Waterford is planned and only 4pc is emergency.

The existing lab should increase its capacity by 20pc, he said.

The report was denounced by doctors in the hospital who said the catchment population of 286,147 cited was too low and the true figure was 500,000.

There are six regional centres in the country for treating serious cardiac cases but Waterford is the only one that does not operate 24/7.

The main option for patients who have a heart attack in the region in the evening or at weekends is to hope they make it to Cork University Hospital on time.

If this is by ambulance they are at the mercy of poor roads and traffic. In order to get their helicopter they must first pray one is available and get to the local airport, which again consumes time when there may be none to spare.

Last September a mobile lab was installed in the campus of the hospital.

But it does not provide an out-of-hours service and was mainly employed in trying to reduce the numbers of patients on waiting lists for planned procedures.

However, there are still 339 patients waiting months in many cases for planned angioplasty or stents.

The mobile unit is now to stay until June such is the demand for care.

The battle for the second cath lab in Waterford has been portrayed as a classic form of "parish pump" pressure aimed at undermining independent decision-making based on clinical criteria.

This was due to the role of Junior Minister John Halligan, who claimed it was part of his deal for supporting the Government. But he has accepted the compromises since then and has not resigned after all.

The capital cost of another cath lab is not huge, at around 2.4m.

There would be the added cost of staffing.

But what price can you put on the loss of a young father and talented botanist?

It is a question the experts who will draw up the national review of cardiac services must weigh up not just for Waterford but other parts of the country.
WALKING AWAY: St Patricks Street in Cork is reportedly suffering from low footfall since the council restricted access for cars. Photo: Daragh Mc Sweeney/ Provision

AN IRISH city is today expected to signal a major climb down over a controversial car ban policy.

Cork City Council has called a special meeting for 6pm tonight amid speculation leading political parties will demand an immediate suspension of the ban on cars on St Patrick's Street.

The move came just 24 hours after traders warned the car ban had driven shoppers out of the city centre with some businesses down 50pc in terms of both footfall and sales.

Other traders warned that the council could face a rates protest unless the move was immediately revised.

Yesterday, senior Cork City Council managers led by Lord Mayor Councillor Tony Fitzgerald met with party leaders and whips over the mounting controversy.

"We have considered in detail the concerns of the people including the traders and, as a result of that, I have decided, at their request, to hold a special public meeting at 6pm tomorrow in City Hall where we will review the city centre strategy," Councillor Fitzgerald said.

More than 200 traders met in a Cork hotel on Wednesday evening and warned they cannot sustain three months of lower footfall and lost sales before the controversial city centre car ban is revised.

Some operators claimed they are down almost 50pc in both trade and footfall since the ban was introduced at Easter.

Cork City Council imposed the ban on cars using the city's main thoroughfare three weeks ago.

It bans all cars from St Patrick's Street between 3pm and 6.30pm daily though buses and emergency vehicles can still use Cork's main street.

Council chiefs, stung by criticism from traders, vowed to review the ban if necessary in July.

However, angry traders warned they cannot sustain three months of lower footfall and reduced sales.

English Market spiced beef trader, Tom Durcan, warned that the aftermath of the traffic ban for city centre business owners has been "a total disaster."

"No business can sustain a decline in footfall and trade of this magnitude," he said.

Idaho Cafe operator, Richard Jacob, said it was vital that City Hall listen carefully to traders about the impact on their businesses.

He said compromises from City Hall in the form of parking and marketing supports were welcome but, if trade was being damaged by the ban, city authorities had to take action.

Councillor Ken O'Flynn said council chiefs needed to accept, given the mounting evidence, that the afternoon car ban on St Patrick's Street might have been a mistake.

"We need people to be big enough to put their hands up and admit they might have got it wrong," he said. City Hall has already moved in a desperate bid to defuse the row following talks with traders and bodies including the Cork Business Association (CBA).

Cork City Council chief executive Ann Doherty unveiled a range of new parking incentives aimed at making it more attractive for people to shop in the city centre.

These ranged from free use of 'park and ride' facilities during specific times and special discounted parking rates at council-owned city centre car parks - all aimed at getting people into the city centre.

"I am so mindful of the challenges that businesses have - I am listening to them," she said.

"What I am asking can we at least give this a reasonable period of time to work?"

"For three months we put in all of these parking incentives - I will also support a promotional campaign to let the citizens know that it is OK to come into the city."

Cork city centre has a very special offering and remains fully open and accessible as it goes through a period of change, investment and improvement," she said.

"The city council will continue to engage with the business interests and thanks people for their support and patience," she said.

Mr Jacob said everyone in Cork had the same goals.

"We all want the same thing which is a vibrant and busy Cork city centre where people like to shop, socialise and enjoy the unique atmosphere."

But Tom Murphy of Murphy's Menswear warned that one day last week the footfall at their St Patrick Street store was down by more than 50pc

compared to the previous week last year. Trade was down by around 25pc or more.

"I haven't ever seen anything like it," he said.

"I live in Ballinhassig and the commute into town can sometimes take a long time due to traffic. But I drove in one day without a single hold-up. Some people might say that is a good thing but what worries me is whether the car ban is now beginning to have a knock-on effect on the morning trade as well."

The famous clothes shop, during one day last week, had just two customers walk in the front door during three hours of the car ban.

"There is absolutely no doubt but that some people have decided not to come into the city centre to do their shopping - that is what is worrying."

Cork's oldest Chinese restaurant is Tung Sing which boasts a dominant position on St Patrick Street. Frank Lee, who employs almost 30 staff at Tung Sing, warned that some afternoons in the city centre following the car ban being introduced resembled the eerie emptiness which preceded Storm Emma.

"It makes no sense - I don't think traffic was ever a problem on the street over recent years," he said.

"My worry is that the city could become a ghost town.

"It is very difficult to say 'wait and see' when your turnover is falling," he said.
WALKING AWAY: St Patricks Street in Cork is reportedly suffering from low footfall since the council restricted access for cars. Photo: Daragh Mc Sweeney/ Provision

CORK has put the brakes on its controversial city centre car ban introduced at Easter.

There was overwhelming support amongst councillors at a special City Hall meeting tonight for the campaign by Cork traders for the immediate suspension of the ban amid claims it had devastated trade.

Some traders claim business and shopper footfall around the city centre was down by 50pc since the afternoon car ban was introduced.

In an embarrassing u-turn, the ban on cars using St Patrick's Street will now be suspended until August.

The suspension of the ban followed a unanimous council vote.

It will be reviewed on August 9 next.

The council will also still proceed with a package of parking and marketing initiatives aimed at boosting city centre trade.

Tanaiste Simon Coveney said the response to public opinion was local democracy working.

"I think it is a good thing - the first thing I'd like to say is that the city council, councillors and traders in the city actually all want the same thing - they want a vibrant city centre," he said.

"They want people walking around with their families shopping, eating and enjoying themselves the city centre."

"There is a commercial element to that but also building a strong city centre atmosphere," he said.

City Hall has also re-stated its support for the City Centre Movement Strategy (CCMS) which is aimed at improving bus reliability and journey times.

Cork has been earmarked for a 200m upgrade of its public transport network which is overwhelmingly dependent on bus services.

Since 2014, the numbers using bus services around Cork city have soared by almost 25pc.

Cork City Council called the special meeting last night after traders had threatened to discuss a commercial rates protest over the impact the car ban had on city centre trade.

More than 200 traders met in a Cork hotel on Wednesday evening and warned they cannot sustain three months of lower footfall and

ost sales before the controversial city centre car ban was revised.

Some operators claimed they are down almost 50pc in both trade and footfall since the ban was introduced at Easter.

Cork City Council imposed the ban on cars using the city's main thoroughfare three weeks ago.

It bans all cars from St Patrick's Street between 3pm and 6.30pm daily though buses and emergency vehicles can still use Cork's main street.

Council chiefs, stung by criticism from traders, vowed to review the ban if necessary in July.

However, angry traders warned they cannot sustain three months of lower footfall and reduced sales.

English Market spiced beef trader, Tom Durcan, warned that the aftermath of the traffic ban for city centre business owners has been "a total disaster."

"No business can sustain a decline in footfall and trade of this magnitude," he said.

Idaho Cafe operator, Richard Jacob, said it was vital that City Hall listen carefully to traders about the impact on their businesses.

He said compromises from City Hall in the form of parking and marketing supports were welcome but, if trade was being damaged by the ban, city authorities had to take action.

Councillor Ken O'Flynn said council chiefs needed to accept, given the mounting evidence, that the afternoon car ban on St Patrick's Street might have been a mistake.

"We need people to be big enough to put their hands up and admit they might have got it wrong," he said.

City Hall had moved in a desperate bid to defuse the row following talks with traders and bodies including the Cork Business Association (CBA).

Cork City Council chief executive Ann Doherty unveiled a range of new parking incentives aimed at making it more attractive for people to shop in the city centre.

These ranged from free use of 'park and ride' facilities during specific times and special discounted parking rates at council-owned city centre car parks - all aimed at getting people into the city centre.

She had urged traders to give the new system three months before making a final judgement.

Mr Jacob said everyone in Cork had the same goals.

"We all want the same thing which is a vibrant and busy Cork city centre where people like to shop, socialise and enjoy the unique atmosphere."

But Tom Murphy of Murphy's Menswear warned that one day last week the footfall at their St Patrick Street store was down by more than 50pc compared to the previous week last year. Trade was down by around 25pc or more.

"I haven't ever seen anything like it," he said.

"I live in Ballinhassig and the commute into town can sometimes take a long time due to traffic. But I drove in one day without a single hold-up. Some people might say that is a good thing but what worries me is whether the car ban is now beginning to have a knock-on effect on the morning trade as well."

The famous clothes shop, during one day last week, had just two customers walk in the front door during three hours of the car ban.

"There is absolutely no doubt but that some people have decided not to come into the city centre to do their shopping - that is what is worrying."

Cork's oldest Chinese restaurant is Tung Sing which boasts a dominant position on St Patrick Street.

Frank Lee, who employs almost 30 staff at Tung Sing, warned that some afternoons in the city centre following the car ban being introduced resembled the eerie emptiness which preceded Storm Emma.

"It makes no sense - I don't think traffic was ever a problem on the street over recent years," he said.

"My worry is that the city could become a ghost town."

"It is very difficult to say 'wait and see' when your turnover is falling," he said.
A MAN who collapsed at the top of Blarney Castle in Cork had to be airlifted by Irish Coast Guard helicopter to hospital

The dramatic incident began at 10am when the man, who is believed to be a tourist, complained of feeling unwell.

The man suddenly collapsed at the top of the famous tourist attraction.

He was immediately attended to by castle staff and paramedics who were at the scene within minutes.

However, due to the lay-out of the castle with its circular stone stairwells, the decision was made to air-lift the man to hospital for operational reasons.

An Irish Coast Guard helicopter was tasked with the mission and was at the famous Cork landmark within minutes.

The person was successfully airlifted from the top of the castle and taken to Cork University Hospital (CUH).

The man's condition is unknown but it is suspected he may have suffered a heart attack.

Blarney Castle ranks as one of Ireland's most visited tourist attractions and is particularly popular with North American visitors.
Violent crime gangs are operating their international empires from behind bars while increasingly exposed and under-resourced prison officers are getting injured trying to separate inmates that cannot be allowed to mix with each other on safety grounds, according to the Prison Officers Association.

Gangs have a hierarchy within the prison estate and have a number of contractors that they hire work out to. In total there are nearly 30 factions within Mountjoy that cannot mix for a variety of reasons, said POA deputy general secretary Jim Mitchell.

Speaking at its annual conference in Kilkenny yesterday, he said the proliferation and power of gangs within our prisons is a matter of major concern.

Because of the number of groups now operating in our prisons the logistical difficulties alone of keeping one group from another are staggering. This has resulted in officers getting injured while keeping groups apart, he added.

POA general secretary John Clinton echoed this view.

Irish gangs work on a global basis, theyve huge resources, huge finances and they can have great influence within the prison system. So when theyre caught by the gardai and imprisoned they dont go away, theres no Road to Damascus transformation for these people, he said.

They reform within the prison system and then they operate as they do on the outside.

The impact is very very difficult on staff. The logistics of keeping criminal gangs apart alone is a huge issue. One gang will want to get at the other gang, when they do our members have to intervene, and our members can get assaulted and injured during the course of their duties, he added.

Mr Clinton said that gang murders and drug shipments are also being organised from behind bars, and the latest advances in technology that have allowed the miniaturisation of mobile phones makes it more difficult for prison officers to detect them.

Its well-known that hits have been ordered from inside prison on mobile phones. They can get up to anything that they want to to control their empire from inside prison, he said.

If one gang wants to get at another and see that the person they want is in prison, the fact that they are in prison wont stop them from getting at that person. They will do everything they can to get at them, he added.

And the gang member actually knows that if they do get the target they could actually be rewarded by their own gang for doing the job.There are two currencies there that would be very predominant in criminal gangs, money and drugs is what gangs are all about in this country and everybody knows that, he explained.

Mr Mitchell said the establishment of a unit in the Midlands Prison to deal with violent and disruptive prisoners does not adequately address the difficulties created by these gangs.

He called on Justice Minister Charles Flanagan to place all violent gang prisoners in the high security Portlaoise Prison.

Its the only prison in the State equipped to deal with them. The State must take charge of these gangs in the prisons with the appropriate supports in the appropriate environment. These gangs must be controlled or we will lose control of our prisons, he said.

But the proposal of placing a large number of gang members in one prison was rejected by Michael Donnellan, the Director General Irish Prison Service.

"We have to keep them separated because we need to disrupt their activity, we need to disrupt their communication, and all the evidence internationally is if we put them all together that that ends badly, he said.

Our policy has been for the last number of years is to disrupt the gang structure, place them in several prisons around our estate, particularly in two or three, but we are intending to use Portlaoise more in the second half of the year for the very more serious people who are intimidating within the prison gangs, he added.

Mr Donnellan also disputed the number of gang factions within the prison system, saying there are a core ten involving around 100 individuals

The POA also took issue with how the statistics on the numbers of assaults on its members are collated.

It said the figures only include direct attacks on prison officers, and not injuries received when they intervene on attacks between prisoners.

Theres statistics showing there were 107 assaults across the entire prison estate in the last 12 months. However, our thought is that there is significantly more and that assaults of prison officers where they intervene between prisoners attacking each other has not been recorded, said Mr Mitchell.

We want the Prison Service to arm our people with proper equipment like pepper spray, body cameras and batons so they can adequately protect themselves, he added.

Michael Donnellan of the Prison Service said it would never seek to minimize the figures of assault within the Irish prison service.

As the Director General I take assaults of our staff very, very seriously. I mean last year for instance we had 104 assaults by prisoners on prison officers but on top of that we had 72 injury on duties because of interventions that prison officers make. So I'm very happy to clarify that and to have a way of reporting that so that people can see the full extent of injury on duty within the prison service, he explained.
Communications Minister Denis Naughten is under fire but has been defended by Cabinet colleagues Simon Coveney and Paschal Donohoe. Picture: Steve Humphreys

Communications Minister Denis Naughten will survive an onslaught of political attacks because Opposition TDs are afraid of collapsing the Government before the abortion referendum.

Mr Naughten now says he "sincerely regrets" discussing the potential takeover of Celtic Media by Independent News & Media (INM) with a lobbyist in November 2016.

A string of Fine Gael ministers have said it would have been "preferable" if their Independent colleague hadn't engaged with PR executive Eoghan O Neachtain - but they will stand by him rather than risk an election.

The party offered logistic support to Mr Naughten as he prepared for a series of accusations in the Dail yesterday.

Fianna Fail is not expected to undermine the confidence and supply arrangement by tabling a motion of no confidence in the minister but will heap pressure on Taoiseach Leo Varadkar to sanction him.

The party's new deputy leader, Dara Calleary, said the situation "stinks".

Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald said her party believes Mr Naughten's position is "untenable" but does not want to risk political instability in the "critical weeks" ahead of the Eighth Amendment vote on May 25.

"That means that in our calculations as people who are responsible and sensible, we take that into consideration. Denis Naughten is not off the hook. There always comes a day of reckoning," she said.

Likewise, People Before Profit TD Brid Smith told Independent.ie's 'Floating Voter' podcast it would be "criminal" to collapse the Government now.

She said: "We need to have that referendum. We have waited so long. It's a very crucial moment for Irish politics."

Mr Naughten admits he took a call from the lobbyist who was working for INM in November 2016 during which he expressed a "personal view" that a proposed takeover of the regional newspaper group Celtic Media by INM was likely to be referred to the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI).

As part of its application to have inspectors appointed to investigate corporate governance issues at INM, the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement's (ODCE) alleges Mr O Neachtain briefed his colleague Nigel Heneghan on the phone call. In turn, Mr Heneghan emailed INM's then chairman Leslie Buckley, alerting him to the minister's thinking.

The State's corporate watchdog claims Mr Buckley forwarded this message to INM's largest shareholder, Denis O'Brien, in a move that may amount to "inside information" and potentially a breach of stock market rules.

Commenting yesterday, Professor of Management and founder of the Corporate Governance centre at UCD Niamh Brennan told RTE that while "with the benefit of hindsight" it does not read well, "it would have been worse if he'd said he would fix the problem".

Fianna Fail's Dara Calleary said the idea the minister was offering a "personal view" amounted to a "the dog ate my homework type of excuse".

But three senior Cabinet members - Tanaiste Simon Coveney, Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe and Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan - put forward unflinching defences of Mr Naughten yesterday.

Mr Coveney said: "I have known Deputy Naughten for 20 years. I know him as a straight minister, just as he is a straight politician."

Mr Donohoe said he was "satisfied" with the explanation offered, adding: "I look forward to seeing Denis continuing with his really important work."
FORMER Taoiseach Brian Cowen has the British governments approach to dealing with the Irish border defies logic.

In a rare media appearance, Mr Cowen said the country should be backing Leo Varadkar in Brexit battle.

Were in a very critical period in the negotiations, he said, adding that agreements already signed up to by the UK government now seem like a rather fallible suggestion.

Mr Cowens comments come amid reports that the EU has comprehensively rejected UK proposals for avoiding a hard border.

It is understood EU negotiators say plans put forward by UK Prime Minister Theresa May were subjected to a systematic and forensic annihilation.

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On RTEs Today With Sean ORourke, Mr Cowen said the Irish government has been very strong in ensuring the border question is addressed.

The ex-Fianna Fail leader said the onus is on the UK to put forward workable solutions for keeping the border open after March 2019.

It defies logic to me as to how that is going to happen. But we have to await the ingenuity of the Brits, he said.

Asked whether he believes the Irish government should have stalled the talks rather than allow them move onto the second phase, Mr Cowen said its a real dilemma.

But he said we must rely on EU negotiator Michel Barnier to put flesh on something that deifies logic at the moment.

Ideally that would be the case but we also have to take into account that the dynamic of the negotiations is not something we can dictate, he said.

On domestic politics, Mr Cowen, who was Taoiseach from 2008 to 2011, said he did not want to comment on the controversy surrounding Independent News & Media.

PR lobbyist Eoghan O Neachtain who is at the centre of the story worked as Press Secretary for Mr Cowen during his time in Government Buildings.

A phone conversation he had with Communications Minister Denis Naughten in November 2016 relating to a proposed merger of INM with the regional newspaper group Celtic Media has led to calls for the Minister to step down.

But Mr Cowen said: It doesnt appear to me on the face of it that the minister involved himself at a level of detail that would mean his position is untenable.

Asked whether Michael D Higgins should seek a second term as president, Mr Cowen replied: Ive admired his presidency. Certainly hes been a very good president.
So, on that basis, every minister has a free "get out of jail card" until May 25 and the abortion referendum.

The more usually fearsome killers on the Opposition benches would be expected take down an errant Government member without a second thought. But the ministerial killing season is temporarily closed, due to exceptional circumstances, for five full weeks.

Maybe it's time some of the others in Cabinet 'fessed up to any evil or ill-judged deeds. We know a week is a long time in politics - so five weeks these days is a political lifetime.

In the meantime, we have to make do with the most critical rhetoric available to damn the behaviour of Communications Minister Denis Naughten, who yesterday added a more contrite version of his earlier explanation. At the same time, the minister's Fine Gael colleagues put a little more commitment into their support for their embattled colleague.

The Opposition continued to crank up their "rhetoricometer". For Fianna Fail, deputy leader Dara Calleary said Mr Naughten's excuses were of the "dog ate my homework" variety.

Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald said the minister's position was untenable.

The heft of criticism was maintained on the left side of spectrum, People Before Profit TD Brid Smith was scathing, as was Catherine Murphy of the Social Democrats, while Labour leader Brendan Howlin accused Mr Naughten of compromising his ministerial functions.

But oddly enough, there is no rush to phase two - an effort to have the minister oxtered out of office. For many of the critics, the only political game in town is the abortion referendum.

Does that mean we'll see it all revived in late May, early June?

Most unlikely, we have to say. This is because the simple reality is that if the Opposition insists Mr Naughen has to go, it had better have its walking boots oiled and election posters ready.

It would make for interesting conversations on the opening days of election canvassing. Politician: "Morning, Ms Moloney, will you vote for me?"

Bemused potential voter: "Why is there an election?"

Politician: "Well, this bloke phoned a minister..."

Things got a bit more real yesterday morning, when the Ipsos/MRBI poll was published by the 'Irish Times'. It showed Fine Gael had dropped three points to 31pc - hardly an incentive to want to go pounding the canvass beat. The same could be said of Fianna Fail, which is up one point but still stuck in the mid-20s on 26pc.

True, it brought good tidings to Sinn Fein, up three points to 22pc, while its newly minted leader has a personal rating of 39pc, far ahead of her predecessor Gerry Adams. But even that says: "Yes, an election - but not yet."

The Sinn Fein referendum posters unveiled yesterday, featuring Ms McDonald, show it wants to showcase her some more before the "big one".
The family of a terminally ill teenager have been "overwhelmed" by the support of the public after they succeeded in raising funds for life-saving treatment in the US, saying "it is like Italia '90".

Aaron McMahon (17) from Shanagarry, Co Cork was diagnosed with a rare chordoma brain tumour in February 2017.

After undergoing treatment, both in Ireland and Germany, the teenager has been told his condition is terminal.

Aaron's only hope of survival is to travel to Pittsburgh in the US to undergo a specialist chordoma treatment.

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However, in order have the surgery a deposit of 100,000 has to be paid to the hospital by April 30.

Speaking to Independent.ie, Aaron's dad Paul said that the family's world was turned upside down when Aaron was diagnosed with a brain tumour.

"It was devastating. At that time, it wasn't terminal. There was hope that an operation could be done and could fix it. He had further treatment in Germany and everything appeared to be stable.

"Aaron's tumour has unfortunately started growing again and it is terminal."

Paul recalled the traumatic moment he had to tell his son that his cancer had returned, and that there was nothing more that could be done.

"When his doctor called me, I knew it wasn't good. He said there was nothing more that could be done for Aaron. My whole world fell apart. The doctor said that he couldn't handle telling Aaron because he didn't want to give him any more bad news but I had to tell him. Aaron has been aware of his diagnosis every step of the way. There are no words to describe how I felt telling Aaron. It was devastating."

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The family refused to give up hope and made contact with the Chordoma Foundation in the US.

"We needed to raise 100,000 for a deposit to get into the treatment in the US. It's the only treatment out there for Aaron but it gives us hope. There are currently 42 other patients undergoing the treatment and they are responding well. The offer we got from the US expires on May 5 and without the money, Aaron would die. We tried to sell our family home and our car, but we didn't have the time to wait for the money to come through because that takes too long.

"Last night, we received the news that we raised the 100,000 deposit for the treatment. It was like Italia '90 all over again. Aaron was at the cinema and we rang him to tell him. The whole theatre erupted. I can't even describe the feeling of joy and relief. It gives us hope again. We cannot thank the public enough for their incredible kindness."

Speaking to Independent.ie, 17-year-old Aaron said he was feeling "tired and weak".

"I'm looking forward to going over to the US, but it's going into the unknown. I have to go, it's the only option. It's the only place where I can get the operation. I just want to put it behind me and get on with it."

The 17-year-old said he wants to return to playing sport and going back to school.

"My friends have been great ... but some of them don't know what to do. It's hard on everyone. Sometimes I want to go out but I don't have any energy. Other times, I do go out and I get tired within five minutes. It's hard. It's stopped a lot of stuff for me and has bound me to home. It's headwrecking."

Aaron said the hardest part is seeing his family in pain.

"It's really hard seeing my family go through it. I can take all the pain, but I can't take the pain of seeing my family upset," he said.

The 17-year-old said he dreams of doing woodwork.

"I keep getting numbness in my hands, so that kind of stops me. But hopefully after the operation, I will be able to build up my strength again."

He urged other young people to not take their lives for granted.

"I always give out to the lads when they have an excuse to miss training because they don't want to do it. I miss it. I haven't been able to do sport in nearly two years. I'm lost without sport and school. Sitting at home 24-hours is terrible."

Aaron said he was blown away by the support he received by the public.

"It's really nice to see all the people who got behind me. It's overwhelming. I don't have the words to thanks people for it."

His mother Gail said that seeing her youngest son battle cancer was "horrendous".

"It has been unbelievable to be able to take care of him and be with him through this. You have to mind him as a mother. Even before I had him, he was so precious to me. I miscarried with twins before Aaron so when I found out I was pregnant with this guy, I protected him before he was even born. He's been my baby that I really took care of since his first day. He was the best baby I had. I have been looking back of photos of him as a baby over the last few months and he had beautiful curls.

"It's been horrendous what he has been going through, but also he has been so courageous and strong.

"I like when he tells me that I can cuddle in next to him ... and we listen to our songs together. He's my baby and I know there is a big battle still ahead of us in the US, but I want to keep him for a long time ahead of me. There is no woman who is going to come in and take my baby away from me. He's not for marriage. He's staying with me for life.

"When I was told he was terminal, no. I'm not going to let him go. I'm going to keep him with me because we have been through too much together. We fought together. We're on a journey and we're not giving up on it yet. No, never."

She said that while they reached their target for the deposit, there is still a lot fundraising to be done.

"It's amazing what we have reached and that will allow Aaron to get the surgery in the US, but it won't cover living costs or his flights or any of his treatments down the road. He'll have to have reviews and check-ups in the US, so we have a long road still ahead of us.

"We can't thank the public enough for all their amazing help. They have given us hope and given Aaron a chance at life."

You can donate to Aaron's GoFundMe here or at https://www.gofundme.com/aaronmcmahon
Irish homeowners who dare to be bold are being celebrated at the House 2018 exhibition with the launch of a new Trend Talks stage.

High-end Danish brand - who have their own strong aesthetic leaning - are sponsoring the stage at the three-day RDS event in May.

Jason Smith of Bang & Olufsen said that the collaboration falls in line with the opening of their new store at Dublin's Duke Street nest month.

"As an innovative company, who pride ourselves on setting the trend in both performance and design of all things audio-visual, this stage was the perfect fit for us," he said.

"We are excited to continue to lead the way as the future of sound and look forward to joining a host of other fantastic speakers on the Bang & Olufsen Trend Talks Stage across the weekend to discuss new and up-and-coming technologies for the modern-day home."

Anders Buchmann Chief Intraprenuer at Bang & Olufsen will join a host of speakers on the stage who are encouraging the domestic designer to be independent in their style.

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Suzie McAdam and Emily Maher of Lost Weekend, Claire Price and Elaine Regan of the House Edit, and Sinead Considine and Niamh deBarra of The Interiors Project will feature.

Julianne Kelly of Kevin Kelly Interiors will also be hosting a panel discussion about soft furnishings trends with Roisin Thompson of Designers Guild, Maeve Power of Colefax and Fowler and Stephen Hunter of The Style Library.

"We are delighted to have Bang & Olufsen on board as the Trend Talks Stage sponsor at house 2018 where interior experts will be on hand throughout the weekend sharing up to the minute design insights and tips," Cliona Carroll, Sponsorship and Events Manager, INM said.
Modern interiors can be lacking in softness. But then again, thanks to improved insulation, double glazing, and underfloor heating, our rooms no longer really need to be cocooned in cosy fabrics. Fusty carpets have been replaced with hard floors and, where there once were heavy draft-excluding drapes, many windows are now left bare. Even wallpaper, which added a subtle layer of softness, is not as universal as it used to be. It's now possible to have a warm, dry, comfortable dwelling without swathing its surfaces in softness.

Like most interiors trends, this is a mixed blessing. "Without curtains, carpets and wallpaper, you can end up with a very echoey space," says Gwen Kenny, interior designer and owner of Divine Design. "You need a bit of softness to absorb the noise." Open-plan living areas, uncarpeted and without curtains, look cool and architectural. They're super-easy to clean. But add a gang of kids or a rowdy dinner party and you'll be unable to hear yourself think. Rugs, upholstered furniture, and even smaller objects like cushions and throws, can all play their part in absorbing noise.

Since most soft things for the home are textile based, the next challenge is whether to go for natural or artificial fibre (or a mixture of both). There's plenty of research to show that natural fibres are better for the health of the user and for overall sustainability and, left to her own devices, Kenny prefers greener healthier fabrics like wool, cotton, and linen. "We've done a good few projects that are 90pc green, but a lot of people think you're a heart-thumping hippy if you start talking about environmentally-friendly fabric."

Artificial fibres last a whole lot longer than natural ones, but there are pros and cons to this too. "A silk curtain will eventually rot in the sunlight," Kenny says. "But a polyester curtain will never rot." That's also true when you come to dispose of them. A discarded silk curtain will break down nicely in landfill, but the polyester one will be in the world forever." She also warns against the use of viscose as a faux silk element in floor rugs. "It looks lustrous when you buy it, but it's easily stained and soon disintegrates into a flattened sad experience of what it once was."

As always, there's a trade-off. Artificial fibres can improve the toughness of textiles and this, as Kenny points out, can be a boon to busy households. But a family that appreciates a bullet-proof fabric for their hardworking sofa might also enjoy pure breathable cotton sheets. And real feather pillows.

"I love feather-filled things," Kenny admits. "Duvets, pillows, cushions You can scrunch them any way you want and they puff back up again. I think that's lovely!"

For Helen McAlinden, head designer for Foxford, softness is about the quality of the yarn. "We think of the handle of our cotton sheets as a combination of softness and crispness. They need to be soft to the touch, but smooth when you climb in between them." And, while some producers bedazzle the consumer with thread counts, McAlinden places a greater emphasis on the fact that their cottons are combed, rather than carded. "It's much more luxurious to the touch."

Foxford's new range at Arnotts comes in styles that range from Ethnic (beige, black and burnt orange) to Lagom, which she describes as: "the colours of clouds in the West of Ireland with a touch of blue and pink amid the grey." If you're dressing a double bed, expect to pay 125 for a duvet cover and 80 for a fitted sheet. Foxford will also soon be releasing a range in cotton and linen mix (50:50). "It's warmer than pure linen and you don't need to iron it!" McAlinden has designed the bed linen to co-ordinate with Foxford's cushions, throws, and the blankets that made the company famous. All of these are woven in Co Mayo (the bedlinen is designed in Ireland but woven in Portugal).

"The looms haven't stopped since 1892," says Joe Queenan of Foxford. "Although we have had a change of ownership."

Foxford has also put a lot of energy into staying abreast of fashion, hence the collaboration with McAlinden. "We may be old but we don't have to look old," Queenan says. "The best buzz I get in this company is seeing a young woman picking up a throw or a blanket. Then you know you're relevant."

Interestingly, Foxford's most expensive throw, a wool and cashmere mix (150), is its most popular. It's also Foxford's softest, and that's probably not a coincidence.

On the international scene, contemporary designers are working hard to achieve clean minimal lines without abandoning softness.

The new Toptun range of upholstered furniture from the Ukrainian company Faina is based on what it describes as a "soft geometry". The armchair, upholstered in felt (715 from Archiproducts), is "the embodiment of large and slightly clumsy bear that still can be found in Carpathian forests". Awww

The Toptun range is part of a trend for furniture that is upholstered all over, but in an architectural way. It's soft, but not squashy, and the shapes are clearly defined. At the upper end of the market, the Ellica bed (6,650) from Roche Bobois is upholstered in velvety nubuck with brushed chrome legs. "It's amazingly soft," says Dorothy Power of Roche Bobois. "Nubuck is like a suede. It's luxurious but fragile and it will age like a sheepskin coat. Some people like that aged look, but I think that it works better on a bed than a sofa." The range includes a six-drawer dresser (from 4,720) as well as a bedside table and an ottoman.

"People are turning away from shiny leathers and moving back to cosy fabrics on sofas," Power explains. "There's a lot of velvet around at the moment." But all velvets are not created equal. "A viscose and cotton mix will take much more abuse than a pure cotton velvet." Because it will last longer and wear more slowly than the purely natural fibre, it's the sensible choice for family living. But will it feel as velvety? "No, not quite."

Divinedesign.ie, arnotts.ie, faina.design, archiproducts.com, roche-bobois.com
It's one of Iceland's most famous tourist attractions, an Instagrammer's idyll set among desolate lava fields on the Reykjanes Peninsula.

And now you can not only visit and bathe in the famous Blue Lagoon, but stay there too - thanks to the opening of a new luxury hotel.

The Retreat at Blue Lagoon Iceland, including a 62-bed hotel, subterranean spa and restaurant, is described as "a place where guests can leave the world behind and enter a timeless realm of relaxation, rejuvenation, and exploration."

The 62 hotel suites features floor-to-ceiling windows, private terraces with Lagoon views and "human centric lighting set to mimic the phases of the sun".

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At the Retreat, guests are welcomed by individual hosts that act as guided and attendants, from managing itineraries to providing tips and insights on local culture.

And the price?

Entry-level suites are available from ISK144,000 (1,165) per night as we publish, including breakfast, Blue Lagoon skin care amenities, valet parking, turndown service and access to guided group hikes and yoga sessions.

If that stretches the budget, an older, 35-bed Silica Hotel sits a 10-minute walk from the Blue Lagoon. Rooms there start from ISK52,400/424 per night... complete with private verandas and a bathing lagoon overlooking the volcanic landscape.

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The Blue Lagoon itself was founded in 1992 in the heart of an 800-year-old lava plain in southwest Iceland, and steaming in its geothermal waters while lathering your face in natural silica mud has become a must-do for tourists.

The resort is a 45-minute drive from Reykjavik, so many visitors book it as an excursion, going to and from the capital in tour buses.

Basic tickets, with a drink and towel, cost ISK9,990 (80pp).

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A slice of history has been made by Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Michael Creed TD who this week announced the opening of the Chinese beef market to exports from Ireland.

The Cork North-West TD said the Chinese authorities will list a number of the Ireland's beef establishments within the next few days.

"The opening of this key market presents an excellent opportunity for the Irish beef sectors - from farmers through to processors," he said. Last year, the total Irish agri-food trade exports to China reached 974 million with China now the third largest market overall.

Dairy exports reached 667 million and pig meat exports were over 100million in 2017. These were the two largest categories of food exported to China, and for both of these commodities China was the second largest destination market.

Within the last 30 years Chinese demand for meat has quadrupled, and the country now consumes one quarter of the world's meat supply. On average Chinese beef consumption per capita is four kilogrammes, compared to average Irish consumption of 19 kilogrammes of beef per capita per year.

However, despite increases in domestic beef production in China, consumer demand for premium imported beef is forecast to rise significantly, driven by increasing urbanisation, higher disposable incomes and health awareness.

The import of frozen boneless beef, the category for which Ireland will have market access, has grown ninefold within the last five years.

Overall beef imports to China have increased from under 100,000 tonnes in 2012 to around 600,000 tonnes in 2016 and frozen boneless beef accounts for around 80 per cent of these imports.

"Opening and developing new markets is also a key part of our responses to the uncertainties arising from Brexit. This decision also represents a powerful endorsement of Ireland's high standards by the Chinese Administration for which food safety is a prerequisite for trade," he said.

He said the agrifood exports to China have increased roughly five fold from around 200 million in 2010 to nearly 1billion last year.

"This has been a remarkable achievement and underlines the importance of the Chinese market. For beef, the door has now been opened and there is a real opportunity for the industry to build on this. I will lead a trade mission to China next month to further build on our trade relationships and continue our dialogue with the Chinese Government," he said.

He thanked all the officials from his own department and the Irish embassy in Beijing which led to this effort in conjunction with Bord Bia and other Government departments and agencies as well as the food industry and the farming community.

Minister Creed said he wanted to personally thank a number of high profile visits to Ireland in recent years, including those by Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang along with the Chinese Ambassador to Ireland, Ye Xiaoyong.
The Fermoy Medical Hall has been acquired by the Irish-owned Sam McCauley pharmacy chain

Pharmacy chain Sam McCauley is to expand its operations in Cork after announcing the purchase of one of Fermoy's landmark businesses.

The company has acquired the Medical Hall in Fermoy, part of a 5million investment that has also seen them buy another pharmacy in Dublin under an ambitious expansion plan that is set to see the size of the company double over the next three years.

It is understood the expansion plan is part of the Irish-owned chain's strategy to challenge the dominance of the two British-owned companies operating Ireland, Boots and Lloyds.

Market sources have indicated that the total investment planned by the company will be in excess of 50million as it bids to build up its presence in both urban and provincial locations across the country.

Last summer Sam McCauley's was purchased in a 50million deal by Carlyle Cardinal Ireland (CCI), a private equity partnership of US giant Carlyle Group and Irish investment house Cardinal.

While it is unclear how much Sam McCauley's paid for the Fermoy Medical Hall, the company said that its two new stores have a combined turnover of more than 5.5million bringing the group's annual turnover to approximately 90million.

The company has also moved to reassure staff at the Fermoy Medical Hall, which it purchased from Orla Mellerick and Brian Whelan, that it will support the existing jobs at the pharmacy.

The company added that it is envisaged that additional staff would be taken on at its Fermoy operation as the company hopes to expand its offering of goods and services.

Sam McCauley already has three outlets within Cork in Midleton, Blackpool and Mahon Point. Commenting on the Fermoy purchase the CEO of Sam McCauley Chemist Ltd Tony McEntee said the company was excited to be expanding its Cork operation.

"The combination of our access to significant funding and our ability to promptly complete transactions puts Sam McCauley Chemists in a great position to continue to add to our portfolio over the next few years, with a number of other significant opportunities already under active consideration," he said.
Alma Hynes and Tony Roibinson (Art In The Open), Mary Kerr, Neil Reck, Madeleine Quirke and Kevin Freeney (Art In The Open)

The Friends of Wexford General Hospital received a welcome boost for their MRI Now campaign when 1,451, proceeds of a fundraiser in the 2017 Art in the Open festival, was presented to them at Clayton White's Hotel.

The funds were the proceeds of the festival's annual Charity Quick Draw which takes place on the final Saturday of the event each year. This year's Charity Quick Draw will take place in the Bullring area on Saturday, August 4 from 2 to 4 p.m.

The countdown is now on to this year's festival, the eleventh since its inception. There will be six spectacular paint-out locations including: Duncannon, Artramon House in Castlebridge, Clonegal/Huntington Castle, Rosslare Harbour/Safe, Bunclody/Newtownbarry House, and, of course, Wexford town.

There will be 20 workshops in Oil, Watercolour and Pastels by ten international masters of their medium. Tutors include: Vincent Crotty (US), Nikki Heenan (UK), Haidee-Jo Summers (UK), Alberto Valentini (NL), Dave West (UK), Stuart White (US), David Diaz (US) Paul O'Kane (NI) and Japanese artist Keiko Tanabe. Alvin Mark Tan will return from Singapore to host a sketching and vlogging workshop in Wexford Library on Saturday, July 28.

The festival welcome artists from all over the globe and hosts many events including a variety of social gatherings, Nocturne Painting (new this year), Charity Quick Draw, sketching and vlogging workshops, themed children's art competition and events in association with The National Gallery of Ireland.

The festival will finish with a Gala Exhibition at Greenacres Gallery on the August Bank Holiday weekend. The festival is sponsored by Boland's Hyundai Wexford. For more information, log on to www.artintheopen.org.
The New Ross members of Wexford Together for Yes are having a coffee evening this Wednesday from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. in Bolg Bui bar on Mary Street.

Spokesperson Bridin Lyng said: 'For those of you who support the Repeal of the 8th Amendment or those of you who are not yet quite sure and have some concerns or queries, Wexford Together for Yes will try answer some of those questions in an open and friendly environment at our coffee evening. This is an informal get together to have a cup of tea, a slice of cake and a chat about how the 8th Amendment affects the people of Ireland.'

She said the vote on May 25 will ask voters if they agree to remove article 40.3.3 from the constitution and enable the government to legislate for abortion care in Ireland. 'Minister for Health Simon Harris has published the heads of the legislation that he hopes to enact if the referendum is passed. The legislation is based on the recommendations of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on the 8th Amendment and also on the recommendations of the Citizen's Assembly. Wexford Together for Yes is already out speaking to voters through canvassing and information stalls throughout the county.'
A small independent Wexford book shop is doing its bit to help members of the Syrian community to integrate into society by appealing for Arabic books that can be passed on to families.

Red Books in Bridgetown is owned and run by Wally O'Neill, pictured right, who explained that he had been asked by a group of college students in Waterford if he could source books for refugees settling in the country.

Wally put out a call and said that the response that he has received has been very supportive.

'Seamus O'Brien contacted me and asked if we would get involved. We've had great response from all over Wexford and even from outside the county. We haven't had any big boxes of Arabic books sent to us yet but we have contacted our own suppliers to see if they can help.'

Wally explained that a big percentage of their customer base was Eastern European as they stocked a lot of books in Polish and Lithuanian and not many stores did that. He said they had, so far, received a couple of singular Arabic books, the vast majority of which had been picked up by accident by people!

'It's more about integration than anything else and books were the first thing that the group looked for. It's about making people feel welcome. We're a book shop and we want to promote reading, whatever language the book is in.'
A new third level course aimed at the aqua business sector has been launched in Wexford by a leading expert in the international fisheries and aquaculture sector.

Dr. Sigurdur Gretar Bogason has over 30 years experience in the area and in launching the Higher Diploma in Business in Aqua-business course, said the Irish seafood sector needs to be equipped with proper and relevant skills.

The launch took place at County Hall and the course will be run through the Wexford Campus of Institute of Technology, Carlow (ITC).

Dr. Bogason made reference to areas such as business, financial management, marketing, law and innovation as being essential for sustainability and growth.

The course will be aimed at the next generation of seafood producers, managers and entrepreneurs, and it is also the only Level 8 programme of its kind in the country. It's the result of a collaboration between IT Carlow, Bord Iascaigh Mhara (BIM), and IFA Aquaculture.

Those at the launch were told that many 'key figures' in the seafood sector are graduates of a similar, and very successful, three-year degree programme currently being delivered in Iceland.

Dr. Bogason said Ireland has to be mindful of Brexit and how it will affect trade and that education will be key to addressing new challenges: 'Equipping the sector with the education and skills it needs is essential to the realisation of a strong and sustainable seafood sector that can meet whatever challenges lie ahead.'

The course, which is aimed at producers, managers and entrepreneurs, has strong links with the industry and in addition to lectures, will include work placements and site visits. There will also be guest lecturers involved who will give students expert insight into the industry.

According to BIM's, Business of Seafood report, the industry currently employs over 14,000 people in Ireland and a Government policy document on the sector marked training as essential for continued growth.

An important component of Irish industry, the aqua business sector is worth around 118m to the Irish economy and aquaculture employs almost 2,000 jobs in rural areas. According to the National Strategic Plan and the Seafood Operational Programme 2020, aquaculture is 'a strong, sustainable and popular strategic asset for development and job creation'. Ireland has also been at the forefront of organically certified farmed fish for over 25 years.

However, the industry faces challenges and that's something that the people who devised the new course hope to help address. An extra 10,000 tonnes of organicially certified farmed salmon would add around 250m to the Irish economy and create over 1,000 new jobs.

The new course will provide participants with hands-on, practical experience of the industry in addition to classroom based tuition, and it's that aspect of the course that it's hoped will equip the participants with all of the necessary skills required to lead the domestic industry here going forward.

Dr Janette Davis, who is Deputy Head of the ITC Wexford Campus, said the programme is specifically aimed at catering for the needs of the seafood sector.

'Its pioneering nature means that we have students travelling the length and breadth of the country to participate in this programme,' she said.

The Chairperson of BIM, Jim O'Toole, was also at the launch and said his organisation's involvement was as part of its wider education and skills strategy which he said will help 'future-proof' Ireland's burgeoning seafood sector.

'Last year the Irish seafood sector recorded its third consecutive year of growth,' he said.

'The continued success of the sector is dependent on having a skilled workforce,' he added.

One of the first students to take up the programme is Irish Mussel Seed Company director, Kate Dempsey, who is a finalist in the upcoming, Ireland's Best Young Entrepreneur Awards.

She also spoke at the launch and having said entrepreneurs need a good understanding of all aspects of their business, said the course had broadened her knowledge and enabled her to 'confidently promote and develop' her company.

For more information on the course log onto www.itcarlow.ie.
The transfer of the National 1798 Centre in Enniscorthy for sale to its new owner was approved after a lengthy debate.

News of the intended sale of the National 1798 Centre at Arnold's Cross was announced at the Enniscorthy Municipal District Council recently. Under the proposal the landmark building will be sold to Mr John Stafford of Slaney Farms, Tomnalosset, at a price of 325,000. Mr Stafford intends to use the building as a micro distillery which will produce artisan gin and vodka and which Wexford County Council hopes will continue to attract tourists. It will also create employment for four people initially.

At last week's Wexford County Council meeting Cllr Johnny Mythen referenced an article in the Enniscorthy Guardian in which the owner of the Castle nightclub - which forms part of plans for a tourist hub in the town centre where the 1798 Centre was to be located - said he would not be selling the property. Cllr Keith Doyle said he would prefer to see the 1798 Centre site being used. 'I have a great affinity to that site. I have watched the discussions about the site and we are also talking about another project in Enniscorthy so I would be voting for this because I don't want to stop another project which would be of benefit to the community and the whole ethos of tourism.'

Cllr Doyle said he would like to see a more concrete proposal about what the council plans for the tourism hub in the town centre. 'I know we are going to move the 1798 Centre over the next couple of years. On a temporary basis I would like to know where it's going to go. This is going to take place after it goes through planning so we do have to get our act together, even for a temporary site.'

Cllr Davy Hynes said: 'It's an iconic site, the only 1798 site in the county,' before being corrected by Cllr Pip Breen who pointed out that Boolavogue also has a national 1798 centre.

Cllr Mythen said it would be preferable to wait until the council had a permanent site for the centre to reopen.

Dirctor of Services for Economic Development Tony Larkin said: 'Postponing the sale until we have a permanent home isn't viable. This is a commercial development which is in planning permission. It will not be able to proceed (until the transfer is completed). A distillery and visitor centre is planned.'

Director of Services for the Arts John Carley said he could pull a finalised plan together for Enniscorthy in time for the May meeting of the local authority.

'I think a decision to postpone is a decision to kill the venture. The businessman involved is under pressure to get this over the line. He has had some delays already.'

Cllr Mythen said: 'I appreciate the dilemma this is causing but I think we should come up with a plan now. There is a huge display and it would require a massive building.'

Cllr Paddy Kavanagh said: 'I think this has gone on long enough. The person who has put this together as a business venture is being delayed. I don't think it is prudent to delay this any further. It will be a tourist attraction. In six months time we could be here again and we could have a building that is neglected. It's already mooted that the 1798 Centre will be accommodated in a tourism hub in the town centre. I think it needs to have a permanent home where we can enhance it and add to it to improve what is there. It's well-known that it is dated; school visitor numbers have dropped off over recent years. Rather than flog it to death we need to have a new approach.'

Cllr Doyle said consultants are being appointed, adding that he hopes they come back with 'something substantial' for Enniscorthy, adding that site closer to the town centre is perferable.

'We need to move this forward,' he said.

Cllr Kathleen Codd Nolan said Enniscorthy councillors agreed to ring fence the money raised from the centre's sale for the town, while Cllr Codd Nolan said a proper budget is needed once a suitable site is located.

CEO Tom Enright said discussions have been held with consultants and Failte Ireland about tourism in Enniscorthy and a funding submission is due to be made in December. He said a consultant will be appointed this month, adding that it will take between six and nine months for the consultancy work to be completed for a permanent solution to the 1798 centre. 'That will involve a new building. It will realistically take between two-and-a-half and three years between planning and funding. It's important to drive this on.'

Mr Enright said he was reluctant to find temporary accommodation for the centre, adding that there was no suitable building in the council's ownership in the town presently.

'I'm reluctant to open it on a temporary basis as I feel it would devalue it and make it unattractive and reduce its impact. We will put items into storage and reimagine the centre which offers a very good experience but it's for 20 years ago. It's a bit dated in terms of modern tourist expectations.'

Mr Enright said the council is advancing a number of projects for Enniscorthy town centre. 'We need people to come in off of the motorway into the town and any town that has a distillery and a tourist centre will attract visitors.'

He said the main tourism offering needs to be located in the town centre. 'If we want a commercial solution to this we need to move reasonably quickly. We are looking at our own properties in Enniscorthy. We open the district office, the old courthouse and the Athenaeum will need a permanent home. There's the Bank of Ireland building, Murphy Floods and the Dunnes property is for sale. There are a number of things happening on the property front. Our library is inadequate in terms of a modern library facilities so there are a number of challenges that we have.'

He said Enniscorthy councillor will be updated on the plans shortly.

When pressed on the need to have some of the 1798 Centre exhibits housed during this anniversary year, Mr Enright said some space could be found in Enniscorthy Castle.

Cllr Willie Fitzharris said: 'The 1798 Centre site hasn't worked. New Ross was very much involved in 1798 and contributed greatly to the building of it. Noone wants to see our 1798 history being lost. The site didn't work and we are just postponing the inevitable. There is no point in leaving an empty building there and being in danger of losing the sale.'

Cllr Kavanagh agreed, saying it would send out the wrong message to potential investors in the town.

Cllr Osiin O'Connell said: 'I appreciate it's of special experience to Enniscorthy but it's a national centre and there was a great amount of support from the diaspora and input from the state and county.'

Cllr Oliver Walsh said the bypass is opening next year. 'We need to do everything we can to ensure we encourage all projects in the town. I think we should have faith in both the CEO and the director that they will find a permanent home for the centre which is of huge importance to Enniscorthy.'

He said its new location in the town centre will bring more footfall.

Chairman Cllr John Hegarty said a month's delay won't impact the site's sale. Councillors voted by majority in favour of the transfer.
Wexford man John Redmond was described as a courageous politician by President Michael D Higgins during the 100th anniversary commemoration of his death on Sunday.

The politician was chairman of the Irish Parliamentary Party from 1900 to 1918. He died on March 6, 1918, at the age of 61. He served as MP for New Ross, North Wexford and Waterford.

On Sunday there was a series of events to commemorate the centenary of his death including a Redmond 100 seminar in Wexford library and a wreath laying at the Redmond mausoleum.

President Higgins attended both events and said it was important that Redmond's death be marked in Wexford.

'Wexford has also held a special place in the history of our long road to national independence. After all it was here that a Republic, inspired by the ideas of Thomas Paine and the example of the French and American Revolutions, was first proclaimed on this island. Such a historical background in the wide sense was important. John Redmond was very influenced by the historical context from which he had sprung and the relationship which his forebears had with the struggles for independence and the folk memory of those struggles. As he put it he had 'been reared in the midst of hills and valleys that witnessed the struggles of '98'.

Speaking about Redmond, President Higgins said: 'When John Redmond took the then parliamentary seat of New Ross in 1881, he was joining a newly revived national movement, one that had, through the New Departure, brought together some of the diverse strands of the Irish nationalism - the struggle for the land, the battle for legislative independence, and the radical separatism of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which drew on the support and organisation of Irish men and women steeped in the radical democratic politics of the United States.

'John Redmond was a wholehearted champion of the rights of tenants, and firmly committed to pursuing that policy through parliamentary obstructionism where he readily joined Charles Stewart Parnell whom he would give an extraordinary loyalty and devotion. For example, speaking on the campaign trail in New Ross in 1881 he committed himself to 'the holy crusade being engaged against landlordism'.

'Famously it was said that he took his seat, made his maiden speech, and was expelled from the House of Commons all on the same evening, a record of which few parliamentarians, then and now, could or can boast.

'He was a brilliant parliamentary orator, described by the colonial civil servant and Conservative MP (Sir) Richard Temple - not a politician with a natural sympathy for Irish MPs - as 'fluent without being verbose, eloquent without being bombastic, earnest without being over-strained'.

'Redmond was also a committed extra-parliamentary activist in the 1880s, supporting the renewal of the Land War through the Plan of Campaign, even against the wishes of the then more cautious Parnell. Indeed, he was convicted of using intimidating language towards landlords in 1888 here in Wexford and served a period of time in prison.

'John Redmond became so associated, in the structuring of the collective memory of Irish nationalism, with the image of very particular kind of Irish Party MP - overly deferential to both parliamentary procedure and to the authority of the Parliament in Ireland - that his energy, his courage, and his commitment to defying landlordism and the legitimacy of the exercise of British power here in Ireland may not have been given appropriate weight. He was, after all, one of the most talented of a remarkable generation of Irish parliamentarians whose radicalism inspired the supporters of democracy both in Ireland in Britain, and whose activism was viewed by the establishment as nothing less than a challenge to the rule of British law in Ireland.

'May I suggest that the decision of John Redmond to stand with Parnell during those fateful days of discord in Committee Room 15 was the most defining and revealing of his political career. It took bravery and courage to side with Parnell and the Fenians against the combined influence of the Catholic Church in Ireland and William Gladstone and the Liberal Party in Britain. It took perseverance to maintain what, in retrospect, now seems a most unusual alliance of Redmondites and Fenians.'

He said that the Land Purchase Act of 1903, Labourers Acts of 1906 and 1911 and Land Purchase Act in 1909 had been defining moments in our history.

President Higgins said: 'I am delighted, as President of Ireland, to have the opportunity to participate in the commemoration of one of the greatest of those Irish parliamentarians, a patriot and a courageous politician who sought, at all times, often carrying the burden of illness, to do what he thought was right in the best interests of our people. The South-East of Ireland was always in his heart and it is so appropriate that he be honoured as his grand uncle was in Wexford.'

On Sunday President Higgins gave the opening address at the Redmond 100 seminar at Wexford Library. Other speakers included Dermot Meleady who spoke on the topic 'From Parnellite to National Leader', Ronan McGreevy who delivered a paper on 'John Redmond and World War One' and Dr Martin O'Donoghue also contributed with his presentation 'The Legacy of John Redmond'.

In the afternoon there was a Ceremony of Remembrance and Wreath Laying at the Redmond Mausoleum in St John's Graveyard, John Street.

Events got under way with a parade, led by a colour party from the 3rd Battalion, Irish Defence Forces, and which included members of the ONE Commodore John Barry Wexford branch, Mayor Jim Moore and other local dignitaries.

Following the welcoming address by the Mayor and keynote speech a series of wreath-layings took place at the Redmond Mausoleum with President Higgins laying a wreath on behalf of the State. A minute's silence was followed by the Piper's Lament played by the New Ross FCA Pipe Band, the playing of The Last Post, the raising of the national flag and Reveille.

The blessing was given by Fr Aodhan Marken and Canon Arthur Minion and this was followed by Amhran na bhFiann, played by St Patrick's Fife and Drum Band.

As part of the centenary celebrations Talking History Wexford was launched. This innovative smart audio facility is located at three well-known Wexford sites associated with the Redmond family, the bust of Major Willie Redmond, located at Redmond Park, the Redmond family monument in Redmond Square and the Redmond Mausoleum in St John's Graveyard.

Using smartphone technology, Talking History Wexford tells the Redmond story in a new way - from the family's perspective. People can swipe their smart phone on the purple plaque at each monuments and then accepting a call from a member of the Redmond family who will tell important elements of the Redmond story. These monuments have been voiced by broadcaster Anne Doyle, actor Gary Lydon and playwright Billy Roche.

An exhibition describing the life and legacy of John E Redmond and his contribution to Ireland's political landscape is currently on display in Wexford Library until the end of April.
Every argument under the sun against solar energy was outlined at a well attended meeting in Clongeen Community Centre on Thursday night.

More than 80 local residents attended, where campaigner Kieran Hartley highlighted the negative aspects of solar energy. Plans by Highfield Solar Ltd to erect solar panels on up 300 acres of land at Coolciffe, Raheenduff, Haresmead and Rospile, with the possibility of wind turbines being erected on adjoining lands, lead to the meeting.

Local residents were notified in early March about the company's intention to create the solar energy farm and since that time some farmers are understood to have given permisssion for their land to be used. A planning application is expected to be lodged with Wexford County Council in the coming weeks.

At the outset of the meeting one local resident said people in the community were in the dark about solar energy.

Mr Hartley, who was a candidate in the last General Election and has a Masters in Environmental Energy, said: 'I have toured the country about these infastructural projects. I will give you factual facts. The proposal is for a solar farm of PV panels to be constructed in Clongeen by Highfield Solar Ltd, a multinational company who have a number of solar farms proposed around the country. They build on behalf of landowners or developers.'

The company plans to apply for land which would enable them to generate 95 MW in power to include a new sub station.

The name on the submission to go on the grid (dated July 14, 2016) is Peter Kavanagh, Mr Hartley said. 'The company will build, operate and maintain the solar panels on up to 155 hectares (around 300 acres) generating 65 MW of power. They still have 200 acres if they want to put up wind turbines. They are not building a new sub station for one solar farm.' which, he said, are around 10ft high with enough space for a sheep to graze underneath.

'The energy will connect to a new sub station with wires to carry it away to a larger station to be put into the national grid. It works out at 1 MW for five acres, so, in total, it will be just under 500 acres so an industrial power plant is being proposed for this area.'

He said 28,000 acres have been signed up for solar power in Ireland 'before we have even one built'.

'There have been 241 applications and 1.75 GW is the generated capacity. To date only eight have been refused.'

When asked by an audience member how many have been granted, Mr Hartley said it was impossible to know. He said the Government subsidises renewable energy schemes, including solar and wind energy. 'You get paid for the energy you generate. All of these come on line and have to fight to get on to the national grid. There is a large scale application for Clonroche. A solar farm of this scale would completely industrialise our rural countryside which is relatively agricultural.'

He said once a public notice is posted on a ditch 'the clock starts ticking' and people have five weeks to make a submission to Wexford County Council based on factual concerns, like inability to access a historical building, damage to flaura and fauna, or proximity to a house. A six month period follows in which further information can be furnished by the company and following this an appeal can be made to An Bord Pleanala during a four week window.

'Once granted the developer has ten years to build. They have a 20 to 30 year contract with landowners.'

Mr Hartley said the PSO levy residents and business owners pay has increased year on year ever since the Government started subsidising renewable energy companies. 'In 2010 it was 19 and in 2017 it was 105. You are paying for them whether you like it or not. You pay tax at industrial rates and it affects inheritance tax. The company are saying this is the future.'

The health implications were outlined. 'They are only small solar panels. The company say this is the future, but they are chemical based with an aluminimum frame. They are for 30 years but you live by the coast and there is salt water.'

He said the chemicals can enter the water source and become air borne if freed from the aluminium. 'The chemicals cause respiratory or lung problems. There can be a reflective glare and if it's on your house there is nothing you can do about it. From 4 p.m. you will be drawing the curtains. It's up to yourselves, as a community, if you are going to stand together. It's very important that the community has an open and honest conversation. The developers are entitled to the same rights as yourself.'

He said the motors which move the panels create noise. One English lady said her community in England was devastated by wind farms the size of Big Ben. She said there is glass covering the solar panels, enquiring how chemical seepages could occur. Mr Hartley said after being exposed to salty air for 30 years they could wear down. He quoted Google searches and said there are a lot of alternatives the Government could be advancing, including roof top solar panels on schools, homes and businesses.

'Minister Denis Naughten is sitting on the fence. This is subsidy harvesting for the very elite few. Why can't we be given rooftop panels which are an educational way whereby we can educate our children into the future about how to be kind to the environment.'

He said solar energy companies are subsidised when the sun isn't shining. 'They get 70 per MW hour. If the sun isn't shining they get 35 per MW so the developer is still getting 70 per M/W.'

He said Highfield also have a licence for wind farms.

'What they are doing is called fishing. They are signing up landowners for 500 and there is no way out of the contracts. If your son or daughter wants to build on the land they have to get permission. Rate and council tax are payable. Farmers I've met will tell you it's the sorriest thing they ever did.'

He said a local auctioneer at Wallace's told him earlier that day that houses in the Tintern, Ballycullane area are devalued by between 50 per cent and 75 per cent after a solar farm planning application went in there.

A farmer expressed concern that a forest at the north end of the site in Raheenduff which might have to be knocked if the solar farm goes ahead. Calling on the Clongeen community to stand and fight against the proposed development, he said: 'You can do what other communities have done and come to regret it later on.'

One man asked if there are restrictions relating to how close solar panels can be to houses. 'There is no restriction. It's a preferred distance. I am not opposed to any renewable energy scheme but it should be up to us (the community).'

He said the IFA expressed concern about the solar panel contracts. One local resident said: 'This is really good agricultural land which could be tied up for 35 years. None of us want to fall out wth our neighbours. We are a tight knit community. We plan to approach the landowners to see if they could back down.'

When asked why farmers would give up their land for which they receive Single Farm Payments, Mr Hartley replied: 'Farming is tough. You can't blame someone. If I have a business and it doesn't work I will try another business. The bigger the area the more farmers think they are making. Farming is crippling at the moment and it's not productive and it's not set up correctly.'

Suggesting that farmers can use anerobic digesters and roof solar panels, he said farmers have had to remove solar panels and wind farms themselves once the developer is finished with a location.

'This is a punt, a gamble. Farmers get 500 for signing. Farmers get 25,000 for 25 acres. They may a small but more but there will be a catch. It's the golden goose. If something is too good to be true, it is. These are American, hedge fund companies. This is guaranteed money for them as the Government has them bonded for 25 years.'

He said fossil fuels are dying out, but solar energy is not the answer, he argued. 'When power stations are placed on idle, they are burning fossil fuels. This can be when there is a chance of no sun or wind. We have to decarbonise our environment but we don't need more wind. We can't use it. We are payng developers to turn off their systems. This is not just coming from me. The statistic are on Bonkers.ie.'

He said all national and European Paris Climate Agreement guidelines are supportive of solar power. 'Be under no illusions, the odds are stacked against us. You must make a decision collectively. Do you want to take ownership of this for your children and your families. It has to be the entire community. It could be five to ten years of a battle. They may move the site location, redraw it, reduce the mega watts. It costs 100,000 for a High Court case, Clonroche paid 120,000 and won and got the money back in legal fees.'

One man asked if the solar energy companies are Irish and was told that most are United States and Chinese based. 'This is really good agricultural land that is going to be tied up for 35 years. The solar farm comes right up to the road in some places,' one resident said. None of us want to fall out with our neigbours. we are a tight kit community.'

Some resolved to approach the landowners to see if they will 'back down'. A committee is being formed this week to campaign against the solar energy farm. Highfield Solar Ltd decliend to comment.
As part of her ongoing quest to highlight the injustice endured by Ireland's Magdalene women local artist and activist Nancy Rochford Flynn recently gave a presentation at the Global Status of Women and Girls international conference in Newport News, Virginia, USA.

Hosted by the Christopher Newport University in late March, the theme for this interdisciplinary conference was 'Women, Social Change and Activism: Then and Now' with a view to shedding light on women's efforts to affect social change by highlighting the challenges faced by women and girls around the world, both historically and today.

Nancy said her paper titled 'Cultural Amnesia: The Role of Active Commemoration in Countering Cultural Forms of Magdalene Forgetfulness', relates to an emerging gendered activism which ensures that the narratives of women who suffered incarceration in Magdalene Laundries are represented in Irish historical memory. 'These narratives have previously been hidden and excluded from Irish history,' she said. One of the many aspects which she explores in her paper is the importance of active commemoration as a means of countering cultural forms of forgetfulness, especially those which fail to connect critically with the past.

'Actively commemorating the past through ceremonies, projects and international days of commemoration help demonstrate how something which is lost in a society's amnesia can be brought to our attention for acknowledging and redressing victims and survivors'. The annual Flower's for Magdalenes' commemoration which she initiated in New Ross is promoted as one such critical practice of active commemoration which remembers, acknowledges and gives voice to the once silenced Magdalene women.

Her interest in this topic began as a result of her work as an interdisciplinary artist. In 2012 she was working on a project which examined identity and commemoration. As a past pupil of St Mary's secondary school which was founded by the Sisters of Mercy, and having spent many happy years at the school, it struck her that during her time there the former history of the building had never been disclosed or discussed.

Intrigued by this hidden history she conducted some research which began with speaking to some of the local people in the town. This led to a series of semi-structured interviews conducted by her with women who were incarcerated in the Sisters of the Good Shepherd Magdalene Laundry in New Ross. The narratives she collected filled her with a desire to give voice to women who have been silenced in Ireland's historical narrative, and so she embarked on a body of work, utilising art and activism in an effort to exemplify ethical engagement between past and present.

'The plight of the Magdalenes is a hugely important era in Ireland's history and indeed the history of our town. Including these narratives as part of Irish cultural memory offers some solace to living survivors who continue to search for some form of reconciliation. This trip afforded me the opportunity and indeed the absolute privilege of sharing my research into the narratives of the once forgotten Magdalene women with a global audience. I wish to extend a word of gratitude to the Limerick Institute of Technology for sponsoring this trip, and for the Master by Research scholarship awarded to me by them within the faculty of business and humanities,' she said.
Sam McCauley Chemists has invested 5m to acquire stores in Dublin and Cork as part of a growth strategy that will see the business double in size within three years.

The group, which owns and operates 32 retail pharmacies nationwide, will also be announcing an exciting city centre green field location in the coming months as it endeavours to build its presence in the capital, as well as most urban and provincial locations throughout Ireland.

The acquisitions, which follow a significant investment in the business by the private equity fund Carlyle Cardinal Ireland (CCI) last year, comprise Life Pharmacy in Clondalkin, Dublin and Fermoy Medical Hall in Fermoy, Cork. The stores have a combined turnover of more than 5.5m, bringing annualised turnover for the group to approximately 90m.

Sam McCauley Chemists' will support all current jobs in both acquired pharmacies, which have a collective staff of 20 people, bringing the total group staff count to over 600. It is envisaged that some additional staff will be recruited over time as the group adds new ranges and services to both pharmacies.

Tony McEntee, CEO, Sam McCauley Chemists, said: 'As an ambitious business, we are excited to be expanding our presence in Dublin and Cork and look forward to serving the people of those communities. Both acquisitions are part of a growth strategy for the business that will see Sam McCauley Chemists grow its presence in Dublin and larger provincial locations throughout Ireland.

'Whilst we will be opening green field sites, we believe that the bulk of our growth plans will be delivered through acquisitions. The combination of our access to significant funding and our ability to promptly complete transactions puts Sam McCauley Chemists in a great position to continue to add to our portfolio over the next few years, with a number of other significant opportunities already under active consideration.'

Life Pharmacy, Bawnogue Road in Clondalkin, Dublin was acquired by Sam McCauley Chemists from Gillian Hudson and becomes the pharmacy chain's third Dublin store as the group seeks to build its presence in the capital. Meanwhile, Fermoy Medical Hall, which was acquired from Orla Mellerick and Brian Whelan, adds another premium retail pharmacy offering to the group's already strong presence in Cork.
An action-packed weekend of festivities is set to shine a light on all things maritime at Hook Lighthouse this May bank holiday weekend.

The Shine A Light festival begins on Saturday, May 5, from 12 noon with The Wobbly Circus, Pirate Pat and Captain Hook, a combat school and medieval games. A craft market will also be hosted over the weekend.

On Sunday, May 6, in the festival marquee, a series of free talks will be on offer from the experts at Leave No Trace, Ecologist and Senator Grace O'Sullivan will host a talk on marine environmental sustainability. There will be a smoked salmon demonstration by Ballyhack Smokehouse and the RNLI will offer free life jacket safety checks.

The Irish Coast Guard and voluntary rescue services will give free demonstrations. Also on Monday afternoon, a 'Naturalist Marine Nature Walk' will be lead by nature heritage expert Jim Hurley. The Irish Whale and Dolphin Group will also host a talk in the afternoon. At 4 p.m. that day a piper's lament will be performed by a member of the New Ross Pipe Band.

Members of the public are invited to the cobbled yard under the lighthouse to take a moment to reflect and remember all those lost at sea. Also taking place on is the annual 'Hike to the Hook' event.
Britain's Prince Harry (R) and his fiancee, US actress Meghan Markle, attend a reception for Women's Empowerment at the Royal Aeronautical Society in central London, on the fourth day of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) on April 19, 2018. / Getty Images / POOL / CHRIS JACKSONCHRIS JACKSON/AFP/Getty Images

Britain's Prince Harry's fiancee, US actress Meghan Markle, attends a reception for Women's Empowerment at the Royal Aeronautical Society in central London, on the fourth day of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) on April 19, 2018. / Getty Images / POOL / CHRIS JACKSONCHRIS JACKSON/AFP/Getty Images

Britain's Prince Harry (R) and his fiancee, US actress Meghan Markle, attend a reception for Women's Empowerment at the Royal Aeronautical Society in central London, on the fourth day of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) on April 19, 2018. / Getty Images / POOL / CHRIS JACKSONCHRIS JACKSON/AFP/Getty Images

Britain's Prince Harry (R) and his fiancee, US actress Meghan Markle, attend a reception for Women's Empowerment at the Royal Aeronautical Society in central London, on the fourth day of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) on April 19, 2018. / Getty Images / POOL / CHRIS JACKSONCHRIS JACKSON/AFP/Getty Images

Britain's Prince Harry's fiancee, US actress Meghan Markle, attends a reception for Women's Empowerment at the Royal Aeronautical Society in central London, on the fourth day of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) on April 19, 2018. Photo: Chris Jackson/AFP/Getty Images

Britain's Prince Harry's fiancee, US actress Meghan Markle, attends a reception for Women's Empowerment at the Royal Aeronautical Society in central London, on the fourth day of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) on April 19, 2018. / Getty Images / POOL / CHRIS JACKSONCHRIS JACKSON/AFP/Getty Images

Britain's Prince Harry's fiancee, US actress Meghan Markle, attends a reception for Women's Empowerment at the Royal Aeronautical Society in central London, on the fourth day of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) on April 19, 2018. / Getty Images / POOL / CHRIS JACKSONCHRIS JACKSON/AFP/Getty Images

Britain's Prince Harry's fiancee, US actress Meghan Markle, holding her clutch bag, arrives to attend a reception for Women's Empowerment at the Royal Aeronautical Society in central London, on the fourth day of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) on April 19, 2018. / Getty Images / POOL / CHRIS JACKSONCHRIS JACKSON/AFP/Getty Images

Britain's Prince Harry's fiancee, US actress Meghan Markle, attends a reception for Women's Empowerment at the Royal Aeronautical Society in central London, on the fourth day of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) on April 19, 2018. / Getty Images / POOL / CHRIS JACKSONCHRIS JACKSON/AFP/Getty Images

Meghan Markle attends the Women's Empowerment reception hosted by Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson during the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting at the Royal Aeronautical Society on April 19, 2018 in London, England. (Photo by Chris Jackson - WPA Pool/Getty Images)

Meghan Markle has been described as a "strong free spirit" who "found her prince, fell in love and made the world believe in fairy tales".

Both Ms Markle and Prince Harry, who will wed at Windsor in a month's time, were named among Time magazine's 100 most influential people of 2018.

Expand Close Britain's Prince Harry's fiancee, US actress Meghan Markle, attends a reception for Women's Empowerment at the Royal Aeronautical Society in central London, on the fourth day of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) on April 19, 2018. Photo: Chris Jackson/AFP/Getty Images / Facebook

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Whatsapp Britain's Prince Harry's fiancee, US actress Meghan Markle, attends a reception for Women's Empowerment at the Royal Aeronautical Society in central London, on the fourth day of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) on April 19, 2018. Photo: Chris Jackson/AFP/Getty Images

To accompany the American star's entry, her friend, the actress Priyanka Chopra, wrote in the magazine that Ms Markle was an important influencer.

The Indian actress said: "This ever-smiling, strong, free spirit found her prince, fell in love and in turn made a cynical world believe in fairy tales again.

"But more than anything else, Meghan is an important influencer in a world that needs strong public figures to respect and look up to.

Harry's entry was written by Elton John, who said: "Prince Harry has that rare ability to walk into a room full of strangers and make everyone feel comfortable and at ease."

Expand Close Britain's Prince Harry (R) and his fiancee, US actress Meghan Markle, attend a reception for Women's Empowerment at the Royal Aeronautical Society in central London, on the fourth day of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) on April 19, 2018. / Getty Images / POOL / CHRIS JACKSONCHRIS JACKSON/AFP/Getty Images / Facebook

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Whatsapp Britain's Prince Harry (R) and his fiancee, US actress Meghan Markle, attend a reception for Women's Empowerment at the Royal Aeronautical Society in central London, on the fourth day of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) on April 19, 2018. / Getty Images / POOL / CHRIS JACKSONCHRIS JACKSON/AFP/Getty Images

On Thursday night, Markle joined her fiance at a reception for Women's Empowerment at the Royal Aeronautical Society in central London, on the fourth day of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), wearing a Jackie O-inspired dress by Black Halo, accessorising with a small black Gucci clutch.

She is the first non-official royal to join in the duties.
Allison Mack has been charged with sex trafficking for helping recruit women to be slaves of a man who sold himself as a self-improvement guru (AP)

An actress best known for playing a young Supermans friend has pleaded not guilty to charges she helped recruit women into a cult-like organisation.

Allison Mack was charged with sex trafficking after US prosecutors said she worked as a slave master recruiting women to a group led by a man who sold himself as a self-improvement guru to the stars.

Mack entered her plea in federal court in Brooklyn. The judge refused a request by her lawyers to release her without bail.

Mack starred in Smallville, a show about the early life of Superman that ended in 2011.

Prosecutors say she helped recruit sex slaves for leader Keith Raniere and his group called NXIVM.
Shadow, the Weimaraner, pictured enjoying an ice cream this afternoon in the Phoenix Park Picture: Colin Keegan, Collins Dublin.

Fire up those barbecues while you can as Ireland is currently experiencing the hottest April in 15 years.

Yesterday's sunshine sent droves of people out to the nation's parks and beaches as temperatures reached a high of 19C.

According to Met Eireann meteorologist Liz Walsh, this is the hottest April we've had since 2003.

"Back 15 years ago, we experienced the hottest April on record when temperatures hit 24.4C," she said.

Expand Close Horacio Diaz, Gabriel Soubhia, Andrerew Maren, Valentina Bincheira and Daniel Haruta all English students, living in Dublin pictured this afternoon in the Phoenix Park enjoying the first heat and sunshine of 2018. Picture Colin Keegan, Collins Dublin. / Facebook

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Whatsapp Horacio Diaz, Gabriel Soubhia, Andrerew Maren, Valentina Bincheira and Daniel Haruta all English students, living in Dublin pictured this afternoon in the Phoenix Park enjoying the first heat and sunshine of 2018. Picture Colin Keegan, Collins Dublin.

"But the weather we've been having recently certainly isn't too shabby.

"On Wednesday the Phoenix Park saw highs of 20C."

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Today looks set to be another dry day with sunny spells and higher temperatures in the afternoon, ranging between 13C and 19C.

In the UK, temperatures are soaring to 28C.

"The reason why it is not as hot over here is because there's a cold front between us and the UK," said Ms Walsh.

"But the east part of Ireland is definitely getting the best of the good weather.

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Whatsapp Shadow, the Weimaraner, pictured enjoying an ice cream this afternoon in the Phoenix Park Picture: Colin Keegan, Collins Dublin.

"Temperatures in western counties like Mayo and Cork are only seeing highs of 14C. This is because the cool air from the Atlantic sea is blowing on to the mainland."

It will be quite a cold Friday night, with grass frost under clear and calm conditions. Temperatures will be as low as 2C to 5C.

Meteorologist Walsh advised sun worshippers to make the most of the sunshine as the weekend will see a return to cooler conditions and a few showers.

"We'll have a warm day on Saturday too, but it definitely won't be as hot and we can expect some showers coming into the afternoon," she added.

Expand Close Charlotte Quay Dock, Grand Canal Dock, Dublin 4. By Niall Manley / Facebook

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"Top temperatures will be around 13 to 19 degrees, but primarily in the east of the country."

It will be cooler along the east coast where temperatures will closer reflect the temperature of the sea - coming in at about 9C or 10C.

It will become cloudier through the day with some showery bursts of rain gradually moving up from the south-east and becoming that bit more widespread into the afternoon and evening.

There will be further showery spells of rain overnight with lowest temperatures of 6C to 9C.

Sunday is set to be much cooler again as an Atlantic westerly airflow takes over, bringing sunny spells with scattered blustery showers. Highest temperatures will range 10C to 13C.

The further outlook for the early days of next week is for cool, fresh westerly breezes with sunny spells and scattered passing showers, some of which will turn heavier into Tuesday.

It comes after Met Eireann launched a new app showing seven-day forecasts for the entire country

At the launch Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy said: "As a nation, we are obsessed with the weather.

"We are constantly talking about it.

"We are interested in what is going to be happening.

"Vitally [with the app] you will also be able to see the latest weather warnings for your county."

Head of forecasting Evelyn Cusack said: "I've worked at Met Eireann over 30 years, and the change has been incredible, which is due to our improved meteorological models."

She went on to describe the app as the "best forecast in the world".
Zimbabwe said it had sacked 16,000 striking nurses as the new government seeks to keep a lid on labour unrest in the build-up to the first elections since the fall of Robert Mugabe.

The nurses walked out on Monday over unpaid allowances and other issues, leaving hospitals understaffed.

The action came days after junior doctors wrapped up a month-long walkout over pay and working conditions.

Vice-president Constantino Chiwenga accused the nurses of staging a "politically motivated" strike and said they would be replaced by retired and unemployed staff. The nurses' union told its members to stay calm as it mulled its response.

The Zimbabwe Nurses Association (ZINA) said it had given its employer, the Health Services Board, until yesterday to reverse the mass dismissal or face legal action.

Mr Chiwenga, the retired army general who led a de facto military coup against Mr Mugabe in November, said ZINA had rejected a $17m (13.7m) offer to clear wage arrears.

Zina said it was open to talks with the government but added that its grievances had not yet been resolved.

"The government now regards this lack of remorse as politically motivated, and thus going beyond concerns of conditions of services and worker welfare," said Chiwenga.

The Zimbabwe Teachers' Union, which itself has threatened to go on strike next month over poor pay, said the government should rescind its "inhuman and unilateral decision."

A doctors and lawyers union said the government decision was illegal.

President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who replaced Mr Mugabe in November, will stand in elections set for July against a revitalised opposition Movement for Democratic Change party led by 40-year-old Nelson Chamisa.

Mr Mnangagwa promised to revitalise the southern African country's economy after decades of severe mismanagement.

Cash shortages mean banks are forced to limit withdrawals, unemployment remains above 80pc and the government still struggles to pay workers on time.
For anyone who wants to make the most of the sunshine, Susie Dent may just have the answer youre looking for.

Yes, the resident expert from Countdowns dictionary corner has a way  and a word  to allow you to bunk off.

If you're looking for a convincing excuse to bunk off into the sunshine, try 'I'm just off to a symposium'. A symposium, for the ancient Greeks, was a get-together for a drink and a chat ('sympotes' = 'drinking partner').  Susie Dent  (@susie_dent) April 18, 2018

Symposium and its etymology is one of the recent words Dent has shared with her 275,000 Twitter followers, each one a morsel to delight her fans.

Word of the day has to be beek (1300s): to bask in the sun and give yourself over to the warmth of its rays on your skin.  Susie Dent  (@susie_dent) April 19, 2018

They are almost always prompted by what Im doing or feeling at that moment, Dent told Press Association.

I might talk about having a fit of the mubblefubbles on a Monday morning (a.k.a feelings of despondency that bring about clinomania: an overwhelming desire to lie down); or tweet the word scurryfunge just before visiting family is about to descend (otherwise known as madly rushing around the house in a frenzied attempt to tidy up).

Political events have inspired quite a few too  e.g. a quockerwodger is a puppet whose strings are entirely controlled by someone else, while a throttlebottom: a bumbling, rather inept person in public office.

All of this makes Dents Twitter feed a fascinating follow offering a glimpse into her life as well as a lexical delight, a smattering of politics without being political.

Should anyone need it, 'crambazzled' is an old Yorkshire term for looking prematurely aged or rough from drinking/partying/a dissolute life.  Susie Dent  (@susie_dent) September 10, 2017

Dent has been a Countdown regular since 1992 when the job of solving the anagrams and besting the contestants was split between a roster of experts.

For more than 20 years she has been the only lexicographer on air, sharing her desk with a range of celebrities.

Today I learned from @ChrisGPackham that humans can distinguish 10 million colours. But only 30 shades of grey. pic.twitter.com/yFN4HVoTrC  Susie Dent  (@susie_dent) April 27, 2016

She has also made the move to the evening version 8 Out Of 10 Cats (Does Countdown) with numbers whizz Rachel Riley, where she spars with host Jimmy Carr.

Oxford educated Dent, also a published author, is well aware people expect her to use obscure vocab to make a point. And relish asking her wordy conundrums of their own.

Quite often people ask me Is there a word for. and go on to highlight a gap in our language that we need to fill, she said.

We dont yet, for example, have a word for pretending not to notice someone spitting on us when theyre talking, or for the compulsion to keep scrolling through Twitter even when you became fed up with it an hour ago. Both of these were questions sent in by my followers.

Sometimes I ask for help myself  we really need, for example, a word for the reassurance and praise we give our hairdresser even when the reflection looking back at us is making us die a little inside. Someone came up with shamproval, which I loved.

We need a word for the reassurance you always give your hairdresser after a cut, even when you're dying a little inside.  Susie Dent  (@susie_dent) March 7, 2018

But just as new words are pouring into English  terms like mansplaining for instance  its important we look into the archive too, believes Dent.

Im a big believer in change and embrace the fact that English is probably the fastest-moving language in the world. But that doesnt mean we should neglect the offerings of the past  a vast treasury of riches is dwindling away as the new contenders stream in, and I try to do my bit to celebrate it.

Among her favourites are:

A reminder of the 13th century word forswunk: exhausted from too much work. To be foreswunk is to be exhausted before you even begin. Morning.  Susie Dent  (@susie_dent) February 2, 2018

A reminder that an 'eyeservant' (1500) is someone who only works hard when being watched. Morning.  Susie Dent  (@susie_dent) June 21, 2017

Catchfart is an C18th insult for anyone who fawns and sucks up to you/the boss/your mother. The idea is they follow behind far too closely.  Susie Dent  (@susie_dent) October 2, 2015

Amidst the convulsions of current affairs it gave me silly pleasure today to discover that the Victorians called a hankie a snottinger.  Susie Dent  (@susie_dent) July 11, 2016

A reminder that to absquatulate is to leave abruptly or abscond, should you want to knock off work early.  Susie Dent  (@susie_dent) August 5, 2016

I like to introduce a few lost gems when I can to fellow word-lovers, and would genuinely love some of them to make a comeback.

Why try to describe your annoyance with the person in your family/office who is perpetually cheery when you can just call them a gigglemug?

A reminder that 'grinagog' is one word for someone who is perpetually and annoyingly cheery. Another is 'gigglemug'.  Susie Dent  (@susie_dent) September 7, 2017

And it seems her followers are having a grand time trying to work Dents old words into conversations.

New words can spread like wildfire thanks to social media  you only have to look at mansplaining and milkshake duck to see language evolution at work  so why not old ones too?

Someone came up to me the other day and told me that their family now regularly talk about hurkle-durkling; it made me ridiculously happy.

I predict the two words of my day: hurkle-durkling and niffle-naffling: overlounging in bed, and pretending to look busy while you daydream.  Susie Dent  (@susie_dent) February 28, 2017

Hurkle-durkle: a 200 year-old Scottish term meaning to lounge in bed long after it's time to get up. Happiness is hurkle-durkling.  Susie Dent  (@susie_dent) June 5, 2016

It all goes to prove that social media is a good thing for language rather than it spiralling downwards, argues Dent, a point in she makes in her 2016 book Dents Modern Tribes.

Such concerns about dumbing down are nothing new  our parents and grandparents worried about the telegram and the postcard. In fact, studies today show the exact opposite, and that far from becoming a bland and monolithic language in which everyone uses the same few words, English is enriched by these new media.

New tribal vocabularies continue to emerge, as each group  from Facebookers and tweeters to gamers and bloggers  introduce their own codes that insiders tune into and recognise.

I think English is actually in a very good place, and that we should keep trying to convince all the mumpsimuses out there (translation: those who carry on arguing a point even when theyve been proved wrong).

Something to discuss at the symposium, at the very least.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un with his wife Ri Sol-Ju at the Rungna Peoples Pleasure Ground. Photo: Getty Images

North Korea is prepared to accept "complete denuclearisation", South Korea's president said, after Donald Trump vowed to abandon talks with the regime if they were not "fruitful".

Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, is reportedly also no longer demanding that US troops leave South Korea as a condition for giving up his nuclear arsenal, a key stumbling block in previous negotiations.

Yesterday, Moon Jae-in, the South's president, announced that the North Korean regime had dropped the request from its list of demands ahead of talks.

"North Korea is expressing a commitment to a complete denuclearisation," Mr Moon told reporters. "They are not presenting a condition that the US cannot accept, such as the withdrawal of the American troops in South Korea.

"North Korea is only talking about the end of a hostile policy against it and then a security guarantee for the country."

If officially confirmed by Pyongyang, the move could speed up plans for the first summit between the US and North Korea's leaders.

Mr Moon made the announcement after Mr Trump threatened to abandon his planned meeting with Mr Kim if he decided it would not be successful or walk out if it was not productive while he was there.

"If we don't think it's going to be successful, we won't have it," Mr Trump said at a news conference with Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister late on Wednesday.

Mr Trump did not outline what would make the meeting a success, but has said the administration is "fighting very diligently to get the three Americans held captive in North Korea back".

The men are all US citizens of Korean ethnicity. Kim Sang-duk, or Tony Kim (59), had been on a one-month teaching assignment at the Pyongyang University when he was arrested last April as he was about to leave Pyongyang.

In May, Kim Hak-song, another academic attached to the university, was arrested. Both are accused of "hostile acts" against North Korea. Neither is yet thought to have been tried or convicted.

Kim Dong Chul (63), the third American, was convicted of subversion, espionage and insulting the North Korean leadership last April.

Mr Trump said his administration is "fighting very diligently to get the three American citizens back. I think there's a good chance of doing it; we're having very good dialogue".

Mike Pompeo, Mr Trump's CIA director, is thought to have discussed the captives with Mr Kim in an unannounced visit to Pyongyang over Easter.

Mr Trump wants to hold his historic meeting with the North Korean leader with only interpreters present, according to South Korean media.

Their meeting could take place as early as next month or June following a summit next week between Mr Kim and Mr Moon that will discuss relations between the North and South.

Sweden and Switzerland are among the places the White House is considering for the summit, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mr Pompeo - who is awaiting confirmation as secretary of state - is the highest-ranking US official to visit the isolated nation since former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in 2000.

A White House official said Mr Pompeo travelled to Pyongyang over the Easter weekend, not "last week" as the president said in a tweet.

The US president told reporters on Tuesday that the administration had "started talking to North Korea directly" and was discussing five potential sites for the meeting.

"We have had direct talks at very high levels, extremely high levels with North Korea," Mr Trump said.

A landmark summit next week between Mr Kim and Mr Moon will set the tone for the later meeting being held with Mr Trump.

Yesterday, Mr Moon said that a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War "must be pursued" but signalled that such a deal would be dependent on North Korea giving up its nuclear weapons.

North and South Korea have both existed with an uneasy truce for almost seven decades after signing an armistice at the end of the Korean War of 1950 to 1953 but not a peace treaty.

"The armistice that has dragged on for 65 years must come to an end," said Mr Moon.

"If the inter-Korean summit or North Korea-US summit lead to denuclearisation, I think that it won't be too difficult to reach practical agreements in the big picture on creating a peace regime, normalising North Korea-US ties, or providing international aid for the improvement of the North Korean economy," he added.

 Daily Telegraph London

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021]
A drug mule said she tried to smuggle 12.6m worth of cocaine into Australia because it was a chance to post selfies on Instagram during a free holiday.

Escort Melina Roberge, 24, broke down in court when she was jailed for eight years for taking part in an attempt to smuggle the drugs into Sydney aboard a luxury cruise ship.

She told the New South Wales state district court she risked a life sentence in an Australian prison for the opportunity to take selfies in exotic locations and post them on Instagram to receive likes and attention during a 13,000 holiday she could not afford.

Three Canadians have admitted smuggling 95kg of cocaine in suitcases aboard the MS Sea Princess during a seven-week cruise in 2016. The trip began in Britain and continued to Ireland, the United States, Bermuda, Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, then Australia.

Roberge, dubbed cocaine babe in headlines and on social media, was sentenced on Wednesday to a non-parole period of 4 years and 9 months in prison before she is likely to be deported to Canada.

Judge Kate Traill condemned Roberges motivation for crime as a very sad indictment on her age group who seek to attain such a vacuous existence where how many likes they receive are their currency.

She was seduced by lifestyle and the opportunity to post glamorous Instagram photos from around the world, the judge said. She wanted to be the envy of others. I doubt she is now.

Roberges accomplice with whom she shared a cabin, Isabelle Lagace, 29, was sentenced in November to seven years in prison backdated to their arrest. Lagace will also likely to be deported after serving a non-parole period of four years.

Police with sniffer dogs found 35kg of cocaine in their cabin on 28 August, 2016, when the liner, operated by California-based Princess Cruises, berthed in Sydney.

Lagace told the court she took part to settle a debt in Canada. Roberge did not admit her guilt until days before her trial was due to begin in February.

Expand Close Melina Roberge and Isabelle Lagace / Facebook

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Judge Traill said Roberge was recruited by a wealthy Canadian benefactor, whom Roberge described in court as her sugar daddy but never identified for fear of repercussions for her family in Canada, with the lure of a free holiday.

The third accomplice, Andre Tamin, 65, will be sentenced in October. He was caught with 60kg of the drug in his cabin.

In an affidavit admitted to the court, Roberge said at the time she was a stupid young woman governed by superficial goals.

I have devastated so many people in the process, she wrote.

The court heard Roberge met her sugar daddy in 2015, and they began an intimate relationship while she worked as an escort for him. He invited her to work as an escort in May 2016 during a trip to Morocco, where he first enjoined her to take part in a drug-smuggling voyage.

Judge Traill said the then-22-year-old was there to look pretty, acting as a decoy to the drug dealing below deck.

Roberge told the court she suspected drugs were brought aboard at Peru, because of increased activity during a stopover there.

The judge said Roberge was also motivated by profit. She was promised the ticket, 4,000 in spending money plus more cash once she returned home.

The US Department of Homeland Security and the Canada Border Services Agency identified the trio as high-risk passengers among the 1,800 on board.

The haul was a record for cocaine smuggled in luggage through an Australian air or sea port.
President Donald Trump told former FBI director James Comey that he had serious concerns about the judgment of his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, according to memos maintained by Mr Comey.

The 15 pages of documents, obtained by The Associated Press, contain new details about a series of interactions that Comey had with Mr Trump in the weeks before his May 2017 firing.

Those encounters include a White House dinner at which Mr Comey says Mr Trump asked him for his loyalty, and a meeting the following month in which he says the president asked him to end an investigation into Mr Flynn.

According to one memo, Mr Trump complained about Mr Flynn at a private January 2017 dinner with Mr Comey, saying the guy has serious judgment issues. He then blamed Mr Flynn for a delay in returning the congratulatory call of an international leader.

I did not comment at any point during this topic and there was no mention or acknowledgement of any FBI interest in or contact with General Flynn, Mr Comey wrote.

Expand Close Copies of the memos written by James Comey (Susan Walsh/AP) / Facebook

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Mr Flynn was fired a month later after White House officials said he had misled about his Russian contacts during the transition period. In a separate memo, Mr Comey says Mr Trump cleared the Oval Office of other officials, encouraged him to let the investigation into Mr Flynn go and called him a good guy.

In a Senate hearing in June, Mr Comey told Congress, I knew there might come a day when I would need a record of what had happened, not just to defend myself, but to defend the FBI and our integrity as an institution and the independence of our investigative function.

The memos were provided to Congress earlier on Thursday as House Republicans escalated criticism of the department, threatening to subpoena the documents and questioning officials.

In a letter sent to three Republican House committee chairmen on Thursday evening, Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd wrote that the department was sending a classified version of the memos and an unclassified version. The department released Mr Boyds letter publicly but did not release the memos.

Justice officials had allowed some politicians to view the memos but had never provided copies to Congress. Mr Boyd wrote that the department had also provided the memos to several Senate committees.

Mr Trump claimed vindication after the release of the memos.

Mr Trump said the memos show clearly that there was NO COLLUSION and NO OBSTRUCTION.

Its not clear what in the memos led the president to reach the conclusion.

Mr Trump also accused Mr Comey of having leaked classified information, though the Justice Department said the memos it provided to Congress on Thursday were in unclassified form.

Mr Trump ended his tweet by saying, WOW! Will the Witch Hunt continue?

Mr Comey is on a publicity tour to promote his new book, A Higher Loyalty. He revealed last year that he had written the memos after conversations with Mr Trump.

Details from some memos were made public in media accounts in the days after he was fired. At the Senate hearing, Mr Comey detailed his conversations with Mr Trump.

One Comey memo recounts a February request from Mr Trump, during a private meeting in the Oval Office, that Mr Comey end an investigation into Mr Flynn.

Mr Boyd wrote in the letter that the department consulted the relevant parties and concluded that releasing the memos would not adversely affect any ongoing investigations. Special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating potential ties between Russia and Trumps 2016 campaign as well as possible obstruction of justice by the president.

Mr Boyd said the decision to allow the release of the memos does not alter the departments traditional obligation to protect from public disclosure witness statements and other documents obtained during an ongoing investigation.

Mr Comey said in an interview on Thursday with CNN that hes fine with the Justice Department turning his memos over to Congress.

I think what folks will see if they get to see the memos is Ive been consistent since the very beginning, right after my encounters with President Trump, and Im consistent in the book and tried to be transparent in the book as well, he said.

Last week, the Republican chairmen of three House committees demanded the memos by Monday. The Justice Department asked for more time, and the politcians agreed.
Police Scotland undated handout photo of juror Catherine Leahy who has been jailed at the High Court in Glasgow for six years in the first prosecution of its kind in Scotland after she accepted a bribe. Police Scotland /PA Wire

A juror has been jailed for six years after accepting a bribe during a 7 million cocaine dealing trial, which saw the defendants walk free.

In what is believed to be one of the first cases of its kind in Britain, Catherine Leahy, 62, was found guilty of accepting money to influence her actions while serving as a juror on a criminal trial.

The widow and former classroom assistant was acting as jury foreman in the five-month trial of a husband and wife who were accused of running a cocaine empire and money laundering operation in Scotland.

Graham Clarke, 36, and his wife Lindsay, 32, walked free from court after the case was found not proven at the High Court of Justiciary in Glasgow in April 2016.

But the day after the verdict was delivered, court staff received a tip off suggesting one of the jurors may have been bribed. Detectives began probing the finances of all the jurors and after suspicion fell on Leahy, they bugged the Glasgow home she shared with Joseph, her 22-year-old son.

He was originally on trial with his mother but the charges against him were later dropped. Police recorded 31 conversations between Leahy and her son, who at one point was heard to say: Mum, it wasnt just you that got bribed so that now when they come to you, youre a step ahead. His mother then replied: There is nothing that can link you with them.

During her trial it emerged that Leahy had received almost 3,000 in instalments, paid into her bank account between April and June 2016.

The court heard that Leahy had been struggling financially at the time with only her salary as a classroom assistant and widows pension.

She vehemently denied having been bribed, claiming the money had come from a savings club she belonged to.

But the jury did not believe her and at the High Court in Edinburgh she was sentenced to six years.

Sentencing, Lord Turnbull said: In my judgment, to agree to accept a bribe, from or on behalf of the accused, whilst serving as a juror in a High Court trial, involves conduct which reflects such a serious breach of the public duty which forms the cornerstone of justice in our society, as to constitute conduct at the most serious end of that contemplated by the provisions of the Bribery Act.

The nature and seriousness of the lengthy trial in which you served as a juror, and accepted the position of spokesperson, aggravates the offence even further.

Liam Murphy, procurator fiscal for specialist casework, said: Leahy took advantage of a position of public responsibility for financial gain without any regard to the consequences.

Prosecutors are now considering whether to order a retrial in the original case.

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021]
Prince Charless bid to take up the role held by his mother will be discussed by heads of state today. Photo: PA

Britain's Queen Elizabeth has expressed her "sincere wish" that her son, Prince Charles, will one day succeed her as head of Commonwealth, in the clearest signal yet about the future of the family of nations.

The queen, who addressed the Commonwealth heads of government meeting (CHOGM) in the Buckingham Palace ballroom at the official opening of CHOGM yesterday, said it was her sincere wish that the prince would "carry on the important work" started by her father, George VI in 1949.

Her highly significant speech, met with warm applause, is the most explicit statement she has made to date of her hopes for the Commonwealth's future, and the honorary and not hereditary position of its head.

In an unusually explicit statement of her views, she told the presidents and prime ministers of the Commonwealth: "It remains a great pleasure and honour to serve you as head of the Commonwealth and to observe, with pride and satisfaction, that this is a flourishing network.

"It is my sincere wish that the Commonwealth will continue to offer stability and continuity for future generations, and will decide that one day the prince...should carry on the important work started by my father in 1949."

The prince's bid to one day accede to his mother's Commonwealth role is due to be discussed at a private CHOGM retreat at Windsor today, but is now widely considered a foregone conclusion. Two years ago, speaking at the last CHOGM in Malta, the queen offered a hint to her feelings, saying she could not have been better supported and represented in the Commonwealth than by the prince, "who continues to give so much to it with great distinction".

At the start of the London summit, she said "my family and I have been heartened" by the successful Commonwealth programmes "in which we are proud to play a part". The ceremony saw leaders move to pay tribute to the queen's service.

 Daily Telegraph, London

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021]
Hans Asperger was a pioneer in the study of autism

Hans Asperger, the respected Austrian paediatrician whose name describes a form of high-functioning autism, actively assisted in the murder of disabled children by the Nazis, a new report claims.

Asperger's Syndrome, marked by an impaired ability to interact socially with others, tends to affect people of average or above average intelligence.

It was first identified by Professor Asperger in 1944 who used the term "autistic psychopathy" to describe the condition of four children under his care.

In 1981, the British psychiatrist Lorna Wing, who helped establish the National Autistic Society in the UK, introduced the diagnosis of "Asperger's Syndrome" in honour of her predecessor.

But according to new evidence, the pioneer of autism research whose reputation is that of a strong opponent of Nazi ideology, had a hidden dark past.

Documents uncovered by an Austrian medical historian suggest that Prof Asperger ingratiated himself with the Nazi regime to the extent of participating in its murderous euthanasia programme.

Asperger is said to have referred profoundly disabled children to the notorious Am Spiegelgrund clinic, where their "unworthy" lives were snuffed out.

An estimated 789 children, many with severe mental problems, were systematically killed at the Vienna clinic, mostly by lethal injection and gassing.

Others died from disease and starvation, or were subjected to harsh medical experiments.

"Aktion T4", the horrific euthanasia programme personally authorised by Adolf Hitler, set out to cull the incurable and severely disabled.

Up to 300,000 victims, including children, were exterminated at clinics in Germany, Austria, Poland and the Czech Republic between 1939 and 1945.

Herwig Czech, from the Medical University of Vienna, set out the claims against Prof Asperger after trawling through previously unexamined documents from the Nazi era including personnel files and patient records.

He said: "What emerges is that Asperger successfully sought to accommodate himself to the Nazi regime and was rewarded with career opportunities in return."

The allegations are reported in the journal Molecular Autism, whose two editors explained why they believed Prof Asperger to be guilty as charged.

One of them, leading British autism expert Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, from Cambridge University, said: "We believe that it deserves to be published in order to expose the truth about how a medical doctor who, for a long time, was seen as only having made valuable contributions to the field of paediatrics and child psychiatry, was guilty of actively assisting the Nazis in their abhorrent eugenics and euthanasia policies."
Russian soldiers and Syrian government forces oversee the evacuation of rebel fighters from the Army of Islam and their families from the town of Dumayr, northeast of Damascus (SANA/AP)

Islamic State (IS) militants have reportedly agreed to give up their last pocket in Damascus, as the government seeks to retake the entire Syrian capital and its surrounding areas for the first time since 2011.

The capitulation followed a week of escalations by pro-government forces against the IS-held Hajar al-Aswad area and Yarmouk Palestinian camp in Damascus.

Pro-government forces bombed the two areas and blanketed them with artillery fire in a manoeuvre captured by the state-affiliated Central Military Media outlet.

The UNs refugee agency warned that the spiralling violence was a threat to 12,000 Palestinian refugees still there  Palestinians who came to Syria since 1948, and their descendants.

Expand Close Russian soldiers and Syrian government forces overseeing the evacuation of rebel fighters (SANA via AP) / Facebook

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Militants were given the option to stay and reconcile with the government or leave on buses to IS-held territory in the eastern Syrian desert, the SANA state news agency said. It did not say when the relocations would begin.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group reported relative calm in the two neighbourhoods after the announcement of the agreement.

In 2012, Syrian rebels and army defectors pushed pro-government forces out of Yarmouk in response to a spiralling crackdown by state security services against anti-government protests.

Pro-government forces, including pro-government Palestinian factions, responded by putting the camp under siege, eventually cutting off food and water by 2014, and bombing and shelling it continuously.

Residents trickled out to neighbouring areas, and the camps population dwindled from an estimated 200,000 people to a few thousand today, not including the IS militants, who took over the camp following a battle with rebels in 2015.

On Thursday, the Damascus-based Palestinian official Khaled Abdelmajid said the government was giving hard-liners two days to leave Yarmouk and Hajar al-Aswad, leaving the government with control of the two neighbourhoods.

That initial deal appears to have collapsed.
Porn star Stormy Daniels (pictured) released an artists sketch of a man she says threatened her over her alleged affair. Photo: Reuters

US President Donald Trump has broken his silence on the media frenzy surrounding allegations he had an affair with porn star Stormy Daniels for the first time.

Ms Daniels, real name Stephanie Clifford, claims she had sex with Mr Trump in 2006 just months after his wife Melania gave birth to their son Barron.

In a tweet, the US president accused Ms Daniels of a "total con job" after the porn star released an artist's sketch of an unidentified man she claims threatened her in a car park in 2011.

Ms Daniels claimed the man warned her not to talk about an alleged sexual encounter with Mr Trump, which the president says never happened.

Earlier this year Ms Daniels used her first television interview discussing the alleged affair to reveal she signed a non-disclosure agreement in 2016.

She said she signed the agreement, which was made just weeks before the presidential election, in part because she was afraid of physical harm.

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"I was concerned for my family and their safety," she said. "This guy walked up on me and said to me, 'Leave Trump alone. Forget the story'.

"And then he leaned around and looked at my daughter and said, 'That's a beautiful little girl. It'd be a shame if something happened to her mom.' And then he was gone."

In his first ever reference to Ms Daniels on Twitter, Mr Trump said: "A sketch years later about a nonexistent man. A total con job, playing the Fake News Media for Fools".

It comes after FBI officials raided the office and home of Michael Cohen, Mr Trump's long-term personal attorney who paid the porn star $130,000 (105,000) after she alleged an affair.

Mr Cohen's payment to Ms Daniels has come under scrutiny after it emerged it was made just weeks before the 2016 election.

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An election watchdog group complained about the payment, arguing it could be classed as an undisclosed campaign contribution, something Mr Cohen denies.

The lawyer has refused to say what the money was for, but the White House has repeatedly said Mr Trump "vehemently denies" having sex with Ms Daniels.

Mr Trump said the FBI "broke into" Mr Cohen's New York offices, and described it repeatedly as "a disgrace".

He added: "It's an attack on our country, and what we all stand for."

However, in court last week, it emerged that Mr Trump's lawyer has been under investigation by the FBI for several months.

Federal agents are believed to have seized emails, tax documents and business records - including communications between Mr Trump and Mr Cohen - during the raid.

Mr Cohen's legal representative said his client has cooperated with authorities.

Separately yesterday, it was reported that former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal has settled with American Media Inc (AMI), freeing her to discuss her alleged affair with Trump.

Ms McDougal had signed a $150,000 (122,000) deal with AMI tabloid 'The National Enquirer', which gave them exclusive story rights.

She filed a lawsuit in California last month to be released from the so-called "catch and kill" deal.

Ms McDougal says she had a 10-month affair with Mr Trump, also allegedly starting shortly after the birth of his son.

She previously apologised to First Lady Melania Trump about the relationship in an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper.

The president has denied any affair.

The former model's lawyer, Peter Stris, reportedly described the settlement in an interview as a "total win".

"We got everything we were fighting for - she got out of the contract, gets the life rights back and owes AMI nothing more."
Woman was shot between the chest and shoulder by her daughter

A three-year-old girl shot her pregnant mother after finding her father's loaded gun, police said.

Shanique Thomas was sitting in the front seat of the car outside shops in Merrillville, Indiana, a small town around 40 miles south of Chicago, when she was shot between the chest and shoulder, according to the Lake County Sheriff's Department.

"There was blood flowing all from her stomach  just coming out like water, like a faucet," said Hadassah Zirkle, who was working in a shop nearby when someone walked in and told her a woman was bleeding outside.

She told NBC Chicago that she took the children inside the store so they could not see their injured mother.

The toddler "had no idea what she had done and she was very scared", Detective Sergeant James Bogner said.

Ms Thomas was rushed to a local hospital before being transferred to a hospital in Chicago, where she remains in a critical but stable condition.

Local media reported that the 21-year-old was believed to be around six-weeks pregnant. Her one-year-old son was also in the car at the time.

Ms Thomas's partner Menzo Brazien, was inside a shop at the time of the shooting. He told police he left the weapon by the side of his seat. Police arrested him on suspicion of child endangerment.

Its frustrating. It was an unfortunate, careless incident that shouldve been prevented and it shouldve never happened," Merrillville police chief Joseph Petruch told The Chicago Tribune. Now this three-year-old, shes going to have to live with this.

Police said the family live in Michigan City and the children had been placed in protective custody.
North Korea has suspended nuclear and long-range missile tests and plans to close its nuclear test site.

The Norths official Korean Central News Agency said the suspension of nuclear and ICBM tests went into effect on Saturday.

The country says it is making the move to shift its national focus and improve its economy.

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The announcements came days before North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is set to meet South Korean President Moon Jae-in in a border truce village for a rare summit aimed at resolving the nuclear stand-off with Pyongyang.

The Norths decisions were made in a meeting of the ruling partys full Central Committee which had convened to discuss a new stage of policies.
Former FBI director James Comey detailed a number of meetings with the US president (AP)

US president Donald Trump told former FBI director James Comey that he had serious concerns about the judgment of a top adviser, asked about the possibility of jailing journalists and described a boast from Vladimir Putin about Russian prostitutes, according to Mr Comeys notes.

The 15 pages of documents contain new details about a series of interactions with Mr Trump that Mr Comey found so unnerving that he chose to document them in writing.

Those seven encounters in the weeks and months before Mr Comey was sacked in May 2017 include a Trump Tower discussion about allegations involving Mr Trump and prostitutes in Moscow; a White House dinner at which Mr Comey said Mr Trump asked him for his loyalty; and a private Oval Office discussion where the ex-FBI head said the president asked him to end an investigation into Michael Flynn, the former White House national security adviser.

The documents had been eagerly anticipated since their existence was first revealed last year, especially since Mr Comeys interactions with Mr Trump are a critical part of special counsel Robert Muellers investigation into whether the president sought to obstruct justice.

Late on Thursday night, Mr Trump tweeted that the memos show clearly that there was NO COLLUSION and NO OBSTRUCTION.

The president also accused Mr Comey of leaking classified information. The memos obtained by the Associated Press were unclassified, though some portions were blacked out as classified.

Details from Mr Comeys memos reported in news stories last year appear to come from the unclassified portions.

In explaining the purpose of creating the memos, which have been provided to Mr Mueller, Mr Comey has said he knew there might come a day when I would need a record of what had happened to defend not only himself but the FBI as well.

Expand Close Copies of the memos written by James Comey (Susan Walsh/AP) / Facebook

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The memos cover the first three months of the Trump administration, a period of upheaval marked by staff turnover, a cascade of damaging headlines and revelations of an FBI investigation into potential ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The documents reflect Mr Trumps uneasiness about that investigation, though not always in ways that Mr Comey seemed to anticipate.

In a February 2017 conversation, for instance, Mr Trump told Mr Comey how Vladimir Putin told him, we have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world even as the president adamantly, and repeatedly, distanced himself from a salacious allegation concerning him and prostitutes in Moscow, according to one memo.

In another memo, Mr Comey recounts how Mr Trump at a private White House dinner pointed his fingers at his head and complained that Mr Flynn, his embattled national security adviser, has serious judgment issues. The president blamed Mr Flynn for failing to alert him promptly to a congratulatory call from a world leader, causing a delay for Mr Trump in returning a message to an official whose name is redacted in the documents.

By that point, the FBI had already interviewed Mr Flynn about his contacts with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, and the Justice Department had already warned White House officials that they were concerned Mr Flynn was vulnerable to blackmail.

Mr Flynn was fired on February 13 2017, after White House officials said he had misled them about his Russian contacts during the transition period by saying that he had not discussed sanctions.

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The memos also show Trumps continued distress at a dossier of allegations  compiled by an ex-British spy whose work was funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign  examining potential ties between him and his aides and the Kremlin. Mr Comey writes how Mr Trump repeatedly denied to him having been involved in an encounter with Russian prostitutes in a Moscow hotel.

The President said the hookers thing is nonsense, Mr Comey writes, noting that Mr Trump then related the conversation with Mr Putin about the most beautiful hookers. Mr Comey said Mr Trump did not say when Mr Putin had made the comment.

The documents also include the presidents musings about pursuing leakers and imprisoning journalists. They also provide insight into Mr Comeys personal and professional opinions. He judges the administrations travel ban to be legally valid, and he takes a swipe at former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, calling her predecessor, Eric Holder, smarter and more sophisticated and smoother.

The memos were provided to Congress as House Republicans escalated criticism of the US Justice Department, threatening to subpoena the documents and questioning officials.

Mr Comey is on a publicity tour to promote his new book, A Higher Loyalty. He revealed last year that he had written the memos after conversations with Mr Trump.
A volcano in southern Japan has erupted for the first time in 250 years, and authorities have set up a no-go zone around the mountain.

The Meteorological Agency said on Friday that Mount Io erupted on Thursday for the first time since 1768, spewing smoke and ash high into the sky.

The volcano is part of the Kirishima mountain range on Japans southern main island of Kyushu.

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The agency has expanded a no-go zone to the entire mountain from just around the volcanos crater.

Officials said explosions briefly subsided Friday, but cautioned residents in nearby towns against falling volcanic rock and ash.

Another volcano nearby also erupted violently in March for the first time in seven years.

Japan sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire and has 110 active volcanoes.
Washington DC, Apr 20 (IBNS): Subhash Chandra Garg, Secretary, Department of Economic Affairs (EA), represented India's Ministry of Finance at the first meeting of the BRICS Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors, held in Washington DC.

The meeting was held in the sidelines of the IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings, on Thursday.

The main issues discussed at the meeting were related to enhancing the project pipelines of New Development Bank (NDB) evenly across member countries, expansion of NDBs membership, the proposal of the South African Presidency for setting up a working group on illicit financial flows and a BRICS Task Force on Public Private Partnership.

Issues related to BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) as well as BRICS Bond Fund were also discussed.

Subhash Chandra Garg, in his interventions, emphasized that India has been a constructive participant to the discussions on NDBs membership expansion.

He expressed that a more careful and cautious approach on the value and addition/ benefits will bring to the Bank would be desirable rather than setting deadlines which are practically difficult to achieve.

On the issue of expansion of NDBs project pipeline across member nations evenly, Garg said that the objective has to be balanced with member countrys requirement for infrastructure financing.

On the proposal for setting up the Working Group on Illicit Financial Flows and BRICS PPP Task Force, the Secretary (EA) expressed Indias appreciation on the proposal.

However, he suggested that NDB already has a Project Preparation Fund. Hence a separate similar preparation fund for PPP is not desirable. This Project Preparation Fund also will be able to serve preparation of PPP projects as well.

In view of the Indias experience to develop brownfield infrastructure projects as asset class, Garg suggested that the BRICS may consider this more readily available infrastructure asset class for getting finances from pension funds, sovereign wealth funds etc. as sources of financing.

He also sought the support of the Presidency in building consensus among the BRICS members on the BRICS Rating Agency proposal.

He requested the Presidency to receive and take forward the Report to be submitted by Expert Group set up under the aegis of BRICS Business Council to study the feasibility of the BRICS Rating Agency.

Image: FinMinIndia/Twitter
New Delhi, Apr 20 (IBNS): External Affairs Minister (EAM) Sushma Swaraj will visit Mongolia from Apr 25-26 at the invitation of Damdin Tsogtbaatar, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Mongolia, read an official statement.

This will be EAMs first visit to Mongolia.

The last visit of Indian External Affairs Minister to Mongolia was 42 years ago, read the statement.

During her visit, EAM will co-chair the 6th round of India-Mongolia Joint Consultative Committee (IMJCC) meeting with Foreign Minister Tsogtbaatar, covering a range of issues including, inter alia, political, strategic, economic, educational and cultural ties, read the statement issued by the MEA.

The last meeting of IMJCC was held in New Delhi in 2016.

"During her visit, EAM will also deliver the keynote address at the Kushok Bakula Birth Centenary Celebrations in Ulaanbaatar commemorating the birth anniversary of Late Venerable Kushok Bakula Rinpoche, a highly revered Buddhist leader and monk from Ladakh, India and a former Ambassador of India to Mongolia. Bakula Rinpoche as the longest serving Indian Ambassador to Mongolia, made seminal contribution to promotion of India-Mongolia ties," read the statement.
New Delhi, Apr 20 (IBNS): Several opposition parties along with the Congress are willing to move an impeachment motion against Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dipak Misra, who had been alleged to assign cases of far reaching consequences to selective judges by senior Supreme Court judges, media reports said.

Several opposition parties met Rajya Sabha Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu on this issue on Friday.

However, Congress itself is divided in opinions over the impeachment motion.

Opposition parties like Trinamool Congress (TMC), DMK, Samajwadi Party (SP), Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) do not support the impeachment motion.

So far, the cluster of opposition parties could manage to get 60 lawmakers' signatures on the petition to move the motion, media report said.

Four senior judges of the top court- Justices Jasti Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B Lokur and Kurian Joseph- months ago alleged that cases with far reaching consequences were assigned to selective judges.

Justice Chelameswar, who represented the four judges in an unprecedented press conference, said they had approached the CJI with a letter but failed to convince him.

Just a day ago, a bench led by Misra dismissed all pleas seeking an independent probe in the death of Justice BH Loya, stirring fresh row.

Loya, who was hearing the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case in which Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) national president Amit Shah was accused, died due to cardiac arrest.

The new judge who replaced Loya acquitted Shah of all charges.

Image: wikimedia commons
New Delhi, Apr 20 (IBNS): Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad has said that seven opposition parties are moving an impeachment motion against Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dipak Misra with the support of 64 present MPs.

Congress, Left, Samajwadi Party (SP), Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) have signed the petition.

Azad said this at a press conference on Friday.

The opposition parties met Rajya Sabha Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu to submit the petitions against Misra, who had recently stirred controversy by dismissing pleas seeking an independent probe into Justice BH Loya's death.

Loya, who was hearing the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case in which Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) national president Amit Shah was accused, died due to cardiac arrest.

The new judge who replaced Loya acquitted Shah of all charges.

Seven retired MPs have also signed the petition. However, Azad asked Naidu to discount those seven names since they have retired.

Azad, who is the leader of the opposition in the Rajya Sabha, said the opposition has moved the motion under five listed grounds of misbehaviour.

However, opposition parties like Trinamool Congress (TMC), DMK, Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) did not support the impeachment motion.

Four senior judges of the top court- Justices Jasti Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B Lokur and Kurian Joseph- months ago alleged that cases with far reaching consequences were assigned to selective judges.

Justice Chelameswar, who represented the four judges in an unprecedented press conference, said they had approached the CJI with a letter but failed to convince him.

Image: wikimedia commons
New Delhi, Apr 20 (IBNS) : Sixty-four Rajya Sabha MPs from seven opposition parties, led by the Congress, signed impeachment motion against Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra for what they said "five listed grounds of misbehaviour."

"We have moved an impeachment motion seeking the removal of CJI Dipak Misra," opposition leader in the Rajya Sabha, Ghulam Nabi Azad said after meeting Vice President Venkaiah Naidu.

The move comes a day after the SC ruling in the CBI Judge BH Loyas death case.

Azad said seven parties, including SP, BSP, CPM, CPI, Muslim League have extended support to the impeachment move.

He said that 71 MPs had signed the impeachment motion (against CJI) but as seven have retired the number is now 64.

" We have more than the minimum requirement needed to entertain the motion and we are sure that the Hon Chairman will take action."

Azad said the opposition has moved the motion under five listed grounds of misbehaviour.

However, reports said that opposition parties like Trinamool Congress (TMC), DMK, Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) did not support the impeachment motion.

Earlier, a delegation of seven opposition political parties, led by Congress leader Ghulam Nabi azad met Vice President and the Rajya Sabha Chairman Venkaiah Naidu to discuss their proposed impeachment motion against the CJI.

Congrsess spokesman Kapil Sibal said. : "No other way to protect the institution except the impeachment motion. We are doing so with a very heavy heart: Kapil Sibal

" We wish this day had never come in the fabric of our constitutional framework. Since the day he (Dipak Misra) was appointed as CJI there have been questions raised in the manner in which he has dealt with certain cases," he said.

"We were hoping that the anguish of the judges would be addressed by the CJI. More than three months have passed, nothing has changed."

" Didn't want this day to come, hope the Vice President will accept the impeachment motion," Sibal said.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court on Friday termed as very unfortunate the public statements, including those made by lawmakers, on impeachment of judges.

"We are all very disturbed about it," a bench comprising Justices AK Sikri and Ashok Bhushan said after the counsel appearing for the petitioner raised the issue of politicians making public statements on impeachment of judges.

The impeachment move has its genesis in the public complaint made by four senior judges of the top court- Justices Jasti Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B Lokur and Kurian Joseph- that cases with far reaching consequences were assigned to selective judges.

Justice Chelameswar, who represented the four judges in an unprecedented press conference, said they had approached the CJI with a letter but failed to convince him.
New Delhi, Apr 20 (IBNS) : Leaders of seven opposition parties on Friday submitted a notice for the impeachment of the Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dipak Misra to vice president Venkaiah Naidu, reports said.

The move comes in the wake of the Supreme Court (SC) judgment on Thursday, which dismissed the demand for an investigation into the death of CBI judge BH Loya.

As many as 64 members of the Rajya Sabha, belonging to seven political parties signed the notice for impeachment proceedings against the CJI. The MPs ae from the Cong, the NCP, CPM, the CPI, the SP, the BSP and the Muslim League.

Senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal said the notice mentions five grounds of misbehaviour for the CJI's impeachment.

"Since CJI Dipak Mishra come, questions have been raised about his conduct. It showed in the January 12 press conference of four judges of Supreme Court. One concern of the four judges was memorandum of procedure was being unsettled," said Sibal after the parties submitted the impeachment notice to Naidu.

There was no other way to protect the institution except the impeachment motion. We are doing so with a very heavy heart," Sibal said.

" We wish this day had never come in the fabric of our constitutional framework. Since the day he (Dipak Misra) was appointed as CJI there have been questions raised in the manner in which he has dealt with certain cases," he said.

"We were hoping that the anguish of the judges would be addressed by the CJI. More than three months have passed, nothing has changed."

" Didn't want this day to come, hope the Vice President will accept the impeachment motion," Sibal said.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court on Friday termed as very unfortunate the public statements, including those made by lawmakers, on impeachment of judges.

"We are all very disturbed about it," a bench comprising Justices AK Sikri and Ashok Bhushan said after the counsel appearing for the petitioner raised the issue of politicians making public statements on impeachment of judges.

The impeachment move has its genesis in the public complaint made by four senior judges of the top court- Justices Jasti Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B Lokur and Kurian Joseph- that cases with far reaching consequences were assigned to selective judges.

Justice Chelameswar, who represented the four judges in an unprecedented press conference, said they had approached the CJI with a letter but failed to convince him.
Kolkata, Apr 20 (IBNS): A single-judge bench of the Calcutta High Court on Friday directed the West Bengal State Election Commission to extend its deadline for nomination filing.

It directed that all candidates, who could not file nominations before the given time, could file nominations and take part in the polls.

Bench of Justice Subrata Talukder also directed the election commission to announce fresh dates to conduct panchayat election in the state.

The verdict was given after the bench heard petitions of the opposition parties which had accused the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) of resorting to violence to hinder the filing of nominations by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Left and Congress.

Earlier the opposition parties moved Supreme Court after the State Election Commission (SEC), in the wake of reports of pre-poll panchayat violence, extended the nomination filing deadline to only rescind it within hours.

However, the top court transferred the case to the Calcutta High Court.

Ever since the poll dates have been announced by the SEC, the eastern state has witnessed widespread violence primarily by the TMC and emerging principal opposition BJP.

The poll will take place in three phases on May 1, 3 and 5.



The results of the poll will be declared on May 8.

Panchayat poll in the state is significant as it is considered to be crucial for the General Elections, which will be held next in 2019.

(Reporting by Deepayan Sinha)




New Delhi, Apr 20 (IBNS): Vice President of India M. Venkaiah Naidu has said that translating legislative intent into programmatic content and demonstrating to the common citizens what Surajya actually looks like in day to day administration, the civil services have an enormous opportunity today.

He was delivering the inaugural address at the 2-day event of the 12th Civil Services Day, here on Friday.

The Minister of State for Development of North Eastern Region (I/C), Prime Ministers Office, Personnel, Public Grievances & Pensions, Atomic Energy and Space, Dr. Jitendra Singh and other dignitaries were present on the occasion.



The Vice President said that a clean, competent, people-friendly, proactive administrative leadership is the need of the hour.

He further said that Swarajya has to be meaningful for each Indian and, for this Surajya is inevitable.

There is a need for honest introspection into the effectiveness and efficiency of our administrative structures and processes, he added.



The Vice President said that the focus has shifted to implementation and innovation and it is becoming increasingly clear that business as usual approach will not do.

"We must collectively transform India into a nation that we can all be proud of," he added.



The Vice President called on officers of Civil Services to reorient their approach to look upon themselves as catalysts of change, as facilitators of change, as inspirational leaders for an aspirational India.

He further said that it is the collective responsibility of the executive, the legislature, the judiciary and the media to identify, combat and root out evils including casteism, communalism, corruption, inequality, discrimination and violence.

"We need to be sensitive to these unpleasant realities and try to alter them by being unbiased and evenhanded," he added.



Following is the text of Vice Presidents address:

It is indeed a great privilege to be a part of the two day celebration of Civil Services Day and address this gathering of change makers.

Today is a day of celebration, a day that reaffirmsthe competence, commitment and confidence of the civil services to make a difference to the governance landscape of our country.

I am happy to be with the officers who are being recognized for their quest for excellence. I compliment them as well as those who are engaged in similar innovative initiatives across the country.

Our countrys civil services are among the best in the world.

They constitute the best and the brightest minds of our country.

They have the ability to absorb new information and knowledge, adapt to a rapidly changing socio-political environment and address the key challenges in contemporary society.

Many of them have the forward looking, strategic vision to guide policy formulation and the drive to make a difference in service delivery.

The essential gap today is between the grandiose conception and the ground level implementation.

There is an urgent need to re-think our existing governance paradigm.

There is a need for honest introspection into the effectiveness and efficiency of our administrative structures and processes.

It is this introspection and reflection that has made many civil servants, some of whom are getting awards today, to come up with alternative strategies for improving the system.

I wish and hope that many more civil servants would also think afresh and keep raising the bar through innovative solutions.

After all, even for the best, there is always a possibility to become better.

And there is no better time than now.

There is an unmistakable air of buoyant optimism today.

The clarion call of the Prime Minister to Reform, Perform and Transform has found a rare resonance everywhere.

The focus has shifted to implementation and innovation. It is becoming increasingly clear that business as usual approach will not do.

Age old institutions like the Planning Commission are being reinvented. The overarching idea is clear. We must collectively transform India into a nation that we can all be proud of.

Swarajya has to be meaningful for each Indian. And, for this Surajya is inevitable. Nothing short of a paradigm shift in governance will be adequate.

A clean, competent, people-friendly, proactive administrative leadership is the need of the hour.

Translating legislative intent into programmatic content and demonstrating to the common citizens what Surajya actually looks like in day to day administration, the civil services have an enormous opportunity today, like never before, to serve the country and our people.

With the mantra of Reform, Perform and Transform and focusing on Gaon, Garib, Kisan, Mahila aur Yuva government has taken up several schemes and programs like Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana, Pradhan Mantri Suraksha Bima Yojana, Pradhan Mantri, Atal Pension Yojana, Sukanya Sammriddhi Yojana , Ujjwala Yojana,BetiBachao, BetiPadhao ,JAM- Direct Benefit Transfer, Mudra Yojana, Start up India, Stand Up, Skill India, , Swachh Bharat , Housing for all, Ayushman Bharat, Mission Indradhanush, Power for All, Ujala Scheme (Leds), Make In India, Swadesh Darshan, Smart Cities, Amrut, Hriday, Namami Gange, Sagarmala, Look east, Khelo India,

Government E Market place  GEM to root out corruption in Government Procurements, GST: One Nation, One Tax and may more.

All these schemes and programmes are building blocks of a new resurgent India we wish to build, for the renaissance we are ushering in. Effective and timely implementation of these schemes and programmes are huge managerial challenge.

We have the strength within our country to achieve results. We have only to get our act together.

As the Vedic sages have said, Samgachadhvam, let us walk together.

As the Prime minister has envisaged, we should work as Team India with people as the main agents of change.

We must aspire for a new India where everyone will become part in the developmental process and get the fruits of it.

Civil Services have to reorient their approach to look upon themselves as catalysts of change, as facilitators of change, as inspirational leaders for an aspirational India.

Sisters and Brothers,

This I said was a renaissance and resurgence. Probably, I should add that this is probably the second renaissance, the first one occurred when India became independent and the all India Services were established.

Modern Indian civil service initially established by the British underwent a metamorphosis after independence. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the chief architect of an integrated India and the visionary Iron man who established the steel frame of all India services had succinctly envisaged this metamorphosis in his stirring address to the civil service probationers at Metcalfe House in New Delhi on 21st April, 1947:

The service will now be free to or will have to adopt its true role of national service without being trammelled by traditions and habits of the past; officers must be guided by a real spirit of service in their day-to-day administration, for in no other manner can they fit in the scheme of things.

This is the expectation expressed by the founder of Indias civil services nearly seventy years ago.

As we commemorate that extraordinary speech of the great legendary unifier of the country, we need to examine how far we have lived upto those expectations.

The shift and the transformation that Sardar Patel envisaged was a shift in attitude, a shift in our behavior.

It is a shift from doing a job to serving the people. The job has a higher objective, a different yardstick for success. It should have people at the centre and it should be done with a spirit of service.

The first is empathy. The civil service is the most visible face of the government since citizens contact the civil servants for various services. The governments image depends to a large extent on the image of the civil service and the manner in which it responds to peoples needs and aspirations. Empathy and courtesy at the cutting edge level can really enhance customer satisfaction. In fact, the hallmark of a well-functioning civil service is the ability to serve the citizens with respect and alacrity.

What does this spirit of service to people entail? It necessitates, in my view, a number of attitudinal shifts. Let me mention just a few important ones.

First and foremost, it requires us to have the humility to hear the voices of the people, the humility to learn from different people and the humility to accept if there are deficiencies.

Second is the agility, the ability to access information and knowledge and creatively apply them to new situations. Keeping our eyes and mind open and our ears and feet to the ground, we need to innovate and improvise to suit the life contexts of the people we are serving.

Third, is to re-define accountability and shifting the focus to outcomes and not merely concentrating on activities. If we have to serve the people, we must know what the real concerns are and be able to address them. We must have the ability to measure our success by the tangible outcomes, by the changes we are able to bring about in the lives of our people.

In this context, it is good to recall Mahatma Gandhijis wise counsel:

Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man [woman] whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him [her]. Will he [she] gain anything by it?  Then you will find your doubts and yourself melt away.

When we talk of service to people, it is good to look at the segmentation of our society and shift our focus towards those segments of people which are marginalized and voiceless. We ought to be especially attentive to these feeble but important voices. As Dr. B.R. Ambedkar said in his speech to the Constituent Assembly on December 9, 1946:

If we wish to preserve the Constitution in which we have sought to enshrine the principle of Government of the people, for the people and by the people, let us resolve not to be tardy in the recognition of the evils that lie across our path and which induce people to prefer Government for the people to Government by the people, nor to be weak in our initiative to remove them. That is the only way to serve the country. I know of no better.

The evils that Dr. B.R. Ambedkar had hinted at are the social evils including casteism, communalism, corruption, inequality, discrimination and violence. These evils continue to raise their ugly heads in different parts of the country at different times. They are a blot on our countrys history.

As leaders in countrys governance, it is the collective responsibility of the executive, the legislature, the judiciary and the media to identify, combat and root out these evils.

We need to be sensitive to these unpleasant realities and try to alter them by being unbiased and evenhanded. This can accelerate the building of a new India, an inclusive India, an integrated India and an innovative India. Sardar Patels exhortation to the All India Service probationers, on April 21, 1947, to maintain utmost impartiality in administration is as relevant today as it was then. He cautioned: A civil servant cannot afford to, and must not, take part in politics. Nor must he involve himself in communal wrangles. To depart from the path of rectitude in either of these respects is to debase public service and to lower its dignity.

Sisters and brothers,

You, as civil servants, have been the sheet anchor of our democratic polity. You have provided the continuity and stability we need in governance. Now, I am happy that you are also revamping the system to induce greater predictability, accountability and agility.

We are living in interesting times. On the one hand, we have formidable challenges, some of them seemingly intractable ones. On the other, we have new frontiers of knowledge, science and technology opening up new possibilities. You are uniquely positioned to find the best fit between the problem and ideal solutions.

This is, I realize, a constant search because the nature of the problems as well as the range of solutions keep changing very rapidly.

But, if you keep the constitutional mandate of civil services in view and the larger picture of serving India as the overarching objective of your mission, a lot of good ideas can emerge and get translated into people-centered policies and programmes.

Sisters and Brothers,

We are an aspirational young democracy, the largest in the world and in the throes of a socio-economic transformation. We need to blend the competencies of diverse stakeholders to achieve a synergistic momentum towards inclusive growth.

I know that many of you have been thinking and acting on these lines. India needs more of your kind. India needs a civil service that constantly refines itself and delivers the finest service at the cutting edge level effectively and efficiently.

I am glad that you are conducting a number of sessions today focused on the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Agriculture, Housing, Skilling and Digital Payments. I hope the discussions will lead to substantive recommendations which will help further advance the cause of developing strong responsive public administration and governance systems. I shall be delighted to hear of the outcomes of your deliberations.

I once again congratulate all the civil servants on their tireless efforts to make our country and our planet a better place to live and work. As our ancient sages have said Shubhaaste Panthaanah Santu (Let your path be full of goodness).

Thank You!

Jai Hind!
Guwahati, Apr 20 (IBNS): One person was killed and three others were injured in a clash between two groups over property dispute in Assam's Kamrup district.

The incident took place at at Bidyanagar area near Nagarbera, where two groups clashed among themselves following a dispute over property.

According to the reports, the incident happened on Thursday evening where a person named Jahidul Islam received severe injuries after a group attacked him by sharp weapons.

Hee was admitted at Guwahati Medical College Hospital, where he succumbed to his injuries.

The situation turned violent after the news got spread that Jahidul died at GMCH.

During the clash, three more persons were injured and agitated mob set ablaze the house of Akkas Ali.

Kamrup district police immediately rushed to the area and brought the situation under control.

They arrested three persons in connection with the group clash.



(Reporting by Hemanta Kumar Nath)
New Delhi, Apr 20 (IBNS): Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Friday said the impeachment motion against Chief Justice of India Deepak Misra is a "revenge petition after the falsehood of the Congress Party has been established in the Justice Loya death case."

He said it is an attempt "to intimidate a Judge and send a message to other Judges, that if you dont agree with us, fifty MPs are enough for a revenge action."

In a Facebook post, Jaitley wrote, "The impeachment of a Judge of the Supreme Court is to be done only in the case of either his incapacity or on proven misconduct. The Congress Party and its friends have started using impeachment as a political tool."

Sixty-four Rajya Sabha MPs from seven opposition parties, led by the Congress, signed impeachment motion against Dipak Misra for what they said "five listed grounds of misbehaviour."

"We have moved an impeachment motion seeking the removal of CJI Dipak Misra," opposition leader in the Rajya Sabha, Ghulam Nabi Azad said after meeting Vice President Venkaiah Naidu.

The move comes a day after the SC ruling in the CBI Judge BH Loyas death case.

Azad said seven parties, including SP, BSP, CPM, CPI, Muslim League have extended support to the impeachment move.

He said that 71 MPs had signed the impeachment motion (against CJI) but as seven have retired the number is now 64.

" We have more than the minimum requirement needed to entertain the motion and we are sure that the Hon Chairman will take action."

Azad said the opposition has moved the motion under five listed grounds of misbehaviour.

However, reports said that opposition parties like Trinamool Congress (TMC), DMK, Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) did not support the impeachment motion.

Earlier, a delegation of seven opposition political parties, led by Congress leader Ghulam Nabi azad met Vice President and the Rajya Sabha Chairman Venkaiah Naidu to discuss their proposed impeachment motion against the CJI.

Congrsess spokesman Kapil Sibal said. : "No other way to protect the institution except the impeachment motion. We are doing so with a very heavy heart: Kapil Sibal

" We wish this day had never come in the fabric of our constitutional framework. Since the day he (Dipak Misra) was appointed as CJI there have been questions raised in the manner in which he has dealt with certain cases," he said.

"We were hoping that the anguish of the judges would be addressed by the CJI. More than three months have passed, nothing has changed."

" Didn't want this day to come, hope the Vice President will accept the impeachment motion," Sibal said.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court on Friday termed as very unfortunate the public statements, including those made by lawmakers, on impeachment of judges.

"We are all very disturbed about it," a bench comprising Justices AK Sikri and Ashok Bhushan said after the counsel appearing for the petitioner raised the issue of politicians making public statements on impeachment of judges.

The impeachment move has its genesis in the public complaint made by four senior judges of the top court- Justices Jasti Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B Lokur and Kurian Joseph- that cases with far reaching consequences were assigned to selective judges.

Justice Chelameswar, who represented the four judges in an unprecedented press conference, said they had approached the CJI with a letter but failed to convince him.
New Delhi, Apr 20 (IBNS): Vice President M. Venkaiah Naidu has said that education should not only prepare the youth to face challenges of a technologically-driven knowledge society, but also make them analyze critically and come out with innovative solutions to the problems faced by people.

He was addressing the gathering after inaugurating the IILM University Gurugram Campus from IILM Lodhi Road Campus, here on Friday.

The Vice President said that students should be confident of dreaming big and exploring uncharted territories and remain rooted to our culture, traditions, customs and history.

He further said that they should never neglect their parents, mother tongue, motherland and native village.

They should always believe in co-existing harmoniously with nature for a better future, he added.

The Vice President expressed concern over the global ranking of Indian Universities and said that there are more than 800 universities in the country and none of them figures in the top ranked global institutes.

He said that merely expanding infrastructure with sleek-looking buildings will not make an institution excellent unless it imparts education of highest standards without compromising on quality.

Liberal and interdisciplinary education is must to get a holistic perspective of the increasingly knowledge-centric and interdependent world, he added.

Vice President said that education in silos will not equip students for future. Liberal education with focus on technology, skill development and entrepreneurship will serve well the students, industry and the society, he added.
Ottawa, Apr 20 (IBNS): Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has featured in the Times 100 most influential list along with several other top global leaders.

Trudeau featured in the Leaders category.

Some of the global leaders who featured in the same category are US President Donald Trump, Bagladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, Chinese President XI Jingping, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, French President Emmanuel Macron and others.

Trudeau, the leader of the Liberal Party, is the 23rd PM of Canada.

He won the leadership battle of his party in 2013.

A year later, Justin Trudeau, the eldest son of former Canadian PM Pierre Trudeau, went to lead his party to win the federal election.

With one year left for the next federal election, Trudeau is eyeing on to a number of policies like legalisation of marijuana sale and making an understanding with the US and Mexico for a better North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which is a trade pact between the three countries.

He is the youngest PM of the country after Joe Clark.



Image: time.com
ThyssenKrupp has delayed its merger with Tata Steel to December 2018 over delays in reaching labour agreements over job guarantees. Thyssenkrupps labour union has asked for safeguards that they would not be disadvantaged by the merger. While the deal does not require the approval of ThyssenKrupps labour union, it is necessary to prevent operational disruptions in the future.ThyssenKrupp and Tata Steel had signed an agreement on September 20, 2017 to form a 50:50 Joint Venture. This newly created entity would become the second largest European steelmaker after Arcelor Mittal Europe. The management of Tata Steel expects the JV to create cost synergies of 400-600mn euros (Rs3,200-4,800cr) per annum through reduction of costs and better utilisation of downstream operations.We feel that this delay does not endanger the deal as the economics for the merger would create an entity with better scale and would thus be more competitive than each separate entity. We also feel that while the delay in the merger may affect earnings in FY19E, it would however, not impact the earnings in FY20E.Tata Steel Ltd (TSL) would benefit from (a) ~2% volume growth in domestic steel production supported by spending on infrastructure and (b) steel spreads to stabilise in medium term due to domestic demand. The company is expected to see revenue and EBITDA CAGR of 2.8% and 8.9% over FY18-20E respectively with an EBITDA margin of 17.7% in FY20E. EBITDA margins are also likely to expand by ~192bps owing to better utilization levels and cost rationalisation for Tata Steel Europe. The stock is currently trading at 7.1x FY20E EPS.TSL is an international steel company with a manufacturing presence in Europe and Asia. The total steel capacity for the company stands at 27.5mn tonnes. The company is planning to upgrade the Kalinganagar plant, which would take the domestic steel capacity of TSL to ~18mn tonnes. Domestic steel production stood at 12.48mt in FY18, up 6.8% yoy. Steel production for TSL Europe stood at 10.68mt in FY18.
Once the battles are lost and won, once the war ends, once the curtain falls, symbolizing the end of a show, it's the credits, one waits for.

Acknowledgement is not always about earning the honour, oftentimes it is also about ensuring that all the hard work didn't go in vain, that people know and firmly understand the gravity of the situation they have been saved from and how different their lives could have been, had things progressed differently.

abc

Unfortunately, life doesn't guarantee any recognition and that's what happened with Sikhs in Australia. For nearly 200 years, Sikhs gave their hard work, identity and life to Australia, yet, their efforts were unfelt, unrecorded, unacknowledged.

Oh so yes. Pauline, Sikhs have been in Australia for nearly 200 years. Like the Chinese Australian community back in the Gold Rush (and all the other multi cultural communities). Ms. Hanson, research!!! https://t.co/od0WbUVePy  Akash Temple (@akashtemple) April 20, 2018

While there were many monuments to honour the colonial pioneers, there wasn't anything substantial to do the same for Sikhs, until now.

abc

Sikhs who have been supporting Australia since the 1800s, participating in wars, contributing as artisans, erudite, cameleers, hawkers, shopkeepers and professional wrestlers have now found a place of their own - a place that will laud their efforts.

The Australian Sikh Heritage Trail is a network of pathways and storyboards by Perth's Canning River, where their contributions have been recorded.

A highlight of my visit to WA this week: inspecting works on the new Sikh Heritage Trail in Riverton with Ben Morton and members of the WA's Sikh community. A series of informative plaques here set out the strong contribution of Sikh people in Australia dating back 150 years. pic.twitter.com/E32M1exJEd  Alan Tudge (@AlanTudgeMP) April 12, 2018

For the first time, Sikhs in Australia will now see the contributions of their ancestors. Teenagers Taje and Nikki Singh born and raised in Perth with be amongst the first generation who will witness the honour.

abc

"I grew up in Riverton, I went to school here, I made all my memories here, and it's really nice to see that my ancestors are being recognised in the place where we grew up," Taje said.

This area will be a physical representation of how culturally rich Australian history is, given the presence of Sikhs. It talks about the multicultural and diversity of its nature.
Shoojit Sircars October, which stars Varun Dhawan and Banita Sandhu in lead roles, has been receiving all the praises from the critics as well as audiences. The emotional and distorted tale of two acquaintances  a beautiful yet heartbreaking story of love and loss  has struck the chord with everyone who has watched it.

However, looks like, the movie is a copy of a Marathi film.

Twitter

Filmmaker/editor Hemal Tridevi saw the movie and noticed that the film was similar to Marathi film 'Aarti'. On behalf of Artis director Sarika Mene, who shared the true story of her brother in the movie, highlighted that the movie is plagiarised in an FB post.

Here's what she wrote:

"Shoojit Sircars October is a copy of a Marathi film  Aarti -- the unknown Love Story

My friends on Facebook who are connected to Bollywood film and media -- please spread the word. Shoojit Sircar stole Sarika Menes acclaimed Marathi film  Aarti  the unknown love story, to make October. Aarti is based on a true story of the films directors own brother -- Sunny. It is alleged that Sircar has not just picked up the plot and the storyline, but has also blatantly copied the look and the moments from the original film.

The filmmakers of October never acquired any rights to the Marathi film and they never contacted Sarika (the director). Sarika is now so depressed that she is almost suicidal. For the past couple of days she has been knocking on doors of various associations in India -- but none have offered any concrete help. She has already spent about 2 lacs in trying to get justice.

Sarika comes from a middle class family and she had sold her ancestral home to make her Marathi film. She will not be able to afford steep legal bills and the uphill battle.

I had acquired 40% rights to adapt this film in Hindi -- and had made modest investments in writing the screenplay and composing the songs. But while we were in the midst of making the Hindi version -- October was released.

I would appreciate if you wrote a story or an article on this -- for the sake of protecting indie voices in Bollywood. I would also appreciate if you can recommend an IP lawyer in India, who can take this case pro bono. Sarika wants to fight. I want to help her with the fight too.

I am happy to share a private link with anyone wanting to help us out with getting justice. Please message me."

Also Read: 'October' Actress Banita Sandhu Explains Why Less Is More In This Story About Love

You can watch the trailer of Aarti below.

..

Also Read: Banita Sandhu Shares An Emotional Account Of Getting Her Hair Chopped Off For Film 'October'
As much as green tea may be beneficial for your health it turns out that higher does of supplements containing green tea extracts can be toxic and even damaging to your liver, according to a recent research from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA).

Tea infusions, as used for brewed tea, are still considered safe. Instant tea drinks are also fine as they contain lower levels of the antioxidants naturally present in green tea, Parma-based EFSA said.

livin3

Consuming too many of these antioxidants can be harmful, which is why the amount contained in supplements can have a harmful effect on the liver.

Most supplements provide an intake of 5-1000 mg, while tea infusions typically only contain 90-300 mg, EFSA, which oversees food safety in the European Union, said.

consumerreports

Researchers determined that consuming over 800 mg per day led to higher health risks, but the EFSA said experts could not yet determine a supplement dosage that would be entirely safe.

Tea infusion did not indicate liver damage due the lower concentrations of antioxidants in them.
A 10-year-old girl has been raped and killed during a wedding function in a village in Kabirdham district of Chhattisgarh on Wednesday. Police said the 25-year-old accused, who has been arrested, admitted to have raped and killed the child by smashing her head with a stone, reported IANS.

The little girl was reportedly related to the bridegroom who was a friend of the accused, Uttam Sahu, a resident of Rehauta village in Kunda police station area.

Finding everyone involved in the wedding, he lured the girl away and committed the crime. The body of the child was found dumped in a dry riverbed in the village on Thursday morning.
The Supreme Court has ordered the centre to seize 1993 Mumbai blast accused Dawood Ibrahim's properties. The central government is likely to acquire at least seven properties of Dawood Ibrahims late mother and sister in Mumbai.

The Apex court also dismissed appeals filed by Dawoods mother Amina Bi Kaskar and sister Hasina Parker against orders of confiscation.

A bench of Justices RK Agrawal and AM Sapre took the decision to not accept the appeal. The seven properties include some flats, in Mumbai's Nagpada.

The bench was hearing a matter in which the government had initiated a move to forfeit the ill-gotten properties, including flats in Mumbai.

All about the case

The Nagpada properties belonged to Dawood, but his mother and sister who are dead now had taken the possession. In 1988, the government sealed the properties under The Smugglers And Foreign Exchange Manipulators (Forfeiture Of Property) Act (SAFEMA).Mother and sister of Dawood challenged the seizure which was initiated after blasts in 1993. Dawood had fled the country and the departments concerned sought to seize properties belonging to him.

The Smugglers And Foreign Exchange Manipulators (Forfeiture Of Property) Act (SAFEMA) tribunal had in 1998 and the Delhi High Court in 2012 upheld the seizure move.

As per the ministry, the properties in posh Nagpada in Mumbai were in possession of Dawoods mother and sister and now the government may forfeit these properties.

Properties auction in November last year

Last November, three south Mumbai properties belonging to the fugitive don were auctioned for Rs 11.58 crore. The properties were put on auction by the ministry of finance, under the Smugglers and Foreign Exchange Manipulators (Forfeiture of Property) Act. The three properties were the Hotel Raunaq Afroz, also known as Delhi Zaika, Shabnam Guest House and six rooms in Damarwala building.

Dawoods properties across the world

Dawood is a fugitive believed to be living in Karachi. He has massive properties worth billions spread across countries like India, UK, Spain, Morocco, Turkey, Australia, Cyprus and UAE.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to UK for bilateral talks and the multilateral Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), was greeted by protesters.

As he was about to meet his British counterpart Theresa May, there were demonstrations by people protesting against atrocities in India. The protests turned violent after an Indian flag was torn down from one of the official flagpoles set up for all 53 Commonwealth countries, reported ANI.

When the PM was addressing a group of Indians in Westminster, a group of Pakistan backed pro-Khalistani and Kashmiri protesters, in the presence of London Metropolitan Police, pulled down the tricolor from a pole at London's Parliament Square and replaced it with a flag representing PoK and Khalistan.

However, the British foreign office has apologised for India's national flag-burning incident, which took place at London's Parliament Square on Wednesday.

ANI

"While people have the right to hold peaceful protests, we are disappointed with the action taken by a small minority in Parliament Square and contacted High Commissioner Yashvardhan Kumar Sinha as soon as we were made aware," according to Foreign and Commonwealth Office's statement, reported by asianlite.com.

The web portal also reported that the UK officials have arranged for a replacement flag to be put up at the Parliament Square.

The foreign office also mentioned that Prime Minister Modi's visit "has strengthened our relationship with India and we look forward to working even more closely together on a number of important areas." The Indian Journalist Association has also taken note of the incident and called for a strong action against the wrongdoers.
When you are going to school by auto, bus or by train keep a safe distance from the other sex. Take care of the way you sit. Dont wear provocative dresses.

These are not warnings from a khap panchayat but lessons from a Class VIII science textbook on ways to prevent child sexual abuse that the Tamil Nadu government publishes under its Samacheer Kalvi (Balanced Education) system.

In a ham-handed effort at sex education, the government has for 12 years been printing a textbook that explicitly warns children against cross-gender interaction and issues a retrograde caution against provocative clothes  implicitly suggesting that children bear the responsibility of meeting an unspecified, nebulous dress code to avoid being abused.

The textbook took on a life of its own on the internet on Thursday, amid a public outcry against the sexual assault of minors in Unnao and Kathua, and gained traction as social media users shared disbelief and outrage over its content.

The Samacheer Kalvi system had already taken a shelling from experts, who say its stress on rote learning alienates students instead of encouraging meaningful engagement .

Textbook was cleared for printing 12 yrs ago, all chapters will be revised: SCERT director

School education department principal secretary Pradeep Yadav said he was unaware of the issue and would look into the matter. State Council of Education Research and Training (SCERT), Tamil Nadu, director G Arivoli said the authorities had cleared the textbook for printing 12 years ago.

It was a long time ago. All these chapters will be revised, Arivoli told TOI. We have consulted officials with the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights to provide inputs this time on ways to prevent abuse.

He said the government now plans to introduce progressive sex education earlier, starting from Class VI.

Representational Image

Child rights activists dismissed the explanation that the government had vetted the textbook 12 years ago as a poor excuse for a regressive mindset.

Sherin Bosko, co-founder of Chennai-based Nakshatra, an NGO that works with victims of child sexual abuse, said the tone of the textbook only reinforces the notion that victims are responsible for rape.

What message are we sending to our children? Sit properly or you will be raped, she said. And to the boy? If you rape a girl who doesnt sit properly, it is her fault.

She recalled the 2014 rape of a 9-year-old girl and how a Child Welfare Committee member had instructed the victim to sit decently as they waited for doctors to arrive and conduct a medical examination.

The CWC member gave the mother a dressing down for not disciplining her daughter, Bosko said. Our education system will drive home the same message to the same girl  that she is to blame for what happened.

In all likelihood, the child will study the same chapter. The school education department will revise the syllabus for class only in 2020-21. The curriculum committee will look into this chapter and remove it by the next academic year if needed, a senior school education department official said.
Google is constantly updating its products and software, both for modernisation and security. Sometimes however, these updates can have a negative overall effect.

This time around, that negative effect if being felt by journalists and activists across the globe.

Google recently made a change to its App Engine, part of its network architecture, that now stops a practice called domain fronting. That in itself isnt much of a big deal, until you realise that its a process relied on by a number of apps that work to preserve peoples Internet freedom.

The update was first spotted by developers of privacy-focused web browser Tor. Domain fronting is something used by a number of apps like encrypted instant messenger Signal, Chinese anti-censorship tool GreatFire.org, and even VPN services. Its used to work around government censorship by hiding where a users Internet traffic is really going, which censors might block if they found out. Instead of connecting directly with a server, the connection is routed through an innocent-looking domain, in this case the Google App Engine. That way any service that might otherwise be censored, instead looks like its Google traffic.

Google spokespersons have indicated the company knows exactly what its doing, and that domain fronting was never a supported feature. They say that it was instead a quirk in the software, which has now been expunged, and they dont intend to offer it as a feature anytime soon.

Also Read: Cat Videos & Online Shopping Websites Are Helping Defeat Internet Censors & Unblock Content

Unfortunately, removing that quirk means that a number of anti-censorship tools have for now been rendered useless. Even switching to another platform that allows domain fronting isnt foolproof, because major censors tend to keep growing their lists of services and sites to block, and Western platforms are usually at the top of those lists. There are only so many options left and theyre numbers are dwindling.

Now, a few digital rights organisations are pushing for Google to reverse the change. Google could end online censorship everywhere, in the blink of an eye, if it wanted, the operators of GreatFire.org said on Twitter. Unfortunately, thats not likely to happen. Google would then be officially calling its quirk a feature. And while journalists and human rights defenders would rejoice at that, it would open up Google to major scrutiny from oppressive regimes, not to mention allow malicious actors to continue to use it for their own gain. Thats clearly not a responsibility the company is ready to take on.
Day 5: Hunger Strike in Santa Clara County Jails by R. Robertson

Thursday Apr 19th, 2018 3:01 PM

On April 15th, Prisoners United of Silicon Valley began a hunger strike in protest of solitary confinement, grievance system negligence, and meaningless classification reviews, among other injustices. As the strike enters day five, prison reform advocate Jose Valle says there is cause for concern, particularly since medical staff is not checking strike participants for hydration levels or weight loss.

With participants from every unit of the main jail in Santa Clara County except the mental health unit, and many more in the Elmwood Correctional Complex in Milpitas, the 2018 hunger strike enters its fifth day. Silicon Valley De-Bug organizer Jose Valle said in an interview today that there is cause for concern, particularly since medical staff is not checking strike participants for hydration levels or weight loss.



Valle explained that by not measuring striking prisoners' vital medical statistics, the prison administration can deny that a hunger strike is taking place. "But that is not the case," he stated.



Silicon Valley De-Bug is a group that, amongst other services, gives support to families with incarcerated relatives by helping them work through the quagmire of prison regulations. Valle, who works with families, emphasized that inmates are on the front line of prison reform. He said that reform is in the works but that progress has been slow.



In 2015, Michael Tyree, a mental health detainee in Santa Clara Countys Main Jail was waiting for a bed to receive mental health services on the outside. Before Michael could lay his head down on that bed, three correctional officers beat him to death. A jury ultimately found those three correctional officers guilty of murder.



"There was a huge outcry after Tyree's death," Valle said, and with inspiration from the Pelican Bay hunger strikers of 2013, incarcerated people in Santa Clara Countys Main Jail began their first hunger strike in 2016 to demand an end to cruel and unusual punishment and inhumane conditions. Due to that strike, the jail administration agreed to make changes.



Over 70% of Santa Clara Countys jail population are pretrial detainees, many of whom remain fighting their cases for five years or more because they cant afford bail. When prisoners are booked, they are classified according to their charges or gang allegations. Based on classification, prisoners can be housed indefinitely in maximum security housing units without any real path to downclass to a less restrictive setting. "This punitive and subjective classification system leaves this population to be vulnerable to correctional officer violence and mental health crises," Valle wrote. "Prisoners need prosocial time out of cell, they need to be treated with dignity and have access to education and rehabilitation programs."



"This classification system disregards in-custody behavior because many prisoners with zero in-custody write ups or charges for five years or more still remain in a maximum security setting," Valle said.



Despite a negotiated end to the first hunger strike and new jail reforms, in 2017 the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors approved $45,000 for a taser pilot project in the jails. Previously, tasers were banned from the Sheriffs department due to related deaths. "There is still a poisonous culture of prison floor staff," Valle said in an interview today. As day five begins, there is cause for concern. The 2016 Prisoners United of Silicon Valley hunger strike ended through negotiations after five days, and a second hunger strike in 2017 ended with resolution in just three.



Photo by Chris Guy, East London Prison, under Creative Commons License, flickr.com.
Poland: police confiscate journalist's computer equipment AP - Sun Oct 3, 8:47AM CDT WARSAW, Poland (AP)  Police confiscated the computer equipment of a journalist working for a leading newspaper in Poland which has carried out investigations of the country's right-wing government. $SPX : 4,357.04 (+1.15%) $DOWI : 34,326.46 (+1.43%) $IUXX : 14,791.87 (+0.70%) DISCA : 25.74 (+1.42%)

Distribution problems, hesitancy slow Uganda vaccination bid AP - Sun Oct 3, 1:21AM CDT GULU, Uganda (AP)  The light bulb hanging from the ceiling flickered on and off, infuriating the technician in this remote Ugandan town as he checked the refrigerators filled with vaccine doses to confirm... $SPX : 4,357.04 (+1.15%) $DOWI : 34,326.46 (+1.43%) $IUXX : 14,791.87 (+0.70%)

Tesla reports stronger-than-expected Q3 sales AP - Sat Oct 2, 1:08PM CDT PALO ALTO, Calif. (AP)  Tesla says it delivered 241,300 electric vehicles in the third quarter even as it wrestled with a global shortage of computer chips that has hit the entire auto industry. $SPX : 4,357.04 (+1.15%) $DOWI : 34,326.46 (+1.43%) $IUXX : 14,791.87 (+0.70%) TSLA : 775.22 (-0.03%)

UK extends truck driver visa program as fuel crisis persists AP - Sat Oct 2, 11:00AM CDT LONDON (AP)  The British government has extended an emergency visa program for truck drivers as fuel shortages showed few signs of abating Saturday, particularly in London and the southeast of England.... $SPX : 4,357.04 (+1.15%) $DOWI : 34,326.46 (+1.43%) $IUXX : 14,791.87 (+0.70%)

USDA reports spark wheat rally Sidwell Strategies - Sat Oct 2, 8:32AM CDT 19-year low in wheat output and 14-year low in stocks

Corn Higher into Weekend Barchart - Fri Oct 1, 4:43PM CDT Friday s finish saw the board 4 3/4 to 6 cents in the black on the day. For the week, December corn futures traded with a 24 1/2 cent range and a net 16 3/4 cent gain. December was a net 2 1/2 cents... ZCZ21 : 541-4s (+0.88%) ZCPAUS.CM : 5.1834 (+0.48%) ZCH22 : 549-6s (+0.96%) ZCZ21 : 541-4s (+0.88%)

Soybeans Red into Weekend Barchart - Fri Oct 1, 4:43PM CDT Soybean futures closed the last trade day of the week with 5 1/4 to 9 1/2 cent losses. For the week, November soybean futures gave back 37 1/2 during a 55 cent range week. During the month of September,... XRG22 : 635.00s (+0.79%) RSX21 : 903.10s (+1.07%) ZSX21 : 1246-4s (-0.76%) ZSPAUS.CM : 11.9884 (-0.92%) ZSF22 : 1256-4s (-0.71%) ZSX21 : 1246-4s (-0.76%)
His two decades of insurance and risk management experience, as well as his hobby, gave him a firsthand look at what happens when risks are unidentified or poorly managed, leading him to explore reality and data capture opportunities.

One of the most exciting advances in site surveys is the evolution to reality capture and modelling, Holland said, The use of drones together with lasers and photogrammetry, has truly evolved the service. It enables identification of targeted and specific information that supports good risk-management decision making.

The specialist insurer started using drones for site surveys three years ago, to capture data from the damaged roofs of clients' faith-based buildings, which traditionally have high roofs which were difficult and expensive to access.

What I find exciting about the technology is that it allows us to access roofs and hard to reach places so that we can fully understand whats happening at a site, Holland said. It provides an unparalleled level of detailed information about the current state of assets. This supports customers with informed decision making, and the ability to address risks as they emerge. It therefore results in fewer insurance claims, and lower insurance premiums as the property is better maintained and issues addressed before they cause damage.

But the use of the technology also involves balancing many complexities and responsibilities, Holland said.

The biggest challenge is being fully aware of your surroundings at all times, he said. That means being aware of people, weather, line of site to the drone, site instructions, birds, other aircraft, power lines, and vegetation. And you need to do all this while trying to get camera and drone in the right spot, so you can capture the required images and information.

And while risk quality surveys provide vital information, Holland said risk management should be about making small incremental changes.

Its a step change process, he said. When organisations make small ongoing and consistent changes, they create a lasting impact. So, creating a culture that embraces risk management concepts and incorporates this into decision making is key.

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The statement is viewed as a historical record as it records a sharp rise in sea surface temperatures in the southern Tasman Sea in November, reaching 2C or more above average over a wide area.

These temperatures were far above any others previously observed at that time of year in the region, and extended west from New Zealand to Tasmania and mainland southeast Australia, the statement says. In parallel with this, land temperatures were well above average in areas near the Tasman Sea with many records set both in New Zealand and in southeast Australia (especially Tasmania).

Petra Pearce, of the NIWA, described the marine heatwave as quite remarkable as the warm weather also spread on land, causing damaging bushfires and droughts.

It spread across the width of the Tasman and resulted in record heat in Tasmania and New Zealand. We would normally see something much more localised but this was very widespread, Pearce said. 201718 is the only summer on record for New Zealand where the nationwide temperature was more than 2C above average.

Tasmania saw its hottest November-January on record while New Zealand experienced its hottest summer ever, the statement noted.

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It is also the case that, in round numbers, maybe about 20% of those will simply be new jobs, the report quoted the bank official as saying. So theyre not all jobs moving out of London, but most of them will be.

Among the attendees of the session was UK Finance chief executive Stephen Jones, who concurred with Woods.

They may be new jobs created in continental Europe, without necessarily displacing jobs here, said Jones, as quoted by a Reuters report.

In the meantime it remains to be seen what kind of trade deal would be agreed between the divorcing parties. Until then, it looks like the UK just has to be on its toes.

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Asia's overall earnings contribution also dropped to $10m in 2017 from $26m the previous year.

The sale of IAG's businesses in Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia, in deals that could amount to about $500m, could be completed by the third quarter, the sources told Reuters.

A spokeswoman for IAG in Australia said the insurer had announced plans to review its Asia strategy, not retreat from the region. She refused to comment on whether IAG had decided to exit those specific markets.

IAG owns a 49% stake Malaysian general insurer AmGeneral Holdings, a 99% stake in Thailands Safety Insurance, an 80% stake in Indonesian non-life insurer PT Asuransi Parolamas, and 63% of AAA Assurance Corp in Vietnam, Reuters said.

The insurance giant, which also operates in India and has a 16.9% stake in Bohai Property Insurance Company in China, gets most of its premium income in Southeast Asia from Malaysia and Thailand, one of the three sources said.

In February, IAG said its Asian operations are under review amidst a lack of buying opportunities to boost growth in a region attractive for its low penetration rates but which is also very competitive.

IAG's Malaysian venture could be appealing to firms, including Maybank Holdings insurance venture Etiqa, Japanese insurer Tokio Marine, and Chinese insurer Fosun, the people told the news agency, refusing to be named as they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Bids for IAGs businesses in Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam were expected in a few weeks, one person said; while the divestment of the Malaysian business is likely to be completed in the current quarter or early third quarter, another person told Reuters.

This month, IAG said its Asian divestments is expected to deliver a potential inflow of capital.

The insurer did not provide financial details on the impact of the review, but according to Macquarie analysts, it will ultimately exit most markets in the region and free up about $800m of capital in the next few years, Reuters reported.

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As well as investment in some of the more active M&A sectors, such as the insurtech and run-off markets, insurance agencies and brokers have also continued to attract significant interest from a private equity standpoint, as they tend to have steady cash flows, high client retention rates and strong revenues, the report says.

Some of the deals led by private equity firms in 2017 included Sovereign Capitals agreement to back the management buy-out of Irish firm Arachas Corporate Brokers, MGA UK Generals acquisition by J.C. Flowers and Co, and the double buy-out and subsequent merger of UK-based Bollington Insurance Brokers and Wilsons Insurance Brokers by private equity firm Inflexion.

Toby Esser, chairman of AFL Insurance Brokers and ex-CEO of Cooper Gay, told Insurance Business that M&A activity in the London Market shows little sign of slowing down.

As weve seen with the recent acquisition of some of the Lloyds vehicles, M&A is as strong as its ever been. Its fuelled by continuing very cheap debt, and continuing difficulties in getting significant organic growth, he said.

Private equity is a lot more prevalent in our business than its ever been, and is continuing to look to get into the industry. Numerous private equity firms have been looking to get in for years and years, and still havent managed to make any investments Theres no shortage of money looking to get involved.

With the involvement of private equity firms comes demands for growth and returns, which can lead to the need for further acquisitions at a time when organic growth is hard to come by, according to the chairman.

The trend for consolidation is having a very significant effect in certain segments of the market, and has led to choice being a lot more limited than it used to be, Esser said  but he predicts it will continue on both the broking and underwriting sides of the market.

I think while private equity stays in, while debt stays low, and while organic growth continues to be relatively difficult to obtain, we will continue to see M&A. Of course, it does depend on whats left out there to be bought, he said.
In November, WINK News conducted a demonstration with a local bartender, discovering that if she changed her occupation to lawyer as she filled out an auto insurance quote, she could save up to $15 monthly.

Not all insurers use consumers occupation and education to determine their rates, however.

Eric Poe, owner of Cure Insurance in New Jersey, said that he planned to lobby congress to ban the pricing practice.

Theres something wrong when the fact that someone who has a four-year college degree that lives next door to the same car, same driving record gets to pay half the rate of somebody who doesnt have a four-year college degree, he told WINK News.

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Meanwhile, Carmella Capitano has been promoted to senior vice president of primary and excess energy casualty, and Andrew Murray has been made profit center manager of primary construction. They will take charge of their respective divisions strategies including profitability, development and refinement of underwriting, pricing methodologies, and portfolio management.

Capitano joined the firm in in 2009. She has more than 18 years of experience in the insurance industry, holding underwriting positions with growing importance in energy, as well as leadership roles within international insurance companies.

Murray joined Starr in 2015. He has more the 33 years experience in the industry, with roles in both construction brokerages and insurance carrier operations.

Starr Companies operates across five continents. The operating insurance firms under its umbrella offer property, casualty, and accident and health insurance products as well as a range of specialty coverages including aviation, marine, energy and excess casualty insurance.

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Speaking to Insurance Business at RIMS 2018, Mike Price, chief underwriting officer at Arch Insurance, said he was confident the company is ready for anything  whether 2018 brings another busy storm season or births another benign catastrophe period.

Arch has a very diversified stream of revenues. From that perspective, while we were impacted by the natural catastrophes last year, as an overall percentage of our shareholders equity, we were much less impacted than some of our peer companies, Price told Insurance Business. However, as a meaningful writer of catastrophe exposed business, we are seeing some movement in pricing in the high single digits for 2018.

Were not smart enough to forecast 2018 storms, but were well positioned at Arch so that, in the event we have a similar catastrophe prone year in 2018, we have the framework, ballast and strength to withstand what comes at us.

Before Harvey, Irma and Maria made impact  not to forget the Mexico earthquakes and the California wildfires  insurers writing catastrophe-exposed business were fighting a soft market environment. After a monumentally busy 2017, rates are heading back into positive territory, which is a healthy uptick for the marketplace, according to Price.

We implement several catastrophe models that help inform our underwriting and pricing. However, I want to emphasize that while all these techniques are useful in making sure we understand the ultimate loss cost and downside risk, we believe good old-fashioned underwriting still has to be at the core of what we do, he said.

Weve seen instances over the last several years where model-driven MGAs are pricing business below its long-term loss costs, but no matter how good your models are, that just doesnt make economic sense. There still has to be a good sense of healthy rates and adhering to your underwriting guidelines to withstand things in the long run. We look at a balanced approach that says: incorporate models to augment and supplement the good work our underwriters are doing in the field.

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The farm owner, Scott Hansmeier, filed a negligence claim against his insurance agent and aunt, Merva Hansmeier. He also named Western Insurors-Platte Valley Agency in the suit, claiming that his aunt improperly advised him regarding the need to purchase workers compensation for his farm and ranch.

Scott and his wife Karie own and operate a farm and ranch. Scotts father also owns farmland  both he and his father are sole proprietors of their own farming operations, but work together and are functionally business partners.

In 2012, Scott secured all of his insurance through his aunt Merva, including his farm policy, homeowners insurance, auto insurance, and health insurance. Notably, Scott did not provide any insurance for his employees.

During that same year, Scott had two full-time employees, including Mike Heble. On February 2012, Heble suffered an injury while loading grain into a truck when his thumb got caught in an auger. Scott attempted to file a liability claim with his insurer, but learned that his employees injury was not covered.

In 2014, Heble filed a lawsuit against Scott; the workers compensation claim was later settled for an amount that covered medical bills and a disability payment. As both of them shared business operations, Scott and his father split the costs of the settlement. Notably, the amount of the settlement was not put into evidence at the summary judgment hearing.

Scott and Karie later filed a complaint against Merva and her employer on January 23, 2015. They alleged that Merva and Western Insurors were negligent in advising them regarding the need to purchase workers compensation insurance. As a result of their negligence, Scott and Karie claimed that they incurred costs defending a lawsuit lodged against them by their employee.

Scott and his wife made three major claims: They were instructed they were not required to purchase workers compensation insurance; they were never advised that workers compensation insurance was available or necessary to cover their employees; and Merva and Western Insurors failed to properly advise them as to their insurance needs.

Merva and her employer later filed a motion for summary judgment on September 21, 2016, maintaining that there were no genuine issues as to any material fact and that they were entitled to judgment as a matter of law, a case study on FindLaw reported.

During the summary judgment hearing on November 18, 2016, Scott acknowledged that he had never asked her if the liability portion of the policy covered injuries to his employees. The farm owner also said that he had never read his policy from front to back, nor did he read the exclusion portions of his policy.

It was later found that Scott and Karie had not been compliant with the provisions of Nebraska law. Specifically,  48-106(7), which mentions that if an employer is exempt from the Nebraska Workers Compensation Act by the subsection regarding services performed by an employee of an agricultural operation, then the employer must provide all unrelated employees with written notice that the employer does not provide workers compensation coverage, and the employee must sign the notice. Failure to provide the required notice subjects the employer under the Nebraska Workers Compensation Act, which requires the employer to carry a workers compensation policy.

Merva and Western Insurors asserted that state law is pretty clear that an independent insurance agent is not obligated to advise an insured as to their insurance needs. They also added that even if Merva encouraged the purchase of workers comp, Scott did not act on the information.

On January 10, 2017, the district court sustained Merva and Western Insurors motion for summary judgement. The order read:

There is no evidence from which it can be concluded that [Scott and Karie] requested workers[] compensation insurance and the policy they obtained unambiguously did not provide such coverage. The evidence is equally clear that [Scott and Karie] never asked [Merva and/or Western Insurors] for help or advice on how to exclude their employees from such coverage.

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Specialty Program Group LLC (SPG), an insurance holding company for specialty brokerages and underwriting facilities, has launched Eastern Pennsylvania-based New Heights Insurance Solutions (New Heights).

New Heights President Megan Rose joined SPG as part of its Norman-Spencer Crane acquisition and will run the newly created platform.

With more than 25 years of experience in the construction insurance space, New Heights provides resources and services to the crane and boom industry.

Headquartered in Summit, N.J., SPG focuses on expanding program underwriting and specialty businesses.

The creation of New Heights is important for SPG and will launch our construction platform, said SPG President and CEO Chris Treanor in a company press release. We believe in the teams ability to build durable solutions for the unique needs of the construction client, starting with crane and expanding into related niches.

Source: Specialty Program Group

Topics Excess Surplus New Markets Pennsylvania
Insurance Australia Group is set to sell its four Southeast Asian businesses in deals that could be valued at about $500 million, under a review of its Asian operations, three people with knowledge of the matter said.

IAG, Australias biggest general insurer by market share, has ventures in Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia in Southeast Asia, and could complete the sale process by the third quarter, the people said.

Despite years of investments, Asia has proved a challenge for IAG. The insurer posted an underwriting loss in Asia of A$6 million ($4.63 million) in its fiscal first half of 2018, although that loss narrowed from A$9 million in the second half of 2017.

Asias overall earnings contribution decreased to A$10 million in 2017 from A$26 million a year earlier.

A spokeswoman for IAG in Australia said the insurer had announced plans to review Asia strategy, not to exit the region. She declined to comment on whether the company had made a decision to exit those specific markets.

IAG also operates in India and owns a 16.9 percent stake in Bohai Property Insurance Co. Ltd. in China.

IAG said in February that it was reviewing its Asian operations in the face of a lack of buying opportunities to boost growth in a region attractive for its low penetration rates but which is also very competitive.

An exit would mean IAG joins other Australian financial firms, including Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), that are retreating from Asian insurance markets to focus on their home businesses.

Southeast Asia Interests

IAG owns a 49 percent stake in its Malaysian venture, AmGeneral Holdings Bhd, the general insurance arm of AmBank Group. It has a 99 percent stake in Thailands Safety Insurance, according to its February investor report.

The insurer also holds an 80 percent stake in Indonesian non-life insurer PT Asuransi Parolamas and has 63 percent of AAA Assurance Corp. in Vietnam.

Malaysia and Thailand account for the bulk of its premium income in Southeast Asia, said one of the people with knowledge of the matter.

The Malaysian entity could be appealing to firms including Maybank Holdings insurance venture, Etiqa, Japanese insurer Tokio Marine and Chinese insurer Fosun, the people said, declining to be named as they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Fosun did not immediately respond to Reuters queries. Tokio Marine and Maybank declined to comment.

One source said bids for IAGs businesses in Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam were expected in a few weeks. The Malaysian divestment process is likely to be completed in the current quarter or early third quarter, another person said.

This month, IAG said it expected a potential inflow of capital from Asian divestments.

It did not provide financial details on the impact of the review, but Macquarie analysts estimate it will ultimately exit most markets in the region and free up about A$800 million ($621 million) of capital in the next few years.

($1 = 1.2958 Australian dollars) (Reporting by Sumeet Chatterjee in Hong Kong and Anshuman Daga in Singapore; additional reporting by Paulina Duran in Sydney and Taiga Uranaka in Tokyo; editing by Neil Fullick.)

Topics Carriers Australia
Rosie Denee and Oscar Moseley have joined Miller to further enhance its credit and political risks offering. Both will be based in London with a focus on political risk and structured credit insurance, specifically for financial institutions.

Rosie joins Miller from RKH Specialty and specializes in structured credit insurance for banks. She has previously worked with some of the largest clients in this area, producing innovative wordings to match the fast-moving nature of the business.

Oscar joins from Marsh, where he spent seven years in a broking role. He specializes in political risk and structured credit insurance for financial institutions, placing risk predominantly from Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Oscar holds an MSc in International Security and worked for a time at Marsh in Dubai.

At Miller, Denee and Moseley will be working with Benjamin Gibbons and James Cunningham to support our financial institutions clients and their lending portfolios.

Source: Miller
Gov. Scott Walkers administration filed a request with the federal government seeking a waiver that would allow Wisconsin to offer a $200 million reinsurance program designed to lower premiums and attract more providers to the private marketplace.

Walker told reporters on April 18 that if the program is in effect premiums will go down 5 percent in 2019, a dramatic shift after they increased 44 percent this year as enrollment dropped and fewer providers offered coverage.

Walker said he was confident President Donald Trumps administration would grant the waiver this summer.

We feel very, very positive about our ability to get an approval and do so on a timely basis, he said.

Under the reinsurance program, the government would provide money to health insurance providers to pay about 50 percent of medical claims costing between $50,000 and $200,000 starting in 2019. Deputy Wisconsin insurance commissioner J.P. Wieske said insurance providers will be required to file reports showing what rates would have been without the program so the savings could be calculated.

Rates are at least 20 percent lower this year in Alaska and Minnesota, and about 7 percent less in Oregon, the only three states with a reinsurance program. There was also a reinsurance program under the federal health care law for its first three years.

Democrats have criticized the move, calling it an election-year attempt to disguise how damaging Walkers opposition to the Affordable Care Act has been. The Legislature passed the bill authorizing the reinsurance program with bipartisan support.

Walker, a longtime critic of the national health care law known as Obamacare, has rejected federal money to expand Medicaid and argued for years that the law should be repealed. But this year, as he faces re-election in November, Walker has pushed the reinsurance proposal as a way to stabilize the market and lower premium costs for the states roughly 200,000 people who purchase insurance under the law.

Walker originally said the states share under the 5-year program would be $50 million annually with the federal government picking up $150 million. But he said Wednesday the states share, to be taken from unspecified Medicaid savings, would actually be $34 million a year with the federal government paying the rest.

There were 227,000 people enrolled in an ACA plan through the private marketplace in Wisconsin in 2017, but that dropped to just over 202,000 this year. The decrease came at the same time premiums increased 44 percent from an average of $520 to $751 a month. They are projected to drop to $710 next year with the reinsurance program.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Reinsurance Wisconsin
A woman who suffered a traumatic brain injury in a thrill ride accident at last years Ohio State Fair will receive $1.8 million.

A judge this week approved the settlement that calls for the rides owner, Amusements of America, and two private inspection companies to pay Jennifer Lamberts legal fees and medical expenses.

The settlement includes a trust to pay for ongoing care for Lambert, who remains in a long-term care facility.

Lambert will get $1.1 million and the remainder will pay attorneys and other expenses.

She was 18 when a carriage on the Fire Ball ride broke apart last July, killing a teenager and seriously injuring her and three others.

The family of the man who died has reached a proposed $1.3 million settlement.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Ohio
A federal appeals court revived a lawsuit seeking to hold Barnes & Noble Inc. responsible for customer losses from a 2012 data breach, where fraudsters tampered with payment verification machines known as PIN pads at 63 bookstores in nine U.S. states.

In a 3-0 decision on Wednesday, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago said victims deserved a chance to seek damages for buying credit monitoring services, losing access to their money while banks reversed unauthorized charges, and spending time to set matters right.

Circuit Judge Frank Easterbrook said a lower court judge wrongly concluded that the plaintiffs, Heather Dieffenbach of California and Susan Winstead of Illinois, lacked legal standing to sue over the skimming of credit and debit card data, including PIN numbers.

But he said they face challenges, because state laws did not expressly make retailers liable for failing to crime-proof their payment systems, and it was far from clear that customers claims were similar enough to justify a class action.

The breached PIN pads were in California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.

Barnes & Noble spokeswoman Mary Ellen Keating declined to comment.

Erich Schork, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said he was pleased with the decision and looks forward to further litigation.

The case was returned to U.S. District Judge Andrea Wood in Chicago, who dismissed the lawsuit last June.

The case is Dieffenbach et al v Barnes & Noble Inc, 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 17-2408. (Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; editing by Diane Craft)

Topics Cyber USA
American International Group, Inc. announced that Anthony Vidovich will join the company as chief claims officer for General Insurance, effective May 14, 2018.

In this role, Vidovich will be responsible for claims governance and policy, settlement authorities, handling and global best practices. Vidovich will report to Peter Zaffino, chief executive officer, General Insurance, and will serve as a member of the General Insurance Executive Leadership Team.

Vidovich is joining AIG from XL Catlin, where he served as global head of Claims, Insurance & Reinsurance, since 2015. Previously, he was XLs general counsel for insurance claims. Prior to XL, he was associate general counsel for Commercial Markets at The Hartford (2006-2014) after serving as assistant general counsel for Reinsurance. Earlier in his career, Vidovich was an attorney at Blank Rome in Philadelphia, where he practiced corporate litigation with a primary focus on property/casualty and life and health insurers.

Topics Claims AIG
Congress is headed for a major showdown over the flood insurance program, according to an insurance broker lobbyist who notes that the program expires July 31, right in the middle of hurricane season.

That also happens to be the very day that Congress goes on recess.

Joel Wood, senior vice president, the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers, told RIMS annual conference attendees that while there is pressure on Congress to not only renew but also reform the flood program, there is no guarantee Congress will do either or get much else done.

Wood was joined by James McIntyre, an attorney with McIntyre and Lemon who represents RIMS on Capitol Hill, at the RIMS Annual Conference to provide an update on insurance politics in the nations capital.

Although there are issues the industry would like to see addressed including flood insurance, cyber security, federal disabilities act reform, healthcare and terrorism reinsurance, Wood and McIntyre both expressed skepticism that Congress will accomplish much in the months before the midterm elections in November.

CIAB is also waiting for the Trump Administration to clarify whether its insurance brokerage members are eligible for major tax relief under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), the signature legislative achievement thus far of President Trump.

Dysfunction Over Flood Insurance

The way Congress has been kicking the flood insurance can down the road for years symbolizes the dysfunction in Washington, according to CIABs Wood.

Congress has simply been attaching the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) reauthorization to continuing resolutions for appropriations for several years rather than dealing with the NFIP and reforms.

We have had periods in the past where the program has expired for a week or few days but Congress has always been in session then so if some major event were to intervene they could make it retroactive. But, he warned, Congress gets out of town on July 31.

Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R.-Texas, chair of the House Financial Services, has been trying to box in the Senate to force consideration of a package of flood reforms. House leadership has finally agreed to disengage the NFIP from the appropriations process.

Hensarling is someone who has long advocated for actuarially sound rates in the NFIP. The key committee chairman has succeeded several times in getting the House to pass bipartisan reforms that would move the NFIP toward actuarial rates and reduced subsidies but the Senate has not been willing to go along or even engage on the issue.

But Hensarling hasnt been successful in jamming the Senate on much of anything over the last five years, according to Wood, so the prospects for key flood reforms including private market incentives remain dim. They remain dim even within the House GOP ranks because of the positions of two prominent players.

In Woods analysis, one difference between regular dysfunction in Congress and the dysfunction surrounding flood insurance is that flood insurance breaks along coastal versus non-coastal rather than partisan lines. That divide sets up what Wood sees as a pending showdown pitting Hensarling, a leader of a key committee, versus Rep. Steve Scalise, R-Louisiana, a member of the GOP House leadership as majority whip, who Wood calls the guy to watch.

Wood is skeptical of anything happening because Scalise represents part of Louisiana including New Orleans and Metairie that are highly susceptible to flooding and whose residents would pay a lot more for flood insurance under actuarially sound rates than they now pay. Half his district is under sea level, said Wood, adding that when Hensarling talks about actuarial soundness, in a district like Scalises, were not just talking about mega mansions on the Florida coast. For a $75,000 ranch house in Metairie, actuarial soundness in the NFIP might mean they have to pay $20,000.

This is going to be a major showdown at the end of July, Wood said, adding that flood insurance remains the biggest remaining issue in property/casualty with a chance of being addressed before the mid-term elections.

While the July 31 deadline could see Congress heading home in the middle of hurricane season without having acted at all, McIntyre thinks the deadline could also turn out to be a positive force because it creates leverage to get the politicians to do something.

Theres a lot of pressure on Congress to reauthorize this program, said McIntyre, citing not only lobbying by insurance and risk managers but also by builders and lenders.

McIntyre believes Congress will renew the NFIP but agrees with Wood that any real reforms will likely be placed on a back burner again until after midterm elections.

Wood said RIMS has been encouraging the Trump Administration in the meantime to use its regulatory flexibility to encourage more private flood insurance in the excess and surplus insurance markets.

Tax Relief Uncertainty

Congress did manage to pass tax reform, a Republican priority. But Wood said that because of the tortuous behind-closed doors way it was drafted, there remains uncertainty about the tax breaks for two-thirds of CIABs member firms that are pass-through organizations including S-Corps, LLCs and partnerships. According to Wood, while some provisions of the tax law indicate the tax relief is not to be available to services firms, other provisions suggest otherwise. The businesses are awaiting clarification from the Treasury department, which Wood said has to make its way through an incredible thicket to determine which businesses are entitled to relief and how much.

We will be seeing in a couple of weeks if they are going to put their finger on the scale towards granting the most possible 20 percent pass-through tax relief for the most possible number of entities. So thats a big, big issue out there, Wood said.

While lower taxes should put downward pressure on insurance rates, the law also contains taxes targeting reinsurance ceded to a foreign reinsurer that some worry could raise reinsurance costs, according to Wood.

RIMS opposed the reinsurance provisions, which have been pushed for years, and RIMS is concerned they could affect availability and pricing of reinsurance. McIntyre suggested proponents of the provisions finally succeeded due in part to a climate of political animosity towards foreign companies in Washington. The jurys still out in terms of what impact its going to have, McIntyre said, although he said risk managers he has spoken with have not yet seen any pricing effect on reinsurance contracts.

Cyber Security

The two cited cyber security as another legislative priority for their members, albeit one Congress is unlikely to address for a while.

Its important for the nation, said McIntyre. All states now have a cyber statute but its a patchwork quilt, he said. If you do business in a number of states, then you have to comply with each states laws and thats a real hassle.

Risk managers would like to see a national standard for reporting and some uniformity in timelines and requirements for corporations when there are data breaches.

Wood said New Yorks cyber regulations have almost become the de facto national standard in the absence of a federal law, while the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) also has a model law that some states may adopt.

The higher standards under the European Unions new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that become effective May 25 of this year that could also be an option for some businesses.

When you look at how fragmented all of this is and what a compliance nightmare there is, if you are looking to those GDPR standards youre pretty much going to be in compliance with everything that is underneath it, Wood told the risk managers.

However, the worry is that even the EU standards represent just a floor in terms of dealing with cyber security, Woods said.

While risk managers may be hoping for a federal standard from Congress, Wood doesnt see that happening in todays Washington. He noted this is another issue that doesnt necessarily break down along Republican versus Democratic lines. Even the insurance industry cant agree on cyber regulation.

However, there is one thing that could motivate lawmakers to move a bill forward: another significant, national headline-grabbing data breach. After the next Equifax, theyre going to move on it, he predicted. A federal cyber bill put together by Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer, R- Missouri, could then move to the rocket docket.

McIntyre noted that state attorneys general have opposed Luetkemeyers bill as an infringement on state rights.

Its not easy to get things done even when youve got bipartisan support, McIntyre added.

Wood predicted that there is not going to be a uniform standard for data breaches, noting that while the insurance industry can be selective about when it supports state rights, it does when it comes to tort reform and regulation of insurance, even cyber. He harkened back to the industrys own debate over an optional federal charter and the fears that federal intervention would not replace state rules but would result in an additional layer of regulation (like the Dodd-Frank Act) on top of existing state regulations.

RIMS is also interested in tweaking the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to reduce litigation for non-compliance against businesses. McIntyre claimed there is a cottage industry of lawyers who find businesses to sue for non-compliance with the ADA, many of them businesses that are unaware that they are not in compliance. Current legislation would require that businesses first be notified and given a chance to comply before they could be sued. The bill has passed the House but prospects in the Senate are not great, McIntyre said.

Healthcare Warning

Wood warned that a dismantling of the individual health insurance market and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) could have implications for the employer-based market, where some of CIABs members operate, including encouraging a wave of support for single payor health care.

Citing difficulties in individual markets, the ending of certain subsidies, states moving away from the ACAs mandated benefits, and Republican efforts to replace employer-based insurance with a consumer-based model, he cautioned: The more we see that market [individual] faltering, the more stress there will be on employer health market.

Too many stakeholders in the health market are battling each other rather than paying attention to the threat of the single payor movement, he said.

Political Climate

The two veteran Washington lobbyists took stock of the current political climate in Washington.

Wood sees Washington as a polarized environment where too many elected representatives let politics get in the way of normal civil life. He said in the Reagan era when he first came onto the Washington scene, right wing Republicans disagreed with left wing Democrats but they liked each other, and their families lived near one another and they socialized together. You never see that today, he said.

He also blamed a lack of expertise and experience among todays Congressional members, 70 percent of whom only know an omnibus approach to the federal budget and have never been through a normal appropriations process that involves more than a dozen separate funding bills.

McIntyre agrees the city is polarized and blames some of it on gerrymandering, which has created electorally safe districts that allow politicians to stick to their extreme right or left views because they do not need to worry about re-election.

Wood thinks Democrats will take control of the House in the midterm elections, while McIntyre thinks they will fall short.

Wood said the elephant in the room is President Trump. He said Republicans feel vulnerable because of Trumps low poll numbers.

Wood said House Speaker Paul Ryans retirement reflects the full repositioning of Republicanism from supply side policies to Trumpism. Quoting a Virginia representative, Wood added: The Republican base has moved from the country club to the country.

Topics Agencies Cyber Legislation Flood Washington Reinsurance Market Risk Management
Program administrator Business Risk Partners (BRP) has released an expanded professional liability form for insurance agents and brokers through Aspen American Insurance Co., part of Aspen Insurance Holdings Limited.

The policy targets a range of insurance agents and brokers  including agents for life/health, property and casualty, wholesalers, consultants and MGA/program administrators  with $10 million in capacity for primary or excess placements with no minimum revenue threshold.

Enhancements to the form include:

Built-in cyber extension coverage with $150,000 of limit.

Deductible reduction coverage, up to 50 percent on each claim.

Broad definition of professional services, including claims handling, risk management, third party administrator, COBRA administrator and coverage for web-based content.

Broadened insolvency coverage.

Increased coverage for administrative proceedings, subpoena inquiry and court attendance costs.

The program is currently admitted in 41 states and has been filed in all 50.

BRP has been in the insurance agents professional liability space for more than a decade. According to Bruce Eisler, Aspens executive vice president and global head of professional & management liability, said the insurance agents segment was a previously untapped market for the company.

Founded in 2000, Business Risk Partners (BRP) is a specialty insurance underwriter and program administrator offers a variety of professional liability, management liability, data breach/privacy and hybridized specialty products to agents and brokers serving middle market customers nationwide.

Topics Mergers Agencies Commercial Lines Business Insurance Professional Liability
Safeco Insurance has appointed Debra Pooley as vice president and general manager of the Southeast Region.

Pooley replaces Carl Canales who has been named vice president and general manager for the Northeast Region. She is is based in Suwanee, Ga.

Pooley most recently served as Regional Operations manager for Safeco in Suwanee, Ga., and is a CPCU and CPA.

Before moving back to Georgia, Debra was the director of Distribution for Liberty Mutual Business Insurance leading the state of Oregon and prior to that the region vice president directing the underwriting and territory manager teams. She also has served in a variety of roles in finance  including chief financial officer for Ohio Casualty, a Liberty Mutual regional company.

In business since 1923 and based in Boston, Mass., Safeco Insurance sells personal automobile, homeowners and specialty products through a network of more than 10,000 independent insurance agencies throughout the United States. Safeco is a Liberty Mutual Insurance company.
West Virginia regulators are monitoring a damaged dam in the northern part of the state that could potentially fail.

The state Department of Environmental Protection says in a news release a worker with the town of Lumberport notified authorities Wednesday about a collapsed section of the dam.

The statement says erosion has occurred underneath a concrete spillway and water is flowing over and under the collapsed section. The dam is about 13 feet tall, has a shallow reservoir behind it and is owned by the community of about 870 residents. Another dam is immediately downstream.

The DEP says its working to open drain gates to relieve pressure on the failing dam and potentially pump water around it. A March 20 inspection noted the erosion. Both Lumberport dams were out of compliance with safety regulations.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Virginia
A school bus and a semitractor-trailer collided in Florida, slightly injuring six high school students.

News outlets report the bus was carrying about 18 students when it crashed Wednesday in Brooksville, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) north of Tampa.

The reports cite the Florida Highway Patrol as saying that a semi hauling toilet paper failed to fully stop at a red light and hit the bus, knocking it over. The students injuries were reported as minor.

Hernando County Sheriff Al Nienhuis says the bus was on its way to Hernando High School.

The truck driver was cited for a traffic-signal violation.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Florida Education
A Florida man has been sentenced to more than a year in prison for his role in a $23 million auto insurance fraud involving chiropractors clinics.

The SunSentinel reports 55-year-old Jason Dalley wept in court April 16 as a judge sentenced him to spend a year and nine months in prison and pay more than $1.8 million in restitution.

Dalley admitted he was part of a group of clinic owners, chiropractors and attorneys involved in the scheme. Court records show the fraud involving clinics in Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties brought in at least $23 million from 10 insurance companies between 2010 and 2017.

Dalley ran a personal injury and criminal defense law firm in Boca Raton. He pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit health care, mail and wire fraud.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Auto Florida Fraud
David Copperfield testified this week that he didnt know until he was sued that a British tourist claimed to have been seriously injured while taking part in an illusion during a performance on the Las Vegas Strip in 2013.

Although Copperfield said it might be his fault if an audience volunteer who was participating in an illusion got hurt, the celebrated magician didnt acknowledge responsibility for injuries Gavin Cox claims to have suffered when he fell.

It depends on what happened. If I did something wrong, it would be my fault, Copperfield said during questioning by Coxs lawyer, Benedict Morelli.

Your defense in this case is  if they participate and someone gets hurt, its their fault, not yours. Is that accurate? Morelli asked. Yes or no?

Its not a simple yes-or-no answer, Copperfield responded in a barely audible voice.

Morelli contends that before Cox fell, the group of audience volunteers participating in the illusion was hustled through an alley coated with what he called construction dust. The people were taking part in a signature illusion that appeared to make them vanish onstage and appear a few moments later in the back of the theater.

Copperfield said he didnt know whether there as a powdery residue near a trash bin in an MGM Grand alley. He said he passed through the same outdoor alley alone while performing another illusion about 10 minutes earlier, and didnt notice any debris.

If in fact there was construction dust, could that be your fault if someone fell and got hurt? Morelli asked.

Copperfield responded that he couldnt answer a hypothetical question before proceedings ended for the day.

The 61-year-old performer is due to return to the witness stand next Tuesday for more testimony in Clark County District Court.

Cox, a resident of Kent, England, claims lasting brain and body injuries and more than $400,000 in medical expenses. He and his wife, Minh-Hahn Cox, are seeking unspecified damages in their lawsuit, which also names as defendants the MGM Grand, show producer Backstage Employment and Referral, and construction firm Team Construction Management.

Copperfields lawyers lost pretrial bids to close proceedings to the public to avoid disclosing performance secrets, although Judge Mark Denton has said some portions of Copperfields testimony might still be conducted behind closed doors.

Related:

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Construction Nevada
Savings and loan institutionsalso referred to as S&Ls, thrift banks, savings banks, or savings institutionsprovide many of the same services to customers as commercial banks, including deposits, loans, mortgages, checks, and debit cards. However, S&Ls place a stronger emphasis on residential mortgages, whereas commercial banks tend to concentrate on working with large businesses and on unsecured credit services (such as credit cards).

Commercial banks can be chartered at either the state or federal level. The same is true for S&Ls. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) is in charge of monitoring all nationally-chartered commercial banks and S&Ls.

Key Takeaways Savings and loan institutionsalso referred to as S&Ls, thrift banks, savings banks, or savings institutionsprovide many of the same services to customers as commercial banks, including deposits, loans, mortgages, checks, and debit cards.

S&Ls were originally created to provide more economic opportunities, like home loans, available to more Americans (specifically, members of the middle-class).

Many commercial banks conduct many of their operations exclusively online.

Some rules for lending differ between S&Ls and commercial banks, although a ruling by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) in 2019 provided more flexibility to the lending practices of S&Ls.

Historically, S&Ls have been private entities and mutually owned by their customers; however, some are publically-traded companies.

Commercial Banks

Commercial banks are owned and managed by a board of directors selected by stockholders. Many commercial banks are large, multinational corporations.

There were 691 savings and loan companies insured by the FDIC as of the end of 2018.

In contrast to the S&L's narrower focus on residential mortgages, commercial banks typically provide a broader range of financial offerings, often including credit cards, wealth management, and investment banking services. Although commercial banks provide residential mortgages, they tend to focus on loans targeting the construction and expansion needs of regional, national, and international businesses.

In the electronic era, many customers utilize commercial bank services online. However, in the past, brick-and-mortar commercial banks often offered personalized customer service via a teller or bank manager and offered customers services like ATMs and safe deposit boxes. Some branches of these commercial banks even offered amenities to their customers, like providing coffee or water to waiting customers.

Savings & Loan Companies

The original purpose of S&Ls was to enable more middle-class Americans to buy their own homes by providing more affordable mortgage options. In the 21st century, these institutions continue to focus on this service, but also offer checking and savings accounts. In this respect, they are similar to commercial banks.

S&Ls are owned and chartered differently than commercial banks. More of their customer-base tends to be locally-drawn. S&Ls can be owned in either of two ways. Under what is known as the mutual ownership model, an S&L can be owned by its depositors and borrowers. Alternatively, an S&L can also be established by a consortium of shareholders that have controlling stock ownership (as issued in an S&L's charter).

By law, S&Ls were previously subject to some limitations that commercial banks were not subject to. However, a final ruling by the OCCthe governing body of S&Ls and thrift banksissued on May 24, 2019, and effective on July 1, 2019, has the power to change some of these limitations and give S&Ls more operating flexibility.

This ruling put into effect a provision that allows for S&Ls and thrift banks that are insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to elect to operate as covered savings associations. This will give federal savings associations the ability to operate with national bank powers (without amending their original charters). In other words, S&Ls and thrift banks may choose to operate in the majority of activities that are permissible for national commercial banks.

Prior to this ruling, S&Ls could only lend up to 20% of their assets for commercial loans, and only half of that can be used for small business loans. In addition, for Federal Home Loan Bank borrowing approvals, an S&L was required to show that 65% of its assets were invested in residential mortgages and other consumer-related assets.

As a result of this provision, eligible S&Ls may have these restrictions lifted.
What Is an Article XII Company?

An Article XII company is an investment company chartered under the New York State Banking Law to finance international banking transactions. Article XII companies are usually owned by foreign banks and typically engage in activities similar to internationally oriented commercial banks, such as lending to overseas borrowers, foreign exchange (Forex) trading, and the issuance of letters of credit.

Key Takeaways An Article XII company is an investment company chartered under the New York State Banking Law to finance international banking transactions.

They typically engage in activities similar to internationally oriented commercial banks, such as lending to overseas borrowers, foreign exchange (Forex) trading, and the issuance of letters of credit.

Companies chartered under Article XII are able to do many things that commercial banks in the United States are prohibited from doing.

They are not permitted to accept deposits, but they can hold credit balances and are exempt from the Federal Reserve System's (FRS) reserve requirements.

Understanding an Article XII Company

Companies chartered under Article XII are given the freedom to operate like banks without facing the same level of legal restraint and scrutiny that other financial institutions (FI) in the United States usually have to endure. These companies are not subject to registration under the Investment Company Act of 1940 and are defined by the New York State Department of Financial Services as: "specialized non-depository lending institutions that have broad borrowing and lending powers and may invest in stocks and bonds."

Article XII companies can sell debt securities to the public without the oversight of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). They are also able to offer various other banking services, although there are restrictions in place on deposits.

Article XII companies are not permitted to accept deposits in New York State. The same rule applies to the rest of the United States as well, unless approval is granted by the New York State Banking Board.

Article XII companies are, however, allowed to accept credit balances in the state of New York. These credit balances are not classified as deposits nor are the accounts in which they are held classified as demand-deposit accounts. For this reason, they are exempt from the Federal Reserve System's (FRS) reserve requirements.

Types of Article XII Company

Article XII investment companies vary in nature. Some specialize in commercial or retail sales finance, while others are focused on domestic and international commercial and merchant banking.

A handful of these companies are also owned by securities firms, serving as holding companies for banking subsidiaries located in the European Union (EU).

Today, several foreign banks, as well as a number of domestic finance companies, such as American Express Co. (AXP), Western Union Co. (WU), and General Electric Co. (GE), have Article XII status.

History of Article XII Companies

The first charter for an Article XII company was granted to Banque Nationale de Paris, France's largest bank, in 1919 in order to open the French-American Banking Corp. in New York. Four years later, in 1923, the second charter was issued, that time to Schroder, owned by the Schroder Banking Group in London.

For many years, the policy of the New York State's Banking Department was to allow foreign banks to establish investment companies only if there were no other practical means of entering the New York market. This explains the existence of many of the current Article XII companies, including French-American, Fiduciary Investment Corp., and Sterling Banking Corp.

From 1950 to 1975, the New York State Banking Department and the Federal Reserve Board (FRB) agreed that no new Article XII companies would be formed. Instead, it was decided that any new foreign applicants for Article XII status would be asked to seek agency or branch status. This would afford them a similar organizational structure while allowing the Federal Reserve to monitor their operations more tightly.

In the late 1970s, the New York State Banking Department had a change of heart. With the economy wavering, and many international financial businesses gravitating toward places such as the Cayman Islands, London, and Zurich, a decision was taken to start offering foreign banks broader financial powers again, mindful that doing so could help to boost employment and tax revenues.
What Are Foreign Items?

Foreign items are checks or drafts drawn on a financial institution (FI) that is different from the one at which it is being presented. Foreign items may also be referred to as transit items.

Key Takeaways Foreign items are inter-bank transactions, consisting of a check or draft made at one bank to be deposited at another one.

When a bank accepts a foreign item for deposit, it must verify if there are sufficient funds in the account to cover it and then obtain them from the issuing bank.

The Federal Reserve's Regulation CC permits banks to place a hold of up to nine days on foreign items if they are new accounts, though most aim to clear them within two business days.

Foreign items that are drawn on banks outside the United States take longer to process and are subject to variations in exchange rates and, occasionally, thresholds.

Understanding Foreign Items

Foreign items are interbank transactions, consisting of a check or draft made at one bank to be deposited at another one. A foreign item that is drawn on a bank different from the one at which it is being deposited is also known as a not-on-us item, as opposed to an on-us item: A check or draft that is presented to the bank where the check writer has the funds on deposit.

For example, if an account holder at Wells Fargo wrote a check to an account holder at Chase, that check would be considered a foreign item, transit item, or not-on-us item when the Chase account holder deposited it in their bank account.

Banks can determine whether or not a check or other bank draft is a foreign item by looking at its routing transit number. The item may also have other information about the bank of origin printed on it, including its name.

Foreign Items Method

When a bank accepts a foreign item for deposit, it must clear the item with the bank that issued it. Firstly, it is necessary to verify whether there are sufficient funds in the account on which the item is drawn to cover the item. If there are, the next step is to obtain those funds from the issuing bank.

The Federal Reserve Regulation CC permits banks to place a hold of up to nine days on foreign items, mindful that they can take some time to clear. This only applies to new accounts. Most FIs, however, aim to make funds from foreign items available the business day after the deposit was made or, failing that, within a maximum of two business days.

Most foreign items are cleared electronically through an automatic clearing house (ACH) network.

This quick turnaround time is made possible thanks to electronic check conversion and other forms of electronic bank draft conversion.

Foreign Items Outside U.S. Banks

Foreign items drawn on banks outside the United States, also known as international items, take longer to process. It is possible to deposit such an item into a U.S. bank account, although doing so may require hold times of up to six to eight weeks, depending on the nation where the foreign bank is located.

Items drawn on Canadian banks are usually processed the fastest. Checks and drafts drawn on banks farther away, on the other hand, can sometimes take several weeks before entering the recipient's account.

Furthermore, some banks might only accept checks or drafts on foreign bank accounts above a certain threshold value, due to the expense and time involved in sending the foreign item to a correspondent bank in the relevant country and then presenting it to a branch of the foreign bank on which it is drawn.

It's also worth bearing in mind that the foreign check or draft may be worth more or less when it clears than at the time of deposit, due to daily variations in the exchange rate.

Special Considerations

Currency other than United States dollars (USD) can also be considered a foreign item when deposited into an account as special procedures may come into play. Canadian currency being deposited into a U.S. bank does not need to be handled differently, although exchange rates will be calculated.
What Is Geographical Diversification?

Diversification, generally speaking, is the practice of allocating money to a wide variety of investments so as to minimize risk. It's the financial equivalent of not putting all your eggs in one basket.

Geographical diversification means holding securities from different regions. You don't want all of your money in a single country or region for the same reason you don't want it all in a single stock. The failure of that stock would be a huge blow to your portfolio.

The term also refers to the practice by large companies of locating operations in different regions or countries in order to reduce business and operational risks.

Key Takeaways Geographical diversification is a way of reducing portfolio risk by avoiding excessive concentration in any one market.

Geographical diversification can involve investing in developing countries that offer greater growth potential than developed economies.

There are risks, such as unfavorable currency fluctuations and unstable political systems.

Understanding Geographical Diversification

Like diversification in general, geographical diversification is based on the premise that financial markets in different parts of the world may not be highly correlated with one another. For example, if the U.S. and European stock markets are declining because their economies are in a recession, an investor may allocate part of a portfolio to emerging economies with higher growth rates, such as China and India.

Most large multinational corporations also have a high degree of geographic diversification. This enables them to reduce expenses by locating plants in low-cost regions and lowers the effect of currency volatility on their financial statements. In addition, geographic diversification may have a positive impact on a corporation's revenues, as high-growth regions offset the effects of lower-growth regions.

Pros and Cons of Geographical Diversification

Diversifying a portfolio across different geographic regions can help investors compensate for the volatility of a single economic region, in the long reducing risk relative to less-diversified portfolios. Exchange traded funds and mutual funds have made investing globally easier than ever before.

Diversifying away from developed economies also offers benefits. In advanced markets, many businesses offer similar products and services, making for stiff competition. Developing markets, however, can be less competitive and thus offer greater growth potential. A business may sell more wearable devices, for example, in an Asian country than in the entire U.S. market.

The counter-argument is that everything in the global economy is already interconnected so that spreading your money over different regions doesn't provide the diversification benefit it once did. Additionally, many of the large companies you would be buying in, say, a U.S.-registered mutual fund already operate as multinationals.

Faster-growing economies may also involve elevated political risk, currency risk, and general market risk compared with developed economies.

Exchange rates, for example, are always in flux and could move against you. An investment in Japan, for instance, could fall in dollar terms if the yen weakens (meaning it takes more yen to buy a dollar). However, investing in multiple currenciesanother way of diversifyingcan provide additional risk reduction.
What Is Impose?

Impose is a term that refers to the act of placing a fee, levy, tax, or charge on an asset or transaction to the detriment of the investor. The imposition of fees is a common practice in most investment products and services and may be used as a deterrent to selling or exiting a financial position early.

Key Takeaways The term "impose" refers to the act of placing a fee, levy, tax, or charge on an asset or transaction to the detriment of the investor.

The imposition of fees is a common practice in most investment products and services and may be used as a deterrent to selling or exiting a financial position early.

Most fees should be made known to investors before they purchase a new security or move funds in a way that will incur a charge of some kind.

Many fees are imposed not at the time of the transaction but instead levied on an annual basis as a percentage of assets or holdings.

Understanding Impose

Fees are inevitable, regardless of whether you are a small retail investor or a multinational investment bank (IB). Just about every financial service involves a payment to the party that helps to facilitate the transaction.

Most fees should be made known to investors before they purchase a new security or move funds in a way that will incur a charge of some kind. Many fees are imposed not at the time of the transaction but instead levied on an annual basis as a percentage of assets or holdings.

Types of Fees Imposed on Investors

Investors can put their money to work in different ways. Some prefer to let someone else, such as an investment advisor, take complete control of their capital. Others might have an idea of which asset class they wish to invest in and from there elect to entrust a fund manager to choose the relevant securities on their behalf. Alternatively, there are those that opt for a completely do-it-yourself (DIY) approach, taking on the task of selecting individual stocks to invest in alone through a brokerage account.

Naturally, the more investors outsource decisions, the more they usually will have to pay. External expertise comes at a cost, although that is not to say that going solo is always a much less expensive endeavor.

Investment Advisor

Investors who want someone else to administer their capital will typically be charged a percentage of the total assets managed. These fees, which tend to vary depending on the size of the account and portfolio, can sometimes be partially funded with tax-deductible dollars.

Usually, fees are debited from accounts each quarter. That means that if an investment advisor charges 1.5% for every $100,000 invested, a client with that sum under management would pay $375 every three months.

Mutual Fund

Mutual funds, professionally managed investment vehicles that pool together money from numerous investors to purchase a portfolio of securities, cost money to run. Investors that go down this route are expected to chip in to help cover these operating expenses, consisting mainly of management and administrative fees, by paying what is known as an expense ratio (ER).

The ER, which is calculated by dividing a mutual fund's operating expenses by the average total dollar value for all the assets within the fund, is not presented as a bill to be paid immediately and is instead deducted from the return that the investor receives. Some mutual funds also add on fees and penalties for early withdrawals as well as a commission when buying or selling them.

Charges vary depending on the type of asset class the fund is invested in and the level of management required to run the portfolio. For instance, funds that invest in small caps will often impose a higher fee than those that specialize in bigger companies. Understandably, actively managed vehicles also impose heftier charges than passive ones, such as index funds.

Broker Transaction Fee

Brokerage accounts impose a transaction fee on investors every time they buy or sell a security. These charges, typically ranging from $5 to $50, encourage investors to execute larger trades and tend to make them think twice about regularly tweaking their portfolios, even if discounts are sometimes offered for regular activity.

Special Considerations

Consumers are also imposed with several charges for just managing cash in their bank accounts.

Fees Imposed by Banks

Since the 2008 financial crisis, more and more banks have imposed fees on customer accounts and transactions. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 implemented a number of new regulations and rules for the finance industry, which translated to more fees for banking customers.

The Durbin Amendment to the Dodd-Frank Act placed a cap on the fees banks may charge to merchants for processing debit card purchases, resulting in even higher expenses for account holders. Banks also impose fees at automated teller machines (ATMs) because ATM fees make these off-premises banking options more profitable. Often, the bank that owns the ATM imposes a fee, and the bank that issued the customer's debit card, if it is a different bank, imposes its own fee. This can lead to total ATM fees of $11 or more in some locations.

Other types of fees banks might impose include:

Foreign transaction fees

Minimum balance fees

Returned deposit fees

Overdraft fees

Annual or monthly maintenance fees

Early account closure fees

Paper statement fees

Lost debit card fees

Returned mail fees

Fees for redeeming rewards points

Fees for using a human teller

According to the Federal Reserve (Fed), banks can only charge customers overdraft fees on debit card transactions if the customer opts in.

Large banks, those with assets of $50 billion or more, charge the most fees because they are less efficient than smaller banks, and they must pay more to maintain common demand-deposit accounts. Increasingly, customers are choosing to avoid the imposition of most fees by banking with smaller community banks or credit unions.
What Is a Torrens Certificate?

A Torrens certificate, also referred to as the certificate of title, is a document that assigns unassailable ownership of real property to the registered titleholder. The certificate is intended to act as the ultimate authority on the title to a property, and its legal supremacy makes the recording of deeds unnecessary.

Understanding the Torrens Certificate

The Torrens certificate originated in South Australia in the 1850s by Sir Robert Torrens, who, seeking to simplify and facilitate land sales, created a system in which a certificate of title would bestow ownership upon its holder. This certificate was to be issued to a purchaser following a search of the propertys legal history by a government registrar and would provide future purchasers with an indisputable history of ownership.

Key Takeaways A Torrens certificate is a document assigning full, indisputable rights of real property to a registered titleholder.

With a Torrens certificate, there is no need to record a deed.

The Torrens system is rare today, with only 10 US states recognizing its use.

The Torrens system includes an insurance policy sponsored by the government to resolve title disputes.

Torrens property owners are guaranteed that no other parties have a claim to their property. Any potential claimant to a property not listed on the Torrens certificate, however legitimate his or her claim, would be forced to petition a government indemnification fund for compensation. The Torrens system includes a government-sponsored insurance policy to resolve title disputes, rather than the private title insurance that is required for the sale of real property today.

The Torrens system spread throughout the British Commonwealth and to the United States in the late 19th century but is in limited use today. In the US, it remains an optional alternative to the deed recording system - the current, standard practice in real estate transactions - in 10 states.

Today, a Torrens Certificate would appear similar to an automobile title issued by a local DMV. It lists physical details of the property in question, such as boundaries, easements, or rights of way, as well as the name and addresses of individual or corporate owners and any lien holders.

The Torrens Certificate System vs. the Recording of Deeds

Unlike the Torrens system, the recording system maintains all records on a property in a central municipal clearinghouse, often a county registrar. Under the recording system, the land is often referred to as Abstract Property". Any transfer of ownership under this system requires an exhaustive search which would, ideally, uncover any irregularities in the history of the property. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the recording of deeds was far less centralized and automated than it is today. Sir Torrens intended for his system to facilitate transactions under these conditions.

Real World Example

Torrens litigation is now rare; however, a 2010 Hawaii case demonstrates the supremacy of the Certificate in resolving disputes. In this case, the state of Hawaii claimed ownership of underground and geothermal rights associated with a property whose title had been held by a family estate that planned to subdivide the land for resale. The family held a 1938 title, issued by the Hawaii Land Court, which did not include the states claim to those mining rights. In the 2010 dispute, the Land Court ruled in favor of the estate, stating that the Torrens Certificate as issued in 1938 precluded the states assertion of rights to underground assets in Hawaii.
IRELAND: The controversial afternoon car ban on Corks St Patricks St looks set to be suspended tonight after just three weeks.

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By Padraig Hoare

Sanctions on a Russian firm that have threatened more than 650 jobs in Limerick are beginning to be felt in industry all across Europe, a powerful German metal lobbying group has warned.

Some 450 jobs and at least 200 agency positions in Limerick are under threat because Aughinish Alumina near Askeaton is owned by Russian firm Rusal, which has been targeted by the US because of its owner, billionaire Oleg Deripaska.

Aughinish is indispensable for the alumina supply of the European market and politicians need to take quick action to avoid an economic crisis, according to a report from Germanys WirtschaftsVereinigung Metalle, a lobbying group for 655 metals companies.

The group called for the Aughinish plant to be exempted from sanctions.

Limerick TD Niall Collins earlier this week called on Taoiseach Leo Varadkar to directly raise the issue of unintended consequences with US president Donald Trump.

Global mining firm Rio Tinto has plants in Dunkirk, France, and Iceland that use the Irish alumina, and Liberty House Groups Scottish smelter also depends on the site.

The Dunkirk plant is Europes largest aluminium smelter and supplies companies like BMW, Mercedes-Benz-owner Daimler, and other manufacturers.

The sanctions have sent the entire aluminium industry scrambling to restore supply chains. Rusals refining operations, which stretch from Aughinish to Jamaica, are a vital cog in a global supply chain that has now been thrown into chaos.

Rusal shares pared back more of the losses yesterday that saw it lose more than half its value last week, rising a further 26%.

It comes as Vladimir Putins government said it would consider nationalising the company in order to support it.

Rusal officials met Chinese firms and traders this week to discuss the possibility of buying alumina and selling aluminum in the Asian country, sources said.

However insiders said China may not be the solution to Rusals problems as the worlds biggest producer has been cutting excess capacity, and is exporting huge volumes of aluminum products it does not need domestically.

The turmoil kept reverberating through metals markets, sending aluminum and nickel to multi-year highs.

The Rusal clampdown has set off a rush for alternative supplies and stirring concern that further US action could affect other markets like nickel.

Aluminium rallied over 7%, a record intraday gain, to $2,718 a ton in London.

Since the start of April, prices are up more than 30%.

Additional reporting Bloomberg
Shire shares have surged following a report that Allergan is considering a bid for the drugmaker to compete with Japans Takedas $63bn (50.9bn) offer.

The pharmaceutical industry has seen a surge in deal-making this year as large players look for promising assets to improve their pipelines, but a Takeda-Shire transaction would be by far the biggest yet.

Two of the three pharma giants potentially involved have major operations in Ireland. London-listed Shire employs hundreds of people between a Co Meath campus and its head office in central Dublin, while Allergans anti-wrinkle Botox plant in Westport in Mayo and a European office in Dublin employs about 1,000 people.

Takeda has offered 46.50 (53.50) a share in cash and shares for Shire in a bid to extend its global reach. Shire said its board and advisers found the offer significantly undervalue the company and Shires growth prospects and pipeline, though its willing to keep negotiating.

Allergan would face several obstacles to get a deal done. The company had about $30.1bn in debt and $6.45bn in cash at the end of the year, and in February, Allergan chief executive Brent Saunders said the company had bought back $15bn shares while instituting a dividend and paying down some of the debt.

In March, Mr Saunders told investors the company was open for business, if you will, in terms of relooking at everything.

Takeda would need to raise large amounts of capital to buy Shire, which has a bigger market valuation than the Japanese firm drugmaker.

Shire shares rose 8.6% in London. Under takeover rules, Takeda has until next week to make an offer or walk away, after it initially expressed interest in Shire last month.

Reuters, Bloomberg, Irish Examiner
A Dutch Moroccan man with links to the Kinahan crime gang has been jailed for 18 years in Holland.

Naoufal Fassih was extradited from Ireland after he was found hiding out in an apartment in Dublin.
Update April 21: Robert Hanratty has been located safe and well.

Gardai have thanked the public and the media for their assistance in this matter.

April 20: Gardai seek help in finding missing Cork teenager

Gardai are asking for the public's help finding a 16-year-old boy missing from Co Cork.

Robert Hanratty - who is 5'9" in height, with brown hair and blue eyes - has not been seen since Sunday.

When last seen, he was wearing a grey tracksuit and white runners.

It is believed Robert may have travelled to Dublin - and anyone who has seen him is asked to contact Gardai.

- Digital Desk
By David Raleigh

Minister for Rural and Community Development, Michael Ring, has offered his full support for Communications Minister Denis Naughton.

Mr Naughton has been embroiled in controversy over his contact with an Independent News and Media (INM) lobbyist about a proposed merger between INM and regional newspapers group Celtic Media.

Speaking in Limerick today, Minister Ring told RTE: Denis Naughton is a colleague of mine, as somebody from the West of Ireland he has my full support and he has the full support of the Government, and to be fair to the Taoiseach and the Tanaiste, they have talked to Minister Naughton.

I'm quite happy now that he has cleared the position in the Dail this week, and he has my full support, as a colleague from the west of Ireland, and as a colleague in government.

Mr Ring described Mr Naughton as a very good minister, and he is somebody that is working very hard.

He has explained what has happened, he explained it well in the Dail this week, and I think now this issue will pass.

Minister Ring agreed it was unfortunate Minister Naughton had apparently made his personal views known about the proposed media merger involving billionaire Denis OBrien.

Well, we all learn, and we all make mistakes.

However, he added: I have to say, in politics, there is no such thing as personal views. When you're speaking as a minister, you're speaking as a minister.

I'm a new senior minister and he's a new senior minister, and we all learn from our mistakes, Minister Ring added.
Two people who died when a light aircraft crashed and caught fire in Northern Ireland were experienced pilots, a DUP MP has said.

They were members of the Ulster Flying Club, based at Newtownards airfield in Co Down, Jim Shannon added.

Paramedics, firefighters and an air ambulance helicopter attended the site near Nutts Corner in Co Antrim after the Cessna plane caught fire.

The incident happened close to a wooded area shortly after noon on Thursday, two or three miles from Belfast International Airport.

Strangford DUP MP Mr Shannon said: "They were very much involved in (aviation) and experienced pilots, there is no doubt that is the case, whatever the reason for the accident."

He said the investigation would be thorough.

The focus has to be on the families - there are two empty chairs, their families are grieving, and we need to focus on how we support the families.

"The flying club is a very strong fraternity, they are a family and they will gather round and support each other."

The Northern Ireland Ambulance Service (NIAS) said no patients were taken from the scene. It put its major incident protocols into action but the incident was stood down at 12.49pm.

The Air Accident Investigation Branch sent a team to Crumlin.

The plane ended up on a grassy area in the middle of a wood. Part of it was covered by what appeared to be a blue tarpaulin.

Police cordons were established to maintain the integrity of the scene.

Newtownards airport, where the Ulster Flying Club is based, said it would make no comment.
By Gordon Deegan

A 37-year old woman has revealed how she was left a broken woman' after suffering a miscarriage and being summarily sacked days later by her employer while on sick leave two years ago.

Aneta Petrova from Bulgaria was commenting today on a Labour Court ruling yesterday that she was unfairly dismissed from Western Brand Group Ltd's chicken processing plant at Ballyhaunis in Co Mayo.

The company have been ordered to pay her 17,000.

Ms Petrova said that she cried down the phone when told by a Western Brand Ltd representative that she lost her job because she was 'sick for too long on December 29 2015.

She said: I cried on the phone because I felt guilty because I lost a job I was looking for for a year. I didnt realise that this was real and was happening - and then when I saw the P45 I cried even more.

Just 12 days earlier, Ms Petrova was rushed to hospital after fainting at home and she subsequently had a miscarriage at hospital as a result of having an ectopic pregnancy.

She said: It was the most sad time. I was grieving - every woman who has been through this - we all grieve. You feel guilty that you didnt keep this baby - you feel terribly, terribly broken.

And to top it off - just to lose a simple job like that for a reason like this - I couldnt understand it.

Ms Petrova said that she didn't know she was pregnant when rushed to Mayo University Hospital on December 17 and believes now that she was seven weeks pregnant when she miscarried.

She said: I was devastated because of my age - I'm old for having children - and I was told that because of my medical history that I probably wont have children. I had the saddest Christmas of my life that year."

Ms Petrova said: I was really, really in a bad emotional condition. Physically Western Brand traumatised me in the manner in which they sacked me. This shouldnt happen to anyone. I didnt do anything wrong at Western Brand."

Ms Petrova has a masters degree in European Law and a degree in economics and speaks English, Russia, German and Spanish.

Ms Petrova left Bulgaria for Ireland for love rather than economic circumstances when she left behind a good job in Bulgaria, where she trained medics how to operate medical equipment, to be with her boyfriend, Stephan in Ballyhaunis.

She said: I was asked why was someone so highly qualified was trying to get a job in a meat factory, but it is a job that puts bread on the table.

Ms Petrova said that the there are a lot of highly educated overseas workers like her on the production line at Western Brand.

Ms Petrova was earning 8.65 an hour and the treatment she endured of being summarily dismissed over the phone gives a glimpse of the difficulties faced by some migrant workers here.

Conor ODwyer of ODwyer Solicitors in Ballyhaunis represented Ms Petrova in the case said yesterday that many migrant workers are often so fearful of losing their jobs that they endure appalling conditions rather than seeking to vindicate their rights.

Ms Petrova said that when she told Irish friends in 2016 of her summarily dismissal they strongly advised me not to do anything - to move on with my life and to get another job.

She said: I didnt listen to them - I believe what happened to me is not right. It would be outrageous not to do anything about it.

The Western Brand Group told the Labour Court that it didnt realise that Ms Petrova was pregnant or had suffered a miscarriage at the time of dismissal and that her medical certs confirming the miscarriage were not seen by payroll before the call was made to dismiss her on December 29.

The company stated that after finding that Ms Petrova suffered a miscarriage subsequently apologised to Ms Petrova and said that she could re-apply for her job when returned to full health.

Ms Petrova gave birth to a baby boy, David 11 months ago "after a hard and complicated pregnancy, but thank God we are here, he is growing up and we are happy.

Ms Petrova is back sending out CVs looking for work once more.

Ms Petrova said she has yet to receive the 17,000 award from Western Brand.
Are you micro-cheating? Is your partner? Is it even a thing? The new buzz-word in relationships has divided social media. Ellie OByrne investigates with the help of a relationship counsellor.

Couples, beware! Ever added a vaguely flirtatious x at the end of a text message to someone you feel an attraction to? Ever hidden a message exchange from your partner? Ever trawled through old Facebook photos of an ex, wondering if it could have worked out with them? Theres a new name for it: micro-cheating.

Each year, some new buzz-word comes along to attempt to describe an aspect of human behaviour, generating countless clickbait listicles: 5 Signs You Were Raised By Helicopter Parents. 10 Signs Your Partner is Stashing You  and so on.

The term micro-cheating was coined by Australian psychologist Melanie Schilling, who has defined it as a series of seemingly small actions that indicate a person is emotionally or physically focused on someone outside of the relationship.

In response, Twitter spats broke out as people debated.

Is it micro-cheating to repeatedly like someones Instagram posts or constantly refresh the social media page of a work colleague? Many found the term ludicrous, with BBC Radio DJ Greg James tweeting Reading an article about micro-cheating without telling your partner = Micro-cheating.

Some were also quick to point out the dangers of the term, pointing out that it could validate controlling behaviour that may even be considered abusive: US relationship advice columnist Dan Savage tweeted: You know who regards these sorts of behaviours as cheating? Abusers.

Lots of the examples online do indeed suggest a thought-police level of control that definitely cant be healthy. One online forum even used the example of a boyfriend sitting with his eyes closed for too longbecause that could mean he might be thinking of someone hes attracted to.

But other examples, such as keeping dating apps updated when youre in a long-term relationship (um, hello?

What could that BE for?!), or entering someones phone number into your phone under a code name, seem more reasonable causes for concern.

By concentrating on specific actions rather than the intention behind them, we are probably missing Schillings point, though.

Waterford relationship counsellor Laura Walsh has 18 years experience counselling couples and she says that its the underlying sense of deception and betrayal that is the damaging thing, whether the cheating has been physical or whether it falls on the contestable spectrum of emotional infidelities.

One thing that hasnt really been addressed in articles about this so far is the awful self-doubt that comes about when there are subtle signs of deception, Laura says.

You start to second-guess yourself and doubt your own instincts if your partner is not being open and honest with you. Its a very toxic place to be in in a relationship.

The definition of what constitutes infidelity is entirely up to individual couples, with huge variation in whats considered acceptable. Whats important, rather than specific actions, is whether theres intentional deceit taking place, she says.

Deception is a massive source of pain in the couples I have seen, she says. Its as though the betrayal of any act, be that sex with someone else or sexting someone, is in the deception. Then comes the what were you looking for?  the need to know.

There may be a gender divide when it comes to what we view as emotional infidelity. Mens Health magazine asked 2,400 men and women what constituted micro-cheating, and there was a clear divide in the results.

Only 22% of men thought they were cheating if they used the services of an online camgirl, while 47% of women did.

Some 62% of women thought that a man taking a woman he knew he was attracted to dinner constituted an infidelity, while 43% of men did. Only three-quarters of men thought that sexting someone else was cheating, while 94% of women did.

Its certainly true in Lauras experience that theres a general tendency for men to have a more physical view of what constitutes cheating, while women tend to focus more on the emotional aspects, she says.

When it comes to the emotional aspects of an affair, women want to know why her? and about the love side of the affair. Men tend to feel very diminished sexually by the fact that shes been with someone else.

There seems to be an online or social media aspect to most of the examples of micro-cheating floating around. Laura, who is based in Tramore, and who trained in the UK before becoming a member of the Irish Association of Counsellors and Psychotherapists (IACP), says that digital interference has formed an increasingly large role in marital strife.

People come in now and talk about texts theyve seen, she says.

When smartphones first came in and people could actually track their partner, I had couples coming in with this dreadful sense of betrayal: Ive been tracked, hes been watching where I am from his desktop. Thats all new stuff.

The explosion of interest around micro-cheating could point to how much stress this digital minefield is putting on relationships. Is micro-cheating nothing more than paranoia caused by a world where, increasingly, we have the illusion that we can know our partners every move? How healthy is that anyway?

According to a recent survey of UK long-term couples, one or both partners had secretly read each others texts and emails in a third of couples, while one in five had checked their partners browsing history.

Our natural curiosity is being put under the microscope and were being criticised and monitored by social media, Laura says.

So much is in text or on social media, that our every word can be examined. I think that makes people way more open to being judged as having emotionally cheated these days.

How do we even get our heads around being able to 24/7 see where our partner is? Laura asks.

Were being made to experience a new kind of intensity of relationship that we never had to before. But its mind-boggling: if you were a very jealous individual, imagine how much power you have with modern technology and how much it has the power to do your head in.

Its a destructive power, too: in a 2012 university study, where two-thirds of respondents admitted to snooping through their partners phones and social media accounts, 28% of relationships got worse as a result of partner monitoring.

Laura says that if you find yourself drawn to constant online monitoring, it may be yourself you need to look at, rather than your partner.

We cant police everything. If you dont trust your partner you can either look at what theyre doing, or you can look at your own behaviour and ask, what am I doing? What is happening with me, that Im not trusting?

"But the subtleties of what were talking about make it difficult, because its hard to know. Could he send the same text to a guy friend, would that be fine? If not, there may be something to talk about.

Admitting to feelings of jealousy can be intensely uncomfortable, but online snooping isnt a substitute for communication, so its better to bite the bullet, put down the device and disclose your worries.

The effects of micro-cheating behaviours can be erosive, not least because, Laura says, they can be a sign of emotional detachment: Some people cant attach to one person because of emotional intimacy issues.

Youre not going to stop being attracted to people just because youve been married or in a relationship for a long time. Were all human, and its important to have relationships with other adults that arent about love and intimacy. But its about withholding intimacy from your partner, thats when its a problem.

If someones not emotionally available, their partner may be trying and trying and trying to move closer with no result, which is really hurtful.

Laura says that, no matter how much technology might change, the basics of strong relationships, communication, trust, and an equal mutual input into the relationship, havent.

And when it comes to the vagaries of micro-cheating, theres only one basic rule: Its emotional cheating when you intend it to be.
Ask Audrey has been sorting out Cork people for ages.

Gday. Cmere what do be the story with no one on Pana? Im home from Australia, and there wasnt a sinner around when I went into town yesterday afternoon. Patricks Street actually looked like someone had shouted: The Kanturk bus is in ye langers, run for your lives. Is there some kind of strike on or something?

 Squidge, Pouladuff Road, how does anyone enjoy themselves in this weather?

By shipping all the gobshites off to Australia. I asked my Posh Cousin whats the idea behind the traffic ban on Patricks Street. She said the city council has a plan to turn Cork into Irelands Pompeii by this time next year  all going well, it will just be guided tours with a robot saying and over there used to be Mandys. I said, is there any chance that city centre trade will be saved by people using the Park and Ride. She said, when was the last time you saw a Cork person with money getting on a bus? I said never.

Myself and my daughter Fifi went to Milan to pick out her confirmation dress. (Six grand, shoes not included.) We arrived home yesterday to find a note from her school saying all the kids will be wearing the same cape on the day, to prevent any showing off and flagrant displays of wealth. (Its like they literally dont understand the meaning of the word confirmation.) Obviously Im not going to take this lying down. Do you have any pull in the Department of Education, to get the principal fired?

 Michelle, Blackrock, I got a new set of breasts for the big day.

Its important to look well for the Bishop. Bad news. Spending more than 150 quid on a confirmation outfit is the same is putting your child in a t-shirt saying Proud to be A Norry. Thats actually the opening line of my new book, the Little Book of Posh Cork. Youre no one without it.

My girlfriend and I are looking to buy a house that reflect the fact I went to Pres. Unfortunately we did our sums last night and the best we can afford is a place in Glanmire. I dont know how to break this to my mother, because she had an operation on her heart last month. There is no point in asking for help from my girlfriends parents, because they are only from Wilton and you cant get blood from a stone. What is the best way to ask my parents for enough money to buy my own place on the Rochestown Road?

 Alan, Rochestown Road, but for how long?

20 minutes is long enough for me. In fairness, I feel sorry for you. It must be awful going out with someone from Wilton. The only things of note out there are an ugly hospital and a huge walking track for old people. (Or Wilton Shopping Centre, as its known locally.)

Bonjour, old stock. Hoggy and myself have been here in Bordeaux all week for the Munster match. Were doing what we do best, complimenting the lovely ladies with whistling sounds and ooh laa laas, and pretending to be French whenever we meet someone from Limerick. (Hoggy is suspicious of any city that doesnt have a Royal Yacht Club.) Anyway, didnt Hoggy turn to me just now and say, shag this Reggie old stock, lets live together in France for the rest of our lives. How can I tell if hes gay or just full of wine?

 Reggie, Blackrock, or La Roche Noire as I have taken to calling it.

Thats pretentious, even for Blackrock. I asked my gay nephew are there any tell-tale words a man uses to signal that hes a homosexual. He said there is one actually  if he says the word yes when another man suggests sex, thats a very clear sign. I said theres no need to be so smart.

So, Im a graduate accountant working for one of the top companies in Dublin. I forgot to like carry the one when doing the tax return for a big client, and as a punishment they sent me to a job in Macroom. So, I totally cant tell if the locals are clearing their throats, or just saying hello. Is there like an app that can help me during my stay in this boghole?

 Gordon, Dublin, so, why does everyone down here seem to happy?

So, because when you are living in Macroom, the only way is up. (Unless you take a wrong turn and end up in Millstreet.) There is an app that can help you, its called Google Maps. Plug in Cork there and drive east until you reach a place where the smell is barely noticeable. (AKA Ovens). I rang my uncle in Macroom yesterday for some local insights. He said, do you know that Macroom is known as the town that never reared a fool. I said, so you were all born one. He said I never looked at it that way. At least I think thats what he said.
WE SAID we would do better. Time and time again, we have said we will do better, writes Joyce Fegan

On March 17, 14-year-old Elisha Gault went missing. For eight long days her photo circulated in the Irish media and populated the countrys Facebook and Twitter feeds. Her body was eventually recovered from the River Suir on Sunday, March 25.

Her mother Grainne described Elisha as her beautiful, funny, intelligent baby.

At her funeral Mass on Thursday March 29, the congregation heard how Elishas outward appearance and behaviour were masked by an air of hopelessness within.

Mental health and suicide were touched upon in the course of a national conversation.

Facebook friends, being artificial, was mentioned too, and young people were encouraged to turn off their iPhones every now and again.

And then this week, her mother revealed that Elisha had told her family, early last year, that she had been the victim of sexual abuse in 2012.

The family engaged with authorities and a file was sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP). In January 2018, the family received a letter from An Garda Siochana informing them that the matter wasnt going to be pursued any further.

Its one thing to have somebody to build up to have that confidence and trust to come forward and express what had happened but then to find that the powers that be have decided that theyre not going to pursue it.

She (Elisha) had a range of emotions. It just feels like youre out there fighting on your own. For all the love in the world if love could save my child, I could have saved everybody in Ireland, Grainne told the Pat Kenny Show.

And theres more.

Grainne revealed that on May 31, 2017, Elisha made a serious attempt to end her life. She was immediately referred to the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS).

Elisha was determined as unsuitable for the CAMHS services, and Grainne said the family were given a printout of other services she could avail of in Ireland.

The family were also linked in with a local youth group through Tusla, the child and family agency, but the group was not in a position to address her psychological issues, Grainne said.

Her mothers interview on TV3 was done for one reason, and one reason only, so that her daughters life meant something.

Because of the kind-natured girl she was, and given all that she was facing in life, she always wanted to reach out and help others. Im going to take on what she would have wanted for other people, and thats to make it better, she said.

But this shouldnt just be on Grainne, it should be on all of us.

It should be on our justice system first of all. Parents are not criminal lawyers, they do not know how to deal with what Elisha went through. Nor are they trained mental health professionals, they are parents, they need places to go to and services they can rely on.

As was evidenced by a high-profile rape case, the common law justice system needs to overhaul how it processes crimes of this nature, crimes where we have vulnerable witnesses, marred in trauma.

Work is being done in this area already by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties alongside Maria McDonald BL of the Victims Rights Alliance.

Our politicians have a role to play too. In April 2016, there was a moment of outrage over the low number of TDs that had turned up to a Dail debate about mental health. The debate was happening against the backdrop of

diverting part of the 2016 budget earmarked for mental health to other areas.

Approximately 33 TDs out of 158, were listed to speak at the debate that lasted just over three hours.

The remains of 14-year-old Elisha Gault are carried by her parents, Grainne and Cameron (centre, and back left of coffin). Elishas body was found in the River Suir eight days after she went missing on St Patricks Day. Picture: Colin Keegan, Collins Dublin

And what about us?

Firstly, when it comes to sexual assault, all too often, our national conversation has re-triggered survivors of these crimes. There was George Hooks comment about the culpability of rape victims in their assaults.

People who spoke out to lessen the damage to silent victims were accused of witch hunting. Then there were the sympathetic musings for convicted paedophile Tom Humphries. And there was the male voice on our airwaves, questioning why it took Harvey Weinsteins victims so long to speak out.

Is it too much to ask that we hold off firing myth-based missives through cyberspace until we have adequately informed ourselves about the complexities of rape, trauma and restorative justice?

We need to do better. We all need to do better if we are to bring about meaningful change in areas such as sexual assault and mental health.

Sadly last year though, we emerged as having the fourth-highest teen suicide rate in high-income countries, according to a Unicef report.

Our young people need us and we too, need them. They are, after all, our future carers, doctors, teachers, academics, scientists, artists and politicians. We cannot continue to fail each other.

So, something tangible we can do?

In exactly 21 days times, Pieta House will host its annual fundraiser, Darkness into Light. There are about 180 locations around Ireland where you can join in by walking or running into the dawn of May 12. When it started in 2009, 400 people showed up in Phoenix Park; last year 180,000 of us took part nationwide.

Anything else? A GP recently told me that positive mental health is the ability to share our stories. As a nation renowned for our storytelling, lets extend that to honest conversations about how we are really feeling, to our closest confidants, if no one else.

For more information on Darkness into Light see www.dil.pieta.ie

The Samaritans free helpline is 116 123 or you can email jo@samaritans.ie

The Rape Crisis Centre can be contacted on their 24-hour helpline on 1800778888
Last October, Justice Minister, Charlie Flanagan, told a human rights conference that imprisonment should be the sanction of last resort.

He was echoing general policy on imprisonment over the last decade in this country.

There had been a gradual decrease in the number of people in custody in the State.

Capacity at the 45m Cork Prison has been constrained by site issues and political considerations. Picture: Dan Linehan.

In 2011, the daily average number in custody was 4,390. This reduced to a daily average of 3,680 in 2017, a decrease of 16%. Since last September, there has been an increase of 12%. (The Irish Prison Service puts the increase at 9% since October).

On 4 September last year, the number of people in custody in prisons stood at 3,520. By April 17 this year, that number had increased by 418, to 3,938.

By any standards, that is a considerable increase. Half of the States 12 adult institutions  including for male and female inmates  are now operating above the recommended capacity.

In Cloverhill prison, the numbers in custody over the last six months has gone from 312 to 422. It is now operating at over 100% of the recommended capacity.

Cloverhill Prison.

Cloverhill deals with remand prisoners and an increase in defendants failing to secure bail may partially explain the spike here.

The number detained in Limericks female prison has gone from 20 to 37, bringing its operational capacity from 83% to 154%. In fact, the worst of the overcrowding is being borne in the female prisons of Limerick and Mountjoy, the latter operating at 154% of capacity.

On the face of it, these numbers may not appear to be large, but overcrowding in todays prisons is a recipe for

disaster, both in terms of potential violence and in the courts.

Limerick Prison.

Overcrowding increases tensions and, since the 2014 Equality and Human Rights Act, prisoners may have recourse to the courts, if they believe their rights are being abused through unsafe forms of detention.

There is also an issue around whether the various prisons currently have contingency cells, in the event of a disturbance or a fire.

Then there is the problem with Cork Prison. Since it was opened in 2016, it has become obvious that the citys 45m prison is barely fit for purpose.

The capacity of the new prison was constrained by site issues and, not least, political considerations.

Main block in Cork Prison.

A long-term plan to build a new prison in Kilworth, in the north of the county, was shelved in the wake of the huge controversy over the building of a prison in Thornton Hall, north County Dublin.

Humanitarian concerns  in both cases, the respective prisons were a good drive from the cities, where most prisoners families lived  along with financial problems ensured that the plans didnt go ahead.

Instead, the new facility in Cork was built down the road from the existing prison, but many within the service are now questioning the wisdom of the move.

Since it was opened, the new prison has had problems accommodating all committals from its designed catchment area in the south of the country. Its capacity has gone from 264 inmates to 280 and is now operating at 95%.

According to reports, some committals have been redirected to Limerick, because of capacity issues.

In the bigger picture, no definitive reason has been identified for the spike. Deirdre Malone, director of the Irish Penal Reform Trust, said that they have not yet ascertained the reasons for the rise.

We would be particularly worried, if standards [of detention] were being affected, as we have had a period where standards were kept-up and we will have to see how that goes.

Sources in the service have offered various reasons for the spike. One is that the policy of imprisonment as a last resort for failure to pay fines replaced the old one of prison as the first port of call.

That policy has been welcomed, but there is speculation that some of the spike may be attributable to the small number who have arrived at at the last resort of imprisonment.

The fines act was a good move. It freed up spaces and gave people an opportunity to pay, according to one source in the prison service.

Prison became a last port of call rather than a first, but it could be that those who have been given every other chance to address fines, and havent, are now reaching the point where they are being committed anyway.

Whatever the specific reasons, there should be some urgency in addressing the spike. If the trend were to continue  and reversing it is unlikely to occur overnight  then, by the end of the summer, the prison population will have increased by around 800 in 12 months, enough prisoners to fill a large prison in itself.

All the more reason to identify why the current spike is occurring and how best to address it.
The commitment by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar that women wrongly excluded from the Magdalene laundries redress scheme will receive redress payments without delay is hopefully the final step on what has been a long road to justice for a small group of women.

As is often the case in Ireland, the Government had to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing what was right.

And, as is also often the case in Ireland, it required the bravery of a group of ordinary citizens putting their heads above the parapet and taking on the State in order to get justice.

The Taoiseach is to be commended for committing to granting the women redress but to do otherwise would have been not just unjust but would also deny the facts of the experience of these women.

They worked in the laundries as young girls alongside the older Magdalene women, they ate the same food and, in many cases, they slept in the same building.

Its worth noting just what it took to get to this point and how hard the Department of Justice fought against granting these women redress.

It began back in 2015 when two former residents of the An Grianan training centre, which was attached to the High Park Magdalene laundry in Drumcondra in Dublin, decided to go to the High Court to fight the departments decision to exclude them from the redress scheme.

In June of last year, the court ruled that the women were denied fair procedures in how that decision was reached.

The department had denied the women redress because the women had been registered as having been admitted to An Grianan and not directly to the Magdalene laundry.

The view of the department  and which was publicly stated on numerous occasions by then justice minister Frances Fitzgerald  was that An Grianan was a separate entity to the High Park laundry which served a different purpose.

Former Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald.

While it did not dispute that the women worked in the laundry, it had decided that only those women who were admitted to and worked in a laundry were to be included.

The Government also repeatedly defended the exclusion of the training centre from the scheme by stating it was included in the Residential Institutions Redress Board scheme (RIRB).

All women admitted to An Grianan were entitled to full compensation for the entire duration of their stay under that scheme and therefore they would be compensated twice.

After the Department of Justice refused the women on appeal in June and October 2015, proceedings were lodged.

Separately, in June 2015, the Ombudsman upheld a decision by the Department of Justice to refuse three other women who were in An Grianan access to the scheme.

While the fact that you worked in the laundry attached to St Marys Refuge is not in dispute, I do not see

anywhere in the file where there is any dispute regarding the fact that you were admitted to An Grianan and not St Marys Refuge, said the Ombudsman.

Therefore, as you were not admitted to one of the 12 listed institutions, I do not see a basis for concluding that there was maladministration in the teams decision not to approve your application on the basis that you did not qualify for funding under the scheme.

The Ombudsmans decision came on June 2, 2015  just two days before the Irish Examiner revealed that evidence that An Grianan training centre and the High Park Magdalene laundry were one and the same thing was uncovered by the HSE in 2012.

This information was sent by Phil Garland, then the assistant national director, Children and Family Services at the HSE, to the Department of Children and Youth Affairs representative on the McAleese committee, Denis OSullivan.

Draft minutes of a meeting held by the McAleese committee investigating the Magdalene laundries on the same day the HSE evidence was uncovered indicate that, as An Grianan was previously included in the RIRB scheme, it would not be examined.

The three women sought a judicial review of the Ombudsmans decision and in December 2015, as part of a settlement, the Ombudsman agreed to re-examine the cases.

By April 2016, the Ombudsman had completely changed its position on the matter and had formed the view that

An Grianan residents should be eligible for the Magdalene redress scheme.

Documents obtained by the Irish Examiner and published in June of last year then revealed an extraordinary nine-month dispute between the Ombudsman and the Department of Justice over the latters interpretation of An Grianan and the redress scheme itself.

Department of Justice.

It was to culminate with the Ombudsman stating, last December, that it had no choice but to launch an investigation into whether the scheme has been administered fairly. The results of that investigation were published last November and were scathing of the departments administration of the scheme.

The investigation found that the women in question suffered a clear injustice by the Department of Justice which relied on an overly narrow interpretation of the scheme to deny women access to compensation they were entitled to.

The report took issue with the interpretation of the phrase admitted to and worked in when deciding applications and said the phrase was used by Mr Justice Quirke who designed the scheme, the Government and the department without anyone ever defining what it was intended to mean.

However, the Ombudsman found that the department chose to interpret this phrase in the most narrow sense and operated on the basis that only women who could demonstrate through available records that they had been officially recorded as admitted to one of the 12 named institutions were eligible.

The report found that, contrary to the claims of the department, the units that many of the women were admitted to and lived in were, in reality, one and the same institution as the laundries  a finding which echoed the evidence obtained by the Irish Examiner in 2015.

It said the department was overly reliant on the evidence, and sometimes just the word, of the religious congregations to the exclusion of other evidence when wrongly denying women access to the redress scheme. The personal testimony of the affected women was considered as a last resort.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar.

On the question of double compensation, the Ombudsman said this was simply not true as that scheme was designed to compensate for address a different wrong. He also said he had never come across such an entrenched and intransigent position from a government department in his role before.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar acknowledged all these differences of opinion in the Dail on Wednesday but said they dont really matter.

What is important is that the women affected receive redress and they will, he said.

The women have waited long enough.
Militants from the so-called 'Islamic State' (IS) group have reportedly agreed to give up their last pocket in Damascus, as the government seeks to retake the entire Syrian capital and its surrounding areas for the first time since 2011.

The capitulation followed a week of escalations by pro-government forces against the IS-held Hajar al-Aswad area and Yarmouk Palestinian camp in Damascus.

Pro-government forces bombed the two areas and blanketed them with artillery fire in a manoeuvre captured by the state-affiliated Central Military Media outlet.

The UN's refugee agency warned that the spiralling violence was a threat to 12,000 Palestinian refugees still there - Palestinians who came to Syria since 1948, and their descendants.

Militants were given the option to stay and reconcile with the government or leave on buses to IS-held territory in the eastern Syrian desert, the SANA state news agency said. It did not say when the relocations would begin.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group reported "relative calm" in the two neighbourhoods after the announcement of the agreement.

In 2012, Syrian rebels and army defectors pushed pro-government forces out of Yarmouk in response to a spiralling crackdown by state security services against anti-government protests.

Pro-government forces, including pro-government Palestinian factions, responded by putting the camp under siege, eventually cutting off food and water by 2014, and bombing and shelling it continuously.

Residents trickled out to neighbouring areas, and the camp's population dwindled from an estimated 200,000 people to a few thousand today, not including the IS militants, who took over the camp following a battle with rebels in 2015.

Yesterday, the Damascus-based Palestinian official Khaled Abdelmajid said the government was giving hard-liners two days to leave Yarmouk and Hajar al-Aswad, leaving the government with control of the two neighbourhoods.

That initial deal appears to have collapsed.

- AP
The coalition partners are hosting a summit this month to mark two years in government. The meeting will go ahead despite a power struggle over a ministerial post between two alliance TDs this week.

The Irish Examiner has obtained a letter signed by all five Alliance TDs which says the coalition partners will review their performance in government, push for more pay for councillors, and plan for upcoming elections.

Ministers Shane Ross, Finian McGrath, John Halligan, and Kevin Boxer Moran and TD Sean Canney will host the conference for councillors in Athlone, Westmeath, on April 28.

The letter says: The conference is being held to coincide with the upcoming second anniversary of the entry of the Independent Alliance into government following the 2016 general election and will review the performance of the IA in government to date, assess what the IA priorities should be for the remainder of the term of this government, and discuss what the IA can do in government to support the work of independent councillors.

The alliance held a similar conference last year, a year after running more than 20 candidates in the 2016 general election. It is known Mr Ross and the group want to prepare the ground for next years May local elections and also get more politicians into the Dail and Seanad.

The letter to councillors promised the ministers would also push for greater pay for them.

We have for example recently made it very clear to relevant Fine Gael ministers that the hard work of councillor in what is, for many, a full-time job, must be properly recognised and remunerated and that there must be an urgent root and branch review of councillors terms and conditions, said the letter.

We will keep the pressure on using our clout in government to secure the right outcome for councillors.

The alliance ministers promise to give special access to information, over and above that given by other Independents.

The letter adds: Other supports which we provide to our IA councillors include visits by our four IA ministers to IA councillors, sometimes making key announcements for the area.

We also keep in regular contact with our IA councillors, keeping them full informed of key developments and announcements and giving IA councillors privileged access to information not available to other councillors.

Independent Oireachtas members and councillors, not with the alliance, are frustrated that an inside track on government business is being promised by ministers.
The Midlands TD came out on top after days of internal bickering in the coalition partner group, which saw a series of crisis meetings called to try to calmly resolve the political spat.

Mr Moran has now won out and will retain his post as minister of state over the Office of Public Works (OPW).

The standoff centred on a pre-government deal to rotate the junior ministerial position between Mr Moran and Mr Canney.

The decision on who would take up the role first was initially decided by the toss of a coin.

Mr Canney held the post for the first year while Mr Moran took over for the second year. It had been thought the Coalitions lifetime might not last this long and so no agreement was made about what would happen after Mr Morans term was up.

A stormy meeting of the alliance earlier this week finished without a resolution. However, the alliance met again yesterday and issued a statement afterwards.

The statement said it has been agreed that Mr Moran will remain in his position as OPW minister for the remainder of the lifetime of this Government.

Alliance sources said it was never agreed what might happen and it was assumed that Mr Moran took a risk by accepting his role in the second year, where there were doubts about the Coalition existing.

Speaking yesterday evening, Mr Moran said he will remain in his position until the next general election. He also said he and Mr Canney will remain good friends.

There were no votes [at the meeting]. What we do is agree, said the Longford-Westmeath TD.

Mr Moran said Mr Canney had not indicated that he would consider his position in the alliance. He also denied it was anything to do with details on claiming a ministerial pension.

The end to the standoff comes as the alliance prepares to hold a summit in Westmeath later this month, where they intend to recruit more councillors with promises of influence and power.

As revealed in todays Irish Examiner, the four ministers and one TD, including Shane Ross, have issued an invitation to Independent councillors around the country to the conference on April 28, in the Shamrock Lodge Hotel, to mark two years in Government. The letter, signed by all five, promises they will ramp up pressure on their Fine Gael government partners to increase councillors pay.

Local government minister, John Paul Phelan, has said that councillors should get more pay but that he will get slated on Joe Duffy for a month if councillors get a rise.

The alliance ministers also promise they will and do give Independent Alliance councillors privileged access to information not available to other councillors.

Independent senator Gerard Craughwell, who saw the letter, said: Its a bit strange. This would be Ross talk. One would expect that they would include all county councillors.

It is important [as ministers] they give out information to all, including outside their group. This is an expectation in new politics.
The move follows weeks of controversy and intense pressure from traders who branded the move a disaster.

A special city council meeting has been called for this evening during which councillors are expected to recommend the temporary suspension, with immediate effect, of the streets 3pm-6.30pm daily car ban for up to four months.

A package of parking incentives introduced last week to support city centre traders will be retained.

However, most councillors are expected to back the vision of the City Centre Movement Strategy (CCMS) which is designed to improve the bus reliability and journey times and reduce reliance on private cars.

It is understood the council will spend the coming months engaging with the citys business community on the strategy.

Some 200m of public investment has been earmarked for massive upgrades to the citys bus network, which has seen passenger numbers grow by 23% over the last three years.

There are fears that if the CCMS is not fully implemented, the funding could be lost.

And it is understood that some of the citys largest employers, including Apple, have also stressed to City Hall the urgent need for a public transport service their employees can rely on.

Tonights council meeting was announced after a meeting yesterday of the councils party whips and leaders with council chief executive Ann Doherty, and the director of the councils transportation directorate, Gerry OBeirne.

It was organised in response to a meeting the night before of some 200 city traders who united in calls for the car ban to be scrapped. They say it has decimated afternoon trade and created an image that the city is closed.

Lord Mayor Tony Fitzgerald said councillors and officials have been listening to traders concerns.

As a result, we have decided to hold a special meeting tonight where we will review the CCMS.

Its a democratic forum. I will allow each of the members to voice their concerns, and we will certainly try to make proactive decisions to address their concerns.

However, he said a united message must go out that Cork is open for business, and is a great city in which to work, live and shop.

Ms Doherty insisted that she has the backing of council, and she said she plans to address with a Fianna Fail councillor allegations made at the traders meeting that officials had misled the elected members.

I am aware that one elected member has said some things about the officials and Ill discuss that with that individual, she said.

But I enjoy the support of council which is something Im quite proud of, and our team of staff, we work together, so if an individual has a problem, they should come and talk to me.

The councils Fianna Fail leader, Terry Shannon, criticised the councillors remarks.

We are 100% behind our chief executive and that type of language is offensive and unacceptable, he said.

Sinn Fein leader Thomas Gould declined to comment on how he will vote tonight pending consultation with his party colleagues.

We are listening. Senior management are listening as well, he said.

But I would just be cautious, that people might think this is being gotten rid of, or will be finished tonight.

We have a long-term view of Cork city and any decision we make has to be integrated with the long-term view, especially with the boundary extension. We have to find a solution.

Fine Gael councillor John Buttimer said: We all want an open vibrant dynamic city  we just have to agree a way forward. I support the policy framework but we need to find a way of working with traders to implement it.

Independent councillor Mick Finn said there is a need for long-term measures to facilitate the sustainable growth of the city.

But we have to be able to marry that with the needs of traders, and we are trying to come up with a solution, he said.

He also urged the business community to get more involved in consultation in relation to the CCMS over the coming months.
Prison officers say they are struggling to keep the gang groupings separated and to prevent inter-gang assaults, as well as prevent hits on the outside being ordered from inside.

Gang members arrested by gardai and convicted are resuming their activities in prison and even hiring contractors to carry out work for them, the general-secretary of the Prison Officers Association (POA) said.

As we all know now, gangs are international, John Clinton said, at the POAs annual conference in Kilkenny. Irish gangs work on a global basis. Theyve huge resources, huge finances, and they can have great influence within the prison system. So, when theyre caught by the gardai and imprisoned, they dont go away. Theres no road to Damascus transformation for these people.

They reform within the prison system and then they operate as they do on the outside, as the criminal gang they are involved in.

Mr Clinton said the logistics of keeping rival gangs separate are very, very difficult for prison guards.

One gang will want to get at the other gang, he said. When they do, our members have to intervene, and our members can get assaulted, as has been pointed out, and injured, during the course of their duties.

Prison officers say prisoner assaults on staff have become the norm, with several serious incidents in prisons over the last year.

Mr Clinton said many people are on protection in prisons, because of the proliferation of criminal gangs.

They control the prison population in the way they control their outside territories, he said. They have plenty of influence. Theres quite a lot of them. They group together and a group of criminals can put their rule of law down on other criminals, if thats allowed to happen.

The prison service is working on a violent disorder unit in Midlands Prison to house prisoners from gang backgrounds, but the POA wants gang members to be removed to Portlaoise, which has incarcerated paramilitaries since the 1970s, for this purpose.

However, the director-general of the Irish Prison Service, Michael Donnellan, did not accept that gang lords are wielding more power.

I think our governors and our prison staff are on top of this situation, he said.

Gang people always try to push and pull and bully their way.

We always stand up to that and were never fearful of taking them on.

He said there are about 10 criminal gangs operating within the prison system, involving about 100 key gangland people, along with others who may be associated with them.

Dealing with criminal gangs is absolutely nothing new for the Irish Prison Service, said Mr Donnellan.

The Irish Prison Service has been engaging with criminal gangs in custody for decades. Dealing with criminal gangs in prison systems around the world is nothing new.
Mr Murphy has faced multiple attacks and has been accused of presenting social housing building figures in a convoluted manner to make them appear better than the reality.

A report yesterday showed more than 2,500 social houses were completed by the end of 2017, with 3,646 more under construction and 1,912 about to go on site.

However, DIT professor and housing expert Lorcan Sirr said that when the figures are examined, the reality is local authorities built just over 500 houses last year.

This was strongly refuted by Mr Murphy last night who said local authorities built 1,014 houses in 2017, a further 761 were provided though Approved Housing Bodies, and 522 came from Part V of the Planning and Development Act 2000. The remaining homes were completed in 2016.

Weve had to ramp up from almost nothing our social housing building  in 2017 we built three times what we built in 2016 and this year well again pretty much double that figure  so theres a huge amount happening, he said.

However, Sinn Fein housing spokesman Eoin O Broin said Mr Murphy was putting his own political career first and has been caught out on the figures a number of times now, it is disingenuous at best and dishonest at worst.

Mr O Broin added: In the 1950s, local authorities were building an average of 5,000 homes a year at at time when the country was broke and in the 1970s there was an average of 7,000 built again at a time when the State was broke.

Fianna Fails spokesman on housing, Darragh OBrien, said the minister and the Government dont get the extreme crisis in housing and are simply waiting on the market to fix the problem, which he said will not work.

The Government has promised to deliver an additional 40,713 social houses between now the end of 2021 though new builds, acquisitions and leasing.

Members of the opposition also hit out at Mr Murphy for publishing reports late at night, giving politicians, housing organisations, and the media little time to examine announcements.

However, Mr Murphy has said this was nonsense

Mr Sirr said figures on the number of social houses that are being built, leased, and acquired are being presented in a really unintelligible fashion.

Commenting on the quarterly report produced by Rebuilding Ireland, Mr Sirr said: You would assume that there were 2,600 houses built in the last quarter but what this report really is is a cumulative progress report from the start of Rebuilding Ireland back in July 2016.

He said when these figures are subtracted, it means only around 1,900 houses were built.

Then you have to take away the Part V houses, which are houses built by developers and given to local authorities, said Mr Sirr.

He claimed when the number constructed by approved housing bodies such as Cluid and Tuath were subtracted, the number of local authority built homes was just 500, a figure dismissed as untrue by Mr Murphy.
An international team of researchers, led by scientists at the Human Health Research Institute at Maynooth University, identified a protein that is a key driver of inflammation. Blocking the protein suppresses inflammation and may be a new approach to treating inflammatory diseases.

Inflammatory diseases are difficult to treat, and sepsis, which can kill in just 12 hours, is particularly challenging for healthcare professionals. Sepsis occurs in only 3.4% of hospital cases, according to latest research from the HSE, but contributed to 25% of all hospital deaths.

Inflammation is the bodys response to infection by disease-causing micro-organisms. White blood cells, such as neutrophils, move from blood vessels into the infected tissue, where they destroy the invading micro-organism.

The research team is led by Prof Paul Moynagh, head of the Department of Biology and director of the Human Health Research Institute. Prof Moynagh, who has worked on the project for four years, says the recruitment of neutrophils into tissue needs to be controlled, as prolonged tissue infiltration of the cells will damage normal healthy tissue.

In the case of sepsis, we see inflammation spread rapidly throughout the body, as a response to a bacterial infection in the blood, which can lead to life-threatening organ dysfunction.

Understanding how the body promotes the migration of neutrophils into tissue may provide important clues for designing new drugs to control chronic inflammatory diseases, such as sepsis.

The team discovered an essential role for a protein called Pellino2 in how the body triggers inflammation and neutrophil movement into tissue. It is in finding ways to suppress or block this protein that chronic inflammation and sepsis can be treated.

Vulnerability to sepsis is increasing throughout the world, as more people undergo invasive procedures or take immunosuppressive drugs to treat chronic conditions. Antibiotic resistance is also increasing the risk of blood poisoning.

The research project is funded by an Investigators Programme Award from Science Foundation Ireland. The findings have just been published in the journal, Nature Communications.
Last month, the Taoiseach drew criticism after he told a Washington lunch he had telephoned Clare County Council about a proposed wind farm near Trumps Doonbeg-owned hotel.

Mr Varadkar subsequently said he was mistaken in his recollection of events, and moved to quell the controversy by releasing an email he sent to Failte Irelands then-CEO Shaun Quinn enquiring about the matter.

However, no emails, letters, or memos written by Mr Quinn were released to this newspaper following a Freedom of Information request to Failte Ireland for all documents relating to the bodys dealings on the wind farm issue.

Our former chief executive officer, Shaun Quinn, left office in December 2016 and we have no records from him relating to this matter, a cover letter issued with the documents stated.

A spokeswoman for Failte Ireland told this newspaper that the records have since been deleted.

Shaun Quinn completed his tenure as CEO of Failte Ireland in December 2016. During the second quarter of 2017, his dormant email account was disposed of, the spokeswoman said.

It is operating procedure within Failte Ireland that all dormant accounts within the organisation are deleted and removed within three to six months of an employees departure. All primary records are held in the relevant areas of responsibility within the organisation.

During last months traditional Taoiseachs St Patricks Day visit to Washington, Mr Varadkar said Mr Trump had called him to raise his concerns about the wind farm and that he endeavoured to do what I could do about it. The Taoiseach later said he didnt have a clear recollection of his actions and that he did not call the county council but emailed Mr Quinn on February 24, 2014.

Failte Ireland released more than 159 records to this newspaper following this request. Only one mentioned Mr Quinn  an email to the former CEO outlining Failte Irelands previous submissions on the wind farm application, which was sent on February 25, 2014, the day after Mr Varadkars email.

The Failte Ireland official said he was writing to Mr Quinn further to your enquiry. No record of this or any other enquiry was released to this newspaper.

Responding to another Freedom of Information request, Clare County Council said all third-party documentation received regarding the wind farms application is already publicly available via the applications planning file.
The Public Appointments Service has declined to reveal details on applications for police chief.

The Policing Authority, for which the PAS is operating the competition, did not provide any details, either.

The PAS said: In line with established practice, PAS makes no comment on any aspect of a recruitment and selection process, whilst it is underway.

A full and transparent report will be published on our website at the end of the process.

Asked how many had applied and the breakdown between internal and external candidates, the Policing Authority said: The Public Appointments Service are running this competition and they would be best-placed to respond to any queries.

The Irish Examiner previously tried to establish who was on the selection panel. While the PAS was not in a position to give such information, both the Department of Justice and the Policing Authority confirmed that the PAS has asked each of them for representatives.

The commissioner job has a salary of up to 250,000. Some sources have speculated that at least four internal garda candidates have applied, with reports also suggesting that a number of applications may have been made by police officers in Scotland.

Internal candidates being mentioned are: Deputy Commissioner Operations and Security, John Twomey; Assistant Commissioner, John ODriscoll, head of Special Crime Operations; Assistant Commissioner for Dublin Metropolitan Region, Pat Leahy; and Assistant Commissioner Northern Region, Barry OBrien.
That is according to a study which aims to highlight a pattern of probable triggers and underlying circumstances that may increase the risk of self-harm.

The authors of Presentations and preceding factors of drug overdose amongst adolescents admitted to a large regional hospital said targeted secondary prevention measures are needed in the aftercare management of self-harm as completed suicide and deliberate self-harm show considerable overlap.

However, it acknowledges that young people do not always receive the aftercare they need due to limited manpower and unavailability of on-call Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) or the medical social work team.

The study, by staff at the Department of Paediatrics and the Department of Emergency Medicine, Cork University Hospital, and the Department of Emergency Medicine, Galway University Hospital, evaluated the data of 85 adolescents, of whom 69 were female, ranging in age from 11 to 17, who presented to the paediatric ED at CUH for drug overdose from January 2014 to December 2016. It found:

More than two in five (44.7%) had a history of deliberate non-drug-related self-harm, including cutting skin, hanging and near drowning;

10 left a suicide note;

33% had been under the care of CAMHS prior to index admission;

Paracetamol was the commonest drug used;

Depression was the most common cause of mental illness. Preceding factors included unstable family dynamics, family history of mental illness, social problems, bullying, break-ups.

More than four in five patients were reviewed by the CAMHS team before discharge. A medical social worker assessed 11 patients before discharge. Twelve were readmitted for drug overdose, mostly females. Only one patient had no documented preceding factor or medical background that might have accounted for OD.

Six patients were transferred to Eist Linn, a child and adolescent in-patient unit in Cork, and one patient was transferred to intensive care. There were no deaths.

The study, published in the Irish Medical Journal said because 14% presented with OD within a two-year period of the study, this might be a pointer that a lot still needs to be put in place.

The study said recent meta-analysis had shown that active interventions among adolescents following an instance of self-harm helped prevent self-harm and suicide.

During the week, the Oireachtas Committee on Future Mental Health Care heard that 70 school children died by suicide in 2017 as mental health professionals begged for more staff.
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has been named by US magazine Time as one of the 100 most influential people alongside the great, good, and downright bizarre.

Alongside US president Donald Trump, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, Saudi Arabian crown prince Mohamed bin Salman, Chinese president Xi Jinping, and London mayor Sadiq Khan, the magazines writers said Mr Varadkar represents changing Irish society.
The man who answered seemed distracted. He was surprised to see the family pet outside. But upon being told by Martha the canvasser that she was with the Together for Yes campaign he immediately replied: Oh were a yes in this house.

She offered him a leaflet, whereupon he told her he couldnt chat further and had to go: The wife is upstairs going into labour.

A few doors down in the middle class estate of Glasnevin Downs in Dublin an older man was out working on his car.

He told Martha himself and his wife had raised six sons in the house although we never really talked about this sort of thing.

He was a strong yes but disclosed that the wife isnt sure, I have to work on her.

Martha was one of around 15 people, two of them men, three of them new, who made up the canvas group in Dublin North West (DNW) on Tuesday night.

The group met at 6.15pm outside a local pub where they donned their branded blue bibs and took their leaflets.

They were handed a tally sheet to record the name of the street and how they thought the person at a particular house might vote on May 25  either yes, no, maybe, or wont vote.

They set off with purpose with Eimear McBride, the Ballygall canvas leader giving instructions on which route to take. Ballygall is between Finglas and Glasnevin.

Eimear, who previously campaigned in the same sex marriage campaign, explained the DNW group hoped to get around to the 40,000 or so households in DNW at least once by the end of the campaign.

Theyve been knocking on doors since mid-February. Canvassers are from all political backgrounds and none but Eimear stressed that together they are very much a non-political group.

The information gathered tonight on the forms will later be fed back to the Together for Yes national campaign by a local data entry team.

Together For Yes Launch: Simon Harris, Katie O'Connell, Catherine Noone and Marcella Corcoran-Kennedy.

Now one canvas does not a campaign make, but after the criticism that the yes side had been slow off the starting blocks, I was curious to see their level of organisation and the response on the doorsteps.

In this particular instance anyway the answer was very highly organised. As to the responses, well there were a high number of yeses, but equally a high number where it was obvious people were uncertain, or if they did know they did not want to say, and that would possibly indicate a no vote.

Obviously there are a significant number of houses where people simply refuse to answer the door to the canvassers.

It was ever thus but its more clear than ever now they are at home with the massive wide screen TVs visible through the window.

The lengthening evenings are a blessing given that those who do answer can see who is at their door, although the default door answering position is to half open the door and semi curl their body around it, keeping half of themselves inside.

Youd have to wonder how much of this semi defensive crouch had to do with the sensitive issue at hand; people being reluctant to be drawn on their private thoughts on this most controversial matter.

What was really notable though was the lack of aggression or anger or finger wagging.

One woman who took a while to answer the door and missed the canvassers does appear belatedly and run out to her gate to shout  in a resolute, rather than an aggressive way  Itll be a no vote here.

Early in the canvas were at Glasanon Road in Ballygall. At one doorstep a woman in her 50s says she has made her decision and its a yes.

The canvasser speaks about compassion for women and womens healthcare needs and the sense of shame women can feel as if they have done something wrong even though it is right for them.

The woman agrees, and then says: I mean its not for everyone. The canvasser immediately concurs: Oh Jesus no, of course not.

At each house the patter is virtually the same. The canvasser gives their first name, saying they are from Dublin North West Together for Yes.

They ask if the person on the doorstep has heard about the upcoming referendum? Do they have any questions or anything they can help them with?

Even in a house that is a definite yes they leave a leaflet and ask the voter to talk to family and friends about the upcoming vote saying it is going to be close and every vote will count.

Canvassers have received training (and you can tell) on how to approach voters at the doorstep, where, from what I overheard, they stress, in moderate tones, the healthcare issues for Irish women, how women have to travel for abortions and the failure in adequate healthcare for crisis pregnancies.

Sometimes they mention how this will likely be a one in a generation chance to vote on this issue. I witnessed no zealousness.

One of the most regularly brought up issues nationally by those who are unsure of how they will vote is the proposal to allow abortion up to 12 weeks.

The Together for Yes campaigners talk about how this is the only way to ensure that cases of rape and incest are included.

Asked about negative canvassing experiences Aoife Traynor, co-convenor of the DNW group, said there had been one house where the woman took the stairs two at a time and nearly took the door off the hinges when she realised they were Together for Yes canvassers outside.

But she just wanted to tell us she was voting no and wouldnt have our leaflet in her house.

Asked her sense of how the campaign is going Aoife feels that it will be a yes vote. But later in the evening another young member of the team says she worries about the outcome.

In general there are a lot of strong yeses, but then you also get a lot of undecided, so I do worry that they are actually no voters.

A lengthy chat is held with a woman in her 30s in the Fairways estate. Her 10-month-old baby can be heard gurgling to his dad (a yes voter) in the kitchen. His wife says she would have been a definite yes before getting pregnant, but is unsure now.

Its when youve been pregnant, she explains. You know when you get to 12 weeks its so real. Im finding it very hard.

The canvasser acknowledges where shes coming from, but raises the issue of fatal foetal abnormalities and women having to travel.

I dont have kids myself and if I did I dont know what decision I would make in that situation but Id like to have a choice.

The young woman is quick to acknowledge the difficulties with that situation. Its just that niggling thing... I think it will be very narrow in the end.

Its still early days in the campaign, and momentum could swing either way, but as of now I think shes right, it will.
Business Yangon Investment Forum Hopes to Garner Foreign Interest

Shipping containers at Asia World Port in Yangon on Sept. 16, 2016 / The Irrawaddy

YANGON  The Yangon Region Investment Committee hopes to boost foreign investment through an upcoming investment forum that is slated for May 9.

Yangon Chief Minister U Phyo Min Thein, who also chairs the Yangon Region Investment Committee, told reporters at a press conference on Friday that the countrys commercial capital has a high potential for investments.

He said there are plenty of opportunities up for grabs in Yangon including industrial zones, city expansion, housing projects and other development projects.

About 300 foreign and 200 local investors are expected to attend the forum, which is organized by the Yangon Region Investment Committee (YRIC) along with other partners.

The forum will take place at the Novotel Yangon Max Hotel.

U Myo Khaing Oo, secretary of the YRIC, said he expects the forum will attract a lot of foreign investment.

The committee approved 40 foreign and 9 local businesses in the manufacturing sector and other service sectors with a total pledged amount of US$59 million and 23 billion kyats, from August, 2017 to April 11. Those approved 49 businesses are expected to create some 22,000 local job opportunities.

The officials said that the forum will provide information on company registration, regulations, tax exemption, investment application procedures and other investment opportunities to facilitate easy access for investors.

For this year, our expectation is rule of law and a clean city, as well as boosting the citys economy, chief minister U Phyo Min Thein said.

He pledged the conservation of city heritage and environmental protection along with the economic developments.

The chief minister said the committee will hold the investment forum annually.
In Person After Bumpy 2017, Tourism Sector Looks for Clear Skies

Daw Yin Myo Su (left) and Daw May Myat Mon Win. / The Irrawaddy

YANGON Myanmars tourism sector has been booming since the country began opening its doors to the outside world in 2011, after decades of isolation under military rule. Tourist arrivals surged from 800,000 in 2011 to 4.7 million in 2015. But the sector had a setback late last year with the outbreak of violence in Rakhine State, which saw hundreds of people killed and drove almost 700,000 Rohingya to neighboring Bangladesh. In the wake of the violence, tourists cancelled their trips. Many raised safety concerns and moral objections.

The Irrawaddy spoke recently with Daw May Myat Mon Win and Daw Yin Myo Su about the countrys tourism sector, the Rakhine conflicts impact on the industry and their efforts to counter the setback.

Daw May Myat Mon Win is chairwoman of Myanmar Tourism Marketing, vice-chairwoman of the Myanmar Tourism Federation, and general manager of the Chatrium Hotel Royal in Yangon. Daw Yin Myo Su is managing director of the Inle Princess Resort in Shan State and the Mrauk-U Princess Resort in Rakhine State, and founder of the Inle Heritage Foundation.

Daw May Myat Mon Win, how did the latest crisis in Rakhine State impact the tourism market?

Followed the crisis, people were asking whether it was safe and ethical to travel to Myanmar. As for safety, Myanmar has restricted areas, but all tourist destinations are safe to visit. Another concern that travelers raised was ethics, from a humanitarian point of view. The sensationalized headlines and pictures of the crisis had an effect. The impact was mostly from Western countries. They felt it was unethical to visit Myanmar. But there are also those from other countries who dont really mind. They see travel as separate from politics and that conflicts happen in their countries as well as in other places.

There are many who believe they should not visit Myanmar because that would constitute support for the human rights abuses in Rakhine. What do you think of that?

We cant say nothing happened in Rakhine. But it is hard to differentiate the news that is true and false. When people make assumptions based on their personal biases, it is very harmful to the situation. What I would like to say is dont politicize tourism. Our country has faced a lot of challenges and difficulties. The peace process has not yet achieved its goal. Its been going on for a very long time. It is difficult for them to understand Myanmars complex problems. But if they really want to help us, they need to support tourism. The Rakhine conflict started because of poverty. The community there has been excluded and isolated. Tourism has a very broad scope. Its not just hotels. It also has an indirect economic impact on local small businesses like restaurants, vendors, souvenir shops. It can drive the local economy, which benefits different groups, different ethnicities and different religions in the country.

Is the market still suffering from the crisis?

It is. Travelers usually make decisions and forward bookings three months, six months or 10 months before their trips. But this is not the end of the road. We cant just despair and do nothing. We need to continue promoting destinations and a positive view of the country to counter the negative views. We need to give our country a facelift. So far we have not been able to do much. Thats why the negative publicity has taken over. It is important to make a priority of countering it. And in giving the country a facelift, tourism has to play a key role.

What are the plans for 2018?

We expect most of the increase in visitors to come from Asian countries this year. We have marketing activities throughout this year in Japan and will target the worlds largest outbound tourism market  China. Not only Myanmar, but also the US, UK and French are enticing Chinese tourists. We plan to have marketing activities there. But we have a small budget while other countries have a decent budget for tourism marketing. Neighboring Thailand spends hundreds of millions of dollars to promote itself globally. For instance, at ITB Berlin (the worlds largest tourism trade fair) Indonesia spent $1.5 million while we had only $150,000 to $100,000 allocated from the Ministry of Hotels and Tourism and collected another $50,000 from private operators. This must be considered seriously.

Daw Yin Myo Su, how is the tourism sector doing right now?

The number of visitors from Europe has declined significantly, as well as from [other] Western countries. We have seen an increase in arrivals from Asian countries. But most Westerners stay at least two weeks to four weeks because they have come from quite far. But Asians, they come mostly for weekends, so the length of stay is different. If we ask whether it is good or bad, the situation is not good right now.

We are all working to attract visitors. Some offer discounts. Some target more Asian countries and do promotions there. There are promotions for domestic tourists also, because locals are traveling more than before. Everyone is struggling to cover operating costs, maintenance and salaries for staff. Looking at the positives, we can improve our skills as we struggle to attract travelers, unlike before. But it is also important to attract good and responsible travelers for sustainable tourism, and not just focus on quantity.

You are in Inle and Mrauk-U, which are among the countrys most popular tourist destinations. What impact has the Rakhine conflict had there?

Mrauk-U has been the worst. Throughout all of 2017 Mrauk-U saw only about 2,000 foreign visitors, based on entrance fee collection data. That number is quite low compared with recent years. It has declined by nearly half. We had to run at a loss in Mrauk-U. Because I have 100 staff there, I have done my best to keep running. We have heard words that we have never heard before  mass murderers, intolerant nation, unkind, no sympathy. While the majority of people think like that, how can we ask and entice people to visit? It makes sense to think like a traveler going on vacation. Why would they want to visit a place where the news is all terrible? But the problem is that there are those who think Yangon and Inle are very close. If they arent familiar with the map of Myanmar, there might be some who think the whole nation is in crisis. But because the conflict is happening in Rakhine, we cant assume the whole nation is like that.

Many have asked whether it is ethical to visit Myanmar. What is your view on that?

Isolation is not a solution. If the economy gets worse and education does not improve, a similar problem could happen again. The problems in Rakhine are mainly because of the failure to integrate and invest in the education of the communities there. It has undone the work of the past 70 years. It cant be resolved in seven days, seven months, or even seven years. A long-term commitment is needed.

How important is the tourism sector to the country?

Just at my resorts, there are 400 [staff] for the small, 23-room Mrauk-U resort and the 36-room Inle resort. And Im talking only about hotels. There are also tourism-related businesses: weaving, tour guides, souvenir shops, handicrafts sellers. And if we talk about restaurants, there are also vegetable and meat sellers, transportation, and so on. The drop in visitors affects them all. And if people become hungry and scared as a result, that could indirectly promote extremism.

What are the main changes needed to develop the tourism sector?

Number one is to develop infrastructure for better transportation and telecommunications at the [tourist] destinations, and to develop direct flights from overseas to the main destinations. We also need to maintain the fast-tract online tourist visas that were introduced. Cooperation between the ministries needs to be improved because their directives on travel restrictions often change. For example, tourists come to visit an area because there are no restrictions, but once they arrive its changed. It is not good for the countrys image. We also need to provide a platform for small [businesses] with a clear direction and capacity building for skilled laborers in the industry.
Asia No Job, No Money': Life in Vietnam for Immigrants Deported by US

Vietnamese deportee and Amerasian Pham Chi Cuong, 47, who was deported from the US, smokes while having a coffee in central Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, April 20, 2018. / Reuters

HO CHI MINH CITY  It wasnt until Pham Chi Cuong saw the plane waiting to deport him from the United States that it sunk in that he was about to be sent back to Vietnam, the country he fled in 1990.

Cuong and at least three other deportees who had lived in America for decades were returned to Vietnam in December 2017 as part of a renewed Trump administration push to deport immigrants convicted of crimes in the United States.

The expulsions were carried out despite a 2008 bilateral agreement that Vietnamese immigrants who arrived in the United States prior to 1995, many of whom had supported the now defunct US-backed state of South Vietnam, would not be sent back.

Cuong and the other men, who spoke to Reuters this week in Ho Chi Minh City, said they spent the 17-hour flight in enforced silence, their hands and legs in restraints.

Adjusting to life in Vietnam, the men all said, has been difficult. They said they were viewed with suspicion by Vietnamese officials and have had trouble finding work.

If you ask me do you want to come back to the US? Ill give you the answer yes, but I dont know how, said Cuong, who left a wife and children back home in Orlando, Florida.

Another of the men, who asked to be identified only by his last name of Nguyen, told Reuters he was asked by local police officials when he returned to Vietnam if he worked for the CIA.

He said he was deported to Cam Ranh Bay, a place he had fled after the war because of his familys connections to the losing side. I ran away from there, said Nguyen.

There were a lot of Americans there at the time, and my family worked for them, he added. My uncle died in the war. He was a South Vietnamese soldier.

It is not known how many pre-1995 Vietnamese immigrants like Nguyen and Cuong have been deported so far, but the Trump administration is seeking to send back thousands, Washingtons former envoy to Hanoi told Reuters in an interview last week. Vietnam has expressed reluctance to take back pre-1995 immigrants.

Of the 8,600 Vietnamese nationals in the United States that the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency says are subject to deportation as of December last year, 7,821 have criminal convictions. an ICE spokesman said. The agency said it could not say how many of the immigrants slated for deportation arrived before 1995.

The White House has declined to comment on the Vietnamese deportations. But the Trump administration has labeled Vietnam and eight other countries recalcitrant for their unwillingness to accept their deported nationals.

Abuse and Discrimination

The son of an American serviceman stationed in Saigon during the war, Cuong is Amerasian, which he said subjected him to abuse and discrimination in Vietnam after the war.

He didnt attend school and spent years ostracized and working in rice fields before leaving the country in 1990 on a program that gave Amerasians like him a chance to resettle in the United States.

But despite being born to an American father and raising three American children in Florida, Cuong never became a US citizen.

It hadnt seemed necessary, he said, since he had come to the country legally and was allowed to work. Then, in 2000, Cuong was convicted of assault and battery and sentenced to 18 months in jail. In 2007, he was given one-year probation for driving under the influence.

Both times, Cuong was warned that his crimes made him eligible for deportation under US law, but at the time Vietnam was not accepting deportees back. He was relieved in 2008, when the bilateral agreement on repatriations was signed in which the return of pre-1995 refugees was specifically barred.

After his arrests, Cuong checked in regularly with ICE as he was required to do, and stayed out of trouble.

He held down a steady job as a sushi chef and put his son through three years of college.

But in October, 2017, he was taken into custody by ICE and two months later found himself on a plane back to Vietnam.

Utterly Shocked

Another of the deportees, Bui Thanh Hung, is also Amerasian, born in 1973 to a Vietnamese mother and an American soldier who died during the war.

Hung was convicted of domestic violence in 2010, which he says came after he walked in on his wife and another man. He spent six years in prison. Last year, he was released into ICE custody and deported in December.

Over here, I have no job, no one to support me, no house to live in, said Hung. He said he was relying on new acquaintances to stay temporarily at their homes.

Many immigration advocates say they assumed the United States would be particularly reluctant to expel Amerasians like Hung and Cuong, because of their American fathers and the discrimination they had faced in post-war Vietnam.

Those of us in the Southeast Asian community were utterly shocked, Tin Nguyen, a US-based lawyer, said of the ongoing deportations. Nguyen volunteers with the Southeast Asian Coalition nonprofit and has been working with the deportees.

It was as if they forgot about the Vietnam War.

Cuong and Bui were deported with around 30 other deportees from Asian countries on a plane that dropped people off in Myanmar and Cambodia before reaching its final destination, Vietnam.

Now back in the country they once fled, the men said they receive little support from the Vietnamese government and were struggling to find work.

I got no money, said Cuong. My wife, sometimes she gives me a couple hundred dollars, but nobody helps me, nothing.
Burma Anti-Corruption Commission Files Case Against FDA Chief

Food and Drug Administration director-general Dr. Than Htut. / FDA

The Anti-Corruption Commission of Myanmar on Friday filed a corruption case against the director-general of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Dr. Than Htut, the director-general of the FDA, which is under the Ministry of Sport and Health, is accused of demanding personal favors from a company that won a tender to build two laboratory buildings at the FDAs Naypyitaws headquarters, as well as structures at 12 FDA district offices around the country.

The anti-graft agency has not disclosed the name of the company involved, but it is believed to be the Ye Taik Myotaw company.

According to the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC), the case was opened against Dr. Than Htut under Article 56 of the Anti-Corruption Law of 2013 at Zabu Thiri Township police station. The agency said it had found that Dr. Than Htut abused his position to demand personal favors from the company in return for the contracts.

Article 56 states that, Other than the Political Post Holder, if any other Authorized Person is convicted for committing bribery; he/she shall be punished with imprisonment for a term of not more than 10 years and with a fine.

U Than Zaw Win, an ACC inspector, would act as plaintiff in the case, said commission spokesman U Han Nyunt. He declined to disclose how long the ACC had been investigating the FDA chief.

The commission receives about 500 complaints a month, according to the spokesman.

The ACCs probe found that the director-general had demanded construction materials with which to build a house in Naypyitaws Shwe Kyar Pin quarter; as well as materials for another two-story building, a swimming pool and fencing in Ywar Thit village in Naypyitaw. All together, the materials were worth more than 151 million kyats.

Dr. Than Htut, 60, was trained as a civilian physician, and later served as a military doctor. He was also an assistant professor at the Yangon University of Public Health. He joined the FDA as deputy director-general in March 2015, and was later promoted to his current position.

This is the first case publicly announced by the ACC since the inauguration of President U Win Myint, who has vowed to crack down on bribery and corruption. At a meeting on April 12, the president urged ACC chairman U Aung Kyi and other members to step up their efforts against corruption. He also encouraged the ACC in its work during his speech to mark the traditional Myanmar New Year on Tuesday.

Moe Moe contributed to this report from Naypyitaw.
Brig. Gen. Tin Ko Ko also headed the No. 1 Security Police Command in Naypyitaw and in October 2017 was transferred to head the No. 2 Security Police Command in Yangon, a position he still holds.

The Border Guard Police are also responsible for civilian administration, which covers public welfare, disaster prevention and management, and search and rescue operations. They are also responsible for promoting bilateral ties with neighboring countries in line with international laws and procedures.

They also inherited the duties of the Immigration Department, including immigration control, citizenship registration, monitoring population growth, preventing illegal trade, combatting smugglers, and supervising the taxation of border trade.

The Border Guard Police are responsible for security and law enforcement at the border. Their duties include collecting information, monitoring the border, preventing cross-border crime, counter-terrorism, responding to riots, and cooperating with local military battalions.

Brig. Gen. Tin Ko Ko served as commander of the Border Guard Police (Headquarters) in Rakhine States Maungdaw Township. The force was established on March 10, 2014, and took over police stations and outposts previously overseen by the Immigration Department.

Here is what we have learned about the brigadier general so far.

YANGON  On Friday, a police captain and prosecution witness in the case of two detained Reuters journalists testified that Police Brigadier General Tin Ko Ko masterminded a setup to arrest the reporters, Ko Wa Lone and Ko Kyaw Soe Oo.

Wa State and Rakhine Aside, Survey Finds Living Conditions Improving Across the Country

AA Leader Dismisses Ridiculous Claim that His Group Has Ties to ARSA

President Orders Anti-Corruption Panel Not to Be Influenced by Powerful Figures

Wa Restaurant Brings Food From the Mountains to the Big City

Zuckerberg Urged to Take Genuine Steps to Stop Use of FB to Spread Hate in Myanmar

More Pressure Needed on Myanmar to Take Back Rohingya: Bangladeshi PM

Thailand Taps Tourists to Fight Human Trafficking  and Keep the Country Smiling

Crime Down but Fatalities Up During Thingyan Water Festival, Police Say

No Job, No Money': Life in Vietnam for Immigrants Deported by US

Myanmar Says Refugees in Bangladesh Have Not Received Repatriation Forms

NMSP Urged to Defy Army Over Limits Placed on Public Meetings

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Burma International University to Be Built in Naypyitaw

A road runs in front of Parliament in Naypyitaw. / Htet Naing Zaw / The Irrawaddy

NAYPYITAW  Naypyitaws municipal administration has announced plans for an international university to be built in the capitals diplomatic zone in Dekkhinathiri Township.

The Naypyitaw Development Committee (NPTDC) is awaiting project approval and land allocation in the diplomatic zone by the Foreign Ministry and the Presidents Office, committee member U Min Thu told The Irrawaddy.

South Korea will fund and provide technical assistance for construction of the university, which is expected to take less than two years, U Min Thu said. The university is expected to open its doors in 2020.

A delegation representing the universitys founding committee led by Sung Ki Baik visited NPTDC officials in early March to discuss the project.

The institution will provide instruction in a wide variety of vocational subjects tailored to the needs of the region and local people, U Min Thu said. The name of the university has yet to be decided, he said.

The university is part of the initiative to make Naypyitaw a smart city, U Thant Zin Tun, a lawmaker representing Dekkhinathiri Township in the Lower House, told The Irrawaddy.

Over 1,500 acres of land were earmarked as a diplomatic zone when the administrative capital was established more than a decade ago. The NPTDC has proposed building a university on 300 acres in the zone, U Min Thu said.

This is very good for the future of local children. We should welcome it as it will unlock not only educational opportunities but also business and job opportunities in the town, U Nanda Kyaw of Zayar Real Estate Agent told The Irrawaddy.

Naypyitaw comprises eight townships covering 2,724.75 square miles with a population of over 1 million people, many of whom are civil servants, according to the NPTDC.

Zayarthiri Township is home to the University of Agriculture, University of Forestry and University of Veterinary Science.

Translated from Burmese by Thet Ko Ko.
Burma Myanmar Says Refugees in Bangladesh Have Not Received Repatriation Forms

A Rohingya refugee boy carries water in the Kutupalong refugee camp, in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, on March 22. / Reuters

YANGON  Myanmar claims that Bangladesh authorities have failed to distribute repatriation application forms to Rohingya refugees its neighbor is sheltering despite a repatriation agreement the two governments signed in November.

The claim came after a 10-member team from Myanmar visited the refugee camps of Coxs Bazar on April 11-13 to meet some of the 700,000 Rohingya Muslims who have fled to Bangladesh since late August, when attacks on security posts in northern Rakhine State by the militant Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) triggered a military crackdown in the area.

The team included U Win Myat Aye, the social welfare minister, U Aung Htun Thet, deputy head of the governments Enterprise for Humanitarian Assistance, Resettlement and Development in Rakhine, and representatives from the Myanmar Womens Federation and different religious communities.

In December, Myanmar handed Bangladesh the application forms it wanted refugees interested in repatriation to fill out, after the two countries had agreed to a Joint Working Group that would vet applicants backgrounds to confirm that they had been residents of Myanmar.

The following month, Lieutenant General Kyaw Swe visited Bangladesh to share information about several hundred suspected ARSA members Myanmar believed were hiding among the refugees. At the same time, Bangladesh handed the general forms for 8,032 refugees who had applied for repatriation.

At a press conference on Thursday at the National Peace and Reconciliation Center in Yangon, U Win Myat Aye said the refugee camp representatives his team met last week all said they had never seen any application forms.

No one knows about the application form, he said.

U Win Myat Aye said Bangladesh Foreign Affairs Minister Abul Hassan Mahmood Ali and Home Affairs Minister Asaduzzaman Khan admitted that the completed forms for the 8,032 refugees were not the ones the two governments had agreed to.

They admitted that the forms handed to Myanmar were not the forms agreed to when the [repatriation] deal was signed on Nov. 23, 2017, he said.

We are very shocked about the refugees claims about the application forms, said U Hla Tun, who joined last weeks visit to the camps as a Hindu representative.

U Win Myat Aye said Bangladeshs foreign affairs minister urged the home affairs minister to supply the refugees with the correct application forms and provide Myanmar with the completed applications as soon as possible. But officials at the press conference declined to say whether Bangladesh had an explanation for why the correct forms had not been distributed and filled out to begin with.

The team also claimed that Bangladesh ignored its requests to arrange meetings for the team with Rohingya imams, with refugees Myanmar had already agreed to allow back, and with Hindus who have also fled Rakhine since August. U Hla Tun said Bangladesh authorities replied that the Hindu camp was too far away.

In fact, the Hindu camp is situated on the way to the Coxs Bazar refugee camps, he said.

U Win Myat Aye said the camp representatives were also ill informed about Myanmars National Verification Card (NVC) and that he expounded on its virtues. He said he told the representatives that the cards allowed for free movement, doing business, access to education, crossing international borders and fishing near international waters. The minister said he emphasized that cardholders were eligible for citizenship after five months.

Most of them have no idea about the benefits of holding an NVC, he said.

However, Myanmar does not grant citizenship to people who identify as Rohingya because the government does not legally recognize them as an ethnic group.

During the teams visit to the refugee camps, camp representatives presented their own list of 13 demands on Myanmar, including property rights, ethnic rights and education.

On Thursday, U Win Myat Aye said he believed the representatives had been well trained to make those demands by people he did not name. Even so, he said the trip had been very successful because the two countries were able to clear up some misunderstandings and agreed to speed up the repatriation process.

When we asked the refugees whether they want to come back to Myanmar, all of them unanimously answered that they want to return as soon as possible, he said.

The Bangladesh Embassy in Yangon did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.
Burma NMSP Urged to Defy Army Over Limits Placed on Public Meetings

The NMSP conducts a public meeting in Nyi Zar, on April 9. / Nai Banya Mon

Mon civil society organizations, political parties and community leaders have urged the New Mon State Party (NMSP) to refuse to hold public meetings in Myanmar Army-controlled areas as a way of expressing their unhappiness with an Army order that not more 40 representatives from Mon community groups join the gatherings, which are intended to provide a forum to discuss the peace process, local sources said.

The NMSP, the political wing of the Mon National Liberation Army, signed the NCA in February with the Myanmar government and the Army, and had planned to hold public meetings in five townships: Nyi Zar, Wa Zin, Moulmein, Mudon, and Three Pagodas Pass.

After holding the public meetings, the NMSP planned to hold a national level peace dialogue in Ye town from May 5 to 7. The party is seeking suggestions from ethnic Mon communities to propose at the Panglong peace conference.

The community leaders urged the NMSP to disobey the order from the Army at the first public meeting, in Nyi Zar on April 9 to 11, and it subsequently invited 250 representatives from civil society organizations, political parties, community leaders and other groups to the event.

The Army has told the NMSP to limit the number of representatives at the meetings to 40 people. Of course, they could still hold the meetings if they wanted but, from our viewpoint this is part of their strategy to suppress the Mon psychologically, said Nai San Hlaing, an executive committee member of the Mon National Party (MNP).

The NMSP should not hold further public meetings if the Army places restrictions on the number of representatives who can attend, he said.

If the NMSP holds them, our party will not send representatives. Our party will not participate in the meeting if the number of representatives is limited, Nai San Hlaing said.

The NMSP plans to hold a second meeting in Wa Zin, which like Nyi Zar is in Mon-controlled territory, on April 26 and 27, and again plans to invite 250 representatives. But the party is still considering whether or not to hold the meetings in the other three locations, which are under the control of the Army, after Mon leaders urged them not to.

The CSO Network based in Mon State also told the NMSP not to organize the meetings to protect the dignity of the ethnic group. The Army told them (the NMSP) that only 40 representatives could join the meeting. We told the NMSP that if they did what the Myanmar Army said our Mon people would look down on the NMSP. The NMSP will have no dignity if they acquiesce to the Armys demand, Nai Aung Htoo, a coordinator of the CSO Network in Mon State, told The Irrawaddy.

Nai Hong Sar, who is the vice chairman of the NMSP, said his party would negotiate further with the Army over the number of representatives allowed to attend the meetings in Moulmein, Mudon, and Three Pagodas Pass.

We want to hold the public meetings in those three locations, so we will negotiate more with them, Nai Hong Sar said.

We accept their position, he said, referring to the CSO, political parties, and community leaders. Even in the NMSP we know that if we give in to the Armys order, they will seek to further restrict our political movement in the future.

The NMSP is worried, however, that if it does not hold the meetings in the Army-controlled areas, some Mon people may think the party was not giving them the opportunity to have their say in the peace process, and it was worried about future political cooperation between Mon people and the NMSP.

Before signing the NCA, the NMSP leaders did not think the Myanmar Army would restrict representatives from participating in public meetings. So, NMSP leadership did not raise the issue before signing the ceasefire agreement.

The NMSP also claimed that as part of the negotiations leading up to the signing of the NCA, the Army had promised to return two bases that it had seized from the MNLA last year. But, it has yet to do so.

The NMSP expected that they would have more time and a better relationship with the Army after signing the NCA, party officials said. But, the NMSP leadership now feels regret that the Army has used the NCA as a tool to restrict its political movement as well as the movement of its troops.

Before signing the NCA, the NMSP was able to freely organize meetings with no limitations on the location or number of representatives who attended. But now they cannot do that, said some members of the NMSP.
Burma Police Officer Admits to Setting Up Two Reuters Journalists

Prosecution witness police captain Moe Yan Naing is taken away by some unidentified men after his testimony at the court on Friday. / Reuters

YANGON  Police deliberately sought to entrap two Reuters reporters by handing them confidential government papers, a prosecution witness testified in court on Friday.

Police Captain Moe Yan Naing told the court that Police Brigadier General Tin Ko Ko ordered the police to ensnare the two Reuters reporters  Ko Wa Lone and Ko Kyaw Soe Oo  who are facing trial for violating the colonial-era Official Secrets Act.

Moe Yan Naing was the officer interviewed by Wa Lone in November about police operations in Rakhine State. He was one of two officers from the paramilitary 8th Security Police Battalion who the police identified in December as allegedly involved in the case.

Moe Yan Naing said he had been under arrest since the night of Dec. 12 and had been told to testify on Friday as a prosecution witness.

He was among several policemen interrogated by a police information team about their interactions with the Reuters reporters, he told the court on Friday.

Moe Yan Naing described to the court how Brigadier General Tin Ko Ko, who led the internal probe, had instructed Police Lance Corporal Naing Lin to arrange a meeting with Wa Lone that night and to hand over secret documents from Battalion 8 as part of a set-upto trap the two journalists.

He then ordered the Htaunt Kyant regional police force to arrest Wa Lone upon his departure from the restaurant, the meeting place.

Tin Ko Ko was not immediately available for comment on Friday.

I am revealing the truth because police of any rank have their own integrity. It is true that they were set up, Captain Moe Yan Naing told reporters.

Ko Wa Lone and Ko Kyaw Soe Oo have been charged under the Official Secrets Act for possessing confidential government papers and face a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison if found guilty.

The Home Affairs Ministry has said that it would take action against Captain Moe Yan Naing and Lance Corporal Khin Maung Lin for their role in passing the government documents to the two journalists.

The court appearance by the two police officers took place on Friday at Yangon North District Court.
News Citing Rohingya Massacre, Myanmar Army Chief Urges Soldiers to Obey Law

Myanmar Army chief Snr-Gen Min Aung Hlaing arrives at the presidential palace at Naypyitaw, Myanmar, March 30, 2018. / Reuters

YANGON  Myanmar Army chief Snr-Gen Min Aung Hlaing has told military personnel in the country that they must obey the law, citing as an example the sentencing of seven soldiers for a massacre of Rohingya Muslim men that was the subject of a Reuters investigation.

In a speech at a military school in the countrys north, Min Aung Hlaing told soldiers they must abide by the military codes of conduct and international laws and conventions, according to a translation posted on his official Facebook page on Thursday.

No one is above the law. Actions will be taken if someone breaks the law. The problems in Inn Din village  were solved in line with the Geneva Convention and legal action was taken against military officers and other ranks who failed to respect the law, said Min Aung Hlaing, in his first direct comment on the killings.

Seven soldiers were sentenced to 10 years in prison with hard labor this month for taking part in the massacre of 10 Rohingya men in the village of Inn Din, in northwestern Rakhine state, last September.

The massacre was being investigated by two Reuters journalists  Wa Lone, 32, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 28  who were arrested in December and remain in custody accused of violating the countrys Official Secrets Act.

The authorities told Reuters in February the military opened an internal investigation into the killings independently and that it was unrelated to the Reuters reporters, who they said were accused of obtaining unrelated secret government papers.

The Rohingya men were buried in a mass grave in early September after being hacked to death or shot by Buddhist civilian neighbors and soldiers. Reuters published its story on the murders in February.

The killings were part of a larger army crackdown on the Rohingya, beset by allegations of murder, rape, arson and looting, unleashed in response to Rohingya militant attacks on security forces in late August.

Nearly 700,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar as a result, according to United Nations agencies. The UN and the United States described it as ethnic cleansing  an accusation that Myanmar denies.

Min Aung Hlaing, one of the most powerful people in a country where the constitution requires the civilian government of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi to share power with the military, reiterated in his speech the armys position that the Rakhine operation was a legitimate counteroffensive against Bengali terrorists.
Friday, April 20th, 2018 (9:00 am) - Score 23,425

A number of TalkTalks broadband ISP customers in the UK have raised concerns after the provider sent them an alarmist warning email, which without providing any useful details claimed that they may have downloaded a virus on one or more of your devices (phishing emails adopt a similar approach).

The message, which was sent several times (during different times of the day) to the same customers from a seemingly official address (info@consumer.talktalkplc.com), continued: Unfortunately, weve detected a potential threat on one or more of your smartphones, tablets or computers. This may have come from an unsafe attachment, a phishing website or many other places, so we recommend you protect your devices to make sure any viruses you have are removed now.

At this point the message recommends that subscribers enable TalkTalks F-Secure based SuperSafe boost, which is an anti-virus software solution that is provided free with every package for use with one device (you can increase this up to 8 devices by upgrading to the Supersafe Boost but itll cost you +2 extra a month). A copy of the email has been pasted below and we will continue our report beneath.

Suffice to say that the vague email resulted in a number of customers scrambling to conduct wider malware and anti-virus scans, except after several hours none of them found any such infections on their devices (note: this does not necessarily mean that a problem doesnt exist, only that the users couldnt find anything with their existing tools).

Related users promptly took to the ISPs community forum (here, here and here) and began questioning whether the warnings were real or fake (phishing). Subscribers were equally curious as to how TalkTalk would even know if a virus had infected their system(s), which might raise one or two not insignificant issues about user privacy and monitoring.

TalkTalk Customer, Gondola, said: Well, info@consumer.talktalkplc.com is a genuine TalkTalk marketing / informational email. So based on the evidence so far its looking more and more like a badly conceived marketing effort thats wasting all our time with a direct implication that a virus or malware has been downloaded. Of course this means that the next time we receive a real warning theres a real threatpeople will ignore it. Im not impressed TalkTalk.

TalkTalk Customer, Marshals, said: The body of the email makes a specific claim that TT has detected a potential threat on one of my devices. Theres no equivocation there. So, I want to know what that potential threat is, so that I can act on it. If this turns out to be a marketing campaign, and there never was any potential threat, TT will come out worse than when customer details were leaked. Lying to frighten your own customers does not look good.

TalkTalk Customer, kobaltx, said: Today received e-mail from TT saying they had detected a virus on one of my devices and should go to my account and turn on F-Secure. This has been turned on for more than a year and account is still valid. Scanning my computer (this is the only way i contact TT) with F- Secure, Hitman Pro, Malwarebytes and MS Malware removal tool all turned up clean. I hesitate to report it as phishing as i recently renewed my contract and it may be a follow up thing.

TalkTalk Customer, ITTroll, said: I received two copies of the same email today from TalkTalk  No specific details were provided and all very vague. I do not have Super Safe or Home Safe enabled. So this is either a fearmongering marketing email to upsell F-Secure, or TalkTalk have been monitoring my browsing and determined that I may have visited a potentially malicious site. Neither is particularly good.

Initially the ISPs community team responded to say they cant see anything [to say] that this came from [TalkTalk], although shortly after this they did confirm that it was a genuine TalkTalk message and after a few more hours an official statement finally dropped (below). In addition, the ISP noted that the message was only supposed to be sent once to each relevant user and that the repetition was done in error.

Official TalkTalk Statement One of our top priorities is keeping you and your family safe online, our Homesafe and Supersafe products helps keep you and your devices protected. Whilst we dont monitor our customers internet traffic, our next generation DNS platform is able to identify traffic patterns from malware and potential threats on the network enabling us to notify our customers.

We have seen other ISPs use similar detection methods before, such as when identifying whether specific subscribers are using a compromised (hacked) broadband router (these often change the DNS settings of the device and thus make a noticeable diversion in traffic flow etc.). Nevertheless in this case customers, including both those with and without HomeSafe and / or SuperSafe enabled, appeared to be receiving the same message.

The original message was quite specific in claiming that it had detected a potential threat on one or more of your [devices], although in the above statement they could just as easily be pointing the finger toward users who simply visited a bad website (even good websites can be marked bad by anti-virus firms, such as when they become briefly affected by a virus). Sadly TalkTalk failed to provide any useful detail to help users identify the true cause.

Some readers may recall that TalkTalks HomeSafe web filtering and monitoring system caused a bit of a privacy stir back in 2010 after customers noted that it was monitoring every URL (website address) they visited (here), even when they had chosen to disable it.

The ISP eventually responded to clarify that, Our scanning engines receive no knowledge about which users visited what sites (e.g. telephone number, account number, IP address), nor do they store any data for us to cross-reference this back to our customers. We are not interested in who has visited which site  we are simply scanning a list of sites which our customers, as a whole internet community, have visited.

The question now is whether or not TalkTalk have done a u-turn on the above commitment and we are still awaiting their response on that. All of this is occurring at a time when issues of internet privacy have become a hot topic in the news, not least due to the recent Facebook fiasco but also the forthcoming GDPR laws and fears of Russian hacking.

A TalkTalk Spokesperson told ISPreview.co.uk: We are continually investing in new ways to protect our customers and helping them to keep their devices free from malware is a top priority for us. Our systems are able to identify devices that may have been infected with malware if theyve connected to our network. These checks are done in the background and at no point do we monitor customers browsing history. Our recent awareness campaign was launched to inform our customers of the potential risks and provide tips on how to clean up their devices. We think its the right thing to do, so that our customers can keep their devices safe and running as well as they possibly can.

Lest we forget that the governments new Investigator Powers Act (IPA) does require larger ISPs to retain Internet Connection Records (ICR) for 12 months (assuming the code for this is ever finalised), which will include basic information about which IP addresses / servers / websites youve visited. All of this raises some interesting questions about the future approach by ISPs to user privacy and security, not least of which is where to draw the line.

However, if any ISPs are going to issue a message that runs the risk of scaremongering their users into thinking they have a virus on their computer, then at least give them a bit of useful detail about precisely what was detected so they know where to look (or even whether to bother looking at all). Otherwise such messages may end up looking too much like phishing or a poorly executed marketing exercise.

UPDATE 1:02pm

Added a new comment from TalkTalk above.

UPDATE 4:34pm

TalkTalk has tweaked their above statement slightly to clarify that they dont identify the individual devices affected but do know its a device connected to their systems.
Friday, April 20th, 2018 (9:32 am) - Score 3,290

A new study has identified the top 10 and bottom 10 council areas in the United Kingdom to live by their average (mean) broadband ISP speed, which is ranked by considering the average speed that is possible if everyone in the area brought the fastest available service. Speedtest data is then used as a balance.

In the past most studies of this sort have tended to rank areas by looking at the results from speedtest based data and then producing a direct average, which can be highly misleading because such reports often fail to factor in the underlying network availability (i.e. whether or not local users could order a much faster connection).

Alternatively other studies have attempted to rank areas purely by network availability, which doesnt always reflect the fact that in some areas even the best available networks may not always deliver its top broadband speeds. By comparison this research from Thinkbroadband has focused on network availability but also weighted that against the known speedtest based performance in order to produce a potentially more useful table.

One difficulty here is shown by the fact that the central City of London area pops up mid-table in the fastest 10 list, which is unusual given that it has a very low coverage of superfast broadband (30Mbps+). This highlights the effect that over 1 in 3 premises with access to [FTTP] with maximum speeds ranging from 300Mbps to 940Mbps can have, said TBBs Andrew Ferguson. The actual observed speeds for the area thus tell a very different story (right side of the table).

NOTE: Weve had to cut the ultrafast (100Mbps+) and FTTP/H coverage columns out as otherwise the data wouldnt fit (TBB has the full table).

Top 10 UK Council Areas for Best Case Speeds

Council Best Case Mean Average Download (Mbps) Superfast Coverage 30Mbps+ Observed Median Download (Mbps) Observed Median Upload (Mbps) Observed Mean Download (Mbps) Observed Mean Upload (Mbps) Bournemouth 401 99.70% 25 4.7 37.3 6 Tower Hamlets 359 93.10% 14.6 2.3 32.3 16 Wandsworth 358 98.20% 22.7 4.6 42.1 20.3 West Berkshire 355 98.40% 25.7 5.7 37.4 14.3 City of London 343 51.60% 19.1 6.5 32.9 23.2 Newham 321 98.50% 23.4 4.9 39.8 13.5 York 321 95.60% 21.3 4.5 36.5 8.3 Southwark 319 93.70% 17.9 2.6 33.4 11.2 Greenwich 312 99.10% 25.3 5.4 37.3 11.9 Hounslow 311 99.10% 25.7 4.8 40 10.1

Bottom 10 UK Council Areas for Best Case Speeds
A bid by US-based Valve Corporation to obtain special leave to appeal against a Federal Court decision imposing a $3 million penalty on it for violating Australian Consumer Law has been thrown out by the High Court.

The Full Federal Court ruled in December last year that Valve, which operates a game distribution platform known as Steam, had violated consumer law when sales were made to Australian users.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission said in a statement that the Full Federal Court had upheld a trial judge's ruling that Valve "had engaged in misleading or deceptive conduct and made false or misleading representations to Australian customers about their rights under consumer guarantees".

With the High Court having refused Valve special leave to appeal, the Full Federal Courts decision, that Valve, despite being based in Washington State, is bound by Australian Consumer Law in its dealings with Australian customers, is the final decision.

This important precedent confirms the ACCCs view that overseas-based companies selling to Australian consumers must abide by our laws.

"If customers buy a product online that is faulty, they are entitled to the same right to a repair, replacement or refund as if theyd walked in to a store, ACCC commissioner Sarah Court said.

The ACCC began its legal action against Valve in August 2014. In 2016, the Federal Court found that Valve had engaged in misleading or deceptive conduct and made false or misleading representations and the same year it was ordered to pay penalties of $3 million.

The ACCC also made a cross appeal in relation to representations made by Valve in online chats to individual consumers, but this was dismissed.

The trial judge had previously found these representations were not misleading, in part because the consumers had asserted their rights under Australian Consumer Law, and were therefore not likely to be misled.
Google is making a quiet bid to win a US$10 billion cloud contract from the US Defence Department which is to be awarded before the end of the year. However, many of the company's employees believe there would be strong objections to providing cloud services to support combat operations.

The other companies in the race are Microsoft and Amazon, with Oracle Corporation some distance behind at fourth, according to a report at Defence One.

Last September, Defence officials indicated that they would make a big move to the cloud. Since then, what is known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI, programme has grown to be worth US$10 billion over a decade.

Diane Green, who heads Google Cloud, has indicated that the company is keen to get more business from the federal government. Towards this, she is said to be contemplating putting in a bid for open source company Red Hat which has obtained a number of certifications from the Department of Defence.

Adding to its security credentials is the fact that Red Hat alsoto the NSA, with the spook agency running its XKEYSCORE programme  an application that the Intercept, the website run by journalist Glenn Greenwald, describes as NSA's Google for private communications  for the most part on Red Hat Linux servers.

However, in the case of Google, its employees have not taken kindly to the move by their employer to get involved in defence-related contracts.

Recently, rank and file workers, including a number of senior engineers, submitted a letter to senior management to protest against a decision to provide technology to a US Defence Department programme that uses artificial intelligence to interpret video images and assist in targeting enemies in drone strikes.

Google's management attempted to play down its role in this project, known as Maven, by issuing a statement saying, in part, that they had provided only "open-source object recognition software available to any Google Cloud customer.

The statement added: "The technology is used to flag images for human review and is intended to save lives and save people from having to do highly tedious work."

On 11 April, Greene met employees at what is known as a Google town hall to discuss the Maven project and said the company was developing a set of principles to guide its involvement in this project and any other future similar work.

But many employees told Defence One that they surprised to learn of the intention to pursue the JEDI contract. Also expressed was the view that many employees would have serious objections to the use of the company's cloud services to back up combat operations, even if it were indirect support, especially if Google's artificial intelligence research was used.

Amazon's one advantage is that its cloud service is certified to handle secret and top-secret data. However whoever wins the contract will have nine months to obtain the certification  and Amazon itself got certified after it had won a previous contract. Amazon is also the only company among the four to have already won a cloud contract with an intelligence agency, having won a US$600 million contract with the CIA.
Australia has confirmed that Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei will have no role in an undersea cable system linking the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea to Sydney, with an announcement that Canberra will provide the majority of funds for the project.

The announcement on Thursday, made by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull during a visit to London to attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, comes in the wake of January's announcement by the Vocus Group that it had entered into a deal with the federal government to undertake a scoping study on design, construction and procurement for the cable system.

Turnbull said: "Today we affirm our commitment to deliver a high-speed undersea telecommunication cable between Australia and Solomon Islands.

"Australia will deliver and majority fund the project as part of a cable system that will connect both Honiara and Port Moresby to Australia, with a financial co-contribution from both Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. It is scheduled for completion by the end of 2019.

"The joint project will be a first for Solomon Islands, which is wholly reliant on satellite technology to access the internet.

"Ensuring stability, security and prosperity in the Pacific is one of the highest priorities of our two nations. Boosting connectivity in Solomon Islands will improve governance and security, and drive economic growth.

"Increased connectivity also exposes countries to risk. Through the Cyber Co-operation Program, Australia is working with Solomon Islands to manage these risks by strengthening its cyber security architecture and combating cyber crime."

A Huawei spokesperson said the company had no comment.

The undersea cable was initially budgeted to cost US$70 million and was to be funded by the Asian Development Bank. But then, after the Solomon Islands Government said Huawei would build it, the ADB withdrew, citing concerns over transparency.

Last July, it was reported that Australia was putting pressure on the Solomon Islands to withdraw from the Project Honiara undersea cable project after the contract was awarded to Huawei.

Security concerns were said to be the reason why Australian officials had made the request which was, tellingly, conveyed to Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare by Nick Warner, the director-general of the spy agency ASIS.

In the US, Huawei has faced problems as well with a deal for AT&T to sell the Chinese firm's phones on plans being cancelled by the American company at the last minute in January.

Not long after, Verizon was reported to have yielded to pressure from the US Government to stop selling Huawei devices.

In February, US intelligence chiefs warned against the use of Huawei equipment. And last month, Republican Congressman Michael Conaway cautioned that the US-Australia relationship could be damaged if the Chinese vendor was involved in building 5G networks Down Under.

Back in 2012, the US Congress issued a report that raised concerns about state-sponsored spying related to products made by Huawei, the biggest global maker of telecommunications equipment. The company has denied any such involvement.

More recently, the Federal Communications Commission said it would move to prevent Huawei, and another Chinese telco, ZTE, from receiving any subsidies from the Universal Service Fund that the US uses to subsidise equipment bought by rural and small carriers. Huawei is reportedly cutting back US sales efforts as a result.

Six years ago, Huawei was denied any role in supplying equipment to Australia's national broadband network project, following advice by ASIS, one of Australia's spy agencies.
The stay of detained British security researcher Marcus Hutchins in the US will be prolonged further, after his lawyers gained more time on Thursday to argue why statements he made after his arrest should be suppressed.

Hutchins, 23, is charged with creating and distributing a banking trojan known as Kronos. The FBI claims he made incriminating statements to them after he was arrested last year, and also in two phone calls from his cell, AP reported.

Details of those calls were unsealed before a court in Milwaukee on Wednesday night and Hutchins' lawyers were granted a continuance on Thursday afternoon to prepare for his defence.

The case is set to resume on 16 May.

Hutchins wasby the FBI in Las Vegas on 2 August after he had boarded a plane to leave the US after attending the annual DEFCON security conference.

He gained the attention of the world when he stopped the spread of the WannaCry ransomware by accident in May last year.

The chargesheet against him said he had written and helped distribute Kronos along with an unnamed co-conspirator.

Here in Milwaukee, @MalwareTechBlog surrounded by his incredible legal team @marciahofmann & @brianeklein for his evidentiary hearing today! Send love, fam! pic.twitter.com/GqjciJjrxf  Tarah M. Wheeler (@tarah) 19 April 2018

According to the documents provided to the court on Wednesday, prosecutors claim Hutchins affixed his signature on a consent form allowing the FBI to search his backpack, phones and laptops.

He "was lucid and answered many detailed questions" over nearly two hours, it was claimed.

His defence lawyers want to get these statements suppressed, claiming that a week of partying during the DEFCON conference had left him with inadequate sleep.

They also say he was unfamiliar with the need for him to be read his rights before being arrested.

Hutchins' lawyer Brian Klein also said the FBI agents delayed the start of recording when he was being interviewed and that what happened before the questioning began was significant. However, he did not elaborate on this claim.

The documents also claim Hutchins was aware two of his phone calls, in which he "made multiple incriminating statements... including writing the code for the banking Trojan and compiling malware binaries and sending to someone", had been recorded.

Additionally, it is claimed he had sold the Kronos trojan in Wisconsin and also "personally delivered" the malware to a resident of California.

The chargesheet says these incidents took place between July 2014 and July 2015. No details have been provided about how many people were affected by the malware.
In an open letter to Twitter chief Jack Dorsey and the company's senior management, the Kaspersky Lab founder and chief executive said Twitter had unexpectedly informed the company of an advertising ban on its official accounts using which it announces new posts on cyber security.

Eugene (below, right) quoted the Twitter communication as saying: "At Twitter we believe in freedom of expression and in speaking truth to power. We also want to ensure that people feel safe when they interact with our site, and that advertisers bring value to our users.

"Accordingly, Twitter has made the policy decision to off-board advertising from all accounts owned by Kaspersky Lab. This decision is based on our determination that Kaspersky Lab operates using a business model that inherently conflicts with acceptable Twitter Ads business practices. Kaspersky Lab may remain an organic user on our platform, in accordance with the Twitter Rules."

Questioning the bit about his company's business model, Eugene said that it was the same as every other company that operated in the cyber security space.

He pointed out that the content posted on Twitter by the company "brings value to a variety of Twitter users, including regular folks who want to read simple tips on how to protect themselves and their families against cyber threats as well as infosecurity experts who are interested in the technical details of our latest research".

And, he added, "Twitter is playing into the hands of cyber criminals when it hinders us providing users, for example, with timely, potentially important information on protection from cyber-extortionists (case in point: our top promoted tweet was one on the worldwide WannaCry ransomware attack)."

After having written to Twitter in February, Eugene said the only response had been a copy of the same boilerplate text: "We continue to abide by our determination that Kaspersky Lab operates using a business model that inherently conflicts with acceptable Twitter Ads business practices. For this reason, all accounts operated by Kaspersky Lab remain ineligible to promote content on our platform. While these accounts are ineligible to place ads, they can continue to remain organically on Twitter as long as they comply with our Terms of Service and Twitter Rules."

Given that more than two months had passed since then, Eugene said he had decided to "publicly ask that you, dear Twitter executives, kindly be specific as to the reasoning behind this ban; fully explain the decision to switch off our advertising capability, and to reveal what other cyber security companies need to do in order to avoid similar situations. Whats more  within a reasonable timeframe please."

Twitter has not issued any public statement about why it has banned Kaspersky Lab from advertising. However, in statements to a number of other media organisations, it pointed to a directive from the US Department of Homeland Security that banned public sector agencies from using Kaspersky's products.

In particular, Twitter cited this passage from the DHS directive: "The Department is concerned about the ties between certain Kaspersky officials and Russian intelligence and other government agencies, and requirements under Russian law that allow Russian intelligence agencies to request or compel assistance from Kaspersky and to intercept communications transiting Russian networks. The risk that the Russian government, whether acting on its own or in collaboration with Kaspersky, could capitalise on access provided by Kaspersky products to compromise federal information and information systems directly implicates US national security."

The US ban came in the wake of allegations that Russia interfered in the 2016 US presidential elections. US retailers Best Buy and Office Depot took Kaspersky products off its shelves last year.

Also last year, there were a number of mainstream media reports claiming that Kaspersky was involved in spying activity.

A report in The Wall Street Journal on 11 October hinted that Kaspersky Lab could have made available its source code to the Russian Government. The same paper kicked off 2018 with a long piece detailing all the claims made in the past.

Prior to that, a report in the Washington Post on 10 October claimed that Israeli Government information security professionals had found NSA hacking tools in Kaspersky Lab's system when it gained access to the company's servers in 2014.
Facebook does not appear to have changed its attitude to user privacy in any way despite all its recent troubles, with the company having decided to avoid providing the protections afforded by the EU General Data Protection Regulation to nearly 70% of its registered users worldwide.

The news agency Reuters reported that only about 30% of users would be covered by the terms of the GDPR, which takes effect on 25 May, and the remaining members would not be afforded the same protections.

As of December 2017, Facebook had 239 million users in the US and Canada, 370 million in Europe and 1.52 billion in other countries where its service is available.

Facebook plans to get around affording GDPR protection to all its users by changing the terms of service which apply to users; until now, all those outside the US and Canada have been covered by terms agreed with its Ireland international headquarters.

But in May, Facebook will change that, so that only users in EU states are covered by the terms of service agreed in Ireland; users in Africa, Asia, Australia and South America will be governed by the same terms as those in North America, where privacy laws are much less stringent.

This means the vast majority of users will fall outside the GDPR regulations which allow European regulators to fine companies up to 4% of their global revenue for any violation of the statute.

Last month, Facebook had to battle claims that data breaches led to information about 50 million of its users being siphoned off by Cambridge Analytica.

Later it emerged that practically all two billion-plus users could have had their data scraped due to "features" on the social media website.

In a blog post, chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer wrote: "Given the scale and sophistication of the activity weve seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way."

Following the Cambridge Analytica revelations, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg had to appear before the US Congress where he adopted a suitably crestfallen attitude.

In a statement provided to Reuters, Facebook attempted to play down the changes to terms of service, saying: "We apply the same privacy protections everywhere, regardless of whether your agreement is with Facebook Inc or Facebook Ireland."

Microsoft-owned LinkedIn is doing something similar to Facebook by moving non-European users to a contract with its US-based LinkedIn Corporation. At present, users outside the US agree to a contract with its Ireland subsidiary when they sign up.
3D printing has been used for prototyping for decades, but now its starting to creep into production process too. Even if youre not printing things yourself, that change is going to have implications for your supply chain management.

Whats different about 3D printing and other additive manufacturing processes

When you think about 3D printing, you might visualize a filament of molten plastic being squirted, toothpaste-like, out of a nozzle, building up an object layer by layer as it solidifies.

Technically, that approach is termed fused deposition modeling but more generally we might talk of additive manufacturing, in which the layers can also be built up by fusing powdered metal or plastic (selective laser sintering) or solidifying a liquid using ultraviolet light (stereolithography or continuous liquid interface production), then lifting the finished object out of the unused powder or liquid.

Although these techniques are radically different from one another in approach, and in the characteristics of the pieces they can produce, they share a number of important characteristics that sets them apart from traditional manufacturing techniques:

- Tooling is not specific to the piece being manufactured: In theory, they could be making a part for an aircraft one minute, and for a food mixer the next. Changing from one to the other doesnt require a fresh mold, or a different cutting tool, just an appropriate design file.

- Theyre slow, because they work layer by layer

- They are free from many of the physical or topological constraints of other manufacturing techniques: If you can imagine it, theres a fair chance you can print it.

- They are usually costlier per piece compared to traditional mass-production techniques such as stamping or molding

Those differences are going to have consequences for all stages of the product lifecycle, from design through to maintenance;

Effects on production lifecycle management

Design for additive manufacturing can be both simpler and more complex with than with traditional manufacturing techniques. Almost any solid or hollow shape can be produced without worrying about how it will be assembled, or whether the tool will fit inside it, and in some cases its possible to optimize parts to exactly the shape needed rather than simply what can be produced.

Prototyping is where 3D printing started to have an impact on industry, allowing design engineers with no machining skills to churn out prototypes in the same way marketing executives laser-print brochures. There are service bureaus that will do the 3D printing for you but these days its just as easy (if not just as cheap) to do it in-house. From an IT point of view, the key issues with outsourcing involve ensuring the security and integrity of the design files transmitted.

Additive manufacturing changes the economic calculus of production: While in principle its slower and so costlier than, say, machining, that may change if the raw material is extremely expensive.

Thats something thats come to the fore in the last five years or so, particularly with the use of sintered titanium in the aircraft industry, where additive manufacturing allows the creation of stronger pieces with less material and less waste, according to Sabrina Berbain, associate professor of supply chain at ISG International Business School, speaking at the Add Fab additive manufacturing conference in Paris recently.

At Sculpteo, a company that makes parts to order using a number of additive manufacturing techniques, falling costs have driven a shift in the use of its services from prototyping to production in recent years. Now 40 percent of Sculpteos customers use it to make production parts, the companys deputy CEO Marine Core Baillais said at the Add Fab event. They turn to additive manufacturing as soon as theres a profit to be made, she said, either by reducing cost or the number of steps in the production process.

For prototyping, she said, turnaround time was the most important, while for production its all about cost and quality.

3D printing can continue to affect products long after they are sold, making it easier to obtain spare parts for maintenance and repair.

Two French brands, domestic appliance and cookware manufacturer SEB and appliance retailer Boulanger, have made moves towards on-demand printing of spare parts.

Boulanger is behind the site Happy3D.fr, which proposes a library of open-source design files for a variety of easily-broken and hard-to-obtain parts such as battery covers, handles, and nozzles. Breakage of these parts typically sends otherwise working products to the dump. SEB, meanwhile, is experimenting with the use of 3D printing to produce parts for a range of products it labels Repairable product: 10 years when its stocks of spares run out.

How this changes the supply chain

Logistics these days is increasingly about bits, not pieces, said another Add Fab speaker, Alexandre Donnadieu, who is French business development manager of 3YourMind, a German creator of industrial additive manufacturing management software.

For him there's no real distinction between the supply chain and production: You produce parts close to where you need them, and its the design and manufacturing data that you need to transport there. His company makes management tools for that kind of decentralized production.

Thats a path Sculpteo has gone down too: When it opened its third 3D printing facility, it did so in California, putting it close to the kinds of startups that were already using the first two in France. Thanks to its own software platform, Fabpilot, it can produce parts for as little as 1.50 each, according to Core-Baillais.

Additive manufacturings ability to produce short runs of a part is changing logistics too.

Just-in-time inventory management has been around for a long while, but in many cases its just a matter of out of sight, out of mind: Custom-molded parts are still produced in huge batches, then stockpiled by a supplier and delivered to the customer piecemeal.

Core-Baillais is seeing changes, though: More and more of Sculpteos customers are ordering small quantities of their designs several times a week, for use in medical equipment, robotics and other applications.

Over the course of a year, that can total tens of thousands of pieces -- hardly the typical use case for 3D printing, you would think. Its responding to the need of cash-strapped startups to put off big investments such as in tooling up for production for as long as possible. They might even stay with additive manufacturing because it allows continuous improvement of their product, she said.

So, while the deliveries still need to be made just in time, warehousing may no longer be an issue.

Something startups have understood, but that Core-Baillais would like larger enterprises to understand, is that there's no point insisting on a two-month purchasing process for a piece that takes just 48 hours to make.

Finding ways to simplify the business processes between saving the design file and taking delivery of the printed part is key to this.

Additive manufacturing is shortening the supply chain, closing the gaps between sourcing, manufacturing and distribution, according to Berbain. In some cases, the customer is becoming a co-creator: With a batch size of one and less need for retooling, designs can be modified or customized almost on the fly, like a permanent beta test.

With 3D printing theres less need for assembly, as more complex forms can be printed as a single piece. This means less coordination of suppliers of different subassemblies, and less likelihood that a whole manufacturing line will be stopped for lack of a tiny part, according to Donnadieu.

Obstacles to the adoption of additive manufacturing

We cant just start 3D printing everything, though.

For one thing, we dont have 3D design files for everything. Some inventory items will not yet have been digitized, Donnadieu said. But it would make sense to print even some of those, perhaps parts with a low rotation that are stocked for a long while, or parts that are no longer made. They will first have to be scanned or models recreated.

Distributed printing brings its own problems -- not so much the cultural differences that can bog down business process outsourcing, but the heterogeneity of additive manufacturing equipment. There are no standard APIs, Donnadieu lamented.

There are also more material matters -- matters like how long additive manufacturing materials will last, or whether parts produced this way meet various industry safety standards.

Having visibility into the cost of additive manufacturing from end to end is still an issue, he said. If you outsource: where should you do it?

Further into the future of supply chain management

So whats next? Five years from now, Core-Baillais expects Airbus to be printing spares for aircraft at airports around the world and repairing them on site although, she notes, there are still a lot of questions around how the design files can be transmitted securely and protected from interference during the printing process.

But she is more skeptical of whether this close-to-the-customer approach will work for consumer products, as SEB and Boulanger are hoping. The success of these initiatives is more likely to depend on civil society than on manufacturers and retailers, said Core-Baillais: Thats the kind of fabrication thats done not by manufacturers but by fab-labs and similar community ventures today.

At the launch of is Repairable product initiative SEB was said to be holding 5.7 million spare parts in stock. But the dream for a lot of businesses is zero inventory, said Berbain.
Students Advocate for Academic Sentenced to Death

April 20, 2018

Ahmadreza Djalali has been imprisoned and sentenced to death by Iranian officials.



BLOOMINGTON, Ill. Ahmadreza Djalali, a 45-year-old Iranian-born Swedish resident and specialist in disaster medicine, has been imprisoned and sentenced to death by Iranian officials in what Amnesty International called a grossly unfair trial. Illinois Wesleyan University first-year students and members of the Advocacy Risk Seminar, Jonathan Panton 21 and Tatum Zsorey 21, advocated for Djalalis release at the second annual Student Advocacy Day in Washington D.C., March 8-9.

Sponsored by the IWU Center on Human Rights and Social Justice, the Advocacy Seminar is affiliated with Scholars at Risk, a non-profit organization that advocates for academics being held in foreign countries. At the beginning of each academic year, Scholars at Risk sends a list of potential scholars who are prisoners of conscience to university organizations who advocate for academics abroad. Although Zsorey said it was difficult to choose one scholar, members of IWUs Advocacy Seminar ultimately chose to advocate for Djalali, who was arrested in Iran while attending a business trip.

I became particularly passionate and thankful that I could advocate for Dr. Djalali when I learned of the horrible conditions he has been facing in prison, the unfair justice system that Iran has used to prosecute him and the unjust sentencing he has received, said Zsorey, an international studies major and environmental studies minor. After understanding the complex implications of Dr. Djalalis case, I became more and more ardent about wanting to help him.

Arrested by Iranian authorities on April 25, 2016, Djalili was denied access to a lawyer for seven months and held in solitary confinement for three months, according to Amnesty International. Although Amnesty said no evidence has ever been presented to show that Djalili is anything other than an academic peacefully pursuing his profession, he has been accused of being a spy and threatened with the death penalty. Amnesty said Iran is using Djalalis work as a doctor in disaster medicine, his studies and teachings in Europe, and his residency to fabricate these claims.

Ahmadreza Djalali has a wife and two children.

Our defense on behalf of Dr. Djalali was that he was simply a professor of disaster medicine who is unlawfully incarcerated in Iran. He was convicted of collaborating with Israel, which does not make any sense considering that he does not have any ties to Israel, said Panton, a business administration major. We hope that Dr. Djalali is released because he has a wife and two children back home.

Working together with seminar participant Emma Cottrell '21, Panton and Zsorey compiled a research case file defending Djalali and presented their findings before staff members in the offices of Congressmen Danny Davis and Rodney Davis in Washington D.C. on Advocacy Day.

I personally had an amazing time in D.C., Zsorey said. Theres a vibrant atmosphere that surrounds the city that made me feel as though the work I was doing was real and actually mattered.

Zsorey said she and Panton received positive responses in D.C. She said the aids agreed to pass on Djalalis case file and talk with the Congressmen about possible measures of action that could be taken to support Djalali.

We are currently working with both offices to draft a joint letter in support of the Swedish government, who has done a lot to help get Dr. Djalali freed, Zsorey said.

In addition to lobbying their case, Panton and Zsorey, along with 30 students from over eight universities, heard advice on international human rights advocacy work from experts at the State Department and other non-governmental organizations. Panton said these presentations helped students gain a better understanding of advocacy.

The most important thing that I learned about advocacy is that you need to tie your mission to their interests  give them a reason to support your cause, Panton said.

Students gathered for Student Advocacy Day in Washington D.C.

One of the most important things I learned was that being an advocate means being active, Zsorey said. You have to actively seek out those who can support you and care about what youre doing, whether they be members of Congress, NGOs, or other advocacy groups. Advocacy isnt easy, and nothing magically happens unless you put in the time and effort.

Zsorey said organizations such as IWUs Advocacy Seminar have given her the opportunity to be active, as they are widely applicable beyond the classroom.

Even though I am only a first-year student, I feel as though Ive always been more aware of the injustices plaguing the world more than the typical person my age. However, I always believed that there wasnt much I could do as a student, Zsorey said. The Advocacy Day allowed me to realize that there is so much work one student or one group of students can do in advocating on behalf of others.

Panton said the real-world experiences he has gained as a member of Advocacy Seminar have allowed him to make a real difference.

I believe events such as Advocacy Day and clubs such as Advocacy Seminar are important because they spread awareness to issues that would otherwise go unnoticed, Panton said. It is incredible to have this real-world experience as a freshman because I am doing whatever I can to protect another human being. The fact of the matter is that Dr. Djalali is a person, and as a person, he deserves all of the inalienable human rights that everyone else deserves.

By Vi Kakares '20
Summerville, SC (29483)

Today

Generally cloudy. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High 79F. Winds light and variable..

Tonight

Partly cloudy this evening with more clouds for overnight. Low 66F. Winds light and variable.
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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) |  

Natalie Portman has declined the award of the annual Genesis Foundation Prize in Jerusalem on the grounds that she is distressed by recent events.

The Academy Award-winning actress, who was born in Jerusalem and is an American and Israeli dual citizen, said that she cannot in good conscience move forward with the ceremony.

Her representative issued a statement saying, Recent events in Israel have been extremely distressing to her and she does not feel comfortable participating in any public events in Israel.

Portman has been a strong supporter of Israel and rejects the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. She has said in the past that she disapproves of people who become prominent and then denigrate Israel.

It seems to me that this past position makes her announcement all the more powerful.

Ms. Portman had been announced as the fifth laureate of the $1 mn. Genesis prize late last fall. Many of the awardees have been personally wealthy and have regifted their prize money to the foundation. Ms. Portman continued that tradition, funding a program to advance womens rights and equality. That program was supported by Israeli philanthropist Morris Kahn, who donated a further $1 million for a Genesis-Natalie Portman initiative on women.

Her abrupt withdrawal thus must have come as a high-voltage shock to the foundation, which has cancelled the June awards ceremony.

The foundations website explains,

The Genesis Prize is a global award created to celebrate Jewish achievement and contribution to humanity. Launched in 2013, the Prize is financed through a permanent endowment of $100 million established by the Genesis Prize Foundation (GPF). The Prize operates as a partnership among The Genesis Prize Foundation, the Prime Ministers Office of the State of Israel, and The Office of the Chairman of the Executive of the Jewish Agency for Israel (JAFI).

Although Ms. Portmans laconic announcement does not spell all this out, it seems most likely that it was the involvement of the Prime Ministers office in the prize that caused her to withdraw at this time.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is allegedly closely involved in the decisions of the foundation and it was rumored that he had nixed giving the 2018 award to US supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg for fear that it would annoy Donald Trump, of whom Ginsburg has been overtly critical. Genesis denies these rumors. Ginsburg was given a Genesis lifetime achievement award in fall of 2017.

Again, Ms. Portman did not say explicitly what so disturbed her, but I think I will be forgiven for the educated guess that it was Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahus decision to order his troops to shoot dead some 40 unarmed Palestinian children and other peaceful civilians at the Gaza border fence and to use live fire to wound hundreds more.

The actions of the Israeli army and of its commanders, including Mr. Netanyahu, are war crimes. A systematic series of war crimes becomes a crime against humanity, an infraction of which Mr. Netanyahu is certainly guilty.

Ms. Portman is a vegan who does not approve of harming animals, and she has also been involved in refugee rights. Mr. Kahn, who supported her initiative on women at Genesis, has also been an activist on refugees.

In addition to the murders committed by the Israeli army at the Gaza border (when you kill unarmed peaceful people on their own territory, that is murder, not a response to clashes), the Netanyahu government has been expelling thousands of African refugees who came to Israel because its government had announced sympathy with their plight. Israeli mobs have often mobilized against these refugees, chanting racist slogans.

In the age of Trump, Mr. Netanyahu will face no formal justice for his crimes in Gaza and the West Bank against the 4.5 million Palestinians over whom he malignly rules.

Ms. Portmans announcement shows, however, that the turn in Israel to the increasingly brazen deployment of a lawless and fascist set of policies does have public costs, even among faithful Jewish supporters of the state.

It should also be underlined that Ms. Portmans decision showed extreme bravery. Public persons who criticize Israel openly are often viciously targeted by the Zionist right wing in the United States, and she could suffer professional and personal reprisals. In fact, social media is abuzz with calls for her to be attacked and refuted on the part of the American Likud.

Concluding parable: Padme Amidala, Queen of Naboo and Luke Skywalkers real mother, gradually realized that her husband Anakin Skywalker had gone over to the dark side.



Bonus Video:

Wochit Entertainment: Natalie Portman Cancels Israel Awards Appearance
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Seyed Ali Alavi | ( OpenDemocracy.net) |  

ISIL may have been defeated, but the battle for Syrias political soul is far from over.

A Syrian army checkpoint in the town of Jaib al-Dikir in the countryside of Raqqa province, Syria, Dec. 23, 2017. Picture by Ammar Safarjalani/Xinhua News Agency/PA Images. All rights reserved. October 2017 was the moment of reaping the whirlwind as the de facto capital of the self proclaimed Caliphate in the Syrian territory fell to US backed Syrian Democratic Forces. The recapture of Raqqa has its symbolic significance. Raqqa was portrayed by ISIL as the revived version of the old Caliphates of the Umayyad (661-750 CE) and the Abbasid (750-1258 CE). Parallel to the western powers, Iran, Russia and Iraq played a significant role in the physical demise of ISIL in Syria and Iraq.

The news of the liberation of Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq, was greeted with great enthusiasm by Tehran, Moscow, Washington and Europe. Since then, many commentators and media outlet began to anticipate who is the main winner in Syria in the post-ISIL era.

However, before attempting to answer this question, it is crucial to discuss the objectives of the powers involved in the Syrian battlefield.

By mid 2014, the Syrian conflict reached its violent peak when ISIL penetrated the Syrian borders and proclaimed Raqqa as its political centre. The rise of ISIL in the region created anxieties not only in the European capitals but in Tehran, Baghdad and Erbil as well.

Since the beginning of the Syrian uprising, the Iranian government supported Assads Syria, its traditional ally in the region. Since the beginning of the Iranian revolution in 1979, Assads Syria supported Iran against Saddams Iraq. Syria also provided a platform for Iran to strengthen its ties with its Lebanese allies, Hezbollah and the Palestinian factions of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad.

During the post Hafez al-Assad era, his successor, Bashar al-Assad continued supporting Iran in fortifying a frontline against Israel. Both Tehran and Damascus portray their alliance with the Lebanese and the Palestinian factions as the axis of resistance against the regional hegemony of Israel. The fall of Assads Syria, therefore, could have posed a significant blow to the Iranian project of resistance in the Levant.

In the wake of the rise of ISIL, Tehran commissioned its regional allies, Hezbollah and volunteered Shia militias from Iraq to effectively enter the battlefield in Syria to support Assads government. Parallel to Iran, Putins Russia officially deployed its armed forces and launched aerial and land operations against anti-Assad forces including ISIL and Al-Qaeda affiliated Al-Nusra front. The main goal of the Kremlin is to salvage its ally in Damascus.

On the other side of the spectrum, a coalition of western powers conducted aerial support to the Syrian Democratic Forces to oust ISIL from northern Syria. Effectively, the Syrian Kurds did not enter the battleground of the Syrian civil war. For the Syrian Kurds, the main goals have been to achieve a limited autonomy in northern Syria and to fight ISIL. Therefore, the Kurdish factions and their Arab local allies welcomed support from both the US/European coalition forces and from Moscow. The SDF forces proved to be effective in fighting ISIL by capturing the capital of the so called Caliphate.

Since the beginning of the Syrian uprising, Turkeys Erdogan on the other hand invested significantly in supporting the pro-Turkish Sunni Arab forces against Assads regime. Seeing the Syrian Kurds holding the upper hand in the north-east and north-west of Syria in post ISIL era, Ankara anxiously launched a military operation code named olive branch in February-March 2018.

To obtain stability in the region military campaigns are not the solution

In doing so, Ankara is pursuing three strategic objectives. The first goal is to create a buffer zone in northern Syria to oust the Syrian Kurds from its borders, and to prevent the discourse of Kurdish autonomy from spreading to its own territory. The second goal is to secure more popular support by projecting a nationalistic discourse among the conservative Sunni-Turks who are concerned about any possible changes within Turkeys immediate borders. The third goal is to engineer a new bridge for the pro-Turkish Sunni Arab forces to gain a foothold in northern Syria in the wake of Assads rapid victories throughout the country.

To this end, Turkeys Erdogan is facing several challenges; first, the military operation may alienate Ankaras NATO partners who have established a successful alliance with the local Syrian Kurds against the ISIL forces. Second, the prolonged military campaign may further destabilise the region and provoke a new phase of ethnic conflict alongside Turkeys southern borders. Third, for Ankara, it can be a financial burden to protract military operation outside Turkeys borders. In addition, the regional states such as Iraq officially objected to the Turkish military campaign. This can limit Turkeys expansion of influence within the region through military means.

One may argue that in the face of the decline of ISIL, seemingly, Iranian and Russian political and military policies have been palmier. Since the Syrian crisis began, Moscow is pursuing multi-dimensional policies. On one hand, Kremlin is continuing its military campaign in supporting Assads regime and, on the other hand it has been organising a series of round-table negotiations between the Syrian factions, more notably in Astana and in Sochi in coordination with Iran and Turkey.

Recently, the Syrian army with military support from the Russian air force has gained the upper hand in Eastern Ghouta near the capital city Damascus. Russia also attempts to maintains connections with all parties involved in the Syrian crisis to have an influential voice in conducting necessary negotiations.

Parallel to this, since Hezbollah entered the Syrian battlefield, it has gained significant combat skills and its forces succeeded in establishing local networks. Tehran has therefore succeeded in cementing its presence without an official deployment of its armed forces. In doing so, Iran continues to fortify its hegemony within the Levant as a counterweight to Israel and other regional forces, namely Turkey and the Arab Gulf states.

However, recent developments may influence the political equilibrium on the ground. In response to an alleged gas attack, French, British and U.S. forces launched a bevy of airstrikes against Assad. The trilateral military operation was the biggest coordinated intervention by western powers since the beginning of the Syrian crisis. Although western powers stated that the strikes were aimed at degrading Syrias chemical capabilities, in fact the operation was meant to send a signal of warning to Assads regional supporters, Iran and Hezbollah.

Russias inaction over the western airstrikes and its unsuccessful bid to condemn it in the UN security council shows Moscows influence in Syria is not necessarily infinite. Facing imposed economic sanctions due to the Ukrainian dossier, Russia seems reluctant to escalate the conflict with Washington to a practical level.

Despite Trumps mission accomplished message, questions were raised over Washingtons Syria strategy. Trump inconsistently announced that he wishes to disengage the American troops in Syria. Meanwhile, the latest trilateral action is supported by Germany, Japan and the European Union. Therefore, a format of influential powers is being created to engineer the western formulated political process.

Notwithstanding, one potent enemy such as ISIL may have been defeated, the battle for Syrias political soul is far from over. In fact, to obtain stability in the region military campaigns are not the solution, rather, there need to be initiatives that involve all elements of the Syrian population.

Via OpenDemocracy



Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

France24 English: Head of UN entity probing war crimes in Syria speaks to FRANCE 24
Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - April 20, 2018) - Avalon Advanced Materials Inc. (TSX: AVL) (OTCQX: AVLNF) ("Avalon" or the "Company") is pleased to report that it has once again placed among Corporate Knights' 2018 Future 40 Responsible Corporate Leaders in Canada from a shortlist of eligible small and mid-size organizations.

Don Bubar, Avalon's President and CEO, commented, "This is well-earned recognition for everyone at Avalon and the sustainability culture we have developed. We believe that making environmental and social responsibility a priority enhances shareholder value by reducing risk while enhancing business opportunities for our Indigenous partners."

Avalon is fully committed to integrating sustainable practices into its business model by minimizing environmental impacts and land disturbed. At the East Kemptville Tin-Indium Project in Nova Scotia, Avalon's current development model will fully remediate the historical environmental liability at site; create no new disturbance area; and minimize GHG production, while profitably recovering tin from low grade stockpiles and other waste materials left on the site.

At the Separation Rapids Lithium Project near Kenora, Ontario, the Company's staged development approach allows for minimizing the environmental footprint of the project while maximizing the number of potential mineral products from the lithium pegmatite, reducing the amount of waste material generated. Under Avalon's current development model, as little as 10% of the mined ore would end up as waste, compared to 90% plus at typical base and precious metals operations.

Avalon is a leader among junior mineral development companies in adopting best practices to reduce its environmental footprint, protect water resources and engage with local communities. The Company has reported annually on its sustainability performance since 2011. Avalon's sixth and current Sustainability Report's theme is Concentrating on Cleantech Materials Production: a theme chosen to reflect the Company's focus on defining profitable business opportunities in the technology metals sector. Avalon's 2017 Sustainability Report can be found online at: Click Here.

This is the third time Avalon has been ranked as a Future 40 Responsible Corporate Leader in the last four years. This year, Avalon is listed among top-ranking companies such as London Hydro, Vancouver Fraser Port Authority and Dundee Precious Metals.

The methodology for the 2018 Future 40 Responsible Corporate Leaders in Canada ranking is based on 16 key performance indicators covering resource, employee and financial management. The full methodology for this year's ranking is available from Corporate Knights here: Click Here. Private or publicly-listed companies headquartered in Canada with revenue of under $1 billion and evidence of ESG reporting are eligible. Ranking is based on publicly-disclosed data, verified by the companies prior to project completion.

Corporate Knights is a specialized media and investment research firm that operates in three segments, including Corporate Knights Magazine: the self-proclaimed largest globally circulating magazine focused on sustainability and responsible business, with a strong track record of providing informed research and analysis to the market.

The full ranking can be viewed in Corporate Knights Magazine's Spring 2018 issue or online at Click Here.

About Avalon Advanced Materials Inc.

Avalon Advanced Materials Inc. is a Canadian mineral development company specializing in niche market metals and minerals with growing demand in new technology. The Company has three advanced stage projects, all 100%-owned, providing investors with exposure to lithium, tin and indium, as well as rare earth elements, tantalum, niobium, and zirconium. Avalon is currently focusing on its Separation Rapids Lithium Project, Kenora, ON and its East Kemptville Tin-Indium Project, Yarmouth, NS. Social responsibility and environmental stewardship are corporate cornerstones.

For questions and feedback, please e-mail the Company at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. , or phone Don Bubar, President & CEO at 416-364-4938.

This news release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and applicable Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to statements that Avalon is fully committed to integrating sustainable practices into its business model, that Avalon's current development model will fully remediate the historical environmental liability at site; create no new disturbance area; and minimize GHG production, while profitably recovering tin from low grade stockpiles and other waste materials left on the site, that the Company's staged development approach allows for minimizing the environmental footprint of the project while maximizing the number of potential mineral products from the lithium pegmatite, reducing the amount of waste material generated, and that as little as 10% of the mined ore would end up as waste. Generally, these forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "potential", "scheduled", "anticipates", "continues", "expects" or "does not expect", "is expected", "scheduled", "targeted", "planned", or "believes", or variations of such words and phrases or state that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will be" or "will not be" taken, reached or result, "will occur" or "be achieved". Forward-looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of Avalon to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are based on assumptions management believes to be reasonable at the time such statements are made. Although Avalon has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking statements, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. Factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from expected results described in forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to market conditions, and the possibility of cost overruns or unanticipated costs and expenses as well as those risk factors set out in the Company's current Annual Information Form, Management's Discussion and Analysis and other disclosure documents available under the Company's profile at www.SEDAR.com. 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. Such forward-looking statements have been provided for the purpose of assisting investors in understanding the Company's plans and objectives and may not be appropriate for other purposes. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Avalon does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements that are contained herein, except in accordance with applicable securities laws.
From surface; 0m to 166m grading 1.14% copper equivalent1,2

(0.84% copper, 0.36g/t gold)

Results pending from 166m to 387m

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, April 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Centenera Mining Corporation (Centenera or the Company) (TSXV:CT) (OTCQB:CTMIF) receives drill results from the first 166m of drill hole 18-ESP-025 at the advanced Esperanza Copper-Gold Porphyry project. Drill hole 18-ESP-025 collared in mineralization and continued to drill mineralized rock to a total depth of 387m, at which depth the hole was abandoned due to drilling difficulties. Laboratory results have been returned (Table 1) for the upper 166m grading 0.84% copper and 0.36g/t gold; 1.14% copper equivalent1,2. Results for the lower portion of the drill hole (from 166m to 387m) are pending and expected in early May.

Partial results for our first drill hole at Esperanza are excellent. Mineralization at the base of this sample batch remains strong, with 1.32% coper equivalent from 142m to 166m. We look forward to receiving results for the remainder of the drill hole in early May, stated Keith Henderson, Centeneras President & CEO. We acquired the Esperanza project in 2017 because drilling results in 2006 had provided such a solid foundation for further exploration. These first results from our drill program demonstrate very clearly that the potential to expand mineralization is real.

Table 1: Partial results for drill hole 18-ESP-025 from surface to 166m depth

Drillhole Azimuth Dip From (m) To (m) Interval (m) 1 Copper (%) Gold (g/t) Copper Equivalent (%)2 280 -67 0 166 166 0.84 0.368 1.14 18-ESP-025 including 0 22 22 1.17 0.556 1.62 and 142 166 24 1.02 0.367 1.32

Notes 1 True width is not known. 2 Copper equivalent = Copper grade % + (0.795 x gold grade g/t), assuming a copper price of $2.20/lb ($4850/t) and a gold price of $1200/oz ($38.58/g) and assuming 100% recovery.

Figure 1: Map showing location of existing 2007 drill holes at Esperanza (blue), the 2018 drill holes (red), both completed and planned

Drilling Update

Drilling at the Esperanza Copper Gold Porphyry project is ongoing. The first drill hole, 18-ESP-025 (Figure 1), collared 120m northwest of previous drill hole 06-HU-02. Drill hole 18-ESP-025 collared close to the western extent of the Canyon Stock as defined by outcropping alteration and mineralization and drilled on an azimuth of 280. The purpose of the drill hole is to test the extent of mineralization to the west and at depth. Drill hole 18-ESP-025 collared in potassic altered (biotite, K-feldspar, biotite) and mineralized porphyry intrusive and remained within this proximal alteration zone throughout the entire length of the hole before being terminated due to technical difficulties at 387m. The planned depth for was 500m.

Drill hole 18-ESP-026 collared approximately 30m south of 18-ESP-025 and was drilling on an azimuth of 080. The drill hole did not test target and was abandoned at 127m.

Drill hole 18-ESP-027 collared 100m south of previous drill hole 06-HU-02 and is drilling on an azimuth of 285. The purpose of the drill hole is to test the extent of mineralization to the west and at depth. The drill hole collared in mineralized rock and is ongoing at approximately 250m. Target depth is approximately 500m.

About Esperanza Copper-Gold Porphyry

The outcropping copper-gold porphyry mineralization at Esperanza was first drill-tested in 2006-2007 by 7 drill holes totalling 2,011 metres. All drill holes intersected significant copper-gold mineralization (Figure 1). Drilling highlights include:

Mineralization is outcropping at surface with a pyrite halo extending over a 1,400m x 850m area

Drill holes generally intersected mineralization at surface

Mineralization is open all directions

Majority of drill holes terminated in mineralization (due to the depth limitations of the rig) and are open at depth

Several drill holes demonstrate increasing grade with depth

Quality Assurance / Quality Control

The Esperanza copper-gold porphyry drill testing was historically undertaken by Cardero Resource Corp. from 2006 to 2007. On site personnel at the project rigorously collected and tracked samples, which were then sealed and shipped to ALS Chemex for analysis. ALS Chemex's quality system complies with the requirements for the International Standards ISO 9001:2000 and ISO 17025: 1999. Analytical accuracy and precision are monitored by the analysis of reagent blanks, reference material and replicate samples. Quality control was further assured by the use of international and in-house standards. Blind certified reference material was inserted at regular intervals into the sample sequence by Cardero personnel in order to independently assess analytical accuracy. Finally, representative blind duplicate samples were forwarded to ALS Chemex and an ISO compliant third-party laboratory for additional quality control.

Drilling undertaken by Centenera in 2018 has been supervised by on site personnel at the project who rigorously collect and track samples, which are then sealed and shipped to SGS Minerals (SGS) for analysis. SGS's quality system complies with the requirements for the International Standards ISO 9001:2000 and ISO 17025: 1999. Analytical accuracy and precision are monitored by the analysis of reagent blanks, reference material and replicate samples. Quality control is further assured by the use of international and in-house standards. Blind certified reference material was inserted at regular intervals into the sample sequence by Centenera personnel in order to independently assess analytical accuracy.

Qualified Person

Keith J. Henderson, P.Geo., is the Company's qualified person as defined by National Instrument 43-101, and has reviewed the scientific and technical information that forms the basis for portions of this news release, and has approved the disclosure herein. Mr.Henderson is not independent of the Company, as he is an employee, a shareholder and holds incentive stock options.

About Centenera Mining Corporation

Centenera is a mineral resource company trading on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol CT and on the OTCQB exchange under the symbol CTMIF. The Company is focused 100% on mineral resource assets in Argentina. The Company intends to focus its 2017 exploration activities on drill-testing its flagship Esperanza copper-gold project. Other assets, including the El Quemado lithium pegmatite project in Salta Province and the Organullo gold project, are intended to be explored by the Company with the aim of proving project potential and attracting a joint venture partner or a project sale. The Organullo project has approximately 8,000 metres of historical drilling and assay results. Organullo has a geological target range from 19.8 million tonnes grading at 0.94 g/t gold (600,000 ounces) to 31.6 million tonnes grading 0.92 g/t gold (940,000 ounces) using a 0.5 g/t gold cut-off-grade. It should be noted that these potential exploration target quantities and grades are conceptual in nature, that insufficient exploration and geological modelling has been done to define a mineral resource, and that it is uncertain if further exploration will result in the delineation of a mineral resource.

On Behalf of the Board of Directors of

CENTENERA MINING CORPORATION

"Keith Henderson"

President & CEO

For further details on the Company readers are referred to the Company's web site (www.centeneramining.com) and its Canadian regulatory filings on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

For further information, please contact:

Keith Henderson

Phone: 604-638-3456

E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release.

This news release contains forward-looking statements and forward-looking information (collectively, "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of applicable Canadian and U.S. securities legislation, including the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein including, without limitation, statements regarding the anticipated content, commencement, timing and cost of exploration programs in respect of the Project and otherwise, anticipated exploration program results from exploration activities, the Company's expectation that it will be able to enter into agreements to acquire interests in additional mineral properties, the successful negotiation and execution of a definitive Option Agreement for the Project, the discovery and delineation of mineral deposits/resources/reserves on the Project, and the anticipated business plans and timing of future activities of the Company, are forward-looking statements. Although the Company believes that such statements are reasonable, it can give no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. Often, but not always, forward looking information can be identified by words such as "pro forma", "plans", "expects", "may", "should", "budget", "scheduled", "estimates", "forecasts", "intends", "anticipates", "believes", "potential" or variations of such words including negative variations thereof, and phrases that refer to certain actions, events or results that may, could, would, might or will occur or be taken or achieved. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to differ materially from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward looking information. Such risks and other factors include, among others, operating and technical difficulties in connection with mineral exploration and development and mine development activities at the Project, including the geological mapping, prospecting and sampling program being proposed for the Project (the "Program"), actual results of exploration activities, including the Program, estimation or realization of mineral reserves and mineral resources, the timing and amount of estimated future production, costs of production, capital expenditures, the costs and timing of the development of new deposits, the availability of a sufficient supply of water and other materials, requirements for additional capital, future prices of precious metals and copper, changes in general economic conditions, changes in the financial markets and in the demand and market price for commodities, possible variations in ore grade or recovery rates, possible failures of plants, equipment or processes to operate as anticipated, accidents, labour disputes and other risks of the mining industry, delays or the inability of the Company to obtain any necessary permits, consents or authorizations required, including TSXV acceptance, for the Property acquisition, or financing or in the completion of development or construction activities, changes in laws, regulations and policies affecting mining operations, hedging practices, currency fluctuations, title disputes or claims limitations on insurance coverage and the timing and possible outcome of pending litigation, environmental issues and liabilities, risks related to joint venture operations, and risks related to the integration of acquisitions, as well as those factors discussed under the heading "Risk Factors" in the Company's Management Information Circular (April 2016) and as discussed in the annual management's discussion and analysis and other filings of the Company with the Canadian Securities Authorities, copies of which can be found under the Company's profile on the SEDAR website at www.sedar.com.

Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward looking information. Except as otherwise required by law, the Company undertakes no obligation to update any of the forward looking information in this news release or incorporated by reference herein.
Vancouver, British Columbia (FSCwire) - Condor Resources Inc. - (Condor or the Company) (TSX.V: CN) is pleased to provide results from Condors follow up mapping and sampling program on its Huinac Punta project. The recent field work was designed to provide a better assessment of the scope and consistency of the carbonate replacement mineralization, hosted in Jurassic limestones.

The Huinac Punta project is located on the eastern part of the Mesozoic polymetallic carbonate replacement belt in central Peru, which metallogenic belt is host to the Antamina Mine approximately 65 km to the north-west of the project. Huinac Punta covers approximately 20 sq km and is 100% owned by Condor, subject to a 0.5% NSR held by Sandstorm Gold Ltd.

Results of a preliminary reconnaissance and sampling program (26 samples) were published in the January 8, 2018 news release. The initial sampling identified several high grade silver results (up to 4,115 g/t), associated with highly anomalous copper, zinc, lead and cobalt.

The follow up mapping and sampling program was completed in March, when an additional 145 rock chip channel samples (all 2 meters in length) were collected. Sampling and mapping was conducted to define the extent and geometry of alteration within the brecciated limestone host, which occurs in the contact area with a weakly altered granitic intrusive stock. Two zones approximately 500m apart contain evidence of old Spanish workings and small adits, where the more massive sulphide zones are exposed at surface. These historic zones produced many of the high grade silver samples.

From the 145 two-metre chip samples in this sampling program, silver values ranged up to 1,295g/t Ag, with 24 of the samples exceeding 100 g/t Ag. Lead values ranged up to 1.9% Pb, with 14 of the samples exceeding 0.1% Pb. Zinc values ranged up to 1.0% Zn, with 15 of the samples exceeding 0.1% Zn. Copper values ranged up to 0.21 % Cu with four of the samples exceeding 0.1% Cu. Anomalous cobalt results were returned from the recent sampling program, with maximum value of 134 ppm Co.

Alteration has developed within the fine grain brecciated limestones in contact with the medium grained weakly altered granitic intrusive. The alteration assemblage with the better silver mineralization consists of a dark coloured lower zone of pervasively silicified brecciated limestone hosting disseminated massive dark coloured sulphides and oxides. This silicified zone has been observed in outcrop to cover an approximate area of about 700 metres by about 400 metres in width. The historic Spanish workings are located in two smaller areas within this zone, where there is more obvious greyish-dark sulphides occurring as patches. The upper part of the limestone is also brecciated and decalcified, with minor disseminated sulphides and oxides largely restricted as infill in the breccia matrix. This area of decalcified breccia is thought to be an alteration halo to the more intensely mineralized alteration.

Pictures of the silicified brecciated limestone alteration at Huinac Punta can be seen on our website: Click Here

The follow up sampling has confirmed the mineralized system hosts potential for discovery of a bulk tonnage, disseminated silver-base metal deposit, related to metasomatic carbonate replacement.

Condor is an explorer and project generator focused exclusively on Peru, and our objective is the discovery of a major new precious metals or base metals deposit. Project acquisition and development is managed by our Lima based exploration team.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

Lyle Davis,

President & Chief Executive Officer

For further information please contact the Company at 1-866-642-5707, or by email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Mr. Brian D. Game, P.Geo, is the Qualified Person under NI 43-101 who has approved the scientific and technical content of this news release.

Quality Assurance/Quality Control: The sampling program was undertaken by Company personnel under the direction of Ever Marquez, Condors VP Exploration. A secure chain of custody is maintained in transporting and storing of all samples. Samples were delivered to and assayed by SGS Del Peru S.A.C. in Lima, a laboratory whose quality control system complies with International Standards OHSAS 18001, ISO 14001 and ISO 9001. Analysis by four acid digestion system with 51 element ICP-MS analysis was conducted on all samples. Gold was assayed using a fire assay with atomic absorption spectrometry and gravimetric finish when required. Copper and silver samples over the upper detection limit of ICP-MS were re-analyzed by atomic absorption spectrometry. Systematic assaying of sample duplicates and commercially prepared blanks and standards was performed for analytical reliability by the laboratory. Rock chip samples from outcrop/bedrock are selective by nature and they may not be representative of the mineralization hosted on the project.

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 news release.
TORONTO, April 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Centerra Gold Inc. (TSX:CG) announced today that it has agreed with the Government of the Kyrgyz Republic to extend the First Longstop Date under the Strategic Agreement for Environmental Protection and Investment Promotion previously entered into with the Government of the Kyrgyz Republic on September 11, 2017. The First Longstop Date is the date by which all conditions precedent to the completion of the Strategic Agreement are required to be satisfied and it has been extended by agreement of the parties from April 20, 2018 to May 31, 2018.

The Company notes that the government of Prime Minister Sapar Isakov was dismissed by the President of the Kyrgyz Republic yesterday following a vote of no confidence in the Kyrgyz Republic Parliament. We understand that Parliament is in the process of appointing a new government and that Mr. Isakov and other government officials will continue in their roles until a new government is formed.

Centerra expects to continue to work with the Government of the Kyrgyz Republic to ensure the satisfaction of the remaining conditions precedent to completion of the Strategic Agreement, including the termination of certain legal proceedings and the granting of land use permits. The Company notes that many of the conditions precedent have already been satisfied, including the granting of various permits and approvals for the Kumtor Mine. In addition, the Government of the Kyrgyz Republic has terminated all of the environmental claims previously brought by the Kyrgyz Republic State Inspectorate Office for Environmental and Technical Safety (SIETS).

While the Strategic Agreement provides a pathway for the resolution of all outstanding matters affecting the Kumtor Project, there are no assurances that all of the conditions precedent to the completion of the settlement contained in the Strategic Agreement will be satisfied. The inability to successfully resolve all such matters, whether through the Strategic Agreement or otherwise could have a material adverse impact on the Companys future cash flows, earnings, results of operations and financial condition.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-looking Information

Information contained in this news release which is not a statement of historical fact may be forward-looking information for the purposes of Canadian securities laws. Such forward-looking information involves assumptions, 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 information. The words believe, expect, anticipate, contemplate, plan, intends, continue, budget, estimate, may, will, schedule, understand and similar expressions identify forward-looking information. These forward-looking statements relate to, among other things: the Companys expectations regarding its future discussions with the Government of the Kyrgyz Republic to satisfy the remaining conditions precedent, and reach completion of, the Strategic Agreement.

Forward-looking information is necessarily based upon a number of estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable by Centerra, are inherently subject to significant political, business, economic and competitive uncertainties and contingencies. Known and unknown factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in the forward looking information. Factors that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from current expectations include, among other things: risks that any of the conditions precedent to the Strategic Agreement will not be satisfied in a timely manner or at all, particularly as the Government may not bind the General Prosecutors Office or the Parliament of the Kyrgyz Republic; a decision by the General Prosecutors Office, or its successor the Anti-Corruption Service of the State Committee for National Security, to re-open at any time civil or criminal proceedings against Centerra, its subsidiaries or other stakeholders; the failure of the Government to comply with its continuing obligations under the Strategic Agreement, including the requirement that it comply at all times with its obligations under the 2009 Kumtor Project Agreements, allow for the continued operation of the Kumtor Mine by Kumtor Gold Company (KGC) and Kumtor Operating Company (KOC) and not take any expropriatory action; actions by the Government or any state agency or the General Prosecutor's Office that serve to restrict or otherwise interfere with the payment of funds by KGC and KOC to Centerra. See section titled Risks that can affect our business in the Companys most recently filed Annual Information Form available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com.

About Centerra

Centerra Gold Inc. is a Canadian-based gold mining company focused on operating, developing, exploring and acquiring gold properties in North America, Asia and other markets worldwide. Centerra operates two flagship assets, the Kumtor Mine in the Kyrgyz Republic and the Mount Milligan Mine in British Columbia, Canada and is the largest Western-based gold producer in Central Asia. Centerra's shares trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) under the symbol CG. The Company is based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

For more information:

John W. Pearson

Vice President, Investor Relations

(416) 204-1953

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Additional information on Centerra is available on the Companys web site at www.centerragold.com and at SEDAR at www.sedar.com.
A Syrian-born German national accused of helping to plan the September 11, 2001 attacks has been detained by US-allied forces in Syria, the Pentagon confirmed on Thursday.

We can confirm that Mohammad Haydar Zammar, a Syrian-born German national, was captured more than a month ago by SDF partners, Pentagon spokesman Eric Pahon said in a statement, referring to the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

A senior Kurdish commander told AFP the previous day that Zammar had been detained and is now being interrogated.

Zammar, in his mid-fifties, has been accused of recruiting some of the September 11 Al-Qaeda hijackers who carried out attacks on Washington and New York, killing almost 3,000 people.

He was detained in Morocco in December 2001 in an operation involving CIA agents, and was handed over to the Syrian authorities two weeks later.

A Syrian court sentenced Zammar to 12 years in prison in 2007 for belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood, a charge that at the time could have resulted in the death penalty.

But conflict broke out in Syria four years later, and many hardline Islamist prisoners were released from jail or broke free and went on to join jihadist groups fighting in the war.

Al-Qaeda operated a branch in Syria known as Al-Nusra Front, but the affiliate has since claimed to have broken off ties.

The Islamic State jihadist group also rose to power in the countrys north and east, but a US-backed alliance has ousted it from swathes of its onetime caliphate.

The SDF, a coalition of Arab and Kurdish fighters, has caught several foreign members of IS in Syria in recent months, particularly since it captured the northern city of Raqa from the jihadists.

The Kurdish commander who spoke to AFP on Wednesday declined to say whether Zammar had been actively fighting as a member of an extremist group in Syria.

wat/wd/it
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When I was 12, my father got into a bicycle accident resulting in traumatic brain injury. Although I was unaware of it at the time, this day became the first day of the rest of my life.

Despite having never seen either of my parents so much as have a sip of wine with dinner, I watched my father spiral into a crippling alcohol addiction that wreaked havoc on our lives.

As I entered my rebellious teenage years, I learned an important lesson: addiction fuels in others a desire to be overly accommodating, even as they simultaneously ignore a dire situation until it becomes intolerable  often, way too late.

The media has recently drawn attention to the urgency of the opioid epidemic. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports over 63,600 drug overdose deaths in 2016. Newly released provisional data for 2017 reflects a continuing upward trend. But much of the surrounding discourse doesnt acknowledge how addiction enmeshes itself in how we respond to it in our everyday lives.

The three following stories are about missed opportunities, breaking social mores around taboo topics and how silence leads to death. They are about how deeply woven the sources of addiction are into the fabric of our culture around substance use.

I met Lilly* in an adolescent detox during my second stay and her eighth. She was sixteen years old when she consumed enough methadone at once to peacefully fade away in her sleep, failing to wake for breakfast the next morning. The nurses knew her well and spared her the nightly proverbial medication check. That morning, staff panicked upon discovering her unresponsive in bed. But instead of informing us of her death  giving us perhaps the healthiest place to grieve  we spent our afternoon art therapy session making get well soon cards for Lilly. The double tragedy here was the missed opportunity to make amends for carelessness and to grow from the experience  for everyone involved.

Despite the lack of transparency about Lillys death, this reaction is pervasive in other realms also. I met James* the day I moved into my freshman dorm. I was drawn to the confidence of someone unabashedly dressed head to toe in tie-dye. We had become good friends by the time that I couldnt sleep and found myself outside the residence hall at 3 a.m., desperate to savor the stillness that typically evaded a bustling city campus. There was James, smoking a cigarette, drinking in the night sky. I havent been able to sleep in days, man. If I could just get some Xanax, I think I could sleep. Could you help me out? he pleaded. Having climbed myself out of addiction relatively recently, I self-righteously snarled at him to never ask me for that again. Addiction makes people grovel in a way thats painful to look at. Even if youve been there, it fills you with terrible emotions like disgust, pity, and embarrassment towards and for others.

I didnt know that would be the last time I would speak to him. And when the news came that he had overdosed on heroin and Xanax, my world shattered. I prided myself on being the person that friends turned to for support. Yet, I had missed the opportunity to talk to him about substance use. In a sea of 40,000 students at a large university, Jamess death went unnoticed. Like Lilly, he became another statistic.

This experience solidified my desire to work in the substance abuse field. After college, I went abroad to fulfill my dream of working in an outpatient rehabilitation center for women and their children. I was enthralled with the prospect of working in a country that heavily supported people who were struggling to overcome addiction. I couldnt wait to step foot in an organization that embraced harm reduction: an approach that accepts total abstinence as unlikely but tries to minimize the negative consequences of drug use. Its something Id only read about in textbooks.

In my first week, I met Trisha*, one of the programs great success stories. She had stably come off heroin three years ago and was working on tapering off of her methadone. We went to an outdoor adventure retreat where the woman could reconnect with their children and get away from the city for a few days. Who knew that death would follow me across the sea and swallow Trisha into its abyss?

The director claimed that she died of a mysterious heart condition that was unknown and belied by her dazzling showmanship in our archery games and rock climbing the previous weekend. With a morbid familiarity, I put on a black dress. I watched three grown sons carry their mothers casket with tears in their eyes and a daughter whose knees buckled under her, wailing in the silent chill of a gray afternoon. The church bells solemnly rang, as hundreds of mourners stood with bated breath and heavy hearts. The silence continued and reverberated through the drug program for weeks after. I began to wonder why not even a model treatment program in a progressive country could discuss the elephant in the room.

If you believe were getting better at talking about substance use because of the opioid epidemic, then I would challenge you to consider how we memorialize those who die from overdose  opioids or otherwise. I am from a suburban town outside of a city thats probably not unlike the one that you may be from or may reside in currently. My town was hit hard by prescription analgesics, and its remains have been ravaged with heroin. Frequently, my social media newsfeeds fill with the telltale signs of an old acquaintance dying from an unintentional drug overdose. Their friends post that the decedent is another one gone too soon or that they are simply tired of losing people to this disease. Everyone is afraid to name it.

We can call the opioid epidemic a public health emergency.

We can debate the legality of newly announced safe-injection facilities in cities like Philadelphia and San Francisco.

Jurisdictions like New York City can sue big pharmaceutical companies to demand penance for the havoc theyve wreaked on their tenants. We can rally for the supply-side interventions targeting drug dealers, like President Trump has demanded and that have been ineffective historically.

Nearly 200 people die from overdoses in the United States every day according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

And yet, were afraid to have nonjudgmental, open conversations with friends, co-workers, and family members early on at the first signs of substance misuse. Instead, we wait until its necessary because our loved one has spiraled into deep, tumultuous oblivion. And we do so with shaming and social distancing. When youre the child, parent, spouse, sibling, friend of a person suffering from addiction, no one tells you that the stigma felt from your loved ones drug use is miniscule compared to the guilt, and overwhelming silence felt after he or she is gone.

We need to be better at reversing a culture that shames people for substance use and pushes their loved ones into silence, which euphemizes and sugarcoats and denies the problem  even after lives are lost. We need to stop blaming and start recognizing the cyclical patterns of addiction and how lack of visibility inevitably leads to death. Perhaps Lillys, James, and Trishas stories wouldnt have ended differently with open, nonjudgmental conversations about substance use. But I often wonder how many people might have been saved had their deaths become the starting point for others.

* Names and identifying information changed.

Ariel Hurley is a masters in public health and masters in social work candidate.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com
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Councillors have said there has been a huge influx of potholes in the wake of the recent extreme weather events with 29 roads in one local electoral area plagued by the cavities.

The issue of potholes was raised at the Kilkenny City Municipal District last Friday and the Castlecomer MD meeting on Monday.

Cllr Peter Chap Cleere said there has been a huge influx of potholes around the county.

He said: There are 29 roads (in the City MD) area that currently have potholes and it probably was 49 last week. He told the meeting that the frost and wet weather had left road conditions treacherous and he asked if there was any correspondence from the Government as regards extra funding.

Director of Services at Kilkenny County Council, Tim Butler, said they are currently putting costs together on the Storm Emma damage and a list of damage caused to roads, similar to the 2016 floods, to get additional funding.

He added: We do have a little bit of extra funding in roads but nowhere near enough. Mr Butler told members that Kilkenny has one of the highest standards of roads condition in the country and is one of the better ones.

Cllr Matt Doran said the countys rural roads have been subjected to serious damage after the bad weather and potholes are getting bigger.

At the Castlecomer MD meeting, Cllr Mary Hilda Cavanagh said there was huge investment needed for the countys roads due to the savage damage done by snow.

She also said it is not a case anymore of filling in potholes and moving on. Roads will have to be widened. Farm machinery is bigger and theyre driving along county roads in the middle and the wheels are digging out debris from either side.

The horse and cart are gone. The window for cutting silage is so tight. The sides of roads are breaking down.

There has been a change in traffic. Lorries are wider than some of our countys roads.

Cllr Pat Fitzpatrick said: This is just another example of under-investment in the rural road network. It simply is not good enough.

It is undeniable that along parts of the rural road network there are what I would describe as avoidable risks being posed to the public with potholes.

The blame for this lies squarely with the Government.

Rural road users pay as much tax as anyone else and they are not seeing the benefit. There has been a total disregard of the needs of rural Ireland when it comes to several issues, including the condition of our roads.

Cllr Michael McCarthy told the meeting how he had gotten a puncture recently from a pothole.

Area engineer for Castlecomer, Philippe Beubry, said it has been a long and hard Winter and added that the Council was struggling to keep some of the roads under control.

He added: I dont think theres money there to widen every road.

Cllr Cavanagh had a motion before the meeting calling for potholes to be filled in on county and other roads and that the issue be prioritised immediately to stop further damage to cars.

Cllr Fitzpatrick also had a motion calling on the MD to write to the Government requesting emergency funding to be put in place to carry out the necessary repairs in the interest of public safety.

For more on this story, read Darren Hassetts column which will be online from Saturday morning or pick up this week's Kilkenny People.
A report released this week by the Local Enterprise Offices (LEOs) has shown the significant impact that business people who have been through the LEO run Irelands Best Young Entrepreneur (IBYE) programme are making.

Ahead of the National Final on the 22nd April, the research showed that the 348 entrepreneurs funded by IBYE to date are generating annual sales of 124million and employing over 2,200 people.

Local Enterprise Office Kilkenny has a National Finalists in 2018. Eoin Treacy, Glanway Ltd is the managing director of a processing and production facility for storage and production of waste-derived alternative fuels at Belview port. The company Glanway has grown rapidly since it commenced operations 3 years ago to become the largest waste processing facility in the South East of Ireland.

In 2015 Kilkenny based applicant, Blaine Doyle won the overall national prize for Best Business Idea. His business, GlowDx, is a diagnostics company that employs innovative molecular biology to supply developing countries with high quality diagnostic tests that focus on neglected tropical diseases. GlowDx has gained significant interest from the Governments of in the developing world and numerous human interest group in his products.



Impact

Fiona Deegan, Head of Enterprise for Local Enterprise Office Kilkenny said; The IBYE programme is making a significant impact on creating the next generation of entrepreneurs all over the country. In County Kilkenny we can see the difference it is making, the interest it generates and the enthusiasm of young entrepreneurs who want to generate ideas, build businesses and create jobs. The programme is giving young entrepreneurs the ability to develop their businesses and working along with their Local Enterprise Office to help bring them to market.

Funding for the LEOs and the IBYE competition is provided by the Government of Ireland through the State Agency, Enterprise Ireland. Irelands Best Young Entrepreneur is a programme for 18-35 years old run by the 31 Local Enterprise Offices across the country. It focuses on three categories; Best Business Idea, Best Business Start-Up and Best Established Business.

The IBYE National Final for 2018 is taking place on Sunday, 22nd April in Google HQ, involving 24 finalists across the three competition categories. This years national winners will share a further 100,000 investment fund.

Every year there is a 2million investment fund contributed to the IBYE programme by the Department of Business, Enterprise and Innovation through Enterprise Ireland and allocated by the Local Enterprise Offices. For more information on Irelands Best Young Entrepreneur, see www.IBYE.ie or follow the conversation online using #IBYE.
A student from St Beacons National School in Mullinavat has been announced as the winner of the Kilkenny County Spelling Bee, which took place last week in Scoil Iognaid De Ris.

Niall Walsh (12) came out on top against 20 other spelling enthusiasts and will now be entered into the Leinster Provincial Spelling Bee final at the end of May. The sixth class student is currently reading IT by Stephen King.

The Eason Spelling Bee encourages kids throughout the country to practice their spelling, to read more and strives to instil greater confidence when it comes to literacy and spelling.

Were extremely proud of the success of the Eason Spelling Bee to date, says Brendan Corbett, Eason.

Over the eight years, we have seen the children of our nation continue to impress with their level of spelling and its wonderful to see schools from across the country continuously supporting this initiative.

Each year, the competition begins with schools hosting their own in-school Bee competitions, to find a school champion. From there, the Eason Spelling Bee team hits the road to host the county final Bees, which then leads to four provincial finals. The All-Ireland final will take place in June.

The winning school will receive a collection of books for their library to the value of 7,500. The winner will be awarded a goody bag full of books worth 500 and the title of the 2018 Eason Spelling Bee champion.
New Plymouth MP Jonathan Young writes:

Im not disappointed  Im angry! A kick in the guts, a wrecking ball for the region, killing the golden goose. All these phrases express the emotional response to the Ardern-Peters Governments announcement to end new offshore oil and gas exploration. Without doubt more bad news is still to come as the Green Party and Greenpeace make onshore exploration their next target.

Hard to imagine that wont have the same fate unless the Government changes.

The Ardern-Peters Government has made a significant misstep in their approach. New Zealand has 10 years of known gas supply lefts. We havent had a gas discovery for eight years. With existing exploration hoping to make a discovery, it has a 10-15% chance of success. When a discovery is made, it will take a further ten years of development before gas is available for market. Just do the math, without considering any chilling effect on investment the Governments decision has created, we should get ready for a gasless future. With every fifth day of our electricity generated from fossil fuels, mostly gas  we have a problem. When electricity demand increases because of the growth of electric vehicles in New Zealand, we have a compounded problem. Wind and solar energy might contribute, but both are intermittent. This will require overbuild and capacity charging, leading to higher electricity prices. With gas possibly gone, and any shortfall in renewables, were left with coal to keep our lights on. Emissions will likely rise rather than fall.

Yep the Government has managed to come up with a policy that both effs over Taranaki and increases greenhouse gas emissions.

Gas replacing coal is one of the key reasons why energy emissions stalled in their growth in 2014, 2015 and 2016 according to the International Energy Agency. James Shaw has said no to that, because according to the Paris Accord, the market for gas is going to dry up and no one will need it. Thats an unrealistic proposal. The IEA have said in 2050, 50 per cent of world energy will still be fossil fuel based.

The Government has taken a purist position that harms the environment and harms New Zealand  just so they can boast overseas about what good works they are doing.

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There are three seeking Labours nomination, and five (after pre-selection) seeking Nationals nomination. They are:

Labour

Shanan Halbert, 2017 candidate, head of relationships at Te Wanaga o Aotearoa, former parliamentary funded staffer

Richard Hills, Auckland Councillor, popular with people on both left and right

Paul McGreal

Halbert and Hills have similar demographic backgrounds.

National

Dan Bidois, economist, works for Foodstuffs, has worked for OECD. Has an MPP from Harvard

Danielle Grant, Chair Kaipatiki Local Board, marketing consultant

Darren Ward

Lisa Whyte, Chair Upper Harbour Local Board, accountant

Simon Watts

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Tova OBrien writes:

These are just a few of New Zealands close friends who got in behind the United States, United Kingdom and France when they launched airstrikes against the murderous Syrian regime and its chemical weapons sites.



 Australia says it supports the airstrikes in Syria  its even considering joining the next round.

 Canada supports them too.

 Germany called them necessary and appropriate and also used the S-word, support.

 NATO supports them.

 The European Union stands with our allies on the side of justice.

The attacks came after yet another gas attack that killed 75 people, including children.

Jacinda Ardern may understand the strikes, even accept the strikes but it will be a cold day in hell before the Prime Minister joins our allies in supporting airstrikes in Syria.
South Korea and the United States have yet to decide whether to continue their combined military exercises through the inter-Korean summit day next week, a defense official said Thursday.



The allies kicked off the Foal Eagle field training in Korea on April 1 with an announcement that it will last four weeks. They are also scheduled to start the Key Resolve simulation-based, command-post drill next Monday.



It's an open secret that the two sides plan to wrap up Foal Eagle, ostensibly before next Friday, when the South's President Moon Jae-in and the North's leader Kim Jong-un will meet at the border village of Panmunjom.



Defense sources said Foal Eagle will likely go on "unofficially" through May.



Another public concern is whether they will hold Key Resolve on the historic summit day while the leaders of the two Koreas discuss ways to bring a peace regime to the peninsula.



"South and North Korea plan to decide (the issue) through consultations in consideration of intended goals and achievements," Army Col. Roh Jae-cheon, spokesman for South Korea's Joint Chief of Staff (JCS), said at a press briefing.



A defense source said later that JCS Chairman Gen. Jeong Kyeong-doo has been discussing the issue with Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, with a joint crisis management exercise under way ahead of Key Resolve.



"They are expected to come to a conclusion next week on handling the issue flexibly if they regard the goal of the training attained to some extent," the source said.



There is also a possibility that the South will switch off anti-Pyongyang propaganda broadcasts using loudspeakers along the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) throughout the summit day.



If Key Resolve pauses for the summit, it is due to resume in the first week of May.



South Korea and the U.S. have apparently played it low-key when it comes to the annual large-scale joint military drills, which Pyongyang has labeled as a rehearsal for invasion and a reason for its nuclear armament. (Yonhap)




Bucharest, April 20: Romanian President Klaus Iohannis on Friday sharply criticised plans announced by the head of the ruling party to move the country's embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Iohannis had "not been consulted or informed over this process," his office said in a statement, adding that in his opinion the decision was "not based on firm, wide-ranging evaluations". On Thursday, the head of the ruling Social Democratic Party (PSD), Liviu Dragnea, told the Antena 3 TV channel: "The decision has been taken... procedures [for the move] have started."

However, the government of Prime Minister Viorica Dancila has not officially confirmed the news and a government spokesman refused to comment on the issue when asked by AFP. Due to a previous two-year suspended prison sentence for electoral fraud, Dragnea could not take up the post of prime minister after the PSD won legislative elections at the end of 2016, but he is still as having a key role in party decisions.

Iohannis, who is from the centre-right and has expressed numerous disagreements with the government, claimed he had the authority to "take decisions relating to Romania's foreign policy" and underlined that Bucharest's position on the Israeli-Palestinian question "had not changed". "At this stage a transfer of the embassy would represent a violation of international law," he said.

"The government's initiative could eventually represent, at the most, the beginning of a process of evaluation... which could only be finalised after the conclusion of peace talks," Iohannis added. In December American President Donald Trump sparked global controversy by announcing that the US would move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

Romania would be the first EU country to follow suit. Israel occupied mainly Palestinian east Jerusalem and the surrounding region in the 1967 Six-Day War and later annexed it, declaring the whole city its capital. However, neither move was recognised by the international community and the Palestinians see the eastern part of the city as the capital of their future state.
On Thursday, Swazilands King Mswati III, Africas last absolute monarch, renamed the country as the the Kingdom of eSwatini. According to a report on Reuters, the King on the occasion of his 50th birthday and at the Golden Jubilee celebration of Swazi independence changed the name to eSwatini, which means 'land of the Swazis.

Reportedly, the King has referred to the Kingdom of eSwatini several times in recent years - in an address to the UN General Assembly in 2017 and at African Union and other international conferences. The country did not change its name when it gained independence in 1968 after being a British protectorate for more than 60 years. As per OkayAfrica, the King has been quoted as saying, "African countries on getting independence reverted to their ancient names before they were colonized,so from now on the country will be officially be known as the Kingdom of eSwatini."

Post the news, there were mixed reactions on social media, which some lauded the monarch's move, there were others that highlighted on how important issues in the country needs to be addressed immediately.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Apr 20, 2018 09:02 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).
Apr 20, 2018, 6:54am ET

Land Rover planning born-again Freelander?

The model could arrive in 2021.

Land Rover's upcoming model offensive will likely include an entry-level model set to revive the dormant Freelander nameplate, according to a recent report.

The British company recently split its line-up into three pillars called Discovery, Defender, and Range Rover, respectively. The Freelander/LR2 successor will slot beneath the Discovery Sport, according to Autocar. It will be smaller than the original Freelander (pictured) introduced in 1997 and it will arrive exclusively as a four-door model. There's no reason to believe the two-door variant with a removable soft top will return.

The Freelander will ride on a new platform named D10 internally. It's a shrunken variant of the front-wheel drive architecture found under the Discovery Sport, the Range Rover Evoque, and the recently-introduced Jaguar E-Pace. The powertrain catalog will include gasoline- and diesel-burning engines and at least one electrified option.

The born-again Land Rover Freelander could arrive in 2021, Autocar learned, though the publication adds the model hasn't received the green light for production yet. If built, it will compete in the same segment as the Jeep Renegade and the MINI Countryman; in Europe, the hot-selling Audi Q2 will be one of its biggest rivals.

Looking beyond that date, the firm could add a Freelander-sized model to each of its pillars to give buyers in the market for a smaller, more affordable off-roader more options. The second model would slot below the next-generation Defender, while the third would fill the space below the Evoque.
Nearly 40 jobs have been created in Portlaoise with the opening of a new store by food retailer Iceland.

The supermarket will open its newest store in Gandon Court, Mountmellick Road, Portlaoise on Tuesday, April 24. This marks the third Iceland store opening this year for the retailer.

Iceland say the new store opening brings 37 new jobs to Portlaoise and is the biggest Iceland store in the country spanning 19,000sq. ft.

The firm says the new store stocks everything for the weekly family shop - from frozen food and fresh produce to a chilled goods range and household essentials. The show will feature a fresh in-store bakery and coffee station.

This month, Iceland also announced it would be the first supermarket retailer to remove palm oil from own label food with a total of 130 products being reformulated by the end of the year.

The company says its stocks will include all of the new food ranges in papers pots, including the new Mumbai street food selection, following the announcement in January that Iceland is committed to the environment by becoming the first major retailer globally to eliminate plastic packaging from all own brand products by the end of 2023.

Iceland is home to over 2,000 branded fresh and frozen grocery products and is proud to support Irish with more than 35 local suppliers  all at great prices, in addition to being the exclusive stockist of the Slimming World range in Ireland.

Ron Metcalfe is Managing Director of Iceland Ireland.

Tuesday marks the official opening of Iceland Portlaoise and we are delighted to welcome new customers through the doors to experience all that Iceland has to offer at our new flagship store. This is our third store opening this year in Ireland and we have had a great response from customers across the county for this new store. 2018 is a big year for us and were excited to see the store numbers grow continuously as well as welcoming new colleagues to the Iceland family.

Caroline Devine is Store Manager of Iceland Portlaoise.

I am delighted to be a part of the first Iceland store in Laois and really looking forward to meeting new customers, and of course, bringing them the wide range of products and great savings that are available at Iceland, she said.

Customers of the Portlaoise store can avail of the Iceland Bonus Card. This is Icelands savings card that rewards customers with 1 free for every 30 saved on to the card. Cardholders can spend this in any Iceland store whenever they choose.
The official number of gangs locked up in Portlaoise and other prisons is at least three times less than has been claimed by prison officers.

At the Prison Officers Association conference in Kilkenny this week it was claimed that there are 30 gangs represented in Mountjoy jail alone. This, however, is three times less than what the Irish Prison Service claims.

Jim Mitchell, Deputy General Secretary said the proliferation and power of gangs within prisons is a matter of major concern to prison officers.

What we have now operating, within Mountjoy particularly, are gangs that have an international profile and significant funds to run their operations like a business. They have a hierarchy within the prison estate and have a number of contractors that they hire work out to. In total there are nearly 30 factions within Mountjoy that cannot mix for a variety of reasons, he said.

However, this figure is a lot less than what prison management has reported to the Department of Justice.

In a Dail reply to Bernard Durkan TD, Minister for Justice and Equality Charlie Flanagan gave the official data on Wednesday, April 17.

"I am advised by my officials in the Irish Prison Service that arising from a report compiled by them, there are currently 10 criminal groupings involving approximately 102 prisoners within the prison population excluding the subversive groupings in Portlaoise Prison and that the situation is subject to continuous monitoring and assessment.

"Membership or allegiance of these criminal groups fluctuates on a continuous basis with some persons breaking links and others becoming affiliated on a daily basis. It is also the case that prisoners will not always declare their affiliation to certain groupings and it is therefore not possible to provide definitive numbers in relation to the number of known members of criminal groupings currently in custody," he said.

The Minister admitted that the gang cause problems.

"The emergence in recent years of criminal groupings has had significant implications for the management of Irish Prisons. Rivalries and feuds which develop on the outside continue inside the prison. Prison management must ensure that the various factions are kept apart, and as far as possible, that members of criminal groups do not have influence over other inmates in the prisons or criminal activities outside," he said.

Mr Flanagan said the Irish Prison Service is committed to preventing identified members of criminal groups from conducting criminal activities while in custody and also to prevent them exerting inappropriate influence over other persons.

He said the security initiatives undertaken by the Operational Support Group have made it more difficult for prisoners to engage in illegal activities while in prison.

"These initiatives include the installation of airport-style security including scanners and X-ray machines. The core function of the Operational Support Group includes the gathering and collating of intelligence information on members of criminal groups in custody, carrying out intelligence-led searches and preventing the flow of contraband, including mobile phones, into the prisons.

"In addition, there is regular contact between the Irish Prison Service and An Garda Siochana to discuss security issues including the operation of criminal groupings," he said.
A 15-year-old Laois youth has been given a juvneile caution in a case in which he was charged with assaulting a member of the Rosenallis juvenile GAA club during a hurling match.

The youth, who cannot be named, was charged with assault causing harm at Portlaoise District Court.

The offence occurred on April 20, 2017, at the Rosenallis GAA grounds.

Portlaoise District Court heard on Friday that the youth had been given a caution by the Garda Juvenile Liaison Officer.

States evidence outlined that during a match between Rosenallis and Clonaslee, the accused ran at the injured party and struck him on the left temple with a hurl, rendering him unconscious.

The injured party was hospitalised with a blunt head injury. He was subsequently re-hospitalised on April 26 with suspected post-concussion syndrome.

The case first came before the court last December and was adjourned on a number of occasions to see whether it could be dealt with by way of the accused receiving a caution.

At todays sitting of Portlaoise District Court, Sgt JJ Kirby said that the Juvenile Liaison Officer had administered the caution on March 9 last and as far as the State was concerned that was the end of the case.

The parents of the injured party were in court and Judge Catherine Staines informed them that the Juvenile Liaison Officer scheme allows for young people who were never in trouble before to receive a caution rather than enter the criminal justice system.

She told the injured partys parents that she had no more function in the case and all she could do was strike it out.

Solicitor for the accused, Mr Philip Meagher said his client had learned a very salutary lesson and the matter had been preying on his mind and his familys minds.

He wishes to put it behind him and very much regrets it, said Mr Meagher.

* The Leinster Express wishes to clarify that the youth received a juvenile caution and not an adult caution as previously reported.
The Minister for Health has claimed he is still trying to work out 'a mechanism' to gather views from the public, doctors, nurses and others on the future of Portlaoise hospital.

Minister Simon Harris updated Laois TD Brian Stanley on the issue in the Dail this week. He asked the Minister when the consultation process on the future of the Midland Regional Hospital Portlaoise involving local clinicians and the community will begin and the expected timeframe for completion.

A HSE Dublin Midlands Hospital Group plan is with the Minister. A final version of the plan proposes extensive downgrade of the Laois hospital with services relocated elsewhere.

Last December, Minister Harris promised consultation on this instead of agreeing to implementation.

"I understand Deputy Stanley's desire, and that of the people in the midlands, for a decision to be made on the consultation as quickly as possible. I want to deliver it as quickly as possible, but not at the expense of getting it wrong. I want to make sure. One can have consultation and one can have real, meaningful consultation and engagement.

"I am trying to work out a mechanism whereby the people of the midlands, the people of Portlaoise, the clinicians, the stakeholders and the public can have their say and their views heard and can tease out and stress-test all the important issues," he said.

Dep Stanley also raised recent comments by Taoiseach Leo Varakar at a private Fine Gael meeting in Mountmellick. The TD told Minister Harris that Mr Varadkar said that he did not envisage any closure, downgrade or significant reduction in services at the hospital because it just would not work as Tullamore and Tallaght hospitals would not be in a position to deal with the extra patients from Portlaoise hospital.

"The Taoiseach is correct," replied Minister Harris. "If I believed that the draft plan and the consultation had been appropriate then we surely would not be in this place. I do not believe the consultation was adequate and I do not believe there was appropriate engagement.

"The reason I do not believe it is because the people of Portlaoise are telling me this very clearly. Deputy Stanley, Deputy Sean Fleming and the Minister, Deputy Flanagan, are also telling me this. The Laois Oireachtas Members, on a cross-party basis, have told me this very clearly," he said.

READ MORE - SEAN FLEMING ACCUSES MINISTER OF UNDERMINING HOSPITAL
Kildare County Council has warned people not to be using metal detectors on the Curragh.

The Heritage Department put up a post on April 15 on the County Kildare Heritage facebook page stating the council had received notification of metal detecting at the national landmark.

In response to a query from the Leader the local authority responded; The council over the years has become aware of the use of metal detectors in archaeological sites including graveyards and near the Military cemetery on the Curragh.

Metal detectors have been used to dig up artefacts. Members of the public have observed the use of metal detectors but have not reported the individuals involved. Unregulated and inappropriate use of metal detectors causes serious damage to Irelands archaeological heritage and is subject to severe penalties under the National Monuments Acts 1930-2004, and can incur a fine of up to 126,972 and/or up to 12 months imprisonment.

It pointed out it is illegal to be in possession of a detection device at monuments and sites protected under the National Monuments Acts.

Most graveyards and the Curragh are recorded monuments. It is also, illegal to promote the sale or use of detection devices for the purposes of searching for archaeological objects and it is illegal to dig or excavate for archaeological objects, added the council spokesperson.

SEE ALSO: Newbridge man leads international Rotary fight to eradicate Polio in India
A man accused of 29 charges of sexual assault against his daughter has this morning been found not guilty of all charges at Naas Circuit Court.

After almost three full days of evidence and submissions the jury of nine women and three men took two hours and eight minutes to arrive at a unanimous verdict of not guilty to all of the charges preferred against the man.

Sitting at Naas Circuit Court this morning, Friday, April 20, Judge Sean O Donobhain dismissed the jury and excused them from having to serve on a jury for five years.

He refused an application by counsel for the defendant for costs on the basis that the defendants income is high, that the case had been properly investigated and put before the jury and that he was not impressed with the conduct of the defendant while in the witness box during the trial.

The trial against the man, who cannot be identified to protect the identity of the complainant, heard evidence of charges which had alleged that over the course of a period of almost two years more than a decade ago he had sexually abused his daughter.

All but one of the 29 charges related to a period when the complainant was a young teenager at the time and it was claimed that they occurred in a house in county Kildare that the family had just bought and moved into.

The final charge had alleged that a sexual assault had occurred more recently, in 2013, when contact between the complainant and her father was re-established following an earlier period of estrangement, and after she moved to Dublin to continue her education.

The complainant had alleged that on numerous occasions she would wake to find her father with his hand on her genitals and inserting his fingers into her vagina or licking her genitals and her vagina.

Over the course of three days, evidence was heard from both the complainant, her mother, a brother of hers, a friend, a school teacher, the investigating detective Christina Brady and the defendant, the complainant's father.

The jury also heard significant evidence from a number of the witnesses of the turbulent nature of the relationships in the family, which was a considerable element in the narrative of both the prosecution and the defence.

Counsel for the prosecution, Paul Murray, SC

Counsel for the prosecution Paul Murray had told the jury that the complainant's allegations had been both detailed and consistent for the past 10 years and that she had maintained her stance notwithstanding suffering terribly by feeling ostracised and isolated by other members of her family.

On the other hand, counsel for the defence Conor Devally closely examined the allegations, both in their nature, their timing and even their narrative, and by placing them in the context of the complicated and often turbulent dynamics of her parent's relationship at various times, he sought to undermine the credibility of the complainants allegations.

The defendant did not react to the verdict immediately, but shortly afterwards put his head down on the barrier in front of the dock. Speaking to the Leinster Leader afterwards, the complainant, the mans daughter, said that she was devastated.

Read more: Naas court hears allegation daughter would wake to find father sexually assaulting her

Read more: Mother of alleged sexual assault victim uncomfortable at attention shown to daughter by defendant, Naas court hears

Read more: Naas Circuit Court sexual assault case jury to resume deliberation in morning
There will be 2,426 new social homes delivered in Kildare over the next three years, Kildare South TD, Martin Heydon said today.

Commenting on a new report from the Department of Housing on April 19, he said this is the fourth highest target in the country after Dublin City, Fingal, and South Dublin.

Deputy Heydon said Kildare will benefit from the significant progress made to date in advancing the construction pipeline, as well as social housing delivery targets for local authorities for 2018-2021. The significant expansion of the social housing build programme is evident in the Q4 2017 Construction Status report published this week by the Department of Housing.

Deputy Heydon said last year we saw 1,190 social housing solutions delivered here in Kildare. This includes 762 delivered through the Housing Assistance Payment and Rental Accommodation Schemes and 428 houses built, acquired and leased by the local authority.

The figures suggest that 64% of the 1,190 were supplied under the Housing Assistance Payment or Rental Accommodation Schemes, in which the State pays private landlord for the accommodation.

The other 36% were either built, bought or leased by Kildare County Council.

He said overall, the Government has, nationally, now committed 6 billion to support the accelerated delivery of 50,000 additional social housing homes by end 2021, through build (33,500), acquisition (6,500) and leasing (10,000) programmes.

Deputy Heydon said he would continue to push Kildare County Council, approved housing bodies, and local elected representatives to ensure the building of new social housing homes is a priority and these targets are reached.

He added that the number dont include new builds under Part V, voids, acquisitions or long term leases so the actual stock of new social housing coming on stream is even greater than this.

Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy said: Under the targets I have announced, a minimum of 40,700 homes will be delivered during the four year period to end-2021, including over 7,800 this year alone.

The Minister added: Taking account of the progress already made in 2016 and 2017, this will ensure that the 50,000 target will be met, signalling this Governments unwavering commitment to a significantly expanded social housing programme.
Criticism continues to mount about the 'failure' of Minister for Agriculture, Michael Creed, to listen when he was advised of a looming fodder crisis late last year.

At Monday's Manorhamilton MD meeting, councillors across the parties expressed their disappointment at the response of the Minister to the crisis.

Sinn Fein councillor Padraig Fallon put forward a motion calling on the Minister and the Department of Agriculture to immediately implement a Fodder Aid Scheme in the form of a voucher for meal, nuts or ration.

I don't honestly believe the (Fodder Transport Scheme) is working. What's required here is aid in the form of a voucher for meal nuts or ration, he said.

This situation didn't just happen out of the blue. Farmers were warning about this as far back as last November, he said, pointing out that a meeting organised by the Irish Natura and Hill Farmers Association (INHFA) had over 1,000 farmers at a meeting last year warning about fodder shortages.

We're fortunate here in Leitrim that co-ops and stores are working with farmers and extending credit to many. We need no more half measures. Minister Creed needs to act now.

His comments were supported by Cllr Justin Warnock who pointed out a voucher system would have saved a lot of the mess we are now seeing as well as minimising the human and psychological costs of the crisis.

He warned that, unless steps were taken this crisis would be a problem next year as well.

Cllr Mary Bohan also expressed her frustration at the situation.

Cllr Paddy O'Rourke was the first to raise this at county council level last year. It is only when this became a problem in the south of Ireland that the Minister actually woke up, she said.

Cllr Sean McDermott agreed something has to be done adding it seems this is something that will happen every year.

We have a weakness here with soil so this area needs more attention. A multi-department solution is what's required going forward.

Chairperson of Manorhamilton Municipal District, Cllr Frank Dolan, acknowledged that Minister Creed has dragged his feet on the fodder crisis.

We met with him in the Bush Hotel in February and he took out his phone and said 'look at the amount of fodder available online'.

He just refused to listen to us then, said the Manorhamilton Municipal Cathaoirleach.

He warned that moves to import fodder stocks will be of little benefit to farmers here in Leitrim observing what's being imported will be snapped up in the south of the country and we won't see any of it up here.

If more isn't done there will be a knock on effect w2hich will run into another crisis next year. The reality is that a voucher scheme (for meal) announced in January or February this year would have allowed farmers to stretch fodder stocks further and would have reduced much of the difficulties being experienced on farms now, he added.
Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Shane Ross, doesn't give a monkey's damn about rural Ireland and is failing in his remit as Minister according to Manorhamilton Municipal District (MD) councillors.

At Monday's MD meeting, councillors received an update on the Local Improvement Scheme (LIS) waiting list for Co Leitrim. LIS funds improvement works on non-public rural roads that access homes and farms. Local homeowners are expected to provide match funding for works and LIS is an essential funding stream for rural counties like Leitrim.

In 2011 Leitrim County Council was forced to close applications for LIS funding after funding ceased.

Following a motion by Cllr Mary Bohan at Monday's MD meeting, Council staff are169 applicants on the LIS waiting list, some of whom have been waiting in excess of 12 years for work to be completed.

In 2017 Leitrim County Council received 487,947 in LIS funding from Minister Michael Ring's Department of Rural and Community Development, allowing 20 schemes to proceed.

This year's funding allocation of 250,000 from Minister Ring, will allow a further 11 schemes to proceed. Leitrim County Council has made a submission to the Department of Rural and Community Development for additional funding but the 4.1m will be required to clear the backlog on the waiting list.

Cllr Mary Bohan asked that a LIS update be listed for discussion at the May meeting of the full council.

At present Leitrim County Council is contacting those on the LIS waiting list to determine those who wish to continue with their application and to also identify any applications which no longer qualify for funding. Of concern is also the fact that there may be more who want to submit an application for LIS funding, but are unable to do so because the scheme is closed to new applicants at the moment.

Cllr Mary Bohan said LIS funding is desperately needed adding that it is disgraceful the traditional Department funding this scheme, the Department of Transport, isn't stepping up with funding.

The Minister for Transport has abdicated his responsibility entirely. His Department is supposed to be funding LIS. Instead the money is coming out of community funding in Michael Ring's Department, she said.

Pointing out that people are paying property, road and other taxes Cllr Bohan added: to think that we cannot get funding for LIS's, to think that the Minister with responsibility for roads has refused to provide funding and even refused to provide match funding to money provided by Michael Ring's department, it is an absolute disgrace.

Cllr Bohan asked how Minister Ross can justify having another Department pay for works on roads, which his Department is responsible for.

She said it is clear that as far as rural Ireland is concerned, we don't exist for Minister Ross. We don't matter.

She said it is clear a special allocation will be needed to help address the significant backlog of LIS applications in Co Leitrim.

I have looked and no other county has as many on the waiting list for LIS schemes as we do.

Cllr Padraig Fallon backed her call stating the LIS application process in Leitrim needs to be re-opened so a 'true picture' can be established of LIS demand.

There could be even more applicants on the waiting list if the scheme was opened, he warned.

Cllr Bohan however, questioned re-opening the scheme to applications pointing out people could be waiting up to 20 years to see work done on their roads because of the low levels of funding available.

People are aware they will be waiting but they want to get on the list, replied Cllr Fallon.

Cllr Sean McDermott supported calls to re-open the list to applications noting If we don't have the list open (to new applications) we don't have a true reflection of the amount of people waiting for this funding.

However Cathaoirleach of Manorhamilton MD, Cllr Frank Dolan argued the Council should complete a review of the list to see how many were interested in proceeding with application already submitted before re-opening the scheme.

Cllr Justin Warnock said it is clear Minister Ross needs to start pulling his weight.

Minister Ross doesn't give a monkey's damn about rural Ireland, observed Cllr Bohan.

She urged the Council to follow up on the application for additional funding for LIS and renewed a call that the matter be brought up for discussion at the next full council meeting.
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A LIMERICK mother-of-two battling a terminal cancer diagnosis is suing the Health Service Executive (HSE) and a laboratory in the High Court, after a smear test carried out in 2011, which showed no abnormalities, was found to be incorrect following a review.

This is being heard in the High Court this Friday.

Last January, Vicky Phelan, from Annacotty, was given between six and 12 months to live, said her representative Jeremy Maher SC.

In July 2014, Ms Phelan was diagnosed with cervical cancer and then underwent radical chemoradiotherapy.

He said that had Ms Phelans cervical cancer been detected in 2011, the mother could have had a 90% chance to be cured.

She should have another 40 years to look forward to but she has a couple of months, he said.

In evidence, she said she was very angry that she only learned last year of a 2014 review relating to the 2011 smear test.

If I was told sooner, I would not be in the position of a terminal cancer diagnosis. I am very angry about it, she said.

Ms Phelan, of Carrigeren, Annacotty, and her husband Jim Phelan have sued the HSE and the Clinical Pathology Laboratories Inc, Austin, Texas, over the smear test that was taken as part of the national screening programme, Cervical Check.

The claims are denied.

The Irish Times reports that the smear test on May 24, 2011, detected no abnormality and a letter of June 2011 advised Ms Phelan of this fact, it is claimed.

Another smear test was taken on June 2014 which showed a high grade lesion and she was referred to a consultant.

The Times reports that it is claimed Ms Phelan was deprived of the opportunity of timely and effective investigation and management of her condition and of treatment at a time when her disease was allegedly amenable to curative treatment.
FORMER mayor Pat Kennedys bid to rejoin Fine Gael has been blocked by the partys Limerick City branch.

The Limerick Leader understands Mr Kennedy, a councillor between 1967 and 2014, expressed a wish to rejoin a party he has been in and out of during his long political career  which included a stint in Seanad Eireann.

However, various sources have confirmed that the former general election candidate would not be considered for re-admission at least locally.

The matter came up for discussion at the Fine Gael Limerick City branchs meeting last week in the Castletroy Park Hotel.

While no Fine Gael party member would comment publicly on the meeting, a number spoke on condition of anonymity. 

A well-placed party source said: There was not a wish within the party for it to happen. People had various different reasons why they felt it should not happen. There was a feeling it wasnt appropriate at this time.

Another opined, There is too much baggage there.

Contacted by the Limerick Leader, Mr Kennedy, who lives on South Circular Road, said he hadnt applied in 2018.

But, he added: I dont want to be very active, but Id be anxious to help Fine Gael in the next election.

I was approached [to rejoin] before, but that was a while back.

Mr Kennedy last held the Fine Gael whip on the old Limerick City Council back in 2013.

However, it was withdrawn after he voted against the partys candidate for that years mayoral election, Denis McCarthy in favour of the eventual victor, Independent candidate Kathleen Leddin, another former Fine Gael member.

In bad tempered exchanges following the controversial contest  the last on the old council  the partys bloc leader Diarmuid Scully withdrew the whip in public.

He had rejoined Fine Gael in 2009 as part of a deal which saw northside councillor Kevin Kiely gain that years mayoralty.

However, for the previous decade prior to that, the barrister-at-law had spent most of his time as an Independent councillor, after Fine Gael overlooked him for a general election nomination.

He told the Leader he remains supportive of Fine Gael, adding: I still subscribe to the Fine Gael lotto. I never terminated that.

 I still canvass for Fine Gael, and keep in touch with people. I remain interested.

Asked by the Leader if he would run again in next years local election though, he said: Oh God No. Id just like to help out the party if they need me.
LIMERICK City Fire and Rescue service is planning to carry out a targetted programme of fire safety inspections of high rise buildings before the end of the year.

The information came to light following a question by Solidarity councillor Paul Keller at this months metropolitan district meeting.

He asked if the service has the appropriate equipment so as to safely rescue people that may become trapped in a burning high-rise building like the 17-storey Limerick City Hotel and the two, 15-storey city centre apartments.

He was told Limerick Fire and Rescue Service has three high-reach appliances in its fleet.

Last month the Limerick Leader revealed, that fire safety concerns have been identified relating to at least one multi-storey building in Limerick, in the wake of last years fire at Grenfell Tower in London, which claimed more than 70 lives.

It was further revealed that Limerick Fire Service has had considerable difficulty in determining ownership of buildings or persons in control of buildings which are to be assessed as part of a national review ordered by the Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government, Eoghan Murphy.

The Limerick Leader has also learned that chief fire officer, Michael Ryan, has threatened to initiate enforcement proceedings against a number of property owners who have failed to carry out fire safety assessments - despite being asked to do so.
Apr 30, 2021, 1 AM

At a small first-day ceremony on the White House grounds, Barbara Bush joined Postmaster General Anthony Frank to unveil the Literacy postal card design and celebrate the new issue.

By Molly Goad

The May 7 issue of Linns Stamp News just landed on the presses and goes in the mail to subscribers Monday, April 23. And if you subscribe to Linns digital edition, youre at the head of the line with early access Saturday, April 23. Here are three stories you won't want to miss.

Barbara Bushs first-day ceremony appearance

In the wake of former first lady Barbara Bush's passing away on April 17, Joe Brockert, program manager at the United States Postal Service, recalls meeting Mrs. Bush in 1990. At that time, Mrs. Bush became a participant in the philatelic world as the U.S. Postal Service finalized its plans for a 15 postal card promoting literacy.

Stamps follow the long history of Siam and the Kingdom of Thailand



The country known today as the Kingdom of Thailand has been through many name changes, a fact that is reflected its stamps. Siams first stamps were issued Aug. 4, 1883, and bear the image of King Chulalongkorn (1853-1910). In this collecting basics article, Janet Klug breaks down a bevy of stamps from 1883 and forward, and describes how they have evolved.

Stamp identifier: Turks and Caicos Islands

Turks and Caicos Islands, a British overseas territory in the West Indies north of Haiti, has issued its own stamps since 1900. Learn the difference between stamps with the "Turks Islands" and "Caicos Islands" identifiers.

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Apr 20, 2018, 5 AM

Cacheted Mister Rogers covers with United States Postal Service branding that was sold at the first-day ceremony in March.

By Colin Sallee

Its time to catch up on the week that was in stamp-collecting insights and news.

Linns Stamp News is looking back at its five most-read stories of the week.

Click the links to read the stories.

5. Canada Post celebrates 65th anniversary of queens coronation April 20: The nondenominated permanent-rate stamp (currently 85) is being issued April 20 in booklets of 10.

4. Look for this firearms transfer tax stamp: In our experience, used examples are not frequently encountered; however, demand for them is also less than for mint.

3. New Royal Mail stamps dedicated to the reintroduction of six species: Stamps from Royal Mail depict once-extinct species in the United Kingdom that have been successfully reintroduced.

2. James Michener color-missing error discovered in intact pane of 20 stamps: The error stamp, found in an intact pane of 20, is missing the cyan, magenta and yellow, with only black and red printed successfully.

1. U.S. Postal Service quietly producing, selling cacheted first-day covers: The United States Postal Service has offered cacheted No. 10-size first-day covers for sale at two of its recent first-day ceremonies.

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Signs of summer: bees are buzzing on two different Canadian permanent stamps issued May 1 in booklets

Apr 20, 2018, 5 AM

Canada Post is issuing a Bees booklet of 10 stamps May 1. The booklet includes five se-tenant pairs of stamps showing the rusty-patched bumblebee and the metallic green bee, respectively.

By Denise McCarty

New booklet stamps from Canada Post depict the rusty-patched bumble bee and metallic green bee, two of the more than 850 species of bees native to Canada. The stamps are stamps being issued May 1 in booklets of 10, with the two design se-tenant (side-by-side).

The stamps are nondenominated with a P inside a maple leaf, indicating that they are permanent stamps paying the basic domestic rate (currently 85).

In announcing these stamps in its Details magazine for collectors, Canada Post said: When bees begin to appear, it is a sure sign that summer is on the way  and designer Andrew Perro and illustrator Dave Murray have come up with a honey of an issue to help celebrate.

Perro has designed several previous stamps for Canada Post, including the 2015 Dinos of Canada set (Scott 2823-2628) and the 2013 commemorative honoring 250 years of postal history and picturing Benjamin Franklin (2649), among others.

A Toronto-based illustrator, Murray is known for his geometric style, which has been described as futuristic cubism.

The first stamp in Canada Posts Bees pair shows the rusty-patched bumblebee (Bombus affinis). Native to North America, this bee is considered endangered in both Canada and the United States.

Wildlife Preservation Canada said: One of the most common species of bumblebee in southern Ontario as recently as the 1980s, this hard-working pollinator is now on the brink of extinction throughout its large range. Despite thorough surveys of historic sites across Ontario, the rusty-patched bumblebee has not been observed in Canada since 2009.

The last known sighting in Canada was at Pinery Provincial Park in Ontario, perhaps the scene that is shown in the background of the stamp design.

As its name suggests, the metallic green bee (Agapostemon virescens) has a shiny green head and thorax. It is a member of the Halictidae family, commonly referred to as sweat bees. These bees built their nest in the group.

In Canada, this metallic green bee is found in southern Ontario. It also is distributed throughout much of the United States.

Canadian Bank Note printed the Bees stamps by four-color lithography in a quantity of 140,000 booklets of 10, Canada Post product number 414084111.

The stamps are square, measuring 31 millimeters by 31mm.

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Canada Posts first-day cover, product number 414084131, bears a May 1 cancellation from Grand Bend, Ontario. The cachet pictures the small eastern resin bee (Anthidiellum notatum), so-named because it uses resin in building its nest.

The Bees booklet and Canada Post FDC are available; by mail order from Canada Post Customer Service, Box 90022, 2701 Riverside Drive, Ottawa, ON K1V 1J8 Canada.

Canadas stamps and stamp products also are available from many new-issue stamp dealers, and from Canada Posts agent in the United States: Interpost, Box 420, Hewlett, NY 11557.
Father Aldo Bonaiuto, one of the Vatican's team of anti-occult priests, conducted exorcism lessons in 2012 at the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical Atheneum in Rome, Italy.

This might make your head spin  officials of the Roman Catholic Church are offering a week-long course in exorcism, and dozens of Catholic priests have flocked to Rome to partake of the Holy See's demon-banishing tips and strategies.

Titled Exorcism and Prayer of Liberation, the course is now in its 13th year, and is presented at The Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum, a Catholic educational institution in Rome, in collaboration with the Group for Socio-religious Research and Information (GRIS), according to the course's website. An estimated 200 people  lay Catholics as well as priests  attended, Reuters reported.

From April 16 to 21, the would-be exorcists learn about issues they might encounter, including recognizing the devil, differentiating between possession and mental disorders, and legal protections for exorcists, according to a course outline. [Exorcism: Facts and Fiction About Demonic Possession]

Alongside the traditional exorcism techniques that you might already expect, such as sprinkling holy water or chanting Bible passages in Latin, this year's course offered a nod to the modern age by introducing a technical element for the exorcist's tool kit: a cellphone. Reuters noted that in one of the course's first sessions, Cardinal Ernest Simoni of Albania described assisting in exorcisms by reciting the Latin prayers over a cellphone.

"They call me and we speak, and that's how I do it," Simoni said.

Now available in English

This technical upgrade to demon banishment followed another recent concession to the 21st century, which took place last year. With the Vatican's permission, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) created the first-ever English translation of the Roman Catholic Church's Latin rituals for exorcism, making it easier for a bishop exorcist to find a priest who could assist him, the religious news service the Catholic Herald announced in October 2017.

"Given that there's less facility in Latin than there used to be, even among priests, it opens the door to more priests to do this," Father Andrew Menke, executive director of the USCCB's Secretariat of Divine Worship, told the Catholic Herald.

Other sessions in the course included: The Auxiliary Exorcist: Requirements and Tasks; Symbolism in Magical-Occultist and Satanic Rituals; and Discerning the Extraordinary Actions of the Devil; and the week winds down with a Ministry of Exorcism roundtable, according to the outline.

An estimated half a million people seek exorcisms each year in Italy alone, and the demand for exorcisms worldwide is growing, BBC News reported. However, mental disorders and physical conditions such as epilepsy are the more likely explanations for accounts of so-called demonic possession  medieval and modern  according to a study published in 2014 in the journal Early Science and Medicine.

Completing the weeklong exorcism course currently underway in Italy provides attendees with a certificate, but that doesn't mean they're qualified to perform exorcisms for the Catholic church  only priests who have received a license or special permission from their bishop are permitted to officially raise a cross against the powers of darkness, course organizer and GRIS leader Giuseppe Ferrari told Reuters.

And, Simoni added, exorcism should be attempted only if medical doctors are unable to find a psychological or physical explanation for the "possessed" person's distress.

Original article on Live Science.
An enormous wildfire in British Columbia in the summer of 2017 sent huge plumes of smoke into the sky.

Wildfires can fuel "dirty" thunderstorms that fill the stratosphere with as much smoke as a volcanic eruption.

That revelation comes from a study on the biggest fire-fueled thunderstorm event on record, which occurred on the night of Aug. 12, 2017, in British Columbia, Canada.

Last year was a record breaker for wildfires in that region. And on that August evening, the heat from fires burning in relatively remote forests in British Columbia combined with the right atmospheric conditions to generate a series of four thunderstorms in a 5-hour period. [Infographic: Earth's Atmosphere Top to Bottom]

These fire storms are called pyrocumulonimbus storms, or pyroCbs. Like regular thunderstorms, they produce lightning and are very tall. But pyroCbs are also filled with smoke.

"You end up with this very dirty thunderstorm," David Peterson, a meteorologist with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory who presented his findings last week at the annual meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna. "Essentially, this is a giant chimney taking smoke from the surface to high altitudes, at least to aircraft-cruising altitudes."

Smoke from the wildfires in August 2017 in northern Canada could be seen from space, by instruments aboard the Aqua satellite. (Image credit: NASA)

The enormous smoke plume from the pyroCbs in British Columbia drifted over Europe and then eventually encircled the entire Northern Hemisphere. Using satellite data, Peterson's team observed the signal from this smoke in the lower stratosphere  the second layer of Earth's atmosphere, above the troposphere  for several months later.

"This was the mother of all pyroCbs," Peterson said. "Normally, when you see something like this, you think volcanic eruptions  that's what normally puts a lot of material into the stratosphere  but it's all coming from these wildfire-driven thunderstorms."

For comparison, the explosive 2008 eruption of Mount Kasatochi, an island volcano in Alaska, sent about 0.7 to 0.9 teragrams (nearly 1 million tons) of aerosols  tiny, suspended particles  into the stratosphere, Peterson said. For months afterward, people around the Northern Hemisphere documented unusually colored sunsets, thanks to the sulfate aerosols and ash the volcano injected into the atmosphere.

Peterson's team estimated that the British Columbia pyroCb event sent about 0.1 to 0.3 teragrams (about 200,000 tons) of aerosols into the stratosphere  which is comparable to the amount seen with a moderate volcanic event, and more than the total stratospheric impact of the entire 2013 fire season in North America, he said.

It's well known that catastrophic volcanoes can influence the global climate. The huge 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, one of the largest in living memory, lowered temperatures around the world by an average of 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit (0.5 degrees Celsius).

While such major volcanic events are sporadic, Peterson said, pyroCb events occur every year. But scientists have not studied these storms enough to understand their potential impact on the climate.

Original article on Live Science.
The frigid Canadian arctic is a rough place to try and catch a spy.

For one, the region is smack dab on top of the world's magnetic North Pole, where the violently charged particles released by sunspots and solar flares are inevitably drawn. This solar interference makes it hard enough to separate important radio signals from background noise  and when you're trying to detect a stealth missile specifically designed to repel radio waves, your job gets even harder.

That's why Canadian scientists want to up their country's spy-spotting game in the arctic by replacing their traditional radar stations with powerful "quantum radars," powered by one of the enduring puzzles of quantum physics. [Supersonic! The 11 Fastest Military Planes]

The phenomenon known as "quantum entanglement," which involves creating pairs or groups of particles whose fates are forever tied, might hold to key to seeing through stealth aircraft's radio-repelling shields.

But a functional quantum radar has never been tested outside of the lab. This week, researchers at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada announced that they're taking a big step forward in doing just that.

The goal for our project is to create a robust source of entangled photons that can be generated at the press of a button, Jonathan Baugh, a faculty member at the University of Waterloo's Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC), said in a statement. This project will allow us to develop the technology to help move quantum radar from the lab to the field. It could change the way we think about national security.

But what do photons, or light particles, have to do with detecting stealth aircraft and missiles? It all hinges on the mysterious behavior of entangled particles, which have puzzled physicists since Einstein's time.

In quantum physics, "entangled" particles are two particles (like photons) that have a special connection. When a force or action changes one particle, the paired particle instantaneously changes too, even if the two particles are separated by huge distances  say, 100,000 light-years apart.

For such a change to occur, particles have to somehow correlate their states with each other faster than the speed of light, which really bothered Einstein. (He famously called the whole phenomenon "spooky action at a distance.") Still, more recent experiments have shown that spooky action at a distance really does seem to happen.

In a quantum radar, entangled photon pairs would be linked with each other on a scale of miles rather than light-years (at first, at least). First, clusters of individual photons must be split by a crystal, each severed photon becoming an entangled pair. One photon in a pair would be contained at the radar station, while the second would be transmitted into the sky. When that second photon strikes something in the sky  say, a stealth bomber  it would bounce off and be deflected, and its return time would reveal the bomber's position and speed.

Stealth planes try to hide from radio waves, so light-based methods would be much more effective against them. And any attempt to scramble or alter the photon that hits the bomber would instantly be reflected in the state of the stationary photon, because the two are entangled. The entanglement between the photon pair also allows the quantum radar to separate the signal of the entangled photon bouncing off a plane from the noise of other light particles cruising through the atmosphere, such as those from solar flares.

In this way, a quantum radar could essentially see past stealth objects designed to repel traditional radio-based radar systems.

Quantum radar technology still remains largely theoretical, despite a state-run Chinese newspaper's claim that the country had already achieved functioning quantum radar in 2016 (some experts are skeptical of this claim). But researchers around the world, including teams at Lockheed Martin and The University of Waterloo, continue pressing forward into the invisible.

Originally published on Live Science.
Algae can be glamorous, too: In the crisp, clear waters off the Atlantic coast in the United Kingdom, an unassuming, bushy seaweed glows in deep blues and greens. It turns out that this species is packed with opals  but, not the gemstone.

Rainbow wrack (Cystoseira tamariscifolia) is a type of brown alga found in the Mediterranean Sea and off the Atlantic coast of Europe. In the water, these algae glow. And although there are many glimmering organisms that live in the water  for example, bioluminescent jellyfish and lantern fish  most produce their own light.

Rainbow wrack, on the other hand, doesn't. Instead, just like the precious gemstone, it uses a crystal structure to reflect sunlight, according to a new study published April 11 in the journal Science Advances.

To study the shimmering seaweed, a group of researchers gathered the plant from a typical tourist-inhabited beach in southwest England during low tide. Using a variety of microscopy techniques, they discovered that the alga's cells contained baggies of "opals." [Gallery: Eye-Catching Bioluminescent Wonders]

Again, not the gemstone. Physicists use the term "opal" to describe any material with a very specific, tightly packed lattice structure, said senior study author Ruth Oulton, a physicist at the University of Bristol. Whereas gemstone opals are made from spheres of silicon dioxide, this algal opal is made from oil droplets called lipids. But all "opals" reflect light in very similar ways. (Opals are also found in insects: shiny beetles and some butterflies have hard opal structures on their exteriors.)

It's very rare for plants to have opal-like structures, but if they do, they're usually found in a hard exterior, like cellulose in cell walls, Oulton told Live Science. In the case of rainbow wrack, "it's the first time that an opal's been found that's not made of hard material inside a living thing."

What's more, the researchers found that rainbow wrack reacted to the light, changing its structure to dim and brighten itself, depending on the conditions. When there was ample light, the alga took apart its tightly packed opal structure to dim its glow. But when surrounded by near darkness, within a few hours it re-ordered all of the spheres back together into a lattice. Soon, it was glowing again.

The researchers don't know exactly why rainbow wrack adopted this mechanism. But because this species lives in an area where changes in the tides sometimes leave it exposed on the beach and other times buried under 9 feet (3 meters) of water, they think it could have evolved to regulate the amount of light that reaches its chloroplasts  organelles that direct photosynthesis in cells. It's more than likely not a coincidence that the baggies of opals are surrounded by chloroplasts, Oulton said.

"What we know is seaweed itself can change [its] opal  when it gets lighter, the opal structure disappears," Oulton said. "When [a] beetle dies, the opal is still there, but if the seaweed were to die, all of it would disappear," she added.

Scientists can't yet replicate the process of turning the opals on and off in the lab, but they'd like to be able to. After talking to some chemists, the team figured out that this new finding could open up new possibilities, such as biodegradable displays. For example, if they can mimic rainbow wrack's process of packing and unpacking opal structures based on light, researchers may be able to create biodegradable packaging and labels from something as commonplace as coconut oil.

This could take the form of labels on food packaging that turn a different color, based on expiration dates; or plastic in packaging that totally disintegrates after a while, the researchers said.

In the meantime, rainbow wrack will continue to sway in high tides, looking glamorous as always.

Originally published on Live Science.
Readers of a certain age will know the reference: This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs.

The simple PSA, put out by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America in 1987, accompanied these words with an image of an egg  first intact, then sizzling on a frying pan. Gripping stuff  but what do drugs do to your brain, really?

The answer to that question depends on the drug, of course, but researchers have found that one common thread is that drugs of abuse alter the brain's so-called mesolimbic pathway, known in plain English as the reward pathway. Substances act on this pathway in different ways, said Stella Vlachou, an assistant professor of psychology at Dublin City University in Ireland, but "one way or another, different drugs of abuse would definitely affect the brain's rewards system." [10 Things You Didn't Know About the Brain]

Reward circuits

This oh-so-crucial system consists of several brain structures that communicate closely with one another via nerve impulses. At one end, deep in the midbrain, is the ventral tegmental area. At the other are the nucleus accumbens and the olfactory tubercle, both found in a region called the ventral striatum in the forebrain. The main neurotransmitter responsible for firing off signals in this pathway is dopamine, which plays an excitatory role, stimulating neurons to fire. Dopamine is a major culprit in addiction, Vlachou told Live Science, though it plays a role in normal, healthy behaviors, too.

"It is released at higher levels when we are motivated to work on something that we like, when we have a strong desire about something, when we experience something we would call reward or pleasure," she said.

Whether directly or indirectly, habit-forming substances act upon this reward system. Psychostimulants such as cocaine and amphetamines affect levels of dopamine directly, Vlachou said. In contrast, other drugs  such as opioids, nicotine and even THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana  act on neurotransmitters or their receptors that indirectly affect the amount of dopamine the brain releases or detects. Some drugs, Vlachou said, have even more complex actions, perhaps interacting with the molecules that shuffle neurotransmitters across the synapses, or gaps between neurons.

Drug by drug

There are a lot of drugs out there, especially since the advent of synthetic compounds that can mimic naturally derived substances or combine the effects of the old standards. The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) curates a long list of drugs and their effects, but here are some highlights:

Marijuana: The psychoactive ingredient in cannabis is called delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, better known as THC. As the name suggests, THC is a cannabinoid, and it just so happens that the body has its own cannabinoid system, known as the endocannabinoid system. Endocannabinoid receptors are found in both the brain and the immune system. In the brain, they're linked to a huge range of functions, including memory, appetite, pain sensation and sleep. They're even partially responsible for the "runner's high" that comes from intense exercise  at least in mice. As one 2013 paper in the journal Cerebrum put it, "Given the enormous complexity of the brain, the endocannabinoid system could affect behavior in an almost limitless number of ways: Simple generalizations of what will happen when CB1 receptors are globally turned on or off are not feasible." (CB1 receptors are the most prominent cannabinoid receptors in the brain.)

Thanks to the widespread nature of the endocannabinoid system, it's no surprise that THC's effects on the brain are also widespread. By interacting with cannabinoid receptors in the hippocampus and the orbitofrontal cortex  two areas of the brain associated with attention and memory  THC can create short-term memory loss and impair thinking. There are also cannabinoid receptors in the cerebellum  the structure in the back of the brain that regulates movement  which explains why someone who's high on pot may not move quickly. And yes, the cascade of THC's effects also stimulates dopamine release, making the whole experience (usually) quite pleasant. [7 Ways Marijuana May Affect the Brain]

Nicotine: Present in tobacco products and e-cigarettes, nicotine is the stuff that makes smoking so addictive. By coincidence, nicotine is very similar in structure to a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine, Vlachou said. Once in the brain, nicotine binds to acetylcholine receptors. This abundance of compounds binding to the receptors prompts the brain to release less acetylcholine, meaning the person needs nicotine to feel normal, according to the NIDA.

But nicotine affects other neurotransmitters, too. Some of the acetylcholine receptors it binds to are on cells that are responsible for releasing dopamine, so nicotine indirectly increases dopamine, tickling those mesolimbic reward pathways. It may also affect dopamine through its interactions with acetylcholine receptors that control an inhibitory neurotransmitter called gamma-aminobutyric acid and an excitatory neurotransmitter called glutamate, which, in turn, can also influence how much dopamine is released.

Opioids: Opioids include naturally derived substances, like heroin, as well as synthetic ones, like fentanyl. They're powerful short-term painkillers because they act on opioid receptors in the brain and spinal cord, which  sensing a theme?  themselves evolved to respond to compounds produced naturally inside the body, including endorphins.

When stimulated by an opioid, whether homemade or not, these receptors inhibit the nerves from sending pain signals. But opioid receptors are also found across the brain, including in the rewards pathway, where they may be involved in pleasurable sensations associated with food and sex, according to a 2009 review. Repeatedly dosing oneself with substances like heroin or prescription opioids, though, prompts the brain to stop producing as many of its own opioids. This can lead to tolerance (the need to take more opioids to get high) and dependence (horrible withdrawal symptoms that drive people to take the drug simply to feel well), according to a 2002 review in the journal Addiction Science and Clinical Practice.

What makes opioids truly deadly, though, are their actions in the brain stem, which controls breathing and other basic, automatic functions. When a person takes a high level of opioids, the molecules inhibit the neurons in the brain stem that control breathing. The result is overdose, often fatal.

Cocaine: Cocaine affects dopamine levels in the brain directly, creating an extremely pleasurable rush as the neurotransmitter floods the mesolimbic reward system. Cocaine molecules bind to a protein in the brain called a dopamine transporter, which acts like a synaptic garbageman, clearing dopamine from the gaps between neurons so that it doesn't continually stimulate the nerve cells to fire. With cocaine as a hitchhiker, the dopamine transporter can't do its job. So dopamine builds up in the synapse, and nerve cells keep firing. It's euphoric in the short term but may rob the brain of gray matter in the long term, according to 2012 research.

Psilocybin: The active ingredient in "magic mushrooms" can create quite a trippy experience, with effects ranging from the sense that time is slowing down to the feeling of being one with the universe. Research suggests that psilocybin works mostly by mimicking the neurotransmitter serotonin. Serotonin plays an important role in how the brain processes emotions, and the frontal cortex  the seat of personality and complex thought  is abundant with serotonin receptors. [Trippy Tales: The History of 8 Hallucinogens]

That means psilocybin has strong effects on complex processes  it might even alter personality permanently. The hallucinatory effect that causes people to see auras or colorful trails behind moving objects seems to be linked to the way psilocybin alters the functional connections, or communication pathways, between brain regions, according to 2014 research. The drug seems to promote the appearance of strong, long-range connections that could explain why people using it feel more connected and creative.

Originally published on Live Science.
It's both solid and liquid, it's 60 times denser than ordinary water ice, and it forms at temperatures almost as hot as the sun's surface.

It's superionic ice  and for the first time, scientists have made it in the lab.

This high-pressure form of water ice has long been thought to exist in the interiors of Uranus and Neptune. But until now, its existence was only theoretical.

"Our work provides experimental evidence for superionic ice and shows that these predictions were not due to artifacts in the simulations, but actually captured the extraordinary behavior of water at those conditions," Marius Millot, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, said in a statement from the laboratory. Millot was the leader author of a new study describing the work.

Scientists first predicted the existence of a weird water phase that makes the substance both solid and liquid at the same time 30 years ago. It's also way denser than ordinary water ice because it forms only under extreme heat and pressure, such as those found inside giant planets. During the superionic phase, the hydrogen and oxygen within water molecules behave bizarrely; hydrogen ions move like a liquid, inside of a solid crystal lattice of oxygen. [The Surprisingly Strange Physics of Water]

Making the ice was complicated. First, the team compressed water into an ultrastrong cubic crystalline ice, in a different crystal form than what you see in ordinary ice cubes. To do that, the researchers used diamond anvil cells to apply 360,000 pounds per square inch (2.5 gigapascals (GPa) of pressure; that's about 25,000 times the atmospheric pressure on Earth). Next, the researchers heated and compressed the cells even further, using laser-driven shocks. Each crystal ice structure received up to six laser beams of more than 100 times that high pressure.

"Because we pre-compressed the water, there is less shock-heating than if we shock-compressed ambient liquid water," Millot said. The new method lets researchers "access much colder states at high pressure than in previous shock-compression studies."

Once the superionic ice was ready, the team moved quickly to analyze its optical and thermodynamic properties. They had only 10 to 20 nanoseconds to perform the work, before pressure waves released the compression, and the water dissolved. And the results were bizarre. They found that the ice melts at an extraordinary 8,540 degrees Fahrenheit (4,725 degrees Celsius ) at 29 million pounds per square inch (200 GPa) of pressure. That pressure is about 2 million times the atmospheric pressure on Earth.

"It's  mind-boggling that frozen water ice is present at thousands of degrees inside these planets, but that's what the experiments show," Raymond Jeanloz, a co-author of the study and planetary physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, said in the same statement.

The new findings could provide a peek inside the interiors of planets such as Uranus and Neptune. Planetary scientists suggest these worlds' innards are composed of up to 65 percent water by mass, plus some ammonia and methane.

Visualizations from computer simulations showing hydrogen atoms flow like a liquid within the solid lattice of oxygen in superionic ice. (Image credit: S. Hamel/M. Millot/J.Wickboldt/LLNL/NIF)

Previous work suggested these planets would have "fully fluid" heat-transferring interiors, but the addition of superionic ice changes the picture. The new research instead proposes "a relatively thin layer of fluid and a large 'mantle' of superionic ice," the researchers said in the statement.

That picture of the mini-giant planets' interiors would confirm a computer simulation performed a decade ago that tried to explain the weird magnetic fields at Uranus and Neptune. Uranus' magnetic field is tilted 59 degrees away from the planet's axis. Neptune's magnetic poles have a roughly 47-degree tilt. This is extreme compared with Earth, which has only an 11-degree tilt. Their magnetic fields also may behave differently; for example, Uranus' field may turn on and off like a strobe.

More detailed study of these planets will have to wait until a spacecraft is available. Fortunately, NASA is proposing a Uranus and/or Neptune spacecraft that would zoom out to these planets sometime in the next few decades. Meanwhile, the experimenters plan to push their compression further to simulate conditions inside of even larger giant planets, such as Jupiter or Saturn.

A study based on the research was published in February in the journal Nature Physics.

Original article on Live Science.
Tens of millions of Americans are expected to clock out and spark up for the global cannabis holiday today known as 4/20. That includes about 15,000 in Golden Gate Park's Robin Williams Meadow, the site of so-called Hippie Hill and the second annual licensed 4/20 gathering.

The term "420" has evolved from a code for "time to toke up" among Northern California high school students in the late 1970s, to a marijuana subcultural meme, to a global rallying cry for cannabis-user liberation.

We talked to 10 noted growers, activists, retailers, and experts about 420's meaning to them on the eve of the first 4/20 with commercial legalization in California.

1) Has 420 lost its meaning now that cannabis is legal?

"NO. After all, it's still illegal to smoke pot in [Golden Gate] Park."  Dale Gieringer, director, California NORML.

"No! It is only further legitimized. My wife sent me an email blast earlier today from a mainstream online clothing retailer who is doing 20% off their entire site on 4/20. I think it's great that we dedicate at least one day a year to globally celebrate this amazing plant. We cannabis users deserve a national holiday and now we have it!"  Aaron Justis, President, Buds & Roses.

"Not at all. ... We just need more public venues to party in style. That will require a change of the regulations, but we will get there."  Mikki Norris, East Bay activist.

"For the longest time, nobody knew what the mysterious 420 stood for anyway ... until High Times revealed its secret. Then, after Senate Bill 420 was enacted, the number became enshrined in the broader vernacular. So I don't think it's lost its significance at all."  Chris Conrad, East Bay activist.

"Absolutely not! It will only get more popular - I expect Hallmark will have 420 greeting cards soon."  Nikki Lastreto, Swami Select Farms.

"Hell no, it's just becoming the St. Patrick's Day of weed, but greener and safer."  Jane West, CEO of the Jane West cannabis lifestyle brand.

"Absolutely not. Adult sales will offer an entrance to the Willy Wonka Factory (cannabis retailers) for an entirely new segment, that were not medical patients or refused to identify as."  Keith Stephenson, Purple Heart Patient Center.

"In fact, you can think about 4/20 like the Super Bowl (or Mardi Gras) of cannabis."  Jamie Warm, CEO, Henry's Original.

2) Is the significance of the "holiday" enhanced or diminished by the fact that the code word for something that was once taboo is no longer taboo and how basically any secrecy has long since passed in the era where huge crowds show up to Hippie Hill?

"Cannabis is only legal in eight states so far, with limited medical exemptions in another 21, so 420 may have lost its significance as far as being a 'secret' code but, to the extent that cannabis consumers federally and in most states still need a secret code to illegally share this pastime, the taboo is real."  Conrad

"It's true that the subversive aspect of the 420 code is long gone. It's no longer being used to quietly signal 'it's time to sneak away to smoke pot' anymore, unless maybe you are in the midwest in a room full of senior citizens. Instead, it has morphed into a day of celebration, where we get together to proudly celebrate the fact that prohibition is finally ending. ... 420 forever!"  Debbie Goldsberry, operator, Magnolia Wellness

"It's enhanced as more people are looking forward to this epic day. There's still sworn secrecy, as casual consumers do not always want everyone to know their personal business."  Stephenson

"Is cannabis 'no longer taboo'? Depends on who you're talking too, even though we have made huge steps forward, it amazes me that some people still live in the dark ages."  Mario Sherbinski, founder of Sherbinskis cannabis

"With legalization and lower dosed products, I think 4/20 has moved away from being a holiday to being more of a lifestyle or integration into every day life. I think every day is now 4/20."  Clement Kwan, co-founder of Beboe

"The vast majority of the world still cannot consume this plant and thousands are still locked up because of it. The hippie's can't stop yet, as Jack Herer once told me, and many others, 'We cannot stop until ALL POT PRISONERS ARE SET FREE!!'"  Justis

"It remains taboo for millions of workers and people on government jobs."  Gieringer

"Legalization brings new consumers, so I would say enhanced. Our industry is growing so rapidly. More people learn about 420 every day, and it means something different to each person, depending on their age, where they grew up, and how important cannabis is to them."  'Hitman Dougie' Dracup, Hitman Glass

"Let us not forget that cannabis is still federally illegal, mothers cannot safely give their kids CBD oil and many counties have placed bans on cannabis cultivation and sales. The fight has only just begun."  Madrone Stewart, author of Feminist Weed Farmer: Growing Mindful Medicine in Your Own Back Yard

"The stigma is not gone yet, but we are working on it though education. We live in a bubble in California, especially up here in Mendocino, but if this were Louisiana ..."  Lastreto.

"I wouldn't say that it's enhanced or diminished. I think we went beyond that long before cannabis was legal this year."  Daniel Stein, EVB, Oakland

"It may have lost its secrecy but there's a lot to celebrate with the end of prohibition."  West

3) Is 420 still used as a code word at all?

"Absolutely."  Gieringer

"Not really. I remember when my kids first 'discovered' 420 in middle school (probably from a Seth Rogen movie). They thought they were on to something that their parents didn't know about. Little did they know..."  Stein

"It's morphed from code word to symbol. 420 means freedom. You say it and cheer."  Goldsberry

"Just to refer to 'weed stuff,' as far as I can tell."  West

"Amongst our circles, we don't hear people using that as a code word at all anymore. I think with the many lower dosage products, it's no longer an event or ritual to consume as its incorporated so seamlessly into every day life."  Kwan

"I don't think it's used as a code word as much as an excuse to smoke herb, because it's 420, haha!"  Sherbinski

"YES, it's still code for 'want to get high?'. Being legal just means more people will use it and know what it means!"  Lastreto

"Yes. People in Humboldt use 420 to advertise properties that are set up for cannabis cultivation."  Stewart

"Yes. We always notice when it's 4:20 and start thinking it's time to light one up. When an ad or someone says something is '420-friendly,' it means that people allow or are open to cannabis use."  Norris

"I don't personally use it, but people use it regularly."  Dracup

4) How will you observe 4/20?

"It's my birthday. I celebrate by taking a vacation from all MJ business."  Gieringer

"I'll probably stay home on my boat and relax. I don't like crowds."  Stewart

"I will be attending a 40 0z. Van party in LA."  Sherbinski

"We'll treat it like your average Friday. We as a brand have found that Mother's Day and the week leading up to it has really been our "4/20".  Kwan

"Smoking out at Earth Day with my lovely wife, Mikki Norris."  Conrad

"We are throwing a big party to celebrate 4/20 at Magnolia Wellness, with a marijuana farmers market, music, and vape samples in our consumption lounge. We are also auditioning for Shark Tank that morning. That is going to be so fun!"  Goldsberry

5) How should 4/20 (4:20) be observed?

"The best way to observe 4/20 is to be with lots of other cannabis consumers, sharing a joint or sacrament, listening to music, dancing, having great conversations, or enjoying some food  all the things cannabis enhances for us. It's up to you about the daily observance of 4:20. Sometimes, when you still have a lot of work to do, it may be better to light up at 6:20 or 8:40 (two 420s). But, if you are done with your responsibilities, then observing 4:20 by smoking cannabis and taking a nice walk to enjoy nature is a wonderful thing to do."  Norris

"Daily!"  Stewart Stinson, general manager of TheWEED.

"Of course! We also like to honor 2:15 (in honor of Proposition 215)  and you could consider Proposition 64 to be 4 minutes after every hour ... in other words, it is always time for 4:20!  Lastreto

"It should be celebrated in every time zone, so you can smoke cannabis with people all around the world. It's 4:20 somewhere, at least 48 times a day."  Goldsberry

"To be proper, in the wee hours of the morning."  Gieringer

"4:20 kicks off the end of my work day. I like to call it 'flower hour,' and I use cannabis to unwind and clear my head of business and busy-ness. This isn't meant to be 'cute.' For real: happy hour is a culturally accepted daily routine where people consume intoxicants in bars and restaurants. How is sparking up at 4:20 at the end of a long workday any different?"  West

"Responsibly, in moderation and within the confines of an approved space."  Stephenson

"420 is one of those magical things that can take the shape of a time, date, dollar amount, address, etc. Every time I see it pop up, it makes me stop and smile. Maybe that is how it should be observed."  Stein

"I like to observe 4:20 when I can. The magic of 4:20 is to light up at the same time you know that thousands of other people are doing exactly the same thing. It creates a virtual community  we don't have to see or hear or even know each other but we know that we all share this moment with cannabis and honor it with high honor. That feels pretty good."  Conrad

"For all that care to unite and light, 420 is still and always will be our time!  Sherbinski
HOUSTON  As domestic gasoline prices surged to their highest level in three years, President Donald Trump railed against the OPEC oil cartel on Friday, declaring that the group was unjustifiably manipulating supplies for selfish gain.

He wrote on Twitter: Looks like OPEC is at it again. With record amounts of Oil all over the place, including the fully loaded ships at sea, Oil prices are artificially Very High! No good and will not be accepted!

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries has been a target of derision by U.S. leaders since the Arab oil embargo of 1973 caused long lines at the pump and badly damaged the economy. But soaring production in the United States, Canada and a few other countries has reduced OPECs influence.

The renewed attention on OPEC comes as Saudi Arabia, the worlds largest oil producer, is cutting back exports to increase prices and add appeal to its proposed initial public offering of Saudi Aramco, the national oil company. At the same time, Saudi Arabia and others in the region have made an alliance of convenience with Russia, a non-OPEC member heavily dependent on oil revenues to finance its government. Together they have restrained production since 2016, reducing global stockpiles.

Prices are high, said Rob West, an analyst at Redburn, a London research firm. Noting that Trump may have a point, he added, I do see some artificiality in the prices we see today.

OPEC and non-OPEC producers gathered Friday in the Saudi city of Jiddah in an effort to continue the policy even as the price of Brent crude, the global benchmark, has climbed above $70, more than double the low point reached in early 2016.

The price of crude is the major reason American drivers are paying more at the pump as the summer driving season approaches. The average price for a gallon of regular gasoline on Friday was $2.75 a gallon, according to AAA, up 19 cents over the last month and 33 cents from a year ago. It is the highest level since the summer of 2015.

The increase has been particularly noticeable over the last week, with prices in some states rising more than a penny a gallon every day.

Americans consume roughly 400 million gallons of gasoline a day, so the 33-cent increase over the last month means roughly $132 million less every day in consumer pockets. Working-class Americans, who usually drive older, less fuel-efficient cars and spend a higher percentage of their income on fuel, are disproportionately affected.

This hurts the pocketbooks of typical Trump voters in swing states who live paycheck to paycheck, said Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis at the Oil Price Information Service. He predicted gas prices would continue to increase modestly, probably rising above $2.80 a gallon in the coming weeks.

Trumps comments may have been informed by his new top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, who has long viewed low gasoline prices as a beneficial stimulus. In a 2014 commentary for CNBC.com, he argued that lower oil prices would produce savings for households and businesses, freeing up money for consumers to spend. All these factors will increase U.S. economic growth, not reduce it, he wrote.

Deutsche Bank analysts warned this week that the rise in gas prices was beginning to cut into the disposable-income gains from the tax cuts Trump signed into law late last year.

OPEC makes an easy scapegoat for American politicians, even as the administration has worked hard to draw closer to Saudi Arabia in attempts to counter Iran and forge a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.

But while OPECs actions have helped push oil prices higher, a litany of other factors have also played a role, including growing demand for gasoline and diesel in both developed and developing countries.

Even as U.S. oil production continues to grow, worldwide inventories are declining. The International Energy Agency reported that global oil supply eased by 120,000 barrels a day in March.

Much of the recent price increase is a result of growing geopolitical tensions  some related to Trumps policies  that have bolstered investor expectations that oil prices could rise even higher.

Oil production is plummeting in Venezuela, the country with the largest reserves, and the expectation of stepped-up U.S. sanctions in the coming months could reduce its exports further. The threat that the United States could pull out of the nuclear deal with Iran has put the size of future Iranian exports in doubt.

Worsening tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran have added to traders concerns. And the illness of a military power broker in Libya threatens more political turbulence and a reversal in the yearlong increase in Libyan exports.

A doubling of U.S. oil production in recent years, producing growing exports and a decline in imports, has helped stabilize the oil market and kept big price rises in check. But U.S. output represents only a bit more than 10 percent of the 98 million barrels a day produced worldwide, and there are limits to its growth.

A shortage of oil and natural-gas pipelines in Texas could slow output over the next two years. In addition, U.S. refineries, generally designed for heavier crudes, are reaching a saturation point for lighter shale oil produced around Texas and North Dakota.

Still, there is no doubt that the orchestrated output curbs led by major producers have had an effect. It is not clear whether the agreement will be extended beyond the end of the year, but the Saudis appear to favor doing so.

In a statement Friday, OPEC praised the high conformity level with the cuts but implied that continued curbs were needed, saying that commercial stocks remain above levels seen before the market downturn.
The China Mission: George C. Marshall's Unfinished War, 1945-1947

By Daniel Kurtz-Phelan

Norton. 476 pp. $28.95

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The telling of George C. Marshall's failed mission from 1945 to 1947 to end China's civil war has always been a hostage to history. As China descended into communist rule in the 1950s, it was used by some Americans such as Republican Sen. Joe McCarthy, and even an ambitious Democratic congressman from Massachusetts named John F. Kennedy, as an example of America's "moral retreat" from its responsibilities to save China. Marshall's loss of China, McCarthy thundered in a speech in 1951, "must be the product of a great conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man."

Undergirding these charges was the belief that no problem was beyond the capacity of America, which stood astride the world following World War II, to solve. Marshall's failure to unite China's Nationalist and Communist parties, which had been at war since 1927, into one government and one army must have been part of a communist plot, the charges went, because if it had wanted to, America could have accomplished anything.

On the other side of the ledger were those Americans, such as the historian Barbara Tuchman, who argued that Marshall and America failed to recognize that Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists were a spent force and that the ineluctable logic of history was going to propel Mao Zedong's Communists to victory. The United States suffered a "lost chance" in China, their argument went, by not tempting Mao, like it had the independent-minded Yugoslav revolutionary Josip Broz Tito, to distance himself from Moscow.

Again, this view was deeply paternalistic because at root it denied the Chinese responsibility for their affairs. Ignored were Mao's decisions to side with the U.S.S.R. and gin up hatred of America. Tuchman's lost chance in China held that China was America's to lose.

These days, however, instead of standing astride the globe, Americans are far more conscious of the limits of their power to build nations, win wars and even manage their own affairs. Against this historical backdrop, diplomat and journalist Daniel Kurtz-Phelan has written an engaging book, "The China Mission: George C. Marshall's Unfinished War, 1945-1947," that stresses the unavoidability at times of "a kind of failure ultimately accepted as the best of terrible options."

With an eye perhaps on the tragedy in Syria, or the emerging nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula, or relations with autocrats from Moscow to Beijing, Kurtz-Phelan has written a story "not of possibility and ambition, but of limit and restraint." This is history as allegory. Foreign policy "is made by analogy," he writes. "The stories we tell matter. How we tell them matters."

The story Kurtz-Phelan tells is a gripping one. On Nov. 27, 1945, the day after he retired following more than four decades in the U.S. Army, George C. Marshall was directed by President Harry Truman to go to China to stop its Communists and Nationalists from resuming their civil war. The idea was to force the warring parties into a coalition government and to absorb Mao's army into Chiang's, with the dangling carrot of billions of dollars of American military and financial aid to smooth the way.

Kurtz-Phelan paints a textured portrait of Marshall, whom Truman called "the greatest military man this country ever produced - or any other country, for that matter." Indeed, if anyone could fix the mess in China, it was Marshall, who was widely credited for masterminding the Allied victory in World War II. Kurtz-Phelan describes the wave of initial optimism when Marshall, after just a few weeks in China, seemingly persuaded Chiang and Mao to agree to a cease-fire and to the terms of a coalition government. And then Kurtz-Phelan painstakingly charts China's descent into civil war as both sides used the negotiations not to lay the foundations for peace but to set the parameters for conflict.

Along the way, Kurtz-Phelan does a splendid job of delineating Marshall's evolving relationships with Chiang and the Communists' main negotiator, Zhou Enlai, who would figure mightily later on when the United States and China resumed their ties in the 1970s. At one point, Kurtz-Phelan writes that Marshall returned to Zhou a notebook, apparently untouched. That was lucky for the Communists, as it contained the names of Communist spies at the heart of the U.S. diplomatic mission and the Nationalist regime. More than most books on American statecraft, Kurtz-Phelan's also gives the reader a deep appreciation of how the diplomatic sausage is made, describing Marshall's trips up to Chiang's summer mountain redoubt in a sedan chair, endless games of bridge and checkers with Madame Chiang Kai-shek, and the useful role played by Marshall's wife, Katherine, in the cultivation of warmer ties with Chiang.

But key to Kurtz-Phelan's book is the thesis that Marshall was right not to involve America further in China's plight. As negotiations collapsed and the civil war raged, Kurtz-Phelan argues, Marshall was correct to wash his hands of China and leave Chiang to his fate. The alternative, Marshall told Congress, would be for America to "take over the Chinese government, practically, and administer its economic, military, and government affairs." Such a move, Marshall feared, could have led the United States into war with the Soviet Union. Walking away from China, Kurtz-Phelan argues, was, indeed, "the best of terrible options."

Kurtz-Phelan's book is the beneficiary of new research on the civil war and the release of Chiang's diaries by the Hoover Institution. The picture we get of Chiang is much better than the usual cartoonish baddie that most American histories of the era present. Still, the Communist side of the story is limited by the continued unwillingness of the government of Beijing to open the party's archives.

Kurtz-Phelan's work also constitutes an enormous contribution to our understanding of Marshall. Most biographers have treated the failure of his mission to China as a blip in a career of untarnished success. But Kurtz-Phelan argues convincingly that Marshall's defeat in China had a deep effect on his later work in Europe with the Marshall Plan and in fashioning a strategy to confront communism. After China, never again would the general advocate a negotiated power-sharing agreement with a communist regime. With diplomat George Kennan, he would become an architect of a containment strategy that involved massive support for anti-communist governments and that endured for more than 30 years.

Another lesson of Marshall's mission that Kurtz-Phelan clearly believes remains relevant is that American will alone is not sufficient to save the world. A capable partner is a necessary part of any solution. In China, Marshall could not find a partner able to rise to the demands of history, and so when he left to become secretary of state in January 1947, he criticized both Communist and Nationalist alike. Marshall failed in China, Kurtz-Phelan argues, first and foremost because the Chinese failed themselves. To Kurtz-Phelan, who worked in the State Department during America's troubled occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, a lesson lies therein. As he observes at the end of his book, even "in its moment of greatest leadership, America did not have to solve every problem to show that it was strong."

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Pomfret, a former Washington Post bureau chief in Beijing, is the author of "The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present."
My American Dream: A Life of Love, Family, and Food

By Lidia Matticchio Bastianich

Knopf. 339 pp. $28.95

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The title of the first chapter of Lidia Bastianich's new memoir provides the first clue that her memories of childhood are going to include more than idyllic days of climbing fig trees and milking goats. It's "Giuliana," for the name she was called the first five years of her life. And the story of how and why it changed involves a baby smuggled in a bag out of a hospital in the middle of the night, a secret baptism - and plenty of risk.

These days, Bastianich is a beloved restaurateur, cookbook author and TV personality with a grandmotherly demeanor and a quiet confidence. But in 1947, she was born into uncertainty, a feeling that followed her for decades. Earlier that year, as part of the Treaty of Paris, the Italian region where her parents and brother lived was given to communist Yugoslavia. And while scores of other ethnic Italians on the Istrian Peninsula headed across the Adriatic Sea while the border was open, her parents hesitated because Lidia was only a month from being born - and after she was, they found themselves stuck when the border slammed shut.

Bastianich's book is titled "My American Dream," appropriate for what reads like a quintessential immigrant story, making her another example of figures who came here as outsiders but became beloved and famous for their way with food. (Others include New York chef Marcus Samuelsson, San Francisco's Charles Phan and Washington's Jose Andres.) And it lands amid anxiety about the potential effects of the Trump administration's policies on the restaurant industry, which depends so heavily on immigrant labor.

Bastianich stays away from any overt political commentary. But her memory for evocative detail - if she didn't keep a journal her whole life, the memoir sure reads as if she did - and her writing style make for compelling reading nonetheless. Rather than squeeze every drop of sentimentality out of sometimes-painful accounts, she reflects on her life with a matter-of-factness that makes the stories all the more poignant.

Here's how she describes her time as one of the "profughi" in San Sabba, a refugee camp in Italy: "Guards watched everyone at the camp twenty-four hours a day. I no longer had a home, a bed, a place to all my own; I felt vulnerable, and the only security I found was when we were huddled together as a family, just like my cat and her kittens back home in Pola."

Before the family escaped from Yugoslavia to Italy, Tito's rule was not kind to them and other Italians. They couldn't openly practice their Catholicism (hence the secret baptism) or even speak their native tongue. Lidia's father, Vittorio, had a trucking company, whose capitalist business practices were under scrutiny by the secret police. Her mother, Erminia, was a schoolteacher expected not just to teach her students Croatian but to indoctrinate them in the ways of communism.

And even though little Lidia and brother Franco did have their fig-tree-and-goat-milking moments, most of them at the country home of their grandmother, things ultimately went from bad to worse in Yugoslavia. After a dramatic escape that involved temporary separation from her father in Italy, they registered as refugees and lived in San Sabba for two years before the United States opened for immigration when Lidia was 11.

In America, the parents struggled while the children began to thrive.

To read it now, Bastianich's future as a food-world star seems almost preordained. As a toddler she would mimic her Grandma Rosa, "sitting on the rocks in the courtyard preparing 'sauce,' by filling old tin cans with rocks to emulate tomatoes and pouring them into my pretend pot to stir and simmer." Later, she would plant her own vegetables alongside Rosa, would play her sous-chef, and would learn about market shopping and food presentation from an aunt who was a private chef in Trieste. When she was allowed to leave the refugee camp to attend a Catholic grammar school in a nunnery, she paid for her food with kitchen labor alongside the nuns and learned large-scale cooking. She dabbled in cake decorating while working for Walken's Bakery in New Jersey (owned by the family of actor Christopher Walken) and made mental notes at waitressing jobs in restaurants in New Jersey and New York while she watched cooks finish orders.

One influence was an early date with the man who would become her husband and, later, ex-husband: She and Felice Bastianich went to Mamma Leone's, a huge Italian American restaurant in New York's Theater District that is now considered so influential that Paul Freedman included it in his 2016 book, "Ten Restaurants That Changed America." Bastianich wanted to know what it was that made the spaghetti-and-meatball brand of Italian cuisine in America so beloved. As an immigrant, she was perfectly positioned to learn, and in "My American Dream" she gives a one-paragraph rundown of how Italian food became Italian-American that is so concise and thorough I'm tempted to blow it up and tape it to my office wall for future reference. Why does Italian-American food use so much more garlic than the cuisine in the homeland? Because garlic was one of the only ingredients immigrants found in America that was close to the Italian version, so "the immigrants ate a lot of it, because it reminded them of home."

Much of the later chapters of her memoir is devoted to the opening of her and Felice's first, second and third restaurants - the latter being their Manhattan flagship, Felidia, four months late and over budget - and moves into public television, thanks to an encounter with Julia Child; writing; and empire-building.

Bastianich's devotion to family infuses "My American Dream." Her beloved father died before Felidia could open, "but he was there with me that night, in my heart and in my soul. It was because of his and my mother's courage in bringing our family here to America that I had come this far, and I remain forever grateful to them both." She writes that she never could have raised two children on such a busy schedule if her mother hadn't been there, living with the family and looking after the kids while she was working late. She also credits her Catholic faith, writing not only about her prayers of thanks but her thrill at being invited to cook for two popes: Benedict XVI in 2008 and Francis in 2015.

Perhaps the most touching moments, though, are when she reunites with her Nonna Rosa on a return trip to Istria as a newlywed, and when she returns years later to the site of the former refugee camp where she and her family had spent some of their darkest days.

With her daughter, Tanya, she co-founded the company that produces her public television shows, and with her son, Joe, she owns the restaurant company Batali & Bastianich Hospitality Group. And here's where her account gets dicey. About four months before the book's publishing date, the other B&B co-owner, Mario Batali, acknowledged years of sexual misconduct and harassment of employees after multiple allegations were reported in Eater, The Washington Post and the New York Times.

Did the news come too late for Bastianich to address it in her book? The omission is a shame - and makes for some jarring reading. Of a dinner she organized for the James Beard Foundation in the late 1990s, she writes: "One of the people I invited was Mario Batali, an up-and-coming chef at the time, who had his own place, Po, in the West Village. ... That night, Joe and Mario met for the first time, and soon they were talking about going into business together."

The innocent statement now sounds ominous. And it's hard to read without thinking of the accusations that Joe helped create a "boys' club" atmosphere with Batali that facilitated the abuse, as Eater reported, and of Joe's admission that he heard inappropriate comments and "should have done more." In the wake of the allegations, B&B has undergone a corporate shake-up, with Batali pushed out of day-to-day operations and Lidia (along with Nancy Silverton) taking on a larger role. I hope one day she writes about it.

It's also strange to read the following, in Bastianich's musings on the solidarity and obstacles of female chefs: "Physically, women have some challenges in the kitchen, like lifting heavy pots on and off the stove. You learn to adapt, you learn to find a way. But the biggest challenge for women in this industry is how to balance a family with such a demanding career."

Is it? I imagine that some of those who have suffered sexual harassment at the hands of Batali - and so many others - might have a different idea.
After Anna

By Lisa Scottoline

St. Martin's. 352 pp. $27.99

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Lisa Scottoline has the antidote for all the emotionally debilitating stories spewing from our daily news feeds: a deliciously distracting thriller.

"After Anna," her latest stand-alone novel, fits comfortably into the on-trend female-centric psychological suspense genre. In these popular works, from Gillian Flynn's "Gone Girl" to A.J. Finn's "The Woman in the Window," women are the alleged victims of heinous crimes that are often solved by other women - police detectives, private investigators or friends and loved ones.

Best known for legal thrillers featuring the wily women who work for an all-female law office in Philadelphia, Scottoline often makes mothers the heroines of her stand-alone works, and this holds true in "After Anna."

The last time Maggie Ippoliti saw her daughter, Anna was just 6 months old. Maggie was voluntarily institutionalized 17 years earlier when she feared her postpartum psychosis would lead to her harming her child. Maggie's feckless, unfaithful husband took advantage of Maggie's illness and whisked Anna away to Europe where he eventually dumped her in a boarding school, out of Maggie's reach. Meanwhile, Maggie recovered and made a new life for herself with her new husband, Noah, and his 10-year-old son, Caleb.

One day, out of the blue, Maggie gets a phone call from Anna, who wants to reconnect. Beside herself with joy - Maggie's never stopped yearning for her daughter - they make plans to meet. And in less than a day, Anna is moving in with Maggie, Noah and Caleb. No way will this scenario have a happy ending, and of course it doesn't.

Early on, Scottoline quickly rolls out a stunner of a storyline, and even its bare bones are meaty and scrumptiously intriguing. Just 17 days after Anna moves in, Noah is accused of sexually abusing Anna and then killing her. "After Anna" opens on the 10th day of Noah's murder trial. The trial chapters, titled "Noah, After," are told in descending chronological order and are interspersed with "Maggie, Before" chapters, which tell the story of Anna from her reunion with Maggie up until the startling reveals of the book's last pages. We learn quickly about the murder and whether Noah is innocent or guilty, but there's plenty to keep us guessing.

A former practicing attorney who lays out complicated legal strategies in her Rosato & DiNunzio thrillers, Scottoline again puts her legal chops on display through the prosecuting attorney in Noah's case. She is "simply dismantling him, the way a butcher breaks apart a chicken carcass, piece by piece, wedging back the legs and wings until the joint breaks, then tearing the limbs off." Ouch!

Among the damning evidence the prosecution has gathered is a text from Noah to Anna asking her to meet him at his home the night of the murder. But how can this be possible when Noah claims his phone was locked in his car at the time the text was sent?

Anna's accusations of sexual misconduct and the Protection From Abuse order she takes out against Noah just a few days before she dies keep us riveted. Scottoline dispenses plotline mind tricks. She makes us feel guilty for wondering if Noah might be innocent. She makes us feel equally guilty for doubting Anna. On the other hand, we also feel guilty for believing her. It's a conundrum that whirls through Maggie as well.

Readers always know more than Maggie but not everything. The real story about the explosive relationship between Maggie and Noah is episodically revealed with Scottoline illuminating the landing strip of revelations and truths in a deliciously slow and intense way. Maggie and the reader are mystified. If Anna's lying about the abuse, why would she do it? And while you may have your own ideas about what's going on, you'll never really know until Scottoline decides to tell you. The last 100 pages of this book are nerve rattling, shocking and explosively violent, even as Scottoline gets to the heart of what lengths a mother will go to protect her child.

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Memmott is a freelance writer in northern Virginia.
Is it just by chance that almost all of the 20 cities and counties on the shortlist for Amazon's second headquarters can boast access to great art museums?

You can't help noticing the correlation. Of the 238 cities and counties that applied for consideration, plenty have the population (over a million), the pleasant environs and the basic infrastructure Amazon seeks. But if they don't also have an exceptional art museum - and preferably more than one - those cities didn't make the cut.

Amazon (whose founder and chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, owns The Washington Post) says it expects to hire as many as 50,000 full-time employees over the next 10 to 15 years for its second headquarters, with an average annual total compensation exceeding $100,000. (Average pay at Amazon's warehouses is a different story.)

How do art museums come into it?

Unemployment has been low for a while now. Demand for workers is high, supply tight. People qualified to expect high salaries tend to have the leisure time and surplus cash to pursue cultural aspirations. Companies trying to persuade them to move to where they are - and often to drag families with them - need to be conscious of those aspirations.

That's why, in the competition to secure the best and brightest, Amazon and other big companies care deeply about cultural offerings in the places they're located.

This isn't just my hypothesis. It's right there in Amazon's stated criteria. Yes, the company wants its second headquarters to be in a place where there is excellent higher education, low crime rates and cooperative local government. But it also wants, in the company's own words, "locations with the potential to attract and retain strong technical talent"; places where its "employees will enjoy living, recreational opportunities, educational opportunities, and an overall high quality of life."

Art museums - which these days are much more than just places to look at art - play an outsize role in satisfying all these factors. Their prestige and prominence make them prime tourist destinations. Their health and quality are also tied up with civic pride, with what makes a city desirable to live in.

Just ask the people of Detroit. They almost lost whole chunks of their art museum's world-renowned collection when the city declared bankruptcy a few years ago. The collection, owned by the city, was considered an asset that could be sold off to pay the pensions of city employees. That nightmare scenario was averted, thankfully; the blow to civic pride would have been irreparable, its cascading consequences immeasurable.

People go to art museums for all sorts of reasons (666,168 of them went to the Detroit Institute of Arts last year): to attend parties, classes, lectures and concerts. Often just to get the little ones out of the house. They're places to drink in beauty and eros (sometimes even while drinking), which makes them ideal venues for hookups and dates. But they're also places where you can learn about cultures from around the world and debate politics in a context much wider and deeper than that offered by the daily news media.

The health of a city's cultural scene - and especially its art museums - directly affects its ability to attract ambitious businesses and the kinds of talented people who might want to work for them. That's part of why almost every big city in the United States wants either to have great art museums or to revamp the museums it has. Tens of billions of dollars have been raised and spent on new museum buildings in the past decade alone. For better or for worse, the sums dwarf those given in support of other art forms.

How, then, in terms of their art museums, do the cities on the shortlist actually compare?

The list, as many have noted, skews east, especially the East Coast. But cities in California, Texas, Illinois, Ohio, western Pennsylvania, Colorado, Indiana, Tennessee and Ontario are all in with a good chance.

Toronto is the only city on the shortlist outside the United States. Its pitch, as you might expect, made a big deal of Canada's universal health insurance. But its major art museums - the Art Gallery of Ontario, with its Frank Gehry addition and its terrific European holdings (including Rubens's "Massacre of the Innocents") and the Royal Ontario Museum - are nothing to sneeze at.

Dallas is surely one of the strongest art cities. The brawny Dallas Museum of Art, with one of the best and broadest collections in the country, is right next to the exquisite Renzo Piano-designed Nasher Sculpture Center, while nearby Fort Worth has an art precinct to die for: the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, and the Kimbell Art Museum, which has one of the world's choicest collections of art housed in Louis Kahn's most beautiful building.

The pickings in Austin and Nashville might be slimmer, but Austin's Blanton Museum of Art, with its new Ellsworth Kelly chapel, "Austin," perched right outside, and Nashville's Parthenon and its Frist Center for the Visual Arts are all jewels. (And what both cities lack in art, I've heard they kind of make up for in music.)

Northern Virginia and Montgomery County are not known for their art museums, but both are so close to the artistic splendors of the nation's capital that it makes little difference. The same goes for Newark, which has the very respectable Newark Museum but is also blessed by its proximity to Manhattan.

If Columbus isn't on every art lover's list, it should be. The Wexner Center for the Arts has one of the most dynamic contemporary programs in the country, and the Columbus Museum of Art, which opened a new building in 2015, has a dynamic program and diverse collection that includes cubist works by Picasso and Juan Gris, and superb paintings by Artemisia Gentileschi, Mary Cassatt and Marsden Hartley. From Columbus, too, you can drive in almost any direction and, in under three hours, arrive at some of the finest museums in the country (Cleveland, Toledo, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati).

Pittsburgh? It has the renowned Carnegie Museum of Art, which hosts the Carnegie International, the world's second-oldest recurring exhibition of contemporary art (it started a year after the Venice Biennale). Entering its 57th edition this year, it has brought an extraordinary number of modern and contemporary works into the collection, which boasts great things by Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Bonnard, Van Gogh, O'Keeffe and de Kooning, not to mention Lynda Benglis, John Currin and Nicole Eisenman. Pittsburgh also, of course, has the popular Andy Warhol Museum, home to the largest single Warhol collection in the world.

Indianapolis combines a great collection, known for its holdings of African, Asian and contemporary art, with a beautiful campus at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, now called Newfields.

Atlanta has the High Museum of Art, which mounts dazzling shows with high prestige loans every year. It has a collection rich in American paintings and sculptures, as well as African art, contemporary art and European masterpieces by Giovanni Bellini, Vittore Carpaccio and many of the impressionists. The city also has a lively Museum of Contemporary Art.

Denver has a 125-year-old museum with a Daniel Libeskind-designed expansion that is recognized around the world. Its deep collection includes one of the strongest collections of Native American, Western American and pre-Columbian art anywhere, and a great impressionist collection that was boosted in 2014 by the Hamilton bequest, bringing in a swag of works by Van Gogh, Pissarro, Morisot, Monet and Manet.

Raleigh has not only the recently renovated North Carolina Museum of Art, with its sculpture park and outdoor amphitheater and impressively wide-ranging collections (which include great Renaissance holdings from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, northern European paintings and a gallery for Judaic art), but a small jewel, Duke University's Nasher Museum of Art, in nearby Durham.

Miami, meanwhile, has its annual art fair, Art Basel Miami, a magnet for art lovers all over the Americas. The fair has helped stimulate a thriving museum culture that includes a newly renovated museum for contemporary art (the Bass) and the Perez Art Museum Miami, housed in a building designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architects Herzog & de Meuron.

In the end, of course, there's no doubt that New York City has the nation's best art museums. Along with the Met, the third-most-visited art museum in the world (after the Louvre and the National Museum of China), it has the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim, plus gems such as the Frick Collection, the Neue Galerie and the New Museum. Nothing to argue with there.

But Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, Washington and Philadelphia also have the kind of historically great museums with deep, often encyclopedic collections that, over time, create whole ecosystems of art around them. Apart from their big, prestige museums (the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Getty, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the National Gallery), these cities also boast private house museums (think the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Phillips Collection and the Barnes Foundation), contemporary museums (La. MoCA, MCA Chicago, ICA Philadelphia, ICA Boston), private collector museums (the Broad), government-sponsored museums (the Smithsonian Institution museums in Washington) and world-famous college museums (Harvard Art Museums).

Am I saying the decision about where Amazon's second headquarters will be based all comes down to art? Of course not.

Is this Amazon decision even that important? Same answer.

But art museums galvanize cities and the people who live in them like few other phenomena. They don't just inspire loyalty (almost 80 percent of LACMA's approximately 1.3 million annual visitors are members.) They also draw in outsiders: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, drew in 622,287 visitors in 2016, which is almost 100,000 more than the entire population of the metropolitan area it is in (Fayetteville-Springfield-Rogers).

Nobody likes reducing art to economics, but here's the thing. If you're a city that wants to attract smart people hoping to work for successful businesses and big corporations, it seems pretty clear: Invest in your art museums.
After receiving complaints from three local elected officials, the director of elections at the Secretary of State's office is calling on an investigation of alleged mail-in ballot fraud in Webb County.

Director of Elections Keith Ingram, in an April 10 letter to the Texas Attorney General's Director of Law Enforcement David Maxwell, wrote that the information his office received "warrants a submission for criminal investigation."

"The complaint alleges that individuals knowingly provided false information on applications for ballot by mail and illegally returned those ballots. A violation of (this section) of the Texas Election Code is a state jail felony," Ingram wrote.

READ MORE: Officials investigating mail-in-ballot fraud in Webb County primary election

"Additionally, if the offense was part of a vote harvesting organization ..., an offense under this section is one category higher than the most serious offense that is committed."

State Sen. Judith Zaffirini, Webb County Judge Tano Tijerina and Webb County Republican Party Chair Randy Blair are copied on the letter, and all said they filed complaints or have been in contact with the Secretary of State's office.

Zaffirini told LMT that she didn't file a written complaint with the Secretary of State but has been in communication with their office, along with the Office of the Attorney General and Gov. Greg Abbott, concerning election fraud in Webb County.

The first thing that caught her attention was hearing that Webb County's mail-in ballot results were dramatically different from early voting and Election Day results.

Zaffirini said the mail-in ballot results for the county judge race and the County Court at Law II race were roughly 500 to 100 in favor of the candidates who lost, Patricia Barrera and Melissa Joy Hinojosa Garcia, respectively.

And with the permission of a local voter, Zaffirini said she sent the Secretary of State copies of that person's driver's license and mail-in ballot, which he did not request, and showed that the signatures did not match.

Zaffirini said she hopes the investigation is successful, and that these shenanigans don't come up again during the run-off or general election.

READ ALSO: District attorney says Laredo Border Patrol agent is a flight risk in double homicide case

"It's wrong and it should stop. It's not a partisan issue," Zaffirini said.

"And those who have evidence should speak up," she added. "It's the only way this is going to stop."

Tijerina said he filed a complaint with the Secretary of State after poll watchers saw that 80 percent of the March 6 primary mail-in ballots were in favor of his opponent, Barrera.

This did not follow the trend of the final ballot tally, where Barrera won about 39 percent of the vote, Tijerina noted.

"Additionally, over 700 mail in ballots were cast, which was an unusual number in comparison with past elections," Tijerina said in a statement.

"In my opinion an unusual number of these mail-in ballots were clustered in one area of the city which is the same neighborhood my opponent lives. Also of interest is a cluster of mail-in ballots in a low income area on Saltillo Street, several lower income apartments, and a Senior Citizen's home on Jaurez Street."

Barrera did not return a request for comment Thursday evening.

In March, El Manana de Nuevo Laredo reported that 80 mail-in ballots from a local retirement home were filled out in the same handwriting and with the same pen, all in favor of two candidates, "an unequivocal sign that someone manipulated (the ballots)."

However, interim Elections Administrator Jose Salvador Tellez told LMT that this is not true. At the retirement home in question, located at 701 Juarez Ave., there were only 22 requests for mail-in ballots. The home is a polling site on Election Day, and Tellez said close to 80 people cast votes there in person.

Nonetheless, this article led Webb County Republican Party Chair Randy Blair to file a complaint with the Secretary of State's Office.

Blair said that voter fraud is not something that should be tolerated in Webb County, and he was unhappy hearing about the events from a newspaper, rather than the Elections Office.

Blair said he has heard of at least two people who tried to vote but could not because mail-in ballots  which they did not request  had already been turned in in their name.

For years Blair has heard allegations of mail-in ballot fraud in the county, but no one would ever come forward and report it, he said. He hopes this time the situation has some teeth, and that the Attorney General's Office will go through with an investigation.

"We've got to have integrity in our elections here, and I just don't see that we have it right now," Blair said.

On March 23, the Attorney General's office sent a letter to Tellez explaining that they were investigating the March 6 primary election in Webb County, specifically mail-in ballot fraud.

"All ballots for the aforementioned election should be kept separate by election day ballots, early voting in person ballots, and absentee/mail ballots, so that mail ballot fraud patterns may be located for investigation," Sgt. Wayne Rubio of the Attorney General's Special Investigations Unit wrote.

The Attorney General's Office said it could neither confirm nor deny any details about possible ongoing investigations, per their policy.

Julia Wallace may be reached at 956-728-2543 or jwallace@lmtonline.com
The Border Patrol agent accused of killing his alleged lover and her infant child appeared in court for the first time Thursday, asking the judge to set a bond and seeking his release for lack of probable cause.

Ronald Anthony Burgos-Aviles, 28, has been in custody since April 9, when LPD said they found evidence linking him to the slaying of Grizelda Hernandez, 27, and her son, Dominic Alexander Hernandez, 1. Police charged him with two counts of capital murder.

Silverio Martinez, attorney for Burgos-Aviles, filed a pre-indictment writ of habeas corpus last week, asking the court to set a reasonable bond. He cited a lack of probable cause.

READ MORE: Border Patrol agent arrested in connection with double homicide in Laredo

Burgos-Aviles has never been convicted of a crime before, and therefore, his confinement and restraint are illegal, according to the writ.

Martinez filed two additional motions Thursday, an hour before the hearing, asking the court to appoint attorney Eduardo Pena as co-counsel and to close pre-trial hearings to the public.

The latter motion states that the "hatred and animosity toward Burgos-Aviles is extremely harsh and prejudicial" due to the high-profile nature of the case.

"(Burgos-Aviles) cannot have the public or media poisoning the jury pool by publishing or otherwise disseminating what is said during the hearing," the document states.

READ MORE: Obituary of mother, son allegedly killed by BP agent

406th District Court Judge Oscar J. Hale Jr. denied the defense's motion.

Webb County District Attorney Isidro "Chilo" Alaniz said the prosecution would present witnesses who would establish probable cause. He asked the court to deny him bond, saying that Burgos-Aviles, who is from Puerto Rico, was a flight risk.

Burgos-Aviles is a danger to the community and used his badge as a shield to hide among law enforcement for the heinous killings, Alaniz told the court.

"The specialized skills that he used in order to commit the crime point and reveal a very dangerous individual," he said.

U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Internal Affairs Officer Adriana Escamilla, who is helping conduct the investigation into Burgos-Aviles for the agency, testified that on the day of the homicides, Burgos-Aviles began duty at 6 a.m. He reported finding the bodies at 11:20 a.m.

READ ALSO: Dozens gather at vigil to honor slain mother, child

Escamilla said the call was the only radio transmission Burgos-Aviles made throughout the five-hour period since he first reported for duty. She said that, especially for someone in a supervisory role like Burgos-Aviles, this was "highly out of the norm."

As a supervisory officer, Burgos-Aviles was in charge of five Border Patrol agents.

Sensors and cameras had been removed recently near Father Charles McNaboe Park, where the bodies were found, according to Escamilla. She said Burgos-Aviles was aware of this. However, she said she could not recall whether the bodies were found in the sensor-free area or just very close to it.

Additionally, while reviewing Burgos-Aviles' record, Escamilla found two incidents of possible misconduct, with one being a vehicle crash involving Burgos-Aviles, she said.

Another 2013 incident involved Burgos-Aviles lying about a break-in at his home, according to Escamilla. She said Burgos-Aviles told supervisors that he needed to leave his post to go check on his wife.

Since he was stationed at the Laredo North Border Patrol Station, far away from his home, Border Patrol agents were sent to check on his home, Escamilla testified. She said agents did not find evidence of a break-in and that neighbors told them that there was no break-in, but rather a confrontation between Burgos-Aviles' wife and his mistress.

Escamilla said the report did not identify the supposed mistress. Burgos-Aviles has been married for over five years, according to his marriage license.

The hearing will resume on Monday.

Arrest

Police said Burgos-Aviles quickly became a primary person of interest in the case after he called 911 at about 11:20 a.m. April 9 to report that he had found a woman's body.

When police responded to the scene, they found the body of the boy near her.

LPD has not disclosed how Hernandez and her son may have died.

After police identified the woman as Hernandez, they said they learned that Burgos-Aviles had been in a romantic relationship with her.

LPD later said it found evidence in a marked U.S. Border Patrol unit that is linked to the double homicide.

Claudio Trevino Jr., Laredo Police Department chief, said they seized the unit but cannot disclose what investigators found in the vehicle.

Border Patrol said it has suspended Burgos-Aviles indefinitely without pay.

Investigators said last week they are seeking out-of-town assistance to expedite the case.

"We're also waiting for the official report for the autopsies in Corpus Christi ... We hope to get those returns quickly," Trevino 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."

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.

Joana Santillana may be reached at 956-728-2528 or jsantillana@lmtonline.com. LMT reporter Cesar G. Rodriguez contributed to this report.
On February 3, 2018, the life of a Fort Worth family was turned upside down when a man appeared at their doorstep angry and with a gun.

Arelii Martinez, the girlfriend of Nicholas Carrillo, 33, said Carrillo was shot and killed in front of her and their family members.

"He was a family man. A loving father," Martinez said.

Now, all she wants is justice.

"I just need the public's help. Nick's family needs peace. My kids need peace," Martinez told LMTonline.com.

READ ALSO: Dozens gather at vigil to honor slain Laredo mother, child

Jesus Duran, Martinez' ex-husband, has a warrant out for his arrest for the killing of Carrillo, according to the Fort Worth Police Department.

Fort Worth Police Officer Ernesto Tamayo said Duran's last known whereabouts point to Laredo, but they suspect he may be in Mexico by now.

On the night of the shooting, Duran told his ex-wife he just wanted to talk, but events quickly spiraled out of control, Martinez said.

Duran became argumentative, Martinez said, asking for all of his belongings back. When Carrillo asked Duran to leave, Duran shot Carrillo in front of Martinez at their home, police said.

Martinez said her two sons -- whose biological father is Duran -- Carrillo's two daughters and his nephews witnessed the fatal shooting.

She said Duran then pointed the gun at her and said, "this is what you wanted," before fleeing away on his motorcycle. He has been at large since that night.

At 10:24 p.m., Carrillo was pronounced dead from a gunshot wound to his chest, according to the Tarrant County Medical Examiner.

"This has been traumatic...what has happened in our life. All the kids are going to counseling. My 6-year-old is having a hard time. He was diagnosed with PTSD," Martinez said.

Martinez said that she believes her ex-husband's family is aiding him in his escape across the border.

READ ALSO: Laredo man accused of shooting teenager, hears verdict

"(Duran) is a danger to everybody. I had to move because I don't want my kids taken away by him. Right now, he has nothing to loose," Martinez said.

There is currently a $1,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of Duran, but Carrillo's father will be adding $5,000 more, Martinez said.

Duran is currently listed as a "most wanted" person on Tarrant County Crime Stoppers. To report information on the whereabouts of Duran, contact Crime Stoppers at (817) 469-8477.

jerilynn.thorpe@lmtonline.com | Twitter: @jerilynnthorpe
1 School shooting: One student shot another in the ankle at a high school in Ocala, Fla., on Friday, and the suspected shooter was taken into custody, authorities said. The injured student, a male, was taken to a hospital for treatment of a non-life threatening injury. Police said the suspected shooter is a former student at Forest High School. The shooting took place as students around the country walked out of classes to protest gun violence on the anniversary of the massacre at Colorados Columbine High School. Chris Oliver said his 16-year-old son told him the shooting happened near his classroom. The boy told Oliver the shooter was standing in a hallway and fired at a closed classroom door. The shooter then ran and tried to hide, the boy told his father.

2 Marijuana laws: Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., the top Democrat in the U.S. Senate, said Friday that he will introduce a bill taking marijuana off the federal list of controlled substances  in effect decriminalizing its use. His bill would let states decide how to treat marijuana possession. Under the measure, the federal government would still enforce laws against moving pot into states where its illegal and would still regulate advertising so it isnt aimed at children. Eight states, including California, and the District of Columbia now allow recreational use of marijuana, and a majority allow its use for medical purposes. The White House said last week that President Trump backs legislation to protect the marijuana industry in states where it is legal.
Mississippi's governor just signed a law, more restrictive than in any state, banning abortions after 15 weeks. Iowa's state Senate is trying to go even further and stop abortions at around six weeks. And 20 Ohio legislators have proposed outlawing all abortions, even if the woman's life is in danger.

In many state capitols, Republican lawmakers are backing unusually strict antiabortion laws. Many are emboldened by President Donald Trump, who has been more supportive of their agenda than any president in decades. Conservative lawmakers also are eager to get more restrictions on the books in case November's elections bring a surge of Democrats hostile to them.

Federal courts have immediately blocked many of these antiabortion laws, including Mississippi's. But they still have a purpose: to set up legal challenges to Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationally, at a time when Trump could appoint the justice who helps overturn it.

"Trump has given hope to the pro-life movement," said Ron Hood, a Republican state representative who introduced the total abortion ban in Ohio.

Under Hood's bill, women could be criminally punished for aborting an "unborn human." In an interview, Hood said prosecutors would decide what charges to seek, just as they do in cases of manslaughter or murder.

For years, many antiabortion groups have argued that laws should penalize the doctor, not the woman, but Hood - who calls abortion an "atrocity" - said about a quarter of his colleagues in Ohio's 99-member House chamber are lined up behind his bill.

"We are seeing extremism on many fronts in the United States today," said Nancy Northup, chief executive of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which supports abortion rights. "Those who oppose abortion rights are seeing this as a time to push for the most extreme measures."

About 1 in 4 women have an abortion in their lifetime, according to a report by the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights research organization, recently published in the American Journal of Public Health.

In the Trump era, the long-running abortion wars are heating up again, and the country is increasingly divided when it comes to the availability of abortions.

Many Republican-controlled states are ratcheting back access - establishing waiting periods, outlawing common medical procedures and cutting off Medicaid funding.

At the same time, Democratic-controlled states are expanding access to contraception and reproductive health; in Washington state, the governor just required insurers to cover abortion costs.

Charles Donovan, president of the research institute of the Susan B. Anthony List, which promotes politicians who oppose abortion, said the looming midterm elections "certainly do add a push" to get antiabortion laws in the pipeline for a potential Supreme Court challenge.

In 2017, Trump's first year in the White House, 19 states passed 63 antiabortion restrictions, according to Guttmacher.

Collectively these measures send a loud message, Donovan said. "It's a cultural message, not just a legal message, to the court," he said.

Before Trump ran for president, he publicly said he was "very pro-choice." But when he became a candidate, he promised to appoint judges to reverse Roe v. Wade and won over many Republican voters, including from the religious right, who remain among his steadfast supporters.

They applauded his nominee to the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, who has never ruled in an abortion case and evaded questions at his confirmation hearings about Roe v. Wade but who has consistently voted with the court's conservative majority. Another vacancy on the court would give Trump a chance to increase that majority, a prospect that has thrilled Trump supporters.

The opportunity has not worked out in the past. Justice Anthony Kennedy was once thought to be the missing vote to overturn Roe but instead affirmed the right of women to seek an abortion.

And although Kennedy has been generally supportive of abortion restrictions, he joined the court's liberals two years ago to strike down a Texas law that was found to impose an undue burden on women.

But Kennedy is 81 and is said to be considering retirement. Two of the court's liberals, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, are 85 and 79, respectively.

The chance to replace one of the three offers abortion opponents "something they never thought they would have: a potential majority on the Supreme Court" who would overturn this landmark decision, said John Weaver, a Republican strategist who has advised Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

While many in Washington are consumed with presidential scandals about alleged mistress payoffs and FBI raids, many people across the country care more about other issues, such as abortion, Weaver said.

"It's an issue that keeps them tethered to an untethered president," he said.

Northup said Trump has unleashed a "new level of aggression" among abortion opponents. Recent bills include those that would prosecute doctors who perform an abortion as early as six weeks, make no exception for rape, forbid women from getting an abortion if the reason is a high probability of Down syndrome and, as in Ohio, allow a prosecutor to seek criminal charges against women.

"People better vote on November 6th like their life depends on it," said Kellie Copeland, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio. She said the discussion in Columbus of criminally prosecuting women "is so far out of the mainstream" that there is urgency for voters to turn out.

Democrats overwhelmingly support preserving the rights of women to end an unwanted pregnancy.

Democrats say energy is high and record numbers of women are running in November, and they are hoping for wins that could shift the power balance in state capitols.

Conservatives also say they are energized.

Susan Swayze Liebel, coordinator of the National Pro-Life Women's Caucus for the Susan B. Anthony List, said abortion opponents are working to turn out their base and "keep the momentum going in the states."

"The Trump effect is the hope effect for the pro-life movement," Liebel said.

More than 90 percent of abortions are performed before 13 weeks, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A Pew Research poll last year found that 69 percent of Americans did not want Roe v. Wade. to be overturned. That ruling gives a women the right to an abortion up to the point where the fetus is viable outside the uterus, which is generally considered around 24 weeks.

But Pew also showed a stark party split - 75 percent of Democrats said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 65 percent of Republicans believed it should be illegal in those cases.

A big Republican-wave election in 2010, after the election of Barack Obama, sharply increased GOP and conservative clout in states, and that clout remains today.

Since then, 33 states have passed laws to limit abortion.

In Texas, an increasingly hostile environment for abortion providers contributed to the closures of 20 clinics, abortion rights groups said, about half of those in the state. In the Republican strongholds of Mississippi and Kentucky, only one clinic is left.

In certain parts of the country, "it is unequivocally much harder now to access abortion care than any year since Roe v. Wade," Northup said.

Elizabeth Nash, the state policy analyst at Guttmacher, said abortion services are increasingly out of reach for many women because of the distance they would have to travel to a clinic and the cost. Women in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and other states have a far harder time than those on the West Coast and in many parts of New England, where ending an unwanted pregnancy is easier and cheaper.

About 75 percent of women who seek abortions are poor or have a low income, according to Guttmacher.

"Roe has already fallen in the practical sense for many women," said Copeland, of the abortion rights group in Ohio. "They are forced to continue pregnancy, sometimes even if it's not what is best for their health, because they cannot get past the travel and financial hurdles."

- - -

The Post's Robert Barnes contributed to this report.
EDWARDSVILLE  The Edwardsville Police Department is hosting its third annual ButterBurgers & Badges Special Olympics fundraiser at Culver's from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m., Tuesday, April 24.

Several EPD officers will be in uniform at the restaurant to serve food and interact with customers. All tips will be donated to the Special Olympics, and Culver's will also donate $1 for every Concrete Mixer sold during that time period.

"It's about giving these individuals an opportunity to get out and experience things outside what they normally are able to do," said Major Mike Fillback. "All of these athletes and their families really seem to appreciate everybody's efforts to help raise money on their behalf to allow them to do it."

The ButterBurgers & Badges Special Olympics fundraiser is one of several fundraisers the Edwardsville Police Department holds throughout the year to benefit Special Olympics. Fillback said the department hopes to raise a total of $15,000 this year through all the fundraisers. The annual Special Olympics Spring Games will be held this year at SIUE's Korte Stadium on Saturday, April 28. The Special Olympics Summer Games will be held June 15 through 17 at various locations in Bloomington and Normal.

The ButterBurgers & Badges Special Olympics Fundraiser is open to anyone and will take place at the Culver's restaurant at 6724 Old Troy Road in Edwardsville. The event is a chance for Edwardsville police officers to meet people in a different capacity than they norally do.

"Hopefully people know that we do more than write tickets and arrest people," Fillback said. "Hopefully people will come out and buy some food and let Culver's make a donation for them. Throughout the years the community has supported it well. There are a lot of charities out there, and I just appreciate the fact that folks take the time to come out."
WASHINGTON - A federal judge in Washington blocked the government on Thursday from immediately transferring to another country an American citizen detained by the U.S. military in Iraq.

The ruling from U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan temporarily halting the planned transfer to an unnamed country came within a half-hour of an 8 p.m. deadline, at which point the government would have been free to make the handoff.

Attorneys for the man, held without charges for seven months, had challenged the move, saying the U.S. government lacks the legal authority to transfer him to a third country.

The Justice Department will almost certainly appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

"Petitioner's motion for a preliminary injunction is hereby granted," Chutkan wrote in a one-paragraph order, enjoining the Defense Department "from transferring petitioner from U.S. custody."

The order said Chutkan would issue a public, redacted opinion after consulting with the detainee and the government's attorneys on classified or sensitive information to be withheld.

The U.S. military has held the unidentified man as a suspected member of the Islamic State since he was turned over to American forces on Sept. 14 after he was captured in Syria at a rebel Syrian Democratic Forces checkpoint and declared his U.S. citizenship. The man, who grew up in Saudi Arabia and is a dual citizen, was questioned for U.S. intelligence purposes, but American officials have said they lack admissible evidence to charge him with a crime.

At a hearing Thursday morning, the man's attorney, Jonathan Hafetz of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the government must either "charge him with a crime or release him. . . . He is fighting for his freedom."

Justice Department attorney James Burnham said handing off the man would end the U.S. government's control over the detainee.

"It's not release," Chutkan responded, "if you're simply giving him over to another jailer."

The ACLU asked the court to temporarily block the transfer and require the U.S. government to cite a specific, "positive legal authority" to move an American citizen prisoner to a third country beyond an assertion that the other country has a "strong interest" in the citizen, according to court papers filed Wednesday.

In the government's filings, a State Department official called the quick transfer "vital diplomatically to the United States" now that an unnamed third country has invoked its "sovereign interest" to accept the detainee and formally confirmed he would not face torture, a pledge required by U.S. law in cases of involuntary transfer.

During the hearing Thursday, Chutkan acknowledged the seriousness of the allegations against the man but seemed skeptical of the government's stated justification, noting there was no evidence that he had committed a crime in the country that would receive him.

"What you're giving me right now is not a lot more than what you gave me in January," she said of the earlier hearing challenging the possible transfer. Chutkan then closed the courtroom to the public to discuss elements of the case that remain sealed.

The hearing Thursday is the latest development in a case that has tested whether U.S. citizens captured on a battlefield as suspected Islamic State fighters have the right to challenge their detentions.

The government has said in court filings that the man was born in the United States but raised in Saudi Arabia. He attended college and studied electrical engineering in Louisiana, is married and has a 3-year-old daughter whom he tried to register as an American citizen on two trips to the United States in 2014, according to court filings.

A Justice Department representative said late Thursday that the government is "evaluating options."

The District Circuit was already weighing an earlier ruling from the same judge in which she required the government to give 72 hours notice before the suspect's transfer. That notice became public this week and the three-day window to intervene closed at 8 p.m. Thursday.
WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump expressed concerns about the judgment of his national security adviser Michael Flynn weeks before forcing him to resign, according to memos kept by former FBI director James Comey that recount in detail efforts by Trump to influence the bureau's expanding investigation of Russia.

The memos also reveal the extent of Trump's preoccupation with unproven allegations that he had consorted with prostitutes while in Moscow in 2013. Trump, according to the memos, repeatedly denied the allegations and prodded Comey to help disprove them, while also recalling being told by Russian President Vladimir Putin that Russia has the most beautiful prostitutes.

The details were disclosed Thursday as the Justice Department released redacted versions of memos - some of which contained previously classified material - that Comey composed in the immediate aftermath of his interactions with Trump, a step he says he took because he was troubled by their conversations and worried that the president might one day lie about them.

The documents, first published by the Associated Press, provide a significantly more detailed account of those conversations than has previously been revealed through Comey's contemporaneous records and are largely consistent with his statements before Congress and in his newly published memoir.

In a Jan. 28, 2017, memo, Comey said Trump blamed Flynn for botching the scheduling of a phone call with British Prime Minister Theresa May. "In telling the story, the President pointed his fingers at his head and said, 'the guy has serious judgment issues,' " Comey wrote. Comey said he did not comment at the time.

Trump has disputed Comey's accounts of their conversations.

On Thursday night, Trump tweeted: "James Comey Memos just out and show clearly that there was NO COLLUSION and NO OBSTRUCTION. Also, he leaked classified information. WOW! Will the Witch Hunt continue?"

Flynn, who was forced out in the early days of the administration, has since pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and is now cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller III's probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

In early February, Comey met with then-White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, who asked the FBI director "if this was a 'private conversation.' I replied that it was," Comey recounted in one memo.

Priebus then asked if the bureau was wiretapping Flynn, according to the memo.

"I paused for a few seconds and then said that I would answer here, but that this illustrated the kind of question that had to be asked and answered through established channels," Comey recounted. "I explained that it was important that communication about any particular case go through that channel to protect us and to protect the (White House) from any accusations of improper influence. He said he understood."

After that discussion, Priebus brought Comey to speak with the president, where Trump raised the issue of Comey's deputy, Andrew McCabe, who had been criticized by Trump during the campaign because McCabe's wife had previously run as a Democrat for a seat in the Virginia state legislature; she had received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from then-Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, a close ally of Hillary Clinton's.

Comey told the president that if McCabe "had it to do over again, I'm sure he would urge his wife not to run, but that the guy put everything aside and did his job well," according to the memo. 

Comey's memo of his Feb. 14, 2017, discussion with Trump also includes a previously unknown exchange about trying to prevent leaks.

At the time, the president was upset that transcripts of his phone conversations with the leaders of Mexico and Australia had appeared in The Washington Post.

Comey said he told the president, "I was eager to find leakers and would like to nail one to the door as a message. I said something about it being difficult and he replied that we need to go after the reporters, and referred to the fact that 10 or 15 years ago we put them in jail to find out what they know, and it worked."

Comey said he replied: "I was a fan of pursuing leaks aggressively but that going after reporters was tricky, for legal reasons and because (the Justice Department) tends to approach it conservatively. He replied by telling me to talk to (Attorney General Jeff) Sessions and see what we can do about being more aggressive."

"I said something about the value of putting a head on a pike as a message," Comey said. "He replied by saying it may involve putting reporters in jail. 'They spend a couple days in jail, make a new friend, they are ready to talk.' I laughed as I walked to the door Reince Priebus had opened."

In a February 8, 2017, memo, Comey recounted how the president denied an allegation raised in a dossier written by a former British spy that he consorted with prostitutes in Moscow, but he also claimed that Putin had told him "we have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world.''

The Justice Department sent redacted copies of the memos to Congress on Thursday, and unredacted versions will be made available for members of three House committees to review on Friday in a secure facility on Capitol Hill.

The delivery of the memos was in response to an April 13 request by the GOP chairmen of the House Judiciary, Intelligence, and Oversight and Government Reform committees for access to them.

The department had earlier allowed certain members to review, but not retain, the memos as long as they agreed not to disclose their contents.

"In light of the unusual events occurring since the previous limited disclosure, the department has consulted the relevant parties and concluded that the release of the memoranda to Congress at this time would not adversely impact any ongoing investigation or other confidentiality interests of the executive branch," Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd wrote in a letter Thursday evening to the three chairmen.

The three Republicans - House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., and House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes, R-Calif., - issued a joint statement saying the memos reveal Comey as a petty person with a grudge against Trump.

The memos "lay bare the notion that former Director Comey is not motivated by animus," the lawmakers said. "He was willing to work for someone he deemed morally unsuited for office, capable of lying, requiring of personal loyalty, worthy of impeachment, and sharing the traits of a mob boss. Former Director Comey was willing to overlook all of the aforementioned characteristics in order to keep his job. In his eyes, the real crime was his own firing." 

Last week, the three had pressed for access to the memos as part of their inquiry into the FBI's handling of an investigation into then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server.

On Wednesday, Goodlatte served notice of his intent to subpoena the memos.

Comey headed the investigation begun in July 2016 into whether there was any coordination between Trump associates and Russian officials during the 2016 presidential election. Shortly after Trump's inauguration, Trump sought a promise of loyalty from Comey during a private dinner, according to Comey, who memorialized that in a memo.

In February 2017, Comey said, Trump asked him in an Oval Office meeting if he "can see your way clear" to dropping the investigation into Flynn, who had been forced to resign as national security adviser after it became public that he had misled Vice President Mike Pence about his conversations with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The two men had discussed during the transition the possibility of lifting Obama administration sanctions imposed on Russia.

In May 2017, Trump fired Comey. Soon after, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was appointed to take over the Russia probe.

Comey wrote some of the memos as unclassified documents. Several others he wrote contained classified information and were kept in a secure facility. After he left office, he shared some of the unclassified memos with a friend, parts of which were then shared with a reporter for the New York Times. All of his memos were subsequently provided to Mueller.

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The Washington Post's Greg Miller and Karoun Demirjian contributed to this report.
Before a roomful of supporters and friends at Wednesday's Midland County Democratic meeting, Joe Weir made a surprise announcement  a campaign for the 36th Michigan State Senate.

The announcement, which came at the Midland County Services Building, brought applause and cheers from the attendees.

Unless another Democratic opponent jumps into the race, Weir would face off against Sen. Jim Stamas, R-Midland, in the Nov. 6 general election. Stamas is seeking his second, and final term, of four years.

I am running to make sure that the voters of the 36th District have a choice, Weir said. I recognize this is a tough district.

The 36th District is composed of 250,000 citizens and the counties of Alcona, Alpena, Arenac, Gladwin, Iosco, Midland, Montmorency, Oscoda, Otsego and Presque Isle.

Weir has long been involved with the Democratic party and has previously served as the vice chair and chair of the Midland County Democrats.

However, it was a Ballotpedia article that helped encourage Weir to run.

For the last couple of election cycles, 40 percent of state seats nationwide have gone unchallenged, Weir said of the article. Democracy says that when you go to vote, you should have a meaningful choice between contrasting ideas.

The Dow Chemical employee of 34 years stated two beliefs that he would take to Lansing if elected.

 A state government that is transparent, accountable and responsive.

 A state government that tries to solve problems that makes peoples lives better.

Having grown up in Northern Minnesota, the chemical engineer earned his degree at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, before heading to Midland for a job in research and development at Dow.
State Sen. Sam McCann announced his intention Thursday to run for governor as a Conservative Party candidate, garnering a quick  and scathing  response from the incumbent governor.

When he ran for the state Senate in 2009, McCann said he was driven by a call to serve. It is this same call, he said, that brought him to throw his hat into the ring to face off against Republican incumbent Gov. Bruce Rauner and Democratic candidate J.B. Pritzker.

I realized after the primary that a huge part of the state feels like they dont have a candidate to choose, McCann said. Both dominant party candidates on the social issues align with each other perfectly, theyre mirror images. On the fiscal side, again, I think theres a large group of people downstate that feel theres no choice. Theres a significant group of people who feel these extreme approaches of the Chicago Democrats and the extreme approaches of Rauner have only made things worse.

His statement of intent does not guarantee that McCanns name will be on the ballot. He still needs 25,000 signatures for that, though McCann believes hell be able to get double that by the June 25 deadline.

In a video released alongside his announcement, McCann spoke critically of Rauner, saying hes assisting Chicago Democrats in controlling the state. He accused Rauner and his brand of Republicans of waging war with the middle class.

During Rauners tenure, McCanns votes have diverged from the governors on several topics, including Senate Bill 1229, which would have called for arbitration during the negotiations between the state and its largest unions. McCann later told the State-Journal Register that Rauner actually had threatened him and his family if he voted in favor of the bill, an action the governor denied.

Rauner and the Illinois Republican Party quickly responded to McCanns announcement.

The state GOP said McCanns entry in the race was using politics for profit. It said his record is shady and that he is the perfect crook to cut a deal with Pritzker and Madigan.

Rauners camp shared similar sentiments.

Sam McCann is the worst kind of political opportunist who is only running for governor to line his own pockets, Rauner spokesman Will Allison said in a release. McCanns unethical record speaks for itself: He failed to pay his taxes, racked up massive debts, lied about serving in the Marine Corps, and used his campaign account as a personal piggy bank, even buying himself an SUV.

McCanns military service claims were questioned in 2016, when a Greene Prairie Press report quoted him as saying the courage I learned in the Marine Corps, when McCann himself had said that he only applied for the service but was injured before going to boot camp.

McCann told reporters at the State Journal-Register that he wasnt sure of the context at the time but that he was referring to a booklet or paper that he had been given in his testing and processing that described courage as no matter how afraid you are, you still do your duty.

Rauners response also refers to a tax lien against the senators two construction companies with which McCann wrestled in 2015 for more than $185,000.

Despite the tone of the response to his announcement, McCann seemed unsurprised by the accusation that he simply is entering the election to act as a spoiler for Rauners campaign.

I think it just goes to show that hes been governor for 3 years and, instead of talking about the issues, all he does is slander other candidates, McCann said. You can definitely see whos running the most scared and I think the reason for that is he knows he cant win. Im not the spoiler in this election, that would be Rauner. He cant win. Hes under water. Hes 2:1 with his disapproval-to-approval rating. If you dont plan on voting for Pritzker, vote for me. Im your best chance.

Polling numbers in 2017 showed Rauner with just a 30 percent approval rating.

Pritzker welcomed McCann to the race, noting that he believes Illinois is ready for a change.

I welcome another voice to the race for governor at this critical time for our state, Pritzker said.

When it comes to facing off against Pritzker, McCann said he does not know the candidate well, having met him only briefly on two occasions, but looks forward to getting to know both him and Rauner more as the race continues.

Accompanying McCann on the campaign trail will be his running mate, Aaron Merreighn of Riverton, a veterans rights activist who worked with the senator in the past on projects to benefit Quincy Veterans Home.

We worked together on a project to benefit homeless veterans here in Illinois and we became friends, we became co-workers on those issues, and it was apparent to me that there was no one more qualified for the job, McCann said. On Day 1 of my administration, Aarons No. 1 priority would be to rebuild Quincys veterans home and get it done ASAP  Aaron will have no idle time.

McCann knows hes entering the field with two candidates who have unprecedented levels of funding, but he believes voters will see the merits of his grassroots campaign, he said.

Some publications have projected that more than $300 million will be spent on the gubernatorial race, an amount that would beat national records for gubernatorial-race spending.

Both of them have an infinite supply of money, McCann said of Rauner and Pritzker. No matter how much I raise, they can always easily raise double that. Were going to rely on a strong grassroots campaign and raise as much money as possible and count on the people to deliver our victory.

Nick Draper can be reached at 217-245-6121, ext. 1223, or on Twitter @nick_draper.
WASHINGTON - Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is scrambling to reassert control over a Republican Party hamstrung by a razor-thin governing majority and riven by increasingly bloody primary fights.

Votes in the Senate on even straightforward measures, like Thursday's on the next NASA administrator, have become a struggle, as individual GOP members leverage the absence of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., to pursue other aims.

McConnell had to pull aside rogue senators over their occasional defiance twice in the last two days. He warned one - Bob Corker - in a private conversation that his comments risked hurting the party's ability to hold its majority in November's midterm elections.

Outside Washington, McConnell's allies have launched major ad campaigns against two Republican Senate candidates they see as potential liabilities in the general election - former coal baron Don Blankenship in West Virginia and Mississippi state Sen. Chris McDaniel.

Other races, in Indiana and Montana, are quickly becoming costly slugfests, distracting the party from its central mission of dislodging vulnerable Democratic incumbents.

"Before you get to the big dance, you always have the intrafamily feuds. And there's a lot of primaries going on right now," said Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., one of McConnell's top deputies. "But hopefully when it's all said and done, the dust settles and the smoke clears, we'll have candidates that are electable in November."

The conflicts come at a time when Republican Senate primaries across the country are devolving into free-fire zones, with millions of dollars worth of negative ads being spent against GOP candidates.

Unlike the House, where the map of competitive seats gives Democrats a clear shot at retaking the majority, the Senate playing field still gives Republicans a significant advantage. Ten Senate Democrats are running for reelection in states Donald Trump won, and Democrats need a net gain of two seats to retake control of the chamber.

While Democrats have successfully avoided contested primaries in Senate races, efforts to clear the field on the Republican side have failed in several states. In some cases, deep-pocketed GOP donors have lined up against each other, filling the coffers of outside groups intended to blister primary rivals.

Republican tensions have flared even in contests where there are no competitive primaries. Corker lavished praise Wednesday on Tennessee's leading Democratic contender, former governor Phil Bredesen, calling him "a very good mayor, a very good governor, a very good business person," who could win in November.

The remarks set off alarm bells at the highest levels of the Republican Party and supporters of the leading GOP candidate in the race, Rep. Marsha Blackburn, interpreted them as a personal slight. In response, McConnell's allies spoke with White House aides about organizing a public response.

President Trump called Blackburn on Wednesday from his club in Palm Beach, Florida, and told her he disagreed with Corker's comments and promised to help her campaign, according to two people familiar with the call who requested anonymity to speak candidly. Trump tweeted his endorsement of Blackburn on Thursday afternoon.

McConnell and Corker, who has said he will support Blackburn, had a lengthy discussion on the Senate floor Wednesday about his remarks, according to three people with knowledge of the conversation. McConnell told Corker his comments were unhelpful - both in the Tennessee race and in the larger battle for the Senate majority, the individuals said.

McConnell also reminded Corker that Republicans were only in the current situation because Corker had decided to retire. Bredesen, a top Democratic recruit, entered the race after Corker bowed out. The conversation did not end on a confrontational note, the individuals said.

Corker declined to comment on the conversation, as did a representative for McConnell.

But Democrats have seized on Corker's comments as a boon for their chances in November. "I'm glad he's sharing his views with the people of Tennessee," said Sen. Chris Van Hollen, Md., who chairs the Democratic Senate election effort. "He's got a lot of credibility. He's also giving firsthand testimony."

The three candidates running for the GOP nomination to challenge Sen. Joe Manchin III, D-W.Va., have created a prime example of a primary that has become an early distraction from Republican goals.

Candidates and outside groups have at various points in the past month accused contenders in the race of contaminating West Virginia groundwater, voting for gun control and indirectly profiting from work with the abortion provider Planned Parenthood, issues that could all be damaging in the general election. A Democratic group called Duty and Country, which has not disclosed its donors, has also weighed in on the race, attacking two of the candidates with television commercials.

At a candidate forum Wednesday in Missoula, Montana, former Billings judge Russ Fagg laid into the most well-funded candidate in the race, state Auditor Matt Rosendale, calling him a Maryland transplant who came to the state only to run for office. Allies of Sen. Jon Tester, D, have rejoiced at a line of attack they will likely pick up in the fall, if Rosendale, who cuts his hair in the same flat-top style as Tester, is the nominee.

Perhaps the nastiest race in the country has been playing out in Indiana, where Sen. Joe Donnelly, D, is running for reelection. All three Republican candidates have been tearing into each other for months, questioning one another's motives, conservative credentials and allegiance to Trump. Led by Mike Braun, a self-funding business executive, the candidates have spent more than $3 million on ads since Feb. 28, according to two strategists who spoke on the condition of anonymity to freely discuss campaign spending.

Allies of McConnell are most concerned about the candidacies of McDaniel in Mississippi and Blankenship in West Virginia, whom they view as liabilities in November. In both cases, outside groups tied to McConnell allies have begun running ads in an effort to sink their candidacies.

In West Virginia, a group called Mountain Families PAC, which is run by a Washington-area GOP strategist who has worked with the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has spent $757,334 on ads attacking Blankenship in recent weeks, according to the strategists who track the spending.

"I think it's better when folks in West Virginia sort out those primaries, but I definitely support the idea of nominating somebody who's electable," said Sen. John Cornyn, Texas, the second-ranking Republican senator. "I think somebody with a criminal conviction - that's a high hurdle to overcome."

The former CEO of Massey Energy, Blankenship has been campaigning while on parole after serving a year in federal prison for a misdemeanor conviction of conspiring to violate mine-safety laws.

Blankenship, who is self-funding his campaign, has promised to punch back hard at anyone who attacks him during the campaign. "The Russians and McConnell should both stop interfering with elections outside their jurisdictions," Blankenship said in a Facebook post this week, which also compared McConnell to a professional wrestler and called him "a Swamp captain."

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, another longtime ally of McConnell's efforts, has begun targeting McDaniel, a hard-right conservative, with six-figure campaign in Mississippi that includes a spot casting him as a "trial lawyer" who "lined his pockets" with money. "Think you know Chris McDaniel?" the ad ends. "Think again."

Other races are likely to become more competitive later this summer. In Wisconsin, where party strategists once hoped for an uncontested primary to focus early on Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D, two outside groups, each funded by wealthy residents, have been harboring funds for former Marine Kevin Nicholson and state Sen. Leah Vukmir.

Some Republican strategists and officials believe the White House is partly culpable for the messy Senate primaries that have erupted across the map. "They got behind the curve," said one, who called the White House political operation in 2017 a "clown show." The Republican spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid.

The White House should have done more earlier in the election cycle to get behind strong contenders and prevent flawed candidates from rising, the Republican said. While the White House is doing a better job these days, this person said, the mismanagement of last year has come at a cost.

The business of running the Senate has become more difficult as well.

The Senate's main focus in the coming months will be confirming Trump administration nominees and federal judges. With the sharp partisan warfare that has seized the chamber, those fights could be contentious.

McConnell's margin for error has been whittled to its narrowest point since he became majority leader. With McCain out, he is operating with a 50-49 advantage over Democrats.

The tensions were on display Wednesday during a procedural vote over the nomination of Rep. Jim Bridenstine, R-Okla., to run NASA. Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., initially voted against moving forward. Later, he agreed to vote yes. Cornyn said Flake wanted to talk to secretary of state nominee Mike Pompeo about travel restrictions to Cuba.

On Thursday, McConnell and Flake had a private conversation on the floor of the Senate. The retiring Arizona Republican is emerging as another potential headache for McConnell, who is trying to get Trump's Cabinet nominees cleared in short order.

Flake has not said whether he will support Pompeo's nomination.

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The Washington Post's Seung Min Kim contributed to this report.
BELL, Fla. - Investigators continued Friday to seek a motive behind the killing of two Florida sheriff's deputies gunned down while eating inside a restaurant the previous day, even as the sheriff's office said no answers would fully explain the shocking attack.

The Gilchrist County Sheriff's Office, in a statement released about 24 hours after the shooting, said "there will never be a reason for what he did to Sergeant Noel Ramirez and Deputy Taylor Lindsey. Nor will it ever satisfy their families. They sat down to eat, and were here to serve."

The slain deputies - 29-year-old Ramirez and 25-year-old Lindsey, both of whom were in uniform and on duty - were eating at the Ace China restaurant in Trenton, Florida, when the gunman went in and opened fire, the sheriff's office said. A day earlier, authorities had said the attacker fired from outside the restaurant. Police have identified the shooter as John Hubert Highnote, 59, of Bell, Florida, and they said Friday he had shot and killed himself in his car parked outside the restaurant.

"Our deputies were ambushed," the sheriff's office said in its statement. "They were unable to return fire."

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement is investigating the shooting. A spokesperson for the agency declined Friday to say what could have motivated the attack, citing the ongoing investigation into what happened in Gilchrist County, a small Northern Florida community 40 miles west of Gainesville.

The sheriff's office said it did not have additional information about Highnote, saying only, "He's a coward, period."

In Bell, the rural community where Highnote had lived, residents with homes not far from his said they had not encountered him, though they described that as common in an area where people live far from each other and are not typically close with their neighbors. Highnote's home in Bell was a small, one-story structure with a no trespassing sign out front, plywood on the windows and shell casings in the front yard.

"Most of us people have lived here for years and years and never even heard of [Highnote]," said Becky Barnette, who lives not far from Highnote's home. "We mostly all just stay to ourselves."

Bill Crace, a mechanic who has spent 27 years repairing engines in Bell, echoed Barnette.

"I never saw him," said Crace, whose business flies American and Confederate flags outside. "I never even heard of him until yesterday. . . . I do know a lot of people. But I never knew him."

In Akins BBQ, a restaurant on Bell's Main Street, waitress Jamie Mallman said the slain deputies had frequently come in to eat.

"It's tragic when it happens to your own," said Mallman, a lifelong Bell resident. "There's no rhyme or reason to this crime."

Public records showed that Highnote had lived or associated with addresses across Florida, including in Daytona Beach, Melbourne, Clearwater and St. Petersburg. During that time, he had a handful of encounters with police, mostly involving traffic infractions. There were other encounters with the courts and law enforcement, including a 1978 charge in Pinellas County for carrying a concealed firearm. He entered a not guilty plea, court records show, and the case was dismissed in 1980.

In 2001, a Pinellas County sheriff's deputy said he was called to a BMW dealership in Palm Harbor, Florida, a community north of St. Petersburg, due to an incident involving Highnote. The parts manager at the dealership told police he had initially called in Highnote, an employee at the time, to talk about a problem with a customer, the deputy wrote in his incident report.

The manager said Highnote "became very upset and began yelling and screaming," at one point throwing a cup of coffee on the floor, the incident report stated. The manager said he fired Highnote and told him to leave. While the manager said Highnote did not threaten him, he did note that Highnote had pledged to return; the manager noted that he would have to come back to turn in his uniforms and get his final paycheck. In the incident report, the manager said he was only contacting police in case Highnote "returned and tried to cause any problems." The sheriff's deputy said he tried to contact Highnote but was unable to reach him.

A few days later, another Pinellas County sheriff's deputy said they were called back to the dealership because the parts manager wanted to give a trespassing warning to Highnote, who had returned to get his last paycheck. In that deputy's incident report, they wrote that Highnote signed a document confirming he had received the paycheck and left without any issues.

Police officials told local reporters Friday that Highnote had no prior history with the Gilchrist County Sheriff's Office. His only court record in the county related to a 2012 traffic ticket for making a wrong turn; according to court records, Highnote pleaded guilty and paid the $143 fee.

At the Ace China restaurant on Friday, where two bullet holes could be seen in a window, people had created a memorial with flowers, balloons, flags and candles.

At a briefing after the shooting, Gilchrist County Sheriff Robert Schultz acknowledged not knowing what could have motivated it, but he also appeared to link what happened to the increased scrutiny police officers have faced in recent years regarding how they use fatal force.

"What do you expect happens when you demonize law enforcement to the extent that it's been demonized?" Schultz said during the briefing. "Every type of hate, every type of putdown that you can think of. The only thing these men were guilty of was wanting to protect you and me."

Through Friday, there had been 40 officer deaths so far this year, down from 41 at the same point in 2017, according to the National Law Enforcement Memorial Fund, a nonprofit that tracks police deaths. The number of officers killed by firearms has increased to 23 such deaths from 13 at the same point, the fund's preliminary data showed, while deaths caused by traffic crashes and other causes fell from last year.

According to the Gilchrist County Sheriff's Office, Ramirez and Lindsey were the first officers killed in the line of duty since 1956. Sheriff Mark Read was killed that year while "responding to a drunk with a shotgun," the sheriff's office said Friday.

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Berman reported from Washington. The Post's Alice Crites in Washington contributed to this report.

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Video link: Two Florida sheriff's deputies were shot and killed through a restaurant window on April 19 in Trenton, Fla. by an assailant who was found dead outside. Gilchrist County Sheriff's Office) https://wapo.st/2HDmCUX
A passenger who was onboard Southwest Airlines flight 1380 Tuesday emotionally described Thursday how he and others tried to save the woman who died when she was sucked outside the plane when one of its engines exploded in midair.

Jennifer Riordan, a 43-year-old bank executive and mother of two from Albuquerque, was seated in row 14 when she was sucked through a 10-by-14-inch window that had been broken by pieces of the disintegrating engine, two individuals familiar with the investigation said.

Firefighter Andrew Needum, of Celina, Texas, said he heard a "loud pop," moments after flight attendants had begun to take drink orders. Needum, seated next to his father and son, turned back to see that oxygen masks had deployed in the cabin.

Needum, who has been described as a hero for his efforts to save Riordan, said he was helping a young woman with an infant in her lap put on their masks when he heard a commotion six or seven rows behind him. He turned to his wife, Stephanie.

"And I looked at her eyes and she basically gave me the approval to go back there," Needum told reporters at a news conference Thursday.

"What took place back there I'm gonna leave, out of respect for her family, I'm gonna leave that alone," Needum said. "I'm trained for emergency situations and it's just exactly what it was. And I felt moved to act."

When he rushed to row 14, passenger Tim McGinty was trying to pull Riordan back inside the plane. Needum helped McGinty and they were able to pull Riordan back.

A nurse began administering CPR.

As Southwest Capt. Tammie Jo Shults turned on her final approach to an emergency landing at Philadelphia International Airport she calmly described conditions on the craft to the air traffic controller:

"Southwest 1380, we're single engine," said Shults, a former fighter pilot with the U.S. Navy. "We have part of the aircraft missing, so we're going to need to slow down a bit." She asked for medical personnel to meet the aircraft on the runway. "We've got injured passengers."

"Injured passengers, OK, and is your airplane physically on fire?" asked the air traffic controller.

"No, it's not on fire, but part of it's missing," Shults said, pausing for a moment. "They said there's a hole, and, uh, someone went out."

With the plane flying at about 550 miles per hour, Riordan probably died instantly. The cause of death was blunt impact trauma to her head, neck and torso, according to the Philadelphia medical examiner.

An individual familiar with the investigation said it is likely Riordan's neck broke from the force of the airplane's speed when her head was pulled outside.

"Sitting by the window - particularly if she was leaning against it the way many people do when they're resting - when it broke the full force of the depressurization would have sucked her right out," said the individual, who asked not to be named to speak candidly about the investigation findings.

The individual said the fact that Riordan had her seat belt fastened most likely allowed passengers who reacted quickly to pull her back into the airplane.

The National Transportation Safety Board has said the principal culprit of the explosion was a fracture - most likely because of metal fatigue - of one of the 24 fan blades in the engine. When that blade broke away at the fan's hub, it carried with it parts of the engine cowling and related engine parts. At least one of those parts broke the acrylic of the window where Riordan was seated. NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt said Wednesday that investigators found no pieces of the window inside the cabin.

"If you can possibly imagine going through the window of an airplane at about 600 miles per hour and hitting either the fuselage or the wing with your body, with your face, then I think I can probably tell you there was significant trauma," Peggy Phillips, the nurse who performed CPR on Riordan told ABC.

At times, Needum cried as he talked about Riordan. "She had two kids and a loving husband and community around her that loved her," he said. "My heart is broken for them. I just pray that they find comfort, that they find healing whatever that may be and however they seek it."

Stephanie Needum, his wife, said that after the episode had ended, Shults spoke with the passengers.

"She reassured us that in her 32 years of flying that her oxygen masks had never come down," she said. "She comforted everyone. She's an amazing person."

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The Washington Post's Lori Aratani contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON - The State Department's annual human rights report released Friday drops references to reproductive rights for women and stops using the phrase Occupied Territories to describe Israel's presence in Gaza and the West Bank.

The report covering 2017 focuses less on societal attitudes and discrimination than in previous years and more on governmental actions that encourage or reward violence and bigotry. It is the first human rights report to reflect the Trump administration's views and priorities.

In what is likely to be the most controversial change, the report strips a section labeled "reproductive rights" that previous reports included for every country outlining access to contraception, abortion and maternal mortality rates. In its place, every country now has a section called "coercion in population control," documenting involuntary or "unethical" sterilization.

The inclusion of reproductive rights as a separate section for every country is a legacy of the Obama administration. It was introduced in the 2011 report released the following year, at the end of Hillary Clinton's tenure as secretary of state.

State Department officials said the phrase increasingly became viewed as a loaded term in the United States, with both opponents and supporters of legalized abortion viewing it as a code word for abortion.

"It's not a diminishment of women's rights, or the desire to get away from it," said Michael Kozak, a senior official with the bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor that issues the report. "It's a desire to get away from using a term that has different meanings."

The change has reduced the role that contraception plays in the annual report, which is mandated by Congress. In the online version available on state.gov, each country includes a link to a 12-page report from the World Health Organization and other international heath groups detailing trends in maternal mortality between 1990 and 2015.

The resulting difference between the report issued last year, which was collected and prepared during the Obama administration, and the current version is often striking.

In last year's report, for example, the examination of India included a 12-paragraph discourse on reproductive rights that stated, "Lack of access to quality reproductive and maternal health care services, skilled attendants at birth, contraception to space pregnancies, and unsafe abortion continued to contribute to high rates of maternal mortality."

This year's report, which was half as long, begins with the statement, "There were reports of coerced and involuntary sterilization," citing pressure for women to have tubal ligations and hysterectomies.

"The country continued to have deaths related to unsafe abortion, maternal mortality, and coercive family planning practices, including coerced or unethical sterilization and policies restricting access to entitlements for women with more than two children," it added.

Another significant change was made in the way the State Department dissects human rights in the section dealing with Israelis and Palestinians.

Previous reports included a lengthy section devoted to Israel and the Occupied Territories. Last year's report mentioned human rights problems, and said the government took "some steps" to punish officials who committed abuses.

This year, the section is titled Israel, Golan Heights, West Bank and Gaza. The introduction to it notes that the State Department sought an Israeli response to allegations of abuse, and that Israel "did maintain generally that all incidents were thoroughly investigated and parties held accountable, as appropriate, according to due process of law."

State Department officials said reports issued by other parts of the government no longer refer to the West Bank and Gaza as occupied territories, and the human rights report was just catching up to what is now standard practice in the administration. David Friedman, the U.S. ambassador to Israel and a supporter of the settlement movement, has urged the State Department to drop the term.

The human rights report is considered an authoritative source for conditions in almost 200 countries around the world, excluding the United States. It includes how countries approach subjects such as arbitrary arrests, government corruption, treatment of ethnic minorities and freedom of the press.

"Promoting human rights and the idea that every person has inherent dignity is a core element of this admintion's foreign policy," said Acting Secretary of State John Sullivan in making the report public.

Sullivan, in remarks to reporters, explicitly called out several adversaries that the Trump administration has tangled with, including China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. Sullivan described them as "forces of instability" due to their human rights abuses.

Some activist groups had expressed concern that the State Department would stop detailing examples of discrimination and abuse involving the LGBT community. In some instances, the report elevates the issue by highlighting violence in an introductory summary of each country's failings. But the report focuses less attention on societal discrimination against members of the group unless the government fails to protect them.

The report excludes the United States from countries that come under scrutiny.

When pressed to defend the State Department condemning countries for a lack of press freedom when President Donald Trump routinely lambastes the news media, Kozak said the difference was considerable.

"We make distinctions between political leaders saying that a story was not accurate, or stronger words, and using state power to prevent journalists form doing their work," he said.

Last year's report was overshadowed by the absence of then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson when it was unveiled. It was often cited as an example of the administration's downgrading of concern for human rights.
At the end of last year, President Donald Trump and Congress officially gave the green light to oil and natural gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). For Alaskan lawmakers, the inclusion of a drilling provision in the GOP tax bill was a victorious end to a nearly 40-year struggle to develop parts of the resource-rich refuge.

But lifting the decades-old ban on fossil-fuel development in the refuge, it turns out, is just the start of a scramble to actually erect rigs into the air and get drills into the ground.

With control of the executive and legislative branches, Republicans are eager to get through the environmental review process before a Democrat has a chance to regain the White House in 2020.

Officials are racing to auction off drilling rights - because once they do that, it makes the job of again closing ANWR to drilling that much harder in the future.

"Once the leases are sold, it's hard for the next administration to undo," said Erik Grafe, a staff attorney in the Alaska office of Earthjustice, which opposes refuge drilling. "It's hard to unscramble that egg."

On Friday, the Interior Department will kickstart the lengthy environmental review process, allowing members of the public to weigh in on developing the pristine coastal plain. During the 60-day comment period, citizens can write to the agency's Bureau of Land Management to identify potential environmental issues. The BLM will also hold public hearings in Anchorage, Fairbanks and three Arctic communities in the state.

This "scoping" period is just the first of several steps mandated under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), often called the nation's bedrock environmental law, to assess the ecological impact of oil and gas work on the caribou, bears, wolves and migratory birds that populate ANWR.

The tax bill requires federal officials to auction off mineral rights in areas encompassing at least 400,000 acres each in the refuge. Despite that language, some Republicans worry that it could be reversed in future administrations.

"The push right now within Interior is to (issue leases) before four years," Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, told an Anchorage business group in February, according to E&E News. "They are working fairly and aggressively to put in place, to lay the groundwork for what comes next ... because once you get those leases out into the hands of those who can then move forward, it's tougher to throw the roadblocks in place."

Murkowski, chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, wrote the tax bill's ANWR drilling provision. Both she and her father, former Republican senator and governor Frank Murkowski of Alaska, championed refuge drilling.

Another concern is litigation from environmental and Native American groups, who often sue the government for failing to properly follow NEPA. They will probably do the same to slow down leasing in the refuge.

"The administration has made my people a target," Bernadette Demientieff, executive director of the Gwich'in Steering Committee, told The Washington Post's Darryl Fears. "We will not stand down. We will fight to protect the porcupine caribou herd ... every step of the way."

In turn, the Trump administration in February proposed sweeping changes to the 48-year-old environmental law as part of its infrastructure package. The plan, which at this point is not going anywhere, is designed to streamline project approvals. The House Natural Resources Committee has taken interest in revampibg NEPA as well, holding a hearing in November titled "Modernizing NEPA for the 21st Century."

"NEPA was originally intended to be a tool to assess the impacts of government actions on the environment. Unfortunately, today it has become a sweeping regulatory framework that does the exact opposite," said Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, the committee's chair. "Like some of our other bedrock environmental statutes, they had a noble intent. But when you write something in an open-ended and vague manner of statutory language, it simply means that administrations and litigation can make it a far cry from what Richard Nixon signed back in 1969."

The committee scheduled another NEPA hearing for later this month after some streamlining provisions were included in a draft of the farm bill, which is up for renewal this year.

The Alaskan Arctic is not the only place the government is moving forward quickly with lease sales. This year the department has held oil and gas auctions in Wyoming, Montana and southeast Utah, close to the Bears Ears National Monument, which Trump shrunk last year to the consternation of environmental and Native American groups.

An Interior memorandum issued this year directs field offices "to simplify and streamline the leasing process" so that federal leases to the oil and gas industry can be expedited "to ensure quarterly oil and gas lease sales are consistently held." The aim is to have the BLM process each proposed lease within six months.

"The Administration is opening up public lands to oil and gas drilling all over the American West," Michael Burger, executive director of the Columbia Law School's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, wrote in an email. "The Administration appears to be doing everything it can to lock in as many fossil fuel lease sales as possible before time runs out."
Salli Garrigan was in music class when the sound of bullets reverberated through the halls of her high school.

She ran. Out of class, down the stairs, past the shattered front doors of Columbine High.

She survived. But 12 of her classmates did not.

Garrigan, now 35 and an Arlington, Virginia resident, stood Friday before a crowd of D.C.-area students gathered on the U.S. Capitol lawn and told them when she was their age, she didn't know how to make her voice heard.

She didn't know if her perspective as a school shooting survivor would matter to anyone.

"I hoped it would never happen again, but here we are 19 years later, and it has happened again and again and again," Garrigan said in an interview. "But for the first time, I feel hope because these students are using a voice I didn't know I had two decades ago."

Garrigan, mother of a 3-year-old and pregnant with her second child, joined Everytown for Gun Safety's network of gun-violence survivors last year. Everytown was founded by Michael Bloomberg, the former New York mayor. Garrigan said it was the first time she had spoken about her experience with other survivors of similar trauma.

In her speech Friday, she cautioned the assembled students that victims of school shootings carry wounds the rest of their lives.

Her former classmates suffer from survivors' guilt, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, suicidal thoughts and more.

"This epidemic should have stopped with us," she said.

She later said she likes to remind young survivors to "be nice to yourself" because "you've been through a lot, and you don't always know how that will affect you."

On her shirt, a small metal pin in the shape of a ribbon bore the words, "Never forgotten."
WASHINGTON - The Trump administration rolled out new policies on Thursday designed to bolster the U.S. arms industry by facilitating more sales to foreign countries, including provisions that will loosen restrictions on the export of American-made drones.

While previous presidents have taken the U.S. defense industry into consideration when conducting foreign policy, President Donald Trump has made arms sales a centerpiece of his approach, regularly emphasizing how many weapons a country buys as a measure of its commitment to Washington.

That emphasis was on display this week during Trump's news conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, in which the president promised to "short-circuit" State Department bureaucracy to speed up sales of U.S. military equipment to allies such as Japan.

"If they're our allies, we are going to help them get this very important, great military equipment," Trump said. "And nobody - nobody - makes it like the United States. It's the best in the world by far."

Trump has often highlighted arms sales while appearing alongside foreign leaders. In the Oval Office this month, he described Qatar's emir as a gentleman "who buys a lot of equipment from us," including military airplanes and missiles. Trump recently thanked Saudi Arabia's crown prince for sharing the kingdom's wealth with the United States by purchasing "the finest military equipment anywhere in the world."

For years, U.S. administrations have sought to balance the interests of the U.S. defense industry with national security and foreign policy priorities when deciding whether to approve arms sales.

The balancing act can prove tricky because weapons often outlast the government that purchased them, and the U.S. military doesn't want U.S. arms used against its troops in any future conflict. The U.S. military also wants to retain some of the most sophisticated American-made technologies for itself to keep an edge.

While it is not yet apparent how the new policy will be implemented, the U.S. government plans to stress how proposed deals benefit the defense industry.

The executive branch enjoys a large amount of discretion on whether to permit an arms sale, but Congress retains an ultimate right of refusal. More substantive changes to the rules would require modifications to the law through legislation.

Tina Kaidanow, principal deputy assistant secretary for political-military affairs, said the policy update inserts economic security "into our broader national security considerations" when looking at arms transfers. She said the Trump administration would be actively engaged with the U.S. defense industry to "enable them to make sales overseas."

"Overall, the approach here, and it's a notable one, is the prioritization of the economy," said Rachel Stohl, an arms trade specialist at the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan policy research organization in Washington. "It's all about our economic interests being as important or maybe even more important than our national security and foreign policy objectives."

Stohl said previous policies emphasized the need to prevent U.S. arms from ending up in the hands of bad actors or being used to commit human rights violations. The new policy retains rules to mitigate such concerns, but they are no longer the focus, she said.

"If you read between the lines, it could be a green light for the U.S. to sell more with less restraint," Stohl said, though she described the update as more of a shift in emphasis than a change to the rules.

U.S. sales already dominate the international market, accounting for 33 percent of all major arms exports and supplying weapons to 103 recipients between 2012 and 2016, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, or SIPRI, which tallies such transactions. Russia is second, with about 23 percent of the market.

The U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency late last year announced a 25 percent increase in cleared transactions for fiscal year 2017, although many of those agreements had been initiated under the Obama administration

In addition to publishing a new policy on conventional arms transfers - which the administration will have 60 days to decide how to implement - the White House and State Department detailed a separate policy on drone exports.

Part of that drone policy remained classified. The known changes include a decision to allow U.S. drone exporters to negotiate certain contracts directly with foreign nations instead of through the government-run foreign military sales program, which should make it easier for U.S. defense contractors to negotiate drone sales abroad.

Another change eliminates rules that require special scrutiny of sales of laser designators on drones. Unarmed drones with laser designators can fly over a battlefield and mark a target, then transmit the information back to a fighter jet or other system that can launch a weapon to strike the target.

"We are widening the space for the companies to do their sales and marketing via direct commercial sales," Kaidanow said. "We're eliminating some of the specific factors that in the past we looked at when we approved these sales or didn't."

U.S. dronemakers have long expressed frustration that they face greater restrictions than foreign competitors such as China when selling their products to other nations.

The companies argue that the U.S. restrictions haven't prevented the proliferation of drones, as the Obama administration intended. They say the rules have simply caused foreign countries that would have bought U.S. equipment, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to pursue Chinese products instead.

Peter Navarro, director of the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, echoed that argument Thursday.

Navarro said the Obama administration's policy on drone exports accelerated an undesirable outcome for U.S. manufacturers, with Chinese replicas of their technology ending up "deployed on the runways in the Middle East." The Trump administration "is changing that policy," he said.

The change marks a win for allies that have long sought to buy top-of-the-line U.S. drones but have been stymied by export rules. While the new policy doesn't ensure they will be able to buy the technology, it represents a step in that direction.

"With key countries in the Middle East, this will be a welcome development by the Trump administration," said Danny Sebright, a former Pentagon official and current president of the U.S.-U.A.E. Business Council.

Still, the revisions fell short of a fuller-scale lifting of restrictions that some in the U.S. defense industry hope to see.

U.S. drone exports are regulated under the Missile Technology Control Regime, or MTCR, a voluntary agreement among more than 30 countries including the United States. The agreement subjects exports of large drones such as the popular American-made Predators and Reapers to a "presumption of denial." China is not a signatory to the agreement.

Kaidanow said that such large U.S. drone exports would remain subject to the "presumption of denial" but that the United States would work to update the agreement and ensure that it keeps pace with U.S. priorities for arms exports.

Defense contractors have complained that the quirks of the agreement make it easier to export a powerful manned fighter jet from the United States than to sell a far less powerful drone to another nation.

Remy Nathan, vice president of the Aerospace Industries Association, a defense industry lobby group, cheered the Trump administration for elevating economic priorities "to their appropriate position" when deciding whether to approve arms deals.

"The real significance of this announcement is that you have a presidential-level declaration that defense trade is important," Nathan said. That laid the groundwork for a conversation between the industry and the administration over the next 60 days about "some real fundamental change that needs to happen," he added.

- - -

The Washington Post's Karen DeYoung contributed to this report.
Federal regulators are poised to impose a $1 billion fine on Wells Fargo for years of selling unnecessary products to customers, the toughest action by the Trump administration against a major bank.

The penalty, part of an expected settlement Friday between the bank and two regulators, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, will punish Wells Fargo for forcing customers to buy auto insurance policies they did not need and other misdeeds, according to four people briefed on the regulatory action.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) recently conducted a study to determine which countries offered workers the best work-life balance. Researchers considered a number of factors when compiling the list, including average working hours, personal time and the employment rate of working mothers. In the end, the Netherlands came out on top with 9.3 score while the United States was one of the countries that offered employees the worst work-life balance.

Failing to find a balance between work and your personal life could put your health in jeopardy. In fact, numerous studies have shown that people who work long hours and leave little time for themselves have a 33 percent greater risk of stroke and a 13 percent greater risk of heart disease. Fortunately, there are ways to balance your personal life and business in order to protect your health.

Related: Is Work-Life Balance Even Possible?

Follow these life-changing tips:

1. Cut out low-value activities.

Many entrepreneurs are working longer hours than they should be simply because they are wasting time on low-value activities. Find out if this is your problem by keeping track of every minute of your time for a few days. Then, review your time sheet to identify low-value or no-value activities.

Eliminate distracting activities such as visiting social media sites or taking personal calls. These activities may only take a few minutes, but these minutes can quickly add up. You should also determine if you are wasting too much time on low-value activities that could be outsourced. For example, if you are wasting an hour a week on shopping for groceries, it may be best to outsource this activity to a grocery delivery service.

Making the most out of every minute in your schedule is the key to finding a balance between work and your personal life. By cutting out low-value activities such as distractions and errands, you may be able to work shorter hours and take care of yourself.

2. Schedule recurring social activities.

Studies have shown that having an active social life is crucial to your health. People who isolate themselves from others could increase their risk of death by about 50 percent. But, it can be difficult to make time for social activities while you are trying to grow your business. One way to overcome this obstacle is to schedule recurring social activities with your closest friends.

Related: 35 Successful Entrepreneurs Share What Work-Life Balance Means to Them

For example, plan on having a monthly dinner with a group of your closest friends. Put this monthly activity on your calendar in advance. Now, you can plan your work schedule around your social calendar instead of the other way around. This strategy is effective because it forces you to carve out time to unwind and have fun with your friends. Think of the recurring social activity as a meeting with an important client that you cannot cancel regardless of how swamped with work you may be.

3. Learn healthy ways to cope with stress.

Being an entrepreneur is stressful. It doesnt matter how many low-value activities you eliminate from your schedule or how often you see your friends -- you cant escape stress. Chronic stress can negatively impact your mind and body, leading to dangerous health conditions such as heart disease and high blood pressure. But, this doesnt mean that being under stress is a surefire way of shortening your life. The key to finding the balance between work and health is learning how to cope with stress.

Get in the habit of stepping away from the stressful situation for a few moments to calm down and collect your thoughts. For example, lets say a client sends an email demanding a nearly impossible turnaround time. If you feel your heart start to pound and your blood pressure rise, step away from the computer. Spend a few minutes walking outside to slow down the thoughts racing through your mind. Taking a walk outdoors -- even if it is just for a few minutes -- can reduce stress and calm the mind.

Dr. Michael Galitzer, a best-selling author and medical doctor, recommends entrepreneurs practice deep breathing to help relieve stress. Put one hand on your stomach and another on your chest. Begin to breathe in deeply from the abdomen to fill your lungs with your air. As you slowly inhale and exhale, focus on the rise and fall of your abdomen. This will take your mind off of the stressful situation and make it easier to quickly calm down. Inhale to the count of four, hold it for four seconds, then exhale to the count of four. Using one of these coping methods can clear your mind so you are more prepared to handle the stressful situation.

Related: 4 Strategies to Survive the Entrepreneurial Roller Coaster

As an entrepreneur, you are probably not used to putting yourself first. But, its important to understand that putting yourself first does not mean neglecting your business. By following these tips, you can finally find the perfect balance between your work and health and succeed more than ever in the business world.

Related:

7 Signs That You're Not Busy; You're Just 'Busy Bragging'

Forget That Product You're Working On. What's Really Going to Sell in the Future Is ... Services.

3 Things Taylor Swift Can Teach Entrepreneurs About Reputation Management



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For half an hour, at least 100 students at Churchill High School were out of school Friday morning, gathered on the sidewalk along Blanco Road to protest school shootings and call for gun control legislation.

They were supervised by North East Independent School District police and their principal, who walked among them with a timer on his phone, encouraging them to return to class. The students held up signs and at one point chanted, No more guns. They cheered as passing cars honked horns in encouragement.

Similar scenes were going on across the city. At 10 a.m., thousands of area high school students placed themselves at the center of a polarizing U.S. debate on gun violence, part of a nationwide protest coordinated in response to the Feb. 14 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, and timed for the 19th anniversary of the one in Columbine, Colorado.

We left our desks because they were shot at theirs, one sign outside Churchill said.

Sophia Mendez, a sophomore who organized the rally there, said turnout was much higher than she expected. She said they wanted politicians to know we are serious and that we demand some sensible gun laws.

Alansa and Arela Delgado, twin sisters and Churchill sophomores, said they were discouraged by the attempts of Principal Justin Oxley to usher the students back inside.

We are learning out here what democracy is, Alansa Delgado said. Im learning more here than I am in English right now.

About 40 student leaders across San Antonio had been sharing their plans on a group text message. Several said they had to shrug off attempts by administrators to dampen student participation, though others said their principals cooperated with and even embraced their efforts.

At Jefferson High School, about 100 students congregated near the baseball diamond, exhorting each other to advocate for their own safety, some with signs that said g(un)safe. One sign said WE CANT PROTECT UR GUNS IF U CANT PROTECT OUR PEOPLE!

Some complained about doors that didnt lock and teachers who didnt take campus lockdowns seriously. Some talked about friends and family members theyd lost to gun violence.

Freshman Michael Mendoza, 14, said a shooting three years ago killed his best friend, who was riding in a car with a cousin near a South Side park. Of his own anguish that followed, Mendoza told the crowd through a megaphone, I hope that doesnt happen to any of yall. Our lives matter.

Raeann Howton, also 14, asked the students if they thought teachers should have guns and got a loud No! in response.

Although Jefferson students had already held a ceremony near the flagpole before classes started  scattering hundreds of shoes to represent the number of mass shootings in the country last year  Principal Orlando Vera said he was expecting the walkout.

We need them to voice their opinion of whats happening across the country, Vera said.

Teachers praised the students organization and civic engagement, offering to help register them to vote when they turn 18. San Antonio ISD police and administrators kept watch, warning several speakers when their speeches contained too many curse words.

The protests seemed to draw larger turnouts in parts of Bexar County that generally vote Republican, with participation more limited on the South Side, which favors Democratic candidates  although South San Antonio High School had about 150 participants, officials said.

You shouldnt be scared to go to school, said Cirah Vinton, a junior at Judson High School, where the walkout  sanctioned and encouraged by the administration  drew an estimated 1,500 students.

Were going to be informing a bunch of other students about gun reform and why we believe that we need it and why we need to make a change in our gun laws in the U.S., said Jeremias Coiro, a senior.

Judson Principal Jesus Hernandez III said student organizers came to him about six weeks ago, and I suggested, if were going to walk out  lets do this in a safe and organized manner, he said. So they set up booths around the parking lot.  Its not just kids walking out to walk out, its walking out with a purpose.

About 150 OConnor High School students walked to the nearby Helotes City Hall, remaining there for about 20 minutes before returning, said Barry Perez, Northside ISDs spokesman.

Organizers at Taft High School and its Communication Arts magnet school had a public address system set up on the front lawn and efficiently distributed posters urging Love your kids, not your guns and decrying the National Rifle Association and President Donald Trump.

Speeches quoted poets and civic leaders as administrators at the Northside campus watched.

Were here  to reject the idea that more guns is what we need  and to remind the world that teens shouldnt fear for their lives every day or plan escape routes out of buildings or have nightmares about getting shot, organizer Erika Howlett told about 100 students there.

During a moment of silence, the group was heckled by a student counterprotester, which prompted a loud and heated argument until organizers confronted him.

Can we just have a moment of silence, please? Of all times  were doing this for victims of a shooting, Gabriel Botello, 15, told the student. This is disrespectful.

About 200 students participated at Clemens High School and 150 at Steele High School, the Schertz-Cibolo-Universal City ISD said. The protest at MacArthur High School drew about 250 participants, and at Reagan High School it reached about 200, organizers said, part of an NEISD total that was roughly 1,300, a district spokeswoman said.

Alamo Heights High School student Brian Yancelson said between 200 and 300 students protested at his school. Brennan High School brought out about the same, said student Hector Mendez.

Chase Jacobson, a Churchill senior, said attitudes toward the protest were mixed at his school, with some students very opposed.

Several Churchill students said some of their peers had been prepared to counterprotest. Junior Gabriella Fleming said she saw students draped in Confederate and American flags in the courtyard before the walkout, but they didnt appear in front of the school.

Most school districts across Bexar County had promised not to prevent the protests or suspend participants but said they would treat missing class time as an unexcused absence.

Howlett, the Taft organizer, said school administrators called her and other students to the office when they became aware of their walkout plans and threatened to remove participants from leadership positions on campus. It was kind of indicated that we could get kicked out of Communication Arts, she added.

But when Northside ISD announced its policy of official tolerance of the walkouts, the tone at Taft shifted, Howlett said.

Im really happy that my school is doing it despite whatever adversity weve faced, she said.

Hector Mendez said he and other organizers got mixed responses from Brennan administrators, who at one point argued about their flyers promoting it.

The one line in it they didnt like was that the only consequence was an unexcused absence, and they wanted the flyers to say that leaving school also meant missing class assignments and lectures, said Mendez, 18.

About 200 students from grades 8 to 12 at SAISDs Advanced Learning Academy, CAST Tech and Fox Tech High School voluntarily attended an on-campus discussion by Rep. Diego Bernal, D-San Antonio, Sterling Zinsmeyer of the National AIDS Housing Coalition and St. Marys University political science professor Larry Hufford.

Leaving campus would have been counterproductive and taken as a form of protest against our school, when our school was already supportive of our cause, said Anna Riggs, a junior at the academy who helped organize the event.

A small group of students left anyway, taking unexcused absences to walk to the Bexar County Courthouse escorted by a district police officer to lie down for a die-in there.

Two of them, sophomores Sam Khoshbin and Asiko Gomis, said they wanted to make a statement to people outside their school. They both missed chemistry  but many people in Main Plaza paused to watch, so I thought it was a success, Khoshbin said.

Staff Writer Jeff Flinn contributed to this report. | Lauren Caruba is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of her stories here. | lcaruba@express-news.net | @LaurenCaruba | Alia Malik is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of her stories here. | amalik@express-news.net | @AliaAtSAEN | Silvia Foster-Frau is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of her stories here. | sfosterfrau@express-news.net | @SilviaElenaFF
A Kentucky trucker who transported dozens of undocumented immigrants from Laredo to San Antonio in a sweltering tractor-trailer, resulting in the deaths of 10 people, was sentenced Friday to two concurrent life sentences without parole.

The judge equated the actions of the driver, James Matthew Bradley Jr., to torture.

My heart goes out to the families who have lost loved ones, Bradley, 61, of Louisville, said in a jailhouse video statement his public defenders played in court. If I could turn back the hands of time, I would.  There is not a day or night that goes by that I dont relive that scene.  I am so sorry it happened.

Bradley pleaded guilty in October to two counts of conspiracy to transport undocumented immigrants for profit, resulting in death.

Last July, Bradley was found with 39 immigrants in his tractor trailer in the parking lot of a Walmart on San Antonios South Side. Eight were already dead when police arrived, two more died later at area hospitals and the rest were hospitalized for treatment of heat-related injuries, some so severe that they had to continue getting kidney dialysis months later.

Federal prosecutors played a portion of video taken by the body camera of San Antonio Police Officer Hector Ybarra, and it showed bodies on top of one another. Some were lifeless; others barely moved and moaned and groaned. One survivor stumbled as he tried to help his fellow immigrants  among them his brother who died.

Ybarra, one of the first to respond, and a federal agent testified Friday about the grisly scene, where urine, feces, vomit and blood flowed or stained the inside of the trailer. The stench was overwhelming.

Ybarra said he offered water to the people inside but could hear only moans and groans and  as he was trained  poured water on the back of survivors necks to help cool them down. He checked for pulses as he went farther into the trailer.

As I got to the (front) of the trailer, it was increasingly hot and humid, Ybarra testified. Along with all my gear, all (the) urine and feces and vomit, I ended up throwing up myself, twice.

Ybarra had to step out of the trailer to compose himself.

Survivors told investigators there may have been more than 70 migrants and up to 200 in the trailer at one point, though many left in passenger vehicles that followed the trailer into the Walmart parking lot after Bradley called the smugglers.

Homeland Security Investigations special agent Cory Downs choked back tears as he recounted what he saw and learned during the investigation. He said the immigrants were told that, as soon as Bradleys tractor-trailer left Laredo, the cooling system in the trailer would turn on. But it never did because it was broken, something Bradley knew, and those inside realized by the time the truck passed a checkpoint just north of Laredo.

Officials later confirmed that an X-ray machine at the Border Patrol checkpoint was not working the night Bradleys rig went through with its human cargo.

They tried to cut holes (in the trailer) with what they had  keys, a knife, a Leatherman, Downs testified. Someone tried to claw their way through (the trailers wall). There was blood everywhere.  You could tell they just shredded their hands, or whatever they used.

At one point, the migrants trapped inside began hallucinating that they thought they saw someone with an oxygen mask and started dogpiling, trying to get access to the air holes.

Bradleys lawyers argued that his lack of education left him vulnerable and that he was duped by professional smugglers. Bradley dropped out of school by sixth grade and learned to drive a commercial truck from truckers while he hitchhiked around the country, the defense lawyers said.

In his early 20s, he paid a $54 fee to get his license but was never required to take a test for it, one of his lawyers told Senior U.S. District Judge David Alan Ezra.

But prosecutor Christina Playton countered that Bradley knew what he was doing because, rather than call 911, he called an acquaintance and one of the smugglers in the chain. Court records show he was paid $5,600 by the smugglers.

Playton also played a videotape of investigators talking to Bradley, who claimed he did not know he was hauling immigrants.

Why would you get in a refrigerated trailer? Bradley said. Why would anybody put them in there? Its airtight.

Playton said despite his IQ of 69, Bradley chose to become a willing participant.

It was death, but not just death; it was extreme and inhumane suffering, Playton said.

Ezra rejected a request by Bradleys assistant public defenders, Alfredo Villarreal and Kim Stevens, for a sentence of 63 months. The judge found the appropriate recommended guideline range was 360 months to life in prison on each count.

The judge said ranchers dont even treat their livestock as horribly as Bradley did and that his human cargo suffered in unspeakable heat  that it could only be equated with torture.

The defendant was fully aware of the conditions in that trailer, Ezra said. He knew there was no cooling in trailer, and he provided them with no water. The result was predictable and tragic.

U.S. Attorney John Bash said afterward that the sentence should serve as a warning to other smugglers and to certain U.S. employers.

Im talking about businesses knowingly hiring hundreds of illegal aliens. You are creating the economic incentive to subject people to exploitation and death, Bash said. That needs to stop, and were going to be looking at it very closely to figure out how we can eliminate the incentive to bring illegal aliens, to smuggle them here in these conditions, by going after employers who are knowingly, and in violation of federal law, hiring unlawful aliens.

Shane Folden, special agent of Homeland Security Investigations in San Antonio, said that of the surviving immigrants, 15 were deported and 14 remain in deportation proceedings.

Besides Bradley, Pedro Silva Segura, 47, an undocumented immigrant who lived in Laredo, pleaded guilty in the case. He is set for sentencing in June. No one else has been charged.

Guillermo Contreras is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of his stories here. | gcontreras@express-news.net | @gmaninfedland
A former Mexican governor has been extradited from Italy to Texas to face several federal charges including drug trafficking and money laundering, U.S. officials announced late Friday.

Tomas Yarrington Ruvalcaba, 61, who was arrested in Italy last year, was handed over to U.S. authorities Friday morning in Italy and arrived in Houston on Friday afternoon. Yarrington, who served as governor of the state of Tamaulipas from 1999 to 2005, was sought for several years in Texas, where hes accused of laundering drug or other illicit proceeds in properties in San Antonio and the Rio Grande Valley.

In 2012, a federal grand jury in Brownsville indicted Yarrington on charges of drug trafficking conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy, racketeering and bank fraud. In an indictment against Yarrington and Mexican businessman Fernando Alejandro Cano Martinez, 61, prosecutors allege that Yarrington used the Tamaulipas state police force to collect bribes from drug traffickers, took kickbacks from state contractors and eventually laundered millions of dollars in Texas through real estate purchases.

In 2007, Yarrington negotiated a truce between the Tamaulipas-based Gulf Cartel and the rival Beltran Leyva smuggling organization to use a seaport in the neighboring state of Veracruz, according to the indictment. In exchange, prosecutors allege, Yarrington received a percentage of each load of cocaine snuggled through the port.

As part of that case, prosecutors seized an airplane and real estate across Texas, including a South Padre Island condo held in the name of a campaign worker and houses in Kyle and McAllen that were in the name of his girlfriend, Sindy Chapa, a former Texas State University professor.

Prosecutors also alleged that dirty money from Tamaulipas was laundered through the purchase of 46 acres of undeveloped land on La Cantera Parkway in San Antonio, near Six Flags, but they eventually reached a settlement with the owner to sell the property and take only $1 million.

The Yarrington matter is part of a joint investigation between several federal agencies and prosecutors in the Western District of Texas, which includes San Antonio and West Texas, and the Houston-based Southern District of Texas, which stretches to the Rio Grande Valley.

HSI aggressively pursues transnational criminal organizations that pose a threat to the U.S. national security, to include corrupt public officials who use their position and influence to further the illicit activity, said Shane Holden, special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in San Antonio. HSI is committed to upholding the rule of law and investigating those involved in criminal activity and bringing the illicit gains of these crimes to the U.S.

Despite reports that he was living in Mexico, Yarrington remained a fugitive for years, prompting some members of Texas congressional delegation to demand that the Obama administration pressure Mexico for the former governors extradition. In 2016, Mexico announced that it was offering a 15 million peso reward, about $800,000, for his arrest on charges that had been filed in 2012.

Yarrington is scheduled for an initial court appearance Monday afternoon in federal court in Brownsville, U.S. officials said.

The extradition of former Tamaulipas Governor Tomas Yarrington comes as no small feat; it has come after years of hard work and dedication by the Department of Justice, the Department of State, and the international community, in their relentless dogged pursuit of those engaged in narco-trafficking, U.S. Rep. Filemon Vela, D-Brownsville, said in a statement Friday. I commend the Department of Justice, the Department of State, and the international community on the extradition, and I look forward to seeing Mr. Yarringtons case resolved in the United States courts. Let it be known that absolutely no one is above the law, and the United States must continue to ensure that justice is served.

According to a news release from Italian police last year, officials there acting on information from the U.S. Homeland Security Department and Interpol located Yarrington in the town of Paola on the Tyrrhenian Sea, where hed apparently been living for several months under a false name. Italian police followed him to Florence, where they arrested the former governor near the citys historic center.

Tamaulipas current governor, Francisco Garcia Cabeza de Vaca, said in a statement that Yarrington will be finally presented to the courts to answer for the crimes committed against the Tamaulipas residents.

We trust that this case will become an exemplary precedent so situations like this do not happen again in states like ours, which until now suffer the consequences of the complicity of governments with organized crime, Garcia said. For its part, the Government of Tamaulipas endorses its unwavering commitment to continue fighting corruption and impunity that have so damaged the finances of the State and the safety of the resident families of Tamaulipas.

Guillermo Contreras is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of his stories here. | gcontreras@express-news.net | @gmaninfedland
Probate Court No. 1 Judge Kelly Cross lack of judicial temperament has been the topic of much discussion among courthouse regulars since she took office in 2014.

That became public last week via an admonition issued by Texas State Commission on Judicial Conduct. This should set off all kinds of red flags for voters who will be asked in November whether she should be reelected to the bench. Its hard to see how that answer should be yes.

Among the complaints filed against the judge: she referred to a ward of the court as Maggot Man and made derogatory comments about a couples adult daughters comparing their daughters IQ to that of a pen.

RELATED: State panel slaps Bexar judge who called man 'Mr. Maggot'

The judicial review commission ordered Cross to take an hour of instruction with a mentor, in addition to her required judicial education for the year.

The commission cited Cross for failure to treat litigants, lawyers, and others with whom she deals in an official capacity with patience, dignity, and courtesy, in violation of the canons of the Texas Code of Judicial Conduct.

The hour of extra-judicial training imposed on Cross is a relative slap on the wrist, but the fact that the commission decided to issue a public admonition in the case speaks volumes.

Each year, the commission reviews more than 1,000 cases, but just under one-third merit full investigation. Last year the investigation resulted in eight judges resigning in lieu of discipline. Disciplinary action was taken against 51 other judges. Three of those actions were private and the judges name was not publicly revealed.

Filing a formal grievance against a sitting judge is a risky undertaking for the lawyers and staff who work in the courts and witness questionable behavior.

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The legal and judicial communities are large, but these communities break down into various specialty areas civil, criminal, probate and appellate. Judges and lawyers work together in small groups.

Filing a complaint can bring adverse consequences for those who make a living in the courts, lawyers acknowledge.

Time is money, When they fall out of favor with a judge or the judges pals, lawyers can find themselves routinely last on the docket, having to wait longer to get judges signatures on documents or they get treated rudely in front of their clients.

We hope the rulings in the case will prompt others to speak out. There are some bad judges on the bench in Bexar County whose activities merit investigation.

The maggot man complaint against Cross was filed anonymously with the judicial commission in August 2016. Then, in February, the commission received another complaint.

San Antonio attorney Kathleen K.T. Whitehead provided the commission with affidavits from several of her clients who complained of their treatment before Cross.

In an appearance before the commission earlier this month, Cross stated she had no specific recollection of making derogatory comments about a ward in her court, but did not question the veracity of the three witnesses who signed statements about what they heard.

More troubling is Cross assertion before the commission that the charges leveled against her are all part of a political conspiracy.

Judge Cross maintained throughout her appearance that she is the victim of a conspiracy orchestrated by Ms. Whitehead and the Judges political opponents to ruin her reputation and hurt her chances for re-election, the commission said in its findings of facts in the case.

We find her failure to accept responsibility revealing.

Cross tenure on the bench has been rough.

She had big shoes to fill when she was elected to replace a long-tenured and well-respected judge who retired. She did not make things any easier for herself when she fired the countys only mental health judge and replaced him with a political appointee with much less experience in that area of the law.

Complicating things even further was a long heated battle with county commissioners over funding for the post, which resulted in litigation that Cross won in court.

Things have not gotten any better for Cross in recent months.

She faced opposition in her own partys primary and is facing the mental health judge she fired on the ballot in November.

Cross came to the bench armed with expertise in guardianship law, but the job requires more than that. An hour with a mentor is not going to result in any drastic changes to an individuals behavior.

The general election is still more than six months away. We will be watching for changes in this court, but, at the moment, its hard to see how Cross could merit our recommendation.
There are mounting calls this week for undercover cameras to be positioned in litter blackspots across the county after yet another incident of illegal dumping was reported in one of south Longfords most scenic locations.

Childrens toys, cooking utensils and the remnants of a muddied tumble dryer were found discarded along the Askey Road, three miles from Newtowncashel by a horrified local resident just over a week ago.



Local Cllr Gerald Farrell said he immediately took it upon himself to visit the area and was outraged by what he saw.



Its just horrible. There was a lot of stuff left there that could have easily been recycled, he said.

Cllr Farrell said the incident bore similar hallmarks to an almost identical dumping episode in Longford town barely a week earlier.

Like the Askey Road incident, it was a local resident who spotted the unsightly remains of domestic household waste while out walking in the Farnagh Hill area of Longford town.

That was followed by what has been described as blatant and strategic dumping in Dromard last week.

Read also 'Trailer load' of rubbish dumped in Longford town



In an email sent to the Leader's offices over the weekend, Dromard Tidy Villages said they had recovered no less than eight pairs of shoes, food and general household waste following an incident last Wednesday evening.



This is not acceptable and will not be tolerated, the group stated.



They were sentiments Cllr Farrell endorsed, saying the growing propensity of indiscriminate dumping across the local countryside was starting to spiral out of control.



This type of carry on in this day and age is just not on, said the Lanesboro publican.



There are so many ways to recycle now and to think this happened in the heart of Bord Na Monas peatlands along a busy road where people commute to Longford for work and shopping purposes.

Asked to outline how best to clamp down on illegal fly-tipping activity, Cllr Farrell insisted the time had come for tighter enforcement measures to be ushered in right across the county.

Clamp Down

I just think the only way we can clamp down on these people is to put covert cameras up in (litter) blackspots where this kind of thing goes on, he added.



Newtowncashel is a former Tidy Towns winner and to think we are trying our best to promote Longford as a tourism destination, its just not on.

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Eamon Farrells Town & Country Bar closed it doors for the last time late last year and was sold in December.

Eamon ran the pub for 43 years and when he started out first, there was 43 public houses in Longford town.

And while the number of pubs has declined substantially in the intervening years, Eamons reasons for shutting up shop was because the business simply wasnt there any longer to keep the premises open.

Hard Graft

Its hard work running a bar these days, he told the Leader.

In fact midweek is a disaster, but business is good at the weekend.

Meanwhile, as the old song says, the times they are a changin and faced with this fact, Eamon decided before Christmas to get out of the bar trade altogether and he placed his much loved bar on the market.

I made the decision to sell before Christmas and there was a lot of interest to be honest, he smiled, before pointing out that a sale finally went through in January.

At the moment I feel fantastic and I would never go into the bar business again.

Read also: Iconic Granard business Pettit's closes after 310 years

Over the years the bar hosted such luminaries as the Dubliners and at least three thousand people claim to have been in the bar the night that Hollywood star and Longford son, Will Ferrell, visited the famed hostelry.

I had great time in the Town & Country; people came to the pub from every county in Ireland over the years and I truly had great times, he recalled.

The one thing I will miss most is the people; I will miss meeting the people and the banter that goes with it.

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A woman who appeared before Longford District Court charged under the Theft & Fraud Offences Act was convicted and fined 200 following a hearing into the matter.

Theresa McDonagh, Moneen Road, Castlebar, Co Mayo appeared before Judge Seamus Hughes charged with stealing goods to the value of 46 at Penneys, Longford on September 30 last.

Evidence

Outlining the evidence to the court, Inspector Blaithin Moran said that on the date in question the defendant entered the store with her sister and took 46 worth of clothing.

She then left without paying for the items, the court heard.

The court was then told that all the goods were later recovered by gardai and returned to the local retail store.

Mitigation

In mitigation, the defendants solicitor Frank Gearty said the matters before the court dated as far back as 2016 and the items had long since been recovered.

She has a seven week old baby and is very anxious to deal with matters today, he added.

Meanwhile, following his deliberations on the matter, Judge Hughes convicted the defendant and fined her 200 in respect of the charges before him.
One of Longford towns busiest pedestrian walkways will finally have traffic ramps installed after several years of local political campaigning.

Grafton Court, the main connection point linking Main Street to Longford Shopping Centre, has routinely come in for concern over both the speed and volume of traffic which avail of its passageway on a daily basis.

Read also: Calls to pedestrianise Longford town's Grafton Court

The persistent representations of local politicians to bring about a resolution to the issue had been delayed, in part, due to noise pollution concerns.

I can assure you there is more noise coming from the flats overhead, Cllr Seamus Butler said at a previous meeting when fears over noise were debated.

This (issue) has been going on for two years and it's (area) crying out for it.

If we (Council) can put them (ramps) in Teffia (Park) and Grian Ard, then let's bloody well put them in in Grafton Court.

Green light for ramps

Now, council officials have given the go-ahead to the move after revealing the news on its website last week.

Cllr Gerry Warnock said the project was part of the councils wider regeneration drive for the Grafton Court and Tesco car park area.

"This has been a long burning issue for traders and shoppers in the area who quite correctly had safety concerns regarding the speed of traffic accessing the area from Main Street.

"We discussed pedestrianising the area but through consultation with the traders it was felt that this would not be in their economic interests, he said.

Read also:

Project Ireland 2040: A victory for Longford as the county dodges a bullet - Cllr Gerry Warnock

Cllr Warnock said the works set out will provide for a Low Cost Safety Scheme aimed at introducing a pedestrian crossing, new energy efficient LED Lighting, footpath replacement and Resurfacing as well as the remarking and landscaping of Tesco Carpark.

We have identified the required funding and plans are at an advanced stage, he said.



We feel that these works will lift the aesthetics of what is a key shopping area in Longford Town whilst addressing the public safety concerns.

Its another example of the ambition that all of the (Longford Municipal District) members have to improve the customer experience in our county town and assist local commerce.

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Irish Rail bosses have distanced themselves from possible moves to cut travel times from Longford to Dublin, saying any attempts to do so would cost hundreds of millions of euro to effect.

Head of Corporate Communications Barry Kenny said provisional esimates to trim journeys on the Dublin-Belfast line by just 15 minutes had been costed at 200m.

Mr Kenny did, nonetheless, contend the state-owned railway company had designs on moving to an all-electric or hybrid fleet, but ruled out moving to a higher speed network at this stage.

Read also: 16.00 Dublin to Sligo and 16.30 Sligo to Dublin delayed up to 60 mins due to points issue at Longford



That would mean us (Irish Rail) closing stations and that's something we are not going to do, he said.

Addressing Longford Co Council Members

Mr Kenny's comments were delivered as he addressed local politicians at last week's monthly meeting of Longford County Council.

He said the company was already making plans to take account of increasing passenger numbers with 2018 expected to be its busiest year on record.

He accepted concerns raised by a number of councillors concerning overcrowding and increased anti-social behaviour problems.

Read also: Possible U-turn for Irish Rail on Longford train carriages

Mr Kenny said one overriding way in which both could be mitigated in tandem was by strengtening its own fleet numbers.

We need to fund what we have now before we look at further network expansion, he said.

In terms of overcrowding, customers don't want it and we (Irish Rail) don't want it.

I probably sound like a broken record when I say this but it's a case of more trains, more trains, more trains.

Also Read: Longford wheelchair user left stranded at train station
This Saturday, thousands of shoppers nationwide are planning to leave leave their unwanted plastic packaging at supermarket retailers as part of the Sick of Plastic campaign organised by Friends of the Earth and VOICE Ireland.

The campaign has received widespread public interest over the past month with over 360 people registering as local organisers. The campaigns online map shows events planned at supermarkets from Buncrana to Skibbereen and from Westport to Greystones.

Oisin Coghlan, Director of Friends of the Earth, explained:

We have never seen a response like this before. People are clearly sick of plastic, and Saturdays Shop and Drop action is a chance for shoppers to let supermarkets know we want them to take action.

Were all proud of the success of the plastic bag tax. Now we want supermarkets to reduce their packaging so we dont have to take home more plastic than ever.

The Shop and Drop action is very simple. The campaign is asking people to shop as normal in your local supermarket and then take off the excess plastic packaging at the checkout and leave it with the cashier. Volunteers will be handing out postcards shoppers can sign and hand in outlinin six ways supermarkets can reduce unwanted plastic packaging

Over the past month, Friends of the Earth wrote to the major supermarket retailers to alert them of this action and ask for their support in providing a receptacle on the day for shoppers to leave unwanted packaging after paying for their items. Supervalu, Tesco and Aldi have confirmed they will provide a place on the day for shoppers to recycle their unwanted packaging after payment.

Head of Communications for Friends of the Earth, Dr. Cara Augustenborg, elaborated:

Supermarkets are in the privileged position to be able to influence brands and manufacturers to change their packaging to more benign materials, yet few Irish retailers have shown any intent to address the mounting seas of plastic surrounding our shores."

"Tomorrow, shoppers have an opportunity to encourage supermarkets to play their part in ending to plastic pollution in Ireland, and we believe this will spur the change that is desperately needed to tackle this problem.

Friends of the Earth, alongside VOICE and Zero Waste Ireland, have called for three measures to address plastic pollution in Ireland now, including: a deposit and return scheme on plastic bottles and cans; a levy on single-use plastic items; and a ban on micro-plastics in cosmetics and personal care products. A deposit and return scheme on plastic bottles and cans. Their petition now has over 4,000 signatures.
A former Co Longford primary school principal is to stand trial accused of fraudulently deceiving the Department of Education of 450,000.

Helen OGorman, with an address at 174 Newtown Lawns, Mullingar, Co Westmeath appeared at a sitting of Longford District Court this morning.

Ms OGorman, who had previously served as the principal of St Marys National School in Edgeworthstown, is charged with six counts of falsely attesting to the number of pupils at the school in order to acquire the services of a greater number of teachers and grant aid than the school was entitled to.

All the charges, which run in accordance with Section 7 of the Criminal Justice Act, are contained in a Book of Evidence that were served on Ms OGorman.

The former school principal was issued with an alibi warning by Judge Seamus Hughes, meaning Ms OGorman must provide the State within 14 days details of an alibi she intends to rely on in her defence.

Sgt Tom Quinn gave evidence of arrest, charge and caution.

When he outlined the facts, Judge Hughes asked why there had been no inspections carried out at the school.

Sgt Quinn replied, saying there hadnt been an inspection carried out at St Marys National School for years.

Frank Gearty, defending, on behalf of Luie Kiernan, said it was imperative to state that there was no personal gain obtained from the charges before the court.

Ms OGorman was granted bail and returned for trial to the next sitting of Longford Circuit Court on May 31 2018.
Funding of 551,559 will be made available for Longford through his Departments Social Inclusion and Community Activation Programme (SICAP).



Fine Gael TD for Longford/Westmeath Peter Burke confirmed the news this morning.

This support which will make a real difference to disadvantaged people and pockets in Longford. The SICAP funding is extremely targeted and supports life-long learning and helping the unemployed to become job ready," commented Deputy Burke.

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He added, SICAP is administered by Pobal and overseen at a community level by the Local Community Development Committees. In Longford, it has a proven track record of helping disadvantaged people to make real progress in their lives.

The programme supports unemployed people; people living in all areas; people with disabilities; single parent families; those on low income and other disadvantaged groups.

Schemes like this are extremely important as we try to make sure the benefits of our buoyant economy are felt by everyone.

Also read: Jobs boost on way as Longford firm buys council building

Significantly, employment has increased, and unemployment has decreased in Longford but there is further progress to be made to get Longford unemployment levels closer to the national average and approaching what is classed as full employment. This targeted money will do just that. Even during the boom years, when employment was considered full, there were people who were experiencing long term unemployment due to a variety of reasons and barriers. These are the people the Government needs to target, to support and to assist in the jobs market as we have more money again to distribute.

This announcement demonstrates the Governments commitment to providing funding to tackle poverty and social exclusion at a local level for the next five years up to 2022. SICAP provides support to those who need it most in all corners of Ireland, from inner city Dublin and across rural Ireland. The half a million euro will go far in Longford and is much needed and deserved.

"Individuals and groups can visit their Local Development Company to receive the support they need. The programme is a great example of local engagement working well within the framework of a national programme."

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Nature & Weather, Local News, Health & Wellness, Politics

By Long Island News & PR Published: April 20 2018

New Energy Efficiency 2025 Target is Equivalent to Energy Used by 1.8 Million Homes.

Albany, NY - April 20, 2018 - Governor Andrew M. Cuomo today announced an ambitious acceleration of energy efficiency in New York, including a comprehensive plan to achieve a new target for significant greenhouse gas emission reductions, decrease consumer energy costs and create job opportunities. Meeting the new energy efficiency target will deliver nearly one third of the greenhouse gas emissions reductions needed to meet New York's climate goal of 40 percent reduction by 2030. This announcement is part of the Governor's State of the State proposal to develop a milestone Earth Day energy efficiency target and comprehensive strategy.

"Energy efficiency is the most cost-effective way for New Yorkers to lower utility bills, curb harmful emissions and battle climate change," Governor Cuomo said. "As the federal government abdicates its responsibility to safeguard our environment, we must continue our bold action to reduce emissions and protect all New Yorkers, today and in the future, from the devastating effects of climate change."

"We're aggressively working to make New York more energy efficient with unprecedented goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and address climate change," Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul said. "The strategies to make our state cleaner and greener will result in high-tech jobs for New Yorkers with investments in workforce development. The focus on energy efficiency will not only enhance the environment and create new jobs, it will also lower energy costs for residents and boost the energy economy."

Statewide, New Yorkers pay about $35 billion annually for electricity and heating fuels, and buildings are responsible for 59 percent of statewide greenhouse gas emissions. The new 2025 energy efficiency target will cut emissions and energy costs by incentivizing building developers, commercial and institutional building owners, and residential households to pursue building improvements to reduce energy consumption by 185 trillion BTUs (British thermal units) below forecasted energy use in 2025, the equivalent to energy consumed by 1.8 million New York homes. Meeting the target will accelerate achievement of energy efficiency in the next 7 years by more than 40 percent over the current path. The new energy efficiency target will not only save substantial heating fuels but will set New York State on a path to achieve annual electric efficiency savings of 3 percent of investor-owned utility sales in 2025.

The initiative will support the growth of cost-effective private sector energy efficiency businesses and further Reforming the Energy Vision opportunities for third-parties to partner directly with utilities. These strategies will deliver benefits to New York consumers through new building retrofits, efficient appliances, and innovative technologies like heat pumps. New York's investor-owned utilities will also be called on to achieve significantly more in both scale and innovation through their energy efficiency activities. By accelerating innovation to deliver energy efficiency solutions, New York will cut emissions by cost-effectively reducing electricity and building fuel demand across the state. This initiative will support the Clean Energy Standard mandate to generate 50 percent of the state's electricity through renewable energy sources by 2030 and build on New York's national leadership on clean energy and climate change.

Energy efficiency is a significant part of New York State's clean energy economy, with more than 110,000 New Yorkers employed in energy efficiency-related jobs. The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority will commit an additional $36.5 million to train over 19,500 New Yorkers for clean energy jobs to support this rapidly growing industry.

Richard Kauffman, Chairman of Energy and Finance of New York State said, "Under Governor Cuomo's leadership, New York is taking tremendous strides to reduce the costs of clean energy, support private sector investment, grow the clean energy economy across the state, and create opportunities for new good jobs. All New Yorkers will benefit as the market delivers energy efficiency more cost-effectively, creating a healthier and safer environment in the process."

DEC Commissioner Basil Seggos said, "While the federal government continues to shrug off its responsibility to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and address the threat of our changing climate, New York is accelerating progress toward a cleaner and more resilient state. Governor Cuomo has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to protecting and enhancing our environment. Energy efficiency is an effective tool to battle climate change that will benefit New Yorkers by reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, saving consumers money on their energy bills, and protecting our natural resources."

State Labor Commissioner Roberta Reardon said, "The clean energy industry is where the jobs of the future will be created, and thanks to Governor Cuomo, New York is on the cutting edge. By investing in clean energy sources, New York is leading the way towards a greener and more prosperous future. In New York, we don't wait for others to lead, we act. Our State's economic growth is undeniable and the Governor understands that to maintain it, we must act boldly and that's exactly what this acceleration plan achieves."

Alicia Barton, President and CEO, NYSERDA said, "Today's efficiency target solidifies New York's leadership position in the global fight against climate change and memorializes Governor Cuomo's commitment to energy efficiency as a cornerstone of his clean energy agenda. This bold policy leadership coupled with NYSERDA's workforce training investments will inject greater momentum into the state's fast-growing clean energy sector, which already employs over 146,000 workers today and is serving as an engine for economic growth in every region of our state."

John Rhodes, Chair of the Public Service Commission said, "New York is committed to transitioning to clean energy, and we will ensure all customers - particularly those who are often left out of market transitions - see the benefits. The ambitious energy efficiency target announced by Governor Cuomo today helps ensure we meet our clean energy and climate objectives as intelligently and effectively as possible."

Rhea Suh, President of the Natural Resources Defense Council said, "This is what climate leadership looks like. Governor Cuomo's plan catapults New York into the forefront of energy efficiency - the cheapest, cleanest and quickest way to avoid the power plant pollution causing climate change and threatening our health. This dramatic increase in energy savings will lower utility bills for all New Yorkers, create thousands of new jobs, and clean our air. At a time when national climate leadership is sadly lacking, Governor Cuomo is an inspiring example of how states can step up and lead in the greatest fight of our lives. We have much more to do, but this landmark decision marks a key turning point. By establishing an ambitious and nation-leading energy-saving target, the Governor has shown strong environmental leadership yet again."

Anne Reynolds, Executive Director of the Alliance for Clean Energy New York said, "This new commitment to energy efficiency is excellent news for an industry that already employs 110,000 New Yorkers, and now will employ more. Efficiency is extremely valuable to the environment, to utility customers, and to a clean and resilient grid. Our industry looks forward to capturing that value and to installing energy efficiency measures in homes and businesses all across New York. We look forward to working with the utilities, the state and all stakeholders to ensure Governor Cuomo's exciting goals yield real and timely results."

Rory Christian, New York Director of Clean Energy, Environmental Defense Fund said, "On top of cutting costs and creating healthier communities, energy efficiency will play a valuable role in helping New York meet its ambitious climate goals. Today's announcement sends a clear signal to the market that the state is committed to energy efficiency, which will go hand in hand with strengthening grid modernization and renewable energy efforts and sends a clear signal to the market that New York's commitment to act on climate is here to stay."

David Hepinstall, Executive Director of the Association for Energy Affordability said, "We are pleased Governor Cuomo has embraced energy efficiency as a key component of his clean energy and climate vision. Establishing energy efficiency targets for the utilities is a necessary first step in valuing efficiency as an energy resource. We look forward to working with the utilities and the State of New York to meet the targets through the inclusion of multifamily buildings where a large portion of low income New Yorkers reside, and where efficiency can help create safe and affordable housing."

Greg Lancette, President, Central-Northern NY Building Trades said, "The trades of Central and Northern NY, representing 5500 working families, look forward to continued efforts of Governor Cuomo to promote energy efficiency through the use of technology and clean energy investments. We look forward to partnering with NYSERDA to create and enhance the skill sets of thousands of works in the clean energy economy."

William M. Lynn, Business Manager and Financial Secretary, I.U.O.E. Local 30 said, "IUOE Local 30 members power and maintain facilities in New York. Governor Cuomo is leading the national effort to create a clean energy economy that benefits our environment and establishes new paths to the middle class for working people. A fair, clean energy economy means unions must be partners and have a seat at the table with government and business which is exactly what is happening under Governor Cuomo's leadership. This initiative is a substantial investment in new training for workers in our industry and will provide important opportunities for our members. We want to thank Governor Cuomo for his continued commitment to union members throughout New York State."

As part of this new energy efficiency target and recognizing the critical importance to include the state's most vulnerable residents, Governor Cuomo is also directing the Public Service Commission (PSC) to ensure that a substantial portion of the new energy efficiency activity be directly targeted to programs for low to moderate income New Yorkers, which will complement the State's existing progressive energy options for these New Yorkers. To implement this vision, individuals and organizations representing low to moderate income and environmental justice communities will be engaged and consulted to design impactful solutions, including the Governor's Environmental Justice and Just Transition Work Group. The State will build on the initiatives underway in the CEF by working with stakeholders and others to advance innovative net zero energy retrofit prototypes for affordable housing, facilitating the adoption of energy efficiency improvements under Medicaid as a component of healthy homes interventions, and advancing the market for zero energy modular homes.

The strategy for achieving the new energy efficiency target also requires that New York identify opportunities by which state facilities can lead by example. NYSERDA and the New York State Department of Public Service are proposing innovative strategies and tools to achieve the target, including energy benchmarking to measure progress, accelerated building codes with implementation support from the Clean Energy Fund, and investment in heat pumps to deliver low carbon solutions for heating and cooling. Advancing clean energy technologies that support beneficial electrification in heating, cooling, and hot water also helps improve the efficiency of the electric grid to the benefit of all customers. NYSERDA and DPS have engaged with over 60 public and private sector stakeholder organizations in developing a strategy for this innovative and ambitious initiative.

Following this announcement, DPS and NYSERDA are submitting a White Paper into the PSC energy efficiency proceeding to determine the mix of programs, policies and regulations that will be necessary to achieve the 2025 target while reducing consumer costs. The proceeding will assess the viability of various program and policy options to dramatically increase energy efficiency and advance an all-fuels approach to achieve energy savings that most benefit New Yorkers.

Reforming the Energy Vision
Local News, Crime

By Long Island News & PR Published: April 20 2018

Mercedes Ramos, 19, was driving eastbound on Sunrise Highway near Exit 53 when the vehicle crashed into the rear of a Truck, cops say.

East Patchogue, NY - April 20, 2018 - Suffolk County Police arrested a woman for driving while intoxicated following a crash during which two officers rescued her from a burning vehicle in Suffolk County Police arrested a woman for driving while intoxicated following a crash during which two officers rescued her from a burning vehicle in East Patchogue this morning.

Mercedes Ramos was driving a 2016 Nissan Rogue eastbound on Sunrise Highway near Exit 53 when the vehicle crashed into the rear of a 2000 MACK Roll-Off Container Truck, driven by a man, at approximately 4:20 a.m. The front end of the Rogue became stuck under the rear of the truck. The truck dragged the Rogue for approximately one-quarter mile before the driver realized what had happened and brought the truck to a stop on the right shoulder of the roadway. The Rogue caught fire with the woman trapped inside. Two passing motorists, a 37-year-old man from Coplay, Pennsylvania and a 41-year-old man from Ridge, New York stopped to try and free Ramos from the Rogue.

When Highway Patrol Officers Richard Gandolfo and John McCrory arrived at the scene, they joined the two men and extricated the Ramos from the burning vehicle. North Patchogue Fire Department responded and extinguished the fire.

Ramos was transported to Long Island Medical Center in East Patchogue with non-life-threatening injuries. The two officers and the Pennsylvania man were transported to the same hospital where they were treated for minor burns and smoke inhalation and released. The Ridge man and the truck driver were not injured.

Ramos, 19, of Medford was arrested and charged with Driving While Intoxicated. She was issued a Field Appearance Ticket and will be arraigned at a later date.
Local News, Crime

By Long Island News & PR Published: April 20 2018

The ATVs were removed sometime between the evening of April 11 and the early morning hours of April 12, officials report.

SCPD are seeking the individuals who stole two quad ATVs in Hampton Bays.

Hampton Bays, NY - April 20, 2018 - Suffolk County Crime Stoppers and Southampton Town Police detectives are seeking the publics help to identify and locate the individuals who stole two quad ATVs from a residence in Suffolk County Crime Stoppers and Southampton Town Police detectives are seeking the publics help to identify and locate the individuals who stole two quad ATVs from a residence in Hampton Bays this month.

Unknown suspect(s) stole two quad ATVs (actual photos above) from a residence in Hampton Bays. They were removed sometime between the evening of April 11 and the early morning hours of April 12. They are a 2016 Black/Yellow Yamaha 700 VIN# 5Y4AM86Y4GA104880, and a 2013 Blue/White Yamaha 450 (red rear rims) VIN#JY4AJ37Y6DC012459.
Local News, Crime, Health & Wellness, Politics

By Long Island News & PR Published: April 20 2018

According to the FDA, a single teaspoon of powdered, pure caffeine is equivalent to about 25 cups of coffee  a potentially toxic dose of caffeine.

Hauppauge, NY - April 20, 2018 - The Food and Drug Administration has weighed in on Suffolk Countys 2014 law, the first in the nation to ban the sale of powdered caffeine to minors, by banning the sale of powdered caffeine sold in bulk.

Suffolk County Legislature Presiding Officer DuWayne Gregory and Legislator William R. Spencer, M.D., sponsors of the county law, expressed gratitude during a press conference yesterday at the William H. Rogers Legislature Building in Hauppauge . The Legislators had traveled to Washington, D.C. in 2014 to speak about the dangers of powdered caffeine and urge the FDA to implement a federal ban.

Presiding Officer Gregory said, We are certainly pleased that the FDA has done its due diligence, looked at how dangerous this is and the potential for loss of life, and made the decision to protect our young people. This is a rare undertaking for the FDA, that they would move forward on a ban, and it emphasizes the critical nature of what we have done here. We are happy that the process has worked.

Laura MacCleery, Policy Director for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, issued a statement saying, We are delighted that the excellent advocacy by lawmakers has resulted in decisive action by FDA to make consumers safer from the risks of pure, bulk caffeine products and appreciate that lawmakers from New York, including Presiding Officer DuWayne Gregory and Legislator William Spencer, M.D., came down to D.C. to push for this terrific outcome.

The measure bans highly concentrated products in either powdered or liquid form that sold in bulk, which contain hundreds of potentially lethal doses of caffeine. According to the FDA, a single teaspoon of powdered, pure caffeine is equivalent to about 25 cups of coffee  a potentially toxic dose of caffeine.

Legislator Spencer said, The recommended dose is 1/16 of a teaspoonful. Can you imagine a consumer trying to deal with this product at home? Our young people today are more stressed than ever to do well in school, to do well in college. They can turn to caffeine to stay up to perform, but when you look at caffeine, one teaspoonful is potentially lethal. There is no antidote. Caffeine stays in the system and keeps attacking the system over and over. So this is important. Its a very special occasion, and its national news.
After a five year gap of time, Simon Chetrit, Man Repellers roving street photographer, returned to Morocco. Ever on the hunt for style that tells a personal story, Simon, who is of Moroccan descent and grew up visiting family in Marrakech, Casablanca and Arfoud, packed his camera and roamed the streets of Marrakech.

It was an incredibly enriching experience to return, he says of his trip back. He cited an inspiring mix of hyper-modern and traditional clothing, color  so many bright colors (a shock to his senses given all the New-York-City black to which hes accustomed), and the convening of cultures from all over the world. But Simons not one to simply tell. Through the lens of street style, he shows.

26 PHOTOS click for more

Click through the slideshow for photos of the people (and their outfits) Simon encountered. And below, a bit more about Simon, the man behind the camera.

Whats your relationship with Morocco?

I feel incredibly blessed to have a distinct identity as a Moroccan Jew. Moroccan Jews have, for the most part, always been welcomed by the broader Moroccan society. I spent a lot of summers in Morocco with my family as a kid, and returned there often for weddings, bar mitzvahs, religious events Ive gone dozens of times over my life and have always drawn inspiration from it. The culture, the history, the art, the foodit could take lifetimes to fully explore.

Morocco has opened my eyes to color, to completely different shapes in clothing (like djellabas and kaftans), incredible jeweled headdresses from the Berbersthe list goes on. It also opened my eyes to the importance of diversity and representation within the subject matter of my photos (statistically speaking, Arabs and Central/South Asian people are the least represented people overall in the fashion industry and in modeling). The more time that I spend there, and the more that I read and learn about Morocco, the many cultures and civilizations which have been there, and the history, the more I am inspired and enriched.

These photos are all from Marrakech. Any trends you noticed within the city?

One of the coolest things about Morocco is that every city has its own unique color motif  Marrakechs is green and red like the flag; Essaouira is blue and white like the beach; Chefchaouen is all one particular shade of blue, and all the residents of that city dress accordingly. You see a lot of red and green combos in Marrakech, and its pretty cool to see coming from black-head-to-toe, ever-so-cool NYC.

If you could describe the energy and style of Marrakech in a word, what would it be?

Beguiling.

Regardless of city, whats it like to take a photo of someone whos used to posing for the camera versus someone who isnt?

For people who are used to being photographed, its no big deal; they go on with their day afterwards like it never happened.

For those people who are very rarely photographed or even ordinarily excluded from fashion, it can be a big deal. People have written me thank you emails; theyve been overwhelmingly grateful that I even bothered to notice them and their outfit enough to take their picture, as happened a few times in Morocco. You forget the power that taking a picture of someone can have. You really can make someones entire day.

What makes you stop someone to take their photo?

Its hard to say but, when you know, you know. After a few years of having to evaluate literally hundreds of outfits in a few moments to pick out which ones to photograph, when an outfit works, it just hits you  almost any street style photographer can see this. Me, personally, I notice the silhouette first, especially if its one Im not used to seeing or one thats totally different, then the material, color, etc. I notice anything that might belong to another culture, another time period

I give massive bonus points for originality, even if I hate the outfit. Its hard to be specific, but when you see it, you just know.

How has taking street style photos impacted your eye for style?

It has made me much much better at taking shots of people walking, ha. Seriously though, before, I would almost never have models move or walk or spin or anything in shoots  it was very dour and serious all the time. It has definitely given me a huge appreciation for the beauty of movement, and what someones outfit says about who they are, their background, what they love and feel close to.

What are some things youve learned about people from taking photos of them?

No matter where you go in the world, no matter the cultural background, the language, the country, whatever  people are fundamentally the same, and when you have a camera in hand, must be approached with trepidation, charm and respect. Most people can understand that you want to take their picture because you like their style in just a few quick gestures, and often I dont even need to exchange any words at all. Style is something truly universal.

Photos by Simon Chetrit.
Meet entrepreneurs, engineers, surgeons and other key players in the ecosystem at the Fifth Annual Rosenman Symposium, a half-day conference held at the UCSF Mission Bay campus on Wednesday, June 20.

Registration is free. Join the 450+ who have already registered by reserving your spot today.

The symposium, a forum for the growing health technology community in San Francisco, features leading speakers from industry, and lightning pitches by founders of selected startups.

The event is produced by the Rosenman Institute, a University of California initiative based at UCSF Mission Bay. The institute helps entrepreneurs commercialize medical device technologies by forging connections with resources such as legal help, mentoring, funding, and industry partners.

Featured speakers include Benson Smith, Chairman, Teleflex; Tejal Desai, Chair, Department of Bioengineering & Therapeutic Sciences, UC San Francisco; Joe DeSimone, CEO & Co-Founder, Carbon; Jeffrey Shuren, Director, Center for Devices & Radiological Health, FDA; and Andrew Thompson, CEO, Proteus Digital Health.

The symposium presentations will conclude with a panel discussion, The Future of Innovation in Health Technologies: Aligning All the Stakeholders, moderated by Josh Makower, General Partner, NEA. Panel members include Tim Homer, VP Health Policy, Market Access & Government Affairs, iRhythm; Wende Hutton, General Partner, Canaan Partners; Kate Rosenbluth, CEO & Co-Founder, Cala Health; Renee Compton Ryan, VP, Venture Investments, J&J Innovation; and the FDAs Jeffrey Shuren.

Through the afternoon, attendees will hear rapid presentations from the Rosenman Innovators: the founders of 10 startups selected in the 2018 cycle of a yearly competition to receive in-kind services from top providers and introductions to investors and industry partners.

A networking reception with speakers, founders, and attendees follows the presentations.

The Rosenman Symposium is sponsored by Brown Rudnick, iO lifescience, MedTech Venture Partners, Nipro, J&J Innovation JJDC, and Silicon Valley Bank. The symposium partner is UCSF-Stanford CERSI and the media partner is Medgadget.

About the Rosenman Institute

The Rosenman Institute is the health technology initiative of QB3, the University of Californias hub for entrepreneurship in life science. The Institutes mission is to drive medical device innovation and education and improve patient care by helping entrepreneurs develop technologies from concept to commercialization. Visit http://rosenmaninstitute.org/
by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, April 20, 2018

TD Ameritrade became the first company to embed an advertisement in the blockchain with assistance from its agency of record, Havas New York.

The campaign, titled Greetings from the Blockchain, aims to celebrate the growing community of blockchain innovators and investors, and highlight how new technologies continue to change consumer behavior and expectations.

Innovation is TD Ameritrades legacy. The company continually tests new ways to use technologies.

I started in digital advertising in 1995, and I remember at Hill Holliday when the first banner ad came up from AT&T, said Denise Karkos, CMO at TD Ameritrade. "I have always thought about firsts. With our heritage of firsts as a brand, wouldnt it be fun to be the first to advertise in the blockchain?

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There is no expectation beyond creating a little buzz for the brand and enjoying the process, Karkos said. TD Ameritrade also was the first brokerage firm to provide access to bitcoin futures, she said.

Karkos worked with Harry Bernstein, Chief Creative Officer, Havas New York and Peter Gosselin, creative director, Havas New York, among others, to bring the ad to life.

The ad is made up of ASCII art and can only be viewed visually on a landing page.

The landing page also links to information about each bitcoin transaction and how ad the ad was built.

Havas and TD Ameritrade were able to place the ad in function of the blockchain called OP_Return, which works like the memo space on a check. Simple messages and characters can be placed within transactions on the blockchain. By linking 68 individual transactions, with 80 characters per transaction, the two companies managed to create the larger image.

All the new technologies are fundamentally changing customer expectations and behaviors, Karkos, said. For TD Ameritrade, thats the core of who we are. Innovation is our legacy.

While there are no plans to run a TV ad, TD Ameritrade and Havas will create a social-media campaign as a way to create buzz around the campaign.
UK Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham is calling for more power to investigate privacy breaches.

In a speech at the IAPP Europe Data Protection Intensive 2018 in London this week, she called for streamlined warrant processes with a lower threshold than we currently have in law.

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) is now in intense consultation with government to make sure the pending Data Protection Bill gives the ICO the ability to move more quickly, in preparation for the EUs General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Denham mentioned this need in the context of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the ICO's probes into that and other situations.

In all, we are looking at 30 organizationssocial media platforms, data companies, campaigns and political parties to pull back the curtain on the use of personal data in modern political campaigns, she said.

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She added, however, that in the context of this probe, the GDPR audit power is already being outpaced by technological advances in data analytics. I want to see this addressed.

For example, We have to look for inter-relatedness between data sets and the effect they have on decisions, she said. We may need to see these effects in short time periods in the context of a fast-moving investigation.

Denham noted that she senses a shift in the posture of industry with regards to privacy regulation in the US, although she did not offer specific details.

According to Denham, Parliament has agreed to a funding increase from 24 million to 38 million for the ICO in 2018/2019.

In addition, the ICO is recruiting at all levels of staff, including 10 newly created director roles, and expects to have a headcount of 700 by 2020, up from 520 at present.

In general, Denham also said, We need the regime to reflect the reality that data crimes are real crimes.

She concluded, If we find that the law has been broken, we will take the necessary enforcement action.
by Steve McClellan @mp_mcclellan, April 20, 2018

Dentsu Aegis digital agency Isobar has appointed Deb Boyda as U.S. CEO, with a mandate to drive growth and innovation.

Boyda replaces Geoff Cubitt who left the agency earlier this year to pursue other opportunities.

Boyda will oversee all U.S. operations for the agency that now counts 562 employees across offices in New York, Chicago, Connecticut, Boston, Detroit and Denver.

She joins Isobar from Publicis Groupes SapientRazorfish where she oversaw the Chicago and Austin offices as central region president for the past four years. Earlier Boyda was vice president and General Manager at Beam Global Spirits & Wine, where she led the marketing for brands including Skinnygirl, Courvoisier and Pinnacle.

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Boydas career has spanned several decades and includes leadership roles at Miller Brewing Company, Ogilvy and Mather, Leo Burnett and EuroRSCG.

In finding the right CEO for Isobar we were looking for a great leader whos passionate about brands, creativity and experience-led transformation, stated Nick Brien, CEO, Americas, Dentsu Aegis Network, and to whom Boyda will report. Deb brings together all of these ingredients and will be a key driver propelling Isobar to the next level in the critical U.S. market.

The appointment is effective today and she will be based at the agencys Chicago office.
by Wendy Davis @wendyndavis, April 20, 2018

The Association of National Advertisers is concerned that revelations of Cambridge Analytica's data harvesting from Facebook will result in hurried privacy laws.

"Sometimes the cure can make the disease worse," ANA executive vice president of government relations Dan Jaffe tells MediaPost. "What we do should be very, very carefully thought out."

Federal lawmakers recently introduced two separate bills that could require companies to obtain consumers' explicit consent to the collection or use of their information. The newest of the proposals, the CONSENT (Customer Online Notification for Stopping Edge-provider Network Transgressions) Act, unveiled last week by Sens. Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), would also require web companies to develop reasonable security practices and to notify users about data breaches.

Various states are also considering privacy laws.

One effort that has attracted particular attention is the Consumer Right to Privacy Act, a California ballot initiative that would give consumers the right to learn the "categories" of personal information collected and shared about them by all companies, brick-and-mortar as well as online. The proposed measure also gives consumers the right to prevent that data from being shared. Backers say they expect to garner the 365,880 signatures needed for the measure to appear on the ballot this November.

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Jaffe says that the ANA plans to become active with a coalition opposing the initiative, which he says would result in an "extraordinarily disadvantageous" situation for companies.

Google, Comcast, Verizon and AT&T recently contributed $200,000 each to a coalition that's fighting the California proposal. Last week, in the wake of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's testimony to Congress, a spokesman said Facebook will instead "focus our efforts on supporting reasonable privacy measures in California."

While lawmakers have proposed privacy measures before, revelations that President Trump's consultancy, Cambridge Analytica, obtained data from up to 87 million Facebook users appear to have given the efforts new momentum.

Jaffe adds that the ANA will urge lawmakers to wait and see what develops in Europe, which will be subject to a new privacy regime in May when the General Data Protection Regulation goes into effect. The GDPR will broadly require companies to obtain consumers' consent to the use of their data, but it's still unclear how EU regulators will interpret the measure.

"We can learn from other people's wisdom, and can also learn from other people's mistakes," Jaffe says. "They're going to go through the land mines, and will probably step on a few."

The ANA sounded the alarm about the proposals in a blog post this week. "U.S. companies continue to be the clear leaders in the worldwide digital economy. Consequently, we should be extremely careful to avoid any proposed steps that could hobble or undermine this sector," Jaffe wrote.
For centuries, weve dreamt of the existence of mermaids and mermen, or people of the seas who can breathe under water. What if these beings were not, in fact, mythical creatures, but real people? They may not have evolved gills yet, but their bodies have adapted to support their frequent freedives.

Share on Pinterest Sea nomads from the islands of Southeast Asia have adapted to find it easier to freedive at considerable depths.

Recently, videos and articles featuring people who don elaborate fish-like tails and make a living by posing as merfolk have become extremely popular online.

They often work as entertainers or activists, promoting the preservation of natural underwater environments.

They are also, more often than not, professional divers who recognize the many difficulties that come with the passion for being under water  such as holding their breath for as long as possible.

Holding your breath can be dangerous, because you become deprived of oxygen that  carried by the blood flow to all extremities of your body  feeds your organs and helps them to stay alive and functional.

Normally, we cant hold our breath for more than a few seconds, although professional freedivers  who spend years training their bodies to get used to staying under water for longer  can hold their breath for around 3 minutes.

Across the world, there are small populations that, for many generations, have made their living out of freediving. In Japan, for instance, ama divers are women who dive in search of pearl oysters and seafood.

Their tradition is slowly dying out. However, in the islands of Southeast Asia, some populations  specifically, the Bajau people  are known as sea nomads. Many of them still practice their freediving lifestyle, which also provides them with their livelihood on a day-to-day basis.

The Bajau freedive for food every single day at dizzying depths of more than 70 meters  hunting fish and octopi, or gathering sea cucumbers  and they spend 60 percent of their working days under water.

So, how can these people have persisted in this pursuit for generations? And has their freediving in any way influenced how their bodies function?

Melissa Ilardo  a former doctoral student at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City  has been fascinated with the Bajau peoples sea nomad lifestyle, and she had a theory.

Perhaps the bodies of the Bajau had evolved over generations to accommodate their freediving needs.
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You wake up in the middle of the night, convinced that an evil figure is lying in wait. You attempt to move, but your body just will not budge. You try to scream, but nothing comes out. The monster draws closer. It may sound like a horror movie scene, but this is the real deal & youre experiencing sleep paralysis.

Sleep paralysis is like a waking nightmare, and the underlying causes for this condition remain unclear. This terrifying and mysterious sleep disorder, or parasomnia, has been experienced by people possibly since the dawn of humankind. And, it may have given rise to numerous ghost stories and mysterious accounts involving things that go bump in the night. This most unsettling experience was first clearly documented in a medical treatise in the 17th century, by Dutch physician Isbrand Van Diembroeck, who wrote about the case of a woman 50 years of age, in good plight [health], strong, yet who complained of mysterious experiences at night. [W]hen she was composing her self to sleep, explains Van Diembroeck, sometimes she believed the devil lay upon her and held her down, sometimes that she was [choked] by a great dog or thief lying upon her breast, so that she could hardly speak or [breathe], and when she endeavored to throw off the [burden], she was not able to stir her members. What the woman in Van Dimbroecks account likely experienced was a condition that has come to be known as sleep paralysis. Researchers define it as a common, generally benign, parasomnia characterized by brief episodes of inability to move or speak combined with waking consciousness.

Sleep paralysis and hallucinations The reason why sleep paralysis is so scary is not just because you will suddenly become alert but realize that you are, in fact, unable to move a muscle or utter a sound, but also because this experience is often  as in the case above  accompanied by terrifying hallucinations. These, as specialized literature has now ascertained, typically fall into three distinct categories: a sensed presence, or intruder hallucinations, in which the person feels the presence of an evil, threatening individual incubus hallucinations, in which the person might feel someone or something pressing down uncomfortably, even painfully, on their chest or abdomen, or trying to choke them vestibular-motor hallucinations, during which the individual thinks that they are floating, flying, or moving  these may also sometimes include out-of-body experiences, in which a person thinks that their spirit or mind has left their body and is moving and observing events from above Among the types of dreamlike hallucinations listed above, the first type  a sensed presence  is one of the most commonly experienced by people with sleep paralysis. As for the time of sleep at which sleep paralysis  with or without hallucinations  normally takes place, again, there is no single answer. According to a study that was published in the Journal of Sleep Research, sleep paralysis typically happens soon after falling asleep (or hypnagogic episodes), at some point during the course of sleep (or hypnomesic episodes), or a little before the persons usual time of awakening (or hypnopompic episodes). The authors of that study note that the most common instances of sleep paralysis are hypnomesic, and that they usually take place after 13 hours from falling asleep. A strange, shadowy man In fact, these visions and sensations can seem so realistic to many people that they may think that they are having a paranormal experience, or even being subjected to strange tests and rituals. Share on Pinterest The most common hallucination linked to sleep paralysis is the sensed presence of a sinister figure. Witness accounts of such hallucinations can be truly unsettling, and a number of long-time experients  such as Louid Proud in his book Dark Intrusions  have offered detailed accounts of years of uncanny nightly encounters. One person who told me about his nightmarish hallucinations said he felt as if someone knelt on [his] chest so that it [felt] as if [he was] being choked out. Another person spoke of a night-time assailant that takes pleasure in tormenting her in myriad ways. When [sleep paralysis] strikes, I get both visual and auditory hallucinations, which most often involve a strange, shadowy man coming up my stairs and into my bedroom. Occasionally, hell prod or tickle me. Often, she told me, this sinister figure even co-opts her partner in his mischief. Sometimes, she says, Ill even hallucinate my partner lying next to me and laughing maliciously at me, or siding with the shadowy figure in annoying me. This is very frustrating, since all I want him to do is help me! Given the intensity of these hallucinatory experiences, it may come as no surprise that researchers have repeatedly argued that hallucinations linked with sleep paralysis can be held responsible for many reports of magical events, sightings of ghouls and demons, and alien abductions. Some happy exceptions Although usually people with sleep paralysis report experiencing terrifying hallucinations, a happy few actually point to a state of bliss that makes them look forward to these episodes. A study that was conducted by James Allan Cheyne, from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, suggests that the people who most often describe experiencing positive feelings and sensations during an episode of sleep paralysis are those who are prone to vestibular-motor hallucinations. These hallucinations were found to involve feelings of floating and [out-of-body experiences], which are associated with feelings of bliss rather than fear. James Allan Cheyne In contrast to the other-oriented nature of the Intruder and Incubus hallucinations, he adds, these experiences are very much focused on the experients own person. Sometimes, Cheyne continues, feelings of bliss during sleep paralysis are derived from pleasant erotic sensations that arise from vestibular-motor hallucinations.

What is the underlying mechanism? So, what happens in the body during an episode of sleep paralysis? Essentially, during the dream phase of sleep  known as the rapid eye movement (REM) phase  our skeletal muscles are paralyzed. The reasons behind this are not fully understood, though researchers have been making progress in uncovering the mechanisms attached to this process. One popular theory posits that this temporary state of paralysis is meant to prevent us from hurting ourselves, perhaps in automatic response to some violent dream. During sleep paralysis, paradoxically, our brains  or parts of our brains  become awake and conscious, but the rest of the body is still immobilized. At the same time, during sleep paralysis, many people experience dream visions and sensations as though they were real  hence the hallucinations  and the fact that they are, in fact, partly awake and conscious blurs the line between reality and dreams.

Who is at risk of sleep paralysis? Sleep paralysis is more common than we may think. A 2016 study declares that it is surprisingly common, but that determining accurate prevalence rates is complicated because researchers and study participants alike have different understandings of what counts as sleep paralysis. Share on Pinterest Although a fair amount of research has been conducted in this respect, it remais unclear as to who is most at risk of sleep paralysis. A recent review of the available data, however, suggests that 7.6 percent of the population have experienced at least one episode throughout their lives. That said, the numbers may be even higher. What causes sleep paralysis, and what the main risks are for experiencing such an episode, remain largely mysterious. Sleep paralysis is a common symptom of the neurological disorder narcolepsy, which is characterized by uncontrollable sleepiness throughout the waking day. But many people who experience sleep paralysis do so independently of neurological conditions. And, to distinguish between narcolepsy-related episodes and independently occurring sleep paralysis, specialists usually refer to the latter as isolated sleep paralysis. Recurrent isolated sleep paralysis often starts in adolescence, and around 28.3 percent of students apparently experience it. Moreover, people with poor sleep hygiene  for instance, those who sleep too much or too little  may also be more likely to experience sleep paralysis. The authors of a systematic review published in Sleep Medicine Reviews note: Specifically, excessively short (fewer than 6 hours) or long (over 9 hours) sleep duration and napping, especially long naps (over 2 hours), were associated with increased odds of sleep paralysis. Long self-reported sleep latency [how long it takes to fall asleep] (over 30 minutes) and difficulty initiating sleep were related to an increased likelihood of reporting sleep paralysis, they add. Are mental health issues to blame? Given the frightening nature of the most of the hallucinations associated with sleep paralysis, many have wondered whether individuals experiencing mental health issues  such as depression or anxiety  are more susceptible to these experiences. The results of existing research, however, are mixed. Some have argued that individuals who have experienced abuse in early life  whether or not they remember it  may be more exposed to sleep paralysis. According to the study that was published in Sleep Medicine Reviews, Levels of waking state dissociative experiences, involving depersonalisation, derealisation, and amnesia, were found to be related to both sleep paralysis frequency and the frequency/intensity of all three hallucination types. But links to other neurological and psychiatric disorders are more uncertain. The authors of a study that was published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition note that previous research has tried to make a case that bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, panic disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder  to name but a few  may play a role in sleep paralysis. However, they report that their analysis of the available data has revealed no general relationship between [isolated sleep paralysis] and major psychopathology. Instead, they decided to focus on the most common symptom of sleep paralysis  that is, sensed presence hallucinations that induce a feeling of fear  and explained that there may be a link between it and what they call passive social imagery. Passive social imagery refers to the experience of individuals who are prone to being more socially anxious, and to imagining themselves in embarrassing or distressing social situations as the passive victim on the receiving end of abuse. These individuals, the researchers suggest, appear to be more at risk of experiencing distress due to sensed presence hallucinations.
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VinCense can be used for health screening in corporate/ industrial set up and for Home Healthcare delivery. It also has applications for non-communicable diseases screening and surveillance, general public health, and community health."The device can also be used to monitor the wellness of the people. Not only the patients, the general public also can wear it like a wristwatch," he said. "At present, the device could cost around Rs 20,000. If the number of devices increased the cost would come down as low as Rs 5,000 and can become affordable to all," he added.This collaboration with MedloTek further leads to algorithms for medical simulation applied to wireless health monitoring systems.It could also lead to early intervention reducing risks and complications and improving clinical outcomes. Some of the applications are close monitoring of high dependency patients like post-operation, rehabilitation, tracking just discharged patients and tracking patients in the ambulance.Source: Medindia
DJ Avicii, the pioneer of the Electronic Dance Movement, is dead. He passed away in Muscat, Oman. He was only 28.

Source: Twitter

Born as Tim Bergling, and famously known as Avicii, the musician is a household name for anyone who doesn't live under a rock. He has won two MTV Music Awards, one Billboard Music Award and earned two Grammy nominations throughout his career.

Source: Twitter

His track 'Wake Me Up', arguably, can be called the King of EDM tracks because it still rules the roost as far as party playlists are concerned across the world. His other hits include 'The Days', 'Levels', 'You make me', and 'Waiting for love'.

Source: Twitter

Interestingly, Avicii got nominated for a Billboard Music Award for top dance/electronic album for his EP Avicii (01), just days before his death.

Source: Twitter

The music world is under a major shock. This definitely is the sort of news that qualifies as a nightmare and all everyone can feel is 'Wake me up when it's all over'. RIP.
Unless you have been living under a rock, or someplace without any Internet connection, the name Banita Sandhu shouldn't sound new to you. Since the time her debut was announced, she has been creating a buzz in B-town for all the right reasons.

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Welsh actress Banita Sandhu is a dusky beauty with magnificent features and, especially, eyes to die for. Her innocent yet sexy look will instantly make you fall for her.

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She made her debut opposite Varun Dhawan in 'October' and has been receiving massive praise for her performance since.

If you have seen the film, we bet you have enjoyed her performance to the fullest.

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She is a 20-year-old Punjabi NRI who spent all her life in London.

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Banita grew up watching Bollywood actors, and she loves Shah Rukh Khan And Aishwarya Rai Bachchan.

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Like any other newcomer, she has her checklist of actors she wishes to work with and we are quite pleased with her choices.

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While speaking to a newspaper, she mentioned how she would love to work with Irrfan Khan, Aamir Khan and Alia Bhatt.

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With this, we believe that she is interested in working with celebrities who are really invested in the characters they play and are not just commercially successful but even do socially relevant films.

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Not many know but Shoojit even praised Banita and said she had to do the maximum amount of hard work for the film. Even Varun complimented her and said she is an extremely selfless actress, a quality very rare to find.

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Actors can go to any lengths to play their character and in doing the same, Banita chopped off her lovely locks for her character Shiuli in the film.

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Though this might be her Bollywood big ticket, very few people know that she has been working since she was 11.

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Describing why he picked Banita for his film, Shoojit said that he was looking out for a new face and felt that she has the potential to fit into the character he was looking at.

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Wonder how they met? It happened while he was shooting an advertisement and Banita was featuring in it.

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Within no time, Banita has made quite a place in the hearts of her Indian fans.

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An English Literature student, Banita received a Bollywood offer during her second year at King's College London.

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She immediately took up the offer. Talking about it to BBC, Banita said, As we had no relatives in India, I had no reason to learn about it or engage with this history. So I loved learning more about the culture and my family's lives, struggles, and traditions.

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Banita became popular after doing a chewing gum ad which had a song 'Ek Ajnabee Haseena Se' in the background.

That small ad made hundreds of people look her up online. As per reports, this is the same ad that Shoojit shot.

 Instagram

Talking about her family, she says My grandparents came to Britain from Punjab, North of India, shortly after World War Two. Both my parents were born here and my sister and I were raised in a middle-class existence in Caerleon.

 Instagram

With just one film, Banita has managed to make a mark in Bollywood and we are sure to see her soon in a lot of movies.
Any kind of sex other than plain old penetration is seen as unnatural by the conservatives. Uganda president Yoweri Museveni has gone ahead and warned the citizens of his country against having oral sex, because he feels 'the mouth is for eating'. *cough* a$$ *cough*

He told media: Let me take this opportunity to warn our people publicly about the wrong practices indulged in and promoted by some of the outsiders. The mouth is for eating, not for sex. [as quoted by OkayAfrica]

We know the address of sex; we know where sex is, he continued.

It is to be noted that homosexuality is already illegal in Uganda. In 2014, the Uganda president had signed the Anti-Homosexuality Act. The punishment for gay sex in Uganda can get you life imprisonment too.

Meanwhile in Uganda, citizens are reminded that "The mouth is for eating" -President Museveni. pic.twitter.com/no3ajK6qZN  thetouchguy (@anetouch) April 18, 2018

What's even more interesting is Museveni's statement after the law was passed. You push the mouth there, you can come back with worms and they enter your stomach because that is a wrong address,' he was quoted by the Daily Mail.

As always, dear Twitterati rose to the occasion:

That escalated quickly

President of Uganda Yoweri Museveni is warning against #Oralsex.

When you're 73 and no one wants to blow you. #deadwillyhater pic.twitter.com/aNBafFSrjD  Wale Gates  (@walegates) April 16, 2018

We've heard crazier things

LMFAOOOOOOOOOOOOO



president of Uganda declared that your mouth is for eating and he is going to BAN oral sex







Man i done heard it all  RUDE RA$TA  (@Rude_Rasta_) April 18, 2018

Exactly what we are wondering about

#YoweriMuseveni has received a signal to RESIGN.

How does he plan to monitor people's sexual activities? Uganda has 43,96 million people.

 https://t.co/cZWq5GJUjB  Uncle Sammy (@MashSammy) April 18, 2018

Well, if there are any Uganda citizens reading this and thinking nothing could be crazier, come to India. We believe in all kinds of crazy here.
The Sikhs might be a minority community in terms of their number, but when it comes to giving humanity lessons to the world, it is one of the few communities which enjoy massive respect in every part of the world.

From Canada to even Australia, they have made homes in every corner of the world and done their bit for the country. Not many are aware of the fact that the Sikhs came to Australia more than 200 years ago and contributed a lot in terms of fighting in the army, being in the armed forces and even gaining fame as wrestlers. The country inaugurated the 'Australian Sikh Heritage Trail' to honour the contribution of this beautiful community.

A highlight of my visit to WA this week: inspecting works on the new Sikh Heritage Trail in Riverton with Ben Morton and members of the WA's Sikh community. A series of informative plaques here set out the strong contribution of Sikh people in Australia dating back 150 years. pic.twitter.com/E32M1exJEd  Alan Tudge (@AlanTudgeMP) April 12, 2018

An open air Sikh museum has been officially inaugurated at Perth's Adenia Park. Known as the Australian Sikh Heritage Trail, it pays tribute to the Sikh pioneers of this country, who made significant contributions... https://t.co/YzU0qlKzfI  SBS Punjabi (@SBSPunjabi) April 18, 2018

The trail showcases and preserves the Australian Sikh history and heritage. It is in Perth and the place holds a lot of emotional significance because when the Sikhs arrived, cremation was not legal and the community was allowed and given a small land for the same, after a lot of struggle with the government.

 Australia Sikh Heritage

The Australian Sikh Heritage Association was established in 2012 to protect and share the history of the community.

It is a beautiful gesture and a great way of celebrating cultural heritage.
Recently, India surpassed France to become the sixth largest economy in the world clocking $2.6 trillion in 2017. That news, however, drowned amidst all the calls for better laws and more protection for the women in India after the horrific rape and murder in Kathua. Christine Lagarde, the IMF Managing Director, joined thousands of women from around the world and communicated what she felt regarding the brutal crime, directly to Indian PM Narendra Modi.

 Twitter

What has happened (in India) is just revolting. I would hope that the Indian authorities, starting with Prime Minister Modi, pay more attention because it is needed for the women of India... When I was last in Davos after Prime Minister Modi's speech, I did tell him that he had not mentioned the women of India enough. And it's not just a question of talking about them, said Lagarde.

Lagarde, though, was quick to clarify that it was not the official IMF position, instead 'it is my position'.

This has been a particularly tough week for Indian PM Narendra Modi in the light of multiple crimes against women in India making headlines all over the world. This comes at a time when Modi is trying to ramp up the image of India as an investment friendly destination for multinationals all over the world.

Earlier, large mobile hoardings were seen all around the British parliament in protest of the Indian PM.

Modi is not welcome. India will never be welcomed to any international forum, until it provide right of self determination to Kashmiris#ModiNotWelcome pic.twitter.com/hEjXtyyRZJ  Anjli Gupta (@ianjligupta) April 18, 2018

'BJP rapist party! Narendra Modi - blood on your hands!' - protests now in London #ModiNotWelcome #JusticeForAsifa pic.twitter.com/7U8WSnzR8T  SouthAsia Solidarity (@SAsiaSolidarity) April 18, 2018

Even though Modi addressed the horrific crimes against women in India (in hindsight he should have spoken a bit earlier) specifically saying that the rape of a child is a matter of national shame, more concrete steps need to be taken in order to help stop this rot in the Indian society. Because while macro factors like GDP reflect the health of the Indian economy, it's actually embarrassing that leaders from all over the world are concerned about the women of our country when it's our job to cultivate an environment where women feel safe.
UPPER THUMB  Dozens of people were arrested this week in a major drug trafficking sweep in Huntington, West Virginia  and local police believe the bust could have positive ramifications all the way into the Thumb.

U.S. Attorney Mike Stuart said more than 200 federal, state and local law enforcement officers targeted nearly 100 people for arrests aimed at dismantling a multi-state distribution network.

"Today's effort is not targeting addicts or corner dealers but trafficking organizations that have made Huntington an unfortunate target of their profits," Stuart said.

Large amounts of suspected fentanyl, heroin and cocaine were seized from the operation before the sweep, including enough fentanyl to kill 250,000 people.

Among those arrested were the ringleaders, one in Huntington and two in Detroit, of a group that had been operating in Huntington for nearly 15 years. Thirty people in the drug organization were indicted in state and federal court in southern West Virginia, and more arrest and search warrants were anticipated in Detroit, he said.

Huron County Sheriff Kelly J. Hanson said the bulk of opioids being brought into the county come from Detroit.

A lot of our people up here get it out of Detroit, Hanson said. Thats where the majority of it comes from.

In Huntington, the situation was the same, just on a much larger scale.

"No longer will we tolerate this epidemic. No longer will we tolerate the folks from Detroit coming to our town, violating our citizens, bringing misery and chaos. Those days are over," Stuart said.

The arrests were part of the Project Huntington initiative Stuart announced on March 15 to involve more federal prosecutors in a crackdown on gun and violent crime and drug trafficking in Huntington. The city of 48,000 residents along the Ohio River had a record 19 homicides last year, up from just three in 2015.

West Virginia leads the nation by far in the rate of drug overdose deaths. Cabell County, which includes Huntington, has been hit especially hard. On one day in August 2016, more than two dozen people in Huntington overdosed on heroin during a five-hour span.

Hanson said there were at least five opioid-related deaths in the area in 2017. He is cautiously optimistic that the taking down of Detroits major opioid supply hub will decrease problems in Huron County.

Id like to believe that to be the case, but it always seems like some poor excuse for an opportunist will step in and try and take care of the demand, Hanson said. Wed like to believe its going to be positive, but time will tell.

Among the agencies involved in Tuesday's arrests were Huntington, state and Marshall University police, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the West Virginia National Guard, the FBI and local sheriff's departments.

"It's a potential game-changer for Huntington and southern West Virginia," Stuart said. "Huntington is a safer city today, but we continue to be vigilant.
MASHANTUCKET  I went to bed one night recently thinking about jumping off the roof of a casino hotel tower the next day. And it had nothing to do with gambling.

The only bet you place in riding the new Foxwoods HighFlyer Zipline is on the personnel, the harness equipment and your connection to the zipline carrying you almost a mile away to a landing area next to the Mashantucket Pequot Museum.

Theres an old quip that Im not afraid of falling; Im afraid of hitting the ground. Well, Im not afraid of heights; Im afraid of being on the edge of a great height without a sturdy guardrail or wall.

That goes back to staring down the little cliff at Fort Hale Park in New Haven as a kid. The thought of mountain climbing gives me agita. (I did enjoy the film Man on a Ledge, but thats because I watched it while sitting on a wide couch.)

But here we were on the day of the official ribbon cutting for the latest eco-tourism attraction at huge Foxwoods Resort, almost 350 feet up on a metal platform atop the Fox Tower, within a few feet of that edge to oblivion. There is music blaring and a well-trained crew awaiting the ceremony in front of a quartet of three-step metal stairs at the release point (i.e. the edge). Good time for Stairway to Heaven, I thought.

The media group assembled is in a light mood but Ive got that face on that I make when Im up for a morning medical procedure and havent had my coffee in 24 hours. (My wife has to inform nurses that hes not in a panic; hes in withdrawal.) Also, Im paying attention to safety stuff, but its really not that intricate.

The gonzo zipline was supposed to open last fall and run through the winter. But Chris OConnell, vice president of hotel operations, told me it was delayed so the towers original engineers and outside builder/operator Redwood Parks Co. could work out the logistics (the building wasnt built to have that kind of load attached). He gestures to the cables anchored behind us at a vertical wall of the roof.

At its 20th anniversary six years ago, Foxwoods announced plans for a new outlet mall despite the fact it had just endured four years of economic pain from too much expansion and debt, particularly opening the MGM Grand hotel (this very Fox Tower) in the teeth of the 2007-2008 global economic crisis.

Led by deal-making President and CEO Felix Rappaport, Foxwoods has picked up steam again, adding the Tanger Outlets, Guy Fieris Foxwoods Kitchen & Bar and the popular Sugar eatery, along with brand-new Caputo Trattoria coming in May from the group that runs David Burke Prime at Foxwoods. The Obama-era recovery and Trump tax cut havent hurt either.

Eco-tourism, says Senior VP of Resort Operations Jason Guyot, means taking advantage of the land the tribe owns around Foxwoods. To that end, Foxwoods in the fall opened its Thrill Tower ride at ground level. Hedging bets against the forces of gaming expansion in neighboring states, Rappaport said its also about being known for much more than gaming.

In remarks at the ribbon-cutting, Rappaport said the goal is really being a world-class destination, integrated resort. You know, were about 9 million square feet under-roof, which is phenomenal, we sit on about 1,600 acres; the tribe owns much more than that in Connecticut and Rhode Island... and he gave credit to the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Council, whose chairman, Rodney A. Butler, joined in the ribbon-cutting and on the first set of zipline rides at the preview.

(Rappaport, who has casino experience in Las Vegas, has ridden ziplines before, he told me. Asked if I have, I said, Not from 30 stories up, but I should have said, Oh hell no. I get motion sickness on escalators.)

Before riders get to the rooftop platform, they need to sign up in the rotunda of the Fox Tower near the entrance from the parking garage. Theres a series of waivers (also known as signing your life away) and warnings that you cant ride if youre pregnant, been drinking, have certain other medical problems, cant walk up steps or hold yourself upright with at least one hand at all times (wait, at all times?) or weigh more than 300 pounds. Counter staff has you get on a scale on the floor to make sure. (Do I look like Im 300 pounds? Dont answer that.) You also cant be over 6 feet 7, so the Yankees Aaron Judge is iffy.

Youre escorted upstairs to one of the top floors where a converted hotel room serves as Flight School and youre fitted with harnesses that become your seat on HighFlyer. Then its up a couple of flights to the roof and more stairs up the platform. Anyone inside the fenced-in launch area of the platform must be tethered to the metal framing above, including the careful workers. Amen to that.

Im in the second group of riders after the two officials. There are four ziplines, and leaving first at right are affable TV guys Matt Scott and Keith McGilvery of Fox-61. I thought I would be the oldest rider of the day but there were a fair amount of people riding this day who remember the Nixon administration or even the single Eight Miles High by the Byrds. (Eight miles high, And when you touch down, Youll find that its... Stranger than known.)

In fact, the guy next to me had to be 10 or so years older than me, and he did just fine. I out-woo-hoo!-ed him at the start, which is the best part of a ride that can approach 60 mph. But a strong headwind this day slowed us down some after that and the only other thrill came as we glided over a tree somewhat closely. The entire time in motion is about two minutes.

The artificial turf landing area was a welcome bit of green in a cold spring, except for more-slender-than-me McGilvery, whose ride stopped short of the platform. An agile young worker swiftly scooted over by hugging the zipline to pull him in, but when other riders began arriving short of the pad, workers on the ground used special poles to guide them in.

Hours are noon to 6 p.m. now but will extend to midnight in summer. HighFlyer prices, which allow you to also get half-price admission to the great museum, are $69 for adults and $59 for children (no age restriction but you have to be at least 65 pounds) and military. Not cheap, but sometimes you just have to go over the edge.

Foxwoods also officially reopened its Thrill Tower attraction April 12, featuring the Sky Drop ($15) and Sky Launch ($25). On Sky Drop, four riders at a time are lifted to the top of Thrill Tower before free-falling 120 feet to the bottom. Theres a magnetic braking system. Sky Launch propels two riders sitting back-to-back from the ground to the top of Thrill Tower and back again at high speed. (I may avoid these.)

Also coming in the resort-attraction category this summer will be the On Track Karting experience: a high-performance, European-style indoor karting center in the basement of the Fox Tower garage. Rappaport said the space was originally going to be a bus bay and was built with a ventilation system, but the bus bay wasnt needed. The track will feature dramatic elevation changes and hairpin turns, officials said.

jamarante@nhregister.com; @Joeammo on Twitter
MIDDLETOWN  South Fire District Chief Michael Howley, whose $5.6 million spending proposal will be considered by voters Tuesday, said he really looks forward to budget crafting time.

Howley, who took over as the station head in November, replaced longtime chief Robert Ross, who retired last July. Its the first budget the chief has compiled, one he began thinking about last fall.

Its a two-tenths of a mill increase  5.08 percent  and would set the tax rate at 4.98 mills, said Howley. The challenges were different from the past: We really went through it with a fine-tooth comb this year. I wanted to get a good handle on it and go from there  and thats really what we did. When we put all of our numbers together, it really kind of fell right where I thought it would be.

Last April, 396 residents voted for a $5.35 million spending package and 324 votes against. Following the passage, the commission set the tax rate at 4.78 mills. It represented a 3.19-percent increase over 2016.

All Middletown residents are required to pay two separate taxes  a city tax and fire tax. If they fall within South Fires coverage area, they get two bills.

I think when considering the South Fire District budget voter trends/history, there really is a growing number of voters of the district who are voting no, which is evident in the last three years where the for or against is just about 50/50, said 30-year resident Daniel Penney, whose letter to the editor urged people to vote no.

The vote last year was the closest its ever been, Penney said, who added once he began actively following the budget process, he began to identify significant opportunities to maintain excellent services but also help reduce spending, easing the tax burden, he said.

Even with the challenges we had, we were still able to keep our increase very, very minimal, Howley said, adding that Penney shows up at all meetings. He had some input. I kept him very well informed on our process, and in any place where he had some questions. He wanted some fine details. That would be given to anyone in the public.

Board of Commissioners Vice Chairman Edward J. Creem Jr. has owned a home in the district since 1990, and formerly owned WCNX radio station from 1984 to about 1992.

Hes been a commissioner for five years.

South Fire District has the lowest mill rate of any paid fire department in taxing districts in the state of Connecticut, he said, adding taxes are about half of what Middletown fire customers pay. And Middletown is low.

He has a theory on why relatively few voters show up for referendums. I believe some people, if we gave money back, would still vote no. They just dont want to pay for fire protection, Creem said.

Residents hes spoken with believe theyre getting taxed twice because they receive two bills for city taxes and South Fire  when others are billed once for both. Most people, as long as theyre getting fire protection, dont seem to be interested in coming out to vote, Creem added.

Out of about 14,000 residents, 5,200 are registered voters, and only about 800 participate in referendums, Howley said, although between 100 and 150 more voters were added to the rolls over the past year so hes hopeful more will attend the public meeting.

People must live in the area for at least six months to register, Howley said.

Its an extremely tight budget, especially in light of a loss of state grants and Payment in Lieu of Taxes formerly given to the district because Middlesex Community College is part of their coverage area, Creem said.

Each year, the amount kept going down and down. The state of Connecticut, if it was a business, would file bankruptcy but states cant do that. It has to be made up someplace.

No one likes tax hikes, the chief said, who knows its hard finding the time to cast a vote  especially for parents. Nobody likes to see costs going up  no one. Theres no question about it, but unfortunately, there are things we have to take care of.

We are a critical infrastructure here, Howley added. We do a lot of services for the community, and unfortunately, it costs money to do those things. I believe we do it very cost effectively.

It should stay no higher than it was last year, said Ken Hasbrouck, 81, a former district commissioner who has lived in the area since 1942.

Hasbrouck, who is retired and on a fixed income, would have liked to see budget line items broken out in more detail.

For instance, $20,000 is allotted for fuel. They said the fire trucks use 3,100 gallons, he said. It came to about $9,000 for the fire trucks, he believes. It doesnt seem to me that the gasoline vehicles should use the same amount of fuel.

I really dont know how to go about sorting it out because of the way it was presented, Hasbrouck said, adding that only he and Penney attended the budget meeting.

Hes retired and on a fixed income, the case for more and more older people these days.

Some increases are beyond the administrations control  like contractual raises and a slight hike in health care. Everyone is seeing that across the board, the chief said.

He managed to achieve a 15-percent savings on workmans compensation payments, which he attributes to statewide increased competition for providers. Another uncontrollable expense is for breathing apparatus  which has reached its 15-year life span.

The department added those costs as a prudent measure, in case state grants theyve applied for dont come through, the chief added.

It could be six or seven months before FEMA tells us. I have to have funds in there one way or another, because this is fundamental to our business.

Voting will be held from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. at the firehouse on Randolph Road Tuesday. For information, visit southfiredistrict.com.

Managing Editor Cassandra Day can be reached at cassandra.day

@hearstmediact.com or Twitter @cassandrasdis.
NEW HAVEN  A man waived his right to be indicted and pleaded guilty Wednesday to one count of access device fraud, according to a federal press release.

Between July 2014 and April 2015, Xiao Bin Xu, 22, of Bayside, N.Y., was a member of a group of individuals from New York who engaged in counterfeit credit card transactions at retail stores along the East Coast. Mei Bao Lu was the ringleader of the group, and Yang-Shi Lin was Lus second-in-command, the release said.

As part of the scheme, Lu provided several individuals with counterfeit credit cards, produced from credit card information skimmed from cardholders, and directed the buyers to purchase gift cards and luxury merchandise using the counterfeit cards. Lu then sold the items to other individuals at a discount, to be fenced or sold on the black market, according to the release.

Xu was one of the buyers in the group and also recruited other individuals to serve as buyers. The group engaged in fraudulent credit card transactions at retail stores in Connecticut, Florida, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, the release said. In total, group members used 120 counterfeit credit cards, issued by 18 victim financial institutions, to make a total of approximately $179,000 in fraudulent purchases, the release said.

The investigation began in February 2015 when the Clinton Police Department and other police departments in nearby Connecticut towns received several complaints from citizens about unauthorized charges on their credit and debit cards. An investigation revealed many of the complaining citizens had all dined at the same Clinton restaurant during a two-week period in early February 2015, the release stated.

Xu is scheduled to be sentenced July 24 and faces up to 10 years in prison. He has been released on bail since his arrest, according to the release.

Lu and Lin, both of Flushing, N.Y., previously pleaded guilty to related charges. Lin was sentenced to one year and one day in prison, while Lu was sentenced to 18 months. Several other members of Lus group were charged and convicted of credit card-related offenses in state and federal courts in Maine, New Jersey, New York and West Virginia, the release said.
NAPLES, Italy -- The mayor of Naples said a nuclear-powered submarine that took part in missile strikes against suspected Syrian chemical weapons sites should not have cruised through waters near the city, but Italian military officials said he has no jurisdiction over the matter.

The Virginia-class submarine USS John Warner passed through the Bay of Naples three miles from shore in late March after participating in NATO's Dynamic Manta exercise.

That prompted Naples Mayor Luigi de Magistris to write the port authority complaining that the submarine violated a 2015 decree establishing a denuclearized zone in city limits.

"The fact that it is the same submarine (involved in the Syria attack) further reinforces the rightness of the order," de Magistris told the Italian news outlet ANSA earlier this week. "Ships of nuclear propulsion or carrying nuclear weapons are not welcome in the port of Naples and, therefore, they are not allowed to transit or stay."

Rear Adm. Arturo Faraone, head of the city's port authority, told the mayor the city has no jurisdiction over foreign naval vessels in territorial waters. That is the Italian defense ministry's purview, he said.

The submarine never entered the port and stayed far enough from shore to avoid the city's nuclear-free zone, Faraone said.

The USS John Warner left from Gibraltar to join U.S., French and British military forces in the April 13 attack on three Syrian chemical weapons sites. The six Tomahawk missiles it launched from the eastern Mediterranean were the first missiles ever fired in combat by a Virginia-class submarine, the Navy said.

The Navy has had a support base in the Naples area since the early 1950s. It is the headquarters for Naval Forces Europe and Africa, as well as a NATO Allied Joint Force Command.

Vice Adm. Christopher Grady, former 6th Fleet commander, praised the city's long-time support of the U.S. Navy.

"We like to call it the sweet spot on the Mediterranean," Grady said after he relinquished command in March. "Naples, not only is it a strategic role, it's a historic role."

Italian politicians had mixed sentiments about the missile strike. For instance, Matteo Salvini, head of the center-right coalition, opposed it, while Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni backed it.

Italy provided logistical support from the air base in Aviano on condition that no attacks would be launched from Italian soil, Gentiloni told Italian media earlier this week.
No civilians were killed in the U.S. and allied strikes on suspected Syrian chemical weapons facilities last week, Pentagon officials said Wednesday.

The April 14 strikes, led by the U.S. in coordination with France and Britain, "were successful in degrading" Assad's ability to use chemical weapons against his enemies, Dana White, the Pentagon's chief spokesperson, said. They were carried out, she said, "without a single report of a civilian casualty."

But while the 105 weapons deployed in the operation met their targets, the strikes left President Bashar al-Assad with the ability to carry out more attacks, they added.

Marine Lt. Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, who joined White at a Pentagon briefing, said that Assad retained a "residual capacity" to conduct more attacks despite the success of the allied response to the barrel bombing on the town of Douma east of Damascus earlier this month.

Assad's remaining chemical weapons arsenal was "probably spread throughout the country at a variety of sites," McKenzie said. "[The Syrian regime] will have the ability to conduct limited attacks in the future. I would not rule that out."

"However," he added, "as they contemplate the dynamics of conducting those attacks, they've got to look over their shoulder and be worried that we're looking at them and we'll have the ability to strike them again should it be necessary."

White and McKenzie dismissed Russian claims that the air defense systems it sold to the Syrians intercepted as many as 71 of the 105 cruise missiles fired at three suspected chemical weapons sites -- one near Damascus and two outside the city of Homs, about 90 miles north of Damascus.

"As we expected, Russia immediately began a disinformation campaign" shortly after the cruise missiles hit their targets, White said. "The Russian-manufactured air defense systems were totally ineffective."

McKenzie also sought to clear up questions on the role that the Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer Donald Cook may have played in the strikes.

The Cook was the only U.S. destroyer known to be in the eastern Mediterranean last Friday, but did not fire any missiles, leading to speculation that the ship may have served as a decoy.

While the Cook was in the Mediterranean, U.S. destroyers in the Red Sea and the northern Arabian Sea played a leading role in the missile launches.

Last April, in a previous strike ordered by President Donald Trump, the destroyers Ross and Porter fired a total of 59 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles (TLAMs) at a Syrian airfield in response to a suspected chemical attack by Assad's forces with the nerve agent sarin.

Prior to the missile strikes last week, which Trump warned about in advance in a series of tweets, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, chief of the Russian General Staff, and other officials had warned that U.S. platforms firing weapons systems could be subject to attack.

Russian aircraft were flying in the general area where the Cook was cruising last week.

"At no time did the Russians threaten the Donald Cook," McKenzie said.

As a precaution, the U.S. "had significant air patrol over the Donald Cook provided by [U.S.] European Command," he said, but the Russian aircraft acted "professionally" by keeping a distance.

Although U.S. Central Command planned and conducted the missile strikes, EUCOM played a significant backup role, Army Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti said Sunday.

Scaparrotti, who doubles as NATO and EUCOM commander, said in a statement that "the strikes were the result of a carefully orchestrated plan which involved dedicated teamwork between EUCOM and CENTCOM and their service assets, as well as our British and French partners."

"Multiple air and maritime assets assigned to U.S. Air Forces Europe and U.S. Naval Forces Europe under U.S. European Command participated in strike operations conducted in Syria," EUCOM officials said.

-- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com.
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Navy Vessels, B-1s Obliterate 3 Syrian Targets in Strike

It was all over in two minutes. U.S., French and British forces hit three suspected Syrian chemical weapons facilities with a total of 105 weapons that all struck their targets within two minutes at about 4 a.m. local time, Pentagon officials said Saturday.

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55 Years After Thresher Disaster, Navy Still Keeps Secrets on Sub Loss

A Naval Court of Inquiry (NCOI) convened to investigate the disaster concluded the probable cause of the Thresher's loss was "major flooding" -- a finding that has since been challenged by naval and submarine experts. After more than a half-century, all but 18 pages of testimony from key witnesses remains closed to the public.

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Airmen in 'Dino Puppet' Re-Enlistment Video Fired, Reprimanded

The Air Force is sending a clear message: re-enlisting with a dinosaur puppet on your right hand isn't funny. Three Tennessee Air National Guard individuals involved in a viral dinosaur puppet re-enlistment video have been removed from their posts -- one immediately retired with a demotion -- and reprimanded for undermining the gravity of the oath of enlistment, officials said Wednesday.

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-- Sean Mclain Brown can be reached at sean.brown@military.com. Follow him on Twitter at @seanmclainbrown
Drew Angerer/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) -- In newly released copies of memos written by James Comey, the former FBI director describes what he says were Donald Trump's strenuous and repeated objections to claims that prostitutes visited his Moscow hotel room in 2013 as well as the president's "serious reservations" about his embattled national security adviser.



"There were no prostitutes; there were never prostitutes," Comey recalled Trump saying in one of the memos.



ABC News obtained copies of the memos, which are partially redacted, on Thursday after the Justice Department turned over 15 pages of declassified material to Congress. Top House Republicans had requested the documents and threatened to subpoena for them. DOJ plans to transmit unredacted copies of the memos on Friday.



The memos, which emerged as a flashpoint in the ongoing Trump-Russia probe, detail Comeys recollections of exchanges with the president about Russian campaign interference and the broader Russia investigation. They include notes of conversations about the Trump Tower briefing on the Russia allegations, on a private White House dinner, and on controversial meetings during which Comey says Trump asked for his loyalty and for him to end the Flynn investigation. Trump has denied making those requests.



Flynns lawyer declined to comment for this story.



Some of Comey's notes closely mirror the account of the interactions with Trump he has provided in congressional testimony, in his new book and in recent television interviews. But the newly released memos also feature previously unreported details and exchanges, including Trump's complaints about retired Gen. Michael Flynn's judgment. He expressed concern that Flynn, who served briefly as his national security adviser, did not alert him about a congratulatory call from a head of state whose name is redacted in the memo released Thursday. A knowledgeable source confirmed to ABC News it was Russian President Vladimir Putin.



Comey said Trump pointed to his head when describing Flynn, and said, "The guy has serious judgment issues."



"I did not comment at any point during this topic and there was no mention or acknowledgement of any FBI interest in or contact with General Flynn," Comey wrote.



In a meeting several days later, then-chief of staff Reince Priebus asked Comey, "Do you have a FISA order on Michael Flynn?" according to Comey's memo. Comey said he responded to Priebus and explained how Priebus should ask similar questions in the future through established White House-Justice Department channels.



The question from Priebus came after former acting Attorney General Sally Yates had warned the White House that Flynn was susceptible to blackmail regarding his contacts with the Russian ambassador.



Flynn later became one of the most senior Trump aides to cut a deal with prosecutors and agree to assist in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into meddling in the 2016 election. He pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents. His attorney did not respond to a request for comment late Thursday.



Other memos from Comey shed light on Trump's reactions to allegations, some of them salacious, in the so-called dossier -- an unverified, opposition-research document prepared by a former British intelligence officer, and paid for by Trump's political rivals.



One memo describes a meeting in which Comey says Trump remarked that Russian President Vladimir Putin had told him that Russia has "some of the most beautiful hookers in the world," without explaining when the conversation took place, according to Comeys notes.



In a joint statement, Reps. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., and Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., the chairmen who requested declassified versions of the memos last week, described the documents as "Defense Exhibit A" in a criminal case for obstruction of justice, arguing that they show Comey was motivated by animus, and did not feel that Trump was attempting to obstruct the Russia investigation in real time.



"While former Director Comey went to great lengths to set dining room scenes, discuss height requirements, describe the multiple times he felt complimented, and myriad other extraneous facts, he never once mentioned the most relevant fact of all, which was whether he felt obstructed in his investigation," they wrote.



Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said the memos are "strong corroborating evidence" of Comeys claims that Trump "wanted his personal loyalty, that he wanted to end the Russia investigation, and that he wanted Michael Flynn to walk."



"President Trumps interference was a blatant effort to deny justice, and Director Comey was right to document it as it happened -- in real time," Cummings said.



Comey said in a CNN interview Thursday he was "fine" with his memos being released to the public.



Trump again lashed out at Comey on Twitter late Friday night. The president said Comey illegally leaked documents to the press and that the special counsel's investigation was "based on an illegal act." He also spelled "counsel" wrong twice in the tweet.

Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.
It's the end of an era for the Navy's F/A-18C Hornet; officials announced the jet's recently completed deployment aboard the USS Carl Vinson was its last.

The service recently told Stars and Stripes it will no longer use the jet in combat or regular deployments, but will find other uses for the attack aircraft first deployed decades ago.

Though the three-month mission that ended March 12 was the Hornet's final full deployment, Strike Fighter Squadron 34 will fly the jets in the 25-nation Rim of the Pacific exercise this summer, said Lt. j.g. Emily Judstra, a Naval Air Forces Pacific Fleet spokeswoman.

After that, the Hornets will mainly be used in demonstrations and training with the Blue Angels, at the Naval Aviation Warfighting Development Center and in reserve squadrons, she said.

The San Diego-based VFA-34 will be the last squadron to transition to the F/A-18E Super Hornets when it does so next February, Judstra said.

The Hornet's similarly looking successor, the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, will continue to be used in deployments and combat.

The Super Hornet, which was rolled out in 1999, is about 25 percent larger with "increased maneuverability, range, payload and more powerful engines" than its predecessor, according to Boeing.

The F/A-18C's departure creates room for newer fighter jets on flight decks. The Navy's F-35C Lightning II is coming closer to operational status, completing fleet carrier qualifications last month.

The service said last fall that its version of the F-35 -- which has drawn scrutiny over a predicted $1 trillion-plus cost of operations over its expected 60-year life span -- will reach initial operational capacity this year.

The Hornet's first C models entered active duty in 1987 and cost $29 million each. In its earlier years, the jet "[broke] all records for tactical aircraft in availability, reliability and maintainability," the Navy said.

"The F/A-18 demonstrated its capabilities and versatility during Operation Desert Storm, shooting down enemy fighters and subsequently bombing enemy targets with the same aircraft on the same mission," the Navy said.

Cmdr. Thomas Bodine, U.S. Navy Federal Executive Fellow to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, said the Hornet proved to be a "stalwart, front-line strike fighter for the Navy" over the years.

"The aircraft and her pilots have contributed to every major combat operation ranging from the 1998 Operation Desert Fox in Iraq, to Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, to the ongoing Operation Inherent Resolve in Syria and Iraq," Bodine said. "The [F/A-18C's] departure from the Navy's operational roster marks an end of an era."

While the Navy's Hornets have seen their final combat action, Bodine said the aircraft's impact will remain.

"Her legacy continues both within the [Marine Corps], whose F/A-18C/D Hornet squadrons are flying her with great precision and lethality, and through the Navy's FA-18E/F Super Hornet, which serves as the only operational strike fighter in the Navy's inventory," he said.
WASHINGTON -- Gen. Robert Neller, commandant of the Marines, told a Senate panel on Thursday that the Corps has enacted a series of reforms to reign in the culture of harassment that has included sexual misconduct and long plagued the service.

Neller said the service has made significant progress installing the reforms since the "Marines United" scandal last year involving a Facebook group exchanging nude photos of female service members.

Neller's comments follow the dismissal Monday of a Marine brigadier general who told a large gathering that a sexual harassment complaint at his command was "fake news."

"They are not the majority. They are not even close to the majority and yes, you should expect more from a more senior officer," Neller told the Senate panel. "Are we where we want to be? Are we where you want us to be? No. Are we in a better place than we were a year ago? I believe we are."

The comments were part of a wide-ranging discussion during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that hosted top Navy and Marine Corps officials to talk about budget priorities for 2019.

Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., the ranking Democrat for the committee, turned the hearing toward the sexual misconduct concerns, highlighting the Marines United scandal, among others.

"You are not the only service facing this but some of these have been quite notorious," Reed said. "Are you addressing a culture that might be contributing to this issue?"

In March 2017, a now-defunct Facebook page called Marines United with an estimated 30,000 followers was uncovered. Active-duty and veteran Marines were exchanging nude photos of female service members, making derogatory comments and even threats in some cases on the webpage. Two commanders were fired in connection with the scandal in August, and more than 30 Marines have since faced reprimands.

Last month, an investigation was launched into allegations that hundreds of lewd images of servicewomen was shared online via Dropbox.

"Aside from those events, as disturbing as they are, I think today you look at our Marine Corps ...we are as diverse, as integrated and inclusive as we've ever been," Neller told Reed. "I would give credit to members of this committee for holding the mirror up and making us look at ourselves and ask ourselves some hard questions."

Neller said he has led significant changes since the Marines United scandal, as the service has clarified policies, rules and regulations so Marines know what's expected of them. The service also had to clarify to commanders what they could do to hold perpetrators of sexual misconduct accountable, he said.

Neller rejects excuses that the misconduct is a result of the service's younger population.

"In my heart of hearts, I have gone out and talked to thousands and thousands and thousands of Marines and I'm not going to use it as an excuse that 62 percent of the Marine Corps is 25 years old or less," the commandant said. "But it's going to take us some time and I assure you, I give you my word that anyone who does violate the rules regardless of whether they are a general or a private, they are going to be held accountable."

The service is also in the midst of revising officer evaluation reports to include a new category that addresses diversity, Neller said. For now, such feedback on personnel is limited to the narrative in the reports.

"We're in a tough business and it's taken some people some adjustments," he said. "Those who can't adjust, they are going to have to either get on board or get out."

Neller also addressed his dismissal of Brig. Gen. Kurt Stein.

The former director of Marine and Family Programs, which handles sexual assault prevention and response, made derogatory remarks about a sexual harassment complaint in a speech before hundreds at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. Stein was reassigned to a new post following an internal investigation of his remarks at the April 6 meeting.

"I had to say I didn't have confidence in (Stein) to lead the organization," Neller said.

--Stars and Stripes reporter Caitlin Doornbos contributed to this report.
Top military leaders have gone public in the past week to disagree with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on the possible erosion of "unit cohesion" and readiness that Mattis said might come from allowing transgender troops to serve openly in the ranks.

The latest to come forward was Sergeant Major of the Army Dan Dailey.

"We haven't heard" of any problems with unit cohesion since transgender troops were cleared to serve under the Obama administration in 2016, Dailey said at an off-camera session with Pentagon reporters Friday.

In addition, "I have received no formal reports" on dissension in the ranks or morale problems caused by the presence of transgender troops, Dailey said.

Army Secretary Mark Esper, who joined Dailey at the briefing, also said that transgender troops currently serving have not been a problem in terms of unit cohesion or other issues.

Esper then cut short the discussion, citing the ongoing cases in four federal district courts that have indefinitely blocked the Pentagon from acting against transgender individuals currently serving, or barring the recruitment and retention of transgender individuals.

In his memo to President Donald Trump last month effectively supporting a ban on transgender individuals serving in the military, Mattis cited the difficulties of reconciling gender dysphoria with military service.

Gender dysphoria has been defined as the conflict between a person's biological sex and the gender with which that person identifies psychologically and emotionally.

Those with gender dysphoria "could undermine readiness, disrupt unit cohesion, and impose an unreasonable burden on the military that is not conducive to military effectiveness and lethality," Mattis said in the memo that summarized a six-month internal study he ordered.

The study followed several tweets sent out by Trump last summer in which he argued for a ban on transgender military service.

"After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow [transgender individuals] to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military," Trump said in a tweet last July.

The Pentagon study backing up Trump included input from the service chiefs, according to Mattis, but those same chiefs have since clearly stated that they've had no problem with transgender individuals in their ranks.

Last Thursday, as Mattis was before the House Armed Services Committee supporting an effective ban, on transgender troops, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley was testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

"No, not at all," Milley said when asked by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-New York, whether transgender troops posed a problem for unit cohesion.

In testimony before SASC on Thursday, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John Richardson and Gen. Robert Neller, the Marine Commandant, also said they have seen no discipline, readiness or unit cohesion problems arising from having transgender individuals serve openly.

"I am not aware of any issues," Richardson said. He said the Navy applied lessons learned from integrating women sailors into submarines in adapting to transgender sailors. He said that maintaining a "standards-based approach seems to be the key to success."

Neller said he had met with several Marines and sailors who have identified as transgender individuals. "I learned about their desire to serve," he said. "As long as they can meet the standard of what their particular occupation was, I think we'll move forward."

Adm. Paul Zukunft, the Coast Guard Commandant, said the Coast Guard has no problems with allowing transgender individuals to serve openly.

Zukunft told the House Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee Wednesday that he has a transgender individual on his personal staff.

"We are certainly committed to their continued service in the United States Coast Guard," he said.

The top leaders' open disagreement with Mattis underlined the potential difficulties he will have in enforcing a ban if the courts permit it.

"The Secretary is in an untenable situation," said Matt Thorn, executive director of the OutServe-SLDN advocacy group. [Mattis] is in an untenable situation because of the president of the United States.

Federal District Court judges in Seattle, Washington, D.C., Baltimore and Riverside, California, have all blocked the transgender ban and ordered the military to continue recruiting and retaining transgender individuals.

In the Seattle case (Karnoski v. Trump), Judge Marsha Pechman earlier this week ordered Justice Department and advocacy group lawyers to prepare for trial but gave notice that the government will have a high standard to meet in proving that a ban is constitutional.

"Because transgender people have long been subjected to systemic oppression and forced to live in silence, they are a protected class," Pechman wrote in her ruling. "Therefore, any attempt to exclude them from military service will be looked at with the highest level of care."

-- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com.
Adm. Phil Davidson, the nominee to take over U.S. Pacific Command, has warned against sanctioning India for buying Russian arms that could include a proposed $6 billion deal for S-400 Triumf anti-air missiles billed as "F-35 killers" by Moscow.

The growing strategic partnership between the U.S. and India to counter China should take precedence over sanctions, Davidson said in written responses to questions ahead of his Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) confirmation hearing Tuesday.

Davidson noted his "concern for our defense relationships in the Indo-Pacific with countries such as India, Vietnam, and Indonesia."

"If the United States decides to sanction these partner nations for their purchases of Russian equipment, this decision may hinder the growth of each developing partnership and increase each partner's dependence on Russia," said Davidson, currently commander of Fleet Forces Command.

The immediate issue was the proposed deal, now in its final stages, for the S-400s that Russian President Vladimir Putin first pitched to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on a visit to India in 2016.

Last week, Indian Defense Minister Nirmala Sitharaman was in Moscow to work out details on the reported $6 billion purchase of the S-400s, a mobile surface-to-air defense system dubbed the SA-21 "Growler" by the U.S. and NATO.

In what could be seen as a sales pitch, Russian officials earlier this week claimed that the U.S., French and British cruise missile strikes on suspected Syrian chemical weapons sites avoided areas protected by S-400 and S-300 systems.

India's interest in the S-400s has intensified with reports that Russia has already begun deliveries of the S-400 systems to regional rival China under a $3 billion deal for the missiles that Moscow claims would be effective against stealthy U.S. F-35 Joint Strike Fighters.

The proposed S-400 deal could potentially make India liable under the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) signed by President Donald Trump last August. The Act targeted Russia for its interference in the 2016 presidential elections and its aggression in Crimea and Ukraine.

The Act required the president to sanction any country that strikes "highly-significant" agreements with Russia's defense industry.

In addition, the State Department last October listed more than three dozen Russian companies and warned businesses and nations worldwide that those dealing with the Russian firms could face U.S. sanctions. The list of Russian firms included missile manufacturer Almaz-Antey, maker of the S-400.

In his written responses to SASC, Davidson urged Congress to consider the long history of India and other regional nations in buying equipment and weapons from the former Soviet Union and now the Russian Federation before moving to consider sanctions under CAATSA.

He added that "Russian operations and engagements throughout the Indo-Pacific continue to rise -- both to advance their own strategic interests and to undermine U.S. interests. Russia also sees economic opportunities to build markets for energy exports and arms sales in the region."

But CAATSA sanctions were not the answer, he said.

The U.S. also faces a dilemma on whether to impose sanctions on NATO ally Turkey for its own estimated $2.5 billion deal to purchase S-400s from Russia. Putin was in Ankara earlier this month to seal the deal with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Several other nations, including Iraq, have expressed interest in acquiring the S-400s rather than the U.S. Patriot surface-to-air missile defense system made by Raytheon.

The interest in the S-400s has been heightened by the perceived failure of the U.S. Patriot systems to protect the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh against missile launches by Houthi rebels in Yemen.

-- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com.
Internet outrage has landed with maximum force on top of an Air National Guard master sergeant who used a dinosaur hand puppet in her re-enlistment video.

"HOW DARE SHE DISRESPECT THE SACRED OATH!," shouted the commenters and the adjutant general for the Tennessee Guard reacted and came down hard, demoting and forcibly retiring the colonel who administered the oath, removing the puppet master sergeant from her job and disciplining the senior NCO who operated the video camera that recorded the ceremony.

Pretty cut and dried, right? People do bad things and they get reprimanded. Our commenters suggest that things might not be that simple.

Here's just a few of the less-than-traditional re-enlistment ceremonies described on Facebook and our original article page comments: Our members report ceremonies that have taken place underwater in scuba gear, on the edge of a ship, hanging off the end of plane while in flight.

So, what's your weirdest or most outrageous re-enlistment ceremony story? Did you participate or just hear about it? Did the Tennessee Guard overreact or did the dinosaur crew get exactly what they had coming? Tell us your best stories and sound off!
Mineral List

Regional Geology

Historic gold mine.The lease, amounting to only 4 acres, bordered the northern side of the more well know Hauraki gold mine, about one kilometre west of Coromandel town.Around 1895 the Bunkers Hill Gold Mining Company was formed to develop the property. Much of the area is heavily faulted, with specimen stone found in patches in the upper areas, but to no extent. A shaft was sunk to 330 feet, with four levels.The company made ends do with these small discoveries, until in 1902 a shareholder meeting was held to voluntarily wind up the company, due to it running out of capital. In the meantime, it was decided to let the mine on tribute for two months to Jamieson (surname), with the company receiving 15% in the unlikely event Jamieson found any gold. On the first day Jamieson discovered specimen stone when sinking a ventilation winze, 30 feet from the main shaft. As a result when the second meeting was called to wind up the company, the shareholders refused.Meanwhile one of the directors James Cameron Fraser had joined Jamieson in extracting gold from the mine, and appointed himself mine manager despite some doubts he held the appropriate certification. The other directors being unaware of the situation, appointed W. Moorecraft as mine manager, however Moorecraft reported he had been barred from entering the mine. It is clear the directors and Fraser were not getting along, with one describing Fraser's behaviour towards them as obnoxious. There were also concerns over a conflict of interest, with accusations Fraser was more concerned over the interests of the tributing party he belonged to and profited from, than the interests of the shareholders who owned the company. Fraser was subsequently removed as a director at a shareholder meeting.The rich gold find did not last with the leader cut off by a fault. In 1906, the lease was amalgamated with the neighbouring Hauraki claim.1 valid mineral.

This geological map and associated information on rock units at or nearby to the coordinates given for this locality is based on relatively small scale geological maps provided by various national Geological Surveys. This does not necessarily represent the complete geology at this locality but it gives a background for the region in which it is found.

Click on geological units on the map for more information. Click here to view full-screen map on Macrostrat.org

Data and map coding provided by Macrostrat.org, used under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License

This page contains all mineral locality references listed on mindat.org. This does not claim to be a complete list. If you know of more minerals from this site, please register so you can add to our database. This locality information is for reference purposes only. You should never attempt to visit any sites listed in mindat.org without first ensuring that you have the permission of the land and/or mineral rights holders for access and that you are aware of all safety precautions necessary.

References
The benchmark index Sensex gained 15 percent in the last 1-month. Moneycontrol tried to find out the stock which is in momentum trades and outperformed the benchmark index but still trading 70 percent below their 52-week high. From the BSE 500, 10 stocks make the cut. Data Source: ACE Equity.

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Akash Jain

Schaeffler India is expected to be strong play on the revival of Indian economy especially industrial and automotive segments. March 2018 monthy sales of automotive numbers have been good which shows that the economy is picking up. Impact of revival of the economy was witnessed in its Q1CY18 result.

The topline witnessed YoY growth of 13 percent due to pick up in industrial segment by 14 percent on YoY basis) and spike in automotive OEM by 26 percent on a yearly basis. Distribution segment which accounts for 30 percent of sales) has also witnessed strong double digit growth. The management expects growth to sustain in coming quarters which may lead to rerating of the stock.

The company has gone for a price hike of 4 percent (effective April 1) across product categories to reduce the impact of rising input cost. However, actual impact on numbers in the next quarters will depend on the inventory levels with customers, price negotiations with key customers,etc.

To give some background of this company as many investors are not aware of this Company. The Schaeffler Group is a leading manufacturer of rolling

bearings and linear products worldwide as well as renowned supplier to the automotive industry. In India, with its three strong brands  INA, FAG and Luk  the Schaeffler Group has emerged as a leading development and engineering partner for its customers ensuring cost effective local production, rapid delivery service, seamless application engineering and sales support. LuK India is ISO TS 16949 Certified Company, strategically located in South India at Hosur in the state of Tamilnadu. LuK India is a fully integrated Clutch Assembly manufacturing unit with in house research and development capabilities.

INA Bearings India Pvt. Ltd. was incorporated in 1998 in Pune. INA India specializes in rolling bearings and precision parts for a wide range of applications in the automotive industry, motorcycles, precision equipment, machine tools and material handling, to name a few.

FAG Bearings India Limited was incorporated in 1962. Since January 2002 FAG has been integrated into a strong network because that is when FAG, together with INA and LuK formed the Schaeffler Group. INA and FAG became the worlds second largest rolling bearing manufacturer. On July 7, 2017 it was renamed to Schaeffler India Limted.

Schaeffler Indias headquarter and manufacturing facilities are located in Vadodara, Gujarat, India.

The company has its presence in automotive and across all core industrial segments. Indian automotive industry has rapidly progressed in the last decade. Schaeffler India has been a proud partner in this technical progress providing Indian industry with bearings of contemporary technology and global quality standards. Schaeffler India's advanced system solutions for wheels, power train and engine accessories support the automotive industrys need for higher levels of integration, increased safety, driving comfort and environment protection. No wonder, FAG is the number one supplier of hub bearings to the Indian passenger car industry.

Since inception, the Indian Railways has been an important customer and Schaeffler India is recognized as the most reliable source for critical applications namely traction motors, journal roller bearings, transmission, auxiliary motors, etc.

Schaeffler India caters to all major industry segments including: construction machinery, electrical engineering, fluid technology, conveying equipment, industrial gears, mining & cement, power generation, agricultural engineering, steel plants, motorcycles, textile machinery, machine tools, wind power, pulp and paper and so on.

Recent times have seen the Indian manufacturing industry metamorphose into a global force to reckon with. Schaeffler India has been an integral part of this industrial revolution providing innovative bearing systems for a wide range of applications. Proximity to the customer and intimate knowledge of individual requirements has enabled Schaeffler India to provide innovative solutions on time and within budgets.

FAG bearings from the Indian plant are exported to Europe, US and Asia. International customers using Schaefffler India products include Daimler Chrysler, Volvo, Volkswagen, Renault, Voith, Otis and General Dynamics.

The free float of the company is very small and hence suggest long term investors mainly in the retail segment accumulate it gradually and hold it for a long time.

: The author isice-president, Equity Research at Ajcon Global Services. 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.
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About 12,000 permanent employees of Alok Industries are likely to lose their jobs as the company is heading towards liquidation, reported Economic Times.

The resolution professional has referred Alok Industries, which owes Rs 29,500 crore to the lenders, for liquidation last Saturday as the 270-day deadline to finalise a resolution plan ended on April 14.

Lenders of the company have been looking for a suitable taker, however, in the absence of recovery options, Alok Industries would liquidate under the insolvency proceedings.

While considering the resolution plans, lenders are looking at only the recovery aspect, Manoj Kumar, partner and head  M&A and Insolvency Service at Corporate Professionals, told the paper, adding that if they feel that an offer does not meet their expectations, they will refuse to approve the resolution plan and the company will go into liquidation.

The Company had 11,759 full-time employees as of March 31, 2017, with a total staff strength at 18,000. Staff costs amounted to Rs 283.31 crore in FY18.

The firm's liquidation will also affect hundreds of small vendors, service providers and about 2.05 lakh equity shareholders, including public financial institutions and retail investors, who may lose their investments.

Earlier last week, lenders to Alok Industries did not approve an offer by Reliance Industries-JM Financial ARC to acquire the bankrupt company. Only 70 percent of the lenders agianst the required 75 percent vote to accept the resolution plan endorsed the revised all-cash offer of Rs 5,050 crore. This amount was just about Rs 100 crore higher than the previous proposal, the report said.

In July 2017, the Ahmedabad bench of the National Company Law Tribunal had admitted insolvency proceedings against the textile company under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code. The consortium of lenders, led by SBI, is claiming dues of over Rs 23,000 crore from Alok Industries.

About 81 companies that have already gone into liquidation under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) and nearly 100 other companies facing insolvency processes are on the verge of liquidation, according to Corporate Professionals.

Disclosure: Reliance Industries Ltd. is the sole beneficiary of Independent Media Trust which controls Network18 Media & Investments Ltd.
Fortis Healthcare | In the September quarter, Rakesh Junjhunwala held a 2.65 percent holding in the stock, and FIIs have increased its stake to 41.04 percent from 40.98 percent in the June quarter. In FY21 so far the stock price has risen 0 percent to Rs 125.70 as on October 26.

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Fortis Healthcare Board on Thursday categorically said it will only consider binding offers, a move that may push Malaysias IHH Healthcare and Chinas Fosun on backfoot in the bidding battle.

While IHH proposed to invest Rs 4,000 crore through preferential allotment valuing Fortis at Rs 160 per share, Fosun offered Rs 156 per share to invest Rs 2,300 crore for an equity stake of 25 percent. Both the offers are non-binding.

The two binding offers from Manipal-TPG consortium offered Fortis a valuation of Rs 156 per share and Sunil Munjal of Hero Enterprise and Burmans of Dabur team have offered to invest around Rs 1,500 crore without due diligence offering around Rs 160 apiece.

A binding offer constitutes a formal agreement between the bidder and seller - should the seller accept the bidder's terms.

What we are saying is whatever the binding bids that are available on April 25 when the advisory committee sits down, those are the ones we actually focus on and the best one from there will be send to us next day April 26 to the board meeting of Fortis Healthcare than it will go to the shareholders, said Brian Tempest, independent director on Fortis Board in a media call.

Fortis Board that met on Thursday also decided to appoint an advisory committee chaired by Deepak Kapoor, former Chairman and CEO of PwC India to evaluate the offers and make final recommendation to the Board on the most eligible one by April 26. The committee will be assisted by the Standard Chartered Bank (SCB).

IHH was yet to respond to Moneycontrol's queries seeking a comment on the groups next plan of action at the time of publishing the story. Fosun spokesperson couldnt be reached for a comment.

With the latest decision of the Fortis Board - IHH Healthcare and Fosun may have to look at the option of hostile bid or reaching out to the shareholders directly with the offer to purchase shares at a substantial premium compared to the bid favoured by the Board.

But thats not going to be easy, said a top executive at a large domestic investment bank. Hostile takeovers have very little history of success in India, the above executive said. Since the board has decided that it will only accept binding offers, its better for the other interested bidders to go back to the drawing board, rework on their offers and come up with something more in line with board's requirement, he added.

Fortis board decision was welcomed by Manipal-TPG and Munjal-Burmans.

Well we are happy with the process laid out and will participate, said Ranjan Pai of Manipal Hospitals commenting on the Boards decision.

We are pleased to note that the Board of Fortis Healthcare has found merit in our offer, which is simple, binding and is the quickest to implement, said Sunil Munjal, Chairman of Hero Enterprise. We believe that our offer is the most compelling, and is significantly better than any other options being explored by the company, Munjal said.

On Thursday, shares of Fortis rose 2.66 percent to end at Rs 148.45 on BSE, while the benchmark Sensex gained 0.28 percent.
Fortis Healthcare | In the September quarter, Rakesh Junjhunwala held a 2.65 percent holding in the stock, and FIIs have increased its stake to 41.04 percent from 40.98 percent in the June quarter. In FY21 so far the stock price has risen 0 percent to Rs 125.70 as on October 26.

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Radiant Life Care on Friday made an unsolicited non-binding expression of interest to acquire Fortis Healthcare, joining the race for acquiring the cash-strapped hospital chain.

As per the offer, Radiant has valued Fortis at Rs 165 per share, making it the highest bidder.

Radiant proposed demerger of hospital business from Fortis to a new entity, leaving the latter with diagnostics business SRL . Radiant valued Fortis hospital business at Rs 126 per share. Radiant said it will separately purchase SRL valuing the business at Rs 3600 crore or Rs 39 per share.

The offer is subject to satisfactory due diligence.

Manipal-TPG, Munjal-Burmans, Malaysia's IHH Healthcare and China's Fosun have already submitted bids for Fortis Healthcare. Fortis Board which met on Thursday said they will only consider "binding offers."

The offers of Manipal-TPG and Munjal-Burmans are binding as of now.

Radiant said the offer is subject to it being able to acquire 26 per cent or more shares of the new entity via open offer.

In case Radiant is unable to acquire 26 per cent or more shares of the combined entity through open offer it will do a preferential allotment at Rs 126 per share.

Radiant said it will fund and underwrite the acquisition of healthcare assets of RHT via rights issue.

"We have done a preliminary and limited assessment of publicly available information about FHL and its associate companies. Based on that, we observe that FHL is in need of a strong promoter and strategic investor with the relevant experience in India healthcare market," Radiant said in a statement.

"We have deep experience of hospital operations. Radiant's strategic alliance with FHL would deliver long-term benefits to FHL and its stakeholders. Our experience on turning around and operating large hospital assets makes us a better partner than other suitors," the statement added.

Promoted by Abhay Soi - Radiant operates two super specialty hospitals in Delhi and Mumbai, received USD 200 million investment from US private equity firm KKR.
Online insurance broker Coverfox.com has raised USD 22 million in Series C funding. The round is led by IFC, which is a member of the World Bank Group, and other existing investors.

The company had previously raised USD 17 million in Series A & B funding together, from SAIF Partners, Accel and NR Narayana Murthys private investment arm Catamaran Ventures.

In a press statement, Coverfox said that it will use the funds to expand insurance coverage into tier 2 and 3 cities and will specifically address womens needs.

Women-centric products including maternity covers as well as insurance for ailments like infertility and breast cancer are not widely available in the market. Existing products are also priced at a much higher premium than regular insurance products.

The technology team will also get a shot in the arm, said the company. Premanshu Singh, CEO, Covefox.com said that a large portion of the investment would go into improving the user experience by going both horizontal and vertical into each category.

The platform, built on an insur-tech model was set up in 2013 and now has tie-ups with 35 insurance companies and offer 150 plus products in the motor, life and health insurance segments.

By investing in Coverfox, IFC is giving a push to the countrys digitization agenda by leveraging technology to deliver insurance products outside metros and to women who are currently underserved, said Jun Zhang, IFC Country Head for India.
air-conditioners-ac-cooler

Consumers delaying home appliance purchases such as air conditioners, refrigerators, televisions and washing machines expecting a GST relief may be in for a shock. They may also have to prepare for another blow  a hike in consumer appliances prices. The GST Council, which meets early next month, is not in favour of reducing the existing 28 percent GST rate applicable on the segment, sources told Moneycontrol.

White goods are still a luxury and not a necessity for a large proportion of the Indian population, said a senior official close to the development. Industry bodies have been in vociferously seeking a cut in Goods and Services Tax (GST) to 18 percent.

In fact, customers may as well make their purchases now, as white goods manufacturers may hike prices in the next six months.

TV, a luxury?

When the GST Council decided on the rates for almost 80,000 items in May 2017, products were segmented into four brackets  5 percent, 12 percent, 18 percent and 28 percent.

White goods, often considered a luxury item, attract the highest quantum of taxes.

Not surprisingly, television sets, refrigerators, dishwashers, air conditioners and washing machines have been placed in the same GST bracket as Bentley car, which costs at least Rs 2.5 crore.

To put their point across, several industry bodies representing consumer appliances companies had held several meetings from July 2017 with the GST Council to request for the products to be brought into the 18 percent slab.

Our market surveys show that consumers have postponed their decision to buy products in an expectation that rates will fall, said a senior official of a consumer durables major.

But members of the Arun Jaitley-led GST Council hinted that there was no sufficient data to suggest that such products were an utmost necessity at households across the Indian geography.

Surcharge impact

Also, in a bid to provide an impetus to domestic production, the Finance Minister had hiked import duty on products such as television sets to 15 percent in his Budget announcements . A social welfare surcharge was also imposed on imported products.

Hence, for global players, GST and import duty could be a double whammy. Though prices for white goods have not been hiked so far, a 5-10 percent increase may be on the cards in the next six months.

The industry bodies had lobbied for a reduction stating that several customers in semi-urban areas have been impacted by the increase in taxes, making these products unaffordable for them.
Answer: Inch of a candle; Candle Wick flame expiration

An equity fund manager with Aegon Life Insurance was found dead near the railway tracks between Mulund and Thane railway stations. Vaishali Jajoo, 41, was reportedly missing since Tuesday and was found dead one day later.

The police have not yet stated the cause of her death. Investigations are on in the case.

According to a report in The Hindu, the police on Wednesday morning received information that a woman in her 40s had been found dead on the railway tracks near Mulund a few hours earlier.

A police team and Jajoos family members went to Agrawal Hospital in Mulund, where the body had been taken. The family members identified her, after which the Kurla Railway Police were contacted.

Jajoo lived with her husband and 15-year-old son in Thane. Prior to joining Aegon Life, she had worked as an auto analyst with Angel Broking, and in research roles in Kotak Mahindra UK and Dalal Street Investment Journal, as per her LinkedIn profile.

Jajoo made regular appearances on CNBC-TV18 and other business news channels where she would discuss stock ideas and her views on the market.
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Akash Jain

We like Parag Milk Foods and expect a target of Rs 350 by year end. Long term investors can also have a slice in this company as its a robust play on Indian dairy industry, growing aggressively and establishing strong distribution network across India to reach the end consumer.

It has become one of the leading dairy products company in India in a short span of time as compared to its peers. The company is presented with a big opportunity in Indian dairy industry which is valued at Rs 6,00,000 crore, and witnessing a CAGR of 10 percent+.

Over the last 10 years, the company has established strong brands like GO, Gowardhan and has recently entered into high margin Whey Protien segment. The company is very aggressive and has gained significant market share in processed cheese market at 33 percent and is ranked second after Amul.

It has a good product mix and has value added products in its basket which commands premium as compared to peers with strong acceptance from customers. The companys value added products like cheese, whey protein enjoy higher gross margins of 25-45 percent as against 6-8 percent entailed in liquid milk. The high margin products account for 66 percent to its revenue (the highest among the listed players versus 25- 30 percent for others).

Recently, Parag Milk Foods Limited has acquired Danone's (a French, Dairy Based MNC) Manufacturing Facility in Sonipat, Haryana and has expanded its footprints in North India. With this acquisition, it has expanded its existing footprints in North and North-East India by having a manufacturing facility near the End Consumer and double the current consumer base in the Fresh dairy category.

The company will leverage existing strong distribution network in North India for effective marketing and distribution of dairy products including Cheese, Ghee, Curd and other products.

Acquisition will establish Parag as the largest player in the Indian private dairy sector involved in the procurement, manufacturing, marketing and distribution of products produced exclusively from pure and fresh cows milk.

The company plans to invest Rs 30 crore which includes setting up additional manufacturing units for pouch milk, flavored milk, buttermilk and curd.This acquisition would help expand the companys footprints in North India and strengthen companys fresh category distribution of Milk, Flavoured Milk, Buttermilk, Curd, Fresh Paneer and Yogurt in this region.

As a part of investment, the company will refurbish the new facility with additional amenities to increase its product portfolio in the region. This acquisition is in line with its long term strategy to make the goodness of cows milk reach different parts of the country.

At current market price of Rs 286, the company is fairly valued at a P/E of 27x on trailing twelve months EPS. We would like to assign premium to its valuations owing to the above factors.

: The author isice-president, Equity Research at Ajcon Global Services. 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.
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The ongoing tension between US and Russia over Syria has led to oil prices spiking up. Yogesh Mehta, Vice President- Equity Advisory, Motilal Oswal, sees crude prices inching close to $80 a barrel in FY19.

Edited experts from an interview to Moneycontrol's Sunil Shankar Matkar

A: The market is awaiting triggers from the ongoing earnings season and the monsoon.

A: A number of state elections are lined up till January next year. The monsoon will also play a key role. It is difficult to project Nifty levels as the earnings season has just begun. If there is a revival in corporate earnings, then we may head to all-time highs.

Q: Crude prices have hit a four-year high of $73 a barrel. Do you expect it to continue upward and breach $80 a barrel in FY19?

A: Oil prices have spiked on ongoing tension between the US and Russia over Syria. With demand rising, prices are most likely to inch to $80 a barrel in FY19. The current spike in oil price has already been factored in by the market.

A: Higher crude oil prices can pose a risk to the Indian economy. However, any subsidy sharing by oil marketing companies can impact their earnings to extent of 25-35 percent. No other sector will face an adverse impact.

A: Not really, but any negative outcome in the 2018 state elections could impact market sentiment and may displace all other factors.

A: Mutual fund flows are dependent on market sentiment. Hence, any factor weighing on market sentiment will affect flows. SIP based inflows crossed Rs 7,100 crore in March and the same is only going to continue.

A: We do not foresee any alteration in policy rates. Hence, bond yields will remain in a 7-7.5 percent range.

A: NBFCs are in a sweet spot due to lower bond yields. We expect an earning revival with a favourable demand outlook.

A: Public sector banks are struggling with NPAs, even though the Reserve Bank is monitoring developments and working them. It is difficult for these banks to get rid of this problem at least in the near term.

A: Pharma is almost on the verge of emerging from the woods on the US Food and Drug Administration import ban issue. Lupin and Sun Pharma are having their key plants inspected. Almost all companies are growing at 17-18 percent.

The IT sector will see 6-10 percent revenue growth in FY19.

Infosys Q4 FY18 earnings was in-line with our expectation. The company is utilising cash for buying back its shares this fiscal. The managements lower EBIT margin guidance of 22 percent is conservative. Pricing pressures seeming to be tailing off. Share of higher margin Digital is also inching up. At the current market price, Infosys is trading at 16x FY19e P/E and hence is a conservative Buy.

It's key focus is to scale up its retail operations, led by a higher share of non-vehicle retail loans by FY20. The bank is targeting 25-30 percent loan growth, led by continued branch expansion and strong customer acquisition. A merger with Bharat Financial Inclusion will strengthen the bank's liability profile and further boost return ratios.

We remain positive on Maruti Suzuki, considering: a) Multi-year favourable product lifecycle; b) Improvement in product mix (increasing share of premium products) aiding realisations and consequently margins; c) Reducing yen exposure; d) Lower capex intensity; e) Improvement in free cash flow conversion; and f) High FCF generation and sharp improvement in return on invested capital.

Looking at the progress at Angul and Raigarh, volume estimates of 1.2MT for Q4FY18 and 5.8MT for FY19 appear comfortable. Steel production is at an inflection and expected to grow at 29 percent CAGR to 6.4MT over FY18-20. Strong long product prices in India, operating leverage and timely volume growth augur well for earnings. Nearly 25 percent of raw material cost is insulated from input price risk due to captive iron ore mines and coal linkage.

Over the past five-to-six years, Shriram Transport Finance's PAT has been in the Rs 1,200-1,300 crore range. Growth slowed and there were concerns on margins due to migration towards newer vehicle financing. Growth in the past 6-8 quarters (barring the quarters around demonetisation) has been good.

The impact of non-performing loan migration on yields as well as credit costs will end soon and FY19 will be a year of normalised return ratios. The company is investing for growth by expanding its branch network aggressively. We expect return on equity to improve to over 18 percent from FY19 onwards which would be at the higher end compared to its NBFC peers.

It has delivered consistent healthy performance. Rapidly expanding distribution, continuing investment in R&D and significant expansion of its own manufacturing indicate the immense confidence that management has on growth prospects. The opportunity beyond biscuits is also substantially high. Continuing premiumisation, significant incremental cost savings, lined up new product launches in FY19 and favourable commodity cost outlook mean that 15 percent EBITDA margins are achievable.
Indian market witnessed a bit profit booking decline which was largely weighed down by weak global cues as well as minutes from the Reserve Bank of Indias (RBI) policy meeting which pointed towards a change in stance from Accommodative to Hawkish.

The Nifty managed to close above its crucial support level of 10500 on Friday weighed down by financials, energy, realty, and infrastructure stocks. The index finally closed 1.2 point lower at 10,564.

On the other hand, IT Stocks gained the most with S&P BSE IT index closing with gains of 4.8% which was led by gains in TCS, Cyient, MindTree, Tech Mahindra, HCL Technologies, Infosys etc. among others.

The S&P BSE Sensex staged a smart recovery but closed 11 points lower at 34,415 weighed down by losses in ICICI Bank (down 2.4%), Tata Steel (down 2.2%), SBI (down 1.9%), and NTPC (down 1.8%).

Sectorally, the S&P BSE IT index rose 4.8%, followed by the S&P BSE telecom index which was up 0.5%, and the S&P BSE auto index gained 0.17%. The S&P BSE Realty index slipped 1.07%, followed by the S&P BSE Banks which slliped 1.04%, and the BSE Capital Goods index was down 0.8%.

The S&P BSE Midcap index slipped 0.4%, and the S&P BSE Smallcap index was up 0.02%.

For the week:

The S&P BSE Sensex closed the week with gains of 0.5% while the Nifty50 rose 0.6% for the week ended April 20.

The Nifty IT index rose 4.7%, followed by the Nifty FMCG index which gained 4.4%, and the S&P BSE Metal index was up 3.9% for the week ended April 20.

The Nifty50 Bank closed 1.2% lower, Nifty PSU banks dropped 5.2%, and Nifty Auto index was down by 0.3%.

Top Nifty gainers include names like Hindlaco (up 9.5%), followed by TCS (up 7.7%), HCL Technologies (up 7%), ITC (up 6.6%), Bharti Airtel (up 6.2%), and Cipla (up 6.1%)

Top Nifty losers include names like HPCL (down 10%), BPCL (down 8%), Axis Bank (down 6.6%), Tata Motors (down 5.8%), and SBI (down 4.1%).

Stocks in news:

TCS:

TCS is the most valued company at Dalal Street, with a market capitalisation of Rs 6.5 lakh crore and no inching towards to become the first USD 100 billion company (Rs6.6 lakh crore) after its healthy earnings performance and strong commentary. The stock closed 6.9% higher at Rs3412.

The stock closed with a market cap of Rs6.53 lakh crore just shy away from its $100 billion market cap which will be attained when the market cap will hit Rs6.6 lakh crore.

Nifty IT index:

The Nifty IT index jumped nearly 5 percent after healthy TCS earnings and depreciation in the rupee. Apart from strong gains in TCS which hit a record high, Infosys, HCL Technologies and Tech Mahindra rose over 4 percent.

Cyient Ltd:

Cyient rose 9.4% after the company posted 16.2 percent rise in net profit at Rs 121.5 crore for the quarter ended on March 31, 2018, compared to the year-ago period.

Mahindra CIE Automotive:

Mahindra CIE Automotive share price gained 1.8 percent as revenue in January-March quarter grew by 32 percent to Rs 612 crore and profit increased 132 percent to Rs 38.56 crore compared to year-ago.

Prakash Constrowell:

Prakash Constrowell share price rallied 10 percent after the company has been declared L-1 bidder by the MCGM (Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai) for the new project Dumpsite Reclamation at Mulund Dumping Ground (MDG) in Mumbai by adopting suitable technology for existing garbage dump. The stock closed 9.9% higher.

Kakatiya Cement Sugar:

Kakatiya Cements surged 20 percent after the company restarted its operations at cement plant in Andhra Pradesh.

Fortis Healthcare Ltd:

Fortis Healthcare said it has received a non-binding expression of interest from KKR-backed Radiant Life Care, making it the fifth bidder for the beleaguered firm. The company closed 0.6% higher.

Glenmark Pharmaceuticals Ltd:

Glenmark Pharmaceuticals has received final approval from the US health regulator for a generic version of Temovate Topical Solution used to treat certain scalp and skin conditions. The stock closed 1.7% higher.

Yes Bank Ltd:

Private sector lender Yes Bank said has received Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) approval to open two representative offices in London and Singapore. The stock closed 3% lower.

Eveready Industries Ltd:

Eveready Industries plunged 10 percent after fair trade regulator CCI imposed a total fine of Rs 215 crore on Eveready as well as Indo National, industry grouping AIDCM and their officials for cartelisation in pricing of zinc carbon dry cell batteries. The stock closed 10% lower.

Global Update:

Weak global cues from the Wall Street spilled over to the Asian markets. Indices there ended in the red, with some losses in the IT sector. The Nikkei 225 slipped 0.13 percent, or 28.94 points, to end at 22,162.24; financial stocks were the gainers.

But the story was slightly different in Europe, with indices opening higher. They are continuing to digest corporate earnings that are coming in, which are largely in the positive terrain. The pan-European Stoxx 600 was up around 0.1 percent in the morning trade.
Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, greets India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the Blue Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace as the Queen hosts a dinner during the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, in London. (Image: AP/PTI)

Protesters organized by the interfaith group POWER convene outside Philadelphia Police Department headquarters before marching to City Hall, Thursday, April 19, 2018, to rally against the decision of officers to arrest two black men at a Center City Starbucks last week. (Image: AP/PTI)

Smoke rises from a pipe factory after a major fire broke out, near Kaushambi metro station in Ghaziabad on Friday. (Image: PTI)

People watch a Malindo Air passenger plane after it skidded to the grassy area at the end of runway in Tribhuwan International Airport in Kathmandu, Nepal. (Image: AP/PTI)

Britain's Prince Charles, right, greets India's Prime Narendra Modi in a receiving line for the Queen's Dinner for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) at Buckingham Palace in London. (Image: AP/PTI)

People visit the Columbine memorial after teens kicked off a voter registration rally, a day ahead of the 19th anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School, in Littleton, Colorado, US. (Image: Reuters)

Students from the Universidad Agraria (UNA) public university protest against reforms that implement changes to the pension plans of the Nicaraguan Social Security Institute (INSS) in Managua, Nicaragua. (Image: Reuters)

Smoke rises from Yarmouk Palestinian camp in Damascus, Syria. (Image: Reuters)

Kashmiri Muslim women pray on the Friday following for Meeraj-un-Nabi, a festival which marks the ascension of Prophet Mohammed to Heaven, at the Hazratbal shrine early morning in Srinagar. (Image: Reuters)

A woman holds her malnourished daughter undergoing treatment at a hospital in Sanaa, Yemen. (Image: Reuters)
Not sure if Aadhaar is best model to accord benefits, says SC

SC allows Sahara to sell properties in Aamby Valley by May 15

Amending POSCO act to allow death penalty as the max punishment for child rape: Centre to SC

April 20, 2018 / 10:01 PM IST / 10:01 PM IST That's all for today! Thanks for tuning in. Your response encourages us. Do come back tomorrow for more news, views and insights.











April 20, 2018 / 09:54 PM IST India accounts for 55% of new bank accounts opened globally: World Bank India's financial inclusion efforts have won recognition from the World Bank as their data indicate that 55 per cent of new bank accounts opened are from India, Financial Services Secretary Rajiv Kumar said today. "WorldBank Global Findex Report recognises India's Financial Inclusion efforts. Of the 51.4 crore bank accounts opened from 2014-17 globally, a whopping 55% from India" he said in a tweet. (PTI)











April 20, 2018 / 09:27 PM IST Siddaramaiah declares assets worth over Rs 20 crore; Kumaraswamy Rs 167 crore Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and his family have assets worth over Rs 20 crore, as per his affidavit filed along with the nomination for the May 12 assembly elections. State JDS chief H D Kumaraswamy, who is contesting from two constituencies, declared his and his wife's assets totalling more than Rs 167 crore. Their liabilities stood at over Rs 103 crores. "While Siddaramaaih filed his nomination from Chamuneshwari constituency in Mysuru, Kumaraswamy"filed papers from Ramanagara as well as Channapatna." (PTI)











April 20, 2018 / 08:56 PM IST Petro products need to be brought under GST: Dharmendra Pradhan Petroleum and Naural Gas Minister Dharmendra Pradhan today stressed on bringing petroleum products under the GST to provide relief to common people from spurt in fuel prices following surging global crude oil rates. Both the central and state governments have started making up their mind in this regard, he said. Petroleum products are out of GST ambit which was rolled out in July last year. "The prices of petroleum products are all time high in past four years in international market due to some disturbances in Syria and US's threats to impose fresh sanctions on Iran," Pradhan told reporters here. (PTI)











April 20, 2018 / 08:54 PM IST











April 20, 2018 / 08:10 PM IST











April 20, 2018 / 08:00 PM IST PNB gets passports of 150 wilful defaulters impounded, files 37 FIRs State-owned Punjab National Bank (PNB) said on Friday that based on its complaints passports of 150 wilful defaulters were confiscated by the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). This is the first such revelation made by any bank in the country, following the government's instructions to banks on seeking passport copies of all those who have borrowed more than Rs 50 crore. Read the full story here.











April 20, 2018 / 07:21 PM IST











April 20, 2018 / 06:55 PM IST Cash supplies improved but cash crunch persists, say bank officials Currency supply to ATMs and branches has improved but cash crunch still persists in the system which would be normalised soon, bank officials said on Friday. The officials said that banks are keeping a close vigil on money supply to ATMs on daily basis to ensure that customers do not face any problem. Currency shortage, however, still persists in the system, a banker said on the condition of anonymity. "With allowance of free-of-charge withdrawals from our PoS terminals across the country, the bank has given an additional option to customers to withdraw money. We hope the short supply of currency at ATMs will be normalised soon," an official of the State Bank of India said. (PTI)











April 20, 2018 / 06:31 PM IST Commonwealth backs Prince Charles as next head: reports Commonwealth leaders agreed on Friday to back Prince Charles as the next head of the organisation, a day after Queen Elizabeth II said it was her "sincere wish" that her son would succeed her in the role "one day". The 69-year-old Prince of Wales will be the next head of the 53-member Commonwealth, the BBC reported. The decision is believed to have been taken at the retreat at the grand Waterloo Chamber of the Castle, one of the homes of Queen Elizabeth II the Head of the Commonwealth. (PTI)











April 20, 2018 / 06:11 PM IST










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Here are the stocks which are in news today:

Results today: Indiabulls Housing Finance, Sasken Technologies

TCS: Q4 profit up 5.7 percent QoQ at Rs 6,904 crore, EBIT margin at 25.4 percent; approves 1:1 bonus

Cyient: Q4 net up 16.2 percent to Rs 121.5 crore

Sadbhav Engineering board meeeting on April 24 to consider issue of non-convertible debentures (NCD)

InfoEdge invested through its wholly-owned subsidiary about Rs 3 crore in Bizcrum Infotech pvt ltd

Fortis Healthcare: Board approved evaluation of binding offers and to constitute expert advisory committee, committee will provide report on April 26, appointed Mr Rohit Bhasin as an Additional Director (Independent) of the company

Lanco Infratech clarified on news article that neither resolution panel nor committee of creditors (COC) have taken decision for liquidation

Lasa Super received WHO-GMP certificate for its unit, entry to business market will commence shortly

MBL Infra: National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) approved resolution plan submitted by its promoter

Tata Metaliks board meeting on April 26 to consider dividend

Thomas Cook: The company has purchased 4.4 percent in Travel Corporation of India.

Indian Metals & Ferro Alloys: Company gets Rs 123 crore notices for excessive mining.

ABG Shipyard: Liberty House UK moves NCLT to challenge resolution professional's decision

Parsvnath Developers: CRISIL rating on NCD worth Rs 200cr to B+ from BB-; NCD are of Parsvnath Landmark developer, company's subsidiary

M&M incorporated subsidiary in Dhaka

M&M Financial board approved NCD worth Rs 1,800 crore

MRSS to conduct demand estimation for IOCL, BPCL and HPCL

Panasonic Energy: CCI issues important order under Lesser Penalty Provisions in the cartel case by leading Indian Zinc-Carbon dry Cell Battery Manufacturers

ICICI Bank clarified on ICICI Bank chairman meets MFs over succession plan that Chairman did not discuss any succession plan for executive management

Everready - CCI imposing a penalty of Rs 171.55 crore

Religare Enterprises raises Rs 145 crore via issue of 11.14 crore warrants at Rs 52.30 each on preferential basis

Kakatiya Cement: Company resumes operation at Telangana plant after its closure on pollution grounds

JB Chemicals: Company gets orders from pollution control board directing closure of formulation unit at Daman

RS Software Q4FY18 YoY: Revenue at Rs 15.33 crore versus Rs 17 crore, loss at Rs 6.73 crore versus Rs 4.32 rore

Bharat Seats Q4 YoY: Revenue up 13 percent at Rs 253.5 crore versus Rs 224.5 crore, EBITDA up 82 percent at Rs 17.9 crore versus Rs 9.8 crore; margin at 7 percent versus 4.4 percent; PAT up 94 percent at Rs 7.76 crore versus Rs 4.01 crore

Mahindra CIE Automotive Q1CY18 YoY: Revenue up 32 percent at Rs 612 crore versus Rs 464.5 crore; EBITDA up 67 percent at Rs 73.9 crore; margin at 12.1 percent versus 9.5 percent; PAT up 132 percent at Rs 38.56 crore

Religare Enterprises: Company raises Rs 145 crore via issue of 11.14 crore warrants at Rs 52.30 each on preferential basis

ICICI Bank rejects call for external audit: ET

Birlas to sell upto 20 percent in Idea Payment bank: ET

NSE, BSE plan commodity derivatives platform: ET

UltraTech Cement open to raising Binani offer: BS

HOEC, South Asia Consultancys field development plans get DGH approval: HBL

NTPC wants to exit JV with BHEL

Thyssenkrupp expects its JV with Tata Steel by 2018-end
The benchmark index Sensex gained 15 percent in the last 1-month. Moneycontrol tried to find out the stock which is in momentum trades and outperformed the benchmark index but still trading 70 percent below their 52-week high. From the BSE 500, 10 stocks make the cut. Data Source: ACE Equity.

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IndusInd Bank

Citigroup: Target Rs2180

Citi maintains a buy call on IndusInd Bank post Q4 results but raised its 12-month target price to Rs2180 from Rs2060 earlier.

Higher CASA ratio and the recent MCLR increase should help net interest margins or NIMs. The loan growth remains strong. However, slippages rose due to divergence. Fee income growth was muted due to a high base of retail third-party fees.

Nomura: Target Rs 1950

Nomura maintains a buy rating on IndusInd Bank post Q4 results with a target price of Rs1950. The March quarters net profit missed marginally due to lower growth in income fees. However, we saw a steady performance on all metrics.

The asset quality remains stable as there were no major issues from divergence. Going forward, completion of the merger would be the next stock catalyst.

Axis Capital

Axis Capital maintains a buy call on IndusInd Bank post Q4 results with a target price of Rs2060. The March quarters results were largely in line with estimates led by superior growth in advances and stable margins.

The financial year 2016-17 net divergence was minuscule. But, the loan growth remains strong at 28 percent; growth in vehicle segment too picked up. The domestic brokerage firm is still watchful on the developments on the acquisitions front.

Brokerage: Jefferies | Rating: Hold | Target: Raised to Rs 1,690

The global research firm observed that high divergence led to 6.4% slippage ratio. Further, it said that it seems the entire corporate slippage came from divergences in FY17.

Brokerage: UBS | Rating: Neutral | Target: Rs 1,950

UBS observed that Q4 results were largely in-line with expectations as net profit grew by 27% YoY. Further, it expects limited upside from current valuations as NPL risk still exists.

Brokerage: PhillipCap | Rating: Buy | Target: Raised to Rs 2,050.

The brokerage expects bank to continue reporting strong performance led by robust advances, margin. Growth in consumer financing loans will gain momentum. Adjusted RoA may remain strong, driven by earnings CAGR Of 23% in FY18-20.

Brokerage: Deutsche Bank | Rating: Buy | Target: Rs 2,100

Deutsche Bank said that minor blips are not concerning, while the growth story is intact. It expects fee growth to accelerate again to 20 percent as base effect wears off.

TCS

Brokerage: CLSA | Rating: Reiterate Buy | Target: Raised to Rs 3,700 from Rs 3,250

The global brokerage house said that Q4 revenues beat estimates sharply. It has upgraded the FY20 revenue and EPS estimates by 1 percent. It also expects the firm to maintain payout ratios. The target multiple has been raised to 21 times one year forward PE.

Brokerage: Nomura | Rating: Maintain reduce

Nomura said that the firm had strong beat on revenues due to ramp-up in large deals in the UK. The company has seen a marginal increase in effective tax rate to 24-25 percent in FY19 against 24.1 percent in FY18.

Brokerage: Kotak Securities | Rating: Maintain reduce | Target: Raised to Rs 3,100

Kotak Securities said that the firm had reported strong 2% CC growth powered by large deals. It also expects a better FY19 & forecasts CC revenue growth of 9.2%. The firm also said that it is justifying current valuation, which requires baking in of USD 2.1 billion of incremental revenue in FY19. It also raised EPS estimates by 4-6 percent largely due to change in rupee-dollar forecast.

Brokerage: Jefferies | Rating: Maintain Hold | Target: Raised to Rs 3,200

Jefferies observed that Q4 revenue was ahead of expectations in $ terms. It is building in 8.5-10% CC growth Over FY19-21 Vs 6.7% reported In FY18. Most of the improved outlook is already priced into the stock price, it said, adding that most of improved outlook is already price into the stock. It is also building in flattish margin over FY18-21.
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Placing a positive bet on Phoenix Mills, which has risen over 32,000 percent between January 3, 2000 and April 19, 2018, brokerage house Motilal Oswal has initiated coverage on the stock. Motilal Oswal has a buy call on the stock, with an upside potential of 21 percent at a target of Rs 732.

In fact, in the last two months, global brokerages have been positive on the stock as well.

For instance, Macquarie maintained an outperform rating on the stock, with a target of Rs 732. This was based on reports of the company having inked an agreement to buy 16 acres of land near Bengaluru and observed that catchment for a mall was good. It also said that Phoenix was one of its top picks in realty space.

Meanwhile, JPMorgan, too, maintained the overweight stance and raised target to Rs 710. Double rental growth combined with residential business to boost earnings, it said, adding that it sees 12/35 percent EBITDA/net profit growth over two years. In fact, it expects positive free cash flow from FY19.

It must be prudent to point out that the stock has witnessed two three rounds of corporate action in terms of stock splits and bonuses. The company had announced a bonus issue of 4:1 on September 1, 2005 and announced two stock splits  September 1, 2005 and December 12, 2005.

The company, as such, has been in operation for more than 100 years. It started off as a textile manufacturer, but has of late been in the business of mall developments.

Also Read: Top 20 stocks that can deliver up to 50% returns; do you own any?

Motilal Oswal house highlighted three aspects of its portfolio

(a) Retail mall development (enjoys a leadership position in cities where it operates)

(b) Hospitality, Residential and Commercial (together contributed 35% of revenue as of

FY17).

Further, it also highlighted that it has become a partner of choice for retailers in India due to its impressive track record of consumption-led growth and strong portfolio of eight malls (6msf) spread across the top cities in India.

It also specializes in mall management, a segment where rivals are seen lagging. Thus, we believe that it offers a unique opportunity for any retailer (both domestic and global) looking to expand rapidly in India, the brokerage house said in its report.

Fund infusion

Motilal Oswal said that the fund infusion of Rs 1,660 crore by Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) in its subsidiary, Island Star Developers, will create a war chse of Rs 3,200 crore. This will gear up the company for next leg of growth and Phoenix plans to buy and build four new malls.

Cash flows

The brokerage also expects cash flow generation from operations of Rs 2,380 crore over FY18-20. These cash flows can be deployed toward (i) acquiring ready/under-construction mall, (ii) unlocking development potential of 4.6msf in its existing land parcels and (iii) reducing debt, the brokerage added.

In terms of financials, it expects the company to record CAGR of 15 percent in revenue, 16 percent in EBITDA and 37 percent in PAT.
True Balance, a digital wallet and financial services platform, today said it has raised USD 23 million (around Rs 152 crore) from Japanese firm Line Ventures Corporation and Korean search engine Naver, among others.

The series B2 funding round also saw participation from Korea's Shinhan Bank along with TS Investment and other partners, the company said in a statement.

The company intends to use the fresh infusion of capital towards talent acquisition and expanding benefits of need based financial services, it added.

True Balance plans to recruit from educational institutes like IITs and IIMs among others to strengthen its technology and business teams.

True Balance has raised USD 42 million in funding so far, including the latest tranche. Previous rounds of funding have seen participation from investors like SoftBank Ventures, Bon Angels, Mega Investment, IMM Investment, Korea Development Bank and others.
Praveg Communications (India) Ltd.

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Drug firm Unichem Laboratories today said it has not received any observations from the US health regulator after completion of inspection of its Ghaziabad facility in Uttar Pradesh.

The company's formulation manufacturing facility at Ghaziabad was inspected by the United States Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) from April 16, 2018 to April 20, 2018, Unichem Laboratories said in a BSE filing.

The inspection concluded with zero observations, it added.

"This inspection also covered one of the first to file molecules," Unichem Laboratories said.
A bird flies by the Vedanta office building in Mumbai August 16, 2010. India-focused miner Vedanta Resources said it will buy 51-60 percent of Cairn India for about $8.5-9.6 billion in cash to be funded via debt and cash resources, a move that would represent Vedanta's first foray into oil and gas, and help Edinburgh-based Cairn Energy fund an expensive drilling programme in Greenland. REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui (INDIA - Tags: BUSINESS ENERGY) - RTXSAAV

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Vedanta's acquisition of the crippled Electrosteel Steels is credit neutral on the resources major as it will have only a marginal impact on its overstretched balance sheet, says a report.

The London-based Vedanta group is highly leveraged with Rs 1.03 trillion in debt. Its debt-equity ratio stood at 2.2 times last fiscal.

In a report India Ratings today said the lower impact on its credit rating is despite higher cash outflows relating to the acquisition of 90 per cent stake in Electrosteel and closure of Goa iron ore mining and copper smelting operations.

The agency expects loss of cash flows from this divisions to be countered by higher-than-expected operational cash flows in the base metals and oil and gas divisions, supported by increased volumes.

It also termed the deal between Vedanta and ESL as credit neutral.

The report sees the Electroseteel deal stretching balance sheet to 2.5 times in FY19 from 2.2 times in FY18.

"FY19 net leverage is likely to increase to a range of 2.3x-2.5x from FY18 estimate of 2.2x. This will be due to the cash outflows relating to this acquisition and stoppage of Goan iron ore mining and copper smelting operations," the report said.

Billionaire Anil Agarwal-led Vedanta's resolution plan for the bankrupt ESL was approved by the National Company Law Tribunal last week, making it the first of the 12 largest accounts referred by the Reserve Bank last June to NCLT for resolution.

As per the deal, Vedanta will pick up 90 per cent stake in Electrosteel for Rs 5,321 crore. Of this Rs 1,806 crore will be equity and Rs 3,515 crore of debt. The remaining 10 per cent will be held by the existing shareholders and financial creditors.

The funds received by Electrosteel will be used to fully settle the debts owed to its existing financial creditors. Electrosteel owned over 13,000 crore to bankers before it turned bankrupt.

Vedanta has a 0.8 million tonne per annum pig iron capacity in Goa. The acquisition will add 1.5 mt capacity to this and another 1 mt on the completion of the expansion programme.

Electrosteel plant is in Jharkhand where Vedanta has a prospecting licence for iron ore mining.

Vedanta's pre-feasibility report proposes a 5 mt iron ore mining capacity for the assessed resource base of 186.7 mt of iron ore with an average grade ranging 54-65 per cent.

The report further said the acquisition will provide synergies in form of forward integration of Electrosteel's steel plant with Vedanta's possible mining operations in Jharkhand.

In February, the Supreme Court had ordered closure of iron ore mining in Goa, which impacted Vedanta's operations. Also, in March, its copper smelting operations were shut down due to the denial of annual consent for operations, according to the report.
Some groups protesting against atrocities in India during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit here have turned violent after a tricolour was torn down from one of the official flagpoles set up for all 53 Commonwealth countries.

Modi, who is in the UK for bilateral talks and the multilateral Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), was greeted by protesters as he met his British counterpart Theresa May.

Some of the protesters at Parliament Square yesterday turned aggressive after the Indian tricolour was torn down from the flagpole.

"Police are investigating after an Indian flag in Parliament Square was pulled down at 1500 (UK time) on Wednesday, 18 April. The flag has been replaced. There have been no arrests. Enquiries continue," a Metropolitan Police statement said.

A UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) spokesperson said, "While people have the right to hold peaceful protests, we are disappointed with the action taken by a small minority in Parliament Square and contacted High Commissioner Yashvardhan Kumar Sinha as soon as we were made aware.

"The visit to the UK by Prime Minister Modi has strengthened our relationship with India and we look forward to working even more closely together on a number of important areas."

A senior broadcast journalist from one of the leading Indian media channels covering the protests was caught in a violent scrum with some of the more aggressive pro-Khalistani protesters and Scotland Yard officers on duty had to step in to the rescue. The group is planning to file a complaint with the Metropolitan Police on the incident.

"We have expressed our concerns with the British authorities and they have apologised for the incident. We have been warning against some of these elements out to make trouble and they have assured us of action. The Indian flag has now been replaced," a senior Indian official associated with the PM's visit said.

The pro-Khalistani demonstrators from Sikh Federation UK and demonstrators from the so-called "Minorities Against Modi" group, led by Pakistani-origin peer Lord Ahmed, were among nearly 500 protesters who descended upon Parliament Square. These included groups led by some Kashmiri separatist groups and at one point, some of them had surrounded the Mahatma Gandhi statue at the square with their banners and flags.

Officials involved with the prime ministerial visit to the UK had said that protests and demonstrations are "part and parcel of any democratic society" as long as they remain peaceful. There are now concerns that some of the more aggressive elements hijacked the tone of the protests.

Earlier on Wednesday, flash mob of sari-clad women with dhols set the tone for the pro-Modi crowds opposite 10 Downing Street as the Indian PM arrived for his breakfast meeting with British Prime Minister Theresa May. They were joined by the Friends of India Society International (FISI) group, which spearheaded a crowd of Indian diaspora from across the UK waving banners such as Chak De India and Jai Hind outside Downing Street and nearby Parliament Square.

"We want to welcome the Indian PM to the UK and show him the diaspora support he enjoys," said one of the members of the gathering.

On the other side, the anti-Modi protesters from Caste Watch UK and South Asia Solidarity group waved banners such as 'Modi, you have blood on your hands' and 'Modi Not Welcome'.

"Hindu nationalism must be curtailed to avert India sliding towards wholesale dictatorship threatening democratic fabric, rule of law and the unity of India," a Caste Watch UK spokesperson said.

They were joined by other protestors carrying images the eight-year-old rape victim from Kathua in Jammu and Kashmir, and Gauri Lankesh, the Indian journalist who was shot at her doorstep last year.

The group also included representatives of several Indian women's groups in the UK, wearing white as part of their silent protest against atrocities that are taking place in India.

"I am Hindustan, I am ashamed," read their placards alongside banners such as 'Beti Bachao' and 'Politics minus rape'.
Essar Steel

The Delhi High Court today sought the response of Essar Group promoters Ravi Kant Ruia and Anshuman Ruia on a CBI plea challenging their acquittal in a case arising out of the probe in the 2G scam case.

Justice S P Garg issued notice to the Ruias and six others and sought their replies by May 25 to the CBI's appeal against the trial court decision of December 21, 2017.

Besides Ruias, the CBI has also appealed against the acquittal of promoters of Loop Telecom Ltd I P Khaitan and Kiran Khaitan, Essar Group Director (Strategy and Planning) Vikash Saraf and three telecom firms - Loop Telecom, Loop Mobile India and Essar Tele Holding.

The probe agency has said in its appeal that the special judge failed to appreciate the evidence and the law in proper perspective and the evidence on record clearly establishes the offence committed by the accused.

On December 21, last year, a special court had acquitted Essar Group promoters, Loop Telecom Promoters and others in a case arising out of the 2G scam probe.

The court had charged them with the offence under section 120 B (criminal conspiracy) read with section 420 (cheating) of IPC, substantial charge of cheating was made out against Saraf.

The CBI had named them in its chargesheet on December 12, 2011, alleging they had cheated the Department of Telecommunication by using Loop Telecom as a "front" to secure 2G licences in 2008 in violation of Clause 8 of the Unified Access Service License Guidelines.
Three days after supporting Tripura Chief Minister Biplab Kumar Deb's claims that the Internet existed in the days of Mahabharata, the state's Governor Tathagata Roy today said what he had meant was there was a possibility of something of that sort.

"See, I have not said that there was Internet at that time," Roy told reporters here.

"I had merely stated this is a thing what we are trying to find out. Unless there was a prototype of something of that sort at that time it was not possible, to conceive such a thing," he said.

In his April 17 tweet, Roy said, "Tripura Chief Minister's observations about the happenings of the puranic period are topical. It is virtually impossible to conceive of devices like 'Divya Drishti', 'puspaka Ratha', etc without some kind of prototype and study there on."

The Tripura chief minister had claimed that the Internet and sophisticated satellite communication system existed in the days of Mahabharata, drawing ridicule from his opponents, academicians and social media users who termed his contention as "unscientific", "illogical" and "retrogressive".

Roy said people did not imagine mobile phones in the 1960s as there was no prototype of cellphones at that time.

So, during the time of the Mahabharata and Puranas, people must have had superhuman imagination or they must have had some kind of prototypes of these already, he said.

Roy, who was West Bengal BJP unit president from 2002 to 2006, was talking to reporters on the sidelines of the launch of a book on Jan Sangh founder Syama Prasad Mookerjee penned by him.

The Tripura governor said Mookerjee was a true patriot and would vociferously protest against attacks on both Hindu and Muslim communities.

"Even legislators in British India like A K Fazlul Huq had said Syama Prasad was a true friend of Muslims," Roy said.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi today had a series of bilateral meetings including discussions with his Bangladesh counterpart Sheikh Hasina and Seychelles President Danny Faure on the sidelines of the multilateral Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) here.

"Neighbourhood first! Connecting with a neighbour and a close friend, PM Narendra Modi and Prime Minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina had a productive exchange of views on various issues of bilateral interest on the sidelines of CHOGM 2018," Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Raveesh Kumar tweeted.

This marked their first meeting since the Bangladeshi leader's visit to New Delhi last year and ahead of her proposed visit to India in the coming months.

Prime Minister Modi also met Seychelles President Faure and discussed cooperation in areas of trade and investment and other bilateral issues, he said.

The bilateral talks between Faure and Modi assumes significance after Seychelles ordered an inquiry into the leak of a highly classified agreement signed with India to develop infrastructure on Assumption Island, which lies southwest of the mainland of Mahe.

The opposition in Seychelles has decided not to ratify the pact because of Assumption's relative proximity to Aldabra atoll, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that is home to the world's largest population of giant tortoises.

Cementing close friendship with Mauritius, Prime Minister Modi met his Mauritius counterpart Pravind Kumar Jugnauth and talked about cooperation in trade and investment, maritime cooperation and people-to-people ties.

The "pull-aside meetings" with world leaders included an interaction with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, Gambian President Adama Barrow, Fiji Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, St. Lucia Prime Minister Allen Chastanet and Prime Minister of Solomon Islands, Rick Houenipwela.

Modi also interacted with President of Kiribati Taneti Maamau, Prime Minister of Antigua & Barbuda Gaston Browne and Prime Minister of Trinidad & Tobago Keith C Rowley.

Some of the other world leaders expected to have one-on-one deliberations with Modi during the summit include South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades, and Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Michael Holness.

"The summit offers ample opportunity for leaders to interact in meeting rooms for bilateral discussions on matters of mutual interest as well as cooperation over Commonwealth issues," a senior official said.

Officials had earlier indicated that no meeting has been requested or scheduled with Pakistan Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and later confirmed there was no interaction between the two.

The bilateral talks took place as the formal heads of government meeting got underway in London today, following a formal launch by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace.

Prime Minister Modi was scheduled to address the second plenary meeting of the heads of government during the closed-door executive session of CHOGM.

At the launch of the CHOGM executive session at Lancaster House open to the media, British Prime Minister Theresa May said: "The great strength of the Commonwealth is that all our members have equal status, an equal voice, and an equal right to make that voice heard. So, as we tackle these challenges, I want to hear from everyone, and everyone will have chance to speak.

"We face many challenges in the world today. But the Commonwealth is a unique organisation and, at this summit, we have an opportunity to deliver lasting change that benefits all of our 2.4 billion people."

Later in the evening, the 91-year-old monarch will host a dinner for all 53 heads of government at the palace later on Thursday evening.

"I had not been able to visit the last summit and this time, it was an honour that Prince Charles came personally to India last year to invite me for it. The Queen herself wrote a personal letter to me, a matter of great pride for India," Modi had said during his Bharat Ki Baat, Sabke Saath diaspora event in London last evening.

An Indian Prime Minister is attending CHOGM, held every two years, after a hiatus of nearly a decade, having skipped CHOGMs in Perth, Colombo and Malta since 2009. The Indian government has said that this symbolises the country's wider efforts to step up its role across global forums.

The executive session of the summit today will be followed by a retreat at Windsor Castle tomorrow, when the leaders get together in an informal setting without any pre-set agenda or being accompanied by their usual coterie of civil servants and advisers.

The summit concludes tomorrow, when leaders will issue their communique and a leaders' statement after their retreat.

CHOGM takes place every two years in different Commonwealth countries, with the next host country also to be announced at the end of this summit.

Following the retreat, Modi will head back to India after a brief stop for his meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi today left for Germany after wrapping up his visit to the UK where he attended the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) and held a series of bilateral meetings.

Prime Minister Modi would meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel during a brief stopover in Berlin.

Modi had arrived in the UK on Tuesday night from Sweden on a four-day visit.

The prime minister, during his interventions at the executive session of the CHOGM here, had announced that India will double its contribution to the Commonwealth fund for technical cooperation and vowed to provide tailor-made developmental assistance to small island states.

Besides attending the CHOGM, Modi held bilateral talks with his British counterpart Theresa May.

He also held discussions with his Bangladesh counterpart Sheikh Hasina, Seychelles President Danny Faure and nearly a dozen other leaders on the sidelines of the multilateral CHOGM.

In Sweden, Modi held extensive talks with Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, besides attending a India-Nordic Summit.
More than 60 Members of Parliament (MP) from seven political parties have signed a notice for the impeachment of the Chief Justice of India, Dipak Misra, under five grounds of misbehaviour. The parties, led by Ghulam Nabi Azad of the Congress party, met the chairman of the Rajya Sabha, Venkaiah Naidu, to move this motion on Friday.

The Congress Party, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPIM), Communist Party of India (CPI), Samajwadi Party (SP), Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Muslim League are the seven parties who have initiated the proceedings.

Addressing the press over the issue, Ghulam Nabi Azad said, We are very much sure that the honourable Rajya Sabha Chairman will act.

Kapil Sibal then took the platform to express his sadness, saying We wish this day had never come. The Judiciarys independence is a constitutional imperative, without which democracy will flounder.

However, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh refused to sign the motion against the CJI. Sibal confirmed this to the press, saying he was not involved in this process due to his stature as the countrys ex-PM.

Sibal explained that there is only one thing that the constitution allows impeachment. The choice was not easy. We only wish to state that anyone occupying the office of Chief Justice must be judged on the basis of high integrity.



The first charge against the CJI relates to how he dealt with the Prasad Education Trust case and the conspiracy of illegal gratification paid by persons involved. The CBI has registered an FIR and there were many taped conversations between middlemen, which included a retired judge from Odisha high court, where the CJIs name has been mentioned.



In the same case, the second charge is that the CJI handled the administrative and judicial side of the case with a writ petition which sought an investigation into the matter. It was highly likely that he would have fallen within the scope of the investigation.



It is an old practice in the Supreme Court that when a Chief Justice is in a constitution bench, matters are to be listed before the first puisne judge. However, a case of antedating was seen, involving senior justice Chelameswar, when the listing of November 6 was brought to his attention on November 9.



Antedating is the third charge against the CJI.



The fourth charge goes way back when CJI was an advocate and he acquired land by submitting an affidavit which was found to be false. He surrendered the land only in 2012, after being elevated to the Supreme Court.



The CJI is also being charged with misusing his power as Master of the Roster by assigning sensitive cases to particular benches, with a possible intent to influence the outcome.



Sibal said the majesty of the law is more important than the majesty of any office. Democracy can stand only when judiciary stands firm. We hope that a thorough inquiry would be helpful so that truth alone triumphs.

How do you impeach a Chief Justice?

Once appointed, the Chief Justice remains in power until the age of 65 and can be removed only through the process of impeachment by the Parliament. A judge can be removed only on grounds of proved misbehaviour or incapacity.

According to Article 124(4) of the Constitution of India, a motion has to be issued for the impeachment from 100 MPs from the Lok Sabha or 50 MPs from the Rajya Sabha, and it can be moved in either of the houses. The motion can be accepted or rejected by the Chairman of the House.

When accepted, the chairman forms a three-member committee, of which a senior judge of the Supreme Court, a judge of the High Court and a special jurist are members, to investigate the said charges.

If this committee supports the move, it is taken up in the house where it was initiated and must be passed by a special majority in the House. After passing through one house, it must be taken up in the second, where it must be passed with two-thirds majority once more. After this, the President of India takes the final call to remove the Chief Justice of the country.
Congress

When Karnataka last went to polls in 2013, the Congress had three distinct advantages that catapulted it to power.

This time, however, all these factors are non-existent and the party will have to rely solely on the performance of the Siddaramaiah government.

Anti-incumbency: The BJPs first government in south India came to power in Karnataka in 2008 under the leadership of BS Yeddyurappa, who had famously declared that his only agenda as chief minister would be development, development and development. The voters had also reposed faith in BJP as they were fed up with the vagaries of coalition politics, which saw three governments and two spells of Presidents rule between 2004 and 2008.

However, the BJP belied the hopes of the people as the government got embroiled in a series of corruption cases, resulting in the imprisonment of Yeddyurappa and a string of his ministers. The promise of stability also fell flat with the acute infighting within the party leading to the appointment of three chief ministers in five years.

When its term ended, the BJP had completely squandered the mandate of the voters and a strong anti-incumbency wave swept it out of power.

Illegal mining in Ballari: One of the major issues that dominated the elections in 2013 was the large-scale illegal iron ore mining in Ballari district by the Reddy brothers and their cohorts during the BJP rule.

With public anger mounting against the plunder of the states natural resources, the then opposition leader Siddaramaiah had led a 320-km padayatra in 2010 from Bengaluru to Ballari, where he thundered at a massive rally, We will soon hoist the Congress flag on Vidhana Soudha.

The Reddy brothers were unperturbed and just as they were gloating over their invincibility, the bubble burst. A Lok Ayukta report exposed the illegal mining scam, which led to the resignation of Janardhana Reddy and Karunakara Reddy from the BJP ministry, with the former being incarcerated for 40 months.

In the elections that followed, Siddaramaiahs words would turn prophetic.

Split in BJP: Another decisive factor which went in favour of the Congress was a two-way split in the BJP. Angered with the party for side-lining him over corruption charges, Yeddyurappa floated the Karnataka Janata Paksha (KJP), while Reddy-loyalist B. Sriramulu formed the Badavara Shramikara Raithara Congress after the BJP distanced itself from the Ballari brothers.

Between them, the outfits managed to win only ten seats and Yeddyurappa succeeded in inflicting a heavy blow on the BJP by splitting votes in several constituencies. The BJPs tally fell from 110 in the previous elections to 40, while the Congress share increased from 80 seats to 122.

Now, as the state goes to polls on May 12, the Congress cannot benefit from anti-incumbency because BJP is not in power; the mining controversy is dead; Yeddyurappa and Sriramulu have returned to the BJP. However, the BJP has given some leeway to the Congress by granting tickets to most of its tainted former ministers.

With the three major factors that propelled it to power no longer in play, it remains to be seen if the Congress will manage to sail through only on the basis of chief minister Siddaramaiahs performance.

(The writer is a political commentator and senior journalist)
Congress

Opposition parties led by the Congress will meet today to give final shape to the proposed impeachment motion against Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra and are likely to submit it to Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu.

According to sources, opposition parties including the Congress, the NCP, the Left parties, the Samajwadi Party (SP), the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and some others will meet in Parliament to give final shape to the proposed impeachment motion.

Thereafter, the opposition parties will meet the Chairman of Rajya Sabha and are likely to submit the same today itself, the sources said.

A time has already been sought from the Chairman, they said.

We will meet today to give final shape to the impeachment motion to be moved against the Chief Justice of India, an opposition leader told PTI.

Sources said the Trinamool Congress and the DMK, which were initially in favour of the impeachment against the CJI, are no longer part of it.

The impeachment notice comes a day after the Supreme Court rejected a bunch of petitions seeking an independent probe into the death of Judge B H Loya, who was hearing the Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case.

The SC judgement was delivered by a bench headed by the Chief Justice of India.

An impeachment motion in the Rajya Sabha has to be supported by a total of at least 50 MPs of the Upper House, while the number of MPs supporting such a motion in the Lok Sabha is 100.

Once the notice for an impeachment motion is submitted to the Rajya Sabha chairman, he will ascertain whether there is merit or ground for moving such a motion.

In case he finds merit, then he may form a committee to look into it, else he can reject it.

If moved, this will be the first time ever in the country's history that an impeachment would be moved against the Chief Justice of India.
US President Donald Trump invited his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to the United States during a phone call, and said he would be glad to see Putin in the White House, RIA Novosti reported on Friday, citing the Russian Foreign Ministry.

The news agency quoted Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as saying Trump returned to the subject of an invitation a couple of times during a phone call with Putin. Trump told Putin he would be happy to make a reciprocal visit to Russia, the RIA news agency quoted Lavrov as saying.
Nothing lasts forever.

Plain spoken and no-nonsense, this is a saying that governs all aspects of our lives. And when it comes to the markets, this impermanence is the shadow that is always lurking behind the scenes.

Vern Gowdie, author of The End of Australia, hammered in this point throughout his speech at Port Phillip Publishings Paradox of Prosperity conference. An event where influential financial thinkers from all over the world have come to put in their two cents about the state of the markets.

As Vern began his talk, the realist attitude that hes known for in his writing shone through. And the questions he posed reflected both the concerns of many Australians, and the critical tone that pervaded the speeches of the day.

Now that we live to 100, how are we going to afford it? Its a very good question.

Economic sustainability is a topic Vern cares deeply about. And with rapidly evolving technology, rising debt and a changing economic landscape, he believes its a topic we should all be paying attention to.

As Vern pointed out, the consequences of our rapid innovation are easy to see. With Netflix came the death of video rental stores. Newspapers disappeared as our screens multiplied. And with the rise of robotics, traditional labour will likely vanish as well.

But even with all of this innovation, our economic growth is slowing. The reason for this, Vern argues, is that we have failed to be adaptive in our economic model. And now we are drowning in debt and are struggling to keep our economy stable.

Although we are accustomed to our GDP always rising, and our living conditions becoming ever-better, its an expectation that we need to rethink. Because the cost of having decades of economic prosperity has been trillions of dollars in government promises. And now we are left with an unsustainable welfare system, falling productivity, and non-productive debt.

As Vern confirmed: Borrowing our way to growth is a model with a finite life. Its impermanent. We know that.

Vern then noted that increasing immigration and debt to drive growth was a Ponzi scheme. But as its political suicide to suggest any drastic change to our financial system, things are unlikely to change anytime soon. And Vern believes that this complacency will likely lead to the next recession.

How to solve the economic dilemma?

Dr Marc Faber, coined Doctor Doom, couldnt agree more. Taking the stage after Vern, he lamented Verns point that we need to adjust our expectations:

If you want the government to give you everything, they will take everything from you.

In our delirious state of economic boom, Dr Faber argues that we have become unproductive and greedy. And as a result, GDP outperformance in the Western world has come to an end.

He noted that China is slowly but surely becoming top dog. Theyre consuming roughly 50% of commodities, hold some of the worlds top brands and have increasing geopolitical influence. Theyre doing so well in fact, that they couldnt care less about the looming US tariffs.

Dr Faber sombrely conceded that the Western world is fast falling behind. And that in these times of rapid change and global uncertainty, it can be very difficult to know where to look as an investor.

But even in these challenging circumstances, both Vern and Marc proposed practical solutions for Australian investors. Outlining how you should invest in this environment and how to protect yourself in the event of a recession. I cant specify the details here, but if youd like to access the presentations in full, its not too late to grab your virtual seat at the Paradox of Prosperity conference.

Our camera crew has recorded all the speeches, questions and ideas from the conference, which include notable financial figures including Greg Canavan, Jonathan Pain, Gerard Minack, and Tim Murray. Get in before midnight tonight to get your 20% discount.

You can secure your copy, here.

Kind regards,

Katie Johnson,

Editor, Money Morning
Its definitely a huge accomplishment as an individual award, but it definitely means a lot to my company. Id be proud of that award and I definitely will let everyone know that I won this award.

Verico Streetwise Mortgages has been nominated for the Award for outstanding Customer Service (Individual Office), and the companys president and principal broker says the event will be an opportunity to hobnob with peers.

I aalways look forward to meeting fellow industry professionals at this event, said Dalia Barsoum. Thats always a big thing. Also celebrating with my teamwere still going to celebrate because we were nominated but if we end up winning it will be a big honour and achievement for our team, so Im looking forward to knowing the results.

Alison Lopes of DLC Premier Mortgages is up for the Mortgage Broker of the Year Award (25 Employees or Fewer), her first nomination, and says that, given the tough competition, shes honoured.

Its quite the honour to be placed in this category, she said. Obviously, there are a lot of brokers and its a competitive market, so its an honour to be recognized in such an esteemed class of brokers.

Win or lose, Lopes says the night is an opportunity to celebrate the year that was with peers and thank them.
Faris will remain president and CEO of Ocwen through June 30, but will not stand for reelection as a member of the board at the companys annual meeting in May, Ocwen announced. Faris will continue to consult after stepping down in order to ensure a smooth leadership transition.

We thank Ron for his leadership and for all of his contributions over the years, said board chair Phyllis Caldwell. As president and CEO, Ron guided Ocwen through a period of significant change, both in the mortgage industry and at our company. Ron redesigned the way we conduct business and, because of Rons leadership, we are strategically positioned to move forward into the future through our pending merger with PHH.

The decision to tap Messina as Faris replacement was the result of a long-term succession-planning process, Ocwen said.

We are very pleased that Glen Messina has decided to join Ocwen as our new president and CEO, Caldwell said. Glen is one of the recognized leaders in the mortgage industry, and his disciplined approach to top- and bottom-line results in his previous roles is widely respected. He also has a successful record of bringing together strong teams to strategically build stability and structure across an enterprise. Glens significant experience leading change as a public company CEO and his deep understanding of PHH will help accelerate Ocwens transformation.
If you ask Wayne Christian, the biggest threat to the oil and gas industry in Texas is millennials  and a general public that's been brainwashed into thinking that fossil fuels are bad for the environment.

That's what the former Republican state representative  who now regulates the state's oil and gas industry as one of three elected members of the Texas Railroad Commission  told his former colleagues during a legislative hearing on Wednesday where state, local and industry officials detailed the many challenges of the latest oil and gas boom in West Texas.

One of the tasks the House Energy Resources Committee has been assigned ahead of the 2019 legislative session is figuring out how the state can "facilitate investment in public infrastructure and workforce development in the Permian Basin region," where heavy truck traffic is decimating roads and the oil and gas industry is struggling to find truck drivers and other qualified workers as production ramps up again.

Christian repeatedly said the workforce development problem is due to misinformation and lack of education about the benefits of the oil and gas industry, which he said has led to "a better, safer, cleaner environment."

"The biggest threat to our boom that we see ahead of us ... is the misunderstanding of the oil and gas industry and the acceptance of the politically-correct-driven environmental anti-oil and gas science," he said. "Because of that misunderstanding of the oil and gas business and what it has provided mankind ... many people don't want to go into the oil and gas industry ... especially students."

He cited a survey that found that a significant portion of millennials wouldn't want to work in the industry.

The vast majority of the world's scientists believe that the production and burning of fossil fuels has damaged the environment and is a primary driver of climate change.

The only mention of climate change during the four-hour hearing on Wednesday came when state Rep. Jason Isaac cited a multiple choice question that had appeared on his son's standardized exam. It asked which energy source was known to cause climate change.

"It infuriated me," said the Dripping Springs Republican, explaining that it had prompted him to work with a nonprofit that advocates for the teaching of an "unbiased view of energy" in public schools.

"We're teaching our kids negative things  we're pre-biasing them," he said. "No wonder the pool is small."

As oil prices have recovered, drilling technologies have improved and the market responds to the lifting in 2015 of a ban on most crude oil exports, energy production has ramped up significantly in the Permian Basin  an ancient, hydrocarbon-rich seabed that spans West Texas and southeastern New Mexico. The International Energy Agency predicts that the United States will surpass Russia as the world's top oil producer by the end of the year thanks mostly to production in the area.

Christian said Wednesday that the country has a "moral duty" to war veterans to drill for oil because it will further a long-held goal of energy independence. However, virtually all the oil being produced in the Permian  a light, sweet crude that most domestic refineries aren't equipped to process  is being exported.

The burgeoning boom has already brought a host of challenges to the rural region that include record traffic fatalities, sky-high housing costs and overcrowded schools. One problem that arose during the last oil boom  earthquakes  doesn't appear to be getting worse, the state seismologist told the committee. Panel members of all political stripes appeared eager to support the industry as they figure out how to address those challenges.

"As progressive as I am and as enlightened as I am, we embrace the energy industry in our region," said state Rep. Armando Walle, a Houston Democrat who countered Christian's assertion that academic institutions aren't doing enough to train a workforce for oilfield jobs.

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Texas Tribine
Rising oil prices are now the latest target in President Donald Trump's cross-hairs. The nation's tweeter-in-chief complained Friday about OPEC fueling an "artificially Very High" cost for crude that he said "will not be accepted!"

So what's behind the jump in prices? Market outcomes, like success, can claim a thousand fathers, but here's a potential rogue's gallery for Trump following Brent crude's move to almost $75 a barrel on Thursday, its highest level in more than three years:

- The Saudis: Trump's right on this one. The world's biggest oil exporter has signaled it wants to push prices even higher, to around $80 a barrel, as it seeks to fund the expansive (and expensive) economic agenda of Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and support the valuation of state energy giant Aramco before an initial public offering. The kingdom spearheaded the successful effort by OPEC, Russia and other major producers to curtail global supply and boost prices. In a meeting this week, oil ministers signaled a willingness to see prices rise further.

- Russia: Saudi Arabia's most important ally in cutting output has backed extending the effort through the end of this year. Meanwhile, tensions are rising between the West and the world's largest crude producer. The U.S. and Europe announced tough sanctions on Russia in recent weeks, including limits hitting oligarchs in the energy sector, although Trump did reverse a plan earlier this week to impose more restrictions.

- The Iran deal: Fears that Trump will reimpose sanctions on Iran when the nuclear deal is reviewed, largely arising from the president's public comments, are adding to uncertainty in the market. The Obama administration's agreement with Iran has boosted production from the nation by more than 1 million barrels a day. A Bloomberg survey of oil-market analysts found a 50-50 chance of a sanctions "snap-back," which could halt as much as 800,000 barrels a day of exports from OPEC's third-largest producer within six months. Watch prices rise then.

- Venezuela's meltdown: This OPEC member has seen its output decline amid political and economic strife. Trump has added to the pressure, with a drive to impose tough sanctions to punish President Nicolas Maduro. Among those hit by sanctions are the former chief financial officer for the state-owned oil producer, Petroleos de Venezuela SA. A cryptocurrency introduced by Maduro, based on the nation's massive oil reserves, may also face sanctions, the U.S. has warned.

- Trade wars: Trump's tough trade talk, and tit-for-tat tariffs between the U.S. and China, have roiled global markets and raised the specter of further restrictions, at a time when American oil and gas exports are rising. In March, the industry said a new White House levy on steel imports could increase the cost of steel for wells by 25 percent and discourage pipeline construction as well.

And about those pipelines: The Permian Basin, the heart of the shale boom, is running into shortages with labor, equipment and, perhaps most critically, pipeline capacity. The output above pipeline space could grow to almost 1 million barrels a day in the year ahead, with no significant new pipes coming online until the second half of 2019.

Pipes aren't the only things carrying oil: The Jones Act - Section 27 of a law enacted in 1920 requires that goods transported by ship between U.S. ports be carried on vessels built and flagged in the U.S. and owned and manned by U.S. citizens. That drives up the cost of shipping U.S. crude from the Gulf Coast, for example, to refineries on the East Coast, which often use international oil instead. Arizona Republican Senator John McCain, among others, has called for the act to be annulled.

Local reaction to President Trump's tweet about oil prices The answer to Mr. Trump's tweet is: Oil prices have gone from, in 2014 $105 a barrel, which is too high, to $27 a barrel in February 2016, which was incredibly too low. If this country wants security and to be self-sufficient in oil production, the oil and gas industry needs oil above $60 a barrel. Oil prices need to be above that level so the industry can drill at a profit and produce oil. No one wants to drill for practice. We have to make a return on their investment. The current price or better is what the industry needs for the next few years. Kirk Edwards

President, Latigo Petroleum See More Collapse

Finally, the world's consumers can blame themselves. Global oil demand likely climbed by 2.6 million barrels a day in this year's first quarter, the biggest year-over-year jump since 2010, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said on Thursday. Rising consumer spending as well as cold weather in Europe and the U.S. helped boost demand, keeping Brent on track to reach $80 in the coming months, the Goldman analysts said.

Meanwhile, there's one lever Trump could pull to tamp down oil prices: releasing crude from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The emergency supply currently holds about 665 million barrels, according to the Energy Department. The backup has been tapped in the past to deal with market disruptions such as Libya's civil war and Hurricane Katrina.
The Border Patrol agent accused of killing his alleged lover and her infant child appeared in court for the first time Thursday, asking the judge to set a bond and seeking his release for lack of probable cause.

Ronald Anthony Burgos-Aviles, 28, has been in custody since April 9, when LPD said they found evidence linking him to the slaying of Grizelda Hernandez, 27, and her son, Dominic Alexander Hernandez, 1. Police charged him with two counts of capital murder.

Silverio Martinez, attorney for Burgos-Aviles, filed a pre-indictment writ of habeas corpus last week, asking the court to set a reasonable bond. He cited a lack of probable cause.

READ MORE: Border Patrol agent arrested in connection with double homicide in Laredo

Burgos-Aviles has never been convicted of a crime before, and therefore, his confinement and restraint are illegal, according to the writ.

Martinez filed two additional motions Thursday, an hour before the hearing, asking the court to appoint attorney Eduardo Pena as co-counsel and to close pre-trial hearings to the public.

The latter motion states that the "hatred and animosity toward Burgos-Aviles is extremely harsh and prejudicial" due to the high-profile nature of the case.

"(Burgos-Aviles) cannot have the public or media poisoning the jury pool by publishing or otherwise disseminating what is said during the hearing," the document states.

READ MORE: Obituary of mother, son allegedly killed by BP agent

406th District Court Judge Oscar J. Hale Jr. denied the defense's motion.

Webb County District Attorney Isidro "Chilo" Alaniz said the prosecution would present witnesses who would establish probable cause. He asked the court to deny him bond, saying that Burgos-Aviles, a Puerto Rican national, was a flight risk.

Burgos-Aviles is a danger to the community and used his badge as a shield to hide among law enforcement for the heinous killings, Alaniz told the court.

"The specialized skills that he used in order to commit the crime point and reveal a very dangerous individual," he said.

U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Internal Affairs Officer Adriana Escamilla, who is helping conduct the investigation into Burgos-Aviles for the agency, testified that on the day of the homicides, Burgos-Aviles began duty at 6 a.m. He reported finding the bodies at 11:20 a.m.

READ ALSO: Dozens gather at vigil to honor slain mother, child

Escamilla said the call was the only radio transmission Burgos-Aviles made throughout the five-hour period since he first reported for duty. She said that, especially for someone in a supervisory role like Burgos-Aviles, this was "highly out of the norm."

As a supervisory officer, Burgos-Aviles was in charge of five Border Patrol agents.

Sensors and cameras had been removed recently near Father Charles McNaboe Park, where the bodies were found, according to Escamilla. She said Burgos-Aviles was aware of this. However, she said she could not recall whether the bodies were found in the sensor-free area or just very close to it.

Additionally, while reviewing Burgos-Aviles' record, Escamilla found two incidents of possible misconduct, with one being a vehicle crash involving Burgos-Aviles, she said.

Another 2013 incident involved Burgos-Aviles lying about a break-in at his home, according to Escamilla. She said Burgos-Aviles told supervisors that he needed to leave his post to go check on his wife.

Since he was stationed at the Laredo North Border Patrol Station, far away from his home, Border Patrol agents were sent to check on his home, Escamilla testified. She said agents did not find evidence of a break-in and that neighbors told them that there was no break-in, but rather a confrontation between Burgos-Aviles' wife and his mistress.

Escamilla said the report did not identify the supposed mistress. Burgos-Aviles has been married for over five years, according to his marriage license.

The hearing will resume on Monday.

Arrest

Police said Burgos-Aviles quickly became a primary person of interest in the case after he called 911 at about 11:20 a.m. April 9 to report that he had found a woman's body.

When police responded to the scene, they found the body of the boy near her.

LPD has not disclosed how Hernandez and her son may have died.

After police identified the woman as Hernandez, they said they learned that Burgos-Aviles had been in a romantic relationship with her.

LPD later said it found evidence in a marked U.S. Border Patrol unit that is linked to the double homicide.

Claudio Trevino Jr., Laredo Police Department chief, said they seized the unit but cannot disclose what investigators found in the vehicle.

Border Patrol said it has suspended Burgos-Aviles indefinitely without pay.

Investigators said last week they are seeking out-of-town assistance to expedite the case.

"We're also waiting for the official report for the autopsies in Corpus Christi ... We hope to get those returns quickly," Trevino 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."

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.

Joana Santillana may be reached at 956-728-2528 or jsantillana@lmtonline.com. LMT reporter Cesar G. Rodriguez contributed to this report.
Last Sunday, I was seated in a Catholic church in the western suburbs of Chicago for the noon Mass that preceded the christening of my great-nephew.

As a non-Catholic, I was doing my best not to draw attention to myself. I had the large book of hymns and readings open on my lap.

That was all for show, of course, because I had no idea what page I was supposed to be on. I had a copy of what some Protestants call a church bulletin, but among all the announcements and ads, I was unable to discern what page to turn to or what was to come next.

The usual strategy for this sort of situation is to sit toward the rear of the church, hoping that my confusion would go unseen and by as few people as possible. Im sure many Catholics attending Protestant services are equally bewildered by the proceedings.

Families arriving late for Mass tend to slip into pews near the back and, sure enough, a group sat down next to me. The father leaned toward me and asked, What page?

I have no idea, was my brilliant reply.

He looked at me as if I were an idiot. He reached over, slid the bulletin from my hand, glanced at the front page and then turned to the proper page.

I might as well have whispered to him, How bout them Cardinals? to confirm his impression.

Of all the people in that crowded church to ask what page? he had to ask me. The rest of the Mass was uneventful and the baptism went off without a hitch. The next morning, I trudged out to my snow-covered car in my sisters driveway. Snow was still falling and the wind was howling.

My hope was that Id probably drive out of this awful weather in a few miles as I traveled south down Interstate 55 on my way home. No such luck. Conditions worsened.

More snow and strong crosswinds made driving difficult. Large semi-trucks were struggling to maintain their lanes against the wind. I gulped as I approached the twin bridges over the Des Plaines River. The wind was blowing across the spans but my little car managed the crossing without incident.

I then came to the Arsenal Road interchange, where many trucks enter and leave the expressway. I was bracketed between two large semis as we began crossing another bridge. On the span I noticed the steering was less responsive and then realized to my horror that the bridge deck had frozen.

I was sandwiched between two huge trucks driving across a skating rink at nearly 70 mph.

The image that filled my rear-view mirror was of an enormous grill and the A and C of Mack Truck. I began quietly, saying, Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy 

Had either of those drivers hit the brakes, their semis might have jack knifed and I would have been crushed like a beer can between them. Fortunately, the truck drivers were pros. They just let off their accelerators as I did, and we all gradually slowed to a safer speed and distance without incident.

Apparently we each knew the danger.

Im no fan of litanies, even when done by Presbyterians. But as I crossed that icy span and others that followed, I found myself repeating what I could remember of the responses from the Catholic Mass the day before.

Im sure my frightened mini-telegrams to the Almighty were garbled and un-Catholic  definitely un-Presbyterian.

But what did you expect? I was frightened and I didnt know what page I was on.

Jacksonville resident Jay Jamison writes each Friday for this page.
Sinohydro deal has turned out to ...
Nanny murder trial: Guilty verdict for caregiver who killed two children with kitchen knife Kevin Krim, a man battered by incredible grief for the last five years, walked into a Manhattan courtroom on Wednesday, slipping into a seat in gallery's front row. The jury was set to announce a verdict in the murder trial of Yoselyn Ortega, the nanny accused of murdering Krim's two young children, Lucia, 6, and Leo, 2.

The 42-year-old father sat next to two alternate jurors, Chloe Beck and Brittany Yee, CNN reported. The pair had been dismissed before the deliberations. But the women returned to watch the resolution. Seeing Krim, the jurors embraced the man whose emotional testimony they had heard weeks earlier. All three began to cry - a sign of the emotional strain that has bound together nearly everyone involved after two months of evidence and painful testimony.

Krim gripped juror Beck's hand as the verdict was read: "Guilty."

Ortega, who had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and two counts of second-degree murder for stabbing the children in their Upper West Side apartment in October 2012.

"This was a very difficult decision for all of us. While the basic facts were very clear from the beginning, we also wanted to be sure that we were giving everybody a fair opportunity," juror David Curtis said in a news conference following the verdict, fighting back his own tears, CNN reported. "It was not a decision we reached lightly or easily. There were some raised voices and a lot of tears. But I think we all feel good that we addressed all of the issues and fairly weighed everything that was presented to us."

The verdict closes the curtain on a horrific murder case that has transfixed media in New York and beyond since Marina Krim caught Ortega in the process of murdering the children. The mother of the dead children has not returned to the courtroom since giving her own testimony in early March, but she posted an Instagram message to her dead son and daughter from the top of the Empire State Building.

"You two never made it to the top, but I'm up here now for the first time, in peace, on top of the world, remembering another lifetime and thinking of you," the message stated, according to the New York Times.

Ortega was originally recommended to the Krims by her sister, who worked as a nanny for a child who attended the same preschool as Lucia, New York Magazine reported.

According to the prosecution, Ortega - who was born in the Dominican Republic but was a naturalized U.S. citizen - had a rocky relationship with her employers due to her own resentment. The nanny was in financial trouble after moving her own son to the U.S. from the Dominican Republic and enrolling him in a private school. The Krims offered Ortega more hours to increase her pay, but the nanny's own ill-will and jealousy toward her employers only deepened.

"Did you see anything during the time of the defendant's employment that made you think she was mentally ill?" a prosecutor would later ask Kevin Krim at the trial, according to New York Magazine.

"Absolutely not," the father replied. "Never. And I know what I know."

On Oct. 25, 2012, Marina Krim came home to her apartment with the couple's third child to find the lights out. Mother and daughter went room to room looking for Lucia and Leo, Marina later testified. When she stepped into the bathroom, she found a horrific scene: the two children were dead in the bathtub and Ortega was slashing her own neck with a kitchen knife.

"My babysitter killed my kids!" she screamed as she fled the house, according to testimony.

Kevin Krim was flying over the country in an airplane when his children were being killed. As he testified in court, his plane was taxiing in New York when he turned on his phone to find messages and voice mails clogging up his inbox. Sensing that something was seriously wrong with his children, he hit play on a voice mail from his wife. "I just heard this background noise of screaming," he testified. Two NYPD officers came on board to escort him to the hospital.

At trial, Ortega's attorney's attempted to explain the murder as the product of severe mental illness. "The reason for the defendant's actions lay within her delusional mind," defense attorney Valerie Van Leer-Greenberg argued to the jury, according to the New York Daily News.

The prosecution, however, countered that although the defendant may have been suffering from depression and anxiety, she had previously never displayed any form of psychosis or mental derangement. Rather, the crime was about spite, the state maintained.

"Every stab, every slash - each one had a purpose and that purpose was to end the lives of those children," a prosecutor told the jury.

The trial was an emotional ordeal for everyone involved.

As she left the witness stand in March, Marina Krim broke down, screaming at her former employee.

"You're evil!" she cried, according to New York Magazine. "You're evil and you like this. You love this. You're getting pleasure from this."

Alternative juror Chloe Beck later told the Daily News she would excuse herself from the courtroom to weep in the bathroom after particularly horrific testimony. "I don't think I'll ever be the same," she told the paper.

As the jury deliberated Ortega's fate, shouting could be heard from outside the room, CNN reported.

Many of the eyes in the juror box were wet as the foreman announced the guilty verdict, according to the Times.

Ortega, however, showed no emotion as she listened to the jury's decision.

The Krims have since moved out of the apartment where the murders occurred. Along with their surviving daughter, the family has grown with the birth of two sons following the murder. The Krims have also been active in pushing for legislation that would make it a crime to lie on a job application or references involving child care.
A Canadian woman who tried to smuggle millions of dollars worth of cocaine into Australia has been convicted and sentenced to eight years behind bars.

Melina Roberge, 24, was sentenced Wednesday after pleading guilty to smuggling 95 kilos (209 pounds) of the drug into the Sydney Harbour in 2016, following an exotic weeks-long cruise that she and an accomplice documented on social media.

Roberge and her accomplice, Isabelle Lagace, had turned their Instagram accounts into travel diaries in the summer of 2016, posting glamorous photos and boasting about their intercontinental adventures on the MS Sea Princess, a cruise ship that docked in 17 ports in 11 countries before it finally stopped in Australia.

They captured their first photo bomb, in New York's Times Square, and their first Irish coffee in Cobh, a seaport town in Ireland. They showed off their tans on a Bermuda beach, where one of them wrote in a caption: "Gone to a place very peaceful - leave a message after the tone." They rode recreational vehicles over the desert sand. They got tribal tattoos. They made new friends. Then, they were arrested.

Roberge - who became known as "Cocaine Babe" in headlines - will serve at least four years and nine months, without eligibility for parole; she will eventually be deported to her home country, the AP reported.

More for you Social media shows luxurious journey 3 Canadians took before arrest for alleged cocaine smuggling

"She was seduced by lifestyle and the opportunity to post glamorous Instagram photos from around the world," Judge Kate Traill said in New South Wales state District Court, according to The Associated Press. "She wanted to be the envy of others. I doubt she is now."

Roberge's Instagram account disappeared following her arrest.

But before the drug bust, she had written: "Traveling is one thing. But traveling with an open mind, ready to taste everything, see everything, learn everything and get yourself out of your comfort zone . . . is probably the best therapy and lesson ever. I used to be afraid to get out of my little town and now I feel like I don't want to see that little town anymore cause it's beautiful out there and it's sooo worth it."

Upon arrival in Australia, border agents searched the ship, discovering 35 kilograms in the women's cabin and 60 kilograms a cabin belonging to Andre Tamin, a wealthy Canadian man in his mid-60s whom Roberge described as her "sugar daddy," according to the AP.

The three were charged with importing a commercial quantity of cocaine, which carries a maximum penalty of life in prison, authorities said.

Late last year, Lagace, 29, was sentenced to 7 years in prison. Tamin is scheduled to be sentenced in October, according to the AP.

The two women were packing so much cocaine in their suitcases that, the Australian Border Force said, they "did not have much room for clean underwear or spare toothbrushes."

Roberge told the court that she was an escort and met Tamin on the job in 2015. She said he invited her to go on a drug-smuggling trip to Morocco the next year.

She realized, she told the court, that she had put everything on the line for some selfies "in exotic locations and post them on Instagram to receive 'likes' and attention."

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Video: Melina Roberge, 24, was sentenced to eight years in prison on April 18 after pleading guilty to smuggling 209 pounds of cocaine into Australia in the summer of 2016.(Elyse Samuels/The Washington Post)

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Two-dozen economically depressed regions around San Antonio could get billions of dollars worth of new investment through a designation handed down this week by U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

The Treasury Department named 24 census tracts in the San Antonio area to become opportunity zones under the $1.5 trillion tax overhaul President Donald Trump signed into law in December, according to the Treasurys website.

Under the tax bill, investors can park their capital in long-term investments in economically disadvantaged areas deemed opportunity zones in exchange for a reduced or, if they keep that investment long enough, eliminated capital gains tax burden.

RELATED: Texas job growth continues, unemployment rate stays at 4 percent

The idea is to incentivize businesses to make what could be otherwise considered risky investments in blighted areas with slow business growth, low household incomes and high unemployment.

The areas selected by the Treasury include large chunks of the East Side near Fort Sam Houston, much of downtown San Antonio, areas of the West Side close to downtown along Commerce St., Port San Antonio, Kelly Air Force Base, portions of the South Side, Stinson Municipal Airport, the Brooks master planned community and the Northeast Corridor  which includes a stretch of Perrin Beitel and Nacogdoches roads that extend to OConnor Road.

The Treasury also picked wide swaths of southern Bexar County that cover Von Ormy, Toyotas manufacturing plant, Texas A&M University San Antonio, Braunig Lake and Elmendorf.

Governors were allowed in March to nominate a quarter of all eligible census tracts in their state  areas where the poverty rate is at least 20 percent and where median family income is no more than 80 percent of the regions median income.

Gov. Greg Abbott nominated 628 census tracts in 145 Texas counties as potential opportunity zones last month, including 24 in Bexar County. San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg had submitted 27 tracts for consideration by Abbotts office in February.

Joshua Fechter is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of his stories here. | jfechter@express-news.net | Twitter: @JFreports
A gas station store with an odor and gnats in the men's restroom, a popular barbeque chain where bulk ingredients were simply labeled "food" and a Mexican grill where an employee with nail polish was seen handling "exposed food" without gloves were among the offenders on this week's list of restaurant inspection violations in San Antonio.

A total of 25 San Antonio establishments made this week's dirtiest restaurants, according to records.

To make the Express-News' list of dirtiest restaurants, an establishment must earn a score of 89 or below  or anything less than an "A"  during a random city health inspection.

SEE LAST WEEK'S VIOLATIONS: San Antonio restaurant inspections: April 13, 2018

In Southtown, Madhatters Tea House & Cafe was cited for having black buildup in the ice shoot and drink dispenser and moldy strawberries in the reach-in cooler.

Little Caesar's Pizza on Bandera Road received points off its score after an inspector found jalapenos dumped in the employee handwashing sink and dead roaches nearby.

Soiled knives were stored alongside clean knives on a wall magnet at Boiler House, a 2018 Top 100 restaurant at The Pearl.

And La Fonda at the Rim landed in hot water after one employee was seen handling raw fish, then proceeding to handle utensils and other items without putting on gloves.

See the other eateries that landed on this week's list of dirtiest restaurants in the slideshow above.

The San Antonio Express-News examines hundreds of restaurant inspections each week conducted by the San Antonio Food and Environmental Health Services division to bring you the eateries with scores of 89 or below.

Restaurants are graded on a 100-point system, where "100" is a perfect score, and demerits are based upon the number of violations found during a regular food establishment inspection. There are three categories of demerits and each are assigned a demerit score of 3, 2 or 1 points, according to the health division.

Scores and demerits listed are only representative of the state of the restaurant at the time of inspection and establishments are surveyed at random.

erobinson@mysa.com | Twitter: @eeelizzzabeth
WASHINGTON  The Region 12 school board is sending a nearly $22 million school budget to voters next month.

The spending plan is $589,000, or 2.76 percent, higher than the current budget, but lower than the initial department requests and Superintendent Patricia Cosentinos proposal.

It is set for a district meeting on May 7 with the possible referendum on May 8. Region 12 includes Washington, Bridgewater and Roxbury.

The Region 12 school boards budget vote came after a public hearing earlier this month where three people spoke against the increase and one in favor of the budget.

I appreciate your efforts, but for me its not enough, Roxbury First Selectwoman Barbara Henry told the board at that meeting.

She said the increase, coupled with reduced state funding, is making it harder for the town to make up the difference. She said its even harder for Roxbury where the student enrollment is declining at a slower rate than the other towns, which is typically seen as a positive thing but translates into a bigger share of the Region 12 budget.

Its still a very difficult pill to swallow, she said.

Cathy Leibowitz, a Roxbury resident, said the $32,000 cost per student is too high and more than the cost of private school tuition. She questioned the $1.2 million spent on busing.

Cosentino said they are required to provide transportation and while the number of students has decreased the geographical area they serve hasnt. Still, she said the number of buses has been reduced from 26 to 18 since she first started with the district. Our hands are tied, she said.

Board member Michelle Gorra has said the largest driver for the budget increase was $526,000 for health insurance premiums. An additional $100,000 is also needed for special education and another $100,000 for teacher contracts.

That reflects over $700,000 thats not on the table for us to work with, Gorra said.

Among the cuts made in the budget are two school buses, 2.5 paraprofessional positions and $20,000 from the superintendents salary. The current superintendent is going to New Fairfield at the end of this school year.

kkoerting@newstimes.com; 203-731-3345
On the morning of Nov. 15, 1840, the Richmond Enquirer reported the nation's first campus shooting on the bottom corner of Page 2.

In a single paragraph labeled "Painful Occurrence," the paper said John A.G. Davis, a beloved University of Virginia law professor, "was shot by an unknown hand, with a pistol, in front of his dwelling" and "the ball was received just below the navel."

Davis died. A manhunt was on for his killer.

Now almost totally forgotten, the episode bears some resemblance to the modern scourge of school shootings - from the 13 people who died at Columbine High School 19 years ago on April 20, 1999, to the recent slayings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida.

The senselessness of motive. The randomness of victims. The gun culture gone awry.

Back in the country's early days, students were prone to riot over the smallest matters - for instance, cabbage.

In telling the story of the professor's death, Virginia Magazine noted this:

"In the early 19th century, rioting was a common practice in the United States among students who either didn't like the food, the rules or the punishments meted out to them. William and Mary students rioted in 1802 after professors punished two fellow classmates for dueling. Bad food - old fish and overripe cabbage - ignited Harvard's Rotten Cabbage Rebellion in 1807."

In Charlottesville that November, students at the university founded by Thomas Jefferson were not, as far as we know, concerned with cabbage.

Their beef: guns.

Matthew Pearl, a novelist who wrote a short story based on the shooting, described the clash in an essay for The HuffPost in 2011:

"For several years at the University of Virginia, students had an annual tradition of raising hell around campus, burning tar barrels and shooting pistols into the air. The rioters wanted the freedom to carry arms on campus and each year marked the anniversary when restrictions were put into place that resulted in some defiant students being expelled."

On the evening of Nov. 12, gunfire erupted near the campus homes of the school's professors and staff. One of the students with a gun was Joseph Semmes, who like the others was wearing a mask.

Davis heard the shots and "stepped out," Virginia Magazine said, "to put a halt to the hullabaloo" and things went south from there:

"Around 9:00 p.m., he saw one of the masked students hiding behind one of the pillars. Davis jumped for him and reached to unmask the student. The student fled, but turned after a few steps, pointed his pistol, and, without uttering a word, fired at Davis' gut. The bullet pierced Davis' abdomen, and he fell to the ground with a groan. Students soon flocked to the pavilion as word spread that a professor had been shot. Several picked up Davis' limp, bleeding body and brought the wounded man inside."

While students were, like today, not all that enthused with authority, they were horrified by the death of a popular professor. Siding with administrators and police who asked for help, students hunted down Semmes, finding him a day or so later in a pine grove. Semmes seemed to care little about the professor's death, laughing and joking while in custody. When a judge asked him to take an oath on a bible to tell the truth, Semmes protested he was atheist.

The next thing that happened would seem shocking today: Semmes was released on bail.

Not shocking: He disappeared.

Rumors spread about his whereabouts for several years. Some students said they heard he moved to Texas. Others said he committed suicide. One rumor was correct, but it was only confirmed fairly recently.

In 2013, Jean L. Cooper, a U-Va. librarian who maintains a blog about 19th-century U-Va. students, tracked down a Baltimore newspaper from July of 1847 that reprinted an item from The Charlottesville Republican about his death.

"He shot himself with a pistol, the ball entering the left eye and penetrating the brain," the Charlottesville paper said, describing his body slumped in a chair at his brother's house in Georgia. "On the table was found an open note, stating, in the form of a certificate, dated July 9th, 1847, that his death was occasioned by himself."

- - -

Part of a continuing series about events of the past that remain relevant.
Three decades after a bombing campaign claimed the life of a federal judge, set off panic and prompted a sprawling federal investigation, authorities in Alabama executed the now-83-year-old man convicted in the explosions.

The lethal injection of Walter Leroy Moody Jr. on Thursday night made him the oldest inmate put to death in the modern era. And in a sign of how death row populations are aging amid a nationwide decline in executions, Moody became the eighth inmate older than 65 put to death since the beginning of 2015.

The execution - which occurred at a correctional facility in Atmore, Alabama, about 118 miles outside Montgomery, the capital - came in the wake of a recent string of bombings in Austin that evoked the 1989 explosions for which Moody was sentenced to death.

Moody, who maintained his innocence in the bombings, was convicted in 1991 on federal charges and then in 1996 on state charges. The FBI calls what followed the explosions "one of the largest cases in our history," with investigators scouring the debris left behind and retracing where the packages had been as they hunted for clues.

Investigators eventually discovered that the 1989 bombings had their roots in an explosive device that went off more than a decade earlier, authorities said. Moody was convicted in 1972 of possessing a pipe bomb - the FBI said it detonated, injuring his wife - and was sentenced to three years in prison.

After that, Moody "declared war on the federal judiciary," Alabama officials wrote in a court filing. They say Moody, who had attended law school, sought to have his conviction vacated, so he "bribed an acquaintance to give sworn testimony that a fictitious individual used by Moody as an alternate suspect in his 1972 trial actually existed." The ploy did not work, the officials wrote.

Moody's simmering anger toward the courts built until, authorities said, he mailed out four pipe bombs in 1989. One was shipped to the Alabama home of Robert Vance, a federal judge.

"When Judge Vance opened the pipe bomb delivered to his address he was killed almost instantly," the Alabama attorney general's office wrote in a court filing. "Helen Vance, Judge Vance's wife, was seriously injured by shrapnel from the blast which included nails that had been secured to the pipe by rubber bands."

Officials said another of Moody's bombs killed Robert Robinson, a civil rights attorney in Georgia. Two more were found and disabled before they could hurt anyone - including one at a courthouse and another at NAACP offices in Jacksonville, Florida.

The mysterious bombings in December 1989 unnerved people about their package deliveries at Christmastime. Similar fears emerged in Austin recently when packages containing explosives killed two people and injured several others. And, as occurred years later in Austin, authorities investigating the 1989 bombs were initially baffled, suspecting early on that the attacks might have been fueled by racial hatred. Authorities would later say they believed Moody had picked some of his targets to try to make them believe racism or hate groups were involved.

Investigators went on to discover numerous similarities linking the explosives, including aspects of the bombs themselves, the packaging in which they were placed and even the "stamps depicting an American flag over Yosemite National Park," according to Justice Department records.

When announcing that he had picked Louis Freeh to lead the FBI in 1993, President Bill Clinton singled out Freeh's work as a special prosecutor investigating the 1989 bombings, calling it "one of the most notorious and difficult criminal cases of our day."

As his scheduled lethal injection neared, Moody sought to have it stayed, arguing against Alabama's ability to execute him because he was first sentenced on federal charges. In 1991, Moody was sentenced in federal court to seven life terms along with 400 years behind bars. Years later, after a trial in state court ended, Moody was found guilty, and the jury voted 11 to 1 that he be sentenced to death.

Moody's attorneys argued that they are fighting "his unlawful custody status and the State of Alabama's plan to execute him before he has satisfied his federal sentences." This week, the Justice Department wrote in a court filing that Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the federal government waived its right to hold Moody in custody and consented to Alabama's holding him so it could carry out the death sentence.

Moody unsuccessfully appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday to stop the execution. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas - the justice assigned to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, which includes Alabama - had issued a temporary stay Thursday evening, but the court dissolved that stay a short time later. The court issued orders saying Thomas had referred stay requests to the court and it had denied them.

Vance's son, Bob, told AL.com in a recent interview that he would not attend the execution. While Bob Vance said he has no doubts authorities found the bomber, to this day he still wonders why his father was targeted.

"That's one of the real frustrating things about it because it's almost a random chance," Vance, a Jefferson County circuit judge running for the state Supreme Court, said in the interview. "The madman picks you out for some reason that only he and God knows and there's no rhyme or reason to it. Why my dad?"

Moody's scheduled lethal injection followed a particularly high-profile case, but it also stands out for his age. Going into Thursday, the oldest inmate executed since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976 was was John Nixon, who was 77 when Mississippi executed him in 2005.

More than 2,800 people remain on death row nationwide at a time when states are carrying out fewer and fewer executions, falling to 23 executions last year from a modern peak of 98 in 1999, according to Death Penalty Information Center records.

"Death row populations are getting older," said Robert Dunham, the group's executive director. "Octogenarian executions are going to remain extremely rare. It's unprecedented in the modern era. It may happen again, but it will be rare. We've seen a series of executions of individuals in their 70s in the last couple of years, and that will become increasingly common."

Earlier this year, the group's records show, Georgia executed a 67-year-old death row inmate. Last year, Alabama executed a 75-year-old inmate who had previously faced the death chamber seven times. In 2016, Georgia executed a 72-year-old inmate - at the time, the oldest inmate on its death row - and Missouri executed another who was 66. A year earlier, executions of older death row inmates included one in Georgia (a 66-year-old), Missouri (a 74-year-old) and Texas (a 67-year-old).

In 2013, 12.2 percent of death-row inmates were age 60 or older, according to Justice Department data. In 2007, that same population made up 5.8 percent of death row inmates.

Dunham said this will lead to more problems for the few states that still execute inmates, because "aging produces certain issues that complicate executions," including health problems. Dunham cited the example of Alva Campbell, who was set to be executed by Ohio last year. The state eventually gave up after being unable to find a usable vein on the 69-year-old, who was in poor health; his execution was rescheduled for 2019, but then he died last month from what corrections officials called natural causes.

A spokesperson for the Alabama Department of Corrections did not respond to a request for comment about whether the state was approaching Moody's execution any differently due to his age. Earlier this year, Alabama's execution of 61-year-old Doyle Hamm - convicted of killing Patrick Cunningham, a motel clerk, in 1987 - was called off after personnel tried and failed to find a vein, which his attorney said was "torture."

In Texas, the country's leading death-penalty state, an inmate's age "does not play a role in the execution process," a spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice said. He noted that three of the past eight people executed in Texas were older than 60.

A case involving another geriatric death-row inmate in Alabama will soon make its way before the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices said earlier this year they would hear the case of Vernon Madison, who was convicted of killing Julius Schulte, a police officer in Mobile, Alabama, in 1985. Madison's attorneys have argued that he should be spared because after suffering from multiple strokes, the 67-year-old "has no memory of the capital offense for which he is to be executed."
Two months after a woman was criticized by a board member for addressing Beaumont ISD's leadership team in Spanish, the district co-sponsored a gathering this week that at least one organizer called a first-step in improving outreach to Spanish-speaking parents.

"There's a large immigrant community that doesn't understand the system, not just the language," said Jesus Abrego, director of the Diocese of Beaumont's Office of Hispanic Ministry. Abrego said he worked with Superintendent John Frossard to coordinate the district's first Bilingual Parent Resource Night, which was held Tuesday at South Park Middle School.

About 10 percent of BISD's nearly 20,000 students are classified as English Language Learners (ELL), according to TEA data for the 2016-17 school year. About 23 percent of BISD students are Hispanic.

Events like the Resource Night help Spanish-speaking parents "be more assertive" for their kids, Abrego said.

Officials detailed for about 50 attendees the district's current and future resources, including summer programs, different curriculum options for students and classes for adults.

BISD currently offers both in-class support and pull-out classes for students who are learning English.

Starting in the fall, the district will also offer some "sheltered instruction" classes, where students take math, science and social studies classes with other English language learners, incorporating vocabulary and other skills as they go.

The district is considering possible online programs that could be incorporated in ELL courses.

Frossard, who briefly welcomed attendees in Spanish, primarily used a translator to communicate with attendees. He said he has "made it a priority to hire more Spanish-speaking employees."

Abrego said that will make it easier for BISD to connect with Spanish-speaking parents.

Alisia Carreon, who has two students in BISD schools, said finding school and district information in Spanish has been difficult. "I'm happy we have this," she said, adding she hoped the district would host more events for Spanish-speaking parents in the future.

Marcelino Rodriguez, a former candidate for BISD's board of trustees in 2013, said the district should consider varied meeting times to make it easier for working parents to attend Resource Nights, and suggested partnering with churches or other locations that parents are already familiar with.

He said more time for questions and answers would have made for a more productive meeting on Tuesday. Administrators answered three submitted questions and one from Abrego, who sat in the audience.

The Resource Night came two months after a woman, speaking Spanish, invited managers and trustees at a February board meeting to a town hall she said would be hosted by "a group of parents from our city who to prefer to express themselves in Spanish."

The woman, Estela Colunga, was asked to repeat her comment in English after she was criticized by manager A.B. Bernard.

"Why would you present something in Spanish when we don't understand?" he said. "I mean, is that a joke or..." Bernard said, before he was cut off by Board President Joe Domino, who asked Colunga to repeat the invitation in English.

Bernard's remarks sparked public outrage on social media.

Frossard said Tuesday's Resource Night was already in the works before the February meeting.

Frossard said he would like to see more parents at the next gathering.

"With anything in BISD, we have to grow it," he said.

LTeitz@BeaumontEnterprise.comTwitter.com/LizTeitz
PORTLAND  With time running out, town officials are optimistic they will hear soon from the owners of an oil pipeline that has stalled efforts to buy a five-acre riverfront property.

The 5.28-acre property located off Brownstone Avenue is the site of the former Connecticut Tar & Asphalt Co. The town hopes to clean up the property and develop some or all of it, or perhaps, sell a portion of to a developer.

However, that plan has been stalled, at least temporarily, after concerns were raised about the status of an oil pipeline that crosses under Brownstone Avenue and runs through a portion of the Tar & Asphalt property. Town officials have asked owners of the property to inspect the pipeline and determine if it contains a significant amount of oil  and whether any of it has leaked out.

Officials have said the pipe was capped after the company closed almost a decade ago. It is not uncommon for companies to leave some residual oil in a pipeline to fight corrosion, however, Selectman James K. Tripp told his board colleagues.

In late January, the town signed an agreement in principle with the heirs of Tar and Asphalt owner John Balletti to acquire the property for $410,000. The agreement, signed Jan. 26, expires Thursday - 90 days after it was signed.

After it went into effect, the contract was referred to the Murtha Cullina legal firm, which represents the town. In the course of its due diligence review, questions were raised by an attorney about the status of the pipeline.

Officials met with the lawyers for the heirs two weeks ago, First Selectwoman Susan S. Bransfield told the selectmen during their meeting Wednesday. We need a clean pipe, she said.

But as of Wednesday, the heirs had not gotten back to the town. And, Bransfield pointed out, the sales agreement will expire on the 26th. She asked selectmen if they wanted to seek an extension. I expect to hear from them, she said of the owners. But at least for now, The ball is in their court.

That was Wednesday. Thursday afternoon, Bransfield said, I expect a response within a couple of days.

So confident is she of getting a response, Bransfield said Friday morning she has scheduled a special meeting for selectmen at 7 p.m. Tuesday in the first-floor conference room in Town Hall. She will propose a short-term extension of the sale agreement so we can have time to review their proposal.

There needs to be a careful analysis of this oil pipeline and how [the owners] will get this properly addressed, she said Thursday.

If that issue can be resolved and residents approve the purchase, the town will use a $700,000 state grant to remediate the property. Among the ideas floated for the site are added parking for the Brownstone Exploration and Discovery Park, or a riverfront restaurant or museum detailing brownstone quarrying.

Almost from beginning of the land discussions, Bransfield has said her primary goal is to get this property back on the tax rolls.

Reporter Jeff Mill covers East Hampton, Cromwell and Portland for the Middletown Press. Contact him at jeff.mill@hearstmediact.com.
A nationwide manhunt came to an end Thursday night near the Texas-Mexico border after authorities captured 56-year-old Lois Riess, the woman suspected of killing her husband in Minnesota and then her look-a-like in Florida in order to steal her identity, the U.S. Marshals Service confirmed late Thursday.

She was found sipping a drink at the bar inside the Sea Ranch Restaurant in South Padre Island, Texas, appearing "cool as a cucumber" until the marshals arrived to take her into custody without incident, the restaurant's manager, Becky Galvan, told The Washington Post.

Riess was wanted by federal and local authorities in Florida, where police believe she befriended and killed Pamela Hutchinson, who had the same light blond hair as Riess. Police believe Riess then stole Hutchinson's car and her identity, and fled to Texas.

RELATED: Alleged killer stabs young couple to death, returns to kill their 17-month-old daughter the next day

Riess is also a person of interest in her husband's death in Minnesota, according to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Authorities said they believe she stole his money to go gambling in Iowa before traveling to Florida.

She was known in the small town of Blooming Prairie, Minnesota - population 1,987 - as "Losing Streak Lois" because of her gambling addiction, the U.S. marshals said.

"I promised all along that Lois Riess would end up in a pair of handcuffs," Undersheriff Carmine Marceno of Lee County, Florida, where Riess is accused of killing Hutchinson, said in a statement. "Tonight, she sits in a jail cell in Texas. We are working as expeditiously as possible to bring her back to Lee County to face murder charges."

Riess was arrested on warrants for second-degree murder, grand theft, grand theft of a vehicle and criminal use of personal identification.

Riess first came under suspicion in Minnesota after her husband's business partner in his worm farm operation contacted local authorities to notify them that David Riess had been missing for a couple of weeks, as the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported. When police arrived at the worm farm on March 23, they found him dead. He had suffered several gunshot wounds.

By that time, Lois Riess was long gone.

Investigators believe that on March 23, Riess drove to a bank in Glenville, Minnesota, and forged her husband's signature to cash more than $10,000 in stolen checks from him and his business, according to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. After that, investigators say she spent the day gambling at Diamond Jo Casino in Northwood, Iowa.

She was spotted on surveillance stopping at a Kum & Go gas station next to the casino to purchase a sandwich and ask for directions, authorities said.

She was apparently headed to Florida.

That's where she met and soon befriended 59-year-old Pamela Hutchinson, authorities said.

On April 5, Riess was caught on surveillance video dining with Hutchinson at the Smokin' Oyster Brewery during happy hour, police said. Other surveillance photographs captured Riess and Hutchinson together at Hutchinson's Fort Myers Beach condo, where, several days later, on April 9, police said they found Hutchinson dead.

Authorities believe she used the same firearm to kill Hutchinson that she allegedly used to kill her husband.

Inside the condo, Hutchinson's purse had been emptied. Her identification was missing along with her car.

Police said they believe Riess stole them to assume Hutchinson's identity, since the two looked alike.

In the days after Hutchinson's death, her 2005 white Acura with Florida tags was spotted in Louisiana and outside Corpus Christi, Texas, which is a few hours up the coast from South Padre Island.

The U.S. Marshals Service and local Florida and Minnesota authorities all warned that Riess was considered armed and dangerous, urging anyone who spotted her to alert police but stay away from her.

Finally, around 8:30 p.m. Thursday, marshals located her at the Sea Ranch Restaurant.

She didn't look armed and dangerous, said the restaurant manager Galvan, and she did not appear suspicious. Galvan said she had been sitting there for about an hour and a half, when she got a call from law enforcement notifying her that there was a customer in her restaurant named Lois Riess, whom they were coming to arrest.

"It happened within seconds," Galvan said. "They came in and they left."

John Kinsey, a deputy U.S. marshal, told The Washington Post that it was unclear whether Riess was on her way to Mexico. He said she had checked in at a local hotel.

"She paid up for a couple of weeks," he said.

The marshals found Hutchinson's car in a nearby parking lot.
WESTPORT  Elana Atlas remembers registering the events of Sandy Hook when they happened, but at 8, she couldnt grasp their horrifying significance.

I knew what happened was terrible, but I didnt realize it was an epidemic, Atlas, now a 14-year-old Staples freshman said from Veterans Green, where she and a group of student activists, town and school officials and residents gathered Friday afternoon so that students could explain the purpose of the walkouts that took place at schools across the country earlier that day.

Unlike the March 14 walkout in honor of the 17 victims of the Parkland, Fla., shooting, Staples students did not work with administrators in planning the event. Rather than hold the event inside the gymnasium and submit student speeches for administrative approval -- as was required in March -- protesters convened in the Staples courtyard from 10 a.m. until school dismissed. Observers said the crowd exceeded 500 students at its peak.

I think its great there were a lot of people, said Staples junior Lydia Donovan, who spoke during the walkout, along with Atlas, sophomore Glendy Cirolia, and junior Addie Hogue.

Hogue said she used the platform to call out politicians not responding to their constituents wishes for stricter gun control.

Gun violence is an issue that affects everybody. Politicians dont seem to be paying attention to that, Hogue said.

During the walkout and at the after-school rally, which was organized by seniors Brooke and Perri Kessler, students called attention to the power they hold over lawmakers as the next generation of voters. Students demonstrators wore bright orange t-shirts, on the back of which was printed their graduation year with the words voting class of Westport Registrars of Voters Marla Cowden and Kevin White had a booth on the green to sign up unregistered voters.

The students invited First Selectman Jim Marpe, Staples alumnus and State Senate candidate for Connecticuts 26th District Will Haskell and State Rep. Jonathan Steinberg. A team of police officers silently watched from the perimeter of the green as Atlas led chants chanted of Tell me what Democracy looks like, and What do we want? Gun Control. When do we want it? Now.

Staples Principal James DAmico, who was present at the rally with Superintendent of Schools Colleen Palmer, said he was extraordinarily proud of his students and that the vast majority protested respectfully, though he felt the school had to play a different role in this particular demonstration because of its overtly political context.

In March, all students wanted some element of a memorial. This time was more about gun control, so I think the school plays a different role, said DAmico.

DAmico said that the vast majority of students acted respectfully, through a small number of detentions were handed out and at one point bullhorns were taken away from students.

But taking away their amplification did not give the protestors a moments pause.

Im louder than a bullhorn, Atlas said.

justin.papp@scni.com; @justinjpapp1; 203-842-2586
HARTFORD - Bridgeport, New Haven and Hartford top the list of federal opportunity zones nominated by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy on Friday to boost economic development in distressed areas within communities.

Malloy nominated 72 opportunity zones across 27 municipalities in Connecticut. The nominations are part of the federal governments recently established Opportunity Zone Program to induce long-term investments in low-income communities.
The Iowa mother packed her bags and boarded a plane bound for Europe.

Last September, Erin Lee Macke had planned to spend 11 days visiting relatives in Germany, but police said she left four other family members at home alone - her then-12-year-old twins and 6- and 7-year-old daughters.

"She felt comfortable that the kids were responsible enough to take care of themselves during that duration," Lt. Lynn Aswegan, with the Johnston Police Department, told People magazine at the time.

Macke, 31, entered an Alford plea, in which she acknowledged that the government had enough evidence to convict her of four counts of child endangerment, but denied guilt. She was sentenced Thursday to two years' probation - avoiding possible prison time, according to the Des Moines Register.

It was a Wednesday in September when Macke jetted off on a European vacation - one that, by all indications, was "a social venture," the police lieutenant said.

Court documents state that Macke planned to have neighbors check in on her children from Sept. 20-22 until her brother was available to watch them. Then she would return on Oct. 1.

After the children spent a night alone in their home near Des Moines, one child's father reported the incident to police when he received a phone call from the child, according to the newspaper.

When officers arrived the evening of Sept. 21, they found the twins preparing a meal for their younger sisters, Aswegan, the police lieutenant, told People. Aswegan said one of the 12-year-olds led officers to the mother's bedroom, where she had left a gun and ammunition.

Police alerted child protective services and got in touch with Macke, who reportedly had been posting photos from the Danube River and the Walhalla memorial in Germany.

"She didn't understand or agree with the concern," the police lieutenant told People.

Police told the mother to fly back home. She did - a full week later - and was promptly arrested. She was charged with four counts of child endangerment and one count of giving a minor access to a gun.

A judge told Macke that she could not see her children.

"You are to have no contact with them - direct, indirect, writing, phone, voice messaging, text messaging," the judge told her last year, as seen in a video taken by CBS affiliate KCCI. "No contact whatsoever. That includes going to the address."

"I don't go there, or they don't go there?" Macke asked.

This led to a confused exchange among the defendant, judge and a county lawyer, as the court tried to determine whether the children were still at Macke's house.

The lawyer said that she had no confirmation that child services had placed the children elsewhere, while Macke sounded certain they were all safe with relatives.

In February, Macke entered an Alford plea and prosecutors dropped the gun charge as part of the plea agreement.

The Des Moines Register reported earlier this month that Matthew Macke, the father of the two younger children, was granted primary custody of them; arrangements are still being determined for the two older children, who have a different father.

"Erin's decision to leave the children was intentional, done knowingly and she has not accepted any responsibility and continued to place blame on everyone else," Matthew Macke told the court during his victim impact statement, according to the newspaper. He added that "Erin refuses to admit that her choices put the children at a substantial risk of harm."

A victim advocate for the other father, Matthew McQuary, read a statement for him, saying the mother "does not feel any remorse or responsibility for her actions."

Erin Macke's attorney, Michael Oliver, acknowledged that his client made a mistake but told the court that she should be able to make amends and move on from it. "The drama that has surrounded this case has been fanned by the fathers in this case," he said.

On Thursday, Polk County District Judge Carol Egly upheld Macke's no-contact order with her children but said she believes "these children need to have some sort of direct contact with their mother as soon as possible."

The judge advised the attorneys to come up with an arrangement, requiring Macke to complete counseling and then allow her to have contact with her children.
Two NASA medical officers on Thursday visited upper-school students at their high school alma mater, Trinity School. The guests, Dr. Sharmila Watkins and Dr. Sean Roden, are serving on an upcoming mission as deputy crew surgeon and crew surgeon, respectively.

Watkins and Roden are former Trinity School students and have been assigned to serve together on the 58 Soyouz, a Russian launch vehicle that will take the crew to the International Space Station. Their mission, scheduled for March through September 2019, is called the Trinity Mission.
TOKYO - North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has declared he will suspend nuclear and missile tests starting Saturday, and that he will shut down the site where the previous six nuclear tests were conducted.

The surprising announcement comes just six days before Kim is set to meet South Korean President Moon Jae-in, a precursor to a historic summit between Kim and President Donald Trump. Trump is set to meet Kim at the end of May or beginning of June, although a location has not yet been set.

Both Moon and Trump have been saying that North Korea is now willing to "denuclearize," a term which means different things to the different sides.

"North Korea has agreed to suspend all Nuclear Tests and close up a major test site," Trump tweeted shortly after the announcement from Pyongyang. "This is very good news for North Korea and the World - big progress! Look forward to our Summit."

But Kim's statement on Saturday made no mention of North Korea giving up its program. It simply signaled a freeze, apparently because the leader is satisfied with the rapid progress it made last year, developing what it said was a "super large heavy warhead" and a missile capable of carrying it to the U.S. mainland.

North Korea has "verified the completion of nuclear weapons," Kim reportedly said during a meeting of the central committee of the ruling Worker's Party of Korea, convened Friday to discuss policy issues related to "a new stage" in a "historic" period.

As such, it "will stop nuclear tests and launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles" effective immediately, he said.

"We no longer need any nuclear test or test launches of intermediate and intercontinental range ballistic missiles, and because of this the northern nuclear test site has finished its mission," the official Korean Central News Agency quoted Kim as saying.

There has been considerable skepticism among North Korea experts that Kim, having poured so much money and effort into the program, not to mention his personal prestige, would give it up so readily.

Many pointed out that Kim's statement does not in any way suggest that he's about to do so.

"There is nothing in North Korea's statement that signals a willingness to give up their nukes," said Benjamin Silberstein, a North Korea researcher at the University of Pennsylvania.

"On the contrary, the tone of the message is one of confidence and strength," he said.

Still, the step is part of a broader and rapidly developing effort to use diplomacy to resolve the standoff on the Korean Peninsula, following months of threats at the end of last year that stoked fears of a military conflict.

Next Friday, Kim will cross the Military Demarcation Line that has divided the peninsula since the end of the Korean War, becoming the first North Korean leader to do so since the war ended. He will step into "Peace House" on the southern side of the line to meet Moon, with their encounter being broadcast live.

Moon signaled this week that everything was on the table at the meeting.

"North Korea is expressing its intention for complete denuclearization," Moon said Thursday. "And it is not making demands that the U.S. cannot accept, such as the withdrawal of the U.S. forces in Korea," he said.

The U.S. military has 28,000 troops stationed in South Korea, with backups in Japan and on Guam - the legacy of the standoff that has ensued since the Korean War ended in an armistice in 1953.

Trump also this week voiced optimism about his summit with Kim, although he said he would walk away from the talks if they were not looking constructive.

"I think we're going to be successful," Trump said shortly after it was revealed that his CIA director, Mike Pompeo, met Kim in Pyongyang over the Easter weekend for talks about the summit. "But for any reason if I think we're not, we end," the president said.

As the presidents of South Korea and the United States prepare for summits with the previously reclusive Kim, there has been lots of conjecture about what exactly the North Korean leader is prepared to discuss.

But North Korea had said very little about all this - and that had plenty of analysts worried that expectations for this summit are too high.

The fact that North Korea has now signaled it is prepared to at least freeze its program is extremely significant, said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association in Washington.

"North Korea's pledge to close down its nuclear weapons testing site is a very significant pledge toward denuclearization," Kimball said. "The U.S. and others should solidify this by securing North Korean signature and ratification of the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, along with confidence building visit by the Comprehensive Test Ban Organization."

Others point out that North Korea has been sending signals through what it has not been saying. It's not talking about the U.S. strike on Syria, it's not talking about the U.S. military conducting drills in South Korea, and it's not talking about the "heinous" and "hostile" United States.

It hasn't even commented on the return of national security adviser John Bolton, a man the regime once derided as "human scum and a bloodsucker."

This is a sharp change from its usual tirade of vitriol against the United States, especially at this time of year, when the American and South Korean militaries are practicing war drills on the southern half of the peninsula.

It hasn't been using one of its favorite phrases, about being a "strong nuclear power," since March 10 - the day after Trump agreed to meet with Kim. Previously, the phrase has appeared in the Rodong Sinmun, the mouthpiece of the Workers' Party, on a daily basis.

"That's not a coincidence," said Peter Ward, a North Korea researcher at Seoul National University. "I think North Korea is on a serious drive for peace right now."

But others were more circumspect, noting that Saturday's announcement fits with North Korea's previous declarations that it had "completed" its nuclear and missile programs.

"This echoes what Kim Jong Un has already said about its nuclear program. Kim Jong Un is satisfied," said Melissa Hanham, a researcher at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation in Monterey, California.

"This means North Korea is also satisfied with fewer tests than many other states that possess nuclear weapons," she said.

Last year was an exceptionally busy one for North Korea's nuclear and missile specialists. In September, North Korea detonated a huge nuclear device that it said was a hydrogen bomb.

This claim, experts said, was supported by the size of the blast, which caused as a 6.3-magnitude earthquake in North Korea's northeast, an area not known for natural seismic activity.

Mount Mantap, the 7,200-foot-high peak under which North Korea has detonated all its nuclear bombs, visibly shifted during that last nuclear test, leading some analysts to wonder if it was suffering from "tired mountain syndrome" and was at risk of collapsing.

If that were true, closing the site would be something North Korea would do anyway, although perhaps without announcing it at such a fortuitous time, if at all.

Then, after launching several intercontinental ballistic missiles in the middle of the year, it fired an ICBM that it said put the entire U.S. mainland is within reach and could carry a "super large heavy warhead."

With that test, North Korea declared that its "rocket development process has been completed."
Support for new gun-control laws has risen to levels higher than after the Newtown, Connecticut, school massacre in 2012, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, with a slight majority of Americans saying student protests for greater gun restrictions represent a "lasting movement."

As students prepare to walk out of schools Friday in protest on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shootings, the poll finds clear majority support for three specific and recently debated restrictions, including an assault-weapons ban, raising the age restriction on certain guns and "red-flag laws" that let police remove guns from people deemed dangerous.

More broadly, a 57 percent majority of Americans say enacting new laws to try to reduce gun violence should be a priority, an increase from 46 percent who said this in 2015 and 52 percent five months after the 2012 shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

There are mixed signs that gun-control supporters will have more sway at the ballot box. Support for new gun laws has grown among Democratic-leaning groups as well as swing-voting demographics. But at the same time, people who strongly prioritize new gun laws are no more likely to say they're certain to vote in this November's elections than the public overall (58 percent each).

In addition, while 41 percent of those who strongly prioritize new gun laws say agreeing with a congressional candidate on gun policy is "extremely important," a larger 50 percent of those who strongly prioritize gun rights say the same.

Whatever the electoral consequences, a slim 53 percent majority say that students across the country holding rallies to call for stricter gun laws represent a lasting movement, while 43 percent say it is more of a one-time thing.

The poll finds broad agreement on two specific proposals discussed since the Parkland shooting. An 85 percent majority of Americans supports a law allowing police to take guns from people who have been found by a judge to be a danger to themselves or others, which are known as red-flag laws and exist in five states, including California and Connecticut. A 72 percent majority supports raising the legal age to buy rifles and shotguns to 21 in all states.

Red-flag laws have the support of more than 8 in 10 Democrats, Republicans and independents, including at least two-thirds who support them "strongly." Raising the legal age for buying rifles and shotguns garners support from 87 percent of Democrats, 70 percent of independents and 55 percent of Republicans.

Most Americans living in gun-owning households also back proposals for a red-flag law and increased age limits. More than 8 in 10 (81 percent) of those in gun-owning households support red-flag laws, and 63 percent support raising the national age to buy rifles or shotguns to 21 years old. Support for both policies is even higher in households without guns.

Banning the sale of assault weapons wins support from 62 percent of adults overall but elicits sharper divisions between partisans and households with and without guns at home. Less than half of Republicans support an assault weapons ban (45 percent), compared with 59 percent of independents and 82 percent of Democrats. And while more than three-quarters of people without a gun at home support such a ban, gun households split 49 percent in support and 48 percent in opposition of banning assault weapons.

Most Americans continue to say Congress and President Donald Trump are not doing enough to stop mass shootings, with views little changed from a Post-ABC poll immediately after the Parkland shooting. The survey finds 59 percent say Trump is not doing enough to prevent mass shootings, roughly similar to 62 percent in February. The share who say Trump is doing enough is up from 29 percent in February to 34 percent this month. A larger 71 percent say Congress is not doing enough, compared with 77 percent two months ago.

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The rise in support for new gun legislation has grown in popularity among several demographic groups that lean Democratic, as well as some swing voting groups including suburbanites and white women.

Support for prioritizing new gun laws is also up 16 points among people ages 18 to 29 and up 12 points among seniors compared with April 2013, five months after the Newtown shootings. It has also grown 10 points among people who live in the suburbs, 11 points among independents and eight points among Democrats.

The share of white women prioritizing new gun laws over gun rights has grown 12 points since 2013, from 50 percent to 62 percent. This view is also up 11 points among women overall.

Among Republicans, a 58 percent majority prioritizes protecting gun rights over enacting new laws, down from 71 percent in 2015 but identical to opinions in 2013.

The Post-ABC poll was conducted April 8 to 11 among a random national sample of 1,002 adults reached on cell and landline phones. Overall results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
WASHINGTON - Tea party groups that say they were unfairly scrutinized by the Internal Revenue Service can now apply for financial compensation, in what is shaping up to be the closing chapter of a long-running fight between conservatives and the agency that dates back to the early years of the Obama administration.

Conservative-leaning organizations sued the federal government after a 2013 report from the Treasury inspector general found that the IRS was slow to approve nonprofit status for groups with "Tea Party" in their title.

After a multiyear legal battle, the Justice Department settled with the conservative groups last October. Earlier this month, a judge gave preliminary approval to a $3.5 million settlement between the department and a class-action lawsuit against the government launched on behalf of more than 400 groups.

Last week, lawyers for the five groups that led the lawsuit started circulating the terms of the federal settlement for hundreds of other tea party organizations to apply. "The $3.5 million settlement will allow these groups to be compensated for what happened to them," said Dane Martin, an attorney with Graves Garrett, a Missouri law firm that represented them. "These are small grass-roots organizations, and that money can go a long way. That's really exciting for them."

The money will be available only to go to the nonprofit organizations, not individuals' bank accounts. A court-appointed official will approve how much money goes to each group after all of the organizations have applied.

The decision adds another, possibly final, chapter to a saga that still infuriates conservative activists and Republican lawmakers, who accused the Obama administration of weaponizing the IRS for political gains.

The controversy was a national topic of conversation in 2013 after a report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration showed that IRS officials focused inappropriately on tea party and other conservative groups based on their names and policy positions when evaluating whether they deserved tax-exempt status.

The ensuing uproar strained relations between the IRS and congressional Republicans, who were already critical of the federal tax collectors and helped cut the agency's budget significantly since 2010. The controversy also led to the resignation of Steven T. Miller, then the IRS acting commissioner, and that of Lois Lerner, who served as director of the IRS exempt organizations division.

After taking control of Congress, the GOP ushered in several subsequent rounds of budget cuts for the tax collection agency. And during a bipartisan vote to overhaul some of the agency's guidelines this week, Republicans again referred to the controversy.

"The IRS is in dire need of a comprehensive overhaul to restore a taxpayer-first focus," House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., wrote on Twitter Wednesday. "For years, its fell short of the standards needed to protect people's data and privacy - not to mention its political targeting scandal."

But IRS defenders argue this was less a case of a concerted administration effort than a small group within the agency not adhering to protocol. They note an additional Treasury inspector general report in 2017 found that liberal groups had also been subject to extra screening, with groups being flagged if they had "Progressive," "Occupy," or "Green Energy" in their titles. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., accused the GOP of a "witch hunt" and "political grandstanding" after multiple rounds of hearings about the controversy, which some conservatives tried connecting to Obama.

Under President Donald Trump, government officials have continued to attack the IRS's previous actions. "There is no excuse for this conduct. Hundreds of organizations were affected by these actions, and they deserve an apology from the IRS," Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement after the settlement was announced. "We hope that today's settlement makes clear that this abuse of power will not be tolerated."

But while Republicans have been accused of exploiting the controversy for political gain, even some former IRS officials acknowledged the agency has made mistakes - and should pay for them.

"These organizations' applications should have been processed in a timely way. There shouldn't have even been a hint of bias at these law enforcement agencies," said Marv Friedlander, a former official in the IRS exempt-organization unit who spent 40 years at the IRS before retiring in 2009. "And there should be a penalty to pay for that."
MEXICO CITY (AP)  A total of sixteen people  six police officers and 10 suspects  were killed in two confrontations in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, authorities said Wednesday.

State security spokesman Roberto Alvarez said the first shootout occurred late Tuesday, when a state police convoy came under attack in Coacuyul, a town near the Pacific coast resort of Zihuatanejo.

He said one policeman was wounded and police returned fire, killing 10 suspected gunmen during a 30-minute battle with assault rifles.

RELATED: 14 people killed in 2 days near popular Mexican resort town, report says

In what Alvarez said may have been retaliation for the first attack, gunmen later ambushed a state police convoy about 20 miles (30 kilometers) north of Zihuatanejo and killed six police officers.

The officers had been visiting nine families in the hamlet of Las Mesillas who were considered at risk because of the drug gang violence that has plagued the area.

The police had been assigned to perform periodic checkups with the families, whose members include 54 people. Alvarez said "criminal gangs had pressured the families, kidnapped and tried to forcibly recruit them."

Hundreds of people have fled their towns in the mountains of the state because of gang threats and violence.

Click through the slideshow to view graphic recent photos of violence in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero.

Last week, soldiers and police had to escort a convoy of 92 people terrorized by drug cartels out of their mountain hamlet, further north, deep in the mountains of Guerrero. Photos showed army Humvees leading the convoy.

The convoy of mostly the elderly, women and children left the hamlet of Laguna de Huayanalco because they fear the drug gangs that operate in the area.

Guerrero has Mexico's third-highest homicide rate, at 64 murders per 100,000 inhabitants. The state has become one of the main opium poppy growing areas in Mexico, and a large number of splintered gangs fight for control of the drug and extortion trade.

Despite being home to once-glamorous resorts like Acapulco, Zihuatanejo and Ixtapa, the U.S. State Department placed Guerrero on its highest, level-four "do not travel" advisories because of the violence there.
A Bexar County program intended to divert low-level offenders from jail has wrapped its 60-day pilot period, but law enforcement agencies across the county, including San Antonio police, have still not received implementation instructions.

On Jan. 31, Bexar County District Attorney Nico LaHood said deputies with the Bexar County Sheriff's Office would serve as guinea pigs for his new program, which allows certain offenders to avoid jail time and a criminal record if they complete a class and pay a $250 fee.

The crimes include: Class A and B possession of marijuana less than 4 ounces, Class B criminal mischief, Class B theft, Class B theft of service and Class B driving with an invalid license.

After initial confusion over what departments the program would be available to during the pilot, Leslie Garza, a spokeswoman for the district attorney's office, said officials there would use the 60-day pilot to evaluate the program and reach out to other police departments in Bexar County with information on how to use it.

RELATED: Law enforcement in Bexar County are not sure how to feel about cite-and-release

Garza said in an email this month that all law enforcement agencies were informed of the program, but officials with county's largest police department said they have not been given any information on the program since it was first announced.

"Chief McManus hasn't had any further discussions regarding this program, as of now, we're waiting on the district attorney's office," a statement from the San Antonio Police Department reads.

In addition to SAPD, departments in Castle Hills, Windcrest, Kirby and Universal City have not received any official notice the program was in place, officials said. Officials with the Alamo Heights Police Department and Terrell Hills Police Departments said they were notified via a letter of the program's existence.

"We have not heard anything from the district attorney's office on the specifics of that," said Kirby Police Chief Kevin Bois on the program.

In an email, Garza said, "Implementing instructions will be provided after we've had the opportunity to review the results of the pilot program to determine if any procedural changes need to be made."

She previously said the district attorney's office found no changes that needed to be made to the program.

The Bexar County Sheriff's Office will continue to use the cite-and-release program, said spokeswoman Sandra Altamirano-Pickell. She said the department found no issues with the program.

So far, 31 cite-and-release notices have been issued, she said. Of those, 10 defendants have shown up and been processed and six have not. The rest are still within the 30-day reporting window to complete the program, Pickell said.

RELATED: Bexar County's cite and release program for low-level marijuana possession now in effect

Representatives from the district attorney's office attended a March 1 Alamo Area Police Chiefs Association meeting to clarify the first 60 days of the program would be restricted to the sheriff's office.

"They said that it was misrepresented in that it was a pilot project," said Windcrest Police Chief A.O. "Al" Ballew. "I can understand them wanting to test it first."

"We have not been told anything officially yet, that probably is soon to come, I'm sure," said Universal City Lt. Tina Vitacco.

In Harris County, the Houston Chronicle reported the area's similar decriminalization program saved $27 million annually and diverted 3,209 people from jail for minor marijuana charges. However, the newspaper found that whether an offender got diverted from jail depended on where they were in the vast county.

The Chronicle reported 12 police agencies out of the 61 in Harris County do not use the decriminalization program, which was enacted in March 2017.

Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg has detailed her misdemeanor program online.

LaHood's website includes a news release from when he announced the program was in its beginning stages in September 2017. However, if a Bexar County resident wanted to look up information about the program, they would not be able to find a detailed description of the policy online.

Additionally, it is unclear if agencies in Bexar County can move forward with the program without instructions on how to use it. For now, they are waiting on the district attorney's office.

Kelsey Bradshaw is a digital reporter for mySA.com. Read more of her stories here.| kbradshaw@express-news.net | Twitter: @kbrad5
A man who police say was fatally shot by his mother Wednesday night on the Northwest Side has been identified by the Bexar County Medical Examiners Office.

Jared Vincent-Michael Brown, 31, was fatally shot once in the chest at about 9:30 p.m. in the 7000 block of Valley Trails, according to preliminary information from the San Antonio Police Department.

Police said Brown may have been high when he went to the home and started yelling at his mother, 62, and his sister. Police did not release his sisters age.

RELATED: Report: Man connected to 3 beach killings nabbed in S.A.

The sister ran upstairs and locked herself in her bedroom to get away from Brown because he has physically assaulted her before, the report states. Brown followed her upstairs, kicked open the door and started punching her. Browns mother grabbed her handgun and ran upstairs to find him choking his sister, the report states.

Police said the mother then shot him in the chest.

Officers arrived to find Brown lying on the living room floor, and he was pronounced dead at the home at 10 p.m.

RELATED: 4th Bexar County deputy indicted in 8 days

The sister had minor injuries, police said.

A decision on whether to charge anyone is pending, according to the report. Because the homicide might have been in self-defense, the mother was released.

Bexar County court records show Brown was out on bond and awaiting a court appearance after he was charged March 20 with assault causing bodily injury - married.

jbeltran@express-news.net
The trucker who transported several undocumented immigrants from Laredo to San Antonio in a sweltering tractor-trailer, resulting in the deaths of 10 people, has only five to seven years to live, according to his family.

James M. Bradley Jr., 61, faces sentencing Friday for the deadly incident last July, in which 39 immigrants were found after Bradley had pulled the trailer into the parking lot of a Walmart on San Antonios South Side. Eight of the 39 were dead at the scene, two more died at area hospitals and the rest were hospitalized for several days for treatment of heat-related injuries.

RELATED: Meet-up between woman, man ends in deadly ambush, police say

In a letter to Senior U.S. District Judge David Alan Ezra ahead of the sentencing, Bradleys relatives say he is a decent man of good moral character who has gone through many ups and downs in his life but that the smuggling arrest stunned them.

We are shocked by his actions because this is not the James that we know, love or grew up with, his sister, Audrey Washington of Louisville, Kentucky, wrote on behalf of the family. Our entire family is saddened by what has happened and our prayers go out to the victims and their families. We certainly do not approve what he has done and in no way condone his actions.

The family also says they pray that he doesnt spend the rest of his life behind bars because they are concerned about his medical condition.

James has a below the knee amputation on his right leg and is a type 2 diabetic, Washington wrote. We have been informed that his life span ranges from 5 to 7 years, according to his most recent medical examinations.

Bradley, most recently of Louisville, pleaded guilty in mid-October to one count of conspiracy to transport aliens resulting in death and one count of transporting aliens resulting in death.

The charges carry a maximum of life in prison without parole. But because Bradley admitted his guilt early on and cooperated with investigators, he may face a shorter sentence.

Bradleys assistant federal public defender, Alfredo Villarreal, has said Bradley provided information about the smuggling ring to investigators during at least six interviews. His information led to charges against a smuggler in the chain, Pedro Silva Segura, 46, an undocumented immigrant living in Laredo. He has also pleaded guilty to smuggling charges and awaits sentencing, records show.

Court observers say prosecutors may reward him by filing a motion agreeing to some kind of leniency because of his cooperation. Such motions are normally filed under seal, and his court record shows Assistant U.S. Attorney Christina Playton filed a sealed document on Thursday.

On July 23, police responding to a call found the immigrants and trailer in the parking lot of a Walmart along Interstate 35, near Texas 16. Police found Bradley in the cab, along with a gun, ammunition and $5,643 in cash.

Survivors interviewed by Department of Homeland Security investigators said between 70 and 200 people were crowded into the hot trailer at one point, with only a small vent for air. The refrigerated trailers cooling system did not work.

When Bradley pulled the rig into the parking lot, the truck was being followed by seven vehicles, including vans and SUVs, prosecutor Playton has said. When Bradley stopped, a man from one of the vehicles opened the door and immigrants got into the waiting vehicles or ran into the bushes, while others staggered around and fell to the ground, Playton has said.

Bradley has a criminal record that crisscrosses the country much like his travels, with arrests or convictions for crimes that include theft and felony domestic violence charges.

He was arrested in 1997 in Arapahoe County, Colorado, on charges of felony menacing, menacing with a deadly weapon and third-degree assault. He pleaded guilty in 1998 to the felony menacing charge, and the others were dropped, records show. He was sentenced to 60 days in jail and two years of probation.

The probation was revoked in 2003 and he was arrested a year later on a felony escape warrant while in Hillsborough County, Florida. He was also charged in Florida with grand theft, but the charge was dropped after he spent more than a month in jail. He was then extradited to Colorado, where he received one year in prison on the escape charge.

His probation was revoked again, in 2005, and he was again sent to prison in Colorado, court records show.

He has also been convicted of several driving offenses in various states, including speeding, being over weight on his axles, misuse of equipment and driving without evidence of financial responsibility (insurance), according to court records.

Florida officials revoked his commercial drivers license in April, months before the deadly incident, and officials said he should not have been driving tractor-trailers in the U.S. because of it.

Though public records and his latest employer said Bradley, who has been married twice, most recently lived in Louisville, he has also lived in Clearwater, Florida, Sacramento and Rancho Cordova, California, along with Denver, Aurora and Broomfield, Colorado.

Bradley dreamed of being a truck driver since he was a young boy, and hitch-hiked around the country, sleeping in drainage pipes along highways until he was picked up by a trucker who taught him to drive commercial trucks, Washingtons letter said. Bradley had been a truck driver for 45 years and was always willing to lend a hand from financial support to mentoring young men in his family about life choices, the letter said.

Bradley worked with Pyle Transportation of Iowa, and company officials have described him as an owner-operator, who made his own decisions and bought his own fuel, and should not have been in Laredo.

Pyle Transportation was placed under an out-of-service order in October by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration after it found Pyles safety rating was so unsatisfactory that it was unfit to remain in business.

Guillermo Contreras is a San Antonio Express-News staff writer. Read more of his stories here. | gcontreras@express-news.net | @gmaninfedland
At least two more suspected drug dealers have been apprehended after a downtown apartment complex was raided Tuesday.

Demitresse Chante Erskion, 27, and Manuel Hernandez, 37, face charges of manufacturing or delivering between 1 and 4 grams of a controlled substance. Erskion faces an additional charge of possession with intent to distribute between 4 and 400 grams of a controlled substance.

RELATED: SAPD: 3 suspects at large after ambush leaves man dead

They join the ranks of eight other suspects who were arrested on Tuesday: Tyree Vashon Davis, 23; Edward Julian Sullivan, 38; Carlos Benavidez Jr., 34; Brian Lee Thomas, 45; Henry Ford, 30; Vanessa Castaneda, 27; ; Robert Turner, 33; Gregory Harris, 46; and Jacrysta Smith, 18.

Joshua Wade Smith, 38, was also identified in court records as a suspect but his status is unknown.

The suspects are accused of dealing marijuana, synthetic marijuana, cocaine and methamphetamine. Both Erskion and Hernandez are accused of dealing synthetic marijuana.

San Antonio police and troopers with the Texas Department of Public Safety raided the Cattleman's Square Apartments in the 900 block of West Houston on Tuesday following a months-long undercover narcotics investigation.

RELATED: Man gunned down at Northeast Side flea market ID'd

"This building, this area was a scourge on the city," said San Antonio Police Chief William McManus Tuesday. "And now hopefully we've made an impact on that."

According to several of the suspects' arrest affidavits, narcotics officers went undercover to buy drugs from the suspects. The operation netted 55 arrest warrants for 32 suspects. Many remain at large.

Authorities are now working with Code Compliance to shut the building down, McManus 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
Police on Thursday arrested a 36-year-old woman who allegedly ran over another woman she believed was having an affair with her boyfriend in the parking lot of a Southwest Side Fiesta Grocery, according to court records.

The suspect, Naomi Mercedes Hernandez, now faces a charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. She was booked into the Bexar County Jail on $75,000 bond.

RELATED: Trucker involved in deadly incident with 39 immigrants sentenced to life in prison

According to her arrest affidavit, Hernandez was sitting in her car in the parking lot of the Fiesta Grocery in the 7200 block of Brook Valley on March 12 when the victim pulled up and parked a few spots away from her.

As the victim walked towards the store, Hernadez confronted her about the alleged affair, and they began arguing. Then the fight turned physical, police said.

The two eventually separated, and the victim went into the store. She came back out a short time later and got in her car, still parked near Hernandez, authorities said.

At that point, Hernandez backed up and started to drive away. But she stopped. According to her arrest affidavit, she then rapidly accelerated and smashed into the side of the victim's car.

The victim got out of her car, and Hernandez made a loop and rushed back to strike again. This time, she struck the driver's side of the car, then swiped the victim and finally crashed into a wall of the Fiesta Grocery, the affidavit says.

The victim was knocked into the wall of the Fiesta Grocery. Her foot was fractured in the crash, police said.

RELATED: 2 more suspects charged in raid at downtown San Antonio apartment complex

Hernandez fled after smashing into the victim, according to the arrest affidavit.

The entire scene was captured on security camera.

When police contacted the victim about the incident, she told them she had known Hernandez for about six months and that she had only spoken to her a few times. The victim said Hernandez accused her of having an affair with her boyfriend.

Later, the victim identified Hernandez as the woman who intentionally ran her over in the parking lot, according to the affidavit.

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
Donald Trump shouldnt fire Robert Mueller, but Mueller should be the last special counsel.

The Mueller probe just took a Ken Starr turn with its lurch, via the Southern District of New York, into the Stormy Daniels affair.

After the Starr investigation in the 1990s, there was a consensus that we werent doing that again, certainly not through the independent counsel statute, which lapsed. The law put investigations on a hair trigger and carved out independent counsels, executive branch officials, from control of the chief executive in a constitutionally impermissible way. Endless politically fraught investigations ensued that often exhibited a zeal disproportionate to the alleged crime.

Its too early to render a verdict on Muellers work, but he certainly appears to have become a kind of free-floating legal ombudsman.

MORE LOWRY: Ronald Reagan  misunderstood and, today, distorted

In response to Trumps blustery attacks on Mueller, a bipartisan group of lawmakers is calling for legal protections against Muellers removal that would be an ill-advised step back toward the independent counsel statute. Instead, we should be thinking of whether this is the best way to hold presidents accountable in the future. As a practical matter, its hard to imagine any administration ever permitting such an investigation to get unloosed again.

Even if Trump is fully vindicated, the probe has exacted a significant price, and much of the left considers the Mueller probe a resistance march with subpoena power.

In his famous dissent in the Supreme Court case of Morrison v. Olson upholding the independent counsel law in 1988, Antonin Scalia wrote, Nothing is so politically effective as the ability to charge that ones opponent and his associates are not merely wrongheaded, naive, ineffective, but, in all probability, crooks. And nothing so effectively gives an appearance of validity to such charges as a Justice Department investigation and, even better, prosecution.

OPINION: Canning Mueller? The worst of all Trump firings.

This is why each side celebrates when it can get such an investigation going  and they know it will ramify in unpredictable, harmful ways.

Scalia quoted FDRs attorney general, Robert Jackson, who warned against prosecutors picking a person to investigate rather than a crime, lest it become a matter of searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him.

Now, obviously, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, a Trump appointee, didnt intend to create such a dynamic (although his initial mandate to Mueller was much too broad). And Trump brought this all on himself with his ham-fisted firing of FBI Director James Comey.

But the trajectory would be maddening for any president. Hes gone from Comey telling him he wasnt suspected of wrongdoing to his personal lawyer being raided. Hes gone from his deputy attorney general blessing a counterintelligence investigation into Russian meddling to blessing FBI agents seizing material related to hush payments to a porn star.

Now it very well may be that every step on that path by Mueller was justified legally, the same as Ken Starrs trajectory from Whitewater to Monica Lewinsky. But the gravitational pull of such investigations is toward expansion.

OPINION: Mueller is no Ken Starr

By the end, the Starr investigation was a pure partisan fight for power. The same will be true of the Mueller probe, if it isnt already. This puts the lie to the idea that such investigations can ever be truly above politics.

Its possible to imagine a different scenario over the past year. Congress could have created an independent commission to investigate Russia. Career prosecutors could have handled the Paul Manafort investigation. The Southern District could have, on its own, taken up the Daniels matter. And if Congress didnt act or the Trump Justice Department quashed legitimate investigations, Democrats could have used it to build their case for the midterms  and for wielding the subpoena and impeachment power.

This effort wouldnt have been as centralized and fearsome as Muellers operation, but it would have been more politically accountable and open.

All this is moot now, of course, but both sides should eventually consider whether they want another Robert Mueller.

comments.lowry@nationalreview.com
Paul Ryans decision to retire from Congress is being interpreted as a sign by many that Republicans will do poorly in the midterm elections. That may be true, but Ryans exit also symbolizes a broad shift that has taken place within the party. It marks the end of the Reagan revolution.

The GOP of the 1950s and 60s was the party of American business, drawing broad support from white-collar professionals and country-club businessmen. It had a straightforward Chamber of Commerce orientation, arguing for low taxes, few regulations and fiscal responsibility. But it was a minority party, willing to go along with the basic contours of Franklin Roosevelts New Deal.

To understand the extent of Roosevelts imprint on American politics in the mid-20th century, consider this fact: From 1933 to 1969, the only men who occupied the Oval Office were FDR, fervent disciples of FDR, or in the case of Dwight Eisenhower, a general handpicked and promoted by FDR.

In foreign affairs, the Republican Party in the 1950s had only recently shrugged off its isolationist posture but was still cautious about international engagement. On civil rights, the party was progressive and activist. Chief Justice Earl Warren, a former Republican governor, issued the Supreme Courts landmark decision outlawing school segregation, and President Eisenhower dispatched federal troops to Arkansas to enforce the ruling.

Nixon ushered in the beginnings of the partys first transformation. The party had long had a nationalist and nativist side, but Democratic President Lyndon Johnsons embrace of the civil rights movement created the circumstances for one of the great flips of American history. The Democrats, heretofore the party of the Jim Crow South, became the party of civil rights, while the Republicans, the party of Lincoln, began to mirror the resentments of Southern whites against the federal government and civil rights legislation. But in other areas of domestic policy, Nixon governed as a liberal.

Reagan finished what Nixon started, turning the GOP into an ideologically oriented party, staunchly advocating free markets, free trade, limited government and an enthusiastic internationalism that promoted democracy abroad. The old country-club Republicans were never true believers, but they accepted Reagans redefinition after its electoral success, as demonstrated by the alliance between the Gipper and his vice president, George H. W. Bush.

The Reagan redefinition of the party, as a quasi-libertarian organization, persisted through the Clinton years, though the GOP always continued to bring along its socially conservative base.

Then came Donald Trump. Early on, Trump seemed to recognize that the Republican Party had changed and that the core ideological appeal was no longer about economics but nationalism, race and religion. His first major political cause was birtherism, the noxious and false claim that President Obama was secretly a Muslim born in Kenya.

When Trump ran for the Republican nomination in 2016, he was virtually alone on the podium in rejecting the Reagan formula. He dismissed any prospect of entitlement reform, while criticizing foreign interventions and democracy promotion. And he flirted with big infrastructure spending to universal health care.

But he was consistently hard line on a few core issues  immigration, trade, race and religion. On all these, he stuck to a tough nationalist, protectionist, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and pro-police line.

A month before the November 2016 election, when everyone expected Trump to lose, Paul Ryan got on a call with other Republican congressmen and told them to feel free to distance themselves from Trump. After the call, the speakers approval rating among Republican voters dropped almost 20 points.

Ryan had his faults. He embodied the hypocrisy of Reaganism, advocating fiscal probity while exploding the deficit. He was a bad legislative strategist, unable to repeal Obamacare after years to prepare for it. But he was a genuine and ardent Reaganite. His successors will not be. The second transformation of the Republican Party is now complete.

fareed.zakaria.gps@turner.com
Re: States war on education hits home, Editorial, Sunday:

Starting with the title, your Sunday editorial is riddled with inaccuracies and filled with misinformation. Texas spends a larger share of its budget on education, 52 percent, than any other budget item  with the vast majority going to K-12. Health care is 31 percent and public safety is 11 percent, leaving only 6 percent to pay for everything else.

Texas public school enrollment grows by an estimated 80,000 students annually. As lieutenant governor, I have ensured that the Foundation School Program, or FSP, is fully funded. In addition, in the 2015 and 2017 legislative sessions, we added nearly $2 billion above FSP requirements to further assist with the cost of educating Texas' children.

RELATED: Editorial: Property tax relief is directly tied to school funding

Your claim that the states share of school funding has dropped to 38 percent is simply wrong and a myth that continues to be repeated over and over. According to the Texas Education Agency, when all expenses including technology and instructional materials, TEA costs and additional grants are included, state funding has increased to more than 45 percent in the past decade. Local spending is 42 percent.

Your suggestion that charter schools are somehow draining funding to traditional schools makes no sense. There are about 6 million schoolchildren in Texas, with around 5 percent attending charter schools. Charter schools are public schools, so a student transferring from one public school to another doesnt take any funding away from public schools in San Antonio or anywhere else.

I took the lead to establish the School Finance Commission  the first since the 1980s  to address the school funding issue and, although few serious ideas for reform have yet to be presented, I remain optimistic. The misinformation that you and others continue to perpetuate, along with the finger-pointing in your editorial about the states commitment to education, neither informs your readers nor advances the cause of reform.

Dan Patrick is lieutenant governor of Texas.
The impact of President Donald Trumps unconstitutional Muslim ban extends beyond the immigration context. It is an attack on the character, hopes and dreams of American families, children and youth who are Muslim and those perceived as Muslim.

This has resulted in an increase in anti-Muslim discrimination and violence targeting these families and children.

The dangers posed by the Muslim ban are not limited to families being torn apart, travelers facing lengthy delays, or denial of entry into the U.S. The Muslim ban epitomizes the culmination of a long-standing history of anti-Muslim discrimination and scapegoating.

These forms of discrimination are an attack on our shared American values of religious freedom and our nations founding principles.

Our country was founded on the principle of freedom of religion, a tradition and ideal that forms the foundation of our country. We do not tell people how to pray, and we do not ban people based on their religion.

Unless the unconstitutional Muslim ban is struck down by the Supreme Court once and for all, Americans who are Muslim or perceived as Muslim are likely to be subjected to the same action again.

Through his tweets, President Trump continues to defend  against all known facts  this unconstitutional ban.

With the presidents continued defense of the Muslim ban, there can be no assurance that the religiously discriminatory policy underlying it will not be implemented.

The Muslim ban signifies a ratification of bigotry by those at the highest levels of our government. What we are witnessing is the broad power of the federal government used to undermine one of the tenets it was established to protect: freedom of religion.

As a longtime civil rights activist and head of the San Antonio office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, I have witnessed the harm from the presidents Muslim ban that restricts travel from predominantly Muslim countries.

But one doesnt need to be an active community member to see the rise in discrimination that the Muslim ban has instigated. Millions of American Muslim children and families have seen increased discrimination, hate violence and threats of violence as a result of the anti-Muslim animus that underpins this policy.

Just last year, we saw hundreds of incidents of anti-Muslim discrimination nationwide. Several mosques were burned, and numerous Americans who were Muslim or perceived as Muslim were shot or beaten severely. During most of these attacks, the attackers uttered or expressed the same anti-Muslim slurs repeated daily in mainstream media headlines and often by candidates and politicians.

By striking down the Muslim ban, the court would communicate to the president and to the rest of our nation that while some may try to divide us, the Constitution, which has stood the test of time, will stand strong to protect religious freedom.

Sarwat Husain is president of the San Antonio office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, the nations largest American Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization.
SYRIA-ISRAEL BORDER, Golan Heights  Ever since the Iranian Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iran and Israel have been fighting each other in the shadows. That may be about to change, and if it does, it will have vast implications for Syria, Lebanon and the whole Middle East.

Im sure neither side really wants a war. It could be devastating for Israels flourishing high-tech economy and for Irans already collapsing currency. But Irans Revolutionary Guards Quds Force seems determined to try to turn Syria into a base from which to pressure Israel, and Israel seems determined to prevent that. And in the past few weeks  for the first time ever  Israel and Iran have begun quietly trading blows directly, not through proxies, in Syria.

Round 1 occurred on Feb. 10, when an Iranian drone launched by a Quds Force unit operating out of Syrias T4 air base, in central Syria, was shot down with a missile from an Israeli Apache helicopter that was following it after it penetrated northern Israel airspace.

Initial reports were that the drone was purely on a reconnaissance mission. But the Israeli armys spokesman, Brig. Gen. Ronen Manelis, said Friday that the flight path and Israels analysis of the drone indicated that the aircraft was carrying explosives and that its mission was an act of sabotage in Israeli territory.

If true, that suggests that the Quds Force  commanded by Irans military mastermind Qassem Suleimani  was trying to launch an actual military strike on Israel.

Round 2 occurred on April 9. Israeli jets launched a missile strike on T4, the drones home base  directly targeting, for the first time, an Iranian facility and personnel in Syria. Seven Quds Force members were killed, including Col. Mehdi Dehghan, who led the drone unit.

Irans government unusually highlighted it  and Irans casualties  and vowed to take revenge.

So now the whole neighborhood is holding its breath: Will there be a Round 3? Israeli defense officials let it be known that if the Iranians strike back, Israel may use the opportunity to mount a massive counterstrike on Irans entire military infrastructure in Syria, where Iran is attempting to establish forward air bases and factories for GPS-guided missiles that could hit targets inside Israel with much greater accuracy. Iran also plans to provide the missiles to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

These Israeli defense officials say there is zero chance Israel will make the same mistake it made in Lebanon  letting Hezbollah establish a large missile threat there  by letting Iran do so in Syria.

Iran has legitimate security concerns in the Gulf; it faces a number of hostile, pro-American Sunni Arab powers trying to contain its influence and undermine its Islamic regime. From Irans perspective, these are a threat. But what is Iran doing in Syria?

Tehrans building of bases and missile factories in Syria, after having helped President Bashar Assad largely crush the uprising against him, appears to be a move by the Quds Forces Suleimani to extend Irans grip on key parts of the Sunni Arab world and advance his position at home in his struggle for power with Hassan Rouhani, Irans president.

The Quds Force now more or less controls  through proxies  four Arab capitals: Damascus, Beirut, Baghdad and Sanaa. Indeed, Iran has become the biggest occupying power in the Arab world today. But Suleimani may be overplaying his hand.

Even before the recent clashes with Israel, many average Iranians were publicly asking: What is Iran doing spending billions of dollars  which were supposed to go to Iranians as a result of the lifting of sanctions from the Iran nuclear deal  fighting wars in Syria, Lebanon and Yemen?

Suleimani could opt to strike back at Israel through proxies, either in the Middle East or against Israeli targets globally. But he now has to think twice about that, both because his forces in Syria are exposed  and for another reason: Iran is exposed financially. The Iranian rial has lost one-third of its value just this year, which a wider confrontation with Israel would only exacerbate.

These are momentous days for both countries. One thing I know for sure. The status quo is not sustainable.
1 South Africa protests: South Africas president cut short a visit to Britain to return home and deal with violent protests in a provincial capital. President Cyril Ramaphosa left the Commonwealth summit in London to respond to the turmoil in the North West capital of Mahikeng, where residents brought life to a standstill with protests over alleged corruption and calls for the premier to resign. The North West premier, Supra Mahumapelo, has faced accusations of corruption from residents who say mismanagement has led to a decline in government services. Similar protests have been common across South Africa, which the World Bank this year called, by any measure, one of the most unequal countries in the world.

2 Al Qaeda attack: Extremists claimed responsibility for an attack in northern Mali that killed a U.N. peacekeeper and wounded seven French soldiers. SITE Intelligence Group reported Friday that the al Qaeda branch in Mali posted a message saying it had carried out the attack nearly a week ago. Witnesses said the attackers struck the town of Timbuktu in vehicles disguised as belonging to the Malian military and the U.N. peacekeeping mission. Extremists controlled Timbuktu and other northern towns in 2012 before a French-led military operation forced them from power the following year. They have continued to attack Malian and international forces.
- The divisional police station at Kutigi, Niger state was attacked around 3.50 am on Thursday, April 19

- A seven-man committee led by ACP Abdullahi Tahir to probe the incident and bring the perpetrators to book has been constituted

- Anyone with useful information that could lead to the arrest of the gunmen will be rewarded with N500,000

The police command in Niger state on Thursday, April 19, said that a police sergeant, Jibril Abubakar, was killed and his rifle taken away when gunmen attacked its divisional police station at Kutigi in Lavun local government area of the state.

The commands public relations officer, ASP Muhammadu Abubakar, disclosed this while addressing newsmen at the command headquarters, The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports.

READ ALSO: Buhari never passed vote of no confidence in Nigerian youth - Presidency

He said that the gunmen stormed Kutigi police station around 3.50 am on Thursday and shot sporadically, but were repelled by the guards on duty.

According to him, the commissioner of police, Dibal Yakadi, had constituted a seven-man committee led by ACP Abdullahi Tahir to probe the incident and bring the perpetrators to book.

He said that the command promised a N500,000 reward to anyone with useful information that could lead to the arrest of the gunmen. The command solicited the support of residents for vital information to assist the command in apprehending bad elements in the state.

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Meanwhile, a mobile police officer was, on Thursday, April 19, killed during a bank robbery at First Bank in Ifaki-Ekiti, Ekiti state.

The Punch reports that the robbers carted away an undisclosed amount of money before the arrival of security operatives.

Legit.ng gathered that the incident which was made known in the pictures that surfaced online showed some residents gathered at the bank premises.

The corpse of the slain mobile police officer was said to have been evacuated to an undisclosed mortuary in the area.

Lagos Police Commissioner parades suspected criminals (Nigeria News) | Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit
The Nigerian Army has announced the arrest of one Bwesse H Tanimu, an alleged notorious criminal popularly known as Skin, in Taraba state as the efforts to rid some states in central part of the country continues to yield results.

Preliminary investigation revealed that the suspect with other members of his gang still at large are said to be responsible for various criminal activities within Takum and its environ.

The Nigerian Army wishes to assure the public of protection of lives and property at all times, a statement by Brigadier General Texas Chukwu, the director Army public relations, said.

READ ALSO: 2019: PDP considering changing name, holds emergency meeting

Legit.ng earlier reported that the Nigerian Army announced it had finished plans to establish a military barracks in Jalingo, the Taraba state capital.

The suspect after his arrest. Credit: Nigerian Army

Major General Benjamin Ahanotu, the general officer commanding 3 division Jos, made this disclosure in his courtesy visit to Governor Darius Ishaku.

The suspect's identity card. Credit: Nigerian Army

Legit.ng also reported that in line with the on going military exercise Ayem Akpatuma in Taraba state, five suspects were declared wanted in Taraba state.

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A statement by the director army public relations, Brigadier-General Texas Chukwu, the suspects were declared wanted for their alleged roles in the killings in Takum local government area in particular and Taraba state in general.

Robbers return firearms to Nigerian Police on Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit.ng
- President Muhammadu Buhari's second term bid continues to generate reactions across the nation

- Former Niger Delta militants have frowned at the declaration of interest by the president

- The group which claimed to have worked for Buhari in the 2015 elections, said it has withdrawn support for the president

Ex-agitators under the aegis of National Assembly of Ex-militants (NAE) have frowned at the declaration of interest of President Muhammadu Buhari to run for second term in office, saying Nigerians could not afford another four years of poverty ridden administration.

The group which claimed to have worked for Buhari in the 2015 elections, said it has withdrawn support for the president, reiterating that the present administration had brought infectious poverty, abandonment of supporters and insincerity to develop Niger Delta region.

READ ALSO: The constant demonisation of the PDP by APC is childish - Governor Dickson

Vanguard quoted the acting national coordinator of the group, Ibifuro Pureheart, as saying: Buharis alleged pursuit of ethnic agenda had left Niger Delta youths poorer than he met them, whereas the president focused more on developing northern youths at the detriment of their counterparts in the Niger Delta region.

The Niger Delta Development Commission, NDDC, was left in the hands of the members of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party to polarise the youth of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the region. The president has shown enough disdain for those who worked for him while patronising his political enemies.

We cannot afford another four years of Buharis poverty ridden regime or else we would all die. The poverty being spread currently brings hopelessness and death upon fellow citizens. It is time we tell Nigerians the truth. Even though the president had our support, we are now calling on the people of the region to chart a new course.

Buhari has disappointed us, we spent our fortunes to bring him to power, we invested our psyche and emotions yet, we have nothing to show for it. With our PVC, we are ready to sack him in 2019. Power resides in the citizens and we shall sustain the campaign to boot Buhari out of office in 2019. Hes a huge failure and it is time to bring a more trustworthy leader on board.

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Meanwhile, the deputy national publicity secretary of the ruling APC, Comrade Timi Frank, has asked President Buhari to apologise to Nigerian youths over his comments that the country's young population are lazy but wanted free things.

In a statement sent to Legit.ng on Thursday, April 19, the APC chieftain said the president's comment cannot be justified because the government has not given the youth opportunity to serve, hence there was no need to demarket them at an international event like Commonwealth Business Forum.

Nigeria News: Aisha Buhari Backs President Husband on Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit
- Nigerian big boy Legit Dollarface Peters has moved on quick from a painful heartbreak

- Peters who was formerly engaged to a "slay queen" girlfriend, called it quits 3 weeks after he popped the question

- Rather than wallow in misery, the apparent rich businessman has married his new girlfriend in a lavish ceremony

Nigerian big boy, popularly known as Legit Dollarface Peters recently remarried after calling off his engagement to his former girlfriend. Dollarface had made it public knowledge his intention to settle down and willingness to pay any woman ready to mother his children.

Fate made it possible, and he somehow met a woman he thought he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. So much, that on her birthday he spent a whooping N1 million alongside a heart-melting marriage proposal.

Unfortunately, barely three weeks later, he called it off, describing the woman as a slay queen. Just shortly after, Peters met another woman and realising what a jewel she is, moved on to propose marriage to her. Wasting no time, the two tied the knot in a fancy traditional wedding and are now rocking the internet with lovely photos.

READ ALSO: 5 reasons why Pastor Adeboye wont make heaven - Daddy Freeze

Legit Dollarface Peters and newly-wedded wife Source: Twitter

The lovers tied the knot in style and rocked matching native attires as they exchanged vows in the presence of family and friends.

Bride and groom at their traditional wedding ceremony Source: Twitter

Congratulations to the couple!

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Emanuella and Mark Angel: Uncle, Imagine That All Men Have Disappeared on Legit.ng TV:

Source: Legit Newspaper
- A Nigeria's envoy to America, Kayode Laro, has emphasised that Nigerians in US are hardworking and law-abiding

- Buhari had on Wednesday, April 18, said that Nigerian youths expect everything to come without making efforts because of the notion of the availability of crude oil

- Laro said the consulate was proud of the contributions of Nigerians to the US and also to their homeland

A Nigeria's envoy to America, Kayode Laro, has disagreed with President Muhammadu Buhari over his London's comments on Nigerian youth.

Legit.ng gathered that Laro, who is the Consul-General of Nigeria at Atlanta, said that Nigerians residents in the U.S. are hardworking and law-abiding.

The diplomats statement comes a day after President Muhammadu Buhari allegedly referred to some Nigerian youth as lazy.

READ ALSO: 2019: We cant defeat APC on our own, we need everybody to join us - PDP

The presidents statement has been condemned by many Nigerians and politicians.

Laro told the correspondent of the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) that the consulate was proud of the contributions of Nigerians to the U.S. and also to their homeland.

The consulate was established in 1998 to strengthen the long existing relations between Nigeria and the U.S. with jurisdiction in the 17 southeastern states of the U.S. and territory.

These are Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Puerto Rico, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia.

Laro said: As a Consulate, we are extremely proud of our citizens here and thats why we engage closely with them and we know what they do.

Nigerians here in Georgia are definitely law-abiding, hardworking and they contribute to enhancing the image of Nigeria, their country, through their actions.

Nigerians are really doing a lot here. We have Nigerians running NGOs and with the recognition within the State of Georgia and so on.

They are highly united under different organisations and we have an umbrella body, which is called the Organisation of Nigerians in Georgia.

This umbrella body accommodates all or a good number of the various Nigerian organisations and associations in the State of Georgia.

Ive been around all those states and I have to encourage them to do similar things.

He, however, said there could be isolated cases of deviants, like in any human group.

Occasionally, there will be the case of someone get arrested for drunk driving or driving under the influence of one thing or the other.

But one would not take it lightly because everybody has to keep within the law and by and large, the majority of Nigerians are really law abiding, he said.

The envoy said the relations between the Consulate and the Nigerian community was cordial, friendly and mutually beneficial.

According to him, the relations between the Nigerian community and the Consulate is one that can be described as a very close engagement.

My colleagues and I demonstrate this, not just by what we say but also through our actions.

We get invited to events and we show up. We also invite members of the community, whenever we have functions, the envoy said.

He said the consulate received between 1,200 and 1,300 passport applications and between 350 and 500 visa applications monthly.

Laro added that the figure had not changed even with the introduction of the electronic visa.

On average, we get 350 to 500 visa applications monthly and even before the introduction of the e-visa arrangement, thats about the same range that we had.

The average number of applications we get monthly ranged between 1,200 and 1,300.

We noticed that at certain times of the year, there might be a slight increase, especially when schools are on holiday.

Thats when parents would have the time to bring them to the Consulate for the biometrics, he said.

The envoy lauded the federal government for upgrading the nations visa to the electronic type, saying this has upgraded Nigerias visa application procedure.

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Its in line with current best global practices and it has enhanced the security of our visa, Mr Laro said. (NAN)

Meanwhile, Legit.ng had previously reported that Nigerian presidency reacted to a statement purportedly credited to President Muhammadu Buhari while fielding questions after his keynote address at the Common Wealth Business Forum in London on Wednesday, April 18.

President Buhari on 2019 presidential election: will you vote for him? | - on Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit
- Criminal elements have been reported by Plateau state government of making use of the governor's cloned line to solicit financial assistace

- The government has warned the public to disregard such messages

- It said that security agencies had been notified on the activities of the fraudsters

An alarm has been raised by the Plateau state government over the cloning of the telephone number of Governor Simon Lalong, using it to solicit financial assistance.

According to the government, security agencies had been notified of the development, Punch reports.

Legit.ng notes that a statement issued on Thursday, April 19, by the Plateau state commissioner for information and communication, Yakubu Dati, advised members of the public to disregard such messages.

READ ALSO: Reps call for prosecution of those selling artificially-ripened fruits

The statement partly read: It has come to the notice of the government that criminal elements have cloned the telephone number of Governor Simon Lalong and are using same to solicit financial assistance from the unsuspecting public."

One of such messages reads: "Call Prof Aminu on this number 07037694791; collect his account details (and) credit it with the sum of N2m. I will talk to you in the night."

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Meanwhile, Legit.ng previously reported that a suspected fraudster, Usman Baba Yusuf, was sentenced to 12 months in prison for his involvement in the cloning of the phone number of Abdulmumini Bako, a former special assistant to the ex-comptroller general of the Nigeria Customs Service, Abdullahi Dikko.

The verdict was passed after the suspect pleaded guilty when he was arraigned by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) on March 29, to a four-count amended charge of cheating, impersonation and obtaining by false pretence to the tune of N2 million.

The anti-graft agency in a statement on Tuesday, April 17, said Yusuf, who was being charged along with Balarabe Abdullahi, had initially absconded, but was later arrested by operatives who found him in his hideout and brought him to court. The convict was alleged to have connived with Abdullahi to defraud a customs officer.

See the faces of newly arrested criminals in Lagos state - on Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit.ng
- The Presidential Committee on Small & Light Weapons has spoken about Herders/farmers clash across Nigweria

- The group said the primary weapons of choice for the perpetrators of conflicts in our West African neighbourhood are the small arms and light weapons

- The group chairman Ambassador Emmanuel Imohe also said weapons are mostly coming in from outside the region

The Presidential Committee on Small & Light Weapons (PRESCOM) has accused the current strife between herders and farmers on unscrupulous arms merchants who are taking advantage of Nigerias porous borders to flood the nation with illicit weapons.

The group chairman Ambassador Emmanuel Imohe stated this at a two-day stakeholders dialogue on eradication of herders-farmers conflict in Nigeria in Abuja, noted that easy access to illicit weapons was responsible for the lingering herders/farmers clashes.

Imohe, who stated this at a two-day stakeholders dialogue on eradication of herders-farmers conflict in Nigeria in Abuja, noted that easy access to illicit weapons was responsible for the lingering herders/farmers clashes.

READ ALSO: 2019: We cant defeat APC on our own, we need everybody to join us - PDP

He said: ''The primary weapons of choice for the perpetrators of conflicts in our West African neighbourhood are the small arms and light weapons, SALW, which appear to be widespread and easily available.

''The long, porous borders are enablers for miscreants who indulge in trans-border trafficking of these weapons across West Africa.

''This is further compounded by the preponderance of local craft manufacturers and artisans whose skills in arms production have improved over the years.

''In addition, there have been some leakages from official stockpiles not only in Nigeria but also in other ECOWAS member states and, indeed, across the globe as well.

''Hence, in spite of the substantial efforts at regulating proliferation of weapons in the region and elsewhere in the African continent, several non-state actors, including herders and farmers have continued to have access to SALW and as such, our communities continue to be awash with weapons, Easy access to illicit weapons is responsible, at least in part, for the heightened nature of insecurity in West Africa.

''The weapons are mostly coming in from outside the region, facilitated by the activities of criminal syndicates and unscrupulous arms merchants who take undue advantage of our porous borders and the inadequacy of our regulatory environment.

''The result is that in country after country in our neighbourhood, once protagonists of conflict have access to deadly weapons, they become less interested in embracing other conflict resolution alternatives, but would rather seek to use such weapons to define their own space.

''The invidious role that easy access to illicit weapons is playing in fuelling and accentuating varied security challenges in West Africa cannot therefore be over-estimated.

''Regarding the subject matter of today, several factors have impacted this age-long system of animal husbandry. Historical, economic and ecological factors, as well as ethnic, religious and political dimensions have all impacted the nomadic and pastoral system of livestock production.

''Climatic changes resulting in recurrent droughts and increased animal movement towards pasture and water, have all heightened the incidence of conflict in the country.

''The limited enforcement of animal movement control, notably the 1978 land use Act, has resulted in conflicts between crop farmers and herders where grazing routes have been blocked and animals have ploughed through farms.

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''Conflicts have also arisen where cattle rustling incidents have been recorded. In recent times, such conflicts have led to deadly confrontations in communities, leading to casualties in terms of loss of human lives and the wanton destruction of property.

''Another factor which has impacted on the environmental space for both Herders and Farmers is our increasing population, resulting in the increased need for arable lands for crop cultivation for food security and the need for nations to develop infrastructure.

''These needs have resulted in the shrinking of farmlands and grazing routes thereby exacerbating the conflicts between crop farmers and livestock farmers.

''It is as a result of the forgoing, and as well the future impact or threat of same that we, as Nigerians must seat together and talk to ourselves with open minds with a view to critically and constructively diagnosing this raging security threat in order to proffer enduring solutions for the consideration of our government.''

Meanwhile, Legit.ng had reported that Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association (MACBAN) in Nasarawa state called on the federal government to quickly intervene over the looming crisis between herders and farmers in the state following the exodus of herders displaced from Benue state.

Muhammed Hussaini, the chairman of MACBAN, said the non-availability of grasses, animal feed and water to graze about two million cattle that migrated from Benue into the state, could lead to clashes between herders and farmers.

Speaking at a press conference in Lafia, Hussaini said the cattle from Benue could destroy crops in the area particularly now that farmers were yet to harvest their crops.

Southern Kaduna killings: part 1 - on Legit.ng TV:

Source: Legit.ng
- The killing of a soldier in Naka, Benue state which led to the attack on the community by some military men has been condemned by a civil society

- The group, Benue Proactive Initiative (BPI) said that the attack on Naka was triggered by the activities of some miscreants in the commuity

- The BPI, on behalf of the state, apologised to the presidency, the Nigerian Army and the family of the deceased soldier

A civil society group, the Benue Proactive Initiative (BPI) has bitterly decried what is described as the 'barbaric, wicked and malicious killing' of a personnel of the Nigerian Army in Naka, Gwer west local government area of the state on Wednesday, April 18.

In reaction to the incident, Comrade Terkaa Jam, the convener of BPI, through a statement on Thursday, April 19, said the incident was regrettable and condemnable. Jam remarked that the soldiers deployed to Benue state on peacekeeping have been making effort to curb the frequent herdsmen-farmers clashes in Nigeria, the Vanguard reports.

READ ALSO: Conmen clone Governor Lalong's telephone number, solicit help from public

Jam said: We wish to boldly attest to the fact that until last night when these restive youths decided to kill and bury an officer after disarming him, the people have had a very cordial relationship with the Nigerian Army and do appreciate all their efforts towards restoring peace to the various communities in the state.

We understand that these acts were carried out by miscreants whose past time is cheap drugs and have nothing to offer the society and regrettable that this led to the burning down of houses by the soldiers who had once conducted themselves peacefully.

"As much as we submit that the anger was well understood, it is our desire that the military does not turn its table against us or stop being of immense assistance to us because of these criminal elements.

The Benue Proactive Initiative wishes to make it abundantly clear that the action of these few disgruntled elements in the state doesnt represent our relationship with the military neither does it portray our appreciation of their numerous sacrifices to the peace project in Benue state.

"It is therefore clear that the actions of the youths were aimed at jeopardizing the peace gradually returning to the local government.

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We extend our condolence to the President and Commander-in-Chief, the Nigerian Army and families of the deceased over the unfortunate incident, and also call on them to halt any action that may demonstrate the bitterness of the Nigerian Army and its Personnel towards the people.

Earlier, Legit.ng reported that some angry Nigerian soldiers reportedly stormed a community in Benue state and set houses ablaze.

The soldiers stormed Naka, the seat of Gwer west local government area, at about 11:00 am and began burning houses to the apprehension of residents, Francis Ayagah, chairman of the local government told newsmen by telephone on Thursday, April 19.

Biafra: Should operation python dance in southeast be canceled? - On Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit
- The Nigerian Army reportedly invaded a community in Benue following the lynching of a soldier by residents

- The soldiers allegedly set houses and properties on fire

- Some suspects have been arrested by a team dispatched from the unit to the scene of the incident

The Nigerian Army has spoken about the reported invasion of soldiers into a community in Benue, saying it occurred after a soldier was killed by residents.

Legit.ng had reported that a soldier was killed and buried in a shallow grave in Naka, Gwer local government area of the state.

According to Premium Times, some soldiers invaded the community in a reprisal attack and set fire to houses and properties.

Francis Ayagah, chairman of the local government, admitted that a soldier was killed in the community on Wednesday, April 18, but said he had been in touch with the commander of the troops, who were stationed near the town.

It was claimed that residents took the soldier for a criminal when they saw him around a farmland and lynched him to death.

READ ALSO: Troops engage Boko Haram terrorists fleeing in gun truck; avert IED attack (photos)

Olabisi Ayeni who is a spokesperson for the Nigerian Army 707 Special Forces Brigade in Makurdi, identified the slain soldier as Danlami Gambo.

He said: On 18 April 2018, at about 3:30 pm, troops of 707 Sf Brigade deployed at Naka in Gwer West LGA of Benue State observed the absence of PTE Danlami Gambo from his duty post. The soldiers rifle was however found at the location.

It was gathered that the soldier was last seen receiving a phone call but left in search of network and did not return. Troops immediately conducted patrols to search for the soldier during the search, at about 6.10 pm, our troops observed blood stains along a footpath leading to a newly dug grave.

They immediately dug out the grave and the dead body of the missing soldier was found butchered. The corpse was later exhumed and deposited at the Nigerian Air Force mortuary, Makurdi.

Preliminary investigation reveals that some locals were involved in the killing of the soldier which has led to the arrest of some suspects by a team dispatched from the unit to the scene of the incident.

Kenneth Kwaghhemba who resides in the community said residents were fleeing for fear of being attacked by gunmen after soldiers deserted the place.

He said: The soldiers have left and many people are running away from the town because theres nobody to protect them from attacks by gunmen.

The situation had been made worse by the withdrawal of police special forces from the community following a clash between the officers and commercial motorcyclists a few weeks ago. Only a few mobile police officers are here now. But they are not cooperating with the people and there is not much that they could do if there is any attack.

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Legit.ng had reported that some angry Nigerian soldiers reportedly stormed a community in Benue state and set houses ablaze.

The soldiers stormed Naka, the seat of Gwer west local government area, at about 11:00 am and began burning houses to the apprehension of residents, Francis Ayagah, chairman of the local government told newsmen by telephone on Thursday, April 19.

Soldier shares battleground experience, dedicates song to colleagues - On Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit
- Senator Ayo Arise said he doesnt think it is necessary for him to inform President Buhari of his intention to govern Ekiti

- He stated that going to the president will create the impression that he is asking for special privileges

- According to him, he is advocating a very free and fair election

An aspirant for the All Progressives Congress (APC) ticket in Ekiti state ahead of the July 14 governorship elections, Senator Ayo Arise, has said President Muhammadu Buhari and national leader of the party, Bola Tinubu, are the contending camps in the party primary slated for May 5.

Nigerian Tribune reports that Arise who made the statement when he spoke with selected newsmen in Abuja, said he doesnt think that it was necessary for him to inform President Buhari that he wanted to be governor of Ekiti.

READ ALSO: Mace theft: Ekweremadu saved the day - Lawmaker

He said going to the president will create the impression that he was asking the for special privileges, adding that Buhari will prefer a free and fair primary.

I have been a victim of such leverage before when I ran in December 2006 for the primary. So, what I dont what to be done to me, I dont want it to be done to other people. So, I am advocating a very free and fair election, Arise said.

Meanwhile, the national chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), John Odigie-Oyegun, declared on Monday, March 19, that the forthcoming governorship election in Ekiti is a must-win for his party as he visited the state.

Oyegun, who was in the state on membership drive, reportedly addressed leaders and members of the party in the state at an interactive forum emphasizing that the party would deploy every available resource to win the election which holds on July 14.

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Nigerian Tribune reports that Oyegun told the members that the delegates list for the party primaries was ready.

Governor Fayose warns Nigerian youths ahead of 2019, tells them what to do on Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit.ng
- Farmers in Borno state have been urged to return home by the Nigerian army

- The army said this will enable the farmers cultivate their farmlands

- Theatre commander, Operation Lafiya Dole also reiterated armys commitment to end insurgency and restoration of peace in the northeast

Nigerian army on Friday, April 20, called on displaced farmers in Borno to return home to enable them cultivate their farmlands.

Maj.-Gen. Rogers Nicholas, the theatre commander, Operation Lafiya Dole, told newsmen in Maiduguri that the call was imperative to enable the displaced farmers participate in the upcoming cropping season.

Nicholas said the military command had adopted proactive security measures to protect farmers in the state.

READ ALSO: Another Nigerian gets top UN appointment

He added that: We would launch Operation Last Hold to dominate northern Borno and Lake Chad region.

It is designed to ensure security in liberated communities and protect farmers in their farmlands.

We will stay with them in the farms and protect them.

I call on Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in camps to return home and cultivate their lands.

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The theatre commander reiterated armys commitment to end insurgency and restoration of peace in the northeast.

Borno government statistics indicated that over 1.8 million displaced persons were taking shelter in camps and host communities in the state.

Legit.ng had earlier reported that Maj.-Gen. Rogers Nicholas, the Theatre Commander, Operation Lafiya Dole, said two Boko Haram commanders and the insurgents physician have surrendered to Nigerian Army.

He made the disclosure when he presented the surrendered insurgents in Maiduguri. Nicholas said a woman leader of the insurgents group and three children also surrendered to the troops at Kumshe in Bama local government area of Borno.

Nigerian Air Force operations against Boko Haram on Legit.ng TV.

Source: Legit
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The Telegraph and other Brexit loyalists are up in arms over what should have come as no surprise: the EU has finally cleared its throat and told the UK that its fuzzy-headed ideas for a frictionless border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland were unworkable. As weve said repeatedly, the UK leaving the Single Market meant there would be a hard border somewhere.1 The least disruptive option is the one that the EU has cleverly called a backstop and has fleshed out, that of a sea border. As UK readers know well, that is anathema to the DUP and quite a few Tories, since it will mean for practical purposes that Northern Ireland is more a member of the EU than the UK. Oopsie! 2

According to the Telegraph, the UKs two clearly unworkable ideas, which it had tried to make seem viable, were slapped down hard by the EU. Its hard to tell how seriously to take this, since the Government desperately needs to shift blame for having conned itself and the electorate into thinking there was an viable way to have a land border without causing any hassle to people on either side.

However, a legitimate reason for the ire is that the EU quite deliberately strung the UK along. Recall that the Ireland border matter was earlier on a short list of three items that the EU had singled out as required to be resolved early, before other matters like the transition deal could be addressed. Then when Theresa May was looking particularly wobbly in December and the UK press was talking up the cretin Rees Mogg as a possible PM, Barnier allowed the Government to negotiate the flabby and often internally inconsistent Joint Agreement that was a short-term punt on Ireland and sketched out some options on the border matter. May was hailed in the UK press as having achieved some sort of great negotiating win when nothing of the sort had happened.

Since then, the EU has been fleshing out a backstop, which is basically the sea border option, with the argument being that there had to be an approach in place in case the UK could not deliver. The Governments allies kept making incensed noises about this EU move, as if it were underhanded. In fact, given the difficulty the UK has had from the get go in producing position papers or indeed any documents worked out in adequate detail, while the EU move may have seemed insulting, the UKs shambolic behavior called for it.

But one could argue that the EU indulging the UK on Ireland and finally pulling the rug out from under them now, particularly right after the House of Lords has broken ranks and made clear it want a soft Brexit, was conniving. But the UK has been so consistently unwilling to hear what the EU has had to say about its red lines, such as No cherry picking, that the EU was going to have to be brutal for the message to sink in. And as the Torygraph presents it, the EU was pretty rough, erm, blunt. But the unnamed EU leaker also displays an unseemly amount of schadenfreude at the shellacking of the UKs wooly-headed ideas. This is awfully reminiscent of the unflattering leaks from dinners between Jean-Claude Juncker and Theresa May. Is Martin Selmayr at it again?

From the Telegraphs exclusive story:

Senior EU diplomatic sources said that Mrs Mays plan for avoiding a hard border in Northern Ireland was subjected to a systematic and forensic annihilation this week at a meeting between senior EU officials and Olly Robbins, the UKs lead Brexit negotiator. It was a detailed and forensic rebuttal, added the source who was directly briefed on the meeting in Brussels on Wednesday. It was made clear that none of the UKs customs options will work. None of them. The demolition of the UKs Brexit customs policy, set out by Mrs May in her Mansion House speech last month, came after five rounds of technical negotiations in Brussels.. Although British negotiators were fully aware of EU scepticism towards the British plans, the complete inflexibility on the part of the European Commission and EU member states is understood to have left them shocked. With talks at an impasse, The Telegraph understands that Mr Barnier has told EU ambassadors that he has suspended the EUs own internal discussions on the future EU-UK trade deal, putting further pressure on the UK to make concessions.

The Telegraph and the rest of the press and punditcracy keep depicting being in a customs union as meaning not having border checks. As Richard North explained long form yesterday, that is another huge misapprehension.

North tears his hair today, since this confusion has now moved front and center in the frantic effort to regroup. Forgive me for quoting at length, but he sets the problem out very clearly:

As late as yesterday, Tusk was saying that, if there was no deal on Ireland, there would be no Withdrawal Agreement and no transition. It follows that, according to Article 50, we drop out of the treaties on 29 March 2019. The customs union is not a fallback position  and neither is it a solution which will allow us to avoid a hard border This is to be the subject of a debate next Thursday where the assembled cretins will consider a motion which notes the importance of frictionless trade with the EU for British manufactures and further notes that the free circulation of goods on the island of Ireland is a consequence of the UK and Republic of Irelands membership of the EU customs union. Not one of them, it seems, is capable of reading the consolidated treaties, but if any of them had the wit to do so, Article 28 would tell them that: The Union shall comprise a customs union which shall cover all trade in goods and which shall involve the prohibition between Member States of customs duties on imports and exports and of all charges having equivalent effect, and the adoption of a common customs tariff in their relations with third countries. On the other hand, Article 26(2) gives them the definition of the internal market (aka Single Market), which shall comprise an area without internal frontiers in which the free movement of goods, persons, services and capital is ensured in accordance with the provisions of the Treaties. From this, it could not be clearer that the free movement of goods which depends on the absence of internal frontiers stems from the internal market, and not the customs union Politico.eu was on the case, and it is adding that EU negotiators have made clear that they are willing to discuss terms by which Britain remains inside the blocs customs union, or to negotiate a separate customs union like the EUs deal with Turkey, which would entail agreed-upon, common tariffs on imported goods. Bluntly, this looks confused. A customs union on the style of Turkey clearly doesnt address the issue of a frictionless border and, unless people have suddenly taken to living in a parallel universe, there cant be anyone with a claim to sentience who believes this is a solution  or even getting close to one. As to remaining inside the EUs customs union, this simply is not legally possible within the terms of the treaty. The European Union itself is the customs union  as per Article 28. The two are inseparable, which means you cannot be inside the customs union and outside the European Union.

Politicos daily European e-mail engaged in liberal application of porcine maquillage:

Quite simply, time is running out for Britain to find a workable solution to the Irish border issue. The EU wants this resolved by the next European Council summit at the end of June  which means a breakthrough is needed and the details resolved within two months. Lest we forget, the backstop Theresa May has signed up to if a solution cannot be found is to effectively keep Northern Ireland inside the customs union  which would be seen by her own Brexiteer MPs and ministers as a betrayal. The PM is stuck between a rock and a hard place, and urgently needs a way out.

Norths conclusion looks correct, that the UK is now on track for a crash-out Brexit. There is astonishingly still no comprehension of what leaving the EU entails among, it seems, both houses of the legislature, all of the ministers, and virtually all of the UK punditry. That means they will not come up with solutions to the problems they are trying to remedy. It also implies yet more incomprehension as the UK will pose approaches to the EU that are non-starters in light of how the EU operates, which the EU will reject them for what ought to understood as perfectly logical reasons. But that will elicit more outrage and upset from the UK, which will instead regard yet more EU rebuffs as proof that the EU wants to punish them by forcing them into the worst possible Brexit, when it will be the UK that has gotten itself in that mess due to unprecedented incompetence.

Shorter: assume the brace position.

_____

1 In fairness, Richard North regularly and in great detail points out that the UK has ignored the option of using its membership in the EEA/Efta to create the sort of very low friction border that exists between Norway and Sweden. But since that isnt on the table, well stick with the simplified but accurate for our purposes point that leaving the Single Market = hard border.

2 Readers in Ireland point out that if the DUP werent such a bunch of doctrinaires, theyd have to admit this is a great economic deal for Northern Ireland, which is a bit of a basket case dependent on subsidies from the UK. Those are almost certain to be cut in post-Brexit austerity.
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By Cahal Moran, who is studying for a PhD in economics at the University of Manchester. He is a member of the Post-Crash Economics Society at the University of Manchester and coauthor of The Econocracy: On the Perils of Leaving Economics to the Experts. Originally published at openDemocracy

In his excellent book Economics Rules, Dani Rodrik outlined what he saw as the rights and wrongs of the dismal science. One of his key refrains was that the problem was economists, not economics: that is, some economists mistook their models for the real world and applied them inappropriately, abusing a potentially useful set of tools. All too often the consequence was ideology masquerading as science, resulting in economic failures such as quantity-targeting monetarism in the 1980s; the 1990s Russian privatisation; and recently the 2008 financial crisis. According to Rodrik, good economics is about making sure you have picked the right model for the right job, basing your decision on sound theory and evidence. Any economist worth their salt should be pragmatic, not dogmatic.

Rodrik is not wrong that there are some economists who are prone to misusing their models, in some cases to an alarming degree. Neither is he wrong about what good economics should entail: intellectual flexibility and a grasp of a wide range of tools for understanding the economy. Despite this, I cannot agree with the general idea that the framework of economics is not the problem with the discipline, and that if this framework were only taught and practiced better many of the disciplines problems would be overcome. In fact, I believe modern economics is characterised by the exact opposite problem: reliance on a single framework is hamstringing the research of capable, conscientious and (to a degree) critical economists. In other words, the problem is economics, not economists.

The bad economics Rodrik highlights should be resisted for sure, but it largely a vestige of the past and does not represent the current direction of the discipline. This is what causes researchers who better represent contemporary economics to become exasperated in response to the myriad of articles criticising the discipline as if it consists solely of free-market ideologues who cling to models of perfect markets. Two Manchester colleagues of mine, Rachel Griffiths and Diane Coyle, have been involved in this debate recently, and the hashtag #whateconomistsreallydo illustrates the frustration and perplexity many of these researchers share at criticisms of the discipline.

In a recent article for Prospect Magazine, Coyle counters a critique by Howard Reed by rattling off several contemporary examples where she believes economists are doing relevant, empirical work that has nothing to do with incubating financial crashes. Among these are papers looking at the benefits of railroads in 19thcentury India; the effect of modern technological change on jobs; and the effect of sugar taxes on obesity rates in the UK. These examples should be enough to convince people that a lot of modern economic research is going in the right direction.

But in my opinion the issue is not so much what economists do as how they do it. Critical thinking exists within the discipline but this criticism remains solely within the bounds of the mainstream. For a long time now economics has been synonymous with a specific methodology, the use of which is considered interesting in itself regardless of whether it uncovers anything new.

Relevant, Interesting  and Unnecessary

At the Royal Economic Society (RES) conference this year, Botond Koszegi gave one of the keynote lectures, A Pro-Market Case for Regulation. Koszegi is a prominent researcher in prospect theory  which happens to be where my research interests lie  and along with his co-author Matthew Rabin is a likely candidate for a future Nobel Prize. The nub of his presentation was a model in which consumers, due to cognitive limitations, were unable to fully examine every single product they purchased. The result was that regulations guaranteeing a certain standard of safety, quality and the like could improve competition by giving people more time to shop around instead of having to devote so much time to investigate specific products. Thus, regulation would improve markets and competition.

I cannot fault Koszegis presentation, which was lucid and engaging. I also cannot fault his technical skills, which certainly surpass mine (a low bar, admittedly). I cannot fault the subject matter of his presentation, which was relevant and interesting. Nor can I fault the certain kind of creativity required to put these insights into an economic model. But then, thats just it: to get an audience among economists, these insights hadto be put into an economic model. Incorporating ideas into these frameworks is a necessary condition for their acceptance, something which stifles the production of knowledge.

Like them or not, the points highlighted by Koszegi were not especially novel. Koszegi himself argued that his framework rationalised existing policy by UK, EU and US regulators, rather than proposing a bold new direction. A quick search uncovered a 2011 UK government documenton regulation  produced a good while before Koszegis research  which stated that If consumers do not have sufficient information, or find it difficult to make informed decisions, firms face less competitive pressure. Institutional economists such as Jamie Galbraith have claimed for a long time that markets function best when the product is what it claims to be, and that it will function as it is supposed to do. This is what a strong system of regulation provides. Clearly, we did not need a complicated theoretical model to make this point.

The dynamic of using standard economic methods to say something which is in some sense already known is quite common. One largely glowing article about last years RES conference published in the Independent came close to realising this when it said that there is one [paper] that shows that married women are tidier than married men and do more housework after they get married. I think many people will be unsurprised by that, but it is good to have it established. I cant help but feel that this point was established long before economists turned their gaze toward it, and despair at the wasted intellectual capital from establishing it when there are far more pressing questions in the world.

As the old saying goes, if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Economists have two main hammers: choice models and variants thereof form the basis of most theoretical models (I include behavioural economics in this, which still uses the utility maximising framework). Linear regression is economists preferred empirical technique (again, commonly used variants such as panel methods or instrumental variables are still fundamentally linear). Research incentives typically mean adhering to at least one of these two techniques, despite the plethora of other techniques available. The aforementioned institutional school of economics might prefer a theoretical lens which looks at social and legal structures over individual choice, and an empirical method which focuses on qualitative details over statistical techniques. This is just one of the many alternative methods available to economists.

Mainstream economic papers often deal with what seem like exciting questions, but give ultimately disappointing answers because they follow the same old methods. I cannot count the number of times Ive been lured into an economics presentation by a promising title only to be frustrated with the actual content. At Manchester last year there was a presentation with the scintillating title Networks in Conflict: Theory and Evidence from the Great War of Africa, which I enthusiastically attended. Many others clearly felt the same since the room was completely packed out, including undergraduates (who dont usually go to these seminars).

But as the presentation began it became apparent that they were going to approach the issue usingdum dum dum a rational choice model, followed by some linear regression! I felt that the war in the Congo was as good a candidate as any for something that was neither rational nor linear, but these underlying assumptions were not even discussed in the presentation or in the paper, which has since been published in a top journal. This could be forgiven if the paper contained revelations about the war in the Congo, but actually its key conclusion verged on trivial: the more your enemies fight, the more you have to fight; the more your friends fight, the less you have to fight. Besides being underwhelmed by this, I was surprised a paper on networks didnt utilise Granovetters network analysis, arguably one of the most famous tools in sociology.

The question is not whether rational choice and linear regression can be useful; anyone who believes they cannot is talking nonsense, as some of Coyles examples illustrate. The question is whether they are always useful, which would also be nonsense, but is something you could be forgiven for thinking economists believe when following economic research. The rational choice model has had quite a few successes, including in matchingkidney donors to one another, but it has at least as many failures, most of which are so well-worn at this point that its not worth going over them again. Linear regression is likely to be the right statistical model most of the time, but this still cannot be assumed a priori. Coyle rightly highlights two recent papers, one by Alwyn Youngand one by John Ioannidi s, which have cast serious doubts on widely used econometric practice and they are far from the first to do so.

Economists may respond that modelling and empirical estimation allows them to isolate and quantify formerly nebulous mechanisms to make the exact trade-offs of policies clear. However, I suspect that in many cases this is a spurious kind of precision, since estimated coefficients and modelling parameters are notoriously unstable. Out of sample predictions are not made habitually in economics, and when they are they have a mixedtrack record, to put it mildly. Furthermore, the choice of model will affect the conclusions, both by determining what to model and by modelling it in a certain way. As both Coyle and Reed agree, this makes value judgments implicit in economic models, but many economists are insufficiently aware of this point and tend to see standard models and regression as the default framework.

The other defence is a practical one: sure, these methods have their flaws, but they are the best way to convince policymakers, politicians and the public that a policy has a quasi-scientific justification. While this may be true given our current state of affairs, there is a circularity to it. Part of the reason that this kind of research is deemed necessary is because of the influence of economists in government and society over the past 80 or so years. By embracing a wider variety of approaches to knowledge, economists could use their considerable influence to alter the perceptions of those in power instead of reinforcing the reliance on a single framework.

Its Monolithic All the Way Down

The uncritical acceptance of one methodology begins with undergraduate economics education. Rethinking Economics conducted a curriculum review of 174 modules at 7 Russell Group universities  rightly or wrongly considered the top universities in the UK  and we found that the uncritical acceptance of one type of economics begins with education. Under 10% of modules even mentioned anything other than mainstream or neoclassical economics; in econometrics, over 90% of modules devoted more than two-thirds of their lectures to linear regression. Only 24% of exam questions required critical or independent thinking (i.e. were open-ended); this dropped to 8% if you only counted the compulsory macro and micro modules that form the core of economics education.

We have previously called this indoctrination, and while this may seem dramatic the dictionary definition of indoctrination is to teach a person or set of people to accept a set of beliefs uncritically, which we think adequately characterises the results of the review, as well as our own experience and many widely used economics textbooks. Given this education, it is no wonder that economists remain wedded to the fundamental precepts of choice models and linear regression no matter where they turn their attention. By putting the method first, the implicit assumption becomes that answering a question using this framework is prima facieinteresting, and critical evaluation of these tools against others is made unthinkable.

This debate may seem too abstract to warrant such extended public discussion, but economics exerts more influence over government, the private sector and the media than any other social science  perhaps than any other discipline altogether. And the intellectual monopoly outlined above makes itself known through this influence, which limits our perceived political choices. Economic debates, including the one surrounding the recent Brexit vote, are frequently conducted in terms of aggregate GDP, which despite some criticism remains the standard measure of economic success both among economists and the public, even though it ignores (among other things) regional disparities in the UK and therefore does not speak to many peoples lived experience. This is perhaps one reason why the ubiquitous forecasts of a loss to GDP from Brexit failed to persuade the country.

One, more concrete example of the influence of economic ideas is the Green Book, a document produced by the UK Government that sets out the framework for the appraisal and evaluation of all policies, programmes and projects. It is remarkable how much this book reads like a first-year economics textbook in places: like a standard textbook, it focuses largely on economic efficiency while also acknowledging equity (distributional) considerations. It then spends much time discussing how to place economic values on the costs and benefits of policies to weigh them up. Other economic objectives such as security, stability, or economic freedom are not given much (if any) attention; other decision-making criteria (especially more democratic ones) are similarly absent.

Rethinking Economics believe that the curriculum needs to embrace a wider diversity of views, as well as focusing more on the real world and less on derivation of abstract models. But even in this debate the poverty of imagination resurfaces: when we call for the curriculum to teach us about issues such as the financial crisis, inequality and immigration, we are frequently met with the rebuttal that the relevant models are too complex for undergraduate education or would take too long to teach. Once again the assumption is that mainstream economic models are the starting point, when it is perfectly possible  desirable, even  to learn about issues such as the financial crisis without using any type of model. Models may help you to understand it at a higher level, but this should be built on top of a strong real-world foundation. Putting the real world first would mean that future business leaders, policymakers and academic economists would not enter the world believing that economics is synonymous with one type of approach.

I believe that Rodriks bad economists are not a few unfortunate renegades; they are the reductio ad absurdum of the education and research practice outlined above. When economists are only taught one approach as if it is economics, then its unsurprising that some take it too far. In one sense whats remarkable is how far contemporary economists have been willing and able to stretch the core framework to accommodate more relevant insights, working with such a limited set of tools. Despite this, areas of the discipline risk finding themselves in a bit of an intellectual dead end by putting their method first and using it to say things which are new and interesting only to economists.

Rethinking Economics and the wider student movement to reform economics believe that critical pluralism is the antidote to this problem. If future economists are taught about relevant issues, using a wide range of models where necessary but not insisting upon them, less effort will be devoted to extending particular methods to trivial or long-answered questions. In policy and in the public arena, economics will give us a better conception of how the world works, and a broader array of political choices for making it a better place. Students will not only have a better understanding of why standard economic tools may fail; they will have a better understanding of when and why they are successful. Critical thinking will be embedded from the start of an economists training.

Several positive signs indicate that the discipline could go in this direction: the open-minded initiative Rebuilding Macroeconomics; a new focus on economics communication, including the fantastic session I attended at this years RES; the revamped CORE curriculum, which seems to be slowly becoming pluralist even if its adherent are reluctant to admit it; and initiatives from within government institutions such as the Bank of England and Government Economic Service, which are embracing pluralism. In fact, the newest version of the aforementioned Green Book, published this year, now includes an entire section on the limits of standard economic analysis when dealing with the environment and alternative approaches.

Heres hoping that this kind of approach will be the norm for the economics of the future.
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The IQVIA Institute published its 2017 recap, Medicine Use and Spending in the U.S. A key finding was the sharp fall in opioid prescriptions:

The report stated:

 Prescription opioid usage in the United States increased considerably from the mid 1990s to its peak in 2011, at 240 billion morphine milligram equivalents (MMEs). It is now declining rapidly; the largest single year change in 2017 was a decline of 23.3 billion MMEs, or 12.0%.

 Prescription opioid usage was about 22 pills or 134 MMEs per adult in 1992 and rose to a peak of 72 pills or 1,011 MMEs in 2011. Usage has since declined to 52 pills or 676 MMEs per adult.

 Decreases in prescription opioid volume have been driven by changes in clinical usage, which have been influenced by regulatory and reimbursement policies and legislation that have been increasingly restricting prescription opioid use since 2012.

However, even with the marked decline from the 2011 peak, opioid prescriptions are only back to their level in, say, 2006 or 2007. The increase in dosage, from 134 MMEs in 1992 to 676 in 2017, is an over five-fold increase that cannot begin to be explained by aging Boomers with creaky joints and higher rates of overweight and obesity.

It is important to understand the degree to which drugs, like stocks, are sold. Pharmaceutical sales are widely recognized as the most sophisticated. For instance, ex military personnel are highly sought after as detailmen (the in-person sales force) because they are both willing to comply with the requirement to stick strictly to the scripts for marketing various drugs yet also be aggressive and persistent. Detailmen are given highly structured pitches, with an elevator spiel rolling into a one-minute version that can then go to three minutes if the doctor will give that much time. A typical detailman will sell at most three drugs, so an MD will often have more than one rep from the same company calling on him. The detailmen will also have that doctors prescription levels relative to that of his supposed peers, and the detailmen will try to depict him as remiss if his Rx level is lower than theirs.

Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, became the master of this game. From a must-read New Yorker story last year:

In the past, doctors had been reluctant to prescribe strong opioidsas synthetic drugs derived from opium are knownexcept for acute cancer pain and end-of-life palliative care, because of a long-standing, and well-founded, fear about the addictive properties of these drugs. Few drugs are as dangerous as the opioids, David Kessler, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, told me. Purdue launched OxyContin with a marketing campaign that attempted to counter this attitude and change the prescribing habits of doctors. The company funded research and paid doctors to make the case that concerns about opioid addiction were overblown, and that OxyContin could safely treat an ever-wider range of maladies. Sales representatives marketed OxyContin as a product to start with and to stay with. Millions of patients found the drug to be a vital salve for excruciating pain. But many others grew so hooked on it that, between doses, they experienced debilitating withdrawal Andrew Kolodny, the co-director of the Opioid Policy Research Collaborative, at Brandeis University, has worked with hundreds of patients addicted to opioids. He told me that, though many fatal overdoses have resulted from opioids other than OxyContin, the crisis was initially precipitated by a shift in the culture of prescribinga shift carefully engineered by Purdue. If you look at the prescribing trends for all the different opioids, its in 1996 that prescribing really takes off, Kolodny said. Its not a coincidence. That was the year Purdue launched a multifaceted campaign that misinformed the medical community about the risks. When I asked Kolodny how much of the blame Purdue bears for the current public-health crisis, he responded, The lions share.

Perdue pitched OxyContin as a remedy for chronic but moderate pain, such as arthritis, when historically opiates were used for acute but short-term pain.

Purdue targeted less well educated doctors in areas where there were likely to be high levels of orthopedic injuries, such as factory towns. Purdue also presented the drug as providing 12 hour relief, when for many patients, pain returned after 8 hours. And Perdue knew that. What was their response? To tell doctors to prescribe higher doses. One doctor described this as a prescription for addiction.

Again from the New Yorker story:

Keith Humphreys, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford, who served as a drug-policy adviser to the Obama Administration, said, Thats the real Greek tragedy of thisthat so many well-meaning doctors got co-opted. The level of influence is just mind-boggling. Purdue gave money to continuing medical education, to state medical boards, to faux grassroots organizations. According to training materials, Purdue instructed sales representatives to assure doctorsrepeatedly and without evidencethat fewer than one per cent of patients who took OxyContin became addicted. (In 1999, a Purdue-funded study of patients who used OxyContin for headaches found that the addiction rate was thirteen per cent.)

Readers will no doubt point out that fentanyl and heroin are bigger causes of deaths than prescription opioids. But the prescription drugs are overwhelmingly the start of the path to addiction and abuse. From the Financial Times:

The decline suggests that policymakers are beginning to get to grips with a crisis that is killing more people each year than car accidents: 63,632 Americans died of a drug overdose in 2016, a 21.5 per cent increase on a year earlier, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The number of overdose deaths caused by heroin has spiked because dealers are mixing the drug with fentanyl, a cheap and powerful synthetic opioid that is being smuggled from overseas. Even though the majority of overdose fatalities are caused by heroin laced with fentanyl, most victims became addicted to prescription painkillers before progressing to the illegal drug. Reducing the number of opioid prescriptions is therefore seen as a major step in stemming the crisis. Dr Andrew Kolodny, who studies addiction at Massachusetts-based Brandeis University, said: We are still massively overprescribing, even if this trend is in the right direction. We have a long way to go before we are at rational levels.

While this is a step in the right direction, reducing the level of opioid abuse will not remedy a big underlying cause, namely, that large swathes of rural America have become dead ends for many people as jobs disappear and desperation rises. But at the same time, other policies are helping reduce the demand for opioids for pain relief. A new study published in JAMA found a significant reduction in opioid prescriptions in states that allowed for any use of medical marijuana, with the biggest declines in ones that legalized dispensaries.

But this reduction in opioid prescription levels is still far short of where we should be. From the close of the Financial Times account:
IFA Farm Business Chairman Martin Stapleton has written to the three main banks urging them to support their farming customers who are facing further problems with the continued bad weather.

The Farm Business Chairman welcomed the announcement by AIB of a number of options to support farmers through the current difficulties.

Commenting on current conditions, Martin Stapleton said, Farmers across Ireland have had to buy in extra feed at higher costs and keep cattle housed because of the appalling weather over the winter, which has gone on now well into spring, and caused serious cashflow difficulties, as well as severe stress.

The Chairman added, We are asking that the other stakeholders in the agri-food sector - merchants, co-ops, Teagasc and agri-advisory services - also support farmers under pressure and help them to work towards a sustainable outlook later in the year. In order to reduce the stress on both farmers and animals, we will need all stakeholders to work together.

IFA is urging all banks to be proactive by contacting their customers and engaging with them about their credit situation.

Further support has been requested in terms of:

- Extending working capital to farmers and the agri-supply sector to cover increased feed and other input costs.

- Providing flexible and affordable restructuring options to relieve pressure on incomes.

- Taking prompt decisions on all loan applications.

Mr Stapleton went on to offer farmers some advice and encouraged them to reach out for support..

Farmers should also tackle any cashflow problems by asking for help and engaging with the relevant people. IFA operates a confidential helpline for those who are experiencing financial difficulties and need support and advice  please call 1890 924 853 if you need our help.
Potential Australian tourists are being attracted to Ireland with beautiful scenes of the Rock of Cashel, in a new advertising campaign.

International airline Cathay Pacific will launch a new flight route from Hong Kong to Dublin in June, with the Rock of Cashel playing a central part of its marketing campaign.

Tourism Ireland in Sydney has teamed up with Cathay Pacific, rolling out the campaign to highlight this new flight option for Australian holidaymakers wishing to visit Ireland in 2018 and 2019.

The campaign, which will run until the end of April, includes online advertising on popular websites  featuring an attractive image of the Rock of Cashel, articles on the popular Traveller.com.au site, as well as extensive social media activity  promoting a good value fare on the new service to Dublin from Australia, via Hong Kong.

With flights four times per week and morning arrivals, the message for Australian holidaymakers is Wake up Fresh in Ireland.

We are delighted to partner with Cathay Pacific, to maximise the promotion of its new service from Australia via Hong Kong and help grow tourist numbers to Tipperary and Ireland. As an island destination, the importance of convenient, direct, non-stop flights cannot be overstated  they are absolutely critical to achieving growth in inbound tourism, said Sofia Hansson, Tourism Irelands Manager Australia & New Zealand.

Our aim is to keep the island of Ireland front of mind for Australian travellers considering a trip to Europe in 2018 or 2019 and to remind them that it is now easier to get to Ireland, with more flight options than ever before.

In 2017, we welcomed around 208,000 visitors from Australia and New Zealand to the island of Ireland, an increase of +2% on 2017.

It's not the first time that the Rock of Cashel was the star of a tourism promotion campaign for Ireland overseas.

Last spring the Rock was seen whizzing through the streets of Milan in Italy when it's image was wrapped around city trams. An estimated 5.s million commuters in Milan saw the eye-catching ads for Ireland part of Tourism Irelands promotion in Italy to highlight the island of Ireland for holidays and short breaks.
Some time ago Breaking News did us proud and highlighted the claim of the village of Clogheen in Co. Tipperary to be the rightful owners and originators of the name 'Hidden Heart of Ireland'

In 1997, when the Clogheen Hidden Heart of Ireland website was established, two members of the group travelled to Dublin to Bord Failte (now Failte Ireland) with a radical idea (in 1997) to promote Irish tourism through village websites.

We suggested the printing of hundreds of thousands of 'village postcards' announcing those new, yet-to-be-established, innovative websites (in 1997). We also introduced Failte Ireland to the 'Clogheen Hidden Heart of Ireland' website.

While we are sure everyone in South Tipperary would wish the Midlands every success in their tourism endeavours, (we are frequent visitors) we would have expected Failte Ireland and the advisors to Minister Ross to have done a little more research and not taken the brand-name of a locality that has used it for 20 years.

It is our considered opinion that the name 'Hidden Heart of Ireland' has been misappropriated and used - albeit in a slightly altered format - in the new initiative to brand the Midlands. Minister Ross and Failte Ireland, Give us back our name!

Regards from 'Clogheen the Hidden Heart of Ireland' Ed O'Riordan

P.S. At the time (1997) we also rightly claimed to be one of the first villages in Ireland to have its own website.
A teacher in Gaelscoil Thiobraid Arann in Tipperary town, and Waterford hurler,, spoke on RTE Raidio na Gaeltachta this week about how a routine belt of a hurl in a match on 1 April left him unable to breathe and very seriously ill, and called on the GAA to consider installing oxygen tanks in clubs across the country.

Eoghan Breathnach, 37, from An Rinn in Waterford, was playing a junior hurling match with his local team against Baile an tSagairt on Easter Sunday when he got a belt of the hurl in the ribs. While he initially thought he was just winded, it became clear when he collapsed that things were more serious. It transpired that he had, in fact, broken three ribs, one of which had punctured his lung. He explained what happened in an interview with Helen Ni She on the An Saol o Dheas programme.

You get a certain amount of belts like that in any match and I thought I was just winded, but then the medic from Baile an tSagairt came over and said that she thought I had broken ribs ... I started to head towards the car with the manager to go to the doctor, but I collapsed after 10 steps.

I was out of breath, and the breathing got harder and harder over the next 15 to 20 minutes ... After that, I couldnt breathe really. The medic, Tina Ni Mheachair, sent her brother down to her mothers house to bring back her mothers oxygen tank. Without that, I was in big trouble.

Eoghan, a teacher in Gaelscoil Thiobraid Arann in Tipperary town, said that the ambulance took 50 minutes to arrive, and that the oxygen was vital during that time.

It was frightening alright, I was ok for the first 5 or 10 minutes after it happened, I was able to breathe a bit, and I knew help was on the way, but as time was moving on I was worried that I was really in trouble. And of course, my wife Caroline was there, and it wasnt nice for her to be seeing all that.

Except for the oxygen, Id be a goner, Im sure of that. After 20 minutes I had no breath left myself, I couldnt do it anymore, and the ambulance didnt arrive for 50 minutes, so I wouldnt have had a hope without it.

After the paramedics arrived, Eoghan was evacuated by helicopter to University Hospital Limerick, and spent 10 days with a tube in his chest. He is calling on the GAA to consider oxygen tanks for every club in the country.

I think that the GAA should look at getting oxygen tanks for every GAA club around the country. Most clubs now have a defibrillator ... and the oxygen would be great if someone is badly hurt, or has a broken a leg, or for an underage match with kids with asthma, its a brilliant resource and it costs a lot less than a defibrillator.

In the interview, Eoghan thanked all those who assisted him at the pitch, especially Tina Ni Mheachair and Maire Ni Riain, and the community of Baile an tSagairt. He hopes to be back at work, teaching in Gaelscoil Thiobraid Arann, shortly.

Eoghan was interviewed on An Saol o Dheas on RTE Raidio na Gaeltachta this week.

More Tipp Town News: Man stabbed - Appeal for witnesses
NATO Deputy Secretary General Rose Gottemoeller thanked Denmark for its contributions to NATO during a visit to Copenhagen on Friday (20 April 2018)

Addressing students, faculty staff and members of the public at the University of Copenhagen, Ms Gottemoeller outlined how NATO has been dealing with the challenges posed by terrorism and violent extremism, and a more aggressive Russia in recent years and discussed preparations for NATOs upcoming Summit meeting in July.

In relation to fighting terrorism, the Deputy Secretary General highlighted NATOs efforts to project stability and its role in the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS. Recognizing that much remains to be done in relation to conflict and instability in the Middle East, Gottemoeller highlighted the successes that have been achieved by NATO as well as through the broader international effort that has significantly diminished ISIS.

Speaking about NATOs efforts to deter and defend against a more aggressive Russia, the Deputy Secretary General highlighted the four battlegroups that have been deployed in the Baltic States and Poland, thanking Denmark for its contributions in Estonia. Recognizing that these battlegroups represent a crucial deterrent element, Gottemoeller explained that NATO is now focused on how it would reinforce NATO forces in the East of the Alliance in the event of a crisis. This includes the adaptation of the NATO Command Structure to ensure it is fit for purpose and discussions on military mobility  an area of work that NATO is pursuing in cooperation with the European Union.

Turning to how threats have shifted in recent years, Gottemoeller noted the increase in the use of asymmetric or hybrid tactics including cyber-attacks and disinformation campaigns. While spreading in virtual space, these methods can have significant consequences in the real world and have become a regular part of conversations about how to ensure security and stability in the 21st century. NATO has already recognized cyber as a domain of operations alongside land, sea, and air.

The Deputy Secretary General concluded her remarks by encouraging students to consider how new technologies pose opportunities when it comes to collective security. We must think seriously about what some of the benefits of these new types of technology might be.

During her visit, the NATO Deputy Secretary General met with the Minister of Defence and of Nordic Cooperation Claus Hjort Frederiksen and the Minister of Foreign Affairs Anders Samuelsen. She also took part in a seminar on Danish Foreign and Security Policy Strategy at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and paid her respects at the Monument for Denmarks International Effort since 1948.
(Natural News) As hundreds of lawsuits against Monsanto for personal injury and wrongful death move forward, German pharmaceutical company Bayer has been given the green light to acquire Monsanto in a deal surpassing $60 billion. The mega monopoly merger was approved by the U.S. Department of Justice in April. Instead of breaking monopolies up, the U.S. encourages monopolies to merge with other monopolies, as the agriculture and pharmaceutical elite clamor for domination over the worlds food and drug supply. The merger follows in the footsteps of the Dow-DuPont and Syngenta-ChemChina mergers.

Monsanto and Bayer announced the merger in September 2016, claiming the deal will boost agriculture research and innovation. This only means there will be more genetic modifications made to plant life to accommodate new agrochemical inventions. Many farmers arent buying into it. During the 2016 and 2017 growing seasons, farmers across the United States have been plagued by dicamba drift. Millions of acres of U.S. crops were damaged in 2017 by a dicamba-based herbicide, manufactured by Monsanto and BASF SE. In order to maintain yields of the most profitable crops, farmers are trapped into growing only the genetically modified seeds that have been engineered to withstand the herbicides. This corporate takeover of agriculture has put many small family farms out of business, consolidating farmland into the hands of the few. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, America continues to do away with smaller farms in favor of larger farms. In 1987, larger farms representing at least 2000 acres, controlled 15 percent of U.S. cropland. In 2012, large farms controlled 36 percent of U.S. cropland. The choking out of small farms and biodiversity has continued since.

In central Montana, fourth generation farmer Todd Enley says that when chemicals and seeds become more consolidated, the small farmer cant compete. He, like other small farmers who struggle year-to-year, havent seen many benefits from GMOs and agrochemicals. He told Business Insider, Our farm has been out here since 1935, and Im 40 years old and Ive watched a lot of small family farms in our area go under. They cant compete because they cant pay the price of input because of what these companies are wanting to charge for input now. He iterated, These corporate bigwigs, are they really going to do what they say?

Despite Monsantos claims of feeding the world, the cost of healthy, nutritious produce has gone up over the years. This is because Monsanto is feeding the world synthetic chemicals, making nutritious, unpolluted foods harder to come by. Monsanto is not assisting farmers with sustainable growing methods, but instead forcing more farmers to rely on agrochemicals and monoculture growing practices that put the food supply and human health at risk.

As the U.S. tries to shut down chemical weapon manufacture in Syria, the country harbors its own chemical weapons facilities, an evil named Monsanto. It was Monsanto that manufactured Agent Orange, which was used on three million U.S. soldiers in Vietnam and on countless Vietnamese, inhumanely causing nervous system and genetic damage. A staggering 500,000 children were born with birth defects and an additional million people suffered health problems or disabilities due to Monsantos Agent Orange. Its only fitting that Monsanto merges with Bayer, a company that manufactured and sold the chemicals that were used to kill Jews in Nazi Germany. Bayer, along with BASF and Hoechst, originally merged as IG Farben and contributed heavily to Adolf Hitler. In return, Hitler relied on the chemical manufacturers to create Zyklon B, a chemical weapon used in Auschwitz and other concentration camps to exterminate the Jews who were too old, too small, or too weak to work.

The Bayer-Monsanto merger is a match made in hell  two chemical weapons manufacturers that are damaging biodiversity, bankrupting small farmers, and destroying human health with poisons like Roundup (glyphosate) and dicamba, all while taking over the world food supply with their genetic experimentation.

Read Monsanto.news for more coverage.

Sources include:

BusinessInsider.com

WakingTimes.com

NaturalNews.com

NaturalNews.com

PeoplesWorld.org

GlobalResearch.ca
(Natural News) Ever since humanitys first foray into space, our astronauts have had to contend with deep-space radiation. Scientists have done what they can to protect space voyagers and technology from exposure to cosmic rays. But, as new research has shown, that may not be enough: The radiation environment of space may be higher than previously conceived.

The radiation dose rates from measurements obtained over the last four years exceeded trends from previous solar cycles by at least 30 percent, showing that the radiation environment is getting far more intense, explained Nathan Schwadron, professor of physics at the University of New Hampshire.

To come to this conclusion, Schwadron and his team analyzed the observations gathered by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) in the last four years. First launched in 2009, the robotic spacecraft has been instrumental in planning upcoming missions to Earths lone satellite. This is because the LRO is equipped with the Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation (CRaTER), which allows it to measure the moons radiation environment.

They discovered that galactic cosmic ray (GCR) levels have been on the rise, and are poised to exceed previous records. According to Space.com, GCRs are highly energized atom fragments propelled into immense speeds by extraordinary events outside of our solar system. Being bombarded by GCRs is very risky, as they can cause damage to astronauts and satellites. Astronauts who have been exposed to large doses of GCRs are at risk of experiencing acute health effects such as radiation sickness. Long-term health problems, like organ damage and cancer, are also a possibility. (Related: Frankenstein astronauts: NASA wants to alter DNA to protect against space radiation.)

But what could have caused the spike in GCR levels? The answer may lie in our sun. During episodes of high solar activity, the suns magnetic field reaches across the stretch of our solar system. GCRs are then deflected by the flow of the magnetic field. Unfortunately, there are also periods when the suns activity ebbs. Its all part and parcel of an 11-year cycle: Six to eight years of low solar activity followed by two to three years of intense activity, then the cycle starts anew.

Since 2006, however, solar activity has entered the longest and weakest lull period yet. Compounding the space radiation problem is the fact that, in September 2017, a series of powerful outbursts ejected forth from the surface of the sun. These massive flares of superheated plasma only contributed to the ever-rising deep-space radiation levels.

Because of this, upcoming missions into space will require more thorough planning to take deep-space radiation into account. These particle radiation conditions present important environmental factors for space travel and space weather, and must be carefully studied and accounted for in the planning and design of future missions to the moon, Mars, asteroids and beyond, said Schwadron. We now know that the radiation environment of deep space that we could send human crews into at this point is quite different compared to that of previous crewed missions to the moon.

Space radiation and the human body

In addition to the suns magnetic fields, our own planets magnetic field and atmosphere provide extra layers of protection from space radiation. When in space, however, humans will be exposed to ten times more radiation than what they normally encounter back on Earth.

Excessive radiation can cause acute and long-term damage to the central nervous system. The long-term effects range from behavioral changes to decreased motor function to alterations in cognitive function. Our soft tissues are especially susceptible to space radiation, as prolonged and excessive doses can lead to cataracts, circulatory problems, cardiac diseases, and other degenerative tissue conditions.

Go to Space.news to read up on even more news relating to space exploration.

Sources include:

Space.com

NASA.gov
A project described as the largest cannabis cultivation facility in North America was proposed in New Mexico Thursday.

Ultra Health announced the acquisition of farmland while unveiling a three-dimensional rendering of what the facility will look like via social media.

The property spans nearly one-third of a square mile in Otero County. It will include 20 acres of indoor cultivation, 80 acres of outdoor cannabis fields and another 100 acres of outdoor hemp fields.

Ultra Health president and CEO Duke Rodriguez said the company is preparing for a future in which New Mexico stands to benefit from an expanded medical marijuana market and legalized recreational use.

The company says the grow facility is expected to employ about 100 people.

Legalization is shaping up to be among the campaign issues in the gubernatorial race.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jeff Apodaca is calling for the expansion of New Mexico's medical marijuana program and for the legalization of recreational use.

Apodaca released his plan Thursday, saying New Mexico is losing out on jobs and tax revenues that could be generated by the industry.

New Mexico's medical program has grown exponentially and now has more than 50,000 patients. Record sales were also reported in 2017.

At a recent forum, Republican Congressman and gubernatorial candidate Steve Pearce expressed reservations about legalization.

Among the other Democratic candidates, U.S. Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham says she would support a measure that includes adequate health and enforcement measures to prevent underage use and workplace problems.

State Sen. Joseph Cervantes has sponsored unsuccessful legislation to decriminalize possession of small quantities of pot but has said the state isn't ready yet to legalize.
Bay Area students are joining other students across the nation who planned to walk out of class Friday to call for tighter gun control.

Over a hundred students from Notre Dame High School and Evergreen Valley High School gathered outside San Jose City Hall holding signs that call for tighter gun laws and chanting "never again" on the anniversary of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Colorado.

San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo was also outside City Hall and praised the young activists for caring about the community.

"There's something about this generation that gets it, about the fact that their voice matters and about the fact that they should care about the future of this country," Liccardo said.

At least 36 walks were planned across the Bay Area. Some students had planned to walk out of school and then pause for 13 seconds  one second for each person that were shot and killed at Columbine.

At Sobrato High School in Morgan Hill, student organizers set up a march to City Hall as well as a town hall with elected officials with students who didn't want to march off campus.

Zoie Wise, a senior at Sobrato High, said "Although this is a pretty safe area, I feel like anything could happen. It could happen anywhere and that means it could happen here."

Student organizers also set up an area where students younger than 18 can pre-register to vote.

"I think it's really important to vote, that way their voice can be heard and they can make a change directly," Wise said.



Many of the students participating were not alive during the massacre 19 years ago, but the recent activism by students at a South Florida high school, who survived the Valentine's Day shooting that left 17 people dead, have inspired students across the nation to call for stricter gun laws.

"I think they've inspired every single student in the United States," Bay Area student Kira Galbraitch said.

"They've shown that they're not just going to stand down and let this happen again because it happens way too frequently. Many people say we are the generations of mass shootings. I have never lived in a world where there hasn't been a mass shooting."

The Parkland, Florida, students organized the March for Our Lives in Washington D.C. and across the nation, and they also participated in Friday's walkout.

Many of the school districts support the students' rights to free speech and expression. San Francisco Unified School District told NBC Bay Area that students who walk out of school will receive an unexcused absence and their parents will be notified.

A large group of SFUSD students gathered at Civic Center in San Francisco chanting "Hey, hey, NRA, how many kids have you killed today?" and "This is what democracy looks like."

On Thursday, some Bay Area students headed to the California capital to ask lawmakers to back four bills in support of tighter gun control.

The collection of roughly 300 students call themselves "Bay Area Student Activists," or BASTA for short, which translates to the word "enough" in Spanish.

Those four bills include raising the age of buying a long gun to 21, making confiscated weapon data public, waiving the fee for people seeking gun violence restraining orders and adding a bill that puts a lifetime ban on weapons possession for anyone convicted of domestic violence.

The National School Walkout website says nearly 2,500 walkouts were planned across the country on Friday, mostly at high schools but at some middle schools and colleges, including the University of Cambridge in Britain.

CORRECTION (April 20, 2018, 12:19 p.m.): An earlier version of this story has been corrected to say students of San Francisco Unified School District will receive an unexcused absence if they participate.
A man who spent nearly 25 years on California's death row for raping and killing a toddler before his conviction was overturned won't be retried and was freed Thursday.

Vicente Benavides Figueroa, 68, remained in prison even though the state Supreme Court last month overturned his 1993 conviction on grounds that medical testimony at his trial was false.

Many doctors who testified to the cause of the girl's injuries recanted.

Kern County District Attorney Lisa Green announced Tuesday that prosecutors won't retry Benavides for first-degree murder and that without the medical testimony, it would be "difficult, if not impossible" to win a conviction for second-degree murder.

Benavides was babysitting his girlfriend's nearly 2-year-old daughter, Consuelo Verdugo, in Delano in 1991 while the mother was at work. The couple later brought the injured child to an emergency room. She died about a week later.

A man who spent nearly 25 years on Californias death row for raping and killing a toddler before his conviction was overturned wont be retried and has been freed Thursday.

The couple told doctors that the girl had hit her head on a door but at trial the defense said the girl may have been struck by a car when she got out of the house and Benavides briefly lost sight of her.

A forensic pathologist concluded that the girl died from anal injuries from being sodomized, and several doctors testified that the girl's injuries were caused by sexual assault.

But nearly all later recanted, saying they hadn't seen her full medical records that indicated there was no evidence of sexual assault when the girl was first hospitalized.

They also said her genital and other injuries may have been caused by her medical treatment and some said the purported cause of death 'anatomically impossible'" according to the state Supreme Court's ruling.
Friday marked a 4/20 celebration like never before.

The annual day when thousands take part in the ceremonious marijuana smokeout has a slightly different air about it this year now that recreational pot has been legalized in California.

"The stigma has been lifted," said Andrew Deangelo, the director of operations at Harborside Health Center in Oakland.

Deangelo said the demographic of people who have been coming to the dispensary since the legalization has changed.

"A lot them are your grandmother or you father, a lot of folks over the age of 50, 55 years old are coming in to the dispensary and feeling safe and comfortable," Deangelo explained.

One of the biggest 4/20 celebrations was at San Francisco's Golden Gate Park at Hippie Hill at the east end of the park. Around 20,000 people lit up their marijuana product of choice at 4:20 p.m.

San Francisco Police Department said they made three arrests for DUI involving marijuana usage. Six people were evacuated, while 12 others were transported for medical care, officials said.

Attendees said the vibe at this year's Hippie Hill was different, being the first year it's celebrated since the legalization of the recreational drug.

"It's better because you don't have to (be) in fear of like someone is going to snitch on you," said Cameron Jenkins from Oakland. "Its about having a good time and no misconceptions about weed!

But while marijuana consumption is now legal, the California Highway Patrol is reminding people that it's still illegal to drive under the influence.

"The big message we want to get out is if you're going to partake, then do it responsibly, just like alcohol," CHP spokesman Officer Vu Williams said. "You still can't consume it or be under the influence while you're driving. That's the big thing we're going to be out looking for."

Williams said it's illegal even to smoke pot inside a non-moving vehicle, and if a driver has marijuana in the vehicle, it must be sealed. He said the CHP will have additional patrols during the day and at nighttime Friday.

"We're going to see quite a big increase in use, if you will, and we're concerned, of course, about the amount of impaired driving and collisions that may come with that," he said.
Soldiers are more at risk of suicide when they're repeatedly deployed with six months or less between rotations, and when they're sent to war too soon after they join the service, new research shows.

As NBC News reported, Dr. Robert Ursano of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences wrote in the report published Wednesday that rates of suicidal behaviors "increased considerably" during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. He and his team studied a group of 593 soldiers in the U.S. Army who had been deployed twice and who attempted suicide between 2004 and 2009. Getting a chance to prepare seemed to be key.

"Those who served 12 or fewer months before their first deployment were approximately twice as likely to attempt suicide during or after their second deployment compared with those who had more time to train and acclimate to the military before initial deployment," Ursano's team wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association's JAMA Psychiatry.

Such quick turnarounds have become common as the U.S. sends combat troops to Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. And suicide rates have soared among veterans. On average, 20 veterans a day died by suicide in 2014, and many more attempted suicide, the Veterans Affairs Department says.


A 3-year-old girl shot her pregnant mother Tuesday in an Indiana parking lot after finding her father's loaded gun in the car, police said.

Shaneque Thomas, 21, was sitting in the front seat of the car outside Plato's Closet at a Merrillville strip mall parking lot when the toddler fired the gun, striking the mother between the chest and shoulder.

The girl's 1-year-old brother was also in the car.

"She had no idea what she had done and she was very scared," Detective Sgt. James Bogner said.



Thomas' boyfriend, identified by police as Menzo Brazien, was inside the thrift store trying on clothes at the time of the shooting. He is being held on a preliminary charge of child endangerment, the Lake County Sheriff's Department said.

A Plato's Closet employee told NBC 5 a witness ran inside the store and told her there was a woman bleeding outside.

"There was blood flowing all from her stomach; just coming out like water, like a faucet, and I screamed 'Someone call 911,'" Hadassah Zirkle said.

Another employee, Paloma Prieto, told NBC 5 Brazien rushed outside and was "balling his eyes out" as he wrapped his jacket around Thomas' waist to try and stop the bleeding until paramedics arrived.

Thomas was taken to a local hospital and then transferred to Loyola University Medical Center where she was listed in critical but stable condition.

Employees took the children inside the store to shield them from the chaos. Zirkle said the little girl had blood on her jacket.

"[She was] just looking at me, caressing my neck. Just holding on to me. I was telling her it was OK," Zirkle added.

Merrillville police say the couple from Michigan City were in Merrillville to visita local Planned Parenthood. The mother is about six weeks pregnant, police said.

The children have been placed in the custody of the Indiana Department of Child Services.

Merrillville Police Chief Joe Petruch called the shooting a "real careless act."
A woman from west suburban Geneva who plotted to go on a Valentine's Day shooting rampage at a Canadian mall was sentenced to life in prison Friday with no chance of parole for nearly a decade.

Lindsay Souvannarath pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy to commit murder in a plan that involved opening fire at a mall in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 2015.

Nova Scotia Supreme Court Justice Peter Rosinski said that Souvannarath is and will remain a threat to society. He said she has not expressed remorse for her plot.

Rosinski also said that if the plan to kill unsuspecting shoppers had not been interrupted by an anonymous tip and the quick actions of local police, it would have been carried out.

Rosinski said his sentence was partly shaped by the principles that apply to terrorism. While he told the court the motivations and intentions in the case aren't precisely the same as those related to terrorism activities, he said the crime requires the court to "send a clear message" to those conspiring to kill multiple people that "they will pay a heavy price."

The judge also gave Souvannarath credit for time served in custody, so she will be eligible for parole in seven years.

Police thwarted the planned attack after receiving an anonymous tip, but Souvannarath had already boarded a plane in Chicago bound for Nova Scotia.

Her co-conspirator, James Gamble, killed himself as police surrounded his Halifax-area home. Souvannarath was arrested at the airport.

A third accomplice  a local man described in court as the "cheerleader" of the plot  was previously sentenced to a decade in jail.

When Rosinski asked Souvannarath if she would like to address the court prior to sentencing, the 26-year-old said: "I decline."

Before delivering sections of his decision orally in court Friday, the judge entered new letters from Souvannarath's parents and grandparents as exhibits in the case. The parents of both Souvannarath and Gamble were in court for the sentencing.

At the time the plot was being planned, Souvannarath and Gamble were unemployed and lived with their families.

Court documents released say online conversations between Souvannarath and her Canadian friend quickly devolved into a shared admiration for the Columbine killers, mass shootings and their murderous conspiracy to go on the shooting rampage at the Halifax Shopping Centre food court.
A Southwest Airlines flight headed to Chicago from Baltimore had to turn around Friday morning after a passenger became ill on the flight, the airline said. Back at the gate, mechanics were called to check a mechanical issue on the plane.



Southwest Flight 314 was scheduled to leave at 6:29 a.m. EST from BaltimoreWashington International Airport and arrive at 7:30 a.m. CST at Midway International Airport, according to an online schedule.



"Shortly after departing the gate in Baltimore, Flight 314 returned to the gate due to a medical situation onboard," the airline said in a statement. "While at the gate, the pilots reported an issue with the aircrafts auxiliary power unit. Mechanics were called out to take a look at it and fix any issues with it."



"Once it was fixed, the aircraft was cleared to return to service and depart for Chicago," the airline said.



According to Pratt & Whitney, a company that manufactures parts for commercial and military aircraft, auxiliary power units are "gas turbine engines used primarily during aircraft ground operation to provide electricity, compressed air, and/or shaft power for main engine start, air conditioning, electric power and other aircraft systems."



Passenger Dennis Quiros told NBC News the plane had unexpected issues before taking off from Baltimore. Quiros also said there was a medical emergency on the plane.

"We boarded the flight like any other, and once the plane had all the passengers on board, we had to wait for almost 20 minutes due to the engine not starting," he said.



Quiros said the captain told passengers a large battery was brought in to jump-start the engine.



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"Once that happened, we were backed out of the gate and were headed to the runway, when all of a sudden the plane came to a very abrupt stop," he said. "It seems as though the right engine was not firing up again. And there was smoke from them trying to start it."



The incident happened days after a different Southwest Airlines flight made an emergency landing in Philadelphia after an engine exploded and tore a hole in the plane, partially pulling the woman sitting next to the opening out of the plane.



In Friday's incident, Quiros said a flight attendant started to "run back and forth from the front to the back, and we didn't know what was going on."

There was a lot of commotion, he said, and the captain "immediately turned the plane around and headed for the gate."

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"When we got to the gate the captain let us know that the engine had gone out or never fired up," he said. "We had to all exit the plane as the mechanic was not able to correct the problem."



Quiros said the pilots and staff "did a great job not only attending to the medical emergency but also realizing the plane was not up to flying conditions. The captain and crew remained calm and got us back to the gate safely."



The flight took off about three hours later and arrived in Chicago at about 10:15 a.m. Further details about the medical emergency were not immediately known.


A person is dead after a car plunged into Lake Michigan near Navy Pier on Friday afternoon.

The victim was removed from the water and was transported to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, according to fire officials. He was later pronounced dead at the hospital, police said.



The Chicago police department's Marine Unit responded to the incident around 5:30 p.m. after a vehicle entered the water. Rescue boats could be seen in the water just north of the pier, and divers eventually reached the vehicle.

According to officials, poor visibility hampered the search and rescue operation, and rescuers had difficulty breaking the windows on the vehicle during the search.



The circumstances of the crash are still under investigation.
The Department of Consumer Protection has suspended a Norwalk bar's liquor permit after authorities found multiple underage people, including 93 Fairfield University students, at the business Thursday night.

Police and agents from the Connecticut Liquor Control Commission were conducting liquor compliance checks and found 103 underage people when they responded to Johnny Utah's bar on Washington Street at 11:30 p.m., so several police officers were called in to assist.

Several of the underage people were intoxicated and most did not have identification.

The Department of Consumer Protection has suspended Johnny Utah's liquor permit and the business will remain closed until further notice, police said.

ECS Transportation and Fairfield University Public Safety were called in to bring the students back to school.

A statement from Fairfield University says the schools department of public safety received notice Friday morning that several students were suspected to be drinking underage at a Norwalk establishment and they are working closely with the Norwalk Police Department to confirm all details of the event.

Fairfield University expects all students to uphold the Universitys code of conduct at all times, which is applicable both on and off campus. The University's alcohol policies reflect the laws of the State of Connecticut regarding the purchase, sale, and consumption of alcoholic beverages, the statement from the school says.

No arrests have been made and police are investigating.
Police in Clinton and East Hartford are issuing warning after coyote sightings in the two communities.

Clinton police said there have been coyote sightings on the Town Beach in Clinton and there are concerns about safety as the weather improves and the use of beaches becomes more of a demand.

Clinton police said in a post on their Facebook page that they have reached out to the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Wildlife Division.

Clinton police said DEEP wants people to be aware that it's the time of year when coyotes are raising their babies and they're active at all hours, searching for food.

The Clinton Department said officers and Animal Control will keep an eye out for coyote dens near the beach. None have been seen as of now.

East Hartford police are warning of an increase in sightings of coyotes in the area between Arnold Drive, Greenlawn Street and Arbutus Street and said coyotes are rarely a threat to humans, but can sometimes hurt or kill pets.
A Montville school superintendent, principal and assistant principal are all on leave after being arrested on charges of failing to tell authorities about an alleged student "fight club," supervised by a substitute teacher at the high school, according to state police. Now the district is working to ensure operations continue as usual amid the leadership shakeup.

Montville Superintendent Brian Levesque, 45, of Brooklyn, Principal Jeffrey Theodoss, 64, of Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, and 59-year-old assistant principal Tatiana Patten, of Niantic, are all charged with failing to report abuse.

The three administrators have been placed on leave pending the outcome of the police investigation and an internal school probe, Assistant Superintendent Laurie Pallin said. Pallin has become the face of the school district while Levesque remains on leave pending the outcome of this investigation.

We want to assure parents that leadership is in place at all Montville schools as students return on Monday from spring break, Pallin explained in a statement.



Pallin will remain the assistant superintendent, but take on the role of superintendent for the time being. She has worked in the Montville School District for 25 years.

Montville High School 'Fight Club' Case Has Multiple Players

Montville named replacements for the other administrators Friday.

Heather Sangermano, current principal of Montville's Palmer Building, will become the acting principal for Montville High School. She has worked as a principal in the district for six years.

Sangermano will work closely with acting assistant principal Phil Orbe.

I am completely confident that Heather will be able to seamlessly step into this new role, so that we can remain focused on the education of our students, Pallin said.

The Board of Education is set to meet Tuesday, April 24 to discuss the specific long-term plans.

The former substitute teacher, Ryan Fish, was arrested last week and charged with two counts of risk of injury to a child, four counts of second-degree reckless endangerment and breach of peace. The 23-year-old from Bozrah, who was accused of overseeing the "fight club," was fired from the school in October after videos of fighting in his math classroom surfaced, state police said. He pleaded not guilty to charges.



The board of education in Montville held a special meeting Thursday at the Montville High School library at 5 p.m. to discuss a "personnel matter related to the incident at the high school." The meeting went into executive session and officials declined to make any public comments on what was discussed.

Parents who spoke with NBC Connecticut expressed concerns about the judgment shown by the three administrators now on leave.

What if the fight got very serious and something happened to these children where they permanently injured because of this teacher encouraging that or what if my daughter or anybody elses child would have been struck?" said Montville parent Rebecca Coy.



Coys then 15-year-old daughter told her a fight broke out in one of her classes six months ago.

I hate to say this but their judgment call was very inappropriate, Coy said.

Coy told NBC Connecticut that back in October her daughter showed her cell phone video taken by a classmate of two boys fighting in a study hall class, and the substitute teacher did nothing to intervene.

They failed to protect the students by allowing this teacher to engage in this behavior, then they totally did not make the right call by calling the police, as soon as they knew this happened they should have contacted the police and Department of Children and Families, right away, Coy said.

Levesque, Theodoss and Patten are due in court on May 3.

Levesque and Patten did not immediately return messages left at their homes. NBC Connecticut was unable to immediately reach Theodoss.
Students at schools across the country, including here in Connecticut, walked out of school this morning in a push for tougher gun laws.

Students at Newington High School held signs and chanted "Hey, hey, ho, ho, gun violence has got to go" as they marched. Some wore orange clothing, symbolizing the color hunters wear to stay safe.

After the march, Newington students took part in activities inside, including writing letters to lawmakers about gun violence.

The timing of the protests, at 10 a.m., was planned to be held on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting, which left 13 people dead in Littleton, Colorado.



Lane Murdock, a Ridgefield High School sophomore who spearheaded the school walkout movement last February after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, organized the walkout at her school, according to a news release from U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal, who said he would be attending that walkout.

U.S. Rep. Elizabeth Esty said she would be at the Kent School this morning, where students organized a March for Action.

The National School Walkout website includes a list of walkouts that people have registered and many in Connecticut are listed.
A Michigan couple with 13 sons has welcomed a 14th into the family.

"It never gets old," mom Kateri Schwandt said on the "Today" show Friday.

Jay and Kateri Schwandt's latest addition was born Wednesday evening, weighing 8 pounds, 4 ounces and measuring 21 inches long. The Rockford couple got creative with the baby's name to commemorate their family's streak: Finley Sheboygan Schwandt.

"We kinda held out a little hope for a girl, but she was a boy again," Jay Schwandt said. "We pulled the trigger on Sheboygan for a middle name. ... If ever we were going to use it, now is the time."

The other Shwandt children range in age from 2 to 25. When asked how she was able to bear them all, Kateri Shwandt said, by "the grace of God, I guess." She added that's she's "feeling great" and that Finley's "arrival was perfect."

Kateri Schwandt has said she's used to large families, as one of 14 children herself. As with their last few children, the couple decided against learning the baby's sex before the birth.

"There was truly no surprise there," Kateri Shwandt said of Finley's sex being revealed. "It's always a neat experience to announce that."
Fort Worth Police are following leads to find the man who attacked a 13-year-old girl while she was walking to the bus stop.

It happened between 6:30 and 7 a.m. Thursday near Calmont and Laredo on the city's west side. The girl was badly injured and stumbled onto the school bus for help.

NBC 5 spoke to some of the girl's family Thursday afternoon. Her uncle said she is having a tough time and is still in Cook Children's Hospital, but the family is relying on faith and staying strong.

While police are searching for the attacker, the community is stepping up to protect its children. A group of men is planning to start patrolling the streets near where this happened, while kids are heading to school.

"When I first heard about it, I was just angry," said Pastor Derwin Harris, Director of the Restoration Center, which provides clothing, food and monetary support to the community near Las Vegas Trail.

"We really need to do something about that," Harris said.

Now hes leading a group of men to turn their anger into action.

"As men, we should be the protectors of our community," Harris said.

They're vowing to prevent a repeat of what police say happened early Thursday morning, when a 13-year-old girl was attacked while walking to the bus stop at Calmont and Laredo. She managed to make it to the bus and was rushed to the hospital with serious injuries.

"Things like this don't happen very often, said Captain Devin Pitt of the Fort Worth Police Criminal Investigations Division. It perks our ears immediately when we get a report of something like this."

Investigators do not believe the victim knew her attacker. Now, while they're canvassing the neighborhood and chasing down leads, a new set of allies is stepping up.

"It's not just the responsibility of the Fort Worth Police," Harris said. "I'm asking that the men in this community, we come together and develop some kind of team where we can patrol the streets in the morning to make sure our kids are safe."

Which brings us back to the Restoration Center, with the first round of volunteers. Christopher Scott walks his son to the elementary school right next to that bus stop every morning.

"I have a daughter who is 11 years old and she actually was attending that school so it actually really hit home," Scott said.

Now he wants to be there for every other child in his community, as an extra set of eyes keeping watch.

"We need to be out here together to be able to support each other, Scott said. It's not just one parent's job."

The group is asking for volunteers to join them, both men and women. Anyone who wants to help should meet Monday at 6 p.m. at the Restoration Center at 3452 Williams Road near Camp Bowie in West Fort Worth for a planning meeting.

They plan to start patrolling Tuesday morning.

Fort Worth police haven't been able to get much of a suspect description yet from the victim because of her condition. They are asking anyone who saw anything suspicious to call police at 817-392-4430 or CrimeStoppers at 817-469-8477.
Collin County is considered the most heavily-tolled county in Texas.

But a new proposal by President Trump could mean even more toll roads in the future  not just in Collin County, but across the state.

The plan calls for more toll roads and public/private partnerships to cover the cost of $1.5 trillion dollars in improvements.

Public pushback to the proposal is growing.

At the end of the day, this hurts Texas families, said Terri Hall with Texans For Toll-Free Highways.

Last week, Hall delivered a letter to Washington signed by 60 conservative grassroots groups across Texas.

If we've already paid for the road we shouldn't have to come back in and pay a toll on a lane that today we drive on for free. So we wanted to make sure that message was communicated to not mess with Texas, Hall said.

The White House has said the plan, which was released in February, is a framework for lawmakers to work with, and is not set in stone.
NBC4 Southern California and Telemundo 52 are the returning media sponsors of this year's March for Babies LA walk on April 28 at Exposition Park to raise awareness about the importance of healthy babies and mothers.

NBC4 Today in LA Anchor Daniella Guzman and Telemundo 52 Anchor Dunia Elvir will emcee the entire program and kick-off the walk as more than 20,000 participants look on.

On April 29, NBC4 Anchor Carolyn Johnson will host the March for Babies Orange County event in Newport Beach at the Fashion Island shopping mall with more than 7,000 walkers expected to participate.



Stay tune to both stations for public service announcements promoting the events, and join us on both days to meet the anchors and learn about the cause.



For details, visit the LA walk and the OC walk.
California lawmakers will consider a proposal to allow parents to bring their newborns to work at state offices.



Heather Chiles, a Poway mom of two young children, said she's a stay-at-home mom because it's cheaper than paying for childcare.

"I'd rather be home with my kids if it's going to even out financially. I would rather be the one raising my children," said Chiles. "It is what it is. I wish that I could work and have time with my boys."

Assembly Bill 2481 was introduced by Assemblyman Randy Voepel, the former mayor of Santee, with bipartisan support.

AB 2481 would allow parents to bring their newborns to work at state offices.

Chiles said she would welcome such a plan. "Instead of having to worry where my kids are or what's going on with the babysitter or nanny or childcare, I know they're right there with me," she said.

Santee mom Elisa Alvarado faced a situation similar to Chiles.

She wanted to return to work when her son Orion turned 1-year-old but said the cost of daycare was too expensive.

Alvarado supports AB 2481, saying, "I think it's an important time, when you're bringing up your kids, to able to be there with them.

The program is for babies between 6 weeks and 6 months when they still sleep a lot and before they can crawl away.

"When babies come into the workplace, it's like a puppy dog coming in," said Voepel. "People love it and it's good for morale. It's good for the family feeling when you come to work."

The infant-to-work program would initially be an option only at state offices, and if passed, would be tested out for a year.

"This is a voluntary program. If that particular department decides that it is a distraction, then that's that," explained Voepel.

Arizona and Washington have successfully adopted a similar program at some of their state offices, mostly with workers who have flexible desk jobs.

Plan administrators said babies get sick less often, and parents return to work sooner.

Santee dad Joe Brettillo works evenings, so he can spend more time with his children.

He thinks the program outlined in AB 2481 would be extremely beneficial to parents.

"I think most offices, I know my workplace, it would be welcome," said Brettillo. "Some people bring their pets and it's not a distraction.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, child care costs in San Diego exceed $15,000 a year.

According to an Assembly Appropriations analysis, implementing the program for the state's Human Resources department would cost in excess of $150,000 from the General Fund.

The costs of implementing the practice at state agencies is unknown depending on the number of employees who would take part.
What to Know April 21 and 22

$10 adult, $5 child

Lancaster

Any teacher from your past would tell you what we're about to tell you, or a parent, or a good friend, or someone who wants you to buck up and carry on: Sometimes you have to be the poppy.

Well... Maybe their sage words of advice wouldn't come in that specific form, exactly.

But you get where we stand with this one: If life isn't delivering exactly what you need, you have to become the thing you need, at least in spirit and outlook.

Which is all to say this: The always-anticipated big bloom didn't arrive at Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve this spring, or, really, even a medium bloom, thanks to a drier winter and warmer days. "Every year will be different," says a Facebook response from the reserve staff, and that is true.

You can, though, be the flower.

In other words, you can pay homage to the beauty, magic, and orange-a-tude of the California poppy at its annual party, which is still very much on: It's the Antelope Valley Poppy Festival, in Lancaster, and we have a feeling that poppy people need this two-day celebration now more than ever.

It's got a sweet family feel to it, with live tunes, an Adventure Zone (yep, there's a Petting Zoo), a Farmers Market, a Sunday car show, all sorts of classic festival eats, and the Sea Lion Splash.

A ticket is $10 for an adult, $5 for a child ages 6 to 12, $5 for a senior 62+. The place is Sgt. Steve Owen Memorial Park.

And while the blanket of poppies didn't spread out, as hoped, at the Poppy Reserve, we're still seeing clutches of the bright buds popping up, in yards and parks, as we enter April's final third.

Inspiring us to find that inner flower. And, of course, to look to 2019, and the lovely AV, when rain, temperatures, and a line-up of other factors deliver us the poppy scene we long for (oh please oh please).

The Antelope Valley Poppy Festival blossoms on Saturday, April 21 and Sunday, April 22.
A 42-year-old Florida man made his first appearance in court Thursday on charges of sexually assaulting a girl in Huntington Beach, who was allegedly victimized by three other men, according to court records.

Dwight Nicholas Castaldi, who was arrested Monday, was charged last month with four charges of lewd acts with a minor younger than 14 and a count of luring a child with the intent to commit a sex crime, all felonies, according to court records.

Castaldi was being held in lieu of $200,000 bail. The dates of the alleged crimes are in January 2016, according to court records.

Orange County District Attorney's Office

The four defendants do not know each other, but met the 13-year-old victim online, according to the Orange County District Attorney's Office. Two of the men had personal sexual relations with the teen, but two others engaged in sexual conduct with her online, according to prosecutors.

Orange County District Attorney's Office

Huntington Beach police Officer Angela Bennett said authorities were working on a news release about the case, but were not ready to comment on it.

Orange County District Attorney's Office

The other defendants in the case are Christian Reid Palmer, 27, of Sacramento, Sohrab Anaraki, 33, of Topanga, and Bradley Thomas Williams, 34, of Dana Point. Palmer's attorney, John Barnett, declined comment.

Williams is charged with three counts of lewd acts with a minor younger than 14 and a count of meeting a minor to commit lewd conduct, all felonies.

Anaraki is charged with one count each of luring a child with the intent to commit a sex crime and meeting a minor to commit lewd conduct, and six counts of lewd acts with a minor younger than 14, all felonies.

Palmer is charged with one count each of luring a child with the intent to commit a sex crime and meeting a minor to commit a lewd act and seven lewd acts with a minor younger than 14, all felonies.

All four defendants face a sentencing enhancement allegation of substantial sexual conduct with a minor, according to court records.

Palmer, Anaraki and Williams pleaded not guilty last month and were next due in court for a pretrial hearing on April 27.
Another nationwide school walkout is planned Friday, marking the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting in Colorado and protesting what organizers call the failure of elected officials to tackle gun violence.

It was unclear exactly how many students in the Southland will participate in the walkout, but organized student gatherings have been planned on multiple campuses, including open-microphone forums and discussions with local elected leaders.

Organizers of the National School Walkout said the event is student- motivated, with more than 2,100 walkouts planned nationally, at least one in every state.

"We are walking out for those who lost their lives to gun violence, to talk about the real problems our country is facing and to find solutions (for) the problems that our leaders have failed to address," organizers said.

The walkouts are expected at 10 a.m. on the anniversary of the Columbine shooting, which left 12 students and one teacher dead, in addition to the two gunmen.

Students at Culver City Middle School, 4601 Elenda St., plan to walk out of class and gather at Veterans Memorial Park, 4117 Overland Drive, where they will voice their opinions on gun violence.

"Simply walking out will not change everything, but allowing students to get their voices heard and take action is motivation within itself that can lead the path for change," eighth-grade student and event co-organizer Kira Grimes said. "It's an act of symbolism and allows us to fight for a cause that directly affects us so change can commence and we no longer have to come to school fearing for our lives."

Student-organized events are also scheduled at several Los Angeles Unified School District campuses. Rep. Karen Bass, D-Los Angeles, and School Police Chief Steven Zipperman will take part in a forum at Dorsey High School, while Sen. Ben Allen, D-Santa Monica, will meet with students at University High School.

Assemblyman Reginald Jones-Sawyer Jr., D-Los Angeles, will meet with students at Alliance Collins Family College Ready High School in Huntington Park. Students at Cleveland Charter High Schol in Reseda will gather in the campus quad for a voter-registration drive and to call on government leaders to act on gun control.

Sen. Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles, and LAUSD Interim Superintendent Vivian Ekchian, meanwhile, will meet with students at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles.

A coalition of community groups plans to stage a protest outside LAUSD headquarters, 333 S. Beaudry Ave., at 1 p.m., calling for safer schools and the elimination of random searches of students.

A district-wide gathering of students is planned at Santa Ana City Hall, where information booths will be set up and speakers will discuss issues of gun control and student involvement in political issues.
Christine Todd Whitman was at the first Earth Day 48 years ago, long before she became governor of New Jersey and head of the Environmental Protection Agency.

Her generation was inspired by "Silent Spring," a book about the dangers of the pesticide DDT, she said. Soon after that day in 1970, DDT was banned  one of many green-friendly policy moves the U.S. has made since, as the country gained a greater environmental consciousness and researchers revealed the dangers of climate change.

On Earth Day this Sunday, thousands will travel to the National Mall for the second-annual March for Science, many of them millennials, the generation whose youngest members are now graduating from college. They'll aim their signs and speeches at President Donald Trump, who last year pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement and wants to revitalize the coal industry even as renewable energy is finally becoming profitable.

Whitman believes millennials have stepped up to the plate to advocate for sustainability, lately more than her own generation  she's seen some complacency on the issue. But if millennials want change to stick, she said that young advocates will need to learn to work with the Trump administration and Congress.

"They are turned off by it, understandably. But if they want these changes they need to work with the government," Whitman said.

Some millennials have other things in mind.

Emily True, a 25-year-old graduate student studying environmental management at Duke University, has seen companies lead the charge on climate change and thinks legislation won't get the country where it needs to be. She's looking to the private sector, where she hopes to land a job where she can still fulfill her passion for advocacy.

"Part of who I am is an environmentalist, and in a job I want to do the same thing," she said. "It makes me feel good and gives me a sense of purpose."

True is among the millennials at U.S. universities working to make up for what they see as a lack of focus by the generation they are succeeding. She's a member of Duke's United Nations Global Compact team and a brand impact analyst for sustainable development nonprofit Fair Trade USA.

"Now a lot [millennials] want to have more out of their jobs to do social good, and that can come through positive work on the environment," True said.



She also thinks she feels a stronger responsibility to advocate for sustainability than her parents did at her age, saying they were probably too focused on climbing up the career ladder while she's had a chance to watch these issues unfold.

There may be something to that feeling, according to Paul Shrivastava, chief sustainability officer and director of the Sustainability Institute at Pennsylvania State University.

The millennial generation feels a keen sense of responsibility, he said  certainly a keener sense of responsibility than his own Baby Boom generation.

"They have been brought up in an era of climate change and ecosystem destruction, which are reported on almost daily in the press. So they know more about these environmental problems," Shrivastava said in an email.

"Sustainability has always been about the coming generations, and millennials and youth in general will bear the biggest risk and responsibility, so their engagement and leadership is most necessary," he added.

Today, millennials are the generation most likely to see "solid evidence" of global warming, according to a Pew Research Center study from March 1.

About three quarters of millennials are concerned about climate change  a larger share than are concerned about gun violence or undocumented immigration  and think it should be stopped or slowed, according to the 2018 Millennial Report, released in February by the Alliance for Marketing Solution, a conservative policy group that advocates for market-based environmental change.

"I think we as millennials just know so much more because of iPhones, globalization and we see things when they're happening and not afraid to take a stand," True said. "The information piece is huge."

Izaiah Bokunewicz, a sophomore agricultural plant science student at Penn State, invests much of his time into the school's one-acre student-run farm, where he oversees the production of vegetables and advocates for decreasing waste on the farm and around campus.

"At Penn State, that's been my huge activity of involvement, with food and how we can really try and decrease food waste. That's an enormous problem, [along with] increasing student access to fresh local produce and telling them how food is produced," Bokunewicz said.

An internship with a Pennsylvania company that makes LED lights taught him the importance of the emerging sustainability sector that he hadn't known much about. He said he applies what he learned there to other areas of sustainability at the school's farm.

Leslie Pillen, Penn State's sustainable student farm design coordinator and associate director of farm and food systems, said that she thinks there is a sense of urgency, and that it is increasing. She added that she hopes the younger generation draws greater connections between issues of social justice and environmental sustainability.

"Those are deeply interrelated, and within the alternative agrifood movement, I see people making those connections more explicitly," Pillen said.

On the other side of the country, the University of California, Berkeley has multiple zero-waste initiatives that are driven by students, according to Director of Sustainability Kira Stoll, with 30 to 50 students working in paid positions on campus to help reach the goal of zero waste.

They focus on issues like how to turn plastic into raw materials and how Berkeley's offices can get vendors to deliver materials with less packaging. At the campus store, students "give away clothing and are working now on an outlet to save furniture and have it available for students," Stoll said.

She said that in an institutional setting like college, there is a chance to make a real difference: "We need all hands on board."

Whitman had a similar message: more need to commit to this work, regardless of which generation might be more actively tackling global challenges.

Having watched the environmental movement for decades, Whitman, now 71 and running her own energy consultancy business, said there was a lot of support in the early years, but she sees complacency now. When people "look up to blue skies" and don't see a problem right in front of them, they lose any sense of urgency, she said.

Things are in fact better in the U.S., she said, but more work needs to be done around the world: "We haven't really recognized the importance of the rest of the Earth."

We are all part of a huge ecosystem, Whitman said, and we must all take care of it together. She referred to a Native American saying: "We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children."
New York's governor is heading back to Puerto Rico with more help as the island continues to recover from last year's catastrophic hurricane.

Democrat Andrew Cuomo announced Thursday that the state is sending another team of utility experts to assist with repairs to Puerto Rico's power system following an islandwide blackout this week. Cuomo will travel to Puerto Rico on April 29.

Also going are college students, construction workers and representatives of organized labor and several charities assisting in recovery efforts.

This will be Cuomo's third trip to Puerto Rico since Hurricane Maria last year. New York state already has sent tons of supplies, food and fresh water along with utility crews, nurses and first responders.

Cuomo called the federal response to the disaster a "national disgrace."
A New York man who spent 17 years in prison for murdering his parents before a court overturned his conviction has settled a civil case with Suffolk County on Long Island for $10 million.

Martin Tankleff said Thursday he was gratified that the county "has finally acknowledged the terrible wrong" that was done to him.

Tankleff was 17 when he was arrested in 1988 for the murders of his parents, Seymour and Arlene Tankleff.

He initially confessed but quickly recanted. Tankleff was convicted in 1990 and sentenced to 50 years in prison.

Tankleff was freed in 2007 when an appellate court said evidence in his trial had been overlooked.

He settled a wrongful conviction lawsuit against New York state for nearly $3.4 million in 2014.
A Brooklyn Postal Service employee is facing charges after federal authorities found years of undelivered mail in his car and apartment, according to a complaint.

Aleksey Germash, an employee for USPS for 16 years, was charged with delaying or detaining mail. His arrest comes after a recent assignment to the Dyker Heights Post Office in Brooklyn.

Germash was brought in for questioning after USPS received a tip that there was a Nissan Pathfinder in the Dyker Heights area filled with more than 20 blue mails bags, according to the documents.

Germash allegedly admitted that the car was his, and that he had been taking mail from work and keeping it in his apartment and work locker as well.

He allegedly told investigators he was "overwhelmed by the amount of mail he had to deliver, but made sure to deliver the important mail."

Law enforcement agents found approximately 17,000 pieces of undelivered mail in Germash's possession, with at least one being postmarked in 2005.

Attorney information for the man wasn't immediately available.
What to Know A Queens bar had its liquor license suspended after authorities allegedly uncovered prostitution, narcotics, illicit gambling, untaxed cigs

The New York State Liquor Authority issued the emergency suspension of Huang Jia Inc in Maspeth Wednesday effective immediately

Authorities have been allegedly investigating the premises for months

A Queens bar had its liquor license suspended after authorities allegedly uncovered prostitution, narcotics, illicit gambling and untaxed cigarettes.

The New York State Liquor Authority issued the emergency suspension of Huang Jia Inc in Maspeth Wednesday effective immediately, which prohibits alcohol to be sold or consumed on the premises.

According to the State Liquor Authority, SLA investigators and officers with the New York City Police Departments Citywide Vice-Enforcement Division executed a search warrant of the bar on April 12. During the search warrant, investigators allegedly discovered 97 packs of counterfeit or untaxed cigarettes, jars and bags filled with the narcotic ketamine, records related to the sale of prostitution and illegal gambling devices.

The NYPD made nine arrests, including the bars owner, for criminal possession of a controlled substance. Additionally, a number of hazardous conditions were observed, including overcrowding, blocked exits and non-working emergency lighting, the State Liquor Authority says.

Top Tri-State News Photos

On April 14, the NYPD and SLA conducted a follow up inspection, making six arrests after allegedly discovering patrons with ketamine in three separate karaoke rooms inside the bar and finding patrons consuming alcohol after closing hours.

On April 16, the SLA charged the establishment with 22 violations of the ABC Law, including disorderly premises for permitting prostitution, gambling, trafficking of controlled substances, failure to supervise and for becoming a focal point for police attention.

Between March 15th and April 12th, the NYPD conducted three undercover operations where detectives posing as customers allegedly purchased narcotics, prostitution and gambling  all which formed the basis for the April 12 raid, officials say.

According to the NYPD, there was an alleged a pattern of criminal activity in and around the premises months prior to these incidents.

On Feb. 15, NYPD officers allegedly observed bar security escort an injured patron to his vehicle and leave him there without calling 911. Authorities say the officers conducted a car stop, allegedly recovered a vial of ketamine and discovered the patron required treatment following injuries sustained inside the premises.

Authorities say that, on Feb. 9, the NYPD arrested a 19-year-old patron for a DWI directly behind the premises who allegedly said he was drinking inside the bar. On Feb. 17 and 18, two patrons leaving on separate days were also arrested by NYPD officers for possession of a controlled substance. Both allegedly said they were given the ketamine inside the bar.

A few days later, on Feb. 22, an NYPD officer allegedly observed an individual exiting the bar with a bag enter his vehicle and make an illegal U-turn. After pulling over the vehicle narcotics residue, two large boxes of empty glass vials used to package ketamine and over $105,000 inside a Hello Kitty bookbag were allegedly discovered. The driver and two occupants of the vehicle were arrested for money laundering and criminal use of drug paraphernalia.

Huang Jia Inc did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

It is unknown if the establishment retained an attorney that could comment on the suspension and allegations.

[NATL] Top News Photos: Pope Visits Japan, and More
"To Kill a Mockingbird" is a timeless book, but that doesn't mean you can keep it out of the library for 43 years.

John Kaplan, an accomplished photojournalist, filmmaker and author from Wilmington, Delaware, recently discovered he never returned a copy of "To Kill a Mockingbird" that he borrowed from his school's library in 1975. The book was a whopping 43 years late.

He returned the book Friday, as he visited Mount Pleasant High School to talk to students about his Pulitzer Prize-winning career.

He asked for forgiveness from students and staff for the mishap. He even enlisted help from author Harper Lee's nephew, via video.

Kaplan won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography in 1992 for a photo essay called "21," which documents the lives of a diverse group of 21-year-olds. His work is exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide.

We can only imagine what the overdue library book fees were like.
A Delaware County, Pennsylvania, businessman has been sentenced to 30 years in prison after a federal court found he lied about his past as a Liberian warlord known for murdering his enemies -- and having their hearts cooked and eaten.

Mohammed Jabbateh took part in atrocities during a civil war in the 1990s in the west African country. Prosecutors say he was known as "Jungle Jabbah," a feared commander in one of two warring military factions.

He "committed various acts of shocking brutality including rapes, sexual enslavement, slave labor, murder, mutilation and ritual cannibalism. He also used children as soldiers," according to a press release from the U.S. Attorney's Office Thursday.

Jabbateh once ordered a captive's heart be cooked and fed to his fighters, according to the press release. He also ordered his fighters to murder a villager, removed his heart and forced the town chief's wife to cook it.

He later had the town chief murdered -- and ordered his widow to cook her husband's heart.

This defendant committed acts of such violence and depravity that they are almost beyond belief, said U.S. Attorney William M. McSwain. This man is responsible for atrocities that will ripple for generations in Liberia. He thought he could hide here but thanks to the determination and creativity of our prosecutors and investigators, he couldnt."

Federal Prosecutors say that a war criminal has been living in Delaware County for years, hiding his past from immigration authorities. Alleged African war criminal Jungle Jabbahs criminal case is set for Tuesday. NBC10s Investigative Reporter George Spencer has the story.

Jabbateh was living in Lansdowne. He was charged with two counts of perjury for lying about his past to U.S. prosecutors, who could not charge him for the Liberian crimes. But he was sentenced to far more than the five years that each count carries.

He is likely to be deported after he serves his sentence, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania said.

Is a Delaware County businessman also the African war criminal known as Jungle Jabbah? NBC10 investigative reporter George Spencer looks into the allegations against him.

Some in greater Philadelphia's close-knit Liberian community know Jabbateh as a hard-working businessman. They had no idea that he was a man that prosecutors now link to the bloody war that left 200,000 dead and many thousands more maimed, raped and displaced.

(David Guttenfelder/Associated Press)

The backdrop for such violence was a country divided by both military coups and ethnic hatred.

"Chaos is too kind a word," said Maghan Keita, professor of history at Villanova University.

Maghan Keita, a professor of history at Villanova University, talked with NBC10 about immigrants who flee their native country and remake their lives in a new place.

He said very few Liberians escaped the war either as an aggressor or victim. Battlefields didn't exist and the brutality played on in villages and towns.

The main target becomes the coercion of civilian populations, as opposed to engagement with other combatants who are as heavily armed as you are," Keita said.

Maghan Keita, a professor of history at Villanova University, talks to NBC10 about those who fought in wars will always have their past following closely behind.
A San Diego research institute has been awarded a $1.3 million federal grant to fund critical research for families devastated by Alzheimer's Disease.

Inside the Conrad Prebys Center For Chemical Genomics researchers hope to zero in on specific chemical compounds that could be part of new medicine to slow the progression of the disease.

The National Institutes of Health awarded the funds as a three-year grant.



This research is vital for San Diego County as recent studies suggest the number of local residents 55 and older with dementia is expected to increase 36 percent by 2030.

There are no known cures and no disease-modifying therapies, according to researchers.

Thanks to the Alzheimer's Project, a county-led initiative and it's research spin-off Collaboration 4 Cure - local companies and philanthropists have worked together over the past few years with great success.

They've zeroed in on a specific gene that seems to be problematic.

Right now with the help of drug screening robots, these researchers are testing more than a million chemical compounds hoping to find specific ones that can attack that problematic gene and help families dealing with dementia.

Participating with Sanford Burnham Prebys in C4C are The Salk Institute, The Scripps Research Institute, J. Craig Venter Institute and the University of California, San Diego.



Right now Alzheimer's Disease is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States but, in San Diego County it is the third leading cause of death, according to the County Health and Human Services Agency.
Students with banners and signs that read "never again" made their way out of class and through the streets of San Diego County Friday for a second round of nationwide walkouts to call for reform that puts an end to gun violence at schools.

Friday's walkouts came on the 19-year anniversary of the mass shooting at Columbine High School in 1999, the deadliest high school shooting in U.S. history until 17 people were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida in February.

Students at schools from Del Norte and High Tech high schools in North County to Scripps Ranch and University City high schools in San Diego, stepped out of their classrooms at 10 a.m. to coincide with National School Walkout Day events across the United States.

While several schools planned moments of silence and on-campus demonstrations, footage captured by Newschopper 7 showed lines of students walking with signs in hand on sidewalks in La Jolla. Similar images were captured across the country.

Students hoped the demonstrations would make an impact on leaders in Washington. Some told NBC 7 they want Congress to make changes like banning assault weapons and implementing universal background checks.

In the days leading up to the walkouts, one student at Coronado High School posted fliers on social media urging classmates to walk out and not come back. Junior Savannah Rose said students should not return until Congress makes changes to gun legislation.

"Congress has not changed laws and so we slowly need to step up what we're doing and escalate it so that Congress is finally pushed to change the laws," Rose said.

She said students have to be the ones to make change.

"We have to do this. I mean, we are students and adults are not protecting us. We have to protect ourselves and do this for everyone," Rose said.

In response to the fliers, the Coronado High School District sent a letter to parents informing them students "choosing to leave school grounds during instructional time will be marked truant and appropriate discipline will be dispensed."

Only a handful of students walked out of Coronado High School Friday. Some students said they felt intimidated by the school's administration who encouraged them not to walk out. An assembly was scheduled to coincide with the walkout, according to students.

The San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) said there is potential disciplinary action for students who walk out of school and do not return. They can be marked as having an unexcused absence and may need to make up the time on a Saturday, the SDUSD said.

The California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sent a letter to 19 school districts ahead of Friday's march. In them, the ACLU said punishing students for exercising their right to protest goes against the constitution.

The letters said that students cannot be suspended or expelled for participating in walkouts or off-campus protests, students can't be marked truant for a single unexcused tardy or absence and students can't be locked into campus to prevent walkouts.

SDUSD said any student with written permission from a parent will face no consequences and although the district supports the students' right to demonstrate, cannot endorse the walkouts.

Instead, school officials urged parents and their children to consider alternatives to walking out, like a writing activity that would allow students to express their concerns, according to a letter sent by University City High School.

The Sweetwater Union High School District (SUHSD) encouraged students to schedule activities at the school and limit the amount of time during the regular school day the demonstration will take place.

"The Parkland school shooting has prompted emotion and student engagement across our nation, however, for safety reasons, we are encouraging students to remain on campus and in school during the scheduled walkouts, SUHSD said.

The first National School Walkout was held last month and several schools across the county took part. While most believed the walkouts can make an impact on leaders, some felt it wasn't an effective use of time.

"We basically walked around the campus and we also signed petitions as well," Sweetwater Union High School senior Cindy Cabaluna said. "People just did it to ditch class, so I really didn't think it was very effective."
As YouTube has ramped up its efforts to identify Russian propaganda, one channel has managed to evade the company's flagging system: ICYMI, a millennial-focused channel that's part of the same entity as Russian government-funded Russia Today.

In ICYMI's bright and bouncy videos, former RT reporter Polly Boiko offers diatribes about recent news stories, such as the poisoning of U.K. double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter. The videos have slick graphics and poppy music, and users having no clear way of knowing about the videos connection to Russias media efforts, NBC News reported.

YouTube has been implementing a new policy to place banners on videos that indicate the channel "is funded in whole or in part by the Russian government." ICYMI does not have that banner. With its content looking like other popular, youth-oriented media, ICYMI showcases the increasing complexity of Russias efforts to spread its talking points across the internet and avoid YouTube's efforts.

YouTube declined to comment on specific channels. And an RT spokeswoman said that it is solely the choice of YouTube to put disclaimers on channels and that "we dont always agree with their selective classification of some channels with certain prejudicial language."
As thousands of National Guard troops deploy to the Mexico border, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions brought his tough stance on immigration enforcement to New Mexico on Wednesday, telling border sheriffs that cracking down on illegal crossings and drug smuggling is necessary to build a lawful immigration system.

Sessions ticked off stories about smugglers being caught with opioids and cocaine at the U.S.-Mexico border and legal loopholes that have encouraged more immigrants to make the journey.

"This is not acceptable. It cannot continue," he said. "No one can defend the way the system is working today."

Outside the meeting, dozens of immigrant rights activists protested, once again rejecting Sessions' previous characterization of the border region as "ground zero" in the Trump administration's fight against cartels and human traffickers.

They chanted in Spanish, saying the region is not a "war zone," and hoisted signs that protested the proposed border wall and the deployment of National Guard troops to the region.

Sessions was speaking in Las Cruces at the Texas Border Sheriff's Coalition annual spring meeting with the Southwestern Border Sheriff's Coalition, which includes 31 sheriff's departments from Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.

The departments patrol areas located within 25 miles (40 kilometers) of the border.

Sessions' trip to Las Cruces, a small city about an hour north of the border, comes as construction begins nearby on 20 miles (32 kilometers) of steel fencing that officials say is part of Trump's promised wall.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials say the heightened barrier will be harder to get over, under and through than the old post and rail barriers that line the stretch of sprawling desert west of the Santa Teresa border crossing.

"The lack of a wall on the southern border is an open invitation to illegal crossings," Sessions said.

Dona Ana County Sheriff Enrique "Kiki" Vigil, whose jurisdiction includes Las Cruces and Santa Teresa, doubted that a wall is an appropriate use of resources to combat the flow of drugs in the area  one of the busiest sectors of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Vigil said he would prefer to see any additional potential spending on a border wall instead go toward acquiring more technology and filling other needs of law enforcement on the border.

"Just the building of the wall, that's going to be a humongous price," he said. "Why not use some of that money to try to address some of the issues here in the counties?"

Citing a crisis on the border, Sessions has issued an order directing federal prosecutors to put more emphasis on charging people with illegal entry.

He took another swipe Wednesday at sanctuary cities, telling the sheriffs that it's "illogical and insane" that a person can enter the country illegally on Monday and make their way to San Francisco by Wednesday and not be deported.

Sessions said the crisis has been allowed to fester for decades while politicians made promised but did nothing to fix the system.

A 37 percent increase in illegal border crossings in March brought more than 50,000 immigrants into the United States. It was triple the number of reported illegal border crossings in the same period last year.

It was still far lower, however, than the surges during the last years of the Obama administration and prior decades.

The attorney general's "zero-tolerance" involving border crossings calls for prosecuting people who are caught illegally entering the United States for the first time.

He told the sheriffs that it would help end a practice of "catch and release" at the border, drawing applause from some in the audience. Yuma County Sheriff Leon Wilmot, of Arizona, was among those who supported the "zero-tolerance directive."

"When they would catch backpackers, for instance, they were seizing the dope and cutting them loose," Wilmot said. "The criminal element is going to exploit that."
A man accused of forcing a Lyft driver to take him 70 miles from Maryland into Washington, D.C., at gunpoint was convicted by a jury Wednesday on federal kidnapping and drug charges.

At 3:20 p.m. Dec. 11, 27-year-old Shane Browne had a Lyft driver take him from Calvert House Apartments in northwest D.C. to a Red Roof Inn in Aberdeen, Maryland, 72 miles away, according to the prosecution. After arriving about two hours later, the driver, having become suspicious of Browne, told him he wouldn't give him a round trip, but about a half-hour later, Browne returned to the car with a suitcase.

The driver again refused a return trip to Browne, who then put a gun to the driver's head, according to the prosecution.

During the return to D.C., the driver was able to send an email to Lyft, saying, "Call the police I'm on (sic) trouble," Lyft records confirmed.

Browne got out of the car upon returning to the apartment building and went inside, at which point the driver contacted 911.

Police monitored the building and arrested Browne as he left an apartment. They searched the apartment the next day and found about 78 pounds of marijuana in suitcases similar to the one the driver saw with Browne, as well as about $35,000 in cash and a cash-counting machine, prosecutors said. The gun wasn't found.

Browne could face about 10-12 years in prison under federal sentencing guidelines. Sentencing is scheduled for July 24.
Students in the D.C. area walked out of class Friday morning as part of a nationwide protest against gun violence. The action comes on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre.

National organizers said walkouts were planned in every state.

Locally, students gathered outside the White House at about 10 a.m. They held signs and read the names of the Columbine victims. Then, they marched toward the Capitol chanting "Enough is enough," "Our blood, your hands" and "We will vote."

The students were set to hand-deliver letters to lawmakers and rally for new gun laws outside the U.S. Capitol.

Expect rolling road closures near Pennsylvania Avenue. The @DCPoliceTraffic Twitter alert is sharing traffic updates.

At Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in Maryland, students placed T-shirts on fencing in honor of gun violence victims and in support of the walkouts.

In Virginia, students planned to host a voter registration drive on Brown's Island in Richmond and then march to the State Capitol for a rally that was set to include Gov. Ralph Northam and state legislators.

Student organizer Maxwell Nardi said the students hope to work with lawmakers to "create a unified message that we're going to fight this together."

HAPPENING NOW: Students read the names of those killed in #Columbine. Theyve staged a walkout on this 19th anniversary. #NBC4DC pic.twitter.com/ZpfaI4W35U  Nicole Jacobs (@NicoleJacobsTV) April 20, 2018

HAPPENING NOW: Students gather at Lafayette Park to stand against gun violence on this 19th anniversary of #Columbine #NBC4DC pic.twitter.com/ZpmhlWsUY2  Nicole Jacobs (@NicoleJacobsTV) April 20, 2018

Students nationwide participated in walkouts on March 14, a month after the Parkland shooting. Ten days later, hundreds of thousands of teens and their supporters rallied across the U.S. during March for Our Lives events.
A Massachusetts man is lucky to be alive after fighting off a coyote that attacked him Wednesday night.

"I got jumped from behind. I was terrified," said Brian Hutchins of Rutland.

Just before 9 p.m., Hutchins entered his backyard to tend to three chickens he keeps there. However, when he stepped out his door, a coyote lurking nearby suddenly pounced.

"I grabbed it and pulled it over my head," he explained. "It was kicking me in the face, the chin, the chest."

Hutchins was able to reach into his pocket for a small knife he carries with him and stab the animal until it left.

"It was trying to claw me," Hutchins said, "I just kept stabbing it and then it just took off into the woods."

While Hutchins was aware coyotes frequented the woods behind his property, he never anticipated an attack.

"This is a first for me," said Chief Nick Monaco of the Rutland Police Department.

Based on their investigation, police don't believe the animal was exhibiting unusual behavior. They think the coyote was going after the chickens and became spooked by Hutchins. However, they are still urging the public to be cautious.

"If they do see any aggressive animal, any animal that seems more bold than usual, we are going to go respond and check it out," Monaco explained.

While he only suffered scratches and some bruising, Hutchins said he plans to take other precautions, including additional fencing and lighting.

"I don't know if the coyotes were looking to get the chickens. Probably, I would assume," Hutchins said. "But that wasn't going to happen with me out here. I had no choice because it was me or the animal."
A police officer in Londonderry, New Hampshire has a new title.

Sgt. Michael McCutcheon, a police officer first, had growing ambitions.

"I knew I wanted to be a policeman," McCutcheon said. "I'm always looking for new things to do," said McCutcheon.

That curiosity led the Londonderry Sergeant on a unique career path to doctor.

"The first time you hear it, it's pretty amazing," he said.

Since 2012, Dr. McCutcheon has been in college earning his doctorate. He recently defended his dissertation and it was accepted.

McCutcheon based his research on this question, 'does time on a police force moderate a relationship between emotional intelligence and the stress of police officers?'

"I wanted to look at how we can better serve policemen who are exposed to continuous stress and traumatic events and if emotional intelligence would be something that would help them deal with those events," McCutcheon said.

The new doctor joined the police force with his bachelor's degree and went on to gain his master's. From there he kept going despite admitting not having a less than studious start.

"Where I am now and where I came from, I wasn't a great student," McCutcheon said. "I wasn't interested."

He said criminal justice grabbed his attention and his passion for teaching.

"And now I can't get enough," McCutcheon said.

This passion motivates him to start his own business on YouTube that takes him all over the country teaching "Forensic Education."

"When I created these classes, I had me in mind, you're not going to be able to fall asleep, because it's exciting and it's different than traditional police training," McCutcheon said.

Training that gave him the discipline to complete his doctorate in education at Nashua's Rivier University.

"I sleep very little, wake up early and go to bed late," he said.

He said the support of the Londonderry Police helped him achieve this accomplishment.

"The Londonderry police educational program, they helped me get my master's degree," McCutcheon said. "They helped pay for my master's degree and they helped pay for my doctoral program."

McCutcheon said even though he's busy with work and his studies, he still makes time for his family and it was also their support that got him through the process.

"They made me the most touching cards of congratulations that I received," McCutcheon said. "Pretty amazing that they appreciated how hard I worked."

Work, Dr. McCutcheon said, he's just getting started.

"I'm looking forward to reaching as many people as possible," McCutcheon said.

Dr. McCutcheon said he will receive his doctoral diploma on May 12.
City and school leaders in Lowell, Massachusetts said Lowell High School will reopen on Monday and every aspect of the heating system has been inspected and is safe.

We dont want to cut any corners when it comes to the safety and well being of our students, Lowell City Manager Eileen Donoghue said at the Friday news conference.

Crews spent the last week inspecting the aging heating system after several gas leaks were detected in the field house, prompting administrators to close the school for three days prior to April break.

Lowell Fire Chief Jeff Winward says people in the building were not at risk.

There were never any dangerous levels of gas in any of the buildings at the high school. Only a small amount, Winward said.

The city said three gas units at the high school will be replaced at a cost of $255,000, but the city manager stressed that in the long-term they need a new high school in Lowell.

We can no longer put band-aids on this system. We can longer try and replace parts - that has been done, Donoghue said.

The news conference was held amid calls for students to have a new school building and questions about what other problems exist in the building.

"Give them a new school already," Ann Draper, the mother of a Lowell High School student, said.

Lowell High School was built in 1920, with later additions in 1980.

The city is now looking at the option to renovate and add to the existing campus on Father Morissette Boulevard, rather than build a new school in the suburbs.

The estimated cost for the project in the city is $350 million.

"That's what I think has to be addressed, is not what whether it should be remodeled or be a new school, but are we getting a proper education for our kids," Lowell resident Paul Dunfey said.

A spokesperson for Mayor William Samaras said he did not have time to meet with NBC10 Boston earlier this week. However, according to the Lowell Sun, Mayor Samaras said parents are "attempting to scuttle the building of any high school."

Tammie Heartquist has a freshman in the school and calls the mayor's claim "absolutely ridiculous."

"We have a daughter that is in seventh grade and we are strongly considering other options for her, which is very sad because she's also been in Lowell Public Schools since kindergarten," said Heartquist.

Parents told NBC10 Boston they would agree to pay more in taxes if it meant building a new school.


Christian shop hosts Dereham's new community fridge Christian shop hosts Dereham's new community fridge

This week a new community fridge was installed at Green Pastures Christian bookshop on Dereham High Street as part of a growing initiative in Breckland to tackle food waste.
Philip Daish-Handy plays at Croft Hall, Hungerford, on Saturday

English cellist Philip Daish-Handy, who has entertained audiences across the world, will be performing at Croft Hall, Hungerford, on Saturday (8pm), as part of Arts For Hungerfords year round programme of events.

Known for his musicianship and projection, Philip came to prominence after winning the prestigious Music at Beaulieu Competition in 2005. This led to solo performances at the Wigmore Hall; Steinway Hall; Adrian Boult Hall; Coda Hall; and Symphony Hall. Philip then went on to win the prestigious Symphony Hall Recital Prize in 2010. As a solo artist, Philip has played all the major concertos with orchestras throughout the UK.

Philip has recently released two encore CDs with Martin Penrose and a celebrated rendition of the Elgar Cello Concerto. Future recordings releases include the Haydn Concertos. Philip holds several important teaching positions for the West Berkshire Cello Academy, the National Chamber Music Course and Yorkshire Young Sinfonia, and is principal cellist of the Nova Foresta Classical Players.

He will be joined in Hungerford by Martin Penrose to celebrate the release of their second album. These two artists will perform a colourful selection of great music, including The Swan, Summertime and other classics.

Arts for Hungerford are offering free entry for up to two children per adult to this event. Buy tickets from Hungerford Bookshop or through ArtsForHungerford.com and just bring along your children on the night.
Teresa Gandy is using her experience to help small firms

Teresa Gandy

Growing up in rural south Somerset, Teresa Gandy was told a university degree was unnecessary for anyone unless they wanted to be a doctor, lawyer or teacher.

This led her to choose a different path; one that she would later discover would hamper her chances of even getting asked for an interview.

At 18 I had no idea what I wanted to do for a career and at that time, because of where we lived, the advice was go to uni if you want to be a doctor, a lawyer or a teacher, otherwise dont bother, she explains.

So I learnt secretarial skills and joined a company, working in admin.

Other jobs followed, in social services, at RNAS Yeovilton and in the marketing department at a poultry incubator manufacturer.

Her next move saw her join Yeovil Hospital as the assistant manager of the procurement team, which she describes as her first experience of big business.

Time off travelling with her now-husband followed, before his job brought them to Berkshire on their return from Australia.

I obviously looked for a job in procurement, she adds, but was killer-questioned out every time because I didnt have a degree.

I had to basically start my career again, at 28.

At 18, a degree would have given me no help whatsoever, but at 28 not having one was crippling as I couldnt even get through the door.

I think things are changing again now, though, because tuition fees are so high.

Teresa eventually started working as a temp in the Vodafone recruitment team and ended up spending 15 years with the

communications giant.

I started out temping in the recruitment team, before I moved over the road into the Global team, she says. The best bit was running an employee experience programme globally.

It was all about HR delivering a consumer-grade experience to their internal customers; the employees.

It had never been done before and I loved it.

Being able to have a programme that was being rolled out across 21 countries was brilliant.

It was a challenge to put a financial benefit on it, but the knock-on improvements were huge.

By early 2016, however, life was very different for Teresa, now a mother of two.

Her eldest son was due to start secondary school and the youngest start primary school, so, when the opportunity to take redundancy from Vodafone came up, she took it.

She spent nine months taking time out with her children before she started to consider going back to work, by now knowing that she wanted to work for herself.

She says she always knew she had something to offer businesses and was keen to work with smaller companies, who didnt usually have the skills or budget to consider customer experience accurately.

She had the experience of world-class strategies, she just needed to pan them down for the smaller business.

The 42-year-old set up Clarity CX in January 2017 and now supports companies with customer experience, staff training, developing action plans and workshops.

She also partners with marketing businesses to utilise the positive feedback and offers feedback capture and reporting as an outsourced service.

People think of customer feedback as picking up complaints, but it is also about using the positive and thats what I love doing, Teresa adds.

Clarity CX is about me utilising my best in-practice approaches and applying that to help small businesses.

Using that approach, Teresa has worked with several primary schools to capture parent feedback and help with Ofsted progression plans.

She has also helped to make pupil premium reporting easier, facilitating the identification of a larger number of eligible students, which, in turn, means more money for both the school and the child.

During her time networking last year, Teresa says it became clear that, although there is an abundance of advice online for the small business owner, there was no practical guidance on how to implement it and what it means for each individual.

And so the Multi Hat Club was born.

You can download anything these days, but it is about applying it to your business and doing it yourself, not paying someone else to do it, she adds.

As a sole trader, your needs are very different to a small business, which can be anything up to 49 employees.

Around 89 per cent of businesses in the UK last year had no employees at all, but everything seems geared to the 11 per cent that do.

The Multi Hat Club is about getting people that help without them having to outsource.

The not-for-profit organisation runs weekly video clinics with its panel of experts on a range of topics that most business owners encounter.

Membership costs from 25 per month, which Teresa points out is the cost of a networking event, and will give people access to a host of resources and advice, as well as one-to-one conference calls with the experts.

All clinics are recorded, meaning a library of advice is being established for members to call on as and when they need it.

The website is currently in the beta testing stage, but, Teresa says, they are getting some great feedback.

Open to anyone in the UK, the Multi Hat Club, which has eight experts working with it, is now endorsed by West Berkshire Council.

Teresa, who lives in Thatcham with her husband and children, is hoping to encourage larger businesses in the area to support their initiative by sponsoring an individuals membership for three, six or 12 months.

Looking to the future, she says she intends to focus on building up the Multi Hat Club and hopes to have around 200 members nationwide within 12 months, while continuing to work with local companies with her Clarity CX hat on.
Thatcham woman remembering father who died last year

A THATCHAM woman is shaving off her hair to raise money for the British Heart Foundation, in memory of her father.

Joanne Smith, 27, is hoping to raise 500 for the British Heart Foundation by shaving her head live on Facebook today (Friday) at 7.30pm.

Miss Smith said: My dad passed away last May, and I lost my cousin a week later as well.

It was a rough time.

Two years before that, my dad had a couple of strokes and they didnt know what was causing it.

Neil Smith was 45 when he died of a heart attack, and the family were told he had suffered from an undiagnosed heart defect

Miss Smith said: My dads heart failed and gave up one evening when he was fixing something outside.

He passed away in the country under the stars.

I miss my dad immensely.

The family have supported each other through the process and have grown closer than ever before.

Anyone who knows me, knows my hair is important.

I have a hair change every two months. I spend a lot of money on my hair.

My dad would probably chuckle because he had a lot of bad shaving experiences from my nan.

Once he was going out on a date and my nan shaved his head, but forgot the attachment and gave him a zero all over.

He didnt go on the date.

He would probably call me a fruit cake for doing this.

The shave is being supported by SalonVIP in Thatcham, a family-run salon where Miss Smith has been a customer for some time.

It will be broadcast live on www.facebook.com/SaonVIP/

To donate, go to www.justgiving.com/fundraising/jo-marie3
The Ezra Woods American Legion Post 31 in New Milford will honor its namesake Saturday at 11 a.m.

Rifle honors will be offered, a flag folding ceremony will be held and Taps will be played at Woods gravesite at Center Cemetery in town.

The event will recognize the 100th anniversary of Woods death.

Woods, who was born in 1897, was the first veteran from New Milford to be killed  on April 21, 1918  during World War I.

Jeff McBreairty of the local post said, according to local newspapers, Woods is interred in Cemetery 72 in France.

Following is information about Woods submitted by McBreairty:

Woods grew up in New Milford and worked on the family farm. When the recruiters of the 102nd Connecticut National Guard came to New Milford in 1917 to find recruits to man its unit up to 2,500 men in manpower, Woods was among the men who signed up.

In the spring of 1918, the Connecticut Regiment, along with several other units in the Massachusetts, all in one the Yankee Division  (26th Infantry), were called to active duty and became the first American units to arrive in Europe to fight.

It is believed that the expression of Yanks or Yankees was originated at this time by the French because of this unit, The Yankee Division, 26th Infantry.

In April of that year, the 102nd Connecticut unit was used to relieve a forward position unit in Remieres Woods, near Seicheprey, France.

The battle front was quiet on the cold night of April 19-20. At about 2 or 3 a.m., the 102nd came under a full German offensive.

The fighting was severe, with orders to hold at all costs, and the unit held steadfast.

Nearing dawn, the Germans suddenly retreated and the battle came to an end.

The casualty loss of the 102nd was more than 80 percent. One of the casualities was Woods.

He was the first listed as missing in action, but later changed to killed in action.

There was no formal American Legion post at the time of his death. Veterans met in the Grand Army of the Republic Memorial Building, which is presently the New Milford Public Library.

The American Legion in New Milford was officially formed and created in 1931 in honor of Woods being the first fallen soldier from New Milford during World War I.
New evidence shows that the Bajau tribes from Indonesia, who are known to dive deep into the waters for up to 70 metres have evolved to develop larger spleens. Previous studies have shown that free dives and spleens have an association.

A larger spleen helps humans to free dive into deeper waters for longer periods of time. This is the first time that a study has shown that genetics and evolution plays a role in spleen size of the divers. The new study results were published in the latest issue of the journal Cell.

Breathtaking Human Adaptations / Cell, April 19, 2018 (Vol. 173, Issue 3) Play

The researchers from the Universities of Copenhagen, Cambridge and Berkeley, write that the indigenous nomadic tribes of Bajau have been called sea nomads and they have travelled all over the Southeast Asian seas. They live in houseboats and forage for food in water using spears by diving deep into them. They have lived in these regions for a thousand years now. Mostly they are colonized presently around the islands of Indonesia. This tribe is well known for their incredible breath-holding capacities that allow them to work under water. They can dive in at around 70m of water with simple weights and wooden goggles. Researcher Melissa Ilardo explains that they never dive competitively so the duration they can spend under water at one-go has never been measured. However it can be to the tune of 13 minutes at one go she said.

According to first author Ilardo this ability to hold breaths for so long prompted the team to look at the spleens of these people. She explained that the connection between genetics, enlarged spleen and diving has not been made before in humans. However, Weddell seals which are deep diving seals, are known to have disproportionately large spleens. She explains that the same evolution theories could be working for these people as well.

She said that the human spleen plays a role in human dive response  or the bodys response to diving into water. When a person dives into water the body is submerged in cold water, the heart rate needs to slow down, blood vessels of the limbs need to constrict to allow more blood flow to the vital organs, and protective mechanisms that work when there is oxygen deprivation are triggered. The spleen contracts in these situations. The same works when a person is facing a situation of acute oxygen deprivation called acute hypoxia. The spleen, when it contracts during hypoxia periods lets out a spurt of oxygenated red blood cells into the blood stream. This leads to a 9 percent rise in oxygen and prolongs dive time.

The team spent some time in Jaya Bakti, Indonesia to examine the people of this tribe. They performed genetic tests by obtaining samples from these people and also performed ultrasound scans of the spleens. They compared the scans of these Bajau tribes with Saluan tribes that live nearby and are primarily land-dwelling. The genetic samples and scans were analyzed at the University of Copenhagen and results showed that the Bajau have a median spleen size 50% bigger than the Saluan. The diving as well as the non-diving Bajau had enlarged spleens which meant that there was genetics at play. A specific gene called PDE10A was found among the Bajau. This was absent in the Saluan.

This gene is also though to control the thyroid gland and its principal hormone Thyroxine or T4. Ilardo explained that thyroid and spleen sizes have been linked to each other before in mice. Genetically changed mice that had lower levels of T4 tend to have smaller spleen sizes.
Researchers at Bar-Ilan University in Israel have found that male fruit flies (Drosophilia melanogaster) enjoy ejaculation and sex and are also keen on alcohol consumption. The results of this novel study that shows that sexual gratification is preserved across species was published in the latest issue of the journal Current Biology this week.

Microscopic extreme sharp and detailed image of head and eye of a fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster). Image Credit: Tomatito / Shutterstock

Galit Shohat-Ophir, researcher, explained that there are tiny amounts of a peptide called Neuropeptide F that is present in the brain. When the male flies mate successfully, the researchers found that there was a rise in this peptide level. As an alternate reward, when these male flies are not allowed to mate, they are more inclined to consume alcohol the researchers found.

Shohat-Ophir and lead author Shir Zer-Krispil along with their team worked on this study in collaboration with HHMI Janelia Research USA. They used novel optogenetic tools. They genetically modified the flies first to make sure that certain neurons in thyem light up when specific light was thrown on them. When the flies were exposed to red light, neurons that contained neuropeptide corazonin (CRZ) lit up or got activated. These neurons present in the abdomen of the flies are responsible to trigger release of sperm within the semen of the flies. Shohat-Ophir explained that the team looked at gratification or pleasure that the flies obtained at sexual encounters  either during courtship, response to female pheromones and release of the seminal fluid during ejaculation.

The flies flocked towards the red light in order to activate their CRZ neurons, the team found. This made them ejaculate and provided them with a pleasurable sensation the team noted. The flies were then provided with the red light as well as a smell that reminded them of ejaculation. The flies preferred both the visual as well as olfactory or smell stimulation. Continued stimulation and pleasure also showed raised neuropeptide F levels in the brain of these flies after a few days. This was same as in flies that actually mated with females.

Now all flies were offered liquid food and liquid food spiked with alcohol. These satisfied males preferred non-alcoholic food. The male flies that were not allowed to mate and also did not have their CRZ stimulated in red light to cause artificial gratification, preferred liquid food containing alcohol.

Shohat-Ophir explained that this study points towards brain behavior with drugs of abuse. Drugs of abuse use the same systems in the brain that are used to process natural rewards. This allows us to use simple model organisms to study aspects of drug addiction, including the interplay between natural and drug rewards and the connection between experience and the mechanisms that underlie the risk to develop drug addiction, she says. More studies are needed to understand this phenomenon better say the researchers.
Findings from Canadian Prostate Cancer Genome Network (CPC-GENE) researchers and their collaborators, published today in Cell, show that the aggressiveness of an individual prostate cancer can be accurately assessed by looking at how that tumor has evolved. This information can be used to determine what type and how much treatment should be given to each patient, or if any is needed at all.

The researchers analyzed the whole genome sequences of 293 localized prostate cancer tumors, linked to clinical outcome data. These were then further analyzed using machine learning, a type of statistical technique, to infer the evolutionary past of a tumor and to estimate its trajectory. They found that those tumors that had evolved to have multiple types of cancer cells, or subclones, were the most aggressive. Fifty-nine per cent of tumors in the study had this genetic diversity, with 61 per cent of those leading to relapse following standard therapy.

"By incorporating time into the context of the existing knowledge we have about where a tumor is at diagnosis we were able to very accurately identify those patients whose prostate tumours needed no treatment, those men who could be cured by existing treatments, and those men who had very aggressive tumours and may have benefitted from novel therapeutic options," says Dr. Paul Boutros, Principal Investigator, Ontario Institute for Cancer Research and leader of CPC-GENE.

"Clinical decision making in treating prostate cancer can be very difficult. These findings pave the way for a new tool to improve our ability to determine the best approach for each individual patient, including sparing patients from unnecessary treatment or over-treatment and the associated side effects," says Professor Robert Bristow, Director of the Manchester Cancer Research Centre at the University of Manchester U.K., formerly of the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre in Toronto.

"Tumors are a community of related cancer cells, and by examining their DNA using machine learning, we can gain insight into how they evolved from normal cells. In this paper, we show that the past evolutionary history of a tumor helps predict whether that tumor will progress into an aggressive form," says Dr. Quaid Morris, Associate Professor, The Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research, University of Toronto, who collaborated with the CPC-GENE team on the study.

"Prostate cancer is the most common cancer among men," says Reza Moridi, Ontario's Minister of Research, Innovation and Science. "Ontario congratulates this research team, whose work is pointing the way toward improved testing and treatment."

The study's findings are not its only contributions to prostate cancer research. The sequencing data generated during the course of the study are now freely available online to researchers worldwide to carry out further analyses, becoming the largest prostate cancer genomics resource available to-date.

CPC-GENE is a team of multidisciplinary researchers from across Canada working to crack the genetic code of prostate cancer. Through funding of approximately $20 million, research of this magnitude has been made possible through a partnership between the Movember Foundation, Prostate Cancer Canada, and the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research. Dr. Stuart Edmonds, Vice-President of Research, Health Promotion and Survivorship at Prostate Cancer Canada, has released the following statement:

"From the tireless work of researchers to the selfless giving of donors, we applaud the efforts of everyone who has played a role in helping make CPC-GENE possible. Since its beginnings as an ambitious undertaking that was massive in scope, the goal of this project has been to greatly improve personalized care for men with prostate cancer. The findings published in Cell - widely considered one of the most prestigious and highest impact medical journals - represent a monumental stride towards that goal. Together, we will continue to advance this important work on behalf of the one in seven Canadian men who will be diagnosed with prostate cancer and their families."
Colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in the country. While the rates of colorectal cancer among patients older than 50 years old has decreased in recent years due to screening, it has increased by 22 percent among those under the age of 50, which could place a burden on the health care system over the next decade.

Researchers at Boston Medical Center, in collaboration with Northwestern University, are using imaging technology to create an effective and inexpensive way to screen for colorectal cancer among young adults.

"This is an entirely new issue that we are facing in the medical community, and we're not entirely sure why it's happening," says lead researcher Hemant Roy, MD, section chief of gastroenterology at BMC. "What we do know is there needs to be a way to identify those patients who are at high risk and ensure they get the treatment they need."

Researchers will use new imaging technology developed by Vadim Backman, PhD at Northwestern, called nanocytology, to view rectal swabs and look for advanced adenomas, markers of potential colorectal cancer. Patients who have advanced adenomas would be referred to a specialist for a colonoscopy to test for colorectal cancer. Nanocytology allows scientists to visualize particles much smaller than a normal microscope and identify cancer risk markers accurately. The test will be low-cost, and can be performed in a primary care setting.

"We're aiming to create a test that won't take much time to conduct, will be far less invasive for patients than a colonoscopy, and most importantly, can save lives," says Roy.

The research is part of the R33 Cancer Moonshot Project, and is a 3 year $1.5 million grant from the National Cancer Institute. Once researchers create this test and achieve quality goals, they will begin a clinical trial, which can then lead to regulatory approval and launch in clinical practice. 860 patients will be recruited from Boston Medical Center with the analysis done at Northwestern University.
A new blood test using gold nanoparticles could soon give oncologists an early and more accurate prognosis of how cancer treatment is progressing and help guide the on-going therapy of patients.

UQ's AIBN Professor Matt Trau and PhD student Jing Wang

Researchers at The University of Queensland have developed new nanotechnology to monitor the diversity of individual cancer cells circulating in the body.

In close collaboration with oncologists at the Olivia Newton John Cancer Research Institute (ONJCRI), the technology was tested on blood samples from melanoma patients and was able to track critical changes in spreading tumor cells before, during and after treatment.

UQs Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN) PhD student Jing Wang said the simple nanotechnology looked at changes in circulating tumor cells, which could indicate whether a cancer is attempting to spread and reveal its response to treatment.

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) have been shed by the original tumor and entered the bloodstream  they can then form into new tumors if they lodge in distant tissue, Ms Wang said.

CTCs can be found in the blood by looking for distinctive proteins on their surface, but the current process is time consuming and can typically only identify one type of CTC protein at a time.

Ms Wang said this was an issue because the types of proteins on the surfaces of CTCs could vary from one type of cancer to another, and even within in the same cancer.

If you go looking for just one kind of protein, you can miss a lot of CTCs, she said.

We have developed a simple technology which uses a special type of gold nanoparticle attached to different antibodies, which can stick to different proteins on a wide variety of CTCs.

These nanoparticles emit a unique barcoded signal when hit with laser light, and this signal changes ever so slightly if that nanoparticle encounters a CTC and sticks to it, making them easy to detect.

With the help of oncology collaborators at the ONJCRI, the researchers demonstrated that the diagnostic approach could be easily translated to the clinic.

The gold nanoparticle technology was tested on blood samples taken from melanoma patients during of the course of cancer treatment.

The technology successfully tracked in real-time how the diversity of tumor cell populations were changing in response to particular therapies for all of the patients studied, and was highly predictive of treatment effectiveness and patient outcomes.

AIBN researcher Professor Matt Trau said they hope the technology can be developed into a simple hand-held device.

The gold nanoparticle technology is easy to use and extremely sensitive to CTC diversity  it can detect multiple types simultaneously down to as few as 10 CTCs in a 1 milliliter blood sample  and we saw dramatic changes during treatment for all patients studied, Professor Trau said.

Olivia Newton John Cancer Research Institutes Medical Director Professor Jonathan Cebon said having information about changes at a cellular level had the potential to guide cancer therapy in real-time.

Signs of drug resistance can be identified which can help doctors and patients make informed decisions about treatment, Professor Cebon said.

The technology could also greatly improve our ability to study how tumor cells change in response to treatment and could help answer important biological questions about how treatment resistance arises.

Source: https://www.uq.edu.au/news/node/121751
A new analysis indicates that opioid pain medications may not be as safe for hemodialysis patients as recommendations suggest, and therefore, their use should be limited when possible. The analysis appears in an upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (CJASN).

Individuals with kidney failure who are undergoing hemodialysis frequently experience pain and often receive prescriptions for opioid medications. These patients may be especially vulnerable to opioid-related complications due to factors such as their kidneys' reduced ability to clear drugs from the body.

To evaluate the risks of opioid use in patients undergoing hemodialysis, Julie Ishida, MD, MAS (University of California, San Francisco and San Francisco VA Medical Center) and her colleagues examined information from 140,899 Medicare-covered adults in the United States who were receiving in-center hemodialysis in 2011.

Sixty-four percent of patients received an opioid prescription in 2011, and 11%, 5%, and 3% of patients had an episode of altered mental status, fall, and fracture requiring an emergency room visit or hospitalization, respectively. Opioid use was associated with higher risks for altered mental status, fall, and fracture in a dose-dependent manner. These risks were present even when patients were not prescribed high doses and when they received the types of opioid medications that have been recommended for use in patients undergoing hemodialysis.

"Opioid use in patients receiving hemodialysis, even at lower dosing, is not without risk, and the balance of risks and benefits in this population should be carefully considered," said Dr. Ishida. "Future research and strategies to predict and reduce the risks of opioid use in patients receiving hemodialysis are needed."

An accompanying Patient Voice editorial provides the perspective of David White, of Hillcrest Heights, Maryland, who remembers the first time a sharp large-gauge needle was inserted into his fistula for his first dialysis session, a procedure that was repeated over 1000 times over the next 6 years. Bracing himself for those painful "sticks" became part of his dialysis ritual. "Everyone's path to dialysis is different-;the permutations are staggering-;and the fact that each session can range from being a pleasant visit to an inconvenience to a traumatic experience or worse adds an additional level of complexity," he writes. "Pain management protocols can range from precise methodologies to 'one-size-fits-all' to woefully dismissive approaches, a sure recipe for patient harm." White points to the need for more pain management research as it relates directly to both clinical care planning and the quality of life for patients undergoing hemodialysis. He also stresses that opioids should be the last pain management option, not the first.
Congressional Republicans have struck a decidedly different tone when talking about the Affordable Care Act, and the Democrats have introduced a new Medicare expansion bill.

Meanwhile, states are talking about Medicaid expansion, and a federal court's ruling on Maryland's proposal to battle drug price-gouging sends shock waves nationwide. Both chambers of Congress have been busy introducing legislative fixes for the nation's opioid epidemic with lawmakers promising that legislation will land this spring.

This week's panelists for KHN's "What the Health?" are Sarah Jane Tribble of Kaiser Health News, Joanne Kenen of Politico, Margot Sanger-Katz of The New York Times and Paige Winfield Cunningham of The Washington Post.

Among the takeaways from this week's podcast:

In the upcoming election season, the tables may be turned: Democrats likely will spend more on health care ads than Republicans.

Democrats think that this congressional campaign season they can effectively target vulnerable Republicans by focusing on the GOP's support for repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act.

Republicans, on the other hand, predict they have a winning argument with their repeal of the unpopular requirement that people get insurance or pay a penalty. Campaigns likely will also point to the partys efforts to encourage more flexible  but perhaps less protective  coverage options, such as association and short-term health plans.

Two Democratic senators, Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Chris Murphy of Connecticut, introduced a bill this week that would allow individuals who haven't yet reached 65 and small businesses to buy into the Medicare program. It would also substantially increase subsidies for people buying ACA marketplace plans.

Democratic efforts to expand the population that can use Medicare could hit opposition from two key groups: health care providers, such as hospitals and doctors, who object to the lower reimbursement, and seniors, who may be afraid that resources could be stretched too thin.

Medicaid expansion advocates in some conservative states seek to follow Maine in getting the issue on the ballot, but those efforts in very conservative states, such as Utah and Idaho, face immense obstacles.

Despite a court last week throwing out Maryland's new law on drug pricing, other states are moving forward on efforts to bring more transparency to what consumers are charged for their prescriptions.

Lawmakers are scurrying to push through Congress efforts to help fight the nation's opioid epidemic. One measure, by Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.), is expected to be marked up next week. Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), the head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, says his panel will bring a bill to the floor by Memorial Day.

Plus, for "extra credit," the panelists recommend their favorite health stories of the week they think you should read, too.

Joanne Kenen: The New York Times' "How Profiteers Lure Women Into Often-Unneeded Surgery," by Matthew Goldstein and Jessica Silver-Greenberg

Margot Sanger-Katz: STAT.com's "A 'Breakthrough in Organ Preservation': Study Shows Keeping Livers Warm Helps Preserve Them for Transplant," by Eric Boodman

Paige Winfield Cunningham: The Washington Post's "Science Hinted That Cancer Patients Could Take Less of a $148,000-a-Year Drug. Its Maker Tripled the Price of a Pill," by Carolyn Y. Johnson

Sarah Jane Tribble: The Washington Post's "One Last Time: Barbara Bush Had Already Faced a Death More Painful Than Her Own," by Steve Hendrix

Additional Reading

Sanger-Katz recommended two stories during the opioid discussion. Here are the links to those, too:

Reason's "America's War on Pain Pills Is Killing Addicts and Leaving Patients in Agony," by Jacob Sullum

Harper's "The Pain Refugees: The Forgotten Victims of America's Opioid Crisis," by Brian Goldstone

To hear all our podcasts, click here.

And subscribe to What the Health? on iTunes, Stitcher or Google Play.
In recent years, researchers have firmly established that gene mutations appearing for the first time, called de novo mutations, contribute to approximately one-third of cases of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In a new study, an international team led by scientists at University of California San Diego School of Medicine have identified a culprit that may explain some of the remaining risk: rare inherited variants in regions of non-coding DNA.

The findings are published online in the April 20, 2018 issue of Science.

The newly discovered risk factors differ from known genetic causes of autism in two important ways. First, these variants do not alter the genes directly but instead disrupt the neighboring DNA control elements that turn genes on and off, called cis-regulatory elements or CREs. Second, these variants do not occur as new mutations in children with autism, but instead are inherited from their parents.

"For ten years we've known that the genetic causes of autism consist partly of de novo mutations in the protein sequences of genes" said Jonathan Sebat, a professor of psychiatry, cellular and molecular medicine and pediatrics at UC San Diego School of Medicine and chief of the Beyster Center for Genomics of Psychiatric Genomics. "However, gene sequences represent only 2 percent of the genome."

To investigate the other 98 percent of the genome in ASD, Sebat and his colleagues analyzed the complete genomes of 9,274 subjects from 2,600 families. One thousand were sequenced in San Diego at Human Longevity Inc. (HLI) and at Illumina Inc., and DNA sequences were analyzed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego. These data were then combined with other large studies from the Simons Simplex Collection and the Autism Speaks MSSNG Whole Genome Sequencing Project.

The researchers then analyzed structural variants, deleted or duplicated segments of DNA that disrupt regulatory elements of genes, dubbed CRE-SVs. From the complete genomes of families, the researchers found that CRE-SVs that are inherited from parents also contributed to ASD.

"We also found that CRE-SVs were inherited predominantly from fathers, which was a surprise," said co-first author William M. Brandler, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar in Sebat's lab at UC San Diego and bioinformatics scientist at HLI.

"Previous studies have found evidence that some protein-coding variants are inherited predominantly from mothers, a phenomenon known as a maternal origin effect. The paternal origin effect we see for non-coding variants suggests that the inherited genetic contribution from mothers and fathers may be qualitatively different."

Sebat said current research does not explain with certainty what mechanism determines these parent-of-origin effects, but he has proposed a plausible model.

"There is a wide spectrum of genetic variation in the human population, with coding variants having strong effects and noncoding variants having weaker effects", he said. "If men and women differ in their capacity to tolerate such variants, this could give rise to the parent-of-origin effects that we see."
International research consortium led by researchers from the University of Helsinki, Finland, discovered new information related to a rare form of leukemia called aggressive NK-cell leukemia. Potential new treatment options were found which are highly warranted as currently this disease usually leads to rapid death of patients.

The study was published in Nature Communications.

Aggressive NK-cell leukemia (ANKL) is a cancer in which leukemia cells consist of natural killer cells, a part of our immune system in normal conditions. The disease is very rare and aggressive: with the current treatment options (cytostatic drugs and hematopoietic stem cell transplantation) patients usually survive only a couple of months. This leukemia type is more common in the Asian population. However, related diseases such as NK/T-cell lymphomas occur also in western countries.

Together with Japanese, South-Korean, Taiwanese and US research teams, the researchers from the University of Helsinki aimed to discover which genetic defects are typical in this type of leukemia.

"ANKL patients often had mutations in the STAT3 and DDX3X genes which points towards partly shared genetic background with other NK- and T-cell malignancies," says Professor Satu Mustjoki whose group initially discovered somatic STAT3 mutations in LGL leukemia.

By comparing the exome sequencing data from ANKL patients to previously published datasets from NK/T-cell lymphoma patients, researchers also uncovered novel gene amplifications in the JAK-STAT signaling pathway. In some cases, the amplified regions in the genome also included the PD-L1 gene which has therapeutic potential. In other lymphoma types, tumors with amplifications in the PD-L1 gene have responded well to novel immune checkpoint inhibitor therapies.

Researchers also aimed to discover novel potential drugs for the treatment of ANKL by testing the ability of over 400 different drugs to kill malignant and normal NK cells in cell culture conditions. Some potential drug candidates were discovered: NK cells were especially sensitive for drugs which inhibit JAK tyrosine kinases and anti-apoptotic BCL family members. JAK inhibitors inhibit the same signaling pathway in which genetic alterations were discovered in ANKL patients.

"JAK inhibitors, currently used in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis and some other hematological diseases, could potentially improve the treatment of various NK-cell malignancies," says MD/PhD student Olli Dufva who is the first author in the publication.
From one stem cell to many differentiated body cells: Scientists from the MDC in Berlin, along with collaborating researchers in Munich, have published a comprehensive lineage tree of a whole adult animal in the journal Science. This was made possible by a combination of RNA and computational technologies.

How do uniform stem cells become complex body cells that serve a wide variety of functions? The differentiation of stem cells into the multiplicity of cell types in the human body is an enigma of modern medical science. An interdisciplinary group of scientists from the Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) in Berlin and the Helmholtz Center in Munich has made important progress with a comprehensive study published in the journal Science. By combining sophisticated single-cell RNA technology with nucleic acid sequencing and computational methods, the scientists were able to establish a detailed cell atlas of an entire complex adult animal, the Schmidtea mediterranea flatworm, and reconstruct the lineage tree of all identified cells. Their work also provides new insights into cellular regeneration processes. "It opens the door to powerful new approaches to study the cell composition of organs, tissues, and developmental stages and to understand the molecular mechanisms of regeneration," says Professor Nikolaus Rajewsky, head of Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology (BIMSB), at the MDC, and senior author of the study.

Researchers reconstructed a comprehensive lineage tree, including 23 cellular differentiation pathways

Planarians such as Schmidtea mediterranea are popular study objects because they are immortal and can completely regrow if cut into pieces. They possess a large number of adult pluripotent stem cells that constantly renew all tissues and cell types. "For understanding how cells differentiate, we need to compare gene expression profiles from cells at various differentiation stages, like the ones we find in planarians," says Dr. Mireya Plass from the MDC. "We dissociated whole animals and characterized thousands of individual cells by sequencing their messenger RNA transcripts." The scientists identified 37 different cell types, 23 of them terminally differentiated, as well as numerous stem cells and so-called progenitor cells at several levels of differentiation.

"We then applied a new computational algorithm, PAGA, developed by Dr. Alexander Wolf, and Professor Fabian Theis in Munich, to predict a lineage tree that includes all identified cell types rooted to a single stem cell group," says Dr. Christine Kocks from the MDC. This prediction was then combined with additional computational and experimental methods to build a robust tree supported by several independent lines of evidence: sequencing of purified stem cells and cells from stem cell-depleted animals; gene expression changes; unsupervised lineage tree prediction from PAGA; and the results from a recently published method, velocyto, that predicts future cell states from mRNA metabolism estimated from precursor and mature transcripts. In addition, the researchers were able to identify gene programs involved in cell differentiation processes along this tree.

The scientists also discovered several new cell types located in the parenchyma of the animals that had been previously overlooked in molecular studies and that play an important role in the regeneration of flatworms. The proportion of these cells is significantly diminished in regenerating animals, suggesting that these cells "fuel" the body remodeling process in planarians.

Additional online and interactive resources are available to the scientific community

Scientists worldwide have immediate access to the new data on flatworm biology as well as the methods used by the team of researchers. "Our work makes it possible to study stems cells and their lineages in multiple animals. It is not only an important resource for the planarian community, but also provides a cookbook for other scientists that want to perform similar studies in other organisms", says Dr. Jordi Solana, formerly MDC, now Oxford Brookes University. Via an interactive app scientists can interrogate the data and look at the changes in gene expression of specific genes during cell differentiation and regeneration. The detailed online tutorial for lineage reconstruction using PAGA and velocyto will provide a guide for future studies. "Single-cell approaches will become an indispensable method for studying developmental and regeneration biology," concludes Nikolaus Rajewsky.

Source: https://www.mdc-berlin.de/news/press/complete-cell-atlas-and-lineage-tree-immortal-flatworm
Maruti Suzuki India's entry-level hatchback Alto retained its status as the best-selling passenger vehicle in India in 2017-18, leading the company's dominance with seven of its models featuring in the top ten list. According to data by the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM), Hyundai Motor India Ltd's (HMIL) three models made it to the list. The top ten list clearly showed the dominance of the two companies in the Indian passenger vehicle (PV) market.

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The Alto retained its number one position by selling 2,58,539 units in 2017-18 as against 2,41,635 units in the previous financial year, up 6.99 percent. MSI's new version of compact sedan Dzire moved to the second spot selling 1,96,990 units in the year. The older version of the sedan, Dzire Tour, had occupied the third spot in 2016-17 with 1,67,266 units. Similarly, the company's premium hatchback Baleno also moved up to the third spot selling 1,90,480 units in 2017-18 from seventh in 2016-17 when it clocked 1,20,804 units. The newly launched version of hatchback Swift retained its fourth position with 1,75,928 units in 2017-18. The model had sold 1,66,885 units in 2016-17. MSI's Wagon R moved down to the fifth position in the list selling 1,68,644 units from second in 2016-17 when it clocked 1,72,346 units, as per SIAM data.

2017 Hyundai Grand i10 Facelift. (Photo: Siddharth Safaya/News18.com)

HMIL's compact car Grand i10 was the sixth best-selling model in 2017-18 with 1,51,113 units, a position down from 2016-17 when it sold 1,46,228 units. Occupying the seventh position in 2017-18 was MSI's compact SUV Vitara Brezza with 1,48,462 units, moving up from the ninth position in the previous year when it sold 1,08,640 units. HMIL's premium hatchback Elite i20 was at eighth position with 1,36,182 units. The model was at the sixth spot in 2016-17 when it registered sales of 1,26,304 units. The company's popular SUV Creta was the ninth best selling PV model in 2017-18 with a total of 1,07,136 units. It did not feature in the top ten list in the previous year. MSI's another compact model completed the list retaining its tenth position at 94,721 units in 2017-18 as against 97,361 units in 2016-17, SIAM said.

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The Toyota Automobile Museum will hold its 29th Classic Car Festival, a local event aimed at promoting car culture, on Sunday, May 27 at the Aichi Expo Memorial Park in Nagakute City, Aichi Prefecture. In addition to a diverse selection of exhibitions and other events for visitors to enjoy, a parade of privately owned Japanese, American, and European classic cars dating from 1988 or earlier will be held on public roads in the vicinity.

Led by the Mirai, the world's first mass-produced fuel cell sedan, the parade will pass through Nagakute City and feature approximately 150 privately owned vehicles driven in chronological order.

2014 Toyota Mirai. (Image: Toyota)

A special exhibition will also be held, entitled "World's First Cars!" Seven of the world's first cars will be on display, all of which are considered pioneering models with significant influence on subsequent cars, including the world's first gasoline-powered vehicle; the Cadillac Model Thirty, the first vehicle to be equipped with a self-starter as standard; and the "Volvo PV544," the first car to feature the three-point seat belt, the patent for which was subsequently released and made available for free. These cars will be driven on the Classic Car Circuit. The Volvo PV544 and Audi Quattro will be exhibited and driven outside the museum for the first time at this year's event.

Cadillac Model Thirty. (Image: Toyota)

Naoaki Nunogaki, director of the Toyota Automobile Museum, commented, "This year marks the 29th edition of the Classic Car Festival, and its continued success is due to the understanding and cooperation of people from across Japan. In Japanese, we often use the word 'aisha' (beloved car) when talking about our vehicles. It is often said that the automotive industry is entering a transformational period. However, no matter how the mobility society of the future takes shape, we want people to see, talk about, and enjoy the 'aisha' of various owners, as well as famous vehicles from around the world. In this way, we hope to foster people's passion for cars so they will continue to be industrial products that are loved."

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A 21-year-old engineering student from Kerala has been killed in a road accident in Karnataka while taking part in a two-wheeler ride challenge, police said. Mithun, a final year student of a local college at Pambady in this district, was riding his bike when he met with the accident near Chitradurga on the Bengaluru-Pune National Highway at 4 am yesterday, police said. He was killed on the spot after his two-wheeler rammed into a lorry going ahead of him when its driver applied sudden brake, police in Karnataka said.

Kerala police, quoting information provided by Mithun's family, said he had a craze for speed bike riding and was participating in the Saddle Sore challenge that required riders to cover around 1,500 km in 22 hours. The challenge is conducted by a US-based organisation.

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Mithun had embarked on the journey on Tuesday evening telling his mother that he was going to neighbouring Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu, police said. Police found a sketch of the route map of his planned trip -- Palakkad-Bengaluru-Pune -- from his home in nearby Ottapalam and some jottings on the risks involved, equipment needed for emergency and eatables such as chocolates to be carried.

A case of rash and negligent driving has been registered against the lorry driver, police said.

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New Delhi: At 98.5 percent for financial year 2017-18, the Indian Railways is set to communicate its worst ever operating ratio to Comptroller Auditor General (CAG). The Union Budget in February had announced a revised operating ratio, a measure of its performance, of 96 percent.

This would be the highest ratio since 2000-01 when it was 98.3 percent, which was previously the worst-ever for the national transporter.

WHAT IS OPERATING RATIO?

Operating ratio is an indicator of the financial health of Railways. It shows how much the Railways spends to earn a rupee. An operating ratio of 98.5% essentially means that the Railways spent 98.5 paisa to earn 100 paisa (Re 1) in the last financial year. This implies a negligible surplus. Therefore, lower the operating ratio, better the financial health of the institution.

The Indian Railways defines operating ratio as the ratio of working expenses to gross earnings expressed in percentage and is worked out by the following formula:

(Working expenditure/ Gross earning) x100.

Simply put, operating ratio can be expressed as the expenditure incurred in getting every 100 rupees as earnings.

WHY THE SURGE IN OPERATING RATIO

Whenever there is a pay commission the expenditure naturally goes up. This time it was the seventh pay commission, Minister for Railways Piyush Goyal had told News18 at its event, Rising India.

Sources in the Railways said that the Rs 20,000 crore spike in salary bill and pension liability hit the Indian Railways hard.

Full implementation of the seventh pay commission dented finances, said a senior Railways official.

Major reasons that have been cited for worsening operating ratio include, less than expected revenues from monetisation of assets and dividend from PSUs going directly to the Finance Ministry after the merger of the Budget.

The Railways also couldn't meet its land monetisation and commercial exploitation target of Rs 20,000 crore as the realty market wasn't upbeat. Only Rs 10,000 crore could be extracted from the non-fare revenue box.

The operating ratio has been around 90% for the last six years. In 2013-14, it was close to 94%. The last time Railways reported an operating ratio of 98% was in 2000-2001. Globally, an operating ratio of 80% or below is considered healthy as it allows Railways to invest through its own resources in capacity expansion and modernisation.

THE ROAD AHEAD

Sources from the Ministry have told News18 that the prime focus will now be the GiveitUp campaign. The Ministry will be going big in convincing monetarily adequate senior citizens to give up subsidy. The Indian Railways is burdened with Rs 33,000 crore of passenger subsidy.

The Ministry of Railways has also reinforced the following pointers to keep the operating ratio as low as possible:

 Punctuality of passenger trains should be maintained.

 Transportation of goods traffic from one place to another place should be done quickly and expeditiously.

 Fuel economy measures should be adopted.

 Unproductive utilisation of rolling stock should be minimised.

 Full and better utilisation of rolling stock should be made.

 High standard of repair work should be executed to the rolling stock.

 Accidents, derailments should be prevented and efforts should be made to check claims.

WHAT PRECEDED

In what has been affecting the Indian Railways manoeuvring power in terms of providing better facilities to its passengers, the CAG had earlier stated that Railways operating ratio was 96.50 percent in the last quarter.

The Operating Ratio during 2016-17 had deteriorated to the lowest level of 96.50 percent since 2000-01 when it was 98.34 percent. Since Operating Ratio is a direct indicator of the working of Railways, the Ministry of Railways should also look into the various innovative ways for revenue generation and closely monitor the expenditure, said the report.

Minister for Railways Piyush Goyal, while talking about reducing losses on 13 February 2018, blamed the Trinamool Congress and Congress Party for deteriorating the financial condition of the Indian Railways and said that the political outfits owe answers to the country.

Goyal said the NDA government in 2014 got the poor performing Indian Railways as part of the legacy. If anybody is responsible for pushing the Railways to this stage then it is the Trinamool and Congress, he said.

Goyal also accused West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee of putting an additional financial burden on the Indian Railways by making loss-making Kolkata Metro a subsidiary of the Railways. The thought of the party and its leaders are limited, he quipped.
Ahmedabad: Former Gujarat minister Mayaben Kodnani has been acquitted of all charges in the 2002 Naroda Patiya massacre case.

The Gujarat High Court on Friday set aside her conviction by a special court in 2012, which had held her guilty of criminal conspiracy and murder, sentencing her to 28 years imprisonment.

Ninety-seven persons of the minority community, including 36 women and 35 children were killed by a mob on February 28, 2002 at Naroda Patiya  one of the most horrific killings in the communal riots that broke out across Gujarat after the Sabarmati Express incident at Godhra.

The Gujarat High Court found several contradictions in the statements of nine witnesses who had testified against Maya Kodnani in the lower court.

Moreover, statements of four police officers who were present at Naroda Patiya when the incident took place do not establish the presence of Maya Kodnani at Naroda Patiya.

The High Court has held that statements of witnesses differ on Maya Kodnanis presence at Naroda Patiya. Moreover, no police officer has given a statement that he or she saw Maya Kodnani at Naroda Patiya, Special Public Prosecutor Prashant Desai told the media after the verdict was delivered.

While Mayaben Kodnani remained elusive from the media, her brother Narayan Meghani reacted after the verdict, saying that the entire family is happy with the acquittal of Mayaben Kodnani. It has been a long fight for justice, but all of us in the family are happy with the order. We have full faith in the judicial process, he told News18.

Reacting to the verdict, deputy chief minister and senior BJP leader Nitin Patel said  The court has acquitted Mayaben Kodnani of all charges. Like thousands of party supporters, we welcome and respect the verdict of the High Court. Now that she has been acquitted of all charges, I personally feel that she should rejoin active politics. She is a big asset to the party and a very senior leader.

But disappointment was visibly evident on the faces of relatives of those who died in the massacre. Reacting to Mayabens acquittal, one of the relatives at Naroda Patiya said, The court should have granted death penalty to Maya Kodnani. We have seen her at Naroda Patiya and said this before the judge as well.

Khalifa Bano, a witness in the case said, I saw Mayaben Kodnani with my own eyes at Naroda Patiya that day. She was instigating the mob too. She has been acquitted and my faith in the judicial process is shaken.

Another victim Ruksana, whose parents were killed in the incident said, When the lower court had convicted Maya Kodnani, it was a relief for us. We thought justice was done. But now the High Court has set her free and this is wrong.

But it was not Maya Kodnani alone who was acquitted by the Gujarat High Court in the case. Of the 32 persons who were convicted by the lower court in August 2012, the conviction of only 12 was upheld by the High Court, with 19 others getting the benefit of doubt (one person who was convicted by the lower court died after the order).

Interestingly, the High Court held three persons guilty among the 29 accused who were acquitted by the lower court. In effect, the Gujarat High Court has pronounced 15 persons guilty in the Naroda Patiya case.

Only three of the 15 persons who have been convicted by the Gujarat High Court are found guilty of criminal conspiracy. These include Bajrang Dal leader Babu Bajrangi, Prakash Rathod and Suresh Chhara alias Langdo. Special public prosecutor Prashant Desai stated that all those who have been convicted have been handed over sentences of 21 years imprisonment.

Ninety-seven persons were killed in the Naroda Patiya massacre on February 28, 2002, a day after the Sabarmati Express burning incident at Godhra.

The Naroda Patiya case was one of the key cases whose investigation was handed over to a Supreme Court monitored Special Investigation Team in 2008. In August 2012, the special SIT court had convicted 32 persons, while acquitting 29 others in the case. Appeals were subsequently filed in the High Court by victims, SIT and those convicted in the case.
New Delhi: Family members of those accused in the rape and murder of an eight-year-old in Jammus Kathua have been sitting on a protest since their arrest, demanding an investigation by the Central Bureau of Investigation. Their contention is that the current probe by the state polices Crime Branch is biased. Members of the lawyers body in Kathua too has demanded the same. As demand swells for a CBI probe, News18 takes a look at the federal agencys track record in Jammu and Kashmir.

Shopian Double Rape and Murder

On May 30, 2009, the lifeless bodies of a 17-year-old and her 22-year-old sister-in-law were discovered near the shallow Rambi Ara stream in Shopian, south Kashmir. The two had gone to work on their small orchard across the Rambi Ara the previous day.

On the orders of the district magistrate, a three-member team of doctors was called in from nearby Pulwama district to conduct an autopsy. The team confirmed that both women had been raped. A report issued by the Forensic Science Lab Srinagar also confirmed the rape and murder on June 6, 2009. The family alleged that the women were raped and killed by Indian army men.

After a massive public outrage, the state government handed over the investigation to CBI. However, the agency gave a clean chit to five police officials who had earlier been indicted by a Special Investigation Team (SIT) of the state police that had probed the case earlier.

The CBI attributed the cause of the teens death to asphyxia as a result of ante-mortem drowning in a stream and said the injuries on her head were simple in nature, not sufficient to cause death. In the case of the 22-year-old, the charge-sheet said there were no ante-mortem injuries and death was a result of drowning by asphyxia.

Pathribal Fake Encounter

In 2003, the CBI took over investigation into the killing of five civilians by Army allegedly in a staged gunfight. The army had picked up the civilians from their homes, killed them and mutilated their bodies beyond recognition before labeling them as Pakistani militants responsible for massacre of 36 Sikhs at Chittisinghpora in 2000.

The CBI in its charge sheet stated that following the killing of Sikhs in Chittisinghpora, the army unit based in the area was under "tremendous psychological pressure" to show results. The CBI indicted personnel of 7 Rashtriya Rifles camped at Shangus in the fake encounter.

The CBI had said the army personnel entered into a criminal conspiracy to pick up some innocent persons and staged an encounter.

The Supreme Court on May 1, 2012 gave the army eight weeks to decide whether the accused should be tried by a regular criminal court or face a court-martial.

On June 29, 2012, the army opted for Court of Inquiry to try the five accused. However, on January 23, 2014, army the closed the case saying the evidence recorded couldn't establish prima facie case against any of the accused.

The families, in April 2016, filed a writ petition in the High Court, seeking re-opening of the case and re-conducting the trial of all the accused in a criminal court. The writ was dismissed.

Later, the families filed the same writ in the Supreme Court, which on August 17 last year issued notice to the Government of India, army and the CBI, rekindling hope among the families of the victims.

The Supreme Court, however, in August 2017, gave a glimmer of hope to the kin of five villagers killed by the army by admitting a plea challenging a Jammu and Kashmir High Court verdict that upheld the Armys decision to close proceedings against five soldiers involved.

2006 Srinagar Sex Scandal

The CBI had also investigated the infamous 2006 sex scandal in which two ministers, top police officers and several influential people were among those named as accused. They were charged under various sections of the Ranbir Penal Code, the criminal code applicable in the states, including under Section 376 for the rape of a 15-year-old girl.

The other charges included procurement of girls, intimidation of witnesses and wrongful confinement of the victims.

The trial of the 14 accused was shifted from Srinagar to a Chandigarh CBI court on orders of the Supreme Court.

The court acquitted most of the accused and the CBI drew criticism for not following the case meticulously.

In February this year, a woman who was allegedly involved in the sex scandal claimed that the CBI had forced her to change her testimony.

Interestingly, the name of then J&K CM Omar Abdullah had also surfaced in the case, which led to him resigning from the post in July 2009. The governor had eventually rejected his resignation.

Killing of 4 IAF officers in 1990

The CBI also probed the killing of four Indian Air Force personnel on the outskirts of Srinagar on January 25, 1990.

According to an FIR registered in Police Station Sadder, unidentified militants fired upon Air Force employees living as tenants in Rawalpora, Srinagar on January 25, 1990. In the indiscriminate firing, 40 employees, including a woman, were injured, and two died on the spot. The assailants escaped from the spot.

The CBI took up the investigation on the basis of a state government notification in 1990 and a charge-sheet was filed on August 31, 1990 under Section 120-B read with Section 302 of the RPC, Section 3 and 4 of TADA and Section 27 of Arms Act in the court of 3rd Additional Sessions Judge (TADA case Jammu) against the accused persons.

During the course of trial, a transfer application was filed by the accused, which was rejected after which they approached the High Court in Srinagar to transfer the case. The High Court stayed the proceedings of the trial court. For now, the court at Srinagar is hearing the transfer appeal.

The CBI identified JKLF leaders Mohammad Yaseen Malik, Manzoor Ahmed Sofi, Javed Ahmed Mir, Showkat Ahmed Bakshi, Javed Ahmed Zargar and Ali Muhammad Mir, as accused in the case.

Now, the CBI is seeking transfer of the case to Jammu wing of the High Court.

The Mehran Lateef Case

On May 13, 2008, Mehran Lateef Mir, a three-year-old boy, returned home from the school and in the afternoon stepped out of his home to buy sweets from a local shop. That was the last time his mother saw him.

Following High Court directions, the CBI on February 6, 2014 took over investigation in the case.

After relentless investigations that continued for over two years, the CBI found no clues about Mehrans whereabouts. The case was closed after a city court accepted CBIs closure report to the effect.

Ten years have passed since with no news of Mehran.
Ahmedabad: The Gujarat Police is now investigating a human trafficking angle in the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in Surat after the body of an adult woman, believed to be the girls mother, was also recovered four days after the first body was found.

Police have arrested three persons in connection with the rape-murder of the minor girl whose body was recovered on April 6.

Gujarat Home Minister Pradipsinh Jadeja on Friday announced that three men, including the main suspect Harsahay Gurjar, have been arrested. Gurjar and was picked up from Gangapur in Sawai Madhopur district of Rajasthan.

According to sources, these men bought the minor girl from Rajasthan for Rs 30,000.

In a new twist to the case, the state home minister on Friday said that the police have gathered adequate leads to believe that the three men not only raped and murdered the 11-year-old girl, but killed her mother as well. The dead body of an unidentified woman was recovered from Surat soon after the rape-murder incident was detected.

The woman was reported missing about 20 days ago and her body was recovered about four days after the minor girl's body was recovered. Investigation have revealed that she is the girl's mother.

Speaking to the media, Jadeja said, "This case has shaken the collective conscience of the people of Gujarat. It was indeed very complicated. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Graphic: Network18 Creative

Earlier this week, a man from Andhra Pradesh approached the Surat police claiming that the girl, whose dead body was recovered, was his daughter. The police collected his DNA samples and sent them to the forensic lab for matching.

Apart from the Surat Police and Surat Crime Branch, the Ahmedabad Crime Branch, too, was roped in by the government to work on this case.

The police got its first leads from a black Chevrolet Spark car, which, according to police, was the car that the three had hired from Rajasthan.

Several questions are yet to be answered in investigations that are on while the motive behind the murder of the girl is yet to be decoded. Also, the police is looking to further probe the human trafficking angle and have sent samples of both the deceased girl and the woman, for DNA testing, to verify if the woman was indeed her mother.

Jadeja added that the state government will appoint a special public prosecutor and designate a special fast track court to ensure speedy trial and justice for the victim.
New Delhi: The All India Muslim Majlis-e-Mushawarat (AIMMM) on Thursday wrote to Delhi Police Commissioner Amulya Patnaik seeking appropriate action against BJP youth wing leader Manish Chandela for allegedly admitting in social media to burning down a Rohingya refugee camp here a few days back.

"This is to bring it to your notice that Manish Chandela, who is a member of the BJP's youth wing Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM), has openly claimed on his Twitter handle '@Chandela_BJYM' that 'Yes, we burnt the houses of Rohingya terrorists'," the AIMMM, an umbrella body of various Muslim organisations, said in the letter.

The AIMMM also attached the screenshots of Chandela's tweets wherein he claimed to have set the Rohingya refugee camp in Kalindi Kunj area ablaze. Chandela had tweeted at 2.16 am on April 15.

Again, on April 16 at 5.42 pm, Chandela posted on his Twitter handle: "Yes, we did it and we do again #ROHINGYA QUIT INDIA."

A fire had broken out at the refugee camp near Kalindi Kunj in south Delhi on the intervening night of April 14 and 15 that quickly engulfed the whole camp in which more than 200 residents of the camp lost all their belongings, including identity cards and special visas issued by the United Nations.

"The open claim on social media by the culprit is a challenge to the Delhi Police and all other law enforcement agencies. The tweet was posted immediately after the fire in the refugee camp We demand immediate arrest of Manish Chandela under appropriate sections of the IPC," the Mushawarat said in the letter signed by its president Navaid Hamid.

The Rohingyas are mostly Muslim ethnic in Myanmar, who are fleeing the northwestern province of Rakhine where they are facing persecution.
New Delhi: Uttar Pradesh government pulled back the Y category security cover from rape accused BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar on Friday, a day after CBI took Unnao rape victim and her mother to Makhi village to recreate the crime scene and probe the murder case of the girls father.

Bangarmau BJP MLA, who was booked by the UP police last week, is presently lodged in jail.

The state government decided to withdraw the security cover from the Bangarmau BJP MLA after nationwide furore over rape allegations levelled by an 18-year-old woman.

The minister, who is presently lodged in jail in the rape case, had 11 personnel and two Personal Security Officers (PSOs) under the security given to him as a legislator.

A day earlier, two CBI teams, headed by a superintendent of police, visited Unnaos Makhi village on to investigate the murder case involving Sengars brother Atul Singh, who is currently on remand.

According to a report in The Times of India, sources said while Atul and one of his aides, Vineet, remained locked inside the police vehicle in which they had been taken to the village from Lucknow, his three other associates were made to de-board and the crime scene was recreated to collect evidence. The CBI team. doing the proceedings. also included forensic experts.
New Delhi: The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has decided to provide compensation of two marks to Class 10 students for a typing error in the English question paper.

Several teachers and students had approached the Board with the plea that the paper held on March 12 had certain errors in the comprehension passage section.

Students had to read a passage and write synonyms for the words endurance, obstruction, and motivation. But the paragraphs they were supposed to look at were incorrectly marked, they had said in an online petition.

"The typing error has been noticed and it has been Board's policy to not let students face any disadvantage. The marking scheme has been decided in interest of students and all those who appeared for the particular question will be awarded two marks," a senior CBSE official said.

The Class 10 and 12 board examinations began on March 5 and will conclude by April 25.
New Delhi: Twenty years on, at least seven properties of underworld don Dawood Ibrahims late mother and sister in Mumbai shall be acquired by the central government.

The Supreme Court on Friday dismissed appeals filed by Dawoods mother Amina Bi Kaskar and sister Hasina Parker against the orders of confiscation.

A bench of Justices RK Agrawal and AM Sapre junked the appeals, which were now being argued through the legal heirs and other relatives of the 1993 Mumbai blasts mastermind.

The court order will allow the central government to forfeit at least seven prime properties, including some flats, in Mumbais Nagpada.

The bench was hearing the matter challenging the move initiated by the Centre following the 1993 Mumbai blasts to confiscate their ill-gotten properties, including flats in Mumbai.

The Smugglers And Foreign Exchange Manipulators (Forfeiture Of Property) Act (SAFEMA) tribunal had in 1998 and the Delhi High Court in 2012 upheld the seizure move.

Justifying the order of attachment passed in 1998, the Ministry of Finance has maintained in its affidavit that relatives of the fugitive were covered under the relevant provisions of the Smugglers And Foreign Exchange Manipulators (Forfeiture Of Property) Act (SAFEMA). This Act provides for forfeiture of ill-gotten properties of smugglers, foreign exchange manipulators and their kith and kin.

As per the ministry, the prime properties in Mumbais Nagpada belonged to Dawood but his mother Amina Bi Kaskar (now dead) and his sister Hasina Ibrahim Parkar were in possession of it and hence the law shall require their forfeiture.
Beijing: China on Friday backed its all-weather ally Pakistan and called on the international community to support its counter terrorism efforts after Prime Minister Narendra Modi described the neighbouring country as a "terror export factory".

"Terrorism is the enemy faced by all. The international community should work together to fight against it," foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said during a media briefing here, when asked about China's response to Modi terming Pakistan as a "terror export factory" during a speech in London.

"We hope the international community could support the efforts made by Pakistan in counter terrorism and forge effective cooperation with it in that regard," Hua said putting up a strong defence for China's all-weather ally.

While speaking at the 'Bharat Ki Baat, Sabke Saath' programme at the iconic Central Hall Westminster in London on Wednesday, warning Pakistan, Modi had said India will not tolerate those who export terror and will respond to them in the language they understand, referring to the 2016 surgical strikes conducted across the LoC.

"When someone has put a terror export factory in place and makes attempts to attack us from the back, Modi knows how to answer in the same language," he had said.

Hua's comment also came ahead of the meeting of the Foreign Ministers of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) here, to be held early next week.

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj is arriving here tomorrow to take part in the meeting to be held on April 24. She is due to meet her Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on Sunday.

Separately Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman too will attend the SCO Defence Ministers meeting on the same day.

These are the first meetings of the SCO after India and Pakistan were admitted into the eight-member group in which China and Russia play an influential role. Both events are to be attended by the respective Ministers from Pakistan.

SCO consists China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

Modi is also due to attend this year's SCO summit to be held in the Chinese city of Qingdao in June.

Hua said issues related to terrorism will be discussed at the meeting of SCO Foreign Ministers.

"We believe it is a purpose of the SCO to promote relevant cooperation in that field. Security has been a priority of the SCO since its inception," she said.

"So the upcoming SCO Foreign Ministers meeting will see participants exchanging views on the relevant issues, major international and regional issues and all the participants will uphold the Shanghai sprit to consolidate more consensus and to move forward the development of the SCO," she said.
New Delhi: Terming it as "unfortunate', the Supreme Court on Friday said it is "very disturbed" about the recent events surrounding the discussion in public of proposed impeachment of the incumbent Chief Justice of India.

A bench of Justices AK Sikri and Ashok Bhushan rued the manner in which prolonged debates were happening over the proposed removal motion, as is being contemplated to be brought by certain Congress MPs.

"We are very disturbed about what has been happening...it is very unfortunate what is happening," observed the bench as it sought the assistance of Attorney General KK Venugopal in the matter.

The PIL, filed by NGO In Pursuit of Justice, has sought a restraint against the legislators as well as media to discuss a proposed removal motion.

Senior advocate Meenakshi Arora, appearing for the NGO, submitted that a judge cannot act fearlessly if such discourse takes place while he is in office and the removal motion has not even been brought.

"Under Article 121, even parliamentarians are restricted to discuss the conduct of a judge up to a certain stage. How can these legislators, as private citizens, talk about the same issue as and when they want? This will impact independence of the judiciary," argued Arora.

The bench retorted that she was right in her submissions but the Court will need to examine if a restraint can be issued through a valid judicial order.

"Law is very clear and everyone is supposed to know the law. Even the legislature should know the law. It is still happening. The question is what can we do now?" remarked the bench.

The Court then deemed it proper to seek the assistance of the top law officer on May 7.

There has been a persistent talk about the proposed removal motion of the CJI. Congress MPs have reportedly taken the lead in this and a signature campaign was also started. Not just this, a draft impeachment motion was also circulated.
New Delhi: Former chief justice and activist Rajinder Singh Sachar, who brought to fore the socio-economic and educational conditions of the Muslim community, passed away here on Friday at the age of 94, family sources said.

The Rajinder Sachar Committee was set up by former prime minister Manmohan Singh for preparing a report on the social, economic and educational status of Muslims and was tabled in parliament in 2006.

Sachar was admitted to the Fortis Hospital earlier this week. He passed away at around noon.

"He was a patient of Ischemic heart disease and was put on pacemaker a couple of months back and had undergone stenting for blocked vessels in the heart," a family friend said.

"He was admitted to the hospital earlier this week. He was not able to take food and was having recurrent vomiting. He developed pneumonia and later succumbed to it," he said.

The former chief justice of Delhi High Court will be cremated at the electric crematorium in Lodhi Road here this evening.

Sachar was chief justice of the Delhi HC from August 6, 1985 to December 22, 1985. He was also associated with the rights group People's Union for Civil Liberties.
Indore: Twenty men, including a priest and a 'writer', have responded to a Facebook advert seeking a match for Geeta, a deaf-and-mute girl who returned from Pakistan after accidentally landing in that country when she was a child.

A social activist in Indore, who is involved in the search for Geeta's long-lost parents, put up a post on Facebook nine days ago, seeking marriage proposals for her. Gyanendra Purohit, the activist, today said 20 men have shown interest in marrying her and sent their bio-data. Of them, 12 persons are disabled, while the rest do not have any disability, he said.

One of them is a temple priest while another claims to be a writer, he said.

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj -- who was instrumental in bringing Geeta back to India -- had asked him to look for a match for the girl, Purohit had claimed earlier. He put up a post on the Facebook page `Reunite Geeta, a deaf girl, with her family', which was originally created to search for Geeta's parents, on April 10.

The advert said they were looking for a "good and smart deaf boy", age above 25 years, for "India's daughter Geeta".

It also made it clear that it is Geeta who would decide on the proposals, and the Union government would take further steps. Geeta is staying in a facility run by Muk-Badhir Sangathan, an NGO, here. The MP Social Justice Department is her caretaker.

Geeta was found alone aboard the Samjhauta Express at Lahore when she was seven or eight years old. It is surmised that she accidentally boarded the train somewhere in India. Karachi-based Edhi Foundation took care of her while she lived in Pakistan.

She returned to India in 2015. So far more than ten couples from different parts of India have claimed that Geeta is their long-lost daughter, but none of them could establish the claim.
New Delhi: In an unprecedented step, Congress and six other opposition parties on Friday moved a notice for the impeachment of Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, accusing him of five counts of "misbehaviour" and "misusing" authority.

The opposition parties met Vice President and Rajya Sabha chairman M Venkaiah Naidu and handed over a notice for the impeachment of the Chief Justice of India (CJI) with signatures of 64 MPs of the Upper House.

No Chief Justice has ever been impeached in India and any decision on the notice by the Opposition parties against the CJI is likely to be taken by the Vice President following legal consultations.

Addressing a press conference, Congress leader Kapil Sibal said the notice for impeachment had been moved with a heavy heart. "As representatives of the people, we are entitled to hold the Chief Justice accountable, just as we are accountable to the people. The majesty of the law is more important than the majesty of any office," he said.

"We hope that a thorough enquiry will be held so that truth alone triumphs. Democracy can thrive only when our judiciary stands firm, independent of the executive, and discharges its constitutional functions honestly, fearless, and with an even hand," Sibal said.

While the notice for impeachment bears 71 signatures, Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad said they have requested the chairman to exclude the names of seven of them as they have retired from the Upper House. The minimum requirement to move a notice for impeachment was 50 members in the Rajya Sabha.

Senior Congress leader Salman Khurshid, however, seemed to disagree with his party colleagues. I hope not and believe not impeachment is too serious a matter to be played with on the grounds of disagreement with any judgment or with any point of view of the court. I am not party to the discussions that have taken place between the parties therefore for me to say whether the grounds are justified or not would be unfair, he said.

The MPs who signed the notice belong to the Congress, the NCP, the CPI-M and CPI, the SP, the BSP and the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML). The leaders of these parties earlier met in Parliament and gave the final shape to the notice for impeachment.

Among those who attended the meeting in Parliament were Congress leaders Azad, Sibal and Randeep Surjewala, besides CPI's D Raja and NCP's Vandana Chavan. The opposition alleged that sensitive cases were assigned to handpicked judges.

Some of these allegations were also raised in January by four top judges of the Supreme Court who had held a press conference.

An impeachment motion in the Rajya Sabha has to be supported by at least 50 MPs of the Upper House, while the number of MPs supporting such a motion in the Lok Sabha is 100.

Once the notice for impeachment is submitted to the Rajya Sabha chairman, he will ascertain whether there is merit or ground for moving such a motion.

In case he finds merit, then he may form a committee to look into it, else he can reject it.

If moved, this will be the first time ever in the country's history that an impeachment would be moved against the Chief Justice of India.

(With PTI inputs)
London: India has demanded legal action against those behind the desecration of the Indian flag at Parliament Square here during Prime Minister Narendra Modi's UK visit.

The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said the matter had been taken up with the UK government and had been regretted at the highest level.

"We are deeply anguished with the incident involving our national flag at Parliament Square. The matter was taken up promptly and strongly with the UK side, and it has been regretted at highest level," Ministry of Exernal Affair spokesperson Raveesh Kumar told reporters.

"We expect action, including legal action, against the people involved in the incident and also people responsible for instigating the incident," he said.

Prime Minister Modi after his arrival in the country was greeted by some groups protesting against atrocities in India.

On Wednesday, during the bilateral leg of Modi's visit to the UK, some protesters at Parliament Square turned aggressive during which the Indian tricolour was torn down from one of the official flagpoles set up for all 53 Commonwealth countries to mark the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) and ripped up by some protesters.

The perpetrators, caught on camera, were pro-Khalistani demonstrators brought together with Kashmiri separatist groups under the banner of the so-called 'Minorities Against Modi' group, led by Pakistani-origin peer Lord Ahmed.

There is growing pressure on the UK government to act against Ahmed, who is seen as repeatedly "instigating" violence against India on UK soil.

A UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) spokesperson said the UK government had been in touch with the Indian High Commission soon after the incident.

"While people have the right to hold peaceful protests, we are disappointed with the action taken by a small minority in Parliament Square and contacted High Commissioner Yashvardhan Kumar Sinha as soon as we were made aware," a spokesperson said.

Scotland Yard also issued a statement following the protests and confirmed that it is investigating the incident involving the Indian tricolour being pulled down.

"Police are investigating after an Indian flag in Parliament Square was pulled down at 1500 [UK time] on Wednesday, 18 April. The flag has been replaced. There have been no arrests. Enquiries continue," a Metropolitan Police statement said.

A senior broadcast journalist from one of the leading Indian media channels covering the protests, who was caught up in the scrum, has now also registered a formal police complaint with the Met Police.

"To my shock, the protesters while raising anti-India slogans brought the Indian flag down, tore it with scissors until it was completely destroyed...Within seconds, I was pushed, abused and intimidated," Loveena Tandon, who represents Aaj Tak news channel in the UK, said in a statement.

"A message must be sent to all those out there that we journalists make people aware of what is going on in the world. Shutting us up or being violent towards us defeats their own purpose of being heard," she said.

The incident also went viral on social media, with people expressing their shock and support to the journalist who was caught up in the incident. The groups involved were seen with "Free Jaggi" posters and T-shirts, calling for the release of Jagtar Singh Johal who is lodged in a Punjab jail over his alleged involvement in the targeted killings in the state.
New Delhi: Seven opposition parties led by the Congress laid out five charges against Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra in the impeachment notice submitted to Vice President Venkaiah Naidu on Friday. Raising questions about Misras conduct, the parties accused him of "misbehaviour" and "misuse" of authority and said that nothing had changed in the three months since four senior judges of the Supreme Court held a press conference in January.

Congress leader Kapil Sibal said the notice for impeachment had been moved with a heavy heart. "As representatives of the people, we are entitled to hold the Chief Justice accountable, just as we are accountable to the people. The majesty of the law is more important than the majesty of any office," he said.

The notice bears the signatures of 71 MPs, of which 64 are sitting MPs in the Upper House. The MPs who signed the notice belong to the Congress, the NCP, the CPI-M and CPI, the SP, the BSP and the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML). The leaders of these parties earlier met in Parliament and gave the final shape to the notice for impeachment.

The charges levelled against Misra include his conduct in the Medical Council of India scam case, his decision as master of the roster and his ownership of a plot of land that he acquired using a false affidavit.

Here are the charges levelled according to the statement issued by Opposition:

1. The first charge levelled against the CJI by the opposition parties is a "conspiracy to pay illegal gratification" in the Prasad Education Trust case and the denial of permission to proceed against a retired high court judge in the same matter.

The original case pertains to a Medical Council of India issue. The MCI had denied permission to Prasad Education Trust, an institution based in Lucknow, to run a medical college. The Trust then moved court and obtained an order in its favour. The CBI raided several people related to the case based on allegations that there was collusion between the Trust and the judiciary.

The impeachment notice says that it on record that the CBI has registered an FIR in the case. There are several recorded conversations between middlemen, including a retired judge of the Orissa High Court, excerpts of transcripts of which are set out in the articles of charge. References to the Chief Justice by innuendo in these conversations are evident. The denial of permission to the CBI to register an FIR against Justice Narayan Shukla of the Allahabad High Court, when the CBI shared incriminating information with the Chief Justice was itself an act of misbehaviour. All this requires a thorough investigation, the notice reads.

2. The second charge against the CJI is that he listed the petition against the Prasad Education Trust before himself, in which he too was likely to fall within the scope of investigation and even when he was heading the Constitution bench. The opposition parties contend that doing so was against the convention.

3. The third allegation is the "serious charge" of "antedating" (backdating) of an order for listing of a petition related to the investigation against the Prasad Education Trust in the Supreme Court.

The impeachment notice submitted to the states that the practice in the Supreme Court is that when the CJI is in a Constitution Bench, and matters are to be listed, requests for listing are made before the first puisne judge.

On November 9, 2017, when a writ petition was mentioned before Justice Chelameswar at 10:30 AM since the CJI was sitting in a Constitution Bench, the same was directed to be listed later the same day. When the matter was taken up, a note dated November 6, 2017 was placed before the judges hearing the matter by an official of the Registry. This is the basis of the third charge alleging that the note of November 6 brought to the attention of Justice Chelameswar on November 9 as the matter taken up was antedated, the statement read.

4. The fourth charge pertains to a piece of land which Misra acquired as an advocate by giving a "false affidavit" and the plot was surrendered in 2012 when he was elevated to the Supreme Court, even though orders cancelling the allotment were given in 1985.

5. The fifth charge relates to "the abuse of exercise of power by the Chief Justice in choosing to send sensitive matters to particular benches by misusing his authority as Master of the Roster with the likely intent to influence the outcome". This was also the issue raised by four senior judges of the Supreme Court at an unprecedented press conference in January when they had raised questions about Misras conduct.
We will keep track of major news events in India and abroad through this live blog.

Big news right now: Leaders of seven Opposition parties have submitted a notice for impeachment motion against CJI Dipak Misra to Rajya Sabha Chairman Venkaiah Naidu. Addressing a press conference, Leader of Opposition in the Upper House Ghulam Nabi Azad said the notice has the signature of 71 MPs, seven of whom have retired since it was signed. Former Union minister Salman Khurshid, however, disagreed with his party colleagues. I hope not and believe not impeachment is too serious a matter to be played with on the grounds of disagreement with any judgment or with any point of view of the court. I am not party to the discussions that have taken place between the parties therefore for me to say whether the grounds are justified or not would be unfair, he said. Hitting out at the Congress in a Facebook post, Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has accused the grand old party of using impeachment as a political tool.

Stay tuned as Aditya Nair brings you live updates:
Guwahati: The BJP-led coalition government in Manipur is all set to pass a bill that would award capital punishment to those involved in rape of minors.

The bill is likely to be passed during the upcoming Assembly session. While condemning the incidents of rape across the country, Chief Minister N Biren Singh said that rapists are criminals who do not have any colour or belongingness.

The Manipur government had recently announced the establishment of two investigative units in the state to address cases of crime against women. In the upcoming Assembly session, we will try to bring in a bill for awarding capital punishment for those who rape and murder minors, said N Biren.

However, human rights activists in Manipur do not agree with the governments decision.

Human Rights defender Babloo Loitongbam said that such a decision would ensure retribution, not justice.

We dont agree to capital punishment. It is not going to solve the problem, said Loitongbam.

Peoples' Resurgence and Justice Alliance (PRJA) convenor Erendro Leichombam asked the state government and the Centre to bring in a bill that would deal not just with civilians, but also armed forces personnel convicted of rape.

Leichomban pointed out that the state is still awaiting justice in the rape and murder of Thangjam Manorama in 2004.

Erendro, however, said that rapists should be given maximum punishment instead of death penalty.

Rapists should be put in jail permanently. We welcome the governments decision to protect women of the state, but we are against capital punishment. The bill would essentially address civilians found guilty of crime, but the Indian Army would not come under the ambit of this bill. Similar laws should be applied for men in uniform, he said.

PRJA had recently organised a candlelight march in Imphal against the rape cases of Kathua, Unnao and Manipur.

According to the Women Action for Development (WAD), an organization working for the rights of women and children, 38 rape cases were reported in Manipur from January to November 25, 2017, of which 28 rape victims are minors. As many as 15 rape cases have been filed in Manipur since the beginning of 2018. The victims and their families still await justice.

After the gruesome rape and murder of an eight-year-old in Kathua, J&K chief minister Mehbooba Mufti and Union minister Maneka Gandhi had proposed a law to make death penalty mandatory for those who violate minors.

MP, Rajasthan, Haryana and Arunachal Pradesh have already passed bills in their respective state Assemblies to award death penalties in similar crimes.

Facing flak for mishandling the alleged Unnao rape case, the UP government too has decided to bring in a law awarding death penalty to rapists in cases of assault on minors.

(With inputs from Noren Ninghombam)
Lucknow: After the Uttar Pradesh government announced to prepare a proposal to ask Centre to award death penalty to rapists, opposition parties on Friday termed the move as hypocritical, saying that its the same Yogi government which had withdrawn the rape and kidnapping case against former union minister Swami Chinmayananda.

BJP is adopting dual standards on all serious issues. On one hand central government files affidavit in Supreme Court that death penalty should not be awarded in rape cases, on the other hand, the state government is proposing death penalty, said Congress spokesperson Anshu Awasthi.

Pointing at the Chinmayanand case, Awasthi said, Despite the matter being subjudice in court, the government is rolling back the rape case. Their dual standard stands exposed.

Nearly 10 days ago, UP cabinet minister Siddhartnath Singh had announced that the government has decided to withdraw the case against Chinmayanand, who had allegedly kept a girl in captivity in Haridwar ashram and had allegedly raped her in 2011.

According to news reports, a letter was sent to the district administration on March 6 on behalf of the government in this regard. Subsequently, the Shahjahanpur administration had written on March 9 to the prosecution officer of the case to withdraw the case.

Samajwadi Party spokesperson Sunil Singh Sajan said, This is nothing but mere dhong (drama) of the government. If they are really serious about controlling crime against women, then they should punish their own leaders and MLAs first. We all have seen how the government tried to save BJP MLA in Unnao rape case.

The decision to seek capital punishment for rapists comes weeks after UP government faced public wrath over delayed action in Unnao rape case.

From beat constable to the SP -- all should be made accountable and answerable. The senior officials should keep an eye and ensure immediate action against those found guilty of laxity. The police should also do foot patrolling and establish dialogue with people. Those having dubious past should not be made SHOs, chief minister Yogi Adityanath said, while proposing death penalty for rapists.

Pointing out that it is necessary for the rapists to get strict punishment, the chief minister said, We are going to send a letter to the Centre to make necessary amendments to award capital punishment to rapists.

Chief minister Yogi, who also holds the Home portfolio, had accepted in a written reply to the legislative assembly that crimes against women had indeed risen in the past one year.

According to the reply given on March 13, there has been a 25% increase in rapes, 40% rise in incidents of outraging the modesty, 35% jump in cases of kidnappings of women, and a 50% increase in cases of eve teasing between April 1, 2017, and January 31, 2018, from the corresponding period in 2016-17 under the then Samajwadi Party government.
New Delhi: With the Congress calling a meeting of like-minded parties on Friday, one of the prime topics for discussion is the draft impeachment motion against the 45th Chief Justice of India, Dipak Misra.

The meeting comes a day after the Supreme Court rejected petitions demanding a probe into the death of special CBI judge BH Loya.

In January, when the four senior most judges of the Supreme Court addressed the historic press conference turning the lens on administrative and judicial irregularity in the Supreme Court, no one thought that the sacrosanct position of the Chief Justice of India would be in question.

Now the question is, can the Chief Justice be impeached like other judges of the Supreme Court or is the process different?

India has never faced a single case of a judge being impeached, so how difficult would it be for the CJI? News18 takes you through the case, procedure and previous examples of similar motions.

Who has moved the impeachment motion against Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra?

Before diving into the question of how an impeachment motion pans out, let us understand who all are circulating the draft impeachment motion against the CJI.

Congress leaders have said that the issues raised by four Supreme Court judges have not been addressed yet by the CJI. They said the party was concerned about the independence of judiciary and people must protect the institution from "gross interferences by the government."

During the Budget Session of Parliament that concluded earlier this month, the Congress had initiated a move collecting signatures from more than 50 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.

The opposition parties who will attend Congress meeting include the Samajwadi Party, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), the Rashtriya Janta Dal (RJD), the Communist Party of India (CPI) and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP).

What is the case on the basis of which impeachment is being sought?

The entire genesis of moving an impeachment motion against CJI Misra gained heat after four senior most judges of the apex court addressed the historic press conference where they highlighted issues with regard to improper system of allocation of cases and had also put the spotlight on judicial impartiality.

The draft proposal deems "abuse of authority to arbitrarily assign individual cases to select judges" as one of the grounds for moving an impeachment motion.

One of the first cases under the lens is that of the illegal gratification in the Prasad Education Trust case. This was a case related to a bribery scam in which medical institutions were alleged to have given kickbacks to senior members of the judiciary for clearances to set up medical colleges. It has been alleged that the CJI had submitted a false affidavit when he was an advocate appearing in a land acquisition matter.

Another issue which had stirred the hornets nest was the case of Judge Loyas death. The four judges presser led to discussions on how the CJIs refusal to list the PIL demanding an independent probe into Judge Loyas death to a bench headed by senior most judges. Congress later held another press conference and spoke about the case which had its lens also on BJP president, Amit Shah, as Judge Loya was hearing the Soharabuddin fake encounter case which has Shah as one of the accused.

What is the basic mode of disqualification of a Supreme Court judge in India?

Impeaching or removing the Chief Justice of India cannot happen for any frivolous ground. In 2013, when Shirani Bandaranayake, the 43rd Chief Justice of Sri Lanka, was impeached by Parliament and then removed from office by President Mahinda Rajapaksa, the country went through an unprecedented turmoil followed by a series of rulings against the government.

In India, legally speaking, a Chief Justice, like any other Supreme Court judges can be impeached. This by the constitutional provision of Article 124. Article 124 acts to keep check on the judiciary by the legislature.

However, unlike other countries there has been no cases of impeachment in India as of now.

Article 124 (4) of the Constitution of India: A Judge of the Supreme Court shall not be removed from his office except by an order of the President passed after an address by each House of Parliament supported by a majority of the total membership of that House and by a majority of not less than two-thirds of the members of that House present and voting has been presented to the President in the same session for such removal on the ground of proved misbehavior or incapacity.

What are the hiccups one has to overcome to achieve CJI impeachment?

Can impeaching the CJI be an easy task? Certainly not. The provisions have been kept deliberately complicated so that no one can initiate such impeachment proceedings as per their whims and fancy.

For initiating the impeachment proceeding both Article 124 (2) (b), Article 14 (4), Article 124 (5), and the Judges Inquiry Act 1968, has to be taken into account.

The first step for such an act is issue a notice of motion by 100 MPs from the Lok Sabha or 50 MPs from the Rajya Sabha. This motion for removal can be moved in either of the house.

Now the next step is to check whether the speaker admits the motion or not. The speaker has the right to reject it.

If in case the speaker decides to admit the motion, then the speaker or the chairman of the house constitutes a three member committee to investigate the charges. The committee would look into the case and the charged levelled against the CJI.

Since this case is against the CJI, the three member committee will comprise of a senior judge of the Supreme Court, a judge of the High Court and a distinguished jurist. The committee usually has the powers of a civil court and can question witnesses and examine documents to investigate the charges.

In case the committee decides to support the motion, then that motion is taken up for discussion in the house where it had been introduced and must be passed by a special majority of the house. It is after this step that the motion is taken up in the next house where again it needs to be passed by the two thirds majority.

It is after this stage that the President is approached to remove the CJI. But it is only possible after both the houses pass such a motion with two third majority. But this case can fall through at any stage whether it be the dismissal by the speaker to admit the motion or the committee failing to find any basis in the charges levelled or the motion collapsing in either of the house.

What are the past instances when Supreme Court judges or HC Judges were impeached?

V. Ramaswami, Chief Justice of Punjab and Haryana, was the first judge against whom impeachment proceedings were initiated in 1993 by a motion through the Lok Sabha. The two thirds majority for passing the motion was lost as the Congress abstained.

Soumitra Sen, Calcutta High Court Judge -- He was the only judge in India history who had passed the first two hurdles of impeachment and had come close to being impeached after Rajya Sabha passed the motion of his dismissal with special majority. The charge against him was misappropriation of funds while he was appointed as receiver by the court as a lawyer. However before Lok Sabha could take up the motion for consideration, Justice Sen had resigned from office which led to the closure of the case.

Another Judge who resigned before impeachment proceedings could be initiated against him was PD Dinakaran, Chief Justice of Sikkim High Court in 2011.

Even Justice JB Pardiwala of Gujarat High Court was at the receiving end of an impeachment motion by 58 Rajya Sabha MPs after a section of the society objected to some wordings in his judgment which questioned reservation in the Constitution. Justice Pardiwala had called it shameful that reservation continued even 65 years after independence.

Later Justice Pardiwala removed the wordings from his judgment leading to closure of the impeachment case.
New Delhi: Even as Congress and six other opposition parties on Friday moved a notice for the impeachment of Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, there were a few notable names within the Congress who were not party to the cause.

Leading the charge was former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Salman Khurshid said he was "not party to or privy with discussions" talking place in the Congress.

I hope not and believe not impeachment is too serious a matter to be played with on the grounds of disagreement with any judgment or with any point of view of the court. I am not party to the discussions that have taken place between the parties therefore for me to say whether the grounds are justified or not would be unfair, he said.

Former Finance Minister P Chidambaram too kept his distance from the present happenings in the party regarding the impeachment of the CJI.

Congress leader Kapil Sibal though had a different take on Manmohan Singh not being a party to the cause.

"We didn't involve Manmohan Singh intentionally as he is an ex-PM," said Kapil Sibal.

Sibal categorically denied rumours that Manmohan Singh refused to sign the petition.

On others who hadn't signed, Mr Sibal said: "We didn't want a few others to be embarrassed as certain matters are pending."

The MPs who signed the notice belong to the Congress, the NCP, the CPI-M and CPI, the SP, the BSP and the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML). The leaders of these parties earlier met in Parliament and gave the final shape to the notice for impeachment.

No Chief Justice has ever been impeached in India and any decision on the notice by the Opposition parties against the CJI is likely to be taken by the Vice President following legal consultations.
Grammy-nominated American rapper Tyga is expected to visit Delhi's tourist attractions like Qutub Minar and India Gate during his less than 24-hour maiden India trip.

He will arrive in the capital on Friday evening to promote his newly-released "Kyoto" album as part of his world tour.

For his visit, event management company White Fox India is going to arrange a Mercedes V Class and a seven spread Indian meal.

The food will include butter chicken, chole bhature, biryani, mango kulfi and more.

The artiste will be doing a quick trip around the city at places like Qutub Minar, India Gate and Gurudwara Bangla Sahib before he hits the luxury pop-up sponsored by Absolut Elyx at The Grand hotel in Vasant Kunj at 1 a.m. on Saturday.

Arjun Jain of White Fox India said in a statement: "This is Tyga's first visit to India and though he is here for less than 24 hours, we want to show him around."

"Luckily his performance will start much later at night giving us enough time to show him a few key spots in the capital."

The 28-year-old is expected to perform tracks like "AYO", "Rack city" and "Still got it" at the Delhi gig.
Despite being a film by veteran Iranian filmmaker Majid Majidi, Beyond The Clouds, at times veers dangerously close to becoming a Bollywood movie (and that's hardly ever a good thing). There are moments in the film that are overwrought and extremely sentimental. Malavika Mohanan's cries for help, that you might have already seen in the trailer of the film, reminds you of the wronged helpless Bollywood behena who needs her brother to make things right. The minimal plot of the film is almost threadbare, and the theme of seemingly-bad-people-discovering-their-innate-goodness has already become a hackneyed concept in Bollywood.

However, as the end credit of Beyond The Clouds roll, it is hard to remember the flaws of the film. Majidi's main focus is to make the audience feel intimately and deeply about his characters and his mastery lies in the fact that he makes you forget that what you are essentially watching is a very simple, if not completely cliched story.

With powerful visuals and some unexpected human bonds, Majidi tugs at the heartstrings of his audience. He touches most of his pet themes in the film -- humanitarianism, the innocence of children, social injustice, familial ties and lastly even faith. However, more importantly, he touches the hearts of the viewers.

The film in itself is not particularly memorable, but, a few scenes are as beautiful as impressionist paintings and leaves you in awe. From hundreds of flamingos flocking at the Thane creek, a wall full of crayon doodles, numerous fishermen's boats floating on the sea to several reoccurring scenes where white sheets, walls, or curtains are used as a medium for shadow play-- there are many scenes in the film that are truly unforgettable.

Beyond The Clouds also happens to be Majidi's love letter to Mumbai. His perspective on the city may be that of an outsider, but it certainly isn't that of a foreigner. With acute mindfulness, the filmmaker meticulously reconstructs the sprawling, pulsating city in his film. He doesn't miss a single sight or sound. In fact, at times he surprises you with locations that you might not have noticed in your rushed existence.

With Anil Mehta's brilliant cinematography, Majidi engages all your senses in his film and captures Mumbai in all its glory and ugliness. The main characters of the film belong to the Mumbai's underclass, and as the camera follows them around we see many dingy, mucky by lanes, where sewer water clogs potholes. Majidi, however, finds ways to introduce a poetic quality to such grim surroundings. Throughout the film, Mumbai isn't just a setting or background, it is in fact Beyond The Clouds' third protagonist.

At its core, Beyond The Clouds is a story of two characters, a brother-sister duo-- brother being Amir (Ishaan Khattar) and his sister being Tara (Malavika Mohanan)-- who are struggling to establish their identities in the world. Both Amir and Tara have their grudges against one another. However, apart from each other, they don't have any other family. Therefore, when tragedy strikes and Amir is on the run from the police, it is Tara who provides him shelter and protection.

Unfortunately, as fate would have it, Akshi (Gautam Ghose), who initially helps Tara to hide Amir from police, tries to rape her and in self-defense, Tara hits Akshi back with a fatal blow. Police immediately arrests Tara and charges her with the attempted murder of Akshi. The only way Tara can get out of jail is if Akshi drops charges. However, after suffering a head injury, Akshi isn't in a condition to speak. Therefore, the two protagonists must wait for Akshi to recover so that Tara can be free.

There is a scene in the film where Khattar's Amir torments the bed-ridden rapist in the hospital. He takes off Akshi's oxygen mask and waits until he cannot breathe anymore, deliciously savoring his pain. But, as soon as he begins to drift off, Amir quickly places the mask back onto his face. It's a tragic situation to be in, trying to keep your sister's rapist alive, so that your sister can stay out of jail. However, Amir isn't the only one in the film who finds himself in such strange predicament.

Khattar delivers a matured performance as Amir. While Bollywood has seen many glorious star kids' debuts in the past, there has hardly ever been a newcomer before Khattar who has had such a confident debut. Although there are a few scenes where Khattar seems out of depth, for most parts his performance is layered and sure-footed. On the other hand, Mohanan looks like she is acting. Her efforts look sincere but she fails to make the audience feel anything for Tara and her miserable plight.

The most winning performance of the film, however, comes from 72-year-old GV Sharada who plays Akshi's mother and grandmother to his two daughters. The two girls and their grandmother (Sharada) are practically inseparable for the entire duration of the film and together they bring a vulnerability onscreen that is heartfelt and warm. Another child actor that deserves mention is Shivam Pujari who plays the role of Chotu. Tara, during her time in prison, grows really fond of Chotu, who is the son of another inmate (Tannishtha Chatterjee).

Strangely, Sharada's grandmother portrayal in Beyond The Clouds reminds one of the grandmother in Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (Song of The Road). There is no commonality in the two characters except that neither of them seems like they are playing a role. They both feel real as if they cannot be anyone other than the characters they are. Majidi has often said that he has been strongly influenced by Satyajit Ray's cinema. In a way, Beyond The Clouds pays tribute to Ray's earlier works where poverty played a pivotal part and shaped the characters of his films.

Like most of Majid Majidi films, Beyond The Clouds is a brilliant exposition of human nature. Through the characters of the film, we are reminded that a little kindness goes a long way and no matter the circumstances, kindness is always possible by everyone, everywhere. Tara's kindness for another inmate's child makes her prison time bearable while Amir's kindness to Akshi's family gives him reasons to be happy even when he knows his sister is facing a lifetime of imprisonment if Akshi doesn't recover. Finally, Beyond The Clouds is about accepting and surrendering to everything that life has to offer, which too requires tremendous faith. Despite few flaws, Beyond The Clouds is a film that should be experienced.
During a song launch of the film 102 Not Out, Amitabh Bachchan was asked to comment on the recent instances of rape in Unnao, Surat, and Kathua. Here is what the superstar had to say: "Even discussing this issue feels disgusting, don't bring up this issue. It is terrible to even talk about it."

Whats most odd about his statement is that Mr Bachchan also happens to be the brand ambassador of India's 'Beti Bachao-Beti Padhao. And when a celebrity of his stature refuses to even talk about rape because the issue is apparently disgusting it reflects a lot on what we as a society feel about rape and sexual assault. Hush hush.

Only yesterday, child rights NGO released a report that showed a sexual offence is committed against a child in India every 15 minutes, and yet, Mr Bachchan thought its better not to talk about the issue. And, how is that going to really help?

When the reports of Kathua rape chargesheet surfaced in the media a week back and the barbaric details of how an eight-year-old was drugged, starved, raped and murdered emerged, I am certain we have all had that one moment, when we could not read further. The details were cruel, and it made us nauseous. It also showed what kind of monsters we have among us.

It was disturbing and painful to read what an eight-year-old went through. Even Mr Bachchan, (as well as every celebrity,) is entitled to have one such moment where they didn't want to read any further. It's a natural reaction to feel choked, and not talk about it. That moment shows that we are human beings and as people of a civilized race we squirm at the unimaginable cruelty that the little girl had to endure.

However, if we use that as an excuse to turn a blind eye to the rape cases in our country and decide that is it too terrible a topic to talk about, we fail to support the victims. What is worse is we also fail as a civilized society which apparently cares for women and their safety.

Therefore, Mr Bachchan, no matter how 'disgusting' the issue may make you feel, it is your responsibility to address it. When a superstar like you addresses incidents of rapes instead of saying "don't bring up this issue", you give voice to the victims who are often dismissed by the police and the system.

The Unnao rape survivor endured the death of her father and had to fight a lot of battles against a powerful MLA of Uttar Pradesh before the national media as well the public (and celebrities) started paying attention to her case. They need voices like yours.

Our silence on rape cases helps the rapists, not the victims. Therefore, it is important to address the issue at every opportunity we get. Yes, step out for those rallies and vent out on social media if you wish. Anything is better than avoiding the topic because it is uncomfortable to talk about.

Lets talk about the horrifying instances, lets send out a message, and lets tell the perpetrators of sexual assaults that their cruel acts wont go unpunished.

Mr Bachchan, it isn't enough to pen down an open letter to your granddaughters about their rights as a woman when you have a movie coming up. As the brand ambassador of Beti Bachao-Beti Padhao movement, it should be your prerogative to publically address incidents of sexual violence.

Please dont ask reporters to not bring up this issue. Because, its time to speak up.
After Sri Reddy's comment against his mother, Pawan Kalyan and his brother Naga Babu arrived at the Telugu Film Chamber on Friday morning. The actor was joined by the likes of Allu Arjun, Sai Dharam Tej, Ram Charan among others. A large number of fans had also gathered outside of the film chamber to support their favourites. A Movie Artists Association meeting about the entire case is currently underway.

Earlier, Kalyan had posted a series of tweets in which he questioned the people involved in abusing him and his mother. He also accused the political party TDP of public humiliation of his mother.

The trio who helped TDP bosses to get my mother abused in public pic.twitter.com/4XHEezvAcy Pawan Kalyan (@PawanKalyan) April 20, 2018

Another member of the Dream Team Open heart RK , who openly got my mother abused in public got mileage and TRP also.. pic.twitter.com/pNEoeMr5l7 Pawan Kalyan (@PawanKalyan) April 20, 2018

It all started when Pawan Kalyan advised Sri Reddy to file an official complaint against the casting couch in the industry instead of at TV studios. However, Sri Reddy did not appreciate his comment and turned abusive. Later, filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma admitted that he had instigated Reddy to abuse the actor and rendered an apology to actor-politician Kalyan and his family.

It was me who is responsible for @MsSriReddy saying that to @PawanKalyan ..it is not her fault ..will give details now by 9.30 pm Ram Gopal Varma (@RGVzoomin) April 18, 2018

My sincere apologies once again to @PawanKalyan and all his fans and also his family members Ram Gopal Varma (@RGVzoomin) April 19, 2018

Reddy made headlines when she sat topless outside the office in Hyderabad to protest against the existence of casting couch in the industry. She alleged that she was asked to send inappropriate pictures and videos to get a chance in Telugu films, and threatened to expose names of people who exploit young, aspiring actors.
New Delhi: Publicists, especially when running short of talking points to broadcast because negatives have created adequate din, are left with little option but to dig into archives.

To begin with, the choice of Prasoon Joshi as host for 'Bharat Ki Baat, Sabke Saath', was not a very smart decision. Inappropriate, because he was part of the Bharatiya Janata Party's 2014 campaign, thereby carrying the self-limiting tag of 'in-house' anchor. In the absence of neutrality, events of this nature get restricted to the already converted.

Additionally, Joshi is also the country's censor board chief now making his selection even more unsuitable because it opened up Modi to the charge of being a control-freak especially in  and of  the media.

The London event thereby was one 'of the believer, by the believer and for the believer'. The political challenge is not just to regain what has possibly been lost from the 31 percent vote base in the last four years, especially post-August 2017, but to add to it. This was not addressed.

This could have been attempted by setting up a semblance of a contest. Instead, planners devised the event as a 'friendly match', with the outcome being known to everyone  and they all went back smiling! Consequently, an opportunity had been lost.

Moreover, what has become passe became the entry point to the talk  that Modi's life "began on the railway platform".

There is a saying in most Indian languages: If you squeeze a lemon too hard, the juice turns bitter. No doubt the opportunity gifted by Mani Shankar Aiyer  the first time  was rightly milked in 2014.

But, as incumbent, when Modi faces the daunting task of establishing promises as being fulfilled and of being the transformative leader that he was anticipated to be, does his personal background matter?

Will Modi's poverty, the hardships his parents  especially mother  faced, provide solace to the proverbial last man who still remains at the end of the queue and with little additional in hand?

Doubtful, because this sort of campaign does not tackle perception to the contrary.

But when Modi came back to this later, stating critics in 2014 said a chaiwala would be a failure in diplomacy, it sounded worse than being tad repetitive. More so, as the vital question was on the space he envisioned for India in the new world.

The answer was typical Modispeak  with another question: Don't you feel more power in the Indian passport when you show it now? No one voiced concerns about the country's neighbourhood policy and the 'greater space' China has secured in South Asia. Possibly because it was decided that there is yet no answer to this awkward query.

Falling back on old analogies did not do Modi any good. His glass half full correlation stirred not just students of SRCC in 2013 when every word he spoke had newness, but using it again draws a gnawing thought of him having run out of expressions.

Similarly, is there little to gain from reminding people of having created the idea of Divyang for a differently-abled person. Likewise, it is time to understand that the impact of labelling himself as 'sevak' (servant) in a strategy drawn from Nehru's book, evokes little positives anymore. Every claim and coinage has a shelf-life and Modi is possibly mouthing phrases whose 'best before' date is long past.

This was an interaction in London but the audience was the voter at home. It should, though, worry him that while he previously didn't allow anyone to anticipate his next line, in this interaction there was an element of predictability throughout the two-hour-plus event.

"Rape is rape, shouldn't be politicised," he said. Modi forgot or chose not to remember, the horrific December 16, 2012, incident which possibly was the last nail in the UPA coffin. Channels which have been replaying then angry statements by his women ministers juxtaposed with their silence post-Kathua and Unnao.

One would have liked a more combative Modi. What we saw was a defensive premier who has decided that it was best to sit on past laurels and remind people only about them. Talk surgical strikes, tell people you flexed muscles to the extent that it scared a Pakistani general from picking up the telephone but sidestep Doklam.

Modi declared he does not shy away from criticism but no question was anything but sycophantic  even Joshi's posers. While no one expected him to do an Oriana Fallaci but Joshi could at least have displayed more bite, even if only for the event's credibility. News anchors close to the establishment are likely to have sported a jaguar's smile at the end of the telecast.

Impatience cost Modi variously over the past four years. In 2014, he told people they gave Congress 60 years, forgetting the six to the NDA regime under Atal Bihari Vajpayee, another three years of Janata rule in which the Jana Sangh was a part and one year when VP Singh was PM with BJPs support. As payback, Modi asked for sixty months which he got. But people were not willing to wait for sixty days. They wanted immediate results because they pressed the 'send' button in April-May 2014.

The smart politician that he is, Modi wisely did not deny the existence of impatience and instead depicted it as a positive trait. Shrewdly, he argued that people were impatient only with those they expected to deliver. This cheered the house but the discourse has to move beyond platitudes. Growing edginess bordering on annoyance may cost electorally.

Criticism has disappeared he said and in a veiled manner stated that the media levelled allegations only due to its 24x7 competitive rush. He said research was not being adequately done. This is true for the other side too, fact-checkers flourish on the Internet and function with an impartiality that Modi does not think free media is committed to.

It surely is a coincidence then that he said people would even be scrutinising 'Bharat Ki Baat, Sabke Saath'. Once asked, I had to watch the show in its entirety.

Someone must tell him that like the child in Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales, none of this is likely to work. In 2014, when there was curiosity about Brand Modi, this may have worked. The publicity script for the next round will possibly have to be different.

The million dollar question, in a party which has sycophancy embedded at the top, is  who will bell the cat?

(The author is a Delhi-based writer and journalist. He tweets at @NilanjanUdwin. Views are personal)
For the first time in the 93 years of undivided Communist party history and the 54 years of CPM, demands were raised for a secret ballot on the partys political-tactical line that will determine its future relationship with the Congress and is critical to the formation of a broad anti-BJP coalition ahead of 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

As of now, the party is divided between the lines of general secretary Sitaram Yechury calling for understanding between all Left-secular-democratic forces, including the Congress, to defeat the BJP and the stand taken by his predecessor Prakash Karat opposing any truck with the Congress.

With just two days left for the party to adopt the crucial political-tactical line and re-elect or elect a new general secretary at its ongoing Hyderabad party Congress, hectic and last-ditch lobbying is underway by both camps to canvass support for their respective resolutions.

The political-tactical line is adopted by a show of hands, but on Wednesday, some delegates demanded secret ballot.

On Thursday, representatives from 11 states spoke, of which six states underscored the different opinions, while Maharashtra delegates also demanded secret ballot.

In the Kolkata Central Committee meeting in January, the Karat faction defeated Yechurys draft resolution by 31:55 vote. On Wednesday, the Central Committee adopted as many as 286 amendments to the majority resolution that will be discussed on Thursday and put to vote.

Organisational report will come up for discussion on Friday and voting is slated for Saturday.

The Central Committee that met on Tuesday allowed the general secretary to present the minority view before the 764 delegates, while Karat presented the majority draft resolution reaffirming his stand of no understanding with the Congress as he tried to delink electoral politics with political resolution.

Yechury camp argues that in the absence of electoral success, the party cannot grow and fight fascistic Sangh Parivar in collaboration with the secular Opposition.

Yechury supporters are expected to highlight the plus points (barring the controversial Indo-US nuclear deal) of the partys association with the Congress between 2004 and 2008 that benefitted the aam aadmi.

UPA-I had passed a slew of right-based legislations and implemented several welfare measures; RTI, Right to Education, food security, right to fair compensation to farmers, MREGA to name a few, and was able to apply brakes on mindless disinvestment of PSUs.

Though the party constitution does not stipulate secret ballot, it does not rule it out either. Sources said a secret ballot could be advantageous to Yechurys political line as some delegates may not be comfortable openly opposing the Karat doctrine backed by the powerful Kerala lobby. They said even if Yechury fails to muster support to his resolution, he could still be re-elected general secretary.

In 1998, Jyoti Basu and Harkishan Singh Surjeet felt that the CPM should join the then United Front government led by Deve Gowda, but their resolution to this effect was rejected by the Kolkata Congress and the same Congress re-elected Surjeet as general secretary.

Whether the Karat faction will field a candidate against Yechury remains to be seen. He has been egging former Tripura chief minister Manik Sarkar to contest against Yechury for the general secretary post. It is not yet clear whether that project has been abandoned or there will be some last minute surprise. A source from Kerala said Sarkar may not like the idea of challenging Yechury.

According to the laid down practice in the CPM, the party Congress is the only occasion that can even amend the constitution and between Congress to Congress, it is the Central Committee that takes all the decisions.

When the question had come up for secret ballot on political resolution at the Central Committee, a senior pro-Karat member tried to scuttle the move saying delegates can express their opinion on political-tactical line without fear or favour by show of hands.

The Kerala faction, it is learnt, was not comfortable with the Central Committee decision to allow Yechury to present his minority draft. There are complaints that the powerful Kerala faction has been trying to influence selection of delegates to stage managed the democratic process.

According to CPM watchers, such lobbying was never seen in the nearly 100 years of Left movement in India. Much will depend on the mood of delegates and their stand on secret ballot to espouse internal democracy in the party.

(The author is a senior journalist and political commentator. Views are personal.)
New Delhi: Even though the Tamil Nadu Governor has apologised for inappropriately touching a woman journalists face, but that did not stop BJP leader S V Shekher from dishing out distasteful advice to the former.

In a Facebook post, now deleted, the Tamil Nadu BJP leader said the Governor should wash his hand with phenyl for having touched the woman journalist.

Making a U-turn, Shekher, in a letter, has said "he does not endorse the views" expressed in the post and said "he comes from a family that respects women".

He tendered an apology and also made it clear that "it was unintentional" and that he put out the message without reading the content.

Chennai journalists though will protest outside BJP office in the city against the hurtful comments made by the leader.

Shekher, not convinced with the protestations of the journalist for having been touched without her consent, said such journalists only motive is to defame PM Modi and the TN Governor.

The leader did not stop there and made a particularly revolting statement against the journalistic fraternity. He wrote: Illiterate scoundrels are now in media, she (senior female journalist Subramanian) is not an exception to that. Sexual abuses are more in media than in educational institutions. No one can become a reporter or news anchor without sleeping with some big shots.

I respect few those who are exceptions, however, most in TN media are blackmailers and cheap people.

The Tamil Nadu Governor had kicked up a huge row earlier this week when he patted journalist Lakshmi Subramanian on her cheek "patronisingly", apparently to diplomatically avoid replying to a question asked by her.

A livid Subramanian immediately took to Twitter to voice her anger, saying, "I asked TN Governor Banwarilal Purohit a question as his press conference was ending. He decided to patronisingly - and without consent - pat me on the cheek as a reply."

In a letter to Lakshmi Subramanian, the 78-year-old under-fire governor said she was like her "granddaughter" and that his gesture stemmed from "affection" and "appreciation" of her performance as a journalist.

Subramanian, who works for an English news magazine, responded to the governor's letter with an e-mail where she accepted his apology "even though I am not convinced about your contention that you did it to appreciate a question I asked
Kolkata: The Calcutta High Court has asked the State Election Commission to announce fresh panchayat poll dates in West Bengal and extend the nomination dates after opposition parties alleged that the ruling TMC government had unleashed a reign of terror and stopped their candidates from filing nominations.

A single-judge bench of Justice Subrata Talukdar asked the poll panel to consult with the state government for the fresh dates and issue a notification soon. The decision is a blow for the Mamata Banerjee-led state government as it had fought against the extension.

The order was passed in response to a writ petition filed by the state's opposition parties alleging large scale violence and intimidation by the ruling TMC that led to obstruction in filing of nominations.

Speaking to News18, Congress Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury called the order a moral victory. The EC was acting on behalf of the state government. I have also requested the high court for deployment of central forces during panchayat polls, he said.

The panchayat election in the state  scheduled to be held between May 1 and May 8 had been stalled by an order of Justice Talukdar last week after the state election commission extended time for filing nominations but then then reversed it the next day.

The opposition parties in the state  BJP, Congress and the Left  had accused the election watchdog of toeing the line of the state government by reversing its decision on the nomination date. After the parties moved the court, the SEC told the court that the judiciary could not intervene once the election process had started.

Chief Minister Banerjee had accused the opposition of deliberately delaying the polls and said that it had stalled development works in West Bengal, as the model code of conduct was in force.

"If you really believe in the people, then why are you not going in for the elections? You are deliberately delaying the process, putting up various political questions. I will not comment about the court's verdict. The state has progressed a lot. But I feel sorry that because the code of conduct is in place, we cannot take any new decision, she had said.

TMC general secretary Partha Chatterjee had alleged that the opposition parties were not ready to face the poll process. "They know that they will be rejected by the people and therefore they are delaying the process," he said.
Kolkata: The Calcutta High Court order asking the State Election Commission (SEC) to extend the deadline for panchayat poll candidates to file nominations could have an indirect impact on the vote percentages.

The HC decision would also require the SEC to reschedule panchayat elections that were earlier to be held on May 1, 3 and 5 and could push the poll dates to the Ramzan period.

Even if the SEC keeps the last date of filing nomination April 21, i.e. Saturday, it will have to maintain a gap of minimum 21 days to conduct the first phase of panchayat poll  which will be on May 11. But if the SEC keeps it Monday, or April 23, then the first phase of polls would be shifted back to May 13.

In that case, the rest of the phases will fall during the Ramzan period, which starts from May 15. The SEC would also have to keep another day for re-polling.

Political observers feel that the new dates could be crucial as there are chances that the vote percentage could decline as fasting Muslims may not come out to cast their ballot in the same numbers.

Experts said that this is exactly what Mamata Banerjee had been hoping to avoid as the BJP has established itself as the principal opposition in the date and the Muslim vote would be crucial for TMC.

This is why she had opposed any extension in dates so firmly. Despite the setback, the West Bengal Chief Minister said on Friday that she welcomed the order.

She requested the SEC to announce poll dates at the earliest due to the looming Muslim Holy month from May 15 and increasing temperatures in the state.

"I would like to request the SEC to announce the poll dates at the earliest because in the coming few days, weather condition will be harsh in Bengal, especially in Birbhum, Midnapore, Purulia and Bankura, she said.

"Also, during Ramzan, Muslim brothers keep fasting and they may face problem. There are nearly 30% Muslims in Bengal. People could die in extreme weather condition and therefore I am stressing for polls at the earliest," she added.

When asked whether the government is planning to appeal against the decision, she said, "Why should we? There is no question of that. We welcome today's decision."

The BJP said that if the TMC loses out on some Muslim votes, it was due to its own blunders.

"Muslim community leaders are unhappy with the state government because it is likely that the poll will happen during Ramzan period. The ruling party is responsible for the present situation because they prevented the Opposition from filing nomination," state BJP head Dilip Ghosh said.

"The good thing about the Muslim community is there complete participation in the polling. But now because of ruling party's hooliganism the poll date postponed. They (Muslim community) are unhappy and it will certainly have some impact in the poll results," he added.

CPI(M)'s Sujan Chakraborty said the Calcutta High Court's ruling was a slap on the ruling party in Bengal." "The current situation arises because the SEC and the state government completely failed in ensuring free and fair election. The administration and police have tuned into an agent of the ruling party. It is a victory for us," he said.

Congress' Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury called the order a moral victory. "The EC was acting on behalf of the state government. I have also requested the high court for deployment of central forces during panchayat polls," he said.

A single-judge bench of Justice Subrata Talukdar had earlier in the day asked the poll panel to consult with the state government for the fresh dates and issue a notification soon. The order was passed in response to a writ petition filed by the state's opposition parties alleging large scale violence and intimidation by the ruling TMC that led to obstruction in filing of nominations.
Hyderabad: In a dramatic development, the CPI(M) on Friday endorsed the political-tactical line proposed by general secretary Sitaram Yechury at the ongoing 22nd CPM Congress in Hyderabad, paving the way for an understanding with the Congress and other secular-democratic forces to form a broad pan-India anti-BJP coalition ahead of the 2019 election.

The turnaround came as more than 16 state units demanded a secret ballot to choose between the two political-tactical line versions advocated by the two warring factions led by Yechury and his predecessor Prakash Karat.

The Karat faction had opposed any understanding with the Congress and had support in the high powered Central Committee and politburo, but a majority of the 786 delegates saved the day for Yehcury as they, departing from the usual show of hands methods, demanded a secret ballot to determine the political resolution.

Many delegates were not willing to be seen openly opposing the Karat line backed by the powerful Kerala comrades, but a secret ballot was an altogether different ball game. Seeing the writing on the wall and to avoid the unprecedented situation of secret voting, the party leadership decided to incorporate the amendments calling for an understanding with the Congress.

The CPI(M) adopted the main political resolution on Friday evening after approving an amendment moved by the Steering Committee, with an overwhelming endorsement from the delegates. A total of

47 delegates had spoken on the resolution. During deliberations, delegates moved around 373 amendments. Of these, 37 amendments were accepted.

The compromise formula that the two rival factions in the party finally arrived at was to drop the words "understanding and electoral alliance" with the Congress and replace it with (no) "political alliance" with the Congress.

This effectively means that the CPI(M) would be ready to enter electoral alliances with the Congress if the situation so demands but it will not form any government with the party.

Yechury had never advocated a political or electoral alliance but only an understanding

In the statement released on Wednesday, Yechury presented a united front. We are all agreed that our main fight is against the BJP/RSS and to defeat this Government. After this Congress we go

back in a unified manner take this fight throughout the country to mobilize the vast mass of our people on the guidance of the political resolution, he said.

Karat said it was not a question of some words understanding and alliance as some delegates stated. "It is the approach of how best to fight the BJP RSS and ensure their defeat. A large number of comrades asked the leadership to resolve the issue so as to go back from this Congress with the message of unity," he said.

He said that the decision was taken keeping the spirit of comrades in mind. As far as the political line is concerned, any political alliance with the Congress is ruled out. Such an alliance with the major party of the Indian ruling classes will weaken our struggle against building the unity of the people for a policy alternative to the ruling classes. It is on the basis of this line that future electoral tactics will be decided, he said.

The former general secretary made it clear that the scope of any understanding has been clearly defined in the resolution.

Within Parliament we have understanding with secular opposition parties including the Congress on agreed issues. We take forward the Vishakapatnam Party Congress resolution that we need a

broad mobilization of all democratic and secular forces against communalism, he added.

Party sources said the decision underscored the vibrant internal democracy in the party and avoided a possible showdown between the two groups that some feared could even lead to a split.

But the battle is not over yet. The next fight will be over the composition of the new Central Committee, which will represent the party as a whole and be responsible for directing the entire work of the party. The CC shall have the right to take decisions with full authority on any question facing the party.

To strengthen his position and carry out party programmes and policies without factional interference, it would be necessary for Yechury to have majority support in the CC that clears all

important decisions until next Congress in 2021, including electoral tactics in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

Unless majority of CC follows him and majority of politburo falls in line it will be difficult for Yechury to implement party programmes smoothly. If he fails, the next Congress could hold him accountable.
Bengaluru: After a long wait, Janata Dal (Secular) on Friday announced its second list of 56 candidates for the May 12 assembly election in Karnataka, fielding its state unit chief H D Kumaraswamy in a second constituency.

Kumaraswamy, a former Chief Minister, will also be contesting from Channapatna constituency, apart from Ramanagara, which was announced in the first list.

In the second list, the party has accommodated several aspirants from BJP and Congress, who knocked at its doors after they were denied tickets.

Among party hoppers who have got tickets include Prakesh Kandre from Bhalki, actor turned politician Shashi Kumar from Hosadurga, Hemachandra Sagar from Chickpet, P Ramesh from C V Raman Nagar, Mangaladevi Biradar from Muddebihal, and Ramachandra from Rajarajeshwari Nagar.

JDS was the first to announce a list of 126 candidates in February itself, much before the poll dates were announced.

The move was seen as an attempt to keep the options open for disgruntled aspirants from Congress or BJP, willing to switch over and field them where the JDS is weak.

JDS had followed a similar strategy in earlier elections also.

The party, led by former Prime Minister H D Deve Gowda, is in alliance with Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party, which, it hopes, would help garner the votes of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in the May 12 assembly polls.

Asaduddin Owaisi-led AIMIM has announced its decision to back the JDS.
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.)
New Delhi: BJP has fielded Karunakar Reddy, one of the Reddy brothers - tainted mining barons- from Harapanahalli as it released its third list of 59 candidates on Friday for the Karnataka assembly elections.

The party had in its second list released earlier fielded another of three Reddy brothers, Somashekhara Reddy, from Ballari. Reddy brothers have been accused in the past of illegal mining.

Like the second list, the third list too seems to have the stamp of the partys chief ministerial face BS Yeddyurappa and follows the mantra of electability above all else.

Their political influence within the BJP seemed to have waned after the alleged scam erupted but it appears that they have made a comeback with the party rewarding them and their associates with tickets in a region they wield considerable influence.

With announcement of 59 more candidates, the BJP has declared its nominees for 213 seats for the elections to the 224-member state assembly.

Here is the full list:

It has fielded Gopal Rao from Chamundeshwari, from where Chief Minister Siddaramaiah is contesting on a Congress ticket.

The BJP also changed its candidate from Kolar Gold Field seat reserved for scheduled caste candidates. S Ashwini will now be its nominee from the seat, the party said.

The BJP has so far not announced its candidate from Varuna, the current constituency of Siddaramaiah from where the Congress has fielded his son. B Y Vijayendra, son of its chief ministerial candidate B S Yeddyurappa, is seen as the likely BJP candidate from there.
Bengaluru: Sons of former Karnataka chief minister late S Bangarappa will cross swords in the May 12 state assembly polls in a bitter battle to inherit the political legacy of their father.

Kumar Bangarappa and Madhu Bangarappa are pitted against each other in Soraba constituency, once represented by their father from 1967 to 1994 till his election to the Lok Sabha.

While Kumar now represents the BJP after quitting the Congress ahead of the elections, his younger brother Madhu, a sitting MLA from Soraba, is seeking re-election from the JD(S).

The ruling Congress has fielded Raju M Tallur from the constituency.

Going beyond the sibling rivalry, the battle between the two has often turned nasty with the family feud spilling into the open and both the sides levelling accusations against each other.

Speaking to PTI, Madhu said he was confident of winning this election as he had started working for his constituency from day one.

He said his accessibility to people of the"constituency, utilisation of funds, completion of pending projects and following his father's legacy were the "factors in his favour".

Asked about being pitted against his own brother, he said, "Kumar is just another opponent for me in this election". He said the issue only looks "interesting" for the media during elections.

Pointing out that his brother has been his electoral opponent since 2004, when Bangarappa was alive, Madhu said, "He (Kumar) may lose badly as the BJP has no presence in our constituency".

Kumar, who has represented Soraba thrice and has also, served as a minister in the past, expressed confidence about his victory from the constituency.

He had won from Soraba in 1996, 1999 and 2004.

Kumar said it was under his father Bangarappa, the BJP started gaining momentum in the region when he contested for parliament in 2004.

"A powerful combination of Yeddyurappa and Bangarappa had worked then, and I think we should be able to repeat it once again now along with Modiji's phenomenon," he said.

Alleging corruption under the JD (S) in Soraba with regard to land grant, Kumar said, his brother Madhu as an MLA had "not performed".

Calling Madhu a "political opponent", Kumar said, "We are reaching out to people to see to that Bangarappa's support base and votes consolidate for development... I hope that voters will favour development politics of the BJP".

"The two brothers have also been associated with the Kannada film industry in the past, with Kumar having worked as an actor and Madhu as an actor and producer.

Like their father, both have shifted parties in the past.

Kumar was in the Congress and Madhu has had his stints with the BJP and the Samajwadi Party.
Hyderabad: The occasion is celebratory, but the mood is sombre as Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu sits on a day-long fast on his birthday protesting against the 'injustice meted out to Andhra Pradesh.

The gloom of being denied 'Special Category Status' is writ large on the stage set for the deeksha or the protest.

The birthday boy in his trademark off white dress accepts greetings from supporters, walking past in queue. Party leaders in another corner hold fort at the microphone to engage the crowd in sultry mid-summer heat.

As he plans his future politics after leaving the NDA, there is a bit of Modi in Naidu's protest fast. Remember the 52-hour fast announced by the then CM of Gujarat in 2012 just ahead of state Assembly polls. That fast was against the UPA regime led by Manmohan Singh seeking immediate completion of the Narmada project.

The larger political theme was similar to the refrain Naidu has used in his speeches - injustice meted out by a dominant Centre.

For Modi in 2012 it was all about Gujarati asmita. In 2018, for Naidu it is about Telugu pride.

On the stage, the leaders who inspired his TDP campaign are carefully chosen and garlanded. Led by Potti Sriramalu, the activist whose death during hunger strike forced Jawahar Lal Nehru to concede to the long standing demand of a separate Telugu speaking state. Then there is Gandhi, followed by Ambedkar, Jyotiba Phule and NTR.

The fact that Telugu megastar NTR picked up a fight with the all dominant Centre and won is at the core of TDP's inception. Denied the 'Special Category Status', Naidu is again playing the victim card invoking the Telugu pride.

His son and heir apparent Nara Lokesh sitting at the back of the stage explains his party's future plans.

"We will be holding a mahasabha soon at Tirupati at precisely the place where Mr Modi made promises to the people of AP ahead of the 2014 elections," said Lokesh.

He, however, remained non-committal on future alliances.

"We will decide three months before the polls. As we did by announcing a tie-up with BJP just one month before 2014 general elections," said Lokesh.

In the next nine months, Chandrababu Naidu will wait and watch and build his campaign against the Dilli Durbar.
Bengaluru: Chief Minister Siddaramaiah is facing perhaps the trickiest situation in his entire political career. His decision to contest from Badami as well in the Mumbai-Karnataka region has divided the ruling Congress and the party chief Rahul Gandhi is yet to make up his mind on fielding him from two seats.

After declaring that he would not be contesting from Badami, Siddaramaiah seems to have changed his mind. On Thursday, he assured Congress workers from Badami that he would contest from there as well.

A few minutes later, in a U-turn he told the media that he would be contesting only from Chamundeshwari in Mysore district. He filed his nomination from Chamundeshwari on Friday.

The Congress has declared the name of Dr Devaraj Patil for Badami. But it has withheld his nomination form fearing speculations that Siddaramaiah might contest from there at the last minute.

The sitting MLA of Badami B B Chimmanakatti has threatened the CM that either he contest from there or the ticket should be given to him instead of Devaraj Patil.

Chimmanakatti has even told party leaders that he may commit "suicide" if the ticket goes to Patil. On the other hand, Patil has also threatened the party that the ticket should be given only to him if the CM decides not to contest from Badami.

Local Congress leaders, including Water Resources minister M B Patil, are requesting Siddaramaiah to contest also from Badami. Speaking to News18, he said Siddaramaiah's contest will enthuse the party cadres in that region helping the Congress to win more seats from there.

Siddaramaiah's well-wishers in Mysore are also persuading him to contest from Badami keeping in the mind the hostile atmosphere in Chamundeshwari.

Siddaramaiah has earlier won five times from Chamundeshwari before shifting to neighbouring Varuna in 2008.

He has now vacated Varuna for his son Dr Yatheendra.

Chamundeshwari is currently held by G T Deve Gowda of the JDS and the Gowdas are pulling out all stops to defeat Siddaramaiah there.

The JDS state chief H D Kumaraswamy has already campaigned across Chamundeshwari for three days vowing to defeat the CM.

The BJP is considered a weak party in Chamundeshwari and the Congress claims it has entered into a secret pact with the JDS to defeat Siddaramaiah.

The BJP is yet to declare its candidate for Chamundeshwari.

This semi-urban constituency has 72,000 Vokkaliga and 40,000 Veerashaiva/Lingayat votes. A combination of these two castes can spell doom for Siddaramaiah, argue political experts.

But the local Congress leaders counter that saying over 60% voters are from Siddaramaiah's AHINDA and they will back him.

Badami, the capital of ancient Chalukya empire, is a Kuruba dominated seat and the CM feels that it will be much easier to win from there.

Siddaramaiah is a Kuruba by caste. They comprise 7% of the total population in Karnataka.

The internal surveys commissioned by the party also favour Siddaramaiah contesting from two seats, claims one of his close aides.

According to state Congress leaders, Rahul Gandhi has asked Siddaramaiah to make up his mind by evening as the nominations close on April 24.

At the same time the party fears that it may generate negative publicity for the CM and the Congress if he chooses to contest from two seats.

The BJP and JDS have already termed it as an act of cowardice on Siddaramaiah's part.
The US Senate has confirmed President Donald Trump-nominated Representative Jim Bridenstine to lead the US space agency. The Senate narrowly on Thursday voted 50-49 on partisan lines to confirm Bridenstine to serve as NASA's 13th administrator. Bridenstine, a pilot in the US Navy Reserve and former executive director of the Tulsa Air and Space Museum and Planetarium, was elected to the US Congress in 2012 to represent Oklahoma's First Congressional District.

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He currently serves on the House Armed Services Committee and the Science, Space and Technology Committee. "I am pleased to have Rep. Bridenstine nominated to lead our team. I look forward to ensuring a smooth transition and sharing the great work the NASA team is doing," acting NASA Administrator Robert Lightfoot said in a statement. "It is an honour to be confirmed by the US Senate to serve as NASA Administrator," said Bridenstine.

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Bridenstine will take over from Lightfoot, who has been leading the space agency since its previous administrator Charles Bolden, retired in the wake of the 2016 elections. "I am humbled by this opportunity,... I look forward to working with the outstanding team at NASA to achieve the President's vision for American leadership in space," Bridenstine added. "Congrats Rep Bridenstine on being confirmed as the next @NASA Administrator! Under @POTUS, America will lead in space once again," tweeted Vice President Mike Pence.

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To recall, NASA's next planet-hunter, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (Tess) successfully launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The satellite launched at 6.51 p.m. EDT on Wednesday (4.21 a.m. on Thursday, India time). Tess, which is expected to find thousands of new exoplanets orbiting nearby stars, including some that could support life, was earlier scheduled to launch on Monday (4.02 a.m. on Tuesday, India time) but was rescheduled to conduct further Guidance, Navigation and Control analysis, NASA said.

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Havana: Raul Castro turned over Cuba's presidency Thursday to a 57-year-old successor he said would hold power until 2031, a plan that would place the state the Castro brothers founded and ruled for 60 years in the hands of a Communist Party official little known to most on the island.

Castro's 90-minute valedictory speech offered his first clear vision for the nation's future power structure under new President Miguel Mario Diaz-Canel Bermudez. Castro said he foresees the white-haired electronics engineer serving two five-year terms as leader of the Cuban government, and taking the helm of the Communist Party, the country's ultimate authority, when Castro leaves the powerful position in 2021.

"From that point on, I will be just another soldier defending this revolution," Castro said. The 86-year-old general broke frequently from his prepared remarks to joke and banter with officials on the dais in the National Assembly, saying he looked forward to having more time to travel the country.

In his own half-hour speech to the nation, Diaz-Canel pledged to preserve Cuba's communist system while gradually reforming the economy and making the government more responsive to the people.

"There's no space here for a transition that ignores or destroys the legacy of so many years of struggle," Diaz-Canel said. "For us, it's totally clear that only the Communist Party of Cuba, the guiding force of society and the state, guarantees the unity of the nation of Cuba."

Diaz-Canel said he would work to implement a long-term plan laid out by the National Assembly and communist party that would continue allowing the limited growth of private enterprises like restaurants and taxis, while leaving the economy's most important sectors such as energy, mining, telecommunications, medical services and rum- and cigar-production in the hands of the state.

"The people have given this assembly the mandate to provide continuity to the Cuban Revolution during a crucial, historic moment that will be defined by all that we achieve in the advance of the modernization of our social and economic model," Diaz-Canel said.

Cubans said they expected their new president to deliver improvements to the island's economy, which remains stagnant and dominated by inefficient, unproductive state-run enterprises that are unable to provide salaries high enough to cover basic needs. The average monthly pay for state workers is roughly $30 a month, forcing many to steal from their workplaces and depend on remittances from relatives abroad.

"I hope that Diaz-Canel brings prosperity," said Richard Perez, a souvenir salesman in Old Havana. "I want to see changes, above all economic changes allowing people to have their own businesses, without the state in charge of so many things."

But in Miami, Cuban-Americans said they didn't expect much from Diaz-Canel.

"It's a cosmetic change," said Wilfredo Allen, a 66-year-old lawyer who left Cuba two years after the Castros' 1959 revolution. "The reality is that Raul Castro is still controlling the Communist Party. We are very far from having a democratic Cuba."

After formally taking over from his older brother Fidel in 2008, Raul Castro launched a series of reforms that led to a rapid expansion of Cuba's private sector and burgeoning use of cellphones and the internet. Cuba today has a vibrant real estate market and one of the world's fastest-growing airports. Tourism numbers have more than doubled since Castro and President Barack Obama re-established diplomatic relations in 2015, making Cuba a destination for nearly 5 million visitors a year, despite a plunge in relations under the Trump administration.

Castro's moves to open the economy even further have largely been frozen or reversed as soon as they began to generate conspicuous displays of wealth by the new entrepreneurial class in a country officially dedicated to equality among its citizens. Foreign investment remains anemic and the island's infrastructure is falling deeper into disrepair. The election of President Donald Trump dashed dreams of detente with the U.S., and after two decades of getting Venezuelan subsidies totaling more than $6 billion a year, Cuba's patron has collapsed economically, with no replacement in the wings.

Castro's inability or unwillingness to fix Cuba's structural problems with deep and wide-ranging reforms has many wondering how a successor without Castro's founding-father credentials will manage the country over the next five or 10 years.

"I want the country to advance," said Susel Calzado, a 61-year-old economics professor. "We already have a plan laid out."

Most Cubans have known their new president as an uncharismatic figure who until recently maintained a public profile so low it was virtually nonexistent. Castro's declaration Thursday that he saw Diaz-Canel in power for more than a decade was likely to resolve much of the uncertainty about the power the new president would wield inside the Cuban system.

"The same thing we're doing with him, he'll have to do with his successor," Castro said. "When his 10 years of service as president of the Council of State and Council of Ministers are over, he'll have three years as first secretary in order to facilitate the transition. This will help us avoid mistakes by his successor, until (Diaz-Canel) retires to take care of the grandchildren he will have then, if he doesn't have them already, or his great-grandchildren."

Cuban state media said Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulated Diaz-Canel and thanked Castro for the many years of cooperation between the two countries, while Chinese President Xi Jinping also reaffirmed his country's friendship with Cuba and expressed interest in deeper ties.

At the U.S. State Department, spokeswoman Heather Nauert expressed disappointment at the handover, saying Cuban citizens "had no real power to affect the outcome" of what she called the "undemocratic transition" that brought Diaz-Canal to the presidency.

Vice President Mike Pence tweeted at Castro that the U.S. won't rest until Cuba "has free & fair elections, political prisoners are released & the people of Cuba are finally free!"

Diaz-Canel said his government would be willing to talk with the United States but rejected all demands for changes in the Cuban system.

With Castro watching from the audience, Diaz-Canel made clear that for the moment he would defer to the man who founded the Cuban communist system along with his brother Fidel. He said he would retain Castro's cabinet through at least July, when the National Assembly meets again.

"I confirm to this assembly that Raul Castro, as first secretary of the Communist Party, will lead the decisions about the future of the country," Diaz-Canel said. "Cuba needs him, providing ideas and proposals for the revolutionary cause, orienting and alerting us about any error or deficiency, teaching us, and always ready to confront imperialism."

Diaz-Canel first gained prominence in central Villa Clara province as the top Communist Party official, a post equivalent to governor. People there describe him as a hard-working, modest-living technocrat dedicated to improving public services. He became higher education minister in 2009 before moving into the vice presidency.

In a video of a Communist Party meeting that inexplicably leaked to the public last year, Diaz-Canel expressed a series of orthodox positions that included somberly pledging to shutter some independent media and labeling some European embassies as outposts of foreign subversion.

But he has also defended academics and bloggers who became targets of hard-liners, leading some to describe him a potential advocate for greater openness in a system intolerant of virtually any criticism or dissent. International observers and Cubans alike will be scrutinizing every move he makes in coming days and weeks.

As in Cuba's legislative elections, all of the leaders selected Wednesday were picked by a government-appointed commission. Ballots offered only the option of approval or disapproval and candidates generally receive more than 95 percent of the votes in their favor. Diaz-Canel was approved by 604 votes in the 605-member assembly. It was unclear if he had abstained or someone else had declined to endorse him.

The assembly also approved another six vice presidents of the Council of State, Cuba's highest government body. Only one, 85-year-old Ramiro Valdes, was among the revolutionaries who fought with the Castros in the late 1950s in the eastern Sierra Maestra mountains.
Mazowe, Zimbabwe: A farm owned by Robert Mugabe's wife Grace is at the centre of a legal dispute after hundreds of illegal gold miners invaded parts of the property and started mining gold.

A Reuters photographer saw hundreds of illegal miners digging for gold at the Smithfield citrus farm using picks and shovels, the tools of choice for most illegal miners in Zimbabwe.

Once guarded by armed police, the farm is now dotted with illegal diggers whose quest for gold has left open shafts and tunnels and uprooted some fruit trees at Smithfield, 40 km (25 miles) north of the capital Harare.

Mugabe was forced to resign in November following a de facto military coup, but during his 37-year rule he and Grace and their allies forcibly grabbed several farms from white farmers under the government's controversial land reform programme.

In a sign of how the once powerful 94-year-old Mugabe and his wife have fallen, the illegal miners at Smithfield last month told Grace that she no longer had any power to evict them, the privately owned NewsDay newspaper reported.

"We are not going anywhere. We are artisanal miners and we will be contributing to the survival of the economy since we will be selling our gold to (state-owned) Fidelity (Refinery and Printers)," one of the diggers told Reuters at the farm two weeks ago.

"This is open pit mining and we are not damaging the environment at all," he said, declining to be named.

Fidelity Printers and Refiners is the sole buyer of all gold produced in Zimbabwe, irrespective of its origin.

"We would not want to get involved in the disputes, that area is covered by the Ministry of Mines which issues mining licences," Fidelity head of gold operations Mehluleli Dube said.

"Ours is to buy gold and we have agents in that area who buy gold on our behalf. Our approach is to have agents in some areas because we cant be everywhere were gold is produced."

The Ministry of Mines has said it cannot interfere with an issue that is before the court.

Neither Grace Mugabe nor her lawyer could be reached for comment.

She filed a theft report last month with the police against the illegal miners but this has not stopped the miners.

Two gold miners who say they own gold claims at the farm, have filed court applications against Grace Mugabe to stop her from interfering with mining operations at the farm.

In December, the High Court granted the two miners the right to mine at the farm and barred Grace Mugabe from interfering. She appealed the ruling and the matter will be heard in court.

On Tuesday the two men went back to court alleging that Grace Mugabe's employees were interfering with their operations. A date has not been set for a hearing.
Islamabad: Pakistan is expected to file its counter rejoinder on or before July 17 in the ICJ relating to the case of Indian national Kulbhushan Jadhav, who was sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court in April last year on charges of espionage and terrorism, a media report said on Thursday.

Pakistan's rejoinder will be in response to a fresh set of pleadings filed by India in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on April 17 relating to the case.

The office of Pakistan's attorney general, which is overseeing the case, is expected to receive the copy of the Indian rejoinder in a day or two, Dawn reported.

Khawar Qureshi, who pleaded Pakistan's case at the initial stage, is expected to plead the case, the report said.

India had moved the Hague-based ICJ in May last after Jadhav, 47, was sentenced to death by a Pakistani military court on charges of espionage and terrorism. A 10-member bench of the ICJ on May 18 had restrained Pakistan from executing Jadhav till adjudication of the case.

In its written pleadings, India had accused Pakistan of violating the Vienna Convention by not giving consular access to Jadhav arguing that the convention did not say that such access would not be available to an individual arrested on espionage charges.

In response, Pakistan through its counter memorial told the ICJ that the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations 1963 applied only to legitimate visitors and did not cover clandestine operations.

India has been maintaining that the trial of Jadhav by a military court in Pakistan was "farcical".

Pakistan claims that its security forces arrested Jadhav from restive Balochistan province on March 3, 2016 after he reportedly entered from Iran.

However, India maintains that Jadhav was kidnapped from Iran where he had business interests after retiring from the Navy. Jadhav's sentencing had evoked a sharp reaction in India.

India had approached the ICJ for "egregious" violation of the provisions of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, 1963, by Pakistan in Jadhav's case.

Pakistan has repeatedly denied India consular access to Jadhav on the grounds that it was not applicable in cases related to spies.
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Modi meets leaders of Commonwealth nations on sidelines of CHOGM

London : As part of India's diplomatic reach-out across the Commonwealth nations, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday met a number of leaders of Commonwealth nations, including the Prime Ministers of Australia and Bangladesh, on the sidelines of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) here.

"Strength in similar values of democracy, pluralism and Commonwealth traditions!" Indian External Ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar tweeted following Modi's meeting with his Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull.

Kumar said the two leaders discussed issues of bilateral and multilateral cooperation.

India and Australia, which is also home to a large Indian diaspora, are discussing a free trade agreement and are important defence partners.

The two countries, along with the US and Japan, are also part of the recently revived quad that seeks to work for the peace and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific region.

According to Kumar, Modi, in his meeting with Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, "had a productive exchange of views on various issues of bilateral interest".

"A lot of time was spent on governmental cooperation during the meeting with the Bangladesh Prime Minister," Kumar said during a media briefing here.

"Mainly, the focus was on development cooperation."

India is a leading development aid partner of Bangladesh and the eastern neighbour is important in India's Neighbourhood First foreign policy.

Keeping with India's increasing engagements with Africa, Modi met Gambian President Adama Barrow and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni.

He also met Fiji Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Rick Houenipwela and Kiribati President Taneti Maamau.

India has been increasingly reaching out to these Pacific island nations given their vulnerability in the face of climate change and their stakes in the blue economy.

Fiji is also home to a large number of people of Indian origin, who constitute around 37 per cent of the country's total population of nearly 900,000. Most of them are descendants of indentured labour taken from India in the 19th and early 20th centuries to work in the sugarcane plantations there.

Among the Caribbean islands, Modi met the Trinidad & Tobago, St. Lucia and Antigua & Barbuda Prime Ministers, Keith C. Rowley, Allen Chastanet and Gaston Browne respectively.

As India continues to engage with its extended neighbourhood, he met Seychelles President Danny Faure and Mauritius Prime Minister Pravind Kumar Jugnauth.

While Modi discussed cooperation in areas of trade and investment and other bilateral issues with Faure, the talks with Jugnauth were around in the areas of trade and investment, maritime cooperation and people-to-people ties, according to Kumar.

India sees both Mauritius and the Seychelles as important stakeholders in the blue economy and Modi has made official visits to both these countries.

Significantly, all these nations whose leaders Modi met are prospective members of the India-initiated International Solar Alliance (ISA).

Launched by Modi and then French President Francois Hollande at the Paris climate summit in 2015, the ISA was conceived as a coalition of solar resource-rich countries to address their special energy needs and provide a platform to collaborate on dealing with the identified gaps through a common, agreed approach.

It is open to all 121 prospective member countries falling between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.

Earlier on Thursday, Modi attended the opening ceremony of this year's CHOGM, becoming the first Indian Prime Minister to attend this biannual event since 2009.

Declaring the summit of the 53-nation Commonwealth open, Queen Elizabeth II proposed that her son Prince Charles should follow her and lead the organisation which her father, King George VI, founded after the end of the British Empire.

India, which is home to half of the 2.4 billion population of the Commonwealth, is expected to play a catalytic role in reinvigorating the organisation which had lost its relevance over the years in an increasingly multipolar world.
DANBURY - Authorities said police seized a substantial amount of cocaine and heroin during a recent drug bust in an apartment near Western Connecticut State University.

Police said they seized the drugs in the apartment after an investigation that stemmed from citizen complaints about drug activity in the area. Both Oliver Joan Ubiera and Daritza Rivera-Nunez were arrested on drug charges after the raid and are being held on $250,000 bonds.
RIDGEFIELD  Just two months after calling online for a national school walkout against gun violence, 16-year-old Lane Murdock stood before hundreds of her high-school peers with a microphone in hand.

Im so happy you are all here, Murdock told the crowd. This is a day in history, and I hope you all will remember it for the rest of your lives.

The group  at least a third of Ridgefield High Schools students  had just marched out of their classrooms to the tune of Bruce Springsteens The Rising and onto the athletic field to rally for legislative action to prevent gun violence. The four-hour rally included remarks by a score of students, a voter registration table and featured other speakers including U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn).

They were joined by fellow students at about 2,700 other schools around the country, including several in Connecticut, holding events inspired by Murdocks National School Walkout petition, which has gained 266,000 signatures. Murdock started the petition hours after the Valentines Day school shooting in Parkland, Fla., and scheduled it for the 19th anniversary of the Columbine school shooting in Colorado.

When we drew this up, we wanted it to be a national movement, but we never imagined 2,700 individual walkouts across the nation, said co-organizer Paul Kim. It honestly feels a little surreal to wake up and see the entire nation talking about one thing, and its these walkouts.

Most other schools in the Danbury area are on spring break, but students from four boarding schools walked through downtown Kent holding signs, wearing pieces of orange fabric and chanting, No more silence, end gun violence.

The crowd of 200 or so stopped outside of Kent Schools pre-engineering building, below a flag flying at half-staff, where several students and politicians including U.S. Rep. Elizabeth Esty spoke about ending gun violence.

Both rallies began with 13 seconds of silence to remember the 13 victims of the Columbine shooting. Students and speakers at both stressed the need to elect politicians who support gun restrictions, including an assault weapons ban and tighter background checks.

It's not left vs. right, it's life vs. death, said Ben Yoon, a student at Trinity Pawling School. What's more important, a hobby? Or the lives of children?

Students at both events described growing during an era of frequent mass shootings, including the 2012 massacre at Newtowns Sandy Hook Elementary School. The latest took place in Ocala, Fla., where a student was shot in the ankle hours before a walkout was scheduled to begin.

This is not normal, said Lillian Steinmayer, a student at Marvelwood School. Children and teenagers should not be dying like this and we cannot forget that. No generation should ever forget these events, lest they happen again.

Jeremy Stein, executive director of Connecticut Against Gun Violence, who spoke at both rallies, told the students that these experiences can help them change the status quo.

Youre the generation that has to train to run and hide in the classroom as if your life depends on it, because it does, Stein said. You are the generation that knows too well what the term active shooter means. I say, Not one more. 

Politicians told the students the younger generation is accomplishing what older generations have not.

You need to be the foot soldiers, you need to be the voice you need to be the face because parents are going to listen to you, Esty told the Kent crowd. Politicians have always had to listen to young people.

Students were also encouraged to take an active role in upcoming elections. Nearly 50 students registered to vote at a table set up in Ridgefield.

In a few years we will all be able to vote, said Ridgefield junior Rachel Lynch. We simply cannot continue to support politicians who do not support our right to live. Inaction has lasted far too long and cost far too many lives.

In both Ridgefield and Kent, school administrators worked with students to ensure that the walkouts would go smoothly. Ridgefield students were told the only discipline they faced for walking out would be an unexcused absence, but that would be excused if their parents called in.

In other Connecticut schools, administrators took a differfent view. Some Darien and Greenwich students were told they would be punished for participating, and Norwalk students were told they could not leave campus, although they had been allowed to do so in an earlier walkout on March 14.

Murdock said the next step will be to highlight the perspectives of communities less privileged than Ridgefield where gun violence often does not make headlines.

Kent organizers Carly Denora and Tyler Holder also noted that the conversation about school safety has focused on public schools. They stressed that it is important for private school students to get involved and press for change.

Murdock said the Ridgefield organizers plan to use their website, text message alert system and social media to continue pushing for gun control measures after the walkout.

The important thing is we keep the momentum alive," she said. This is not the finale of the movement, this is the launch pad.
DO NOT WEB; EMBARGOED UNTIL 12:01 AM FRIDAY

DANBURY - A leading charity working to reduce poverty in the states fastest-growing city has secured a $1 million private grant to invest in the development of new affordable child care centers.

The United Way of Western Connecticut, which announced the gift on Friday, will use the money to create hundreds of new child care slots for Danburys working poor.

Weve already started recruiting, and we have as many as 10 providers who are interested in the program, said Kim Morgan, the CEO of United Way of Western Connecticut. We are doing tests right now to determine what services would best support these new child care businesses.

The $1 million gift, named after a donors late wife who was a benefactor of childrens causes, will be added to two other major grants awarded to the city in February to reduce poverty and increase affordable childcare.

The hope is to relieve the onerous expense of quality child care for immigrant and minority families through a program of education, training, licensing and subsidies for meals and health services.

Licensed, quality child care for infants and toddlers can account for as much as 25 percent of a poor familys income, the United Way says. As a result, poor families often chose unlicensed or substandard care, which can delay a childs pre-school readiness.

United Ways investment in child care ... will not only increase the number of safe child care centers for our citys families, but provide an economic benefit to the city by growing the number of small business operators, said Cindy Merkle, president and CEO of Union Savings Bank and the chair of United Way of Western Connecticuts board, in a prepared statement.

The gift from Harold Spratt in the name of his late wife, Cora, will be invested in efforts already launched by United Way and its partner organizations in February, when they received back-to-back competitive grants.

In early February, Danbury received a $450,000 Working Cities Challenge grant to reduce poverty by 30 percent over the next decade. United Way, the Community Action Agency of Western Connecticut and City Hall designed a three-part plan to address the biggest challenges facing the working poor: learning English, finding affordable, quality child care and learning to trust service organizations that are trying to help.

Later in February Danbury won a $100,000 competitive grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies 2018 Mayors Challenge to increase affordable child care for immigrants and minorities.

At that point, the United Way was already speaking with Harold Spratt about a similar initiative, Morgan said.

We spent about a year setting this up, and it all came together at once, she said.

The child care initiative, named Coras Kids, fits the spirit of its namesake, Morgan said.

Morgan described Spratt as a quiet but firm mover behind the scenes, who was a major supporter of Danbury Hospital, United Way, and the Womens Center.

When we determined that a generous gift from Mr. Spratt would be used to help children start life off safe and secure, it seemed fitting to name the program in Mrs. Spratts honor, Morgan said. Our hope is that Coras kids will return to us in 20 to 30 years with stories of great success because they were cared for and educated from the beginning of their lives.

rryser@newstimes.com 203-731-3342
The issue: A certain group of college students in Connecticut has been treated unfairly for years. They are required to pay into a pool for financial aid, but are barred from applying for that aid. The only difference with this group of students and others who are eligible for grants or work-study jobs is that they are undocumented.

Through no fault of their own, they were brought to this country illegally by their parents. They graduated from public high schools, were accepted into state colleges and universities with the same criteria as other students, and pay tuition and other expenses. They call themselves Dreamers.

This comes down to fairness: These students pay into the $150 million pool of financial aid, so they should be able to apply for that aid.

What we wrote: Fairness is at the core of a bill that would allow undocumented students to be eligible for financial aid at the states public colleges and universities. It is time. ... The bill simply would allow equal access to institutional financial aid  such as tuition waivers, grants and student employment. ... It would not guarantee aid; the eligibility requirements would be the same for all students. ... What is happening to Dreamers nationally is unfair; promises are broken.

Connecticut can show its moral fiber by letting the Dreamers apply for the financial aid to which they contribute. Pragmatically, the state benefits from an educated workforce that will contribute a higher share of taxes.

 Editorial, Feb. 14, 2018

What happened: The state Senate voted 30-5 (with one absence) Wednesday in favor of SB-4, a bill that enables undocumented students to apply for financial aid at the states public colleges and universities. Given that the Senate is split evenly between Republicans and Democrats, the vote indicates broad bipartisan support.

What this bill is about is the importance of giving an education, Senate Republican Leader Len Fasano, a co-sponsor of the bill, said. Education is an equalizer.

It is important to note what the bill does not do: It does not guarantee financial aid.

The undocumented college students would have to meet appropriate criteria. They must have come to the United States before the age of 17 and be under the age of 36 by mid-June, and they must have attended a high school in Connecticut for at least two years. Those who served in the military and were honorably discharged also would be eligible to apply for financial aid.

In 2011 undocumented students were allowed to pay in-state tuition, as every other Connecticut resident. Opening eligibility for financial aid does not hurt legal students as it actually will increase enrollment and therefore the number contributing to the pool.

What should happen next: The House must vote on the bill before the end of this session in three weeks. In 2015 and again in 2016, similar bills came through the Senate but languished in the House without a vote. This year can be  and should be  different.
The U.S. Army Research Laboratorys Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Propulsion made an historic first with its experiment in a gas turbine combustor using X-rays. The data will help advance gas turbine engine designs for higher power density and efficiency, scientists said.

This is the strongest X-ray source in the world, said Tonghun Lee, an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which recently joined forces with ARL.

Lee and his graduate students, along with partners from the ARL Center for UAS Propulsion, set up shop in the U.S. Department of Energys Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, resulting in a unique experiment, which continued through April 11.

Were here to do spray imaging inside a gas turbine combustor as relevant to the Army, Lee said.

Lee said their experiment mimicked what happens inside a typical Army helicopter gas turbine engine.

Inside a gas turbine engine, a combustor is fed high-pressure air that is heated by constant pressure. After heating, the air passes from the combustor through the nozzle guide vanes to the turbine, producing thrust. Combustors play a crucial role in determining many of an engines operating characteristics, such as power density, fuel efficiency and levels of emissions.

We had a combustion going on, which is done for the first time ever at APS and we are imaging the spray breakup at the very tip of the injector using an X-Ray source, he said. Typically that region where the liquid breaks up is very dense and its difficult to image anything inside there.

By using the worlds most powerful X-Ray source, the team was able to penetrate and understand how the ligaments, or strands of burning fuel, breaks up into small droplets.

We are trying to understand exactly what occurs inside the gas turbine combustor to understand how it responds to different operating conditions, Lee said.

The data gathered during this experiment will become the initial conditions for numerical simulations that will further understanding of gas turbine combustors.

Were trying to get an understanding of the physics, which to this day we have been speculating, we can really visualize using this X-Ray source, he said. We want to understand what were doing right now, understanding the fuel impact. When Soldiers are off in a different location and they have different types of fuels, how will it impact the combustor they have?

The professor said in the slightly longer term, he hopes the data from the experiment will allow researchers to design more optimized combustor systems for the future.

The Advance Photon Source has spent a lot of effort over the last decade or so looking at spray-droplet breakup. And never has it been done in a live combusting environment, Lee said. So we made the hardware to make it happen and this is actually this first time its ever been done live with a combusting flow in a combustor.

Lee, while remaining a faculty member at UIUC, recently accepted an additional position as a researcher on the laboratorys regional office in Illinois, ARL Central. The Army established ARL Central in November 2017, as an extension of its Maryland-based headquarters with the goal of leveraging regional science and technology talent.

It was great to see a team of ARL, UIUC and Argonne researchers working together with the unique capability at the Advanced Photon Source to gain unprecedented insight into the fuel injection and combustion process, said ARL Central Regional Lead Dr. Mark Tschopp. It was so exciting to see this novel experiment firsthand because it symbolizes what ARL Central is all about  partnering to accelerate discovery and innovation for future Army applications.

The experiment was the first accomplishment of the labs new Center for UAS Propulsion, which kicked off a massive partnership between academia and industry. ARL held a ribbon cutting for the center April 2.

I am so pleased to perform this historic experiment right after the ribbon cutting ceremony for Center for UAS Propulsion, said center founder Dr. Chol-Bum Mike Kweon, who also serves as the labs Propulsion Division chief. I was thrilled watching the quality of the spray breakup processes in the gas turbine combustion in real time, which is extremely difficult to measure at this quality.

Dr. Jaret Riddick, director of the labs Vehicle Technology Directorate watched the experiment in person April 4.

Future Vertical Lift is one of the Armys six Modernization priorities, Riddick said. Future tactical unmanned aerial vehicles will play a key role in manned-unmanned teaming for Future Vertical Lift.

Breakthroughs in small engine technology for future unmanned aerial vehicles will enable longer duration, larger payloads and silent operation, he said.

Research partnerships through the newly established Center for UAS Propulsion, such as the one we witnessed at Argonne National Lab, will make these breakthroughs possible in support of the Army modernization priority for Future Vertical Lift , he said.
HARTFORD  Eversource Energy, which already has acquired one of the states largest water companies, now is making a bid for the Connecticut Water Co.

Eversource officials announced Thursday that the company has made a proposal to acquire all outstanding shares of Connecticut Water for either $63.50 a share in cash and/or Eversource common shares.

Eversouce completed its acquisition of Bridgeport-based Aquarion Water Co. in early December 2017.

Eversources move to acquire Connecticut Water comes a little more than a month after a San Jose, California-based utility, SJW Group, announced it was acquiring Connecticut Water. That deal came just five months after Eric Thornburg left his jobs as chairman, president and chief executive officer of Connecticut Water to work for SJW Group.

Eversource officials told the New Haven Register they had been making attempts to acquire Connecticut Water since last year.

We believe that our proposal represents a unique opportunity to deliver significant and immediate value to Connecticut Waters shareholders, customers, employees, and local communities, Jim Judge, Eversources chairman, president and chief executive officer, said in a statement. As such, we were surprised and disappointed that Connecticut Waters Board of Directors has been unwilling to engage in discussions with us. We urge the board of Connecticut Water to act in the best interests of its shareholders by meeting with us to seriously discuss our compelling proposal.

Connecticut Water officials said Thursday the utilitys board of directors, in consultation with its legal and financial advisers, carefully reviewed Eversources unsolicited acquisition proposal and concluded that it is not a superior proposal or reasonably likely to lead to a superior proposal compared to the deal with SJW Group.

Carol Wallace, chairwoman of the Connecticut Water board, said the Eversource offer was unsolicited.

We continue to believe that Connecticut Waters merger with SJW Group is in the best interest of our shareholders, particularly given the significant growth opportunity that the combined organization will have as a leading pure-play water company, Wallace said in a statement. We also believe our merger with SJW Group provides important benefits for customers, employees and communities that would be hard to replicate in a combination involving contiguous and overlapping territories, as was contemplated in the unsolicited Eversource acquisition proposal. Accordingly, the Connecticut Water Board remains firmly and unanimously in support of the SJW Group merger agreement.

A Louisiana law firm announced in March it is looking into whether the Connecticut Water-SJW deal is in the best interests of the local companys shareholders.

Eversources proposal represents a 21 percent premium on Connecticut Waters closing share price of March 14, 2018, the day prior to the SJW announcement, officials of the Hartford-based utility company said. Eversources proposal also represents a premium of 22 percent to Connecticut Waters 20-day volume-weighted average price as of March 14, Eversource officials said.

Eversource officials told David C. Benoit, chief executive officer of Connecticut Water, in an April 5 conversation that they planned to submit an offer and delivered a written proposal the same day.

Eversource sent a follow-up communication on Tuesday to Connecticut Water expressing its continued interest in pursuing an acquisition.

Aquarion Water serves nearly 230,000 customers in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, with approximately with 90 percent of its service base in Connecticut. Connecticut Water serves approximately 125,000 customers in Connecticut and Maine with with about 85 percent of its service base in this state.

The proposed transaction would provide Connecticut Water customers with the benefit of premier service quality and a highly reliable water supply into the future, Charles Firlotte, Aquarions president and chief executive officer, said in a statement. The combined company would have a complementary service territory and would allow for an expansion of the superior customer service our employees proudly provide.

luther.turmelle@hearstmediact.com
BRIDGEPORT - The town of Trumbull has agreed to pay a settlement to the family of a young women with Down Syndrome who was abandoned during a school field trip.

The amount of the settlement was not disclosed, however, in January the family of the young woman, Megan Gereda, had offered to settle the case with the town and the Trumbull Board of Education for $125,000.

"The facts of this case in the handling of Megan, a special needs student in need of constant supervision was extremely negligent," said the Geredas lawyer, Thomas Ganim. "Even more troubling was the way the staff and school officials handled the situation after learning that they left Megan at school completely alone and unattended, wasting critical time by not reporting it to the police. She wandered on busy streets for over two hours placing her life in great danger."

Lawyers for the town and the school board did not return calls and emails for comment. Gereda family members also could not be reached.

On May 26, 2016, 20-year-old Megan Gereda and 11 other special-needs students from the Educating Learners in Transition Environments program were assembled at the Helen Plumb building on Church Hill Road in Trumbull for a field trip to the Monroe YMCA, according to the family's lawsuit filed in Superior Court here.

While Gereda was in the bathroom, the other 11 students were loaded into vans for the trip, the suit states.

When the vans reached their destination, staff realized Gereda was not there and, in a panic, staff members drove back to the Plumb building to look for her.

Meanwhile, Gereda wandered along the town's streets ending up about a mile and a half away, where police found her tired and disoriented.

"This shouldn't have happened and a simple head count would have avoided it," said Ganim. "These students require constant supervision for a reason. Everyone should be accounted before you leave."
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HAMDEN  Police are searching for a shoplifter who stole $52 worth of energy drinks Thursday afternoon, according to a release.

Police responded to Walgreens, 1697 Whitney Ave., around 4:15 p.m. on the report of a larceny. An investigation a white man with glasses wearing a beige hat entered the store and stole energy drinks. The man then fled from the store in a green minivan with Vermont plates, police said.
WALLINGFORD  The sound of an alarm followed by stern pre-recorded instructions echoed down the empty halls of James J. Moran Middle School Thursday afternoon as police officers trained for skills they hope they will never have to use.

Attention: An emergency situation is in progress, the message began. Please move into the lockdown mode. Disregard P.A. system announcements bells and alarms.

Loudspeakers issued the same warning outside the building and into the surrounding Hope Hill Road neighborhood.

Adult volunteer role players lied motionless on various levels of the three-story school building, serving as simulated victims, school personnel and students.

Wallingfords public schools are on vacation this week and were empty.

From outside the building, it might have been easy to mistake the warnings as evidence that the horrors of Parkland, Fla., and Newtown, had made their way to Wallingford.

This training is an unfortunate, but necessary, fact of life, said Sgt. David Blythe. My adrenaline is still flowing.

Blythe, who is in the departments Patrol Division, had just completed a drill in which officers used a simulator to give officers the feeling of breaking down a heavy, metal door. From there, working in teams, the officers involved in the drill made their way down the main hall with one at the front of the diamond formation, two in the middle and one covering any threat from the rear.

From the first floor, the officers moved up into one of the second-floor classrooms where they were faced with another scenario: An attacker among students hiding in a classroom. One by one, the volunteers role playing as students and teachers were ordered to come out of their rooms with their hands behind their heads until officers ultimately were able to weed out the attacker.

Keep your eyes open, Sgt. Joe Cafasso told the officers doing the training. Somebody may come at you from behind. You dont have to sprint down the hallway, keep it tight (because) youre stronger as a group.

About 70 Wallingford police officers have gone through the training this week, said Lt. John Ventura, who leads the departments emergency response, or SWAT, team. Some of the officers engaged in training are part of the 17-member SWAT team, which operates jointly with the Cheshire Police Department.

Ventura said one of the hardest things for officers going through the training is the idea that they cant stop to aid or comfort any of the wounded until the threat is either disarmed or otherwise neutralized.

You have to keep moving, Ventura said.

While the teams cant come to a full stop until the threat has ended, Ventura told the officers who are training that they need to pay attention to what any of the wounded may be trying to tell them as they make their way down the hallway.

The most important people you have are the ones who are laying there, he said.

The last active shooter training Wallingford officers did was about four years ago, Ventura said. But this weeks training has been more comprehensive, he said, including helping officers learn the latest techniques for binding the wounds of those shot or injured.

luther.turmelle@hearstmediact.com
WEST HAVEN  Allingtown Fire Chief Vincent P. Landisio resigned this week for personal reasons, less than five months after being named chief of the City of West Haven Fire Department - Allingtown, two key officials confirmed.

There was no immediate confirmation of rumors that Landisio, a retired New Haven battalion chief and former North Haven fire chief who worked for 22 months as interim deputy chief and deputy fire marshal of the independent West Shore Fire Department before taking the Allingtown job, was headed back to West Shore to be fire marshal.

Landisio, who was hired last November after an exhaustive search following the ouster of former Allingtown Chief Peter Massaro, did not immediately return calls for comment.

Reached by phone Thursday, Michael Doyle, chairman of the West Shore Board of Fire Commissioners, did not deny it.

If you call me after tomorrow, Ill be able to tell you more, Doyle said. Right now, Chief Landisio is under contract with the Allingtown fire department. Hes not under contract to West Shore.

West Shore Fire Chief Steven Scafariello did not immediately return a call for comment.

Mayor Nancy Rossi and Allingtown Board of Fire Commissioners Chairman John Panza both confirmed that Landisio resigned from the Allingtown position, effective at 4 p.m. Friday.

Rossi said she received a resignation letter about 7:30 a.m. Thursday, which stated that Landisio was resigning for personal reasons.

She said she did not know any more. Rossi said she had not sought the resignation from Landisio, whom the fire commissioners named to the position just six days before former Mayor Ed OBrien left office.

Ive had nothing but a good relationship with the chief, Rossi said. It was a blind-side to me. I know nothing about it.

Panza said Landisio told the commissioners in closed-door executive session during a meeting Wednesday night. The special meeting was called because Landisio wanted to address the board, Panza said.

He told us its for personal reasons and he didnt elaborate much more, Panza said.

Panza said Landisio was not being pushed out.

I think he was doing a great job, he said. He didnt have any issues with the commissioners. I think he respected us, as we did him. ... I think he was a great person, a great leader.

Panza said he was unaware of any other job Landisio might be considering.

I think its devastating to me, Panza said of Landisios decision to leave so soon after being hired. He said he was not prepared to discuss any other candidates for the job, or whether there was anyone who stood out during the previous search.

Id like to act as a group and make the decision together as a group, he said.

West Haven Fire Chief Jim OBrien said he spoke with Landisio Thursday morning and he said only that he made the decision to leave the Allingtown job for personal reasons.

Its too bad, OBrien said. He was great to work with. I was kind of taken aback by it.

Landisios resignation came at a time when the citys finances are under the scrutiny of the state Municipal Accountability Review Board and there is strong pressure on Rossi to cut the budget and rein in spending.

It also came just days after Allingtowns primary firehouse, the Minor Park Firehouse on Fairfax Street, sustained significant damage during recent heavy rains, said Rossi.

What began as a roof leak grew so severe that the department had to move all of its apparatus to the antiquated Admiral Street Firehouse, which generally is used for the departments administrative offices and storage of volunteer apparatus.

The city, which has overseen the formerly independent Allingtown fire department since 2012 has filed an insurance claim, Rossi said.

mark.zaretsky@hearstmediact.com


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Dr. Rohrig said the effects include sleepiness, blurry vision and dry mouth. Benadryl will do that, plus a hangover effect, he said. All the symptoms and the timing are consistent with the ingestion of diphenhydramine.

Dr. Rohrig said diphenhydramine has been used in numerous cases of drug-facilitated sexual assault. He said the effects of Benadryl would take 15-30 minutes to begin, and would reach their peak in one to two hours. The drug has been produced in round, blue pills, like the ones Ms. Constand said she took, but has also been available in oblong or oval shapes, Dr. Rohrig said.

When Mr. Ryan asked Dr. Rohrig to describe the effects of quaaludes, which Mr. Cosby has said he has given to women he wanted to have sex with, Dr. Rohrig said the sedative would make the user sleepy. He said quaaludes were used as a party drug in the 1970s and were believed to have aphrodisiac effects.

The defense teams expert, Dr. Harry A. Milman, a pharmacologist and toxicologist from Rockville, Md., who has worked for the American Cancer Institute, denied that Ms. Constand would have experienced the symptoms she described by taking the amount of Benadryl that came up in the case, as stated by Mr. Cosby.

The symptoms that she described after taking a therapeutic dose would not have occurred within 10 to 15 minutes, Dr. Milman said, under direct examination from Becky James, an attorney for Mr. Cosby.
The Federal Aviation Administration had already been close to ordering airlines using that particular engine, the CFM-56B, to conduct ultrasonic inspections. The agency appears to have been prompted to act after another Southwest 737 engine came apart in 2016, sending debris into the planes fuselage, wing and tail. The investigation into that incident is ongoing.

Late Wednesday, the F.A.A. said it was ordering those ultrasonic inspections. The engines on both Southwest planes, were manufactured by CFM International, a joint venture of General Electric and Safran of France.

The National Transportation Safety Board concluded that the inspections were insufficient to detect flaws in the disk of a CF-6 engine on an American Airlines Boeing 767 in late 2016. The plane was gaining speed on the runway in Chicago when the engine broke apart, sending metal fragments into the fuel tank and igniting a fire. The engine was manufactured by General Electric.

The chairman of the transportation safety board, Robert L. Sumwalt, said on Wednesday that the problems with the Southwest engine were worrisome because the agency had already discovered in the Chicago incident that some engine flaws were undetectable. We are concerned about it, Mr. Sumwalt said.

Inspections have also been ordered for the Rolls-Royce Trent 1000 engines that power a quarter of Boeings newest wide-body, the 787 Dreamliner, after cracks were found on rotor blades. But the F.A.A. went further and rescinded the operators approval to fly the airplanes any farther than 2 hours and 20 minutes from an emergency airport.

International long-haul carriers like United Airlines, Qantas Airways, Japan Airlines, Air New Zealand and British Airways purchased the Dreamliner over the past decade specifically for the planes ability to carry fewer people on longer routes more fuel efficiently. On extended flights over water, an airline could schedule flights on routes of up to five hours flying time from an emergency airport.
The chairwoman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission announced on Thursday that she was stepping down from her post, after nearly four years of a sometimes tumultuous stewardship.

The chairwoman, Meenakshi Srinivasan, had faced fierce opposition to a set of proposed rule changes that critics said would weaken protections for historic buildings in New York City.

Those changes would, among other things, put the commission staff in charge of some types of landmarks decisions. Critics said that would remove decisions from public view and eliminate the chance for public comment.

At a commission hearing on March 27, an overwhelming majority of speakers voiced opposition to those rules; at least one speaker at the hearing called for the removal of the chairwoman, to loud applause.
MEXICO CITY  When the Mexican writer Sergio Pitol arrived to pick up his fellow writer Margo Glantz at the Vienna airport in the mid-1980s, he complemented his impeccable suit with a Venetian carnival mask.

Sounding a trumpet he carried, Mr. Pitol, who was the Mexican ambassador to Czechoslovakia at the time, shrugged off the formality of his position and, as Ms. Glantz emerged from customs, cried out, My best friend has arrived, my best friend has arrived!

That is just how he was, always playful, irreverent and loving, recalled Ms. Glantz, who had met Mr. Pitol in Mexico City in 1953.

He died on April 12 at 85 in Xalapa, in the Gulf Coast state of Veracruz. Ms. Glantz said he had been in poor health in recent years and had struggled in particular with progressive aphasia, which prevented him from writing or talking.
Then theres the question of what the E.R.A. would do. Even the most die-hard proponents of the amendment acknowledge that its unlikely to radically advance womens rights, at least in the short term. Thats because, for decades, many courts have applied the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to sex discrimination, creating a body of case law thats functioned as a sort of de facto E.R.A. As to whether the amendment could actually undo some programs that are beneficial to women, like sex-based affirmative action efforts, legal experts point to the fact that though the Constitution already protects the rights of people regardless of race, race-based affirmative action continues to exist. They also point to parts of the country that have state-level E.R.A.s and have not had such outcomes.

The fight against the E.R.A. is being led by groups on the religious right like the Illinois Family Institute, using arguments that are the ideological heirs of those so vociferously expressed by Phyllis Schlafly, whose group Stop E.R.A.  the first word standing for Stop Taking Our Privileges  which became the Eagle Forum, prevented the E.R.A.s ratification at the time.

Those arguments include fearmongering about how coed locker rooms could become standard and alimony for women outlawed  arguments that are hard to take seriously but that nonetheless helped Mrs. Schlafly to very effectively convince Americans, including many women, that the E.R.A. was bad news. (Mrs. Schlafly, who died in 2016, would no doubt be appalled that her home state, Illinois, could now play such a pivotal role in ratification.)

Another conservative talking point is that the E.R.A. would lead to abortion restrictions being struck down. That outcome is not at all certain, but it would help many women. (For obvious reasons, the anti-E.R.A. crowd already had to slink away from an argument that the amendment would lead to legalizing same-sex marriage.)

Looking at everything the E.R.A. would not do raises the question of why its still needed. Heres why it is: The court decisions that make up the de facto E.R.A. can be undone in a way a constitutional amendment cannot. The E.R.A. would add an extra layer of legal protection for women  and men  against discrimination. This could become especially important if Mr. Trump gets to pick additional conservative Supreme Court justices.

Theres also a symbolic and emotional element to this fight thats not to be discounted. Ruth Bader Ginsburg  who, before becoming a Supreme Court justice, fought many legal battles over gender discrimination and is a longtime supporter of the E.R.A.  summed up this argument in 2014.
NATIONAL

An article on Thursday about the impact of a trade dispute between the United States and China on the computer chip manufacturer Qualcomm misstated the title of Guan Zhisheng. He is an associate professor at Sun Yat-sen University, not an assistant professor.

NEW YORK

An article on Thursday about Judge Kimba M. Wood, who presided over a hearing related to President Trumps attorney Michael D. Cohen, described incorrectly Judge Woods marital history. Michael Kramer was her second husband, not her first. The article also misstated the connection between her current husband, Frank E. Richardson, and George Soross Quantum Industrial Holdings. Mr. Richardson once served as an unpaid member of an investment advisory committee for the group; he did not sit on its board.

THE ARTS

A review on Saturday about works by the Martha Graham Dance Company misstated the name of an award the company grants. It is the Martha Graham Award, not the Martha Graham Award for Lasting Impact to the Field of Dance.

OBITUARIES

An obituary on Thursday about Jean McFaddin, who as Macys events planner was in charge of the stores Thanksgiving Day parade, misstated the name of a college in Missouri that she attended. It is Stephens College, not St. Stephens College.
Another bomb two days later killed Robert E. Robinson, an African-American lawyer in Savannah, Ga. Officials also intercepted a device that was sent to the 11th Circuits offices in Atlanta, as well as a bomb that was mailed to a Florida office of the N.A.A.C.P.

Prosecutors believed Mr. Moody disguised his motive by using the name of a fictitious group when he vowed to kill judges and railed against African-Americans and the Atlanta-based 11th Circuits treatment of them.

Federal officials began to focus on Mr. Moody after an investigator described one of the bombs to a chemist with what was then known as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, who sketched the device on a napkin and noticed its similarity to one Mr. Moody had built in 1972.

Thats Moodys bomb, the chemist said in an episode Mr. Freeh described in his memoir, which noted that Mr. Moodys companion ultimately cooperated with investigators and provided crucial information.

Mr. Moody, who attended law school and apparently resented that he could not practice, has maintained his innocence. In a recent letter to Judge Vance, he wrote, Had my Dad been murdered, I would want to know who had done it.

Yet federal officials long pointed to a recording, partly transcribed in a court ruling, of Mr. Moody talking to himself in jail after the killings: Now youve killed two.  Now you cant pull another bombin.

I never came across someone like him: very brilliant, very determined, very skillful, Mr. Freeh recalled on Thursday, adding, He made it a campaign to declare war against the courts and kill these innocent people, but Ive never seen a defendant like that.
WASHINGTON  A federal judge blocked the Trump administration on Thursday from transferring an American citizen detainee  who has already been held in Iraq as a suspected Islamic State member for seven months  to the custody of another country against his will.

The decision, by Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, was a significant ruling in a case that has raised novel questions about national security and individual rights. It was also a milestone in the unusual case of the man, whose name has not been made public, and which will now most likely go before a federal appeals court.

The man was captured by a Syrian militia in September and turned over to the American military. This week, the government notified the man that it intended to transfer him to another country, but he has decided to fight that plan in court.

While that countrys name has been redacted as classified in court filings, the man is also a citizen of Saudi Arabia. Officials familiar with his case have said the Trump administration decided to ask Saudi Arabia to take custody of him after concluding that there was insufficient courtroom-admissible evidence to prosecute him.
The board meeting was called to certify Puerto Ricos new fiscal plan, a document intended to chart the way forward. Six of the seven voting members voted in favor of an amended plan that includes the new austerity measures.

Since 2016 the island has been functioning under a federal law called Promesa, which gives it legal powers that are normally found only in bankruptcy  in particular, protection from creditors. That means that for the time being, Puerto Rico does not have to make payments on its bond debt, for a savings of about $3 billion to $3.5 billion a year.

In exchange for those extraordinary powers, Congress required the island to submit to a federal oversight board. The law gives the governor of Puerto Rico the right to develop the all-important fiscal plan, but the board must certify it. If it does not find the governors fiscal plan credible, it has the authority to impose its own version.

But Mr. Rossello has clashed repeatedly with the board, saying that as Puerto Ricos elected leader, he has the final say over economic policy.

Our position has always been clear, he said in a statement on Thursday. Issues that are not in line with my governments public policy will not be carried out. Period.

Puerto Rico has already been through the process once, certifying a fiscal plan in March 2017. But it soon became clear that the governor was not carrying out the parts he disagreed with, and the oversight board took him to court. Before the lawsuit could be adjudicated, Hurricanes Irma and Maria struck, leaving all financial planning in a shambles.

The two biggest flash points over the new plan now under review on Thursday appeared to be labor law reform and the cost of the pensions due to Puerto Ricos retired government workers. On many other elements of the fiscal plan  reducing health care spending and subsidies to cities; lowering tax rates while improving collections; and cutting red tape for businesses  the oversight board and the governor appear to be in agreement.
Living under the specter of a delicate power grid has forced many to adapt. Residents have sunk thousands of dollars into buying and fueling generators. But the situation has also forced subtler changes to everyday routines.

Ms. Ortiz, who makes a living caring for the elderly and children, no longer stocks her refrigerator or pantry with much food beyond the emergency hurricane supply. She buys only a few days worth of, for example, meat at time.

I buy just what we need, she said. You never know when the power is going to go out again and youll lose all that food.

The power was not out long enough on Wednesday to force her to throw out any food, but she said that the day brought back painful memories.

After Hurricane Maria, she had to cook only what was needed that day because she could not refrigerate leftovers and had to wash clothes by hand. Debris and trash piled up at the end of her block for months, and her family slept with the windows open in the sweltering heat. Her children missed two months of school, and she said she cried when her children asked why this had happened to them.

It was really hard, maybe the hardest thing in my life, she said.

Many Puerto Ricans have left the island completely, including one of Ms. Ortizs clients, an older woman whose family moved her to the mainland. That meant Ortizs work schedule dropped to two days a week from six.

That was my best paying job, she said.

A few blocks away, Jorge Piris, 70, the owner of Nueva Vida Car Care, was busy catching up on work because of a backlog created, in part, by Wednesdays blackout. Nine cars in his shop needed work, and he was late for an appointment with an accountant.
On the list of possible midair emergencies, airline passengers are instructed on every flight what to do if the cabin pressure suddenly drops. If the airplane loses pressure, oxygen masks will drop automatically, the safety video on American Airlines flights says. The yellow cup goes around your mouth and nose.

But selfies and videos snapped on Tuesday by passengers on Southwest Airlines Flight 1380, which suffered an engine explosion and depressurization that caused the masks to fall, are proof that the safety warnings before takeoff are not always heeded. The photos show panicked passengers with the yellow oxygen masks around their mouths but not their noses.

Immediately after the engine exploded, throwing shrapnel into the side of the plane and fatally wounding one passenger, many of the passengers believed the airplane was going to crash. Their minds raced to how they could say goodbye to loved ones. Whether their masks were on properly was not a priority, some said later.

Timothy C. Bourman, 36, a pastor from Woodside, N.Y., whose wife, Amanda, was scrambling to get a message to their three daughters, said he could not figure out how to use his mask and quickly gave up trying. I wasnt having trouble breathing, he said Thursday.
A landlocked, rural nation in southern Africa, Swaziland has significant problems. Nearly a third of the countrys population lives in extreme poverty, and about as many are infected with H.I.V., one of the worlds highest prevalence rates for the virus. Life expectancy is low, around 50. A recent drought and an infestation of armyworms, an invasive species, devastated crops.

So the kingdoms 1.4 million residents might have been surprised on Thursday when King Mswati III, one of the worlds few remaining absolute monarchs, announced the news: The country will henceforth be known as eSwatini, the kingdoms name in the local language. (It means land of the Swazis in the Swazi  or siSwati  tongue.)

The king, who has reigned since 1986, announced the name change  an adjustment, really  during a ceremony in the city of Manzini on Thursday to mark his 50th birthday.

Many African countries upon independence reverted to their ancient, native names, The Associated Press quoted the king as saying. We no longer shall be called Swaziland from today forward.
STANSTED MOUNTFITCHET, England  What was the most expensive form of art in the early 16th century? Having Michelangelo paint your ceiling, surely?

In his 1553 biography Life of Michelangelo, Ascanio Condivi wrote that Pope Julius II had paid the artist 3,000 ducats, or about $945,000 in todays money, to paint the vault of the Sistine Chapel in Rome from 1508 to 1512.

It was a substantial sum, but far less than the 15,000 ducats Pope Leo X gave a few years later for an accompanying set of 10 Brussels tapestries depicting scenes from the lives of Saints Peter and Paul. These were based on cartoons by Raphael, who was paid 1,000 ducats for his designs, seven of which are now in the British royal collection. The tapestries remain in situ in the Sistine Chapel.

Requiring huge amounts of time, skilled labor and luxury materials to produce, tapestries were the ultimate prestige art form in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance.
The career synopsis of the Cuban-born dancer Carlos Acosta reads like a fairy tale. As a dark-skinned boy from an especially poor part of Havana, he was forced to audition for the national ballet school by his father, who wanted him off the streets. After he was accepted, he started winning competitions in Europe while still a student. Soon, he joined the prestigious Ballet Nacional de Cuba, only to be snatched up by Houston Ballet, and then the Royal Ballet in Britain, where he became an international star.

For an exceptionally successful person, Mr. Acosta can come across as exceptionally ambivalent about his success. Recounting his achievements in his 2007 memoir No Way Home, he seems to wince with each step up the ladder, registering the cost  the painful separation from his family, his country, his sense of belonging. Speaking about his past in a recent phone interview, he again emphasized the estrangement, not the glory, recalling that on visits home even his cultural references were met with incomprehension.

Nevertheless, the successes have continued. In 2016, when he retired from ballet, at 43, his fans packed the 5,000-seat Royal Albert Hall in London for five farewell shows. Already, he had initiated the next stage in his career. Acosta Danza, a classical-meets-contemporary company he founded in Cuba, had given its first performances in Havana. Tours of Europe and Britain were soon to follow. The troupe makes its United States debut at City Center in New York on Wednesday.

As its name indicates, the company clearly banks on Mr. Acostas fame, but its not your usual vanity project. At City Center, he will dance (as a guest artist) in only one of the five works on the program, applying his gallant presence and superb partnering skills to Mermaid, a drunk duet by the Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. And although Mr. Acosta is himself a choreographer, no pieces on the program are by him.
Naming The Money (2004), a throng of 100 life-size standing figures, was inspired by portraits of black slave servants who were given as gifts to the king of France by the king of Spain. Each figure bore a sash stating their name and occupation in the court: lute player, dog handler, dancer and so forth. Lavishly dressed, they were the glamorous face of exploited black labor and exotic status symbols.

Gabi Ngcobo, the Berlin Biennales curator, said that it was important to look at Ms. Himids work in the global context of creative practices giving voice to shared history that remains hidden or untold: It is here that black artists working in different parts of the world can find a space in which they are not marked by an otherness but rather self-determination. This year the Biennale borrows its title from the Tina Turner anthem We Dont Need Another Hero, a call for love and compassion that Ms. Ngcobo said was reflected in the determined but generous way Ms. Himid has worked as an artist, curator and cultural activist: quietly, forcefully whilst reaching out to many.
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 recent weeks, the big businesses that present music to the public have undergone some tectonic ripples and shifts. On April 3, Spotify went public, offering shares on the New York Stock Exchange via a direct offering. (The shares sold were all previously held by investors  no new shares were made available.)
Season 10, Episode 5

For a show that celebrates the power and glory of artifice, RuPauls Drag Race is tackling some gritty realities. Last week, we faced the horrors of climate change and the incipient apocalypse. This week, were at war. I will attempt to be as objective as possible as I report the shoots-and-scoots of the latest episode from my embed.

In the beginning, the house mother Asia OHara announced her crisis of faith in the face of her shared sartorial services and subsequent standing-suffering in the previous weeks maxi-challenge. She expressed shock and awe that her fellow members of a familialist flock, whose professed values include compassion, charity and sisterly love, could evolve into merciless resource-hoarders who are only out for themselves and do not support their fellow woman. (I envy Ms. OHara, who apparently has not read a think piece in the last 18 months.) Incensed that she did not reap what she sewed, a changed Asia vowed to take her focus off the family.

We were forced to bear witness to an outtake from last weeks Untucked in which The Vixen and Eureka engaged in a heated domestic conflict. (I abstain from Untucked for the same reason I abstain from Twitter  I simply cannot bear to watch like-minded freedom fighters defuse their collective power via relentless infighting.)

In a confessional, The Vixen sent incendiary missives to her followers: Do you know theres $100,000 on the line? Girl, I got enough sisters. Yes, in the workroom, as well as in our cowardly new world, money, and the race within which smooth individuals compete for it, trumps fellowship.
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous nights highlights that lets you sleep  and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If youre interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox.

What Colbert Doesnt Want to Know

Every so often on The Late Show, Stephen Colbert returns to a familiar, exasperated thought: How much do we really want to know about President Trumps sex life?

This week, hes had another reason to wonder, as the model Karen McDougal settled a lawsuit and gained the right to speak publicly about her alleged affair with Trump.
Learn more about Meghan Markle, who will become the newest member of the British royal family. Or relax with buddy comedies that all have something in common.

Whats on TV

BILL & TEDS EXCELLENT ADVENTURE (1989) 9 p.m. on Viceland. Way before he was Neo, John Wick or even Hamlet, Keanu Reeves was Ted, an affable high school slacker with a best friend named Bill (Alex Winter). In danger of flunking out of history class, they stumble on a time machine that lets them carouse with Napoleon, Joan of Arc and more; George Carlin plays their time travel guide. The movie was brutally panned in The New York Times upon release but has since become a cult classic and even received a shout out in Ready Player One. Rolling Stone named it the eighth best stoner movie of all time, but if youre looking for a different strain of comedy there are plenty of options: CHEECH & CHONGS NICE DREAMS runs at 9:35 on FLIX; Comedy Central shows HAROLD & KUMAR GO TO WHITE CASTLE at 10; and IFC has PINEAPPLE EXPRESS at 8.

JANE THE VIRGIN 9 p.m. on the CW. Season 4 wraps up on Friday. Jane believes she and Rafael are in a good place until she realizes he is keeping a secret from her. Petra and JR make a decision about their future that neither of them saw coming.
In this book, Teachout, a Fordham University Law professor and one-time candidate for governor of New York, makes the case that throughout this countrys history, lawmakers have gone to great lengths to divide the personal from the political. Teachout notes, for instance, that when Benjamin Franklin was the United States ambassador to France and, during one of his visits, received a diamond-studded snuffbox, there was concern that the gift would sway his politics. In her view, Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court decision that loosened restrictions on political spending by corporations, has compromised that work. Our reviewer wrote: You have probably heard pundits say we are living in an age of legalized bribery; Corruption in America is the book that makes their case in careful detail.

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TRUMPOCRACY

The Corruption of the American Republic

By David Frum

301 pp. HarperCollins. (2018)

Frum, a writer for The Atlantic, places the Trump administration and the current struggles of the white working class in context. In this book, he argues that any corruption within President Trumps administration is a symptom of a system in which political figures have been able to leverage their political influence for financial gain. Similarly, the white working classs current predicament is a natural result of an unequal economic system in which a small group of companies and industries hold most of the countrys wealth. According to our reviewer, Frum has been writing sharp but sympathetic books about conservative America for more than two decades, and he calls this is an excellent addition.

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DARK MONEY

The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

By Jane Mayer

449 pp. Doubleday. (2016)

This impressively reported and well-documented work, as described in our review, focuses on the influence the Koch brothers and other financiers have had on politics over several decades. Though David Koch never pursued public office after running for vice president in 1980, he and his brother, Charles, have contributed vast amounts of money to campaigns, think tanks, media groups and academic institutions aligned with their conservative views. Mayer, a staff writer for The New Yorker, delves into the Koch familys past, including how they made their fortune and the influences that shaped their beliefs. Neither of the Koch brothers agreed to be interviewed for the book, but Mayer draws from hundreds of other interviews to illuminate how they and other plutocrats have infiltrated politics.
British bank regulators on Friday fined James E. Staley, the chief executive of Barclays, over his attempt to unmask a whistle-blower within the bank.

The bank, however, said it would continue to stand by its top executive, who has been tasked with bringing stability to the three-centuries-old institution after years of management turmoil.

Barclays said that two British regulators, the Financial Conduct Authority and the Bank of Englands Prudential Regulation Authority, had fined Mr. Staley, though it did not disclose the amount. The regulators also required Barclays to submit reports on parts of its whistle-blowing program, the bank said, though it added that the regulators did not take any action against Barclays itself.

But Barclays said the regulators did not demand that he resign, nor that he acted with a lack of integrity or was not fit to remain the banks chief executive.
NEW DELHI  For the second time in 18 months, India has a shortage of cash. And like last time, economists say, its primarily the governments fault.

Empty A.T.M.s and bank restrictions on withdrawals have been reported in eight states this week, and some bank managers said the cash crunch had been building for months.

The government says the cash problem was caused by an unusual spurt in demand and will be eased within days. But if it persists, the shortage poses a political threat to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose administration has been hit in recent weeks by a series of stumbles. Most recently, he was criticized for his long silence over the horrific gang rape and murder of an 8-year-old Muslim girl that the police say was committed by a group of Hindu men to terrorize the Muslim population.

On Monday, Sampath Kumar Lohati drove his scooter around Warangal, a city in the south Indian state of Telangana, for more than four hours trying to withdraw money.
For the first time, a major American retailer is offering a dedicated line of decorations for the holiest month on the Islamic calendar: Ramadan, which culminates in the Eid al-Fitr celebration.

The retailer, Party City, which has about 850 locations, mostly in the United States, was motivated to create the items because customers kept requesting them, Ryan Vero, the companys president of retail, said this week. We are always seeking insights from our store teams who are engaging with our customers every day, said Mr. Vero, who called these customers underserved when it comes to party supplies.

Party Citys Ramadan items, which were designed by its internal product innovation team, have been selling well online  many items have sold out  and will be available by Saturday in some stores in cities like New York, Los Angeles and Sugar Land, Tex.

The announcement is welcome news to many Muslims gearing up for the holiday, which begins on May 16 and ends at sundown on June 14  the start of the Eid al-Fitr party that goes through June 15.
The Federal Aviation Administration on Friday issued an emergency order instructing airlines with the same type of engine as the one that failed catastrophically on Tuesday on a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 to more thoroughly inspect the engines fan blades.

The agency told airlines to perform ultrasonic inspections  which can detect flaws or cracks not visible to the unaided human eye  within the next 20 days on fan blades of engines with more than 30,000 cycles. A cycle includes an engine start, takeoff, landing and shutdown.

The F.A.A.s order came shortly after the manufacturer of the engines, CFM International, issued guidelines for the ultrasonic inspections. CFM, a joint venture of General Electric and the French company Safran Aircraft Engines, went further than the F.A.A., recommending that fan blades with 20,000 cycles be inspected by the end of August. It also recommended inspections of all other fan blades when they reach 20,000 cycles, and repeating the inspections every 3,000 cycles, which, it said, represents about two years in service.

The F.A.A. said it was acting because it determined that fan blade cracking is likely to exist or develop in other products of the same type design.
Union membership grew rapidly during her tenure and continued to do so in the immediate post-World War II decades, reaching a peak in the mid-1960s, when at least a third of all wage-earners in the upper Midwest states belonged to unions. In Michigan  the quintessential manufacturing state  the share stood at 45 percent in 1964, or nearly half of that states work force. Simply by their numbers, unions had the leverage to slow manufacturers who wanted to build factories abroad.

By the late 1970s, however, the merchandise trade deficit  the excess of imported goods over exports  turned negative. (It grew to almost $800 billion last year.) The many benefits of global trade have come at a tremendous cost to American workers. As the trade deficit swelled, unions lost much of their power.

Think about it: A huge amount of what America consumes is made overseas, with the implicit consent of the nations now nearly neutered industrial unions. There were just seven strikes that involved at least 1,000 workers in 2017, according to Labor Department records. From 1968 to 1983, in sharp contrast, the total number of strikers across the country fell below 10 million in only one year  1982. After that period, the annual total exceeded 10 million only three times.

In 1983, union membership was 17.7 million  representing 20 percent of all wage and salary workers. Last year, it was 14.8 million, representing just 10.7 percent of those workers. No wonder President Trump can talk about making America great again and not feel much pressure from organized labor to do much about it.

As union membership declines, labor has less leverage to intervene in the management of a corporation, or to galvanize the public into boycotting the products of manufacturers who put too many factories overseas while exporting less from the United States.

Strikes work when union membership is high enough to encourage the public to support the strikers, or at least feel a kinship with them. My parents, who lived comfortably on my fathers earnings as a textile broker in New York, never crossed a picket line thrown up by a labor union in pursuit of a favorable contract. They might not have agreed with a unions demands, or even known what they were. But they respected a strike as an often-necessary tool in reaching a compromise acceptable to both sides.

They wanted that compromise. They had been young adults during the Depression, and they did not want to see, once again, the vagrancy and hunger that had been so commonplace  so visible  in the 1930s. That sentiment resurfaced for many Americans in 1965, when Cesar Chavez dug in his heels against Californias table grape growers, organizing a strike against them and calling  successfully  for a nationwide boycott of their grapes.
Caroline MacDonald, 54, is Rosewood Hotel Groups vice president of sales and marketing for the Americas and Europe.

Did you have your current job in mind from the start?

Not at all. I wanted to be a vet, because I had a soft spot for animals. My first job at the age of 15 was working for my mother, who owned a small answering service in Los Angeles back when people called in for messages delivered by actual people in real time. Graduating from high school, I did not have a specific path or interest. So I enlisted in the Air Force in 1984.

Why the Air Force?

For one thing, they would subsidize my further education and train me in a field. Also, I wanted to travel. I describe my interview at the recruitment center as my Private Benjamin moment. I said I want to travel to exotic places, to experience different cultures and to go to college while working abroad.

How did that work out for you?

They found I had a high administrative and leadership aptitude. So I was sent to Germany, where I held an administrative role during peacetime and later was trained to plot nuclear, biological and chemical fallout as my wartime function. I attained the position of staff sergeant.
Last week, Representative Trey Gowdy, the South Carolina Republican who is chairman of the House Oversight Committee, opened an investigation into Mr. Pruitts expenditures on first-class travel, which the E.P.A. has said were necessary because passengers have made threatening remarks to Mr. Pruitt during flights. Mr. Gowdy, who gained prominence for his investigations into Hillary Clinton over the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead, on Sunday had pointed words for Mr. Pruitt.

"I would be shocked if that many people knew who Scott Pruitt was, Mr. Gowdy said on Fox News. So the notion that I have to fly first class because I dont want people to be mean to me, you need to go into another line of work if you dont want people to be mean to you, like maybe a monk where you dont come in contact with anyone.

Privately, a number of Republican staffers and strategists say that last weeks Senate confirmation of Mr. Pruitts deputy, Andrew Wheeler  a former coal lobbyist who worked for years on Capitol Hill  would make Mr. Pruitts departure easier because Mr. Wheeler would be in place as acting E.P.A. chief and could be relied upon to implement an agenda of rolling back environmental regulations.

Some Republican lawmakers have also pointed out the similarities between Mr. Pruitts case and that of Tom Price, Mr. Trumps former secretary of health and human services. Mr. Price was forced to resign after racking up at least $400,000 in travel bills for chartered flights.
They fetch his takeout meals and draw him into conversation. They buy him warm coats and scarves and sneakers. Some trade emails about his health, which has been remarkably robust despite an occasional scare. (He didnt get to the corner until 5:30 instead of his usual 3, a neighbor messaged to another on a morning in 2014. He said he has to down cough syrup twice in the night now, and this time it knocked him out.)

A physician in the White House arranged for a free chest X-ray. The superintendent at another building lets Mr. Singh into the basement for bathroom breaks. Customers stand guard over his papers until he returns.

A man of quiet ways, Mr. Singh can be gloomy and taciturn one day, lively and opinionated the next; his mood varies with the weather and the headlines. Yet his regulars, most of them middle-aged or older, speak of him with warmth, and something more.

Ive stayed with Singh out of loyalty, said Ken Coughlin, who runs a legal-information website and has been buying The New York Times from him every day for at least 20 years, at a cost now of about $1,250 a year. Hes a fixture in the neighborhood, a fixture in my life. I want to support him.

Lee Herman, a curator emeritus at the American Museum of Natural History, has been a patron since Mr. Singh first showed up. "You see this guy, with wind chill of 11 below, out there selling papers, Mr. Herman said. Hes got a life thats extraordinary  what he has to go through to live.

These neighbors know little about that life, or one anothers, but Mr. Singh knows all their preferences and quirks. He notices when they miss a day, and offers to save their papers. He serves noncustomers, too  clearing trash from the sidewalk, warning subway riders when trains arent running, feeding the birds and dogs (my other customers, he calls them), holding the door when White House residents need a hand.
With funding from the National Institutes of Health, the investigators plan to inoculate participants with potential vaccines and then to inject them with small doses of the Zika virus to test the vaccines effectiveness. The N.I.H. has not yet decided whether the research will proceed.

The scientists leading the trial say it is necessary to prevent a future epidemic. But Ms. Shah and other bioethicists convened by the N.I.H. concluded in 2017 that the research had insufficient value to justify the risks.

People outside the study, such as sexual partners, might also be infected, the panel said. And Zika infection might have unspecified consequences for participants in the long term.

But scientists in charge of the study said the panels concerns were hypothetical and did not take into account the proposed protocol. They plan to use minimal doses of Zika virus and to quarantine patients in a hospital inpatient unit.

The study also would start by enrolling only women  who are less likely to transmit Zika sexually  and would require them to use long-term birth control.
One way to prove himself, he said, was to accept the condition they have for outsiders who want to learn about the area: Newcomers have to share some bit of knowledge or help with a project. On his first trip, Mr. Vallejo made photographs for a catalog of traditional plants in the communitys herbarium.

Members of the community who had left to study have returned to apply their newly acquired skills and help preserve their culture and the environment. The financial settlement they reached with the government allowed them to set up a local bank, and they have also undertaken projects to provide each home with a solar panel that can power a light and radio.

And while they may be far from the city, they are not cut off. An administration building has a satellite internet connection and a generator, which attracts people who want to charge their phones, tablets or laptops (which, apart from connecting them to supporters and allies in the environmental movement, are also good for watching movies).

This super global tool, you might think was a bad influence, but they use it for their campaigns, Mr. Vallejo said. Its interesting how there is this influence of foreign culture, and the majority of people there, especially the young, have Facebook and Instagram accounts. They connect to the Western world and borrow some things. For example, when they have feasts, they paint their faces. Used to be they painted spirits. Now, one kid paints his face like a member of Kiss.
In a phone interview from her home in New York, Ms. Burstyn  whos won a Tony for Same Time, Next Year, an Oscar for Alice Doesnt Live Here Anymore and an Emmy for Political Animals  spoke about her friendship with Mr. Fuller, her former co-stars Kevin Spacey and Louis C.K. and a long-ago #MeToo moment.

Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Having known Bucky, as you call him, what did you think when you first read the script?

I was glad to see Bucky still being talked about, because when he was alive he was considered the greatest mind on the planet, and he could talk at the highest level to experts in the fields of physics, mathematics, architecture, design. So, for me, he was a great loss on the planet when he left, and it made me very happy that he was being reintroduced in a lively way as he is in this film.

Have you implemented his philosophy into your own life?

He was always looking ahead to the future and started me thinking that way and got me involved in the ecological movement and being concerned about the planet and where were going. So I would say that it was more a mental leaning from knowing him.

What do you look for in a role at this point in your career?

Im always attracted to good writing. At my age, Im grateful to get any work, so when somebody sends me a script, I approach it with a positive attitude. In the past, I might have been more uppity, but now Im just like, Oh God, a script  great! There just arent that many roles written into scripts for women, say, over 65. I dont think there are all that many young writers who are interested in whats going on at the other end of the age stick. [Pause] Age stick is something I just made up.
A mother of five, Ms. Killian, 57, studied engineering in college and, after earning a masters in business, worked in finance. In 2012, she created a coalition to fight the opioid epidemic, which claimed the lives of several young people in Rye in recent years alone.

At a time of national reckoning for women who were victims of sexual abuse, Ms. Killians campaign has sought to show that Ms. Mayer dropped the ball in addressing sexual misconduct complaints when, before running for the Assembly, she served as legal counsel to the Senate Democrats.

According to a recent report in The Daily News, two women  one a former Senate staff member, the other still employed  said that in 2010, Ms. Mayer failed to help them when they alerted her to sexual harassment they had suffered at the hands of their bosses.

In recent debates, Ms. Mayer, 64, acknowledged that she met with one of the women, and learned about the other incident through the womans boyfriend. She followed the protocol in place at the time, which was to refer allegations to the secretary of the Senate, a political appointee.

In both cases, I went to the secretary of the Senate and I made the case that they need to do more, she said in a debate held in the studios of WRNN-TV on Tuesday. They failed to do so. 
 This story was published in 2018.

An actress from the television series Smallville was charged on Friday with sex trafficking for her involvement in an organization promoting itself as a self-help group for women that forced its members to have sex with its leader, federal prosecutors said.

The actress, Allison Mack, 35, helped gain recruits for what was purported to be a mentorship group but instead exploited its followers, who were branded with a symbol containing the initials of the organizations leader, said Richard P. Donoghue, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, in a statement.

Ms. Mack participated in a group known as Nxivm (pronounced Nex-e-um), the authorities said. The organization, near Albany, was led by Keith Raniere, 57, who was arrested in March by federal officials in Mexico on sex-trafficking charges. Its followers were forced to have sex with him because they feared that if they did not do so, compromising material that they had provided about themselves would be released publicly, according to a complaint.

[Inside a secretive group where women are branded: Read our article on Nxivm.]

The group has denied it was a cult, but former members have said that Mr. Raniere demanded obedience from his followers, who referred to him as Vanguard.
It was nearly three decades ago that Mr. Tankleff, then 17, woke up on a September morning in 1988 to find that his parents, Arlene and Seymour, had been slashed and bludgeoned in the familys Long Island home. In 1990, Mr. Tankleff was convicted of killing them and sent to prison, where he would remain until 2007.

His conviction was based on a confession that was written by a detective and then attributed to Mr. Tankleff. The detective had told Mr. Tankleff during his interrogation that investigators had found forensic evidence incriminating him, and that his father had woken from a coma and accused him of the killing. In fact, his father had never woken up. According to the lawsuit, Mr. Tankleff was encouraged by the detectives to believe he could have experienced a blackout and killed his parents without remembering it.

The detectives then described their version of events to Mr. Tankleff, persuaded him to acknowledge it, and wrote out a confession that made it seem as though Mr. Tankleff had volunteered the account, according to the lawsuit. Mr. Tankleff never signed the confession and quickly renounced it, but was still convicted.

Seventeen years later, an appellate court overturned his conviction on the basis of new evidence, and New York officials decided in 2008 not to retry Mr. Tankleff.

The settlement the committee approved Thursday stems from a lawsuit Mr. Tankleff filed nearly a decade ago, in 2009. In the lawsuit, Mr. Tankleff and his lawyers alleged a widespread practice of coercing confessions among the homicide detectives of the Suffolk County Police Department and argued that his imprisonment was a direct result of gross misconduct by Suffolk County law enforcement officials that violated his constitutional rights.

Looking forward, Mr. Tankleff said he had invited the Suffolk County district attorney to sit down with him, his lawyers and his private investigators to hear every new piece of evidence weve developed regarding the killings that put him in prison.

This way, he said, the district attorney can develop the case and prosecute the people who were responsible for my parents murders.

And after that?

I look forward to being admitted to the bar in the next few months, he said, and working on wrongful convictions to make sure theres no more Marty Tankleffs.
Carolyn Jacobson, who roused organized labor to confront sexism in its ranks and helped place womens health care on its bargaining agenda, died on March 23 at her home in Washington. She was 67.

The cause was cancer of the uterus, her niece, Clarice Jacobson, said.

During her 40-year career in the union movement, Ms. Jacobson galvanized support for her agenda from several platforms, beginning as communications director for the Bakery, Confectionary and Tobacco Workers & Grain Millers.

She was also a founder of the Berger-Marks Foundation, which trained women union organizers; a founding member of the Coalition of Labor Union Women; and a member of the International Labor Press Association (now the International Labor Communications Association).

I am one of many women labor leaders that stand on her shoulders and have benefited from her legacy, Elizabeth H. Shuler, secretary-treasurer of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said in an email.
Joan Konner, an award-winning television executive, producer and documentarian who became the first woman to lead the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. She was 87.

The cause was leukemia, her daughter Rosemary said.

After raising two daughters, Ms. Konner got a late start professionally, graduating from Columbias journalism school herself in 1961 when she was 30, almost a decade after she had received her bachelors degree.

By 1977 she was executive producer for national news and public affairs for WNET/Thirteen, the public broadcasting station of metropolitan New York. From the early 1980s until she left for Columbia in 1988, she was the executive producer of Bill Moyers Journal, and then the president and executive producer of Mr. Moyers production company, Public Affairs Television.

Among the acclaimed documentaries they produced was the six-part Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth With Bill Moyers (1987-88). In the series, John J. OConnor wrote in The New York Times, both men grapple with the very essence of life and living.
Kirk Simon, a documentary filmmaker who turned luminaries in the arts into teachers and brought cameras into the classroom, memorably in an Academy Award-winning film about a multinational school in Israel, died on April 14 in Manhattan. He was 63.

His brother, Ron, said Mr. Simon suffered cardiac arrest and was declared dead after he was taken to a hospital.

Mr. Simon directed and produced documentaries for PBS, National Geographic and HBO, tackling a wide range of topics. But he often returned to education, as he and his creative partner, Karen Goodman, his first wife, did in 2010 with Strangers No More, which won the Oscar for best short documentary.

That film focused on the Bialik-Rogozin School in Tel Aviv, where children, many of them refugees or migrants from more than 48 countries, came together to learn and adapt to life in their new home. Many had endured extreme hardship and had little schooling.
During her husbands eight years as vice president, she traveled 1,629 days, visited 50 states and 65 foreign countries and covered 1.3 million miles, which is 54 times around the world. She mothered her kids in every kind of living quarter imaginable  cheap inns, well-heeled mansions, hotel rooms, apartments and the back of a station wagon that she drove from Maine to Texas every year. She hosted 1,192 events at her house and 1,232 events in Washington. Yet she still answered her own front door. Her smile was genuine, her delight infectious. Mrs. Bush liked to laugh, and she could converse as easily with a Mexican mother of seven as she could with a head of state. It made no difference. She was a true Christian. My mother admired her.

She was not without fault. Her public statements sometimes caused controversy. She recalled wearing sneakers to meet the prime minister of Greece. When she was a young bride-to-be and was called upon to cook for Mr. Bushs younger brothers, her future mother-in-law bragged to Mrs. Bushs mother that Barbara was a wonderful cook. Her mother, shocked, responded, Oh? Peanut butter and jelly was the actual menu. It didnt matter. The menu was love, something Mrs. Bush learned from her own mother, whom she would lose in an auto accident after she married, unable to attend the funeral because she was living in California and very pregnant with her second child and, ironically, her own duties as a wife and mother prevented it. There was nothing to do. Family comes first.

And what a family she raised. In the tight-knuckled, bare-fisted world of Washington politics, the Bushes proved over the years that they could hit as hard as anyone. Some did not like it. Still, you will not find a more loyal family. Republican, Democratic, black, white, Latino, North, South, Dixie, New England  you wont have to look far down the Bush family line to find some of this, or that, or the other. Theyre a real American family, flawed as all families are, shaped by a matriarch who understood, even as a young woman, that in all the ways of life, the importance of a mothers love is paramount. It is the last line of reason and discourse in a planet gone seemingly mad. It is our last breath and greatest hope. Motherhood defines a society.

Barbara Pierce Bush defined every single bit of it. In the last years of her life, she dragged her octogenarian body onto planes and buses and into cars from one end of the country to the other, raising money for her literacy foundation. She despised ignorance. She despised it because she knew it was wrong.

And if you loved her and what she represented, youll go out and get a book. And you will read it. You will turn off that TV and pay attention. And cut the tweeting. And cut the Facebook chatter and all the other nonsense. And you will get busy doing what Barbara Bush spent a majority of her life doing. You will fight ignorance. You will learn to love. And in doing so, you will do what she did.

You will change the world.
To the Editor:

Reading Mom Is Running for Office, by Susan Chira (news analysis, Sunday Review, April 15), I wondered: Why are we still arguing about women nursing on the legislative floor?

In 1977, four days postpartum, I voted on the New Hampshire state budget. It was a tight vote; every vote counted. I had been elected to serve my constituents, and chose not to abandon my responsibility.

And of course I would not abandon my newborn daughter. Like so many women all over the world, I put her in a sling to nurse and went about my day. A male legislator lobbied me and never noticed the nursing baby.

Why, 40 years later, when breasts are exposed in bus ads, in movies and on tops of buildings, is modesty required of lactating mothers? Perhaps legislators need a sex education course that teaches them that breasts do not exist merely for their sexual pleasure, but to perpetuate the human race.
Every once in a while people ask me about it. Journalists and diplomats who talk to me for the first time usually open with it. When I meet new people I dont mention it at all, and yet somehow the next time I see them they know all about it: the confession I was forced to make on Chinese television in 2016.

The Chinese media has been long known to work with the state, or rather, Chinas Communist Party, to spread propaganda. It is now clear that the media outlets have also become active players in Chinas foreign policy. I didnt think about it that way when I first viewed, in extreme discomfort, my own televised confession. At the time, I thought of the scene as mere propaganda and an attempt to scare other foreign human rights workers.

But in February, when I watched Gui Minhai, a brave independent bookseller and a fellow Swede, paraded for the third time in front of the media, it became clear: These televised confessions are actually weapons of foreign policy.
This practice started with the retaliation operations of Unit 101 in the 1950s, payback for Palestinian terrorist attacks. It continued during the brief occupation of Gaza in 1956, during what Israel calls the Sinai Campaign (aka the Suez Crisis), and it resumed again during the early days of occupation after 1967, when Ariel Sharon  then an army commander, later the prime minister  set up death squads in Gaza.

Its no coincidence that the First Intifada broke out in Gaza in 1987. And its no coincidence that Israel has embarked on three savage military offensives there over the past decade, killing thousands of people, wounding tens of thousands, leaving hundreds of thousands homeless and sowing unbelievable ruin. This would not have been possible in the West Bank, if only because there are too many Jewish settlements there now, abutting Palestinian villages.

The test case was Operation Cast Lead. In just over three weeks in December 2008 and January 2009, according to the Jewish Virtual Library, Israel killed 1,434 Palestinians in Gaza, many unarmed  compared with 14 Israelis, most of them soldiers, killed by Palestinians. The ratio is gruesome: about 100 to 1.

The world was put to the test then. Had it taken substantial action against Israel, the country might not have dared be so brutal again. A United Nations investigation known as the Goldstone Report cast heavy blame on Israel (and some on Hamas). Still, Israel read past the lip service and understood that it would have to pay nothing, not even for acts suspected of being war crimes or crimes against humanity.

Just three years later, in November 2012, it embarked on Operation Pillar of Defense, which was relatively restrained. But two years after that came Operation Protective Edge  the most brutal of its assaults on Gaza, which killed more than 2,200 Palestinians.

The decade-long siege of Gaza is an unparalleled collective punishment. Israels methods, disproportionate under international law, are carefully planned and considered. At one point, the military justified restrictions on food imports into Gaza by calculating the number of calories a person there needed daily to survive.
The fired F.B.I. director, James Comey, said in a recent interview that Mr. Trump is morally unfit for the job, and Mr. Trump predictably replied by ranting about him on Twitter. Meanwhile, the Pittsburgh police are preparing for the protests they anticipate if Mr. Trump fires the special counsel, Robert Mueller.

My point is, there is a lot going on in the world. There is a lot going on in my world. There is a lot going on in your world. This is the nature of life. We try to find ways to balance taking care of ourselves and our families, with caring about the world we live in and the greater good. Sometimes, we will fall short in one of these areas. Sometimes we will fall short in all of these areas. Most of the time, we do the best we can.

I dont have an easy answer for you, but I do think many of us get overwhelmed because we think we have to care about everything all the time, as if thats even possible. We get mired in solipsism and delude ourselves into believing that the proverbial struggle cannot go on without us. This is rarely the case. The grand thing about collective effort is that we can generally trust that someone is out in the world, doing important social justice work when we are too tired or burned out to join in.

Your friend didnt go to the womens march in New York this year, but hundreds of thousands of other people did. Every day, everywhere, people are doing the work of resisting oppression and tyranny in ways great and small.

Lately, Ive been doing two things to maintain my sanity without checking out completely. Ive stopped watching cable news because the 24-hour news cycle has become an incoherent mess. There are plenty of ways to stay well informed without listening to lazy punditry and an endless regurgitation of only the most salacious news. Ive also been trying to pick one issue at a time in which to invest my social-justice-oriented energy.

If I focus on just one issue and apply genuine effort and attention to it, I just might contribute something useful. I choose to invest that energy in different ways, whether its writing about a pressing issue, amplifying the voices of others, donating money and time to nonprofit organizations, or whatever I can think of that might be useful. Sometimes, I have no idea how I can be useful, so I ask people who are well positioned to point me in the right direction because I recognize that I dont have to have all the answers.

What you describe in your letter is not apathy. You arent indifferent to the current state of the world. You are human, a woman trying to balance your own needs with doing good in the world, and right now, your own needs are winning out. Take the time you need. There is no shame in that so long as you remember to extend your empathy as far as you can when your emotional stores have replenished.

I would worry if you didnt care about the state of the world. I would worry if you didnt ask this question.
On Tuesday evening, Randa Jarrar, a creative-writing professor at California State University at Fresno, wrote a series of insensitive and politically incorrect tweets. The next day, amid national outrage, the schools provost gave a news conference denouncing Jarrars deeply disrespectful statements, and telling journalists that the incident is under review. The Fresno Bee quoted the schools president, Joseph Castro: A professor with tenure does not have blanket protection to say and do what they wish.

This case shows that threats to free speech on campus are very real. It also shows that, contrary to a great deal of hype, these threats dont come only, or even primarily, from the left.

Jarrar, who is an award-winning Arab-American writer, got herself in trouble for attacking Barbara Bush, whose death on Tuesday occasioned heartfelt bipartisan encomiums. Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal, Jarrar wrote in a since-deleted tweet. She went on to call the former first lady a witch and said she cant wait for the rest of her family to fall to their demise. Her tasteless words became an international story; a Fresno TV station even aired an interview with her ex-husband denouncing her.

Im not going to defend Jarrars tweets. Its true that, as people celebrate Bushs extraordinary life, her Marie Antoinette side has gotten lost. (Shortly before her son ordered the invasion of Iraq, she said she didnt want to waste her beautiful mind worrying about body bags and deaths.) But its indecent to let politics erase everything admirable about a person, especially at the moment of her death. And wishing for the demise of a family  even a family that includes politicians who have done terrible things  is grotesque.
Well, actually, no. We had it right. But perhaps we should have anticipated the confusion.

Many people are familiar with the use of this expression in the sense of getting what you had coming to you, usually meaning punishment. But often people have only heard it spoken. And because the word is pronounced with the stress on the second syllable, they assume its spelled dessert, like the sweet course at the end of a meal.

But desert in this sense is related to deserve, and thats what it means: He got his just deserts means He got what he deserved. It has nothing to do with whether he got ice cream or cake. (Dessert comes from the same Latin root, but via an Old French word meaning to clear the table.)

The confusion is compounded, of course, by the other word spelled desert, pronounced with the stress on the first syllable  the one that means a dry, barren region.

By midday Friday we had received emails from nearly 100 readers pointing out what they assumed was an error. Others voiced their concern on social media. My colleague Zach Montague replied to each reader who contacted us, explaining the distinction. We even included a famous quotation from Hamlet using desert in the sense we intended:

Use every man after his desert, and who should scape whipping?

(Of course, Shakespeares spelling was famously erratic, so a good dictionary is probably a better way to settle a spelling question like this. But we thought that if readers didnt believe us, they might believe Shakespeare.)

As the overseer of The Timess style manual and the de facto newsroom language arbiter, I know that many Times readers care passionately about grammar, usage and good writing. I hear often from readers pointing out our all-too-frequent lapses (in fact, weve gotten just deserts wrong ourselves). Many of their observations end up in copy-editing quizzes I publish occasionally.
Standing on the High Line last week while surveying the twisted concrete structure rising out of the ground for his latest building, the XI, the architect Bjarke Ingels said, Its a lot more dramatic in real life, huh?

His client Ziel Feldman, the chairman and founder of HFZ Capital Group, said with a smile, Youre not changing your mind, are you?

Mr. Feldman knew it was already too late for major changes. Construction is well underway on the XI (the Eleventh), a mixed-use development at 76 11th Avenue that is transforming a full city block between 10th and 11th Avenues, and West 17th and West 18th Streets, directly south of the Frank Gehry-designed IAC Building.
The next morning I called Sarah. I dont have a healthy relationship with alcohol, I said, cursing myself for saying it out loud because I knew she could never unhear it. But I knew: If I drank, I would cheat, and she would leave. She had the tools and presence to move on, and I didnt. She would be the one who got away.

So I stopped drinking, and my life jolted forward at an unbelievable clip: a cross-country move, a career change, cohabitation, another career change, an engagement, homeownership, marriage. Also: death, professional challenges, family politics gone awry, financial anxiety, actual anxiety and, now, cancer.

Two days later I sat in the United lounge, looking at fellow travelers, the clock, my phone and my club soda. A man with a fedora sipped something brown on the rocks; a woman left smudged lipstick on what looked like a wine spritzer. A little boy watched his parents drink, his eyes moving from her red wine to his beer, his head moving slightly between the two. I saw a young couple  honeymooners, too?  toast with champagne flutes. I looked down at my club soda. The ice was mostly melted.

If I drank now, could I pause my life again? Could Sarah and I go back to that first summer, when everything was still a possibility? I imagined the coldness of the chardonnay leaving an imprint on every cell as it traveled down my throat. My back would loosen, my thoughts would get fuzzy in the best way.

I could call an old friend, chat about mindless gossip as I waited to board. The bartender wouldnt think twice about giving me a pour for the road. The flight attendant wouldnt cock her head when I asked if I could have both red and white with dinner. Sarah would never have to know. No one would.

Except, I would know. The thing I prized most about our relationship was that Sarah knew everything about me  and loved me anyway. If I were to drink, that secret would be the first brick in a wall between us.
WASHINGTON  The Justice Department has opened an antitrust investigation into potential coordination by AT&T, Verizon and a telecommunications standards organization to hinder consumers from easily switching wireless carriers, according to six people with knowledge of the inquiry.

In February, the Justice Department issued demands to AT&T, Verizon and the G.S.M.A., a mobile industry standards-setting group, for information on potential collusion to thwart a technology known as eSIM, said two of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the details are confidential.

The technology lets people remotely switch wireless providers without having to insert a new SIM card into a device. AT&T and Verizon face accusations that they colluded with the G.S.M.A. to try to establish standards that would allow them to lock a device to their network even if it had eSIM technology.

The investigation was opened about five months ago after at least one device maker and one wireless carrier filed formal complaints with the Justice Department, two of the people said. The device maker was Apple, one of them said.
In Santa Monica, the city attorneys office filed a nine-count misdemeanor criminal complaint against Bird and Mr. VanderZanden last year for operating a commercial scooter rental business without a mobile vending business license and for failing to comply with citations. The company pleaded no contest and paid a settlement of $300,000.

Those who work for Santa Monicas city government even went so far as to reach out to other towns to caution them about electric scooters.

My brother and sister legislators from Santa Monica warned me that that phenomenon has hit their cities, said Aaron Peskin, who is on San Franciscos board of supervisors, the citys legislative branch. Referring to the scooter start-ups, he added, These people are out of their minds.

Even other scooter companies dont seem to like each other much. When Mr. VanderZanden recently announced a pledge for scooter start-ups to sign that promised responsible growth and revenue sharing with cities, he did not get much of a response. Were still waiting for others to sign the pledge, he said.

Mr. VanderZanden also feigns ignorance about all the controversy he has caused.

Anything any citys asked us to do, aside from shut down, we do, he said.

And even though Bird is handing out helmets, he said the requirement that scooter riders wear them is absurd unless all pedestrians have to wear helmets because cars are the real danger.

Were not going to be happy till there are more Birds than cars, Mr. VanderZanden said.
Fans of the avant-garde Italian director Romeo Castellucci will be in familiar territory here. The piece unfurls as a succession of visually astonishing tableaus; you could freeze-frame any second of the show and have a picture-perfect composition. A figure in a white hood and red mask shoots arrows upward. Actors parade in long black or white aprons and Puritan-style hats, their faces hidden by veils. Joseph Merrick, a.k.a. the Elephant Man, is there, too, along with two women in identical red dresses evocative of Dickinsons time.

Sometimes there is pin-drop silence; sometimes there is Bach; and sometimes there is a punishingly loud electronic drone. (Felix Magalhaes did the sound.)

In recent years, Ms. Liddell has pulled back from the extreme physical abuse she would inflict on herself onstage. Her body-centered work, which often involved bloodletting, is somewhere on a continuum that would also include the Viennese Actionists, Marina Abramovic and the American performance artist Ron Athey. Perhaps Ms. Liddell would be better known in the United States, if, like Ms. Abramovic, she were on the art, rather than the theatrical, circuit.

Here she reveals all in a gesture that, paradoxically, feels opaque. Lifting up her camisole in an early scene, she slides, spread-eagled and facing the audience, down onto a dildo positioned on a chair. (This is not all that new, as those who saw Cecilia Bengolea and Francois Chaignauds dance work Paquerette can attest.) Then a bloodlike substance dribbles from her mouth. Watching this felt oddly clinical.
Noah Karvelis, an elementary school music teacher and the founder of Arizona Educators United, said he was sympathetic to the disruption that widespread school closings would cause students and parents. But, he said, that should not forestall a walkout.

If we maintain the status quo, that is way worse than missing a couple of days of school, Mr. Karvelis said at a news conference outside the union headquarters in Phoenix. The biggest disservice any of us could do for our students right now is to not act in this moment.

Across Arizona, tens of thousands of teachers, parents and students, clad in red, participated in protests outside schools on April 11. Gov. Doug Ducey said he was impressed by the movement, which calls itself #RedForEd. He promised to provide teachers with a 20 percent raise by 2020, and to restore school budgets to pre-Recession levels over the next five years. He said he could do so without raising taxes, because the states economy is improving and existing state programs could be cut.

But many teachers rejected that plan, or said they distrusted Mr. Ducey, a first-term Republican.

You dont rob Peter to feed Paul, said Kassandra Dominguez, who teaches kindergarten and first grade in the Pendergast school district, near Phoenix. Thats so wrong, and I wouldnt want that money.

Alternate proposals for raising school budgets include increasing an education sales tax from six-tenths of a cent to one cent, or closing corporate tax loopholes.

The average teacher salary in Arizona is about $47,000 per year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. But starting salaries are much lower, and many teachers leading the protest movement are in their 20s and 30s.

Ms. Dominguez, 27, earns $38,250 per year, and says that because of low education budgets, she has had to pay out of pocket, or raise money from private donors, to buy her students science supplies, chairs and snacks. She voted in favor of a walkout. Her district had lost a total of $1.6 million over the past five years because of budget cuts, according to administrators, and the school board had come out in favor of the #RedForEd movement.
HOUSTON  There was no question on primary night in Texas last month that Franklin Bynum would win the Democratic nomination to become a criminal court judge in Houston. The 34-year-old defense attorney had no challengers.

But for his supporters who packed into a Mexican restaurant that evening, there was still something impressive to celebrate. Many in the crowd were members of the Democratic Socialists of America, or D.S.A., a group that has experienced an enormous surge of interest since the election of President Trump, even in conservative states. And Mr. Bynum was one of their own  a socialist who, along with at least 16 others, appeared on the ballot in primary races across the state of Texas.

Yes, Im running as a socialist, Mr. Bynum said. Im a far-left candidate. What Im trying to do is be a Democrat who actually stands for something, and tells people, Heres how we are going to materially improve conditions in your life.

Rather than shy away from being called a socialist, a word conservatives have long wielded as a slur, candidates like Mr. Bynum are embracing the label. He is among dozens of D.S.A. members running in this falls midterms for offices across the country at nearly every level. In Hawaii, Kaniela Ing, a state representative, is running for Congress. Gayle McLaughlin, a former mayor of Richmond, Calif., is running to be the states lieutenant governor. In Tennessee, Dennis Prater, an adjunct professor at East Tennessee State University, is running to be a county commissioner.
BARBARO: But you confronted that, in a sense, by saying its kind of true  the ego question.

COMEY: Yeah. I guess thats right. Although I dont think I was thinking about confronting it so much as making sure that I am  because I think thats an important part of who I am as a leader, not just as a person, because so much of what Ive tried to do as a leader is guardrail around what I think my weaknesses are. Really important to me that I avoid the danger  which I think all humans have, but I know I have  of falling in love with my own view of things, my own righteousness, and so I really think it was a prelude, and maybe unconsciously but not explicitly or consciously, a reaction to some of the criticism, if that makes sense.

BARBARO: It does. As youve been reflecting on the experiences of the past 18 months, in writing this book and processing everything that happened, can you give me an example of a moment where you were driven by ego, as the phrase you used, in your relationship with President Trump?

COMEY: Hmm. I dont know that I can identify one with President Trump. I associate a couple of small mistakes I think I made in the Clinton email investigation with  Im not certain of this, but  a risk of ego. I dont consciously associate any of my encounters with President Trump with an ego weakness on my part.

BARBARO: And how about the Clinton one?

COMEY: Well, I think that among the screw-ups I think I can identify is one that my children pointed out initially. They called it Seacresting. Where I thought that if 

BARBARO: Seacresting, as in Ryan Seacrest?

COMEY: Yeah. And Im not looking to pick on Ryan Seacrest, but my kids take is that Ryan Seacrest was often guilty of this: Im about to announce this thing  but first, this commercial. And they said, Dad, you, by waiting till the very end of your announcement on July the 5th to say what it is you were going to do, we think you Seacrested it, and 

BARBARO: Hmm. Kind of publicly tortured people.

COMEY: Yeah. And I kind of brushed that off, and then the more I thought about it, the more I thought, actually, people were confused. What I was thinking was  this is where I think its an ego issue, is  I thought I knew best, and that, if I announced the result at the front, nobody will listen to what I say, and what I say about why we were reaching this conclusion and the transparency was essential to people having confidence that we were doing it in an independent way. But I think the criticism is actually valid. But the reason I associate it with ego is, I think, I thought I knew the right way to do it, and in hindsight, especially with great feedback from my family, I dont think I did.

BARBARO: Hmm. I want to come back to this question of, of you believing you knew the right path, but lets just hold onto that thought. We want to focus a lot of this conversation on the now-famous memos that you wrote as F.B.I. director, documenting your interactions with President Trump, and in some cases, President-elect Trump. Youve acknowledged that after the president fired you, you asked a friend of yours to share the contents of those memos, or at least one memo 
WASHINGTON  Memos written by the former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, that were released on Thursday revealed several new details about his relationship with President Trump and the presidents first chief of staff, Reince Priebus.

Though much of what the memos describe was already public, the documents themselves provided an intimate portrait of the early months of the Trump White House and how the president and Mr. Priebus confronted leaks, the prospect that the national security adviser was under investigation and allegations about Mr. Trumps ties to Russia.

Mr. Comey depicts Mr. Trump as a man engrossed to the point of distraction with political rivalries and fears that bureaucrats and government officials, including in the F.B.I., were trying to undermine his legitimacy.

[Read the memos here.]

The president responded late Thursday by insisting that the memos showed no collusion with Moscows election interference and that Mr. Comey had erred by leaking classified information. The memos were reviewed by Justice Department officials before being released.
There is a great deal the American public wants to know about the corruption of the Democrats, Mr. Parscale said.

White House officials and a number of other defendants did not immediately comment on the lawsuit. Roger J. Stone Jr., a former campaign adviser to Mr. Trump who is named as a defendant in the suit, dismissed it in an email as a left-wing conspiracy theory dressed up as a lawsuit.

In a statement forwarded by Mr. Stone, Rob Buschel, Mr. Stones lawyer, said he had not yet been served with the D.N.C. suit and described it as a regurgitation of a complaint filed last year by Democrats alleging their privacy was invaded during the campaign. That litigation is still in progress.

The Democrats legal maneuver comes amid a swirl of intensifying scrutiny of Mr. Trump, his associates and their interactions with Russia. The president, who has long denied allegations of collusion, has repeatedly attacked the special counsel investigation this week and has vented angrily about renewed claims by James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, that Mr. Trump sought to influence the bureaus review of the election.

Mr. Trump added Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York City mayor, and two other lawyers to his legal team this week. And on Thursday night, Mr. Trump thundered on social media that there was NO COLLUSION and NO OBSTRUCTION, and again branded the whole Russia investigation as a witch hunt.

The D.N.C. complaint is broad in its claims and stark in its language, naming a long list of defendants that includes Mr. Trump; his son, Donald Jr., and son-in-law, Jared Kushner; the Russian government and its intelligence service; and a group of former campaign aides including Mr. Stone, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates and George Papadopoulos.

There is substantial overlap between the targets of the D.N.C. lawsuit and the group of people known to be under investigation by Mr. Mueller. Mr. Manafort has been indicted by the special counsel, while Mr. Gates and Mr. Papadopoulos have both pleaded guilty to different charges.
WASHINGTON  Federal civil rights prosecutors have recommended charges against a New York police officer in the 2014 death of Eric Garner, three current and former officials said, but top Justice Department officials have expressed strong reservations about whether to move forward with a case they say may not be winnable.

Mr. Garner died on a Staten Island street after the police officer, Daniel Pantaleo, used a chokehold to subdue him. Officers had confronted Mr. Garner, who was unarmed, over accusations of selling untaxed cigarettes. His final gasps of I cant breathe, captured on a cellphone video, became a rallying cry for protesters around the country.

In recent weeks, career prosecutors recommended civil rights charges against Officer Pantaleo and sought approval from the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, to seek an indictment, according to the officials. Mr. Rosenstein has convened several meetings that revealed divisions within the Justice Department over whether to move forward. No decision has been made, but one law enforcement official said that, based on the discussions so far, it appeared unlikely that Mr. Rosenstein would approve charges.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has also been briefed on the case and could weigh in after Mr. Rosenstein makes his own recommendation, officials said.
Meet Gina, a spy for over 30 years, a devoted public servant and a devotee of Johnny Cash. Shes dedicated her life to protecting our nation. Meet Gina, a spy for over 30 years, an overseer of torture, and a destroyer of valuable documents. She believes that waterboarding should be something that we use. This is Gina Haspel, the nominee to head the C.I.A. with two distinct storylines about her. A C.I.A. P.R. blitz aimed at bolstering her nomination tells us most of what we know about Haspel. Gina Haspel is the best prepared person ever to be nominated for this job. A nonpartisan person. Shes got a spine of steel. Her only goal is to live out the agencys mission. The C.I.A. tells us that she joined towards the end of the Cold War. She wanted adventure and meaning in her life. We dont get too much detail. We know she first deployed to Africa, then later overseas during the Gulf War. At one point she helped catch two terrorists linked to an embassy bombing. They dont say where. But pretty much everything else about her 33 years at the agency is classified. And all the while, the C.I.A. says she remained a big fan of her alma maters basketball team: the University of Kentucky Wildcats. Now critics of Haspel are more concerned with what the C.I.A. isnt saying about her. America shouldnt be known for torture. She was supportive of the program. A cover-up from A to Z. A dirty past. After 9/11. she managed a secret C.I.A. prison in Thailand. And at that prison she oversaw the torture of a detainee. And then, later, she helped execute an order to destroy videotapes of brutal interrogations. Heres her then-boss explaining why he didnt want the tapes kept: It would make the C.I.A. look bad. And it would actually, in my view, it almost destroyed the clandestine service because of it. The president decided to focus on good Gina. Gina the trailblazer. Gina, by the way, who I know very well  who I worked very closely with... will be the first woman director of the C.I.A. Critics worry that the presidents embrace of torture wont get any pushback from Haspel. What do you think about waterboarding, Mr. Trump? I said, I love it. And Id bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding. Torture works, O.K., folks. Haspel recently gave a very rare public appearance on Capitol Hill. Her aim: to woo some of her critics. She smiled and appeared approachable, more public servant than controversial public official.
An entire section that last year was titled Reproductive Rights was renamed Coercion in Population Control, with much of the text, including most references to the availability of birth control, eliminated.

Another section that had been labeled Israel and the Occupied Territories was retitled Israel, Golan Heights, West Bank and Gaza. The word occupied was largely eliminated from the text.

The news media in Israel reported last year that David Friedman, the American ambassador to the country, had asked the State Department to stop using the word occupation when referring to the territories, and he has said publicly that settlements in the West Bank are part of Israel.

The United States has referred to the West Bank as occupied for decades. Heather Nauert, the departments spokeswoman, said in January that the Trump administration had not changed its policy regarding the term occupied territories. But in her remarks at the time, she carefully avoided using the word occupied, and on Friday, she and other officials declined to answer repeated questions about the words almost complete banishment from the report.

As in previous versions, the report identifies problems in 194 nations while excluding the United States, an omission that has long prompted foreign countries to cry hypocrisy.

Asked whether this years frequent descriptions of news media suppression might be considered particularly problematic in light of President Trumps musings to reconsider libel laws and penchant for dismissing critical coverage as fake news, officials drew a strong line between insulting journalists and killing or jailing them.

I think the report is very clear about the kind of things that we consider to be inappropriate restrictions on freedom of the media, said Michael G. Kozak, an ambassador and the senior official in the State Departments bureau of democracy, human rights and labor. He added that journalists in Cuba also get called names, but if it were limited to that, theyd be pretty happy as compared to the situation theyre in now.
Thousands of students across the United States walked out of their classrooms and into the nations schoolyards and streets on Friday in a renewed, coordinated protest against gun violence.

The demonstrations, from the statehouse in Texas to a Chicago park, coincided with the 19th anniversary of the mass shooting at Colorados Columbine High School  a rampage that stirs students still, even though it happened before most of todays high school students were born.

Fridays walkout was the third nationally organized student protest in the two months since 17 people were shot and killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. Students walked out of classes in March and held rallies across the country later in the month. They say that elected officials have not done enough to prevent school shootings despite a yearslong national debate and the grim roll call of campus killings since Columbine.

Shortly before the walkout on Friday began, at 10 a.m., another Florida high school was the site of a shooting when a 19-year-old man entered Forest High School in Ocala and shot a 17-year-old student before being apprehended by an officer stationed at the school. The victim was expected to survive.
SAO PAULO, Brazil  Just as former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the front-runner in Brazils presidential election, was surrendering this month to start serving a 12-year sentence for corruption, a former Supreme Court justice quietly made his debut on the political stage, quite possibly upending the contest.

Joaquim Barbosa, who made history in 2003 when he became the countrys first black Supreme Court justice, registered with the center-left Brazilian Socialist Party on April 6, one day before the deadline for potential presidential candidates to join a party.

While he has yet to formally begin a campaign, party leaders have spent the past few weeks building a strategy that draws on Mr. Barbosas remarkable biography. Having overcome poverty and discrimination to reach the pinnacle of the legal profession, Mr. Barbosa became a crusading figure in the fight against corruption, which is the top concern among Brazilian voters.

His campaign wont be based on polarization, Carlos Siqueira, the president of the party, said in an interview. It will be about his clean, honest name and about a black man who comes from humble origins and made it to the Supreme Court and now could reach the presidency.
MEXICO CITY  Extraordinary protests against the government of President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua extended into a third day on Friday as thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in Managua, the capital, and other cities, clashing with government security forces and barricading neighborhoods in opposition to newly announced changes in the social security program.

At least three people, including a police officer, have been killed in the protests since they began on Wednesday, according to the authorities, and dozens of people have been wounded.

The demonstrations have been partly driven by students from the countrys public universities, which historically have been a faithful base of support for Mr. Ortega. They have been joined by a variety of groups, including retirees. The protests are among the largest and most violent in Nicaraguas recent history.

They were set off by changes to the social security system approved by the Ortega administration this week, but they also tapped growing discontent with the government, protesters and analysts said.
BEIJING  Visitors to a zoo in southeast China, apparently hoping for a livelier show, pelted kangaroos with rocks, ultimately killing one, injuring another and setting off a wave of public disgust and anger.

The 12-year-old female kangaroo died in a zoo in Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian Province, over a month ago. But the news surfaced only this week, when a local newspaper, The Haixia Metropolis News, described zookeepers shock at finding it with a smashed foot, hobbled and listless, after at least one visitor apparently threw stones in an attempt to make it jump.

Some of us saw visitors throwing stones, and an attendant went out to stop it, but the visitors denied doing it, a veterinarian at the zoo, who gave only her surname, Chen, told The Paper, a Shanghai-based news website.

A veterinarian cleaned and treated the kangaroos injured foot. But a few days later, it died suddenly from profuse internal bleeding. The zoo believes the bleeding was caused by undetected injuries from the stones.
To officials and analysts in South Korea, Mr. Kims decision to shut down his countrys only known nuclear test site, in Punggye-ri in northeastern North Korea, and his moratorium on long-range missile tests, are some of the trust-building steps that they have hoped Mr. Kim would take to help improve the mood for dialogue in Washington.

Mr. Kim spent last year conducting a series of nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile tests, raising tensions and a risk of war with the United States. But he has initiated a dramatic about-face since January with a sequence of diplomatic maneuvers, including a summit meeting with President Xi Jinping of China in Beijing last month in his first trip abroad as leader, and his invitations to Mr. Moon and Mr. Trump for summit talks.

Analysts in the region are deeply divided over Mr. Kims motives. Some argue that Mr. Kim just wanted to use negotiations to buy time and ease international sanctions, never intending to abandon his nuclear weapons. But others say that Mr. Kim would eventually give up his nuclear arsenal if he were provided with the right incentives, such as security guarantees, like a peace treaty and normalized ties with Washington, and the economic aid he needs to rebuild his economy.

His latest announcement came one day after North and South Korea installed what officials said was the first-ever hotline between their top leaders, another sign of improving relations on the divided Korean Peninsula.

Mr. Moon was expected to use the hotline, which was installed in his office, to talk with Mr. Kim before the two leaders hold their summit meeting on the Korean border next Friday. But no date has been set for their first call.

The two Koreas have run a telephone hotline at the so-called truce village of Panmunjom  the site for the inter-Korean meeting  for years. Duty officers from both sides man their telephones at Panmunjom daily in case one side calls the other. The line has been cut off at times when bilateral relations have soured, but communications there have been restored.

But the two countries have never run a direct hotline linking their top leaders offices, officials said.
In Pyongyang, some families make fewer trips to restaurants and choose cheaper domestic goods over more expensive imports. Outside the capital, rural families now sometimes make do with only two meals a day.

My worry is that the gains and progress made in recent years in terms of food security and marketization could fade as a result of the sanctions, said Katharina Zellweger, who has visited North Korea 70 times since 1995, living there from 2006 to 2011 to run a Swiss aid program. That would mean we are moving backward.

One Chinese trader who does business with middle-class North Koreans said that he had noticed a growing discontent with the government because of the shortages.

I can feel they are not satisfied with the government, and if the authorities cannot resolve the sanctions problem, such dissatisfaction will go on and on, said the trader, who asked to be identified only by his English name, Terry, for fear of repercussions in North Korea. They have lost the loyalty toward the regime.

But the Kim government still has enormous power to suppress or deflect discontent. No organized antigovernment resistance exists in North Korea, where the government maintains a tight grip on society and relies on the police, backed by a system of informers, to imprison critics.

Complete control over the news media, and the Norths almost total isolation from the internet, allows the government to shape how many people perceive reality. Bombarded by daily propaganda appeals, North Koreans are more likely to see themselves as citizens of a small nation persecuted by hostile Americans than they are to blame Mr. Kims government for their economic hardship, recent visitors and defectors say.

These ineffective sanctions are being used as propaganda tools to further flame anti-American sentiments, said Kim Tae-hoon, co-founder of DoDaum, a humanitarian group that has organized an H.I.V. diagnosis and treatment program in the North.

We do ask people about sanctions, said Linda Lewis, the North Korea country representative for the American Friends Service Committee, a humanitarian aid group, who last visited in November. We ask about the impact of them. The answer that we usually get from people is: Weve never experienced a life without sanctions, so how would we know?
MANILA  President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, who has chafed at overseas criticism of his strongman style since he was elected to office in 2016, has overseen the deportation or detention of two foreign critics in recent days, taking personal responsibility for the arrest of a 71-year-old Australian nun.

It was not the military who arrested this nun, the Catholic nun from Australia, Mr. Duterte told an audience of soldiers on Wednesday. It was upon my orders, implemented by the Bureau of Immigration. And I take full responsibility, legal or otherwise, for this incident.

The nun, Patricia Fox, a longtime Philippines resident, has been an activist for many years and has joined rallies against Mr. Dutertes bloody crackdown on drugs, which has left thousands of Filipinos dead. She was detained Monday at her house in Manila after visiting the southern island of Mindanao, which has been under martial law for almost a year.

Sister Fox was held overnight and released on Tuesday, but she was expected to face deportation proceedings next week. Her arrest came a day after Giacomo Filibeck, an Italian official with the Party of European Socialists, was deported after landing in the Philippine city of Cebu. Mr. Filibeck has also been a critic of Mr. Dutertes antidrug campaign.
Israel, she said, was created exactly 70 years ago as a haven for refugees from the Holocaust. But the mistreatment of those suffering from todays atrocities is simply not in line with my Jewish values. Because I care about Israel, I must stand up against violence, corruption, inequality, and abuse of power.

Israel has drawn international censure for using live fire against mostly unarmed protesters during recent weekly demonstrations along the fence dividing Gaza from Israel.

The protest, which began as a grass-roots campaign and was quickly adopted by Hamas, the Islamist militant group that controls Gaza, is meant to draw international attention to the 11-year blockade of the isolated, impoverished coastal territory, which Israel and Egypt impose, citing security grounds, and to Palestinian demands for a return to lands in what is now Israel.

Israels military says it is acting to prevent any mass crossing of the fence and to prevent attacks against Israeli soldiers and nearby communities under cover of the protests.

Ms. Portmans decision was not the first time a celebrity has opted out of an event in Israel over disagreements with its policies. Also this year, the musician Lorde ignited outrage in some quarters when she canceled a concert in Tel Aviv at the urging of fans who asked her to reconsider the performance.

Her cancellation drew angry denunciations from several prominent Israelis and Jewish leaders. A well-known American rabbi, Shmuley Boteach, took out a full-page ad in The Washington Post calling her a bigot, and an Israeli rights group filed a lawsuit against two New Zealanders who wrote one of many open letters urging Lorde to cancel the show.

Many others offered support to the singer, including dozens of celebrities and artists who signed an open letter in The Guardian. Among them were the former Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters, the singer Peter Gabriel, and the actors Viggo Mortensen and Mark Ruffalo. Hundreds of other celebrities criticized Israel and offered their support for the Palestinian cause, including Rihanna, Penelope Cruz and Russell Brand.
MOSCOW  An organ-failure-inducing, military-grade nerve agent may seem an unlikely source of inspiration for a product that is advertised as promoting longevity.

Not so for Alexei Yakushev, a farmer from a village in central Russia. This week, he launched Novichok, a sunflower oil named after the chemical agent the Kremlin is accused of using last month to poison the Russian former spy Sergei V. Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury, England.

The oil comes in a tall brown bottle with a black label decorated with the emblem of the Soviet-era secret police and the words, Recommended by the K.G.B. On Thursday, a beaming Mr. Yakushev posed for photos and a video promoting his new product at a trade fair in Ulyanovsk, a city 520 miles east of Moscow.

The 43-year-old farmer, who runs a family business called Yakushev, said in a telephone interview that he was seeking to inject an element of humor into an international spy scandal that has prompted Western nations to eject more than 150 Russian diplomats and the United States to impose a new round of economic sanctions, sending relations with the West to their lowest point since Russias military interventions in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
STOCKHOLM  The panel that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature acknowledged on Friday unacceptable behavior in the form of unwanted intimacy by a major cultural figure with close ties to the group, but said its members were not aware of any illegal conduct.

Engulfed in a scandal over allegations of sexual assault against Jean-Claude Arnault, the panel, the Swedish Academy, said that it was turning some of the results of an investigation over to law enforcement. It was the first collective statement made by the academy, whose ability to function has been badly shaken after five of its members resigned over the handling of the investigation.

Last November, in the midst of the #MeToo movement, the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported that 18 women had accused Mr. Arnault of sexual assault and harassment over more than two decades.

Mr. Arnault, a noted photographer, is married to a member of the academy, Katarina Frostenson  together, they own Forum, a club in Stockholm that is a cultural hub for Sweden  and is close to other members. He was accused of using his proximity to the academy, and his status as an influential cultural arbiter, to abuse women artists in properties owned by the academy in Stockholm and Paris.
JERUSALEM  They came in smaller numbers. But the outcome was still deadly, and the victims this time included a 15-year-old boy.

Palestinians protested for a fourth Friday along the security fence dividing Gaza from Israel, some of them burning tires, hurling rocks or flying kites with flaming tails in the hope of setting ablaze the fields of Israeli rural communities on the other side. The Israeli military distributed a photograph of one kite with a scrawled swastika.

The military estimated the number of participants at about 3,000 in five locations along the Gaza border, down from at least 30,000 on March 30, when the protest campaign started.

But by evening the Gaza Health Ministry reported four killed by Israeli sniper fire. One was identified as Muhammad Ayoub, 15. Amateur video taken on the Gaza side of the fence purported to show him shot while running with other youths, apparently empty-handed. Graphic photographs showed the teenager lying on the rocky ground, bleeding from the head, and later on a hospital gurney.
At 3 a.m. on a recent Sunday, Herb Wilsons wife fell backward in the bathroom of their New York apartment and hit her head. It was not her first fall. She has Parkinsons disease and has fallen many times, causing him worry.

The previous time his wife had fallen, Mr. Wilson, 79, had taken her to a hospital emergency room, where they spent five hours waiting for her to be examined and discharged. This time, they went to a concierge emergency room for faster service.

I called up at 3:15, and they said come over, Mr. Wilson said. I walked in there at 3:30 in the morning, and a physician, a technician and a physicians assistant were waiting for me, literally, at the door.

The facility, Priority Private Care, administered a CT scan and read the results on the spot. Mr. Wilsons wife was fine, and they went home. I was out of there in 40 minutes, he said.
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

'I will abide by High Command decision,' says Siddaramaiah

India

oi-Chennabasaveshwar

By Chennabasaveshwar

Amid speculations about Chief Minister Siddaramaiah contest from Badami constituency, Siddaramaiah's son Dr. Yathindra announced that his father would file nomination papers on April 23rd. Dr. Yathindra in his Facebook post stated that Chief Minister Siddaramaiah would file his nomination papers from Bagalkot district's Badami on April 23rd.

However, the post was taken down moments after television channels highlighted it.

On the other hand, Siddaramaiah in a press conference held in Mysore told that he would abide by the party High Command's decision. He said, " Whatever the party leadership says I will abide by it."

Also, he denied poll alliance with any other political party. "We are not going to enter into an alliance with any party. We are a secular party," he said.

When asked about Janata Dal(S) is also a secular party, CM Siddaramaiah shot back at the reporter, saying, "Who told you JDS is a secular party?"

Siddaramaiah will file his nomination from Chamundeshwari constituency. It is a hectic day in Chamundeshwari. GT Deve Gowda the man being touted as the giant killer will file his nomination from this constituency. He takes on the Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and expressed confidence that he would win. He is incidentally the sitting MLA of this constituency.

Whatever the party leadership says I will abide by it: CM Siddaramaiah on if he will also contest from Badami constituency #KarnatakaElections2018 pic.twitter.com/5Lw3Arrog5  ANI (@ANI) April 20, 2018

Though Congress has already announced the candidate for Badami, KPCC chief G Parameshwara has not given the B-form to Dr. Devaraj Patil.

Meanwhile, the Congress high command under the leadership of Rahul Gandhi would meet in New Delhi to discuss whether Siddaramaiah should also contest from Badami. If Siddaramaiah contests from Badami, he will become the first incumbent chief minister to contest from two new segments. Siddaramaiah had announced his decision to contest from Chamundeshwari, vacating his Varuna seat for son Dr Yathindra.

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
50 per cent of ATMs may shut down by next year: Here is why

Currency crunch shows signs of easing, to be resolved today

India

oi-Staff

By Oneindia Staff Writer

The currency crunch has been showing signs of easing with 86 per cent of the ATMs coming online, officials have said.

India's largest bank SBI Chairman Rajnish Kumar said the problem will be resolved by Friday. "It is not a uniform cash crunch problem. It is there in geographies like Telangana and Bihar. We are hoping that the problem will be resolved by tomorrow because cash is in transition and it is reaching these states by today evening," SBI's Kumar told reporters here.

Meanwhile, government officials said that with special arrangements being made to transport cash to areas that during the last three days faced an "unusual spurt in demand", 86 per cent of the 2.2 lakh ATMs were operational, dispensing cash. This was higher than 80 per cent operational ATMs yesterday and just 60 per cent working ATMs on Tuesday.

The shortage has been blamed on the inadequate availability of Rs 2,000 currency notes, which sources in the government said could be because of hoarding ahead of elections. Also, ATM cassettes had not been configured to dispense smaller sized Rs 200 notes.

An official said the government has ramped up printing of currency notes and is operating all the four presses 24x7. The presses this week have been minting Rs 500 and Rs 200 notes without a break to meet an estimated Rs 70,000 crore of currency shortfall in the country.

On an average, the four presses of Security Printing and Minting Corporation of India Limited (SPMCIL) operate for 18-19 hours daily with a 3-4 hour break. But since the time ATMs ran dry, the presses are operating 24X7, the official told PTI.

Such overtime printing was last seen post demonetisation when the printing of new Rs 2,000 notes was fast-tracked to meet the liquidity shortage in the market.

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had on Tuesday stated that there is sufficient cash in its vaults and currency chests. "Nevertheless, printing of the notes has been ramped up in all the 4 note presses."

Holding accountable those who are hoarding cash, Kumar said the money should be recycled, meaning that if people withdraw money from the bank and the money needs to be deposited back as well.

If we (people) hold everything, then whatever supply we (banks) do, it will be insufficient for the country. So it is important that the currency is also recycled," he said.

Commenting on the issue, Telecom Minister Manoj Sinha said the hype around currency shortage has been created to mislead the nation.

"I feel that it is unnecessary hype which has been created. Finance Secretary and RBI have said that there is no cash crunch in 80 per cent of the ATMs and there is enough cash available in RBI chest also. It is a political conspiracy to mislead the nation. People should remain cautious about such conspiracies," he said.

Meanwhile, All-India Banks Employees Association (AIBEA) has threatened to launch an agitation saying bank staff was facing public anger due to the cash crunch. It blamed the government and the RBI for the situation.
Right to be forgotten: HC asks Centre, Google to reply to plea for removing verdict from search engine

Delhi HC reserves order on Ajay Chautala's plea seeking two months parole

India

oi-Madhuri

Delhi High Court on Friday reserved its order regarding plea filed by INLD leader Ajay Chautala where he had a sought a two months' parole.

Order reserved till May 2. He had asked parole in order to prepare for his exam and attend a wedding. Ajay is pursuing PG Diploma in Counselling and Behaviour Modification (PGDCBM) under the Distance Education from Guru Jambheshwar University of Science and Technology, Hisar.

Former Haryana Chief Minister Om Prakash Chautala, his MLA son Ajay, and three other officials were sentenced to ten years in prison in 2013 by a special CBI court on charges of illegally recruiting over 3,000 teachers in the state by using forged documents.

The Supreme Court had on August 3 last year dismissed the appeals of Chautala and his father O P Chautala challenging the high court verdict upholding their conviction and sentence of 10 years awarded by a trial court in the junior basic trained (JBT) teachers recruitment scam case. The high court had on March 5, 2015, said "the overwhelming evidence showed the shocking and spine-chilling state of affairs in the country."

The father-son duo and 53 others, including two IAS officers, were among 55 persons convicted on January 16, 2013 by the trial court for illegally recruiting 3,206 JBT teachers in Haryana in 2000.

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Story first published: Friday, April 20, 2018, 17:11 [IST]
For the cause of life and love, this Bengal bride organises blood donation camp on her wedding day

He lost his mother to cancer, now; Delhi man travels 6,000 km to create awareness on blood donation

India

oi-Oneindia Staff

By Oneindia Staff

New Delhi, April 20: It was a 'tragic' learning curve for Delhi-based branding and marketing consultant, Kiran Verma. After he lost his mother to cancer, the 33-year-old man decided to take upon himself to create awareness on blood donation to save lives across the country.

In order to do so, the man with a mission, not only founded Simply Blood, an online platform for blood donation, but he also travelled 6,000 km, almost half of the distance on foot, to encourage people to donate blood.

He started his arduous journey from Srinagar in January this year and he visited places like Udaipur, Vadodara, Chennai and Bengaluru to fulfill his mission, stated a report by ANI.

"#Thiruvananthapuram: A 33-year-old man named Kiran Verma has travelled over 6,000 km on foot to spread awareness about blood donation. He started his journey from Srinagar & has gone through places like Udaipur, Vadodara, Chennai & Bengaluru," tweeted ANI.

#Thiruvananthapuram: A 33-year-old man named Kiran Verma has travelled over 6,000 km on foot to spread awareness about blood donation. He started his journey from Srinagar & has gone through places like Udaipur, Vadodara, Chennai & Bengaluru. pic.twitter.com/0hRhUUWKpq  ANI (@ANI) April 19, 2018

As he travelled and met people, Kiran made it a point to share his experiences online to further spread his message. "So, from extreme North to West and from West to now the Southernmost point of India. I just wanted to share that I have travelled more than 6,000 km till now out of which, I walked more than 2,600 km on foot and more than 3,400 km by different means of transport," he wrote on Twitter.

So, from extreme North to West and from West to now the Southernmost point of India. I just wanted to share that I have travelled more than 6000kms till now out of which, I walked more than 2600kms on feet and more than 3400kms by different means of transhttps://t.co/ECqSoyQ5NR  Kiran Verma (@VermaKiran) April 16, 2018

During his journey, as he met several friendly strangers, Kiran told them about the Simply Blood app, which allows people to find blood donors online. "I started my journey on January 26, 2018, from Lal Chowk, Srinagar and have travelled more than 6,500 kms till Trivandrum in two months. I have met more than 600,000 people across the country. I have shared my vision with students in colleges, Universities and public places like malls, restaurants, railway stations, bus stands etc," Kiran said.

As a part of creating awareness on blood donation, Kiran has also visited Nepal and Bhutan. "Every day more than 12,000 people die in India due to lack of blood. Our mission is to encourage at least 10 people every kilometre to take a pledge to donate blood once in their life," he said.
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

In poll bound Karnataka, this couples wedding invite looks like a voter ID: Find out why

India

oi-Oneindia Staff

By Oneindia Staff

In poll bound Karnataka, here is a wedding invite that resembles a voter identification card. Siddappa Doddachikkannanavar, an activist and an Indian Railways employee , and Jyothi, a BCom graduate are set to get married on April 27.

The wedding card has the national emblem and also says 'SJMRG27042018' - a combination of the wedding date and the initials of Jyothi.

The couple printed around 1,200 cards with the messages highlighting the importance of both voting and blood donation. On the second page of the card are the details of the wedding, names of family members and venue. The card also reads," your vote is valuable."

Siddappa has also given the invitation to the Haveri Deputy Commissioner and the Superintendent of Police. The couple is said to have taken the permission of the district collector to print the invitation cards.

We have been working towards promoting Kannada language in Goa. Being the state president of Kannada Srujanasheela Balaga, we do visit Kannada schools and distribute Kannada books. I also enjoy writing limericks. I wanted to do something unique for my wedding to promote Kannada," Siddappa told the Bangalore Mirror.

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
Indias daughters under attack: Now, 2 minor girls raped, murdered in UP, Chhattisgarh

India

oi-Oneindia Staff

By Oneindia Staff

New Delhi, April 20: Reviving the horrific memories of Jammu and Kashmir's Kathua gang-rape and murder case, now, reports stated that two minor girls have been reportedly raped and killed in Uttar Pradesh and Chhattisgarh in two separate incidents.

Both the crimes happened during two separate wedding celebrations in the two states. In the Uttar Pradesh case, a nine-year-old girl, who attended a wedding function, was allegedly raped and afterwards strangled in Etah district on Thursday night. In fact, a few days ago another girl child was raped and murdered during a wedding in Etah district.

In the Chhattisgarh case, a 10-year-old girl was raped and murdered during a wedding function in Kabirdham district on Wednesday. The accused, a 25-year-old man, confessed that he raped the minor and then smashed her head with a stone.

An alarming rise in rape cases, especially of minor girls, has shocked the nation. The two cases--the gang-rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua by eight persons and rape of a 16-year-old teenager by BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar in Uttar Pradesh's Unnao--brought into focus the barbaric nature of crimes against girls.

The cruelty involved and the shameful support enjoyed by the accused from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in both the Kathua and Unnao rape cases triggered massive protests across the nation.

In spite of public anger against rapes, sexual assaults against girls continued in the last few days. A few days ago, an 11-year-old girl was raped and murdered in Surat, Gujarat. Her body bore 86 injury marks.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi faced flak for his "studied silence" over the rape cases. Although he has condemned the rape cases in two occasions, once recently in London, critics say it's "too little, too late" and the government needs to ensure justice for the victims.
Step by step instructions on how to lock and unlock your Aadhaar biometrics online

'Is Aadhaar the best model to accord benefits', asks SC

India

oi-Staff

By Oneindia Staff Writer

The Supreme Court on Thursday said it was not sure whether bringing people "face to face" with authorities through Aadhaar was the best model as the state should reach them to accord the benefits of the welfare schemes.

A five-judge Constitution bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra, hearing a clutch of petitions challenging Aadhaar and its enabling 2016 law, was told by the counsel for the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) that the 12-digit national identifier brought the citizens face to face with the service providers for getting the benefits.

"We are not sure if that is the best model. The individual should not be a supplicant. The state should go to him and give him benefits," the bench, also comprising Justices A K Sikri, A M Khanwilkar, D Y Chandrachud and Ashok Bhushan, said.

The bench observed that the UIDAI says Aadhaar is a means for identification, but the "only caveat to that is that there should be no exclusion".

Senior advocate Rakesh Dwivedi, appearing for UIDAI and the Gujarat government, said the development was necessary to ensure that people are freed from poverty.

Liberating people from poverty is at one end of the spectrum and the right to privacy is on the other, the bench observed.

The UIDAI referred to social ills like manual scavenging and prostitution and said that despite laws, these evils were rampant in the society and the apex court should strike a balance while dealing with the competing fundamental rights of citizens.

Referring to apex court judgements, the senior lawyer said it has been held that to save the freedom of speech and expression, the right to reputation of a citizen under Article 21 cannot be crucified.

The court, besides being the protector of fundamental rights, is also a "balancing wheel" to ensure that competing fundamentals co-exist.

Dwivedi then referred to a verdict by which a HIV+ve rape victim was denied the permission to abort the foetus after a doctors' panel gave the report that it could be fatal for the woman.

The court balanced the rights in the case where fundamental right to life was involved," he said, adding that in the present matter, the issue merely pertained to identification.

"What is being done under section 7 of the Aadhaar Act covers human rights of a lot of people of our country. This court should act as a sentinel to ensure that right to privacy is balanced with all the other rights under Article 21 that Aadhaar covers," Dwivedi said.

The counsel for Dwivedi would resume his submissions on April 24. Earlier, the bench had said that if biometric authentication is attached to every transaction entered into by a person, it would "form a wealth of information" necessitating the need for data protection.
JDS releases 2nd list of Candidates: Congress, BJP rebel leaders get tickets

India

oi-Chennabasaveshwar

By Chennabasaveshwar

Janata Dal (Secular) on Friday released the second list of its 58 candidates after party chief HD Kumaraswamy filed his nomination papers from Kanakapura and Channapatna constituencies. JDS has given chance to rebel leaders from both BJP and Congress who did not get tickets to contest.

In a surprising move, the party has fielded former minister PGR Sindhia from Basava Kalyan constituency. Sindhia, who was one of the architects of Janata Parivar, had held various portfolios in different governments of the Janata Parivar.

[JD(S) Candidates List for Karnataka Assembly Elections 2018]

Actor-turned-politician Sasikumar gets JDS ticket to contest from Hosadurga constituency and BH Ramachandra to contest from Bengaluru's prestigious RR Nagar constituency.

Also, BJP's rebel candidate Prakash Khandre, who did not get the ticket to contest from Bhalki constituency, will now contest from the same constituency.

Mandya- M Srinivas, Tarikere- Shivashankarappa, Shanti Nagar- Sridhar Reddy, Rajajinagar- Jedarahalli Krishnappa, Bommanalli- M Somashekhar, Chickapete- Hemachandra Sagar, Hukkeri- MB Patil, Khanapur- Nasir Bagwan, Jamakhandi- Sadahivmaruti Kalal, Aurad- Dhanaji yadav, Nanjanagudu- Dayanand, Raichur Rural- Ravi Patil, Rona - Ravi Doddameti, Shigganvi- Ashok Bevinamarad, Kampli- B Narayanappa, Bengaluru South- Prabhakar Reddy, Bellary city- Iqbal Ahmed, Siraguppa- Devarahipparagi-

The party had announced names of 126 candidates in the first list.

More details awaited.

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 elections: 117 kg ganja seized by NCB in Bengaluru meant for voters?

India

oi-Oneindia Staff

By Oneindia Staff

Bengaluru, April 20: It's raining money, liquor and freebies in poll-bound Karnataka, these days. However, what is worrying officials are the rumours of drugs and ganja being given to voters by political parties ahead of the crucial Assembly elections in the state.

The rumours of drugs being distributed among the voters got some amount of credence when on Wednesday, the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB), Bengaluru seized about 117 kg of ganja from Bellary Road in the city. The NCB said that the ganja was sourced from Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh and was meant for local consumption in Bengaluru.

Two persons have been arrested in the case and sent to judicial custody. The officials of the NCB refused to say whether the seized ganja was meant to entice voters before the elections. The Assembly elections in Karnataka are scheduled on May 12. The results will be out on May 15. A total of 224 seats are up for grabs for political parties in the elections.

A few days ago, on April 4, one person was arrested for possessing ganja from the Bengaluru International Airport by sleuths of the NCB. The arrested person was carrying 4,700 kg of ganja from Bengaluru to Doha, stated a report by the NCB.

The amount of liquor and cash seized by the officials in poll-bound Karnataka since the model code of conduct was put in force on March 27 has really baffled one and all. Since March-end, 1.92 lakh litres of liquor have been seized from different parts of the state. Reports added that a total of Rs 34 crore has been seized by the officials in the last 20 days.

The huge amount of unaccounted money has been seized at a time when several parts of the country have been facing a cash crunch. Apart from cash and liquor, the officials have also seized Rs 19 crore worth of freebies and gifts like sarees, helmets, laptops and cookers from various parts of the state.

Regarding drugs, the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has recently alleged that the incumbent Congress has failed to stop the free flow of banned substances in the state.

"Failing to curb growing Drug Mafia in B'luru has been one of many failures of the Siddaramaiah govt. City is now infamously identified as drug capital of south India. Will Rahul at least address the drug problem in Bengaluru? Or is it wrong of us to expect this from him?" tweeted the Karnataka BJP.

Failing to curb growing Drug Mafia in B'luru has been one of many failures of the Siddaramaiah govt.



City is now infamously identified as drug capital of south India.



Will Rahul at least address drug problem in Bengaluru? Or is it wrong of us to expect this from him?  BJP Karnataka (@BJP4Karnataka) April 8, 2018

It is not that the incumbent Congress government has not admitted that drug abuse cases are a real menace in Karnataka. Back in 2017, former Karnataka home minister G Parameshwara has said that "Udta Punjab" will not happen in the state after the BJP raised the issue in the legislative council.

"Udta Punjab" is the name of a Hindi film which highlights drug abuse by youths in Punjab. "A special drive has been launched to curb drug menace in the state, especially Bengaluru and Mangaluru. We will not allow Bengaluru to go the Punjab way. Udta Punjab will not happen here," he said.
Karnataka elections: NA Haris to get Congress ticket from Shantinagar constituency?

India

oi-Oneindia Staff

By Oneindia Staff

Bengaluru, April 20: If reports are to be believed, controversial Congress leader NA Haris is likely to be fielded as the party candidate from the high-profile Shantinagar constituency in Bengaluru for the upcoming Karnataka Assembly elections.

Haris is a two-time Congress MLA from the constituency. However, the party took its own sweet time to decide on whether to field the politician from his home turf once again following the scandalous incident of his son being involved in a pub brawl earlier this year.

Now, the Congress told reporters that they are confident of Haris' win once again this time from Shantinagar and there is no need to punish him for his "son's sins".

"All surveys conducted by us predict Haris' win. He is still popular in the constituency. The BJP which is talking against corruption has fielded five candidates who went to jail during its last regime. In Haris' case, the MLA is innocent. He is facing no cases. The government has taken the strictest possible action against the son. He is in jail. We can't punish the father for his son's sins," a senior Congress leader was quoted as saying by News18.

Earlier, a lot of Congress leaders opposed the idea of giving a ticket to Haris, after his son Mohammed Nalapad Haris was named as the main accused in the sensational pub attack case in Bengaluru. Junior Haris was booked for attempt to murder for allegedly assaulting a man in a pub in February this year.

Till now, the Congress has announced the names of 218 candidates for the upcoming 224-member Assembly elections in Karnataka. Soon the party will announce the names of five more candidates, which is likely to have Haris' name too. The Congress has decided not to field any candidate from the Melkote constituency from where Swaraj Abhiyan leader Darshan Puttannaiah is contesting the elections. Darshan is the son of the farmer leader and sitting MLA KS Puttannaiah who died in February this year.

There were reports that Haris threatened to quit the Congress and join the Janata Dal (Secular) after his name did not feature in the Congress' candidate list.

However, there is a lot of resentment among the people of Shantinagar against Haris for lack of infrastructural development and rising crime rate in the constituency during his regime. The interesting part about the constituency is that along with housing some of poshest localities in Bengaluru, it has seven slum areas too. The Assembly elections in Karnataka will take place on May 12. The results will be declared on May 15.
Modi returning 'empty handed' from UK: Shiv Sena

India

pti-PTI

Mumbai, Apr 20: Stating that Narendra Modi is coming back "empty-handed" from the UK which has given shelter to fugitive businessman Vijay Mallya, the Shiv Sena on Friday denounced the Prime Minister for speaking about domestic issues on foreign soil. The Uddhav Thackeray-led party said one may have a deep dislike for the Congress or the Gandhi family, but speaking about domestic issues on foreign land does not befit anybody.

The regional party said Modi should follow the advice of his predecessor Manmohan Singh and speak more often.

"(Former PM) Manmohan Singh has advised Modi to speak more often and to speak on time. He has also said that Modi's advice to him when he was the prime minister is now applicable to him as well," the Sena said in an editorial in party mouthpiece 'Saamana'.

The former PM was quoted as saying that Modi should follow the advice he gave him when he was in office - that is to speak more.

"The advice given by Manmohan Singh is only fair. Except bhakts (Modi supporters), who are flying in the air, the whole country feels the same. However, what Manmohan Singh said was only a half truth. Modi may become a 'mauni baba' (mute spectator) in India, but he talks abroad," it added.

The Marathi daily said Modi probably thinks it's better not to speak in his own country as he feels nauseated with the happenings here. Taking a jibe at Modi, the Sena said if one wants to see the PM speak, the country's capital will have to be taken to London, New York, Tokyo, Paris or Germany. If that is not possible, like in movies, a "set" of national capitals would have to be constructed in foreign locales, the Sena publication said.

"The PM has spoken about rape cases (in India) in London. This is part of his sensitive mind. He is emotional and there are sparks in his mind against injustice, and we are seeing the sparks turn into flames on foreign land. Is it right for the prime minister to speak on an issue like rape on foreign land? Why speak about the insulting incidents abroad? Why should a picture of prevalent corruption, rape incidents and an insecure country should be painted outside?" it questioned and added that on a visit to Japan, Modi had spoken about black money and corruption in India.

"You may have enmity with the previous regime. You may also have a deep enmity with the Congress or the Gandhi family... Speaking about the incidents occurring in the country on foreign land does not befit anybody," the Sena said.

Diamond trader Nirav Modi looted the country and fled, and Mallya is in London itself, but "our prime minister goes to the country that has given him shelter and comes back empty-handed", it said.

Nirav Modi is a key accused in the multi-crore PNB scam, while Mallya is wanted in a loan default case.

"However, bhakts do not want to comment on this. Now, Manmohan Singh has started speaking, while Modi has become mute. This can only be considered as revenge taken by fate against the BJP.

"Rahul Gandhi (Congress chief) asks for a mere 15 minutes to silence Modi. This is a proof that Modi has become like Manmohan Singh," the Sena said. The party is part of the BJP-led governments at the Centre and also in Maharashtra.

PTI
We live in times when what we eat is not personal: Justice Gogoi

Going public was the only option says Justice Chelameswar on the famous presser by SCs top 4

Opposition parties move impeachment motion against CJI Dipak Misra

India

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

The Congress on Friday (April 20) said that they have moved an impeachment motion against Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dipak Misra with the support of 64 MPs of the opposition. The Congress leaders, along with the leaders of other opposition parties, met Rajya Sabha chairman Venkaiah Naidu and told him about their decision. To move impeachment motion in the Rajya Sabha, support of a minimum 50 MPs is needed. Now, the opposition has the support of 64 MPs, it is up to Naidu to accept or reject the motion.

Impeachment: The procedures and judges who have faced it in India

Before meeting Naidu, the opposition leaders held a meeting of Congress leaders Ghulam Nabi Azad to discuss the move.

"We have moved an impeachment motion seeking the removal of CJI Dipak Misra..71 MPs had signed the impeachment motion (against CJI) but as 7 have retired the number is now 64. We have more than the minimum requirement needed to entertain the motion and we are sure that the Hon Chairman will take action," Ghulam Nabi Azad told the media after meeting Vice President Venkaiah Naidu.

Senior Congress leader Kapil Sibal said that since the day CJI Misra was appointed, questions were raised about the way he dealt with certain cases.

"We wish this day had never come in the fabric of our constitutional framework," he added.

"When the judges of the Supreme Court themselves believe that the Judiciary's independence is at threat, alluding to the functioning of the office of the CJI, should the nation stand still and do nothing?" Sibal asked.

On March 28, it was reported that the Congress has circulated a draft proposal for moving an impeachment motion against Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dipak Misra to the other opposition parties. It was then reported that Leaders of the Congress, the Trinamool Congress, the Nationalist Congress Party and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) discussed the possibility of moving an impeachment motion against Misra in Parliament.

[Opposition's move to impeach CJI Dipak Misra gaining momentum]

As per latest reports, The Trinamool Congress (TMC), a key opposition party, has not signed the motion. The Telugu Desam Party (TDP) had also backed out of the move.

How is a judge impeached in India?

A judge of the Supreme Court can be removed by an order of the President of India. The order can be issued following an address the Parliament which is supported by a special majority of each house- a majority of the total membership of that House and a majority of not less than two-thirds of the members of that house present and voting.

Impeachment process:

First, a removal motion has to be supported by 100 members in case of the Lok Sabha and 50 in the Rajya Sabha. The same is to be given to the Speaker of the House and it can be introduced in any of the two Houses.

It is up to the Speaker/Chairman to admit to rejecting the motion.

If admitted then a three-member committee is formed to investigate the charges. The Committee will comprise either the Chief Justice of India or Judge of the SC, Chief Justice of a High Court and an eminent jurist.

If the Committee finds the judge guilty then the House in which the motion was introduced can take up the matter.

Once the House passes the motion with a special majority, an address is presented to the President of India. The President then passes an order to remove the judge.
We live in times when what we eat is not personal: Justice Gogoi

Going public was the only option says Justice Chelameswar on the famous presser by SCs top 4

Opposition's move to impeach CJI Dipak Misra gaining momentum

India

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

The opposition parties, especially the Congress and CPI (M), have been mulling for quite some time to move an impeachment motion against Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra. Yesterday's (April 19) Supreme Court order that no further probe is needed in the death of judge B H Loya has definitely not gone down well with the opposition and now reports say that intense discussions are being held behind the closed doors to oust CJI Misra.

Impeachment: The procedures and judges who have faced it in India

The Congress' Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad has sought a meeting with Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu, the chairperson of the Rajya Sabha, on Friday. The opposition has reportedly collected 67 signatures of RS members for the motion which it may submit to Naidu. Initially, it was the CPI(M) which mooted the idea and said it was in talks with various opposition leaders regarding the issue. Congress later decided to back the move.

Before meeting Naidu, the opposition will hold a meeting in which leaders from Communist Party of India (Marxist), Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) are expected to take part.

"Azad's office has called us for a meeting. We will discuss a range of issues," a Hindustan Times report quoted CPI leader D Raja as saying.

The HT reported quoted a Congress leader as saying that deliberations would be held to take forward the motion for the removal of the CJI.

On March 28, it was reported that the Congress has circulated a draft proposal for moving an impeachment motion against Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dipak Misra to the other opposition parties. It was then reported that Leaders of the Congress, the Trinamool Congress, the Nationalist Congress Party and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) discussed the possibility of moving an impeachment motion against Misra in Parliament.

[Congress circulates draft proposal to impeach CJI Dipak Mishra]

As per latest reports, The Trinamool Congress (TMC), a key opposition party, has not signed the motion. The Telugu Desam Party (TDP) had also backed out of the move.

How is a judge impeached in India?

A judge of the Supreme Court can be removed by an order of the President of India. The order can be issued following an address the Parliament which is supported by a special majority of each house- a majority of the total membership of that House and a majority of not less than two-thirds of the members of that house present and voting.

Impeachment process:

First, a removal motion has to be supported by 100 members in case of the Lok Sabha and 50 in the Rajya Sabha. The same is to be given to the Speaker of the House and it can be introduced in any of the two Houses.

It is up to the Speaker/Chairman to admit to rejecting the motion.

If admitted then a three-member committee is formed to investigate the charges. The Committee will comprise either the Chief Justice of India or Judge of the SC, Chief Justice of a High Court and an eminent jurist.

If the Committee finds the judge guilty then the House in which the motion was introduced can take up the matter.

Once the House passes the motion with a special majority, an address is presented to the President of India.

The President then passes an order to remove the judge.
Punjab woman who went missing in Pakistan honey trapped alleges family

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

The family of a Punjab woman who went missing now suspect that she may have been honey trapped by the ISI. Kiran Bala had gone to Pakistan on April 12 as a member of the Shiromani Gurudwara Prabandhak Committee Group. She visited Nankana Sahib on April 14 and two days later she went missing.

Her family suspects that she may have been honey-trapped amidst reports suggesting that she had converted to Islam and married a Muslim man. Her family says that she was very active on Facebook and was addicted to her mobile phone.

Kiran had lost her husband in a road accident in 2013. She is a mother of three. Kiran had left India on April 10 saying that she wanted to visit Nankana Sahib in Pakistan.
Why is rebel star Ambareesh rebelling?

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

Rebel star Ambareesh has been given a ticket to contest from Mandya, but is he is not happy. He has been sulking ever since the election process has been set into motion and has several demands before he agrees to file his nomination papers.

The Congress is on the other hand racing against a ticking clock as the last date to file the nominations is April 24. The party has a lot on its plate and would have to resolve two key issues in another four days. While one would be the much debated Badami seat and whether Chief Minister, Siddaramaiah should be contesting from it, the other pertains to Ambareesh.

Several senior leaders in the Congress have tried to patch things up with him. His primary grievance was that he was dropped from the ministry. While that issue has become quite old, Ambareesh has new ones as well.

After his name was announced, he had refused to collect the B-form. He is yet to receive it says a source close to the actor-politician.

During the patch up attempts, the first point he had raised was with regard to the candidature of Cheluvarayaswamy who joined the Congress after quitting the JD(S). Ambareesh is upset that he was not consulted. He was also not consulted when Cheluvarayaswamy was given a ticket from Nagamangala in Mandya district.

A meeting that Ambareesh had with senior leader K J George too did not yield any results. Mandya has 7 constituencies and Ambareesh can play a crucial role in at least 3. The Congress is in a battle with the JD(S) in this constituency and would not want to lose out due to rebellion.

The question is what does Ambareesh want. He has put forth these conditions before the party leadership. He wants to be in charge of the Congress campaign in Mandya. He wants an assurance that he would be given a cabinet berth if the Congress comes to power. He also wants the post of district-in-charge minister if the party is voted into power.

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Friday, April 20, 2018, 16:26 [IST]
Our economic growth is powered by combination of legacy industries and start-ups: PM Modi

Berlin: Narendra Modi meets Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel

International

oi-Madhuri

Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel at German Chancellery in Berlin on Friday in what will be the first meeting between the two leaders after the latter began her fourth term on March 14 this year.

Modi arrived in Germany's Berlin from Britain on Friday on the third and last leg of his three-nation tour of Europe.

Modi and Merkel are expected to exchange views on a number of bilateral, regional and global issues.

Earlier on Friday, Modi attended the concluding ceremony of this year's Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) and participated in the leaders' retreat, becoming the first Indian Prime Minister since 2009 to attend this biannual summit of the 53-nation grouping of former British colonies.

Prior to Britain, he visited Sweden where he attended the first ever India-Nordic Summit which also saw the participation of the leaders of Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Norway.

For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications

Story first published: Friday, April 20, 2018, 23:44 [IST]
Will review comprehensive global strategic partnership with Biden says PM Modi ahead of US visit

Jim Bridenstines pick as NASA chief raises questions

International

oi-Shubham

By Shubham

The US Senate on Thursday, April 19, narrowly voted President Donald Trump-nominated Republican Representative Jim Bridenstine as the new chief of US space agency, NASA or National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Bridenstine won the voting procedure 50-49.

The 42-year-old is a pilot in the US Navy Reserve and former executive director of the Tulsa Air and Space Museum and Planetarium. He was elected to the US Congress to represent Oklahoma's First Congressional District in 2012.

Currently, Bridenstine is on the House Armed Services Committee as well as the Science, Space and Technology Committee.

Though Nasa's acting administrator Robert Lightfoot welcomed Bridenstine on board, the latter's choice also sparked controversies.

According to a Vox report, Nasa administrators are generally picked from within the space agency's ranks or are those who have a military or science background. Bridenstine brings none of those qualifications. "Even members of Bridenstine's own party have voiced concerns over what putting a politician in charge could mean for the future of the agency," the Voice report said.

The Republican Congress member will fill up the post after it fell vacant in January 2017 when Charles Bolden, Nasa's leader under former president Barack Obama stepped down.

Bridenstine said he was humbled by being given the opportunity to lead Nasa and would work hard towards fulfilling the president's dream of seeing America leading in space.

US Vice President Mike Pence also welcomed Bridenstine's elevation.
New Yorks 9/11 mayor Rudy Giuliani joins Trumps legal team

International

oi-Shubham

By Shubham

The former federal prosecutor and mayor of New York City Rudy Giuliani have joined the personal legal team of US President Donald Trump, the latter's attorney Jay Sekulow announced in a statement on Thursday, April 19.

Sekulow said Trump was pleased with Giuliani's arrival, describing him as a "friend for a long time" who "wants to get this matter quickly resolved for the good of the country".

Giuliani, 73, is among the three lawyers who were joining Trump's legal team which is handling the Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe into Russia's alleged interference in the 2016 presidential election in the US.

Trump's opinion is that there was no collusion with Russia during the election and he called Mueller's investigation a "witch hunt".

Giuliani, who served as the mayor of New York between 1994 and 2001 and was in the post during the 9/11 attacks, was also the chief federal prosecutor in Manhattan for a long period in the 1980s. The veteran Republican was also a top justice department official in the Ronald Reagan administration.

After his mayoral stint got over, Giuliani was busy in private practice.

Giuliani said he was joining Trump's legal team to help conclude the Russia investigation. He told the Washington Post in an interview: "I hope we can negotiate an end to this for the good of the country."

Trump expressed his displeasure over Mueller's work again as recently as on Wednesday, April 18, saying "this is a hoax" made up by the Democrats and that the US was "hopefully coming to the end". He also said that there have been no instances of collusion. He spoke on the special counsel's Russia investigation while addressing the press jointly with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe after talks at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.

Trump did not support the idea of firing Mueller or deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein who is overseeing the probe. The president said there were talks about him firing the duo over the past several months but they continued to be there.
North Korea okay with US troops remaining in South Korea: Moon Jae-in

International

oi-Shubham

By Shubham

For the West and its allies, it couldn't get better than this. Kim Jong-un's North Korea, a country which has in the recent past posed a major threat to world peace with its reckless nuclear ambitions, has dropped its demand of the US removing forces from South Korea in lieu of its denuclearisation, South Korean President Moon Jae-in said on Thursday, April 19, a week ahead of his much-awaited summit with the former.

The US has around 28,000 troops deployed in South Korea, something that has angered Kim whose country is still technically at war with South Korea since the Korean War of the early 1950s did not see a peace treaty signed between the warring parties but an armistice.

However, in a drastically changing environment over the past few months when the opposition parties in the region have embraced each other with a common objective of 'taming' North Korea and Pyongyang has responded to the process with a receptive mind.

Kim met Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing in March end; is scheduled to meet Moon Jae-in on April 27 and is also likely to meet US President Donald Trump in May end or early June.

But North Korea's willingness to give up its nuclear ambitions without forcing the condition of the American troops' withdrawal makes the rapprochement look all the easier.

"North Korea has expressed willingness to give up its nuclear program without making (a) demand that the (US Forces Korea) forces withdraw from the Korean Peninsula," CNN quoted Moon as saying to the media. He also said that any proposed troop withdrawal would be a condition that the US could not accept.

Moon added that North Korea is concerned about its security and wants hostility against it to end. He said Pyongyang has agreed to sit with Washington with this clarification.

Officials from both Koreas will have rehearsals ahead of the summit, South Korean officials said on Thursday. While Seoul will have two rehearsals on April 24 and 26, Pyongyang will conduct its sole rehearsal ahead of the summit on D-Day, CNN added.

North Korea's softened stand came after Trump remarked on Wednesday, April 18, that he would leave the summit meeting with Kim if it didn't fulfil his expectations.
Another Record High for NJ Online Gambling and New Hope for Online Poker

Published April 19, 2018 by Elana K

March 2018 marks the third consecutive month that New Jersey online gambling revenue has broken previous records.

Another month, another record set by the online casino industry in New Jersey. The New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement (NJDGE) released Marchs numbers, and the state's overall revenue came to $25.6 million. The overall revenue of February 2018 also set a record-high, but Marchs revenue surpassed it by over $3 million. March marks the third consecutive month that New Jersey online gambling revenue has broken previous records.

Online Casino Rankings

As usual, the Golden Nugget was the frontrunner in March, earning over $8 million, more than Borgata and Caesars combined. Borgata came in second as usual with $4.58 million, but the pleasant surprise was Caesars, which brought in $4.41 million in revenue, a double-digit increase over last months numbers.

Good News for NJ Online Poker

Unfortunately, New Jerseys online poker continues to struggle. In March its revenue came to $2 million, with a negligible .2% increase from last month and a 12.7% decrease from March 2017.

The good news is, the shared player liquidity compact that governor Chris Christie signed with Nevada and Delaware in October 2017 will finally kick off on May 1, 2018. The compact means that players from all three states will be able to play online poker against each other.

David Rebuck, director of the NJDGE, commented that the compact "will raise jackpots and provide even greater opportunities for play. It also paves the way for additional states to join and grow the regulated, legal online poker market."

Moreover, it may be just the boost the New Jersey online poker needs in order to see higher revenue numbers.
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Will Trump scrap Iran nuclear deal? President Donald Trump warned media on Thursday that they were witnessing the .calm before the storm.. This comes in the midst of hints that the Iran nuclear deal may be .de-certified.....

(Image by YouTube, Channel: RT America) Details DMCA



The P5&1 countries signing nuclear deal with Iran. Trump has threatened to withdraw the US by May 12 if the deal is not "fixed".

As we know in July 2015 the US, Britain, France, Russia, China plus Germany-the P5&1--the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany signed a nuclear deal with Iran. Essentially Iran agreed to inspections limiting its nuclear program and sanctions against it would be lifted. Iran has fully complied with the agreement.

However President Trump has been critical of the deal believing it was too lenient on Iran-and wrongfully as it happens--he maintains Iran hasn't fully complied particularly over its testing of ballistic missiles--which significantly was not part of the deal. So despite Iran being in full compliance Trump has threatened to withdraw the US unless the deal is renegotiated. All the other signees want the agreement left as is. Iran has said it would not renegotiate the deal.

May 12 is the deadline for the US to recertify the deal and Trump has said he will withdraw the US unless the deal is "fixed" by that date-little more than three weeks away.

Here's a few things to consider:

Though seemingly unrelated to the Iran deal Trump last month accepted an invitation by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un for a direct face-to-face meeting sometime in late May or early June. Now it's been confirmed Trump's nominee for Secretary of State, former CIA Director Mike Pompeo, secretly met with Kim in Pyongyang discussing Trump's upcoming meeting with Kim.

On May 27 Kim is to meet with South Korean President Moon in the Panmunjom demilitarized zone to discuss a peace treaty officially ending the Korean war of 1950-'53. Such a peace treaty has never been signed. It must also include the US and China as they were a part of the 1953 armistice that ended the hot war. The two Korean leaders are also to discuss reunification of the two Koreas.

Kim has indicated he is willing to discuss denuclearization of the North if there is a peace treaty. A potential stumbling block is the 30,000 US troops stationed in South Korea, which undoubtedly Kim would demand the US withdraw as part of the peace treaty.

Though the Iran nuclear deal and Trump's meeting with Kim don't appear to be directly linked if Trump reneges on the Iran deal on May 12, how would that affect Trump's meeting with Kim later in May or early June? Would the meeting even take place? If Kim concludes the US president would not honor an international agreement signed by the US with Iran why would he trust Trump in any peace agreement the US signed with him officially ending the Korean war--to say nothing about Trump agreeing to send the 30,000 US troops out of the Korean peninsula?

To further complicate matters there is John Bolton, Trump's new National Security Adviser, who has not been shy as a TV analyst indicating the US should bomb Iran and North Korea. Pompeo during his time as CIA director had similar leanings.

A week ago the leaders of the US, Britain and France sent 107 cruise missiles into Syria over an alleged chemical attack attributed to Syrian President Bashar Assad gassing his own people. A chemical attack that likely never happened and has been debunked by independent journalist Robert Fisk [1] on the scene in Douma where the attack allegedly occurred and talking directly with residents and a doctor who said the people had suffered from dust inhalation from a bombing attack and not a chemical gas attack. The cruise missiles were sent before The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons--OPCW--could arrive on the scene to confirm whether a chemical attack actually occurred. The OPCW inspectors have yet to enter the alleged scene in Douma over security concerns for their safety. Though this writer can't confirm this the residue of a chemical attack supposedly remains on walls and the soil for months. So current accusations against Russia not permitting the inspectors to enter and them destroying evidence is not credible.

As for the cruise missile attacks it was only Secretary of Defense James Mattis who advised Trump the attack be "moderate" and no Russian, Iranian or Syrian army troops be targeted. This over the supposed objections of Bolton who wanted a more intensive strike. Now it's been learned the de-confliction zone between the US and Russia in Syria was discussed with the military leaders of both sides before the missile attacks commenced so as not to occur within that zone--the US military wanting at all costs no direct confrontation with the Russian military in Syria.

But with Bolton now firmly ensconced in the White House as Trump's National Security Adviser and Pompeo needing only Senate confirmation as Secretary of State and neither aligned with Mattis' ideas and Trump supposedly not enamored with Mattis, the war secretary's days may be numbered thus removing the one adult in the room who at least knows war intimately.

All the above with neo-cons Bolton and Pompeo seemingly having full sway with the unpredictable Trump makes May and June a truly inauspicious time that's fast approaching.





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See original here

By Walter Einenkel

Daily Kos Staff



Parents Of Sandy Hook Children Are Suing Alex Jones

(Image by YouTube, Channel: ThinkTank) Details DMCA



The other day it was reported that two Sandy Hook families decided to sue InfoWars snake oil salesman Alex Jones for defamation, stemming from his years of attacks on the validity of the murders that took place in Sandy Hook Elementary. Jones's lucrative propaganda war against reality has led to parents of deceased children receiving death threats from very deplorable people. WSHU Public Radio reports that Alex Jones is now saying that the Sandy Hook shooting did happen.

"In a YouTube video, Jones said he now believes the shooting really happened, and that the families are being used by the Democratic Party and the news media. Jones invited the parents onto his program for a discussion about guns. "In the past, Jones has repeatedly claimed the shooting was staged and that parents of children who died in the shooting are actors."

Alex Jones has stoked the fires of people who believe conspiracy theories that somehow connect a super vast evil conspiracy -- so vampirish and insidious in nature, so cruel and power-hungry -- that instead of actually killing people and covering it up, they pretend to kill people and then cover up that cover up by paying actors to pretend, hundreds and hundreds of "crisis actors," for years and decades after that their loved ones were murdered. They also believe that these shadowy forces are also trafficking in child sex slavery at pizza places; and so while these shadowy forces have the morality not to murder children in order to take away your guns, they don't have the morality to protect children from being systematically raped in order to ... whatever the reason is.

People like Alex Jones are the only time I vaguely hope that there is an actual hell.

You can watch Jones' weak sauce statement below the fold; but you can watch a supercut of what Jones is pretending he didn't say now right here.
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In February, US intelligence community leaders told the US Senate's Intelligence Committee that Chinese phone manufacturers Huawei and ZTE represent a national security threat. FBI director Christopher Wray warned of the Chinese government finding ways to "maliciously modify or steal information" and "conduct undetected espionage" through these inexpensive consumer products.

In March, Federal Communications Commission chair Ajit Pai proposed a new rule forbidding use of the two companies' equipment in phone and Internet access projects financed through the commission's Universal Service Fund, pointing to similar national security concerns.

On April 16, the US Department of Commerce banned American firms from selling vital components to ZTE for seven years, citing the company's violations of trade sanctions on Iran and North Korea. Or, to put it a different way, citing national security.

Are cheap Chinese phones and Internet routers really a significant threat to national security? Probably not. The more likely motive behind these moves is the inclination of US president Donald Trump, and his administration, toward "economic nationalism" in the form of protectionist trade policies directed with particular venom toward China.

Simply put, the Trump administration would rather see Americans buying phones made by American companies (e.g. Apple and BLU) or at least by companies in countries more closely tied to the US (e.g. Samsung and LG in South Korea, Sony in Japan, and HTC in Taiwan) than phones made by Chinese companies.

In other areas, Trump's protectionism has been more overt, as with his tariffs on steel and aluminum. Why this different, under-handed approach with phones? Because it's hard to put an "America First" spin on phone protectionism.

For one thing, he knows Americans are going to buy foreign phones. Apple's price point is a bit high for most, and BLU has recent consumer confidence problems over Chinese malware (sort of inconvenient to the "national security" story, huh?) Americans on a budget buy cheap foreign Android phones; more well-heeled buyers who prefer Android to iOS choose Samsung.

Secondly, he'd rather not have his base see as him throwing a bone to foreign phone makers (although you can bet he'll bring it up in trade negotiations), while at the same time hitting the bottom lines of American companies like Qualcomm, Intel and Microsoft.

This dog and pony show is less about "America First" than it is about "Get China." It's sure to put American firms in other market sectors on edge. Who will the next victims be and how bad the damage? The administration's anti-China scheming is the trade equivalent of Russian roulette.

In a globalized economy, it's impossible to hurt one country or firm without also hurting several enterprises in your own country -- and your own country's general economy. More domestic companies will be harmed than helped, and the harm will exceed the benefits.

Hiding protectionist schemes behind appeals to "national security" doesn't reduce the damage. It merely shifts blame and conceals motives. Every time Trump indulges his urge to "Get China," American companies and American consumers will feel the pain.
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From LA Progressive



The Vietnam War: An Intimate History by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns

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The companion coffee-table book to the 10-part PBS series by Ken Burns, The Vietnam War, is so closely tied to the series that it's left ambiguous whether Ken Burns himself is the co-author or not. Burns is shown as the second author on the dust jacket but not on the title page itself.

Book and series are clearly aimed at dominating the popular consciousness about the history of the war. Weighing in at nearly 600 glossy oversized pages, the book is vast in scope, starting with the French colonization of Indochina and the Communist-led struggle against the French and taking the reader though each phase of the War. Like the series, the written version is rich in arresting details, especially about the War's major battles.

But when it comes to the question that should still trouble Americans -- how and why the United States went to war in Vietnam in the first place -- the book reflects the failings of the series. Instead of citing the documentary record that by now sheds harsh light on this fundamental issue, author Geoffrey C. Ward trots out the standard myths.

According to Ward, the conflict was "begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence, and cold war miscalculation." To support that claim, Ward relies on Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara's later explanation that the problem was a misperception of the threat from the communist world: "I saw communism as monolithic," McNamara is quoted as saying. "I believed the Soviets and the Chinese were cooperating in trying to extend their hegemony." In addition, the former Defense secretary claims he believed, "The communist movement in Vietnam was closely related to guerrilla insurgencies in Burma, Indonesia, Malaya and the Philippines," and that those were "signs of a unified communist drive for hegemony in Asia."

But McNamara's claims about what he and other senior officials in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations believed are contradicted by the internal U.S. documents now available. Those documents show that, by early 1962 -- a few years before the big troop commitment in Vietnam -- McNamara and others were acutely aware that communism was not at all monolithic. They knew full well that the split between China and the Soviet Union was very serious and could be exploited by the United States in Southeast Asia.

Ward asserts that it was the "Domino Theory" -- that image of one domino falling and causing each one in the row to fall, as a vivid metaphor for the loss of a whole series of Southeast Asian states to communism if Vietnam was lost -- that propelled the United States into the War. But official papers and memoirs reveal that Dwight Eisenhower had ceased to believe that as early as 1953. Eisenhower propounded the falling-domino image in 1954 only for the purpose of convincing the Russians and Chinese that the United States was preparing to intervene militarily to save the French war against the Viet Minh. So the theory originated in a conscious deception rather than an unconscious misperception.

Moreover, the Central Intelligence Agency had explicitly rejected the Domino Theory for years, and had reiterated its conclusion in an intelligence estimate in March 1961. In June 1964, at the request of Lyndon Johnson, the CIA had rejected even more decisively the idea that failing to defeat the communist insurgency in South Vietnam would result in the toppling of the Southeast Asian dominoes. What the CIA said was likely to occur instead was that the United States would face a rise of neutralism in the region, especially in Thailand, where U.S. military airbases threatened China.

McNamara and other senior advisers cited precisely the threat of neutralism in meetings in late 1964 and mid 1965 as the main reason for rejecting the option of a negotiated withdrawal from South Vietnam. The refusal to negotiate reflected the policy of surrounding and threatening China with military allies, which might well have become untenable if Thailand and the Philippines went neutral.

The insistence on continuing the Cold War in East Asia was not the only political-military consideration pushing the United States toward war in Vietnam. Another consideration was the belief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that having combat troops in South Vietnam would strengthen their case for a substantial increase in the military budget, as they informed Lawrence Korb (who later became a Pentagon official during the Reagan administration), who was interviewing them for his doctoral dissertation in the late 1960s.

The fate of the 1954 Geneva Agreement's provision for an election to reunite Vietnam in 1956 certainly deserves some space in Ward's very long history. The author makes it clear that Vietnamese Communist leader, Ho Chi Minh, who had led the defeat of French colonialism in the country, would win any honestly held election in a landslide. But the only explanation in the book for the failure to hold the elections is that the South Vietnamese government under Ngo Dinh Diem had become strong enough by 1955 to refuse to participate. That claim comes in a six-page essay by historian Edward Miller, who refers only to "the proposed elections," as if they had not been legally binding on the government in the South that had taken over legally from the French colonial power.

What actually occurred, however, was that the United States itself determined the fate of those elections. In mid 1955, Diem was completely dependent on the economic and military support of the United States and could not afford to adopt a policy without U.S. approval. And as late as mid June 1955, the Eisenhower administration was still committed to free elections to unify Vietnam, in order to be consistent with its policy of holding free elections in other divided Cold War states, i.e., Germany and Korea. The Diem government had still not ruled out free elections, privately or publicly. Then on June 14, 1955, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles adopted a new policy that quietly approved a completely different policy of opposing the Geneva Elections. Diem quickly fell in line and refused to participate in consultations with North Vietnam on those elections.

Contrary to the conventional version of the story, then, it was Secretary of State Dulles, not Diem, who killed the best chance the United States would have for averting a violent resolution of the division of Vietnam. Had Ho Chi Minh's government taken over a unified Vietnam, there would have been no Vietnam War. Ho's socialist government would have been open to economic relations with the United States, since it would have viewed the United States as a counterweight to domination by China, just as it had seen such relations as a counterweight to the return of the French in 1945 -- and just as it has done more recently since the end of the Cold War.

Ward does not blink at the fact that the U.S. war in Vietnam exhibited little concern for the lives of Vietnamese civilians. What he fails to mention is that the indiscriminate killing of civilians was consistent with the U.S. war strategy rather than a violation of it.

The author devotes considerable space to the U.S. massacre at My Lai, including a color picture of a large group of women, children, and even infants who had been shot at close range. But he repeats the conventional view that the atrocity was the result of individual officers acting on their own, and that the official policy did not permit killing civilians in Vietnam. He cites the investigation and subsequent indictment of 30 officers by Gen. William R. Peers "and the Peers Commission," as prima facie evidence that the atrocities were a violation of command policy.

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From The Hill

As the world remembers former first lady Barbara Bush, who brought grace and dignity to American public life and who was the only woman in American history except for Abigail Adams who was married to one president and a mother to another, we should remember that American politics has not always been a place of warring tribes and political insults.

In the 1992 presidential campaign, George Herbert Walker Bush and Barbara Bush battled against William Jefferson Clinton and Hillary Clinton for the highest stakes in American government and world leadership.

In those days, America was the leader of the free world, and while politics was not always the noblest profession, there were standards in American civic life and values that transcended the great divides of political partisanship.

As Barbara Bush is laid to rest, surrounded by a loving family and grateful nation, many words of affection and respect will be spoken of her. All of those words will be said with sincerity and admiration for who she was, all she did and the American spirit she embodied so gracefully.

Barbara Bush was a loving mother, a devoted wife and a wonderful first lady. While George Herbert Walker Bush was the leader of the free world, steering international politics skillfully as the Berlin Wall tumbled down, Barbara Bush was making the world a better place by championing the great cause of literacy, which benefited so many children and adults too.

This is not the time or place to comment at length on contemporary political affairs, but it is a good moment to reflect on the friendship and respect that Democrats named Clinton and Republicans named Bush came to feel for each other.

In a remarkable television interview, on The David Rubenstein Show on Bloomberg, Rubenstein brought together George W. Bush and Bill Clinton to discuss the friendships that grew between three former presidents representing two political parties and two families.

After leaving office, they collaborated with each other on various matters, including helping those who had been ravaged by national disasters.

George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton shared the distinction of having been leaders of the nation, and they developed working friendships of mutual respect and worthy collaboration despite their differences of policy, politics and philosophy.

When George W. Bush wrote his memoirs, "Decision Points", in 2010, he discussed the bond between Clinton and his father. Clinton offered the book lavish praise, said people of all political viewpoints should read it and often reminisced about his friendship and respect for the 41st president, whose political goodwill and foreign policy expertise he praised and admired.

In a wonderful interview on C-SPAN in 2014, Barbara Bush spoke of this friendship, saying: "I love Bill Clinton. Maybe not his politics, but I love Bill Clinton." The former First Lady continued: "My husband, Bill Clinton, and I have become friends, and Bill visits us every summer. We don't agree politically, but we don't talk politics."

She spoke of the relationship between Bush 41 and Clinton as a kind of father-son relationship and noted how loving Clinton always was to her husband when they travelled together.

From her youth until her last moments on earth, Barbara Bush could be plain spoken and strong willed at times and always radiated a humanity and goodwill that is quintessentially American.

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History too often repeats itself. We are currently in a period when the rise of anti-democratic sentiment is sweeping the globe. Experts on authoritarian leaders and governments underscore that totalitarianism and misogyny go hand in hand. Even in 2018, women forging their own narratives get disparaged.

"Lou Andreas-Salome'," a German language film directed by Cordula Kablitz-Post, begins with a scene of a 1933 Nazi book burning. Freud's work is going up in flames. Psychoanalysis was designated as a "Jewish science," and Salome' was a friend and colleague of Freud.

Reminiscent of two big movies of the late 1960s, "Isadora" and "Women In Love" -- both made when the Women's Movement was gaining traction -- the film is a rich tapestry of history, emotion, and visual imagery. In the latter category, one creative motif employed by Kablitz-Post is the transition of her players, from one locale and time frame to another, via tinted postcards. First introduced as part of Salome''s memorabilia, static individual cards act as a backdrop for actors engaged in an activity.

Salome' is a larger-than-life figure. Top thinkers including Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Re'e, and Rainer Maria Rilke are entwined in her life. Yet, despite her accomplishments in the fields of philosophy, psychology, and published writings as a poet, essayist, and novelist (Her first book was written under a male pseudonym.), Salome' has remained woefully under the radar.

No more.

Revealing Salome''s story in flashbacks, Kablitz-Post uses the talents of three actresses to capture the essence of her subject. Broken down into the ages of 16, 21 to 50, and 72, this approach allows the viewer to experience the evolution and journey of Salome''s life. The audience accompanies her while witnessing how her personal history evolved, and the events in which they were rooted.

The interlocutor for this process is Ernst Pfeiffer, a young man who reminds the older Salome' of Rilke. Their interaction is not without conflict. Yet, Pfeiffer develops into a close friend, and ultimately serves as the literary executor of Salome''s estate.

Salome' is introduced as a little girl, emphatically insisting, "No!" It sets the stage for her saying, "Nein!" to the strictures of the church, a mother who wants her to marry and become a financially comfortable hausfrau, and the men who want to possess and control her.

The character of Salome' delivers remarks throughout the movie which embody her thinking from each respective period. As a young woman, we see her lecturing on the importance of women having "freedom of movement" to develop a "true path in life."

When Salome' meets the leading male minds of her time, most who will fall in love with her, the excitement she feels when engaging in intellectual discourse is palpable.

Born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1861, Salome' is the sixth child of her family. Her siblings are boys. She rebels against the clothes and shoes that prevent her from climbing trees as easily as her brothers. "Why should girls always play indoors?" she laments, after falling out of a tree she was exploring. The tree will become an anchoring point, as well as a symbol of Salome''s quest for self-determination.

The world Salome' has known is shattered when father, and ally, dies. She is 16-years-old. He leaves her a note which advises, "Become who you are."

She takes his words to heart.

In a dramatic scene, Salome' challenges the leader of her church during services, only to storm out when he is unwilling and unable to supply a satisfactory response.

To advance her knowledge, Salome' begins to read about philosophy. She studies with the Dutch-born minister Henrik Gillot, who expands her horizons in the areas of theology, German and French literature, and philosophy. While under his tutelage, her youthful crush is taken to heart by the 40-year old Gillot. When he proposes to Salome', offering to unencumber himself from his wife and children, she rejects him and his physical advances. Shaken, Salome' vows to close herself off from falling in love.

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I'm in Houston listening to TV stations that I normally don't watch -- but this time, I'm surely glad I did.

On April 16, One America News, a conservative Christian TV network and supporter of President Trump, sent reporter Pearson Sharp into Syria to cover the reported chemical attack that killed 42 on the night of April 7. He arrived in Damascus the day before the US, the UK and France bombed three facilities in Syria in response to the alleged chemical attack in Douma.

Pearson Sharp has made two TV reports from Douma with a third to be posted today, April 19. In the report posted on April 16 "OAN Investigation Finds No Evidence Of Chemical Weapon Attack In Syria," and the report posted April 18 "OAN reporter Pearson Sharp Refutes MSM Reports of Chemical Weapons Attack in Douma," Sharp said that he spoke to 30 people in Douma that he picked out at random and no one heard of a chemical attack.

He then went to the hospital where the "chemical attack" video was taken and the doctors in that hospital said that a group of people they did not know rushed into the hospital and poured water on children and adults they had brought with them, put oxygen type masks on the wet people, took videos of the scene and then left with those they had "treated." The doctor said the group had staged the scene and the attack.

UK Independent Daily investigative reporter Robert Fisk writes in "The Search for Truth in the Rubble of Douma -- And One Doctor's Doubts Over the Chemical Attacks" that he tracked down 58-year-old Syrian doctor Dr. Assim Rahaibani who said he was told by fellow doctors who were on duty at the clinic when patients were brought in by "jihadi gunmen of Jaish el-Islam [the Army of Islam] in Douma and that the patients appeared to be "overcome not by gas but by oxygen starvation in the rubbish-filled tunnels and basements in which they lived, on a night of wind and heavy shelling that stirred up a dust storm."

Dr. Rahaibani told Fisk, "I was with my family in the basement of my home three hundred metres from here on the night but all the doctors know what happened. There was a lot of shelling [by government forces] and aircraft were always over Douma at night -- but on this night, there was wind and huge dust clouds began to come into the basements and cellars where people lived. People began to arrive here suffering from hypoxia, oxygen loss. Then someone at the door, a "White Helmet", shouted "Gas!" and a panic began. People started throwing water over each other. Yes, the video was filmed here, it is genuine, but what you see are people suffering from hypoxia -- not gas poisoning."

Fisk writes that, "There are the many people I talked to amid the ruins of the town who said they had "never believed in" gas stories -- which were usually put about, they claimed, by the armed Islamist groups. These particular jihadis survived under a blizzard of shellfire by living in other people's homes and in vast, wide tunnels with underground roads carved through the living rock by prisoners with pick-axes on three levels beneath the town. I walked through three of them yesterday, vast corridors of living rock which still contained Russian -- yes, Russian -- rockets and burned-out cars."

Fisk wrote that "I walked across this town quite freely yesterday without soldier, policeman or minder to haunt my footsteps, just two Syrian friends, a camera and a notebook. I sometimes had to clamber across 20-foot-high ramparts, up and down almost sheer walls of earth." OAN reporter Pearson Sharp also said that he was able to walk wherever he wished without any government minders.



Robert Fisk

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Reporter and author Max Blumenthal has tracked the role of the White Helmets in the Syrian conflict and reports that the White Helmets were created in Turkey by James Le Mesurier, a former British MI5 and have received at least $55 million from the British Foreign Office and $23 million from the U.S. Agency for International Development as well as millions from the Kingdom of Qatar which has backed a variety of extremist groups in Syria including Al Qaeda.

Blumenthal writes that "When Defense Secretary James Mattis cited "social media" in place of scientific evidence of a chemical attack in Douma, he was referring to video shot by members of the White Helmets.

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From Alon Ben-Meir Website



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The re-election of Egypt's President Sisi came as no surprise. Despite irregularities at some polling stations, President Sisi won handedly because he remains the most popular president, and perhaps for good reason. A clear majority of Egyptians feel that unlike any of his predecessors, Sisi is dedicated to improving the socio-economic wellbeing of the people. Although he made tangible progress on the economic front, the impact has not been significant enough, given the magnitude of Egypt's dire economic conditions. Egypt remains saddled with a serious trade deficit, escalating national debt, and weak industrial base.

No president, regardless of his political ideology, commitment, or determination, can overcome these national challenges without massive financial aid, substantial increase in foreign investments, considerable increase in tourism, and sustainable development projects in particular.

The EU and the US have been publicly criticizing Sisi's government for its human rights abuses and lack of transparency based on democratic principles. The West often threatens to suspend financial assistance unless President Sisi acts to correct his government's record on human rights. There are obviously no excuses for committing human rights violations under any circumstances, and the Egyptian government must take every measure required to address such violations while showing political transparency.

The question is how to help Egypt economically while simultaneously charting a new course to address human rights violations, which is extremely sensitive to Sisi's government and to himself.

Top Egyptian officials tell me that the West's public rebuke and criticism only paints their president into a corner and puts him on the defensive. They prefer that concerns over human rights violations be addressed behind the scenes in order to not embarrass and weaken Sisi's position in the eyes of the public.

The problem is that the scope of Egypt's economic disparity, the lack of democratic traditions, and entrenched bureaucracy make it impossible to institute social, economic, and political reforms, especially when the population is growing exponentially and financial resources are limited.

The following statistics clearly highlight the uphill battle Egypt is facing and point to the priorities the government should pursue to address its socio-economic malaise, while at the same time mitigate the problems related to human rights violations.

Egypt's current total foreign debt is over $80 billion. It receives on the average $9 billion annually in financial aid from foreign countries (that it does not need to repay). In addition, Egypt generates a little over $4 billion in annual revenue from the Suez Canal, and a similar amount from tourism. The International Momentary Fund (IMF) has recently approved a $12 billion loan to be divided over a three-year period. Egypt's annual GNP is approximately $345 billion. In 2017, Egypt's trade deficit was approximately $36 billion, importing roughly $58 billion and exporting just over $22 billion.

Of Egypt's total population of almost 100 million people, the poverty rate exceeds 27 percent. Unemployment hovers around 13 percent (for youth under 30, it is 31 percent). There are 2.1 million children under age 5 who suffer from malnutrition.

Adding to the socioeconomic ailments is the rise of violent extremism concentrated in the northern Sinai, which is consuming tens of millions of dollars and poses a burden the authorities are struggling to address.

Western-style democracy, however, will do little to alleviate the dire economic conditions in Egypt, and will not provide a panacea to prevent human rights violations. Following the ouster of President Mubarak, fair and free elections were held. The Muslim Brotherhood won the elections and its leader Morsi became the president -- but this exercise in democracy had little effect on the economic and social well-being of the country.

Elections in and of themselves, however free and fair, do not provide food, education, healthcare, or other social needs. Moreover, in a country where there is no tradition of a political system that encourages the creation of rival political parties with no restrictions, irrespective of their political ideology, it is impossible to establish a full-fledged democratic government la western political systems.

Besides, a solid democratic form of government requires democratic institutions, including think tanks that provide comprehensive research on foreign and domestic policies, non-profit organizations that focus on social issues, free but responsible press, an unbiased judiciary, and above all economic development projects to provide job opportunities and foster social stability and better prospects for the future.

Whereas human rights abuses must not be tolerated, addressing this problem in Egypt cannot be accomplished by the West's mere public criticism of the Sisi government. As stated earlier, such criticism, however warranted, evokes only denial and puts government officials on the defensive, rather than choosing to tackle the problem more effectively by means consistent with Egyptian social psychology and culture.

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From Dispatches From The Edge



Meeting of the presidents of Russia, Turkey and Iran

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An unusual triple alliance is emerging from the Syrian war, one that could alter the balance of power in the Middle East, unhinge the NATO alliance, and complicate the Trump administration's designs on Iran. It might also lead to yet another double cross of one of the region's largest ethnic groups, the Kurds.

However, the "troika alliance" -- Turkey, Russia and Iran -- consists of three countries that don't much like one another, have different goals, and whose policies are driven by a combination of geo-global goals and internal politics. In short, "fragile and complicated" doesn't even begin to describe it.

How the triad might be affected by the joint U.S., French and British attack on Syria is unclear, but in the long run the alliance will likely survive the uptick of hostilities.

But common ground was what came out of the April 4 meeting between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Meeting in Ankara, the parties pledged to support the "territorial integrity" of Syria, find a diplomatic end to the war, and to begin a reconstruction of a Syria devastated by seven years of war. While Russia and Turkey explicitly backed the UN-sponsored talks in Geneva, Iran was quiet on that issue, preferring a regional solution without "foreign plans."

"Common ground," however, doesn't mean the members of the "troika" are on the same page.

Turkey's interests are both internal and external. The Turkish Army is currently conducting two military operations in northern Syria, Olive Branch and Euphrates Shield, aimed at driving the mainly Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) out of land that borders Turkey. But those operations are also deeply entwined with Turkish politics.

Erdogan's internal support has been eroded by a number of factors: exhaustion with the ongoing state of emergency imposed following the 2016 attempted coup, a shaky economy, and a precipitous fall in the value of the Turkish pound. Rather than waiting for 2019, Erdogan called for snap elections this past week and beating up on the Kurds is always popular with right-wing Turkish nationalists. Erdogan needs all the votes he can get to implement his newly minted executive presidency that will give him virtually one-man rule.

To be part of the alliance, however, Erdogan has had to modify his goal of getting rid of Syrian President Bashar Assad and to agree -- at this point, anyhow -- to eventually withdraw from areas in northern Syria seized by the Turkish Army. Russia and Iran have called for turning over the regions conquered by the Turks to the Syrian Army.

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OpEdNews Op Eds 4/19/2018 at 10:06 PM EDT H4'ed 4/19/18

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From Strategic Culture

Reading first reports that American CIA chief Mike Pompeo held secret talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un on April 1, one might be forgiven for thinking it an April Fool prank.

But no, the meeting did take, confirmed by none other than US President Donald Trump. In a tweet this week, Trump wrote:

"Mike Pompeo met with Kim Jong Un in North Korea last week. Meeting went very smoothly and a good relationship was formed. Details of Summit are being worked out now. Denuclearization will be a great thing for World, but also for North Korea!" -- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 18, 2018

Pompeo, who is awaiting confirmation of his new post as Secretary of State before the Senate later this month, is known for his hawkish foreign policy views. As CIA chief, he notoriously said that he wanted to make the feared quasi-paramilitary organization even more "vicious."

Now Pompeo is serving as a peace tribune to North Korea, which until recently he has taken a confrontational stance towards.

When he was nominated last month to take over from outgoing Rex Tillerson at the State Department, some observers expected the surprise rapprochement between the Trump White House and the North Korean leader would be subsequently nixed. Pompeo, and the advent of John Bolton as Trump's National Security Adviser, personify the neocon faction in Washington.

The emerging fact that Pompeo met in person with Kim Jong-Un in Pyongyang and that the pair apparently formed a "good relationship" seems a rather dizzying revelation.

It was the highest level meeting between a senior American official and a North Korean leader since 2000 when then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, from the Bill Clinton administration, met with Kim Jong-Il -- the father of the state's current leader.

Not only that, but Pompeo and Kim Jong-Un reportedly discussed making preparations for a forthcoming face-to-face summit between Kim and Trump. That encounter could take place in June, although a venue has not yet been finalized. It would be an unprecedented breakthrough and the first time a sitting American president has ever met a North Korean leader.

Trump took his inner circle aback last month when he impulsively accepted an invitation from North Korea's Kim to hold a one-on-one summit. Trump jumped at the chance even before his national security team had been consulted. It appears that the president is very much still on board for the tete-a-tete.

This is a startling turnaround in bilateral communications. During Trump's first year in office, he frequently used incendiary rhetoric towards North Korea, disparaging Kim as "little rocket man," and threatening to use overwhelming military force against the northeast Asian nation over its clandestine nuclear-weapons program.

For his part, Kim was none too shy about firing back the rhetoric at Trump, mocking the American leader as "an old dotard" and threatening to strike the US mainland with nuclear ballistic missiles. It is not confirmed if North Korea has reached the capability to hit North America with nuclear warheads. But it seems that Kim's newfound willingness to engage in diplomacy with the US may be prompted by a sense of strength from having achieved that nuclear threshold.

Others would say that the ratcheting of US-led economic sanctions under Trump has forced Pyongyang to the negotiating table.

Whatever the exact motive force, the upshot is that the American and North Korean leaders are willing to talk. That outcome of jaw-jaw is better than war-war, as Winston Churchill once said.

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Many Trump supporters voted for Donald because they believed he was a successful businessman -- rather than a reality TV star. These Trump adherents thought he would bring business acumen to the White House. Trump backers believed Donald had a strategic vision to "make America great again." Turns out they were mistaken.

There are several attributes of a successful businessman. One of these is Vision: the ability to see the big picture and to propose a plan to focus the business and achieve its long-term goals. A successful President also needs vision.

Trump holds up an image, "make America great again," but doesn't have a coherent vision of what it will take to accomplish this (noble) objective. Trump doesn't have a reasoned domestic or a foreign policy. There is no strategy; instead Trump presents a random set of assertions -- "China is taking all our jobs!" -- or tactics -- "build the wall!"

The absence of strategy has dire consequences for America's domestic and foreign policy. So far, Trump has presented four domestic policy initiatives. He promised to "repeal and replace Obamacare," but in reality, he supported repealing Obamacare and designing a replacement later.

Trump promised to create good-paying jobs by a combination of tax cuts and trade policy. He passed the tax cuts but there's no evidence they have generated better paying jobs. So far his tough talk on trade has not produced results.

Trump also promised to create good-paying jobs by a far-reaching $1.5 Trillion plan to rebuild America's infrastructure. It hasn't gotten off the ground. Fifteen months of the Trump presidency have established that Trump doesn't have a job-creation or economic strategy beyond helping the rich get richer.

Finally, Trump promised to "protect" America -- and coincidentally create jobs -- by building a multi-billion dollar wall along the southern border. Once again, nothing has come of this.

So far, Trump's domestic policy failures haven't hurt the country. Trump inherited a strong economy and it seems to be growing in spite of him. Foreign policy is a different matter; Trump's lack of vision endangers us.

Trump doesn't have a big picture vision of America operating in a world where there are several strong nations and our relationship to them changes depending upon context. Consider China. We're in a "trade war" with China. Nonetheless we need their help dealing with North Korea. We have a multifaceted relationship with China.

Because he doesn't have a realistic vision of world politics, when forced to make a foreign-policy decision, Trump relies upon his instincts. And his instincts are isolationist. His slogan, "America first," means, "America alone."

We can see this in his handling of global climate change and the Paris climate agreement. Trump wants the US to withdraw from this treaty in November 2020, "unless we can re-enter on terms the are more favorable for our country." (Trump has assigned a delegation to renegotiate terms but so far there has been no progress.) If the US withdraws, we will be alone in opposition to this deal.

Trump's position on most foreign-policy issues goes through these two stage: first he wants to withdraw and then he backpedals to, "We'll withdraw unless we can renegotiate on more favorable terms." That's his position on NAFTA. And his position on Syria.

To say the least, Syria represents a complicated and dangerous situation. The United States has military personnel in Syria as part of a coalition to eradicate ISIS. On March 29th, Trump announced that the US would be withdrawing from Syria "very soon." Next came Assad's use of chemical weapons in Douma; then the US and it British and French allies responded by bombing Syria. While emotionally gratifying, the bombing wasn't a strategy; as a result, Americans still do not understand what the US plans to do in Syria and the Middle East, in general.

Russia stands in contrast to most foreign countries because Trump doesn't want to cut off relations with the former Soviet Union; instead he wants the two nations to get closer. He muses that "getting along with Russia is a good thing" and "I think I could have a very good relationship with President Putin." Most foreign-policy experts believe that Russia is the number one threat to the United States and predict that the former Soviet Union will attempt to meddle in the US mid-term elections. Nonetheless, Trump remains sanguine. But he doesn't have a US-Russia strategy beyond his "cutting a deal" with Vladimir Putin. Trump's ego has shoved aside his isolationism.

That's what's happening in North Korea. Trump is getting ready for personal negotiations with Kim Jong-Un the North Korean leader whom he once derided as "little rocket man." It's not clear what Trump's strategy is but it is clear that he sees this as an opportunity to cut a historic deal.

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Bioliquid Heat and Power Generation 2018 Global Industry Key Players - Olleco , BTG , Kraton , REG , Neste Market Analysis And Forecast To 2025

Global Bioliquid Heat and Power Generation Market

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Global Bioliquid Heat and Power Generation MarketThis report studies the global Bioliquid Heat and Power Generation market status and forecast, categorizes the global Bioliquid Heat and Power Generation 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 Bioliquid Heat and Power Generation 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.Request a Sample Report @The major manufacturers covered in this reportOllecoBTGKratonREGNesteREG Power ManagementMBP GroupBioxBungeEnsyn FuelsBetarenewablesMunzer BioindustrieArgent EnergyEncontechGeographically, 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 intoBioethanolBiodieselOn 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, includingHeat ProductionElectricity GenerationThe study objectives of this report are:To analyze and study the global Bioliquid Heat and Power Generation capacity, production, value, consumption, status (2013-2017) and forecast (2018-2025);Focuses on the key Bioliquid Heat and Power Generation 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 Bioliquid Heat and Power Generation 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 StakeholdersBioliquid Heat and Power Generation ManufacturersBioliquid Heat and Power Generation Distributors/Traders/WholesalersBioliquid Heat and Power Generation 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 Bioliquid Heat and Power Generation market, by end-use.Detailed analysis and profiles of additional market players.Table of Contents-Key Points CoveredGlobal Bioliquid Heat and Power Generation Market Research Report 20181 Bioliquid Heat and Power Generation Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Bioliquid Heat and Power Generation1.2 Bioliquid Heat and Power Generation Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global Bioliquid Heat and Power Generation Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category)(2013-2025)1.2.2 Global Bioliquid Heat and Power Generation Production Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.2.3 Bioethanol1.2.4 Biodiesel1.3 Global Bioliquid Heat and Power Generation Segment by Application1.3.1 Bioliquid Heat and Power Generation Consumption (Sales) Comparison by Application (2013-2025)1.3.2 Heat Production1.3.3 Electricity Generation1.4 Global Bioliquid Heat and Power Generation Market by Region (2013-2025)1.4.1 Global Bioliquid Heat and Power Generation 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 Bioliquid Heat and Power Generation (2013-2025)1.5.1 Global Bioliquid Heat and Power Generation Revenue Status and Outlook (2013-2025)1.5.2 Global Bioliquid Heat and Power Generation Capacity, Production Status and Outlook (2013-2025)2 Global Bioliquid Heat and Power Generation Market Competition by Manufacturers2.1 Global Bioliquid Heat and Power Generation Capacity, Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.1 Global Bioliquid Heat and Power Generation Capacity and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.2 Global Bioliquid Heat and Power Generation Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.2 Global Bioliquid Heat and Power Generation Revenue and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.3 Global Bioliquid Heat and Power Generation Average Price by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.4 Manufacturers Bioliquid Heat and Power Generation Manufacturing Base Distribution, Sales Area and Product Type2.5 Bioliquid Heat and Power Generation Market Competitive Situation and Trends2.5.1 Bioliquid Heat and Power Generation Market Concentration Rate2.5.2 Bioliquid Heat and Power Generation Market Share of Top 3 and Top 5 Manufacturers2.5.3 Mergers & Acquisitions, ExpansionContinued.Complete Report Details @Wise Guy Reports Is Part Of The Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. And Offers Premium Progressive Statistical Surveying, Market Research Reports, Analysis & Forecast Data For Industries And Governments Around The Globe. Wise Guy Reports Features An Exhaustive List Of Market Research Reports From Hundreds Of Publishers Worldwide. We Boast A Database Spanning Virtually Every Market Category And An Even More Comprehensive Collection Of Market Research Reports Under These Categories And Sub-Categories.Wise Guy Research Consultants Pvt LtdOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, HadapsarPune - 411028Maharashtra, India
Concrete and Cement 2018 Global Industry Key Players - Cemex , Holcim , HeidelbergCement , Lafarge , CRH Market Analysis And Forecast To 2025

Global Concrete and Cement Market

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Global Concrete and Cement MarketThis report studies the global Concrete and Cement market status and forecast, categorizes the global Concrete and Cement 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 Concrete and Cement 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.Request a Sample Report @The major manufacturers covered in this reportCemexHolcimHeidelbergCementLafargeCRHBuzzi UnicemItalcementiCimporVotorantimUS ConcreteShanghai Jiangong Engineering MaterialChina Resources Cement Holdings LimitedSoutheast Cement CopporationWest China Cement LimitedCahina Energy Enigeering GroupGeographically, 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 Regions (India, Southeast Asia, Central & South America and Middle East & Africa)The 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 intoLow Heat CementSulphates resisting cementBlast Furnace Slag CementHigh Alumina CementWhite CementColoured cementPozzolanic CementOn 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, includingResidential BuildingsIndustrial BuildingsCommercial BuildingsThe study objectives of this report are:To analyze and study the global Concrete and Cement capacity, production, value, consumption, status (2013-2017) and forecast (2018-2025);Focuses on the key Concrete and Cement 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 Concrete and Cement 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 StakeholdersConcrete and Cement ManufacturersConcrete and Cement Distributors/Traders/WholesalersConcrete and Cement 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 Concrete and Cement market, by end-use.Detailed analysis and profiles of additional market players.Table of Contents-Key Points CoveredGlobal Concrete and Cement Market Research Report 20181 Concrete and Cement Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Concrete and Cement1.2 Concrete and Cement Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global Concrete and Cement Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category)(2013-2025)1.2.2 Global Concrete and Cement Production Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.2.3 Low Heat Cement1.2.4 Sulphates resisting cement1.2.5 Blast Furnace Slag Cement1.2.6 High Alumina Cement1.2.7 White Cement1.2.8 Coloured cement1.2.9 Pozzolanic Cement1.3 Global Concrete and Cement Segment by Application1.3.1 Concrete and Cement Consumption (Sales) Comparison by Application (2013-2025)1.3.2 Residential Buildings1.3.3 Industrial Buildings1.3.4 Commercial Buildings1.4 Global Concrete and Cement Market by Region (2013-2025)1.4.1 Global Concrete and Cement 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 Concrete and Cement (2013-2025)1.5.1 Global Concrete and Cement Revenue Status and Outlook (2013-2025)1.5.2 Global Concrete and Cement Capacity, Production Status and Outlook (2013-2025)2 Global Concrete and Cement Market Competition by Manufacturers2.1 Global Concrete and Cement Capacity, Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.1 Global Concrete and Cement Capacity and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.2 Global Concrete and Cement Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.2 Global Concrete and Cement Revenue and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.3 Global Concrete and Cement Average Price by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.4 Manufacturers Concrete and Cement Manufacturing Base Distribution, Sales Area and Product Type2.5 Concrete and Cement Market Competitive Situation and Trends2.5.1 Concrete and Cement Market Concentration Rate2.5.2 Concrete and Cement Market Share of Top 3 and Top 5 Manufacturers2.5.3 Mergers & Acquisitions, ExpansionContinuedComplete Report Details @Wise Guy Reports Is Part Of The Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. And Offers Premium Progressive Statistical Surveying, Market Research Reports, Analysis & Forecast Data For Industries And Governments Around The Globe. Wise Guy Reports Features An Exhaustive List Of Market Research Reports From Hundreds Of Publishers Worldwide. We Boast A Database Spanning Virtually Every Market Category And An Even More Comprehensive Collection Of Market Research Reports Under These Categories And Sub-Categories.Wise Guy Research Consultants Pvt LtdOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, HadapsarPune - 411028Maharashtra, India
Pain Management Therapeutics Market Secure Growth Rate over 2025

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Global Pain Management Therapeutics Market: SnapshotPain is invariably around whenever a body is suffering from diseases, which can be of multiple types including fibromyalgia, stomach ulcer, osteoarthritis, chronic arthritis, diabetic neuropathy, and cancer. Even during and after the therapy, pain constitutes a major part of the procedure that the subject has to bear but with technological advancements, it has become possible to considerably reduce the suffering and manage the pain via a variety of physiological mechanism, targeting the nociceptors for example. As the investments on robust infrastructure escalates across various emerging and developed countries, and awareness regarding the availability of alternatives increase, the demand in the global pain management therapeutics market is projected to increment at a healthy CAGR during the forecast period of 2017 to 2025.Currently, the developed regions of North America and Europe serve the maximum demand in the pain management therapeutics market, although highly populated emerging economies in Asia Pacific such as India and China are expected to turn into a profitable market towards the end of the forecast period.Request Sample Copy of the Report @In the current scenario, the global pain management therapeutics market is highly competitive, with the leading players constantly striving to come up with new products that are more efficient and hence gives them an edge over their competitors. In the current scenario, Purdue Pharma LP and Pfizer lead the market with nearly half the global shares, although the likes of Depomed Inc. and AstraZeneca Plc gaining ground. There is a strong presence of conventional medicines for pain management, which will keep the competitive landscape saturated throughout the forecast period. In the near future, a number of medium and small generic drugs manufacturers are expected to have a foray into pain management therapeutics market too, which will further intensity the tussle for the pole position.Pain Management Therapeutics Market: OverviewPain management therapeutics comprise various methods to ease varied degrees of pain among patients and improve their quality of life. Pharmaceutical therapeutics are usually the first line of treatment for pain management and if this does not work, patients opt for other methods such as pain managing devices, physiotherapy, and chiropractic therapy.Request TOC of the Report @Pain management therapeutics can be categorized into antidepressants, anticonvulsants, opioids, anesthetics, antimigraine agents, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDS), and non-narcotic analgesics. Various drugs are used for the management of different kinds of pain, such as fibromyalgia, neuropathic pain, arthritic pain, chronic back pain, post-operative pain, migraine, and cancer-related pain. A common trend that has been observed among patients is the consumption of over-the-counter (OTC) drugs rather than prescription drugs.Pain Management Therapeutics Market: TrendsThe growing prevalence of chronic diseases such as diabetes and cancer has been single-handedly driving the demand for pain management therapeutics and the number of people suffering from this kind of pain has been surging at a substantial rate. In addition to this, a massive geriatric population susceptible to arthritis, nerve damage, neuropathy, and joint pain is also boosting the market for pain management therapeutics. Supplementing market growth are favorable regulatory scenarios in many developed countries around the world.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @However, as more and more patients opt for generic pain management drugs, the branded segment has been suffering a major setback. Moreover, the patent expiries of a number of blockbuster drugs will have a significant impact on the overall market for pain management therapeutics.Pain Management Therapeutics Market: Market PotentialDespite the fact that leading brands are nearing a point of saturation, the pain management therapeutics market possesses strong potential for growth, particularly for smaller players. For instance, looking to expand its footprint in the global market as well as strengthen its U.S. pharmaceutical unit, Ireland-based Endo International plc acquired Auxilium Pharmaceuticals in 2015. The company also launched the BELBUCA Bucccal Film in 2016, which is used for the management of chronic pain.Purdue Pharma, headquartered in Connecticut, U.S., ventured into a patent agreement with Acura Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and Egalet Corporation in 2016 for the development and sales of opioid pain management medicines.Pain Management Therapeutics Market: Regional OutlookGeographically, the global market for pain management therapeutics comprises North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East and Africa. North America and Europe hold the largest share in the overall market and are slated to continue their dominance throughout the forecast period. The rising consumption of advanced pain management drugs and the availability of well-established and sophisticated healthcare infrastructure are the key factors driving the North America and Europe pain management therapeutics market. Asia Pacific is an immensely lucrative region and a number of players are looking to expand their operations in the many emerging countries in the region. This can be attributed to strong economic growth in nations such as China, India, Malaysia, and Japan, rising investments in the healthcare industry in these countries, and the increasing affordability of the population.Pain Management Therapeutics Market: Competitive AnalysisThere are a host of generic as well as branded drug manufacturers in the global pain management therapeutics market. These include GlaxoSmithKline plc, Novartis AG, Johnson & Johnson, Abbott Laboratories, AstraZeneca, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Limited, Merck & Co., Inc., Purdue Pharma L.P., Endo Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, Depomed, Inc., and Pfizer, Inc. Although companies producing branded pain management therapeutics have a strong foothold in the market, the market is actually dominated by generic drug manufacturers, giving small- and medium-scale players immense scope for growth.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
Collagen Market Highly Demanded over a Period of 2025

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Global Collagen Market: SnapshotThe demand in the global collagen market is projected to increment at a healthy CAGR during the forecast period of 2017 to 2025, gaining traction from a number of factors such as increasing demand for collagen-based products for medical applications including tissue engineering, wound healing, and bone reconstruction, growing consumption from food and beverages and cosmetic products, rising percentage of geriatric population, increasing disposable income of urban populations, and consumer inclination towards healthy lifestyle and protein consumption. On the other hand, stringent regulations pertaining to food additives, concerns regarding the depletion of animal source, and lack of consumer awareness are some of the challenges obstructing the prosperity of the global collagen market. Nevertheless, the vendors operating in this market are expected to gain new opportunities in emerging economies.In the current scenario, the competition in the global collagen market is intense, which is a reflection of a vast number of integrated players who have a strong platform of raw material suppliers. While CONNOILS, Nitta-Gelatin, PanBiotech GmbH, Advanced BioMatrix, and JBS-Brasil are some of the prominent companies operating in the global collagen market, their primary focus is on resilient research and development of new products as well as expansion of their production capacity in order to stay ahead of the curve.Request Sample Copy of the Report @Geographically, Asia Pacific is quickly emerging as most lucrative regional market for collagen as countries such as India, China, and Japan have a population base that is drifting towards skin care and personal care products. A number of companies have already shifted their attention towards these heavily populated countries, which is helping them solidify their position before the market reaches is peak point. That being said, North America and Europe are expected to remain highly profitable region throughout the forecast period, owing to high level of awareness among the consumers and rapid adoption of new technology.Global Collagen Market: OverviewCollagen accounts for nearly a third of protein composition in the human body, and plays essential role of providing skin structure and helping blood clot. Being the prominent building block of muscles, skin, bones, ligaments, and tendons, in the recent past, the use of collagen as a nutritional supplement and ingredient in body lotions and shampoos has escalated. Out of 16 types of collagen that are present in the human body, four types are most important, termed as type I, type II, type III, and type VI. 90% of the bodys collagen is of type I, made up of densely packed fibers, which helps in structuring the bones, skin, connective tissue and teeth, and fibrous cartilage. Type II is more loosely packed fibers that are primarily found in elastic cartilage that cushions joints. Type III aids the structure of organs, muscles, and arteries while type VI helps in filtration. With aging, the body produces low-quality and significantly less collagen and hence, supplements are recommended. Consequently, with rising geriatric population across the world, the demand in the global collagen market is expected to rise at a healthy CAGR during the forecast period of 2017 to 2025.Request TOC of the Report @Global Collagen Market: Key TrendsBesides escalating number of people beyond the age of 60 years who need collagen supplements, the incremented use of collagen in drug delivery system and medical devices is the primary driver of the market for the same. Moreover, effectiveness in wound healing with collagen and the rising adoptability for minimally invasive technologies are some of the other important factors that will boost the demand in the global collagen market in the coming years. Rising population of obese people across the world is further boosting the demand for collagen, as obesity bodies produce decreased levels of collagen. By source, the collagen market can be segmented into marine, bovine, porcine, chicken, and others. Currently, bovine and porcine are the leading sources for collagen used in various applications.Global Collagen Market: Market PotentialThe flourishing healthcare industry is opening new avenues for the players in the global collagen market. Losing collagen in skin due to aging and daily exposure to sun leads to wrinkles as the elasticity fades. Several beauty products now utilize collagen to improve health of skin and hair, heal leaky gut, strengthen nails and teeth, reduce joint pains and degeneration, improve liver health, and protect against cardiovascular disorders.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @Global Collagen Market: Regional OutlookOwing to high awareness pertaining to the benefits of collagen and robust healthcare infrastructure, North America and Europe currently are the most lucrative regional markets for collagen. The region is also gaining from the presence of high-end manufacturing organizations. Among other regions, Asia Pacific is projected to increment the demand rapidly over the course of the forecast period. The region houses nearly half of the worlds population and the number of geriatrics is proportionally increasing. Continuously expanding application of collagen is aiding the market in this region, as is favorable government policies and improving healthcare infrastructure.Global Collagen Market: Competitive AnalysisAmple of opportunities are available for new players in the global collagen market, while the existing key players also have enough fodder with expanding application of collagen. To be precise, with the rise in chronic diseases such as diabetes, players can concentrate on drug delivery or tissue engineering segments to establish stronghold.The market overall is fragmented in nature with several regional players, Collagen Matrix, Inc. seems to have taken a lead over the competitors, concentrating on all of the three major application segments. Some of the other prominent companies in the global collagen market are Medtronic plc, Botiss biomaterials GmbH, Nippi, Inc., and Baotou Dongbao Bio-Tech Co. Ltd., although most of them are active in only a few market segments.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
Fuel Cells Market Healthy Pace during 2017 - 2025

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Global Fuel Cells Market: SnapshotFuel cell technology has risen in prominence as a combustion-free conversion device for producing electricity, apart from producing heat and water. They can be made to power systems in variety of stationary application, particularly in backup power systems, and are more efficient than most conventional combustion engines. Hydrogen is one of the most versatile fuels used and its demand has gained traction in modern fuel cell vehicles in various developing and developed regions. Other fuels used include natural gas, ethanol, methanol, and biogas. Fuel cells are scalable and can power backup systems almost indefinitely, as long as the supply of the fuel is maintained. The pressing demand for cleaner fuel sources and technologies with low-carbon footprint, coupled with the burgeoning demand for electricity in numerous developing and developed economies, is a notable factor stoking the demand for fuel cells. The growing demand for non-conventional sources of energy, attributed to fast depleting sources of fossil fuels world over, is a crucial factor bolstering the demand for fuel cells. In addition, stringent implementation of regulatory norms for reducing carbon emissions in emerging economies is a key development boosting the market. The versatility of applications of fuel cells and their scalability are significant factors expected to bolster their uptake. In addition, fuel cells can easily be combined with other standard energy technologies, notably batteries, solar panels, wind turbines, and super-capacitors. This is a crucial factor fortifying the demand. In recent times, substantial research and development activities related to fuel cell vehicles and their growing adoption are key factors expected to accentuate the market growth. Furthermore, the growing investment by governments in several developing and developed countries is a prominent factor expected to provide a robust impetus to the growth of the market.Request Sample Copy of the Report @Global Fuel Cells Market: OverviewFuels cell is a fairly recent technology that is used as a source of heat and electricity in various spaces such as commercial, industrial, and residential sectors. They generate power without movement of any parts or combustion and thus are known to be noise-free technologies. The most popularly used form of fuel cell is PEMFC due to their ability to fit in a wide range of applications.Global Fuel Cells Market: Drivers and TrendsThe primary usage of fuel cells is to provide backup for a certain period of time or so long as the fuel is supplied to them. Thus, fuel cells are extensively being used in stationary applications such as backup power systems and CHP, portable applications such as consumer electronics, and the transportation sector. Though the usage of fuel cells for transportation sector is limited, the ongoing research and development will offer efficient fuel cell systems in vehicles, thereby boost the segments progress.Request TOC of the Report @The soaring rise of the global fuel cells market is also attributable to the dire need of cleaner fuel sources, depleting conventional sources of energy, and rising pollution. Analysts expect that the market will also be driven by the growing demand for electricity and strict regulatory norms to reduce carbon emissions. The uncontrollable rise in population and the excessive dependency of the mankind on fossil fuels has fueled the demand for fuel cells in recent years. The report states that rising temperatures and greenhouse emissions will also be responsible for the uptake of fuels cells in the near future.Global Fuel Cells Market: Market PotentialThe changing outlooks of governments are also expected to have a positive impact on the growth of the global fuel cells market. For instance, the Government of Canada has committed to support technologies that will benefit the environment and offer jobs that will promote cleaner and greener output. In tandem with this sentiment, the government announced its plans to invest US$10 million non-repayable contribution to the Automotive Fuel Cell Cooperation (AFCC). This organization is a joint venture run by German-based Daimler AG and Ford Company.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @Global Fuel Cells Market: Regional OutlookGeographically, the global fuel cells market is segmented into Asia Pacific, Europe, North America, and Rest of the World. Asia Pacific is projected to lead the global market in the coming years. Analysts anticipate that Japan will dominate the region as the demand for power and combined heat systems rises in the country. The rise of hydrogen power plants in several emerging countries of Asia Pacific are also anticipated to augment the demand for fuel cells in the coming years.The rapid technological advancements and the supportive regulatory scenario in North America is expected favor the regions progress in the global fuel cells market in the near future. As of 2015, the region held a 50% share in the installed capacity and is projected to show its dominance during the forecast period as well.Key Players Mentioned in this Report are:Some of the leading players operating in the global fuel cells market are AFC Energy PLC, Doosan Fuel Cell America, Inc., Ballard Power Systems Inc., FuelCell Energy, Inc., Nedstack Fuel Cell Technology B.V., Hydrogenics Corporation, Panasonic Corporation, Plug Power, Inc., Toshiba Corporation, and SFC Energy AG.About TMR ResearchTMR Research is a premier provider of customized market research and consulting services to business entities keen on succeeding in todays supercharged economic climate. Armed with an experienced, dedicated, and dynamic team of analysts, we are redefining the way our clients conduct business by providing them with authoritative and trusted research studies in tune with the latest methodologies and market trends.Our savvy custom-built reports span a gamut of industries such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals and metals, food and beverages, and technology and media, among others. With actionable insights uncovered through in-depth research of the market, we try to bring about game-changing success for our clients.Contact:TMR Research,3739 Balboa St # 1097,San Francisco, CA 94121United StatesTel: +1-415-520-1050Email: sales@tmrresearch.com
Coffee Premixes Market by Industry (Nestle (Nescafe), Coca Cola Company, Starbucks Corporation), Product (Brewing, Flavors, Forms) and Global Forecasts to 2022

Coffee Premixes

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Coffee Premixes Market, 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.Global Coffee Premixes market competition by top manufacturers, with production, price, revenue (value) and market share for each manufacturer; the top players including Nestle (Nescafe) Coca Cola Company Starbucks Corporation Godrej & Boyce Manufacturing Company Limited Paulig Juhla Mokka Vending Updates India Pvt. Ltd ...Request a Sample on Coffee Premixes market atOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split into Brewing Flavors FormsOn 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 Coffee Premixes for each application, including Coffee Shop Food and Beverage OtherGeographically, this report is segmented into several key Regions, with production, consumption, revenue (million USD) , market share and growth rate of Coffee Premixes in these regions, from 2012 to 2022 (forecast) , covering North America Europe China Japan Southeast Asia IndiaOrder a copy of Global Coffee Premixes Market atKey Point from Table of Contents:1 Coffee Premixes Market Overview2 Global Coffee Premixes Market Competition by Manufacturers3 Global Coffee Premixes Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2012-2017)4 Global Coffee Premixes Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Region (2012-2017)5 Global Coffee Premixes Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type6 Global Coffee Premixes Market Analysis by Application7 Global Coffee Premixes Manufacturers Profiles/Analysis8 Coffee Premixes Manufacturing Cost Analysis9 Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream Buyers10 Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/Traders11 Market Effect Factors Analysis12 Global Coffee Premixes Market Forecast (2017-2022)13 Research Findings and ConclusionComplete report on Coffee Premixes Market is now available atReportsWeb.com is a one stop shop of market research reports and solutions to various companies across the globe. We help our clients in their decision support system by helping them choose most relevant and cost effective research reports and solutions from various publishers. We provide best in class customer service and our customer support team is always available to help you on your research queries.505, 6th floor, Amanora Township,Amanora Chambers, East Block,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028
Artificial Intelligence in Manufacturing: Market 2018 Segmented by Manufacturers (Siemens, Intel, NVIDIA, Alphabet, IBM, Microsoft, General Electric, DataRPM, Sight Machine, AIBrain) and Forecasts to 2025

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Artificial Intelligence in Manufacturing Market Analysis to 2025 is a specialized and in-depth study of the Artificial Intelligence in Manufacturing industry with a focus on the global market trend. The report aims to provide an overview of global Artificial Intelligence in Manufacturing market with detailed market segmentation by product/application and geography. The global Artificial Intelligence in Manufacturing market is expected to witness high growth during the forecast period. The report provides key statistics on the market status of the Artificial Intelligence in Manufacturing players and offers key trends and opportunities in the market.Artificial Intelligence in Manufacturing Market Players: Siemens Intel Corporation NVIDIA Corporation Alphabet IBM Corporation Microsoft Corporation General Electric Company DataRPM, Sight Machine General Vision AIBrain Rockwell, Automation Cisco Systems Mitsubishi Electric Corporation Oracle Corporation SAP SE Preferred Networks Vicarious Skymind Citrine Informatics CloudMinds Technologies Ubtech RoboticsRequest a Sample Report atOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, and market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split into Deep Learning Computer Vision Context Awareness Natural Language ProcessingOn 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, including Semiconductor and Electronics Energy and Power Pharmaceuticals Automobile Heavy Metals and Machine Manufacturing Food and Beverages Others (Textiles & Aerospace)Major regions are as follows: North America Europe China Japan Southeast Asia IndiaThe report provides a detailed overview of the industry including both qualitative and quantitative information. It provides overview and forecast of the global Artificial Intelligence in Manufacturing market based on product and application. It also provides market size and forecast till 2025 for overall Artificial Intelligence in Manufacturing 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 Artificial Intelligence in Manufacturing 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 Artificial Intelligence in Manufacturing 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.Inquire for Discount atContact Us:Call: +1-888-236-2744Email: sales@qyresearchgroups.comQY Research Groups is a company that simplifies how analysts and decision makers get industry data for their business. Our unique colossal technology has been developed to offer refined search capabilities designed to exploit the long tail of free market research whilst eliminating irrelevant results. QY Research Groups is the collection of market intelligence products and services on the Web. We offer reports and update our collection daily to provide you with instant online access to the world's most complete and current database of expert insights on global industries, companies, products, and trends.Room B1510, Shiji Kemao Building,No.66 Zhongguancun East Road,Haidian District, Beijing,100190, China.
Global Sevoflurane Market Analysis 2018 Forecasts To 2023: Abbott, Baxter, Maruishi, Hengrui, Lunan

Global Sevoflurane Market Analysis, Global Sevoflurane Market Parameters

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Global Sevoflurane MarketDescription:-Wiseguyreports.Com Adds Global Sevoflurane market 2018: Global Analysis, Industry Size, Share, Trends, Application Analysis and Growth Opportunities Forecast to 2023 To Its Research DatabaseThe global Sevoflurane market will reach xxx Million USD in 2017 and CAGR xx% 2011-2017. The report begins from overview of Industry Chain structure, and describes industry environment, then analyses market size and forecast of Sevoflurane 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.Product Type Coverage (Market Size & Forecast, Major Company of Product Type etc.):Original DrugsGeneric DrugsCompany Coverage (Sales Revenue, Price, Gross Margin, Main Products etc.):Abbott (AbbVie)BaxterPiramalMaruishiHengruiLunanBrowse sample report @Application Coverage (Market Size & Forecast, Different Demand Market by Region, Main Consumer Profile etc.):Urinary SurgeryCardiac SurgeryUrinary SurgeryHepatobiliary SurgeryNeurosurgical ProcedureRegion Coverage (Regional Output, Demand & Forecast by Countries etc.):North AmericaEuropeAsia-PacificSouth AmericaMiddle East & AfricaTable of Content1 Industry Overview1.1 Sevoflurane Industry1.1.1 Overview1.1.2 Development of Sevoflurane1.2 Market Segment1.2.1 Upstream1.2.2 Downstream1.3 Cost Analysis2 Industry Environment2.1 Policy2.2 Economics2.3 Sociology2.4 Technology3 Sevoflurane Market by Type3.1 Segment Overview3.1.1 Original Drugs3.1.2 Generic Drugs3.2 Market Size3.3 Market Forecast4 Major Companies List4.1 Abbott (AbbVie) (Company Profile, Sales Data etc.)4.2 Baxter (Company Profile, Sales Data etc.)4.3 Piramal (Company Profile, Sales Data etc.)4.4 Maruishi (Company Profile, Sales Data etc.)4.5 Hengrui (Company Profile, Sales Data etc.)4.6 Lunan (Company Profile, Sales Data etc.)5 Market Competition5.1 Company Competition5.2 Regional Market by Company6 Market Demand6.1 Demand Situation6.1.1 Demand in Urinary Surgery6.1.2 Demand in Cardiac Surgery6.1.3 Demand in Urinary Surgery6.1.4 Demand in Hepatobiliary Surgery6.1.5 Demand in Neurosurgical Procedure6.2 Regional Demand Comparison6.3 Demand Forecast7 Region Operation7.1 Regional Output7.2 Regional Market7.3 by Region7.3.1 North America7.3.1.1 Overview7.3.1.2 by Country (U.S., Canada, Mexico)7.3.2 Europe7.3.2.1 Overview7.3.2.2 by Country (Germany, U.K., France, Italy, Russia, Spain etc.)7.3.3 Asia-Pacific7.3.3.1 Overview7.3.3.2 by Country (China, India, Japan, Southeast Asia etc.)7.3.4 South America7.3.4.1 Overview7.3.4.2 by Country (Brazil, Argentina etc.)7.3.5 Middle East & Africa7.3.5.1 Overview7.3.5.2 by Country (Saudi Arabia, South Africa etc.)7.4 Regional Forecast8 Marketing & Price8.1 Price and Margin8.1.1 Price Trends8.1.2 Factors of Price Change8.1.3 Manufacturers Gross Margin Analysis8.2 Value Chain8.3 Marketing Channel9 Research Conclusion Table Upstream Segment of SevofluraneBrowse full 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.Contact Us:Wise Guy Research Consultants Pvt Ltdsales@wiseguyreports.comPh: +1-646-845-9349 (Us)Ph: +44 208 133 9349 (Uk)Maharashtra, Pune  411028
Process Safety System Market Investigation Highlights Growth Trends in the Coming Years

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The global process safety system (PSS) market report provides analysis for the period 20152025, wherein the period from 2017 to 2025 is the forecast period and 2016 is the base year. The report covers all the major trends and technologies playing a vital role in process safety system market growth over the forecast period. It also highlights the drivers, restraints, and opportunities expected to influence markets growth during the said period. The study provides a holistic perspective on the PSS markets growth throughout the above mentioned forecast period in terms of revenue (in US$ Mn), across different geographies, including North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East & Africa (MEA) and South America.Ask for detailed Sample of the Research Report @The market overview section of the report demonstrates the market dynamics and trends, such as the drivers, restraints, and opportunities that influence the current nature and future status of this market. An attractiveness analysis has also been provided for every geographic region in the report, in order to give a thorough analysis of the overall competitive scenario of the process safety system market, globally. Moreover, the report provides an overview of the various strategies of key players operating in the market. Introduction and market definition chapter helps in understanding different technologies of PSS along with their applications which are included in the report.Global Process Safety System Market: Market SegmentationThe report segments the global process safety system market on the basis of component into hardware, software and service. Thus, the report provides in-depth cross-segment analysis of the process safety system market and classifies it into various levels, thereby providing valuable insights at the macro as well as micro levels. Further, the PSS market is segmented on the basis of safety integrity level into SIL1, SIL2, SIL3 and SIL4. The PSS application market is classified into burner management system (BMS), emergency shutdown (ESD), high integrity pressure protection system (HIPPS), turbo machinery control (TMC) and others. Process safety system is also segmented on the basis of end-use into Oil & Gas, Energy & Power, Chemical, Pharmaceutical, Food Processing, Paper & Pulp and others (Water & Waste Water Management, Paint & Coating etc.).On the basis of country, North American market is divided into The U.S., Canada and Rest of North America. Similarly, Europe market is segmented into The U.K., Germany, France and Rest of Europe. Asia Pacific has been segmented into China, Japan, India and Rest of Asia Pacific. Middle East and Africa covers the GCC countries, South Africa and Rest of Middle East and Africa. Similarly, South American region includes Brazil and Rest of South America. This report provides all the essential information required to understand the process safety systems and its components. Furthermore, Porters Five Forces analysis explains the factors which are currently affecting the market. This report also provides the value chain analysis for the PSS market which explains the participants of the value chain.Request to view complete TOC of this report @Global Process Safety System Market: Competitive LandscapeThe report also highlights the competitive landscape of the PSS market, thereby positioning all the major players according to their geographic presence and recent key developments. The comprehensive optical character recognition market estimates are the result of our in-depth secondary research, primary interviews, and in-house expert panel reviews. These market estimates have been analyzed by taking into account the impact of different political, social, economic, technological, and legal factors along with the current market dynamics affecting the process safety system markets growth.Some of the key players operating in PSS market with most significant development include ABB Ltd., Emerson Electric Co., General Electric Co., HIMA Paul Hildebrandt GmbH, Honeywell International Inc., Intergraph Corporation, Rockwell Automation Inc., Schneider Electric SE, Siemens AG and Yokogawa Electric Corporation among others. Details such as financials, SWOT analysis, business strategies, recent developments, and other such strategic information pertaining to these players have been duly provided as part of company profiling.The global process safety system market is segmented as follows:Process Safety System Market Analysis, by Component Hardware Software ServiceProcess Safety System Market Analysis, by Safety Integrity Level SIL1 SIL2 SIL3 SIL4Process Safety System Market Analysis, by Application Burner Management System (BMS) Emergency Shutdown (ESD) High Integrity Pressure Protection System (HIPPS) Turbo Machinery Control (TMC) OthersProcess Safety System Market Analysis, by End-use Oil and Gas Energy and Power Chemical Pharmaceutical Food Processing Paper and Pulp Others (Water and Waste Water Management, Paint and Coating)Process Safety System Market Analysis, by Region North America The U.S. Canada Rest of North America Europe Germany France The U.K. Rest of Europe Asia-Pacific Japan China India Rest of Asia Pacific Middle-East & Africa GCC Countries South Africa Rest of MEA South America Brazil Rest of South AmericaAbout (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 and customers 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
Geofencing Market Evaluation Targets Advancement Anticipated until 2022

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Market Research Reports Search Engine has developed an exclusive market study on geofencing, analyzing the market from a global perspective and deriving forecast on its expansion for the assessment period, 2017-2022. Key players in the global geofencing market have been identified and profiled to create baseline for market size forecasting. By aggregating the revenues of these players for the past five years, the report offers a comprehensive analysis on the historical growth of the global geofencing market. In addition, notable developments undertaken by these players have also been studied to gauge their influence in the expansion of the global geofencing market for the immediate future.Ask for detailed Sample of the Research Report @Report SynopsisExecutive summary and overview are the initial sections in the report that offer summarizing outlook on the forecasted market size estimations across metrics such as compound annual growth rate (CAGR), Year-on-Year (Y-o-Y) growth rate, and absolute dollar opportunities. The executive summary highlights the regional market forecast, while the overview provides a standard introduction to the overall global geofencing market. The term geofencing has also been defined in the overview of the report.The report has further provided exhaustive analysis on a slew of factors influencing the growth dynamics of the global geofencing market. Analysis on parameters such as internet user penetration, smartphone penetration, vendor list, and IoT spending has also been provided in the report. The report also delivers an intensity map that demarks the presence of key companies across multiple regions. These companies have been extensively profiled in the section dedicated to revealing the competition landscape in the global geofencing market. Current market standings and strategic undertakings of market players have been disclosed in this section.Market SegmentationKey sections in the report reveal the analysis and forecast of the global geofencing market across several segments. Primary segmentation of the global geofencing market includes the component, the type of network, end-use industry, and region.Request to view complete TOC of this report @On the basis of components, the global geofencing market is segmented into Software Application RFID Tag Smart SensorsNetwork-based segmentation of the global geofencing market entails: Cellular Unlicensed Low Power TechnologyKey end-use industries segmented in this report are: Transportation and Logistics Retail Healthcare & Life Sciences Aerospace & Defense OthersThe report has also analyzed the expansion of the global geofencing market across regions, namely: North America (US and Canada) Latin America (Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, etc.) Europe (Western European and Eastern European countries) APEJ (Asia-Pacific excluding Japan) MEA (Middle East & Africa) JapanAdditional information on cross-segmental analysis and country-specific forecast have also been delivered in the report.Research MethodologyMarket Research Reports Search Enginehas employed a team of analysts, business consultants & subject matter experts in the development of this study on the global geofencing market. For delivering accurate forecasts, robust research methodology comprising of primary and secondary research approaches has been employed. To cater to the universal understanding, the report offers market size estimations in US dollars (US$). Moreover, tailor-made formulas and authorized interviews with company representatives have instrumented the reliability of this business document. Qualitative insights have been infused with quantitative market size forecasts to ensure that the key players in the global geofencing market can undertake informed decisions by availing the report and assessing the inferences provided within.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 and customers 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
Complete Industry Analysis of Global Hypoxia Inducible Factor 1 Alpha Inhibitor Market Professional Survey Report 2018

Complete Industry Analysis of Global Hypoxia Inducible Factor 1 Alpha Inhibitor Market Professional Survey Report 2018

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The Global Hypoxia Inducible Factor 1 Alpha Inhibitor Market Professional Survey Report 2018 is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the Hypoxia Inducible Factor 1 Alpha Inhibitor industry.Firstly, the report provides a basic overview of the industry including definitions, classifications, applications and industry chain structure. The Hypoxia Inducible Factor 1 Alpha Inhibitor 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 Hypoxia Inducible Factor 1 Alpha Inhibitor 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.Get a complete report sample:This report studies the global Hypoxia Inducible Factor 1 Alpha Inhibitor market status and forecast, categorizes the global Hypoxia Inducible Factor 1 Alpha Inhibitor market size (value & volume) by manufacturers, type, application, and region. This report focuses on the top manufacturers in North America, Europe, Japan, China, India, Southeast Asia and other regions (Central & South America, and Middle East & Africa).The global Hypoxia Inducible Factor 1 Alpha Inhibitor 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 reportAileron Therapeutics, Inc.CASI Pharmaceuticals Inc.Cerulean Pharma, Inc.F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd.InterMed Discovery GmbHOncoImmune, Inc.Peloton Therapeutics, Inc.RXi Pharmaceuticals CorporationSorrento Therapeutics, Inc.Transcriptogen LtdVascular Biogenics Ltd.Geographically, 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 AmericaEuropeChinaJapanIndiaSoutheast AsiaOther regions (Central & South America, Middle East & Africa)The 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 intoBC-001CASI-2ME2CRLX-101OthersBy Application, the market can be split intoSolid TumorAcute Myelocytic LeukemiaColorectal CancerOthersTable of contents:Chapter One: to provide Industry Overview of Hypoxia Inducible Factor 1 Alpha InhibitorChapter Two: to provide Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Hypoxia Inducible Factor 1 Alpha InhibitorChapter Three: to provide Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants Analysis of Hypoxia Inducible Factor 1 Alpha InhibitorChapter Four: to provide Global Hypoxia Inducible Factor 1 Alpha Inhibitor Overall Market OverviewChapter Five: to provide Hypoxia Inducible Factor 1 Alpha Inhibitor Regional Market AnalysisChapter Six: to provide Global Global 2013-2018E Hypoxia Inducible Factor 1 Alpha Inhibitor Segment Market Analysis (by Type)Chapter Seven: to provide Global Global 2013-2018E Hypoxia Inducible Factor 1 Alpha Inhibitor Segment Market Analysis (by Application)Chapter Eight: to provide Major Manufacturers Analysis of Hypoxia Inducible Factor 1 Alpha InhibitorChapter Nine: to provide Development Trend of Analysis of Hypoxia Inducible Factor 1 Alpha Inhibitor MarketChapter Ten: to provide Hypoxia Inducible Factor 1 Alpha Inhibitor Marketing Type AnalysisChapter Eleven: to provide Consumers Analysis of Hypoxia Inducible Factor 1 Alpha InhibitorChapter Twelve: to provide Conclusion of the Global Hypoxia Inducible Factor 1 Alpha Inhibitor Market Professional Survey Report 2018Chapter Thirteen: to provide 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. 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Global Monitoring Relays Market Analysis 2018 Forecasts To 2023: Omron, Eaton, Banner,Siemens, PHOENIX CONTACT

Global Monitoring Relays Market Trends, Global Monitoring Relays Market Share, Global Monitoring Relays Market Analysis

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Global Monitoring Relays MarketDescription:-Wiseguyreports.Com Adds Global Monitoring Relays market 2018: Global Analysis, Industry Size, Share, Trends, Application Analysis and Growth Opportunities Forecast to 2023 To Its Research DatabaseMonitoring Relays are an inexpensive solution for numerous monitoring functions. They ensure error-free and cost-effective operation of your system.The global Monitoring Relays market will reach xxx Million USD in 2017 and CAGR xx% 2011-2017. The report begins from overview of Industry Chain structure, and describes industry environment, then analyses market size and forecast of Monitoring Relays 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.Product Type Coverage (Market Size & Forecast, Major Company of Product Type etc.):High VoltageMedium VoltageLow VoltageCompany Coverage (Sales Revenue, Price, Gross Margin, Main Products etc.):OmronEatonBannerMerlin GerinSiemensSchneider ElectricBroyce ControlABBFinderPHOENIX CONTACTBrowse sample report @Application Coverage (Market Size & Forecast, Different Demand Market by Region, Main Consumer Profile etc.):UtilitiesIndustriesRenewablesOthersRegion Coverage (Regional Output, Demand & Forecast by Countries etc.):North AmericaEuropeAsia-PacificSouth AmericaMiddle East & AfricaTable of Content1 Industry Overview1.1 Monitoring Relays Industry1.1.1 Overview1.1.2 Development of Monitoring Relays1.2 Market Segment1.2.1 Upstream1.2.2 Downstream1.3 Cost Analysis2 Industry Environment2.1 Policy2.2 Economics2.3 Sociology2.4 Technology3 Monitoring Relays Market by Type3.1 Segment Overview3.1.1 High Voltage3.1.2 Medium Voltage3.1.3 Low Voltage3.2 Market Size3.3 Market Forecast4 Major Companies List4.1 Omron (Company Profile, Sales Data etc.)4.2 Eaton (Company Profile, Sales Data etc.)4.3 Banner (Company Profile, Sales Data etc.)4.4 Merlin Gerin (Company Profile, Sales Data etc.)4.5 Siemens (Company Profile, Sales Data etc.)4.6 Schneider Electric (Company Profile, Sales Data etc.)4.7 Broyce Control (Company Profile, Sales Data etc.)4.8 ABB (Company Profile, Sales Data etc.)4.9 Finder (Company Profile, Sales Data etc.)4.10 PHOENIX CONTACT (Company Profile, Sales Data etc.)5 Market Competition5.1 Company Competition5.2 Regional Market by Company6 Market Demand6.1 Demand Situation6.1.1 Demand in Utilities6.1.2 Demand in Industries6.1.3 Demand in Renewables6.1.4 Demand in Others6.2 Regional Demand Comparison6.3 Demand Forecast7 Region Operation7.1 Regional Output7.2 Regional Market7.3 by Region7.3.1 North America7.3.1.1 Overview7.3.1.2 by Country (U.S., Canada, Mexico)7.3.2 Europe7.3.2.1 Overview7.3.2.2 by Country (Germany, U.K., France, Italy, Russia, Spain etc.)7.3.3 Asia-Pacific7.3.3.1 Overview7.3.3.2 by Country (China, India, Japan, Southeast Asia etc.)7.3.4 South America7.3.4.1 Overview7.3.4.2 by Country (Brazil, Argentina etc.)7.3.5 Middle East & Africa7.3.5.1 Overview7.3.5.2 by Country (Saudi Arabia, South Africa etc.)7.4 Regional Forecast8 Marketing & Price8.1 Price and Margin8.1.1 Price Trends8.1.2 Factors of Price Change8.1.3 Manufacturers Gross Margin Analysis8.2 Value Chain8.3 Marketing Channel9 Research Conclusion Table Upstream Segment of Monitoring RelaysBrowse full 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.Contact Us:Wise Guy Research Consultants Pvt Ltdsales@wiseguyreports.comPh: +1-646-845-9349 (Us)Ph: +44 208 133 9349 (Uk)Maharashtra, Pune  411028
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Global Umbrella Insurance Market 2018 Industry Key Players: Allianz, AXA, Geico, USAA, Allstate.

Umbrella Insurance Market

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Umbrella Insurance Market:WiseGuyReports.com adds Umbrella Insurance Market 2018 Global Analysis, Growth, Trends and Opportunities Research Report Forecasting to 2025reports to its database.Executive SummaryThis report studies the global Umbrella Insurance market size, industry status and forecast, competition landscape and growth opportunity. This research report categorizes the global Umbrella Insurance market by companies, region, type and end-use industry.This report focuses on the global top players, coveredAllianzAXAGeicoUSAAAllstateFarmers InsuranceBerkshire Insurance GroupLiberty MutualWestfieldSafeco InsuranceShelter InsuranceMarket segment by Regions/Countries, this report coversUnited StatesEuropeChinaJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaMarket segment by Application, Umbrella Insurance can be split intoPersonalCommercialThe study objectives of this report are:To study and forecast the market size of Umbrella Insurance 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 Sample Report @In this study, the years considered to estimate the market size of Umbrella Insurance 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 StakeholdersUmbrella Insurance ManufacturersUmbrella Insurance Distributors/Traders/WholesalersUmbrella Insurance Subcomponent ManufacturersIndustry AssociationDownstream VendorsAvailable CustomizationsWith the given market data, We 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 Umbrella Insurance market, by end-use.Detailed analysis and profiles of additional market players.Table of Content:Global Umbrella Insurance Market Size, Status and Forecast 20251 Industry Overview of Umbrella Insurance1.1 Umbrella Insurance Market Overview1.1.1 Umbrella Insurance Product Scope1.1.2 Market Status and Outlook1.2 Global Umbrella Insurance Market Size and Analysis by Regions (2013-2018)1.2.1 United States1.2.2 Europe1.2.3 China1.2.4 Japan1.2.5 Southeast Asia1.2.6 India1.3 Umbrella Insurance Market by End Users/Application1.3.1 Personal1.3.2 Commercial2 Global Umbrella Insurance Competition Analysis by Players2.1 Umbrella Insurance Market Size (Value) by Players (2013-2018)2.2 Competitive Status and Trend2.2.1 Market Concentration Rate2.2.2 Product/Service Differences2.2.3 New Entrants2.2.4 The Technology Trends in Future3 Company (Top Players) Profiles3.1 Allianz3.1.1 Company Profile3.1.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.1.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.1.4 Umbrella Insurance Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.2 AXA3.2.1 Company Profile3.2.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.2.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.2.4 Umbrella Insurance Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.3 Geico3.3.1 Company Profile3.3.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.3.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.3.4 Umbrella Insurance Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.4 USAA3.4.1 Company Profile3.4.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.4.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.4.4 Umbrella Insurance Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.5 Allstate3.5.1 Company Profile3.5.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.5.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.5.4 Umbrella Insurance Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.6 Farmers Insurance3.6.1 Company Profile3.6.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.6.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.6.4 Umbrella Insurance Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.7 Berkshire Insurance Group3.7.1 Company Profile3.7.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.7.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.7.4 Umbrella Insurance Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.8 Liberty Mutual3.8.1 Company Profile3.8.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.8.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.8.4 Umbrella Insurance Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.9 Westfield3.9.1 Company Profile3.9.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.9.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.9.4 Umbrella Insurance Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.10 Safeco Insurance3.10.1 Company Profile3.10.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.10.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.10.4 Umbrella Insurance Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.11 Shelter Insurance4 Global Umbrella Insurance Market Size by Application (2013-2018)4.1 Global Umbrella Insurance Market Size by Application (2013-2018)4.2 Potential Application of Umbrella Insurance in Future4.3 Top Consumer/End Users of Umbrella InsuranceContinuousFor further information on this report, visit Contact Us:Norah Trentsales@wiseguyreports.comPh: +1-646-845-9349 (US); +44 208 133 9349 (UK)About Us:Wise Guy Reports Is Part Of The Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. And Offers Premium Progressive Statistical Surveying, Market Research Reports, Analysis & Forecast Data For Industries And Governments Around The Globe. Wise Guy Reports Features An Exhaustive List Of Market Research Reports From Hundreds Of Publishers Worldwide. We Boast A Database Spanning Virtually Every Market Category And An Even More Comprehensive Collection Of Market Research Reports Under These Categories And Sub-Categories.Addres:WISEGUY RESEARCH CONSULTANTS PVT LTDOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersPune - 411028Maharashtra, IndiaPhone :+91 841 198 5042
Osteoarthritis Market Growth Analysis by 2023 | Novartis AG (Europe), Pfizer Inc. (U.S.), TissueGene Inc. (U.S.), Ampio Pharma

Osteoarthritis Market

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The Global Osteoarthritis Market is expected to grow at an approximate CAGR of 6.8% during the forecast period 2018-2023.Osteoarthritis is a sort of joint inflammation that happens when adaptable tissue at the finishes of bones wears out. Expanding age is the main consideration for the reason for the sickness. Statistical surveying Future, a firm which spends significant time in showcase reports identified with the human services segment among others, as of late estimated in its cover Global Osteoarthritis Market Research Report-Forecast to 2023 that the market will exhibit an unfaltering CAGR while accomplishing million dollar development promptly in the conjecture time frame.Osteoarthritis is the most widely recognized type of joint inflammation which for the most part influences the hands, knee, hip and spines. It can causes torment, swelling, and decreased movement in the joints. Geriatric populace and over-weighted people are at higher dangers of osteoarthritis. Components like developing geriatric populace, rising commonness of the osteoarthritis and expanding per capita human services use will drive the market development amid the estimate time frame.Get a Sample Copy of This Report @In 2015, as indicated by the National Institutes of Health, the American geriatric populace is relied upon to about twofold from 48 million out of 2015 to 88 million by 2050. Also, in 2015, as per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the U.S. the aggregate medicinal services use represented 17.8% of the aggregate (GDP), which represented USD 3.2 trillion. Be that as it may, low per capita wage in the creating nations and symptoms of the treatment systems will control the market development amid the estimate time frameAttributable to the expanding number of the general population experiencing osteoarthritis numerous organizations are associated with the assembling and presentation of the better and powerful treatment and analytic choices. Various indicative treatment, for example, imaging (X-beams, attractive reverberation imaging (MRI), and bone output), joint liquid investigation and others are accessible. However these are not that compelling accordingly, numerous private and government associations are offering help to the maker for the improvement of the new and propelled gadgets.Competitive Analysis:The key players profiled in osteoarthritis are Abbott. (U.S.), Novartis AG (Europe), Pfizer Inc. (U.S.), Eli Lilly and Company. (U.S.), ABIOGEN PHARMA S.p.A (Europe), Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp. (U.S.), TissueGene Inc. (U.S.), Ampio Pharmaceuticals Inc. (U.S.), Regeneron (U.S.), and others.Latest Industry Updates:Being a competitive market, a number of different manufacturer are focusing on the product launch, and acquisition for the market development. Some of the latest development in the market are-May 2017 Ablynx, a biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Belgium, announced the completion of a preclinical package for a novel nanobody, ALX-1141 for the treatment of the osteoarthritis. Merck will now be responsible for further clinical development of the molecule.Get Attractive Discount on This Report @Jul 2017, Kolon Pharmaceutical got the approval for the World's first cell and gene therapy for knee osteoarthritis in Korea.Aug 2016, Bioventus, a global leader in orthobiologic solutions launched GELSYN-3, a three-injection hyaluronic acid (HA) product for pain relief associated with osteoarthritis (OA) of the knee.Brief TOC1 Report Prologue2 Market Introduction2.1 Definition2.2 Scope of the Study2.2.1 Research Objective2.2.2 Assumptions2.2.3 Limitations3 Research Methodology3.1 Introduction3.2 Primary Research3.3 Secondary research3.4 Market Size Estimation4 Market DynamicsTOC ContinuedInquire about This 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:Market Research Future+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com
Seed Coating Material Market to Receive overwhelming hike in Revenues by 2025

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Seed coating is a process in which seeds are directly coated with various material such as fertilizers, repulsive agents, crop protection chemicals plant growth regulators and others, which offers both aesthetic and environmental benefits. The primary goal of seed coating material is rapid multiplication and timely supply of crop at reasonable price. Other benefits associated with seed coating material include high yield per hectare, low seeding rate, multicomponent product and others, which are driving the demand for seed coating material across the globe. This growth is especially observed in the developing regions, where agriculture is the prime contributor to the overall economy.A sample of this report is available upon request @Seed Coating Material Market SegmentationSeed coating material market is segmented on the basis of type which includes, colorants, binders, polymers and other additives. Among all the above segments polymer is expected to account for the major share in terms of revenue contribution in seed coating material market during the forecast period. Higher efficiency to improve plant ability and durability of seeds is expected to support the growth of polymer seed coating material during the forecast period. Apart from polymer, binders are also expected to show a substantial growth in next five to six years. Many different compounds are used in binders which includes various starches, sugars, cellulose, vinyl polymers, clay, gum arabic, and others. However, binder concentration is critical as too much binding delays germination, while too little binding can cause chipping and cracking of pellets in the planter box. This causes skips or wide gaps in the plant rows.Seed coating material market is also segmented on the basis of crop type which includes fruits & vegetables, cereals & grains, oilseeds, and others. Among all these product type cereals and grains is expected to account for the highest market share as compared to other segments. High consumption of cereal and grains across the globe has generated the requirement of the increased volume of the crop production is expected to contribute to the growth of seed coating material market in the near future. Moreover, oilseed segment is expected to register a healthy growth during the forecast period.On the basis of region, the seed coating material market segmentation includes North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia Pacific excluding Japan, Japan and Middle East and Africa. North America is expected to be dominant in terms of revenue contribution in seed coating material market followed by Europe. Increased consumption of packaged food and beverages with health benefits in North America is expected to support the demand for seed coating material among food products across the region. While, among all the countries in the European region United Kingdom is expected to account for major market share during the forecast period. Moreover in developing region of Asia Pacific. China and India are the prominent countries in terms of the production of agricultural crops contributing to significant share for seed coating market in Asia Pacific region. Moreover, in Latin America Brazil is expected to show a healthy growth over next five to six years.Seed Coating Material Market Drivers & RestraintsGrowing population across the globe has generated the requirement for the production of increased agricultural crops, which is expected to fuel the demand of seed coating material market over the forecast period. Moreover, to have less impact on the environment and protecting crops, the seed coating market is expected to flourish in the near future. However, limited usage such as higher dependency on seed surface, compatibility with active ingredient and/or dye, and application temperature may hinder its growth during the forecast period.To view TOC of this report is available upon request @Seed Coating Material Market Key PlayersSome of the key international players in seed coating ingredient market includes Bayer Cropscience AG, Clariant International, Precision Laboratories, LLC, Chemtura Corporation, Incotec Group Bv, BASF SE and Chromatech Incorporated among others.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:
Drug of Abuse Testing Market | Grow Over 5.3% CAGR | Research Summary | Geographical Analysis- Revenue Post 2020

Drug of Abuse Testing Market

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Drug of abuse testing is based on diagnosing drug addiction, also called substance use disorder, requiring a thorough evaluation and often includes an assessment by a psychiatrist, a psychologist, or a licensed alcohol and drug counselor. Blood, urine or other lab tests are used to assess drug use, but they're not a diagnostic test for addiction. These tests may be used for monitoring treatment. The factor which may influence the growth of the drug of abuse testing market is increased use of drug testing at organizational level, increased production and trade of illicit drugs worldwide and others. Globally The Market For Drug Of Abuse Testing Is Expected To Grow At 5.3% GAGR From 2016 To 2020.Global Drug of Abuse Testing Market Players:The major players of this market are: Roche Holding Limited, Quest Diagnostics, Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings, Alere Inc, Abbott Laboratories, Randox Laboratories Ltd, Psychemedics Corporation, Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc, Sonic Healthcare and Thermo Fisher Scientific IncGet Sample copy @Key Finding:The global drug of abuse testing market is expected to reach $3.0 billion in 2020, mainly driven by increased use of illicit drugs and need of drug abuse testing at organizational level.Onsite testing market is more than double the size of laboratory testing due to ease of use, cost effectiveness and immediate results.Urine followed by saliva is the most common specimen used in the drug of abuse testing. Hair as a specimen is also becoming a more effective way for testing long term drug use.North America was the largest market by geography for drug abuse testing in 2014, with 76.4% share of the total marketGlobal drug of abuse testing market is mainly segmented into test type and samples. Furthermore the test type is segmented into onsite screening test and laboratory drug testing. On the bases of samples the market is segmented into urine, hair, saliva and others.Taste the market data and market information presented through more than 51 market data tables and figures spread over 66 numbers of pages of the project report. Avail the in-depth table of content TOC & market synopsis on Drug of Abuse Testing Market Research Report - Global Forecast to 2020Regional Analysis:North America is one of the fastest growing regions for Drug of Abuse Testing Market; the growth in mainly attributable to an increasing use of illicit drugs in the region. In South and Central America and the Caribbean, use of cocaine remains high, especially in South America, where cocaine use is currently at levels comparable to high-prevalence regions. Europe is amongst one of the largest markets for alcohol breathalyzer and drug testing equipment. The Asian market is expected to show high growth rate in the drug testing equipment, mainly due to rise in alcohol consumption and strict government rules and regulations about testing alcohol consumption in the region.Top 5 Reasons to Purchase this Report:Company profiling with detailed strategies, financials, and recent development activities.Market Strategic Business Influence Data.Market Research Future recommendations in key business segments based on the market estimations.Market share analysis of the top industry players.Market forecasts for a minimum of 5 years of all the mentioned segments, Trends and the regional markets With SWOT Analysis.Get Amazing Discount @List of Tables:TABLE 1 SPECIFIC PRIMARY AND SECONDARY SOURCES USED FOR THIS PUBLICATIONTABLE 2 GLOBAL DRUG ABUSE TESTING MARKET SNAPSHOT (2015AND 2020)TABLE 3 WORLDWIDE NUMBER OF ILLICIT DRUG USERS, BY MAJOR DRUGS, % SHARE (2011)TABLE 4 MULTIPLE PARAMETER TEST ADVANTAGES OVER SINGLE PARAMETER TESTTABLE 5 DRIVERS FOR THE MARKET: IMPACT ANALYSISTABLE 6 RESTRAINTS FOR THE MARKET: IMPACT ANALYSISTABLE 7 GLOBAL MARKET BREAKDOWN BY TYPE OF TEST, $M (2011  2014)TABLE 8 GLOBAL MARKET BREAKDOWN BY TYPE OF TEST, $M (2015  2020)TABLE 9 GLOBAL MARKET BREAKDOWN BY SAMPLE, $M (2011  2014)TABLE 10 GLOBAL MARKET BREAKDOWN BY SAMPLE, $M (2015  2020)ContinuedList of Figures:FIG 1 GLOBAL DRUG ABUSE TESTING MARKET SHARE BY TYPE OF TEST (2014)FIG 2 GLOBAL DRUG ABUSE TESTING MARKET SHARE BY SAMPLE (2014)FIG 3 GLOBAL DRUG ABUSE TESTING MARKET SHARE BY REGION (2014)FIG 4 GLOBAL DRUG ABUSE TESTING MARKET SHARE BY TYPE OF TEST (2014)FIG 5 THE NORTH AMERICAN DRUG ABUSE TESTING MARKET SHARE BY TYPE OF TEST (2015)FIG 6 THE EUROPEAN DRUG ABUSE TESTING MARKET SHARE BY TYPE OF TEST (2015)FIG 7 THE ASIAN DRUG ABUSE TESTING MARKET SHARE BY TYPE OF TEST, 2015FIG 8 GLOBAL DRUG ABUSE TESTING MARKET SHARE, BY SAMPLE, 2015FIG 9 NORTH AMERICA DRUG ABUSE TESTING MARKET SHARE BY COUNTRY (2014)FIG 10 EUROPE DRUG ABUSE TESTING MARKET SHARE BY COUNTRY (2014)FIG 11 ASIA-PACIFIC DRUG ABUSE TESTING MARKET SHARE BY COUNTRY (2014)FIG 12 PORTERS FIVE FORCES OF COMPETITIVE POSITION ANALYSISAsk Any Question @About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.ContactMarket Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune  411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com
Electric Bicycles Market Analysis From 2018 to 2023: By Size, Share, Sales, Region, Electric Bicycles Type, Battery Type, Motor Type, And Region

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Electric Bicycles Market Analysis 2018 to 2023 Research Report added by the MarketResearchFuture, Global Electric Bicycles market is predicted to grow at 5.91% CAGR by 2023. Electric Bicycles market report provides detailed insights on acting forces in market with drivers, opportunities, restraints and challenges industry facing. Report provides comprehensive information on Electric Bicycles Market shares, size, competitive insights, key players analysis, with regional forecast to 2023.Global Electric Bicycle Market Information Report by Type (Pedal Assist or Pedelecs, Power on Demand, And Pedal Assist with Power on Demand), Battery Type (Sealed Lead Acid and Li-Ion Battery), Motor Type (Hub Motor and Mid Drive Electric) and region.Key players in Electric Bicycles market mentioned:NYCeWheels (U.S.), Accell Group (Netherlands), Derby Cycle (Germany), Easy Motion USA (California), Moustache Bikes (France), Jiangsu Xinri E-Vehicle Co., Ltd. (China), myStromer AG (Switzerland), Karbon Kinetics Limited (KKL) (U.K.), Pedego Electric Bikes (California) and A2B Electric Bikes (U.K).Get Sample Report At:The factors that are responsible for the growth of electric bicycle market are growing demand for E-Bikes among tourist, growing demand for E-Bikes among tourists, provides rides with less physical effort, and increase in fuel price. Due to the rising concerns regarding environmental pollution, many governments across the world have implemented several regulations and policies to reduce vehicle emission during the last few years. Global warming has also created a major threat to the environment and human life.Moreover, the emergence of eco-friendly vehicles has also been played a major role in the increasing sales of e-bike. In Europe, people are more encouraged and have created much awareness for eco-friendly vehicles. Additionally, the rising health concerns, and growing demand for e-bike from tourists, have propelled the European market for e-bike. Along with this, governments along with agencies such as European Environment Agency and others, have set certain regulations on vehicles to reduce the emission. As a result, a large pool of population have shifted their preferences towards electric vehicles such as e-bikes.Market Segmentation:The Electric Bicycle market is segmented based on type, battery type, motor type, and region. On the basis of type, Pedal Assist or Pedelecs accounted for the largest market share of 46.25% in 2016, with a market value of USD 6,648.5 USD Million and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 5.87% during the forecast period. The Pedal Assist or Pedelecs segment is the largest market duen to comfort provided by the pedal assist bicycle in the ride.On the basis of battery type, the market is segmented based on sealed lead acid and Li-Ion battery. Sealed lead acid battery segment accounted for the largest share with 58.74% in the global electric bicycles market due to growth in automotive industry. On the basis of battery type, sealed lead acid battery segment dominate the global electric bicycles market with share of 58.74% in 2016, in terms of value. It is expected to grow at 3.04% CAGR during the forecast period.On the basis of motor type, the market is segmented based on hub motor and mid drive electric. Hub motor segment accounted for the largest share with 62.84% in the global electric bicycles market due to growth in automotive industry. Mid drive electric is the second largest on the basis of motor type and accounted for 37.16% share in the same year.Regional Analysis:This study provides an overview of the global electric bicycle market, 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 (APAC) and Rest of the World (ROW). 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 automotive electric drivetrain systems market by its type, battery type, motor type, and regionMajor 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 Threat Of Substitutes3.1.4 Segment Rivalry3.1.5 Bargaining Power Of Buyers3.2 Value Chain/Supply Chain Analysis4 Market Dynamics4.1 Introduction4.2 Market Drivers4.3 Market Restraints4.4 Market Opportunities4.5 Market Trends5 Global Electric Bicycles Market, By Type6 Global Electric Bicycles Market, By Electric Battery Type7 Global Electric Bicycles Market, By Motor Type8 Global Electric Bicycles Market, By Region9 Competitive Landscape10 Company ProfilesBrowse more details about Electric Bicycles Market Research Report - Forecast to 2023 at: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.Contact Us:528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, HadapsarPune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312sales@marketresearchfuture.com
Worldwide Business Management Software Market | Top Key Players  SAP, Oracle, ZOHO, ODOO NETSUITE, BITRIX24, WORKetc, StudioCloud, SCORO | Forecast till 2025

Business Management Software Market

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BusinessIndustryReports.com has new research report on the global Business Management Software Market. The global Business Management Software Market is growing continuously and expected to grow healthy CAGR by Forecast year 2025Business Management Software Market is any software or set of computer programs used by business users to perform various business functions. These business applications are used to increase productivity, to measure productivity and to perform other business functions accurately.Business Management Software Market is likely to be developed to meet the needs of a specific business, and therefore is not easily transferable to a different business environment, unless its nature and operation is identical. Due to the unique requirements of each business, off-the-shelf software is unlikely to completely address a company's needs. However, where an on-the-shelf solution is necessary, due to time or monetary considerations, some level of customization is likely to be required. Exceptions do exist, depending on the business in question, and thorough research is always required before committing to bespoke or off-the-shelf solutions.Some Business Management Software Market are interactive, i.e., they have a graphical user interface or user interface and users can query/modify/input data and view results instantaneously. They can also run reports instantaneously. Some business applications run in batch mode: they are set up to run based on a predetermined event/time and a business user does not need to initiate them or monitor them.Premium Sample Report Available atThis report studies the global Business Management Software market size, industry status and forecast, competition landscape and growth opportunity. This research report categorizes the global Business Management Software market by companies, region, type and end-use industry.This report focuses on the global top players, coveredSAPOracleZOHOODOONETSUITEBITRIX24WORKetcStudioCloudSCOROOnesoftGeographically, this report is segmented into several key Regions, with production, consumption, revenue (million USD), market share and growth rate of Business Management Software in these regions, from 2013 to 2025 (forecast), coveringUnited StatesEUChinaJapanSouth KoreaTaiwanThe regional scope of the study is as follows:- North America, United States, Canada, Mexico, Asia-Pacific, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Indonesia, Singapore, Rest of Asia-Pacific, Europe, Germany, France, UK, Italy, Spain, Russia, Rest of Europe, Central & South America, Brazil, Argentina, Rest of South America, Middle East & Africa, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Rest of Middle East & Africa.Market segment by Application, Business Management Software can be split intoPC & TabletMobile PhoneThe study objectives of this report are:To analyze and study the global Business Management Software capacity, production, value, consumption, status (2013-2017) and forecast (2018-2025);Focuses on the key Business Management Software 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.Key StakeholdersBusiness Management Software ManufacturersBusiness Management Software Distributors/Traders/WholesalersBusiness Management Software Subcomponent ManufacturersIndustry AssociationDownstream VendorsComplete report on Global Business Management Software Market Size, Status and Forecast 2025 is spread across 99 pages and provides exclusive vital statistics, data, information, trends and landscape details in this niche sector. Get Direct Copy of this Research Report @Major Table of Content1 Global Business Management Software Market Research Report 20182 Global Business Management Software Market Competition by Manufacturers3 Global Business Management Software Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2013-2018)4 Global Business Management Software Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Region (2013-2018)5 Global Business Management Software Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type6 Global Business Management Software Market Analysis by Application7 Global Business Management Software Manufacturers Profiles/Analysis8 Business Management Software Manufacturing Cost Analysis9 Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream Buyers10 Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/Traders11 Market Effect Factors Analysis12 Global Business Management Software Market Forecast (2018-2025 )13 Research Findings and Conclusion14 AppendixKey questions answered in the report:What will the market growth rate of Business Management Software market in 2025 ?What are the key factors driving the global Business Management Software market?What are sales, revenue, and price analysis of top manufacturers of Business Management Software market?Who are the distributors, traders and dealers of Business Management Software market?Who are the key manufacturers in Business Management Software market space?What are the Business Management Software market opportunities and threats faced by the vendors in the global Business Management Software market?What are sales, revenue, and price analysis by types and applications of Business Management Software market?What are sales, revenue, and price analysis by regions of Business Management Software market?What are the market opportunities, market risk and market overview of the Business Management Software market?More Inquire 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 Market ReportsPune  Indiasales@businessindustryreports.com+19376349940
Worldwide E-learning Software Market | Top Key Players  IBM, SAP, Net Dimensions, Citrix, Upside learning, Litmos, iSpring Solutions, Versal, Docebo, Absorb, Traineaze, Mindflash Technologies | Forecast till 2025

E-learning Software Market

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BusinessIndustryReports.com has new research report on the global E-learning Software Market. The global E-learning Software Market is growing continuously and expected to grow healthy CAGR by Forecast year 2025E-learning Software Market is "the study and ethical practice of facilitating learning and improving performance by creating, using, and managing appropriate technological processes and resources".E-learning Software Market is the use of both physical hardware and educational theoretics. It encompasses several domains including learning theory, computer-based training, online learning, and where mobile technologies are used, m-learning. Accordingly, there are several discrete aspects to describing the intellectual and technical development of educational technology:An E-learning Software Market is someone who is trained in the field of educational technology. Educational technologists try to analyze, design, develop, implement, and evaluate process and tools to enhance learning. While the term educational technologist is used primarily in the United States, learning technologist is synonymous and used in the UK as well as Canada.Premium Sample Report Available atThis report studies the global E-learning Software market size, industry status and forecast, competition landscape and growth opportunity. This research report categorizes the global E-learning Software market by companies, region, type and end-use industry.This report focuses on the global top players, coveredIBMSAPNet DimensionsCitrixUpside learningLitmosiSpring SolutionsVersalDoceboAbsorbTraineazeMindflash TechnologiesSkyPrepAccord LMSAdobeConfigioGeographically, this report is segmented into several key Regions, with production, consumption, revenue (million USD), market share and growth rate of E-learning Software in these regions, from 2013 to 2025 (forecast), coveringUnited StatesEUChinaJapanSouth KoreaTaiwanThe regional scope of the study is as follows:- North America, United States, Canada, Mexico, Asia-Pacific, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Indonesia, Singapore, Rest of Asia-Pacific, Europe, Germany, France, UK, Italy, Spain, Russia, Rest of Europe, Central & South America, Brazil, Argentina, Rest of South America, Middle East & Africa, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Rest of Middle East & Africa.Market segment by Type, the product can be split intoMobile Content AuthoringE-booksPortable LMSMobile and Video-based CoursewareInteractive AssessmentsContent DevelopmentM-EnablementMarket segment by Application, E-learning Software can be split intoBFSIHealthcareGovernmentProfessional ServicesTelecom and ITOtherThe study objectives of this report are:To analyze and study the global E-learning Software capacity, production, value, consumption, status (2013-2017) and forecast (2018-2025);Focuses on the key E-learning Software 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.Key StakeholdersE-learning Software ManufacturersE-learning Software Distributors/Traders/WholesalersE-learning Software Subcomponent ManufacturersIndustry AssociationDownstream VendorsComplete report on Global E-learning Software Market Size, Status and Forecast 2025 is spread across 104 pages and provides exclusive vital statistics, data, information, trends and landscape details in this niche sector. Get Direct Copy of this Research Report @Major Table of Content1 Global E-learning Software Market Research Report 20182 Global E-learning Software Market Competition by Manufacturers3 Global E-learning Software Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2013-2018)4 Global E-learning Software Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Region (2013-2018)5 Global E-learning Software Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type6 Global E-learning Software Market Analysis by Application7 Global E-learning Software Manufacturers Profiles/Analysis8 E-learning Software Manufacturing Cost Analysis9 Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream Buyers10 Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/Traders11 Market Effect Factors Analysis12 Global E-learning Software Market Forecast (2018-2025 )13 Research Findings and Conclusion14 AppendixKey questions answered in the report:What will the market growth rate of E-learning Software market in 2025 ?What are the key factors driving the global E-learning Software market?What are sales, revenue, and price analysis of top manufacturers of E-learning Software market?Who are the distributors, traders and dealers of E-learning Software market?Who are the key manufacturers in E-learning Software market space?What are the E-learning Software market opportunities and threats faced by the vendors in the global E-learning Software market?What are sales, revenue, and price analysis by types and applications of E-learning Software market?What are sales, revenue, and price analysis by regions of E-learning Software market?What are the market opportunities, market risk and market overview of the E-learning Software market?More Inquire 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 Market ReportsPune  Indiasales@businessindustryreports.com+19376349940
Future Growth of Energy Management System Market | Top Key Players  Siemens (Germany), General Electric (U.S.), IBM (U.S.), Itron (U.S.), CA Technologies (U.S.), Comverge (U.S.), Energate (Canada), Ecobee (Canada), Netatmo (France), Atmel (U.S.) | Fore

Energy Management System Market

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BusinessIndustryReports.com has new research report on the global Energy Management System Market. The global Energy Management System Market is growing continuously and expected to grow healthy CAGR by Forecast year 2025Energy Management System Market is a system of computer-aided tools used by operators of electric utility grids to monitor, control, and optimize the performance of the generation and/or transmission system.The computer technology is also referred to as SCADA/EMS or EMS/SCADA. In these respects, the terminology EMS then excludes the monitoring and control functions, but more specifically refers to the collective suite of power network applications and to the generation control and scheduling applications.Manufacturers of Energy Management System Market also commonly supply a corresponding dispatcher training simulator (DTS). This related technology makes use of components of SCADA and EMS as a training tool for control centre operators. It is also possible to acquire an independent DTS from a non-EMS source such as EPRIEnergy Management System Market are also often commonly used by individual commercial entities to monitor, measure, and control their electrical building loads. Energy management systems can be used to centrally control devices like HVAC units and lighting systems across multiple locations, such as retail, grocery and restaurant sites. Energy management systems can also provide metering, submetering, and monitoring functions that allow facility and building managers to gather data and insight that allows them to make more informed decisions about energy activities across their sites.Premium Sample Report Available atThis report studies the global Energy Management System (EMS) market size, industry status and forecast, competition landscape and growth opportunity. This research report categorizes the global Energy Management System (EMS) market by companies, region, type and end-use industry.This report focuses on the global top players, coveredSiemens (Germany)General Electric (U.S.)IBM (U.S.)Itron (U.S.)CA Technologies (U.S.)Comverge (U.S.)Energate (Canada)Ecobee (Canada)Netatmo (France)Atmel (U.S.)Honeywell (U.S.)Nest Labs (U.S.)Ecobee (Canada)Geographically, this report is segmented into several key Regions, with production, consumption, revenue (million USD), market share and growth rate of Energy Management System in these regions, from 2013 to 2025 (forecast), coveringUnited StatesEUChinaJapanSouth KoreaTaiwanThe regional scope of the study is as follows:- North America, United States, Canada, Mexico, Asia-Pacific, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Indonesia, Singapore, Rest of Asia-Pacific, Europe, Germany, France, UK, Italy, Spain, Russia, Rest of Europe, Central & South America, Brazil, Argentina, Rest of South America, Middle East & Africa, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Rest of Middle East & Africa.Market segment by Type, the product can be split intoIn-House DisplaySmart ThermostatsSmart PlugsLoad Control SwitchesMarket segment by Application, Energy Management System (EMS) can be split intoHome Energy ManagementBuilding Energy ManagementThe study objectives of this report are:To analyze and study the global Energy Management System capacity, production, value, consumption, status (2013-2017) and forecast (2018-2025);Focuses on the key Energy Management System 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.Key StakeholdersEnergy Management System ManufacturersEnergy Management System Distributors/Traders/WholesalersEnergy Management System Subcomponent ManufacturersIndustry AssociationDownstream VendorsComplete report on Global Energy Management System Market Size, Status and Forecast 2025 is spread across 107 pages and provides exclusive vital statistics, data, information, trends and landscape details in this niche sector. Get Direct Copy of this Research Report @Major Table of Content1 Global Energy Management System Market Research Report 20182 Global Energy Management System Market Competition by Manufacturers3 Global Energy Management System Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2013-2018)4 Global Energy Management System Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Region (2013-2018)5 Global Energy Management System Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type6 Global Energy Management System Market Analysis by Application7 Global Energy Management System Manufacturers Profiles/Analysis8 Energy Management System Manufacturing Cost Analysis9 Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream Buyers10 Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/Traders11 Market Effect Factors Analysis12 Global Energy Management System Market Forecast (2018-2025 )13 Research Findings and Conclusion14 AppendixKey questions answered in the report:What will the market growth rate of Energy Management System market in 2025 ?What are the key factors driving the global Energy Management System market?What are sales, revenue, and price analysis of top manufacturers of Energy Management System market?Who are the distributors, traders and dealers of Energy Management System market?Who are the key manufacturers in Energy Management System market space?What are the Energy Management System market opportunities and threats faced by the vendors in the global Energy Management System market?What are sales, revenue, and price analysis by types and applications of Energy Management System market?What are sales, revenue, and price analysis by regions of Energy Management System market?What are the market opportunities, market risk and market overview of the Energy Management System market?More Inquire 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 Market ReportsPune  Indiasales@businessindustryreports.com+19376349940
Complete Industry Analysis of Global Analog Excitation System Sales Market Report 2018

Complete Industry Analysis of Global Analog Excitation System Sales Market Report 2018

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The Global Analog Excitation System Sales Market Report 2018 is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the Analog Excitation System industry.Firstly, the report provides a basic overview of the industry including definitions, classifications, applications and industry chain structure. The Analog Excitation System 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 Analog Excitation System 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 & professional report sample:This report studies the global Analog Excitation System market status and forecast, categorizes the global Analog Excitation System 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 Analog Excitation System 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 reportABBRolls RoyceVoithTenelBasler ElectricKonear InemAltex ElectricAutomation Electronics IndiaAmtech PowerAndritzSiemensGeographically, 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 intoStaticBrushlessOn 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, includingSynchronous GeneratorsSynchronous MachinesTable of contents:Charpter 1 - Analog Excitation System Market OverviewCharpter 2 - Global Analog Excitation System Competition by Players/Suppliers, Type and ApplicationCharpter 3 - United States Analog Excitation System (Volume, Value and Sales Price)Charpter 4 - China Analog Excitation System (Volume, Value and Sales Price)Charpter 5- Europe Analog Excitation System (Volume, Value and Sales Price)Charpter 6 - Japan Analog Excitation System (Volume, Value and Sales Price)Charpter 7 - Southeast Asia Analog Excitation System (Volume, Value and Sales Price)Charpter 8 - India Analog Excitation System (Volume, Value and Sales Price)Charpter 9 - Global Analog Excitation System Players/Suppliers Profiles and Sales DataCharpter 10 - Analog Excitation System Maufacturing Cost AnalysisCharpter 11 - Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream BuyersCharpter 12 - Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/TradersCharpter 13 - Market Effect Factors AnalysisCharpter 14 - Global Analog Excitation System 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
Third-party Banking Software Markets Competitive Research, Emerging Companies & Forecast

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Several organizations are becoming customer-centric and are focusing on attracting and retaining customers. These organization are threatened by high competition, disruption, and increasingly expanding to different markets. The rising need for personalized experience to suit their specific requirements is encouraging the banks to focus on analytics and acquire smart insights from data. Publishers market study identifies the increasing adoption of customer-centric perspective to be one of the primary growth factors for the third-party banking software market. Banks are steadily adopting third-part banking software to enhance their customer-centric services. Implementation of this software provides flexibility that enables organizations to become data-driven and attain customer-centricity perpetually, while enhancing business banking. Our market analysts estimate that the market will grow steadily at a CAGR of more than 8% by 2022.The advent of open banking paradigm is one of the key factors driving the growth of the third-party banking software. Banking organizations are adopting open banking platforms by implementing open application programming interfaces (APIs). These APIs enable the third-party and stakeholders to cooperate and share information through several cases. Third-part banking software providers are attracted by open banking paradigm as it opens new revenue streams and deliver an enhanced customer experience.Sample Copy is Available @Companies coveredThe third-party banking software market is fragmented owing to the presence of several international and regional vendors. This research report analyzes the competitive environment while focusing on the product offerings of the key companies. Additionally, our analysts also study the focus key areas followed by the banking software companies in the banking software solutions market.Some of the companies covered in this market research report are -FISFiservInfosysOracleTemenosFor Inquire before Buying @Contact Us:Phone: +1-646-491-9876Email Id: sales@reportsweb.comAbout Us:ReportsWeb is a one stop shop of market research reports and solutions to various companies across the globe. We help our clients in their decision support system by helping them choose most relevant and cost effective research reports and solutions from various publishers.505, 6th floor, Amanora Township, Amanora Chambers, East Block, Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028
Global Interactive Projectors Market: Education and Corporate Industry to Keep Supporting Interactive Projectors Market Growth

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With the rise in adoption of advanced technologies in every sphere, there is a growth in popularity of Interactive projectors. The market is being focused in a new research report added to the database of Market Research Report Search Engine (MRRSE). The report is titled Interactive Projectors Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2017  2025. The report highlights an in-depth analysis of global interactive projectors market, along with the key dynamics affecting it.To Get Sample Report Click Here:Global Interactive Projectors Market: OverviewThe interactive projectors possess a lucrative market, as it is expected to have a high demand during the upcoming years. These advanced projectors have found its applications in various areas including education and corporate. It has become an important part as it allows using hi-tech features like touch screen and access to swipe, draw, pinch in/out etc. With the availability of advanced technology in every field, the interactive projectors have also find its mass adoption especially in the education industry. It is used in schools and colleges which are a part of an intense competition and are trying to stay ahead of each other by making use of advanced technologies. The corporate industry also stays up to date with the new technologies. These projectors are used in most of the offices and has a lot of dependency on it.Global Interactive Projectors Market: Segmentation and Competitive AnalysisThis comprehensive research report consists of a market forecast for 2017-2025. The data is based on various dynamics including drivers that are fuelling markets growth, restraints that have limited the growth of market, opportunities arising in foreseen years for leading companies and also the trends that are currently ruling in the industry. To give this data a lucid flow, the report begins with a market definition and executive summary. The definition provides market scope and details about the market and products involved in it. This is followed by a market segmentation which bifurcates the market into different segments based on product type, application and geography. This helps in identifying the most attractive segment or the most profitable part of the market, which can be beneficial for the market players. Regional segmentation possess an essential part of the report, as it provides a brief overview of the markets regional presence and growth prospects for the upcoming years. The key regions that are analysed for global interactive projectors market is North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, MEA and South America.Access the Report and full TOC @Another important part of this research report is competitive landscape. This section is solely dedicated to the analysis of dominant players in the industry. It provides brief profile of these companies that are leading in the market, including their current development and future market strategies. Some of these key players briefed in the report are Boxlight Mimio, Seiko Epson Corporation, NEC Display Solutions, BenQ Corporation, Sony Corporation, Touchjet, Hitachi Ltd, Dell Technologies, Panasonic Corporation and Optoma Technology.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.Contact UsState Tower90, State StreetSuite 700Albany, NY  12207 United StatesTelephone: +1-518-730-0559Email: sales@mrrse.comWebsite:
Global Fertilizer Additives Market 2018 - Solvay, Clariant, KAO Corporation

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Apex Market Reports, recently published a detailed market research study focused on the Fertilizer Additives Market across the global, regional and country level. The report provides 360 analysis of Fertilizer Additives 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 Fertilizer Additives on the basis of this detailed study. The study shares Fertilizer Additives performance both in terms of volume and revenue.The market research report explores the Fertilizer Additives Market across the globe along with major regions and countries. The research report provides a detailed study on each and every aspect of Fertilizer Additives 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 Fertilizer Additives Market based on major product types, application and end users industries of Fertilizer Additives. Besides, the report also covers geographical segmentation for Fertilizer Additives 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 ReportNovochem GroupSolvayClariantKAO CorporationFiltra Catalysts & Chemicals Ltd.ChemSol LLCForbon TechnologyArrmazChemipolMichelmanTolsa GroupThe competitive landscape of the global market for Fertilizer Additives is determined by assessing the major industry participants, production capacity, production capacity utilization rate, Fertilizer Additives Markets production chain, pricing by each manufacturer and the revenue generated by each manufacturer in the Fertilizer Additives Market globally.Inquire Before Buying @The Global Fertilizer Additives Market 2018 is further analyzed on the basis of product pricing, Fertilizer Additives production volume, data pertaining to demand and Fertilizer Additives supply, and the revenue garnered by the product. The report provides upstream and downstream analysis covering major raw material used in manufacturing of Fertilizer Additives 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 Fertilizer Additives 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 -
Oil Storage Market - SWOT Forecast 2017 - 2025

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Global Oil Storage Market: SnapshotKey oil product storage types include those meant for crude oil, gasoline, aviation fuel, as well as middle distillates such as diesel, fuel oil, marine bunker fuels, naphtha, kerosene, gas oil, and petrol. Oil storage provides a greater level of constancy in costs of these products through the removal of fluctuations in the short term supply market for crude and all its derivatives. The Middle East is expected to continue being a primary target region for manufacturers of oil product storage units, due to the continued lead taken by the region in the production of crude.Request Sample Copy of the Report @Leakage of oil products is one of the leading causes of product wastage and traders and manufacturers are aware of the investments that are required into developing superior alternatives in storage that can help avoid these losses. This also includes diverting manual labor and manufacturing capabilities towards expanding the manufacture of these storage units. Carbon steel and stainless steel are the two key materials currently being used to manufacture oil storage units. Carbon steel has been a staple in the market primarily due to its lower cost, but provides several disadvantages that stainless steel can mitigate. It is very likely for more players to shift towards stainless steel storage units over the coming years.Global Oil Storage Market: OverviewOil storage products are mainly comprised of gasoline, crude oil, aviation fuel, and middle distillates such as fuel oil, diesel, naphtha, marine bunker fuels, kerosene, petrol, and gas oil. Oil storage brings about stability in pricing by eliminating short term supply fluctuations of crude and its derivatives. On account of different stringent norms to thwart leakage, vendors of storage equipment have invested heavily in manpower and in building steel tanks. There are two types of material used in this process, namely, carbon steel and stainless steel. Although carbon steel is low priced, stainless steel will likely see significant demand in locations of high air salinity and open storage facilities. Further, the chromium content enhances resilience against strong chemicals, resulting in its higher demand in the global market.Request TOC of the Report @Global Oil Storage Market: Key TrendsWith the global glut in oil on account of the Middle East countries showing little signs of reducing production and the U.S. production of shale in massive quantities, supply has outpaced demand. This has necessitated the effective storage thereby resulting in a major growth in the global market for oil storage. Suppliers worldwide have augmented their inventories and infrastructure to store massive quantities of crude oil. Another factor fuelling an uptick in demand is the governments endeavors to increase oil reserves to avert an economic crisis.A noticeable trend in the market is the stockpiling initiatives undertaken by nations such as the U.S., China, and India to cushion the price volatility and achieve consistent supply to the end-use sector.Global Oil Storage Market: Market PotentialWith the global oil supply not showing much signs of letting up, the future for the global oil storage market looks promising. These tanks are used mainly for gasoline, aviation fuel, crude oil, and middle distillates. Storage demand for crude oil is predicted to cross 1 billion cubic meters by 2025. However, capacity expansions and high demand for diesels and fuels for power and transportation sectors are expected to up demand for gasoline, aviation fuel, and other petrochemical derivatives in the next couple of years.A major concern, however, is the increasing inventory due to lessened consumption. This results in economic losses to suppliers. Besides, strict rules pertaining to stockpiling of oil in above and below-ground tank installations is another factor hobbling the market. Control of Pollution (England) Regulations 2001 and the Water Environment (Scotland) Regulations 2006 are some of the primary legislations that industry participants in Western Europe need to comply with.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @Global Oil Storage Market: Regional OutlookFrom a geographical perspective, the Middle East spearheads the global oil storage market on account of the increasing oil production and rising refinery throughput. Robust requirement for distillates, petroleum, and fuel in different industrial and commercial segments has significantly upped tank demand in the region. Nations such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE are at the forefront of driving growth in the region. Crude oil storage demand in Saudi Arabia is anticipated to reach 67.4 million cubic meters by 2025.North America too contributes significantly to oil stockpiling demand. Asia Pacific oil storage market is also predicted to see a turnaround in petrochemical demand in the years ahead.Global Oil Storage Market: Competitive AnalysisSome of the prominent players in the global oil storage market are Marquard & Bahls AG, ZCL Composites, Zepnotek Storage TanksLF Manufacturing, Columbian Steel Tank, Belco, and Palmer. Among them, Marquard & Bahls provides a wide array of tank designs to store crude oil, biodiesel, bioethanol, vegetable fats, and middle distillates.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
Drill Pipe Market - Growth Perspective 2017 - 2025

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Global Drill Pipe Market: SnapshotDrill pipes are hollow pipes, usually made of aluminum alloys or steel and are a core component in the drilling process. The hollow drill pipes enable for the transfer of drilling fluids downwards towards the drill point or back upwards through the annulus. Although a standard length for drill pipes is up to 32 feet, there are longer pipes that could stretch till 45 feet and are used in special circumstances.Request Sample Copy of the Report @Most stems in drilling systems need to be created in a way that allows for efficient drilling torque transfer that can be sent downward, over many miles and through the Earths crust. In order to do this, the pipes need to be able to withstand the massive pressure exerted by the ground towards the outer walls of the pipe, as well as the pressure exerted by the fluids from within. This involve the use of tempered steel tubes that can be expensive in nature. Due to this, the reusability of drill pipes is a highly regarded quality that could end up hampering the overall demand rates for them.Global Drill Pipe Market: OverviewDrill pipes, usually made from aluminum or steel, are hollow and thin-walled and utilized in drilling rigs. Drilling fluid is pushed down the hole and back up the annulus. They are available in the market in different sizes, strengths, and wall thicknesses. Their length is usually between 27 and 32 feet. They can withstand massive internal and external pressure, distortion, bending, and vibration as they can rotate and lift the bottom hole assembly (BHA). The two types of drill pipes are standard drill pipes and heavy weight drill pipe.Global Drill Pipe Market: Key TrendsAt the forefront of driving growth in the global drill pipe market is the spiking demand for energy, which has necessitated exploration of offshore reserves on account of tanking production from onshore fields. The progress in drilling technologies such as pad drilling and horizontal drilling have also helped up output and lowered drilling rig downtime, which has expedited drilling operations. This is slated to push up demand even further.Countering the growth in the global drill pipe market is the tanking crude oil prices. This has also resulted in a steady decline in rig rental capital in the offshore market. Customers now have strong bargaining power in negotiating new contracts and extensions too on account of the downward pressure on prices.Request TOC of the Report @Global Drill Pipe Market: Market PotentialAt present there are way too many offshore drilling rigs chasing too little work. Hence, many are being idled or scrapped. Offshore opportunities, however, are abound in Africa and the Middle East that provide an avenue for growth for the market. The onshore oil and gas presents much greater opportunity than the offshore ones because the explosive drilling activities from shale reserves, coal bed methane, and tar sands. Additionally, the continued spike in global petroleum consumption is also predicted to create major growth opportunities for the market in the near future.Going forward, the premium grade drill pipe segment is slated to hold out a lot of potential because of the growth in the exploration activity in deepwater and ultra deepwater regions primarily in Europe and Africa, where recent oil and gas discoveries have occurred in the offshore regions. Premium grade drill pipe is helpful in deepwater exploration on account of it being immune to high pressure and high temperatures.Global Drill Pipe Market: Regional OutlookFrom a geographical perspective, North America is a key region on account of the burgeoning shale gas exploration and production in the U.S., which has favored the drill pipe market and will continue doing so in the near future. Canada is another important market in the region. The Middle East and Africa are other crucial markets on account of the presence of a large number of reserves.In terms of growth, however, Asia Pacific, powered by China, will outshine all other regions. This will be mainly on account of the flexible and hassle-free regulatory scenario in the countries of China, India, Indonesia, and Singapore.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @Global Drill Pipe Market: Competitive AnalysisSome of the prominent players in the global drill pipe market are Superior Manufacturing, Tenaris S. A, Drill Pipe International, Oil Country Tubular Limited, Texas Steel Conversion, Inc., Hilong Group of Companies, TMK Group, DP Master, Vallourec S.A., Tejas Tubular Products, Inc., Jiangyin Long Bright, National Oilwell Varco.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 Pioglitazone HCL Market Top Key Players: BOC Sciences, Tocris, ChemSpider, Rxlist

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Qyresearchreports include new market research report Pioglitazone HCL to its huge collection of research reports.The global market for Pioglitazone HCL is the focus of analysis of the recently published report. Based on information sourced through extensive primary and secondary research, the report presents refined forecasts for the market. It studies the drivers and hurdles that the markets trajectory would encounter in the near future along with the opportunities and pitfalls that players might come across while trying to expand their operations and revenues. To do so, the market research study leverages analytical tools such as Porters Five Forces and SWOT Analysis.Global Pioglitazone HCL market competition by top manufacturers, with production, price, revenue (value) and market share for each manufacturer; the top players includingBOC SciencesLondon DrugsAbhilasha Pharma Pvt LtdTocrisChemSpiderRxlistBeijing TaiyangSigma AldrichHubei Jusheng TechnologyXiamen Hisunny ChemicalCangzhou Senary Chemical Science-tech...Get Sample Report of the Research Study at:Table of ContentsGlobal Pioglitazone HCL Market Research Report 20181 Pioglitazone HCL Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Pioglitazone HCL1.2 Pioglitazone HCL Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global Pioglitazone HCL Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category)(2013-2025)1.2.2 Global Pioglitazone HCL Production Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.2.3 15 mg1.2.4 30 mg1.2.5 45 mg1.3 Global Pioglitazone HCL Segment by Application1.3.1 Pioglitazone HCL Consumption (Sales) Comparison by Application (2013-2025)1.3.2 Industrial1.3.3 Pharmaceuticals1.3.4 Other2 Global Pioglitazone HCL Market Competition by Manufacturers2.1 Global Pioglitazone HCL Capacity, Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.1 Global Pioglitazone HCL Capacity and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.2 Global Pioglitazone HCL Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.2 Global Pioglitazone HCL Revenue and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.3 Global Pioglitazone HCL Average Price by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.4 Manufacturers Pioglitazone HCL Manufacturing Base Distribution, Sales Area and Product Type2.5 Pioglitazone HCL Market Competitive Situation and TrendsRead Complete Table of Content of the Report at:3 Global Pioglitazone HCL Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2013-2018)3.1 Global Pioglitazone HCL Capacity and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.2 Global Pioglitazone HCL Production and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.3 Global Pioglitazone HCL Revenue (Value) and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.4 Global Pioglitazone HCL Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.5 North America Pioglitazone HCL Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.6 Europe Pioglitazone HCL Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.7 China Pioglitazone HCL Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.8 Japan Pioglitazone HCL Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.9 Southeast Asia Pioglitazone HCL Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (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
Global Floor Cleaners Market 2018 Industry Overview and Forecast : Unilever, Clorox Co., Fuzheshi, Bluemoon

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Qyresearchreports include new market research report "Global Floor Cleaners Sales Market Report 2018" to its huge collection of research reports.In this report, the global Floor Cleaners 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.The report on the global market for Floor Cleaners is a mark of precision, accuracy, and cohesion. The researchers of the report have handled every area of study with immense deftness in order to stay closest to the actual fettle of the global market for Floor Cleaners. Moreover, the report succinctly caters to the needs of the readers by simplifying complex theories into understandable precepts and postulates. Decoding and decrypting the market dynamics has been the main focus of the report, thus, giving an easy-to-understand set of insights about the market. The researchers have responsibly elucidated all the factors that could fetch revenues for the global market for Floor Cleaners.For more info, Get a Free Sample Report :Geographically, this report split global into several key Regions, with sales (K MT), revenue (Million USD), market share and growth rate of Floor Cleaners for these regions, from 2013 to 2025 (forecast), coveringUnited StatesChinaEuropeJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaGlobal Floor Cleaners market competition by top manufacturers/players, with Floor Cleaners sales volume, Price (USD/MT), revenue (Million USD) and market share for each manufacturer/player; the top players includingReckitt & BenckiserS. C. Johnson & SonUnileverClorox Co.Procter & Gamble Co.Henkel KGAAKao CorporationChurch&DwightOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoWood Floor CleanerCeramic Tile Floor CleanerCompound Floor CleanerOn 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, includingHouseholdCommercialThe report can act as a source of key information about the global market for Floor Cleaners while providing guidelines for success to market players. The strategies that have fetched success for market players in the past have been explained in the report, which shall principally direct the new entrants into the market. Moreover, the business landscape of the global market for Floor Cleaners has been explained with a plush level of expertise within the report. Turbulence and unrest within the market could act as a major restraint, and hence, the report has given an extensive account of these obstructive elements of the market. The market players can use the information within the report to dodge the discrepancies that crop up in the market. Besides this, the segmentation of the market based on a wide set of parameters is also covered in the report.If you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.Obtain Table of Content @Table of Contents1 Floor Cleaners Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Floor Cleaners1.2 Classification of Floor Cleaners by Product Category1.2.1 Global Floor Cleaners Market Size (Sales) Comparison by Type (2013-2025)1.2.2 Global Floor Cleaners Market Size (Sales) Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.3 Global Floor Cleaners Market by Application/End Users1.4 Global Floor Cleaners Market by Region1.5 Global Market Size (Value and Volume) of Floor Cleaners (2013-2025)2 Global Floor Cleaners Competition by Players/Suppliers, Type and Application2.1 Global Floor Cleaners Market Competition by Players/Suppliers2.1.1 Global Floor Cleaners Sales and Market Share of Key Players/Suppliers (2013-2018)2.1.2 Global Floor Cleaners Revenue and Share by Players/Suppliers (2013-2018)2.2 Global Floor Cleaners (Volume and Value) by Type2.3 Global Floor Cleaners (Volume and Value) by Region2.4 Global Floor Cleaners (Volume) by Application3 United States Floor Cleaners (Volume, Value and Sales Price)3.1 United States Floor Cleaners Sales and Value (2013-2018)3.1.1 United States Floor Cleaners Sales and Growth Rate (2013-2018)3.1.2 United States Floor Cleaners Revenue and Growth Rate (2013-2018)3.1.3 United States Floor Cleaners Sales Price Trend (2013-2018)3.2 United States Floor Cleaners Sales Volume and Market Share by Players (2013-2018)3.3 United States Floor Cleaners Sales Volume and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)3.4 United States Floor Cleaners Sales Volume and Market Share by Application (2013-2018)Avail Discount @List of Tables and FiguresFigure Product Picture of Floor CleanersFigure Global Floor Cleaners Sales Volume Comparison (K MT) by Type (2013-2025)Figure Global Floor Cleaners Sales Volume Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 2017Figure Global Floor Cleaners Market Size (Million USD) by Regions (2013-2025)Figure United States Floor Cleaners Revenue (Million USD) and Growth Rate (2013-2025)Figure China Floor Cleaners Revenue (Million USD) and Growth Rate (2013-2025)Figure Europe Floor Cleaners Revenue (Million USD) and Growth Rate (2013-2025)Figure Japan Floor Cleaners Revenue (Million USD) and Growth Rate (2013-2025)Figure Southeast Asia Floor Cleaners 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
Cancer Gene Therapy Market - Potential Industry Outlook 2025

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Global Cancer Gene Therapy Market: SnapshotGene therapy is a massive and swiftly expanding field that could hold promising cures and treatments for several diseases and genetic problems. One of the more innovative segments in gene therapy falls under cancer treatment. It is one of the widely researched aspects of gene therapy, and thanks to increasing interest and investments from both government and private organizations, is showing a swift rate of development towards actually becoming a feasible and strong treatment alternative for cancer. These treatment options could be used to save a large number of lives of patients who are suffering from cancer, a disease that is causing one of the leading causes of deaths.Request Sample Copy of the Report @Of the several types of gene therapy approaches, the more promising ones include gene transfer, oncolytic virotherapy, and immunotherapy. The latest versions of vaccines being developed for cancer using gene therapy, are also expected to show an optimistic rate of development. These vaccines could potentially be used against malignant melanoma, prostate cancer, pancreatic cancer, and lung cancer, to name a few. Gene therapy involves modifying the genetic information in materials in order to effectively devise a cure.Global Cancer Gene Therapy Market: OverviewCancer results from the multiple mutations in a single cell that makes it to proliferate out of control. Cancer cells invade new cellular territories, have a high metabolic rate, and an altered shape. The various methods to treat cancers are surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. When the aforementioned therapies fail to achieve desired results, gene therapy is leveraged. Gene therapy involves the insertion of a functional gene, also known as therapeutic DNA, into the cells of a cancer patient to rectify the metabolism, to change or repair an acquired genetic abnormality, and to provide a new function to a cell. The two main types of gene therapy are germinal and somatic.Global Cancer Gene Therapy Market: Key TrendsMajorly promoting the global cancer gene therapy market is the swift pace of technological breakthroughs and the growing popularity of emerging genomic technologies like next-generation sequencing and high-density DNA microarrays. Additionally, the government support for these technologies is also slated to stoke growth in the near future. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), for example, supports screening programs for breast cancer control and cervical and colorectal cancers among low-income group women sans health insurance in the U.S.Request TOC of the Report @Besides, the rising occurrence of cancer worldwide is will substantially drive up demand for gene therapy in the years ahead. According to WHO, cases of cancer will likely touch US$15 million mark by the end of the decade.Global Cancer Gene Therapy Market: Market PotentialAt present, most of the cancer gene therapy products are in being tested. The market is predicted to grow once the trials bear results. An US pharmaceutical company named Kite Pharma, for example, recently revealed the results from the initial six months of the trial of a new gene therapy treatment called CAR-T cell therapy. It helped up patients own immune cells and has eliminated the disease from one third of terminal patients. Around 36 per cent of the 101 patients on the trial were still in complete remission at six months, and eight in 10 saw their cancer reduced by at least half during the study.Groundbreaking therapies such as this is slated to revolutionize the global cancer gene therapy market.At present, adenoviral vector is a popular oncology application because of its effective nuclear mechanism and low pathogenicity. Adenoviral vectors are leveraged in gene replacement approaches, suicide gene, gene-based immunotherapy, and syndicate gene with chemotherapy. Retroviral vector-mediated gene transfer also plays a key role in the gene therapy industry for it brings about the crucial benefit of changing the single stranded RNA genome into a double stranded DNA molecule, which eventually integrates into the target cell genome.Global Cancer Gene Therapy Market: Regional OutlookNorth America and Europe are key regions in the global cancer gene therapy market on account of a massive elderly population and significant technological progress in the region. In the years ahead, however, the market is Asia Pacific is forecasted to surge on account of supportive government initiatives, improving economy, bettering healthcare infrastructure, and growing thrust on research and development.Global Cancer Gene Therapy Market: Competitive AnalysisSome of the prominent players in the global cancer gene therapy market are Altor Bioscience Corporation, SiBiono., Shanghai Sunway Biotech company Limited, BioCancell, GlobeImmune, Inc.,Aduro Biotech, OncoGeneX, New Link Genetics., ZioPharm Oncology, and GENELUX. At present the market is led by small pioneering biotech firms who may eventually collaborate with prominent players for clinical development or commercialization of products.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
Optical Network Hardware Market 2018 Global Key Players: Huawei Technologies, Ciena Corporation, Alcatel Lucent, Infinera, Cisco systems, ADTRAN, ADVA Optical Networking, Ericsson, ZTE

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Market Research Future published a research report on Optical Network Hardware Market Research Report- Forecast 2023  Market Analysis, Scope, Stake, Progress, Trends and Forecast to 2023.Market Overview:The global Optical Network Hardware market is expected grow moderately and register a value CAGR of 13.85% over the forecast period. Some of the protuberant drivers supporting the growth of global Optical Network Hardware market are identified as, growing demand of fiber optic network for datacenters, advancement in Li-Fi wireless connectivity and increased FTTH broadband internet penetration. However, lack of infrastructure in developing and under-developed countries and higher cost of transition and maintenance from existing cable are some of the restraining factor for the Optical Network Hardware market.Optical network hardware Market is segmented by equipment and application. Based on equipment, Optical network hardware market is bifurcated into WDM and SONET/SDH. And on the basis of application, the market is segmented into broadband infrastructure, datacenter, fiber optic network and smart cities. The global market for broadband is increasing with the growing rate of internet and smartphone penetration. Broadband infrastructure comprise of wired technologies and wireless technologies, out of which FTTP (Fiber to the Premise) accounts for nearly 7% of global broadband subscriptions, thereby increasing the growth opportunity for optical network hardware market.Get Sample of Report @According to Market Research Future Analysis, Optical network hardware market has been valued at approx. USD 32 billion by the end of forecast period with 13% of CAGR during forecast period 2017 to 2023. Optical Network Hardware market, by equipment is segmented as WDM (Wavelength-division multiplexing) and SONET/SDH. The WDM accounted for the largest market share of 69% in 2017. The segment is anticipated to grow at value CAGR of 15% during the forecast period to reach USD 24 Billion by 2023. SONET/SDH is the second largest segment by equipment and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 10.45% during forecast period 2017-2023.Key Players:In competitive landscape, the report studies the key developments adopted by the companies between 2015 and 2017. Players in this market adopted various strategies to expand their footprint and augment their market share. The key strategies followed by most companies in the global Optical Network Hardware market were agreements and collaborations, mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures and expansion.Market Research Future (MRFR) recognizes the following companies as the key players in the Optical network hardware market  Huawei Technologies, Ciena Corporation, Alcatel Lucent, Infinera, Cisco systems, ADTRAN, ADVA Optical Networking, Ericsson, and ZTE Corporation.The study was conducted using an objective combination of primary and secondary information including inputs from key participants in the industry. The report contains a comprehensive market and vendor landscape in addition to a SWOT analysis of the key vendors.SegmentsOptical network hardware Market is segmented by equipment and application.Based on equipment, Optical network hardware market is bifurcated into WDM and SONET/SDH. And on the basis of application, the market is segmented into broadband infrastructure, datacenter, fiber optic network and smart cities. The global market for broadband is increasing with the growing rate of internet and smartphone penetration. Broadband infrastructure comprise of wired technologies and wireless technologies, out of which FTTP (Fiber to the Premise) accounts for nearly 7% of global broadband subscriptions, thereby increasing the growth opportunity for optical network hardware market.Regional AnalysisOptical network hardware market is categorized based on region and is comprised of North-America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Middle-East & Africa.North American region is dominating the market in the year 2017 and is expected to remain the leading region over the forecast period growing with 13% CAGR. The U.S. and Canada are expected to be the prominent regions of the North- America. Additionally, Asia-Pacific region is expected to be the fastest growing region mounting with 16.75% CAGR over the forecast period. The increasing investment by Asian government in building high capacity network, increasing trend of broadband network, and emerging datacenter market are some of the factors driving the growth of optical network in the region. Whereas, high installation cost of optical network is expected to hamper the market growth in Asia Pacific during forecast period 2017-2023.Get Complete Report @Intended Audience Raw material providers Component manufacturers Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) Integrated device manufacturers (IDMs) Original design manufacturers (ODMs) Assembly, testing, and packaging vendors Suppliers and distributors Government Technology investors Research institutesAbout 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
Global 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5) Market Report 2018-2022 by Process, Derivative and Application

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Qyresearchreports include new market research report Global 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5) Sales Market Report 2017 to its huge collection of research reports.The report on the global market for 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5) is a mark of precision, accuracy, and cohesion. The researchers of the report have handled every area of study with immense deftness in order to stay closest to the actual fettle of the global market for 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5).In this report, the global 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5) 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.Global 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5) market competition by top manufacturers/players, with 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5) sales volume, Price (USD/MT), revenue (Million USD) and market share for each manufacturer/player; the top players includingEastmanHangzhou Sage ChemicalGoodyear ChemicalShanDong Fine ChemicalDownload Free exclusive Sample of this report:The report can act as a source of key information about the global market for 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5) while providing guidelines for success to market players. The strategies that have fetched success for market players in the past have been explained in the report, which shall principally direct the new entrants into the market. Moreover, the business landscape of the global market for 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5) has been explained with a plush level of expertise within the report. Turbulence and unrest within the market could act as a major restraint, and hence, the report has given an extensive account of these obstructive elements of the market. The market players can use the information within the report to dodge the discrepancies that crop up in the market. Besides this, the segmentation of the market based on a wide set of parameters is also covered in the report.Table of ContentsGlobal 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5) Sales Market Report 20171 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5) Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5)1.2 Classification of 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5) by Product Category1.2.1 Global 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5) Market Size (Sales) Comparison by Type (2012-2022)1.2.2 Global 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5) Market Size (Sales) Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20161.2.3 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene 97%1.2.4 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene 99%1.2.5 Other1.3 Global 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5) Market by Application/End Users1.3.1 Global 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5) Sales (Volume) and Market Share Comparison by Application (2012-2022)1.3.2 Stabilizers1.3.3 Lubricants1.3.4 Hydroperoxides1.3.5 Other2 Global 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5) Competition by Players/Suppliers, Type and Application2.1 Global 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5) Market Competition by Players/Suppliers2.1.1 Global 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5) Sales and Market Share of Key Players/Suppliers (2012-2017)2.1.2 Global 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5) Revenue and Share by Players/Suppliers (2012-2017)2.2 Global 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5) (Volume and Value) by Type2.2.1 Global 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5) Sales and Market Share by Type (2012-2017)2.2.2 Global 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5) Revenue and Market Share by Type (2012-2017)2.3 Global 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5) (Volume and Value) by Region3 United States 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5) (Volume, Value and Sales Price)4 China 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5) (Volume, Value and Sales Price)5 Europe 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5) (Volume, Value and Sales Price)6 Japan 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5) (Volume, Value and Sales Price)7 Southeast Asia 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5) (Volume, Value and Sales Price)Read Complete Table of Content @List of Tables and FiguresFigure Product Picture of 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5)Figure Global 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5) Sales Volume Comparison (K MT) by Type (2012-2022)Figure Global 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5) Sales Volume Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 2016Figure 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene 97% Product PictureFigure 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene 99% Product PictureFigure Other Product PictureFigure Global 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5) Sales Comparison (K MT) by Application (2012-2022)Figure Global Sales Market Share of 1,4-Diisopropylbenzene (CAS 100-18-5) by Application in 2016Figure Stabilizers ExamplesFigure Lubricants ExamplesEnquiry For Discount Visit @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
A Staggering CAGR of 4.5% Projected for Tower Crane Market During 2017-2027

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Future Market Insights, in an upcoming report titled Tower Crane Market: Global Industry Analysis 2012-2016 and Opportunity Assessment 2017-2027 has assessed the global tower crane market for the decade ending in 2027. Increased demand for the building and construction segment is fuelling the tower crane market. The growth of different sectors such as real estate, civil infrastructure, and industrial construction should drive demand for energy efficient and more advanced tower cranes. The tower crane market is anticipated to record a moderate CAGR of 4.5% from 2017 to 2027.Product Type  Hammerhead Cranes have Immense Potential in Tower Crane Market : The hammerhead crane segment is the most lucrative in the tower crane market and key stakeholders are advised to focus their attention on this product type. The hammerhead segment is expected to witness the highest CAGR of 5.2% for the forecast period, making it crucial to target. The mobile tower segment has the second largest revenue share in the tower crane market but is likely to witness a notable decline in BPS; Capacity  5 -10 Ton Capacity Gains at Expense of Up to 5 Tons in Tower Crane Market :The 5-10 ton capacity tower cranes have a little over a fifth of the market share in the tower crane market in 2017 and this could grow to approx. a quarter by end 2027. The 5 -10 ton capacity crane segment and 10-20 ton segments are projected to gain share at the expense of all others in the tower crane market. An incremental dollar opportunity of roughly US$ 2 billion is waiting to be tapped in the 5  10 ton segment for the period.End-Use  Greatest Scope in Building & Construction and Civil Infrastructure : In terms of end use, the building & construction and Civil Infrastructure segments dominated the tower crane market and should remain so. High investment by both the public and private sector in building & construction across developed and emerging economies is responsible for the construction boom. The building & construction segment should exceed a volume of 62,000 units by end 2027, i.e.Request Sample Report @larger than the residential & commercial and industrial segments combined in the tower crane market; Design  Top Slewing Segment to Gain Substantial Share in Tower Crane Market : The top slewing segment is poised to witness a massive growth of 120 BPS from 2017 to 2027 and have a market share of just under 70% in the tower crane market. The top-slewing segment is sought after in the construction sector and should comprise half the volume by sales in the tower crane market at the end of 2017.Region  APEJ Rural to Urban Migration Requires Civil Infrastructure Development : The APEJ region had a market share greater than a third of the tower crane market in 2012 and is estimated to grow to more than 40% by 2027. Government initiatives such as Make in India have made APEJ countries an export hub. In addition to this, millions of people migrate annually from rural areas to urban ones in search of better job prospects. That is why there is a need for large-scale urban infrastructure projects, spurring the demand for tower cranes in this dynamic region.Request For Table Of Content @Companies profiled are Zoomlion Heavy Industry Science & Technology Company Ltd., XCMG, Liebherr, Terex Corporation, Manitowoc, Sany Group, Kroll Cranes, Linden Comansa, FMGru srl, Konecranes, Fushun Yongmao Construction Machinery, Raimondi, AMS Kranbau GmbH, WOLFFKRAN International, Sichuan Construction Machinery, HKTC, Wilbert, ELMAK Crane & Equipment, JASO group, and Anka Hoist USA; Takeaways : Key stakeholders need to ensure that the lifespan, capacity, and efficiency of their tower cranes exceeds industry expectations. The best way to do so is by way of continuous product innovation. Long term contracts with end users and expansion of construction activities can also be very helpful indeed. Working training at manufacturing facilities can go a long way in reducing accidental injuries and deaths.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 District Cooling Market Analysis, Size, Share, Growth Trends and Forecast till 2024

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A latest research report titled as District Cooling Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth Trends and Forecast 2016  2024 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 district cooling has gained a significant momentum in the recent past. The rising urbanization across the world, especially in Asia Pacific and the Middle East and Africa, has influenced the real estate sector, global, which consequently, is impacting the demand for district cooling to a great extent.The growing population in emerging Asian economies, such as China and India, leading to an increased consumption of building energy for heating and cooling needs, and the construction of high-rise buildings in Europe, North America, and the Middle East and Africa, which tends to decrease natural ventilation, thereby increasing the obstruction of buildings on each other, are likely to bring an upswing in the need for the mechanical means of air conditioning and, therefore, energy consumption.The rising primary energy consumption, peak electricity demand, and greenhouse gas emissions, are projected to increase the requirement of district cooling services as a sustainable energy solution, enabling local communities to gain the economic and environmental benefits of this technology over the next few years. Expanding at a CAGR of 5.10% between 2016 and 2024, the global market for district cooling is estimated to increase from US$11.1 bn in 2015 to US$17.3 bn by the end of 2024.Commercial Sector to Surface as Leading Application Area for District CoolingOn the basis of application, the global district cooling market is segmented into the residential, commercial, and the industrial sectors. The commercial sector has surfaced as the dominant application of district cooling across the world. In 2015, it led the overall market with a share of more than 50% and is anticipated to remain doing so over the next few years, thanks to the significant expansion in the commercial sector, worldwide. The growing emphasis on energy saving, together with the rising demands for BREEAM and LEED-certified buildings are likely to fuel the demand for district cooling in this sector in the near future.To Know The latest Trends and Insights Prevalent in This Market, Click the link below @Hotels, restaurants, malls, shops, hospitals, data centers, laboratories, and various other commercial facilities are the key application areas for district cooling in the commercial sector. The industrial sector, on the other hand, includes power generation plants, manufacturing plants, chemical plants, and several other industrial facilities. Individual houses, buildings, and connections of individual flats in buildings come under the residential sector.North America to Lose Ground to Middle East and AfricaThe Middle East and Africa, North America, Latin America, Asia Pacific and Europe are the key regional markets for district cooling across the world. North America led the global market in 2015 with a share of nearly 48%. Although the rising temperature levels, increased incentives for the adoption of renewables, and the efficient usage of energy resources are expected to boost the adoption of district cooling technology in this region, the North America market for district cooling is likely to lose ground to the market in the Middle East and Africa in the years to come, thanks to its massive potential for DC development due to its hot climatic conditions.Ramboll Group A/S, ADC Energy Systems LLC, Emirates Central Cooling Systems Corp., Emirates District Cooling LLC, Stellar Energy, Keppel DHCS Pte. Ltd., Emirates National Central Cooling Co. PJSC, Logstor A/S, Tekla Corp., Shinryo Corp., Dalkia, Veolia, Singapore Power (SP) Group, and Alfa Laval AB are some of the leading players in the global district cooling market.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:
North America Cannabis Market Size,Growth and Industry Trends Analysis by Top Key Players-Tweed Marijuana Inc, Affinor Growers., Cannabis Sativa Inc, Cannavest, Canna Brands Inc, Omnicanna Health Solutions

North America Cannabis Market, North America Cannabis Market size, North America Cannabis Market share, North America Cannabis

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North America Cannabis Market research report includes various topics like total market size, key market drivers, challenges, growth opportunities, Industry share, growth, demand, outlook etc. Furthermore it covers key market updates, the impact of regulations and technological updates in. The report addresses the need to stay updated in this competitive market conditions and this provides and comprehensive data for making strategies and decision so as to stimulate the market growth and profitability.North America Cannabis Market Poised to Grow at A CAGR Over 30% between 2016 and 2021 :Market Synopsis of Cannabis MarketThe report on North America cannabis market focuses primarily on the major markets in the region such as the U.S. Canada and Mexico. The market size of cannabis stood over USD 3.5 billion in 2015. It is expected to expand at a CAGR over 33% over the period of 2016 to 2021.Major Key Players :Some of the major players in North America Cannabis Market include Canadian Cannabis Corporation, Plandai Biotechnology., Tweed Marijuana Inc, Affinor Growers., Cannabis Sativa Inc, Cannavest, Canna Brands Inc, Omnicanna Health Solutions., Privateer Holdings, Inc, And Arena Pharmaceuticals, Inc.Key Findings:Among the derivatives marijuana accounts for the largest market share. The revenue of this segment stood more than USD 2.5 billion in 2015.The U.S. being the largest market in the region accounted for over 95% of the market size of the North America cannabis market.Rapid growth of cannabis and its applications in medicinal purposes has driven the growth in this market.Get Sample Copy of this Report @Objective Study of Cannabis Market:To provide detailed analysis of the cannabis market along with historic data from 2011 and forecast for the next 5 years of the various segments and sub-segments of the North America cannabis marketTo provide insights into the factors affecting global market growth.To analyze the cannabis market on the basis of factors such as price analysis, supply chain analysis, and Porters five force analysis.To provide country level analysis of the market with respect to the current market size and prospective by 2021To provide country level analysis of the market for segments by derivatives, applications of cannabis.To provide strategic profiling of key players in the market, comprehensively analyzing their core competencies, and drawing a competitive landscape for the marketRegional Analysis of Cannabis Market:Cannabis market in North America was over USD 3.5 billion in 2015. This industry was mainly operating in the black market; however with developments in the medical applications of the derivatives such as marijuana and hemp this market experienced significant growth over the past few years. Presently, the cannabis market is not a bare collaboration of the growers or producers of marijuana and hemp; it is rather a conglomerate of science and technology. The U.S. being the largest market in the region was valued over USD 3 billion and is anticipated to grow at a CAGR over 30% between 2016 and 2021.Regional CoverageNorth AmericaUSRest of North AmericaFull report Available on North America Cannabis Market report spread across 110 pages, profiling 15 companies and supported with tables and figures available @SegmentsNorth America Cannabis Market can be segmented as follows:Segmentation by Derivatives: Marijuana/Flowers And Industrial Hemp, Other Concentrates/Products which include keif, hash, hash oil etc.Segmentation by Applications type: on the basis of applications the market is segmented asApplications of marijuanaMedicinal applicationsRecreational applicationsOthersApplications of hemp.Food and baby careClothing and textileOthersAbout Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com
Thermoelectric Refrigerator Market Forecast, Trend Analysis & Competition Assessment till 2027

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As per the current market trends and the promising nature of the global thermoelectric refrigerator market, it can be estimated that the future holds positive outcomes. In order to provide a deep insight about the concerned market, Fact.MR would be publishing a resourceful analysis that will enclose knowledge about the regional market size, revenue and opportunity status. Readers will be offered the privilege to decode various facets of the market during the period 2018to 2027, together with the active access to secondary and primary research methodology. Furthermore, various segments of the market associated to product, application, end-user etc., would also be present in this intelligent research report. Quantitative data and qualitative information have been provided by the report, which tracks the growth of global thermoelectric refrigerator market in the foreseeable future. The report also provides an array of objective information on the way manufacturers of thermoelectric refrigerator (TER) are developing and implementing novel strategies for capturing untapped opportunities across the global landscape.Request TOC of this Report-Thermoelectric Refrigerators in Medical Science ApplicationsIn the field of medical science, refrigerators are employed to cool specimens or samples for the purpose of preservation. These include refrigeration units to store blood products such as blood plasma, and several other pharmaceutical or medical supplies such as vaccines. Reliability and hygiene are among top considerations while procuring refrigerators for the aforementioned applications.Problems incurred in transportation of these perishable pharmaceutical components has led to the adoption of portable refrigeration systems, where thermoelectric refrigerators have gained paramount importance. This niche concept of refrigeration enables leveraging waste electricity for efficient cooling, thereby playing a vital role in catering current fossil fuel depletion challenges.Combination of TER with Other Systems to Attain Better COPDevelopments in thermoelectric refrigeration system over the years has made technology a novel and better alternative to conventional refrigeration systems. Several research & development activities have been carried out by researchers worldwide for making enhancements in coefficient of performance (COP) of thermoelectric refrigerators. For example, researchers from the Universidad Publica de Navarra have developed a thermoelectric domestic refrigerator, with its cooling system comprising two equal thermoelectric components.Each of these components comprise a Peltier module with its cold side connected to two-phase & capillary lift thermosyphon (TPM), and the hot side to two-phase & natural convection thermosyphon (TSV). By leveraging a computational model for simulating and designing this thermoelectric refrigerator, and carrying out experimental optimization phase of thermosyphons, the electric power consumption was reduced. Moreover, incorporation of the two-phase thermosyphons in thermoelectric refrigerator enabled enhancement of COP by 66%. Such thermoelectric refrigerators can be of high use for consumers in developing countries where cost of electricity are relatively higher.To know more about Global Thermoelectric Refrigerator Market, visit -Development of Smart, Eco-Friendly Refrigerators for Rural AreasComplications related to the disposal of hydro chlorofluoro carbons (HCFCs) and chlorofluoro carbons (CFCs) have led adoption of conventional energy sources in refrigeration systems, in a bid to reduce environmental degradation. With abundant availability of solar energy, thermoelectricity is being leveraged for generating power for heating and cooling applications. Recently, researchers from SB Jain Institute of Technology, Management and Research (SBJITMR) have demonstrated an innovative, eco-friendly, and smart thermoelectric refrigeration system that is solar-powered.This Peltier-based solar-powered thermoelectric refrigerator is highly beneficial for consumers in rural areas, where electricity supply remains uncertain. This proposed thermoelectric refrigerator claims greater reliability than other portable refrigerators, and it caters to prime requirements of current world  eco-friendliness and cost-effectiveness. With the provision of temperature range control over the cooling unit, the solar-powered thermoelectric refrigerator can be employed across various applications that includeStorage of dairy products that require greater emphasis, Coastal areas, wherein marine edibles are transported to the marketplace, Medical sector for storing pharmaceutical and blood productsImplication of Thermoelectric Refrigeration Technology for Future of RefrigerationThermoelectric refrigeration has sought use in compact fridge units having minimum temperature of 4 degree celcius. However, opportunities exist for technological advancements to pick up pace, for implementation into both supermarket as well as home refrigeration equipment. Numerous benefits asoociated with thermoelectric refrigeration will drive their proliferation in the upcoming years. Some of these benefits includeLesser vibration and noise pollution compared to their compressor-dependent counterparts, Lower emission of harmful refrigerants, thereby resulting into reduced carbon footprintMore energy-efficient, as these are devoid of pumps or coolers for squeezing refrigerants and converting them into liquidPre-book Global Thermoelectric Refrigerator Market Forecast Report-About Fact.MRFact.MR is a fast-growing market research firm that offers the most comprehensive suite of syndicated and customized market research reports. We believe transformative intelligence can educate and inspire businesses to make smarter decisions. We know the limitations of the one-size-fits-all approach; thats why we publish multi-industry global, regional, and country-specific research reports.Contact UsFact.MRSuite 988427 Upper Pembroke Street,Dublin 2, IrelandTelephone: +353-1-6111-593Email: sales@factmr.com/Web:
Global Plastic Bottles & Containers Market by Manufacturers, Countries, Type and Application, Forecast to 2023

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"The Report Global Plastic Bottles & Containers Market 2018 by Manufacturers, Countries, Type and Application, Forecast to 2023 provides information on pricing, market analysis, shares, forecast, and company profiles for key industry participants. - MarketResearchReports.biz"About Plastic Bottles & Containers MarketThis report focuses on the Plastic Bottles & Containers 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 Segment by Manufacturers, this report coversALPLAAmcorPlastipak PackagingGraham PackagingRPC GroupBerry PlasticsGreiner PackagingAlpha PackagingZijiangVisyZhongfuXLZTPolycon IndustriesKW PlasticsBoxmore PackagingGet Sample copy of this Report @Market Segment by Regions, regional analysis coversNorth America (United States, Canada and Mexico)Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)South America (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia)Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa)Market Segment by Type, coversPETPPHDPELDPEOthersMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided intoBeverages and FoodPharmaceuticalFMCGOthersRequest for TOC @There are 15 Chapters to deeply display the global Plastic Bottles & Containers market.Chapter 1, to describe Plastic Bottles & Containers Introduction, product scope, market overview, market opportunities, market risk, market driving force;Chapter 2, to analyze the top manufacturers of Plastic Bottles & Containers, with sales, revenue, and price of Plastic Bottles & Containers, in 2016 and 2017;Chapter 3, to display the competitive situation among the top manufacturers, with sales, revenue and market share in 2016 and 2017;Chapter 4, to show the global market by regions, with sales, revenue and market share of Plastic Bottles & Containers, for each region, from 2013 to 2018;Chapter 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9, to analyze the key regions, with sales, revenue and market share by key countries in these regions;Chapter 10 and 11, to show the market by type and application, with sales market share and growth rate by type, application, from 2013 to 2018;Chapter 12, Plastic Bottles & Containers market forecast, by regions, type and application, with sales and revenue, from 2018 to 2023;Chapter 13, 14 and 15, to describe Plastic Bottles & Containers sales channel, distributors, traders, dealers, Research Findings and Conclusion, appendix and data sourceView Report @Table of Contents1 Market Overview1.1 Plastic Bottles & Containers Introduction1.2 Market Analysis by Type1.2.1 PET1.2.2 PP1.2.3 HDPE1.2.4 LDPE1.2.5 Others1.3 Market Analysis by Applications1.3.1 Beverages and Food1.3.2 Pharmaceutical1.3.3 FMCG1.3.4 Others1.4 Market Analysis by Regions1.4.1 North America (United States, Canada and Mexico)1.4.1.1 United States Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.1.2 Canada Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.1.3 Mexico Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2 Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)1.4.2.1 Germany Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.2 France Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.3 UK Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.4 Russia Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.5 Italy Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3 Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)1.4.3.1 China Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.2 Japan Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.3 Korea Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.4 India Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.5 Southeast Asia Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4 South America, Middle East and Africa1.4.4.1 Brazil Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.2 Egypt Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.3 Saudi Arabia Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.4 South Africa Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.5 Nigeria Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.5 Market Dynamics1.5.1 Market Opportunities1.5.2 Market Risk1.5.3 Market Driving Force2 Manufacturers Profiles2.1 ALPLA2.1.1 Business Overview2.1.2 Plastic Bottles & Containers Type and Applications2.1.2.1 Type 12.1.2.2 Type 22.1.3 ALPLA Plastic Bottles & Containers Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.2 Amcor2.2.1 Business Overview2.2.2 Plastic Bottles & Containers Type and Applications2.2.2.1 Type 12.2.2.2 Type 22.2.3 Amcor Plastic Bottles & Containers Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.3 Plastipak Packaging2.3.1 Business Overview2.3.2 Plastic Bottles & Containers Type and Applications2.3.2.1 Type 12.3.2.2 Type 22.3.3 Plastipak Packaging Plastic Bottles & Containers Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.4 Graham Packaging2.4.1 Business Overview2.4.2 Plastic Bottles & Containers Type and Applications2.4.2.1 Type 12.4.2.2 Type 22.4.3 Graham Packaging Plastic Bottles & Containers Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.5 RPC Group2.5.1 Business Overview2.5.2 Plastic Bottles & Containers Type and Applications2.5.2.1 Type 12.5.2.2 Type 22.5.3 RPC Group Plastic Bottles & Containers Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.6 Berry Plastics2.6.1 Business Overview2.6.2 Plastic Bottles & Containers Type and Applications2.6.2.1 Type 12.6.2.2 Type 22.6.3 Berry Plastics Plastic Bottles & Containers Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.7 Greiner Packaging2.7.1 Business Overview2.7.2 Plastic Bottles & Containers Type and Applications2.7.2.1 Type 12.7.2.2 Type 22.7.3 Greiner Packaging Plastic Bottles & Containers Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.8 Alpha Packaging2.8.1 Business Overview2.8.2 Plastic Bottles & Containers Type and Applications2.8.2.1 Type 12.8.2.2 Type 22.8.3 Alpha Packaging Plastic Bottles & Containers Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.9 Zijiang2.9.1 Business Overview2.9.2 Plastic Bottles & Containers Type and Applications2.9.2.1 Type 12.9.2.2 Type 22.9.3 Zijiang Plastic Bottles & Containers Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.10 Visy2.10.1 Business Overview2.10.2 Plastic Bottles & Containers Type and Applications2.10.2.1 Type 12.10.2.2 Type 22.10.3 Visy Plastic Bottles & Containers Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.11 Zhongfu2.11.1 Business Overview2.11.2 Plastic Bottles & Containers Type and Applications2.11.2.1 Type 12.11.2.2 Type 22.11.3 Zhongfu Plastic Bottles & Containers Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.12 XLZT2.12.1 Business Overview2.12.2 Plastic Bottles & Containers Type and Applications2.12.2.1 Type 12.12.2.2 Type 22.12.3 XLZT Plastic Bottles & Containers Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.13 Polycon Industries2.13.1 Business Overview2.13.2 Plastic Bottles & Containers Type and Applications2.13.2.1 Type 12.13.2.2 Type 22.13.3 Polycon Industries Plastic Bottles & Containers Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.14 KW Plastics2.14.1 Business Overview2.14.2 Plastic Bottles & Containers Type and Applications2.14.2.1 Type 12.14.2.2 Type 22.14.3 KW Plastics Plastic Bottles & Containers Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.15 Boxmore Packaging2.15.1 Business Overview2.15.2 Plastic Bottles & Containers Type and Applications2.15.2.1 Type 12.15.2.2 Type 22.15.3 Boxmore Packaging Plastic Bottles & Containers Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)3 Global Plastic Bottles & Containers Sales, Revenue, Market Share and Competition by Manufacturer (2016-2017)3.1 Global Plastic Bottles & Containers Sales and Market Share by Manufacturer (2016-2017)3.2 Global Plastic Bottles & Containers Revenue and Market Share by Manufacturer (2016-2017)3.3 Market Concentration Rate3.3.1 Top 3 Plastic Bottles & Containers Manufacturer Market Share3.3.2 Top 6 Plastic Bottles & Containers Manufacturer Market Share3.4 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
False Eyelashes Market 2018|Top Key Players:-Revlon, Inc,Mac Cosmetics ,Ulta Beauty,Kiss Products Inc,Ardell International

False Eyelashes Market, False Eyelashes Market size, False Eyelashes Market share, False Eyelashes Market trends, False Eyelas

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False Eyelashes Market is estimated to spot a considerable growth in CAGR from 2018 to 2025. This report gives an in-depth assessment of current False Eyelashes key market drivers, market size and trends and Global False Eyelashes opportunities, challenges, key market segments and technological developments.Market IntroductionFalse Eyelashes are defined as artificial eyelashes which are worn to define the eyes and to thicken the upper eyelashes. The false eyelashes are worn with the help of a special glue and can be self-applied. The product majorly is categorized into two types: Strip lashes and Individual lashes. Strip lashes are worn directly across the eyelashes while the individual eyelashes needs to be applied each separately. False eyelashes are available all across the globe in a huge variety of designs, colors, lengths and material-type. The growing trend of highlighting the lash line to make it look more defined is one of the major factor influencing its market.Market ForecastThe global market for false eyelashes has witnessed continued demand during the last few years and is projected to reach USD 1,330.56 million by 2023. Increase in demand of false eyelashes in cosmetics and fashion industries is likely to drive the market globally. Increasing fashion awareness and increase in disposable income has a positive impact on its market growth.Get Sample Copy of this Report @Competitive analysis:-The major key players in False Eyelashes market areRevlon, Inc. (U.S.)Mac Cosmetics (U.S.)Ulta Beauty, Inc. (U.S.)Kiss Products Inc. (U.S.)Ardell International, Inc. (U.S.)Shu Uemura Cosmetics, Inc. (Japan)Esqido Lashes (Canada)Synthetic hair based false eyelashes will witness high growth rate (~4.42%). By 2023, synthetic hair based false eyelashes among the various other raw materials is projected to grow the most due to its high consumers preference and convenience in production. Human hair based false eyelashes share will experience highest growth in the market. Fur and feather based lashes will experience fair growth rate based on changing trends and increasing demand for unique products.By Downstream analysis-By 2023, synthetic hair sourced false eyelashes will reach more than USD 500 million. The easy availability and convenience processing for production is supporting the growth of synthetic hair based false eyelashes in the market. Individual flare lashes will dominate amongst the various product-types and will account for a major share in the market.Machine made production holds a lions share in the production means and it is projected to grow at a CAGR of 4.42% by 2023. However, semi-handmade lashes will witness a high growth rate (~4.39%) during forecast period 2017 to 2023. By 2023, sale of false eyelashes through cosmetic stores is projected to hold a major share and is projected to have a significant growth rate backed up by consumers purchase convenience.Regional AnalysisAsia-Pacific will continue to dominate the false eyelashes market with more than 50% market share and it is projected to reach more than USD 600 million with CAGR of 4.02% by 2023. North America will witness the highest growth rate (~5.14%) during forecast period 2017 to 2023. Europe region will witness the growth of 4.50% in False Eyelashes market for the same period. Growing popularity of eye cosmetics and increasing beauty awareness amongst the female population is driving the market growth of false eyelashes globally. Rise in sale through various distribution channel is playing a key role in the false eyelashes market growth from last few years.Market Segmentation-Global False Eyelashes market is segmented by Raw Material, Product-Type, Production, Distribution Channel and Region.Full report Available on False Eyelashes Market report spread across 127 pages, profiling 15 companies and supported with tables and figures available @Study Objectives of False Eyelashes Market Forecast to 2023Detailed analysis for individual micro and macro markets for False EyelashesTo estimate market size by Raw Material, Product-Type, Production, Distribution Channel and RegionTo understand the supply and demand dynamics of False EyelashesTo provide region level market analysis and future outlook for U.S., U.K., China, France, and South-East AsiaCompany profiling of major players & competitive positioning for the false eyelashes marketValue chain analysis and supply chain analysis of False EyelashesAnalysis of historical market trends, and technologies, and current government regulatory requirements related to false eyelashes marketTarget AudienceFalse Eyelashes manufacturersCosmetics industriesRetailers and wholesalersTraders, importers and exportersAbout Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com
Global Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Market by Manufacturers, Countries, Type and Application, Forecast to 2023

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"The Report Global Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Market 2018 by Manufacturers, Countries, Type and Application, Forecast to 2023 provides information on pricing, market analysis, shares, forecast, and company profiles for key industry participants. - MarketResearchReports.biz"About Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) MarketA plastic pail is a type of container made from plastic that is employed in carrying out various applications ranging from construction, housing, shipping, to food and beverages. It is also popularly known as a plastic bucket. It plays quite an important role in transporting a wide range of fluids and liquid materials.Get Sample copy of this Report @Scope of the Report:This report focuses on the Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) 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 Segment by Manufacturers, this report coversBWAYRPCJokey GroupGreifBERRY PLASTICPro-design GroupM&M IndustriesEncore PlasticsIndustrial Container ServicesHitech GroupRuijie PlasticsPriority PlasticsPro-westernParagon ManufacturingHofmann PlasticsCL SmithXingguang IndustrialLeaktiteNCI PackagingParekhplastQianyuan PlasticZhonglianbangRequest for TOC @Market Segment by Regions, regional analysis coversNorth America (United States, Canada and Mexico)Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)South America (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia)Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa)Market Segment by Type, coversHDPEPPMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided intoFood and BeverageConstructionChemical IndustriesHouseholdOtherThere are 15 Chapters to deeply display the global Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) market.Chapter 1, to describe Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Introduction, product scope, market overview, market opportunities, market risk, market driving force;Chapter 2, to analyze the top manufacturers of Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket), with sales, revenue, and price of Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket), in 2016 and 2017;Chapter 3, to display the competitive situation among the top manufacturers, with sales, revenue and market share in 2016 and 2017;Chapter 4, to show the global market by regions, with sales, revenue and market share of Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket), for each region, from 2013 to 2018;Chapter 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9, to analyze the key regions, with sales, revenue and market share by key countries in these regions;Chapter 10 and 11, to show the market by type and application, with sales market share and growth rate by type, application, from 2013 to 2018;Chapter 12, Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) market forecast, by regions, type and application, with sales and revenue, from 2018 to 2023;Chapter 13, 14 and 15, to describe Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) sales channel, distributors, traders, dealers, Research Findings and Conclusion, appendix and data sourceView Report @Table of Contents1 Market Overview1.1 Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Introduction1.2 Market Analysis by Type1.2.1 HDPE1.2.2 PP1.3 Market Analysis by Applications1.3.1 Food and Beverage1.3.2 Construction1.3.3 Chemical Industries1.3.4 Household1.3.5 Other1.4 Market Analysis by Regions1.4.1 North America (United States, Canada and Mexico)1.4.1.1 United States Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.1.2 Canada Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.1.3 Mexico Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2 Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)1.4.2.1 Germany Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.2 France Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.3 UK Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.4 Russia Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.5 Italy Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3 Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)1.4.3.1 China Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.2 Japan Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.3 Korea Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.4 India Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.5 Southeast Asia Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4 South America, Middle East and Africa1.4.4.1 Brazil Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.2 Egypt Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.3 Saudi Arabia Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.4 South Africa Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.5 Nigeria Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.5 Market Dynamics1.5.1 Market Opportunities1.5.2 Market Risk1.5.3 Market Driving Force2 Manufacturers Profiles2.1 BWAY2.1.1 Business Overview2.1.2 Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Type and Applications2.1.2.1 Type 12.1.2.2 Type 22.1.3 BWAY Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.2 RPC2.2.1 Business Overview2.2.2 Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Type and Applications2.2.2.1 Type 12.2.2.2 Type 22.2.3 RPC Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.3 Jokey Group2.3.1 Business Overview2.3.2 Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Type and Applications2.3.2.1 Type 12.3.2.2 Type 22.3.3 Jokey Group Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.4 Greif2.4.1 Business Overview2.4.2 Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Type and Applications2.4.2.1 Type 12.4.2.2 Type 22.4.3 Greif Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.5 BERRY PLASTIC2.5.1 Business Overview2.5.2 Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Type and Applications2.5.2.1 Type 12.5.2.2 Type 22.5.3 BERRY PLASTIC Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.6 Pro-design Group2.6.1 Business Overview2.6.2 Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Type and Applications2.6.2.1 Type 12.6.2.2 Type 22.6.3 Pro-design Group Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.7 M&M Industries2.7.1 Business Overview2.7.2 Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Type and Applications2.7.2.1 Type 12.7.2.2 Type 22.7.3 M&M Industries Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.8 Encore Plastics2.8.1 Business Overview2.8.2 Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Type and Applications2.8.2.1 Type 12.8.2.2 Type 22.8.3 Encore Plastics Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.9 Industrial Container Services2.9.1 Business Overview2.9.2 Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Type and Applications2.9.2.1 Type 12.9.2.2 Type 22.9.3 Industrial Container Services Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.10 Hitech Group2.10.1 Business Overview2.10.2 Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Type and Applications2.10.2.1 Type 12.10.2.2 Type 22.10.3 Hitech Group Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.11 Ruijie Plastics2.11.1 Business Overview2.11.2 Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Type and Applications2.11.2.1 Type 12.11.2.2 Type 22.11.3 Ruijie Plastics Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.12 Priority Plastics2.12.1 Business Overview2.12.2 Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Type and Applications2.12.2.1 Type 12.12.2.2 Type 22.12.3 Priority Plastics Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.13 Pro-western2.13.1 Business Overview2.13.2 Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Type and Applications2.13.2.1 Type 12.13.2.2 Type 22.13.3 Pro-western Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.14 Paragon Manufacturing2.14.1 Business Overview2.14.2 Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Type and Applications2.14.2.1 Type 12.14.2.2 Type 22.14.3 Paragon Manufacturing Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.15 Hofmann Plastics2.15.1 Business Overview2.15.2 Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Type and Applications2.15.2.1 Type 12.15.2.2 Type 22.15.3 Hofmann Plastics Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.16 CL Smith2.16.1 Business Overview2.16.2 Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Type and Applications2.16.2.1 Type 12.16.2.2 Type 22.16.3 CL Smith Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.17 Xingguang Industrial2.17.1 Business Overview2.17.2 Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Type and Applications2.17.2.1 Type 12.17.2.2 Type 22.17.3 Xingguang Industrial Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.18 Leaktite2.18.1 Business Overview2.18.2 Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Type and Applications2.18.2.1 Type 12.18.2.2 Type 22.18.3 Leaktite Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.19 NCI Packaging2.19.1 Business Overview2.19.2 Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Type and Applications2.19.2.1 Type 12.19.2.2 Type 22.19.3 NCI Packaging Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.20 Parekhplast2.20.1 Business Overview2.20.2 Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Type and Applications2.20.2.1 Type 12.20.2.2 Type 22.20.3 Parekhplast Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.21 Qianyuan Plastic2.21.1 Business Overview2.2.2 Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Type and Applications2.21.2.1 Type 12.21.2.2 Type 22.21.3 Qianyuan Plastic Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.22 Zhonglianbang2.22.1 Business Overview2.22.2 Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Type and Applications2.22.2.1 Type 12.22.2.2 Type 22.22.3 Zhonglianbang Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)3 Global Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Sales, Revenue, Market Share and Competition by Manufacturer (2016-2017)3.1 Global Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Sales and Market Share by Manufacturer (2016-2017)3.2 Global Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Revenue and Market Share by Manufacturer (2016-2017)3.3 Market Concentration Rate3.3.1 Top 3 Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Manufacturer Market Share3.3.2 Top 6 Plastic Pails (Plastic Bucket) Manufacturer Market Share3.4 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 Power Line Communication Systems Market By players, Regions, Product Type, Consumers Forecast 2017-2022

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"The Report Global Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems Market 2018 by Manufacturers, Countries, Type and Application, Forecast to 2023 provides information on pricing, market analysis, shares, forecast, and company profiles for key industry participants. - MarketResearchReports.biz"About Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems MarketPower Line Communication (PLC) is a communication technology that enables sending data over existing power cables. This means that, with just power cables running to an electronic device (for example) one can both power it up and at the same time control/retrieve data from it in a half-duplex manner.Get Sample copy of this Report @Scope of the Report:This report focuses on the Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems 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 Segment by Manufacturers, this report coversABBGeneral ElectricSiemensAMETEKTexas InstrumentsMaxim IntegratedDevoloCypress SemiconductorST MicroelectronicsPanasonicMicrochipQualcomm AtherosTP-Link TechnologiesNETGEARNXP Semiconductor NVSigma DesignsZyxel CommunicationsRenesas Electronics CorporationRequest for TOC @Market Segment by Regions, regional analysis coversNorth America (United States, Canada and Mexico)Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)South America (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia)Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa)Market Segment by Type, coversNarrowband PLCBroadband PLCMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided intoCommercialResidentialSmart GridAutomotiveOtherThere are 15 Chapters to deeply display the global Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems market.Chapter 1, to describe Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems Introduction, product scope, market overview, market opportunities, market risk, market driving force;Chapter 2, to analyze the top manufacturers of Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems, with sales, revenue, and price of Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems, in 2016 and 2017;Chapter 3, to display the competitive situation among the top manufacturers, with sales, revenue and market share in 2016 and 2017;Chapter 4, to show the global market by regions, with sales, revenue and market share of Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems, for each region, from 2013 to 2018;Chapter 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9, to analyze the key regions, with sales, revenue and market share by key countries in these regions;Chapter 10 and 11, to show the market by type and application, with sales market share and growth rate by type, application, from 2013 to 2018;Chapter 12, Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems market forecast, by regions, type and application, with sales and revenue, from 2018 to 2023;Chapter 13, 14 and 15, to describe Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems sales channel, distributors, traders, dealers, Research Findings and Conclusion, appendix and data sourceView Report @Table of Contents1 Market Overview1.1 Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems Introduction1.2 Market Analysis by Type1.2.1 Narrowband PLC1.2.2 Broadband PLC1.3 Market Analysis by Applications1.3.1 Commercial1.3.2 Residential1.3.3 Smart Grid1.3.4 Automotive1.3.5 Other1.4 Market Analysis by Regions1.4.1 North America (United States, Canada and Mexico)1.4.1.1 United States Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.1.2 Canada Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.1.3 Mexico Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2 Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)1.4.2.1 Germany Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.2 France Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.3 UK Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.4 Russia Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.5 Italy Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3 Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)1.4.3.1 China Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.2 Japan Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.3 Korea Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.4 India Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.5 Southeast Asia Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4 South America, Middle East and Africa1.4.4.1 Brazil Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.2 Egypt Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.3 Saudi Arabia Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.4 South Africa Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.5 Nigeria Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.5 Market Dynamics1.5.1 Market Opportunities1.5.2 Market Risk1.5.3 Market Driving Force2 Manufacturers Profiles2.1 ABB2.1.1 Business Overview2.1.2 Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems Type and Applications2.1.2.1 Type 12.1.2.2 Type 22.1.3 ABB Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.2 General Electric2.2.1 Business Overview2.2.2 Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems Type and Applications2.2.2.1 Type 12.2.2.2 Type 22.2.3 General Electric Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.3 Siemens2.3.1 Business Overview2.3.2 Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems Type and Applications2.3.2.1 Type 12.3.2.2 Type 22.3.3 Siemens Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.4 AMETEK2.4.1 Business Overview2.4.2 Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems Type and Applications2.4.2.1 Type 12.4.2.2 Type 22.4.3 AMETEK Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.5 Texas Instruments2.5.1 Business Overview2.5.2 Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems Type and Applications2.5.2.1 Type 12.5.2.2 Type 22.5.3 Texas Instruments Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.6 Maxim Integrated2.6.1 Business Overview2.6.2 Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems Type and Applications2.6.2.1 Type 12.6.2.2 Type 22.6.3 Maxim Integrated Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.7 Devolo2.7.1 Business Overview2.7.2 Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems Type and Applications2.7.2.1 Type 12.7.2.2 Type 22.7.3 Devolo Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.8 Cypress Semiconductor2.8.1 Business Overview2.8.2 Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems Type and Applications2.8.2.1 Type 12.8.2.2 Type 22.8.3 Cypress Semiconductor Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.9 ST Microelectronics2.9.1 Business Overview2.9.2 Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems Type and Applications2.9.2.1 Type 12.9.2.2 Type 22.9.3 ST Microelectronics Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.10 Panasonic2.10.1 Business Overview2.10.2 Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems Type and Applications2.10.2.1 Type 12.10.2.2 Type 22.10.3 Panasonic Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.11 Microchip2.11.1 Business Overview2.11.2 Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems Type and Applications2.11.2.1 Type 12.11.2.2 Type 22.11.3 Microchip Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.12 Qualcomm Atheros2.12.1 Business Overview2.12.2 Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems Type and Applications2.12.2.1 Type 12.12.2.2 Type 22.12.3 Qualcomm Atheros Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.13 TP-Link Technologies2.13.1 Business Overview2.13.2 Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems Type and Applications2.13.2.1 Type 12.13.2.2 Type 22.13.3 TP-Link Technologies Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.14 NETGEAR2.14.1 Business Overview2.14.2 Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems Type and Applications2.14.2.1 Type 12.14.2.2 Type 22.14.3 NETGEAR Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.15 NXP Semiconductor NV2.15.1 Business Overview2.15.2 Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems Type and Applications2.15.2.1 Type 12.15.2.2 Type 22.15.3 NXP Semiconductor NV Power Line Communication (Plc) Systems Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)Buy 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 Programmable Power Supply Market by Manufacturers, Countries, Type and Application, Forecast to 2023

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"The Report Global Programmable Power Supply Market 2018 by Manufacturers, Countries, Type and Application, Forecast to 2023 provides information on pricing, market analysis, shares, forecast, and company profiles for key industry participants. - MarketResearchReports.biz"About Programmable Power Supply MarketThis report studies the Programmable Power Supply market, Programmable power supplies are sometimes called "system" power supplies, as they are often used as part of a computer-operated system for testing or production. A programmable Production power supplys Production voltage can be set (programmed) by the user.Get Sample copy of this Report @Scope of the Report:This report focuses on the Programmable Power Supply 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 Segment by Manufacturers, this report coversAMETEK Programmable PowerTDK-LambdaTEKTRONIX, INC.CHROMA ATE INC.Keysight TechnologiesMagna-Power Electronics, Inc.National Instruments CorporationB&K PrecisionEA-ELEKTRO-AUTOMATIKXP PowerGW InstekRigol TechnologiesKepco IncAcopian Technical CompanyPuissance PlusVersatile PowerEPS Stromversorgung GmbHRequest for TOC @Market Segment by Regions, regional analysis coversNorth America (United States, Canada and Mexico)Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)South America (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia)Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa)Market Segment by Type, coversSingle-Output TypeDual-Output TypeMultiple-Output TypeMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided intoSemiconductor FabricationAutomotive Electronics TestIndustrial ProductionUniversity & LaboratoryMedicalOthersThere are 15 Chapters to deeply display the global Programmable Power Supply market.Chapter 1, to describe Programmable Power Supply Introduction, product scope, market overview, market opportunities, market risk, market driving force;Chapter 2, to analyze the top manufacturers of Programmable Power Supply, with sales, revenue, and price of Programmable Power Supply, in 2016 and 2017;Chapter 3, to display the competitive situation among the top manufacturers, with sales, revenue and market share in 2016 and 2017;Chapter 4, to show the global market by regions, with sales, revenue and market share of Programmable Power Supply, for each region, from 2013 to 2018;Chapter 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9, to analyze the key regions, with sales, revenue and market share by key countries in these regions;Chapter 10 and 11, to show the market by type and application, with sales market share and growth rate by type, application, from 2013 to 2018;Chapter 12, Programmable Power Supply market forecast, by regions, type and application, with sales and revenue, from 2018 to 2023;Chapter 13, 14 and 15, to describe Programmable Power Supply sales channel, distributors, traders, dealers, Research Findings and Conclusion, appendix and data sourceView Report @Table of Contents1 Market Overview1.1 Programmable Power Supply Introduction1.2 Market Analysis by Type1.2.1 Single-Output Type1.2.2 Dual-Output Type1.2.3 Multiple-Output Type1.3 Market Analysis by Applications1.3.1 Semiconductor Fabrication1.3.2 Automotive Electronics Test1.3.3 Industrial Production1.3.4 University & Laboratory1.3.5 Medical1.3.6 Others1.4 Market Analysis by Regions1.4.1 North America (United States, Canada and Mexico)1.4.1.1 United States Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.1.2 Canada Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.1.3 Mexico Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2 Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)1.4.2.1 Germany Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.2 France Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.3 UK Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.4 Russia Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.5 Italy Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3 Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)1.4.3.1 China Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.2 Japan Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.3 Korea Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.4 India Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.5 Southeast Asia Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4 South America, Middle East and Africa1.4.4.1 Brazil Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.2 Egypt Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.3 Saudi Arabia Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.4 South Africa Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.5 Nigeria Market Status and Outlook (2013-2023)1.5 Market Dynamics1.5.1 Market Opportunities1.5.2 Market Risk1.5.3 Market Driving Force2 Manufacturers Profiles2.1 AMETEK Programmable Power2.1.1 Business Overview2.1.2 Programmable Power Supply Type and Applications2.1.2.1 Type 12.1.2.2 Type 22.1.3 AMETEK Programmable Power Programmable Power Supply Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.2 TDK-Lambda2.2.1 Business Overview2.2.2 Programmable Power Supply Type and Applications2.2.2.1 Type 12.2.2.2 Type 22.2.3 TDK-Lambda Programmable Power Supply Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.3 TEKTRONIX, INC.2.3.1 Business Overview2.3.2 Programmable Power Supply Type and Applications2.3.2.1 Type 12.3.2.2 Type 22.3.3 TEKTRONIX, INC. Programmable Power Supply Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.4 CHROMA ATE INC.2.4.1 Business Overview2.4.2 Programmable Power Supply Type and Applications2.4.2.1 Type 12.4.2.2 Type 22.4.3 CHROMA ATE INC. Programmable Power Supply Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.5 Keysight Technologies2.5.1 Business Overview2.5.2 Programmable Power Supply Type and Applications2.5.2.1 Type 12.5.2.2 Type 22.5.3 Keysight Technologies Programmable Power Supply Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.6 Magna-Power Electronics, Inc.2.6.1 Business Overview2.6.2 Programmable Power Supply Type and Applications2.6.2.1 Type 12.6.2.2 Type 22.6.3 Magna-Power Electronics, Inc. Programmable Power Supply Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.7 National Instruments Corporation2.7.1 Business Overview2.7.2 Programmable Power Supply Type and Applications2.7.2.1 Type 12.7.2.2 Type 22.7.3 National Instruments Corporation Programmable Power Supply Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.8 B&K Precision2.8.1 Business Overview2.8.2 Programmable Power Supply Type and Applications2.8.2.1 Type 12.8.2.2 Type 22.8.3 B&K Precision Programmable Power Supply Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.9 EA-ELEKTRO-AUTOMATIK2.9.1 Business Overview2.9.2 Programmable Power Supply Type and Applications2.9.2.1 Type 12.9.2.2 Type 22.9.3 EA-ELEKTRO-AUTOMATIK Programmable Power Supply Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.10 XP Power2.10.1 Business Overview2.10.2 Programmable Power Supply Type and Applications2.10.2.1 Type 12.10.2.2 Type 22.10.3 XP Power Programmable Power Supply Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.11 GW Instek2.11.1 Business Overview2.11.2 Programmable Power Supply Type and Applications2.11.2.1 Type 12.11.2.2 Type 22.11.3 GW Instek Programmable Power Supply Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.12 Rigol Technologies2.12.1 Business Overview2.12.2 Programmable Power Supply Type and Applications2.12.2.1 Type 12.12.2.2 Type 22.12.3 Rigol Technologies Programmable Power Supply Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.13 Kepco Inc2.13.1 Business Overview2.13.2 Programmable Power Supply Type and Applications2.13.2.1 Type 12.13.2.2 Type 22.13.3 Kepco Inc Programmable Power Supply Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.14 Acopian Technical Company2.14.1 Business Overview2.14.2 Programmable Power Supply Type and Applications2.14.2.1 Type 12.14.2.2 Type 22.14.3 Acopian Technical Company Programmable Power Supply Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.15 Puissance Plus2.15.1 Business Overview2.15.2 Programmable Power Supply Type and Applications2.15.2.1 Type 12.15.2.2 Type 22.15.3 Puissance Plus Programmable Power Supply Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.16 Versatile Power2.16.1 Business Overview2.16.2 Programmable Power Supply Type and Applications2.16.2.1 Type 12.16.2.2 Type 22.16.3 Versatile Power Programmable Power Supply Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.17 EPS Stromversorgung GmbH2.17.1 Business Overview2.17.2 Programmable Power Supply Type and Applications2.17.2.1 Type 12.17.2.2 Type 22.17.3 EPS Stromversorgung GmbH Programmable Power Supply Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)Buy 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 Cold Plasma Market Increasing Demand for Product Type, End-user, Top Key Players, Upcoming opportunities with Impressive CAGR of 16.4% And Forecast to 2025

Global Cold Plasma Market

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Competitive Analysis: Global Cold Plasma MarketThe global cold plasma market is highly fragmented and is based on new product launches and clinical results of products. Hence the major players have used various strategies such as new product launches, clinical trials, market initiatives, high expense on research and development, agreements, joint ventures, partnerships, acquisitions, and others to increase their footprints in this market. The report includes market shares of cold plasma market for global, Europe, North America, Asia Pacific and South America.Market development can be fundamentally ascribed to the advantages of cold plasma, for example, its condition benevolence; advancements in material generation; developing sustenance wellbeing concerns; developments in icy plasma innovation; and the expanding utilization of chilly plasma in meat and poultry bundling cleaning. In any case, the constrained commercialization of this innovation and the high capital ventures required are relied upon to control the development of this market.This Report Consists of  No of pages: 350, No of Figures: 60, No of Tables: 220Global Cold Plasma Market, By Regime Type (Atmospheric Pressure, Low Pressure), By Technology (Direct Treatment, Electrode Contact, Remote Treatment), By Industry (Electronics and Semiconductor, Food & Agriculture, Medical, Polymer and Plastic, Textile, Others), By Geography (North America, South America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa)- Industry Trends and Forecast to 2025Market AnalysisGlobal Cold Plasma Market is expected to reach USD 3,156.1 million by 2025 from USD 943.1 million in 2017, at a CAGR of 16.4% 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.Download PDF Sample Report @TABLE OF CONTENTS1) Introduction2) MARKET SEGMENTATION3) Market Overview Drivers Restraints OPPORTUNITIES CHALLENGES4) EXECUTIVE SUMMARY5) premium insights6) Global Cold Plasma Market, by Regime Type7) Global Cold Plasma Market, by Technology8) Global Cold Plasma Market, By Industry9) Global Cold Plasma Market, by Geography Overview North America Europe Asia-Pacific south America Middle East and Africa10) Global Cold Plasma Market, Competitive Analysis11) company profilesGet Detailed TOC @Frequently Asked Questions? What will the market size be in 2025? What are the key factors driving the global market? What are the challenges to market growth? Who are the key players in the market? What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the key players? What will be the growth rate in 2025? Which strategies are used by top players in the Global Cold Plasma Market?To Avail 10% Discount On This Report Mail us on @ sopan.gedam@databridgemarketresearch.comTop Competitors of Market: Global Cold Plasma Market Plasma Air Systems Corporation, ADTEC Plasma Technology Co., Ltd., SVCS Process Innovation s.r.o., Hiden Analytical Ltd., Enercon Industries Corporation, Nordson Corporation, Bovie Medical Corporation, Plasmatreat GmbH, P2I Limited, Ionitech Ltd., Aerox B.V., Neoplas Tools GmbH, Tantec A/S, Wacker Chemie AG, Igniss Energy, Mamel Ltd, Dr.-Ing. K. Busch GmbH, terraplasma medical GmbH, Europlasma NV, Analytik Jena AG, Henniker Plasma Treatment, Solayer GmbH, Technofer S.R.L., Vetaphone A/SMarket Segmentation: Global Cold Plasma MarketOn the basis of regime type global cold plasma market is segmented into low pressure and atmospheric pressureIn 2018, atmospheric pressure is estimated to rule with 62.2% shares and will cross USD 1,984.7 million by 2025, rising at the highest CAGR of 16.6%.On the basis of technology global cold plasma market is segmented into remote treatment, direct treatment and electrode contactIn 2018, direct treatment segment is estimated to rule with 63.3% shares and will cross USD 2,022.0 million by 2025, rising at the CAGR of 16.6%. However, remote treatment segment is expected to grow at the highest CAGR of 17.0% in the forecast period, and is expected to reach USD 486.9 million in 2025 from USD 139.8 million in 2017.On the basis of industry global cold plasma market is segmented into textile, polymer and plastic, electronics and semiconductor, food & agriculture and medicalIn 2018, electronics and semiconductor segment is estimated to rule with 27.6% shares and will cross USD 903.5 million by 2025, rising at the highest CAGR of 17.0%. The electronics and semiconductor is further sub segmented into coating, etching and thin film depositions. The polymer and plastic is further sub segmented into surface treatment, printing, adhesion and others. The textile is further sub segmented into finishing, dyeing/printing, sterilization and others. The food & agriculture is further sub segmented into packaging decontamination, food surface decontamination, wastewater treatment and seed germination. The medical is further sub segmented into wound healing, blood coagulation, dentistry, cancer treatment, dermatology and surgeries.Based on geography, the market is segmented into 5 geographical regions, North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, South America and Middle East and AfricaGet a Call from Our Analyst -Market Drivers and Restraints: Global Cold Plasma Market Environment-Friendliness and Other Uses of Cold Plasma Techniques Food Safety Worries Great Capital Investment Development of End-User Industries in Emerging Nations Existence of Small PlayersVisit 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: +1-888-387-2818Email: sopan.gedam@databridgemarketresearch.com
Automated Radiosynthesis Modules Market Prophesy 2025

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Global Automated Radiosynthesis Modules Market: SnapshotThe global automated radiosynthesis modules market is forecasted to be a million-dollar opportunity for industry participants expected to be encouraged by a colossal demand in the recent years. End users of automated radiosynthesis modules could ensure an improved performance in their therapy monitoring and diagnostic activities. With the help of these modules, end users could also gain a wide scope for the customization of radiotracers. Besides this, the application of automated radiosynthesis modules is anticipated to be strengthened by their easy use and simple set up. Available as automated equipment, radiosynthesis modules could be engaged for the production and formulation of radiotracers for decentralized settings.Request Sample Copy of the Report @Manufacturers of automated radiosynthesis modules are predicted to be advantaged by additional income by catering to the requirements of new markets through the diversification of their product offerings. The demand for automated radiosynthesis modules could be fortified by radiolabeled compound manufacturers keen on adopting them and the rise of new era nuclear medicines. The alleged global mandate on the employment of automated radiosynthesis modules to protect operators with reduced radiation exposure in a clinical setting is envisioned to bode well for the market. Furthermore, the high accuracy offered by automated radiosynthesis modules could create new opportunities in the market in view of increased adoption.The benefits of producing quality radiopharmaceuticals for multiple applications and receiving a high yield are foreseen to significantly increase the growth of the global automated radiosynthesis modules market. Funding and grants provided by governments around the world could be another factor supporting the market growth.Global Automated Radiosynthesis Modules Market: OverviewThe world automated radiosynthesis modules market is prognosticated to gain traction with the heavy adoption of PET (positron emission tomography) and SPECT (single-photon emission computed tomography) imaging and widespread of chronic diseases. Automated radiosynthesis modules can be employed to improve the scope of customization of radiotracers to help with the therapy and diagnostic monitoring performance for end users. They are the breakthrough evolution of the production and formulation of radiotracers in decentralized settings.Request TOC of the Report @Global Automated Radiosynthesis Modules Market: Key TrendsThe buyers of automated radiosynthesis modules are significantly impressed by their encouraging capacity to create radiotracers for a variety of applications. This has increasingly augmented the possibility of introducing newer opportunities in the world automated radiosynthesis modules market for the manufacturers to take hold of. Howbeit, end users could be shy of adopting the modules on account of their premium cost. Nonetheless, the lavish spending by government as well as private bodies on grants for the promotion of automated radiosynthesis modules is envisaged to compensate for the slow sale predicted.The usage of tomographic imaging diagnostics methods can be dramatically enhanced with the incorporation of PET and SPECT techniques in radiopharmaceuticals. As a result, complex diagnostic processes of chronic diseases can be utterly simplified with high-resolution quality imaging.Global Automated Radiosynthesis Modules Market: Market PotentialThe fully automated radiosynthesis modules market has attained a large focus in the recent time with vendors such as RadioMedix, Inc. making their presence known in key regions such as the U.S. In 2016, RadioMedix successful installed All in One (AIO) and SmartMedix (mini AIO) synthesizers in various research and clinical sites in the U.S. such as Wake Forest University, University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins University, and Excel Diagnostic Clinic. Powered by Trasis S.A., the automated modules of RadioMedix are good manufacturing practice (GMP) compliant and allow for efficient clinical dose preparation and research process optimization and product development.There has been a high adoption of radiopharmaceuticals witnessed as cancer treatments worldwide include radiotherapy as a viable option. In this regard, the global automated radiosynthesis modules market is expected to entertain a parallel pattern of growth as the radiopharmaceuticals market grows in size. The reason for this parallel growth is the expansive implementation of automated radiosynthesis module in the manufacture of radiopharmaceuticals.A 2016 research published in one of the SpringerOpen journals has revealed the versatile nature of AIO synthesis module in the preparation of six varied F-labeled radiopharmaceuticals used for performing PET imaging studies.Global Automated Radiosynthesis Modules Market: Regional OutlookWhile the growth in the international automated radiosynthesis modules market is predominantly attributed to the traces of tangible developments in Asia Pacific and Europe, North America is anticipated to secure a titanic share in terms of volume. North America is foretold to accommodate a concentrated share of a major part of the automated radiosynthesis modules market.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @Nevertheless, the honor of posting growth at a stallion pace could be placed into the hands of Asia Pacific for the forecast period. Although the higher price of automated radiosynthesis modules in Asia Pacific will benefit vendors, the buyers in this market could be turned off. However, the binge development of automated radiosynthesis modules and their pressing need in various momentous clinical and research trials are predicted to answer for the faster growth in Asia Pacific.Global Automated Radiosynthesis Modules Market: Competitive AnalysisAs explained previously, since North America and Asia Pacific are researched as crucial grounds to start afresh or extend automated radiosynthesis modules portfolio, key vendors in the global market will look to capitalize on these regions.Players such as Eckert & Ziegler Group, Posi-Med LLC, Raytest Isotopenmessgerte GmbH, Sofie Biosciences, Scintomics GmbH, and Sumitomo Corp could be eying the grants and funding provided by private and government institutions. Top players such as IBA Radiopharma Solutions, Siemens Healthcare, and GE Healthcare are envisioned to leave no stone unturned and leverage every opportunity to expand their product portfolio worldwide.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 Automotive Exterior Trim Market by Manufacturers, Regions, Type and Application, Forecast to 2023

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"The Report Global (North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, South America, Middle East and Africa) Automotive Exterior Trim Market 2018 Forecast to 2023 provides information on pricing, market analysis, shares, forecast, and company profiles for key industry participants. - MarketResearchReports.biz"About Automotive Exterior Trim MarketCar trim refers to the items that can be added to the exterior, and interior, of an automobile to increase its appeal. There are several types of car trim. Some are used to protect the car from unwanted damage that can be caused by surrounding vehicles in a parking lot, while others are simply for aesthetics.Get Sample copy of this Report @Scope of the Report:This report focuses on the Automotive Exterior Trim 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 coversMagnaCooper StandardPlastic OmniumToyoda GoseiMINTH GroupYFPOHutchinsonNishikawa RubberSaarGummiKinugawaCIE AutomotiveGuizhou GuihangDura AutomotiveZhejiang XiantongRequest for TOC @Market Segment by Regions, regional analysis coversNorth America (United States, Canada and Mexico)Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)South America (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia etc.)Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa)Market Segment by Type, coversPlastic TrimMetal TrimMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided intoPassenger VehicleCommercial VehicleThere are 15 Chapters to deeply display the global Automotive Exterior Trim market.Chapter 1, to describe Automotive Exterior Trim Introduction, product scope, market overview, market opportunities, market risk, market driving force;Chapter 2, to analyze the top manufacturers of Automotive Exterior Trim, with sales, revenue, and price of Automotive Exterior Trim, in 2016 and 2017;Chapter 3, to display the competitive situation among the top manufacturers, with sales, revenue and market share in 2016 and 2017;Chapter 4, to show the global market by regions, with sales, revenue and market share of Automotive Exterior Trim, for each region, from 2013 to 2018;Chapter 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9, to analyze the market by countries, by type, by application and by manufacturers, with sales, revenue and market share by key countries in these regions;Chapter 10 and 11, to show the market by type and application, with sales market share and growth rate by type, application, from 2013 to 2018;Chapter 12, Automotive Exterior Trim market forecast, by regions, type and application, with sales and revenue, from 2018 to 2023;Chapter 13, 14 and 15, to describe Automotive Exterior Trim sales channel, distributors, traders, dealers, Research Findings and Conclusion, appendix and data sourceView Report @Table of Contents1 Market Overview1.1 Automotive Exterior Trim Introduction1.2 Market Analysis by Type1.2.1 Plastic Trim1.2.2 Metal Trim1.3 Market Analysis by Applications1.3.1 Passenger Vehicle1.3.2 Commercial Vehicle1.4 Market Analysis by Regions1.4.1 North America (United States, Canada and Mexico)1.4.1.1 United States Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.1.2 Canada Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.1.3 Mexico Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2 Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)1.4.2.1 Germany Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.2 France Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.3 UK Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.4 Russia Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.5 Italy Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3 Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)1.4.3.1 China Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.2 Japan Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.3 Korea Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.4 India Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.5 Southeast Asia Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4 South America, Middle East and Africa1.4.4.1 Brazil Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.2 Egypt Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.3 Saudi Arabia Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.4 South Africa Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.5 Nigeria Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.5 Market Dynamics1.5.1 Market Opportunities1.5.2 Market Risk1.5.3 Market Driving Force2 Manufacturers Profiles2.1 Magna2.1.1 Business Overview2.1.2 Automotive Exterior Trim Type and Applications2.1.2.1 Type 12.1.2.2 Type 22.1.3 Magna Automotive Exterior Trim Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.2 Cooper Standard2.2.1 Business Overview2.2.2 Automotive Exterior Trim Type and Applications2.2.2.1 Type 12.2.2.2 Type 22.2.3 Cooper Standard Automotive Exterior Trim Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.3 Plastic Omnium2.3.1 Business Overview2.3.2 Automotive Exterior Trim Type and Applications2.3.2.1 Type 12.3.2.2 Type 22.3.3 Plastic Omnium Automotive Exterior Trim Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.4 Toyoda Gosei2.4.1 Business Overview2.4.2 Automotive Exterior Trim Type and Applications2.4.2.1 Type 12.4.2.2 Type 22.4.3 Toyoda Gosei Automotive Exterior Trim Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.5 MINTH Group2.5.1 Business Overview2.5.2 Automotive Exterior Trim Type and Applications2.5.2.1 Type 12.5.2.2 Type 22.5.3 MINTH Group Automotive Exterior Trim Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.6 YFPO2.6.1 Business Overview2.6.2 Automotive Exterior Trim Type and Applications2.6.2.1 Type 12.6.2.2 Type 22.6.3 YFPO Automotive Exterior Trim Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.7 Hutchinson2.7.1 Business Overview2.7.2 Automotive Exterior Trim Type and Applications2.7.2.1 Type 12.7.2.2 Type 22.7.3 Hutchinson Automotive Exterior Trim Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.8 Nishikawa Rubber2.8.1 Business Overview2.8.2 Automotive Exterior Trim Type and Applications2.8.2.1 Type 12.8.2.2 Type 22.8.3 Nishikawa Rubber Automotive Exterior Trim Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.9 SaarGummi2.9.1 Business Overview2.9.2 Automotive Exterior Trim Type and Applications2.9.2.1 Type 12.9.2.2 Type 22.9.3 SaarGummi Automotive Exterior Trim Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.10 Kinugawa2.10.1 Business Overview2.10.2 Automotive Exterior Trim Type and Applications2.10.2.1 Type 12.10.2.2 Type 22.10.3 Kinugawa Automotive Exterior Trim Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.11 CIE Automotive2.11.1 Business Overview2.11.2 Automotive Exterior Trim Type and Applications2.11.2.1 Type 12.11.2.2 Type 22.11.3 CIE Automotive Automotive Exterior Trim Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.12 Guizhou Guihang2.12.1 Business Overview2.12.2 Automotive Exterior Trim Type and Applications2.12.2.1 Type 12.12.2.2 Type 22.12.3 Guizhou Guihang Automotive Exterior Trim Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.13 Dura Automotive2.13.1 Business Overview2.13.2 Automotive Exterior Trim Type and Applications2.13.2.1 Type 12.13.2.2 Type 22.13.3 Dura Automotive Automotive Exterior Trim Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.14 Zhejiang Xiantong2.14.1 Business Overview2.14.2 Automotive Exterior Trim Type and Applications2.14.2.1 Type 12.14.2.2 Type 22.14.3 Zhejiang Xiantong Automotive Exterior Trim Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)3 Global Automotive Exterior Trim Market Competition, by Manufacturer3.1 Global Automotive Exterior Trim Sales and Market Share by Manufacturer (2016-2017)3.2 Global Automotive Exterior Trim Revenue and Market Share by Manufacturer (2016-2017)3.3 Global Automotive Exterior Trim Price by Manufacturer (2016-2017)3.4 Market Concentration Rate3.4.1 Top 3 Automotive Exterior Trim Manufacturer Market Share in 20173.4.2 Top 5 Automotive Exterior Trim Manufacturer Market Share in 20173.5 Market Competition Trend4 Global Automotive Exterior Trim Market Analysis by Regions4.1 Global Automotive Exterior Trim Sales, Revenue and Market Share by Regions4.1.1 Global Automotive Exterior Trim Sales by Regions (2013-2018)4.1.2 Global Automotive Exterior Trim Revenue by Regions (2013-2018)4.2 North America Automotive Exterior Trim Sales, Revenue and Growth Rate (2013-2018)4.3 Europe Automotive Exterior Trim Sales, Revenue and Growth Rate (2013-2018)4.4 Asia-Pacific Automotive Exterior Trim Sales, Revenue and Growth Rate (2013-2018)4.5 South America Automotive Exterior Trim Sales, Revenue and Growth Rate (2013-2018)4.6 Middle East and Africa Automotive Exterior Trim Sales, Revenue and Growth Rate (2013-2018)5 North America Automotive Exterior Trim by Countries, Type, Application and Manufacturers5.1 North America Automotive Exterior Trim Sales, Revenue and Market Share by Countries5.1.1 North America Automotive Exterior Trim Sales by Countries (2013-2018)5.1.2 North America Automotive Exterior Trim Revenue by Countries (2013-2018)5.1.3 United States Automotive Exterior Trim Sales and Growth Rate (2013-2018)5.1.4 Canada Automotive Exterior Trim Sales and Growth Rate (2013-2018)5.1.5 Mexico Automotive Exterior Trim Sales and Growth Rate (2013-2018)5.2 North America Automotive Exterior Trim Sales and Revenue (Value) by Manufacturers (2016-2017)5.2.1 North America Automotive Exterior Trim Sales by Manufacturers (2016-2017)5.2.2 North America Automotive Exterior Trim Revenue by Manufacturers (2016-2017)5.3 North America Automotive Exterior Trim Sales, Revenue and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)5.3.1 North America Automotive Exterior Trim Sales and Sales Share by Type (2013-2018)5.3.2 North America Automotive Exterior Trim Revenue and Revenue Share by Type (2013-2018)5.4 North America Automotive Exterior Trim Sales, Revenue and Market Share by Application (2013-2018)5.4.1 North America Automotive Exterior Trim Sales and Sales Share by Application (2013-2018)Buy Now @About usMarketResearchReports.biz is the most comprehensive collection of market research reports. 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Silver Based Antimicrobials 2018 Global Industry Key Players  BASF , Thomson Research Associates , Toagosei , Microban , Ishizuka Glass Group Market Analysis And Forecast To 2025

Global Silver Based Antimicrobials Market

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Global Silver Based Antimicrobials MarketIn this report, the global Silver Based Antimicrobials 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.Global Silver Based Antimicrobials market competition by top manufacturers, with production, price, revenue (value) and market share for each manufacturer; the top players includingBASFThomson Research AssociatesToagoseiMicrobanIshizuka Glass GroupSanitizedSinanen ZeomicAddmasterKoa GlassSciessentMillikenDowChenzhou City Jingui SilverPure BioscienceNafurHangzhou Wan Jing New MaterialWeilaiJinda Nano TechRequest a Sample Report @Geographically, this report is segmented into several key Regions, with production, consumption, revenue (million USD), market share and growth rate of Silver Based Antimicrobials in these regions, from 2013 to 2025 (forecast), coveringNorth AmericaEuropeChinaJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoSilicate CarriersPhosphate CarriersTitanium Dioxide CarriersGlass CarriersOn 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, includingTextileCoatingPlasticCosmetic & MedicalTable of Contents-Key Points CoveredGlobal Silver Based Antimicrobials Market Research Report 20181 Silver Based Antimicrobials Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Silver Based Antimicrobials1.2 Silver Based Antimicrobials Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global Silver Based Antimicrobials Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category)(2013-2025)1.2.2 Global Silver Based Antimicrobials Production Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.2.3 Silicate Carriers1.2.4 Phosphate Carriers1.2.5 Titanium Dioxide Carriers1.2.6 Glass Carriers1.3 Global Silver Based Antimicrobials Segment by Application1.3.1 Silver Based Antimicrobials Consumption (Sales) Comparison by Application (2013-2025)1.3.2 Textile1.3.3 Coating1.3.4 Plastic1.3.5 Cosmetic & Medical1.4 Global Silver Based Antimicrobials Market by Region (2013-2025)1.4.1 Global Silver Based Antimicrobials 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 Silver Based Antimicrobials (2013-2025)1.5.1 Global Silver Based Antimicrobials Revenue Status and Outlook (2013-2025)1.5.2 Global Silver Based Antimicrobials Capacity, Production Status and Outlook (2013-2025)..7 Global Silver Based Antimicrobials Manufacturers Profiles/Analysis7.1 BASF7.1.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.1.2 Silver Based Antimicrobials Product Category, Application and Specification7.1.2.1 Product A7.1.2.2 Product B7.1.3 BASF Silver Based Antimicrobials Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.1.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.2 Thomson Research Associates7.2.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.2.2 Silver Based Antimicrobials Product Category, Application and Specification7.2.2.1 Product A7.2.2.2 Product B7.2.3 Thomson Research Associates Silver Based Antimicrobials Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.2.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.3 Toagosei7.3.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.3.2 Silver Based Antimicrobials Product Category, Application and Specification7.3.2.1 Product A7.3.2.2 Product B7.3.3 Toagosei Silver Based Antimicrobials Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.3.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.4 Microban7.4.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.4.2 Silver Based Antimicrobials Product Category, Application and Specification7.4.2.1 Product A7.4.2.2 Product B7.4.3 Microban Silver Based Antimicrobials Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.4.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.5 Ishizuka Glass Group7.5.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.5.2 Silver Based Antimicrobials Product Category, Application and Specification7.5.2.1 Product A7.5.2.2 Product B7.5.3 Ishizuka Glass Group Silver Based Antimicrobials Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.5.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.6 Sanitized7.6.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.6.2 Silver Based Antimicrobials Product Category, Application and Specification7.6.2.1 Product A7.6.2.2 Product B7.6.3 Sanitized Silver Based Antimicrobials Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.6.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.7 Sinanen Zeomic7.7.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.7.2 Silver Based Antimicrobials Product Category, Application and Specification7.7.2.1 Product A7.7.2.2 Product B7.7.3 Sinanen Zeomic Silver Based Antimicrobials Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.7.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.8 Addmaster7.8.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.8.2 Silver Based Antimicrobials Product Category, Application and Specification7.8.2.1 Product A7.8.2.2 Product B7.8.3 Addmaster Silver Based Antimicrobials Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.8.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.9 Koa Glass7.9.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.9.2 Silver Based Antimicrobials Product Category, Application and Specification7.9.2.1 Product A7.9.2.2 Product B7.9.3 Koa Glass Silver Based Antimicrobials Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.9.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.10 Sciessent7.10.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.10.2 Silver Based Antimicrobials Product Category, Application and Specification7.10.2.1 Product A7.10.2.2 Product B7.10.3 Sciessent Silver Based Antimicrobials Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.10.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.11 Milliken7.12 Dow7.13 Chenzhou City Jingui Silver7.14 Pure Bioscience7.15 Nafur7.16 Hangzhou Wan Jing New Material7.17 Weilai7.18 Jinda Nano TechContinued..Complete Report Details @Wise Guy Reports Is Part Of The Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. And Offers Premium Progressive Statistical Surveying, Market Research Reports, Analysis & Forecast Data For Industries And Governments Around The Globe. Wise Guy Reports Features An Exhaustive List Of Market Research Reports From Hundreds Of Publishers Worldwide. We Boast A Database Spanning Virtually Every Market Category And An Even More Comprehensive Collection Of Market Research Reports Under These Categories And Sub-Categories.Wise Guy Research Consultants Pvt LtdOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, HadapsarPune - 411028Maharashtra, India
Global LTE Equipment Market to Reach US$ 104.49 bn by 2025

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A new research report titled, LTE Equipment Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2017  2025 has been added to the comprehensive repository of Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE). According to the report, the global LTE equipment market is likely to grow at a CAGR of over 21.4% during the assessment period 2017-2025, and reach a valuation of US$ 104.49 Bn.To Get Sample Report Click Here:LTE (long term evolution), marketed as 4G LTE, is a wireless communication standard for high-speed data used by data terminals and mobile phones. LTE equipment can be defined as the various components required for the effective operation of LTE network and its protocols. LTE offers a superior user experience for next-generation mobile broadband. LTE networks are constantly evolving and is paving the way to 5G with the introduction of new capabilities. The requirement of improved data speed, demand for bandwidth and increasing data consuming applications and services are driving the demand for LTE networks.The sudden and massive rise in availability of internet-enabled devices such as smartphones, and tablets are also driving the growth of LTE equipment market. Moreover, telecom operators and government organizations are investing in 4G networks, which is responsible for the growth of LTE equipment market. Furthermore, growing demand for high-bandwidth data services by consumers is compelling telecom operators to provide efficient services at lower costs.Commercial Sector to Prove to be More LucrativeThe global LTE equipment market has been segmented on the basis of component, technology, application and geography. On the basis of component, the market is categorized into LTE infrastructure and LTE testing Equipment. LTE infrastructure has large market share due to increasing deployments of base stations by the players to increase network coverage area. LTE base station is one of the major component of LTE network. LTE equipment are deployed in overall end-to-end network infrastructure.Access the Report and full TOC @On the basis of application, the market has been classified into commercial and government segment. The commercial segment holds large share as the businesses utilizes LTE equipment for safety infrastructure, remote diagnostics and for simplified network management. There is rise in adoption of public safety LTE which is contributing in the growth of LTE equipment in government sector. On the basis of technology, the market is segment into TD-LTE, LTE-FDD and hybrid. LTE-TDD provides strong device support and wireless technology adoption. Due to faster adoption of TD-LTE by the network providers, the TD-LTE segment of LTE equipment is expected to grow at a faster rate during the forecast period.Global LTE Equipment Market: Scope of the ReportThis research study on the global LTE equipment market provides a detailed analysis of various component and applications of LTE equipment available in the market. Based on the component, the market is divided into LTE infrastructure and LTE testing equipment. The various types of application of the LTE equipment includes commercial and government sector. Based on technology, the market has been segmented into TD-LTE, FDD-LTE and hybrid. The report includes a comprehensive coverage of the underlying economic development factors under the key trends analysis section.The report aims to provide in-depth analysis of the global LTE equipment market across geographical regions, which are further segmented to country level analysis. North America region is segmented into the U.S., Canada and Rest of North America. Similarly, under Europe, analysis for UK, Germany, France and Rest of Europe LTE equipment market has been provided. Asia Pacific section includes analysis of the China, India and Rest of APAC LTE equipment market. Analysis of LTE equipment market for GCC countries, South Africa, and Rest of Middle East and Africa has been provided under MEA region, whereas under South America, LTE equipment markets across Brazil and Rest of South America have been analyzed. The revenue estimates for these regions and countries is also included in the report. The report also provides key trends analysis for all the regions and different policies and regulations implemented in countries across these regions.Global LTE Equipment Market: Competitive DynamicsThe report also highlights the competition matrix of the LTE equipment market, positioning all the major players according to their geographic presence, market position, key recent developments, and segment growth. The report provides recommendations for various new entrants, small and medium and large market players in the global LTE equipment market.Under the company profiles section, the report provides an overview of the players operating in the market, the strategies deployed by them to gain competitive advantage, annual revenue generated by them in the historical years and their relevant business segment revenue. The key players profiled in this report include, Ericsson AB, Fujitsu Limited, Huawei Technologies, Motorola, Nokia Corporation, NEC Corporation, AT&T Inc., Sprint Corporation, Telrad Networks and ZTE Corporation.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.Contact UsState Tower90, State StreetSuite 700Albany, NY  12207 United StatesTelephone: +1-518-730-0559Email: sales@mrrse.comWebsite:
Global Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Market by Manufacturers, Regions, Type and Application, Forecast to 2023

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"The Report Global (North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, South America, Middle East and Africa) Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Market 2018 Forecast to 2023 provides information on pricing, market analysis, shares, forecast, and company profiles for key industry participants. - MarketResearchReports.biz"About Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) MarketBulk Molding Compound (BMC) is a thermoset plastic resin blend of various inert fillers, fiber reinforcement, catalysts, stabilizers, and pigments that form a viscous, 'puttylike' injection molding compound. Bulk molding compound is highly filled and reinforced with short fibers. Typical applications include demanding electrical applications, corrosion resistant needs, appliance, automotive, and transit.Get Sample copy of this Report @Scope of the Report:This report focuses on the Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) 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 coversIDIA.Schulman (BMCI)SDKLorenzPolyntTencateHuayuan GroupMar-BalYueqing SMC&BMCPolmixChangzhou FondaKyoceraJiangshi CompositeJinchuangyi ElectricAstarChangzhou HaoyuanCuyahoga PlasticsPlencoCMEDonghai CompositeMolymer GroupAomingweiShimadaWah Hong IndFoshan RipengRequest for TOC @Market Segment by Regions, regional analysis coversNorth America (United States, Canada and Mexico)Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)South America (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia etc.)Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa)Market Segment by Type, coversGeneral BMCElectrical BMCOthersMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided intoElectrical industryAutomotive industryOthersThere are 15 Chapters to deeply display the global Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) market.Chapter 1, to describe Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Introduction, product scope, market overview, market opportunities, market risk, market driving force;Chapter 2, to analyze the top manufacturers of Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC), with sales, revenue, and price of Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC), in 2016 and 2017;Chapter 3, to display the competitive situation among the top manufacturers, with sales, revenue and market share in 2016 and 2017;Chapter 4, to show the global market by regions, with sales, revenue and market share of Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC), for each region, from 2013 to 2018;Chapter 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9, to analyze the market by countries, by type, by application and by manufacturers, with sales, revenue and market share by key countries in these regions;Chapter 10 and 11, to show the market by type and application, with sales market share and growth rate by type, application, from 2013 to 2018;Chapter 12, Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) market forecast, by regions, type and application, with sales and revenue, from 2018 to 2023;Chapter 13, 14 and 15, to describe Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) sales channel, distributors, traders, dealers, Research Findings and Conclusion, appendix and data sourceView Report @Table of Contents1 Market Overview1.1 Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Introduction1.2 Market Analysis by Type1.2.1 General BMC1.2.2 Electrical BMC1.2.3 Others1.3 Market Analysis by Applications1.3.1 Electrical industry1.3.2 Automotive industry1.3.3 Others1.4 Market Analysis by Regions1.4.1 North America (United States, Canada and Mexico)1.4.1.1 United States Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.1.2 Canada Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.1.3 Mexico Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2 Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)1.4.2.1 Germany Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.2 France Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.3 UK Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.4 Russia Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.5 Italy Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3 Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)1.4.3.1 China Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.2 Japan Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.3 Korea Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.4 India Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.5 Southeast Asia Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4 South America, Middle East and Africa1.4.4.1 Brazil Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.2 Egypt Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.3 Saudi Arabia Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.4 South Africa Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.5 Nigeria Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.5 Market Dynamics1.5.1 Market Opportunities1.5.2 Market Risk1.5.3 Market Driving Force2 Manufacturers Profiles2.1 IDI2.1.1 Business Overview2.1.2 Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Type and Applications2.1.2.1 Type 12.1.2.2 Type 22.1.3 IDI Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.2 A.Schulman (BMCI)2.2.1 Business Overview2.2.2 Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Type and Applications2.2.2.1 Type 12.2.2.2 Type 22.2.3 A.Schulman (BMCI) Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.3 SDK2.3.1 Business Overview2.3.2 Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Type and Applications2.3.2.1 Type 12.3.2.2 Type 22.3.3 SDK Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.4 Lorenz2.4.1 Business Overview2.4.2 Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Type and Applications2.4.2.1 Type 12.4.2.2 Type 22.4.3 Lorenz Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.5 Polynt2.5.1 Business Overview2.5.2 Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Type and Applications2.5.2.1 Type 12.5.2.2 Type 22.5.3 Polynt Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.6 Tencate2.6.1 Business Overview2.6.2 Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Type and Applications2.6.2.1 Type 12.6.2.2 Type 22.6.3 Tencate Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.7 Huayuan Group2.7.1 Business Overview2.7.2 Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Type and Applications2.7.2.1 Type 12.7.2.2 Type 22.7.3 Huayuan Group Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.8 Mar-Bal2.8.1 Business Overview2.8.2 Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Type and Applications2.8.2.1 Type 12.8.2.2 Type 22.8.3 Mar-Bal Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.9 Yueqing SMC&BMC2.9.1 Business Overview2.9.2 Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Type and Applications2.9.2.1 Type 12.9.2.2 Type 22.9.3 Yueqing SMC&BMC Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.10 Polmix2.10.1 Business Overview2.10.2 Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Type and Applications2.10.2.1 Type 12.10.2.2 Type 22.10.3 Polmix Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.11 Changzhou Fonda2.11.1 Business Overview2.11.2 Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Type and Applications2.11.2.1 Type 12.11.2.2 Type 22.11.3 Changzhou Fonda Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.12 Kyocera2.12.1 Business Overview2.12.2 Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Type and Applications2.12.2.1 Type 12.12.2.2 Type 22.12.3 Kyocera Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.13 Jiangshi Composite2.13.1 Business Overview2.13.2 Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Type and Applications2.13.2.1 Type 12.13.2.2 Type 22.13.3 Jiangshi Composite Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.14 Jinchuangyi Electric2.14.1 Business Overview2.14.2 Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Type and Applications2.14.2.1 Type 12.14.2.2 Type 22.14.3 Jinchuangyi Electric Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.15 Astar2.15.1 Business Overview2.15.2 Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Type and Applications2.15.2.1 Type 12.15.2.2 Type 22.15.3 Astar Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.16 Changzhou Haoyuan2.16.1 Business Overview2.16.2 Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Type and Applications2.16.2.1 Type 12.16.2.2 Type 22.16.3 Changzhou Haoyuan Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.17 Cuyahoga Plastics2.17.1 Business Overview2.17.2 Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Type and Applications2.17.2.1 Type 12.17.2.2 Type 22.17.3 Cuyahoga Plastics Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.18 Plenco2.18.1 Business Overview2.18.2 Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Type and Applications2.18.2.1 Type 12.18.2.2 Type 22.18.3 Plenco Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.19 CME2.19.1 Business Overview2.19.2 Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Type and Applications2.19.2.1 Type 12.19.2.2 Type 22.19.3 CME Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.20 Donghai Composite2.20.1 Business Overview2.20.2 Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Type and Applications2.20.2.1 Type 12.20.2.2 Type 22.20.3 Donghai Composite Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.21 Molymer Group2.21.1 Business Overview2.2.2 Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Type and Applications2.21.2.1 Type 12.21.2.2 Type 22.21.3 Molymer Group Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.22 Aomingwei2.22.1 Business Overview2.22.2 Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Type and Applications2.22.2.1 Type 12.22.2.2 Type 22.22.3 Aomingwei Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.23 Shimada2.23.1 Business Overview2.23.2 Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Type and Applications2.23.2.1 Type 12.23.2.2 Type 22.23.3 Shimada Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.24 Wah Hong Ind2.24.1 Business Overview2.24.2 Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Type and Applications2.24.2.1 Type 12.24.2.2 Type 22.24.3 Wah Hong Ind Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.25 Foshan Ripeng2.25.1 Business Overview2.25.2 Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Type and Applications2.25.2.1 Type 12.25.2.2 Type 22.25.3 Foshan Ripeng Bulk Molding Compounds (BMC) Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)Buy 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
Zimbabwe Insurance Industry Segmentation Detailed Study with Forecast Up To 2021

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Zimbabwe Insurance Industry MarketSummary'The Insurance Industry in Zimbabwe, Key Trends and Opportunities to 2021' report provides detailed analysis of the market trends, drivers and challenges in the Zimbabwean insurance industry.It provides key performance indicators such as written premium, incurred loss, loss ratio, commissions and expenses, total assets, total investment income and retentions during the review period (20122016) and forecast period (20162021).The report also analyzes distribution channels operating in the segment, gives a comprehensive overview of the Zimbabwean economy and demographics, and provides detailed information on the competitive landscape in the country.Click here for sample report @Scope of the ReportThis report provides a comprehensive analysis of the insurance industry in Zimbabwe:It provides historical values for the Zimbabwean insurance industry for the reports 20122016 review period, and projected figures for the 20162021 forecast period.It offers a detailed analysis of the key segments in the Zimbabwean insurance industry, along with market forecasts until 2021.It covers an exhaustive list of parameters, including written premium, incurred loss, loss ratio, combined ratio, total assets, total investment income and retentions.It analyzes the various distribution channels in Zimbabwe.It profiles the top insurance companies in Zimbabwe and outlines the key regulations affecting them.Table of Contents1 Key Facts and Highlights2 Executive Summary3 Economy and Demographics4 Industry Outlook4.1 Industry Indicators4.1.1 Gross written premium4.1.2 Claims4.1.3 Assets and investments5 Life Insurance Outlook5.1 Individual Life Insurance5.1.1 Gross written premium5.1.2 Penetration5.2 Group Life Insurance5.2.1 Gross written premium5.2.2 Penetration6 Non-Life Insurance Outlook6.1 Property Insurance6.1.1 Gross written premium6.1.2 Penetration.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
Global Calcium Hypochlorite Market by Manufacturers, Regions, Type and Application, Forecast to 2023

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"The Report Global (North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, South America, Middle East and Africa) Calcium Hypochlorite Market 2018 Forecast to 2023 provides information on pricing, market analysis, shares, forecast, and company profiles for key industry participants. - MarketResearchReports.biz"About Calcium Hypochlorite MarketCalcium hypochlorite is an inorganic compound with formula Ca(ClO)2. It is sold as a white, solid concentrate in granular, tablet or briquette form with a distinct chlorine odor. Calcium hypochlorite is widely used as a disinfectant and bleaching agent. It is considered more stable and has greater available chlorine than sodium hypochlorite (liquid bleach).Get Sample copy of this Report @Scope of the Report:This report focuses on the Calcium Hypochlorite 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 coversLonzaAxiallBarchemicalsNippon SodaTosohNankai ChemicalSree Rayalaseema Hi-Strength HypoWeiliteSalt & Chemical ComplexNankeYufengKaifengJianshengXinzeHuanghua KaifengRuifuxinRequest for TOC @Market Segment by Regions, regional analysis coversNorth America (United States, Canada and Mexico)Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)South America (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia etc.)Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa)Market Segment by Type, coversCalcium ProcessSodium ProcessMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided intoWater Treating AgentBleachOthersThere are 15 Chapters to deeply display the global Calcium Hypochlorite market.Chapter 1, to describe Calcium Hypochlorite Introduction, product scope, market overview, market opportunities, market risk, market driving force;Chapter 2, to analyze the top manufacturers of Calcium Hypochlorite, with sales, revenue, and price of Calcium Hypochlorite, in 2016 and 2017;Chapter 3, to display the competitive situation among the top manufacturers, with sales, revenue and market share in 2016 and 2017;Chapter 4, to show the global market by regions, with sales, revenue and market share of Calcium Hypochlorite, for each region, from 2013 to 2018;Chapter 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9, to analyze the market by countries, by type, by application and by manufacturers, with sales, revenue and market share by key countries in these regions;Chapter 10 and 11, to show the market by type and application, with sales market share and growth rate by type, application, from 2013 to 2018;Chapter 12, Calcium Hypochlorite market forecast, by regions, type and application, with sales and revenue, from 2018 to 2023;Chapter 13, 14 and 15, to describe Calcium Hypochlorite sales channel, distributors, traders, dealers, Research Findings and Conclusion, appendix and data sourceView Report @Table of Contents1 Market Overview1.1 Calcium Hypochlorite Introduction1.2 Market Analysis by Type1.2.1 Calcium Process1.2.2 Sodium Process1.3 Market Analysis by Applications1.3.1 Water Treating Agent1.3.2 Bleach1.3.3 Others1.4 Market Analysis by Regions1.4.1 North America (United States, Canada and Mexico)1.4.1.1 United States Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.1.2 Canada Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.1.3 Mexico Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2 Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)1.4.2.1 Germany Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.2 France Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.3 UK Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.4 Russia Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.2.5 Italy Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3 Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)1.4.3.1 China Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.2 Japan Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.3 Korea Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.4 India Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.3.5 Southeast Asia Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4 South America, Middle East and Africa1.4.4.1 Brazil Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.2 Egypt Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.3 Saudi Arabia Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.4 South Africa Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.4.4.5 Nigeria Market States and Outlook (2013-2023)1.5 Market Dynamics1.5.1 Market Opportunities1.5.2 Market Risk1.5.3 Market Driving Force2 Manufacturers Profiles2.1 Lonza2.1.1 Business Overview2.1.2 Calcium Hypochlorite Type and Applications2.1.2.1 Type 12.1.2.2 Type 22.1.3 Lonza Calcium Hypochlorite Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.2 Axiall2.2.1 Business Overview2.2.2 Calcium Hypochlorite Type and Applications2.2.2.1 Type 12.2.2.2 Type 22.2.3 Axiall Calcium Hypochlorite Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.3 Barchemicals2.3.1 Business Overview2.3.2 Calcium Hypochlorite Type and Applications2.3.2.1 Type 12.3.2.2 Type 22.3.3 Barchemicals Calcium Hypochlorite Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.4 Nippon Soda2.4.1 Business Overview2.4.2 Calcium Hypochlorite Type and Applications2.4.2.1 Type 12.4.2.2 Type 22.4.3 Nippon Soda Calcium Hypochlorite Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.5 Tosoh2.5.1 Business Overview2.5.2 Calcium Hypochlorite Type and Applications2.5.2.1 Type 12.5.2.2 Type 22.5.3 Tosoh Calcium Hypochlorite Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.6 Nankai Chemical2.6.1 Business Overview2.6.2 Calcium Hypochlorite Type and Applications2.6.2.1 Type 12.6.2.2 Type 22.6.3 Nankai Chemical Calcium Hypochlorite Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.7 Sree Rayalaseema Hi-Strength Hypo2.7.1 Business Overview2.7.2 Calcium Hypochlorite Type and Applications2.7.2.1 Type 12.7.2.2 Type 22.7.3 Sree Rayalaseema Hi-Strength Hypo Calcium Hypochlorite Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.8 Weilite2.8.1 Business Overview2.8.2 Calcium Hypochlorite Type and Applications2.8.2.1 Type 12.8.2.2 Type 22.8.3 Weilite Calcium Hypochlorite Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.9 Salt & Chemical Complex2.9.1 Business Overview2.9.2 Calcium Hypochlorite Type and Applications2.9.2.1 Type 12.9.2.2 Type 22.9.3 Salt & Chemical Complex Calcium Hypochlorite Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.10 Nanke2.10.1 Business Overview2.10.2 Calcium Hypochlorite Type and Applications2.10.2.1 Type 12.10.2.2 Type 22.10.3 Nanke Calcium Hypochlorite Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.11 Yufeng2.11.1 Business Overview2.11.2 Calcium Hypochlorite Type and Applications2.11.2.1 Type 12.11.2.2 Type 22.11.3 Yufeng Calcium Hypochlorite Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.12 Kaifeng2.12.1 Business Overview2.12.2 Calcium Hypochlorite Type and Applications2.12.2.1 Type 12.12.2.2 Type 22.12.3 Kaifeng Calcium Hypochlorite Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.13 Jiansheng2.13.1 Business Overview2.13.2 Calcium Hypochlorite Type and Applications2.13.2.1 Type 12.13.2.2 Type 22.13.3 Jiansheng Calcium Hypochlorite Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.14 Xinze2.14.1 Business Overview2.14.2 Calcium Hypochlorite Type and Applications2.14.2.1 Type 12.14.2.2 Type 22.14.3 Xinze Calcium Hypochlorite Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.15 Huanghua Kaifeng2.15.1 Business Overview2.15.2 Calcium Hypochlorite Type and Applications2.15.2.1 Type 12.15.2.2 Type 22.15.3 Huanghua Kaifeng Calcium Hypochlorite Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)2.16 Ruifuxin2.16.1 Business Overview2.16.2 Calcium Hypochlorite Type and Applications2.16.2.1 Type 12.16.2.2 Type 22.16.3 Ruifuxin Calcium Hypochlorite Sales, Price, Revenue, Gross Margin and Market Share (2016-2017)3 Global Calcium Hypochlorite Market Competition, by Manufacturer3.1 Global Calcium Hypochlorite Sales and Market Share by Manufacturer (2016-2017)3.2 Global Calcium Hypochlorite Revenue and Market Share by Manufacturer (2016-2017)3.3 Global Calcium Hypochlorite Price by Manufacturer (2016-2017)3.4 Market Concentration Rate3.4.1 Top 3 Calcium Hypochlorite Manufacturer Market Share in 20173.4.2 Top 5 Calcium Hypochlorite Manufacturer Market Share in 20173.5 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
Security Labels Market 2018 Leading Industries 3M Company, Avery Dennison Corporation, UPM , Honeywell International, Holosafe Security Labels and More

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Global Security Labels Market: By Identification Method (RFID, Barcode, Holographic, Others), Product Form (Reels and Sheets), Application (Food & Beverages, Pharmaceuticals, Consumer Goods, Others) And Region  Forecast 2023Market ScenarioThe demand for security labels is increasing rapidly and is estimated to grow at the same pace over the forecast period owing to exponential growth in the food & beverage sector. The security label is attached to the products or bundle of products that provide security. These labels secure the confidential information from getting leaked. . The global security labels market is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 5.3% during the estimated period, 2017-2023.Get Report Sample@The global security labels market is consists of North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Rest of the World (RoW). The Asia Pacific region dominates the global security labels market on account of rapid growth in the retail industry. As the retail industry increases, the demand for the security labels increases mainly due to the rising the incidence of theft in the retail industry. Growing manufacturing activities such as consumer good, also have the positive influence on ther growth of the market. As disposable income increases, the purchase power of the consumer increases which creating a huge opportunity to the global security labels market. China, Indonesia, India, and Japan are the crucial contributor to Asia Pacific market. China accounts for the largest share of the regional market due to the largest demand from the food & beverage, and good consumer industry.North America holds the second largest of the the global security labels market on the basis of Increase in the demand for packaged foods & beverages, including ready-to-eat meals, frozen meals, and snack foods. The continuous growth in the pharmaceutical industry is also stimulating the growth of the security labels in its labeling application. As per IMS Market prognosis, the U.S. was the leading market in terms of pharmaceutical spending per capita in 2016, followed by Japan and Canada. The U.S. is the major contributor to the North American market. The Middle East is another major market in terms of demand for security labels mainly due to growing industrial base and high growth in retail sector.Global security labels market is segmented based on Identification method, product form, application, and region. On the basis of the Identification method, the market is segmented into the RFID, barcode, holographic, and others. The barcode segmented accounted for the largest market share in 2016. Barcodes are largely used in various industries such as consumer good, pharmaceuticals, transportation & logistics, and retail for keeping track of their products as well as for locating outgoing shipments and equipment. It is cost-effective and most reliable method for gathering any kind of necessary data. RFID is expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period mainly because it is replacing the barcodes in supply chains. RFID contain electronically stored information. This can be attached to the products or even human beings. It can be read wirelessly and without line of sight, and it contains more information than barcodes. On the basis of the product form, the market has been segmented into the reels and sheets. Sheets accounted for the largest market share in 2016.On the basis of the application, the market is further segmented into food & beverages, pharmaceuticals, consumer goods, and others. The food & beverage is dominating the global the security label market. Security labels have extensive applications in the F&B industry due to increasing importance of labeling in the packaged and processed food industry. The food and beverage packaging is regulated by several government policies and regulations, which makes the labeling and barcode essential both to the consumers and sellers. Many beverage manufacturers use security labels on bottles due to aesthetic appeal, brand positioning, and durability. The pharmaceutical sector is another major application in the global market as result of increasing concern about drug counterfeit and safety, growing concern to reduce operational cost in the healthcare, and rising incidence of medical device theft.Industry NewsIn September 2016, UPM Raflatac, one of the world's leading producers of self-adhesive label materials, has expanded its security label range in the European market. The security range included the labels such as two new ultra-destructible (UD) film labels. These films help to meet growing demand from the brand owners for more secure labeling solutions and pharmaceutical applications.In April 2017, CCL Industries, a global leader in specialty label and packaging solutions, has completed the acquisition of two European software-powered online digital printing and direct-to-consumer business for its Avery Units. This acquisition is expected to create a significant market in Europe.The global security labels market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 5.3% during the forecast period.Check For Discount @Some of the prominent players in the security labels market are 3M Company (U.S.), Avery Dennison Corporation (U.S.), CCL Industries Inc. (Canada), UPM (Finland), Honeywell International Inc. (U.S.), Tesa SE Group (Germany), Data Label Inc. (U.S.), Colour Data UK Ltd (U.K.), Holosafe Security Labels (India), Label Lock (U.K), Polylabel.com (Canada), Star Label Products (U.S.), Watson Label Products (U.S.), Rako Security Label Produktsicherungs GmbH (Germany), and Seiko Holdings Corporation (Japan)The report for Global Security Labels Market of Market Research Future comprises extensive primary research findings along with the detailed analysis of qualitative as well as quantitative aspects by various industry experts, key opinion leaders to gain deeper insight into the market and industry performance. The report gives a clear picture of current market scenario, which includes historical and projected market size in terms of value, technological advancement, macroeconomic and governing factors in the market. The report provides detailed 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.Product Analysis Product matrix which gives a detailed comparison of the market for different recycled product typesAdditional Information Regulatory Landscape Pricing Analysis Macroeconomic IndicatorsGeographic Analysis Geographical analysis across 15 countriesCompany Information Profiling of 10 key market players In-depth analysis including SWOT analysis, and strategy information of related to report title Competitive landscape including emerging trends adopted by major companiesAsk for your specific company profile and country level customization on reports.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 FiguresAbout 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 FutureMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com
Natural Rubber Latex Condoms 2018 Global Market Key Players -Nulatex Sdn Bhd, Qingdao Durex, J.K. Ansell, Double Butterfly, Thai Nippon Rubber, Angel Latex....

Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Market 2018

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Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Market 2018Wiseguyreports.Com Adds Natural Rubber Latex Condoms  Global Market Demand, Growth, Opportunities, Manufacturers, Analysis of Top Key Players and Forecast to 2023 To Its Research Database.Description:The Natural Rubber Latex Condoms market revenue was xx.xx Million USD in 2013, grew to xx.xx Million USD in 2017, and will reach xx.xx Million USD in 2023, with a CAGR of x.x% during 2018-2023.Based on the Natural Rubber Latex Condoms industrial chain, this report mainly elaborate the definition, types, applications and major players of Natural Rubber Latex Condoms market in details. Deep analysis about market status (2013-2018), enterprise competition pattern, advantages and disadvantages of enterprise Products, industry development trends (2018-2023), regional industrial layout characteristics and macroeconomic policies, industrial policy has also be included. From raw materials to downstream buyers of this industry will be analyzed scientifically, the feature of product circulation and sales channel will be presented as well. In a word, this report will help you to establish a panorama of industrial development and characteristics of the Natural Rubber Latex Condoms market.The Natural Rubber Latex Condoms market can be split based on product types, major applications, and important regions.Major Players in Natural Rubber Latex Condoms market are:Nulatex Sdn BhdQingdao DurexJ.K. AnsellDouble ButterflyThai Nippon RubberSuretex(Ansell)Angel LatexXibeiHuman-care LatexSuretex India(Ansell)Pleasure LatexDoubleone LatexHBMMINGBANChurch&DwightUnidus CorpOkamotoSSL(Thailand)KarexHLL LifecareDalian LatexTTK-LIGGuilin LatexRequest for Sample Report@Major Regions play vital role in Natural Rubber Latex Condoms market are:North AmericaEuropeChinaJapanMiddle East & AfricaIndiaSouth AmericaOthersMost important types of Natural Rubber Latex Condoms products covered in this report are:Ultra-Thin TypeThin TypeOrdinary TypeMost widely used downstream fields of Natural Rubber Latex Condoms market covered in this report are:Under 2525-3435-49There are 13 Chapters to thoroughly display the Natural Rubber Latex Condoms market. This report included the analysis of market overview, market characteristics, industry chain, competition landscape, historical and future data by types, applications and regions.Chapter 1: Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Market Overview, Product Overview, Market Segmentation, Market Overview of Regions, Market Dynamics, Limitations, Opportunities and Industry News and Policies.Chapter 2: Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Industry Chain Analysis, Upstream Raw Material Suppliers, Major Players, Production Process Analysis, Cost Analysis, Market Channels and Major Downstream Buyers.Chapter 3: Value Analysis, Production, Growth Rate and Price Analysis by Type of Natural Rubber Latex Condoms.Chapter 4: Downstream Characteristics, Consumption and Market Share by Application of Natural Rubber Latex Condoms.Chapter 5: Production Volume, Price, Gross Margin, and Revenue ($) of Natural Rubber Latex Condoms by Regions (2013-2018).Chapter 6: Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Production, Consumption, Export and Import by Regions (2013-2018).Chapter 7: Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Market Status and SWOT Analysis by Regions.Chapter 8: Competitive Landscape, Product Introduction, Company Profiles, Market Distribution Status by Players of Natural Rubber Latex Condoms.Chapter 9: Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Market Analysis and Forecast by Type and Application (2018-2023).Chapter 10: Market Analysis and Forecast by Regions (2018-2023).Chapter 11: Industry Characteristics, Key Factors, New Entrants SWOT Analysis, Investment Feasibility Analysis.Chapter 12: Market Conclusion of the Whole Report.Chapter 13: Appendix Such as Methodology and Data Resources of This Research.Complete report details @If you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.Table of Contents:Global Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Industry Market Research Report1 Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Introduction and Market Overview1.1 Objectives of the Study1.2 Definition of Natural Rubber Latex Condoms1.3 Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Market Scope and Market Size Estimation1.3.1 Market Concentration Ratio and Market Maturity Analysis1.3.2 Global Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Value ($) and Growth Rate from 2013-20231.4 Market Segmentation1.4.1 Types of Natural Rubber Latex Condoms1.4.2 Applications of Natural Rubber Latex Condoms1.4.3 Research Regions1.4.3.1 North America Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Production Value ($) and Growth Rate (2013-2018)1.4.3.2 Europe Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Production Value ($) and Growth Rate (2013-2018)1.4.3.3 China Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Production Value ($) and Growth Rate (2013-2018)1.4.3.4 Japan Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Production Value ($) and Growth Rate (2013-2018)1.4.3.5 Middle East & Africa Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Production Value ($) and Growth Rate (2013-2018)1.4.3.6 India Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Production Value ($) and Growth Rate (2013-2018)1.4.3.7 South America Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Production Value ($) and Growth Rate (2013-2018)1.5 Market Dynamics1.5.1 Drivers1.5.1.1 Emerging Countries of Natural Rubber Latex Condoms1.5.1.2 Growing Market of Natural Rubber Latex Condoms1.5.2 Limitations1.5.3 Opportunities1.6 Industry News and Policies by Regions1.6.1 Industry News1.6.2 Industry Policies8 Competitive Landscape8.1 Competitive Profile8.2 Nulatex Sdn Bhd8.2.1 Company Profiles8.2.2 Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Product Introduction8.2.3 Nulatex Sdn Bhd Production, Value ($), Price, Gross Margin 2013-2018E8.2.4 Nulatex Sdn Bhd Market Share of Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Segmented by Region in 20178.3 Qingdao Durex8.3.1 Company Profiles8.3.2 Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Product Introduction8.3.3 Qingdao Durex Production, Value ($), Price, Gross Margin 2013-2018E8.3.4 Qingdao Durex Market Share of Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Segmented by Region in 20178.4 J.K. Ansell8.4.1 Company Profiles8.4.2 Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Product Introduction8.4.3 J.K. Ansell Production, Value ($), Price, Gross Margin 2013-2018E8.4.4 J.K. Ansell Market Share of Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Segmented by Region in 20178.5 Double Butterfly8.5.1 Company Profiles8.5.2 Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Product Introduction8.5.3 Double Butterfly Production, Value ($), Price, Gross Margin 2013-2018E8.5.4 Double Butterfly Market Share of Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Segmented by Region in 20178.6 Thai Nippon Rubber8.6.1 Company Profiles8.6.2 Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Product Introduction8.6.3 Thai Nippon Rubber Production, Value ($), Price, Gross Margin 2013-2018E8.6.4 Thai Nippon Rubber Market Share of Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Segmented by Region in 20178.7 Suretex(Ansell)8.7.1 Company Profiles8.7.2 Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Product Introduction8.7.3 Suretex(Ansell) Production, Value ($), Price, Gross Margin 2013-2018E8.7.4 Suretex(Ansell) Market Share of Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Segmented by Region in 20178.8 Angel Latex8.8.1 Company Profiles8.8.2 Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Product Introduction8.8.3 Angel Latex Production, Value ($), Price, Gross Margin 2013-2018E8.8.4 Angel Latex Market Share of Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Segmented by Region in 20178.9 Xibei8.9.1 Company Profiles8.9.2 Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Product Introduction8.9.3 Xibei Production, Value ($), Price, Gross Margin 2013-2018E8.9.4 Xibei Market Share of Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Segmented by Region in 20178.10 Human-care Latex8.10.1 Company Profiles8.10.2 Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Product Introduction8.10.3 Human-care Latex Production, Value ($), Price, Gross Margin 2013-2018E8.10.4 Human-care Latex Market Share of Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Segmented by Region in 20178.11 Suretex India(Ansell)8.11.1 Company Profiles8.11.2 Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Product Introduction8.11.3 Suretex India(Ansell) Production, Value ($), Price, Gross Margin 2013-2018E8.11.4 Suretex India(Ansell) Market Share of Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Segmented by Region in 20178.12 Pleasure Latex8.12.1 Company Profiles8.12.2 Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Product Introduction8.12.3 Pleasure Latex Production, Value ($), Price, Gross Margin 2013-2018E8.12.4 Pleasure Latex Market Share of Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Segmented by Region in 20178.13 Doubleone Latex8.13.1 Company Profiles8.13.2 Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Product Introduction8.13.3 Doubleone Latex Production, Value ($), Price, Gross Margin 2013-2018E8.13.4 Doubleone Latex Market Share of Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Segmented by Region in 20178.14 HBM8.14.1 Company Profiles8.14.2 Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Product Introduction8.14.3 HBM Production, Value ($), Price, Gross Margin 2013-2018E8.14.4 HBM Market Share of Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Segmented by Region in 20178.15 MINGBAN8.15.1 Company Profiles8.15.2 Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Product Introduction8.15.3 MINGBAN Production, Value ($), Price, Gross Margin 2013-2018E8.15.4 MINGBAN Market Share of Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Segmented by Region in 20178.16 Church&Dwight8.16.1 Company Profiles8.16.2 Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Product Introduction8.16.3 Church&Dwight Production, Value ($), Price, Gross Margin 2013-2018E8.16.4 Church&Dwight Market Share of Natural Rubber Latex Condoms Segmented by Region in 20178.17 Unidus Corp8.18 Okamoto8.19 SSL(Thailand)8.20 Karex8.21 HLL Lifecare8.22 Dalian Latex8.23 TTK-LIG8.24 Guilin LatexContinued..Contact US:NORAH TRENTPartner Relations & Marketing Managersales@wiseguyreports.comPh: +1-646-845-9349 (US)Ph: +44 208 133 9349 (UK)About Us:Wise Guy Reports Is Part Of The Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. And Offers Premium Progressive Statistical Surveying, Market Research Reports, Analysis & Forecast Data For Industries And Governments Around The Globe. Wise Guy Reports Features An Exhaustive List Of Market Research Reports From Hundreds Of Publishers Worldwide. We Boast A Database Spanning Virtually Every Market Category And An Even More Comprehensive Collection Of Market Research Reports Under These Categories And Sub-Categories.Addres:: Wise Guy Research Consultants Pvt Ltd: Pune  411028: Maharashtra,: Ph: +91 841 198 5042
Financial Analytics 2018 Global Market Key Players  IBM, Deloitte, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, Microstrategy, Symphony Teleca SAS -Analysis And Forecast To 2022

Financial Analytics Market 2018

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Financial Analytics Market 2018Wiseguyreports.Com Adds Financial Analytics  Global Market Demand, Growth, Opportunities, Manufacturers, Analysis of Top Key Players and Forecast to 2022 To Its Research Database.Description:This report studies the global Financial Analytics market, analyzes and researches the Financial Analytics development status and forecast in United States, EU, Japan, China, India and Southeast Asia. This report focuses on the top players in global market, likeIBMDeloitteMicrosoftSAPOracleMicrostrategySymphony TelecaFicoTableau SoftwareHitachi ConsultingTeradata CorpSASTibcoInformation BuildersRosslyn AnalyticsRequest for Sample Report@Market segment by Regions/Countries, this report coversUnited StatesEUJapanChinaIndiaSoutheast AsiaMarket segment by Type, the product can be split intoOn-premiseCloud-basedMarket segment by Application, Financial Analytics can be split intoAssets & LiabilityBudgetary ControlGeneral LedgerPayablesReceivablesProfitabilityOtherComplete report details @If you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.Table of Contents:Global Financial Analytics Market Size, Status and Forecast 20221 Industry Overview of Financial Analytics1.1 Financial Analytics Market Overview1.1.1 Financial Analytics Product Scope1.1.2 Market Status and Outlook1.2 Global Financial Analytics Market Size and Analysis by Regions1.2.1 United States1.2.2 EU1.2.3 Japan1.2.4 China1.2.5 India1.2.6 Southeast Asia1.3 Financial Analytics Market by Type1.3.1 On-premise1.3.2 Cloud-based1.4 Financial Analytics Market by End Users/Application1.4.1 Assets & Liability1.4.2 Budgetary Control1.4.3 General Ledger1.4.4 Payables1.4.5 Receivables1.4.6 Profitability1.4.7 Other2 Global Financial Analytics Competition Analysis by Players2.1 Financial Analytics Market Size (Value) by Players (2016 and 2017)2.2 Competitive Status and Trend2.2.1 Market Concentration Rate2.2.2 Product/Service Differences2.2.3 New Entrants2.2.4 The Technology Trends in Future.3 Company (Top Players) Profiles3.1 IBM3.1.1 Company Profile3.1.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.1.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.1.4 Financial Analytics Revenue (Value) (2012-2017)3.1.5 Recent Developments3.2 Deloitte3.2.1 Company Profile3.2.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.2.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.2.4 Financial Analytics Revenue (Value) (2012-2017)3.2.5 Recent Developments3.3 Microsoft3.3.1 Company Profile3.3.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.3.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.3.4 Financial Analytics Revenue (Value) (2012-2017)3.3.5 Recent Developments3.4 SAP3.4.1 Company Profile3.4.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.4.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.4.4 Financial Analytics Revenue (Value) (2012-2017)3.4.5 Recent Developments3.5 Oracle3.5.1 Company Profile3.5.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.5.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.5.4 Financial Analytics Revenue (Value) (2012-2017)3.5.5 Recent Developments3.6 Microstrategy3.6.1 Company Profile3.6.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.6.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.6.4 Financial Analytics Revenue (Value) (2012-2017)3.6.5 Recent Developments3.7 Symphony Teleca3.7.1 Company Profile3.7.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.7.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.7.4 Financial Analytics Revenue (Value) (2012-2017)3.7.5 Recent Developments3.8 Fico3.8.1 Company Profile3.8.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.8.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.8.4 Financial Analytics Revenue (Value) (2012-2017)3.8.5 Recent Developments3.9 Tableau Software3.9.1 Company Profile3.9.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.9.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.9.4 Financial Analytics Revenue (Value) (2012-2017)3.9.5 Recent Developments3.10 Hitachi Consulting3.10.1 Company Profile3.10.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.10.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.10.4 Financial Analytics Revenue (Value) (2012-2017)3.10.5 Recent Developments3.11 Teradata Corp3.12 SAS3.13 Tibco3.14 Information Builders3.15 Rosslyn AnalyticsContinued..Contact US:NORAH TRENTPartner Relations & Marketing Managersales@wiseguyreports.comPh: +1-646-845-9349 (US)Ph: +44 208 133 9349 (UK)About Us:Wise Guy Reports Is Part Of The Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. And Offers Premium Progressive Statistical Surveying, Market Research Reports, Analysis & Forecast Data For Industries And Governments Around The Globe. Wise Guy Reports Features An Exhaustive List Of Market Research Reports From Hundreds Of Publishers Worldwide. We Boast A Database Spanning Virtually Every Market Category And An Even More Comprehensive Collection Of Market Research Reports Under These Categories And Sub-Categories.Addres:: Wise Guy Research Consultants Pvt Ltd: Pune  411028: Maharashtra,: Ph: +91 841 198 5042
Worldwide Canned Vegetables Market Analysis 2018-2023: Key Findings, Regional Analysis, Key Players Profiles and Future Prospects

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Market Overview:The demand for healthy convenience food is increasing. The canned vegetables are convenient as there is no need to wash, peel, and cut them. The working population of women and men is increasing, so the need for such convenience is growing at a significant rate. Improved consumers preference towards convenience foods is driving the market for canned vegetables, especially in Europe and North America. Advancements in technology and improved distribution network in the developing markets such as India and China has led to strong growth opportunities for the canned vegetable market. Canned vegetables are becoming more popular among health-conscious consumers as fiber content present in vegetables does not get affected by the canning process.Consumers prefer canned vegetable dut to convenient packaging and longer shelf life. Extensive marketing and distribution through organized retailing are attracting the consumer to buy more canned vegetables. Canned vegetables are labor-concentrated businesses which are gradually facing competition from countries with low productions costs. Due to this factor, the U.S. and other developed countries have seen growth in imports of canned vegetables.Nevertheless, many financial and demographic changes are liekly to arise simultaneously, and some will have equalizing effects on the demand for canned fruits and vegetables. Therefore, it is difficult to predict the demand for canned vegetables in the global markets. Canned vegetables seem to have been both moderately substituted by, and supplemented with, an increasing amount of fresh and frozen vegetables. Therefore, the share of canned vegetables witnessed a decline in the U.S., the U.K, and Germany.Receive Sample Copy @Competitive Analysis:Some of the key players profiled in the global canned vegetables market: Herfraga (Spain), Mediterranea Belfiore SRL (Italy), Kyknos (Greece), Banmai Co., Ltd (Viet Nam), Casual Spain (Spain), Fujian Chenggong Canned Food Co.,Ltd (China), Satko Sarl (Bulgaria), Ukraininan Canning House (Ukrain), Shenzhen Mingjun Co.,Ltd (China) and Domaine Les Bastidettes (France).Key Findings:Fungi (mushrooms) canned vegetables is projected to experience a high demand from the European regionThe major importers of canned vegetables are Japan, Turkey, South Korea, the U.K., and the S.Industry Segments:The global canned vegetable market is segmented into type, form, and packaging.On the basis of the type, it is segmented into bulbs, flowers, fruits, leaves, roots, stems, tubers, fungi, and others. Among all, the bulb vegetables like onion and garlic will witness the growth rate during the forecast period.On the basis of the form, it is segmented into sliced, chopped, peeled, and others. Among all, the sliced form of canned vegetables holds the major market share due to high demand for sliced vegetables in the developed countries.On the basis of the application, it is segmented into culinary, salads & soups, toppings & dressings, and others. Among all, the culinary segment is dominating the market owing to the high use of canned vegetables in households.Access Report Details @Regional Analysis:APAC will witness maximum growth in the canned vegetable market followed by North America. Volume wise, the market size of the APAC region will continue to be high with more than half of market share. With increasing, disposable income in India and China and growing demand for canned products will drive higher demand for canned vegetables. Europe will witness maximum growth in the canned fungi market followed by APAC. The demand for sealed and tamper-proof steel container vegetables in Europe is increasing as the packaging prevents harmful bacteria from contaminating the product. Changing consumption pattern due to busy lifestyle is also driving the growth of the market. Convenient packaging and longer shelf life as compared to its fresh counterpart are boosting the growth of the canned vegetable market. Extensive marketing and distribution through organized retailing are also attracting the consumers globally to buy canned vegetables.About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.ContactMarket Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com
Stents Market - Implementing Trending Business Strategies 2025

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Global Stents Market: SnapshotThe lifesaving function of stents, which are small mesh tubes inserted inside blocked arteries to open up the passage for blood to travel from the heart to other parts of the body, have resulted in their swift sales.Majorly fuelling demand for stents, globally, are the rising occurrence of cardiovascular diseases, alarming increase in cholesterol levels, and rising prevalence of respiratory disorders. Further, rise in unhealthy eating habits such as smoking, alcohol intake and sedentary lifestyles, all of which up instances of cardiovascular disorders, are also serving to boost demand in the market. Obesity and hypertension are some other health conditions associated with the blockage of the arteries.Request Sample Copy of the Report @Posing a challenge to the sales of stents, on the other hand, are the risks pertaining to their insertion. This is because, they can result in blood clots, soreness, allergic reactions, infection of the vessel, re-narrowing of an artery, and development of kidney stones on using a stent in the ureters.From a geographical standpoint, North America and Europe are major markets for stents because of new varieties such as bioresorbable stents gaining traction in the region. In Asia Pacific, Japan, India, Australia, and China are primarily powering growth on account of their gradually increasing healthcare infrastructure, helpful government regulations and policies, and prevalence of cardiovascular diseases.Medtronic, Inc., OrbusNeich, Eurocor GmbH, Cordis Corporation, Sahajanand Medical Technologies Pvt. Ltd., Micell Technologies, Inc., MIV Therapeutics, Inc., Bioring SA, Abbott Laboratories, and Boston Scientific Corporation are to name a few prominent vendors of stents in the global market.Request TOC of the Report @Global Stents Market: OverviewStents are tiny tubes that doctors can insert into a blocked passage to keep it open, so as to facilitate the flow of fluids such as blood. Made of plastic, fabric, or metal, stents are needed when plaque, a substance made of cholesterol, attaches itself to the walls of a blood vessel. An emergency procedure may also require a stent if an artery of the heart is blocked. Apart from blood vessels, stents also aid in the opening of bile ducts, airways of the lungs, and tubes that carry urine to the bladder from the kidney.Global Stents Market: Key TrendsIncreasing incidence of cardiovascular diseases, high levels of cholesterol, and growing prevalence of respiratory disorders are some of the prominent growth drivers of the global stents market. Growing adoption of unhealthy lifestyles and eating habits, along with harmful practices such as smoking, drinking alcohol, and lack of physical activity have been the major reasons for increased prevalence of cardiovascular disorders. Obesity and hypertension are some other health conditions associated with the blockage of the arteries.On the other hand, the growth of the global market for stents might be restricted on account of the risks associated with the inserting of stents, such as soreness, blood clots, allergic reactions, infection of the vessel, re-narrowing of an artery, and development of kidney stones on using a stent in the ureters. However, the risks of not using a stent outweigh the risks of getting one, because blocked blood vessels and limited blood supply can have life-threatening consequences. The coronary stents segment is likely to present considerable opportunities, with the bioabsorbable or bioresorbable stents commanding maximum share.Global Stents Market: Market PotentialThe increasing number of approvals of new stents worldwide is expected to result in better patient outcomes, thereby raising the demand for stents. For instance, in March 2017, CeloNova BioSciences, Inc. achieved the approval of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its nano-coated coronary stent system, COBRA PzF.The Health Ministry of India approved the nations premier locally made naturally dissolving stent, MeRes100, developed by Meril Life Science, a Gujarat-based company. Also known as bioresorbable cardiac scaffold, these stents are made from a material that gets absorbed by the body and disappears gradually over a period of three years. Before Meril Life Science, Abbot India came up with its Absorb stents in 2012.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @In India, the price of coronary stents has been reduced by almost 85% by the government. A drug eluting stent, which was previously priced between Rs.40000  Rs.170000, will now be made available at Rs.29600. This development will boost the deployment of previously expensive stents such as bioabsorbable vascular stents (BVS) in India to a significant degree.Global Stents Market: Regional OutlookBased on geography, the global market for stents can be segmented into Asia Pacific, Europe, North America, and the Rest of the World (RoW). The rising geriatric population worldwide has led to a rising frequency of various diseases that require stents for their treatment. As a result, the demand for stents will rise substantially.The countries in North America and Europe are expected to represent a significant share in the global stents market owing to the rising awareness about the benefits of bioresorbable stents. The stents markets in India, Japan, Australia, and China are likely to expand steadily as rising healthcare infrastructure, beneficial government regulations and policies, and rising incidence of cardiovascular diseases are accelerating the demand in these regions.Global Stents Market: Competitive AnalysisSome of the major companies operating in the global stents market are Medtronic, Inc., OrbusNeich, Eurocor GmbH, Cordis Corporation, Sahajanand Medical Technologies Pvt. Ltd., Micell Technologies, Inc., MIV Therapeutics, Inc., Bioring SA, Abbott Laboratories, and Boston Scientific Corporation.The global stents market appears to be highly fragmented in terms of competition. Several leading companies at the global as well as regional levels have been adopting business strategies such as mergers, partnerships, and acquisitions to make a mark in 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
Global 1080p TV Market: Production, Sales, Supply, Demand, Analysis & Forecast to 2022

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https://www.researchtrades.com/report/global-and-chinese-1080p-tv-industry-2017-market-research-report/1235856

Global 1080p TV Industry Report provides key statistics on the market status of the 1080p TV manufacturers and is a valuable source of guidance and direction for companies and individuals interested in the industry.You can get a single user copy at USD 3000 and can get discount on it @Scope of the Report:he report provides a basic overview of the industry including its definition, applications and manufacturing technology. Then, the report explores the international and Chinese major industry players in detail. In this part, the report presents the company profile, product specifications, capacity, production value, and 2012-2017 market shares for each company. Through the statistical analysis, the report depicts the global and Chinese total market of 1080p TV industry including capacity, production, production value, cost/profit, supply/demand and Chinese import/export. The total market is further divided by company, by country, and by application/type for the competitive landscape analysis. The report then estimates 2017-2022 market development trends of 1080p TV industry. Analysis of upstream raw materials, downstream demand, and current market dynamics is also carried out. In the end, the report makes some important proposals for a new project of 1080p TV Industry before evaluating its feasibility. Overall, the report provides an in-depth insight of 2012-2022 global and Chinese 1080p TV industry covering all important parameters.Get FREE and detailed sample copy of updated Analysis & Status @Table of Content:Chapter One Introduction of 1080p TV Industry1.1 Brief Introduction of 1080p TV1.2 Development of 1080p TV Industry1.3 Status of 1080p TV IndustryChapter Two Manufacturing Technology of 1080p TV2.1 Development of 1080p TV Manufacturing Technology2.2 Analysis of 1080p TV Manufacturing Technology2.3 Trends of 1080p TV Manufacturing TechnologyChapter Three Analysis of Global Key Manufacturers3.1 Company A3.1.1 Company Profile3.1.2 Product Information3.1.3 2012-2017 Production Information3.1.4 Contact Information3.2 Company B3.2.1 Company Profile3.2.2 Product Information3.2.3 2012-2017 Production Information3.2.4 Contact Information3.3 Company C3.2.1 Company Profile3.3.2 Product Information3.3.3 2012-2017 Production Information3.3.4 Contact InformationGet complete analysis @3.4 Company D3.4.1 Company Profile3.4.2 Product Information3.4.3 2012-2017 Production Information3.4.4 Contact InformationContinue....Who we areResearch Trades has team of experts who works on providing exhaustive analysis pertaining to market research on a global basis. This comprehensive analysis is obtained by a thorough research and study of the ongoing trends and provides predictive data regarding the future estimations, which can be utilized by various organizations for growth purposes.We distribute customized reports that focus on meeting the clients specific requirement. Our database consists of a large collection of high-quality reports obtained using a customer-centric approaches, thus providing valuable research insights.
Fire Suppression Systems Market Forecast, Trend Analysis & Competition Assessment till 2028

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As per the current market trends and the promising nature of the global fire suppression systems market, it can be estimated that the future holds positive outcomes. In order to provide a deep insight about the concerned market, Fact.MR would be publishing a resourceful analysis that will enclose knowledge about the regional market size, revenue and opportunity status. Readers will be offered the privilege to decode various facets of the market during the period 2018 to 2028, together with the active access to secondary and primary research methodology. Furthermore, various segments of the market associated to product, application, end-user etc., would also be present in this intelligent research report.Request TOC of this Report-Fact.MRs new report on the global fire suppression market provides a comprehensive market outlook during forecast period of 2018 - 2027. The report delivers an in-depth analysis of the past, current, and future trends of the industry which can assist stakeholders in assessing the opportunities in the market.Based on the extinguishing agents used to suppress the fire, the fire suppression systems are of three types -- water-based, chemical-based, or gas-based. Within these categories, based on specific requirements, different delivery systems are found such as water pipe, sprinklers, and manual or automated suppression systems. Apart from this, the fire suppression system also includes detection systems, alarms, and emergency control system.Fire incidences lead to several disastrous impacts such as threats to livelihood, destruction of public as well as private properties. To prevent such damage, fire suppression systems are highly adopted in the commercial sectors. The International Fire Suppression Alliance (IFSA) data suggested that approximately 135.8 million units of sprinklers were installed worldwide in 2016. Further, the highest installation was reported in Asia, followed by North America and Europe.Increased construction activities in commercial, residential as well as industrial sectors have contributed significantly in this record breaking installations. Increased industrialization and on-going construction of new infrastructures are set to influence the future adoption of the fire suppression systems market.To know more about Global Fire Suppression Systems Market, visit -Stringent Government Regulations Fuelling Adoption of Fire Suppression SystemAccording to the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), over 1.3 million fire incidences were reported in the United States. These incidences caused over 3000 deaths and property loss of worth US$ 10.6 billion. Due to this, NFPA has enacted guidelines for commercial business infrastructures to deploy fire suppression system such as sprinklers and clean agent suppression systems. Further, NFPA has included two important requirements of regular maintenance and training of personnel of the clean agent fire suppression system. Moreover, IFSA has recently published an article that includes the FM Global data sheet that included technology updates for installation of sprinkler systems in automated storage facilities. Recently announced new US federal tax reform will support small business annually and large business entities over the span of five years for retrofitting of sprinkler systems. Such government reforms will enhance the adoption of fire suppression systems at larger geographical locations.The Global Fire Suspension Market: Innovative Product LaunchVictualic VortexTM is a fire suppression system launched by Victaulic, a global provider of mechanical pipe joints, fire protection systems, and innovative engineering and construction solutions. This is a new hybrid fire suppression system that involves combination of water and nitrogen extinguishers that efficiently suppresses the fire.Other key companies in the global fire suppression market include Minimax, Lubrizol, Bristol Fire Engineering, Halma PLC, SFFECO, NAFFCO, TYCO, United Technologies Corporation, Master Fire Preventions Ltd., Firetronics, National Fire Equipment Ltd. and Amerex Corporation.As manufacturers are aligning their product launch to the evolving regulatory reforms and changing building infrastructures, adoption of advanced fire suppression systems is likely to grow. Further, a need for developing effective method of fire safety has led to the development of innovative solutions that are superior as well as environmental-friendly. In addition, technology innovations and integration of IoT and cloud-based solutions are driving the demand for fire suppression systems in the new smart building constructions globally.Overall, the report offers holistic analysis and insights on the global fire suppression systems market. Stakeholders can gain a wealth of information on the key factors likely to shape the market during the assessment period 2018-2027.Pre-book Global Fire Suppression Systems Market Forecast Report-About Fact.MRFact.MR is a fast-growing market research firm that offers the most comprehensive suite of syndicated and customized market research reports. We believe transformative intelligence can educate and inspire businesses to make smarter decisions. We know the limitations of the one-size-fits-all approach; thats why we publish multi-industry global, regional, and country-specific research reports.Contact UsFact.MRSuite 988427 Upper Pembroke Street,Dublin 2, IrelandTelephone: +353-1-6111-593Email: sales@factmr.com/Web:
Polo Shirt 2018 Global Market Key Players  Banana Republic, Ralph Lauren Corporation, Abercrombie & Fitch, Calvin Klein, Prada, Lacoste, Tommy Hilfiger -Analysis And Forecast To 2023

Polo Shirt Market 2018

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Polo Shirt Market 2018Wiseguyreports.Com Adds Polo Shirt  Global Market Demand, Growth, Opportunities, Manufacturers, Analysis of Top Key Players and Forecast to 2023 To Its Research Database.Description:This report mainly introduces volume and value market share by players, by regions, by product type, by consumers and also their price change details. As a Detailed Analysis report, it covers all details inside analysis and opinion in Polo Shirt industry.This report splits Polo Shirt market by Polo Shirt Type, which covers the history data information from 2013 to 2017 and forecast from 2018 to 2023.This report focuses Global market, it covers details as following:Major CompaniesBanana RepublicRalph Lauren CorporationAbercrombie & FitchBrooks BrothersCalvin KleinBurberryPradaLacostePaul StuartJ. PressHugo BossGucciTommy HilfigerVineyard VinesKent WangThom BrowneRequest for Sample Report@Main RegionsNorth AmericaUnited StatesCanadaLatin AmericaMexicoBrazilArgentinaOthersEuropeGermanyUnited KingdomFranceItalySpainRussiaNetherlandOthersAsia & PacificChinaJapanIndiaKoreaAustraliaSoutheast AsiaIndonesiaThailandPhilippinesVietnamSingaporeMalaysiaOthersAfrica & Middle EastSouth AfricaEgyptTurkeySaudi ArabiaIranOthersMain Product TypePolo Shirt Market, by Polo Shirt TypeKids ShirtWomen ShirtMen ShirtPolo Shirt Market, byMain ApplicationsEvery Day WearGame WearOthersComplete report details @If you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.Table of Contents:Global Polo Shirt Detailed Analysis Report 2018-2023Chapter One Polo Shirt Market Overview1.1 Global Polo Shirt Market Sales Volume Revenue and Price 2013-20231.2 Polo Shirt, by Polo Shirt Type 2013-20231.2.1 Global Polo Shirt Sales Market Share by Polo Shirt Type 2013-20231.2.2 Global Polo Shirt Revenue Market Share by Polo Shirt Type 2013-20231.2.3 Global Polo Shirt Price by Polo Shirt Type 2013-20231.2.4 Kids Shirt1.2.5 Women Shirt1.2.6 Men Shirt1.3 Polo Shirt, by 2013-20231.3.1 Global Polo Shirt Sales Market Share by 2013-20231.3.2 Global Polo Shirt Revenue Market Share by 2013-20231.3.3 Global Polo Shirt Price by 2013-2023Chapter Three Polo Shirt by Players 2013-20183.1 Global Polo Shirt Sales Volume Market Share by Players 2013-20183.2 Global Polo Shirt Revenue Share by Players 2013-20183.3 Global Top Players Polo Shirt Key Product Model and Market Performance3.4 Global Top Players Polo Shirt Key Target Consumers and Market Performance..Chapter Five Global Top Players Profile5.1 Banana Republic5.1.1 Banana Republic Company Details and Competitors5.1.2 Banana Republic Key Polo Shirt Models and Performance5.1.3 Banana Republic Polo Shirt Business SWOT Analysis and Forecast5.1.4 Banana Republic Polo Shirt Sales Volume Revenue Price Cost and Gross Margin5.2 Ralph Lauren Corporation5.2.1 Ralph Lauren Corporation Company Details and Competitors5.2.2 Ralph Lauren Corporation Key Polo Shirt Models and Performance5.2.3 Ralph Lauren Corporation Polo Shirt Business SWOT Analysis and Forecast5.2.4 Ralph Lauren Corporation Polo Shirt Sales Volume Revenue Price Cost and Gross Margin5.3 Abercrombie & Fitch5.3.1 Abercrombie & Fitch Company Details and Competitors5.3.2 Abercrombie & Fitch Key Polo Shirt Models and Performance5.3.3 Abercrombie & Fitch Polo Shirt Business SWOT Analysis and Forecast5.3.4 Abercrombie & Fitch Polo Shirt Sales Volume Revenue Price Cost and Gross Margin5.4 Brooks Brothers5.4.1 Brooks Brothers Company Details and Competitors5.4.2 Brooks Brothers Key Polo Shirt Models and Performance5.4.3 Brooks Brothers Polo Shirt Business SWOT Analysis and Forecast5.4.4 Brooks Brothers Polo Shirt Sales Volume Revenue Price Cost and Gross Margin5.5 Calvin Klein5.5.1 Calvin Klein Company Details and Competitors5.5.2 Calvin Klein Key Polo Shirt Models and Performance5.5.3 Calvin Klein Polo Shirt Business SWOT Analysis and Forecast5.5.4 Calvin Klein Polo Shirt Sales Volume Revenue Price Cost and Gross Margin5.6 Burberry5.6.1 Burberry Company Details and Competitors5.6.2 Burberry Key Polo Shirt Models and Performance5.6.3 Burberry Polo Shirt Business SWOT Analysis and Forecast5.6.4 Burberry Polo Shirt Sales Volume Revenue Price Cost and Gross Margin5.7 Prada5.7.1 Prada Company Details and Competitors5.7.2 Prada Key Polo Shirt Models and Performance5.7.3 Prada Polo Shirt Business SWOT Analysis and Forecast5.7.4 Prada Polo Shirt Sales Volume Revenue Price Cost and Gross Margin5.8 Lacoste5.8.1 Lacoste Company Details and Competitors5.8.2 Lacoste Key Polo Shirt Models and Performance5.8.3 Lacoste Polo Shirt Business SWOT Analysis and Forecast5.8.4 Lacoste Polo Shirt Sales Volume Revenue Price Cost and Gross Margin5.9 Paul Stuart5.9.1 Paul Stuart Company Details and Competitors5.9.2 Paul Stuart Key Polo Shirt Models and Performance5.9.3 Paul Stuart Polo Shirt Business SWOT Analysis and Forecast5.9.4 Paul Stuart Polo Shirt Sales Volume Revenue Price Cost and Gross Margin5.10 J. Press5.10.1 J. Press Company Details and Competitors5.10.2 J. Press Key Polo Shirt Models and Performance5.10.3 J. Press Polo Shirt Business SWOT Analysis and Forecast5.10.4 J. Press Polo Shirt Sales Volume Revenue Price Cost and Gross Margin5.11 Hugo Boss5.12 Gucci5.13 Tommy Hilfiger5.14 Vineyard Vines5.15 Kent Wang5.16 Thom BrowneContinued..Contact US:NORAH TRENTPartner Relations & Marketing Managersales@wiseguyreports.comPh: +1-646-845-9349 (US)Ph: +44 208 133 9349 (UK)About Us:Wise Guy Reports Is Part Of The Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. And Offers Premium Progressive Statistical Surveying, Market Research Reports, Analysis & Forecast Data For Industries And Governments Around The Globe. Wise Guy Reports Features An Exhaustive List Of Market Research Reports From Hundreds Of Publishers Worldwide. We Boast A Database Spanning Virtually Every Market Category And An Even More Comprehensive Collection Of Market Research Reports Under These Categories And Sub-Categories.Addres:: Wise Guy Research Consultants Pvt Ltd: Pune  411028: Maharashtra,: Ph: +91 841 198 5042
Austria Institutional Construction Dynamics, Forecast, Analysis and Supply Demand 2021

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Austria Institutional Construction MarketSummaryInstitutional construction market covers the development of government, public and religious buildings. This market includes five categories: educational buildings, healthcare buildings, institutional buildings, religious buildings and research facilities.The Austrian institutional construction category has observed some fluctuations in the review period with a value of EURxxx.xx million (US$xxx.xx million) in 2016 and increased at a rate of x.xx% over 2015. The market recorded a CAGR of x.xx% from 2012 through 2016.Click here for sample report @Scope of the Report An overview of the institutional construction market in Austria.Historic (2012 through 2016) and forecast (2017 through 2021) construction market output values are provided.A detailed breakdown of the data by construction activity (new construction, repair and maintenance, refurbishment and demolition) is provided at the market level while the values for the segments are provided by cost types (construction materials, construction equipment & construction services).This report covers all the segments of commercial construction market including Institutional construction market covers the development of government, public and religious buildings. This market includes five categories: educational buildings, healthcare buildings, institutional buildings, religious buildings and research facilities..Table of Contents1 Introduction1.1 What is this Report About?1.2 Definitions1.3 CAGR Definition and Calculation2 Overall Institutional Construction: Market Analysis2.1 Overall Institutional Construction Output Value, 2012 - 20162.2 Overall Institutional Construction Output Value Forecast, 2017 - 20212.3 Overall Institutional Construction Output Value by Cost Type2.3.1 Overall Institutional Construction Output Value by Cost Type, 2012 - 20162.3.2 Overall Institutional Construction Output Value by Cost Type Forecast, 2017 - 20213 Institutional Construction Output: Analysis by Category3.1 New Construction Output Value, 2012 - 20163.2 New Construction Output Value Forecast, 2017 - 20213.3 New Construction Output Value by Cost Type3.3.1 New Construction Output Value by Cost Type,2012 - 20163.3.2 New Construction Output Forecast, by Cost Type, 2017 - 20213.4 Repair & Maintenance Output Value, 2012 - 20163.5 Repair & Maintenance Output value Forecast, 2017 - 2021.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
Analysis of Food Container Market in Global Industry : Key Players, Share, Trend, Applications, Forecast to 2023

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Global Food Container Market Information by Type (Rigid and Flexible), by Material (Plastic, Paper & paperboard, Metal, Glass and others), by Product (Bags, Pouches, Containers and others), by Application (Fruits & vegetables, Dairy Products, Meat products, Frozen Food, Candy & Confections, and others) and by Region  Forecast to 2022Market Synopsis of Food Container MarketThe key drivers contributing to the growth of the food container market are increasing awareness of environmental issues, adoption of new regulatory requirements, health awareness and new packaging material development. The growing requirement for brand differentiation in an increasingly competitive environment is expected to drive the market. The plastic packaging both rigid and flexible has been dominating the market.Plastic packaging has been dominating the market. The food container market has grown over the years. The products are required to be preserved for longer span of time; they are required to be packed using durable, efficient and protective methods. Food& Beverage industry contributes the highest to the overall growth in the food container market. North America contributes largest share to the market. The Asia-Pacific region is the fastest growing region for the food container market, followed by Europe.Key PlayersThe key players of global food container market include Bemis Company Incorporated, Berry Plastics Corporation, Crown Holdings Incorporated, Graham Packaging Company Incorporated, Graphic Packaging Holding Company, Ball Corporation, Constar International Incorporated, Anchor Glass Container Corporation, Alcan Packaging Food Americas, and Associated Packaging Technologies.Request For Sample Report @Study Objectives of Food Container Market: To provide detailed analysis of the market structure along with forecast for the next 6 years of various segments and sub-segments of the Global Food Container Market To provide insights about factors affecting the market growth To analyze the Global Food Container Market based on various factors- price analysis, supply chain analysis, porters five force analysis etc. 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, APAC, and Rest of the World (ROW) To provide country level analysis of the market with respect to the current market size and future prospective To provide country level analysis of the market for segment by type, material, product, application, and regions To provide strategic profiling of the key players in the market, comprehensively analyzing their core competencies, and drawing a competitive landscape for the market To track and analyze competitive developments such as joint ventures, strategic alliances, mergers and acquisitions, new product developments, and research and developments in the Global Food Container Market.The report for Global Food Container Market of Market Research Future comprises of extensive primary research along with the detailed analysis of qualitative as well as quantitative aspects by various industry experts, key opinion leaders to gain the deeper insight of the market and industry performance. The report gives the clear picture of current market scenario which includes historical and projected market size in terms of value and volume, technological advancement, macro economical and governing factors in the market. The report provides details information and strategies of the top key players in the industry. The report also gives a broad study of the different market segments and regions.Complete Report Details @Product Analysis Product matrix which gives a detailed comparison of the market for different recycled product typesAdditional Information Regulatory Landscape Pricing Analysis Macroeconomic IndicatorsGeographic Analysis Geographical analysis across 15 countriesCompany Information Profiling of 10 key market players In-depth analysis including SWOT analysis, and strategy information of related to report title Competitive landscape including emerging trends adopted by major companiesAbout 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 FutureMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com
Global Spinal Cord Stimulation Devices Market Research Report and Demand

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Qyresearchreports include new market research report Global Spinal Cord Stimulation Devices Market Professional Survey Report 2018 to its huge collection of research reports.In the last several years, global market of spinal cord stimulation devices was experienced an upward trend rapidly, with an average growth rate of 5.51%. In 2017, global revenue of spinal cord stimulation devices is nearly 2.15 billion USD; the actual Sales are about 116 K Unit.The Global market for Spinal Cord Stimulation Devices has been thoroughly studied with every available detail in the said study with increased focus on various important factors such as restraints, market opportunities, and growth drivers. Each of the elements that pertain to the shaping of the market dynamics that has been analyzed and studied in detail by the research analysts, so as to offer the best and most evaluative and exhaustive study to the buyers of the report. The overview or the executive summary that has been provided in the market intelligence study has been designed in such a way so as to give a quick overview of the market for receiving information on the go. This could assist readers with hands-on data needed to make quick decisions anytime during their journey of growth in the market.Get Report FRee Sample and Customization:This report studies Spinal Cord Stimulation Devices in Global market, focuses on top manufacturers in global market, with production, price, revenue and market share for each manufacturer, coveringMedtronicBoston ScientificAbbott (St. Jude Medical)NevroNuvectraThe study of market segmentations that has been offered with the publication that explores some of the most significant categories of the world Spinal Cord Stimulation Devices market is deemed significant for the growth of industry participants. All of the segments that have been studied elaborately in the said publication have been deeply evaluated with assistance from best of the research techniques. The analysts have dissected each of the segments and have shed light on vital factors that influence the growth of the various segments. Using this key information, market players could rightly shape their business plans in favor of the betterment of their growth in the Global market. Segments that have been analyzed in the publication could be related to product, end use, application, and geography.Split by Product Type, with production, revenue, price, and market share and growth rate of each type, can be divided intoRechargeableNon-RechargeableSplit by application, this report focuses on sales, market share and growth rate of Spinal Cord Stimulation Devices in each application, can be divided intoFailed Back Surgery SyndromeComplex Regional Pain SyndromeChronic PainOtherTo Browse a Full Report with TOC:Table of Contents1 Industry Overview of Spinal Cord Stimulation Devices11.1 Definition and Specifications of Spinal Cord Stimulation Devices11.2 Spinal Cord Stimulation Devices Segment by Types (Product Category)21.2.1 Global Spinal Cord Stimulation Devices Production and Growth Rate Comparison by Types (2013-2025)21.2.2 Global Spinal Cord Stimulation Devices Production Market Share by Types in 201731.2.3 Rechargeable41.2.4 Non-Rechargeable41.3 Global Spinal Cord Stimulation Devices Segment by Applications51.3.1 Global Spinal Cord Stimulation Devices Consumption Comparison by Applications (2013-2025)51.3.2 Failed Back Surgery Syndrome61.3.3 Complex Regional Pain Syndrome61.3.4 Chronic Pain72 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Spinal Cord Stimulation Devices122.1 Raw Material and Suppliers122.2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Spinal Cord Stimulation Devices142.2.1 Raw Materials142.2.2 Labor Cost Analysis152.2.3 Other Costs Analysis192.3 Manufacturing Process Analysis of Spinal Cord Stimulation Devices242.4 Industry Chain Structure of Spinal Cord Stimulation Devices25Click here to avail discount on this reports @3 Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants Analysis of Spinal Cord Stimulation Devices263.1 Capacity and Founded Date of Global Spinal Cord Stimulation Devices Major Manufacturers in 2017263.2 Headquarter of Global Spinal Cord Stimulation Devices Major Manufacturers in 2017263.3 Products Brands of Global Spinal Cord Stimulation Devices Major Manufacturers in 2017273.4 Mergers & Acquisitions, Expansion274 Global Spinal Cord Stimulation Devices Overall Market Overview474.1 2013-2018 Overall Market Analysis474.2 Capacity Analysis494.2.1 2013-2018 Global Spinal Cord Stimulation Devices Capacity and Growth Rate Analysis494.2.2 2017 Spinal Cord Stimulation Devices Capacity Analysis (Company Segment)49About 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:
Advanced cardiovascular Life Support Market 2018 | Dazzling Leading Players Cardiac Science Corporation (U.S.), CPR Medical Devices, Inc. (Canada)| by 2024

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Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support Market Research Report, By Techniques (Airway Management, Non-Invasive Airway, Endotracheal Intubation, Electrical Therapy And Lethal Arrhythmias), By Algorithm (Cardiac Arrest, Acute Coronary Syndromes, Bradycardia, Tachycardia, Suspected Stroke Algorithms), By Instruments (Devices, Accessories), By End Users (Medical Training Centers, Cardiac Catheterization Labs, Hospital) - Global Forecast Till 2023.The global advanced cardiovascular life support market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 7.0% during forecasted period 2017-2023.KEY PLAYERS FOR ADVANCED CARDIOVASCULAR LIFE SUPPORT MARKETCardiac Science Corporation (U.S.), CPR Medical Devices, Inc. (Canada), General Electric Company (U.S.), Michigan Instruments (U.S.), Koninklijke Philips N.V. (Netherlands), Physio-Control, Inc. (U.S.), St. Jude Medical, Inc. (U.S.), and ZOLL Medical Corporation (Now part of Asahi Kasei Corporation (Japan)).Access the Sample Report @MARKET SCENARIO FOR ADVANCED CARDIOVASCULAR LIFE SUPPORT MARKETAdvanced cardiovascular life support is also referred as advanced cardiac life support is a set of clinical interventions for the emergency treatment of stroke and other life-threatening medical emergencies. According to WHO, more than 35% of the total global population were suffering from major or minor cardiovascular complication in 2015 and is the number one cause of death globally. Advanced cardiovascular life support is provided by well qualified health care personnel. The market growth of advanced cardiovascular life support is driven by the increasing number of cardiovascular diseases, coronary diseases and increasing demand for the emergency services. Other factors that propel the growth of market are continuous up gradation and modification of products, rising diabetic and obese population and excessive use of tobacco and alcohol. However, limited number of trained personnel has restrained of the growth of market.SEGMENTATION FOR ADVANCED CARDIOVASCULAR LIFE SUPPORT MARKETGlobal advanced cardiovascular life support market is segmented on the basis of techniques, into airway management, non-invasive airway, endotracheal intubation, electrical therapy and lethal arrhythmias. On the basis of algorithm they are segmented into cardiac arrest, acute coronary syndromes, bradycardia, tachycardia, suspected stroke algorithms, and other. By instruments they are segmented into devices, accessories and other and on the basis of end users, the market is segmented into medical training centres, cardiac catheterization labs, hospital and other.REGIONAL ANALYSIS FOR ADVANCED CARDIOVASCULAR LIFE SUPPORT MARKETThe regional analysis comprises of America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Middle East & Africa. Global advanced cardiovascular life support market is dominated by America due to the rising number of patient suffering from cardiovascular diseases, well developed healthcare infrastructure and increasing aging population. Europe accounts for the second largest market which is followed by Asia Pacific. Asia Pacific is an emerging market for advanced cardiovascular life support. Increasing prevalence of cardiovascular diseases, a growing focus on the prevention, treatment and diagnosis of cardiovascular disease, changing lifestyle has led to the growth of market in Asia Pacific region.Get Discount @MAJOR TOC FOR ADVANCED CARDIOVASCULAR LIFE SUPPORT MARKETCHAPTER 1. REPORT PROLOGUECHAPTER 2. MARKET INTRODUCTION2.1 Introduction2.2 Scope of Study2.3 Research Objective2.4 Assumptions & Limitations2.4.1 Assumptions2.4.2 LimitationsCHAPTER 3. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY3.1 Research Process3.2 Primary Research3.3 Secondary ResearchCHAPTER 4. MARKET DYNAMICS4.1 Drivers4.2 RestraintsCHAPTER 5. MARKET FACTOR ANALYSIS5.1 Porters Five Forces Model5.1.1 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 Supply Chain AnalysisTOC ContinuedInquire 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
Global Flat Panel Displays Market Anticipated to be Worth US$ 135 Mn by 2020

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A latest research report titled as Global Market Study on Flat Panel Displays: Liquid Crystal Display(LCD) Segment Estimated to Remain Dominant Throughout the Forecast Period 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 @Flat panel display, a thin, lightweight display, has been a consumer preference since the past few years. Applications of an FPD are more a commonplace in televisions, desktop monitors, laptops, digital cameras, smartphones, and other electronic devices. Superior to conventional CRTs, these flat panel displays gain a competitive edge owing to increased brightness, improved contrast settings, higher pixel resolution support, and lower power consumption. With flourishing consumer electronics industry, FPDs are currently witnessing dramatically high demand on a global level. PMR forecasts promising growth prospects for the global flat panel display market over a five-year forecast period 2015-2020.The global flat panel display market is pegged to attain the revenues worth US$ 135 Mn by the end of 2020. However, the growth of the global market for flat panel display will be moderate at a CAGR of 5.8% over a five-year forecast period 2015-2020. The market for FPD witnessed a slight decline in the last few years; however, PMR indicates steady recovery of the market through 2015 to 2020.Market DynamicsBrisk rebound in the prices of flat panel displays within the past few years has been a major factor that will continue to favor the growth of the global flat panel display market. Another strong driver propelling the demand for flat panel display is the exploding consumer electronics market. Rising demand for laptops, smartphones, high quality television sets, in addition to flat screen monitors in the automotive sector, will together accelerate the market growth over the forecast period. Moreover, the growth of consumer electronics sector spurs a parallel demand for HMI technology, which is again foreseen to escalate the need for flat panel displays.Siemens AG recently launched two new industrial flat panel (IFP) monitors with widescreen, IP650 protection, and capacitive multi-touch glass fronts. Introduction of such innovative FPD models will continue to push the flat panel display market further. In addition, emergence and promising adoption of superior technologies such as OLED over LCD will also accelerate the market growth during the forecast period. After 2K and 4K resolutions, the 8K UHD is anticipated to soon enter the mainstream market, eventually fostering the market for flat panel display. Besides electronics and automobiles, there has been a surge in discovery of various application of FPDs in the advertising industry as well as education field. This is expected to create new growth opportunities and support the market growth over the five-year forecast period.To Know The latest Trends and Insights Prevalent in This Market, Click the link below @In addition to remarkable proliferation of mobile computing devices, advancements in semiconductor manufacturing technology will also play an important role in driving the flat panel display market ahead. The medical sector has also been increasingly using FPDs in order to address high resolution imaging requirement. This will provide a strong opportunity in the next few years. The flat panel display market is likely to be the most concentrated in emerging Asian countries, attributed to the major cluster of consumer electronics manufacturers in the APAC region. This will continue to boost the market growth to a large extent.Segment AnalysisThe global flat panel display market is segmented on the basis of technology and application. By technology, LCD (liquid crystal display) segment are estimated to remain the clear dominator with the revenues beyond US$ 116 Mn by 2020 end and over three-fourth of the market share as well. However, OLED (organic light emitting diode display) segment will witness the strongest CAGR over 2015-2020.Based on application, the global market for flat panel display is categorized into consumer electronics, automotive, and others i.e. healthcare, military, and defense. Consumer electronics application segment will remain dominant, whereas automotive application segment is likely to thrive at a higher CAGR during 2015-2020.Regional AnalysisGeographically, the global FPD market is classified into Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific (excluding Japan), Japan, and Middle East and Africa. APEJ is projected to continue dominance with more than 85% share of the entire market by 2020 end. This region will be led by China, which is the topmost manufacturer of consumer electronics. While APEJ is foreseen to expand at a CAGR of 6%, Japan  the second largest FPD market will witness a sluggish growth at a CAGR of 1.2% during 2015-2020. Europe and Americas are also predicted to see significant growth over the forecast period.Key Players AnalysisSome of the key players in the global flat panel display market include Sony Corporation, LG Display Co. Ltd., Panasonic Corporation, Sharp Corporation, Emerging Display Technologies Corp., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Innolux Corp., AU Optronics Corporation, Universal Display Corporation, and Japan Display Inc.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:
Bariatric Surgical Procedures Market to Make Great Impact in Near Future by 2025

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Obesity is a medical condition which occurs due to excessive fat accumulation leading to adverse effect on health. Few of the prime reason for obesity are excessive food intake, less physical exercise and genetic susceptibility. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the body mass index (BMI) greater than or equal to 25-30 kg/m is known as overweight, and BMI greater than or equal to 30 kg/m is considered as obesity. According to the WHO, globally, around 1.8 billion adults are overweight, and around 600 million of them were obese in 2014. In addition, around 40 million children below the age of five years were overweight. Bariatric surgery is one of the best treatment option for obesity and overweight.Increasing obese population due to the rise in lifestyle diseases and sedentary lifestyle is one of the key factors to drive the global bariatric surgical procedures market over the forecast period 2017-2027. Similarly, growing trend of body toning and grooming therapy would have a greater importance on the aesthetic appearance leading to the market growth. Furthermore, increasing healthcare expenditure for obesity management, strategic collaborations among devices manufacturers and bariatric surgery service providers are is also anticipated to fuel the growth of this market over the forecast period.The increasing spending on healthcare per capita for quality patient care and various advanced treatments also boost the growth of the global bariatric surgical procedure market. However, the post-surgical complications and the cost associated with bariatric surgery might hamper the growth of the global bariatric surgical procedures market. On the other hand, the availability of weight management medications and other alternatives might lead to the decreasing growth rate of the market.Request for Table of Contents @The global market for bariatric surgical procedures is segmented on basis of surgery type, end user and geography:Segmentation by Surgery TypeGastric Bypass SurgeryAdjustable Gastric Banding SurgeryGastric Sleeve SurgeryDuodenal Switch SurgeryOthersSegmentation by End UserHospitalsAmbulatory Surgical CentersBased on surgery type, the global bariatric surgical procedures market has been segmented into gastric bypass surgery, adjustable gastric banding surgery, gastric sleeve surgery, duodenal switch surgery and others. Gastric bypass surgery type dominated the market in 2016 and expected to do so throughout the forecast period. The gastric bypass surgeries are preferred by patients with diabetes and gastric reflux. Increasing innovation such as minimally invasive surgeries is expected to boost the adoption of surgical procedures leading to the market growth.Based on end user, the global bariatric surgical procedures market has been segmented into hospitals and ambulatory surgical centers. Hospitals are expected to contribute highest share in the global bariatric surgical procedures market over the forecast period due to large number of local and outpatient surgeries performed each year.On the basis of regional presence, global bariatric surgical procedures market is segmented into five key regions viz. North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Middle East & Africa. North America is expected to lead the global market due to high incidence rate of obesity in U.S. and Canada, while Europe is expected to hold second largest market share in the global market. Market in Asia-Pacific region is expected to witness significant growth owing to increasing case of diabetic and sedentary life leading to obesity. In addition, increasing healthcare expenditure related to weight loss treatment and growing trend of medical tourism is expected to boost the market growth in near future.Request a Sample Brochure of the Report @Some of the players operating in global bariatric surgical procedures market are Medtronic Plc, Intuitive Surgical Inc., Allergan Inc., Johnson and Johnson, Pare Surgical, Inc and Mediflex, and TransEnterix Inc. among others. For sleeve gastrectomy companies such as Medtronic launched flagship devices representative the expansion of the global 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:
Inferior Vena Cava (IVC) Filters market to Make Great Impact in Near Future by 2025

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The inferior vena cava (IVC) is the largest vein in the body, which carries de-oxygenated blood to the hearts right atrium and then to the lungs. Inferior vena cava is the main vessel that returns blood from the lower half of the body to the heart. An IVC filter is a cone-shaped small device, which is implanted in the inferior vena to capture blood clots and to prevent them from reaching to the lungs. These devices are implanted either permanently or temporarily based on patients to patients. IVC filters are placed in the patient when anticoagulant therapy cannot be effective at the risk of pulmonary embolism.The global market for IVC filters is driven by growing incidences of cardiovascular diseases. According to World Health Organization (WHO), in 2008, around 17.3 million people died from cardiovascular disease (CVD), which is expected to reach 23.3 million by 2030. Few of the factors responsible for the market growth includes increasing number of patients diagnosed with cardiovascular diseases (CVD) across the globe, growing government initiative to increase the awareness about CVD and the devices used for treatment. For instance, in May 2014, a post market surveillance by U.S. Food and Drug Administration (US FDA) provided the information about the implementation of IVC filters coupled with the risk of pulmonary embolism.Request for Table of Contents @In addition, frequent product innovation and product launch by key companies would further boost the market growth of inferior vena cava filters. For instance, in January 2014, Argon Medical Devices, Inc. received U.S.FDA clearance for its Option ELITE retrievable inferior vena cava (IVC) filter. Despite several advantaged offered by IVC filter, the high cost of the product might hamper the market growth to some extent. Similarly, complex regulatory approval of cardiovascular devices might lead to the slow market growth.The global market for Inferior vena cava filters is segmented on basis of product type, material type, end user and geography:Segmentation by Product TypeRetrievable Inferior Vena Cava filtersPermanent Inferior Vena Cava filtersSegmentation by MaterialNon-ferromagnetic materialFerromagnetic materialsSegmentation by End UsersHospitalsAmbulatory Surgical CentersEmergency Care CentersBased on product type, the market is segmented into retrievable inferior vena cava filters and permanent inferior vena cava filters. Based on material, the inferior vena cava filters market is segmented into non-ferromagnetic materials and ferromagnetic material. IVC filters made from ferromagnetic materials are also classified as MR conditional.Based on end user, the global Inferior vena cava filters market has been segmented into hospitals, ambulatory surgical centers and emergency care centers. Hospitals are expected to contribute highest share in the global Inferior vena cava filters market over the forecast period due to increased use of inferior vena cava filter for cardiac surgeries performed each year.On the basis of regional presence, global Inferior vena cava filters market is segmented into five key regions viz. North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Middle East & Africa. North America is expected to lead the global market due to large demand for the device for cardiovascular disease patients, large geriatric population prone to heart disease. Europe is expected to hold second largest market share in the global IVC filters market. Market in APAC region is expected to witness significant growth rate over the forecast period owing to large patient population and increasing awareness regarding the cardiovascular disease and its treatment options.Request a Sample Brochure of the Report @Some of the players operating in global Inferior vena cava filters market Cook Medicals, C. R. Bard, Inc., B. Braun Melsungen AG, Boston Scientific Corporation, Cordis Corporation, Argon Medical Devices, Inc., ALN, are 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:
Soft Tissue Sarcoma Treatment Market to Make Great Impact in Near Future by 2025

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Sarcoma are the type of cancer that develops from tissues such as nerves, muscles, fats, blood vessels and deep skin tissues. It occurs in the blood vessels, muscles, and tissues that protects, supports and surround the organs. It is not categorized as tumor, but a life-threatening disease when the cancer has spread to the other body parts. Currently, there are around 50 different types of soft tissue sarcoma, few of them are Adult fibrosarcoma, Angiosarcoma, Clear cell sarcoma, Alveolar soft-part sarcoma, Kaposi sarcoma, Malignant mesenchymoma, and Rhabdomyosarcoma among others. Few of the drus used for the treatment of soft tissue sarcoma includes Bevacizumab (Avastin), Doxorubicin (Adriamycin), Sunitinib (Sutent), Sirolimus (Rapamune), and Trabectedin (Yondelis) among others.Soft tissue sarcoma can be diagnosed with some physical examination such as X-ray imaging, CT scanning, MRI, ultrasound, PET scan and a biopsy. Physical examination with other test are used to diagnose the stage of soft tissue sarcoma, which is important to plan the treatment method. According to the American Cancer Society, around 12,390 new patients with soft tissue sarcoma will be diagnose by the end of 2017 and around 55% of the cases are reported to males. Moreover, around 4,990 American are expected to die due to soft tissue sarcoma in coming year.Request for Table of Contents @Increasing cases of soft tissue sarcoma and different types of cancer are expected to boost the growth for soft tissue sarcoma market. Few of the major driving factors includes increasing research and development on biological and targeted drug therapies for the cancer treatment along with the expiration of patents. The increasing spending on healthcare per capita for quality patient care and various advanced treatments also boost the growth of the global soft tissue sarcoma treatment market. In addition, increasing focus on personalized medicine along with the huge investment for anti-cancer treatment research is likely to unveil the new paths for soft tissue sarcoma treatment market in the near future.However, the side effects of cost associated with soft tissue sarcoma treatment may hamper the growth of the global soft tissue sarcoma treatment market. Similarly, high cost of chemotherapy and radiation therapy, stringent government regulation, and high failure rate of clinical trials might hamper the market growth to some extent.Based on treatment type, the global soft tissue sarcoma treatment market has been segmented into chemotherapy, targeted therapy, anti-angiogenesis drugs, radiation therapy, and surgery. Surgery and chemotherapy segment is expected to dominate the global soft tissue sarcoma market. Hospitals are expected to contribute highest share in the global soft tissue sarcoma treatment market over the forecast period due to large number of patients receiving treatment at hospitals for soft tissue sarcoma and related cancer.Based on end user, the global soft tissue sarcoma treatment market has been segmented into hospitals, oncology centers, and long term care centers. Hospitals are expected to contribute highest share in the global soft tissue sarcoma treatment market over the forecast period due to large number of patients receiving treatment at hospitals for soft tissue sarcoma and related cancer.On the basis of regional presence, global soft tissue sarcoma treatment market is segmented into five key regions viz. North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Middle East & Africa. North America is expected to lead the global market due to high incidence rate of cancer and soft tissue sarcoma, while Europe is expected to hold second largest market share in the global market. Market in Asia-Pacific region is expected to witness significant growth owing to increasing case of cancer and growing awareness regarding advanced cancer treatments. In addition, increasing healthcare expenditure related to cancer and associated disease is expected to boost the market growth in near future.Request a Sample Brochure of the Report @Some of the players operating in global soft tissue sarcoma treatment market are Eli Lilly and Company, Genentech USA, Pfizer, Inc., Johnson & Johnson Services, Inc. GlaxoSmithKline, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Teva Pharmaceuticals, Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd, and Celgene Corporation among others.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.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:
Veterinary Teleradiology Market Share, Growth, Demand, Trends, Region Wise Analysis of Top Players and Forecasts by 2025

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Veterinary teleradiology is the practice of medical images interpretation and analysis by a radiologist who is not present at the site where the images were generated. This market is utilized by hospitals, pet clinics, and veterinary radiology centers. Teleradiology enables radiologists to use advanced teleradiology solutions in order to improve patients care and treatment without any delay in the treatment process. The concept of teleradiology arose due to dearth of radiologists, as the specialized group of people is generally located in metropolitan areas. Teleradiology markets enable trained specialists to provide their interpretation and guidance 24/7 across the globe.The primary factor fuelling demand for teleradiology market is increasing domestic, livestock and companion animal industry, rising animal disease and accidental cases, growing number of veterinary practitioners and the income levels. In addition rising innovations in teleradiology services, which offer rapid and accurate results to customers. However, a primary factor hampering growth of the teleradiology market is the risk of data security, high cost of technology, dearth of trained radiologists and technicians and transformation access to remote areas.Request for Table of Contents @High cost of services, image transmission issues, low awareness in emerging economies are going to be a major challenge for veterinary teleradiology services market. Manufacturers are expected to invest more on the product technology for quick transformation of data which include various parameters of information and technology. Ongoing trends for teleradiology services are driving the whole market coupled with the latest IT infrastructure which also include artificial intelligence and algorithms, cloud with low maintenance and image backup storage.Based on services type, the market has been segmented into emergency care, day time coverage, subspecialty reading, and second opinion. Day care and emergency care dominates the global veterinary teleradiology services market and is expected to do so throughout the forecast period. This service type segment is anticipated to expand with the fastest CAGR over the forecast period.Based on modality type, the market is segmented into X-Ray Scans, CT Scans, MRI Scans, Ultrasound Scans, Nuclear Scan, and Others. In terms of revenue share, CT scans dominated the veterinary teleradiology Market owing to increase in CT scans in the region is projected to do so throughout the forecast period. However, MRI scans are projected to grow with high CAGR than other modalities over the forecast period.Based on end user, the global veterinary teleradiology market has been segmented into hospitals, pet clinics and veterinary radiology centers. Hospitals are expected to contribute highest share in the global veterinary teleradiology market over the forecast period.On the basis of regional presence, global veterinary teleradiology market is segmented into five key regions namely North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Middle East & Africa. North America is expected to lead the global market due to large number of pet adoption, increasing disease and accidental cases in pet animals, and growing expenditure on animal healthcare, while Europe is expected to hold second largest market share in the global market. Market in Asia-Pacific region is expected to witness significant growth rate over the forecast period owing to growing trend of pet adoption and increasing focus on teleradiology services.Request a Sample Brochure of the Report @Some of the players operating in global veterinary teleradiology market are VetCT, Veterinary Imaging Consultations, Inc., Lynks Group, Animal Imaging Consultants, Vet-Rad LTD, Veterinary Medical Centers, and PetRays among others.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.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:
Polyimide Fibers Market to Reach a Valuation of US$ 433.6 Mn by 2026

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Persistence Market Research has published a new research report on polyimide fibers. The report has been titled, Polyimide Fibers Market: Global Industry Trend Analysis 2013-2017 and Forecast 2018-2026. The global polyimide fibers market is expected to witness moderate growth prospects over the years ahead.Request for Table of Contents @The complex manufacturing procedure and premium prices for these fibers have resulted in their restricted use for highly specific conditions. According to the report, the global polyimide fibers market is expected to witness a CAGR of 5.0% from 2018 to 2026. In 2017, the market was worth US$ 279.2 Mn and is expected to touch a valuation of US$ 433.6 Mn by the end of 2026.The presence of a limited number of players has made this market a consolidated one. The companies are continuously focusing on the development of new and cost-effective ways of production in order to cater to the growing needs of the consumers and the vertical industries. The companies are also expanding their production capacities.Request to Sample of Report @The companies operating in the market are Jiangsu Shino New Materials Technology Co., Ltd, Jiangsu Aoshen Hi Material Co. Ltd, Ningbo Yide Fine Chemical Co., Ltd., and Evonik Industries AG. The main six companies have a per annum consolidated capacity of 7000 tons.Use of Polyimide Fibers for Protective Clothing to Boost Market GrowthFilter media by far holds the core application area for polyimide fibers. However, over in the recent past, there has been a rise in the use of polyimide fibers in the garment industry for the manufacturing of protective clothing in order to make the outer shell of suits and jackets for fire fighters, army, and industry.Polyimide fibers are characterized by excellent flame retardant properties and good chemical resistance. Additionally, the fiber has good mechanical strength and are thus durable for being used in clothing. Moreover, these fibers are also used in the spacecraft for sealing and thermal insulation.The growing number of space launches requires a large number of space vehicle fleet. Space research organizations such as NASA and ISRO to name a few are continuously sending their space shuttles into space. With this rise in the launch of activities across the globe, the demand for light weight and high performance material is also surging which can withstand exceptionally high temperature.All the space shuttle manufacturers are using polyimide fiber as a potential material for multilayer insulations. The external layer of the space craft is generally PI coated with a minute layer of aluminum along with it. Moreover, these fibers are used in the spacesuits of astronauts as well, thus supplementing the market growth.Request Report Multiple Chapter @Premium Pricing and a Handful of Players to Threaten Future Market ProspectsOwing to the exceptional properties it inherits, polyimide fibers are primarily used in the manufacturing of dust filters. Furthermore, with growing sophistication in industrial infrastructure, the demand for filter is also increasing. Owing to the availability of limited vendors in the marketplace and the complex manufacturing procedure, these fibers are only used in areas with specific demands and low emissions.Get full report now @There are only a few market players, which limited production capacity. Sudden disruption in the throughput or in the production output from these players disturbs the whole value chain of polyimide fiber market. Expensive pricing is another key concern estimated to hamper market growth.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
Radiant Barrier & Reflective Insulation Market is Expected to Expand US$ 1,927.0 Mn by 2026

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Increasing consumption of energy efficient passive cooling systems is primarily fuelling the sales of radiant barrier and reflective insulation globally. Persistence Market Research recently discovered that the global radiant barrier and reflective insulation market that was valued at US$ 890.0 Mn in 2017, will attain a value of US$ 1,927.0 Mn by the end of 2026. The market is estimated to thrive at a robust CAGR of 9% over 2018-2026, attributed to growing adoption of green building technology by several countries worldwide.Request for Table of Contents @By product type, the market has two key segments which are further classified  radiant barrier segment is bifurcated as metallized film and pure Aluminum, whereas reflective insulation segment is sub-segmented into bubble type, foam type, and others. Reflective insulation has been a larger product type segment and is expected to remain the dominant one during the forecast period.On the basis of end-use, there are four key segments of the market, including residential, commercial and agriculture, industrial, and institutional and others; among which commercial and agriculture will remain dominant in terms of revenue generation, followed by industrial segment.Request to Sample of Report @Markets in Emerging Economies to Elevate Following Popularity of Green Building TechnologyAccording to regional analysis, the global radiant barrier and reflective insulation market is classified as North America, Latin America, Europe, SEA & Pacific (SEAP), China, Japan, and Middle East & Africa (MEA). Among all the regional markets for radiant barrier and reflective insulation, Persistence Market Research finds that North America, SEAP, and China are estimated to be lucrative markets in terms of revenue generation.North America and SEAP are projected to hold significant shares in the global radiant barrier and reflective insulation market, predominantly attributed to stringent regulations for mandatory installation of radiant barriers in new constructions in certain rapidly developing countries, such as Singapore.Request Report Multiple Chapter @While North America is expected to see healthy growth at a CAGR of around 8.5% between 2018 and 2026, SEAP is projected to expand at a stellar CAGR of 12% owing to the increasing green building initiatives in the region. China will possibly reach a value worth US$ 129.3 Mn by 2018 end and is expected to expand at a CAGR of 9.8% during the forecast period. MEA and Latin America are also projected to witness robust growth throughout the assessment period, at the CAGRs of over 9.5% and 8.5% respectively.The growth of market in North America is primarily driven by growing demand of passive cooling systems in the southern states of US. The report indicates soaring popularity of radiant barriers and reflective insulation in the Pacific Rim, and Malaysia and ASEAN countries also export substantial amount of radiant barriers and reflective insulation materials to the North American industry.This growth is attributed to the bolstering green building initiative and strict regulatory standards regarding radiant barrier installation in a few rapidly developing countries such as Singapore.Get full report now @Competitive LandscapeSome of the prominent players active in global market are Reflectix, Inc., Dunmore Corporation, Innovative Insulation, Inc., FiFoil Company, Inc., Spunchem International, Patidar Corporation, Attic Foil Radiant Barrier Supply LLC, and SC M&E Hardware Supplies Sdn. Bhd. A majority companies are likely to concentrate more on introducing innovative technology products and expanding their manufacturing capacity. Collaborative efforts are also expected to fuel the market growth in near future.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
Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy Treatment Market to Make Great Impact in Near Future by 2025

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Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy is a rare but fatal demyelinating disease of the central nervous system, affecting primarily in immunosuppressed individuals, characterized by widespread lesions due to infection of oligodendrocytes by JC virus (human polyomavirus). Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy particularly occurs in patients affected with, autoimmune rheumatological diseases, hematological and lymphoreticular malignancies, AIDS, or those who have undergone organ Transplantation. Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy has a Mortality rate of 3050 percent in the first couple of months and the individuals who survive can be left with varying degrees of neurological disabilities. Patients with PML can have a variety of symptoms including the sensory deficit, muscle weakness, cognitive dysfunction, coordination and gait difficulties and language impairment. There are no specific antiviral drugs for the JC virus.However, Current prophylaxis and treatment of PML are focused on restoration of immune responses to JC virus infection, immune reconstitution, and eventual suppression of immune reconstitution inflammatory syndrome. There are several distinct PML risk populations. The largest is the human immunodeficiency virus positive PML population, around 5% of people with AIDS eventually developed PML. Owing to the continuous increase in the population exhibiting HIV Infectious Disease, the market for Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy Treatment is expected to witness robust growth over the forecast period.Request for Table of Contents @Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy Treatment Market: Drivers and RestraintsThe rise in incidence and prevalence rate of AIDS is the primary factor responsible for the growth in the Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy Treatment market during the forecast. The rate of the allogeneic transplants has increased which is one of the factors influencing the growth of the global market. The patients suffering hematological malignancies are at high risk of developing Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy; therefore the rise in the rate of hematological malignancies is another factor that can influence the growth of the Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy Treatment market. Furthermore, revenue growth in the Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy Treatment market is expected to fuel by factors such as the increase in awareness about available diagnostic procedures, technological advancement in Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy diagnosis, and rise in research activities for developing Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy drugs.Some factors that can restrain the growth of the global market during the forecast are the rise in the cost of the Treatment, less availability of super specialized professionals. Strict FDA approvals and stringent government regulation and rapid replacement of Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy drugs and therapies by new drugs and therapies are also the factors that can hinder the growth of the Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy Treatment market.Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy Treatment Market: OverviewThe Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy Treatment market is expected to expand at a significant growth rate across regions. Major players in this segment are working on their research and development process for advance drugs and therapy. Prevalence of unhealthy lifestyle, Higher spending on healthcare with increased investment in the R&D by various pharmaceuticals and biotechnology companies are also the factors leading to increased demand for Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy Treatment, thereby fuelling the growth of the Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy Treatment market.Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy Treatment Market: Region-wise OutlookA geographic condition regarding for Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy Treatment market, it has been segmented into five broad regions: North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia-Pacific excluding Japan, and the Middle East & Africa. North America, followed by Europe, has the largest market for Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy Treatment due to affordability and accessibility of expensive tests for Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy and innovations in drug therapies in this region. Growing demographics and economies in the developing countries such as India and China is expected to lead the growth in Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy Treatment market in Asia. In addition, the rise in awareness about Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy Treatment and increasing research activities for developing Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy drugs in the region are also expected to offer the new opportunity to Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy Treatment market.Request a Sample Brochure of the Report @Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy Treatment Market: Key Market ParticipantsMajor Key players in the Progressive Multifocal Leukoencephalopathy Treatment market include GlaxoSmithKline plc, Novartis AG, Watson Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Hoffman La Roche and Mylan N.V.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:
Nonwoven Fabric Market to Reach an Estimated Value of US$ 66,800 Million by 2024

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The nonwoven fabric is considered to be the most versatile material worldwide. Non-woven fabric is generally used for making products that are disposable. However, in recent years increasing focus on less consumption of raw material, sustainability, and environmental responsibility the companies are working towards advanced nonwoven fabric production.Request for Table of Contents @Companies are also producing a nonwoven fabric with various properties including soft, harsh, strong, and extremely weak. These properties of a nonwoven fabric are leading to its increased demand in a wide range of products. New devices are also being launched to simplify each and every process from molding, spinning, elongation, to process of separating elongated filament.The companies are also focusing on introducing chemical sensors to produce smart nonwoven fabric using advanced methods. Incorporating active material in a nonwoven fabric. The active materials in the non-woven fabric can be evaluated on the basis of humidity, temperature, chemical substances and ultraviolet radiation.Request to Sample of Report @Manufacturers of nonwoven fabrics are using a percentage of recycled fabrics and oil-based materials to produce nonwoven fabrics. Hence, the nonwoven fabric is considered to be eco-friendly and witnessing increasing use in industries where single-use or disposable products are produced. Using nonwoven fabric, manufacturers are also developing various hygiene products.However, the use and price of raw material for nonwoven is also the concern among manufacturers. Hence, various countries are focusing on reducing the price of fibers and polymers used to make a nonwoven fabric.The report by Persistence Market Research (PMR) anticipates the global market for nonwoven fabric to see a strong growth during the forecast period 2017-2024. The global nonwoven fabric market is estimated to exceed US$ 66,800 Million in terms of revenue by the end of the forecast period 2024.Spunlaid Technology to Gain Maximum Traction in the Global Market for Nonwoven FabricBased on the technology, the global nonwoven fabric market is expected to witness substantial growth in the spunlaid technology. By 2024 end, spunlaid technology is projected to bring in nearly US$ 32,800 Million revenue.On the basis of material type, polypropylene is likely to be the highly preferred material type during 2017-2024. Polypropylene as a material for nonwoven fabric is projected to surpass US$ 49,500 Million revenue towards 2024 end. Meanwhile, polyester is also anticipated to see an impressive growth between 2017 and 2024.Request Report Multiple Chapter @In terms of the application, the nonwoven fabric is expected to find the largest application in personal care products. Towards 2024 end, the use of nonwoven fabric in personal care is expected to bring in more than US$ 25,000 Million revenue.Asia Pacific to Dominate the Global Nonwoven Fabric MarketGeographically, Asia Pacific is expected to lead the global market for nonwoven fabric during 2017-2024. By the end of 2024, Asia Pacific is estimated to surpass US$ 31,600 Million revenue. Improvement in standards on prevention of infections in Asia Pacific region is driving the use of nonwoven fabric materials and products.Increasing use of nonwoven fabric in producing face mask, surgical drapes, and beddings is driving the growth of the market in the region. Companies are also shifting their manufacturing units of the nonwoven fabric to various countries in Asia Pacific due to the availability of low-cost labor and raw material. Along with this, companies are focusing on producing consumer-specific products and basis weight reduction.Get full report now @Major Companies in the Global Market for Nonwoven FabricMajor companies operating in the global nonwoven fabric market include Avintiv, Inc., Ahlstrom-Munksjo, Freudenberg SE, Kimberly-Clark Corporation, P.H. Glatfelter Company, Asahi Kasei Corporation, and Toray Industries, 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,Telephone - +1-646-568-7751USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.com
Endotoxin Testing Market Share, Growth, Demand, Trends, Region Wise Analysis of Top Players and Forecasts by 2025

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The gram-negative organisms release endotoxins, the presence or absence of which is determined by the endotoxins tests. Endotoxin testing is carried out at different phases of the manufacture and development of bulk lot release testing, raw material testing and final product release testing. Endotoxin testing is used in various industries such as medical devices, biopharmaceuticals, research, and pharmaceutical to name a few.In early 1950s, Frederick Bang discovered that the horseshoe crab s blood cells contain a clotting agent which attached to the endotoxins produced by gram-negative bacteria. In 1983, the test was further approved by the FDA. Soon FDA, established guidelines for Limulus Amebocyte Lysate testing of medical devices and pharmaceuticals in 1987. Endotoxins can be found in water, air, via human contact, soil and any other non-sterile environment.Request for Table of Contents @Endotoxin Testing Market: Drivers and RestraintsLimulus Amebocyte Lysate assay is the choice of endotoxin test used in the parenteral pharmaceuticals. Tachypleus Amebocyte Lysate is one more approved test, but only in Asia. The demand of biologics has triggered the need for more limulus amebocyte lysate and tachypleus amebocyte lysate testing. As more countries are moving toward economic development, healthcare needs are expected to increase and so will the product development and research scenario. This is expected to create an exponential demand for the exotoxins testing market.Endotoxin Testing Market: OverviewThe demand for the endotoxins market is expected to propel in the near future as industry players are bringing in newer methods such as the USP chromogenic method by Sigma-Aldrich Co. LLC or the Endosafe-PTS test by Charles River Laboratories, Inc. Moreover, industry is consolidating by acquiring companies expertise in proving the e ndotoxin test. For instance, in December 2016, Fujifilm agreed to acquire Wako Pure Chemical Industries, Ltd. for US$ 1.40 billion. The synergy is expected to help Fujifilm in the field of regenerative medicine, contract development and manufacturing organization and in-vitro diagnostics.Endotoxin Testing Market: Region-wise OutlookIn terms of geography, endotoxin testing market has been divided into five regions including North- America, Asia- Pacific, Middle-East & Africa, Latin America and Europe. North America is the dominating region with most established regulatory guidelines for taking care of the limulus amebocyte lysate and tachypleus amebocyte lysate shortage. Moreover, the region is experiencing many takeovers by the pharmaceutical industry to lead in the exotoxing testing market.Economically developing region such as AsiaPacific is expected to be the fastest growing region during the forecast testing.Request a Sample Brochure of the Report @Endotoxin Testing Market: Key Market ParticipantsSome of the endotoxin testing market participants are Accugen Labs, Wako Chemicals USA, Inc., Charles River Laboratories, Inc., Pacific BioLabs, Sigma-Aldrich Co. LLC., Lonza, STERIS, Nelson Laboratories, LLC, Bio-Synthesis Inc and Biogenuix.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:
Sleep Apnea Devices Market Growth Drivers, Restraints, Opportunities, Future Trends and 2025 Demand Forecasts

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The Global Sleep Apnea Devices Market Analysis to 2025 is a specialized and in-depth study of the sleep apnea devices industry with a focus on the global market trend. The report aims to provide an overview of global sleep apnea devices market with detailed market segmentation by diagnostic devices, therapeutic devices, end user, and geography. The global sleep apnea devices 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.Sleep Apnea is abnormal pauses in breathing, which range from a few seconds to minutes, or occurrence low breathing during sleep. Sleep apnea is the most common sleep disorder that usually goes undiagnosed; however, it has serious and life-threatening effects. Sleep Apnea Devices diagnostic and therapeutic devices are used for treating this disorder caused due to pauses in breathing during sleep. The treatment for this sleeping disorder includes surgery, PAP devices, and lifestyle changes.Rising awareness of sleep apnea in pediatrics and growing geriatric population are the major drivers which are likely to propel the growth of sleep apnea devices market. Technological advancements, healthcare spending & improving healthcare infrastructure are likely to add new opportunities for this market in the coming years.FREE | Request Sample is Available atThe report provides a detailed overview on the industry including both qualitative and quantitative information. It provides overview and forecast of the global sleep apnea devices market based on diagnostic devices, therapeutic devices, and end user. It also provides market size and forecast till 2025 for overall sleep apnea devices market with respect to five major regions, namely; North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific (APAC), Middle East and Africa (MEA) and South & Central America. The market by each region is later sub-segmented by respective countries and segments. The report covers analysis and forecast of 13 countries globally along with current trend and opportunities prevailing in the region.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 & Central America after evaluating political, economic, social and technological factors effecting the market in these regions.The report also includes the profiles of key sleep apnea devices manufacturing companies along with their SWOT analysis and market strategies. In addition, the report focuses on leading industry players with information such as company profiles, products and services offered, financial information of last 3 years, key development in past five years. Some of the key players influencing the market Resmed, Inc., Koninklijke Philips N.V, Fisher & Paykel Healthcare Ltd., Somnomed Limited, Whole You, Inc., Weinmann Medical Devices GmbH, Devilbiss Healthcare LLC, BMC Medical Co., Ltd., Compumedics Limited, and Braebon Medical Corporation among others.Inquire before Buying atSleep Apnea Devices Market Key Players1. ImThera Medical, Inc.,2. Fisher & Paykel Healthcare,3. Resmed, Inc.,4. Somnomed Limited,5. Weinmann Medical Devices GmbH,6. Philips Healthcare,7. Devilbiss Healthcare LLC,8. Curative Medical Inc.,9. Itamar Medical Ltd.,10. Braebon Medical CorporationComplete 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:533, 5th Floor,Amanora Chambers, East Block, Amanora Township,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028
Spare Parts Logistics Market 2018 - Demand, Insights, Analysis, Opportunities, Segmentation and Forecast to 2023

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Market Study Report.com present the report on global Spare Parts Logistics market evaluates the growth trends of the industry through historical study and estimates future prospects based on comprehensive research. The report extensively provides the market share, growth, trends and forecasts for the period 2018-2023.Scope of the Report:This report focuses on the Global Spare Parts Logistics 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.A spare part, spare, service part, repair part, or replacement part, is an interchangeable part that is kept in an inventory and used for the repair or replacement of failed units. Spare parts are an important feature of logistics engineering and supply chain management, often comprising dedicated spare parts management systems.Get Sample Copy of this Report:Market Segment by Manufacturers, this report covers:Deutsche Post DHL, DSV, CEVA, DB Schenker, UPS, FedEx, Kuehne+Nagel, Logwin, TGW logistics, Toyota Tsusho, Network Global Logistics, Broekman logistics.Market Segment by Regions, regional analysis covers:North America (United States, Canada and Mexico), Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy), Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia), South America (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia), Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa).Market Segment by Applications, can be divided into:Automotive, Industrial Sector, Technology Industry, Electronics, Others.Table of Contents  A Section-wise Analysis of Spare Parts Logistics market report: Industrial overview of Spare Parts Logistics market with classification, specification, geographic application segmentation Major Manufacturer Analysis of market, Consumers Analysis of market Development Trend of Analysis of Spare Parts Logistics market, Regional Market Trend and Consumption Forecast Regional Marketing Type Analysis Traders or Distributors with Contact Information of Spare Parts Logistics by region and Supply Chain Analysis Spare Parts Logistics market methodology, business strategies, data source, future development analysisTopics covered in Spare Parts Logistics market report: Development Environment of Spare Parts Logistics market Supply and Demand of Spare Parts Logistics in the World Price Trend of market with Threats and Challenges in Spare Parts Logistics market Driving Forces and Market Opportunities of Spare Parts Logistics market in the World, 2018-2023 competitive analysis of the key market players, in terms of product types and application areas Spare Parts Logistics market inclusive analysis of players with their recent developments and future scope.More Report At:Related Report:Global Spare Parts Logistics Market 2018-2022The report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the global spare parts logistics market for 2018-2022. To calculate the market size, the report presents a detailed picture of the market by way of study, synthesis, and summation of data from multiple sources.About Us:Marketstudyreport.com allows you to manage and control all corporate research purchases to consolidate billing and vendor management. You can eliminate duplicate purchases and customize your content and license management.Contact Us:Market Study Report4 North Main Street,Selbyville, Delaware 19975USAPhone: 1-302-273-0910US Toll Free: 1-866-764-2150Email: sales@marketstudyreport.comWebsite:News:
Global Bio-Based Surfactant Sales Market Size, Trends, Revenue and Future Scenario Forecast Until 2025

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A comprehensive study, with a prime focus on chemicals industry has been publicized to the vast archive of Market Research Hub (MRH), which provides precise information on the Bio-Based Surfactant Market, thus titled as Global Bio-Based Surfactant Sales Market Size, Trends, Revenue and Future Scenario Forecast Until 2025. The research gives readers a clear perspective of the market current scenario as well as future growth prospects until 2025. To interpret market size estimations, metrics such as Year-on-Year (Y-o-Y) growth rates and compound annual growth rate (CAGR) have been used. A broad competitive analysis has been offered in the report that studies the business and product strategies of the key players in the market. The demand-supply equations, along with analysis and information on the product innovations in the market have been included for the perusal of readers.Get Access to Free Sample Report@Geographically, this report split global into several key Regions, with sales (K Units), revenue (Million USD), market share and growth rate of Bio-Based Surfactant for these regions, from 2013 to 2025 (forecast), coveringUnited StatesChinaEuropeJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaGlobal Bio-Based Surfactant market competition by top manufacturers/players, with Bio-Based Surfactant sales volume, Price (USD/Unit), revenue (Million USD) and market share for each manufacturer/player; the top players includingEcoverJeneilSarayaAGAESolianceGlycoSurfTensioGreenRhamnolipidMG IntobioVictexKingoriginOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoGlycolipidsPhospholipid and Fatty AcidsLipopeptides and LipoproteinsPolymeric SurfactantsParticulate BiosurfactantOn 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, includingEnvironmentalAgriculturePetroleum ProductionCosmeticOthersBrowse Full Report with TOC@Table of Contents1 Bio-Based Surfactant Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Bio-Based Surfactant1.2 Classification of Bio-Based Surfactant by Product Category1.2.1 Global Bio-Based Surfactant Market Size (Sales) Comparison by Type (2013-2025)1.2.2 Global Bio-Based Surfactant Market Size (Sales) Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.2.3 Glycolipids1.2.4 Phospholipid and Fatty Acids1.2.5 Lipopeptides and Lipoproteins1.2.6 Polymeric Surfactants1.2.7 Particulate Biosurfactant1.3 Global Bio-Based Surfactant Market by Application/End Users1.3.1 Global Bio-Based Surfactant Sales (Volume) and Market Share Comparison by Application (2013-2025)1.3.2 Environmental1.3.3 Agriculture1.3.4 Petroleum Production1.3.5 Cosmetic1.3.6 Others1.4 Global Bio-Based Surfactant Market by Region1.4.1 Global Bio-Based Surfactant Market Size (Value) Comparison by Region (2013-2025)1.4.2 United States Bio-Based Surfactant Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.3 China Bio-Based Surfactant Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.4 Europe Bio-Based Surfactant Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.5 Japan Bio-Based Surfactant Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.6 Southeast Asia Bio-Based Surfactant Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.7 India Bio-Based Surfactant Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.5 Global Market Size (Value and Volume) of Bio-Based Surfactant (2013-2025)1.5.1 Global Bio-Based Surfactant Sales and Growth Rate (2013-2025)1.5.2 Global Bio-Based Surfactant Revenue and Growth Rate (2013-2025)2 Global Bio-Based Surfactant Competition by Players/Suppliers, Type and Application2.1 Global Bio-Based Surfactant Market Competition by Players/Suppliers2.1.1 Global Bio-Based Surfactant Sales and Market Share of Key Players/Suppliers (2013-2018)2.1.2 Global Bio-Based Surfactant Revenue and Share by Players/Suppliers (2013-2018)2.2 Global Bio-Based Surfactant (Volume and Value) by Type2.2.1 Global Bio-Based Surfactant Sales and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)2.2.2 Global Bio-Based Surfactant Revenue and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)2.3 Global Bio-Based Surfactant (Volume and Value) by Region2.3.1 Global Bio-Based Surfactant Sales and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)2.3.2 Global Bio-Based Surfactant Revenue and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)2.4 Global Bio-Based Surfactant (Volume) by Application3 United States Bio-Based Surfactant (Volume, Value and Sales Price)3.1 United States Bio-Based Surfactant Sales and Value (2013-2018)3.1.1 United States Bio-Based Surfactant Sales and Growth Rate (2013-2018)3.1.2 United States Bio-Based Surfactant Revenue and Growth Rate (2013-2018)3.1.3 United States Bio-Based Surfactant Sales Price Trend (2013-2018)3.2 United States Bio-Based Surfactant Sales Volume and Market Share by Players (2013-2018)3.3 United States Bio-Based Surfactant Sales Volume and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)3.4 United States Bio-Based Surfactant Sales Volume and Market Share by Application (2013-2018)4 China Bio-Based Surfactant (Volume, Value and Sales Price)4.1 China Bio-Based Surfactant Sales and Value (2013-2018)4.1.1 China Bio-Based Surfactant Sales and Growth Rate (2013-2018)4.1.2 China Bio-Based Surfactant Revenue and Growth Rate (2013-2018)4.1.3 China Bio-Based Surfactant Sales Price Trend (2013-2018)4.2 China Bio-Based Surfactant Sales Volume and Market Share by Players (2013-2018)4.3 China Bio-Based Surfactant Sales Volume and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)4.4 China Bio-Based Surfactant Sales Volume and Market Share by Application (2013-2018)Read More.@@Enquire about this Report@About Market Research HubMarket Research Hub (MRH) is a next-generation reseller of research reports and analysis. MRHs expansive collection of chemicals 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 -
Surgical Loupes And Camera Market to Exceed US$ 410.2 Mn in 2024

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According to the latest market report published by Persistence Market Research titled Surgical Loupes and Camera Market: Global Industry Analysis and Forecast (2014-2024), the global surgical loupes and cameras market is expected to expand at a CAGR of 9.3% during the forecast period. The market is segmented based on product type, modality, application, end user and region.Segmental ForecastOn the basis of product type the market has been segmented into surgical loupes, surgical headlights and surgical cameras. By product type, surgical loupes is expected to remain the largest segment, registering a CAGR of 10.0% in terms of value over the forecast period.Get full report now @On the basis of modality the market has been segmented into clip-on and head band mounted. The clip-on segment is expected to remain the largest segment, registering a CAGR of 9.8% in terms of value over the forecast period.Request Report Multiple Chapter @On the basis of application the market has been segmented into dental application and surgical application. The dental application segment is expected to remain the largest segment, registering a CAGR of 9.5% in terms of value over the forecast period.On the basis of end user the market has been segmented into hospitals, dental clinics, specialty clinics and ambulatory surgical centers. The dental clinics segment is expected to remain the largest segment, registering a CAGR of 10.5% in terms of value over the forecast period.Request to Sample of Report @On the basis of region, the market has been segmented into North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Middle East and Africa. North America is estimated to dominate the global market with maximum value share of the overall market (in excess of 35%) recorded throughout the forecast period.The primary factors driving revenue growth of the global surgical loupes and camera market are an increasing number of surgical procedures, which in turn creates demand for surgical loupes and cameras among surgeons. Increasing application of dental loupes in restorative dentistry and endodontic practice is responsible for a strong growth of the global surgical loupes and cameras market. Expansion of dental insurance coverage will upsurge the growth of the global surgical loupes and cameras market. However, surgical microscopes outpacing dental loupes with better technology and ergonomics is anticipated to hamper the revenue growth of the global surgical loupes and camera market in emerging economies.Request for Table of Contents @Vendor InsightsSome key players operating in the global surgical loupes and cameras market across the value chain are Orascoptic, Carl Zeiss Meditec AG, Designs For Vision, Inc., Heine Optotechnik GmbH & Co. KG, Keeler Ltd., Rose Micro Solution, L.A. Lens, ErgonoptiX, North-Southern Electronics Limited, Enova Illumination, PeriOptix, Inc., SheerVision Incorporated, Xenosys Co. Ltd. The report identifies company specific strategies related to product development, market consolidation initiatives and analysis of companies specific strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.For 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:
Analysis of Ice Cream Market in Global Industry 2018: Market Capacity, Production & Informative Developments by key players

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Global Ice Cream Market Professional Survey Report 2018" to its huge collection of research reports.This report studies Ice Cream 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, coveringUnileverNestlLotte ConfectionaryDean FoodsGeneral MillsMarsTo Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Yili GroupMorinagaMeijiMengniuTurkey HillBlue Bell CreameriesAmulOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoPremium Ice CreamSuperpremium Ice CreamRegular Ice CreamEconomy Ice CreamLight Ice Cream & Reduced Fat Ice CreamBy Application, the market can be split intoC-StoresSupermarketGroceryCatering (Restaurant,Hotel,etc.)Ice Cream FrenzyFood Processing IndustryBy Regions, this report covers (we can add the regions/countries as you want)North AmericaChinaEuropeSoutheast AsiaJapanIndiaView Complete TOC with tables & Figures @Table of ContentsGlobal Ice Cream Market Professional Survey Report 20181 Industry Overview of Ice Cream1.1 Definition and Specifications of Ice Cream1.1.1 Definition of Ice Cream1.1.2 Specifications of Ice Cream1.2 Classification of Ice Cream1.2.1 Premium Ice Cream1.2.2 Superpremium Ice Cream1.2.3 Regular Ice Cream1.2.4 Economy Ice Cream1.2.5 Light Ice Cream & Reduced Fat Ice Cream2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Ice Cream2.1 Raw Material and Suppliers2.2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Ice Cream2.3 Manufacturing Process Analysis of Ice Cream2.4 Industry Chain Structure of Ice Cream3 Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants Analysis of Ice Cream3.1 Capacity and Commercial Production Date of Global Ice Cream Major Manufacturers in 20173.2 Manufacturing Plants Distribution of Global Ice Cream Major Manufacturers in 20173.3 R&D Status and Technology Source of Global Ice Cream Major Manufacturers in 20173.4 Raw Materials Sources Analysis of Global Ice Cream Major Manufacturers in 2017Browse Report @4 Global Ice Cream Overall Market Overview4.1 2013-2018E Overall Market Analysis4.2 Capacity Analysis4.2.1 2013-2018E Global Ice Cream Capacity and Growth Rate Analysis4.2.2 2017 Ice Cream Capacity Analysis (Company Segment)4.3 Sales Analysis4.3.1 2013-2018E Global Ice Cream Sales and Growth Rate Analysis4.3.2 2017 Ice Cream Sales Analysis (Company Segment)4.4 Sales Price Analysis4.4.1 2013-2018E Global Ice Cream Sales Price4.4.2 2017 Ice Cream Sales Price Analysis (Company Segment)5 Ice Cream Regional Market Analysis5.1 North America Ice Cream Market Analysis5.1.1 North America Ice Cream Market Overview5.1.2 North America 2013-2018E Ice Cream Local Supply, Import, Export, Local Consumption Analysis5.1.3 North America 2013-2018E Ice Cream Sales Price Analysis5.1.4 North America 2017 Ice Cream Market Share Analysis5.2 China Ice Cream Market Analysis5.2.1 China Ice Cream Market OverviewAbout 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 Blogger at:
Chromium Salt Market Segmentation : In-Depth Overview and Region-wise Outlook 2017 - 2025

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Press Release - 20 April 2018Global Research and Development News --. .Report Description-' 'Chromium salt is chemically represented with the symbol Cr and atomic number 24 in the periodic table. It is placed in the first position in group six of the periodic table. Chromium is steel gray in color. It has high melting point and high polish properties. It is resistant to tarnishing. Chromium has high corrosion resistance ability. Natural existence of chromium is rare; most of the chemical compounds are manufactured. Stainless steel, an alloy of steel and chromium, offers corrosion and stain resistance.Hence, it one of the extensively used metals in commercial applications. The process of manufacturing chromium salt by removal of iron ore with the help of sodium carbonate and calcium oxide in order to form water soluble chromium salt. Chromium salt is always found in the form of crystalline powder, which is soluble in water. The melting point of chromium salt varies to some extent; it is usually between 190C and 2600C. Additionally, its solubility in water depends upon the oxidation sate, as the solubility property rises with the increased oxidation state of chromium salt. Demand for chromium salt is anticipated to rise due to the increase in number of applications.. . Get Sample Report' 'The global chromium salt market can be segmented based on application, end-use industry, and region. In term of application, the chromium salt market can be divided into metallurgy, dyes and pigments, wood preservatives, leather tanning, refractory material, and catalyst. The dyes and pigment segment comprises paints. The segment is expanding rapidly in emerging markets. This is projected to boost the chromium salt market in the near future. Metallurgy is used widely in automobile and mechanical industries.Chromium salt is employed extensively in metal, leather, and sweater treatment process. In terms of end-use industry, the chromium salt market can be divided into textile, automobile, leather paints, aerospace, steel, and tool manufacture. In the leather industry, 90% of leather tanning process is carried out with the help of chromium salt. Demand for leather in the global market has been rising significantly. This is likely to propel the chromium salt market during the forecast period.Geographically, the chromium salt market can be segregated into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East & Africa, and Latin America. Increase in demand for dyes and paints in Asia Pacific and Middle East is driving the chromium salt market in these regions. The pigments industry in the U.S. is in the stage of maturity. However, it is projected to expand further in the next two years. This is anticipated to drive the chromium salt market. Developing economics such as India and China are the most promising markets for chromium salt, as majority of demand arises from these countries.The paints and dye industry is flourishing in major countries in the Middle East and Europe. This is indirectly attracting the interest of chromium salt manufacturers. Chromium salt exhibits harmless and hazardous properties, which are bound to affect the people, who work in close proximity with the salt on the regular basis, and hence, proper safety gear is to be utilized while handling such a salt. Environmental rules and regulations owing to these harmful properties of chromium salt is deployed, especially in Europe and the U.S.Key players operating in the global chromium salt market are BASF SE, Bayer AG, American Elements, Ciba Specialty Chemicals, and Oxkem Ltd.The report offers a comprehensive evaluation of the market. It does so via in-depth qualitative insights, historical data, and verifiable projections about market size. The projections featured in the report have been derived using proven research methodologies and assumptions. By doing so, the research report serves as a repository of analysis and information for every facet of the market, including but not limited to: Regional markets, technology, types, and applications. The study is a source of reliable data on:Market segments and sub-segmentsMarket trends and dynamicsSupply and demandMarket sizeCurrent trends/opportunities/challengesCompetitive landscapeTechnological breakthroughsValue chain and stakeholder analysis The regional analysis covers:North America (U.S. and Canada)Latin America (Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Chile, and others)Western Europe (Germany, U.K., France, Spain, Italy, Nordic countries, Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg)Eastern Europe (Poland and Russia)Asia Pacific (China, India, Japan, ASEAN, Australia, and New Zealand)Middle East and Africa (GCC, Southern Africa, and North Africa)The report has been compiled through extensive primary research (through interviews, surveys, and observations of seasoned analysts) and secondary research (which entails reputable paid sources, trade journals, and industry body databases). The report also features a complete qualitative and quantitative assessment by analyzing data gathered from industry analysts and market participants across key points in the industrys value chain.A separate analysis of prevailing trends in the parent market, macro- and micro-economic indicators, and regulations and mandates is included under the purview of the study. By doing so, the report projects the attractiveness of each major segment over the forecast period. Highlights of the report:A complete backdrop analysis, which includes an assessment of the parent marketImportant changes in market dynamicsMarket segmentation up to the second or third levelHistorical, current, and projected size of the market from the standpoint of both value and volumeReporting and evaluation of recent industry developmentsMarket shares and strategies of key playersEmerging niche segments and regional marketsAn objective assessment of the trajectory of the marketRecommendations to companies for strengthening their foothold in the market. . More Clear Details get Table of Contents' 'ResearchMoz is the worlds fastest growing collection of market research reports worldwide. Our database is composed of current market studies from over 100 featured publishers worldwide. Our market research databases integrate statistics with analysis from global, regional, country and company perspectives. ResearchMozs service portfolio also includes value-added services such as market research customization, competitive landscaping, and in-depth surveys, delivered by a team of experienced Research Coordinators.Researchmoz Global Pvt. Ltd.90 State Street,Albany, NY 12207,United States,Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free),Tel: +1-518-621-2074
Underwater Monitoring System for Oil and Gas Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2017 - 2025

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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.Get the sample copy of this report @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.Request for complete report TOC @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.The report segments the global Underwater Monitoring System for Oil and Gas market as follows:Underwater Monitoring System for oil and gas Market: Subsea Sensor AnalysisPressure SensorsTemperature SensorsProximity SensorsInclinometersRotation SensorsLoad Sensors for Tension andCompressionLinear Displacement GaugesFlexible pipe systemsRiser TechnologyPipeline typeUnderwater Monitoring System for oil and gas Market: Monitoring Systems AnalysisAcoustic Sensor MarketAcoustic underwater VehicleAcoustic Doppler Current ProfilerSonobuoysHydrophonesCable HydrophonesAutonomous HydrophonesOthersWireless Sensors networks3G/GPRS Communication ModuleRTUSCADASatellite Radio NavigationUnderwater Monitoring System for oil and gas Market: Communication Method AnalysisFDMA (Frequency Division Multiple Access)TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access)CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access)SDMA (Space Division Multiple Access)Underwater Monitoring System for Oil and Gas Market: Regional AnalysisNorth AmericaU.S.CanadaEuropeU.K.GermanyFranceSpainRest of EuropeAsia PacificChinaJapanIndiaASEANRest of Asia PacificLatin AmericaBrazilMexicoRest of Latin AmericaMiddle East & Africa (MEA)GCCSouth AfricaRest of MEAMRRbiz 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
Nebuliser Market To Hold a High Potential for Growth by 2025

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According to medical science, a drug delivery device which used to administer medication in a form of mist which is to be inhaled into the lungs is called as a nebuliser. This medical device is generally used for the treatment of asthma, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, cystic fibrosis and other respiratory disorders and diseases. While functioning, nebulisers use compressed air and oxygen and thus break the solution into small aerosoldroplets which can be directly inhaled with the help of mouthpiece which is connected to the device. Ideally, the nebuliser should be used for around three to four times a day. The more usage of it may likely to increase the risk of infection in lungs. The nebuliser is mainly fallen into two categories, i.e. mechanical and electrical. Both the types are easy to use even at home.Nebuliser Market: Advantages and disadvantagesNebuliser gives immediate relief to the patients who suffer from the asthma attack or having Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease as the solution goes directly into the respiratory tract. They are easy to use and in an acute situation of breathlessness, patients can immediately use it as a home remedy before approaching hospitals or private clinics.Nebulisers are suitable for both, elderly persons and for youngsters. Even infants with respiratory diseases such as pneumonia, bronchitis or asthma are administered with the nebuliser as they have relatively fewer side effects than oral administration of the same medication. Along with all these benefits, there are certain disadvantages which are associated with a nebuliser. One of the most common drawbacks of using nebuliser is, it can carry infection into the lungs through tubes or chambers of the nebuliser if the usage is for the long term. Nebulisers are larger and less portable.They are noisy and require an electrical power source to operate. Half of the drug is wasted during the use of nebuliser as the drug converted into vapour which goes out while using the device. Thus, the medication through nebuliser is generally a costly affair.Nebuliser Market: Drivers and RestraintsOne of the major factors which are fuelling the growth of nebuliser market is increasing air pollution. Rising number of vehicles, growth of industries, reduction in the number of trees, etc. are responsible for rising of air pollution which is ultimately resulted in the number of lung diseases. For immediate relief from these various lung diseases including asthma, the use of nebulisers is increased which is creating a positive impact on the global nebuliser market.Another factor which is driving the growth of global nebuliser market is the increasing aged population across the globe. The prevalence of respiratory diseases is more in aged population rather than youngsters which are creating robust development in global nebuliser market. However, the risk of infection associated with the long-term use of a nebuliser and its less portability are hampering the growth of global nebuliser market.Nebuliser Market: RegionThe increasing prevalence of respiratory diseases and the various initiatives taken by the government to fight with it are increasing the use of nebuliser in North America. Developing regions like Asia-Pacific is also creating the positive impact on the nebuliser market due to increasing number of the population diagnosed with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease and other lung related diseases.Nebuliser Market: ForecastSmoking, rising environmental pollution and the various types of allergies associated with it, will increase the respiratory disorders such as asthma and other lung diseases in coming years. These respiratory disorders will increase the demand of nebulisers in future.Request for Table of Contents @Request to View Sample of Research Report @Nebuliser Market: Key playersPhilips Healthcare, Agilent Technologies, Allied Healthcare Products, Omron Healthcare Co. Ltd., PARI Respiratory, Inc and CareFusion Corporation are some of the key players in global Nebuliser market.The research report presents a comprehensive assessment of the market and contains thoughtful insights, facts, historical data, and statistically supported and industry-validated market data. It also contains projections using a suitable set of assumptions and methodologies. The research report provides analysis and information according to market segments such as geographies, types and applications.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance. To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.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:
Portable Forklift Ramps Market Forecast, Trend Analysis & Competition Assessment till 2027

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As per the current market trends and the promising nature of the portable forklift ramps market, it can be estimated that the future holds positive outcomes. In order to provide a deep insight about the concerned market, Fact.MR would be publishing a resourceful analysis that will enclose knowledge about the regional market size, revenue and opportunity status. Readers will be offered the privilege to decode various facets of the market during the period 2018 to 2027, together with the active access to secondary and primary research methodology. Furthermore, various segments of the market associated to product, application, end-user etc., would also be present in this intelligent research report. A new report by Fact.MR provides a comprehensive outlook of the global portable forklift ramps market. Careful analysis of the past, present and future trends of different end-user industries has been considered while forecasting the market growth between the period of 2018 and 2027.Request TOC of this Report-With the focus on an ever-growing demand for material handling equipments, technology and metallurgical innovations, rising international trade, and growing industrialization are few of the prime factors included in the report analysis. Based on this, the report provides most credible go-to forecast for multiple industry executives interested in business expansion.Portable forklift ramps are convenient, cost-effective, and safer solutions for material loading-unloading purposes in multiple industries. Advances in the technology, design, material and assembly of portable forklift ramps have increased their adoption in several end-user industries. Providing the best solution for warehouse setup, portable forklifts ramps are popular in shipping, distribution, loading and docking centers across the globe.Growth of Warehousing Industry to Boost AdoptionAs it plays a critical role in development of trade and commerce, warehousing industry is an important entity of the logistics market worldwide. Further, the purpose of the warehousing industry has dramatically evolved beyond the basic storage. With the intension to provide safer transportation, distribution and delivery, multiple companies take assistance of third party logistics system to outsource their distribution and fulfilment services. Due to this, material handling equipment are highly utilized in warehouses of industries including e-commerce, food & beverage, chemical, electronics, pharmaceutical, and aviation. Portable forklift ramps are one of the preferred equipment that are utilized in loading and unloading of materials. Forklift can easily access materials to and from the ground level and loading dock level through portable forklift ramps. In addition, portable forklift ramps are a cost effective and convenient solution over construction of permanent loading docks. Market for portable forklift ramps is likely to grow following the growth of warehousing industry.To know more @ Global Portable Forklift Ramps Market, visit -Global Portable Forklift Ramps Market: Product InnovationManufacturers are focusing on implementing variety of innovations in the designs of portable forklift ramps. Traditional portable ramps have steel wheels, aluminium body and manual setups. With the demand for heavy duty, durable, mobile and foldable ramps manufacturers have introduced multiple advanced portable forklift ramp solutions.Material of the ramp plays an important role in maintenance of durability, strength, and safety. While traditional ramps are made of aluminium, manufacturers have used carbon steel and welded steel or combination of materials for the production of durable and heavy body portable forklift ramps.Further, to accommodate evolving demand form the end-user industry, custom loading ramp solutions have been introduced in the market by leading manufacturers. Dura-ramp, a leading provider of portable loading dock solution in North America has introduced the rail series forklift loading ramps that are suitable for safe and convenient railcar loading.Self-cleaning feature due to presence of serrated grating surface attracts the clients. Portable forklift ramps experience heavy mechanical friction and forces while performing loading and unloading functions. A sturdy and self-cleaning equipment that require less maintenance is always preferred by clients.Recently, an emerging company has launched mobile forklift ramps with hydraulic leg system that locks the ramps at location for incidences of unexpected trailer departure or other accidents. Innovative wheel systems are being implemented to enhance efficiency as well as safety of mobile forklift ramps.Rental Activities: An Important Influencer of the MarketRental activities are common in material handling equipment industry. Leading global providers are involved in rental activities to deliver loading-unloading solutions to clients that look for a temporary solutions. Smaller businesses do not engage in frequent activities of distribution and delivery. They temporarily require logistic maintenance. Demand for rented portable forklift ramps remains high in such short-term applications. Manufacturers have introduced attractive options for renting a portable forklift ramp such as convenient monthly payment, and leasing contracts. Increased demand for rented portable forklifts in several end-user industries can prominently influence future growth of the global portable forklift ramps market.Pre-book Global Portable Forklift Ramps Market Forecast Report-About Fact.MRFact.MR is a fast-growing market research firm that offers the most comprehensive suite of syndicated and customized market research reports. We believe transformative intelligence can educate and inspire businesses to make smarter decisions. We know the limitations of the one-size-fits-all approach; thats why we publish multi-industry global, regional, and country-specific research reports.Contact UsFact.MRSuite 988427 Upper Pembroke Street,Dublin 2, IrelandTelephone: +353-1-6111-593Email: sales@factmr.com/Web:
Nasal Aspirator Market to Reflect Steady Growth Rate by 2025

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Nasal aspirator is a small medical device which is used to clear the nose of a baby. When babies suffered from cold, the snot (nasal mucus) develop in their nose. Unfortunately, babies do not know how to blow their nose to clear, nasal aspirators, however, work effectively in clearing up their stuffy nose and give them immediate relief from breathlessness.A nasal respirator is cheap and is easy to use. Moreover, the device is also suitable to remove the snot in infants. There are various types of nasal aspirators and parents should choose it carefully according to the need and age of their babies. Bulb nasal aspirator is a rubber bulb which can easily insert in babys nostrils to remove the mucus. They are cheap and disposable and are suitable for the thin secretion. The human suction nasal aspirator is another device which has high control over suction and is easy to clean. Electric nasal aspirator does not require squeezing or sucking and they just provide constant suction for thin or runny snot.Nasal Aspirator Market: Advantages and disadvantagesThe common and obvious advantage of using nasal aspirator is that it gives instant relief to a baby from breathless due to the stuffy nose. The nasal aspirator makes them sleep peacefully at least for a temporary period. With mucus in the nostrils, babies are not able to suck the milk from mothers breast or from the bottle.The hunger makes them fussier and therefore it becomes necessary to remove the snot from their nostril before the breast or bottle feeding. Nasal aspirator works well in such situation. Nasal aspirators are cheap and easily available in the market. They are easy to use and there is no need to visit the doctor every time in order to remove the secretion from babys nostril.However, the excess use of a nasal respirator can also be dangerous for babies. For instance, babys nose tissues are extremely delicate and thin. On the other hand, bulb nasal aspirators function aggressively, which can be resulted into nose bleeding and eventually damage of nasal tissues.Request for Table of Contents @The repetitive use of nasal respirators can also result in the swellings of the membrane inside the nostrils. Doctors, therefore, suggest the minimum use of the nasal respirator. Some nasal respirators, for example, human suction nasal aspirator, needs the parent to suck the other side of the aspirator in order to suck the mucus of the baby. In this exercise, there are high chances of cross-contamination and germs can be transferred from child to parents.Nasal Aspirator Market: Drivers and restraintsThe lesser options available in the market to remove the mucus in the nostril of the infants, babies and toddlers are automatically driving the growth of the nasal aspirator market across the globe. As the nasal aspirators do not use any medication to give relief to the babies, especially infants, they are largely preferred by the parents as well as paediatrics which boost the global market of the nasal aspirator. Rising air pollution is creating allergies among babies.The dust particles cause black mucus which needs to be removed in order to give immediate relief to babies. This particular factor is creating a positive impact on global nasal aspirator market. However, there are few factors which are hindering the growth of the global nasal aspirator market. For instance, the risks of babys nasal tissue damage and cross-contamination are some of the factors which are pulling the parents back from using nasal aspirators.Request to View Sample of Research Report @Nasal Aspirator Market: Key ManufacturersRumble Tuff, Baby Bubz, Bremed, Graco, NoseFrida, Little Martins Drawer and NeilMed are some of the global manufacturers of nasal aspirator market.The research report presents a comprehensive assessment of the market and contains thoughtful insights, facts, historical data, and statistically supported and industry-validated market data. It also contains projections using a suitable set of assumptions and methodologies. The research report provides analysis and information according to market segments such as geographies, types and applications.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance. To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.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:
Mono DiGlycerides Market Healthy Pace throughout the Forecast during 2017 - 2025

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Mono DiGlycerides market: OverviewMono DiGlycerides is commonly known as fatty acid; it is used in food products as an emulsifier. Fatty acid or mono-diglycerides are typically low in concentration. This chemical is extensively added in food commodities to enhance their shelf life. Though it is used to increase the storage life of the food products, several inbuilt negative qualities are impacting the overall development of the mono-diglycerides market.Some of the popular food products such as palm oil contain a considerable amount of mono-diglycerides and studies reveal and the consumption of this chemical hampers health. Ricinus fatty acids, nickel, tartaric acid are some of the commonly found compounds in mono-diglycerides. Mono-diglycerides are typically present in packaged foods. Some of the less health friendly food products available in the market, such as baked foods, soft drinks, ice creams, gums and candies harbour mono-diglycerides.The packaged food industry is booming, and this constant growth of this industry is expediting the sale the preservatives such as mono-diglycerides. Packaged food industry is continually expanding its periphery. In the recent times' packed food and drinks have grown manifold in some of the developing regions such as APEJ and MEA. Countries such as India and China are playing a crucial role in the growth of the packaged food and beverages industry.Apart from the APEJ region, processed and packaged food industry in GCC region has witnessed a standard growth in the last few years. Market experts believe that the food processing sector will register a significant CAGR in the coming few years. Political turmoil in some of the East European countries will continue to hamper the growth of the food processing and packaged food and beverages industry; the adverse political climate has already fractured the financial development of this region and further reduced the purchasing power millions of citizens present in this region of the globe.The packaged food will clock less profit from the Chinese market as stringent regulations; enhanced awareness will play a spoilsport in the growth of the prepared food and beverages market. These conflicting elements will affect the healthy development of the food preservatives market in the years to come.Request for Table of Contents @Mono DiGlycerides market: DriversRapid change in the lifestyle of the commoners around the globe, rising need of on -the- go- food products and the emergence of new thriving markets packed with millennial population will help to expand the market of the packed foods and beverages. These factors will fuel the use of mono-diglycerides as an additive. Natives of the emerging markets such as India, MEA are less concerned about food safety and government rules are lenient, authorities are apathetic towards public and food security.These factors will support the growth of the food preservatives such as mono-diglycerides in the forthcoming years. Though the awareness levels about healthy foods are high in developed markets such as North America and Europe, still there is a large chunk of the population which is dependent on these packaged foods. The food giants present in these regions of the globe are incredibly powerful and they are capable of twisting government policies to continue their market dominance.Request to View Sample of Research Report @Some of the biggest names from the processed food industry are camped across this region to compliment the market requirement. These food giants are moulding the psyche of the consumers through star-studded brand campaigns. These components will promote the processed food market which will further enhance the demand of the chemicals such as mono-diglycerides.Mono DiGlycerides market: RestraintsDip in the use of packaged food products and minimal use of harmful chemicals adapted by some organic or halal food manufacturing companies around the globe and stringent government rules to protect public health will slow the growth of the mono-diglycerides market.Mono DiGlycerides market: Key RegionsBeing the largest processed food market North America will drive the growth of the mono-diglycerides market. Europe will follow suit. APEJ and MEA market will probably hold a lion share of the monoglycerides market in the years to come. As the consumers of these regions are unaware of the harmful effects of this chemical and government rules on food safety are full of loopholes. China and Japan will showcase a dip in the growth of the mono-diglycerides market as buyers are sensitised, and their food habits are different from rest of the world.Mono DiGlycerides market: Key PlayersESTELLE, gillco ingredients, parchem, ChemNet, Hangzhou GengYang Chemical Materials Co., Ltd., Hangzhou Fuchun Food Additive Co., Ltd. are some of the many companies operating in the mono diglycerides market.The research report presents a comprehensive assessment of the market and contains thoughtful insights, facts, historical data, and statistically supported and industry-validated market data. It also contains projections using a suitable set of assumptions and methodologies. The research report provides analysis and information according to market segments such as geographies, types and applications.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance. To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.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:
Voice Evacuation Systems Market Forecast, Trend Analysis & Competition Assessment till 2027

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As per the current market trends and the promising nature of the voice evacuation systems market, it can be estimated that the future holds positive outcomes. In order to provide a deep insight about the concerned market, Fact.MR would be publishing a resourceful analysis that will enclose knowledge about the regional market size, revenue and opportunity status. Readers will be offered the privilege to decode various facets of the market during the period 2018 to 2028, together with the active access to secondary and primary research methodology. Furthermore, various segments of the market associated to product, application, end-user etc., would also be present in this intelligent research report. An analytical report by Fact.MR delivers key insights on global voice evacuation system market, highlighting the drivers, restraints, opportunities, and trends impacting this landscape. The need for communication with large group of individuals in hazardous situations is a key factor driving growth of the global voice evacuation systems market. This is bound to impact volume sales of voice evacuation systems. The research study offers a holistic analysis on the global voice evacuation system market for the forecast period 2018 to 2027.Request TOC of this Report-Key companies involved in the manufacturing of voice evacuation systems have been profiled in this report. Further, analysis of key companys product portfolio, SWOT analysis, key financials such as shares and sales, as well as strategies implied to gain competitive advantage have been incorporated in this report. Bosch Security Systems, Inc., Honeywell International, Inc., Protec Fire Detection Plc., and Siemens Building Technologies are among the leading participants profiled in the report.Demand for Quick and Smart Voice Evacuation Systems Influencing Key Companies to Focus on R&D ActivitiesDetectors that clearly announce danger with preloaded message have become increasingly popular, as studies have showed that people are increasingly responsible to recorder messages than tones from horn or chime. Effective voice alarm and safe evacuation of individuals needs professional skills in installation and design to make sure that emergency messages are clearly understandable and the system fulfill needs of a companys on-site emergency strategy. Creation of emergency plan must include emergency services and insures to identify types of risk, areas of risk, as well as required response time. Demand for quick and smart voice evacuation system is forcing key companies to focus on research and development to innovate product that satisfies the demand from end-use industries.Voice-based systems are widely accepted in fire and safety market, which is a key driver for the growth of the global voice evacuation system market. Improving regulations and guidelines by governments of various countries are resulting into increase in demand for voice evacuation systems, penetrating lower tiers of the market and opening up mass market opportunities to drive growth. This is likely to lead more companies to enter into the market, often selling complaisant products at lower prices than rivals. Owing to intensifying competitive pressure, TierI companies will increasingly concentrate on high-value applications for protection of infrastructure and smart buildings to stay at forefront in the global voice evacuation systems market.To know more @ Global Voice Evacuation Systems Market, visit -Increasing Emphasis on Boosting Safety Apparatus Leading to Increasing Adoption of Voice Evacuation SystemRisk of serious injury or death is clearly the most essential influence on safety planning. The responsibility to protect people, business and property has brought into sharp focus when the potential consequences are considered. In fact, reputation is the increasing concern of various companies with digital and social media empowering the wider public to publish and share views across the globe. From offices to commercial sector, and from airports to stadiums, rise in human footfall in public as well as commercial places has been observed. Additionally, complexity of escape routes has intensified to reflect sheer diversity of modern as well as current designs. Necessity to be prepared for all scenarios is improved by social consideration such as ageing population with disabilities or impairments that might require assistance. Set against this background, improved understanding of risks combined with innovative technologies such as ability to make evacuation safer by tailoring solutions to meet various situations.Bosch Introduces One-Stop-Shop SolutionIn line with the latest European standards Bosch Security System provides a new one-stop-shop solution with voice and fire alarm integration to satisfy rising demand as well as consumer requirements within the safety segment. The new fire alarm system designed by Bosch utilize a serial RS232 interface that is linked to Voice Alarm system and Plena Public Address. This is unique system on the back of single manufacturer source and considerable reduction of hardware cost and cabling.Overall, the research study on voice evacuation systems market offers in-depth analysis on the key factors that are likely to shape this landscape for the period 2018-2027. Readers can expect holistic analysis and insights on the strategies adopted by key players in this market. The insights offered in the report can help stakeholders in gaining a holistic perspective on the future of voice evacuation systems market.Pre-book Global Voice Evacuation Systems Market Forecast Report-About Fact.MRFact.MR is a fast-growing market research firm that offers the most comprehensive suite of syndicated and customized market research reports. We believe transformative intelligence can educate and inspire businesses to make smarter decisions. We know the limitations of the one-size-fits-all approach; thats why we publish multi-industry global, regional, and country-specific research reports.Contact UsFact.MRSuite 988427 Upper Pembroke Street,Dublin 2, IrelandTelephone: +353-1-6111-593Email: sales@factmr.com/Web:
New Data Shows Magnificent Trends for PCB Design Software Market

PCB Design Software Market

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Latest research study from HTF MI with title Global PCB Design 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 PCB Design Software Forecast till 2023.If you are involved in the PCB Design 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 Consumer Electronic, Computer, Communication Electronic, Medical Equipment & Automotive Electronic, Product Types such as [Basic type & Professional type] 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 PCB Design Software Market Size, Status and Forecast 2025 @:This report studies the global PCB Design Software market size, industry status and forecast, competition landscape and growth opportunity. This research report categorizes the global PCB Design Software market by companies, region, type and end-use industry.Key Companies/players: Mentor Graphics, Candence, Zuken, Altium, CadSoft, Novarm & Shanghai Tsingyue.Application: Consumer Electronic, Computer, Communication Electronic, Medical Equipment & Automotive Electronic, Product Type: Basic type & Professional type.The research covers the current & Future market size of the Global PCB Design 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, Europe, China, 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 PCB Design 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 PCB Design 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 PCB Design Software Market Size, Status and Forecast 2025What will the market size be in 2023 and what will the growth rate beWhat are the key market trendsWhat is driving Global PCB Design Software Market?What are the challenges to market growth?Who are the key vendors in PCB Design Software Market space?What are the key market trends impacting the growth of the Global PCB Design Software Market ?What are the key outcomes of the five forces analysis of the Global PCB Design Software Market?What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the vendors in the Global PCB Design 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 PCB Design Software market.Chapter 1, to describe Definition, Specifications and Classification of Global PCB Design Software, Applications of PCB Design 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, Europe, China, Japan, Southeast Asia & India, PCB Design Software Segment Market Analysis (by Type);Chapter 7 and 8, to analyze the PCB Design Software Segment Market Analysis (by Application [Consumer Electronic, Computer, Communication Electronic, Medical Equipment & Automotive Electronic]) Major Manufacturers Analysis;Chapter 9, Market Trend Analysis, Regional Market Trend, Market Trend by Product Type [Basic type & Professional type], Market Trend by Application [Consumer Electronic, Computer, Communication Electronic, Medical Equipment & Automotive Electronic];Chapter 10, Regional Marketing Type Analysis, International Trade Type Analysis, Supply Chain Analysis;Chapter 11, to analyze the Consumers Analysis of Global PCB Design Software by region, type and application ;Chapter 12, to describe PCB Design Software Research Findings and Conclusion, Appendix, methodology and data source;Chapter 13, 14 and 15, to describe PCB Design 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.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
Commercial Boiler Market in United States: - Complete Research & Foresight to 2024

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U.S. Commercial Boiler Market is expected to grow at over 3% CAGR to surpass USD 1 billion by 2024. Growing requirement for space heating system from cold regions will stimulate the industry growth. North Dakota, Alaska, Minnesota, and South Dakota are some of the coldest states in the country with winter temperatures regularly falling below 13F. In Minnesota, healthcare, lodgings and food service are some of the key industries where boilers are installed for space heating applications.Introduction of government standards and regulations towards greenhouse gas emission will drive the U.S. commercial boiler market. Replacement of existing inefficient heating units may augment the product demand. Government has announced National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants which aims to reduce emission of pollutants including particulate matter, carbon mono oxide and mercury.Request for a sample of this research report Growing investments toward upgradation of healthcare facilities and educational institutions will propel the U.S. commercial boiler market. Healthcare applications of boiler include sterilization, space and water heating in rehabilitation centers, hospitals and diagnostic centers. Advancements in heating technology and boiler control will further augment the industry growth. Boiler to Boiler communication, building automation systems and remote diagnostics are some of the technologies which will complement the business landscape.Commercial boiler market share for natural gas is predicted to experience robust growth owing to easy storage and its abundant availability. Natural Gas fired units also offer advantages which include reduced noise, absence of soot, and low operating costs. California, New York, Texas, Illinois and Louisiana are some of the largest natural gas consuming states.Stringent government regulations towards carbon emission and demand for high efficiency boiler with will drive condensing commercial boiler market. Low operating costs and high efficiency are some of the key features which make its adoption preferable. Rising investments toward upgradation of warehouse and storage facilities will stimulate >10MMBtu/hr capacity boiler demand.Lodgings accounted for over 11% of the commercial boiler market share in 2016. Boilers are primarily used for steam and hot water generation in guest cottages, dormitories, hotels and nursing homes. Growing spending toward tourism and hospitality sector will further enhance the industry outlook.Ohio commercial boiler market revenue is set to cross USD 55 million by 2024. Positive outlook towards healthcare and education sector coupled with investments towards net zero energy buildings will drive the product demand. In 2016, state government announced to spend over USD 600 million for local school construction including renovations, repairs and maintenance.Request for Enquiry of this report @Commercial boiler market demand for Delaware is predicted to experience growth over 4% by 2024 owing to rising investments in services and healthcare sector. Thriving tourism sector will further boost the product demand in the state.Key industry participants in the U.S. commercial boiler market include Fulton, Weil-McLain, Superior Boiler Works, Columbia Boiler, Bradford White Corporation, Cleaver Brooks, A.O. Smith, Burnham Commercial, Clayton, Babcock and Wilcox and Parker Boiler.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 @
Levant Power Cable Market 2024: comprehensive research Report

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Levant Power Cable Market is expected to grow at over 8% and exceed USD 6 billion by 2024. Growing investment towards the refurbishment of war affected infrastructure in countries including Iraq and Syria will fuel the industry landscape. In March 2016, Siemens signed MoU with the Government of Iraq to strengthen the collaboration with the Ministry of Oil & Gas as well as Ministry of Energy for modernizing the oil & gas energy infrastructure.Shifting trends towards clean energy to reduce the dependency on conventional energy will stimulate the levant power cable market growth. In 2017, Government of Israel announced to develop largest solar power project having 310 MW capacity by 2018. The country also aims at meeting 10% electricity demand from the sustainable sources by 2020. In December 2016, the government of Jordan issued the 300 MW solar & wind energy tender with an aim to expand its clean energy infrastructure.Request for a sample of this research report MV levant power cable Market is projected to surpass USD 2 billion by 2024 owing to its extensive applications across the growing T&D channels. In 2016, a state monopolist company, Egyptian Electricity Transmission announced to invest over USD 1.6 billion with an objective to strengthen its existing transmission network.Internal conflicts between rebels and government coupled with construction projects post-war will augment Syria levant power cable market share. The Government of Syria is creating opportunities for public-private financing within local authorities as well as mandating local organizations to work with the international community with an aim to conduct reconstruction projects in the country. However, the industry is poised to witness exponential growth post-civil war owing to rising investment towards affected areas.Expansion of transmission and distribution network along with rising demand for electricity owing to rising urban population along with will further complement the levant power cable market. In 2017, Government of Iraq signed a USD 500 million electricity agreement with ABB towards the deployment of new energy transmission systems.Request for Enquiry of this report @Turkey levant power cable Market is predicted to exceed USD 2 billion by 2024 on account of ongoing expansion programs across transport, energy, and communication sector. In 2016, Turkey announced to supply electricity to the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) with undersea cables by 2017.Major participants across the levant power cable market include Bahra, Riyadh Cables, KEI, The Okonite, Nexans, Prysmian, Southwire, Oman Cables, Belden, MESC Jordan, Saudi Cables, DUCAB, Nuhas Oman, Sumitomo Electric, and El-Sewedy.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 @
Dye Sensitized Solar Cells Market Best Productivity Supply Chain Relationship, Development by 2022

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Worldwide Market Reports added Latest Research Report titled Global Dye Sensitized Solar Cells Market Professional Survey Report 2017 to its Large Report database.This report studies Dye Sensitized Solar Cells 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.** The Values marked with XX is confidential data. To know more about CAGR figures fill in your information so that our business development executive can get in touch with you.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, coveringPhotovoltaics Ltd, Gcell, Dyenamo, Sono-Tek, Dyesol, Exeger Sweden AB, G24 Power, Fujikura, Solaris Nanosciences, Solaronix SA, Merck KgaA, Dalian Heptachroma Solar Tech, Yingkou OPV Tech.On the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoTiO2, SnO2, ZnO, Nb2O, Other.By Application, the market can be split intoPortable Charging, Automotive, Embedded Electronics, Outdoor Advertising , Other.By Regions, this report covers (we can add the regions/countries as you want)North America, China, Europe, Southeast Asia, Japan, IndiaGet discount on this report :Table of Contents :Global Dye Sensitized Solar Cells Market Professional Survey Report 20171 Industry Overview of Dye Sensitized Solar Cells2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Dye Sensitized Solar Cells3 Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants Analysis of Dye Sensitized Solar Cells4 Global Dye Sensitized Solar Cells Overall Market Overview5 Dye Sensitized Solar Cells Regional Market Analysis6 Global 2012-2017E Dye Sensitized Solar Cells Segment Market Analysis (by Type)7 Global 2012-2017E Dye Sensitized Solar Cells Segment Market Analysis (by Application)8 Major Manufacturers Analysis of Dye Sensitized Solar Cells9 Development Trend of Analysis of Dye Sensitized Solar Cells Market10 Dye Sensitized Solar Cells Marketing Type Analysis11 Consumers Analysis of Dye Sensitized Solar Cells12 Conclusion of the Global Dye Sensitized Solar Cells Market Professional Survey Report 2017**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.CONTACT US:Mr. ShahWorldwide Market Reports1001 4th Ave,U.STel: +1 415 871 0703Email: sales@worldwidemarketreports.comWebsite:
Atmospheric Water Generator Market Trend to 2023 Profiling AT Company, Shenzhen FND, Aqua Sciences, EcoloBlue, Island Sky, Drinkable Air, Dew Point Manufacturing

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Atmospheric Water Generator Market report 2023 focuses on the major Types and Applications for the key players. Atmospheric Water Generator market research report also provides analysis of the market share, segmentation, revenue forecasts and geographic regions of the market. The Atmospheric Water Generator market research report is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of Atmospheric Water Generator Industry.As we know, 97% of the world's water is undrinkable salt water and more than half of the 3% that is freshwater, is inaccessible due to polar ice caps. Even though 70% of the earth is covered by water, more than 50% of the world population has insufficient drinking water. According to the World Bank, $600 billion is invested in water delivery systems and the United Nations has announced a worldwide water shortage. Scientists have given warning of this and constructive steps are being taken, but current methods to achieve clean drinking water are expensive and wasteful.Scope of the Report:This report focuses on the Atmospheric Water Generator Market, especially in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, South America, Middle East and Africa. This report categorizes the market based on manufacturers, regions, types and applications.Request for a Sample Copy of Atmospheric Water Generator Market Report @Atmospheric Water Generator Market Segment by Top Manufacturers Including:Hendrx, AT Company, Shenzhen FND, Aqua Sciences, EcoloBlue, Island Sky, Drinkable Air, Dew Point Manufacturing, Sky H2O, WaterMaker India, Planets Water, Atlantis Solar, Watair, Saisons Technocom, Konia, Air2Water, GR8 Water and Ambient Water.An inherent sub-vertical of the Manufacturing and Construction Industry space, Atmospheric Water Generator market stands to gain remarkable proceeds over 2018-2023, as per a recently compiled report Market Segment by Regions, regional analysis covers:North America (United States, Canada and Mexico)Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)South America (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia)Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa)Market Segment by Table of Contents:Global Atmospheric Water Generator Market OverviewGlobal Atmospheric Water Generator Market Manufacturers ProfilesGlobal Atmospheric Water Generator Market Competition, by ManufacturerGlobal Atmospheric Water Generator Market Analysis by RegionsGlobal Atmospheric Water Generator by CountriesGlobal Atmospheric Water Generator Market Segment by TypeGlobal Atmospheric Water Generator Market Segment by ApplicationAtmospheric Water Generator Market Forecast (2018-2023)Sales Channel, Distributors, Traders and DealersResearch Findings and ConclusionMarket Segment by Type, coversProduction Volume Rate below 100 Liters per DayProduction Volume Rate between 100 and 5000 Liters per DayProduction Volume Rate Higher than 5000 Liters per DayMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided into:Residential, Commercial, Industrial and Government and ArmyThere are 15 Chapters to deeply display the global Atmospheric Water Generator market.Chapter 1, to describe Atmospheric Water Generator Market Introduction, product scope, market overview, market opportunities, market risk, market driving force;Chapter 2, to analyze the top manufacturers of Atmospheric Water Generator, with sales, revenue, and price of Atmospheric Water Generator, in 2016 and 2017;Chapter 3, to display the competitive situation among the top manufacturers, with sales, revenue and market share in 2016 and 2017;Chapter 4, to show the global market by regions, with sales, revenue and market share of Atmospheric Water Generator, for each region, from 2013 to 2018;Chapter 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9, to analyze the key regions, with sales, revenue and market share by key countries in these regions;Chapter 10 and 11, to show the market by type and application, with sales market share and growth rate by type, application, from 2013 to 2018;Chapter 12, Atmospheric Water Generator market forecast, by regions, type and application, with sales and revenue, from 2018 to 2023;Chapter 13, 14 and 15, to describe Atmospheric Water Generator sales channel, distributors, traders, dealers, Research Findings and Conclusion, appendix and data sourceFor more information on this report, Please visit at:Related Reports: -Global Atmospheric Water Generator (AWG) Market Research Report 2018In this report, the global Atmospheric Water Generator (AWG) 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.More Report @Marketstudyreport.com allows you to manage and control all corporate research purchases to consolidate billing and vendor management. You can eliminate duplicate purchases and customize your content and license management.Market Study ReportGlobal Headquarters4 North Main Street,Selbyville, Delaware 19975USAPhone: 1-302-273-0910US Toll Free: 1-866-764-2150Email:sales@marketstudyreport.comWebsite:News:More Report at:
Iv Equipment Market to Exceed US$ 12 Bn in 2022

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Rising cases of needle stick injuries, the shift in demand towards ambulatory surgical centers and fusion pumps, and a greater number of surgical procedures performed are poised to benefit the IV equipment market. Furthermore, a prevalence of chronic diseases in an ageing population in developed nations are positive signs for the IV equipment market. However, lack of wireless connectivity, regulatory mandates for new product launches and increasing cases of medication errors inhibit the unencumbered growth of the IV equipment market that is anticipated to witness a steady CAGR of 5% from 2017 to 2022.Request Report Multiple Chapter @The IV catheter segment is the most popular in the IV equipment market and should remain so for the foreseeable future. The IV catheter segment is expected to be worth more than US$ 2.7 billion in 2017 itself and companies are recommended to target this segment with gusto. The infusion pump segment is a close second in the IV equipment market in terms of product type segment and is likely to be the biggest winner in terms of market share. Key stakeholders in the IV equipment market would do well to focus their energy on the Europe infusion pumps market as the region accounts for more than a third of the revenue contributionGet full report now @The securement device segment and stopclocks & valve segment have single digit revenue share in the IV equipment market. While the former is projected to lose market share, the latter is on track to gain share and companies may seek to take advantage of this. The stopcock & valves segment is estimated to grow with a CAGR of just under 6% from 2017 to 2022. Along with Europe, the stopcocks & valves segment has strong potential in APEJRequest to Sample of Report @The drip chamber and needleless connector segment have a revenue share of less than a tenth in the IV equipment market at the end of 2017. The needleless connector segment is predicted to lose substantial share in the near future while the drip chamber segment should fall slowly. The Europe drip chamber segment is assessed to grow past more than US$ 285 million at the end of the forecast period. The needleless connector segment also has the greatest potential in Europe. Along with Europe, companies could additionally target the North America needleless connector segmentHospitals hold the lions share in the IV equipment market by end user segment and are forecast to hold steady for the medium to long term. Hospitals are the most-well equipped to deal with any and every patient need pertaining to IV treatment. Europe is the largest region in the hospital segment of the IV equipment market but there is a close competition for the second place between APEJ and North AmericaRequest for Table of Contents @The companies profiled in the IV equipment market are AngioDynamics, Moog Inc., Terumo Corporation, C. R. Bard, ICU Medical, Smiths Group, Baxter International Inc., Fresenius SE & Co., B. Braun Melsungen AG, and Becton, Dickinson and CompanyFor 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:
Alcoholic Beverages Market Dynamics 2018: Global Industry Analysis, Competitors Size & Share, Trends, Demand, Global Research to 2025

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According to the new research study, Global Alcoholic Beverages Market, By Product Type (Beer, Wine, Spirits), By Packaging (Plastic Bottles, Glass Bottles, Tins), By Distribution Channel (Modern Trade, Convenience Stores, Specialty Stores, Online Retailers, Hotels/Restaurants/Bars, Commercial Stores), By Geography (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Europe, South America, Middle East & Africa) Industry Trends and Forecast to 2025Get Free Sample Report @Report Analysis:The Global Alcoholic Beverages Market accounted for USD 1,272.85 billion in 2017 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 5.6% during the forecast period of 2018 to 2025. The upcoming market report contains data for historic years 2016, the base year of calculation is 2017 and the forecast period is 2018 to 2025.This report consists of below pages: No of pages: 350 No of Figures: 60 No of Tables: 220Report Definition:This market report defines the market trends and forecast the upcoming opportunities and threats of the alcoholic beverages market in the next 8 years. Alcoholic beverages are the fermented drinks which contains the chemical properties of ethanol. They are flammable and colorless liquid such as beer, spirits and wine. These are made by allowing the sugars in berries, fruits, grains and others to go through decomposition or fermentation. The percentage of alcohol in drinks can be maximized by the distillation process. In this process, vodka, whisky, brandy, rum is produced, which usually contains 40 percent of pure alcohol. Beer is known to be the finest member of malt family of alcoholic beverages which comprises of malt, ale, stout liquor. Its alcoholic content ranges from about 2 percent to 8 percent. Wine is produced by fermenting the juices of apple, grapes and other fruits under the rigorous temperature control in large vats. Generally, unfortified grape wines consist from 8-14 percent alcohol whereas, fortified wines to which brandy or alcohol is added contains 18-12 percent alcohols. According to Government of Canada, the market size of alcoholic beverages in Canada grew to USD 15,852.7 Million in 2012 from USD 15,720.4 Million in 2011.This states that there is rise in the demand of premium alcoholic beverages. Another factor that helps in driving the alcoholic beverages market is new product launches and innovations related to alcoholic beverages. Diageo, a U.K. based company launched new range of product innovations across its brand portfolio, which includes Guinness, Smirnoff, Pimms, Captain Morgan, Gordons and CIROC.Report Drivers and Restraints: Growing demand for premium alcoholic beverages New product launches and innovations as well as change in consumer preference Increase in disposable income of customers High cost of premium or super premium products Intensification of non-alcoholic beverages market, owing to health concerns Increasing government regulation and taxesHave Any Query? Ask Ours Expert @Scope of the Report: The global alcoholic beverages market is segmented based on product type, packaging, distribution channel and geographical segments. Based on product type, the global alcoholic beverages market is segmented into beer, wine, spirits and others. Beer is sub segmented into Ale, hybrid and lager. Wine is sub segmented into fortified and sparkling. Spirits is divided into vodka, rum, whiskey and others. On the basis of packaging, the global alcoholic beverages market is segmented into plastic bottles, glass bottles, tins and others. On the basis of distribution channel, the global alcoholic beverages market is segmented into modern trade, convenience stores, specialty stores, online retailers, hotels/restaurants and bars, commercial stores and others. Based on geography, the global alcoholic beverages market report covers data points for 28 countries across multiple geographies such as 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.Competitive Analysis of Global Alcoholic Beverages Market:The global alcoholic beverages market is consolidated due to the presence of limited number of players concentrated in few countries. These major players have adopted various organic as well as inorganic growth strategies such as mergers & acquisitions, new product launches, expansions, agreements, joint ventures, partnerships, and others to strengthen their position in this market.Top Players:Some of the major players in global alcoholic beverages market are E & J Gallo, William Grant & Sons, Boston Beer, Miller Coors, Diageo, Treasury Wine Estates, Jose Cuervo, Constellation Brands, Beam-Suntory, Mast-Jaegermeister, Bacardi, Pernod Ricard, Edrington Group, Brown-Forman, Pabst Brewing, Anheuser-Busch, Carlsberg, China Resource Enterprise, Accolade Wines, Vina Concha y Toro, Torres, Heineken, The Wine Group, Craft Brew Alliance Inc., Molson Coors Brewing Co., Haelwood International Holdings Plc and Bundaberg Brewed Drinks Pty Ltd. among others.Research Methodology:Data collection and base year analysis is done using data collection modules with large sample sizes. The market data is analyzed 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.Read more news about the Global Alcoholic Beverages Market Visit @Related ReportGlobal Lactose-Free Market- Industry Trends and Forecast to 2025Global Lactose-Free Market Type (Lactose-Free, Lactose-Reduced Products), Application (Milk, Cheese, Yogurt, Baby-Foods, Ice-Cream), Distribution Channels (Supermarkets/Hypermarkets, Online Stores, Retails Stores), Geography  Industry Trends and Forecast to 2025Report 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
Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC) Market Share 2018 Global Industry Size, Growth, Demand, Segment, Statistics & Forecast to 2023

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Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC) Market report 2023 focuses on the major Types and Applications for the key players. Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC) market research report also provides analysis of the market share, segmentation, revenue forecasts and geographic regions of the market. The Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC) market research report is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC) Industry.The direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC) is a relatively recent addition to the suite of fuel cell technologies; it was invented and developed in the 1990s by researchers at several institutions in the United States, including NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. During decades of research, especially around 2010, many high tech companies like NEC, UltraCell they all have dedicated a large mass of R&D source into DMFC, and they all exhibited their prototype of their own DMFC. But as the fact, there are only two companies focus on commercial productions. This report only study the DMFC market will full-time commercial production participants.Scope of the Report:This report focuses on the Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC) Market, especially in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, South America, Middle East and Africa. This report categorizes the market based on manufacturers, regions, types and applications.Request for a Sample Copy of Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC) Market Report @Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC) Market Segment by Top Manufacturers Including:SFC Energy AG and Oorja Protonics.An inherent sub-vertical of the Energy and Power Industry space, Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC) market stands to gain remarkable proceeds over 2018-2023, as per a recently compiled report Market Segment by Regions, regional analysis covers:North America (United States, Canada and Mexico)Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)South America (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia)Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa)Market Segment by Table of Contents:Global Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC) Market OverviewGlobal Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC) Market Manufacturers ProfilesGlobal Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC) Market Competition, by ManufacturerGlobal Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC) Market Analysis by RegionsGlobal Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC) by CountriesGlobal Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC) Market Segment by TypeGlobal Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC) Market Segment by ApplicationDirect Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC) Market Forecast (2018-2023)Sales Channel, Distributors, Traders and DealersResearch Findings and ConclusionMarket Segment by Type, covers1 KW and 1 KW-5 KWMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided into:Defense & Security, Mobility & Industrial Application, Leisure, Materials Handling Equipment, Telecommunications and OtherThere are 15 Chapters to deeply display the global Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC) market.Chapter 1, to describe Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC) Market Introduction, product scope, market overview, market opportunities, market risk, market driving force;Chapter 2, to analyze the top manufacturers of Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC), with sales, revenue, and price of Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC), in 2016 and 2017;Chapter 3, to display the competitive situation among the top manufacturers, with sales, revenue and market share in 2016 and 2017;Chapter 4, to show the global market by regions, with sales, revenue and market share of Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC), for each region, from 2013 to 2018;Chapter 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9, to analyze the key regions, with sales, revenue and market share by key countries in these regions;Chapter 10 and 11, to show the market by type and application, with sales market share and growth rate by type, application, from 2013 to 2018;Chapter 12, Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC) market forecast, by regions, type and application, with sales and revenue, from 2018 to 2023;Chapter 13, 14 and 15, to describe Direct Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC) sales channel, distributors, traders, dealers, Research Findings and Conclusion, appendix and data sourceFor more information on this report, Please visit at:Related Reports: -Global and Chinese Automotive Direct Methanol Fuel Cell Industry, 2018 Market Research ReportThe 'Global and Chinese Automotive Direct Methanol Fuel Cell Industry, 2013-2023 Market Research Report' is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the global Automotive Direct Methanol Fuel Cell industry with a focus on the Chinese market. The report provides key statistics on the market status of the Automotive Direct Methanol Fuel Cell manufacturers and is a valuable source of guidance and direction for companies and individuals interested in the industry.More Report @Marketstudyreport.com allows you to manage and control all corporate research purchases to consolidate billing and vendor management. You can eliminate duplicate purchases and customize your content and license management.Market Study ReportGlobal Headquarters4 North Main Street,Selbyville, Delaware 19975USAPhone: 1-302-273-0910US Toll Free: 1-866-764-2150Email:sales@marketstudyreport.comWebsite:News:More Report at:
DVD & Blu-ray Players Market Global Outlook 2018: QiSheng, OPPO, Baru, Bevix

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Qyresearchreports include new market research report Global DVD & Blu-ray Players Market Professional Survey Report 2018 to its huge collection of research reports.This report focuses on top manufacturers in global market, with production, price, revenue and market share for each manufacturer, coveringSonySumsungPansonicPioneerLGPhilipsToshibaHUALUGIECSeastarQiShengOPPOBaruBevixViewlabDownload Free exclusive Sample 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 intoDVD PlayerBlu-ray PlayersThe report has made an effort to understand how certain segments of the global DVD & Blu-ray Players market could 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.Table of ContentsGlobal DVD & Blu-ray Players Market Professional Survey Report 20171 Industry Overview of DVD & Blu-ray Players1.1 Definition and Specifications of DVD & Blu-ray Players1.1.1 Definition of DVD & Blu-ray Players1.1.2 Specifications of DVD & Blu-ray Players1.2 Classification of DVD & Blu-ray Players1.2.1 DVD Player1.2.2 Blu-ray Players1.3 Applications of DVD & Blu-ray Players1.3.1 Residential1.3.2 Commercial1.3.3 Others2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of DVD & Blu-ray Players2.1 Raw Material and Suppliers2.2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of DVD & Blu-ray Players2.3 Manufacturing Process Analysis of DVD & Blu-ray Players2.4 Industry Chain Structure of DVD & Blu-ray Players3 Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants Analysis of DVD & Blu-ray Players3.1 Capacity and Commercial Production Date of Global DVD & Blu-ray Players Major Manufacturers in 20163.2 Manufacturing Plants Distribution of Global DVD & Blu-ray Players Major Manufacturers in 20163.3 R&D Status and Technology Source of Global DVD & Blu-ray Players Major Manufacturers in 20163.4 Raw Materials Sources Analysis of Global DVD & Blu-ray Players Major Manufacturers in 20164 Global DVD & Blu-ray Players Overall Market Overview4.1 2012-2017E Overall Market Analysis4.2 Capacity Analysis4.2.1 2012-2017E Global DVD & Blu-ray Players Capacity and Growth Rate Analysis4.2.2 2016 DVD & Blu-ray Players Capacity Analysis (Company Segment)4.3 Sales Analysis4.3.1 2012-2017E Global DVD & Blu-ray Players Sales and Growth Rate Analysis4.3.2 2016 DVD & Blu-ray Players Sales Analysis (Company Segment)4.4 Sales Price Analysis4.4.1 2012-2017E Global DVD & Blu-ray Players Sales PriceRead Complete Table of Content @List of Tables and FiguresFigure Picture of DVD & Blu-ray PlayersTable Product Specifications of DVD & Blu-ray PlayersTable Classification of DVD & Blu-ray PlayersFigure Global Production Market Share of DVD & Blu-ray Players by Type in 2016Figure DVD Player PictureTable Major Manufacturers of DVD PlayerFigure Blu-ray Players PictureTable Major Manufacturers of Blu-ray PlayersTo 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
Alternative And Complementary Medicine Market 2018 Global Analysis By Key Players  Pacific Nutritional Inc, Herb Pharm, Herbal Hills, Helio USA Inc, Deepure Plus

Alternative And Complementary Medicine Market

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WiseGuyReports.Com Publish a New Market Research Report On  Alternative And Complementary Medicine Market 2018 Global Analysis By Key Players  Pacific Nutritional Inc, Herb Pharm, Herbal Hills, Helio USA Inc, Deepure Plus.Description:This report studies the global Alternative And Complementary Medicine market, analyzes and researches the Alternative And Complementary Medicine development status and forecast in United States, EU, Japan, China, India and Southeast Asia. This report focuses on the top players in global market, likePacific Nutritional IncHerb PharmHerbal HillsHelio USA IncDeepure PlusNordic NaturalsPure encapsulations, Inc.Iyengar Yoga InstituteJohn Schumachers Unity Woods Yoga CenterYoga TreeThe Healing Company and Quantum Touch Inc.Get a Sample Report @For more information or any query mail at sales@wiseguyreports.comMarket segment by Regions/Countries, this report coversUnited StatesEUJapanChinaIndiaSoutheast AsiaMarket segment by Type, the product can be split intoBotanicalsMind, Body, and YogaAcupunctureMagnetic InterventionMarket segment by Application, Alternative And Complementary Medicine can be split intoDirect ContactE-trainingDistance CorrespondenceComplete Report Details @Table Of Contents  Major Key PointsGlobal Alternative And Complementary Medicine Market Size, Status and Forecast 20251 Industry Overview of Alternative And Complementary Medicine1.1 Alternative And Complementary Medicine Market Overview1.1.1 Alternative And Complementary Medicine Product Scope1.1.2 Market Status and Outlook1.2 Global Alternative And Complementary Medicine 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 Alternative And Complementary Medicine Market by Type1.3.1 Botanicals1.3.2 Mind, Body, and Yoga1.3.3 Acupuncture1.3.4 Magnetic Intervention1.4 Alternative And Complementary Medicine Market by End Users/Application1.4.1 Direct Contact1.4.2 E-training1.4.3 Distance Correspondence2 Global Alternative And Complementary Medicine Competition Analysis by Players2.1 Alternative And Complementary Medicine 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 Pacific Nutritional Inc3.1.1 Company Profile3.1.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.1.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.1.4 Alternative And Complementary Medicine Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.1.5 Recent Developments3.2 Herb Pharm3.2.1 Company Profile3.2.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.2.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.2.4 Alternative And Complementary Medicine Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.2.5 Recent Developments3.3 Herbal Hills3.3.1 Company Profile3.3.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.3.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.3.4 Alternative And Complementary Medicine Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.3.5 Recent Developments3.4 Helio USA Inc3.4.1 Company Profile3.4.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.4.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.4.4 Alternative And Complementary Medicine Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.4.5 Recent Developments3.5 Deepure Plus3.5.1 Company Profile3.5.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.5.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.5.4 Alternative And Complementary Medicine Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.5.5 Recent Developments3.6 Nordic Naturals3.6.1 Company Profile3.6.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.6.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.6.4 Alternative And Complementary Medicine Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.6.5 Recent Developments3.7 Pure encapsulations, Inc.3.7.1 Company Profile3.7.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.7.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.7.4 Alternative And Complementary Medicine Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.7.5 Recent DevelopmentsContinueFor more information or any query mail at sales@wiseguyreports.comABOUT US:Wise Guy Reports is part of the Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. and offers premium progressive statistical surveying, market research reports, analysis & forecast data for industries and governments around the globe. Wise Guy Reports features an exhaustive list of market research reports from hundreds of publishers worldwide. We boast a database spanning virtually every market category and an even more comprehensive collection of market research reports under these categories and sub-categories.Office No.528,Amanora Chambers,Magarpatta Road,Hadapsar,Pune-411028.
Industrial Internet Chip Market by Manufacturers,Types,Regions and Applications Research Report Forecast to 2025

Industrial Internet Chip Industry

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WiseGuyReports.Com Publish a New Market Research Report On  Industrial Internet Chip Market by Manufacturers,Types,Regions and Applications Research Report Forecast to 2025.Description:In this report, the global Industrial Internet Chip market is valued at USD XX million in 2017 and is expected to reach USD XX million by the end of 2025, growing at a CAGR of XX% between 2017 and 2025.Geographically, this report is segmented into several key Regions, with production, consumption, revenue (million USD), market share and growth rate of Industrial Internet Chip in these regions, from 2013 to 2025 (forecast), coveringUnited StatesEUChinaJapanSouth KoreaTaiwanGet a Sample Report @For more information or any query mail at sales@wiseguyreports.comGlobal Industrial Internet Chip market competition by top manufacturers, with production, price, revenue (value) and market share for each manufacturer; the top players includingABBARM Ltd.Intel CorporationGeneral ElectricCisco Systems, Inc.Rockwell Automation, Inc.Honeywell International Inc.Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.Texas Instruments IncorporatedDessault SystemesOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoConnectivity ICLogic DeviceMemory DeviceProcessorSensorOn 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, includingIT & TelecommunicationAerospace & DefenseEnergy & PowerElectronicsAutomotiveHealthcareIndustrialComplete Report Details @Table Of Contents  Major Key PointsGlobal Industrial Internet Chip Market Research Report 20181 Industrial Internet Chip Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Industrial Internet Chip1.2 Industrial Internet Chip Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global Industrial Internet Chip Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category)(2013-2025)1.2.2 Global Industrial Internet Chip Production Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.2.3 Connectivity IC1.2.4 Logic Device1.2.5 Memory Device1.2.6 Processor1.2.7 Sensor1.3 Global Industrial Internet Chip Segment by Application1.3.1 Industrial Internet Chip Consumption (Sales) Comparison by Application (2013-2025)1.3.2 IT & Telecommunication1.3.3 Aerospace & Defense1.3.4 Energy & Power1.3.5 Electronics1.3.6 Automotive1.3.7 Healthcare1.3.8 Industrial1.4 Global Industrial Internet Chip Market by Region (2013-2025)1.4.1 Global Industrial Internet Chip Market Size (Value) and CAGR (%) Comparison by Region (2013-2025)1.4.2 United States Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.3 EU 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 South Korea Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.7 Taiwan Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.5 Global Market Size (Value) of Industrial Internet Chip (2013-2025)1.5.1 Global Industrial Internet Chip Revenue Status and Outlook (2013-2025)1.5.2 Global Industrial Internet Chip Capacity, Production Status and Outlook (2013-2025)7 Global Industrial Internet Chip Manufacturers Profiles/Analysis7.1 ABB7.1.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.1.2 Industrial Internet Chip Product Category, Application and Specification7.1.2.1 Product A7.1.2.2 Product B7.1.3 ABB Industrial Internet Chip Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.1.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.2 ARM Ltd.7.2.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.2.2 Industrial Internet Chip Product Category, Application and Specification7.2.2.1 Product A7.2.2.2 Product B7.2.3 ARM Ltd. Industrial Internet Chip Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.2.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.3 Intel Corporation7.3.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.3.2 Industrial Internet Chip Product Category, Application and Specification7.3.2.1 Product A7.3.2.2 Product B7.3.3 Intel Corporation Industrial Internet Chip Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.3.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.4 General Electric7.4.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.4.2 Industrial Internet Chip Product Category, Application and Specification7.4.2.1 Product A7.4.2.2 Product B7.4.3 General Electric Industrial Internet Chip Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.4.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.5 Cisco Systems, Inc.7.5.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.5.2 Industrial Internet Chip Product Category, Application and Specification7.5.2.1 Product A7.5.2.2 Product B7.5.3 Cisco Systems, Inc. Industrial Internet Chip Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.5.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.6 Rockwell Automation, Inc.7.6.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.6.2 Industrial Internet Chip Product Category, Application and Specification7.6.2.1 Product A7.6.2.2 Product B7.6.3 Rockwell Automation, Inc. Industrial Internet Chip Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.6.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.7 Honeywell International Inc.7.7.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.7.2 Industrial Internet Chip Product Category, Application and Specification7.7.2.1 Product A7.7.2.2 Product B7.7.3 Honeywell International Inc. Industrial Internet Chip Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.7.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.8 Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.7.8.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.8.2 Industrial Internet Chip Product Category, Application and Specification7.8.2.1 Product A7.8.2.2 Product B7.8.3 Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. Industrial Internet Chip Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.8.4 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.
To the editor:

After the Feb. 14 shooting in Parkland, Florida, the Majory Stoneman Douglas Students united and said: "Never again!" They called on students across the nation to join them in a 17-minute school walkout on March 14 to honor the 17 people killed at their school. They called on students to join them on March 24 for March For Our Lives events to demand actions by legislators to end gun violence.
When we bombed Syria last Friday, the White House released a statement claiming they had evidence the Syrian government was responsible for the two April 7 chemical attacks on civilians in the town of Douma. The statement reads in part:

On April 7, social media users, non-governmental organizations, and other open-source outlets reported a chemical weapons bombardment in Douma. Videos and images show the remnants of at least two chlorine barrel bombs from the attacks with features consistent with chlorine barrel bombs from past attacks. In addition, a large volume of high-resolution, reliable photos and video from Douma clearly documents victims suffering from asphyxiation and foaming at the mouth, with no visible signs of external wounds. The World Health Organization (WHO) issued a statement about its concern over suspected chemical attacks in Syria, noting that victims showed symptoms consistent with exposure to toxic chemicals.

Not exactly a slam dunk. French President Emmanuel Macron also said he had proof that implicated the Assad regime, but unless Macron meant amateur photos and video and third-party reports, weve yet to see this proof.

At the same time, Russia told the United Nations that it had clear evidence the chemical attack was in fact staged. The Russian Defense Ministry pointed the finger squarely at the U.K.: We have  evidence that proves Britain was directly involved in organizing this provocation, said spokesperson Igor Konashenkov. The Russians claim the U.K. told first responders in the area to stage the attack, which took place just outside the Syrian capital of Damascus.

Whom to believe, and why?

That might sound like an insane question, but its not, especially the why part. Even if you think its obvious the Russians are lying, as I do, the answers offer important lessons in belief, evidence, and the extra-judicial use of military force.

First, lets take a close and fair look at the competing claims.

The first strike against what the White House said happened: The White House said it happened. They lie all the time, and at this point have negative credibility. Beyond that, though, there are a few other legitimate reasons to check your belief.

First, consider the type of evidence: Reports, pictures, and video. Though pictures and video can be convincing, and in this case they certainly are, the White House statement offers no incontrovertible hard proof that chemical weapons were used, or who used them. On this pretense we launched an attack on a sovereign state, an attack incompatible with both international and constitutional law.

As for the justification of that pretense, the statement goes into more detail, and cites as further evidence the reported use of helicopters to drop the barrel bombs containing the alleged chemicals. This makes absolute sense: Something dropped the barrel bombs from the sky, and the White House notes that no non-state group has conducted air operations in the [Syrian Civil War]. The statement also cites local reports of a specific helicopter, an Mi-8, which we know the Syrian military houses at an airbase close to Douma.

But lets advocate for the devil: If we take the position that the White House is lying, how might we support that assumption?

We could point to the White Houses credibility, as mentioned above. We could also go further and argue that its not just this White House: The U.S. is a deceptive and often ignoble colonial power, and our government cant be taken at face value. To back that claim up we might point to our history of carrying out false flag operations, perhaps most relevantly the Gulf of Tonkin incident that the U.S. used as pretext to get involved in the Vietnam War. The U.S. later admitted this attack was faked. (False flag operations are attacks or other events carried out by one group to deceive another group into blaming someone else, all in order to create a pretext for launching a war or something like that.) The logic behind the false flag: We want a reason to take the war to Assad. Not only that, but the last time we craved war in the Middle East, the same chemical weapons justification was usedIm speaking, of course, of the invasion of Iraq that led to the death of Saddam Hussein.

Additionally, theres good reason to be at least a little skeptical of the type of evidence the White House cited. Photos and video can be faked, and the scene could be staged. Also, the first-hand reports we have of the attack, along with the reports of helicopters, come from unnamed sources. Who are those people? Why should we believe them? What competing interests might they have that would induce them to lie or make the truth messy? And whats the reliable intelligence the White House cites that proves the Syrian government coordinated the attack? Why is that information reliable?

These questions poke at weak joints in the White Houses story: Theres no proof in them that rules out the possibility the attack wasnt staged, or carried out by the rebels. Which brings us to Russia.

First, the Kremlin hasnt yet offered the irrefutable evidence it claims proves the April 7 chemical attacks were staged. Also, its the Kremlin, which these days has about as much credibility as the White House.

But theres a twist: Back in March, one month before the attack, Russian Armed Forces Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov predicted the U.S. and/or our allies might carry out a false flag chemical weapons attack, blame it on the Syrian government and Russia, and use it as a pretext to attack Syria.

Yeah: In March.

Gerasimov went on to specify the Russian military had reliable information that terrorists planned to launch the false attack in Eastern Ghouta, the region where the alleged attack did indeed take place. He also claimed that White Helmets activists and film crews were already in place, and that they had satellite communications equipment to broadcast the fake attack. We havent seen proof of this, of course, but the fact that Gerasimov seems to have predicted this very event, and in some detail, is pretty compelling.

After the attack, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov pushed the same story: The attack was staged. The Russian military went a step further and blamed the U.K. specifically. Other Russian government officials have told the same story.

Russia has yet to provide evidence to support these claims.

But Russia has added that its inspectors on the ground in Douma havent found any evidence of a chemical attack. General Gerasimov said independent Russian inspectors took soil samples, collected fragments from the so-called place of the alleged chemical weapons attack and concluded those samples showed the absence of nerve agents and chlorine-containing poisonous substances.

As of the time of this writing, its unclear how you can prove the absence of something.

The general added that after a visit to the medical facility shown on the set of the White Helmets, the interview of the medical staff and the patients, neither facts of the use of poisonous substances nor injured among the inhabitants of this city were detected.

But Russia controls the attack sites, and outside inspectors have so far been blocked from gaining access. According to the BBC, one U.N. security team came under small arms fire, and an explosive was detonated.

Still, the Russian government has been consistent in its claim: The attack was faked.

But was it?

First, lets note that the official White House statement also made specific claims of fact. The most relevant of these:

The World Health Organization (WHO) issued a statement about its concern over suspected chemical attacks in Syria, noting that victims showed symptoms consistent with exposure to toxic chemicals. The symptoms described in reporting from media, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and other open sourcessuch as the WHOinclude miosis (constricted pupils), convulsions, and disruption to central nervous systems. These symptoms, in addition to the dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries reported, suggest that the regime also used sarin in its attacks on April 7.

The World Health Organization also said it had treated 500 patients in Douma that exhibited these and similar symptoms.

This means we have competing evidentiary claims: The WHOan independent international organization with zero interest in escalating a large-scale warversus the Kremlin. Who to believe?

Here lets note that reporters from CBS news and CNN have since made it into Douma and spoken with residents there. Watch this video and tell me these are actors.

The CBS correspondent, who gained access to the alleged attack site, reported a resident describing the attack: All of a sudden some gas spread around us. We couldnt breathe. It smelled like chlorine. Another resident showed CBS a yellow gas canister, similar to others used in earlier chlorine attacks. He said the canister had been dropped through the roof of the building.

In addition, a journalist from the U.K. publication The Independent reported from the ground in Douma that hed met a Syrian doctor, Dr. Assim Rahaibani, who cheerfully tells me that the gas videotape which horrified the world-despite all the doubters-is perfectly genuine. So yeah, shocker: Its not a fake video, folks.

But Dr. Rahaibani adds a twist to his report: The victims werent killed by gas; they died of oxygen starvation, suffocating in the tunnels and basements where they lived. He said a combination of heavy wind and heavy bombing whipped up a deadly dust storm. The doctor, though, wasnt an eyewitness, and the reporter is careful to observe the doctor also repeatedly called a certain group of fighters terroristswhich he notes is the Assad governments term for their enemies. And to this the reporter from The Independent adds that many people [he] talked to amid the ruins of the town said they had never believed in gas storieswhich were usually put about, they claimed, by the armed Islamist groups.

This story, though, directly contradicts Russias claim that the attack was faked: All these people say an attack happened, but some have questioned the chemical element.

So yeah, I guess its possible the rebels carried out the attack, but if they did theyd need to have upgraded their military capability exponentially. And given the sickening video evidence and testimony on the ground, its impossible to believe the attacks didnt happen at all, and very tough to believe it wasnt chemical.

But maybe the U.S. or the U.K. actually got people to launch the attack on their behalf. If you believe we or the U.K. ordered someone to gas kids, I hope you dont have a drivers license and never vote.

And if youre still not convinced, the U.S. now has made chemical analyses of blood and urine from victims, and they tested positive for exposure to nerve agent and chlorine.

Conclusion: This is beyond all reasonable doubt a chemical attack carried out at the direction of the Syrian government.

Heres a logical counterpoint, though: If Assad did gas his own people, and hes done this several times, its an invitation to the U.S. to turn its military against him. This is stupid, and a compelling reason to suspect he didnt do it.

But maybe its not so stupid.

Assad could have a reason for this senseless attack. Its twofold: Hes testing the resolve of the U.S., and hes also showing the international community what he can get away with. Effectively, Assad is claiming victory and asserting complete domain of his country.

So yes, it might seem stupid to bait the wrath of the U.S. and international community, but the gamble seems to have paid off. Look at the price Assad paid for the attacks: Nothing. A couple of pinprick missile strikes on some army fortifications with plenty of heads-up from the United States.

Still, Assad took a hell of a risk here, especially considering President Trump is more likely than Obama was to enforce a red line. And the dictator himself should be concerned about meeting the same fate that befell Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, two dictators the U.S. took down in the region. He probably isnt, though, because hes got something those other two guys didnt have: allies. Assad has the support of Russia and Iran, who both have a military presence and stake in the country. Iraq and Libya didnt have the support of anyone nearly as strong as those two countries.

In the end, I think Assad has called Trumps bluff. Trump has no idea what to do here. I mean, hes turned to Macron for advice.

But back to the problem with the evidence. The problem here is the room for doubt. The only hard evidence the U.S. cited ahead of our missile strike was easy to discredit; not on its merits, of course, but on the form of the evidence, such as social media, pictures, and third-party reports. It was only after the attack that we produced our chemical analysis.

The big lesson here is that we need to demand hard evidence before launching a missile strike on a sovereign nation. I mean, even Dylann Roof got a trial. The process is more important than we might understand, and we cant let our institutions crack. This extra-judicial missile launch, small as it was, sets us on a dangerous path: Unilateral action, sanctioned only by the opinions of the attackers. A knee-jerk response wasnt necessary here, and indeed it didnt take long for incontrovertible hard evidence to surface. Trump should have, as Trumps Secretary of Defense General James Mattis advised, at the very least gone to Congress, and we should have shown enough restraint to wait until we could present our hard evidence to the international committee. If at that point they still balk, unilateral military action becomes a more viable option. (The Iraq invasion is a glaring counterpoint.)

But Assad, we must admit, might have us beat. Trumps ego and inexperience pose a threat of escalation and full-on war, which will destroy Assads regime, but thats not a likely option. The U.S. wont approve of ground troops and occupation of rebel areas, which risks an almost inevitable conflict that might lead to war with Russia. No one in the world wants that to happen, including Trump, who wont attack Russian interests without making sure Putin has a nice fat heads-up. Trumps infamous tweet about the missiles coming, which so many interpreted as his first threat to Putin, was pure grandstanding. Putin didnt see any missiles. We warned him. It was a bluff, and we all bought it.

So I believe were going to back down in Syria, and in the end that might be for the best, in the sense that it doesnt risk full-blown war between nuclear powers.

But theres really no for the best in Syria. Trump is correct in one respect: Assad is a Gas Killing Animal. If you havent already, please watch this video from the attack sites.

Syria is the biggest humanitarian tragedy of our time, and the biggest stain on American foreign policy in who knows how long. Well, since 2003 I guess. But the human toll in the Syrian Civil War is beyond reckoning. Its so bad that the U.N. has stopped counting the number of people killed. The most recent estimate, from 2016, reckons that more than 400,000 people have died in the war. Its sick. And though there might not be a palatable military solution, there is a human one: If Donald Trump really does care about all those beautiful babies that the Gas Killing Animal is slaughtering, not only with chlorine but with guns and fires and thousands of barrel bombs, he could start letting them into the country he leads. But were not, and thats damning evidence in its own right.
Update 5:25 p.m.: This article has been updated with more details about chat.

Ever since I became a phone reviewer, my messages have been a mess. When I switch from an iPhone to an Android one, I need to remember to turn off iMessage on all of my devices lest I miss a blue bubble that sneaks through. And any conversations I was having on my iPhone are effectively over when I switch, since nothing carries over between operating systems.

Its not much better when switching between Android phones. Android Messages doesnt sync or restore your texts between phones, no one uses Allo, and third-party apps can be wonky. Ive taken to using Pulse to keep my conversations synced across numerous phones and devices, but I still need to be careful when I switch SIMs since its not technically designed for multiple handsets. On more than one occasion, Ive blown up my conversation history and needed to start over.

But now Google is working on a new solution. Following Allo, Hangouts, Voice, Messenger, Groups and Talk (am I forgetting any?), Google is poised to rollout a new messaging protocol to Android called chat (with a lowercase C since its a protocol, not a client). According to The Verges exclusive report, chat wont be a standalone app but rather a part of Android Messages that finally bring modern texting features to Androids stock messaging app, such as typing indicators (those dots that let you know someone is responding), read receipts (that switch that everyone turns off), quick replies, proper group texts, and, most importantly, full-resolution pictures and videos.

Google via The Verge Androids new chat will bring features such as quick replies (left) and proper group chatting (right).

To say this is long overdue is a massive understatement. While iPhone and Whatapp users have enjoyed these fundamental features for years, Google has been slow to roll them out, due in no small part to its numerous carriers and manufacturers. To be successful, Google needs to get everyone on board, and thats no small task. But according to The Verge, Google has full support from 55 carriers and 11 phone makers. Even Samsung.

Chat works by leveraging the power of Rich Communication Services to supplant SMS inside Android Messages. Like iMessage, it will be an optional switch (turned on by default), and the rollout will be staggered depending on carrier and manufacturer. If a message is sent to a phone that doesnt have chat enabled, it will send as a normal SMS, but chat-to-chat conversations will feature all of the benefits of a rich, modern message service. Inside Android Messages, phones updated with RCS will see a chat message message while non-RCS phones will see text message.

Google has already begun rolling out RCS internationally, but it could take a while before everyones on board. And it wont be as good as iMessage. But for the first time in a while, theres hope that the messaging mess on Android will be fixed.

The long and short of it

In a perfect world, heres how chat would work:

Every Android phone (including Samsungs Galaxies) will have Android Messages as the default messaging app with chat turned on. Every carrier will flip their RCS switch on the same day so all Android users enjoy the same experience. There will be an Android Message app with chat support for download in Apples App Store. Google Assistant will be integrated like Allo. Stickers, search, and GIF support will come soon. Back-ups will be done automatically each night to your Google Account and restored when you sign into a new phone.

Heres how it probably will actually work:

Samsung refuses to abandon its Messages app and instead creates its own RCS system Carriers slowly sign on to chat, with at least one of the big four dragging its feet for the better part of a year. Apple wont support chat on iPhones. Google Assistant will be integrated within the first year. Stickers and search will come slowly, GIFs even slower. Back-ups will be limited to the Pixel phones and still wont restore media.

In reality, chat will fall somewhere in the middle, and Im kind of OK with that. I mean, at least it wont be worse than what we have now, and it gives Google a foundation to work with. As it stands, theres no unifying vision to tie everything together on Android. Even if you just want simple SMS, your Android phone pales in comparison to an iPhone. Chat wont bring Android Messages up to the level of iOS, but it will make it a lot better. Heck, theres even a web interface in the works.

Carriers are still in control

Like Android Messages, Chat wont be a Google service, in that messages will be funneled through carriers servers, not Googles. Thats a big distinction over Apples service, and it wont be as easy to add new features like Google Pay support and selfie stickers. But the biggest detriment to RCS is exception.

Google via The Verge The new Chat will have a web interface so you can chat on a laptop or Chromebook.

Where Apples Messages and apps such as Signal and Telegram (and Allos incognito mode) feature end-to-end encryption for text messages, chat will not. It would be nice if it did, of course, but that shouldnt be a deal-breaker for most people, since SMS isnt encrypted either. Anyone who values privacy on Android is likely already using a secure messaging app, and those wont be going away.

But for the rest of us, chat is the best start to a proper modern messaging service weve ever gotten on Android. In a way, it feels like Googles last chance to get it right, and from what I see here, its finally doing it the right way, with a universal method rather than a proprietary one. For it to work, Google will need to stay focused and not stall development like it did with Hangouts, Allo, Voice, and every other messaging service its launched. Itll need to lean on carriers and OEMs to build in support. And it will need to woo Apple to allow a chat app in their App Store.

Greenbot Google has tied and failed numerous times to get messaging right. Chat might be the answer.

That wont be easy, and Googles track record with messaging apps isnt great. But for the first time, the vision is right. When Allo tried to fix Android messaging, the core concept was flawed. Any new service, even a Google one, will require a massive commitment by users to be successful, and unless its the default app on every phone, thats not going to happen.

With chat, Google isnt trying to build a new service from the ground up. Its leveraging the existing foundation of Android Messages and adding a modern layer, with the promise that its just the start of something new and better. And I couldnt be more on board.
Petoskey competes for four quarters with TC West, comes up just short
The air pressure and Ramp Control are adjusted on the left side... ...And the low speed compression is adjusted on the right.

The Bartlett uses MRP's signature Outcast arch. Rather than going with a 20mm thru-axle, MRP chose 15x110mm spacing.

Like the Ribbon, the Bartlett uses a spring-backed IFP in its damper, with externally adjustable rebound and low-speed compression, while the air spring side has independently adjustable positive and negative air chambers.



MRP have also installed their Ramp Control cartridge, which provides speed-sensitive end-stroke adjustment. However, there's a new feature on this version  the bottom of the cartridge is threaded, allowing plastic volume spacers to be added or subtracted as needed. Basically, you can do larger adjustments to the shock's air spring curve with the spacers, and then fine tune with the dial on the top of the fork.



MSRP for the Bartlett is $1289 when it becomes available this May.

MRP has added the ability to install volume spacers to the bottom of the Bartlett's Ramp Control cartridge.

The Hazzard shock.

MRP had two brand new additions to their suspension lineup on display at Sea Otter this year, the Bartlett dual crown fork and the Hazzard coil shock. The air-sprung Bartlett is basically an up-sized version of the Ribbon , with travel options between 170-190mm. The fork was designed with freeride / mini-DH bikes in mind, but it will also work with full-on DH sleds like the 29 wheeled Banshee Legend that's pictured. The name is a tribute to Bartlett's Wash, a sandstone playground in Moab, Utah, that's full of natural wall rides, steep rolls, and the iconic Mushroom Drop.One feature that sets the Bartlett apart from other dual crown forks on the market is the use of a 15x110mm thru axle. That means many riders will already have already have compatible wheels, which was MRP's intent. It's easy to envision mounting the Bartlett on something like the YT Capra, Santa Cruz Nomad, or a Pivot Firebird for a weekend trip to the bike park, and then tossing the single crown back on for those non-lift assisted rides, especially considering that the Bartlett's claimed weight is only 5.5 pounds. There will be two versions, one for 27.5" wheels with 49mm of offset, and the other for 29" wheels with 51mm of offset.MRP also have a new coil sprung shock on the way called the Hazzard. Its design is based on the company's Raze shock, with adjustable low- and high-speed compression damping, but the Hazzard has lever an additional lever for firming up the amount of compression on-the-fly for climbing.There are three styles of spring available  standard, light, and progressive. The progressive spring ramps up 20% at the end of its stroke, a feature that will allow the Hazzard to work well even on bikes that were designed with air shocks in mind.
The "spokes" pass through the hub flanges and carry the loads to the opposite side of the rim.

Head engineer Benoit Grelier explained that Syncros threw out their preconceptions about carbon wheels. Beginning with computer models, the design team set a goal to exceed the stiffness and strength of the top three carbon wheel makers' XC/trail hoops. In the end, Syncros decided that a hybrid between the classic five-spoke molded wheel and the classic multi-spoke build was the most efficient way to use carbon.



They settled on a 26-millimeter inner-width rim (31mm outer width) with a 35 millimeter deep profile. The hub flanges are molded to ovalized carbon spokes that are bonded to the outer sides of the rim. To keep the carbon filaments as straight as possible, the left-side "spokes" cross to the right side of the

Mastermind of the Silverton SL wheel, Benoit Grelier.

Aluminum inserts bonded inside the hubs ensure bearing alignment and proper freehub operation. After molding and curing, the left and right-side hub flanges and spokes are spread and the hub in inserted.

A complex mold design allows the wheel to be molded in one piece. Hookless bead flanges and wrapped carbon spokes.

Scott's Spark XC racer will be debuting Silverton SL wheels next season.

Syncros launched a production carbon wheelset today that are molded almost entirely in one piece. It's called the Silverton SL and the pair reportedly weighs only 1250 grams. The concept of molding carbon spokes to a hub and rim was pioneered by Lighweight, a German boutique wheelmaker that closely guarded its constructed methods. Syncros, however, wanted to bring a similar wheel design to full production, which was no small task.rim, and vice-versa, which reportedly boosts lateral strength. A similar X-cross lacing pattern was used in spoked racing car wheels, where lateral stiffness is of paramount importance.After molding, the hub flanges and spokes are pulled outwards and the carbon hub is inserted between the flanges, which tensions the spokes. The hub and wheel assembly are bonded in a final step and after the bearings, axles and DT Swiss freehub are installed, the wheels are true and need no further tension adjustments for the rest of their lives.So far, Syncros only plans to make the Silverton SL Wheels for XC racing, but, when pressed, they said that there is no reason that the system could not be adapted for trail, enduro, or even downhill use. The issue was not whether it was possible or practical, it was the lead time required to vet the system's key components to work together in a more hostile environment.So, how much will a pair of one-piece carbon racing wheels cost? Syncros says $3500 for the pair. Silverton SL wheels will start shipping to dealers this fall, and Scott plans on spec'ing them on its upper-end Spark and Scale models for 2019. Do you need a pair? Well, that's up to you and your wallet. Scott says that the boost in control and steering precision was what convinced them to make the Herculean effort to produce Silvertons in their Taiwan factory. It's a safe bet we'll be riding them soon, so keep an eye out for the full review.
Parker Longbough premieres "Infinite Zinn" today on Popdust. The song is from Left on Tri, his latest album, slated to drop April 20. "Infinite Zinn" is a homogenized tribute to Howard Zinn and David Foster Wallace.

Parker Longbough is the musical project of Matthew Witthoeft, who hails from Anchorage, Alaska. Prior to performing as Parker Longbough, Witthoeft played with the band Uncle Jesse. After Uncle Jesse dissolved, Witthoeft started performing with various musicians as Parker Longbough. In 2006, he released his first LP, Commander Comatose, followed by Bridges to Nowhere/Delirium in Lo-Fi.

With a sound merging guitar-pop flavors and rootsy indie rock, Parker Longbough's music brims with contagious lo-fi ambiance, rough and ready tones, and elementary resonance. In other words, it's unprocessed and vibrant.

"Infinite Zinn" kicks off with crunching drums, followed by spluttering synth harmonics augmented by potently dirty guitars. The raw, splashy feel of the music reeks of cool lo-fi proto-punk essences, providing a sharp metallic stridency to the sound. Essentially, it's industrial punk-pop with beau coup sonic heft. When the brass accents jump in, riding over the roiling guitars and synths, the music takes on a delicious eccentric zest.

Witthoeft's distorted vocals hit just the right note of low-fidelity rasp and scratch infusing a gut-wrenching dynamic, like an out-of-joint desperate rictus, as if his vocal chords are being tightened from within.

"Infinite Zinn" comes across with wild, ferocious energy, akin to a slo-mo atomic tornado full of knotted, dense, and de-rezzed momentum. The lo-fi distorted harmonics introduce an almost exotic gravitational force both rudimentary and seductive.Parker Longbough absolutely has it going on.

Follow Parker Longbough on his website, Facebook, and Twitter.



Randy Radic is a Left Coast author and writer. Author of numerous true crime books written under the pen-name of John Lee Brook. Former music contributor at Huff Post.




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Commercial properties on Spring and Cannon streets already qualify for short-term rentals. A new set of rules would allow them citywide under certain circumstances. File/Brad Nettles/Staff
Paul Bowers is an education reporter and father of three living in North Charleston. He previously worked at the Charleston City Paper, where he was twice named South Carolina Journalist of the Year in the weekly category.
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.
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I have been asked a few times by close friends and family, how I can "defend criminals." The answer is not complicated, but first, I must poin Read more
PR-Inside.com: 2018-04-20 09:22:01

M2C2 Chooses NoBlue and DSI to Provide a Native Direct for NetSuite Solution

DSI

Steve OKeeffe

Regional Vice President, EMEA

+44 1628 421740

steve.okeeffe@dsiglobal.com

DSI announced today that M2C2 has chosen NoBlue and DSI to provide a warehouse solution centered around the NetSuite ERP.

M2C2, the manufacturer of Viyella Menswear, Peter England, Tootal and Rocola brands is a leading manufacturer of mens shirts, knitwear and accessories. M2C2 sought out a flexible, cloud-based ERP and warehouse management solution to back up their growth trajectory and cover all regulation requirements without compromising budget from their core business.

M2C2s legacy ERP was slowing business processes and holding them back from expansion. With their old system becoming unsupported and separate warehouse management needed, M2C2 sought out an ERP and WMS that allowed rapid implementation, seamless transition, end-to-end inventory visibility and one system of record across their entire business.

M2C2 selected NoBlue to implement a cloud-based ERP system, NetSuite, and chose DSI to provide a flexible and scalable solution to leverage their NetSuite investment and provide them with the inventory visibility they required. DSIs native mobile applications and NetSuite allowed us to offer M2C2 the best solution that would easily fit the clients needs and their budget, said Ian Irwin, Managing Director, NoBlue.

Through DSI Direct for NetSuite apps, M2C2 is able to streamline their processes and optimize their supply chain. The native-built apps allow for increased inventory accuracy and productivity while providing M2C2 with a single system of record to enable quicker task completion and data sharing within the warehouse.

NoBlues experienced team of consultants and certified developers worked hard to make the transition and adoption of NetSuite systems a seamless experience. We are sure together, DSI and NoBlue will provide a native NetSuite solution to accommodate all of M2C2s needs, said Mark Goode, Chief Operating Officer, DSI.

About DSI

DSI is the Digital Supply Chain Platform company that provides mobile-first and cloud supply chain solutions for the digital economy. Visit www.dsiglobal.com to learn more.

About NoBlue

NoBlue, international 5Star NetSuite Partner, specialises in developing and implementing tailored cloud-based IT solutions for business. Their aim is to remove your business headaches with a single, flexible solution, making transition and adoption a seamless experience, allowing you to concentrate on your organisation. Visit https://noblue.co.uk/about to learn more.

About M2C2

M2C2 Group Ltd. is a menswear and accessories manufacturer based in Riddings, UK and is the home of brands Viyella Menswear, Peter England, Tootal and Rocola.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180420005
PR-Inside.com: 2018-04-20 07:51:02

The annual general meeting of Statoil ASA (OSE: STL, NYSE: STO) will be held on 15 May 2018 at 17:00 (CET) at Statoil Business Center, Forusbeen 50, 4035 Stavanger, Norway.

Notice of the annual general meeting is attached hereto.

This information is subject to the disclosure requirements pursuant to section 5-12 of the Norwegian Securities Trading Act.

This announcement is distributed by Nasdaq Corporate Solutions on behalf of Nasdaq Corporate Solutions clients.

The issuer of this announcement warrants that they are solely responsible for the content, accuracy and originality of the information contained therein.

Source: Statoil via Globenewswire


Preaching in a social media saturated society.

I was running for the train station as the storm hit Seoul, Korea. I hoped against hope that I would get to the airport, and my plane would make it out of the country before the promised hurricane arrived. As I rushed through Seoul's travel hubs, I whispered a prayer. But by the time I got to the airport, I could see on the display that one-by-one, every plane was being cancelled. These huge, heavy jumbos had no chance against the oncoming tropical storm. They may look strong and sturdy, but this storm would see them picked up and tossed around like a paper airplane in the hands of a toddler. Watching the clouds gather and lightning streak across the sky I suddenly felt very small. The power of the storm grounded me far from home, as the unstoppable force attempted to destroy whatever lay in its path.

Sometimes when I pick up the microphone to speak at my church I am reminded of that moment in the storm. To my right the teens are already ignoring etiquette and each other and scrolling ...
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The European Investment Bank (EIB) and the African Development Bank (AfDB) have agreed to support the new Development Bank of Nigeria (DBN) with $70 million.

EIB put in an equity stake of $20 million to finance the bank, while AfDB put in $50 million as equity participation.

A statement sent to PREMIUM TIMES on Thursday showed that the reason behind the contribution was to strengthen lending for business and agriculture investment in the country.

The Development Bank of Nigeria has been created to provide funding and risk sharing facilities to micro, small and medium enterprises as well as small corporates, by the federal government. The bank is also to address financing challenges hindering private sector investment in the country.

According to the statement, at present, new investments essential for companies to expand and create jobs are hindered by limited access to commercial banks. It is estimated by the Development Bank of Nigeria that only five per cent of the 37 million entrepreneurs and small businesses in Nigeria that contribute 50 per cent of GDP can access credit in the financial system.

The Vice-President of the EIB, Ambroise Fayolle, said his bank is pleased to support DBN to enhance private sector investments in Nigeria.

New private sector investment is crucial to create jobs and enable business to expand and limited access to long-term financing holds back economic growth. The European Investment Bank is pleased to support the new Development Bank of Nigeria to strengthen private-sector investment in Africas largest economy.

We look forward to continued close cooperation with Nigerian and international partners to ensure that once fully operational, the new Development Bank of Nigeria can help harness the countrys economic potential, he said.

The Director of the Financial Sector Development Department of the AfDB, Stephen Nalletamby, said there has been an under-performance of private sector businesses in Nigeria which has undermined their contribution to economic growth as private sector businesses are critical to the development of the Nigerian economy.

Private sector businesses are critical to the development of the Nigerian economy as they possess huge potential for employment generation and output diversification. Nevertheless, there has been an under-performance of these businesses and this has undermined their contribution to economic growth.

Among the issues affecting their performance, the shortage of finance, particularly investment finance, occupies a very central position. The Development Bank of Nigeria is expected to contribute to mobilizing significant long-term financing to an important yet underserved sector with high development potential, he said.

Tony Okpanachi, Managing Director of the DBN, said the bank will overcome the funding gap and unlock business opportunities across Nigeria.`

DBNs ambition is strengthened by the financial and technical support of international partners, including the European Investment Bank and African Development Bank. The new institution builds on international experience and uses a business model that has demonstrated proven success to enhance private-sector investment across Africa and around the world where other financing options are inadequate or absent, he said.

The Head of the European Union Delegation to Nigeria, Ketil Karlsen, pledged the European Unions commitment to support private sector investment in Nigeria

The European Union is committed to supporting private-sector investment in Nigeria. The new backing for the Development Bank of Nigeria by both the European Investment Bank, the bank of the European Union and the African Development Bank, with 13 EU member state shareholders, will make a clear contribution to tackling the lack of access to credit by entrepreneurs and businesses across the country.

With more investment, we hope to promote a vibrant economy and stimulate growth, employment and increase opportunities, especially for youth, he said.

Other international financial institutions including the World Bank, Germanys KfW and the French Agence francaise de developpement (AFD) will also support the new bank alongside backing from the Federal Government of Nigeria, the statement showed.
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The federal government has disclosed plans to incorporate the African Drum Festival into the national calendar of festivals, adding that all national media platforms would be made available to create awareness for it.

President Muhammed Buhari, who was represented by the Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, disclosed this while speaking Thursday night at the opening ceremony of the 3rd edition of African Drum Festival in Abeokuta, Ogun State.

He noted that the festival had continued to grow better with each edition, stating further that, the drum festival keyed into the objective of turning the creative industry into a thriving industry that provides jobs and promotes the economy.

The drum festival keys into our objective of turning the creative industry into a thriving industry, one that provides jobs and promotes the economy. I will also appeal to the corporate world to partner with Ogun State and support this festival by providing the much needed resources to ensure its sustenance, he said.

This festival is important to Africa because it provides us an avenue to showcase our rich cultural heritage as well as an opportunity to preserve the culture for the future heritage, Mr Mohammed added.

Also speaking, the Alaafin of Oyo, Oba Lamidi Adeyemi, noted that the drum serves as a veritable instrument of inspiration, mentoring and motivation, particularly in the Yoruba culture.

Wole Soyinka, who is the consultant to the Ogun State Government on the festival, is expected to lead legends in a  Drum Walk from Kuto to the Olumo rock in Abeokuta and also expected to co-ordinate an international conference with the theme: Drum for Advancement.

The third edition, which began on Thursday, is an annual event organized by the Ogun State Government which started in 2016.

It drew participants from 20 states and 40 African countries as well as other foreign countries including Haiti, Brazil and Trinidad and Tobago.
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Acclaimed author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been selected by the Harvard College Class of 2018 to address the graduating seniors as part of the annual Class Day celebration on May 23, the day before Harvards 367th Commencement.

We are honored to welcome Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as our Class Day speaker, said First Marshal Berkeley Brown 18, co-chair of the speaker selection committee. Her eloquence and perspective as a writer and public speaker have inspired audiences to look beyond stereotypes and social norms to recognize our common humanity.

Adichie, whose work has been translated into more than 30 languages, is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus, which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; Half of a Yellow Sun, which won the Orange Prize; and Americanah, a 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award winner, which she finalized during a fellowship year at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Her most recent book, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, was published in March 2017.

A compelling storyteller and influential cultural critic, Adichie has delivered two landmark TED talks: The Danger of a Single Story in 2009, and her 2012 TEDxEuston talk We Should All Be Feminists, which started a worldwide conversation about feminism and was published as a book in 2014.

In her captivating TED talks, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie urges us to better understand one anothers stories and to plan for a world of happier men and happier women who are truer to themselves. This is a powerful message for our class to hear as we reflect on our time at Harvard and prepare to write the next chapter of our stories, said Jerry Nelluvelil, co-chair of the speaker selection committee.

Adichie is also the co-founder of Farafina Trust, a Nigerian nonprofit that promotes reading, writing, social introspection, and engagement with society through the literary arts.

The Harvard College Senior Class Committee has invited a guest speaker for Class Day since 1968. Prior to that, the honor was given to University affiliates, such as deans, faculty, or classmates.

The first invited guest was Martin Luther King Jr., who accepted the invitation shortly before his assassination.

His widow, Coretta Scott King, delivered the speech in his absence and also became the first woman to give a Class Day address at Harvard.

Since that time, speakers have spanned fields including politics, social activism, journalism, film, comedy, and more.

In addition to Adichies address, Class Day includes award presentations and student orations. All of the events will take place in Tercentenary Theatre in Harvard Yard beginning at 2 p.m. and will be streamed live online.
Nigeria needs about $2.7 billion (N824 billion) to buy vaccines over the next 10 years to enable it achieve its target of 84 per cent immunisation coverage by 2028, the National Primary Health Care Development Agency (NPHCDA) has said.

The Executive Director of NPHCDA, Faisal Shuaib, said the investment will also allow the agency attend to the over 4.3 million unimmunised children in the country.

Speaking at a breakfast meeting with donors and partners on immunisation financing in Abuja on Friday, Mr Shuaib said the countrys immunisation coverage currently stands at 33 per cent.

The meeting was part of activities marking the 2018 Africa Vaccination Week, which is celebrated every last week of April. This years event will run from April 23 through 29 under the theme Vaccines work, do your part.

The week was set aside to ensure children get the vaccines they need.

Nigeria will require about $2.72billion to procure vaccines and devices from 2018 to 2028. While GAVI will support with $773.2 million, the government and other source, which include Basic Health Fund, loans and marching grants from donor agencies, will provide the balance, Mr Shuaib said.

He said out of about $93 million needed for immunisation in 2018, the federal government approved only $33 million.

He noted that Nigeria is graduating from GAVI support in the next two years, though conversations are still ongoing for extension.

This, he however said, has necessitated that government takes full responsibility for immunisation in the country.

As part of the programme for the vaccination week, Mr Shuaib said NPHCDA will be visiting the 18 worst performing states on immunisation.

He said the exercise is also targeted at children who have not been vaccinated in the last two to three years.

The plan of NPHCDA is to reach any child, no matter where they live. It is a moral responsibility that we do not take for granted. Plans are in place to locate the hard to reach areas and to get the vaccines to them, he said.

Nigeria country director, IVAC, Chizoba Wonodi, highlighted the economic importance of investing in immunisation programmes.

She said countries that invests one dollar in immunisation get about $16 to $44 back on their investment.

She noted that Nigeria will need about $1.9 billion to procure Routine Immunisation and SIA vaccines and devices from 2018 to 2028 and $295million annually following GAVI transition

The World Health Organisation Country Representative, Wondi Alemu, called for increased domestic resources for immunisation programmes in the country.

I call on governments, parliamentarians and policy makers, civil society organisations, the private sector, communities and all families to break down the barriers to immunisation and ensure all Nigerian children get the shot to life that they deserve.

WHO and partners are dedicated to working with the government in ensuring universal immunisation coverage, he said.

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One of the major problems of the Nigerian health sector is the failure by government to implement existing laws and policies, the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) has said.

Mike Ogirima, the president of the association, stated this at a press briefing in Abuja.

He said Nigerias health and socio-demographic indices have kept declining because a series of laws, policies and conventions adopted were not being followed with the right implementation.

He listed some laws he said would have revolutionised healthcare delivery in the country had they been diligent implemented.

They include the National Health Policy 2004 & 2016; Healthcare Financing Policy & Strategy 2006; Recommendations of National Vaccine Summit 2012; Outcome of Presidential Summit on Healthcare Financing 2014 and the National Health Act 2014.

Speaking particularly about the Health Act, Mr Ogirima said it addresses most of the issues bedevilling the nations health sector.

The Nigerian government and the NMA have previously disagreed over the status of the National Health Act, a law that came into effect in 2016 to improve the access of Nigerians to health care delivery.

While the Minister of Health, Isaac Adewole, in an exclusive interview with PREMIUM TIMES, said the Act had been substantially implemented, the NMA President, Mr Ogirima, said that was far from the truth.

The National Health Act was signed into law in 2014, after 10 years of consideration. The Act aims to establish a framework for the Regulation, Development and Management of a National Health System; to achieve the Universal Health Coverage and meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Mr. Ogirima on Tuesday further lamented that Nigerian doctors are leaving the country in droves.

He said it was against the backdrop of these challenges that the association will be holding its 58th Annual Delegates Meeting and Scientific Conference.

He said the event to be held between April 29 and May 5 will be a multi-stakeholder meeting that will present health professionals, NGOs, CSOs, government parastatals and political parties an opportunity to deliberate on the challenges of health care delivery in the country.

Mr. Ogirima said he will also leave office as the president of the association during the event.

I will cease to be the president of the NMA on Saturday 5th May 2018 when another president and national officers will be elected by the delegates, he said.

Chiedozie Achonwa, the NMA chairman in Abuja, said free medical outreach will be conducted during the conference.

500 people will be treated for free in Abaji General Hospital, Abuja.

The central theme for the NMA annual conference is Quality Healthcare delivery- an indicator of good governance.

The conference would also examine the following sub-themes:

Budgeting for/Financing Health in Poor Resource Settings: Nigerian Experience; Reversing Medical Tourism through Public Private Partnership in the Health Care System; and the National Health Act: Where Are we?

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President Muhammadu Buhari is the expected guest of honour while former President Yakubu Gowon will chair the occasion.
PHILADELPHIA, Pa.  They had terrifying names like General Cobra Red, Bad Blood DeJangle and Bullet Vest and committed horrific crimes during the early days of Liberias civil war. In a milestone ruling Thursday, a judge in Philadelphia ordered their leader, Mohammed Jabbateh, AKA Jungle Jabbah, to spend 30 years in a US prison for those crimes.

Mr. Jabbateh, now 51, has become the first Liberian to be tried and convicted for crimes committed during Liberias civil war. Previous president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf rejected the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report that more than 90 combatants be tried.

In this case Mr. Jabbateh was prosecuted for immigration fraud  lying to US immigration officials when he applied for asylum here in 1998 among thousands of other refugees fleeing the war. He could have received as little as time served but the judge gave him the maximum sentence in recognition of the egregious nature of the crimes.

Todays verdict means victory for Liberia, not only for the victims, said Hassan Bility, a long time justice campaigner whose Global Justice Research Project together with Civitas Maxima helped prosecutors gather evidence for the trial.

It means the time is gone when people hid themselves from justice; the time is gone when people discouraged victims and witnesses from stepping forward and telling their stories.

It is the longest sentence ever given in a US court for criminal immigration fraud. Judge Paul S. Diamond, said Mr. Jabbatehs crimes including systemic rape, murder, slavery, torture, use of child soliders, genocide and cannibalism were so extreme it was difficult to believe anyone could be capable of committing those acts.

In recognition of those crimes the judge imposed the maximum crime possible under the law. He stressed that he was giving Mr. Jabbateh the maximum not because of his war crimes but because in lying about them to US immigration officials he violated US law in the most extreme way possible.

In his statement US Assistant District Attorney Nelson Thayer urged the judge to impose the maximum sentence saying that Mr. Jabbateh had entered the country as a wolf clothed in the sheeps clothing of refugee. He said a strong sentence was needed to show Americans and the Liberian diaspora that this is a country of laws and those who violate them will be prosecuted.

If he does not deserve the maximum, Thayer asked Who does? In an interview after the sentence hearing Thayer paid credit to the 17 Liberian witnesses who had come from Liberia to the court to testify against Jabbateh. They are real heroes, he said.

We both immediately thought of the victims, said Mr. Thayer. They can go to sleep tonight knowing that Mohammed Jabbateh will not be coming back to Liberia. In all likelihood he will die in this country and he will not be running for office. He will not be coming back to be embraced by his supporters. He will die in a federal prison.

Outside the court, Mr. Jabbatehs family and friends were angry. His 19-year-old son, who a family friend said was planning to enlist in the US army in two months, supported Mr. Jabbatehs sister who was crying. They refused to talk to the media.

A supporter, Alphonso Seke-Horton, told reporters the sentence was unfair and a political act designed to frame Mr. Jabbateh. He said Mr. Jabbateh was only acting in defense of his people when he commited the acts.

Mr. Jabbatehs lawyer Greg Pagano said Jabbateh would appeal the decision.

Mr Jabbateh was found guilty on four-counts of U.S. immigration fraud and perjury charges  all linked to atrocities he committed nearly three decades ago in Liberia when he was commander of the Zebra Battalion in the militia known as ULIMO (United Liberation Movement of Liberia for Democracy), in Western Liberia operating from 1990-1994.

ULIMO was one of the many warring factions that fought Charles Taylors NPFL (National Patriotic Front of Liberia) during Liberias first civil war (1989-1996). In the areas that lived under Mr. Jabbahs terror there was joy at the outcome.

Ye, he is supposed to go to jail. 30 years is even small, said John Wanner, 49. Me I see Jungle Jabbah, I was not a small boy at that time. Here in Lofa Bridge when they kill somebody he takes of their heart to cook pepper soup and eat it.

Whenever soldiers under his commend complain of hunger he will ask for all the prisoners to get out, said Town Chief Momoh FenSeh, 60. He like the fair skin people. Whether you are a woman or man as long as your skin is fair he referred to you is hog (pig) meat. We are satisfying with that 30 years, for somebody to kill people like chicken and be walking free it is not fine.

The response was the same in the Gbarplou area where a bridge is still known as Jungle Jabbah bridge after Mr. Jabbateh forced the local community to build the bridge to allow him to transport goods stolen from a logging company and then tortured the local community after the bridge collapsed.

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Let him be there. Let them put him in jail. Jungle Jabbah did a lot of things here. Let him be in jail, said Joseph Ballah, 78, a resident of Gbarqueta, in the county of Gbarpolu.

He ran away from here to America, taking himself to be a good person. Let him bear the penalty.

When they said Jungle Jabbah [is] coming, nobody would remain in this town, said George Massaquoi, now 51. Everybody used to jump in the bush. I was afraid to even lay eyes on him. I really feel happy because those are the people who tortured our people here.

In order to prove that Mr. Jabbateh provided false information to U.S. immigration authorities and procured asylum in the United States by fraud, the prosecution first had to establish that he was a high-ranking rebel commander during the first Liberian civil war and committed criminal actions while in that position.

The U.S. District Attorneys office flew in 17 victims from Liberia to testify. During the three-week trial, witnesses recounted brutalities committed at the hands of Mr. Jabbateh and his rebels, including cannibalism, mutilations, rapes and slave labor in and around Liberias diamond-rich western region, where they said that Jabbateh brutalized villagers while he was building an empire with looted diamonds and other natural resources.

Jury members wept as an elderly widow of a village chief recalled how Mr. Jabbateh had ordered her husband be murdered by having his heart cut out.

They brought his heart to me to cook, she told the visibly shocked jurors. Make yourself strong ma, she remembered a young rebel saying as he urged her to build a fire. If you dont, hell kill us both.

Another juror told how Mr. Jabbatehs rebels had lined up all the men in the village and identified two men they said were Krahn (Jabbahs rival ethnic tribe). They cut off their ears and then ordered us to clap, recalled the witness.

Mr. Jabbah, now 51, and father of 10, was operating a shipping outlet in Southwest Philadelphia when he was picked up by U.S. Marshals on April 23, 2016 and charged with lying about his brutal past, when he sought asylum in the U.S. in 1998.

Mr. Jabatehs trial is the first case in a new legal push for the prosecution of Liberians who are known to have committed war crimes during the countrys plunge into bloody civil conflicts that intermittently ran for nearly 20 years.

The push has been led by the Global Justice and Research Project in collaboration with the international lawyers and investigators of Switzerland-based Civitas Maxima. The campaign is running under the banner #Quest4Liberia. The trials of Thomas Woewiyu, Charles Taylors Defense Minister in Philadelphia and Agnes Taylor, Charles Taylors ex-wife in the UK will begin later this year. Two other combatants are facing trial in Belgium and Switzerland.

Liberian President, George Weah [Photo credit: The Southern Times]

Pressure is mounting on President George Weah to hold a war crimes court. In a big change in their position the Liberian Council of Churches recently called on the president to hold a trial. In a visit to Liberia in March, UN Deputy General Amina Mohammed also called on the president to hold a trial.

So far President Weah, who said a trial was necessary in 2004, has refused to discuss a trial since he became president in January. When asked about it by the BBCs reporter in Liberia, Mr. Weah ignored the question and made unsubstantiated accusations about the reporters bias against him. The reporter has since fled the country in fear of retaliation from Mr. Weahs supporters. Mr. Weah has appointed several people accused of war crimes to his government.

But speaking in Philadelphia on Monday, Lenn Eugene Nagbe, Weahs Information Minister, said the government is working on a plan that takes into account the countrys fragility, reconciliation and possible prosecution while maintaining peace.

The pressure will only intensify as trials continue.

This sentence should come as a wake-up call for the Liberian government, said Alain Werner, Director of Civitas Maxima. Victims will be relentless in their quest for justice. They want to be heard and they will be heard. The George Weah administration should listen to them now, take steps towards establishing war crimes courts in Liberia.

Mr. Woewiyus trial will begin in Philadelphia on June 11.

This story was a collaboration between Front Page Africa and New Narratives. Jackson Kanneh reported from Philadelphia. Tecee Boley was in Lofa Bridge, Liberia and James Harding Giahyue was at Jungle Jabbah Bridge in Gbarpolu, Liberia.

THE ORIGINAL RIGHTS OWNERS GRANTED PREMIUM TIMES PERMISSION TO PUBLISH.
The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) said it was consulting various interest groups and political stakeholders for synergy to enable it regain power in 2019 elections.

The National Chairman of the party, Uche Secondus, made this known at an emergency National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting of the party on Thursday in Abuja.

Mr Secondus said that the consultation with the groups was useful, and that in coming days, a broader platform would be raised to wrestle power from the All Progressives Congress (APC).

He said that PDP had taken it upon itself as the leading opposition party to broaden its scope, open its doors and allow ideas to flow in for a more robust democratic process.

Our consultations have taken us to meet with various interest groups, who are willing to do business with us.

I can report to you that it has been very fruitful.

We expect in the coming days to have a broader political family, working hard to rescue this democracy and our beloved country from the hands of APC.

He hinted that all former presidents and former leaders of Nigeria were in unison to make sure that in 2019 a fresh and new government was formed in the interest of the nation.

Mr Secondus called on members of the party and other political parties to join forces to rescue power from the APC.

We, therefore, invite our brothers, sisters, youths and women from other political parties in this platform to join us to rescue our country that is in distress, socially, politically, economically and security-wise.

On Wednesdays Mace at the Senate chamber, he called for the prosecution of those responsible for the act.

The chairman described the incident as ugly and sad, which underscored the fact that the countrys democracy was seriously under threat.

He said, how did the hoodlums pass through all the security checks, majestically walked into the chambers to cause such havoc, leaving much to chew to all discerning minds.

What happened in the Senate yesterday is a clear assault on democracy, a coup against the legislature and should not only be condemned but those responsible should be tried for treason as demanded by the law.

Herdsmen brazenly invade our homes and farms, rape, maim and kill our people daily, and thugs do the same in our parliament, yet we have a government.

This obnoxious development has placed enormous challenge on us as the main opposition party to up our game and quickly rescue this country from the appalling APC administration.

File Photo: President Muhammadu Buhari addressing the Party chieftains during the Party 4th National Caucus Meeting held Monday night at the Presidential Villa Abuja. PHOTO; SUNDAY AGHAEZE. FEB 26 2018

Mr Secondus also expressed disbelief on the news credited to President Muhammadu Buhari, describing Nigerian youth as lazy people and his continued de-marketing of Nigeria each time he travels outside the country.

Our youth are not lazy, they are resourceful and indeed they are our future leaders.

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On his part, Deputy President of the Senate, Ike Ekweremadu, who explained the Senate incident, said it was not just a coincidence but collusion.

According to him, this will send a wrong signal to foreign investors interested in investing in the country.

Mr Ekweremadu, however, pledged the support of PDP senators for all PDP activities.

In his part, Governor of Ekiti State and Chairman of PDP Governors Forum, Ayodele Fayose, pledged that the hope of Nigerians in the party would not be let down.

Mr Fayose also expressed optimism that the PDP would emerge victorious in the July 14 governorship election in his state.

(NAN)

OBE/IFY/OPI
Nigerian taxpayers need to know this. Their representatives at the National Assembly, led by Senate President Bukola Saraki and Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, have just illegally received and shared a hefty N10billion from the national treasury.

The money is not part of the obscene N125billion appropriated for the federal legislature in the 2017 fiscal year for recurrent and capital expenditures.

It is also not part of the N100billion allocated for the controversial zonal intervention projects through which lawmakers have always enriched themselves.

This N10billion, more than enough to pay a years salary of 45,000 civil servants on the minimum wage of N18,000 per month, was not appropriated, and insiders say it was not even approved by President Muhammadu Buhari.

It was arbitrarily and illegally approved for the lawmakers by the Minister of Finance, Kemi Adeosun, in collusion with the Accountant General of the Federation, Ahmed Idris.

PREMIUM TIMES and UDEME became aware of this curious cash release while engaged in their joint accountability project of scrutinising how funds released for capital projects are spent.

The money was released to the lawmakers as part of a secret N50billion approved for the execution of the so-called constituency projects Mr. Saraki and other lawmakers discreetly inserted into the budgets of several ministries, agencies and parastatals.

That is different from the controversial zonal intervention projects for which N70billion of the N100billion appropriated in the 2017 budget have so far been released to contractors handpicked by lawmakers.

Former Senate President, Bukola Saraki

Apart from the N10billion cash given to the National Assembly, another N485million was released for a project conceived by Mr. Saraki  construction of model junior secondary schools across Kwara Central Senatorial District.

Four hundred and fifty million naira (N450million) was approved for the project in the 2017 appropriation law. But an additional N35million cash was released for its execution, in clear breach of the law.

To take possession of the illegal N10billion cash given to them by Mrs. Adeosun, Messrs Saraki and Dogara submitted a list of 82 contractors which they claimed the National Assembly was owing and the amount due to each contractor. It was based on that single document that the cash management office at the finance ministry funelled the huge cash to the lawmakers.

Mrs Adeosun failed to do further due diligence such as asking the lawmakers to provide award of contract letters, Certificates of No Objection issued by the Bureau of Public Procurement and job completion certificates issued by the National Assembly.

Finance ministry insiders described the action as deceitful and illegal, saying since the National Assembly has its own budget, which is usually a first-line charge on the federal treasury, any other cash released to it is extra-budgetary and unlawful.

Slush funds and fraudulent companies

National Assembly sources described the released cash as slush funds for the leadership of the two chambers and top civil servants at the management unit. Our sources said the national assembly budget already provided for the projects and that there was no need for any extra-budgetary funding from the ministry of finance.

Investigations by PREMIUM TIMES showed that at least 44 of the 82 contractors Messrs Saraki and Dogara claimed they were owing were not registered on the National Database of Contractors, a database of the Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP). That means they are not eligible to be awarded federal contracts. A further check by this newspaper revealed that 17 of the 44 firms were not even registered with the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC).

Our National Assembly sources said the contractors were indeed awarded jobs but that some of them had already been paid while while pending payments were already provided for in the federal legislatures own budget.

When contacted for explanation, Mrs. Adeosun referred our enquiries to the Accountant-General, Mr. Idris. After three days , the accountant-general sent us a written response saying the controversial payment was sourced from a N20 billion service-wide vote provided for local contractors liabilities under the 2017 Appropriation for all Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) and institutions of Government.

But while it is true that N20billion was appropriated for the payments of local contractors, experts say it was illegal to pay those hired by the National Assembly from the funds.

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Questions were also raised regarding why Mrs. Adeosun would give half of allocations made to pay local contractors to the National Assembly at a time those who built primary health centres and roads and supplied drugs to hospitals were yet to be paid.

One official at the finance ministry also challenged the minister to explain why the funds were first moved to the National Assembly instead of paying the contractors directly. It is a monumental fraud that they are now desperate to cover up, the official, who asked not to be named, said.

Furious activists want investigation

The National Assembly already has its own budget of N125billion and it cannot therefore benefit from any other federal funds without appropriation, said Auwal Rafsanjani, executive director of the advocacy group, Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre (CISLAC).

This is a serious financial recklessness orchestrated by the minister of finance and the National Assembly. Here, the Appropriation Law, the Fiscal Responsibility Act and the Public Procurement Act appear to have been broken.

It is sad that the executive, in a desperate bid to make peace with the National Assembly is now conniving with unaccountable lawmakers to further shortchange Nigerians.

Nigerians must stand up for their right and the minister of finance must be compelled to explain why she sacrificed integrity and financial prudence to engage in this kind of practice.

Olanrewaju Suraj of the Civil Society Network Against Corruption believes the nations anti-corruption agency should be called in to thoroughly investigate the matter.

It is a major blight in the anticorruption fight of the government and prudent management of resources by the Buhari government, Mr. Suraj said.

The National Assembly has its own budget that should cover capital and recurrent expenditures. So it cannot benefit from any other fund without appropriation.

Besides, every payment for capital expenditure is not at the whims and caprices of the finance minister. There is always a procurement process that must be certified by the BPP.

The anti-corruption agency must be invited to investigate the motive, the process and the purpose of the released fund.

Mum is the word from Saraki, Dogara

Speaker Yakubu Dogara

Messrs Saraki and Dogara declined to comment for this story. Their spokespersons, Yusuph Olaniyonu and Turaki Hassan, directed all enquiries on the matter to the Clerk of the National Assembly, Mohammed Sani-Omolori.

But Mr. Sani-Omolori did not answer multiple calls made to him by this reporter on Wednesday. He also failed to answer a text message sent to him.

The clerk, through Mr. Olaniyonu, later gave PREMIUM TIMES an appointment for Thursday. But the several times our reporter visited his office, his aides said he was unavailable. Again he did not answer or return calls made to him to remind him of the appointment. He is also yet to respond to a follow-up text message sent to him.
The Nigerian Army has explained what led to the burning down of a Benue community by its troops on Wednesday, saying the attack followed the killing of one soldier by some residents.

The soldier was allegedly buried in a shallow grave a day before, but the apparent reprisal by the army resulted in the death of one elderly citizen who was killed in the blaze.

Photographs of the victims charred body covered in soot were sent to PREMIUM TIMES.

PREMIUM TIMES broke the news of the attack by irate soldiers who stormed Naka, the headquarters of Gwer West Local Government Area, burning down residential buildings and commercial stores. Properties and goods, especially cash crops, estimated in millions were destroyed during the incident.

Francis Ayagah, chairman of the local government, had told PREMIUM TIMES on Thursday afternoon that Nigerian soldiers were responsible for the arson.

He acknowledged that a soldier was killed in the community on Wednesday, but said he had been in touch with the commander of the troops, who were stationed near the town to check ongoing killings linked to herdsmen across Benue State.

The soldier was said to have been alone when he was killed in unclear circumstances Wednesday afternoon.

One account said he was roaming on a farmland near the community and was lynched by hoodlums who mistook him for an attack. There have been reports that some killers were sighted in military fatigues in the state over the past week.

Another account said the slain soldier went to buy bread in large quantity in the community and when asked to identity himself by curious residents, he declined to do so and was subsequently assumed to be an attacker and mobbed to death.

Mr Ayagah said five suspects had been arrested based on information received from the Army, expressing his dismay that the soldiers could still embark on a rampage across the town despite his cooperation.

A group of women looking at buildings set ablaze by soldiers

Olabisi Ayeni, a spokesperson for the Nigerian Army 707 Special Forces Brigade in Makurdi, identified the slain soldier as Danlami Gambo, a private.

On 18 April 2018, at about 3:30 pm, troops of 707 Sf Brigade deployed at Naka in Gwer West LGA of Benue State observed the absence of PTE Danlami Gambo from his duty post. The soldiers rifle was however found at the location.

It was gathered that the soldier was last seen receiving a phone call but left in search of network and did not return. Troops immediately conducted patrols to search for the soldier during the search, at about 6.10 pm, our troops observed blood stains along a footpath leading to a newly dug grave.

One of the buildings set ablaze by soldiers in Benue community

They immediately dug out the grave and the dead body of the missing soldier was found butchered. The corpse was later exhumed and deposited at the Nigerian Air Force mortuary, Makurdi.

Preliminary investigation reveals that some locals were involved in the killing of the soldier which has led to the arrest of some suspects by a team dispatched from the unit to the scene of the incident, Mr Ayeni, a major, said in a statement Thursday evening.

He, however, failed to say whether the soldiers who participated in the reprisal attack that left a senior citizen killed would be punished for the criminal offence.

A mud building set ablaze by soldiers in Benue community

Governor Samuel Ortom is on an annual vacation in China. But his deputy, Benson Abounu, who has been acting as governor, would tour Naka to assess the damage by the soldiers today, Mr Ayagah told PREMIUM TIMES Friday morning.

Kenneth Kwaghhemba, a resident of the community who witnessed the attack and sent pictures and videos of the aftermath to PREMIUM TIMES, said the soldiers have deserted the town, prompting residents to flee for fear of being attacked by gunmen.

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The soldiers have left and many people are running away from the town because theres nobody to protect them from attacks by gunmen, he said.

One of the buildings set ablaze by soldiers in Benue community

The situation had been made worse by the withdrawal of police special forces from the community following a clash between the officers and commercial motorcyclists a few weeks ago, Mr Kwaghhemba said.

Only a few mobile police officers are here now, he said. But they are not cooperating with the people and there is not much that they could do if there is any attack.

Mr Ayeni did not immediately reply a message from PREMIUM TIMES seeking to know when soldiers would be deployed back in the community.

Benue police commissioner, Fatai Owoseni, and spokesperson, Moses Yamu, did not say when police special forces would be deployed back in the community when asked by PREMIUM TIMES Friday morning.
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The Nigerian Army has announced the launch of a new operation to totally destroy the terror group, Boko Haram.

According to a statement by David Ahmadu, the Chief of Training and Operations, the new operation will last four months.

Operation LAST HOLD is expected to last for 4 months and it will entail deployment of 6 additional manoeuvre brigades and other critical assets in Borno State, Mr Ahmadu, a major general, said.

Over 100,000 people are believed to have died from the Boko Haram insurgency since 2009, majority of them in Adamawa, Borno, and Yobe states.

The military and the federal government have in the past announced that the insurgents have been technically defeated.

However, the terror group, which has since split into factions, is still able to carry out attacks on civilian and military targets.

Mr Chukwu, however, says the new operation will ensure the destruction of Boko Haram Terrorist camps and strong points in the Lake Chad Basin.

The operation will also facilitate the rescue of hostages, he said.

Read his full statement below.

You may recall that the Nigerian Army has been engaged in the conduct of counter insurgency operation tagged Operation LAFIYA DOLE in the North East region for some years with considerable successes. However, the complex and adaptive nature of the Boko Haram insurgency has resulted in the dissident group still sometimes being engaged in abductions, attack on soft targets, Improvised Explosive Device attacks and suicide bombings.

2. It has become expedient for the Nigerian Army to change operating tactics, techniques and procedure in the North East region. Accordingly, the Nigerian Army Day Celebration (NADCEL) 2018 will be commemorated with the conduct of an operation tagged Operation LAST HOLD in Northern Borno within the North East Theatre. The design is to deploy personnel and equipment to showcase the combat efficiency of the NA and thereafter conduct operations to totally destroy Boko Haram locations in the Lake Chad Basin.

3. Operation LAST HOLD is expected to last for 4 months and it will entail deployment of 6 additional manoeuvre brigades and other critical assets in Borno State. The operation is intended to facilitate the clearance of the Lake Chad waterways of sea weeds and other obstacles obstructing the movement of boats and people across the water channels. It will also ensure the destruction of Boko Haram Terrorist camps and strong points in the Lake Chad Basin. The operation will also facilitate the rescue of hostages. The operational end-state of Operation LAST HOLD is the total defeat of the Boko Haram Terrorist Sect. Strategically, the conduct of Operation LAST HOLD will facilitate the restoration of fishing, farming and other economic activities in the Lake Chad Basin. Additionally, it will facilitate the relocation of Internally Displaced Persons from IDP camps to their communities.

4. Operation LAST HOLD is conceptualised to involve the conduct of population influence activities targeted to improve Civil-Military relations in the North East region. It is pertinent to note that Operation LAST HOLD is set to record remarkable achievements that would make the nation proud of the Nigerian Armys determination at sustaining its constitutional role of defending the territorial integrity of the nation as well as its commitment to aid the civil authority to bring about peace and security. In this regard, law abiding members of the public in Northern Borno State are enjoined not to panic as their safety and well-being have been deliberately factored in the operation. The general public is requested to remain vigilant and be security conscious, as suspected insurgents may be fleeing from military operations in the North East and finding safe haven amidst our communities. The public is also reminded to report any suspicious activity or movement to the nearest military formation or other security agencies for prompt action.

5. Gentlemen of the press, you have always been our partners in progress; hence we are using this opportunity to request you to give this operation widest publicity in your respective media. On this note, on behalf of the Chief of Army Staff, officers and soldiers of the Nigerian Army, I thank you all for honouring our invitation. I will now take questions from you and clarify doubts if any.

Major General David D AHMADU

Chief of Training and Operations (Army)
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The Senate President, Bukola Saraki, has assured that the Senate is working to ensure the growth of digital Financial Technology (FinTech) popularly known as digital financing in Nigeria.

According to a statement signed by his Chief Press Secretary, Sanni Onogu, in Abuja, he gave the assurance while speaking before the Africa Finance Forum, organized by the Corporate Council on Africa, at this years Spring Meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) holding in Washington D.C.

He said the Senate is desirous to see Nigerian banks expand with capacities to create opportunities for financial services penetration as well as support for enterprises, adding that the Committee on Banking, Insurance and other Financial Institutions is engaged in legislative interventions to ensure financial inclusion for all, especially in the rural areas where a large percentage still remains unbanked by bridging services between the banking and telecommunications sectors.

The net impact of our legislative interventions; through the relevant Committees oversight and engagement will be to expand the ability of our banking sector to facilitate digital financing, expand the opportunity for financial services penetration and reach with the SMEs, and for enterprise support.

We believe that these will give a fillip to the development of innovation and private sector capacity across the country. You will agree with me that innovation is the engine that powers financial inclusion. We are therefore working assiduously to encourage innovation in the FinTech space in Nigeria, and we shall continue to do so, he said.

The lawmaker noted that challenges militating against the growth of FinTech in Nigeria include (but not limited to) issues about consumer protection, intellectual property, concerns about money laundering and fraudulent activity.

FinTech growth requires us to pay attention to all of these, and to come up with regulatory frameworks that will safeguard our people.

Therefore, as we seek to improve the business environment for SMEs and tech entrepreneurs in Nigeria, we are also committed to passing legislation that strikes a balance between facilitating the sector and maintaining a secure financial system.

We are continuously working to reframe our payment systems, strengthen mechanisms for electronic commerce, reduce non-performing loans and strengthen the credit market for SMEs through a broad range of legislative interventions, he said.

Mr Saraki announced that the Senate has continued its legislative interventions by passing the Electronic Transactions Act; the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act (Repeal and Re-Enactment) Bill; the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission Act.

Former Senate President, Bukola Saraki

He said while the Consumer Protection Commission Act creates a Consumer Protection Commission to safeguard consumers from fraud and price manipulation; the Consumer Credit Agency Act allows lenders to better assess the credit worthiness of loan applicants.

The Credit Reporting Act, which has been signed into law, will enable the market reduce credit delinquencies, serve as a behaviour change and institutional framework that brings sanity into the credit community which will inspire confidence in the Nigerian market by drawing in more participants.

The Secure Transactions in Movable Assets is the signature bill in our support of SMEs, Mr Saraki stated. It frees up capital and creates opportunity for the funding of SME ventures as never seen before in Nigeria.

With this law, we have created a new stream of opportunity for SMEs to access capital by using movable goods including small machinery, cell phones and even household items as collateral. The implication of this is enormous in terms of dealing with capital formation and poverty eradication.

Our work is not exhaustive and will continue to adapt to changes that innovation in technology brings.

We are confident in the signals we are sending to the world, that Nigeria fully intends to key into the astronomical growth of the FinTech industry  and to harness its full potential for the benefit of the largest economy in Africa; and we welcome any partnerships that ensure that this happens.

He commended the Corporate Council on Africa for convening the event and its inspired focus on the FinTech environment on the African continent, and emphasized that the Senate will continue to encourage innovation in the Financial Technology (FinTech) space in Nigeria.
Some Nigerians think government officials at different levels in Nigeria give backing to extremist groups perpetuating violence attacks in the country, says a report by an international research group, Afrobarometer.

According to the report, 46 per cent of Nigerians polled by the group think that some senior officials in the federal government support extremist groups, while 33 per cent think that most, if not all of them, do so.

Seventeen per cent of the respondents think government officials do not offer such support to extremist groups.

The report, released on Wednesday, also said 46 per cent of respondents think that some members of the National Assembly give support to extremist groups in the country.

Forty-eight per cent of the respondents think some members of Nigerias military give support to extremist groups. The same percentage of the respondents think so of local government officials.

Forty-seven per cent think some traditional leaders do give support to extremist groups.

Fifty-two per cent of the respondents, the highest, think most or all the extremist groups in Nigeria get support from international extremist groups.

Afrobarometers partners in Nigeria, CLEEN Foundation and Practical Sampling International, conducted the research between April 26 and May 10 2017, using random, stratified probability sample of 1,600 adult Nigerians, the report says.

According to the report, Respondents were asked: How many of the following people do you think are involved in supporting and assisting the extremist groups that have launched attacks and kidnappings in Nigeria, or havent you heard enough about them to say?

Thirty-one per cent of the respondents see unemployment or lack of opportunities as the reason Nigerians join extremist groups, while 11 per cent blame it on religious beliefs.

Boko Haram sect used to illustrate the story

Thirty-nine per cent think government efforts in fighting armed extremist groups have been somewhat effective.

Fifty-three per cent rate government performance in preventing or resolving violence community conflict as being very well or fairly well.

According to the report, Large majorities agree or strongly agree that the army keeps the country safe from insurgents (83%), gets necessary training to defend and protect the country (82%), and operates in a professional manner (77%).

Nigerians say the best ways for the government to effectively address the problem of armed extremists are to improve the economy/create jobs and to strengthen the military response.

For several years now, Nigeria has been struggling to contend Boko Haram insurgency which has led to thousands of deaths, especially in the North-east of the country. Many Nigerians have also been killed through violent herder-farmer clashes.

A former Nigerian defence minister, Theophilus Danjuma, recently accused the military and police of being complicit in the killings across the country.

The armed forces are not neutral. They collude with the armed bandits to kill people, kill Nigerians, Mr Danjuma had said.

The military, apart from denying the accusation, set up a panel to probe the allegation.

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The panel is yet to finish its investigation.
The invasion of the hallowed chamber of the Senate by hoodlums who carted away the mace and other paraphernalia of authority is a violation of the sanctity of the Senate and constitutes a threat to our democracy, the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) has said.

The mace was forcefully taken from the Senate chamber by some hoodlums believed to be working for a senator, Ovie Omo-Agege, on Wednesday.

PREMIUM TIMES reported the complicity of security agencies in the theft.

But, the Senate, in reaction to the theft, gave security agencies 24 hours to find the stolen mace.

The police in the early hours of Thursday claimed the mace was found under a bridge in Abuja.

Hours after this announcement, the police brought the mace to the National Assembly

In a statement signed by the president of the union, Ayuba Wabba, and made available to PREMIUM TIMES on Friday, the president said stolen mace represents a throw-back to those dark old days we are better off without

According to the statement, it is a sad commentary on the quality of representation.

We therefore condemn it in its entirety. We similarly invite all who love Nigeria to rise and condemn this crude and sordid act or conduct, the statement highlighted.

The statement said the Senate, from the days of the Greeks and Romans from whom the world borrowed this concept of democracy, has always been a sacred arena for the nobility.

According to the statement, As a house packed full of representatives from different parts of the Republic, there are bound to be differences (of opinion, tactics, strategy) and even conflicts but these are expected to be resolved in a dignified manner befitting of men and women of character and learning!

The labour union said there are rules of engagement that every member is made to understand as a precondition to swearing in while referring to the stolen mace saga as a big anomaly.

The group said the National Assembly Security should be called to question for laxity or compromise.

They have often distinguished themselves by keeping at bay constituents and peaceful protesters from the precincts of the National Assembly, (however), these thugs seem to have walked on a laid red carpet, the statement reads.

Could these agencies have been acting alone? What is the degree of their complicity? Which ever way, we condemn this primitive conduct and demand sanctions. Let it never happen again. There are better methods no matter the issues, he concluded.

In its reaction, the Nigerian Union of Journalists (NUJ) described the invasion as a dastardly act and inimical to democratic norms and values.

The union called for proper investigation into how suspected thugs got unhindered access into the Senate.

In a statement signed by its National Secretary, Shuaibu Leman, the union said most politicians have forgotten the implications of such disruptions.

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We consider the invasion and disruption of the proceedings of the Senate by thugs today as inimical to democratic norms and values.

Paralysing parliamentary sessions and seizing of the mace which is a symbol of office or authority is a favourite pastime of most aggrieved members of the National and State Assemblies, for whatever reason.

We note with regret that most politicians have lost the sensibility to understand the cost implication of such disruptions, especially as loss of time through pandemoniums translates into substantial loss of public money, the union stated.
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The National Union of Air Transport Employees (NUATE) on Friday said it had finalised plans to ground the operations of Kenya Airways over the airlines recent sack of no fewer than 20 Nigerian employees.

The airline issued the threat in a Notice of Industrial Action seen by the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos.

Olayinka Abioye, NUATEs General Secretary, who signed the notice, accused Kenya Airways of anti-labour practices and breach of collective bargaining protocols.

He alleged that the airline had violated the extant labour laws by declaring the affected workers redundant and refused to pay them their entitlements.

As you may be aware, the Kenya Airways team sneaked into Nigeria on April 12, and in concert with some Nigerians, stormed its Lagos office with armed policemen the following day.

Their action disrupted the Workers Cooperative Annual General Meeting and the team later summoned workers to inform them of their sack from Kenya Airways, as they have been declared redundant, he said.

Mr Abioye alleged that the airline management effected the sack, while parties were still on the negotiation table by distributing the letters to 20 workers contrary to the fundamental principles of the Labour Act.

He said the notice, therefore, was to inform all intending passengers on Kenya Airways from Lagos to seek alternative travel plans following the imminent grounding of the airlines operations.

The union and Kenya Airways had been at loggerheads over the disengagement of the workers.

The airline in a letter dated April 11 and addressed to NUATE, accused the union of being unwilling to engage the management in negotiations on behalf of the affected workers.

The letter, which was signed by Kenya Airways acting Chief Human Resources Officer, Bridgette Imbuga, claimed the airline had to use its best endeavours to negotiate terms for the workers.

Mrs Imbuga noted that the employees affected by the redundancy were those performing sales and commercial roles which had now been contracted to a General Sales Agent (GSA).

She argued that the airline had complied with the provisions of Sections 20 (1) (a) and (b) of the Labour Act, Cap 198, Laws of Nigeria, in declaring the affected workers redundant.

Mrs Imbuga said consequently, the airline would proceed with the payment of their one month salary in lieu of notice and severance allowance at the rate of 23 days basic salary for every completed year of service.

According to her, among other entitlements, the workers will also receive payment for underutilized leave days accrued as at the date of redundancy.

(NAN)
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The management of both the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) and PREMIUM TIMES will, on July 12, jointly host a National Dialogue Forum on Restructuring, Federalism and National Unity: Options, Obstacles and Opportunities.

The conference had been originally scheduled to hold between April 24 and 25, but the organisers said circumstances beyond their control necessitated a change in the date.

Besides, the conference originally scheduled for two days, has now been streamlined to a one-day programme.

Official sources, however, confirmed that all other details remained unchanged as contained in the earlier partnership and sponsorship letters sent to potential participants in the conference.

While regretting the inconveniences associated with the postponement, both NAN and PREMIUM TIMES stated that new letters were being despatched to all concerned to explain the new changes in detail.

The national chit-chat forum is expected to feature participation by state governors, traditional rulers, distinguished scholars, politicians, statesmen, business leaders, technocrats and bureaucrats who will deliver seminal papers on the various themes and sub-themes of the dialogue forum.

The dialogue will also engage and involve all stakeholders in our national unity question so as to promote harmonious relationship between the different groups in Nigeria and uphold the integrity of our nation.

The organisers said they believe that such a forum had become crucial at times like this when we are all undertaking a fresh holistic overview at our nationality question.

The International Conference Centre, Abuja, will provide the ambience for the dialogue scheduled for 10 a.m. on that day and will be broadcast live on national television.

The Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo, is expected to declare the conference open.
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The Vice Chancellor of Plateau State University (PLASU), Bokkos, Yohanna Izam, says the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) has approved N500 million as an intervention fund for the institution.

Mr Izam, a professor, disclosed this on Friday when the Plateau State House of Assembly Committee on Public Accounts and Petition led by its Chairman, Peter Gyendeng, paid him a courtesy visit in his office.

Already modalities for accessing the fund are being vigorously pursued in view of felt needs of the university for urgent infrastructural expansion to improve its carrying capacity.

This is an impressive development for us in PLASU considering the fact that our monthly allocations from both the state and local governments are inadequate in meeting the needs of the university,  he said.

He appealed to the lawmakers and the state government to increase the universitys allocations to enable it cope with its increasing demands, particularly in the payment of staff salaries.

Mr Izam said that the funds provided by Federal Ministry of Education and the state government tremendously assisted the university in running 17 accredited programmes.

According to him, another 15 courses would be re-visited by the National Universities Commission (NUC) in May for full accreditation.

The vice chancellor commended the state government, TETFund and the NEEDS Assessment funded by the Federal Ministry of Education for their interventions, attributing the growth of the university to their assistance.

On admission and employment, Mr Izam said the management of the university was mindful of its status as a state-owned institution.

He said efforts must be made to strike a balance in subsequent employment and admissions so that all the 17 local governments in the state have fair representation.

The vice chancellor appealed to the lawmakers to mobilise their constituents through awareness visits to take advantage of the university education the institution is providing to ensure that each local government area fills its quota.

Mr Gyendeng, on his part, commended the management of the university for being up to date in auditing the universitys account.

He said the committee members were on a fact finding mission to all the state-owned tertiary institutions to ascertain whether their accounts had been audited.

(NAN)
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.





to Ottawa and Istanbul to document their secret summits, allowing you to witness global kingpins setting the world's agenda and instigating World War III. Learn about the formation of the North America transportation control grid, which will end U.S. sovereignty forever.





Discover how the practitioners of the pseudo-science eugenics have taken control of governments worldwide as a means to carry out depopulation.





View the progress of the coming collapse of the United States and the formation of the North American Union.

Never before has a documentary assembled all the pieces of the globalists' dark agenda. Endgame's compelling look at past atrocities committed by those attempting to steer the future delivers information that the controlling media has meticulously censored for over 60 years. It fully reveals the elite's program to dominate the earth and carry out the wicked plan in all of human history.

Endgame is not conspiracy theory, it is documented fact in the elite's own words.




Finalists for the Michigan Fitness Foundation's Governor's Fitness Awards will be honored at the State Capitol in Lansing

Contact

Michelle Coss

Director of Community Engagement

***@michiganfitness.org Michelle CossDirector of Community Engagement

End

-- The finalists for the Michigan Fitness Foundation's Governor's Fitness Awards will be honored during an April 19 morning event at the State Capitol in Lansing. Award winners will be announced during a Gala event at the Cobo Center in Detroit on the evening of April 19, which will also feature special recognition of Detroit Tigers great Al Kaline, and U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow.The Michigan Fitness Foundation, the Governor's Council on Physical Fitness, Health and Sports, and sponsorship partners present the annual Governor's Fitness Awards (GFAs) as a way of honoring individuals and organizations that inspire others to live healthier lives.At the Capitol, GFA finalists will be individually recognized by their local legislators and on the floor of the State Senate. The primary sponsor of the Capitol event is Health Alliance Plan, a Michigan-based nonprofit health plan that offers a broad range of wellness programs led by fitness and wellness experts."The Michigan Fitness Foundation is doing a great job of highlighting the importance of wellness in our lives and how our environment, including our workplaces, can affect our health," said Tom Spring, director of wellness and community programs, HAP. "We salute those who are making an effort to improve their health and are especially proud of employers who are implementing programs to care for their employees."Governor's Fitness Awards are given in 11 categories including Director's Champion for Health, Conquering Obesity, Wins for Warriors Veteran of the Year, Charles T. Kuntzleman Accepting the Challenge, Extraordinary Event or Organization, Healthy Workplace, Active Community Award, Lifetime Achievement and the People's Choice YouTube Video Contest.For more information, visit http://www.michiganfitness.org/ gfa
Calls for strengthening immigration procedures through a 13-step plan.

Contact

Cynthia Cook

***@townsendfornevada.com Cynthia Cook

End

-- Bill Townsend, a candidate for U.S. House of Representatives in Nevada's Congressional District 4, today released his policy position on immigration."Immigration is a subject that is close to home for my family. My wife is an immigrant, coming to the United States from Beijing, China in 1992. She came here legally, via a Green Card, because her mother had taken the legal route and obtained permanent residence status. After arriving in America, she applied for citizenship and, in 1999, after 7 years of waiting, became an American citizen," said Townsend. "She describes that moment as 'One of the proudest days of my life'"."While awaiting citizenship, she earned a college degree in accounting, became a certified public accountant, enrolled and received certifications in information technology and auditing, and worked for a handful of companies, rising to the head of global finance for newegg.com, a $2.8 billion revenue company in Southern California. By all definitions, she is the kind of person we want to immigrate to America," said Townsend.The facts of the immigration debate are universally acknowledged. Immigration has long supported the growth and dynamism of the American economy. Immigrants and refugees are entrepreneurs, job creators, laborers, taxpayers, and consumers. They add trillions of dollars to the US gross domestic product, and their importance will increase in the coming decades as America's largest generationthe baby boomersretires en masse, spurring labor demand and placing an unprecedented burden on the social safety net. Additional benefits to the US economy and society more broadly could be obtained through legislative reforms designed to modernize the US immigration system and provide unauthorized immigrants already in the country today (but not future illegal immigrants) with a path to becoming taxpaying members of our society.Increased immigration enforcement imposes costs on taxpayers and threatens legal immigrants, their families, and communities across the country. The effect on illegal immigrants is even starker. Stepping up detentions and deportations will cost taxpayers an estimated $80 billion dollarsmoney that could be better spent on education and school safetyand will break apart families and place vulnerable individuals, such as survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault, as well as women and children fleeing violence in their homelands in peril.For the sake of our country's future, Congress must develop a well-rounded strategy to deal with the issue of legal and illegal immigration.Townsend's immigration plan outlines 13 steps he will push for if elected to serve the people of Nevada's CD4:1. Enact a law that prohibits, form the day it is passed forward, people who have entered the United States illegally from applying for citizenship.2. With the passage of this law, we will prohibit people who have entered the United States illegally from applying for a work permit.3. Work-place enforcement through mandatory e-Verify must be codified.4. Require certain regulated businesses  especially banks, check-cashing companies, and those offering electronic fund transfers  to require non-citizens to document their legal status when making certain transactions that routinely require a photo ID.5. Enact legislation that states "any illegal alien who is deported and then returns to America illegally will receive an automatic five year jail term" to be increased to 20 years if they are deported and illegally reenter the United States.6. Complete the Congressionally-mandated biometric entry/exit system to track non-immigrant visitors.7. Require state and local law enforcement to report affirmatively all non-citizens in custody to ICE, make ICE detainers mandatory, and require ICE to pick up and remove deportable aliens.8. Expand expedited removal to include all illegal aliens with criminal convictions, estimated to include about 2,000,000 individuals.9. End catch-and-release of illegal aliens by requiring that they be detained until removal.10. Deny immigrant and non-immigrant visas to nations that refuse to repatriate their citizens.11. Reign in the practice of birthright citizenship for illegal aliens and foreign visitors.12. Reform legal immigration laws to include skills and education requirements so America may attract the best and brightest from around the world.13. End the often corrupt EB-5 visa program."I often hear people say, 'The majority of illegal aliens aren't criminals.' The fact of the matter is, technically, by the rule of law, they are. They broke the law when entering America illegally and continue to break the law by staying here. Should we reward this behavior? No. For if we do, we tell the world that it is acceptable to sneak into America and live here illegally. Howeverthere is a way to deal with this issue while telling would be illegal aliens there is no way outside of official channels to move to America," commented Townsend.# # #Bill Townsend is a candidate for US House of Representatives in Nevada's 4th Congressional District. The Townsend Campaign's website is available atand featureswith policies for each one.Townsend is a long-time entrepreneur and was part of the senior management team and/or cofounder of Lycos.com, sixdegrees.com (the intellectual property behind LinkedIn), Deja.com (now Google and ebay). He is President and CEO of RevolutionSports, Inc., a television production company, and President and CEO of TRICCAR Holdings, Inc., a pharmaceutical and nutraceutical research firm. He founded Amati Foundation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, in 2000.Townsend is the author of the Internet industry's 1st, written in 1996, that set rules and standards for marketing to minors, privacy, and the use of personal data. He is the author of, and co-author ofpublished in Harvard Business Review.Paid for by The Townsend Campaign
First Choice Business Capital has new branches opened in cities across Montana and Oklahoma.

Contact

Glen Andrade

***@digitalsynergy.com Glen Andrade

End

-- - First Choice Business Capital announced new branches in Montana and Oklahoma, to help businesses in those areas get unsatisfactory business loans without any hassles at all."The number one advantage for First Choice's clients is the fact that customers can avail themselves to business loans, that traditional banks have refused them for," said First Choice Business Capital's Media Director Glen Andrade. "This is a massive differentiator between our lending institution and other financial lenders within the United States."First Choice Business Capital's goal is to help the over 70% of businesses which do not qualify for a loan. Along with the acceptance of business loans for insufficient credit, many business niches can qualify, funds are available within 48 hours after approval and the application process is effortless.Unfortunately, after the 2008 financial crisis, many entrepreneurs have struggled to get their new business ventures off the ground and running. New rules that were established after this credit crunch have made lending an ordeal for many small size businesses. First Choice Business Capital sees this frustration and need that companies with less than 50 employees are enduring. These types of companies are treated differently, so First Choice has made lending an easy and friendly experience for them.First Choice Business Capital has the upper hand on helping entrepreneurs get the funding that companies want and need. The business community is a better place when financial institutions like First Choice Business Capital come in and save their declining enterprise.To learn more about achieving a business loan when you have credit issues, please visit: https://www.1stchoicebusinesscapital.com/
(TSX: AAV,NYSE: AAV)

CALGARY, April 19, 2018 /PRNewswire/ - Advantage Oil & Gas Ltd. ("Advantage" or the "Corporation") advises that as previously disclosed in our press release dated March 5, 2018, a production outage was scheduled at our 100% owned Glacier gas plant in April 2018 associated with expanding our plant capacity to 400 mmcf/d and 6,800 bbls/d of liquids. This outage was scheduled to coincide with planned third party pipeline maintenance when AECO natural gas prices were anticipated to be negatively impacted. During plant start-up operations, Advantage experienced an upset in our gas dehydration process that has been fully resolved but required a longer outage than originally scheduled. Additional work is still required to complete the Glacier gas plant expansion project and we expect to have the expanded plant fully commissioned during the second quarter as originally planned.

With our increased focus on liquids rich development and in response to periods of low natural gas prices and netbacks in 2018, Advantage prudently decided to moderate the ramp up of gas production subsequent to the outage and may restrict natural gas production levels from time to time. Advantage will also defer dry gas well completions and re-allocate budgeted capital in support of drilling additional liquids rich wells at Valhalla and in the liquids rich Middle Montney formation at east Glacier during the second half of 2018. This will help preserve gas well productivity for the latter part of 2018 and beyond as lower storage levels and western Canadian basin supply declines could result in strengthening gas prices at which time, Advantage retains significant operational flexibility to immediately increase gas production.

This investment and production strategy is supported by our recent liquids rich drilling successes at Glacier and at our nearby land blocks at Valhalla and Wembley which extended and increased our significant inventory of liquids rich and dry gas drilling locations. Annual average liquids production is expected to grow by approximately 50% year on year to 1,800 bbls/d with a 2018 exit rate of approximately 2,400 bbls/d. Increased drilling on our liquids rich lands will support doubling Advantage's liquids production to 8% or more of total production during the latter part of 2019 and could potentially reach 13% or more in 2020. This program will significantly enhance our cash flow and netbacks.

Guidance Updated

Advantage's second quarter 2018 production is estimated to be within the range of 205 to 215 mmcfe/d, lower than earlier estimates. Total per unit corporate cash costs will be higher during the second quarter at $1.35/mcfe to $1.45/mcfe due to lower production and are expected to decrease to approximately $1.15/mcfe as production is increased during the second half of 2018.

The Corporation's 2018 annual guidance is updated as follows:





Updated Previous







Average Annual Production (mmcfe/d) 240 to 255 255 to 265



(boe/d) (40,000 to 42,500) (42,500 to 44,170)









Annual average liquids production (bbls/d) 1,800 1,900

Exit liquids production (bbls/d) 2,400 2,400





Royalties (%) 3% to 5% 3% to 5% Operating costs ($/mcfe) $0.28 to $0.33 $0.25 to $0.29 Transportation costs ($/mcfe) $0.55 to $0.62 $0.52 to $0.58 Total corporate cash costs ($/mcfe) $1.10 to $1.30 $1.00 to $1.20 Capital Expenditures $175 million $175 million

Advisory

The information in this press release contains certain forward-looking statements, including within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements relate to future events or our future intentions or performance. All statements other than statements of historical fact may be forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are often, but not always, identified by the use of words such as "seek", "anticipate", "plan", "continue", "estimate", "guidance", "demonstrate", "expect", "may", "can", "will", "project", "predict", "potential", "target", "intend", "could", "might", "should", "believe", "would" and similar expressions and include statements relating to, among other things, expected timing of completion of the Glacier gas plant expansion project; potential restriction on natural gas production levels; the deferral of well completions and the re-allocation of capital to drill new wells at Glacier and the timing and anticipated benefits therefrom; the anticipated number of wells to be drilled; the Corporation's expectation that liquids production for 2018 will grow and the 2018 year end exit rate; the impact of increased drilling on the Corporation's total production during the latter part of 2019 and 2020 and the benefits to be derived therefrom; anticipated annual 2018 production and financial guidance; and other matters. Advantage's actual decisions, activities, results, performance or achievement could differ materially from those expressed in, or implied by, such forward-looking statements and accordingly, no assurances can be given that any of the events anticipated by the forward-looking statements will transpire or occur or, if any of them do, what benefits that Advantage will derive from them.

These statements involve substantial known and unknown risks and uncertainties, certain of which are beyond Advantage's control, including, but not limited to: changes in general economic, market and business conditions; industry conditions; impact of significant declines in market prices for oil and natural gas; actions by governmental or regulatory authorities including increasing taxes and changes in investment or other regulations; changes in tax laws, royalty regimes and incentive programs relating to the oil and gas industry; Advantage's success at acquisition, exploitation and development of reserves; failure to achieve production targets on timelines anticipated or at all; unexpected drilling results; changes in commodity prices, currency exchange rates, capital expenditures, reserves or reserves estimates and debt service requirements; the occurrence of unexpected events involved in the exploration for, and the operation and development of, oil and gas properties, including hazards such as fire, explosion, blowouts, cratering, and spills, each of which could result in substantial damage to wells, production facilities, other property and the environment or in personal injury; changes or fluctuations in production levels; individual well productivity; lack of available capacity on pipelines; delays in anticipated timing of drilling and completion of wells; delays in completion of the expansion of the Glacier gas plant; delays in gas production from the Glacier gas plant; lack of available capacity on pipelines; individual well productivity; competition from other producers; the lack of availability of qualified personnel or management; credit risk; changes in laws and regulations including the adoption of new environmental laws and regulations and changes in how they are interpreted and enforced; our ability to comply with current and future environmental or other laws; stock market volatility and market valuations; liabilities inherent in oil and natural gas operations; uncertainties associated with estimating oil and natural gas reserves; competition for, among other things, capital, acquisitions of reserves, undeveloped lands and skilled personnel; geological, technical, drilling and processing problems and other difficulties in producing petroleum reserves; ability to obtain required approvals of regulatory authorities; and ability to access sufficient capital from internal and external sources. Many of these risks and uncertainties and additional risk factors are described in the Corporation's Annual Information Form dated March 5, 2018 which is available at www.Sedar.com and www.advantageog.com. Readers are also referred to risk factors described in other documents Advantage files with Canadian securities authorities.

With respect to forward-looking statements contained in this press release, Advantage has made assumptions regarding, but not limited to: timing of regulatory approvals, conditions in general economic and financial markets; effects of regulation by governmental agencies; current and future commodity prices and royalty regimes; future exchange rates; royalty rates; future operating costs, cash costs and liquids transportation costs; frac stages per well; lateral lengths per well; well costs; expected annual production growth rate; availability of skilled labor; availability of drilling and related equipment; timing and amount of capital expenditures; the impact of increasing competition; the price of crude oil and natural gas; that the Corporation will have sufficient cash flow, debt or equity sources or other financial resources required to fund its capital and operating expenditures and requirements as needed; that the Corporation's conduct and results of operations will be consistent with its expectations; that the Corporation will have the ability to develop the Corporation's properties in the manner currently contemplated; available pipeline capacity; that the Corporation will be able to complete the expansion and increase capacity at the Glacier gas plant; that Advantage's production will increase; current or, where applicable, proposed assumed industry conditions, laws and regulations will continue in effect or as anticipated; and that the estimates of the Corporation's production and reserves volumes and the assumptions related thereto (including commodity prices and development costs) are accurate in all material respects. Production estimates contained herein are expressed as anticipated average production over the calendar year. In determining anticipated production for the year ended December 31, 2018 Advantage considered historical drilling, completion and production results for prior years and took into account the estimated impact on production of the Corporation's 2018 expected drilling and completion activities.

Management has included the above summary of assumptions and risks related to forward-looking information in order to provide shareholders with a more complete perspective on Advantage's future operations and such information may not be appropriate for other purposes. Advantage's actual results, performance or achievement could differ materially from those expressed in, or implied by, these forward-looking statements and, accordingly, no assurance can be given that any of the events anticipated by the forward-looking statements will transpire or occur, or if any of them do so, what benefits that Advantage will derive there from. Readers are cautioned that the foregoing lists of factors are not exhaustive. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this press release and Advantage disclaims any intent or obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or results or otherwise, other than as required by applicable securities laws.

This press release and, in particular the information in respect of the Corporation's prospective annual operating costs, transportation costs, total corporate cash costs and capital expenditures may contain future oriented financial information ("FOFI") within the meaning of applicable securities laws. The FOFI has been prepared by management to provide an outlook of the Corporation's activities and results and may not be appropriate for other purposes. The FOFI has been prepared based on a number of assumptions, including the assumptions discussed above, and assumptions with respect to the costs and expenditures to be incurred by the Corporation, capital equipment and operating costs, foreign exchange rates, taxation rates for the Corporation, general and administrative expenses and the prices to be paid for the Corporation's production. Management does not have firm commitments for all of the costs, expenditures, prices or other financial assumptions used to prepare the FOFI or assurance that such operating results will be achieved and, accordingly, the complete financial effects of all of those costs, expenditures, prices and operating results are not objectively determinable. The actual results of operations of the Corporation and the resulting financial results may vary from the amounts set forth herein, and such variations may be material. The Corporation and management believe that the FOFI has been prepared on a reasonable basis, reflecting management's best estimates and judgments. However, because this information is highly subjective and subject to numerous risks including the risks discussed above, it should not be relied on as necessarily indicative of future results. FOFI contained in this press release was made as of the date of this press release and the Corporation disclaims any intention or obligations to update or revise any FOFI contained in this press release, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, unless required pursuant to applicable law.

Barrels of oil equivalent (boe) and thousand cubic feet of natural gas equivalent (mcfe) may be misleading, particularly if used in isolation. Boe and mcfe conversion ratios have been calculated using a conversion rate of six thousand cubic feet of natural gas equivalent to one barrel of oil. A boe and mcfe conversion ratio of 6 mcf: 1 bbl is based on an energy equivalency conversion method primarily applicable at the burner tip and does not represent a value equivalency at the wellhead. Given that the value ratio based on the current price of crude oil as compared to natural gas is significantly different from the energy equivalency of 6:1, utilizing a conversion on a 6:1 basis may be misleading as an indication of value.

The following abbreviations used in this press release have the meanings set forth below.

bbls/d barrels per day boe barrels of oil equivalent of natural gas, on the basis of one barrel of oil or NGLs for six thousand cubic feet of natural gas boe/d barrels of oil equivalent per day mcfe thousand cubic feet equivalent on the basis of six thousand cubic feet of natural gas for one barrel of oil or NGLs mmcf/d million cubic feet per day mmcfe/d million cubic feet equivalent per day

SOURCE Advantage Oil & Gas Ltd.

Related Links

http://www.advantageog.com


WASHINGTON, April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The American Federation of Government Employees today announced its endorsement of Rep. Ruben Gallego for another term representing the 7th district of Arizona.

"Congressman Gallego stands with AFGE in supporting the federal workers who keep our government running, including the doctors and nurses caring for veterans like himself at VA hospitals and medical centers in Arizona and across the country," said American Federation of Government Employees District 12 National Vice President George McCubbin III.

The largest federal employee union, the American Federation of Government Employees, is endorsing Rep. Ruben Gallego for re-election this November to the U.S. House representing the 7th district of Arizona.

Rep. Gallego has introduced legislation to help veterans struggling with student loan debt and promoted legislation to ensure veterans have access to well-paying jobs. He has led the fight against efforts to privatize the Department of Veterans Affairs and has stood with AFGE members fighting to fully fund and staff the VA.

"Congressman Gallego is a combat veteran who has been fighting to ensure veterans have access to all the benefits they've earned, including having their health care delivered by VA doctors and nurses  many of whom are veterans themselves," McCubbin said.

In February, Rep. Gallego joined with AFGE members and fellow union advocates in calling for filling the VA's 49,000 vacant positions in a rally outside the AFL-CIO that culminated in a march to the VA headquarters. The congressman recalled how it was an AFGE member at the VA who held his hand when he first returned from Iraq.

"It wasn't some private soulless corporation," Gallego said. "It was a dedicated government employee who said, 'I understand what you're going through because I'm a veteran myself and I'm here to help you.' There are thousands, thousands of veterans like me every day who have that relationship with that VA employee, and only that VA employee. That can't be replaced with some thinktank, Koch brothers, wannabe organization."

More than 56,000 federal employees live in Arizona  caring for veterans, supporting the military, guarding our borders, and keeping dangerous criminals safely behind bars.

AFGE is the largest federal employee union in the country, representing 700,000 federal and D.C. government workers in all functions of government. District 12 has more than 40,000 dues-paying members in Arizona, California, Hawaii, and Nevada.

The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) is the largest federal employee union, representing 700,000 workers in the federal government and the government of the District of Columbia.

For the latest AFGE news and information, visit the AFGE Media Center. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

SOURCE American Federation of Government Employees

Related Links

http://www.afge.org


DUBLIN, April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Allergan plc (NYSE: AGN), a leading global pharmaceutical company announced today that the company will share 25 presentations at the 70th Annual American Academy of Neurology (AAN) Meeting, including five oral podium presentations. Five presentations will focus on migraine and one will spotlight the clinical trial results evaluating the safety and efficacy of onabotulinumtoxinA in treating lower limb spasticity in children ages 2-16. Results of the Phase 3 ACHIEVE I study of ubrogepant, an investigational oral calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) for acute treatment of migraine, were selected as an emerging science "data blitz" presentation and poster to be presented on April 24th at 5:45 pm PT.

As the leader in migraine research, Allergan will present 16 pieces of data across a spectrum of migraine types, as well as furthering the scientific understanding of these diseases with epidemiology and comorbidity data. Additionally, results from COMPEL (Chronic Migraine OnabotulinumtoxinA Prolonged Efficacy Open Label), a 108-week study designed to evaluate long-term efficacy and safety of onabotulinumtoxinA treatment in Chronic Migraine patients will be presented. Presentations also include additional data in spasticity and movement disorders.

"We're extremely pleased about the wide range of data being presented at AAN that demonstrate Allergan's continued commitment and leadership in neurology and migraine in particular," said David Nicholson, Chief Research and Development Officer, Allergan. "The unmet need in migraine remains a key priority for Allergan, so we're pleased to have ubrogepant recognized for its unique position with investigational data in the emerging CGRP category, and to share long-term data on BOTOX in Chronic Migraine."

The scheduled times (noted in local Pacific Time) of the presentations and locations are as follows:

Oral presentations include:

Results of the Phase 3 ACHIEVE I Study of Ubrogepant. Authors: Trugman J, et al. Tuesday, April 24 th , 6:06 pm .

Authors: Trugman J, et al. , . Migraine Treatment Patterns and Opioid Use Among Chronic and Episodic Migraine Patients Identified by a Clinician-Administered Semi-Structured Diagnostic Interview. Authors: Pavlovic JM, et al. Wednesday, April 25 th , 1:00 pm .

Authors: Pavlovic JM, et al. , . Efficacy and Safety of OnabotulinumtoxinA for the Treatment of Pediatric Lower Limb Spasticity: Primary Results. Authors: Kim H, et al. Wednesday, April 25 th , 2:12 pm .

Kim H, et al. , . Evaluation of the Identify Chronic Migraine (ID-CM) Screener in a Large Medical Group. Authors: Yu JS, et al. Thursday April 26 th , 3:54 pm .

Authors: Yu JS, et al. , . The Relationship Between Sleep Disorders and Migraine: Results from the Chronic Migraine Epidemiology and Outcomes (CaMEO) Study. Authors: Buse D, et al. Thursday, April 26 th, 4:42 pm .

Migraine

The following posters will be on display on Tuesday, April 24th from 11:30 am-7:00 pm:

Identifying Natural Subgroups of Migraine Based on Profiles of Comorbidities and Concomitant Conditions: Results of the Chronic Migraine Epidemiology and Outcomes (CaMEO) Study. Authors: Lipton R, et al.

Authors: Lipton R, et al. Medical Comorbidities of Migraine: Results from the Chronic Migraine Epidemiology and Outcomes (CaMEO) Study. Authors: Manack Adams A, et al.

Authors: Manack Adams A, et al. The Relationship Between Pain, Psychiatric, and Endocrine/Neurological Comorbidities of Migraine: Results from the Chronic Migraine Epidemiology and Outcomes (CaMEO) Study. Authors: Manack Adams A, et al.

Authors: Manack Adams A, et al. Productivity Loss and Indirect Costs of Chronic Migraine and Episodic Migraine in a Commercially-Insured Population. Authors: Yu JS, et al.

Authors: Yu JS, et al. Development of a Claims-based Algorithm for Use in Patients with Migraine to Identify Potentially Undiagnosed Chronic Migraine Patients. Authors: Pavlovic JM, et al.

The following presentations will be on display on Wednesday, April 25th from 11:30 am-7:00 pm:

Long-Term Safety and Tolerability of OnabotulinumtoxinA Treatment in Chronic Migraine Patients: COMPEL Analysis by Treatment Cycle. Authors: Brin M, et al.

Authors: Brin M, et al. Effects of OnabotulinumtoxinA Treatment on Disability and Quality of Life in Patients with Chronic Migraine with Baseline Allodynia: A COMPEL Subanalysis. Authors: Young W, et al.

Authors: Young W, et al. Effects of OnabotulinumtoxinA Treatment on Disability and Quality of Life in Patients with Chronic Migraine with Baseline Headache Every Day: A COMPEL Subanalysis. Authors: Lopez J, et al.

Authors: Lopez J, et al. A Multicenter, Prospective, Randomized, Open-Label Study to Compare the Efficacy, Safety, and Tolerability of OnabotulinumtoxinA and Topiramate for Headache Prophylaxis in Adults with Chronic Migraine: The FORWARD Study. Authors: Rothrock J, et al.

Authors: Rothrock J, et al. Real-Life Use of OnabotulinumtoxinA for the Symptomatic Treatment of Chronic Migraine: The Repose Study. Authors: Ahmed F, et al.

Authors: Ahmed F, et al. Effects of OnabotulinumtoxinA Treatment on Chronic Migraine Comorbidities of Depression and Anxiety: Psychiatric Comorbidities Responder Analysis. Authors: Blumenfeld A, et al.

Authors: Blumenfeld A, et al. The Effects of OnabotulinumtoxinA Treatment on the Chronic Migraine Comorbidities of Sleep and Fatigue. Authors: Blumenfeld A, et al.

Authors: Blumenfeld A, et al. Treatment Patterns for Newly Diagnosed Chronic Migraine Patients in a Large US Health Insurer's Population. Authors: Shewale A, et al.

Spasticity and Movement Disorders

The following presentations will be on display on Thursday, April 26th from 11:30 am-7:00 pm:

Comparison of OnabotulinumtoxinA Utilization and Effectiveness Across Various Etiologies of Spasticity from the Adult Spasticity International Registry Study: ASPIRE. Authors: Francisco GE, et al.

Authors: Francisco GE, et al. The Adult Spasticity International Registry (ASPIRE) Study: Real-World Treatment Utilization and Effectiveness of OnabotulinumtoxinA in Post-Stroke Patients Treated for Spasticity. Authors: Bavikatte G, et al.

Authors: Bavikatte G, et al. Cervical Dystonia Patients Treated with OnabotulinumtoxinA Report Improvements in Health-Related Quality of Life in a Multicentre, Prospective, Observational Study: POSTURe. Authors: Petitclerc M, et al.

BOTOX (onabotulinumtoxinA) Important Information

Indication

BOTOX is a prescription medicine that is injected to prevent headaches in adults with chronic migraine who have 15 or more days each month with headache lasting 4 or more hours each day in people 18 years or older.

It is not known whether BOTOX is safe or effective to prevent headaches in patients with migraine who have 14 or fewer headache days each month (episodic migraine).

IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION

BOTOX may cause serious side effects that can be life threatening. Get medical help right away if you have any of these problems any time (hours to weeks) after injection of BOTOX:

Problems swallowing, speaking, or breathing, due to weakening of associated muscles, can be severe and result in loss of life. You are at the highest risk if these problems are pre-existing before injection. Swallowing problems may last for several months.

Spread of toxin effects. The effect of botulinum toxin may affect areas away from the injection site and cause serious symptoms including: loss of strength and all-over muscle weakness, double vision, blurred vision and drooping eyelids, hoarseness or change or loss of voice, trouble saying words clearly, loss of bladder control, trouble breathing, trouble swallowing.

There has not been a confirmed serious case of spread of toxin effect away from the injection site when BOTOX has been used at the recommended dose to treat chronic migraine.

BOTOX may cause loss of strength or general muscle weakness, vision problems, or dizziness within hours to weeks of taking BOTOX. If this happens, do not drive a car, operate machinery, or do other dangerous activities.

Do not receive BOTOX if you: are allergic to any of the ingredients in BOTOX; had an allergic reaction to any other botulinum toxin product; have a skin infection at the planned injection site. Serious and/or immediate allergic reactions have been reported. Get medical help right away if you experience symptoms; further injection of BOTOX should be discontinued. Tell your doctor about all your muscle, nerve and medical conditions. Tell your doctor about all the medicines you take. Using BOTOX with certain other medicines may cause serious side effects. The most common side effects include neck pain and headache.

For more information, refer to the Medication Guide or talk with your doctor. You are encouraged to report negative side effects of prescription drugs to the FDA. Visit www.fda.gov/medwatch or call 1-800-FDA-1088.

Please see BOTOX full Product Information including Boxed Warning and Medication Guide.

About Allergan plc

Allergan plc (NYSE: AGN), headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, is a bold, global pharmaceutical leader. Allergan is focused on developing, manufacturing and commercializing branded pharmaceutical, device, biologic, surgical and regenerative medicine products for patients around the world.

Allergan markets a portfolio of leading brands and best-in-class products for the central nervous system, eye care, medical aesthetics and dermatology, gastroenterology, women's health, urology and anti-infective therapeutic categories.

Allergan is an industry leader in Open Science, a model of research and development, which defines our approach to identifying and developing game-changing ideas and innovation for better patient care. With this approach, Allergan has built one of the broadest development pipelines in the pharmaceutical industry.

Allergan's success is powered by our global colleagues' commitment to being Bold for Life. Together, we build bridges, power ideas, act fast and drive results for our customers and patients around the world by always doing what is right.

With commercial operations in approximately 100 countries, Allergan is committed to working with physicians, healthcare providers and patients to deliver innovative and meaningful treatments that help people around the world live longer, healthier lives every day.

For more information, visit Allergan's website at www.Allergan.com.

Forward-Looking Statement

Statements contained in this press release that refer to future events or other non-historical facts are forward-looking statements that reflect Allergan's current perspective on existing trends and information as of the date of this release. Actual results may differ materially from Allergan's current expectations depending upon a number of factors affecting Allergan's business. These factors include, among others, the difficulty of predicting the timing or outcome of FDA approvals or actions, if any; the impact of competitive products and pricing; market acceptance of and continued demand for Allergan's products; the impact of uncertainty around timing of generic entry related to key products, including RESTASIS, on our financial results; uncertainty associated with financial projections, projected cost reductions, projected synergies, restructurings, increased costs, and adverse tax consequences; difficulties or delays in manufacturing; and other risks and uncertainties detailed in Allergan's periodic public filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including but not limited to Allergan's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2017. Except as expressly required by law, Allergan disclaims any intent or obligation to update these forward-looking statements.

 2018 Allergan. All rights reserved. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

CONTACTS: Allergan:

Investors:

Daphne Karydas

(862) 261-8006

Media:

Amy Rose

(862) 261-7001

Lisa Kim

(714) 246-3843

SOURCE Allergan plc

Related Links

www.allergan.com


ROHNERT PARK, Calif., April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- For students in many fields of graduate study, having debt is the norm - student debt, specifically, especially when it comes to master's and professional degree programs, where funding is often scarce. Student loan borrowers who were in master's degree programs should be aware of repayment options available to them, especially because they often face such steep monthly payments. Ameritech Financial, a document preparation company that helps federal student loan borrowers apply for repayment plans, encourages former grad students to explore their choices for loan repayment.

"Graduate students often take on a high amount of debt in the hopes of achieving a high enough salary to counter-balance it," said Tom Knickerbocker, executive vice president of Ameritech Financial. "But it doesn't always go to plan, and another solution is needed."

Solutions for federal student loan borrowers include a wide range of repayment and forgiveness programs which are offered by the Department of Education. One type of repayment plan is called income-driven repayment, which describes a few different plans that require borrowers to make payments based on income and family size. Borrowers in income-driven plans are also positioned for loan forgiveness at the end of 20 or 25 years of payments in such plans.

Because former graduate students in particular often have high balances relative to their incomes, income-driven repayment might be worthy of consideration for these types of former students. It's important to note that those who finished their degrees and others who did not finish are all eligible to apply for federal repayment and forgiveness options.

That said, income-driven repayments do require an application to enroll. Some borrowers may be unsure of the process and in need of additional assistance. Ameritech Financial helps borrowers select a plan, apply for the plan and recertify enrollment in the plan on a yearly basis if the borrower wishes to remain enrolled.

"Graduate students who are feeling overwhelmed by their debt are not without options when it comes to their federal loans," said Knickerbocker. "Ameritech Financial provides guidance and excellent support to borrowers of a wide range of education backgrounds and levels of debt."

About Ameritech Financial

Ameritech Financial is a private company located in Rohnert Park, California. Ameritech Financial has already helped thousands of consumers with financial analysis and student loan document preparation to apply for federal student loan repayment programs offered through the Department of Education.

Each Ameritech Financial telephone representative has received the Certified Student Loan Professional certification through the International Association of Professional Debt Arbitrators (IAPDA).

Ameritech Financial prides itself on its exceptional customer service.

Contact

To learn more about Ameritech Financial, please contact:

Ameritech Financial

5789 State Farm Drive #265

Rohnert Park, CA 94928

1-800-792-8621

[email protected]

Related Links

Ameritech Financial home page

SOURCE Ameritech Financial
ROHNERT PARK, Calif., April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Farming is an essential industry as it supplies food to communities across the nation. However, as older farmers retire, young farmers are not replacing them at equal rates. About 69 percent of young farmers have student loans, and many are postponing their dream of starting their own farm business because of their student loans. Recently introduced legislation would provide student loan forgiveness for beginning farmers. Ameritech Financial, a document preparation company that helps student loan borrowers apply for federal repayment plans, reminds borrowers who struggle with high monthly payments that the Department of Education offers a variety of repayment plans that may help.

"Starting any business can be difficult when you have student loans," said Tom Knickerbocker, Executive Vice President of Ameritech Financial. "Farming is an essential industry, so it makes sense that aspiring farmers whose student debt is getting in the way of farming get some student loan relief."

Farmers often have difficulty paying their student loans on a monthly basis because their income varies throughout the year, often in connection to harvest. The bill proposes student loan forgiveness for young farmers with less than 10 years of experience. Eligible farms must make at least $35,000 in a year on produce sales and borrowers must be in good standing on their student loans.

Starting a farming business requires having land on which to farm. For most young farmers, that requires a loan, which can be difficult to obtain when student loans represent a large portion of monthly income. Countless borrowers have found federal income-driven repayment plans useful in reducing their payments and allowing them to focus on other financial goals, such as saving money or paying down other debt. Such plans base payment amounts on income and family size and end in the forgiveness of any remaining balance after 20 to 25 years of enrollment.

"At Ameritech Financial, we help borrowers understand IDRs in the context of their personal situation," said Knickerbocker. "We also help borrowers who decide to apply for an IDR to complete the application paperwork so that they can focus on pursuing their goals."

About Ameritech Financial

Ameritech Financial is a private company located in Rohnert Park, California. Ameritech Financial has already helped thousands of consumers with financial analysis and student loan document preparation to apply for federal student loan repayment programs offered through the Department of Education.

Each Ameritech Financial telephone representative has received the Certified Student Loan Professional certification through the International Association of Professional Debt Arbitrators (IAPDA).

Ameritech Financial prides itself on its exceptional Customer Service.

Contact

To learn more about Ameritech Financial, please contact:

Ameritech Financial

5789 State Farm Drive #265

Rohnert Park, CA 94928

1-800-792-8621

[email protected]

Related Links

Ameritech Financial home page

SOURCE Ameritech Financial

Related Links

https://ameritechfinancial.com


LOS ANGELES, April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Bali Juice today announced two new brand partners working with the California-based Mangosteen juice brand: Merlin Kauffman and Chuck Muth.

Merlin Kauffman is the founder of Soothe, the world's largest and fastest-growing on demand massage service. Not only has Kauffman invested in Bali Juice, he has joined the Bali Juice team in a business advisory role.

Chuck Muth is a former Coca-Cola executive and has spent more than 38 years in the beverage industry with brands Honest Tea, Zico and Coke's VEB group. Muth is currently the Chief Growth Officer at Beyond Meat and he will also take an active role in leading Bali forward as a member of the board of directors.

"We are thrilled to have both Merlin and Chuck as part of the Bali Team," says Edward Farley, Founder and CSO. "Chuck and Merlin will be advising the business and supporting the executive team."

Bali Juice is the first company to bring a 100 percent pure Mangosteen juice to the US. Mangosteen is a rare super fruit grown on trees that can take up to 15 years to flower with fruit. It is found in just a few countries in South East Asia.

ABOUT BALI JUICE:

Bali was founded by Edward Farley after growing up feeding Mangosteen fruit to Gorillas and other primates. Bali strives to create products that are as pure as they are potent, and are the first to bring mangosteen into the US. For more information, visit http://bali-juice.com/.

Follow us on Facebook and Instagram: @balijuice

Media Contact:

Matt Kovacs/BLAZE PR

[email protected]

SOURCE Bali
SANTA ANA, Calif., April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Banc of California, Inc. (NYSE: BANC) today announced it will release 2018 first quarter financial results on Friday, April 27, 2018, before the market opens. The Company will host a conference call to discuss its first quarter earnings at 7:00 a.m. Pacific Time (PT) on the same day.

Interested parties are welcome to attend the conference call by dialing 888-317-6003, and referencing event code 1373989. A live audio webcast will also be available and the webcast link will be posted on the Company's investor relations website at https://www.bancofcal.com/investor. The slide presentation for the call will also be available on the Company's website prior to the call.

An audio archive of the conference call will be available on the Company's investor relations website within 24 hours after the end of the call.

About Banc of California, Inc.

Banc of California, Inc. (NYSE: BANC) provides comprehensive banking services to California's diverse businesses, entrepreneurs and communities. Banc of California operates 34 offices in California.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release includes forward-looking statements within the meaning of the "Safe-Harbor" provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are necessarily subject to risk and uncertainty and actual results could differ materially from those anticipated due to various factors, including those set forth from time to time in the documents filed or furnished by Banc of California, Inc. with the Securities and Exchange Commission. You should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements and Banc of California, Inc. undertakes no obligation to update any such statements to reflect circumstances or events that occur after the date on which the forward-looking statement is made.

Investor Relations Inquiries: Media Inquiries: Banc of California, Inc. Abernathy MacGregor Timothy Sedabres, (855) 361-2262 Ian Campbell / Joe Hixson / James Bourne, (213) 630-6550 [email protected] / [email protected] / [email protected]

SOURCE Banc of California, Inc.

Related Links

http://bancofcal.com


PETALUMA, Calif., April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Starting a business is extremely difficult, but growing a small business can pose different challenges. It takes a solid foundation, a plan that includes short- and long-term goals, and steady income to fuel growth. Brandon Frere, CEO of Frere Enterprises, has turned floundering companies around and stimulated growth in small businesses.

"Growing a business takes dedication and passion and a lot of good people," said Frere. "Change won't happen in a day, so business owners should be patient throughout the process. But the result is worth it, especially if it means you can help more people with something they need."

Whether a company wants to grow its customer base, expand into different verticals, or expand in other ways, growth requires a plan and a solid foundation. Such a foundation should include excellent customer service that encourages referrals and repeat customers. Workflows should be easy to follow and conducive to expansion. All this supports a steady income, which is necessary for stability as the company enacts plans to move toward future goals.

Coming up with a plan for growth may take a lot of research. Market research and speaking to a mentor can help with the planning process. Once outlined, company leaders should be flexible with their plan. If one avenue for growth is not gaining traction, changing direction may be necessary. "Remember, the goal is growth and what that allows you to offer to your clients, whether that's new products or services or improvements or additions to existing products or services," said Frere.

"Sometimes it takes a trial and error mindset, in that any setbacks should be learned from and built from," said Frere. "As long as any changes you make align with the company mission statement and goals and it's something that will benefit your clients, you know it'll be worth it in the end."

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 home page

SOURCE Frere Enterprises

Related Links

http://frereenterprises.com


HOUSTON, April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Crossmark Global Investments ("Crossmark") today announced that Arthur G. Smith has been named Managing Director, Distribution and Marketing. Mr. Smith, who previously held senior sales, marketing and branding leadership roles with several global financial institutions, will oversee the firm's efforts to market its products to institutional investors, financial advisors, and the clients they serve. Smith will join the firm immediately and will report to Michael L. Kern, III, CFA, President & CEO.

"We are pleased to announce that Art Smith, an executive with a proven and respected background in sales and marketing, is joining Crossmark. His market knowledge and expertise in strategic growth will help us to expand our business and advance our mission of providing responsible investment solutions to retail and institutional investors," said Mr. Kern. "Prior to joining Crossmark, Art was engaged with our firm as a strategy consultant, and he has a deep appreciation for our values and purpose, coupled with his extensive experience in advancing the growth of world-class financial institutions."

"Throughout my work with Crossmark, I have been deeply impressed by the firm's commitment to responsible investing and passion for exceptional client service," said Mr. Smith. "I look forward to helping Crossmark reach even higher levels of excellence, client service and growth as a member of the team."

Most recently, Mr. Smith was Managing Partner of VIRE, a global management consulting firm providing comprehensive services in such areas as marketing, brand management and corporate strategy. He held senior executive positions with MUFG, as Managing Director, Chief Communications & Marketing Officer. Prior to MUFG he was SVP, Head of Brand Marketing at Wachovia, and Global Chief Marketing Officer of RSM International, Ltd.

In his career, Mr. Smith also held positions with companies in a diverse range of non-financial industries, including President and CEO of Narenco, a nationwide developer of solar energy projects, and strategic roles with Duke Energy Corp. and Xerox Corporation. He holds an MBA from the Simon School of Business of the University of Rochester, and a BS in Business & Economics from Nazareth College. Among his community-oriented activities, Mr. Smith has been involved in programs to relieve hunger and homelessness through St. Matthew Catholic Church in Charlotte, NC.

About Crossmark Global Investments:

Crossmark Global Investments is an innovative investment management firm. The firm provides a full suite of investment management solutions to institutional investors, financial advisors and the clients they serve. Crossmark has a multi-decade legacy of specializing in responsible investment strategies for clients. Founded in 1987, the firm is headquartered in Houston, Texas. Additionally, Crossmark is the exclusive manager of the Crossmark Steward Funds, which is a fund family that applies an overarching values-based screening methodology to its suite of equity and fixed income funds.

The Crossmark Steward Funds are offered by Crossmark Distributors, Inc., member FINRA/SIPC. Crossmark Distributors is an affiliate of Crossmark Global Investments, the Steward Funds' investment adviser. Crossmark Global Investments is an investment adviser registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission that provides discretionary investment management services to mutual funds, institutions, and individual clients.

Media Contacts:

Stephanie Dressler / Elizabeth Germack

Dukas Linden Public Relations

(212) 704-7385

[email protected] / [email protected]

SOURCE Crossmark Global Investments

Related Links

http://www.crossmarkglobal.com


KING OF PRUSSIA, Pa., April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Global biotherapeutics leader CSL Behring today announced that it will host an Industry Therapeutic Update at the 2018 annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) which will focus on neuromuscular medical research from the PATH (Polyneuropathy and Treatment with Hizentra) study, the largest ever CIDP trial. In addition, CSL Behring will support two scientific poster presentations and host an exhibit booth, #846, where attendees will have the opportunity to go through a simulation to understand some common CIDP symptoms from a patient perspective.

Privigen Immune Globulin Intravenous (Human), 10% Liquid

"CSL Behring has a long history in delivering on its promise to develop immunoglobulin replacement therapies that treat rare conditions related to the immune system and we are committed to bringing those treatments to neurologists," said Debra Bensen-Kennedy, MD, Vice President for Medical Affairs, North America, CSL Behring. "Our significant presence at this year's AAN meeting signals our formal entry into the field of Neurology in the US, with a specific focus on neuromuscular medicine."

During Monday's Industry Therapeutic Update, "A PATH FORWARD IN PERIPHERAL NEUROIMMUNOLOGY: A Subcutaneous Alternative for Patients With Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy (CIDP)" (April 23, 7 p.m. PDT, Orpheum Ballroom, Hotel Indigo Los Angeles) leading expert Ericka Simpson, M.D., will share highlights from the PATH study. She will be joined by Chafic Karam, M.D., and CIDP patient and advocate Elizabeth Thirtyacre as they share their experiences with the CIDP patient journey and treatment approach. The program will also include a live demonstration of a subcutaneous infusion by infusion science specialist Melody Bullock, BS, BSN, MS, IgCN, CRNI.

Posters summarizing research supported by CSL Behring will be presented during the meeting, including:

Efficacy and Safety of Intravenous Immunoglobulin (IVIG) IgPro10 in CIDP: the PRIMA and PATH studies. (Mielke, Van Schaik , et al.) Poster P1.153 (Poster Session 1, Sunday, April 22 , 4:00-5:30 p.m. )

(Mielke, , et al.) Electrophysiological Testing in Patients With Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy Treated With Subcutaneous Immunoglobulin: The PATH Study (Bril, Van Schaik , et al.) Poster P1.433 (Poster Session 1, Sunday, April 22 , 4:00-5:30 p.m. )

About CIDP

In CIDP, a rare autoimmune disorder that affects the peripheral nerves (those outside the brain and spinal cord), the myelin sheath, the protective covering of the nerves, is damaged. This may result in numbness or tingling, muscle weakness, fatigue, and other symptoms. CIDP effects can worsen over time, leading to significant activity limitations and a decreased quality of life. CIDP can occur at any age and is more common in men than in women. Approximately 30 percent of CIDP patients will progress to wheelchair dependence if not treated. In the U.S., it is estimated that the incidence of CIDP is up to two patients per 100,000 people each year,[i] with a prevalence of 40,000 people affected.[ii]

About Hizentra

Hizentra (Immune Globulin Subcutaneous [Human] 20% Liquid), the first 20 percent subcutaneous immunoglobulin developed for subcutaneous use, is registered in over 51 countries and approved to treat certain immune deficiencies. Hizentra, the world's most prescribed subcutaneous immunoglobulin, has a proven track record of safety, efficacy, and tolerability and has over 4.8 million exposures worldwide since 2010.

Important Safety Information for the U.S.

Hizentra, Immune Globulin Subcutaneous (Human), 20% Liquid, is indicated for:

Treatment of primary immunodeficiency (PI) in adults and pediatric patients 2 years and older.

Maintenance therapy in adults with chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP) to prevent relapse of neuromuscular disability and impairment.

Limitation of use: Maintenance therapy in CIDP has been systematically studied for 6 months and for a further 12 months in a follow-up study. Continued maintenance beyond these periods should be individualized based on patient response and need for continued therapy.

For subcutaneous infusion only.

WARNING: Thrombosis may occur with immune globulin products, including Hizentra. Risk factors may include: advanced age, prolonged immobilization, hypercoagulable conditions, history of venous or arterial thrombosis, use of estrogens, indwelling vascular catheters, hyperviscosity, and cardiovascular risk factors.

For patients at risk of thrombosis, administer Hizentra at the minimum dose and infusion rate practicable. Ensure adequate hydration in patients before administration. Monitor for signs and symptoms of thrombosis and assess blood viscosity in patients at risk for hyperviscosity.

Hizentra is contraindicated in patients with a history of anaphylactic or severe systemic reaction to human immune globulin (Ig) or components of Hizentra (eg, polysorbate 80), as well as in patients with immunoglobulin A deficiency with antibodies against IgA and a history of hypersensitivity. Because Hizentra contains L-proline as stabilizer, use in patients with hyperprolinemia is contraindicated.

IgA-deficient patients with anti-IgA antibodies are at greater risk of severe hypersensitivity and anaphylactic reactions. Thrombosis may occur following treatment with Ig products, including Hizentra.

Monitor patients for aseptic meningitis syndrome (AMS), which may occur following treatment with Ig products, including Hizentra. In patients at risk of acute renal failure, monitor renal function, including blood urea nitrogen, serum creatinine and urine output. In addition, monitor patients for clinical signs of hemolysis or pulmonary adverse reactions (eg, transfusion-related acute lung injury [TRALI]).

Hizentra is derived from human blood. The risk of transmission of infectious agents, including viruses and, theoretically, the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) agent and its variant (vCJD), cannot be completely eliminated.

The most common adverse reactions (observed in 5% of study subjects) were local infusion-site reactions, as well as headache, diarrhea, fatigue, back pain, nausea, extremity pain, cough, upper respiratory tract infection, rash, pruritus, vomiting, upper abdominal pain, migraine, arthralgia, pain, fall, and nasopharyngitis.

The passive transfer of antibodies can interfere with response to live virus vaccines and lead to misinterpretation of serologic test results.

Full Hizentra prescribing information can be found at http://labeling.cslbehring.com/PI/US/Hizentra/EN/Hizentra-Prescribing-Information.pdf.

About Privigen

Privigen (Immune Globulin Intravenous [Human] 10% Liquid) is the first and only 10 percent, ready to use, room-temperature stored, liquid intravenous immunoglobulin stabilized with proline. A naturally occurring amino acid, proline has been shown to reduce IgG aggregation and dimer formation. Privigen has been approved to treat CIDP in Europe since 2013. In the U.S., Privigen is also approved for primary humoral immunodeficiency (PI) and chronic immune thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP) in patients age 15 years and older. It is available in 80 countries around the world for treating these and other rare diseases.

Important Safety Information for the U.S.

Privigen,Immune Globulin Intravenous (Human), 10% Liquid, is indicated for the treatment of:

Primary humoral immunodeficiency (PI)

Chronic immune thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP) in patients age 15 years and older

Chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP) in adults

Limitation of use: maintenance therapy in CIDP has not been studied for periods longer than 6 months. Individualize duration of treatment beyond 6 months based on patient response.

WARNING: THROMBOSIS, RENAL DYSFUNCTION AND ACUTE RENAL FAILURE

Thrombosis may occur with immune globulin products, including Privigen. Risk factors may include advanced age, prolonged immobilization, hypercoagulable conditions, history of venous or arterial thrombosis, use of estrogens, indwelling vascular catheters, hyperviscosity, and cardiovascular risk factors.

Renal dysfunction, acute renal failure, osmotic nephrosis, and death may occur with immune globulin intravenous (IGIV) products in predisposed patients. Renal dysfunction and acute renal failure occur more commonly in patients receiving IGIV products that contain sucrose. Privigen does not contain sucrose.

For patients at risk of thrombosis, renal dysfunction or renal failure, administer Privigen at the minimum dose and infusion rate practicable. Ensure adequate hydration in patients before administration. Monitor for signs and symptoms of thrombosis and assess blood viscosity in patients at risk for hyperviscosity.

See full prescribing information for complete boxed warning.

Privigen is contraindicated in patients with history of anaphylactic or severe systemic reaction to human immune globulin, in patients with hyperprolinemia, and in IgA-deficient patients with antibodies to IgA and a history of hypersensitivity.

In patients at risk of developing acute renal failure, monitor urine output and renal function, including blood urea nitrogen and serum creatinine.

Hyperproteinemia, increased serum viscosity, or hyponatremia can occur with Privigen. Infrequently, aseptic meningitis syndrome (AMS) may occurespecially with high doses or rapid infusion.

Hemolysis, either intravascular or due to enhanced red blood cell sequestration, may occur. Risk factors include non-O blood group and high doses. Closely monitor patients for hemolysis and hemolytic anemia.

During and shortly following Privigen infusion, elevations of systolic and diastolic blood pressure (including cases of hypertensive urgency) have been observed. These elevations resolved or significantly improved within hours with oral anti-hypertensive therapy or observation alone. Check patients for a history of hypertension and monitor blood pressure during this period.

Consider relative risks and benefits before prescribing high-dose regimen for chronic ITP and CIDP in patients at increased risk of thrombosis, hemolysis, acute kidney injury or volume overload. Monitor patients for pulmonary adverse reactions (transfusion-related acute lung injury [TRALI]).

Privigen is derived from human plasma. The risk of transmission of infectious agents, including viruses and, theoretically, the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) agent and its variant (vCJD), cannot be completely eliminated.

In clinical studies of patients with PI, the most common adverse reactions to Privigen, observed in >5% of subjects, were headache, fatigue, nausea, chills, vomiting, back pain, pain, elevated body temperature, abdominal pain, diarrhea, cough, stomach discomfort, chest pain, joint swelling/effusion, influenza-like illness, pharyngolaryngeal pain, urticaria, and dizziness. Serious adverse reactions were hypersensitivity, chills, fatigue, dizziness, and increased body temperature.

In clinical studies of patients being treated for chronic ITP, the most common adverse reactions, seen in >5% of subjects, were laboratory findings consistent with hemolysis, headache, elevated body temperature, anemia, nausea, and vomiting. A serious adverse reaction was aseptic meningitis syndrome.

In clinical studies of patients being treated for CIDP, the most common reactions, observed in >5% of subjects, were headache, asthenia, hypertension, nausea, pain in extremity, hemolysis, influenza-like illness, leukopenia, and rash. Serious adverse reactions were hemolysis, exacerbation of CIDP, acute rash, increased diastolic blood pressure, hypersensitivity, pulmonary embolism, respiratory failure, and migraine.

Treatment with Privigen might interfere with a patient's response to live virus vaccines and could lead to misinterpretation of serologic testing. In patients over 65 and those at risk of renal insufficiency, do not exceed recommended dose and infuse at the minimum rate practicable.

Full Privigen prescribing information, including the complete boxed warning, can be found at http://www.privigen.com/prescribing-information.

About CSL Behring

CSL Behring is a global biotherapeutics leader driven by its promise to save lives. Focused on serving patients' needs by using the latest technologies, we develop and deliver innovative therapies that are used to treat coagulation disorders, primary immune deficiencies, hereditary angioedema, inherited respiratory disease, and neurological disorders. The company's products are also used in cardiac surgery, organ transplantation, burn treatment and to prevent hemolytic disease of the newborn.

CSL Behring operates one of the world's largest plasma collection networks, CSL Plasma. The parent company, CSL Limited (ASX:CSL), headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, employs nearly 20,000 people, delivering its life-saving therapies to people in more than 60 countries. For more information visit www.cslbehring.com and follow us on www.Twitter.com/CSLBehring.

i Laughlin R.S. et al. Incidence and prevalence of CIDP and the association of diabetes mellitus. Neurology. 7;73(1):39-45.

ii American Association of Neuromuscular & Electrodiagnostic Medicine (2017). Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy. http://www.aanem.org/Patients/Disorders/Chronic-Inflammatory-Demyelinating-Polyneuropathy. Accessed March 2018.

SOURCE CSL Behring

Related Links

http://www.cslbehring.com


LAS VEGAS, April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Fusion Bank proudly announces experienced and accomplished financial expert Derek Scallet as its pick for Chief Financial Officer

Fusion Bank, a leading cash and treasury management solution for licensed cannabis operators and other members of the cannabis community has announced Derek Scallet as its choice for Chief Financial Officer (CFO).

Scallet was a "Big 8" audit/tax CPA and a financial transaction advisor and manager before becoming a finance and operations executive. During his career he has gained experience with complex restructurings, acquisitions and divestitures, improving mature operations, and assessing start-ups. His new role with Fusion Bank will put him at the helm of the company's finances, including financial planning, record keeping and management of financial risk and reporting.

His resume includes working for companies ranging from $15 million regional enterprises to $2+ billion multinational operations across varied sectors. He has experience in enhancing enterprise value through optimized strategies; creating tailored solutions to match market scope and scale; setting goal directed benchmarks and milestones; enhancing communications; team building and leadership; and development and management of the capital stack.

Most recently, Scallet was CFO for a fast-growing $30+ billion private equity-held mortgage bank with more than 2,000 employees. He also held the same office at a privately held OEM aerospace supplier and a privately held telecom services provider, the latter of which is a $200+ million global operation with markets across 65 countries and more than 15 reporting entities.

Prior to his position as CFO for these companies, Scallet worked as both an external and internal strategic advisor to Fujitsu IT Holdings, absorbing the Amdahl Corporation, a $1+ billion multinational corporation with 2,000 employees (ranked 65 on the Global 100 Index). He fulfilled the role of Vice President of Finance of two companies: Enhanced Information Systems, a start-up telephony services business with segments in virtual private networking, the Internet, and prepaid and subscriber-based services; and Power Cooling Systems, a GEA-subsidiary and a German multi-national, multi-billion dollar civil engineering and manufacturing company.

"Derek Scallet's formidable career track makes him one of the most experienced and qualified individuals for the position of Chief Financial Officer of Fusion Bank and we are privileged to have this seasoned expert on our team," said Fusion Bank President Philip LaChapelle.

About Fusion Bank

Fusion Bank is an innovative cash and treasury management solution that is in compliance with required government and central bank regulations. This members-only financial institution is licensed under the Bahamas-based Friendly Society and provides safe, legal, and ethical financial, cash, and treasury management services to licensed cannabis operators, ancillary service providers, and qualified cannabis friendly members around the globe, including cultivators, grower industry supporters, patients, healthcare providers, lobbyists, and more.

Contact:

For information, please email [email protected] , call +1-866-347-3321 or visit Fusion Bank to Register for a Bank Account.

SOURCE Fusion Bank
WASHINGTON, April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- In anticipation of the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day in 2020, Earth Day Network, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the U.S. Department of State, through the Eco-Capitals Forum, announce Earth Challenge 2020, a Citizen Science Initiative. This initiative is in collaboration with Connect4Climate  World Bank Group, Conservation X Labs, Hult Prize, National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE), Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), Reset, SciStarter, UN Environment and others to be announced.

Earth Challenge 2020 will help fulfill our goal of engaging millions of global citizens in collecting one billion data points in areas including air and water quality, pollution and human health. Citizen science volunteers around the world, working with professional scientists, will collect and share earth science data of their local communities on an unprecedented scale, providing new insight on the state of our environment.

Our initiative aims to contribute to and inform research and to educate members of the public by raising environmental and scientific literacy. By leveraging citizen science, we will drive meaningful action, empowering people to work with decision makers, including the private sector and policymakers at all levels, to make better choices.

In 2019 hackathons will be hosted around the world to help create technologies and data platforms that will underpin Earth Challenge 2020. These events will connect Earth Challenge 2020 with existing and emerging citizen science projects, highlighting successes and crowdsourcing solutions to challenges. These global hackathons will develop new hardware and software for gathering and sharing data, including an official Earth Challenge 2020 mobile app. The initial data collection campaign will launch on April 1, 2020, with the objective of collecting one billion data points by Earth Day.

Earth Challenge 2020 will result in a platform of open source data that will live, grow and connect with other global efforts, including those of governments, multilateral and scientific institutions and non-governmental organizations. Our initiative will include a broad and cross-cutting social media effort, encouraging participants to share stories, videos, photos, and other media to build a global movement and community.

The modern environmental movement was born on the first Earth Day in 1970, when 20 million people joined together changing the way we understand and manage the environment. Today, with the inclusion of new communications technology, people have the capacity to measure and make decisions about their own environment. With the support of valued partners and global citizens, Earth Challenge 2020 has the potential to be the largest coordinated citizen science project ever attempted on Earth.

To sign up for updates or to get involved email or for a complete list of partners go to https://www.earthday.org/earth-challenge-2020-a-citizen-science-initiative/

MEDIA CONTACT

The Wilson Center

wilsoncenter.org

Contact: Anne Bowser

Phone: (202) 691-4031

[email protected]

Earth Day Network

earthday.org

Contact: Denice Zeck

Phone: (202) 355-8875

[email protected]

U.S. Department of State

state.gov/ecodiplomacy

Contact: State GDI Team

[email protected]

SOURCE Earth Day Network

Related Links

http://www.earthday.org


DUBLIN, April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

The "Global Malignant Melanoma Drug Market, Dosage, Price & Clinical Pipeline Outlook 2024" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

The global melanoma market is anticipated to expand in value from US$ close to 5 Billion in 2016 to an estimated US$ 14 billion by 2024, representing a robust Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 12%. The advancement in research and development of therapeutics, early entry and dominance of immunotherapeutics, strong investor base and a robust clinical pipeline ensures a bright future for the key players involved in the segment.



This report on the global malignant melanoma is based on an in-depth analysis of the current market trends, opportunities and other dynamics that may have a significant impact on the market. Special emphasis has been put on the collection and analysis of latest data that will influence the market in the present and the future. Further, analysis of sales data, patent expiry, Cost analysis of therapeutics and collaboration between industries has been used to devise an accurate and efficient projection regarding the future of malignant melanoma market which clearly indicates it to be a key market in the future of skin cancer therapy.



The targeted therapy segment of the malignant melanoma market is anticipated to be the most promising market of the future due to its high efficacy with minimum side effects. Further, sales analysis and future projections of existing therapeutics show exponential growth for the newly introduced biologics like Opdive and cotellic due to multifold increase in adoption rate, positive post marketing response and feedback from users.



The US currently leads the global malignant melanoma market due to large patient base, easy availability and affordability of the newly introduced biologics followed by Europe. Other regions such as Australia and New Zealand have also contributed significantly to the current market size. However, the increasing patient base in highly populated regions like China and India is estimated to shift the market size to these Asian regions by the year 2024.



Key Topics Covered



1. Malignant Melanoma - Common Cancer with High Mortality

1.1 Prologue to Malignant Melanoma

1.2 Risk Factors Associated with Melanoma

1.3 Overview of Melanoma Diagnosis & Therapy



2. Analysis Regarding the Global Prevalence of Melanoma

2.1 Prevalence in the US

2.2 Prevalence in Europe & Rest of the World



3. Melanoma Market Analysis by Diagnosis & Screening

3.1 Stages of melanoma Diagnosis & Treatment Options

3.2 Cost Analysis of Melanoma Screening



4. Malignant Melanoma Therapy & Cost Analysis by Stage

4.1 Stage 0

4.2 Stage I

4.3 Stage II Melanoma

4.4 Stage III Melanoma

4.5 Stage IV Melanoma

4.6 Recurrent Melanoma



5. Malignant Melanoma Management & Therapy - Cost Analysis by Treatment Modality

5.1 Surgery

5.2 Radiation Therapy

5.3 Chemotherapy

5.3.1 Decarbazine

5.3.2 Temozolomide

5.3.3 Taxol (Paclitaxel & Carboplatin)

5.4 Biological Therapy/Targeted Therapies

5.4.1 T-VEC (Imlygic)

5.4.2 Nivolumab (Opdivo)

5.4.3 Ipilimumab (Yervoy)

5.4.4 Pembrolizumab (Keytruda)

5.4.5 Peginterferon alpha 2-b (Sylatron)

5.4.6 Interleukin-2 (IL-2; Proleukin)

5.5 Inhibitors in Malignant Melanoma Treatment

5.5.1 Vemurafenib (Zelboraf) + Cobimetinib (Cotellic)

5.5.2 Dabrafenib (Tafinlar) + Trametinib (Mekinist)

5.5.3 Vemurafenib (Zelboraf)



6. Sales Analysis of Global Melanoma Therapeutics

6.1 Global- Melanoma Chemotherapy Drug Sales

6.2 Melanoma Targeted Therapy Sales Analysis



7. Malignant Melanoma Therapy - Market Trend & Scope Analysis

7.1 Overview - Screening & Traditional Therapy Market

7.2 Modern Melanoma Therapeutics Market



8. Global Malignant Melanoma Drug Clinical Pipeline Overview



9. Regional Analysis of the Melanoma Drug Market

9.1 North America

9.1.1 US

9.1.2 Canada

9.2 Europe

9.3 Asia Pacific

9.3.1 Japan

9.3.2 China

9.3.3 Australia

9.4 Middle East & Africa (MEA)



10. Global Melanoma Drug Market Dynamics

10.1 Driving Factors of the Malignant Melanoma Drug Market

10.2 Restraining Factors of the Melanoma Drug Market



11. Future Forecast Regarding the Malignant Melanoma Drug Market



12. Global Malignant Melanoma Drug Clinical Pipeline by Company & Phase

12.1 Unknown

12.2 Research

12.3 Preclinical

12.4 Clinical

12.5 Phase-I

12.6 Phase-I/II

12.7 Phase-II

12.8 Phase-II/III

12.9 Phase-III

12.10 Preregistration

12.11 Registered



13. Marketed Malignant Melanoma Drug Clinical Insight



14. Competitive Analysis

14.1 AVAX Technologies

14.2 Biogen Idec

14.3 BioVex

14.4 Bristol-Myers Squibb

14.5 Chiron

14.6 Enzon Pharmaceuticals

14.7 GlaxoSmithKline

14.8 Lorus Therapeutics

14.9 Medarex

14.10 Merck

14.11 Ono Pharmaceutical

14.12 Plexxikon

14.13 Reliance Life Sciences

14.14 Roche

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/qsrm8n/global_melanoma?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 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

The "Global SUV Market By Length (SUV-C, SUV-D, SUV-E & SUV-F), By Engine Capacity, By Fuel Type (Diesel, Petrol & Others), By Region (Asia-Pacific, North America, Europe, South America & Others), Competition Forecast & Opportunities, 2013-2023" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

Global SUV sales was around 26.68 million units in 2017, and this volume is projected to reach 50.95 million units by 2023, in the global SUV market is anticipated to be driven by increasing consumer inclination towards compact SUVs, rising consumer demand for a car that is comfortable and can perform the occasional off-roading, and growing adoption of hybrid and electric SUVs.

Moreover, increasing investments by leading auto manufacturers such as Jeep, Toyota, Honda, etc., in their SUV product lines is expected to positively influence the global SUV market in the coming years.

Global SUV Market 2013-2023, discusses the following aspects of SUV market globally:

SUV Market Size, Share & Forecast

Segmental Analysis - By Length (SUV-C, SUV-D, SUV-E & SUV-F), By Engine Capacity, By Fuel Type (Diesel, Petrol & Others), By Region ( Asia-Pacific , North America , Europe , South America & Others)

, , , & Others) Competitive Analysis

Changing Market Trends & Emerging Opportunities

Some of the major players operating in the global SUV market are:



Fiat Chrysler Automobiles N.V.

Honda Motor Co. Ltd.

Toyota Motor Corporation

Nissan Motor Corporation

Ford Motor Company

General Motors Company

Hyundai Motor Company

Daimler AG

Renault SA

Volkswagen AG

Key Topics Covered:



1. Product Overview



2. Research Methodology



3. Analyst View



4. Voice of Customer



5. Global SUV Market Outlook



6. Asia-Pacific SUV Market Outlook



7. Europe SUV Market Outlook



8. North America SUV Market Outlook



9. South America SUV Market Outlook



10. Middle East & Africa SUV Market Outlook



11. Pricing Analysis



12. Market Dynamics



13. Market Trends & Developments



14. SWOT Analysis



15. Competitive Landscape



16. Strategic Recommendations



For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/pkf8xt/global_suv_market?w=5





Media Contact:

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


ROCHESTER, N.Y., April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- VerifyMe, Inc. (OTCQB: VRME), a technology solutions company that markets a broad patent portfolio and proprietary products that provide identifiers and serialization for authenticating, tracking and tracing functions for labels, packaging, products, people and financial transactions, today announced changes to the makeup of its board of directors. The company has appointed Mr. Harvey P. Eisen to its board of directors. Mr. Eisen is currently the Chairman, CEO and Director of Wright Investors' Service Holdings, Inc. (WISH). Mr. Eisen also served as Chairman of Bedford Oak Advisors, LLC, an investment partnership since 1998 and Chairman and Director of GP Strategies since 2004. Mr. Eisen was previously Senior Vice President of Travelers, Inc. and held various executive positions with Primerica, SunAmerica Corp., and Integrated Resources Asset Management. Mr. Eisen was President and Portfolio Manager of Eisen Capital Management for 10 years and he began his career as an analyst with Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. and Wertheim. Mr. Eisen is widely recognized as one of the country's leading portfolio managers and is often consulted by the national media for his expertise of the investment marketplace. Mr. Eisen is frequently quoted in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Pension World, U.S. News & World Report and Bloomberg Businessweek and appears regularly on various television programs like CNN, CNBC, Bloomberg TV and Fox News.

Mr. Patrick White, President and Chief Executive Officer of VerifyMe, stated, "It is my pleasure to welcome Harvey as a new director of VerifyMe. Harvey is well known in the investment community as one of the leading portfolio managers in the U.S. He has in excess of 30 years' experience and is often a guest and recognized in the national media (CNBC, Bloomberg) for his business acumen and knowledge of the financial markets. On behalf of the board of directors, we look forward to working closely with Harvey and the contributions he'll provide to our company."

The company also regrets to announce the untimely passing of Mr. Claudio R. Ballard, a member of the board of directors since March 30, 2013. This sudden, unexpected event was unrelated to the election of Harvey Eisen.

Mr. White added, "We are saddened by the untimely loss of our fellow board member Claudio Ballard. Claudio was instrumental in helping the company over the past few years. He will be sorely missed, and we have our deepest sympathies for his family and friends."

About VerifyMe, Inc.

VerifyMe, Inc., is a technology solutions company that markets a broad patent portfolio and proprietary products that provide identifiers and serialization for authenticating, tracking and tracing functions for labels, packaging, products, people and financial transactions. VerifyMe's physical technology authenticates packaging, labels & documents with a suite of proprietary security inks and pigments. The company's digital technologies authenticate people by performing strong, multi-factor verification via its patented digital software platforms. To learn more, visit www.verifyme.com

For Licensing or other information contact:

Company: VerifyMe, Inc.

Email: [email protected]

Website: http://www.verifyme.com



For investors contact:

Lytham Partners

Adam Lowensteiner or Robert Blum

646-829-9700  New York

602-889-9700 - Phoenix

[email protected]

SOURCE VerifyMe, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.verifyme.com


LONDON and NEW YORK, April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

ICIS (www.icis.com ), the trusted information provider for the global chemical and energy industries, today calls for entries for its 15th annual ICIS Innovation Awards (www.icis.com/awards), designed to recognise outstanding technological and business innovation in the chemical industry.

(Logo: http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/619935/ICIS_Logo.jpg )



ICIS is pleased to welcome BASF (www.basf.com), one of the world's leading chemical producers, as the overall lead sponsor for the Awards this year.

"As the most innovative company in the chemical industry, BASF has long been developing solutions for the biggest challenges of our time, and has enjoyed great success in doing so," says Detlef Kratz, Senior vVice President for Technology and Operational Excellence.

"We are continuously working on many more innovations to improve people's day-to-day lives and we would like to share this spirit with those who work on innovations in the chemical industry.

"For this reason, we are honored to support the ICIS Innovation Award for the first time and acknowledge the teams and people behind contributions for a sustainable future. We are optimistic that brilliant minds will come up with outstanding ideas. We wish all of them great success."

US chemical distribution company Maroon Group (www.maroongroupllc.com), continues as a category sponsor, supporting the Innovation with Best Benefit for Environment and Sustainability category.

ExxonMobil Chemical (www.exxonmobilchemical.com) continues its support by sponsoring the category for Best Innovation by a Small or Medium-sized Enterprise, as does professional services company Accenture (www.accenture.com), which is sponsoring the Best Product Innovation category.

John Baker, ICIS Innovation Awards Manager at ICIS, comments: "We are delighted to welcome BASF as overall sponsor and to have the continued support of all three category sponsors again, a sign that the Awards continue to be successful in their goal of highlighting the importance of innovation in the chemical industry.

"The awards continue to grow and gain industry support and last year attracted a high level and quality of entries. We once again look forward to highlighting the very best of innovation in the chemical industry."

Celebrating success

The ICIS Innovation Awards enable companies to celebrate their success in the vital activity of innovation and the increasingly important areas of sustainability and environmental performance.

There are four categories to enter:

Best Product Innovation - sponsored by Accenture

sponsored by Accenture Best Process Innovation

Best Innovation by a S mall or M edium-sized E nterprise (SME) - sponsored by ExxonMobil Chemical

sponsored by ExxonMobil Chemical Innovation with Best Benefit for Environment and Sustainability - sponsored by Maroon Group

The ICIS Innovation Awards are open to entry from today, with a deadline for entries of 29 June 2018. The winners will be announced in October 2018.

For more information or to enter the awards, visit www.icis.com/awards or call John Baker on +44-20-8652-3153.

For further information contact:

John Baker

Global editor, ICIS

Tel: +44-(0)-20-8652-3153

Email: [email protected]

Web site: www.icis.com

About ICIS

ICIS is the world's largest petrochemical market information provider, with divisions spanning energy and fertilizers. Our aim is to give companies in global commodities markets a competitive advantage by delivering valuable information and analytics tools which enable our customers to identify and react to opportunities in markets which are constantly evolving. We have more than 30 years' of experience in providing pricing intelligence and news, forecast data, market analytics and independent consulting to buyers, sellers and analysts.

With a global staff of more than 600, ICIS has employees based in London, Houston, New York, Singapore, Dubai, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Beijing, Mumbai, Tokyo, Karlsruhe, and Milan. ICIS' team of journalists is engaged in reporting market prices and news, and ICIS is fully committed to upholding the highest journalistic principles of verification, corroboration and authentication. ICIS has a compliance framework that along with its methodologies and business processes adheres to the requirements of the IOSCO PRA Principles.

ICIS is a division of Reed Business Information, part of RELX Group.

About Reed Business Information

Reed Business Information provides information, analytics and data to business professionals worldwide. Our strong global products and services hold market-leading positions across a wide range of industry sectors including banking, petrochemicals and aviation where we help customers make key strategic decisions every day. RBI is part of RELX Group, a world-leading provider of information and analytics for professional customers across industries.

http://www.reedbusiness.com

About Reed Elsevier

RELX Group is a worldleading provider of information and analytics for professional and business customers across industries. The group serves customers in more than 180 countries and has offices in about 40 countries. It employs approximately 30,000 people of whom half are in North America. RELX PLC is a London listed holding company which owns 52.9% of RELX Group. RELX NV is an Amsterdam listed holding company which owns 47.1% of RELX Group. The shares are traded on the London, Amsterdam and New York Stock Exchanges using the following ticker symbols: London: REL; Amsterdam: REN; New York: RELX and RENX. The total market capitalisation is approximately 30.0bn|34.4bn|$42.6bn

www.relx.com

About BASF

At BASF, we create chemistry for a sustainable future. We combine economic success with environmental protection and social responsibility. The more than 115,000 employees in the BASF Group work on contributing to the success of our customers in nearly all sectors and almost every country in the world.

Our portfolio is organised into five segments: Chemicals, Performance Products, Functional Materials & Solutions, Agricultural Solutions and Oil & Gas. BASF generated sales of 64.5bn in 2017. BASF shares are traded on the stock exchanges in Frankfurt (BAS), London (BFA) and Zurich (BAS).

For further information contact:

Barbara Gerster

Tel: +49-621-60-59077

Email: [email protected]

Web site: www.basf.com

About Maroon Group

Maroon Group is one of the fastest growing specialty chemical and ingredient distributors in North America. Our operating verticals focus on end markets which include CASE, Plastics, Specialty Intermediates, and CARE. We leverage a common infrastructure of industry leading technology, value-add services, global sourcing & logistics network, and a commitment to Creating Customer Success.

For further information, contact:

Mike McKenna

Chief Operating Officer

Maroon Group

Tel: +1-440-937-1000

Email: [email protected]

Web site: www.maroongroupllc.com

About ExxonMobil Chemical

ExxonMobil Chemical is one of the largest chemical companies in the world. Our unique portfolio of commodity and specialty businesses generates annual sales of more than 24 million tonnes of prime products. We have world-scale manufacturing facilities in all major regions, and our products serve as the building blocks for a wide variety of everyday consumer and industrial products.

For further information, contact:

David Woods

Opportunity Identification Manager

New Product Platforms

ExxonMobil Chemical Company

Tel: +1-832-625-4134

Email: [email protected]

Web site: www.exxonmobilchemical.com

About Accenture

Accenture is a leading global professional services company, providing a broad range of services and solutions in strategy, consulting, digital, technology and operations. Combining unmatched experience and specialised skills across more than 40 industries and all business functions - underpinned by the world's largest delivery network - Accenture works at the intersection of business and technology to help clients improve their performance and create sustainable value for their stakeholders.

With approximately 425,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries, Accenture drives innovation to improve the way the world works and lives.

For further information, contact:

Guy Cantwell

Tel: +1-281-900-9089

Email: [email protected]

Web site: www.accenture.com

SOURCE ICIS
EDGEWOOD, N.Y., April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- ILVE, known for their handcrafted Italian appliances, introduces the ILVE Pro Series to their line of free-standing dual fuel ranges. A sleek, modern design and a sharp price point matched with ILVE's superior quality ensure that this is no ordinary kitchen appliance. The new line flaunts chef quality features including a removable griddle, high BTU brass burners and a built-in warm drawer to keep cooked food at an ideal temperature for serving.

ILVE Pro Series

The ILVE Pro series is available in a 36" single or unique double oven configuration as well as an exclusive 40" & 48" size with double ovens. The electric ovens feature multi-function cooking options and built-in rotisserie accessories for a truly professional-style cooking experience. The triple pane glass doors ensure the outside of the oven doors maintain a safer to touch temperature while effectively trapping heat to conserve more energy.

"Expanding ILVE's line of free-standing ranges gives consumers even more ability to find an appliance to best suit their cooking, design and budget needs," says Melissa Haber, Vice President for EuroChef USA. "The ILVE Pro Series flaunts a modern style while encompassing all of the most desirable cooking features for the home chef at a sharp price point."

Offered in two colors, stainless steel & matte graphite, the Pro Series features spindle legs, tubular style knobs and handles and a digital clock and timer.

Other Details:

Available in 36" single oven, 36" double oven, 40" double oven and 48" double oven options

Offered in Stainless Steel and Matte Graphite colors

Equipped with High BTU Brass Burners, including one Dual Triple Ring Burner

Features easy clean oven cavities

24" depth with a 2" extended standard backguard to reach an overall 25.5" depth

Digital programmable clock & timer

UMRP starting at $4,299 for the 36" Single Oven in Stainless Steel

For press release and high-res images, click here.

About ILVE: Founded in 1952, ILVE is steadfastly committed to exceptional handcrafted quality in residential cooking appliances including ranges, cooktops, ventilation and accessories. Their state-of-the-art manufacturing facility, located near historic Venice, Italy represents more than 50 years of tradition, continuous technological research and relentless innovation. Bringing a unique brand of Italian craftsmanship to the devoted chef, ILVE has become known as the brand for people who are passionate about cooking and fine kitchen appliances. Although crafted in Italy, each appliance is made to U.S. market specifications. EuroChef USA is the exclusive importer of the ILVE brand for the U.S. and distributes the collection through an authorized network of retailers and distributors throughout the country.

For more information visit http://ilveappliances.com.

Twitter: @ILVEUSA Pinterest: pinterest.com/ILVEUSA Facebook: Facebook.com/ILVEUSA Google +: plus.google.com/+ILVEUSA Instagram: @ILVEUSA



SOURCE ILVE

Related Links

http://ilveappliances.com


BOSTON, April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- John Hancock Hedged Equity & Income Fund (NYSE: HEQ) and John Hancock Financial Opportunities Fund (NYSE: BTO) announced earnings1 for the three months ended March 31, 2018. The same data for the comparable three months ended March 31, 2017 is also available below.

Three Months Ended 03/31/2018 Ticker Fund Name Current Fiscal Year End Net Investment Income Per Common Share NAV Total Managed Assets

Total Net Assets

















HEQ Hedged Equity & Income Fund 12/31 $2,105,415 $0.173 $16.93 $206,669,038

$206,669,038 BTO Financial Opportunities Fund 12/31 $1,719,311 $0.092 $37.32 $806,422,646 * $696,422,646

















Three Months Ended 03/31/2017 Ticker Fund Name Current Fiscal Year End Net Investment Income Per Common Share NAV Total Managed Assets

Total Net Assets

















HEQ Hedged Equity & Income Fund 12/31 $1,604,700 $0.131 $17.16 $209,451,182

$209,451,182 BTO Financial Opportunities Fund 12/31 $1,771,517 $0.095 $34.36 $749,892,403 * $639,892,403

* Total managed assets include assets attributable to borrowings under a Liquidity Agreement.

Amounts distributed by the Funds may vary from the earnings shown above and will be announced in separate press releases.

Statements in this press release that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements as defined by the United States securities laws. You should exercise caution in interpreting and relying on forward-looking statements because they are subject to uncertainties and other factors which are, in some cases, beyond the Fund's control and could cause actual results to differ materially from those set forth in the forward-looking statements.

An investor should consider a Fund's investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses carefully before investing.

About John Hancock Investments

John Hancock Investments provides asset management services to individuals and institutions through a unique manager-of-managers approach. A wealth management business of John Hancock Financial, we managed more than $155 billion in assets as of December 31, 2017 across mutual funds, college savings plans, and retirement plans.

About John Hancock Financial and Manulife Financial

John Hancock Financial is a division of Manulife Financial, a leading Canada-based financial services group with principal operations in Asia, Canada and the United States. Operating as Manulife Financial in Canada and Asia, and primarily as John Hancock in the United States, the Company offers clients a diverse range of financial protection products and wealth management services through its extensive network of employees, agents and distribution partners. Funds under management by Manulife Financial and its subsidiaries were C$1 trillion (US$829 billion) as of December 31, 2018. Manulife Financial Corporation trades as 'MFC' on the TSX, NYSE and PSE, and under '945' on the SEHK. Manulife Financial can be found on the Internet at manulife.com.

The John Hancock unit, through its insurance companies, comprises one of the largest life insurers in the United States. John Hancock offers and administers a broad range of financial products, including life insurance, annuities, fixed products, mutual funds, 401(k) plans, college savings, and other forms of business insurance. Additional information about John Hancock may be found at johnhancock.com.

1 Earnings refer to net investment income, which comprises the Fund's interest and dividend income, less expenses. Earnings presented represent past earnings and there is no guarantee of future results.

SOURCE John Hancock Investments

Related Links

http://johnhancock.com


NEW YORK, April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- KCSA Strategic Communications ("KCSA"), a fully-integrated communications agency specializing in public relations, investor relations and social media announced today that it has acquired Salar Media Group ("SMG"), a leading public relations and marketing firm specializing in the cannabis industry. SMG founder and CEO, Cynthia Salarizadeh, will join KCSA as a managing partner. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Since its inception, SMG has positioned itself as one of the cannabis industry's leading public relations firms, representing brands that include cannabis tracking software company BioTrackTHC, Humboldt's Finest and JuJu Royal, the ultra-premium cannabis brand launched by Julian Marley, son of late Reggae star Bob Marley.

"Along with the three core industry focus areas of KCSA  Technology, Healthcare and Financial Services  we are committed to expanding our considerable communications expertise across the entire supply chain in the cannabis industry," said Todd Fromer, Managing Partner of KCSA Strategic Communications. "We are excited to welcome Cynthia and to integrating her experience and expertise in cannabis into our already robust offering."

"Over the past couple of years I have watched KCSA establish a position of leadership in providing expert communications counsel to the cannabis industry. The opportunity to join KCSA was too good to pass up, and I look forward to working closely with the entire KCSA team," said Ms. Salarizadeh. "KCSA's vast infrastructure, combined with SMG's knowledge of the cannabis industry, will uniquely position us to offer unparalleled service and support to our clients from around the globe."

About KCSA Strategic Communications

KCSA is a fully-integrated communications agency specializing in public relations, investor relations, social media and marketing with expertise in financial and professional services, technology, healthcare, media, energy, cannabis and public services companies. Since 1969, the firm has demonstrated strategic thinking and program execution that drives results for its clients in the ever-changing communications and digital landscape. The firm's clients are its best references. For more information on the KCSA Cannabis Practice or "The Green Rush," KCSA's 30-minute podcast covering the business of cannabis, please visit our website www.kcsa-cannabis.com. You can also follow KCSA Cannabis across social channels by following @kcsa_cannabis.

SOURCE KCSA Strategic Communications
IRVINE, Calif., April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- In the world of transportation there is a major focus on the future of automotive, from autonomous vehicles to electrification. While the future isn't here yet, and pure electric and hydrogen-powered fuel-cell vehicles have their challenges for full-time use, the present offers plug-in hybrid vehicles with great fuel efficiency, smart value and no range anxiety. In time for Earth Day, the expert editors at Kelley Blue Book evaluated four plug-in hybrids on the market today, the Chevrolet Volt, Honda Clarity Plug-In Hybrid, Hyundai Ioniq Plug-In Hybrid and Toyota Prius Prime, in a real-life comparison, including a long-distance road trip from the busy Los Angeles freeways to Northern California.

Plug-in hybrids run on efficient electric power, a gasoline engine, or the combination of both, and today there are more plug-in hybrid models available than ever before from luxury SUVs to simple, no-fuss commuter cars.

"Plug-in hybrids stand out for most buyers because they can plug into a regular wall socket, charge overnight, and get drivers to their job the next morning on pure electric power with zero tailpipe emissions," said Karl Brauer, executive publisher for Kelley Blue Book. "These vehicles offer clear advantages for smarter commuting, superior fuel economy and good highway manners."

Excerpts from Real-Life Plug-In Hybrid Vehicle Comparison

(Vehicles listed in alphabetical order)

2018 Chevrolet Volt

The Chevy Volt entered its second generation in 2016 and became the better for it. It gained range in both all-electric driving (53 miles) and total distance, five-passenger seating versus the previous four, enhanced technology such as an infotainment system ready for Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, and a sleek new design. Power is perfectly acceptable for this class, and we'll go as far as saying the Volt even packs a punch when electrons are doing the work. In all-electric mode, the Volt has the satisfying acceleration associated with an electric vehicle (EV). Mash the throttle and Chevy's plug-in electric vehicle scoots.

2018 Honda Clarity Plug-In

It takes about as long to adjust to driving the Clarity as it takes to get used to a Honda Accord. While its styling is admittedly quirky, the Clarity is much like any other sedan in most ways, but with the added bonus of 48 miles of electric-only driving. That's why we named the 2018 Honda Clarity PHEV a 2018 Kelley Blue Book Best Buy Award winner in the Electric/Hybrid Car category. The nicely appointed interior uses attractive, quality materials, and the controls are well laid out and within easy reach. The Clarity has a comfortable ride, which adds to the car's pleasant demeanor on the highway.

2018 Hyundai Ioniq Plug-In Hybrid

The 2018 Hyundai Ioniq Plug-In Hybrid stands tall as the most everyday car in this test. From a practical plug-in-hybrid point of view, the gasoline/electric PHEV version of the Ioniq got fan notes from every driver in our test. We universally agreed that for a 5-passenger hybrid hatchback that starts at just $25,835, the Ioniq had an inside line when it came to value. Standard features at that price include body-color exterior trim pieces -- including heated outside mirrors -- and a gift basket of interior features like heated front seats, a rearview camera, and dual-zone climate control. For the media junkies, a 7-inch touch-screen display and Apple CarPlay/Android Auto are also included. Throw in a $4,500 federal tax credit and a 10-year/100,000-mile warranty on the hybrid powertrain, and you've already got a pretty good lock on value.

2018 Toyota Prius Prime

Toyota's second crack at a plug-in hybrid in its pioneering Prius lineup brings enough differentiation in both styling and performance to warrant a serious look at this vehicle for those who want the best of both the pure electric and hybrid worlds. While the 2018 Toyota Prius Prime doesn't have the same all-electric range as its archrival Chevrolet Volt, it does offer 25 miles of pure EV mode, plus an impressive 54 mpg EPA combined fuel-economy rating when it's running as a conventional hybrid (the agency gives it a 133 MPGe rating when both modes are combined). On our road trip, the Prius Prime went more than 475 miles on a single tank with an overall mpg of 54.3 mpg.

For the full plug-in hybrid vehicle comparison, including driving impressions, specs, consumer ratings and reviews, photos, videos, and more, visit https://www.kbb.com/car-news/all-the-latest/2018-plug-in-hybrid-comparison-test/2100005336/.

For more information and news from Kelley Blue Book's KBB.com, visit www.kbb.com/media/, follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/kelleybluebook (or @kelleybluebook), like our page on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kbb, follow us on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/kbb_com/ (or @kbb_com), and get updates on Google+ at https://plus.google.com/+kbb.

About Kelley Blue Book (www.kbb.com)

Founded in 1926, Kelley Blue Book, The Trusted Resource, is the vehicle valuation and information source trusted and relied upon by both consumers and the automotive industry. Each week the company provides market-reflective values on its top-rated website KBB.com, including its famous Blue Book Trade-In Values and Kelley Blue Book Price Advisor tool, which provides a range for what consumers can reasonably expect to pay for a vehicle in their area. Car owners looking to sell immediately can also get a redeemable, transaction-ready offer with Kelley Blue BookSM Instant Cash Offer. The company also provides vehicle pricing and values through various products and services available to car dealers, auto manufacturers, finance and insurance companies, and governmental agencies. Kelley Blue Book launched its first international consumer-facing site in 2017. Kelley Blue Book is a Cox Automotive brand.

About Cox Automotive

Cox Automotive Inc. makes buying, selling and owning cars easier for everyone. The global company's 34,000-plus team members and family of brands, including Autotrader, Dealer.com, Dealertrack, Kelley Blue Book, Manheim, NextGear Capital, VinSolutions, vAuto and Xtime, are passionate about helping millions of car shoppers, 40,000 auto dealer clients across 100+ countries and many others throughout the automotive industry thrive for generations to come. Cox Automotive is a subsidiary of Cox Enterprises Inc., a privately-owned, Atlanta-based company with revenues exceeding $20 billion. coxautoinc.com

SOURCE Kelley Blue Book

Related Links

http://www.kbb.com


"Our new branch will allow us to more directly deliver our brand of financial services to this robust and growing community," said Jay Magulski, President and Chief Executive Officer.

"As an active member in the community, Landmark will be making a donation to the Muskego Food Pantry," said Magulski.

The Muskego branch will also have a food donation barrel for community members to easily drop off items that are most-needed by the Muskego Food Pantry which includes non-perishable food and toiletry items like soap, shampoo and toilet paper. Donations may be brought in to the branch through the end of May.

A grand opening will be held on Saturday, April 21 where community members can check out the branch's amenities, including a new architectural style, teller pods and a welcoming atmosphere while enjoying some light refreshments. Individuals and families are encouraged to attend and meet Landmark's mascot, Blinky the Lighthouse, as well as receive a free gift during their visit.

Landmark Credit Union is Wisconsin's largest credit union, with $3.6 billion in assets and over 600 employees, who serve over 300,000 members at more than 30 locations throughout Southern Wisconsin.

SOURCE Landmark Credit Union
NEW YORK, April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Lenovo is rated the best laptop brand for a second year in a row by Laptop Mag, which released its annual Best and Worst Laptop Brands rankings today. HP and Dell followed closely behind Lenovo in second and third place, respectively.

Crowd favorite Apple, which used to dominate this contest, continues to tumble, coming in seventh place this year after it ranked fifth last year. A full list of the rankings is available here.

Each year since 2010, Laptop Mag has published its Best and Worst Laptop Brands list, which rates the top 10 major manufacturers. Each laptop brand is assigned a score based on a 100-point scale. Points are awarded in five categories: Design, Reviews, Tech Support and Warranty, Innovation, and Value and Selection.

"Whether you're purchasing a $1,500 gaming laptop or a $200 Chromebook, the brand matters. That's why, each year, we rate the top 10 laptop brands, so shoppers know what's worth spending their money on and what they can expect from each company," said Mark Spoonauer, editor-in-chief of Laptop Mag. "Between Lenovo, HP and Dell, this was a nail-bitingly close race."

Lenovo tops the list again thanks to the strength of the company's product lineup, which includes the ThinkPad X1 Carbon  the only product to get a perfect, 5-star review from Laptop Mag in the past year.

Samsung and MSI tied for last place. According to Laptop Mag's editors, MSI made plenty of high-quality notebooks, but the company lost a lot of points because of its poor-quality tech support. Samsung, on the other hand, got a high score in tech support but suffered from low scores in innovation, design, value and product ratings. Rounding out the list are Acer, Asus, Microsoft and Razer.

To learn more about how each of the top 10 brands fared and the point system that led to these rankings, read the Best and Worst Laptop Brand Ratings 2018 on laptopmag.com.

About Laptop Mag

Laptop Mag reviews hundreds of laptops to help shoppers decide which notebooks, 2-in-1s or Chromebooks are right for them. We also evaluate the brands that bring you these products and provide helpful tips and advice so you can save time and money.

About Purch

Purch is a digital publishing and marketplace platform uniquely positioned at the intersection of content, commerce and customer. By combining in-depth product reviews, comparisons and services with industry-leading publisher technology, Purch creates a seamless connection between intent-based buyers and sellers. The company generates more than $1 billion annually in facilitated commerce through its tech, shopping, lifestyle and SMB brands, including Tom's Guide, Tom's Hardware, Top Ten Reviews, ShopSavvy and Business.com. With more than 1,200 product categories, Purch is the #1 source for buying advice for more than 100 million people each month. To learn more about Purch and its owned-and-operated sites, please visit www.purch.com.

SOURCE Purch

Related Links

http://www.purch.com


ENGLEWOOD CLIFFS, N.J., April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Lipton and WE are working together to empower 80,000 women in tea farming communities across Kenya by providing them access to financial and business skills training. Program participants will learn financial fundamentals from budgeting and cost-pricing to creating business plans and applying for loans in addition to:

Financial literacy including communication, bookkeeping and loan distribution

including communication, bookkeeping and loan distribution Leadership fundamentals like conducting corporate elections, drafting policies and establishing group constitutions

like conducting corporate elections, drafting policies and establishing group constitutions Entrepreneurship tools from marketing to pricing

tools from marketing to pricing Health management, including stress and substance abuse education

Powered by WE's 'Track Your Impact' promise, tea drinkers can help support the program by purchasing their favorite Lipton product with a Track Your Impact sticker. Each sticker has a code that consumers can enter on we.org/Lipton to see exactly where and how every purchase has made an impact on women tea farming communities. Lipton's Track Your Impact products are available now at grocery retailers nationwide while supplies last.

"We are proud to have the opportunity to support the women tea farmers in Kenya, and are keen to let people know that their Lipton purchase makes a difference in these women's lives," said George Hamilton, Tea Director at Unilever. "Our goal is to help them build a cycle of learning, sharing and empowerment within their communities that will help future generations of Kenyan families."

Lipton and WE recently visited Kenya to speak with the tea farmers and see how the program was making a difference in their lives. Hear more from the women about this important initiative at YouTube.com/LiptonTea.

"The impact of the partnership between Lipton and WE is monumental. It will empower tens of thousands of women in tea farming communities, providing them with the opportunity and knowledge to access financial tools and support their families and communities," said Roxanne Joyal, CEO of ME to WE, the social enterprise to WE.

For more information about the Lipton partnership with WE, visit we.org/lipton.

About Lipton Tea

With more than 125 years of experience, Lipton is one of the world's great refreshment brands, with tea-based drinks including leaf tea, infusions, and ready-to-drink iced tea. For more information, please visit www.Lipton.com.

About Unilever United States, Inc.

Unilever is one of the worlds leading suppliers of Beauty & Personal Care, Home Care, and Foods & Refreshment products with sales in over 190 countries and reaching 2.5 billion consumers a day. In the United States, the portfolio includes brand icons such as Axe, Ben & Jerrys, Breyers, Caress, Country Crock, Degree, Dollar Shave Club, Dove, Good Humor, Hellmanns, I Cant Believe Its Not Butter!, Klondike, Knorr, Lever 2000, Lipton, Love Beauty and Planet, Magnum, Nexxus, Noxzema, Ponds, Popsicle, Promise, Pure Leaf, Q-tips, Schmidts Naturals, Seventh Generation, Simple, Sir Kensingtons, St. Ives, Suave, Sundial Brands, Talenti Gelato & Sorbetto, TAZO, TIGI, TONI&GUY, TRESemme and Vaseline. All of the preceding brand names are trademarks or registered trademarks of the Unilever Group of Companies.

Unilever employs approximately 8,000 people in the United States  generating more than $9 billion in sales in 2017.

Unilevers Sustainable Living Plan underpins the companys strategy and commits to:

Helping more than a billion people take action to improve their health and well-being by 2020.

Halving the environmental impact of our products by 2030.

Enhancing the livelihoods of millions of people by 2020.

The USLP creates value by driving growth and trust, eliminating costs and reducing risks. Globally, the companys sustainable living brands are growing 50% faster than the rest of the business and delivered more than 60% of the companys growth in 2016.

For more information on Unilever U.S., its brands visit and the USLP visit: www.unileverusa.com

About WE

WE is a family of organizations making doing good, doable. WE Charity empowers domestic and international change. ME to WE is a social enterprise that creates socially conscious products and experiences to help support the charity. WE Day fills stadiums around the world for the greatest celebration of social good. WE enables youth and families to better the world  supporting 2,500+ local and global causes by volunteering millions of hours of service, shopping daily with an impact, and raising millions of dollars that directly benefit their local communities and the world. Globally, WE's teams in Asia, Africa, and Latin America have provided more than 1 million people with clean water, built 1,000 schools and schoolrooms overseas, and empowered more than 200,000 children with access to education. WE was founded more than 20 years ago by social entrepreneurs, brothers Craig and Marc Kielburger. Join the movement today at WE.org.

Media Contact: Courtney Pischke

Golin

312-729-4412

[email protected]

SOURCE Lipton
ORLANDO, Fla., April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Marriott Vacations Worldwide Corporation (NYSE: VAC) will report financial results for the first quarter 2018 before the market opens on May 3, 2018. A conference call is scheduled to follow at 10:00 a.m. ET to discuss the company's results.

Participants may access the call by dialing (877) 407-8289 or (201) 689-8341 for international callers. A live webcast of the call will also be available in the Investor Relations section of the company's website at www.marriottvacationsworldwide.com.

An audio replay of the conference call will be available for seven days. To access the replay, call (877) 660-6853 or (201) 612-7415 for international callers. The conference ID for the recording is 13678402. The webcast will also be available on the company's website for 90 days following the call.

About Marriott Vacations Worldwide Corporation

Marriott Vacations Worldwide Corporation is a leading global pure-play vacation ownership company, offering a diverse portfolio of quality products, programs and management expertise with over 65 resorts. Its brands include Marriott Vacation Club, The Ritz-Carlton Destination Club and Grand Residences by Marriott. Since entering the industry in 1984 as part of Marriott International, Inc., the company earned its position as a leader and innovator in vacation ownership products. The company preserves high standards of excellence in serving its customers, investors and associates while maintaining a long-term relationship with Marriott International. For more information, please visit www.marriottvacationsworldwide.com.

SOURCE Marriott Vacations Worldwide

Related Links

http://www.marriottvacationsworldwide.com


WESTMINSTER, CO, April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ - Maxar Technologies (the "Company" or "Maxar", formerly MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd.), (NYSE: MAXR; TSX: MAXR), a leading global provider of advanced space technology solutions for commercial and government markets, plans to release its first quarter 2018 financial results before the market open on Wednesday, May 9, 2018.

Maxar President and Chief Executive Officer, Howard Lance, and Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer (Interim), Anil Wirasekara, will host an earnings conference call the same day, reviewing the first quarter results, followed by a question and answer session. The call is scheduled to begin promptly at 6:30 a.m. MT (8:30 a.m. ET).

To participate in the conference call, please call the conference line approximately five minutes prior to the commencement of the call:

Conference Call Dial-In Numbers:

Toll Free North America: 1-888-390-0546

Toronto: 1-416-764-8688

Vancouver: 1-778-383-7413

Instant Replay:

Toll Free North America: 1-888-390-0541

Toronto: 1-416-764-8677

Passcode: 521528#



Replay available:

From Wednesday, May 9, 2018 at 9:30 a.m. MT (11:30 a.m. ET) to

Wednesday, May 23, 2018 at 9:59 p.m MT (11:59 p.m. ET)

The conference call will also be Webcast live and then archived at: http://www.maxar.com/investors/events&presentations

About Maxar Technologies

Maxar Technologies (formerly MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates) is a leading global provider of advanced space technology solutions for commercial and government markets including satellites, Earth imagery, robotics, geospatial data and analytics. As a trusted partner, Maxar Technologies provides unmatched integrated capabilities, solutions and expertise to help customers anticipate and address their most complex mission-critical challenges with confidence. With more than 6,500 employees in over 31 locations, the Maxar Technologies portfolio of commercial space brands includes MDA, SSL, DigitalGlobe and Radiant Solutions. Every day, billions of people rely on Maxar Technologies to communicate, share information and data, and deliver insights that Build a Better World. Maxar trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange and New York Stock Exchange as MAXR. For more information, visit www.maxar.com.

Forward-Looking Statements

The above referenced earnings release and the associated conference call and webcast, which will include a business update, first quarter 2018 results and a question and answer session, may contain certain forward-looking statements and information, which reflect the current view of Maxar Technologies Ltd. (the "Company" or "Maxar") with respect to future events and financial performance. Any such forward-looking statements are based on Maxar's current expectations, estimates, projections and assumptions made in light of its experience and perception of historical trends. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond Maxar's control and the effects of which can be difficult to predict. Maxar's actual results of operations could differ materially from historical results or current expectations. You are referred to the risk factors described in above referenced earning release and in Maxar's most recent annual Management's Discussion and Analysis and Annual Information Form, which are available under the Company's profile on SEDAR, www.sedar.com, under the Company's EDGAR profile at www.sec.gov, or on the Company's website at www.maxar.com.

Investor Relations Contact:

Jason Gursky

Maxar VP Investor Relations

1-303-684-2207

[email protected]

Media Contact:

Turner Brinton

Maxar Media Relations

1-303-684-4545

[email protected]

SOURCE Maxar Technologies Ltd.

Related Links

www.maxar.com


NEW YORK, April 19, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council praised the Senate Judiciary Committee for unanimously voting out of committee the "Protecting Religiously Affiliated Institutions Act of 2018," thanked Senators Orrin Hatch and Dianne Feinstein for their leadership on the bill, and urged swift action by the full Senate.

"Bipartisan adoption of this bill will send the right message of no tolerance for hate crimes against people of faith," said Council Co-Chair Farooq Kathwari.

Council Co-Chair Stanley Bergman added, "Concrete steps need to be taken to ensure that hate crimes are investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and this bill is a critical step in this effort."

The bill expands coverage of federal hate crimes laws to include religious institutions, such as schools and community centers. It clarifies that threats against, as well as acts that result in damage to, religious institutions are covered under federal law.

After passage in the House last December, the bill is advancing in the Senate in the context of a recent rise in religious hate crimes. Anti-Jewish incidents comprise the majority all religious hate crimes, while anti-Muslim incidents rose nearly 20 percent year on year, according to FBI statistics.

The Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council brings together 46 civil society, religious, and business leaders from across the United States to advocate for domestic policy issues of common concern to the Jewish and Muslim communities, and the entire country. The Council has eight regional Muslim-Jewish affiliates in the United States. The American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) are its co-conveners.

SOURCE The Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council
NEW ORLEANS, April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- New Orleans' GAINSWave is pleased to announce they now offer GAINSWave! This breakthrough noninvasive medical therapy uses low-intensity shockwave therapy to enhance sexual performance and to treat Erectile Dysfunction symptoms.

As men age, the vessels in their penis weaken, contract and fill with micro-plaque, which can lead to Erectile Dysfunction. As these tiny vessels become clogged, the penis decreases in sensitivity, making it harder for men to achieve and maintain an erection. Thankfully, the GAINSWave protocols can enhance a man's performance by using high-frequency acoustic waves to repair existing blood vessels and improve blood flow.

Thanks to the numerous clinical studies on Low-Intensity Extracorporeal Shockwave Therapy (Li-ESWT), we can see that this therapy improves not only Erectile Dysfunction symptoms but also sexual performance. "GAINSWave is an ideal solution for men looking to improve spontaneous erections without the use of Viagra or Cialis," says Alan Arrington, M.D.. Patients receiving GAINSWave therapy have reported improved erection quality, enhanced sexual performance and decreased refractory times between orgasms, which is why this a great alternative to ED medications.

This drug and surgery-free procedure only takes about 20 minutes and can enhance a man's sex life while addressing the root cause of Erectile Dysfunction. New Orleans' GAINSWave is now treating men with the GAINSWave Therapy in their offices located at 8422 Oak St, New Orleans, LA 70118, USA.

Dr. Alan Arrington's career began by achieving his medical degree from the University of Alabama in Birmingham. He went on to complete an internship in internal medicine at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California, had residencies in internal medicine at Oschner Medical Foundation New Orleans, Louisiana, neurology and internal medicine at UC Davis Medical School in California. He completed fellowships in pulmonary diseases, sleep disorders medicine and age management medicine at Tulane University and Stanford University and with both Age Management Medical Group as well as the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine.

He has had training in and is a practitioner of GAINSWave therapy, PRP and the "P and O" shot procedures pioneered by Charles Runels, MD. His excitement in GAINSWave therapy as well as in anti-aging medicine in general centers around the ability to prevent illness, enhance longevity and cure underlying conditions.

For More Information Contact:

Alexandra Schapiro

Marketing Account Manager

[email protected]

305-918-1886

SOURCE GAINSWave
Dr. Rohrich and his colleagues performed a retrospective analysis of plastic surgeries between 1995 and 2017 at an accredited outpatient surgery center. By examining 26,032 separate cases and assessing a wide range of factors, they found that complication rates at these facilities were exceptionally low and compatible or better than those in larger facilities and accredited hospitals in the USA.

Only 0.78% of the entire study group has complications as Dr. Rohrich's research delineates. Rohrich and his team reviewed this patient group and found that the higher risk patient included those individuals with a significantly large body mass index, those whose operative time exceeded 6 hours, and patients who were undergoing a series of combined procedures.

Plastic surgery, particularly for cosmetic purposes, is on the rise with nearly 16 million cases performed in 2015 alone. As the demand for this kind of medical care continues to increase, so does the need for truly accredited plastic surgery surgical centers.

While once thought to be facilities designed for minor types of procedures, accredited outpatient centers are proving to be viable options for most plastic surgery patients. It should be noted that such procedures should be performed only by board-certified plastic surgeons who have staff privileges at the nearest hospital should any complications emerge. As a requirement for continued membership in the 2 largest plastic surgery societies (The American Society of Plastic Surgeons and The American Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons) each society mandates that all of its board certified plastic surgeon operate only at fully accredited Operating Facilities to maximize both patient safety and outcomes. Dr Rohrich and his colleagues' study from Dallas, Texas is the largest single group PS practices study to date that confirms the safety of doing plastic surgery procedures in accredited facilities.

Dr. Rohrich and his colleagues' publication gives confidence to patients and the public looking to undergo a cosmetic procedure and shines light on the numerous accredited outpatient locations across the nation. This research reaffirms the current established safety guidelines which accurately predict which patients will be most successful in this setting.

Dr. Rod J. Rohrich

Dr. Rod Rohrich is board certified by the American Board of Plastic Surgery and has a global clinical practice at the Dallas Plastic Surgery Institute. He is a Distinguished Teaching Professor and the founding Professor and Chairman of the Department of Plastic Surgery at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. He has served as the President of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS)the largest society of board certified Plastic surgeons in the world, the Association of Academic Chairmen of Plastic Surgery, as well as president of the Rhinoplasty Society. Dr Rohrich was a member of the Board of Directors of the Plastic Surgery Research Council, the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS), Plastic Surgery Educational Foundation and the American Society of Maxillofacial Surgeons. He also served as the Chair of the Plastic Surgery Residency Review Committee of the ACGME which oversees all the accredited Plastic Surgery training programs in the USA. Dr Rohrich was also a Director of the American Board of Plastic Surgery (ABPS), chair of the Oral Exam Committee and President of the Dallas Society of Plastic Surgeons as well as the Texas Society of Plastic Surgeons. He is also a founding member of the Board of Governors of the National Endowment for Plastic Surgery.

SOURCE Dr. Rod Rohrich
Max Macarthur and his wife, Deborah, started New View 11 years ago after immigrating to Australia from the United Kingdom. Upon arriving in Sydney, they sought out the right business opportunity, purchased an existing window cleaning service and got busy obtaining a business visa. Two years later, New View was up and running and the Macarthurs were full-fledged Australian citizens.

Since 2007, New View has grown to serve a wide range of customers across the Northern and Eastern Sydney beaches and throughout the greater Western Sydney region. The Macarthurs handle commercial and residential accounts, with construction cleans and residential homes making up the majority of their business.

When their business required more capital in April 2017, Max and Deborah began researching online for a short-term financing solution to cover commitments on several new large-scale jobs. Max went to his long-time bank, but was told a business loan would take four to six weeks to be approved. Instead, the Macarthurs checked their business credit online using OnDeck Australia's 'Know Your Score' product. Their business credit score quickly came up healthy and they applied online for an OnDeck loan. Max Macarthur tells the rest.

"We were approved by OnDeck in six hours or less, rather than the bank's quote of four to six weeks, says Max Macarthur, owner, New View Window Cleaning Service. "OnDeck's online process was remarkably quick, simple and efficient. Most importantly, they listened to my needs and understood that I couldn't wait forever and a day for a bank loan."

Max believes the banks are 'missing out' on business opportunities with clients like New View because small businesses cannot wait up to six weeks for funding. As a business owner, he doesn't view the need for cash to take on new jobs as a 'problem,' but rather as a normal part of growing a business. The Macarthurs have subsequently received three renewal loans from OnDeck and the capital they received has proven to be an easy and efficient way to fund their business growth.

"As a repeat customer, I can vouch for the first-class customer service at OnDeck," said Max Macarthur. "You always get to speak with a real person, who's both a product expert and extremely helpful. I would recommend OnDeck to any small business owner in need of funding. They understand a small business owner's needs like no one else."

"OnDeck is delighted to recognize the achievements of Max and Deborah in building their New View Window Cleaning business in Sydney," said Cameron Poolman, Chief Executive Officer, OnDeck Australia. "Since launching in Australia in 2015, we at OnDeck have been constantly inspired by business pioneers like the Macarthurs, whose hard work, vision and use of reliable online lending has opened new pathways for business growth."

To learn more about the Macarthur's journey to business growth with OnDeck, visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLuK8NKjOPs.

The Small Business Spotlight series from OnDeck is designed to highlight and reinforce the vital importance of small businesses. Every month, OnDeck spotlights the achievements of its small business customers and how they are thriving as a result of receiving capital from OnDeck. To learn more, visit: http://www.ondeck.com/smallbusinessspotlight

About OnDeck

OnDeck (NYSE: ONDK) is the leader in online small business lending. Since 2007, the company has powered Main Street's growth through advanced lending technology and a constant dedication to customer service. OnDeck's proprietary credit scoring system  the OnDeck Score  leverages advanced analytics, enabling OnDeck to make real-time lending decisions and deliver capital to small businesses in as little as 24 hours. OnDeck offers business owners a complete financing solution, including the online lending industry's widest range of term loans and lines of credit. To date, the company has deployed over $8 billion to more than 80,000 customers in 700 different industries across the United States, Canada and Australia. For more information, please visit www.ondeck.com.

Contact:

Jim Larkin

OnDeck

[email protected]

P: 203-526-7457

SOURCE On Deck Capital, Inc.
HOLLYWOOD, Calif., April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Fans of *NSYNC will have another opportunity to rejoice and relive the legacy of the evergreen mega-group through a nostalgic and immersive *NSYNC-centric Pop-Up experience that is scheduled to run from April 28-May 1 in Los Angeles. The "Dirty Pop-Up" will celebrate the 20 year history of the group and will serve as the launch of *NSYNC's official merchandise capsule collection. The celebration also ties in with *NSYNC receiving its star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on April 30th.

NSYNC "Dirty Pop-Up" Experience, featuring a limited inventory of official merchandise, launches on April 28 - May 1 in Hollywood, CA. *NSYNC, in collaboration with merchandise and licensing partner Epic Rights, will launch the *NSYNC Dirty Pop-Up Experience in Los Angeles, CA from April 28 - May 1. With free admission, visitors will have first dibs to a limited inventory of official merchandise as well as immerse themselves in fun, engaging photo activations that pay homage to iconic visuals from the group's career. The new line of high-quality branded apparel and accessories will also be available online as of April 30th.

In collaboration with *NSYNC's merchandise and licensing partner, Epic Rights, visitors can expect to have first dibs on a limited inventory of official merchandise as well as immerse themselves in fun, engaging photo activations that pay homage to iconic visuals from the group's career. The experience will also feature authentic props, wardrobe, artwork and photography on display. Admission to the Pop-Up will be free to the public. The new line of high-quality branded apparel and accessories will also be made available online as of April 30th.

The experience will be open at Cinematic Pictures located across from SWEET! at the Hollywood & Highland Center, 6801 Hollywood Blvd Ste 200A, Hollywood, CA 90028 from 12:00pm-8:00pm on April 28, 29, and May 1; and from 4:00pm-9:00pm on April 30. For more information, visit www.NSYNC.com.

*NSYNC "Dirty Pop-Up" Experience

Venue: Cinematic Pictures  6801 Hollywood Blvd, Ste 200A, Hollywood, CA 90028

Date: Saturday, April 28  Tuesday, May 1

Hours of operation:

Saturday, April 28  noon to 8pm

Sunday, April 29  noon to 8pm

Monday, April 30  4pm to 9pm

Tuesday, May 1  noon to 8pm

About Epic Rights

Epic Rights, Inc. is a leading music industry retail branding, merchandising and concert artist services company representing many top artists. Epic Rights provides a broad scope of services, including retail branding and licensing, official artist's website and social media management, official concert artists online shops, VIP ticketing, official fan communities and trademark registration consultation. Epic Rights is headquartered in Los Angeles, California. For more information, visit: www.epicrights.com

Media Contacts:

Michelle Orsi

Three.Sixty Marketing & Communications

310.418.6430

[email protected]

SOURCE NSYNC Merchandising

Related Links

http://www.NSYNC.com


"Ubiquo Telemedicina provides a unique opportunity for PharmaCielo to continue our leadership in the Colombian marketplace, and to support the expansion of medical cannabis expertise throughout the country," said Anthony Wile, CEO. "With over 400 medical practitioners currently engaging this interactive platform in support of a wide range of specialties, including areas of critical care, the facilitation of knowledge from within the medical community about cannabis formulations and medically appropriate treatment options is unparalleled."

The operating mandate of Ubiquo Telemedicina is to create fair and equal access for all Colombians to medical care and expertise. By enabling the Colombian medical community to provide increased access to highly specialized practitioner knowledge and consultation, Ubiquo Telemedicina facilitates continuing medical education and treatment focused communication among practitioners. As part of the operating agreement, knowledge about the possible uses, benefits and risks of medical cannabis will be enabled among medical practitioners associated with the platform to help them make educated and informed decisions about products and monitoring, in addition to the current broad range of consultative supports currently provide by the platform.

Following execution, the two organizations are jointly working to conclude definitive agreements for working together to meet the needs of current medical practitioners associated with Ubiquo Telemedicina as well as confirm strategies for expansion throughout the country.

Acquisition Terms

Pursuant to the agreement, the Company intends to acquire all of the shares of Ubiquo Telemedicina, which will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Company in exchange for a combination of cash and shareholdings in PharmaCielo Ltd. valued at approximately $1.5-million CDN. The acquisition is arms-length and remains subject to due diligence, applicable approvals and a definitive purchase and sale agreement, which will include customary conditions, including obtaining all necessary corporate and applicable regulatory approvals. The acquisition is anticipated to be completed in 60 days or less.

About PharmaCielo

PharmaCielo Ltd. is a global company privately held and headquartered in Canada, with a focus on processing and supplying all natural, medicinal-grade cannabis oil extracts and related products to large channel distributors. PharmaCielo's principal (and wholly-owned) subsidiary is PharmaCielo Colombia Holdings S.A.S., headquartered at its nursery and propagation centre located in Rionegro, Colombia.

The boards of directors and executive teams of both PharmaCielo and PharmaCielo Colombia Holdings S.A.S. are comprised of a diversely talented group of international business executives and specialists with relevant and varied expertise. PharmaCielo recognized the significant role that Colombia's ideal location will play in building a sustainable business in the medical cannabis industry, and the Company, together with its directors and executives, has built a compelling business plan focused on supplying the international marketplace.

For further information:

www.PharmaCielo.com

Media Relations:

David Gordon, Tel: +1 647 259 3258, [email protected]

(Colombia) Juan Manuel Cuellar, Tel: +57 310 3298776, [email protected]

Investor Inquiries:

[email protected]

Forward Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of words such as "intends", "anticipates", or variations of such words and phrases or state that certain actions, events or results "may" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved. These forward-looking statements are based on assumptions, including the ability for the Company and Ubiquo Telemedicina consummating the acquisition and executing their business plans, that management believes are reasonable in the circumstances, but the actual results, performance or achievements may be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by any forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements can be affected by known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, including, but not limited to, risks associated with closing the acquisition of Ubiquo Telemedicina including failure to obtain necessary approvals, risks associated with early stage companies, risks associated with the regulation of cannabis and cannabinoid derivatives, and risks associated with operating in Colombia. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements.

Except as required by law, PharmaCielo undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. However, any further disclosures made on related subjects in subsequent reports should be consulted.

SOURCE PharmaCielo

Related Links

http://www.PharmaCielo.com


EMERYVILLE, Calif., April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- REBBL, crafter of organic coconut-milk based super-herb drinks, launched Rooted In Purpose, a new digital campaign in honor of April's Earth Month. The campaign will raise awareness of REBBL's commitment to three utterly vital areas of importance to the company: mindful impact sourcing; addressing the root causes of human trafficking with non-profit organization Not For Sale; and climate revitalization. Through digital media and social content, the campaign will energize REBBL's community around important topics impacting the planet and its inhabitants, and how they can take part in inciting change.

The Rooted In Purpose campaign and three-part blog series highlights REBBL's commitment to revitalizing communities around the world through the unique partnership with Not For Sale and the sustainable impact sourcing initiatives the company implements. "REBBL is built upon the principle that humanity and the natural world have vital interconnections," said Rusti Porter, Senior VP of Marketing for REBBL. "From our soulfully crafted super herb elixirs to our efforts to help catalyze positive social and environmental outcomes for our communities, REBBL has a deeply rooted commitment to people and planet. This Earth Month we want to honor those that are helping build the momentum for brands and businesses that are finding game-changing ways to balance profit and purpose. Through social campaigns like this one, we invite our tribe to share how they themselves are deeply Rooted In Purpose."

REBBL is empowering its Tribe to engage with the campaign and the community using #RootedInPurpose to share their methods for reducing climate impact whether it be through supporting brands with dedicated missions to reversing climate change or taking action in their homes and communities. REBBL Tribe members, Rachel Mansfield, founder of food and wellness social media rachLmansfied; Kim-Julie Hansen, founder of Brussels Vegan, Best of Vegan, The Vegan Reset and The Vegan Challenge; Rachael Devaux, RD and founder of Rachael's Good Eats; and Berto Clemente from vegan lifestyle and fitness blog, Tatted Vegan will be sharing their personal approaches to combatting climate impact throughout April on REBBL's Instagram and their personal channels.

REBBL will be hosting social giveaways throughout the month, including a giveaway with mission driven brand Alter Eco. Follow along using #RootedInPurpose on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Visit http://rebbl.co/botanicalrevolutionforgood/ to read the first post in the Rooted In Purpose blog series. New blog posts will be shared weekly. For more information about REBBL or to find REBBL's Elixirs and Proteins in a store near you visit http://rebbl.co/.

About REBBL

We are REBBL. Righteous Plant Alchemy. A celebration of the traditional super-herb wisdoms refined over millennia, which are only now being openly shared, studied and embraced globally. Thousands of years of collective intelligence are captured in every bottle of our super-herb, adaptogen powered Elixirs and Proteins to deliver you delicious and nourishing goodness. Every bottle of REBBL is certified organic, soy and dairy free, gluten free, GMO free, and made without cane sugar, carrageenan, thickeners, gums, natural flavors or agave.

We are REBBL. A Botanical Revolution for Good. REBBL was born out of a conscious collaboration between global thought-leaders, whose soul purpose was to address the malfunctioning global food system through a regenerative business model that would respect, uplift, and delight the world. REBBL partners with Not For Sale, with a goal to create a future without human trafficking, and donates 2.5 percent of net revenue from the sale of every bottle to Not For Sale to support efforts to rehabilitate people who have been trafficked. REBBL also works with its growers to support their livelihood, so the grower communities are not vulnerable to trafficking. REBBL is in the process of becoming a Certified B Corporation, a process expected to be complete in 2018.

SOURCE REBBL

Related Links

http://rebbl.co


VALLEJO, Calif., April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Robby Poblete Foundation will be unveiling its inaugural Art of Peace exhibit on May 11 at 5:30 p.m. at the Temple Art Lofts, 707 Marin Street, in Vallejo, Calif., during the city's monthly 2nd Friday Art Walk. The event is the culmination of an eight-month project that started with the foundation's Solano County Gun Buyback held on August 26, 2017. Materials from decommissioned firearms from the buyback, as well as from weapons collected from law enforcement agencies from throughout Northern California were distributed to selected artists for The Robby Poblete Foundation's Art of Peace project to turn into art. Many of the weapons were directly related to crimes.

"My vision for this project was to take the destructive power of a gun and transform it into the healing power of art," said Pati Navalta, executive director of The Robby Poblete Foundation. "Many of these artists have been personally impacted by gun violence and this is their way of honoring their lost loved ones. It's not only a transformation of the guns, it's a transformation of everyone involved in this project who has been touched by violent crime."

Eight artists were chosen for the project: Keyvan Shovir of Walnut Creek; John Ton of Petaluma; Tsingwei Moo of San Francisco; Jean Cherie of Vallejo; Karen Lewis of Oakland; Kaytea Petro of San Francisco; Joel Stockdill of San Francisco; and Matthew Mosher of Orlando, Fla. All artists will be present at the event.

"As one of the artists who has been helping promote 2nd Friday Art Walk for the past four years, it has been a goal of our event to partner with other non-profit groups to promote art and culture in Vallejo," said Kathy O'Hare, co-owner of Obtainium Works Art Car Studio in Vallejo. "To that end, we have wanted to partner with non-profit groups that support art and culture in our community and are pleased to make that possible on May 11 with The Robby Poblete Foundation."

The event will take also include a pop-up dinner by League of Chefs at 6:30 p.m. on the 300 block of Virginia Street, followed by a "Healing Ceremony" at 8 p.m., during which survivors and family members of gun violence victims, surrounded by a drum circle, will be given parts of guns to place into a foundry to be melted down.

The exhibit will be at the Temple Art Lofts until June 29 and will be available for private showings for students as a means for educators and law enforcement agents to address the issue of gun violence among youth and young adults. To book a private showing for schools and/or classes, please email [email protected].

Tickets for the pop-up dinner can be purchased at www.leagueofchefs.com.

About The Robby Poblete Foundation

The Robby Poblete Foundation is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation whose mission is to reduce gun violence through its gun buyback program and transform the weapons into instruments of hope and opportunity through its art and vocational programs. www.robbypobletefoundation.org

About The California Wellness Foundation

The Art of Peace unveiling ceremony is funded in part by a grant from The California Wellness Foundation (Cal Wellness). Created in 1992 as a private independent foundation, Cal Wellness' mission is to improve the health of the people of California by making grants for health promotion, wellness education and disease prevention.

About 2nd Friday Art Walk in Vallejo

Vallejo Art Walk is a monthly celebration of the arts, held in the Downtown Arts District of Vallejo, California. The event was founded in February of 2014 by local artist Sean Murdock and a small group of dedicated vendors. It is held on the second Friday of each month rain or shine. www.vallejoartwalk.com

Media Contact:

Pati Navalta, The Robby Poblete Foundation

Kathy O'Hare, Vallejo 2nd Friday Art Walk

[email protected]

Photos:

https://www.prlog.org/12704025

Press release distributed by PRLog

SOURCE The Robby Poblete Foundation

Related Links

https://robbypobletefoundation.org


MIAMI, April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. (NYSE: RCL) has scheduled a conference call for 10:00 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, Thursday, April 26, 2018, to discuss the company's first quarter 2018 financial results. The call will be available on-line at the company's investor relations website, www.rclinvestor.com. To listen to the call by phone, please dial (877) 663-9606 in the US and Canada. International phone calls should be made to (706) 758-4628. There is no passcode or meeting number. A replay of the webcast will be available at the same site for a month following the call.

Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. (NYSE: RCL) is a global cruise vacation company that owns and operates three global brands: Royal Caribbean International, Celebrity Cruises and Azamara Club Cruises. We are a 50% joint venture owner of the German brand TUI Cruises, a 49% shareholder in the Spanish brand Pullmantur and a 36% shareholder in the Chinese brand SkySea Cruises. Together, these brands operate a combined total of 50 ships with an additional twelve on order as of March 31, 2018. They operate diverse itineraries around the world that call on approximately 540 destinations on all seven continents. Additional information can be found on www.royalcaribbean.com, www.celebritycruises.com, www.azamaraclubcruises.com, www.tuicruises.com, www.pullmantur.es, or www.rclinvestor.com.

SOURCE Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd.

Related Links

http://www.royalcaribbean.com


CHARLOTTE, N.C., April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Signicast, a Form Technologies company, has signed an agreement to acquire Consolidated Casting Corporation, an investment casting company in Hutchins, Texas. Consolidated Casting will become the first Signicast location outside of Wisconsin.

"The addition of Consolidated Casting extends our footprint in the United States, expands our services to the oil & gas sector, and provides added capacity for existing and new markets. We are excited to have the Consolidated Casting employees join our division," says Clayton Tychkowsky, CEO Signicast Division.

Consolidated Casting is a great fit for Signicast and the Form Technologies platform as they are equally customer focused and employee driven. Their current facility also provides further opportunity for future Signicast growth and expansion. Additionally, the acquisition gives current Consolidated Casting customers access to the entire Form Technologies platform of precision manufacturers including, Signicast, Dynacast, and OptiMIM. The transition will ensure every customer receives not only the stability of the Form business but knowledgeable insight and expertise during each stage of the design and manufacturing process.

About Signicast

For over 50 years, Signicast has helped leading manufacturers overcome their most pressing commercial challenges. We help them work faster, using state-of-the-art automation to deliver components in a fraction of the time of old-school alternatives. We help them unleash radical innovation with manufacturing experts who know how to push the limits of investment casting in every possible way. And we help them drive greater competitiveness, removing cost at every stage, and unlocking true just-in-time efficiencies. We can do this because we refuse to limit our ambition for our customers' success to current thinking or yesterday's processes.

About Form Technologies, Inc.

In today's cut-throat global markets, manufacturers must deliver more innovative products faster than ever before. They must be able to out-think, out-pace, and out-perform competitors if they are to survive and thrive. And there is no room for failure.

Form Technologies and its portfolio of companies offer a direct route to sustained competitive advantage.

Designing and delivering the highest quality precision components, we give our customers freedom to create the products their customers' value most. We support them with unparalleled expertise from the most knowledgeable professionals in the industry. And, with 26 manufacturing facilities in 16 countries, we have the scale and capacity to deliver virtually any volume, anywhere around the globe.

Media Contact: Taylor Topper, 704-927-2790

SOURCE Form Technologies
CENTENNIAL, Colo., April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- SEMA Construction, Inc. has been awarded a 2018 Top Workplaces honor by The Denver Post. The list is based solely on employee feedback gathered through a third-party survey measuring several aspects of workplace culture, including alignment, execution, and connection, just to name a few.

SEMA Construction, Inc., based in Centennial, Colorado, employs over 200 in Colorado, and 500 nationwide. Specializing in heavy construction and civil infrastructure, SEMA is consistently ranked as one of the nation's top contractors. Since inception, SEMA has completed nearly $4 billion in heavy civil projects, with $2 billion in this region alone. SEMA currently leads Denver's $80 million design-build infrastructure project, 39th Avenue Greenway and Open Channel.

Says Brett Ames, SEMA's Rocky Mountain District President, "Our success as a company is entirely due to our exceptional workforce. Over the past 27 years, SEMA's employees have built and refined our unique culture. We offer what many companies do nota culture of freedom, autonomy, and responsibility. Our highly aligned, but loosely coupled, workforce has found that this culture promotes top performance. Being named a Top Workplace by our own employees is an incredible honor for which we are sincerely grateful."

"Becoming a Top Workplace isn't something organizations can buy," said Doug Claffey, CEO of Energage. "Our research shows organizations that earn the award attract better talent, experience lower turnover, and are better equipped to deliver bottom-line results. Their leaders prioritize and carefully craft a healthy workplace culture that supports employee engagement."

About SEMA Construction, Inc.

Privately-held and founded in 1991, SEMA Construction, Inc. is a full-service contractor regarded for completing high-quality construction projects safely, ahead of schedule, and within budget parameters. With four district offices across the country, SEMA is based in Colorado and operates in the following sectors: Highways & Roadways; Bridges & Structures; Alternate Delivery; Railroads; Dams & Reservoirs; Airports; Earthwork, Environmental Services; Underground Utilities; Water Storage & Treatment; Industrial & Mining; Oil, Gas & Energy; and Precast Concrete.

SOURCE SEMA Construction, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.semaconstruction.com


The Killers Career Vinyl Box will be made available to all retail outlets in an across-the-board 180-gram black vinyl configuration, in addition to a limited-edition 180-gram clear vinyl version. A slip mat featuring the "K" from the band's logo and inspired by the vintage lights of the Las Vegas strip completes both packages.

There could be no better way to start off such an epic collection than with The Killers' three-times-platinum June 2004 debut album, Hot Fuss. Hot Fuss ushered in the band's fresh take on New Wave and post-punk conventions by way of the instant-hit debut single "Mr. Brightside," the wistful request to "Smile Like You Mean It," and the sensual come-on of "Somebody Told Me."

The Killers' second studio album, October 2006's Sam's Town, was produced by Flood (New Order, U2), Alan Moulder (Nine Inch Nails, Foo Fighters), and The Killers, and it features the chart-busting sing-along singles "When You Were Young" and "Read My Mind."

The band's third album of studio-bred material, November 2007's Sawdust, consists of a prime selection of the band's B-sides, covers, remixes, and other rarities, including the band's cover of Joy Division's "Shadowplay," which is always a crowd favorite during their live set and the galvanizing "Tranquilize," the latter of which features the legendary punk icon Lou Reed at his finest.

Meanwhile, November 2008's Day & Age, the band's fourth studio album, was produced by Stuart Price (Madonna, Kylie Minogue, Pet Shop Boys) and The Killers, and it includes the singles "Human" and "Spaceman."

Live From The Royal Albert Hall is a 2LP and exclusive to the Career Vinyl Box. Originally released in November 2009 as a live DVD, this double album captures The Killers at the peak of their live powers, as amassed from two energetic July 2009 gigs at the storied London venue.

September 2012 saw The Killers' put forth their million-selling sixth album, Battle Born, which was named after their own recording studio as well as for a phrase that appears on the Nevada state flag. Battle Born is clearly battle-tested with such indelible hit tracks like the uplifting groove of "Runaways" and the thrilling buildup of "Miss Atomic Bomb."

Finally, The Killers' most recent studio effort, the stirring September 2017 Island release Wonderful Wonderful, saw the band once again debuting right where they belong at the apex of the album charts in both the U.S., the UK and Australia. Wonderful Wonderful also carries the distinction of being the band's fifth consecutive UK chart-topper overall, and it's buttressed by the disco-fied declaration of "The Man" and the urgent plea to "Run For Cover."

The contents of The Career Vinyl Box all goes to show how truly wonderful wonderful The Killers' recording resume has been to date. Have all the songs been written? Given the overall breadth found in the grooves of this fine, fine compendium alongside the promise of what's to come, the answer can only be, "Not if The Killers have anything to say about it."

Preorder The Killers Career Vinyl Box here

thekillersmusic.com

facebook.com/Thekillers

twitter.com/thekillers

instagram.com/thekillers

The Killers HOT FUSS [180-gram vinyl]

1A

1. Jenny Was A Friend Of Mine

2. Mr. Brightside

3. Smile Like You Mean It

4. Somebody Told Me

5. All These Things That I've Done

1B

1. Andy, You're A Star

2. On Top

3. Change Your Mind

4. Believe Me Natalie

5. Midnight Show

6. Everything Will Be Alright

The Killers SAM'S TOWN [180-gram vinyl]

1A

1. Sam's Town

2. Enterlude

3. When You Were Young

4. Bling (Confession Of A King)

5. For Reasons Unknown

6. Read My Mind

1B

1. Uncle Jonny

2. Bones

3. My List

4. This River Is Wild

5. Why Do I Keep Counting?

6. Exitlude

The Killers SAWDUST [double 180-gram vinyl]

1A

1. Tranquilize (feat. Lou Reed)

2. Shadowplay

3. All The Pretty Faces

4. Leave The Bourbon On The Shelf

5. Sweet Talk

1B

1. Under The Gun

2. Where The White Boys Dance

3. Show You How

4. Move Away

2A

1. Glamorous Indie Rock And Roll

2. Who Let You Go?

3. The Ballad of Michael Valentine

4. Ruby, Don't Take Your Love To Town

2B

1. Daddy's Eyes

2. Sam's Town (Live From Abbey Road / 2006)

3. Romeo And Juliet

4. Mr. Brightside (Jacques Lu Cont's Thin White Duke Remix)

The Killers DAY & AGE [180-gram vinyl]

1A

1. Losing Touch

2. Human

3. Spaceman

4. Joy Ride

5. A Dustland Fairytale

1B

1. This Is Your Life

2. I Can't Stay

3. Neon Tiger

4. The World We Live In

5. Goodnight, Travel Well

The Killers LIVE FROM THE ROYAL ALBERT HALL [double 180-gram vinyl]

1A

1. Human

2. This Is Your Life

3. Somebody Told Me

4. The World We Live In

5. I Can't Stay

1B

1. Bling (Confession Of A King)

2. Shadowplay

3. Smile Like You Mean It

4. Losing Touch

2A

1. Spaceman

2. A Dustland Fairytale

3. Sam's Town

4. Read My Mind

2B

1. Mr. Brightside

2. All These Things That I've Done

3. Jenny Was A Friend Of Mine

4. When You Were Young

The Killers BATTLE BORN [double 180-gram vinyl]

1A

1. Flesh And Bone

2. Runaways

3. The Way It Was

1B

1. Here With Me

2. A Matter Of Time

3. Deadlines And Commitments

2A

1. Miss Atomic Bomb

2. The Rising Tide

3. Heart Of A Girl

2B

1. From Here On Out

2. Be Still

3. Battle Born

The Killers WONDERFUL WONDERFUL [180-gram vinyl]

A

1. Wonderful Wonderful

2. The Man

3. Rut

4. Life To Come

5. Run For Cover

B

1. Tyson Vs. Douglas

2. Some Kind Of Love

3. Out Of My Mind

4. The Calling

5. Have All The Songs Been Written?

SOURCE UMe
Steve Danyluk, who spearheaded the legislative meeting with Veterans, is retired from the Marine Corps Reserves. His last position was working wounded issues at Walter Reed and Bethesda. That is where he became very troubled by what he saw.

"I witnessed what I believe is a policy of overmedicating wounded service men and women with opiates and other toxic medications, which led me to establish Warfighter Hemp," said Steve Danyluk, LtCol, USMCR (RET.) and founder Warfighter Hemp. "CBD derived from Industrial Hemp provides much of the relief that these Veterans seek, at a fraction of the cost, without the psychoactive side effects, making it an ideal alternative to the various psychotropic and toxic medications in the VA's dispensary. We welcomed the opportunity to share our CBD stories with legislators."

Danyluk, along with three Veterans from Minnesota and Virginia, met with Congressman Jared Polis (D) Colorado, Congressman Earl Blumenauer (D) Oregon, and representatives from the offices of combat Veteran Congressman Moulton (D) Massachuetts, Congressman Don Young (R) Alaska, and Congressman Tim Walz (D) Minnesota. The group met individually with Congressman Brian Mast (R) Florida, himself a combat Veteran, along with an aide for Congressman Scott Peters (D) Ohio.

The group requested legislators sign a letter to Acting Secretary Robert Wilke, Department of Veterans Affairs, asking him to green light a study into CBD derived from Industrial Hemp.

This comes on the heels of a request by several members of the House Veterans' Affairs Committee requesting that the VA study medical marijuana. The request was rejected. However, on Wednesday, Congressman Lou Correa (D) California joined Ranking Member Walz and Chairman Phil Roe (R) Tennessee in introducing the bipartisan VA Medicinal Cannabis Research Act. The bill clarifies that the VA has the authority to conduct medical cannabis research and requires the Department to report to Congress on how it will use that authority.

The move is prompting positive response. "After taking a sister soldier's advice, I was able to trade out the VA "zombie cocktail" for CBD oil. Not long after that I began to feel an occasional sense of joy for the first time in over two years," said TSgt Christine Clayburg. "Is it too much to ask that the VA at least test this plant that its own warriors are telling them is working?"

To advocate for the study of hemp, contact your Congressman or Congresswoman in the US House of Representative. To learn more, visit WarfighterHemp.com or follow on Facebook.

About Warfighter Hemp

Warfighter Hemp is comprised of veterans and non-veterans who strive to provide an alternative to the medical reality that many veterans face. We develop CBD oil products derived from hemp, a federally legal and non-marijuana plant grown on USDA organic land at our fourth-generation family farm in Eaton, Colorado. We give 50 percent of our profits to other charities that support veteran's independence.

SOURCE Warfighter Hemp

Related Links

https://www.warfighterhemp.com


LOS ANGELES, April 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

FN Media Group Presents USA News Group News Commentary

USA News Group - The future of lithium production within South America's prolific Lithium Triangle is in the balance, as Chile has sent a strong message to China that the nation won't sell off the majority of its lithium stake. Meanwhile, neighbouring Argentina plays catch up by opening itself up more to the global economy in the aftermath of its own far-left hangover.

The result has been heightened by interest in the activities of companies operating in the Lithium Triangle, including Albemarle (NYSE: ALB), Lithium X Energy Corp. (TSX.V: LIX) (OTC: LIXXF), Orocobre Limited (TSE: ORL) (OTC: OROCF), Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile (NYSE: SQM), and A.I.S. Resources Limited (OTC: AISSF) (TSX.V: AIS).

While on its way out the door, the deposed leftist Chilean government left quite a mess for the incoming pro-business elect to deal with-by summoning antitrust authorities to block the possible 32% purchase of Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile (SQM) by Tianqi Lithium Corporation out of China. The deal was worth a reported US$4 billion, and once ratified, would leave Tianqi and SQM controlling 70% of the global lithium market.

However, the resistance in Chile has somewhat led to a shift of focus toward neighbour Argentina, which shares dominion over the continent's renowned Lithium Triangle brine basins. There was considerably less resistance when Lithium X Energy finalized the sale of its Argentinean interest in an all-cash deal worth $265 million to Chinese investment firm Nextview New Energy Lion Hong Kong Ltd.

Earlier in its development phases, fellow Canadian company A.I.S. Resources Limited has been aggressively moving forward on its four main lithium projects in Argentina's Puna region, including its preparation for drilling on the potentially lithium-rich aquifers at its Chiron project that were recently detected earlier this year.

With the lingering uncertainty over how Chile will welcome future foreign investments, there's good reason to believe that companies like Albemarle (NYSE: ALB), Lithium X Energy Corp. (TSX.V: LIX) (OTC: LIXXF), Orocobre Limited (TSE: ORL) (OTC: OROCF), Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile (NYSE: SQM), and A.I.S. Resources Limited (OTC: AISSF) (TSX.V: AIS) will be fielding more calls on Argentina properties than the Chilean neighbors.

LEAD-UP TO A LITHIUM STANDOFF

Just days after Chile's regulatory body in charge of lithium production, Corfo, leveled its recommendation against the Tianqi bid, the Chilean development agency reassured the market by stating that companies from Chine, South Korea, and domestically from within Chile, had been approved to make investments of around $754 million into the country's lithium industry. However, these approvals would've been decided over prior to the March 9th announcement of the Tianqi block attempt.

The Chinese miner Tianqi hasn't taken this decision lightly, as they have met with Chile's top anti-trust prosecutor in an effort sort things out. The 32% stake comes from the forced sale on behalf of Canadian fertilizer company Nutrien, which came from the merger of Agrium and Potash Corp. earlier this year.

More Chinese bids are going to come to this region, as the emerging superpower is expected to raise its electric cars production to 7 million units in 2025, up from 1 million last year. Whether deals to secure lithium supplies will all be in the form of the $4 billion deal in Chile, or if it'll be a smaller deal like the Lithium X deal is still up for grabs.

It's also likely that Chinese buyers will look to up-and-comers such as A.I.S. Resources to hedge their future supplies, given the junior's massive footprint across all four of its Argentinean lithium projects. With plenty of blue sky on each project, a partnership or outright acquisition is not out of the question in the future.

THE A.I.S. ACREAGE ADVANTAGE IN ARGENTINA

Boasting four significant lithium projects in Argentina's Puna region, A.I.S. Resources has secured extremely valuable lithium real estate in the heart of South America's Lithium Triangle. Located on an elevated plateau that lies east of the Andes Mountains, the Puna Region contains one of Argentina's largest known lithium deposits.

Spanning approximately 10,457 hectares, A.I.S.'s four lithium projects are comprised of Chiron 2,732 hectares, Guayatayoc, 2,500 hectares, Guayatayoc III, 2,725 hectares, and Vilama, 2,500 hectares-All of which are surrounded by large, known lithium deposits, operated by prominent lithium majors.

Guayatayoc - the company's flagship - already has a mining permit, where A.I.S. will soon undergo a TEM-Electromagnetic survey. A drilling permit on the property is expected to be issued before the end of April 2018. The company's brain trust knows quite a bit about the property already, having already acquired a 2013 PhD study on the property, bringing with it an exploration value worth approximately USD$3 million, and shaving about three years' worth of work from their timeline.

A.I.S. has compiled a NI 43-101 report on the project, and has completed an environmental impact study. Samples from the Guayatayoc returned Li ranging from 270-900 ppm from brine ponds with aquifer flow, and an added bonus of 100-190ppm brines sitting in the top layers.

The Guayatayoc Salar shares the same tectonic structure that extends to other well-known salars, such as Salinas Grandes, Pozuelos, Pocitos, and Rincon, which hold the most lithium in the Puna Region.

Probably next on the company's priority list would be the Chiron Project, which consists of four concessions in the Salar de Quiron in the Province of Salta, that other nearby explorers have shown to contain significant prospectivity.

Plenty of drilling is already planned, as evidenced by CEO Marc Enright-Morin's public statements that A.I.S. is sufficiently funded to drill both the Guatatayoc and Chiron properties in the coming months. With valuable real estate in close proximity to high-market-cap neighbours that include properties held by Orocobre, SQM, and others companies worth more than $200 million, A.I.S. has the project space, upcoming news flow, and milestones ahead to provide plenty of growth potential looking forward.

Hence A.I.S. is a prime example of the type of company that could entice Chinese lithium buyers either for future purchase agreements of product, a development and production partnership, and/or an outright acquisition in the very near future.

Active miners in the industry also includes:

Albemarle (NYSE: ALB)

Albemarle Corporation globally develops, manufactures, and markets engineered specialty chemicals. The company offers lithium compounds, including lithium carbonate, lithium hydroxide, lithium chloride, and lithium specialties and reagents for applications in lithium batteries, high performance greases, thermoplastic elastomers for car tires, rubber soles and plastic bottles, catalysts for chemical reactions, organic synthesis processes, life science, pharmaceutical, and other markets; cesium products for the chemical and pharmaceutical industries; and zirconium, barium, and titanium products for pyrotechnical applications. Albemarle Corporation was founded in 1994 and is based in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Lithium X Energy Corp. (TSX.V: LIX) (OTC: LIXXF)

Lithium X Energy Corp., is a resource company operating as a lithium explorer and developer in Argentina and the United States. The company owns a 50% interest in the Sal de los Angeles project comprising 8,156 hectares located in Salta Province, Argentina. Lithium X Energy Corp. was founded in 1997 and is headquartered in Vancouver, Canada.

Orocobre Limited (TSE: ORL) (OTC: OROCF)

Orocobre Limited explores for and develops lithium and potash deposits in Argentina. Its flagship project is the Salar de Olaroz lithium project located in north-west province of Jujuy. The company also produces boron minerals and refined chemicals. Orocobre Limited is based in Milton, Australia.

Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile (NYSE: SQM)

Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile S.A., is a producer of potassium nitrate and iodine. The Company produces specialty plant nutrients, iodine derivatives, lithium and its derivatives, potassium chloride, potassium sulfate and certain industrial chemicals. Its segments include specialty plant nutrients, industrial chemicals, iodine and derivatives, lithium and derivatives, potassium, and other products and services Lithium and its derivatives are used in batteries, greases and frits for production of ceramics. Potassium chloride is a commodity fertilizer that is produced and sold by the Company across the world.

For a more in-depth look into AIS you can view the in-depth report at USA News Group:

http://usanewsgroup.com/2018/01/28/the-worlds-lithium-demand-is-growing-everyday-no-signs-of-slowing/

Article Source:

USA News Group

http://usanewsgroup.com

[email protected]

Legal Disclaimer/Disclosure: This piece is an advertorial and has been paid for. This document is not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to purchase or subscribe for any investment. No information in this Report should be construed as individualized investment advice. A licensed financial advisor should be consulted prior to making any investment decision. We make no guarantee, representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness. Expressions of opinion are those of USA News Group only and are subject to change without notice. USA News Group assumes no warranty, liability or guarantee for the current relevance, correctness or completeness of any information provided within this Report and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein or any omission. Furthermore, we assume no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or, in particular, for lost profit, which you may incur as a result of the use and existence of the information, provided within this Report.

DISCLAIMER: USA News Group is Source of all content listed above. FN Media Group, LLC (FNM), is a third party publisher and news dissemination service provider, which disseminates electronic information through multiple online media channels. FNM is NOT affiliated in any manner with USA News Group or any company mentioned herein. The commentary, views and opinions expressed in this release by USA News Group are solely those of USA News Group and are not shared by and do not reflect in any manner the views or opinions of FNM. FNM is not liable for any investment decisions by its readers or subscribers. FNM and its affiliated companies are a news dissemination and financial marketing solutions provider and are NOT a registered broker/dealer/analyst/adviser, holds no investment licenses and may NOT sell, offer to sell or offer to buy any security. FNM was not compensated by any public company mentioned herein to disseminate this press release.

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This release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E 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 as a result of various factors, and other risks identified in a company's annual report on Form 10-K or 10-KSB and other filings made by such company with the Securities and Exchange Commission. You should consider these factors in evaluating the forward-looking statements included herein, and not place undue reliance on such statements. The forward-looking statements in this release are made as of the date hereof and FNM undertakes no obligation to update such statements.



Media Contact Information:

FN Media Group, LLC

e-mail: [email protected]

U.S. Phone: +1(954)345-0611

SOURCE USA News Group
Hemso is acquiring two nursing homes that are under construction in the Turku region. A 12-year lease agreement has been signed with the care company Esperi Care Oy for both of the nursing homes. The investment amount is c. 12 million (SEK 125 million). The two nursing homes are in

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EXPERT OBSERVER

Housing finance data from The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) on first home buyer activity has generally shown that this segment of the market has been tracking at below average levels over recent years.

However, with each state and territory offering some level of incentive to first home buyers including grants and tax concessions, this segment is moving along quite nicely.



Nationally, there were 8,782 housing finance commitments in February 2018. Although the volume of loans was down on levels in late 2017, it was 33.1% higher than the previous February.

Click here to enlarge.

As a share of all owner occupier commitments, first home buyers accounted for 17.9% in February 2018 compared to 13.3% the previous year.



Across the individual states and territories, were seeing several varying trends emerge  all likely due to activity across other buyer types in the market and how recently certain incentives have become available.

Performance around the States: NSW: February 2018 saw 2,246 first home buyer housing finance commitments compared to 1,105 the previous year which is an increase of 103.3%. Since the end of June 2017, stamp duty concessions have become available and over the 8 months there have been 18,400 commitments compared to 10,857 over the previous 8 months. First home buyers now account for 15.1% of owner occupier finance commitments up from 7.5% a year earlier. The 15.1% is the greatest share 3,000 since October 2012.

Click here to enlarge.

Vic: 2,619 finance commitments to first home buyers in February 2018. The number of commitments was 38.6% higher than a year earlier. Vic also saw stamp duty exemptions go live on July 1 last year. From the end of June there have been 23,996 first home buyer commitments compared to 17,522 over the previous 8 months. First home buyers accounted for 18.3% of commitments compared to 13.9% a year earlier.

Click here to enlarge.

Qld: Over the month there were 1,839 first home buyer housing finance commitments. The number of commitments was only marginally higher from a year ago (+3.8%). First home buyers have been much more active over recent years than in NSW and Vic although, it should be noted investors have been much less active in the Qld market. First home buyers accounted for 19.3% of the market in February 2018 compared to 17.6% a year earlier.

Click here to enlarge.

SA: In February 2018 there were 443 first home buyer housing finance commitments. Although the number was lower than those recorded late last year, it was 17.8% higher than the previous February. Despite house values being the lowest of any mainland capital city, SA has the lowest share of first home buyer activity of any state or territory with 13.0% of owner occupier commitments going to first home buyers, a year ago they accounted for a 10.5% share so they have risen a little. Click here to enlarge.

WA: There were 1,185 first home buyer finance commitments in February 2018 which was -0.1% fewer than the volume in FHB No. (LHS) February 2017. WA is the only state or territory in which there were fewer commitments to first home buyers than a year ago. Despite the fall in volumes, first home buyers account for 25.0% of all owner occupier housing finance commitments compared to 22.2% a year ago. Click here to enlarge. Tas: Over the month of February 2017 there were 137 first home buyer housing finance commitments which was 2.2% higher than the previous February. As a share of all owner occupier housing finance commitments, first home buyers account for 13.9%, up marginally from 13.8% a year ago. A common commentary is that a lot of younger people are moving to TAS to buy a home because they cant afford one on the mainland. Although the number of first home buyers rose over the year, they remain very low which suggests, at least at this stage, first home buyers in TAS are not particularly active.

Click here to enlarge.
Sydney's iconic The Basement, the oldest jazz and blues club in Australia, has been taken over by musical entrepreneur and property developer Albert Dadon.

Dadon, a leading jazz guitarist himself, plans to re-open the club as soon as possible after the doors were closed last month.

It's not Dadons first foray into jazz club ownership. He has been somewhat of a pioneer of keeping Australia's jazz music scene alive over the past two decades.

He rescued the Melbourne International Jazz Festival when its funding was cut.

In eight years Dadon increased its visitors from 5,000 to 200,000 before stepping down in 2009.

He owns the Jazz Corner Hotel on Williams Street in the Melbourne CBD.

Recently he opened Bird's Basement below, a sister venue of Manhattan's Birdland.

Speaking on the acquisition, Dadon said he is examining possible Sydney CBD locations for the club. He is appealing to the public and others to suggest a suitable venue.
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In an effort to combat harassment in the creative fields, PEN America has published, on its website, an Online Harassment Field Manual. The resource is intended, the nonprofit said, to "equip and empower writers, journalists, and all those active online with practical tools and tactics to defend against hateful speech and trolling." It launched this morning in New York as part of the PEN World Voices Festival.

"Online harassment poses a clear threat to free expression, as evidenced by the results of our survey, said PEN CEO Suzanne Nossel. As an organization of and for writers, PEN America is especially disturbed by the ways in which online harassment affects their work. Journalists and writers whose web presence is a professional imperative can't be left defenseless in the face of rampant digital intimidation, provocation, and vitriol when they dare to stick their heads above the parapet.

Among the resources included in the manual are:

First-hand accounts of online harassment and their aftermath

Step-by-step guides for enhancing cybersecurity and preventing doxing

An online harassment glossary with proposed responses

Ideas for leveraging online writing communities to combat online harassment

Tips for combating hate speech with counterspeech

Guidelines for allies and witnesses interested in intervening in online harassment

Best practices for employers of writers and journalists to improve institutional support during episodes of online abuse

Information about online harassment and the law

The manual also offers recommendations directed to employers, tech companies, and law enforcement, in addition to its content geared toward writers. The manual is available here.
How should we react to news reports that China challenged Australian warships in the course of transiting the South China Sea, on their way from Subic Bay in the Philippines to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam?

Without knowing where the challenge occurred (was it inside 12 nautical miles of a Chinese-occupied feature, or not?) or what form it took (a verbal challenge by radio, or something more physical in nature?), its hard to say how significant this episode really is.

Chinas military has previously challenged Indian Navy vessels and Australian aircraft in the South China Sea without any indication that they were operating within 12 nautical miles of rocks or islands. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbulls response when asked about the reports this morning was simply to assert Australias perfect right to operate in the South China Sea.

Was this the much-anticipated will-they, wont-they Australian FONOP in the South China Sea? Probably not. Canberras standard refrain is that it doesnt do FONOPs, at least not in the way the U.S. Navy does.

A navigational course from Subic Bay to Ho Chi Minh City would have taken the Australian warships conveniently close to the disputed Spratly Islands, the scene of Chinas island-building efforts and US Navy FONOPs in recent years. But most likely this was a routine transit conducted in the normal operational mode.

Clearly, someone in Australias defence and security establishment wanted the challenge to be made public. That is significant in itself, suggesting a desire to publicise Australias naval presence in a strategically important and contested body of water, and Chinas apparent intention to impede legal passage there.

The news reports on Friday also underline a more basic point about the recent revival of Australias naval presence in Southeast Asia.

Multi-ship Australian naval deployments used to be a routine occurrence in the region. Small naval contingents previously visited Vietnam, as far back as 1999 and again in 2001. But in recent years the combined demands of border security and Middle East coalition deployments have sapped the Royal Australian Navys resources for such discretionary presence activities.

That is changing. Last years Indo-Pacific Endeavour exercise saw an extended Task Groupsized deployment across the broader region, including engagements with several Southeast Asian countries. The current three-ship group in the South China Sea, composed of two ANZAC frigates and an oiler, demonstrates that Australia has the capacity to maintain a multi-ship presence in Southeast Asia beyond the annual showpiece deployment.

Moreover, since November 2017, Australia has forward deployed two Armidale-class patrol vessels, taking part in joint counterterrorism patrols with the Philippine Navy in the Sulu Sea. That adds up to an impressive forward presence for a modest-sized navy such as Australias.

But maintaining legal operational access to the South China Sea will likely be challenged increasingly as Chinas military presence there thickens.

Dr. Euan Graham is Director, International Security Program at the Lowy Institute.

This article appeared originally at Lowy Institute's the interpreter.
In early 2016, I contributed to an Armament Research Services (ARES) report on the use of commercially available drones by non-state actors in contemporary conflicts, including in Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine. We predicted that the use of commercial drones, which up until that point had been used for reconnaissance purposes predominantly, would soon be regularly weaponised.

As recent events in Syria have shown, weaponised commercial drones are now a regular feature in a range of conflicts, notably involving non-state actors.

Drone use by non-state actors in the Middle East is not a new phenomenon. Libyan rebels spent more than US$100,000 buying a drone in 2011 to aid their fight against forces loyal to Gaddafi. Hezbollah has been operating Iranian-built drones against Israel for years, but these have been predominantly military-grade models and thus fairly sophisticated.

Things started to change in Syria and Iraq in 2014 when organisations such as ISIS began regularly using relatively cheap commercial drones. Since then there have been hundreds of reported uses of drones by ISIS and other armed non-state actors in Iraq and Syria.

In addition to direct military uses, ISIS in Syria has used drones to make professional-looking propaganda videos  a significant contrast to the chaotic and grainy images of mass executions and cheering jihadists of early ISIS videos.

Whats more, these commercial drones can easily have their range boosted, a fact not lost on ISISs online supporters, with at least one DIY manual on how to boost a drones capabilities appearing on a jihadist website.

A more spectacular use of commercial drones was seen on 5 January when a Syrian Islamist group sent a swarm of 13 home-made drones to attack Russian airbases. The Russian Ministry of Defence claimed that all were shot down with a mixture of electronic and kinetic countermeasures.

The Houthis in Yemen have also made effective use of drones in their fight against government forces and the Saudi-led coalition. In 2017, locally built kamikaze drones were reportedly used to target radar systems of Emirati Patriot missile batteries, the idea being to knock them out as a precursor to conventional missile attacks.

The Houthis have struck targets inside and outside Yemen with ballistic missiles, and US-supplied Patriot missile batteries are the primary defence against these attacks. The recent Houthi launch of seven missiles into Saudi Arabia has already highlighted weaknesses in the Patriot systems; dealing with tandem drone attacks is an added challenge operators can hardly afford.

Drones have not only appeared in the air. Houthi forces in Yemen have also conducted attacks on coastal shipping using remotely controlled IED drone boats. The most significant example was an attack on a Saudi frigate on 30 January.

The 5 January swarm attack in Syria is the most obvious example of how non-state actors, using drones that probably cost only a couple of thousand dollars to build, are pitted against some of the worlds most expensive and sophisticated weaponry. Herein lies the challenge for advanced militaries, such as Australia.

Current countermeasures struggle to deal with the threat posed by large numbers of cheap drones, and tend to be extremely expensive by comparison. The US military has recognised that it is impractical to rely on state-of-the-art multimillion-dollar aircraft and munitions to knock a drone worth $1000 out of the sky.

The lesson hasnt been lost on senior Australian military figures. In January, Australias Lieutenant General Angus Campbell warned of the risk posed by drones in the hands of non-state actors.

Increasingly, jamming is seen as the most effective countermeasure against small commercial drones. However, drones are becoming more and more autonomous, nullifying the ability of jammers to take them down. Kinetic solutions are the usual recourse, but small drones are extremely tough or expensive to take out. As a result, a number of different countermeasures are being explored, ranging from lasers to trained eagles, although as yet it seems none of these solutions is easy, cheap, or completely effective.

It can be argued that the now regular appearance of cheap, often commercially purchased drones in the hands of non-state actors marks a shift in modern asymmetric warfare. Non-state groups today have access to the kind of operational awareness previously held only by state militaries.

This has serious policy implications for Western powers, such as Australia, who seek to limit the capabilities of militant organisations on the ground, as well as the domestic terrorism threat that they could pose.

To ensure that drones they dont fall easily into the hands of organisations such as ISIS, continued investment in new technologies to counter them will be needed, and the market for dual-use technologies will likely require more stringent regulation by national and international legal regimes.

Alexander Harper is an analyst for the Sanaa Center for Strategic Studies. He is currently based in Beirut, Lebanon, where he is completing his Masters in Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut.

This article appeared originally at Lowy Institute's the interpreter.
Russias shipbuilding program for 20112020, under which the country plans to build over 100 new warships (Military Paritet, February 7, 2012), is reportedly causing a very bad feeling among some Russian naval experts (Topwar.ru, August 10, 2016). They describe the current status of the Russian Navy as a ceremonial fleet and have suggested that one third of the shipbuilding program has resulted in little more than a donut hole (Nezavisimoe Voennoe Obozrenie, December 22, 2017; March 3, 2018). The ongoing production difficulties appear linked to insufficient naval shipbuilding capacity and a problematic manufacturing process.

The countrys largest shipbuilding complex is the more-than-300-hectare Sevmash Production Association, located in Severodvinsk, which features 100,000 square meters worth of covered slipways (Flotprom.ru, accessed April 17). The yard has already transferred to the navy four early-model Borei-class nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines (Regnum, March 18). Additionally, 11 fourth-generation improved nuclear submarinesthe pride of the Russian nuclear fleetare currently under construction (five Borei-A-class and six Yasen-M-class subs). However, only two are expected to be commissioned before the end of 2020. Sevmash is presently undergoing reconstruction to modernize its obsolete facilities and address chronic personnel shortages as well as labor discipline violations (Izvestia, March 20, 2018; Flotprom.ru, November 18, 2015).

Four more shipbuilding complexes are based in St. Petersburg. The most capable is arguably the Admiralty Shipyards, which has already built six improved Kilo-class conventional submarines between 2010 and 2016; two more are planned to be commissioned by 2020. A couple modestly capable Lada-class diesel-electric submarines have been under construction since 2005, and both are planned to be commissioned by 2020 (Rossiyskaya Gazeta, March 21, 2018). The shipyard is also building an Ivan Papaninclass Arctic-zone patrol ship, but it will not be ready earlier than 20232024, because of ongoing financing problems (RIA Novosti, March 21). The enterprises profits in 2017 decreased by 40 percent compared to 2016 due to modernization efforts.

Another St. Petersburg naval shipyard, the Severnaya Verf, is continuing to fulfill defense contracts for two multi-purpose ocean-going Admiral Gorshkovclass frigates. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has determined that these frigates will form the backbone of Russias blue-water fleet (see EDM, May 12, 2017). But twelve years after construction began on the original Admiral Gorshkov (which lends its name to the ship class), this frigate has yet to be commissioned because of the absence of a domestic-made analog to the gas turbines Russia used to purchase from Ukraine. Additionally the Polyment-Redut air-defense complex, designed to be outfitted on the vessel, continues to exhibit technical problems (RIA Novosti, February 27). The Severnaya Verf shipyard is also building five Steregushchiy-class missile corvettes; in total, six to eight such ships are supposed to enter service by 2020.

The other two major shipbuilding facilities on the Neva River, in St. Petersburg, are the Sredne-Nevsky Shipyard and the JSC Leningrad Shipyard Pella. The first specializes in producing Georgie Kurbatovclass minesweepers. The initial of these has already been handed over to the Navy, while the second was laid down in 2017 and is planned to be commissioned before the end of 2020 (Snsz.ru, accessed April 18). The shipyard has been working on slip reconstruction since 2016. The Leningrad Shipyard Pella builds 23-ton Raptor-class fast boats. According to the defense order, twelve such boats have already been commissioned (RIA Novosti, October 10, 2017), and two more are planned to be built in 2018 (Topwar.ru, December 13, 2017). The shipyard has also signed a contract to build four Karakurt-class small missile ships, but apparently they will not be ready before the end of 2020 (TASS, November 24, 2017).

OJSC Zelenodolsky Plant named after A. M. Gorky (located in Tatarstan Republic) builds small Buyan-M-class missile ships and Nikolay Sypyaginclass patrol ships. Five Buyan-Ms have already been built, and six more are currently under construction (Zdship.ru, February 23), including two or three that will likely be transferred to the navy by 2020. Six patrol ships, destined for the Black Sea Fleet, are in the process of being built; a couple are scheduled to be commissioned by 2020 (Topwar.ru, March 27). Five small Karakurt-class missile ships are also supposed to be constructed by this shipyard, and at least a pair may be commissioned before the end of 2020 (Lenta, June 29, 2017).

Two more shipyards, Amur Shipyard (Komsomolsk-on-Amur) and Baltic Shipyard Yantar (Kaliningrad), appear to be less overburdened by orders. The Amur Shipyard has nine docks inside closed heated slipways, but the facility needs modernization. Only three Steregushchiy-class missile corvette hulls were laid there, and the building process met with serious lags (Izvestia, February 2, 2018). Three Karakurt-class missile ships are also under construction in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, but problems with financing and engine procurement call into question whether these ships will be ready by 2020 (Flotprom.ru, February 6). The Yantar Shipyard has been building a large amphibious Ivan Grenclass vessel since 2004. This ship has yet to be commissioned due to ongoing issues with the shipbuilding process and financing (TASS, April 4). In 2011, the Yantar also began construction of six Krivak Vclass frigates. Three have already been commissioned, but construction of the next three was frozen because of Ukrainian gas turbine sanctions. Reportedly, at least of two of the incomplete frigates will be sold to India (Interfax, February 28).

Moscow is also trying to build new naval vessels at shipyards in illegally annexed Crimea. Three Karakurt-class corvettes have already been laid down in the More shipyard (TASS, December 19, 2017). Several of these vessels are planned to be built at the Zaliv shipyard as well. But likely, those corvettes will not be commissioned before the end of 2020.

Russias naval construction program continues to suffer from multiple problems, including the shortage or obsolesce of Russian shipbuilding facilities, financial and management problems, as well as technological flaws and lack of access to foreign componentsnotably Ukrainian-made engines. As a result, a serious gap exists between planned and expected warships. Up to 2020, Russia is likely to operate 5 out of 20 new nuclear submarines, 9 of 20 frigates, 4 of 14 small missile ships, 1618 out of 41 corvettes and patrol ships, 1 of 6 amphibious ships, 2 minesweepers, and 14 out of 14 fast boats. Such limited numbers of new ocean-going vessels, problems with modernizing older ships (Vz.ru, February 26, 2018), along with reductions to military expenditures (Wek.ru, March 27) may compel Moscow to postpone its blue-water ambitions. Nonetheless, several hundred more long-range cruise and anti-ship missiles deployed to its forthcoming small naval platforms will still likely increase security threats to littoral countries within Russias neighborhood.

Ihor Kabanenko is a retired admiral with the Ukrainian Navy. From 1983 to 1990, he served in the Soviet Navy in various positions up to Commander of the ship and Chief of Staff of Missile Ships Division. Since 1993, he served in the Ukrainian Armed Forces. He was appointed to the positions of Chief of Operations and Chief of Staff of the Ukrainian Navy, the Military Representative of Ukraine to NATO, Chief of Operations of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and the First Deputy Chief of Defence. He retired in 2013, with the rank of Admiral.

This article appeared originally at The Jamestown Foundation's Eurasia Daily Monitor.
As the likelihood that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia seems headed toward zero, the likelihood of proof of a different form of collusion seems headed upward toward certainty.

The Russia collusion charge had some initial credibility because of businessman Donald Trump's dealings in Russia and candidate Trump's off-putting praise of Vladimir Putin.

It was fueled by breathless media coverage of such trivial events as Jeff Sessions' conversation with the Russian ambassador at a Washington reception -- and, of course, by the appointment of former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel. But Mueller's prosecutions of Trump campaign operatives were for misdeeds long before the campaign, and his indictment of 13 Russians specified that no American was a "knowing participant" in their work.

Now there's talk that Mueller is winding up his investigation. It seems unlikely that whatever he reports will fulfill the daydreams so many liberals have of making Trump go the way of Richard Nixon.

Meanwhile, the evidence builds of collusion by Obama administration law enforcement and intelligence personnel in trying to elect Hillary Clinton and defeat and delegitimize Trump in and after the 2016 election.

The investigation of Clinton's illegal email system was conducted with kid gloves. FBI Director James Comey accepted Attorney General Loretta Lynch's order to call it a "matter" rather than an "investigation." Clinton aides were allowed to keep her emails and destroy 30,000 of them, plus cellphones. They were not subject to grand jury subpoenas, and a potential co-defendant was allowed to claim attorney-client privilege.

On June 27, 2016, Lynch clandestinely met with Bill Clinton on his plane at the Phoenix airport -- a meeting that became known only thanks to an alert local TV reporter. Lynch supposedly left the decision on prosecution to Comey, who on July 5 announced publicly that Clinton had been "extremely careless" but lacked intent to violate the law, even though the statute punishes such violations whether they are intentional or not.

Contrast that with the collusion of Obama officials with the Clinton campaign-financed Christophe Steele/Fusion GPS dossier alleging Trump ties with Russians. Comey and the Justice Department used it, without divulging who paid for it, to get a FISA warrant to surveil former Trump campaign operative Carter Page's future and past communications -- the "wiretap" Trump was derided for mentioning.

Similarly, when Comey informed Trump in January 2017 of the contents of the then-unpublished Steele dossier, he didn't reveal that the Clinton campaign had paid for it. Asked on his iatrogenic book tour why not, he blandly said he didn't know. And maybe he doesn't actually realize he was employing J. Edgar Hoover-like tactics to keep his job. Maybe.

In any case, after he was fired, he immediately sent four of his internal memos, at least one of them classified, to a law professor friend to leak them to the press, with the intent of getting a special counsel appointed -- who turned out to be his longtime friend and ally Robert Mueller. Collusion, anyone?

Collusion can get complicated and sometimes fails to produce the intended results. Comey's deputy FBI director, Andrew McCabe, reportedly kept to himself for weeks the discovery that Clinton emails had been transmitted over the home computer of her aide Huma Abedin's then-husband, the disgraced ex-Rep. Anthony Weiner. After Comey learned of this, he made his Oct. 28 announcement that the Clinton email investigation was being reopened.

Comey and McCabe have produced contradictory accounts of events, and Comey's public praise of McCabe contrasts with his referral of McCabe to Justice's inspector general, who found him guilty of "lack of candor" -- a fireable offense for which he was indeed fired. Partners in collusion sometimes fall out.

Longtime Clinton friend Lanny Davis charges that Comey's statement was responsible for Clinton's defeat, and Comey, on his book tour, admitted that he may have made it only because he assumed Clinton would win.

Davis may be right, though no one can prove it. But one could also say that the Democratic Party lost the presidency because it nominated a candidate under investigation for committing a felony. And it seems as certain as these things can be that if Hillary Clinton had followed the law and regulations, there would be today no President Trump, no Attorney General Sessions, no EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, no Justice Neil Gorsuch.

The blame ultimately belongs to Barack Obama, who knew of Clinton's private email system and who could have ordered her to follow the law. But that's one bit of collusion that didn't occur.

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Ordinarily, a GOP governor filing a restraining order against his state's Republican attorney general, who happens to be running for one of the most competitive U.S. Senate seats in the country, would be politically devastating for the candidate.

In Missouri, however, Republicans hope it will help the challengers campaign to defeat Sen. Claire McCaskill.

Earlier this week, state Attorney General Josh Hawley announced his office found evidence of potential criminal wrongdoing by Eric Greitens, alleging the governor stole electronic property by using the donor list from his veterans charity for his own campaign fundraising. Greitens then sought a court order to prohibit Hawley from investigating him.

And that's the least of both men's worries. The case is separate from the real blockbuster scandal involving Greitens, who was indicted in February on an invasion-of-privacy charge amid allegations he took semi-nude photos of a woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair to be used for blackmail. Last week, a GOP-lead Missouri House committee investigating Greitens released a report with disturbing details of the allegations against him, including violent and unwanted sexual assault.

Nearly every Republican public official in the state, including Hawley, has called on the first-term governor to resign, and on Thursday a judge decided to proceed with the felony invasion-of-privacy charge against him. But the defendant is defiant, refusing to step down and calling the case "a political witch hunt." Greitens trial is scheduled to start May 14, and state lawmakers are evaluating whether to move forward with impeachment, which could drag on for the next couple of months.

The ordeal threatens to cast a long shadow over Republicans running for office in Missouri, but party operatives hope Hawley can use his position as attorney general to flip the script.

"I think you have to concede that when the governor of your own party is so focused on saving his own political skin that he's attacking anyone in reach is not an ideal situation, but there are signs Josh is going to take that situation and turn it into a positive," says Missouri GOP strategist Gregg Keller. "To some extent, it's playing into Josh's hand politically, because when you're the attorney general, you can stand behind the podium with the seal of the state of Missouri and explain you're going after corruption and malfeasance."

Democrats say Hawley is acting out of political expediency, arguing he has had months to move against Greitens. They point to Hawley previously dropping an investigation into the governors use of a messaging app that would allow his campaign to skirt state disclosure laws (the AG argued there was no wrongdoing). "This guy campaigned as an outsider cleaning up corruption, and Jefferson City is corrupt as ever," says Chris Hayden, spokesman for the Senate Majority PAC, a Democratic group that has run over $1 million in on-air advertising trying to connect Hawley to the scandal.

"The evidence in this case has been publicly available since October 2016  what excuse could Josh Hawley possibly have for failing to pursue an investigation and allowing this evidence to languish for over a year?" said McCaskill campaign spokeswoman Meira Bernstein.

The notion that the Missouri scandal could jeopardize the GOP's chances of holding its slim majority in the Senate is particularly gut-wrenching for the party, which has spent the past several years meticulously trying to avoid such self-inflicted wounds.

Indeed, Hawley is the embodiment of lessons learned the hard way by Republicans in previous elections. After GOP Senate candidate Todd Akin shot himself in the foot with controversial comments about abortion and lost a winnable 2012 race to McCaskill, Republicans underwent a self-analysis and re-education program to avoid similar mistakes. With another chance to unseat McCaskill this year in a state Donald Trump won by 19 percentage points, Republicans cleared the primary field by securing their top recruit in Hawley, a 38-year-old Yale and Stanford graduate who clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. McCaskill is considered among the most vulnerable Democrats in the country, even in a favorable year for her party. But the Greitens scandal could once again alter the odds.

"It's an unmitigated disaster," says one longtime Republican operative in the state. "Every day the governor is there is a bad day for the Josh Hawley campaign. ... Every day there's a conversation, that this thing sits out there, is another day Claire is able to work on getting Republican-leaning women in St. Louis and Jackson Counties."

"This year's Todd Akin is Governor Greitens," the operative added, arguing that women will decide who will be the next senator from Missouri.

But the specter of Akin could be a motivator, some Republicans argue. "Base Republicans are thinking, we're not going to let this race get away from us again," says Missouri GOP strategist James Harris. "It is probably a distraction for fundraising, and there are some Republicans who are probably a little demoralized or worried about what's going on. ... But have no doubt, the resources will be there for Josh."

Hawley's "political liability in the Greitens' debacle is limited by the sheer amount of money he and his affiliates are going to be able to use to define him and his opponent," says Keller. "He's going to have somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 million to spend defining him, defining the race, and defining McCaskill."

But so far, the Republican candidate's war chest pales in comparison to the incumbents. Hawley, who is the only Senate candidate so far that Trump has fundraised for, brought in $1.5 million this past quarter, on par with or exceeding past top recruits. But McCaskill raised $3.9 last quarter, and has over $11 million on hand while her opponent only has $2 million.

And though Trump overwhelmingly won the Show Me State, and McCaskill has shown little independence from the national Democratic Party, incumbent Republican Sen. Roy Blunt won re-election in 2016 by just one point over Jason Kander. "If Republican enthusiasm is what we've seen it to be nationally, then throw in fighting between the governor and the candidate, it's a lot more difficult for them," says Hayden, who also worked for Kander's campaign.

While most elected officials have denounced Greitens, Republicans acknowledge there is still support for the former Navy SEAL among base voters who could be turned off from Hawley's action against him. "Any time you have Republicans fighting Republicans, it's just bad for politics," says former Missouri GOP Chairman John Hancock. But the impact that will have come November is unclear.

"The governor is a divisive factor for Missouri Republicans because everybody is forced to take a side, Hancock says. If it persists for months and months, it will have a real and negative impact on our ability to win the Senate race. But if the governor goes away  either on his own or through impeachment -- I don't think this will have much effect at all."
Nikki Haleys surprising remonstrance, issued this week from under the bus, earned huzzahs from both parties and showed the world what successfully surviving service in the administration of President Trump looks like. It also showed the lady can throw some damn good shade.

After she appeared last Sunday on CBS Face the Nation and announced there would be new sanctions on Russia to follow recent airstrikes in Syria, the White House said the ambassador was mistaken. Larry Kudlow blamed it on momentary confusion, to which Haley responded: With all due respect, I dont get confused. Kudlow folded immediately and apologized. And the man of too many words used none -- a rare occasion when Trump himself held back.

Haley is an unlikely heroine in the ever unfolding drama that is the presidency of Donald Trump. She was an outspoken opponent of Trump during the 2016 campaign, and is the daughter of Sikh immigrants who smashed glass ceilings to become South Carolinas first female governor, the nations first ever Sikh governor and the second ever Indian-descent governor. She has not stooped to the sycophancy most of her colleagues have, and without foreign policy chops has studied and worked her way to success in one of the highest-profile positions in U.S. government.

Out of the gate Haley made it clear she would confront Russian aggression, and considered its interference in the 2016 election an attack on the United States. And when her boss and other Republicans were backing Alabama Judge Roy Moores Senate candidacy and the #MeToo scandals were consuming the news, she dared to go on television to answer the obvious question about her views on sexual misconduct, saying the women should be heard.

But Haley reportedly speaks frequently with the president, listening and acknowledging, working in his some of his preferred rhetoric to official declarations. She is as careful as Trump is chaotic, working hard to be the official who avoids getting tripped up. So she didnt take the effort to scapegoat her lightly. Indeed, the truth was not at all confusing -- yet officials including Kudlow thought they could cover for the president by blaming his U.N. ambassador for screwing up a critical national security matter. According to the New York Times, Trump began screaming at the television set Sunday morning while watching Haley, certain he hadnt agreed to something he in fact had. The report said discord stems not just from competing views on Russia but from larger questions of political ambition, jealousy, resentment and loyalty. He has longed disagreed with Haleys hawkish stance against the Putin government even though, as some recent policy choices illustrate, he has been convinced at times to be tougher on Russia.

But following his outburst Sunday, word was transmitted to Russian officials there would be no sanctions, CNN and other outlets reported. The following day, some White House officials said Haley erred in announcing them because they would be delayed as a result of the Treasury Department having yet to prepare legislation for them.

Thats strange, since they were included in talking points for surrogates released by the White House on Saturday night, described as punishment for Moscows ongoing support for the Assad regime, which has enabled the regimes atrocities against the Syrian people.

Kudlow was shrewd to fall over backwards with his apology -- calling Haley directly and conceding publicly, I was wrong to say that -- totally wrong. The national economic adviser, in his second week on the job, had clearly been brought up to speed on the value of Haleys currency. Even Trump, who enjoys weighing in on personnel dust-ups on Twitter -- to deny chaos, declare the insulted and mistreated employee is doing a great job despite reports theyre days from being fired -- was rendered tweet-less.

Haley is one of only two high-level Trump officials who remain untarnished -- Defense Secretary James Mattis is the other. There are two groups of those thus far tainted: those who turned out to be everything the president promised not to hire and those who have allowed their integrity to be sullied by Trump himself. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt, and former Secretary for Veterans Affairs David Shulkin are in the first category. If you throw in alleged wife beaters, theres Rob Porter too.

In the second, more distressing category are Chief of Staff John Kelly, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, former National Economic Adviser Gary Cohn and Vice President Mike Pence. Others were scattered along the way, spokespeople both current and departed who have lied for Trump.

There is also the case of Dina Powell, the deputy national security adviser who seemed to serve quietly and effectively and to leave quietly and effectively in December. Silence is a theme here. To be sure, Mattis has retained both the trust of the president as well as the respect of most everyone else inside and outside of the administration. But he has done so by staying mute. He will occasionally give answers to some defense-related questions but works hard to avoid interviews asking too much.

Haley, however, has been more than willing to take on both the tough questions and the incredibly awkward ones. Throughout her tenure she has maintained and burnished a reputation which she clearly intends to preserve for the future. She was acutely aware of how damaging this weeks incident is to her standing with foreign leaders who are perpetually left questioning the shelf life of each and every statement coming from the Trump administration. Both Tillerson and McMaster suffered tongue lashings on Twitter from the commander-in-chief. Fresh from strikes in Syria, and approaching a summit between the U.S. president and the leader of North Korea, Haley is being relied upon as secretary of state when there is no one officially on the job.

Its significant that several Republicans were eager to jump to her defense once Haley spoke out, since Trump-inflicted personnel kerfuffles are a topic GOP lawmakers work hard to dodge. Shes been a very forceful advocate and I would hope the administration really values that. She stood up for herself admirably, so helpfully that will end the story there, Sen. Ron Johnson said.

Sen. John Thune, third in line in Senate leadership, said, It doesn't help her credibility if, whenever she gets out there and is articulating the administration and the United States position, to have somebody undercut them.

Tillerson and McMaster would have loved more defenders when they were humiliated on the world stage by their boss.

Haley made sure to her message was clear: #NotMeToo.
A recent blog post by a British Columbia naturopath is raising questions from health professionals about the practice of naturopathy, and the use of homeopathic remedies. Anke Zimmerman, a Victoria-based naturopath, wrote a blog post on how she treated a child's behavioural problems with a remedy made from a rabid dog's saliva.
Some of the most exciting discoveries in evolutionary biology in recent years have shown how humans have adapted to extreme conditions, such as living at high altitude. Now, researchers have found that Indonesia's Bajau people, who for generations have spent the majority of their days diving and hunting underwater, also have genetic adaptations for their unusual lifestyle.
Two days before the Allied forces declared victory over Nazi Germany at the end of World War II, a high-tech German submarine set out from Denmark on a mysterious mission.

The sub was a brand-new Type XXI U-boat, hailed as the most advanced Nazi submarine of its time. It was deadly quiet, superfast and allegedly capable of traveling from Europe to South America without having to surface. Still, for all its cutting-edge technology, the sub could not save itself from being blasted to the seafloor by a British aerial assault on May 6, 1945. [Images: Missing Nazi Diary Surfaces]

The boat, named U-3523, lay undetected at the bottom of the North Sea for 73 years. This week, researchers at the Sea War Museum Jutland in Denmark finally found the U-boat's wreckage, half-buried and jabbing diagonally from the seabed like a cannon from a turret.

Researchers at the museum are in the midst of doing an extensive scan of the seabed around the North Sea and the Skagerrak Strait (which flows between Denmark and Norway) and have documented more than 450 wrecks so far, according to a statement from the museum. Twelve of these wrecks so far have been submarines (nine of which were German-made, and three of which were British), but the newfound U-3523 represents an especially rare discovery, museum officials said.

"This was the most modern submarine the Germans built during the [Second World War]," Gert Normann Andersen, director of the Sea War Museum Jutland, told the Danish newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad in an interview (translated from Danish). "Only two of the 118 that were ordered actually entered service."

Researchers with the museum found the half-buried wreckage of U-3523 about 10 nautical miles north of Skagen, the northernmost city in Denmark. The bow of the 250-foot-long (76 meters) submarine stabbed into the seafloor some 400 feet (120 m) below the water's surface, slanting upward with the boat's stern floating 65 feet (20 m) above the bottom of the sea.

According to the museum, the boat embarked from Denmark with 58 crewmembers, all of whom perished in the bombing. Their mission remains unknown, but museum researchers suspect that the boat was likely fleeing for safety days after German forces surrendered in Denmark, the Netherlands and northern Germany. Among the vessel's new technology was a battery system that could allow it to remain submerged for several days at a time, making it a perfect getaway vessel, Andersen said.

Following the end of World War II, rumors abounded that high-ranking Nazi officers (including Hitler himself) had escaped to South America on similar long-range submarines. Many of the original 118 Type XXI submarines were captured and dismantled after the end of the war, but countless others still remain missing.

Originally published on Live Science.
I am not a globalist because I am some kind of citizen of the world. On the contrary, I am a globalist because I am a proud American -- that is, a person with Irish, English and German roots, born in Pennsylvania, raised in Massachusetts, who came of age in Texas. I am a globalist because a career as a Foreign Service officer representing the United States in Africa, Europe, and Latin America showed me firsthand the power of our countrys positive-sum vision of the world.

As a proud globalist and a proud American, I am perplexed and dismayed to see so many Americans starting to think of the two as mutually exclusive. As though globalization were a threat to our American identity, a game we cant win.

This is particularly ironic because, in its contemporary form, globalizations roots are to be found in American diplomacy in the years after the Second World War. But the big bang of globalization can actually be dated quite specifically: 9:30 p.m. Central European Time on Thursday, November 9, 1989.

At that moment, the East German government declared that East Germans were free.

At that moment, the Berlin Wall was reduced to an artifact.

And at that moment, Communism was repudiated by its most ardent supporters and the Cold War was over.

It was a great victory for the United States, and a great opportunity.

Billions of people who had previously walled themselves off from the global economy tore down those walls -- in some cases literally -- and reached for the prosperity and opportunity that we had promised them the global market could provide.

The United States responded to this unique opportunity with a series of proposals that shaped the rules of the global marketplace according to American principles and practices. In effect, those billions of newly freed people did what we had been advising them to do for most of a century: They worked, they bought and sold, they manufactured, they imported, and they exported. They competed.

And it worked. Governments withdrew from large swathes of the market, freedom of choice for consumers and entrepreneurs rose around the world, and billions of people were lifted out of poverty.

Then came September 15, 2008.

The ensuing recession was a human tragedy across the U.S. and the world that laid bare longstanding underlying stresses and undermined confidence that the American approach was effective. With the emergence of China as a major factor on the global market, and accelerating innovation, some people wonder whether the American model is played out. Maybe the Chinese model of state-led capitalism and neo-mercantilism is better adapted to the realities of today.

At the same time, a populist-nationalist backlash has arisen against the global structure Americans built. It appears to be rooted in a suspicion that the global game is stacked against us and we cant win. How can that be, when we wrote the rules?

Based on the data, we in fact can win. And we do win. And not just because we wrote the rules: Our industry remains the global gold standard for dynamism and innovation.

The idea that America is the loser on the global marketplace is news to our competitors. The Europeans have been trying for years to reform their labor markets in an effort to reach our job creation rates. The Japanese are just now starting to see our growth rates for the first time in a generation. Our Mexican friends would give anything to have our productivity levels -- not to mention our institutional stability. Our Canadian friends obviously covet our climate -- more than one Canadian in ten owns real estate in the U.S. -- but why does their Prime Minister visit San Francisco every time he comes south of the 49th Parallel? He is courting the technology industry on behalf of Toronto and Montreal in hopes of copying our ability to innovate.

At the Bush Institute, we have looked at globalization since NAFTA and its impacts on American growth, job creation, trade, and competitiveness. We have looked at the impact of immigrants on our economy. We see a largely positive picture of growing prosperity based on stable demographics, innovation, and rising productivity.

But we recognize that too many in our country still struggle to reach the middle class, and that many Americans feel left behind and betrayed by the globalization of our economy. We understand that it is incumbent on those of us who believe in the transformative power of the global marketplace to propose policies that help restore our nations faith in our ability to compete. We have done it repeatedly in the past and there is no reason we cant do it again now.

I am a globalist because I am an American who is not afraid of the future.
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Page: 1 2 Missouri governor indicted on felony invasion of privacy charge and led away by p LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 04:51 AM











Post: #16 RE: Missouri governor indicted on felony invasion of privacy charge and led away by p

Advertisement LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 04:51 AM











Post: #17 RE: Missouri governor indicted on felony invasion of privacy charge and led away by p

He man is a pathetic shill-bot. Very ineffective & obvious. Why do people still respond to this blatant propaganda machine? He man is a pathetic shill-bot. Very ineffective & obvious. Why do people still respond to this blatant propaganda machine? LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 05:07 AM











Post: #18 RE: Missouri governor indicted on felony invasion of privacy charge and led away by p

LoP Guest Wrote: (04-20-2018 04:51 AM) BREAKING: LOP hits new low by pinning this crap.

LOP fuckmods are fucktarded with fucktardations happening in their f*cking brains. LOP fuckmods are fucktarded with fucktardations happening in their f*cking brains. zakkeryzakk

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 05:59 AM











Post: #19 RE: Missouri governor indicted on felony invasion of privacy charge and led away by p

LoP Guest Wrote: (04-20-2018 03:42 AM) He man is a pathetic shill-bot. Very ineffective & obvious. Why do people still respond to this blatant propaganda machine?

you understand that heman is a freemason right? its a masonic control droid.



anyone using 80's cartoons as a name is going to be a 'elevated' loser who is programmed with.. energies that are close to the cartoons.. yet, watch, it will lie about its masonic status because its a homosexual child molester who 'paid' to be a 'master' mason.



joke it to its face you understand that heman is a freemason right? its a masonic control droid.anyone using 80's cartoons as a name is going to be a 'elevated' loser who is programmed with.. energies that are close to the cartoons.. yet, watch, it will lie about its masonic status because its a homosexual child molester who 'paid' to be a 'master' mason.joke it to its face LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 06:03 AM











Post: #20 RE: Missouri governor indicted on felony invasion of privacy charge and led away by p

youre a dumbass liberal racist patriotically oriented sycophant op, white privilege is a myth in your little pea brain, toting guns is the law of the land you treasonous patriotically oriented sycophant LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 06:08 AM











Post: #21 RE: Missouri governor indicted on felony invasion of privacy charge and led away by p

LoP Guest Wrote: (04-20-2018 06:03 AM) youre a dumbass liberal racist patriotically oriented sycophant op, white privilege is a myth in your little pea brain, toting guns is the law of the land you treasonous patriotically oriented sycophant

LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 06:09 AM











Post: #22 RE: Missouri governor indicted on felony invasion of privacy charge and led away by p

LoP Guest Wrote: (04-20-2018 03:20 AM) He Man Is a pathetic shill-bot. Very ineffective & obvious. Why do people still respond to this blatant propaganda machine? LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 06:09 AM











Post: #23 RE: Missouri governor indicted on felony invasion of privacy charge and led away by p

LoP Guest Wrote: (04-20-2018 05:07 AM) LoP Guest Wrote: (04-20-2018 04:51 AM) BREAKING: LOP hits new low by pinning this crap.

LOP fuckmods are fucktarded with fucktardations happening in their f*cking brains.

Isabella

Registered User

User ID: 1337

04-21-2018 02:44 AM



Posts: 26,467









Post: #24 RE: Missouri governor indicted on felony invasion of privacy charge and led away by p

Greitens charged with felony computer tampering



"T. LOUIS  Gov. Eric Greitens, who has been in a public court fight against a felony invasion of privacy charge for nearly two months, now faces a new felony charge: that he misused a charity donor list to solicit campaign cash for his 2016 run for governor.



St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner charged Greitens, 44, with felony computer tampering relating to a list of donors to his St. Louis-based charity The Mission Continues, which Greitens founded in 2007 and left in 2014.



The new charges rely at least in part on evidence shared with her office by Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley, a Republican, who announced Tuesday that his office had uncovered evidence Greitens misused the list to help fund his 2016 campaign. It also add to a minefield of problems for a defiant governor struggling to save his job and political future.



In a statement published on Facebook on Friday, Greitens criticized Gardner. "Her original case is falling apart  so today, shes brought a new one. By now, everyone knows what this is: this prosecutor will use any charge she can to smear me."



"When I have my day in court, I will clear my name," Greitens said.







http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime...-top-story

0 "T. LOUIS  Gov. Eric Greitens, who has been in a public court fight against a felony invasion of privacy charge for nearly two months, now faces a new felony charge: that he misused a charity donor list to solicit campaign cash for his 2016 run for governor.In a statement published on Facebook on Friday, Greitens criticized Gardner. "Her original case is falling apart  so today, shes brought a new one. By now, everyone knows what this is: this prosecutor will use any charge she can to smear me.""When I have my day in court, I will clear my name," Greitens said. If you want to influence Trump, you got to be the last guy he talks to."



Steve Bannon
















Athens, GA (30605)

Today

Overcast with rain showers at times. High 82F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 60%..

Tonight

Scattered thunderstorms early, then variable clouds overnight with more showers at times. Low 67F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 70%.
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LITCHFIELD  Chuck Loring, considered one of the nations top authorities on board governance and board fundraising will hold a workshop, High Performing Fundraising Boards, Thursday May 17, 8 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.,Wisdom House, 229 East Litchfield Road, Litchfield.

The fast-paced workshop will cover several topics critical to achieving exceptional board leadership. Sustainable fundraising is the goal for every nonprofit organization and it is possible with an engaged and educated board of directors. The event is co-hosted by the Northwest Connecticut Community Foundation and the Connecticut Community Foundation.
Currently Reading

50 things to do this weekend in Connecticut, April 20-22
5 events to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month in Connecticut

Here are Hispanic Heritage Month events, celebrated from Sept. 15 to Oct. 15, around the state.
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/
KENT  The home at 112 Segar Mountain Road was built at the end of the 18th century, but the land it stands on was farmed as far back as the towns founding in 1737.

The land where Kent now stands was auctioned off at a courthouse in Windham on the first Tuesday of March 1737, according to the Kent Historical Society, and was divided into parcels of about 1,000 acres each.

The lot where 112 Segar Mountain Road stands, then known as Lot 33, was bought by Humphrey Avery at that meeting, according to a history of the home.

Over the years, the lot was divided further as it was sold to another original proprietor, one of the towns 45 original male settlers, and finally to Ebenezer Hoyt, a Revolutionary War soldier who built his home there. The small colonial is still known as the Hoyt House today.

Its funny; he only lived there less than 10 years and here we are, 200 years later, and its still named after him, said the homes listing agent, Dave Fairty.

The Hoyt family was one of Fairfield Countys earliest settlers. Ebenezer and John  possibly a brother or cousin  moved to Kent from Danbury in the late 1750s, records show.

Fairty said the home hasnt changed much since it was built, except for the addition of a garage and family room. It still has its original floors, fireplace and beehive oven, and hooks where meat was once hung for smoking can be found in an upstairs closet.

This one is really maintained, Fairty said. Any additions that were done were done tastefully, so nothing was done to wreck the look of the house.

But other pieces of Kents history have made their way onto the property over the years.

A small structure behind the house, likely built in the early 1800s, is thought to have been a one-room schoolhouse, though that has never been confirmed.

In the 1980s, a two-story tobacco barn was added to the property, which Fairty said has been converted for use as a studio or office space.

The barn was built in the late 1800s and is the only remaining structure from the time the property was used as a farm, both for dairy cattle and raising tobacco, according to a history of the home.

A 15-foot-by-15-foot window added to the tobacco barn was taken from an old hardware store when it was torn down in the 1980s.

Theres a lot of moving parts, Fairty said.

The home is on the market for $425,000.

Fairty, originally from New Canaan, said he discovered his own connection to the house when researching the property. It turns out Ebenezer Hoyt is one of his ancestors.

He knew he was related to the Hoyts, Fairty said, but never knew they made it all the way to Litchfield County.

He was kind of a lone wolf, Fairty said. The best I can tell, most of the rest of the Hoyts all stayed down in New Canaan and Stamford.

Its funny, in Kent theres a really core group that are actually from Kent and everyone else, about 85 percent, are transplants, Fairty said. So, here I am, 250 years later. Am I a local now?

aquinn@newstimes.com
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Page: 1 2 3 4 5 The KGB "Fake News" Narrative & Hypocrisy of the Alt-Right & Libertarian Media Iconi

lop guest

User ID: kaput

04-20-2018 04:56 PM











Post: #1 The KGB "Fake News" Narrative & Hypocrisy of the Alt-Right & Libertarian Media

Advertisement



Putins KGB are trying to demoralize Americans and destabilize the US with the old KGB tactic of turning the people against their own government and media. The KGB wants to make it impossible for Americans to make rational choices about our future and render us unable to understand that Russia is our mortal enemy and is trying to destroy our society.



The KGB controls the Alt-Right and the libertarians and engineers the words their mouthpieces parrot in a cacophonous chorus relentlessly bashing America and the West. They concurrently refuse to apply the same standards to Russia, Red China, North Korea, Iran or Putin. Their hypocrisy and double standards are obvious to any rational person willing to examine them. But the demoralized masses who occupy their audience are becoming increasingly incapable of rational and critical independent thought. They have turned into zombie-like cult members whose sole purpose is to rally around their god emperor Putin.



Both Trump, Sr. and Trump, Jr. have now confessed that there was contact between the Trump campaign with the Russians to gain dirt on Hillary Clinton. President Trump has now acknowledged that the Russians did hack during the election to benefit Trump. They have acknowledged that these things are true, but the Putin Suicide Cultists cannot register, let alone acknowledge, these proven facts admitted by all relevant parties. The KGB has successfully demoralized them to the point where facts and logic cannot be processed in their brainwashed brains.



Fox News falsely reported that Comey had leaked classified information. They retracted the story. Did President Trump, or Putins Suicide Cult, accuse them of providing fake news? Trump retweeted the story.



Comey did leak information. That is bad. The Fox News false embellishment does not change that proven and admitted fact. A rational person can analyze the facts from that perspective. But the Putin cultists can not apply this standard to the lies the Putin trolls constantly spoon feed them.



Brandon Martinez has sent me these links to sources which address Russian lies and fake news:



http://www.russialies.com/



You can find Brandons writings here:



https://martinezperspective.wordpress.com/ By Christopher Jon BjerknesPutins KGB are trying to demoralize Americans and destabilize the US with the old KGB tactic of turning the people against their own government and media. The KGB wants to make it impossible for Americans to make rational choices about our future and render us unable to understand that Russia is our mortal enemy and is trying to destroy our society.The KGB controls the Alt-Right and the libertarians and engineers the words their mouthpieces parrot in a cacophonous chorus relentlessly bashing America and the West. They concurrently refuse to apply the same standards to Russia, Red China, North Korea, Iran or Putin. Their hypocrisy and double standards are obvious to any rational person willing to examine them. But the demoralized masses who occupy their audience are becoming increasingly incapable of rational and critical independent thought. They have turned into zombie-like cult members whose sole purpose is to rally around their god emperor Putin.Both Trump, Sr. and Trump, Jr. have now confessed that there was contact between the Trump campaign with the Russians to gain dirt on Hillary Clinton. President Trump has now acknowledged that the Russians did hack during the election to benefit Trump. They have acknowledged that these things are true, but the Putin Suicide Cultists cannot register, let alone acknowledge, these proven facts admitted by all relevant parties. The KGB has successfully demoralized them to the point where facts and logic cannot be processed in their brainwashed brains.Fox News falsely reported that Comey had leaked classified information. They retracted the story. Did President Trump, or Putins Suicide Cult, accuse them of providing fake news? Trump retweeted the story.Comey did leak information. That is bad. The Fox News false embellishment does not change that proven and admitted fact. A rational person can analyze the facts from that perspective. But the Putin cultists can not apply this standard to the lies the Putin trolls constantly spoon feed them.Brandon Martinez has sent me these links to sources which address Russian lies and fake news:You can find Brandons writings here: LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 05:03 PM











Post: #2 RE: The KGB "Fake News" Narrative & Hypocrisy of the Alt-Right & Lib...

f*#k you, the only hypocrites in america are establishment trash that change their tune twice a day and ten times when elections roll around LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 05:04 PM











Post: #3 RE: The KGB "Fake News" Narrative & Hypocrisy of the Alt-Right & Lib...

Yep. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 05:08 PM











Post: #4 RE: The KGB "Fake News" Narrative & Hypocrisy of the Alt-Right & Lib...

Iconi Wrote: (04-20-2018 04:56 PM) By Christopher Jon Bjerknes



Putins KGB are trying to demoralize Americans and destabilize the US with the old KGB tactic of turning the people against their own government and media. The KGB wants to make it impossible for Americans to make rational choices about our future and render us unable to understand that Russia is our mortal enemy and is trying to destroy our society.



The KGB controls the Alt-Right and the libertarians and engineers the words their mouthpieces parrot in a cacophonous chorus relentlessly bashing America and the West. They concurrently refuse to apply the same standards to Russia, Red China, North Korea, Iran or Putin. Their hypocrisy and double standards are obvious to any rational person willing to examine them. But the demoralized masses who occupy their audience are becoming increasingly incapable of rational and critical independent thought. They have turned into zombie-like cult members whose sole purpose is to rally around their god emperor Putin.



Both Trump, Sr. and Trump, Jr. have now confessed that there was contact between the Trump campaign with the Russians to gain dirt on Hillary Clinton. President Trump has now acknowledged that the Russians did hack during the election to benefit Trump. They have acknowledged that these things are true, but the Putin Suicide Cultists cannot register, let alone acknowledge, these proven facts admitted by all relevant parties. The KGB has successfully demoralized them to the point where facts and logic cannot be processed in their brainwashed brains.



Fox News falsely reported that Comey had leaked classified information. They retracted the story. Did President Trump, or Putins Suicide Cult, accuse them of providing fake news? Trump retweeted the story.



Comey did leak information. That is bad. The Fox News false embellishment does not change that proven and admitted fact. A rational person can analyze the facts from that perspective. But the Putin cultists can not apply this standard to the lies the Putin trolls constantly spoon feed them.



Brandon Martinez has sent me these links to sources which address Russian lies and fake news:



http://www.russialies.com/



You can find Brandons writings here:



https://martinezperspective.wordpress.com/

worthless corrupt hypocritical politicians and businesses are the source of the demoralization and no one else, constantly blaming russia will save the two faced trash worthless corrupt hypocritical politicians and businesses are the source of the demoralization and no one else, constantly blaming russia will save the two faced trash LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 05:09 PM











Post: #5 RE: The KGB "Fake News" Narrative & Hypocrisy of the Alt-Right & Lib...

LoP Guest Wrote: (04-20-2018 05:03 PM) f*#k you, the only hypocrites in america are establishment trash that change their tune twice a day and ten times when elections roll around

You mean like Russia being communist in 1990 then a year later being democratic?



nice person. You mean like Russia being communist in 1990 then a year later being democratic?nice person. TicklePickle

Registered User

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 05:09 PM



Posts: 1,352









Post: #6 RE: The KGB "Fake News" Narrative & Hypocrisy of the Alt-Right & Lib...

Iconi Wrote: (04-20-2018 04:56 PM) By Christopher Jon Bjerknes



Putins KGB are trying to demoralize Americans and destabilize the US with the old KGB tactic of turning the people against their own government and media. The KGB wants to make it impossible for Americans to make rational choices about our future and render us unable to understand that Russia is our mortal enemy and is trying to destroy our society.



The KGB controls the Alt-Right and the libertarians and engineers the words their mouthpieces parrot in a cacophonous chorus relentlessly bashing America and the West. They concurrently refuse to apply the same standards to Russia, Red China, North Korea, Iran or Putin. Their hypocrisy and double standards are obvious to any rational person willing to examine them. But the demoralized masses who occupy their audience are becoming increasingly incapable of rational and critical independent thought. They have turned into zombie-like cult members whose sole purpose is to rally around their god emperor Putin.



Both Trump, Sr. and Trump, Jr. have now confessed that there was contact between the Trump campaign with the Russians to gain dirt on Hillary Clinton. President Trump has now acknowledged that the Russians did hack during the election to benefit Trump. They have acknowledged that these things are true, but the Putin Suicide Cultists cannot register, let alone acknowledge, these proven facts admitted by all relevant parties. The KGB has successfully demoralized them to the point where facts and logic cannot be processed in their brainwashed brains.



Fox News falsely reported that Comey had leaked classified information. They retracted the story. Did President Trump, or Putins Suicide Cult, accuse them of providing fake news? Trump retweeted the story.



Comey did leak information. That is bad. The Fox News false embellishment does not change that proven and admitted fact. A rational person can analyze the facts from that perspective. But the Putin cultists can not apply this standard to the lies the Putin trolls constantly spoon feed them.



Brandon Martinez has sent me these links to sources which address Russian lies and fake news:



http://www.russialies.com/



You can find Brandons writings here:



https://martinezperspective.wordpress.com/

Liberal propaganda to demonize conservatives & alt-right types.



The left is working lock & step with the KGB to turn America into a socialist dump.



Once America's economy falters under high socialist taxes & regulations, Russia and China can take the reigns as global super powers while America goes down the socialist toilet, like Venezuela. Liberal propaganda to demonize conservatives & alt-right types.The left is working lock & step with the KGB to turn America into a socialist dump.Once America's economy falters under high socialist taxes & regulations, Russia and China can take the reigns as global super powers while America goes down the socialist toilet, like Venezuela. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 05:10 PM











Post: #7 RE: The KGB "Fake News" Narrative & Hypocrisy of the Alt-Right & Lib...

TicklePickle Wrote: (04-20-2018 05:09 PM) Iconi Wrote: (04-20-2018 04:56 PM) By Christopher Jon Bjerknes



Putins KGB are trying to demoralize Americans and destabilize the US with the old KGB tactic of turning the people against their own government and media. The KGB wants to make it impossible for Americans to make rational choices about our future and render us unable to understand that Russia is our mortal enemy and is trying to destroy our society.



The KGB controls the Alt-Right and the libertarians and engineers the words their mouthpieces parrot in a cacophonous chorus relentlessly bashing America and the West. They concurrently refuse to apply the same standards to Russia, Red China, North Korea, Iran or Putin. Their hypocrisy and double standards are obvious to any rational person willing to examine them. But the demoralized masses who occupy their audience are becoming increasingly incapable of rational and critical independent thought. They have turned into zombie-like cult members whose sole purpose is to rally around their god emperor Putin.



Both Trump, Sr. and Trump, Jr. have now confessed that there was contact between the Trump campaign with the Russians to gain dirt on Hillary Clinton. President Trump has now acknowledged that the Russians did hack during the election to benefit Trump. They have acknowledged that these things are true, but the Putin Suicide Cultists cannot register, let alone acknowledge, these proven facts admitted by all relevant parties. The KGB has successfully demoralized them to the point where facts and logic cannot be processed in their brainwashed brains.



Fox News falsely reported that Comey had leaked classified information. They retracted the story. Did President Trump, or Putins Suicide Cult, accuse them of providing fake news? Trump retweeted the story.



Comey did leak information. That is bad. The Fox News false embellishment does not change that proven and admitted fact. A rational person can analyze the facts from that perspective. But the Putin cultists can not apply this standard to the lies the Putin trolls constantly spoon feed them.



Brandon Martinez has sent me these links to sources which address Russian lies and fake news:



http://www.russialies.com/



You can find Brandons writings here:



https://martinezperspective.wordpress.com/

Liberal propaganda to demonize conservatives & alt-right types.



The left is working lock & step with the KGB to turn America into a socialist dump.



Once America's economy falters under high socialist taxes & regulations, Russia and China can take the reigns as global super powers while America goes down the socialist toilet, like Venezuela.



So only leftists criticize Russia? Is that what you are saying? So only leftists criticize Russia? Is that what you are saying? TicklePickle

Registered User

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 05:13 PM



Posts: 1,352









Post: #8 RE: The KGB "Fake News" Narrative & Hypocrisy of the Alt-Right & Lib...

LoP Guest Wrote: (04-20-2018 05:10 PM) TicklePickle Wrote: (04-20-2018 05:09 PM) Liberal propaganda to demonize conservatives & alt-right types.



The left is working lock & step with the KGB to turn America into a socialist dump.



Once America's economy falters under high socialist taxes & regulations, Russia and China can take the reigns as global super powers while America goes down the socialist toilet, like Venezuela.



So only leftists criticize Russia? Is that what you are saying?

No, leftists and Russia have the same exact goal.

To weaken the power of the United States. No, leftists and Russia have the same exact goal.To weaken the power of the United States. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 05:13 PM











Post: #9 RE: The KGB "Fake News" Narrative & Hypocrisy of the Alt-Right & Lib...

TicklePickle Wrote: (04-20-2018 05:09 PM) Iconi Wrote: (04-20-2018 04:56 PM) By Christopher Jon Bjerknes



Putins KGB are trying to demoralize Americans and destabilize the US with the old KGB tactic of turning the people against their own government and media. The KGB wants to make it impossible for Americans to make rational choices about our future and render us unable to understand that Russia is our mortal enemy and is trying to destroy our society.



The KGB controls the Alt-Right and the libertarians and engineers the words their mouthpieces parrot in a cacophonous chorus relentlessly bashing America and the West. They concurrently refuse to apply the same standards to Russia, Red China, North Korea, Iran or Putin. Their hypocrisy and double standards are obvious to any rational person willing to examine them. But the demoralized masses who occupy their audience are becoming increasingly incapable of rational and critical independent thought. They have turned into zombie-like cult members whose sole purpose is to rally around their god emperor Putin.



Both Trump, Sr. and Trump, Jr. have now confessed that there was contact between the Trump campaign with the Russians to gain dirt on Hillary Clinton. President Trump has now acknowledged that the Russians did hack during the election to benefit Trump. They have acknowledged that these things are true, but the Putin Suicide Cultists cannot register, let alone acknowledge, these proven facts admitted by all relevant parties. The KGB has successfully demoralized them to the point where facts and logic cannot be processed in their brainwashed brains.



Fox News falsely reported that Comey had leaked classified information. They retracted the story. Did President Trump, or Putins Suicide Cult, accuse them of providing fake news? Trump retweeted the story.



Comey did leak information. That is bad. The Fox News false embellishment does not change that proven and admitted fact. A rational person can analyze the facts from that perspective. But the Putin cultists can not apply this standard to the lies the Putin trolls constantly spoon feed them.



Brandon Martinez has sent me these links to sources which address Russian lies and fake news:



http://www.russialies.com/



You can find Brandons writings here:



https://martinezperspective.wordpress.com/

Liberal propaganda to demonize conservatives & alt-right types.



The left is working lock & step with the KGB to turn America into a socialist dump.



Once America's economy falters under high socialist taxes & regulations, Russia and China can take the reigns as global super powers while America goes down the socialist toilet, like Venezuela.

Yep also. The article fails to mention the communist left in America. It should already be apparent that they were always pro-Russia. They have gained the narrative on both sides because people have short memories and no sense of history. Yep also. The article fails to mention the communist left in America. It should already be apparent that they were always pro-Russia. They have gained the narrative on both sides because people have short memories and no sense of history. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 05:14 PM











Post: #10 RE: The KGB "Fake News" Narrative & Hypocrisy of the Alt-Right & Lib...

TicklePickle Wrote: (04-20-2018 05:13 PM) LoP Guest Wrote: (04-20-2018 05:10 PM) So only leftists criticize Russia? Is that what you are saying?

No, leftists and Russia have the same exact goal.

To weaken the power of the United States.

Exactly. Thank you. Exactly. Thank you. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 05:15 PM











Post: #11 RE: The KGB "Fake News" Narrative & Hypocrisy of the Alt-Right & Lib...

TicklePickle Wrote: (04-20-2018 05:13 PM) LoP Guest Wrote: (04-20-2018 05:10 PM) So only leftists criticize Russia? Is that what you are saying?

No, leftists and Russia have the same exact goal.

To weaken the power of the United States.

Ah, yes, I agree. Why are so few truthers seeing this? Ah, yes, I agree. Why are so few truthers seeing this? LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 05:16 PM











Post: #12 RE: The KGB "Fake News" Narrative & Hypocrisy of the Alt-Right & Lib...

LoP Guest Wrote: (04-20-2018 05:13 PM) TicklePickle Wrote: (04-20-2018 05:09 PM) Liberal propaganda to demonize conservatives & alt-right types.



The left is working lock & step with the KGB to turn America into a socialist dump.



Once America's economy falters under high socialist taxes & regulations, Russia and China can take the reigns as global super powers while America goes down the socialist toilet, like Venezuela.

Yep also. The article fails to mention the communist left in America. It should already be apparent that they were always pro-Russia. They have gained the narrative on both sides because people have short memories and no sense of history.

Did you know that since Trump got elected, the Communist Party USA has seen a spike in new memberships? Maybe that was the whole purpose of Russia putting Trump in power: galvanize the Left. Did you know that since Trump got elected, the Communist Party USA has seen a spike in new memberships? Maybe that was the whole purpose of Russia putting Trump in power: galvanize the Left. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 05:16 PM











Post: #13 RE: The KGB "Fake News" Narrative & Hypocrisy of the Alt-Right & Lib...

LoP Guest Wrote: (04-20-2018 05:15 PM) TicklePickle Wrote: (04-20-2018 05:13 PM) No, leftists and Russia have the same exact goal.

To weaken the power of the United States.

Ah, yes, I agree. Why are so few truthers seeing this?

Because half of the people here aren't after truth. They just don't want you to have it. Because half of the people here aren't after truth. They just don't want you to have it. engineering

Banned

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 05:22 PM



Posts: 5,299









Post: #14 RE: The KGB "Fake News" Narrative & Hypocrisy of the Alt-Right & Lib...

Iconi Wrote: (04-20-2018 04:56 PM) The KGB controls the Alt-Right and the libertarians and engineers the words their mouthpieces parrot in a cacophonous chorus relentlessly bashing America and the West.

It's a 2 pronged attack on both wings of government not just the alt-right.

It's a 2 pronged attack on both wings of government not just the alt-right. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 05:23 PM











Post: #15 RE: The KGB "Fake News" Narrative & Hypocrisy of the Alt-Right & Lib...

LoP Guest Wrote: (04-20-2018 05:16 PM) LoP Guest Wrote: (04-20-2018 05:13 PM) Yep also. The article fails to mention the communist left in America. It should already be apparent that they were always pro-Russia. They have gained the narrative on both sides because people have short memories and no sense of history.

Did you know that since Trump got elected, the Communist Party USA has seen a spike in new memberships? Maybe that was the whole purpose of Russia putting Trump in power: galvanize the Left.

Russia did not put Trump in power. Pissed off Americans did and they will again. Russia did not put Trump in power. Pissed off Americans did and they will again. Advertisement


















Rohingya refugees from Myanmar detained in Malaysia territorial waters off the island of Langkawi arrive at a jetty in Kuala Kedah, northern Malaysia, April 3, 2018.

Forced disappearances of lawyers and intensified repression of Tibetans and Uyghurs in China, ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, arbitrary arrests of politicians in Cambodia, and mistreatment of prisoners in Vietnam topped the list of human rights problems in Asia in 2017, according to an annual U.S. State Department report issued on Friday.

Official repression of the freedoms of speech, religion, movement, association, and assembly of Tibetans in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) and other Tibetan areas and of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) worsened and were more severe than in other areas of the country, said the report in its chapter on China.

In the XUAR officials imposed new regulations, increased severely repressive security measures, and subjected individuals engaged in peaceful expression of political and religious views to arbitrary arrest, detention harassment, and expedited judicial procedures without due process in the name of combatting terrorism and extremism, said the report, which is mandated by U.S. Congress and which covers every other country in the world.

The July 2015 709 roundup of more than 300 human rights lawyers and legal aides continued to have ramifications in 2017, with lawyer Wang Quanzhang missing throughout the year and thought to be held in an undisclosed location without access to an attorney of his choosing, the report said.

As of December, Wangs family had neither seen nor heard from him since his detention, and his friends and family said they did not know whether or not he was still alive, it said.

There were multiple reports that lawyers, law associates, and activists detained in the 709 crackdown suffered various forms of torture, abuse, or degrading treatment, the report said in a separate section about abuse of prisoners.

Numerous former prisoners and detainees reported they were beaten, subjected to electric shock, forced to sit on stools for hours on end, hung by the wrists, deprived of sleep, force fed, forced to take medication against their will, and otherwise subjected to physical and psychological abuse, said the report.

Although China denies holding any political prisoners, the report said authorities, however, continued to imprison citizens for reasons related to politics and religion.

Human rights organizations estimated that tens of thousands of political prisoners remained incarcerated, most in prisons and some in administrative detention, it said, adding that former political prisoners and their families faced continued surveillance, telephone wiretaps, searches, and other forms of harassment or threats.

In Myanmar, under its second year of civilian government under de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi, a main human rights concern was ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya minority in Rakhine State,

In early August some security forces deployed throughout northern Rakhine State, committing enforced disappearances and arbitrary arrests and displacing villagers, the majority of whom were Rohingya, said the report.

Widespread atrocities against Rohingya

The campaign against Rohingya came in response to coordinated deadly attacks on August 25, 2017 against 30 security outposts in northern Rakhine State, for which the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) claimed responsibility.

Augmented security forces, as well as local vigilante groups acting independently or in concert with security forces, then reportedly committed widespread atrocities against Rohingya villagers, including extrajudicial killings, disappearances, rape, torture, arbitrary arrest, and burning of tens of thousands of homes and some religious structures and other building, said the State Department.

This displaced more than 655,000 Rohingya to neighboring Bangladesh as of December, as well as an unknown number within Rakhine State, and more than 20,000 villagers from other ethnic groups, many of whom were evacuated by the security forces, it said.

Beyond Rakhine, the State Department identifies problems including arbitrary or unlawful killings; politically motivated arrests; authorities human rights violations against civilians in other ethnic minority areas and conflict zones, particularly in Kachin State and Shan State; (and) continued harsh conditions in prisons and labor camps.

It also found restrictions on freedom of speech, assembly, and association and intimidation and arrests of journalists, the report said.

Although the government took some limited actions to prosecute or punish officials responsible for abuses, the vast majority of such abuses continued with impunity, it added.

In Cambodia, where strongman Hun Sen has ruled for more than 32 years, the most significant rights problems included extrajudicial killings, prisoner abuse in government facilities and arbitrary arrests by the government, including the warrantless arrest of the (Cambodia National Rescue Party) CNRP leader Kem Sokha.

Kem Sokha was arrested last September on charges of collaborating with the U.S. to overthrow the government, and the Supreme Court followed in November with a decision to ban the CNRP for its role in his alleged plot, stripping officials of their posts and banning many from politics for five years.

The Supreme Courts dissolution of the CNRP on November 16 effectively outlaws any participation in or identification with the party, said the State Department report.

Cambodia holds general elections on July 29, but the banning of the CNRP, whose parliamentary seats were doled out to small parties loyal to Hun Sens Cambodia Peoples Party, has turned the contest into a one-party affair and led to calls for a boycott.

In one-party Communist Vietnam, officials or other agents under the command of the Ministry of Public Security or provincial public security departments committed arbitrary or unlawful killings, including reports of at least 15 deaths of persons in custody, said the report.

In most cases, authorities either provided little information regarding investigations into the deaths or stated the deaths were the result of suicide or medical problems. Authorities sometimes harassed and intimidated families who questioned the police determination of cause of death, it said.

Police, prosecutors, and government oversight agencies seldom conducted investigations of specific reports of mistreatment. Some activists reported receiving death threats from security officials, the report said.
Myanmar Police Captain Moe Yan Naing emerges from a courtroom in Yangon after giving testimony in the case of two Reuters reporters on trial for allegedly obtaining state secrets, April 20, 2018.

Myanmar police ordered the entrapment of two reporters for Reuters news agency on trial for allegedly possessing state secrets for their work investigating violence against Rohingya Muslims by the military in Rakhine state, a police officer said Friday during sworn testimony before the court.

Police Brigadier General Tin Ko Ko ordered officers to set up reporters Thet Oo Maung, also known as Wa Lone, and Kyaw Soe Oo, Police Captain Moe Yan Naing told Yangons Northern District Court.

Police arrested the pair on Dec. 12 on the outskirts of Yangon shortly after they had dinner with two police officers who gave them documents about a military crackdown on Rohingya Muslims in northern Rakhine state.

They were formally charged on Jan. 10 with obtaining state secrets and face up to 14 years in prison if found guilty.

In December, police had identified Moe Yan Naing, who was serving in the paramilitary 8th Security Police Battalion outside Yangon, as one of two officers allegedly involved in the case.

Moe Yan Naing said he met Wa Lone once on Nov. 23 at a teahouse to discuss police operations in Rakhine, but he was not among the officers when the two reporters were arrested. He also said he had never met with Kyaw Soe Oo.

A witness for the prosecution, Moe Yan Naing told the court that Tin Ko Ko, who was in charge of the internal investigation, ordered Police Lance Corporal Naing Lin to set up a meeting with Wa Lone and give him documents from the battalion.

Of the six policemen who were interrogated in the matter, only Moe Yan Naing and Police Sergeant Khin Maung Lin have been detained since Dec. 12 on charges of violating the British colonial-era Official Secrets Act and the Police Disciplinary Act.

During the hearing, Moe Yan Naing said Tin Ko Ko had disgraced the union government and made the union government misunderstood by the international community.

I am revealing the truth because police of any rank must maintain their own integrity, he told reporters after the court hearing. It is true that they were set up.

Moe Yan Naing had served at the Inn Din village regional police station in Rakhines Maungdaw township where the crackdown took place.

At the time of their arrest, the two reporters were working on a story about the brutal murders of 10 Rohingya civilians from Inn Din, and the news agency later produced a gripping account of the killings by soldiers and ethnic Rakhine Buddhist neighbors.

Myanmars military commander-in-chiefs office announced last week that seven officers and soldiers of other ranks involved in the killing of the 10 Rohingya had been sentenced to 10 years in prison following an investigation of the incident.

In the meantime, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo remain in detention in Yangons Insein Prison until their next court hearing on April 25.

Court finally heard truth

Stephen J. Adler, president and editor-in-chief of Reuters, called for the release of the journalists after the hearing.

Today the court finally heard the truth, he said in a statement. One of the prosecutions own witnesses admitted that the police received orders to plant evidence and arrest Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo on false charges. This case cannot be squared with fairness or justice, and its time to bring it to an end. We call for our journalists immediate release.

Lawyers for the two defendants and Myanmar journalists previously had told RFA that it was likely that police had entrapped the two reporters.

As police Captain Moe Yan Naing told the truth, it is very supportive for the reporters freedom, said Thant Zaw, one of the attorneys representing the reporters, following Fridays hearing.

Moe Yan Maing took a risk by telling the court about his detention and that Tin Ko Kos actions destroyed the integrity of the Myanmar Police Force, he said.

Lawyers representing the journalists filed a motion for a dismissal of the case in late March, arguing that there was insufficient evidence to support the charges and inconsistencies in witness testimony. The judge rejected the request because others had not yet testified.

Myanmar Press Council member Myint Kyaw said whether Moe Yan Naing's testimony will be grounds for the dismissal of the case remains to be seen.

Police Captain Moe Yan Naing told the truth, and we welcome what he did, he said. But we have to wait and see if the reporters can be freed now that someone has told the truth.

Zayar Hlaing, editor of the investigative magazine Maw Kun, said Moe Yan Naings words have an even greater impact on Myanmar society.

Both the army and police force are essential institutions in a country, but the police are closer to the people, he said. The attitude of the police force will determine a countrys rule of law and integrity.

A policeman spoke the truth, and it is good for society, he said. The relevant authorities should pay attention to this until justice is served.

Sein Win, director of the Myanmar Journalism Institute, expressed concern about Moe Yan Naings safety.

I respect and appreciate Police Captain Moe Yan Naing for telling the truth, he said. It shows that the military and security guards are used as part of a political agenda. He is brave, but I am worried for his safety.

Reported by Aung Theinkha, Khin Khin Ei, and Thinn Thiri for RFAs Myanmar Service. Translated by Khet Mar. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.
The U.S. has called on China to end their counterproductive policies in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) and urged Beijing to release the estimated hundreds of thousands of ethnic Uyghurs who are arbitrarily detained there in political re-education camps and jails.



At a press briefing on Thursday, U.S. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert told reporters that Washington is increasingly concerned about excessive restrictions on freedom of religion and freedom of beliefs in China, as well as the countrys efforts to pressure other governments into forcibly returning Uyghurs to China or to coerce family members.



She also expressed alarm over widespread detentions and the unprecedented levels of surveillance in the XUAR, where Uyghurs accused of harboring strong religious views and politically incorrect views have been jailed or detained in political re-education camps throughout the region since April last year.



China's central government authorities have not publicly acknowledged the existence of re-education camps in the XUAR, and the number of inmates kept in each facility remains a closely guarded secret, but local officials in many parts of the region have in RFA telephone interviews forthrightly described sending significant numbers of Uyghurs to the camps and even described overcrowding in some facilities.



Among those in custody are dozens of family members of six RFA Uyghur Service reporters, and Nauert specifically referenced their cases Thursday, reassuring the journalists that the U.S. will continue to raise our deep concerns with the Chinese government on their behalf.



We call on China to end their counterproductive policies and  free all of those who have been arbitrarily detained in the XUAR, she said.



Nauert noted that Laura Stone, the acting deputy assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, visited China earlier this week and expressed concerns over the mass detentions in the XUAR she said paints a disturbing picture of life in the region, where Uyghurs have long complained of pervasive discrimination, religious repression, and cultural suppression under Chinese rule.



Official visit



Speaking to reporters in Beijing on Wednesday, Stone urged Chinese authorities to employ a more transparent and accountable system in the XUAR, noting that while a clampdown on the flow of information coming out of the region had made it difficult to determine the number of people detained, it was at the very least in the tens of thousands.



Maya Wang of the New York-based Human Rights Watch told The Guardian in January that estimates of XUAR residents who had spent time in the camps went as high as 800,000, while at least one Uyghur exile group estimates that up to 1 million Uyghurs have been detained throughout the region since April 2017, and some Uyghur activists say nearly every Uyghur household has been affected by the campaign.



Stone said that the U.S. is troubled by the Chinese efforts to clamp down on the legitimate rights of Uyghurs in the XUAR and pledged to continue to  call for legitimate due process in the detention of [Chinas] citizens.



Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying dismissed Stones comments later that day, saying people of all ethnicities in Xinjiang live and work in peace and contentment, and she urged the U.S. to stop any form of interference in Chinas internal affairs or any unjustified criticisms.



Stone and Nauerts comments are the latest to condemn China for its policies in the XUAR and follow a letter earlier this month published by the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), led by Senator Marco Rubio, which urged U.S. Ambassador to China Terry Branstad to visit the region with the aim of investigating claims of mass surveillance and detention of Uyghurs.



In the April 3 letter, Rubio and U.S. Representative Chris Smiththe co-chair of the CECCcalled the camp network in the XUAR the largest mass incarceration of a minority population in the world today and asked Branstad to determine whether Washington should level sanctions against those responsible for the policies under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act.



Deteriorating rights situation



On Friday, Omer Kanat, chairman of the executive commission of the Munich-based World Uyghur Congress exile group, applauded the U.S. State Department for bringing attention to the rapidly deteriorating human rights situation in East Turkestan, using the name preferred by many ethnic Uyghurs for their historic homeland.



He also thanked U.S. officials for highlighting the collective punishment of the family members of Uyghurs who bring these issues to light, such as the staff members of Radio Free Asia.



Acting deputy assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Laura Stone is correct to point out that the Chinese government lacks transparency and accountability, he said.



Uyghurs are being sent to camps in massive numbers, but the Chinese government is attempting to hide this obvious fact by refusing to address the issue and preventing government and non-government delegations and independent journalists from investigating the situation.



He urged the U.S. to push back against these falsehoods and show Beijing that the world is not ignoring the situation.



No country can afford to ignore what is happening in East Turkestan, as the most extreme of the human rights abuses perpetrated by the Chinese authoritiesthe securitization of East Turkestan and mistreatment of Uyghursis a disturbing sign of the direction in which the Chinese government is headed, and should affect its relations with the rest of the world, Kanat said.



Rights report



Also on Friday, the State Department issued its annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, in which it said official repression of the freedoms of speech, religion, movement, association, and assembly of Uyghurs in the XUAR and Tibetans in Chinas Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) worsened and were more severe than in other areas of the country in 2017.



Officials in the XUAR imposed new regulations, increased severely repressive security measures, and subjected individuals engaged in peaceful expression of political and religious views to arbitrary arrest, detention harassment, and expedited judicial procedures without due process in the name of combatting terrorism and extremism, the report said.



The State Department noted that many of the Uyghurs who disappeared in the XUAR in 2017 had been detained after returning home from studying abroad, that Uyghurs reported great difficulty in getting passports, and that they also faced restrictions on movement within the XUAR itself.



Uighurs and other religious minorities continued to be sentenced to long prison terms and in some cases executed without due process on charges of separatism and endangering state security, the report said.



Since XUAR 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 the XUAR, 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 Alim Seytoff for RFAs Uyghur Service and Joshua Lipes. Translated by Alim Seytoff. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.
Hundreds of villagers in central Vietnams Binh Dinh province held five local officials hostage for a day before releasing them late on Friday to demand that authorities free more than a dozen people detained for holding an environmental protest, according to sources.



Residents of My Tho and My An communes, in Binh Dinhs Phu My district, on Wednesday held a protest against what state media has reported are plans by Vietnam Trading Engineering Construction's (Vietracimex) to construct a wind power plant.



The villagers blocked a local highway and threw sand at police over the plans, which they said are a cover for a titanium ore exploitation operation that they believe will destroy local forestland through pollution.



Authorities broke up the protest and detained 14 people for disturbing public order.



Early on Friday morning, some 500 people surrounded the local government office in My Tho commune and took five officials hostage, including the local ruling Communist Party chief, the party chairman, and three police officers, a villager told RFAs Vietnamese Service, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.



The mob forced authorities to release the 14 people arrested in the earlier protest and eventually allowed the five hostages to go free around midnight on Friday, before returning to their homes, the villager said.



Public demonstrations are extremely rare in one-party Communist Vietnam, where dissent is not tolerated.



In April last year, farmers in Dong Tam commune, in the capital Hanois My Duc district, detained dozens of police officers and officials during a week-long standoff over their claims that the government was seizing their farmland for the military-run Viettel Groupthe countrys largest mobile phone operatorwithout adequately compensating them.



At the end of the standoff, Hanois mayor pledged not to prosecute residents and to investigate their claims, but months later, the citys Inspectorate determined that they had no right to the land and awarded it to the military.



Vietnam has also seen regular protests over the governments handling of a toxic waste spill that occurred along the countrys central coast in April 2016, polluting more than 125 miles of coastline along four coastal provinces, killing an estimated 115 tons of fish, and leaving fishermen and tourism industry workers jobless.



Two months after the spill, Taiwan-owned Formosa Plastics Group acknowledged it was responsible for the release of the chemicals from its massive steel plant located at the deep-water port in Ha Tinh provinces Ky Anh district.



The company voluntarily paid U.S. $500 million to clean up and compensate those affected by the spill, but the slow and uneven payout of the funds by the Vietnamese government has prompted ongoing demonstrations.



Reported by RFAs Vietnamese Service. Translated by Viet Ha. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.
Protests continued in Yerevan on April 20 against former Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian's move into his new role as prime minister. Speaking to Current Time TV, opposition lawmaker and protest leader Nikol Pashinian said that the protests are entirely peaceful, and called on police not to protect Sarkisian but to serve the Armenian people.
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Opposition lawmaker Nikol Pashinian led crowds of protesters in the Armenian capital as demonstrations continued on April 20. Protesters are opposing what they call a "power grab" by former President Serzh Sarkisian, who became prime minister on April 17.
KEMEROVO, Russia -- The Kemerovo Regional Court in Siberia has overruled a lower court's decision to allow a rally against former regional Governor Aman Tuleyev, who resigned over a deadly shopping-mall fire earlier this month.

The aim of the rally, scheduled for April 21, was to protest Tuleyev's becoming the Russian region's parliamentary speaker just days after his resignation.

The regional court's decision on April 20 came a day after Kemerovo city's Central District Court found the city's April 18 refusal to allow the rally was illegal.

Tuleyev also urged the organizers of the rally to move the protest from April 21 to another day, saying that several victims of the fire will be buried on that day.

"I consider that it is blasphemous [to rally on the day of the burials] and, from the humane point of view, it must not be done," Tuleyev's statement said.

Earlier on April 20, the Investigative Committee said that forensic examinations and DNA analysis showed that 60 people were killed in the blaze on March 25.

Earlier official statements said that 64 people, including 41 children, had died in the fire.

The Investigative Committee did not explain in detail how the higher figure had been determined earlier, and also did not say how many of the deceased were children.

Residents, relatives of victims, and Russians nationwide blamed corruption and government negligence for the high casualty toll in blaze.

Investigators said days after the fire that blocked fire exits, an alarm system that was shut down, and "glaring violations" of safety rules before the blaze exacerbated its human toll.

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.
BRUSSELS  The 28 European Union member states have agreed on a draft declaration ahead of the EU-Western Balkans summit on May 17 in Sofia, overcoming internal divisions.

The draft, seen by RFE/RL, was agreed by EU ambassadors late on April 19 and will now be sent to the six Western Balkans countries participating in the summit: Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia.

The presence of Kosovo has complicated the drafting with five EU members -- Cyprus, Greece, Romania, Slovakia, and Spain  that are not recognizing Pristinas independence.

According to diplomats who spoke to RFE/RL, some of the five were unhappy about calling the document a declaration and would prefer to call it the Bulgarian Presidency conclusions or to produce a declaration endorsed only by the EU but not by the six Western Balkan countries. The diplomats spoke to RFE/RL on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter on the record.

The compromise forged according to the draft is that it would be called the Sofia declaration but with a statement in brackets, after the 16 points of the declaration, saying that we note that our Western Balkans partners align themselves with the above points.

The six Western Balkan countries are not mentioned by name and are referred to as partners, as supposed to states or countries, in an apparent effort to ease concerns about the reference to Kosovos status.

Kosovo, a former Serbian province that declared independence in 2008 after a bloody conflict with Serbia almost a decade earlier, remains unrecognized by the five EU member states due to aspirations of autonomy by people in those countries.

Spain has adopted a tough stance amid the fallout from what Madrid says was an illegal October 2017 independence referendum in the Catalonia region. Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy indicated that he wont participate in the summit due to Kosovos presence.

Elsewhere in the document, the language about the EU enlargement perspective of the region has been strengthened by referring to the previous EU-Western Balkans summit in 2002 in the Greek city of Thessaloniki, where EU member states agreed that the Western Balkans one day will be part of the European Union.

It says that recalling the Thessaloniki summit of 2003, the EU reaffirms its unequivocal support for the European perspective of the Western Balkans. Building on the progress achieved so far, the Western Balkans partners have recommitted to the European perspective as their firm strategic choice, to reinforcing their efforts and mutual support. The credibility of these efforts depends on clear public communication.

That language will please countries such as Austria, Italy, and Sweden that are keen for the EU to take in Western Balkans countries. But at the same time, countries in the Western Balkans are likely to point out that no firmer commitment to their eventual membership has been achieved in 15 years.

Commenting on several disputes that persist among the Western Balkan nations, most notably between Serbia and Kosovo, the draft declaration notes that the EU supports the Western Balkans partners pledge to continue strengthening good neighborly relations, regional stability and mutual cooperation. This includes in particular finding and implementing definitive, inclusive, and binding solutions for their bilateral disputes rooted in the legacy of the past and devoting additional efforts to reconciliation.
BISHKEK -- The Kyrgyz parliament has confirmed Mukhammedkalyi Abylgaziev as the Central Asian countrys new prime minister, a day after an ally of former President Almazbek Atambaev was sacked.

The new cabinet proposed by Abylgaziev and approved by parliament on April 20 includes a mix of newcomers and holdovers from the previous government led by Sapar Isakov.

President Sooronbai Jeenbekov sacked Isakov's government on April 19, hours after lawmakers passed a no-confidence motion in the strongest sign of a power struggle between Jeenbekov and his predecessor, Atambaev.

The confidence vote was initiated by opposition lawmakers and followed criticism of the cabinet's 2017 annual report by opposition parties. But the ruling coalition led by Atambaev's Social Democratic party abruptly withdrew its backing for Isakov, and 101 of 112 present in the 120-seat chamber voted against him.

Atambaev kept a low profile for several months after leaving office five months ago, but he has publicly criticized Jeenbekov -- his former prime minister and favored successor in the October 2017 presidential vote -- on several occasions following his election as head of the Social Democrats on March 31.

Earlier in April, Jeenbekov dismissed Abdil Segizbaev, the chief of the State Committee for National Security, and Prosecutor-General Indira Joldubaeva, who are also Atambaev's allies and had long been criticized for a crackdown on opposition politicians and independent journalists.

Kyrgyzstan, a country of 6 million that hosts a Russian military base, is widely seen as the most democratic but also the most politically volatile of the five Central Asian states that gained independence in the Soviet breakup of 1991. Antigovernment protests toppled presidents in 2005 and 2010.

Atambaev had backed Jeenbekov in the presidential election but started criticizing him this month in a sign of a rift between the two.
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Page: 1 2 3 4 Iran Ready to Crush Israel - Had Enough IRAN's EDICT

lop guest

User ID: kaput

04-20-2018 05:58 PM











Post: #1 Iran Ready to Crush Israel - Had Enough

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Fri Apr 20, 2018 6:2

TEHRAN (FNA)- Lieutenant Commander of Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Brigadier General Hossein Salami warned Israel to avoid sabre-rattling against Iran, saying that his country would wipe Israel off the map in a twinkling of an eye if Tel Aviv proves to be fool enough to spark war on Iran.



"We know you well, you are too vulnerable, you have no depth and no backyard, you are the size of our Beit-ul-Moqaddas operations (during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war), any point in the land under your occupation is a cross point of fire from North and from West, and this is a new phenomenon. You have no way out to escape and you are living in dragon mouth," General Salami said on Friday, addressing the Zionists.

"You may not stand to the domino of occupation when your soldiers and citizens start escaping; you have no way out to escape, but swimming in the sea. Don't trust your airbases, they are within reach and they will become idle soon," he added.



General Salami advised the Tel Aviv regime not to pin hope on the US, Britain and France, and said, "You are gone when they arrive there like an ambulance sent to a dead man that can only take him to the graveyard; then, behave yourselves and avoid doing dangerous calculations."



http://en.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13970131000710 Fri Apr 20, 2018 6:2TEHRAN (FNA)- Lieutenant Commander of Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Brigadier General Hossein Salami warned Israel to avoid sabre-rattling against Iran, saying that his country would wipe Israel off the map in a twinkling of an eye if Tel Aviv proves to be fool enough to spark war on Iran."We know you well, you are too vulnerable, you have no depth and no backyard, you are the size of our Beit-ul-Moqaddas operations (during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war), any point in the land under your occupation is a cross point of fire from North and from West, and this is a new phenomenon. You have no way out to escape and you are living in dragon mouth," General Salami said on Friday, addressing the Zionists."You may not stand to the domino of occupation when your soldiers and citizens start escaping; you have no way out to escape, but swimming in the sea. Don't trust your airbases, they are within reach and they will become idle soon," he added.General Salami advised the Tel Aviv regime not to pin hope on the US, Britain and France, and said, "You are gone when they arrive there like an ambulance sent to a dead man that can only take him to the graveyard; then, behave yourselves and avoid doing dangerous calculations." Builder of the Adytum

Enemy of the State

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 05:59 PM



Posts: 6,633









Post: #2 RE: Iran Ready to Crush Israel - Had Enough

In the end, the shoe will be on the other foot.





You are a fool. Fu King

Registered User

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 06:06 PM



Posts: 3,345









Post: #3 RE: Iran Ready to Crush Israel - Had Enough

"THIS IS THE REAL ENEMY, THIS INVADER FROM THE EAST, THE DRUZE, THE RUFFIAN, THE PARASITE; IN A WORD: THE JEW"



GEORGE BERNARD SHAW "THE LONDON MORNING POST"

DEC. 3, 1925 Lakeofmarch

~Shemhazai, Key and Guardian of the Gate

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 06:07 PM



Posts: 17,770









Post: #4 RE: Iran Ready to Crush Israel - Had Enough





They, too, will drink the wine of God's fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of his wrath.







They, too, will drink the wine of God's fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of his wrath.

https://terebess.hu/english/tao/wu.html

https://het-report.nl/



NS "Snow Crash", CC "Eagle's Gift"

Son Calenda/Fudo Myoo

https://secretsun.blogspot.com

Axte Incal, Axtuce Mun

-NO8DO-

The Great Tao is universal like a flood. How can it be turned to the right or to the left?NS "Snow Crash", CC "Eagle's Gift"Son Calenda/Fudo MyooAxte Incal, Axtuce Mun-NO8DO- LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 06:15 PM











Post: #5 RE: Iran Ready to Crush Israel - Had Enough

Welp Syria will no doubt get their asses bombed again tonight. Thanks Iran. Natura Naturans

Registered User

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 06:19 PM



Posts: 13,155









Post: #6 RE: Iran Ready to Crush Israel - Had Enough

Israel would collapse if all the countries that surround it attacked. They all hate Israel and would pounce on Israel at the first opportunity. The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free. --Baruch Spinoza Builder of the Adytum

Enemy of the State

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 06:20 PM



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Post: #7 RE: Iran Ready to Crush Israel - Had Enough

LoP Guest Wrote: (04-20-2018 06:15 PM) Welp Syria will no doubt get their asses bombed again tonight. Thanks Iran.

Yup.



Count on it. Yup.Count on it. Builder of the Adytum

Enemy of the State

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 06:21 PM



Posts: 6,633









Post: #8 RE: Iran Ready to Crush Israel - Had Enough

Natura Naturans Wrote: (04-20-2018 06:19 PM) Israel would collapse if all the countries that surround it attacked. They all hate Israel and would pounce on Israel at the first opportunity.

Egypt and Jordan don't have any such hard-on for Israel.





Truthfully, neither does Syria or Lebanon -- but they have made some very bad friends. (Iran/Hizbollah). Egypt and Jordan don't have any such hard-on for Israel.Truthfully, neither does Syria or Lebanon -- but they have made some very bad friends. (Iran/Hizbollah). LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 08:13 PM











Post: #9 RE: Iran Ready to Crush Israel - Had Enough

The chosen are paranoid fks, and because of their paranoia, they will eventually be the making of their own demise. Which is not a bad thing. Luvapottamus

Registered User

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 08:14 PM



Posts: 32,054









Post: #10 RE: Iran Ready to Crush Israel - Had Enough

LoP Guest Wrote: (04-20-2018 06:15 PM) Welp Syria will no doubt get their asses bombed again tonight. Thanks Iran.

Nothing I write is unlicensed medical or legal advice. Do your own research, and challenge me if something I write seems wrong. That makes the discussion better. Seek licensed professionals for professional advice. Be choosy. Vet them too. Ask them questions when they seem full of sh*t. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 08:15 PM











Post: #11 RE: Iran Ready to Crush Israel - Had Enough

The Ghost of David Carradine Wrote: (04-20-2018 05:59 PM) In the end, the shoe will be on the other foot.





You are a fool.

Go shrink with yur spaceshuttle Go shrink with yur spaceshuttle Damrod

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 08:16 PM











Post: #12 RE: Iran Ready to Crush Israel - Had Enough

Persia was one of the only countries in the ancient world that allowed conquered regions to maintain their sociological structure.



Persia is not your enemy.



Authoritarianism/statism is your enemy. Lakeofmarch

~Shemhazai, Key and Guardian of the Gate

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 08:20 PM



Posts: 17,770









Post: #13 RE: Iran Ready to Crush Israel - Had Enough

LoP Guest Wrote: (04-20-2018 08:13 PM) The chosen are paranoid fks, and because of their paranoia, they will eventually be the making of their own demise. Which is not a bad thing.





A la Moses, you know. Selected to lead, yes, but their ways are beyond justification, no matter the end, and they took the easy path for centuries instead of shoulder to shoulder with others. They will do their best/worst and then watch everyone else march in from the mountain. A la Moses, you know. Selected to lead, yes, but their ways are beyond justification, no matter the end, and they took the easy path for centuries instead of shoulder to shoulder with others. They will do their best/worst and then watch everyone else march in from the mountain.

https://terebess.hu/english/tao/wu.html

https://het-report.nl/



NS "Snow Crash", CC "Eagle's Gift"

Son Calenda/Fudo Myoo

https://secretsun.blogspot.com

Axte Incal, Axtuce Mun

-NO8DO-

The Great Tao is universal like a flood. How can it be turned to the right or to the left?NS "Snow Crash", CC "Eagle's Gift"Son Calenda/Fudo MyooAxte Incal, Axtuce Mun-NO8DO- (This post was last modified: 04-20-2018 08:27 PM by Lakeofmarch .) LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 08:21 PM











Post: #14 RE: Iran Ready to Crush Israel - Had Enough

The Ghost of David Carradine Wrote: (04-20-2018 06:20 PM) LoP Guest Wrote: (04-20-2018 06:15 PM) Welp Syria will no doubt get their asses bombed again tonight. Thanks Iran.

Yup.



Count on it.

Syria will soon have the S300.. if not now. Israel will fall if it attacks.. and there will be no one there to help it.



Just watch..





Syria will soon have the S300.. if not now. Israel will fall if it attacks.. and there will be no one there to help it.Just watch.. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

04-20-2018 08:23 PM











Post: #15 RE: Iran Ready to Crush Israel - Had Enough

LoP Guest Wrote: (04-20-2018 08:13 PM) The chosen are paranoid fks, and because of their paranoia, they will eventually be the making of their own demise. Which is not a bad thing.

If Israel attacks then hopefully it is neutralized so it can not attack again.



Incentive not to warmonger..







If Israel attacks then hopefully it is neutralized so it can not attack again.Incentive not to warmonger.. Advertisement


















Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has suggested that Moscow might supply high-precision S-300 air-defense missiles to its ally Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the wake of Western air strikes.

In an interview with state news agency RIA published on April 20, Lavrov said that Russia had refrained from supplying Assad's government with S-300s in the past because Western countries had urged it not to do so.

"We had a moral obligation, we promised [not to supply S-300 missiles to Assad] about 10 years ago," Lavrov said. "Although they are used purely for defense, we met the requests. Now we no longer have this moral obligation."

The United States, Britain, and France fired more than 100 missiles at Syrian facilities on April 14 in response to what Western officials say was a chemical attack that killed dozens of civilians in the town of Douma, outside Damascus.

In the interview, Lavrov also said that Russia had told U.S. officials ahead of the strikes which parts of Syria were "red lines" for Moscow, and that the strikes did not cross those lines.

U.S. officials have said they used military communication lines with Russia to clear airspace before the strikes, but did not inform Moscow of the targets in advance.

Lavrov also said that he was confident that Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump would not allow an armed confrontation between their two countries.

With reporting by RIA and Reuters
President Klaus Iohannis has sharply criticized plans announced by the head of Romania's ruling party to move the country's embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Iohannis had "not been consulted or informed over this process," his office said in an April 20 statement.

Liviu Dragnea, the head of the ruling Social Democratic Party (PSD), told a local television channel on April 19 that "the decision has been made" and that "procedures [for the move] have started."

Iohannis said the decision was "not based on firm, wide-ranging evaluations."

Prime Minister Viorica Dancila has not officially confirmed the news. However, Dragnea has been the party's key decision maker since it won a 2016 election, despite being barred from leading the government due to a previous suspended prison sentence for electoral fraud.

Iohannis said the authority to "make decisions relating to Romania's foreign policy" belongs to him.

"At this stage a transfer of the embassy would represent a violation of international law," Iohannis said.



U.S. President Donald Trump sparked controversy in December by announcing that the United States would move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

Romania would be the first EU country to follow suit.

Palestinians want East Jerusalem to be the capital of their future state. Israel has annexed East Jerusalem and declared the entire city as its capital, a move not recognized by the international community.



Based on reporting by AFP and The Jerusalem Post

*CORRECTION: A previous version of this story contained a photo incorrectly identified as Romanian President Klaus Iohannis
YEREVAN -- More than 180 people were detained in the Armenian capital, authorities said, as police tried to stop opposition supporters from blocking streets in protest against the election of former President Serzh Sarkisian as prime minister.

Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of the capital for an eighth straight day on April 20, opposing what they say is Sarkisian's attempt to maintain his grip on power after his 10-year stint as president ended two weeks ago.

WATCH: Live Stream from RFE/RL's Armenian Service in Yerevan

Rallies continued in the evening with thousands of opposition supporters gathered in Yerevans central Republic Square.

Opposition lawmaker Ararat Mirzoyan told the gathering that government officials have been offering dialogue with the opposition in recent days.

Addressing the rally, opposition lawmaker Nikol Pashinian, who is leading the protests, called for Sarkisians resignation as prime minister. He said it was too late for dialogue with the government.

Now its late for dialoguebut it does not mean that we are not ready to have any discussion. We, of course, are ready to discuss the terms [dates] of Serzh Sarkisians resignation and certain conditions in that regard, Pashinian said, adding the opposition doesnt want vendettas and revenge.

If Serzh Sarkisian resigns as soon as possible, it will only be beneficial for himself and for the Republic of Armenia, he said.

Earlier, opposition lawmaker Ararat Mirzoyan told the gathering that government officials have been offering dialogue with the opposition in recent days.

We are ready to have dialogue with them only on one issue: the capitulation of Serzh Sarkisian and the [ruling] Republican Party of Armenia, he said.

During the day, Pashinian marched through downtown Yerevan in a crowd of demonstrators, while other protesters gathered at several sites.

Dozens of Yerevan streets and several major roads connecting regional cities to the capital have been blocked by crowds of protesters. In some cases, police abandoned the streets and protesters were regulating traffic themselves.

Truck drivers also joined the protesters, blocking three intersections with their vehicles.

Protesters also rallied in Armenia's second largest city, Gyumri, where they attempted to block a highway leading to Yerevan, and in Vanadzor, the third largest city in the country of about 3 million people.

Police warned in a statement that they would resort to adequate measures, up to using special means if needed.

The number of those detained grew steadily throughout the day, according to figures relased periodically by the national police.

"As of 3:30 p.m. local time, 183 people have been taken to police stations," police spokesman Ashot Agaronian told the media.

PHOTO GALLERY: Eighth Day Of Armenia Protests by Amos Chapple (click to view)

Video footage showed men in plainclothes shoving protesters in unmarked cars. It was unclear whether they were police officers and whether those they apprehended were counted among those officially detained.

In an interview with Current Time TV, Pashinian rejected the accusation that protesters were committing offenses against public order.

"This is a completely peaceful [protest], but there is a new element to it," Pashinian told Current Time, a project of RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA, as he marched in a crowd.

"We are calling on the police not to protect Serzh Sarkisian, because they are not Serzh Sarkisians police, but the police of the Republic of Armenia and its people," he said.

Sarkisian wants to "see Armenia either through barbed wire or through the slots in riot shields," Pashinian said, suggesting that the longtime leader is hiding behind the police.

WATCH: Thousands In The Streets Of Yerevan As Protests Continue (natural sound)

Throughout the city, groups of young activists, students, and other opposition supporters organized marches and blocked streets, interrupting traffic, and forcing police to respond by deploying units in various parts of Yerevan.

Mikayel Ghukasian, a 23-year-old student from Yerevan State University, told RFE/RL that the Armenian people want changes.

People come here because they are unhappy about the situation in the country, unhappy about the developments in the country over the past 10 years, and do not want the country to continue in the same direction, he said. People want changes and they want the government to hear their voice and make good on its promises.

Another protester, Mikayel Nazarian, said that he has seen protesters with a wide range of social and political backgrounds.

The uniqueness of [these protests] is that everyone is here  rightists, leftists, centrists. From anarchists to nationalists  all are here. This is a situation when a conservative society and a more progressive society or, putting it more bluntly, traditionalists and LGBT community people can sit together in one place, Nazarian said. "This already means that there is a great change in this society."

Tirayr Muradian, a journalist working for the Sut.am website of the Union of Informed Citizens nongovernmental organization, was forcefully removed on April 20 from a site of protest on Yerevan-Sevan highway, where he says he was covering the event.

Authorities have been warning members of the media to stay at a reasonable distance from the sites where police are carrying out their lawful actions.

What appeared to be plainclothes policemen shoved Muradian in a car and drove him away from the protest site before letting him go.

A day earlier, Muradian was beaten up by unknown men and hospitalized with head injuries while covering the protests near the government building, despite identifying himself as a journalist.

President Armen Sarkisian -- who is not related to Serzh Sarkisian -- called for dialogue on April 19 after a full day of scuffles between protesters and riot police which resulted in some 120 demonstrators being detained in downtown Yerevan.

The protesters' actions apparently forced Serzh Sarkisian to put off his first cabinet meeting for several hours, prompting President Sarkisian to call for dialogue.

"I'm confident that the only solution is a dialogue and mutual respect," Armen Sarkisian said in a statement on April 19.

"As a leader of the country, I'm calling on the sides to hold a dialogue in order to find the best solution in the current situation," added the president, who is not related to Serzh Sarkisian.

PHOTO GALLERY by RFE/RL's Amos Chapple: Police break up protest

Serzh Sarkisians junior coalition partner, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun) factions, on April 19 urged Armenias leading political groups to try to jointly find solutions to end stalemate.

The United States urged both sides to exercise restraint and avoid violence, and Russia said that laws should not be broken.

In Warsaw, Ingibjorg Solrun Gisladottir, director of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), urged the Armenian authorities to protect and ensure the right to freedom of peaceful assembly in the country.

She also expressed concern over reported instances of the disproportionate use of force by Armenian police against peaceful protesters, including minors, as well as indiscriminate arrests in Yerevan and other cities.

The protests erupted on April 13 after parliament voted in Sarkisian as prime minister, consolidating his continued dominance of power after a decade as president.

On April 17, eight days after his presidency ended and his handpicked successor was elected president by parliament, Serzh Sarkisian was voted prime minister in a 76-17 vote.

Sarkisian was first elected in 2008 in the South Caucasus country of about 3 million people and served two terms. He has maintained warm ties with Russia, which Armenia relies on for aid and investment more than a quarter-century after the Soviet collapse.

In 2015, Armenia held a referendum to change its form of government and hand more powers to the prime minister, downgrading the president -- now also elected by parliament -- to more of a figurehead. Sarkisian had promised in the past that would not seek to be prime minister, and Pashinian and other opposition leaders accuse him of breaking that pledge.

Sarkisian, in a speech to the lawmakers ahead of the April 17 vote, claimed that if someone else were to become prime minister, it could lead to the appearance of a shadow government situation in which the ruling party leader governs de facto, instead of the prime minister, but is able to evade responsibility for developments in the country.

With reporting by AP, Reuters, and AFP
The world will most likely never know the precise origins of the deadly nerve agent used to poison former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in the English city of Salisbury last month, says a former Russian chemical engineer who worked on developing the Novichok family of poisons.

"Imagine that you have the corpse of a murder victim," chemist Vladimir Uglyov told Current Time TV, the Russian-language network run by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA. "The criminal has left clues, including fingerprints. But you don't have those fingerprints in your database. That means you can only identify the killer if you catch him."

The source of the poison used in the Skripal case, Uglyov said, is almost certainly "some beaker standing in some safe in some city in some country."

British officials and allied governments have blamed Moscow for the March 4 poisoning of the Skripals, which has prompted sanctions and diplomatic expulsions and threatens to further harm relations between Russia and the West. Moscow has maintained its innocence.

Although Uglyov believes U.K. authorities' assertion that a nerve agent called A-234 was used against the Skripals, he said he is puzzled by the lack of the basic symptoms of A-234 poisoning -- uncontrollable urination and defecation. Such symptoms, he said, should appear if a person is exposed to something approaching half the median lethal dose.

"Maybe the dose was too small, as happened to me," he said.

Uglyov described working in the secret Russian chemical-weapons laboratory in the closed town of Shikhany in Saratov Oblast in the 1990s when the back of his hand was exposed to a small amount of a related substance, A-242. Unlike A-234, A-242 is a granular solid.

"For me, there was a lesion on the back side of my hand that lasted for five or six years," Uglyov said. "Of course, I was afraid because I knew....I was saved only because it was A-242, which crystallized almost immediately.... I didn't have any other symptoms."

Uglyov said that when he realized he'd been exposed, he soaked his hand in a solution of hydrochloric acid and then rinsed it with hydrogen peroxide.

"Then I just washed it with soap and water," he said.

In the Skripal case, British media have reported the nerve agent was used in the form of a gel. Uglyov told Current Time that Novichok normally has a low viscosity, only slightly thicker than water. Adding a "thickening agent" would make it adhere longer to a surface -- such as a doorknob, as has been theorized -- without evaporating, he said.

"The degree of infectiousness is higher in the pure substance than in its gel form," he said. "The gel form would likely penetrate the skin worse, because it has some sort of internal structural network, in a manner of speaking."

"Most likely, the father [Sergei Skripal] touched the door handle first," Uglyov speculated. "The daughter [Yulia] probably didn't touch the door handle herself but probably either brushed it lightly or he touched her with his [exposed] hand. It would appear that he was the primary source and the daughter had secondary exposure. Maybe that's what happened."

Uglyov expressed his certainty that Novichok was used in the unsolved 1995 killing in Moscow of banker Ivan Kivelidi and his secretary, Zara Ismailova. They both died after being exposed to an unknown nerve toxin that had been placed on the mouthpiece of Kivelidi's office telephone.

"When Kivelidi was poisoned, my guardian angel from the KGB or the FSB -- at that time, the KGB already no longer existed and the FSB (Russian Federal Security Service) hadn't really been created -- approached me," Uglyov said. "This colonel had been contacting me over the previous two or three years. As soon as Kivelidi was poisoned, he questioned me. He said, 'We have identified this substance, Vladimir Ivanovich; you made it.'"

Uglyov told the BBC recently that "the logic of events suggests it was Russia" that poisoned the Skripals, "as does the way our leaders reacted."

Officials in Moscow and other Russian sources have variously sought to parry the British accusation of Russian state involvement in the Skripals' poisoning, including saying neither Russia nor the Soviet Union conducted any research "under the direct or code name of Novichok," that countries including Great Britain, the Czech Republic, or Sweden could be sources of Novichok, and with Russian President Vladimir Putin suggesting that Russia has "no such" weapon and that any military-grade nerve agent would have killed the Skripals on the spot.

Speaking to Current Time TV, Uglyov rejected the claims by fellow Russian chemical-weapons engineer Vil Mirzayanov that as much as 10 tons of Novichok was produced at various labs, including in Uzbekistan. Uglyov said the conditions for producing Novichok do not exist in that post-Soviet republic or even in other laboratories in Russia.

"I would estimate that we produced no more than 100 or 200 kilograms of all types [of Novichok] -- A-230, -232, -234, and -242," he said. "Not more than 200 kilograms altogether. And no one else was producing it. Not in Volgograd and especially not, as Mirzayanov has written, somewhere in Uzbekistan."

Yulia Skripal has been released from the hospital and, while doctors have upgraded his condition from "critical," Sergei Skripal remains in a Salisbury hospital.

British officials have said Russian agencies spied for years on the Skripals, and U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has suggested Moscow sees covert operations like the poisoning as a way to divide the West over who is responsible.
Editor's Note: To receive The Week In Russia each week via e-mail, subscribe to RFE/RL's Russia Report by clicking here.

Russia sought to shut down Telegram, stood by as Western air strikes targeted its Syrian ally, and avoided a fresh volley of U.S. sanctions -- for now -- while holding off on its own retaliation to punitive measures for its "malign activity around the globe."

Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week, and some of the takeaways going forward.

Syria And Salisbury

Russia became a chemical-weapons hero in 2013, at least to some, when it forged a deal with the United States to rid Syria of its stockpiles, averting the prospect of U.S. air strikes. Five years later Moscow stands closer to zero on that score, accused of poisoning a former spy and his daughter with a deadly nerve agent in England and seeking to cover up what Western states say was a Syrian government chemical attack that killed dozens of civilians in Douma, outside Damascus.

"Moscow is willing to accept and impose catastrophic human costs" to achieve its goals in Syria, Assistant Secretary of State Wess Mitchell told U.S. lawmakers on April 18.

But the direct costs for Moscow over the past week were lower than President Vladimir Putin might have expected after U.S. President Donald Trump, in a tweet on April 11, accused Russia of partnering with a "Gas Killing Animal" and warned it should "get ready" because missiles "will be coming" to Syria.

Struggling to blame Washington in advance for any military confrontation between the nuclear-armed Cold War foes, several Russian officials compared the situation to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The missiles did come, but World War III did not. U.S., British, and French forces chose their targets carefully and the Russian air-defense systems protecting Russian facilities held their fire despite chilling but informal warnings -- never quite backed up by the Kremlin -- that any U.S. missiles fired at Syria would be shot down and the launch sites targeted.

Pinpoint Strikes

For Putin, the outcome could not have been much better. While there was grumbling from hard-line nationalists at home over the lack of a Russian response, the limited nature of the Western air strikes enabled him to avoid openly betraying Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, which analysts say he fears would harm his projected image as a strong and reliable partner against U.S. hegemony despite widespread disdain for the Syrian president. More important, the strikes seem to have done little to set back some of Russia's main goals: maintaining a strong foothold in Syria and influence in Middle East.

British Prime Minister Theresa May said the Western strikes were "not about regime change" or changing the course of the war in Syria, and there has been no sign they would have such an effect. That leaves Assad firmly in place and Russia with no less power to influence an eventual Syrian "endgame" -- on the battlefield or in talks -- than it had before.

The Douma attack has done further damage to Russia's reputation, however. Accused of failing to make Syria destroy its chemical weapons and then seeking to cover up the carnage in Douma, Russia has doubled down. It denies the government conducted a chemical attack and has made elaborate claims that what occurred was "provocation" possibly staged by Britain -- including an assertion that Syrian troops found smoke grenades from the English city of Salisbury in eastern Ghouta, the area that includes Douma.

Russia's claims about Douma echo the wide-ranging theories it has publicized about the nerve-agent attack in Salisbury on former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, which Britain and its allies blame on Moscow. In a development that deepened concerns about the credibility and intent of such statements, the head of the Organization for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) flatly rejected Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov's claims that traces of a second substance -- BZ -- were discovered in the English city.

But Russia has seemed impervious to criticism over such claims since it muddied the waters by supporting outlandish assertions about events in the war in eastern Ukraine, such as the downing of a passenger jet that killed all 298 people aboard in July 2014.

And for the time being, Putin can smile at the mixed signals coming from the United States over potential new sanctions. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, said on April 15 that sanctions over Moscow's backing from Assad would be announced the next day. They were not, and Trump's top economic adviser said on April 17 that Haley "got ahead of the curve." White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said a decision on new sanctions against Russia would be made "in the near future," but Trump was less specific on April 18, "There will be sanctions as soon as they very much deserve it."

It's unclear when that might be. And with Trump hesitating on additional sanctions, Putin also appears to be pulling his punches.

Delayed Reaction

With Moscow still gauging the damage from U.S. sanctions imposed on tycoons, politicians, and security officials close to Putin on April 6, Russian lawmakers on April 13 proposed legislation that would enable his government to retaliate by banning or restricting the import of wide range of U.S. goods and services. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said on April 16 that Russia would "not delay in adopting legislation" to counter the U.S. sanctions -- but the State Duma did just that the same day, scheduling the first reading of the bill for May 15. That seems like ages away.

That sluggish timeframe suggests Putin may be holding out hope for an end to the downward spiral in U.S. ties and the start of a thaw. In an April 18 report citing four unnamed sources, Bloomberg News said that Putin wants to give Trump "another chance to make good on pledges to improve ties and avoid escalation." One of the sources "said the Kremlin has ordered officials to curb their anti-U.S. rhetoric," the report said.

As if on cue, the Trump administration has now set out its conditions for a thaw.

Days after taking up his post as Trump's new national security adviser, John Bolton told Russian Ambassador Anatoly Antonov that Moscow must address U.S. concerns on election meddling, the "reckless" nerve-agent attack in Britain, and the situations in Ukraine and Syria before relations can substantially improve, the White House said on April 19.

Russia won't like those conditions, as its aggressive rhetoric and adamant denials of wrongdoing on each of those four points makes clear. But Putin will like the statement of interest in better ties and may see even the demands -- as well as the meeting itself -- as a welcome sign of engagement by the United States.

Another sign: In the first such meeting since 2013, the chief of the Russian armed forces general staff held talks with the U.S. general who is NATO's top commander on April 19, in Baku.

Throughout his years in power, both before and after he sent Russia's relations with the West into tailspin by seizing Crimea and backing armed separatists in eastern Ukraine, one of Putin's overarching goals has been to ensure that Moscow has a prominent place in the world stage and as strong a say as possible.

Amid sanctions, diplomatic expulsions, and an onslaught of vehement criticism from the West, Putin may see the meeting between Russian General Valery Gerasimov and U.S. General Curtis Scaparrotti as one of several recent signs in recent days that Moscow will not be entirely shut out -- or shut up.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel signaled potential trouble for the prospects of Russia's Nord Stream II gas pipeline project, and said after a phone call with Putin on April 17 that Russia bears "joint responsibility" for the Douma attack. But she added that "it is nevertheless important to keep talking to Russia."

French President Emmanuel Macron, meanwhile, was quoted as saying on April 15 that he has not abandoned plans to travel in May to St. Petersburg, where Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov earlier said he would be the guest of honor at an annual economic forum hosted by Putin.

Where's That Invite?

There was still no new word about the big prize for Putin: a meeting with Trump, who courted controversy by congratulating the long-ruling Russian president on his reelection in a March 20 telephone call and told reporters the two would "probably get together in the not-too-distant future."

In a sign that Russia is eager to firm up plans for a meeting, Lavrov said in an interview published on April 20 that during that call, Trump said he would be glad to see Putin in the White House and would be happy to make a reciprocal visit to Russia.

"He returned to this topic a couple of times, so we have let our American colleagues know that...considering that President Trump made this proposal, we proceed from the position that he will make it concrete," he said.

At the same time, Lavrov also said that Russia would not offer to host a meeting between Trump and North Korea leader Kim Jong Un.

It would be a blow to Putin's pride -- and Russia's geopolitical standing -- if Trump were to meet with Kim before he meets again with Putin, whom he last saw in person at a G20 meeting in Germany in July 2017. Trump said on April 17 that he hopes to meet with Kim in the next two months and that five locations are under consideration. 

'Whack-A-Mole'

U.S. officials have suggested that the air strikes on Syrian facilities were carefully targeted pinpoint strikes. Russia's effort to shut down Telegram -- not so much.

State communications regulator Roskomnadzor ordered Internet service providers on April 16 to block the popular messaging app over its refusal to provide the Federal Security Service (FSB) the encryption keys that would unlock correspondence on Telegram. In starker terms, the KGB's successor wants to read Russians' mail, and the state moved to shut down the postal system when it refused.

What ensued was a virtual chase in which Roskomnadzor blocked millions of IP addresses in what media outlet Meduza described as "basically a game of whack-a-mole" -- the instant you whack one with a hammer, another pops up somewhere else.

Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, warned users not to "play hide-and-seek" and try to get around the ban, and said the Kremlin -- which used Telegram to schedule Peskov's media conference calls, among other things -- would find another messenger.

But days later, media reports said that several senior officials and lawmakers were still using it and that some -- including Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova and German Klimenko, Putin's adviser on Internet development -- have lashed out at Roskomnadzor over its actions. And as of April 18 the Investigative Committee -- a top Russian law enforcement agency whose head answers to Putin -- was still using Telegram, in at least some cases, for routine statements to the media.

The effort to block Telegram also prompted a unique and colorful protest in which activists -- among them Maria Alyokhina of the punk protest group Pussy Riot -- threw paper airplanes at the headquarters of the FSB on Moscow's Lubyanka Square. At a hearing in which the judge seemed hard-pressed to stifle a laugh, Alyokhina was ordered to perform 100 hours of community service for violating legislation on public assembly.

In the court of public opinion, meanwhile, the verdict on Russia's bid to block Telegram was severe. "A complete and utter fiasco," journalist Aleksei Kovalyov tweeted. But he added that "at least there's good news: Russia is already so globalized and internet dependent that it really can't afford to become a pariah."

'Raped, Tortured, Killed'

The campaign to close down Telegram on Russian soil is particularly notable because its defiant CEO, Pavel Durov, is a 33-year-old Russian whizz-kid who left the country in 2014 after he was forced to sell his stake in another popular social network, VKontakte, amid pressure from the authorities.

Putin's critics say that his government undermines its own stated goal of making Russian flourish by failing to nurture home-grown talent.

Ironically, perhaps, Russian authorities chose this week to unveil a campaign to persuade Russian studying at universities abroad to come home. The Highly Likely Welcome Home campaign comes at a time when relations with Britain -- a popular destination for Russians seeking education abroad -- are severely strained by the poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in England last month.

Judging by the responses of several Russian students in England, the campaign -- whose name is a trolling play on British Prime Minister Theresa May's statement that it is "highly likely" that Russia was responsible for the attack -- is highly likely to fall flat.

"I am not considering going back to Russia under this proposal. I don't feel any negativity here." Timur Khairov, who is studying machine building at the University of Bath, told RFE/RL's Siberia Desk.

In another development that might make a bright young Russian think twice, the newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported on April 16 that an entrepreneur colleagues called a "Russian Elon Musk" was tortured, raped, and killed in a pretrial detention center in St. Petersburg, where he was found hanging in his cell in February.

Somewhat like Sergei Magnitsky, the whistleblower who died in a Moscow jail in 2009 after being accused of fraud by the same people he claimed stole $230 million from the state, Valery Pshenichny was put behind bars after a former business partner he accused of theft managed to turn the tables on him at trial.

According to Novaya Gazeta, forensics experts ruled out suicide and said Pshenichny's spine was broken, lacerations and stab wounds were found on his body, and electric shock burns from a water-boiler cord were found in his mouth.

A lawyer told the Independent newspaper that when investigators came to Pshenichny's home in January, they told him "to take a good look at his suits."

"He was told he wouldnt need them anymore, save for his coffin," the lawyer said.
Photos by RFE/RL's Amos Chapple YEREVAN -- Grizzled opposition veterans might be running the show, but there are lots of young people protesting what they see as an illegitimate power grab by former Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian. While 42-year-old opposition lawmaker Nikol Pashinian, usually clutching a megaphone, has been the gray-bearded face on the front lines of the demonstrations, younger Armenians have provided the backbone among the crowds of thousands this week calling for the resignation of now-Prime Minister Sarkisian. They also figure prominently among the hundreds of arrests so far in the capital and two other major cities, Gyumri and Vanadzor.

This is a generation who wants to see change in Armenia and is fed up with being ruled by the same faces and the same party. They have passion and principles, Thomas de Waal, a senior fellow with Carnegie Europe who specializes in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus region, told RFE/RL. Protests erupted on April 13 with lawmakers poised to vote in Sarkisian, a 63-year-old former military officer, as prime minister, consolidating his dominance after a decade as president of the former Soviet republic of around 3 million people. The specter of Sarkisian's tactic pushed groups of young activists, students, and other opposition supporters to organize marches and block streets. Still, on April 17, eight days after his handpicked presidential successor was elected by parliament, Sarkisian was voted prime minister in a 76-17 vote. Term limits meant he could not run again, but constitutional changes approved through a 2015 referendum made the prime ministers position more powerful at the expense of the president, opening up an avenue for Sarkisian to retain power.

We have joined the protests for our rights, for our future, said 25-year-old student Mikayel Nazarian, whose picture with another protester, Ani Hakobjanian, while in a romantic embrace against a backdrop of razor wire went viral on social media. I think this student awakening is the strongest prerequisite for the formation of civil society, and I think it will lead to serious changes both inside the education sector and beyond for students as citizens and parents he added. The push to remove Sarkisian from power appears similar to the "Electric Yerevan" protests that erupted in 2015 against a steep hike in energy prices and shady privatization plans. Those demonstrations were also led by youth groups organized under the name No To Plunder. They wanted the government to scrap a planned 17 percent increase in the price of electricity, a goal that was partially achieved.

While there were no official estimates on the demographics of the current protests, video and photographs appear to show the majority of those on the streets are students and younger Armenians looking to break down barriers. I can see young people, a post-independence generation, who are ready to rise up. This spirit must be maintained. It must not be broken, Armen Rustamyan, a member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation Bureau and the partys parliamentary bloc, told RFE/RL.

The new generation is speaking up and speaking out. If the new government is honest about making changes for the advancement of Armenia, they must not allow the youths spirit to be broken and they must not shatter the aspirations of the independence generation. Protest leader Pashinian has called for the start of a national velvet revolution, a reference to the nonviolent political transition in Czechoslovakia from communism to a Western-style democracy at the end of 1989. That revolution was sparked by student protests on the streets of Prague that turned violent and brought the rest of the nation out in support. People are unhappy about the situation in the country, unhappy about the developments in the country during the past 10 years and do not want the country to continue in the same direction, said 23-year-old Mikayel Ghukasian, a student at Yerevan State University.
A new U.S. State Department report has labeled the governments of Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea as "morally reprehensible" with human rights violations on a daily basis, making them "forces of instability."

While releasing the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2017, an annual examination of human rights practices of nearly 200 countries, acting Secretary of State John Sullivan said on April 20 that while some governments are not able to maintain security and meet the basic needs of their people, others "are simply unwilling."

"States that restrict freedoms of expression and peaceful assembly; that allow and commit violence against members of religious, ethnic, and other minority groups; or that undermine the fundamental dignity of persons are morally reprehensible and undermine our interests," he said.

"The governments of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, for example, violate the human rights of those within their borders on a daily basis and are forces of instability as a result."

The report sharply chided Moscow in the Russia section of the report, saying it continues to arm, train, lead, and fight alongside pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine and that human rights in Russia continue to be "significantly and negatively" affected by Moscow's "purported annexation" of Ukraine's Crimea Peninsula and its support for separatist fighters in eastern Ukraine.

The harsh words for Russia contrast with U.S. President Donald Trump's largely conciliatory rhetoric toward Moscow and his reluctance to speak publicly about human rights concerns, either in Russia or elsewhere in the world.

Authorities also conducted politically motivated arrests, detentions, and trials of Ukrainian citizens in Russia, many of whom claimed to have been tortured. Human rights groups asserted that numerous Ukrainian citizens remained in Russia as political prisoners, the report said.

The report also chides the government for failing to take adequate steps to prosecute or punish most officials who committed abuses, resulting in a climate of impunity.

Russia illegally annexed Ukraines Crimean Peninsula in March 2014 and continues to back separatists in eastern Ukraine in a conflict that has killed more than 10,300 people since April 2014.

The report says that the conflict in the North Caucasus between government forces, insurgents, Islamist militants, and criminals has led to numerous abuses of human rights, including killings, torture, physical abuse, politically motivated abductions, and a general degradation in the rule of law.

Ramzan Kadyrovs government in Chechnya committed abuses with impunity. Virtually none of these abuses was credibly investigated or prosecuted by either the federal government or local Chechen authorities, it said.

On the Kyiv government, the U.S. State Department report says civilian authorities generally maintained effective control over security forces in the territory controlled by the government, but that it generally failed to take adequate steps to prosecute or punish most officials who committed abuses, resulting in a climate of impunity.

Human rights groups and the United Nations noted significant deficiencies in investigations into human rights abuses committed by government security forces, in particular into allegations of torture, enforced disappearances, arbitrary detention, and other abuses reportedly perpetrated by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), the report said.

Investigations into alleged human rights abuses related to Russias occupation of Crimea and the continuing aggression in the Donbas region remained incomplete due to lack of government control in those territories and the refusal of Russia and Russia-led forces to investigate abuse allegations, it added.

The report said Irans theocratic government was responsible for a high number of executions for crimes not meeting the international legal standard of most serious crimes and without fair trials of individuals.

It also accused Iran of torture, jailing of dissidents, severe restrictions on freedom of the press, gays, and religious minorities.

The country materially contributed to human rights abuses in Syria, through its military support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and for Hizballah forces there, as well as in Iraq, through its aid to certain Iraqi Shi'a militia groups, it added.

The State Department report does not include comparisons or rankings of the countries that it studied.

The report comes as Trumps nominee to be secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, is awaiting confirmation.
WASHINGTON -- The new U.S. national security adviser has told Russias U.S. ambassador that Moscow must address U.S. concerns on election meddling, the "reckless" nerve-agent attack in Britain, and the situations in Ukraine and Syria before relations can substantially improve.

A White House statement on April 19 said John Bolton, who took over from H.R. McMaster on April 9, made the remarks in a meeting with Russias ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov.

"At the first meeting between the two in their current roles, they discussed the state of the relationships between the United States and Russia," the statement said.

"Ambassador Bolton reiterated that it is in the interest of both the United States and Russia to have better relations, but that this will require addressing our concerns regarding Russia's interference in the 2016 election, the reckless use of chemical weapons in the United Kingdom, and the situations in Ukraine and Syria," it added.

Several global issues have raised tensions between Washington and Moscow despite President Donald Trumps stated goal of improving relations between the two countries.

The U.S. intelligence community has accused Russia of a widespread cyberhacking-and-propaganda campaign aimed at influencing the 2016 presidential election vote.

The United States and Europe have slapped sanctions on Russia for its 2014 annexation of Ukraines Crimea Peninsula and its support for separatists in eastern Ukraine.

The U.S. military has assailed Russia for its support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and says it holds Moscow responsible for an alleged chemical weapons attack.

Meanwhile, the United States has said it supports Britain in a dispute with Russia over the March 4 poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury. Britain has blamed Russia for the attack.

Moscow has denied it interfered in the U.S. election, said it had nothing to do with the Skripal poisonings, and claimed the allegations of a chemical attack in Syria are false.

The 69-year-old Bolton, a former UN ambassador, has served as a hawkish voice in Republican foreign-policy circles for decades. Among his more controversial stands, he has advocated for preemptive military strikes against North Korea and war with Iran.

With reporting by Reuters, Politico, and TASS
Airbnb building real estate project in Cancun Hotel Zone

Cancun, Q.R.  A Cancun real estate developer says that Airbnb is building their own luxury apartment complex in the Cancun Hotel Zone to compete with the hotel sector.

Miguel Angel Lemus Mateos reports that the vacation property platform, Airbnb, is in the process of building a 12-apartment real estate project in the Cancun Hotel Zone that will cater to luxury vacationers.

He explained that the investment is ready and construction will begin at the end of 2018. The project, Airbnb Plus, will consist of 12 apartments aimed at the luxury vacationer with nightly prices reaching as high as $1,000 USD. Each apartment will be completely furnished, offer luxury finishes and a minimum of three bedrooms.

The project of the complex is a property that will be a condo-hotel and will allow investors to acquire the development and offer it on platforms for this market segment that spends up to three times more than the average tourist, he said.

The new real estate project is set for construction in the middle of the Cancun Hotel Zone where there are already nearly 140 accommodation places, most of whom are against the vacation platform since they do not pay hotel-level taxes.

The Hotel Association of Cancun is against the platform saying they do not pay total taxes as a hotel does, and although the Secretariat of Finance and Planning imposed the Lodging Tax for the hotel sector, it is not enough for many hoteliers.

According to the Directorate of Supervision there are already more than 9,000 rooms in Benito Juarez that are rented by Airbnb that average 18,000 guests.

In April, Airbnb announced they will begin promoting Cancun and Riviera Maya in their Airbnb Experiences since the region is the second most important region for them after Mexico City.

The company also reported that Playa del Carmen, Riviera Maya was the power vacation spot during Easter, making it the reservation leader in Latin America.
The locomotive that was moving the Venice train crashed into the standing Zurich carriages for reasons that are still unknown. At least 40 people have been left injured. There are no reports of any fatalities. Most of the passengers were still sleeping, and the injuries were apparently caused by falling objects. A large number of rescue workers have been deployed at the scene, including volunteers from Red Cross. Injured people from both trains were brought to hospitals. The engine driver also needed medical assistance.

Austrian Federal Railways spokesman Robert Mosser said it is still unclear how the accident happened. Investigations are underway. The Austrian police have already arrived on the scene and sealed off the area. Residual rail disruptions are possible. Travelers are advised to confirm the status of their trains prior to departure for the train station. Salzburg Central Station is a major transportation hub in western Austria. It also forms a junction between several OBB local and long-distance transport routes. Also located at the station is one of the key hubs in the StadtBus Salzburg trolleybus system and city bus network.

This story will possibly be updated
Daughters are the most precious Gift of God, says Sajal Sheth from Cuttack, Odisha. Like any father, he loves his daughters beyond imagination. And to show that love, he has done something unique. He rode on his motorcycle all the way to her college in Jaipur, Rajasthan. And this is not the first time he is doing this. He did a similar ride back in 2013, that time he went to meet his elder daughter.

Speaking about his ride, Mr Sheth says, This time to meet my younger daughter NEHA SHETH , I rode 3630 kms on my Bajaj Pulsar 200 NS motorcycle for 6 days, covering 5 states. My ride was from Cuttack, Odisha to Jaipur, Rajasthan on my Bajaj Pulsar 200 NS motorcycle via Odisha, Jharkhand, Bihar , Uttar Pradesh & Rajasthan.

He adds  My daughter NEHA studies B.Tech (C&CE) 1st year at Manipal University Jaipur (MUJ) , Rajashthan. This ride was only to meet her. Hence I named this ride as -Ride To NEHAsthan. What a wonderful gesture. But, it was not only his ride that spread joy, it was also the message he was carrying along. And the message is  Educate Girl Child. Loud and clear.

Mr Sheth says, I feel it is very important to educate girl child, not just graduate but they should be highly educated. In this world of uncertainty only education will help her ultimately. I wanted to carry and give this message through this ride also. So I choose EDUCATE GIRL CHILD as message of this ride.

You are absolutely right Mr Sheth. We respect you for your ride, and the message you carry. Hope you carry on riding for many more kms. All the best.

#BetiBachaoBetiPadhao  Sajal Sheth.
Disclaimer  The manufacturer (TVS Motor Company) has blacklisted Rushlane from its events/rides as a consequence of decisions based on restrictive practices. This blog is reliant on available UGC and customer input.

Engineer by degree, but a biker at heart. Chennai based Poonkathirvelan Boopalan is a proud owner of the new TVS Apache 310. He is also the first Apache 310 owner to complete Golden Quadrilateral road trip. Boopalan completed the trip in 104 hours, of which 70.5 hours was ride time.

A seasoned biker, who also completed the Saddle Sore 2000k (riding 2062 kms in 24 hours) back in 2013 on his Apache 180, Boopalan completed the 5900+ Golden Quadrilateral journey in 104 hours. Of this, 70.5 hours was ride time while remaining was rest, caught up in dust storm, traffic, etc.

He adds  First apache RR310 bike in india crossing 10K, but couldnt do the best timing GQ due to unexpected dust storm, 400+Km heavy construction work at bihar and UP and never experienced a climate of 46Deg with dust. Extreme support from friends and family. My fathers eyes says I am important for him and also, my goal and dream is important for him.

Talking about his biking journey, he says  When I was 2 I started loving bikes. Moto GP is the only thing I watch all the way. After completing 12th I got govt college engineering seat in Kovai and Salem. My father slightly insisted me to take govt college but I am bold enough to go to any college in Chennai because it is where the race track is. All the time I just speak about bikes, engine, power, road, race and Ducati. Most of my college friends criticized me like anything, few call me as dacalti, I cant forget those days.

After lot of struggle I got a bike and went to track and went to get track licence and searched for protective gears, racing teams. Days are just passed with full of disappointments. My father was in the situation that he can give max 5 to 8k per month. But racing is extremely expensive that a common man to reach till top and in India it is extremely difficult. Slowly I started realizing that I cant ever compete with 46. Age has just gone but not that passion and strength. Whatever I earn thats only for my passion and bike. As of now i have owned 8 bikes and ridden more than 3 lakh Kms on Indian roads.

Just like be crazy or stupidly riding what you are gaining is the common question raised in front of me by many? As of now I dont have any answers. There is no endurance racing or message to spread, all it is there is speed.

But one thing I want to share them all is that definitely I dont gain any money but I got and will get real people around me who believes me and who cares for me. Thats the only value I gained. One day you will come for me, i believe.

During GQ solo expedition at Varanasi Gangai river bridge after crossing difficult path (Bihar) I just stopped and called Vishal to tell there was a huge dust storm and it drained my energy and extreme construction work. I couldnt complete it in 80hrs. My eyes were filled with tears.

But he just motivated and told its not your fault you have to accept the nature. Just forgot about timing and completing is more important, he said. And Venkat also told while you crossed Gaya I felt really proud of you because just few days back he went Bihar and he knows the situation. And Jothi, Vaithy, Bhakya said machi nee safe ah vaa. Vidhya spoke and got appointment for quick service at Varanasi around 12 to 2 pm but I reached there at 18:00, she continuously monitored me and updated about my arrival to the service people, so even after service center was closed they stayed and serviced my vehicle, still I donna how can I thank them.

At Bhubaneshwar strange friend gave me shelter for power nap with wishes and at Varanasi I got permission for stay at petrol bunk from old man via Vidhya ( She spoke in Hindi) , suddenly owner came and just asked about me and few minutes of talk he went and gave me cot for stay. Same happened at Kishangarh (RJ).

I am extremely grateful to people who followed and supported me throughout the journey and also to people who hates me.

India is extremely beautiful country and most of the people are awesome and helpful. I love you all, we are all Indians and humans. Only government is dividing us. Wherever i lost energy vishal will be der to boost.

Life is strength nothing else matters. Just wait for your day and keep doing what you love.
[KIGALI] African countries need to embrace circular economy to lessen waste production and pollution whilst promoting environmentally friendly and sustainable growth, experts say.

Circular economy  the concept of reducing and reusing waste  could help the continent solve environmental challenges, according to the 2nd Next Einstein Forum held in Rwanda last month (26-28 March).

Ann Therese Ndong-Jatta, director of the UNESCO Regional Office for Eastern Africa, criticised policies and regulatory frameworks in the region, saying they do not promote circular economy. For instance, used cars imported into Africa continue to pollute the environment because of low implementation of environmental standards.

This requires political will, more education and training for people to understand the importance of this [circular economy]. Ann Therese Ndong-Jatta, UNESCO Regional Office for Eastern Africa,

Ethical principles between governments and investors that consider negotiating creation of employment and protecting the environment, she added, are needed before a company starts its operations.



This requires political will, more education and training for people to understand the importance of this [circular economy], Ndong-Jatta says.

The continent, Ndong-Jatta added, needs to make sustainable use of natural resources through technology, citing the use of solar energy to light cities and villages and to increase food production.

Kathryn Toure, regional director, Sub-Saharan Africa, Canadian International Development Research Centre, explained that there is a need to find biological or natural ways of using resources that result in zero waste because waste produces almost ten per cent of global greenhouse emissions.

Tade Akin Aina, executive director of Kenya-based Partnership for African Social and Governance Research, said that schools, faith groups and governments should champion building the capacity of citizens to demand accountability in regard to promoting sustainable environment.

Investing in research that helps the local people, designing the circular economy to increase women participation, and monitoring what the companies are doing could make the difference, Toure told SciDev.Net, adding that some companies produce emissions of waste, which are harmful to peoples health and also pollute the environment.
University of Connecticut researchers have created a biodegradable composite made of silk fibers that can be used to repair broken load-bearing bones without the complications sometimes presented by other materials.

Repairing major load-bearing bones such as those in the leg can be a long and uncomfortable process.

To facilitate repair, doctors may install a metal plate to support the bone as it fuses and heals. Yet that can be problematic. Some metals leach ions into surrounding tissue, causing inflammation and irritation. Metals are also very stiff. If a metal plate bears too much load in the leg, the new bone may grow back weaker and be vulnerable to fracture.

Seeking a solution to the problem, UConn professor Mei Wei, a materials scientist and biomedical engineer, turned to spiders and moths for inspiration. In particular, Wei focused on silk fibroin, a protein found in the silk fibers spun by spiders and moths known for its toughness and tensile strength.

The medical community has been aware of silk fibroin for a while. It is a common component in medical sutures and tissue engineering because of its strength and biodegradability. Yet no one had ever tried to make a dense polymer composite out of it, and that is what Wei knew she needed if she was going to create a better device for healing broken load-bearing bones.

Working with UConn associate professor Dianyun Zhang, a mechanical engineer, Wei's lab began testing silk fibroin in various composite forms, looking for the right combination and proportion of different materials to achieve optimum strength and flexibility. The new composite certainly needed to be strong and stiff, yet not so much so that it would inhibit dense bone growth. At the same time, the composite needed to be flexible, allowing patients to retain their natural range of motion and mobility while the bone healed.

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After dozens of tests, Wei and Zhang found the materials they were looking for. The new composite consists of long silk fibers and fibers of polylactic acid -- a biodegradable thermoplastic derived from cornstarch and sugar cane -- that are dipped in a solution in which each is coated with fine bioceramic particles made of hydroxyapatite (the calcium phosphate mineral found in teeth and bones). The coated fibers are then packed in layers on a small steel frame and pressed into a dense composite bar in a hot compression mold.

In a study recently published in the Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials, Wei reports that the high-performance biodegradable composite showed strength and flexibility characteristics that are among the highest ever recorded for similar bioresorbable materials in literature.

And they could get even better.

"Our results are really high in terms of strength and flexibility, but we feel that if we can get every component to do what we want them to do, we can get even higher," says Wei, who also serves as the School of Engineering's associate dean for research and graduate education.

The new composite is also resilient. Large leg bones in adults and seniors can take many months to heal. The composite developed in Wei's lab does its job and then starts to degrade after a year. No surgery is required for removal.

Joining Wei and Zhang in the research were Bryant Heimbach, a Ph.D. candidate and materials scientist in Wei's lab; and Beril Tonyali, a UConn undergraduate pursuing a degree in materials science and engineering.

The team has already begun testing new derivatives of the composite, including those that incorporate a single crystalline form of the hydroxyapatite for greater strength and a variation of the coating mixture to maximize its mechanical properties for bones bearing more weight.
An algorithm tool developed by Purdue Polytechnic Institute faculty will help law enforcement filter out and focus on sex offenders most likely to set up face-to-face meetings with child victims.

The Chat Analysis Triage Tool (CATT) was presented last week by principal investigator Kathryn Seigfried-Spellar, assistant professor of computer and information technology, at the International Association of Law Enforcement Intelligence Analysts Conference in Anaheim, California.

Seigfried-Spellar said law enforcement officers are inundated with cases involving the sexual solicitation of minors -- some interested in sexual fantasy chats, with others intent on persuading an underage victim into a face-to-face meeting.

CATT allows the officers to work through the volume of solicitations and use algorithms to examine the word usage and conversation patterns by a suspect. Seigfried-Spellar said data was taken from online conversations provided voluntarily by law enforcement around the country.

"We went through and tried to identify language-based differences and factors like self-disclosure," she said. Self-disclosure is a tactic in which the suspect tries to develop trust by sharing a personal story, which is usually negative, such as parental abuse.

"If we can identify language differences, then the tool can identify these differences in the chats in order to give a risk assessment and a probability that this person is going to attempt face-to-face contact with the victim," Seigfried-Spellar said. "That way, officers can begin to prioritize which cases they want to put resources toward to investigate more quickly."

Other standout characteristics of sexual predators grooming victims for a face-to-face meeting is that the chats will often go on for weeks or even months until a meeting is achieved. Those involved in sexual fantasy chatting move on from one youth to another quickly.

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The project started as a result of a partnership with Ventura County Sheriff's Department in California.

Seigfried-Spellar said the research discovered tactics like self-disclosure is used early in a predator's talks with a potential victim.

"Meaning that we could potentially stop a sex offense from occurring because if law enforcement is notified of a suspicious chat quickly enough, CATT can analyze and offer the probability of a face-to-face," she said. "We could potentially prevent a child from being sexually assaulted."

Seigfried-Spellar worked in developing CATT with two co-principal investigators, associate professor Julia Taylor Rayz, who specializes in machine learning and natural language processing, and computer and information technology department head Marcus Rogers, who has an extensive background in digital forensics tool development.

CATT algorithms examine only the conversation factors and do not take the sex of either suspect or victim into consideration, at this time.

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The project began with initial research done by Seigfried-Spellar and former Purdue professor Ming Ming Chiu. The exploratory study examined more than 4,300 messages in 107 online chat sessions involving arrested sex offenders, identifying different trends in word usage and self-disclosure by fantasy and contact sex offenders using statistical discourse analysis.

The trends determined through this research formed the basis for CATT. The research, "Detecting Contact vs. Fantasy Online Sexual Offenders in Chats with Minors: Statistical Discourse Analysis of Self-Disclosure and Emotion Words," has been accepted and will be published in the journal Child Abuse and Neglect.

Initial plans are to turn the tool over to several law enforcement departments for a test run. Seigfried-Spellar said CATT could be handling data from active cases as early as the end of the year.

The conversation analysis provides the basis for future law enforcement tools as well, she said.

"What if there is a chat online and you don't know if you're chatting with an offender or someone who is 15 years old pretending to be 30," she said. "Maybe then, this tool can analyze the differences in an actual 13-year-old versus someone who is pretending to be 13 or an actual adult versus someone who is pretending to be an adult.

"So, you can then start trying to figure out, language wise, who this person is I'm chatting with."

At some point, she believes CATT could even teach officers to better portray a 10-year-old victim by perfecting constantly changing factors like language, emojis and acronyms.

"In these types of operations, our goal isn't to entrap people," she said. "In these, the offender is initiating, and as they do that, law enforcement is simply responding.

"If officers can respond in a way that speeds up the process, that gets the person off the street sooner compared to waiting eight months to allow a trust relationship to develop."

The CATT project was funded through a grant issued in 2017 from the Purdue Polytechnic Institute.
Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and other recent human relatives may have begun hunting large mammal species down to size -- by way of extinction -- at least 90,000 years earlier than previously thought, says a new study published in the journal Science.

Elephant-dwarfing wooly mammoths, elephant-sized ground sloths and various saber-toothed cats highlighted the array of massive mammals roaming Earth between 2.6 million and 12,000 years ago. Prior research suggested that such large mammals began disappearing faster than their smaller counterparts -- a phenomenon known as size-biased extinction -- in Australia around 35,000 years ago.

With the help of emerging data from older fossil and rock records, the new study estimated that this size-biased extinction started at least 125,000 years ago in Africa. By that point, the average African mammal was already 50 percent smaller than those on other continents, the study reported, despite the fact that larger landmasses can typically support larger mammals.

But as humans migrated out of Africa, other size-biased extinctions began occurring in regions and on timelines that coincide with known human migration patterns, the researchers found. Over time, the average body size of mammals on those other continents approached and then fell well below Africa's. Mammals that survived during the span were generally far smaller than those that went extinct.

The magnitude and scale of the recent size-biased extinction surpassed any other recorded during the last 66 million years, according to the study, which was led by the University of New Mexico's Felisa Smith.

"It wasn't until human impacts started becoming a factor that large body sizes made mammals more vulnerable to extinction," said the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Kate Lyons, who authored the study with Smith and colleagues from Stanford University and the University of California, San Diego. "The anthropological record indicates that Homo sapiens are identified as a species around 200,000 years ago, so this occurred not very long after the birth of us as a species. It just seems to be something that we do.

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"From a life-history standpoint, it makes some sense. If you kill a rabbit, you're going to feed your family for a night. If you can kill a large mammal, you're going to feed your village."

By contrast, the research team found little support for the idea that climate change drove size-biased extinctions during the last 66 million years. Large and small mammals seemed equally vulnerable to temperature shifts throughout that span, the authors reported.

"If climate were causing this, we would expect to see these extinction events either sometimes (diverging from) human migration across the globe or always lining up with clear climate events in the record," said Lyons, assistant professor of biology at Nebraska. "And they don't do either of those things."

Off the Face of the Earth

The team also looked ahead to examine how potential mammal extinctions could affect the world's biodiversity. To do so, it posed a question: What would happen if the mammals currently listed as vulnerable or endangered were to go extinct within the next 200 years?

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In that scenario, Lyons said, the largest remaining mammal would be the domestic cow. The average body mass would plummet to less than six pounds -- roughly the size of a Yorkshire terrier.

"If this trend continues, and all the currently threatened (mammals) are lost, then energy flow and taxonomic composition will be entirely restructured," said Smith, professor of biology at New Mexico. "In fact, mammalian body size around the globe will revert to what the world looked like 40 million years ago."

Lyons said that restructuring could have "profound implications" for the world's ecosystems. Large mammals tend to be herbivores, devouring large quantities of vegetation and effectively transporting the associated nutrients around an ecosystem. If they continue to disappear, she said, the remaining mammals would prove poor stand-ins for important ecological roles.

"The kinds of ecosystem services that are provided by large mammals are very different than what you get from small mammals," Lyons said. "Ecosystems are going to be very, very different in the future. The last time mammal communities looked like that and had a mean body size that small was after the extinction of the dinosaurs.

"What we're doing is potentially erasing 40 to 45 million years of mammal body-size evolution in a very short period of time."

Smith and Lyons authored the study with Jon Payne of Stanford University and Rosemary Elliott Smith from the University of California, San Diego. The team received support from the National Science Foundation.
The diagnosis and treatment of multiple myeloma, a cancer affecting plasma cells, traditionally forces patients to suffer through a painful bone biopsy. During that procedure, doctors insert a bone-biopsy needle through an incision to get a bone marrow sample -- or make a larger incision and remove a section of bone via surgery.

But the days of using bone biopsies to guide treatment for multiple myeloma and other cancers, such as many types of leukemia, may be numbered.

A new University of Kansas research effort featured in the current edition of Integrative Biology has resulted in a low-cost, reliable blood test that uses a small plastic chip about the size of a credit card that can deliver the same diagnostic information as a bone biopsy -- but using a simple blood draw instead.

"For the last 10 years, we've been developing a blood-based test for a variety of cancer diseases -- one of them is multiple myeloma," said Steven Soper, Foundation Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Mechanical Engineering at KU and a member of The University of Kansas Cancer Center, who led the research. "We'll be able to eliminate the need for bone-marrow biopsies and allow the clinician to determine the best way to treat the disease using a blood draw. From this test, the clinician will be able to determine the stage of the disease, what type of drug will best treat the disease and monitor for signs of recurrence if the disease goes into remission."

Soper, who also serves as director of the Center of BioModular Multi-scale System for Precision Medicine at KU and KU Medical Center, said that previous plastic chips to test for multiple myeloma had shortcomings, such as picking up regular blood cells instead of multiple myeloma cells in the blood. By contrast, the new chip developed at KU vastly improves testing performance and accuracy over previous chips for multiple myeloma.

High levels of circulating multiple myeloma cells are linked with more aggressive disease and worse outcomes, so a sensitive test is vital for assessing the state of the disease in a patient and devising the most effective therapy.

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"We get very few blood cells," Soper said. "Only multiple myeloma cells. So, the ability for us to efficiently detect those cells is very high and thus, diagnose the disease at a more treatable stage."

Moreover, other attempts to create chips that test for multiple myeloma have proven to be complicated and expensive to manufacture.

"The chip we're using, because it is made from a plastic, can be injection molded, the same method that is used to produce CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray Discs," Soper said. "What's really nice is we can produce these chips for a couple of dollars per chip, which makes it really appropriate for testing in a clinical setting."

Soper's co-authors on the paper are Joyce Kamande, Maria Lindell and Peter Voorhees of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Ma?gorzata Witek of KU.

The new test for multiple myeloma developed by the team will be brought to market by BioFluidica, a San Diego-based company with a research lab in Lawrence and a clinical testing lab planned for the KU Medical Center very soon.

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"BioFluidica has been around for about two years now and is making excellent progress in bringing this chip-based technology to market," Soper said. "Patients will soon be benefiting from this technology. We're already doing clinical testing on different diseases using this technology at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City on pediatric patients with acute leukemia. It's the same premise -- we are looking for tumor cells in blood to see signs of disease recurrence, negating the need for a bone biopsy."

Indeed, the KU researcher said the new technology developed by his team could have applications across many cancers, making diagnostics easier for patients and clinicians, and helping usher in more tailored therapies that could improve patient outcomes.

"We've demonstrated the utility of this technology in a variety of cancer diseases," Soper said. "Here, we're homing in on multiple myeloma, but we've developed tests for two forms of leukemia and for pancreatic cancer, prostate cancer, ovarian cancer, colorectal cancer and breast cancer. With our technology, we'll be able to see if patients are developing cancers before they have overt symptoms and help improve survival."

Soper noted the technology could be ideal for patients living far from major medical facilities, such as those living in rural regions.

"Some of this technology can be really important to areas that don't have high-end cancer screening tools and thus must travel to a major cancer center to be treated," he said. "For instance, this test can be conducted in a doctor's office in a place like Hays, Kansas."

For Soper, the work on the microfluidic technology goes beyond academic or entrepreneurial interests -- like so many Americans, his life has been touched by cancer.

"This is very important to me," he said. "Just like a lot of people, I've experienced a family member dying of cancer. My dad passed away from colon cancer, and he never had a colonoscopy. A lot of the technology we're developing can minimize the need for these invasive screening technologies like colonoscopies and bone biopsies. This is important for screening but also to assist doctors to provide the correct medication to patients and monitor for recurrence."

The researcher envisions a day where screening for a broad array of cancers would be routine and widespread, long before symptoms present themselves in patients.

"At some point, you'll just go in for your yearly physical where they'll do a blood draw anyway," he said. "But then they'll screen it for cancer."

The National Institutes of Health, the Carlson Family Foundation, the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center and the KU Cancer Center supported this work.
CNBC reports that Google is looking to get advertisers to create how to content and videos to be used as voice responses for Google Assistant and Google Home queries. CNC wrote "Google has been pitching companies to create videos for a new "How To" feature for its smart assistant. It plans to show the feature at its annual conference for software developers in May, according to a person who's seen the pitch."

The "how to" skill would provide videos with step-by-step instructions when a user asks how to do something. For example, Johnson and Johnson could create a video about how to bathe a baby, or Kraft could make a video with a recipe for cheese fondue. The article says while Google isn't launching this as an ad model, they can use this in the future as such. "While surfacing a how-to video from a brand will be free, initially, Google could eventually charge companies for promotion," they wrote.

As Glenn Gabe posted on Twitter, wouldn't it be "wonderful" if your "featured snippets could be replaced by sponsored 'how to' videos on Assistant (and a version of Home with a screen). Would be a way for Google to monetize Assistant/Home."

Of course, this ad stuff is all just speculation on CNBC's end but how else will Google make money with Google Assistant?

Forum discussion at Twitter.
People seeking the removal of a controversial statue in San Franciscos Civic Center that critics say celebrates the subjugation of American Indians have suffered a major setback as the citys Board of Appeals sided with a Petaluma man opposed to taking it down.

The Early Days statue depicts a conquering vaquero and a missionary standing over a fallen and nearly naked Indian man. Its one of five bronze statues that make up the Pioneer Monument, an 800-ton shrine to the settling of California that sits between between the Main Library and the Asian Art Museum.

The statue, which has been criticized as an offensive celebration of native peoples suffering at the hands of European settlers, was slated for removal after the citys Historic Preservation Commission approved in February a request to take it down. The Arts Commission had previously approved its removal but needed the blessing of the preservation commission because the statue is located in a historic district.

But last month, Frear Stephen Schmid, a Petaluma attorney who said he had lived in San Francisco for decades, challenged the Historic Preservation Commissions decision. Schmid argued that the decision was inconsistent with the citys standards for removing or altering historic artifacts.

Schmid, who could not be reached for comment Thursday, previously said that removing the statue from public view was equivalent to blowing it up with dynamite.

The Board of Appeals agreed, ruling Wednesday that the Historic Preservation Commission erred in approving the statues removal because removing Early Days would change the Pioneer Monuments historic character.

Kate Patterson, director of communications for the Arts Commission, said it intends to request a rehearing, which it must do within 10 days. But the agency faces a high bar: The Board of Appeals rules specify that rehearing requests are granted only when new facts or circumstances can be presented.

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The Arts Commission also disagreed that removing the statue would fundamentally alter the Pioneer Monument. If it is denied a rehearing, Patterson said the commission would seek the city attorneys advice on what to do next.

In a statement, the Arts Commission said it was extremely troubled by the Board of Appeals decision. As previously stated by Mayor (Mark) Farrell and members of the Board of Supervisors, this type of racist imagery does not represent our values and has no place in our Civic Center where it can be interpreted as emblematic of our governmental policies.

The commission said it remains committed to taking the sculpture down.

Dominic Fracassa is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: dfracassa@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @dominicfracassa
Alberto Carrillo began the morning of March 27 in much the same way as he has for the past year, working as a public Pit Stop monitor at Eddy and Jones streets in the Tenderloin.

The start of his shift usually involves a fair bit of cleaning, hosing down a portable public restroom in one of San Franciscos grittiest neighborhoods. But by the end of his day at 5 p.m., Carrillo, 31, had saved one life and may have saved another.

And on Thursday, dressed in a crisp yellow and black Pit Stop uniform and cap, and surrounded by his family, Carrillo was honored for his actions when San Francisco Mayor Mark Farrell presented him with the citys Certificate of Honor.

Supervising a public toilet is an unglamorous and at times even dangerous job. But for people like Carrillo, who was in prison just 14 months ago for a crime hes not yet ready to talk about, the Pit Stop program is a path toward his future. A future that doesnt include prison, where he has spent a total of 17 years during several incarcerations.

I went to jail, but its not something I want to put out there. I dont want to have that as a memory, Carrillo said. I went in for something Im not proud of that I did when I was young. Im trying to leave the past in the past.

There are 18 Pit Stop locations in nine neighborhoods around San Francisco. In addition to serving as public toilets, they also provide a space to dispose of needles and for getting rid of dog waste.

Michael Macor / The Chronicle

Around 11 a.m. on that day last month, after perhaps two or three Pit Stop patrons had come and gone without incident, a man entered the stall and stayed for about four minutes. Carrillo began to worry.

Injection drug users looking for a sheltered space to shoot up frequently seek out the restrooms, meaning monitors like Carrillo have to be on the lookout for potential overdoses.

When somebody goes in the bathroom, its mandatory for us to double-check the time and log it in, Carrillo said. He speaks slowly in a soft voice and occasionally cracks a boyish grin. I said, Hey, are you all right? The man inside said that he was.

Another two minutes passed. Carrillo called out again, but this time, the response he was hoping for didnt come. He called out again, warning the man that he would be forced to open the bathroom door if he didnt hear a reply. After six or seven tense minutes, Carrillo threw open the door.

Thats when I saw him lying on the floor, he said. He was turning purple and his eyes were upside-down, so my reaction was to bring him out of the bathroom. He dragged the man out onto the sidewalk. My reaction was, I dont know what to do, but Im going to pump his chest.

He had never administered CPR before.

I was just trying to bring him back. I was just thinking, Dont die. I was actually telling him that. I dont know if he heard me, but I was telling him not to die, that everything was going to be all right, and that the ambulance was going to be here.

A passerby called 911 as the man appeared to be coming around. Carrillo held his head as he vomited. An ambulance arrived moments later, and Carrillo called his supervisor, Harvey Turner.

His demeanor is pretty much what it is now  cool, calm and collected. Thats why we have him at that location, Turner said, adding that Pit Stop monitors are placed in locations befitting of their personalities and skills. Overseeing a public toilet in the Tenderloin is not for the faint of heart.

Carrillo, Turner said, doesnt panic under pressure. He has good verbal skills  he just knows what to do in any given situation.

Carrillos nerves  and his reflexes  would soon be tested again.

Just hours after an ambulance took the first man away, he noticed another staggering past his Pit Stop. Within seconds, the man slumped and began to fall head-first to the sidewalk. Carrillo dived to the ground to break the mans fall, catching his head in his hands before it smacked against the concrete.

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I went right down, Carrillo said. I slid on my stomach, and he landed right in my hand. He didnt hit as hard as he was going to. It was perfect timing.

He stayed with the man and helped to calm him before flagging down a police officer, who took over caring for the man and radioed for an ambulance. The man was suffering from severe dehydration, city officials said.

There are a lot of people that think, Oh, youre at the Pit Stop, you just stand there all day. But its work, and its dangerous too, at the same time, Carrillo said. Other than that, its pretty good.

The Pit Stop program, which employs many former prisoners, is run by the Hunters Point Family organization and the citys Public Works department.

The more open doors, the better, said Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru, who was on hand Thursday alongside Farrell.

Thank you for your really heroic efforts, the mayor told Carrillo, who has ambitions of eventually working for Public Works or at BART. What you did exemplifies what every city employee is all about  going above and beyond your duty.

After several rounds of applause and handshakes, Lena Miller, the co-executive director of Hunters Point Family, presented Farrell with a gift  a black and yellow Pit Stop uniform, just like Carrillos, so when you walk around the Tenderloin, you have automatic street cred, she said.

Dominic Fracassa is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: dfracassa@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @dominicfracassa
Two days after a controversial state bill to allow more housing near public transit was stopped dead in its tracks, one of its biggest supporters  Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman  called on other tech leaders to pressure their local governments to expand housing near their campuses.

Google and Facebook have started to engage locally, Stoppelman said, and hes surprised that more tech leaders werent paying attention to this problem as it was developing.

Stoppelman spoke alongside the bills author, state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, and other backers in an event at Yelp headquarters Wednesday.

Asked how his San Francisco local-reviews company is helping employees find housing, Stoppelman replied, You end up paying (them) more. Thats the most straightforward solution.

Stoppelman gave $100,000 to California YIMBY, a grassroots pro-housing group that sponsored Wieners bill, SB827. The measure would have stopped cities from using planning, zoning and other barriers to block certain high-density housing projects up to five stories near public-transit stops.

Contrary to what critics contended, the bill would not have wiped away all local control, Wiener said. Cities could still impose their own approval process, design standards, affordable-housing requirements and demolition controls.

Many business, real estate and housing groups supported the bill. But it faced stiff opposition from cities that didnt want to give up any local control, neighborhood groups afraid of overcrowding and some affordable-housing advocates who thought it would displace low-income residents.

Wiener modified his bill to address those concerns, but in its first hearing Tuesday, the Senate Housing and Transportation committee voted 5-4 to stop it from moving forward.

Wiener vowed to bring it back next year. He wouldnt say in what form, except that I dont believe the bill should be further scaled back in terms of density and geography.

The event was sponsored by Yelp and the Center for California Real Estate, an institute of the California Association of Realtors, to discuss potential solutions to the states housing shortage.

Sonja Trauss  founder of the SF Bay Area Renters Federation and a candidate for District Six Supervisor  said she has learned from campaigning that people genuinely want housing. At the same time, they can become distressed if the proposal is for housing in their neighborhood. Unlike other issues where people have absolute opinions, such as abortion and the death penalty, every single individual is both for and against housing, she said.

Amy Osborne / Special to The Chronicle

The last time California had a serious building boom was in the 1960s and 1970s, when the suburbs were being built. It was cheap housing, she said. On San Franciscos west side, single-family homes were replaced with three-story apartment buildings known as Richmond specials.

Since then, the city has downzoned single-family neighborhoods and upzoned South of Market, where developers are building extremely expensive high-rises. As Trauss put it, the city has outlawed Toyotas, but you can build Lamborghinis.

The least disruptive way to create more housing, she said, would be to let homes, when the owner has died or retired and moved out, be replaced with three- or four-unit condos or apartment buildings. Wieners bill would have allowed that. Minneapolis is considering allowing fourplexes citywide.

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In an interview, Stoppelman said companies such as Google and Facebook are massive, massive employers. The communities where they are located havent built much housing at all. Google, he said, should have taken action sooner to encourage housing creation. They werent interested in it.

In December, Mountain View approved a Google-supported plan to allow nearly 10,000 units of housing to be built near its headquarters. Yelp and Google have feuded on business matters, including the way Google features Yelp reviews in its search results.

More than 100 Bay Area tech executives, including Stoppelman, Marc Benioff of Salesforce, and Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Square, signed a letter to Wiener supporting his bill.

Every major tech firm is considering hiring outside the Bay Area, and some already have, Stoppelman said. If nothing is done about housing, the trend will escalate: Its like ice caps melting. It starts out slow and very quickly gains momentum.

For non-engineering jobs, he said Yelp is load-balancing employees between its San Francisco headquarters and its Scottsdale, Ariz., office, but engineers are hired at the home office because they want to be around other great engineers.

Asked if hes considering relocating Yelps headquarters somewhere outside the Bay Area, Stoppelman said, Not yet.

Kathleen Pender is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: kpender@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kathpender
The students gathered in the high school auditorium had read about Minnijean Brown-Trickey, learning about the day she walked through a rage-fueled mob to desegregate a Little Rock, Ark., school, and how she was expelled later that year for an infamous chili incident.

She was only 15 at the time, one of nine black teenagers who walked into a white Southern high school in 1957 and then into the civil rights chapter of high school history books.

She was an icon, the San Mateo students said, someone who exemplified what young people can do to make a difference  yet until Thursday only as a name in the pages of their textbooks.

Brown-Trickey, one of the Little Rock Nine, smiled as she walked out onto the auditorium stage at Aragon High School before spending the next hour answering questions and recounting the day she marched into Central High School under the protection of armed soldiers.

I was the most gorgeous thing you ever saw, Brown-Trickey, now 76, told the several hundred San Mateo students gathered in the auditorium, their cell phones forgotten as they leaned in to hear her first-hand account. I was smart. I was talented. I was thoughtful.

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Brown-Trickey recounted what it was like to be out front in a fight for desegregation and equal access to education, to be a teenager who resented the public restrooms with pretty pink doors and signs that read White Ladies.

She described going to class every day, knowing her white peers would trip her, spit on her or push her into lockers. She kept a change of clothes at school because she was frequently doused in soup. And she recounted the chili incident, which included students trying to trip her and her full lunch tray falling on the heads of two boys  resulting in her expulsion.

She didnt know all of it would make her a historical figure.

You just take a step and see what happens, she told the students.

It was a message that resonated with the students, who see themselves at another flash point in history, this time over gun violence in schools and on the streets.

Brown-Trickey said she took a stand, in part because she was worried. Todays teens must be worried, too, she added, noting that Friday is the 19th anniversary of the mass shooting at Columbine High School.

While integrating Central High wasnt easy, 17 people didnt die, Brown-Trickey said, referring to those who were killed two months ago at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Fla.

I cant imagine what it must be like for you, she said. I cant imagine.

Backstage, Brown-Trickey said she believes the school walkouts, the protests  including the 200 Bay Area students who went to Sacramento Thursday to speak to legislators about gun control measures  indicate perhaps the origins of a movement.

My definition of a movement is people doing things simultaneously in different places, she said, adding you dont need a Martin Luther King Jr. to spark one. So many young people say, We dont have a leader, and I say, No, no, no, you are the leaders.

Brown-Trickey is speaking from experience.

Paul Chinn / The Chronicle

The civil rights icon has spent a good part of her life in the years since the desegregation of Central High speaking to young people about her role in making change.

I know who you are, because I know who I was, she told the students. I know youre worried and concerned about what our society is like right now.

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That first day at Central High, she wanted to give up in the face of the onslaught of hate. But she kept going.

There were 20 white classmates who were nice to the Little Rock Nine. There were 200 who tortured them verbally and physically. And then there were 1,900 silent witnesses, she said.

The silent witnesses are the ones who stand by and say nothing, Brown-Trickey said, pausing to study the pin-drop-silent auditorium, a sea of diversity staring back.

Before the civil rights movement, this room of people could not exist, she said.

As the hour-long talk wrapped up, it became clear that it was not just a history lesson, but perhaps something of a motivational speech aimed at creating a new chapter in history books.

Were all the Little Rock Nine, she said. We can choose to be the Little Rock Nine. We could choose to be the (200) terrorists, the 20 nice kids or those who remained silent.

The choice for many of the students was clear. They want to be the next Minnijean Brown-Trickey.

She is what you strive to be, said Aragon senior Jenn Dixon, 17, following the talk. She just proves what we do matters, that kids can and will change the world.

Jill Tucker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jtucker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jilltucker
During nearly 60 years as a San Francisco Chronicle columnist, Herb Caen didnt lose many battles.

But while restaurateurs, politicians and even Hollywood celebrities were deferential to his sharp wit and barrels of ink, the writers war with the Union Square pigeons ended in defeat.

Final score: San Francisco pigeons 10,000 or thereabouts, Herb Caen 0.

One of the most famous Caen photos has the writer sitting on a park bench with Alfred Hitchcock in 1963, looking alternately amused and terrified as pigeons perch on his shoulders and head  part of a promotion for the movie The Birds.

But Caens disdain for pigeons began as early as the late 1940s, when he started complaining about increased numbers of birds in Union Square after a parking garage remodel, acting as if the war against the birds was one he could win.

I like pigeons as much as the next cat, but they belong in a sanctuary, safe from columnists and press agents, Caen wrote in 1958.

At one point in 1962, Caen partnered with an airline to put four racks filled with parasols at the corner of Union Square, calling them Herb Caen Fallout Shelters. The columnist was photographed walking through Union Square under shelter of a flimsy umbrella, big smile on his face.

He admitted defeat within days, when all but one of the parasols was missing, and the pigeons remained.

Hitchcock arrived in Union Square on April 1, 1963, two days before The Birds was scheduled to open in San Francisco. Caen could hardly hide his displeasure with the pigeon-themed photo shoot. The resulting columns tone ventured beyond passive aggression  it actually felt a little like revenge against the director and his marketing crew.

On Monday afternoon the portly figure of Mr. Alfred Hitchcock was to be seen emerging, with a definite thwuck, from a large black limousine on Powell, Caen wrote. He waddled over to a bench in Union Square and spread himself out like roly-poly pudding. Some nut with a paper bag sprinkled grain at his feet, attracting pigeons by the hundreds.

Hitchcock delivered one joke after another, riffing with Caen and the pigeons themselves.

Get thee to Ernies, Hitchcock said, kicking at the birds gently. Ill see you under glass at 7.

Its notable that Caen buried the exchange, placing it in the second half of his April 3, 1963, column, below a local item about tenant parking restrictions at the Union Square Garage.

With another thwuck, he squeezed back into the limousine, on the rear of which was a sticker reading, The Birds is Coming, Caen wrote. So long, he waved. I are going.

But the photographs are fantastic, with Hitchcock never breaking his solemn gaze, even as Caen appears to be under siege. The poor columnist doesnt have the same expression in any two photos. Hes laughing in one, flinching in another, looking like hes ready to flee in a third. Pigeons dig claws into his balding head in several photos. In almost all of them, a pigeon is perched on his shoulder, staring dismissively at The Chronicle legend.

The best photo: The two men on the bench, Caen looking overwhelmed but smiling. The image never appeared in the paper in 1963, at least not surrounding the coverage of The Birds. A tight shot of a pigeon fluttering its wings while on Caens head appeared on the front page instead.

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But that great shot has since become a classic, published when Caen won a special Pulitzer Prize in 1996, after his death in 1997, and many times since them. The photo has been used recently in The Chronicle both online and in print, notably highlighted in The Chronicle of a Great City book a few years ago.

As for the pigeons, they continued their dominance over the writer for another 3 decades after The Birds. He wrote about them often, and was always the butt of his own jokes.

The last Caen mention of pigeons in Union Square appeared in 1994.

Word must be getting around among the pigeons that I am not exactly their best friend, Caen wrote. Walking through Union Square, my brown fedora was shat upon, and I could swear I heard the culprit cackling as it flew off.

Peter Hartlaub is The San Francisco Chronicles pop culture critic. Email: phartlaub@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @PeterHartlaub

Podcast

Tony Bravo and Beth Spotswood join host Peter Hartlaub to talk about Alfred Hitchcocks The Birds and the Herb Caen pigeon stunt in Union Square. Listen to the latest episode of The Big Event: www.sfchronicle.com/podcasts
In 1928, at the height of his international popularity, Ravel undertook a grueling concert tour of the United States. For four months, the intensely private composer shuttled by overnight train from one hotel to another, conducting and serving as piano soloist on his own works.

Among his stops was a two-concert visit to San Francisco, where he conducted the San Francisco Symphony in programs that included La Valse, the orchestral song cycle Sheherazade and the orchestral suite Le tombeau de Couperin. And on Thursday, April 19, in Davies Symphony Hall, guest conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier led the orchestra in a smartly executed all-Ravel program that paid a 90th anniversary tribute to the occasion.

Its not easy now to re-create the feeling of a time when a musical elder statesman could have been greeted as an actual celebrity. (Ravel, a slim and exquisite 2006 novel by the French writer Jean Echenoz, conjures up this tour, and the composers final years, in deft strokes.)

But Tortelier and the orchestra  together with mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, who was an eloquent soloist in Sheherazade  did convey some of the sensibility of music that was still both new and accessible. The intermittent strangenesses of Ravels harmonic language, a language that at the time was still in the process of being assimilated, mixed with the unassailable ripeness and sensuality of his orchestral mastery.

That blend was most notable in the performance of Daphnis et Chloe that occupied the second half of the program. This was the one piece that did not figure in Ravels San Francisco visit, but it fit right into the program, and Tortelier (who stepped in after the originally scheduled conductor, Charles Dutoit, was fired in the wake of allegations of sexual misconduct) led a vibrant and energetic account of the score.

Purists might have lamented the lack of the chorus whose wordless expostulations are a key part of the sound world in this ballet (the arrangement without chorus was Torteliers handiwork), but there was enough instrumental vivacity to make up the loss. The strings raced and darted, the brass glowered gracefully, and the woodwinds  especially the flute section of Tim Day, Linda Lukas and Catherine Payne  contributed to the image of an Arcadian fantasy world.

A pair of early piano pieces by Debussy, Sarabande and Danse, opened the evening in Ravels orchestral versions, just as they did in 1928  a reminder that the tradition of the unobjectionable and inconsequential curtain-raiser has always been with us.

There was more meat and more enjoyment in Grahams lustrous and insinuating account of Sheherazade, with its dreamy, billowing melodies and tellingly inconclusive ending. Grahams vocal tone may not be quite as robust as in the past  her lower register tended to fade  but she probed the cycles fusion of surrealism and eroticism as expertly as ever.

Joshua Kosman is The San Francisco Chronicles music critic. Email: jkosman@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JoshuaKosman

San Francisco Symphony: 8 p.m. Friday, April 20, and Saturday, April 21. $15-$159. Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave., S.F. (415) 864-6000, www.sfsymphony.org
Elmwood Cafe, a Berkeley coffee shop, closed without warning Friday, days after the business was brought back into the national spotlight amid conversations about racial bias.

Some believe the abrupt closure may be a result of a recent wave of negative reviews after parallels were drawn between this months controversial arrest of two black men at a Philadelphia Starbucks and a similar 2015 incident at Elmwood Cafe involving Bay Area comedian and CNN contributor W. Kamau Bell.

The cafe was open Thursday afternoon, yet by Friday morning, the windows at the cafe at 2900 College Ave. were covered with brown paper. A note on the shops window read: Elmwood Cafe has closed. Our sincere gratitude to all in the community. Thank you for your support through the years.

Local reaction to the closure has been one of surprise, evident in the groups of Berkeley residents who could be seen milling outside the cafe Friday morning as news of the closure spread.

Now Playing: Facing furor over racial profiling in the arrest of two black men at a Philadelphia Starbucks, the company announced it will be closing its stores on May 29 to offer unconscious bias training. Some are questioning how effective that will be. (April 20) Video: Associated Press

More on Elmwood Cafe Starbucks' racial apologies revive bad memories for W. Kamau Bell

Nigel Jones, an East Bay native and chef, said the closure reflected the influence of a vocal East Bay community.

Well, them closing shows the importance of the conversations about race our society is having right now, in general, said Jones, who owns Caribbean restaurants in San Francisco and Oakland.

Elmwood Cafe was associated with racial bias in 2015 when Bell, who is black, said he was told to leave after an employee incorrectly asserted he was bothering a group of white women seated outside at a table. Bells wife was among the group. The incident made headlines after it was detailed in his blog.

This week, Bell told The Chronicle that after the incident at Elmwood, he was told by the business that the employees at the time would go through sensitivity training. But the Elmwood Cafe definitely went back to business as usual, he said.

The owner of the Elmwood Cafe, Michael Pearce, could not be reached for comment Friday. In 2015, shortly after the incident involving Bell, the news site Berkeleyside reported that Pearce reached out to the comedian and they agreed a public forum to address issues of race would be an appropriate step. The employee in question was fired, Pearce told Berkeleyside.

At the Philadelphia Starbucks, two black men were handcuffed and removed from a store after an employee called 911 because they had not purchased coffee and refused to leave. The men were detained for nine hours before being released without charges. A video of the incident posted on Twitter has more than 11 million views.

Starbucks announced Tuesday it is planning to close more than 8,000 stores for an afternoon of racial sensitivity education for its employees.

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.

Oakland chef Preeti Mistry, a queer person of color who for years has pushed for equal representation of minorities within the Bay Area food landscape, said the situations in Starbucks and at Elmwood Cafe had distinctive parallels and easily could have been avoided.

Giving (people of color) the benign interpretation that is always given to white people can de-escalate most situations, Mistry said. Treating someone with respect and dignity also de-escalates situations.

Keba Konte, the founder of Red Bay Coffee in Oakland, one of the countrys more prominent, black-owned coffee businesses, said that while a community like Berkeley has little tolerance for racial bias, Elmwood Cafes demise may have had a simpler foundation.

No place really closes that fast. I think they were probably on their deathbed already, Konte said. If they were a vibrant, thriving business, it would have taken weeks or months for this kind of negative press to have any effect on the financial side of the business.

Justin Phillips is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jphillips@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JustMrPhillips
The pro- and anti-reform houses of education land are prepping for the next big battle between charter schools and teachers unions. The great houses in philanthropic foundation land are deciding where to place their bets. But winter is coming, and no one can avoid it.

Schools in Tracy faced a deficit of $8 million. The hole was $124 million deep in San Diego Unified. After making millions in cuts, Oakland Unified faces a $9 million deficit next year and $20 million in 2020. These are just a few of the hundreds of districts that made cuts.

These deficits appeared at a time when California isnt facing a budget crisis. In fact, after years of increases, Californias education spending will be the highest ever.

What happens when state funding improves, but local school budgets get worse? And how did we get into this situation in the first place?

Its simple. School systems are getting hammered by the rising costs of pension and health care commitments. Meanwhile, they are being pinched by external factors including declining student enrollment, increased competition and frozen federal funding.

California is not an anomaly. Districts throughout the nation are facing the same squeeze.

So why isnt anyone paying attention? Three main reasons:

Money is boring: And only boring people like chief financial officers talk about money and use phrases like unfunded liabilities. Interesting, cutting-edge people talk about disruptive innovations like personalized learning, or anything with the word maker in it.

Money is politically messy. Everyone wants funding for their favorite education project. In this zero-sum world, no one wants to talk about making tough choices. Even fewer want to discuss sensitive topics such as pension and health care liabilities.

Education finance has never been part of our nations education wars. Most of the opinion makers in education are like the Great Houses of Westeros in the HBO series Game of Thrones. They are much happier fighting each other to the death about issues like unions and charter schools than focusing on the more powerful forces that could destroy them all.

In Game of Thrones, that force is the White Walkers. In education, its the Silver Tsunami  the tens of billions of dollars in pension and other post-retirement benefits guaranteed to retirees.

In the olden days (before the mid-2000s), these budget problems seemed very far away. But over the past decade, millions of Baby Boomers have retired. Suddenly pension and retiree health care costs were at hand.

Most state and local officials failed to plan for these increased costs. During good times, they sweetened already generous benefits. During bad times, such as the Great Recession, they reduced the already inadequate amounts they were socking away.

The size of these unfunded liabilities is mind-boggling. Nationally, the estimate is $1.4 trillion. In California, its $97 billion for teachers and other school employees as of 2015-16. To put this into perspective, total venture capital investment in educational technology since 2010 was $2.3 billion.

In 2013, California state leaders attempted to address the shortfall by increasing payments from districts into the pension fund to $1,600 per pupil in 2023-24 from $500. This increase will only pay for part of the state pension obligation. Billions of dollars more will come directly from state coffers and never reach education budgets.

Just when you think it couldnt get worse, California has more than $92 billion in unfunded health care liabilities. By 2030, Los Angeles Unified School District, serving more than a half-million students, is projected to spend half its budget on retiree pension and health care costs. Hundreds of other districts could make dramatic budget cuts or even go bankrupt.

District and charter leaders are beginning to talk about the impact of these rising costs. Unfortunately, everyone else is making things worse. Unions, foundations, and nonprofits still live in a world where an improving state economy was a reason to advocate for salary increases or fund the latest program.

That world is gone.

In this new world, resources will continue to shrink regardless of the strength of the economy. Unless we respond, every promising education innovation will starve from a lack of money. To keep that from happening, the warring houses of our education Westeros must behave very differently. They must:

Prepare for winter: Everyone must focus on doing less with less. The Houses of Government, Philanthropy and Nonprofits should stop making absurd promises to fund everything from free college to universal preschool. The public should be wary of any politician or interest group that proposes a new program without identifying long-term funding to support it.

Sound the alarm: If its this bad when the economy is good, then imagine what happens in a downturn. Our education system will be devoured by a horde of unfunded obligations. The Houses of Philanthropy, Government and Education Systems must sound the alarm so that the public recognizes the crisis and consequences of inaction. Voters should demand solutions from their elected leaders and candidates for public office.

Dont fight  unite: The upcoming elections for superintendent of public instruction and governor are already rehashing the same old education wars between unions and charters. These battles sap attention from the real fight. Charters, unions, parents and district leaders are confronting the same crisis. Costs are predictable and rising, and funding will be cut regardless of responsibility. The warring houses must unite and convince the public that the solution will include some mix of cost controls and increased education funding.

Winter is already here. Unlike the fantasy world of Westeros, there are no magical solutions or heroes coming to save us. The problem may seem insurmountable, boring and politically dangerous, but ignoring it places the future of Californias education system and our children at risk. Responsibility for its solution lies with all of us.

Arun Ramanathan leads Pivot Learning, the largest nonprofit provider of technical assistance to school districts in California. Chad Aldeman is a principal at Bellwether Education Partners and editor for TeacherPensions.org. To comment, submit your letter to the editor at SFChronicle.com/letters.
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A big-money ad war in Californias governors race officially started Thursday when a billionaire-backed independent expenditure campaign touting Democrat Antonio Villaraigosa launched a seven-figure buy that will blast a commercial on TV screens statewide for at least a week.

The 30-second spot, titled Ahead, is intended to introduce the former Los Angeles mayor to voters who may not have been paying close attention to the June 5 primary race. It says violent crime in L.A. dropped by nearly 50 percent during Villaraigosas time in office, from 2005 to 2013, an assertion that the nonpartisan fact-checkers at Politifact California rate as mostly true.
SACRAMENTO  A well-known Sacramento lobbyist and former chief of staff to a disgraced San Francisco state senator exposed himself and engaged in unwanted touching and sexual conversations with a Senate staffer in 2013 and 2014, according to investigative findings released Thursday.

An independent law firm hired by the Senate substantiated the sexual misconduct allegations against Adam Keigwin by a woman who worked for him in the Senate. Keigwin was a longtime staffer to Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, who was arrested in 2014 and sentenced in 2016 in a corruption case that involved gun trafficking.

The Senate Rules Committee, which acts as a human resources arm of the legislative body, barred Keigwin from future Senate employment and warned that any further similar misconduct with any Senate employee could result in him being barred from Senate offices and hearing rooms in the Capitol.

The law firm used the standard of a preponderance of evidence to reach its conclusions. Keigwin, managing director of the Sacramento lobbying firm Mercury Public Affairs, denied the accusations.

These allegations are absolutely untrue; they are contrary to and against everything I stand for and have spent my entire career fighting for; and I will vigorously defend myself against them, Keigwin said in a statement.

The investigation concluded that Keigwin had engaged in sexually inappropriate conduct while he worked in the Senate, including unwanted touching, exposing himself and sexually explicit talk.

The evidence supported a finding that this behavior occurred at social events that involved drinking when Keigwin had become inebriated, according to the investigation findings. That was not intended to excuse the behavior, bur rather put it in context.

The woman was not identified in the report. Investigators wrote that she had asked that her complaint be kept confidential, and that she had later decided she did not want to participate in the investigation.

Investigators continued their work, interviewing nine people. The woman participated in an initial interview before declining to participate.

Investigators wrote that Keigwin had exposed himself on one or two occasions, during the time that they worked for the Senate at social events.

The investigation was conducted by the Berkeley law offices of Amy Oppenheimer, who was hired by the Senate last year following reports of widespread sexual harassment in the state Capitol. For decades, the Legislature kept investigations into sexual misconduct against lawmakers and employees private, but in recent months it decided to release substantiated complaints against lawmakers and high-ranking employees.

The #MeToo movement that started with women in Hollywood moved to the state Capitol in October when hundreds of women signed on to a letter calling out pervasive sexual harassment in Sacramento politics.

Melody Gutierrez is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mgutierrez@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @MelodyGutierrez
Scott Leonard is no latecomer to the sustainable fashion game. Quite the opposite: He and his Sebastopol business, Indigenous, are pioneers in the world of organic, fair-trade apparel making. For just shy of 25 years, the privately owned B-Corp has been dedicated to producing planet-friendly clothing while creating opportunities for artisans in South America.

How sweet it must be for the founder and CEO to be celebrating the opening of his companys first-ever brick-and-mortar on Earth Day. Starting April 22, the 2,500-square-foot space in Petaluma will welcome shoppers, introducing them to a wide range of mens and womens styles that give modern expression to the ancient traditions of Peruvian textile design. Think effortless sweaters, soft organic T-shirts and alpaca jackets. Most prices fall in the $50 to $200 range, and everything is handmade with 100 percent ecological fibers with zero waste.

And in keeping with Indigenous green mission, the stores fixtures are built with local recycled and refurbished materials.

The stars most certainly aligned with our launch timing, says a beaming Leonard.

We believe, today, its critical for Indigenous to be available to our customers in the place and in the way that they find most convenient. Matt Reynolds (co-founder/president) and I feel that our time is now with this direct-to-consumer opportunity. We have grown consistently over the past nine years  even during some of the worst of economic times. And on the foundation of integrity, respect and dignity with which weve built this company, were ready to launch this store, Leonard says.

Along with connecting directly with customers and the Sonoma community, having a physical space provides the brand with the ability to express and control the narrative and eco-shopping experience.

The store gives us a platform to educate people about sustainable fashion and showcase how ethical fashion can still be beautiful, Leonard says.

As an advocate for Indigenous and the larger sustainability movement, Leonard and team have much to share. A short list includes information about the companys 100 percent certified organic cotton (Grown Peru), the small-scale alpaca ranchers in the Peruvian Highlands with which it partners, and the real-life positive impact it makes on the 750 artisans in its employ.

Furthermore, a quick scroll through Indigenous newly redesigned e-commerce website is peppered with a wealth of facts and stats about its contributions to a greener world  i.e., it has saved 13 million gallons of water and 45,600 pounds of carbon dioxide, and prevented 400 pounds of pesticides from ever touching land.

While the online store has been around for six years, the label itself is far from a household name. We sell to retailer Eileen Fisher, and our products via the Eileen Fisher label show up in Nordstrom, Bloomingdales, Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus.

These respected retailers and individual customers are, no doubt, drawn to the companys unflagging social conscience and hard-won commitment to doing good in an industry currently dominated by fast fashion and a sea of polluting manufacturing processes.

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We have spent over two decades building a network of organic farms, eco-mills, cottage-industry artisan groups and green and fair-trade finishing facilities, Leonard says.

Our model of ethical sourcing ensures that artisans in our supply chain receive fair wages and enjoy a safe working environment. We believe ours is one of the most stable and equitable fashion production models in existence. For every Indigenous garment purchased a direct positive impact is made to organic farmers and indigenous artisans.

In honor of Earth Day, do Leonard a favor: Next time you go shopping, ask questions and make sure the clothing you purchase reflects your values  it should look good, feel good and do good.

Gail Goldberg is a San Francisco freelance writer. Email: style@sfchronicle.com.

Shop 110 Petaluma Blvd. North, Unit A, Petaluma. www.indigenous.com
Enough.

The word echoed across the quad of Pittsburg High School on Friday as students gathered at 10 a.m. to decry gun violence in schools and on the streets, one of countless sites across the country where young people paused to remember the 13 victims who died exactly 19 years earlier in the mass shooting at Columbine High School.

Enough, said the signs the students carried. And Enough, said those who stepped up to the microphone, repeating the hash-tagged battle cry of a generation of young people spurred to action following the Valentines Day slayings of 17 teachers and students in Parkland, Fla.

The Day of Action was the latest in a string of youth-led demonstrations calling for increased gun control and a focus on school safety, a national movement launched by the survivors of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High shooting in February.

The protests, which included a national student walkout on March 14 and the March for Our Lives on March 24, have challenged politicians to take up the gun debate, to consider a ban on assault weapons and an increase in the age required to buy a gun, from 18 to 21.

We dont want to live in fear were going to get shot up before we graduate, said Roxana Ramos, 18, one of the organizers of the Pittsburg High rally.

Teenagers across the country marched to city halls or chanted in school courtyards Friday, in many cases with the support of school administrators and teachers.

Educators are united in saying No More to the gun violence that has senselessly injured or taken the lives of too many students and too many school staff members, some of whom have bravely sacrificed themselves to shield their students from harm, said Eric Heins, president of the California Teachers Association, prior to attending a walkout at a Richmond elementary school. Words and condolences from policy makers are not enough. Its time for common-sense gun laws.

At Pittsburg High, students held a 30-minute rally, with voter registration tables, speeches, chanting and a five-minute moment of silence as a few dozen teens participated in a die-in, lying on the ground in remembrance of their fallen peers.

Civics and economics teacher Stacy Poppinga watched the rally in the shade of a voter registration tent, where dozens of teens were filling out forms and vowing to vote in the first election they could.

Poppinga recalled that at the start of the school year many students believed they didnt have a voice, that their vote wouldnt matter. Shes seen that perspective shift as students watched the Florida teens draw the attention of elected officials from city council chambers to state legislatures and all the way up to the White House.

This is really important to them, that they feel they matter and are not forgotten, she said.

Senior Alex Torres, 18, said he had many sleepless nights in the wake of the Parkland shooting, with sleep eluding him until 5 a.m. as he thought about the Florida victims and the potential victims at his own school.

I was thinking about their lives, about how much they mean to us, but not to the system, he said.

On Friday, he stepped up to the microphone to read a poem written in the wake of those long nights and out of those dark thoughts.

It was called, A Poem to Assault Rifles.

While the defenseless minors of America are put to pressure, the only number going up is our body counts, he read as he neared the end of the poem. And the number after that: bullets made. And the number after that: caskets made.

After reading the poem, Alex surveyed the 3,000 students in his school quad and the hours of planning to gather them there. After the Parkland shooting, he felt he had to do something.

Enough was enough.

It had to stop there, Alex said.

Jill Tucker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jtucker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jilltucker
San Francisco has paid nearly $2.8 million to City College of San Francisco to pay for the enrollment of students in its free college program.

The payment comes after a dispute between the city and the college over the documentation the college provided to support the amount it billed the city.

The colleges latest invoice, dated April 4, was its fourth attempt to count correctly the number of students participating in the popular Free City program. For the record, the winning number reported by City College was 14,062.

Thats the number of students  not counting the 3,817 who dropped out  who signed up for hundreds of free classes last fall, including biology, math, journalism and cooking.

Leo Chyi, chief financial officer of the Department of Children, Youth and Their Families, which cuts the checks for Free City, told City College Chancellor Mark Rocha in a memo that he still has problems with how the school is handling the program.

Chyi said college officials havent required students to first apply for financial aid, which places an undue burden on the city that finances the program. The money for the two-year, $11.2 million program that began last fall comes from a voter-approved tax on San Francisco properties that sell for at least $5 million. A portion of the tax is used to buy out the $46-a-credit fee paid by most students.

Chyi told Rocha that although he understands why the college might not want to mandate students to apply for financial aid, the city had expected that this be done. There is a clear interest to both City College and the city that students draw down all funds they are eligible for from external sources.

Jeff Hamilton, a spokesman for Rocha, said only that the chancellor will be making a number of recommendations in response to the memo on Friday, at the first meeting of the Free City oversight committee.

The public meeting is scheduled for 10 a.m. to noon in Room 201 at San Francisco City Hall, said Alisa Messer, a City College instructor who sits on the committee.

Among other problems Chyi cited was a low enrollment number for very-low-income students poor enough to qualify for a fee waiver even without Free City. Such students are eligible to receive grants of $200 to $500 through Free City, depending on whether they are full- or part-time students.

City College enrolled 2,539 such students full time and 1,970 part time. Chyi called that significantly below what was expected.

Nanette Asimov is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: nasimov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @NanetteAsimov
A hospital executive from Riverside has been named the new head of the Veterans Home of California in Yountville, where a troubled Army vet shot three health care workers to death last month.

Gov. Jerry Brown announced the appointment of Frederick Just, 60, as administrator of the home on Thursday. He replaces Donald Veverka, who was dismissed last year.
San Francisco officials escalated the citys crackdown on rental scooters Thursday, seizing 159 of the slender vehicles as police were ordering riders off sidewalks.

The coordinated enforcement efforts by the Department of Public Works and the Police Department came three days after City Attorney Dennis Herrera sent LimeBike, Spin and Bird, the three scooter companies responsible for unceremoniously dropping the scooters on city streets late last month, letters ordering them to cease and desist from illegal operations.

The number of scooters confiscated Thursday for blocking sidewalks and entrances far exceeds the 66 scooters impounded last Friday and the 61 seized Wednesday. Until Thursday, there was little evidence that police had made an effort to stop riders from weaving in and around pedestrians on sidewalks in violation of state law.

Herrera acknowledged that city departments are working together to get the scooters off of city sidewalks, where many users ride them or park them in a manner that creates a potential hazard for pedestrians or obstructs their paths.

The cease and desist letters dont order these companies to shut down, he said in a statement to The Chronicle. They direct them to stop their unlawful activities and address their business practices to ensure their scooters are used lawfully. Our office is working closely with Public Works and the Police Department to ensure that our sidewalks are safe and that the laws are enforced while a permit program is being designed.

The motorized scooters have become both reviled and adored since the three companies deposited hundreds of them three weeks ago on city sidewalks, particularly downtown, South of Market and in the Financial and Mission districts.

The scooters have become a hit with riders who rent them, using an app for short trips between transit and workplaces, or to meetings or lunch. But theyve become an object of scorn for people who complain that riders often leave them in the middle of sidewalks, in front of building entrances or blocking bus stops, violations of city codes.

The 159 scooters scooped up by Public Works staff Thursday were blocking pedestrian pathways, bus stops or curb ramps, said Rachel Gordon, a department spokeswoman.

Thats 220 scooters in two days, she said, noting the 61 scooters picked up Wednesday. And well be back out there tomorrow.

Meanwhile, as Public Works officials focused on getting parked scooters out of the way of pedestrians, San Francisco police issued a statement vowing to keep up their sidewalk enforcement.

Safety measures may include citations or warnings in order to educate scooter users about the regulations and public safety steps they should follow for their well-being and that of others, the statement said.

David Stevenson, a department spokesman, said he didnt know how many, if any, citations have been issued to scooter riders, noting that officers were focusing on informing them of their responsibilities.

A lot of the emphasis has been on educating people as our officers encounter them, he said.

San Francisco lacks laws that would allow the city to impose specific regulations on scooters or require them to seek permits  but not for long.

The Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance Tuesday granting the Municipal Transportation Agency that power. The agency expects to have applications ready in early May, with a permit process and regulations taking effect later in the month.

In response to Thursdays seizures, Rachel Katz, a Bird spokeswoman, said the company looks forward to engaging with city officials in a fair process to review the reasons for confiscating. We are continuing to build upon Birds user education efforts so that our growing user base becomes accustomed to considering their fellow San Franciscans and parks safely out of the right-of-way."

Michael Cabanatuan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mcabanatuan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ctuan
Agents of the Bureau of Immigration (BI) arrested a Chinese fugitive wanted for economic crimes in his country. The Chinese fugitive identified Shi Hongye was apprehended outside the Terminal 1 of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA). Immigration Commissioner Jaime Morente said Shi will be sent back to China as he was already issued a summary deportation order by the BI board of commissioners on Nov. 17 last year for being an undesirable alien. He said the arresting agents chanced upon Shi during an operation to capture another Chinese fugitive, named Miao You Chun, who did not appear at the scene. Miao, like his compatriot Shi, is also in the BIs wanted list for being a fugitive wanted for economic crimes in China.BI intelligence officer and FSU chief Bobby Raquepo disclosed that Shi is also an undocumented alien as his passport was already cancelled by the Chinese government. Raquepo said Shi was ordered deported as his presence here was deemed inimical to public interest. He added that the fugitive will be deported as soon as the Chinese embassy issues him his travel documents.
A West Oakland debris hauling company that was ordered by a court to halt operations has continued to move garbage in and out of its property, the Oakland city attorney said Thursday.

The city obtained a preliminary injunction on April 3 that barred Santos Engineering from hauling debris to or from its warehouse at 2850 Poplar St. The injunction also ordered Santos, which the city says has yet to obtain the proper permits, to stop any unlicensed operations.

But since the injunction was granted, neighbors and city inspectors have seen trucks entering and exiting the facility, one of which was filled with industrial debris, City Attorney Barbara Parker said.

We are closely monitoring Santos operations and will submit evidence to the court to hold defendants in contempt if necessary, Parker said.

Santos Engineering and its owner, Moacir Santos, were sued by the city in January. The suit, filed in Alameda County Superior Court, alleged that the company was contaminating the citys storm water system and intentionally blowing dust from construction debris into the neighborhood. The company could not be reached for comment.

Since the company moved into its West Oakland location in 2017 from Richmond, it has operated in violation of Oaklands zoning laws, the suit alleges.

The company began hauling and breaking down construction debris at its Poplar Street location, near homes and a playground, without obtaining the conditional use permit required to conduct industrial activities near a residential area, according to the suit.

From day one they were operating, they were in violation, said Alex Katz, Parkers chief of staff.

The lawsuit cites multiple environmental and health hazards stemming from the way Santos Engineering operates its business. Instead of installing an air filtration system, the defendants allegedly removed skylights to create openings in the roof of the property to allow dust to float out into the neighborhood, the city alleges.

Santos Engineering also allegedly tapped into a municipal fire hydrant on 28th Street for the companys water usage. The company also allowed runoff from sprinklers, which contained potentially toxic dust, to contaminate the storm water system, the citys suit says.

In the suit, residents in the area surrounding the warehouse allege that Santos Engineerings operations have adversely affected their health. Barbara Johnson, 71, who lives across the property, said dust from the companys demolition activities has collected in her house and car, forcing her to close all her windows.

Johnson said in the suit that she and her grandchildren have complained of coughing and feeling lightheaded and have had difficulty breathing.

In this case, we sued them because it was a very clear example of a business that was creating a nuisance and danger for the neighborhood, Katz said.

The city attorney said that in addition to its polluting activities, the company has misrepresented itself to city officials during site inspections and the conditional use permit application process.

A man who introduced himself as Jim Wolf told city officials that he represented Santos Engineering, according to city officials. After the January suit was filed, the city attorneys office discovered that Wolf was actually James Philip Lucero, officials said.

Lucero was convicted by a federal jury in February on three counts of violating the Federal Clean Water Act. Lucero was found guilty of illegally dumping pollutants near a wildlife refuge in Newark, the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Northern District of California said.

The U.S. Attorneys Office said Lucero was known as a dirt-broker, someone who charges a fee to contractors and trucking companies for providing an open space to dump construction debris.

Annie Ma is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: ama@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @anniema15
Mari Ellen Loijens has resigned from the Silicon Valley Community Foundation amid allegations from former employees that she made demeaning and lewd comments in the workplace. Loijens had been a top executive at the Mountain View foundation, which said it will continue its investigation into the alleged misconduct. The allegations were reported in the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Party City adds Ramadan line

For the first time, a major U.S. retailer is offering a dedicated line of decorations for the holiest month on the Islamic calendar: Ramadan, which culminates in the Eid al-Fitr celebration. Party City, which has about 850 stores, mostly in the United States, was motivated to create the items because customers kept requesting them, said Ryan Vero, the companys president of retail. The items have been selling well online  many items have sold out  and will be available this weekend in some stores. The holiday begins May 16 and ends at sundown June 14  the start of the Eid party that goes through June 15.

Frida Kahlo doll

raises eyebrows

Distant relatives of the late Mexican artist Frida Kahlo have won a temporary injunction that stops sales of a Frida Barbie doll. Kahlos grandniece Mara de Anda Romeo argued in Mexican court that Mattel doesnt have the rights to use Kahlos image as part of its Inspiring Women series. Mattel has said it worked with Panamas Frida Kahlo Corp., which it claims has rights to the artists image. Critics say the doll doesnt reflect Kahlos heavy eyebrows, and its costume doesnt accurately portray her elaborate Tehuana-style dresses.

From staff and news services. See more items at www.sfgate.com.
UP Profesor Clarissa David

KUALA LUMPUR, MalaysiaInflammatory stories masquerading as real news pose a particularly toxic threat in Asian countries with long-standing religious and ethnic divides but promises by some regional leaders to tackle the problem carry equal menace. Borrowing from US President Donald Trumps political playbook, government heads with an authoritarian streak are using the mantra of fake news to shield themselves from negative media coverage, and push legislation that critics say is aimed more at stifling dissent than punishing fabrication. The problem they profess to be addressing is a genuine one. Internet penetration is now so extensive -- even in the poorest areas -- that fake stories dressed up as fact can go viral on social media overnight and reach massive audiences with often dire consequences. In India last year, seven people were killed by a mob after a false story spread on WhatsApp that they were child-traffickers, while in Myanmar, doctored photos and bogus reports shared on Facebook have fueled the persecution of Rohingya Muslims. Several Asian leaders have tapped into the resulting public concern and launched campaigns that claim to target malign rumor-mongers but, experts say, serve to turn the screws on critical media and political opponents. This vague notion of fake news, which has been used and abused by US President Donald Trump, is a boon for governments who want to muzzle overcurious independent voices, Daniel Bastard, head of the Asia-Pacific desk at Reporters Without Borders (RSF), told AFP. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte -- who once memorably warned media that just because youre a journalist, youre not exempted from assassination -- has regularly accused news outlets critical of his deadly war on drugs of peddling fake news. He has openly attacked a top newspaper and broadcaster, while the biggest target of the media clampdown has been news website Rappler.Philippine authorities have cancelled its corporate license over claims the outlet violated foreign ownership laws and filed a criminal complaint over an alleged failure to pay taxes on bonds it issued. In Cambodia, authoritarian Prime Minister Hun Sen has openly praised Trumps Fake News Awards -- handed out in January by the president to his usual targets, including CNN and The New York Times -- and lobbed the fake news charge at his own media critics. It has helped provide ammunition for his governments sweeping assault on independent media in recent months, with the widely-respected Cambodia Daily newspaper shuttered after being hit with a huge tax bill and dozens of independent radio stations closed. Some countries are seeking to legislate against fake news, sparking concerns that the laws will be used to stifle dissent.Malaysia enacted a law this month that punishes publishers of false reports with up to six years in jail, which observers say is a clear bid to stifle criticism of scandal-hit Prime Minister Najib Razak before elections next month. Singapore has been holding parliamentary hearings to consider measures, including laws, against what the government terms deliberate online falsehoods while the Philippines is considering legislation that could see publishers of fake news punished with up to 20 years in jail. Clarissa David, a media expert at University of the Philippines, warned that any such law in the Philippines may become a tool for censorship that could be used to silence legitimate news organizations from covering stories that are unfavorable to groups in power. Michael Vatikiotis, a Southeast Asia expert, said that legislating against fake news puts journalists in deeper peril. Unlike normal justifications for curbing media freedom, fake news is a broad, catch-all definition that is wholly subjective, Vatikiotis, an author and former journalist, told AFP. Still, fake news is undoubtedly a real threat and has sparked alarm in Europe where governments are worried that Russia may try to meddle in elections, following allegations that Moscow sought to tilt the 2016 US poll in Trumps favor. Germany has passed a law threatening social networks with fines if they do not remove bogus reports and hate speech while Brussels is working on a Europe-wide plan to tackle fake news online. But media rights groups are against legislation, arguing instead for the press to follow a strict set of standards they set themselves, and for social media giants such as Facebook to come up with responsible policies to stem the flood of misleading information. RSFs Bastard warned that the idea of social media companies policing themselves could pose as many problems as governments passing laws, however. Will (Facebook CEO) Mark Zuckerberg decide what is real or fake? he said. Just as we have big reservations when states want to control the realness of news through legislation, we dont want corporations to decide it without any transparency.
Tragically, one passenger died on Southwest Airlines' Flight 1380 from New York to Dallas last Tuesday after an engine blew apart in midair  and now other passengers are getting a payout from the carrier.

Debris from the engine failure blew through a window in the fuselage, striking a woman. She died, and other passengers went through a traumatic experience as oxygen masks came down and the plane veered and plunged before the crew brought it back under control for an emergency landing a Philadelphia.

According to media reports at week's end, Southwest sent a letter of apology to the passengers who endured the midair ordeal, offering them an apology, a $1,000 travel voucher, and a check for $5,000. The letters were signed by Southwest CEO Gary Kelly. The flight was carrying 149 people.

Southwest said the $5,000 was meant to cover "any of your immediate financial needs," and the travel voucher was "a tangible gesture of our heartfelt sincerity."

In spite of the airline's payout to passengers, legal experts said it was likely that Southwest could still expect lawsuits from the survivors, even though they suffered no physical injuries. The trauma they suffered could likely lead to post-traumatic stress disorder in some passengers, the experts said.

The incident attracted major media attention for days, as passengers recounted their experiences and posted photos and videos from the flight online. A New York Times headline described their ordeal as "20 minutes of chaos and terror" before the 737 landed safely

Some observers noted that the photos revealed a problem with emergency procedures on the part of some passengers. Instead of holding the oxygen masks to cover their nose and mouth as they should have, they only covered their mouths. But otherwise, the captain and crew on the flight drew praise from passengers for their professional response to the crisis.

Although metal fatigue was suspected for causing a fan blade to break off in the engine, the National Transportation Safety Board said it could take more than a year to definitively determine the cause of the accident.

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Chris McGinnis is the founder of TravelSkills.com. The author is solely responsible for the content above, and it is used here by permission. You can reach Chris at chris@travelskills.com or on Twitter @cjmcginnis.
A Manteca man who earlier pleaded not guilty to threatening to kill female staff members of a Bay Area Congresswoman was indicted on eight counts of making threats to federal officials in a separate case, the U.S. Attorneys office said.

Ronald Joseph Lafaye, 52, threatened to assault, murder, beat or sodomize employees of the Department of Veterans Affairs on eight occasions between March 19 and March 26, the indictment alleges.

On the phone, Lafaye made violent threats against the people he spoke to, their families and other employees at the VA. According to the indictment, Lafaye was motivated to retaliate against the officials because he was upset with the way they performed their duties.

Lafayes threats to the VA staff included saying he would carve peoples hearts out, snap their necks and pimp them out, the indictment alleges. He also used a range of epithets and slurs on race and sexuality to verbally attack the people who answered the phone.

Lafaye earlier pleaded not guilty to charges of criminal threats, threatening a public officer and making annoying telephone calls in San Mateo County Superior Court. In that case, Lafaye allegedly left 12 threatening voice mails on the office phone for U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Hillsborough.

San Mateo County district attorney Steve Wagstaffe said that Lafaye had made an innocuous call in December, in which he sought help with veterans affairs. On March 19, Lafaye left a dozen voice mails interlaced with expletives, threatening violence against women on Speiers staff, prosecutors said.

Lafaye left his first and last name as well as his phone number in the voice mails, Wagstaffe said. Police found him in Oregon, and he was extradited to California.

He is being held at the Maguire Correctional Facility in Redwood City in lieu of $150,000 bail on the charges originating from San Mateo.

Annie Ma is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: ama@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @anniema15
San Francisco police busted 11 auto break-in suspects over a five-day period this month, including three smash-and-grab crews, authorities said Friday.

The crews operate in designated roles, often with lookouts and getaway drivers, in addition to team members who pluck stolen property through broken windows, said Officer Joseph Tomlinson, a spokesman for the San Francisco Police Department.

Theyre able to hit cars faster, and get to more cars at one time, Tomlinson said. Working in a crew like that, it takes 30 seconds to get your property.

While the process for crews may be streamlined  to the point that San Francisco had a record 31,322 auto break-ins last year  the districts targeted in early April were diverse. Police reported arrests after three separate incidents in the North Beach, Design District and South of Market neighborhoods.

At 1:45 a.m. on April 2, police responded to Grant and Filbert streets after a report of people fleeing the area after breaking into multiple vehicles. On the way to the call, officers were notified of a victim reporting the suspects vehicle at Montgomery and Francisco streets. Officers changed course and came upon three men and one juvenile breaking into a vehicle on the 1800 block of Kearny Street, police said.

The suspects  Tyler McKinney, 26, of Berkeley; Christopher Wise, 28, of Sacramento; and Robert Warren, 23, of San Francisco  were booked into jail on two counts of burglary and one count of conspiracy. A 16-year-old boy was also booked into jail.

Two days later, at 8:24 p.m., plainclothes officers from the Southern District were conducting surveillance on the 1700 block of Alameda Street when they reportedly witnessed a smash-and-grab.

Troy Savoy, 20, of San Francisco allegedly got out of a parked car and began to case a vehicle. He then got back into his car and drove off, police said, before returning moments later to break the window of the car he had earlier targeted to steal a backpack.

Officers moved in to arrest him, but Savoy attempted to flee and crashed his vehicle into another parked car, police said. He and a passenger, 18-year-old Earl Jihad of Pleasant Hill, allegedly attempted to run from the scene but were arrested a short distance from the collision.

Savoy and Jihad were booked into jail on counts of second-degree burglary, possession of stolen property, conspiracy and resisting arrest.

The next night at 9:32 p.m., officers reportedly came upon Manuel Mills, 30, of Richmond casing vehicles near 10th and Harrison streets. Mills and another man, 41-year-old Taj Williams of Alameda then drove to Division Street just west of King Street, where Williams allegedly got out of the vehicle and broke the rear window of a parked car.

The men tried to drive off when officers moved in for the arrest, police said, but Mills crashed his vehicle into a car that was stopped in traffic. Both men were arrested along with a third suspect, 25-year-old Savannah Jacobs of Richmond.

The three were booked into jail on suspicion of burglary, conspiracy and possession of burglary tools, and Mills and Williams were also booked on possession of stolen property.

San Francisco police reported two additional arrests on April 3 and 7 related to separate auto break-ins in the city.

Annie Ma is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: ama@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @anniema15
A teacher at a Vallejo elementary school was arrested Thursday after he allegedly tried to meet with an undercover agent posing as a teenage girl, officials said.

Andrew Lund, 36, of Vallejo, was arrested Thursday morning and booked into jail on felony charges of sending harmful matter to a minor and contacting a minor with intent to commit sexual offense, the Contra Costa County District Attorneys Office said.
Posted Friday, April 20, 2018 4:00 am

Six Marshfield High School seniors and their star partners put their dancing skills to the test during this years "Dancing With the Stars" competition Saturday, April 14, in the Marshfield High School gym.

Master of ceremonies Chuck Cooksey started the evening by introducing judges Natalie Espy, Kim Kicker and Agina Robinson, who commented on the competitors after their performance and gave them a "paddle score." The audience could also determine the winner by voting with their dollars for their favorite dance pair. All proceeds from the show will go to benefit Marshfield High School Project Graduation.

The first competitors were seniors Jason Whittington and Brooklyn Schaefer and their father, Terry Whittington, who danced to When the Saints Go Marching In. Senior Payton Nunn and Ryan Sarbia made use of the stage and chair props as they performed Q-Feels Dancing in Heaven. For their Michael Jackson mix, senior Nikki Ostrowski and Gene Hyder dressed up in leather jackets, sunglasses and wigs similiar to Jacksons hairstyle.

Michael Jackson is just a fun thing to do and I thought maybe we could do a mix or something, said Ostrowski. As for the costumes, we just looked up stuff and tried to figure out what Michael Jackson wore.

Senior John Gray and his partner, Dena Weaver, chose a '50s-style theme for their dance. Senior Ella Wheeler and Herb Maddox demonstrated a merengue-style dance to Ricky Martins Livin La Vida Loca.

Merengue is basically like a really simple Spanish dance, said Wheeler. It is not as complicated as the salsa.

The last dance couple, senior Shannon Jester and Terry Hardy, used inflatable palm trees and surf boards as they danced to Surfin USA. According to Jester, it took them a couple weeks to get the whole dance down. Hardy added that they started practicing in January.

We learned from each other to just have fun, said Jester. That was the main thing.

The first three or four weeks of practice, we were not really sure about it, but then we figured we should just relax and enjoy the moment, said Hardy. Plus, I wanted to make some good memories for Shannon since this is her senior year.

Throughout the evening, there were entertainers between each act. Senior Katie French and junior Kollin Bailey sang two songs together, senior Wyatt Greer juggled bowling pins while riding a unicycle, senior Lane Williams and Cody McHardy played a saxophone/piano duet to songs from Disney Pixars Monsters, Inc. and Toy Story, senior Seth Graham told jokes on stage and senior Garrett Dudley performed a drum solo. A first-place prize was presented to Greer and a second-place prize to Williams and McHardy.

This years Dancing With the Stars winners were Ostrowski and Hyder. Gray and Weaver earned second place, along with the Judges Choice award. Third place went to Jason Whittington, Schaefer and Terry Whittington, while the Best Costume award went to Jester and Hardy.
NEW YORK  The Democratic National Committee on Friday sued President Trumps campaign, Trumps son, his son-in-law, the Russian Federation and Wikileaks, saying they conspired to help Trump win the 2016 presidential election by breaking into DNC computers and stealing tens of thousands of emails and documents.

The lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court seeks unspecified damages and an order to prevent further interference with DNC computer systems.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Russia launched an all-out assault on our democracy, and it found a willing and active partner in Donald Trumps campaign, DNC Chairman Tom Perez said in a statement. He called it an act of unprecedented treachery.

Trump has said repeatedly that there was no collusion between his campaign and Russia. His 2020 campaign manager, Brad Parscale, said he thinks the sham lawsuit will be dismissed.

The lawsuit alleges the brazen attack on American democracy began with a cyberattack on DNC computers and phone systems, allowing the extraction of tens of thousands of documents and emails. It said the assault enabled Russia to advance its own interests and support Trump.

The lawsuit accuses Donald Trump Jr. of secretly communicating with WikiLeaks, saying the presidents son was offered a password to an anti-Trump lawsuit in one exchange. The lawsuit blames the president, too, saying he praised the illegal dissemination of DNC documents throughout fall 2016, making it a central theme of his speeches and rallies.

The lawsuit said Trumps son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was part of the conspiracy as a senior adviser and key decision-maker in the campaign. It said he began in June 2016 to control all campaign data-driven efforts, beginning with establishment of a 100-person data hub in San Antonio, and by hiring Cambridge Analytica, the social media and analytics firm.

The lawsuit said the conspiracy inflicted profound damage upon the DNC, costing it donations and preventing it from communicating the partys values and vision to voters and sowing discord inside the Democratic party.

The conspiracy constituted an act of previously unimaginable treachery: the campaign of the presidential nominee of a major party in league with a hostile foreign power to bolster its own chance to win the presidency, the lawsuit said.

Larry Neumeister is an Associated Press writer.
1 Plane inspections: U.S. airline regulators have ordered inspections on engine fan blades like the one that snapped off a Southwest Airlines plane, leading to the death of a woman who was partially blown out a window. The Federal Aviation Administrations announcement late Wednesday comes nearly a year after the engines manufacturer recommended the additional inspections, and a month after European regulators ordered their airlines to do the work.

2 Police apology: Philadelphias police commissioner apologized to two black men who were arrested at a Starbucks in the city while waiting for a business meeting. Commissioner Richard Ross, who is black, apologized to Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson on Thursday after he previously staunchly defended police for their handling of the incident. The men have met with the CEO of Starbucks and are pushing for meaningful change so what happened to them does not happen to anyone else.
Dee Jessop had planned a grand romantic gesture for his wife's 51st birthday.

There would be candles  51 of them  arranged in the shape of a heart atop a ridge overlooking a wide expanse of his family's Utah property. Jessop would set fire to an arrow and launch it, setting the 3-foot-wide heart ablaze.

But something went wrong. On Saturday night, while artfully placing the waxen tokens of his love, Jessop slipped. He fell some 50 or 60 feet off the canyon, his brother, Willie Jessop, told the Salt Lake Tribune on Tuesday.

Jessop's friends and family were in the area when he fatally fell, according to Fox13. They attempted to revive the injured man with CPR and called an ambulance. He was later pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.

Dee Jessop was the eldest child of eight on his mother's side. The 51-year-old belonged to the polygamous Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and had a "large family," his brother told the Salt Lake City paper.

Jessop's family had recently purchased a large swath of land in south central Utah after leaving a land trust on the Arizona-Utah border called the United Effort Plan, often considered the headquarters of polygamy.

Willie Jessop described his older brother as "a cross between a Steve Irwin and a Crocodile Dundee" to the Tribune. A Facebook post by Willie Jessop pictured his brother posing with a deer, llama, horse and atop a zebra.

Michelle Robertson is an SFGATE staff writer. Email her at mrobertson@sfchronicle.com or find her on Twitter at @mrobertsonsf.
Morocco and the EU started on Thursday negotiations to reach a new mutually beneficial fisheries agreement, said minister of Agriculture, Fisheries, Rural Development, Waters and Forests, Aziz Akhannouch.

Morocco and the EU will start a new phase and I hope that the negotiations will culminate in a mutually beneficial agreement that respects the commitments of both parties, Akhannouch told reporters following a meeting with members of the European Fisheries Commission.

Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita and EU Ambassador to Rabat Claudia Wiedey took part in the meeting.

The current agreement has helped Morocco make significant investments in infrastructure and support the implementation of Moroccos fisheries development plan dubbed Halieutis.

In a comment on the start of negotiations, Moroccos foreign minister Nasser Bourita made it clear that there would be no compromise over the Kingdoms sovereignty over all its territories including the Sahara.

Bourita also denounced the attacks by the adversaries of Moroccos territorial integrity who sought in vain to undermine Moroccos exemplary partnership with the EU.

The foreign minister underscore the longstanding cooperation and partnership with the EU, recalling that the first fisheries agreement was sealed in 1988.

For her part, Wiedey said that the Morocco-EU partnership in the fisheries sector is a key element of relations between the two parties.

The new deal will determine the conditions for this partnership, the objectives of which are the development of sustainable fisheries in the interests of both parties, and the strengthening of ocean governance, in particular by enhancing scientific monitoring, control and surveillance of fisheries in the region.

The head of the EU delegation in Rabat also expressed the blocs determination to continue to support the fisheries sector in Morocco through the Halieutis strategy, which Brussels has supported with more than 120 million since its launch.

Negotiations started after the Council of the European Union last Monday gave its green light to the European Commission to open such negotiations with Morocco on a new fisheries agreement, which includes the Moroccan Sahara.

The mandate, approved unanimously by the 28 EU Member States, provides that the waters off the Moroccan Sahara will be covered by the fisheries partnership between Morocco and the EU.

The unanimous adoption of the negotiating mandate was a victory for Morocco as it overlooked a ruling issued by the European Court of Justice las February 27. The ruling deemed the fisheries agreement inapplicable to the Sahara.

About 120 vessels from 11 EU countries (Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, Germany, Lithuania, Latvia, The Netherlands, Ireland, Poland and United Kingdom) are operating in Moroccos waters under the current agreement, which expires on July 14.
The annual Bay Area Book Festival takes place in the heart of Berkeley, a city perhaps best known as the home of the flagship campus of the University of California.

The festival and UC Berkeley share missions to make knowledge accessible, to engage people intellectually and creatively, to serve locally while reaching globally, and to foster community  indeed, as with Cals motto, to let there be light.

Because of these commonalities, in 2018 the festival significantly expanded its partnership with UC Berkeley, working especially closely with Berkeley Arts + Design, ASUC/Student Union, BAMPFA and UC Berkeleys office of Government and Community Relations.

The festival moved its date from June (as in previous years) to April, allowing students, academics and teachers who would otherwise be scattered across the world on summer break to attend for the first time.

Berkeley Arts + Design has been at the helm of the partnership, sponsoring six author programs (see sidebar) and helping the festival connect with campus departments. Whats more, Arts + Design closes out its semester-long BAMPFA Mondays on April 30 with a special program featuring festival speakers (see bampfa.org).

Several UC Berkeley departments, including Arts + Design, ASUC, and Cals official Student Store, have underwritten 1,000 wristbands for students, allowing general admission to the festivals indoor sessions free of charge.

Students can pick up their wristbands at the outdoor Cal Pavilion hosted by the ASUC/Student Union. This lounge-like setting is open to the public to browse Cal-related books, hear student authors, and get a commemorative tote bag (see sidebar).

Students have been involved in planning the festival this year in hands-on ways. Through a course co-taught with the Department of Rhetoric, the festival created intensive internships in volunteer management, marketing, ticketing, and community engagement.

Finally, BAMPFA has partnered with the Bay Area Book Festival since the events second year, co-hosting a five-day film series around the festival weekend. This years series, entitled Auteur, Author, includes renowned films that celebrate, adapt, or creatively reinterpret the written word and its practitioners.

UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ notes, The Bay Area Book Festival has become one of Californias leading literary events, bringing tens of thousands of readers and a diverse set of writers to Berkeley for an annual celebration of the power of the written word. While our campus has supported the festival since it began, were excited to strengthen ties to this event, whose mission of promoting literary expression and creating forums for discussing topical issues is very much in line with our own.

Festival Sessions Sponsored by UC Berkeley Arts + Design

Saturday, April 28

10 to 11:15 a.m.

Resisting Hate with Free Speech: Nadine Strossen interviewed by Erwin Chemerinsky (Freight & Salvage)

11:45 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Wrestling with the Devil: Ngugi wa Thiongo in Conversation: Ngugi wa Thiongo interviewed by Namwali Serpell (Freight & Salvage)

1:30 to 2:45 p.m.

Viet Thanh Nguyen on Art and Politics: Viet Thanh Nguyen interviewed by Karen Tei Yamashita (Freight & Salvage)

Sunday, April 29

10 to 11:15 a.m.

How Stories Make the World: Anthony Marra, Ismail Muhammad, Joyce Carol Oates, and Scott Saul, moderated by Joe DiPrisco (Veterans Memorial Building Auditorium)

11:45 a.m. to 12:15 p.m.

Standing at the Edge: Finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet: Joan Halifax interviewed by Dacher Keltner (Freight & Salvage)

2:30 to 3:15 p.m.

Smart Activism: History and Hope: L.A. Kauffman and Rebecca Solnit (San Francisco Chronicle Stage in the Park)

Other Sessions Involving UC Berkeley Faculty and Alums

Saturday, April 28

3:15 to 4:30 p.m.

The Imperative for Truth: Academy Award-Winning Documentarian Errol Morris in Conversation with Edward Frenkel: Errol Morris interviewed by Edward Frenkel (Veterans Memorial Building, Auditorium)

2:30 to 3:45 p.m.

Income Inequality: A World Gone Mad, Mean and Immoral: Steven Clifford, Jeff Clements, Robert Reich (San Francisco Chronicle Stage in the Park)

7:30 to 9 p.m.

The Common Good with Robert Reich (Saturday Night Keynote): Robert Reich (Freight & Salvage)

Cal Pavilion

A pop-up lounge where visitors can browse and enjoy!

Student authors

Cozy reading and browsing

Books written by Cal faculty and about Cal itself

Cal-branded merchandise

Goodies, tote bags, surprise giveaways
To our readers:

Welcome to the San Francisco Chronicles comprehensive guide to the fourth annual Bay Area Book Festival. The Chronicle is proud to be a sponsor of this major event that has become a mainstay of literary life in Northern California.

The festival is a two-day takeover of downtown Berkeley that brings together an unprecedented collection of writers and attracts tens of thousands of Bay Area residents.

Next weekends event reflects the Bay Areas important literary tradition  as well as our centerstage role in global culture and the marketplace of ideas.

For more than 150 years, Chronicle writers have played a key role in that heritage  from Mark Twain to Herb Caen to the talented writers on our staff today. A host of Chronicle writers, editors and contributors are bringing their keen observations and writing to many of the programs throughout the weekend.

The San Francisco Chronicle Stage in the Park  an outdoor, free venue seating nearly 600 people in the heart of the festival  will showcase discussions about well-being, food, politics, social good and more.

I hope you take the time to visit Berkeley, see your favorite authors and enjoy the food and activities that the city has to offer.
Repeated truancy from school is illegal. But its not a crime that can get you locked up, a state appeals court said Thursday, even when youre defying orders from a police officer as well as your parents.

The ruling by the First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco was far from flattering to the Napa youth identified as R.M. The court described her as a mouthy 17-year-old high school student with an abysmal school attendance record who swore at a police officer and a sheriffs deputy when they told her to go to class.

But the court said a judge should not have sent R.M. to juvenile hall for two days, and then sentenced her to another 15 days of confinement for resisting or obstructing an officer in the performance of his duties.

It is for the Legislature to decide how to redress a minors truant behavior, and the California Legislature has decided against criminal punishment, Justice Therese Stewart said in the 3-0 ruling. Youths who are arrested for truancy, she said, can be placed under court supervision and ordered to undergo counseling, along with other measures to get them to attend school, but cannot be threatened with the full force of criminal law, including incarceration.

Long before the incident that led to Thursdays ruling, R.M.s mother had frequently called an officer assigned by Napa police to help parents and school officials deal with children who had behavior problems or refused to attend class, the court said. The mother put in another call one morning in March 2016, and the police officer went to the home, accompanied by a deputy sheriff who was assigned to the high school.

The girl was hostile and defiant, uttering profanities, but eventually got into the patrol car and was driven to campus, the court said. They were met by the principal, who told her to go to class, but instead she walked away and swore again at the deputy who told her to come back. He then walked up and grabbed her by the arm.

R.M. was booked into juvenile hall for resisting or obstructing the officer. Superior Court Judge Michael Williams upheld the charge and ordered 15 days of additional confinement, followed by probation and further restrictions.

But the appeals court said R.M. did not illegally obstruct the officer, because his only actual duty in arresting a truant was to take her to school, not to make sure she actually attended class.

At that point, responsibility falls to school officials to handle the matter, Stewart said. She said a student who leaves school grounds can be arrested again, and possibly returned to her parents or a counselor, but cant be locked up for repeated truancy. She said R.M.s mother and school officials later took legal steps to place the girl under court supervision and deal with her truancy.

Some parents of unruly teenagers undoubtedly have fantasized at one time or another, when all else fails to get their teens out of bed and off to school, about having authorities press criminal charges, Stewart said. But under California law, she said, quoting a state Supreme Court ruling, the emphasis is not on punishment but on correction of truancy ...to promote attendance in order that students may be educated.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter @BobEgelko
Qatari military forces headed by their Chief of Staff took part in a military drill in the region along with forces from Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf countries, which have cut off ties with Qatar since June last year.

The Qatari military said its Chief of Staff Ghanem bin Shaheen al-Ghanim took part in the closing ceremony, which took place last Monday in the presence of King Salman and other Arab leaders.

The exercises, known as Gulf Shield drills, saw the participation of 23 countries in addition to Qatar.

A Qatari ship was involved in the drills which started on March 21. Nine Qatari officers took part in the exercises while seven others joined as observers.

The US and the UK also were part of the drills.

Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, and Egypt in June cut off ties with Qatar over its alleged support for terrorism. Air, sea and ground links with Qatar have cut off.

Qatar was invited to attend the Arab League Summit in Saudi Arabia last week, but it sent a low-key delegation.
Children and families will love whats in store for them at the ShowTime Stage in the festivals free outdoor fair. The something-for-everyone lineup features childrens authors, book illustrators and essay winners in addition to live theater, dance, magic and more!

Please note that this schedule is subject to change. Visit
Four security forces lost their life Thursday in an attack at a checkpoint, in the southern province of Asir, by Saudi nationals, the interior ministry announced.

Unidentified suspects opened fire on the checkpoint killing three. The fourth reportedly died in a shootout with the assailants who tried to run away.

Authorities however noted that two of the suspects have been arrested while a third was killed in a chase.

No group has claimed responsibility for the attack but the kingdom has since late 2014 witnessed a surge in attacks against security forces and Shia minority population. The Islamic State has claimed several attacks on Shia mosques.

Houthi rebels in Yemen where Saudi Arabia is leading an international coalition have fired a series of missiles on the kingdom. The Iran-backed rebels have started using drones to attack oil installations in kingdom.
ALBANY - On a sunny day blasted by wild and bitter wind, 500 students rallied outside the state Capitol to demand laws curbing gun violence. They were among many thousands high school students across the nation at events Friday that marked the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting.

The Albany protest started with a "die in" as students collapsed on the steps of the Capitol and a single speaker at the podium recited names of the 12 Columbine students and one teacher killed on April 20, 1999. Since then, 122 students and teachers have been slain by school shooters. Albany student organizers used a GoFundMe page to fly Parkland, Fla., student Adam Alhanti to speak to the crowd. Alhanti survived February's slaughter of 17 in Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School by a gunman with an AR-15.

"There's a sickness spreading across this country and it's not the common cold. It's the belief that AR-15s are a necessity to the average American," Alhanti said as the crowd's cheers exploded. He denied the National Rifle Association's claim that the student movement aims to ban all guns but noted, "The Constitution says nothing about an assault rifle that's able to pick off 58 people from 300 yards."

Chants of "This is what democracy looks like" and "NRA has got to go" filled the air. People waved homemade signs. Some had red handprints over the words, "NRA You Have Blood on Your Hands." Others said, "School is Stressful Enough Without Getting Shot" and "The Only Thing Easier to Buy than a Gun is a Republican." The handful of adults at the rally were mostly police, reporters. Some of the protesters too young to drive they took CTDA buses to the protest. Matthew Carter, 15, rode his bike.

About a third of people were students of color, a detail that Rachel Prosper, 16, said caught her eye as an African American. Prosper helped her brother Ralph, 13, make T-shirts using black ink and a stencil of the word "Enough" in the shape of a Glock gun.

"Gun violence is always a concern for our community," the Albany High School student said, "so I wanted to learn more about the issue and political solutions for a problem that my parents say has lasted forever."

Albany Academy student organizer Caroline Crowell sat in on a live streaming with American Civil Liberties Union lawyers after some schools threatened students with suspensions if they participated.

"The ACLU told us the schools could not legally create new punishments for kids who participate in these anti-gun violence events," Crowell said. "Our school just asked that students get a permission slip signed by their parents."

In Niskayuna, more than 200 students assembled on the lawn outside Town Hall. High School seniors Alana McNulty and Emily and Hannah Meade completed voter registration cards as the crowd chanted "Vote them out."

About 25 Schenectady High School students, including Trevor Luciani, senior class vice president, attended the Niskayuna event. He said that four youngsters talking among themselves within two minutes named 17 of their peers who had died of gun violence.

"When we stop talking is when the change stops as well," said Luciani. "When we work together, we're stronger together."

Other speakers included Assemblyman Phil Steck, Meisha Rosenberg with New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, Rabbi Matt Cutler and a representative from Schenectady Clergy Against Hate.

In Clifton Park, Shenendehowa High School student Jackson Hengsterman and his team of teenagers drew 600 students onto the football field where they had a rally with speakers, music and sessions devoted to the 1st and 2nd Amendments, gun laws, mental health and violence directed toward LGBTQ students. Copies of the Constitution were available for free. Hengsterman said a high point for him was when a student sang "Imagine," John Lennon's anthem for peace.

Many of the Shenendehowa students wore orange to the rally. "It's the color chosen by our movement. We wear it the same reason hunters do; we don't want to get shot," he said.

A counterprotester drove past the crowd in a pickup truck with a Confederate flag flapping. Ten male students carrying blue flags marched to the field chanting, "Blue lives matter," rallying cry of a movement formed in response to Black Live Matter after the killing of two police officers in 2014.

"We were hoping to have a discussion with them and reassure them this is not an anti-police rally or anti-gun owner, but they just kept cursing about liberals," said Hengsterman, who describes his home as conservative and focused on family values. "The kids who signed up to attend our rally got bored with them. They really didn't offer reasons for objecting to any of our ideas."

As the rally and the school day ended, students stopped to ask Hengsterman how they could help him plan events throughout the year. He tried to use a Google app where volunteers could sign up to help him with the next gun violence protest and communicate with each other. But he hit the app's maximum of 250 participants within an hour.

Times Union reporter Paul Nelson contributed to this story.
Talks to replace ailing Khalifa Haftar at the head of self-imposed Libyan National Army (LNA) are in full swing as the militarys entourage and international backers, mainly Egypt and United Arab Emirates (UAE), have begun secret talks to choose a successor to the LNA top commander.

Haftar has been out of Libya for over one week. The army commander has been admitted to hospital in Paris after he suffered a stroke while on a visit to Jordan. According to a diplomatic source, he has a lung cancer, which has affected his brain.

London-based Middle East Eye has revealed that Haftars health condition is embarrassing. The media, citing an informed source, notes that the warlord is not lucid and has lost ability to talk.

He is unable to talk or even fully comprehend. He cannot even sit or stand up, the source is quoted as saying.

The media, citing a doctor at the Paris hospital, notes that it looks uncertain to see the 75-year old military commander winning back his speaking abilities.

There are drugs that can be administered to reduce the swelling in the brain. They could give Haftar back the power of speech, for instance, but these effects would be temporary, the doctor told the media on condition of anonymity.

Haftars alarming health condition is worrying the LNA and capitals backing him as succession wars emerge.

Negotiations, according to media reports, have begun in eastern Libya and in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to find a successor to Haftar.

Salem al-Hassi, the second commander in line right after Haftar, is the leading successor. He is said to be popular in the east-based army and enjoys Egypts backing.

UAE on the hand has rallied behind Aoun al-Ferjani  another LNA official close to Haftar, the New Arab reports.

A third figure, Abdel Razak al-Nadhuri, is also tipped for the army top position. Al-Nadhuri also close to Haftar according to the LNA survived an assassination attempt Wednesday in the entrance of the city of Benghazi.
For its fourth annual Young Authors Writing Contest, the Bay Area Book Festival chose the theme of perception to challenge teenage scribes to explore multiple viewpoints in short stories, essays or autobiographical pieces.

Everyone sees the world through different eyes  both literally and figuratively. How is it possible that two people can look at the same thing, but see different things? noted instructions for the contest, which was judged by the festivals community engagement team.

Lily Wancewicz, a junior at the Harker School in San Jose, won the 11th/12th grade division for The Trouble With Sudoku, about a girl attending her mothers funeral in rural Alabama with her Sudoku-obsessed father.

Recently, Ive been reading (Raymond) Carvers short story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and I really admire his minimalistic style, said Wancewicz, 16. The San Jose resident said she plans to continue creative writing in college while focusing on Japanese and East Asian studies.

Arushi Avachat, a 15-year-old sophomore at Foothill High School in Pleasanton, won the 9th/10th grade division with of honey and spice, which traces the evolving perspective of an Indian American schoolgirl on her cultural heritage.

Citing Jane Austen, Nicola Yoon and J.K. Rowling as her favorite authors, Avachat credits Rowlings Harry Potter series for inspiring her to become a writer.

I hope to publish a novel one day, Avachat said.

The two divisions also included second- and third-place awards (see below.) The six winners, who received cash prizes from $50 to $100, will read their works at the Emerging Voices session 11:30 a.m. Sunday, April 29, on the ShowTime Stage.

Writopia Lab, the contests sponsor and emcee of the session, also awarded Wancewicz a free place in one of its weeklong summer workshops.

Additional winners

9th/10th grade: 2nd place, What Are You Looking At, by Kaya Dierks, 9th grade at the Branson School (Ross); 3rd place, Becoming Nancy, by Yuwei Dou, 10th grade at Amador Valley High School (Pleasanton).

11th/12th grade: 2nd place, Careening, by Zeke Gerwein, 11th grade at Oakland School for the Arts; 3rd place, Sincerely, Darkness, by Angela Yang, 12th grade at St. Ignatius College Preparatory (San Francisco).
OAKLAND (BCN)

The city of Oakland has secured an injunction against a debris-hauling company to stop unpermitted operations that discharge dangerous dust into a West Oakland neighborhood, City Attorney Barbara Parker said.

Alameda County Superior Court Judge Brad Seligman issued the order on April 3 which bars Santos Engineering and business and property owner Moacir Santos from hauling any debris to or from its warehouse at 2850 Poplar St., according to Parker.

The injunction also orders Santos to stop any unpermitted and unlicensed operations.

The city filed suit against Santos in January alleging that the company intentionally blows dust from construction debris into the neighborhood, allowing contaminated water to flow into the city's storm water system, in violation of the city's zoning laws.

The city says that since the injunction was issued, witnesses including city inspectors and a neighbor have seen trucks leaving and entering the warehouse, including one truck with a full load of debris.

Parker said her office has sent notice to Santos Engineering to meet and confer about violations of the injunction.

"We are closely monitoring Santos' operations and will submit evidence to the court to hold defendants in contempt if necessary," Parker said in a statement.

Parker said, "West Oakland neighborhoods have long suffered disproportionately from pollution in the air, soil and ground water, and that has taken a toll on the health of West Oaklanders. It is unconscionable and contemptible for anyone to try to profit from poisoning the neighborhood - including the children and adults who live there."

Last year Santos Engineering moved from Richmond into the warehouse on Poplar Street, which is near homes, a playground and a farm.

According to the suit, Santos hauls construction debris from job sites around the Bay Area, such as drywall, old steel and fiberglass, to the warehouse, where it then stores, sorts and breaks down large amounts of materials, potentially including materials that are known sources of asbestos.

The city says handling and breaking down construction debris creates huge amounts of dust, but instead of mitigating the harm from those activities, Santos knocked out parts of the warehouse ceiling and installed a fan to blow dust directly outside of the property and into the surrounding neighborhood.

In addition, the suit alleges that Santos illegally tapped into an East Bay Municipal Utility District fire hydrant and allowed contaminated water to run into the city's storm water system and that it routes its trucks down residential streets where commercial trucks are prohibited under city law.

According to Parker, Santos engineering claimed that he was fixing violations that were identified by the city and other agencies but neighbors still complain about dust and other nuisances generated by the business.

Parker said one reason the city has reason to mistrust Santos' representations about its business activities is that during site inspections and throughout the conditional use permit application process, a person speaking on behalf of the company represented himself as "Jim Wolf."

But Parker said that after the suit was filed the city learned that "Jim "Wolf' is really James Philip Lucero, who recently was convicted in federal court of felonies related to illegal dumping of construction debris in federal wetlands in Newark.

Santos Engineering officials couldn't be reached for comment.

###
VALLEJO (BCN)

A Vallejo elementary school teacher was arrested this morning on suspicion of attempting to contact a minor for sex and sending harmful matter to a minor, Contra Costa County prosecutors said.

Andrew Lund, 36, a fourth-grade teacher at the K-5 Glen Cove Elementary School at 501 Glen Cove Parkway, was arrested at his Vallejo home by Vallejo police and members of the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force's Silicon Valley Chapter, Scott Alonso, spokesman for the Contra Costa County District Attorney's Office, said.

Charges against Lund are expected to be filed Friday morning in Contra Costa County Superior Court in Martinez.

Lund allegedly communicated this month over the internet with an undercover investigator with the ICAC Task Force who was posing as a girl, Alonso said.

County prosecutors are asking anyone in Vallejo who might also be a victim to contact the district attorney's office.

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SAN FRANCISCO (BCN)

As San Franciscans this week look back on the 1906 earthquake during its 112th anniversary, the city's Department of Building Inspection announced today it is expanding its emergency training program to help ensure that residents are prepared for the next major disaster.

The free Seismic Safety Outreach Program began in 2015 in Chinatown, offering five once-a-week training workshops on personal preparedness, basic first aid and citizen CPR, earthquake mitigation response and recovery and fire safety.

The program has since expanded to the Western Addition, Sunset, Bayview and Richmond neighborhoods and is now being offered in all of the city's 11 supervisorial districts. Additionally, workshops are provided in Chinese, Spanish, Russian, and Korean among other languages, building inspection officials said.

Attendees who attend and complete all of the workshops will earn the title of Seismic Safety Ambassador, allowing them to be part of a core group of city residents trained with the knowledge of what to do after the next big earthquake.

"For the last three years, the SSOP has equipped residents with vital knowledge and hands-on training to prepare and respond immediately within their communities to a major disaster," DBI director Tom Hui said in a statement.

"By expanding this program citywide, we are able to provide essential information and training right to the doorsteps of our most vulnerable and diverse communities. We are preparing our multilingual communities for the next big one, and ensuring they have the basic knowledge and tools to respond immediately and effectively when the next disaster hits," Hui said.

Since its inception, the program has been spearheaded by DBI's two community-based partners, Community Youth Center of San Francisco and Self-Help for Elderly.

According to building inspection officials, the program has reached about 25,000 San Francisco residents through its program's workshops, public events and presentations. Additionally, out of the 350 workshops provided in 2017, 2,000 San Franciscans graduated as Seismic Safety Ambassadors.

Residents interested in attending the newly expanded workshops can visit www.sfdbi.org/seismicsafety for more information.

###
A federal court Thursday ruled that local governments across the country need not provide information on undocumented immigrants to federal immigration authorities in order to get certain grants.

The ruling upheld a September lower court ruling holding that the Justice Department couldn't withhold Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grants, better known as Byrne JAG grants, to so-called sanctuary cities including San Francisco unless they provided information on undocumented immigrants.
A man was shot to death in Richmond and another man was wounded late Thursday night, police said this morning.

Officers responded around 11:30 p.m. to the parking lot of the Stop and Shop convenience store at 800 Carlson Boulevard on a ShotSpotter alert, police said.

The officers found a 21-year-old Pittsburg man on the ground suffering from multiple gunshot wounds to his upper torso, according to police, and he succumbed to his injuries.

A second man, an Oakland resident, was also struck by gunfire, according to police. He was taken to the hospital, treated and released.

The suspect in the shooting walked down Carlson Boulevard, then stopped near the convenience store and started shooting at the victim as he left the store, according to preliminary information gathered by homicide detectives.

The suspect ran northbound on Carlson immediately after the shooting, police said, but there is no suspect information nor is anyone in custody.

Police are still trying to determine the motive for the murder.

A wide (or is that wild?) variety of events is on tap today in the Bay Area celebrating 4/20 in this, the first year that recreational use of marijuana for adults is legal in California.

One of the biggest celebrations, San Francisco's annual 4/20 celebration of cannabis, is taking place all day in Golden Gate Park at Hippie Hill at the east end of the park. The highlight of the day, with thousands of people lighting up, is planned at 4:20 p.m.

In an example of truly fortuitous timing, AAA Northern California will offer its Tipsy Tow service beginning at the same time. Driving under the influence of marijuana is still against the law in the state.

The service runs from 4:20 p.m. today until 4:20 a.m. Saturday and includes a free tow and ride home up to 10 miles and does not require AAA membership. Anyone can call (800) AAA-HELP and say they need a tipsy tow.

An all-day educational cannabis event is taking place at Oaksterdam University in Oakland, with legal, horticulture and cooking experts on hand, according to Dale Sky Jones of Oaksterdam.

"Our campus is family-friendly. We only distribute knowledge, not cannabis," Jones said.

The venue is at 1734 Telegraph Ave.

At least two marijuana dispensaries will have extended hours in recognition of today's date. The Berkeley Patients Group at 2366 San Pablo Ave. in Berkeley will be open until 10 p.m. There will be vendor demos, a photo booth, snacks and raffles all day.

Bay Area Harborside Marijuana Dispensaries will be open until 8 p.m. today. The dispensaries have two locations, one at 1840 Embarcadero in Oakland, the other at 1365 N. 10th St. in San Jose.

A federal court Thursday ruled that local governments across the country need not provide information on undocumented immigrants to federal immigration authorities in order to get certain grants.

The ruling upheld a September lower court ruling holding that the Justice Department couldn't withhold Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grants, better known as Byrne JAG grants, to so-called sanctuary cities including San Francisco unless they provided information on undocumented immigrants.

The conditions include two elements: giving advance notice to federal authorities of the release date of undocumented immigrants held in state or local custody, and allowing ICE agents to enter local correctional facilities and meet with detainees.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions had attempted to tie receipt of the funds to the grant recipient's compliance.

The September ruling was made in response to a case brought by the city of Chicago. The lower court held that the Justice Department couldn't withhold the grants to jurisdictions that refused to comply.

A federal grand jury has indicted six Oakland residents for various drug related crimes, acting United States Attorney Alex G. Tse announced Thursday.

Timothy Crawford, 55, Alan Johnson, 40, Ridell Lambert, 30, Wilmon Ingram, 40, Karlos Ely, 52 and Keith Woodson, 34, were all indicted on crimes related to distribution of cocaine or a cocaine base in the area of 85th Avenue and International Boulevard in East Oakland between February of 2017 and April of 2018, prosecutors said.

Two of the defendants, Crawford and Lambert, were also indicted for being felons in possession of firearms.

The defendants were charged in separate indictments as part of a larger crackdown against narcotics distributors in the area, prosecutors said.

A woman has been arrested on suspicion of drunk driving in connection with a vehicle collision in a Walmart parking lot in Rohnert Park that left a man with major injuries Thursday.

Kathy Jean Barella, 58, was arrested on suspicion of felony drunk driving, according to the Rohnert Park Department of Public Safety.

Emergency crews responded Thursday at 5:55 p.m. to the incident at 4625 Redwood Drive and found a 66-year-old San Francisco man on the ground suffering from major injuries, police said.

Witnesses told police a blue 2005 Jeep Liberty backed into the man and possibly drove over him.

Police said the driver of the Jeep, identified Barella, was seen inside the Walmart acting erratically prior to the incident.

Barella gave spontaneous statements to investigators admitting she had consumed alcohol prior to the collision, police said.

Officers conducted a preliminary in-field DUI investigation, and a preliminary alcohol breath test determined Barella had a .11 percent blood alcohol content level, police said.

She was taken into custody and booked into jail.

The victim was transported to the hospital and was undergoing surgery Thursday night.

Officers arrested a woman on suspicion of drunk driving Tuesday in connection with a four-car collision on northbound state Highway 1 in Pacifica, police said.

Police and firefighters responded to Highway 1 at Reina Del Mar Avenue around 3:55 p.m. on a report of a collision, police said.

They found four vehicles in the northbound lanes of traffic, according to police. There were no injuries, but a lane was closed until around 5:15 p.m. so officers could investigate, police said.

The officers allegedly determined that the driver of one of the vehicles showed signs of intoxication and determined after further investigation that she was driving under the influence, police said.

Marsha Byrd, 53, of Pacifica, was arrested on suspicion of drunk driving, according to police.

A Santa Rosa man was arrested Thursday on suspicion of committing a lewd act with a minor who lived in the same residence, a police sergeant said.

Miguel Flores-Gonzalez, 34, is suspected of making a girl under age 14 get into bed with him, then touching her chest underneath her shirt, Sgt. Terry Anderson said.

Police received a call about the alleged molestation Tuesday and arrested Flores-Gonzalez after he left his residence in the 1500 block of Sebastopol Road Thursday morning, Anderson said.

Police said the man lived in the girl's home but have not said if they are related.

Flores-Gonzalez is being held in the Sonoma County Jail under $250,000 bail and is scheduled to be arraigned Monday afternoon in Sonoma County Superior Court.

###
Dozens of people began gathering their belongings and dismantling makeshift tarp structures and tents at a homeless camp behind a Dollar Tree store in the Roseland area of Santa Rosa Thursday morning.

The "Last Chance and Remembrance Village" camp is located on land owned by the Sonoma County Community Development Commission, which wants the site cleared so it can begin construction of 175 apartments, some of which are to be affordable housing.

The camp was to be vacated by March 23 but the date was extended to April 9. Housing advocates' attorneys then challenged the eviction and a federal judge suggested a three-week delay. The Community Development Commission then set Thursday as the final date to vacate the camp.

A Sonoma County Supervised Adult Crew, an alternative program for offenders sentenced up to 90 days in the county jail, began removing trash and debris from the camp Thursday morning.

About 80 people were at the camp on Wednesday, but some left during the night, according to homeless advocates at the camp Thursday morning. Others left one by one over the past week ahead of the eviction deadline.

Advocates from Homeless Action! said it was home to as many as 130-140 people at one point who were displaced by the October wildfires or the evictions of people who were living underneath three U.S. Highway 101 overpasses in downtown Santa Rosa area and on "Homeless Hill" in east Santa Rosa. The camp started in November 2015.

"I've been here 16 months. I came with my boyfriend after I left an abusive marriage with just the clothes on my back," Nicholle Vannucci said. "I don't have any place to go."

Chief Deputy County Counsel Alegria De La Cruz said about 55 beds were available Thursday in the Samuel L. Jones Hall homeless shelter in Santa Rosa for those with no where to go.

Community Development Commission executive director Margaret Van Vliet, who also was at the site Thursday morning, said permanent housing was found for six people at the Palms Inn motel where previously homeless veterans now live.

She said shelters are "the front door" for assessment of the homeless people's needs and housing when there are vacancies.

Jennielynn Holmes, director of shelter and housing for Catholic Charities, said 40 campers have found temporary shelter in Samuel L. Jones Hall, and Catholic Charities is helping the campers with inventory and transportation of their belongings.

The Community Development Commission is providing free storage of the campers' personal belongings for 90 days in the vacant former Roseland Hardware store building on its Sebastopol Road property.

Participants are allowed up to two boxes 18-by-18-by-16 inches. Bikes, computers, appliances, furniture and perishable food are not allowed.

Several Santa Rosa police officers and some firefighters were present at the site Thursday morning. Police Lt. Rick Kohut said clearing the camp will take several days.

"We're helping Catholic Charities with outreach and our goal is to get people into services or shelters. We want people to be actively removing," Kohut said.

Santa Rosa Assistant Fire Marshall Paul Lowenthal said there have been cooking fires and bonfires at the camp and there are concerns about getting people out of the camp containing dozens of tents in the event of a fire.

Lowenthal said there is propane and diesel fuel in the camp, and the fire department has tried to get the campers to create aisles. Clearing the camp will be a lengthy process, he said.

As the decampment slowly progressed, several people took turns addressing the large gathering at the site.

Kathleen Finigan, a homeless advocate, said some campers were panicking because they had no place to go. Most of the remaining campers are disabled, she said.

"People are frustrated, anxious and feel they are fighting for their right to just exist," Finigan said. "People prefer the privacy of their own tents over the Sam Jones shelter. They don't feel safe there. This is a real community that has grown here."

Adrienne Lauby of Homeless Action! said the camp had a formal camp council structure.

The Rev. Christopher Bell of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation, Santa Rosa, said he had no words, only heartache as he watched the camp disbanding.

"We are not living up to our obligations as children of God. God is on the side of the poor, the homeless and disenfranchised. I'm not feeling that today. I pray for their strength, peace, safety and courage," Bell said.

President Donald Trump took to Twitter Thursday morning to threaten the funding for a recent deal reached with Gov. Jerry Brown as part of the White House's effort to send military troops to the Mexican border.

"Governor Jerry Brown announced he will deploy 'up to 400 National Guard Troops' to do nothing," Trump tweeted.

"The crime rate in California is high enough, and the Federal Government will not be paying for Governor Brown's Charade," he added. "We need border security and action, not words!"

That came in response to an agreement inked between the state and the federal government to add 400 guardsman to an ongoing program combating transnational crime. The program currently includes 55 troops stationed at the border.

The agreement came with certain caveats, however, including stipulations that these troops would remain under the governor's command as commander in chief for the California National Guard and that they would not be enforcing federal immigration laws during their deployment - or help build a border wall.

Under those circumstances, however, Brown said the state was willing to accept federal funding to make it happen.

Around 2 p.m. officials with the California National Guard said via Twitter that around 11:30 a.m. they'd received written confirmation from the Pentagon that the deal was still going through.

"In short, nothing has changed today," the Guard said.

The city of Oakland has secured an injunction against a debris-hauling company to stop unpermitted operations that discharge dangerous dust into a West Oakland neighborhood, City Attorney Barbara Parker said.

Alameda County Superior Court Judge Brad Seligman issued the order on April 3, which bars Santos Engineering and business and property owner Moacir Santos from hauling any debris to or from its warehouse at 2850 Poplar St., according to Parker.

The injunction also orders Santos to stop any unpermitted and unlicensed operations.

The city filed suit against Santos in January alleging that the company intentionally blows dust from construction debris into the neighborhood, allowing contaminated water to flow into the city's storm water system, in violation of the city's zoning laws.

The city says that since the injunction was issued, witnesses including city inspectors and a neighbor have seen trucks leaving and entering the warehouse, including one truck with a full load of debris.

Parker said her office has sent notice to Santos Engineering to meet and confer about violations of the injunction.

"We are closely monitoring Santos' operations and will submit evidence to the court to hold defendants in contempt if necessary," Parker said in a statement.

Parker said, "West Oakland neighborhoods have long suffered disproportionately from pollution in the air, soil and ground water, and that has taken a toll on the health of West Oaklanders. It is unconscionable and contemptible for anyone to try to profit from poisoning the neighborhood - including the children and adults who live there."

Last year Santos Engineering moved from Richmond into the warehouse on Poplar Street, which is near homes, a playground and a farm.

According to the suit, Santos hauls construction debris from job sites around the Bay Area, such as drywall, old steel and fiberglass, to the warehouse, where it then stores, sorts and breaks down large amounts of materials, potentially including materials that are known sources of asbestos.

The city says handling and breaking down construction debris creates huge amounts of dust, but instead of mitigating the harm from those activities, Santos knocked out parts of the warehouse ceiling and installed a fan to blow dust directly outside of the property and into the surrounding neighborhood.

In addition, the suit alleges that Santos illegally tapped into an East Bay Municipal Utility District fire hydrant and allowed contaminated water to run into the city's storm water system and that it routes its trucks down residential streets where commercial trucks are prohibited under city law.

According to Parker, Santos engineering claimed that he was fixing violations that were identified by the city and other agencies but neighbors still complain about dust and other nuisances generated by the business.

Parker said one reason the city has reason to mistrust Santos' representations about its business activities is that during site inspections and throughout the conditional use permit application process, a person speaking on behalf of the company represented himself as "Jim Wolf."

But Parker said that after the suit was filed the city learned that "Jim "Wolf' is really James Philip Lucero, who recently was convicted in federal court of felonies related to illegal dumping of construction debris in federal wetlands in Newark.

Santos Engineering officials couldn't be reached for comment.

San Jose State University's Student Homeless Alliance Thursday called on President Mary Papazian to become involved with the university's housing crisis and include them in her efforts.

The Student Homeless Alliance stood in front of the Olympic Black Power Statue on the university campus, a known symbol of social justice, surrounded by academic buildings featuring Olympians Tommie Smith and John Carlos, and demanded land, sanitation services and security.

Group founder Gigi Bellanos called the demands "very simple" and said that the coalition of students is looking for these things in order to set up a sanctioned village on campus for students and staff facing homelessness.

According to Bellanos' group, there are an estimated 300 students that are homeless at San Jose State. That doesn't even begin to cover faculty members who face these conditions.

"SHA would like to see SJSU develop an immediate solution to this problem, which might include free housing on campus, a sanctioned legal encampment on SJSU property and the de-stigmatization/decriminalization of houseless individuals," the student group said in a statement.

About 50 people showed up to the event, including one full class, Bellanos said. The SHA reportedly began as a sociology course project meant to fight social injustices in San Jose.

Bellanos opened the conference and passed the mic to Pastor Scott Wagers, an SJSU alum and a crusader for the homeless for nearly 30 years. Wagers said that he formed the first SHA in the '90s as a student working towards his master's degree and is happy that the organization is back and speaking up for the displaced.

The establishment of the HomeFirst Shelter on Little Orchard Street in San Jose can be tied directly to the founding of the alliance in 1992, the pastor said. He and several others brought the homeless and pitched tents outside City Hall, leading to his arrest and ultimately a conversation with the mayor about what could be done.

Now, the issue is even timelier than it was during Wagers' time at the university, he said.

"I know homeless students, I run into them all the time," Wagers said. "The SHA went from an alliance of students and homeless uniting in the '90s to homeless students now," he said.

Bellanos confirmed that some of the 18 active members of SHA have experienced homelessness or have had a hard time accommodating to a lack of affordable housing surrounding the school.

Cesar Herrera is an SHA member and has personally requested help in trying to finance his housing through the university. Herrera was told that he should max out his student loans in order to get by.

"That's what they want you to do before they give you any free money, before they give you any grants," Herrera said. "Some students max out their loans and they still need help. They'll help them."

Bellanos said that this "solution" causes huge problems for students in the future, as they have debt before even entering the working world, which leaves them susceptible to homelessness.

Bellanos said that all of the comments that have been received from the community about the organization's efforts to advocate for the homeless have been positive, despite not getting any concrete answer from the school.

"President Papazian prides herself on being a president who places the well-being of her students at the center of her decisions," the group said in a statement. "SHA encourages her to live up to her own standard and extend those caring decisions to our students whose basic needs are not being met."

Wagers said that the SHA calling Papazian out specifically is a great strategy because it forces the university to take a stance.

"It's right out of the Martin Luther King Jr. handbook," the pastor chuckled.

Bellanos said that she does believe the school tries to provide resources to students facing homelessness, but it's not enough. The SHA looks to work alongside the university, not against it, but they are now waiting to see if their demands will be heard.

"We want a seat at the table, every single time the administration talks about homelessness among students and housing instability, we want to be there," Bellanos said.

Representatives of SJSU's Office of the President were not immediately available to comment.

A judge Thursday ordered two men to stand trial on attempted murder and shooting into a motor vehicle charges for a shooting in Berkeley last July that sent another man to the hospital with multiple gunshot wounds.

At the end of a preliminary hearing, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Horner said prosecutors produced "significant evidence" that both Alan Garcia, 26, of Richmond, and Mateo Calvillo, 33, of South San Francisco, shot at the victim while he was driving on Seawall Drive near University Avenue at the Berkeley Marina at about 3:40 a.m. on July 29.

Berkeley police said the victim was shot in his neck twice and in his right wrist once and his car went off the embankment and partially into the water, but he managed to crawl to safety and call authorities.

Horner said Garcia and Calvillo "were both firing at him (the victim) and perhaps others were as well but we don't know who they were."

Prosecutor Ward Winklosky said the victim doesn't know the motive for the shooting and testified, "I'd like to know why" he was shot.

Winklosky said the victim "recognized the people who were firing at him" and identified Garcia and Calvillo.

Garcia's lawyer Lauren Williams said she thinks there were "a number of inconsistencies" in the victim's testimony and "there are serious questions about what happened out there."

Williams also said the victim "obviously had a history" of interactions with the people who shot at him.

Calvillo's lawyer Brian Caruth alleged that the victim was hesitant to tell police that Calvillo and Garcia shot at him.

Caruth said that's troubling because the victim wanted to deal with the manner in his own way, indicating that he wanted to take the law into his own hands.

Winklosky said, "We wouldn't encourage him (the victim) to handle it himself" but he said the victim's statement was a credible and understandable explanation for why he initially was reluctant to talk to the police.

Horner ordered Calvillo and Garcia to return to court on May 3 to have their trial date set.

Calvillo is being held in custody without bail and Garcia is being held in lieu of $2 million bail.

About a half dozen family members of Calvillo and Garcia attended the hearing and some of them cried when Horner ordered the two men to stand trial.

Two hospitals in Oakland have been hit with penalties from the state Department of Public Health for failure to maintain compliance with their licensing requirements in recent years.

The Kaiser Permanente Oakland Medical Center at 275 W. MacArthur Blvd. was fined $75,000 for a 2016 case in which a person was found dead in a chair.

The subsequent investigation revealed that hospital staff had failed to follow their policy and procedures for monitoring the patient's heart rhythm.

As a result, staff failed to respond when the patient began to experience a lethal hearth rhythm known as asystole, health department officials said.

This is Kaiser's fourth administrative penalty for placing a patient in "immediate jeopardy," defined as a situation where noncompliance with the requirements of their licensing has caused, or is likely to cause, some sort of serious injury or death.

Highland Hospital, listed at 1411 E. 31st St., was fined $39,187 for a 2017 incident in which the hospital failed to follow policy and procedure for the prevention and control of infections among their patients.

Investigators found a series of violations, including failure to climate control the hospital's decontamination room, failure to present evidence that the decontamination room or the sterilization room had been regularly cleaned, failure to pre-clean soiled surgical implements after use, failure to clean closed containers used for sterilizing equipment in between use, and failure to follow infection control standards.

There was also no comprehensive quality assurance and safety program for endoscopy, the process of looking inside the body with a camera.

Hospitals cited by the Department of Public Health in these cases are required to provide a plan of correction to avoid these violations in the future.

Jeff Collins, senior vice president and area manager for Kaiser Permanente East Bay, said Kaiser has evaluated its processes, implemented improvements and added training for nurses, physicians and staff, and those corrective actions were approved by the state Department of Public Health.

"While this was an isolated occurrence, we believe that even one incident is too many, and we are not satisfied until we understand why an error occurs and implement changes to prevent it from occurring again," Collins said.

He also offered his condolences and sympathy to the family of the decedent.

Alameda Health System did not immediately respond to a request for additional information.

Full versions of both reports are available at www.cdph.ca.gov.

An activist entering the U.S. at San Francisco International Airport this week for a speaking tour addressing a human rights crisis in the Philippines was detained by customs, denied entry and sent back to Manila, according to his colleagues.

Jerome Aladdin Succor Aba was scheduled to arrive at SFO around 8 p.m. Tuesday, but U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents detained him. Aba's friends spent hours waiting for him outside the international arrivals terminal, uncertain of what happened.

When they learned that Aba had been denied entry, they launched a protest on short notice, bringing banners and a sound system to the airport demanding that Aba be allowed into the country, or at least allowed access to legal representation through National Lawyers Guild personnel who went to the airport to help.

They even launched a hashtag, #AllowJeromeEntry, that was used in dozens of tweets and retweets within the activist community.

Nonetheless, early Thursday morning Aba boarded a flight back to Manila around 12:30 a.m., according to Terry Valen, a spokesman for the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines.

"That was ridiculous," Valen said, later describing the incident as a human rights violation at SFO.

"They held him for more than 24 hours," Valen said. "Basically it's illegal detention.

According to him, they told Aba there was a "glitch" with his visa.

Customs officials said they were prohibited from discussing Aba's case specifically when asked for more information on Wednesday, citing privacy laws, but said that country of origin and human rights activism are not determining factors in cases like his.

It is unclear at this time if and when Aba will attempt to travel to the U.S. again.

The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority Thursday unveiled five all-electric buses expected to roll out in May.

Elected officials and representatives from partners of the project gathered at the VTA Cerone bus yard in San Jose Thursday to talk about the concept, design and execution of the buses as well as their use in meeting California's statewide goal for all transit fleets to have zero emissions by 2040.

The buses, which are charged through a new pilot system designed by Oakland-based Kisensum to reduce the impact on the state's electricity grid, are anticipated to run through a number of routes starting in early May, according to the VTA.

One of the test routes will be the Airport Flyer, or Route 10, which is a free airport connection from the Santa Clara Transit Center to the Metro Airport station located at Mineta San Jose International Airport.

The emission-less buses are 42 feet long, have 40 seats and can travel around 200 miles on one charge. They take an estimated eight hours to charge on ChargePoint machines, but the VTA is working on making chargers that will do the same in four hours a practical feature.

A function provided by supplier Clever Devices tracks the amount of energy buses use while in operation and provides dispatchers real-time information about that usage and predicts the amount of energy needed to complete the day's work plan.

The buses also have batteries that are "regenerative," which means that they get re-charged during the act of braking, an asset that VTA's hybrid buses have too.

The charging pilot project will act as a major case study for transit agencies across America and the research driven will be handled by the National Renewable Energy Lab based out of Colorado.

Mayor Sam Liccardo said he believed that the buses will help local efforts to try to make green options available to everyone.

VTA confirmed that the cost of the new buses, which average $925,000 each, will not impact fare prices. The initiative is paid for by a grant offered by the California Energy Commission for researching energy management for large vehicles.

Proterra Inc. CEO Ryan Popple, whose company manufactured the buses, said that his company "invested heavily" in the project because they believed in the vision of giving everyone access to electric vehicle technology.

"The opportunity to give this to every single person in the community who wants a clean, healthy ride ... that's what this is all about," Popple said. "We thought, 'What vehicle technology is the most accessible?' but also 'What vehicle technology is going to be the first to electrify?' Buses are the best place to start."

The VTA's current plan is to add more of the buses, made in City of Industry, California, in the coming years until their entire fleet is electric.

Right now, an estimated 75 percent of VTA's buses are diesel hybrid electric, but that number will be lowered when five more buses are anticipated to be added in 2019.

The life expectancy of the buses is expected to be just as long as diesel, which is approximately 12 to 15 years, VTA officials said.

Fremont police Thursday named the officers involved in a fatal officer-involved shooting earlier this month and described what led up to the suspect's death.

At 6:47 p.m. on April 5, police spotted the suspect named Nathaniel Prasad, 18, riding in a vehicle driven by his mother near Central Avenue and Fremont Boulevard.

Alameda County sheriff's officials last week had identified Prasad as an Oakland resident. But police said Thursday Prasad was from Hayward.

Police said Prasad was wanted on a felony gun possession warrant, a felony probation warrant and a misdemeanor evading arrest warrant for fleeing from a Fremont school resource officer on March 22.

Prasad was initially spotted by the Police Department's street crimes unit, who asked for officers in marked patrol units to stop the vehicle.

Police said two patrol officers responded, activated their sirens and emergency lights and Prasad's mother stopped the vehicle just before the intersection of Fremont Boulevard and Nicolet Avenue.

Police said Prasad got out of the right side of the vehicle and ran. According to police, one officer in a vehicle followed Prasad to the back of an Arco gas station at the corner of Fremont Boulevard and Nicolet Avenue.

The officer, who was in uniform, stopped the patrol vehicle and got out to confront Prasad.

Police said Prasad pulled a gun from his waist area and appeared to fire one or two shots in the direction of the officer.

The officer fired back and reported to other officers that the suspect had a gun.

According to police, Prasad ran back toward Fremont Boulevard.

Police said the officer's interaction with Prasad was captured by video cameras and corroborated by witnesses and the officer.

More officers arrived at the gas station.

Police said Prasad ran toward the officers before turning and running south on Fremont Boulevard into oncoming lanes of traffic.

Officers deployed a K-9 and six officers, three in uniform, started running after Prasad.

According to police, during the chase Prasad pointed a gun in the direction of officers and fired at least once.

Police said the interaction is corroborated by witnesses, statements by the officers, body-worn camera footage and in-car camera footage.

The officers returned fire and bullets struck Prasad. According to police, Prasad fell to the ground. But he still had a weapon in his hand and officers shot again.

Police said officers approached Prasad, removed the gun from the area and started to provide medical care.

Paramedics arrived and pronounced Prasad dead a short time later.

No officers were injured in the shooting. Police said at the Police Department Prasad's mother provided a statement to investigators.

According to police, Prasad had a .22 caliber revolver with him and officers found it had three spent casings and three empty cylinders.

The gun had allegedly been stolen.

Police said the recovery of the gun from Prasad was caught on at least one officer's body-worn camera and corroborated by witnesses.

The officers involved in the shooting were Sgt. Kurtis Romley, Crime Scene Investigator Officer Calvin Gaziano, K-9 Officer Jared Madsen, Officer Craig Perry, Officer Thomas Degenstein, Officer Jamil Roberts and Officer Ralph Meredith, according to police.

Police said the officers' experience ranges from seven months to 24 years. All the officers were placed on paid leave immediately after the shooting.

The Alameda County District Attorney's Office and the Fremont Crimes Against Persons Unit are investigating the shooting.

Anyone with information about it is asked to call the Police Department's investigative unit at (510) 790-6900 or send an anonymous tip by texting TIP FREMONTPD followed by a message to 888-777. A tip can be delivered online at https://local.nixle.com/tip/alert/6216337.

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OAKLAND (BCN)

A judge today ordered two men to stand trial on attempted murder and shooting into a motor vehicle charges for a shooting in Berkeley last July that sent another man to the hospital with multiple gunshot wounds.

At the end of a preliminary hearing, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Horner said prosecutors produced "significant evidence" that both Alan Garcia, 26, of Richmond, and Mateo Calvillo, 33, of South San Francisco, shot at the victim while he was driving on Seawall Drive near University Avenue at the Berkeley Marina at about 3:40 a.m. on July 29.

Berkeley police said the victim was shot in his neck twice and in his right wrist once and his car went off the embankment and partially into the water, but he managed to crawl to safety and call authorities.

Horner said Garcia and Calvillo "were both firing at him (the victim) and perhaps others were as well but we don't know who they were."

Prosecutor Ward Winklosky said the victim doesn't know the motive for the shooting and testified, "I'd like to know why" he was shot.

Winklosky said the victim "recognized the people who were firing at him" and identified Garcia and Calvillo.

Garcia's lawyer Lauren Williams said she thinks there were "a number of inconsistencies" in the victim's testimony and "there are serious questions about what happened out there."

Williams also said the victim "obviously had a history" of interactions with the people who shot at him.

Calvillo's lawyer Brian Caruth alleged that the victim was hesitant to tell police that Calvillo and Garcia shot at him.

Caruth said that's troubling because the victim wanted to deal with the manner in his own way, indicating that he wanted to take the law into his own hands.

Winklosky said, "We wouldn't encourage him (the victim) to handle it himself" but he said the victim's statement was a credible and understandable explanation for why he initially was reluctant to talk to the police.

Horner ordered Calvillo and Garcia to return to court on May 3 to have their trial date set.

Calvillo is being held in custody without bail and Garcia is being held in lieu of $2 million bail.

About a half dozen family members of Calvillo and Garcia attended the hearing and some of them cried when Horner ordered the two men to stand trial.

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272-6280

Brian Caruth, Calvillo's attorney (510) 272-6600

Lauren Williams, Garcia's attorney (510) 761-8990
SAN FRANCISCO (BCN)

A Bay Area man was indicted on eight counts of making threats to federal officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs, acting United States Attorney Alex G. Tse announced Thursday.

Ronald Joseph LaFaye, 52, threatened to assault, kidnap or murder federal officials with the intent to impede, intimidate, interfere with and retaliate, prosecutors said.

There were eight occasions between March 19 and March 26 when LaFaye threatened to either assault, murder, beat, "pimp", sodomize or harm employees of the Department of Veterans Affairs, prosecutors said.

If convicted, LaFaye faces a maximum prison sentence of 10 years and a maximum fine of $250,000.

LaFaye is currently in state custody on other charges. His next federal court appearance has not yet been scheduled.

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Evergreen School District in San Jose was honored Wednesday evening as the first California Exemplary District in Santa Clara County, according to the county's office of education.

The Exemplary Districts Award celebrates districts that have implemented practices, which have had a positive impact on students, county officials said.

One school was required to be a part of the California Distinguished Schools list this year in order for the district to win the award, but Evergreen School District had two, which were Carolyn A. Clark Elementary School and Tom Matsumoto Elementary School.

"Every county in California was asked to identify and select one district for this prestigious award," county Superintendent of Schools Mary Ann Dewan said in a statement. "It gives me great pleasure to recognize Evergreen School District."

Claudia Rossi, Santa Clara County Board of Education trustee, said that all of Evergreen School District's eighteen schools have been California Distinguished schools, which means their programs and practices are outstanding.

"Evergreen offers full-day kindergarten as a strategy to help close achievement gaps, they have launched a parent university to support families and have high stakeholder engagement," Rossi said.

Dan Deguara, assistant superintendent of Evergreen School District, and other district officials were present Wednesday evening at the gathering put on by the county's board of education to accept the award for district Superintendent Kathy Gomez, according to county officials.

"Programs like the California Exemplary Districts Award allow our county an opportunity to celebrate and collaborate," Dewan said. "As educators, we are all members of one community, and together we can learn from one another and share our innovative practices."

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SAN JOSE (BCN)

San Jose State University's Student Homeless Alliance today called on President Mary Papazian to become involved with the university's housing crisis and include them in her efforts.

The Student Homeless Alliance stood in front of the Olympic Black Power Statue on the university campus, a known symbol of social justice, surrounded by academic buildings featuring Olympians Tommie Smith and John Carlos, and demanded land, sanitation services and security.

Group founder Gigi Bellanos called the demands "very simple" and said that the coalition of students is looking for these things in order to set up a sanctioned village on campus for students and staff facing homelessness.

According to Bellanos' group, there are an estimated 300 students that are homeless at San Jose State. That doesn't even begin to cover faculty members who face these conditions.

"SHA would like to see SJSU develop an immediate solution to this problem, which might include free housing on campus, a sanctioned legal encampment on SJSU property and the de-stigmatization/decriminalization of houseless individuals," the student group said in a statement.

About 50 people showed up to the event, including one full class, Bellanos said. The SHA reportedly began as a sociology course project meant to fight social injustices in San Jose.

Bellanos opened the conference and passed the mic to Pastor Scott Wagers, an SJSU alum and a crusader for the homeless for nearly 30 years. Wagers said that he formed the first SHA in the '90s as a student working towards his master's degree and is happy that the organization is back and speaking up for the displaced.

The establishment of the HomeFirst Shelter on Little Orchard Street in San Jose can be tied directly to the founding of the alliance in 1992, the pastor said. He and several others brought the homeless and pitched tents outside City Hall, leading to his arrest and ultimately a conversation with the mayor about what could be done.

Now, the issue is even timelier than it was during Wagers' time at the university, he said.

"I know homeless students, I run into them all the time," Wagers said. "The SHA went from an alliance of students and homeless uniting in the '90s to homeless students now," he said.

Bellanos confirmed that some of the 18 active members of SHA have experienced homelessness or have had a hard time accommodating to a lack of affordable housing surrounding the school.

Cesar Herrera is an SHA member and has personally requested help in trying to finance his housing through the university. Herrera was told that he should max out his student loans in order to get by.

"That's what they want you to do before they give you any free money, before they give you any grants," Herrera said. "Some students max out their loans and they still need help. They'll help them."

Bellanos said that this "solution" causes huge problems for students in the future, as they have debt before even entering the working world, which leaves them susceptible to homelessness.

Bellanos said that all of the comments that have been received from the community about the organization's efforts to advocate for the homeless have been positive, despite not getting any concrete answer from the school.

"President Papazian prides herself on being a president who places the well-being of her students at the center of her decisions," the group said in a statement. "SHA encourages her to live up to her own standard and extend those caring decisions to our students whose basic needs are not being met."

Wagers said that the SHA calling Papazian out specifically is a great strategy because it forces the university to take a stance.

"It's right out of the Martin Luther King Jr. handbook," the pastor chuckled.

Bellanos said that she does believe the school tries to provide resources to students facing homelessness, but it's not enough. The SHA looks to work alongside the university, not against it, but they are now waiting to see if their demands will be heard.

"We want a seat at the table, every single time the administration talks about homelessness among students and housing instability, we want to be there," Bellanos said.

Representatives of SJSU's Office of the President were not immediately available to comment.

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President Donald Trump took to Twitter this morning to threaten the funding for a recent deal reached with Gov. Jerry Brown as part of the White House's effort to send military troops to the Mexican border.

"Governor Jerry Brown announced he will deploy 'up to 400 National Guard Troops' to do nothing," Trump tweeted.

"The crime rate in California is high enough, and the Federal Government will not be paying for Governor Brown's Charade," he added. "We need border security and action, not words!"

That came in response to an agreement inked between the state and the federal government to add 400 guardsman to an ongoing program combating transnational crime. The program currently includes 55 troops stationed at the border.

The agreement came with certain caveats, however, including stipulations that these troops would remain under the governor's command as commander in chief for the California National Guard and that they would not be enforcing federal immigration laws during their deployment - or help build a border wall.

Under those circumstances, however, Brown said the state was willing to accept federal funding to make it happen.

Around 2 p.m. officials with the California National Guard said via Twitter that around 11:30 a.m. they'd received written confirmation from the Pentagon that the deal was still going through.

"In short, nothing has changed today," the Guard said

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ROHNERT PARK (BCN)

A woman has been arrested on suspicion of drunk driving in connection with a vehicle collision in a Walmart parking lot in Rohnert Park that left a man with major injuries Thursday.

Kathy Jean Barella, 58, was arrested on suspicion of felony drunk driving, according to the Rohnert Park Department of Public Safety.

Emergency crews responded Thursday at 5:55 p.m. to the incident at 4625 Redwood Drive and found a 66-year-old San Francisco man on the ground suffering from major injuries, police said.

Witnesses told police a blue 2005 Jeep Liberty backed into the man and possibly drove over him.

Police said the driver of the Jeep, identified Barella, was seen inside the Walmart acting erratically prior to the incident.

Barella gave spontaneous statements to investigators admitting she had consumed alcohol prior to the collision, police said.

Officers conducted a preliminary in-field DUI investigation, and a preliminary alcohol breath test determined Barella had a .11 percent blood alcohol content level, police said.

She was taken into custody and booked into jail.

The victim was transported to the hospital and was undergoing surgery Thursday night.

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Ethiopias new Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has named a new cabinet of 16 members with six veterans from the previous cabinet.

Abiy Ahmed, who was unanimously endorsed by the Ethiopian House of Peoples Representatives (HoPR) as Ethiopias Prime Minister earlier this month, said on state television that he had reshuffled six ministers and introduced 10 more.

The countrys former mining minister is now the defense minister. Finance and foreign ministers keep their portfolios.

The Ethiopian 547-seat parliament, which is to evaluate and endorse the new cabinet members this Thursday, started the session by electing Muferiat Kamil as the new house speaker.

Mrs. Muferiat Kamil is a former Minister of Womens Affairs and the current deputy whip of the ruling coalition. Outgoing House Speaker, Abadula Gemeda, had resigned in October last year.

Abiy is leader of the Oromo bloc of the EPRDF  the Oromo Peoples Democratic Organization (OPDO). He is also the first Premier from the Oromia region  Ethiopias largest and most populous regional state that has seen mass, anti-government protests for several years.

The Oromo, who make up more than 34 percent of the population, have long complained about their political and economic exclusion.

Opposition parties have been kept out of the Ethiopian parliament for decades and the government has used anti-terrorism legislation to arrest and detain several prominent opposition leaders.
South Africas President Cyril Ramaphosa has cut short his visit to Britain to return to South Africa to deal with protests in the southern African nations North West province.

Clashes broke out between protesters and police in the region on Wednesday. It is the first big demonstrations since Ramaphosa took power in February.

Ramaphosa was participating in the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in London where he led a government delegation.

Protesters seeking jobs, better housing, roads and hospitals are demanding the provinces Premier Supra Mahumapelo, a member of the ruling African National Congress party, to step down. Mahumapelo is a supporter of Jacob Zuma, ousted as the nations president in February.

Ramaphosa called for calm, ordered police to exercise maximum restraint and urged protestors to express their grievances through peaceful means and engagement rather than violence and anarchy.

Police have reportedly used tear gas and rubber bullets to try to quell the protests. There have not been fatalities linked with the protests, provincial police spokesman Sabata Mokgwabone said.

However, SABC, the state-run broadcaster said one person reportedly died in the demonstrations.

The president is expected to meet with provincial leaders of the ANC Friday, the party said in a statement.
A court in Kenya Thursday declared that the governments plans to tap private phone conversations of its citizens is illegal, the Daily Nation reports.

The government, through the Communications Authority of Kenya, has ordered the three major telecom agencies in Kenya, Safaricom, Airtel and Telkom Kenya, to allow it to tap their computers by planting spy gadgets on all networks.

The devices had the capacity to access all information stored by service providers and transacted on the phone.

But Justice John Mativo declared the plan illegal as it violates consumer rights.

According to Mativo, the move was adopted in a manner inconsistent with the constitution. In his words, there was inadequate public participation prior to adoption and implementation of the system.

Mativo prohibited the telecoms regulator from implementing the decision or installing any connectivity between the DMS and the mobile companies to access information on the IMEI, IMSI, MSISDN and CDRs of subscribers.

According to the Director General of Communications Authority, Francis Wangusi, it is the proliferation of illegal devices that had forced them to snoop on private phone calls in a bid to arrest cybercrime.

However, many of Kenyas 40 million cell phone users have cheap, knock-off brand-name phones, identifiable by their International Mobile Equipment Identity, a unique 15-digit code.
Swazilands King Mswati III announced that he was renaming the country the Kingdom of eSwatini.

The monarch made the announcement on Wednesday during the celebration of the kingdoms 50th anniversary of independence.

African countries on getting independence reverted to their ancient names before they were colonized. So from now, the southern African tiny nation will be officially known as the Kingdom of eSwatini.

King Mswati explained that the name had caused some confusion, saying: Whenever we go abroad, people refer to us as Switzerland.

The new name, eSwatini, means land of the Swazis in the local Swati language.

King Mswati III referred to the Kingdom of eSwatini several times in recent years including in an address to the UN General Assembly in 2017.

Swaziland is Africas last absolute monarchy. King Mswati III has ruled the kingdom with its one million inhabitants since 1986 with absolute political and military authority.

Since 1973, Mswatis father Sobhuza II banned all political parties and declared a state of emergency, which is still in place today. The king governs the countrys 55 administrative divisions, known as Tikhundla.

Mswati, known as Ngwenyama or the lion, is known for his many wives and for his lavish lifestyle in adherence to traditional dress.
Brian Cahn/TNS

She called me unexpectedly one day. I was busy at work and was stunned when I answered the phone. We had not talked in 10-15 years. Things were strained between us. Actually, not friendly at all. I went into a private room and listened. She was seeking information about a mutual friend. The conversation was cordial. But there was also a certain awkwardness. I had hurt this woman in the past. Said things I shouldn't have said. Halfway through the conversation I stopped and said: "I'm sorry. I know I hurt you." Silence. Then quiet crying on the other end of the phone line. She sniffled and said "Thank you."

There has been quite a bit of public feuding in the past month among public figures. Hannity vs Kimmel. Laura Ingraham vs David Hogg. Tony Robbins vs the #MeToo movement. Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. Nasty words launched back and forth on both ends. When the barbs finally got worn out, someone offers an apology. Of sorts. But they are not accepted.
Things got ugly during a Wednesday night episode of "The Ingraham Angle" that featured a debate over California's sanctuary state law.

Host Laura Ingraham brought California GOP candidate for governor John Cox and immigrant activist Enrique Morones onto her show to debate the issue, but things took a turn for the worse after Morones went after both Cox and Ingraham personally.

Morones, the founder of the immigrant activist group Border Angels, began his remarks by telling Ingraham that he was "glad that David Hogg let you back on the air," an obvious reference to the advertising boycott Ingraham faced after controversial remarks she made toward the Parkland school shooting survivor.

MORE COX: Newt Gingrich: California may elect a Republican governor in 2018

Things escalated when Cox discussed some of the local backlash to the state's sanctuary law and recent polling that suggests the Republican may be gaining some momentum.

"I think there really is a revolution brewing, just like I think there's a revolution in the governor's race here, and I'm going to be the next governor of this state," Cox said.

"I don't know who this guy is. Who is this guy?" Morones jabbed. "Who is this Cox guy? I've never even heard of him."

CALIFORNIA GOVERNOR'S RACE: Villaraigosa, Cox battle to advance in California governor's race

Ingraham jumped in and told Morones that he was being "rude" and "nasty," which led Morones to direct his fire toward Ingraham.

"Where's your sponsors?" Morones asked the Fox host. "David Hogg got rid of half of them. A high school kid shut you down."

You can watch the full exchange in the video above.
Miners War for Their Rights

By Levan Khutsishvili

On April 15, 2018 Initiative Group of Tkibuli Miners submitted a list of requirements to the company SakNakhshiri (Georgian coal).The Group requires:1. Temporarily suspend the operation of Tkibuli mines; The Company and the state should collaborate with the joint efforts to address the existing labor conditions and safety problems in the shadow. In particular, a full assessment of labor conditions and safety conditions in mines should be studded and plan of modernization of the enterprise and work process should be created. Plan should focus on labor conditions and security issues in the enterprise and they should be in accordance with the national and international standards. In addition, the salary of the employees in the enterprise should be fully compensated for the temporary suspension of the operation of the enterprise and the Company and / or the Government should take full responsibility for it;2. Conduct a collective agreement between the employer and the employee, which will provide adequate employment and social guarantees for the employees;3. Persons who are responsible for the unbearable situation existing in the enterprise should be immediately dismissed;As the Independent Initiative Group of Tkibuli Miners state, working in the existing conditions is inevitable. In the beginning of every shift they farewell to their families as they dont know whether they will go back or not. They will not continue working in mines if management does not satisfy their requirements."Tkibuli has been in the hardest social and economic conditions for many years, and most of the residents are on the brink of extreme poverty. Only opportunity for employment in the town is mines of the Ltd "SakNakhshiri. In our mines labor conditions and labor safety is extremely difficult, which has repeatedly become a reason for the mutilation and destruction of lives of our friends. In Tkibuli, over the last 11 months, 11 miners died during performing their duties, and it is the result of our hard labor conditions and safety norms in mines. An extremely difficult situation in Tkibuli needs appropriate response from the government and the company. We are starting to fight for the right of life and work. Join us! "- the group says in a statement.After the tragic incident in Mindely Mine (5th April, 2018), when 6 miners died and 3 was injured, students group and miners organized solidarity demonstrations in Tbilisi, Kutaisi and Tkibuli. Some of the activist in Tbilisi were caught by the police. Actual changes in mines are still not planned. Miners are looking for different ways to defend their rights. Creating a self-sufficient, independent initiative group, separated from labors union and political parties can be the solution.
Looking to get out of the states this summer?

According to travel site Kayak.com, median airfare to European cities is the cheapest it has been in three summers. "Across the board, low cost carriers and new flight routes are making travel across the pond even easier (and less expensive)," the site reports.
A police dog in Michigan was just trying to be a good boy when his beloved toy ball was snatched away by a man who earlier confronted an officer, police said.

The dog named Eli, was participating in scent training with his handler near a hotel in Troy, Mich. earlier this month when the incident occurred. According to the Troy Police Department, the officer left scent tracks as a part of a drill, using the ball as the dog's last target and reward.
BUENOS AIRES  Pushed by a wave of demonstrations by womens groups, the homeland of Pope Francis seems closer than ever to legalizing abortion.

The protests and shifting public opinion have led conservative President Mauricio Macri to call for Congress to launch a debate on a broader legalization of abortion in Argentina, which currently allows the procedure only in cases of rape or risks to the mothers health.

A bill allowing elective abortion in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy was introduced in Congress earlier this year with the backing of 70 lawmakers from across the political spectrum. The bill needs 129 votes in the 257-seat lower house and then would go to the Senate. The lower house vote is expected in June. Macri has said that even though he remains antiabortion, he would not veto the bill if passed.

Natalia Rodas welcomes this unprecedented opening to greater abortion rights in Argentina. The 31-year-old housemaid recently found herself pregnant and in dire economic straits after the father refused to accept responsibility.

Desperate and alone, she went to a pharmacy on the poor outskirts of Buenos Aires and paid twice her monthly salary for the drug misoprostol. Unsure if the drug would harm her without medical supervision, she fearfully took the pills and aborted.

An illegal abortion has made me live through some horrible situations, Rodas said. If something goes wrong, who do you call? Who do you fall back on? No, you just die.

Argentinas health ministry estimates that between 370,000 to 522,000 Argentine women undergo illegal abortions each year and thousands of women, mainly poor, are hospitalized each year for complications. It is the main cause of maternal death.

What point is there in penalizing abortions if they continue to happen? asked Nelly Minyersky, a 90-year-old lawyer and one of the authors of the bill, who underwent an illegal abortion more than 50 years ago.

Although therapeutic abortions to protect the mother are allowed in Argentina, advocates say doctors and judges often continue to block women from carrying them out despite a 2012 Supreme Court ruling that was supposed to remove barriers and take judges out of these decisions.

Argentinas Roman Catholic Church is leading the resistance against the initiative.

When you deny the most elemental right to live, all human rights hang by a thread, said Gustavo Carrara, who was recently named auxiliary bishop by the pope. If theres an excuse to eliminate a human life, there will always be reasons to exclude humans who are a nuisance from this world.

In recent years, Argentina has been at the forefront of social movements in the region. In 2010, it became the first country in Latin America to legalize same-sex marriage. More recently, the Ni Una Menos, or Not One Less, movement that was created in Argentina to fight gender-based violence has grown into a global phenomenon.

These days, demonstrators have filled the streets in front of Congress wearing the green handkerchiefs that symbolize the abortion rights movement.

Doctors who perform abortions, and women who have illegal abortions, can face from one to four years in prison in Argentina. In Latin America, only Nicaragua, Honduras, the Dominican Republic and El Salvador prohibit abortion without exceptions.

Debora Rey is an Associated Press writer.
MADRID  The Basque militant group ETA on Friday offered an unprecedented apology for the pain caused during its more than four decades of armed campaign for independence from Spain and France, and vowed not to return to violence.

ETA, which killed around 850 people including police, politicians and entrepreneurs, is due to announce its final dissolution early next month, ending one of Europes last standing violent nationalist conflicts.
BEIRUT  Islamic State militants agreed to give up their last pocket in Damascus on Friday, state media reported, as the government seeks to retake the entire Syrian capital and its surrounding areas for the first time since 2011.

The capitulation followed a week of escalations by pro-government forces against the Islamic State-held Hajar al-Aswad neighborhood and Yarmouk Palestinian camp in Damascus.

Pro-government forces bombed the two areas and blanketed them with artillery fire in a crescendo of violence captured by the state-affiliated Central Military Media outlet on Friday.

The United Nations refugee agency warned that the spiraling violence was a threat to 12,000 Palestinian refugees still there  Palestinians who came to Syria since 1948, and their descendants.

Militants were given the option to stay and reconcile with the government or leave on buses to Islamic State-held territory in the eastern Syrian desert, the SANA state news agency said.

The United Nations humanitarian arm, OCHA, said more than 55,000 fighters and civilians were bused out of the Damascus region to rebel-held areas in north Syria in recent weeks.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group reported the militants had accepted the latest deal.

But government air strikes on Yarmouk resumed Friday evening, putting the fate of the agreement in question.

In 2012, Syrian rebels and army defectors pushed pro-government forces out of Yarmouk in response to a spiraling crackdown by state security services against antigovernment protests.

Pro-government forces, including Palestinian factions, responded by putting the camp under siege, eventually cutting off food and water by 2014, and bombing and shelling it continuously.

Philip Issa is an Associated Press writer.
1 Royal wedding security: British officials say armed and undercover police officers will patrol train stations with routes leading to Windsor when Prince Harry marries Meghan Markle on May 19. British Transport Police said Thursday there will be a visible deployment of officers along with canine units and specialists trained to detect dangerous behavior. There will also be specialist teams ready to deal quickly with reports of unattended items being found in stations or on the railways. Officials expect more than 100,000 people to travel to Windsor to try to see the royal couple. Extra trains will be added.

2 Indonesia quake: A shallow earthquake in central Indonesia killed three people and damaged more than 300 homes, disaster officials said Thursday as they declared a two-week emergency for the affected areas. Indonesias Meteorology and Geophysics Agency said the magnitude-4.4 quake that occurred Wednesday at a depth of 2.4 miles was centered about 32 miles north of Kebumen, a densely populated district of Central Java province. Indonesia is prone to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions due to its location along the Pacific Ring of Fire.
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A former Westpac financial adviser whose misconduct has cost the bank $2.2 million in compensation payments was motivated by a desire to boost his bonus, the royal commission has heard.

The bank also took months to report the misconduct to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) as a "significant breach", and failed to inform his next employer that it had made this report to ASIC.

Michael Wright, national head of BT Finance (pictured), agreed that one reason Andrew Smith had given inappropriate advice was to increase or maintain his share of revenue and increase his monthly bonuses. Credit:AAP

Senior counsel Rowena Orr on Friday morning probed further into the incentives on offer to financial advisers, the role this plays in promoting misconduct, and problems with advisers who engage in misconduct continuing to work within the industry.
Work on Icon Developments proposed flagship Cremorne office building at 600 Church Street is poised to start after winning approval from the planning appeals body.

The Victorian Civil and Appeals Tribunal signed off on the building this week, restoring the eighth level which the City of Yarra eliminated during planning.

Render of Icon Developments' new building at 600 Church Street, Cremorne.

The Woods Marsh-designed building is proposed for the prominent Nuttelex site on the corner of Balmain Street. The 36-metre high building will have ground floor retail and seven levels of office covering 5264 square metres.

Icon Developments chief executive Ashley Murdoch said Wood Marsh was employed to design an iconic building reflecting the sites gateway position and help it get through the planning process with some height.
James absolutely trusts him, says one of their former colleagues, and John always does the best thing by James. Other observers are less confident in the Alexander approach. Some privately accuse him of being a blunt instrument who has proven adept at reining in costs and steadying the ship but lacks the vision, gaming and hospitality experience, and sensitivity to risk. One example is a high-profile bust-up with Victorias militant electrical union last year. The Electrical Trades Union (ETU) maintains the 2600 poker machines at Crowns flagship Melbourne casino. Alexander wanted to outsource 17 pokies technician jobs to a contractor linked to former Liberal premier Jeff Kennett, where wages and conditions would be reduced. It was a small cost saving overall, but one that shattered Crowns long period of industrial harmony. John Alexander: a steadying influence or a 'blunt instrument'? Credit:Rob Homer The dispute triggered political intervention from Labor and a whistleblower campaign that led to a share price plunge of $500 million in a single day. Crown eventually reinstated the sacked staff.

We told the casino on four occasions what would be in store if they went down this road, ETU state secretary Troy Gray says. I wouldve thought he would have resolved this dispute sooner, but the people who worked with him said hes not of that demeanour. Sources familiar with the affair say Packer was far from happy. For all Packer's personal extravagances, he adopts a conservative approach to the critical relationships that come with managing a heavily-regulated business, working hard to build ties with media proprietors Kerry Stokes and Lachlan Murdoch, who control tabloids in Crown casino towns Perth and Melbourne, and courting both sides of politics. Then there's Crown's solid relationship with United Voice - the union covering many of its employees - which helped it avoid a backlash by the ALP in NSW when Packer announced plans to build a massive hotel and casino project in Sydney's Barangaroo. Allowing a small dispute over the maintenance of poker machines to blow up in a way that crossed over into politics and the market is a reminder that Alexander's judgement is not always perfect. The man known as JA's rise has bordered on astonishing, from a copy boy and journalist on the Sydney Sun to the editor's chair at Fairfaxs Financial Review and Sydney Morning Herald. A newspaper clipping from the 1990s summed him up in seven words: Mercurial style, dynamic mind, keen political sense.

When he was brought into the Packers' media and gaming conglomerate, PBL (Publishing & Broadcasting Ltd), he also entered their inner sanctum, their fold. He controlled Australias top-rated TV network, Channel Nine, and headed up its biggest magazine empire, Australian Consolidated Press. He was made Crown's executive chairman at the start of last year. Such influence must seem a world away from the 66-year-olds roots, growing up in a family of six children in public housing in Sydneys outer north. Alexander was an unusual fellow in some ways, coming from a relatively modest background, says Gerard Noonan, whom JA replaced as head of the Financial Review in the early 90s. But he seemed determined to shuck off his humble beginnings. It has been said that JA was an unlikely journalist to emerge from the newsroom culture of that era in Australia. For one, you would never find him on a bar stool swigging schooners after deadline, according to ex-AFR editor, Colleen Ryan, in Fairfax: The Rise and Fall. "If Alexander drank at all," she says, "it was only the finest wines." James Packer, Pam Williams and John Alexander at the Sydney launch of Williams' book Killing Fairfax in 2013. Credit:Rob Homer

He is a connoisseur, says Glenn Burge, the SMH's business editor during Alexanders time as editor-in-chief. He has always enjoyed five-star restaurants, good wine and nice suits. But for Burge and countless others who have worked alongside him over the years  in newspapers, magazine publishing and at Crown  it is Alexanders razor-sharp intelligence that most defines his leadership. Very talented, very smart, says Burge. And he has always been very ambitious. Some of the countrys most celebrated news identities, to this day, rank JA among the great editors. Gutsy, assertive, effective. We write stories for people who read newspapers, not sleep under them, he famously once said while rejecting a homelessness story from page one. On a bushfire in Heathcote, in southern Sydney, according to a staffer, he said no AB readers there! and relegated the story to page eight or beyond.

He really pushed people to achieve, a colleague recalls. But he was pretty brutal at the same time. He is also often described in other terms: Machiavellian, ruthless, intimidating, cold. He speaks through the side of his mouth, and instils fear in those he is speaking to. As a former senior colleague puts it: JA is someone who manages by fear ... but when you're running a business, that can work well. At Fairfax and later at Packers ACP magazines, he was known to play favourites, splitting his staff into an A-team and B-team. The A-team would be handsomely paid, escorted to long lunches at some of the citys best Italian restaurants, no expenses spared. The others, some say, wouldnt be given the time of day or worse, would be treated with contempt. And the two teams could fluctuate without warning from one week to the next. They [the A-team] were a talented bunch, Noonan recalls, but woe betide you if you fell out with the Prince. In May of 1998, JA was called to a meeting with Fairfax chief Bob Muscat, who fired him on the spot. The meeting was brief, the reasons unknown. Some have speculated it was over suspicions that he had been consorting with the enemy. He was already known to be close to the Packers, who were widely rumoured to be considering an attempt to take over Fairfax. He had been sighted on Packer snrs 87-metre luxury cruiser, Arctic P, in Fiji with senior executives from PBL. Others say his dismissal was more to do with workplace politics.

John Alexander in his office at The Sydney Morning Herald on the day he was sacked in 1998. Credit:Dean Sewell Alexander did not stay jobless for long. He was brought into the Packer family vehicle, PBL, to run the ACP magazine stable, which at the time included Womens Day, Womens Weekly, Cleo and The Bulletin. In a very short space of time, he completely turned the place around, a friend says, reeling in many of his best former Fairfax colleagues, cutting costs, boosting circulation and sending profits soaring. The Packers propelled him even higher, into the new position of chief executive of PBL Media, overseeing magazine publishing and the Nine Network. His brief, as it was reported at the time: to slash costs at the broadcaster by $30 million. He destroyed value with brutal cost-cutting and needlessly provocative fights with executives, says shareholder activist Stephen Mayne. Ian Johnson, former CEO at Channel Nine, said he decided to cut short his time in the position and return to Melbourne in part because of Alexanders management.

Crown is a fabulous business, and John is the executive chairman, so he must be doing something right, he says. Hes an exceptionally good executive, but what you think of him as an individual  that could be a different story. When Kerry Packer's godson, David Gyngell, also quit as the boss of Nine, he blamed multi-layered management. Sources close to Gyngell say it had much to do with Alexander. The slashing at the broadcaster won him little popularity, but great favour with James Packer, who credits his hard work and tough decision-making in securing the $5.6 billion sale of the businesses to private equity in 2006. When the Packer flagship PBL split into separate media and gaming companies in 2007, Alexander picked up a $15 million redundancy payout. He would go on to earn a further $15 million in five years for sitting on the boards of the two new entities, Crown and Consolidated Media Holdings. For some time Alexander sat in the back of the Crown boardroom as a humble director. But when tumult arrived he was sent to the fore.

The start of last year was a bad one for Crown. In the fallout from its China scandal, ever-important VIP casino gambling programs from mostly Asian high-rollers had dropped from $1 billion in 2016 to about $605 million. Normalised net profit took a heavy hit, falling 5.5 per cent to $343 million. Packers overseas expansion ambitions in Macau and Las Vegas lay in tatters. The business was considered bloated under chairman Rob Rankin, who had fallen out with Packer. Alexanders reputation for protecting the family's interests, cleaning house and cutting fat saw him tapped to step up. Some Crown observers say Alexander's colleagues question his value beyond slashing. They hate him in there, says one source familiar with Crowns board. [Hes] good at sacking people, but the business needs strategy. Legacy in the balance: John Alexander. Credit:Michele Mossop Other Crown executives, however, insist that Alexander is proving a good exec, across the board. Obviously he is not well-liked across the company because of the budget cuts, but they had to happen, a Crown insider says.

Much of his legacy still hangs in the balance. Will he decide to act on the proposed One Queensbridge skyscraper development in Melbourne? Crown and the Schiavello Group have received conditional planning approval to build Australia's tallest skyscraper on a site adjacent to the casino  90 storeys including a new 388-room, six-star hotel and 700 luxury apartments. But that window is closing quickly, with sources saying a decision will be required within 12 months before the approval lapses. Alexander was unavailable for interview. Chris Warren, of journalists union the MEAA, regards Alexander as one of the huge characters of Australian media who have shaped the industry for good and for ill. A lot of people in management pass through the industry without a trace, Warren says.
Shares in Australia's second-biggest gold miner, Evolution Mining, dived on Friday as the market digested news that its largest investor had offloaded a 5 per cent stake. In a statement released on Friday, La Mancha Group International said it had sold about 84.6 million Evolution shares at $3.21 each. Evolution Mining's Cowal gold mine in NSW. La Mancha sold the Evolution shares in a block trade worth about $271.6 million after the Australian sharemarket closed on Thursday. The sale price was at a 4.5 per cent discount to Thursday's record high $3.36 closing price. Evolution's stock price dropped as much as 9 per cent on Friday before closing 18, or 5.4 per cent, lower at $3.18.

La Mancha still holds a direct interest of 15 per cent in Evolution, and "continues to be its [Evolution's] largest shareholder". Naguib Sawiris, the chairman of La Mancha, said his organisation had sold some of its Evolution shares to invest the money in other mining opportunities, and support La Mancha's other investments. "This sale will enable La Mancha to fulfil its strategic objectives while remaining the largest shareholder of Evolution Mining, and it will remain one of the largest constituents of our portfolio," he said. "Since our initial investment in 2015, we have witnessed and supported the extraordinary success of the company. We are very proud of what Jake and his team have achieved, and continue to see significant potential in the company." Mr Sawiris said the successful sale demonstrated the support for Evolution among institutional investors internationally.
Industry players have called on state and federal governments to keep pushing forward on the National Energy Guarantee's design to give business certainty to make investment decisions and help reduce power prices.

"This agreement gives real momentum to the development of a workable national energy framework which will give businesses the certainty and confidence they need to make investment decisions," Business Council of Australia chief executive Jennifer Westacott said.

Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg ahead of a pivotal meeting with his state counterparts on Friday.

"Its great to see positive progress being made and a timetable set for August, meaning that state and federal ministers can focus on planning for a National Energy Guarantee."

State and federal ministers met on Friday to agree on whether the Energy Security Board had state support to continue developing the plan.
It sounds straightforward enough, but I know from my own experience that it isn't always so simple. My own son lives where he grew up, 320 kilometres from where I now live, and though he's 25, I worry endlessly, check in on social media daily  much to his irritation  and am happy to offer financial back-up if required. Clinical psychologist Dr Chirag Gorasia says it may be healthier for me, and mothers like me, to practise a little tough love rather than embracing a state of endless support. "The concept of parenting has changed and both parents and children now find it difficult to let go," says. Dr Gorasia "Financial support can often mean a better quality of life for young adults. However, it can also mean that children end up less able to cope with challenges, as they've not had much experience of resolving their issues independently." A recent opinion piece in the The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health medical journal states that adolescence now lasts until the age of 24, whereas it used to be considered at an end by 19. This coincides with social issues keeping young adults at home, including high rents and fewer jobs, as well as an upward shift in the median age for first marriages  in Australia in 2016 it was 30.3 years for men and 28.7 for women.

Young people in first jobs stand little chance of scraping together a house deposit, so it's little surprise that the average age parents expect children to leave home is now 25. This is not exactly new: in the past, whole families often lived together until death did they part. But nowadays, with personal independence prized and sex before marriage no longer taboo, it's a big ask for both generations to get along under the same roof indefinitely. Family dynamics can easily slip back into old patterns and parents can feel resentment towards their overgrown cuckoos, who often return to the nest just just as their parents had become used to freedom. Should we be negotiating our way into old age as our grown-up children remain at home, or is there a good time to say enough is enough? "I wish I'd done that sooner," says Claire Winters, 56, mother of Alfie, 27, who recently moved into a flatshare. "Alfie was home for three years, and every day was a battle. I felt that as we were supporting him financially he should help around the house, but he was always leaving a mess, and coming home at odd hours  once he set the toaster on fire when he was drunk at 3am. It was like living with a big, unmanageable labrador." Claire set house rules  she would never tidy his bedroom and he would do his own washing  but enforcing them was tough. "He didn't care if he lived in a tip," she says, "but I worried about mice. And when he brought girlfriends home, I felt embarrassed because I could overhear everything."

Clearly, it's necessary for 20-somethings to form romantic relationships, but "Alfie hated it when I was around the next day," says Claire. "He felt having breakfast with his mum was tantamount to asking the girl to marry him. The few times it happened, I pretended I had an early meeting and left them to it." Experts agree that it's vital to set boundaries  for parents to respect their children's adult status, and for grown-up children to accept strictures when they're living in the family home. "I really think it's a quid pro quo situation," says Laurie Cooper, 56. "When my daughter Sasha came home after uni, she struggled to get a job. Eventually it became clear that she was sticking around for longer than we'd planned, so we had to set some rules." They agreed that she would pay a small amount towards the bills, and do her own washing. She'd also shop and cook one night a week. "It doesn't sound like much, but it meant she was making some effort and she no longer felt like a drain on our resources." While it may seem practical for children to move back to the nest, not all experts concur. "Having your children home again can be rewarding as you all develop a more adult relationship," says psychotherapist Ellie Roberts. "But most parents know that the appropriate developmental stage is for their children to move away from the home and establish themselves in relationships and work."

She believes that greater involvement in education has resulted in helicopter parenting, where we overprotect children. "Education has become stressful for children and parents tend to compensate by offering a kind of butler service," she says. But once education is done, she suggests, it's time to let go. Grotty flat-shares may not be appealing compared to home, but "even a not-very-nice flat-share is a reality check and a spur to establishing one's own life". Roberts warns against the temptation to check in on social media. "It has blurred the boundaries," she says. "If parents aren't careful, their anxiety about what their children are up to can drive them into becoming voyeurs. It can also lead to parents assuming they are 'friends' when it's more developmentally healthy for children that their parents remain parents." This strikes like an arrow to the heart. My constant interest in my son's life and my longing to chat with him, check he's okay, has often led me into what could more realistically be termed pestering than parenting. "Being supportive isn't the same as over-involvement," Roberts says (as I nod). What is a bad idea, she says, is "enmeshment  when the young person finds it difficult to separate and is constantly either appeasing the parents or rebelling against them."

For many parents, cutting the apron strings can feel like severing the most precious tie. I never understood the mothers raving about "having the house to themselves" once the kids were "out of the way". But it's dawned on me that my neediness where my son is concerned is doing neither of us any good. If we want our children to enjoy the freedom and independence that we did, regardless of financial restrictions, the first step is to start treating them as the adults they are. How to cut the apron strings Don't follow your kids on social media At least, not unless they ask you to. They have to go out and make mistakes, so don't spy on them. Withdraw financial support gradually

Grown-up kids have to learn to contribute to society and the family  but if you like, keep money aside to help with a house deposit. Spell out the rules Write them down and remember this  there have to be consequences for breaking them. Back off Create an independent life beyond parenting; don't fit around theirs.
An Australia-first micro finance scheme aims to support domestic violence victims in the "missing middle" - those who earn too much to qualify for government assistance, but not enough to manage essential costs as they re-establish their lives.

Assistance Beyond Crisis offers domestic violence victims in immediate financial need living in the ACT region and earning between $50,000 and $100,000 no-interest loans of up to $5000 to be repaid over three years.

A new scheme aims to support victims of domestic violence in reestablishing their lives. Credit:Gabriele Charotte

Women's Centre for Health Matters chief executive Marcia Williams said research from the Domestic Violence Crisis Service showed an overwhelming number of domestic violence victims lost their homes after leaving a violent partner.

Others struggled with childcare costs, school fees, renegotiating loans, legal costs, maintaining cars and their pets, she said.
Out of the studio Out of the studio, an exhibition of work by the eight ceramic artists who are tenants at Watson Arts Centre - Richilde Flavell, Lia Tajcnar, Andres Caycedo, Raj Reddy, Alya Khan, Mark Saunders, Lesley Lebkowicz and Jo Victoria - opened this week at the centre. It's in Aspinall Street, Watson and is open Thursday to Sunday, 10am to 4pm. The exhibition continues until May 6. See: canberrapotters.com.au. Claire Primrose, Before and After 2. Landscape workshop Claire Primrose of Form Studio and Gallery is conducting a two-day landscape drawing and painting workshop on April 28 (:Riverbank Cafe, river side, 4 Trinlico Place Queanbeyan) and April 29 ( Form Studio and Gallery 1/30 Aurora Avenue, Queanbeyan), 10am to 4pm both days. The first day will be devoted to traditional and non-traditional methods of drawing on location; the second to painting in the studio, For booking enquiries, email Claire@formstudioandgallery.com.au or phone 0430359776.

Untitled by Lia Tajcnar inOut of the studio at Watson Arts Centre. First seen Now in its seventh year, The Street Theatre's First Seen: New Works-in-Progress development program is returning from April through July, giving Canberra audiences the chance to be part of the creative process and giving them a peek into a part of Canberra's artistic community. It helps The Street progress performance works to the production-ready stage and begins on Sunday, April 22 at 3pm with Icarus by Christopher Carroll, a wordless solo piece, loosely based on the true story of a refugee's journey from Mozambique to Britain. Future pieces will be Sherpas by Tom Davis featuring a lead G20 negotiator as protaganist (June 16, 5pm) and Irene's Wish, a love story from David Cole (July 15, 3pm) All were selected by Canberra theatre-maker Camilla Blunden from 14 scripts submitted. After each public presentation Canberra audiences are invited into a discussion with writers, directors, dramaturges and actors by sharing their thoughts with the creative teams. Entry is $15 including a glass of wine or coffee. Bookings: 6247 1223 or thestreet.org.au. Acting workshop Unlock the secrets to playing Shakespeare at Acting For the Fun of It's course from May 10 to June 21. from 7 to 9pm. It's on at the Hedley Beare Centre for Teaching and Learning, 51 Fremantle Drive, Stirling..Cost: $150 (wage earners) $100 (concessions). For further information and enquiries contact course tutor, Peter Wilkins at peterbwilkins@aol.com or call 0408 034 373.
Dr Lewis Rushbrook, who has chaired the Lagani owners' committee for more than a decade, said the impact on residents had been "horrendous" with their "quality of life shot to pieces".

The payout  which is understood to include $1.4 million to fix waterproofing defects, structural-steel corrosion and de-bonded masonry; as well as interest and legal costs  ends more than a decade long battle between builder Michael Koundouris and the owners corporation of the Lagani Apartments.

A Canberra developer has paid $2.8 million to settle a legal dispute over the construction of a Braddon apartment complex.

"Living with full-on water damage, frustration with the developer, anxiety about what to do, where to get advice and how to fund repairs, and then the daunting, alien avenue for 10 little 'nobodies' of taking legal action against a well-known Canberra developer," Dr Rushbrook said.

Mr Koundouris was contacted for comment, but did not respond to questions.

Damage alleged to have been caused by defective building work at the Lagani apartment complex in Braddon.

The sales brochure, from 2000, hailed the complex as a "magnificent new living style" and said the name Lagani meant "Place of Rest".

"Lagani now raises [the old-fashioned] standards [of quality and workmanship] to new heights" the brochure reads.
And Montague told Stewart how to staff a merged Canterbury-Bankstown: The amalgamated council would need to get rid of all the senior staff except for Spiro Stavis, Montague said, according to Stewart. Stewart was not on board. He rebuffed the attempted offer, and left the meeting after telling his hosts the state government would determine who would run a new council. And the relationship between Azzi, Hawatt, Montague and Stavis is now being laid bare in a corruption inquiry that would seem to confirm the worst fears of many into the relationship between developers and councils in Sydney: a world of graft, favours, bullying and barbecues. An alliance forms To hear the principals tell it, the impulse for Canterburys development frenzy was simply the fear of missing out.

Were getting left behind, Azzi lamented in 2013, according to what Marcelo Occhiuzzi, Canterburys former planning director, told the Independent Commission Against Corruption. On Occhiuzzis account, during a meeting in October 2013 Azzi lost his temper and theatrically walked to the window. Have a look at this, Azzi said. Canterbury isnt developing. Loading But the momentum had shifted. Azzi was elected in 2012, and soon formed an alliance with Hawatt - who began his political life in Labor before jumping ship. Together they forged a cross-party political bloc with other Labor and Liberal councillors.

It became reasonably clear to me that Azzi and Hawatt formed an alliance and had an interest in the development in the Canterbury Council area, Occhiuzzi told ICAC. Occhiuzzi soon found himself having to field repeated inquiries from his councillors  but as well as from his boss, Montague  about why things werent moving quickly enough. Hawatt and Azzi had such a controlling influence on council that Montague began referring to them as the junta, Occhiuzzi recalled. By late 2014, Occhiuzzi had had enough. His resignation triggered a hunt for a new director of planning, one who could help ensure Canterbury remained on Sydneys development wave. The man proved to be Spiro Stavis - a town planner, who had worked at Strathfield and Botany Bay. How Stavis won the job is being examined by the corruption watchdog.

Judith Carpenter, a consultant engaged by the council, told ICAC she repeatedly insisted Stavis was unqualified for the job, only to be rebuffed by Montague. We need to include him, she remembers Montague telling her. Unusually, when the time came to interview the candidates, Azzi and Hawatt - as well as Canterburys mayor, Brian Robson - sat on the panel. Azzi and Hawatt were rude and abrasive, but not to Stavis, Carpenter said. It was a very disrespectful process to some of the candidates and it was a complete debacle, she recalls. It appears Stavis had another advantage. Photographs of the job interview questions were discovered by ICAC investigators on Stavis mobile phone. According to Carpenter, Karen Jones, a planner from Leichhardt Council, was clearly the best candidate. But her gender counted against her. Shes a female from Leichhardt, lets, lets [get] rid of her, was how Montague summarised Azzi and Hawatts views. Shes not gonna get the job.

Montague offered the job to Stavis, but soon after received a letter of complaint from Carpenter. Carpenter followed up with references from Stavis most recent employers. Those references have been described as negative. On December 18, 2014, Montague wrote to Stavis to rescind the job offer. The move plunged the council into chaos. Loading Montagues change-of-heart produced, in his words, a Mount Vesuvius response from Azzi and Hawatt. They made frenzied efforts to get Montague to reverse his decision, and threatened to remove him from his job if he didnt toe the line, Montague claims. At one point, Azzi and Hawatt allegedly offered Montague a financial settlement to leave the council. Montague rejected the offer, and passed it onto his mayor Robson, as well as ICAC, as a potential corrupt inducement.

Hawatt sought advice from Kent Johns, a Sutherland Shire councillor and current vice-president of the NSW Liberal Party, about how to remove Montague. And on Christmas Eve, the two councillors attempted to call an extraordinary council meeting to force Montagues ouster, claiming he was exposing ratepayers to financial risk in withdrawing the offer to Stavis. But something changed early in the new year and Montague dropped his opposition to Stavis appointment. It was a terrible terrible period of my career  and I  I was numbed by it all so I made decisions, he told ICAC investigators. By the end of February, Montague, Hawatt and Azzi were repairing their relationship. And Stavis was Canterburys director of planning. Within weeks of taking up the job, Stavis was being barraged by text messages from Hawatt over council issues. In a string of exchanges recovered by investigators, Hawatt inquired about the progress of development applications before the council, and arranged meetings between Stavis and developers. Featuring prominently among Hawatts inquiries were two properties owned by his son-in-law, Talal El Badar, with whom he also had business dealings.

Stavis was also brought into a social fold. The scene included invitations to barbecues at Azzis house. Everyone used to come to Pierres, Khouri told investigators. His wifes a brilliant cook so hed invite people round usually on Fridays, said Montague. There was one meeting I recall where they were all there, all the Bankstown boys, [former NSW premier] Morris Iemma, [former NSW Labor secretary] Jamie Clements  and those meetings really were just in more recent times were talking about amalgamations, Montague recalled. It was at Azzis house, ICAC heard, that Stavis met developer Demian, who at the time was seeking approval for developments at properties at 548 Canterbury Road and 998 Punchbowl Road. The empty block of land at 548 Canterbury Road, which developer Charlie Demain sold for nearly $50 million after securing favourable planning outcomes from the former Canterbury Council. Credit:Steven Siewert On the map Montague was not the only Canterbury figure to make complaints to the corruption watchdog. Robson, the mayor, himself wrote to ICAC on January 29, 2015. He warned not only that the two councillors had attempted to induce Montague, but also that the councillors were potentially manipulating planning processes. I have reasonable suspicions that planning decisions introduced by Crs Hawatt and Azzi have been introduced, not on sound planning principles, but simply to benefit individual developers, Robson wrote to ICAC. Robson cited Jimmy Maroun, an associate of Azzi, and another developer whose name ICAC has obscured. The favourable re-zonings of 15-23 Homer St Earlwood and [blacked out] are of particular concern.

The Earlwood property is one of a number to have been examined this week by ICAC. Assad Faker, the owner of 15-23 Homer Street, a vacant block on the Cooks River, submitted a planning proposal in 2014, seeking an increase allowable height from 10 to 18 metres. Council staff opposed the idea. In March 2015, the Department of Planning asked for an independent report into the proposal be placed on public exhibition. When that independent report was placed on exhibition in June 2016, it was a report prepared by consultants paid by Faker and favourable to the proposal, rather than a critical report paid for by the council itself. ICAC is also examining planning proposals and developments at Roselands, Lakemba, Punchbowl and along Canterbury Road. At some sites, the former council made owners millions. Demian, for instance, sold 548 Canterbury Road for $49.5 million in late 2016 only a couple of years after buying it for $14 million. David Buchanan, SC, counsel assisting the inquriy, said this week that in relation to 548 Canterbury Road, the evidence is expected to be that Stavis, following meetings at Azzis house, felt he had to help find solutions to Mr Demians issues with that development. The evidence will be that at those meetings, Councillor Azzi was almost acting as a mediator between Mr Stavis and Mr Demian, Buchanan said.

In late 2015 Stavis prepared a favourable planning report which recommended - in breach of council height controls - handing Demian two extra floors on his proposed six-storey apartment complex at 548 Canterbury Road. There will also be evidence, Buchanan said, that Hawatt was trying to find purchasers of the property for Demian. Neither Hawatt nor Azzi declared an interest when voting on the proposal. Buchanan has also indicated that Stavis will give evidence at the inquiry and is expected to offer explanations for some of his decisions. It is not known whether Azzi and Hawatt have cooperated with the commission's inquiries. However, in comments made to the Herald last year, Hawatt denied any wrongdoing. Azzi has previously claimed ICAC's investigation was a "political stunt" and that the council's planners "never let anyone jump above the law".
Two policemen had no option but to gun down a drunken, self-harming postal worker who was trying to stab them, a NSW coroner has found.

Australia Post employee Stephen Hodge was shot dead by an officer in Lake Macquarie after coming at him with a kitchen knife in September 2015.

Police were called to the post office after an employee activated a duress alarm.

Deputy State Coroner Teresa O'Sullivan handed down her inquest findings on Friday and suggested NSW Police provide more training so officers could better deal with mentally ill people in emergency situations.

"Police have an extremely difficult job to do and often very little time to plan and find out all the information they need - particularly about someone's mental health," she told Glebe Coroner's Court.
A Sydney man charged with foreign incursion offences after he went to Syria told a court he "just wanted to help" the war-ravaged country and had been prepared but not eager to fight.

Mehmet Biber, 25, left Sydney and travelled to Syria via Turkey with a group of Australian men who joined a rebel group fighting against Bashar al-Assad's government in July 2013.

The men were supported by terrorist recruiter Hamdi Alqudsi, who was jailed for a minimum six years for recruiting seven men, including Biber, and facilitating their entry to Syria.

Mehmet Biber has pleaded guilty to entering a foreign state with intent to engage in a hostile activity. Credit:Fairfax Media

Biber returned to Australia after about seven months and was arrested with a teenage boy during counter-terrorism raids in south-west Sydney in 2016.
A problem gambler who fleeced more than $1.7 million from elderly investors blamed his English boarding school upbringing for his descent into crime.

Edward Charles Toller was on Friday sentenced to eight years in jail, with a five-year non-parole period, for 14 counts of obtaining financial advantage by deception over a three-year period.

Edward Charles Toller.

NSW District Court judge Stephen Norrish QC said the 34-year-old alcoholic and gambling addict arrived in Australia in 2013 to escape a toxic lifestyle.

But soon after his arrival, Toller began approaching investors who had lost money through firm Velvet Assets under the guise of running a rival investment company.
Stephen Paul Hodge began his last day alive with a bottle of Solo and a packet of cigarettes, sharing a joke with the sales assistant at the counter of a Warners Bay newsagency.

At 9am he clocked in on time for work at the post office, but less than seven hours later he was pronounced dead, having been gunned down in the car park by two police officers.

Stephen Hodge confronts his boss Brendan Hogan in the Warners Bay post office on September 9, 2015. Photo Supplied

Now a coroner has urged greater mental health training for police in the wake of the brief and dramatic confrontation that led to the death of the Australia Post employee.

Mr Hodge, 51, was shot multiple times after he strode towards Senior Constable Jamie Taylor bearing a large kitchen knife, apparently ready to stab him.
Peter Gruenberg, who has died aged 78, was a German solid state physicist who shared the 2007 Nobel prize in physics with French scientist Albert Fert for their development of a novel technology used to read data on hard discs, allowing them to be miniaturised, thus paving the way for gadgets such as the MP3 player, the smartphone and iPod.

In 1988, both men, working separately, discovered a hitherto unknown magnetic effect known as giant magnetoresistance, whereby a small magnetic field can induce a large change in the electrical conductivity of a material composed of sandwiched nanolayers (only a few millionths of a millimetre thick) of magnetic and non-magnetic materials. The magnetic layers behave a little like bar magnets pointing in one of two directions, north or south.

Nobel laureate Peter Gruenberg in 2008. Credit:Armin K?belbeck

When a current is induced into this sandwich, electrons move through the layers. However, the degree of hindrance they experience is different depending upon an intrinsic quantum characteristic of electrons that scientists call "spin" (even though the electrons are not actually spinning). Instead, "spin" means each electron acts like a miniature magnet pointing either up or down.

In the magnetic layers, this spin can be aligned to or counter to the direction of the bar magnet. The upshot is that electrons with a spin in one direction will move more freely and hence be the predominant carriers of the current through the layer, so the flow of electrons through the sandwich can be controlled by the relative arrangement of the bar magnets of the top and bottom layers.
It was disturbing vision. Police dragging a disability pensioner from his house in Preston before he was beaten with a baton, capsicum sprayed, blasted in the face with a high pressure hose and filmed on a mobile phone.

As outrage swept Victoria, with one human rights lawyer dubbing it Australia's "Rodney King moment", former police investigator Roger Knight had a different view  the force should have seen it coming.

An image from CCTV showing police pinning pensioner John to the ground outside his home in Preston.

He was sure that if he looked at those officers files, they would have several things in common.

As the first Victorian officer seconded to the Office of Police Integrity, when Mr Knight arrived at Preston police station in 2005 he was already being called a "dog" for investigating his own.
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Melbourne is a remarkable city and when you catch a glimpse of faded hand painted signs, beautifully intricate architecture, proud family names over long lost shops, it lures you in.

It is hard for history to compete for attention in a world now so used to the instantaneous. Yet where we came from can teach us so much as we busily navigate to where we want to go.

These short episodes seek to bring alive little chapters in the history of Melbourne that are rich in insight.

They illustrate what happened to a city and its people when a property boom came crashing down.

They reveal those who pioneered acceptance of a community that only now can marry equally.

They remind us to respect those who came before us and to question a pervasive, bullish faith in all that is new.
One Melbourne principal is concerned about the migration of students out of his area Credit:Erin Jonasson

The more families who flock to a school, the better its reputation becomes and the more funding it attracts. But theres often a neighbouring school thats left behind.

You don't go into the restaurant that is almost empty. You go to the one with people in it, he says.

While the popular school is rolling out portable buildings to accommodate extra students and enforcing strict enrolment zones, the forgotten school is screaming out for children.

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This Melbourne principal, who wants to remain anonymous to protect his schools reputation, sees many students bypassing state schools in his area, including his own.

They travel great distances to access schools in neighbouring suburbs, sometimes even moving house so they can enrol at zoned schools.

His observations are backed by figures in an Auditor-General's report from last year, which revealed that more than half of Victorian parents are now avoiding their local state school.
Water Corporation chief executive officer Sue Murphy said she was deeply saddened by the death of a construction contractor as a result of an incident at the upgrade project at the Woodman Point Wastewater Treatment Plant this morning.

Mrs Murphy expressed her heartfelt sympathy to the contractors family and fellow workers.

She said the Water Corporation did not have full details of the incident yet and would cooperate fully with police and Worksafe who were currently on site as they investigated the incident.

Emergency services were called to the Water Corporation facility at 10am following reports a man had become trapped under a beam.
As a clearly panicked Scott Morrison announced on Friday a stream of eye-watering new penalties for serious misconduct by banks and financial services firms, its instructive to look back at his zealous efforts over two years to protect the banks from a royal commission currently uncovering just that sort of misbehaviour.

The Treasurer and his colleague, Revenue and Financial Services Minister Kelly ODwyer, are falling over themselves to claim the new jail-time threats and bank-busting fines are just business as usual by responsible stewards of the national interest.

Treasurer Scott Morrison was the loudest opponent of a royal commission into the banks. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Why, they insisted, theyve been working on the new regime of penalties since examining the findings of an ASIC enforcement task force inquiry established way back in November 2016.

The idea that it is mere coincidence that the new penalties - including fines up to $210 million or 10 per cent of a banks annual turn-over - are being announced right now is about as believable as the excruciating line in Muriels Wedding from the guilty and embarrassed husband: Deirdre Chambers! What a coincidence!
The Turnbull government is planning a special visa to stave off a Nationals rebellion, address a shortfall of hundreds of thousands of farmers in the next decade and rescue billions of dollars in revenue.

The agricultural visa could also be used by ministers with sympathy for white South African farmers to encourage them to immigrate to Australia, as the issue continues to divide the highest levels of the Coalition.

"That would solve the South African problem," a government source said.

The preliminary stages of the visa have been in discussion for months after intense lobbying from the National Farmers Federation on the need to address a gap of 100,000 workers in the agriculture industry, but it is understood it is more likely to be announced months after the May budget.
Schools, universities and the ATAR system are driving students away from vital science, maths and technology subjects, according to chief scientist Alan Finkel, who has strongly defended the importance of STEM in a report to the country's education ministers.

Dr Finkel has urged a review of the university entrance system, the reintroduction of maths as a prerequisite for relevant university courses and the tracking of students' performance from cradle to grave using a controversial ID system.

The report, currently being considered by the Education Council but obtained by Fairfax Media, takes particular aim at the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank, used by 73 per cent of school leavers to gain entry to university.

The report found high school students are choosing easier subjects in which they can get a higher score in order to maximise their ATAR rank. Credit:James Alcock

The report found high school students are choosing easier subjects in which they can get a higher score to maximise their ATAR rank, citing NSW research and testimony from educators.
He said the deadly nerve agent Novichok A234 - which he insisted Russia had never developed or produced - was "in a condition that it was just injected if this substance stayed for almost a month it always works with the other parts of the body and of course the composition of that chemical substance will be different". "It was probably highly likely injected before taking the blood test," he said. Yakovenko said the poisoning of the Skripals was "a huge provocation against Russia". He declined to say who might have injected the Skripals with the Novichok. Poisoned: Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter Yulia Skripal, 33. Credit:AP

"We dont know who did it, how it was done, this is just the assumption based on the papers that we got," he said. Yakovenko, in a press conference at his Kensington residence on Friday that lasted more than an hour, also presented two videos in relation to the Syrian regimes recent chemical attack using what was reported as chlorine gas on Douma. Loading One video, he said, showed Hassan Diab, an 11-year-old child who had pretended to be affected by a chemical attack for videos later shared online. Diab's father said his son was given "dates, cakes and rice" to play a part in staging the alleged attack. Another video by Chinese reporters, the ambassador said, showed "a lot of chemical components which were left by the jihadists" in eastern Ghouta.

"There will be physical evidence that the chlorine was supplied from Germany," he said. "Basically what they did, they produced the chemical weapons, the chlorine and some others, then they staged the so-called chemical attacks and, with the help of the White Helmets, it was presented in a way that it was done by the Syrian government." Loading Fairfax Media asked whether he was saying there had been no chemical attack, or there had been an attack by the regimes opponents. Yakovenko said there was "no contradiction" in the two accounts he had presented.

He also said the UK was breaking international law by refusing access to Russian diplomats to see the former spy and his daughter, calling it "an abduction of two Russian citizens". Yulia Skripal has issued a statement via Britsh police saying she did not wish to speak to Russian diplomats or to media. Loading Meanwhile, British authorities have sealed off nine areas in Salisbury that they are concerned may be "toxic hotspots" left by the use of Novichok against the Skripals. The decontamination effort is expected to cost millions of pounds. A government scientist said there were "some high concentrations" of the poison at some locations that could be toxic to the public.

The cleaning operation has deterred tourists: the BBC reported that Americans are no longer stopping in Salisbury en route to Stonehenge. Yakovenko said the "so-called decontamination" was a way to destroy evidence. Russian and pro-Russian social media accounts are working hard on social media to spread Kremlin denials related to both the Skripals and Syria. Almost as soon as Fairfax Media tweeted the ambassadors claim, a Twitter account calling itself melbcity.net.au and describing itself as "Melbourne City Council  holding them to account" responded with a series of tweets defending the Russian position.
Washington: US President Donald Trump says Russian President Vladimir Putin told him, "We have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world."

That is according to memos maintained by former FBI director James Comey and obtained by The Associated Press on Thursday.

President Donald Trump, right, and Russia President Vladimir Putin in 2017. Credit:AP

Comey wrote that the comment came during a brief meeting he had with Trump at the White House in February 2017 although he added that Trump did not say when Putin had made the comment.

Referring to allegations about a possible encounter with Russian prostitutes in a Moscow hotel, Trump told Comey that the "hookers thing" was nonsense, the memo says.
EnWave Receives First Repeat Costco Order from Pacific Northwest Division for Moon Cheese

Posted by Publisher Internet

EnWave Corporation (TSX-V:ENW | FSE:E4U) (?EnWave?, or the \Company\  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyKTfx_H0Tk&t=60s) announced today that NutraDried Food Company, LLC (?NutraDried?), a wholly owned subsidiary of the Company, has received a second purchase order for its Moon Cheese? snack product from Costco Wholesale Corporation?s (?Costco?) Pacific Northwest division after the initial rotation launch at the beginning of April 2018. ?The Company previously announced the first purchase order and product rotation in Costco?s Pacific Northwest division in a press release dated March 14, 2018.

The recent repeat purchase orders from Costco?s Pacific Northwest division along with the Midwest division demonstrates the success of club format packaging of Moon Cheese? in the Costco system. NutraDried will continue to pursue expanded distribution with Costco through both additional repeat orders and potential expansion into other Costco divisions. Each Costco purchase order represents significant revenue growth for NutraDried.

The current success of club format Moon Cheese? distribution in Costco does not guarantee future continued success.

Forward-Looking Information: This press release may contain forward-looking information based on management\-\-s expectations, estimates and projections. All statements that address expectations or projections about the future, including statements about the Company\-\-s strategy for growth, product development and market position are forward-looking statements. These statements are not a guarantee of future performance and involve a number of risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including those relating to the expectation of commercially successful integration of the EnWave technology to the dehydration of cannabis, the outcome of EnWave?s patent application, the ability of the Company to expand into the cannabis industry and successfully market its technology and patents, that the Company will be able to meet all applicable legal regulatory requirements in order to commercially exploit its patent, if and when its application is approved, or otherwise market its technology to cannabis industry participants, and other risks applicable to the Company as disclosed in its public filings. Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. 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. EnWave does not undertake to update its forward-looking information unless required by applicable securities law. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

EnWave Corporation, a Vancouver-based advanced technology company, has developed Radiant Energy Vacuum (\REV?\)  an innovative, proprietary method for the precise dehydration of organic materials. EnWave has further developed patent-pending methods for uniformly drying and decontaminating cannabis through the use of REV? technology, shortening the time from harvest to marketable cannabis products.

REV? technology\-\-s commercial viability has been demonstrated and is growing rapidly across several market verticals in the food, and pharmaceutical sectors including legal cannabis. EnWave\-\-s strategy is to sign royalty-bearing commercial licenses with industry leaders in multiple verticals for the use of REV? technology. The company has signed over twenty royalty-bearing licenses to date, opening eight distinct market sectors for commercialization of new and innovative products. In addition to these licenses, EnWave\-\-s wholly-owned subsidiary, NutraDried Food Company, LLC, was formed to develop, manufacture, market and sell all-natural cheese snack products in the United States under the Moon Cheese? brand.

EnWave has introduced REV? as the new dehydration standard in the food and biological material sectors: faster and cheaper than freeze drying, with better end product quality than air drying or spray drying. EnWave currently has three commercial REV? platforms:

 nutraREV? which is used in the food industry to dry food products quickly and at low-cost, while maintaining high levels of nutrition, taste, texture and colour;

 powderREV? which is used for the bulk dehydration of food cultures, probiotics and fine biochemicals such as enzymes below the freezing point, and

 quantaREV? which is used for continuous, high-volume low-temperature drying.

An additional platform, freezeREV?, is being developed as a new method to stabilize and dehydrate biopharmaceuticals such as vaccines and antibodies. More information about EnWave is available at www.enwave.net.